Monthly Archives: July 2023

Thoughts On an Airplane

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop... 
-- excerpt from Prelude, William Wordsworth

I am cloud sailing
and feel as if all the silver-bellied geese
I saw this morning have come 
to pull the plane along like a boat.
On the horizon, sea-shell pink spreads
below thunder-topped tremolo

as if to sing  about clouds, sailing
high above the patterns of geese
reflecting possibility of response to come—
steering towards anything,  like the luff of a boat
caught in the wind . Silence now, calm spreads
around us, hurry-hurry ceases its tremolo.

Can you feel it, the possibility sailing,
ruffle of wind?  No bafflement in the geese.
Just this moment, preparing what's to come.

Fruit of the Forgotten Hedgerow -
The Crab Apple


I was a crab apple – hard, small, sour. 
I made sunny, expectant faces twist and disfigure
at the taste of me, so that I was dropped 
at the track edge and could rot myself down 
into the soil and rise again from my seed.

I was nothing much at all - except I had 
something, I had something, that my fruit-bowled, 
my pocketed cousins could only dream of. 

And the lovely Scarecrow - he, at least, 
would always take me, and chew at me; 
his lovely face, his grin, never changing.
His eyelids never closing on his ecstatic gaze.

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

Bloviation

Ruptured sense of self
finds direction
when He maps it for me.
I’m convinced it’s Him:
This is a function of faith.
In lightlessness
He ushers in the lamp of lines.
 
Unsettled moorings prod
wanton moves. In dispassion,
my inmost lines show up.
Rigid abidance by the rules
gifts poetry its pliancy.
A poem shouldn’t be polyped:
It must not run all over the page.

Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He has been published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 400 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He edited Dreich Planet #1, for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. In 2023, he won the First Prize in a Poetry Competition by the prestigious National Defence Academy, Pune, during its 75^thanniversary in the “family members category.” He lives in Mumbai, India.

The Transcendental Desert
 
                Homage to Agnes Pelton
 
The yellow scent. Red-tailed shadow
on the trail. A drop of blue
from a lizard’s neck
shading all the way to darkness and from there
to glow the glow of mysteries
when not knowing is the greater part
of beauty. The spirits
never have an edge that would define them;
they float as dreams do
when they appear in waking life
with fragments of the night
adhering. And they are silent
as the border
that runs through desert and has no
opinion on why one country
has a history and the other
one a future. The poorest of the poor
have learned to fly. They wait
for darkness and they spread
their wings to get across. There is
no need to believe
anything about the desert.
It is a vision with shallow roots,
patience with a sting,
a memory of ocean, a jaguar’s first
last hope. He is
on the trail of years long gone, but still
treading slow ground
with the taste of a kill in his mouth.
Monsoon. Black moth. Dust winds.
Something of the spirits moves
red earth and laughs
at sudden rainfall. Lightning signs its name
and each cholla and saguaro
lights up from its core to
the tips of its thorns.  The rocks howl.
Arroyos buzz. The sun
prys canyons open. A single wing
comes sailing into summer.
Another desert moment
beyond an explanation. More tracks
on the path to disappearance,
a scent the coyotes
have followed for centuries. The light
has a pulse. They may be
hallucinations that are visible and
passing shape across shape
as temperatures blossom
and the sky comes down
to strip bare
what is left on the ground.

David Chorlton has lived in Arizona long enough to see beyond the surface of the desert and to appreciate its wildlife and ability to endure the heat. He has a new book featuring watercolors of birds together with poems, The Flying Desert, from Cholla Needles Arts and Literary Library in Joshua Tree, California.

St. James, Avebury

	13 October 2018


How many who have entered here have found
what they were seeking? Safety, peace, salvation,
communion, hope, direction, inspiration?
We two, who simply want to look around,
open the heavy wooden door set in 
the Saxon archway leading to the nave
enlarged by Normans, whose descendants gave
the rood a loft and screen, considered sin-
ful later and removed but now restored.
Immediately we feel like trespassers:
a woman mopping floors of stone deters
our passage. Greetings given, we turn toward
the altar, bend or bow, then say a prayer
as scent of minted cleanser fills the air.

Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia (USA). Her work has recently appeared in Allegro, Light, Pulsebeat, and Snakeskin. Her collections include Never Enough Already (2021) and Sooner or Later (2022).

How to Pray
After Jessica Jacobs, How to Pray 

Forget words, especially rote. 
Resist the temptation to flee.
Dig in. 
Listen 
to all that talk inside that makes you crazy.
Rub those knotted worries like a rosary,
inhale the rusty fear,
get rid of your preference for certain tastes.
Accept them all. 
With your eyes closed, fall deep into the dark.
Let it chaff  your skin until you are tender, raw. 
Stop holding your breath as if underwater.
Breathe. 

