Nonfiction The Ginger Remains Crescent Holiday The first words I spoke to my then-future husband were, “Don’t fall in love with me.” His response was, “I think it’s already too late.” Memento Mori Katherine Bryant Joy can be contagious. When you see a broad and toothy smile, eyes squinted and creased at the corners, you can’t help but feel joy yourself... No Longer Shackled Kristina Landrum Dear Methamphetamine, When I was fourteen, you introduced me to your liquid charm encased in the syringe of euphoria, and I surrendered to your manipulations... War Through Chan's Eyes Chan Truong Jones “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness,” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once said. These words resonate deeply with me because although I was born after the wars were over in Vietnam, their impact remained constant in my life... Read More Read More Read More Read More

Poetry Why I Write Read More Megan McGrory I always say that I’ve been writing before I could write. / As a young girl, I dictated stories to my mother... Twelve Bridges Read More Terra Patrie One is for not looking down because you’re petrified you’re going to fall through to the river below. / Two is for crossing back over... An Ode to My Cat Read More Megan McGrory When I collapse on the couch ready to rest, my cat comes with his tail held high./ A cloud of black fur with a squeaky meow and loud purr. / He settles by my side, unaware of the joy and comfort he brings... Far Away in a Place Nearby Read More Sarah Myton Where the owl hoots in the morning / And the birds sing at night... Late Fruit Read More Sarah Myton In the dark of winter / we hide away / In the comfort of our homes... golden (h)our Read More Eleanor Song in my mind we laugh in a glowing field. / the sun laughs with us, peeking past a calm horizon... 1,000,000+ Pieces (Some Lost) Read More Terra Patrie Wouldn’t it be so nice / to not have to solve the puzzle / of every broken thing you encounter? grandfather clock Read More Eleanor Song on the plane ride home i wondered what it must be like to mourn your life as you live it; you sat there with me, almost... Used Book Review Read More Dean Wilson This book of poetry is not new / the pages are flagged / and yellowed... Why I Risked the Strikeout Read More Terra Patrie 1) If you’re afraid of the ball, you’ll never win... Dirt Poor Read More Crescent Holiday I grew up / as free and wild as the blackberries... Over the Under Waves Read More Moriendi Lenore Is this what quicksand feels like? / Ocean waves dampen the sand / around my feet with each return... Moon Gardening on a Funeral Pyre Read More Moonrose Doherty This offering / subsumed / fires that burn on water... Peace Machete Read More Moriendi Lenore A naturally curious mind is stuck with me / Forever wishing and hoping to wander so / It is never content to sit and just be... Two Years Older Read More Sarah Myton Two years older / Makes you wiser and bolder / and smarter than I’ll ever be... Nights Read More Nikolai Neerenberg A graphite-stained sky (minus the moon) / Watches my copper-stained fingers... Recipe for Conduits Read More Moonrose Doherty Stop waiting / rattlesnake resting / for brilliance to strike / you must open your mouth... dyspraxic Read More J. Artemis Mackay limbs find unsteady / rest, weak upon the earth / stirring from the bird-song dawn... Fucking rip, I kinda liked you Read More Moriendi Lenore Brown doe eyes stare at a ‘Wolf’ in disbelief, she wonders what she did wrong— / Panicked fight, blade makes a mess... Sludge House Read More J. Artemis Mackay this place looks like shit / you know it’s / going to be great... Devil-Damned Read More Shane Allison When my mother speaks of how my father has hurt her over the years, / She acts as if each time is the first. As if him being a bastard / Is something she never saw in him before... An Ode to the Unsung Heroes of My Home Read More Shamik Banerjee Music is anodyne, but what compares / to our rice steamer’s ‘hissing’? Oh! that sound / flies to each corner, even down the stairs, / and makes our home a curry-cooker’s ground... Home Economics Read More Shane Allison I’d like to think that Mrs. President, / My ninth-grade home Economics teacher, / Is in heaven... Amir Nisha Read More Shamik Banerjee Congested footpaths slowed us down that day. / The sun, imperious, laughed during noon / And mocked our plodding as we made our way / To your most-stopped-by marketplace that June... A Foreign Being Read More Aster Aliaj It’s a division of the heart, sir / If I could, I would make myself whole / I would / Your laws bar my way... Kids Read More Shane Allison In my dream we are two best friends / lying on our bellies reading comic books / strewn across your bedroom floor. Intrusion Read More Dean Wilson Calm, serene, peaceful... Rose City Read More J. Artemis Mackay Impurity / midwinter baptism / rain motor oil swells concrete... Read More

