2022 Theme Meet the 2022 Editors Fiction Nonfiction Poetry Scripts Art Bellwether Review 2022 A Search for Meaning This year, we discovered that many of our submissions related to a search for meaning throughout year two of the pandemic. This search manifested in a cycle of experiences, as shown below. Experiencing Loss and Injustice Finding Strength and Surviving Discovering and Creating Finding Strength and Surviving A Cycle Feeling Trapped and Imprisoned Finding Strength and Surviving Finding Strength and Surviving Finding Strength and Surviving Works Browse our wide array of stories, poetry, and art. View all

BELLWETHER REVIEW Poetry Check out our prestigiously chosen works from the students of PCC. Here you'll find some of our beautifully written short stories Our Flash Non-Fiction pieces are sure to capture your attention. Our Spring Collection Fiction Nonfiction Art See our new pieces of photography and art that were phenomenally crafted. About Welcome Editors 2021 Contributors 2021 A Literary Magazine like no other. Cover Art by: Jessica Graber

A TALE OF EVERY NIGHT Shamik Banerjee By midnight, once his bottle’s downed and trashed, They sprawl out on the couch and talk of stuff Still unresolved: which tutor for their son Can make his Latin-fearing brain more tough, Some loan-related duty yet undone, Or which investments need to be encashed. Amidst such things, if something unrequired Sprouts like a weed upon a verdant yard— Some past discordance or unfounded blame— It makes the husband seize her, all off-guard, Distressing her with words that sear like flame. No sense of fault can douse his evil fire. And she, the lesser, stands there like a wall, Mute to his waistbelt’s whips. Perhaps, such wild Savagery even beasts would seldom use. She finds a little corner, and their child Has ample proof before him to deduce The weak’s meant to be trampled after all. Shamik Banerjee Shamik Banerjee is a formalist poet from Assam, India, where he resides with his parents. His poems have been published by The Society of Classical Poets, Sparks of Calliope , The Hypertexts , Snakeskin , Ekstasis , Ink Sweat & Tears , and Autumn Sky Daily , among others.

