betweenthehighway


receipt publisher 
food insecurity non-prophet
Cleveland, Ohio - Cuyahoga Valley



betweenthehighway started from behind a gas-station register and developed in contact with food & home insecurity along highway 54 in Carrboro, NC. In 2024, the press and its editor returned to nest in the more agreeable climate of Cleveland, Ohio. 

betweenthehighway publishes three to five receipts every summer as well as free receipts when the occasion demands. 

betweenthehighway publishes excerpts of Cleveland publisher and poet d.a.levy

after production costs, profits go to authors and food insecurity.


learn more from our FAQ

check out our collaborative WIKI


share your thoughts on our receipts
in an old forum or as a RE-VIEW


for any inquiry,
including submissions, book exchanges, and questions
write to betweenthehighway@gmail.com
::: S-Settling, Settled :::
09-26-2024













Before I Spoke to Myself


by Cela Xie






2.25″ x 90’’


Edition of 300





They greet you as a shade,
and leaves you as a mirror.

They eat plums, oh, they eat plums.
No, not those plums—no, the ones

whose color empties into you,
the ones into which you empty yourself.

These are “Letters From Now:”
words before we have spoken to ourselves.
Before? Words spoken before oneself.
Where else?

This is the ascent of a wound
breaking into brighter skin.

Now, assent and, rising,
bury yourself before
this desire
.




Cela Xie is a person of twenty-five years who has accomplished nothing in particular, except writing for almost two decades. His favorite color is the blue just after the sun has been wheeled into the morgue. His favorite animal is the cloud leopard. His favorite number is six, the number of books he plans to write. His poetry has been published by The Pierian and he is currently pursuing an MFA at North Carolina State University, near the place where he was born.














































































between you and me 


by alex benedict...?





2.25″ x 30″


Edition of 200




Here, I collage the descriptions
I’ve written about the first three years
of betweenthehighway press releases:


  • Nate Hoil: Returning to Earth Without Additional Tools (2021)
  • beumuth: apa rtm ent (2021)
  • puddlethumb: [cattle] (2021)
  • alex benedict: throatfolding (2021)
  • Joey Puckett: From the Eye of Noah (2022)
  • Alexandre Ferrere: Mechanical Ode to a Snake, (2022)
  • Tommy Noell: Return from Falcon Prison (2022)  
  • Nick Felaris: SPLICE (2022)
  • puddlethumb: yezo garland 2022)
  • heatflow: RIVERSIDE (2022)
  • alex benedict: ode to a barking rabbit (2023)
  • Ruth Jeffers: When Roads Dissolve (2023)
  • Praghya Vishnoi: Small Consolations (2023)
  • Daniel Flosi: still in this place where there is no sun (2023)
  • Madison Krob: This is how it will always start: We leave something behind. (2023)
  • Su Zi: flux: a spell of acid (2024)
  • emilio Taiveaho Peláez: TO BE “IN THE MOUNTAINS” IS “A FLOWER OPENING WITHIN THE WORLD” (2024)
  • Angel Warwick: And there I was, I was just hanging out, doing nothing. Then death appeared and said something dumb. (2024)
  • JL Rosser: Taking 500,000 Photographs of a Dogwood Tree (2024)
  • Sara Lefsyk: I draw a fake effigy. “Who let us into hell?” It says. (2024)
  • Al Brilliant: OIL (2024)
  • Cela Xie: Before I Spoke To Myself (2024)



Disregarding republications and a handful of “secret” or one-off publications, betweenthehighway has now released twenty-two titles. Over half are with authors who had not previously published a book or collection.




Can you guess what book provides the backgorund in the photographs? 
















































[FORTHCOMING]


d.a. levy republications


As I continue to delve further into my archival research of Cleveland poet and publisher d.a. levy, I plan on republishing more of his work that has seen less light. 

For now, I still have free excerpts of his major works available d.a. levy excerpts

I’m currently writing the introduction to my biography on d.a. levy and recently has this article published where I discuss his writing in relation to waste and waste workers: “waste is a form of devotion.” 










betweenthehighway

wherever
visible and invisible
streets meet





Read receipt excerpts here





If you are unable to pay, we exchange!
Write to 
betweenthehighway@gmail.com

::: S4 ::: receipts
06-17-2024








flux: a spell of acid


by Su Zi





2.25″ x 52″


Edition of 300




What body accepts endlessly? In eight ebbing movements—the number of her birth and name—Su Zi’s spell of acid is a “little wound of ink” in a vast sea where memories, membranes, and insecticides meet.

