Issue 221

Robert L. Giron
May 1
20 min read

This issue features

Art/Photography by

Dylan Hong

Jinwoo Brian Park,

Seoyun Park, and

Edward Michael Supranowicz

Poetry by

Tori Grant Welhouse, and

Lynn White

Fiction by

DC Diamondopolous, and

Trevor Conway

Neil Carpathios

My Dead Father Gives Me Advice

Because you know you must die, you should do more of this and less of that.

More singing off-key, not caring. Less celery nibbling. More looking out of windows.

Less looking at TV. More deep kissing. Less praying. More floating naked in water.

Less number crunching. More picnics. Less cutting up a life into pieces using clocks.

More writing love poems to your wrinkles. Less turning up the volume.

More channeling the insect that lives but a single minute. Less wondering what it all means.

More having a quiet heart and taking part in all the dances. Less pondering where I am.

More pondering where you are. More doodling. Less erasing. More of this, less of that.

About the Author

Neil Carpathios is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently, Lifeaholics Anonymous (Kelsay Books, 2023). His book of original aphorisms, The Lost Fragments of Heraclitus (Wipf and Stock), was also released in 2023. His work has appeared in publications such as Poetry, The Georgia Review, Southern Review, The Sun, and many others. Currently, he teaches creative writing and poetry at University of Mount Union in Ohio.

Alan Cohen

Fleecing Sleep

I cut my night

Into tranches

And try to sell them off

To sleep

An hour here

Two hours there

At a discount

Sleep takes no interest

Hedges

Wants more derivatives

Wants options

On all my nights

For the next

Ten years

I hesitate

Dither

Wake up

Leave sleep leveraged

Frantic

And furious

For once counting

My ill-got hoard

Not sheep

Not yet worried

About tomorrow

About the Author

Alan Cohen retired after a rewarding career in medicine; and turned his attention to writing and publication. His poetry has appeared in nearly 100 venues; he has had letters to the editor in Poetry magazine and the New Yorker; and has published medical articles and essays concerning current affairs. Easy in Harness: A Productive Approach to Hiring a Good Manager was published in 2023 and Taxonomic Vignettes, a book of poetry, in 2024, and Inferno, a novel in 2025. All three had highly positive feedback from reviewers and readers. And he has nearly completed Hijacked, a new nonfiction work, about how to revive equality, democracy, and freedom.

Dylan Hong

Bond

About the Artist

Dylan Hong is a 15-year-old student from Seoul who attends an international school. In addition to his passion for art, he enjoys swimming, sailing, coding, and playing video games. His work often reflects his diverse interests and the vibrant energy of youth.

Louis Faber

Blessing

For years I practiced law and that led

some people to suggest that was proof

that I lacked a soul for that must have

been the price of admission to the bar.

I never argued with them although

in a passing moment I wondered if

I might sue them for defamation but then

I’d have to prove I had a soul, no easy task.

But I reveled in the irony when those

same people would respond to my sneezing

by saying “bless you,” not realizing they

were not only saying I had a soul but

they were keeping it from leaving my body.

About the Author

Louis Faber’s work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Cantos, The Poet (U.K.), Alchemy Spoon (U.K), Dreich (Scotland), Prosetrics, Passager, Atlanta Review, Glimpse, Rattle, Pearl, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among others, and was twice nominated for both The Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Lynn Gilbert

The One Good Thing

A heavy nausea has settled in my midsection

since I got the call today that he’s gone,

he’s not coming back.

I can visualize him, of old, waving his arms

to Mahler’s Second, or wagging his head

to Rodiguez’ Concierto de Aranjuez.

Only a few days ago I spoke with him.

He was slow in answering; I could picture

him groping for his phone among the bedclothes.

I didn’t say who I was, nor did he:

we knew each other’s voices from of old—

his lightly bantering, mine high and tense.

Should I have gone to see him again

there at the last? Would it have

done him any good? or anyone else?

Would I have felt, besides pity,

mostly a guilty triumph

at his crumpled and shrunken body,

his mental mix-ups? at the likelihood

I would soon outlive him?

Near the end of our years together

that was all I looked forward to.

Life with him felt like sibling rivalry,

or a job where I was seriously

underemployed. Clearly it was time

to get out before I strangled him

or pushed him off a tall ladder.

