The food is cold and so his mind drifts
a blue fin angling toward deeper water
the sky’s thin music
like a woman’s singing
from the other side of a wall
and so he tongues that night’s gristle
he can spit it out later
he can cover it up like a cat
his heart throbbing
muscular butterfly among the marigolds
though now he nods/speaks little
to the swagged faces
animal/vinegar stink of a sister
a brother’s waxen scalp
his parents higher up
with their bronzed teeth and wrecked liquors
he waits for the shove-off into dusk
when he can drag the short blade
through woven bark
the initial or full name signifying possession
or un-thought-through greed
then the longer blade pinched open
for deeper cutting
sometimes so quickly
accidentally
the skin, even the shirt tails
are blurred with bloody moth-prints
though he sometimes draws it
on purpose, a dare
over a thigh or forearm’s bunched skin
so he can follow each layer’s snap, release
a fraying rope inside the dermis
and sense something give
the whole elegant structure collapsing
a girl’s hard breathing beside him (her turn next)
as blood oozes from the hardly bleeding wound
spit rubbed in to make this tribal
the names still un-carved
the witness still to be carved
the girl’s arm laid out in a stench of creosote
for eternity is a steel blade in a child’s hand
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
