It was the watches I wanted, those radium dials
Glowing like bomb sights
When I cupped my palm.
Wisp
Of radioactivity—the hour hand;
Nether-wisp—the second.
For weeks my mother worked the counter at Kresge’s—
Her faded pink smock
As tight as a nurse’s—
As she laid out the bands in their false
Reptilian shines—
The cowboy tans, the avocado greens. This
Was Radium City
And my mother, Marie
Curie, scientist of jewels and hams,
The chunks of meat slapped
Like memory into the knife
And the iridescence sliced to pieces as thin
As winter sky, shaved uranium.
I had to stack them high to tongue the plugs
Of fats, the permeating salts.
The roll breaking in my hands like a ball of
Glass. And the stench of drugstore
Popcorn, its second perfume
Mingling with what my mother wore
As she shoveled out
The bags like spent carnival fortunes.
More money was one we wasted on ourselves.
Or new drapes.
One last snap of the Tupperware over the nightly concoctions
No one ever wanted to eat.
I’d go away and ponder mono/stereo
For the extra buck
In the lp bins, or keep an eye walking
Home for Tarzan—
Weissmuller in a shiny Olds or Cadillac.
And then wait out the summer hours pitching
A 9-inning game
In a chalk box the side of the house.
Ferguson Jenkins for 7 or so,
Then Abernathy for the submarine.
Next door a neighbor would peg out his pet
Skunk and I’d listen as it roiled
With thirst
Or hunkered under diving blue jays,
Their cobalts dipped
In the mouth of the sun
And set out like hour hands
To the shadowed yard.
The Cubs would lose.
Weissmuller never show.
The Mexican kids from Dempster would threaten
To beat my ass into the street
And leave me there
Dented and ringing as a hubcap,
Another rat-faced kid
Waiting for his mother to come home.
Pink smock.
Ham in a pocket.
Singing beyond the genius of the meats,
The radium dials, the gems,
The gold fish
And guppies in their clouds of hopelessness.
The kiss, the mother’s kiss, put like a cure to the child’s face.
Artist Statement:
I believe the portrait can disclose more about the subject than what is found on the surface. The subject, either willingly or subconsciously, shows us more than they intend. The camera can see more than the naked eye, moving past our persona and catching a glimpse of who we really are. With this in mind, I turned the camera on myself. I hoped to see deeper, looking to see if there were aspects of myself that would be revealed in the image. After years of self-reflection, I started photographing other people, looking for differences and similarities between them and myself.
Jody Ake creates portraits, nudes, still lives, and landscape images using the wet collodion printing process, an historic photographic technique. Ake is one of a handful of contemporary artists who have revived this process.
He holds a BFA from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from the University of Oregon.
Ake participated in the 1999 Oregon Biennial and he has been featured in “Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes,” as well as “The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes.” He was also featured in an article on black identity in Aperture Magazine. He was featured in “Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity , as well as the traveling museum exhibition and the group exhibition, “Five Alchemists: Contemporary Photographers Explore 19th-Century Techniques,” Wichita Art Museum,Wichita, Kansas, USA.
Jody currently lives and works in Portland, OR.
Amid the national erosion of our cultural institutions, the defunding of public programs for the arts, and the privatization of arts funding, I find myself at the helm of a magazine uniquely positioned to be a standard bearer for inspiration. My hope is that the literature contained in the 2025 Winter Issue of Solstice might prompt its readers to rethink the roadblocks that keep us from understanding others. Throughout this issue I find examples of what is aptly explained by the recently ousted Vice President of the Kennedy Center, Marc Bamuthi Joseph; “The way to turn apathy into empathy is to infuse inspiration as a conversion element.” Bamuthi Joseph asserts that apathy divided by inspiration equals empathy. I agree strongly with Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and feel this equation throughout the 2025 Winter Issue of Solstice.
This equation, put another way, can be called “duende”. In the words of Federico García Lorca, duende is “the spirit of the earth…”, the element that travels up through the ground into all of us–one way or another. Put yet another way, inspiration to create is innate to the human condition; however, the beauty of creation is that perception makes our creations different even if our subjects are the same. This, I think, is at the core of diversity and represents its primary importance: the difference in ways of creating, yet the commonality in the need to create.
I hope some part of this issue inspires you to create something. If just a word or sentence helps you leap from apathy into inspiration then we have, together, found empathy. Undoubtedly, there is much to love about this issue of Solstice. From Lea Aschkenas non-fiction “The Almost Friend: On the Inter-Personal Legacy of US-Cuba Relations” to the post postmodernism of Erik Armstrong’s “A Works Cited”. The literature within the 2025 Winter Issue of Solstice is echoing a cultural moment across genres and between authors. A conversation that cannot be muted by our national moment or our differences. My hope is that these pages foster what we need most today: a couple steps in someone else’s shoes.
Sincerely,
Ryan Benjamin Clinesmith Montalvo
Editor-in-Chief
Solstice Literary Magazine
