M A G A Z I N E

poems from
K. Felician
Brittney uecker

fiction from
Grace Kelton
KJ Harper

art and photography by

Laura Meintjes
Lynn Shield
and many more
I s s u e 5

E d i t e d by B r i e B a r r o n
 M A G A Z I N E

I s s u e 5

E d i t e d by B r i e B a r r o n
 In this issue
Po e t r y
editor-in-chief & designer brie barron

K. Felician A r t & pho t og r a p h y

poetry editor julie schultz
Anthropocene Dreams 1
fiction editor riley netzley-hale Laura Meintjes
Mangifera 2
staff editor elizabeth goffena Brittney Uecker
Reference Frame 32
Phase Shift 6
editorial & production assistant Raw Materials Supine 34
rylee treu
33
Subadult/Juvenile/Child 47
New Year’s Eve 55 Kean Christensen
10, 30, 31
We would like to thank Tami Haaland,
Dr. Rachel Schaffer, and Dr. Deborah Daniel Lurie Shirley Marin
Schaffer for advising us in creating and The Big Dry in Fragments 12 13
maintaining this project, and for their Mourning Montana 42
unceasing support. The Listing 50 Rilie Tané Zumbrennan
Cyanide 51 25, 40, 44
FeverDream Magazine (ISSN 2694-0752) is published
Lynn Shield
twice a year. Single copies are available at This No nf i ct i o n
House of Books in Billings, MT and at their 43, 48, 49
website: thishouseofbooks.indielite.org
FeverDream Feature Dana Barnes
Please address all correspondence to our editor- 46
Eric Warren
in-chief: brie@feverdreammagazine.org. For more
information, including submission guidelines,
Notes from the Apocalypse: Journey
please visit feverdreammagazine.org. Through an American Sacrifice Zone Daniel Lurie
Waiting on Manifest Destiny 52
The short stories in this issue are works of fiction, 15
unless otherwise identified. Names, characters, Craig Botnen
places, events, and incidents are products of the 54
author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. F i ct i o n
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
or to actual events is entirely coincidental. The
views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily Grace Kelton Co nt r i bu t o r B i o g r a p h i e s 56
reflect those of its editors or sponsors. If You Need a Place
E di t o r i a l S ta f f 58
8

Cover: KJ Harper
Prone, 10x20” Watercolor, 2022, Everything Happens for Some Reason
by Laura Meintjes.
36
to those turning the page
Anthropocene Dreams
K. Felician

Oil drips from their wicked lips,

the bones from whom they inherited this existence.
Time wove quick and clever.
It nestled in their lungs, sprouting forth like an algae bloom.
The body is an ecosystem
in and of itself. A billion
interconnected universes. A host
for the parasite of singular consciousness.

But the parasite wanders in rest, and

what they find in their conception of the body is
not an ecosystem.
They find a monument of electrical impulses.

There is no logic in dreams, but they seem sure

that they need to extract a bit of themself,
a drop of the thickness that is not oil,
but someday might be.

What they find

when they peel back the flaking skin is
not an ecosystem.
Not the shimmering maroon.
Their veins, laid open
against cement flesh,
flicker, violet blue,
the pulse of an obsidian heart still commanding them
to contract and push forward,
but there is no blood.
The parasite presses, perplexed, along the wound, and finds
only unyielding stone.

It can crumble, but

it cannot bleed. This is survival
swaddled in grief.
It could give way to rage
if they press too hard.

In waking hours, the parasite tends to

their microcosm home. They treat gently
their flesh-wrapped ecosystem.

Perhaps someday (they allow the hope

to take root at the base of their skull)
something kinder will find use in them.

1
 Mangifera
Laura Meintjes

2 3
4 5
 phase shift
brittney uecker

I’m still a sucker for all the things that hurt me. I say you, but I mean me.
I’m still as raw as freshly picked fruit.
No — raw as a freshly slaughtered animal I’m in my blood phase, but it’s not what it sounds like.
(something about feeding consumption abundance voids, unfillable voids) Bones and birds and boys’ bodies
and things that bring
You won’t like where this is going. your lips together.
You won’t like where we will go.
I say yours, but I mean mine.
I have carbonated blood and caffeine shakes
and I chew through the soft parts like they’ll nourish me I’m in my oral fixation phase, but it’s not what it sounds like.
like I’ll never hit bone. Bite of bubbles,
burn of liquor,
I make myself believe there is no scaffold, things to occupy
no shared vulnerability. my mouth.
_____________
_____________

If you asked those ancestors what to do

Did our ancestors have feelings? with a broken, hungry heart,
Who piled up conveniences until we lost they would look at you like the fool you are
all our skills and tumbled like and tell you to
a line of dominoes, identical and clinking eat it.
against each other like
the teeth behind your lips?

Soon the sun will shrivel and you’ll be drunk on stiff limbs and cold winds.
This is familiar,
a safe place.
There is safety in repetition,
in really grinding it in.

___________

6 7
 If You Need a Place
Grace Kelton
There is something clean about leaving a town in the
morning, telling no one, and being on your way. I’ve
been sleeping at this dusty crossroads for the better part
of three months, and now apple picking is finishing up.
The last few nights, I’ve been cold in my little tin can
sedan.
It’s been safe, parked and sleeping in this yellow field
where the town has dumped its old cars, its rusted tillers,
balers, and swathers. All of it’s falling apart and it’s my
camouflage. No cop has come in the night to knock on
my window, look over me while trying to guess what my
body’s like under my sleeping coats.
There’s a little trailer that has coffee across the
intersection. It’s one of the topless ones where a woman
stands in the cold waiting for a stranger to pull up and
study her tattoos while she asks if he wants room for
cream. I walk over when Georgia opens it first thing.
I look her in her eye and try to know the shape of her
from the edges of my vision. She tells me about her trips
to the big reservoir up north.
I promised myself I wouldn’t tell her that I’m leaving.
She might hug me through the window. I don’t think I
could bear it, her skin on my thick coat.
I wasn’t able to skirt out of here in the dark like I
hoped. I fell asleep with my dome light on, writing plans
for going to a cannery for the winter. The sedan needed
a jump, and I knew I’d have to wait for light.
In time, at the dirt pullout beside the crossroad, there
was a man standing beside a truck. He was staring up
the road with his feet wide apart. His hands were behind
his back, at ease, like he had a military father too. I got
closer and the man was a tall woman in work pants and
a soiled vest. She had her hair tucked into a hat, and a
headlamp cinched down tight over it all.
I made my voice soft and said, “Hey.”
The woman had those eyes that are so blue it hurts
to look at them. I feel rude talking to people with eyes
like that.
“I’m here for apple season and my car needs a jump.
Could you?” I asked.
She looked pained and looked at her watch. “I’ve got
a woman coming down the valley who is about to give
birth,” she said.
She realized she wasn’t being clear, that I hadn’t been
in town long enough to know who she was.
8 9
and I got worried that she would miss her people. leave it. I held it while he slit its belly, pulled its insides
“Leave it running,” she said. out into the daylight in a single scoop of his hand. I
Microfiction have never had a better meal.” She turned to me and,
I followed her back to the pull out. She stared north without any self-consciousness, said, “I hope that all
again, and looked at her watch. The day was getting made sense. It makes sense in my head.”
lighter, the green edge of the sky had ebbed into a thin
“I’m a doula. I ride with couples over the pass to the
line above the mountains. In the warming light I looked She looked up the road and saw her ride. She got
hospital,” she said. “In case they don’t make it to the
at her profile. She had deep lines stretching from the squarely in front of me and I tried hard to hold her
hospital.”
corner of her eye. The ridge of her nose was perfectly blue eyes in mine. Her thumbs were on my temples,
“The headlamp?” I asked.
straight. I wanted to pull my finger down that ridge. I her fingers wrapped around the sides to the back of
“To see in dark places,” she said and finally smiled.
kept my hands in my pockets. my skull. She held me hard by my head. Her thumbs
She looked at her watch again.
rubbed against my skin, and she said, “If you need a
“Have you ever delivered a baby in a car?” place.”
“I’m just worried. This is her second-born. They
“I have. It was wet,” she said.
tend to come out faster,” she said. “But her husband’s
“Did you have to pull it out of her?” I said, “Okay,” and her arms went around me.
bringing her down from way up Slate Creek. Where’s
“No, you don’t ever really pull. I just caught the girl. She pressed me into her oily vest. I felt every stiffness
your car?”
I wiped her off a little and held her because her mother from sleeping in my car, from three months of picking
passed out, which I’ve never seen since.” She was talking work, leave me. Every touch of hers seemed to be so
The Doula pulled her truck up nose to nose with my
with her hands now. “Have you ever held a newborn? sure, so firm in its intent. I was lost in her.
sedan, and she looked over my nest in the backseat in
They have this smell that’s so sweet and you can feel just
the same way I look over Georgia’s body. She pretended
how new they are. They’re more resilient, less fragile, Another truck pulled beside us. The Doula grabbed
not to be looking, but I knew she was, and she knew that
than you’d think.” a bag she had ready and opened the passenger doors.
I knew.
A young woman filled the back seat. She was silent.
I just looked at her. She reached out and gripped my Her head tilted back as if she was looking for the sky
“So, people are still having babies in towns like this?”
shoulder. through the car roof. There was no room in her world
I asked.
“You have a home to go to?” she asked. for anything other than her swollen body.
She dug in her truck for cables. Her voice was harsh
“My town is a Dollar Tree and a hydroelectric dam,” The Doula reached in and held her hand. She said
and her back was to me, “How old are you anyways?”
I said. something to the man driving the truck and he nodded
“Twenty-eight,” I said.
“You know that’s not what I’m asking,” she said. “If his thin white face. She climbed into the backseat and
“I would have guessed older,” she said, handing me
you need a place.” shut the door. The man pulled closed the front door. He
the cables.
“I appreciate it,” I said, and she knew not to ask more. looked scared. His tires chirped on the pavement. She
had not given me her name. They turned west, heading
I laughed. She liked me better for laughing. I liked her
“I always knew I wanted a job where I could touch for the hospital over the pass.
better for saying what she said.
people, touch my work,” she said. “When I was young,
“People are having kids everywhere all the time,” she
I hitched through Italy and stayed in this ancient stable So, I am standing here and the sun is on the hills
said.
where an old man fed me. Everything he made, I have across this wide valley. Something about her is still here,
“What do you do with them here? Your two stores are
never had anything like it again. He told me that the but she has left me, and these two feelings are making
boarded up and the air is nearly always full of smoke.”
reason food tasted like shit now was because nobody me empty and I want to eat. I could wait for her. I could
really touched it anymore. He said that even now, when easily find out who she is. I could.
I expected her to give me more shit, but she said, “You
hands are put on food, they are gloved. Nobody touches But I am going to walk over to Georgia, and I am
know, I do this job because kids will always keep being
anything anymore. That’s what he said.” going to tell her I’m leaving. She will look at me and say,
born. People’ll keep having them after the world ends
‘Oh honey, where are you going?’
and those kids’ll not know any different, just like we
She laid her long arm across my shoulders and looked I’ll lie and tell her whichever state name comes to
don’t.”
east towards the almost risen sun. She was old enough mind first. She will be sweet and she will give me free
to be my mother, but she was nothing like my mother. coffee for the road. It’ll be burnt and I will love Georgia
She shut me up and she knew it. She got close to me
even more for that. I will hug her if she reaches for me.
as she lifted my hood. She smelled like gasoline and
“He made fish one evening, a fish he had caught and I will let her hug me in her string bikini bottoms and her
leather work gloves.
brought to me while it gasped. I understood his Italian silver high-heels. And then I will go back into the world
“Hook it up,” she said.
enough to know that he told me to ‘hold it like a lover of long roads and new work.
who was leaving.’ I did, it was all tight strength under
She started her engine and I waited, then turned my
its scales, but it didn’t thrash. I held onto it firmly and
key. My engine sputtered for a few minutes and finally
he drove a spike through its brain and I felt the tension
came back. She smiled at me through her windshield
Kean Christensen

