Cate McGowan

Light, Birds, Lake 

a supplement to “’RSVP’ Is a Collective Noun for Snowy Egrets”

We are in a Florida park walking toward the lake’s edge. Or I am the one walking. Pushing, really. And Mom is sitting in her wheelchair. Above us, snowy egrets glissade into nests hidden high in the old trees. Some of the hefty birds land to rest; some loft to the sky, white wings ruffling, blinks of shadow. 

This morning, Mom and I search for a suitable site for my unplanned nuptials, and we sweat in the hard sunlight as we go. She won’t be here much longer. She lifts her mask and sucks from the oxygen tank I’ve propped onto her lap. In front of us, the putrid lake licks at cattails, and Mom chatters, misses otters playing in the shallows, the slippery creatures ducking in the muck. We wheel through the azalea garden, its pinks and oranges full-blown, and she shifts, turns in her seat, points to spots appropriate for a ceremony. She’s so cheery, so excited I’m finally engaged.  

I imagine you walking down that path in an ivory gown. Not white. You can’t wear white, but you should wear sensible shoes. Mom’s words always feel veiled in something. I don’t respond, let the park’s sublimity envelop us. The wind picks up like it does before a storm, and the stench of a dead animal drafts onto the scene. I look up and spot a lifeless egret perched in a shading oak; its feathers still swish in the breeze, head drooping, swaying on a broken neck, the open beak clacking on the tree’s trunk. Like everything else in the tropics, there’s a perfumed blend—the sharp scent of blossoms barely mask the stink of a putrefying corpse. On the same branches as the egret’s carcass, the flock roosts and fiddles with their feathers, fussing at one another, squawking, trilling. 

The light, the birds, the lake. Redolence and loss. Mom pulls off her oxygen mask, gossips about her bridge club. And I guide her air back toward her face, gentle with her brittle fingers. They’re snappable as wishbones. 

Look at this! she exclaims when we pass under a cypress festooned in hair-like Spanish moss. Is that an anhinga? She gestures as we reach the dock. I shake my head.

No, it’s a cormorant—look at the curved beak. We stop for a while to watch the water bird’s show. With its outstretched wings, it shimmies to air-dry, hopping from one leg to the other on the pilings. A slow jig. Thunder trembles through the forest behind us, and the worrying rain clouds creep in.  

Mom pretends not to notice the mounting storm, commends the sun’s slashes on her blanket-covered knees, Good ol’ sun.

Then the morning disappears completely into a thicket, and she gestures toward the climbing cumulus. That’s the kind of sky you’d see in an Old Masters’ painting, isn’t it? We continue along the water’s lip, heading toward the car, and I lean down, consider kissing my mother’s moist crown, but I don’t. 

Jeremiah Gilbert

Jeremiah Gilbert on “Deadvlei, Namibia” and “Halong Bay”

The two photos included in issue 13 of Split Rock Review where taken at two very different locations, the only commonalities being the photographer and use of a wide-angle lens. “Deadvlei, Namibia” was shot this past December while my wife and I were exploring southern Africa. We began in South Africa, worked our way up Namibia, then across Botswana into Zimbabwe and Zambia. Deadvlei means “dead marsh” and is a white clay pan located near the more famous salt pan of Sossusvlei, inside the Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia. It requires off-roading and then some hiking to get to. The site creates a stunning visual with the cracked white of the clay pan against the red of the sand dunes and the stark black of the dead trees. The remaining skeletons of the trees, which are believed to have died 600–700 years ago, are now black because the intense sun has charred them. Though not petrified, the wood does not decompose because it is so dry in the region.

“Halong Bay,” on the other hand, is brimming with life and water. Located about a two hour’s drive from Hanoi, in Vietnam’s Quang Ninh Province, the bay consists of a dense cluster of some 1600 limestone monolithic islands each topped with thick jungle vegetation. Several of the islands are hollow, containing enormous caves. While tourists flock here to sail among these islands and explore a few of the caves, a community of around 1600 people also live on Halong Bay in four fishing villages. They live on floating houses and are sustained through fishing and marine aquaculture. I was fortunate to capture these two while on a late afternoon cruise—I assume coming in from a day of fishing. The lighting was not ideal, and I was shooting handheld, but those are some of the challenges of travel photography that I love.

Amy E. Casey

Amy E. Casey on “Wilderness”

It takes a long time for me to finish a poem-comic. And so, “Wilderness” is a project that comes from a whole litany of artistic influences that shaped its being. 

I always start with the text of a poem. This one began at a writing conference, as an exercise that got tucked away in a notebook in the spring of 2018. Then, the following fall, certain circumstances led me to an hour of writing in a sculpture garden in Milwaukee where an open-air writing desk sits, unassuming and ready, in a lush grove. I wrote more lines there, in another notebook. Those two different drafts came together as the raw material for the poem I was ultimately compelled to write. I was thinking about encountering the natural world. Understanding our human frailty under the gales and bites and vastness is so frightening, so sensual. It stirs us to awe. Physical and emotional wildernesses wait for us all, to enter with vulnerability, to teach us. Such encounters necessarily encompass risk, but also exaltation. I felt the power of giving myself over to that, and the words came from that certainty.

The drawings, then, I worked on all winter long, my back against a window crystalline with frost, wrist guiding black pen over paper. It’s important for me to create images by hand, to stay unrefined, because I want my readers to see the truth that I feel in each line. Each panel takes me one to three hours to complete, depending on complexity. Form language echoes accumulate from panel to panel to assert a sense of familiarity, even in the geographically disparate environments of the piece. I was going for that feeling of Have I been here before?  

By the time spring came around again, I was at work on the final step--photographing the originals and turning them into a digital product. I am grateful for the year of reflection and work that built this poem-comic on its own slow, contemplative time. 

Jada Fabrizio

Jada Fabrizio on “Cry Wolf,” “Fragile,” and “Lamb Chop”

I believe art has the power to inspire people to consider their ethical stance towards nonhuman animals in the modern world. In my photographic series “Animalia,” the images portray play creatures set in incongruous circumstances. I use toys as a way to soften the subject matter when depicting animals as objects to be collected, bred, farmed or tortured simply for our entertainment.

My set up is simple; the toys are minimally lit and placed in antiseptic tableaux. The background colors are choices based on my personal history with an animal or animals.

Art and animal rights have not always been perfect bunkmates. On the wrong side of history, artists have displayed animals suspended in formaldehyde, killed thousands of butterflies, had dogs run endlessly on treadmills, cats thrown up stairs and videoed, and countless other offences. We do not allow animal cruelty in the movie business, so why is it allowed so enthusiastically in the art world?

It is my hope that in some way this work will inspire others to advocate for animals, whether it be in the form of volunteer work, donations to shelters or advocacy groups or just eating less meat.