Issue 220

Robert L. Giron
7 hours ago
7 min read

This issue features

Art by

Mario Loprete, and

Photography by

Poetry by

Review by

Michael Blaine

Tether

He remembers the automatic way

her small hand once found his—

a quiet tether as they crossed parking lots

and stepped into the bright echo of stores,

until the day

she slipped her fingers free

not roughly,

just a shift, a choice,

a new balance she was learning to trust.

He thinks of fledglings

perched on the lip of the nest,

how the first drop must feel

like falling through the whole sky,

how the world waits below

wide and uncertain,

offering no promises.

And he stands there,

his hand suddenly empty,

hoping her path will be

all soft landings,

knowing he cannot make it so,

so he exhales,

breathes in the quiet belief

that she will find her wings

before the ground arrives.

Matt Byun

Conversation

About the Artist

Matt Byun is a high school student and an aspiring artist who enjoys experimenting with different styles and techniques. His art is inspired by everyday experiences, emotions, and his love of problem-solving. When he’s not in the art studio, Matt can be found strategizing over a chessboard or practicing with his wrestling team.

Diagnosis

The words arrive in

the flat tone of a report,

clinical, trimmed of comfort—

just a name for a thing removed,

nothing more.

You search for the word benign,

as if its absence could tilt the world,

as if reassurance must be spelled out

to be real.

But medicine speaks in its own dialect:

danger is named loudly,

boldly, unmistakable—

and its silence

is its own kind of mercy.

So the paper simply says polyp,

a small piece of tissue

someone once worried over,

now identified, understood,

done.

And there is a moment,

quiet as the breath after fear,

when you realize

that sometimes

good news is written

in what doesn’t need to be said.

About the Author

Michael Blaine’s chapbook, Murmur (Bay Oak Publishing), was the winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. His second chapbook, Brackish Water, was published by Broadkill Publishing. He is a Delaware Fellowship of the Arts recipient in the field of poetry. He grew up on the Delmarva Peninsula and earned English degrees from Ole Miss and Salisbury University. He taught English at a public high school for over twenty years and currently teaches English at Delaware Technical Community College.

Mario Loprete

Feet on Tightrope

About the Artist

Mario Loprete of Catanzaro, Italy has shown his work throughout Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome, Torino, etc.), in galleries in Holland, Greece, Spain, Germany, and the UK as well as in the USA (Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, New York). He states: “For my Concrete Sculptures I use my personal clothing. Throughout the artistical process, I use plaster, resin and cement to transform the clothing into artwork to display. My memory, my DNA, my memories remain concreted inside, transforming the person who looks at the artwork as a type of post-modern archeologist that studies my work as if the items were urban artefacts. In the past few years, I have freed myself from all of the work relationships with galleries that I collaborated with. I think that my work has reached the maturity to be coveted and to be presented outside of an important gallery and I would like to use this venue to make it be known to others who might see my work.” Please visit: www.marioloprete.com

Henry L. Gulacy

Blue Belly

Oh, little old man,

Sprawled out like a lizard

Atop the blue boiler

Holding onto life,

With a knife between your teeth

Looking down through a hole,

‘Come down!’ they yell up,

But your legs are too short

To reach the ladder,

So you keep looking

Down through the hole,

At your life’s mistakes

About the Author

Outside of writing poetry, Henry L. Gulacy focuses his time on creating fiction, studying film and drawing portraits. He lives near Portland, Oregon where he was born and raised.

Marianne Szlyk

Your Visit Before I Travel North

Once a friend told me the dead visit us

as cardinals on branches, on fresh snow,

in flight. I think this bird I see is you.

Short, stout, red as your old car, your parka,

he stands on a cypress branch. He glances in,

flies off as I pack for your funeral.

So many birds visit me. Their loud songs

at dawn shatter the air like falling ice.

I know so many dead. It’s one of them,

not you. It’s only a bird. You are gone.

You’re just ashes underground. Not that I’m

the one you’d visit this too bright morning.

Still I wish that this bird could be you.

Haeun (Regina) Kim

The Heart

About the Artist

Haeun (Regina) Kim is a student artist from Seoul, South Korea. Her work has been recognized by Bennington College, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, River of Words, and other organizations. Her artwork explores observation, memory, and personal experience through visual form. In addition to creating art, she serves as the founder of MISO-JIEUM and is involved in youth literary and creative communities. When not working in the studio, she can be found reading, observing the natural world, or struggling through amateur ballet.