10 11
 The Big Dry in Fragments
Daniel Lurie

Guilt, because I can’t help but blame the too late

homesteaders with their trailer homes
and handful of cattle, for my mother not being able to sell her dead husband’s bones.

Fire has become part of the ecology,

same as the yucca, and sandstone.
Like the time I lit a pack of matches and let it drift between my feet to an anthill below.

I had looked into its eye and wondered if eagles didn’t

need to blink. After it never flew away,
I rushed it to a vet. Somewhere along 87, I knew it had died, but kept driving, alone.

On a summer day, the biggest diamondback I had

ever seen basked next to the barn.
A ranch hand chopped off its head with the flat of a shovel, as if it had something to atone.

Come winter, it’s quiet, save for the porcupine,

who digs in the onset sludge. Underneath
a clear comet sky. Near the withered crabapple tree, it uncovers crimson graves in snow.

In the corner of our land, a cottonwood

was struck by lightning.
I had carved my initials into the widow-maker, and in the wind, it let out a soft groan.

Shirley Marin

12 13
 Eric Warren
FeverDream Magazine’s Issue 5 Featured Photographer & Writer

14 15
14 15
 The Bakken has become the crude version of a wild
west gold rush. And the Fort Berthold Reservation is the
fiery heart of it. The reservation has been hit hardest by
the flaring epidemic. Methane, the main ingredient in
natural gas, comes up with oil during production, and
then gets burned off as a byproduct.
While flaring off natural gas that could be sold seems
counter-intuitive, it’s a common practice for oil companies
who choose not to take the financial hit of connecting
wells to the natural gas grid to sell a product that’s not
as lucrative as oil. Billions of dollars of natural gas
owned and managed by the federal government is flared,
vented, or leaked around the US. If you’re an American
citizen, this is your natural gas being wasted. It’s enough
gas to heat over two million homes a year. Some states
have stricter requirements against wasting this resource
than others. Colorado, for example, flares less than 2%
of all gas produced by oil wells. North Dakota, on the
other hand, flares off about 19%. On the Fort Berthold
Reservation, oil companies flare more than 37%, leading
to this apocalyptic light show.
It’s not just the light from the flares that pollutes the sky.
Chemicals come up with the methane including volatile
organic compounds (VOCs) known to cause respiratory
illnesses like asthma as well as the carcinogens benzene,
toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene. Burning the gasses
doesn’t remove all of the chemicals, and everyone living
downwind has to deal with the medical consequences. I met
Joletta Bird Bear, a long-time resident of the reservation.
She described a recent trip to the Elbowoods Clinic where
she asked if people have been coming in with respiratory
issues. The nurse confirmed that not only were young
people being diagnosed with asthma in greater numbers,
but they’d been treating adults for asthma who’d never
been asthmatic. Residents were increasingly coming in
with a debilitating respiratory infection that oil workers
call the Bakken Cough. I couldn’t find any solid numbers
of cancer rates on the Fort Berthold Reservation, but
every single local I talked to knew someone with cancer.
Usually more than one.

N o t e s f r o m t h e A p o c a ly p s e
A Journey Through an American Sacrifice Zone
by Eric Warren

A natural gas flare howls just a few feet away from me,
sounding like a rocket trying to take flight. Flame shoots
thirty feet into the air, casting everything—oil tanks,
nodding oil pump jacks, and the surrounding wheat
field—in an undulating, hellish glow.
The bluff I’m on overlooks the town of Four Bears,
just across the bridge from New Town in the heart of
North Dakota’s Bakken oil play. Flares like this one burn,
gyrating all the way out to the horizon in every direction.
Hundreds or thousands of them. It’s almost midnight, but
the sky glows orange overhead, blocking all but the most
robust stars.
The Bakken oil play covers 200,000 square miles of
North Dakota, Montana, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
Over 14,000 oil wells perforate the North Dakota region
alone. There are plans for the number of North Dakota
wells to top out over 48,000, depending on the price of
oil. As it is, the flaring can be seen from space, looking
like a clone of Minneapolis / Saint Paul plopped down
in the sparsely populated prairie. There’s a lot of money
being pumped out of the ground here. But looking out
across this landscape of perpetual daylight, like a scene
out of Bladerunner, it’s hard not to ask, has the money
been worth it?
I work for a nonprofit that advocates for responsible
energy development. I’m in western North Dakota for a
couple of days to get a sense of what our members are
experiencing on the ground. Being from Billings, I see the
Bakken in the news and know oilfield workers. But coming
out and seeing it is very different. All of the descriptions
and space maps can’t prepare you for the petroleum scent
and heat washing over you in the light of a nearby flare
and the landscape on fire.
Hell on Earth
Oil was first discovered in the Bakken Shale Formation in
1951, but it wasn’t until hydraulic fracturing was coupled
with horizontal drilling that the oil became recoverable
in significant amounts. Since 2000, North Dakota has
surged to become the second largest oil-producing state in
the US, pumping more than one million barrels of oil out
of the ground per day.

