‘Anthony Acri--A Bunny’s Life Cartoons’

Anthony Acri is a cartoonist, illustrator and a social critic, in the terms of Croce or Vidal, who lives in the suburbia of Pittsburgh Pa, with his sister and brother and are all that is left of a family of Italians who had coddled and both warned him of the quagmire that he was going to be dealing in and with as a boy.

‘Past the Wall’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

past the wall

my king in my queen bed--I ask how much
do you love me?
he unwraps and stretches to the wall
in the corner of my room—our nook
his knuckles rap
the plaster

see this
past it and if you walk on
there will be another
past that one too
and the next
and again

we cocoon

what a way to say so much

Cheney Luttich enjoys write poems and historical fiction. During the day, she's Professor Luttich at Southeast Community College in Nebraska. Off campus, she's having fun being mom and wife, and she's always up for a road trip to a museum, making a new friend, a chat on the front porch, or a giving a lecture about which of the three 19th century bustle periods is the coolest.

‘Fishing’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Fishing

What you cannot bear

is the carp gone slack.

The bright hook, deadly J,

piercing the cartilaginous lip,

and the hollow, papery

sound of its removal,

like a knife tearing through a

delicate Japanese fan.

What’s dismissed, though,

is that elemental struggle

between man and nature;

a strange, primal necessity

pursued to great lengths –

the sudden, violent thrashing

just beneath the water’s

surface; the nearly-invisible line,

taut and thin as a spider’s silk

winking in the dusky light.

I remember fishing with my father

off a stony outcrop in Scituate;

the sleek stripers the color

of twilight, and the bluefish

he didn’t mean to catch

and approached cautiously

with pliers to remove the hook.

I remember, too, wading knee-high

in a muddy Ohio creek and spotting

a long gar swimming toward us

with a face like hedge trimmers

and a mouth full of tiny translucent teeth.

We spent most of the afternoon

in that creek, catching nothing.

For toilet paper, he tore off

the sleeves of his T-shirt. Old

Coke bottles were unearthed,

rinsed off, and carried home

in a plastic bag. They clinked

against each other, causing

hairline cracks and chips.

Some, like memories, shattered.

Derek Kalback is a music teacher in Cincinnati, OH. In his spare time he reads, writes, and spends time with his three daughters and fiancee.

‘Sheers of Fire and Ice’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Sheers of Fire and Ice

I am born of virgin skin and white eyes.

Matted in my mother’s blood, with strong hands I am lifted to the skies.

I hear cries and “oo”’s and remarks of my unfavorable size,

“We thought she would breed something of a prize.”

But my ma embraces me in her full-textured coat

as she exhales with me in a rhythm we both have just wrote.

The strong hands gathered to talk of me and to gloat,

their conversation continued over the first “Bah” I let from my throat.

My mother and I lay positioned in the corner,

sheltered by painted red wood and hay stored around the border.

Dirt sprinkles down onto us with smells of my unspoken fate of horror,

Something in Ma’s cradle told me our lives would be shorter.

Just feet from us, those standing note my potential and worth:

the amount I will eat, the warmth of my wool, and my girth.

All of this greatness that I have had since the time of my birth,

are they just to use it until my last days on this earth?

I looked into Ma’s eyes, downturned and pretty,

was this a look of love or an expression of pity?

This was what life would be for me, I am now privy:

I am to grow how they like, it matters not if I’m lionhearted or gritty.

My questions waned with the rise of the moon.

The weighted silence of the barn hummed with its dark history a tune;

the flesh before these bodies have been scattered and strewn,

they all asked how they could live knowing it’d all end too soon.

Before I know, my train of thought is interrupted

by a sliver of daylight on my face, I get up as it instructed.

My knees knock and shake, a confident walk they obstructed.

One hoof at a time, I move wobbly and jagged as I grunted.

The wet of my nose leaves a mark on the splintered barn door

as I swing it out of the way, the creak matching Mum’s breathy snore.

Light and color hit my crusted eyes, morning sun washed my despair of yore.

How could this bonny kingdom breed these men with the words of a boar?

The bitter wind carried a mist that studded the ends of my hair.

At the tail of the gust lingers a musk strong and agrar.

Powdery ashes and old smoke prove eruptions previously aflare,

this land’s fire and ice seem to be a balanced affair.

