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Five Haiku  from a Pandemic


as if all
were right with the world -
magnolia blooms


***


protecting each other's 
solitude -
path through the bamboo 


***


all day rain -
i add more flour
to the kneaded dough


***


fresh spring breeze -
the wildflower field between 
our morning greeting 


***


shortest day -
does the lark too
grasp the great truth?

Deborah A. Bennett began writing Haiku as a mindfulness exercise at the beginning of the pandemic; now she writes it as a form of self expression,  and as the poet Mary Ruefle said, “in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.”

--Roots of Mist Between--



     Grasping? Should it fade
what was half-remembered, now
     through a veil      unseen


          What is there to say?
     Precip ice, before progress…
          --roots of mist between--

 
           gambling memory.
 Of words to 
                    recompose-what?
                    re-embrace whom? 
          Swallowtail saltwinds.


     & should I rewrite
          story & self direction
     is it all a game. 

          Q'udi qeyagha--
     "something new"
          --wove of kinship.
               ...I repeat myself…

Fern Golden (they/them or she/hers) is a Dena’ina Athabaskan artist from Alaska. Their writing navigates the confluences of culture and language, ecology and belonging, chronic illness, and healing.  

The Shaman Said 

First, you must float, 
losing the fear of falling 
to the muddy bottom. 

Spread yourself on the water.
Let it carry you with cool arms 
after catching you from a fall. 

The water is your friend, 
a friend supporting, lifting, carrying. 

A best friend.  

You might be tempted 
to tug at the covers of the water
and curl up into a fetal creature, 
sinking in the encompassing comfort, 
dreaming till you drown. 

Resist. 

You are resting on the water, 
a silky membrane covering your back. 

Relax until you forget the water. 

Soon the water will forget you. 

Drift, 
drift, 
let liquid fingertips 
brush against 
your open palms, 
touching until a thin veil 
of molecules 
separate you. 

You are safe, 
you are weightless, 
you are harmonious 
with the water.   

Be present to the water, 
knowing this water 
will hold you, 
never harming you, 
never letting you down. 

Focus on these things, this path. 

In time, this will come naturally, 
anytime you choose, without 
a buoy. 

In time, you shall walk here.

Kevin Zepper teaches at a small midwest university. He writes, photographs, and acts. 

Blueberries

This morning I ate blueberries, tart and sweet
slight grit, soft explosions in my mouth.

I thought of my nephew, recently introduced
to the pleasures of eating, now able to feed himself in fistfuls

with those long fingers he folded beneath his chin 
the day he was born; I saw the Buddha in his hands.

He seems to hold the secret of contentment in the world 
he inhabits; almost everything is cause for smiling,

is reason to reach, point, look, explore with face 
and mouth and skin.

When he eats blueberries, it is enough to fill his sweet body 
with such satisfaction his whole being radiates delight.

He stretches a finger in my direction and I bend closer 
to receive his benediction, the blessing of his sticky touch.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and lives in Massachusetts.  Her work has appeared in Red Dancefloor, Gulfstream, Women’s Words, Beltway Quarterly Review, and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Dodging the Rain.

Wind Shaking Leaves
 
 
The wood we burn is not the wood we own.
None of it was ever ours. Not the cabin,
not the key to unlock a life of wonder.
Smoke from our fire threads branches
in a needlework that fades at the first breath.
 
It thins into a sky inhaling the warming air,
and the finch song of a spring catching its hem
in the early buds. Everything is loosed
toward a light that sizzles, even as night
closes the distances to stars and dreams.
 
While we snuggle into sleep, and each other,
a siren warns of something lost or taken.
But the ash keeps rising and the one voice
I follow through the dark is yours.

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection is The Infinite Doctrine of Water. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Breakwater, FRiGG, The Inflectionist Review, and Talking River Review.