16 Feature layout by Rylee Treu

17 17
Blank Spot on the Map well as several towns, including Van Hook and Sanish. thirty feet from the flare. It lights up a dozen massive oil their flares lighting up the sky. Unlike the logging industry,
I’d spent that afternoon driving from Glendive, Montana, When New Town was built, one of the names proposed tanks and several oil pump-jacks all bobbing up and down which clearcuts the backsides of mountains so your
to New Town, North Dakota, cutting across the Dakota for the new settlement was Vanish, a blend of the lost at different speeds. The roar of the igniting gasses drowns average tourist can’t see the destruction from the highway,
Prairie National Grasslands. The road threaded its way town names. A particularly apt name considering the out all other night sounds. The heavy scent of petroleum the oil industry doesn’t try to hide its impact. What was, a
through miles of steep-sided hills carpeted with prairie destruction of the Three Affiliated Tribes’ food hangs in the air. Heat presses against my face as I watch. decade ago, pristine range or farmland can now only be
grasses that rippled in the wind like cascading dominoes. sovereignty and economy. Now, almost a sixth How many homes would this blaze heat on a chilly described as one thing: a sacrifice zone.
Those grassy hills are home to all kinds of birds from of the tribes’ land is water. When the US night like tonight? Behind the flare, thousands of similar
eagles and prairie falcons to wild turkeys and sharptail government proposed damming the flares dot the land out to the The Davis Refinery Boondoggle
grouse. Deer, elk, coyote, fox, and even bighorn sheep can river, the tribal council responded, horizon like flickering The next morning, I head south toward Belfield, North
be seen wandering the slopes. “We have been, and now are, orange stars. Along Dakota, following a long line of water trucks and pickups
The National Grasslands were like an oasis in the as nearly self- this road, less than with overloaded trailers known here as “hotshots.” I pass
industrial fires of the Bakken. A dark spot in the sea of supporting as the a mile from the man-camps of prison-cell-sized apartments and RVs
light seen in photos from space. As soon as I crossed out average white most populous decorated with American flags. A massive flare burns
of the protected lands, oil wells began popping up along community...the town on the just feet from where the oil workers sleep. A fracking rig
the highway. By the time I got to Watford City, they were lands which will reservation, oil towers above the prairie pressing millions of gallons of
a constant companion along the roadside. Even during be flooded are pads are placed water thousands of feet into the ground to shatter the
daytime, flares were visible for miles. Semi-trucks hauling practically all every half mile shale and release the oil. The semi-truck ahead of me has
produced water, the radioactive saltwater backwash from the lands which or so with the words “drill baby drill” painted on the trailer. Fire is
drilling, clogged the roads at intersections and round- are of any use their pumps everywhere.
abouts. Once I hit the border of the Reservation, the or value.” The sucking oil The badlands rise up out of the prairie like a rough
flaring was everywhere. government out of the spine of knife-edged ridges and erosion-cut valleys.
What was gone was the steady stream of carcasses was unswayed g round The Lakota called this harsh landscape “Mako Sica,”
along the highway. Throughout the grasslands of eastern by the protest and somewhat directly translating to Land Bad. There’s little
Montana, dead deer, raccoons, and rabbits were the and in 1954, vegetation and even less water, making the stretch between
unfortunate result of interactions with cars and trucks. the Garrison central North Dakota and eastern Montana particularly
The lack of roadkill gave some credence to Bird Bear’s Dam was unforgiving. It’s also one of the most beautiful
comment about the wildlife disappearing after the oil completed. 80% landscapes in the west. So beautiful, in fact,
boom started. “The difference is astounding,” she said. of the reservation’s that the landscape inspired a skinny, glasses-
A local teacher named Tom Abe told me about a flare native population was wearing kid from New York out hunting
that lights up his front window at night. It sits on a bluff displaced to the hard, in 1883 to try his hand at ranching.
overlooking the Missouri River Valley, where the Army dry prairie above the Experiences running cattle and seeing
Corps of Engineers flooded his ancestors’ agricultural fertile river valley. Now, the devastation of unregulated
land in the 1950’s. seventy years later, every overgrazing as well as the slaughter
Ignoring Lake Sakagawea’s tragic history, it’s a corner of the tribe’s
beautiful spot that looks out over the water to the low hills remaining land is being
of the badlands in the distance. This view, and every other impacted by the oil
vista looking out over the lake is now marred by countless industry.
towers of flame along the banks glinting off the water. The flare that Tom
When the reservoir was created, not only did it destroy pointed out was easy
an agricultural way of life for the people of the Mandan, to find. Now, at almost
Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes of the Fort Berthold midnight, I pull to the
Reservation, it also flooded countless sacred sites, as side of the road, less than

18 19
of the bison turned Teddy Roosevelt into a champion of
conservation. During his presidency, he saved 230 million
acres of land for future generations. Theodore Roosevelt
National Park sits just a few miles from where he ranched
cattle in the mid-1880s.
It’s heartbreaking, then, to roll into Belfield and see
North Dakota’s newest proposed oil refinery sited just
three miles from the border of Teddy’s national park. The
Davis Refinery, if built, will be closer to the national park
than the ranch that inspired it.
Belfield hugs the eastern edge of Theodore Roosevelt
National Park’s South Unit. Flatbed trucks loaded with
hay saunter down roads at a walking pace. A tall grain
elevator looms at the edge of downtown. Farm stores and
energy company warehouses line the streets.
From the top of a hill overlooking town, I can see the
bulldozed land where the proposed refinery will sit. The
first thing I’m struck by is that, as big as it is, the plot is
way too small for a 50,000 barrel-a-day refinery. I grew up
in the shadow of three 50,000 barrel-a-day refineries, and
each takes up a lot more space than this 150-acre field.
For comparison, the 20,000 barrel per day Dickinson
Refinery, just six miles away, is sited on 320 acres of land.
It seems likely that the extra land is going to have to come
out of people’s property. Homes and farm fields will have
to be leveled as the refinery plans expand, whether the
owners like it or not.
Recently, I’d seen the documentary “My Country No
More” about local farmers fighting a refinery proposed
in Trenton, North Dakota. The film described the way
that the oil industry had pressured Williams County into
rezoning farmland to industrial use for a crude oil railroad
terminal on the outskirts of town. The project was small
enough that people didn’t get too worked up about
it. As soon as part of Trenton was zoned for industrial
development, however, an oil company swooped in with
plans to build a refinery. Once the precedent was set, it
was nearly impossible for the people of Trenton to fight
both the oil company and the county, who were already
finding ways to spend the anticipated tax revenue.
A mile up the tracks, I see lines of black oil train cars
snaking around massive oil tanks. The oil terminal looks
pretty new. Meridian Oil, the developers of the Davis
Refinery, appear to be using the exact same playbook.
I cross the tracks, and make my way along a narrow road
to the fence protecting the proposed refinery, wondering
what all of the semi-truck traffic was going to do to the
asphalt. Would the increased tax base cover it? If the
Dickinson Refinery is any clue the answer would be no.
The Dickinson Refinery was a similar project to
the proposed Davis Refinery. Lots of promises. Lots of
tax breaks. And then, once it was complete, it was so
20
unprofitable that the company dumped it in less than a
year. According to the Wall Street Journal, shareholders
took such a hit that they sued over the mishandling of
their investments. That refinery, built to turn Bakken crude
into fuel, now processes soybeans and corn into biodiesel.
Will being a few miles closer to the oilfields really be the
difference between profit and loss?
There’s a lot about the proposal that doesn’t seem
to add up. Whether it’s the location so close to North
Dakota’s only national park, or the fact that the company
has changed the proposed output of the refinery from
40,000 barrels a day to 55,000 barrels a day and then back
down to 49,500 barrels a day once it became clear that
North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality
(pressured by environmental groups) might actually
force them to have the more thorough environmental
assessment required for refineries over 50,000 barrels. But
nothing has changed to the design on paper.
There’s a sign at the edge of that 150-acre plot that
reads “future home of Davis Refinery.” Arrow K Farms’
tidy white farmhouse and out-buildings stand a couple
hundred yards down the road. Across the street, fields of
soybeans and other crops stand lush and green. Who’s
going to have to give up their land to this sprawling
industrial site? With the uncontrolled fracking binge to
the north keeping oil prices at rock-bottom, what are they
going to do with the refinery when it goes bust? And what
will be the impact to the tourism industry which brought
in over 700,000 visitors to the park in 2018 generating
upwards of $39 million in nearby communities like
Belfield?
In his 1908 speech titled “Conservation as a National
Duty,” Theodore Roosevelt challenged the way
Americans see the landscapes in which they live by turning
conservation from an economic issue into one of morality.
“We have become great because of the lavish use
of our resources” Roosevelt said. “But the time has
come to inquire seriously what will happen when
our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the
oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have
still further impoverished and washed into the
streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields
and obstructing navigation.”
As I look at this bulldozed and barren field among the
grassland hills that inspired his conservation, I see that this
is still Teddy’s wild west. We’re still economically flush and
morally bankrupt. Nothing has changed, except, perhaps,
our hunger for resources.
a Conversation with the
Author, Eric Warren
What originally drew you to writing?
I’ve been writing since I was little. I remember sitting at
my dad’s desk with a few sheets of paper stapled together
illegibly handwriting stories about castles and portals to
other worlds. I didn’t have a lot of friends and didn’t really
belong, so I wrote up some worlds where my characters
(and essentially I) did belong. That kind of fell by the
wayside when I picked up a camera and started capturing
images of the non-imaginary world. I went to school
for photography, but only used it to make a part-time
living at best. I found myself in a lot of physical jobs
like loading trucks, bussing tables, and digging graves that
gave my mind a lot of time to wander. Fictional worlds
and characters began to creep into my consciousness. I
took up writing again, and at twenty five, I decided to go
back to school for fiction.
What is one thing you took away from your time
in an academic creative writing program (whether
your learning it was intentional or not)?
I got so much from my time at both University of
Montana and the University of Kansas’s science fiction
and fantasy summer workshops. I’m not convinced you
need an MFA to be a writer, but solid undergrad courses
are invaluable. What I learned in two years in a structured
writing environment would have taken me at least a
decade on my own. I also don’t think that learning craft
is enough to make you a good writer. It takes a lot of
words on pages, and a lot of rejected stories, which is a
lesson I continued learning after college. I’m constantly
re-learning it.
Something else I learned in school was that good
writing is good writing no matter the genre. I went to the
University of Montana wanting to write science fiction,
but with a few exceptions, it was geared toward literary
fiction. I felt disappointed at the time, but the intense
focus on literary craft gave me a solid foundation for
when I later went to science fiction and travel-writing
workshops. With the basics down, I was able to focus on
learning what made those genres unique. I continue to
use that foundation whether it’s a blog post or something
more like Road Tripping the Apocalypse.
Another thing that both University of Montana
and University of Kansas taught me was the value of
workshopping with people who are better than you are,
which was easy to do at both of those places. Watching
someone else take your work apart and offer constructive
feedback can be a magical experience, as long as you keep
your ego out of it. A fabulous side effect of keeping your
ego out of the work is that it prepares you for the world
of professional writing, where you’ll be working with
editors whom you can also learn a lot from, if you’re open
minded. In the end, writing is for the reader, and editors
generally know their readers better than you do.
Your photographs here feature the working cogs of
the day-to-day Anthropocene and paint them with
their own light in a very apocalyptic, foreshadowing
way: the refinery flames engulfing the landscape,
for instance. When you are behind the lens, do you
endeavor to present such microcosms of our current
age, or is it simpler than that? More complex?
The nonprofit that I work for does a lot of work with
Bakken-based community organizations trying to curb the
flaring, venting, and leaking of methane and other volatile
organic compounds from oil and gas infrastructure. It’s
a problem that’s hard to grasp unless you’ve been in the
area. Methane comes out of the ground with the oil,
but rather than capture it and add it to the natural gas
infrastructure, companies vent it or flare it off. Millions
of dollars of publicly owned minerals are released into
the atmosphere where they can cause health issues in
nearby communities and exacerbate global warming.
Technical solutions for capturing the gas and adding it to
the natural gas supply chain are available and have been
21

