Monthly Archives: February 2024

The World's Sharpness

Arising from the 24th sonnet of Elizabeth Barrett Browning


          Despite a handstitched receiving blanket
for your arrival   soft   dry & warm
& your mother's strong arms
          despite the appearance of our world   
so round & smooth   you could   only briefly   
be protected from the catch
of serrated things   from the stab of worldlings  
          So come   you pierced 
torn   & riven of soul
          come   you born to trouble  
muddled by sunderings   & you   
so hard pressed
          come to the one who offers rest

D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College, and Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. He has written five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021), Ampersand (2018), and Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis (2013). He and his wife live in Brampton, Ontario; they have two adult sons.

YAD					

from Consecration of the Alphabet by Leonore Scliar-Cabral
                           Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin




Extended arm, a hand like a reprieve,
mouth’s roof, a tongue against its cartilage.
Papyrus spreading wide its foliage,
then, one by one, the loss of all its leaves.

An arm of violence raised up in space,
or else a soothing image of a hand
pressed to the earth, a rigid ban
to passage, or an arabesque’s embrace.

Or hands in desperation, offering pleas
for clemency, the same sign being stripped
of frills and all its former fripperies.

A simple stroke. That’s all. A line alone
that serves as mirror to extended lips,
a slash that cuts across unbending stone.

Leonor Scliar-Cabral is Professor Emerita at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. At the age of 94, she continues to work as a psycholinguist in the field of literacy training. Her poetry has appeared in Brazil in the following collections: Sonnets, Memories of the Sephardim, Of Erotic Senectitude, The Sun Fell on the Guaíba, Consecration of the Alphabet, and José. A good number of poems taken from her collection Consecration of the Alphabet have appeared in literary magazines in the United States, such as Per Contra, Blue Unicorn, Home Planet News, Measure, and Poetica Magazine. A bilingual presentation of that book will be published next yearby Ben Yehuda Press in the United States..

Alexis Levitin: his 48 books in translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. More recent collections include Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord, both from Milkweed Editions. His translations have appeared in well over two hundred literary magazines, including Agni, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New York Times, New Letters, Partisan Review and Prairie Schooner. The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game, a collection of chess-related stories he wrote during the pandemic, has just been released by Russell ]Enterprises. His study W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision has just been published by Lexington Books. 

Sometimes I Pick at the Past


It’s an insect bite I can’t leave alone,
I won’t bother with the hydrocortisone,
instead digging with my fingernail 
at the edge, working my way around it, 
saying, I won’t pick it all the way off 
this time. I’ll just pick a little bit. 

I never do though.

I end up with the scab picked off, 
dabbing the spot with a tissue
whose white turns red. You tell me,
I already bled for you, my child. 
Why do you do this to yourself?

And you hold your hand over mine, 
pressure clotting my blood and later
healing my wounds.

Nathaniel Lee Hansen is the author of the short-story collection Measuring Time & Other Stories (Wiseblood Books, 2019) and the poetry collection Your Twenty-First Century Prayer Life (Cascade Books, 2018). His website is plainswriter.com. He is on X @plainswriter.

Boulder


It’s a common erasure, I guess,
every dip and depression
filled in. I’m dragging, it seems,
a lifetime behind me
with scant tread left
under my heels. It must be 
I’m in my own mind a little
weighty. But no, it’s just a dog 
on the back of my snowshoe, 
trotting fast to a boulder. Rugged 
granite etched in frost, tell me, 
how do you bear having to re-learn 
every spring, your own face, 
forgiveness, everything?

Judith Chalmer is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Minnow (Kelsay Books 2020) and is co-translator of two books of Japanese haiku and tanka by poet, Michiko Oishi. Her poems have been published individually in journals such as Poetica, Leaping Clear, Third Wednesday, Lilith, and Quiddity, and in anthologies such as, The Wonder of Small Things, How To Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry. In 2023 she attended the inaugural Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference as a scholar. She lives in Vermont, USA where she currently serves on the board of Vermont Humanities.

Sunday Bangor									

First morning
   of light frost

a rare day
   of cloudless sky

along the harbour
   birch leaves turn
      yoke-yellow

Abbey bell
   chiming through

      this momentary home

Tim Dwyer’s poems appear in Irish and UK publications, recently/forthcoming in Cyphers, Masculinity Anthology (Broken Sleep), New Irish Writing, Under The Radar. His chapbook is Smithy Of Our Longings (Lapwing). He worked as a psychologist in New York State Prisons, and now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland. He is a previous contributor to Amethyst Review.

