Monthly Archives: August 2024

The Thinness Has Vanished

We’ve lost the otherworld, the shadows fall
empty from trees that hide nothing. They’ve gone,
all who made this place their home, unseen but
always sensed. We sense them no more. No small
stirrings, no bright glitterings, breezes on
the air hold no hint of other-song, not
a soul is here but us.  It’s strange to think
they would leave and yet they have.  Sacredness
has drained from pond and stone, awareness fled
from every field. As if an ancient link
has been removed between their world and this,
severing all connection. Coins, cream, bread—
we still place them out on the harrow, in
hope that one day such gifts are sought again.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work can be found in Eternal Haunted Summer, The Deadlands, Polu Texni, 34 Orchard, Under Her Skin (Black Spot Books), Vastarien: Women’s Horror (Grimscribe Press) and many other venues. Her latest collection is Curses, Black Spells and Hexes (Alien Buddha Press). She tweets: @poetforest and lives on the Pacific North West coast of America in a crumbling Victorian, where many spirits besides her own repose.

Newly Qualified

'On tiptoe I follow God around the classroom'
    – Astrid Alben, 'And Become A Monkey'

Our Martyrology and Saints Studies
degree requires constant self-sacrifice
and a devotion to impossible facts.
Believe and you will be rewarded
by degree, by decree. It is hard
to know the truth and the truth
has set a fee. The cave doctor will
see you now; we are all together
in this world, living in the dark.

Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010)

Rubble

I keep thinking about the desecration of the Temples,
the First, the Second, the Tenth, the Thirtieth, the Hundredth.
I am standing in the middle of the ruin

            the burnt Torah scrolls
            the benches hacked to pieces
            the oil from the nair tamid
            eternal flame filling my nostrils
            slick under foot 
            broken glass, blood everywhere.

I try, so hard, to remember this body is a temple
here on earth to praise God, to bring light and joy.
This body is the only holy of holies left on earth.

Mostly though, it’s the rubble that comes to mind.
I can’t even look except slantwise,
the task, so beyond my ken.

I bring only a strong hand to move a bench,
a strong back to bend over a soiled floor.
I approach the task as I do God

eyes downcast, no clear word to guide me 
only names that cast kaleidoscope
fractured light into the space around me.

How did my ancestors do it?
Their most sacred spaces - vitiated -
enter with bucket in hand, sudsy water, rag ready?

These days it's more than I can muster.
Is it not better sometimes to turn away?
To leave that which can never be truly rectified?

Dreamily I imagine the rebuilding
my hands hammering nails, weaving deep blue thread
sitting on gleaming wood all made new

the light shining in from windows,
the nair tamid burning once again overhead,
my feet firm against hewn stone.

I imagine that hope in a heart
that this time, this time
everything will be okay.

Mostly though we know how the story goes:
we carry on even with the broken window taped up,
the hinges never quite right, the doors to the ark askew,
the scrolls singed around the edges.

Still we light the light.
Still we tuck the scrolls into the silver boxes,
hang them with a tiny nail, tiny hole
in the doorposts of our hearts. 

Liza Halley works as an elementary school Library Teacher. Liza helped establish the Poet Laureate position in her hometown of Arlington, MA. She is the co-founder of Write Around Portland, a nonprofit based in Portland, OR that amplifies voices and builds community through our writing workshops, literary programming, books, and readings.She loves to build community through the written word, be it through poetry, zines, or comics. She has been published by Braided Way Magazine: Faces and Voices of Spiritual Practice.

In aid of the restoration of the reredos

An austere island    this church                
its romanesque escarpment    
set solid among 
stone scattered homes        it is

the hub      summer holds the door
and inside    whitewashed walls mask 
centuries carrying the vault       frame 
the cracked and blackened reredos 

hushed greetings     settling on benches
a small frail lady quilted in cardigans  
is ushered forward to her spot 
a cushion placed on worn-shined wood

she turns    shyly remembers the war
the children in our house back then
      says that now she is a stranger here
and smiles

standing   facing us    silver-maned    
pale faces poised on white shirts and dresses
closeness bracing tired bodies      
      one    needs to sit

a few words to begin      the conductor 
gently serries their rank       gives the note
    voices     some quavering   
some struggling to rise

all      ring their gift      sing    the mass       
the requiem      the partisan’s poem in Occitan
pause      and listen with us      
enchanted       to the pavane

Jane Angué lives in the foothills of the Cévennes and teaches English Language and Literature. She contributes in French and English to print and online journals such as Amethyst Review, Erbacce, morphrog, The High Window, Traversées and Arpa. A pamphlet, des fleurs pour Bach, was published in 2019 (Editions Encres Vives). A collection of poems, Fruit, leaf and flesh, was published in 2023 by Erbacce Press.

Prevent: archaic (of God) act in anticipation of

through all the farm of Hammers prevent me:
	with rain to brim my well
	with a quartz pebble to cool my palm

	with flames to dance my stove
	with whole flesh to my body

	with firm flanks to the cattle
	with pockets of seed to scatter

	with honeycomb in the wall
	with six dots and a crooked line

	with grass swaying the field forenoon and night
	with the sound of your feet as you walk ahead

wear a track up Fitty Hill
	for to obtein primrose
	for to obtein knots of heather
	for to obtein the whole sky, the whole sea

Lydia Harris has made her home in the Orkney island of Westray. Her second full collection Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World was published by Blue Diode in March.