implemented by oil companies in other parts of the U.S.
where states require it, but since it would impact the bottom
line and companies can get away with flaring and venting in
North Dakota, they do so.
Because of this, the Bakken is known for its prolific
flaring, especially on the Fort Berthold Reservation where
both regulations and enforcement can be gray areas. It can
be seen from space like a duplicate Minneapolis-Saint Paul.
The scope of the problem can be hard to see during the
day, since the sun overpowers the light of the flares. To
tell the story, I went out at night where the scope of the
problem becomes clearer. From any high point you can see
hundreds of flares dotting the landscape out to the horizon
in all directions. The eerie light of the flares gives everything
a creepy glow and hides the stars. It’s one of those places
where the story almost tells itself.
What are a few stories you could credit with shaping
who you are, even if for a short time in your life?
I can trace where I am today from more or less a single
event. When I was growing up, I’d come home from
22
school to watch this show called Globe Trekker by Lonely
Planet. Every new episode featured a new destination and
the experiences of an entertaining “traveler” show host.
Growing up, I’d spent summers traveling with my family
around the country in a converted van visiting historic
places, national parks, and weird roadside attractions. When
I saw Globe Trekker, I imagined myself being one of those
hosts traveling the world and doing all the awesome stuff
they did.
Fast-forward twenty years. I’d been writing a few travel
stories for Matador Network when I stumbled upon a
travel video that wasn’t a network TV operation. This solo
traveler, without a camera crew, was hosting a “travel show”
on YouTube. I quickly did a search for HD camcorders
and found that you could get a small, high-definition video
camera for just a few hundred bucks. All those feelings
of watching Globe Trekker came back. I bought a cheap
Canon and began filming what would now be called a travel
vlog of some adventures around Maine. I certainly wasn’t
as entertaining as Ian Wright or Justine Shapiro, but my
photography training meant that my footage looked pretty
decent. It didn’t take long to learn that I’m a better listener
than an on-camera personality; I asked the right kinds of
questions to bring stories to life. It opened the doors to
doing documentary film, and eventually working with
nonprofits to tell their stories, including heading into the
Bakken to see how flaring is affecting communities there.
Being a documentary filmmaker meant that I could finally
tell a story that had moved me earlier in my life. Mountain
biking has been one of my primary loves since I was a kid.
In the early days, trail access was a huge issue. Mountain
bikers were considered renegades. Private landowners
who’d allowed hikers to cross their land on established trails
for years closed those corridors because mountain bikers
started using the trails. Public land managers weren’t much
better.
However, in the summer of 2000, I heard about a 24-
hour mountain bike race being held by a bunch of ranchers
in Rapelje, about an hour from Billings. These people, many
of whom hadn’t ridden a bicycle since childhood, weren’t
just opening their land to mountain bikers but inviting them
out to ride. It was revolutionary at the time. I had to work, so
I couldn’t participate in the race. I went out and took photos
of the event and spent some time talking to the volunteers,
which it turned out was most of the town. I found out there
was an amazing story behind the race. They were putting
the race on to support their only cafe. The story was so
moving that I made a short documentary about it called
Saving the Stockman. The race went on for years and was
the premiere mountain biking event in eastern Montana.
The people of Rapelje were so welcoming. Ranchers who
own or lease a tremendous amount of land in Montana had
gone from being the enemy of land access to stewards of
land access, seemingly overnight. In this one instance, we
all aligned over economic interests, but economic interests
alone don’t account for the warmth of the community
toward us. These were people who loved the land, and
once the walls came down, they wanted to share it. It’s all
about trust. It was my first introduction to the power of
relationships.
You talk about growing up near large-scale refineries.
How did this influence your career path? What was
it that kept you from normalizing practices for
immense profit?
The refineries gave me headaches growing up when the
wind was right, but they didn’t really influence my career
path much. In fact, I grew up as a car guy in a “car family”
and going to streetrod meets and roadtripping around the
U.S. in a converted van. I even owned a 1968 Barracuda.
I actually came to the work of exposing “harm for
profit” from the food and agriculture side, starting with the
book “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. I realized as I
read the book that I’d grown up in a semi-rural landscape
with horses and cattle roaming a pasture abbutting my
backyard, and yet, I didn’t have a clue how food actually
got to my plate. Another pivotal moment came when I was
filming Saving the Stockman. I was sitting in the Stockman
Cafe with a wheat farmer and cattle rancher, and I said
something about how good the burgers were because they
were local. The guy snorted a laugh. “They come off the
Sysco truck like everything else,” he said. He went on to
tell me how that beef could have come from anywhere,
including other countries (even if it’s labeled “Product of
the USA). He also talked about the difficulty of having to
ship his cattle out of state to get them processed in one
of the few remaining USDA packing plants. I remember
being shocked that I was sitting in a cafe in the heart of
“beef country” and that my hamburger could have been
from Florida, or even Canada. Since then, I’ve learned that
it’s so much worse than he described. We saw during the
pandemic how unstable our food system is. There are just
four multinational meatpackers controlling 84% of the U.S.
beef market, and other non-meat foods aren’t much better.
When I lived in Maine, I saw a film series called Meet
Your Farmer featuring Maine’s local producers and the
23
restaurants who supported them. When I moved back to
Montana, I had ambitions to tell similar stories about our
farmers and ranchers. A friend connected me to the ag
and food organizer at Northern Plains Resource Council. I
pitched the idea, but instead, they hired me to make a short
film about how oil and gas was affecting water quality in
the Bakken. It was my first time in the Bakken. Seeing the
chaos of the Bakken oil play, even on the Montana side
of the border, was eye-opening. I spoke to people whose
lives and livelihoods depended on clean water, and they
were terrified. To a rancher, a single blown well casing could
poison all the wells they use for drinking or watering their
cattle. “Accidents happen,” one of them told me. “Just look
at the ‘Bakken Fail of the Day’ page on Facebook.” It was a
time when people were really starting to question fracking,
and my film, Mixing Oil and Water, screened all over the
U.S., plus in Europe and Africa.
I also made several short films about the impacts of coal
mining on the people living nearby before shutting down my
film production business and joining the nonprofit world.
What became very clear since I started down this path is
that both food production and energy production can be
done responsibly, but that’s not what happens when an
industry gets too powerful. Once an industry starts writing
its own rules, as is so often the case, the industry’s profits
take priority over the lives of the people being harmed. It
ends up falling to the people who have the least, the people
who never had any say over the bad things happening to
them, to stand up against these well-resourced corporations.
What are some of the changes you’d like to see
implemented in order to mitigate the damages we’ve
already caused, and may continue to cause?
A good start would be to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel
industry. Oil, gas, and coal get billions of dollars every year,
starting with cheap federal resource leases and breaks on
extraction royalties. The subsidies continue throughout the
supply chain to the end product. If you’ve ever bought gas
in another country, you know how much cheaper it is here,
even though oil is sold on a global market. The second, and
more important change I’d make would be for the fossil
fuel industry to absorb their externalized costs. Right now,
corporations get out of paying for even the most basic
things, like cleaning up oil and gas drilling sites and coal
mines (often by simply going out of business). But they
also get away with externalities that adversely affect public
health, dangerously pollute water, and harm the climate.
Those externalities are then unloaded onto the healthcare
system or taxpayers. That sounds like it would be a huge
amount of money that would get passed on to rate-payers,
but with the scale of use, it would only add something like
$0.20 per kilowatt hour to the average electric bill for coal
24
generated electricity. It’s not an enormous amount, but
with renewables already cheaper than fossil fuels, it would
generate even more motivation for people to shift away
from expensive, dirty fuels. Since these are free market
approaches, they would be easier for Americans to stomach
than other changes if things weren’t so politically polarized.
I think most Americans would agree we should be paying
for what we’re really getting, and that if a corporation gives
you cancer, they should pay for it.
I also recognize that these kinds of changes would hurt
low-income, rural, and communities of color more than
everyone else, and those impacts must be mitigated at the
same time. A farmer or a family priced out of their walkable
community shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of higher
fuel prices. This is where things get complicated, but not
insurmountable.
What was the reaction like amongst you and your
colleagues when President Biden passed the Inflation
Reduction Act? Was it enough to produce significant
change?
Speaking only for myself, I think it was a big step in the
right direction. More than the monetary investment in clean
energy and other technologies, I think that the time-frame
is important here. Most federal incentive programs sunset
after just a few years, making investors skittish about funding
projects. The Inflation Reduction Act ensures that these
programs will be funded for a decade or more. This will
create market stability and open the floodgates for private
investors to support the shift to a cleaner economy. In the
end, the billions the government is spending will be dwarfed
by private capital pushing clean technologies forward. As
for the fossil fuel-friendly side-deal that Senator Manchin
forced through in order to get his vote, the danger isn’t the
fossil fuel leases that are required to go on sale in order to
get renewable energy projects approved. Oil companies are
sitting on thousands of leases right now that they’ll probably
never drill. They’re simply used to pad their holdings to
attract investors. The biggest issue is that the deal weakens
the National Environmental Policy Act, America’s bedrock
environmental law, in order to fast-track the Mountain
Valley Pipeline. Since the 1970s, NEPA has been one of the
best tools for ensuring big projects don’t harm people or
nearby communities. Weakening or “streamlining” it gives
private companies a lot more latitude to move forward with
projects on their word that the projects are safe. In this
political climate, that’s a genie that won’t easily go back in
the bottle.
Rilie Tane Zumbrennan
25
 “You can never get a cup of
tea large enough or a book
long enough to suit me.”
– C.S. lewis

