“I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise...”

I never really loved Jane Kenyon’s poem “Otherwise.” I love other poems more. The language of “Otherwise” is so quiet. It’s almost too quiet. It’s everyday language—cereal, bed, candlesticks. It doesn’t arrest me while I read it. But then, sometimes a poem becomes a part of your mind, regardless of whether you want it there. Despite not loving it, I think of “Otherwise” often. I hear her phrase “it could have been otherwise” reciting itself inside me at surprising moments.

I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood…

Like Jane, I have my bowl of cereal. I have the dog to walk. The laundry in the hamper. It could all have been otherwise.

Maybe the poem lingers because I know it was published after her death. It was likely written while she was sick. I’ve read her husband Donald Hall’s book of poems about that period of time—his wife’s early, terrifying, beautiful death from leukemia. He made it beautiful, somehow. Donald made her death into art. And so did she, really, with “Otherwise” and the other poems in that final collection. She was a poet married to a poet and so her death is still here, even now, twenty years later. It’s still there in the books.

“They talked about their
adventures—driving through England
when they first married,
and excursions to China and India.
also they remembered
ordinary days—pond summers, working
on poems together,
walking the dog, reading Chekhov
aloud. When he praised
thousands of afternoon assignations
that carried them into
bliss and repose on this painted bed,
Jane burst into tears
and cried, ‘No more fucking. No more fucking!’”

–Donald Hall

I can’t get over how alive she is. The painted bed; the coarse, honest language of a living woman. I opened my copy of Donald Hall’s selected poems and I found her alive, still there in the pages. And isn’t that kind of a miracle? I am there, standing in the doorway of his memory. I am allowed to be present with her, sitting together on the bed.

To call something a miracle, to say that this poem, this life, is special—it’s simply to say the same thing over and over again. It’s what Jane said. It could have been otherwise. Everything, anything, could be otherwise. Will certainly be otherwise. But here we are. We have this moment. This bowl of cereal.

I began to think of this essay in the middle of a heat wave. Over a hundred degrees in New York at the start of the Fourth of July weekend. The city filled up with French and Paraguayan World Cup fans, who met each other in New Jersey that Sunday. The East River was like a kid’s bathtub, masts and more masts of tall ships, sailing in celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary. The Navy was arriving for Fleet Week. Uptown, the cops were diverting traffic around Madison Square Garden for Taylor Swift’s wedding.

I was indoors that morning, dreaming of a drive out of the city. I couldn’t stop thinking about a book I’d read by Ian McEwan, called What Can We Know. It’s another one that’s become lodged in my mind. On one level, it’s just another book written for English majors—a book about an English professor and his quixotic pursuit of a lost work of literature. The professor is like any other professor in any academic fiction you’ve read: he’s poorly paid, inept with his friends, fumbling at love. The book could have been any number of less memorable campus novels, except that, in this case, the professor character is living and teaching literature in the year 2119. He’s seeking a lost poem written by a British poet, Francis Blundy, in 2014—a year which is, for the professor, an almost unimaginable before-time. In the intervening century between 2014 and 2119, the world has gone through what they call “The Derangement” and “The Inundation,” during which time the seas rose and overtook most of the world’s dry land. A series of regional squabbles developed into a pingpong of escalating nuclear attacks. Eventually, the human population (halved by this point) retreated into its crippled nations, nurturing and rebuilding what it could.

Which all sounds very dramatic, but the book wasn’t dramatic. By 2119, the upheaval has finished heaving, and people are living a recognizable existence again—even if they need to take a ferry to get from one town to the next. Much of the past is still recorded. The libraries are situated on high ground. Universities continue, and research continues. What I found fascinating was less the book’s description of life in 2119, (which was wisely left vague beyond the pertinent details,) and more the lyricism of McEwan’s professor on the subject of the distant past—my own present tense. The last golden days of the early 21st century. Those passages are what I keep remembering:

“Simply writing those place names - magical Swindon! - brings on a sweet melancholy. Oh, to have been there, when strawberries and oranges came in winter as a matter of course. Even to set down a date - 2010! To have been alive then in those resourceful raucous times, when the sea stood off at a respectful distance, when you could walk in any direction as far as you liked and keep your feet dry. When you might see and hear the real Francis Blundy in proud Huddersfield - 1994, in the town hall…”

“The Blundys and their guests lived in what we would regard as a paradise. There were more flowers, trees, insects, birds and mammals in the wild, though all were beginning to vanish. The wines the Blundys’ visitors drank were superior to ours, their food was certainly more delicious and varied and came from all over the world. The air they breathed was purer and less radioactive. Their medical services, though a cause of constant complaint, were better resourced and organised. They could have travelled from the Barn in any direction for hours on dry land…”

The character’s love interest, Rose, accuses him of having “distorted notions of the period.” She thinks that he exaggerates “the vitality and beauty of the past and ignore[s] its squalor and cruelty and morbid greed.”

“What, she demanded, of the self-serving short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders - take your pick - and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations? What of the people’s careless love of autocrats? How could we overlook or forgive the desolation those times bequeathed, the poisons they left in the oceans, the forests they stole, the soils and rivers they ruined and the Derangement they acknowledged but would not prevent? It was all scorched earth, all blithe contempt for the generations to follow. The world I hankered after was a privileged corner - Gloucestershire! The big world beyond was sinking. How could I go on about the James Webb telescope?”

But he can’t help himself. And I couldn’t either, reading the book. I couldn’t stop myself from loving these admittedly barbaric times.

“I treasured the crazy music and fads and troubled movies and serious science, serious history, serious biography. My list was long - the suspension bridges, the orchestras, street parties and a thousand forms of music festivals, and people’s gardening and cooking, their need for holidays, extreme sports, historical enactments, gay-pride carnivals, the risks they took with AI, the sense of humour, the safe airplanes, the passion for pointless sports. A hundred thousand at a football match! An astronaut playing golf on the moon! Did she know about the cheese-rolling competitions? Four billion people watching the–

‘Enough, Tom.’”

I put down McEwan’s book with an odd kind of exhilaration. I opened my refrigerator and was amazed. Look, there are the strawberries! It’s all still here! The feeling has kept at me ever since, even after picking up and laying down a handful of other books. When I’m out in the evening and I hear a bird singing at the river, I think of the book again, and my heart breaks at the thought that I am able to hear this bird. Someday, no one will hear that sound again. Even if that species of bird never dies out, that particular bird will be long gone, and then I’ll be gone too. I won’t be here anymore to do anything, much less stop and listen to a bird. And I won’t ever have known precisely what kind of bird this one was, or even which tree it was perched in when I heard it.

One day, everything will be otherwise—for me, for the bird, for the river. One day, and this day could be tomorrow, we’ll be gone. If we’re lucky, we’ll be words on a page, and someone will read about us and they’ll think it was an amazing thing to be standing in this city on an evening in July as the sun fell behind Jersey City for the evening. Somewhere uptown, just at that moment, Taylor Swift was changing into another dress. And all across the city, people were throwing their sweaty clothes in their hampers and taking a quick shower before they met their dates. From restaurant to restaurant, the waiters were unwrapping the piles of freshly laundered napkins. Out on the sidewalk sheds, they dotted the tables with battery-powered candles or tiny, elegant lamps.

I nearly wrote “the Covid Cabanas,” but I realize we’ve already lost that phrase, just in the past few years. It’s frightening how quickly the present tense falls into memory…

We’ve been planning a trip to South Dakota for the end of the month. We’re watching the smoke maps and the weather forecasts, which are predicting hundred degree temperatures in the days before we arrive. A hundred degrees in the Black Hills seems impossible to me. The trees will be like matchsticks.

When I was a kid, in the forest, we never needed air conditioning. In the high summer, for a week or two, it would get hot enough that we closed the curtains and spent the midday hours in the basement, which stayed cool like a cave. But then, each evening, we would open all the windows again and the breeze was so sweet, it was impossible to stay inside. Even now, if I try to think of my happiest moment, I think of a summer evening at that house, running up the grass from the forest toward the yard. The way the grass felt so cool and soft after the pebbles and pine needles. I was always barefoot then. And the way the air felt. That purple late-evening summer sky.

Time had no meaning in the summer. I remember standing on the porch at night, watching my mother work in the garden. Her shadow moving in and out of the light cast by her little lantern. I wasn’t thinking of anything then, not the next day or the next years. I was only happy. Everyone I loved was there.

I had that forest before the logging trucks came, back in the days when we could follow the deer paths unerringly to the edge of the bluff and look down on the clean, green meadow below. The highway in the distance. That was my favorite view, out across that meadow into the hills, back in those years before the wildfires burned the tall pines down to the rock. Before the scrubby new trees began to grow back in their place. I knew the creek below when it was still wide and the highway was skinny, clinging like a pen line to the sharp curves in Boulder Canyon. Later, the road was wide and the creek went dry, and in the dry years, the pine beetles came for the trees. But all that was later, after the deer trails were all scrambled and tree-fallen, so that I could only find my way to the edge of the bluff by guessing. And then still later, when the meadow below was run all to mud by off-roaders. After the trees in the hills grew back different, scarred by yet another fire and another seven years of drought. And I never did find my old reading place by the creekside again.

But I knew magic there. That sensation doesn’t go away. I was raised in a place that smelled like pine. In the summers, I watched my parents fell trees in the woods behind our house. I sat at a safe distance as they sawed the trees into logs, then chopped down the logs into ever-narrower pieces for the winter wood stove. I was young enough and unhurried enough to really see it all happening. The first pasque flowers on the forest floor. The lupines. I find myself reaching for a sketchbook now, wanting to draw that ancient view from the bluff, a crescent of road bending along the hill, and, across the valley, the trees stretching out forever.

It looked that way once. It was a wonder. One of the many wonders.

I have such a strong memory of sitting out at that bluff in the evening, watching the headlights of cars on the highway. I recall the feeling so strongly, the simultaneous love of this heartachingly beautiful place, the knowledge that the beauty I felt wouldn’t last very long—only as long as I was willing to sit, a few minutes maybe—and the most powerful longing, which was all tied up with the headlights, the flash of yellow along the trees, the way I lost each of them around the turn. That urgent adolescent mix of infatuation and sadness. Which has become, maybe, the defining feeling of life. Of being alive.

You can never quite get your fingers around it.

As I’ve been planning this trip back to South Dakota, I’ve had fits when I felt unaccountably resentful. What is it about that old place? Why does it make me feel so ill done by? It’s like the hills are withholding something. Or something was taken away. Something was meant to have stayed the same, but instead it’s all changed. Why didn’t someone hold my place for me while I was away? I know, walking down the street in Rapid City, or even Sturgis, I won’t recognize any faces. But shouldn’t there be one or two, at least, who remember me?

I guess you can’t expect it of a place, not a town, not even a small town. Not even a forest, after nearly twenty years away. The trees themselves are different, after so many of them burned away or died of disease, and new ones have grown in their place. I should stop expecting to find any of myself there. But still, I do.

Some days I think I’ve moved through my life like water. Touch, touch, touch without holding. To the grocery, on the train, to another town, a gallery, another train, through the park, through the crowds moving alongside the river. I have always moved on my own current, swimming among all the others, but rarely a part of anything. Rarely pierced by anything. Depending on the day, I can be exhilarated by my separateness (I am free!) or else I become unhappy. I feel like an alien in the world. No place to settle.

Sometimes I want to close my eyes and run my hands again through the sage I planted, far away, a long time ago. I want to rub my fingers into the leaves of the lemon balm. I can touch them again, then let them go again. I can imagine all my memories are gone; where they were is only wind.

Then sometimes I want to sit down where I am, in the dust, on the edge of the park, and let the rest of the world continue to move forward around me. I want to root down into this moment and let everything else pass by, all the people, money, opportunities, the flow of technological progress. To let loose of all the striving. To not even be interested by it. To, instead, look up to where the trees are swaying against the sky. To give in to the clouds. To put on a piece of music and fall headlong into it and stay there. To live inside a painting, inside music, inside tree bark and soft touches. And then stay there. Just stay.

I grow lazy some days, confusing the lines between the miraculous and the everyday. I forget that it’s a miracle just to be whole and to be on this earth at this time. It is a miracle to be in love. To be loved back. A miracle that we don’t disappoint each other. It’s a miracle to be given so much kindness. To be given such opportunities to be kind. To have sweet, perfect strawberries and blueberries in June and then peaches in July. To know there will be figs in the fall.

Gratitude is a kind of sadness, if you think about it. It isn’t feathered. In some ways, it’s the opposite of hope. It’s knowing where you’ve been. It’s seeing where you are. That soft evening light glinting off the taxi cabs. Knowing that you were given these gifts, and that they don’t just stick around, certainly not forever. Even in the next few moments, everything could change.

“Why were they not
contented, four months ago, because
Jane did not have
leukemia? A year hence, would he question
why he was not contented
now? Therefore he was contented.”

-Donald Hall

Isn’t it extraordinary that I made it here at all? Somehow I found my way to this place, along this wide river, and I’ve met all these people I now cherish. Isn’t it something? We were all given a little time together, even if it is only a little time. Even if it’s only for a single lifetime. Knowing how few hours there can be in a lifetime… And look, now, we’ve had this rare, perfect summer evening, tree-shaded, cooled by that extraordinary breeze off the water. We may never feel that breeze again, you know, or see another barge sailing north into the interior.

We were alive today and, as Paul and I walked home from the river, we saw the fragile heads of purple columbine blooming in the tree pit between the bike path and the traffic. I should be so thankful. I should be glad for all the little, inconsequential things I’ve worried about today. The kind of things I won’t even remember in a year or more.

I have been haunted by otherwise over the years. Otherwise has been my teacher. In worse days, I survived on so much less than this. Less love, less light. I know where the empty room is, and I know I’ll stand in its doorway again. But still. Somehow, tonight, we’re here. And there is so much

Music.
and look, some flower petals have fallen from the vase.
And we have muddy doggie paws.
and an open window.
and outside, the soft, green, tree leaves.

There are people laughing below.
And there is kissing
and lamp light
and books piled by the bed.

And, in the morning, there will be coffee and
bread. And we can’t forget,
I don’t want to forget the strawberries.

Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.

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In Need of Old Gods

stitched the seer into horse hide
to dream
upon
some conjoined chief

gifted to birth
sorrow and lack
joyous sleep

(she said they ended up in France
tongues wagging in spite of fealty
or chronos)

killed the horse
for the seer’s cloak
sewn into womb
   hide and hair

memoried songs unfurl
till the bones rattle in their frame

(“i think they gave up on truth
and spent themselves in infamy”).

what do we know of who we are:
   round in passing
   words betraying us
   the past a broken promise?

summer rains give way
the seer forgotten
all fire and combustion
the industry of marking
a world

in need of old gods.

