Author Archives: Sarah

Steve Mueske is a music producer and the author of A Mnemonic for Desire and Slower than Stars. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Water~Stone Review, Cream City Review, The Pinch Journal, The Normal School, Jet Fuel Review, Thrush, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. 

Cashmere

Balls of goat hair 
from Outer Mongolia
bagged up in my closet
fine thread unknotted
in hand-rolled skeins

Bright earth colors of supple cashmere
personal favorites
green for vibrant growing things,
 white for scudding clouds
blue for summer sky

Heirlooms knitted, complex designs
with vigilantly counted stitches,
given freely away— 
delicate christening robes,
yards of sweaters and vests

I cradle blue, green, and white
envisioning cashmere comforts
that I will knit for myself
when I am ready

Poet Victoria Crawford lives in Thailand  now, but has spent a good portion of her life teaching and writing in the Middle and Far East.  Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pensive Stories, The Muse, and Pacific Poetry.   

Back in St. Jude’s Room 

Kneeling beneath the patterned bronze slats
spaced with holes that imitate the rags 
of the saint’s clothes, his arms raised forever
frozen in God’s time over wicks yet untried 
by hope and over the walls of jagged brick 
blessed and polished dark marble and dark 
corners seen when shadows are opened
by flickering candlelight, there is only the 
candlelight here. The secular remains 
on the outside, the war, movements, 
domestic violence, television reruns. 
We pray for Danny Coscarelli, my cousin
to return safely from Viet Nam, for Dad’s 
soul, for the neighbors, aunts. Mom prays 
for our teachers, for co-workers who orbit long 
in our hearts, Mom counting on her rosary 
silently while I whisper to our Father and Mary’s 
prayer only a few times, only have a few I 
have to say and then fall silent as the rosary sorting 
continues near the movement of light and smoke. 
Leaving again through doorframes into 
outside, then the car, and passing 
lawns where the sun shines 
we drive home, cross the highway 
but the silence has followed, 
swallowed the small talk, with us not to speak 
of all this again, understand the passing of
field and lawns and houses with opened 
garage doors stand changed and drawn on 
along the silence after morning.

Thomas Allbaugh‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Amethyst Review, Whale Road Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, and a number of other venues. His chapbook of poems, The View from January, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books. He has also published a collection of short stories and a novel. 

The Garden 


Sweat trickles down my temples. 
I sit in dirt pulling up chickweed and crabgrass  
 
one weed at a time. A full bed awaits, but I’m in no rush. 
Pushing my trowel under the surface, I loosen dirt around roots,  
 
give space for my hand to gently pull the next weed,  
shake off excess dirt and add to my pail.  
 
Under a green leaf, a lady bug startles:  
rich soil also home for my tiny neighbor. 
 
A gnat buzzes my glasses, a fly tries to land on my arm.  
I watch it hover, arms and back lazy with heat. 
 
I build an altar of two gray stones stacked next to the agave 
on the edge of the bed, like Jacob did centuries before. 
 
I bless the cypress for its gift of shade.  
Marking this moment, I inhale  
 
the dampness of turned soil, sink my hand  
back into dark brown earth. 

Margaret Anne Kean received her BA in British/American Literature from Scripps College and her MFA from Antioch University/Los Angeles. Her chapbook collection, Cleaving the Clouds, was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her work has appeared in various journals including Eunoia Review, San Antonio Review, EcoTheoReview, and Tupelo Quarterly.   

wind-riffle through the leafy green

while
i read

of 
neutrinos

sifting

through
the net

of me--

drift-galaxy

breath
hue

Melanie Green‘s most recent book of poetry, A Long, Wide Stretch of Calm, was published by The Poetry Box, of Beaverton, Oregon, USA. Her poems explore the numinous, an appreciation of nature, and living with chronic illness.

Cristo Redentor
          jazz by Donald Byrd
 
A haunting chorale
laced with sonorous chords
leads me through winding hills
to deliver me
into the narrow valley
that holds Westphalia,
where a church spire high on a hill
rises from surrounding trees to be seen
by all who pass on the highway
below, both wayward and devout.
 
As I leave that steeple behind,
Donald Byrd’s trumpet,
slow, and almost sultry, moves in,
dances with those voices,
and Duke Pearson’s piano teases,
seems to offer a revelation.
 
Rich Fountain lies just down the road,
waits to follow suit, its church
again totally obscured above me, 
save the lines of its spire
rising above the trees.
 
When the road from there
opens to a wide valley,
I almost expect to see
Sugarloaf Mountain on the horizon
with the arms of Christ the Redeemer
opened wide, expecting me to come home.
 
Once baptized,
that boat long since capsized,
I still know all the rituals,
mouth the words at weddings
and funerals, though I know
they’ll never be uttered at mine.
 
As if knowing that ship has sailed,
trumpet, piano, and chorale
fade into the distance
as I head down the road to Belle.
 

 
Ken Gierke writes primarily in free verse and haiku. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming both in print and online in such places as Amethyst Review, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Breakfast, and Silver Birch Press. Glass Awash, his first collection of poetry, was published by Spartan Press in 2022. His poetry collection, Heron Spirit, was published in April 2024.  His website: https://rivrvlogr.com/
 

almond blossoms

After the cold's unblunted knife,
a tenuous gracility
resembling a linen coif
is tangled on the almond tree.

Help me to stand as nude of line
where the sky nailed my summering,
as starkly witnessed as this sign
the year hammered on nothing --

as mute a token as this maimed,
unapprehending winter tree.
A dark menorah, till enflamed
with white-intense fragility.

Isabel Chenot has loved and practiced poetry for as long as she can remember. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various places — most lately Ekstasis, Shotglass Journal, Vita Poetica. She writes regularly for Story Warren. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood books.

Eddie's Knees

I always forget about Eddie’s knees.
I pray for peace, of course, I always pray 
For peace, and always for the sorry souls
I see along the street whose lives unroll
And more and more impact me by degrees;
For friends as well, their joys and their regrets,
And Eddie, too, but somehow still forget
To say a little something for his knees.

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, Amethyst Review, the St. Austin Review, U.S. Catholic, America Magazine, The Society of Classical Poets, 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.

When

I was a name
	when I was a body inside a name 

I sounded  
	like the sigh of willow or hazel

a breath,  holy repetition 
	as I crossed the field 

Lydia Harris has made her home in the Orkney island of Westray. Her second full collection Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World was published by Blue Diode in March.

When You Don’t Know What Else to Do 

Shhhh. Look. 

Left eye, soul eye
secret eye looks down
to the white and black 
of the Sphinx moth 
nestled in the primrose leaves,
to the moss-covered rock
aglow in morning dew,
to the hole between tree roots
hiding a cluster of fungi.

Right eye,
turns up
to the towering sunflowers
filling the field,
to that October parade of maple leaves
lighting up the river road,
the trembling of finches 
cutting a dark swath 
across the cloudless sky.

Sometimes you must pack 
everything you need 
in one bag. Board a plane
to a land an ocean away,
sit on the edge of a canyon
watch the sun change the sky.

Sometimes you need to
gently pick the grass
stuck between the hot pink
dianthus blades in your garden bed.

Sometimes only your embrace 
of midnight’s pitch, eyes wide
everyone else asleep or gone
searching the internal darkness,
sometimes only then
can you see. 

Liza Halley works as an elementary school Library Teacher. Liza helped establish the Poet Laureate position in her hometown of Arlington, MA. She is the co-founder of Write Around Portland, a nonprofit based in Portland, OR that amplifies voices and builds community through our writing workshops, literary programming, books, and readings.She loves to build community through the written word, be it through poetry, zines, or comics. She has a poem that was recently published in Braided Way Magazine: Faces and Voices of Spiritual Practice.