Author Archives: Sarah

Pax di Assisi 


In the Basilica,
I feel Christed—
as I watch a dove 
encircling above
San Francesco,
winging prayers 
holy heavenward,
just like his gaze
in this thin place 
where serenity 
settles upon me,
natural and pure
as morning mist 
on hills of home.

The hush here 
respires kindness—
inhale, exhale—
the breath a bridge
‘twixt earth and sky,
and faith forges
a soundless space, 
a moment to rest 
beyond doctrines,
the only hymn a hum 
of cleansing peace, 
intoning a grace
I’ll carry outside. 

Danita Dodson is an educator, literary scholar, and the author of three poetry collections, Trailing the Azimuth (2021), The Medicine Woods (2022), and Between Gone and Everlasting (2024) all published by Wipf and Stock. She is also the coeditor of Teachers Teaching Nonviolence (2020). Dodson’s poems have appeared in Salvation South, Critique, Tennessee Voices, Amethyst Review, Women Speak Anthology, Thin Places and Sacred Spaces, and elsewhere. She is a native of the Cumberland Gap region of East Tennessee, where she hikes and explores local history connected to the wilderness. For more, visit www.danitadodson.com.

Homecoming

Through cirrus clouds spread thin as stretched cotton
glued to paper for woolfell on lost sheep 
in Sunday school, terrain unforgotten:
the Columbia, wild, dark, and deep,
strewn like scrapped satin between strips of pine;
the old house on the hill off the highway;
the water-logged hills that fed my bloodline
where kin now rest in a womb of decay; 
the dam, salmon, paper mill, evergreens
all ancient guardians, once at odds, nod
to acknowledge a homecoming of grief
through layers of atmosphere, holy sod,
and troubled time.
                                         I step out into air 
thin as paper, strands of woolfell and prayer.

Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis was born and raised between the mountains and ocean in the Pacific Northwest but now writes from the Ohio River Valley. Her work has been published in Dappled Things and Salamander.

Birdsong

The way their song lifts your spirits
in the spring when a convocation
of birds returns to meadows 
and fields they favor, trees
they seem to know. Although
it’s hard to find them by sound alone,
surveying as you go
trying to echolocate
the cheeps and chirps, tweets
and whistles, clicks 
and squawks,
the piercing cries of hawks,
guttural caw of crows.
You search for splashes of color:
cardinal red, oriole orange,
goldfinch yellow, hiding 
in the camouflage of leaves.

Ed Meek is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of short stories. His most recent book is High tide. He has had poems in The Paris Review, The Sun, Plume, etc.

Backyard, Mid-May 2

Watch. The plants are coming forward,
Bougainvillea foams with flowers,
Lavender seeps upward slowly,
Orange planets on the rose bush
Burst and seed their stuff through space.
Everything is coming forward.
You can almost see the doorway
Through which each plant makes an entrance,
Come forward from the place of nothing.
Watch as nothing becomes something.
Is this what they called the void?
Who knew it was so creative?
Who knows how it does its work?
Even though you watch it happen
Mystery looks back at you.

Peter Cashorali is a neurodiverse pansy living at the intersection of rivers, farmland and civil war. He practices a contemplative life.

Shadow Theatre

I thought I saw a fly; it was the shadow of a fly
That flitted past a window full of sun
A Doppelgänger buzzing through the corner of my eye
A zero, if the fly should stand for one
Or if the fly was Word, a fiendish pun.

I thought I knew you well; it was your shadow that I knew
You dawdled for a while before the glow
My passion kindled in the night, and, blocking it from view
Replaced it with the shade I came to know.
Desire remained above, and I below.

I thought I worshipped God; that shadow fell beneath the tower
Atop whose roof a golden cross shone bright
A solemn, ancient edifice of ritualistic power
That sometimes came as blessing, sometimes blight
But always blocked whatever made the light.

I thought I found myself; it was a shadow cast by dreams
That intervened between my thought and action.
“I think therefore I am” is not as simple as it seems
For what we think is subject to refraction 
So what we are, a muddled-up redaction.

I think I’ve told the truth; these symbols printed on the page
Have shapes that seem to promise revelation
But really they’re just shadow puppets dancing on a stage.
Their shadows? Those we call “interpretation”.
Such shadows are the gist of all creation.
 

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Spectral Realms, Aphelion, Black Petals, Grim and Gilded, Ekstasis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Emberr, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, The Sirens Call, The Chamber Magazine, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.

Transubstantiation

Past depth, beyond the chemical,
Where collisions sometimes occur,
Awareness embeds particle,
Divinities themselves bestir.

Where collisions sometimes occur,
Here being from being splits off,
Divinities themselves bestir
Awake—they yawn, they stretch, they cough.

Here being from being splits off,
Reflecting essential matter.
Awake they yawn, they stretch, they cough,
They ripen into their nature.

Reflecting essential matter,
These hallowed ur-forces expand.
They ripen into their nature
In this difficult wonderland.

These hallowed ur-forces expand,
Awareness embeds particle,
In this difficult wonderland
Past depth, beyond the chemical.

Dennis Daly has published eleven books of poetry and poetic translations. A number of his translations have recently been published by Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House) in Uyghur Poems, part of Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. Please visit his blog site here: dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.

Psalm

I want to speak heaven
into earth, into the fields 
of wildflowers, into the
woodlands.
I want to braid heaven
into your hair, let you 
see yourself resplendent,
see yourself divine. 
Lit by that fire, 
I see you, you are like
no other, you are essential
as the sun, as the heart.
Look at you shine.

Erin Olson is a counselor and poet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Third Wednesday, ONE ART, and Sky Island Journal.