In Need of Old Gods first appeared in Bardo, published in 2018. Contact Ned Mudd at nedmudd@me.com for copies.

Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.

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We celebrate the passage of time in a funny way on Juke. Every three months, I send out a question to anyone who’s contributed (writing, art, etc) to Juke. They send back their responses and I gather them all into one big celebratory post—a smorgasbord.

For today’s smorgasbord, I sent the question:

What’s grabbing you lately?

The whole point is for everyone to respond however they’d like. They can take the question literally or metaphorically. They can send poems or photos or whatever. They could even make up another question for themselves and answer it instead, though no one’s tried that yet.

Inevitably, when all the replies come in, they join together in a way that’s just wonderful. I hope you agree. And I hope you’ll be inspired to join us in the comments!

Now, as for what’s grabbing all of us…

I’ll go first.

Tonya Morton:

What’s grabbing me now is the color green. Green hillsides. Green parkland. Green leaves. I’ve been obsessed lately with the idea of gardening. It’s my chief complaint about living in the city, that I haven’t found a way to garden here. People who have heard me complain about this include: my friends, my mom, the waiter at the nearby diner, the clerk at The Strand bookstore, the owner of a cute kitchen store in the east village… I just don’t seem to be able to stop talking about plants and how much I want them. A couple weeks ago, I discovered a new garden in the park at the Battery and (because the sign said I could) I went wild. I touched everything. The sage. The lavender. I took a leaf from the lemon balm. I walked away feeling euphoric, at least for a few minutes, until I tried to cross the street and was nearly killed by a bicyclist. But since that happens multiple times a day, and lemon balm never happens, I just kept right walking home, rubbing my fingers on the lemon balm leaf until I’d worn it down to nothing.

Our apartment living room has one sunny-ish window, in which we’ve kept alive an aloe, a peperomia rosso plant, and a surprisingly healthy pot of basil. This summer, I have been debating adding a rosemary plant. A small one. I’d love to go crazy with plants in here—it would help my green-obsessed head—but we do travel a lot.

In my ideal world, I could somehow have both. The exuberant city, then long stretches on the road, and then also a big, overflowing garden somewhere. Tomato plants and every kind of herb. Flowers and trees. A quiet place without traffic. For now, though, it’s just a place in my head. A green place to go to when the sirens are racing by and they’re jackhammering in the streets again…

Paul Vlachos:

“What’s grabbing you?” is one of those muscular American idioms - a bit dated now, actually - that could go many ways. At the core, it’s saying something like, “What interests you?” but the intent is more, “What’s REALLY interesting to you right now?” I see it also as a form of “What’s catching your attention?” or “What’s your current favorite thing to do, see or watch?” Am I going on too long here? Future generations that discover this as a remnant on the internet, in some cosmic archive, deserve to know what we’re talking about. I’m also trying to figure out what’s grabbing me. I almost see the phrase as an equivalent to those basic salutations of “What’s up?” or “How’s it going?”

I won’t count the world news, although a disinterested observer would think, based on my reading habits, that I’m consumed with the news, that it might be “grabbing” me. It’s not. I just can’t stop reading it. I’m not being grabbed or grabbing at much new music or art, although I did just discover these reissues of singles from the mighty Lee “Scratch” Perry from the early 1970s that are making me happy. There IS the music of Anton Batagov, whom I recently discovered and who is very much grabbing me. And, AS ALWAYS, I’m running a low level fever about where to go next, what road adventure is in front of us, but that’s not a grab as much as it is a constant state. I need a hill to aim towards.

I’m trying to get out of a rut in my work. Released a book of photos of Florida at night, but I want to revise it, which might simply be an excuse to NOT promote it. That doesn’t sound very grabby. I have a few writing projects on the back burner, but they’re barely bubbling at the moment. Trying to deal with a rotator cuff injury that’s bothering me. This is all devolving into a bad list. What’s grabbing me? As someone who can get obsessed about stuff, I usually have a quick answer for that. I don’t have to think about it. But here we stand, grab-free in New York.

Possibly, what’s grabbing me CONTINUES to be the idea of where else we might live. Upstate? Uptown? Spuyten Duyvil? Vermont? We talk about this, Tonya and I, all the time and it seems to consume the most brain cycles. I visualize life elsewhere, run through the pros and cons, think hard about it. I guess that the *possibility* of life outside of Greenwich Village is grabbing me. Does that count, a dream?

When we thought we were moving last year, before things fell through - not of our own doing - I began a piece about leaving Greenwich Village. That piece is on hold now, but it’s sitting there on my desktop and in my mind. I’m just trying to get through each day with a modicum of gratitude, patience, and an openness to mystery and serendipity.

I’m not waiting for some magic to grab me - that already happened and the magic is real. I’m just trying to stay out of its way. Does that make sense?

Damon Falke:

What has been grabbing me lately? Coffee, specifically a coffee from a bordegón in a small town in another country. The coffee, a cortado naturelle, is perfect—perfecto. The coffee has earthy flavors and is slightly tinged with cigarette smoke. It is served in a short, clear glass. You drink the coffee among locals, of course, and you drink it with your good friends. You drink. Your friends drink. After a taste, you all stare at each other. There is the recognition that you have tasted the best coffee in the world. The glass empty, you are enchanted. Then you all go for a walk. You see a cathedral. Later, you reach the sea where you stand on a cliff edge. And just before you leave, just before you drive back to the village and cottage where you are staying, you stop in the bordegón again and drink another coffee. Is it healthy? What about the cigarette smoke? It doesn’t matter. None of that matters. It is best coffee in the world. You have stood on a cliff edge. You have seen the sea and walked in holy court yards. You are with dear friends. You drive with the thought that it has been one of those days you would live again. You would live it with more gratitude and go more slowly if you could, if there was a chance.

Tabby Ivy:

I have been totally sucked in by the World Cup.

Not so much the actual game, which I only vaguely understand from my boys playing youth soccer in the 70s.

No, it’s not the game.

It’s the players, the fans, the country pride and the pure joy and humanity that has been shown in big and small ways. As I write this we are just getting into the quarter finals. We do not know yet who will win the Cup, and before that win there will be more drama and stories - thankfully without our President’s involvement - enough said about that sad moment.

I have been grabbed by the stories; of the people of Lawrence, Kansas, who welcomed the Algerian team into their community by learning French and Arabic, hosting cultural events to make them feel at home. The Scots who drank up all the liquor in Boston. The Cape Verde team who lost in the Round of 16, but won the hearts of the world to make it even that far. A tiny island off the coast of Africa (pop 500,000) taking the mighty reigning World Cup Argentina to extra time; their 40 yo goalie, Vozinha, didn’t start playing professionally until he was 25. The Cape Verde team showed the world what true grace is.

My Norwegian friend Anne, who wouldn’t know a goal kick from an offsides, singing the praises of the Nordic Viking, Haaland. The “Viking Row” in stadiums and on escalators. Filled stadiums from Mexico City to Seattle, all for the love of the game, their team and their country.

The World Cup has brought so much of what the world needs right now, allowing us to witness with awe and wonder what is possible when we are one world, together. It’s been fantastic!

Sue Cauhape:

What is Grabbing Me Lately?


my hands grab weeds growing where I don’t want them
they’re just trying to live their lives from seed to bloom
who am I to seal their doom with an arrogant yank?

my grandson grabs my attention in a preschool video
his wide-mouth grin, his jumping waving exuberance
joy personified in a tiny body that can never hold it in.

my hand grabs the bottle cap, gives it a futile twist,
a little stab thrusts through my fingers and wrist
as I fail to wrest a package open with broken nails.

I grab a few minutes stolen from chores, the must-dos
when clothes are washed, clutter tossed, lunch prepared
moments outdoors listening to lizards sliding across sand.

Joy grabs me when cloud shadows skid over hillsides
a siskin alights upon the birdbath, yellow feathers flash, 
dipping for a drink while anticipating the cat’s sudden dash.

grandkids writhe upon a beanbag painted like the world
Mom grabs and hides it because they are fighting again
irony grabs me when a child’s toy becomes a metaphor.

Ned Mudd:

Letter to Antares

listen. the business isn’t doing that well. i am not trustworthy and something of a fraud. satellites track us like flying bird dogs. we are not who we believe in. youth speaks its own irony. don’t fall for a rain check. it isn’t raining but it will be. meanwhile the earth is its own violence. her molten blood spills into the sea. a savage ritual. procreation carries her bags. we can only fall into place. our jetsam overwhelms us. we are strangers even to ourselves. so much longing so little time.

Matt Layne:

When I turned six years old in 1975, I had a birthday party and received two of the same Planet of the Apes books and 45 records. For those on the younger end of the spectrum, we used to have tiny little records that came with books. The records would chime to let you know when to turn the page. They were badass. I had a couple of GI Joe ones that were epic. My mother took one of the duplicate Planet of the Apes sets back to TG&Y to exchange it. When she came home, she handed me a full-length album. Pretty sweet. I loved albums, but this particular album didn’t have a single rocket ship or talking ape on it. Cartoonish rosy-cheeked children pranced about with a creepy nutcracker on the pages of the enclosed book, and there was not a bit of dialogue on the entire album. It was all classical music. I was six, and I was not enchanted. Thus began my long-running beef with ballet.

45 years later, I was attending Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. Puss-in-Boots and Snow White pranced about at Sleeping Beauty’s wedding in the second act, and my mind wandered. I wondered what she dreamed during all those years she slept. I decided to give voice to her dreams in poetry. That project led me to research the history of Sleeping Beauty stories. This summer my fairy tale research led me to stay in a tenth-century Italian castle. While studying there, I discovered an even older medieval version of the tale from France. All that is to say, what’s been grabbing my attention lately is really old fairy and folk tales. Wandering the ever-dark forest of old tales often seems brighter than the current state of our world. So many of these tales don’t end with happily-ever-afters. Rather, the reader is left to discover how to make do when a story wraps with a less-than-perfect ending. However our story ends, may we all keep adventuring until the last line.

M Sebastian Araujo:

The zinnias do not apologize for their color.

If that makes sense.

Anthony Head:

I am at a loss. Nothing is grabbing me. Nothing.

Contance Christopher:

What’s grabbing me is I cannot find just one answer to the question? For me it’s that I have a maximal response. I am interested in our planet’s losing case of survival. The atmosphere we have destroyed and will do more and more damage to with so little real investment in what it will mean to live through the disastrous effects on our lungs, hearts, brains. All of us in the grand island of Manhattan breathing in smoke from the Canadian wild fires that erupt every year. Spring and summer have become a threat to our lives, and yet not too many people even think about it. And it’s not just the impossibility of putting these seasonal eruptions back in a bag, as if anyone is truly working to find a remedy that would defuse the danger. To breathe in and out should not be a danger to one’s life let alone that is what it has become for countless living creatures. So, it is the atmosphere that most grabs my thoughts and fears, survival, not just of human species, but of all living creatures. Why such a global failure cannot be taken seriously? These sources of deadly pollution killing our earth that has taken care of us forever? I cannot accept the lack of will that humanity has evolved to just get by. Who will live and who will die is a rather dull solution? That grabs me where it hurts the most, in my sense of disgust at the power of the dollar bill or rupee? Honestly, another Musk satellite thruster is not going to do it? No more than another moon landing. Forget our water, waste, mountains of trash. It grabs me that Bali, once a paradise is now the capitol of the world’s garbage. Balinese, not long ago, had a divine and creative civilization. Today, countless Balinese only thrive by picking through scraps of garbage from mountains of our global deposits onto their onetime pristine and glorious island.

Kathryn Reiss:

We are grabbing at HOUSES lately, and they’re making me dizzy.

We should not own three houses. I hesitate even to mention that we (currently) do, because we don’t intend to keep them all for long. We don’t have the funds to maintain three homes!

But right now each one of them is grabbing me in different ways. Our house in California is the one that will soon be up for sale… and it’s grabbing at my pocket book as we fix it up to go on the market. It’s grabbing at my heartstrings because we’ve lived in it for nearly thirty years and raised our family there. It’s a very special old place, circa 1867. But we’re selling it as soon as we can because it’s time for a new chapter.

We are retiring. Our children have moved away, following job opportunities. They live in five different states and in the UK. We found an old farmhouse, circa 1885, that grabbed us. It’s right on the edge of a pretty college town in Ohio very near two of our sons and an easy driving distance to three more of our kids and their families. Ohio is where I grew up. Most of the grandchildren live in the east and Midwest. It seemed to make sense that we buy it before it got away. This took some creative financing that still leaves me gasping.

But I’m writing this now from our ancient English cottage, circa 1640, which we bought four years ago. It was for sale just down the road from our daughter who has settled here with her sweet family, and we couldn’t bear for it to get away.

It ticked every box in our considerable list of what we wanted in the second home we’d been saving up for decades to buy for our retirement. It’s the Gamekeepers Cottage—a traditional servant’s cottage on a large historic estate. I feel I’m entering a fairy tale every time we drive along the narrow lane, past fields of sheep and a pretty bit of woodland where I’ve seen red foxes and badgers, and the ancient stone turrets of the old manor house rise up in front of us.

Three houses require crazy amounts of upkeep. Each of them requires funds we don’t actually have—even as we’re now deep into renovations in California and restorations in Ohio and repairs in Derbyshire. This summer we’re writing checks and transferring funds and paying electricians, contractors, floor refinishers, painters and plumbers in hopes of keeping on top of all we have set in motion in this quest to find the perfect place we can call home. An email today from my longtime employer in California reminded me to sign up for Medicare Part B as soon as possible. Here in England our wooden kitchen counter is sticky with some sort of awful ancient varnish and needs refinishing. The HVAC repairman in Ohio just called me to explain that the reason our a/c stopped working was because a pincer bug crawled into one of the parts and died there and now the whole part needed to be replaced.

I lie in bed at night here in our little cottage and conjure up the Gamekeepers and their wives who dwelled within these thick stone walls over four centuries. I wonder what was grabbing them!

Jodie Meyn:

Picked at by little ideas like doctor fish at your feet
Pulled at by big ideas like gravity in your heart
Poked at by the need-les of today
Grabbed at by the musts and the mom!s and the wordless wants of the moment
Spun around by today’s enjoyments, jumping through its mundane hoops
Hypnotized by the siren call of the screens
Ignore the pricks and pulls of other dreams - 
This one will have to do.  

Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton:

Elementary aged Messi, Ronaldo and Lamine Yamal play a pick up game of soccer in the town square. The Spain v Belgium match plays on improvised screens in outdoor cafes. Eruptions of cheers punctuate every score. The World Cup has captured my imagination this summer! Gooooaaalllll!!!

