Monthly Archives: September 2024

Hail Storm

A storm just shuddered over us
scattering icy pearls over everything
the trees and their mossy coats 
make bowls and cups to collect 
the tiny delicate pellets of wildness. 
How tender they are. 
How brave. 
The sun prepares to take them back. 
They will be gone soon, not dead, 
but breath for ravens and frogs 
singing in the aftermath. 
Now the forest is steaming and stretching 
out in front of me. Proud of herself. 
I could die right here and become 
breath and fire, 
just like the ice. 

Sharon RC Lee has been writing poetry and prose since she was young. For the last twenty years she has been focused on raising her kids and on her career as a psychologist and therapist trainer in Portland, Oregon. Now on sabbatical, she is working on a memoir as well as essays and poetry. She has an essay that was published in Hip Mama, and she has written two chapters for a book edited by Ken Hardy that will be published next year.

Michaelmas


September equinox, below the surface.
The tunnel, the burrow, and buried, yet—
a holy day: Michaelmas,
with slight blade of light
Appears, bracing and recovered
from some remembered book.

J E Shipley is a new writer from the East Midlands of England. She is working on her first poetry collection. Contact: js.bookbench@gmail.com

Wonder      

I sit on black lava rock
as shadows gather in the sharp folds of the cliff
already moving on
endless rows of waves
rise and dissolve before me
albatross
wheel and skim
in effortless, ancient circles
and I weep for how I was back then
before I knew you
how brittle
unyielding to wonder
to this

Jody Reis Johnson is an emerging poet from St. Paul, Minnesota, whose writing grows out of a practice of silence. Her essays on spirituality and contemporary social issues appear in a variety of periodicals including Bearings and Middlebury Magazine. Jody is a retired mental health professional who now teaches contemplative spirituality and practice, facilitates retreats, and provides spiritual guidance to individuals. She enjoys travel, cooking, and surfing with her grandchildren during winters in Hawaii.

The Door

I’ve spent too many days
curled away from God,
squeezing my pillow tight.

Why are we most afraid
of the one road that can save us?
Carry us beyond hope of returning.

I guess that’s a question
that answers itself. One day
I will be filed away as ashes.

We cannot live beyond our time.
When that deep horn wails for us from afar,
there’s no refusing its call.

Why not lay my questions,
self-doubt and grudges to rest?
Why not wake to the soft miracle
of the everyday?

Soon I will realize that love
has caught me in a corner.
There is a bright white door.
I see myself
reaching for the handle.
 

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.

The Vanity of Faith

The vanity of faith
in a universe measured 
by light years
black holes
by infinite, shapeshifting views.

Easy to lose oneself in such a place.

Sing, if you must,
a song of sweet fears
your hallelujahs dissolving
as snowflakes on tongue.
Sing of broken cathedrals.
My hand on the sleeve of 
your coat hiding the rift 
in our gratitude.

Beware the distances yet crossed.
The stuttered flight,
path petered out.
Fix on stars in their sapphire wake.
The snake, bright and 
sinless in the grass.

Ulrica Hume is the author of An Uncertain Age, a spiritual mystery novel, and House of Miracles, a collection of stories, one of which was selected by PEN and broadcast on NPR. Her work appears online (EcoTheo, RIC Journal, Short Édition, etc.), in literary journals (Firmament), and in anthologies. She is a labyrinth guide.

Rumination


The shadows of the roadside trees
broaden in the late September morning,

cloud shapes lingering over
Monument Mountain disappear,

light wind stirs the hedge	
that borders the rail of the veranda

to further deepen the quiet.
Cloud-watching, you say, “Look,

how they move apart ever so slowly,”
gesticulating with a hand

to the bands of cirrus that
only drift farther across the light blue sky,

resembling ocean waves 
imprinted upon a shore 

of imagination.  Things evolve
in constant disappearance:

the contrail above the mountain,
the small plane’s engine droning

into far distance, your memory now
from one moment to the next,

like silence filling the descending scale
of our lives where music was once heard

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. Recent essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Asymptote (Taiwan), Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, Healing Muse: Center for Bioethics & Humanities La Piccioletta Barca (U.K.), Pensive: A Journal of Global Spirituality & the Arts, Tipton Poetry Review, Poetry London, and Your Impossible Voice. Shanti Arts published his translation of L’Allegria, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s first iconic book, in August 2023. He will be featured writer in the Spring 2025 issue of Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation that will highlight several of his translations from the Spanish of Roberto Juarroz.

Finishing Line Press will be publishing his book, If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from The Book of Hours, in 2025.

The Temple of Hera
    ~ at Agrigento

The temple does not stand,
but seems to float,
pressing lightly down.

And we, like those gone,
are thinking of the sheer
mathematics of it all --
the almost invisible curves
to fool the quick eye
at a distance or near.

Illusion is in service
to a pure, godly reason --
sacredness in paraphrase --
lets us see what is real.

And here we merge with
the polyglot tourists
stumbling over rock
polished by myriad feet
to gaze on her absence.
But I can feel sharply
the peacock talons pierce
my irregularly beating
heart. 

Royal Rhodes is a poet and retired educator who was trained in the Classics. His poems have appeared in numerous journals in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.  He lives in a small village in rural Ohio, surrounded by Amish farms and sheep pastures.

Sometimes I fall

through 
the notes
of a song

like light
through 
a window

at this
bright peace
and thirst

this
alive
and fragile

cruel
and 
deep

beauty
so good
I believe

in a place 
I can’t quite
get to

somewhere
I already 
am

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Away (Finishing Line Press, 2023).  Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in publications such as Blue Heron Review, EcoTheo Review, Wild Roof Journal, and others.  Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun or visit her website: https://jennawysongfilbrun.wixsite.com/poetry.

Askesis in the Wild

Luke 1

At first, it seemed the Seraph’s punishment:
tongue turned to silt, to sand, to drought-dry bed,
once living words etched in a fossil stream,
seeming extinction in this wilderness
where winds licked joints of bone with neither whine
nor throaty groan. 
                   The incense turned to ash. 

But wallowing in ash he had a dream
of green shoots in cracked dirt, reminding sign
this silence nourished voice, that it was sent   
to teach him not to question but to bless, 
askesis through long desert months, then flash 
and flooding flow:
      		    “His name is John,” he said.
 

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.

Featured photograph: Bulto of Santo Nino de Atocha by Felix Lopez – Richard L. Rieckenberg

In Santo Niño de Atocha Chapel, Chimayo, New Mexico

I don’t know what to think 
of the hundreds of pairs of tiny shoes 
attached to the chapel walls. I wonder
if they might have belonged to babies 
who were sick or who had died, left there
by bereaved parents and other family members. 
Later I learn that people offer shoes to Santo Niño, 
who walks everywhere on foot to help the suffering. 
Often it’s the people’s own children who need healing. 
The air in the chapel is soft and full of silence 
that follows prayer, or weeping. Sunlight leans
bright against the stained glass windows, listening. 
 

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner) The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared inRedbook, The Sun, SWWIM Every Day, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Cultural Daily, and many other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Northern Colorado.