Reflections behind "Sunrise in Future Goma Without Roaming Bullets"

By Bacopa Literary Review 2024 Free Verse Poetry Honorable Mention Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo 

Over the last few years, the world has been riddled with a significant number of tremendous disasters emanating from sociological or political events. One of those challenges that continues to threaten the survival of human beings is war. And war, as Soyinka said, is a human problem. It is in this feeling as a human I have shared in the despair of those who have been displaced by war.

Some of the countries that felt the intensity of civil unrest, war, and genocide last year were Ukraine, Palestine, and Congo. There were various reports and videos that came out on the ongoing war in Goma, Congo. Reading some of this horrendous news, I was unnerved and disheveled to see people lose friends, family, and properties, thereby prompting me to write the poem, Sunrise in Future Goma without Roaming Bullets. As captured in the work, I was yearning for hope in Congo where there's peace, restoration, and ebullience; hence, lines like: “the first sun that cascades upon a dark horizon / is a sign that a meadow awaits at the root of elegy”. 

If there's one thing I have failed to understand, it is man's propensity for destruction. It hurts to see that our divide in the world will outlive us all, but it hurts me more to acknowledge that I cannot grant freedom to people like me, so I am often reduced to hope. I wonder how much beauty that love could have fashioned out of this world if lust for violence never stumbled mankind. Yet, as one who leads an artistic life, I must keep hoping. 

About the contributor: Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo is a poet and essayist. He won the 1st Edition of Wanjohi Prize for African Poetry, received a honourable mention in 2024 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Contest, and was a finalist for Folorunsho Editor's Poetry Prize. His works have appeared in 2024 Small Fictions anthology, Bacopa Literary Review, Weganda Review, The Republic, ANMLY, Nigeria Review, and elsewhere. He currently serves as a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review.

Learning to Slow Down

By Bacopa Literary Review 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contributor Joanna Baxter

I move through life like I’m driving on the freeway. I trail run and race my road bike, and in the Winter I’m flying down the slopes. I zip through my chores and my chopping and my talking and my thinking and my household is busy with kids and the dog. But when it comes to writing, my usual “harder, better, faster, stronger” mantra does not apply. Sitting at my writing desk, my speedometer lags and sometimes I flood the choke—stalling out slower than a snail’s pace. 

For years, the act of writing came with the paralyzing pressure of “compare and despair” as I watched those around me get published and win awards. The creeping pace of my writing didn’t match the rest of my life and, as I muscled through my pages I began to think, the next person who tells me to “trust the process” is getting a punch in the nose!

It took years of self-flagellation to come to terms with the undeniable speed of my writing, to accept it as part of my unique process that cannot be rushed. My writing process, it seemed, had its own mantra, something like, “softer, honest-er, slower, real-er”. The realization not only rang true, but felt kind, and the kindness was a nurturing new angle. 

Writing is Life, and this appreciation of my own process has helped me turn from my work inwards, towards myself and deep into my sense of well-being. It’s shown me how hard I can be on myself and how having made so much of my life into a sort of race made many things harder too. Softening my pace to smell the flowers and touch the grasses enriches my life, just as it makes my writing richer on the page. As I learn to slow down, I’m surprised and delighted to find myself closer to winning a completely different type of race, one that is intensely personal, with no finish line in sight.

About the contributor: Joanna Baxter is a graduate of The Writing Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her work is published in “Better Next Year” (Tidewater Press) and other anthologies. She founded a reading event and podcast called SPiEL and is writing her memoir about sailing. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Sowing the Hills with Bones

By Bacopa Literary Review 2022 & 2024 Contributor Marisca Pichette

I’ll be the first to admit that my writing doesn’t like to behave. Often, when I begin working on a piece, I’ve got no clear sense of what it will be. Is it a poem or an essay? A short story or a novel? Is it literary or dwelling in the shadowy in-between? Creativity is a wild thing, and I am merely a collector of curiosities.

