Monthly Archives: August 2022

By-the-wind-sailor


By-the-wind-sailor on the beach I go down to
and stand beside. Happy at your name.
You have travelled far with the others and if it was spring
I would go so far as to bring Jack-by-the-hedge to you 
in particular - stuff we have along the waysides here - picked 
for you to dry in private inside your oilskin. It will bring you 
Good fortune when you sail on as you must. 

You stand side on to me and to the waves, 
dressed in dusk on the flat low-tide shore, 
Your eyes glistening as gift is given, doubting nothing,   
Pipe bowl glowing, eyes of you singing songwords -
Neap. Venus. And Star O’ the Sea.
‘I knew a bar of that name,’ my eyes sing back, wet as your own.
You see something in the sky then and turn away, back 
Towards the fateful waters and I stand seeing full beam car lights 
Weaving between B road hedges on the headland beyond the dunes.

Martin Towers recently moved from Northern Ireland to Wales where he works as a support worker. Moths are a big thing for him, his favourite being the Angle Shades.

       K

1

Stars blooming in the sky.
Burbling Yamuna.
Ri and Krishna are sailing away on a boat.
Ri asks murmuring, 'can the world ever separate you from me?

Krishna smiles.
The oar cuts burbling water 
but they're weaved together again.

3

Ri, if you'll not receive me, I am nothing.
Lightning, the tragic king of sparks, loses his crown in a flash as there's no one to receive him.
Ri, I'm nothing if you will not receive me.

4

Ri, neither in a sound sleep nor in an unfeeling death, I love my eyes to be closed during an amorous kiss on the flute summoning you.

5

Sakhi, when I shed tears, Krishna never casts words of solace over me. Rather, sitting beside me, he also sheds tears
as he knows only water can hold water. Raindrops on the land just wither away

5

Sakhi, Krishna is so mischievous.
When I run on tiptoe for fear of getting drenched in rain, he beckons me waving his leaves as a tree and offers me shelter, but gradually makes me wet with the raindrops dripping from his leaves, when rain stops outside.

Partha Chatterjee is a practising poet from India. His first anthology, Flashes of the Lightning, was published from AlienBuddha Press , California, USA. in 2018.

This Morning’s Minion Glimpse

Oh God, it’s growing, some kind of grey mass
of muscle flexing within, still living in
the sinewed wetlands of the mind; live bands
of light, spindly bright, threading over time.
The yearning agony of energy
is shoving through, pushing in my chest,
pushing me, swirling through an outlet,
a chasm, opening to more and more light.
I push myself part way through, an astral birth,
an oozing forth by inches, slow, yet sure.
It isn’t us that’s in control, we know
that much is true. It’s us, but then it isn’t.
It’s no one, then it’s me and you. Engage,
supply, and circulate. We, this, is new.

Tom Bauer always wanted to write poetry. In the late 1980s, he published his own chapbooks, which he sold door-to-door. Currently, he has work forthcoming in Blue Unicorn.

Mating Goldfinches


They drift and float over
power lines then freefall
across the stream bed where
lemon gorse and whitethorn beam.
Their bellies flash in
each churn of wing
a duet in the blue sky.
Each lift, fall and spin
synchronised -
Love's golden measure.

Mari Maxwell’s poetry appears in Washing Windows Too, Arlen House 2022; and, the Poetry Jukebox STARS Curation, part of the 2021 Belfast International Arts Festival. She received a 2020/21 Professional Development Award with the Arts Council of Ireland and a 2019/2020 Words Ireland/Mayo County Council Mentorship. TWITTER: @MariMaxwell17

I Was Eve


that naked rib, weaving through tiny words
on the tissue pages of my bible.
I lifted her out of the ink and drank her.

The curves of her body glowed, clothed 
only in the warmth of a young sun  
that seeped through the leaves of Eden.  

Eden, that scrim of perfection,
paper thin and easily torn.  

She had seen the serpent, long and supple, 
wound around branches and coiled 
at the base of trees.  It writhed a path

in the soil and grass.  Unrestricted.
How would it feel, its one cord-like
muscle massaging its way all over

her body.  She wanted to dance with it 
twined around her torso.  Oh, the tingle
of its tongue on her skin.

Temptation to know and know,
throw open the garden gates.

Deborrah Corr is a long-time resident of Seattle where she taught kindergarten for twenty-eight years.  Currently, she is digging as deeply as she can into the joy and craft of poetry.  She also quilts, reads, and enjoys the outdoors where she can be seen watching and sometimes talking with birds.  Her work has appeared in Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Halcyon, and Raven Chronicles and will be included in upcoming issues of The Main Street Rag and Sequoia Speaks.

Transfiguration


Sitting between the law and prophets, 
The word that holds them together, 
Bound not in letters transcribed 
But in glorified flesh and bone. 
It is good to be here but not to stay.
Mountain rest must be spoken in the valley. 
Transfiguration comes by going down; 
Our perishable seed planted for the imperishable. 

