Monthly Archives: April 2025

A Thousand Hallelujahs

I saw a man in the grocery store who had a black smudge in the center of his forehead. A woman passing him in the canned goods aisle stopped to tell him about the dirt on his face. As she gestured to his forehead with a swiping motion, he erupted in an angry outburst that sent us both rocking backwards on our heels.

“It’s Ash Wednesday, heathen! Get some religion!” Everyone froze and watched him stomp away, his back rounded like a cat, his bent neck wagging back and forth like a parent scolding a disobedient child.

Thirty years later as I stand in the church’s opulent sanctuary, I remember the look of scorned shame on that woman’s face. I didn’t console her. I offered no retort, no comfort, no relief. I wanted to, but I had no way to process what had just happened. I wasn’t even sure I knew what the word “heathen” meant. But I was fairly sure I was one of them. Her shame was my shame.

Now, as I hold the bell in my right hand and use the left hand to hold the hymnal, I think about the candlelight ceremony forty days ago when the Lent season began on Ash Wednesday. The pastor had instructed us to write on a piece of paper something we wanted to give to God, some sin that haunted us that we would crumple in our fists and burn in the large crucible at the altar. One by one, we walked forward, opening our fists and dropping our sins into the flames, watching the smoke rise as they burned. We solemnly waited for the elders to dip their thumbs into the ash, making the sign of the cross on our foreheads. I wasn’t sure if it was the smell of lighter fluid or the sign of repentance on my forehead that made me lightheaded as I returned to my seat empty handed. Had I really let go of bitterness that easily? Was my struggle with pride and selfishness so abruptly reduced to ashes?

For the next forty days, I fasted from movies and sugar as I was instructed to remember Jesus’ fasting in the desert, his resisting Satan’s temptation. But truthfully, it wasn’t hard for me to live with such discipline because for decades, Anorexia had taught me to restrict everything good in life. No one was more disciplined than me about the rule of not saying “Alleluia” during Lent. I made a Lent-approved playlist that included only Alleluia-free songs. Fasting the use of the word was supposed to intensify its meaning and remind us that an incredible joy awaits us in heaven.

The man in the grocery store would certainly be impressed with my determination, my steadfast commitment to the rules.

On Easter morning, the choir sang the Hallelujah chorus. A thousand bells rang each time the blessed word was sung. In every hand, young and old, students and lawyers and construction workers and moms, a bell became a powerful weapon against despair, and we wielded their power like only the forgiven can.

Nothing prepared me for the feelings that washed over me like a baptismal wave, the unrestrained joy ofanticipating the collective ringing of bells and the sound of a thousand hallelujahs pouring out of grateful hearts, swelling and rising to the rafters.

I was not prepared to feel the depth of emotion that tackles me, leaving me speechless with mascara stinging my eyes and staining my cheeks. I have never experienced anything like it before. But then, I’ve never been a Presbyterian during the penitential season of Lent either.

Part of me always understood it was never about the ashes, the playlists, or the bells. But it sure felt good to approach God from such lofty heights. I mean, the alternative was humbling myself to see the weakness of my humanity in the presence of holiness. I was not quite ready for that. Until I heard the bells.

I think about the woman in the grocery store often. I hope she knows how deep and how wide God’s unfailing love for her is, and how sorry I am that I didn’t know to tell her. I think about that man in the grocery store often. I hope he knows how deep and how wide God’s unfailing love for him is, and how sorry I am that I didn’t know to tell him.

Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia. Pushcart nominee 2025. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Does It Have Pockets, Cleaver Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Cool Beans Lit, and others. Read her work at http://www.tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.

Our Lady of the Ridge

I First meeting

In a forest of undoing, a maple grew and grew for 80 years or more, gracefully pregnant above a west-facing slope; she is only an upright trunk now, still in elegant skirts with her sweet swayback and tender protruding belly swollen from years of growing up within gravity’s pull on this steep and holy ridge. Three parts of her, each thick as a mature tree, once met and extended from her neck. Now they lie behind, below, beside, where they collapsed on a terribly windy night with only stumps for arms that rest fingerless of extending leaf or bud. Redwing blackbirds flock to discuss their spring dissemination; saplings crowd her remains while animal prints approach her body from below. She is empty, hollow, losing her skin. All this personification, all this chronicling of undoing! The blackbirds quiet and begin again, cranes saw sound into the ground from above, robins interject a melody. I take care and walk on with my stick.

II Return  

Drawn back, I rest on one of her three children—no, these trunk-like limbs were part of her, but aren’t they? Our children? Mine, themselves graying and sustaining me; hers, sprouting mushrooms, growing moss. From this angle, our maple matriarch appears to be looking down the ridge, a large gnarl at her trunk top, a protuberance—her head hanging, an old woman with one remaining limb extending blessing, calling out for what it is worth, for all she is worth. Am I projecting? Rain condenses drops of cool humidity, a distant red squirrel clucks the seconds in the maple grove, the maple graveyard. Always before, I sought the oldest living tree, but this substantive specter with graceful rooted skirts, pregnant swayback belly, craggy open back, crone’s head, and outstretched arm is speaking to me about how lives move on and on and on with nowhere to go and always somewhere to be.

