Issue 156
20 years
Allan Peterson
Annie Stenzel
Bill McCloud
Brad Rose
Clare Rolens
Corey Mesler
Dale Wisely
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco
Eric Burke
F. J. Bergmann
F. John Sharp
Howie Good
J.I. Kleinberg
John Grey
Jordan Smith
Ken Chau
Larry D. Thomas
Laura M Kaminski
Katherine DiBella Seluja
Lynn Strongin
Mark Cunningham
Mark Danowsky
Meg Pokrass
Natalie Wolf
& Katherine Schmidt
Steve Klepetar
Tina Carlson
Tom Fugalli
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Please use the pointing right hand icons to move through the issue. It's just a thing we have.
The Note
Dear Friends,
Before I get into this being our 20th year as a publication and this issue being our celebration thereof, I'd like to say a few words about emeralds.
I don't pay attention to jewelry. I'm not interested in it. I don't have any. My wife has no interest in fancy or expensive jewelry and doesn't have any. If you had asked me what I think of emeralds I'd say, 'uh, green, right? Pretty, I guess."
Turns out, I'm told by search engines, emerald is the material traditionally featured in 20th anniversary gifts. I thought it might be cool to find a picture of an emerald to use as a graphic for this issue. If you want to see some tacky stuff, y'all, do a Google image search on emeralds. Or even better, "emerald encrusted." You might even want to go down the rabbit hole and check out some VIRTUAL emerald crusted stuff. Like combat boots. As in that familiar schoolyard taunt, "You're mother wears emerald-encrusted combat boots."
Enough about that. I'm just trying to explain why our graphic for this issue is a right hand pointing with nothing emerald about it. Also, this is the kind of thing I think about to avoid thinking about how in the USA we're a few months away from our democracy being murdered by American voters.
I just don't have the word chops to say how much Right Hand Pointing, along with all our associated journals, has enriched my life. I'll just say that I've made many friends and read a lot of beautiful, beautiful work.
This issue includes the work of some of our most faithful contributors. There's new work and there are poems that appeared in past issues. As we sometimes do on these special-occasion issues, we suspended our rule about not publishing the work of our editors. So, you'll find work here by many of the editors of Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken, Unlost, and first frost. I am so grateful to them. This is our editorial team at Ambidextrous Bloodhound: F. John Sharp, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Ken Chau, Howie Good, Michael Dylan Welch, Annie Stenzel, Bill McCloud, Eric Burke, Ina Roy-Faderman, Clare Rolens, Katherine DiBella Seluja, F. J. Bergmann, Natalie Wolf, Steve Klepetar, Tom Fugalli, Tina Carlson. And a special mention of our emeritus editors Laura M Kaminski, Robert Scotellaro, Tony Press, Mike James, RL Black, José Angel Araguz, and Brenda Birenbaum.
Finally, thank you for reading!
Dale
Ken Chau
7 Second Poem
This poem will take exactly seven seconds to read
if you read it at the correct speed.
Any longer, you’re reading too slowly.
Any shorter, you’re reading too quickly.
Katherine DiBella Seluja
Elixir for Your Last Rodeo
You thought he would protect you from the fall, or at least soften the blow. Bull snorts, pony exhales and there goes that girth belt. Just when the prize was within reach. Silver buckle looking so good on your jeans. The shine of it, the heft. You hear screams from the crowd, sirens in the distance, the announcer’s harried voice. You think: I can’t believe I gave him my passcode. Your mouth fills with blood and he’s trying to get the bull’s attention, waving that stupid bandana. All that ridiculous face paint.
Lynn Strongin
CHALK a seabird makes me think of chalk;
Not only its color
But the way it inscribes sky
I can’t afford a slurry, how the tongue slips
Death took a stab at me
Which is when I learned to value each grain of rice like my eyes.
The night in hell
Bedlam I’d call it; when the virus burned me like an ingot, hotter and hotter.
A knife in the heart.