Su Zi casts spells of acid from the ocean shore with the grace and caution of a spider walking on water. 




     i rise up
          rise up to you
                  up into the decline of the day
      when the River of the Americas
                  takes up her blue gray shroud
      i see you hanging
                  voluptuously
      in the smog smear
      a vibrant round inferno,
      a majesty in the vermillion decay.




Poet, Artist, Eco-Feminist, and Equestrian, Su Zi edits and handmakes the bi-annual publication Red Mare



























TO BE “IN THE MOUNTAINS” IS “A FLOWER OPENING WITHIN THE WORLD”


by emilio Taiveaho Peláez





2.25″ x 91″


Edition of 300




Peláez writes how they climb, with the patience of mountains and glaciers, the swiftness of birds and streams.  Originally written during 2023 and printed at their home in Haw River, North Carolina, the long poem introduces itself:




     Dogen sang Sansuikyo
      as if speaking with
      the North Cascades

      the birth of
      place, these words

      poems fruiting
      with humility & gratitude
      for the wild places
      that remain




emilio Taiveaho Peláez is an investigative poet based in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Their word-work emerges from flesh-eye experiences within the living archives of American landscapes and seeks to grapple with the colonial languaging practices that shape these environments — from sidewalks to national parks to the common places of lyric poetry.


















And there I was, I was just hanging out,
doing nothing. Then death appeared and said something dumb.



by Angel Warwick




2.25″ x 91″


Edition of 300




Welcome to Grief Club. This is death’s party and they know everyone. The Angel of Death is in pursuit, but their bicycle chain is rusted and you’ve already cycled across England.




      The pallbearers of my grief
            have slipped to their knees.
      I wander through the shifting gloom
      between streetlights, until
      I hit the reaching black
           of country roads —
      those corners you can't see around.
      The blazing hell of headlights.
      He's coming, he's coming for me.




Angel Warwick is a poet from the South Coast of England, as well as an avid cyclist and consumer of scotch whisky that tastes like peat bog water. He left school at 12 and learnt to write in online poetry communities. For inquiries and support with the Grief Club, write Angel: adgwarwick@gmail.com





















Taking 500,000 Photographs of a Dogwood Tree


by JL Rosser





2.25″ x 51″


Edition of 300




They say pick a tree to grow old with, yet leaves still gather like withered lives around you, and even that tree—once rooted fast in your memory— now falls into the mire among its rotting children, remaining only to be seen across the frenzied moments of this search for “a life stripped away.”




     The dogwood blooms droop
      like sleeping children over
      the water, and the twigs
      droop like it hurts to carry
      them. The roots of the trunk
      spread out like Papa when
      he walked too drunk. It’s
      branches spindly  and knobby
      as his twiggy arms gorged
      on bursitis. Liver stuck out
      like the front of an 85’
      Silverado. Legs like Marlboro
      100s but this one woman;
      she takes photos at funerals
      to show them to the family,
      so there’s Papa all folded up
      like a paper plane that didn’t
      fly far enough. Polaroids
      ain’t useful. This is no time
      to be useful. This is time
      to sing badly in the woods
      and scare deer.




JL is a queer poet living in Georgia. Currently, most of the poems they write are about Yugioh cards and Youtube videos.











I draw a fake effigy. “Who let us into hell?” It says.


by Sara Lefsyk





2.25″ x 70″


Second edition of 200




With the shrieks of 10,000 Angels, Sara’s poem forces 10,000 insurance companies to fall to their knees in terror at meeting “the daughter of a solitary fish” speaking with the language of “a small but savage town.”




      When they found me scraping
      my ugly little teeth against the
      pavement, my diagnosis was
      dental. When they sent me to
      the actual dentist, my diagnosis
      was an eight-fold path.

      No one could tell me anything
      because my diagnosis was small
      and vegetal.

      When my diagnosis was glass-jar
      heart, the treatments were: wild
      hare, water of rye and water of
      snake.

      My diagnosis was a never-
      ending receipt.




Sorting rocks from beans until she kills all desire, Ethel carries a shovel as if she really knows how to dig a grave. When she is let loose inside the orchard, she is a wide-eyed god, dehydrated and convulsing. Nailed to the ground, laughing with the sun in her eyes, she is dreaming of a videotape about an even more disposable fashion. Fashioning a wound or planning for gestalt, out in the field or trapped in the cloisters, she fingers the firmament and role-plays a joy, then vomits all over the sanctuary carpet.

