Tributaries: "Loose Ends"

By Carla Sofia Ferreira

 

Left without argument,
merely to stand for a while by the river
once frozen and now free flowing, the evening
turns the sky in once more and out and again to dust and glimmer
and back to how each thing simply was.
 

The walk down staircases
becomes the walk towards the river,
not thinking—the grace of repetition— |
these are the ways in which I tie together loose ends.
Waiting for an answer without asking a question,
looking towards the curve of architecture above moving water. 

Carry me to the bridge.
Take me home.
It’s past the time of sitting on the empty bench. 

What closure I get from the evening
settling itself in the frost that embraces me without asking.
Everything becomes familiar: 

The stars they hang upon the city streets,
each tripping brick falling into one another,
even the train station greets me as though I cannot leave. 

Everywhere, I am looking for the answer to the question I do not ask.

Each time, I hear it:                       you can let go now.
Only I don’t listen and instead wait by rivers,
watching the evening and I measure

Carla Sofia Ferreira is a Portuguese-American poet from Newark, NJ currently teaching English language development to immigrant high schoolers in the Bay Area. As an undergrad at Harvard, she was selected to write a creative thesis in poetry, from which many poems about trees grew. Past and forthcoming work can be found in journals such as The Lascaux Review, Shot Glass Journal, and Awkward Mermaid.

Tributaries: "Forward"

Marian Rogers

 

A woman carries a doe forward. The woman is naked and smooth and stands erect. The doe’s coat appears smooth, but short strands of hair are visible on a closer look. The doe is limp in the woman’s hands, its legs hanging down, its head over the woman’s shoulder and tilted back in an unnatural manner. It is no longer alive. The woman doesn’t embrace the doe, nor does she carry it deliberately, though she could, with most of its weight flung over her shoulder. Instead, she holds it rigidly, its back against her belly, the doe facing outward, forward. Where the woman is going with the doe isn’t clear, or for what purpose. Only forward.

 

On my desk is a stone I have used as a paperweight for twenty-seven years. The stone is round and flat, its shape from above almost a perfect circle. It’s what some people call a moonstone. It feels smooth but isn’t polished, and in a certain light its color shifts from blue-gray to a darker gray. Its weight is surprising. It is heavy. When I pick the stone up, at first it seems to fit the palm of my hand, and then overwhelms it.

 

I found the stone on a beach near Lubec, Maine, in 1989. Lubec is the easternmost point in the continental United States, way downeast on the Maine coast, where the sun rises first. That summer day was pristine—windy and brisk, sunny and clear. All afternoon, my four-year-old daughter and I combed the sand, unusual at the Maine shore, collecting stones. When we returned home, we hauled our bag of beach loot inside, laid the stones out on the floor, and made small piles of the ones we liked, grouping them by shape, color, texture, size, feel. I selected the stones that I thought would look best in the garden I had planted in front of the house. My daughter had her own preferences and made her own choices. I think she especially liked the heart-shaped stones. But I confess my memory about that has faded, so much storm and stress followed. Two years later I left my husband and our log cabin on fifty acres in Maine to start a new life with our daughter in upstate New York.

 

What do we choose to carry forward into a new life? There are the obvious things that meet our needs: a few sticks of furniture, the everyday contents of cupboards and closets, favorite books off shelves, small items from drawers. Nestled in one of the many boxes that I packed for the move was the round, almost perfect stone I had found on the beach that day, now nearly thirty years ago. When I look at it on my desk, I see not a memento of a pristine place where the sun rises first, but something stolen from a place at the end of the world. I keep it as a reminder that I went there and somehow got back.

 

Marian Rogers is a freelance editor of scholarly nonfiction and holds a PhD in classics from Brown University. She has been a participant in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Literary Nonfiction, where she has written about place, the natural world, travel, myth, family, and identity. She lives in Ithaca, NY.

