Tributaries, The New Nature: “Pigeonblood”

By Shaun Turner

Bette wrung the white cotton tees out into her big iron wash bucket then pinned them to the line with a set of rusty clothespins as she watched the bloody pigeon land hard at one of the wash lines. The nearly-dying pigeon hung to her rope and she couldn’t bear to leave it. Why a pigeon, this far away from a big city? And why was its eye missing?

It landed with a soft thunk—–the bloody pigeon– —and Bette felt the tension; it waved the thin sisal rope she strung between her single-wide mobile home and the sugar maple—–the only tree on the acre of land she rented from her elderly great-aunt.

Two dresses fell from the line. Bette cursed under her breath quiet. She was used to hard work: been taking in the laundry for a few folks from Grogan First Baptist then news spread by word of mouth. Now, every family in the community, it seemed, sent her their laundry. She had two more loads to dry, and one left to hang, and the morning was half-over at 10:40. And then to rewash the dresses.

When she was a kid, the whole community was farms and churches. Now, new trailers and small houses lined the highway.

She watched the bloody pigeon with rapt attention. The bird lacked an eye: one a dark hole while the other stared suspicious. Its torn down wing left a jagged red gap against its gray chest. Maybe a neighborhood cat had grabbed hold. Maybe the pigeon fought it off.

Bette leaned her back against the sugar maple, sap and bits of bark tickling the nape of her neck, almost a break. She hadn’’t always wanted to be a laundress. But her parents were in their forties when she was born. They started getting sick when she was a senior in high school. And so she stayed until all she had was bills to pa–y—a house foreclosed on. She knew she could housekeep, launder.

Bette watched the bloody pigeon tremble with breath, kept her sight fixed on the pigeon until the its one good eye closed shut. She felt like she was going crazy. Fabric slapped together in the wind.

Bette leaned into the wind and let its force pull her hair up around her ears and into her face. Between the strands of black she could barely see the pigeon’s red blood shining under the sun.

A bubble rose in her chest, like hope or a soft scream. Her body felt like the dozens of shirts on her line, now fighting and tangled. Bette pulled her hair back and wished she could climb up the sugar maple like a kid, up and higher until her trailer and the lines of wash looked like a ship at sea. Higher until she could see past the rows of trailers on her aunt’s old farmland. Higher like she and the bird had almost switched places—–she’d have the sky. She’d open her good eye and then, screaming, spread her bloody wings.

---

Shaun Turner serves as fiction editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection, and co-editor at Fire Poetry Journal. He is the author of ‘The Lawless River: Stories’ (Red Bird Chapbooks). His writing has been selected as a finalist in Best Small Fictions 2018, and can found in New South, Appalachian Heritage, and FRiGG Magazine, among others. Shaun earned his MFA at West Virginia University.

Tributaries: “The Snapping Turtle”

By Karen J. Weyant

The road near Benson Pond is always littered with roadkill. Twisted deer legs lie tangled in weeds, dead raccoons are knotted in cattails, and mounds of porcupine quills puncture the air. There’s matted fur and hovering flies. Sometimes, there is blood. Later, there will be maggots.

Yesterday, on my way to work, I saw a snapping turtle peering out from a patch of overgrown brush, getting ready to cross the road. Turtles are vulnerable here. Unlike the famous fable where the tortoise quietly triumphs against its hare opponent, turtles rarely win when matched against trucks that round this sharp curve.

I imagined on the way back I would see the turtle dead, shell flattened, neck and head and tail bulging.

Yet, hours later, when I took this same road home, I saw nothing. I imagined that the turtle turned around and slid back into the pond. I imagined there was a long break in backroad traffic so that the turtle made it across to the other side. I even imagined that it was still there, somewhere, safe in the weeds resting and hidden from my view, but with no urge to crawl out onto the road.

As a child, I had received mixed messages about the power of imagination. “Use your imagination,” my mother always told me when I complained during those long hot hours in August when, impatient for school to start, I had grown bored of summer.

