Author Archives: Sarah

Sukkovid (Sukkot 2020)

God leaves us 
instructions—love one another,
celebrate and mourn together,
for when we are in fragments
in uncertain times
and in inconvenient places,
when all we can see 
are the jagged edges of a world still waiting
for redemption,
we must gaze skyward
and remember:
God’s world was left
unfinished by design.
Each fragmented soul
braided together like challah
completes another,
working in miraculous tandem.
God’s instructions, sometimes whispered,
“Keep and remember.”
Secure your hope
tightly in its hiding place,
for we celebrate
everything that grows.

Even hope.
Even you.
 

Katherine Orfinger is a writer, artist, and MFA candidate at Rosemont College. She holds a BA in English from Stetson University. Katherine’s work has appeared in Beyond Queer Words, Outrageous Fortune, You Might Need to Hear This, Touchstone, Aeolus, and others. Katherine draws inspiration from her Floridian hometown and Jewish faith. She currently resides in Pennsylvania. 

In the Glow

sunlight washes over the beige kitchen tiles 
and it is twenty years prior, mother calling out 

from the bedroom hall; i follow her voice 
to reality overgrown, where time exceeds 

the linear, as emblematic patterns rise
and dust congeals to bone. in a muddle

of probability, my vision gestures still-life
misconfigured softly cogent, where the ends

diverge and reconvene full circle. i detach
from the bend and emerge on the deck 

with a fervent understanding. an eye above
the brow ridge and a lens to ease my focus.

meet me in the glow: collect across 
the backdrop as a concept interwoven. 

on a multitude of levels i experience 
her presence, a shift in common era— 

she wanders past the garden, rustling 
in the charm of swaying leaves.

Lydia Falls resides in the woods of New York after living abroad in South Korea and Taiwan. Her poetry collection, Beneath the Heavy, was published under Merigold Independent (2021). Lydia’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut River Review, Midway Journal, Washington Square Review, Here: a poetry journal, and elsewhere. www.lydiafalls.com

Poets

Emily:...Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it…?
Stage Manager:...The saints and poets, maybe -- they do some.
							Our Town
On days when cicadas sing
we allow dragonflies
to light atop our wheelbarrow’s load
and give them safe passage
to the garden across the field.

We observe with holy envy
a cat’s meticluous patience
to count and clean with sandy tongue
every hair on its body,
perpetually purring serene.

Like the bee we consider
the lillies of this world, but then find
the golden tattoo of angels
hidden within the folds
of the rhododendron’s spring bloom.

During our walks we sometime pause
to pray at the roadside church
of the fallen sparrow, joining
its burgeoning congregation
of gathering crows.

We know that in the beginning
and begetting of a poem
there is the eternal blink of now,
the shared creation, the new creation,
the ordinary, always the word.

And while many of us have not
been boiled, pierced, or canonized,
we have sawed our words into staves,
let our pens sweat Gethsemane ink;
and when you ask us for a fish,
we will hold the stone and give you God.



John Hopkins has been an English teacher for forty-two years. He was the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) poet of the year in 2008. John’s poetry has appeared in Commonweal, Saint Anthony Messenger, The National Catholic Reporter, The  Leaflet, Sr. Melannie Svoboda’s blog, “Sunflower Seeds,” The Catholic Poetry Room, Amethyst Review, and Father Timothy Joyce’s book Celtic Quest. For the past six years, John has been a Benedictine Oblate affiliated with Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham, Massachusetts. He loves to read, write letters, tramp the Blue Hills, and play pickleball with Kerry, his amazing wife, and mother of their wonderful children: Kate, Danny, and Brian. In February of 2021, John’s first book of poems, Celtic Nan, was published, and in February of 2023, his second book, Make My Heart a Pomegranate was published. You can reach John at brotherjohnnyhop@gmail.com.

Grace Suffices
After an Observation by Wittgenstein

Does our weight rest on shifting ground
or hang by gold wires from heaven?
We work and sleep, a dreary round 
stumbling over shifting ground,
afraid to kick the gray walls down,
faithless to pray: may grace be given
to wrest our weight from shifting ground
and rise on gold wires toward heaven.

Herons on slick river stones
are my emblem. Unafraid of
falling or drowning, they leap into
the air and oar themselves toward home,
doing what I long to do
but lack the beating wings of love.

J.S. Absher has published two full-length books of poetry, Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022) and Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press), winner of the 2015 Lena Shull Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Absher’s poems have won prizes from BYU Studies Quarterly and Dialogue and have recently been published or accepted by The McNeese Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Tar River Review. He lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife, Patti. (www.jsabsherpoetry.com/) 

The Twilight Language

Before the sun sets, the landscape grows dense
And darkens into ambiguity.

All objects take on a significance 
At once familiar and hard to see.

What we dismissed as nothing new or strange—
Trees, stone, moss, fences, sky, stars, grass, river—
Speak to our hearts in the twilight language.

The boundaries of our bodies quiver,
And we dissolve like raindrops in the sea.

A lightning flash illuminates the gloom
Of all our furtive, momentary dreams. 

