Author Archives: Sarah

May the Circle be Unbroken   

At nineteen,
I learned I couldn’t hold
anything in my hands.

Even my heart sat on sinews,
waiting for directions
from my soul, waiting for my 
bones to call it beautiful. 

When I took my whole
heart to a holy 
space, I reached for a
long, slender door handle, installed
by hands I never touched.

The grey-green
slate seemed impenetrable
until I put one sandaled foot 
in front of the other, stepping on well-
worn stones. The absent voices
stored in the wood beckoned me. 

In this sustained,
constrained-open
place, I knew the high triangular ceilings
would catch me if I faltered. 

God stirred together
a strange alchemy, 
wrapping me in warmth
while hushing me
in awe. 

My fingers gripped 
the rosary
I received at Confirmation
with its 
black
obsidian beads.

All the way around,
ten to a set, I held
each bead between
index and thumb,
saying one Hail Mary
after another 
into reverie. 

Fingers on black beads;
atom on atom—there’s still
space

between everything
we touch. 

Jessica Mattox is a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University and an adjunct English professor. In addition to writing poetry, she is passionate about the teaching and learning of technical/professional communication and first-year composition. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Last Leaves Magazine, The Album at Hollins University, Exit 109 at Radford University, and others. In addition, her academic scholarship has been published in the Virginia English Journal.

Basho and Wallace Stevens



What I like about language is what I like about fog. 
What comes between us and things grants them 
their shine.
- Mark Doty



How many times can a koan
stub the mind’s toe?
Or a sensei clap his hand
with no sound?
Here it is, late at night,
and you’ve come together,
like two old friends
who never knew each other.
Stillness, whispering leaves,
and a promise that only
things themselves can make,
or the moon as the ghost
of everything possible.
Step in, step in…
and together we’ll go down the long
darkened hallway
in the House of Being,
down to the last window
at the end
where the stars glimmer
in the flickering light, 
like a scatter of coins.
And later, when fog is a thief
clouding the moon,
what better veil than the mist?
I’ve fallen in love with illusion.
And if I whisper,
tell you the truth of a life,
that I lean on your lines,
will you come and sit by my side
while I read,
read everything into your worlds?

John Valentine has recently retired from 45 years of teaching philosophy courses at various colleges. 

Lightning flashed before my eyes - 
I lay in bed near death.
I felt bright colors on my chest,
and smelled the warm sunrise.

I heard my dear priest’s throaty rasp 
proclaim an ancient prayer; 
his water words flowed up the stairs,
outpacing my weak grasp - 

and rose into a golden climb, 
which beckoned to the top. 
I left my failings far behind -  
my overtrying stopped. 

As water once was turned to wine, 
I was - then I was not - 

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of Gently Between the Words: Essays and Poems. He is a Presbyterian pastor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he shares life with his spouse, also an ordained minister, their three young children, and dog named Ramona after their favorite literary heroine.

Eve’s Theme
 
 
Rumor suggests that the name of things originated with me,
even those distinct variations of rain.
 
But this is not exactly the truth.
Even the smallest creature, the least observed plant,
 
the most distant star has a voice and speaks
its own appellation.  I’m sorry
 
if you don’t understand.
If you are still enough, long enough, you can hear
 
all those who speak.  And as for the gossip of temptation,
don’t be so quick to judge.
 
Even the seeds inside the fruit call out.
I listen.
 
They say bite into the flesh,
let them see the light.
 

David B. Prather is the author of We Were Birds (Main Street Rag Publishing). His second collection will be published by Fernwood Press. His work has appeared in many print and online journals, including Prairie Schooner, Psaltery & Lyre, The Meadow, Cutleaf, Sheila-Na-Gig, etc. He studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory, and he studied writing at Warren Wilson College.

Diet of Worms

The boys at the conference feel so sorry for me
"He thinks the Diet of Worms is a diet, of food,"
they say among themselves
"He knows not enlightenment
He is simple, he is not truly Reformed"
Another says,
"I heard him once say he had never heard
of the Nicene Creed!"
And another adds,
"I heard him say he reads Beth Moore!
Has he never heard of Piper or Bonhoeffer?"

So I sit alone and eat my dish of worms
while the others, careful to avoid me
for fear of catching some Baptist sniffle,
indulge in big, lofty cakes
The icing is too rich, but they chew
and make the most absurd faces,
faces one makes when pretending his nose doesn't itch
The bread is too tough for any of them to slice and share
So they proclaim it predestined to be uneaten
I ask them what this means, 
but there are worms in my teeth
and they tell me they'll send me an email
with a link to explain it so I'll understand

So I sit alone and eat my diet of worms
They are sweet to the taste but bitter in my stomach
I remark to one of the boys passing by
that truth and revelation from God are like my worms,
or like the scroll eaten by John -
so sweet to the taste, but when we must face them
and apply them with all our grit and tears,
they're so trying on our guts

He suggests I read The Pilgrim's Progress
and walks away

Bud Sturguess was born in 1986 in the small cotton-and-oil town of Seminole, Texas. He has self-published several books, his latest being the novel Sick Things. Sturguess’s work appears online at New Pop Lit and Erato, as well as in the print anthologies Mid/Southfrom Belle Point Press, and The Daily Drunk’s From Parts Unknown. He lives on disability benefits and collects neckties.

