Monthly Archives: September 2022

While we are gone


Spring will soliloquy
while we’re away
then collapse once again
into that vortex of mystery
where only the winged world
has both privilege and privy to.

And somehow we’ll carousel
along with the sojourn of leaves
sadly contorting
into vague wisps of self

with us on the outskirts
where weeds ache with loneliness
forsaken by worldly pretension
yet at peace with the gift of exclusion.

When not writing poetry, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting with macrame art. She volunteers in animal rescue, tending to cat colonies. She walks with a birding group on Sundays. Her work has appeared in Mad Swirl, Amethyst Review, Literary Veganism and other wonderful places. Her latest collection is “This water paint life,” published by Origami Poems Project.

On Faith, Personal or Otherwise


Is faith set and certain
or is it alive and changing (or is that me)?
On one hand, I hold onto a
dogma that has been passed on,
outlawed, that has martyred and inspired, 
started wars and healed nations.
Is it a solid rock with histories on top
or does bad ol’ humanity stay the same,
while faith, like vapor, takes up the shape
of needed grace?

My faith (can it be claimed?) is filed into
the different drawers of me. 
Jesus in my chest, and the saints close by—
Blessed Mother behind my eyes, 
but the Old Testament and the epistles
are in some bone or another,
still making up my structure but not understood, 
the tolerated ache undiagnosed.
I’ll never be set and certain, 
so will I ever be whole enough
to hold it all at once?

Grace C. Przywara received an English degree from the University of South Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in Ekstasis Magazine and is forthcoming in Rise Up Review, and has placed multiple years in contests hosted by human rights organization Rehumanize International. Grace currently lives in Aiken, South Carolina.

Everlasting 

A single raindrop falls, 
seeps through grass
and soil and rock,
is pulled by the sunlit hand of God
into thirsty roots, up, up,
up through xylem and stoma 
into the womb of a cloud,
to be born again, life everlasting
beyond the reach of priest or prayer 

Brian Kates holds a Pulitzer Prize, George Polk Award and Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spirit Fire Review, Paterson Literary Review, Broadkill Review, Banyan Review, Third Wednesday, Common Ground and other journals. He lives with his wife in a house in the woods in the lower Hudson Valley.

Song
 
"She sang a song without any questions, full of color and joy"
                                                                      -Elisa Kleven
 
 
It isn't easy to sing that way,
since song suggests word and all
words can be questions.
And she was not naïve.
She wasn't singing without knowing
why we worry about any joy
asking us to accept it
without inquisition.
 
And yet her song seemed
satisfied to suggest its colors
proved how natural it also is
to sing.  Rainbows are real:
though no more believable
than killing storms, no less
so, either.
 
Her singing said suspend
your doubts, breathe in belief,
make your very listening a prayer
of thanks someone can still sing
this way, and you will co-create
these colors,
join this joy.
 

Joe Benevento’s work has appeared in almost three hundred publications, including Bilingual Review, U.S. Catholic, Dappled Things and Poets & Writers. He has had fourteen books of poetry and prose published, including: Expecting Songbirds: Selected Poems, 1983-2015.  He teaches creative writing and American literature at Truman State University.

Dive into light
 
Dive deep into light and swim.
Then, stand and squeeze the
light from your hair and
watch it fly around you.
Grab some drops from their flight
You can feel droplets of water
smaller than fog, but a liter of light
feels no different from a
wheelbarrow full.
All light reflected from the ocean
weighs the same as
the light in your hand.

As it does every day
darkness falls upon you.
There! See the trail you generate:
A rainbow, droplets of light
continue to fly from your
saturated hair.
You might see a pot of gold
revealed by rainbow light,
or perhaps your greatest fear
no longer hidden in the dark.

Know that light always returns.
Dive back in.
See how light receives you,
welcomes and uncloaks the
dark cloud that, like the rainbow,
follows you.
How well you swim
buoyed and cleansed
unhampered by the darkness
you just explored.

Elizabeth Hykes lives and writes in southern Missouri. A retired clinical social worker, writing has sustained her through the ups and downs of life.

Kaleidoscope


Look at a barley loaf
through the beveled lens.
See it open
like a feast of 
golden flowers 
slicing into my hunger
on a thousand knives.

Do it again with a fish.
Prismatic acrobat leaping
through glass fragments,
filling the frame
with silver glint.
I was never filled
before today.