The only good thing we did was

to surprise ourselves by producing

a child who is the best of us both,

as I think he’d have agreed. All I regret

is, while he still had some days left

I didn’t go see him

and ask him.

About the Author

Lynn D. Gilbert's poems, twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, have appeared in such journals as After Happy Hour Review, Arboreal, Blue Unicorn, carte blanche, Consequence, The MacGuffin, and Sheepshead Review. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in an Austin suburb and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.

Susan L. Pollet

Boxes

What promise lies in a box

Objects chosen with care

A lock of hair, brooch,

photograph, love letter

The objects which made

her feel better

In her grief she made

many hand painted boxes,

with paint or decoupage,

to give to others, all with

a different color, hoping

that they would fill them

with evidence that they

had lived and loved with

heart and beauty, curated

with their essences

Seoyun Park

Bound

About the Artist

Seoyun Park is a high school student and emerging artist. Passionate about visual storytelling, she works to create evocative and thought-provoking pieces. She is currently putting together her portfolio for university.

Susan L. Pollet

Trauma Bonding

In a lawyer’s office or a courtroom,

surrounded by those who would

help, the survivor of domestic violence

withdraws her petition, and returns to

the accused, again and again, maybe

eleven times before she finally leaves,

or never does, as all turn their eyes to

the mental health professionals who

try to explain trauma bonding and

why this happens to so many who

endure unspeakable abuse

“Why not leave,” many think, until

they understand trauma bonding and

see it is not an excuse for what many

cannot understand, but something

which is in human nature just as a tree

has sap, roots, a trunk and crown

About the Author

Susan L. Pollet is a published author of books in multiple genres and a fine artist who is a member of the Arts Student’s League in New York City. Her poetry and art have been published in multiple literary publications and in on-line shows.

Emmie Randall

What Peace?

Regimes fallen, despots tumbled

What is left when all has crumbled?

A people in despair, left under the rubble

Desperate, disregarded, for all their troubles

Their children slaughtered for the world to see

Pain on display as their spirits flee

Victims of men playing God oceans away

For peace they do not pray

Civilians and soldiers, set into danger

Sacrificed for a war incited by a stranger

All calls for peace for the many called to naught

For the actions of a few, devastation has been brought

About the Author

Emmie Randall is a poet from the beautiful American Pacific Northwest. Her work can be found in Down in the Dirt Magazine and in Dissident Voice.

Michael Theroux

Awash

Come teach me colours with your soft touch

in broad swaths wash fears away

Fears lock the light up in dark places

pull back the dawn pour on afterglow

So much to know

I’ve held so close wrapped in my skin

bent about these bones clamped between teeth

Your fingers pry my life loose to let me spill free

awash in your colours come teach me

About the Author

Michael Theroux entered the literary publication field in his seventh decade. His career has spanned field botanist, environmental health specialist, green energy developer and resource recovery web site editor. He is shifting from decades of publishing scientific and technical environmental works, to placing a cache of creative writing - much more satisfying! He has had 98 poems, stories and sketches published in the past three years in Cerasus, City Key, Wild Word, Ariel Chart, CafeLit, Midsummer Dreamhouse, and elsewhere.

Tori Grant Welhouse

Fall

Irritation scurries from your throat in an accident of sound. You forget

your daughter's ski jacket at the hotel with the lift and lesson ticket

wired to her front pink pocket. You are two adults, three children.

You are a chaos of five bodies on a hurried morning, you too busy

with your memory picture, commenting on the green fur of the foot hills

in the pass it takes two hours to traverse. He grips the steering wheel,

the car’s silence a grim metronome on the two-way trip. The lesson has started.

If the day starts off kilter, is there any way to save it? The Austrian instructor

meets us at the Over and Out and ascends the three-man with our daughter

and another charge. Our teens barge onto an express lift and disappear

on the mountain. He entertains his own memory tableau— two syncopated skiers,

skiing figure-eights—but crowds the distance, clipping your ski.

The tilt of the day shortchanges the gravity. You avalanche in a fall,

taking all his weight. Face-down in the snow, you calculate the costs incurred.

