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PROMISE RINGS Bailey Moore Butterflies on silver wings tie silver strings On our fingers Blue skies, dark eyes Do you remember? Long days. No life Asking what am I? A pebble among the thousands Another grain among the bunch A tree in the forest Something easily overseen. Out of touch? You know When it rains it pours When I cry it storms, Sunshine What I’d give to see from your eyes A vision An after-image A reason Wings fluttering and suns setting Through the clouds and fields of blue I will be there for you Bailey Moore Bailey Moore: I live in a small Halloween-loving town with my family, including two cats and a dog. I love reading, writing, and playing games. I’ve worked with a lot of different mediums, but I have enjoyed working with oils the most. I plan to transfer to a university and pursue my degree in fine arts.

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

MISSION STATEMENT The Bellwether Review is Portland Community College Rock Creek’s literary magazine. Our mission is to showcase the original writing and art from both students and artistically inclined folks from the greater community. We aim to publish diverse bodies of work from a variety of voices. All submissions go through a fair and democratic process, which ensures the highest quality of work is selected. The Bellwether Review commemorates the hard work and dedication of all those involved in its creation.

WANT TO SEE YOUR WORK PUBLISHED IN THE BELLWETHER REVIEW? The Bellwether Review primarily seeks to promote the work of Portland Community College students, but we also consider a limited number of submissions from the general public. Any individual can submit up to 5 poems, 2 short stories, 2 scripts, 2 creative nonfiction essays, and/or 4 pieces of visual artwork. We generally do not publish research essays or works over 5,000 words. All works submitted will be reviewed and taken into consideration by our editorial team! Submit your work(s) via e-mail to bellwetherreview@gmail.com . Written works should be submitted as a .docx file, and visual artwork as a print quality .jpeg or .png file. All submissions must be titled. Include your name, list of titles submitted, and phone number in the submission email, which should be sent from your PCC email address, if you have one. Submission files should not have your name or identifying information within the file itself. All contributors will receive a copy of The Bellwether Review . Send your work to bellwetherreview@gmail.com by April 6, 2025 to be considered for our next edition.

Spring 2023 art poetry fiction Nonfiction Thank you for visiting our website. The Bellwether Review is a literary journal that hopes to promote and inspire creativity amongst those not only at PCC Rock Creek, but throughout the community. We hope you take the time to review these great pieces that were sent in to us and selected for publication by our editorial team. Visit our Submissions page if you are interested in having your work considered for publication. Email us at bellwetherreview@gmail.com with any questions. Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, This edition of The Bellwether Review is special in two ways from previous editions. It is the first print edition to be published after the Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, and will be the first edition to be published alongside its online companion at bellwetherreview.com . Our editing team is honored and privileged to have witnessed the amazing levels of beauty, creativity, bravery, thought, and emotion infused by the Contributors into all of their submissions. Each piece was reviewed, discussed, and carefully selected by us with you, and a profound respect for the act of artistic creation, in mind. The Bellwether Review is created by the students of Portland Community College for the purpose of being enjoyed by all it can reach, and the editorial team would like to thank you for exploring and enjoying the contributions of our fellow students contained within these pages. With gratitude, The 2023 Editorial Team Copyright © 2023 Portland Community College Portland Community College reserves all rights to the material contained herein for the contributors’ protection. On publication, all rights revert to the respective authors and artists.

