Monthly Archives: January 2026

Pardon

The road away lifts like a kite and catches
in a gust of morning. Something small, someone 
lost, could ride on that kite and flutter sunward.

My eyes are in the maples – no longer bound
by lid and bone. They are owls that didn’t
blink at the corona of another day.

Light tilts to fill a hollow, to open me
to blue. This pang is at the nerve of each
new feather that prays to the wind.

What saves me is the buoy of air. I am a child
on a shoulder she knows. The road sways
to that old step; it rises to the tug of my string.
 

Melanie McCabe is the author of four books of poems, most recently the forthcoming All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize. Her debut novel Road Longer Than Memory will be out from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Prize.

Balanced Hearts                                                       

Progress reports are due soon.  My colleagues and I are putting the finishing touches to our narratives with the goal of writing balanced, positive assessments that take into account areas of strength and struggle.  At this time of year, I make my semi-annual suggestion that teachers should play a game which involves reviewing narratives and reading between the lines, discerning what the educator is  trying to say without coming out and saying it.  “X. is an energetic, curious student” really means, “X is a hyperactive kid who never stops asking questions all day long.”  When we write, “Z. sometimes finds it challenging to consider other perspectives,” what we are not saying is, “Z. only thinks about himself and has zero empathy.” The fine art of subtext — how to get across point with a light touch — feather rather than sledgehammer, as it were.

Not that long ago, my husband and I went to an exhibition, “Ancient Nubia Now.”  Standing before a case full of exquisitely carved figurines known as shawabties, I caught the predictably lilting tone of a teacher addressing elementary school-age children.  “Did any of you ever have stuffed animals when you were younger?” (Note: the students in question were all of eight or nine years old, at most.)  “Did you know they weren’t real?”  As the students rather reluctantly nodded, she continued in a joking voice, as if letting them in on a secret, “Did you pretend they were anyway?” At that point, I wanted to throw a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit at her head.

To her (questionable) credit, she was trying to explain the significance of the shawabties in a way that would make sense to modern-day children. Ranging in height from about four to fifteen inches, the statuettes were placed in tombs on behalf of the dead, should they be called upon in the afterlife to perform agricultural duties.  Shawabty, I learned, comes from an Egyptian word meaning “one who answers.”  The afterlife featured prominently in ancient Nubia, much as it did in adjoining ancient Egypt.  According to tradition, at the time of death, the heart of the deceased (carefully removed and preserved in an alabaster pot designed for that specific organ) would be weighed in judgment and “only if the heart was lighter than a feather could they be included in the blessed afterlife.”  Heart scarabs were inscribed with spells from the Book of the Dead, requesting that the heart “testify favorably.”

How will my heart testify at the end of my days?  And to whom will it need to answer? More to the point, how will others testify as to my heart’s favorability?   The way I see myself — both literally and figuratively — is not the way others see me.  The other day I entered the teachers’ room and made a kind of amused grimace to indicate, “I’m dealing with some real craziness here.” One of the aides said, “I’ve never seen that expression on your face before!  You always look so calm and collected.”  I didn’t realize I was such an accomplished actress.  The imposter syndrome is alive and well and living in me, taking a veritable curtain call at the end of each performance (a/k/a doing my daily job).  I wonder how many of the students I work with each day – to say nothing of the adults in the building – feel they are being judged, their merits weighed in the balance, most of the time.

Sometimes my heart feels weighted down by my perceptions of the woes of the world.   Is there a way to live with a lighter heart?   We don’t always know when we are going to die, although some of us are given that gift.  My grandmother was told how much time she had left before she died.  She decided to knit a scarf for as many members of the family as she could, and knitted eight hours a day for months, marking on a piece of paper the number of rows she’d finished so as to keep track of her destination.  She was at peace with her fate, contented with her lot, she enjoyed the company of the staff at the nursing home and the regular visits of family and friends.  It seemed to me that she was freeing her heart of regret, grudges, and longings.  When she died, it was a tranquil death, and she left us with a lightened heart.

