Monthly Archives: February 2024

Bharata & the Deer


In my last life I was a politician — a good one —
they named a city after me — its streets swept
& beggarless — even the stray dogs’ fur shone —
but I walked away from everything —
homes hung with Mughal silks
the laugher of children in sunlit courtyards
my wife’s body — warm from dreams at dawn.

I cast off my clothing like old lives
& sat by the river Chakra — its waters 
washing over shaligrams — ammonites
sacred to Vishnu, tightly coiled snakes
in centuries-deep sleep — & I meditated 
till my mind was a shoreless sea —
thoughts darting away like silver fish. 

But prarabdha karma had yet to fruit 
& I was wrenched from bliss —
a doe damp from a lion’s breath 
lept over the river & died beside me 
& out from under her a living fawn —
I’d never seen anything so vulnerable —
wet leaf-mulch eyes looking up at me. 

I fed him milk & later grass from my hand
& we walked in the forest & when he tired
I carried his fine bones on my shoulders
& I when I slept, he curled up by my flank —
soothing my sleep with his pulse —
& when I meditated I saw him —
nose black & wet as a shaligram. 

When death came, it was a storm
& my last thought was of my deer, 
shaking in the rain, so I was born a deer — 
but a jatismara remembering past lives — 
so I skitter through the mustard field 
to the banks of the Gandaki where the rishis are
to drink the water rippling with their wisdom.

Charlotte Couse lives in Wareham, on the south-west coast of the UK. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Southampton University and works as an acupuncturist and practitioner of Chinese herbal medicine. 

Not Afraid of Bees

There is enough complexity of life
in this micro-creature
to still the gaze 
and protract the 
ordinary progression
of time.

There is enough simplicity of being
in the observer
to abandon all assumptions
about the observed, 
an open-ended question
about whom is whom.

There is enough nakedness of intention
to challenge the usual
apprehensions
on both sides,
in both dimensions.

There is enough congruence
between the iridescence of 
paper wings and the iris 
of an eye, to birth 
mystics for years to come. 

But who is the mystic?
Is it the bee?

Honey and fear mingle
in one shared aliveness,
one sweetness,
one wariness. 

The bee leaves me alone
without really leaving me alone.

Cortney Collins lives on the Front range of Colorado with her two beloved feline companions, Pablo (after Neruda) and Lida Rose (after a barbershop quartet song from The Music Man.) She is the founder of the pandemic-era virtual poetry open mic and community Zoem, which ran for two years and produced an anthology of its poets’ work, Magpies: A Zoem Anthology, of which she is co-editor. Her poetry has been published by South Broadway Press, Sheila-Na-Gig, 24hour Neon Mag, and other various print and online journals. 

Impatient Spring


Warm morning light eases the transition
from melting snow to winter lawn.
Four robins skip across the turf,
pausing to peck at both soil and snow,
ignoring juncos and wrens
that forage for dropped seeds
below a feeder monopolized
by cardinal, titmouse, and chickadee.

I step outside for the morning paper,
greeted by the call of another robin
high in the white oak that towers
over the yard.  Snow is still banked
beside the driveway, witness to shoveling
during last week’s introduction to February.
Beside it and below the oak lies bare lawn.
The robin calls to me, as if to say
snow may fall again, but we are here,
and there is no stopping spring.

Ken Gierke writes primarily in free verse and haiku. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming both in print and online in such places as Amethyst Review, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Breakfast, and Silver Birch Press. Glass Awash, his first collection of poetry, was published by Spartan Press in 2022. His website: https://rivrvlogr.com/

Roots

                          
I’ve been soaking them in a wheelbarrow, 
a little like bathing a baby,
rubbing off any remaining dirt 
to see their vital darkness,  
smell their resin, 
feel their bumps, U-
turns tapered like tusks,
reaching like rays of light.

A buckthorn’s jagged root 
the length of my keyboard 
seemed ancient and lonely.
I scraped off the dark red bark,
peeled off the softer layer of phloem,
then, whittled a blocky crescent moon 
out of the lemon-yellow wood, which,

when it lived in this moist New England 
ground among voles, fungi, and sow bugs,
did not rot; while my father lies 
in his Jerusalem grave;
and our forebears mingle 
in the fertile soil of Poland.

Some nights, I hear them calling me in Yiddish,
telling me, I think, to rise from my warm bed
for some kind of familial duty;
and I promise them I will 
finish the sculpture.

Joel Moskowitz, an artist and retired picture framer, is writing poems about living in a house at the edge of a forest in Massachusetts. His poems have appeared​ in The Comstock Review, Ibbetson Street Press, J Journal, Midstream, Naugatuck River Review, The Healing Muse, MuddyRiverPoetryReview.com, BostonPoetryMagazine.com, AmethystMagazine.org and Soul-Lit.com. He is a First Prize winner of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire National Contest. 

