Posit

A journal of literature and art

About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.

Gary Sloboda

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

cenotaph

our eyes enlarge behind the lenses of our glasses. coats out of season and heels worn out. like prisoners at the moment before release. we are held so tightly. and the tall buildings’ windows once dazed by the river. glare down tonight at our home. of pressed wood and carpenter’s glue. glitter paint job in the moonlight. and our belongings piled everywhere. as if we’re about to or will never leave.

taurus

i was distressed. voices of others landed in our conversations like spores. when we stood on the curb. its scattered jagged glass reflected the years to come. and our mutiny of life’s more gentle features: hollering on the street like it’s the end of the world. and on the walkway of the bridge. how the form of our breath ascended. like the ghosts of pigeons. floating through the city. and the stars fetchingly arranged.

renewal

the intention was always there until it wasn’t. moon glow on the balcony before eviction. i stared across at the alley peppered with bugs and struggle. without a holler or alarm to catfish my attention. i stood there as if standing in line. to be written out or scripted. the last tenant’s plastic plants gathered tightly on the sill. and left for the next one to leave. as they were left for me.

sunfish

i’m made in the same way. shambling out of the stale fungal scent of my books. through the rusted gate that leads to the cellar. or the courtyard the lobotomized belltower looks down upon. where bullets whine when creditors arrive. in a ripple of wind that once laid down on the sea. people are moving towards me. their arms wide open and slightly animatronic across the concrete. and they hold me against the tides of refusal. as we taste the first light of the day.

memorial 2

the decades of ellipses tracked us home. it’s broken now but weighs the same. and the same emotions linger. pelican wedge overhead. like the hillside cemetery flags fly. we stumble with our bags. as the last days’ dark melodies unwind from passing cars. in the salt pinch of the waves that corrodes the metal railings. along the walls of rock where the ocean begins. and goes on forever.

Gary Sloboda’s work has recently appeared in such places as Blackbox Manifold, Twyckenham Notes, and Word For/ Word. He lives in San Francisco.

Bryan Price

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

Light coming over the mountain

I.

you are dead but light keeps
coming over the mountain
as you awaken from life you
realize that the mountain is a line

and the light is everything else
no color or substance
nothing but clarity for the
last few moments of finitude

II.

there is a thing Adorno said
about poetry and yet I go on
returning to it reading about
beds into tombs reading about so

much death among future ruins
a lilac a little finger a grain of sand
dust into dust but the light
keeps coming over the mountain

The mystery of transubstantiation

the wine smells like grass again and vice-versa

when I say ghosts I mean his inglorious past

his oiled boots reminded me of gun grease

he shot the lights out once—sunsets made the

age of angels immaterial but we’d sit and watch

planes crash into the mountains we’d burn

tires in order to fuck with the satellites and when

he gave us his teeth we sharpened them on

a landmine the shape and color of a new moon

The libra archive

one cannot conjure out of thin air or the dead blue leaves
cannot make or break cannot hit or beat with belt
cannot swim or shower cleanse bathe or soak in acid
cannot put plastic into effluvial veins one
cannot ride or rail or with tongue the color of snail put napalm
in the black-as-night shoes of a former lover
the street weeps inchoate the sky falls in dribs and drabs
summer summons suicide summer summons situation-comedies
about certain simulacrums concerning the immutability
of young parasitic love one cannot conjure lovelorn mindless
mind-numbing mindfuck gyrate to gunplay cannot do so
clandestinely without what I’ve heard referred to simply as the
gadget one cannot wear black theoretical tightrope-walker’s shoes
and just walk into the distance between hazel and hazelnut

Bryan Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, EPOCH, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.

Stephen Paul Miller

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

For David Shapiro (1947-2024)

I can already see the wall around
paradise lifting

Ecstatic,
I know no difference

between heaven
and this moment,

your garden
and a bell,

a violin and going crazy.

Angel Boss

I wake up ‘n
see
my mother
pulling off my sheet

I look straight ahead
and see my births
layered in
crystal.

I close my eyes
and see
my angel boss
ordering

me around your
sonnet factory.

A Living Force Field

is holding your hand. Turn around.
Here comes the east. A pool
player frets and struts
watching your footsteps
heart in hand over a new aura
some time when you have time.

