Monthly Archives: July 2025

Rising


A mood as much as a time of morning, 
the amniotic hour before first light 
is more languid than tranquil, like the dark
blue sea all that ever breathed was born from.  

Cowboy coffee simmers in the saucepan. 
The frost-tinged window mirrors back my face
beside a moth that might be dead, and the stars 
that might have died already, so I'm told.

The wind-stirred birches whir with l'heure bleu bird song.  
Never refusing the music they're given,  
they shed their skin until their lives are choirs 
of praise for light that voids the void it leaps from.  

The hour of my death is any hour  
I dare to be reborn, to be suborned 
and let the sleeper drown, the dreamer wake,    
and walk above the waters of what I sense—  

to scry the life that's mirrored in the sky  
as it appears, a fading lone frontier
for minor glories like the morning star,
that bright moth awaiting a greater flame. 

Michael Scottoline lives in Bucharest, Romania.

Come to the Water

On a rainy morning in July,
clouds hung low over the forest 
of spruce and birch trees.
I sat on a log watching and listening
as a clear-water tributary tumbled 
over boulders into the main 
channel of the Nenana River.

I thought how nice it would be to see
a moose or bear amble to shore,
perhaps a lynx. It was early enough 
in the day and we were in wild enough country.
But that was not what came.

I can’t be sure if it arrived on the light
patter of raindrops or on the whisper of a breeze,
but like a mirage, a deep sense of 
Soul not so much appeared, as materialized, 
a creature so elusive, I can count the
number of times I’ve encountered it.

“This is you.”

I grew still as the marrow
of a tree, life surging up from the roots. 
No longer a separate observer of
river, rain, or forest, I was those things. 
Quiet elation, I held my breath in
wonder of wild beings willing
to show themselves, trusting 
if only for a moment, the 
largeness of Love. 

Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan is an author who lives in Alaska. She has published six books of non-fiction, completed a historical novel, and writes poetry when the soul calls for such. Two of her poems were recently accepted for the anthology Alaska Literary Field Guide. Her essay “Crossing the Wild River” appears in Deep Wild Journal: Writing from the Backcountry 2024.

This Abstract Painting


You put down one stroke of a color you love, say alizarin crimson, then pthalo green beside it. They whisper. Hum. Silently nod or sharply turn away from each other. Every stroke’s a gesture in an open-ended conversation you’re a little afraid of. A love affair you end up painting over. Or you scrape down the layers in the manner of a gritty, soulful excavation.

Once you painted while listening to Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas for violin, composed around 1676, rarified and difficult to play in part because of their odd tunings, beautiful in a tortured way, especially the ones about the crucifixion and everything leading up to it.

Mostly you let the twisting, knotted notes sear your brain. Suffering disguised as beauty. Mostly your sins are ones of omission. Old failures of nerve.

Always you run the risk of scraping down too far, down to the board, back to where you began, then where would you be? With scissors, nails, old credit cards, you scrape with the intensity of a woman on the verge of an archeological discovery. Suddenly an old color erupts by happenstance and makes you happy. And then you get out the paint again. It all comes down to this, doesn’t it, the swirl of paint on and under your brush, your fingers feeling the resistance of another form to work with, another life.

Kathleen A Wakefield‘s first book of poetry, Notations on the Visible World (2000), won the 1999 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her second book Grip, Give and Sway was published by Silver Birch Press (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, Blue Line, The Georgia Review, Hubbub, HumanaObscura, Image, One, Poetry, Rattle, River Styx, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and Visions International. She has taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Rochester, as a poet-in-the-schools, and share poetry through public libraries.

Hospice

I am eating an orange 
when the text comes in,
Please say a prayer,
the angels are near.
Oh, I think, dear Nancy.
I imagine her watching
as angels drift and gather 
above her bed,
bright light pours in
through the open window,
and the hum of the monitor 
becomes a hymn.

I say a prayer
and wait for the call.

The orange is sweet,
weeping sticky juice 
into my palm.

Sharon V. Brown is a retired English professor and poet living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. She recently joined the Greenwood Poets Group in Seattle, Washington and has begun honing her craft with the enriched perspective of an older woman. Previous poetry publications include Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place; Lamar University Literary Press, Senior Class: Poems on Aging; Cirque Literary Journal; and Still Points Quarterly.