We both tried to turn it away, mother and I
But it struck my spine, and had full run, making the exquisite sound of a nail on a blackboard, chalked, age-darkened.
Corey Mesler
Windsong (for my mother)
Inside my head
it’s snowing.
Hundreds of miles
and as many years
away
my late mother rises.
She wants to talk
to me
in the voice the wind uses
to mollify the people.
Allan Peterson
Sleep Text
It started with names in the table of contents
flowering thank you s and words lace as tablecloths
Then the edge of sleep like a seep of dark water
and the page I was reading liquified my lamp
snuffed the moon on the dresser
It became easy to confuse even things I was sure of
ghost birds that remained in the upper branches
blossoms with the face of Elaine Del Vecchio
I might have been reading standing up
the faucet letting on in its inner language
the way the Gulf Stream talks to Sargasso
and I heard French as if written in italics
elegant and ligatured leaning forward to ask
why use some letters at all if they are silent
Brad Rose
Night Snow
You’re allotted only so many lies in a lifetime. One person, one vote. Of course, only the adventurous few will reach the heavenly gates unscathed by truth, but what’s up with all this heart attack snow?
It’s hard to separate the poison from the ivy. At least, that’s what my book club says. Sequels, spinoffs, add-ons, follow-ups, guilty pleasures. Isn’t that what heaven is for?
As if they belong here, the night-blind particles fall precisely into place, the darkness bright with white noise, the crematoriums busier than usual, for this time of year.
Laura M Kaminski
Roadkill Communion
Walk with me
down the road
to the Church
of the Sacrificial
Squirrel
Black-winged
clerics
perform the ritual
Occult truth
drips
from their beaks
in strands:
the cautious and
courageous both,
come, in time,
to the same end.
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco
Middle-School Scrimmage
I’m learning
when you root
against the girls you always
win. It doesn’t matter
if you are one, if you're
not.
Go bat left. Give them
six tries. No matter
what they do, they’re small, they’re slow, more
rounded.
They can’t help
it, like those birds
with nests
on concrete. Killdeer. Killjoys. Fragile
shells. Their wings that might be just
fake-broken.
Howie Good
Near Distance
Where we had been was where we were going, a region of shockingly blue Play-Doh
mountains. In the near distance, a farmer driving his tractor in a field of soybeans was singing to his favorite crop. A turgid brown stream trickled past the collapsed wall of an old abandoned sawmill, a form of sadness too few recognize, fast-food wrappers and other trash floating on the surface. The trees thinned as the road continued to climb. We were almost there when a cold, gray, taunting rain began. An image of myself at the side of the road with my thumb out reminded us of the violent strangeness of being alive.
Eric Burke
Calyx
a fragment. the weathered self-ordination of middle age. a fragment
Bill McCloud
Tree Bark (her sad eye)
She has a Paul Newman eye
bright sparkling blue and
the other is as brown as tree
bark and her mother always
called that one her sad eye
F. J. Bergmann
Depth
It was always about money. Each coin
dropped into the hat was the silver face
of another moon, all those eyes watching
them. The mermaids sang with their hands
at each other’s throats, until a deep-voiced
deep-sea-diving stranger reprimanded them.
He had come back from the abyssal plain
with only a pressurized box of exploding
fish, which was to be expected. Parts of
these fish had internal applications.
Natalie Wolf & Katherine Schmidt
At IHOP We Eat the Food of Champions
& choke on grease, wet eggs, and everything we won’t say:
Something about fear and something else about failure.
We trade stage lights for fluorescents so bright
the windows are less of a reflection and more of a mirror.
Now it’s 12:03 AM and the day won’t end. With fake nails,
we trace melted butter across laminated countertops.
Lap up pools of syrup. Flick each other to the tick tick tick
of the wall clock. Sing Rent so loudly the waiter shushes us.
We are theatre kids, baby, still done up in stage makeup,
loud and bold, but hiding from the dark.
We talk and mean what we don’t say.
We won’t leave until they kick us out.
