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Past EditorsIssue # 43 Fall 2020
Editors for this Issue:
Dorian Gossy
Roger Mitchell
Table of Contents
(Click on title of the piece to go directly to it.)
Poetry
Tony Beyer
Hoist
Hut book
Glass plate
R. T. Castleberry
Shock in the Wind
A Habit of Stone
Three Views of a Storm
William Cordiero
Maple Sugaring
Plain Views
Shannon Cuthbert
Contours
Sisterhood
Chimera
John Davis
White-out at Mission Ridge
Robert Fillman
Promises
Omen
The Vanity of it All
Howie Good
The Aftermath of the After-Party
Nels Hanson
Musical Chairs
Michael Hettich
The Fireflies
The Legacy
The Skinny Dip
The Lake
Richard Jones
Le Jeu de Palme
Daughter
Star Route One
Tricia Knoll
Autumn
El Dia de los Muertos
Naomi Bess Leimsider
Strangertwin
Crazy for Two
Half-Life
Virus Poem
Tim Mayo
Cheongsam
The Archaeology of Remembrance
John Palen
Blue Piano
At the Supermarket After an Early Snow
Bruce Parker
The Annunciation
Waiting in the Car While the Wife Buys Groceries
In Dependence
Kenneth Pobo
Cooper’s Hawk
Will Reger
Flightless
Crossing Ohio
John Repp
After Browsing the Red Bookstore
Another Snow Ode
Stan Sanvel Rubin
The Stars Are a Net
Root
Rikki Santer
Quarantine Spring
Hymn
Carla Sarett
before the first frost
Terry Savoie
“You Can’t Have Everything”
Claudia Schatz
Bodies of Water
Block Party
Claire Scott
The Shape of Silence
Phillip Shabazz
Reminiscence
Of the Water
Snow Against the Window
Ben Sloan
Medusa in Her Garden
David Spicer
Switch
After My Grandfather’s Death
In the Park
D. E. Steward
The Doric Mode
Eleanor Swanson
Drafting My Desire
Bombed Out Cities
Geography: An Illusion
Taunja Thomson
From an Aerie (Ornithophile)
Dream During a Pandemic
O Capricious (after Kandinsky’s “Capricious”)
Bill Tremblay
The Luminous Racetrack
What Is Kept From the Children
Heartwood
Gerry & the Sacrament of Music
Equipage
Carol Tyx
On Unlocking the Bathroom Door
Bacon
Richard Weaver
Night Writing at the Braille Factory
Dance of the Wooden Leg
Charles Wyatt
Notes Toward an Unheard Music – Part Three
Mark Young
The Sasquatch walks among us
I Can’t Wait to Reconnect With Lilo Again
Prose
Austin Adams
A Full Accounting
Olusola Akinwale
We Are What We Make Ourselves
Ron Dowl
Otis Discovers Mysteree's Secret
Natthinee Khot-asa Jones & Hardy Jones
Foot in the Spokes
Eleanor Lerman
Murmansk
Nicanor Millan
Thoughts before Bed
J. Alan Nelson
The Book Cobbler
Leah Sackett
The Lord's Table, Reservations Required
Jeff M. Sellers
Cokie
Diane Simmons
Setting the Water"Setting the Water," was a winner of the Fish Publishing (Ireland) short essay prize and was originally published in the Fish Anthology in 2016.
Contributors' Notes
Austin Adams is a writer from Tennessee. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Prelude, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Offing, Adelaide, The Millions, Poor Yorick, and others. He was a finalist for The Sewanee Review’s Fiction Contest.
Olusola Akinwale is a writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. His work has appeared in Silk Road Review, The Cardiff Review, Prole, Monarch Review, and elsewhere. He attended the Fidelity Bank Creative Writing Workshop and was a finalist for the 2017 Galtellì Literary Prize in Sardinia, Italy.
Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand. Recent work has appeared online in Hamilton Stone Review, Molly Bloom, Mudlark, and Otoliths. Print titles include Anchor Stone (2017) and Friday Prayers (2019), both from Cold Hub Press.
