Tributaries: “A Woman Escapes Herself in the Redwood Forest”

BY KAT LEWIS

When her boot slips from rock into mud, the silence is broken. The distant careening of creek over stone, bellow of a bird somewhere close to the constant buzz of tiny insects near the ear, but not. The rhythm of calypso orchids knocking their heads together in time with the synth of sunlight slicing through the space between everything. The motion of doors neither opened or closed. Silken drip of water from fern to moss in flux with the vibrating heartbeat thrumming inside her head with whisper of limb leafing limb leafing limb on canopy wind above.
Pressing an abandoned snail shell to shell
of her ear, she muffles the kaleidoscope of sound. To
the banana slugs, her own pitch she hums.

Kat Lewis, a Northwestern Pennsylvania native, is a MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Idaho where she is the Managing Editor for Fugue literary journal. She travels relentlessly, writes passionately, and photographs constantly. More of her poetry can be found in Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment and The Merrimack Review.


Tributaries: “What Remains”

By Nicole Robinson

Near the edge of Lake Erie a common tern skims the shoreline
for small fish. Behind me the marsh is golden brown
with only buds of green. Migrating warblers flutter their wings
with urgency. I sing a church song my foster father taught me:
“Mountains bow down and seas will roar at the sound
of your name.” If the waves are mountains they burst
when they bow to shore. The water is dark blue,
blue like the hallway outside the sanctuary
of the church where my foster father pulled me to his chest
and I played a game of reaching around the width of his body,
tried to stretch my right hand to reach the left.
The hair of his goatee scuffed the side of my neck and he whispered
something. But I only remember the speakers crackling
the sermon and how he grew hard between us.
Today I want to find a sand creature, to learn how to burrow
but I keep noticing the distance between me and the place
where water meets sky, the flocks of birds that decide
this is the day to leave the marsh and fly. I list what I see and know:
Lake Erie, song sparrow, pine siskin, that church song he taught me,
the way a whisper fades across decades. I cling to a stone
before skipping it, watch it bounce across water and sink.

Nicole Robinson is the author of a chapbook of poems, The Slop of Giving in, The Melt of Letting Go (2008, p2b press). Her recent poems have appeared in Artful Dodge, Great River Review, The Louisville Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for her poetry in 2016. Robinson is the former assistant director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University where she also taught. Currently, she is a writer in residence at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio.



Tributaries, The New Nature: “Breadcrumbs”

By Chelsea Catherine

I wake up to a vision of her sitting on the floor of my bedroom, her back pressed to the door. Her hair curls around her ears, the color of sunlight. She sits with her knees bent in an oversized grey sweater that pools around her naked thighs. Her hands are covered. I can’t see the engagement ring her fiancé gave her.

“Come here,” I tell her.

A cool breeze flutters in from the open window, fluttering the curtain. I turn towards it. The last dredges of winter still linger on the glass, tiny trails of frost. When I look back at the door, she’s gone.

+++

        At work, she’s the same as in my vision, always there and then gone—flitting out to meetings, legislative sessions, and lunches with senators and lobbyists. She calls me “Rockstar” when I show her my completed tasks. She bellows when I tell her jokes, and wears heels that stab the tiled floor as she walks. Mornings, she slices apples and smears them with organic peanut butter, the smell of it wafting from her office so often I start associating it with her.

The office space seems larger when she’s gone. Quiet and dank and dark. One Friday, I cry after she leaves and can’t figure out why. In afternoons when she’s away, I place snack sized Snickers on her computer for her to eat when she returns. Like little breadcrumbs luring her back to me.

+++

        “We’re closing on the house August first,” she tells my coworker the day after my vision. They sit in her office, reviewing bills. It’s seventy degrees outside, much too hot for a spring day in Vermont. I pull at the collar of my blouse, sweat etching my neck.

“How far a drive?”

“Just fifteen minutes.”

Heat blazes. I shift, turning my music up louder so I can’t hear them talking. The noise quiets them, and I can feel when her gaze turns to me. She can always hear my music, who I’m speaking to, everything I’m doing. We sit ten feet apart five days a week, and there’s still so much distance between us.

+++

        After she leaves for the day, I wander into her office. Her heeled boots are at the door, wedged up against the black filing cabinet. I grab hold of the end of one and try it on, but halfway through my foot gets stuck. Too small.

Sunlight slips through the window, warming my back even though the grass outside is still yellow and the river clots with ice.