Meeting Minutes (Friends Meeting House, Rochester)

Hobbled by life, I searched for open doors
to escape this boastful, plug-in city.
Found one, just as the weather was coming fast. 
In here, my place was already set
with silence waiting, inviting me to sit.

Silence was a hail-fellow-well-met type
(of hitherto, I had not cared for), but
he had friends – each with eyes closed, 
messaging in their own private channels. I joined them
bringing only an elevated ear.

My blood clock listed the seconds, minutes. 
I watched shadows sit, stretch, then rise to leave – 
and then return like jealous agnostics.
Silence worked the room – a trainer breathing, 
train rails seething, the brush of frond on glass.

Silence told me, but I never asked.
Spoke with mailed fist – I considered leaving,
but silence invited me to sit.
Spoke with bare-knuckle – and I rose to leave, 
but silence invited me to sit.

With ten minutes left, silence left me to it
and when my ungummed, Wedgewood eyes opened,
something came on and came on unbidden.
Something much bigger than the rational,
something once buried, something once hidden.

Into drying weather and milk happy,
into once engraved streets (storm windows down),
into a human river – broad, boiling.
I heard nothing – and have heard nothing, since
the day silence invited me to sit.

 

Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Douglas Dunn, Ian Hamilton & Seamus Heaney.
Joseph has been published by Stand, Blackbox Manifold, The Rumen, The Brussels Review and ingénu/e and he was also highly commended in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2024.

Children of Encouragement

Gray stone chapel waiting
in the new green morning
I pull the door and plunge 
into still shadow thick 
as a carpet of pine 

I start about the business
of setting up for Mass
laying out the books
the booklets the chairs
shake out twelve 

perfect creamy wafers 
from their plastic sleeve
place them on a paten
of green clay swirling
smooth as sea glass 

mix wine with water
my own miniscule miracle
click a hot pink lighter
touch flame to dusty wicks
breathe in and wait

more arrive hushed
and sleepy-eyed 
not many but enough 
for us to say Amen
and hear another’s voice

saying Amen too
this is no great ecstasy
just simple people simply
praying—oh, for more
ordinary love like this 

Erika Takacs is an Episcopal priest, teacher, and poet originally from Wilmington, Delaware. Her writing has been published in Earth & Altar, The Christian Century, Braided Way, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and as a part of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poetry in Plain Sight. Outside of her work and her family, her three great loves are the music of J.S. Bach, books, and baseball. She currently resides in North Carolina, where she and her husband serve at the pleasure of their very spoiled beagle.

Cellular Theology

It is late. He should sleep, but tonight the monk feels a restless pull from the manuscript before him. Under the frail, flickering candle, the illuminated capital letter (the T of Tau) shimmers with gold filigree. It is a beacon—but the apostle’s words that follow are dull, mere shadows. Whenever this mood descends, everything becomes leaden—all that is real is the sullen flesh. His hand rests heavy on the vellum: calf skin. His quill is nothing but a bird feather: a dead thing plucked from a dead thing.

His gaze drifts to the whimsy added by a previous brother in Christ: a single peacock feather decorating the margin. Inexplicable. Indulgent. Why does it rivet him now?

His mind fixates on a vast peacock strutting before drab peahens, and regards his own drab robe—his solitary cell. He curses himself. Why does everything distract? Even in this cold, dark stone room—or because it is so plain?—so many serpentine streams flow underground into indulgent fantasy. Self-regard. A species of sloth. Why do feeble minds twist away, perverse, from the sacred source: the refreshing lake of God’s presence? 

His mind fans out at the vague threat of Viking invasion. He fantasizes about killing marauders—engaging in the righteous slaughter of heathens. Protecting The Word. Him! Hero martyr monk! The banality of pride…

It is not all my fault, he defends himself feebly. His imagination is vivid from all the visualization techniques the Abbot taught him as a boy, training him to recollect all manner of catechism. To this day, each sin and virtue has a geometric shape and a color for him. And if his mind drifts, it may be because he hasn’t eaten a full meal in days—partially out of devotions, but mostly by circumstance. The oat stores grow thin, and weevils wriggle in the porridge, putting him off his repast.

The abbey cat purrs in the corner. Is she enjoying infused meditation? Bright dreams of bloody murder? He remembers her asleep outside in the summer, her head resting in a halo of feathers. What is it like to hunt? To pounce and— 

No! An error! A cursed error! A repeated letter. Has he ruined the page?

He can’t lift his hand. His skin is fused with the calfskin vellum—one continuous medium. Something burns. He slides up his sleeve. Script swirls under the skin of his forearm—not Greek, Latin, Aramaic… The letters blaze. It hurts to look directly at it. He screws his eyes shut.

*** 

The peacock pattern unfurls in every direction. Within the details of each feather the monk spies interlocking figures: every martyr and persecutor, every sinner and saint, every angel and demon that has ever been or may ever be, all emerging from each other—dazzling symmetries! Consistent as syllogism! The Unsayable Form behind all forms!

Peering closer, the monk spies infinite monks with infinite concentration encoding the manuscript of manuscripts. They work in tiny cells—it is cells all the way down! Great cities emerge, and from them the City of Cities, its noise become choruses of perfection, its stink become perfume. Infinite city, and script, and scribes are one, are many. Sublime glory. 

Now the feathers part: a gate. He is the gate, the opening, the way.

***

The abbey cat wakes with a start. She mews, then pads off, preying near the stone crevices where pests cower and twitch between frantic dashes into the light. The cat is oblivious to the new image on the vellum: peacock feathers perfectly rendered, profuse, swallowing all text, all errors, all sin. Beautiful, but unreadable. As the stern Abbot would say: what human eye could draw sense from such a wayward sign?

Colm O’Shea is a Clinical Associate Professor of essay writing at New York University.