Yet, she was quick to complain that my imagination would get me into trouble. “There’s no wolverine in your father’s garden,” she would say, clearly exasperated with my description of a fat groundhog wandering through our backyard. “There’s no alligator in the tub,” she would sigh when I refused to take a bath because I was sure that a giant reptile rested near just inside the drain.

Afterwards, I heard her tell my brothers, “No more scary movies.” She was sure that they (both my brothers and the movies) were the culprits of my tall tales and stories.

I still have my imagination.

That day, when I drove around Benson Pond, I could imagine happily-ever-after scenarios for that turtle because there was no evidence of another, more tragic, outcome.

So I imagined that some local kids, fishing poles and pails in hand, taunted the turtle with a stick so that it snapped its beak tight around the wood — tight enough, so that the children could drag it back to some sort of safety. The turtle then slid deep into the bottom of the pond and slipped into the mud, its body covered, except for its neck that occasionally stretched to the surface for a breath of cool air.

---

Karen J. Weyant’s poetry and prose has been published in The Briar Cliff Review, Chautauqua, Cold Mountain Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry East, Punctuate,Spillway, Storm Cellar, River Styx, Waccamaw, and Whiskey Island. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag’s 2011 Chapbook Contest). She teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. When she is not teaching, she explores the rural Rust Belt of northern Pennsylvania and western New York.

Tributaries: "Arrows Go in Circles"

By Ryan Loveeachother

You drag the blue recycling crate to the curb. When you’re at work, the big truck comes collecting. Shrill hydraulic brakes. A robotic arm snatches, lifts and shakes. Everything shatters into a million loud pieces.

Speculations surface. Then, they’re confirmed. On a Saturday night, you’re braless underneath an oversized t-shirt and grey Champion sweatpants. Your fingers peel the skin off the garlic. As NPR regurgitates the daily headlines, the clean female voice of weekend newscaster Lakshmi Singh explains. Federal dollars reimburse the cities for the collection of recycling, but Congressional legislation is silent on disposal requirements. So, the loophole allows cities that collect recycling to dump it in the landfill and still receive federal funding.

You feel like the bottoms of your stained sweatpants: limp fabric and tired elastic, each leg deflated at the knee.

Your city, your county and your state are all complicit. The paper, glass and plastic that you so neatly separate—your proud contribution to the fragile ecological future—gets trashed. All of it compacted, crunched and dumped into the landfill. All of it a fraud. The cans of peach-pear La Croix, folded boxes of Yogi Tea, Fage 2% Greek Yogurt containers, cans of El Paso black beans, La Preferida Authentic refried beans, coconut milk, newspapers, junk mail— all of it—packed inside a gaping hole underneath the planet’s skin.

Like you, your apartment is very small. And because it’s late September, the dark seeps in. You dress up dinner. The black beans glisten under sautéed garlic and caramelized onions and crimini mushrooms. You shake yellow flakes of nutritional yeast on top of it all. You drizzle a red Pollock swirl of Sriracha. You indulge. Stuffed, you gulp audibly from a glass of clouded tap water.

You’ve texted your two closest friends, your mom, and your sister. No one replied. Eyes sagging, you’re tired and ready to sleep. And since the bathroom sink still won’t swallow, even after the grey bottle of Draino, you wash your face in the kitchen. You lather cracked hands in Dr. Bronners 100% certified organic and fair trade magic soap. You scrape dead skin from behind your ears.

Grasping blindly for your glasses, you prick your finger. You forgot to rinse and recycle the dinner’s spent can of black beans. The can’s gnarled metal lips bit your finger. Instead of attending to it, with Band-Aid or cold water, you ignore the pain. You plunge the vibrating toothbrush dabbed with toothpaste into the stream of tap water. You grit your teeth, and pull the electric toothbrush to your face. You see the dark red eddies swirl out from the tip of your pointer-finger. Slack-jawed, you stare down at the jagged rim. Looking out the window above the stainless steel sink, you see the street. The sun collapsing into the horizon, embers snuffed out like a cigarette flicked into a wet pavement. You flick the toothbrush on, covering the window in flecks of foam and spit and blood.