Tributaries, The New Nature: “On Monsoons”

By Oliver de la Paz


1. I said to him, “Look at the rainbow.”

2. We were walking and the road ran parallel to the light.

3. Because it was hot we knew about storms.

4. In my country, when it is stormy all the pots come out of the kitchens.

5. I let go of the fantasy that colors would appear if I squinted and looked at the sun.

6. Here there are no words for this—the double rainbow. The rain and the sun simultaneously.

7. Sometimes the fish would come to the road.

8. The children would gather them up in their shirts.

9. All day their bodies would glisten from scales.

10. I was taken by the mouths opening and closing for air.

11. Desperation is duplicable—we would hold our breaths and act like swimmers thrashing to breathe.

12. So many streams would have to be crossed.

13. Streams of this sort are impermeable.

14. Streams are metaphor.

15. I dreamt my son had walked the roads of my childhood holding an umbrella over his head.

16. Neither the sun nor rain could ever pierce it.

17. Water filling the pots along the alleyway in time to the rain beating on the cloth of the umbrella.

18. The petrichor, a sudden topic of conversation.

19. Many naked bathers beneath the eaves.

20. The rain snaking down their torsos.

21. We enter the vapor of the evaporating water.

22. We breeze through it, in a hurry.

23. Storms are a metaphor.

24. Children are metaphors.

25. There is a bright nimbus through the opacity of clouds.

26. I was watching the air between my child and my mouth filled with inscrutable waters.

27. The pots are musical because they are in unison.

28. Simultaneous clatter. The pots and the palpations of rain against an umbrella.

29. One day there were fish and the next they were taken back to the sea.

30. The light, which had been pursuing us all day amplified the pooled water.

31. Liquid on liquid became a coalescing theme.

32. And then we emerged.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada, and Post Subject: A Fable (U. of Akron Press 2014). He is the co-editor with Stacey Lynn Brown of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U. of Akron Press 2012). He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry and serves on the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Board of Trustees. A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

The New Nature: “Breadcrumbs”

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

“Come here,” I tell her.

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

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The New Nature: “Freeze and Thaw”

I met her in early January on a sidewalk in Missoula, Montana. It was only nine but it felt past midnight, the dark and cold thrumming along my skin, the stars dagger points suspended in the frozen air. A puff of air came from her mouth as she said her name and extended her mittened hand. I offered my own name puff and reached back. The snow crunched beneath our boots as we parted ways, hurrying to our vehicles.

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Tributaries: "Crossing Borders"

By Aileen Bassis

Walking on roads and rubble, gravel

and grass, pavement and black-top.

We know our past.

We don’t know what waits.

Grass and pavement, black-top

hillsides and grasslands, desert and dirt,

we don’t know what waits —

our lips are silent as we journey

through hillsides grasslands, desert and dirt,

through clutches of branches and bracken.

our lips are silenced in our journey.

Night runs a rough tongue

through a clutch of branches and bracken.

We enter a lap of rivers

running night’s rough tongue.

Remember, sweet — taste of milk.

Enter a lap of rivers

like cracked shells, words, thoughts tumble:

Remember. Taste sweet milk.

Pressed between riven rock, a sea breaks

like cracked shells our words, thoughts tumble

keening of roads, highways, fences split.

Pressed between rock and broken sea

we float. Tide-gripped waters

keen of roads, highways, fences ripped

and we fall into uneasy sleep,

and float in tide-gripped waters

to lie stranded on a shallow bank

where we fall into uneasy sleep,

drifting like oil’s black pour,

lying stranded on a shallow bank

and on we walk: roads and rubble,

gravel and grass.

Aileen Bassis is a visual artist in Jersey City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her art can be viewed at www.aileenbassis.com. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. Her poems have appeared in B o d y Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, Amoskeag, Stone Canoe, The Pinch Journal and others.

