Author Archives: Sarah

If the Early Days of Our Relationship were The Holy Trinity

Jesus Christ would have to be the sex, wouldn’t He?
The attraction that crept over the both of us, fitting
us into each other, making us see somehow & spookily
what we’d be for each other, I’ve got as The Holy Spirit.
God? God’s sat in the heaven we hadn’t yet guessed
we were designing: the flat in which we’d live
with stickle-bricks & jigsaw pieces increasing over
the floor, corresponding twinkles still spooled
in our eyeballs; the framed memories up on the walls;
the British Heart Foundation Furniture Shop sofa
I’d one day swear would never fit in the lift.
But the substantive body nailed to the cross?
That has to be effort we put in each & every time –
whilst occasionally proclaiming His good name.

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Jack Houston is a writer from London. His work has been shortlisted for the Basil Bunting and Keats-Shelley prizes, the Live Cannon Pamphlet competition and was runner-up in the 2017 Poetry London Competition. His online lockdown poetry workshop with Hackney Libraries can be joined by emailing jack.houston@hackney.gov.uk

I Spoke Into Heaven

and a message was delivered. Becoming a part
of the clouds, the pale winds which
make the sky. A parting of seagulls,
white plumes

the plainest song ever sung—
prophetic diamond essence of coal.

Then I heard a vibration deep in return,
euphoria forming from the Earth—brilliant shards of
words and numbers strung together like blueprints
of constellations. A pattern of agreement, of purpose between,
among, and beyond moving, dwelling
in the essence of motion, in the fourfold of the world.

The rest was near to come and the work
began to get done—co-creator of carpentry. You gave
us a voice of wood to design and care for.

And finally, when the sun and moon came down to rest,
the four sources came to complete— we sat down to eat
our last before an answer, low and old:

a bird, made from air and light, come
to save us with one feather
soaring down upon the sunset of Creation.

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Margaret Marcum is currently a student in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. She graduated with a B.A. and her literary interests include animal rights, healing the collective through personal narrative, vegan studies, and ecofeminism. Her poems previously appeared in Literary Veganism and Children, Churches, and Daddies. 

Discontinuity/ At infinity

When I first learned about asymptotes, I puzzled:
what happens to the graph at infinity?
For there’s no dividing by zero in life,
no abrupt switch from positive almost-infinity
to re-emerge at negative almost-infinity.
Later, I stopped wondering.
I trusted the mathematics
without letting thoughts of life intrude.

But now, in this time of lockdown, I know
what it’s like to be at infinity,
this odd indeterminate state
where all that we hear is birdsong
where the skies are so clear, we can see
the secrets of the universe
where the only touch I feel
is the air on my skin

and who knows
when we re-emerge
at what point on the graph we will be?

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Marian Christie was born in Zimbabwe and has lived in Africa, Europe and the Middle East before settling in her current home in southeast England. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Allegro Poetry,Amethyst Review, The Beach Hut, Black Bough Poetry and The Ekphrastic Review, and in the anthologies The Stony Thursday Book 2018 and The Bridges 2020 Poetry Anthology.

When not writing or reading poetry, she looks at the stars, puzzles over the laws of physics, listens to birdsong and crochets gifts for her grandchildren. She blogs at www.marianchristiepoetry.net and can be found on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marian_v_o.

Bonfire Travelers

We camp in the Santa Catalinas,
saturation of sage, mesquite, mackerel
sky, wind threaded bird song.
We’re office warriors, but quarantine
sends us out. We set up a twisted tent

that leans in the tough ground. Darkness
layers, we build a fire. We decide to make
mulligan stew. We take an empty coffee
can, fill it with raw burger, carrots
& potatoes. Put it right in the bonfire.

It’s a haiku: the tent, the flames,
the shawl of stars. We hold hands
& wait hungry. Finally, we pull the can
straight from embers with tongs,
pour it out onto plates. It’s juice-stained

& raw. What does it mean we can’t
turn fire to cook meat, no matter
how hot the embers? We toss it.
It’s the connection
to the flame that makes it right,

not what comes out. We trust the
fire still. We make smores: chocolate,
marshmallow & graham crackers,
crackling on sticks, like fishermen,
or women, a good supper under the pines.

We burrow into lumpy sleeping bags,
our minds awakened to the distant stars.
“We can’t cook, can we?” you say.
“What does it matter?” I say.
“The stars are here, & they love us.”

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Lynn Finger’s work has appeared in the Ekphrastic Review, MineralLitMag, Night Music Journal, Journal of Compressed Arts, and is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Feral, and Tiny Seed. Lynn also works with a group that mentors writers in prison.

Heavenly Scene Backdrop Banner – $10.37

Clouds, beams of light:
the classics.

I’ve sometimes been afraid
of heaven, and this is
the heaven of my fear –
an eternity encapsulated
in something unnatural,
static and devoid
of heart.

Who wants to live in the air?

Still, the Bible has a few
other images – cities
and banquets and rivers,
things I’ve known,
things that feel human.
But that doesn’t dilute
the fear of forever.

Any image is still a grasping
at something my hands have never held.