Larry D. Thomas
Emily Dickinson’s Attic
The mirror she peered into
was nothing but an intricate
arrangement of silver, sand.
The shaft of moonglow
she saw there was a comet,
streaking through a galaxy
of dust; the spider and the fly
shining there, Greek tragedy.
She heard, in each waking
moment, the note of an étude;
in each fleeting dream,
a nocturne scored in blood.
Her oeuvre lurked
in the mirror's play
of light, shadow.
Tina Carlson
And the Night Was Full of Lions
after Jorge Luis Borges
In a dream cave: wrapped packages,
warm as new bread. Cougars leap
baring teeth. I growl, raise my hands
as you hide. We climb down cliffs:
lava still hot. You leave me steaming.
As girls we rode Mexican buses.
Chickens, and thick scented
men who leaned across the aisle
to touch us. They peed down dark
alleys between the seats. We were
fourteen, full of tequila before
we arrived. Tampico: wild beaches
and trucks. Mangos, drownings
and song.
Handholds appear in the cliff.
Into these dreams, I empty.
Those dangerous days ripple,
like old skin.
Steve Klepetar
No Fire
"there is no fire, there is no room..."
Jorie Graham
Some days there are gulls,
who remind you of all the hungry dead.
There is no fire,
no room, only sea sounds and wind.
You have looked citizens in the eye,
wept to see them so mad and strange.
You eat dinner alone, watching the news
or reading a novel on your phone.
Strange how good the food tastes,
the fish or eggs or beans.
In your hands, nothing but the dry skin
of winter, the lifeline flowing down your palm.
F. John Sharp
Three Minutes At a Stop Light
On your right is a cemetery. In a small clearing, past a low stone wall, sunlight glints off a polished child-sized casket, which is surrounded by a half dozen flower arrangements and a collection of mourners. Some wipe their eyes; some stand quietly. One woman sobs. A black-dressed pastor speaks but you cannot hear, even with the windows rolled down. Stretching far into the distance, an eclectic array of headstones radiates from this sorrowful epicenter, as if all deaths before now have been preparing for this. Your heart aches at the sight.
You hear giggling and you pull your gaze away from the proceedings. On your left is a playground, where three preschoolers, fueled by sunlight and a warm breeze, are engaged in the work of children. The mother looks on from behind dark glasses. There is a fence for safety, and she relaxes with a book.
Your first instinct is to want to shush the kids on the left, to make them play quietly out of respect for the gatherers on the right. But you watch and listen, and the instinct dissolves into a smile. You close your eyes and can almost feel the dichotomy pulling at you in equal directions. It’s like you couldn't drive away no matter how hard you pressed the gas.
You open your eyes just in time to see a bushy-haired boy scamper over the gate, then dart for the road. A car from the other direction slams on its brakes and the mom drops her book with a shout. The boy runs in front of your car, across the grass, over the stone wall, then stops at the canopy. He looks at the casket, reaches out, touches it, grabbing one of the handles to pull himself closer. The pastor stops talking, and the sobbing woman bends over and scoops up the boy.
The mom races to the cemetery, screaming the boy’s name. She barges into the gathering and takes her son into her arms, crying and kissing him on his confused face. She apologizes several times and thanks the sobbing woman, who has not let go of the boy's hand. Finally the mom pulls away, then carries him back toward the playground, rocking him gently.
The light’s about to change, and your part in all this is nearly over. Your heart rate and respiration will return to normal and soon you will move on. In a few blocks you will remind yourself to pick up bread and a box of cereal. At dinner you will tell the story, but you are not capable of the eloquence necessary to make your listeners feel like you felt. You will exaggerate in places, but the listeners will have expected a better ending. You will chew slowly and try to decide if there is any such thing.
Wendy Carlisle
Birding
When I go out to say good morning
to the woods, I take my new Merlin
bird identifying app. It’s funny about that.
