Gargoyle Online

# 12

Hello Pretty Pretty by Carl Gopalkrishnan

Table of Contents

fiction

Poetry

Art

Kelli Allen
• And Then You Came Along

Rose Mary Boehm
• The Buddha Beaming Under the Rhubarb Leaf

Ryan Alan Boyle
• The Odds

Drew Bufalini
• Observation from an Alien
Anthropologist at a Starbucks

Tara Campbell
• Making the District of Columbia White
• Our Bright Experiment of Control
• America’s Beautiful Coal Amen
• Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement

Andrew Daniel Dick
• Mr. Salesfloor, Please Come to the Front of the Store

Marcesa Ephemra
• Whence and So Forth

Zary Fekete
• Canning Season (A treatment of the book of Job)

Ben Guterson
• Capsule Biography Number 20–Howard Kaminsky

D. Latta Kübeck
• John Quinn’s Fostoria Repose

Joseph E. Lerner
• The Five Obstructions

Nathan Leslie
• My Blinds are Broken, Can You Fix Them?
• My Micro and Nanoplastic Menagerie
• National Association for Fetus Armament: A Manifesto

Wayne Lockwood
• Ozzymandias
• What Happens When We Die

Justin McDevitt
• Exceptional Person

Chris Pawar
• A Rare Delivery

Gary Percesepe
• Bonaparte
• Greenland, Greenland

Steve Romagnoli
• The Sign

Elizabeth Rosen
• Now We Are Twenty-Two
• Making Sky

Donna Baier Stein
• The Last Snowfall

Maris Catherine Tiller
• Bumper Sticker

Joanna Urban
• Into the Beyond

Vallie Lynn Watson
• Farewell Aeroplane

nonFiction

Andrea Canfield
• Chincoteague: The Most
Miserable Happiest Beach Town

W. D. Ehrhart
• Whitewashing America
• Beautiful Wreckage
• The Farmer

Martin Golan
• It’s All Flat Fives, Man

Karen Laugel
• Mentor

Priscilla Lee
• Where Music Bleeds and Giraffes Parade

Charley Mitcherson
• Veola, Sophie and Claudine

Sharon North
• A USAID Farewell

Steven B. Rogers
• Paris Postcards

Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb
• The Bad Word

Sheryl Stein
• bat mitzvah girl 1978

Robin Tricoles
• Heart of the Horse

Elle Wood-Glas
• Motherhood
• Pregnant

Kirby Wright
• Baton Rouge

Mary Kay Zuravleff
• I Stand Here Sweeping (Reprint)

Anya Achtenberg
• Hell to play, already cast
• The breaking that
• Sudden

Deborah Ager
• Field Notes for Grieving
• Rowing Past Blood Run

Lisa Andrews
• Viewfinder (For My Father)
• Machine Hunger (In-Sink-Erator)
• Idlewild
• Show and Tell

Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey
• “Before we
begin, I need you to tell me our safe word one more time.”
• Boundaries versus narcissism

Anne Becker
• Hands (Two) 14th C., Bronze,
Thailand
• Crazy
• Pinch Pot for Four Hands
• Poiesis

Grzegorz Białkowski
• the return of Odysseus
• labyrinth
• a tale about the world [tr. from the Polish by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka]

Michelle Bitting
• I Get You, Norma Desmond

Shirley J. Brewer
• Pink Flamingos Spotted on the Shores of Lake Michigan
• The Spider and the Fly

Chris Bullard
• Approaching Scylla
• Arguments For

Grace Cameron
This is not a recipe

Nancy Naomi Carlson
• (Sub)contexts

Joel Chace
• One filched wish deserves another.
• In tents. Squished?

Patrick Chapman
• Night Shift

Victor Armando Cruz Chavez
• SALIVA OF A DEJECTED GOD
• SALIVA DE UN DIOS ABATIDO

Cait Coker
• I Saw Thor in the ModMarket

Jim Conwell
• The Question Why
• Story of Class

Juliet Cook
• My Seesaw Sideshow
• The Waterbed Will Explode in Different Directions
• Death is an Amusement Park Ride
• Dissecting Your Brain
• I Try to Be Real but Why?

