‘How the mystical beckons us’ – a reflection by Chuck Thompson

Every day I try to sit for a spell, to begin to create. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not. I never know the difference. I try to transcend the ordinary in a way that sings, that comes alive, that speaks to me in ways I can’t always describe. In that sense, writing for me is […]

Four Hundred Roses – a poem by Peggy Turnbull

Four Hundred Roses From books I learned the Great Mother still lives, disguised, yet as much with us as carbon. I’m curious. Franciscan Sisters dispatch an invitation wrapped in newspaper, to honor Her in the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Inside the chapel modernist and vertical wood seems institutional. I perch behind women […]

Mato Tipila – a poem by Ruby McCann

Mato Tipila (“Bear Lodge” in Lakota) last night trickling intricate filaments of light-centred clusters orbited Taurus’s shoulder in a fluid milky-ultraviolet smouldering like scattering starlight seven neon-mercurial sisters dance with four-hundred luminous boys holding seven ears of green corn from seven tilled fields embodying seven tribes tumbling sequential celestial bodies unravel a pointing finger of […]

To a god I don’t believe in – a poem by Anjali Bhavan

To a god I don’t believe in I look for prayers in the crack of a peepal leaf, in your trembling sur. I look for blessings in thunderstorms slithering down with mallippu blossoms in palms. I stare at my atheism in a darpan filled with you; your questions dripping on me. I find your fragrance […]

111 Trees for Every Girl-Child – a poem by Ruby McCann

111 Trees for Every Girl-Child (An Ode to Kiran)* a young girl’s life ……………………………….Kiran transforms death ……………………………….Kiran through rebirth ……………………………….Kiran her divine manifestation lingers lives……in an oasis of neem sheesham……mango……amla from seedling holds dear…..birthing baby girls……budding like saplings blossoming reforestation into womanhood growing girls……yielding trees from shooting seeds nurtured side by side…..girl-trees flourishing in […]

A Ghazal of Love and Purity – a poem by Carolyn Patricia Richardson

A Ghazal of Love and Purity inspired by حافظ شیرازی With Great Blessings from the Imam The Poet Seer feels the Wings of Protection With a noble Heart & strong Mind The Poet Seer struggles to apprehend the Truth With a bowl of Muscat grapes & sweet stringed Lyre The Poet Seer sings Ghazal to […]

Après – a poem by Wayne-Daniel Berard

Après you hope it will become a cathedral not a last aerodome …..vast empty space once filled with solid light now propped hurriedly with prayer and Study and more poems than you ever wrote before is that enough to hold the ceiling up will this cavernous leftover air be past tense of flight […]

Since feeling comes first … – a poem by Carolyn Martin

Since feeling comes first … – e.e. cummings …………..… why bother with thought? Ask any riled wave or wind-swept gull. They do what they do without studying tidal charts or Bernoulli’s principle. Electric bees in wildflower fields or mother seals prodding pups to shore? No conferencing with expert botanists or sophists on the art […]

Mary of the Rotten Heart – a poem by Jessie Lynn McMains

Mary of the Rotten Heart O Mary of the Lake Goddess of the Empty Cathedral the cathedral with roof of sky-cerulean roof of sky-black pinpricked by far-off leaking light the cathedral which molders only opens for funerals and midnight masses presided over by your acolytes Father Turkey Vulture, choir-boy bats how they sing so sweet […]

To Each Her Saint – a poem by Carolyn Martin

To Each Her Saint Canonize? The prize for two miracles. Not much to ask, considering. Someone walks upright, banishes unruly cells, faces off the voices in her head, stops a river’s rise: triumphs claimed in an almost-saint’s name. For those of us who dismiss titles and candles lit on flowered altars in a namesake church, […]