I’ve lived here with the Carolina wrens
who are not-from-around-here and
the red-winged Blackbirds’ song
and the dark-eyed junco
whose name sounds like Flamenco
and the tufted titmouse, a bird I thought
only existed in children’s lit
and the only cries I recognized
were the skwak of the American crow
and the dragged-metal sound of the vulture.
John Grey
Where Bats Fit into the Relationship
At dusk, bats fly out of their cave and over my head.
So here are my choices.
Dusk is when sun paints the mountains mauve
or when ugly winged things begin their feasting.
It's the blood red of the horizon
or the ruptured flesh of fig.
It's that last wisp of warm on my face
or the thought of tiny sharp teeth
piercing my throat.
"What was that?" you ask me,
as the flap of moving black
distracts you from the gorgeous colors.
So here are my choices.
I either tell you it was nothing
or I explain what nothing is.
Annie Stenzel
To the lilies in a strange-shaped vase
I think I’ll let you go today
before your beauty
changes to decay and your petals
into ghosts of their quick glory.
Some people are opposed to flowers
cut and sold, doomed to languish
indoors for a fraction of the lives they’d lead
connected to the ground or tree.
Forgive me. There are times I need
to be force-fed this lesson in mortality.
Say what you will, these lilies
had a job to do, and did it well.
J.I. Kleinberg
Jordan Smith
And What of You
And what of you, my friend, met by accident on this bench
In this needle-strewn park after so long?
If we have thought of each other at all,
Did we swallow hard at the taste of a bottle too long unopened?
Why turn away, preoccupied,
Lost, like this century, in its own strange business?
Let us spare each other the stories we might have imagined.
Tell me what I haven’t the heart to hear:
Not the scars in your leather jacket, but the day you found it.
I will trade you the two pennies from my scuffed oxblood shoes.
Mark Cunningham
[future words]
__________. 1. reflection of light on a window or other transparent
surface that prevents you from seeing what is on the other side. 2. a
component in an electronic circuit that is introduced to provide a
specific delay in transmitting the signal. 3. to consider zero a
number.
__________. 1. a word you do not know how to spell, but whose spelling you can approximate enough to find in a dictionary. 2. the grayish marginal portion of a sunspot.
__________. 1. tenuous but at times brilliant clouds observed during
the midnight hours of the summer months in latitudes higher than 50°.
2. a long ocean swell that rises almost to breaking as it passes over
shoals. 3. to dream of being in a musical.
Meg Pokrass
The Settling of Crows
Flocks of crows settle in the bare trees. At home, with Jeopardy on, Sam struts his superior brain around the condo. Ravens are bulky, crows are sleek. Sam calls me “Birdie," unplucks me. Men have shorter life spans than women, most of the time. Sam slops toothpaste on the sink and dots the bathroom with pee, spots of one kind or another, and in this way I am sure he is marking.
Sometimes we walk in Golden Gate Park, eating donuts and fighting about my weight. The park never closes, you can walk inside it day and night. Sometimes I spot the tail of a coyote running across the road. Sam loves donuts and snorts when he chews them. He lives for 2 things: 1. Worrying about my weight, and 2. Eating so many donuts in one sitting he’ll probably drop dead.
Bird scientists say that crows can recognise a face and hold a grudge. My mother told me my father died of heart failure when I was a baby, but she lied. I google my father's name and he is the owner of a small donut franchise in Palm Desert. Back then, there were other fathers who lined up like crows to watch out for me.
Mark Danowsky
Cold Light
sleeping without sleeping
I wake unrested
I hear, I swear
a low wall of sound
an oboe, flute, organ—
ambient tones
I listen, I watch
devils in the ceiling
laugh & laugh
at my bleary-eyed plight
Clare Rolens
Fixed
Her eyes gave me a start when I saw them staring at me from under the clear surface of the water. There she lay, the girl who ran away from home so long ago, drowned in a shallow stream. I saw the story in the news, but I never thought I'd see the poor girl with my own eyes.