Of course, my grandmother was a ballet dancer.  She knew all about feather-light balance.  After all, she could do it on the tips of her toes.

This past week, my new students noticed the old CD player I had in my room.  I’d borrowed it from a colleague as part of the annual language testing we are required to perform.  I hadn’t even thought to use it for music.  It’s been years since I’ve played music on a CD player in my classroom.  But the moment my new students spied it, they immediately said, “Teacher!  Speaker!” and asked if we could dance.

In ancient Nubia, the heart had to be lighter than a feather at the time of passing.  Maybe that’s the way to get there: walk lightly through our lives.  Dance whenever and wherever we can.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and resides in New England, where she teaches multilingual learners at a public elementary school. Her work has appeared in The Manifest Station, Salvation South, Inscape Magazine and other places.

Breath and Bone   


No breath is yours to keep: you take it in, 
and then return some to the atmosphere.
The bones that bear your weight and frame your skin 
decay a little with each passing year. 

But from the breath and bone of each of us 
come matchless gifts more durable than stone.
Each self observed—unique, miraculous— 
affirms that we are more than breath and bone. 

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry; her work has earned the Able Muse Book Award, the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honors. A Professor Emeritus of Music at Bridgewater State University, she has published articles on the intersections between music and literature in numerous academic journals. She lives on the coast of Massachusetts.

The Monk a Chair Away

He was already there when I 
Came in and seemed at first asleep,
But no, he actually was deep
In something hard to classify
(We’ll call it prayer for now;
It doesn’t matter anyhow.
What matters only is its depth…).
He'd come from the infirmary
To sit before the Sacrament,
Hunched over yet an elegant
Embodiment of sanctity
That definition overstepped.

And so I took the chair but one
From him and as I sat before
The Presence, felt some inner shore
Recede from view: it had begun.
Then in the dim and silence heard
A rhythm faint yet undeterred:
His breathing, gentle as a hymn,
So fragile I was rendered awed
To be there in the morning dark
With a beloved patriarch
Who simply wants to sit with God
And I to simply sit with him.

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Amethyst Review, America Magazine, Pensive Journal, Forma Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets. He is a certified catechist with the Archdiocese of New York, a Benedictine oblate of St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, NJ, and editor of The Catholic Poetry Room.

To Summon Rain					


I keep remembering
where I might return
into fields flush with clover
and seeded deeper down,
a million floating cells
for all the floating grasses.

Wind keeps calling me in
to flower and seed
mohawk and argentine
to fit the waiting ground,
reciting their names
as wind again

furrows through my hair,
leaves dirt in my scalp
and I dance my circle dance
with rattles to summon rain,
bringing me a little closer
to the beginning.

Anita Pinatti lives in the Connecticut River Valley finding inspiration for poetry and photography nearby and beyond. Her work has appeared in Amethyst Review, Blue Heron Review, The Orchards, Sage Magazine and many other journals.

We Have Our Beginning in the Unbegun

“And when He would, by full accord of all the Trinity, He made us all at once; and in our making He knit us and oned us to Himself: by which oneing we are kept as clear and as noble as we were made.” Julian of Norwich (Chapter 58, Revelations of Divine Love, )


HE manifested, through a gracious Love, all that could be

MADE in this life, while maintaining the eternal Being where every one of 

US came from. The essence we share with God is as uncreated as God Is, and

ALL of our soul is as timeless and endless as God. When we return to that Source where God’s love is Forevermore, we will realize

AT that new, everlasting moment what we

ONCE thought was created in time is as unmade as God has Everbeen. We have our beginning in the Unbegun.

Patricia Daly is a USA Today bestselling author and writer of narrative nonfiction and spirituality. She has been published by Leaders Press, Story Circle Network, The Sun, Medium.com, and Reiki News Magazine. She indie-published The Women in His Life, Indelible Imprint, and The Deliberate Thinker, all available on Amazon. She is retired and lives in Largo, Florida, USA.

