Monthly Archives: July 2023

Early Buddhism


Polly Cannon set off all by herself
to find un-named trees and lose her wrong self
like a basket or a love note. She looked
at leaves, branches, sky. She refused to chant.
The sounds that god-names made scared her infant
soul. She ignored birds. Learned no holy books
while scratching words in dust. She asked for no
meaning. She sat still. She breathed. She let go.

Mark J. Mitchell has worked in hospital kitchens, fast food, retail wine and spirits, conventions, tourism, and warehouses.He has also been a working poet for almost 50 years.An award-winning poet, he is the author of five full-length poetry collections, and six chapbooks. His latest collection is Something To Be from Pski’s Porch Publishing. He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka, Dante, and his wife, activist and documentarian Joan Juster. He lives in San Francisco, where he makes his marginal living pointing out pretty things. He can be found reading his poetry here: https://www.youtube.com/@markj.mitchell4351A meager online presence can be found at https://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/A primitive web site now exists: https://www.mark-j-mitchell.square.site/ He sometimes tweets @Mark J Mitchell_Writer

What the Light Can Conjure
 
If you find it
(and it may
find you unexpectedly),
hold on to it with your eyes
for a very long time.
Stretch it out against the evening
before it disappears.
If you’re lucky,
you can watch it go
back to where it came from.
 

Sarah Rehfeldt lives with her family in western Washington where she is a writer, artist, and photographer.  Her poems have appeared in Blueline; Appalachia; Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction; and Weber – The Contemporary West.  She finds inspiration in the close-up world of macro nature photography.  Favorite subjects include her garden; the forest; cloudscapes; and the ever-plentiful raindrops of western Washington.  You can view her photography web pages at:  www.pbase.com/candanceski

 
Evensong


To you before the close of day

            Drifting down like ashes or snow
Creator of all things, we pray

            chest rises and falls
That in your constant clemency

            breath descends to the belly 
Our guard and keeper you would be
            shoulders drop, arms open
Save us from troubled, restless sleep
            hands hit the lap, empty,
From all ill dreams your children keep

            defenseless under the mantle of night.
So, calm our minds that fears may cease

            Banish the dark thoughts.
And rested bodies wake in peace.

            Shed everything.





Words in italics are from a 6th century Latin hymn.

Rachel Matters Clark received a BA in Drama from Bennington College, and an MDiv from San Francisco Theological Seminary. While raising her children, she directed educational programs in several churches and worked as an actor and acting teacher. She and her husband live in Falls Church, Virginia, where she teaches ESOL students and leads a small poetry salon on Zoom.

Hey, Climb a Tree

Grey squirrel hunches up and up
the corrugated oak,
wee claws clinging tight as burrs.

A nuthatch does it upside-down
and backward.  Even

the twenty-pound porcupine
can get its bulk and ordnance
into the foliage,

where it stoically outwaits
grounded predators.  Even a bear,

when you and I are near.

Jesus, beneath a mustard tree,
branches harboring hatchling nests,
told still another parable—

of a sanctuary citadel
for the littlest, the lost, the least—
vast as that overspreading tree.

He held out one of the very sort
of seed from which it grew,

so tiny the myopic couldn’t see.

Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions.  His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications.

People of the Holloways -
The Seer

I was a Seer, Touched. I inhabited shadows 
and hospital wards, in league with darkness, 
able at any time to drop beneath, besides or under. 
My eyes had it, I know – my eyes had the ache
of skies over fields empty late in the afternoon. 

I listened to the whispers not the shouts.
I could See what was not there.
I could hear the hum at the back of things.

Martin Towers is a support worker in Aberystwyth, Wales. His poems have been published in Crannog, Banshee and The Galway Review.

My Spiritual Practice



It is practice, the going again and again
through the heavy double doors and along
the polished wooden pews, the week’s program 
in my hand, the list of hymns and verses ready
for the faithful and the struggling, the ones like me
who repeat the prayers silently but with my lips 
in motion.  It is practice, the discipline 
of repetition, the dumb fingers climbing the scale,
rehearsing the tricky cross over, making time 
to serve the melody, making the body serve 
the will, and training the spirit when the spirit 
no longer feels the flame of faith.  It is practice,
the familiar, the regular, the repeated 
that will keep the spirit afloat assures the priest,
agrees the therapist, the bright orange vest you wear
to sustain you through the rapids and buoy you 
in the deepest waters, the keel of the life boat 
where you cling even after belief has capsized. 
It is practice, not perfection, not mastery,
that winches me out of my despair following 
her loss, the winding rope of dailiness, the meals 
with awkward friends, the re-filling of bird feeders
each morning, the dogged breaking up of concrete 
and hauling of debris, the work down on my knees
to level flagstones, the Wednesday morning doughnut 
rendezvous, the Sundays inside the heavy doors,
under high ceilings, arches, and the rhythmic words 
that I heard again and again that hold me here.

