Author Archives: Sarah

The Annunciation of a Dying Woman 

Gabriel undresses my tongue
a little more each night,
folds my worn words
into neat little squares,
places each gently in the heart 
of a cedarwood chest 
he carries under his wing.

Devils whisper dementia, but 

I know I go 
virgin tomorrow
unsullied by tense, 
unbroken by words,
save Father, Mother, and Son,
kissing the voice of an angel 
who might be a holy ghost
carrying me under his wing.

Mary Alice Dixon is a hospice volunteer who finds prayer in reading poetry to the dying. She is a Pushcart nominee whose work appears inGyroscope Review, Kakalak, Main Street Rag, moonShine review, Northern Appalachia Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Pinesong, three PSPP anthologies, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlotte, NC, frequently walking the Stations of the Cross. 

Miracles and Sorrows

poor death, so bored, so certain
unable to close his gaping jaw

waiting a lifetime 
with his one-trick mouth

while we cling to our delicate thread
dangling for a moment in sanctified light
mortals swinging from miracles to sorrows
and back again

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.

watch and wait


the branching trees and their capillary networks
flush with nothing for many months.
you learn the words xylem, phloem. run them around
your mouth like magic rinse.

something so big can live, breathe, shed and then,
shuddering, come into a tender green
with the foul-smelling white flowers, or the stony
berries, or sway alone with papery leaves.

it’s easy to love a thing adorned. a thing in its spring
blush. but someone’s heart must pluck
at the sight of the barren fingers arcing against blue,
laced by ice and sugared with snow.

someone must mourn kore’s arrival, her petal train,
her pollen parade. gone, the ice. the burning cold.
hands outstretched instead of curved around
exothermic bundles deep in downy pockets.

someone must make do with the stray breezes,
the summer hail, the sky torn apart by rain.
count down the waxing days until the dark embrace
wraps round again, and frost unfurls its blankets.

agesander, i wait with you. two lovesick fools
struck dumb by the same song,
the same circle creaking along since the first dawn.
the rose garlands dry in our grasp,

but when she tires of embellishing the branches,
ornamenting with fruits and flowers,
it will be our turn to bedizen. to drape the world in
monochrome, to lay beauty to rest for a time.

a a khaliq is a poet and medical student from the midwest. she writes, in the tradition of kafka, to close her eyes. 

Afterlife

My death was not what I thought it would be.
I was expecting tunnels, light, a life
review, and dreading, actually, that thing
you hear about – you feel what everyone
was feeling every moment that you spent 
with them, and every shadowed motive comes 
to light. Instead I got into some sort
of ship, a vessel for a thousand souls.
There was a kind of river, but no need
of pilots, boatswains, ferrymen, or ghosts 
to guide the floating ventricle across 
the void. A holy wind enfolded us in warmth, 
a glow, and seemed to guide our unseen sails.
The bardo, bathed in halos, lay ahead
containing chambers in which each of us,
alone, would face a tilted scale upon 
which lay the iridescent feather that 
would weigh our worth, that mythic, colored plume
composed of all our memories and deeds,
all curling and unfurling on a quill,
the calamus our lifepath formed from birth
on earth to our arrival here. There was
no god or angel there to take our hearts 
and place them on the balance; we just knew
we had to do it for ourselves. And so 
I cupped my hands like one in prayer, felt
my spirit coalesce, a hand, a heart,
a life with just the heft to tip the scale,
the beam’s slow tilt toward eternity
excruciatingly vertiginous
as the feather brushed against me with
what seemed, from here, like dreams – a chance
encounter, lover’s face, a cruel word, 
a secret moment when a kindness shaped
a life, my friends, my enemies, the fears
I’d known. I felt the scale swing up and down
and realized the final test was this, 
the lesson I’d been learning all along:
to choose between the heaviness of fear  
and love that turns our souls to light. I made
my final choice; the tattered feather sank;
and, clothed in light, I started my ascent.

Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in America magazine, The Dewdrop, Pensive, FOLIO, Dappled Things, HeartWood, Coastal Shelf,  The Good Life Review, and others.

Crows

Raucous ballet of dark birds, cries sawing cold air, flap
in staggered sequence, landing of one cue for the next

to take heavy flight in brief spaces between branches, feathers
shifting ebony to chrome, chorus of tarnished angels overhead,

miracle of somber, hoarse-voiced beauty, plaintive
threnody stinging me to tears as I turn to see you 

elbows folded on car roof, gaze lifted 
to those gold-and-silver birds.

Not every love is as you'd pictured. Not every gift 
comes wrapped and labelled with your name.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and lives in Massachusetts.  Her work has appeared in Red Dancefloor, Gulfstream, Women’s Words, Beltway Quarterly Review, and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Dodging the Rain.