 I’ve been here my share of time. 
The backs of my thighs are itchy 
where they meet the cushion,
just like when I sit in the grass.
My ribs once tied together have loosened 
and the closed fist around my heart has let go. 
My stomach, a nest of crying birds, has quieted
but my lashes are soaked 
as if snowflakes have pooled there. 
The solid shadows, the debris of all yesterdays 
have been swept out.
Under the topsoil of my hair, my roots run audaciously 
in an open field under a clear sky
where I find nothing but a longing. 

Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily and Olly Olly Oxen Free (Kelsay Books). She placed third in the WFOP Kay Saunders Memorial Emerging Poet in 2022. Her poems have been published internationally. She has written a poem a day since the start of the pandemic. Angela lives in rural Wisconsin.  

The Grammar of Repair 

White Baltic churches, a low barn in Vermont,
the eye needs something solid to rest on,
simple, heat-holding. Even the imagination
greys from so much rain. Before this week
the phrase an angry sky seemed clumsy, foolish,
its use a casting round in choppy waters.
But here we are. What else can we say?

Except that there is always high ground, 
a retreat, for the mind at least, 
and the generosity of words, reminding that beneath
mud and misery proceeds an endless
filtering; that tomorrow or next week will see
a thousand streams, each clear and singular,
their spills and turns, the grammar of repair.

Ted Mc Carthy is a poet, translator and playwright living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. He has had two collections published, ‘November Wedding’, and ‘Beverly Downs’.

His work can be found on www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com

My Broken Prayer

When she tells me her news, I say
I’ll hold you in my thoughts and I do:
I ask everyone to keep her longer on earth:
Creator, Goddess Mother, God the Father,
our ancestors, the broken statue of Mary
under the cedar tree in the backyard.
Buddha, fat and smiling by the front door.
The various goddesses that line our walk, 
brought home from garage sales 
or prizes from white elephants.
Every deity welcome.

The year that drove me to my knees: cancer
in my house in my bed in the air I kissed
when tucking my children in at night.
His constellation suggests no obvious path, 
the oncologist said of my husband’s lab results. 
Metastatic galactic. Cells exploring the frontier
of his body, looking for a place to land.
We’d peer at the graphs and numbers, 
nod and shake our heads in concert
with the earnest doctors in their white coats.
Maybe the stars would know, I thought.
I beseeched the heavens. 

One sleepless night I drove to a field
and when I felt good and alone
screamed myself to depletion. Then 
there it was, a wellspring of presence, 
a hammocking, I tell you. I felt something,
maybe the hand of God on my head,
maybe the porous veil laced thin.
I’ve not felt it since, but this memory 
is the rope anchor I attach myself to.
I want to believe the hammock will hold,
there is no freefall; me, my friend, all of us,
cupped like the rain in my broken Mary.

Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in JAMA, Atlanta Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Review and many others. She is a Hedgebrook fellow, the founder of Fishplate Poetry, and the inaugural poet laureate of her town.

How to be kind to yourself, like an 8-month-old


you stretch sadness taut, an
anaconda across the length 
of your spine, then
abandon it. 

this boy embraces every sadness, it 
fills up your face, like a montage.

aut dormi, aut lacte
hare krishna, krishna krishna 
meetha meetha, tera kiya meetha lage 


you fill yourself with him like a 
diligent squirrel at work
fore-paws around face
burp aloud

I hum lullabies
your name punctuates
my breath

When Kashiana Singh is not writing, she lives to embody her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her every day. Her chapbook Crushed Anthills by Yavanika Press is a journey through 10 cities. Her newest full-length collection, Woman by the Door was released in Feb 2022 with Apprentice House Press.

Andrew

Make a garden out of everything you’ve lost                                                                                                  in this no man’s land so broken and so gaunt –                                                                                          old brick and bone. Make it before the frost,                                                                                           this space between dull walls that no-one wants.                                                                                           First for the birds: plant a wooden table deep                                                                                                and scatter it with seeds. Come down some day                                                                                            to catch a gust of goldfinch blowing in, and keep                                                                                                   the moment safe: such memories should never fray.                                                                                             Now that you’ve found a hiding place to bring                                                                                             your deepest fears and dreams, stand here to pray                                                                               even on raining days and hear the wet grey sing;                                                                                                 lift up your face to let the drops wash fear away.                                                                                                                 More than all else, make this a place of light –                                                                                           for the stars to come in gemstones every night. 

Kenneth Steven is widely published as a poet, a writer of fiction and as a translator (from Norwegian). The lion’s share of his work is inspired by Iona and the Celtic Christian story. His volume of selected poems Iona was published a couple of years back by Paraclete Press in the States.