Author Archives: Sarah

Kimbol Soques has been writing since before she got her first typewriter at age 3. Her work has been included in a variety of publications, including Non-Binary Review and  Windhover, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She lives and writes in Austin, Texas. Visit kimbol.soques.net for links to her published poetry online.

Transfiguration
 
There will be days
remade in the image
of losses that overtake me.
There will be sadness
that steals my daylight,
and jams the clocks.
Memories will be born
of someone gone
holding hostage
my sleep and dreams.
 
But there will follow
a quiet rising from
that pain and exhaustion,
a clarity in which
these sorrows
find their words,
and turning back to God
and friends, 
I will hold them out,
saying, “Here,
this is the song
I have made of them.”

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection is The Infinite Doctrine of Water. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Breakwater, FRiGG, The Inflectionist Review, and Talking River Review.

Constellations

The Farmer’s unseen hand sows
the furrowed sky by day
and at night it blooms

Brian Kates holds a Pulitzer Prize, George Polk Award and Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spirit Fire Review, Paterson Literary Review, Broadkill Review, Banyan Review, Third Wednesday, Common Ground and other journals. He lives with his wife in a house in the woods in the lower Hudson Valley.

rounds unpetal

Into the Fall, and the Insect Orchestra
still plays through the night, rasping and chirping, soft
and persistent as hope, as bats tumble aloft
through brevities of feasting, throbbing with hunger
like song beneath the silent music of stars,
the rush and stumble of lost beginnings swift
as desire to fill what is not, till nothing is left
of nothing, and emptiness, voided, disappears.
The urgencies of moment, the lazy sprawl
of time; one point in space that spread to all:
watching the spin and rattle, the shiny ball
that chases the wheel to fall into its slot,
to racket and hop and hiss, and finally stop
while songs continue that sound like what is not.

JBMulligan has published more than 1100 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 45 years, and has had two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books: The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation). He has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, and was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Restoration   
				10/08/2011-10/08/2021

In the family of the remnant prairie 
every member has a purpose;
the hardy bluestem grass anchors the soil 
and protects the delicate iris from floating away.
A simple scene from a distance, but up close,
the relationships are as deep and intertwined 
as the root systems scribbled by a mad artist.
There is a purpose for every curve
in this strange language called Harmony.  

In October, the steely blade of death
tore through nature’s beautiful tangle
like widowhood tore through me.
Bloodlines were destroyed, grasses 
turned under, spirits turned under; 
the faces of the wildflowers buried, no longer 
able to interpret the message from the sun.

Once broken, the prairie takes a decade to recover.
The seedlings struggle in perpetual night;
dormant, but not dead, 
hoarding pain inside like a tiny ember, 
until that day God’s light bends toward the earth 
and starts the burn to recovery.
The new language is shaky but legible;
a charcoal line is drawn from the stream, 
to the bee, to the flower, to the bird. 
Life here now is all about staying above ground.  

Linda Duede Starbuck left her life in Iowa behind and retired to the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota in 2017. In addition to writing, she loves to draw, is a historic interpreter, and volunteers at various art and history venues. Her poems have been published in both traditional and online journals. Her first book, Willing Pioneer, was published in 2020. http://www.lindastarbuck.com.

In the Refectory of the Blessed


Fresh mint and lily-of-the-valley bells
Swished out of cool, clear water, as from wells
Unfailing, herbs and flowers for the blessed
That filled the hall: old monks and nuns all dressed
in grey, keen-eyed and radiant, and they 
sat rapt in joyful banter on this day
Of their reunion.  
                           Weary from the quest,
And anxious I was not a welcome guest,
Voiceless and fearing I could not be seen,
I hoped the old brown friar would let me glean
Whatever stems remained.  He was the one
Whose heavy steps I followed, he alone
Carried the pail and drew the herbs and flowers
In bunches from the water. 
                                          After hours,
It seemed, at last, he turned to me and drew,
From the same water, plants of startling hue:
Deep purple columbines and plum-tree leaves,
Silent and gazing down he gave me these.
Flowers of the eagle’s talon and the dove,
My bridal flowers and my living trove.  

Lubna Haddad Walford is a stay-at-home mother and former Latin literature teacher.  Her work has appeared in The Catholic Poetry Room. She resides in Southern California. 