Around

All the dead
are like a dachshund
following you around.

Tide

She asks
me if
I can
identify

a particular moment.

You mean
the moment, I answer,

when I

become the cliff I hover over

and time goes out with the
tide.

Yes, she

says,

that’s the moment.

Stephen Paul Miller’s nine poetry books include Beautiful Snacks (Marsh Hawk, Fall 2026), and his critical books include The Seventies Now (Duke University Press). He’s co-edited Radical Poetics and Secular Judaism and New Work on New York School Poets. His poems appear in Best American Poetry 2023, 1994 and surrealist and Jewish American anthologies. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, and he’s a Professor of English at St. John’s University, NYC.

Shari Mendelson

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

For the past 17 years I have been making sculptures that reference ancient art and are constructed mainly from recycled plastic bottles.

My inﬂuences include ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern votive ﬁgures, tomb models, animal sculptures, vessels, and hybrid animal/vessel sculptures. I love these works for their visual beauty and mystery, for their visceral connection to the past, and for their timeless themes that depict a common humanity across cultures. Through these pieces, I learn about the history, customs, and religious practices of the past while marveling at the beautiful forms and exquisite skills of these artist ancestors.

In my studio, with equal parts reverence and play, I reinterpret these ancient works using recycled plastic bottles. I collect, cut into pieces, and glue the found convex and concave parts into new sculpture. Some of my pieces are a close facsimile of the ancient works, while others evolve through the process of making and take on a form of their own.

Building my sculptures is slow—I construct, cut away, and remake my pieces until the forms feel right and seem to embody an inner life. I then coat the pieces with glaze-like layers of resins, polymers, paint, mica, and glass powders to alter the color of the plastic, vary the levels of transparency and opacity, and emphasize or obscure the original material. At ﬁrst glance, my work might look like glass or ceramic, yet upon closer inspection, a logo, a familiar embossed pattern, or an expiration date reveals the actual plastic material.

Conceptually, I’m interested in our understanding of ancient works and cultures, our shifting notions of value, and the environmental impact of our contemporary throwaway culture. Formally, my interest is in transforming unlikely materials into compelling sculptures through the exploration of structure, form, scale, texture, and color.

Shari Mendelson is a sculptor living and working in Brooklyn and Schoharie County, New York. She has been the recipient of four New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2017, 2011, 1997, and 1987), a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (1989), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant (2017) and a Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2024). She has been a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bau Institute/Camargo Foundation, as well as a visiting artist at UrbanGlass, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Toledo Museum of Art, and Pilchuck School of Glass.

Solo exhibitions include Fahrenheit Madrid, Madrid Spain, (2023-24) Tibor de Nagy, NYC (2023, 2020), Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY (2025, 2022), The Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ (2019), The Agnes Varis Art Center, Brooklyn, NY (2018), Todd Merrill Studio, NYC (2067/17), John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY (2013) and Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (1997) among others. She has been included in numerous 2 person and group exhibitions including a 2-person show at the Eckert Art Gallery at Millersville University, Millersville, PA, and a 4-person show at Make Hauser & Wirth, LA, CA both in 2024.

Mendelson’s work is in the permanent collection of the following museum collections: The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, AU. Her work is also in many other public and private collections.

Her work has been featured in publications including in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Forward, the Los Angeles Times, Glass Quarterly, and others.

Mendelson received an MFA from the State University at New Paltz and a BFA from Arizona State University. She has taught at many schools including Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, The Maryland Institute College of Art, New York University, and The Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

If With You

i look and you tell me to look and i look
—Laura Walker

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.
—Pauline Oliveros

I.

If I walked with you      on a dimly lit afternoon.
If we descended      a scrub hillside,   the air fine
& dry—      where would the trail lead?
A thousand leaves      lying on the floor—
a thousand      leaves

II.

If we made our way      past lichens & bearded moss.
If what looks like bittersweet hangs    in spangled vines.
A handful of acorns, waxy & wood brown.
On another coast,    acres of shaded farmland—
maples flaming      in autumnal red.

III.

If I followed you      to where the trees thin—
sheep without a shepherd,      no goatherd to be seen,
cracked earth      welt & bone      switchbacks & brittle grass,
bearded heads      bent     to the ground
If they lift not a single head      at our passing.

IV.

