Author Archives: Sarah

Gnosis


Let the ocean enter you,
let the rush of saline silence fill the dark cavern 
cluttered with detritus,
with your collection of broken thoughts, 
obsessions and addictions piled like idols.

Awash, submerged, and sunken -
observe their frailty.

Waters deeper than you knew 
settle into glassy reflection.
All open, receiving, all palms thankful,
ears fanned like conch shells. 

This mirror birthed in briny wash
and reverence -
gaze there to see the mystery.

Erin Olson is a licensed professional counselor living in southeastern Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, Last Leaves Magazine, and Sky Island Journal. 

Jacob’s Angel

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. 
And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

Genesis 32:26 (KJV)


The herder Jacob, gripped by guilt and fear,
has wrestled with a stranger all the night
when in the borderlands of dawn he hears
his foe entreat to end the fight.

I will not let you go, the herder cries,			
unless you bless me! Then awakening
from sweat-soaked sleep he rubs his aching thigh
and hears an echo from the fading dream:

From now you shall be known as Israel! 
And as he limps into the breaking day,
while meditating on this nameless angel’s
benediction, Jacob asks if he

had just contended with his God or if
the mystery angel might have been himself.

James Green is a retired university professor and administrator.  He has published five chapbooks of poetry and individual poems have appeared in literary journals in Ireland, the UK, and the USA. His collection, Stations of the Cross, was nominated for the MLA’s Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year. His website can be found at http://www.jamesgreenpoetry.net.

Illuminated Manuscript
 

I am the flourish,
Not the trumpet,
 
Yet I am at least
Ornamental,
 
If not instrumental,
To the prophecy—
 
Come to think of it,
I am in the same
 
Position as God the
Father, always
 
Sky, not the sun, neither
The accumulating
 
Nor dispersing clouds.
But I am a handful
 
Of colors (available to men 
In the medieval period), the
 
Revelation
Incomplete without
 
The whole sum
Of foreground, middle ground,
 
And back, animate
And invisible musics,
 
And the spirit of
It,
 
Coursing through it all.

Marion Evalee (they/she), formerly Justin Burnett, has appeared in Montage, Survivor Lit, The Boston Compass, Neologism, and Willows Wept Review. A selection of their poetry was featured in the anthology 14 International Younger Poets, edited by Philip Nikolayev.

God is Spirt is Wisdom

Elder Gideon is the author of two poetry collections Gnostic Triptych and Aegis of Waves (Atmosphere Press) and co-author with Tau Malachi of Gnosis of Guadalupe (EPS Press, 2017). His poems and sculptures have appeared in dozens of journals. 

Siddhattha Rewrites “O Store Gud” 

Let us not worship sadness for the aim of great art; 
I say, let us worship art, for the sake of great sadness.

Bow your head and pray, without the content of your words. 
Pray with your knees, pray with your slumped shoulders, 
pray with your chin set, in the basket of your clavicle. 

A buddha might sit 
in a blade of grass, in a bowl of water, 
along a fly’s hum, on a weathered stone

but no buddha has ever nor will ever be housed in your form. 
There is no enlightenment for you, for are you not 
            unsure?

We may yearn for what we’ve forgotten. 
Never was there safety or simplicity within the womb you might long for. 
How many ways you could have died, how many sufferings you did endure.

My god is the God of General Sadness. 

No god requires you to believe, for holy places be dark places. 
No gospel was ever meant to be written down, 
spoken aloud, agonized over, 
kept, cradled dearly.

So draw the face of your god. 
Paint the trappings of the next, the nothing, 
the end, the beginning you have never known.

You have been given no soul that is whole. Rather, you are building it. 
            I say, you must labor, you must pain over it.

When you ascend, or sink, or dissolve, or join, 
will you be a being? Will you be whole?

När brister själen (When the soul breaks)
ut i lofsångsljud, (and the hymns sound,)

            let us be as great art. 

Let us in finality be hung on the walls. 
Ourselves, at last, surrendering.

Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She is lead editor of Green Lion Journal and writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review. Her poems have appeared in Porridge Magazine, AIOTB, Headline Press, Whimperbang, Free Verse Revolution, Vita Brevis, Streetcake, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. Find more of her work at www.renwickberchild.com

Mary Magdalen Seated Before a Mirror

After Georges de La Tour, Penitent Magdalen, 1640



                        1.