Though still and lifeless she is perfectly preserved, looking as she did then. I stand with my feet in the same cool water that rushes over her; she looks a little like me, I think, back before it all happened, back when I still had the clean lines of a young woman. But her eyes, those look more like my eyes now—staring out without wandering, unaffected by what passes before them. An old sight has fixed her gaze thus, and that old sight is all she sees.
I wait for her to acknowledge me, to say hello, as if to a friend. She wouldn't have to stir or sit up, she could just fix her eyes on me, and I'd know the greeting. But then I remember she died long ago, that it's silly to think of a dead woman looking at a live one. Ghosts aren't real, and besides, she's the opposite of a ghost: body left over, spirit dissolved and rushed out to sea.
Tom Fugalli
Eternal Flame
Heaven’s gates are not guarded
By intoxicated harpsichordists
So there’s no chance
We’ll charm ourselves in.
They make a kind of music,
These wings plucked of hope,
Which beat against the bars
As we slide downward.
Now’s a good time to ask your name
Since we haven’t had the pleasure—
Your face is familiar.
We swore we’d never tell a soul.
Who knew it’d last forever,
That moment we stole.
Dale Wisely
Heroin
You are four years old,
cold and wet, shivering,
scared, hungry.
Your mother brings you in
and wraps you in a towel,
warm and fresh from the dryer.
She takes you on her lap and
rocks and sings to you.
You lift your head from her
chest, just for a moment,
to see her smile.
You sink and sleep and
your breathing slows
and soon you no longer
need to breathe.
Mike James (d. 2023)
Ingmar Bergman Contemplates Silence on a Beach
This is not a swimmer’s beach. The water is cold year-round, as if cursed by a witch. No matter how many years of waves come ashore, the rocks don’t wear to smoothness. Each is a flint knife, water-sharpened. Hard shoes are needed. There are summer days when the water looks like polished candy. That’s what an uncle called hard blue candies he pulled from his pockets. The snow was always falling on those days. It covered boats and docks and streets which led to them. Snow fell at night and the next day and then even another.
Contributors
F. J. Bergmann fantasizes about tragedies on or near exoplanets. Her poems and stories appear in various places on the planet and in the air of time. Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press just published her latest chapbook, The Book of Burning. She thinks imagination can compensate for anything. She has been eagle-eyeing the heck out of Right Hand Pointing as our copy editor since the early 1970s.
Eric Burke writes poems and programs computers in Columbus, Ohio. Links to more of his work can be found on his blog at https://anomalocrinus.blogspot.com. Eric co-edits first frost.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Tab, Rattle, and elsewhere. Find her at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com.
Tina Carlson is the author of four poetry collections. The most recent are: A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery (UNM Press 2023) and Obsidian (Dancing Girl Press, 2024). She is one of the editors of Unbroken and is learning to write lyric essays.
Ken Chau is a poet living in Melbourne, Australia. His collections are Possible Lyrics for Chinese and Western Pop Songs (Bendigo Publishing, 2015) and 15 More Chinese Silences (Blank Rune Press, 2020). He is the chief editor of our journal Unbroken and an editor of our other unjournal Unlost.
Mark Cunningham is now offering his books on Lulu. So far, sort/quantum; morfact; bl(A)nk; Constelldriftongue; and Dented Breeze have appeared with the books already on Lulu, including Scissors and Starfish from Right Hand Pointing. The Future Words pieces are collected in a book titled Future Words published by if p then q, available through Lulu or as a free download from the publisher.
Mark Danowsky is editor-in-chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. His short poetry collections include Meatless (Plan B Press), Violet Flame (tiny wren lit), JAWN (Moonstone Press), and As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press).
Katherine DiBella Seluja is a poet and a micro fiction writer. Her most recent book is Point of Entry from UNM Press. She is an editor at Unbroken.
