Category Archives: Uncategorized

After the Thunderstorm
                         
                                 a solitary heart
                                 is no heart at all

                                            Antonio Machado   

the sandy bottom arroyo
channels what the mountain

can't use between banks
of sage and saltbush 

each grain of sand
lending its voice

to the music
we call running water 

Carl Mayfield does not sigh as much as he thought he would in old age. His poems have found homes at various places on the map.

Disinterment

Antonio stoops in the tilled plot
Feeding white beans forward
From leathery palm to shrapnel-scarred fingers
Thence, with his ancient, cracked thumb
He buries them in rich black earth.

In over-sized boots and old brown dress, 
She watches, enthralled
“Abuelo, why do they go in threes?”
“Hush child”
“But why always in threes?”
“Hush child!”
“But why? Why in threes?”
“Will you ever hush child?,” he growls
Now he wipes thin hair with a muddy sleeve,
And stands slowly, hands on aching knees
Staring down at mounded earth, hung
Between tenderness and angry exasperation
“But why in threes, Abuelo?”
“Niña, will you hush now!” 

He resumes the planting ritual
“One for the Father
One for the Son
One for the Holy Ghost”
Old icons long interred,
Resurrected, unbidden.
 

Roger Suffling is a retired ecologist living in Ontario, Canada. His non-science articles and poetry have been published in Canadian, American and UK journals including Shot Glass Journal, Morphrog, Poetry Pause, and Environments Journal.  He was a runner-up in the 2020 Night Skies Poetry Competition. Roger is currently working on a historical novel set in early 19th century Northern Ontario.  

Milarepa


In the land of snow
The winds blow a thick cover
Over your cave.

Years of mischief
Block me from entering
Your quiet grace in solitude.

Somehow beneath the ice
Your energetic body melts
The tar of obscurations,

And joyful, melodic sounds 
Spring rainbow light to All
Who climb to hear you sing.

Fellow Yogi, I broke my ankle
Trying to ascend the mountain pass.
What black karma do I possess

That keeps me from your songs;
Strains my step in deeper darkness;
Blocks my open ears to listen?

My melancholy yearning looms
Enough to blow my trumpet bone.
Lying in the snow, I might have blown

A small crack in your cave's door
To welcome me to Shambala,
But my feet, frigid from an icy wind,

Have not sensed your fire warmth.
Still with broken ankle, I rise.
A cratered moon guides my limping.

Jon Inglett is a Professor of English at Oklahoma City Community College. He was inspired by the natural world from his youth, particularly the lakes, small forests, and mountains in Central and Northwest Arkansas. He has self-published his work over the years and is the faculty advisor for the Absolute Literary Journal at Oklahoma City Community College.

habibullah 

What do you think we're made of? one of us asks
to the other -- all voices blend together in the
end, no use trying to distinguish them. The point
is that one of us asked. I think it was you. There's
a problem with that, but I will avoid it. I always do.

Whoever asked is waiting. I think it was you, but
it easily could've been me. I'm always waiting: lingering
on the edge of existence and wonder, dressing up as
some beloved of God, habibullah, waiting. That's
hypocrite behavior, the straight-to-hell kind. Irony is funny.
Did you know that I am still waiting? I always am. Even if
a question was never posed in the first place. But the
query is repeated:

What do you think we're made of? and it must be
you because I already know the answer. But you
are me and I am you -- it's all rhetorical. Still
we wait. Forever, we are stuck in apprehension, to
become something greater, forgetting that we are
already forgotten. It's just you and me. It always was. 

Jannah Yusuf Al-Jamil is a Muslim-American writer and a co-founder of antinarrative zine (@antinarrativeZ). They enjoy stories about vigilantes (please talk to them about The Umbrella Academy or Daredevil). Find their work in Overheard, Pollux Journal, celestite poetry, and at jannahyusufaljamil.carrd.co. 

Just This

From the beginning of time: just this!
Ryokan


The spotlight of awareness locked
on the soundless rocking heel 
of my shoe, gliding to the middle, 
propelling my toes, feeling each touch, 
each finished step, just this. 

How is this solitary step so full 
of quiet refreshment, so great 
a subtraction of choppy waters,
roaring road trucks, the daily news? 

Each kiss of rubber on sidewalk 
sharpens sinews, awakens senses. 
Nothing but this raw and untroubled 
truth. Gone is my usual runaway 
universe of preoccupations. Now 
filled with a chain of nows. Gratitude 
and goodwill after minutes of mindful 
stepping, like the Jainist merging 
with the ant, the postman, 
the mail, myself.

Let life continue as it is, only adding
just this to the steps of the day.

During a career practicing and teaching at UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry, William H. Miller published three books: Personal Stress Management for Medical Patients, Systematic Parent Training, and a memoir, Soothing: Lives of a Child Psychologist. He recently rediscovered his love for poetry. Partly retired, he plans to spend his time studying and writing poetry.

Ishmael
 
And I, as well, have walked among these galleries.
I, too, have walked between the word and flesh, almost
Unknown, like you, and almost chosen– I, also, saw
Alternatives spelled thick in sparks and ash, and
When the rooms were throbbing with a better life,
I, too, could stand aside and say I was not pampered,
Was not loved; the striped and sunny rooms I may,
But for the burning thing that called and cut me, the rooms
I may have spent myself inside– the thrill of being
Somewhere, being home, of windows and cigars– and I,
I too, was walking once– and I was stopped beneath
The terrible red wing, the dripping flight, the substance
Of the stars that branded nations by my mother in the night.
I, too, have tumbled through those empty rooms,
After the soirées and their starry gowns have swept
All but our dust beyond the sills– and I was here to mark,
In scrolls of paradise and oxhide, that there is glory, too,
In being last of all– the song of one whose steps contain
The city at its peak, who sees the gleam at each horizon,
And who lifts her tone in blazing particles to be again
The night an angel filled the forest with its terror and its song,
The night an ancient thing unbound itself in time and spoke,
And said that I, too, am a wanderer, and scale myself
Unto the city’s eye– even in sleep, to scale my living
And my night, to scorch my aim in ecstasy, and be
The fellow marksman, with my brother, of the dance.