ART ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES Dame Christa Fowles Oil on board 12 x 12 in cover on print edition Farsighted Adam Idris Photograph Everyone Mark Strehlow Ink on paper 16 x 10 in Old Town Portland Early Morning Blake L. Johnson Photograph 20 x 15 in Intrusion Dean Wilson Photograph The Procession Mark Strehlow Ink, charcoal, and pencil on paper 18 x 24 in Kitchen in Blue Christa Fowles Oil on board 24 x 30 in Crickets Mark Strehlow Charcoal and white charcoal on paper 11 x 8 in Grouch LW Woods Stricklin Digital photograph The Dinner Guest Dean Wilson Photograph Eternal Life Addie Berry Screenprint 14 x 11 in Big Step on the Big Stepping Stone Adam Idris Digital photograph Growth Grows from my Fingertips Carter Kohler Digital illustration 11 x 16 in Leaving Home LW Woods Stricklin Digital photograph Hug Dean Wilson Linoleum print on drawing paper 1 x 2 in Gene's Christa Fowles Oil on board 18 x 24 in moonglade Eleanor Song Stickers on paper 6.5 x 8.5 in Brooke Benefits Shane Allison Mixed media collage 9 x 12 in Force Field Shane Allison Magazine page & mixed media 9 x 12 in The Garden Mark Strehlow Ink and oil pastel on paper 20 x 10 in Goose Witch Hannah Lavender Gouache on paper 9.5 x 7.5 in Aerial at City Hall Adam Idris Digital photograph

