angular flake grasped in sunlight stained windowpane shimmered holy thirteen thousand years connect golden fallen leaves crisp November prayer in glint soil and time weathered rind shared whispers ancient struggle current hope
*
flake held above me sunlight pours through thinned stone dirt and rain taken toll on us on weathering amber chalcedony my eyes greet his tease write poetry about history about our weathering our connection between thirteen thousand years and present
I warble disgraced calligraphy my sigh awe in dirt awe in strikes millennia deep debitage love song the screen catches my sunlight marvel
Kim Malinowski is a lover of words. Her collection Home was published by Kelsay Books. Her verse novel Phantom Reflection was published by Silver Bow Press. Buffy’s House of Mirrors was published by Q, an imprint of Querencia Press. Reverberations was published by Kelsay Books. Her chapbook Death: A Love Story was published by Flutter Press. She writes because the alternative is unthinkable.
Beneath towering big leaf maples, huckleberries tempt me with their translucent red. A salmon berry’s bumpy bright orange pricks my fingers. Beside delicate maidenhair fern, I wander the cobbled stream bed lined with dusty sword ferns. Spring proclaimed by snowy trillium.
I walked here fifty years ago holding my mom’s freckled hand, carrying my infant son on my chest. Moved by the hallowed sound of our family’s footsteps, I called this place a cathedral. Now she is gone and his son is cherished. I find myself consecrated anew in this lush dwelling of the holy.
Now retired from teaching as a community college English professor, and having raised three children, Pat McCutcheon and her wife live in the redwoods of far northern California. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Fish Poetry Prize Anthology , Pisgah Review, Ship of Fools, Sinister Wisdom, and other journals and anthologies. In 2015 her chapbook Slipped Past Words, was published as a winner by Finishing Line Press. Her debut collection, Through the Labyrinth, was published in 2023.
Compline is the Church’s night prayer, facing the danger at the edge of darkness, rendering time holy, quieting minds for rest.
Compline starts with stillness. Silence. Candlelight flickering. Shadows dancing on ancient talismans: wait for it—
The breath of air brushing past, the presence, the cloak of darkness spread gently in
the silence. Holding back the night. Voices rise, a chant written in the stars, transcribed centuries ago when the world trembled with fear.
The breath of air the presence You are not alone. Wait for it—
The prayer rises with the incense:
Be our light in the darkness deliver us from all perils and dangers of this night.
Candlelight flickering Holding back the dark:
This is how we live on the threshold of night.
Jeannette de Beauvoir is a poet and novelist who lives and works at Land’s End—Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Emerson Review, the Looking Glass Review, Avalon Literary Review, the Blue Collar Review, Sheepshead Review, On Gaia Literary, Merganser Magazine, the Adirondack Review, Perception, and the New England Review, among others; she was featured in WCAI’s Poetry Sunday, and received the Mary Ballard Chapbook Prize and the Outermost Poetry Contest national award. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com
6.56 am snowdrops push through cloudless dawn breathe in delicate Imbolc air,
heads bowed in prayer.
Half a teaspoon of candlelight
prayers for the king of kings a promise to return.
Welcome patron saint of poets, printers, farmers, nuns, sailors— workers gather in quiet reverence.
The moment weighs on me, half-formed cross in my hands, rushes press between
thumb and forefinger, each fold, each turn, a prayer,
each turn and wrap a word weave a poem, a prayer.
Welcome patron saint of babies, midwives, dairy workers, beer— blessed, in earthly joy, holiness
hands on rushes, fold with care — prayers made visible,
Weave poems, bless connections between
everyday and the divine; this humble ritual binds us all. Welcome St. Brigid, patron saint of poets.
Margaret T Rochford is a poet and playwright originally from Ireland living in London. She regularly performs her poetry at open mike sessions. Her poetry has been published in magazines and on line, she is working on her first pamphlet. Two of her short plays have been performed at the Irish Cultural Centre in London and she is currently working on a play about Irish dancing.
Not up there, out there, somewhere separate from the reality around us.
Nothing foreign like some great power leaning over the universe
tweaking the force of fate, casually dispensing life and death.
Not the Other, a stranger to our nature but something that shares our Being.
I feel that great Familiar, the life force itself that wears us as its flesh,
holds us nearer than breath, as vital as blood and bones.
*from Wordsworth’s 'Lines Written above Tintern Abbey'
Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor (humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website of original music and poetry (www.freeprintmusic.com). She is a church musician still active at 90 as member of a piano duo. Her poetry chapbooks (Seasons, Remains, Timescape) are available from Amazon Books. Individual poems are current in Gyroscope Review and Rockvale Review.
‘Sagrada Corazon de Jesus.’ Anonymous folk art, painted on tin; 5 x 3.5 inches; tinwork frame – Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM.
Tin was called “the poor man’s silver.” Extracted from the earth, and labor-intensive. Whose labor though, and what earth? Tinwork goes back to the 16th century in Mexico. It was pounded, rolled, shaped, stamped, and cut with metal shears. Made into masks, mirrors. Also ex-votos, milagros, retablos, and this portable altar. Earthy, earthly bridge between the human and the divine. Personal. Private. Whose home held this object of devotion?
~
The frame is tin, and wondrously ornate. The humble metal from earth, once a flat sheet, is now lushly extravagant with plants, suns, and, abundant with decorative flowerings. I can’t help but think: pagan. How much of this came from the religion before?
