Monthly Archives: November 2023

Reflections on Dad’s 100th Birthday
	flying into Alaska


Last night the sun tried to set for seven hours
but could only balance on the lip of the world
restraining the darkness of space.

The plane gazed down on a blanket of clouds
poked through with jagged snow-covered peaks
belonging no more to earth than sky

and I remembered how Jack climbed the bean stalk
hand over hand until field and village acquiesced
to a world of riches ripe for the taking.

Your granite eyes held their own kinds of riches.
Sometimes love disguises itself as a challenge
poised on the rim of trivial conversations.

It’s alright if a thousand things were left unsaid
between us. Sometimes God folds the blanket back
just enough for us to wriggle inside.
 

Alfred Fournier is a writer and community volunteer in Phoenix, Arizona. His poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Third Wednesday, Gyroscope Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Indianapolis Review and elsewhere. His chapbook A Summons on the Wind is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Twitter: @AlfredFournier4.

The Leper and St. Francis 



When St. Francis heard you 
ring a bell to stay away, 

he came near
and got off his horse, 

kissed your hand
and gave you money. 

When he turned to leave, 
he saw you had vanished.

What happened to you, 
dear man?

Did you transform into a vine 
of blue morning glories

that stayed open 
all day?

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, Talking River Review, and The Westchester Review. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.   

Fogburst

This morning we awoke to fogbound winter – 
leafless trees of onyx encased in hoarfrost, 
having formed overnight from our natural world –  
visibility a dreamy residue of sleep. An hour

later the burn-off commences: Soundless
symphony of mist and steam hovering
round the melting branches; the clear ice,
now become water, clean and pure, dripping 

onto the snow below; blue sky and sun 
appearing here, and there, I stand, drinking 
a mug of honey-infused tea, an accidental witness 
to the unseen longing of this bespoke universe.

M F Drummy is the author of numerous articles, essays, reviews, haiku, poetry, and a monograph (Being and Earth). His work has appeared or will appear in 3 Sisters, Mayfly, The Mainichi Daily Express, Worldviews, Connecticut Review, Shamrock, Sciences Religieuses, Eunoia Review, Sacred Heart University Review, Frogpond, and Allium. He and his wife of nearly 20 years enjoy splitting their time between the Colorado Rockies and the rest of the planet. 

Prayers at Sunrise

The world is too beautiful
for someone like me,
who, after so many 
days in this world, still 
doesn’t know the name
of the bird that rouses me
each morning with
a loopy coil of sound or
what the morning means
in the trilling songs, 
that sound like joy,
which is maybe
the natural state
for wild things waking,
who greet the dawn 
with praise, and are not
cluttered with tangles 
of irrelevant fretting.
My ingratitude shames me
and I mourn all the sunrises
I have missed,
and will miss.
in this all too short life
I am blessed with.

Dorothy Cantwell has worked as an educator, actress, and playwright, Her work has been published in the Long Island Literary Journal, Brownstone Poets Anthology, Constellate Literary Journal, Flash Boulevard, Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters, River and South Review, Poetrybay, and Angel City Review, among other print and online journals. She has been featured at various venues in NYC where she lives and works. She studies poetry with Sister Fran McManus in the St Francis of Assisi Poetry Workshop.

Thanksgiving
 
When Jupiter’s the light you see first
as it blurs the cinnamon stars
 
and feet orbit this living room floor
as you peek at a fig hearted sky,
 
and sigh at persimmon striped lines
as acute western blue feathers by,
 
say Grace for the magnificent now
as apples disappear on the sill
 
then set into  honey crowned night
as a cardamom moon rises full –
 
Who says you’ve given or taken your fill?

Kerstin Schulz is a German-American writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her work can be found in River Heron Review, HerStry, The Bookends Review, Raft, Relief, Montana Mouthful, and Cathexis Northwest Press, among other publications. She is also the winner of the PDXToday 2023 Poetry Contest.

