theophany – a poem by David Banach

theophany

it is hard to find God under all this snow
ground of our being  frozen under 18 inches

I can feel  almost   the pulse in my hand still
warm and the flush on cheeks of passing people

this   is  a kind of God   the spark  the lighting from 
another place  the mind   a candle far away in a forest

even stars hide behind clouds and new moon dark
still there   but God is always in the past or the future

now   the salt crunches under my boots and I am
the only one awake here trudging dutifully to work

at 5:30  underneath it all  in the seams of nothingness
like quarters left behind couch cushions  God speaks

mumbles really  and you can make nothing out
of something in the cold going on of days  of my heart

of and of and of  the of   of everything  simple as it seems
being is one of the names of God  just being here without

David Banach is a philosopher and a poet, though often not in that order. He lives in Goffstown, NH, where he tends chickens, keeps bees, and watches for lessons in the sky. He likes to think about Dostoevsky, Levinas, and Simone Weil and the way form emerges in nature and how the human heart responds to it. He has published over 70 poems in journals, and is editor of Touchstone, the journal of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. He is a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize nominee, and is the author of How to be Good (2025 Bee Monk Press).

Sometimes, this is Enough – a poem by Rebecca Watkins

Sometimes, this is Enough
 
Will I ever be the kind of person
who learns each bird’s call,
the trill, the chirp, the warble?
 
Will I ever be someone who knows
the constellations, those warriors,
women and men of the skies?
 
I can trace their silver light
as it beckons, my eyes,
the wide night above me, 
 
but I stop,
not needing more,
than standing here
on wet grass,
stark branches
hidden by night,
quiet and whole.



Rebecca Watkins holds an MFA in poetry and an MSed from the City University of New York. Her poems have appeared in The Banyan Review, Sin Fronteras, and The Roanoke Review among other literary journals. Her creative nonfiction has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards. She is the author of Field Guide to Forgiveness (Finishing Line Press 2023) and Sometimes, in These Places (Unsolicited Press 2017). She lives in Hudson Valley with her husband and two dogs. More of her work can be found at rebeccawatkinswriter.com.

Awakenings – a poem by David Chorlton

Awakenings


Dark north, dark east, a Great-horned
owl shakes loose the sky
from underneath her wing. A rustling
on the ground between
lantana and the bush with small blue
flowers, a low hum in the distance
from roads that never sleep
and a thread of dark silence
running down the wash
from recent rains still searching for
a way into the earth.
A fire in the core
is where time goes to thaw. There’s no way back
from a million years of darkness
burnt away, mammoth bones to dust, no language
to record the years
but first light on the surface while 
flames speak to each other about
magma’s first ambition; today
the fire wants nothing but
to be a sun.
Haze across the four peaks
and a blue that shines
down on the desert mountain where all trails
lead to sky. There’s a buzz in the light
that flows across the boulders 
where wrens are
and moisture on the branches
running green
along the bed of an arroyo freshly stirring
itself awake. Bees clinging
to a shadow, urban streets below
lying at rest from fitful dreams,
kestrel setting shivers free and watching
from a mesquite bough.
A warbler at the window, thrashers
on the grass, no distance
between domestic and the wild
when night has left a fingerprint
on the backyard wall,
a metal strut moved aside
for a coyote to ease himself across
and investigate space that once
was in his native land. There’s past
where the present ought to be.
It happens without notice,
something quiet
wakes up and wipes the history
from its eyes. Rock formations
awaken bearing scars
of lightning, and memories
return as the moth does
who rests on tree bark
still wearing last night’s moonlight.


David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix. Over the decades his writing has helped him adjust to the desert and its wildlife to the point that he now considers the desert to be the best teacher of making use of limited resources, whether natural or artistic.

Terrible Reverie – a poem by Douglas Jones

Terrible Reverie

“Posted like silent sentinels…stand 
thousands upon thousands of mortal 
men fixed in ocean reveries.” – Ishmael

Pacific waves reprise in measured time,
blue swells that surge, crest, spill, and valley,
only to repeat – a meter said to calm
the strain of us observing from the beach.

I’ve come to doubt this water parents peace. 
Sometimes, it runs strict riptides our sturdy 
swimmers can’t combat. Sometimes, with least
alarm, it surges rogues so swift that purge

the beach of players. Then, too, its floor can 
rise, devising demon waves, trampling cliffs 
and smashing houses clear, while darkened
depths veil beasts with mouths serrated. 

We thrill to sit beside this lunging ghost,
defy its teeth and let it kiss our toes.

Douglas Jones, MA (philosophy) University of Southern California, MFA (poetry) Univ. of Idaho has published poetry and fiction in McSweeney’s, Antiphon, Phil Lit Review, Books and Culture, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lullwater Review, River Oak Review, Spaceports & Spidersilk, and the California Quarterly. He is a literature instructor at the Cambridge School, San Diego.