Craig Cotter
• ON O’HARA’S BIRTHDAY

Barbara Crooker
• Meet Cute
• Lake George
• Small Poem Featuring Blackbirds

Deborah Elliott Deutschman
• Day #15—America
(2/5/25)
• By the End of Summer

Margaret Diehl
• After the Eclipse
• Almost Eighteen Almost Seventy

Marc A. Drexler
• Now It Is Up to Us

Kari Ann Ebert
• Vestigial Home
• Oubliettes

Mel Edden

• The Poet Imagines Her Retirement On Martha’s Vineyard
• We Make Pancakes on Sundays
• I Had a Vision for My Vision

Corwin Ericson
• Of Course, You Know, This Means War

Alexis Rhone Fancher
• French Onion Soup
• Mojave Melody
• Poem for the Man who Loves Women

Kristin Kowalski Ferragut
• Memorie’s Intrusion
• Stars Bend Light, Erase Habit of Devotion

Irene Fick
• Just Take My Breast
• New Hope, Pennsylvania
• Four Lies and a Few Truths

Cole Fiscus
• Praying to the Mountains
• Pollock
• Fairy Tale

Naomi C. Gades
• Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times
• Look Me in the Eyes
• Holy Week

Bernadette Geyer
• Parable of Sleep
• Parable of the Lie
• I waited at the gallery

Tony Gloeggler
• Still There
• Sweet Sixteen

Sid Gold
• Alien
• Always
• Knees

Moriah Hampton
• Blanket

Kathleen Hellen
• what the mob taught me
• weather report
• dear job

Nancy Kennedy
• The Joy of Sex Too

Craig Kirchner
• Trophy

Beth Konkoski
• Losing
• My Mother Sleeps at Home

Karen Laugel
• Hands
• Childhood/Adulthood

Jane C. Miller
• Fall
• My parents on a two-month junket to Hawaii, I rode with relatives from California
to Texas
• Totems
• When Walking Away is Running Towards

Jane Edna Mohler
• Discussing Men with a Girlfriend
• To Hold Ourselves on One Leg
• Up Close

Ann Black Nash
• Obsidian Sea
• To Hold You
• Broken Window

Irene O’Garden
• Carrying America

Shaun R. Pankoski
• Tonight

Lara Payne
• Samsonite
• The Growing Season
• Planting Cosmos

Trish Saunders
• How come Melania and Barron aren’t being deported? a 5-minute read, mister president

Steven Schutzman
• Refugee
• Departure Time

Claudia Serea
• In Washington Square Park
• Ways to Disappear
• Inside the snow globe
• Vacuuming before the holidays
• Walking the High Line on a Cold Night
• Since I was little, I knew

Carol Shillibeer
• Mother did not die of suicide
• fictive kinship
• rules for raising offspring

Hilary Sideris
• Gulf of America
• 69
• Extended Release
• Feta

Caroline N. Simpson
• Four writers walk barefoot along the beach at Cape Henlopen

Michael Dwayne Smith
• Gone Fishing
• Violets in the Wash
• Note Passed from a Citizen to the Outside

Alison Carb Sussman
• The Blood of Womenfish

Jeff Thomas
• Spring in The Thumb
• When a Rural Woman Gets Mean
• Return to Nature

Emily Guardado Toledo
• Big bad principal
• in half

Barbara Ungar
• The Triangle Diner
• March Madness

Yashasvi Vachhani
• Harvest
• Hole
• A Good Research Candidate
• Fire

Dine Watson
• Abbey (Lincoln) Tells All

Renée Weitzer
• For Roz, Turning the Syllables, Read at her Memorial Service

S. Chase Wilfong
• Sergeant Hogg
• White Bucket, Brown Rabbit
• Around the Tongue with Silk
• Frogman

Pamela Murray Winters
• True Crime All the Time
• Queen of Comedy
• Jump-Start at Emily Dickinson’s Grave
• Triumph of the Mid-Century Moderns