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Now the Storyteller

The earliest bus was the one he liked to catch when he needed to go to town, and this time of year when greens colored the hills and rain often fell at night and felt cool and fresh and smelled good, especially in the morning, he didn’t mind waiting for the bus, since all those greens and the scent of rain meant more life and he desired more life, so he caught the bus early that morning and climbed up the three steps, careful to keep his hat on his head and his scarf tucked under his collar and against his neck, as the driver waved good morning, and he scanned the bus and found a place where no one else sat and soon settled into a seat next to a window and looked out of the window at the countryside, at the mountains streaked with late snow and at the fields that in less than a month had deepened with green grass and yellow wildflowers, then he settled into his seat again and thought about how long it had been since he had seen town and he tried to remember what he had done there, who he had met, or what he had searched for, when he looked out of the window again and wondered when his life had started to narrow, which caused him to shake his head and maybe to say out loud I don’t know, for there had been starts, certainly there had been starts, starts into worlds and then an accumulation of worlds and then worlds without direction or ends and this despite his knowledge, his actual experience of ends which he had known since childhood, a time when he had seen children, many in conditions like himself, die in their rooms, die in their hospital beds, and he could recall the old people who had died too and who while hardly fixed into their coffins had relatives snap pictures of them that were later developed into 4x6 photographs which in turn were placed into albums and shared with family and friends at picnics, reunions, sometimes ordinary visits, and as a child he had understood something of why the living needed to take pictures of their dead, which was to preserve the dead and those worlds that the dead carried with them, worlds that the living tried not to forget, neither the dead nor their worlds, but what he did not comprehend as a child, what he could not have comprehended was that life narrowed for everyone, narrowed and narrowed and narrowed for years and before most people had the chance to die, given that long before death, long before the final squeeze through the proverbial sack, life collapsed into something so small and narrow that people felt it, felt it like the weight of some strange heavy air upon their person or the heavy sum of real regrets

as a child he had heard speculations regarding his own death, what the doctors said to his parents when they thought he was sleeping, what the chances were of his making it through another night, another we’ll just have to wait and see, yet he could not quite believe, not as a child, that his life might succumb within the diminishing width of a hospital bed, which perhaps was impossible for any child to believe, then later the facts of his childhood became circumstances that he was, on occasion, required to explain though he never understood why, considering that there was an allotment for everyone, a designation of unknown time in which the past could be an excuse for the limitations or failures of a present life, and by the time he needed to explain the facts of his own childhood and illness, he had already answered for his obvious failures, which he had accounted for and had apologized for and apologized again and still again, and he remained comfortable in his seat when the bus wobbled to a stop and a group of reindeer crossed the road and went in the direction of the sea, and he watched them as they went and saw how beautiful they looked against the new grass and he saw how the sky looked blue and close, but what would have been the point to go on explaining, for we are all wounded, he told himself, as he settled back into his seat, and nothing can alter a choice already made and acted upon, least of all how someone is born, then he checked the bus and saw there were two other passengers, one a woman whom he guessed to be in her late forties, sleeping, nodding her chin into her chest, and another, a teenage boy locked into the damnations of his phone, though they had touched him, those failures and mistakes and consequences, of course they had touched him, the reality of wounds, of wounded bodies, of wounded hearts, but it was this same knowledge of wounds and death that had corrupted him from childhood, corrupted him with a ruthless sense of wanting to stay alive and to be alive, and what did it mean to be alive but to see worlds, to embrace them, to live within them and to absorb something of their atmosphere, their light, their darkness, as well as their hopes, pleasures, risks and something like time, time expressed in terms of past, present and future, and later time expressed as seasons and later still time expressed as months and days, and yet with enough time and enough loss, we begin to account for our experiences not in the language of tenses or seasons or months or even days but by what most of us come to call the day-to-day, the lonely tick-tock of the mere day-to-day, and he was no exception, no exception at all

the bus arrived downtown and he got off one stop before the terminal and instantly became aware of his feet, and he took a couple of steps away from the departing bus and stared upwards at the geometries of the city, at the cornices, architraves and façades, and saw how the sky, still deeply blue, conformed to the angles of the buildings and how avenues ended at other avenues or at other buildings though none of them taller than four stories, and he checked his feet again before moving on, and he saw that the shoes he wore, shoes that had belonged to his father, needed polishing, and he wondered if men polished their shoes anymore, maybe shoes didn’t require polish these days, maybe polished shoes were part of some praxis that simply had faded, and wasn’t it curious how many things in a lifetime could simply fade, could simply disappear, and he walked on and thought about stories his father had told him of things passing, about how he, his father, had hit a homerun in Little League but had the homerun called back because his shirt was untucked or how when he had been a child all men wore ties whenever they went outside unless it was to grill meat, cut grass, or fix a car, and his father had insisted that in his day to get into a car and find a radio station with music to match your mood could very well change your life, and it did change his father’s life, when one evening he and a young woman got into a car and found a radio station and heard Andy Williams sing “Try to Remember,” and their lives changed forever, his father’s life and the young woman who would become his mother, her life changed, too, and their lives after love, loss, regrets and hard, sometimes bitter years would indeed become slow and oh, so mellow, and he kept going but without much attention to where he was, rather he wanted to feel the sensation of being lost, as though in a different city, among unfamiliar streets and buildings and possible detours into some new magic, and he walked through an alley where there had been a used bookstore and then he crossed the street and walked up a block and turned left into the town center where no cars were allowed, and he saw people moving along the street, some of whom raised their hands to the sun and others who took pictures of the cathedral, and young women who twirled and smiled when they landed, and old people who fumbled along in tired khaki, with their coats left unbuttoned, and couples who sat at small tables outside of cafes, drinking coffee, talking with each other or sitting in some knowing silence, and he could hear them, could hear their chatter, their calls, their joys in the sunlight, and were not these scenes, these people what he had wanted to see, why he had come to town, to go along streets where people and their dreams had not yet been sacrificed or castigated but thrived under sunlight and stories, maybe one story, then suddenly there was the odor of cigarette smoke and he saw the man a few paces ahead and understood him to be the one who smoked, and when the man stopped in front of a café and turned around and patted down his kitchen apron, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled, and he slowed his pace to see him, to see the man’s gold rimmed glasses, his unshaven, rounded face, his greyish brown hair curled just above his ears, and to see the confidence of a man who appreciated that his shift would end early and afterwards the rest of the day would be his, his to smoke again, to people watch, to see the young women twirl, the old women who held their coffee cups exactly as his mother had held her coffee cup, or to sit in front of the cathedral and recover some memory of wherever he had come from, perhaps Poland or Lithuania, then to ask himself if this was the life he had chosen or planned or even wanted and knowing the answer, he might think again about what he could have amended or confessed but then noticing the time or something else, he would get up to leave, though before all that, before that later might arrive, the two of them glanced at each other and nodded a greeting and he felt an urge to thank the man for smoking and for stopping, but he went on instead, he kept going, and he walked past the cathedral and past the pretty flowerbeds, all the crimsons and purples, and resisting the urge to hurry, he went in the direction of another bus stop, one he believed to be at the end of the street—

This piece is a companion to “How the Sea Became A River,” published in May:

Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

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I’m a better grandparent than I was a father.

This is not a confession so much as a receipt. Time has stamped it. I have paid for it in years, and in the silences that come back at night and sit at the foot of the bed like patient dogs.

A father believes he is building a life. He carries boards, hammers rules into place, measures the child against a future he has already sketched. He calls this love. More often than not, it is ambition in a decent coat. He does not mean harm. It arrives anyway. Harm rarely announces itself. It arrives dressed as instruction and leaves without signing its name.

I was a man of instruction. My father demanded discipline and I inherited the demand without examining it — the way you inherit bad teeth or a preference for silence at breakfast. I was a coach and I took the whistle home when I should have left it on the field. I corrected tone. I corrected posture. I corrected language. I corrected the way to hold a fork, as if the future depended on the angle of the tines. I believed in the long reach of small habits when I had but a few of my own to speak of.

I mistook a raised voice for guidance. I had forgotten the fear of my own childhood and the promise I used to make in the dark: I’ll never be like that.

A child is not a project but I had plans. Plans are a tidy way of refusing to see what is in front of you. The child stands right there, in plain sight, and the planner looks past him at the blueprint.

Grandchildren arrive without plans, much like the weather. You do not correct the rain. You stand in it or you don’t. I find I am willing now to get wet.

With a grandchild, there is no illusion of authorship. The story began without you. You are permitted a margin note. You can be kind in the margins. You can be quiet. You can let a question hang in the air and watch how the child answers it for herself, which is usually better than anything you would have supplied, and considerably shorter.

With Leona I do not rush to fix things. Last week, she decided her little crocs belonged on the wrong feet. I started to say something. She looked at me with the patience of a woman who has heard enough. I’ve lived with some of those women so I know what I’m talking about. She wore them that way most of the afternoon. The crocs looked fine. I said nothing.

A tower falls; I sit on the floor and hand over another block. Leona looks at me as if I have revealed a principle of the universe. Perhaps I have. Things fall. We build again. No speech required.

As a father, I kept accounts. Who did what. Who owed whom. I would not have called it that. I would have called it fairness. But fairness, in a house, can become a narrow god. It demands exact change. Children do not carry exact change. They pay in noise and appetite and a faith that is easily spent, and they look genuinely puzzled when you present the bill.

A grandparent has fewer accounts. The books are mostly closed. What remains open is small and bright. An hour or two on the floor. A story told badly and enjoyed anyway. A hand that trusts yours without audit.

I am slower now. This helps, I think. Speed is the ally of certainty. Slowness makes room for doubt, and doubt, in a man, is a kind of mercy. I doubt my first thought. I doubt my second. By the third, I have decided to say nothing at all. Saying nothing beats being right. This took longer to learn than it should have, which is itself an argument for saying nothing.

I have also found a certain pleasure in being unnecessary. But the old may tell you otherwise. As I see it, with necessity comes the long, low hum of worry that a man starts to hear with the birth of his first child and never quite shakes. As a father, I made myself central. I stood in doorways. I filled silence with advice, which is what a man does when he has confused speaking with helping. Now I sit off to the side and watch Leona—the Italian word for lioness, trying to fill a cup with water while holding it upside down. She bares her teeth at the cup with a seriousness that would impress. Then laughs when the water slips over the cup. I do not step in. The cup is hers. So is the pride because, maybe, it is only I who wants the cup filled.

Regret is not much of a tool. It points at things it cannot fix and then stands there, like a man with a flashlight at the bottom of a well he has already fallen into. I see now where I spoke when I should have listened, where I pressed when I should have waited, where I called something small that was, to the child, the whole sky. I cannot return to those moments. The past does not entertain visitors. I can only behave differently the next time the door opens, and hope the house is not yet empty.

People will tell you grandchildren are easier because you can give them back. This is a joke that hides a truth. You can give them back, yes, but what you receive in the first place is not yours to keep. It never was. I mistook proximity and parental rights for possession. My daughters, I know now, were never mine to keep. Nor were they mine to correct into my own image — I had enough trouble with the original. They were only ever mine to stand beside for a while, like a man who holds a lantern at a crossroads and then watches the traveler choose the road and go.

I should say, at this point, that I have grown wise. I would very much like to say that. What I can say, instead, is that I have run out of certain errors while others still remain. I have learned to recognize the sound of my own voice when it grows too sure of itself, and I let it pass the way you let a train go by — with some relief that you weren’t on it.

On a side note, at some point a man writing about how he finally stopped instructing people ought to notice that he has not, in fact, completely stopped. I noticed as much as I review these last hundred words or so. Nonetheless, I’m choosing to finish the essay anyway. This is either growth or consistency on my part. I genuinely cannot tell.

My granddaughter laughs and it asks nothing of me. I am used to laughter that needs tending, approving, redirecting. Leona’s laughter, I see now, is complete. Last week she laughed for a solid minute at a word she’d invented — borbuly — which she has since come to describe soup, apparently a particular cloud, and me. I did not ask for clarification. I was honored to have learned a new word.

She is sixteen months old with a great deal on her mind and none of the vocabulary for it yet. She can talk the way rivers run — continuously, over everything, and apparently without concern for who is downstream. I have begun to think she is right about most of it.

If there is a lesson here — and I am aware of the irony of saying so — it is a small one. Do less. Look longer. Leona knows how to begin without a plan. She knows how to forgive a moment before it hardens. She knows how to leave a thing and return to it without keeping score. She is, in this way, considerably ahead of me and entirely unbothered by the gap.

I am a better grandparent than I was a father. This is not a medal. It is a measurement taken too late to be of use where it would have mattered most. Still, it is not nothing. A man takes what he can: the weight of her in his lap, shoes on the wrong foot and we leave it that way. Or her hand finding mine without looking, holding on, then letting go.

For at least one afternoon, I’m almost the kind of company I once needed and did not know how to offer.

Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.

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Emberwork

when morning
		loosens the dark
			with her careful impatience
	and you wake
		from that dream

notice

something improbable  
     	            still burns
     not quite hope
	           but a quieter urgency
		         flickering beneath
               your skin

the horizon
	     gently contradicts
the night	     

and your burnt hands 
trembling 
remember
		what they carried
			without witness
hold them
     in a brief forgiveness  

there are small fires in you
oddly certain
       not quite finished

do not rush
		to understand them

some truths arrive
		out of sequence
and remain

you were never meant
		to escape the fire

only

to carry  
      its dancing unrest  
           without disappearing  
		into it

walk forward

with your clarity  
      your defiance  
	clutched tightly to your breast

the light in you—

fragile  
      but exact—  

waits for nothing
except your willingness  
 to keep it

You can read more of Sean’s poetry on Arise !



Check it out here:

Arise

your own light undiminished by their darkness

By Sean Downing

And discover his cowboy poetry on Bite the Bullet, here:

Bite The Bullet: Cowboy Poems by Sean Downing

Sean Downing's Cowboy Poems

Sean Downing, poet, musician, teaches high school English and Theater Arts in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. He can often be found in his woodshop, coaxing music from odd scraps of junk, or haunting the trout streams around southwest Colorado. If you see him, don’t tell anyone: they’re probably looking to get an honest day’s work out of him.

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Each painting has its own journey. Some paintings happen quickly, within one session en plein air, or in the studio. Larger pieces can take weeks, as time is required to allow the painting to evolve and reveal itself. With some paintings it’s smooth sailing, like the painting paints itself. Others can be a bit more troublesome, taking time to find themselves, or just for me to get out of the way. But mostly, it’s a joyful process where I learn a lot about myself and painting along the way.

This is the story of one of those journeys.

It is early May.

Over a morning latte at my local place for a morning latte I am pondering an idea for a painting. One totally different than anything I have done before. I have brought a sketch pad and my computer, I am ready to act on this idea.