Sugar Cube
 
“…if you could squeeze all the empty space out of all the atoms in all the seven billion people in the world, you could indeed fit them in the volume of a sugar cube.”: Marcus Chown in Ten Bonkers Things About the World.
 
 
We are mostly empty space. Squash us close
all seven billion of us – redbacksblackknees
yellowelbowsbrowneyeswhitetoes – and we’d fit in a cube
of sugar. A hollow woman, dressed in fingers and toes
 
I climb these hollow hills heaving with flowers.
Such beauty in empty. Sunlight on the tops of trees
manna gums bleached pink and everywhere
the smell of leaves. How many cubes for these hills?
 
Squeeze in the green gleam, the leaf-light, the fern’s
carnal curl. Slip in the soft bodies of the mushrooms,
the mountain ashes smooth-arming their white limbs
into the sky. Make room for this small stream, this one –
 
bubbling and slipping over the brown knees of stones
spanned by stream-stripped sun-bleached limbs of fallen birch
giant-bones left over from long ago
a forest of small births, the press of tiny deaths
 
mayflies and moss – to measure is moot.
Over the valley, a pair of rosellas dip and bank
a pinch of red, then of blue, opening now, now closing
make space for colour in our cube.
 
Nothing is lost, say the Upanishads –
fullness abides. I want to remember everything
these soft-spoken buds, the azaleas’ pink shouts,
your hand in mine, the sky leaning in.
 
 
 

Aparna Mitra lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children. Her poetry has twice won the My Brother Jack Awards and been shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize 2021. Aparna grew up in Calcutta, has a Masters in  Business Management and has worked in banking and in micro finance. Her most recent publication was in the Empty House Press. When not writing, you can find her trying to coax temperamental Indian tropical plants to bloom in her suburban Melbourne garden and tweeting @aparnamitra0.

Our Lady Undoer of Knots


While reflecting on how
knots of ribbon or string
always seem to be so
convoluted, beyond
amend, I remember
one small tug can shift the
entire contortion now.
inch by inch, connections
reveal themselves: to pull
this pulls that then, gaps where
before threads strangled tight.
Serpentine blooms rosettes.
The knot unravelling
spills smoothly down her hand:
disjointed disarray
has always been one strand.

Grace C. Przywara received an English degree from the University of South Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in Ekstasis Magazine and is forthcoming in Rise Up Review, and has placed multiple years in contests hosted by human rights organization Rehumanize International. Grace currently lives in Aiken, South Carolina.

Prayer

 hmm…


What I mean is, the words I was just using—
very fine words, which meant everything—
not so many, potent—all are lying 
like dust about me.
 
Which one did I just say, the one that was perfect?
Every word is the same, is all wrong. 
I can’t tell one from another,
I’m saying nothing.
 
What I want to tell you is escapement, beanbag,
pulsar. Nothing can untie my tongue.
The something in me that wants to speak to you
reduces words to ash.
 
You will understand if I just sit here stupid and mute. 
You can commune with this vast incoherence. 
I won’t understand a thing, but
I’ll listen in.

Melaney Poli is an artist, writer, and Episcopalian nun. She is the author of the accidental book of poems You Teach Me Light: Slightly Dangerous Poems and an accidental novel, Playing a Part.

Eclipse


How long does this moment last?
Cold dust obscures hot hydrogen gas.
 
Black umbra, lead weight, 
iron anomaly dangling from an invisible thread.
You burn the soul from my eyes.
 
I belong here no more than I belonged there.
My life compacted into a few family photos,
wedding crystal wrapped in tissue and packed in rubber bins.
A gravitational confinement only found in ancient stars.
 
You are in the shadow of the moon.
You know what you left behind.
You know you are alone.

You know what hell feels like.

Not fire, not heat,
just paralysis, blackness, the crackling gold corona,
and laughter in another room.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic,  Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.  

Redwing Tseep


Tseep of redwing, out of the dark over the high street
Of an autumn seaside town - and again, after one car comes 

then goes away. On the ground, mystery holds the swinging 
Pukka Pie Takeaway sign in a hover just back and away from upright. 

You watch, holding your ticket, the only one out there, outside 
the empty shop, on a chair, in a mask. Hungry but you can wait.

Redwing tseep changes things, you note - in its thinness, in its closeness 
to silence and nothing. It brings in winter. Brings remembrance 

Of responsibilities, to the dark side, to the moon. It slows down steps
To a stroll that will breathe when you go away from there with your food.

As you do, after a while, into night street solitude. Into yourself.  Into slow 
Stride past windows, your boots doing their heel tap, soul whisper on stone.

Martin Towers recently moved from Northern Ireland to Wales where he works as a support worker. Moths are a big thing for him, his favourite being the Angle Shades.