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has had a handful of poems published in Cimarron Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines.

From a Window by the Schuylkill

I sit beside the window
The early morning sun pours in
The afternoon light is there
The light seems to continue 
I sense that there is light
The day passes
                without me turning to look

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of Meatless (Plan B Press) and other short poetry collections. His poems have been curated in many journals including Across The Margin, The New Verse News, anti-heroin chic, Right Hand Pointing, The Broadkill Review, Otoliths, and Gargoyle. 

This Moment
 
 
//
 
 
Because you took Wayne 
instead of Lakewood.
 
Because after the storm 
waned,
and the temperature 
dropped,
 
you walked up, in enough time 
to stop at Ellie’s
 
the coffeeshop
with the terrible hours. 
 
And then it was suddenly late.
 
And because the traffic was calm, 
and you never took the phone call
or the alleyway,
 
on your way 
back home from Aldi Grocery.
 
But instead, took the main road, 
past the two-flat,
with the brown mixed breeds— 
that race to the iron gate
 
and snap
at the back
of your heels. 
 
Because your friend
didn’t invite you to the show, 
 
and your neighbor stopped you 
suddenly, on the porch, 
to talk about their week, 
apple picking in Michigan—
 
This very moment is ours!
This moment. This moment.
 
 
\\
 
 
Yesterday has gone.
Tomorrow has yet arrived.    
 
All we have is this moment
right now:
 
me glancing occasionally at boats, 
writing these words to you, 
 
you hunched over this poem, 
reading these words from me—
 
across years, and years, still, 
I’ll never give up
 
this moment with you.
 
 
//
 
 
This is the very moment you have
 
—this moment swelling like a bulb 
before your eyes, holding sun
slowly illuminating the blinds. 
 
Do you hear the wren
through the thin window-glass? 
 
This is the moment you’re holding 
air in your lungs, in whatever condition, 
you’re alive, you’re alive.
 
Lean in close, let me whisper some-
thing very important into your ear
 
—you’ve arrived, you’ve arrived. 

Ahrend Torrey is the author of Ripples (Pinyon Publishing, 2023), Bird City, American Eye (Pinyon Publishing, 2022), and Small Blue Harbor (Poetry Box Select, 2019). His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and West Trade Review, among others. He earned his MA/MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press. He lives in Chicago with his husband Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat. 

On The Spiritual Practice Of Clouds

They can congregate or be
A lone mendicant wandering the blue
They never seem to know when
They are given birth to
Nor when they will give birth
To those who never know when
They will be given birth to

They concentrate they consolidate 
They fly apart in the wind

There is one now a child with its plaything
Being bidden to come along or this one
A woman at the well weeping

Now it is night and yet they continue to practice
Moving toward the moon like worshipers in the night 

Gerry Grubbs has a book forthcoming from Dos Madres Press, Learning A New Way To Listen. 

The Name of God


The light dances in the garden,
a perfect stillness,
the greenest green,
a silent breeze
and in the leaves -
it has no name.

But I used to call it God.
Every night I’d kiss the stars
and pray they would keep me safe. 

I found no truth; I found no safety.
My pockets stuffed with receipts and wrappers,
half-eaten biscuits and stones.
A mother now,
and yet a stranger.

I learn nothing.
I find myself in different rooms,
but I don’t know how I got here.

The words elude me,
the sacred secrets,
the revelations,
the clear laughter,
the child I was,
I chase their shadows,
my hands are empty.

Still, I look outside,
I see the light,
I hear a whisper.

Irene Cantizano Bescós is a writer and immigrant from Spain lost between two languages. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Black Hare Press, Moria, Five Minutes, (mac)ro(mic), and Tales to Terrify, among others. She is also a freelance journalist, and her reporting has appeared in leading Spanish and UK titles such as Huffington Post, El País, Telva, and Positive News. Irene lives in England with her husband, two toddlers, and two warring cats. You can find her on Twitter as @IreneCantizano.