Jonah – a poem by Merryn Rutledge

Jonah

“The word of Yahweh was addressed to Jonah…: ‘Up!’ he said, ‘Go to Nineveh, the great city, and inform them that their wickedness has become known to me.’ Jonah decided to run away from Yahweh, and to go to Tarshish.”	
Jonah 1:1-3

I’m telling you, you are in for it if you hear Yahweh’s call 
to witness. I thought it was a curse.
My next folly was when I imagined I could 
reason with Yahweh about the outsiders in Nineveh.
Worse, that I could wander out of God’s sight
like when, as a boy, I sneaked off to play at the river’s edge
after Mother warned me not to—
The current nearly took me.

I caught a merchant ship heading west for Tarshish. 
And I want to tell you I was scared
when our heavy-laden boat started rocking, 
pitching bow-to-stern in a tumbling sea,
the sailors’ gods paying no attention.
Slowly, it occurred to me that I was headed the wrong way,
that it was my will ruling and roiling my insides 
to seasick and vomiting all over myself 
as I hid in the hold. Hid. Hah. 
So I climbed up on deck and shouted to the thunder, 
I give up. Throw me over or I’ll jump.

Wet-weary and sinking into the sea, 
I suddenly felt a buoy slide under me,
a great, gray fish slicing the waves,
making a straight way toward shore
where I lay down on sun-soaked sand,
limp, dazed, free.

The foreigners weren’t bad, really.
They fed me, gave me sandals and a new cloak.
But when I recovered, can you believe 
I started arguing with Yahweh again?
Patience had to teach me once more
about freefall, at wit’s end, 
when you sigh, Take me. I’m yours.
 

Winner of Orison Books’ 2023 Best Spiritual Poem and a 2024 Naugatuck River Best Narrative Poem finalist, Merryn Rutledge‘s work has appeared widely. Her collection Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed is available from Kelsay Books, where her next book, To Carve a Path Through Thickets, will be published in 2026. Merryn enjoys teaching poetry craft and reviewing poetry books by women. She lives near Boston, MA, USA.

Maybe All that Shakes Us is Music or Angels – a poem by Alison Stone

Maybe All that Shakes Us is Music or Angels  
(after Eduardo C. Corral)

Once, visible in the shorn field,
I poured handfuls of dirt back onto the earth –
buffalo after buffalo, falling.

You said it was just
shadows performing.
Dark haunches. Dark hooves.

Once you were my angel.

You’d crouch by the water for hours
to watch birds abandon sun-drenched sky
and dive into the cold river.

You said it was like returning
a violin to its velvet-lined case.
If the playing has been masterful,
the air still hums.

Alison Stone has published nine full-length collections, including Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2019), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, others. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. www.stonepoetry.org www.stonetarot.com

The Burning of the Summa – a poem by Patrick Hamilton

The Burning of the Summa

On a spring evening at the Sorbonne
The sleepy monks awoke to the scent
Of a smoky burning pyre of French pine.
In the courtyard they slowly shuffled through
To find the source of the fine smelling blaze
The Angelic Doctor inspired by God’s grace
Bringing his humble, contrite heart to bear
The Summa bound like Isaac on the mountain.
Yellow pages of golden loving wisdom
That strange child of Athens and Jerusalem.
The court illuminated, the lilies in bloom
Aquinas, ecstatic, proclaimed his loving wound:
“All I have done is straw!” And the monks in awe,
In silence shifted their robed feet in wonder.
Yet his brothers did not understand.
From his hands they wrenched their reasonable idol
Aquinas, meek in sheeplike countenance
Was led back to quiet prayerful quarters,
The saint denied his finest sacrifice.

Patrick Hamilton is a writer and poet from Charleston, South Carolina.

To What is Divine – a poem by Nathan Hassall

To What is Divine

I lie on a beach in Malibu,
sand pressing asterisks into my back,
the long-dead foam, receding.

Ahead, ginger-root sun buries
behind the horizon,
cinnabar unspooling behind.

My mouth snagged:
chew or praise?
Above, stars scatter

from the ruptured bodies
of their mothers and fathers.
An owl glazed in silver

clamps a crab,
rises above the cliff.
You, spirit who webs my lungs,

are the nucleus that never sees
its own surface. Your tides
wash over the dead

whose breath baptizes me,
my skin opening into mouths
that howl apart the mist.

You rush in, my body
erased from the sand,
forehead breaking open

under your flood.

Nathan Hassall is the 2023–2025 Poet Laureate of Malibu, California, and founder of The Poetry Vessel, a poetry education platform and podcast. His poems have appeared in Luna Luna, Moria, Ghost City Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Find more of his work and join his mailing list at www.nathanhassall.com

Smallwhite – a poem by Martin Towers

Smallwhite
 
 
settle on to me. There is no one here.
I will keep my arm in the sun for you.
 
They are all in town or at the Credit Union
at the end of the street.
 
I would feel the touch of you sat on me 
and would not move or blink.
 
We could open everything and the river 
would rise, clear completely and She   
 
would come down swimming for us
while the others are all away.

And the mirrored gulls would fly along with Her. 
Around Her. In silence.


Martin Towers lives in the seaside town of Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Mid Wales. He is a support worker for people who have a learning disability.
Videos of his poetry are on the YouTube channel of Professor J J Badger. Go to @Profjjb