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Feathers and Redbirds

I walk the beach and look
for feathers and sit on my patio
eager for a red bird sighting—
there hasn’t been one yet—
perhaps a cardinal or tanager, even
a red-breasted robin—just a little red
on the bird counts, I tell myself.
A woman I trust to tell me Truth told
me the day you crossed the Veil to be
on the lookout for
feathers and redbirds for, she said,
she was told to be watchful and she was and
the fruit of her labors paid off.
I’ve found feathers—three—
on the beach near the 17th street jetty
since that day 6 months ago; that stretch
of beach where, when we still were We,
I so often walked–
3 miles east—at sunrise to watch the sun kiss
the gulf good morning and
I prayed in gratitude
for another day with you and for sobriety and grace
and then, afterward,
when I found myself drawn there again,
for a feather.
I tell myself—for I must—you left
those feathers for me to chance upon.
Still no red bird at the place I’m
most often found—for now—yet I
tell myself no matter the redbird’s
absence the feathers are proof of
you yet,
still,
considering how much you loved red
I thought…yet,
still,
I have three feathers.

Jillian Bain is a recent widow learning to navigate life without her beloved. Her education involves a lot of walks in Nature and on the beach listening for that still, small Voice to direct her path, all the while keenly watching for feathers and red birds.

Curfew

A man across the way swings his broom 
as if he’s lost his mind 
or has declared war on the cobwebs in there. 
Below him, in the park, an American Elm 
sways from deep frog green to dusty lime. 
The breeze will blow itself out, 
the marionettist needs a smoke break. 
But, there’s more where that came from.
Nature is a hippodrome, 
an everlasting gobstopper. 
The water in the creek that crawls 
past our home is newborn every day 
even though the creek itself is ancient. 
At night as we balance ourselves 
between what just was and dream, 
we hear it sneaking toward the sea. 
The lights from the construction site 
look more and more like campfires 
as we draw down on our camelback 
of whiskey. Clouds crowd in near dusk, 
the remaining light cinches a belt 
around the pants of the horizon. 
Is this production staged for us 
or did we conjure it from nothing? 
And, when exactly, did they plan 
to tell us about the curfew? 
Dusk gives way to infrared dark. 
All of the elements evolve toward the elemental. 
Bursts of color from the lower left 
migrate toward the middle. 
Fires luminesce the right edge of vision. 
The palette ignites like a switchboard. 
Our synapses flash with heat lightning. 
We cower in a corner of nascent night 
a fold-worn map at our feet 
and wonder if today might be the day. 

Edward Johnson is a civil rights attorney who has spent the past 30 years representing people living on and over the edge of homelessness. He is now living fulltime in a cabin in the North Cascades mountains. He has work recently out or forthcoming in: Eclectica Magazine, Indefinite Space, Ginosko Literary Journal, Packingtown Review and Evergreen Review.

Luminescence


pink perigee moon of August
scent of wild rose and honeysuckle

where fireflies dance in the grass 
and frogs croak in the swamp

swallows are flying to roost
barn owls are flying to hunt

bluefish and stripers run in the floodtide 
churning the surface of the sea 

comb jellies bob in the currents
their tiny combs refracting moonlight

underwater rainbows 
shimmering in liquid darkness

Anne Whitehouse is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks, Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, Being Ruth Asawa, and Adrienne Fidelin Restored. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love. Her poem, “Lady Bird,” won the Nathan Perry DAR 2023 “Honoring American History” poetry contest. She has lectured about Longfellow and Poe at the Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland, Maine, and Longfellow House Washington Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lazara 
					– after the Sacrament of Reconciliation
					Ezekiel 36:26

Grit & grind of gravestone shoved aside:
bars of light burst in.
My leprous heart bounds up:
blossoms like a rose.

A shout. I hear my name, words cried out 
by the voice of Love himself, the voice 
of one I know; of one who still knows me...
Lazara! Come out!

Tangled in death’s trappings, 
I stagger to the cave-mouth, 
blindfolded by the slam of light, yet
washed in the outrush of mercy’s river. 
		
And then,
a command:
Loose her.
Let her go.

Fumbling fingers ease away
the cloths that bind my eyes close-shut,
untie the twines tight-knotting
death-stiff hands.

His voice is one that was, not long before,
too full of weeping.
Walk here,
he bids me.

After four blank nights, I tremble, stumble forward—
dazzled, dazed. Blood surges through me;
Mercy’s torrent breaks across my ears.
Here, today, I do begin to live again,

my blood to run,
my red-rose heart to bloom.
Now rolled away is that leaden sorrow,
by grace replaced with far more tender marrow.



© Lizzie Ballagher

One of the winners in Ireland’s 2024 Fingal Poetry Festival Competition and in 2022’s Poetry on the Lake, Lizzie Ballagher focuses on landscapes, both psychological and natural. She was a Pushcart nominee in 2018. She will be reading at Poetry on the Lake (Italy) in October this year. Her poems have appeared in print and online in all corners of the English-speaking world. Find her blog at lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com

Pilgrim
    
Once I leave the territory of youth, and it’s not a gentle 
leaving, I walk, no seeker of free land or mere hiker 
slogging away her allotted timespan, but a pilgrim

sojourning to a holy place, desiring the cachet of holiness 
for herself, though knowing no more of holiness 
than the next traveler meeting silence on the pebbled pathway, 

brushwood, blackberry, sunflower faces on track 
to the Alto de Perdon, turbines spinning in gale-force winds, 
towering over a city where men seek to outrun bulls

as I seek to outrun regrets that occasioned the walk 
in the first place. I reach the high place of pardon, 
park my spine against a concrete spire, evade voices 

from another time spinning their complaints: 
You knew his first breath, his first steps, how could you 
not help him? How could you not know what he required? 