Lucy Frost is an Arabic-American transgender woman poet from Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Serotonin Magazine, C*nsorship Magazine, Wrongdoing Magazine, Melbourne Culture Corner, and Unpublishable Magazine. She can be found on Twitter @intomymachine

Upon Learning that Bees Taste with their Feet


I lament the half century I failed to marvel 
at this one honeybee, as the book heeds, “hovering 
over a bloom then plumbing toes inside to divine 
if its nectar has already been imbibed and, thus, 
save precious calories for the thousand-plus 
flowers each gatherer touches down upon a day. ” 

It’s like the time I learned butterflies navigate 
by ultraviolet light (we don’t see) and, suddenly, 
felt cheated by streetlights and road signs. 
Tonight, then, I porch sit until dawn so I might espy 
“that June, lunar moth emerging from cocoon 
with no mouth for the two weeks it flies 

and seeks mates in the feintest moonlight.” 
And I dream, now, of suicide prevention week 
featuring those bio luminescing fish whose “glowing, 
worm-shaped lips attract prey to steel-trap jaws 
so they can survive the  complete darkness of bottom” 
Still, some friends think me a bit mad as, between sips 

from the wine glass’s tulip, I wax poetic on ”the humming-
bird’s heart beating twelve-hundred times per minute 
from the body weight in nectar it drinks each day.” 
But as I flit from the bloomed tomes of books rife 
with this life-giving-science, l’ve come to bee-lieve 
earth’s own looming colony collapse might be 

averted if we evolve this taste to gather only the
sweet distillations of light in, say, “the small, male cuttle fish 
shape-shifting and coloring into a female impersonator 
who then sashays past the fighting alpha males 
to mate.” And if, one day, enough of us gather 
and carry—into conversation—the tupelo honey

Of “the humpback’s song echoing a whole time zone
In search of a mate,” maybe we’ll see wild reverence
as vital to survival as bees are to our food supply
for see, already, the growing fieldtrips where kids 
are asked to imagine the hive’s hidden queen 
laying over a million eggs a lifetime; and hear how 

they jostle to be the first to press ear to the wild, 
winter hive to hear  the “soft symphony from the bees 
staying warm, can you imagine, by alternating being 
on the edge of the swarm and furiously flapping wings 
to keep the hive at ninety degrees while, outside 
it’s a whopping five below.” And think how 

the teachers and chaperone--taking in the 
children’s’ oooohhhs and ahhhs over honeybees
dancing directions to the newest lupine blooms—
find themselves tap dancing heal to toe
on the bus ride home while wondering at all 
this long-overlooked sweetness at their very feet.

Dennis Camire is a professor of writing at Central Maine Community College. His poems have appeared in Poetry East, Spoon River Review, The Mid-American Review and other journals and anthologies. An Intro Journal Award Winner and Pushcart Prize nominee, his most recent book is Combed by Crows, Deerbrook Editions. Of the collection. X. J. Kennedy says: “Dennis Camire is an up and comer… The poems engage us with their promising titles, and deliver with skill and energy.”  Of Franco-American and Acadian American origin, he lives in an A-frame in West Paris, Maine.

Looking Out at the World

The hills swell like green bellies to the eye - 
Separated by lengthy rulers of emerald thread.
From here I am Herculean,
I breathe at the view, and it breathes
Back at me. It is soundless, 
Unmoving as death, 
Except for one car - 
A red kia. It bleeds
Its way through narrow bends.
I look down and there is a cut on my arm 
A steady trickle.
In this moment from up here
All things are connected.

Charlotte Cosgrove is a poet and teacher from Liverpool, England. She is  published in Trouvaille Review, Dreich, The Literary Yard and in various anthologies. She has work forthcoming in Confingo, Beyond Words, The Broadkill Review, Words and Whispers and Sledgehammer Lit. She is Editor of Rough Diamond Poetry Journal.

Pauline Shen is an emerging writer in London, Ontario. Her writing aims to showcase beauty and courage rooted in unexpected and challenging places. Her work is published or forthcoming with Blank Spaces, CommuterLit, and Dreamers Creative Writing. Pauline completed her B.A. in psychology at The University of Western Ontario. More: paulineshen.ca

God in the Dew, God in the Adieu


Floating like backwards snowflakes
going to their mother cloud, that salt shaker in the sky:
what happens if you lose your saltiness?
Are the holes in God’s hands black holes sucking 
all the dead stars and planets into a cataclysmic clap?

Does God always clap on beat?

The angel’s skirt hem gets ruffled 
by the entropy from one dimension melting into another—
like an Einstein Rosen Bridge melting into itself.
The angel choir hums its hymn,
it reverberates chilling thrills, 
and with dissonance 
it echoes and unfolds in spacious arpeggios. 

The angels on high 
waiting for God in the dew, 
oh, God adieu. The Alpha and the Omega,
the beginning and the end, God in the dew,
oh, God adieu.

The grass grows in the meadow,
the trees reach toward the clouds,
the lilies fashion out white petals,
all when time goes forward. 

Jennifer Silvey lives in the St. Louis area with her husband, their two cats, and their dog. She studied digital film for her bachelor’s and creative writing for her master’s. Both degrees were earned at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO. Her book Midnight Galleries is slated to be published through LCk Publishing.