Monthly Archives: March 2024

Toward the Sun

As we grow older
our bodies as well as minds
seem to  turn toward the sun;
even the sunflowers
at dawn yearn upward,
we hear their petals
whisk by the shutters;
curling up a trellis
morning glories flick
off the early dew
to crane a look at the sky;
what we all hope for
--I like to think—is
the streaking of a comet
or the twinkling of a star
that should not be there.



Ray Greenblatt is an editor on the Schuylkill Valley Journal and teaches a “Joy of Poetry" course at Temple University-OLLI. His newest book of poetry is From an Old Hotel on the Irish Coast (Parnilis Media, 2023).

Looking Forward to My Sixties

Some say there is no reason constellations wheel
across the sky, there is only space and time and smallness.
But smallness can contain galaxies of meaning.

One person spends their life searching for answers while another
stares out at the pond. Herons and frogs mostly worry
about each other. What to eat. How not to be eaten.

The frog sings through summer darkness while the heron
stands long hours in the light. Patience is a virtue
woven on the loom of a long life. Youth is too restless

to master the details of thread over thread to the end.
David, when he grew tired of bullying, picked up a stone
that had lain in the desert for a thousand years.

How strange to find that whatever we need was provided
before our birth. A shorter road ahead brings a life into focus.
I kneel in the garden, watching ants march in a line,

less uniform than you might think. Their tiny feet
shuffle past each other. Some with empty mandibles,
some carrying ten times their own weight.

Alfred Fournier is an entomologist, writer and community volunteer in Phoenix, Arizona. He runs poetry workshops for Connect and Heal, a local nonprofit. His poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Cagibi, The Sunlight Press, Gyroscope Review, Ponder Review and elsewhere. His first collection, A Summons on the Wind (2023) is available from Kelsay Books or on Amazon.com. Web: alfredfournier.com. X: @AlfredFournier4.

Murmurations of Becoming More Human

We watch the spectacle of horror, 
view the theater of rubble,
sense the slipping of humanity.
Violence begets more violence.
Grief is palpable, helplessness, insurmountable.

Life is bound to rules of loving. 
If you don’t believe, watch the synchronized movement of 
a school of fish, a swarm of  bees, the murmuration of starlings, 
never colliding, just moving as one large being. 
There is no single leader, no outsider,   
just a requirement to watch out for your neighbor.

One small act of kindness makes a difference;
an invitation to attract another starling to the group,
swooping and swirling, rising.
Wings transform to His hands and feet, 
becoming more fully human. 

Angela Hoffman lives in Wisconsin. With her retirement from teaching and the pandemic coinciding, she took to writing poetry. Her poetry has been widely published. Angela’s collections include Resurrection Lily 2022, Olly Olly Oxen Free 2023, and Hold the Contraries, forthcoming 2024 (Kelsay Books). 

The Joy of Floating

I’m floating in Little Black Creek waters, 
spread eagle in the sun.
Set adrift, chest and cheeks burning red. 
Ripples reflecting sunlight in geometric shapes, 
glittering turquoise diamonds and triangles.

Belly lifting toward surface,
water filling in that empty space
in the hollow of my back.
Pushing me up toward the 
circling dragonfly with a neon blue tail 
and silver-veined wings, 
that contemplates landing on my stomach,
covered in hot pink and black burn-out roses.
The wind stirs the late summer tree line, 
like a lazy bobcat dragging its paws through the 
gold, rust, and burnt orange jewel-toned leaves, 
pine needles and prickly sweet gum balls.

Momentarily still, the gentle current 
serpentines around my curves,
as if navigating an outcrop of rocks.

I’ve gone too far, 
floated out beyond the red ball buoys.
Lacey grass from the sandy bottom reaches upward,
wrapping around my ankles, threatening to
trap me once again in the thermocline middle,
where I’ve trod for so many years.

Nothing can stop my desire to glide along the glassy surface,
stay afloat in the giant blue-green levied bowl,
drift away, and moor in the unknown, 
underneath a crush of early evening stars.