Praise Bread
 
—after Jeanne Lohmann

I learned as a child that one 
of the many names of God is bread.
Our pastor broke in half 
a round loaf, said, This is my body,
broken for you. Communion’s silver trays,
doll-sized glasses of grape juice,
doll-sized crusts of bread passed hand
to hand. Do this in remembrance of me. 
Consider the many names of bread: 
croissant and tortilla and challah 
and naan. Baguette, lavash, injera. 
Consider cornbread, banana bread, 
buttermilk biscuits. Consider rye 
and pumpernickel, cracked wheat 
and white, lemon cake, pound cake.
Consider the cinnamon toast your mother 
made for you when you were sad. 
Consider aroma of baking bread, firmness 
of crust. Consider how each day
the baker rises early to her work,
the bread, kneaded and shaped, 
baked fresh, offered to the hungry,
taken, like praise, daily into one’s mouth. 

Bethany Reid’s stories, essays, and poems have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide, Kithe, Descant, Peregrine, and Catamaran. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, The Pear Tree, won the 2023 Sally Albiso Award from MoonPath Press and is due out this winter. She lives in Edmonds, Washington, and blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com.

Blessed Are The Lowly
 
Give me the strength to be as weak as God;
Lead me to love as though I were
A crucifix in an empty church.

The might of kings lies buried in the sod;
The meek alone will last beyond the earth.
Give me the strength to be as weak as God -
Lord, lead me to love as though I were.

Give me the sense of soft and little-pawed
Dark creatures in the corners of the world,
Who creep inside to die without a word.
Give me the strength to be as weak as God;
Lead me to love as though I were
A crucifix in an empty church.

Maggie Palmer has recently graduated from the University of Dallas with a B.A. in English and Classical Philology and currently lives with her family in Fort Cavazos, Texas. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, Grand Little Things, and Mezzo Cammin.

All Our Houses are the Same House


All our stories are the same story: it
gets dark and we light fires and lamps.
Seeds sleep under the snow. No one

really dies. Our grandparents come
out to meet us at the end of a long
sidewalk in the shade of tall bushes.

They fall to their knees, glad-crying
but then we wake. Except one day, 
we don’t wake. In the wind, the wind— 

that’s where everyone is, riding the
updraft, circling like the year’s last 
leaves. The door blows open and

no one knows why. But that’s why.
Nobody’s hung Christmas lights yet
but up and down the street, each

window goes yellow in the dusk. The
creek is slow and quiet. Seeds sleep 
under the snow. No one really dies. 

In these days, we’re clothed only
with love. Someone is leaving and
someone is coming to the door. All

our houses are the same house. What 
an honor to wait in it, listening. What 
an honor to turn on the stove and cook.
 

Christine Potter lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley.  Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Sweet, Mobius, Eclectica, Kestrel, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Fugue, and been featured on ABC Radio News. She has poetry forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly. Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen.

Spun Glass, Harp Strings, and Theology 


Each will weave and intertwine
like silk, ice, sand, and even you—
working backwards from one great line. 

That’s because the images shine
like moonlight, money, and white hot glue—
each will weave and intertwine. 

Rhymes, like leather, must be fine: 
water words to draw, wooden ones to hew
working backwards from one great line. 

What’s appearing is true, divine—
within the echoes find something new:
each will weave and intertwine. 

Nature helps, a tree, a vine,
writing in a silent room, with a view,
working backwards from one great line. 

By the end, each word a sign, 
when it’s time to start anew,
each will weave and intertwine,
working backwards from one great line.

Isaac James Richards is a poet, essayist, and graduate student in the BYU English Department. He has won four poetry contest awards and five essay contests. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Irreantum, BYU Studies Quarterly, Y-Magazine, and Literature and Belief. He is also a contributing editor at Wayfare Magazine. He can be reached via his personal website: https://www.isaacrichards.com/  

Diamond Time

That evening moment when a slant of sun
bedazzles little waves with points of light
creates across the lake a belt of stars
anticipating the oncoming night.

This earth, less than a mote of cosmic dust,
becomes within our human point of view
the center of a universe of thought,
its gravity uniting me with you

in temporary selves somehow alive.
The carbon atoms now called you and I
will shatter, scatter through unmeasured time 
to reignite as diamonds in the sky.

Barbara Loots resides in a historic neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in magazines, textbooks, and anthologies for more than 50 years.  Her three collections can be found on Amazon. She serves on the Advisory Board of The Writers Place.