I place the boot back on the floor. It feels like I keep picking up pieces of her and trying them on, but none stick. She already has her life—her fiancé, her new house, her fancy job. There’s no space left for me.

I linger a moment longer before making my way out.

Chelsea Catherine is a queer writer living in Vermont. She is a PEN Short Story Prize Nominee, winner of the Raymond Carver Fiction contest in 2016, a Sterling Watson fellow, and an Ann McKee grant recipient. Her short story collection ISABEL was a finalist for the 2018 Katherine Ann Porter prize. Her novella, “Blindsided” won the Clay Reynolds novella competition and will be published in the fall of 2018.



Tributaries: “What a Butterfly Means”


By Joanna Brichetto

At book group someone asked why write about nature, and someone answered we write to make meaning.

But what if meaning is already there?

Let’s say I see a butterfly in the rain, and it’s a Gulf fritillary that has only been a butterfly for a moment. It hangs from its empty casing to let gravity stretch what had been sausage-packed. I see bronze and white and a smidge of gold, but no orange. Orange stays secret till wings fly.

Let’s say the butterfly is trellised from rain above, beside and below by tutored stems of its own host plant: Tennessee’s native passionvine, Passiflora incarnata. Weeks ago, when the just-now-butterfly hatched as a 2mm caterpillar (and devoured its own eggshell), it pigged out on this plant. It survived every predator while it ate leaf after larger leaf; as it sloughed itself from four too-tight skins (and ate those, too); as its turds grew from invisible to the size of kosher salt; as it chose a likely spot to spin just enough silk to anchor its butt to the top of the trellis, and to dangle as a letter “J” to whiten and twinkle and boil and heave and then unzip one last caterpillar outfit up, up, and off till it fell—a bristly mask—to the dirt below.

As chrysalis, it fooled chipmunk, wasp, skink, bird.

Let’s say this all happened because if it hadn’t, the butterfly wouldn’t be here.

I’m here.

I’m here in the Nature Center’s organic garden with my husband and our boy, who are hollering at me to “Come try a pepper” and who answer my what kind with “The sign says ‘Ornamental.’”

Let’s say I leave the butterfly some privacy while it figures out its new body parts and new purpose, that I wish it well, and that I pull the wet, wooden gate to find out if Ornamental peppers are more than just, you know, ornamental.

Joanna Brichetto is a naturalist and educator in Nashville, where she writes the urban nature blog Look Around: Nearby Nature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in storySouth, The Ilanot Review, Killing the Buddha, Dead Housekeeping, November Bees, Vine Leaves Literary Journal and The Fourth River.


Tributaries: "Landmarks"

By Deborah Fass

Not the lawn taken by oxalis, not the yellow flowers we recklessly
call buttercup, not the Caution: Repaving sign tacked to a sawhorse,
not the sawhorse, not the pavement, not the 1950 single-family ranch,
not the vacant lot, not the nest in the naked maple, not the squirrel,
not the five caws of the crow, not the telephone wire, not the metal
on metal wheels on train tracks, not the grinding tree chipper,
not the hundred-year-old pine dead of drought, not the drought.



Deborah Fass’s work appears in literary journals including New Directions, Kudzu House Quarterly, and The Clearing (U.K.). Her work has been shortlisted in contests including the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project, the Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and The Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Program. She lives and teaches English in the San Francisco Bay Area

Tributaries: "Badgers Run"

By Andrea M. Jones

The three dark shapes ripple—not the fur so much as the bodies, undulating across the landscape like figments of a wave. I feel like I’m seeing the wind itself: a phenomenon usually visible only by its effects is glancing back at me across its shoulder. Having lived here fifteen years, I’ve only seen one badger, once. I often find their holes in the pasture, though—fresh-dug evidence of industry powered by stocky limbs and a predatory appetite. They hunt gophers, excavating narrow pipes of burrows to pits full of shadow.

The badgers manage to be simultaneously plump and flattened, their broad forms parting amber-colored bunchgrasses taller than them. The trio shimmers up the slope, headed for the fence line. My brain anticipates a break in their rhythmic gait. Fences, by design, interrupt movement. Even birds flutter and land, borrowing the taut strands as aeries from which to drop onto unsuspecting insects. Deer and elk stop and mill uneasily before jumping or bowing to nose under and, either way, I wince. The leaps don’t always clear the top strand, and passing under, which begins in forced genuflect, proceeds with a cruel raking by barbed wire and ends in an ignominious squat.

The badgers ripple smoothly under the wire and for a second my mind sputters, its expectations defied. I’m surprised at my own surprise, that the low-slung animals, still moving uphill and no longer looking back, are indifferent to a demarcation so obvious to me.

