Issue 2
Table of Contents
Contest Winners and Finalists
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Bios

Authors
Elizabeth R. Curry
Poetry Contest Winners

First Place
Ellaraine Locke
Godot Goes to Montana

Second Place
Emily Reardon
Crowing

Third Place
Jean Tupper
Here: after





First Place, Ellaraine Locke
Godot Goes to Montana

My farmer father waited to see
if crops would hail out or dry up
If coyotes would tunnel the chicken coops
If the price of grain could keep
me out of used clothes
If the bank would waive foreclosure
for another year

After hay baling and breech delivering
from sunrise to body’s fall
He slept in front of the evening news
Too worn out to watch the world squirm
Too weary to hear warnings from ghost brothers
who were slain by beef, bacon and stress
Too spent to move into the next day

when he couldn’t afford to forget
how Brew Wilcox lost his left arm to an auger
How the mayor’s son suffocated in a silo
Too responsible to remember the bleak option
my grandfather chose for the rope
hanging over the barn rafters

Never too lonely because every farmer
had a neighbor to bullshit with
To share an early a. m. pot of Folger’s
To eat fresh sourdough doughnuts
To chew the fat of their existence

Second Place, Emily Reardon
Crowing

A woman gazes out a wood-paned window
in December at a murder of crows who’ve
landed fatly on her empty Ash in the yard.

Black baubles on the holiday death tree
she notes and cups her mug of hot black tea.
Pythagoras had something to do with math.

He stands inside her forehead, also looks
at the crow-packed boughs, reminds her that she
only hates crows because others told her to.

He tries to seduce her into believing
those matted swathes of feathers house the souls
of her dead. Count them he says. Count each one.

Begin with the longest dead on the low
limbs and work your way up to last year’s
accident. See how they narrow inward.

The woman banishes him but secretly,
she counts in the pattern he’s instructed,
sees the triangle crookedly emerge.

There is one soul shelter at the top of
the tree that remains unaccounted for.
Vile little pig birds weighing down my tree.

She crushes a half-smoked cigarette out,
lifts her sleek shotgun from the pantry
and walks outside. She aims for the topmost

bird with its swiveling head glancing over
its back. With a crack, he is an explosion.
The murder clears the tree and fills the air.



Third Place, Jean Tupper
Here:after

After Sophie’s wake I just want
to curl up in my own bed,

want to lie in this cool darkness
and listen to silence;

but it is broken
by a fly buzzing overhead

and he—poor fellow— is trapped
with me on this side of the skylight:

no need to go after the fly swatter
since none of his brash whizzings

can buy freedom with the window sealed;
no more than her circumlocutions

could outrace the cancer cells. I think of her
wearing that Oh—so Sophie! Perfect! crimson dress

splayed with black chrysanthemums—the one
found with tags still on in her closet.