Beneath the wood 
ran lines of water,
cutting across the root.

The wood had rotted;
it broke off in her hand,
splintery like a clod of earth,
crawling, and beneath her hand
the sharp running blades –
her dry, soundless weeping,
her solitude.


                        2.

She knew that she had fallen:
the cold descent 
a jewel of knowledge 
placed upon her.

Close by was the little dresser
with its oval glass, oblique,
discreet in dust – 
unwilling to embarrass her.

The dresser in a child’s size;
she had to fold herself up to be near it,
to trace with her finger the oval,
the old view.  The first.

She placed her fingers on the surface:
here; here.
She bent forward, turned her head
to the sliding impossible image,
the eyelash, the whole, the furnished room:
now it is there.

                        3.

To her flesh was laid the edge of the knife,
division of eternity.

The skin was lifted away.
Veils fluttered,
unresisting the edge that caught, lifted,
found easily the quick fraying,
the edge everywhere at once,
the separation at first schematic
along the warp and the weft,
then from each point
equal motion in all directions was possible,
all outwards,
the veil lifted: torn, adrift, smoke.

The muscles of the body lay exposed,
bound in curving sheaves,
braided into one another at the narrow end;
the sheaves of the reed boat journeying,
at every point at the crossing
of descending lunar spears,
and the horizontal breaking 
of silver multitudes
of blades cutting the water.

Braided around the globe of the eye,
the cavity of the mouth,
locked fingers of the open hand,
down the neck, across the shoulders,
the breast, the belly, the arms
and the thighs and the lower legs,
all the limbs and parts,
locked fingers drawn tight,
then loosening, 
rising to curve,
then drawn, twisted tight, 
drawn down.

What word, what step,
what composed and thoughtful gesture
was possible,
drawn from the locked knot of fingers
blind, groping to open and close, 
unclenched, mute?

And the slashed triangle,
slashed like the backbone of a fish,
slashed like the locked, interwoven edges
of the sheaf?

                          4.

To the veil, the reed boat, the sheaf,
from the mirror, the water, the wood,
a candle approached,
as flame, and light.

Cynthia Sowers was a Senior Lecturer at the Residential College of the University of Michigan. Until her retirement in 2019, she developed and taught interdisciplinary courses for the Arts and Ideas in the Humanities Program. Her past teaching and current creative activity are centered on the engagement of literature and the visual arts.  She has published poetry, drawings and paintings in The Solum Journal (2020; 2021) and poetry in Amethyst Review (2021).  She has published a short story, “A Trap to Catch the Earth,” in The Carolina Quarterly (Spring/Summer 2021).

Jacob

The night I fled my father and brother
I came to a certain place at sundown.
I used a stone for my pillow and shelter
and while I slept the curtain of the sky
was lifted and I saw steps climbing up
to heaven and a face carved out of fire
fashioning a Temple. And my face glowed
from God and the angels of God who stood
over me, and I blessed the place when I woke,
the place where the future was folded up
and put beneath my head as a pillow.
And God’s voice and God’s visions pursued me,
they rattled like the fruit and leaves of the
almond tree, and peace were not on those lips.

The night before I met my brother again
I was alone with someone at that river,
and we wrestled through our strength on the ground
and we rose up to heaven and continued
to scuffle there, until both our bodies
glowed and he wrenched my leg into a limp,
and adorned me with a new name – Israel.
And he did not tell me I would find peace,
he did not say there would simply be love,
he did not simply say “sons and daughters,”
but he did say, “You will always see the
morning others hoped to keep from you.
Your stubbornness will never cease, your words,
your families, no more than this blue river.”

I was marked by all my family’s stories
I was marked by this wrestler in God’s skin
I was marked by what God did to my body,
making it whole with injury and strangeness.
I will die with sons and grandsons around me
and all of Egypt will be led beyond
the Jordan to mourn my body’s return
to those who made pilgrimage before me.
My years have been bright in enormous struggle,
in vivid love, injustice, and mercy.
Let the world worship every obvious
power and glory, and leave me alone
with silence and exile, the gathering
of my sparks, with God’s slow accumulation.

