Author Archives: Sarah

Preparation for Yoga



Notice butter
that’s gotten to know
the hot rough toast 
a while will
at the gentlest pressure
of the butterknife
just soak and vanish 
effortlessly in.

I zero myself 
lotus position 
on the bright-embered 
pyre of the world
and when I feel
my thinking melting
golden sinking 
then

and only then

do I begin

Amit Majmudar’s work appears widely, including in the Best American Poetry anthologies and New Yorker. www.amitmajmudar.com. 

Cathedrals of Humboldt County					

Fog and sunlight dapple through my limbs, a
breeze brushes my needles, sprinkling dew on the
understory - moss, fox gloves, ferns, wood sorrel,
columbia lilies, golden waxy caps, hypochnella’s 
violet blooms - all brimming in expectant repose. You 
call me coastal redwood, or sequoia sempervirens.  

Ever. Lasting. My taxonomy tells a tale rooted in a
symbiotic mesh of mycorrhizae that 
interlace us, our understory, Douglas Fir, 
hemlock, maple and madrone cousins. Intertwined, 
we stand in gullies and valleys and withstand 
fires and gales. Spotted owls, bears, banana slugs 
flourish in our web. We thrive on reciprocity, 
and know taking without giving depletes all. 

My concentric rings, weaved over fifteen hundred years, 
bore witness to countless stories of nurture, healing, 
heartbreak, siege, each scored into my core. The
dreams and aches you bore when seeking 
respite and replenishment resound through my canopy. 

Those who seek learn that lessons 
etched into my spirals rival those of your 
finest scrolls.  I know fulfillment springs from 
solidarity, prosperity blossoms from 
balance, and listening widens the 
aperture of seeing,
seeding understanding. 
 

V. A. Bettencourt is a Brazilian-American poet and writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a B.A. from Brown University, graduate degree from Boston College, and is refining her craft at Philip Schultz’s The Writers’ Studio. Ms. Bettencourt’s work is inspired by our wondrous natural world and variegated human emotions and has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry.

Ice Age

A year of losses and loneliness – 
and for some, despair.
We’re all still grieving 
for someone – and I’m
still living in fear.

A new kind of climate change – 
trees alive with birdsong,
but a feeling of lead in the air. 
A sky that should dazzle the eye – 
but a veil of mist even there.

A poet once said the lost 
are like this – frozen
in spirit, caught in ice.
How to break free,
get to live twice?

I tell myself the birds 
came back long ago from the frost.
Somehow they managed to nest,
even on glaciers.  I love the thought
of them snuggling, breast

to breast, wing to wing.  
It’s how one survives 
an age like this – 
how one keeps alive 
the fire to sing.     

Adrian Schnall is a retired physician and Professor of Medicine (Case Western Reserve U.) whose poetry has been published in Pathogens and Immunity, Poetica, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  His poems have been selected for public readings by Choral Arts Cleveland, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Lit Youngstown, Lit Cleveland, and the Island Writers’ Network at Hilton Head.  He lives in Beachwood, Ohio.                   

Baseball with Birds


Tom Merton saw fresh deserts where
most people only sit and stare.
He listened through the surge of blue
that would have threatened to undo
       most men.

But did he ever see the sun
where Clark meets lonely Addison?
Did he try to catch the birds that
hovered over first or third, wet

from Michigan’s half-frozen spray?
Kentucky was too far away.

Casie Dodd lives in Arkansas with her husband and two children. Her writing has appeared in Fare Forward, Ekstasis, Front Porch Republic, and other journals. She is the Founder and Editor of Belle Point Press, a new small press celebrating the literary culture of the American Mid-South.

                                                              AAMCHI MAI

Traveling around India– as I often did pre-pandemic–I try to read as much Indian literature as I can. On one trip, I read a novel in which one of the central characters refers to her mother not just as mai but aamchi mai or “our mother.” Adding the possessive was very important to the girl and her younger sister. They wanted everyone to know– all the time– that their mother was theirs; she belonged to them and they to her. Yes, to the exclusion of everyone else. This habit shed critical light on the physical and psychological boundaries of their inhabited universe.

At the time of reading this passage, I had just completed a few weeks of trekking around Madikeri in the state of Karnataka. Aamchi mai, especially the possessive adjective, resonated with feelings experienced and perspectives adopted both before and during my hikes through the Kodagu hills with their, at times, patchwork of rice paddies or coffee plantations. The walks, along with this seemingly mundane reference from a novel, got me thinking again about ways of thinking about things, ways of inhabiting not just our universe, but also our own individual “universe.”