Dew of Tabor collects into a stream, 
Watering the fields prepared for glory; 
Holy potential we glimpse in Spring 
As light illuminates vivid hues 
Born in tulips and daffodils, 
Woken by the piping of playful crocus: 
Delicate as children, in carefree laughter. 

Even the canopy of cherry blossoms bear 
Splendor as which graced the visage of Moses, 
Who spoke plainly with God as to a friend. 
He veiled his face to hide what was fading in the Old, 
Longing to behold the unfolding of the New 
Made manifest in blooming buds 
And green blades of young grass, 
Caught up in the song and dance of Creation. 

Never to what has been but what will be. 
Transfiguration comes by growing up. 
It is good to be here, to rest awhile; 
Bound not in letters transcribed 
But in the word made flesh around, 
Over our heads and under our feet, 
Nourished by the dew of Tabor.

James Robert Kibby is an accomplished songwriter and aspiring poet whose love for creative writing began when he authored and illustrated his first comic book at age 11. James has poems published through Calla Press and The Voices Project and is currently working on his first poetry collection.

The Fisherman

At the shore
a silver boat gleams
beneath the moon

and a white-robed Fisherman
cuts Fish

from His skin.

A. Michele Leslie has written more than twenty plays, including one about a bus-ride that won 1st prize in the one-act play contest sponsored by Kalliope Magazine (Jacksonville, FL). This play was nominated for a Pushcart in 1993. Another play she wrote, Location Unknown, which treated schizophrenia during Victorian times, placed as Alternate in the Jerome in 1991. She has had about 7 plays produced in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and has also published poetry, short stories, and essays and edited an international literary magazine (as a hobby) for about fifteen years.

She lives with her husband and two wonderful cats in Minnesota. She deeply enjoys meditation and in her spare time dabbles in reflexology, essential oils, and a variety of mystical issues. She is presently putting the finishing touches on two new full-length plays.

a grape is a berry


Are there holy grapes, is there holy ground, is anything here holy? – Annie Dillard


i’ve taken a lot of communion 
in a lot of traditions, watched my mother 
cut loaves into squares, or my aunts open
jugs of store-brand grape juice
for the blood of Christ. 
i notice the flouriness of pita, 
the way that wafers melt in my mouth, 
or the honey whole grain sweetness 
of the st. luke’s loaf. 
 
when i join a wine-drinking church, 
they ask me to keep them supplied, 
so i use my employee discount 
to pick up half a case at a time.
the vicar puts her hands on the bottles
that i carried in my backpack, 
next to my wallet and a carton of oat milk.
 
there is no moment i can see
when the holiness is added in
or set apart. holiness runs
alongside of the ordinary:
wine and coffee,
wafers and doughnuts.
whatever there is of holiness 
in communion is in the taking of it.

Jennifer Avignon (she/her) is a queer poet who lives in Seattle with her husband and lots of houseplants. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. Her work appears in This Present Former Glory, Stepaway Magazine, and Beaver Magazine. https://www.jenniferavignon.com/

Morning Transport
 
I.
 
This time. I am sure.
You don’t. Exist. Random. Soup cans.
Crush. My toenails. The birds. Stagger to their. Time cards.
And punch. In red. She is refusing. To brush her. Teeth. Unexplained. Traffic. Jams clog. 
The arteries. This is a mere. Conglomeration. Of sound. Metaphors crack. In my cell.
Like old. Flower pots.
There is no. Such thing.
As a poem.
 
ii
    my car skirts the open trench ducks
      the height limit sign flashes its readiness to merge 
                   on aerial pathways tons of steel climbing above the airport call
                    to mind pleasures of descent the compensations of bearing
                divergent angels 
        even magnetic fields migrate 
  unmasking the flayed terror of radiation 
  forty thousand years ago
        our ancestors were trapped in caves and invented art.
           the little bonfires of my cells bloom red 
              with their refining flame
                    peel this poem like a burning orange all
                  points on the surface 
                 are equidistant from the center   
             everything is glowing         no
           every         thing 
 
is
 
glowing   the poem 
 
  is a bird the bird of my cells
      singing to you sing yourself 
             into me my mirror twin, mouth
           bearer of galaxies 
     open your laughing eyes again
 my butter child
and swallow me
 

Ethan Ashkin Stanton is a husband, father, teacher, and poet in San Jose, California. He is a Jewish pantheist with a side of skepticism. His work often explores the interpenetration of the sacred and the mundane. Every answer brings a new question, and that is how it should be.

Rosary

1

Pearls find a way
to their oyster. 

2

Keeping count for a one-off. 

3

Does clairvoyance
call for an add-on?

Can names lead me
to the anonymous?

Beads are tags,
they accept duality.  

Kiriti Sengupta, the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize recipient, is a poet, editor, translator, and publisher. He has authored eleven books of poetry and prose, two books of translation, and edited eight anthologies. Sengupta’s poems have been published in The Common, The Florida Review Online (Aquifer), Otoliths, Headway Quarterly, Moria Online, Amethyst Review, Madras Courier, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Mad Swirl, Outlook Magazine, among other places. He is the founder and chief editor of the Ethos Literary Journal. Sengupta lives in New Delhi. More at www.kiritisengupta.com