Author: South Broadway Press

South Broadway Press is a publisher of poetry through books, print journals, and on our online journal.

Editor Interviews // Chris Bullock

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CHRIS BULLOCK

Chris Bullock, otherwise known as Tall City, has self published a few volumes of his work, and has been presenting his poetry at open mics and showcases for quite some time now, even reading for audiences with a rudimentary grasp of English. He has written and been published by South Broadway Press, has displayed art and curated exhibitions at The Lab on Santa Fe, has toured the country a few times with The Nicotine Fits, has sung his poetry inspired lyrics along his autoharp at venues and open mics, has spun original beats for freestyle rappers in Colorado and New Mexico, has studied in China on scholarship from community college, among other activities, and has recently decided to get a little more serious and diligent about something.

Writing is a way to formulate an ideal thought that is fluid and perfect from beginning to end. Some readers find life and emotion in it, others find some kind of death and a doubt of self.

Chris Bullock
SBP: WHAT IS FUELING YOUR CREATIVITY RIGHT NOW? WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE MOST CREATIVE?

CB: I feel the most creative when I am bored and my thoughts start playing around.

SBP: WHAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY?

CB: Failing at almost everything else I have tried.

SBP: WHO DO YOU HOPE FINDS YOUR POETRY? WHO IS YOUR ART FOR?

CB: I am not sure people will find my poetry and I usually write it to get it out of my head, and if I think it’s pretty cool, then I leave the apartment and go share it with someone, and I am not too concerned with whether they like it or not.

SBP: IF YOUR WRITING WERE A KEY, WHAT DOOR WOULD IT UNLOCK, AND WHAT WOULD YOUR READERS FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE?

CB: Writing is a way to formulate an ideal thought that is fluid and perfect from beginning to end. Some readers find life and emotion in it, others find some kind of death and a doubt of self.

SBP: WHAT POEM THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN RECENTLY WENT TO A PLACE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING, OR WHICH WAS THE MOST/LEAST CHALLENGING TO WRITE?

CB: A poem about the many elements of my diverse background, which felt like a rant, but the outcome was that it was praised as one of my best.

SBP: WHAT HAS BROUGHT YOU JOY THIS LAST YEAR?

CB: Sleeping really well, I forget when it was.

SBP: WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT OBSESSION?

CB: Accumulating enough money to afford Denver rent and stay off the street. Otherwise, Colombian style salsa dancing, boleros, reading books in languages I don’t fully understand, and eavesdropping on strangers on public transit.

SBP: WHAT MAKES SOMETHING HARD TO WRITE OR CREATE?

CB: Reluctance and avoidance.

SBP: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF WRITING AND ART IN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD?

CB: Fairly low but as George Wallace, poet laureate of Suffolk County confided to me, “Poetry is a vow of poverty.”

Editor Interviews // Debra Keane

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DEBRA KEANE

Debra Keane (she/her) is a Denver poet, artist, advocate, social worker, facilitator, and identical twin. She’s written over 1,000 daily poems and simultaneously squirms at and strives for creative vulnerability in her everyday. Her work has been published by Twenty Bellows, Beyond the Veil, Last Leaves, South Broadway Press, 40West, and ALA Editions.

I don’t know that writing, art, ​or poetry will save us​, but it can save its individual creators and receivers for a little while. It gives us a way to lean in, to make sense of, to understand what it means to be alive​ in our particular moment, and in all the moments past and in whatever’s coming.

Debra Keane
SBP: WHAT IS FUELING YOUR CREATIVITY RIGHT NOW? WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE MOST CREATIVE?

DK: I am relishing this particular moment in my own brain, heart, and spirit. I have structured my day-to-day to be filled with creative practices and deadlines, so my creativity is fueled by the routine of my commitment to meeting the page/paper/canvas at intervals. It’s such a dang treat to encounter myself over and over again against our backdrop of global and individual pain and joy and grief and knowing and not knowing.

SBP: WHAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY?

DK: Poetry came along in my childhood and broke all the rules of language I was learning in this beautiful, strange, abstracted, and queer way. I’ve always been a listener and observer; poetry gave me a lens to search for the beauty of the world – the poetry of everyday conversation, sound, literature, trees, emotion, thought – all of it. Poetry also has such an efficient impact-to-word ratio! ​G​iving voice to the unmentionable with such brevity. What’s not to love?

SBP: WHO DO YOU HOPE FINDS YOUR POETRY? WHO IS YOUR ART FOR?