THE WHISPER OF THE RAIN Brooklyn Shepard It was a stark and unforgiving mid-winter’s evening in western Oregon. This was my second time in Corvallis in a week. The light from the Shari’s sign reflected off our faces, casting a morbid glow on the pavement. Sitting on the ground of a rain-soaked parking lot, I held Jason’s uncalloused hand as he bled to death. The dark rivulets spreading out from his body were growing into a puddle, somehow avoiding the place where I sat, as if they too blamed me for their presence. “I . . . I think I got shot,” Jason spoke quietly. Three days prior, my daughter had called me, hysterical on the phone, blubbering out, “He hit me.” I already wasn’t fond of Jason Williams. While my daughter, Cha’uri, felt he was a mature and distinguished older guy, I just saw him as the nearly thirty-year-old who was dating my barely legal daughter. I may have been able to get past that, but he had been accused of molesting his much-younger sister when she was a baby, and he was all too often around my infant granddaughters. When my youngest granddaughter was born to Cha’uri and Jason, the Department of Health and Human Services stepped in and refused to let Nova go home with him. They called me early on the second morning of my daughter’s hospital stay and asked if I would take the girls until Jason completed a psychosexual parameters test. We didn’t expect that he would refuse, but he did. At the time of the incident, I was living in Forest Grove, a tiny agricultural town two hours north of Corvallis. It was a harshly beautiful night. There was no moon out, and the stars glinted hard like chips of quartz freshly dug out of their earth. The highway was lonely, and headlights spit their beams through my windshield in stark bursts breaking up long periods of darkness. During my frantic drive south, Cha’uri and Jason had the ill grace to make up, and she sent me a text right before I left the interstate telling me to turn around. She tried to assure me that she was fine; it was all a big misunderstanding. But once a plate is broken, no amount of glue can put it back exactly the same as it was before. I convinced her to meet up with me, and we talked, but she decided not to go home with me, to stay instead with Jason. No amount of my considerable persuasion could change her mind. She was definitely my daughter. Stubborn as a mule. I couldn’t let it go. My boyfriend of the time, an ex-Army grunt, pitched one solution that would remove Jason from ever being a problem again. If the United States Armed Forces is good at anything, it’s at training its recruits that killing another person is a solution to most problems. The next day, I offered to meet up with Cha’uri and Jason for dinner, saying I had something to talk to Jason about. I never intended to have a conversation with him. Upon arriving at the Shari’s Saturday evening, I expressed a desire to smoke, and predictably, as smokers will do, my daughter and Jason followed outside, bumming smokes off me as we huddled under the bicycle rack out of the rain. I stepped away to drop my filter in the receptacle, and the first shot ricocheted off the bike rack and hit me in the knee. No plan survives the first attempt, and my plan was already going awry. The shots came from across the parking lot, in the wooded area near the cars, and the pops from the gunfire were so loud and so close together that they sounded like fireworks going off in the space between us. I fell to the ground, and saw my daughter, still standing, staring agape at Jason, who lay on the ground behind me. I screamed at Cha’uri to get down, honestly afraid for the first time. What would I do if she got hurt? She dropped and scrambled over to me on hands and knees. I checked her quickly, desperately making sure she wasn’t injured, then shoved her inside the glass-walled entrance to the diner. The door chimed, an incongruous welcoming noise. I crawled over to Jason. He lay on his back, several small red marks scattered across his body, like he had been dotted with a red Sharpie. I could see that none were immediately fatal, but it wouldn’t be long. Suddenly, this wasn’t what I wanted at all. Death, right in front of you, goes from being a distant, sterile concept, to being a real and present event. “I . . . I think I got shot,” Jason whispered to me. I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “You’re going to be fine,” I lied. There was no reason to frighten him. It would be pointlessly cruel. Both of our lives were fading away like the last light from the sky. While he would never hit my daughter again, I hadn’t saved her. I had cost her both her own free will in her relationship choices, and her time with her mother. As I watched her through the plate glass window, safe within the restaurant, I realized I would spend most of the foreseeable future unable to hold her when she needed me or be by her side as she celebrated life. Our lives would be as they were in this moment: me on the outside, watching her, and all too often doing so through glass. The police and ambulance arrived in minutes. It didn’t take the detectives long to arrest my boyfriend and me. I was treated at the Corvallis hospital for a superficial gunshot wound to the knee, and released into the custody of a detective of the Corvallis Police Department. After spending eight months in the county’s ancient and derelict jail, my co-defendant and I were each sentenced to prison time for our roles in Jason’s death. I received eighteen years, and he got twenty-five to life. It could have been worse. I’ve been at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility for a little over eight years. The time has passed quickly, but I’ve missed so much of my life outside of these walls. My granddaughters are now nine and eight years old. Like them, I’ve learned and grown. Most importantly perhaps, I have learned that no one has the right to take life from someone else. It is possibly the only thing we own that is ours alone. The ending of a life is a lot like strong perfume. It’s impossible to put it on someone else without getting a little on yourself. My freedom died with Jason that night in the parking lot, our funeral dirge the whisper of the rain. Brooklyn Shepard Brooklyn Shepard, who also goes by Crescent Holiday, is a resident at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. She takes college courses offered by both Portland Community College and Portland State University, where she majors in English. She is the mother of a number of children including Soriyah, Britain, Iliyana, Indigo, Sterling, and Cha’uri—and she has a husband who is the love of her life. She can be reached by mail for comments and discussion: Brooklyn Shepard/Crescent Holiday CCF #15721242 24499 SW Grahams Ferry Rd. Wilsonville, OR 97070

SMALL TOWN, AMERICA Alli Tschirhart Yes ma’am no sir. In school, we prayed before every football game, the coach hand in hand with the players as amen rings out. Giant pickles wrapped in paper at every single event. Four churches in one square mile. A dog named Bear roamed the streets of town for years before we realized it was a pack of fluffy white dogs all with the same name. Once, through the window of our truck, I saw them, a pride of lions resting after a hunt. We find one on the side of the road one year and collectively grieve for a dog we didn’t really know. An old silo brittle and sharp, roof gone from past storms, we play carelessly, counting down for hide and seek. A vast backyard where we run, wild children screaming and pushing our hands into mud. The sprawling pecan tree in the yard that I spent so much time collecting the nuts from, and then more shelling. The one small bathroom with no windows that we all huddled in as the tornado warning rang out. The worn-out trampoline that my dad would spray in the summer so we could dance with the water, sometimes we would just lay out and watch the stars. Alli Tschirhart Alli Tschirhart is an aspiring writer and poet. From Texas, she enjoys being outdoors and reading, as well as her three cats. Her work has previously been published in The Bellwether Review and Free Verse Revolution . She is continuing her passion for reading and writing at PSU this fall. Instagram ~ @allitschirhart