About the Author

Tori Grant Welhouse is a Midwest poet. Her newest poetry chapbook is Padding Loamy

on a Brew of Earth from Bottlecap Press. She has been most recently published in RockPaperPoem and nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Visit: www.torigrantwelhouse.com.

Lynn White

Holding Back the Tide

Once I really believed

that there was an honest motive

that can break down barriers.

Now

I see things differently.

I see

no honest motive

only the graft

of barrier building,

only the graft

and dishonest motives

of barrier builders,

not breakers,

wave after wave of them

drowning out honesty

holding

back it’s tide

and staying

vainglorious

even

as the breakers

roll in,

staying

vainglorious

even as

their barriers

are challenged

and ready to collapse,

the breakers

on a roll

now

crash in

to wash away their lies.

About the Author

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award.

Jinwoo Brian Park

See

About the Artist

Jinwoo Brian Park is a student attending high school in Massachusetts with a passion for visual arts. Brian's art portfolio encompasses a range of mediums and styles, reflecting his diverse interests and inspirations. Outside of his artistic pursuits, he enjoys exploring nature, reading, and spending time with friends and family. He is excited about the possibility of sharing his artwork with a wider audience and looks forward to continuing to grow as an artist.

DC Diamondopolous

1932

Pa decided to join the Bonus Expeditionary Force. After dropping Ma and the youngsters off at Uncle Vernon’s, he let me ride the rails with him from our home in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, all the way to the Washington Freight Yard.

Pa and thousands of other veterans were demanding their bonus pay—the money they could have earned if they hadn’t gone off to fight for their country in the Great War. No man wanted to wait until 1945 to get paid, not while his family was starving. That’s why we came to Anacostia Flats, a swampy, muddy area along the Anacostia River across from the Capitol where we could see the dome. Ankle-deep in mud, Pa and I built our shanty along with forty-three thousand, counting wives and children—the biggest Hooverville ever, named after the president who no one seemed to like.

When the bank people came to take our farm, Pa rushed out of the house with a shotgun and fired over their heads, scaring me and Joey. Ma cried. The twins howled and clung to her flour-sack dress. Pa cursed the politicians, said they were just bumping gums when it came to veterans’ bonus pay.

We made our shack out of materials from the nearby dump site—old lumber, packing boxes, and scrap tin. Pa and I worked shoulder to shoulder. He started calling me Tom instead of Tommy.

Other veterans were scattered around Washington in deserted billets, but Camp Marks was the heartland. We built a real city with streets, latrines, a barber shop, a lending library where I spent most of my time, and a boxing ring, where Pa liked to spar.

For breakfast and dinner, everyone ate a stew made of potatoes, onions, and hotdogs. We lived on Pennsylvania Road, a place I called home.

Next door was a colored man from Harrisburg and his son Cornelius.

Pa said two things made a man equal—fighting for your country and taking care of your family—so it appeared, ‘cause everyone got along. Pa said the newspapers lied, wanting to cause trouble, saying the races couldn’t mix, and that communists were infiltrating the camp. How could that be when everyone had to show their service certificate?

One day, Pa and I walked to the top of the bluff where we looked over the entire encampment. From poles and shanties, hundreds of American flags rippled in the breeze, showing how much we loved our country.

That night we took our meal back to our shack. Pa gulped his down and said, “War makes rich men richer. Remember that, son, before you go off to be a pawn in a rich man’s game.” I didn’t eat much after that. Pa’s anger and bitterness filled my belly instead.

A few days after we settled in, we walked to the Capitol where the House of Representatives took a vote on the Bonus Bill. Pa and I wore white shirts and bib overalls, wool caps—hot for June, but that’s what we had, being farmers and all. Other men dressed in wrinkled suits and worn fedoras. The tall columns dwarfed the people on the steps. Veterans sang, “America,” the air itself charged with hope.

When the organizer, Mr. Waters, came out and said the House passed the bill, I never heard such whooping and hollering. Tears ran down Pa’s cheeks. Hats twirled in the air, cheering going on for near half an hour. We had money and could go home.

But when we headed back, Pa said, “Son, this is just one hurdle, the Senate has to pass the bill and that’ll be harder.”

“Why?”

“More Republicans in the Senate.”