DK: I want my poetry to be found by anyone who could read or hear it and go, “huh” in some way. ‘Huh’ could be for a spark of recognition, a moment of delight, a confusion, a reckoning. I love the idea that one of my poems could save my own life and then simply go kiss someone else on the cheek as it passes them by. My art is absolutely for me first: it lets me know if it wants to be shared outside of my audience of one, and then usually won’t shut up until I get it to the right person or people in my life.

SBP: IF YOUR WRITING WERE A KEY, WHAT DOOR WOULD IT UNLOCK, AND WHAT WOULD YOUR READERS FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE?

​DK: My writing is the key to my own existence! By training or happenstance or personality, I have not always paid attention to what my brain/body/spirit is communicating, and so meeting the page every day is the way that I can re-/discover that I do in fact exist and am having a deep human experience that is simultaneously unique and universal. Behind that door, readers would find me and my host of speakers waving at them and shrugging and pointing at everyone and everything with awe.

SBP: WHAT POEM THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN RECENTLY WENT TO A PLACE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING, OR WHICH WAS THE MOST/LEAST CHALLENGING TO WRITE?

DK: ​My poems have been walloping me with their grief surprises at the bottom of the bag. And then there’s a weird burnt french fry of anger that keeps butting in every few weeks as I write daily. I don’t mind them, though. People perceive me as a really joyful person, and I absolutely am, though I think only because I let grief and The Anger Fry speak in my work.

SBP: WHAT HAS BROUGHT YOU JOY THIS LAST YEAR?

DK: ​Meeting myself again in a really sweet, unrestrained way and embodying a sense of spaciousness. Trees, flowers, my nephews.

SBP: WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT OBSESSION?

​DK: I love my houseplants dearly. They all have names and enjoy visitors.

SBP: WHAT MAKES SOMETHING HARD TO WRITE OR CREATE?

DK: It’s hard to write or create when I have too specific a vision for a project and don’t leave space for the unfolding of what’s underneath what I think I’m trying to say. Or when I’m trying to be clever — oh my gosh, watch out. 

SBP: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF WRITING AND ART IN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE WORLD?

​DK: I don’t know that writing, art, ​or poetry will save us​, but it can save its individual creators and receivers for a little while. It gives us a way to lean in, to make sense of, to understand what it means to be alive​ in our particular moment, and in all the moments past and in whatever’s coming. I love that we can look back and recognize ourselves in the work of the ancients and our contemporaries. What a treat that things have both always sucked and always been amazing — writing and art is the record of that truth.

Book Review: In the Soup by John Calderazzo

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BOOK REVIEW:
IN THE SOUP BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Calderazzo is an accomplished Nature Writer and emeritus professor within the English Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.  In The Soup is his latest poetry collection.  Expressed in three sections Calderazzo relays how he feels, in the soup, in the thick of life-after-retirement on the “Big Day,” as he is “Gathering Voltage,” and one “Windy Day at the Dump.”

Calderazzo begins with his titular poem, “In the Soup” – a psychedelic homage to his inner-man found at the bottom of a can of turkey noodle soup.  Calderazzo ponders the ingredients. What makes a man, what makes the contents of life, what inspires our mindfulness?  The ensuing pages hope to reveal these answers.

PART I: BIG DAY

“Second Coming” wonders about our connection to fading stars and skies laden with floating feathers that cascade like snowfall (13).  Calderazzo takes up his lament for extinct and endangered species.  The Passenger pigeon, “that once blocked the sun” now, “bearing down on oblivion” (13).  Will their eradication be the future for howling wolves and roaring grizzlies?  The same goes for unshackled rivers, and sludge gray oceans.  What will their fate be as climate change deepens?  Some may deny these cause-and-consequence actions but, “even the wind-bitten crew of / the farthest-out whale boat… began to comprehend / what we had done” (14).  

In “The Secret Life of Mountains: Front Range of the Rockies,” Calderazzo explicates his home-place in a meditation of tercets:

Deep in,
a lupine meadow
scored with trails

softens, mists over,
dousing spot-fires
of glacier lilies (33).

It is Spring. The Front Range is emerging into new life.  The:

Pasque flowers
close their petals
like eyelids folding (33)

into meditation,
relieved from 
the trespass (34)

This is Calderazzo’s means of telling his reader to “Go lite” and “Think Like a Mountain” as Aldo Leopold implores.  Yet to also take on John Muir’s challenge, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” but do so with care in order to preserve their beauty, and to protect them from “boot scrape” and drone’s “beauty-lust” (34).

