I didn’t start making art until after I’d graduated from college. While I never got much of an artistic education, it turns out that you can learn a great deal if you are persistent (read: stubborn) enough. After a few years of study in McGuffey Art Center’s figure drawing sessions, I eventually produced a drawing that was put in a show. Someone asked me, “What is this drawing about?” I blanked: my art wasn’t “about” anything. I just wanted to be an artist. So I studied Dalí and Picasso, Tamer and Turner and … Continue reading Fisher Samuel Harris Shows at McGuffey Art Center →
Driving switchbacks on Shenandoah’s spine, dipping into valleys and screaming up again, we scorch speed warnings from yellow diamonds as the dashboard Garmin’s destination time spins backwards. We’re regaining invisible minutes that would have languished on a longer voyage, one that slowed to marvel at purple splashes of ironweed and white tassels of sweetspire or braked to heed warnings of falling rocks. The cerulean sky has tumbled other sarsens in our path, and instead of ringing them in monuments, we have taken to the road, racing time itself, arms stretched out windows, splayed fingers … Continue reading Time Traveling by Bill Glose →
Many, oh, many, many, years ago, a friend and I took a plane trip to Minneapolis, Minn. It was not a first flight, but it was a first time west for both of us. Our flight began in Newark, N.J. This friend believed, or professed to believe, that airplanes only stayed in the air because the passengers kept willing it to do so. Perhaps she was being facetious, but in any event, that was probably our only worry. In those days, no one searched your luggage and the rows of seats seemed not to be … Continue reading A Very Small Adventure by Susan Shafarzek →
We first met holding hands at the outdoor Saturday market, vendors selling tie-dyed tee shirts and us eating foods that seemed exotic to me, like yakisoba noodles and teriyaki chicken. You revealed an existence better suited for me—one that lay beyond the endless berry fields and tractors and crippling solitude of my rural childhood. Although our time together was limited, you were the first city I ever knew, dear Portland. And my love for you was instant and deep and true. Remember how, when I was in high school, I tried to visit you as … Continue reading Dear Portland: a Love Letter to My Childhood Sweetheart by Melissent Zuwalt →
Five years ago, my wife fell in love. I’m not talking about me (we have been married thirty-nine years, so I hope the falling in love thing happened much earlier). Through her genealogy research, my wife, Vicki, discovered a ninety-three-year-old cousin living on her own in Montreal. Vicki’s research started with one item that she found among her late parents’ belongings: a postcard, sent from Poland and written in Yiddish, that had been addressed to her paternal great-grandfather. This was her first inkling that she might have family that had not emigrated to the United … Continue reading My Wife Is In Love by E. H. Jacobs →
A Gull A gull so far from the river circles the parking lot. Its whiteness is lost in this late fall day’s brightness. Its black edges are lost in the sunlight. Its black edges are lost against the glowing clouds, where its whiteness is lost. My daughter sleeps in the car and does not see the gull gleam above us so far from the river. She is lost in a glowing white dream. Tomorrow I will have forgotten the gleam of the gull that circled above her so far from the river. Years from now … Continue reading A Gull and The Black Birch, 2 poems by J. R. Solonche →
Across the narrow alley way between row houses, where trash cans totter and feral cats loiter, a window opens onto the neighbors’ kitchen. For once, the blinds are open after dark, and I can see the family at dinner. Though they moved in this past winter, we haven’t spoken yet; but I feel like I know them from their Sunday morning ritual. If I sit at my front window at 8:45 a.m. sharp—which I often do as I drink coffee and read the newspaper in my chair—I see them file onto the sidewalk, from tallest … Continue reading Duck Blind by Regina Guarino →
When I was about twelve years old, I found John Christopher’s YA Tripods books in the library. In this series, the humans on Earth have reverted to an agricultural, village-based society dominated by aliens who stalk the planet as giant “tripods,” three-legged metal vehicles in which the domineering hierarchy scans the population to make certain there are no outliers plotting to overthrow them. The aliens use technology to place a “cap” hard-wired into people’s heads when they are twelve or thirteen, and there’s a ritual ceremony surrounding it. The cap keeps humans docile and obedient … Continue reading In Which She is Briefly a Curmudgeon by Ann E. Michael →
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