Living Now

Something entered 
and struck a match 
against my chest wall 
and a fire was lit.

And what had struck 
stayed 
to tend the fire 
that became 
an unfading flame. 

I am living now 
with this constant 
burning
and its widening 
light. 

I am unable now 
to not see 
from inside my heart.

Pernille Bruhn, PhD, is a poet, dancer and heart whisperer calling the Earth her home. A former academic and psychologist, she was impelled to embrace a radically different way of living, being and writing when a brain injury changed her abilities and life trajectory. Today, you will often find her lying on the ground; resting, writing poems by hand, and dreaming of an Earth witnessing a global blossoming of the human heart. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Dawntreader, London Writer’s Salon’s Anthology Vol. 4, and Tvergastein Journal.

Keeper

And if, despite everything, you 
decide to stay in conversation 
with this gut-clench of a world, with 
all that grates and grovels, all 
the shrapnel pocking glass, 

if you buttress your own vertebrae 
in whalebone, masticate through hard-talk 
just to grit your jaw at bombast; if you wedge 
whatever weathered voice you have through 
existential crevices until it echoes oilskin courage 

back to you;  if you open up your mollusk 
softness, let listening ungrist a bit of sand, 
then, friend, know that you will find inside 
yourself a lighthouse, a glow across the dark 
of new moon water, 

a compass, pointing towards the edge 
of what’s unseen. Turn your human quaver 
toward horizon. Know that now you will be 
arrow, be illumination, be a keeper, 
pointing someone home.

Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist and dancer who now finds music in language. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and for Best of the Net in 2023 and 2024, Alison is the host of the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Her work is published or forthcoming in South Dakota Review, SWIMM, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART and The Westchester Review. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorial services, walks in the woods, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

Discernment

Think back:
what has remained?
Who said something 
that rang out,
a bell in your heart,
chiming its sweet
tone, sustaining 
your joy, lifting
you above the grind
and grime of today
into a passable way
forward?

Even if it only moved
in you, and not
in the world, no one,
nothing, can take away
that tone, that toll,
ringing true at your
center.

No matter how many
shifts pass with no
discernible change, 
your days do make
a life, and you too
might be the bell
that calls someone 
else to joy, that echoes
the true timbre of their
soul, that rings in new 
possibility in each 
moment even when 
they all seem 
the same.

Deb Baker lives in New Hampshire and works for a climate justice organization and in a hospital. Since childhood, she has felt connected to her kin in creation, who appear along with her human relatives in many of her poems. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Third Wednesday, Naugatuck River Review, Hawk & Whippoorwill, Radix, humana obscura, New Feathers Anthology and The Penwood Review.

From Stardust to Stardust

An economy of farms and wineries.
Quiet neighbors on either side.
My husband would pull out the telescope, where we’d find different planets and stars in the solar system.
At night, we were lucky.

But time requires change:
where we are now, the stars are a little harder to find.

Someday I hope we return,
where our backyard is once again an astronomer’s playground,
free from the light pollution a bigger city brings.

Perhaps I have stumbled on some astronomical truths,
and the ashes on our forehead from the parish priest, 

“Ashes to ashes”
“Dust to dust”

remind us one day we’ll return
to where we came, though the details are fuzzy.

“Stardust to stardust”
“Star to star”

like an unfocused lens, searching for Jupiter.

Bethany Riddle is a writer and educator living in Washington State where the Evergreens are hard to find, but the wineries are plenty. She lives with her husband, two kids, and two dogs. You can find her on Instagram @bethanyjriddle.

Pussy Willows

An early Easter.  Sun low over the river. 
Red Wing Blackbirds shrill their mating call. 
Back-lit last autumn’s grasses bend golden. 
Light catches a stand of pussy willows 
neither of us noticed walking past 
the first time.  Slender branches beaded 
with that dark gray fur we both came to love 
in childhood.  Is He then for each of us 
what we need Him to be?  How generous. 
Softly stroking the gray buds I feel 
my way back through my life to a time 
when we first met and I was not afraid, 
when without a word spoken, He understood 
me, laid a hand softly over my heart. 