---

Before becoming a writer, Ryan Loveeachother worked as a human rights attorney, dishwasher, yoga instructor, food truck fry cook, and Christmas tree salesman. Born in Connecticut, he now resides in Georgia with his wife and cat. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Culture Counter, Potluck, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Good Men Project, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Slink Chunk Press and Canyon Voices Literary Magazine.

Tributaries, The New Nature: “Bus Stop”

By Donna Miscolta

It’s eight a.m. and I’m at the bus stop in my mostly white neighborhood in my mostly white city. I’m reading a book by a Latino novelist as I wait for the Rapid Ride that will carry me past dying motels and new mid-rise apartment blocks into downtown. I don’t look up as the bus stop crowd grows with the regulars. We’ve never spoken because that’s how we roll in this city. Surely, I’m familiar to them. Surely, I stand out. Or maybe, they “don’t see color.”

I’m used to it – the whiteness of this neighborhood, and my brownness in its whiteness. I’ve lived here over forty years after growing up in a mostly brown neighborhood. When I see another person of color on my streets, there’s a jolt of recognition and a simultaneous urge to suppress it, like maybe we’re not supposed to acknowledge each other too outwardly. Or maybe, I just don’t know the protocol.

I sense people behind me so I glance over my shoulder. I don’t make eye contact, but at some level, it registers that they are people of color and I give a mental thumbs-up that is visible to absolutely no one. I go back to reading about a millennial who leaves behind his Texas upbringing and Latino surname to make it in the New York fashion world of privilege, but soon there is pacing behind me and mutterings about “over your shoulder.” I should be paying more attention, but I keep reading about the protagonist struggling with identity and disillusionment. Something splashes the back of my legs and feet. It’s July and I’m wearing capris and sandals. I turn and see the puddle, foam dying at its edges, the smell of beer rising from the sidewalk. A can rolls hollowly on the ground. As her boyfriend studies his phone, a young woman looks at some imagined point of interest through black-framed glasses, not unlike mine.

“Why did you do that?” I say.

“Accident,” she says, smirking at her own bullshit.

“No,” I say, “why did you do that?” I step forward for an answer.

Suddenly she’s in my face. I watch up close the movement of her penciled brows, gold ringed- septum, bared teeth, and neck tattoo as she hisses, “Fucking bitch, you know what you did.”

It occurs to me that she could punch me in the face. Yet, I don’t lean away. I tell her I don’t know what I did – that she has to tell me. I stand there. We breathe each other’s air.

Finally, she spins away, still insisting that I fucking know what I did. I take a step again. “Look, if I offended you, it wasn’t intentional.”

She’s not having it. She paces back and forth, swearing under her breath. I wonder what to do next. I turn, see the white people at the bus stop, watching, waiting for the violence to happen.

**

Donna Miscolta is the author of the story collection Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories (Carolina Wren Press, 2016). Hola and Goodbye was selected by Randall Kenan for the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman. It also won an Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction and a silver medal in the International Latino Book Awards for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She is also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press, 2011). She has stories forthcoming in Moss and Blood Orange, and contributes book reviews to the Seattle Review of Books.

Tributaries: "Loose Ends"

By Carla Sofia Ferreira

 

Left without argument,
merely to stand for a while by the river
once frozen and now free flowing, the evening
turns the sky in once more and out and again to dust and glimmer
and back to how each thing simply was.
 

The walk down staircases
becomes the walk towards the river,
not thinking—the grace of repetition— |
these are the ways in which I tie together loose ends.
Waiting for an answer without asking a question,
looking towards the curve of architecture above moving water. 

Carry me to the bridge.
Take me home.
It’s past the time of sitting on the empty bench. 

What closure I get from the evening
settling itself in the frost that embraces me without asking.
Everything becomes familiar: 

The stars they hang upon the city streets,
each tripping brick falling into one another,
even the train station greets me as though I cannot leave. 

