Monthly Archives: March 2023

Making Grits on a Sunday

Two cups of water
One and a quarter cup of milk.
Add the grits slowly, stirring.
Feel the liquid begin to thicken,
Individual grains absorbing the water and milk.

Pre-pandemic, I cooked to eat.
Now I seem to cook to cook.
Recreating the ordinary comfort food 
I have been soothed by.
I follow an urge to give it
To the sleeping people in my home.

Add the butter.
Watch it seem to sigh as it leans into the warmth,
Contributing its own good to the concoction.
Next the cheese that then assimilates like the butter,
Melting in the melting pot.

I too sigh as I lean over the hot pot,
Slowly stirring, comforting myself
With an offering that feels holy.

Robin Dake is a mother, daughter, friend, writer, and photographer. She has spent her career working as a journalist or non-profit manager while writing essays and poems on the side. Her work has appeared in This I Believe radio program and in Trailway News magazine She lives in N.E. Georgia with two hoodlum cats and one patient dog.  

Calls from the Edge

Simon Maddrell is a queer Manx man, thriving with HIV. He’s published in fifteen anthologies and publications including AMBIT, Butcher’s Dog, The Moth, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Stand and Under the Radar. In 2020, Simon’s debut, Throatbone, was published (UnCollected Press) and Queerfella jointly-won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition.

Joy
 
          In the upstairs room, the resurrected Christ
          is recognized by the wounds
          on his new-old body,
          still bearing the marks of pain.
                    (John 20:19-31)
 
God, of course, does not protect you
from anything, any more
than anyone else.
And atrocities abound everywhere.
 
It is spring.
The house down the road
blooms out in its purple
crocus daffodil carpet.
 
God is a slight heaviness
around your ears
in the quiet.
That is all.
 
In the early light,
the singing bloom,
is the long dark
and the frozen silence.
 
Having suffered
the kind of pain
that made you
wish for death,
 
you are always afraid
of the kind of pain
that made you
wish for death.
 
Joy knows this
and never pretends
it isn’t true.
 
You look around
at suffering –
An impossible question.
A deep cavern.
 
You go in because love goes in.
Someone is asking for a prayer.
The asking is the most beautiful prayer
you have ever heard.
 
Well below any low
you have ever been
lies pain like a seed
buried in the ground.
 
Deep down
where there is no light.
Where few seem to know
it exists.
 
But joy knows –
thanks to the long,
hard practice
of not pretending.
 
You go by the house
with the flowers
and marvel.
It is a gift
 
you can only accept
from deep
in the bare ground
of what also is.

Jenna Wysong Filbrun’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Blue Heron Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Dewdrop, Snapdragon Journal, and Wild Roof Journal.  Her first full length collection of poems, Away, will release with Finishing Line Press in 2023. She is married to Mike, and they have two dogs, Oliver and Lewis.  Find her on Twitter @Jenna_W_Filbrun.

Beyond


...power came out of him that cured them all (Luke 6:19).

distant, she watches Jesus moving in the raw 
crowd— he sees the sick: stiff flesh and pith, 

he touches all, strong in his long hands—air 
vivid, quick as fingers of flame. she looks 

away.  her sickness? hid.  how can he restore 
a soul?  lost.  her life?  forfeited.  so marred, 

dead.  tell him of her spirit-wound? no word- 
spin can spell it, nor hands plumb rude space.  

too late;  hope’s gone               yet linger—
yet look at him curing by mere command—

and she hears him bless.            she yearns.  
that man—his life burns beyond the rim of loss—

                         ***
not easy, her giving over to hope
misery has its own perverse claims
the first healing must be remote—
long-distance breach of a shut, shamed

mind: but blind, lame, deaf: see, leap, 
hear: a mute boy’s chatter, his laugh low
Ephphthata—she hears the order breathe,
unlock. She’ll try—she’ll go to him. Go!

                           ***
she heard
he’d gone to Simon’s house to dine

she sped
dazed—a brook to sea—beyond all fear

she sought—
her self? her life? her blighted life.

she flew 
through moonlight’s maze, shadows heaved

her hair 
came loose, swung long—later remarked

—belaboured— 
by the host and his dinner guests, 

but she,
beyond their grasp, tight-clasped her jar 

of nard, 
and, panting, clutched it to her breast.  

                 ***
At last, 
at Simon’s house, creep inside.

reel: 
He’s there at table—waits

for me.  
weep: mercy—the near sight 

of him: 
drop to his feet, kiss, embrace

forgiveness
beyond this world, in his eyes

I drench 
his feet in nard—beyond paradise

Johanna Caton, O.S.B., is a Benedictine nun.  She was born in the United States and lived there until adulthood, when her monastic vocation took her to England, where she now resides.  Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, The Windhover, The Ekphrastic Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other venues, both online and print. 

A Small Prayer


a cento in homage to David St. John, 24 lines from 24 poems from Study for the World’s Body


I talked again about changing my life. 
“I can’t believe how much the world has changed.
A single cloud descended like a hand. 
Nothing stops it, the crying.”