Tributaries, The New Nature: “Bus Stop”

By Donna Miscolta

It’s eight a.m. and I’m at the bus stop in my mostly white neighborhood in my mostly white city. I’m reading a book by a Latino novelist as I wait for the Rapid Ride that will carry me past dying motels and new mid-rise apartment blocks into downtown. I don’t look up as the bus stop crowd grows with the regulars. We’ve never spoken because that’s how we roll in this city. Surely, I’m familiar to them. Surely, I stand out. Or maybe, they “don’t see color.”

I’m used to it – the whiteness of this neighborhood, and my brownness in its whiteness. I’ve lived here over forty years after growing up in a mostly brown neighborhood. When I see another person of color on my streets, there’s a jolt of recognition and a simultaneous urge to suppress it, like maybe we’re not supposed to acknowledge each other too outwardly. Or maybe, I just don’t know the protocol.

I sense people behind me so I glance over my shoulder. I don’t make eye contact, but at some level, it registers that they are people of color and I give a mental thumbs-up that is visible to absolutely no one. I go back to reading about a millennial who leaves behind his Texas upbringing and Latino surname to make it in the New York fashion world of privilege, but soon there is pacing behind me and mutterings about “over your shoulder.” I should be paying more attention, but I keep reading about the protagonist struggling with identity and disillusionment. Something splashes the back of my legs and feet. It’s July and I’m wearing capris and sandals. I turn and see the puddle, foam dying at its edges, the smell of beer rising from the sidewalk. A can rolls hollowly on the ground. As her boyfriend studies his phone, a young woman looks at some imagined point of interest through black-framed glasses, not unlike mine.

“Why did you do that?” I say.

“Accident,” she says, smirking at her own bullshit.

“No,” I say, “why did you do that?” I step forward for an answer.

Suddenly she’s in my face. I watch up close the movement of her penciled brows, gold ringed- septum, bared teeth, and neck tattoo as she hisses, “Fucking bitch, you know what you did.”

It occurs to me that she could punch me in the face. Yet, I don’t lean away. I tell her I don’t know what I did – that she has to tell me. I stand there. We breathe each other’s air.

Finally, she spins away, still insisting that I fucking know what I did. I take a step again. “Look, if I offended you, it wasn’t intentional.”

She’s not having it. She paces back and forth, swearing under her breath. I wonder what to do next. I turn, see the white people at the bus stop, watching, waiting for the violence to happen.

Donna Miscolta is the author of the story collection Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories (Carolina Wren Press, 2016). Hola and Goodbye was selected by Randall Kenan for the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman. It also won an Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction and a silver medal in the International Latino Book Awards for Best Latino Focused Fiction. She is also the author of the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced (Signal 8 Press, 2011). She has stories forthcoming in Moss and Blood Orange, and contributes book reviews to the Seattle Review of Books.


Tributaries, The New Nature: “Outlanders”

By Dheepa Maturi

I remember a mangled mallard,

a blotch of emerald, a blur of brown

on the dirt road, and though I’d been

told never to touch a bird because

they carry diseases, a heartbeat is

a heartbeat, and I placed one hand

upon him, and the other upon the earth,

so that all of us could weep together.

I remember a mangled mallard,

who dodged pellets and spittle and

crouched under a bus seat that

smelled of sweat and tennis shoes,

and she timed her ride by the pulse

in her head so that she knew when

to crawl out of the hydraulic door and

fall into the green grass that loved her.

I remember a mangled mallard,

who flailed from a man’s mouth —

it’s kind of funny to shoot and watch

them crumple to the ground — but it

was a party, so I swallowed my own

throat-burn, stumbled to the shadows,

found the avian iridescence, whispered

yes, your existence had meaning.

I remember the mallards, all of the

mallards. Together, we thrash and wail

until we locate our home in the ether,

until our cries smooth to a symphonic line.

We are the shamans who must honor

our own streaks of life.

Dheepa R. Maturi is the director of an education grant program in Indianapolis and a graduate of the University of Michigan (A.B. English Literature) and the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Brevity, Every Day Poems, Tweetspeak Poetry, A Tea Reader, Mothers Always Write, Here Comes Everyone, Flying Island, Branches, Corium, Dear America: Reflections on Race, and The Indianapolis Review. Her short story ‘Three Days’ is a finalist in the 2017 Tiferet Writing Contest.”


