Author Archives: Sarah

Stella Maris	
                    Mary, Star of the Sea		
                    Ocracoke Island, North Carolina

in the churchyard's quiet  
corner where leaves 
collect she stands   
gaze unbroken to the sea
somber
steady
one tear
stains her left cheek
	~
where are your children
Mother
what can be done 
to save them
what expanse
would you not 
brook to bring
them safely home
you know better
than we the perils
awaiting on the waves
	~
what tear falls for me 
Mother
is it the time
I've wasted
flesh I've feted
doors left unopened
have I been grateful
for the sea
and all it contains
	~
from your vantage 
among the stars
your silent witness 
unwavering
can you see 
the speck of me 
the canopy of night
like a magician's robe
reveals and conceals
in endless folds 		
	~			
long have I struggled
as one who rows 
blind in the night
like John of the Cross
your shimmer 
on the water
lights my way 
not to the distant shore
but to the crest
of the next wave 
	~
nothing left
but trust 
a choice when 
there is no choice
I fold my hands
	~
beneath your light  
o bright and morning star
conspicuous in your dark 
cape of wind
I feel the first cold 
filaments of my leaving

Gregory Lobas is the author of Left of Center (Broadkill River Press, 2022) which won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, such as Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, Tar River Poetry, Cimarron Review, Vox Populi, Susurrus, and many others. He is a retired firefighter/paramedic living with his wife Meg and dog Sophie in the Hurricane Helene-ravaged area of western North Carolina

Kept 

Faith calls, comes in, 
but doesn’t stay, won’t be kept 
on display like that – in a frame 
on a cross, for people to see. 
Faith loses interest in what we think 
it should be. Faith waits, easy to find, 
difficult to follow. Faith is us 
flailing, failing, falling asleep 
with the television on. Faith waits, 
but we can’t keep it waiting. 
Faith knows that even the ocean 
grows tired of itself sometimes.   

James Lilliefors is a poet and novelist, whose writing has appeared in Door Is A Jar, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, The Belfast Review, The Miami Herald, and elsewhere. His first poetry collection, SUDDEN SHADOWS, will be published in October.

Evensong: Wet


I slip into the church to get out of the storm,
my coat clinging damp to my back.
I have a train to catch in a few hours and nowhere to go, 
except a bar or a bistro
and I can’t face the noise.

It’s Evensong, the pews almost empty, two old ladies in the front,
a mother and her babbling toddler behind me, 
a man with a cane on the other side. 
A sign asking me to turn off my phone.

Voices process down the aisle, rising and falling, a young priest.
The old ladies bow their heads, so I bow mine, but not before
catching sight of a little choir boy with an untied shoe. 
I smile at him and he smiles back as if we share a secret.

Canticles, psalms, the old prayers.
Things that don’t change give me peace.
A blessing descends on my head.
I watch the candles flicker in the draft.
My shoulders relax. The rain stops. 

Gabriella Brand‘s work has appeared in Comstock Review, Echoes, Citron Review, Room Magazine (Canada) and Shiuli (India). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee in both fiction and poetry. An active outdoorsperson, Gabriella teaches in the OLLI program at the University of Connecticut. Her website is gabriellabrand.net

This World When Starlings Shimmer On the Grass

All have risen in sleep. We glide into the sky 
over Pine Mountain, over the winding valleys, 

runneled hillsides, family graveyards,
the homesteads of this longing to gather

the smoky, broken years aside like a veil.
We soar and hover, climb again for love 

of the far moon, a way back into the brilliant 
globe of childhood, the ache for flight we scoured

into our flesh like frost, like sand, like soot
—until the body tugs, insists on day, 

and the sleeper turns,
regains the muddy shell and casts about

for a word to crack open the dream,
for threshold in the tongue of angels.

James Owens‘s newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Channel, Arc, Dalhousie Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and Atlanta Review. Originally from Virginia, he earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.