Because I’m Canadian, those words, aamchi mai, also make me think of native cultures in my own country which thrived before the arrival of European explorers and colonists. Native spirituality referred to the Great Mother from whom all things come and to whom all things must return. Yes, return. And then what? Be reborn? Go to some paradise in the sky? Does it really matter? 

Yes, it does. In reality, it is the matter that really does matter. Because, in fact, the matter that is all things, while it gets transformed into something else in the returning, it– or we– never really stop existing. But obviously our continuation is not how it used to be. For lack of a better word, we get recycled. Is that enough for us?

I think it should be. We don’t really know if “our mother” is unparalleled in the universe. But as far as we know, she’s unique. Life itself is unique. It’s rare. Any form of life in its countless varieties is invaluable. How often, getting caught up in human affairs, do we lose sight of this?  But aren’t we the lucky ones for having evolved to such a degree that we can first marvel at and then actually share through discussion the incomparable beauty of our mother’s creation. Would my lasting forever in this particular human or heavenly form give an added boost to feelings of being special or even superior in light of the ephemeral nature of all other things? Would it intensify my own sense of gratitude, appreciation and perhaps guardianship of the natural world? 

I doubt it. In fact, it might erode it; I might take it for granted. Generally, I think knowing there’s a limited amount of time tends to make a person want to maximize his or her experience of something. Of course, this could, and often does, lead to unbridled gluttony, an approach to living summed up in the phrase, “get as much as you, while you can, at any cost.” No doubt Oscar Wilde was thinking about similar behavior when he referred to those “who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.” There are far too many supporting examples past and present to offer for that avaricious response to having a short time in our present bodies. But it can also go the other way, a better way for our mother. And in order for it to do just that, I would argue that, as a beginning, we need to experience the awe of nature. Such experiences can be watershed moments that redefine the territorial boundaries that I spoke of earlier. Let me illustrate some powerful moments of mine from around Madikeri.

For a couple of nights our base was outside of a village northwest of Madikeri in the home of a family of rice farmers. It was an absolutely inspiring setting on a hillside overlooking the golden, windswept, ready-to-harvest rice. This was our spot for welcoming in the new year. In the twilight, with the last bit of sun draining off the outstretched jungle leaves that seemed to blush in so many varieties of green, I sat on a bench on the hill above the paddies watching hundreds of swifts in a grand, frenetic choreography. The birds soared from the top of the jungle canopy at the perimeter, diving down to the tasseled husks of rice. Clearly, there was a bounty of insects that kept this mesmerizing display of acrobatics well-fueled. Later, after a simple yet deliciously spiced dinner of various masalas prepared by our adopted mai, followed by a rich cup of local coffee (plantations abound in this area), we headed to the concrete roof of their home, ready to sing in the new year beneath a chorus of braggart stars. 

Looking skyward, it would be enough to say that I was whelmed. It was loud Orion that eventually made me feel the “over” part. Looking so imposing with his hunter’s sword, he just told me, or so I thought, to get stuffed. Physicists tell us that we are all star dust. And you know what that means, don’t you? While I glow in pride, musing about my shared cosmic bonds with  Sappho or Da Vinci or Curie or Chopin, what about the other, less “radiant” multitudes of the family?! Think of a bit by the American comedian, George Burns, who joked that happiness consists of having close ties with family members who live in another faraway city. I feel the same way about brilliant, fraternal constellations light-years away. I’m very happy to enjoy them from a distance.

We were very fortunate to be in the countryside at this time. Not least for all the bees you could see and hear buzzing around the paddies. That’s a good omen (at least, I like to tell myself that despite what we keep learning about hive decimation worldwide). The honey from the hives of Pushad, the son of our hosts, was incredibly tasty. What the bees seemed most interested in captured our interest as well. The rice harvest was on. And the farmers allowed us to learn about all of the processes, which, in this locality, are still done manually and are carried out cooperatively.

Sometimes I find farmers can have an intellectual arrogance. And rightly so. They’re entitled to it. They know so much about things which are essential to our survival. They can be wary and suspicious of the creatures of the city. Fair enough. I also understand that theirs is a body of knowledge of which urbanites can be ignorant and therefore tend to undervalue. We can be shocked when our type of intellectual arrogance comes up against theirs. These local farmers, however, were very hospitable. 