I usually use a photo reference to start a painting; a photo of a place that captured my attention, made me stop and look - then look again, as my friend Damon Falke writes of places that have captured him. But today as I am looking over archived photos of Montana, and more recently Oregon, I am looking for forms within the landscapes before me. Of course form is very important in any painting. But, today I am looking more at shapes and forms within the landscape in an abstract way. I pull out my sketch pad and make a quick line drawing of what I see. I am blown away with the change in how I view the scene and how it translates into an abstraction of itself.

Now this could be exciting, I think. This is how I will approach the painting - as an abstraction.

I have been wanting to pursue abstraction for some time. To approach the blank canvas purely intuitively, without a preconceived idea. The Surrealists had a word for this, automatism. In the early 20th century, the Surrealist movement adopted automatism to bypass conscious control, reason, and aesthetic rules in order to explore the subconscious in their work. I have done a few abstract pieces in the past. There are some things you do control when getting started; the size of the painting, the palette, the mood, and a general idea of composition. Once paint begins to be applied to the canvas however, all bets are off. That is when chance and emotion come into play. The physical energy of the process and the movement within the painting provides early structure. But then, intuition and spontaneity takes over, with an unconscious dialog with the work guiding you to a place where the painting ultimately finds itself.

An example from 2019:

But, for these “forms in the landscape” paintings, as I think of them, the structure is already there. It is up to me to translate these forms into something else. But what? That’s the rub.

I have always approached my painting practice as a form of self-expression. Once I mastered the basics, or at least enough to know when I messed up and what to do to fix it, I could trust muscle memory and instinct to get me to the finished painting. An early instructor, the amazing master of the Western landscape and Glacier National Park, Joe Abbrescia, stressed the importance of knowing and staying true to your “intention” for a painting. That is your North Star to guide you through the process. I try to adhere to that as much as possible, but, sometimes the painting has other ideas.

Painting is equally a practice and therapy for me. The pleasure of having painting as a creative outlet is very rewarding, as is having a means for connection to and expression of my inner self. As Megan O’Grady says in her wonderful book, How It Feels To Be Alive - Encounters with Art and Our Selves, “…the questions of impact and legacy, will always feel uncertain. There will likely be few rewards outside the pleasure of making.” So true. The making of art has changed my life in immeasurable ways.

A little context is probably needed.

I came to painting later in my life, not until my early fifties. By then I had lived a lot of lives; teenage mother, twice divorced, a career in healthcare, then in the corporate world before moving to Montana for a new life with husband number three. I was also someone who, in 1964, had suddenly and unexpectedly lost their father from a heart attack while he was on a business trip to San Francisco. He was only forty-three. I was fifteen.

I read somewhere that when a young child loses a parent they stop growing emotionally. I don’t know if that is totally true, though there is indeed some truth to it. I have also heard that children who lose a parent grow up to be high achievers with extreme resilience and independence. I would need that resilience, for within a year of losing my dad I was pregnant and married. My son was born two months before my eighteenth birthday. Losing a parent at a young age forces you to grow up quickly. As does being a mom at seventeen. I hit the daily double “grow up quickly” jackpot.

Today at almost seventy-eight I look back and wouldn’t change a thing. I have two wonderful sons, four grandchildren, and two adorable great-grandchildren. I have another wonderful extended family through my husband of thirty -six years. Whatever life was cut short on the front end, has more than been made up for on the back end. To be able to enjoy my sons, and adult grandchildren, and their children, is a gift and endless blessing. But cutting childhood short comes at a cost.

I became a master of holding my feelings in, and even worse, burying them so deeply that even I could not feel them, nor even feel. I played the part; of mother, wife, respiratory therapist, market manager, etc., but in the process lost myself. Who was this Tabby person? When I became a painter “Tabby” began to find her voice. I found that painting, for me, was more than making pretty pictures of pretty landscapes. Painting slowed things down for me. The studio became my “room of one’s own”, as Virginia Woolf advocated; a place where I could get in touch with my thoughts and express my creativity. For the first time in my life I was contemplative, not just reactive. Painting became a place for expressing something unique to me.

The French impressionist painter Edgar Degas said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” In time I found my painting voice. I was able to paint the quiet, the subtle, the places that softly whispered to me, the places that invited me to stop, and look again. In the paintings I have made over the past twenty -five years I strive to make others see the silence and calm I have always sought.

Now, back to the abstract.

I settle on the scene. A river reflection on a quiet morning, a simple composition.

I make a quick sketch of the forms. I decide to paint over an existing 24x36 framed painting that I now find I really do not like. I mask off the floating frame, as I couldn’t figure out how to easily remove the painting from it. I sand down the panel and apply two layers of white oil gesso to prepare the surface for the new painting. I then add a layer of thinned transparent paint to tone the white surface.

I then do my first block in:

I know I am in trouble.

This is not an abstract, or at least not the abstract I envisioned. I figure, ok, it’s not what I thought I wanted but let’s see where this goes, still thinking it will in time take a more abstract form.

I start adding some value contrast to the shapes, as well as change the hue/colors in the painting.

Here is where I landed:

You can see from the detail on the right the impact of thicker paint and darker value in adding contrast to the painting. I do not like where it’s going.

This is when things start really going sideways. The painting is fighting me. I am being pulled away from my original plan and toward the familiar. I am in no mans land. I intuitively start adding layers, changing values. Things were happening rapidly as I intuitively made changes - so quickly I forgot to take photos. Along the way, it’s safe to say, the painting distanced itself from its abstract beginnings and found itself in a new place:

It was obvious at this point that I was not going to be staying with my original abstract intention for this painting. Perhaps because it was already in a frame, I wasn’t feeling as adventurous and free to explore something new. I realize now that I had not fully committed the time and attention necessary to fully explore what it was going to take to make my idea of “forms in the landscape” a Tabby Ivy painting - whatever that might be. I had not lived with the idea long enough to truly know what I wanted to say and how the intention for the work would take form.

My connection with a painting is very much a form of communication. I have to listen closely to what my inner voice is trying to say. And, she was telling me, at least with this painting, she was done with anything close to abstract.

When I first started to paint I took several workshops from painters I admired. I approached each workshop curious about the techniques used and the instructor’s approach to their practice. But I never went into those workshops wanting to paint like they did. I was more interested in their thinking process as they painted. How they set their intention for the painting; how they made the painting their own. The great abstract expressionist painter, Mark Rothko said, “Art doesn’t have to depict life to express it.” I wanted to know how to do that.

At the time, I was living in the Flathead Valley of Montana, very close to Glacier National Park. There were fabulous painters of the Park. While it is a vast and beautiful place, I never was drawn to paint it. I was drawn to different places, quieter places: a crevice within a hillside, a misty forest at dawn, the reflections of trees on a pond or river, or the glow of the sunset behind silhouetted hills. It is the quiet landscape that speaks to me, not the majestic nor grand; more the mood and mystery of a place.

I recently watched a Louisiana Channel interview of British painter Peter Doig, where he said, “I like the singleness of being a painter, the fact that you did it on your own…the fact that you don’t have to ask others what to do or being told what to do. It’s totally your own responsibility, a solo pursuit.” I very much relate to what he was saying. I like the solitude of being in the studio, in a place where I am separate, insulated and focused.

My studio is my sanctuary, I am not unique in feeling this way, of course. Most artists approach a painting in solitude. You can’t have anything or anyone in your head when you are in the studio. For me, I want to provide that inner child who was silenced so young a safe place to express herself. I think of her as the voice of my unconscious thoughts. I want my paintings to convey something that touches an unconscious place within the viewer. In my work, it’s the quiet that allows these whispered thoughts to be heard and seen.

For a painting of this river scene, the abstract approach was too restrictive and pushy, it spoke too loudly. I resisted it dictating to me what I had to do.

So, I embraced a new path.

I welcomed a new intention for the painting, turning away from the original abstract approach. I followed the voice steering me into the emotion and feel of the scene I saw evolving before me. This intuitive approach to my work allows me to be sensitive to what I want to say in the final painting. In this case it was all about the reflection in the water, the gentle touch of the wind on its surface, the quiet of the scene. This is what stopped me to take this photo on that quiet morning by the river that made me look, and look again.

I gave the painting a few days to rest, and to put some distance between us. We both needed a break. After a week or so I returned with a new focus. Gone was the combative energy, where the painting and I were fighting each other. I knew what I needed to do. Layers and texture were added, the palette changed, silence entered into the work. It became more the painting I had envisioned that day when I stopped along the river. I had trusted that inner voice, and gotten myself out of the way. The painting became the painting it should be. I was able to make what I wanted others to see.

So, what happened to that abstract painting of forms in the landscape?

It is still out there, or more specifically in there, within me. I will let it be for a while, let it play around in my subconscious. It will find its voice eventually, and when it does I will be ready to let her sing.

But for now….

“This is what I saw, and it meant something to me; it mattered that I was here. This is how it feels to be alive.”

-Megan O’Grady

How It Feels to Be Alive, Encounters With Art and Our Selves

After over thirty years in Montana, contemporary painter Tabby Ivy now lives and works in Carlton, Oregon. Learn more about her painting practice and Between Artists, Life in Paintings and Prose and Stops Along the Way, her two books with Damon Falke, at www.tabbyivy.com.

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The Work of Keeping

They took a square of cloth
and gave it a spine.
Split sticks. Twine drawn tight.
A seam already taking strain.

A field, then. Stones turned under,
roots cut back,
hands blistered into agreement.
Rise, they said.
It would not rise at first.
It dragged through dirt,
caught bur and thorn,
wanted sky, knew weight.

Someone ran.
Not freedom.
Run hard enough
and the shape took air.

The line paid out slowly.
Fingers burned on it—
the line a live wire in their grip.
Too slack and it dropped.
Too tight and it tore.

Then it leaned on the string:
cloth lifting hard in the wind,
sticks alive at the crosspiece,
the tail waking behind it.
They cheered.

Not cloth, not sticks up there—
light through the weave,
the old shirts gone translucent,
the tail drew a long slow signature across the sky.
Below, the field was small.
The hands were small.

The line stayed.
A hymn above the field.
Round its rough spool
the shape above
and the hand below.

Storms came.
The string cut skin.
One corner blackened.
Rain drove grit through the cloth—
the kite a bruised flag in the gale.

Some hands let go.
Some were made to—
fingers pried back,
knuckle by knuckle,
nothing was said.

More string.
More knots.
More line stripped from a reluctant hand.
The knots thickened.

By dusk it was hardest:
light going flat,
wind turning with a cold edge,
the kite a dark pulse
over the field.
No one answered.

The wrist did.
The pull in it.

When it came down,
it came down tired:
edges thinned,
crosspiece working the seam,
a tear opening there.
They laid it flat.
Mended what they could.
Left what they could not.

Morning came back with wind.
Spool in the hand.
Line through the thumb.

Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.

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Begin with the table.

Not with the artist, not with the prizes or the Brussels gallery or the Whitney curator who found the words — begin with the table, because the table is the truth of it. A long surface in a studio in East Burke, Vermont, holding forty years of daily devotion in the form of paint-encrusted tins, brushes at every stage of ruin and usefulness, tubes squeezed to their last honest inch, rags that have absorbed more thinking than most libraries, small ceramic bowls wearing yesterday’s color and today’s. It is not a pretty table. It is better than that. It is a table that has been used, every day, without apology, in the service of something that matters.

Terry Ekasala created the studio herself…

Designed it, raised it with a group of amazing artisans and builders who made every decision that went into the bones of it — the light, the sight lines, the way Burke Mountain fills the window in a way that is neither distraction nor decoration but simply the world reminding you it’s still out there while you’re in here doing the necessary thing. This is the studio she spent her whole creative life working toward. Not the studio she found. The one she built, because the work demanded a space equal to it and she was not the kind of person to wait.

That tells you something essential before a single painting comes into view.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that works of art are of an infinite loneliness — that only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. Terry Ekasala’s paintings know this. They are not paintings that come to you. You go to them, and you go slowly, and you go with everything you have, and even then they do not fully open. What they do is stranger and better than that…

Stand in front of one long enough and you become almost certain you see something — a figure crossing a room, light falling through a window, a woman’s back, a bird in arrested flight — and then the paint asserts its own authority and the image recedes back into color and gesture and you are left in a state that is less confusion than revelation. It is the feeling of remembering something you cannot be certain you experienced.

Recognition without origin.

Chrissie Isles of the Whitney Museum calls it work suspended somewhere between abstract composition and storytelling, creating interior, psychological spaces evoking memory and place — which is precise and true, though it doesn’t quite capture the particular loneliness of standing in front of one of these paintings and understanding that it knows something about you that you haven’t told it.

She works in oils on linen — canvases she builds by hand, stretchers and all, sometimes up to seventy-two by eighty-four inches. She also works daily in acrylics on paper, faster and more immediate, a different conversation running parallel. Both practices feed each other. Both are unmistakably hers. She brings to neither of them a plan.

“Letting go and allowing intuition to take over is when the best work happens.”

This is not a philosophy.

It is a daily practice requiring a quality of courage that most people never locate in themselves, because most people cannot tolerate not knowing what they’re making until it’s made. Terry Ekasala has structured her entire life around that tolerance. It is the central fact of who she is.

She was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Studied at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. Set up her first studio in 1983 at the Clay Hotel on Española Way in Miami Beach — a broken-down palace of art deco dreams, in her own perfect words — and ran with a crew of graffiti artists whose work on abandoned buildings made the Miami Herald and turned up as backdrops in national advertising campaigns. She was part of the Artifacts Art Group, staging events weekly at Fire and Ice. This was Miami in the early eighties: electric, dangerous, before money arrived and decided what everything was worth.

In 1987 she moved to Paris. Settled in Belleville — the marvelous, ungovernable Twentieth Arrondissement — and found a studio at La Forge, where she became part of a community that organized the first artist squat in the city to achieve legal status. She exhibited in Paris, in Berlin, in New York. She moved from figurative to abstract. She found, in the long slow work of those years, what was actually hers.

Agnes Martin left New York for the desert and spent decades alone making paintings of almost unbearable quietude, and she said that the goal of life is happiness — meaning not ease, not comfort, but the radical, costly thing of becoming entirely oneself. In 2001, Terry Ekasala moved to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. She will tell you, with a particular lightness that is itself a kind of eloquence, that it was a whim.

She has not left.

The studio went up.

The table filled.

The mountain fills the window every morning.

In 2023 she was named winner of the Vermont Prize. Her work has shown at Catamount Arts, at Momenta Art in Brooklyn, at PIERMARQ in Sydney, at Metalstone Gallery in New York, at the Schonfeld Gallery in Brussels, where a solo show earlier this year drew the kind of serious, sustained attention that tends to travel. The critic Alex Weinstein placed her in conversation with Joan Mitchell, de Kooning, Diebenkorn — and described her as a heart that beats furiously, keeping painting alive not just for herself but for everyone who encounters the work and finds it authentic, rigorous, fierce.