The Overwhelming Beauty of the Sky

The month was June, late June. A child
Lay in the unmown grass.
Indoors, a worried father, reading, smiled—
But only briefly. Smiles soon pass.

The child interpreted the sky
As rivers seem to do,
When lying meek and mantled in such high
White splendors set in luminous blue.

The child, in time, would number this
Among his blessings. What
He’d felt that day he came to call a kiss
And, all his life, never forgot.

Charles Hughes is the author, most recently, of Ifs, a Few Buts, and Other Stuff, a book of poems for children, published by Kelsay Books, and of two previous poetry collections, The Evening Sky and Cave Art, both from Wiseblood Books. He worked for over 30 years as a lawyer and lives in the Chicago area with his wife.

clouds

whispered mist as little clouds moving quickly,
the great expanse seems timeless and constant before them,
the pillar of fire leading me onwards in the early morning,
i am moses and my feet are bare.

Emily Kledzik is an undergraduate student studying Creative Writing. She is a queer woman in Appalachia devoted to understanding humanity. Her writing pays tribute to the people around her, the divinity and slight humanity she sees within her surrounding nature, and the great writers that come before her.

Like a Long River Running

It breathes you in and sings you out
as it carries you to your wilderness 
where you have to go to find yourself
finally on your knees 

You gleaned its grace in your weakness 
and found the deep reservoir of kindness 
where we all recognize each other 
when brought to our depth.

It showed you how to rise 
again like morning dew, 
to disappear then gather 
to find your course again.

It beats the drum of your dreaming
and sounds the bell of your being
while you tumble and fall
and continue to carry on

Through the narrow gorge of sorrow
through the golden fields of delight
to the mouth of all that ends
and all that begins again.

Laura Denny has lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains for many years. She is retired from thirty years of teaching kindergarten. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sunlight Press, Remington Review and Academy of the Heart And Mind.

Nine Birds

I.
As a child, my first moments of wonder 
arrived on the backs of American Robins.
How do those dull feathers and hollow bones
carry the weight of spring?

II.
Turkey Vultures would often stalk 
high above the Gunpowder River,
casting their silver shadows
on my father and I as we fished 
for trout and conversation.

III.
On the day I left for bootcamp,
Purple Martins were returning
from their southern tour. 
A thousand bodies finally finding rest
as I was finding an escape route.

IV.
There was a Red Cardinal 
perched in the barren pear tree 
past our kitchen window,
watching my wife and I
celebrate Christmas the best we could 
despite postpartum depression.

V.
From the pine barks of Idaho,
Mourning Doves cooed 
my son and I awake,
telling us the fish were biting.

VI.
As my daughter and I danced
among the basalt boulders
of the Snake River,
Peregrine Falcons gazed down
from their cliffed perch
with yellowed ancient eyes.

VII.
There was the Northern Fulmar 
hovering over my right shoulder 
as I crossed an arctic fjord in Greenland,
a warm belly of comfort, 
patiently reminding me 
I was not completely alone.

VIII.
Far above the neighborhood worries,
a Barred Owl nests in the pines,
diligently overlooking my home
and all who enter it.
Now, when my son asks me 
Where is proof of God’s existence? 
I will tell him to look for the birds.

Matthew Merson is a travelling salesman who lives with his family and dogs in Charleston, South Carolina. His other work can be found in Hidden Peaks Review, JAKE and The Spotlong Review among others.

God in the Garden

In the light of owl eyes,
orb of alium seed-head,
centre of sunflower's crown
God appears,	 
		and I am calmed.

In grain of sand; hole of hag stone;
spreading radius of rippled pond;
crossed loops of waggle dance ~
eyes grow wide in wonder: 
		
			God is here. 

