Monthly Archives: March 2023

To speak


To speak
is
to separate.

One word cannot be another –
A stone is not a tree.
Love is different from pain.
I am just I, and nothing else.

And yet this is a lie, because
all things are one; love turns to pain,
makes hardened hearts break into leaf,
form seeds that fall to earth as stones
and burst with love. I am this tree.

How can my words come back to truth?

Keep open eyes, and never say
“That cannot be.”

It can, it can.

Lory Widmer Hess is an American currently living with her family in Switzerland. She works with adults with developmental disabilities and is in training as spiritual director. Her writing has been published in Parabola, Red Letter Christians, Kosmos Quarterly, Ruminate: The Waking, Christian Community Perspectives, and other print and online publications. She blogs at enterenchanted.com.

Zackary Sholem Berger is a poet and translator who works in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew. He lives in Baltimore where by day he is a primary care doctor (zackaryberger.com).

Leah Goldberg (1911-1970) was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, translator, playwright, novelist, literary critic, and philologist. This translation and publication of the original appears with the consent of her estate. 

Santa Zitae, Virgine Luc
Basilica di San Frediano, Lucca

santa zitae, virgine luc:
bejeweled in roses, encased in glass and gold,
body long, brown, open before me:
her mouth stretched wide in endless inhalation, 
skin papery and packed like mud, 
bone creviced and crusted, 
fingers and toes poking like knives:
i can hear them scraping.

dust scratched and lace lined,
she holds me. 
the cathedral air is thick with her, 
rustling with death, hot and musty whispers,
suspended in shadow.
i wonder how my flesh will rot.
body exhumed in 1580, 
three centuries spent curled inside the earth.
she was real, she was real, i think it as a question.
i will her a voice, one that sounds like wet sand–dense, beautiful;
i feel entitled to some sort of comfort, explanation, prophecy.

tell me what you loved, touched, wondered: 
did you dream?
did you stare at your own reflection? 
an aching to sliver between the fluttering colors of her consciousness,
the human of her, to know her ripest and most shiny parts, 
for her to hold my face close, spill her metallic language into me 
until i recognize that i am of her, and she of me: 
it is my body exhumed, adorned, preserved, displayed,
my eyes gouged smooth as peeled bark, 
my breath sucked dry in the airless case. 

Lucy Seward is in her third year at Hamilton College, where she majors in Literature and double minors in Women and Gender Studies and Spanish. She loves to read novels, write poetry, go for walks in the woods, and listen to music. She spends time at school as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the campus’ main literary magazine, Red Weather (https://www.redweather.org/#home-section), and as the Music Director for the campus’ radio station. 

Doubt?

I wrestle with it
Like some spar with angels.

God,
Who doesn’t exist for a lot of peopl
Or who becomes a poster Jesus
Stuck on light poles,
Bumpers, vacant building windows,
Is always a shadow
Who may be my projection
Or an absence that is a presence.

The enlightenment only goes so far,
Then Heisenberg’s unprincipled principle.
Shadows lay across the mind
And the heart,
Its pulse so emotion driven.
Revelation is certainly a matter of perception.
All stories are true if you suspend disbelief.
Poems are not philosophy,
Or axioms,
Or wisdom;
Poems are the cries of the heart,
The fire of immaterial molecules,
The immaterial fire of molecules,
Arrows shot into the night,
String Theory at its finest.

Dan Cuddy is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. In the past he was a contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and an editor for Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. He has had a book of poetry published, Handprint on the Window, in 2003. Most recently he has had poems published in the End of 83, Broadkill Review, Welter, the Twisted Vine Literary Journal, the Pangolin Review, Madness Muse Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, the Rats’s Ass Review, Roanoke Review and, Gargoyle, and the LA Cultural Daily.

Apis Vero Est



The bees in
ever-rising
spheres,
scatter iridescent lures 
before the
open boundary fence;
a diligent, eloquent
choir.
Avenues of almond trees
fringed with mint and rue
welcome gold-winged 
harvesters
chanting by the dawn.

Enlivened in
their gathering task 
to live a now familiar life
after the bee of Nazareth,
in lambent cells
of wine--
their healing angels
ward the life
as slender Wedgewood thyme.

All labor ends at sunset,
but singing
never dies.

Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and has family roots in both countries.  His work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. charleshaddox.wordpress.com

Inheritance 

An oval of silver, feather-light against my throat. Mother Mary stands atop the world, a serpent crushed beneath her feet. Her arms are open in welcome. Rays of light descend from her palms. Grace. Blessings. Once my mother’s, fallen to me.