PART II: GATHERING VOLTAGE

“Way Stones” told in three numbered stanzas stories acts of subtle environmental activism.  Beginning with his friend who knocks over cairns – the way stones marking paths on trails.  His friend, who shakes his head in disgust and kicks the keystones which topple in disarray, demonstrating that he prefers, like Robert Frost, to take the road less travelled by.  However, Calderazzo actually doesn’t mind them.  The stone pyres, “suggest a tall dance / with gravity” marking where, “The trail / goes this way… [and] Death is that way” (43).  Calderazzo notes that in other lands, cairns value prayer, offer blessing, and lead the way, “A last ride / through the stars,” which is entirely a different matter.

Author John Calderazzo

PART III: WINDY DAY AT THE DUMP

“Windy Day at the Dump” is a necro-pastoral poem which details environmental decline’s  connection to humanity by listing the things discarded within a landfill.  The poem documents Calderazzo’s personal letting-go of things and moments in his life that now decay within the dump’s depths.  Medical records of a last parent to die, the draft of a youthful novel too embarrassing to recycle, love letters, a broken wall clock, a fizzling floor lamp.  These objects mark his passing of time and are his mile markers of maturation.  They are the cairns that lead the way to his end flight (68-69).

Calderazzo’s closing poem of his collection, “Passing through” is his quest through Wingo, Kentucky in search of his final resting place.  However, “The casket shop has moved” and so he decides to, “pass on a casket, thank you.”  Instead he chooses for his final destination to be a “high flower valley” surrounded by “peaks of snowlit fire.”  He prefers for his ashes to “zephyr off while friends & family / lift their arms & sing” (87).  And in this way those who would remember him, mimic his chosen poetic lineage as they burst into a Whitman-like mighty yawp.

Calderazzo’s collection, In The Soup (2025) by Middle Creek Publishing & Audio nods to his literary community and those who came before him.  Through this gathering, he enters their company, and encourages others to tell their stories, communicate to the public about the importance of wilderness preservation, and find those ancient cairns while trekking among high mountains around the world.

IN THE SOUP

BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

AVAILABLE NOW!

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: compost your despair by hayden dansky

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Book Review: compost your despair by hayden dansky

A BOOK REVIEW BY LIZA SPARKS

Compost Your Despair is Hayden Dansky’s love letter to Palestine, community organizers, to the “queer and weird and trans and disabled,” to the “dark and indigenous,” to “those of us who live in liminal spaces, or are kin to it,” to their past self, to anyone who feels empathy, anyone with a heartbeat.

The speaker in these poems writes with a fierce urgency that begs us to pay attention and asks us to move our bodies towards action.

In “Now That I Have a Voice,” the speaker defiantly asserts:

So let them
Burn me
with the rest of them
Burn me like they did
my ancestors before time and place
made me white
Burn me like the heathen they call
me for my love, desire, joy
Burn me with the rest because
now that I have a voice
I will never close
my mouth

These poems tumble down the page like spoken word and it does feel like Dansky is speaking just to us. They capture our attention. They invite us in to the prayer. This poetry is a communal act—a protest poetry spoken on the street.

They write in, “Until They Hear Us:”

What else can we do
besides scream from every corner

There is not a lot of excess in these poems; there is not flowery language, sentimentality, romanticization of struggle. They write with a conversational language that seeks to be understood. In “Climate” they write:

it really, really matters how we treat
each other

There is the examination of complexity and Dansky struggles with their own positionality of privilege and oppression. They write:

Peace is a process of
relationship to self
just as much as
relationship to other.

They write, in regards to the ongoing genocide in Gaza,

I will scream that this is not
my Judaism.

These poems demand a megaphone.

There is not the promise of peace or justice, but an impulse towards it. In “Until They Hear Us,” the speaker repeats, “I will try” and “I can try.” It is a vulnerable and humble sentiment. In times like these, what else is there to do but try? Trying is the first step towards action.

There is a force in these poems that is driven by the musicality of repetition, like the drumbeat of “Burn me” in the final stanza of “Now That I Have a Voice.” The speaker is not afraid to write in defiance of powers that will oppress them and the people they love, and they will say it again.

In the poem, “Climate” the speaker struggles with the power of words. What can words actually do in “a burning world.” They write, “How can I trust these words.” Yet, Dansky is driven to speak, to write, and to share. There is a deep desire to be heard. There is a fierce drive to express.