In the heat of the afternoon, their generosity of spirit included sharing some cane liquor nicely warmed up in the sunlight. To go with this, we received a healthy serving of badh, which is a doughy sweet made with either rice or wheat flour to which raisins are often added. This little repast took place after observing and asking questions about the cutting, hauling and threshing of the rice. Not that I have attention deficit disorder, but, at times, there were admittedly deep challenges to keep focused on the lessons. And this was because surrounding us the whole while were some saucy distractions. We were being tantalized, if not solicited, by what could be called the tart trees or, if you prefer, the bordello blossoms: the huge, white, mammary-sized petals of the thorn apple; the orange, crush-your-heart mayflowers; and the red-siren poinsettias. 

Larger mammals or fauna in general you don’t really see in this area, though locals claim that wild elephants, tigers and leopards are out there in the surrounding jungle. Of course you see plenty of domesticated water buffaloes and cows. Not far from a buffalo or cow, you will inevitably find a white egret, welcomed for its facility at picking off harassing parasites from the hide. And what would a white egret be without its contrasting black cormorant. No big deal? Cormorants, you might say, are a species as fecund as flies. But when you see one stretch its wings out and harness the wind to reach the top of a sprawling tamarind tree, it makes you think that at least that particular cormorant is king. I’ll admit, though, that I’m a sucker for any of nature’s panoply of wonders. 

In this region, and while making our way to the tops of Pushpagiri and Tadiyendamol, two of Karnataka’s highest peaks at just under 1800 meters, I witnessed much. And with the witnessing comes the childlike awe of our mother’s own wondrous fertility: a stout kingfisher on an electrical wire preening itself boldly above a field of rice stalks that seemed to sway in appreciation of the fashion show; in the early morning, high up in the branches of a wild mango tree, a family of iridescent green parrots loudly gossiping; on a boulder, a chameleon, seemingly frozen, deliberating over which color it will betray next in order to keep its tongue larded with bugs; as long as my arm, a pale green-yellow rat snake, molting in an irrigation ditch, its delicately tiled tissue of skin a testimony of resilience; a rebellious young monkey hanging by its tail to impress or taunt its mother with its well-guarded handful of fruit; over-sized tadpoles in a creek looking fat as fish for fry; an imperious Western Ghat brown eagle, like the Hindu deity, Garuda, surveying on high for potential disciples below who also happen to be delicious; a quarter moon hanging in the night sky between Venus and Alpha Centauri like a bright white hammock; or a symphony of fireflies sent to tame the darkness with its lyrical glitter. Let me just witness all this and more. Let me just feel and be a part of it. And I will have my thumb in my mouth with drool running down my wrinkling cheeks.

Having said what I did about the ultimate mortality of things doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to continue living in this form. Given that paradise seems to be right here all around us on this spinning sphere of rock in seemingly infinite, dark space, I have no particular appetite for adding my dust to the great bounty of our mother’s dust. Not yet. However, it is important to acknowledge, as the father of the two girls in the novel does as he comes close to his death, that our bodies aren’t really ours; they’re merely on short-term loan to us. But as the loan is in progress and when it ends, how to pay off all that’s owed? 

I believe that the recognition of the finality of things, particularly of us in this form, can and should heighten the appreciation and value we ascribe to all of our evolutionary diverse “relatives” within the embrace of “our mother.” Yes, right now, before it’s too late. Perhaps in that way we can start to pay down the principal and the incalculable interest on our mother’s magnificent loan to us.

Of course, it is a privilege to travel and have such deeply felt responses. It is a privilege, however, which may well have to end for a variety of reasons. Writers such as George Monbiot argue this because, in the “getting to” distant places, the consequences for our mother can be irrevocably dire. But in order to make, at times, those ineffable connections, and thus feel a sense of reverence for our larger “home,” we don’t have to do the sort of traveling that requires flights across vast expanses of water. It can be as simple– and as complex– as paying attention when stepping out into our gardens, or going for walks in a local forest or along a beach, or taking bike rides along a city riverbank. Still, certain problems remain.             

As we all know, increasing numbers of humans are breathing in more oxygen, blithely converting it into carbon dioxide. Perhaps that in itself would be innocuous. But that supply is then added to the myriad of other greenhouse gas sources created through our hungry pursuit of even more space and our consumption of even more of our mother’s finite resources. We humans, however, were given special gifts: a relatively big brain with its complicated consciousness and miraculous abilities like memory, thought, imagination, and language. Our mother was generous to us. She is ours and we are hers. We belong to each other. That’s an important perspective. But it’s only a start. 

Now it’s time to be generous back. And part of that generosity must include knocking down the exclusive, walled community of “we,” encompassing, as it often does, only the human species. Unlike the girls in the novel, aamchi mai has to be seen as the mother of all things, not just ours alone. Then the varied members of our mother’s extended family might in fact have a raging chance– a chance to return to our mother in their own natural time rather than be forced into the dust by us well before their own good night has dawned.      