What seemed whacky to me was how something so sensible, like paying people their due, had to be voted on in the first place.

That night sleep came in jerks.

Two days after the House passed the bill, we went to the Capitol for the Senate vote. Veterans held signs reading, No Pay We Stay, Give Us Our Bonus Or Give Us A Job.

Pa’s fists stretched the holes in the pockets of his overalls, his jaw working back and forth. I could feel him wanting to get into the ring while we waited. He took off his cap and looked to the heavens.

Pa’s bonus money went down in the Senate. He said it was like the crash of ‘29 all over again.

I was too old to take his hand, but I let him take mine.

“We’re staying on son, until justice is done.”

Some folks left. But many stayed, with more coming from out west to join in the protest.

Toward the end of July, Hoover demanded that all veterans go home, but most had no home to go to.

On July 28, thousands of us walked to the Capitol. Food was becoming scarce at Camp Marks, so everyone looked gaunt, but we were righteous in our cause, and that gave us strength.

Police walloped the protesters with their billyclubs. We broke through their line and ran. Gun shots fired. Women screamed. It turned into a riot, and then I saw the U.S. Army marching toward us.

There was infantry, soldiers on horseback, tanks. They were coming to rescue us. Overjoyed, I cheered along with Pa and everyone else. The army aimed their rifles. Sunlight glinted off the tips of their bayonets. But then—

. . . they were charging at us!

Bile roared in my stomach. They hurled gas grenades. People scattered.

I hacked, snot poured from my nose. I experienced Pa’s pain from being gassed in the war.

Veterans threw rocks at the army.

I shuddered, knowing my father could be killed by his own.

We ran toward the flats.

But what we were running to suddenly rose up in flames—the shanties, the library, all of Anacostia Flats.

Pa put his arm around my shoulder while we watched our city burn. I held back tears, wanting to be strong for my father.

About the Author

DC Diamondopolous is an award-winning short story, and flash fiction author with hundreds of stories published internationally in print, online magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. DC's stories have appeared in: Amazing Stories, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, Lunch Ticket, Broadkill Review, Zoetic Press, and others. DC has two published collections of short stories: Stepping Up and Captured Up Close (20th Century Short-Short Stories). She was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and three times for Best of the Net Anthology. She lives on the California coast with her wife and animals. Visit: dcdiamondopolous.com

Edward Michael Supranowicz

Cursing the Darkness

About the Artist

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Lithuanian / Russian / Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet who has had over 700 poems published and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times.

Trevor Conway

Valid Arguments

Yenn Sufiva has been described as “a formidable intellect”. During a career spanning forty years and eighteen books, she has reduced some interviewers to tears. Not so during the last decade, however, as she has shunned all public attention. I’ve repeatedly asked for an interview with the philosopher for more than a year, without any acknowledgement. But then, I receive a phone call at seven in the morning: “Meet me in Stephen’s Green, twenty minutes. Bring coffee.”

She sits on a bench, gazing straight ahead. A long, black dress sits loosely over her pale frame. She looks much different from the pictures in her books, with yellowish-white hair, as though her scalp once had a smoking habit. Her voice is croaky, sometimes tailing off into wispy breathlessness. Some conjecture surrounds Yenn’s illness: whether it’s AIDS or bowel cancer, whether she has weeks or months to live.

Of course, the subject Yenn has always been most unwilling to discuss is the matter of stabbing her second husband in the 1980s, and her subsequent jail term. This wouldn’t be an ideal opener, so I enquire about what first attracted her to philosophy. “Probably a book,” she answers, seeming bored at the question. “How does anybody dive headlong into anything?” I also want to get to the heart of her latest book, Where Words Fail. Her radical shift in focus has stirred debate, some seeing veiled support for fascist principles.

“So, your name?” she asks. It’s Daniel, I tell her. “Your family name – I know your first name.” Porter, I answer. “Like the drink,” she says. I’ve read of Yenn’s attempts to test her interviewers, to figure out whether they deserve her respect. I offer no reaction. Instead, I ask about the hurdles she’s faced throughout her life. “None,” she replies. What about jail? She denies this was an obstacle, rather “a form of education, but one we don’t need to talk about”.