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Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Susquehanna University. Her poetry has been published in various publications, including The Christian Century, The Cresset, Psaltery & Lyre, Amethyst Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Gyroscope Review, and Saint Katherine Review.

The Potter’s Wheel

Creation starts slowly.
Palms surround the amorphous form,
begin molding as the wheel turns
spinning clay, soft and damp.
Each turn transforming matter,
this pliable earthy mass.
As if by magic, slight-of-hand,
when fingers press in, a vase appears.
A mere touch and a lip is added,
the vase becomes a pitcher.
Thumbs brought in pushing out,
a bowl comes into existence.
The evidence of things unseen,
something made from nothing.
Or was it there all along
waiting for the master’s hands?

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Lynne D. Soulagnet was born on Long Island and grew up in Dix Hills where she worked for many years as a nurse tending to people in all stages of life. She will never forget the influence her wonderful English teachers had on her, giving her the lasting gift of a love for poetry which has followed her all her life. She has been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Paumanok: Interwoven, The Avocet, Better Than Starbucks, The Paterson Review, Blue Collar Review, Months to Years and others. She remains active in many poetry venues in New York.

Salt in July

Grandpa brought us to his church
some Sunday mornings
after we slept over
and before he would let us escape
to the swim club,
strange in its chemical blue beauty.

Alive with the vibrating
bodies of divers
and old ladies peeling in lacy petals.
We begged to visit the snack stand
which drew us at noon from
our deep dream of breathing beneath the water.

The church was a smooth hollow
we found ourselves fallen,
where sounds and time stood strange.
The priest’s voice shrouded,
refracting stained glass.
We burned our fingers on its blue.
Mesmerized, memorized shapes in windows
of men contorted, conflicted in pleasure.

Pagan children, we melted wafers
and prayed to new gods,
imagined our exhales bent cool blue.
Grandpa bent in prayer,
his athlete’s limbs gnarled as storm-trees
sloughing off old ills.
We watched, we chased his patterns of faith,
strange as lullabies grow over time.

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Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Gingerbread House, Collidescope, and Enchanted Conversation, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Dodging the Rain and Schuylkill Valley Journal.

Giant Inflatable Whale – $19.59

“Use this giant ocean pal as part of your Jonah And The Whale lessons or have him make a splash at any Sunday School or VBS event.”

The “or”
is what interests me,
a whale able to play
two roles: either
Jonah’s doom-slash-
savior (doom because
who wants to be
stuck in whale
insides, savior
because it was dry,
it wasn’t drowning,
it wasn’t death)
or just some generic
example of God’s
creation, to be
dragged out of
the closet for any
old event.

Though, on some level,
maybe it makes sense
to play both roles at once.
Jonah’s whale wouldn’t
define herself by Jonah,
who was just a bit of odd food
she couldn’t digest, a footnote.

If the whale was being used
by God then, it didn’t know it.
What, then, of the whale’s own graces,
things for which we have no record?

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Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Susquehanna University. Her poetry has been published in various publications, including The Christian Century, The Cresset, Psaltery & Lyre, Amethyst Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Gyroscope Review, and Saint Katherine Review.

The Legacy of Dreams

I swore no cold headwind
would ever make me shiver
nor blow me back
to crossroads tied in knots.

I swore that this is the road
going somewhere, everywhere,
an invincible dream passing
through roadblocks like a ghost,
all the way, all the way, all the way
to the end of time,
to where the dream turns to dust,
where the road dead ends
but somehow keeps on going.

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Robert S. King edits Good Works Review. His poems appear widely, including Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014) and Messages from Multiverses (Duck Lake Books, 2020).

The World is just A Lie
translated by Yuanbing Zhang

The world is just a lie,
truth is on the other side of the world.
We can neither see the light of time
nor know that everything is a shadow on the running water.
There is another me on another planet,
you have never been born or died.
When the maze becomes transparent, the door of time-space opens,
you will shake hands and smile with the giant in the heavens.
The words are both music and the epic of the soul,
telling you that the palaces of outer space are incomparably lofty,
as if they are as endless as the mountains of gold.
03.17.2020

世界只是一个谎言

世界只是一个谎言
真理在世界的另一面
我们看不到时间之光
不知道一切只是流水之上的影子
另外的星球上有另外的自己
你不曾出生也不曾死去
当迷宫透明时空之门敞开
你将和那天上的巨人握手微笑
那词语是乐曲也是灵魂之史诗
告诉你天外的宫殿无比的巍峨
如黄金之山岳连绵而无际

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2020.03.17

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Hongri Yuan (b. 1962) is a Chinese mystic poet and philosopher. His work has been published in journals and magazines internationally in UK, USA, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada and Nigeria. He has authored a number long poems including Platinum City, The City of Gold, Golden Paradise, Gold Sun and Golden Giant. The theme of his work is the exploration about human prehistoric civilization and future civilization.

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Yuanbing Zhang (b. 1974), who is a Chinese poet and translator, works in a Middle School, Yanzhou District , Jining City, Shandong Province, China. He can be contacted through his email- 3112362909@qq.com.