III Your aspirant

Mosquitos hum their high-pitched hymn. I am back sitting below, this time on your south side upon your two-pronged daughter with her fungi frill. I see perforations in your bark, fresh pileated woodpecker holes bleeding sawdust on your skirts, and a high-placed umbilicus, the scarred site of a lost limb—no, an eye, a portal into fathomless black darkness. I allow myself to be seen and drawn in. Another hole, two-thirds moon, larger than any other and open to the sky. I’m certain this is your heart, the organic curve, a bark circle halved, concave, radiant unstained glassless green light beyond. I aspire to such a transparent heart. I have become your aspirant. I sit that you may see me and my tangled 70 years with your elephantine eye. I sit with you in our patience, yours holding mine. Is this a pastoral poem? Objectifying, fantasizing? No, this is alchemy. You engulf me in your black-eyed, tender gaze. In time, I will head down the ridge inside cicadas’ waves of rattle and through the web of humid haze to the cabin, car, highway, and town, but I’ll remain in your velvety black line of sight with the breath of air and a shaft of green light in the cave of my heart.

Susan Mary Freiss writes poetry because she hears many things in listening to everyday and pervasive silence. When she records what she hears and listens for more, she learns. She is a mother, grandmother, gardener, teacher, and activist in Madison, Wisconsin. Her poem “Below and Beyond War” is posted on the Madison Vets for Peace website.

When a Child Asks His Grandmother a Simple Question

The boy asks me what my favorite color is
and his mother tells him I like black
because it represents death,
which he cannot comprehend.
But no—I love much more 
than the absence of color,
The absence of light
showcases pinprick shimmers
only visible when the sun flees
or we flee from it. This is why 
I thrill in the gift of black, for all 
that would be obscured without it, 
like the face of God in the star Regulus, 
divinity held in a telescope
a boy’s hand is too small to hold.

Claudia M. Stanek’s work has been turned into a libretto, been part of an art exhibition, and been translated into Polish. She is the author of the chapbooks Language You Refuse to Learn (BHP, 2014) and Beneath Occluded Shine (FLP, 2025). Her poems appear in Susurrus, The Windhover, Cutleaf, Ekstasis, Solum, and Book of Matches. Claudia spent a Writer’s Residency in Bialystok, Poland. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. After a lifetime in the frozen tundra of Western New York, Claudia now lives in East Tennessee with her elderly dogs, where she also rescues the occasional overheated hummingbird.

In the Shadow of Eternity

Their twigs shall be broken off untimely…
		Wisdom 4:5


Time, she said, is more accordion 
Than tree. Its bellows expand,
Compress, according to whimsical
Tripping, tapping squeezebox
Rhythms. Riffs, played well 
Or poorly. Who’s to say? 
Then closing up. Resuming 
A black box aura of mystery. 
Unlike your average tree, with
Its seasonal moods, its frequent 
Periods of death-like pause. How,
When you cut it down, there
On its trunk, easy to see, 
It was marking time all the while,
The way we like, linear,
In a roundabout kind of way. 

Maryanne Hannan has published poetry in both All Shall Be Well: A poetry anthology for Julian of Norwich and Thin Places & Sacred Spaces. A resident of upstate New York, USA, she is the author of Rocking Like it’s all Intermezzo: 21st Century Responsorials.

A Window Shalt Thou Make to the Ark
(From Genesis 6:16)

First days, and out our one window, water whipped, 
the twisting brawn of sycamore scrawls its gray-white grief 
across the red alluvium of sky; the sky turns gully, 
gravid green, pounding into blear spires of black:  
pines stripped bare, tired verticals we have to trust 
but know not if they’ll snap and smash us. Or, 
if we’ll smash them, or — for this one hour, at least — 
we’ll be hurled unharmed beyond. Housed hollow, 
how we pitch and roll, crash and groan. And lumber on. 
No — we bob. We’re meager, mini; the horned ones, 
snorting ones — even they go flying tiny with us 
through a sea that’s all around, within, on top of, one with 
this brilliant covenantal square of writhing sky.

Kelli Logan Rush lives in her native city of Winston-Salem, N.C., where she worked in the corporate world as a writer and web manager for the tobacco industry. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, Plainsongs, The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Delta Review and Third Street Writers, among others. Her interests include local music, home and garden, atomic-era style and U.S. East Coast travel. She has an MA in European history.

Humming a Blessing

This blur of a blessing darts
left, right, up, down,
an iridescent gyroscope 
hungry for nectar.
It hovers, adjusts pitch and yaw,
then divebombs you in a rufous
dervish of feathers reflecting 
turquoise motes of sunlight.

For a frenetic breath it perches,
dips its slender straw once, 
twice, three times, gulping 
syrupy tincture before 
accelerating into aspen tops.