F.D. Jackson lives in the southeastern U.S., along with her husband and sundry furry family members. She writes about loss/grief and the restorative and transformative power of nature. Her work has appeared in FERAL, Book of Matches, Cosmic Daffodil, and Poetry Breakfast. She has work forthcoming in Green Ink Poetry, San Antonio Review, and Wild Roof Journal.

at night she slips out of her stone dress  

feels stars rise to the surface 
of her skin spangled 

out of the heart
traces running under her nerve

behind her ears 
burrowing down in the dusky woods 

beneath her hair dark hinterlands 
configured in names like ash or willow

trees of long slim leaves 
like rowan - rowan for faithfulness

longevity and sleep, buds and berries
night’s brightness a forest that shines

Lesley Sharpe teaches literature and creative writing, and enjoys living by the river which is always changing. Her poems, reviews and essays have appeared in several journals and anthologies, most recently Aesthetica, Tears in the Fence and The Alchemy Spoon, Finished Creatures and Spelt. Her poems have also been short/long-listed, including for The London Magazine, Rialto, Fish, Paper Swans Pamphlet, Primers, Cinnamon Debut Collection, Live Canon and Bridport Prizes.

After the Winter

Each spring wears the perfume of baptism, of coming
up for air; we’ve been so down below

our toes have wrinkles frozen in months
of ice, and now we crack loose, open
our screaming eyes like newborns

dipped in a chalice of blood. Waking blooms
press into the bottoms of feet

and we are one—a fungal scent
like earth damp too long—and we are one

more year beyond our fishy histories, lively
and twitching like nerves afire. I am 

a weeping chain, you the ancient lock,
and we rust in pleasant streams unfrozen.

Brian Baumgart (he/him) is the author of the poetry collection Rules for Loving Right (Sweet, 2017), and his poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including South Dakota Review, Spillway, Whale Road Review, and has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net awards. Brian is an English professor and previously served as the Director of Creative Writing at North Hennepin Community College. He was 2018 Artist-in-Residence at University of Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Ecological Science Reserve and co-coordinated the Minnesota State Write Like Us Program. He is the father of two teenagers. For more: https://briandbaumgart.wixsite.com/website.

Studying Torah 

And make for the tent a covering of tanned ram skins, and a covering of dolphin skins above. 

—Exodus 26:14

Dolphin skins? What? 
Where would the Israelites 
find dolphins in the desert?
We sit at a table and debate, 
thick books with footnotes open.

Is the Hebrew translation off?
Was it some other animal?

The woman on my right
offers a theory from the Talmud 
suggesting a unicorn, a miraculous 
multi-colored creature appearing 
for a single Divine purpose
only to disappear thereafter.

Perhaps it’s just semantics,
the man across the table posits.
Cheesecloth isn’t made of cheese.
Dolphin skin could be a color, 
goat leather dyed purple or blue.

Speculation continues in our cozy synagogue room
where we study with bagels, Shabbat mornings 
9 a.m., returning week after week to puzzle over 
an ancient document revered for centuries
as a doorway to the Divine. 

Gripped by the desire to decode 
what we cannot know, we examine each word,
turning it over and over like a precious gem,
gleaming with finely cut facets. 

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including The Sunlight Press, Gyroscope Review, One Art, and Amethyst Review. She is also the author of two poetry books for young readers, Tag Your Dreams: Poems of Play and Persistence. (Albert Whitman, 2020) and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit  www.jacquelinejules.com

Moments of Being

That’s what Virginia Woolf called them,
those evaporating flashes of insight
that give us
for a few brief seconds
a conviction of our own significance
in a larger, well-planned scheme.

Such fits of faith are not life-changing.
They do not merit an augmented chord
in the soundtrack of our lives.
They might happen while we are cutting carrots
or brushing our teeth
or waiting in line at the post office.

We might have three or four in a lifetime,
but at those times
we know with saintlike certainty
that an unknowable artist has placed us
as a spot of color
on a pointillist canvas
that can only be understood
from a million light years away.

Glenn Wright is a retired teacher living in Anchorage, Alaska with his wife, Dorothy, and their dog, Bethany.  He writes poetry in order to challenge what angers him, to ponder what puzzles him, and to celebrate what delights him.

Loveys

Every weekday morning, a gray striped cat droops on the other side of our sofa. In 1886 a girl in France took over her older sister’s room. For months I have held a photo of my wife in mind. We are all doing the same thing. 

* * *

The other side of our sofa is my wife’s side. Visit us any weekend and you’ll find her ensconced there, making her online jigsaw puzzles, Sir Charles sprawled over the fleece blanket on her lap. On Saturdays they can sit this way for hours. 

On weekdays they can’t. So every morning, minutes after my wife leaves for work, Sir Charles curls his muscular frame into the back of her seat. He sleeps there till noon, next to where I sit with my laptop. Some experts would tell you her scent makes him feel safe. He cannot be where she is, but he can be where she was. 

