Monthly Archives: August 2024

Still Point

The half of the earth in night
the other half in day 

a black fish and a white 
dash through the dark of space

and we, who are neither dark 
nor wholly bright,

in sleep and also waking,
our days both clear and cloudy,

our nights both calm and stormy—
these lives of ours revolve 

around a sane and sacred place
a hidden still point 

at the heart of space, where time 
forgets where it was headed,

and what is here 
is all there ever was

Richard Schiffman is an environmental reporter, poet and author of two biographies. His poems have appeared on the BBC, in Rattle, the New Ohio Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, Writer’s Almanac, This American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and other publications. His first poetry collection What the Dust Doesn’t Know was published in 2017 by Salmon Poetry.

Worship of Light

On a high plateau far away,
lived a race of people who enslaved light.
No Zoroastrians, these, for they had usurped the sun:
Their technology encompassed fluorescence,
lasers, mirrors, globes and gigantic lens.
Originally harmless in their faith,
they worshipped bio-luminescence, keeping fish and worms
in temple tanks where devotees would rub and click
on rosaries of beaded quartz for mystic sparks.
But priests were now advanced to inner rings
of atoms and their photons—pressuring
with heat and forced velocity,
splitting the very finest grains of paradise.
They persecuted unbelievers—named them heretics—
who lived in cellars now and bunkers underground,
for world had gone insane with zealots and religious wars,
as wayward balls of fire ripped through ether.
And they all went blind in that realm of captured light,
for their god, in emergence from dark ruptured elements,
revealed just a fraction of his bright transcendent glow,
exploded to engorged illumination
like the stars of Van Gogh...

Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021] and Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Amethyst Review, Crannog, Popshot, Prole and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He was a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems.

No Hurry


Someday we may reach a level of love
so high it will seem foolish to compose
a poem, impossible even to whisper of
the meaning behind the obsolescent rose.
We aren’t there yet, of course, but only skim
the meadow tops until we roost in church,
not gone to heaven but crying our hymn
skyward from our consummated perch.
I’m in no hurry for transcendence, dear.
An astral body scares me, no matter how
sublime, how infinite, emancipating, and clear
the unstrained light; I want the stained light now. 
Enough for me to glimpse us heading to
an us beyond ourselves, yet still with you. 

Garret Keizer is the author of The World Pushes Back, winner of the 2018 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and seven books of nonfiction, including Privacy and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want.  He is also a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review. His website is here:  https://garretkeizer.com.

A mild panic attack at the end of the day

Behind my heart is fluttering a fear that stills my feet;
a spreading heat, a weight, a clenched arrhythmic pulsing beat.
I tell myself what I’m observing, feeling into pain;
accepting everything that’s there and softening the strain.
All suffering, emotional or taut electric nerves,
is calling out for company; to be held and observed.
With hands warm on my heart I let the comfort spread until
the panicked immobility retreats; I know it will.
In trying to be helpful, function in this racing world,
I blunder: missing out the quiet pause that makes the pearl. 
Just give your wisdom time to form, solidify, and let 
the final insights take their place; don’t do it now, not yet.
That rush to have it over with, to move on to the next
self-fabricated duty is what’s put you in this mess. 

Liz Kendall works as a Shiatsu and massage practitioner and Tai Chi Qigong teacher. Her poetry has been published by Candlestick Press, The Hedgehog Poetry Press, and Mslexia. Liz’s book Meet Us and Eat Us: Food plants from around the world is co-authored with an artist and ethnobotanist. It explores biodiversity through poetry, prose, and fine art photography. Her website is https://theedgeofthewoods.uk and she is on Twitter/X and Facebook @rowansarered, and on Instagram @meetusandeatus.

Uma

Soft gusts, the windows down, I’m reading the
Upanishads.

The parking lot is overfull.
It’s STEM night at my daughter’s elementary
school: programmable robotic arms,
volcanoes, mirror tricks,
prismed light and laser beams,
the fecund hollowness within the seed,
the crowding furrowed brows, delighted eyes,
the ancient wonder veiled,
but also intimated.

I close the book and think,
“What we can never comprehend
is that by which we comprehend the world.”

A toddler waiting with her mother near
the door grips spring’s first meadow garlic shoots,
lifts chubby fingers to her nose, leans back
her head, and laughs into a flaming sky.

Too easily, too easily,
we all word-wrap the mystery.
Sophia, Uma, 
wisdom,
take my hand.

Steven Knepper teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute.  His poems have appeared in The Alabama Literary Review, The William and Mary Review, First Things, Presence, Pembroke Magazine, Seminary Ridge Review, SLANT, The American Journal of Poetry, and other journals.

