Author Archives: Sarah

Eschatological Logic

Estrogen ecstasy eschaton eschatological 
Burning visions of the end of this world 
Extirpation excision excelsior extinction deo 

Metamodernist Metaphysics 

What is being? Being in itself, being in all
Of its sets of Heideggerian equivocation 
Does being have a ground, an essence?

Ship of Souls

Sails over the dark dharma horizon 
Slipping into the Dantesque dramaturgy 
Of lithium lakes destabilized in Lethe 

Nothingness 

Why is there something rather than 
Nothingness? Why is there life 
Rather a formless void of darkness?

Multiverse Shift

The universe shifts into multiplicities 
Of multiverses, coreless essenceless
And infinities of nonlinear pythic paths 

Rose Knapp (she/they) is a poet and electronic producer. She has publications in Lotus-Eater, Bombay Gin, BlazeVOX, Hotel Amerika, Fence Books, Obsidian, Gargoyle, and others. She has poetry collections published with Hesterglock Press, and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. She lives in Minneapolis. Find her on at roseknapp.net and on Twitter @Rose_Siyaniye

Grieve Well, Friend 
 
May grief’s moon-round pebble imbue 
thumb and forefinger with memories 
that stitch your breath’s seams, 
cut—honed like moon’s crescent— 
through jellied platitudes. 
 
May grief map your trek 
past memories that light— 
improbable—into your hands, 
onto your tongue, then melt 
fusing to skin and within. 
 
And may those memories 
bank a fire that smolders, 
sheds mere shreds of warmth 
for now, promises to dance 
in the fullness of time. 

Nancy K. Jentsch’s poetry has appeared recently in Thimble Literary Magazine, Tiferet, Zingara Poetry Review and in numerous anthologies. In 2020, she received an Arts Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her chapbook, Authorized Visitors, was published in 2017 and her writer’s page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/NancyJentschPoet/ 

If You Want the Rainbow
—inspired by Dolly Parton’s infinitely wise words

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow
you gotta put up with the rain.”
But storms can hit harder than any blow.

Just when you need relief, the skies will flow
and pummel you with tears and aches and pain.
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow,

kiss your hurts and hug them close. Above all, take it slow.
And breathe! Losing your shit cannot be called “a gain;”
your storms can hit harder than any blow!

Get wet. Jump in puddles toe-to-toe.
Take a stroll, hand-in-hand with a friend. This is sane.
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow,

thank the rain! It saturates you ‘til you know
you cannot get any wetter. Head inside. Get dry again
once storms have hit harder than any blow.

Towel off. Drink tea. Cuddle. Then work hard! And throw
aside the fears that you can’t take it. Let those wane.
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow,
know storms hit hard. They’re part of getting clean and letting go.

Amy Baskin‘s work is currently featured in Bear Review, River Heron Review, and is forthcoming in Pirene’s Fountain. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, an Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and an Oregon Poetry Association prize winner. When she’s not writing, she matches international students at Lewis & Clark College with local residents to help them feel welcome and at home during their time in Oregon.

Tea Leaves in Confinement
 
Mornings are for finding words,
but the leaves in my tea
float orange and green
among the ginger, turmeric
dissolving in spoonsful of splendid honey.
This aroma sweetens the delicious quiet 
punctuated by bursting pops of sap
from the old stove.
The mild whistle of the wind brushes 
my windows. A seductress of play.
 
Mornings are best to write and amend
but the taste of tea lures me
to contemplate
the meadow with its brown brush
the long dark weight of Mount Emily
the nervous chirping of juncos under the hawthorn
their fleeting presence while they rummage the mullet 
I placed early in the moon’s shadow.
During this plague, solitude is the gift. 
Just like this morning’s tea.

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a ‘Mexi-Rican,’ born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. She has two poetry books published, Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, and a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time by Redbat Press. A chapbook was released by Finishing Line Press in February, Fossils on a Red Flag. Currently, Amelia Díaz Ettinger is working on an MFA in creative writing at Eastern Oregon University.

