Sweet Taste of Beauty I step outside and my eye catches …a beam of light filtering through the tree branch a red-breasted finch …looks back at me for a second before it remembers to be alarmed and flies off in that brief moment before thought claims the experience beauty stuns my mind and I am […]

Master of Tides This night, the monuments of grace outweigh the monuments of desire. They shine in the moonlight like twisted trees. They fill with birds, and spread out over the horizon a tapestry of song. Your sorrow leaves you. Your fear wilts into a flower. Certainty pours its milk over all the doubts in […]

Never letting go (of religious programming), or Agnostic lament Despite my default atheism, I still find myself stubbornly wanting to give into the urge to spell the word Heaven with an upper case H. To clasp my hands in undulating prayer, at the dinner table or just before I sleep. To contemplate the afterlife and […]

The Lost Divorce If your Grand Canyon is man made A creation of concrete and glass If you are surrounded by pavement And the gardeners use spray paint If you will upload your brain into a website Live forever or until McAfee mistakenly erases you When all the promises of religion Are subsumed by technology […]

Keeping Thyme We are gone now. No second yesterday. Spring sun runs, melting fast into summer. Copper butterflies jig then lilt away, leaving petals, frail blue wings, in tatters. Breezes brush a sword lily’s unsheathed head; through bows and shudders, shifting thoughts unread when streams plaited woods splashed in rain. Wrapped in holm oak’s dusty […]

Prayer for Inflorescence A single red spider lily, Lycoris radiata, appears suddenly one September day, its leafless bloom a tiny burst of fireworks in my back yard. I planted the bulbs twenty years ago; a few bloomed, then disappeared beneath the soil, presumed dead until now. I, too, disappeared those twenty years ago, into a […]

Sacred Kitchen The short-order cook prepares his spiritual homage in a sacred kitchen between the grill and deep fryers. His ambition is full of flavor, adding just the right amount of salt to his tireless concoctions. With eyes as bright as the sun, he creates culinary magic in his little cove of the paradise with […]

Ouroboros Festival Mired in itself, the circuit goes: All of the gods have died. Here, in this ring, we worship, not only them, but all of nothing. Our mates are ourselves, centered in a void. Outside the ring, yet in it. All momentum is the same. It will go. It will go nowhere. The pianist […]

liturgy beating of wings, sky widens in iris ears perk goosebump pent-up, is it sighing or singing? wondering wave of prayer to the streetlamps from below, where the life is orange! broke motion, still-life, …too many fruits. ……………silver plate.   Henry Brown is a student/activist from Austin, Texas currently involved with the Democratic Socialists of […]

The Path of Ghosts huge night unwraps what folds silently in the half light quivering in the evening mist losing the sense of day the sound, a different place to sway familiar specters with an eye to the next path moving along losing a little feeling the world roll beneath knowing others are present and […]