Monthly Archives: May 2025

The Alto Takes Her Solo
 
At church this cold morning, the choir
sings selections from Handel’s Messiah.
 
With a voice deep as Earth, the bass
sounds like the reason men were created.
 
The strong, far-reaching sopranos sound
closest to God.
 
From my seat near the front I can see
that when it’s the alto’s turn
 
there’s a pause, as she and the conductor
lock eyes in a warm gaze they hold
 
until he makes a move that releases them
and she begins.
 
Recently returned from the country
of the ill, the alto has tinted her hair
 
a subtle but triumphant purple.
Her body, a temple assaulted
 
but not destroyed, still stands
and her singing is not loud but true
 
like the sound of someone praying.

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in a wide range of journals, including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Pedestal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She has a collection from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions (spring 2025), and lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, with whom she works in a company attempting to slow the rate of global warming.

Feeling Good

The sky never alone, even on a cloudless day,
heron, swallows, and cormorants
pass around me. The pace of my paddle
is more in time with the slow rhythm of
the heron than the frantic flight of
the swallows, but as Nina Simone
reminds me, my heart is with them,
and with the few leaves that drift on by
in the early morning summer sun,
still low in the sky and glinting off
the ripples of my wake.

Each season has its rewards,
from blossoms on the trees in spring
to the dragonfly resting on the bow of
my kayak, to the colors of autumn, 
to the sheen of ice clinging to
the river shore in late winter,
each season offering the peace of
a new dawn, each new day
a reason to feel good
about what life has to offer.

My strokes are slow and sure with a horn
that plays like a slow march, as if to keep
Nina grounded, her joy likely to carry her
away to the stars. Strings and piano
move in to reflect that joy, with the horn
stepping in again, underlying her words
as if to give weight to such a peaceful feeling.
As her voice trails off, I continue 
to paddle along the shore, feeling good.

Ken Gierke is retired and writes primarily in free verse and haiku. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as Poetry Breakfast, Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, Silver Birch Press, Trailer Park Quarterly, Rusty Truck, The Gasconade Review, and River Dog Zine. His poetry collections, Glass Awash in 2022 and Heron Spirit in 2024, were published by Spartan Press. His poem, ‘Driving Off, Minor’, has been nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. His website: https://rivrvlogr.com

Apple

red and gold
variegated globe

slice in half
draw quarters

dip in salt
bitter and sweet

Fay L. Loomis leads a quiet life in the woods in Kerhonkson, New York. Member of the Stone Ridge Library Writers and the Rat’s Ass Review Workshop, her poetry and prose appear in numerous publications, including five poetry anthologies. Sunlit Wildness (Origami Poems Project, 2024) is her first chapbook. Fay is a nominee for the 2024 Pushcart Prize.

Ars Poetica
(with reference to Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, translated by Wendy
Doniger O’Flaherty) 

How clever to make of ourselves a constellation 
in a milky way, between the spirals packed with nebulae, 
other galaxies, dwarf stars and super novas, moving 
in light years against the smooth round belly of infinity. Listen,

the fetal Doppler sounds like waves. Remember dusk on the beach,
just you and the tide, the sounds of gentle crashing, the whoosh 
of foam and water at your feet? A way home, even suggested
in the Vedic creation hymn, where the poet arrives before the gods.

Taste the salty buoyancy of our place in the universe.
We did not know dark or light, we did not know the waves 
that lured us, lulled us, the matching pulses of life blood 
through the tiniest veins, pumping from the center

where expansion began, the space occupied with valves 
and ventricles, music of the spheres, heart of the poet.

Michelle Holland, Poet-in-Residence for Santa Fe Girls School and treasurer of NM Literary Arts, has lived in Chimayo, NM for over 25 years. Her poems can be found in literary journals, in print, online, and anthologized, most recently in the 2023 New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, UNM Press, and The Common Language Project: Ascent. She has two book-length collections of poetry, Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press, and The Sound a Raven Makes, Tres Chicas Press, which won the New Mexico Book Award.

Pax di Assisi 


In the Basilica,
I feel Christed—
as I watch a dove 
encircling above
San Francesco,
winging prayers 
holy heavenward,
just like his gaze
in this thin place 
where serenity 
settles upon me,
natural and pure
as morning mist 
on hills of home.

The hush here 
respires kindness—
inhale, exhale—
the breath a bridge
‘twixt earth and sky,
and faith forges
a soundless space, 
a moment to rest 
beyond doctrines,
the only hymn a hum 
of cleansing peace, 
intoning a grace
I’ll carry outside. 