Everywhere, I am looking for the answer to the question I do not ask.

Each time, I hear it:                       you can let go now.
Only I don’t listen and instead wait by rivers,
watching the evening and I measure

---

Carla Sofia Ferreira is a Portuguese-American poet from Newark, NJ currently teaching English language development to immigrant high schoolers in the Bay Area. As an undergrad at Harvard, she was selected to write a creative thesis in poetry, from which many poems about trees grew. Past and forthcoming work can be found in journals such as The Lascaux Review, Shot Glass Journal, and Awkward Mermaid.

Tributaries: "Forward"

Marian Rogers

A woman carries a doe forward. The woman is naked and smooth and stands erect. The doe’s coat appears smooth, but short strands of hair are visible on a closer look. The doe is limp in the woman’s hands, its legs hanging down, its head over the woman’s shoulder and tilted back in an unnatural manner. It is no longer alive. The woman doesn’t embrace the doe, nor does she carry it deliberately, though she could, with most of its weight flung over her shoulder. Instead, she holds it rigidly, its back against her belly, the doe facing outward, forward. Where the woman is going with the doe isn’t clear, or for what purpose. Only forward.

On my desk is a stone I have used as a paperweight for twenty-seven years. The stone is round and flat, its shape from above almost a perfect circle. It’s what some people call a moonstone. It feels smooth but isn’t polished, and in a certain light its color shifts from blue-gray to a darker gray. Its weight is surprising. It is heavy. When I pick the stone up, at first it seems to fit the palm of my hand, and then overwhelms it.

I found the stone on a beach near Lubec, Maine, in 1989. Lubec is the easternmost point in the continental United States, way downeast on the Maine coast, where the sun rises first. That summer day was pristine—windy and brisk, sunny and clear. All afternoon, my four-year-old daughter and I combed the sand, unusual at the Maine shore, collecting stones. When we returned home, we hauled our bag of beach loot inside, laid the stones out on the floor, and made small piles of the ones we liked, grouping them by shape, color, texture, size, feel. I selected the stones that I thought would look best in the garden I had planted in front of the house. My daughter had her own preferences and made her own choices. I think she especially liked the heart-shaped stones. But I confess my memory about that has faded, so much storm and stress followed. Two years later I left my husband and our log cabin on fifty acres in Maine to start a new life with our daughter in upstate New York.

What do we choose to carry forward into a new life? There are the obvious things that meet our needs: a few sticks of furniture, the everyday contents of cupboards and closets, favorite books off shelves, small items from drawers. Nestled in one of the many boxes that I packed for the move was the round, almost perfect stone I had found on the beach that day, now nearly thirty years ago. When I look at it on my desk, I see not a memento of a pristine place where the sun rises first, but something stolen from a place at the end of the world. I keep it as a reminder that I went there and somehow got back.

---

Marian Rogers is a freelance editor of scholarly nonfiction and holds a PhD in classics from Brown University. She has been a participant in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Literary Nonfiction, where she has written about place, the natural world, travel, myth, family, and identity. She lives in Ithaca, NY.

Tributaries, The New Nature: “On Monsoons”