Perennial
 
I pray out loud too.
 
As dune grasses pray,
with their empty, crisp, quivers. 
 
I’m bound, like anything else
alive in winter, to attempt survival. 
 
Torn stem. Berries. Gull prints 
lonesome for life’s evidence.
 
Sunlight pools, wilts leftover snow and
where sand shifts ground, I imagine 
 
warm pockets. Contained. Underneath,
new stems heed nothing, not even cold.  

 

Lauren Carlson is the author of a chapbook Animals I Have Killed which won the Comstock Writers Group chapbook prize in 2018. Her work has been published in Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Windhover, and Blue Heron Review among others. She recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson, the first low residency program in the United States.  https://laurenkcarlson.com/ 

Last Request
 
When my time has come, let the ram skin wheeze
and pipe me to rest with Amazing Grace.
I’ve only a wee bit of Scots, but please,
when my time has come, let the ram skin wheeze.
Send ashes and dirge on a fairy glen breeze,
dispatch me to heather and thistle’s embrace.
When my time has come, let that ram skin wheeze
and pipe me goodbye with Amazing Grace.

Mary Kipps writes poetry for all age groups, in traditional forms as well as in free verse. Internationally published since 2005, Mary is also the author of three humorous paranormal Kindle books: All in Vein, A Sucker for Heels, and Bitten: A Practical Guide to Dating a Vampire.

Islandia

Each hour I am stunned alive by you:
Glaciers jutting into forever sky, 
how the soft sea of your mouth burned so blue 
that we stood there mid-morning, asking why 

we were gifted such air more pure than god-- 
the backbone carving through this mountain ridge, 
every bird song, the pine’s gentle nod,
river rocks and mountain talks, body’s bridge

bending to the bloodless earth. A blank page
where I retrace roots, wonder what’s to come: 
the clouded future, words a war to wage 
like the moment ink sets in, leaves you numb.

I walk to the lake, frost silvering sheer 
kiss my own wrist, woman warm, without fear. 

Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, Hobart, Levee Magazine, and more. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online: www.karaknickerbocker.com.

 

The Gospel of Eve by Rachel Mann. 262pp, Darton, Longman & Todd

Earlier this week I had a good old marking crisis. I was up until 2:30 am working through dissertations. As I finally collapsed into bed, I drifted back to memories of my undergraduate essay crises, the all-nighters that I occasionally had to pull. I do think of those intense, pressurised, tortured, idyllic (and pre-internet) college years from time to time, and it’s amazing how vividly the memories return. 

Rachel Mann’s debut thriller, The Gospel of Eve, is partly responsible for this latest bout of reminiscence. Firstly, because I compulsively spent time earlier this week reading it, and hence substantially precipitated my own marking crisis. Secondly because, although not a traditional campus novel, it is set in the 1990s in a fictitious Oxford theological college, Littlemore, which has affinities with the rarefied world of traditional collegiate universities in decades past. Littlemore’s world is inhabited by well-bred students plus a few mature do-gooders, prissy or downright antediluvian dons, rooms in halls, scholarly jousting – and gut-wrenching disasters, all lightly doused in nostalgia.

The Gospel of Eve is also a page-turner. Characters and events shock and intrigue from the first pages when a body is found in terrible circumstances. We have a sympathetic but troubled narrator in Catherine, or Kitty, who gradually unravels as the story unfolds. Kitty had her own crisis of faith that led her to train for the priesthood and so, it transpires, did some other members of the close circle with which she becomes involved – Evie, Piers, Richard, Charlie (a young woman) and the enigmatic Ivo. Relationships within the group are fraught and intense, fuelled by mistrust, crushes, and alcohol: ‘We drank like only the young and holy can,’ (p.68) remarks Kitty. Then we find out that the group’s spiritual quest has taken a disturbing turn. There’s a chilling early scene in the novel, set on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral, that our narrator describes as ‘the blood incident’.  From then on, bodily existence – its pleasures, temptations and discomforts – is placed at the heart of religious faith – for good or ill. At one point, Ivo declares: ‘Faith is not about belief or doctrine so much as the body. It is eating and fasting. It is acting in the world, in the light of faith. It is knowing God in the discipline of the flesh.’ (p.100). But Ivo is a dangerous character underneath his privileged, authoritative exterior. Should he be trusted? 

