Introduction: A/PART

Portland, Oregon; Issue 38

Apr 10

These pages were designed as a time capsule brimming not only with art, but also with stories of the humans making art over the past year (2020-21). Rather than paint a broad picture, they are meant to reveal bright glimpses of what it looks like to fight, to grieve, to celebrate, and to take up space. This issue grapples with a sense of urgency at the intersections of art, identity, and the environment in an expansive sense; through the words and work of artists, designers, organizers, storytellers, and poets.

Bold type reads BEAR on photo of magazine, standing upright in ashes with new growth surrounding.

(photographed by Mario Gallucci)

A/PART is the latest issue (#38!) of a magazine that started as the Bear Essential and became the Bear Deluxe—one piece of [this] nonprofit, volunteer-run organization, Orlo, with the mission to explore art and the environment on the brink. The Bear has survived many evolutions since 1993. Our aim has always been to provoke and explore. We have been fortunate to find fans among writers and artists, punks and academics, artists and instigators who are interested in issues of the environment and a sense of place as a nexus of culture. A/PART is a labor of love, born from an endeavor to re-vision this project and to consider what our legacy could be…

Madison, South Dakota; Issue #34

Nov 02

by Justin Blessinger

for my father

Clayton strikes the rod to steel;
a blinding arc of buzzing, wicked blue
lights the workshop,
fusing bolt to chalybeous plate to looping rod puddle.
His black glass face reflects the plasma bolt,
his hammer near to hand
shattering flux.

A Ford bidirectional tractor hunkers behind him,
its bucket bowed in submission
waiting for Clayton’s next endowment
never adornment;
its cerulean paint has washed.

Insulation, silver-backed, keeps Montana’s winter out,
the blue is much softer out there, on the drifts,
absorbing the cold moon
and colder stars
Someone’s old engine oil burns above him
in a red furnace he pulled from the county junkyard
and made it breathe again.

That cobalt night,
bounding in ruts of the dirt road,
a cottontail ignites
in the twinkle of his eye
and his Chevy pickup’s noble headlamps
when he turns toward the house
and thick sleep.

Orlo

Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

Toward Xenon

Madison, South Dakota; Issue #34