By Oliver de la Paz

1. I said to him, “Look at the rainbow.”

2. We were walking and the road ran parallel to the light.

3. Because it was hot we knew about storms.

4. In my country, when it is stormy all the pots come out of the kitchens.

5. I let go of the fantasy that colors would appear if I squinted and looked at the sun.

6. Here there are no words for this—the double rainbow. The rain and the sun simultaneously.

7. Sometimes the fish would come to the road.

8. The children would gather them up in their shirts.

9. All day their bodies would glisten from scales.

10. I was taken by the mouths opening and closing for air.

11. Desperation is duplicable—we would hold our breaths and act like swimmers thrashing to breathe.

12. So many streams would have to be crossed.

13. Streams of this sort are impermeable.

14. Streams are metaphor.

15. I dreamt my son had walked the roads of my childhood holding an umbrella over his head.

16. Neither the sun nor rain could ever pierce it.

17. Water filling the pots along the alleyway in time to the rain beating on the cloth of the umbrella.

18. The petrichor, a sudden topic of conversation.

19. Many naked bathers beneath the eaves.

20. The rain snaking down their torsos.

21. We enter the vapor of the evaporating water.

22. We breeze through it, in a hurry.

23. Storms are a metaphor.

24. Children are metaphors.

25. There is a bright nimbus through the opacity of clouds.

26. I was watching the air between my child and my mouth filled with inscrutable waters.

27. The pots are musical because they are in unison.

28. Simultaneous clatter. The pots and the palpations of rain against an umbrella.

29. One day there were fish and the next they were taken back to the sea.

30. The light, which had been pursuing us all day amplified the pooled water.

31. Liquid on liquid became a coalescing theme.

32. And then we emerged.

---

Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada, and Post Subject: A Fable (U. of Akron Press 2014). He is the co-editor with Stacey Lynn Brown of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U. of Akron Press 2012). He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry and serves on the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Board of Trustees. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Tributaries, The New Nature: “Another Morning”

By Soo Young Yun

The kkachi [1] watches the girl, admiring her ebony tresses as dark as his own tail. She peels off her shoes and lays them daintily behind her, much like every time she enters her home. The kkachi blinks as the streaks of the cold morning sun paint the girl’s silhouette onto the cement. Her shadow is the same colorful grey of the sunlight, her eyes the same hue of everyone else’s in the city. The city is full of pleasantries and scripts, of malleable noses and always lit hagwons, and the kkachi notices the same question hanging by the girl’s head, saying, sadness is the minority, is it not? How can anyone be sad when everyone is wrong in the head?

The kkachi admires the grace in how the girl’s shadow leaps and soars from the ledge. He flaps to the glittery studs on her sneakers, cawing in pleasure to see another lovely pair of ivory shoelaces. Another pair for his collection.

Soo Young Yun is a writer from Seoul, South Korea, and the author of Sixth Grade Stories from Young Hoon. Yun’s writing has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, Aerie International Journal, Writing for Peace Organization, Skipping Stones Youth Honor Awards, Yonsei University, Oxford Youth National Writing Challenge, among others. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Burningword Literary Journal, Emerald Coast Review, Hawai’i Review, Watershed Review, among other journals and anthologies.

Tributaries: "Crossing Borders"

By Aileen Bassis

Walking on roads and rubble, gravel

and grass, pavement and black-top.

We know our past.

We don’t know what waits.

Grass and pavement, black-top

hillsides and grasslands, desert and dirt,

we don’t know what waits —

our lips are silent as we journey

through hillsides grasslands, desert and dirt,

through clutches of branches and bracken.

our lips are silenced in our journey.

Night runs a rough tongue

through a clutch of branches and bracken.

We enter a lap of rivers

running night’s rough tongue.

Remember, sweet — taste of milk.

Enter a lap of rivers

like cracked shells, words, thoughts tumble:

Remember. Taste sweet milk.

Pressed between riven rock, a sea breaks

like cracked shells our words, thoughts tumble

keening of roads, highways, fences split.

Pressed between rock and broken sea

we float. Tide-gripped waters

keen of roads, highways, fences ripped

and we fall into uneasy sleep,

and float in tide-gripped waters

to lie stranded on a shallow bank

where we fall into uneasy sleep,

drifting like oil’s black pour,

lying stranded on a shallow bank

and on we walk: roads and rubble,

gravel and grass.

---

Aileen Bassis is a visual artist in Jersey City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her art can be viewed at www.aileenbassis.com. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. Her poems have appeared in B o d y Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, Amoskeag, Stone Canoe, The Pinch Journal and others.

