Monthly Archives: June 2023

It’s summer solstice


hottest longest day in June
and the coldest whitest snowdrop flowers
in the empty garden bed
under Olivia’s window
next the coal shed
where the puppies lightly snore
dreaming of flying bones and
kittens unravelling wool.

There’s a nip in the skittish air,
a distinct rip in the skin of light
and shadows are chasing silhouettes into the darkest bedroom corner.

Today’s postcard has just fallen on the mat.

Up on the island 
beside the cottage -
remember where harebells once carpeted our field -
the rowan will soon send out the reddest berries
prescient of her winter runes.

 

Julie Sampson’s poetry is widely published. She edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems, 2009 (Shearsman Books); her collectionsare Tessitura(Shearsman Books, 2014) and It Was When It Was When It Was (Dempsey & Windle, 2018 ). She received an ‘honourable mention’ in the Survision James Tate Memorial Prize, in 2021. Her main website is at JulieSampson. 

Lingering 

Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden
Portland, Oregon


I don’t remember why I paused. 
Might have been to catch my breath 
on the uphill path or to grab 
a last panoramic shot of rhodies 
and azaleas astonishing in whites/ 
pinks/purples/yellows/blues.

I had five goslings on my mind––
golden innocence paddling
across the spring-fed lake––
not to mention waterfalls 
tucked with curated randomness
around the garden’s edge.

Might be why I didn’t see 
the child skipping up the slope 
or the mother unscrewing the mason jar. 
Only this: a stunned monarch––
shocked by how freedom felt––
spreading wings––royally––
on a rhodie’s violet bloom.

As if grateful for the sun
and my awe-filled stare, 
it posed for two dozen clicks,
waiting for the future to appear.
It approved, as it folded up
its wings, the art of standing still.

Blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. Her poems have appeared in more than 175 journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. For more: www.carolynmartinpoet.com.

Shepherd’s Hour


You’ve been a rusty parking lot for desolation
but this hour your night mind calculates
sheep bells deep in the belly of the ravine.

Your herd wanders through fog in syncopation,
their frosty breaths leave behind trails of
ellipses.  You light another cigarette and

stumble down the steep hill of brambles
to crouch among their low bleats. Musk 
of their matted wool drapes you in stillness, 

stillness you’re prone to making thick with 
gloom and inertia. But this hour, listen to the 
steadying of their hooves in high grass, place 

your hands onto the rippling lilt of their haunches, 
taste the haunting vapors of hallelujah, so strange
to your lips, secret chord ready to release you.

Nikki Santer‘s poems have appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Heavy Feather Review, Slab, Slipstream, [PANK], Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika and The Main Street Rag. Her work has received many honors including six Pushcart and three Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her twelfth poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and was recently published by the arts press, Cereal Box Studio.

Nature's Gift


Do flowers
have
souls?


Large white
blossoms
reign
over the 
prairie


Majestic
in their
stature,
kings
and
queens
all-knowing


Infinite
beauty,
free
and wild,
total perfection--

Born in Cincinnati, Bobbie Saunders is a graduate of Emory University, B.A. in Psychology and Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, B.F.A. in Painting & Drawing.  Her interests include running, baseball, swimming, playing with dogs.  Her poems have appeared in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Talking River Review, Westward Quarterly and others.  Illusions is her collection of poems.

Living Room									

The cradle of my mother’s arms 
became the site of her second daughter’s
final breaths. 

There was built a bridge, moments
long, and mourning wide, 
housing them both, pearls of Child
and of Nurture, before gently dismantling

to return as the nook of an old, worn couch.

I am a woman of twenty-nine.

A third daughter.

Prayer and solitude linger, 
these alternating mechanisms spinning
the cogs of my worship,
not to be overridden by any ordinary
force. 

To this day when light catches 
in corners of everywhere, 
I want God to be there smiling.
For my body to cease its ticking and winding 
so that my sister can hear that I remain
curious as to what I was doing for three
years, or if we had once crossed, starfire to starfire,
before settling into His plan, 
all of us watching on while our mother

draws the blinds in the cave of the living room.  

Amanda Emilio is fascinated with and often writes about the strong ties between everyday life and spirituality. Her work has been published in The Janus Journal and The America Library of Poetry: Impressions of Youth. You can connect with her on her instagram: @sun_spotsss.