If I lay myself    among the bracken fern
beside tangled roots      & understory—
longing    sweat      goatherd

V.

If with you I find my way into silence & back again.

VI.

If with you every leaf      is an instrument—
every oak      a song      If with you I become
the trail itself—      sweat & muscle      dry heat.
If my mind parches—      & my mouth
dirt    dirt      shade me    dry— the sun

VII.

& the land’s uneven      tempo,
oak-laden forest      & scrubland,
the trail’s      wandering score.

VIII.

If my heart narrows, then circles around.

IX.

If first one leads, then the other—      you, me
then you again—      alternating along the path,
your steady footfall—      & mine, echoed
across chaparral—      a sound    I might
not hear,    if I weren’t already      listening

X.

If we cut across miles of scrub oak      whisked
leaves & surface      forest dim      light filtered
& wide      If we pause to listen—      sound poured
round our head      every leaf & stem, trembling—
If the forest      shook my mind      a mountain wind
falling on trees    crowns billowing in late afternoon.

XI.

hard-packed earth   & dappled light      it sings
sun-bleached grasses      it sings      twining wood-
bine & honeysuckle      it sings      underbrush
& speckled leaf—      shall dance    & sing

________________________________________

This pastoral sequence derives much of its form and language from Forrest Gander’s Twice Alive, Sappho’s If Not, Winter (trans. Anne Carson), the book of Psalms and Laura Walker’s psalmbook, Obi Kaufmann’s The California Field Atlas, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of course, the coast live oak scrublands of Northern California.

Wave Organ II

& seated by a window  at first  she might  keep the feeling  at bay
maybe  take a breath or two  & staring at the glass   the ocean’s
vast flattening  & release   in the corner of her mind  a little tug
not a self  she can look   in the eye   body blurring  in  & out  of focus
though  in the presence  of this little one   she might feel  her own
frequency  slow  to a steady whoosh   & the little one  sensing this  shift
might draw nearer  & they might find themselves entering  into phase
all around them  the feeling  of a great heart  beating   or she might
be out walking with a friend  who might turn to her  & say describe that
sadness   a sudden flush rising  behind the eyes  or under the skin
a bruised color  surfaced in the face of the lake  lifting & lapping
gravelly shore    a lake is not  an ocean  she might think to herself
but a body  surrounded on all sides     with this new safety a person
could navigate this  glittery self-contained life  & never  drown

under the skin
that bruised color
surfacing

describe that sadness

she might say
a tenderness
rising

behind the eyes

body blurring in
and out o f focus

two selves rhythms
beating
against
each other

a great heart
pulsing

around them like the sea

Wave Organ V

& later    making her way along the harbor    around cement blocks    bits    of broken masonry
strewn across the jetty    she might sit    with a hand to her forehead    shielding herself from
the sun’s glare    as it reflects    the ocean’s brilliance    its foamy spray    catching    & releasing
the children    playing along the water’s edge    it could swallow them at any second    she might
think to herself    watching their lithe bodies tumble    in   & out of the surf    but no day is
without its movement    she might say to herself    reaching down    to brush    the sand from her
ankles    stopping to press her ear against the pipe    angled    into the ocean    like a periscope
listening to its open-mouthed whoosh    she might hear something    of the body’s origins
its rhythmic thunks & gurgles    the tide going out & coming back    empty masts of sailboats
bobbing along the dock    & the sky’s limitless blue    & in the distance    the lighthouse    in its
immovable clarity    keeping watch over all aspects    of the sea    an unlit eye staring    in six
directions at once    & the murmur of waves in the air    the pull of some immeasurable depth
drawing her    into the restless    element of her    own interior    its lively    & perpetual    music

at the water’s edge
sea
the sky
the waves

its foamy white spray

pulling her

deeper
in her
infinitude
a restless blue that

spreads and spreads

the sea’s steady music
rocking her
from within

O
sea

resonant
its music
surge and return

tide
going out empty
and coming back
whole

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, 2025) and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year. Currently Mia lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a 2025-2026 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Ma Yongbo

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

Night Stay by Gongchen Bridge

Two dark red painted boats bring dusk from upstream,
moored for a long time, emitting smoke, like two dowries
waiting to be opened, barges carrying sand and stone
pass under the bridge arch, almost soundlessly,
under the bow light, a few white plastic boxes
nurturing flowers, someone in love, unmoved by the flowing water.