Andrea M. Jones lives with her husband on a high ridge in central Colorado, where she hikes, rides horses, and gardens during the short growing season. She is the author of the essay collection Between Urban and Wild: Reflections from Colorado. In addition to writing literary nonfiction, Andrea works as a freelance indexer and blogs at www.betweenurbanandwild.com.

Tributaries: “Welcome to the Heat”

By Adriana  Páramo

I landed in Kuwait in the summer of 1996. As soon as I stepped out of the plane, a violent searing puff of sand hit my face, fogged up my glasses, and punched me nice and square in my throat. A heavy sandstorm had swept across the country, clouding the sky for days. When the sun came out, Kuwait simmered in a miasma at 120F. This new kind of heat felt red, angry and sharp, like a discordant violin. Like a searing blow to the head breaking the skin all the way to the other side of the skull.

The customs officer looked displeased with my presence, as if something about the combination of: Colombian passport/woman traveling alone/dark skin/unruly curly hair, offended him. What was I doing in Kuwait without a male chaperone? I told him about my job offer as a teacher while he examined my passport suspiciously. He muttered something under his mustache. I wondered if he’d like to share with me useful tidbits of information about his country. You know, mundane tips on how to survive my first Arabian Desert summer, such as:

Do not leave anything locked in your car, the summer heat reduces plastic bottles, toys, and anything malleable into an amorphous mass of twisted polymers. Do not attempt fastening your seat belt as soon as you get in the car. The buckle will sear your fingers before you click the strap. Wear gloves. You’ll feel as ridiculous as you look, but while in Kuwait, do as Kuwaitis do.

Sprinkle your stifling summer with flakes of levity. Don’t take the heat too seriously. It is temporary. Play with it. Cook eggs on the hood of your car. Watch the whites bubble up as they curl like the pages of an old book.

Stare at the fully-clothed Muslim women bobbing in the waters of the Gulf and wonder how they manage to keep their wet scarves on.

Get a box of dust facemasks. You will need to cover your mouth and nose from June to July when the bawarih season brings heavy sandstorms all the way from Saudi Arabia.Tiny dust particles will cover everything, everything. Don’t bother cleaning your house. It’s impractical.

In August, brace yourself for the 90% humidity. Get used to fogged up windows, sunglasses, mirrors, headlights, camera lenses, and windshields. Don’t expect balmy evenings. Muggy days are typically followed by muggy nights.

Don’t think the melanin concentration in your brown skin will protect you from the UV rays. The Arabian sun is an equalizer. Your skin will sizzle, blister, curl, blacken and peel off, just like a white woman’s skin would.

The customer officer stamped my passport. Reluctantly. As though if he could have it his way, he would send my Latino ass back to the USA. I’m here to teach your brothers and sisters, I wanted to say in my defense, but he refused to look at me. Instead, he pushed my passport under the window, turned his back at me, and waited until I disappeared into the crowd.

Adriana Páramo is a cultural anthropologist, writer and women’s rights advocate. She is the author of “Looking for Esperanza,” and “My Mother’s Funeral.” Her essays have appeared in multiple literary magazines and been noted in The Best American Essays of 2012, 2013 and 2014. In 2014, she was named as one of the top ten Latino authors in the USA.  She is an adjunct professor in the low-residency MFA program at Fairfield University and an active member of the travel writing workshop of VONA—Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation—a community of writers of color. She keeps a travel blog at: http://www.paramoadriana.com/travel-blog  



Tributaries: “The Dream”

By J. Matas

The dream saw you before you woke.
The creek.
The clear creek leaving the lake.
Where it was possible to see a temperature.
Where your dream had run in desperation.
Your sleep was maudlin.
You casted one incipient belief after another, sploshing through Canada.
Smart, you think, as you notice a life underground.
You thought you might be crazy to love in such complexity.
In your dream you drew your body over, dam after dam.
Scrape the crust off an idyll until it’s bloody.
Incise with Swiss steel.
Don’t cauterize.
Watch for colour.
Your dream finds a job.
You work nights (mornings too).
The creek is cold, but your legs never get so.
Break off.
Spend as much as you can on words.
Throw dirt over.
Water.
Wild has never felt like anything but home.
I am a tree shaker (said the wind).
The dream spoke in a baritone that shook the raft.
If only you could stop moving.
You made a journey through the most breathable smell.
It took more than your life.
What you call seasons were knit into lower hair.
Time you learned what bird makes that sound.
You called for a sunset, just before dark, and it came.
That night, stars so bright they awaken a new dream, standing up beside the bed.