The Delinquent

I patter through static departments
disrupting the midday, midweek
midwinter lull of the middling weather
and the middling temperature—
What was it the wise man once said?
Surely it was: middling, middling
all is middling.

All is middling except the sun
who, at the moment, is sticking 
his radiant and rebellious finger
up at our concession to middling.
He does so by peeking through
the windows which trace cubicles.

Oh, he would scoff at a middling
word such as “peek,” for he crashes,
he collides, he cartwheels, he cakes,
he clatters a countering cacophony
of lustful luminescence.
This delinquent — yes, I am still
referring to the sun — consumes all 
that middles. 

Caroline Liberatore is a poet, editor, and librarian from Cleveland, Ohio. Her vocations are indicative of what she cares most deeply for: the written word, artistic and intellectual excellence, embodied presence in local communities, commonplace beauty, and redemption as articulated in the tangible, reconciling work of Christ. Caroline serves as Editor at The Clayjar Review and writes regularly on her Substack, Dog-Eared Inquiries.

The Passing of Sacred Geometry          		

My Sunday School teacher drags 
a straight black line across the whiteboard. 
Whips out four more, up, down, across—

A star! I gasp with the other kids.

Five points and five lines, she says,
make the perfect star. Try.

With my fat, gold crayon I scrawl
a curly line. Lavish
another over it and another—
	five lines, 
		eight lines, 
		     nine	
		          too many to count 
	 my hand flourishes
			            a wild
	 	       	       sea-anemone star.

Wrong, the teacher says. Your star
is uncontained. How will you color it in?
She jabs her diagram. Pay attention
to the star God tells you to follow.

	Tonight, I lie on August grass 
in Gregorian cricket-chant, surround-sound. 
Dad called this star-bathing
in the long-ago-here-and-now. 
	Too many to count
		tremor on a black sky drum.
		     Radiance
	     from light-years 
	away pulses
		my eyes, throat, belly, lips—
		     incandesces 		
		 then rushes out 	
	to far-off eyes
		in other worlds
		      through the tips of my curly, white hair.

Dia Calhoun is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm(Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She has won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; published poems and essays in The Writer’s Chronicle;EcoTheo Review; The Nashville Review; MORIA Literary Magazine; Grist Journal; And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, and others. She co-founded readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize, and taught Creative Writing at Seattle University and Stony Brook University. More at diacalhoun.com.

Fife Pilgrim Way

Wynds, ochre Palace,
pilgrims, St Serf, Kentigern,
flowing tides, prayers, God.

Dunfermline Abbey,
processional walk, feast days,
journey to heaven.

Well-earned rest, overnight,
wary of robbers and worse,
bonds with fellow men.

Boggy, uneven ground,
pastures rich, wildflowers, shrubs,
through gates to worship.

Passage of lost time,
broken fragments of footsteps,
memento mori.

Waterless Way, ghosts,
Coal Road, Ancient Stobb Cross,
markers of deep faith.

Mottled canopy,
blue above, murmur of flow,
blackbird song, hunger.

St Andrews, blessings,
wonder of ancient cathedral,
grace, shrine, miracles.

Walkers, chatter, rest,
Margaret, her holy well,
Queensferry her name.

Maggie Mackay’s poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ is in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection. Her second collection The Babel of Human Travel (Impspired.com  ) was published in 2022. She reviews poetry collections at The Friday Poem (https://thefridaypoem.com).  Her best downtime moments  are spent with her greyhound and a malt whisky. Twitter handle is @Bonniedreamer.

Present

If you sit still and quiet in the same place, 
time and time again, you will get to know its 
folks. 

Robin, chaffinch, blackbird, collared dove, 
cleavers, nettle, red campion, blue aconite, 
ant, bee, woodlouse, worm, orange-tipped 
butterfly, tadpole, toad, rock, moss, 
sycamore, blackthorn, willow, ash.

If you are still and quiet often enough, they 
will get on with being a bird or a plant or an 
insect, right up close to you. Right up close 
so you can see their eyes, their feathers, their 
petals --

their tiny, ordinary, intricate beauty.

Julie Leoni lives on the Welsh Borders where she teaches yoga, swims in the river at the bottom of her garden and raises raspberries, rhubarb and her children. In 2024 she was announced the winner of the Bournemouth Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Cinnamon New Voices Award, and again for their pamphlet award, the Mslexia Poetry award, and the Fish memoir prize. Her first collection of poems Farmotherlands will be published by Hedgehog Press in Spring 2025. Meanwhile she blogs and runs family retreats in community settings. Her PhD means that she gets to teach interesting courses at a number of universities and schools. She is also the author of three non-fiction books which can be found at www.julieleoni.com.

Before
 
the sun slid around the house
light on window frame 
the dresser
the side of the cross
 
she looked down
for the umpteenth time
but could not see
for tears
 
he picked up his pen 
but the words slurred 
on the paper
as if in a dream
 
she fed him a spoonful
movements mechanical
from some place better 
than her heart
 
he could not speak
warmed her with
his smiling eyes
sun slipping by
 
finding no words
she looked through the window
at moonlit trees
indistinct but beautiful

Jane Keenan has been writing poems since the age of six, and has already contributed to Amethyst Review and All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich. She met Susan Brice and Viv Longley on the Open University’s MA course in creative writing. In 2022 the three friends published Daughters of Thyme.  (www.dotipress.com) and are now compiling a sister volume, Home Thyme. Jane lives in the Scottish Borders with her beautiful dog, Wellington.