About All Ways Open is a publication aiming to tell small stories about place: stories about pigeons and mountain ranges, stories both real and imagined. It's an experiment in opening writing outwards, directing readers towards visual histories and archives. We aim to think in triplicate: to consider past / present / future, visual / written / read, self / friend /community. In this game of telephone, we always begin with an archival image, which a writer interprets, which an artist then reinterprets. Each time the meaning shifts, changes, opens.

All Ways Open is open for submissions.

▲ Illustration by Charles Sindelar for “Cherubim of the Golden Heart,” poem by Chanera, The Voice of the I Am no. 2 (Sindelar Studios, April 1937), p. iii, Mabry Hazen House Collection.
▲ Jua Im

gold’s anatomies

Kristie Kachler
Jua Im

1.

adipose, the throne on which i sit
a backlit tulip
flames licking up and up

—fat conveys sunlike radiance
celluLIGHT blessings and giggles
and
i am an angel

vibrating just beyond.

2.

the heart, as each sweet globe
shining on the vine
slept through winter in one seed,

heart gestated in hearth
till she perceived herself a tenant
and burst forth, burst

the bounds of the chest,
truly bad@$s
tendrilling touch
through her magnetic field.

3.

hands are heart’s emissaries.

mine wanted to be normal hands,
do verb things. they sampled
your topography, traced occipital caves

to sternum’s riverbed;
penetrated your depths
to blood and breath and lymph.

but hands awaken as projectors:
light without and light within.
heart and hearth, heaven and earth, wish and witness.