Author Archives: Sarah

Spiral


A silver spiral, the clean curve
	of a hand-crafted earring gaining weight
		as each loop orbits the first.
	Light lands gently,
lifts it like a sacred symbol, a sigil
	that is constant in nature —
		the whorls of a shell
	the core of a tornado.
I think of a labyrinth on a Scottish shore
	its journey of stones marked in the sand,
		how the path curled to a cairn,
        a feather, seaweed, driftwood
and how I stood
	not knowing who made it
		or what it meant 
        content to reach its still spot
feel myself unwind

Barbara Hickson’s poems have appeared in anthologies and journals including Poetry Salzburg Review, London Grip, Channel, Echtrai and Finished Creatures amongst many others. They have also won prizes in major competitions. She has two poetry pamphlets, A Kind of Silence (Maytree Press, 2021) and Only the Shining Hours (Maytree Press, 2024).
Barbara lives in Lancaster, UK, with her husband and is a keen fell-walker, organic gardener and nature conservation volunteer.

Aubade

4:00 a.m., wide awake. 
Coffee, toast, a book. 

By 5:00, exhausted, poor excuse 
for being human.

I slip outside into the last of the cool night air.

A breeze strokes the birch’s 
dangling branches into the mane 
of a tender beast.

Tell me, why am I on this earth?

I hear my good friend laughing, 
what she’d say,
You are here. Simple. 
That’s it.

And mostly she’s happy.

The rose petals of the impatiens
flare from the dark.

How long can I stand here praying 
and to what? 

To have loved, 
that is the thing.
 
The crickets churn like a quiet engine 
turning earth toward the day.

Kathleen A Wakefield‘s first book of poetry, Notations on the Visible World (2000), won the 1999 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her second book Grip, Give and Sway was published by Silver Birch Press (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, Blue Line, The Georgia Review, Hubbub, HumanaObscura, Image, One, Poetry, Rattle, River Styx, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and Visions International. She has taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Rochester, as a poet-in-the-schools, and share poetry through public libraries.

Confession in Gold

Once declared a deliverer 
from slavery. Once overlaid 
the inner sanctuary. On Dura’s plain 
brought threat of fire and fury. Still gifted 
to the child of Mary. 
Perishable, and stones could sing 
in praise of kingly glory; and yet 
your ways are infallibly sturdy. To descend, 
pure as glass, the street, the heavenly city. 
Yet still I speak foolishness 
to the Almighty. 

So arise Lord, 
silence my tongue, break my bones, 
refine me.

Andrew Senior is a writer of poetry and short literary and speculative fiction, based in Sheffield, UK. His work has appeared in various publications including Ekstasis, Fathom, Crow & Cross Keys and Postbox Magazine. Visit https://andrewseniorwriting.weebly.com/

What I have learned

always is
	as long as 	right now

forever is	the sun’s tall shadow
		across one grasp of	 green yard

it is today.

& i cannot break your promise-

i am told time expands		in every direction at once
there is a world	where this is the world,
but for every 	is			there is 	not:

so, in love-		do right	by both

fall laughing,		 & land	in the shattered mirror of
									grace.

swift is not certain

certain is	the sun’s tall shadow
		held loosely		in the copse where children
					turn branch to armament;

we are then called home.

surrender yourself,
	wager your full heart upon
		the game worth losing

	as the ocean gambles its fullness
	upon the shore,

		as the sun stakes its weightlessness
			upon the earth.




Stephen Joffe is an award winning actor, musician, writer, and sound designer based in Toronto. He has previously been published as a playwright, songwriter (Birds of Bellwoods, etc.), and poet.

Land 

Crates of ruby rhubarb, 		
at the city market,		
tall stalks of pink and green, 

sour soldiers of the spring,
born in lines beyond the village: 
light Rhineland soil, 	

come closer, 		
step past the conflicts, 
mind the fallen,

hear the cherry tree 
in its swirling cape of snow, 	
call us to the garden.	

Jill Husser-Munro grew up in the north of Scotland and has lived and worked in Strasbourg, France, for over thirty years. Her work has been published in Poetry Scotland, Amethyst Review, The Alchemy Spoon and Dreich Magazine.

Anniversary 

Good Friday came and left.
I recalled a few years before 
when my sister died. 
We lived in a common sadness 
that was ordinary and blue.

When we sat together, 
light entered from the window.
The beams were undistinguished
but whole in their holy attention
to the detail and clarity of each 
human face. Our invisible breath,
our words, rattled around in that 
luminous air. The light streamed in
like a river without gravity
that ran through time’s windows. 

The entry was triumphant
and lasted the morning while we sat
together, before the light staled. 
And it happened like that every day—
no matter how much we lost, no matter
how many times—that lustrous silence
always came back, and our minds
leaved and flowered through the sky
where we dreamed of following.  
 

