Author Archives: Sarah

Tell No One

Peter had built them after all.
Three tabernacles stood empty
when we returned in the evening,

darkness following us
up the mountainside.
We stood where Moses and Elijah

had appeared. Neither of us had expected
to find anything, and yet
we couldn’t resist the dreaming

of our hearts. We knelt where we had
pressed streaked faces to the earth.
The voice in the cloud? The cloud itself?

We stood and watched as the land
emptied of color and the warrant
of our sworn silence took hold.

Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, High Plains Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sewanee Theological Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Antigonish Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, among other publications. He won Descant’s Baskerville Publishers Poetry Award in 2018. He lives in Waco, Texas.

On gazing up

Let ego fade into foliage seas
into
burnt orange…….fringed clouds sailing above

Restlessness…………downward spiral…..pirouetting leaves
from Oak trees……….they stand insistent………they encircle

a way of life
hardship testing character

Testing your skin……..peeled plum
bark scratch

Leaves pull apart at their veins

We only glide………on the eagle-span wings of essence
dodge surface………structured artifice

Troubles are meddling mounds….unsteady footing
stand stagnant………..you are a stable Oak

focus through the lens of lucidity
a gift as abundant as trees themselves

Look

down
your feet……….resilience-entwined roots

up at the breadth of your branch-made shelter

inside your earthy heart…….revel in your majestic stature

Gaze up at your canopy

let ego
fade into foliage
seas
into burnt orange fringed
clouds sailing above

Now step.

David Hanlon is a confessional poet from Wales, living in Bristol, England. He is a qualified counsellor/therapist. He is a Best of the Net nominee, and you can find his work online in Into The Void, Barren Magazine, Mojave Heart Review, Kissing Dynamite and Homology Lit, among others. His first chapbook is forthcoming in Spring 2020 with Animal Heart Press.

The Cremation

As I watched my dog
being taken to the fire,
I closed my eyes
imagining his soul
being transformed,
his past ending, a future beginning,
a pile of remains on the hot oven floor.
His charred bones
sanctified by the burning flames,
a spirit floating out in space,
vulnerable in the vast universe,
infinite and everlasting.

Mark Tulin is a former therapist who lives in California.  He has a chapbook, Magical Yogis, and two upcoming books: Awkward Grace, and The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories. He’s been featured in Fiction on the Web, Ariel Chart, Leaves of Ink, among others.  His website is Crow On The Wire.

Views from the Telemetry Unit

1.
Small bits of light
hover in the low afternoon clouds
pretending to be angels.

2.
By 3 AM,
the soul can be a rusting hulk
in the corner of a desolate parking lot
but still glisten with dew
if the temperature and humidity are right.

3.
The heart already knows every dance step.
Give it music.
Give it air.

Alan Toltzis is the author of 49 Aspects of Human Emotionand The Last Commandment. A two-time Pushcart nominee, he has published in numerous print and online journals including, Grey Sparrow, The Wax Paper, Hummingbird, IthacaLit, and Poetry NI. He serves as a Contributing Editor for The Saturday Poetry Series in As It Ought to Be Magazine and as an Editor for the Mizmor Poetry Anthology. Find him online at alantoltzis.com and follow him @ToltzisAlan.

Great River

It’s okay to love this perishing dream-body.
You don’t have to reject the world.
Eternity courts the ten-thousand things
on their way to nowhere, sliding out of darkness
like fallen stars. So, let the emerald wind
rush across your skin until your tender as field grass.
Let the moon ignite on your shoulders. It’s so much lighter
than the earth, than the troubled engine of thoughts.
It’s all shadows now, and distant longings,
silver poems shot up like flares.
When gravity finally reigns us back in
it will find us slick as salmon
wriggling our way up the great river,
disappearing into the mouths of caves.
The continents are burning, but there is another forest
in the heart. The roots tie us together
in a nexus of bright connection. I don’t care
that you don’t believe in ghosts or meanings,
in big-time flowery love. The language doesn’t matter.
We burn for one another out of a secret knowledge
in our blood and bones.
This really is the middle point between horizons.
We are here to build the ladder.