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

NOTICE Nancy McKinley Wagner Hey, you . . . did you perhaps notice something as you passed this way? Did something wonderful try to sneak into the corner of your eye? Did you resist? Did you notice the lovely little sparrow singing its song? Did you hear the hopefulness in its shrill? Did it make you feel alive and connected to the whole wide world? Or did you simply pass by? Allow me to let you in on a secret; there is an innate knowledge that’s been washed away by a good scrubbing and an infantile belief that the world must be conquered in the name of progress. We live in a world of concrete, of chemicals and of hard steel and flimsy plastics. It is a place of indifference and of a strange superiority that dares to look down on the soil of the good earth like it’s something dirty. The sound of traffic is amplified by the tall fences that skirt the sides of the wide boulevard. People enveloped by cars speed by. Every one of them wears a crumpled forehead of practiced concentration accompanied by an intense and slightly sorrowful scowl. There is not one smile among them, not one. The striped song sparrow tries to get your attention. It is in a bush near the entrance of your building. It sings its lovely song. Its little throat vibrates with every note. The roar of traffic almost drowns it out but if you listen—if you stop and take a moment to notice this tiny life right there in front of you, singing its heart out, you may be able to receive its message. You may then realize, if you haven’t already, that you, all-powerful human, and this small, seemingly insignificant creature are kin. If we don’t notice something, we don’t notice when it’s gone. Humankind’s expansive growth has left our precious wildlife with nowhere to go. And we are losing our precious birds. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, habitat loss poses by far the greatest threat to birds, both directly and indirectly, more so than any other cause ("Threats to Birds "). It is essential to conserve what we have and rewild and restore what places we can that will make the most impact. Our natural world is our home as well as it is home to the sparrow and all the other creatures. All life on this Earth is connected. It is up to us all to do our part. Desmond Tutu, the Nobel prize winning Archbishop, once said, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” I believe that wholeheartedly. We have inherited this good Earth from our ancestors, just as others have before them, but never has the Earth needed us as it does now. It goes beyond recycling and reusing, it entails a rethinking of what it means to be human and live on this planet. Coexisting in harmony and working with nature instead of against her. This is a way of thinking we must teach our children who will ultimately inherit it all from us. The little sparrow is a canary in a coal mine, singing a warning and a plea. My hope is that we listen. Nancy McKinley Wagner Nancy McKinley Wagner is a business major with a love for nature and writing. Writer of nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry centered on the natural world and its wondrous and beautiful connection to the human spirit, she lives with her family in Beaverton, Oregon.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to acknowledge that the home of The Bellwether Review , Portland Community College’s Rock Creek campus, is located on the land of the Atfalati-Kalapuya tribes (also known as Tualatin Kalapuya), who were among the First People living in what we currently call Washington County. In 1855, the Atfalati tribes were forced to sign a treaty relinquishing ownership of their land . Today, the Kalapuya people are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, located southwest of Washington County. We also want to acknowledge and thank the original stewards of the land throughout the area which PCC serves today, including the Molalla; the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinook; as well as the many other Tribes who have made their homes along the Columbia River. We, the editors, have chosen to include this land acknowledgment as an active commitment to supporting contemporary Indigenous sovereignty by promoting awareness and fostering dialogue as a contribution toward decolonizing the oppression which has resulted from systemic policies of colonization—including genocide, relocation, broken treaties, and assimilation. The Bellwether Review seeks to highlight the diversity of linguistic and artistic expression of student voices on the Rock Creek campus and throughout the PCC community; with this in mind, we want to acknowledge the absence of voices that might otherwise have been thriving today, if it were not for the practices of forced cultural assimilation that leads to the loss of fluency in local Indigenous languages. The last known fluent speaker of Tualatin Northern Kalapuya, Louis Kenoyer ( baxawádas ), died in 1937. Kenoyer’s memoir, My Life: Reminiscences of a Grande Ronde Reservation Childhood , translated into English from Tualatin Northern Kalapuya, is available at the PCC Rock Creek Library. We encourage readers of The Bellwether Review to honor the journal’s connection to the history of the land upon which it is produced by supporting and promoting organizations that are working to cultivate and honor contemporary Indigenous cultures in a variety of ways, such as PCC’s Native Nations Club , Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde , Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians , The NAYA Family Center , Salmon Nation , and the First Nations’ Native Language Immersion Initiative . Learn more about the Kalapuya people by exploring Kalapuyan Tribal History , Pacific University’s Indigenous History of Oregon , and the Five Oaks Museum’s online exhibition, This IS Kalapuyan Land . The Bellwether Review editorial team would like to thank PCC Native Nations Club Coordinator Karry Kelley (Yahooskin/Modoc) and Dr. Blake Hausman (Cherokee Nation), PCC faculty in English and Native American Studies, for advising us on crafting this acknowledgment.

The Bellwether Review A Student-Led Literary and Arts Journal Spring 2023 art poetry fiction Nonfiction Thank you for visiting our website. The Bellwether Review is a literary journal that hopes to promote and inspire creativity amongst those not only at PCC Rock Creek, but throughout the community. We hope you take the time to review these great pieces that were sent in to us and selected for publication by our editorial team. Visit our Submissions page if you are interested in having your work considered for publication. Email us at bellwetherreview@gmail.com with any questions. Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, This edition of The Bellwether Review is special in two ways from previous editions. It is the first print edition to be published after the Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, and will be the first edition to be published alongside its online companion at bellwetherreview.com . Our editing team is honored and privileged to have witnessed the amazing levels of beauty, creativity, bravery, thought, and emotion infused by the Contributors into all of their submissions. Each piece was reviewed, discussed, and carefully selected by us with you, and a profound respect for the act of artistic creation, in mind. The Bellwether Review is created by the students of Portland Community College for the purpose of being enjoyed by all it can reach, and the editorial team would like to thank you for exploring and enjoying the contributions of our fellow students contained within these pages. With gratitude, The 2023 Editorial Team MEET THE 2023 EDITORS Copyright © 2023 Portland Community College Portland Community College reserves all rights to the material contained herein for the contributors’ protection. On publication, all rights revert to the respective authors and artists.

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