Night Forest Folk Poetry and Short Story is the 2021 anthology from Flying Ketchup Press's imprint Salt & Fig Books. Illustrated by Parisian artist, Elka Trittel and featuring poets Katharyn Howd Machan and Gary Baumier.  This collection of fractured tales and lyrical verse fights for forgotten wonder and reaches into colorful truths with new bite. Reading this collection will make you want to take up the dark path and find the heart of your inner hero. The collection contains works by over 45 international poets as well as five short stories: Fomka by Katie Sakanai, Briefest Use by Hayden Moore, Swan Song by Courtney Stogsdill, Into the Woods by Kevin Callahan, and Eleventh Night by Lauren Tunnell.

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KATHARAYN HOWD MACHAN is one of two featured poets in this collection. She inspired our anthology topic with her poem "Clouds" a free verse poem from the perspective of the Giant's wife in the folk tale Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer. She is the author of 39 published poetry collections, most recently A Slow Bottle of Wine, winner of the 2019 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Competition, and many magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including What the Piper Promised (winner of the 2018 Alexandria Quarterly Press Chapbook Competition.) She is a professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College, specializing in fairy tales and featuring Ithaca, a small city in central New York State, resplendent with gorges and waterfalls and a long lake. She says that for three and a half decades her work has been picking up where Rod Serling left off. Her specialty courses, besides poetry, are Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Women and Fairy Tales, and a first-year seminar called Fairy Tales: The Hero’s Journey. Read her poem below.

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ELKE TRITTEL: ART.  Elke's mixed media originals landed on our pages from her studio in Paris. France provides her fans with a colorful journey into the wonderful inner world of the interior imagination. Her dreamscapes and characters evolved from her fifteen years of traveling around the world. Primarily selling her originals from Instagram and to collectors, she works in acrylic painting, collage and mixed media with a zest for humor in her work for all to enjoy.

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GARY BEAUMIER's winning entry for our Love Poetry Contest, Night Forest was selected to receive our 2020 Vision Award by our staff--which titles this year's anthology. Beaumier is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in English Literature, and has been a long-time poet. His work has been a finalist for the Luminaire Award, as well as a finalist for the Joy Bale Boone Award for his poem, The Migratory Habits of Dreams in Late Autumn. Find his book of poetry From My Family to Yours published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press, and his second book to be released in 2022 by Uncollected Press. Gary says, "I have been a teacher, a book store manager, and a gandy dancer (for one summer a long time ago). I used to build wooden sailboats, and I once taught poetry in a woman's prison. He says he is often found walking by Lake Michigan.

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Clouds

by Katharyn Machan Howd

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Fortuitous

is the word I like to use.

Then I smile.

I’ve written the story 56 times

and burned every version. With glee.

That boy was like a golden harp himself

and I knew I could play him.

I’d wanted my husband dead so long

I’d forgotten when I first wished it.

Maybe I could have just melted gold

to pour down his snoring gullet.

Maybe I could have plucked the goose

and forced feathers into his throat.

But if he’d woken? Another fist

to my face, kick to my aging ribs.

No, the boy was best.

Him and his hunger, his greed.

Once, twice, thrice he came.

I helped him feel confident, safe.

I was the one who whispered darkly

to the unplucked strings:

Sing now!

That bellow, that roar as the big oaf woke,

that fumbling long run to the stalk:

I hid my laughter, waiting, watching

for the gleam of that axe far below.

 

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Night Forest

Gary Beaumier

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Once there was a woman in the night forest 

who could hear above the register of most. 

She would listen to mice sing in chorus 

or coyotes comfort their young 

over the flash and rumble of coming weather. 

  

There was the night when I stayed in the garden 

late into the hours and you called for me 

and together we watched the gods 

toss stars across the sky and later 

we returned to our bed and I watched you 

over the vastness of our pillows 

as your breathing fell into a rhythm 

and you separated from me. 

  

Have your dreams returned you to a wooded place, 

dusted in moonlight, where you keen your ears 

to other selves, selves beyond the register of my knowing? 

 

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