Monthly Archives: August 2023

On Fire								
	a story from the Fioretti				

Saint Clare insisted 						
on a meal with him.  She stared 
beyond him, fingered

her coarse sleeve and asked
again – would not be denied
that bread.  When at last

he heard her longing,
he planned, for her delight,
a lunch al fresco

beside her heart’s home:
Saint Mary of the Angels –
where she had been shorn.

That day, Clare hastened 
beyond San Damiano’s walls
to sit in sunshine

on the bare ground
where Francis served the first dish.
They started talking.

And their talk was sweet –
a cordial so inspiriting
for two fervent souls

that from far away
people saw the church on fire.
With buckets and cries –

sure the church and woods
and convent were all destroyed –
crowds burst through the gate

to quench flames but found
only two friends picnicking
with Love, their refiner. 

Mia Schilling Grogan is an Associate Professor of English at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.  She is a medievalist, who publishes in the areas of hagiography and women’s spiritual writing. Her poems have appeared in America, Presence, First Things, The Windhover, and Ekstasis among other journals.  

Raphael


Heal, such a fragile sound, like a long
Exhalation, yearn audible to myself as sigh - 
Arrival of the day of my return to balance,
Leaving worry and pain relievers behind.

I’ve been asking for the restorative touch.
Dip your hand in my mind’s pool and stir
Energy. I immerse in water, Siloam wherein I  
Abandon maladies. I envision my own relief

Harmonizing from words, your staff
Evolving from my texts, scepter shaped from
Allusions. Let me breathe in my return to
Lightsome lift. Let me know good health again.

Infuse, fiber my being with insights. I want to 
Delight with no said words, how quietly
Extraordinary a morning of weeds - lighter, light -
Aromas of salted fish, garlic rice, pineapple juice.

How rejuvenating the smell of sweat, 
Extraordinary as I walk along. My senses
Aspire for prescription, sensuality filtering
Love like ground coffee. I shall taste it again,

In the room where wonder orders words,
Drawing from memory. Once again,   
Elevation holds. I invoke your name,
Archangel. Inspire me into your places of

Healing, where the pot breaks for roots to
Enter new space, where a door opens
And the pail overflows. Take me to where
Living in peace and ease is modeled 

Instead, words reflecting what the body
Does to heal itself. Flesh and bones are
Elm to blood. It needs air cleaned of greed,
Atmosphere for a kaleidoscope of wings to

Hear pollen and draw near. Hear nectar and be
Eager. The scenic system to circulation. Clean  
Air opens petals - for the style to be seen,
Lifting up as the ovary’s extension, flower

In sunlight showing the altered perspective.
Dream me a quiet meeting of minds, where an
Earring draws to the smile. Cupid sends his
Arrow and, wow, first sight sends ripples 

Heartward. I long to close my hand on another,
Earthen as I am. Remember again the face I 
Adore. I’ve forgotten the gentleness of
Love, the long sigh turned into contentment.

I ask that my touch echo and heal, past
Detritus of the mind and close the wound,
Effluvia of conscience dispersed, bouquets of
Air wafting, wine of forgiveness. Let me

Heed your call to blueprint with phrases,
Exercise into the best body of words, excise
Aging. Hope is my fruit, faith my vegetable,
Light a verb, noun or an adjective -

Illuminating, truth or weightless. Teach me to
Decompress into bare essentials, give away
Everything I don’t need, so I could transcend
And image my return to wellness, which
Lifts, this time, from my body to my mind.  
 

Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the Philippines. He writes poetry and fiction. He considers the sacred an important element of his personal poetics. He advocates animal rights and living comforts. He has three beloved dogs.

Mirth Tons

Thomas Merton and I are having a small quarrel.

That’s not entirely fair. My Thomas lives in the great crescendo beyond quarrels, and when he prays for me, his smile is as warm as peace.

But my Thomas was once a tight knot, and I tangle with him across time and space.

My Thomas is not my Thomas alone, of course. Many others feel his arm linked in theirs, his soft steps crunching leaves beside them. He is one of those writers who feels like home, precisely because he never seems fully at home. 

That makes my Thomas a bit of a mood ring, which would amuse him immensely. The Vatican I persnicketies, the Buddhiversalist kaleidoscopes, my angriest atheist colleague, and the man who mops the Wawa — they all claim my Thomas as their friend. None of them are wrong.

