Monthly Archives: October 2022

Dr Fabrício



It’s unnerving he’s set up his clinic in Rua da Artilharia – 
Artillery Street – but I am drawn into a realm of whiteness.

A moment’s wait. Knowing only dente, I lift recheio 
(which also means stuffing) from the online dictionary. 
I’ve come as I am, an emergency.
Acute-white shoes, trousers and tunic have rendered 
Dr Fabrício’s hair jet, his sentences beautifully chiselled.
This treatment unfortunately cannot be permanent. 


Bibbed, plunged back, I float away from the spotlight 
up into rooftops pastelled on the ceiling. Language
and debates ebb. Not one twinge. 
Dr Fabrício requests a verdict. Slightly tall, I croak. 
Yes yes, he says, I understand. He adjusts his work 
as if he were subject to the judgement of a higher being. 

I leave no fingerprints. The sliding doors’ white swoosh 
hushes me to a state of near grace. 
An eternally serene woman, with a golden tooth 
suspended from her necklace, greets me from a niche. 
She is just another fitment installed in this sanctuary
by Dr Fabrício, specialist in the dental-spiritual. 

Santa Apolónia, patron saint of dentists and sufferers,
I dare to rest my anguish at your feet. 
Here or home? Shelter or danger? Nothing is permanent.  

Anne Ryland’s third collection of poetry, Unruled Journal, was recently published by Valley Press. Her previous books are Autumnologist, shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2006, and The Unmothering Class, a New Writing North Read Regional choice. She leads community-based writing workshops in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. https://anneryland.co.uk/

St. Francis of Assisi Receives the Stigmata

That empty town in the background seems to float –
But still, it could be any smooth-walled town,
Just as that sky slowly unrolling its white
Design could be any sky.  But those green,

Shaley foreground outcroppings must be Mount
Alverna.  Though beasts look up – a crane, a mule
A hare, its fur precise and fine – they don’t
Startle as they hear a whoosh, or shy when they feel

Seraphic heat, as light bends an olive
Sapling, its leaves suddenly gold-foiled to just-
Minted coins, descends towards rock-wall and cave,
And presses, presses into the saint’s almost

Horrified face, and into his palms, held out
And curving, a gift of neat, supernal slits.

 – after the painting by Bellini

James Scannell McCormick writes and teaches college English in Rochester, Minnesota.  His third collection of poems is First of Pisces (Kelsay Press).

My Bannered Rose


Love is my bowl of cereal
my boarding pass
my ruler and my nemesis

no no no love is granddaughter’s
dollies, trips to the dollar store,
disarray and peanut butter

love predates dinosaurs
shines from the heavens
dog paddles through muck

love loves beginnings, endings,
in-betweens, love loves hate,
dirty laundry, tawdry sentiment

I praise love, indict love,
throw love under the bus,
deny love its name

yes yes yes I say to love
that fries me in its skillet,
entombs me in its snows

you are my plum, my freight,
my bannered rose,
yet I’ll grant you no credence

and gnaw at your bones
should something better 
even than you come along.

Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee. His writing has appeared in Amethyst Review, Soul-Lit, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Buddhist Poetry Review, Verse-Virtual, and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). A father of five and grandfather of six, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.

The Thing About Belonging to the Moon


Tonight I wish to have the valor and daring to belong to the moon.” 
-Virginia Woolf


Is that you are allowed to pull aside the night, 
or hang your shape, gravid as a grapefruit, 
to unfurl instinct, spread an owl’s wings 
into that feral and inevitable hunger,
curving wilderness along the sky.

There, you will not ever be 
domesticated, tamed, instead become
a thing as mutable as fever or a wish, 
stirring tides to rise inside the pulse –

that surge another woman felt 
some centuries ago, bareheaded 
on a hill where ritual decreed
that stone made slick with blood 
would bring good harvest.

You can be a sharpened sickle slicing 
meaning through the skin of time–
or even disappear into the dark and nobody 
reproaches you or blames you for retreat. 

You can be new and luminous, 
glide high through interlacing clouds 
some humid summer night, 
when the saturated air breathes out 
its longing heavily and sighs.

