To be dead is to be safe. I am excused the touch of hands. I am contained. I cannot be removed from here. I am free to concentrate on pain. I am companion to God. Sounds enter through this window. I am a mind quiet within these walls. I am contained by God and contain God. I do not find myself sufficient. I am safe from the touch of hands. Water enters through this window. I am a companion to pain. I will be buried in this floor. Cold enters through this window. I am excused the trouble of voices. I am insufficient to God. I am dead and thus am safe from death. I am companion to this silence. I am contained by solitude. My hands will touch in prayer. I am companion to visions. Day enters through this window. I am excused the limitless horizon without. There is enough of God in here.
Clare Starling started writing poetry when her son was diagnosed with autism during lockdown. Her poems have since been published in many journals including Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Poetrygram, Porridge, Obsessed With Pipework, and The Interpreter’s House. Her pamphlet Magpie’s Nest won the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award 2023. She particularly loves writing about our connection with nature, and about how neurodiversity can give different perspectives on the world.
A neighbourhood fixture, no one actually knew the mysterious Reb Moishe – one of those who escaped Russia with a battered valise and a horde of enigmas. A roomer behind a discount men’s wear shop, he never spoke of family and lived alone. Lacking discipline and precision, with only the barest employment, Reb Moishe was the indifferent tailor of a reluctant clientele. Hat and coat from the “old country,” a daguerreotype of a refugee wearing out the sidewalks of this beach town or ruminating in some deserted park long abandoned to the weeds – that’s what people saw.
To live by a stream would be consolation enough for the locust years, he’d mumble if anyone cared to hear. The sand and the salt air were a constant irritation yet he would not leave.
When Reb Moishe died it seemed he was fated to go unmourned – or worse – unburied, a test imposed by the Divine Court on Shmilke Fine, chairman (and only member) of the Burial Society. Even a spot next to the fence where suicides were hidden cost more than the contents of the charity box.
A respectable funeral for Reb Moishe defied Shmilke Fine’s resources. The notice placed in the Jewish newspapers produced no heir. (Who wants to inherit a debt?) And then… while others were concentrated in prayer two back row regulars engaging in idle chatter brought the salvation merciful as the dawn.
– Well, he did wear a hat. Maybe he was pious?
– Maybe he was a “lamed-vavnik”? came the facetious reply.
What Shmilke Fine overheard broke the spell of his helplessness. An epiphany! One of the concealed 36 righteous pillars that hold up the world! He rose as if from the dead and with whispers let on that Reb Moishe was a descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, may his name be blessed. As the rumour spread donors sprang forth – such an illustrious genealogy, a holy man – Reb Moishe’s burial could not be delayed. And so it was that with donations sufficient for a prestigious plot, a nephew of the Baal Shem Tov’s grandfather’s grandmother on his stepmother’s side was laid to rest in the section of the cemetery reserved for the elite.
Covered in brambles and vines a century hence, obscured by lichens, how will the inscription on the headstone explain the past? Surrounded by the once-revered rabbis – how did Reb Moishe merit such company? Only Shmilke Fine was privy to the secret and with Shmilke Fine the secret passed away.
Marty Newman was born in Czechoslovakia, raised in Montreal, Canada, educated at McGill University & lives in Jerusalem where he studies ancient languages & texts. The modern poets who influence him most are Dan Pagis, Richard Wilbur, Zbigniew Herbert & Vasko Popa.
I find God every time I go hiking sometimes he’s waiting for me at the peak
sometimes he whistles between Longleaf Pines sometimes he meets me at a critical
juncture last weekend in the wake of our rupture two months out still reeling I drove
to Hanging Rock to shake my mind loose first mile straight up a stone staircase was brutal
in the midst of deciding whether to give up my footsteps sunk into a groove
and I was flying Falcon’s wings took me high above present circumstance soon cresting
the thunderstorm-tinged horizon I could think again rhythmed temperate terrain
brought me back to my body fixed footstep cadence rewiring rebuilding systems
of self I found God on Balancing Rock we sat shoulders touching I wrote he was
still we sat and watched the storm move across rolling Piedmont hills miles away from us
after an hour I stood up breath calm and patterned God and I parted I pulsed
my descent to the sound of my footsteps one foot after the other back to myself
Eva Alter is a poet and information professional whose work explores memory and myth through hybrid and procedural forms. Her work is published or forthcoming in Maudlin House, Don’t Submit, scaffold literary journal, wildscape. literary journal, and elsewhere. She can be found @eva_alter_poet on Twitter, @eva.alter.poet on Instagram, and @evaalterpoet.bsky.social.
