Author Archives: Sarah

In the cathedral, on the morning when I learned of Mary Oliver’s death
	Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Los Angeles, California.


alabaster
light spills 
slant sugar 

pipe organ
hums 
deepest cherry

and my bones 
are jealous to inhabit 
the sweetest part – 

I am hungry to be overwhelmed with being – 

to press my spine to this cold tile
let my eyelids flutter 
soft shadow
in smooth pool of pearl

and be mingled with rumble – 

and didn’t she say at last, and too soon?

and how splendid 
after a lifetime of wondering
for her to know hush of pebble 
dwell in throat of lily – 

I will dig these heels into moment		
clamor cloud-full grateful

(of course it is raining)

Bryn Cavin is a current MFA student at Pacific University. She holds a B.A. (Hons.) in Literature & Writing from Whitworth University and has held writing positions with such organizations as Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, Tahirih Justice Center, Museum of Glass, and the Smithsonian. Bryn is a former Assistant Managing Editor of Rock & Sling Literary Journal. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her boxer-pittie mix, Dalloway.

A Mother’s Hope

Hope is the only step you can take at the start.
When you wrap your newborn in yellow gingham
and wait for a sun-painted, early October day
for your first walk to the corner tree.
You tuck in her toes.
Because though she broke into the world,
she is still a seed, and your arms alone
don’t feel enough like nurtured ground.

Remembering hope in the first sight
of her heartbeat at the ultrasound.
Surrounded by a sea of empty space,
a possibility she would grow into.
A rapid pulse in the swirl of a slower one.
Now her heartbeat is still mixed with yours.

Hope is that she might not yet see shadows.
Her eyes are not yet their true color,
and her vision unfocused.
Below the tree, you hope she sees dappled sunlight.
But you sense winter’s edge in the first-leaves’
fall from the maple.

Hope is that there, you remember a stream,
today you only hear it, like birdsong from hollows 
in branches. Here you send your baby to start her story, 
like the bramble-arched brook,
the water hidden. 

You know only how it flows in this valley,
the green things rooted alongside,
sheltering trees before the bend, 
until the creek, at last, can’t be seen. 

Sherry Weaver Smith writes poems inspired by her Catholic faith and the landscapes of the American West. Poems have received a Pushcart Prize nomination and a semifinalist award in the Narrative Poetry Contest (Naugatuck River Review). She is the author of The Wolf and the Shield: An Adventure with Saint Patrick. Her poems have been published in The Heron’s Nest, The Seventh Quarry, Vancouver Cherry Blossom Haiku Invitational, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place and Nature; and Amethyst Review.

Splitting the Atom

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
 – from the Hindu Sanskrit scriptural text TheBhagavad Gita,
   quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atom bomb.

We humans have a habit
of leaving evidence of our crimes.
We devour whole the forbidden fruit
from the tree of knowledge,
spitting out the seeds.
Cavalier, confident we are safe,
we make our getaway.
But behind us,
the seeds sprout.
Tender green shoots spiral up,
growing stronger in the sun.
Soon these new trees
spread their wings.
New apples, sour and green
in their youth,
ripen to a luscious blood-red,
their existence proof of our crime:
we have scattered the seeds
that will spread knowledge
by luring all who seek its secrets
to fall under its weight.
We are culpable of the widespread
destruction of innocence,
from seeking the fulsome fruit
to sowing the fallen seed.

Cynthia Pitman, author of poetry collections The White Room, Blood Orange, Breathe, and Broken, has been published in Amethyst Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Literary Yard, Third Wednesday (One Sentence Poem finalist), Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art (Pushcart Prize nominee), and other journals, and in anthologies Pain and Renewal, Brought to Sight & Swept Away, Nothing Divine Dies, and What is All This Sweet Work?