R. T. Castleberry’s work has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Pedestal Magazine, Misfit, Trajectory, The Alembic, Switchback and Hamilton Stone Review. Internationally, it has been published in Canada, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, Portugal. the Philippines and Antarctica. He’s had poetry in the anthologies: Travois-An Anthology of Texas Poetry, TimeSlice, The Weight of Addition, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, You Can Hear the Ocean: An Anthology of Classic and Current Poetry and Level Land: Poetry For and About the I35 Corridor.
Will Cordiero has work published or forthcoming in Agni, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Offing, The Threepenny Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Will’s collection Trap Street won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.
Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Bluepepper, Collidescope, and Chronogram, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Ligeia Magazine, Green Silk Journal, The Oddville Press, and Schuylkill Valley Journal.
John Davis is the author of Gigs and The Reservist. His work has appeared recently in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, One and Rio Grande Review.
Ron L. Dowell holds two Master's degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His short stories have appeared in Oyster Rivers Pages, Moon Magazine, Unlikely Stories, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #11, Watermelanian Magazine, The Fear of Monkeys, Writers Resist, Baby Boomers Plus 2018, and The Bombay Review. His poetry resides in Penumbra and The Poeming Pigeon. He's a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow.
Ron's in-progress collection, Crooked Out of Compton, is a semifinalist for the Chestnut Review Stubborn Artists Contest and a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2020 Big Moose Prize. He connects gritty stories showing how people find hope and even joy in lives where basic needs are hard to meet. For more about Ron, please visit his website: https://crookedoutofcompton.com/
Robert Fillman is the author of the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019), finalist for the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Award. He has also been a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Gerald Cable Book Award and the Rash Award in Poetry. His poems have recently appeared in The Hollins Critic, Nashville Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Fillman earned a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University, where he was also a Mountaintop Creative Writing Fellow. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Kutztown University.
Howie Good is the author of The Death Row Shuffle, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.
Michael Hettich has published a dozen full-length books of poetry, most recently To Start an Orchard, which was published in September, 2019, by Press 53. A new book, The Mica Mine, is forthcoming. His work has appeared in many journals and in a few anthologies as well. His website is michaelhettich.com.
Short fiction by Bryan Jones has appeared recently in Cease, Cows, The Tiny Journal, and Crack the Spine. He lives and works in Texas.
Richard Jones’s two most recent books are Stranger on Earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2018) and Avalon (Green Linden Press, 2020). He has been the editor of Poetry East for forty years and in 2020 will publish his one-hundredth issue, a volume called The Bliss of Reading.
Natthinee Khot-asa Jones & Hardy Jones
Natthinee Khot-asa Jones is a memoirist, novelist, and short story writer publishing in Thai and English. She is a country girl from the Thai side of the Thai-Cambodian border who grew up speaking Cambodian, Thai, and Laotian. In 2001, she graduated from Sophon Business School in Thailand, and later attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Auburn University, and the University of New Orleans. Her English publications include the memoirs Wal-Mart Girl, When I Was a Child, A True Story of Child Labor. She is the coauthor of the story collection Coconuts and Crawfish and the novel International Love Supreme. Please check out her books.In addition to being a writer, Natthinee is a photographer, and one of her photos was used for the cover image of the “Family Secrets” (Issue #44) Sugar Mule Online Magazine. In 2006-2007, she was a Laotian translator and interpreter for Louisiana’s Folklife “New Populations Project.”
For this project, her husband Hardy Jones received a research grant to write about Songkran, the Buddhist New Year's celebration in the Laotian community of Lanxang outside of Lafayette, Louisiana. The essay and photographs from their research are on the Louisiana Folklife website. Natthinee loves cooking Thai and Cajun food, and in 2006 her Phad-Thai recipe was featured in the Wal-Mart Family Cookbook. Organic gardening is her newest passion, building on her childhood experiences on her family’s farm in Thailand. Her website is www.natthineeandhardy.com. She is the co-founder and the Webmaster of the online journal Cybersoleil (www.cybersoleiljournal.com)
Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet. Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies. Her collected poems include Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press); Ocean's Laughter (Kelsay Books), Broadfork Farm (The Poetry Box), and How I Learned To Be White (Antrim House) which received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.