Much of his and the group’s ascetic practices are born of a fervent scholarly and spiritual longing for the Medieval, where there is undoubtedly much food for thought. ‘The Medieval offers a subtle discourse, dangerous and pregnant with violence, of course, but nuanced.’ (p.98). Ivo and the others don’t comment on the poignant and affective devotion of later Medieval mysticism such as that of Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich, perhaps because this would tilt devotional practise away from endless penance and towards lyricism and compassion. We are left with the thrill of a dangerous alterity, and a certain amount of horror at how easily its violence can resurge.

Mann’s novel obliges the reader, as much as Kitty, to reflect on the implicit structures of power and gender bound up with concepts of fraternal correction and the mortification of the flesh. How much is punishment not only of the flesh, but of the feminine, requisite for the maintenance of Christian patriarchy, and what disruptive counternarrative is waiting to emerge? Hidden, subversive and suppressed currents of thought run through this novel like underground rivers. Once I’d finished the book, I could still hear them rushing along, under the surface of our everyday perceptions and (if we have any) religious assumptions. 

For those with ears to hear it, this is a really notable quality of Mann’s novel. It’s a well-paced story of death, sex, intrigue and revelation in a college setting, but it’s a lot more than that too. Mann is herself a priest and a scholar, and weaves in her considerable theological knowledge lightly enough for it to be an organic part of the narrative. References from the Cummean Penitential (a medieval record of punishments for specific sins) to Phyllis Trible (a feminist theologian) appear – as do, literally, some priceless first editions, variously appropriated, bequeathed and stolen. Theft and restoration, intellectual as well as literal, is another significant thread of the narrative.

I should add that as well as drama and scholarship, the novel has its fair share of satire, both clerical and cultural. The well-meaning pastoral innovation of ‘prayer triplets’ will either intrigue or dismay you (or possibly both), and I daresay I could be persuaded to join Littlemore’s ‘Edmund Bertram Society’: ‘Ostensibly devoted to Mansfield Park’s serious clergyman, it supplied an excuse for middle-aged female ordinands to drink Pinot Grigio and watch videos of Colin Firth’s chest-hair.’ (p.71). Well!

Full of pace and paradox, then, this is a great novel for almost any circumstance, except perhaps for those of a nervous disposition, or those with urgent marking deadlines easily derailed by an imaginative mystery. If you enjoyed Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, you might like the somewhat similar intellectual and narrative energy to be found here. But The Gospel of Eve has its own very distinct atmosphere, and is likely to leave you both enchanted and troubled.

My Sister’s a Witch, or They’ll Always Find Someone to Come For

“There’s a lack of mystery in the air,” I remember you saying. It was an odd, poetical thing to articulate, but you were always a strange one.

You flipped over tarot cards and mumbled incantations. You said they were just words—hopes and wishes and things to ground yourself—but you once gasped when you saw the position of the moon. 

I thought it was weird.

You dried herbs and grew the greenest plants. You had a cupboard filled with tiny bones and equally small bottles. You smiled a lot, and it all seemed a contradiction. Your pointed fingernails clicked against teacups as your long hair sat twisted in knots.

People looked at you sideways, and you didn’t care.  

I did though. I cared a lot.

We grew up in a small town—an everyone knows everyone else type of place—and everyone certainly knew you: the witch. Which made me the witch’s sister, a moniker I didn’t ask for and did not appreciate. Still, you didn’t care.

You picked mushrooms and hummed songs and dreamed of the ocean. You baked bread and laughed and lived for yourself. You were happy even as I wilted in misery, wondering why you couldn’t just be like everyone else. 

And, I’ll have you know, it was their idea—not mine. Although, at the time, it sounded like a good one.