Blue
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26 27
 Discover English Language Arts at MSU Billings!

Sigma Tau Delta is the international

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28 29
Kean Christensen

30 31
 Raw Materials
Reference Frame
Brittney Uecker
Laura Meintjes

All we’ll ever know is what we’ve seen before

Based on archetype and biblically engrained
Feels like communion on the tongue
Soak it up, blood sponge
Feels like teacups cracking when our hips tap
Drink it up, delicate lips
When my breakdown happens at 7AM
Driving aimlessly to sad songs
How will I go on?
To speak it is to force it into being
We laughed at this, the impossibility
Unfathomable
I am the crazy one
Am I the crazy one?
These circles we’ve spun before
All of us, tails chased

Cloying loneliness, rolling nauseous splaying

That makes you speak it into being
Words shot from the hip and rolling of your tongue
Cling to your lips like sugar water
The bites you take after you are full

I find myself where I’ve been before

How many destructions have I left in my wake?

32 33
Supine
Laura Meintjes

34 35

Everything Happens for Some Reason
KJ Harper
I suppose I should have waited. Maybe a week couldn’t have been a coincidence. If we’d still been
or two. The housing crisis here is insane. People with
money are living in their cars, moving back to towns
they hate, their irritating parents moving shit from
the basement to the garage. I blame the Californians,
the fucking Californians, but Amalie tells me its more
complicated than that. Blame land shortages, blame
labor shortages, blame low-interest rates, blame
material shortages, blame the pandemic. It wouldn’t be
fair for me to point out that Amalie herself, came from
California, a mere six years ago, so I won’t mention that.
Bias aside, she may have a point, but it’s much easier to
blame the Californians.
I should have waited to break things off, but it really
did feel selfish to do so. I never did figure out what
purpose I served for Amalie. She’s very type A—she
runs every morning, she does her laundry every week,
most of her plants are still alive, she uses a physical,
paper planner, and she gets visibly angry when we get
stuck behind fat shoppers at the supermarket. Our first
date took place at a little spot downtown called Flask,
which, ironically, did not serve liquor. I showed up early
(a rarity) waiting at the table with a sour. She sat down
with a kombucha, and I immediately began questioning
whether we’d make it to a second date.
I won’t provide a list of my own type B tendencies.
You’ll come to see them for yourself, and perhaps you’ll
also feel inclined to applaud me for valiantly embracing
homelessness in order to euthanize what we both failed
to vocally acknowledge as a malignant relationship.
The creature had four functioning legs, but cancer had
already taken the heart, and then the throat, and the
mind was presumably next.
I didn’t expect her to kick me to the curb right then
and there, because she is, unquestionably, a good person,
but here I am, somewhat aimlessly driving in a ’92 Ford
Ranger whose odometer stopped working at 229,884
miles. She did not cry. Just bit her lip while she watched
me haul my shit from upstairs, around the kitchen table,
through the living room (where she occupied the couch,
pretending to watch a documentary about NASA) and
out the front door. She did not pick up on the hints
when I got to the mahogany bookshelf, a side project I
was supposed to finish refinishing several months ago.
Surely she heard me, breathing loud and heavy and
saying fuck, but she chose to turn up the volume which
36
Chapter excerpt
Note to the reader: this story contains drug use
and references to rape and a homophobic slur.
together, sidekicks, as I always said, I would have set the
bookshelf down right in front of the TV and made a
scene, and she would have laughed in that charming,
obnoxious way which I already know will come to haunt
me for years. She would have slapped me in the ass
and called me a walnut, something like that. Can you
ask the person you just dumped to help you move the
heavy shit? She knows I have a faulty back so I think the
answer is more nuanced than you initially thought. She
turns the volume down so I can tell her that it won’t all
fit, I’ll have to leave the topper in the garage because it
won’t all fit and then I’ll come back tomorrow or the
day after to get it. She turns the volume back up which
I regard as an “okay.”
I’m headed for a place I call Donut Road, a lazily
maintained logging road that stretches for miles and
miles in the mountains. This here, this is where I take
a right, this is where I make my way up through a
residential neighborhood where every other lawn has
a sign saying “Drive Like Your Kids Live Here,” but
instead I flip my blinker off and I continue down SW
Higgins instead. This happens frequently. My choices
feel as though they’re made for me. Am I indecisive?
Impulsive? I cannot say for sure, but these pivots change
my life for the better or the worse, just like any other
decision we could possibly make, right? I’m gonna
keep going, keep going until I can find the first bar
with an open parking space. It’s the Golden Rose, a
smaller place known for the soft red glow of the neon
lights that wrap around the top of the walls. It’s also
known for the person, likely a transgender woman or a
crossdressing man, who wears floral blouses and dresses,
who likes to sit on a rolled-up sleeping bag outside the
entrance with their backpack and their dog, where they
make conversation with anyone willing to pause. It
typically isn’t regrettable, stopping to chat. They’re very
knowledgeable about a wide variety of topics. Cars,
fashion, guns, the medicinal uses of various plants.
Tonight they just ignore me, grunting in response to
my question. Maybe something is wrong, maybe the
burden of homelessness is finally dampening their usual
cheery disposition. Maybe something is wrong.
I take one last glance at my rig before reaching for
the door handle. My belongings, my fresh displacement,
on display for everyone to see. The shame passes
quickly when I remember that Missoula is a place of
openness, of vulnerability, a place where spotting tents
on sidewalks has become as normalized as seeing tents
in the mountains. Speaking of, I shouldn’t be here. I
should be setting up my tent before the sun fully sets.
I should be searching for firewood, looking for open
storage units. I should be—
“Malik. Yoohoo. What are you having?”
“Sorry,” I respond, “whiskey sour.”
“No Amalie?” he asks, and the question suddenly feels
profoundly invasive to me, truly irritating, even though
he’s got every right to ask it.
“She’s meal prepping,” I say.
This one’s much more whiskey than sour, probably
for the better. I scan the bar, which is fairly busy for a
Wednesday. The temperature finally breaks ninety and
everybody needs to see each other.
There’s a table of four: younger twenty-somethings,
one of them could be nineteen, and they’ve got twenty
piercings between them. Lots of pontification. I get to say
the word because I am one, a thin, tattooed girl says. Faggot,
faggot, faggot. Laughter. I notice Thoreau’s face, beard
and all, inked on her left shoulder and I decide I like her.
I’m not sure I’d want to own a face like his on my body.
An older woman, cowboy hat, trying to figure out
how to work the jukebox. I don’t want to say she doesn’t
belong here, but she doesn’t. Obviously tanked, she
sways like a cattail in the wind, and I wonder if it’s
possible that she doesn’t know where she is.
Two guys at a table in the corner. A black man with
thick, black-rimmed glasses and perfect teeth. The other
guy, Middle Eastern, sports a plain white tee with denim
overalls, and I wonder if double-taking makes me racist
in some way.
The only other interesting person of note is a lanky-
looking guy, maybe thirty, in a booth by himself. He’s
wearing a Radiohead shirt, but obviously this isn’t
interesting. His face is flat and emotionless, yet I can see
the glint of where the tears continue to fall. He glances
at me, but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care that I can see,
so he puts his chin in his hand and his indifferent gaze
returns to the front door.
And so we’ve got another question of morality on our
hands—do I sit next to the man? Console him? I always
considered it incredibly rude to cry around others, but
his grief appears to be reserved for himself and himself
only. He isn’t trying to hide it, but he isn’t trying to
display it either. I try my best to put myself in his shoes
for a moment or two, and decide to leave him alone. I
choose to shoot pool instead.
Fortunately, there’s only one table, and it’s in an
empty room around the corner. I’m old enough to drink
alone without feeling too loserish and insecure, but
playing pool solo is something different. I remember
something my mother said when we were kids, and she
was bitching about Whichever Boyfriend It Was At The
Time, the better you are at pool, the worse you tend to be at life.
Fucking loser. I think about how pathetic my checking
account is, how I should own my own island by now.
I’m trying to remember how to rack when she rounds
the corner. I’m guessing her foot got caught in the
carpet. By the time I sense her presence, she is already
mid-flight, slanting toward the hardwood, drink in
one hand, the other arm flailing, but I am squatted at
the edge of the table so there is nothing I can do. The
plastic cup makes contact first, creating a geyser of ice
cubes and vodka Red Bull.
She’s fortunate no one else had been around to capture
the tragedy with a phone. She’d surely have gone viral—
the way the contents of her drink came right back down
on one side of her face. The other cheek smudged up
against the floor.
I have to wonder if she’s dead, but only for a moment,
because she doesn’t move at first. She just lies there
motionless, and you might want to trace her body with
a piece of chalk if you had a sense of humor.
I approach cautiously, extending a hand.
She finally turns onto her back and gazes up at me,
that empty look in her eyes that I’m sure you’re familiar
with.
“I’m a raging alcoholic,” she says matter-of-factly, and