Across Water

 
There’s a church on the lake
up ahead. We travel down a

narrow road that leads to its
dead, wooden doors, hoping

that the drive itself is not the
full journey, that deferral is

not our final destination. The
end of the road is always a

river: it flows in a different
direction, sometimes against

where we’re praying to go.
It’s not opposite arrival but 

sideways, off parallel paths
into bleak interiority. These

nearby lakes are shining
with a resonant life while

the church is empty. Still,
there’s something piercing

and angelic hovering over
both. It’s something great,

something wild.

Alexandria Barbera (she/her) lives in Ontario, Canada and is a regular contributor at Women in Theology. She recently completed her MA in Cultural Studies at Trent University, where she studied literary ecology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tiny Seed Journal, The Other Journal, Ekstasis Magazine, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. She is currently the editor-at-large at EcoTheo Review.

Box Turtle Jazz
 
I wish I could come back sometime
to this spot of woods. After
the world recovers from us.
When fires blazing
punishment have long swept
our harm into nothingness.
 
When the box turtles feast
on wild strawberries and on
the roots of nature’s return.
After the last cracks of concrete
and remnants of our indifference
have decayed to a blessed September
timpani. And the saxophone
wind blows alto jazz again
smooth into the night.
 
When the sassafras trees
burst from their sandy loam soil
belting Hallelujah through
stained glass open sky.
Where I could enjoy
the tangerine sunrise.
Breathe in the quiet.
Give an audience
to earth’s healing.

Sarah Mackey Kirby grew up in Louisville Kentucky. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Taste of Your Music (Impspired, 2021) Her work has been published in Impspired Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review,Ploughshares,  Third Wednesday Magazine, and elsewhere. Sarah loves to cook and feel summer dirt on her hands. She and her husband split their time between Kentucky and Ohio. https://smkirby.com/

Consent


the spinning stars, riding along the dark elliptical arches
of a sacred temple

gaze down upon us
a round and radiating brilliance in their eyes

progressing past us, deep in their own thoughts
which they do not share

leaving a still, open space
that begs a burning question of the darkness

to which they give no answer
but for their waiting

for us to unknot our perplexities
until we whisper yes and yes and yes

for a fleeting moment
the stars shine brighter, answering ah! 

we gaze back in silence, empty and unbounded
in each black pupil, a glimmering pearl

Victoria Twomey is a poet and an artist. She has appeared as a featured poet at venues around NY, including the Hecksher Museum of Art, The Poetry Barn, Barnes & Noble, and Borders Books. Her poems have been published in several anthologies, in newspapers and on the web, including Sanctuary Magazine, BigCityLit, PoetryBay, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Tipton Poetry Journal and the Agape Review. Her poem “Pieta” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

As If God Will Dress Me Down to Dust



or descend me deep into a grudge of shadows,
sometimes a bitter eye glints in me,
but soon I feel eternity flow through a horse’s mane,
as it spirits across a glen  
under my shirt button, as if right behind
the blowing through is the veil between this life and the last.
A backlog of belief bares as fact: God knew me
before I was born—even with my eyes unfinished,
and no spark lurked in them—when He
tussled with my bones to prop up
my heart—sumptuous breath laid out in a wreath—

as he gave my cheeks a pinch of sky to fly on,
and impulsive me nodded “Yes! Yes!” 
right there in the garden, since even there the head 
was first to form. But in the gruel of birth and wandering 
flesh I forget: sixty odd years has the weight of 600,
though later, realizing I, maybe, signed up for this,
I grab onto faith in the free-flowing mane
of perhaps a palomino, head jutted forth—
as if out of my chest, knowing that later, 
in a struggle to mount, I’ll get the vaporous push 
up its flanks to perch upon its sleek back 
and veer toward the hidden field.

The former poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rodney Torreson is a retired parochial schoolteacher who taught in the Lutheran Church Missouri-Synod for thirty-six years. He won the Seattle Review’s Bentley Prize, and Storyline Press named him runner-up for the national Roerich Prize for first books. In 2015, the Dyer-Ives Foundation honored him “for his longstanding commitment as a poet, teacher, patron, and advocate for poetry in West Michigan.

His third full-length collection of poetry, THE JUKEBOX WAS THE JURY OF THEIR LOVE, was issued by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Torreson has published in many journals, most recently AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY, MAIN STREET RAG, NORTH DAKOTA QUARTERLY, PATERSON LITERARY REVIEW, AND  TAR RIVER POETRY.