When it returns, it comes not
single spies but in battalions,
dozens of topaz, sapphire, ruby, 
emerald blessings that encircle
you with trills of wonder, 
a glissando of glory that
fills you even as they 
drain you dry.

Amy Nemecek is the author of The Language of the Birds (Paraclete Press, 2022), which was awarded the Paraclete Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in Presence, Whale Road Review, Windhover, and Last Leaves. She enjoys taking long walks in nature, preferably near a creek or river.

The pink years

For decades I’d watch you
with window eyes, through 
branches of blue birds and 
hailstorms at high noon, when
I feared you'd root up just like
Dorothy's house, from the same
earth that held you. This, as
I starred in my own melodrama...
the pink years, the lapsed years and
years marking deep in the marrow 
believing that you felt me too
in the curve of your cradling bough.

When not writing poetry, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting with macrame. She volunteers in animal rescue tending to cat colonies in the neighborhood. She walks with a birding group on weekends. Living by a beach town, is inspiration for her art and poetry. Some of her poems have appeared in Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Amethyst Review, The Rye Whiskey Review. Her latest collection is Ten random wrens, published by Maverick Duck Press.

Sunday Afternoon 


I walk into the thrift store 
looking for immortality. 

As always, I find it 
in pieces—				the books:

nooked and crammed, alien or Proustian 
or ringing tiny bells to mark memories 

of distant doors—something I’ve heard of, 
something I should know—something

worth knowing.  Speaking in titles
as the fluorescent light moves

me, wandering across every color of spine.
Shelved skeletons in their paper shrouds, 

offering my new
original hunger— 			to know: 

which is always to want more. 
That’s why I’m here, where I can collect

myself—past and future memories, 
a few dollars each at most—I know I can’t afford 

my whole self at anything like 
full price; these I can gather cheap and leave 

precious— 				postmortem: 
Pompeii-perfect.  

I’m here, Sunday after Sunday, because I know 
I will not live forever. Not in the way 

I was promised as a child.  
Instead, by this ritual, I find my mind

made manifest— 			re-incarnate: 
caro verbum.  

The soft parts and skins transmute 
into papers full of psalms, the meated bones 

into offerings. All this knowing 
to burn through, to breathe in, to breathe 

into.  Devouring and jealous, I end
only knowing it’s never enough 

and always
too much— 				but broken:

pieces small enough to hold 
in my hand, small enough to hand

to my children—			here, my loves:
these are pieces of me. 

These are pieces of the world 
worth loving:				Take, eat.

Charisse Stephens is a poet and teacher with an MA in English from the University of California – Berkeley. She has a deep fascination for science, religion, history, and the places they intersect. Her work has been published in literary journals including SLANT, Neologism, and Irreantum. She currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with her partner, two kids, and dog Polly.

Ancient Ground 
 	 
I step through and stumble
on the tumbled rocks, the lichen
that lines the narrow footpath
between ancient boundary walls.

I caress the old stones, the shapes.
This one was a millstone,
that a threshold, there a food trough.
And then they were a wall.

And then rubble in a field
and again a wall. Today shaded
by oaks, they shift under my feet.
Wall, rubble, millstone; thresholds all.

Spy the ruin behind the iron fence -
that is to say, behind the iron
that was a bed frame then
a grape trellis then a gate.

Who can say what is a ruin
in a land that knows
how to use everything forever?
Tiny orchids bloom between the rocks.

Iron and stone were my ancestors too.
Strong enough to weather, to change,
to move aside when oaks
and orchids need a place to root.

I am the offspring of bed frames,
of millstones and rubble and walls.
Shall I become next a gate?
Or a trellis, threshold or path?

Franny Bryant-Scott is a Canadian poet, artist, art therapist, and interfaith spiritual companion living on the ancient land of Crete, Greece. Her writing is an attempt to meet, grapple with, and embrace her experiences as a human being living in a more-than-human world. Ever since she created objects and rituals of remembrance for wild birds and family pets as a small child, the transformative power of the arts to hold both the beauty and suffering in our lives has been at the core of all of her work.

Caedmon, a shepherd at the abbey, writes a poem

He fell asleep hard by. He was simple 
and lived among the animals,
was not given to speech except
to call his herd and settle them
before laying in the hay.

Fell asleep hard by,
because it was the time when
drinking started and songs were
improvised, and in terror
he would excuse himself
to find solace with the animals
who asked nothing.
Then, peaceful sleep would come.

Fell asleep hard by,
after answering the dream
that set him on fire,
his tongue forming sounds
never before shaped by him,
music to the locals,
holy prayer to the ears of the
abbess, and even the sheep
followed after, hearing
for the first time
sacred poetry.

William Ross is a Canadian writer and visual artist living in Toronto. His poems have appeared in Rattle, The New Quarterly, Humana Obscura, Bicoastal Review, The Hooghly Review, Underscore Magazine, Amethyst Review, Bindweed Magazine Anthology, Topical Poetry, Heavy Feather Review, Passionfruit Review, and others.