Monthly Archives: November 2024

webbed worlds 

I.

we called the number on the instruction manual
and they think it's a spider that's been setting off our new smoke alarm
these past few nights,
sending fears into my head and blood pumping into my face
hands shaking with adrenaline
just to have it 
stop. 
suddenly.
always at night. 
the baby didn't wake up--- thank God
(or no, that's a problem?
sounding the alarm is supposed to rouse the village)
certainly I’m not sleeping now. 
this will not be a night for making toast, 
my usual nocturnal calm down balm.
standing in the kitchen,
hungry but not on fire,
I think of when I've dusted a spider's work away 
with a rag and sent them 
scurrying. worrying no doubt. 
off to their corners to destress and try again.
oh, now I see.

II.

the light came in sideways across his face this time
from the street lamp
though he would have preferred 
low campfire glow
"I don't crush bugs as they race
across the wideness of the kitchen floor"
he thought aloud, long legs folded spider style 
around a short camping chair,
"because I have been in expansive places on this planet,
I have been small 
and did not want to be crushed"

III.

in my family, the grandparents
now passed
have become guardian angels, legends.
one of these saints was known for saving spiders
so in his memory, I do too. 
these rituals are an act of remembrance
as much as an act of animal stewardship,
a small candle lit in the vast cathedral of a life once lived.
many of these rescues are not noteworthy---
messy, in fact,
the invisible silk inevitably tangling and twisting,
the dismount out the screen door hurried
and full of apologies. 
one time, though, I had just driven back to Philadelphia,
to a rowhome shared with roommates,
and a white spider danced down between antique mirrors
over the filigreed radiator.
exhausted, distracted, but ever dutiful,
I grabbed a small shopping bag to catch and free this ivory gymnast.
once it was caught I peered into the bag
but the spider was gone.
in its place: a pearl earring I had lost a year ago.

Annie Powell Stone (she/her) likes sad songs and funny movies. Her poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook Hampden Wildlife: Reflections on the Nature of a Baltimore City Neighborhood was published by Bottlecap Press; she has been featured in numerous literary journals. Annie has a Master’s in Education from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Maryland. She lives on the ancestral land of the Piscataway people with her husband and two kiddos in Baltimore City, MD. Read more: anniepowellstone.com

THREE SHELL POEMS


THE NAUTILUS SHELL


Let the eye dim with approach of twilit thought
like the opal veil of the Nautilus Shell
unlocked from its bejeweled case of Glasswork Time.

Press its murmuring to the inner ear:
the muffled mask of sandswept depths
galleons of undisturbed miasmic whorl
oceans of the earth’s crust
darkened pure within its
lampless state of indigo

The light arrives
the casement cracks.
The chambered funnel steals upon my wakeless mind
demanding consecration of my torpid soul.

What need the dust?
The glow within transluminates the coil.



ARCHITECTONICA PERSPECTIVA


I deck myself as in a shroud — in black
to kill the outer joints that stiffen pale
to cut the flow from limb and sharply angled thew
stretched out insensate on a bier.

I summon Death — and I am laced with Goldness
heavy sculpture brown with clay
ochre-stained and gilded, leaden, fixing weight
and centered Standing on the beams of light —
the eyes — held down with aurous coins that say

I am the Sundial.
Granuled Mollusk writ with Incan Scroll,
ablaze and scorched the radiance settles
on the core.



ANGEL-WING

Benediction


Descend
in an Aeolian mode of flight
benign with silver aqua-rustling
silent, voiceless chord
to join me swiftly
with the Godhead.

Wings are clapped,
and in an instant
dust-light sprays the midday blinds
like weightless jewels of opaline
the shrine expanding boundless
centers on the inward gaze.