Warm tones of earth run up to the muted sky of grey.

Green hills are brushed with flaxen grass and charcoal clay.

Four-legged things like me are out to graze and to play,

do they know what I do– that we live to be prey?

All this beauty and wonder is hidden behind this question:

How am I to enjoy this life when it only goes in one direction?

I am to die at the hands of those who debate my perfection,

while also finding my own purpose without air of madness or objection.

I want more for my life than what I understand is given to me.

Why am I being pigeonholed into something that others think they foresee?

My death cannot be my only gateway to feeling free,

and it is now my duty to find my own true destiny.

I take a step forward and turn my petite head around,

I see the still body of my ma lying peacefully on the straw mound.

If I can sneak out while she is asleep soft and sound,

then I can come back and show her what more for me I have found.

My neck snaps back forward and my ears tense up straight,

another inch I move my hooves and pause to look at the land so ornate.

I breathe in the smells from the barn before it’s too late

to remember what it feels like before deciding my own fate.

The soft grass tickles my bony shins as I walk,

and my eyes squint from the air sprinkled with particles of chalk.

I approach some new friends lying in the pasture, hopeful to talk,

but I’m met with unbothered stares and mouths open just to gawk.

Their coat was unlike mine, spotted in brown and black.

Before I could speak, I was interrupted by one from the pack.

“Are you the one born today from inside the shack?

Why are you out here? Don’t you think you should see to your Ma and go back?”

I stand afront the group of marble-covered beasts.

Stunned at their unwelcoming and sorry attempt at my retreat.

“I came out to see you, to see the earth and its sweets.

Truthfully, I stand here in pursuit of finding what makes me complete.”

Their pink snouts turn away and some of them even huff,

a small creature from the back stood up from behind the green fluff

to tell me how none of them believe in all that kind of stuff:

“We sit here together in the sun and the flowers, that’s more than enough.”

I scan over the crowd cuddled tightly and nestled in,

not one of their bovine faces not in a grin.

But they’re just like those before me, they failed to ever begin

looking for their own purpose, their lifeline, failing to look within.

I retort and tell them that I have a purpose I must find,

I thank them for speaking with me and for being open and kind.

They wave me goodbye as their bodies again intertwined,

I turn my back and sigh, thinking that all their lives have been resigned.

My infant joints are adjusting as I turn upwards on a hill,

perhaps what I am looking for is up at the top near the mill.

I notice the beauty of violet poppies and Mountain avens just until

I remember my mission is to fulfill and not to find thrill.

I finally reach the peak after much huffing and heaving.

Catching my breath, thin air pierced my dry throat, so much for speaking.

The grass was not as long near the windmill that was achieving

a wind that gustoed and shouted, leaving me grieving.

As the weather was less than desired at the top,

I was pleased to see a peaking hoof just behind the mill to the left of a flower crop.

I skip toward the wooden structure, moving like a marionette with a flop,

hope builds for my purpose and down my cheek rolls a teardrop.

I hop around the corner to the back to look for the owner of the foot,

but my upturned mouth quickly shuts in horror as I see what’s afoot.

Another white creature just like me is standing facing me, covered in soot.

Her eyes had something old in them, and her wornness sank in her caput.

Still did I stand. Unsure what to say, suddenly I forgot the meaning of today.

Feeling my confidence dwindle, I fought to keep this new feeling at bay,

then I move myself closer to explain why I have intruded on her day.

“Ma’am,” I say softly, “I think you can help me on my journey. That I pray.”

The nearer I came to her, the more I understood

that she was closer to my age in my young girlhood.

Why were her eyes dark and her hoofs chipped like aged driftwood?

Why did I feel a sadness when she looked at me such as Ma under the red wood?

“Are these your flowers?” I questioned, “They’re really quite nice.”

She stared at me with an expression rather empty, blinking twice,

“If they are beautiful as you say, what do you say is their price?”

I wondered what she meant, “Oh, I didn’t come here to buy, I came for advice.”

The girl motions behind me and down the hill I just scaled,

“Do you see all of the floral lives you ended all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?”

Flattened stems show my trail and under my feet the delicate petals were unveiled,

“I wonder why you think your journey is worth the lives of flowers?” she exhaled.

“I’m sorry I didn’t mean to hurt them, my ma would be upset.”