While my publication record is as varied as the sun-dappled forest floor, my two Bacopa Literary Review essays are kin. 2022’s “The Taste of Hundred-Leaved Grass” touches on memory and nostalgia, planted in the bedrock of a constantly shifting landscape of birth and heritage. At the heart of the essay is a meditation on whether land can ever be truly understood: And because it doesn’t belong so much, it has always belonged. It is there to be the thing that doesn’t fit, the reminder of how this landscape has been altered, tinkered with, held.

These themes continue in 2024’s “Bones Within and Without: An Ode to the Wild Dead.” But where the first essay tracks the living, the second catalogues the dead. Beginning in childhood, it recounts the story of a strange little girl obsessed with remains. Again, the question of understanding–and connection across realms of being–is raised: A skeleton is a memory. It doesn’t belong to me; its owner has fled with the flesh. All I can offer is a home, and care for every piece.

These two essays attempt to catch that elusive feeling that insinuates itself into all my writing regardless of genre: Where is my place? Is it the hills and forests that raised me, growing for ages before I was born on the cusp of their diminishment? Is it my passion–writing the wilderness, seeking to capture the magic of nature in words? Or have I already failed before I’ve begun, and there is no place that can wholly hold a person?

Humans have tried over millennia to mold the landscape to suit our needs. Now it is withdrawing from our grasp. Ice caps and topsoil trickle through fickle fingers, retreating until the horizon is bare. I write with both reverence and fear. And I wonder–does that not also apply to looking inward? Seeking to understand the external is often easier than examining the cluttered dimensions of self.

So if there is a place of belonging, let it be this: uncertainty and desire interlaced. Here writing and wondering are one. My place is me–wherever I find myself today. My voice is whatever it wishes to be when I look out the kitchen window and catch a glimpse of some ancient, wild thing, silhouetted between naked trees. And in my work and my life, let this be both a promise and a spell:

Their thoughts are not available to me. I watch them as I watch the stars—at a distance I can little comprehend, and know I’ll never narrow.

About the contributor: Marisca Pichette is a queer author based in Massachusetts. More of her work has appeared in The Razor, Door is a Jar, Room Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Necessary Fiction, and Plenitude Magazine, among others. Her debut collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker and Elgin Awards. Her first novella, Every Dark Cloud, is forthcoming in March 2025 from Ghost Orchid Press. 

An Overview of the Submissions Process

By Bacopa Literary Review Managing Editor T. Walters

At Bacopa Literary Review, we strive to include as many voices from as many different backgrounds as possible. One way we try to achieve this is by having our Genre Editors read each submission blind: the only information they have about a piece is the title, word count, and submission itself. We do this in the interest of fairness. 

How it works: the Genre Editors review each submitted piece. As they find pieces they want to accept, the Genre Editors run it by both myself and our Editor in Chief, J. N. Fishhawk. Either I or J.N. will review the piece, ensure the author hasn’t submitted to our other categories, and check whether or not they’ve contributed a piece in our past editions. Note: We only allow submitters to contribute to one out of our six categories in order to have more diversity among contributions. When we see that the potential contributor hasn’t submitted to other categories and is not a previous contributor, we tell the Genre Editor they’re all set to accept the piece! 

Once the Genre Editors have accepted or declined all the pieces, we move forward with picking prize winners, copyediting, organizing contributor information, and assembling the journal. We normally receive over 1,200 submissions each contest. In an effort to keep the total number of pages to under 200, we are usually only able to accept about 50-70 contributors. So, try and keep your spirits up even if your work is declined because we often have to turn away pieces that have merit simply due to monetary and page number constraints.

Journal assembly is my and J. N.’s responsibility. We ask our Genre Editors to place works from their categories into the order in which they’d like the pieces to appear, with the acknowledgement that we might not stay totally true to it. Then, we begin the weaving process, alternating prose and poetry pieces to balance the journal. We assemble it in the manner that someone would read through it from start to finish, though of course people have their own style of reading an anthology. As a team, we also decide on the cover art after soliciting work from local artists. After journal assembly, we send it in to be printed and celebrate its yearly release at a Reading event, usually in November, at our local library. We also send out a copy of the journal to each domestic contributor (or two copies for prize winning pieces). We send a USD $10 eGift card to international contributors so that they can buy a copy through their local Amazon affiliate. 

