Author Archives: Sarah

The jackdaws caw and do not care 
that for a moment we allowed 
ourselves to dream. Do they look 
out across the waters they do 
not allow themselves to visit 
and wonder, still, and dream, 
too? In the chapel we are 
invited to pray, as if in the 
hush of contemplation you might 
hear something other than the 
thoughts you yourself offer up.
But hush, now, and listen, as
if there, in the midst of the 
dream, the answer might come.
The still, small voice you are 
perhaps not too deaf yet to hear.
The narrower way you might yet 
give yourself leave to follow.

JM Summers is an IT Consultant, blogger, and busy father of three. Previous publication credits include Another Country from Gomer Press, Borderlines, Blithe Spirit and Presence. He is the former editor of a number of small press magazines. He has published one book, Niamh, a collection of prose and poetry.

Evening Walk

Gathering clouds like bunches of fat above. 
Gray, wavery, a reflection that trembles. 
The leaves droop down around me, hundreds
of sinners shivering at the steps of the temple.
It smells like rain, asphalt, an old memory, even. 

I will always be afraid of my parents dying.
All those theologians in books
writing about death gentle-like,
but I’d love for grace to thunk me on the skull
if it meant answers written on the walls. 

At least the puddles have gathered politely 
against the curbs. I walk with my fingers 
curled like I’m holding a cigarette. 
For looks, for the plain sense of it, just to cope. 
I won’t to avoid gums lined with licorice black,
and no sermon ever taught me how to smoke.

Forever it seems God speaks words
through the sounds of extinct birds, 
and eternity hides like a cricket in the bush. 
Like death is an expansion of life,
and I want to laugh at that joke
because who thinks so 
staring at an earth-mound filled to the brim
with memories roaming like ghosts?

Three crows chime at me from the power lines. 
A bad omen, those squawks, if I believed so. 
I pass a string of bushes on the walk, their red
berries match flames among the shadows. 
Clouds break, and sunset nestles on the horizon, 
a bowl of blood-red swaddling the earth. 

I don’t know what I mean. I am the leaf
that trembles at the bottom of the temple stairs. 
I am undone by questions that have no shape,
words like rabble thrown in the gutters. 
Has that really settled the matter?
Who but God knows how the force of disorder
also means a sense of plenty—
bridges strangled by vines, clearings 
dotted with wildflowers like flames, 
the pale blue network of my veins. 

Streetlight shadows stretch over my head,
and the last bit of light slinks away 
before night’s iron seas roll in, 
but the light will spring lively again. 
All the answers will finger the walls,
as if the poetry of the earth, the sounds of God,
are those three birds chiming on the power lines, 
framed by fading gold, dusty and blurry, 
like three old dimes lifted to the light. 

Sarah Tate is a writer, a poet, and a life-long student of literature. Her work has previously appeared in Calla Press, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and LAMP. She lives in rural Virginia where she especially enjoys long walks and contemplating things she doesn’t understand. 

The Hard Winds of Kentucky
 
I know you, Old Kentucky. Your petal hands
below the callused hard. Your Tulip Poplar
mornings, branches lifting prayers into the gray.
 
It’s December now, and the Cooper’s hawks
forget which way to fly. A raging torrent
sweeps suffering to folks already grasping
 
for a light. It’s how it always is, isn’t it. Since
time was born, those struggling pay the highest
price. Signs of love pour in from every corner,
 
over broken-porch-swing fields and dreams in rust.
Stories lay scattered through the shadows, waiting for
a cue. To tell their newest twist on starting again.

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/

Garden


“And it wears me out and it wears me out” 
from Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead


This summer was a question mark last spring,
so much depends on too much
of any one thing.

The garden I tended for weeks yielded nothing, 
first it was too much water, 
then not enough, 
and last, the heat.

Small bodies reaching out of bursting seeds 
bent in prayer to weather 
that which could not be controlled,
once, twice, then surrender.
How many times was it really?
The soil was a promise not a guarantee.

Summer saunters toward another beginning
and some green is showing in my garden 
pushing against the oppressive heat,
David and Goliath.

Early fall 
and the zucchini's young yellow flower 
greeted me this morning,
that is all,
and it may just be enough for today.

German Dario (he/him) resides in Tempe, Arizona with his wife, two sons, three dogs, a guinea pig, many plants, and sometimes a fish. Recently published work in Novus Literary Arts Journal, Five South, Opossum, Gargoyle Magazine, Gyroscope Review, and San Pedro River Review. His poem “sanctuary” was short listed in 2021 for the Five South Poetry Prize.

The Lark Ascending

The strings begin to sing, the violin
releasing its melody while the lark hovers
over the meadow, over the white cottages
and the wavery line of alders along the rill.

The throb in his throat
quickens in sun-splashed flight,
as higher and higher he rises,
and the last infinite note soars

beyond the reach of sight and hearing,
beyond the reach of all
but faith at the swing
of heaven’s gate.

