Monthly Archives: April 2024

Ice Cream and Talmud


If only I could get you to eat this ice cream!
Sometimes simple tasks are hardest, and I’ve lived through that.

And the heart does have its reasons. The Talmud
says we are each a planet: “Save one life,
save the whole world.” Now to my mind, this is accurate
based on everything I’ve come to know of people,
which is all anyone can go on in the end.

To get back to the ice cream. I’ve been trying to reconcile
you and this ice cream, and it hasn’t happened.
I’ve laid out for you
the ways this world would be a better place,
if only you would follow my advice
and eat. Because I grieve to see you
not happy. And just now it dawns on me –

perhaps a little late – that my desire
to see you happy may not be what you
most want. Perhaps you want something quite different.
Perhaps you don’t know what you want. Your heart
says no to ice cream, and you just trust that.

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 this year, both about women authors.

Doubts creep in like a vine

Doubts creep in like a vine
crawling up a wall, and I wonder:

Are You there, God? Up there—in heaven?
Above the clouds? Beyond the blue sky?
Where I can’t see?

Or are You hiding somewhere else—
behind that tree or inside that flower
where a butterfly is whispering
its secret prayer to You?

Maybe You are the voice I hear
when I write these words.
Maybe You are the air I breathe,
the golden light of dawn, the songs 
that birds sing?

Maybe these doubts are just an illusion
You create to see if we are seeking You 
sincerely, to see if we will persist in our 
search or just give up.

Or maybe the doubts are Your way of
asking a question, a way of drawing us
closer to You?

Bruce Black is editorial director of The Jewish Writing Project. His poetry and personal essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Write-Haus, Soul-Lit, The BeZine, Bearings, Super Poetry Highway, Poetica, Lehrhaus, Atherton Review, Elephant Journal, Tiferet, Hevria, Jewthink, The Jewish Literary Journal, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Mindbodygreen,  and Chicken Soup for the Soul. He lives in Highland Park, IL. 

Sway


And then there was the time I'd had a couple of drinks at home
and went out wandering in the woods near my house
in a light snowfall and found an illegal deer stand high up in a tree
and being seized with a sudden sense of outrage
I ran home and got a sledgehammer from my shed
and went back and climbed up the tree despite my fear of heights
and standing in the crotch of the tree
and trying not to look down I pounded away at the wooden planks,
at first ineffectually but with escalating frustration and stupid fury 
until they finally succumbed and one by one broke loose and fell
away from the tree. At one point in my frenzied onslaught 
I had to stop and rest for some moments,
looking out breathing hard sweating and swaying 
over the forest floor and its carpet of leave
and I felt the whole world stop for a moment
as I waited to find my balance again
and I thought I could die doing this
and what a stupid way to die that would be
but I didn't really care and I resumed whacking away
with the sledge until all the parts of the deer stand 
had been knocked down and then I climbed down shakily
and dragged all the wooden planks home and sometime later I burned
them in my wood stove and they gave off sparks
as they burned. And there was nothing more of it
except that afterward I would sometimes wonder why
I had done it and whether others I met had ever stood,
leaning out into space, in the thrall of some strange passion,
and swaying. 

E. J. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds), Conversations with the Horizon (Box Turtle Press), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press). He has poetry forthcoming in Innisfree Poetry Journal, I-70 Review, and Worcester Review. He has lived in California and in Florida and currently lives in central New York. 

Voice of Calm
August 2023

Bedridden once again – shin splints, this time –
I found distractions through the aching days.
I had my friends, my work, the joy of rhyme
to ward off all the worries. But the blaze
of these activities was quiet at night
and catastrophic thoughts would overwhelm,
a tide directed by a moon too bright
to cast aside. Yet in this anxious realm,
I’d use a crutch to part the curtains wide
and watch a pigeon, sitting on the wall
or in a birch. Some anguish would subside
come dawn, when she began her soothing call.

Felicity Teague is a poet from Pittville, a suburb of Cheltenham, UK. She has had inflammatory arthritis since she was 12 yet is able to work from home as a copywriter and copyeditor, with her foremost interests including health and social care. Her poetry features regularly in the Spotlight of The HyperTexts; she has also been published by The Mighty, Snakeskin, The Ekphrastic Review, The Dirigible Balloon, Pulsebeat, Lighten Up Online and a local Morris dancing group. In December 2022, she published a small collection of poems, From Pittville to Paradise. Other interests include art, film, and photography.

Call to Prayer in Luxor			

The muezzin cracks the dream open
like an egg, the yolk and white spilling
into the deep dark. Allahu Akbar

streams into my hotel room in Luxor.
Caught in the nets of sleep, I want oblivion.
The voice pulls me to surface. A long flight 

the day before, my arms and legs
stiff. The room unfamiliar,
the recitation not. Now, another joins, 

then a third. What time of day is it,
although I see it on my clock. Pre-dawn,
of course. Stop this, or lull into the soft 

reverent voices I knew. A word of blessing
or two still slips through the pillow I’ve pressed
	   over my head, and I drift on that sail-breathing

breeze. The Salat al-fajr begins the day
for many here but returns no faith to me
to kneel, face east. How I wish it would.