Author Hayden Dansky

These poems bring to mind the Audre Lorde quote: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” With that same sentiment—Dansky must speak, must write, must share.

There’s a hunger in the speaker to understand the past and the present, to make sense of the trauma and their position and responsibility.

In “Nex” there is a firm defiance against the powers of hate:

Our bodies are resistance.
Our love is survival.
Our identities are our anchors,
always in transition.

“Nex” is addressed to Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old non-binary student, youth, and precious soul who died as the result of anti-LGBQTIA+ policies. Dansky’s poems do not exist merely on the page, but are in deep conversation with the world around them.

And although the world around them is apocalyptic, there is hope in these poems. In “A Pandemic Note to the Creative Organizers,” the speaker writes:

You are not alone.
When you listen
you will remember
you never have been.

and in “A Pandemic Note to Self,” the speaker asserts:

Fall into the earth like it’s your home
It has always been.

Dansky’s impulse towards social justice is driven by a deep love for their fellow humans and for the world. In “Gaza” they write:

called by a deep love
of all humanity
of a belief
that nobody will be free
until we all are.

Compost Your Despair asks the reader to look at their own privilege and positionality—What drives you? What moves you? What do you love?

In “Pride,” Dansky reminds us that

Pride is not complacency

our lives are choices
and we are choosing to stay

Dansky’s poetry asks the reader: What are you choosing to do with your life? What are you choosing to do with your voice?

compost your despair

BY HAYDEN DANSKY

AVAILABLE NOW!

Liza Sparks (she/her) is a student in the 2025-2026 Poetry Collective at The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Liza follows her literary obsessions and collects books the way toddlers collect rocks and pinecones (beloved friends, sacred treasures). She is a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee.

Book Review: Leaf Manifesto by Laurel Radzieski

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WILD NATURE, WILD WOMEN, A WILD ECOPOETICS:
LAUREL RADZIESKI’S LEAF MANIFESTO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Laurel Radzieski welds her pen to manifest an embodied poetics and advocacy for the wild.  Wild nature. Wild Women.  This collection is unique because she plays upon the page physically and artistically in form, as many of these poems take shape within female curves. The growth from within is her child, and in this way the verse thrives.

The collection follows a flora lifecycle.  Each section reminds the reader of this beginning to end:  Seed, Germination, Sprout, Seedling, Sapling, Tree, Flowering, and ultimately the tempestuous Fruit.  Radzieski sets out upon her poetics journey stating, “One day I said aloud / I might like to be a tree” (11) and so she entices her reader to figure out what this may mean.

Throughout Leaf Manifesto Radzieski prompts us with questions: “What is a woman?” (15). And provides multiple choice answers, that only lead to more internalized questions.  Through this feminist lens she taunts her reader to poke at their own preconceived perceptions.  “Who gets to be a woman?” (16).  “What use is a woman?” (17).  “What’s it like to be a woman?” (21).  Once again, she tests her reader through a True / False dichotomy.  She dares us to shade in our answer fully with a #2 Lead Pencil.

In “How to Identify as a Tree” (38), Radzieski considers identity, origin, and belonging.  “Consider what others would want to know about your bark patterns and inner rings.”  Yet how a tree-body-person may appear doesn’t describe the within.  Rather, “roots and family tree” nudge toward fuller truths.  Especially as it oft happens, “If you are on unseeded land, know the history of the ground, how it got that way.”  In this way, Radzieski alludes to those who came before us.  She acknowledges that the land of her manifesto is of indigenous origins and birthright.

Author Laurel Radzieski

Throughout her collection, Radzieski offers up Ven Diagrams.  In “Woman Tree” (69), she encloses what these two entities have in common: branches, limbs, mistakes, leaves, organs, roots, flesh, rings, family, pain, and flowers.”  At least with this last word, she ends on hope.

Radzieski’s final poem in the collection, “Past Life Regression” (121) is a haiku:

Fallen walnut.  Such
a long way down, but then
soft idea of grass.

This seasonal form representing a walnut tree’s lifespan, culminates in a fruit-nut’s finality.  Not eaten, but allowed to cascade to an end-place.  Tranquility lands in grass.  Her bed, which begins again the tree’s lifecycle as the seed buries into soil knowing she will sprout once more. 

