By Gail Rappa

Disclaimer: This story mentions suicide. Suicide is preventable. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988. Nevadans can reach services by calling, texting, or chatting online.

I recently hosted a table at a health fair, sharing information about new mental health resources at Great Basin College (GBC). This event welcomes a few thousand folks eager for information and swag from health-related businesses and providers. I had a tabletop prize wheel courtesy of GBC Student Government Association. I knew that if I captured the attention of the kids, their adult companions would follow and listen to my message.

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By Laura Momoh

You wore that flag with pride and honor
Half of a yellow sun was the ornament of your hope
Addicted to the fight for freedom, you lay broken
You understood the level of your weakness
But you had power in your pain
What happened in 1966 was the ultimatum
Give us our freedom or perish!

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By Eva Toplak

I had a mint plant once
I killed it because I kept overwatering it.
I tried so hard to keep that plant alive,
And in the end that’s exactly why it died.
Love is like that, I think.
Sometimes, at least, the people who love you the most
Are the ones who hurt you so.

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By Kimberly Roberts

You get to know the people who lived in your house before you. They lurk like ghosts under the carpets you pull up, revealing the marks of former walls, closets, cabinets, and bookcases on the floor. They leave pieces of themselves in nooks and crannies—rings dropped under the floorboards, Prohibition-era liquor bottles stashed in the walls, scraps of newspaper articles in the basement. We made such discoveries daily when we bought and began to restore our rather dilapidated colonial revival bungalow in the Wells Addition just south of downtown Reno, Nevada.

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By Harrison Nuzzo

My name is Harrison Bernard Nuzzo, I am a poet, visual artist, and climber who calls Las Vegas home. I moved here 16 years ago with my family when I was still a teenager and have spent so many formative years in this city. In my time here, there has always been one thing I’ve noticed that goes overlooked, and that is the locals.

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By Elizabeth Allen Berry

The grand earth
knows not
of time passing 

Not of movement of matter

Great watcher understands
the ethereal state of nature

The perception of bodies
that collect and land fruitless

 Skin that rots and decays

Gradients of long forgotten coffee stains 

Unknowing of
the nectar within

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By Kathleen Kuo

As we settle into another Nevada summer, I fondly remember my move to Las Vegas from the Midwest in the summer of 2019, and the many sensory “firsts” of desert life I learned that year. I remember my apartment parking lot smelling of chocolate chip cookies baking on a sheet pan someone had left in their car; the next week that same car filled the air with the perfume of slowly roasting hot dogs (I make no recommendations as to the food safety of either of these preparations).

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By Scott Dickensheets

Hey, you’re old.

Tell me about it. I didn’t use to be. Then, suddenly, whammo. “Old age,” quoth James Thurber, “is the most unexpected thing that happens to a man.” True in my case.

Surely you had some inkling ...

Well, I don’t mean suddenly in a bodily sense. I’ve had crunchy knees since JV football, and my back has been 85 years old for a decade. No, the suddenness was more about, I dunno, headspace.

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By Lindsay Wilson

This year the river through the trees
has much legroom, but the ducks care nothing
of depth, or sandbags in piles by the doors,
or the old ex-cons who used to sit here watching
water slide into the Great Basin. Those men
loved words and the cigarettes you pretended
to smoke back then because of a woman.
Some days you want a story from an old man
who meant leaving when he said river,
and who believed in the currency of cigarettes.

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Begin playing as I leave a little late for work—
my girlfriend getting in the shower,
crying minutes ago, feeling overwhelmed.

The first song is a wordless tune about love
which I consider skipping as I coast down
Charleston Blvd. when a man and woman
too young, too clean, dart across the street from a 7-11.

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By Matt Malinowski

A brilliant red glow hung in the sky over the mountains to the north of Las Vegas as the Aurora Borealis put on a cosmic performance for one night only. This interstellar light show had locals and tourists looking away from the neon glitz of the Strip and up towards the stars. The aurora was a sight to behold and a rarity this far south— it was also a reminder of Nevada’s nuclear past and a looking glass into our atomic connections to the universe.

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By Sheila Bock

In 2016, I began conducting research on how graduating college students personalize their graduation attire, giving focused attention to the ways many graduates transform the tops of their graduation caps, or mortarboards, into sites of creative expression.

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By Lisa Gavon

Artist, builder, and renegade, Rolling Mountain Thunder exhibited ideas that encompassed cutting edge thought politically, environmentally, and spiritually. He was a modern advocate of individual freedoms, but operated on the assumption that the best part of life was lived with compassion for other human beings.

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By Julian Kilker

What work does photography involve? How can it document the world around us? Photographers have explored the intersections between the technologies at play and the humanity it can portray since the field’s beginning.

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By Jesse James Ziegler
Nevada Poetry Society Challenge Poem for March 2024
♾️

There aren’t enough hours in the day
Not enough moments in a life
Reflect 

Surrender to the obvious
Humbly plead your case to the wind
Lean in

Moments shared widen across time
Elongating experience
To feel

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When the bees swarm
around the lavender
you gently shush them

as you carefully part
the branches to free
the dried stalks, still

fragrant when their day
is done.

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By Petit Monstre

Odyssey of the artist, a blank canvas is where you started 

picked up a pen and the begin was actually the end of the old you, 

dearly departed. 

Now we have gathered here today not to lay rest to the soul but to set it free, strap on your seatbelt, things might get a lil unsettling. 

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By Dustin Howard

Reno has been my adopted home for six years now, and in those six years, I’ve developed a true love for the beauty of the untamed West and the drama of the natural landscapes around us. The history of our state, and indeed, our country, is a brutal one. We are born from war–even Nevada’s state motto, “Battle Born,” acknowledges this provenance.

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By Courtney Cliften

The smell of wet dirt and onions from the Perry Farm
constricts the entire town with undistributed wealth,
masks the crystal, chemical-mixture stink
from tiny apartments chalked throughout the streets.
Children ride bikes down Main street
to buried jars of coins saved for hot summer days…

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By Donald M. Scott

In April MGM+/Amazon Studio will begin filming a mini-series version of George R. Stewart’s ecological novel, Earth Abides—a milestone in the rediscovery of the pioneering ecological author who was inspired by Nevada.

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