Naomi Bess Leimsider has published poems and short stories in Rogue Agent Journal, Coffin Bell Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Newtown Literary, Otis Nebula, Quarterly West, The Adirondack Review, Summerset Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Pindeldyboz, 13 Warriors, Slow Trains, Zone 3, Drunkenboat, and The Brooklyn Review. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College.
Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts & the New York Foundation for the Arts.Her novel, Radiomen (The Permanent Press), was awarded the 2016 John W. Campbell Prize for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her most recent novel, Satellite Street (The Permanent Press, 2019) was a finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and the Eric Hoffer Award. Her next novel, Watkins Glen, will be published by Mayapple Press in the spring of 2021. Read more http://www.eleanorlerman.com/
Tim Mayo’s first full length collection, The Kingdom of Possibilities, (Mayapple Press, 2009) was a finalist for the 2009 May Swenson Award. His second volume of poems, Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing 2016) was a finalist for both the 2017 Montaigne Medal and the 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award. His chapbook, Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (Kelsay Books), was published in 2019 and received an Honorable Mention in the chapbook category of the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Awards.
Nicanor Millan has contributed to The Surreal Times and Hamilton Stone Review.
J. Alan Nelson is a writer, poet, and actor. He has stories and poetry published in or forthcoming from Confrontations, California Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Manhattanville Review, Illya ’s Honey, International Poetry Review, Red River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Identity Theory, Hawai ’i Review, Haggard and Halloo, Review Americana, Main Street Rag, Pegasus Review, Fulcrum, Connecticut River Review, Blue Fifth Review, Chiron Review, Ship of Fools, Pamplemousse, and Heartwood.
John Palen's most recent book is Distant Music (Mayapple Press, 2017). Twice a Pushcart nominee and 1989 winner of the Passages North Poetry Competition, Palen has had work published in Poetry Northwest, The Formalist, The MacGuffin, Bluestem, McNeese Review, Williwaw Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, Ocotillo Review, Sleet and elsewhere. He is a retired journalist and journalism educator. After 36 years in central Michigan, he moved south to milder winters and now lives in retirement on the Illinois Grand Prairie. He blogs at Keeping an Eye on the World at https://johnpalenspoetryblog.wordpress.com.
Bruce Parker holds a BA in History from the University of Maryland Far East Division, Okinawa, Japan, and an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. He has taught English as a second language, worked as a technical editor, and as a translator He reads for Boulevard and lives in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in CIRQUE, The Inflectionist Review, Cloudbank, Blue Mountain Review and elsewhere.
Kenneth Pobo just retired from teaching at Widener University. He has a new book forthcoming from Assure Press called Uneven Steven. In addition to HSR, his work has appeared in: Hawaii Review, Nimrod, Indiana Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, Brittle Star, and elsewhere.
Will Reger is the Poet Laureate for the City of Urbana, IL. He has published consistently since 2010, including his first full-length book, Petroglyphs (2019). Many of his published works have been linked at www.twitter.com/wmreger. When not scribbling, he relaxes with the nan xiao and enjoys studying small local waterways (sloughs, creeks, rivers, canals, and ditches) looking for wildlife.
John Repp grew up along the Blackwater Branch of the Maurice River in southern New Jersey and has lived for many years in Erie, Pennsylvania. His most recent collections of poetry are the chapbooks Madeleine Wolfe—A Sequence (Seven Kitchens Press) and Cold-Running Current (Alice Greene & Co.), both published in 2019.