Photo Gallery
• Barbara DeCesare
• Triptych (Eurydice, Laura Strachan, and Cordelia Hudson)
Carl Gopalkrishnan
4 paintings
• A Many Splendored Thing
• A Constitutional Crisis
• Four Horsemen Running Wild
• Hello Pretty Pretty (Cover photo)
Tammy Higgins
4 photos

Jody Mussoff
• Shadow, 2024, 14×11
• All Girl Band 2022, 14×11
• Voyage, 2025, 24×18
• Bubbles, 2025, 17×14

William Wolak
• The Unanticipated Excitement of Delight
• The Mirror’s Secret Lipstick
• The Despair of Silk
• Cock Five

Audio

Maxine Clair
• Running
• Dejavu
• Penmanship
• Lone Lily Beside the Road

James Norcliffe
• when the heart attack came
• Errol Flynn at Battery Point
• ATM

Mark Ari
• El Dorado

Video

Interview

Victor Armando Cruz Chavez
• Interview by Lillian O. Haynes

Edward Hirsch
Interview by By Gregg Shapiro

Special Thanks

Special Thanks to: Deborah Ager, Hildie S. Block, Michelle Brafman, Jennifer Browne, Gabriel Don, Marc A. Drexler, Mel Edden, Margaret Grosh, Lilian O. Haynes, Liz Hazen, Gerry LaFemina, Rose Solari, Susan Isla Tepper, and Mary Kay Zuravleff.

Readers—

Rose Anderson,  Beth Konkoski, Raima Larter, Leah Scheble,  Samantha Segal, and Sally Toner.

Wendy Guberman -Electronic mag layout

last words

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
—Hannah Arendt
“To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.”
—Bertolt Brecht
“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins—it never will—but that it doesn’t die.”
—John Steinbeck
“We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.”
—Grace Paley
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
—James Baldwin
“Whenever the choice had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”
–Aldous Huxley
“The Christian who is misinformed; who is subject to the demagoguery of extremists in the press or radio, or on TV, and who is perhaps to some extent temperamentally inclined to associate himself with fanatical groups in politics, can do an enormous amount of harm to society, to the Church, and to himself. With sincere intentions of serving the cause of Christ he may cooperate in follies and injustices of disastrous magnitude.”
–Thomas Merton
“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager’.”
—William S. Burroughs
“Since corrupt people unite amongst themselves to constitute a force, then honest people must do the same.”
—Leo Tolstoy
“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.”
—Toni Morrison
“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”
—Henry Miller
“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”
– Thomas Merton

rip

Parnia Abassi

Bob Andrews

Cliff Bernier

Sallie Bingham

Susan Brownmiller

Ina Césaire

Lou Christie

Dave Cousins

Patricia Crowley

Rick Davies

Rick Derringer

Rosalyn Drexler

Thomas Sayers Ellis

Serge Fiori

Susan Firer

Maurice Gee

Andrea Gibson

Graham Greene

Jane Greer

Simon Groot

Bobby Hart

Patrick Hemingway

Joe Hickerson

Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Polly Holliday

Simon House

Fanny Howe

Paulette Jiles

Ihor Kalynets

Dill Katz

George Kooymans

Cleo Laine

Al Lefcowitz

Tom Lehrer

James Lowe

Michael Madsen

Valerie Mahaffey

Chuck Mangione

Jim Marshall

Lea Massari

John Martin

Louis Moholo

David Morris

Bill Moyers

James Nolan

Alice Notley

Michael Ochs

Ozzy Osbourne

John “Poli” Palmer

Eddie Palmieri

Jim Parkinson

Mark Peploe

Jacques Poulin

Mick Ralphs

Robert Redford

Terry Reid

Marcia Resnick

Lalo Schifrin

Lynn Sheridan

Bobby Sherman

Mark Snow

Rosalind Fox Solomon

Terence Stamp

Sly Stone

Loretta Swit

George Wendt

Edmund White

Dan Wickett

Brian Wilson

Robert Wilson