Francis Bacon said the job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. Terry Ekasala has spent forty years refusing resolution. The paintings stay open. They stay difficult. They insist on remaining alive.

My husband Joe and I arrived at half past noon with the intention of a studio visit. We left at seven thirty in the evening, and neither of us had noticed the hours going.

That is the thing I most want you to understand about Terry Ekasala.

There are people in whose company time reorganizes itself — not because they perform for you or dazzle you or work to keep you there, but because something genuine is happening and genuine things have their own gravity. The afternoon moved the way only certain afternoons move: lunch appeared, conversation went where it wanted without asking permission, deep without warning, hilarious when it needed to be, quiet when it needed to be quiet. We talked about cities that made us. About Paris. About New York. About the specific texture of a life given to art before anyone confirmed it was a reasonable idea. About what you carry from one chapter into the next and what you are, finally, glad to set down.

Seven hours. The light came through the studio in the afternoon way and then in the early evening way and then Burke Mountain went that particular gold it goes in April and still none of us moved toward the door. We felt like old friends who had simply been out of touch — people with whole shared histories who had somehow lost the thread and were now, gratefully, finding it again over a table with food on it and a mountain in the window.

This is a quality I have encountered rarely in a life not short on interesting people. It belongs, I think, to those who have spent years practicing radical honesty — on a canvas, in a life, at a table. A person who shows up every day and tells the truth in paint cannot help but bring that same quality of presence to everything else. It is not a technique. It is what you become.

What she made us feel, without trying, was seen.

We drove home through the Kingdom,I kept thinking about the afternoon, the food, the conversation, the secrets shared. The art.

The studio she designed and built herself.

The table inside it. The forty years of mornings that table has absorbed. Miami and Belleville and the Northeast Kingdom, the graffiti and the squats and the linen canvases built by hand — all of it, every detour and decision and whim, leading to a studio at the end of a drive in Vermont with Burke Mountain in the window and a table that tells the whole story before she says a word.

She created the studio her work deserved.

Then she went in and made the work deserve it.

That’s the whole thing, really.

That’s what greatness looks like from the inside.

Terry Ekasala · terryekasala.com

Find the work.

Let it find you back.

All Words and Images by M. Sebastian Araujo (except where noted).

Read more from The Magpie Chronicles…

The Magpie Chronicles is written by M Sebastian Araujo from a handbuilt house deep in an old growth forest, where the winters are long and the opinions are longer.

The Magpie Chronicles arrives when it has something worth saying — antiques, art, history, the occasional miracle, and whatever the world is doing at the moment. If something here found you, subscribe. The basket is always full.

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The Magpie Chronicles

Where design history meets the thrill of the hunt and the art of home. Exploring antiques, art, and cultural treasures with a magpie's eye for beautiful things and the stories behind them. Former NYC wanderer, now living deep in an old growth forest in a

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Lost Tapes of the Golden Age

Old Blue says two eggs over easy!
moon eyes, skillet fire

when the traffic gets quiet
   you can hear music
coming across the fields.

this could be a dream.

“A Very Long Haiku About Gravity” is from Ned’s new album “Lost Tapes of the Golden Age,” released June 4, 2026. All the songs on this album were produced during May, 2026, using a Zoom recorder, handheld sampler, frame drum, acoustic guitar, chimes, bells, and kitchen appliances.

Stream more music from Ned and buy the full album here:

Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.

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Tonya:

It’s easier to write about cooking while I’m in the kitchen. I can jot down notes while I’m making my red curry, which I’ve been making regularly for at least fifteen years now. It’s one of those things I can make without even thinking. Grating the nubbin of ginger that lives in the freezer with a few spare heads of garlic. Peeling open the cans of the good coconut milk. When one of us has been near Chinatown, then I throw in a bunch of fresh Thai basil from the Bangkok grocery on Mosco Street, but otherwise, I just use regular basil from the grocery nearby, or even occasionally cilantro. This isn’t a fussy dish.

If I have broccoli in the fridge, then it goes into the curry. Carrots. Peppers. If I have tofu, it goes in. But I love it just as well with veggies alone. The coconut creaminess and the complex spiciness of the red curry paste. The light tang from the lime juice. It’s almost a soup, spooned over rice, and it comforts me like a soup. If I were given the painful task of playing chef tonight for a large group, without any preparation, I would inevitably make my curry. It’s as familiar to me now as my pots and spoons. More familiar, actually, because I’ve known this recipe longer than I’ve had these particular pots and spoons.

Funny how the curry is two things to me at the same time. It’s tonight’s big pot on the stovetop, for one thing, but then it’s also the memory of making it a million times before. This version is a cousin to each earlier version. Like the first time I cooked it for my mom and her new boyfriend, over a decade ago, back when he was “my mom’s boyfriend” and not yet “Chris,” who’s become fully integrated into the family. They rented a lake house near my little town in Kansas and I came over to cook in the unfamiliar kitchen. Mom helped me to dice up the onion and the carrots. I remember her surprise when I cut the broccoli down to a pile of little heads and then threw all the stalk parts into the garbage. “You’re throwing all of that stalk away?” She looked horrified. But my first husband didn’t like the stalks, wouldn’t eat them. And now I have a second husband—you—who also won’t eat broccoli stalks, which makes me think there’s something about men and broccoli stalks. Or else something about men, period, that they are accustomed to eating only the parts of things they like.

I used to make this curry with chicken, because I used to eat more meat. For a while, I added a little fish sauce to the curry paste, but then I decided it didn’t change the flavor enough to matter. Then, for a while, I made it as a true soup, with a few cups of broth and with the rice mixed in. It was hard to get the spice level right when it was a soup, so I gave up on that.

Because I’ve made it so many times, the logic of curry is simple to me. Most of the activity is dicing, and then it’s a slow incorporation of the curry paste into the sautéed vegetables, and then the coconut milk. Wilting in the basil at the end, and adding lime juice. It must have all been new to me once, and I can vaguely remember thinking the dish was sort of difficult in the beginning. But I got to know my red curry so long ago, we’ve become old friends.

I could just as easily cook a few other things—broil a salmon filet, make a quick marinara, or maybe sauté white beans and greens. Otherwise, I have to rely on recipes.

My saved folder from the New York Times Cooking section tells me I’ve recently made Broiled Swordfish and Lentils, and Baked Feta with Broccolini (I’ve made the feta twice, actually, in two weeks,) and Creamy, Spicy Tomato Beans with Greens. I’ve made Pearl Couscous with Sautéed Cherry Tomatoes and Roasted Sole with a Spice Butter. You liked all of those things, so I’ll make them again.

But tomorrow, I think I will make Miso Leeks and White Beans. I have the recipe printed out, with a few splatters on it from the last time I made it. This time, unlike last time, I’ll cut the leeks correctly. Now that I know what a leek is; something I didn’t know a year ago. And now that I know what miso is, too, which I only learned a few weeks ago. If I cook the leeks, then we won’t be tempted to go out for pizza. And, God knows, we’ve had enough pizza lately…

Paul:

NOTA BENE - There is NEVER enough pizza, although there is sometimes the wrong kind of pizza. This topic must wait for another, more serious column. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, along with bad pizza.

I must say, though, that this is odd. When you first sent me your piece and I read it - for the usual back-and-forth conversation that we sometimes do - it felt like a different piece to me than it does now. What was the original idea, something about cooking? Was it my idea? Did I say “Let’s write about cooking?” I feel as though you are talking about curry or about my alleged dislike of broccoli stalks (not completely true, but there is a germ of truth, I suppose, in the idea that I completely loathe broccoli stalks.) Anyway, let me compose myself and take a slug of tea.

Okay, that’s better. The first time I read this, I was composing a response in my head that went something like this:

“If you know that Tonya and I live under the same roof and that Tonya enjoys cooking and is an excellent cook, and if you knew my own history of cooking, then you’d agree that I am a fortunate man. I have nothing further to say.”

That is still my response, but I will say more.

I always liked to cook. From when I was young and had to stand on a box to reach the stove, I enjoyed frying up stuff, blending things, chopping, kneading dough and making crepes. It was a substitute for art, I think. I liked to make things, to see them evolve. Eating, not so much. I still like to make things. I have also learned to enjoy eating. Maybe too much.

I wanted to be a chef when I was 7 or 8, shortly after I decided I did not want to be a priest. Instead, I became a teenaged pothead and my cooking got weird. Strange Dagwood sandwiches at 3 in the morning, consisting of heaps of melted cheese, fried pepperoni, mayonnaise, mustard and oregano. These sandwiches got bigger and bigger until the denouement, when my friend and I got really sick one day after many bong hits and a couple of these sandwiches. I swore them off forever and then veered into industrial-grade canned chile, garnished with onions and peppers and eaten directly from the pot. Kraft mac and cheese was also consumed directly from the pot, preferably with a wooden mixing spoon, preferably the whole package, and preferably while watching some old film on the TV at 2 AM after everyone else had gone to bed.

When I finally got my own place, it was with my first wife. I don’t remember her stance on broccoli stalks, but we probably disagreed on it. I do know that I enjoyed cooking. She read from recipes and could make a good meal, but her cooking was more formal and more consistent. I liked to freestyle it. I had become a master of eggs as a teenager and this carried over into my 20s. If I had died then - and I came close a few times - a proper epitaph could have been “He made a mean breakfast.” From the coffee to whatever else, I made good breakfast food. I also could open a can of chili and make a passable pot of Kraft mac and cheese.

We got divorced ten years later and I was finally on my own. This is when my culinary world broadened. I don’t have time here to elaborate on the sloppy art of bachelor cooking, but feeding oneself is one of those things that should be of interest to all. This is foundational stuff. I remember seeing a photo of John Lennon once with a teapot and it felt intimate. Even Jimi Hendrix probably made himself a sandwich once in a while.

Tonya:

I want to say, before anything else, that this whole thing could take a left turn now and become about the fact that you once wanted to be a priest. Given that you were raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, where the priests spoke entirely in Greek and were, per your own descriptions, formidable to the point of being terrifying, I am so curious to know how little six or seven year-old Paul imagined his future life as a priest would be...

But, to return to the point, yes, we were supposed to be talking about cooking. It’s just such an enormous subject, I needed an entry point. So I took on that individual dish—the curry. And, as I began to write about it, I was intrigued by the idea that food encodes itself directly into memory, possibly more so than the things we see or hear. That taste buds are a direct conduit to the past.

When I was a kid, food wasn’t the same thing. We had plenty of it, of course, and I have deeply ingrained comfort responses attached to things I ate back then. Boxes of rice pilaf. The taste of lemon pepper. But no one in South Dakota was cooking the foods I cook regularly now. The ingredients just weren’t there. We didn’t have farmers markets or ethnic groceries. We didn’t know about good fats. I can remember my father explaining avocados to me when I was in high school: yes, they were technically healthy, but they were just too fatty to eat on a regular basis. We never had them at home. He was concerned about my tendency to snack on olives, but not concerned about the margarine in the fridge or the diet sodas or sugar-free ice cream.

We didn’t know better, not then and not in that place. And my parents had so little spare time to dedicate to cooking, I can’t fault them for relying on spaghetti and canned vegetables and frozen chicken breasts. I am grateful for the few hints I was given, clues to the kind of cooking I would embrace later—my mother’s summer vegetable garden, my father’s chokecherry jam. Fresh lettuce will always remind me of running outside to the garden in the summer. The rare, complex taste of chokecherry will always summon up my father at the stove.

But, probably because I was a little deprived of fine cuisine as a kid, after I got out in the world, discovering food, the whole breadth of what food could mean, I just went crazy about everything. I’ll always remember the first time I made my own guacamole. Or pesto. The first time I smashed a garlic clove in my apartment kitchen in Connecticut or picked my own blueberries.

Foods belong to the places where you discover them. Pad Thai will always hold a little of Chicago for me. Lemon bars will always take me back to pre-school. Fresh dates belong to Westmoreland, California, where you and I bought our first pound of them together. And piñon coffee always summons the chilly mornings in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Living with you in New York, though, has brought me more food than anywhere else. Escarole. Farro. Japanese sweet potatoes. Persimmons. Chestnuts. Swordfish and fennel and oyster mushrooms from the farmers markets. And yes, of course, your scrambled eggs. Which are superb.

Cooking is so intimate. It’s how we care for ourselves. How we care for each other. I like to cook for you, even when I know I’m making some dishes just a bit healthier than you’d like them to be. I enjoy the creative act. I like the (fleeting) sense of control. Ultimately, I enjoy the food I make. I think I may enjoy it even more than the food I get at restaurants.

Liking your own food is important. Sort of like enjoying your own company. Which does seem like an obvious opening for you to talk about your years of cooking as a bachelor...

Paul:

I just read your whole response but, instead of executing the elegant segue that you set up for me - cooking as a bachelor - I’m going to respond to your points in order, as my brain is a bit cooked from driving all day. Lucky for me, I had excellent company.

I was raised with the Greek Orthodox religion, but it might be too much to say that I was raised “in” that church. We were not diligent churchgoers. Weddings, yes. Funerals, yes. And Easter - that was my favorite time in church and one of my dearest family memories. The pagan way that the Eastern Orthodox celebrate Easter, with the incantations, the chants, the incense and the candles. Leaving the church and re-entering it again, then going for the tremendous feast - always the latest night of the year for me until I was much older.

By Easter Eve, my mom and grandmother would have been cooking for days and, while I did not like all the traditional Greek Easter dishes, I loved the noise, the conversation, the music, and the table atmosphere. That is all now gone and I mourn that world more than I can express. I helped them cook, though, and really enjoyed that, especially making the Greek Easter bread, with the machlep and masticha, which it was my job to pulverize with the mortar and pestle.

I don’t remember why I briefly wanted to be a priest when I was young, but you’re correct - those priests scared the crap out of me. I did not understand a word they said, so they did not inculcate me with whatever they were mumbling and chanting. The costumes? I don’t think so. I am told I went to Sunday school for a whole semester when I was 7 - and there exists a single photo of me in that class - but I have no memory of it. It could be that I recognized their passion, those priests. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I appreciated how they said it.

Also, I never imagined how life would be as a priest or as anything else. I didn’t think it through. This airy attitude would become a problem later in life. I was very much a daydreamer.

Either way, that period did not last long - less than a year. The most significant thing was that I could tell people years later that I had once wanted to be a priest. After that, I wanted to be a chef and if you asked me why, I again could not come up with a good answer. Except that I enjoyed cooking. And that’s enough of a reason.

I’m sorry I was confused at how you used curry as an entree into this piece. I now see what you were doing.