Tributaries, The New Nature: “Bus Stop”

By Donna Miscolta

It’s eight a.m. and I’m at the bus stop in my mostly white neighborhood in my mostly white city. I’m reading a book by a Latino novelist as I wait for the Rapid Ride that will carry me past dying motels and new mid-rise apartment blocks into downtown. I don’t look up as the bus stop crowd grows with the regulars. We’ve never spoken because that’s how we roll in this city. Surely, I’m familiar to them. Surely, I stand out. Or maybe, they “don’t see color.”

I’m used to it – the whiteness of this neighborhood, and my brownness in its whiteness. I’ve lived here over forty years after growing up in a mostly brown neighborhood. When I see another person of color on my streets, there’s a jolt of recognition and a simultaneous urge to suppress it, like maybe we’re not supposed to acknowledge each other too outwardly. Or maybe, I just don’t know the protocol.

I sense people behind me so I glance over my shoulder. I don’t make eye contact, but at some level, it registers that they are people of color and I give a mental thumbs-up that is visible to absolutely no one. I go back to reading about a millennial who leaves behind his Texas upbringing and Latino surname to make it in the New York fashion world of privilege, but soon there is pacing behind me and mutterings about “over your shoulder.” I should be paying more attention, but I keep reading about the protagonist struggling with identity and disillusionment. Something splashes the back of my legs and feet. It’s July and I’m wearing capris and sandals. I turn and see the puddle, foam dying at its edges, the smell of beer rising from the sidewalk. A can rolls hollowly on the ground. As her boyfriend studies his phone, a young woman looks at some imagined point of interest through black-framed glasses, not unlike mine.

“Why did you do that?” I say.

“Accident,” she says, smirking at her own bullshit.

“No,” I say, “why did you do that?” I step forward for an answer.

Suddenly she’s in my face. I watch up close the movement of her penciled brows, gold ringed- septum, bared teeth, and neck tattoo as she hisses, “Fucking bitch, you know what you did.”

It occurs to me that she could punch me in the face. Yet, I don’t lean away. I tell her I don’t know what I did – that she has to tell me. I stand there. We breathe each other’s air.

Finally, she spins away, still insisting that I fucking know what I did. I take a step again. “Look, if I offended you, it wasn’t intentional.”

She’s not having it. She paces back and forth, swearing under her breath. I wonder what to do next. I turn, see the white people at the bus stop, watching, waiting for the violence to happen.

Donna Miscolta is the author of the story collection Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories (Carolina Wren Press, 2016). Hola and Goodbye was selected by Randall Kenan for the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman. It also won an Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction and a silver medal in the International Latino Book Awards for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She is also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press, 2011). She has stories forthcoming in Moss and Blood Orange, and contributes book reviews to the Seattle Review of Books.

Tributaries, The New Nature: “Outlanders”

By Dheepa Maturi

I remember a mangled mallard,

a blotch of emerald, a blur of brown

on the dirt road, and though I’d been

told never to touch a bird because

they carry diseases, a heartbeat is

a heartbeat, and I placed one hand

upon him, and the other upon the earth,

so that all of us could weep together.

I remember a mangled mallard,

who dodged pellets and spittle and

crouched under a bus seat that

smelled of sweat and tennis shoes,

and she timed her ride by the pulse

in her head so that she knew when

to crawl out of the hydraulic door and

fall into the green grass that loved her.

I remember a mangled mallard,

who flailed from a man’s mouth —

it’s kind of funny to shoot and watch

them crumple to the ground — but it

was a party, so I swallowed my own

throat-burn, stumbled to the shadows,

found the avian iridescence, whispered

yes, your existence had meaning.

I remember the mallards, all of the

mallards. Together, we thrash and wail

until we locate our home in the ether,

until our cries smooth to a symphonic line.

We are the shamans who must honor

our own streaks of life.

Dheepa R. Maturi is the director of an education grant program in Indianapolis and a graduate of the University of Michigan (A.B. English Literature) and the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Brevity, Every Day Poems, Tweetspeak Poetry, A Tea Reader, Mothers Always Write, Here Comes Everyone, Flying Island, Branches, Corium, Dear America: Reflections on Race, and The Indianapolis Review. Her short story ‘Three Days’ is a finalist in the 2017 Tiferet Writing Contest.”