It is very fulfilling to be a part of this publication process from start to finish. Reading through each piece as we assemble the journal is my favorite part, and something I look forward to every year. Our submissions period will be open from March 3, 2025 to May 5, 2025 and I am so excited for the contributions we will receive this year. 

About the editor: Managing Editor T. Walters is a writer, artist, musician, and cannabis worker living among the orange trees. Their work appears in Nymeria Publishing’s Descendants of Medusa. Tea lives to connect, create, and marvel at nature’s many wonders. 

Our 2025 Editorial Team

We at Bacopa Literary Review are excited to introduce a talented and varied team

Editor in Chief J.N. Fishhawk is a poet and freelance writer. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks and Postcards from the Darklands, ekphrastic poems accompanying artwork by artist Jorge Ibanez. The second book in his and illustrator Johnny Rocket Ibanez’s ongoing World of Whim Sea children’s series is out now. Info at fishhawkandrocket.com.

Managing Editor T. Walters is a writer, artist, and musician worker living among the orange trees. Their work appears in The Sapphic Sun and Nymeria Publishing’s Descendants of Medusa. They are Managing Editor for Bacopa Literary Review. Tea lives to connect, create, and marvel at nature’s many wonders. 

Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin studied English Literature and French at the University of Florida. She has published humor, short fiction, and personal memoir and spent over 15 years as a freelance editor and teacher of languages.

Fiction Editor Wendy Thornton has been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and many other literary journals and books. Her latest books, Arrested Motion and Hanging On, were published in 2023 and 2024 respectively.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has won many literary awards, and started the Writers Alliance (www.writersalliance.org).

Poetry Co-Editor Oliver Keyhani is a visual and performance artist, poet and writer. He is a member of the Gainesville Fine Arts Association and a founding member of the Carousel of Souls Curiosities Circus Troupe (CoSCCT). His short experimental poem-play “Children of Gaia” has been produced at the Tank Theater in NYC. His hybrid visual-poetry works the “dada manuscripts”: thé avec dada and the book of dada dandies have received international acclaim.

Poetry Co-Editor Grayson May is a poet, playwright, writer, artist and actor. Their work has been published in Colorado Review, Cleveland Book Review, Ponder Review and Z Publishing House, among others. Their lyric play Scripture was recently featured in the Actors Studio Drama School's Repertory Season in NYC. They have a MFA in Playwriting from Pace University and a BFA in Creative Writing with poetry concentration from the University of the Arts.

Poetry Co-Editor Susan Ward Mickelberry is a writer, editor, poet, and long-time yoga teacher. Her poetry collection And Blackberries Grew Wild was published by Roadside Press in 2024. She is a 2024 Pushcart nominee. Poems appear in many publications including This is Poetry: Volume IV: Poets of the South. She participates in regional poetry readings and events, most recently at the Lynx Bookstore and at Civic Media Center’s Poetry Jam.

2024 Bacopa Literary Review Letter From the Editor

By Bacopa Literary Review Editor in Chief J. N. Fishhawk

Our lives flower and pass. Only robust
works of the imagination live in eternity,
Tlaloc, Apollo,
dug out alive from dead cities.

--Denise Levertov, Art (after Gautier)

Liminal spaces, lines of demarcation crossed, boundaries blurred, distinct and sometimes even radically different elements mixed—whether blended consciously and voluntarily or not--to form something new. These are the types of places many of this year’s contributors take us. Bacopa Literary Review 2024 is a creature of its place and time. Like many journals, its “place” is manifold and multi-faceted. Though we are based in North Central Florida as a project of the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, Bacopa contains multitudes. Our contributors hail from all across the United States and all around the world. For many of us in 2024 the times are volatile, to say the least. 

As we assemble this year’s journal we are navigating our way through the murk of a chaotic and uncertain national election, here in the United States. The infinitely worse chaos and uncertainty of war afflicts the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Northeast Africa. Rumors and threats of war well up elsewhere across the globe. Whether we are trying to cross lines of politics and culture, or the shifting, blood-bought, invisible lines of borders on a map, it seems we have no choice but to heed the warning of Hardy Coleman: Whatever else you do, keep moving/ for the placement of stones/ is not set in stone/ ...the current runs swiftly/ and the eddies have teeth.

