Author Archives: Sarah

Caroling on Christmas Eve


We walk the streets where slush and ice
assault our feet, to serenade 
this beautiful busted neighborhood.
We are but bagmen and women 
bearing birth and stars and breath.
Many homes are dark, some people
peek out but don’t open. An elderly 
woman says, “thank you so much”,
and a family of eight steps onto
their porch to sing along.  As we turn
back to the church, dozens, then hundreds 
of crows begin to gather in the bare tree tops.
Their black and raucous bodies against 
the milk gray sky spook us for a second,	
but then we begin to hear their song: 
a summons to all tribes and tongues,
a welcome to the worst and the best 
behaved alike. We see no hierarchy,
no rule but their common life lived 
through wings and their love of bark
and branch. We stop for a moment
on the corner to raise our eyes to 
the bustling sky and to feel their hymn 
pull something deeper from our flesh.
I don’t know how long we will stand here.
Sometimes God serenades with beasts.
Sometimes God is serenaded 
with cold feet keeping silence.
 

Patrick Cabello Hansel is the author of the poetry collections The Devouring Land (Main Street Rag Publishing) and Quitting Time (Atmosphere Press). He has published work in over 80 journals, and won awards from the Loft Literary Center and MN State Arts Board. You can find him at www.artecabellohansel.com

Not An Air Sign


I want to feel light
Like Anemoi’s feet on shoulders
In the neighbor’s swimming pool
Or the sated smile of Plutus
As he unbuttons his oxford shirt.

Find me airborne as a piece of lint
Drifting outside domestic dribble -
Like Andromeda out for dry-cleaning
To never dirty the doorstep again.

I don’t know how to be free
Within this context,
Would I earn respect
Without this desk 
Against my cheek
Against free time?

Forget legacy,
What you mean is 
A friend at a funeral saying
you made her feel lighter?

I was always more fun in the open air.
I’m probably more valuable in a meadow.

But to swear myself to Elysium
Feels like its own form of condemnation.

I want to build a temple to myself
That’s a temple to everyone human.

I pick up a brick
And feel the wind
That makes me wonder
If I’ve gotten it all wrong
And I should be the air
The temple tries to reach.

Sam Ligeti (She/Her) has always known that she’s a writer, but is only just starting to believe it. Connect with her on Instagram: @samligeti, or at www.samligeti.com.

“Israel’s Hands” by Unknown

It was nearing springtime when Ezekiel visited his sister
in the city and brought his sprawling notebooks.
She was almost done with an exhibit-- her living room
on the 15th floor covered with canvas and paint,
the concrete floor splattered and everywhere, everywhere
was God. “Tell it to me again,” she said, and stood in front
of the biggest canvas of them all. Ezekiel turned a page.
“Think of it like this, my-people-who-will-not-listen. 
You are walking, passing by a field. In the ditch to the left
you hear wailing. A baby! Still slippery with blood and warm,
like a calf born in the dirt, kicking and screaming with fear.
You pick it up, wipe away the grime with your jacket--”
The painting is taking shape. She’s feathered the background
softly, green fading into blue, the cool mud of a resting field
clumping at the front. The way her prophet brother tells it,
the baby is afraid, but there! off to the left, a speck of red,
a tiny fist waving above the grass, a hint of a leg kicking
in defiance. “You know, in the moment, everything. How
that child will grow to hate you, curse you, throw your love 
in the dirt. And still you wrap it, and take it with you.”
She flicks her wrist, and there, in the corner:
a pair of hands reaching to meet the bloody fist.

Emma McCoy is a poet and essayist with love for the old stories. She is the assistant editor of Whale Road Review, co-editor of Driftwood, and poetry reader for the Minison Project.  She is the author of In Case I Live Forever (2022), and she has poems published in places like Flat Ink, Paddler Press, and Jupiter Review. Catch her on Twitter: @poetrybyemma

Miraculous


How each new day opens the gate.
               How months and years only echo

their loon-like howl. How they tunnel
               and froth at our feet that decide

always to keep moving forward,
               beyond the maps of the past,

each ping and prod a pressure point
               released for now out the open window

of tomorrow’s potential. Listen,
               I need to tell you how difficult it is

to live in the world, and how lucky
               we are to be a part of its churning. 

Originally from Pennsylvania, Alicia Hoffman now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. She is the author of three collections, most recently ANIMAL (Futurecycle Press). Her poems can be found in a variety of publications, including The Atticus Review, The Rise Up Review, The Night Heron Barks, SWWIM, The Penn Review, Typishly, and elsewhere. Find her at: www.aliciamariehoffman.com

Peeling Habas


Habas are hard and they are aloof,
they come about once a year, like miracles, 
or my mother’s second cousins, doubtful 
they will come, annoying when they do.

