Ruminate Magazine

Notes

Editor’s

From You

Artist’s

Last

Poetry Prize

 

Poetry
Mary E. O’Dell: Walking this labyrinth, Safekeeping
Brian White: Out of the Eater
Ellen Birkett Morris: Down by the River
Julie L. Moore: Confession, The first time I saw a shooting star
David Feela: Digging a grave, No Moon
Misty Anne Winzenried: Jonah’s Revelation
Ellaraine Lockie: Rebirth
David Wright: Return
Lauren Dobay: The Birds are Falling, Privacy
Leland James: Mist
Sally Rosen Kindred: American Sweetgum, Apple Night, Pilgrimage
William R. Stoddart: River Cabin
Richard Sederstrom: The Circus Beautiful
Shanna Powlus Wheeler: The Widow’s Lament in Autumn
Mary Van Denend: Rehearsals, Waterhouse
David Harrity: Heth, Kaph, Semekh
Jennifer Stewart: Postcard, Yellowstone  

 

Fiction
Leif Nikunen: Thieves’ Weather, 1996

Nonfiction
Jo Scott-Coe: Calling

 

Art
Evan Mann: Donkey #3, Donkey #1, Creation #0, Creation  #1, Creation  #2,
Creation  #4, Creation #5, Creation #6 , Creation #7, Donkey #2

 

Mark 5:24-34 

by Julie L. Moore

 

And in the twelfth year, there was still 

         Blood. And so many difficult degrees 

 

Of separation. Everything, at this point, 

         Burned. The once-soft skin of her labia. 

The following is an excerpt from "Thieves' Weather."

 

Clifton Clark on his way home from the OK Liquor Corral with two new bottles of brandy took the pasture road instead of going round by the blacktop. A bright night in new November and he drove south into a cloud encamped in the big open country, as though God had pitched a tent to be his neighbor for the night. The first snow melted on the windshield and the hood of the pickup and the hides of the Hereford cattle around him, but more snow came and it didn’t all melt. It sifted down and covered the country and all the country lay cuddled under snow and wet weather. Thieves’ weather.
     Taking a turn out of his regular path, Clifton Clark jockeyed his pickup truck over soft slopes and winter grass and stopped on a boulder-crusted nob. He shut off the headlights and cut the engine. The changed terrain of the season made everything unfamiliar so that he had to wait for the moon to break cover like a startled hare flitting between clouds to see where he was. The snow gathered on the windshield and the wiper blades. He got out and walked forward to the lichen-covered rocks jutting out of the hillside. He listened. He stood on the tracks of jackrabbits and looked down on a creek feeding south toward the south fork of the Grand River, but there was nothing to see. There was nothing to hear but the wet sag of snow descending. But he knew. He had a feeling. He drove east and then south into the coulee, looking for the Texas crossing he knew was there. He crossed the creek with its frozen shine of meltwater from that week’s warmth. A half-mile south he stopped again and shut off the engine and rolled down his window to listen. He got out to listen more closely. He heard unmistakably the sound of a four-wheeler.

Evan Mann.  Creation #6. Intaglio Etching on Zinc. 2008.