* * *

No one should ever have to live through what Thérèse Martin endured. At four, “my happy disposition completely changed after Mama’s death,” she wrote in her autobiography, describing her girlhood in France. “I, once so full of life, became timid and retiring, sensitive to an excessive degree.” Right after the funeral, a friend lamented that “you have no mother any more.” Thérèse threw herself into the arms of her older sister Pauline and cried, “It’s Pauline who will be my Mama!”

Thérèse’s second Mama coddled her, instructed her, shared wisdom from their Catholic faith, and Thérèse glommed onto her with abandon. But Pauline didn’t last either, entering the monastery in their Normandy town in 1882, when Thérèse was nine. This would have been the perfect time for Thérèse to take over Pauline’s room, while the scent of her sister lingered there, but she didn’t. If she had, she might not have come undone. 

* * *

I’ve seen more attractive pictures of my wife. After all, no one looks good in a hospital gown. Her eyes gaze at the camera, expressionless, the tube in her mouth delivering oxygen to her lungs. She’d had the tube and the gown for maybe four days. I never saw any of this in person, since her COVID (and mine) made visits impossible. 

During those four days she’d sent me a terse text or two. Then, voilà: photographic evidence that she lived. I gasped, my body’s way of rising to good news. 

People keep photos of their beloveds in their phones, or as wallpaper on their laptops. I did neither: the photo of my wife clung to my memory like her scent on the sofa, and I carried that memory with me everywhere. 

* * *

Losing two mothers must be more than any nine-year-old can stand—let alone someone as sensitive as Thérèse—and the hallucinations proved it. 

No one paid much attention to her headaches, which began after Pauline’s departure. The tremors—“nothing was able to stop my shaking,” she wrote, “which lasted almost all night”—were a different story. Everyone, the doctor included, agreed they were serious. Her father moaned that his little girl was either going crazy or about to die. 

Worse was to come, and it went on for weeks. “I often appeared to be in a faint, not making the slightest movement…. Once it happened that for a long time I was without the power to open my eyes…. My bed seemed to be surrounded by frightful precipices; some nails in the wall of the room took on the appearance of big black charred fingers.”

With no help and no answers, Thérèse turned to a statue of the Virgin Mary by her bedside, and she credited the statue’s smile for her cure. Something else might have helped as well: a letter from Pauline. “My greatest consolation,” Thérèse wrote. “I read and reread it until I knew it by heart.” 

* * *

Two nights before my wife entered the hospital, we’d spent eight hours in a different ER—the dreariest shift of all, 4:00 p.m. to midnight—and neither of us wanted to return. But then she blacked out in the shower and dragged the glass doors off their rails; her blood oxygen plunged to eighty-three, her speech slurred, her eyes barely opened. 

The nurse on the phone listened quietly to our ER aversion. “There’s another ER in town that isn’t a trauma center,” she explained, her voice a comforter. “So the wait time is shorter. I’ll get an ambulance to your door.”

Slowly, gingerly, I helped my wife down the stairs when the EMTs came. Just off our front porch they laid her on the gurney and started carting her away. We didn’t lose eye contact until they loaded her in. The ambulance drove off, and I rushed to my place on the sofa to sob.

There was much to do in the next few days, so I couldn’t have imagined my need for the photo of her and the breathing tube and the hospital gown. My body knew, which is why it saw the photo and gasped. 

* * *

Sir Charles may know more about scents and loss than he lets on. He could have learned it from Max, his gray striped predecessor, even though they never met. Max and his best friend Beorn would curl up into my wife’s seat as well, partly for her scent—Max adored her too—but more for each other’s presence. They’d form a yin-yang symbol, exchanging pheromones while each groomed the other’s head. 

Beorn died first, after a long wasting in which he never lost his high spirits. Two yowls from his cat bed and he was gone. Amid our sorrow, we looked forward to the extra time we’d have for Max, to give him more cuddles, in the few years he had left. Max had other ideas. He drooped in his friend’s old haunts and eventually turned away from food, his life’s great pleasure. It was only six months later when grief carried him off.

This is what Sir Charles may know, and why he insists on lying where he does, never too far from the scent, and the ghosts, that sustain him. 

* * *

Four years after Pauline’s departure, Thérèse finally took over her old painting room in the attic and “arranged it to suit my taste.” She used a whole page in her autobiography to describe her bric-a-brac: a cage full of birds, a massive cross in black wood, statues of saints, baskets made of seashells, schoolbooks scattered all over, an hourglass, a doll’s cot that was once Pauline’s. 

She also dedicated a wall to a portrait of Pauline. The portrait was not her sister in the flesh, of course, but that didn’t keep Thérèse from sitting in its shadow. 