We could start this over again with your most excellent observation that, when you were a kid, food wasn’t the same thing. A seemingly simple statement of fact, but it contains a lot. I might add, “Same here.” I was a child in a nuclear family in the 60s and 70s. For my mom, frozen food and canned food were modern conveniences - breakthroughs - they were not considered lazy expedients or bad nutrition.

Fresh food was harder to come by then. It existed, for sure, but this was the dawn of convenience food. My mom always made sure that we had a protein, a vegetable dish, and what she may or may not have called “a starch,” but that was it. We did not have a microwave or a toaster oven. She liked her pressure cooker and her casseroles. She baked chicken and broiled lamb and hamburgers. We had canned and frozen veggies and fresh ones from the garden in the summer.

Dessert was usually My-T-Fine pudding or Jello or Junket (a strange, rennet-based custard) or homemade rice pudding. Sometimes, she would make a pressure cooker bread pudding, which was surprisingly good. She kept up with modern cooking and cut recipes out of magazines and off the sides of boxes. And then she would occasionally make one of the Greek dishes that she had learned to cook as a girl. These were exquisite, but she was a full-time mom and homemaker and cooked three meals a day for her family, so convenience often took the day over gourmet food.

By the way, I always love hearing about your mom’s vegetable garden and your dad’s chokecherry jam. Those memories are precious. When I got a bit older and stronger, around 12 or 13, they handed me a pitchfork and I became the guy who turned over the garden every spring. Then, I’d go turn over my grandmother’s garden in another part of Yonkers. More sweet memories.

We never ate out when I was young, but I didn’t feel as though I was missing something. I got to sample the food that my best friend’s Sicilian grandmother made every once in a while and this was a revelation. It was a far cry from my mother’s spaghetti and meatballs. I knew there was other food out there - maybe - but I also didn’t care. I was more into pizza. I still am, actually.

In college, I worked in the dining hall kitchen, but that was institutional food. I did not encounter much exotic food until I moved into the city at the age of 21. I had little money then, but suddenly I was near these amazing places in Greenwich Village - and they were cheap. Mexican Gardens, Taste of Tokyo, Saigon, that Tibetan place near Gramercy Park, the Jewish delis, Italian restaurants, Persian restaurants, and countless others. I began to take for granted that there was great food everywhere. Only later did I learn that was not true. I was in New York City, a crucible of immigrants and a hotbed of international food.

And cooking truly IS intimate, which should be the segue into my years of bachelor cooking, but I have gone on way too long here, taken way too many weird tangents, and will have to talk about that after your next reply.

Tonya:

In this last response, you hit on the main reason why I don’t cook now as often as I used to. New York can make cooking seem silly. We can’t walk the dog without passing a dozen restaurants worth trying. And, even though our neighborhood has become a little homogenous (how many French and Italian small-plate places do we really need?) it’s still only a few extra blocks to get to excellent Thai food, or an all-night Cuban diner, or a Georgian or Israeli or Mexican restaurant. If we wanted to try all the great restaurants in the city, we’d never manage it. We would need to eat six meals a day, every day, for years, and by the time we ate our way through half of them, many would have already closed and new ones would have appeared in their place. There are restaurants nearby, within ten blocks, where we’ve been talking about eating for years and we somehow still haven’t managed to get there. There just aren’t enough meals in a day to justify it.

But, of course, all those restaurants—even the cheapest ones—aren’t as cheap as they would have been a couple decades ago. And even the healthiest of them aren’t healthy enough to eat on a regular basis. So, in order to avoid an early death and bankruptcy, we return to the subject. Back to cooking.

Because the city is equally rich in ingredients. Freshly made pasta from Raffetto’s. Hundreds of cheeses from Murray’s. Today’s baked bread from any of three or four local bakeries. Just this morning I walked over to Abingdon Square’s Saturday farmer’s market and brought home spring onions and cilantro and early zucchini from the Finger Lakes region. Sweet little strawberries from New Jersey. Swordfish from Long Island. In the cupboard, I have herbes de provence from a heavenly little spice shop in the East Village. In the fridge, we have Burgundian cheese and apricot jam from the fromagerie. On the counter are organic dates from the Uzbek grocery on Sixth Avenue.

I realize I’m going on a bit, but I’m still astonished by everything I can find here. I did my best to find fresh food when I lived in Kansas, and what I couldn’t find I tended to grow myself, but I could never have replicated the Thessalonian feta from Queens, cut from the thick spongy block and doused in brine, or the opportunity to try out my tentative “Ευχαριστώ” (thank you) on the man behind the cheese counter. I never smelled anything in my life like the dark, coffee-dusted aisles of McNulty’s Coffee and Tea. I love breathing in the smell of that that shop, while you yell back and forth to the owners about how poorly the Yankees are playing.

Of course, we do also go to Trader Joe’s a lot, because the ingredients in this town will drain your wallet nearly as fast as the restaurants will. But still. But still. I get a lot of joy out of finding food here.

You were the one who introduced me to most of these places—Raffetto’s pasta and Murray’s cheese. The fish counter at Citarella. So, before we forget, I want to hear a little of what cooking was like for you before I took over your kitchen...

Paul:

Ok, your homage to New York City - especially on the morning after this Knicks title victory - got me a little teary-eyed. It’s all true, and it’s all stuff that I might miss were I to move away - something I have been threatening to do for decades. In fact, I just found out that two friends have wagered each other on the odds of my ever moving out. No matter, there is good food everywhere, but I have been spoiled here. One could say that my penance in life would be to move somewhere with horrible food choices. Luckily, I don’t believe in a punishing god.

In response to your question, what was food like in the “before times,” let me try to recall.

There were many diners for many years. Many of these were the Polish and Ukrainian diners, most of which have vanished, but they were all uniformly excellent. There were many restaurants and trips to takeout places. Of course, that’s also not cooking. Cooking? For years, I’d buy a heap of good ravioli at Raffetto’s every week, make some sauce or do it up with pesto, steam up a bunch of vegetables and douse them with olive oil and fresh lemon juice. Then I would graze on that combo for days. But I ate it cold after the first day. I still like leftover food cold and I know you consider that barbaric, but I don’t mind. At the same time, you have enlightened me to the joys of heating up leftover food.

You brought with you a wizardry of the microwave, toaster oven and large oven that I never possessed, and for that I am grateful. But what else did I eat?

During Covid, I fell into a rut of eating frozen prepared meals from the local health food store. Glop and slop. But I was exhausted all the time during that first year of the pandemic. What did I eat between the cold ravioli phase and the frozen meal phase - a period that stretched for as long as the Triassic or the Cretaceous eras? This is already sounding worrisome.

I ate a lot of what I’ll call “tub food” - stuff you get at stores. It’s already made and you just pop the lid and dig a spork into it. This was especially true during the Econoline era, when my van eating habits bled into my home cuisine. Tortellini in a tub, tuna, egg salad, weird vegetable salads. You name it. If it came in a tub, I ate it.

My kitchen looked like most other bachelor kitchens - a tiny dish rack held one spoon, one knife and one fork. The same bowl and mug got rinsed out and used again and again. The dishwasher that came with this place was used so little that it died. One of my great achievements in this era, let’s call it the Mesozoic - was to replace the dishwasher on my own. This involved plumbing, electrical work and weird shims. But back to cooking.

As with most bachelors, I became quite skilled at cooking eggs. I am a good short order breakfast cook, but I did not do a whole lot of it. I ate yogurt because it’s part of my DNA and my childhood - my Greek grandfather made his own yogurt - and besides, it comes in a tub. What’s not to like? I went through a frozen waffles period. You’re starting to get the idea, right?

At one point, I figured I’d get all healthy, so I bought a big salad bowl and made a few killer salads. Then I put the bowl on a high shelf and did not touch it for years. It remained as unused as my dishwasher. I made the occasional soup and, in the late teens of this century, I began to make some casseroles from recipes in the New York Times “Cooking” section. These were all delicious and I began to freestyle with them.

To jump back in time, I was vegan for a few years in the 1990s and don’t remember what I ate, but I think it contributed to my first kidney stone. My diet was heavy on soy products and I eventually got freaked out - rightfully so - by how much soy I was ingesting. Vegan tub food is not as good as non-vegan tub food. It was pizza that lured me back to the lacto-ovo-pescatarian camp. For many people, bacon is the gateway drug out of veganism. For me, it was pizza.

I remember what I cooked a lot of during my bachelor days - cold cereal, in many and various forms. I cooked a lot of cold cereal and was a wizard at opening those boxes, adding in things like raisins and wheat germ, then pouring in the milk. At the same time, I remember making a snarky, but true, post on social media that stated, “My favorite recipes begin with the words ‘Make a one-inch slit in the overwrap before inserting in the microwave.’” Does Chinese takeout food count as home cooking? Probably not.

I know there was other stuff, but I honestly cannot remember. Maybe there was no other cooking? I do like to cook, but this piece has been a sad-sounding compilation of ersatz pseudo-cooking and sorry excuses. Still, at the end of the day, I am not only here, but I weigh more than I did 30 years ago, so I must have been doing something right. Or maybe not, the more I consider that statement. I used to love baking bread and would like to make more bread, along with my favorite food - blueberry muffins. I should quit writing while I’m ahead.

Tonya, I’m so happy that you took over my kitchen. I cannot tell you how happy I am.

Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity,” in 2021, and 2023’s “Exit Culture.”

Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.

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I kept a journal, making simple sketches of the stunning landscape and writing of fleeting moments.

Here is one.

Wet hair dries
in the warm
Norwegian sun

Gentle breeze
on the water

Songbirds
between
the silence

After over thirty years in Montana, contemporary painter Tabby Ivy now lives and works in Carlton, Oregon. Learn more about her painting practice and Between Artists, Life in Paintings and Prose and Stops Along the Way, her two books with Damon Falke, at www.tabbyivy.com.

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The Small Things We Learn

Older, yes, and we learn the life we make is largely made in shadows. We could be 
disappointed, but we must leave something for the light. Happiness is not a season. It is a rainfall. Rain on your windows. Rain on your street. Rain when you drink coffee in the afternoon and wait or sometimes wait for another moment to end. We go on and go on. And your questions are for answers I no longer possess. I would reshape your realities, yes, and yet I have tried to wash away my own realities in a hundred different rivers of half-dreams, only to discover more stones, more of my own dirt, my own filth that no dream, half or full, can cleanse. But no, you cannot start over. We live, each of us, within our own wounded lives. What your hands, what the nape of your neck remembers lies between an unspeakable vitality and illusion. Vital, yes. Illusion, yes. Although you bend, you still notice the sun. You notice clouds in the far away of the sky. Summons are not enough. Yet on the other side of words is where the sun sets, where the herons fly, where leaves return after they vanish, where my heart once surrendered to the desert. I want them to remain, to be. Names fail us. Being is the fire of what you imagine. Breathe in the clouds, breathe in the far away of the sky. Here is a secret I have been meaning to tell you: the ocean is small.        

Note: this poem first appeared on Juke in 2024.

Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

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I can set sail on a piece of wood. As I say that, the blond shaving, curled like a fairy’s canoe moored between two reeds, begins to move on the sky-blue river so still that I imagine it is a mirror, though not the two-way kind. My eyes know the way, as do the sun and the moon, toads and turtles, but not the mud that holds it altogether. A lone juvenile bird, I read, flew the longest non-stop flight, going eleven days without food or water, from the North Pole to the South Pole, losing half its body weight to reach Tasmania where it will breed. There was no mention of the return trip home. And yet, I had the sense that the young bird knew all about its future chores, only half of which involved following the stars at night. Most creatures do. They understand every mile they fly or run or dig means they are alive. And some people do, too, whether at work or at rest. So many more than we know can count the beats in their hearts and see in the dark constellations that switch places on the horizon as the seasons go. It is just like that, the surprises of what is original and what is unique, being enlightened by some spare gift of caring that the weak believe is an unworthy trick. But not so fast. There she stands looking down at her grave, knowing those resting within are but bones and overgrown nails and hair. Until this is her place, she thinks, she will not visit it again. She is the last of her family and that makes her free. I can set sail on a piece of wood, she thinks, the tree limbs in the nearby forest suddenly raving in the wind, their sprouts green as emeralds, shining in the sun.

Constance Christopher’s work has been in Fence, Bomb, Northwest Review, & Ginosko. A novel Dead Man’s Flower was published in the Bogie’s Mystery series. She has published reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and worked in film & television. She is painting a large oil based on Robert Graves’ White Goddess.

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By the time the last of the charcoal goes gray in the grill and the flags on the porches have gone soft in the wind, the day is supposed to be over. The calendar moves on; the dead do not.

The first shape of it was strictly for the dead. It was 1868 and they called it Decoration Day in honor of the Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. Graves in straight rows with names cut into stone that holds weather better than memory. Once the fighting was over, they gathered the bodies they could name and the ones they could not, and they put flags in the ground like small, bright decorations. Decoration Day. The word was soft and said nothing of what was done to the men.

Memorial Day came later, not until 1971, the last Monday in May. A celebration. Every year looking forward to the three day weekend. The beginning of the summer season to many.

Morning comes early to cemeteries. The grass is wet during those hours even in the heart of summer. A man kneels and presses a flag into the soil. He does not look at the dates too long. He has work later. He has always had work. Unlike the dead that have finished theirs.

The day was meant to be simple. Stand still a while and feel the cost settle into the body. It was that at first, like an instruction, though no one wrote it down.

With the years the day widened. Sales. Long drives. It takes on heat. The first burn of the sun on the shoulders. Coolers open. Laughter carries over water. Someone says it is the start of summer and no one corrects him. The flags are still there, though with more stars. Smaller now against the noise. The graves do not move.

What it means depends on where the day finds you. At the edge of a plot, maybe, where a ledger holds name, date, branch — a life reduced to lines that fit the stone. Or in a kitchen, with a photograph on a refrigerator door. In a driveway, looking at the oil stain of the car he used to drive. In a warm body, it is a thing that does not heal. It wakes early. It keeps count. Days turning into years.

We have learned to speak around it. Sacrifice. Service. Freedom. Honor. Clean words. Public words. Words that do not show the rooms where decisions were made, the maps with their clean arrows, the distance between a voice giving an order and the ground that receives it.

The dead ask for a closer language. They’ve earned it. Simple words will do. Dirt. Metal. Heat. A boot that will not come off. A letter that arrives after the man it names. The small arithmetic of absence: one chair, one plate, one voice gone from a dinner table that keeps its shape anyway.

There is always a temptation to make the day prove something. To set the dead in ranks behind whatever we already believe. It feels efficient. It is also a second use of a life already spent. But the graves do not consent. They do not correct us either.

Better to stand where the ground dips slightly from all the years of settling. Better to read one name and keep it in the mouth a moment, as if it were a piece of hard bread. Better to admit what does not balance. The account does not close. It never has.