There Are No Words

To really know happy, you must 
also know hurt. To know love, loss. 
But this – to know this moment, 
you need only to stand still, perfectly
still, and feel the soft sunlit movement 
of air over your shoulders, the slow 
suction of sea-pebbles underfoot, tidewater 
sluicing back to where it came from, 
eons ago. You need only to look out 
at the wind-scalloped waves 
to see what’s there and what isn’t.
In this moment, you are just flesh again, 
remembering the first flowering 
of sea and land, the third day. 
A fish breaks the surface, leaping 
through air, then falls back to what it knows, 
the churn of life, known trying to explain 
unknown. Fisher of moments, you need 
only to hold this one now, like a breath, 
or a pose, for a moment – that’s all we get. 
A moment in which the world appears
to say hello, but a moment that explains 
everything else – as seed explains flower; 
flower, seed; as sea explains land. Hold it, 
take it with you, as you fall back to the familiar 
churn, and remember, don’t forget 
to let the world astonish you,
wordlessly, every now and then.

James Lilliefors is a poet and novelist, whose writing has appeared in Door Is A Jar, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, The Belfast Review, The Miami Herald, and elsewhere. His first poetry collection, Sudden Shadows, was published in October.

Tired as a Cold Gray Winter Day

So tired,
nearly blank—

thoughts freeze
in mid-thaw.

Icicles—
blunted pens of invisible ink
write into snow,
punctuation marks without words.

Snow—colorless from a distance,
yet each flake,
a cut-crystal prism
turns white light
into sparks of rainbow—
that alight and disappear
like feelings that flicker
and escape my tired mind,
heavy with a day's blizzard,
settling into a drift of thoughts:
If “I think therefore I am” is true,
then what am I now?

I sense my “am”
in a sense of touch,
my fingers on the window,
its cool glass,
in the still silence
that I can almost see,
and in my smile
as I notice snow cushions
on my summer chairs.

Marso writes poetry shaped by years of living in different cultures and by a practice of paying attention to ordinary life.

Incomplete Salvation In The Tall Gray Afternoon

A bus of wounded dreams comes to a stop by the liquor store to discharge its waste and open its doors for more. A tall entangled man boards, his long gray hair dirty but blessed by his mother, a fact known because he raises his voice to announce it.

Kathryn of no repute above the rear wheel well lowers her head and whispers into her hands. Within the glare of her afternoon doubt, she wonders if she will ever find a home worth coming home to. The failed playwright across the aisle pales.

Unemployed Johnson sits near the back with his face unshaven and pressed against the bus glass when long gray hair man boards. He looks up. Something about the man reminds him of episodes he suffered at the hands of a neighbor when he was a boy learning to feign an enjoyment of molestation to avoid punishment.

Gray hair man drops some coins in the charge box and walks the aisle as if to pass judgment on sinners. He resembles a giraffe in his walk, and in his eyes, a jackal.

An ex-cop looks up from his undercover bottle he clasps with both hands. Its dark glass holds an aborted second coming. Ex-cop is no longer named and only wanders the bus routes in search of the courage to shut the door on his life. He accidental shot a kid in the pursuit of justice, and though cleared of legal charges, fell from the earth into his demons.

Gray man returns to the front, slops himself down on one of the sideways seats, rubs his hands through his hair and then down his shirt and the front of his pants, leaving a streak. Kathryn of no repute above the rear wheel well swallows a lump of apprehension. Her breath rasps.

The afternoon grows jagged as the bus driver groans the bus forward toward all the places riders don’t want to go but must, like a dealer’s dump that smells of coverup bleach or the porno place on Kingston Ave that drives girls with nowhere to go from their youth.

Don’t say it, says gray man. The bus lurches.

And nobody does. Nobody rears their thoughts into a voice until the next stop across from a rundown church when a woman of indeterminate authenticity climbs up with a large bag of bottles that sing a muted clanked harmony from their paper prison. She carries herself like a queen fallen to hard times and announces to the bus in a flawed regal tone that she has no one person but herself to blame for her lack of position and descent from grace, and that they, all the lost riders, could learn a thing or two from her honesty.