J. Matas is a musician and a poet. He has released 3 albums and toured in 10 countries with his band Crooked Brothers. He lives in western Manitoba and works masonry for a living.



Tributaries: “the tenth muse (i drink to you)”

By Sylvan Lebrun

I sit across a table from a mortal bleeding out
as the cruel touch of admiration flays her alive
or to think of a person as more than a person is to kill them
and when they called her a myth
it is like they took the mind from the body
took the roots from a twisting willow tree
took the forces of gravity from the earth and sent the oceans flying
and careening into the air
they ask me to save her, to staunch the flow of scalding force of life
out of her so upright form
but I look in her eyes and see misery
so I refuse.
look what they have done to her. and to me,
handing me the lungs of the afterlife and begging me to sing
they have learned to carve from marble what is only from the air
they took what is rooted in the loving earth
what is rich, what is flourishing, what will never cease to
bloom. they took what is of rivers,
and blackbirds
and mothers
and they stood. letting it spill from their lips that they have taught the cosmos
to shine brighter
but I dissent
and at the site of all decay, I ponder
how they called Sappho
the tenth muse
burned her books and hallowed her name
like it was theirs to hold in reverence
I swipe my finger through the stains
of creation upon the abiotic
and I raise a glass with shaky hands
to the poetess,
to the true

Sylvan Lebrun is a student, poet and musician living in Tokyo, Japan. She likes to write about constellations and solid right hooks. Her work has previously been published in Crab Fat Magazine.


Tributaries: “Pawpaws”

By Kelly Garriott Waite

The thing is, I’m not even sure I like pawpaws, deceitful things: I look at the oversized fruits dangling from the branches ten feet up and think pear. Yet a pawpaw cut open and tasted astonishes the tongue, expecting, as it is, a gritty sweetness to land there and squeak beneath the teeth. But a pawpaw is no pear: It’s creamy banana custard, a slippery sloppiness that leaves the mouth confused, unable to decide, at least mine cannot, whether to spit out the fruit or have another taste.

I cannot explain the pull of the pawpaw: Why do I leave the trail and lean my bike against the wooden fence? What compels me to stand on the lower rail of that fence, hoping it won’t give way beneath me as I reach overhead to gently pull down a branch? Why do I bother to press my thumb into the round side of a fruit with which I have, at best, an uncertain relationship?

There are other secrets along the bike trail and in the nearby woods: Wild asparagus and thyme and the morels my hairstylist gathers every spring. The fall crabapples with which I make jelly, storing it in crystal jars that, held up to the sky, stain the clouds a gentle pink. There are shagbark hickories, tiny beech nuts and the black walnuts that, come fall, litter the trail with their softening green and black husks.

There are blackberries and mulberries and grapes as well, fat with a fragrance so strong and so true, bursting with such promise my mouth waters with the memory of biking past them as the trees let go their leaves, orange and red and yellow.

I haven’t yet gathered the courage to search for morels; to wave away the drunken bees feasting on a bunch of grapes. It isn’t the bees that frighten me: I am afraid to trust myself to know good from bad.

My great-grandfather could walk into the woods and emerge with the ingredients for lunch. Every fall, for the Christmas baking, my mother gathered hickory nuts, smashing them with a hammer on the basement floor, plucking hearts from shattered shells. And this is the person I want to become: one who can look at a plant in nature and know: This is food. This is safe to eat.

My forays into foraging represent my tentative steps toward revealing the deceit of big business, the deceit that says we are not intelligent enough to care for ourselves. In foraging, I make a small reclamation of my life and my senses. The fruit is unyielding beneath my touch. Tomorrow, I’ll return to this place. For a brief moment in time, I’ll return to my own wilderness, my own uncontrollable nature.

Kelly Garriott Waite’s work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere.

Tributaries: "Screen Memory 3: Who Do You Wanna Live With?"

By Allen M. Price

We are standing in the back hall of our house on Toledo Avenue, me, my mother, and my father; my dog, Lady is asleep underneath of the table in the kitchen adjacent to us. There are no lights on; I can’t see my parent’s faces, or anything for that matter, only the flickering blue and orange flame from below the rustic furnace that clicks off, the boiler sits next to it in silence. I can hear my father whimpering, sniffling in between Lady’s heavy breathing, something he has never done in front of me. My mind pictures him as strong in body and in will. He picks me up and holds me in his arms. I pull the chain on the light, which switches on, but my father quickly turns it off, so I’m unable to see anything, not even a quick glimpse in the blasted brightness. The glimmering bulb of the night-light in its clear plastic covering, shaped like a candle, plugged in the wall socket in the kitchen, tries to penetrate the darkness, but its presence only becomes plainer the longer we stand there and my eyes adjust.

