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< Back Sludge House J. Artemis Mackay this place looks like shit you know it’s going to be great every timber & rigging buzz & clatter amplifier worship carbon copied upon my heart I will lose three of my favorite S-tier teeth by encore until then pay the ferryman $12 at the door, exact change preferred. Author Bio Artemis Mackay (they/them) is a queer, trans writer living near a bridge in Portland. They hold a Master’s Degree in Comparative Social Change from University College Dublin and several DSM-V diagnoses.

< Back Memento Mori Katherine Bryant Joy can be contagious. When you see a broad and toothy smile, eyes squinted and creased at the corners, you can’t help but feel joy yourself. We often find ourselves smiling back at our photographs, feeling overcome with nostalgia, remembering that day fondly, or missing the people or time we are observing. It means even more to catch that momentary laughter, when the subject hasn’t had many reasons to smile. And just as quickly as it comes, the joy will abandon you when you remember that he is dead. In the photo above, we will meet my dad. I say we because I, too, do not know him. He’s pictured here on a sticky, humid day in Houston, Texas. The year is 1989, and he has just become a father—my father. He is in the courtyard of his apartment, a run-down, low-income complex occupied mostly by immigrants. You can see the faded siding, a result of the blazing Texas sun, which is contrasted by nicely manicured landscaping. He has a huge smile, an authentic one that can be seen in every feature of his face. He may even be in mid-laugh. He is shirtless, exposing four tattoos. The one on his shoulder looks like a grave, but it is hard to tell what it actually is. It is in a sketchy prison style and all black. The one on his bicep is the profile of a woman with a spider web. She is my mother. On his bare chest you can see a tank top tan line and two more tattoos. There is a thick and dark scorpion tattoo, and another tattoo he received during one of his many incarcerations. He has dress pants on and a belt to keep them from falling off his small, yet muscular frame. He always insisted on wearing dress pants, even in the intolerable heat and humidity. It was his way of presenting himself as someone to be respected. The unfortunate reality was, as a Vietnamese immigrant he was treated as second class in Texas. His proclivities tended to be unsavory at best, and illegal at worst. With few options as a teenage refugee, no knowledge of the English language, no family, and not enough money to survive, he quit his low-paying, abusive jobs and opted to chase money the easier way—with guns. Along with the dress pants, he was always quite particular about his hair. Here it is thick and dark. It’s nicely styled with an unmistakable ’80s volume. It is impressive for someone with stick-straight, Southeast Asian hair texture. My mom is behind the camera. Perhaps she said or did something humorous to elicit this giant grin. What you cannot see here is the reality of living in poverty and crime. You cannot see the police sirens, the gunshots, the cockroaches, and yelling from the neighbors’ apartment. You can not see his prison record, the thefts he’s committed, his murder trial, the guns, the cocaine, or the violence. Still, with this secondhand knowledge of the tumultuous life led by the man in the photo, to me, at first impression, this photograph is pure joy. It is a priceless moment in time of the person I never got to know. I see a man in love and happy, radiating his pride in being sober, out of jail, and having a new baby girl. You can, in some ways, still see the little boy inside of him. There is a glimpse of the person before the forced family separation, boats, and refugee camps. When we express pure happiness and excitement, it is the closest, as adults, we will get to our younger selves, before trauma, before pain, and before the worries and pressures of the world. In this moment he looks content, and he has nothing but promise and potential ahead of him. He is twenty-four and starting to plan out the life he wants and the life he will create for his family. He is trying to find a way to survive that does not involve crime and gang activity. This photo is now a cherished reminder of the parts of him that were good, and the parts of him that showed love. As writer Susan Lee Sontag muses, “Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people … of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie” (16). This is how I choose to see him even after knowing the fate he will meet just after I turn two years old. The truth is, he was not able to fulfill the hopes he had in this snapshot, and his promise was snuffed out prematurely. He was gunned down in broad daylight, a victim of homicidal violence. It was an almost ironically karmic ending to his much too short life. Because he is gone and left me before I had the opportunity to make memories of him, this photo also shows all things lost and things he and we will never become. I see experiences ripped away from me. I see hair that will never turn gray, smile lines that won’t become permanent fixtures of his face and eyes that will never shed a tear at my wedding. Earlier in her writing Sontag states “A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori” (15). This sentiment beautifully depicts the pull of negative emotions I experience today, holding his picture in my hands. In some ways, every single photograph we take will become a weapon to inflict pain on those that loved us once we are gone. To see someone on a piece of glossy paper that you will never get to hug, to smell, to hear and know their voice, is its own form of torture. I do not know the sound of the laugh that he’s making in this image. I sometimes can not bring myself to look at it because when I do, suddenly the hole in my heart rips wide open and the feelings of joy I caught by staring at that smile are replaced with tears and a feeling of profound deprivation. The bias I have in glamorizing someone important to me that has passed is not the rule when observing this image. My mother looks upon it and is filled with memories, both beautiful and horrific. The man here to her, is much different than the one I daydream him to be within my imagination. He is the man that abandoned her, that put her in harm’s way, that cheated and lied to her, and disappeared for weeks at a time. He is also the man that loved her the most. He is the man that made her a mother and gave her the gift that saved her life and gave her purpose. She has a familiar but vastly different conflict when the memories of the photograph come flooding back to her. He left her just as much as he left me, but she is both punished and gifted with the shared experiences with him that I do not have. My father used to refer to himself as “fey,” which means doomed or fated to die. He mentioned with frequency he would not be here long, as if to predict the future he knew he would not have. Perhaps this photo was for me, too little to remember the man shown here when it was taken. This photograph is an intentional donation of a laugh I will never hear. He is forever twenty-four, smiling into the sun, my mom making him grin ear to ear. The joy of that humid Texas day in 1989 will live forever through this image, but a photograph is only a moment in time, and eventually, we all must die. Author Bio Katherine Bryant is a full time PCC student in pursuit of an undergraduate in Social Work and then a degree in Law. She greatly enjoys reading and writing, particularly emotionally driven nonfiction. When she’s not studying or writing, she’s running her business in downtown Portland or spending time with her partner and four dogs.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to acknowledge that the home of The Bellwether Review , Portland Community College’s Rock Creek campus, is located on the land of the Atfalati-Kalapuya tribes (also known as Tualatin Kalapuya), who were among the First People living in what we currently call Washington County. In 1855, the Atfalati tribes were forced to sign a treaty relinquishing ownership of their land . Today, the Kalapuya people are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, located southwest of Washington County. We also want to acknowledge and thank the original stewards of the land throughout the area which PCC serves today, including the Molalla; the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinook; as well as the many other Tribes who have made their homes along the Columbia River. We, the editors, have chosen to include this land acknowledgment as an active commitment to supporting contemporary Indigenous sovereignty by promoting awareness and fostering dialogue as a contribution toward decolonizing the oppression which has resulted from systemic policies of colonization—including genocide, relocation, broken treaties, and assimilation. The Bellwether Review seeks to highlight the diversity of linguistic and artistic expression of student voices on the Rock Creek campus and throughout the PCC community; with this in mind, we want to acknowledge the absence of voices that might otherwise have been thriving today, if it were not for the practices of forced cultural assimilation that leads to the loss of fluency in local Indigenous languages. The last known fluent speaker of Tualatin Northern Kalapuya, Louis Kenoyer ( baxawádas ), died in 1937. Kenoyer’s memoir, My Life: Reminiscences of a Grande Ronde Reservation Childhood , translated into English from Tualatin Northern Kalapuya, is available at the PCC Rock Creek Library. We encourage readers of The Bellwether Review to honor the journal’s connection to the history of the land upon which it is produced by supporting and promoting organizations that are working to cultivate and honor contemporary Indigenous cultures in a variety of ways, such as PCC’s Native Nations Club , Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde , Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians , The NAYA Family Center , Salmon Nation , and the First Nations’ Native Language Immersion Initiative . Learn more about the Kalapuya people by exploring Kalapuyan Tribal History , Pacific University’s Indigenous History of Oregon , and the Five Oaks Museum’s online exhibition, This IS Kalapuyan Land . The Bellwether Review editorial team would like to thank PCC Native Nations Club Coordinator Karry Kelley (Yahooskin/Modoc) and Dr. Blake Hausman (Cherokee Nation), PCC faculty in English and Native American Studies, for advising us on crafting this acknowledgment.

