BEE, I’m really thinking of you Here in this deepest winter place Putting your sweetness in my tea. Hmmmmmmm, I sing along with Your wings as I slowly stir Summer into the dark water in my mug. Round and round, humming, sighing Swaying in the meadows of my mind A flower in the warm wind, waiting for You to make love to me and Fly away carrying a little of my sweetest Essence, so you can turn it into food For God and bears!
And then I sit in my chair and stare Out at the snow, and take in all of this In slow, savoring sips. Warmth spreads And deeper knowledge sinks Into my gut. I feel your buzz down Inside me, and smile, thinking how Lovely to drink a dream of spring. It makes winter richer, more real.
Laura Vines is from Birmingham, Alabama but spent 11 years in Alaska, which affected her music, her poetry, and her writings tremendously. She is a teacher, performer, singer-songwriter, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist.
see / through (after the installation at Down Cathedral)
see / through
not there but cut out
the air is his him
you move and he moves
no – he is the moving
s c r i p t u r e grows but here it bleeds through
polished stone brass wound look: the body gone
so what do you see through the gone one
glass faces your own the ache of being seen
no triumph only metal air light
and you
caught
inside the cut
Poet’s Note: the cathedral was reordered a few years ago around the theme of pilgrimage. A brass cross was suspended over the altar. Revealed gradually as pilgrims enter, the cross’s impact lies largely in its emptiness: it is pierced by a cut-out silhouette of the crucified Christ. Pilgrims are invited to ‘see through’ Christ. The surrounding space becomes part of the work, so what is perceived through the crucified Christ depends on the viewer’s angle.
Christopher N. West (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is also an Irish Anglican priest.
Patrick Trombly wrote and published poetry at the College of the Holy Cross in 1989-1990, and upon graduation in 1991, he took a 35-year hiatus before picking the genre back up again in 2025. His poems have been published or accepted for publication in a number of journals, including Loch Raven Review, Beyond Words, the Dewdrop, Hemlock Journal and multiple Wingless Dreamer anthologies. His writing explores the relationships among humans, nature, God/the afterlife, and time. His poems are visual, use approachable language, and use various forms and literary devices such as personification, metaphor, and symbolism.
Chanting melodies of holy water. Each burbled gush a song bird trickling your boy-throat. Look up. Blue-cheeked bee eaters and willow warblers drip sugar psalms. White-winged snow finches and meadow pipits fly bliss-stung with your voice. Ivory-throated dippers, song thrushes and violet loons pray to you. And always the smallest of warblers, the Italian sparrows, trill of the sea. Child, fear not the night. Call not for home. Listen in the dark. God hums and saints chirp. Follow their truth. All sound sings perfume. Forest flowers rained on by angels color-wash your lips. Buttercups and cowslip, bluebells and bellflowers silk your tongue. Purple angelica and Tuscan blue rosemary stain your voice. Croon it all. Nodding lilies and honey garlic, snowball bush and Florentine iris. Bring them to your body, roll in them, and with the birds suck their nectar.
Suzanne Scarfone is a poet from Michigan. Influenced by English Romanticism and French Surrealism, her writing paints the visionary musical moments found in the smallest details of everyday life. Her work has appeared in such journals as New Feathers Anthology, Cider Press Review, Phoebe, Coe Review, Frigg, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, and in the anthology To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project . She has also co-authored Lessons from Afghanistan: A Curriculum for Exploring Themes of Love and Forgiveness.
a Buddhist monk taught me to sit silently be the moon floating over my back field a buttercup cradled in a clump of spring grass sit hushed as the broad shoulders of granite mountains in their shawl of clouds— sit despite an unquiet morning that buzzes and twitters and zips sit to be a dewdrop in the garden a perfect pearl of daybreak— a Buddha sitting.
Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist. She has published over 140 poems and is a 2025 Pushcart nominee. In 2025, she won the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest for To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone, the Distinguished Favorite of the NYC Big Book Award for grief and remembrance. She lives on a Connecticut farm with five hounds.
We waited all winter for signs of life skunk cabbage poking through the muck the eastern phoebe's song the red maple's crimson cloud. The early garden morphs from bare ground and fallen leaves to rosy bleeding hearts and creeping phlox, golden ragwort’s golden glow and Jacob's ladders' soft blues. We wait so long for what is too soon over. Ephemeral beauty beckons. Gifted by what we cannot control, is this not grace?
Ann Bodling is a gardener and spiritual director and writer who readily experiences God’s sacred presence in the land and its plants and creatures. She lives in the eastern United States with her husband, three goats, seven hens and the many wild ones who come to the two acres she is restoring for them.