Mark Goodwin is a poet-sound-artist, fiction-maker & re-thinker who speaks and writes in differing ways. He is also a walker, balancer, climber, stroller … and negotiator of places.  Mark has a number of books & chapbooks with various poetry houses, including Leafe Press, Longbarrow Press, & Shearsman Books. His latest chapbooks are: to ‘B’ nor as ‘tree’ (Intergraphia, Sheffield, October 2022) & Of Gone Fox (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, Clevedon, April 2023). Mark lives with his partner on a narrowboat just north of Leicester, in the English Midlands. He tweets poems from @kramawoodgin, and some of his sound-enhanced poetry is here: https://markgoodwin-poet-sound-artist.bandcamp.com  

Surrender


Will I ever stop expecting 
this journey to be a steady row 
downstream on sweetly flowing waters? 
I should know by now it’s a mixed bag.
Wise ones say we seekers 
need to surrender—
a manner of living learned with practice.  

Like yesterday when I stopped 
to watch six wild turkeys 
on my usual trek up over the hills.
For months, we had seen a group of seven 
roaming in our rural neighborhood.
Now, I counted and recounted,
lamenting the loss of one.
But then the thought— the six 
still have each other.
And I tried to take comfort in that
as they clacked along, digging up bugs 
hidden under dried leaves.

On my way home, the turkeys 
had moved their grazing to the weeds 
on the opposite side of the path.  
And I sighed with relief to see 
once again, there were seven.

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

Fratello

O, Poverello,
did your feet
with blood wounds
walk the camino
on slippers sewn
by Santa Chiara
whose golden hair
once outshone the sun?

And did the holy
lamb of God
prove more fierce
than the beastly wolf
whose feral wildness
you accepted?

What of the birds
shrieking in the square
you ordered still
while you spoke or sang a psalm
as they alighted
on your arms
and on your head?
What language
did they hear?

When the bishop
slapped my cheek,
bestowing on me
your name, Franciscus,
how was I able
to feel the wolf fed,
the palsied boy
uncoil his legs,
the shunned leper
accept your kisses?

Royal Rhodes taught for almost forty years courses on the history of Christianity at Kenyon College. His poems have been published by Amethyst Review, Ekstasis Poetry, The Heart of Flesh, Ekphrastic Review, and The Montreal Review, among others. He is currently working on a volume of collected poems.

Who Understands All the Mysteries of Life

My wife’s uncle, blind since his twenties, blind 50 years now, 
tells her that our late daughter, dead herself at 39,
has been coming to him in his dreams where she begs 
to be baptized, and I wonder if she has come 
to him as a vision, as the tall blonde athlete ravaged 
at the end by cancer pain, her eyes retreating, dark, 
her hair just beginning to grow out, the soft short coat 
of a plush toy, or does she come to him as she was 
six months before, her chemo-polished head adorned 
with wigs and hope, her pink clothes an eyesore, a badge 
of defiant pride, a challenge thrown up, a flag flown,
her mouth a cave of plans, a hive abuzz with what comes next. 
In my dreams she appears as four-year-old girl who vibrates 
with life, with tantrum rage and swing-set joy, her fine blonde hair 
a shaking flame.  She flashes through, eleven on soccer field, 
her limbs an intense blur, her hair a streak escaping.  
Or sixteen in silvery slink, corsage and laughter.  
How does she enter his dreams, this girl he has never seen, 
our daughter now dead and gone, now converted to ashes, 
now dispersed by whims of water, our daughter idea 
and memory?  Is she a voice from darkness calling, 
a disembodied entreaty, a soul trying 
to enter life once more, trying to buy by proxy
the ticket to eternal bliss if it can be had? 
I imagine her dream voice a whisper swelling
like Whitney Houston’s voice opening to miracle 
in her anthems, an angel’s wail, a declaration 
of glory’s truth though I do not believe in God 
or afterlife any more than our daughter did 
until those last agonizing weeks.  But he, the blind uncle, 
is LDS and devout and so we tell him 
to go ahead and baptize whatever has come to him. 

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 appearing or forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.

Echoes of Light

 
If you walk right into the darkness, you’ll get slapped by a small light
that lingers beyond dreams and shadows of living light—
like the glint of a glass rim attracting scorpions in starlight.
I am a cluster of chemical reactions in this meat sack of photosynthesized light
riding the twelve winds of anxiety in carnival light.

You are the living hope of splintered dead light
bound to the ocean’s loneliness soaked in liquid light.
Feel through the textured darkness of prismed light
may a ragged thread of lightning
strike between two nights of dark light. 

Let’s vanish into Neptune’s rings of ice light
pulsing the heartbeat of ancestral light.
Go to it. Like gnats and flies and moths—
whatever becomes trapped finds a window towards light. 

T. Jones is a poet, cultural curator, and literary citizen who hails from a lineage of Buddhist rice paddy farmers. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a Writer’s Grotto Rooted and Written Fellow. This is their first publication!