I know only sweat, the telltale bead of a blister starting, 
some breathless yearning to cease striving, lie down 
in darkness, and return to the old morning of my birth 

before regrets could take hold. But the pilgrim 
I’m becoming plays host to a different voice, 
unsullied by animus or time, potent, entreating me: 

Sink into mercy. I push myself from the concrete post 
and step out, knowing only the pilgrim’s mantra: 
Have mercy on me. So I move on, leave off the voices 

brandishing blame, branding my heart. I press on 
toward a place I cannot know, yet awaiting my arrival, 
already speaking my name. 

  

Ruth Whitney lived two years in Zaire, a time that informs her novel, Mimosa Road, forthcoming from Adelaide Books and her novel, Slim (SMU Press), about HIV/AIDS coming to sub-Saharan Africa. Slim received First Book Award from Writer’s Guild/ PCUSA. Other work: in Threepenny Review, Natural Bridge, Assisi, and elsewhere.

Fugue

Notes’ linear arrangement first makes sense
When comprehended fully as one work: 
	Completed composition. In what tense
	Is fugue a fugue? Consider scale. Rework
Each subject’s episodes and counterpoint
In four dimensions: open, middle, end,
	The whole experienced. Each note a point
	That tunes the score, the re-composing blend
Of tones fulfills your mind. Is just-performed
Less real than still-in-progress? In the end,
	We hear the fugue entire as being formed
	Re-membered. Art, like space-time’s curve, must bend
Back to its origin to be, first cause
Accomplished per appreciative applause.

Beth Houston has taught writing at ten universities and colleges in California and Florida. She has published a couple hundred poems in dozens of literary journals. She edits the Extreme formal poetry anthologies (Rhizome Press). www.bethhouston.com

Forest Edge

Woodpecker tap from the dark in
the dark. Blue birdsong in the old growth.
There’s a landscape underneath
that Earth couldn’t dream into life, and a layer
of moonlight trapped between  history
and future. The deer have evergreen
hearts, the foxes
fire for tails, and there’s a slender path raccoons
follow to drink water 
that drips from the stars.

Those mornings the mist wakes up before the sun
there comes an ancient asking
of questions relevant to how
a forest is to be addressed when doubt
hangs from the needles in the pines.
Crows break the silence,
black voices on grey
and when they move on they leave
their calls on the high boughs,
hanging to dry.

Lost thoughts and sunlight, yesterday’s lightning
lying down in the forest
and lizards slip out of their scales
as they run, stop, run and whip
any moment that dares chase them
back where time doesn’t count. Centuries lean
against moments, and moments
stand firmly grounded
come dry years and wet and the memories
groundwater has of the once
when it was rain.

Morning on the forest floor, already
evening in a hawk’s eye
where he floats above a clearing
between pines. He sees the world turn from where
he is, while time is still; or time
turning around in a world so still
he grabs light with a claw and can
hear the trees talk.

Give a shadow a chance
it will fly, be a nuthatch, a grosbeak, a flake
of the moon. Forest present, forest past, forest
mysterious. It’s beautiful
to be lost here, to find a way so deep inside
that north is south, blue is green, the sky
the earth, ancient new, and wild
has no tame to be
compared with.

A splash of sky between
the pines , day’s end, ground on the run,
summer’s dark breath
soaking into the earth as an owl
claims the moon for her own.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix. Over the decades his writing has helped him adjust to the desert and its wildlife to the point that he now considers the desert to be the best teacher of making use of limited resources, whether natural or artistic.

Redemption

Everything has changed for them. 
They can no longer eat 
a mango, an orange, or a slice 
of cantaloupe. They only have 
their memories of taste and 
smell. They were happy. 
The sun was always very bright.

They can remember the warm 
blood flowing through their 
bodies. They are these monarch 
butterflies in the reds, oranges 
of the Pride of Barbados flowers 
in Texas in October. They keep 
their distance from the bees, 
watch for bad spirits that we do 
not know about. Their next 
destination will be the marigolds 
and the Mexican sunflowers 
on their way into the setting 
sun, the redemption, the second
chance, the new life they have. 

They can remember eating
pumpkin pie and peaches in
their ice cream. They already
miss their families, the
children. Some will return 
to watch over, protect them. 
They will come back and you 
will feel good inside. You won’t 
know why you feel better. 
Their souls are intense blue and 
orange flame. They burn new 
and light up this cold dark place 
with their love, their smiles, 
and their warmth. The demons 
are afraid of them. We need 
them to come back to us 
from the dead, share their 
goodness, but they are on their way home.

Benjamin Nash has Sun available at Finishing Line Press. He has had poems published in Louisiana Literature, 2River, Tar River Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and other publications.

An Unlikely Pair

And Noah released a raven

Genesis: 8:6

I

Before he released the dove, he dispatched me: thick-billed, large-bodied, of the genus corvus, a ground feeder, unclean.

Raven

I flew for days over a punished world of water, cawing out to God, searching for that land where once bloomed the lilies. No rainbow yet. Just acres of ocean. I did not return.

II

He could wait no longer, and so he sent me, the clean one, the pure one, the holy one, the soon to be symbolic one,  the dumb one with the small nib and tiny eyes.

Dove

I flew for seven days, came back; I flew for seven days, came back, an olive branch in my beak. Soon a rainbow. Then a promise. 

III

I did not return because I had found ground, seeded it, finally felt the sun. The olive tree grew   and when she arrived, we perched on its limbs.   

Peace

She wanted to stay. Go back I said, and our feathers touched, a promise made, an unlikely pair.

Love

John Hopkins is a retired English teacher and active Benedictine Oblate out of Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham, Massachusetts. He has written three books of poetry: Celtic Nan, Make My Heart a Pomegranate, and With Caught Rain.