FAT BOY Shane Allison I’m barely awake checking emails And social media messages When my mother asks me If I want anything from the store. She does this sometimes, As if she’s some kind of space Martian From Mars who is new to planet Earth And doesn’t know her way around a supermarket. With sleep seeds still in my eyes, I tell her to get yogurt, Turkey cold cuts, and chicken pot pies. I tell her to throw waffles in the cart, Plums and green grapes without the seeds. I know she’ll forget most of what I ask For, like kiwi and dragon fruit. Raisin bread instead of Cherry plums. I don’t want to clutter the corners of her mind With things like blackberries and almond milk. Needed ingredients for smoothies To lower my blood pressure. She will come home armed With an arsenal of bags Filled with turkey wings, Ham hocks, Neck bones and frozen okra. Finger cookies for dad And canned vegetables pickled in some soupy, Salty concoction. She’ll come with chocolate milk, Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes, Zero sugar root beer for Dad’s bad blood And her kidney disease, which was News she broke to me in the lobby at the cancer center Minutes before her CAT scan. The calories I burn at Planet Fitness Will only be regained under her reign Where everything must be cooked With butter, bacon, or grease. She doesn’t know that it takes more than push‑ups To flatten a belly like this. A thousand thigh crunches to keep them from rubbing together. My friend Chuck lost 90 pounds on Noom. I would give both my nuts To shed 90 pounds of fried food flesh, Suck out the midnight cravings with a vacuum hose. My mother doesn’t know what it’s like to look down And not be able to see your dick without having To hold your belly in. “You look fat sitting on the sofa,” she told me once. “Are you still going to the gym?” she asked when she Saw me coming out of the bathroom with my shirt off. Tonight I’ll write out a grocery list on the back of this poem: Pork loin Salmon Beet and pomegranate juice Almond milk, Yogurt, Blackberries and whiskey, A little something extra for the smoothies. Shane Allison Shane Allison was bit by the writing bug at the age of fourteen. He spent a majority of his high school life shying away in the library behind desk cubicles writing bad love poems about boys he had crushes on. He has since gone on to publish several chapbooks of poetry, Black Fag , Ceiling of Mirrors , Cock and Balls , I Want to Fuck a Redneck , Remembered Men , and Live Nude Guys , as well as four full-length poetry collections, I Remember (Future Tense), Slut Machine (Rebel Satori), Sweet Sweat (Hysterical), and I Want to Eat Chinese Food off Your Ass (Dumpster Fire). He has edited twenty-five anthologies of gay erotica and has written two novels, You’re the One I Want and Harm Done (Simon & Schuster). Allison’s collage work has graced the pages of Shampoo , Unlikely Stories , Pnpplzine.com , Palavar Arts Magazine , Southeast Review , and a plethora of others. He is at work on a new novel and is always at work making a collage here and there.

PAYING FOR THAT FREE CUP OF COFFEE Dean Wilson Eking out this road trip Scrimping, saving, surviving Somewhere between a frugal gourmet And a dumpster diver. Not quite changing from A can of House Red to A bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Not quite ready, not quite yet. I chose cafés that Honored senior citizens 55 and older while pondering Unaccepted offers from AARP. Free refills are a blessing in disguise, Like the toss of a coin: Never knowing the outcome Until it’s too late. Driving faster to pay For time spent drinking That needed extra cup of caffeine; My drug of choice. “No Services Next 90 Miles” The sign revealed. I had plenty of fuel to go That extra mile. The next corner revealed a line Of 10 MPH, of bumper to bumper. That extra cup doesn’t seem Like a good deal after all. Dean Wilson Born in Oregon, our family moved around a lot. I used my first camera, a 126-roll film from the 1960s, very infrequently. Progressing through the Instamatic days of the 1970s, I bought my first SLT in 1976. This eventually led to a DSLR in 2015 and mirrorless from 2019. Photography is a passion for me that allows me to capture a feeling, mood, or a moment in time that tells a story. I capture landscapes with a creative eye of a place that may have existed for thousands of years or in the blink of an eye, which may suddenly disappear tomorrow. Instagram ~ @DeanWilsonCanby Facebook ~ Dean Wilson Photography

Fiction The Fool Gigi Giangiobbe-Rodriguez The Red's Death Matt Smith

Nonfiction The Whisper of the Rain Brooklyn Shepard Not the Worst Day Sean P. Hotchkiss What If I Got Those Cupcakes? Keith Kunze Notice Nancy McKinley Wagner