Tom Fugalli is the author of a chapbook of prose poems, The Mind-Body Problem (White Knuckle Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Prime Number Magazine, Voicemail Poems, The Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the online journals Unbroken and Unlost, and lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Howie Good believes he was in the first ever issue of Right Hand Pointing. His latest poetry collection is The Dark, available from Berlin-based publisher Sacred Parasite. (Editor's note: Howie was not in the first issue. He first appeared in issue 8. But if he needs to go around saying he was in issue 1, Dale is not going to stop him, because no poet has appeared in more issues of Right Hand Pointing than Howie. And we love him.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots
Laura M Kaminski, an editor emeritus at Right Hand Pointing, has a set of hourglasses that measure time in increments of one minute to one hour. She actually uses them.
Mike James was a widely published poet and the poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His Portable Light: Poems 1990-2021 was published by Red Hawk Press. He was an editor for Unbroken and Unlost. We loved being friends and colleagues with him. Mike died in 2023 and we miss him.
J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Chapbooks of her visual poems how to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023; she needs the river (Poem Atlas) was published in 2024.
Bill McCloud is the poetry reviewer for Vietnam Veterans of America. His poetry book The Smell of the Light: Vietnam, 1968-1969 published in 2017 by Balkan Press, reached #1 on The Oklahoman’s “Oklahoma Bestsellers” list. In 2023 he won three poetry contests with three different poems.
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley, and works as a librarian at UC Merced. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals. She co-edits One Sentence Poems and first frost.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Lunch Ticket, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 45 books of fiction and poetry. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.
Allan Peterson’s most recent books are Life At All (Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press) and This Luminous, New & Selected Poems (Panhandler Books). He lives and writes in Ashland, Oregon. See more at his website: www.allanpeterson.net
Meg Pokrass is the author of nine collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of flash including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary journals including Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, Split Lip, storySouth, and Passages North. Her new collection The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories by is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in late 2024.
Clare Rolens is an English Professor at Palomar College and a faculty advisor for Bravura, Palomar's literary journal. Her writing has appeared in Cornice Magazine, Vestal Review, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, and Bright Flash Literary Review. Clare is an editor at our journal One Sentence Poems. She lives in San Diego.
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Boston. He is the author of five collections of poetry and flash fiction: Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain., Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. WordInEdgeWise is forthcoming. He has periodically published poems in Right Hand Pointing since 2010. His website is www.bradrosepoetry.com
F. John Sharp lives and works in Northeast Ohio. He has been associated with Right Hand Pointing for nearly the entirety of its existence, and is proud of the quality of work they've published. He thanks everyone who has contributed. His fiction and poetry can be found at FJohnSharp.com.
Katherine Schmidt’s poetry is published in Roi Fainéant Press, Icebreakers Lit, JAKE, Unbroken, and elsewhere. She is a co-founder and EIC of Spark to Flame Journal. Twitter: @ktontwitr
Larry D. Thomas, the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, has published twenty-three print collections of poems and numerous chapbooks, both print and online. Several of his online chaps have been published by Right Hand Pointing. His awards for his work include the 2023 Spur Award from Western Writers of America.
Jordan Smith is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Little Black Train from Three Mile Harbor Press, and four chapbooks (including Cold Night, Long Dog and The Flute is Zero from Ambidextrous Bloodhound/Right Hand Pointing). He teaches at Union College.
Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second collection, Don’t misplace the moon, has just been published by Kelsay Books. Her poems have appeared in Atlas and Alice, Chestnut Review, Kestrel, Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Saranac Review, SWWIM, The Lake, and UCity Review, among others. Annie is an editor for Right Hand Pointing. She lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.
Lynn Strongin is an American poet currently residing in Canada who has published more than two dozen books. Lynn's new book of poems, Kiosk, is just published in England.
Dale Wisely is the dental insurance coordinator for Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, a publishing concern that is located in a murky zone between reality and his imagination, which is also where the dental insurance exists.
Natalie Wolf (https://nwolfmeep.wixsite.com/nmwolf) is a writer from the Kansas City area. She is an editor for Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press and a former co-editor and co-founder of Spark to Flame Journal. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Popshot Quarterly, I-70 Review, JAKE, and more.