Monthly Archives: July 2022

Resurrection 

“Watch out for largemouth bass,” my grandfather said, “especially the lunkers, they’ll eat anything:  frogs, mice, muskrats . . . I even saw one leap out of the water and pull down an eagle whose wingspread was as wide as a paddleboard.  Those fish see everything with their dragonfly eyes.”  That was the day before he left in the hour of the wolf to row to the middle of the lake where he cast his line deep.  Just as dawn pulled itself up over the horizon, like a pink-crested bird struggling out of a trap, a behemoth bass hit his boat and swallowed it whole.  All that was left was my grandfather’s straw hat bobbing on the water like a buoy.  

	before time
	moon-sized mouths
	lurking below

Three days later he returned, smelling faintly of fish, but with a light in his eyes that I had not noticed before.  When I asked him, he would not say what happened, only that he’d been somewhere that was like the inside of a cold coal furnace.  After that, when we fished, we kept close to the shore, pulling in perch and bluegill, walleye and bass small enough so that they wouldn’t break the line.  One evening as we were rowing back to the dock, he said, “In a few years, it will be time for me to take you out to the middle of the lake while it is still dark.  In the meantime, and this will take a while, you’ll need to learn how to breathe underwater.”

	dry dock
	the creak and groan of wind
	in the old boat

Keith Polette has published poems in both print and online journals.  His book of haibun, pilgrimage, received the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award in 2021.

Rock Collection

My daughter deposits a rock 
into the round-topped treasure box 
that guards her growing collection.
Thuds and rattles sound the value
of each piece to her and so to me.
What distinguishes these from those
scattered in the garden outside
isn’t quantified by qualities
or colors or mineral compounds.
She likes them.
And that’s enough for both of us.

She knows I keep rocks of my own.
A brown round one in my briefcase
gathered from a gravel driveway,
a stone altar to remember 
losing a long season of love.
We look at it together sometimes
so she can share its worth with me,
a pebble three thousand miles from
the rubble heap, not because it shines,
but because we look at it sometimes.

And today, squinting from the sun
on my front porch and the planet
I’m learning to see the beauty
as Christ opens to me his treasure
composed of rocks, thuds and rattles,
heaps of things and shining people,
gardens and memories of loss,
a collection, a stone altar,
beautiful because he keeps it.
And we look at it together.

Ryan Keating is a pastor, writer, winemaker and coffee roaster on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. His work can be found in publications such as Saint Katherine Review (forthcoming), Ekstasis Magazine, Agape Review, and Miras Dergi, where he is a regular contributor in English and Turkish.

Madonna in the mid-Devon Meadows 

Lowering her hands from the clouds
she smooths the swathe of her apple-green skirt – 
field-mice scuttle the tunnelling rhynes of her veins,
her eyes are Neptune, Venus,
her belly the Devon meadows lit with glowing wheat,
her hips, the hedges – cicely, wild parsley, bedstraw –
her girdle their green-gold figured brocade.

Unfolding its soothsayers
over the furrowed boughs of oak-leaf lap  
her scroll squirms ants, caterpillars, bees -
warblers and wrens roost in her nooks and 
owls are hooting under Cassiopeia’s gaze.

***
Here near the stream
the alders
where, following the stranded years when plague 
took its peopled toll
the land heaves 
           full of grief

One whose heart stopped.
One who bled with her last child.
One who lost sight, then
failed to hear cuckoo’s returning call.

***
Don’t call our names 
    Dead
our Lady of the Goldfinch,
we, who suppliants at your grounded feet
held our whispered pagan rites
as you rose with sun from the east each day,
don’t remind us of the times we walked 
white brides beneath our wedding arch.

We, who till we went under and became micro particles 
 floating through your dusty air, 
lived for the turning soil at our feet,
breathing the self-choices, stories of our lives 
dandelion seeds, away

No one took the trouble 
to sketch or scribble 
even the limned edges of our lives
back of history’s notepad,
no poet set us down in exquisite verse.

We were driven into the periphery, 
the hart’s tongue undergrowth
of your side-lined hedge,
the hidden inner boles of your unfathomable trees.

For, 
   although You and We are One
      We are Gone.