Laurel Radzieski won the Halycon Award from Middle Creek Publishing & Audio for this collection.  It is her second full collection of poetry.  Other poems have found a home in Rust + Moth, The New Your Quarterly, and Atlas.  She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania and is the Director of Grants at Alvernia University.

LEAF MANIFESTO

BY LAUREL RADZIESKI

AVAILABLE NOW!

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

2026 Pushcart Prize Nominations

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We are incredibly excited to announce South Broadway Press‘ 2026 Pushcart Prize nominations! Please join us in celebrating these wonderful poets.

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America – including Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.

The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60’s and 70’s.

Pushcart Prize Nominees

FROM SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS’ SUMMER & AUTUMN 2025 EDITIONS

Because Every Girl Has a Pomegranate Poem In Her

BY MONICA FUGLEI

One Foot in the New Year

BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ

Geranium

BY ASPEN EVERETT

they say the rice won’t grow without blood

BY SREEJA NASKAR

Scribe

BY T. LYDIA MCKINNEY

I Do Not Care if You Are Across the Country

BY WHEELER LIGHT

Artist Feature: Rachel Mulder

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  • Your Gentleness Is Powerful, 2025, toned cyanotype on paper, 22 x 30 inches.
  • I Can’t Stop Drawing Angels, 2025, cyanotype on paper. 22 x 30 inches.
  • Portal (Twins), 2024, toned cyanotype on paper, 34 x 44 inches.
  • Discernment Spirit, 2025, cyanotype on paper, 22 x 30 inches.
  • Lovers, 2023, bleached cyanotype on paper, 30 x 43 inches.
  • Intimacy Loop, 2025, cyanotype on paper, 11 x 14 inches.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is a swirling devotion to process and surrender.

Since 2019, cyanotype has taught me subversive techniques via states of play, acceptance and transformation. This alternative photographic process uses light-sensitive chemicals which are applied to a surface like paper or fabric, exposed to UV light, and developed with water to create brilliant blue and white images. Additional processes like bleaching and toning (with everyday kitchen witchery like baking soda or tea!) make for additional color possibilities using the same old chemistry.

Both imagery and process are relational, with my work often revealing my own emotions to me before I’m even aware of their presence. I often explore this terrain by painting shapes with the chemistry, placing objects onto the surface to resist the light, rinsing and repeating this process in multiple layers. The paper holds the memory of each new layer, dodging destruction while creating space for possibility. 

Conversely, there are also magical moments where the image snaps into place in one exposure, as if by a flick of the wrist. The simplicity can be electrifying. The paradoxical nature and generative inertia of making these painterly cyanotypes continually invites me to learn and my work to transform.

INTERVIEW

South Broadway Press asks Rachel Mulder a few questions to get to know this artist a bit better.

SBP: WHERE ARE YOU FINDING INSPIRATION AS OF LATE?

RM: As a leo (sun, mercury and mars), I feel really grateful that a major part of my practice is actually worshipping the sun! Cyanotype is such a whirling dervish of magic, it’s really easy to be endlessly captivated by the process itself. I also enjoy listening to podcasts while I work, including Dean Spade’s Love in a F*cked up World (named after his most recent book, which I haven’t read yet) and Margaret Killjoy’s Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff (especially the four-parter on how the Surrealists were even cooler than we thought!)

WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH, IF ANYTHING, WITH YOUR ARTWORK?

Currently, I feel like I’m at a kind of journeyperson stage with cyanotype; I have a lot of confidence and trust with the chemistry and timing but I feel as though I’ve barely begun deepening the secondary processes available to me, like toning or adjacent methods like anthotype or Solarfast (the latter offers lots of different colors outside of the traditional blue!). I’m also passionate about sharing this magical process with others, and am on the lookout for an ideal, accessible location where I can continue to offer more masks-required cyanotype workshops for people of all ages and abilities here in Portland.

SBP: WHAT IS BRINGING YOU JOY RIGHT NOW?

I’ve been spending a lot of time in parks lately, and I feel really lucky and grateful when a dog or baby locks eyes with me and demands to become my friend. Like, when a dog you just met gives you The Lean or crouches beneath your legs like you’re its protector, that’s like the highest compliment. 

SBP: ANY UPCOMING EVENTS?

My solo show SUNWORK will be on view at Elbow Room in Portland, Oregon next month! The opening reception is on Sunday, October 26 from 3:00 – 6:00 pm and will be up through November 27. I’m also part of a little co-op called Grover’s Curiosity Shop where I sling prints, stickers, cards and more, and we host sweet and weird events there. My website is rchlmldr.com and there you can easily sign up for my newsletter or find my online shop. I offer a selection of prints where 25% of my sales are shared with Palestinians and mutual aid efforts in Gaza, like the anticapitalist mutual aid fund Bridge of Solidarity. Last, I have a Patreon where at the $5 tier or higher you get monthly postcards in the mail as well as behind the scenes process stuff, discounts in my shop and more.

Rachel Mulder (she/they) lives in Portland, Oregon, with her two cats, Opal and Tomasina. She was born in rural Wisconsin and when she was small she spent a lot of time sitting in the grass staring, obsessing about animals, watching cartoons and peeling her skin off. Now she makes drawings using a variety of media that often yield printmakerly textures – residual effects from earning her BFA in Printmaking at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2007. A process-oriented artist, her work vacillates back and forth between the meticulous and obsessive to playful experimentation and experientiality. Whether it’s drawing with human hair, mud, cyanotype, gel pen or graphite, her imagery explores human connection, expression, and the strangeness of existing in a body. Encouraging others (and herself) to create/exist sincerely is a parallel passion of hers that braids itself into her visual work.

Three Poems // Wheeler Light

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Image: Louis K. Harlow

I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE ACROSS THE COUNTRY

BY WHEELER LIGHT

or down the country, or around the country.
The country, an exercise in understanding the space

of the country. I do not care if you are my friend
or my best friend or a collection of memories

I can talk to about the memories you are.
I do not care about meaning or anger

or hope or apocalypse when I care about laughter.
I do not care if it makes sense to call you

too many times in a day until you pick up
to tell you a joke you will like and laugh and laugh.

What I care about is distance as a measure
of effort to overcome said distance. If the distance

between us is the country, then the effort
is the world. You are a world away. I am

a world away. When I stare into the middle
of nowhere, you are there laughing at the joke

I traveled around the world to tell you.

THE BAD NEWS

BY WHEELER LIGHT

You wake up
knowing nothing.

The day, the shape
of a chrysanthemum

bell. Unraveling
is the start

of eventually hoping.
Oh, I too mistake

disaster
for salvation.

I take my medication
the same as anyone else,

staring at myself
in the bathroom mirror

to see what I recognize.
My actions reflected—

the bad news
is the actions.

The good news
is the reflecting.

Mistaking the self
for its consequences.

Mistaking the self
for anything at all.

The bad news
is the self.

The good news
is waiting at the end

of the illuminating
hallway of you.

SAWMILL RUN

BY WHEELER LIGHT

Writing about a mountain
because there is a mountain.

Photographs of the mountain
capture more than words

can carve out of enjambment’s
live edge. Oranges and reds

at the end of fall litter
my eyes with the image

I try to translate into imagery.
Can’t you see the green

peeking between naked birch
trees? The sun reflecting off

the fog blanketing everything?
A photograph is a headstone

which mourns the moment
it was taken. Up the road,

there is another overlook
and another. Different angles

to view the jagged document
of time, these peaks erupting

and softening over enough millennia,
their existence nearly makes you forget

dry brush, pipelines, controlled
burns, doe crossing the road doesn’t

make it. The present, a cloud of smoke
invisible behind the cliff in the distance.

Writing about the earth
because there is the earth

cracking its knuckles
and arching its back.

At the overlook, I get out of the car
and step on a pile of broken glass.

Wheeler Light received his MFA in creative writing from University of Virginia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Barely South, and Allium, among other publications. You can find his poems at www.wheelerlight.net.

Sinew // Three Poems by KD Hack

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment
Image: David Young
EDITOR’S NOTE: THESE POEMS ARE BEST READ
ON TEXT OR HORIZONTALLY ON A MOBILE DEVICE.

LAGNIAPPE

BY KD HACK

I could’ve held you / the whole night / through / the wilderness / of my body-mind / asks /
too many questions / but I am parched / & prefer / too many answers / meet me / at every
river bank / along the Mississippi / your name / a prayer / my name / a promise / your kiss / a
wish / it’s good medicine / it’s my command / teach me / something sweet / something
mother-father-auntie-grandma / tongue / I want / the knowledge / to blacken on / my tongue
/ I want / the taste / to linger / the lagniappe / of a love / freshwater / & somehow / still
molten / I molted / here / on these rocks / slippery / but not too heavy / to hold /  I will bring
them / back / to you / like precious stones / like something / we might build with / the levees
won’t break / there / the gumbo will be / glorious / & the bowls / never empty / bring your
spoons / bring your lover’s lover / bring your appetite / bottomless / as the river / where we
sent up Hail Marys / like shooting stars / fletting but full / of feeling / a feast / we won’t soon
forget.