Janina Aza Karpinska achieved an M.A. in Creative Writing & Personal Development, with Merit, at Sussex University, and won 1st prize in The Cannon’s Mouth Poetry Competition shortly after. Her work has featured in Magma #85: Poems for Schools; Poetry in the Waiting Room; Drawn to the Light; Ekphrastic Review; Cold Signal; Raising the Fifth; Sein und Werd, and Epistemic Lit among others. She lives in a house full of books on the south coast of England, and makes writing a daily practice, drawing on a wide variety of styles.

Good Enough Church

Sunday attendance is sparse these days, which does our sumptuous chapel an injustice. So many treasures of the Episcopal Church in one cozy space: deep crimson carpet, old stone walls, dark wood, assorted saints in stained glass windows, Jesus reigning in heaven from the front, his mother high above the chapel’s entrance.

I’ve come here for twenty years, but that’s nothing in this place. Take Doris: she adored the Jesus window from her very first visit four decades ago, as she told me once. Did she look as magisterial then as she does now? No one remembers, not even old Clarence wearing his bolo tie and pink shorts whatever the weather, in the front pew with his three-day stubble and the unforgettable HA-HA-HA that he unleashes during the sermons. He stoops a bit, like Bob did, seated in the back pew behind me, swimming in his oversized ecru suit, shuffling with the offering plate to the altar despite his ninety years. Across the aisle, tiny Abigail, who late in life married the drummer in a cover band (sixties rock, of course, the music they grew up with) and bitched about his deafening practice sessions in their shoebox house. Next to her was Katharine, the youngest of our “old guard” at fifty-nine, who held Abigail’s hand when the older lady teared up, which was often. In the very back, Marian with the snow white hair, sitting on her walker because her legs couldn’t carry her further. 

I wouldn’t say we knew each other, not exactly. True, some of our secrets would seep out from time to time. Once or twice I thought I smelled gin on Abigail’s breath. One Sunday Bob told a story about his childhood in a fundamentalist church; only by “listening between the lines” did we realize he was gay. Occasionally Marian would allude to an adult child in trouble, but she never provided details, just sighs.

In that way she was like the rest of us. Nothing truly intimate: instead we’d natter about grandchildren, the price of meat at the grocery store, our gardens (Katherine used to decorate the altar with her exquisite roses). We’d moan about the church roof and, every now and then, mention God. Each new priest received a warm welcome and a chair at our table during coffee hour, but in the end priests come and go, and we remained.

I could tell this way of doing church was good enough—for me, anyway—when Bob disappeared and his departure punched a hole in my solar plexus, a blow more painful than you’d expect for a back-pew acquaintance. I ached when Abigail vanished as well. Did anyone try to call her? Maybe she couldn’t hear the phone with her husband riffing in the background. Then one day last year the walker wasn’t in the back of the chapel, and we sighed over that too. 

Even now, during coffee hour, their names come up. Doris still raves about the brilliant sweaters Abigail knit—one a week, though what she did with them Doris never knew. Clarence booms with laughter when he recalls (but, thankfully, does not retell) Marian’s off-color jokes. We all bemoan the loss of Katharine’s bouquets as we bemoan the loss of Katharine, three months ago, too soon for our taste. 

Yet their scents, like the psalms recited at an ancient monastery, have penetrated the walls. I still inhale the waft as I find my pew and hear Clarence whispering his pre-service prayers. Doris clenches my arm and smiles like always, and I see genuine affection though I’m not sure why. 

We’ll all leave eventually, all of the old guard, in our own ways. One thing’s for sure: as long as two or three of us show up on Sundays, we’ll slide into our pews, open our bulletins, and take a quick look round for the rest, even those who left our sight years ago, lifetime strangers who found their way into our hearts. 

#  #  #

John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, the everyday strangeness of karma, cats, and whatever else comes to mind. Janelle’s work has appeared in The Citron Review, Catapult, the tiny journal, Typehouse, HerStry, and Amethyst Review, among other places. Her essays have made several contest shortlists and earned a few Pushcart nominations. Find her at http://www.backmanwriter.com.