A kid of fifteen broken summers or so sits in the far back. He wears a barista apron he found on a sidewalk. He carries two memories in the form of old photos in its pockets. His mother disappeared little by little into dark smoke and injections, captured, she might say if able, by the lure of an addicted existence that carries no hope of recovery in that a ruined hope is worse than none at all.

From her standing place, fallen queen calls out to the kid in the back to come forward and take her hand so she can show him up close the face of a prophet. When the kid rises and starts forward through the bus, more curious than afraid, the bus hits a large potholed asphalt canker and throws him into the arms of the ex-cop without a future.

That’s okay, kid, says the ex-cop as he helps the kid up. Go to her.

The bus pulls over in front of a bricked building. Someone pulled the stop cord, but nobody rises from their seat to let the afternoon play on without them. A certain hypnotic trance grips Kathryn of no repute who might otherwise take the opportunity to flee from her fear, and unemployed Johnson sits still with an uncertain look on his face that speaks of jagged crevices in his being that might one day, God willing, be filled.

Gray man stands and grasps the metal rail. He breaks a smile into three pieces that each carry a hint of malice or love or indifference to pain. He is the maestro, he announces, and will decide which passengers shall be forgiven.

Nothing enters the bus from the outside air. Each doubt or worry or courage comes from within. Each knows this in their transport, or if not, fall into a stupor in which many find comfort when their life has no meaning.

It’s dark outside, whispers the failed playwright although the sun still beats the boulevard down. He was once a bard.

Fallen queen says they called her Anastasia and the kid of fifteen summers or so takes the hand she offers as the bus descends further into its route. What’s this about? asks the kid, but Anastasia only points to the gray haired man and says: Look.

The kid looks. Gray man is dressed in blue denim faded from years of walking in the light of the Lord he would say if asked, and the kid sees a sort of displacement or skewing of things he thought he understood when he puts his eyes upon what might be a font of enormous judgment.

What do you see? asks Anastasia, and the kid breaks into the house of himself to find an acceptable answer. He doesn’t want to expel aloud what without effort floats into his throat as he regards the long hair man and fingers the photos in his pocket.

The despised prophet disguised, says Anastasia.

Somehow she heard his thoughts, realizes the kid. Maybe she is the real savior and the gray man a trick to lure kids with failed mothers away from the light, but Anastasia knows his thoughts again and says: No, he is real.

From her plastic seat, a woman not introduced asks in a voice that beats tribal drums who the hell is driving the bus. It enters a canyon between buildings on a street that shouldn’t slope downward but does. The afternoon dims and the gray hair man, his incomprehensible existence manifested as one who knows the real difference between right and wrong, speaks.

We go down, he says. Where we all birthed. All of us. Now here to rise again, transcend. You, failed playwright. Write again. You who shot an innocent. Shit happens.

What about me? asks the kid of fifteen broken summers.

You’ll be my replacement one day, says gray hair. It’s why we’re all gathered.

I don’t know how.

None do.

And none did. It had been told on the sidewalks by the newsstands and down in the subway tunnels where men without the means to touch God wandered that all the gutshot certainties of life were illusions invented to keep one from the higher truth of a higher peace within themselves. Then night fell and such knowledge was refused.

Gray man staggers when the bus stops, regains his balance, disembarks. Anastasia raises her bag of muted harmony in a goodbye gesture. Ex-cop drinks from his bottle, his last. Kathryn cries a joy for something inside of her lifted, and unemployed Johnson forgives himself for what he could not as a child have known.

When the bus moves, the engine growls and the light lifts. The kid of fifteen summers runs to a window and sees the gray man disappear into an alley next to a day and night bar. The shadow of an angel may follow, but it could be the reluctant ghost of his mother seeking salvation. The kid is a little older now, somewhat wiser, but still cannot tell which is which.

Victor D Sandiego, once from the big city west coast of the United States, now writes his odd time compositions from his home on the edge of ex-pat society in small town. He is the founder and editor of Dog Throat Journal. His work appears in various journals and anthologies, and is upcoming in Bull and others.