Tim Miller‘s books include the poetry collection Bone Antler Stone (High Window Press), and the long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun (S4N Books). He is online at wordandsilence.com, and can be heard on the poetry and mythology podcast Human Voices Wake Us.

The Nine Ways of St. Dominic


She made her prayers arrows and fired them forth 
from the bent bow of her heart, from the curve
of her need where she nocked each shaft on sinews
redly supple and listened for the fletches'
sizzle in flight.  She wanted to pierce heaven
with the sharpened ardor of her entreaty.

She had already tried prostration, flattened
herself—fitted sheet face down under slow
unblinking eye, the prickle of God's green 
grass an irritating mortification,
pressing a chaotic pattern in flesh 
of her cheek, forearm, and exposed stomach,

making her itch outside and in, the smell—
earthy dirtiness, growth—reminding her 
of her snaky lowliness.  She had wanted
forgiveness, notice, and something she could
not say even in cloister of her skull,
certainly not in the yard with the children 

at play around her.  She had bent before 
in adoration over these children,
each in its turn and all together, all
miracles beyond understanding.
She had held each one like an open book, 
like an offering entrusted to her,

each a wonder that grew in mystery.
She had felt each inside her and feels still
each so keenly that she must clasp her hands 
over her heart and clench her jaw.  She has
given herself more than once for each one,
spread her arms wide in universal sign

of welcome or surrender. She has made
an offering of herself, pelican 
mother.  She has stood back, her arms raised,
her palms out, the model of surprise 
or fear or thanks, her own heart awobble 
on unsteady legs, on first bike with wheels 

tilting, turning, rolling away, and then
returning, gratitude welling in her,
replacing the prayer she thought without saying.
Her children were her scripture, and she studied
them, each finger and nail, each hair she brushed
and braided, every smile and tear, each fold

of flesh or whorl of ear she washed and washed 
again.  These were the Rosary she worried
and treasured, the roses on which she prayed
and meditated, day and night, the joys 
beyond all number and prime, like starlings
wheeling as one according to God's will.

But now, as her children's lives turn from her 
in widening gyres, she presses her palms
together, raises them, stretching her arms
higher to lift her pleas to the right ear
of heaven.  She closes her eyes to the blank
blueness above and holds her breath and waits.

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, Cobalt Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines.

Why I Wake up Early
 
I have eleven wild turkeys
that play and dance and eat all day.
Soon there will be turkey babies
who will learn the daily walks 
and rituals of their parents.
 
They pass by my red door without 
knocking, but I hear them all the same—
their cackle and, holy gods, how I envy 
their agility even when they are plump!
Oh, the joy they bring me to watch them free.
Do they have any cares, or is this what 
it means to belong to the Universe?
 
I rise to greet them each day. My heart 
pounds with concern when I do not see 
them at the expected time. I imagine the worst—
bears, foxes, humans… but before I can go on 
with my wretched thoughts, they show up. 
I do not wait for another sign to assure me that 
I, too, am loved somehow.

Mildred Kiconco Barya is a writer from Uganda and assistant professor at UNC-Asheville. She has published three poetry books and her fourth poetry collection, The Animals of My Earth-School Institute, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books, 2023. Her prose, hybrids, and poems are published in Joyland, Shenandoah, The Cincinnati Review, andelsewhere.www.mildredbarya.com

Painting the View

. . . for holy theologians frequently liken that which is superessential and formless to fire.
                                                                  —Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite


River light on your mind,
the hunter’s snare of thoughts,
withdraws beneath a silver flock 
of wading birds with restless eyes.
What faultless day is long enough
for secret errands, flight unfolding,
signs left with a multitude
pale in shrouded winter mist?
I’ve known it all
through other eyes,
just as the artist on a cave wall
left a hint of that pure seeing
in the bull’s red ochre hair.

You speak of what the world misses,
sketched from dawn,
reflected from
our daily bread of hands and currents.

Unmoored branches floating free
with their seasoned shapeliness.

Throw your fire offering
to the water’s canopy.

Reviving now
a world in art,
tracing that primeval space
risks attracting fire trucks

alarmed by flames, by flames.

Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and has family roots in both countries.  His work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. charleshaddox.wordpress.com