The Lichen and the Rock

I took a thousand pictures of
lichen growing on rocks
wondering how they managed to
know to put that mint green next to 
the gold
so enthralled I was by their art 
I asked if I might join their tribe
being used to collaboration 
they agreed to give it a try
(taking a peek no doubt at some
of the rocks in my mind)

It feels like joining a movement
being taught how to lichenise
this dissolving of certainties
seems never to come to an end
it is a surprise to find new
colours appearing in my mind
improvising 
searching for the spaces between
alive and not alive carrying
strange bacteria as start ups

Lately I take gifts of coloured
glass to place amongst them to see
if they might do something they have
never done before to bring it
alive or sometimes I leave one 
just to surprise as thanks for the
blessed living soil

Jackie Henshall is an established artist working mainly in glass out from an old woollen mill in West Wales www.jackiehenshall.co.uk . She is in the process of writing a book of poems with drawings which she plans to publish early next year, with the working title Shapes I live Inside. She takes her inspiration from natural forms as well as geometric and archetypal forms exploring her own spiritual life and creativity in relation to them. 

Benediction 				 


You may not share the belief 
	of a half-starved scribe, but 

when the panic of insomnia won’t be 
	quelled, enter the raw night; look up.
		 
Although you can’t see inside the moon, 
	it pulls pliant water within you.

Its unavailable light summons.
	Be the angry drunk and rail against 

the stuttering wind, but still bet the pot 
	on such a thing as grace.

Paula Colangelo’s poems are published in SWWIM Every Day, Lily Poetry Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifactand forthcoming in Sugar House Review and Canary Literary Magazine. Her book reviews appear in Pleiades and Rain Taxi. She has taught poetry in healing focused rehabilitation programs.

Sundown Psalm
 
It starts in the evening. We bring the words,
find the shimmer of gold across the sky, the rose,
the whisper of a Presence just beyond the trees.
 
Remember before. Before the fruits ripened. Before
work took center stage, and evenings dwindled into
endings, mumbled farewells, wishes and wondering.
 
Let this evening be a promise: sweet dough
in a wide bowl, slow to rise, preparation for morning,
for baking, for cooling, for setting a table
 
a long slow reach of hours. Two candles, a prayer.
It starts, as always, opens, in the evening.
 

Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont, with a mountain at her back and a river at her feet. Poet, novelist, historian, and memoirist, she shares her research and writing process at BethKanell.blogspot.com. Find her on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/BethKanellBooks), Twitter (https://twitter.com/BethKanell), and Medium.com.

Pottery and Religion
after Les Murray

Religions are pots. They disconcert
our whole abstracted business, our
insistence on intellect, brains, idols of IQ

into the only whole thinking: pottery.
Nothing’s said till it’s spelled out in motion
with the body, and nothing’s true that’s not done.

A pot, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like the sky on any perfect morning
just before the light changes. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is a pot formed upon the whole wheel of creation:
like any pot, it must be dialogue and complete
with starry turns where we ask Now why did the potter…?

You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can’t throw one either. It is the same logos:
heaven in ordinary, we call it pottery,

the ordinary heaven, we call it religion,
and God shatters the pottery of any religion—
shatters, not destroys. Shatters into sherds

for each bearer to remake together, being in the world as 
the center is in the pot, a law against circumference.
There’ll always be religion around while there is pottery

or a lack of it. Both are of the earth, and a dance of partners,
as the skilled action of those bodies that are one enough
and courteous with the clay, to let it say the pot.

Melaney Poli is an artist, writer, and Episcopalian nun. She is the author of the accidental book of poems You Teach Me Light: Slightly Dangerous Poems and an accidental novel, Playing a Part.

what the ghost thinks of me

 
this rose shell is recalcitrant: 
although i have led her 
 
to water every night, proposed 
skeleton keys and bloodletting, 
 
she prefers to take flight, to stay
intact, suffer. i have run out of hands 
 
to launch her to ocean. with moon
tides, i invite her return. she turns 
 
her face away from me and runs,
scrambles for distractions in these dry
 
sediments, structures of solitude: 
will he save her, will she save her, 
 
will they? her predictive patterns are
musical – i enjoy a listen – but lengthy
 
and repetitive. when i unpeel 
my face from this one storyline, and
 
before i witness the next embodiment, 
i will say this: that it was difficult.
 
interesting, but difficult.

Lorelei Bacht is a poetic experiment, a beautifully broken body, and a mother to two young children. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beir Bua, Dodging the Rain, The Madrigal, Briefly Zine, The Selkie, Green Ink Poetry, streecake, Marble Poetry, and elsewhere. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter @bachtlorelei