But when his youth was a fist, my Thomas would have called them all wrong.

In the brisk certainty of first faith, my Thomas was November wind. His words gasp exasperated in this era, pedantic and squeezing. 

How do the self-indulgent not see what he sees, a pitiful shoreline of Jabba the Hutts making Jesus weep? How could their arms be so limp, their hands so grasping, their fidelity prone to brown-outs when the Power was present?

This is where I’m meeting my Thomas right now, in his early writings. Even though I know how he later unfurled, bewildered with wonder and large with love, I wriggle when he tells me I am flabby and blind. 

I wriggle because I see the wraith of myself at the same age. 

I knew who was right and who was wrong, and I feared the fat of gentleness. Far better to err on the lean side, the pristine side. 

This took different hues for me than for my Thomas — where he was crisply Catholic with stern centuries behind him, I was an undercooked evangelical, counting among my favorite theologians Larry the Cucumber and Kirk Cameron, spurning mood rings and desktop Buddhas as nefarious New Age devilry.

I quarrel with my Thomas when he speaks in razors, because when we walk together, I realize we have matching, self-inflicted wounds. 

But my Thomas loved the Wounded One enough to keep walking. 

As they walked into the night together, my Thomas was taken by surprise. The people of peace came in colors outside any codex. Distant hymns did not align with fixed hours. What was asked and what was given took each other’s hands, and grace had the stronger grip.

And when my Thomas unclenched his fist, seeds of joy blew in a thousand directions.

Love overtook my Thomas, love that left him with a limp and a laugh. He famously fell into ecstasy on an ordinary street corner, engulfed in God’s infatuation for the selfish, threadbare, gasping strangers scrambling past. They were so beautiful, he trembled. His open hands stretched to show them what he knew: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

But he did, my Thomas. For the rest of his life, he did, and he does, and he will, until every wound is healed and the only knots are cords of love. 

Like all his moody, muddled friends, I have made Thomas Merton my own Thomas, when he is of course God’s Thomas. In the post-rigid recovery of my wildflower-child faith, I have probably painted him more technicolor than he was, a huggable universalist Jesus freak who wants me to prioritize self-care whilst feeding the hungry.

But my Thomas, cresting the great crescendo, can forgive me. 

My Thomas, who found the grace to go without knowing, goes with every mixed-up mystic with courage to quarrel. We are all so right and so wrong, street-corner urchins saved by grace. We hurt ourselves and each other. We get our fists pried open and filled with bread. Jesus bandages our wounds before the light turns red.

We all belong to God.

We shine like the sun.

Peace be with you, my Thomas, my brother, my friend.

Story is the soul of Angela Townsend’s calling. As Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, she has the privilege of bearing witness to mercy for all beings. This was not the vocation Angela expected when she got her Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, but love is a wry author of lives. Angela also has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Vassar College. She has had Type 1 diabetes for 32 years and lives in Bucks County, PA with two shaggy comets disguised as cats.

Of Belief

Though he’s blind,
his arguments are solid
as the molecules of diamonds.
He probes, even in his sleep,

the nuanced depths of philosophy
and highest science.
When bothered by his somber,
respectful colleagues

as to how, with the net
of his nimble Nobel mind,
he’s somehow managed
to snag the naive

butterfly of belief,
he says he’s opened
his eyes to the darkness.
Just the darkness.

Larry D. Thomas served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.  He has published several collections of poetry, including As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems (Texas A&M University Press 2015).  Journals in which his poetry has been published include The Windhover, Christian Science Monitor, Southwest Review, Poet Lore, and Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith.

Forgetting the Flashlight
		

Even after my eyes have adjusted,
it is not always possible 
to pick out the path.

Firs seem more massive.
Blind— feet trip.

Finding the woodpile,
I select a log 
like feeling Braille— 

Pitch, honey thick, sticks
to both hands.

Laying the log on the coals,
flames take hold—
burning the rings,
trips around the sun,
years lost, somewhere
behind us.

Mark Thalman is the author of Stronger Than the Current, The Peasant Dance, and Catching the Limit.  His poems have appeared in the Paterson Review, The MacGuffin, Pedestal Magazine, and Valparaiso Review, among many others. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon.  Thalman retired from the public schools after teaching English and Creative Writing for 35 years.  Besides writing, he enjoys painting landscapes and wildlife art. Please visit markthalman.com. 