Amidst all of this uncertainty, these edges colliding--too often brutally--creating shifting, crossover spaces that tend to disappear all too quickly, we may feel with Amanda Faye Martin that nothing is known/ not ourselves/ not the world/ not each other. Whether we are struggling to move through political chaos and economic instability, the immediate mortal threat of existing in a warzone, or merely one more awkward social occasion with people whose politics set our teeth on edge, we may find ourselves tempted to cross our own inner boundaries and engage in the masking and suppression of our true selves to appeal to the expectations and desires of others. 

We see the peril of doing so through the eyes of Wilson Taylor’s masked protagonist as she navigates a simultaneously literal and metaphorical masquerade: He hands me champagne, and the glass feels nice in my hand. So easy to shatter...I feel completely absent, anonymous. Cameron Edrich’s protagonist runs her life aground on the rocks of similar contradictions as she buries her true cultural and personal identity in the name of what passes for love: Of course, change is only possible if there is something worth changing for. Of course, something worth changing for must be either extremely amazing or deeply horrific, and there is never any in-between. The reality, for this character and for so many of us, is that much of the time the world seems to be little more than a jumble of in-betweens.

It’s easy to get lost in liminal spaces. Water, earth, and sky may commingle, become confused as in the fraught winter landscape Christine Pennylegion’s anonymous woman struggles through, trudging steps into whiteness under the answering grey-whiteness above. Richard Laurberg expresses the way the boundaryless spaces of the natural world reflect the perilous crossings of our own inner bogs and fens as the coiled verse of his recipe commands its reader to compound corruptions that/ you make (part, land; part lake). Stefan Malizia reminds us that removed, above, and in control though we may pretend to be, we humans are part and parcel of these melanges, animals commingled among animals as [w]e secret species,/ Dancing, stir the dark and light. Likewise, Marisca Pichette presses us to lift ourselves up and through the mirage of a wall between humans and other beings: Holding a sliver of wilderness doesn't offer me ownership...What I was searching for then is the same thing I look for now: kinship.

It is the task of the artist to attempt to pierce the veils of deception and denial, to deliberately and boldly cross imposed borders of authoritarian dictates in politics, culture, and economy, to try to see around the curves and corners of ever-moving history. Against relentless tides of cynicism, confusion, and despair, to seek, magnify, and give wildly away to whomever come who may the joy of embodied existence, no matter how rare and precious it feels against the profusion of shifting, razor-bound borders. Angela Townsend reminds us: Innocence is a mountain range, and love is a guard dog against the impossible. Though we spend whole calendars’ worth of time and gallons of ink writing out all the ways in which the liminal, the commingled, the unclear edges of reality confuse and scare us, life demands that we face those boundaries. 

Finding our way through the world so often involves either stumbling or being shoved through shadowed margins. The choice to make art, to act on the upwelling wisdom behind the urge to create, can limn those edges golden, no matter how hardened, how knife-edged they may feel. Sarah Salvia shines that light into one of the darkest places a human being can enter, the loss of a child. Remembering watching the waves wash away her dead son’s name where she’d scrawled it in beach sand, she writes: The image of his name being erased so quickly, so completely, makes me realize that a real goodbye will never be possible. I will carry him within me until I, myself, am erased.

Reader, cross this threshold. Turn these pages. Catch the spark. Carry the fire.

~

This is the introductory letter from the Editor in Chief that appeared in the 2024 edition of Bacopa Literary Review. If you would like to purchase this edition, it is available on Amazon in print or Ebook and you can find it here.

About the Editor: Editor in Chief J.N. Fishhawk is a poet and freelance writer. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks and Postcards from the Darklands, ekphrastic poems accompanying artwork by artist Jorge Ibanez. The second book in his and illustrator Johnny Rocket Ibanez’s ongoing World of Whim Sea children’s series is out now. Info at fishhawkandrocket.com.