Author Archives: Sarah

My Spiritual Practice



It is practice, the going again and again
through the heavy double doors and along
the polished wooden pews, the week’s program 
in my hand, the list of hymns and verses ready
for the faithful and the struggling, the ones like me
who repeat the prayers silently but with my lips 
in motion.  It is practice, the discipline 
of repetition, the dumb fingers climbing the scale,
rehearsing the tricky cross over, making time 
to serve the melody, making the body serve 
the will, and training the spirit when the spirit 
no longer feels the flame of faith.  It is practice,
the familiar, the regular, the repeated 
that will keep the spirit afloat assures the priest,
agrees the therapist, the bright orange vest you wear
to sustain you through the rapids and buoy you 
in the deepest waters, the keel of the life boat 
where you cling even after belief has capsized. 
It is practice, not perfection, not mastery,
that winches me out of my despair following 
her loss, the winding rope of dailiness, the meals 
with awkward friends, the re-filling of bird feeders
each morning, the dogged breaking up of concrete 
and hauling of debris, the work down on my knees
to level flagstones, the Wednesday morning doughnut 
rendezvous, the Sundays inside the heavy doors,
under high ceilings, arches, and the rhythmic words 
that I heard again and again that hold me here.

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has had a handful of poems published in Cimarron Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines.

From a Window by the Schuylkill

I sit beside the window
The early morning sun pours in
The afternoon light is there
The light seems to continue 
I sense that there is light
The day passes
                without me turning to look

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of Meatless (Plan B Press) and other short poetry collections. His poems have been curated in many journals including Across The Margin, The New Verse News, anti-heroin chic, Right Hand Pointing, The Broadkill Review, Otoliths, and Gargoyle. 

This Moment
 
 
//
 
 
Because you took Wayne 
instead of Lakewood.
 
Because after the storm 
waned,
and the temperature 
dropped,
 
you walked up, in enough time 
to stop at Ellie’s
 
the coffeeshop
with the terrible hours. 
 
And then it was suddenly late.
 
And because the traffic was calm, 
and you never took the phone call
or the alleyway,
 
on your way 
back home from Aldi Grocery.
 
But instead, took the main road, 
past the two-flat,
with the brown mixed breeds— 
that race to the iron gate
 
and snap
at the back
of your heels. 
 
Because your friend
didn’t invite you to the show, 
 
and your neighbor stopped you 
suddenly, on the porch, 
to talk about their week, 
apple picking in Michigan—
 
This very moment is ours!
This moment. This moment.
 
 
\\
 
 
Yesterday has gone.
Tomorrow has yet arrived.    
 
All we have is this moment
right now:
 
me glancing occasionally at boats, 
writing these words to you, 
 
you hunched over this poem, 
reading these words from me—
 
across years, and years, still, 
I’ll never give up
 
this moment with you.
 
 
//
 
 
This is the very moment you have
 
—this moment swelling like a bulb 
before your eyes, holding sun
slowly illuminating the blinds. 
 
Do you hear the wren
through the thin window-glass? 
 
This is the moment you’re holding 
air in your lungs, in whatever condition, 
you’re alive, you’re alive.
 
Lean in close, let me whisper some-
thing very important into your ear
 
—you’ve arrived, you’ve arrived. 

Ahrend Torrey is the author of Ripples (Pinyon Publishing, 2023), Bird City, American Eye (Pinyon Publishing, 2022), and Small Blue Harbor (Poetry Box Select, 2019). His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and West Trade Review, among others. He earned his MA/MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press. He lives in Chicago with his husband Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat. 

On The Spiritual Practice Of Clouds

They can congregate or be
A lone mendicant wandering the blue
They never seem to know when
They are given birth to
Nor when they will give birth
To those who never know when
They will be given birth to

They concentrate they consolidate 
They fly apart in the wind

There is one now a child with its plaything
Being bidden to come along or this one
A woman at the well weeping

Now it is night and yet they continue to practice
Moving toward the moon like worshipers in the night 

Gerry Grubbs has a book forthcoming from Dos Madres Press, Learning A New Way To Listen. 

The Name of God


The light dances in the garden,
a perfect stillness,
the greenest green,
a silent breeze
and in the leaves -
it has no name.

But I used to call it God.
Every night I’d kiss the stars
and pray they would keep me safe. 

I found no truth; I found no safety.
My pockets stuffed with receipts and wrappers,
half-eaten biscuits and stones.
A mother now,
and yet a stranger.

I learn nothing.
I find myself in different rooms,
but I don’t know how I got here.

The words elude me,
the sacred secrets,
the revelations,
the clear laughter,
the child I was,
I chase their shadows,
my hands are empty.

Still, I look outside,
I see the light,
I hear a whisper.