< Back Memento Mori Katherine Bryant Joy can be contagious. When you see a broad and toothy smile, eyes squinted and creased at the corners, you can’t help but feel joy yourself. We often find ourselves smiling back at our photographs, feeling overcome with nostalgia, remembering that day fondly, or missing the people or time we are observing. It means even more to catch that momentary laughter, when the subject hasn’t had many reasons to smile. And just as quickly as it comes, the joy will abandon you when you remember that he is dead. In the photo above, we will meet my dad. I say we because I, too, do not know him. He’s pictured here on a sticky, humid day in Houston, Texas. The year is 1989, and he has just become a father—my father. He is in the courtyard of his apartment, a run-down, low-income complex occupied mostly by immigrants. You can see the faded siding, a result of the blazing Texas sun, which is contrasted by nicely manicured landscaping. He has a huge smile, an authentic one that can be seen in every feature of his face. He may even be in mid-laugh. He is shirtless, exposing four tattoos. The one on his shoulder looks like a grave, but it is hard to tell what it actually is. It is in a sketchy prison style and all black. The one on his bicep is the profile of a woman with a spider web. She is my mother. On his bare chest you can see a tank top tan line and two more tattoos. There is a thick and dark scorpion tattoo, and another tattoo he received during one of his many incarcerations. He has dress pants on and a belt to keep them from falling off his small, yet muscular frame. He always insisted on wearing dress pants, even in the intolerable heat and humidity. It was his way of presenting himself as someone to be respected. The unfortunate reality was, as a Vietnamese immigrant he was treated as second class in Texas. His proclivities tended to be unsavory at best, and illegal at worst. With few options as a teenage refugee, no knowledge of the English language, no family, and not enough money to survive, he quit his low-paying, abusive jobs and opted to chase money the easier way—with guns. Along with the dress pants, he was always quite particular about his hair. Here it is thick and dark. It’s nicely styled with an unmistakable ’80s volume. It is impressive for someone with stick-straight, Southeast Asian hair texture. My mom is behind the camera. Perhaps she said or did something humorous to elicit this giant grin. What you cannot see here is the reality of living in poverty and crime. You cannot see the police sirens, the gunshots, the cockroaches, and yelling from the neighbors’ apartment. You can not see his prison record, the thefts he’s committed, his murder trial, the guns, the cocaine, or the violence. Still, with this secondhand knowledge of the tumultuous life led by the man in the photo, to me, at first impression, this photograph is pure joy. It is a priceless moment in time of the person I never got to know. I see a man in love and happy, radiating his pride in being sober, out of jail, and having a new baby girl. You can, in some ways, still see the little boy inside of him. There is a glimpse of the person before the forced family separation, boats, and refugee camps. When we express pure happiness and excitement, it is the closest, as adults, we will get to our younger selves, before trauma, before pain, and before the worries and pressures of the world. In this moment he looks content, and he has nothing but promise and potential ahead of him. He is twenty-four and starting to plan out the life he wants and the life he will create for his family. He is trying to find a way to survive that does not involve crime and gang activity. This photo is now a cherished reminder of the parts of him that were good, and the parts of him that showed love. As writer Susan Lee Sontag muses, “Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people … of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie” (16). This is how I choose to see him even after knowing the fate he will meet just after I turn two years old. The truth is, he was not able to fulfill the hopes he had in this snapshot, and his promise was snuffed out prematurely. He was gunned down in broad daylight, a victim of homicidal violence. It was an almost ironically karmic ending to his much too short life. Because he is gone and left me before I had the opportunity to make memories of him, this photo also shows all things lost and things he and we will never become. I see experiences ripped away from me. I see hair that will never turn gray, smile lines that won’t become permanent fixtures of his face and eyes that will never shed a tear at my wedding. Earlier in her writing Sontag states “A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori” (15). This sentiment beautifully depicts the pull of negative emotions I experience today, holding his picture in my hands. In some ways, every single photograph we take will become a weapon to inflict pain on those that loved us once we are gone. To see someone on a piece of glossy paper that you will never get to hug, to smell, to hear and know their voice, is its own form of torture. I do not know the sound of the laugh that he’s making in this image. I sometimes can not bring myself to look at it because when I do, suddenly the hole in my heart rips wide open and the feelings of joy I caught by staring at that smile are replaced with tears and a feeling of profound deprivation. The bias I have in glamorizing someone important to me that has passed is not the rule when observing this image. My mother looks upon it and is filled with memories, both beautiful and horrific. The man here to her, is much different than the one I daydream him to be within my imagination. He is the man that abandoned her, that put her in harm’s way, that cheated and lied to her, and disappeared for weeks at a time. He is also the man that loved her the most. He is the man that made her a mother and gave her the gift that saved her life and gave her purpose. She has a familiar but vastly different conflict when the memories of the photograph come flooding back to her. He left her just as much as he left me, but she is both punished and gifted with the shared experiences with him that I do not have. My father used to refer to himself as “fey,” which means doomed or fated to die. He mentioned with frequency he would not be here long, as if to predict the future he knew he would not have. Perhaps this photo was for me, too little to remember the man shown here when it was taken. This photograph is an intentional donation of a laugh I will never hear. He is forever twenty-four, smiling into the sun, my mom making him grin ear to ear. The joy of that humid Texas day in 1989 will live forever through this image, but a photograph is only a moment in time, and eventually, we all must die. Author Bio Katherine Bryant is a full time PCC student in pursuit of an undergraduate in Social Work and then a degree in Law. She greatly enjoys reading and writing, particularly emotionally driven nonfiction. When she’s not studying or writing, she’s running her business in downtown Portland or spending time with her partner and four dogs.