Fine rain wets the lanterns, no one rides a donkey in the drizzle,
passing through doors and gates, no one ties a lean horse under the willow tree,
unfolds poetry scrolls and dark swords from yellow parcels,
how many old things along the riverbank are hidden by the willow colours?
They only emit faint light and sighs when there is no one in the deep night.

But there will still be someone waking up against the wall,
what he supports just waits for him to fall,
like a dead end filled with miniature landscapes,
at the southern end of the canal, those irregular heads
shine like lights, instinctively pure.

I can’t have a life as long as a river,
the skeletons of moths revolve around my silent brain.
Don’t regret, just turn off the lights,
this is your night, this is the world’s way,
autumn rain is still falling in the darkness,
still disappearing into the waters of the Grand Canal.

News of the Snow

In my hometown, snowfall
is a frequent occurrence,
those I asked about the news of snow
have vanished deep within the hometown,
just like snow vanishing into the sky.

And then, cold seeps from a single word,
like frost emanating from within a stone.
Some people returned, exhaling air,
nameless yet oddly familiar.

Because snowfall, in my hometown,
is a frequent occurrence,
as if riding in a car, the road seems to be rushing towards you,
rough landscapes are illuminated,
only to be engulfed by endless darkness moments later.

Sleeping on the Street

Step by step, you step along snowflake stairs
down to the street; often, the street
is a deep black river,
you are on the riverbed, flickering like a failing signal.

Snowflakes gather around your head
like the final tribute to a thought
continuously surprising you, wherever you go,
like a jellyfish stirring up dust – it takes a lifetime to be born.

These snowflakes in the dark
are the remnants of everything you touch,
transmitted to you through your fingertips;
it seems that you are always the uncertainty they crave.

Inch by inch, you lose your skin,
blood, bones; you become the wind without nerves,
beyond the ancient struggle between being and nothingness.
You rise again, like snowflakes from the depths,
no-longer flickering awake
but falling asleep again; relaxed and nameless.

Ma Yongbo, Ph.D was born in 1964. A representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, he is a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He has published over eighty original books and translations since 1986, including 9 poetry collections. His translation included the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell, Williams, Ashbery, and Rosanna Warren. His complete translation of Moby Dick has sold over 600,000 copies.

Joseph Lease

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

Wake

we have this chance, when the sun opens

all the doors, somebody died, someone

lost the answers in the night sky, don’t

say it, don’t say that, I tried to be in the

space, I made the plastic capsule, we’ll

come running, daydreams in hand,

there’s less now, just, there are fewer,

fewer minutes, fewer useable minutes, I

was dazzled by the words, I couldn’t

read them, be specific, say place names,

Cambridge, Southie, Providence, place

names don’t place me in my life, he said

when I was a kid, when I was your age,

when I was this, when I was that, there

was no room for me, we got used to it,

we are getting used

to it, we fall upon the thorns of life, we

bleed, and this pen, this notepad, he left

pages and pages, key words, he left I’m

not the man I think I am at home,

make the sound of some dying mouth,

give me back my life, give back what

once you gave, so they gave you the

earth, or they said they did, the earth said

remember me, I was trying to stay sane

in the other pages of the book, I am

respectable, what passes for respectable,

we are quite literally here, draw the sign

in the corner of the page, return to the

breath, he just doubled down and tripled

down on knowing the names of flowers,

he seemed to come out of nowhere,

filling the page with light, the page as

slab of light, work was my salvation he

said, get to work, get back to work, we are

the people who mask, look, a picture of a

blackberry, why can I remember that, so

I’m writing to you again, I guess I’m

saying anything and everything, how can

you leave me, how could you die, I know

you wanted to see him again, what did it

feel like to pass over, to go there, oh, how

I’d love to be in that number, turning the

paper this way and that, I want you to

read this and imagine me: in Berkeley,

in Chicago, drinking tea, eating apples,

walking slowly in the blustery day, the

day was full of talking animals

The Buried Life

(head full
of
plastic
(“you can

be anything
you put
your mind
to” (are

we
extinct?
(colors burn
like garbage

on fire
(we
shoot
cows in

the head
(the wind-
washed
air

(roses
(bones
(bones and
dirt

and (we’re
waiting to
die (we’re
waiting to

pray (God
the rabbit
afraid
(God the

cat
dying (God
are not
my days

few (rain
side-
ways
(redwoods

(on
fire (horses
on
fire

Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books include Fire Season (Chax Press, 2023) and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). Lease’s new book, Now What, winner of the Philip Whalen Award, will be published by Chax Press. Lease’s poems “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and “Send My Roots Rain” were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease’s poem “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” was anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2002 (Robert Creeley, Guest Editor).

