Monthly Archives: September 2026

It Has Always Been Yours

There are women across those hills,
desert women, a mess of shining.
Flesh hotter than coals, the 
scent of bodies most earthly.
I hear they make fire when they
dance.

Good men do not travel beyond those hills,
the edge of this, the land of my father, 
the end of the world.
We don’t dance.
Certainly, no one ever danced for me.

Each morning, the same dream.
Foggy valleys full of wine, a face like a door, 
giving itself to my probing, speaking a foreign tongue
saying, “I see you, good son, keeper of crops, bringer of gold”

I drape the carpet of duty
once more across the cave of my body. 
Today, we will count the sheep.  I will tend
my father’s barley. I will make the meager
gifts suffice. 

I will present it all. And then, perhaps, a 
fatted calf for me, a moment to salve the bruise
of being.  It is only fair. 
What is love that is not fair?

I stretch blameless limbs to earning
in the long shadows of every morning.
Every morning, I fear a familiar stranger 
bearing in his guilty arms injustice, running toward home,
crying “father”.

Dean Abbott is a writer, poet and pastoral counselor living in Kentucky. He can be contacted through http://www.deanabbott.com or on X @deanabbott.

   House of Heaven
                             “My favorite house is my mother”
					   Haya Alyan

Sometimes, when caught in the jaws 
of fear or trouble, I talk with my mother 
in a quiet room in my heart. We are in a house 
where I have never lived but which I know well—
chintz armchairs, a fireplace, a four-poster bed, 
and large, mullioned windows cranked open 
on woods and fields. And my last cat, alive 
in his plush tuxedo, there on the window 
seat overlooking all that green. I understand 
that this is heaven, though I do not know 
why I am allowed to see it now, no distance 
here between dead and living hearts. My mother 
is in the room, and I am, too, though I am also 
in my world, so far away from hers. I ask 
her questions, seeking reassurance, and she tells 
me exactly what I need to know. Our voices blur 
inside my body until I cannot tell if what I understand 
is my own wisdom or what she has become in me, 
these sixty years since her death. But that doesn’t 
really matter. What matters is that she is here 
and I am, too. My heart is in my body. 
And my body knows what it knows. 
Night comes and goes, dawn pinks the sky, 
the cat sleeps, wakes, purrs his bass rumble. 
And still we talk. I am always rested in this place 
where everything is holy and everything is safe, 
the rise and fall of our voices like quiet music 
reminding me that all shall be well, no matter 
what happens. I trace the stitches in her patchwork 
quilt the way I did as a girl, everything so real 
I can feel my pulse beating in one finger. 
When I rise to leave, she cradles my face 
in her hands for a moment before they drop 
into the wild, blue floral of her skirt, hushed 
as sleeping doves. And then I am alone again, 
my heart my own house, in a different room, 
this other place, where I must live without her.

Alison Townsend’s books include the PEN/America shortlisted memoir, The Green Hour, Persephone in America, and The Blue Dress. Recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays, she is professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Must be a sign


the gardener had said 
when he unearthed my sister’s ring
twenty years buried in mulch.

Now lost again
I stare at the bare flesh of a pinkie
in a washroom in Trafalgar Square.

Panic is electric,
it fizzes capillaries, chest to throat –
I rummage through basin and bin.

Rewind – I remember the rub,
my thumb twiddling silver
in a gallery, a Turner sunrise.

Later, the restaurant slumps,
the trinket slips into our minds,
consumes all conversation.

The train slow motions.
I sit silent,
the Celtic design soft-swirling.

Back home, I exhale,
a chink of silver rolls over laminate,
mystery circling my feet.

Kate Young’s poetry has been published in journals including Stand, Fly on the Wall, Alchemy Spoon and Poetry Scotland. It can be heard on the Podcast Poetry Worth Hearing. Fear was placed 2nd in The Canterbury Poet of the Year Competition, 2022. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate have been published by Hedgehog Press. 
Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk

Parousia

Yet it was you who took me from the womb; 
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
—Psalm 22:9

You formed me then pushed me 
out of darkness through a narrow gate
between temple pillars—into life. 

Nuzzled between mountains,
I heard prophets beyond the peaks 
speak of you, label you distant 
and unseen, theirs alone 
to deliver. Come, they called—
We will show you the way. 

But you, with a still, small silence
spoke inside my bones 
and marrow: find yourself—and me—
in the desert, not the prophets.

So, I descended the crag,
stone by stone, into hush of darkness, 
where I wandered and slept 
twenty-seven years.

You shook me awake 
with a mighty earthquake. 
Crazed with thirst, I wandered 
and searched until fatigue 
sat me in a shittah’s thin mercy.

Sparrows arrived—tiny witnesses—
and perched above me. 
You whispered through their wings:
Stop searching—I never lost you. 

Howard S. Carman, Jr., Ph.D., is a retired physical chemist in Blountville, TN, USA. He published his first poetry collection, But Now I See: Rhymes and Reflections in 2017. Recent poetry appears in Tennessee Voices Anthology, Black Moon Magazine, Abyss & Apex, Braided Way Magazine, and Troublesome Rising Digital Anthology. He serves on the Board of Directors of Poetry Society of Tennessee and is an editor of Tennessee Voices Anthology.

God’s word to his creation (a Cento)	

I give you every seed-bearing plant on earth

every tree that has fruit 

to everything that has the breath of life in it

I give every green plant for food.

sing a new song

you who go down to the sea

Leviathan, formed to frolic in it

wild animals and all cattle



creeping things and flying birds

not one of these shall fail



not one shall lack her mate

for My mouth has commanded it

let everything that breathes
    
     offer praise 

ask the beasts
if they keep silent, the stones will cry out

the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons


turtledoves, swallows, and cranes
    
     observe the time of their migration

I will make a covenant on that day

with the beasts, the birds, and the creeping things of the ground

and all flesh will see salvation

who let the wild donkey go free?
I untied his ropes

Genesis 1:29-30 NIV Isaiah 42: 10 NCB

Psalm 148: 10 NCB Psalm 104: 26 NIV

Psalm 150: 6 NCB Isaiah 34: 16 NKJV

Job 12: 7 KJV L uke 19: 40 NCB

Jeremiah 8: 7 NIV Ecclesiastes 18: 22

Hosea 2: 18 NLT Luke 3: 6 KJV

Job 39: 5 ICB

Barbara Usher cares for retired ewes who bring their lambs at foot, and ex-commercial hens on her animal sanctuary, Noah’s Arcs (barbaraushernoahsarcs.com). Her poetry has been published in various journals including Amethyst Review, Last Stanza (Editor’s pick) and in anthologies including Thin Places & Sacred Spaces. She is the representative for the Fife Stanza of the Poetry Society, and led a workshop at the St Andrews International Literary Festival in 2026. She is co-editing an anthology Crossings: writings from Fife and Edinburgh, which will be published in November 2026.