< Back No Longer Shackled Kristina Landrum Dear Methamphetamine, When I was fourteen, you introduced me to your liquid charm encased in the syringe of euphoria, and I surrendered to your manipulations. The innocent giggles of smoking marijuana or the happy hallucinations of psychedelics soon turned to something white and sparkly, faster, darker. The novelty of experimenting wore off, and the thrill became a means to an end. Your evil intentions caused me heartache and destruction in one form or another. You stole my mother from me, who had also succumbed to the lies of your seduction; you stole my childhood, brutally used me to satisfy your own agenda and stole my hope of ever crawling out of hell. You have done nothing but bring terror and violence into my life and destroyed every relationship that mattered to me. I was blind to your truth, and by the time I figured you out, you had already brought me to my knees, to the point of not caring anymore. Before I realized what was happening, I found myself seeking you out and doing things for you that I never imagined. I committed untold crimes for you, kicking in doors and robbing people to pay you. I shamefully sold my body to any bidder just to feed you, numbly letting creeps play out their fantasies. There were so many times I chose homelessness, so you were my only responsibility. Throughout the years, you disguised yourself with a variety of names: crystal meth, crank, glass, or ice (Nicholas I. Parsons). In 2005, when I was in the midst of another relapse, Methamphetamine was proclaimed by Newsweek magazine as “America’s Most Dangerous Drug” (Jefferson). Arguably, it has become the worst mind-altering substance known to mankind (Parsons). In a needle, in a pipe, or laid out on a mirror, none of it dressed you up to represent anything but death, yet my craving for you was insatiable. The tears I’ve shed over the pain you poured into me could fill a reservoir. Oh yes, I tried to leave you time and time again, but I always crawled back and let you take me for another rollercoaster ride. Each time I gave in to your bullshit, I went deeper and deeper into the pit of despair. Little did I know, that’s exactly where you wanted me. You were an alluring god who successfully controlled every aspect of my life, always laughing as you shattered my self-esteem, my dreams, and my hope of ever escaping you. The sad truth is that from the time I was a little girl, I never knew I had a choice. You had my mom under your thumb even while I was in the womb, so unfortunately, I was born drug-affected and already in the clutches of your perversion and insanity. Never once did I question your twisted authority over my life. Most of the time you were good at killing the pain, comforting me, and loving me through multiple seasons of loneliness. As our relationship continued, there were countless times when I believed you were my only friend, the only thing I had to live for. So often, you seductively took me to the edge of blissful darkness, the brink of death, and I begged you to let me go. But you held on a little bit tighter each time just so you could spare my life once again and keep me all to yourself—plucking at the tattered strings of my mind. You fucked up my head in more ways than I can describe, shattered my heart, and tried to crush my spirit with the violence of your depravity. In 2009, as I was attempting suicide by way of police to get away from your hold over my life, someone bigger than you came along and spared my life. I experienced divine intervention as a new master lifted me out of the pit of desolation. He held me tenderly in His arms, told me all the things that I longed to hear—that I am loveable, valuable, needed, and have a purpose. Slowly, I came out of the fog and discovered your true nature. I was led into a marvelous light filled with forgiveness, compassion, and grace. The sins of my past no longer kept me in chains. I have been promised a new life, real hope, and a future. You