Emily Kingery

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

Home Front

The night of our wedding, another couple pounded beers at a frat party. They slurred their love-yous, collapsed on a bed with rope lights wound on the posts.

In the morning, they ate pancakes. They talked about spring, booked a hotel, nursed their headaches and awaited the declaration. When it arrived, they threw shoes at the television, missed the President’s face by inches.

We stood in the stale-coffee air of a Midwest church, blood harelike in our legs and a blizzard coming through. We sucked in champagne like helium, and somewhere, lovers waited for bombs to explode in their rooms.

We bore the explosions of old friends in tuxedos. They passed a microphone and slurred into the black foam sponge.

Things would get ugly. Our friends would split like a wishbone: one part seething stay the course, one part turn back, thou pretty bride. It would continue this way, without exit. Shores would continue to recede with our hairlines; footage of far-off countries would loop.

The watch turned to a warning. Snow drifted onto mute cars in the parking lot, poured static into the local screens. The private companies soon rushed in to unbury us.

God bless, our relatives crooned through the cake. They drove their forks like tanks through the roses, leaving streaks of raspberry filling behind.

The Shelley Disciples

The Shelley disciples keep dirt in their kitchens, in rinsed-out hummus containers. They plant mint and basil, sometimes; they never pick the leaves. They look bruised. They fall apart at the windowsills and stay there for days.

What they say: “Who knows what to do with it?” What they mean: “We wish our mothers were here. We wish you would be our mothers.”

When we were girls, we filled a banged-up pot with puddle water and mint. We crouched on the porch, used branches to stir while mosquitos swirled, haloed us in sound.

Once, a brother came out. He played along; he tucked a napkin at his chin. But when we gave him a spoon, he laughed: “You can’t really cook.” He spat.

He grew up to be a father of girls. Remember how he raised his spoon to the cat, how it hissed and pawed it to the ground?

I was a daughter fond of families, unbodied. I would dunk my hands in paint and smear the legs and arms right from the heads. No stomachs, lungs– just heads. Moons, reaching to the edges of things.

My father boasted that I used every color: “So thorough,” he laughed. “Such a smart girl.”

He kept a box of my paper monsters because he was like any father. He has never missed what’s missing.

The Shelley disciples press books to their laps. The room creaks under the ache of desks.

And what were thou, he asks a mountain, and rivulets wet their chins. They nod and nod like lunatics or limbs in the wind.

We walk to their houses, shifting weight. We imagine the sand of snack crumbs making headlands of their mattresses. Some of us who imagine less think of books before we lay them down: how they slap our hip bones like the sea.

The Shelley disciples admire our hair, or how words about hair turn to song in their mouths. They sing of our hair spread over wood grain, of locks of the approaching storm. The notes quicken; the castors glide. Chairs catch poems beneath us.

After, they weep for their fair copies torn. We are sorry, as though for typewriter errors. We twist open, like vials of correction fluid.

They set flame to hand-rolled cigarettes. When they speak, they move like acolytes. They dream of expulsion, of snuffing out God, of women who receive men in graveyards.

We group at their elbows to hear. In this town, what isn’t a grave?

Smoke perfumes our clothes and the spike of their unshaved skin. We trace the dizzy embers when their hands float, flick cherries to their feet.

I stood at the arm of my grandfather’s lawn chair. He tousled my hair, his hand warm from a Bic. “You get prettier each time I see you,” he said. I breathed in beer, prettiness; I studied the float of ash in a half-drunk lemonade.

When the Shelley disciples talk anarchy in their kitchens, wine bloodies their teeth into the teeth of lions. The beers of men before them haunt their refrigerator doors.