The Substance of Things Not Seen 

we begin 
here
in the middle of the ocean 
clinging to 
whatever will float 

a rock 
a leaf
a voice from the door 
we hold
to the scent of his old clothes 
hoping his face will stay 
hold to the 
stumps of flowered walls and 
tar-papered floors 
our faith 
on wooden angels 
and pockets of gin 

on pomade braids and 
processions of little girls in 
communion white dresses 
on cornbread skillets and 
pots for sunday greens 
we cling to the spirits that hold to 
the bodies of chairs 
the shadows of halls 
the blue lines of paper 

shades that lie in 
the folds of veils 
and rings
and locks of hair 

the substance of things 
not seen
the evidence of things 
not known 

a rock
a leaf
a voice from the door 

a tide 
of salt 
and stone. 

Deborah A. Bennett is an American poet who was long-listed for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for 2022. Her work is spiritual in nature and inspired by her life-long affinity for solitary walks in the woods.

Adherent


Exaggerated emotions like in the Big Boss house 
are kosher for capturing eyeballs 
but the meatspace has other exigencies.

The unfalsifiable often belong to faith 
and its fasteners. Those on the circuit 
do not wish to validate it. 

From the cut of his jib, I know that co-traveler 
also, a seeker and I share a dialect—
the dialect of disciples.

Our paradigm isn’t to question the ways of
the cosmic; we are in a lilt with lauds. Our 
pursuit caps at His presence—intrinsic or imagined.

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, an anthology of Indian poets for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the recipient of the Ethos Literary Award 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by 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^th anniversary in the “family members category.” He lives in Mumbai, India.

X/ Twitter @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems

Canterbury Ghost 

I could sleep in the fireplace.
Flat out, fingertips

to toes. I saw him there.
The resident ghost is agitated,

unsolid and pale.
He shakes my plate and cup

with thought alone.
Unfazed, I want to talk.

Not before I sip my first
cup of Jamaican coffee.

Not before my first bite
of my fruit scone, a mini monster,

poised to expand and conquer.
It’s surprisingly light, crumbly,

unlike the ghost beside me
asking for a piece.

I explain that ghosts don’t eat.
He growls that no one told him that.

I laugh and offer him a mouthful.
Confused, he disappears.

Paul Attwell lives in Richmond, London and is recovering from doing a Masters in Creative Writing with the OU. Paul loves to read and is a fan of Startrek. He spends time as servant to his cat, Pudsey.

No Earthbound Thing

The Cantus Mariales now have ended. 
I’m gazing at the heavens, and they seem
serene, unchanging. They are not. A bird

swims through that vast expanse as if it had
no project to set foot on land. The pale
pink clouds of dawn are white now, on their blue 

unbroken canvas. At their feet – the squat 
and jumbled realm of earthbound things, which are
my stamping grounds. If there should come a day

when more than light descended on the globe
as we pursued our business – when the clouds 
might open to reveal some entity

whose home is unlike ours – I would not bat
an eye, I would not spill my cup of tea:
each newborn instant threatens it. Above

our busy heads, the sky calls out to all
the dreamers, the far-sighted. And it says 
that it is quite unlike our world. The things 

that matter to us, it holds cheap. And we 
have little time for sunrise in the East,
but it comes daily. As the birds propel

themselves through air, I hear the singer yet.
He’s speaking of what’s holy. And my heart –
no earthbound thing – climbs up with every note. 

John Claiborne Isbell was born in Seattle, USA and later lived in Europe and the United Kingdom, where he went to school. He has been teaching languages for some time, teaching French and German at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States. He has published various books, including a volume of poetry, Allegro, with a picture of a cello on the cover. Two more books came out recently, both about women authors.

The Artist’s Touch


The hawk affords no harbor for remorse.
It waits and captures, carries off, and feasts
in shady privacy on lesser beasts,
a practice owls and eagles both endorse.
The sparrows do not take long to come back.
Their raptor, after all, is feeding now,
not hunting. Parent birds show fledglings how
to peck at seedcakes, safe from an attack.
A feather and a strew of husks attest
to much hectic activity, a lull,
the continuity of breed and cull,
those specialties of weather, need and nest.
There’s not a breath of wind, each leaf in place,
held still remorselessly, as if by grace.

Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/

Practice

I settle into a chair named forgiveness—
for observation the best seat in the house.
Multitudes pass before me—faces ringing
as gusts blur the flowers, drawing their fragrances out.
Soon my table is crowded—
my challenge now to absorb 
detail of iris and mouth
as family and strangers lean in
without getting up to walk out.
As I laugh with new friends’ fortunes
or painfully cradle their woes
but turn and send away others 
because behaviors are boundaries proposed, 
my own comfort in its commodious arms
and cushioned seat—its lumbar support bolstering me—
costively grows. Some come hoping
to catch a reflected vision, 
to hear an unsinkable tongue, 
or to visit an unruffled aspect—
to provoke or perhaps
to learn how it’s done.
But no tricks exist to tell them.
My derrière steers the way, still in its spot, 
imprinting the harsh weight of my person;
the work of the sit bones is hard.

Deborah J. Shore has spent most of her life housebound or bedridden with sudden onset severe ME/CFS. This neuroimmune illness has made engagement with and composition of literature costly and, during long seasons, impossible. She has won poetry competitions at the Anglican Theological Review and the Alsop Review. Her most recent or forthcoming publications include THINK, Thimble Lit, Ekstasis, Reformed Journal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Christian Century, Relief Journal, and the Sejong Cultural Society.