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.

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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.

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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.

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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).