Seth Jani lives in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress (www.sevencirclepress.com). Their work has appeared in Chiron Review, The Comstock Review, Psaltery & Lyre and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. Their full-length collection, Night Fable, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2018.  More about them and their work can be found at www.sethjani.com.

A Nobody Madly in Love
(for Hafiz and Rumi)
Be an idiot for a while,
mute as a stone,
empty handed as a beggar, an
amnesiac without a name, without
memory hanging onto your heartstrings
fickle like a moody lover.

Stop searching for your Self
wandering like a frightened fool
looking in all the wrong places.
Close the door to your cluttered
mind busy like a teeming city.
Let the light that you are
be your knowing, a nobody
madly in love with everyone.

Marilyn Grant taught Creative Writing at Cerritos College, CA, where she was an adjunct professor of English, and journal writing workshops for Orange County Hospice nurses.  Roger Housden, a published author, was her teacher for a memoir writing course, and she is a member of Writers4Writers in Orange County, CA.  She recently joined a nationwide group of spiritual seekers called “We Awakening Circle.”

This was Written by a Fish

My people swam in lakes – stealing whatever.
Their bodies make our silt. A moving grave,
fitting for a stream. My people – hunted.
A few fled. Their children don’t know their homeland.
There are records, but they aren’t studied.
Time is allotted to the important, not the swept.
My people were old. We don’t know what they looked like.
Travelers went “home” and found a collection of art,
but it wasn’t ours. Couldn’t have been our parents nor theirs.
Seashells and bones, strewn in loops amongst others.
Some decided to worship this.

Patrick Key started writing seriously later in life, thanks to the help of a poetry class during his undergraduate years. His interests revolve around the absurdity of life and love, disillusionment, and the human tendency to struggle with impossibilities. His works have appeared in The Corner Club Press, The Penwood Review, and Argus.

ON THE DAY MY MOTHER’S NINETY-SIX DAFFODILS BLOOMED

(a cento)

A reminiscence of departed love,
a sweet regretful power,
the splendor bright of that display,
a lute, a drum, a flower.

Within us is a universe as well.
And limitless are leaves,
stiff or drooping in the fields,
the golden eternity of blissful safety,
… the shade of my mother,

After such great wonder,
let the field be joyful and all that is therein
live for generations without any help from us.
Other eyes will see the spring.
What I have seen is unsurpassable.

Poem Note: All lines in the cento are the 96th line, or from a 96th poem in a long series, from poets such as Thomas Cole, The Pearl Poet, Ginsburg, Dante, and others.

Diane Kendig’s five poetry collections include Prison Terms, and she co-edited the anthology In the Company of Russell Atkins. She has published poetry and prose in journals such as J Journal, Under the Sun, and Ekphrasis. She curates “Read + Write: 30 Days of Poetry,” now with over 2200 subscribers.

Link to: dianekendig.com

No Ordinary Time

Growing older, I try harder to catch
the grace of each moment, remain in the world
despite the constant flooding of thoughts
that sweep us down their jagged arroyo
toward the end of moments as we know them.

The church distinguishes between the high
holy seasons of the birth and death of Christ
and “ordinary time.” I have struggled
against the dictates of the secular mind
to linger in the forcefield of the divine,

resisted the fall into the profane and
unremarkable, grey hatching by which we
count our cell-wall days. But what if there is
no ordinary time, but only our failure
to awaken to sacred existence?

Then these celebrations are places in
the heart irrespective of calendar
and clock, openings to divine love
which is also our human love. Not
moments of time at all, but states of soul

to which longing restores us whenever
our memory of union breaks the trance
of the habitual. Can it be that,
at any point on those lonely miles we drove,
had we known it, we could have been home?

Thomas R. Smith lives in Wisconsin, USA, and have seven published collections so far, and was included in Diamond Cutters, edited by Jay Ramsay and Andrew Harvey. He has also edited several books, most recently Airmail, the correspondence of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, published in the UK by Bloodaxe. Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems was published in 2018. His first prose book, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival, is forthcoming from Folded Word Press in 2020.