No, don’t tell our names
   Dead
Dead, our Lady of the Goldfinch, but
     
speak of blackbirds in the beech field 
those air-blue butterflies 
levitating there above horizon’s east, 

instead call out the irradiating dust,
our Lady of the Candelabra,
watch it rise above our sheep-grazing grass,
our breathing fields, 
our barley susurrating
over the heavy land, where
hares are mesmerised by moon,
and the ladybird creeps from the depths of  her stolen crevice - 
for we, with you, are one with chi in ivy seed, 
in spore of Lady fern.

 

Julie Sampson’s poetry is widely published. She edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems, 2009 (Shearsman Books); her collectionsare Tessitura(Shearsman Books, 2014) and It Was When It Was When It Was (Dempsey & Windle, 2018 ). She received an ‘honourable mention’ in the Survision James Tate Memorial Prize, in 2021. Her main website is at JulieSampson. 

An apprentice at the bottom of the long stairs
 
 
The first thing they give you 
            for your room 
at the Buddhist monastery
is not a scroll of the Dhammapada.
 
            It’s a broom.
 
Crawling before walking.
Walking before dancing.
Dancing before sitting 
            in the Lotus position.
 
When they hand it to you,
            it feels like this means . . . nothing.
 
I hope that I am eventually forgiven
            for not advancing.
 
I am not ready any time 
            soon
for any kind of graduation
                                    
                                    . . .       
                        I’ve yet 
            to master 
the first step.

J.T. Whitehead earned a law degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He received a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Purdue, where he studied Existentialism, social and political philosophy, and Eastern Philosophy. He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a writing tutor, a teacher’s assistant, a delivery man, and book shop clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. Whitehead has published poems in a number of other literary journals, including Home Planet News, The Iconoclast, Poetry Hotel, Evening Street Review, Book XI, and Gargoyle.  His one book of poetry, The Table of the Elements, was published by The Broadkill River Press in 2015.  Whitehead lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph, where he practices law by day and poetry by night. 

When the Raven Came

The raven’s wing was so close to my head
the swooshing split my being wide open.
Like an unexpected christening, 
the gray air of angels.

Nothing has been the same since.

I am here now with the air and earth
under the wing of gratitude
sitting in the trees covered 
with mossy fur watching.

My eyes transport my body 
into all things 
beginning and ending.
A full view of the world
birthing, the grave,
both an equal struggle.

The river, the dirty bank, 
wild daisies.
The green things eaten.
The meat and the bone.

The shame that is required to kill to live
without this great misery we are lost.

There will not be bread upon 
the water  
nor a small 
hand of a god, that dips into some
luminescent pool.
to heal you.

Salvation is walking through it.

No matter how good, angry or pleasant
That it’s a relief that you did not
have to suffer 
like another
the same waits for you
it comes to you as all
great sorrow
                 loss
                        terror comes
whether you feel it in your bones or flesh
or you watch it with your tired eyes.

It comes to pull you into the meat of life
Place you slanted into the deep water.
Baptism and release.

See there out of the corner of your eye?
The small bird lights
on that branch?
It has known far more sorrow 
than you and sings.

J.V. Foerster has been published in: Eclectica, Agnieszka’s Dowry, Midnight Mind, Premiere Generation Ink, Fickle Muse, Oak Bend Review, Fox Chase Review, Elohi Gaduji to name just a few. She has work forthcoming in The Fiery Scribe,The Bluebird Word and Orchard Lea Anthology. She was nominated in 2011 for a Pushcart for her poem “Apple Girl” and included in Rosemont College Anthology. She is also a published painter and photographer. J.V. lives in Portland, Oregon.

Website: J.V. Foerster – Poet, painter, photo taker (jvfoerster.com) also

JV Foerster | Poets & Writers (pw.org)

Contrapuntal Progression
 
There is that time of morning, after dawn,
When dew is yet on the grass, and the sun,
Though climbing still, is above the horizon,
And we are ready to work, not noticing
The shifting light falling slantwise
Through trees, onto grass, and flowers.
We are given over to the rhythm
Of the melody of our daily tasks
Of repetition, and the birdsong,
The burst of flowers, and breeze through the leaves,
Continue in their own processional
Completing the day’s antiphonal hymn.