then she tilts her head back and laughs, and it’s pathetic
and beautiful. Or maybe I’m just relieved to see a smile.
She takes my hand and I pull her to her feet, almost
thinking better of it because she seemed safer on the
floor. She’s on the Titanic, but instead of “Nearer, My
God, To Thee,” it’s Baby Keem. Overwhelming, to say
the least. She gestures for my arm, and when I offer it
she shoves me away and cackles.
“What’s your name,” she says, more of a statement
than a question, but before I can answer she interrupts.
“I’m Parker. Winner buys me a new drink.”
The games go fairly quickly. I have to remind her once
or twice that she can only hit the cue ball. She knows
this, but she doesn’t care. I did not come here to play
babysitter, so I move from singles to doubles. I know I
won’t catch up with her, even when I do start ordering
her Red Bulls sans vodka. She doesn’t notice, of course,
she is immersed in these moments and she dances with
them, as Baby Keem becomes Kendrick, as Kendrick
becomes EARTHGANG. She mentions her father
several times throughout the night, saying he’s “hella
dead,” and I assume it’s a metaphorical death because
she laughs vibrantly every time she reminds me. I ask
37
 her where her friends are, why is she here alone, and she
shrugs, says maybe they’re in the bathroom doing lines.
“ARE YOU TIRED,” she says, and I shake my head.
“ME TOO,” she says, “I NEED A PICKMEUP,”
and I play along, because that’s what I’ve been doing
all night, allowing this woman to hear whatever it is that
suits her, because she is a deadly hurricane and I love
to swim.
“BATHROOM,” she says.
“Okay,” I respond. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“NO,” she says, laughing again, “LET’S GO TO
THE BATHROOM.”
She points toward the little black square. A primitive
figure with a triangle for a dress.
“No,” I respond. “No, I um, no.”
She scrunches up my t-shirt in her fist, and leads me to
the men’s room instead. I think of a VICE documentary
on scopolamine I saw a few years back. The drug is
extracted from nightshade plants, and used for nefarious
purposes in places like Columbia and Ecuador. Devil’s
Breath, or, “The World’s Scariest Drug,” they called
it, because of its immense potency and its ability to
renders its victims unconscious for several hours at a
time. The drug can be absorbed via the skin, in small
doses, and just like that, you’re fucking done, poof, your
sense of free will is gone. You’re under hypnosis. Those
who employ the drug can get you to empty your savings
account while they wait outside the bank. They could
watch while you load a U-Haul with your personal
belongings. They could rape you. They could do lots
of things, and although I’m certain Parker isn’t an
Ecuadorian drug lord who wants to rob me, I’m not all
that sure why I’m letting her take the driver’s seat. She
isn’t conventionally attractive, at least not to me, but I’ve
never been one for that kind anyway. She’s short, maybe
5’2” or 5’3” with circular glasses and crooked teeth. Just
a couple years younger than me, twenty-five or six if I
remember correctly. Her skin is pasty and drippy with
sweat. Her eyes are wide and intense, as though some
sort of atrocity occurs everywhere she looks. Everything
she regards seems to hold a significance of sorts, and
that must be what it is, I decide, it’s the eyes, and the way
they betray her take on the unfolding of things.
A man is whistling as he uses the urinal. He glances
back at the pair of us, and returns to his business as if
there is nothing unusual about a small woman dragging
a man twice her size into the handicapped stall. Her
hands are shaking, and I realize I’ve been holding my
breath. I can’t say for how long. She’s got a small metal
spoon on her keyring—very cute, but yet another red
flag to add to the list.
“Last year he hung himself from a tree, up in Miller
38
Creek,” she says, and before I can say sorry she’s hoisting
the small baggy up into my face. “Have you seen my
friends?” she asks.
I can feel my face begin to numb, especially my teeth,
and I wonder if this means it’s good or maybe its just cut
with benzocaine.
“The little hipsters at the table? Piercings?”
She ponders for a moment and shrugs again. Dips the
spoon.
“This place sucks. Let’s bounce.”
I assume she means the bar, that she wants to navigate,
but she only meant the bathroom.
“I wanna shake it up,” she says, “I’m feelin’ lucky.”
We take two chairs at the counter, next to Thoreau
Tattoo Girl. I can’t hear but Parker leans in, whispers
a few words into her ear, and the two begin kissing,
violently, while I tap my leg against the foot of my chair.
TTG pulls away suddenly. “My girlfriend is outside.
She’ll be fucking pissed. It was nice to meet you.” She
looks to me. “Make sure she’s safe tonight, ‘kay?”
I nod, not knowing what to say. I am 28 years old, so
if anyone should feel unsafe at 1 AM on a Wednesday—
no, Thursday—it’s me.
Parker asks for another vodka Red Bull and the dice.
It’s a new bartender, much older than the last one.
“One outta one thousand two hundred ninety-six,” he
says, as he slides the cup across the counter. “Pot is three
hundred sixty-one bucks. You get two rolls.”
Parker takes the cup and shakes it and she shakes it
and she shakes it. The bartender sighs. She lifts the cup
to her face and gives it a kiss.
Four dice end up on the floor, two on the counter. Five
five’s and one six.
“That doesn’t count,” she snaps, “these counters are
too small.”
“You still have one turn,” he says, bending over to
retrieve the dice.
Same ritualistic over-shaking of the dice, but this time
she gives two quick kisses. She rolls five sixes and one
five. She scoffs and hands the cup back to the bartender.
He lifts the cup to me and tilts it, a kinetic question.
I shake my head. Gambling is for fools. I’m more of
a betting man, myself. Football, basketball, women’s
tennis. I’ve convinced myself that there is something
to be seen, with a keen enough eye, when it comes to
sports, but if you’d seen my win-loss percentage for the
year you’d wonder how I get around without a probing
cane.
“I hate getting close,” she mutters. “It pisses me off.
Let’s go.”
It is while we are fighting our way to the door,
swimming through a tangle of pheromones, through
waves of color and sound, that I finally notice the bitter I love you. Care package, care package do not steal my
taste of chemicals oozing down the back of my throat. fucking care package.”
This is a good thing, of course, only mucus escorting “I gotta piss,” she says. “My room is downstairs.”
powdered incitation from my head to my stomach. She’s gone before I can ask where the stairs are. I
Trazodone would lose this battle, at least for now, but it’s wander toward a large bookcase in the living room.
okay because the last thing I want is sleep. The last thing I’ve always considered a bookcase as a peephole into
I want is to stumble around in the darkness, trying to a person’s mind, and possibly even their heart, if that
erect a multifarious tent, a process that nearly requires doesn’t sound too dramatic. She’s got lots of James
two people despite its capacity for one. Patterson, the newly-infamous Rowling, Tolkien,
But of course we’re trading places again, she says Dostoevsky, Toni Morrison, Melville, Sedaris, a few
she’s ready to deflate. tacky self-help books, Stephen Hunter, Stephen King,
“Let’s go back to yours,” she says. She offers me a Stephen Crane, everything Gillian Flynn, she’s got some
cigarette. I hadn’t even realized how much I needed one Rupi Kaur, Stephanie Meyer, and a bunch of other shit
until now. by people I’ve never heard of. What do you think?
She doesn’t seem like the outdoorsy type. How to, I’m not too sure, either. It’s hard to say what might be
how to, how to make a tent sound appealing. I struggle hers and what might be her brother’s.
to come up with a lie, so I settle for an excuse. “It’s a I hear her walking down the hallway, and I hurriedly
shitshow. I’d be embarrassed to let anyone see it.” find something else to look at, something less invasive.
“Do I look like the sorta person to care about what I settle on a photo above the fireplace mantle. Parker
your house looks like? We’ll leave the lights off if you’re and her brother on either side of her father, his eyes
so bothered.” closed tight in laughter. It looks fairly fresh by the looks
“Where do you live?” I ask. of Parker, as if it could’ve been taken last week. Her
“Up in Miller Creek,” she says, and I wince, thinking brother is a handsome guy,
about how many cops we’d have to elude to make it to She finds me standing there, staring there, staring at
the opposite end of town. Dumb little guppies in shark- her past, and only snorts.
infested waters. “C’mon,” she says. “I’ll show you how stairs work.”
“I’ll get an Uber,” I say, reaching for my pocket, but It isn’t long before she’s straddling me, a dummy-
she bats it away. glazed look in her eyes. It doesn’t matter how attractive
“No seriously I can drive just fine,” she says, still I find her, I spend the next three and a half minutes with
violently slurring her esses. “But I can almost guarantee my eyes closed, thinking of Amalie.
my house’ll be messier than yours.”
I want to argue, to insist that there’s no reason not
to get a lift, but she says she refuses to leave her car
downtown.
“Too many break-ins lately, and if that doesn’t happen
I’ll just show up to a parking ticket.”
I guess I’m just glad she doesn’t ask about my car,
which also happens to be my house. I give in, and
after at least fifteen minutes of searching for her Kia
Forte (bright red, with lots of bumper stickers, she says
repeatedly) we are on our way to southwest Missoula.
She does surprisingly well, taking extra care to avoid
potholes, curbs, and parked cars. Her house isn’t what
I expected either; it’s a gray, two story home with faux
stone siding on the bottom half, a two-car garage, and
neatly trimmed junipers beneath the patio.
“My brother is a gamer so we don’t need to whisper,”
she says as she leads me toward the patio.
I don’t know what to make of this, but it becomes
clear to me as soon as we open the front door.
“YOU’RE AN INCEL, DARREN” he yells. I feel
myself tense up until he continues, “Just kidding buddy,
39
 Rilie Tane Zumbrennan