Jesse Breite’s recent poetry has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Pinch, Terrain, and Rhino. His first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Jesse teaches high school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two kids. More at jessebreite.com.

A Tree’s Hashkiveinu

Let my roots dive deeply and drink
of soil that has never been tainted
by blood unjustly or otherwise spilled.

Let my trunk grow so wide
that no one can encompass me
alone. Let my strength 
make parent and child,
refugee and soldier,
rabbi and stranger and
lover and lover and lover
join hands to embrace me
and then each other.

Let my branches become
weighted with the privilege
of bearing nourishing fruits
more valuable than rubies
for any who hunger 
for sustenance and sanctuary,
for those who do not have
the means to shelter themselves. 
Let my leaves be a canopy
for those who need solace and rest

And do not let your enemies—greed and fear
and wickedness—sully your heart and
cause you to take up your swords and your axes against me.
Instead, polish your metals
until they shine, and
eschew the mirror.
Raise them skyward, 
and ask God to look at Himself.

Katherine Orfinger is a writer, artist, and MFA candidate at Rosemont College. She draws her inspiration from her Floridian hometown, love of nature, and Jewish faith. Katherine’s work has appeared in The Write Launch, Beyond Queer Words, Touchstone, Aeolus, and many others. She currently resides in Pennsylvania with her partner.

Higher Order of Being

Blurred hoofprints in the mud here
suggest something drank recently from the brook:
I think a deer.

Quenched thirst is immediate, like daily bread.
The sound of water drew a deer
unlikely to consider it the answer to a prayer;

unable to number
seven waterfalls far down the gorge, or identify
a lake at the outlet—

and what small brain in such a narrow cranium
even dreams that “all waters flow
toward the one sea, yet the sea is never filled”?

I was born to find
the moment beautiful—but then Preacher put
eternity into my head.



Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Red Eft Review, Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

Among Olive Trees

We slowly grow, we olive trees, but live
For many years. Our memories are old,
Are seeded, bedded in the earth and nursed
On earthly time. Our memories are rich
With loam, with stories passed from root to root
Until they’re written in the gnarled twists
And tortured turnings of our ancient trunks.
For we’re a knotty yet a noble race;
We’ve not the levity of willows nor
The elegance of elms. We envy not
The fabled strength of oaks and feel no call
To emulate the aspen’s chaste demean. 
We some of us have lived a thousand years
And some have even more. We know ourselves
And know the steady ache of time; have inch
By inch and year by year our skyward push
Maintained as empires around us far 
More quickly grew but of a sudden fell,
The names of those who ruled them unrecalled.
We find that human stories come and go,
But now and then a simple moment claims
Its place in memory, will not give way
To Time’s corrosive chafe. Our eldest tell
Us of a time long past, an evening when
A man—a rabbi, so they said, or some 
Such thing—had come among us, fallen to
His knees and cried aloud into the face
Of death while farther off his friends were all
Asleep. And then some people came, were rude
And rough and quite abruptly took him off.
We always wondered what became of him. 
(The friends woke up but quickly ran away…)

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Amethyst Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Modern Reformation, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He was the 2nd Place winner in the Catholic Literary Arts 2022 Assumption of Mary poetry contest and 1st Place winner in its Advent: Mary Mother of Hope contest later that year. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.

Undertones


‘The trumpet does not more stun you 
by its loudness, than a whisper 
teases you by its provoking inaudibility’
— Charles Lamb

Does a speck of lint
make a sound when it drops
into a wastebasket?
I only ask because
souls are weightless, too,
flaking off traces of deadened thoughts,
sins, bruises, and abraded threads 
of paths long gone awry
as they make their way 
down life’s buckled corridors.

My ears are attuned and entwined 
with the spiral of sounds
stretched out and taut 
with the snap of catgut,
a string that resonates 
with each shifting of sound. 

Will a footstep be heard
in a snow-covered glen?
Will the leaves of crisp maple
intone in accord when the wind 
draws its bow through their veins
in a pulsing of rhythm?

I grow fainter and lighter 
as each thought is shed, 
diaphanous as the snow.
Conjoined with the chorus of trumpets,
the deafening knock of each blast 
carries me further, hammering footfalls
burying my prints soundlessly, 
weightlessly, in mounds of dust 
humming louder and louder
with the clarion roar and cry
I silently follow towards home. 

Author of the debut novel Twelfth House, and Shaded Pergola, a collection of haiku and short poetry featuring her original illustrations, E.C. Traganas has published in over a hundred literary magazines including The Brussels Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Amethyst Review, Story Sanctum, Penwood Review, and others. She enjoys a professional career as a Juilliard-trained concert pianist & composer, has held over 40 national exhibitions of her artwork, and is the founder/director of Woodside Writers, a New York-based literary forum. www.elenitraganas.com