Author Archives: Sarah

What They Said When Io Ran

Words liberate
Poetry heals

The sages of the ages past
Tried their best to lock away
The knowledge of what words can do
They should not keep them from you

They will try to chain you with meter
And clip your wings with rhyme
Say that you are not good enough
Because you cannot write like them
Because your iambs are trochees and your lines stumble on broken feet-

But they do not see
That you are writing a new song
They do not see
That a new language is required
To tell the world of how you were
………………Beaten
………………Broken
………………Erased
………………Desired
………………But never silenced.

When Io ran, they claimed she liked the chase
When Daphne transformed into a tree
Rather than embrace her rapist
They said, how lovely is the laurel
And used her arms to crown the heads of poets

Daughter of Eve-
Do not let them keep the words.

When they will not let you write
Sing your songs to yourself
And know that
When men have shut their ears
All creation is listening.

Rebecca Holland is a visually impaired Filipino-American writer who lives in Pennsylvania. Her writing is particularly fascinated with the intersection of faith, gender, disability, and race. Her work has recently appeared in The Drabble, Bold Blind Beauty, and CAPTIVATING! She blogs about faith, literature, and disability awareness at BeckieWrites.com

The Calmative

Exhaling slowly, the expecting clouds
are just above the brim, we brighten up
though the trip has totally exhausted us,
we’ve stopped at the brothel, abandoned,
an abbess has taken over, composing it
into a convent, the building next to you,
is the mud. The shadows under the mud
grow larger, making a promise on their death,
a few are dreaming aloud with the skin-colour
instead of the eyes, we hunker to see the air
leaving a huge hunky-dory low field after
the hybridization, we remain calm in this
shelter to hustle into the husk of new seeds.
We’re the rooms, blossoming. A hyacinth
in its sweet-smelling bell-shaped flowers
fills the hurtful walls among us, we begin
to feel weightlessness and a husband among us
carries the hurricane lamp from face to face,
mapping the next move before the morning.
I return the hush money to the landlady.
After breakfast, Agnes sits beside me,
asking for my name and pointing to the wine.

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is the author of the new hybrid work, Z. His individual poems are widely published and recently appearing in The Meadow, Juked, North Dakota Quarterly,  etc. He is algebraist and artist and lives in the southern part of Ghana, Spain, and Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.

The Nature of Inquiry

We are all butterflies flitting aimlessly
from flower to flower in lavender fields,
harboring secrets even from ourselves.
What instinct drives us to fly?
What is this why we cannot let go?
Searching shadow’s flicker
on walls of candlelit rooms.
Not a clue to be found.
Who is the love that rocks
our landscape with gale force winds?
Where are we headed, what are
we wishing for underneath
shadows of passing stars?
Who will guide our lost hearts?
Every day a new river flows across
anachronistic fish who seem to know better.
What are they swimming toward?
An army of the unique, marching
toward individual oblivion.
This is the cloud of dust that defines us,
the familiar melody stuck in our head,
the song that plays on and on,
relentless and redeeming,
yet we own it through
humming the refrain
as if it held answers.

Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. His two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press), are available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and directly from the publishers.

Prayer to Contrivances

Contrivances,
the grumbling cars down the road
of our imaginative mind,
wipe out the cosmos dreams,
as we turn on lightswitches,
Tell us the sum of engines,
or what the windscreens remember
correcting at midday
with white asterisks for sunlight,
down the road that Iveco
gargles outside these walls
of our imagination,
with the sun on the whale back
of our moving freight car,
with the sunset as well
behind orange cemetaries,
open the sliding windows
of our imaginative minds,
and the walls to the traffic,
of red horns and taillights,
let things come my way,
let four things go back
And forth like door leaves
That nothing goes where
but if we imagine it,
we remember.

Rabiu Temidayo writes from Lagos. Visar has either appeared or is soon appearing on Isacoustic, Merak Magazine,  Riggwelter, Picaroon Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, kalahari review, African Writer,  the Gerald Kraak Anthology etc. Twitter: @rabiutemidayo.

Pirouette

Don’t sing me your songs
of slow-melting scrimshaw
of time found uncounted
of rain-draining clouds
of wind-flown sky-falls
of drowning the desert
of vanishing points
that won’t go away.

Don’t tell me your stories
of rock salt sleigh bells
of winds that won’t blow
of microscopes sliding
of far-flung highways
of slow-slung snow globes
of birds that can’t sing
and brides that won’t stop.

Don’t cry me your sorrows
of love here and never
of sun-setting dawns
of bright unlit starlight
of moons without rings
of curves of ashes
of empty boxes
of half-eaten peaches.

Don’t ask me your questions:
why red shoes?
why stone cold?
why scattered seeds?
why loops of lamplight?
why caves of incense?
why blown glass?
why gone glory?

Just leave me alone.
I’m dancing the Divine.