Danita Dodson is an educator, literary scholar, and the author of three poetry collections, Trailing the Azimuth (2021), The Medicine Woods (2022), and Between Gone and Everlasting (2024) all published by Wipf and Stock. She is also the coeditor of Teachers Teaching Nonviolence (2020). Dodson’s poems have appeared in Salvation South, Critique, Tennessee Voices, Amethyst Review, Women Speak Anthology, Thin Places and Sacred Spaces, and elsewhere. She is a native of the Cumberland Gap region of East Tennessee, where she hikes and explores local history connected to the wilderness. For more, visit www.danitadodson.com.

Homecoming

Through cirrus clouds spread thin as stretched cotton
glued to paper for woolfell on lost sheep 
in Sunday school, terrain unforgotten:
the Columbia, wild, dark, and deep,
strewn like scrapped satin between strips of pine;
the old house on the hill off the highway;
the water-logged hills that fed my bloodline
where kin now rest in a womb of decay; 
the dam, salmon, paper mill, evergreens
all ancient guardians, once at odds, nod
to acknowledge a homecoming of grief
through layers of atmosphere, holy sod,
and troubled time.
                                         I step out into air 
thin as paper, strands of woolfell and prayer.

Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis was born and raised between the mountains and ocean in the Pacific Northwest but now writes from the Ohio River Valley. Her work has been published in Dappled Things and Salamander.

Birdsong

The way their song lifts your spirits
in the spring when a convocation
of birds returns to meadows 
and fields they favor, trees
they seem to know. Although
it’s hard to find them by sound alone,
surveying as you go
trying to echolocate
the cheeps and chirps, tweets
and whistles, clicks 
and squawks,
the piercing cries of hawks,
guttural caw of crows.
You search for splashes of color:
cardinal red, oriole orange,
goldfinch yellow, hiding 
in the camouflage of leaves.

Ed Meek is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of short stories. His most recent book is High tide. He has had poems in The Paris Review, The Sun, Plume, etc.

Backyard, Mid-May 2

Watch. The plants are coming forward,
Bougainvillea foams with flowers,
Lavender seeps upward slowly,
Orange planets on the rose bush
Burst and seed their stuff through space.
Everything is coming forward.
You can almost see the doorway
Through which each plant makes an entrance,
Come forward from the place of nothing.
Watch as nothing becomes something.
Is this what they called the void?
Who knew it was so creative?
Who knows how it does its work?
Even though you watch it happen
Mystery looks back at you.

Peter Cashorali is a neurodiverse pansy living at the intersection of rivers, farmland and civil war. He practices a contemplative life.

Shadow Theatre

I thought I saw a fly; it was the shadow of a fly
That flitted past a window full of sun
A Doppelgänger buzzing through the corner of my eye
A zero, if the fly should stand for one
Or if the fly was Word, a fiendish pun.

I thought I knew you well; it was your shadow that I knew
You dawdled for a while before the glow
My passion kindled in the night, and, blocking it from view
Replaced it with the shade I came to know.
Desire remained above, and I below.

I thought I worshipped God; that shadow fell beneath the tower
Atop whose roof a golden cross shone bright
A solemn, ancient edifice of ritualistic power
That sometimes came as blessing, sometimes blight
But always blocked whatever made the light.

I thought I found myself; it was a shadow cast by dreams
That intervened between my thought and action.
“I think therefore I am” is not as simple as it seems
For what we think is subject to refraction 
So what we are, a muddled-up redaction.

I think I’ve told the truth; these symbols printed on the page
Have shapes that seem to promise revelation
But really they’re just shadow puppets dancing on a stage.
Their shadows? Those we call “interpretation”.
Such shadows are the gist of all creation.
 

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Spectral Realms, Aphelion, Black Petals, Grim and Gilded, Ekstasis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Emberr, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, The Sirens Call, The Chamber Magazine, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.

Transubstantiation

Past depth, beyond the chemical,
Where collisions sometimes occur,
Awareness embeds particle,
Divinities themselves bestir.

Where collisions sometimes occur,
Here being from being splits off,
Divinities themselves bestir
Awake—they yawn, they stretch, they cough.

Here being from being splits off,
Reflecting essential matter.
Awake they yawn, they stretch, they cough,
They ripen into their nature.

Reflecting essential matter,
These hallowed ur-forces expand.
They ripen into their nature
In this difficult wonderland.

These hallowed ur-forces expand,
Awareness embeds particle,
In this difficult wonderland
Past depth, beyond the chemical.

Dennis Daly has published eleven books of poetry and poetic translations. A number of his translations have recently been published by Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House) in Uyghur Poems, part of Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. Please visit his blog site here: dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.