Author of the debut novel Twelfth House, E.C. Traganas has published in The San Antonio Review, The Society of Classical Poets, The Brussels Review, The Penwood Review, Dark Winter Literary Magazine, Agape Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Story Sanctum, Confetti Magazine and countless other journals. Hailed as ‘an artfully created masterpiece’ and a ‘must-read’ by The US Review of Books, her  work of haiku & short poetry, Shaded Pergola, features her original illustrations. A Juilliard trained concert pianist & composer by profession, E.C. Traganas is the founder/director of Woodside Writers, a literary forum based in New York City. www.elenitraganas.com

The Mulberry Branch

This branch, now low enough to touch, in leaf,
come winter will sway out of reach above.
This simple fact makes no call on belief,
or, if it does, come out, reach up a glove
in January, see if you can reach
a single twig you touched here in July.
But neither of us came to hear, or preach.
The weather beckoned us; the cloudless sky,
the breeze that nudged us to the riverside
to walk awhile in sun and dappled shade.
Here where the river bends and stretches wide
and shallow, you might see a heron wade,
then, seeming not to notice you, to rise,
blue blending blue into its blue disguise.

Dan Campion’s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review. He is the author of A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024), and the monograph Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press, 1995). He is a coeditor of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press, 1981; 2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2019). His poetry has appeared in Able Muse, Light, Measure, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Shenandoah, THINK, and many other journals.

Some Rooms are Prayers

The times they wanted me 
to think their thoughts
and I went on thinking 
mine. 

The times they expected me
to hear, to see, to remember 
a certain way, and I tried, 
but couldn’t.

Those times were rooms, 
where people lived 
and worked 
and worried, 
and loved and died. 

I am surprised sometimes
to hear late-at-night voices 
through open windows 
and realize those rooms 
are still out there. 
Voices carry 
answers to questions posed 
long ago, to prayers spoken
 – and not spoken – 
in those rooms. 
‘Let us befriend fear that we 
may know what it really is,’ 
they say. And I reply,  
‘Let us find the rooms that want us, 
and learn to live in them for a while.’

Some rooms are rivers, 
winding a way. Some rooms
are repositories, keepers of secrets. 
Some rooms are circles,
always returning.  
Some are sacred sanctuaries,
others stops in stations. 
Some rooms are prayers,
some prayers are rooms. 
No room is ours.

James Lilliefors is a poet, journalist, and novelist, whose writing has appeared in Door is a Jar, Salvation South, 3 Elements Review, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald and elsewhere. His first collection of poetry will be published by Finishing Line Press. He’s a former writing fellow at the University of Virginia, and now lives in Florida. 

Spiritual Mending (To Emily D)

Daughter, 
	reach into thy heart—
		a poet’s sewing kit—

and using
	but the primal needle
		of humble language

and the liquid
	thread of grace, fix
		your doubts and fears.

Words
	overflow
		your mending box,

the daily pleas
	and psalms
		and silent prayers.

In seclusion,

devote
	deep thoughts
		to what’s felt inside.  

Be not
	uneasy
		with disbelief—

waiting for
	answers, we 

		all dwell in Possibility.

Alison Jennings is a Seattle-based poet who worked as a journalist and accountant and taught English and math in public schools before returning to her first love, poetry.  Since then, she has had a mini-chapbook and over 100 other poems published internationally in numerous journals, including Amethyst Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea, Mslexia, Poetic Sun, Red Door, Society of Classical Poets, Sonic Boom, Stone Poetry, and The Raw Art Review.  She has also won 3^rd Place/Honorable Mention or been a semi-finalist in several contests.  For more details and links to her published poems, visit her website at https://sites.google.com/view/airandfirepoet/home.  

Glory 
	After Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory for the golden gingko leaves
that fan out on the sidewalk
in autumn, like open hearts 
after their silent fall, 
no breast-beating, 
teaching us how to let go, 
how to die with grace. 

Glory to autumn, the burning glow
it gives the world, its pink / orange
sunsets, and 
the sepia heads of dried 
rhododendron, the ones that blow
along the macadam like tumbleweed. 

Glory to autumn’s leaving, the winter
it brings when darkness comes early
and we cozen ourselves in fleece robes
and listen to the wind, what it reveals, 
what it keeps to itself. 

