Issue 4 - Trace

Issue 4 Contributors & Extended Bios

Adam Syty lives and works in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. He teaches high school English and coaches track and field. Alex Quinlan’s poetry, nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Tampa Review, and the Birmingham Poetry Review. He

Artwork

Bound By Will

Artist’s Note These two pieces signify trace in the way of discovering, investigating and developing a perspective of self outside of what’s “real” to our physical senses. I wanted to focus on the message encompassing pieces of our being we trace back

Essay

Grave Tracing

W e are all collectors of nothing. Taking pictures of things we’ll likely never spend much time looking at, and never spending enough time on a single object to ever truly experience much of it. Every kid I grew up with came home

Poetry

Driving

Poet’s Note The only thing I know about poetry is that if I go into a poem assuming I know what it’s about, I’m going to be proven wrong if I stick with it long enough. That and the language is

Artwork

Lineage

Poetry

Sunset

Some evenings just before Sunset you see thousands Of birds, black dots against Sky, raving around each other, Draw a line in blood, Or smoke, or hope, You won’t be able to Map it all the way. Somewhere in black dark We know

Poetry

Resurrection

And perhaps someday my own ashes will be scattered through the meadows of tickseed, carrot weed, and drooping dog hobble, Kentucky wildflowers that I love. A speck of me might be caught in the wind and dropped like a flea into the cupped hand

Poetry

Synonyms

Though used interchangeably, as with most synonyms there is a denotative as well as a connotative difference between a graveyard and a cemetery. A graveyard rests beside a church: one wanders from the pews and pulpit to visit the still members of his congregation.

Issue 4 - Trace

Cara Cara

1. They Would Have to Build a Town They would have to build a town, stat. Bill Bird watched a stroke of sand drift from his fingers. Gulls squalled over the barren beach. Marram grass, salt-crusted and limp with humidity, nodded in the hot

Issue 4 - Trace

Something To Believe In

E ven approaching evening, the heat was the kind one’s body didn’t believe, where people suffered strokes because it couldn’t bake them that fast. It was the kind in which folk made YouTube videos about cooking eggs on their dashboard, swimming

Poetry

Not Everyone Has Returned

Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below. Not everyone has returned. Not all names have been revived. Silence has not yet been lifted from every crime. Leaden shadows lay at the feet of gray buildings. Give me their pedigree, from

Poetry

Fire

Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below. This red fire of dry stalks— and what dry stalks and sweet crackling of first rains!— of fallen leaves that fell for a long time, warm with currant smoke, or maybe raspberry, the

Poetry

Red Railcar

Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below. don’t be afraid it’s just a breath just a moment just a train speeding up into the mountains it’s a train a lonely game a short dream a railcar stopped

Essay

Putin, Save the Penguins of the Arctic

Translated by Nina Murray. Nina is a poet and literary translator currently on sabbatical from her job as a Foreign Service Officer. She lives in the UK. This piece is a reflection on the Maidan protest that started at the end of the 2013

Essay

They Carry A Sickle and We Bow Down To Them

I am a petite, baby-faced woman. Many people close to me still joke about it. It is all too familiar—every time I get ID'd at a bar (or worse,

Essay

Becoming a crumb: Thoughts on truth and recounting memory

J acques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction grapples with the incidental term ‘tracing’—a distinction or mark that something is missing. Trace is also a condition of thinking. Whether one has studied Derridian philosophy with enough depth to wrestle with each interpretation of the

Poetry

ODD RADIO CIRCLES (ORCS)

Our hot air balloon / turned into a lead ball. ⁠—Marjana Savka, Ukrainian poet They look like a virus you’d see under a microscope. A city flattened by artillery. A

Essay

How to Buy Teeth in Mexico

"D ental Tourism” the brochure called it. “Save thousands of dollars,” it touted, tempting U.S. citizens to cross the southern border for affordable healthcare. My husband and I had been on the road for five years. The lingering fumes of adolescent optimism and

Poetry

water from nowhere

the desert does not love you back, but it sees you, dunes hunched in watchful wake, brooding and clenching a hold of my heart and eating it. there are stains on the sky from my fingers sticky with the juice of dates and aloe,

Artwork

New Year's at the Church

New Year's at the Church (2021) Artist’s Note For a time, I was a part of an art collective that ran an enormous DIY house venue. We had rented a whole-ass church in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Chicago. For 5 years, we

Artwork

Trace no. 3

Trace no. 3 (2022) | ink & watercolor Artist’s Note In this piece, I wanted to evoke the feeling of walking into the dark woods, retracing your steps, looking for the monsters you once ran from but don’t fear now.

Poetry

Running Dry

You can dream of the ’30s but it’s the era of darkness blood ox plaid and baby shit gingham. It might be better to destroy than create red paint on the ax at the construction site and I missed the leaves peak but

Poetry

Sanctuary

Poet’s Note Thanks to the artist Mark Bradford and his process in his work, my own writing process changed. I no longer write in a linear fashion, and I've been much more invested the past few years in getting interesting text down on

Poetry

Wolf River

Poet’s Note What drew me to this poem was the two conflicting desires: one, "I want to believe you suffer no more", and two "I want a sign you still exist". The former can only come from the rational finality of death, and

Poetry

To Platonov…

To Platonov... They said you liked simple people And complicated machines. They said that trains had sung Your lullabies for you and that You were afraid of women, Who could not think…or Were not enough manly. Your hands…Your hands were so Manly.