Issue #30.4 A Triple Issue: Vivian Faith Prescott, LC Gutierrez, Richard LeDue
A Poem by Vivian Faith Prescott
Escapement Goals for Flannel Shirt Girls
The number of adult salmon that return to the rivers to spawn is called “escapement.” They’ve escaped predators—fishermen, sealions and killer whales. How escapement is measured in us island girls, though, is by how many jobs we have, where we’re hiding money, like the bills I hid in my Chinese puzzle box. We’re not taught to escape predators or even what they look like. We only know wolves stalking deer, brown bear boars ripping apart cubs. Those young women whose parents own tug and barge companies, or are schoolteachers, escape better. Not so much the girls from the families of loggers or fishermen or sawmill workers. Do they live in public housing or the trailer court? What are their escapement goals? There’s no college on our island. They all have ferry tickets to nowhere. My brother joins the army and disappears for a couple decades. My older sister gets teen-married, I get teen-married, my younger sister gets teen-married. We escape to the cascading falls we cannot jump.
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Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska where she still lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan. She is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQIA+ group on the island. She mentors Alaskan writers in two writers’ groups: Blue Canoe Writers and the Drumlin Poets. She’s the author of several full-length poetry collections, a short story collection, and a foodoir.
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A Poem by LC Gutierrez
Through the Smoke
i.
I packed myself to college, and when I emptied bags felt nothing
but the weight of it, like a cowbell trolling me back to blood- thinned doubt.
The pleat of plaid skirts weren’t for me, so I whacked off in a heavy-sweatered crouch.
Failure smells of rank incense and skunk weed. It lays awake
when you don’t want to be: unreadied and unreleased.
ii.
There is only space and nothing. I would fill it with the mud of thick-toed discontent.
The black light fuzz has taken me again like a cancer.
You say I’m a prince in rags, but when I dare look up the room is a hollow
the learned ones have picked through and walked away.
iii.
We don’t choose family, but this sinking version of myself was mine to take
and know they wouldn’t see me for the smoke or come a-rooting like wet-snouted truffle hogs
to find me where I’d flapped my wings to thud.
iv.
I took “The Matrix” for its philosophical crux and swallowed every sweaty pill that I was handed.
Head buried between the legs of strange bedfellows, and now I’m feeling hollow-puked inside out.
Shall I name this place of blind iteration, and know you’ll never see me here again?
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LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the South and the Caribbean. He currently lives, writes, teaches, and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work has been published or forthcoming in a number of wonderful journals, such as: Notre Dame Review, Sugar House Review, Hobart, Tampa Review, Trampset and Trampoline Journal. He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review.
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A Poem by Richard LeDue
“Reshelving the Dead”
I worked in the university library when I was a student. All the poetry books were together and the shelves there were as dusty as the old philosophy books that seemed to mock me for thinking about minoring in philosophy.
It was during this time I developed my allergy to dust, which seems an appropriate response to seeing all those great texts still as tombstones people pass by while looking for someone they know.
I wish I could say I discovered something interesting then, like how paper cuts were really dead writers haunting potential readers, but I mainly learned about minimum wage not being enough and how easy it is to whisper.
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Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He writes poems. His last collection, “Another Another,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2025.
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