Melissa Ann Reed, after offering the IB and Cambridge literature courses overseas, is now a private international educator and exhibited Chinese calligrapher and brush painter. Her post-doc research is remarked by literary, psychology and medical journals. She collaborated with Mabel S. Chu Tow and University Press of America to publish ‘Strange Kindness,’ now curated by Rowman & Littlefield. An award winning poet, her poems, published by literary arts journals, are included in the chapbooks, making oxygen, FLP 2020 and ekphrastics & eccentricities, Kelsay Books, 2023. Kelsay Books published her full-length poetry book, he for she she for he, February 2025.

In Orbit 

In sleep, a comet stopped beside the garden.
Its voice was the green taste of running water.
It said, I will come down on the seventh day,
then passed through the wall without breaking it.

I woke where night was becoming a window.
Morning carried a blue scent, like an unopened road.
I wrote the date inside my diary,
and roots began to grow beneath the number.

Since then, the sky has moved closer to the house.
Birds circle a place that has not yet arrived.
Perhaps the comet is already on the earth,
waiting for it to notice.

Olya K-Mehri is a Forward Prize-nominated, London-born poet of Iranian heritage whose poetry explores landscape as a site of mystery, the spirit of place, and the quiet presence of the sacred in the natural world. She is a researcher in environmental ethics and philosophy, and the founder of the Rooted Art Collective. Her work has appeared in various anthologies, as well as in print and digital publications, including Osmosis Press, Dust Poetry Magazine, Rough Diamond Poetry, and Seedlings.

before visible dawn


the sky is a bruise
any stars that might have shone 
long since disappeared

bare branches sway round 
nimbus shift their leaden bulks 
weight against shadow

atop a slight band 
of subtle lighter grey 
suffusing into 

the leavening dark 
all the hues mingle and swirl
nothing linear 

this is how dawn begins
is this how everything begins:

from what we can’t see
and therefore name darkness void
when it is neither

and both

	

John Janelle Backman composes rensakus (a series of connected haikus) as a cornerstone of her daily prayer. Most mornings she watches the ever-changing sky, examines her deepest self, and writes a rensaku that both responds to what she sees and reveres the divine spirit. Readers are invited to draw the poem into themselves and make it their own. Outside of prayer, Janelle has published essays, poems, or both in The Iowa Review, Catapult, Typehouse, HerStry, and Amethyst Review, among other places. Find her at backmanwriter.com.

Soft Ruin

Inside the chrysalis,
the body begins by forgetting itself.
Muscles loosen its faithful grip.
The old mouth dissolves.
Legs surrender their labor.
Even the patient architecture of hunger
is taken apart until nothing remains,
but a pale, breathing hush where
certainty once lived.

Metamorphosis.

As if becoming were gentler than this.
From within, it is a slow flood,
each familiar room of the body
filling with a void,
each remembered shape softening
into something that can no longer hold its own name.

There is no applause for a miracle.
Only surrender.
I know something of that,
my whole life in shackles.

There are lives we do not leave behind;
they dissolve around us until the person
who first entered them exists only
in fragments,
drifting beneath the surface
like leaves returning to dark water.

I did not choose to change.
I simply grew grew beyond the borders
that once held me, and the world,
faithful to its own turning,
never paused long enough
for my roots to understand
they were no longer touching earth.

So I taught myself the quiet ways of unmaking.
How to loosen my grip without failure.
How to survive the long country of shapelessness,
where every morning arrives wearing a stranger’s face,
and even hope must learn to move without wings.

Yet hidden inside the ruin,
a small congregation of living cells
keeps its impossible promise,
building what the breaking could never imagine. 

Perhaps that is what grace has always been:
not escaping the undoing,
but discovering that the deepest part of us
was never asked to dissolve.

May Garner is an author and poet residing in rural Ohio. She has been writing for fifteen years and sharing her work online for over a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising (2023) and Melancholic Muse (2025). Her work has appeared in more than seventy literary magazines and anthologies. She is the recipient of first place in the 4th Annual Poet-It Like Poe Poetry Contest and a winner of the 2026 Woody Barlow Poetry Contest. Find her work on Instagram (@crimson.hands).