When I was pregnant with you, my fifth pregnancy, my first surviving child, I remembered. I scrabbled through my closets for her red lacquered jewelry box; untangled the pendant from tarnishing chains, placed it around my neck. Grace flowed from it, seeping into my body. Light like gold flecks infused red blood cells. Cupping the curve of my belly, I whispered: My blood sings with grace. My blood is a blessing to you. Over and over. And I could feel it, a Mother’s grace, spiraling through the cord that bound us, nourishing you, plumping you, keeping your grape-sized heart, going, going. This heart would not stop.

Last night, you cried as you studied for your chemistry finals. I’ll never remember all this, you shrieked, and something slammed against your closed bedroom door. You let me enter your room, smooth your hair, kiss the top of your head, while you stared at sketches of polymer chains as if they’d betrayed you. I started to unclasp the pendant from my neck and fasten it around yours, but you put up a hand. Mom, you know I don’t believe in that stuff.

Your words fell like arrows. Somewhere, they pierced. But before the reality of you, what could I do except nod? I know too well: Some gifts can’t be given, only found. So, I just lay my hands on your cheeks, wiped your tears with my palms.

Marveled at the light seeping into your face,

the gold flecking your brown eyes. 

Barbara Diggs’ fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including FlashBack Fiction, Reflex Fiction, (mac)ro(mic), and Ellipsis Zine. Her work was Highly Commended in the 2022 Bridport Prize, and has been longlisted and shortlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards. Barbara lives in Paris, France with her family. 

a date with god

Sharon Lopez Mooney, poet, is a retired Interfaith Chaplain from the End of Life field, living in Mexico. Mooney was given a CAC Grant to establish a rural poetry series; nominated for “Best of the Web Award”; co-published a regional anthology; co-owned an alternative literature service; produced poetry readings, continues facilitating poetry feedback workshops. 

Mooney’s poems are in publications nationally and internationally, like: The Blotter, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Kennings Literary Galway Review, California Quarterly, Ginosko, Door is a Jar, The Ricochet Review, Glassworks, Tipton Literary Journal, Sybil, Revue {R}Évolution”…, anthologies: “CALYX; Cold Lake; Strong Words; Smoke & Myrrors” (UK), amongst others.

A Morning Theophany at Noah’s Arcs 2022


‘Let the fields be jubilant and everything in them.’ Psalm 96:12


Lambs play ‘king of the castle’
from old mats, graduate to upturned water
troughs, leap as only tups do once adult, feed
with tails whirring like prayer wheels.
Cuthbert watches from solitary walnut tree …..
smiles as leaves and lambs unfurl.

Barbara Usher practises animal theology on her 4 acre animal sanctuary, Noah’s Arcs. Her poetry has been published in Borderlands:  an Anthology,Dreich, Last Leaves, and in Liennekjournal. Her work appears on the Resilience soundscape for Live Borders, and she has contributed to a local project with Historic Environment Scotland. 

At a coffee shop in Rogers
 
Break it like communion bread,
my best friend said of the coffee cake,
thick gluten-free and afternoon cold.
My fingers stalled on the spongey
dough, sugar granules pressed
 
into skin. Don’t make this holy, I said,
that stresses me out, stared at the snake-
skin swirl of cinnamon through its center.
I might have scrambled for a pen, cast
my hands to a pocket notebook,
 
scribbled words that would become a poem
about how a piece of coffee cake
becomes a holy thing, leaving sticky
ridges on the page because I couldn’t pause
to rub the sugar from my fingers.
 
But not anymore. Anxiety is the absence
of surrender, pride the alienation of
holiness, and my halted hands pull
this bread in two pieces, brush the crumbs
from my skin, offer her the half with less
 
sugar because she is more health-conscious
than I. The blogs tell me anxiety is not
punishment, not an enemy, but a catalyst
for deeper faith in the One who tested
Job when he was faithful, banned Moses
 
from the Promised Land. Why shouldn’t I
ask to be whole again? How am I to pray,
Lord, break me     like communion bread.
 

McKinley Dirks grew up in Castle Rock, Colorado and now resides in Northwest Arkansas with her one-year-old corgi, Bentley. She received her Bachelor’s of English from John Brown University and spent much of her time there as editor-in-chief of the student-run publication Shards of Light. In addition to poetry, she enjoys art, flower bouquets, and mysteries.

Lilies of the Field


A diaspora of day lilies sprouted
in random clusters beside steel
girders over which a train runs 
every morning at four.
There they huddled, 
their cheery orange heads 
whipped sideways by the 
hot rush of the train’s engine 
until that day in early summer 
when I uprooted them and 
brought them back to my 
waiting garden, where they have 
lived and multiplied for a decade. 

I do need to keep an eye
on the youngest generation, 
though, as they are showing
a proclivity to wander.

 

Mary Ellen Shaughan is a native Iowan who now lives in Western Massachusetts with her beagle, Zeke. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines and in her first collection of poetry, Home Grown, which is available on Amazon.