“as if it was easy for the world to make flowers” Ada Limón, “In the Shadow”
Dependable like sunlight, color bursts onto every berm and field, seemingly effortless, a new season appearing overnight, as if flowers make the world, such making easy as opening a bloom, easy as breath, a sigh in the dark.
If only each of us could exhale flowers, see the beauty we birth as we breathe, the blossoms teeming with potential, with connection, a belonging easy as color belongs to flowers, easy as hope, budding in a field.
Elisa A. Garza is a poet, editor, and writing teacher. Her full-length collection, Regalos (Lamar University Literary Press), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her chapbook, Between the Light / entre la claridad (Mouthfeel Press), is now in its second edition. Elisa’s sacred poems were recently published in The Ekphrastic Review. Her writing about cancer has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, American Journal of Nursing, and Huizache, who nominated her for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches writing workshops for cancer survivors.
Over the years I may have lost more than I have held on to. Dozens of pairs of sunglasses. Sentenced to squinting in bright light. Scores of gloves. Lonely left hands left in coat pockets.
I don’t hold onto things. Gone are the treasures brought home by precocious children. Poems, mosaics, handmade mugs, awards and trophies. Family heirlooms, I have few. Most discarded, some lost.
Hard feelings, regrets, hurts and defeats. I let them all go. It’s people I hold on to and now I keep losing them too.
I’d rather write a poem about what I have found. Criss crossing waves on a windy beach. Tiny colored stones spread across the sand like freckles on a sunburnt arm.
A flat rock at the edge of the water that fits my body like the recliner chair in my living room. Miles of pale blue sky striped with puffy white clouds.
A warm breezy day after an endless series of blustery cold ones. The courage to go out into it and write this poem.
HM Ayres grew up in Northern New Jersey. She retired and moved to Cape Cod, MA in 2021 after a 43 year career in college student affairs administration. Since retiring Helen has been devoting her time to writing poetry, exploring the Cape conservation areas, bike paths, waterways and beaches and is engaged in several social justice and community volunteer efforts.
the daunting inviting portal behind my moving body
above my moved mind pillars rising to reach and reclaim
one arch after another buttresses strength and intricacy
gasping in the midst of it all sheltered from the bright and the loud exposed to a different self
you sense there is something to the light and sound that speaks to you
as if there was more as if there had to be someone there
there is in the timeless tireless swirl of the tissues of the earth
generations breathing in and out unsung stories echoing
prime mover that is hardly final first cause that does not count eternity fleeting
look back out through the vault across the shimmering expanse and see the curvature of it all
cavernous masonry cannot but follow the living features of the only planet that just might care
with our evolved bodymind one and all we need no stained glass
Dawid Juraszek is the author of, among others, Medea and Other Poems of the Anthropocene (2020) and Carbon Capture and Stories (2024). A bilingual writer and educator based in China, he is working on a research project in cognitive ecocriticism and environmental education. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have have been published in numerous outlets in Poland, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
To dream of a volcano—hold your joke— is not so bad. By reckless driving, we outran the pyroclastic flow, the smoke, the falling flaming rock and ash. The key to such a dream is always poetry. The underworld, the hectic flight, the air a churning bioluminescent sea are, for a rhapsode, a routine affair. Take Dante’s reeking hellfire’s reddish glare: What is it but a flare-up from the deep, and his descent the key to it, right there for anyone to see, awake, asleep— or in that zone between, poised as Pompeii to feel the mountain breathe upon its clay?
Dan Campion is the author of Calypso (1981), The Mirror Test (2024), A Playbill for Sunset (2022), and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, THINK, and many other magazines.
Jeanne- Marie could simply not forget what she had seen the night before. It might be 1890 but in the Brittany hamlet of Yaudet things took decades, even centuries, to change; she thought ruefully. She herself knew that better than most. She stood pressed close to the dark granite rocks which had been carved years before, to shelter the wooden image of the crucified Christ. She had rushed out in such a panic, that she had forgotten to bring the bright bunch of pansies she had picked to lay at the pierced feet. Quickly she gathered a bunch of golden buttercups and laid them on the wood, smoothed by centuries of village mothers, many of them probably in a similar state.