Kathleen Calby lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and hosts writer events for the North Carolina Writers Network. Her work appears in San Pedro River Review, New Plains Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal. Named a 2022 Rash Award Poetry Finalist, Kathleen published Flirting with Owls (Kelsay Books) in 2023. Her Sufi background and other mystical associations contributed to a recent full-length manuscript she is completing about ancient and contemporary Egypt and the Pharaonic Era landmarks she was privileged to experience. Back home, Kathleen enjoys fried chicken and biscuits a bit too much and long, strenuous walks not enough.

Prayer 



When I was younger, I asked God
to give me a Nintendo Wii® for Christmas.
I did not ask my parents, I did not tell
my siblings, I only bowed my head
for the whole of December and prayed
to the ultimate creator of the universe
for, yes, a video game console. Come the morning
of Christ’s birth, there it was under
my stocking like a baby in a manger.

I have forgotten about that answered-
prayer until now and, I am sure, I have since
forgotten many others. Now, I ask God to make me
a wise man. But, recently, I am reminded
that harvesting prayer demands more than
a few words cast about the air like grains of wheat
above a field awaiting planting.
How are the wise to follow the star they ought
to if caught in the permanence of prayer, 
the lips enacting the dance of supplication?

Samuel Louis Spencer is an American journalist and poet based out of Tampa, Florida. An avid traveler and former missionary child, Spencer loves pushing his limits of prosody and writing on the human psyche. His faith resides in every aspect of his identity as a person. When he is not writing, Spencer enjoys snowboarding and spending time with his family.

The Soul of Everything

the optometrist
and I sit in the dark 
he shines 
a beam 
of light
through to the back 
of my eye
I see 
that I hold my own orbing planets
in these sockets

right retina
a jupiter swing 
bending bright blue waves
to some dark space inside my head

left retina
its own violet Venus
in how she holds on to moving light

pathways unveiled
black holes turned inside out
to brilliance
and when he finishes
says the exam is over
I carry imprints
of two bright stars
burning
on my eyes
and everywhere I look		(light)
in faces			(light)	
in trees				(light)	
in a lifting bird		(light)	
this new aura clouds my vision
as I move through the world
my windows
fully open 
to the soul of everything

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, and author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (forthcoming, Harbor Editions, 2024) and Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press, 2021). She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE grant fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. 

Preview of Postmortem

Exhausted I—
            sinking into
            hot water
            and bath salts,
            less embraced
            in amniotic bliss 
            than embalmed 
            like a specimen,
            long-gone grotesque 
            (two-headed goat,
            albino frog)
            curled, pickled,
            shelved in a jar
—dissolve
in tub and eucalyptus,
calm. My stars invisible,
but aligned. Afloat.
In space. Denizen 
of the sensate, nothing
amiss. 

Water running down
the drain gurgles
glory glory glory
nullity golly
gone

and emerging 
I find my body
lost,
no face 
not even a ghost 
stares back
from the clouded mirror
and so what
to believe 
of shrouded hereafters?

 

Jeanne Julian is author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems are in Kakalak, Panoply, RavensPerch, Ocotillo Review and elsewhere, and have won awards from Reed Magazine, Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review,and Maine Poets’ Society. She reviews books for The Main Street Rag. www.jeannejulian.com

Matinee


On the count of her hand’s baton, 
the venetian blinds rise. Outside 
the weeping willows curtsy. I tell her 
the blue flowers of the chaste tree she loves 
make her medicine. “Really?” she says. 
Everything is a miracle, including 
the pink crepe myrtle she sees as if 
for the first time. She doesn’t remember 
planting it there, but I can still see her
dragging the sapling across the lawn
where the birds still picnic. When they shoot up 
into the sunlight like arrows dripping 
purple feathers, she applauds, and asks,
“When’s the next show?” 

Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Most recently her writing has appeared in Does It Have Pockets? Switch, Gone Lawn, Your Impossible Voice, Necessary Fiction, Pure Slush, and other journals. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.

Melissa Huff feeds her poetry from the power and mystery of the natural world and the ways in which body, nature and spirit intertwine.  An advocate of the power of poetry presented out loud, she twice won awards in the BlackBerry Peach Prizes for Poetry: Spoken and Heard, sponsored by the (U.S.) National Federation of State Poetry Societies.  Recent publishing credits include Gyroscope Review, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, Encore: Prize Poems 2022 (NFSPS), Persimmon Tree and Blue Heron Review.  Melissa has been frequently sighted making her way between Illinois and Colorado.