Thomas R. Smith is a poetry, essayist, teacher, and editor living in western Wisconsin. His most recent books are Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications), poetry, and a prose book Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press).

Spiritual Discipline


With an arrow knocked on a taught bowstring,
he stares down the shaft toward his target,
an apple dangling from a distant tree
as a sweet Mediterranean breeze
frolics with green pastures and olive groves.

He slowly exhales, stilling his body,
sensing the rhythm of his heartbeat calm
as muscles remember Father’s guidance:
“Don’t lock your elbow; keep it bent slightly;
hold loosely the grip; let it rest in the hand;
and when you’re ready, let the string slip free
with such a light touch it seems to surprise,”

an inheritance bequeathed over time
shaped by wisdom, commandments, and advice 
that he’s put into practice for seasons,
arrow after arrow, shot after shot;
these words transforming from thoughts on the brain
into memories rooted in marrow 
that move his flesh, fresh reflexes fostered
as behavior and being become one.

He misses his shot, a cricket’s width wide,
a necessary misstep along the way
as he pursues his purpose on the hunt
for as he draws a new dart from his quiver
and sets it to his string, pulling it to his ear,
his nerves mature with a more subtle sense
as his shoulders flex with a refined strength, 
helping him to embody the traditions
he learned in his Macedonian home, 
similar doctrines to those of Carthage, Rome,
where different tongues speak of the same art.

He repeats this process with devotion
as the sundial moves through its shadows 
for though he will never possess the skill
of Odysseus, that hero from myth
who bent his bright bow, loosed his sharp arrow 
through a dozen axe-heads to reveal his true self
before serving justice, his wife’s suitors slaughtered, 
this story inspires our archer to try
to emulate what virtues he’s observed,
an ideal icon he aspires to reflect,

and as he takes aim yet another time,
ever more aware of his own limits,
his heart breathlessly mouths a prayer 
to Artemis, moon goddess of the hunt,
asking her spirit to show him favor,
to see and understand his humble plot,
she the light in the darkness, the lamp for his feet,
no stag escaping her targeted will
while her athletic shape, elegant, beautiful,
chaste, remains unpenetrated by human quills,
she unconquerable, free, the queen of the chase.

Such images fly through my consciousness 
when I consider the Greek term for sin,
ἁμαρτία : “to miss the mark, to stray 
from pathways that course through our vicious wood;”

how from the day I was born I would fall,
make mistakes, stumble in my attempts to do good;
how my inexperienced soul needed
my mother’s caresses at the cradle,
my father’s book-kept stories at bedtime,
and the listening ear of my pastor
along with her homilies, nurturing, healing,
to illuminate what road I should take 
as I sought to hold to a righteous life
like the lives of the saints, holy heroes
who, for all the bizarre parts of their myths,
dragon-slaying, bird-speaking, martyrdom,
taught and encouraged the care of others:

all these voices helping me to follow Christ 
whose sandals navigated Palestinian dust
as this god-man dwelt amongst his people,
caring for the poor, upsetting empire,
to be the perfect human, so they say,
never once stepping away from his course
as the aim of his life always found its target.

And if this is true, the impossible 
become reality, not a sole wrong transgressed,
this renders my missteps into failures,
damnable, I unable to attain such a standard,

unless my god views me not with judgement
but love, accepting all my feeble endeavors
at goodness, even though they fall far short,
for they reflect an honest intent, a passion 
for the same cares that motivate his heart;
he a father who takes delight in his toddler
playing at his feet with toys on the floor
by stacking block upon block upon block
in imitation of the grown-up world:
acts endearingly naive yet affectionately full
that are received by the divine with a warm smile –
he celebrating the attempts and successes
as his child continues to grow in his image.

ἁμαρτία = harmatia

Nathaniel A. Schmidt is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America and serves as a hospice chaplain. He holds degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary, Calvin University, and the University of Illinois Springfield. His newest collection of poems, Transfiguring, is available from Wipf & Stock, as is his first collection, An Evensong. He lives with his librarian wife, Lydia, and their daughter in southwest Michigan, meaning life is a perpetual story time.