Irene Cantizano Bescós is a writer and immigrant from Spain lost between two languages. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Black Hare Press, Moria, Five Minutes, (mac)ro(mic), and Tales to Terrify, among others. She is also a freelance journalist, and her reporting has appeared in leading Spanish and UK titles such as Huffington Post, El País, Telva, and Positive News. Irene lives in England with her husband, two toddlers, and two warring cats. You can find her on Twitter as @IreneCantizano.

Thoughts On an Airplane

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop... 
-- excerpt from Prelude, William Wordsworth

I am cloud sailing
and feel as if all the silver-bellied geese
I saw this morning have come 
to pull the plane along like a boat.
On the horizon, sea-shell pink spreads
below thunder-topped tremolo

as if to sing  about clouds, sailing
high above the patterns of geese
reflecting possibility of response to come—
steering towards anything,  like the luff of a boat
caught in the wind . Silence now, calm spreads
around us, hurry-hurry ceases its tremolo.

Can you feel it, the possibility sailing,
ruffle of wind?  No bafflement in the geese.
Just this moment, preparing what's to come.

Fruit of the Forgotten Hedgerow -
The Crab Apple


I was a crab apple – hard, small, sour. 
I made sunny, expectant faces twist and disfigure
at the taste of me, so that I was dropped 
at the track edge and could rot myself down 
into the soil and rise again from my seed.

I was nothing much at all - except I had 
something, I had something, that my fruit-bowled, 
my pocketed cousins could only dream of. 

And the lovely Scarecrow - he, at least, 
would always take me, and chew at me; 
his lovely face, his grin, never changing.
His eyelids never closing on his ecstatic gaze.

Martin Towers is a support worker in Aberystwyth, Wales. His poems have been published in Crannog, Banshee and The Galway Review.

Bloviation

Ruptured sense of self
finds direction
when He maps it for me.
I’m convinced it’s Him:
This is a function of faith.
In lightlessness
He ushers in the lamp of lines.
 
Unsettled moorings prod
wanton moves. In dispassion,
my inmost lines show up.
Rigid abidance by the rules
gifts poetry its pliancy.
A poem shouldn’t be polyped:
It must not run all over the page.

Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He has been published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 400 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He edited Dreich Planet #1, for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. In 2023, he won the First Prize in a Poetry Competition by the prestigious National Defence Academy, Pune, during its 75^thanniversary in the “family members category.” He lives in Mumbai, India.

The Transcendental Desert
 
                Homage to Agnes Pelton
 
The yellow scent. Red-tailed shadow
on the trail. A drop of blue
from a lizard’s neck
shading all the way to darkness and from there
to glow the glow of mysteries
when not knowing is the greater part
of beauty. The spirits
never have an edge that would define them;
they float as dreams do
when they appear in waking life
with fragments of the night
adhering. And they are silent
as the border
that runs through desert and has no
opinion on why one country
has a history and the other
one a future. The poorest of the poor
have learned to fly. They wait
for darkness and they spread
their wings to get across. There is
no need to believe
anything about the desert.
It is a vision with shallow roots,
patience with a sting,
a memory of ocean, a jaguar’s first
last hope. He is
on the trail of years long gone, but still
treading slow ground
with the taste of a kill in his mouth.
Monsoon. Black moth. Dust winds.
Something of the spirits moves
red earth and laughs
at sudden rainfall. Lightning signs its name
and each cholla and saguaro
lights up from its core to
the tips of its thorns.  The rocks howl.
Arroyos buzz. The sun
prys canyons open. A single wing
comes sailing into summer.
Another desert moment
beyond an explanation. More tracks
on the path to disappearance,
a scent the coyotes
have followed for centuries. The light
has a pulse. They may be
hallucinations that are visible and
passing shape across shape
as temperatures blossom
and the sky comes down
to strip bare
what is left on the ground.

David Chorlton has lived in Arizona long enough to see beyond the surface of the desert and to appreciate its wildlife and ability to endure the heat. He has a new book featuring watercolors of birds together with poems, The Flying Desert, from Cholla Needles Arts and Literary Library in Joshua Tree, California.

St. James, Avebury

	13 October 2018


How many who have entered here have found
what they were seeking? Safety, peace, salvation,
communion, hope, direction, inspiration?
We two, who simply want to look around,
open the heavy wooden door set in 
the Saxon archway leading to the nave
enlarged by Normans, whose descendants gave
the rood a loft and screen, considered sin-
ful later and removed but now restored.
Immediately we feel like trespassers:
a woman mopping floors of stone deters
our passage. Greetings given, we turn toward
the altar, bend or bow, then say a prayer
as scent of minted cleanser fills the air.

Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia (USA). Her work has recently appeared in Allegro, Light, Pulsebeat, and Snakeskin. Her collections include Never Enough Already (2021) and Sooner or Later (2022).