You must boil them to loosen 
their coarse skin, then move them
to a bowl filled with cold water, 
and so the penitence begins.

You must peel them by holding 
to one end and squeezing softly 
until its inner soul slides elegantly out,
otherwise their sacrifice would be unworthy.

Like most saints, their sweetness
resides under their robes, like John,
Paul, Anthony of Padua or Joan of Arc,
they demand the incandescence of our spirit,

our absolute surrender. We are here
to peel away, the account of our good deeds
inconsequential, heaven counting on all of us
to abide by the peeling of our hardness.

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires. His poems appeared in The Worcester Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Impspired (UK), and Otoliths (Australia), among many others. His work has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His chapbook,  Contraband, was published this year.

Approaching the Last Solstice


we are all Joshuas
knee-deep in the Jordan
our feet stone still
our words frozen trumpets
about to crack the earth
we make the sun stop
simply by singing our song

Katherine was laid to rest
on her anniversary
confirmation
	reformation
		desecration
the bullet from her back
tilts in the examiner’s hand
the prayer for her murderer
lights like a crow
on the white stone tower 

when we love someone
we bundle them in fabric
then wood, then earth
we hear their voices
for a few days, a month
then winter down
for the long silence
now
we must wait
we must kindle
we must sink

Patrick Cabello Hansel is the author of the poetry collections The Devouring Land (Main Street Rag Publishing) and Quitting Time (Atmosphere Press). He has published work in over 80 journals, and won awards from the Loft Literary Center and MN State Arts Board. You can find him at www.artecabellohansel.com

Railway Fields


Between our rubble sprawls 
is a crack of infinity. 
It fills the interregnum of every train journey. 

Dogwalkers – the sages of this space
traipse copse and field flank, 
breathe brownfield pleasure. 
They wander the Pindrop flatland with apothecary vials. 
Their sweetened tinctures a mud remedy. 

Steam rises from a pasty, seat 36
and the great synapse of flood glass reflections 
fragments past scarred windows. 
The scent of peppered turnip 
conjures a request stop:

Decanting into fields of oil-seed rape,
the Citizens of Carriage B watch 
muntjac fangs strip the fibres of burdock root,
and sweat in the herbalist air.

Anthony Tomkins is a PhD researcher with the University of York’s English and Related Literature Department, working on athletic memoirs. He writes about ethereal nature and the sublime landscape of his Brecon Beacons home. 

Locution I: We are more wretched than the animals

A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press), and four poetry chapbooks. She has won poetry prizes from Palette Poetry, Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal and Ruminate Magazine. Her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill Journal and West Branch, among many other journals. She’s managing editor at THRUSH Poetry Journal. Nicole holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University. She’s also co-founder and CEO of Strand Writing Services. Visit her online: www.nicolemrollender.com.

Stick Figures


Two, jogging way up there along the beach
in hoodies, spindly in the sun. Waves reach
to touch about their shadows, which pull back,
then jab out suddenly again—flicked, black
switchblades bobbing straight along in sync.
They merge a moment now, now they shrink
apart again, a sparkling flop-eared dog
galumphing up ahead, meet analogue,
if there ever could be, or couldn’t, for
a kind of love still wagging anymore,
some image, some weird numinous embrace
receding forward, way up past that place,
past rocks and sea-cress, tide pools—shining—white—
something: a laid out open palm of light.

A two-time Pushcart nominee, Terence Culleton has published three collections of formally crafted narrative and lyric poems, including A Communion of Saints and Eternal Life (both out through Anaphora Literary Press) and, most recently, A Tree and Gone, a collection of formal English sonnets out in 2021 through Future Cycle Press. Sonnets from A Tree and Gone have appeared in Antiphon, Better Than Starbucks (featured poem), Blue Unicorn, Eclectic Muse, Innisfree, Orbis (Readers’ Choice), Raintown Review, Schuylkyll Valley Journal (featured poet), and numerous other anthologies and journals. A Tree and Gone is available at https://amzn.to/3qDrRqN or through his website, terenceculletonpoetry.com.

Jonah


When God regrets agreeing
to deals he made with devils
devised with dark designs
he appeals to sunken creatures
for whom he chose a flood
so that evils would survive
to be summoned from the seas
when he needs something to swallow
his own graven image.

And when he’s half-digested,
reformed with dovish graces,
the man’s regurgitated
on foreign shores for salvage.
He puts his ear to shells
he’s scavenged from the wreckage
and listens for his message
     
     susurring 
          
          in the waves

Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called “the country north of Belleville”, where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. He is on the web at birdsandbeesandblooms.com, and on twitter @cincinnatus_c_.