“Oh, and your mother, I see you’re a babe, don’t you think that she frets?”

I remember Ma’s soft breath, her warm full coat. “Where is your ma? I haven’t seen her yet.”

The lamb before me looked down at the earth, the wind held our silence singing a duet.

“What is it you wanted to ask me?” Her voice cracked and low.

“I came to find my purpose. My reason for living, Something to relieve me of my woe.”

The babe shook her head, moving it over to glance at the crushed indigo,

“Don’t you see that what you had before is all you need tomorrow and all you needed long ago?”

“The perfume that called you out, the musky air, the land charcoaled and chalked.

The sun the cows lay in, the wheated grass that prickles your legs as you walked,

the flowers you forgot to admire before leaving them, with your life you now mock.

Not to mention your home in that barn nested below this bedrock.”

Before I had time to think of an answer that would suffice,

her eyes met mine and her voice bellowed the worst words one could splice:

“My mother is dead, killed the day of my birth. Slaughtered with sheers of fire and ice.

That’s what we are here for, you know this, to be served atop a bed of rice.”

My heart was ignited and my eyes flowed over with water,

“They cannot kill her when she has a newborn daughter!”

“I know that you have feared your own death since you understood the slaughter,

but the first to go are the oldest. It is not you, it is her.”

I turn to run back to my red barn to find my ma and make things straight,

but not before I could hear the last words spoken from my mate.

“Your fate may be death, but so is every living thing’s to date.

Do not get lost in finding a purpose when you lose what matters before it’s too late.”

Tears burn my hot face,

I think I let out a cry one could hear from outerspace.

The keratin covers of my toes scratched and chipped from my pace,

I can’t think of anything else other than picturing Ma in her same place.

Finally, I reach the large splintered door still ajar,

my heartbeat reached my ears when there was no sight of movement near or far.

It was then that I hear the sound of metal, perhaps the shot of an engine from a car?

To my left, I see a sliding door, sealed with a bar.

Ramming my head through the wood to get through,

I know I must muster every ounce of strength in order to breakthrough.

I hear shouts from the voices I knew early in my birth, corrupt and evil. Ugly, too.

The wood cracks and springs out after one final push as I come flying through.

Shaking myself off, I feel my knees weak again and now bruised from the thud.

My eyes adjust to the light that entered my irises with a flood,

but in this moment I regret ever opening them and expecting a truck with an engine dud.

Instead, what I see is far worse: Ma laying still. Covered in blood.

Her face looks at me, painted red like our barn.

Her eyes are wide open looking at me, metal sticking from her head like a horn.

The men that I remember who once held me when I was born,

now held onto the smoking gun and the firey sheers. And now my ma I must mourn.

Karlyn Rainey is a 22-year-old writer who studied professional writing and rhetoric and film and digital media at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She has always enjoyed creative writing, especially longer-form poetry and fictional short stories. While creative writing is one of her hobbies, she also enjoys hiking, making bread, making collages, and painting for her online website, karlynrainey.art, in her spare time while balancing job hunting in technical writing or editing. She hopes to continue writing creatively while growing her career and continuing to do everything that she loves.

‘Tambourine Man’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Tambourine Man

            An icy cloud blankets the barren trees of central Kentucky. Mounds of brown decay become covered in a blinding sheet that will glisten and shimmer off the sun’s glorious beams when it eventually rises and pokes through that gray fog like a filled water balloon. Both complete and broken icicles tender the roof of a covered bridge, the tin creaking against the wood as a tundral breeze winds through the forest like a forlorn spirit.

            Although it is still dark, and the moon provides more light than the sun does at this current moment, two boys push through the cold. Their meager jackets, the pockets furnished by minor holes and an invasive chill, do poorly to protect against the morning zephyr. Despite the porous weather, perhaps even in rejection of it, one of the boys pulls a small, handheld camera from his pocket. He records the snow falling. The limbs transitioning from brown to white. The hills developing a delicate, translucent armor. He pans between gaps in the wood, capturing tall shadows and distorted shapes, as if searching for something within them. The two boys walk in silence for some time before returning to an RV on the outskirts of the great unknown. There, they will hold onto the past and examine figures in the treeline.