The mudras of the pine boughs pierce the moon’s
Mandala and the mantra of the wind
Chants wordless tones that still the storm within.

Lee Evans lives in Bath, Maine in retirement from the Maryland State
Archives and the Bath YMCA. He writes poetry whenever he cannot resist
the urge to do so.

To Time

It was You, wasn’t it, on the mountain
when the wind stopped,

and my soul welled into the quiet
to roll with the peaks through the clouds?

When in the forest, I felt the earth
in my roots and the wind in my leaves?

You the tenderness in me for the finch
who no longer alights from the eave when I pass.

If all that exists matters, how does the river 
carry on with calm assurance

when most days the smallness 
of my understanding is my best hope?

I feel You unfold sometimes
like a purple flower after a rainstorm  

as the pines drip spicy gold
into beams of old sunlight.

Then I want to love my way to You
straight through this body

and this sacred ground,
like a river.

To touch petals and plant seeds,
hold hands and scatter ashes.

I don’t need to ask 
if You’ll have me.

Does the river ask the ocean
if it’s ok to come home?

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Away (Finishing Line Press, 2023).  Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in publications such as Blue Heron Review, EcoTheo Review, Wild Roof Journal, and others.  Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun or visit her website: https://jennawysongfilbrun.wixsite.com/poetry.

Agitation Wave

Starlings fly in the physique
of a palm tree or hanging traitor
to avoid avian predators.
You hold back to catch them, en route
to the village. If a village
becomes disreputable, is it still the same village?

To avoid the predator miraculous,
the sorcerer love, ordinary townsfolk 
coalesced like raindrops into a dark cloud, 
mimicked their neighbours, acted out cruelties
they could not have perpetrated alone.
A predator scourged and speared.

How do you recognise the semi-transfigured
on the road home? At first,
you do not. You no longer trust love, 
do not believe it to be what you had. 
But when you see it, you desire it
more than you desire your own breath.

It is too late by then,
but you witnessed a miracle. 
And, now, here comes the murmuration, 
an abundant obscuring of all the light 
the sorcerer took with him.
Remember that light, how you bathed in it?

The road is dusty, your skin 
riddled with dust. Heart given, and purified,
you will always be clean.

Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. His book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain Press in 2020

I Cried Out to My God in an Empty Sanctuary


& I cried to Him & He didn’t answer,
crying out to my own echoes,
to a wooden cross high on the organ pipes,
overlooking the altar, the lectern, the pulpit,

once alive with sermon. Tears flocked
my horizon, argued with the emptiness.
I cried out again, the pit of my stomach huge
& filled with sorrow. I wanted

to say my heart ached
while my shoulders slumped,
& each time my hands trembled, I prayed:
Listen to me, I said, strained flakes

of whisper exhaling into the stained glass
windows filtering autumn’s generous sky,
a blade of sunlight hanging in the corner
of my eye. I am undone. The heartbreak

of all the yellow of what should be
untucked the light, & I exhumed
the heave & surge from the grave
of my chest until all at once it was quiet

& I was stilled. & as I let Him take me,
let Him lift me up, consume me
for that second, let light fall in, let His spirit
fill my mouth & air, let Him be the God for me,

I felt the moment for what it was—
everything—all I am ever meant to feel,
my yesterdays & tomorrows
not yet fogging up the windows

where I wait, this wintering making ghosts
of my breath while my body
fills with beautiful, boundless
certainty that tomorrow 

everything will change, & I thanked Him.
& we sat side-by-side,
drawing breath between our breaths,
a minute of wellness in my unwell world.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of four collections and twenty-one chapbooks, among others. She is founder and publisher of ELJ Editions, Ltd., a 501(c)3 literary nonprofit. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words. 

Walking Madonna
		
			Elisabeth Frink, bronze, 1981, Salisbury Cathedral 


The mother of God walks 
	away from the cathedral   
away from the closed shadows 
of its interior 
into the open green
of the world outside

Despite the drag of the long skirts
she strides

Her thin arms swing 	
	empty now	
these arms that held 
the tender flesh of her child
	 measured his growing
helped to carry him 	
from his place of execution
	prepared his body for the afterlife

She is slight   small   
as she makes her way
into the light    
of a cold blue morning sky
	ready to face the hard business 
of resurrection

Beth Brooke is a retired teacher who lives in Dorset. She has three published pamphlets and one of those, Transformations, has been nominated for the PEN Heaney Prize. She has been published in a number of print anthologies and journals and several online journals including Amethyst. The most exciting thing about her is her beautiful grandson.

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138966572

Yesterday’s Making

At times, the colors
are slow to wake. He turns them over,
finds their edges with a brush, with a stone
and with the sun, prepares a space.
He lifts a canvas and, beneath a window
the threads of yesterday’s Making
are feathers in the dawn-light, minerals, and prayer, and dust
rising gold.
He listens to their memory.
He sings them back to the Maker, and waits.

Kimberly Beck: Kim is a quiet, listening soul, who lives in Washington State. She can often be found at a local therapy ranch, caring for a very special herd of Norwegian Fjord Horses. She believes that horses are some of the best teachers when it comes to listening and writing poetry.