~
At the center of a tiny painting, a man with long dark hair and a round face. Rays emanate from his head, above and to each side. He sits above cushiony clouds. His garment is the color of the night sky. Deep celestial blue emblazoned with stars of gold. His eyes were made large and dark, and his gaze meets yours. Whose hands took up the brush, the paints?
~
The man’s cloak is opened. He is naked beneath the garment, and yet he does not look away. His fingers are painted curled around the garment’s edge. This is not an accident. This is a gesture. The man’s hands part the garment and he shows you his heart. How can we nakedly meet another’s gaze? How do we reveal our hearts?
~
This is not the heart shape of the profane commercial world. It’s an anatomical heart, and the heart is bleeding. It’s pierced and wounded. It’s aflame, a heart for humanity I’m sure. But I think also for animals, plants – all of nature’s creaturas. It is a passionate heart, a passionate love. It’s called sacred. How do we find our devotion, reverence, sacrality, and for what.
Sally Miles paints, makes mixed media art and more recently, writes about art, spiritual experience and our relationship with plants. She has recently been published in The Ekphrastic Review.
What shocked me was not the January snow that covered the live oaks, but that day in September that should have been brutal.
Walking by the bayou, you spoke of the leper the Lord made whole: told to show the priests though not to say where he had been.
You also recalled what the thinker said: when the risen Christ told Mary Magdalene not to touch, he was showing how presence and the need to verify it cannot coexist.
Turning back, I noticed the sugar cane was high. The heat had obscured the year’s lateness. I thought of calendars, lost your word.
As big trucks rolled past, you said accounts differ about where she was when he told her this, when he said noli me tangere, and it is very likely she was already clinging.
Chris Monier lives with his family in the Bayou Region of south Louisiana where he teaches French and English at Nicholls State University. He has published poetry, literary criticism, and translations of several French-language writers.
Neither grief nor belief serve me. A tap-dance around doubt, never a curtsey.
To differentiate between prayer and a prayer’s answer provides me a thud…
Heartache in a vacuum throbbing amid both contrition and infinity
of faith—every soul’s footnote for forever. Apparition fraught or ashes wrought,
the imaginable beckons, as a dial on a radio makes it easy to rescue
golden oldies with a twist. Their renewed soundtrack bolsters
a vigorous voice eager to craft questions coiled in my cranium, earning answers
without cliché, not passé— You’re Out of Order / Your Ship has Sailed,
or Your King is Dead…Checkmate! Perpetuity probes my failed certainties.
I listen for further instructions…eyes and ears encouraged by a next step beyond Stalemate.
Sam Barbee‘s most-recent collection is titled Apertures of Voluptuous Force (2022, Redhawk Publishing). Three previous collections include That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016. Also, Uncommon Book of Prayer (2021, Main Street Rag) which chronicles family travels in England.
His poems appeared recently in Poetry South, Salvation South, Dead Mule School of Literature, and Streetlight Magazine, also upcoming in Cave Wall, among others; plus on-line journals Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual, Grand Little Things, and Medusa’s Kitchen; and is a two-time Pushcart nominee.
Poem to Be Read If It’s Night Where and When You Are Right Now
My advice? Stay up later: it’s not late enough unless the moment feels—with a tiny twinge of fight-or-flight-or-freeze—too dangerous for wakefulness, unless you get a sudden shiver
energizing along your nerves, a shocking bolt of electro-jolt realizing what concocted hour, minute, second you find yourself in since units measuring moments are human made,
are totally tied to our far-out Sun-revolving rock, are relative to each earthling, so no one tells the same time as another. When it’s then, go outside and stare up at the Moon (or the place
in the sky where it should be) beside intergalactic spangles, and count your lucky stars, and hold your breath, and take a blink of comfort, aware you’ll need to give our Cosmos comfort in return.
Matt Zambito is the author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities (Cherry Grove Collections), and two chapbooks, Guy Talk and Checks & Balances (Finishing Line Press). Other poems have appeared in Poetry International, North American Review, Writers Without Borders, and elsewhere. Originally from Niagara Falls, he has lived in Ohio, Idaho, and Washington. He now writes from Wilson, New York.
I make a chapel of the pupil: a round nave where light kneels through a pinhole, contrite and clear. The slit lamp hums its psalm, fluorescein flares like incense on the corneal altar.
A child’s eye opens, a stained glass rose: green shard, gold flicker, a moving parable of sight. The retina waits, patient and merciful, to turn radiance into record, illumination into proof.
There is confession in the flash: the cataract’s slow surrender, a scar’s pale Amen. Outside, the hospital hums like choir practice; inside, a single pulse translates light to vision, vision to memory, memory to grace.
When I step back, gloves powdered with light, the child blinks, astonished by color: a face, a wall, a blue coat, the world restored by filament and faith. I close the instrument, whisper thanks to the small, unwavering cathedral that lives inside us all.
David A. Lee is physician and an emerging poet based in Houston, Texas, whose work explores memory, human connection, and the liminal spaces between perception and reality. He holds a background in medical science and philosophy, bringing a reflective and inquisitive lens to his writing. His poetry draws inspiration from both contemporary and classical literature, emphasizing vivid imagery and emotional depth. His poems are forthcoming in Mobius, Eunoia Review, and Unbroken Journal. David is currently developing a collection of original poems examining time, identity, and place.
