New Issue! Cholla Needles 114

 

Cover art by Bonnie Bostrom
New literature by:

John Dorroh

Judy K. Mosher

Edward L. Canavan

Arvilla Fee

David Chorlton

Marlene M. Tartaglione

Barry Kritzberg

Bonnie Bostrom

David Larsen

and J. Malcolm Garcia

Click here to purchase on-line ($8.00*)
*includes full color art by David Chorlton*

Available during the month of June at:

California Welcome Center
56711 29 Palms Hwy 

Yucca Valley, CA 92284

From J. Malcolm Garcia

Favorite items:

Arvilla - The Sound of Thunder--"it thunders like guttered bowling balls." Damn, I'd steal that line if I could.

David L. - The detail in Gossips was impeccable.

David C. - Hawk--Turns grace into mythology/cleans the flesh from its bones. 

spellbinding.

I'm still reading.

From Bonnie Bostrom:

Dear Rich,

Thought I would send comments on the writers in this volume.  I was very impressed.

John Dorroh:  His writing is fresh; the images are stunning and his voice is novel. He moves us into his perspective gently so we share his world.

Judy K. Mosher: i appreciate her obvious love of the natural world and how she creates intimate pictures of it.  Her take on being a crone resonates with me at a visceral level.

Edward l. Canavan: This suite of poems is like an avant garde play. The scenes pull you in, leave you changed. It is a very creative way to present poetry.

Arvilla Fee:  Her ability to take something commonplace and treat it as a rare commodity is fabulous.  The intricacy of her work is compelling and inspiring. I am a fan.

David Chorlton:  His poetry actually leaves me breathless.  The way he understands the processes of nature is unparalleled. He is, in my estimation, one of the finest poets alive today.

Marlene M. Tartaglione: What she does is mind-boggling.  The way she uses color in this collection is masterful.  She draws the reader in, holds us there, and does not let us go until we have surrendered to her vision.  So good.

Barry Kritzberg: His stories! Enchanting and a delight.  Loved his two poets encounters and then the  newspaper clippings in support...genius.

Bonnie Bostrom:  I'm just happy to be in the company of such talented writers.

David Larsen: I was totally charmed by this story.  It is a wonderful portrait of two men in conversation, inviting us into the cafe and letting us feel as though we are right there at the table with them.  Very strong images and great dialog.

J. Malcolm Garcia:  This work floored me.  I was there with the writer through the marvelous intertwining of times, places, people.  It shines a very bright light on a chapter of our history that was dark. It is heart breaking and heart warming.  Kudos.

r soos:  He consistently curates the finest writing by the most talented poets and writers he can find. Those of us privileged to be included, are grateful for his guidance and for giving us such a wonderful venue.

Love,

Bonnie

From Maia:

On The Thermals - David Chorlton in Hawk, knows something most humans don’t—what it is like to be Hawk. You can see this in his series of airy luminous paintings, hear it in his vivid verses. He knows because he has witnessed again and again . He knows because he loves.

What is it like to be a wild creature? Winged predator, perpetually on the edge of starvation, missing more often than catching the warm blooded creatures he hunts to keep living. Yet David, the poet knows too, “it’s peaceful on the thermals...holding by a wingtip to the light.”

He knows beforehand what air never does: “what cut(s) it open” as the hawk dives, claws extended. He feels the descent the ground can’t detect yet. Simultaneously, he carries the terrible and the beautiful, the past and future of intelligent life—that he has been, he will be, the hunter and also the hunted, caught on the claw”. He is the contradictory spirit, knowing panic, and surrender, of the small furred-being, “inside the stomach’s darkness”.

Claw too embodies the hawk both as hapless? creature and also deity. Eloquent dynamic fierce. Hawk flown out of creation myth, the one who arranges with her claw, mountains and rivers, forests

and fields.

For Hawk (or mouse or human) the revelation here might be: “After each passing the air//flows back into the shape it was before.”

From Maia:

Turquoise

            is water, is stone, is a worn chenille robe...

 Bonnie Bostrom invites us into her world through her poems’ resonant, everyday yet extraordinary detail. Inside the “illusion” of rain-coming in “drought troubled lands”. an old woman walks. making friends with death. Her own. The world’s. These two cannot be separated.

 The old woman walks with care...imagines herself a “tortoise, flipped, unable to rise.”  But as she finds herself on the ground, she wonders at the lingering intuition that somehow, even here “real rain is coming.”

 She is elemental, sensing “readiness to die.”  Almost an embrace. Even as, within the subtle or sudden displacement of aging, layers of time and changing points of view render her/our familiars strange and what is close, distant. All she/we can do is learn to savor changes, find out their secrets. Come to make meaning of and to treasure the strangeness. “My walls are starting to smooth/where I use them to navigate…into silence and shadow.”  And so it seems we too might find ways to translate the vertigo of aging, its sudden incapacities, fading of senses, which for so long were our sture guides.

  In the last poem, Adapting to Change, the poet imagines a time after dying, when she would be devoured by fire, wearing  her “favorite garment”, her long lived-in turquoise robe, “a last defense. The flames will be no match/for her fierce spirit.” And “she will abide newly adrift” as ash, sand, wind, water…Living as music lives, in some ancient paradoxical mode, “without the world.”

Maia, June 3, 2026