"Journalist, photographer, and long-time Quail Bell Magazine contributor Alexander C. Kafka is known for his intimate portraits, eye-catching landscape photography, and now his colorful abstract photos. 'Regenerators,'  his latest photo series, embraces the world of abstraction using lights, digital editing, and color to capture familiar and organic forms with vibrancy.

Each of the 22 photos in Kafka's 'Regenerators' series emphasizes the complexities of color, line, and shape as they balance between symmetrical shapes of circles and star forms to the ambiguous and abstract forms made by Kafka with light and shadow."  

- Audrey Garrett

​​By Lorelei Bacht

​For every man bottled to death in a quarry,
A mother, a sister, left behind to carry
The shame. Inventive ways of surviving living
Two doors down from murderers, for the next decade

By Amy Lee

By Lorelei Bacht

​We make soup from our bones / pine needles / roots / the hope 
That times may change / spring come again / mother will live 

By Dynas Johnson

1. ok2222- space travels 

i was alone for a long     long       time       time was measured
by how far i moved from earth           the abyss revealed to me hauntings 
and tears in space that i would find myself falling through       over and over 
again         i was a fugitive from everything including 
myself      home was a bedtime story and i couldn’t fall asleep 
there were days of travel             when silence was both dreamcatcher 
and dream-eater                my body the size of a moment             
my essence the stuff         of stars     except       where i was from      
i was only waste matter         you were the first to show me that blackness 
was not death                  that it’s not an it           that she is alive and 
moving             and full of more planets than i ever learned to look for
​

By Ann Christine Tabaka

By Jaime Grookett

​During your death notification
the officer, disappointed--
by my dry eyes—straight lips,
he didn’t know you were dying for decades
his politeness prickled my skin
like when we were five and dove

By Nathan Tompkins

​You sit on the bottom of a black pool, waiting, always waiting for another companion to call and drink tea and whiskey to warm the bones against the coolness of the water. Your white eyes follow the circle of light to the surface six fathoms up, longing for some conversation more stimulating than the lives of salmon. But the most you hear are the falls eroding the rocks at the edge of your lair.

​By Jaime Grookett

perched sock-footed on the top step
anticipation igniting your eyes
flung yourself
downstairs

By Audrey Garrett

​Artist Statement
​
When my mom dropped me off in Richmond, Virginia with no mattress and no phone (due to my own poor planning) I ran out the back door to bike around my new city.   My transfer experience to VCU was absent of name tags, guided tours, or pep rallies but nevertheless I was determined to enjoy my first year as a VCU undergraduate.  I biked, walked, and soon skateboarded throughout Richmond finding porches filled with personal art and bird of paradise plants next to painted porch swings. My local 7-11s had colorful and abstract murals painted on their side brick walls and the bridge I parked on near my new home was spray-painted with "BLM" tags and stickers promoting pop-up art shows. My eyes were never bored.