Ruth Holzer is the author of eight chapbooks, most recently, Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press) and Among the Missing (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, Faultline, Slant, and Plainsongs, as well as previously in Amethyst Review. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations.

If There Be Speaking

Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells.
GM Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire

To enter this garden
             in the horizontal light
                          of early morning

is to blunder uninvited
             into a conversation without
                          intention, without end,

encountered in medias res, where speech,
             if there be speaking,
                          goes for the most part

unheeded, where meaning
             is not what meaning means
                          among the interlocutors

of pressing human business,
             among the code-talkers, between
                          participants in a shared 

and sheltering system. To enter
             this garden is to be exposed 
                          to a bright atonality, a hilarity

of dialects defying concordance, 
             where each thing declares the things
                          it’s not, where each fine thing, 

innocent of irony or innuendo, 
             declaims its entanglement 
                          in a convolution of interceptions

and interferences, the hazardous 
             transversals of which we humans dream, 
                          to which we impute shape

and happy harmony, and so declare them Nature. 
             And if here we find peace, 
                          perhaps it is that here 

we are reduced to silence, 
             and in this slanting morning light,
                          in the unauthored eloquence

of this leaf, this weather,
             these blooms and stones, must 
                          suffer gladly the disaggregation 

of our own precious personhood, 
             our burdened self-containment, 
                          far from that cozy “being indoors”

where each presumes to dwell, and stand 
             instead outside the house of speech 
                          and oh so briefly greet 

this wild exposure, the vivid efflorescence 
             of life’s relentless dying,
                          in mute response past all replying.

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.

as I am

in-between the night and the dawn
there is a moment,

in and of itself, this too —

blessed are you, gxd —

the words exist
in-between
before they even pass my lips.

I am here,
and I am nowhere,

but these hills
glow with flowers
and echo and resound
with birdsong,
all of creation —

I can feel gxd
in the clear blue sky

who has made me
as I am.

k. rowan jordan-abrams is an over-the-road commercial truck driver as well as an undergraduate religious studies major at the University of Nebraska Omaha. they are originally from California and live with their spouse and their cat. they can be found at http://www.semante.me/ and on Twitter as @where_the_rider.

One Girl’s Childhood

I was nine once,
with pigtails and pedal-pushers, 
white anklets and the scuffed saddle oxfords
I wore to school.

Children’s faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.

The best part of my day
was when the nuns wrote a poem
on the blackboard, clicking the chalk stick, 
to be copied Palmer-style
into my favorite notebook,
the kind with blue-lined pages stitched
in cardboard covers of mottled black.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree….

We were allowed to use ballpoint
or the new fountain pens with ink
in a cartridge that you popped into
the spring-loaded tube. I loved the way
the dark blue script flowed neatly 
from my hand onto the paper, its regular 
darkness my sea of sanity from which
I drank the saving wave of words.

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, ParisLitUp, Meniscus, The Pedestal, Agenda, Gradiva, and other journals. Her seventh and most recent book of poetry is EDGES.

Canticle


Water-splashed forehead. 
Product of times.  
Cheek slapped, new name, chrism. 
Child of century. 
Sign of.

Communion of saints. 
Myrrh burial. 
Finger ringed. 
Deathly afraid.
Rolling frenzy.

     Praying the uncertainties. 
     Intoning the mysteries. 
     Chanting the doubts. 

Frankincense body. 
All the days of my life. 
Lips oiled. 
Reliquary of gold. 
Field lily. 

Soil son. Sky daughter. 
With you always. 
Fodder. 
Tonsure. 
Kill the fatted.
Defend, do justice, deliver.
Derangement.

     Empty of urge for logic. 

Wafer tongue.  
Sin into words.  
Breath into words. 

Immutable trumpet whisper. 
Wood sags like child resigned.
Great Wall.  Great Amen. 
Table of sinners. 
Lift up your hearts.  

Breathing. 
Be.

Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, has authored eleven books, including the poetry collections Requiem for David (Silver Birch), Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay) and The Lost Tribes(Grey Book). Forthcoming is his memoir in prose poems Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby (Third World).  His website is patricktreardon.com.  His poem ‘The archangel Michael’ was a finalist for the 2022 Mary Blinn Poetry Prize.

Anima

Her skin marine, her fragrance haze,
Eyes buoys that mark the harbor. 
Her length awash in waterways
While ruddering limbs ride the currents.
Her womb capacious, the ocean’s loom.

She lives in bodies’ salt recurrence,
The lit electrolytes and sonar lore
Below. Queen of the drifting sanctum,
A lone blue whale whose purlieus are
The billowing domains of plankton.

Andrew Frisardi is a Bostonian living in central Italy. His most recent books are Ancient Salt: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and the Modern World (Wipf & Stock) and The Harvest and the Lamp (Franciscan UP). His annotated translation of Dante’s Convivio was recently reissued in paperback by Cambridge UP.