Tree of Heaven

after Tree of Heaven / el alinto by Jeremy Ferris and Heather McMordie

Once this tree was small, one sprout

in stony ground. Once it was

the only tree that grew on Green

Street after the elms had died, yards

turned to blacktop. This plucky tree,

like a steeple, stretched to Heaven.

Once this tree was legal. It shaded

street, alley, and back porch.

They say it smelled of rotting fruit,

of too-hot summers, of unwashed

men in undershirts, their women

smoking Pall Malls while hanging clothes.

Once planting this tree was banned,

I walked past the cemetery,

its naked hillside a place where

black locust and trees of heaven

have died, a place where we cannot

afford to plant trees anymore.

After The Morning She Decides to Stay, 2019

Alicia forgets that she and David once walked past Rock Creek.

That time, her first and only hike with him before this one, she

didn’t stop. Not even to glimpse the water, to look for tiny fish

or beavers in the floating branches. She walked so quickly,

almost forgot to breathe while David, a very tall man with long legs,

glided ahead. Now they are hiking in Oregon, along the dirt path

through the woods past the azaleas as colorful as the clothes she once

loved to wear. Perhaps this time she’ll stop, write, drawn to the moss

that clings to knobby tree trunks and stone. The moss that hangs from

thick limbs above her head. The strange trees above her, behind

ferns as tall as she is. The nameless, perhaps poisonous berries beside her.

Later she’ll read about them online as she tries to remember what to write about her breathless walk. For now she half-walks, half-runs to keep up with her David.

She fears being lost, losing herself the way she did in Rock Creek Park.

The way she has always done with each man she has loved.

About the Author

Marianne Szlyk is a faculty member at Montgomery College. Her most recent book is Why We Never Visited the Elms (Poetry Pacific, 2022). Her poems have appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Verse-Virtual, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Breakfast, One Art, and Scurfpea Press’ anthologies Green Elephant and Dream among others. Her stories have appeared in Impspired and Mad Swirl.

David Calvert

Henry Moore’s Large Reclining Figure Sculpture in the Early Morning Sunlight, UK Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, UK, March 2021

Review by Robert L. Giron of Paula Goldman’s Late Flowering (Finishing Line Press, 2026)

Paula Goldman opens her collection Late Flowering with the poem “Witness,” reflecting upon Henry Moore’s sculpture.

Their hollowed eyes stare

At emptiness

…

They rise from the earth

like witnesses

to a life we once lived.

I hold onto them

In my dreams. At daybreak,

I walk with them.

With this poem leading into the folds of memory and art in which Goldman reflects back at the viewer, we quickly ascertain that this intimate collection of emotions, memories and dreams is a canvas anyone can identify with in their lives.

The careful interpretations of artistic works by Paul Klee set in poetic clay (“Hot-Blooded Girl”), we sense the wants and desires of youth.

In the poem “Miami Visit,” a native of Atlantic City, Goldman recalls and longs for the past.

…

where is my Atlantic City

steadily sinking

with my childhood’s

castle turreted hotels

…

Who amongst us has not reminisced about our past, both wanting to recapture its vibrant qualities while at the same time wanting to live in the present as happily as one can?

“Cordelia’s Apology” invokes the emotions of sibling rivalries, natural, of course, yet these feelings stay with us like thumb tacks stuck in the souls of our feet. Duality echoes in Goldman’s poems of the love and numerous emotions that interfere with love of others, be they siblings, spouses, friends, or colleagues. In these poetically painted snapshots of the past, the present helps us better understand ourselves even more than we think we know ourselves, as often the natural tendency is to forget or ignore the emotional tug we feel amongst family friends or colleagues. Yet if one opens oneself up to the clarity that is needed to understand, we grow and with time relationships flourish like the late flowering of a summer daisy proudly displaying its beauty and joyful essence.

Goldman in Late Flowering provides a means to better understand ourselves through art and her interpretation of real life and artistic strokes are meant to convey meaning and deep philosophical pearls of wisdom. All we need to do is read, reflect, and allow the poetic truth to enter our psyche. This is what makes art and literature restorative therapy.

About the Reviewer

Robert L. Giron, founder of Gival Press, the Editor-in-Chief of ArLiJo, and an associate editor for Potomac Review, recently released Songs for the Spirit / Canciones para el Espíritu. His work has appeared in national and international journals and is the author / editor of several books/anthologies of poetry and nonfiction.