Cynthia Pitman has had poetry published in Amethyst Review, Right Hand Pointing, Third Wednesday, Leaves of Ink, Vita Brevis, Ekphrastic Review, Literary Yard, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Postcard Poems and Prose, and Mused: Bella Online. Her first book of poetry, The White Room, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.

Effigy

Smoke-cocooned in the sacral
end of the year
outside the back door
swaying in time
to the ale in my glass
I loop my cigarette
in the path of fire-blossoms
unfurling across
the almost-winter sky

friends have drifted
home to sleep
and dream of revolutions

alone in the rain-smouldered night
ancestral memories awaken
this unfamiliar stirring in my stomach—
like devotion branded treason
like gunpowder waiting to flash-bang-devour
like an uprising I am not leading

I can’t see the stars
he doesn’t believe in ghosts or me
I bide my time

Kate Garrett writes and edits. She is the author of six pamphlets, and her first full-length collection, The saint of milk and flames, is forthcoming in April 2019 from Rhythm & Bones Press. Kate lives in Sheffield, UK with her husband, five children, and a sleepy cat. www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk / twitter @mskateybelle

Given a Life to Spend

Not holy. Not holy, yet wholly
snow spins like a swarm of bees,
like a gauzy cloud snagged in
the crab apple tree where red &
green birds feather dust branch
to branch to feeder, swinging
tenderly, like the priest’s censer
leaking pearl-gray smoke over
heads bowed in thoughts few
say in prayers, in lent’s ashes
that can be read as sad petitions
for one’s life centered on things
incidental & idle that fail to be
transmuted in a veil of incense.

M.J. Iuppa ‘s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017).For the past 30 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.

First Exit

The day I would lay down
to face the sun. In the darkest
hour, they told me not to fear
what, in my mind, I had already
repeated. Because to think is to do.
And since I thought of my death,
I had died already.

I watched those around me
in their slim tombs, the length
of their bodies thick, horizontal.

They were to prepare my body, remove
all but the essential heart
so that I could stare into
the eye for eternity.
They wrote falcons on my coffin
so that my son could become god.
I was meant to keep forever
locked within the walls of Osiris.
But, like a god, I passed
back through life
as through a dark pupil.

It has been miles since.
I return every hundred years or so
through strange doors.
The vulture of heaven is no more
than the stomach through which one passes
at times. I am no more
cemented in eternity
than the crumbled offerings
presented at my first death.

Like the mortals, I keep
repeating this dying
and rising from the dead.

L.B. Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry, often exploring themes of transformation, woundedness, and interdependence in her poetry.  She grew up in the Southern US, has worked as a university instructor and as a professional tutor, and holds an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing.

Hidden

I have lost my boy
in a perpetual game
of hide and go seek.

I have looked
everywhere.

Is he in heaven?
He’s certainly not
in the other place.

Will he be found
only in my heart,
my memories?

Is he simply buried,
a star above his head,
waiting for the rapture,
or for the rest of us to join him
and become stardust.

Sam Norman has been teaching high school for 16 years at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. Until now, most of what Sam has written has been shared only with family and a few friends, though he has been published in Bacon Academy’s literary journal, The Salmon River Review. Most of Sam’s recent poetry focuses on a terrible tragedy. Sam’s son, Ben, just 20 years old, lost his life in a weather-related traffic accident on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2018. Sam lives in Coventry, Connecticut with his wife Teri, their children, Becca and Daniel, a bunch of chickens, and their beloved dogs, Cloudy and Ripple.

Unicorns in The Hood Part 26

i walked along the smoking mirrors
of tescatlipocatl and the day keepers
the ones that swallow keys and skeletons
walked
until i found
the mouth of queztalcoatl
feathered serpent
stretching into
the womb of water
where water births stars
i tried to walk
into the mouth of quetzalcoatl
and found myself
back inside smoking mirrors
of tescatlipocatl and the night keepers
the ones that swallow dreams and visions
walked away
again
until i found
the mouth of queztalcoatl
feathered serpent
stretching into the water
of my eyes
queztalcoatl
swallowed my hope
and gave me
feather serpent
wings
to place
in my tongue
to remember
to fly when
i speak

Israel Francisco Haros Lopez was born in East Los Angeles to immigrant parents of Mexican descent. Israel graduated from U.C. Berkeley and received a degree in English Literature and Chicano Studies followed by an M.F.A in Creative Writing. At formal and informal visual art spaces, Israel creates and collaborates in many interdisciplinary ways including poetry, performance, music, visual art, and video making and curriculum creation. His work addresses a multitude of historical and spiritual layered realities of border politics, identity politics, and the re-interpretation of histories.

Israel has been published online and in print poetry journals and magazines, including, Rise Up, Across The Margin, La Bloga, The anthology ‘Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice’. He has two collections of poetry ‘Waterhummingbirdhouse: A Poetry Codex’ and ‘Mexican Jazz Vol. 1’.