My aunt shrugged,
dragged a folding chair onto the fire escape,
as the fog both offered & erased her in the night.
“Sometimes the drawers of the earth close,
rain enters in a diary left open under the sky,
yet no memory is stilled.” 

She laid out the morphine.  
“How softly the night steps toward us,
set loose above the stormy waters, 
shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite.
Starlight litters the slowly falling dew. 

The syringe still hanging limply from my vein, 
the hammered whiteness 
cracks under my feet as I walk this long corridor. 
I pick my way slowly through the rubble 
along that sun-and-sin-lit landscape. 

Then it hit me,
a man with less than perfect faith in any God. 
The shadow you once blessed. 
Hope.

Mara Fein‘s poetry has most recently appeared in Poetry Quarterly.  Other work has appeared in Jonah Magazine, Poor Yorick, Tahoma Literary Review, and Wilderness House Review.  She holds a PhD in English from the University of Southern California.

The Museum of Lost Souls

Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010)

Lola Wavers


Honey slows the speed of light it bears
to opalescence,
its silence worth more than prayers.

The air has turned to syrup, it bears
her into quiet luminescence,
its honey slows the speed of light. It shears

from her the husk of sin, which scares
her—into shame, not gratitude. But acquiescence 
to silence is worth more than prayers

or penance. The calm light prepares
her for its grace, its healing phosphorescence,
honey slowing the speed of light, it flares

then holds her still. The light declares
itself a prayer, an ascendance
into silence worth more than prayers.

But she’s not ready yet. She still cares
for, clings to, her faults, though their allure lessens
as honey slows the speed of light it bears
to silence worth more than prayers.

This poem is from an unpublished collection titled The Ecstasy of St. Lola. They consider a young nun named Sister Lola who experiences a profound religious experience. 

A poet, professor, and editor, Richard Ryal has worked in marketing and higher education. He stops for every poem he hasn’t read before, and no one can talk him out of doing that. His recent publications include Notre Dame Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The South Florida Poetry Journal, and Survision.

Building a Cathedral

When warming up your voice, it’s almost like you’re building a cathedral inside your skull.            -Bjork

Sunshine pours through flashed glass,
windows gleam rainbow hues;
they pry open the sky 
for a holographic entry
to the hidden place
where we are part of All That Is,
and All That Is is part of us.
Up one octave, then the next, 
higher and higher, then the final climb
to the sacred spire, where sounds
at once primeval and ethereal 
ring through the atmosphere,
vibrating the polished beams.
Then silence—as the brightest of lights
shines upon calcinated limestone,
illuminating the Carver’s signature.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth,The Last Time I Saw You, andThe Wild Parrots of Marigny. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

        Of Saints 


“There are three sorts of saint,” the angel said,
“The first don’t seem to do that much at all,
“Some simply walk barefoot on summer grass

“Yet people seeing them lament their lives.
“You’ll find them, once or twice, half in a smile,
“And then God leaps the void to hold them tight.

“The second sort of saint,” he seemed to say
(I felt his thought burn darkly in my mind),
“Feel God must tick each single thing they do,

“No deed goes by without Him seeing it,
“Each thought is wrung and rinsed for Him alone;
“Difficult men, and women too, they are,

“And yet without them stones would snap in half. 
 (That angel looked at me the way cliffs do.)
“The third,” he said (and paused), “will live as though

“The love of God must open all of time,
 “Not even twenty thousand lives would do
“To show the wonder of a drop of rain,

“Each word, each silence too, is sung, not said,
“And each deflects death’s No into a Yes.”
The angel looked out calmly from my fear,

A night was falling hard, like an eclipse,
A question bit its way into my heart:
“Which one are you? Not that you have a choice,

“But day must see you be the one you are.”
He gazed from deep within my darkest self
And disappeared into the grainy air.

Kevin Hart‘s most recent collections of poetry are Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (Notre Dame UP, 2015) and Barefoot (Notre Dame UP, 2018). His Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation, will appear with Chicago UP in 2023. He is currently completing two new collections of poetry, Lone Pilgrim and So Dark Over the River. He lives in central Virginia. 

Marigolds
 
Ruffles of bright orange and cinnamon,
you, marigolds, spun from a pinch of
seeds, grow in abundance in between
 
eggplants’ glossy purple, protecting
them with stenciled green leaves
like an armor worn close
 
to skin—the scent of rain,
the sight of monarchs,
the sound of bees.
 
No wonder I am mesmerized
by your tongues’ small fires
glowing with desire.
 
You are ancient medicine
in the time of women
whose faces mirrored the sun.
 

M.J. Iuppa’s fifth full length poetry collection The Weight of Air from Kelsay Books was released in September 2022; and, a chapbook of 24 100-word stories, Rock. Paper. Scissors., from Foothills Publishing in 2022.  For the past 33 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.