            It was 2013 then. They were filming “The Tambourine Man.” A short found-footage horror film about a fabricated local legend permeating the labyrinthian trees of Danville, Kentucky. Inspired heavily by online mythology of the time period and popular mediums of communication, “The Tambourine Man” was a nauseating collection of innocuous footage collected over a two-and-a-half year span. Intoxicating perspectives conveying abstract portrayals of rural property and urban exploration. The lore behind the being was just as muddled and confused as the adolescent shot composition: contradictory and immature. Six years later, this footage would be lost forever, and, by association, so too would the memories.

            In 2019, a home on the outskirts of Burgin, Kentucky burnt down overnight. The family lost everything. From two dogs and clothing, to easy breathing and childhood. Their lungs heavied beneath black soot and ash, those embers staining their pupils and marking their flesh like cattle. At first, nobody thought much about those lost times, or the lost tapes that preserved them. But as days turned into months, and the years passed by, those are what they miss most about that house. Being able to go back and inhabit who they used to be. Living within those moments like vagrant time travelers in search of some abandoned purpose.

I was a different person then. A complete stranger to who I am now. The memories that link myself and that child feel like fleeting visions from another life, transmitted through dream and packaged by some terrible fog. Really, all I can remember is how cold it was out in those woods. The exact narrative of “The Tambourine Man” is missing, and the footage those boys captured on that frigid morning has become inconsequential. I’ve become separated from the time spent pillaging those beaten trails and mangling intricate cobwebs.

On the rare occasion that we’re all together again, we reminisce on these times. Our tongues act as devices of transportation, muddying our sneakers and polluting our jeans with grass stains and pollen in an instant. Specific moments do come to mind on occasion — trivial fights or comedic bloopers — but the details are half buried beneath plateaus of dirt and bone. Each story contradicts the next and we argue about the truth, distorting the past like expired film spiraling from a dusty reel. Nothing is how it’s supposed to be.

This is why we miss these tapes so dearly. Not because we believe “The Tambourine Man” to be a cinematic masterwork lost before it could be found, but because these tapes were the truth. These tapes were our lives. In lieu of something extraordinary, they became scrapbooks in motion. Moving images depicting our growth. The changing of pitch and the sprouting of facial hair, prepubescent discussions of life and the paltry challenges that came with it. Immature humor and teenage angst. Although the film was about a fictional local legend, it was a complete and earnest documentation of childhood. Our childhood. Images, and memories, that we will never get back. No matter how hard we focus or how deeply we sleep, these moments are lost. Forever. These years exist within a vacuum. A bottomless pit, blacker than night and entirely void.

In 2024, with a new camera, I attempt to fabricate time. I craft my own souvenirs through a fuzzy lens, echoing an accidental entrapment of reality. I fixate on shot composition and lighting. The framing of faces in conversation and staging of missed opportunities. Instead, however, these recordings feel cheap and hollow. They are false rememberings of plastic mannequins and scripted dialogue, no more true than those drunken discussions of nostalgia through toothy, dejected lips. In a few years time, all I will have are these videos. Disconnected from memory, entirely null of context and history.

I return to those central Kentucky woods on another cold winter day. They are different than I remember them being, and their current state forever alters their past form. The paths that we walked all those years ago have since faded into overgrown clusters of serpentine shrubbery and that bridge boasts an illness only contracted through bouts with human touch and time. I can never be certain that this was the road traveled, or that we saw anything of importance within these very trees. I like to think that those videos would help. But, in actuality, they would reveal nothing but our own shrill, impotent voices ricocheting through an abyss of jagged limbs, fearful beasts, and a stark, domineering cold. No matter how often we return, or how firmly we squint into the darkness, those kids are gone. There is nothing out there. Nothing for us in these woods.

Daniel Ungs is a twenty-three year old writer from Danville, Kentucky. He recently earned his bachelor's degree from Western Kentucky University where he studied English and Film. While attending WKU, Daniel published several works in undergraduate literary and academic journals, such as Zephyrus and The Ashen Egg. He was also the recipient of several creative writing awards at the university, including the Wanda Gatlin Essay Award in 2022, the Dale Rigby Essay Award in 2023, and he took home first place in the Mary Ellen and Jim Wayne Miller Celebration of Writing Fiction Writing Contest in 2023. Instagram: @danielungs Writing Blog: onbusterpike.wordpress.com