We sew loose buttons, purchase hummus. We are Mary: mother of God, mother of infants dead enough before born. Some of us who imagine less sew stones in pockets, dream of water: bodies of it; steeping leaves.

The Shelley disciples speak, unbound. We brutalize. Our pens turn blades in the knife games they play in dive-bar light.

After, their doors hide empty plots. After, they sigh in kitchens.

We are Mary, whose hair drapes down from her head to her prophet’s unclean feet.

A Made Place, That Is Mine

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

—Robert Duncan

In Bambi, the part that breaks me comes before the doe is shot. A frantic bird is told, Don’t fly, but she can’t bear waiting for the gun. She showed me what to do when you came. When you fit the needle in crackling grooves. When you poured gin in an orange juice glass.

I think of your hands breaking eggs, your fingers swirling butter pats. I was broke and ate what you made me. Can I bring you more? you said. My yes held still in an open field for you, quailed in the light. Your hands raised over the expanse.

I was broke. I took your paper: thick, expensive sheets. I made them into fat-creased birds and with a sewing kit I pricked them, put a needle through the peaks. I love them, you said. The thread came cheap as bloodshed, air.

For years, your threaded bird-heads have hung starry in the hall. At night, I run a finger in my mind across their backs. I make for them a thicket, and beyond that place, a field. It is featureless as an egg. I raise a shovel to it and break.

Emily Kingery is the author of Invasives (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in journals and has been selected for multiple honors and awards. She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Ambrose University and is an emeritus member of the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit supporting writers in the Quad Cities community.

Sharon Horvath

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

I like it when my paintings make me feel like I am not alone in the room, when a painting shows me a new code to play with. I begin with a pair of colors which might derive from a painting of a Tantric deity or a cereal box from the 1960’s. I paint lines as if I am following tributaries I’ve never seen before but seem familiar. Within the lines are sometimes stars. Or, I place tiny obstacles in the path to shift the scale and throw the lines off the trail on purpose. At those junctures, the lines become inflamed and secrete larger shapes. I try to see a syntax forming within the composition and make the whole thing rhyme with itself. Rhyming is the key.

In the composition of the painting, circulation is everything. Like water bubbling with air, blood effervesces into thoughts in the brain, flesh eventually transfigures; ashes and dust disperse and magnetize the mists exhaled by trees. Clouds fill and fall as rain into rivers flowing on and on, their journey destined for your teacup. I’d like my painting to be like offering you that cup of tea.

Sharon Horvath grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and moved to New York City to attend The Cooper Union. She lived abroad in Rome (MFA, Tyler School of Art) and Amsterdam, and currently works in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Andes, NY. Horvath is Professor of Art in Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY, and was inducted into the National Academy Museum in 2016. She received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to India in 2013-14. Other distinctions include a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Anonymous was a Woman award, and a Painting Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Horvath has had numerous solo exhibitions with Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Lori Bookstein Projects, Victoria Munroe Fine Art, and Pierogi Gallery in New York City, as well as the Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton, New York.

David Hornung

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Posit Editor

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

My paintings are never based on a preparatory sketch or plan. I usually begin with quickly painted shapes, lines, or a configuration. It’s a casual, energetic start and a proposition to contend with. Once I’m locked in, I try to sharpen my focus without extinguishing the life of the nascent image. If I suspend judgement and maintain an open, playful attitude, unexpected pathways emerge, and I can find my way forward.

When I too quickly feel a sense of satisfaction and control, I get suspicious that I’m trading on what I already know; not discovering. When this happens, I need to kill the lovely thing so the unexpected can come into view. It takes a surprising number of adjustments in color and composition along with layering, blotting, scraping, and sanding to arrive at a resolution. It’s the interplay between physicality and thought that makes a painting real.

David Hornung is a painter and collage artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the US and UK. As an educator, he has served on the faculties of The Rhode Island School of Design, Indiana University, Skidmore College, Pratt Institute, and Adelphi University. He is the author of Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers (Laurence King Pub Ltd.), a color theory and practice textbook that has been translated into six languages and is used in art schools and private studios around the world. He shows at the J.J. Murphy Gallery in NYC, Elena Zang Gallery in Woodstock New York, Pulp Gallery in Holyoke Ma., and Cynthia Winings Gallery at Blue Hill, Maine.

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cenotaph

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