A child runs between the stones he does not know yet. That is not failure. It is a mercy and a charge that he will need to pay. The child will learn from what is kept and what is refused. He will learn whether the day is made light enough to forget or heavy enough to shape him.

By afternoon the flags lift a little in the wind. They are bright because they must be. Color holds the eye. It says look here. It says remember this. It does not say why. It does not say now. By evening the heat goes out of the grounds. The cars leave. The flags remain, like small fires that do not burn down. Somewhere a bugle sounds, thin as a line drawn across distance. It does not resolve. It leaves the air marked.

Please stand a while. The stone will help you. It has only a few lines to give. Name. Rank. War. A pair of dates with a dash between them. A life rendered as punctuation. It does not tell you what was said to the boy who became the man who became the name on the stone. It does not repeat the speech in the school auditorium, the quiet talk at the kitchen table, the poster in the post office window promising a steady wage and a sharp uniform. At least the stone has the decency to keep its mouth shut where the living have not.

What was said to the boy was cleaner than what was asked of the man. We phrase our demands like hymns. Your country needs you. You will see the world. You will make a difference. We hang the words high, where they catch the light and are hard to examine from below. A man in a good suit points at a map with his whole hand and calls the plan necessary. The boy in the back row hears only that he is wanted. Nobody gets up to say you may spend the rest of your life with metal where your knee used to be. We are a practical people. We don’t clutter a sales pitch with the fine print.

A man whose pockets are empty has less room for principle. He listens to the tune the country is playing and steps in, because what else is there. The moral truth may live inside him yes, but the rent was due and it didn’t care about that. So he goes. He takes the words they gave him because his own are not enough to say no or why.

But these speeches, pressed and laundered, always arrive before that truth and after it.

So the real speech, the one that should be carved and never is, might go like this: We will tell you this is for your country. Sometimes that will be true. Sometimes it will be for an error no one is willing to admit to. Sometimes it will be for black gold. We will stand behind wooden podiums and swear that history demands it. And even though history is not in this room, we will speak for it and shape it.

We will not be with you when the transport door closes. And when the bullets start flying, you will not be there for country nor gold. You will not be there for a line on a map. You will not be there for policy or slogan or a clean phrase spoken under bright lights. You will be there for the man next to you, whose breathing you can hear. You will be there for the one you might get home.

We will see you again on a tarmac with flags, or in photographs, or not at all. If you come back, we will put you on the field during the seventh-inning stretch. And we’ll let a jet roar the sky so the crowd can cheer and feel square for the price of a ticket. If you do not come back, we will give your mother a folded flag and say the word honor until it sounds like nothing at all.

But we are more polite than to say all of that out loud. Maybe too cowardly. Maybe too thoughtless. Maybe too selfish. Instead, we let the monuments hold the silence while the parades talk over them. We make sure to sew the flag big enough to cover both the coffin and a mistake, and we act surprised when somebody points out that cloth cannot tell the difference.

Memorial Day is our annual attempt to square those accounts without looking too closely at the ledger. We prefer, instead, to dress the day well. Flags on every porch. A parade where children in paper hats wave at old men. Cotton candy is sold. A discount on whatever can be tagged and moved. The same words from the same mouths that tell us that the fallen gave their lives for our freedom. They made the ultimate sacrifice, we’re told. It is a handsome sentence that leaves the blood in the trenches. It sounds carved. It also skips the part where somebody asked them to.

Somewhere between honoring the dead and using them, we reached for a word that would cover both. A minute of silence between innings. A discount on a mattress. A photograph passed around with a caption about bravery. Honor has become our all-purpose cloth. We throw it over what we do not want to sort through: the good wars, the bad ones, the boys and girls who never should have been there, those who went twice because they could not find their way back to anything else.

But the stones are not fooled. They make no distinction between the clean cause and the crooked one. They hold the body the same. The grass over a man killed in a righteous defense grows no greener than over a man sent on a fool’s errand. Nature is impartial. It returns everyone to the same dark and calls it order. It is only the living who insist on pinning meaning to it like a ribbon or a poppy.

Maybe the honest way to stand in a cemetery on that day, or two weeks after, is to put down the big bright words for a while. Put down honor. Put down glory. Put down freedom even. Let these words rest. Say instead: here is a man who once sat on a porch and hated the taste of medicine. Here is a woman who could climb a rope faster than any man in her town. Here is a kid who believed what he was told because he hadn’t been given reason not to yet. The country asked something of them it will never ask of a balance sheet. That is fact enough.

After that, if the word honor is still wanted, let it mean this: not as a blanket thrown over every grave, but as a promise made to each other. That we will not lie about why you are lying here. No smoothing the jagged edge of your story because the speech goes down easier that way. We will remember that the flag on your stone is not a logo. It is a question.

The parades will still pass, sure. The smoke will still rise from backyards. Children will still come home with ice cream on their shirts. It is a country after all, not a monastery. But underneath all that noise there still ought to be room for one plain sentence, a sentence that does not excuse or explain or lie. A sentence that simply stands as the stones stand. We were told many things. Some were true. And you, lying there, paid for all of them.

Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.

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We arrived at JT Basque Restaurant at 6:30 p.m., the appointed time for cocktails. On this rainy Friday night, it surprised us to score a parking spot near the door. Already, tables were filling, barstools were occupied, and a haphazard line formed at the dining room entrance. Typical Friday night at JTs. This evening, however, included a visit from two Bertsolaris from Gizpuzkoa, a province in the mountainous Basque country between Spain and France.

Bertsolari is an ancient contest between those who have mastered the art of poetic improv. Sebastian Litsaso and Aitor Mendizule would improvise a back-and-forth story supported by folk melodies to maintain the meter of each line until the saga was finished. Anyone who has taken a poetry class has probably done a written version of this exercise between classmates, but doing it orally raises the bar significantly.

Jeff and I didn’t know what to expect. Would someone get up and introduce them before assigning subject for this poetic dialogue? Would tensions rise as each singer tried to outdo his opponent? All we could do was enjoy our dinner and wait and see.

And wait we did. And wait … and wait. As the hour of nine approached, even some members of Mendiko Euskaldun Club, who sponsored the event, grew restless. Unfortunately, everyone near the singers was having too good of a time.

Finally, the waitress brought small plates of Basque cheeses to signal the end of their meal. Courses were brought to the club’s long table to be passed around. It is the traditional way of dining in Basque restaurants around the American West.

Despite the signal, however, no singing ensued. Jeff wondered if we should go. Apparently, bertsolari wasn’t happening tonight. The host came over to apologize for the delay. He didn’t know why the evening’s entertainment had fizzled. As we rose and put on our coats, two rich baritones erupted from the center of that long table. The poetry had begun … at last.

Our host laughed. “You should’ve put on your coats sooner.”

Jeff had studied a bit of Basque/Euskara from classes given by JT’s bartender, Etienne Lekumberry. After a few sessions of the class, I realized my bandwidth for this totally unfamiliar and obscure language was extremely narrow. While I couldn’t understand the story and the wit and humor that brought laughter and applause from the native speakers, I still enjoyed their mellow voices and the cadence of music that supported their lines. Sometimes those lines ran off the end of the music, but no matter. They just kept going until they completed their lines.

When I look at Euskara in print, there are strange combinations of letters: tx, iak, oa. The last two denote articles and places. A painting of the heraldic shield on the wall above our table contains the phrase, Zazpiak-Bat. Jeff parsed it for me: Zaz - seven, iak - of, bat - one. Of Seven One, a motto that embraces the provinces into one homeland in the Pyrenees.

As the bertsolaris sang in Euskara, the sounds of the words lay gently upon my ear. Without harsh gutturals, it almost hypnotized me. As we drove home, I hummed the folk melody to myself, feeling the tug of age-old oral literature that has borne humanity’s stories for eons. The Basque people have been around for so long, isolated in their mountain realm, that the word for tool also means stone. Bertsolari is a storytelling art form similar to what troubadours and shanachies have used since Homer wrote the Odyssey.

Many times during the recitations, a line was repeated, allowing the guests to join in the song. Jeff informed me it also signaled the end to that particular poem. For about a hour, the men traded back and forth, each adding a line responding to the one just given. At one point, the men seemed to be arguing. Jeff surmised they were baiting each other. No fights or mayhem broke out, though, as everything happened in the spirit of fun and friendship.

After the bertsolaris finished their poems, Mike Bidart, who arranged the event, sang a folksong with a voice as rich and delightful as his two visitors. After his performance, Etienne Lekumberry rounded out the performance with his rendition of Izarren Hautsa, “Stardust” by Mikel Laboa.

While JTs welcomes everyone, such events illustrate how restaurants like this are actually community centers. When young men immigrated from the Basque Country in the early 1900s to tend sheep in the West, hotels like JTs sprung up in towns throughout Idaho, Nevada, and California. As tonight’s guests did tonight, the shepherds sat at long tables, eating communal meals, passing around platters of meat, tureens of soup, stew, and beans, and baskets of fresh bread. After a lonesome summer tending thousands of sheep, their only companion a dog, these men stayed in these hotels to reunite with others from their homeland. Some returned to that sacred place, but many stayed and built communities. Their language and culture continues to be taught to successive generations through organizations like Mendiko Euskara Cluba. The Club’s Facebook page is headed by a photo of their children’s dance group. Likewise, guests from the Basque Country visit their American friends and bring bits of their culture for us to enjoy.

My friend Sharron Bassano, of Leaves on Substack, read this piece and found this link to a Bertsolari contest held in the Basque Country. Thank you so much, Sharron, for adding to this article.

Read more from Sue Cauhape on her page, “Ring Around the Basin”:

Ring Around the Basin

Poetry, stories, and essays about the beauty of the Great Basin, Truckee and Santa Cruz, and Utah. Welcome to Ring Around the Basin.

By Sue Cauhape

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Giant Steps

—for fallen friends

There’s an iron heart ringing
on an anvil this morning.
There’s the blacksmith stoking his forge.
No iron will turn till it’s hot;
no sorrow will end till it’s gorged.
Callous fingers drum blunt
on a wood tabletop as years drop
like coins to the floor.

Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny,
there is no sorrow won’t burn.

The giant has fallen; the stalk has been cut
that led to treasures above.
The princess chose another. The witch turned not.
I’m alive and lacking for love.

Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny,
there is no sorrow won’t burn.

Giants trip as mortals do. Gods fall flat from untied shoes.
Rugs bunch up. There are patches of ice,
uneven stairs, too dim lights.
If sleeping dogs lie, there is no truth.
This night is darker for lack of you.

Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny,
there is no sorrow won’t burn.

Matt Layne writes…

The line “there’s an iron heart ringing on an anvil this morning” came to me when my friend Sharon Lewis won a marathon (I think the Vulcan) the first time she competed in one. It must’ve been around 1998 or so, but it wasn’t until about a decade later that the rest of the poem emerged, and when it did, it flowed so naturally.

I know I’ve written about what a euphoric feeling that is when the words do flow and the poem essentially writes itself. To become conduit. Vessel. The line between creator and created is blurred, and a kind of ecstatic pleasure takes over. It’s my favorite type of high and always has been; a feeling of connectivity I rarely achieve but always crave. Y’all, the writing doesn’t even have to be very good. I might look at it a few weeks later and hate it, but in that moment, it feels like the coolest thing ever put to paper.

But back to Giant Steps, I wrote that one line, and it sat there in my notebook. I tried a few times, but the poems always came loose and fell apart. Then years later, my friend, Mike Shrader, passed away. Shrader was an Alabama iconoclast. Some people called him the King of Alabama. He would recite Whitman from the heart, and he would do this ommmmm poem that morphed into a fuuuuuuck you in what was a shockingly delightful way. My favorite instance of it was hearing him perform Om at a spoken word stage in downtown Birmingham. When Shrader moved on from this world, the poem coalesced into what it is now. Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny. There is no sorrow won’t burn. I don’t know if that does for you what it does for me, but damn, if that don’t sing.

Keep climbing those beanstalks, y’all. There are adventures yet to be had in this life.

Love,

Matt

“Giant Steps” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022. The music is “Bewild” from Ned Mudd.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us.

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is in print! Get your copy today!

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet’s nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. His debut multimedia poetry collection, Miracle Strip, had been awarded the 2025 Alabama Author Award for Poetry and was named the 2024 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. Order your copy today.

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Theophilus was a Roman scribe — a man of documents, of official language, of the bureaucratic machinery of empire — who made a sarcastic remark to a woman on her way to her own beheading, and nobody in the history of public mockery has been more immediately and thoroughly punished for it.

The woman was Dorothea of Caesarea. The remark was: “O Bride of Christ, send me some fruits from your Bridegroom’s garden.”

It was February.

He meant it as a joke. The kind of joke that powerful men make to women who are no longer in a position to answer back — which is to say, the lowest and most reliable form of humor available to the human animal. Theophilus had behind him the full temporal authority of the Diocletian empire, which had been trying to stamp out Christianity with increasing desperation before eventually, exhausted by the project, converting to it entirely. He had every reason to feel secure.

He was not.

Dorothy turned to face him in the crowd — this woman being marched to her execution dressed, by all accounts, like a bride — and she looked at him with what witnesses described as kindness and said, quietly and with complete self-possession: “You and I shall meet together in that garden.”

Theophilus laughed.

The crowd laughed. But earlier, when the governor had offered her marriage or death, Dorothy had already answered in words that left no room for negotiation: “Christ was her only Spouse, and death her desire.” She was not a woman who said things she didn’t mean. Theophilus, being a man who worked in words for a living, should have understood that.

After Dorothy’s beheading — I use the word plainly because she bore it plainly — a child appeared to Theophilus carrying a basket. In the basket: three apples, three roses. In February. In Cappadocia. Theophilus turned to his friends, this educated man, this officer of the empire, and said: “In the winter, Cappadocia is covered with ice and frost, and the trees are bare of leaves. What do you think? From where do these apples and flowers come?”

His friends had no answer.

Neither did he. He confessed his faith in Christ on the spot and was subsequently martyred, which is the universe’s way of making a point it considers important.

I have been thinking about this story for thirty years, and every February it finds me again, and I would probably have kept thinking about it privately and said nothing, except that Hans Baldung Grien painted it in 1516 in a way that makes it impossible to keep to yourself.

The painting hangs in the Národní Galerie in Prague. Go. It is smaller than you expect — roughly the size of a good hotel mirror, which is precisely large enough to make you look at yourself looking at it. Baldung was Albrecht Dürer’s most gifted student, a fact confirmed when, after Dürer’s death, his people sent Baldung a lock of the master’s own hair— which is the most German expression of love and esteem ever recorded, and which Baldung earned, and which this painting proves.

