September 2020 The smoke arrives Monday night, filling the sky with a deep ashen yellow. A color associated with jaundice, with sickness. The winds follow. Forceful, demanding, intentional. Tossing around electrical wires and tree limbs with careless abandon. Then we lose power. In the morning, at my mother’s house thirty-five miles away, she awakes […]
Melissent Zumwalt
Melissent Zumwalt is an artist, advocate and administrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her written work has appeared in the Whisk(e)y Tit Journal, Full Grown People, Oregon Humanities’ Beyond the Margins, the Oregon Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel. She learned the art of storytelling from her mother, a woman who has an uncanny ability to recount the most ridiculous and tragic moments of life with beauty and humor.