There, the moon and you dare everything.
There, you will be changed, remade 
without having to explain 
or make amends,

or bend your light to fit 
inside some tiny, 
tightly angled 
box.

Alison Hurwitz has most recently been featured in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers Journal, Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus Volumes 1 and 2, Tiferet Journal, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice.  She was one of six finalists for the grand prize given by Volume 2 of Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus, and recently received an honorable mention Tiferet Journal for its annual poetry prize. On the second Saturday of each month, Alison facilitates a free online poetry reading, Well-Versed Words.  Poets interested in appearing on Well-Versed Words may contact her at wellversedwords@gmail.com. She lives with her husband, two sons and rescue dog in North Carolina. Find links to her work at www.alisonhurwitz.com

Fire my Clay to Cup


Potter, shape me 
in your hands
with holy heat. 
Turn me to your 
rounded vessel full.

Paint my mouth 
to prayer, Potter, 
dye my lip in juice
turn water into wine,

Fire me big 
with you, Potter,
shape my clay 
to cup. 

Fire my clay to cup
Potter, turn my clay 
to life, make sacred 
blood of sacrament, 
communion 
on newborn 
open lips.

Mary Alice Dixon is a hospice volunteer who finds prayer in reading poetry to the dying. She is a Pushcart nominee whose work appears inGyroscope Review, Kakalak, Main Street Rag, moonShine review, Northern Appalachia Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Pinesong, threePSPP anthologies, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlotte, NC, frequently walking the Stations of the Cross. 

Teresa

stark immured the city
against creeping infestation
its scorched and frosted plateau

abode of the untamed
a seven-dwelling vaulted soul
she gazes out guard-tower

haunting then turns in
sight strives to soak through
cold tangled innards

the forgotten corridors
old doors for fusty stairs
destination unclear

and first hesitant steps
seeks the outsider and inner guest
who grounds the same

Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Manchester, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published by Eyewear in December, 2017. 

Meeting Place

I have laid out a blanket,
held at four corners by pinpricks of Light.
To meet me here you will have to take a leap of faith.
Believe in the magic of the fire that holds the corners
but never burns the flesh.
Believe in the power of possibility
that explodes you into the cosmos
and deposits you on the floral center
of a pulsing mandala
with a soft, gentle thud.

Believe in emptiness and space.

Within that field lies the butterfly and the rain.
It pulses with life and vibrates with harmonies unsung.
A richness meets the eyes,
though the field is vacant.
What is seen is Divine artwork,
strokes of whimsy meeting gestures of passion
yielding ribbons of Light
and flowing rivers of sacred color
bleed into everything.

I feel the liquid Light bleeding into my body.
As it moves through the sacred vessel
it merges with blood and bone
and finds already flowing there
subtler ribbons of luminous Light.
Threads of familiarity magnetize together
pulled by rapture and affection.

A concert of hums erupts
and the body is moved.
What pulls the head from the Earth?
What draws the feet to the soil?
What winds the body in waves of ecstasy
and morphs the mind into jelly?

It feels so pure and true.

Surrendered like a marionette
in the hands of our puppeteer,
the body receives.
and the waves amplify.
and the body receives.
and the waves amplify.

And just like that
I am exploded into the cosmos,
seated on the floral center
of the rippling mandala of time,
the eternal Now.

Care to leap with me
and picnic among the pricks of Light
and whimsical ecstasy?
Care to lose yourself in the fabric of Eternity?
Care to be unbounded in sacred harmony?

I have laid out our blanket.

Cit Ananda’s poetry is inspired by direct experience, captured in moments between perception when the mind falls quiet and deep silence shares an offering that touches the mystery of life. She will tell you she catches poetry on the winds of the universe. She has work published or forthcoming in Mountain Path, Tiferet Journal, Soul-Lit, and OFFERINGS: A Spiritual Poetry Anthology from Tiferet Journal. Explore more at https://www.vitalrootsherbalism.com/publications.