We walked to the edge of the clearing, and by “we,” I mean my friends and me. And by “friends,” I mean the people I went to school with. We walked to the edge of the clearing and we watched your house. At first, we just looked at it, waiting for something to happen. But nothing did.

And I don’t know what they expected to see. You riding out on a broomstick? You returning with a baby clenched in your claws? You communing with Satan himself? I didn’t expect to see these things, but maybe they did. 

(I already knew you didn’t eat babies. You didn’t even eat meat.)

You were hanging laundry on a sagging line when they set your house on fire. I say “they,” but I also mean “we.” And if I’m being honest, which I suppose I should be, by “we,” I mean “me.” But I’m sure you knew that. (You always seemed to know so much.) I threw the match that ended up catching. I threw it into a patch of dried-out lavender. Because I knew how fast it would burn.

And it did.

It burned your house down. It burned all your plants and it burned your cards and it destroyed everything you held dear. And that included me.

As the smoke mixed with the soggy, soupy air, I saw the look on your face. It was crisp and smooth like the flesh of an apple, but sad. Resigned. I remember you said, tears beginning to stream down your face, “Why do you want me to hate you?” 

It wasn’t a question I was expecting. Of all the things you could’ve asked, I would’ve never guessed that assemblage of words would find itself on the tip of your quivering tongue. It wasn’t the point I would’ve belabored, but you…you always knew. You always had your sights set left of center.

The truth was, I didn’t want you to hate me. Why would I set out to achieve such a ridiculous objective? I didn’t want you to hate me, but I liked taking things from you, so maybe that’s what you were really asking: Why do you seek to claim the things you hate?

You then asked me if I knew what I had done—if I had meant to, and some girl—I think her name was Jocelyn—yelled, “It was her idea!” before hooting and running away.

“Why couldn’t you just be normal!” I asked. “Don’t you know how hard it is to be your sister?”

Your face twisted and the pain turned into anger and you left. (I can’t seem to erase your apple-cheeked grimace. Like I had taken more from you than just a house.)

I don’t know where you went. No one does. 

It’s almost as if they barely remember the flesh and blood you. You’re a character in a story told with distance; reverence and fear are placed on your name. You’re the star of cautionary tales. You’re the threat the keeps children leaping into bed on time. You’re a piece of local lore—a legend. 

Your house is a shell and kids go there to get high. They go to ditch school, to drink and hook up. They aren’t afraid until they want to be. 

I think that’s confusing. But I often find myself confused these days.

In your absence, I noticed my hair beginning to fall out. I started twisting it in knots so that could be the reason…but I bet you know more.

I also watch the moon and imagine you’re looking at it too, but it hurts my eyes even though it never used to.

And I took some of the ashes from your burnt-up house and I used them to fill a little leather pouch. They’re too hot to touch, so I don’t. I just leave them hanging around my neck.

That girl, Jocelyn, she threw a rock at me the other day and it bounced off my back. I remember when that would happen to you, and I wonder how you smiled so much. I wish I could ask you.

But you left when your house burned down, and with you gone, I’m no longer the sister of a witch. I’m just a witch, my shoulders hunched and my eyes milky.

All this is to say, are you the reason my teeth are loose? Why my skin peels, and animals howl outside my window? These sores and rashes on my body? Did you do that?

Are you the reason I’m falling apart?

If I said I was sorry, could you make it stop?

Would you know if I was telling the truth? 

Christine Makepeace is a weird fiction writer and film essayist living in the Pacifc Northwest. Links to her work can be found at christinemakepeace.com

Prayer

You made me
Want to be 

A saint.
Holy in this life

And the next.
But I am giving up

My rosary beads.
I am burning

My robes,
My sage. 

Ribs and water
A feast of fish.

This is my salvation?
This is my God?

He looks frail as a baby bird, brittle
Wings clipped wide.

He looks as weak as me.

Brennon Elzy is a person from West Virginia who occasionally writes poetry. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Poetry from West Virginia University. Twitter: @BrandonElzby