You, Whom I Have Named

You, whom I have named static between radio stations -
I heard You in the morning humdrum
[7:53 A.M. middling 94.3 FM and 95.1 FM],
the peach fuzz of signal searching,
each buzz before a noise noses in.
Sentimentally, I always let the dial dillydally there like
an offering to You: my attention with no demand for
Your intention.

You, whom I have named a rose in the pavement -
it was surely You, emerging from concrete cracks,
red and green against a sea of rusted grey,
form conquering over function, a kind of alleycat angel.
I watered it once, as
an offering to You: my outpouring, for a singular gift of beauty.

You, whom I have named the summer light after streetlamps -
that slate-sea hour when the sky is a swirling seascape.
I throw my wrists out to west and east, fingers unwrapped,
calling in the wind, calling at the windows, at all times
an offering to You: seeing salvation in the lingering light,
faded but never faded away.

You, whom I have named a man in a novelty t-shirt on Victoria Beach, June 2026,
I mean it, because if cotton can curl my mug into a meaty smile, 
it is an affirmation that an aliveness courses through this conduit
and it does not ask for blessing,
and no high and holy miracle ever did.
And so even that paltry moment of giggling is
an offering to You: my laughter, measured out in dad jokes
on sand-scratched shirts.

You, whom I have named nothing at all
because all that I can say of You falls short,
and everything is nothing in full colours, 
and You left a porch light on for me, 
in case I want to come in to experience
how wonderful nothing ever is. So, here,
an offering to You: my feet on the porch 
steps, I will leave the light on for the others.

Magnus Briar is a poet from Winnipeg, Canada. Their first poetry collection, Prairie Chicken, appeared on several Amazon bestseller lists. They have performed their original poetry at festivals across the region.

Book of Hours

	after ‘Book of Hours’, 15th century 

A gold and blue salamander 
finds me in an ancient calendar,
swimming beside crimson oxide. 
I could stay forever, hidden inside 
botanical margins left behind.
Sift through lists of saints intertwined
with my questions. I’m tethered
to thistles, poppies, and roses all treasured 
enough for someone to paint 
in 1528. I hope my inexperience won’t taint
this brilliance. My admiration 
settles down beside a curved creation
whose golden leaves call to me, 
a rustling cacophony.  

Rachael Watson’s stories and poetry have been published online, in print, and converted into a short film. Rachael recently completed a Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. Her debut middle grade novel, ELIZABRIE, will be published in 2027.

Rain III: A Love Supreme, Psalm


The swelling saxophone warms my car’s
Cockpit, makes the little constellation 
Of droplets that coats my windshield sparkle
A bit more, refracting traffic lights’ reds
And streetlights’ yellows, a scintillation
Of dew bedecking the befogged pane 
Like twinkling Christmas lights seen hazy,
Lazy-strewn by a happy hand. 

There’s something perfect about jazz
In the warmth of the car as you drive 
Home by night in a gentle rain. Its wist
-fulness imbues existence (for a few
Moments) with just the proper tenor 
Of melancholy longing. I become 
So absorbed in Coltrane’s and Ellington’s
Sentimental Mood that I drive past 
My own intersection, not realizing 
My street is my street, somehow seeing
These sky-washed asphalt flats
As if from an utterly new man’s eyes. 

Taking a detour home, I reckon with
Rain as supreme condescension, 
Heaven coming on down 
To cover this earth in a purgative power
Which will wipe away the grime
Of time, draw out a whiff of that dear freshness,
A scent, to be man-masked by diluting devices 
No more. Car door closed, I’m wrapped
In a wondrous birthwet night 
Whose distant, slick tire tracks whisper
Rhythm and news: Heaven will not drown 
That which he wishes to water,
To wash clean.

Ian Heisler teaches 9th grade classics, U.S. history, and poetry in Phoenix while trying to become a better host of convivial community. His poetry appears in Salt and Iron Magazine. He likes writing Letterboxd movie reviews pretentiously, dancing Ceili eagerly, and hosting festal parties joyfully.