Trumpet Morning



It is no cloud surrounding the horizon, 
that silhouette revealed now 
in the growing light along its range.

Around each peak the coming sun’s
announcement glows
like tongues of cleaving fire.  Canyons

exhale on the last lights of the city
as a thunderhead flotilla
emerges from the west

acquiring the migration trails.
Fig trees shiver along the stream
like a weave of trembling chalices.

Beneath the aerial schism the sleeping
earth dreams on:  not the dream
of storm’s omened contact

at the mountains’ first ridges, where light
flies up in face of the blackness, climbs wing
upon wing from the dwindling blue

which at the moment before engulfment
sends the only calling ray
to a waiting rose of sharon in the field.

A former Pastor’s Assistant, David W. Parsley is an engineer/manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he works during the day (okay, and some nights and weekends) on interplanetary probes and rovers. His poems appear in London Grip, Poetry LA, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. “Kyoto: A Cycle” was a semi-finalist for the Able Muse Award.

Dusk Fog

As pastel clouds bloom, stretch, and slack,
mist rises from the hillside’s back.
Dishes get washed. The kids get hugs
and story time. The lightning bugs
and bats show up to flash and flit.
The treetop’s now a silhouette
in the fading light. All the day’s rough
words and anxious thoughts are enough
to bleach the evening’s beauty, when
they’re fully felt. The softness in
the warm air whispers wordlessly
that maybe wrecked hearts can still be
restored, as this simple, lonely place
awaits the night, shrouded in grace.

Steven Searcy lives with his wife and three sons in Atlanta, GA, where he works as an engineer in fiber optic telecommunications. His poetry has been published in Ekstasis Magazine, Reformed Journal, Fathom Magazine, The Clayjar Review, and Foreshadow Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @ithinkiamsteven

An Angel Flies Over


You think—at first—it’s a wind
battering trees at sunset.

Or perhaps an airplane, lower
than usual on a flightpath by moonlight.

But it is his wide wing,
enfolding a weary, guilty earth.

You cannot hide from it.

Mark J. Mitchell was born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. His latest poetry collection, Roshi San Francisco, was just published by Norfolk Publishing. Starting from Tu Fu   was recently published by Encircle Publications.

A new collection, Something to Be and a novel are forthcoming.

He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka and Dante. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster where he made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. Now, he’s looking for work again.

He has published 2 novels and three chapbooks and four full length collections so far. His first chapbook won the Negative Capability Award.

https://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/

https://www.mark-j-mitchell.square.site/

@Mark J Mitchell_Writer

This Material World: A Benediction

                                    World-mothering air, air wild, /… fast fold thy child.
                                     GM Hopkins

Morning’s heron drifts
low over the sycamore.
A solitary, saurian flap
astonishes the cedar-tops.
Far past seeing, 
through the gun-metal dawn, 
a thousand cranes 
in weary squadrons 
bellow joy.

Out in this air a wildness cries out only to itself, lives only 
once to hear its whispered voice alive among the swaying trees.

A wildness cries in every air where only silence ought to be.
Here a tiny voice disturbs the quiet space where each one lives alone,

where each thing dries its leaves in the trailing fragrance of the rain, 
in the dispossessions that engender and expose each stark enfolded self,

in the cry that draws us one and all and time and time again into this 
mordant, murderous world’s life-mothering atmosphere, as far

from spirit as things get, as far from things unseen as those dark
quantities themselves: the compromising body, the uncompromising

body of evidence that rises to our life-denying eye, into our joyous 
pulsing heart, into all we struggle not to see. So if it please, o world, 

do grant us each and every day our dread day’s daily crumb, 
and deliver us each moment from the life of worlds to come,

for here, from somewhere far past seeing,
you can hear the wild clamor
of your interrupted solitude.
Listen as, within your precious
silence, above the pearly dawn, 
a thousand cranes in weary squadrons 
make joyful noise.

DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Willows Wept, Sequoia Speaks; Revue {R}évolution (https://www.revuerevolution.com/en/db-jonas) and others.

Holy Basil
 
 
I notice the young holy basil, 
delicate,
 
with its two shiny leaves 
like tiny elephant ears.
 
I ask it, why we live—
then leave it for a day
and come back.
 
Then leave it for a day
and come back.
 
Without directly answering the question:
            
each day 
I watch it grow.

Ahrend Torrey is the author of 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 The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), 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.