DIOSCOREA POLYSTACHYA

BY KD HACK
Fairy 
as in 
frolick 
as in 
               lick
my faggity ass
while you’re at it 
we’re all wild
	here 
& freer
than 
they want us 
to think 
when the water 
grew 
too frigid to dip 
a toe into 
my friend 
               fluorescent 
in the finger-smudged 
mirror made 
             a man 
out of mascara 
& might 
& I might not be
convincing anyone 
but myself 
but you 
can kiss
my faggity ass 
& even my lips
while you’re at it
I promise
I won’t bite 
unless you ask
	nightly 
I wish 
for whiskers 
I whisper 
in their ear  
let me 
              come 
nearer 
let me 
             come
closer
to the fairy prince
I promised 
to be 
in the woods
where we dug
our faggity fingers
in the soil
in the seams 
making streams
across our bodies
I’d dig a grave
in the space 
	      between
your breasts 
& your	belly 
my legs melt 
into jelly
when you lick me
	       hard
enough 
this is not 
a metaphor
this is not 
a death wish
this is 
a grave 
I’m digging 
down where 
the fairy potatoes 
grow I am not 
asking 
you to 
             die 
but to be
	      reborn
beneath the soil
I’ll meet you 
down there
soon.

BLOOD MOON

BY KD HACK
Blood Moon

KD Hack is a Queer/Trans writer, Death Doula & land steward. Their artistic practices were nourished across the Northwoods of Wisconsin, & reside in the spaces between fingers in the soil & pencils on the page. His work is featured in Peach Fuzz, Fruitslice, Querencia Press, Transfix, Tence, & Volume One, among others.

Mending Bones // Hillary Gonzalez

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment
Image: Matt Artz

MENDING BONES

BY HILLARY GONZALEZ

In college, I sat in a room, painfully
lit by the overhead fluorescents,
at an uncomfortable desk meant
for someone much shorter than me,
listening to my Anthropology professor,
as he asked a room full of half-awake
students, what the first evidence of civilization was.
It was a test, which most people failed.
One intrepid student answered Egypt,
another offered the presence of agriculture,
others stared blankly–waiting for an answer.
It was a broken bone, he said.
Thousands of years ago,
a human broke their femur–
that long bone connecting hip to knee.
Had they been an animal,
they would have been left,
weakened and alone,
And as the day shortened
into the terrors of a wild night,
other animals would have crept in, no doubt,
circled around them, picking
them off as the weakest in the herd.
But this human was cared for.
Their bone was mended.
This was the pivotal sign that other humans
had wanted to care for them,
had perhaps thought of them as family,
had perhaps loved them.
Today, as I scroll on my phone,
I see video after video
of people begging to be seen as human,
of children whose limbs were blown off,
of people with no homes
holding up signs that say, “hungry,”
and I wonder if we can
still call ourselves a civilization?
Somewhere along the line,
perhaps when we traded
oral tradition for computer screens,
and living off what the earth
so readily wants to give to us,
for speedy factory convenience,
we forgot about the human
with the broken femur.
we forgot that deep down in our lineage,
we share the same tree roots.
now, I see signs in my city
as people march down the street,
saying “Jesus was a refugee,”
and I wonder if the people
yelling at the ones protesting
to protect our siblings,
would they even recognize
the face of their god,
if he were holding up a sign
in that same crowd,
demanding the deportations stop.
When did we lose our humanity?
What will it take for us
to see the value in mending
bones again–not for profit,
but because it’s what the spirit needs?

Hillary Gonzalez (she/they) is a Baltimore based queer, disabled, and AuDHD poet, whose work explores themes of eco-consciousness and reconnecting with the land, identity, and healing. They are the authors of Seasons and Wild Unfelt World, a collection of eco-poetry coming in 2026 from Gnashing Teeth Publishing. Their poems have been published by South Broadway Press, and in anthologies by Bi+ Book Gang, Yellow Arrow Publishing, Loblolly Press’ zine: Understory, a fundraising anthology for the victims of Hurricane Helene, and In Praise of Despair, an anthology for disabled artists by Beyond the Veil Press.