Tributaries: “Rehabilitation: A Gospel”

By Ashely Adams

It took three days

to pull your wings    from the metal grille.

What can a man do with an owl

a shroud of cardboard and terry cloth?

There’s no one here to roll back

your stone. To call you to choir,

the caterwaul thump of

bullfrog string.

I don’t need gauntlets to

clean your perch where you turn

spheres against astroturf.

Your eyes full of holy fire and nebula

as I wonder how

you sing   these gular hymns.

There’s no one here to bury

your quiet wings. But I wail

your silhouette

against the last full moon.

Ashely Adams recently acquired an MA in Writing and Literature at Northern Michigan University, where she also worked as an associate editor for NMU’s literary journal, Passages North. She has been previously published in Rum Punch Press, Heavy Feather Review, Permafrost, Flyway, and Anthropoid.

Tributaries:"Arkansas Anoles"

By Stacy Pendergrast

Before Daddy left us
for New York, he told me
if I could catch one of
those lizards its tail
would snap off.
Those critters
ran up and down
our house all day,
their true skin color
the shade of mortar
that held the bricks
of our home together.
So easy for them
to change from puke-green
to dirt-brown. I found out
later they weren’t
real chameleons.
When I grew up I discovered
I wished for the same things
my father wanted: time to read,
someone to talk to in the night,
and just once, a dream car—
that black Camaro he gave me
after he balded its tires.
He’d said he moved away
so someday I’d know
how to leave.
I remember the cold,
wriggling tail in my hand
as I watched the rest
slip under the rocks.

---

---

Tributaries: "Willow Grove, Acrostic"

By Abigail Wang

Walls streaked in tape was how we left it on the last day. A father’s pride is

Immutable, but at six, I swore I would never do the same when I had children,

Letting them plaster the walls with paper whales and caterpillars, grime

Languishing for later families, because this is how stickiness keeps—

Onerously, obviously, like love does. I came home from kindergarten each day

Wearing a large t-shirt matching the one my father never threw away,

Green and blue and pink, matching sea foam, matching candy canes, matching

Retired old houses in Florida and Pennsylvania that he would one day

Own. We worked alongside each other under incandescent bulbs casting a

Vignette on our scrubbing, soap on drywall, sliding to the carpet: my fingers

Ecstatic and raw, letting the tack have its own way in the gluey dust of an apartment.

---

Abigail Wang grew up in Bucks County, PA. She has spent the past four years in Pittsburgh and is trying to decide where to go next. Her work can be found in Words Dance and is forthcoming in DIALOGIST. She reads poetry for Persephone’s Daughters.

Tributaries: “We are the Ocean”

By Urvashi Bahuguna

A whale fall is the carcass of a whale that has fallen to the ocean floor,

& that sometimes creates complex, localized ecosystems supporting deep sea life.​

​We have learned to hold the drift ​

in our jaws, seaweed ​breathing

from a blowhole. We are the ocean

trying one​ hand at perpetuity.

Though we feel them reaching for

the place, ​flashlights rarely locate us,

a slight warmness percolating after

the fact. We have made a shelter

out of a shape. The men low

on oxygen swim down and marvel

at a sleeper shark exiting

a chest. We are reminded of a story:

a ship after a pod of minke whales,

driving them close, too close to

​shore. The men don’t resist running hands

along tails that have lost a sharpness.

​A​ squat lobster just startled them. We worry

they will not stay afraid very long.

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Urvashi Bahuguna is a poet from India whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nervous Breakdown, Barely South Review, Kitaab, Jaggery, The Four Quarters Magazine and elsewhere. She was recently shortlisted for the Beverly Prize and the Windword Poetry Prize. She has a poetry pamphlet forthcoming from Eyewear Books (UK). She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at PartlyPurple, Bangalore (India).