Tributaries: “Rehabilitation: A Gospel”

By Ashely Adams

It took three days

to pull your wings    from the metal grille.

What can a man do with an owl

a shroud of cardboard and terry cloth?

There’s no one here to roll back

your stone. To call you to choir,

the caterwaul thump of

bullfrog string.

I don’t need gauntlets to

clean your perch where you turn

spheres against astroturf.

Your eyes full of holy fire and nebula

as I wonder how

you sing   these gular hymns.

There’s no one here to bury

your quiet wings. But I wail

your silhouette

against the last full moon.

Ashely Adams recently acquired an MA in Writing and Literature at Northern Michigan University, where she also worked as an associate editor for NMU’s literary journal, Passages North. She has been previously published in Rum Punch Press, Heavy Feather Review, Permafrost, Flyway, and Anthropoid.


Tributaries:"Arkansas Anoles"

By Stacy Pendergrast

Before Daddy left us
for New York, he told me
if I could catch one of
those lizards its tail
would snap off.
Those critters
ran up and down
our house all day,
their true skin color
the shade of mortar
that held the bricks
of our home together.
So easy for them
to change from puke-green
to dirt-brown. I found out
later they weren’t
real chameleons.
When I grew up I discovered
I wished for the same things
my father wanted: time to read,
someone to talk to in the night,
and just once, a dream car—
that black Camaro he gave me
after he balded its tires.
He’d said he moved away
so someday I’d know
how to leave.
I remember the cold,
wriggling tail in my hand
as I watched the rest
slip under the rocks.



Tributaries: "Willow Grove, Acrostic"

By Abigail Wang

Walls streaked in tape was how we left it on the last day. A father’s pride is

Immutable, but at six, I swore I would never do the same when I had children,

Letting them plaster the walls with paper whales and caterpillars, grime

Languishing for later families, because this is how stickiness keeps—

Onerously, obviously, like love does. I came home from kindergarten each day

Wearing a large t-shirt matching the one my father never threw away,

Green and blue and pink, matching sea foam, matching candy canes, matching

Retired old houses in Florida and Pennsylvania that he would one day

Own. We worked alongside each other under incandescent bulbs casting a

Vignette on our scrubbing, soap on drywall, sliding to the carpet: my fingers

Ecstatic and raw, letting the tack have its own way in the gluey dust of an apartment.


Abigail Wang grew up in Bucks County, PA. She has spent the past four years in Pittsburgh and is trying to decide where to go next. Her work can be found in Words Dance and is forthcoming in DIALOGIST. She reads poetry for Persephone’s Daughters.

Tributaries: “We are the Ocean”


By Urvashi Bahuguna

A whale fall is the carcass of a whale that has fallen to the ocean floor,

& that sometimes creates complex, localized ecosystems supporting deep sea life.​

​We have learned to hold the drift ​

in our jaws, seaweed ​breathing

from a blowhole. We are the ocean

trying one​ hand at perpetuity.

Though we feel them reaching for

the place, ​flashlights rarely locate us,

a slight warmness percolating after

the fact. We have made a shelter

out of a shape. The men low

on oxygen swim down and marvel

at a sleeper shark exiting

a chest. We are reminded of a story:

a ship after a pod of minke whales,

driving them close, too close to

​shore. The men don’t resist running hands

along tails that have lost a sharpness.

​A​ squat lobster just startled them. We worry

they will not stay afraid very long.

Urvashi Bahuguna is a poet from India whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nervous Breakdown, Barely South Review, Kitaab, Jaggery, The Four Quarters Magazine and elsewhere. She was recently shortlisted for the Beverly Prize and the Windword Poetry Prize. She has a poetry pamphlet forthcoming from Eyewear Books (UK). She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at PartlyPurple, Bangalore (India).