Older Than God


God might be the 80-year-old
with the dyed red pageboy
going pew to pew after Mass
picking up crumpled bulletins
donation envelopes scribbled on
by kids who ran out of Cheerios
and whose parents were praying
Mass would end before the baby
wailed oh God, she’s screaming 
make her stop Father is looking
saying hush does no good at all
what the hell is she crying about
forgive me for cursing but I see
the struggle in the Father’s eyes
as he fights between love for all
and frustration okay we’ll go out
Pageboy God remembers those days
but now everybody’s gone
and the old woman cleans
here’s a pair of sunglasses
put it in lost and found
I once was lost but now am
found in the box in the vestibule
the choir leaves lozenge wrappers
in the loft like fallen leaves 
it hurts to bend to pick them up
they should clean their own mess
she always taught her children
that but did they listen one
drinks too much another 
died the third lives in her house
with her wife oh yes her wife
but it’s all love fine with God
okay the church is clean enough
blow out the candles quaff the lights
breakfast oh look below the crucifix
that homeless man is sleeping
God wants her eggs and bacon
she nudges him arise he does. 
 

Sue Fagalde Lick has published two chapbooks, Gravel Road Ahead and The Widow at the Piano: Poems by a Distracted Catholic. Her poems have appeared in many journals, as well as the anthologies From Pandemic to Protest and Opening the Gate. She and her Zoom poetry dog Annie live on the Oregon coast, where she is a Catholic music minister. 

Life Cycle
 
Each second an unveiling
rich black tuber
 
coaxed 
into thin green air
 
red-winged blackbird
trilling in bleached bullrushes
 
her eggs    will break
and the nest     fall into dust

Ruth Chad is a psychologist who lives and works in the Boston area.  Her poems have appeared in the Aurorean, Bagels with the Bards, Connection, Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England, Constellations, Ibbetson Street, Montreal Poems, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, Amethyst Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice and Poetry Super-Highway. Most recently, a poem has been published in Voices of the Earth: The Future of the Planet III. Her chapbook, The Sound of Angels, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2017. Her forthcoming book, In the Absence of Birds will be published by Cervena Barva Press in 2024. Ruth was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2021.

The Goddess of Remorse

It’s full on dark night when
the bar of gold light sears 
across my heart. Coming 
from nowhere out of nothing 
right onto me. Coincidence. 
No meaning in it, a fluke 
of twisting beams that I 
can’t track its source. 
Hand across my chest 
now, the mark a layer 
removed: under the strip, 
my hand’s back and underneath 
that skin, bones, beating. 
The life in me, on a night 
I can’t sleep, anxiety stirring
bad memories with its 
nightmare stick and here
I am, marked by light, clothed 
and naked, part of me bright 
and honest, part the biggest
lie I know. What am I? What
is happening here? I am not new 
news. The voice between
time. Seconds tick, my chest 
thumps to move my blood, 
The life in me all shadows
and bright dreams, all the 
bustle of day punctuated 
by the lost and quiet night
of this. I want to lift this 
bar, turn my hand, hold 
its fire to warm my palm. 
Instead, I shift, let it spear 
back into my heart, let 
the light break me open, 
burn me alive. You will know 
my face by its shadows. Time
to get the shadows right, let
light fall shining wherever it may. 

Neile Graham is Canadian by birth and inclination but currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Her publications include: four full-length collections, most recently The Walk She Takes (2019) and a spoken word CD, She Says: Poems Selected & New. She has also published poems in various physical and online magazines, including Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Mad Swirl, and Polar Starlight.

Morning Song


The wren doesn’t care that it’s early dawn,
or that we can sleep in if we choose.
Its volume swells during a riff that becomes
the song stuck in our heads.
It has shed its own covers and entered
the play of light on the dogwood leaves.
Half-awake, questioning the songbirds’ urgency,
I place my feet on the floor, then stand and take
a brief inventory of my usual aches and pains.

The song, now silent, fills a space that reminds
one of an empty church sanctuary.
Coffee and the toothbrush await, my 
wife’s hair fans about her pillow.
The neighbors’ lawn sprinkler arcs strands
of water above our back fence.
Now the singing resumes – a jazzman
playing his horn, breath insistent 
with its melody of eternal notes.

Bruce Gunther is a former journalist and writer who lives in Bay City, Michigan. He’s a graduate of Central Michigan University. His poems have appeared in Arc Magazine, the Comstock Review, the Dunes Review, Modern Haiku, and others.

Summer Stock


We’d swim out to the tethered raft and dive
and swim down to the bottom of the lake.
You couldn’t see down there, but when your hand
met bottom stuff you knew enough to start
back up. It couldn’t have been far, but felt
like you were surfacing from boundless deep
and that you’d touched the bottom of the world.
Of course we never saw what lay there curled
up like a fiddlehead or stretched, asleep,
beneath the raft or sunk last night to melt
into the sandy murk. It was our part
to climb the ladder, shake off, then to stand
again with toes over the side and take
another blind leap, each performance live.

Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/