Sara Lefysk runs Ethel Zine & Micro Press. [link]













OIL



by Al Brilliant






2.25″ x 28″




In deciding what to republish of Al Brilliant’s vast writings, I considered excerpts from his many journals, such as Bus Journal or Bookshop Journal, but I was continually drawn to the slim PAINTBRUSH pamphlet with the even slimmer poem “OIL.” If not only for its applicable formatting for receipt, then for how the poem encompassingly depicts a life through a single substance, oil, and how that life—the life of a publisher—takes on a mythic quality, subsisting on that lubricating, penetrating, birthing, and protecting substance. This republication includes the  biographical essay by alex benedict, “A Brilliant Life.” 

Al Brilliant is born by oil and births books with oil.




     They say that oil and water
            won’t mix
      but when I was born
      they put olive oil scented with balsam
      in the sea water of my mother’s womb
      they put ink there and pads of paper
      a hammer, a ruler
      a type case full of lead




Writer, bookmaker, and late editor of Unicorn Press, Al Brilliant was born in St. Louis, Missouri “a triple Gemini on May 22, 1936 in the midst of a severe American Depression.” In 1965, he and his wife Teo Savory began running Unicorn Press, publishing hundreds of poetry collections as well as translations from French and German. At 73 years old, Brilliant established the Glenwood Community Bookshop in Greensboro, North Carolina where he passed away in May of 2022.

















betweenthehighway

wherever
visible and invisible
streets meet





Read receipt excerpts here





If you are unable to pay, we exchange!
Write to 
betweenthehighway@gmail.com

::: S3 ::: receipts
08-13-2023

Daniel Flosi’s 




53 in. x 2.25 in. 

edition of 200



          “i don’t know how to sit with the living”
          ...walked as much as written, this long
          poem swells along the page like the voice
          of morning grass in the mouth of a drying
          river that knows loss is gradual and even.



          Daniel J Flosi is the founder of Black
          Stone / White Stone Zine and author
          of the chapbook Cries, the Midnight Sky
          (Bullshit Lit, 2023).



















Pragya Vishnoi’s




174 in. x 2.25 in. 

edition of 200



          Formed across years of feedback
          between the author and editor, this
          collection of poems begins by visiting
          the holy city of Varanasi with a lover
          and concludes by returning to Varanasi
          to cremate a lover.




          Pragya Vishnoi lives in India and her
          work has been published in Rattle
          Magazine and forthcoming in the
          I-70 Review, Canthius and BoomerLitMag.

















Madison Krob’s 




40 in. x 2.25 in.

edition of 200



          "The bunny believes in letting things go."
          This essay jumps between the small
          dreams of sports and art in Midwestern
          small towns and a 200 ft. plush pink
          bunny decaying into the Italien countryside.




          Madison Krob is in the internet-age
          space of storytelling. Her work interacts
          with virtual reality and the weird things
          you find in your grandmother's basement.
          In addition to her website, she can be
          reached visually at @maddykrob
          on Instagram.














Ruth Jeffers’




40 in. x 2.25 in. 

edition of 200



          Three excerpts from "Bodies of Salt"—a
          record of her five months in Palestine as
          a student and volunteer—these brief
          essays are for Emad and Mohammed,
          “who awoke me to the beauty and injustice
          occurring in occupied Palestine. This
          story is for them and every Palestinian
          who showed me endless generosity
          as I witnessed their homeland.”



          Ruth has lived in North Carolina most of
          her life, but she likes to write about the
          times when she didn’t. She currently lives
          in Carrboro and cares for rescued farm
          animals.


Palestinians are humans.

“There’s too much at stake.”










alex benedict’s 




218 in. x 2.25 in. 

edition of 300



          An ode to d.a.levy and Northeast Ohio,
          this poem follows an attempt to return,
          make offerings and listen, visualize
          and take vows, and wander cloud bridges
          or, more often, endless asphalt
          and concrete. Just as levy challenged
          the concrete reality of Cleveland,
          this ode is a struggle to thoroughly
          investigate the reality of the highway
          as a gate of liberation.          



          alex benedict runs betweenthehighway.
          Currently, he lives in the Cuyahoga Valley
          as he writes a full biography of Cleveland
          publisher and poet d.a.levy.




















read excerpts of books here







if you are unable to pay, we exchange!
share book exchange ideas with 
betweenthehighway@gmail.com