How about personal obstacles? Does she suffer from writer’s block? Are there physical limitations that affect her work? Then, I refer to her famous temper. “Those aren’t obstacles, my boy. They’re flaws. They’re interior. Obstacles are exterior.” What are her biggest flaws, then? “So, we’re entering the business end of the conversation,” she smiles. “What’s the next question you’ve got on your little list?” I read it out verbatim: What does Yenn think of modern philosophy and its place in society?

“Ha! Philosophy has no value. I have even less time for its modern bastard. Modern philosophy is downright destructive.” And what about her own writing? She puts the cardboard cup to her lips. I tell her I sensed more of her true self in Where Words Fail, that it seemed much less guarded than her other books. “More of myself?” she scowls. “What does that mean? That means nothing. You have theories? Okay. So, what’s your theory? Some deep emotional scar?” She laughs. “Crikey! What’s next? Any adult questions?”

I ask if she has any fascist leanings. “God, you’re a robot! Wait, is that a bit harsh? No, I stand by it. I know you have more interesting questions that that,” she says. How would she describe the book herself, I ask? “I wouldn’t. It is what it is. And I think labels are for children. I expect adults to be able to distinguish between things for themselves.” I tell her there was no point in meeting me if she chooses not to answer my questions. Why are we even here, I ask? “We’re just talking. We both know the benefits for you, Danny Boy. You see yourself as top banana someday.” I’m ambitious, I admit. “Skulking, that’s the word I’d use.” She spits on the ground.

Neither of us speak for nearly a minute. I’m about to tell her I need to leave. I’m sure she senses it. Then, in a sleepy way, she says: “He survived, if only for a few years, okay? Cancer killed him, not me. Nobody can say I got off lightly, though plenty of fools did.” There must have been a reason for stabbing him, I say. “What age are you: twenty-four, twenty-five?” she asks. Twenty-three, I tell her. “Not much younger than I was when I got jail. I wrote this thing while I was inside, a self-pitying piece of drivel. No-one’s seen it. God, those bland days stuck inside your head, feeling your brain rot from the lack of exercise. And that whiney bitch I had in the cell next to me for the best part of a year.” Did she strike up any friendships inside? “Stop asking stupid questions,” she snaps.

It’s only then that I notice a thick wooden cane resting against the far end of the bench, capped with a silver skull. She starts into a story about how she came to own it, seeing it displayed, oddly, on a mantelpiece during a house party twenty years ago. She set a small fire in the bathroom, then took the cane while everyone was distracted. “You don’t believe me,” she remarks. I’m aware of Yenn’s reputation for playing games, particularly when dealing with journalists. “Ah, I don’t care what you believe,” she says. At this point, my Dictaphone dies.

Soon-to-be-working people stream through the park, handbags swinging by hips. I give up on the Dictaphone. At least my notepad won’t fail. She rambles vaguely for some time. I struggle to keep up, my bad handwriting resembling a battlefield strewn with disfigured bodies. I tell her to stop rambling. She seems to respect this, and the fact that I ask her to tell me about her second husband. “He thought too much of me,” she says. “Many husbands do, I guess. There were problems, though. There were always problems. You want to know why I did it? Would you believe me if–”

She cuts it short to fling her coffee cup at a passing cyclist, a suited man, about thirty. He skids to a halt. “You’re cycling too fast,” Yenn shouts, without even bothering to look towards him. “You’ll kill someone,” she says. “Unfortunately, it might not be yourself!” I apologise to the cyclist, explaining that Yenn is ill. A second later, I collapse to the ground after receiving a blow to my knee from Yenn’s cane. She croaks at me: “Never apologise. Especially not to idiots. They take it as a sign that they’re right.” The cyclist carries on, carefully threading through the crowd.

When I sit again, it’s clear the interview will end soon. Yenn appears restless, more interested in the reading woman wearing too much make-up or the fountain with a dozen spouts, its water like a huge, sci-fi spider. “You’re preoccupied with my last book,” she says. I tell her I’d like to know what it’s really about. She asks what I think it’s about. Her regrets, I say. When she asks me to elaborate, I say that she approaches the subject of love repeatedly, then draws back, as if there’s something too raw there. “You remind me too much of myself,” she smirks. “God, I can be an asshole. Get up – I want to sit in the shade.”