Stan Sanvel Rubin's poems appear recently in Galway Review, Red Wheelbarrow Review,8 Poems, Change 7, and One Art, and have been in many journals including Agni, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, Iowa Review and One, plus two recent anthologies, the 25th Anniversary of Atlanta Review and Nautilus Book Award winner, For Love of Orca. He’s published four full collections, including There. Here (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. He lives on the north Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.
Leah Holbrook Sackett is a short-story writer. Her debut book, Swimming Middle River, was published with REaD Lips Press in 2020. Additionally, her short story, “The Family Blend,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Crack the Spine. Leah's work has won various awards, including the Gold Award in Art Ascent, Two Sisters Publishing Contest, & the Creative Writing Award from the Institute for Women and Gender Studies.
Over fifty of Leah's stories have appeared in literary journals. She is an adjunct lecturer in the English department and the Communication & Media department at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, where she earned her M.F.A. Leah's short stories explore journeys toward autonomy and the boundaries placed on the individual by society, family, and self. Learn about her published fiction at LeahHolbrookSackett.website.
Rikki Santer’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications both nationally and abroad including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, The Journal of American Poetry, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, Grimm, Slipstream and The Main Street Rag. Her work has received many honors including five Pushcart and three Ohioana book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her eighth collection, Drop Jaw, inspired by the art of ventriloquism, was published by NightBallet Press in the spring. Please contact her through her website: www.rikkisanter.com
Carla Sarett's recent work appears or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hobart, The Virginia Normal and elsewhere; her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize. A Closet Feminist, her debut novel, will be published in 2022 (Unsolicited Press.). Carla has a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania and lives in San Francisco.
Beyond a previous appearance in HSR, Terry Savoie has had more than four hundred poems published both here and abroad over the past four decades. These include ones in APR, Poetry (Chicago), Ploughshares, North American Review, Commonweal, American Journal of Poetry and The Iowa Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of North Dakota Quarterly, One, America, Chiron Review, and Tar River Poetry among others. A selection, Reading Sunday, won the Bright Hill Chapbook Competition and was published in the spring of 2018.
Claudia Schatz (she/hers) is a master’s student at the Middlebury School of French and lives in New Haven, CT, where she reads, writes, and makes the storytelling podcast Rearview. Her stories and poems have been published in the Postscript Journal, Euphony Journal, Artifex Magazine, and Five on the Fifth.
Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Jeff M. Sellerss has published short fiction in literary journals that include the Global City Review, The Chariton Review, and others. His work as a journalist and writer included three years in Mexico City and four years in Madrid, Spain. Chronicle Books has published his bilingual collection of Mexican proverbs, Folk Wisdom of Mexico. Author of a yet-unpublished novel on the ironies of anger, Prayers of the Butt-Kickers, he writes and edits from his home in the Mountain West with his wife, Karen, and two children, 10-year-old Eli and 7-year-old Zoe.
Poet, Writer, and Arts Educator, Phillip Shabazz is the author of three poetry collections, Freestyle and Visitation, and XYZoom, and Flames in the Fire. He is also the author of a novel in verse, When the Grass Was Blue. His forthcoming collection of poetry is titled: Moonflower. His poetry has been included in the anthologies, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont: A Guidebook, and Home Is Where: African-American Poetry from the Carolinas. Some of the journals his poems have appeared include Across The Margin, The American Voice, Fine Lines, Obsidian, and The Louisville Review.
“Setting the Water" by Diane Simmons won the Fish Publishing short-essay prize and was originally published in the 2016 Fish Anthology (Ireland.) Other publications include "Nobody Goes to the Gulag Anymore,” Missouri Review (Fall 2019). An abbreviated version of this essay appeared on Literary Hub under the title “Visiting Vojna: On the Horrors of the Communist Regime in Czechoslovakia” https://lithub.com/visiting-vojna-on-the-horrors-of-the-communist-regime-in-czechoslovakia/ Forthcoming is “Principles! You’re Making a Killing on Them!” as a Fall 2019 travel contest winner in Nowhere Magazine. For her books and other publications, see dianesimmonswrites.com.