My Cup

Dream the light that blazes
over the arch of time.
Plunge in and peel.
Now. You are here.
There is no path, but the path
of intensity, trusting, 
even when you fail.
Shave off the matts, the baggage of loss
that has outlived its necessity.
Step on the grass. Reach. Know you are
on the other side. 
The past and its broken greenhouse
cracked walls, yellowed stems, rotted leaves
are of another country.
No loss was unbearable.
Torment has transformed, 
has been set right and matured. 
Happiness is a horse. 
She stands before you, offers you a ride.
Be brave as a confident child, 
feet off the ground, 
in union, in flight.

Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Five times nominated for “Best of the Net,” she has over 1300 poems published in over 500 international journals. She has 25 published books of poetry and 6 chapbooks. She lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay.

To the Hawk Outside the Brand-New Mosque of Lombard, Illinois


Unbelieving and prodigal, just here for a funeral, I bargain
as you click a raptor toe on the roof of my hastily parked
soft burrow, which is also my red exit and, as such, all my next days. 

Was this where a homey branch held your childhood 
nest, before you got the tough-loving push? Before the invading 
mammals held out permits and loans in trembling hands,

stretched out black asphalt and put up concrete minarets. Or before 
when they prayed for years in heated tents over gravel, as you circled 
overhead and the white men in orange helmets that we paid

—and sometimes I use we, when speaking to hawks—
drove home each night and made dubious accounts of their aches? 
Or before that, when we were just a potluck in the borrowed space

of the unitarian church, near the campus where the students could pretend 
to eat like they did at home. Where the imam smiled as a skinny
engineering student sat next to me and tried, so earnestly, 

to make conversation and gave me the chance to pretend, too
—were you keen to find others then, were you studying vague 
traces of shell? Or before that, when your well-flapped woods 

were cut by nothing but a strand of blue highway, and my father brought                    me 
to the barely finished basements and cold garages of grocery store owners
—where the creaking cabbies led our bowing and praying, and collections 

were raised for one of the brighter versions of the future, did this hawk
—did you, I say—know that some rituals built into our bodies 
would lead us both here, when all the obligations were reduced to wind 

and ashes? Those same old men, just today, marked on their waistlines
how tall I once stood. Just here, where your talons and our fine memories
find nothing to hold but the sight of a holy remnant of trees

on the far side of the road. They wave to us and cause our flight feathers,
our undyed cotton pennons made for prayer in other climates to wave, 
so earnestly, in response. We listen and retake our positions:

me, an unfulfilled darting along the busy ground, 
you, an unforgiving eye in the hard marble sky—us
in my soft burrow, in your red exit, in all our next days.

Ali Abid (he/him) is a writer, civil rights attorney, and policy advocate. He has been a featured storyteller at Pour One Out, a monthly storytelling series hosted by Volumes Bookcafe. Ali lives and works in Chicago.

Bounce Bunny
 
oh the music
moves elevates a burning pogo stick
kind of jumpiness
when the bass booms
boom my heart is in my throat fist
pumping unrelenting
drumbeat electric star cosmic
Easter egg pigments fly royal
blue sapphire shine dance rabbit! bounce
bunny! there’s a force field of light chasing you down
and this is joy! Unsure rabbit plain jane
rabbit this is your evening blue light soundtrack glow stick
night energy so powerful anyone over sixty
feels they've been hung from a power line oh
when the house the house goes all out
choruses of angels appear in
gold leotards American Apparel knee
socks there's no stopping glory solar flare bouncing
bodies surfing titanic radio waves
fly rabbit! glitter nightingales soar gilded
wings you don’t have to be
small bunny there’s sky fulls light in billions disco
flesh breathing electric pink trembling orange
phoenix fires rhythms rising we are we are
so close to being one body—
 
 

Mary Paulson’s writing has appeared in multiple publications, most recently in Chronogram, Pine Hills Review, Backchannels, Discretionary Love, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Poetica Review, Orchards Poetry Journal, DASH Literary Journal and The Pomegranate London. Her debut chapbook, Paint the Window Open was published by Kelsay Publishing in 2021. She lives in Naples, FL.