“Who do you wanna live with, Allen?” My father asks. “Me or your mother?”

A spell of uncertainty comes over me. Unsure of how to answer, unsure of what exactly he means, I look at my daddy like I have never seen him before. Then shrug. It was as though I was asleep in my bed dreaming. My father’s strong arms and hands and broad chest holding me secure and safe like my bed does, like my heavenly Father does in the midnight hour, allowing me to relax my consciousness and lose all sense of place and being and find myself flying through the clouds towards heaven as though God had thrown down Jacob’s enchanted ladder to draw me up in, but turn around and see my body detouring, traversing, descending away from the plane of unconsciousness, and be awoken by a harrowing image of surmounting flames and gusts of heat shifting and altering in scorching temperatures striking my face from the depths of hell.

A shadow goes across my father’s face. I stretch my tiny fingertips to dry the water dripping from it. What do I know at this young age besides what I feel, and all I know is what my internal, instinctive, inherent feelings tell me, feelings that know where I belong even though my conscious, my brain does not, keeping me from the chaos between me and what is right and wrong and deviating off of my life’s road.

“Mommy” they tell me to say. A clear understanding as to why I say that, why I choose my mother over my father is beyond my five-year-old mind’s comprehension. I haven’t any answer to justify my choice or doubt it, for there is no reason to explain this reasoning.

His tears drop and streak his cheeks like lightning bolts. His anguish penetrates my skin and seeps deep beneath my flesh into my bones, even my organs. These uncomfortable, awkward feelings etch themselves into the corners of my soul, this soul that’s inside me, like a best friend I’ll spend the rest of my life getting to know, and for me to remember when I am gone.

“Don’t cry daddy.”

My father turns his head, releases me, puts me on the floor, opens the screen, and walks out the door. Just the foggy silhouette of the tall trees with their bare branches shadowing night’s dark sky remains. I stand there looking out the door for long minutes as the night whispers peace, like the voice of an angel. Night rescues me from the dark, allowing me to feel like I’m falling free, free to let loose of the need to know, free to be, free to go, free of what river runs aground, free from the face of God staring down, free from the chain of hours that throw a shadow over time, my time as I grow like the trees, wandering forth in every direction, but planting my imperfect roots of health and vigor deep, gripping the ground tight, bemoaning the imprisonment, always wondering, waiting, fearing man will cut me down.

Allen M. Price is a writer from Rhode Island. Screen Memory 3 “Who Do You Wanna Live With?” is one of only three childhood memories he has of his father. They are part of the memoir he is writing and spent time working on with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Paul Harding. He is a 2018 semi-finalist for Grub Street’s Emerging Writing Fellowship. He has an MA in journalism from Emerson College. His fiction and nonfiction work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Jellyfish Review, The Citron Review, Gertrude Press, Columbia Journal, The Adirondack Review, Tulane Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Muscle & Fitness, Natural Health magazine, and many other places. His poetry has appeared in Tower Journal.




Tributaries: “Single”

By Lucian Mattison

The cabin window overlooks a thicket of scrub brush, pine. Sprawled

on the mattress, I’ve found something I had forgotten went missing,

but this time it fails to surprise me: paper wasp embalmed in the eaves,

beam of dust flecks cutting across the room in a constant state of rising,

sheets bunched at the foot of on an empty bed. So, this is the freedom

I desired so much—wilderness devoid of animals, hidden in the snowfall

of ashes from a nearby brush fire. I left her and a few odd belongings

behind in a city apartment for every right reason. I just opened the door

and she is already waiting for me to come back to collect them.

Lucian Mattison is an Argentinean American poet and author of ‘Peregrine Nation’ (The Broadkill River Press, 2014) and ‘Reaper’s Milonga,’ forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2017. He is the winner of the 2016 Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize and his poems appear or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Hinchas de Poesia, Hobart, Muzzle, Nashville Review, Pinwheel, and elsewhere online and in print. His fiction appears in Fiddleblack, Nano Fiction, and Per Contra. His poetry translations are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Newfound, and The Offing. He works at The George Washington University and is an associate editor for Big Lucks. To read more visitLucianmattison.com

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.