Ego loves no one. Therefore, it can’t exist because love alone exists a fact the ego must conceal or ego dies
So ego tells a story where ego’s a hero ego’s a villain or ego is something else lying faster than me turning around can see
Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in many magazines and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press). A second poetry collection (Before the Fall, Kelsay Books) and a debut novel (Food Court, Main Street Rag) are forthcoming in 2026. Mike lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
On two works,“St. Catherine of Siena Invested with the Dominican Habit” by Giovanni di Paolo and “Catherine of Siena” by Sigrid Undset
Could wise Augustine and meek Francis—saints, too, but this errant thought intrudes—be slightly miffed when you, exchanger of hearts with your Gesù, gently decline the tempera-rendered gift each holds aloft? Augustine, stern and hoary, looks heavenward. A stranger now to worry, he takes the pass in stride. But Francis still seems hopeful, like he’s entertaining certain dreams.
Dominic himself has unsure eyes. In spite of your extended arm, verging on a yes, your near-floating form suggests impending flight. I think he’s picturing when Christ leaned to bless you from atop San Domenico. No room for irony, but did his namesake-church loom large on the periphery as he rushed down with his black cloak to your holy, broken town?
*
Once called “Euphrosyne,” you suppressed disgust at weeping sores, nursing terminally ill, ungrateful patients, meanwhile rebuffing lust and temptations sent to test your faultless will in perfect fires. One woman you cared for had pus and other unspeakable human gore from cancer ravening unchecked through her breast, and you, in self-chastisement, contritely pressed
your face to her disease-ridden chest. I must confess a touch of empathy at this stage in your biography for the cold mistrust your patient showed thereafter, failing to gauge your pious purity as real. When she let reckless words drift into calumny, regret not gripping her just yet, you made no complaint; maybe you’re not a relatable saint.
*
But these darts, Caterina, you also bear. Fingers brushing the fringed edge of the lilies, you give the waiting saint your fiat, and wear the contrapuntal habit. What ecstasies and agonies are to come, you don’t yet know. Before Rome beckons, your cup will overflow with princes and prelates bent on worldly wins, the prying and possessed, souls mired in sins.
Di Paolo doubles you in tone: pale and warm and dark-drawn with thoughts of what lost shepherds need. The crucifix you kneel before gives form to pain that adumbrates the trials and greed you’ll circumnavigate with legates and boors: They knew that you wanted no part of their wars. “Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love,” you wrote the power-blind. Your Lord asked for all. And No never crossed your mind.
Kristi A.S. Gomez has a BA in Creative Writing from Pepperdine and an MA in Literature and Publishing from University of Galway, Ireland. She had poems published in both university publications and was a finalist in the Catholic Literary Arts 2024 Advent Poetry Contest. She has been a corporate-world and freelance editor and has taught poetry classes to homeschooled students.
I sit here in the awkward silence now, sharing an Irish whiskey with my Fear, a plate of chocolates, hazelnuts, and cheese, sitting untouched by anyone but me. I’ve felt this Fear for quite a bit of time. It neither chills me nor gnaws at my soul, but hangs around and sometimes pokes my side. It is the fear that God’s no longer near, that I have wandered out of God’s earshot, who made the stirring music of the spheres, and whispered Psalms and Proverbs to wise kings. I’m sure I’ve been the wanderer, not Him. I’ve not forgotten or forsaken Him, and still I see the wonders He has made, the grandeur flaming out as Hopkins wrote, like lightning in a darkened field at night or stars that twinkle brightly in the sky. But feel I’ve stumbled on the bottom rung of St. John’s ladder of divine ascent, or that my Lord no longer speaks to me, and all is silent, save perhaps the sound of crunchy hazelnuts against my teeth.
Michael C. Paul is a writer, illustrator, and historian who lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, daughter, and stepson.
Souls are like poems. An idea in the air, ephemeral, but written, committed to shape. The line, “We are God’s workmanship,” in the letter to the Ephesians, but the original Greek poiema. Why translate as workmanship? Why not poem? We are God’s poem. Every soul an ars poetica.
Something so mysterious recorded in ink on parchment, charcoal on linen, or chalk and slate, voice and lyre. Words. Black and white. And yet so full of color: olive, amethyst, sunflower, plum.
What is it that happens when you read iris— little line with a dot, line with a curve, another line and dot, double curve s—and you see rows of brilliant purple blooms along the road up the hill to the cemetery?
Janna Schledorn’s poems have appeared in The Marbled Sigh, SWWIM, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, and other journals. Her work is featured in the Phenomenal Women chapbook from the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation (2023), her chapbook, Those Nine Days (2021) and the anthology Mother Mary Comes to Me (Madville 2020). She teaches composition and creative writing at Eastern Florida State College. For more visit jannaschledorn.com
Amethyst Review 