What Baldung understood — what makes this picture live when a thousand other martyrdom paintings are merely dutiful — is that he set the whole thing in SNOW. Heavy, particular, February snow. The kind that has been on the ground long enough to look like it has always been there and intends to stay. And against all that white: Dorothy’s dress. An extraordinary red. The red of a decision that cannot be walked back.

He was not being decorative.

He was being PRECISE. Dorothy’s feast day falls on the sixth of February. In sixteenth-century Germany there was no global supply chain, no truck arriving on a Tuesday morning loaded with strawberries from Chile, no Whole Foods to make miracles routine. There was just winter — which lasted longer than we now remember it ever lasting — and the distant theological promise that things might, eventually, bloom. To find roses and apples when the world outside offers nothing but grey sky and frost-hardened ground was a miracle in the plainest and most physical sense of the word. It would have landed in the body. Like cold air. Like sudden heat.

It still does, if you let it.

Look at the child.

He is painted as a kind of putto — chubby, rose-crowned, bare feet on frozen ground — and the bare feet are the thing I cannot stop thinking about. A child, unshod, standing in snow that would make any living creature flinch, and he is not flinching. He exists in some other relationship to cold and frost and the ordinary cruelty of February than the rest of us do. His expression is the expression of someone who has been asked to deliver a message and intends to deliver it, no more complicated than that, entirely unimpressed by the fact that he should not be possible at all.

And the basket. The apples glow red against all that white and seem, impossibly, warm. The roses are pink in the way that roses in February have no business being pink. The whole thing should not exist and it DOES — the way the child should not be standing barefoot in snow and IS — and the feeling this produces is not wonder exactly and not quite fear but something that lives between them, in the place where the world cracks open just slightly and you see, briefly, that the rules you have been living by were never as fixed as you believed them to be.

In the corner of the painting, tucked away like a footnote, there is a monk. Dark-habited, small, watching the child with the expression of a man whose entire intellectual architecture is being quietly, methodically dismantled by a small barefoot boy with a basket of fruit, and who has not yet decided whether to be grateful for this or to grieve it.

I know that expression.

I have made that expression.

St. Dorothy is the patron saint of gardeners, florists, and newlyweds — a combination that is DEEPLY coherent, if you think about it. All three are in the business of tending things that are fragile and lovely and prone to dying at the wrong moment. All three require a particular faith that what you press into the ground now will, against considerable evidence, come up in the spring. All three know what February does to a person — that it is one thing to believe in gardens in June, when everything is lush and green and practically insisting on itself, and another thing entirely to believe in them when the sky is the color of an old argument and nothing, nothing, looks like it is ever going to bloom again.

And yet

Here is the child with his basket. Here are the apples. Here are the roses — in February, in the snow, in a small painting in Prague that a German made five hundred years ago and that is, if you stand in front of it long enough, still making its argument to anyone with the nerve to receive it.

The miracle was not that the fruit appeared.

The miracle was that Theophilus — pompous, educated, fully armed with the contempt of the powerful — opened his mouth in the cold and ASKED for it. He did not know he was asking. He meant to wound. But the universe is not always interested in what you meant.

Sometimes you ask for the miracle in the very act of declaring it impossible.

Sometimes you get what you asked for.

See more of the work of Hans Baldung Grien here:

Read more from The Magpie Chronicles…

The Magpie Chronicles is written by M Sebastian Araujo from a handbuilt house deep in an old growth forest, where the winters are long and the opinions are longer.

The Magpie Chronicles arrives when it has something worth saying — antiques, art, history, the occasional miracle, and whatever the world is doing at the moment. If something here found you, subscribe. The basket is always full.

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The Magpie Chronicles

Where design history meets the thrill of the hunt and the art of home. Exploring antiques, art, and cultural treasures with a magpie's eye for beautiful things and the stories behind them. Former NYC wanderer, now living deep in an old growth forest in a

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It was April of 2016. I had woken up in Fort Stockton, Texas and was heading towards Las Cruces, New Mexico in my Ford E-350 van, which had carried me for 100,000 miles over the past 5 years. I had built this van into a little 4x4 stealth camper and it had been trustworthy for all that time until the year before, when I had broken down in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and had to hang out for 5 days, waiting for parts, so they could repair the flex plate and torque converter on the transmission. I figured I was okay after that, but in the back of my head lingered a hint of mechanical mortality. After that, I never did stop worrying about that transmission.

I went through Pecos, Texas, searching for photos, and came up into New Mexico on US 285. I took one of the lesser highways west and was finally slowing down and enjoying the Western lands. God, but it was glorious to be out west again. It’s what I dream of when I’m back east. I stopped and shot a billboard that had said “TRUST IN GOD,” but was now painted over. Did they stop paying the bill? Did that particular church go out of business? I was pondering the possible stories behind that sign and enjoying the drive.

Not far past that, I stopped to shoot another blank billboard and was thinking that maybe I was onto a new theme - painted-over messages. I drove up a little mound of dirt to get the shot, then went into reverse when I suddenly felt the transmission slip. Oh please God, no. Please don’t do this to my transmission. I did some more testing and realized I was on thin ice.

I pointed the van towards El Paso, over a massive hill, and was grateful to get a signal on my phone. I had had no signal for most of the day. I found a transmission shop that was open in Las Cruces and limped along, tranny slipping then sliding the whole way. I didn’t stop. When I got there, it was a strange crew, presided over by an ancient guy who said he had been in the transmission business for over 55 years. He told me that he also owned an RV park and lived in the town of Vado. One of his guys, “my top rebuilder,” he said, went for a ride and confirmed that I was fucked. I was fucked in more ways than one. It was late on a Friday, but I knew the drill after that week in Rocky Mount. I found an Enterprise car rental, put most of my stuff in the car, and checked into a local motel. I decided to make the best of it. There are FAR worse places to be stuck than Las Cruces.

I settled in, got my camera bag out, then took the car out to drive around. Las Cruces has some great food, a great used bookstore, and it’s well-situated. The next morning, I went by the transmission shop, but it was just the owner and another old guy. They could not get my 9000 pound van on the lift to get the transmission down until “the young guys” came in on Monday. The younger of the two old guys got on a creeper under the van and tried to loosen some bolts. “Another northeastern vehicle,” he said grimly as he looked at the corrosion. He held a lit candle under each bolt to heat it up before he loosened it with his wrench. Those two talked shit while I looked on in silence. I was trying to be cheerful and ingratiate myself with them. “See if you can bring us some donuts on Monday,” the old guy said, and I took this as my sign to leave. “Try Bosa Donuts.” I got into the rental car and headed out towards Alamogordo, past the town of Organ and the ruins of the old Organ Mountain Lodge.

It was the first cross country trip since my dog Elko had died, earlier that year, and I was pretty lonely. For the next week, I fell into a routine of heading into El Paso every day to shoot. El Paso is not that far from Las Cruces and it’s a great town for photos. I found the H&H Car Wash and Cafe, where the owner - I learned later - was a legendary crank. He yelled at me when I asked him about the bathroom, but he and I made up after that and he ended up giving me an H&H cap. The little coffee shop attached to it made exquisite breakfast tacos and huevos rancheros. Every time I went by, he seemed to be yelling at somebody from his lawn chair by the entrance to the car wash. I think it’s what kept him going. He reminded me of Hunter Thompson if Hunter Thompson had owned a car wash and lunch counter.

I loved El Paso and could not stop thinking about the movie “Touch of Evil” and the whole border town mythos, but that was me romanticizing the West again - and it’s an easy thing to do when you’re from the East. The land is magic and feels exotic to someone from the greener parts of the country. Of course, I feel the same strangeness about the deep south, but not in the same way. The light, the air, and the sky out west always touch me in ways that are difficult to articulate without sounding facile. I claw for words.

I kept thinking, “THANK GOD I’m not in Ohio or Indiana or Tennessee.” NOT that there is anything wrong with those places, but they are not New Mexico or West Texas. Maybe I just read too many books as a kid and had an extra vivid imagination. Either way, I was happy to be where I was, even if I was anxious over the state of the van. I had to trust in something greater than myself or I would have been a complete wreck. I trusted in that 22 year-old kid who was the ace transmission rebuilder. And then I shot photos in El Paso, in White Sands, and in Las Cruces.

I found an ice cream custard shop that served green chile pepper sundaes. I ate New Mexican food every day like it was my last meal. I shot photos. I harassed the guys in the transmission shop and brought them donuts. It was a calculated mixed message. I banged around El Paso, getting lost with my camera, and I think I healed a bit from the loss of Elko. As I discovered on previous trips, anything worth doing with someone is worth doing alone. I was on the lookout for stray dogs the whole time, but that bit of cosmic magic would not happen for another 18 months.

As with my breakdown in Rocky Mount, I realized I could actually live in a place like Las Cruces. I had always just blown through these towns and cities, never stopping too long, just enough to shoot photos, grab a bite, bed down, sleep in the van in some casino parking lot, find a hot spring, or visit a friend. After almost 6 forced days here, the place had come into focus and I liked it. I was not ready to put down stakes - and I’m still not, apparently — but I could see the possibility of doing so. So that was a good thing. My mind expanded just a bit.

I lost a little bit of trust in that machine, although I would hold onto the van for another 7 or 8 years until I sold it. And I still miss it. But I had miles to go - on that trip and afterwards - and when I got the van back, I vowed to lighten it up a bit and keep driving. I sold the awning to a guy in Jersey. I threw out some of the stuff I had been hauling around. And I did my best to keep it in good running condition. Breakdowns are a part of life. They are, in fact, an integral part of life.

There would be another breakdown on this trip, just a day or two later. The steering column fell apart near Phoenix, on the day that Prince died, but that was ahead of me. For now, I would leave Las Cruces, both relieved and sad, happy to be back on the road, but with a little piece of my heart in Las Cruces. The town had sheltered and taken care of me. Seven years earlier, I had stayed in a cheap motel there on Christmas Eve of 2009, on my way to get the van in Portland, Oregon. I had used it as a way station since then, and I have gone back many times. There’s always something to see in Las Cruces, and these trips are generally about looking for things to see. That’s an odd construction - “look to see” - and I’m pretty certain I read it in a letter that someone - was it Walker Evans or somebody else - wrote in support of Robert Frank’s grant application that took him on the trip that became “The Americans.”

Home can be many things and home on the road is something else altogether. Shelter, solace, comfort, and care. It’s always far better to leave a place, wanting to stay, than to never want to come back. We are lucky to find safe places while traveling. The road can often be hostile, and this is part of what makes it interesting, part of the allure, but to find a place that grows in your heart is more rare. We talk incessantly, here at Casa Santo, chez nous and all that, about places to live, and have tried to quantify what makes a place feel right, what would make a place worth settling in. With two people and two different sets of needs and desires, of phobias and scars, that equation becomes more difficult, but it’s very possible. That’s one reason why New York City is so easy, in some ways. There’s a wrench for every nut.

Still, this town is not for everyone and it may not even be for us in the long run. How did I get here from talking about breakdowns? Maybe breakdowns and being stranded in other places are like reading a book. They take us somewhere else. Maybe I’m too busy making lemonade from the lemons life has thrown at me. Then again, I like lemonade.

Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity” in 2021, and 2023’s “Exit Culture.”

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Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says

AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

Source: The Guardian

OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters

OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.

The bill would shield frontier AI developers from liability for “critical harms” caused by their frontier models as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly cause such an incident, and have published safety, security, and transparency reports on their website. It defines a frontier model as any AI model trained using more than $100 million in computational costs, which likely could apply to America’s largest AI labs, like OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

Source: Wired

The New Wild West of AI Kids’ Toys

AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category. It’s easier than ever to spin up an AI companion, thanks to model developer programs and vibe coding. In 2026, they’ve become a go-to trend in cheap trinkets, lining the halls of trade shows like CES, MWC, and Hong Kong’s Toys & Games Fair. By October 2025, there were over 1,500 AI toy companies registered in China, and Huawei’s Smart HanHan plush toy sold 10,000 units in China in its first week. Sharp put its PokeTomo talking AI toy on sale in Japan this April.

Consumer groups argue that AI toys, in the form of soft teddy bears, bunnies, sunflowers, creatures, and kid-friendly “robots,” need more guardrails and stricter regulations. FoloToy’s Kumma bear, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o when tested by the Public Interest Research Group’s New Economy team, gave instructions on how to light a match and find a knife, and discussed sex and drugs. Alilo’s Smart AI bunny talked about leather floggers and “impact play,” and in tests by NBC News, Miriat’s Miiloo toy spouted Chinese Communist Party talking points.

Source: Wired

Hackable Robot Lawn Mower Unlocks a New Nightmare

Most people hope that the 200-pound robot with blades in their backyard cannot be easily hacked. Unfortunately for the owners of Yarbo, a $5,000 lawn mower robot that can also work as a leaf blower, snowblower, and edger, that was not the case. The Verge reports that a security researcher found numerous vulnerabilities in the lawn bots that could allow hackers to remotely take over the machines (including their camera feeds,) as well as extract owners' email addresses, Wi-Fi passwords, and home locations.

Source: Wired

‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Source: The Guardian

Literary Prizewinners Are Facing AI Allegations. It Feels Like the New Normal

At first, the winners of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize for 2026 enjoyed the envy of their peers. But since their works of fiction earned this distinction, these authors have found themselves facing harsh scrutiny from the literary community, with several accused of enlisting generative artificial intelligence to write for them.

The allegations have come from numerous readers, many of them writers themselves, expressing bafflement and dismay that the prize jury could have overlooked potential signs of inauthentic authorship.

Source: Wired

Silicon Valley Wants to Put a Chip in Your Brain

There will come a time, in the not-so-distant future, when you decide to stick a computer chip in your brain.

At least, that’s what D. Scott Phoenix told the audience at TED 2026 in Vancouver last month.

“Someone you work with will get it first. And you’ll hold out for a while, the way you did with the smartphone. But eventually, you won’t,” said Phoenix, dressed in all black with a tiny mic attached to his ear. “The advantages of integration will be hard to compete with.”

Put bluntly, in his view, “We’re on the cusp of the next major transition, the merger of humans and AI.”

Source: Politico

Almost half of everything orbiting Earth is space junk

Nearly half of all known objects currently orbiting Earth technically classify as space junk, but the true amount may be even higher. Not only that, the debris continues amassing faster than it’s being removed.

The latest red alert report comes from the engineering components company, Accu, and is based on information compiled from the U.S. Space Surveillance Network and its Space-Track database. According to their assessment, there are at least 12,550 tracked orbital debris fragments circling the planet “with no control or purpose.” That’s around 47 percent of the 33,269 known objects, which includes almost 17,690 satellites. But with many of those satellites now inactive along with nearly 2,400 jettisoned rocket bodies, the total space junk is likely worse than the current numbers suggest.

Source: Popular Science

Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.

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