* * *

Six days after the photo I pulled up to the hospital’s main entrance and waited till a nurse wheeled out my wife: wan, befogged, but more herself than when she left our home in the ambulance ten days earlier. Years ago we began to point at each other when meeting somewhere—there’s the one I love—and my arm shot out, index finger extended, of its own accord. 

At some point I got hold of her discharge papers, settled into my seat on the sofa, and ran web searches on the medical terms in the one-line diagnosis. Two or three times, I read and reread the definitions to make sure I hadn’t imagined the phrase in front of me: often fatal. Each time, something deep inside me rattled like a china teacup during a tremor, threatening to shatter.

* * *

Some years ago, when visiting Thérèse’s childhood home in France, I bought the photo of her that I love best: face close up, enshrouded in her nun’s habit, a steady gaze, a hint of weariness around the eyes. Now the image occupies a space on my sitting room wall, just as Pauline’s portrait did for Thérèse herself. 

Amid the darkest of my dark moods, I trudge to the sitting room, lay my body on the futon, and talk with the photo as one would a friend. Conversations like this are easier when I can see the person, I’ve found. As we look at each other and chat, I can sense my place among all those who’ve gazed at icons, kneeled before crucifixes, or ranted at statues, pouring our hearts out and hoping, more than anything, for the solace of a response.

* * *

The image of Thérèse, my wife’s photo, Pauline’s old room, Sir Charles’s place on the sofa: whenever a comfort does its work, an ancient practice plays out again. We relearn this practice from our children, who know from instinct how to use such things. 

 On most nights in the late 1980s our toddler clutched her hand puppet, a pink bunny, while she lay on her bed. The bunny traveled everywhere with her: to Boston for play days, to child care, on walks to see the cows at the nearby farm. Her index finger slid in and out of a fold in the puppet, which was trimmed with satin edging. Today parents call them loveys: those objects that no child—that none of us—can ever, ever, be without. We didn’t know what losses our toddler warded off with the pink bunny, but she must have known they would inundate her, as they inundate us all, without her friend by her side, bearing the scent of everything she loved. 

#  #  # 

John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, the everyday strangeness of karma, and whatever else comes to mind. Janelle’s work has appeared in Catapult, the tiny journal, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Tiferet Journal,  and Amethyst Review, among other places. Her essays have made the shortlist of the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and Wild Atlantic Writing Awards. She can be found on the web at www.backmanwriter.com.

Bees and Goldenrod


I know I’m not supposed to believe 
 That the bees bee-lieve in some God 
and a heavenly hierarchy of hives 

 but, this morning, so many sister bees
were piously harvesting each bloom’s
 vaulted altar of nectar and pollen 

that their work seemed like worship; 
 and I dreamed of a rosary bead of bees 
to keep me alert to this single-mindedness 

 on sweetness, light, and the source, maybe, 
of all being where a Hildegard Von Bingen 
 of queen orchestrates this holy order

of receiver bees (can you believe) ingesting
 arriving nectar then transferring it—mouth to mouth—
to the interior hive while others, unseen,

 all day, flap wings inside dark chambers to keep 
the hive between eighty-five and ninety degrees. 
 Oh, by noon, I swooned over this last supper 

of summer as I witnessed some arriving 
with half their weight in pollen and willing, 
one book says, to die in flight for the sake 

of the  hive. Now, it was all too much 
not to kneel over the gravel’s pew of duff 
and lift a chalice of nectar-filled blossom up 

to get a God’s eye view of sister bees’ 
transubstantiating nectar into honey 
that heals the human body. Forgive, then,

 my seduction by these sweet, Carmelite nuns 
plunging me beneath the pool of buds  
before rising to be born again into the 

First Universalist Church of all things bloom. 
And forgive these ceaseless sermons on
these blessed bees almost walking on water

 as hovering over flowers, they taste buds
with their feet to see if it’s worth burning 
 calories to land then launch. And, yes, musing
on earth’s own looming colony  collapse, 

I bought the hive, don the suit, and feel 
my own being communing with some sacred body 
each time I raise the host of honeycomb  

and proclaim “Amen” to the priestess bees 
giving their lives, so joyfully, to tend 
one of God’s rods of fall goldenrod.

Dennis Camire is a writing instructor at Central Maine Community College. His poems have appeared in Poetry East, Spoon River Review, The Mid-American Review and other journals and anthologies. An Intro Journal Award Winner and Pushcart Prize nominee, his most recent book is an Anthology of Awe and Wonder, Deerbrook Editions. Of Franco-American origin, he lives in an A-frame in West Paris, Maine.