see, today I have a new God who loves me better than you. Even though I stayed with you all those years, deep down, I hated you and everything you represented. You are a ruthless monster with no regard for who you destroy, ugly to the core, selfish, disgusting, and full of broken promises. What I find interesting is that you don’t just chase after the poor or the lowest of the low. Nobody is exempt from experiencing your torturous devices. There are countless people in all walks of life who have been ruined by your euphoric illusions, including political leaders. I recently learned of Matt Dorsey, a politician who has faced you publicly. His story has inspired me to believe in the recovery movement on every level, regardless of one’s socioeconomic status. He is open about his twenty-five-year battle with you, and in speaking out, he empowers others by saying, “It’s important for people in early recovery to see there’s a better life on the other side of this” (Heather Knight). Dorsey understands that early recovery support is crucial for ongoing recovery and he advocates for better systems to help others to succeed. If he can face you amongst some of his most judgmental, powerful peers and stand tall, so can I. Most recently, I learned that in Portland, Oregon, my hometown, there are three men in recovery running for City Council. They’re calling for more funding for sobering centers as well as more residential treatment facilities and abstinence-based housing (Knight). Hallelujah! How awesome is it that you have been exposed for the monster you are, and armies are rising up to take you out? Matt is a courageous hero who has opened the door for others in our government to come forward so that the devastation you cause can be addressed differently; people no longer need to hide in shame and hopelessness. This letter is to let you know that I no longer want or need you in my life. Have no doubt, I will join the fight against all that you stand for, but I don’t hate you anymore, nor do I miss the relationship we had. I have been able to move past all the craziness you brought into my world. In fact, I want you to know that I have forgiven you. I forgive you for all the destruction, heartache, and emptiness that you used me to cause for others. I choose not to harbor resentment and hate toward you or because of you. That would only hinder my own recovery. You no longer hold me hostage to your lies, threats of violence, or cravings. I’m proud to say that as of 2025, I have fifteen years of recovery and healing. My addiction to you has finally been broken. You can’t claim me as one of the 106,600 overdose statistics of the methamphetamine crisis plaguing our communities as of 2023 (KFF). I’m not a slave to delivering your brutality anymore. I’m not a slave to your deranged schemes of manipulating others anymore. And more importantly, I’m not a slave to your corrupted thoughts about my own self-worth that imprisoned me for so long. I thank God for the freedom that has finally come into my heart, mind, body, and soul. I can rest in peace that you are no longer the queen occupying the throne of my existence. Author Bio Kristina Landrum : As far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved reading and writing. Books often helped me to escape the dark reality of my household. They allowed me to envision a different life, a different family, a different me. When I learned to write I discovered a sense of control and power over my thoughts and emotions. It helped me express and sort through much trauma, pain, and confusion. I became a kind of “word nerd” in third grade, acing all of my spelling tests and dabbling in poetry. Now my writing is more about healing, advocating, and connecting with others. In the last 15 years I’ve written several program proposals, short stories, and more recently a “goodbye” letter to my addiction. I’m 56, going to college for the first time, and I have renewed her passion for writing … it’s never too late!