40 41
 Mourning Montana
Daniel Lurie

Montana, I get to see your face before it breaks

the day. Golden light slips out of night, creeping

across the sage grass, peeling the sleep from a herd

of antelope. A crow clutches a barbed wire fence

in a death grip. At peace, a creek slips out

the corner of your lips and I see everything

I could’ve been. Every time I return,

you’re a little something else. Thinning

ponderosas; boarded up storefronts.

I don’t recognize the faces around you—

giggles and galleries. Elk bugles no longer

carried in the wind. I can’t see the mountains,

the Big Sky, buildings so high. You roll over

and lets out a sigh, and I see your eyes flutter

and open in a flurry. How much longer before

I look at you and you aren’t staring back?

lynn Shield

42 43
 Rilie Tane Zumbrennan
44 45
 Subadult/Juvenile/Child
Brittney uecker

In the lab lays

a partial subadult skeleton, three to six years old,
soft and green and, well, partial
disconnected dots of just the ideas of bones
carpals and tarsals like beads of a broken necklace
teacups of a sexless pelvis
tiny joints swimming in sockets
truly, truly breakable.

At this age, sex is indeterminate.

At this age, age is only a range.
At this age, the skeleton is so malleable
that death doesn’t leave a mark.
Sickness, injury, pain is resorbed
in hopes that there are more slights and
resiliencies to come.

I can see where the bones would give way,

the point where they would splinter—
greenstick, torsion.
Paper thin scapulae, peeking fontanel,
ossifying outward, puddles of hard bone reaching
to the little handful where the heart would beat
taps against the fleck of a sternum,
tinkling like a bell.

We harden. Life hardens us, on a species level.

We learn to become heartier.
Soft goes brittle,
cracks build up to a shatter,
until a tap feels like a wrecking ball.

I thought that death would break me of bones,

but it was having a child that made me see them differently,
see that love is the violence you could cause but don’t.

I lay the skull back in its box—

gentle, as if it had organs, blood—
gather limbs like a bundle of sticks
Dana Barnes like I’m building a fire,
scoop tiny beginnings into my palm
and deposit in the velvet.
I flip the clasp, slide it back onto the shelf.

The violence you could cause but don’t is love.

46 47
 lynn Shield

48 49
 The Listing Cyanide
Daniel Lurie Daniel Lurie

I used to fire concrete screws at the murder, This is just to say, the crabapples I gathered

until I got tired of pulling the shotgun from my lips. for you have started to rot. They aren’t poisonous,

not even the seeds, or core,

This tired is yours now. Almost killed my mother. until mixed with a living creature.

Pry up the floorboards; patch my sisters’ mouths.

In winter, you lay next to me and peeked

Keep a candle lit in each of the yawning maws. out the slats of the widow at the weary

Sew your gaslight into the belly of these walls. tree. You asked if I thought it would flower
next year. I spit seeds from my mouth

In an evening undone, in a wisp of smoke, before answering.

just let the spider in the downstairs bathroom be.

All we got are bodies in the backyard,

but we’ll try to sell you on good bones.

50 51
 Waiting on Manifest Destiny
Daniel Lurie

52 53
 New Year's Eve
Brittney uecker

This will be the year

that my body hurts with purpose
that I thrum with patient life
and I quit counting days like rosary beads.

This will be the year

that the land is supple and forgiving
that we are kind and contrite
and hellfire goes back to hell.

This will be the year

that we give the benefit of the doubt
that star-crossed lovers are no longer crossed
and everybody has somebody.

This will be the year

that words flow direct from heart to mouth
that they are soft in their delivery
and stitch together like a healed wound.

This will be the year

that you don’t poison yourself
that you dry out like a sheet on a line
and you whip in the wind with controlled abandon.

This will be the year

that I paint my nails once in a while
that I concede to cut off my hair
and let my age recklessly calcify.

This will be the year

that I won’t recognize a year from now
that renders last year an eon
and graveyard dirt packs under my nails.