The Bellwether Review 2020 Art Poetry Fiction Groundswell Archive Best Essay Winner

< Back Intrusion Dean Wilson Calm, serene, peaceful in your private world and way, you disturb my peace. Author Bio Dean Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Canby, Oregon, whose creative work spans both photography and the written word. His photograph "Quiet Time" was featured in Fifty Years, Fifty Artists: A Celebration of the West , and his work has been exhibited at Northview Gallery and Blue Sky: Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. His images have also appeared in Uncommon , a publication by the Portland Photographers Forum, as well as The Bellwether Review . Dean’s poetry and prose have been published in the Lewis and Clark Review , Alchemy Magazine , and The Bellwether Review . Driven by a lifelong need to create, he approaches his art with a spirit of exploration—often blending visual storytelling with reflective narrative. Refusing to be confined by style or subject, Dean embraces both photography and writing as open-ended conversations with the world around him.

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.

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

< Back Fucking rip, I kinda liked you Moriendi Lenore Brown doe eyes stare at a ‘Wolf’ in disbelief, she wonders what she did wrong— Panicked fight, blade makes a mess. A lamb watches, ‘Fucking rip, I guess’ ‘Fucking rip, this is a mess to clean.’ She chose the painful way out. Faded red dye, brown eyes adore us both. She doesn’t mind the mess. Devoted brown eyes gaze at a ‘Wolf’, understanding c’est la vie in the cabin. Quick slash, she didn’t suffer. A lamb sighs, ‘Fucking rip, I kinda liked you’ Badges, sirens, my eyes meet a quick slash. A sacrificial Lamb— ‘Fucking rip me’—time passes, scars fade, knowledge gained, tarot read. The cards are flipped, why am I here—tarot read—she sees without knowing how close to the truth she is. ‘Fucking rip, you fascinate me.’ Friends with a badge hidden in plain sight, the truth in our mothers’ graves. A bond I don’t want to shake. ‘Fucking rip, why are you a magnet for death.’ Tricked by a ‘Wolf’, blades meet. His cold grin of proudness ends our bond. Safe, together, two lambs—one with teeth. ‘Fucking rip, I kinda care about you.’ Author Bio Moriendi Lenore is a Southern California native who moved to Oregon in 2008. They are finishing up their second year at PCC and plan to pursue a degree in Creative Writing and Film Studies. Their writing tends to focus around all things that go bump in the night; along with variations of folklore and mythology. When not at home with their cat, Schrödinger, working on projects or playing TTRPGs with friends, they are with their dog, Chopper, and can be found hiking around Oregon.

< Back Kids Shane Allison In my dream we are two best friends lying on our bellies reading comic books strewn across your bedroom floor. The sugar rush from the wad of Big League gum we’re chewing is assurance that we’ll be up all night reading The Fantastic Four , Captain America , and Superman back when they were seventy-five cents. We hang loose at your parent’s house because my mother is afraid we’ll break something, that we’ll track in dirt from playing outside. She offers us Cheetos and Capri Suns to stay away. Our friendship is impenetrable like a GI Joe tank. Nothing can break us after the pinky swears and blood oaths we take using the pocket knife stolen from my dad’s glove box. We go around collecting worms in jelly jars, burning ants under a magnifying glass. When the black neighborhood kids ask, Why are you always hanging out with that white boy? I tell them to shut up and hold them in headlocks until they say sorry. I am the biggest kid in school like The Thing from The Fantastic Four . Mother would never let him in the house. I had this dream where we were kids with superpowers, who could fly over buildings, shoot red beams out of our eyes and bend crowbars like licorice ropes. I wish I had grown up with you in Tallahassee or Kettering, Ohio. I could have used a friend like you. Author Bio 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 many 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 Books), Slut Machine (Rebel Satori Press), Sweet Sweat (Hysterical Books), and, most recently, I Want to Eat Chinese Food Off Your Ass (Dumpster Fire Press). He has edited twenty-five anthologies of gay erotica and has written two novels, You’re the One I Want and Harm Done (Simon and Schuster Publishing). Allison’s collage work has graced the pages of Shampoo , Unlikely Stories , Pnpplzine.com, Palavar Arts Magazine , The Southeast Review , South Broadway Review , Postscript Magazine , and a plethora of others. Allison is at work on a new novel and is always at work making a collage here and there.