Along the Shaded Woods


i talk in frenetics at the midnight hour
before time slips beyond the skyline 

from my star-flecked room, as a meditative darkness 
falls in circles. caught between the passage 

of concentric navigation, i memorize 
the lost in found with space carved out 

for emptiness, reframe my light upon 
the nurtured grace of suffering.  

now the lilac dust speckles the garden.
the metaphors litter the yard.

this vessel is a temple and i have risen
here before: tilting on the middle path

towards waking. along the shaded woods
thrives a whirlwind of devotion, yet 

the flower feels its ache as it still opens.

Lydia Falls resides in the woods of New York after living abroad in South Korea and Taiwan. Her poetry collection, Beneath the Heavy, was published under Merigold Independent (2021). Lydia’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut River Review, Midway Journal, Washington Square Review, Here: a poetry journal, and elsewhere. www.lydiafalls.com

Thief of Joy

I’m not sure where I lost my fear of joy.
I must have dropped it
getting out of the car at the airport
five years ago maybe,
or forgot it with my coffee mug
on the counter of the information desk
at the Fort Wayne Science Museum.

I used to be a thief of joy,
sneaking glimpses
when God’s back was turned—
brief but unforgettable—
like sunrays slicing through clouds.
As a child I was warned
never to look into the face of God
by religious people afraid to peer
into the pond of their own darkness.

But now
when those waters lay still in me,
I listen for the curve-billed thrasher
swooping into my yard for a bite of suet, 
and if the sun slants just right,
catch my reflection in the light of his eye
and the flood of a moment’s wonder
drowns me in a no-longer-secret ecstasy,
and the insight
that I might as well enjoy it.

Alfred Fournier is a writer and community volunteer in Phoenix, Arizona. His first poetry collection, A Summons on the Wind (2023, Kelsay Books), was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Orchards Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, The Sunlight Press and elsewhere. Twitter (X): @AlfredFournier4, alfredfournier.com.

Sabbath in the Hills

Before I backslid myself, I shook my head
over backsliders who felt nearer God’s heart in a garden,
or worshiped just as well in the hills—

yet here I am of a Sunday,
up where the distant steeple looks like the point of a pin.

I’ve found a whole congregation
of white Hobblebush, enveloped in Quaker-ish stillness,
and paused to share it.

It is the seventh of days,
set apart for rest after industry.  I have often groomed
the trail here, or reworked a few poems

in the cool of morning.  Have left
no word of thanks, forgiveness, or apology unspoken.

Now I reflect on what got done
or redone this week—all perhaps more good than not.

Meanwhile, Hobblebush are the nuns of the hardwood.

To accomplish nothing more 
than to be here, alive and together, is their devotion.



In retirement, Russell Rowland continues his work as a trail volunteer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.  His poetry has appeared in over a hundred small journals. His most recent books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications.

I am still on clock time

I am still on clock time
not digital time
the clock hands return 
again and again
to their folded hands prayers
and God is in the world of clocks
the maker
the fixer
the eternal spring
that bounces back
and shields the many rocks of alarm

oh but digital time
the great expanse of the universe
the never returning to the point of origin
digital time that accumulates without God
just a system amok
in the dark night of our souls

is the multiverse
asymmetrical
the leap of time
of consciousness
into oblivion
entropy
forever
expanding
but once

why

I hold onto my clock
a teddy bear
a pillow
a thing so human
and necessary
to make sense of the world
a clock
and the God who made it

Dan Cuddy is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. In the past he was a contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. He has had a book of poetry published, Handprint on the Window in 2003. Recently he has had poems published in Madness Muse Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, the Rats’s Ass Review, Roanoke Review, , Synchronized Chaos, Fixator Press, Beatnik Cowboy, Gargoyle, The Chamber Magazine and Witcraft.

Thich Nhat Hanh 

As my wife removed a tick from the inside of my wrist, 
I joked that I’d name my brand of deep woods, bug dope
Tick Not On for the monk I’ve read often with the hope
of becoming a more settled person. He doesn’t insist,
but in an understated way suggests that trying to resist
the world’s pain is impossible—not effective strategy.
I like the idea that sitting quietly could itself be remedy,
nothing more being needed to transform fear 
into curiosity. Marriage and work have worked for me,
helping me expand my constricted sphere 
of comfort slowly. It’s taken decades. No quick awakening 
but shifts by small degree in modus operandi 
from shirking to deliberate activity. A mantra I still enlist—
get over yourself—is what reality asks of everything,
work that in the end none of us gets out of doing.



Charles Weld’s poems have been collected in two chapbooks, Country I Would Settle In (Pudding House, 2004) and Who Cooks For You? (Kattywompus, 2012.) A full-length collection, Seringo, was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. A retired administrator for an agency serving youth with mental health challenges, Charles Weld lives in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.