Yenn’s scowl is remarkable, an expression of utter contempt and frustration at having to endure some form of hardship, most likely another’s conversation. In this case, it’s my offer to help her walk that brings the scowl to her face. She steps along unsteadily with her cane. It seems an inappropriate time, but I ask her how she felt about her second husband’s death. She ignores the question until we sit, tattooed in the trees’ shadows. “I was numb at that stage of my life,” she tells me, almost out of breath. “I lost my father and my mother. I had no feelings left. I’d banished them all. Hearing about Gerald’s [her husband’s] death when I was in jail, though, that nearly killed me. I was like a faded photo that suddenly regained its colour. Oh, the pain of it! And all I could do was stare at a dirty, cracked wall all day.”

Why did she do it, I ask? She stares me straight in the eyes. I’m ready for a slap to the face. “Because he asked me to, okay? He actually stood there and told me to stab him. He’d been running a small thing with a few girls. They’d escort high-class clients who came in for business deals with Gerald’s company. And you do know what I mean by escort, don’t you? Our generations’ vocabularies still have some common ground?” I tell her I know what she means.

“Some guy got it into his head that Gerald stole one of his girls. The guy was a pimp, of course. They got into a fight. It escalated. Gerald beat the shit into him, smashed his face in. He knew he was dead. This was all in broad daylight, and Gerald knew that a few people passing by saw it. There were cameras nearby, too, so he figured there was no way he’d get away with it. He ran down the street to our apartment. He came in in such a panic, I didn’t know what was going on. He thought he’d make it look like the guy had a knife, so he took one from the drawer. He wanted it to look convincing, so he asked me to stab him.”

“The first few times, it barely broke the skin,” she says, her face noticeably paler now. “Gerald kept telling me to do it harder, and to hurry up. He had to get back and plant the knife. I didn’t mean to wound him so badly. The blood, though. You’d never believe how much could come from such a small wound. When he fainted, I thought it was the end. I had to call an ambulance. We couldn’t tell them what’d happened. Gerald would’ve lost everything. He would’ve gone to jail for the prostitutes and the murder. So, I told them we had an argument.”

Wasn’t he prosecuted for the murder anyway, I ask? “No. They couldn’t identify the attacker from the camera footage, and the witnesses were no use. Nobody made the connection between that and me stabbing Gerald. And why would they?” Yenn’s jail term was unnecessary, I observe. Her husband could have simply left the scene and got away with it. She nods. “With that kind of insight, you could be a lawyer,” she says. “So, yes, I have regrets, maybe more than most. Two marriages that ended badly. A bunch of books huddled together on dusty bookshelves. Of course I’d have regrets.”

She reaches for her cane again. I flinch. Then, I ask her to speculate on how she’ll be remembered, especially in relation to modern philosophy. She doesn’t answer, but I sense that she wonders if she’ll be remembered at all. Where to from here, I ask? “What else is there?” she says. “You’ll hear soon enough.” I ask what she means, but she simply says the interview has “served its purpose”. As she limps towards Grafton Street, I read over my notes. She raises her cane at a passing cyclist, shouts something I can’t hear.

Three days later, I’m crossing the street when I get the news. A couple are walking ahead of me, a pair of headphones shared between them. The guy asks the girl if she heard anything more about the suicide that took place near their house the day before. The girl says something, but I only catch the words “sixth floor” and “philosopher”. I know it’s Yenn, but I check the newspaper anyway. And there it is, barely half a column describing her death, with only a few words devoted to her remarkable life. I can only speculate whether it was her fear of the illness or her huge self-loathing that made her do it. For a woman supposedly so full of ego, I don’t think anyone can be sure whether she considered her life a towering success or whether she thought it amounted to anything at all.

About the Author

Trevor Conway, from Ireland, writes poetry, fiction, and songs. His short fiction has been published widely in the US, the UK, Ireland, India, and Australia. He has published three collections of poetry: Evidence of Freewheeling (Salmon Poetry, 2015), Breeding Monsters (2018), and No Small Thing (2023). He wrote a guide to writing poetry, aimed at child/young adult poets, titled Nurturing the creative Child: A Guide to Writing Poetry. He is currently revising a collection of short fiction.