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published in the New York Times (Lives). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her short stories and poetry have been published in The MacGuffin, Euphony, the Iowa Review, and many more. Her poetry collection, Death, Please Wait was published by Turtle Box Press in 2023. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension. http://rochellejshapiro.com @rjshapiro

Creation


Crows caw at full volume,
one contingent in the apple tree
west of the house,
another in the maple to the east,
loud enough so that Great-Uncle Ernest,
the patriarch of the flock, 
who everyone knows dropped 
his hearing aids when flying low
over the Connecticut River last week,
can hear what they are saying. 
The crow-versations go on for long
interminable minutes,
rending the morning air,
ripping it to shreds.

And then the birds are gone
as abruptly as they arrived,
following Ernest to a new location,
leaving the morning as silent
and still as the day She created it,
before unwittingly giving
voice to these, Her winged creatures.

Mary Ellen Shaughan is a native Iowan who now lives in Western Massachusetts. Her  poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. Her first volume of poetry, Home Grown, is available on Amazon.

ordinary

you lay 
     down,
    swirl your 
     fingertips 
        in the cool 
          stream— 
       surrounded 
       by water,
          you want 
              to dissolve 
     into droplets, 
         melt into 
         brilliant sun, 
            diamonds in a 
               stream— 
               yet you 
                 stay 
               clay,
         heavy,
           waterlogged,
                     waiting for 
                    the flame 
                 that will 
                 turn the 
                wet dirt 
                    into a 
                  vessel 
                     of light 

            the moon 
           is hiding, 
            the dark
                 howls—
                   you have to 
                       quiet your 
                         own thrumming
	     quaver to 
                            hear the 
                            whispers 

                           i am here 
                           too 
                   i reside not 
                      only in 
                        the stars
                            or 
       the magic 
                of blossoms
                  or the 
                  dance of 
                  letters swirled 
                     into gold 

                i am here too 
         among the 
            ordinary—
          in the baked clay 
                that tastes 
             bitter as 
               it touches 
          your lips

             i house the 
               unseen 
                miracles 
                  of breath
                  
            come visit 
              me, i'll 
       spread a colorful 
        cloth, welcome 
         you in, welcome 
            you back 
             to your own 
             enchanted self

Diane Roberson Douiyssi is a poet and writer currently living near the earth and peoples that nourish the world in South Dakota in the United States. She’s a lifelong writer who received her B.A. from Grinnell College. Her poems have appeared in Pasque Petals, song of ourself, and World Lives, Prairie Living. She’s founder of Inner Wisdom Wayfinding, where she hosts writing workshops and mentors women who want to tell their stories.

Waves & Particles

If I could come to you uncut.
   If I could speak to you 
   in our first language
   the language of light
With all its teeming
   prisms, motes, 
   sines and cosines
   But I would probably
Have to be dead again
   to speak with
   the mouth of a star.
   At least you would 
Catch what we have been
Trying to get at all along.
 

The lightning-cracked pages of Ed Ruzicka’s third, full-length book of poems, Squalls (Kelsay Books), was released in March. Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle, Canary and many other literary publications. Ed, who is also the president of the Poetry Society of Louisiana, lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge.

It could have been a raindrop
	
Or an undulating echo of a whispered breath
more likely a fertilized ovum
that birth a universe,
not a big bang, after all.

Rippling spirals of creation.
forever reverberating cybernetics
resonating waves beyond human hearing
switching dimensions when observed
transforming into particles of white matter.

Or it may be a quantum spirograph
spinning at the rate of a universal heartbeat
pulsing with Life’s sacred geometry
endlessly out from the center and back again
suspended in the galaxy of fired glass. 



inspired by One Drop by Sheri Cox Whetstine
Kiln-formed Glass
Artwww.glassicdesign.net

Eva McGinnis, PhD has published three books of poetry, the latest Strands of Luminescence: Poetry of the Spirit’s Quest.  Her poignant poems are in several anthologies and magazines as well as on placards in Poetry in the Park in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington for the fourth year in a row.  Eva writes from her heart about her spirituality which she experiences deeply in Nature.