Bottom of the Box
 
So far, I’ve been lucky to live
a life I would perish for,
 
my everyday pockets full
of Cracker Jack surprises found
 
at the bottom of the box.
Having chosen to do what I most love
 
is one more reason to maneuver
through my days with awareness,                                         
 
instead of checking off a list
that won’t be long remembered.
 
I need a poem that gives permission
to disregard daily impositions,
 
tells me it’s wiser to commune
with the sunshine, then with the moonlight,
 
a poem that advocates my living
these hours as the miracle they are—
 
gems, reminding me to dwell,
as often as I can remember,
 
in wonder. Right now, that’s sharing
the sunset with blackbirds lined up
 
on the high wire, later in the company
of cooing owls and a full to bursting moon.  
 

Carolyn Chilton Casas is a Reiki master and teacher who loves to write about nature, mindfulness, and ways to heal. Her articles and poems have appeared in Braided Way, Energy, Odyssey, Grateful Living, Reiki News Magazine, and in other publications. You can read more of Carolyn’s work on Facebook, on Instagram @mindfulpoet_, or in her first collection of poems titled Our Shared Breath.

Aphorism #12


On beatitude. – With my beaten
will being broken,
I realize Beauty
after miles of radical reflection,
which have led to this low valley
dotted in purple and white flowers—
and the green beginnings—
along hills as rolling rises
between two steep climbs.

And there’s natural rapture
in the stream running across the way,
silent measure in stones
stepped upon while I further
into the exhaustion
of an inner finitude
known now by this late, repeating light—
falling onto the impulses of nature— 
as if veils from eyes.

After navigating around the angled
vision of a photographer,
who seems to be searching pathway
toward presence beyond image,
I pass over the sand and skeleton
of a dried-up creek bed,
to find beatitude when climbing
this narrow ascension
lined by wildflower. 

Alex Missall studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. His work has appeared in Alexandria Quarterly, Hole In The Head Review, The Basilisk Tree, and Superpresent, as well as other publications. He lives in the rural Midwest, where he enjoys the trails with his Husky, Betts. 

divine lepidopterology


to God the lepidopterologist i could ascribe
99 qualities or 99 to its power, but instead i
get stuck marveling at the quality of His sight.
you look upon me as i crawl across my life,
scuttling and striding in alternations, desperate
to keep my butterfly heart beating jauntily.
so soon will your tweezers come and pinch
and your needle thrust through me in one fell
swoop until i am in twain: vessel and that being
that was once your breath. i don’t need to beg
you, handle me gently. i know that you are being
so tender it would bring me to tears, that what
feels like you rocking me from side to bitter side
of my life is really the barest kiss. where does
one begin in questioning the expert? all i can
wonder is, how does my weeping seem to you?
from your vantage, is it an attempt to waterboard,
or a drop teetering, teetering on top of a penny?
 

a a khaliq is a poet and medical student from the midwest. she writes, in the tradition of kafka, to close her eyes. 

[The day my gods died]

The day my gods died I was afraid
they would take me with them.
I turned from prophets to poets,
and my church became 
a coffee shop named after a saint.
I went from right to wrong,
and all the wrongs became
questions, not sentences.
There’s a ball of ants at my feet,
pulling some leftovers toward a hole
too small to permit it entrance
but they’ll keep at it until dusk.
And I’ll keep pushing these things
until the lights go out or a bird shows up.

Jason Gabbert participates with words (those things that stir and explore the vast range of what it is to “be”) with simple sentences.

A Bit of What I’ve Learned

There will be detours, side trips in your journey. 
You will deviate from the path that is trodden. 
You can’t stay unconscious when you are lost. 
Pay attention. 
You’ll learn to be resourceful, to depend on the stranger. 
You’ll get stronger, softer at the center when moving on the edges. 
It’s there you’ll learn about radical acceptance. 

Then find your church even if its in a large box, a tree, 
in the pine sap, the mud, the tender green.
Love, make bread, feed someone kindness. 
Walk, take a nap, remember the Sabbath. 
Attend to your work. The doing will teach you. 
Garden, hang laundry, dig, chop the onion. 
Subtract from your life but take every offering:
the tears, the laughter, the good, bad, the ugly. 
Look the other in the eye, look anywhere, 
and see humanity all mingled together with divinity. 

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.