Joseph Kleponis lives north of Boston, Massachusetts. His poetry has been appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Eucalypt, First Literary Review -East, Penmen Review of Southern New Hampshire University, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Truth’s Truth, his first book, was released in 2021 by Kelsay Books. 

Uzzah

Released wayward, silicate pinball rages,
ricochet on porcelain globes, chip and tarnish.

A crime of misplaced trajectory, awry in vibrancy,
                                        and yet, who is the culprit?

Past, present, future: the apple falls.
The bird ascends in dance, not fight. 

All yield to the pull with fervorous grace but I, the great
                                        and undomesticated. Or do I surge in blasphemy?

Constellations may dismantle into individuals,
But when held in cohesion, Orion pirouettes.

Dear cosmos, teach me to capitulate.
Untethered desire seethes fury. Gravity radiates

And all is well. Drag me down deep
Under layers of dirt, rightfully burrowed

As a paralytic of the universe.
                                        This, the highest of callings?

Caroline Liberatore is a former English student and future librarian. She has also been published in Ashbelt Journal, Ekstasis Magazine, Foreshadow Magazine, and Clayjar Review. You can read more of her work at carolinelib.wordpress.com.

Long

One cannot measure
an anxious heart—hope becomes
a long wait, stretching
into the watchful stillness 
of the always now of God. 


Water

Those dark waves roared, yet 
you parted and stilled and walked
on them; now, Living 
Water, reach out—free me from
the pull of the undertow.

X

X marks the spot on 
a treasure map; and what more
could my heart long for
except to be a pearl of
God’s, found and rejoiced over?

Leslie Anne Bustard is a writer, poet, and editor who lives in Lancaster City, PA. She writes for Cultivating Project and Black Barn Online. Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children, a book of essays she co-edited, will be released this April through Square Halo books. Her website Poetic Underpinnings (https://www.poeticunderpinnings.com) contains her writings, podcasts, and the goodness of other people’s creativity.

What the Ark Left  
  
When you poured out your love   
like ten thousand hands, blue-throated   
Shiva at world’s end, what remained   
beneath that ark of flesh  
but bright dorsal fins, eyes lit fuchsia  
in luminous dark, a world we call alien—  
wilderness in kelp, liquid animals   
transparent to the gill, limbs   
grown from bitten wounds—  
and your crescent-moon smile, your hand   
stretched out over the amniotic world  
to welcome us home.  
  

Hannah Hinsch is a Seattle-based writer who has published essays in Cultural Consent and Ruminate, poems in Ekstasis and Amethyst Review, and has written for Image journal’s ImageUpdate. She was the editorial intern at Image for two years. Hannah finds that writing has always been a conversation—her work emerges in response to the word He has already spoken. She writes to witness, to be caught up in Him over and over again. She writes to be well. Find more of her work at hannahhinsch.com

Heaven as Cave


You need to make redemption
out of your dust and bones
as you knot melodies in your hands
that reach for the child,
scarred and full of healing,
the child made of the shadow plays
in your cave.

I never believed in anything
but heaven as a cave
with stalactites reaching
from the ceiling
and the water as still
as my father’s eyes on God,
the bats as dark as their home,
heaven an underground heart
encased in ribs of contrition,
and my mother a reservoir of memory,
a water where I steer my canoe
to the cave’s opening, 
shaft of light the belief
that her wounded mind could heal
in the dark water.

Verticality promised stars for homes
but I only knew how to scaffold
from the wood of fallen trees
and when I rose higher
than my outstretched arm
I could see how the devil
lived in cloud and sun
and I buried my God
and I chose to believe
that not all ghosts rise.
They dig through the earth
with the scapular bones
of timid and gentle deer
and fill our graves
with jewels and arrows.

My father saddles my horse,
my mother kneads my dough,
my lover lives as long
as horizons on the plains
where underground
is a treasure we cannot see yet,
and the children collect stones,
every one of them a promise. 

Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado.  Her books include the chapbook Beside Herself  (Flutter Press, 2010) and three full-length collections: Rust, Coming Up for Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), which won the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection.