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Canticle


Water-splashed forehead. 
Product of times.  
Cheek slapped, new name, chrism. 
Child of century. 
Sign of.

Communion of saints. 
Myrrh burial. 
Finger ringed. 
Deathly afraid.
Rolling frenzy.

     Praying the uncertainties. 
     Intoning the mysteries. 
     Chanting the doubts. 

Frankincense body. 
All the days of my life. 
Lips oiled. 
Reliquary of gold. 
Field lily. 

Soil son. Sky daughter. 
With you always. 
Fodder. 
Tonsure. 
Kill the fatted.
Defend, do justice, deliver.
Derangement.

     Empty of urge for logic. 

Wafer tongue.  
Sin into words.  
Breath into words. 

Immutable trumpet whisper. 
Wood sags like child resigned.
Great Wall.  Great Amen. 
Table of sinners. 
Lift up your hearts.  

Breathing. 
Be.

Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, has authored eleven books, including the poetry collections Requiem for David (Silver Birch), Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay) and The Lost Tribes(Grey Book). Forthcoming is his memoir in prose poems Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby (Third World).  His website is patricktreardon.com.  His poem ‘The archangel Michael’ was a finalist for the 2022 Mary Blinn Poetry Prize.

Anima

Her skin marine, her fragrance haze,
Eyes buoys that mark the harbor. 
Her length awash in waterways
While ruddering limbs ride the currents.
Her womb capacious, the ocean’s loom.

She lives in bodies’ salt recurrence,
The lit electrolytes and sonar lore
Below. Queen of the drifting sanctum,
A lone blue whale whose purlieus are
The billowing domains of plankton.

Andrew Frisardi is a Bostonian living in central Italy. His most recent books are Ancient Salt: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and the Modern World (Wipf & Stock) and The Harvest and the Lamp (Franciscan UP). His annotated translation of Dante’s Convivio was recently reissued in paperback by Cambridge UP.

The Psalms

 
The psalms sing down the centuries
and meet me at the kitchen sink,
worrying overmuch about stuff.
 
I imagine a stylus poised over vellum,
a man pulling a jellabiya round him in a cold night,
yearning to express profound thoughts.
 
They had stuff too. The same stuff.
Children who never listened to their parents. 
Endless wars, good people who try to keep the peace
 
and work with the consequences.  
Then there is money, 
long wrangles about The Law,
and locusts too.
 
I intone the Psalms under my breath
in a quiet church of grey stone, 
dappled light entering
through stained glass windows.
They did the same in magnificent temples
with sand scudding in the heat.
 
The plain chant gradually
pulls a shawl of acceptance and
peace round my shoulders
giving me the strength to straighten up
and start again.

Viv Longley has been writing for her own pleasure since she was a child.  Later in life she undertook an MA in Creative Writing at The Open University, specialising in poetry. As well as having one collection (Tally Sheet, Currock Press, 2021) she is undertaking a number of collaborative publications.  Notably, Daughters of Thyme. She is also preparing a second collection of her own and a number of essays – the latter to be called I am in a Hurry. ‘Now nearing my 80’s, you just never know how much time you have left!’

To Brave Pain
	after Ellen Bass

To turn toward it
When you’d rather bolt
Than watch your world
Dissolve, acid in water, 
Your eyes pierced by the sting.
When fear pins you, its river
Rushes, floods you, its g-force 
Smothers you submerged,
When grief tears at you 
Like your own teeth,
And you wonder
Will I surface? 
You pick up that pain 
Where you abandoned it
In the corner 
Under the dirty laundry 
And you say, okay, try me.
I’m ready this time.

Cheryl Slover-Linett (she/her) is a poet based in Santa Fe, NM. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, River Mouth Review and Haiku Journaland she serves on the editorial team at High Desert Journal. In addition to writing, she leads wilderness retreats through Lead Feather, the nature non-profit she founded in 2008, and spends as much time as she can in the high desert mountains of northern New Mexico.

Prayer of Doubt

                                 
God, 
the ritual of thinking about you, fighting
over and with ideas of you is the pattern
of blood and scribblings and passings
all my life; my doubts, denials, dejections,
disappointments, distractions, delusions
with you are the weaving myth of my story.
You are my contradiction and my confusion;
you are the question that keeps asking.
I think of you and my mind is a circus, a carnival,
a charnel house of memories, a feeling in the gut;
I have doubted you, I have been doubt.
There was a self-surprising, really absurd,
dawning in the harrowing heart of any despair
while you harpooned me and I screamed.
Is doubt my cross?  A thorn in my fleshly soul?
Doubt is the prayer, doubt the necessary nativity
for seeing the simplest thing; doubt is itself
the dying of doubt, the strange birth of faith 
through the dark canal of doubt’s density where
new belief and old doubt are a lover’s quarrel.
God.  You are my doubt and consume my doubt;
my doubt is everything, nothing and neither
for You absorb my doubt and absorb me
in my every act of pure or murky abandonment 
to You, for You are my absolution and sole hope.
Amen. 

Alan Altany, Ph.D., is a septuagenarian college professor of religious studies. He’s been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, small magazine poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, etc.  He published a book of poetry in 2022 entitled A Beautiful Absurdity:  Christian Poetry of the Sacred.  His website is at https://www.alanaltany.com/.  

The Garden of Earthly Delights
Three Miltonic Sonnets, After Bosch


Eden

The newborn world is all aswirl with beasts
Obedient who, as God specified,
Have duly fruitful been, have multiplied
And claim laid to the garden west to east.
Their prowl for food and flesh knows no surcease;
With feral instinct so preoccupied
(As mammals munch in happy fratricide)
They barely note the human arrivistes.
Amid this world of roving appetite
The pair, their souls as naked as their skin,
Their Maker’s grace in twofold flesh distill.
Yet Adam, as his eyes first take Eve in,
First knows the trenchant stirrings of free will;
God holds her wrist, perhaps a bit too tight.
For while these two delight,
His biting eyes as yet make out the end
Whereto this all too earthly flesh will tend.
It already impends:
Off to the side where one can hardly see,
An apple sits that’s fallen from a tree…

The Garden of Earthly Delights

All nature is distorted now, perverse,
As frenzy wanton far and wide presides.
In endless circles dry desire rides,
And fruit grown monstrous cannot slake the thirst.
Gigantic birds and fish are interspersed
With mythic beasts and forms that have decried 
All beastly nature, God’s designs defied.
Yet human nature’s clearly all the worse.
For once these rutting things had living souls
Subsumed in God but severed now by lust
Insatiable they somehow call delight.
In endless permutations they adjust
Themselves to unleashed pleasure’s strangest rites
And Paradise is now a Grand Guignol:
A garish rigmarole
Of human impulse twisted into knots,
All dignity rejected or forgot
As near the center squats
With head to ground some soul within the throes
Of sodomy inflicted with a rose.

Hell

A ravaged city’s belching smoke ingrains
A livid sky whose onyx clouds are tried
By stunted rays like searchlights misapplied,
For search in such a darkness is in vain.
A bloody lake has taken on its stain
From corpses of the endless genocide;
Another’s frozen solid, vitrified
By cold despair, benumbed by human pain.
A tortured orchestra the ears beset—
Someone is crucified upon a lute;
A horn is muted by a severed limb—
While fore the Lord of Evil Absolute
Devours corpses and ad interim
Excretes them into some hell deeper yet.
Delight turned to regret
Eternal is the fate of human flesh
That thought it could from godly soul unmesh
Itself and thus refresh
Unendingly the crest of pleasure’s swell—
A wave that breaks upon the shores of Hell.

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, America Magazine, U.S. Catholic, Pensive, Grand Little Things, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.

Fantasia on a Good Old Hymn

Any day the Spirit sends could be the one
that otherworldly ladder, Jacob’s, touches down
like a slant of sunshine through rain.

There might be angels ascending, who would 
make way, or lend a hand, as this time
it is my heart, and too many rungs to count.

My house recedes below into a village,
village to dots on undulant landscape, terrain
a mere patch of the quilt.  Higher, higher…

Did I love enough to be called away up here?
Or am I just a child the universe
let sit on its lap awhile and listen to stories?

Careful not to look down, will I reach the top?
Will I find a cloud-swept meadow,
understand at last what the larks are saying?

Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions.  His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall(Encircle Publications), and “Covid Spring, Vol. 2” (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Wooden Nutmegs, is available from Encircle Publications.

The Pastor and His Reconciliation


Death is giving a party in the fields.
Our priests point out the spot
in the tall weeds. They step forward
in their white albs like lab coats, some
days peaceful as doves. On black-cloak days
they perch like fat crows on the altar.
Those days, death is a punishment, and death’s
party, a wake. Their sermons are true as
harpoons to the guilty heart; then they wait
in confessional boxes with their bandages,
antiseptic, and laudanum chants. On
the dove days they give you purity
and unflagging, full-span hymns. You
forget your invitation, neglect your rsvp.
Your heart, like air in a fountain, rises
up in white pearls to bate your breath.

 

Rose Bedrosian received her B.A. in Literature from UC Santa Barbara, where she edited Spectrum and won The Frank W. Coulter Prize. A winner of The Independent poetry competition, her work appears or is forthcoming in Verse-Virtual, San Pedro River Review, Beatnik Cowboy, and Pembroke Magazine, among others.

oboe in the morning


elegant architecture well-dressed 
dog walkers joggers benches trees
cars speed by on the highway 
New Jersey’s tall white buildings 
on the other side of the river

small birds hop in a budding tree
a man warms up on his oboe
sheet music on his stand
the sweet sound mixed with 
the early morning light and air

brought a stillness an open clarity
a balance I’d been seeking
the vibrations coming from
his double reed instrument 
ran through me				

for a time there 
seemed to be no more
me or him or them 
no more separation

Nora Howard’s interests include people, language, dreams and the mysterious events of life. In her visual art and in her poetry she focuses on the fleeting moment, the passage of time and human interactions. She was raised in Greenwich Village and has spent most of her life living in NYC.

Midnight Prayer



It is not simply 
For evening breeze, 

Dark pond, lustrous inky 
Sky, hum of crickets, 

Cool grass, evensong 
Of creatures, that she

Emerges. It is the lure 
Of soul awakening,

Nudging, prodding,
Drawing her into depths

Visible only at night. She
Roams moon-soaked fields,

Slips in the swirling river.
Awakened from death,

She finds herself
Where she started—

On bloody knees, halfway
Between dusk and dawn.

Prasanta Verma‘s poetry has been published in Relief Journal, Barren Magazine, Bramble Lit Mag, and is upcoming in Without a Doubt, a New York Quarterly anthology. Verma tweets @VermaPrasanta, and feel free to stay connected with her by signing up for her newsletter at www.prasantaverma.com.