D.B. Goman is a poet, essayist, photographer, and educator. Poems, essays, and photographs have been published in a variety of print and on-line journals, some of which include Quarry, Orion Magazine, 2River View, Travel Mag (UK), Outside In Literary Travel Magazine, The Literary Bohemian, Eye Magazine, Poetry Montreal, 2 Bridges Review, New Verse News, and Sisyphus Magazine. A  collection of poems will be launched this year, and a YA novel (a nature adventure) is forthcoming next year.

On The Prayer Trail in Ordinary Time

	 	  Transfiguration Hermitage, 2021


My skis become my wings the snow 
my sky as I fly through it. 
My arms my legs reach, pull 

and kick as I draw one breath in, let one 
breath out, this motion on this first Sunday 
after Epiphany lifting me closer to heaven 

where I am touched by the radiance 
they say can be found there. 
Who cares now what I have left behind 

it is gone into the past
where I’ve done what I could.  Gone 
are the must do’s, what 

I could do, what I haven’t done
to mend my ways or help 
with the troubles of this world.

How I pity those who plod on snowshoes while I 
glide in this element part air made from what 
the sky has given of itself to lift me 

closer to heaven.  Its jewels 
spread before me on snow sunlit
all around the trees.  Their dark bodies 

stripped of leaves or regal in evergreen offer
their own silent witness to my body this gift 
I praise now steering itself between earth and heaven 

spilling out my bodily prayer, silent 
but for the scuff of skis across snow 
its blanket smoothed over winter ground 

otherwise ugly and barren
but now given this icing 
most divine, most extraordinary.

Denise Pendleton is a recipient of The Jinx Walker Poetry Prize of the Academy of the American Poets.  Her poems have appeared in the book collection, American Sports Poems, and various journals including Northwest Review, Tar River Poetry,Goose River Anthology and Kerning.   Pendleton coordinates the local literacy program, teaches college writing and visits the sanctuary of her backwoods most every day.

Sitting on the Steps


           of my little wooden cabin,
I watch a cloud shrink. The leaves 
           of the hedgerows 
either side of the meadow
           shiver to chattered commands.
Inside, the flames of the gas stove 
           gutter. A moment ago 
the afternoon was clearing. Now 
           more clouds roll up 
like giants’ fists. I hold 
           my own shoulders, 
chilled. Light from the open door 
           falls across the table – 
yellow-white, silver, 
           ash. The kettle rattles, hisses.
What was it
           I was thinking?

Dharmavadana lives in London, UK, where he teaches meditation and creative writing. He is poetry editor of the Buddhist arts magazine Urthona: www.urthona.com. His own poems have appeared in the magazines Prole, Under the Radar, Poetry Salzburg Review, Ambit, The North and The Dawntreader. His short stories have been published in Scribble and Litro.

The Aspirant 


Doves dance in warm air
hands tell the Buddha’s story

with uneven voice not quite manly
a crescent walnut centered in his throat
ascending descending vocal tides 
dive deeper within

unable to get the divine pearl
young fisherman aspiring monk
dreams of Tibetan monasteries 
hoping brass bells’ sweet invitation

the empty bowl on the table
misses nurturing rice 
blessings from the receiver’s
fingered smooth beads 

meanwhile crossed legged on the stern
he quietly notices how life’s pattern     
resembles jelly fish swept away 
by unpredictable ocean currents 

Alicia Viguer-Espert was born and raised in Mediterranean Spain. She combines old and new traditions to elicit hope in her poetry. Her work has been published national and internationally. Winner of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Contest with ‘Holding a Hummingbird’, her second chapbook Out of the Blue Womb of the Sea, was published by Four Feathers Press.  She’s a twice Pushcart nominee.  

The Guiding Voice

Moonlight filters through the canopy of leaves and illuminates the small clearing. The whole tribe is here. The men wear woven grass skirts and necklaces made of jaguar bones, while the women wear dresses made from animal hides.

My father has a scar beneath his ribcage from an old arrow wound. His arms are covered in geometric patterns, which have been carved into his flesh and darkened with ash.

For tonight’s ceremony, everyone plays a precise role. The women chop down small trees and throw them onto a roaring fire. The shaman scrapes the vine of the caapi tree. The men wrestle a boar and hoist its lifeless body onto a spit.

My father dips his fingers into the pig’s flesh and smears the blood onto my forehead. He pounds his chest, looks up to the skies and releases a war cry.