< Back The Ginger Remains Crescent Holiday The first words I spoke to my then-future husband were, “Don’t fall in love with me.” His response was, “I think it’s already too late.” A few hours before, a group of us had converged on the local Shari’s restaurant after our theater troupe’s night of vampire cosplay. We drank bitter coffee like it was the only thing keeping us alive and shoved bites of rapidly cooling food into our mouths between stories of ourselves and highlights of the night’s events. The mood was raucous, and the laughter contagious. Since I was the newcomer of the group, I was the focus of much attention. Amid cacophonous laughter over my regaling of the story of the first time I met someone of a different sexual orientation, I made the flippant comment, “Don’t fall in love with me.” As a recent divorcee at the ripe old age of seventeen, I wasn’t looking to get into another serious relationship, and I certainly didn’t want to be in love. Love was what had gotten me into the last mess and why I had had to move from my tiny hometown in eastern North Carolina to the foreign country of western Oregon. With hair the color of an orange crayon and covered with freckles, he wore a Hawaiian shirt so loud and so ugly that it could probably be seen—and complained about—from space. He topped six feet by several inches and had a lanky build. He was definitely not my type, whatever that was. He petitioned me for months to go out with him for a cup of coffee, and once I agreed, he convinced me to repeat it nearly every subsequent night. I later found out he’d already told his friends he was going to marry me. He was there to bail me out of jail when I was arrested for throwing mashed potatoes at my stepfather. He let me punch his stomach when I cried over my ex-husband being an asshat. Then, he bought me a punching bag and encouraged me to keep up the habit. He convinced me to sign marriage papers “for tax purposes” after our first child was born. He never seemed disappointed or upset when I would “fail” yet another pregnancy test, even if we just had a baby a couple of months old. When our children were all teenagers, and I LOST MY MIND and decided I wanted another baby, he was supportive of me. He told me I was crazy, but he was supportive. When my oldest daughter posted 158 photos of my vagina on Facebook, just because her little brother happened to be exiting it at the time, he was there to keep me from wrecking our car. He held me after the death of our son, Theodore, when I would stop in the middle of a retail store’s aisle and bawl over some baby item I saw. He started planning our routes around stores to avoid the baby section. He held me through all the bumps and bruises, hopes, and hiccups in life. He religiously killed spiders, wiped noses, opened doors, and lifted heavy objects for me—and he still does. He strove to actively be my best friend, and I fell in love with him in moments, over my own strident objections. He wore me down. His journey of falling in love with me not only led to my falling in love with him, but also with myself. Twenty-five years later, we have seven beautiful children and a legacy of love I never imagined I would have. The loud Hawaiian shirts are gone, but the ginger remains. Author Bio Crescent Holiday , who also goes by Brooklyn Shepard, is a resident at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. She takes college courses offered by both PCC and PSU, where she majors in English. She is the mother of a number of children, including Soriyah, Britain, Iliyana, Indigo, Sterling, and Cha’uri—and she has a husband who is the love of her life. Last year, her nonfiction essay “The Whisper of the Rain” was published in The Bellwether Review .

HISTORY OF THE BELLWETHER REVIEW The Bellwether Review got its start in 1996. Originally dubbed The Rock Creek Review , the journal used to be staffed by Rock Creek faculty members. The Rock Creek Review was renamed The Bellwether Review in 2011 with the inception of the Advanced Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing course. Former editors chose the name The Bellwether Review to symbolize the artistic drive of writers and artists. A “bellwether” is the leader of a flock of sheep—a sheep who wears a bell to signal the best direction for the entire herd. Today, the term more commonly refers to any person who takes initiative and sets trends. We believe those whose work is published in The Bellwether Review are leading the way for artistic expression.

The Bellwether Review 2020 Art Poetry Fiction Groundswell Archive Best Essay Winner

Home ART POETRY FICTION NONFICTION Thank you for visiting our website. The Bellwether Review is a literary journal that hopes to promote and inspire creativity amongst those not only at Portland Community College Rock Creek but also throughout the broader global community of writers and artists. We hope you take the time to review these great pieces that were sent in to us and selected for publication by our editorial team. Visit our Submissions page if you are interested in having your work considered for publication in a future issue. Email us at bellwetherreview@gmail.com with any questions. LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Reader , First and foremost, thank you for reading this year’s edition of The Bellwether Review . Students who submit their works for publication, as well as those who create the review, spend hundreds of hours working their craft, and we here on the editorial team truly appreciate the efforts that have gone into developing the outstanding works that appear in this year’s journal. One hundred and six works were submitted this year, and each one was reviewed and discussed by the editorial team, as we sought out what makes each piece special—what makes them beautiful—and ultimately selected those that stood out as exemplary to share with you, the readers of the 2024 edition. We here at The Bellwether Review team thank you for taking the time to appreciate the work of these contributing writers and artists, and we especially want to thank all those who contributed works to this edition. And with that, we hope to see you next year. Until then, take care. — The 2024 Editorial Team Copyright © 2024 Portland Community College Portland Community College reserves all rights to the material contained herein for the contributors’ protection. On publication, all rights revert to the respective authors and artists.