Ben Sloan teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College, the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, and the Buckingham Correctional Center. He lives in Charlottesville.
David Spicer has published poems in The American Poetry Review, CircleStreet, Gargoyle, Moria, Oyster River Pages, Ploughshares, Remington Review, Santa Clara Review, The Sheepshead Review, Steam Ticket, Synaeresis, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart twice, he is author of six chapbooks and four full-length collections, the latest two being American Maniac (Hekate Publishing) and Confessional (Cyberwit.net). His fifth, Mad Sestina King, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.
D. E. Steward’s five volumes of Chroma were out in 2018 from Archae Editions in Brooklyn. Chroma is a month-to-month calendar book, the months are continuing of which ‘The Doric Mode” is one.
Eleanor Swanson’s poems have been featured twice in The Missouri Review. Her work has appeared in the Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, the Denver Quarterly, the Bloomsbury Review, the American Poetry Journal, and other publications. Awards include an NEA Fellowship and three Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first poetry collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, won the Ruth Stevens Award (NFSP Press), and her second collection of poetry, Trembling in the Bones—about the Colorado Coal strike of 1913 and the 1914 Ludlow Massacre—was reissued in 2013 ( 3: A Taos Press). Her third poetry collection is Memory’s Rooms (Conundrum Press). Her fourth poetry collection, Non Finito, is forth coming from Fernwood press in 2021.She has also published a novel and two collections of short stories. Her second collection, Exiles and Expatriates, won the 2014 Press Americana Prize. She mentors incarcerated men at the Sterling Correctional Facility.
t.m. thomson’s work has been featured in several journals, including Wild Age Press, The Ekphrastic Review, and These Fragile Lilacs, most recently appearing in The West Trade Review and Borrowed Solace. Her poetry will be featured in upcoming issues of The Voices Project, The Blue Ash Review, and The Pittsburg Poetry Review. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: “Seahorse and Moon” in 2005, “I Walked Out in January” in 2016, and “Strum and Lull” in 2018. She has co-authored Frame and Mount the Sky, a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry (2017) and is author of Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She has a writer’s page at https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter.When she’s not writing, she can be found communing with cats, playing in mud, or spinning.
Bill Tremblay has nine books of poetry. The poems included here are from his tenth, The Quinebaug at Twelve, which is looking for a publisher.
Carol Tyx lives in Iowa City, where she facilitates a prison book club, raises her voice in the community sing movement, and supports community-based agriculture. Her poetry has most recently been published in Big Muddy, Caesura, Iowa City Poetry in Public, and Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History with Hidden River Press. Currently Tyx is the artist-in-residence at Prairiewoods eco-spirituality center. She also makes a phenomenal strawberry rhubarb pie.
Richard Weaver lives in Baltimore where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the poet-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. More than 100 of his prose poems have appeared since 2016 in Algebra of Owls, Burningword Lit Jrnl, Juxtaprose Literary Journal, Kestrel, Magnolia Review, Misfit Magazine, OffCourse, Pilcrow & Dagger, Spank the Carp, & Unbroken Journal. He is the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and provided the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars, 2005, performed 4 times to date by the Birmingham Symphony.
Charles Wyatt is the author of two collections of short fiction, a novella, and two poetry collections. His most recent works are Goldberg-Variations from Carolina Wren Press, 2015, and Rembrandt's Nose from Ex Ophidia Press, 2017. He teaches short fiction for UCLA Extension (for 20 years now) and fiction and CNF for the University of Nebraska Omaha low residency MFA program. He lives in Nashville, TN where he was principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony for 25 years.
Mark Young's most recent books are a collection of visual pieces, The Comedians, from Stale Objects de Press; turning to drones, from Concrete Mist Press; & turpentine from Luna Bisonte Prods. Text &/or visual poetry has appeared recently in Word For/Word, E·ratio, Die Leere Mitte, Brave New Word, X-Peri, Synchronized Chaos, Futures Trading, & several other places.
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Virgens de Guadalupe by Lynda Schor