My aunt places the end of a narrow stick into the fire’s embers, then presents it to my father. My uncles grab hold of my wrists, then step on the back of my knees to force me to the ground.

Someone places a mask over my face. Someone else pours a liquid onto my right arm. My father prays to the gods, then tickles the stick over my arm in the traditional intercrossing pattern. 

I scream out in anticipation of the pain that never comes. Someone rips off my mask. It’s my older brother. He’s laughing.

My father points to the markings on the men’s arms. “If you want these stripes, you must earn them.”

The shaman chants something in an unfamiliar tongue. He holds a husk of coconut filled with tea. Steam rises from the liquid, obscuring his face.

I take the husk from his withered hands. There are bits of roots and sap floating in the murky water. It looks like the swampy lowlands after rainfall. The shaman urges me to drink the concoction while it’s still hot.

I choke on the first sip, but the shaman tips the husk and forces down the sludge. My uncles spin me in circles, while the women dance around me, their lips red from the pig’s blood.

My father hugs me. “Go forth my son into the unknown woods.”

The shaman sprinkles a greyish powder onto my chest. “May the spirits guide your way.”

The tribe elder leads me to the edge of our territory. “Do not return until you’ve proven your worth to the tribe.”

I cry out. “Where am I going? When can I come back?” But there are no answers to my questions, only the sounds of the leaves ruffling in the wind.

I have nothing but the grass around my waist, the bones around my neck and the moon shining down upon me. I marvel at the brilliance of the light, so bright, as if daytime.

I see things I’ve never been able to see before. Ants crawling up a vine one hundred paces away. A chameleon mimicking the color of a mossy rock. The outline of a woman’s face etched into the moon.

I feel at one with the dense bush. I see life in the birds, the trees and even the stones. A warmth overtakes me as if ensconced in moonlight. A powerful compulsion drives me forward.

I hear a familiar voice through the tangled vines. “Come with me child, I will show you the way.”

The tangled vines morph into my mother’s thick matted hair. I reach for her hand but I can’t quite grasp it. She has a familiar arrow scar just like my father’s, only her wound is higher, near her heart.

I must get to her. I press my way through the dense bush. The vines’ sharp thorns slice into my flesh. Blood drips down my forearms and stains my hands red. 

I use the shaman’s powder to temper the worst of the bleeding. I emerge through the undergrowth to the bank of a river. I spot my mother’s silhouette rocking in the water. I shout into the wind. “I’m coming!”

I step into the roaring stream. Waves crash against my chest and knock me over. I fall prone and instinctively flail my arms, pulling walls of water behind me.

I manage to wrap my fingertips around the base of her body. But something’s wrong. She’s as hard as stone and as cold as the water. 

The moonlight falls upon her. She’s painted entirely in green. There’s an orange halo fastened to her head with rope. It’s made of a material that feels like the hardened sap of the rubber tree.

I run my fingers along the rope. It leads to a mesh netting that holds a motley of fish. I pull one of the jaguar’s bones from my necklace and use it to slice the net free. I tie the loose ends into a bundle and throw it over my shoulder.  

I look back to the distant shore, trembling, wondering how I swam this far against such a powerful current.

My mother’s voice rings out from the skies. “Hold onto the halo as if it were my hand and I will guide you to the shore.”

I reach for her rubbery orange hand and kick my way through the current towards land. I wash up on the beach coughing water and gasping for air. I look up to the sky for one last glimpse of my mother but a mass of clouds blocks the moonlight.

I lie on the beach until daybreak desperately missing my mother. When the sun rises, I carry the fish back towards camp, eager to share the bounty with my tribe. 

Jared Cappel’s work has been featured in Door Is A Jar, Reflex Press, and Slackjaw, among others. A lover of wordplay, he’s one of the top Scrabble players in North America. Follow the latest at www.jaredcappel.com.

Vessel


Just to look 
at smooth clay curves 
makes me thirsty 
I know 
the healing warmth 
can bring. 
Like hot tears, 
after a guilty 
outburst. Or 
summoning 
sunlit eyelids
to brave the dull, human 
illumination of
a surgery room. 
Hands awoke 
one morning to swirl 
this shape, to lay liquid 
inside me
to keep my throat from 
more apologies 
to keep me 	bright 
in the cavern of my maker’s
sun, to let me rupture—
when ready
into all my finest
pieces.

Cassy Dorff lives in Nashville, Tennessee and teaches courses about politics, data science and writing as an assistant professor of Political Science. Cassy’s poetry is published at Terrain.org and Rust + Moth; academic research publications can be found at the Journal of Politics, Journal of Peace Research and other outlets.