Craig Botnen

54 55
Contributor Biographies
Laura Meintjes was born and raised in Plano, Texas. She went to the same school, the same church, and had
the same family and friends until a move to California as a teenager made her realize that not much in this life is
permanent. Her desire to create art grew stronger as an adult and she studied art in several states before landing
Brittney Uecker is a writer, librarian, and Scorpio currently in Lewistown, Montana. Her fiction and poetry has
in Billings, Montana where she was introduced to watercolor painting and finished her degree in 2020. She now
appeared in HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, Pile Press, and elsewhere and is a Best of the Net nominee for fiction. She is
favors the medium and though she is in a busy stage of family life, she sets aside time to wrestle with big concepts of
@bonesandbeer on the internet.
the human condition and puts her findings onto paper. Laura’s art reflects her love of people and places that signify
where we find meaning and purpose in the temporary spaces we exist in.
A former athlete and coach, Craig Botnen only discovered his artistic talent due to an injury that left him
A rtist Statement: I am drawn to the “in-between spaces” we pass through in life that ultimately point
permanently sidelined. The Billings native specializes in Suburban Street Photography and excels at finding beauty
to our temporary existence. I combine imagery from real stories with my own symbolic visual language that has
in the “mundane.” You can find him walking around Billings at any given time wearing his headphones taking
developed in my work as I’ve explored the underlying patterns and interconnections that exist in conditions of
pictures. A sampling of his work can be found on Instagram @magic.city.magic.
displacement. This layered perspective reveals a vulnerability that we can all relate to and fosters compassion for the
sojourner.
Dana Barnes has been a nurse for almost 12 years. He loves the mountains and has always enjoyed being outside,
especially hiking. He has always wondered how he could share these experiences with others. As a result, he picked
Lynn Shield is a self-taught artist based in Billings, Montana. She began drawing and painting as a young girl.
up photography a couple of years ago and now tries to capture the beauty of creation for others to enjoy. He loves
Throughout her career, she used her creative and business skills as a marketing professional in the aerospace industry,
to share these adventures with his three children who are his biggest fans. When taking portraits, he enjoys using the
and later in her own small marketing and web design firm.
colors of nature to complement the client and bring out who they truly are. His work can be seen on Facebook at
Living in Montana and retiring from her business has given Lynn time to focus on painting. Her use of
Barn Door Creations Photography, on Instagram @barn_door_creations, and at his website barndoorphotos.com.
traditional watercolors as well as Brusho® watercolour crystals create the rich vibrant hues in her work. She also
creates unique, colorful abstract florals using alcohol inks. Most recently, she has completed some stunning black and
Daniel Lurie is a Jewish, rural writer from Roundup, Montana. He attended Montana State University Billings,
white larger scale oils. When she isn’t painting, Lynn enjoys traveling with her life partner, Jeff.
where he received his Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Communications. He is currently in his second year at the
A rtist Statement: “I love color! Using Brusho® watercolour crystals and alcohol inks opened a whole new
University of Idaho, pursuing an MFA in poetry. Daniel is passionate about the environment, human rights, rural
world for me. Both mediums have stunning, vibrant colors, which have helped mold my signature “style” of painting
life, and conceptualizing grief. He is the Poetry Editor for Fugue. His work has appeared in The Palouse Review, The
Montana wildlife and abstract florals. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t paint something. I guess you could say I have
Rook, Sidewalk Poetry, and most recently in Moscow’s Third Street Gallery.
become addicted!”
After a few years working as a photographer, barista, bicycle mechanic, and various other things, Eric Warren
Rilie Tané Zumbrennan is a pyrography and mural artist, wife and mother, as well as a kindergarten through
enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Montana. In his standard fashion, he bucked the
eighth grade art teacher in Billings, Montana. She has spent most of her life drawing and painting with acrylic
program’s expectations by turning in science fiction and fantasy stories while the other students were exploring
paints. In 2016, she was inspired by another artist to try pyrography. In addition to wood burning, she burns art onto
fiction that was considered more literary. Despite the challenges of workshopping pop-fiction stories in a high-fiction
hats and paints murals. Her most recent mural was a 4-story buffalo face on the north side of The Grand Building
program, he learned a tremendous amount about writing from those literary fiction students and instructors.
in downtown Billings. This mural shows her true love for wildlife and reflects the colors found in her wood burnings.
After a few years of learning craft and publishing short stories, Eric took a turn down a different literary
Born and raised in Montana, Rilie has been influenced by the beauty of the outdoors. She enjoys wood burning and
path—one focused on travel and adventure. He began publishing travel articles, incorporating his earlier degree in
painting animals and landscapes the most. Wood burning allows her to give more texture to her pieces, rather than
photography and then expanding into travel filmmaking. Eventually, his travel documentaries became documentaries
using paint alone. Pyrography has allowed her creativity to grow immensely because when she makes a mistake, she
about education, the arts, and the environment leading to a People’s Choice award at Magic City Shorts Film Festival
cannot erase; she is forced to transform the mistake into something beautiful. As an artist, she is interested in creating
for Saving the Stockman and screenings for his other films at festivals around the world.
works that allow viewers to relate to the same extent as her involvement in each piece. Find her on Instagram @
While he racked up some successes, he needed to get back to his first love, building worlds out of words. As a
rilie_tane_art, on Facebook at Rilie Tané Art, and on her website: rilie-tane-art.square.site.
storyteller, Eric uses his experience with film and photography to create vibrant, cinematic scenes and characters that
lead you to unexpected places.
Shirley Marin is a Latina/Chicana artist who was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She and her family
relocated to Montana a year ago in hopes of a slower paced life and better opportunity for their little one. She has
Grace Kelton is a current MFA candidate at University of Montana in Missoula. She grew up in Northern
been photographing everyone and everything from family portraits, military homecomings, abstract images, concerts
Vermont and have spent her adult life in an extremely rural town in Central Washington. I am so pleased to now be
and has been published in an obscure music magazine. When she’s not busy having an existential crisis, she is home
living and writing in Montana!
reading, writing, plotting her next global adventure and spending time with her family. If you’d like to visit her
website you can visit www.exploreavecmoi.com. It is currently under construction (much like her life) but includes
K. Felician lives in Missoula, Montana with her cat. She is a graduate student studying environmental philosophy,
some of her previous work.
and she works as coordinator for a literacy education nonprofit. In her spare time, she runs a creative writing
mentorship program for middle school students. You can follow her on Instagram @kat.alyyst.

Kean Christensen is a photographer based out of Billings, Montana. He is on Instagram @kidkrewl_photo or

@UAVisualsMT and on his websites: kidkrewl.com and uavisualsmt.com.

KJ Harper is an aspiring novelist in Missoula, MT. They are a single parent to several houseplants and a cat named
Chicken.

56 57
Feverdream Magazine Editorial staff Past Issues

Editor-in-chief, Designer Issue 1

Brie Barron is specializing in literature, linguistics, sociology, and environmental 2020
studies at Montana State University Billings, and is the mother to two children
who are, in fact, the best. She has been a winner of Sigma Tau Delta’s MSUB featuring the work of Haley Barthuly, Del Curfman, Daniel
poetry contest three years running and her work has been published in Up the
Staircase Quarterly, MSUB’s The Rook, and Criterion: A Journal for Literary Criticism.
Kessel, Jim Gransbery, Cara Chamberlain, Patrick Landry,
Most importantly, she can recite both of Mr. Darcy’s confessions of love in Pride & Precious McKenzie, Charlene Sleeper, Mary Uecker, and more.
Prejudice from memory.

poetry editor
Julie Schultz was born in Wyoming and grew up in Montana but left for college
at Boston University and stayed away for twenty years. After getting a master’s
degree in economics and pursuing a career in finance in New York, London, Issue 2
and Bermuda, she slowly came to believe that artificial intelligence could do
2021
her job better than humans could. She decided to switch gears and moved
back to Montana in 2016, settling close to family in Billings. Luckily (because
books are sanity), an independent, cooperative bookstore opened shortly after featuring the work of Sheila Miles, Cara Chamberlain, Kat
Julie moved back, and she joined the board of This House of Books in 2018. Felician, Tavin Davis, Julie Schultz, Kati Sanford, Bryon
In addition to board responsibilities, she takes classes for fun at MSU Billings,
Rogers, Alanna Wulf, Clair Mikeson, and more.
hikes the trails at Four Dances, and loves all her friends’ pets. She also writes
poetry that has been published in Rattle. For more of her non-fiction writing, visit
thedisgruntledrationalist.com

Fiction Editor
Riley Netzley-Hale is an avid reader, passionate searcher for all things created Issue 3
from the soul, and an explorer of stories—bullying anyone she can to show her 2021
a bit of their humanity and passion. She is excited to start pursuing her own life
goals by working with the wonderful humans of FeverDream Magazine and grow in
featuring the work of Luke Ashmore, Linds Sanders, Kean
her own writing and editing skills.
Christensen, Gail Langstroth, Lyon Doyle, Dominick Vanderlip,
Dave Caserio, Noelle Sullivan, Samantha M. French, and more.

Staff Editor
Elizabeth Goffena is a junior at MSUB. Elizabeth is an English major, focusing on
Creative Writing. Her hobbies include writing, playing video games, and spending
too much money on books. She is excited to be a part of the talented team
working on FeverDream.

Issue 4
2022
Staff Editor
featuring the work of Craig Lancaser, Nichole Davies, Flor
Rylee Treu is a senior at Montana State University Billings. She is currently
finishing her degree in English with an emphasis in literature. After graduation, Vega-Castillo, Amanda Zhou, Charlene Sleeper, Teresa Brown,
Rylee is hoping to earn her teaching license and teach in rural Montana. She Grayson Brown, Jordan Lefler, Jade E. Snell, and more.
enjoys reading copious amounts of nonfiction literature and cooking—but refuses
to follow a recipe.
F E V E R D R E AM MAGAZI N E I S
TH E WO RK OF COL L E CTO RS.

Here, we ask only for the fragmented pieces

of yourself that you’ve immortalized in art.

We want to know where you have been

and where you are going.

The Montana that we know is treasured

for a reason—that’s you and everyone else,
if you look closely—and we’d like to
put it in print.

At the intersection of chaos and form,

where you meet the page, the pen,
the brush, the lens,

that’s where we’ll meet you.