Look at our clustered
faces, and hands 
splintering across green grass,
giving, taking
mirrored baskets, 
circling round the center
where all good gifts meet.

Janice L. Freytag currently resides in Souderton, PA. She began writing poetry after working in post-war Bosnia.  Her poems have appeared in Radix, Relief, Saint Katherine Review, Windhover and others. In addition to poetry, she has written four children’s musicals. She is an enthusiastic, though not always successful, gardener.

Prepare the Way


No, I’m not afraid
I’ve been expecting this
since the day I pointed my finger and
spit brood of vipers into the desiccated air
They’re lavish with their silk raiments
and unworked hands
They’re why I flagellate 
with camel hair and rope a leather belt
against my need
This is the costume Elijah wore—
his eyes sparking 
above a fearsome beard
People require their prophets to 
eat locusts and scoop handfuls of 
honey with dirty fingernails

They came when I cried to them
from the edge of a sand filled sea
Followed me right to the Jordan River,
I stood thigh deep, 
my legs gleaming like the fish 
who caressed my feet
I baptized them to purity,
the way my mother taught me 
when she said it was time and
reminded me of the way I’d leapt 
within her womb 
when He came near
She smoothed my spine and
strained my ears toward heaven—
so certain was she that I would 
discern the whispers
What could I do but shout my truth?
The city blazed with wickedness and 
writhed with sin on scented sheets

So here I am—
slumped against a wall
beneath Herod’s palace
The guards laugh to 
feed me meat and milk
and poke their fingers into the softening
glut of my flesh
There was a moment when 
fear devoured my faith and I
sent Him a letter, asked
if He was the One

And He answered—told me
The blind are regaining sight,
The lame are walking


They’ve unchained my hands and 
lead me to the banquet hall 
where Salome sways a hypnosis
I should look away, 
but the solidity of my stench
cleaves clouds of incense 
and I hold her childish gaze
She hoists a platter 
that winks with rubies and
then I’m on my knees
Metal bites my neck

The dead are being raised 

He’d said
The dead are being raised

Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency physician and mother of five. She is the author of A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press 2022). Some of her recent work is featured or forthcoming in Nelle, A Gathering of the Tribes, Dialogist, Rattle and elsewhere. More of her poetry can be found at rachel-mallalieu.com

Noontime  

    Michael says he likes the noontime best
Not because the sun is the brightest then
But because all the shadows and shades
Are shrunk or retreated to the smallest
Spaces around human shapes, artifacts
Or other natural presences, when even 
The soul becomes a shadowless angel 
That can fly without leaving a single
Fragment of darkness on its long journey 
Towards Heaven, but in the morning or
Evening, our shadows would grow longer
Colder and darker than our selfhoods, like
The leftovers of last night, even if we dwell
In an earthly paradise, or a paradisiacal earth

Yuan Changming hails with Allen Yuan from poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations & chapbooks (most recently ALL MY CROWS) besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline & Poetry Daily, among 1929 others. Yuan both served on the jury and was nominated for Canada’s National Magazine (poetry category). 

High Commission
       Christ of the Deesis, mosaic by an unknown artist,
	  Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, c. 1260

My workers toil for their daily pay;
they chisel glass and stone, mix grout, and set in	
this vast design, perhaps an inch each day.
Bits of beveled, golden glass let in
the glory of daylight to the gleaming background.
When set atilt, these tiny bits reflect
a mystic flicker that, by lamplit night,
evokes the realm where faithful souls expect
He dwells. Here He looms, with one hand lifted
to judge how worthy every life has been.  
Artistic bent does not mean I am gifted,
but art is what I give to God and men.
Earthly emperor, this work is now complete;
heavenly emperor, judge kindly when we meet.

Barbara Lydecker Crane, twice a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, has received several awards for her sonnets. Her poems have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, Measure, THINK, and many others.  Her fourth collection, You Will Remember Me, sonnets about artists and portrait paintings, will be published by Able Muse Press. 

Five Haiku  from a Pandemic


as if all
were right with the world -
magnolia blooms


***


protecting each other's 
solitude -
path through the bamboo 


***


all day rain -
i add more flour
to the kneaded dough


***


fresh spring breeze -
the wildflower field between 
our morning greeting 


***


shortest day -
does the lark too
grasp the great truth?

Deborah A. Bennett began writing Haiku as a mindfulness exercise at the beginning of the pandemic; now she writes it as a form of self expression,  and as the poet Mary Ruefle said, “in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.”