She whispered a few prayers, then peered round the edge of the rock. Stone steps, carved from the granite, led between the cliffs to the beach. The sea was lapping over the bottom step, leaving a strip of white lace as the wave retreated. Jeanne guessed the tide was on the turn. A young woman with black hair, as dark and shiny as the cormorants flying overhead, was sitting looking down to the sea. The fishing boats will soon be back, that’s why the gulls are gathering. Jeanne stepped into the shadow of the rocks. She didn’t want Veronique to see her.
The view down the steps had disturbed her more than she had expected. How often she had sat there waiting for Luc to run up those stairs two at a time, carrying the creels full of wriggling fish. He’d balance the baskets on the rocky path before holding her tightly in his arms. Then they’d walk to the cottage together. She pushed back her hair which had once been as black as Veronique’s, but now it was impossible to hide the streaks of grey.
As she stood looking at the crucifix, the old wooden carving began to fade. Three women appeared holding the body of Christ taken down from the cross. Between them they held the dead figure. They looked with sadness but also with a strange sort of joy. Jeanne found it difficult to read the emotions of the three mourners. In the shadow of the rocks the images took on a green shade – the colour of the fields round Yaudet in spring when the lambs were born.
Like most of the village girls, Jeanne had had to attend catechism classes but she had found the priest’s lugubrious voice sent her off to sleep or into a daydream. This was so different. The love of the three women for this broken body they held was palpable, as they carried Him somewhere beyond death. Jeanne remembered the day Luc and the rest of the crew were lost in a freak storm when the waves had come right up the steps and the coast guard had carried his body to her as she waited. Apart from a cut on his hand, Luc looked peacefully asleep. She had stared up at the crucifix as the men carried his body into the village. You don’t care a damn. Perfect and unreachable stuck up above everyone.
She looked back down the steps. A young man ran up two at a time and Veronique disappeared in his arms, her dark hair falling over his shoulders.
Jeanne looked back at the wooden image. The three women had gone but the sense of their love remained. She turned back to Yaudet. It wasn’t going to be easy. The young man, as she had suspected, was a Guillou, the outcasts of the village, but Jeanne knew her love for her daughter was stronger than any village feud.
Sarah Das Gupta is an 83 year old, retired English teacher from Cambridge who has taught in UK, India and Tanzania. She lived in Kolkata for some years. Her interests include, Art, the countryside, Medieval History, parish churches, early music and ghosts. She has had work published in journals and magazines online and in print, in countries, from New Zealand to Kazakhstan. She has recently been nominated for Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star Award.
On TUESDAYS 6-7PM UK TIME, Editor Sarah will be leading a generative writing workshop online (Zoom), with poems, extracts, and prompts that engage with spirituality and the sacred.
Each session will have a theme with a connection to writing and the sacred. We will look at poems, extracts from fiction and creative nonfiction (usually 2 examples per session), and there will be time for writing in response to prompts given by Sarah.
Theme for October 21st: LIGHT
There will be the opportunity to read from your own writing, if wished. We will not be critiquing but listening supportively.
Please spread the word and join me! Very affordable, pay as you go, and only an hour per week. Sign up via Eventbrite
In the beauty you wish to create there lies something you cannot know
In the brush suspended over the canvas the stroke that would finish the painting or begin it In the synapse between the words of the poem the word written and the word sought In the sequence of notes / the missing phrase that one chord that would complete the sonata
What but the search : that last leap the release from certainties into risk What you have struggled to discover what you have reached for what would save you
Out past the unsure edge : fledging : that wing / that reaching that necessity : a kind of Faith.
Cordelia Hanemann, writer and botanical artist, currently co-hosts Summer Poets, a poetry critique group in Raleigh, NC. Retired English professor emerita, she conducts occasional poetry workshops and is active with youth poetry in the NCPS. She has published in numerous journals including Atlanta Review, Connecticut River Review, California Quarterly and others; in several anthologies including best-selling Poems for the Ukraine and her chapbook. Her poems have been performed by the Strand Project, featured in select journals, won awards and been nominated for Pushcarts. She is now working on a novel about her Cajun roots.
Amethyst Review 