Category Archives: Uncategorized

Morning High Above Bordeaux
I look down from on high
at Bordeaux every morning
or rather it looks down
from above my desk at me.
The postcard bought
when we flew over
is now my daily matins for you.

A prayer of the eyes,
lifted briefly from private thought
to where you’ve gone to roost
in a fusty attic in the russet roofs,
near the green pool of a municipal garden
and the twin-spired cathedral;
my hands to heaven.

Paul Bregazzi’s poetry has appeared widely in print and on-line in Ireland, the U.K., France, Mexico and the U.S. His work has been shortlisted and awarded in numerous competitions in Europe and the U.S., including the Bridport Prize. He was Cuirt New Writer of the Year 2017.

Pruning the Thorn Child

for Jane and Katie

Handle everything with open hands,
showing warmth.
Spread your fingers apart
the thorns will rest between them.

Grasp slowly.
Trim small.
What you cut cannot be undone
So train your eyes to feel.

Pull quietly, without fuss, eyes averted;
the Osage is easily embarrassed.
……….Leave the bird’s nest there:
……….wonder and beauty and surprise
……….are required in every thorn child.
……….This is why we plant them.

Cut everything that crosses,
Everything you can reach.
What you can’t reach, commend to God.

Those branches, even tangled,
will reach the sky anyway
stretching to the light,
towards God,
towards flight
thorns and all,
every one.

Jenny Jordan grew up in Liberia, fleeing the approaching civil war with her family in 1990. She now lives in Wisconsin with her husband and teen daughter. She has a formal degree in architecture and an informal one in parenting an unusual child. She blogs at anewelephant.wordpress.com 

Light Hearted

the molecules of glass match the frequencies of light
which is why we have windows and not dense dim
rectangles of other matter to look through darkly

and how we can see while still indoors the grass and green
leaves of gardens, when we go outside we see the same
but unframed larger wider views of plane trailed skies

and when our eyes, in love with light, become windows
we also are framers of all clear sight, feeling that
lightness larger even than dimension

brimming over from its darkness into form
light-hearted then we no longer take ourselves too
seriously seeing that light always makes us lighter.
 

Barn Owl Over the Levels

I saw her once, flying towards me.
Her pale, heart-shaped face
wearing my dark eyes.

Barn owl stalks the liminal edge
water and light deepening to violet;
her talons will take heartbeats
in white silence; as much as she needs
from the visible dark that swells around
like the sea. Some nights, the levels
are thick with saltflecks of stars
and she is the moon’s flying woman,
cloaking light over her deadly wings.

I would be luminous then, walking
beside her on stilts, entering the marsh
through the night gate above the water,
trailing my sharp net, certain to find you.

© Rose Flint

Rose Flint has worked as a creative writing tutor and was for 10 years Writer in Residence at Salisbury District Hospital, working in all areas of healthcare. She has five collections, including A Prism for the Sun (Oversteps). Awards include the Cardiff Poetry Prize and the Petra Kenney International Prize.

The Existence of Things Inside Wall Spaces

……..What exists in the gap between bricks? The gap where the mortar has crumbled away as aggregates of time. I have to know. I have to know, like the Canadian geese have to know the way back from Ireland in the
spring. I have to look.
……..I’m looking. Not into the interior of a house, but into a small hole. Inside the hole is a miniature spinning wheel, not more than an inch big, and beside it, a pair of silk mittens, like mocha-colored oven gloves. They seem to have a ferrous tinge from the orange brick. As my eyes scour the space, I see mocha-colored silk threads zigzagging their way from upper to lower facets of brick.
……..Where I’m looking, a chunk of plaster is missing from the wall, as if someone spent a good deal of time carefully peeling it away from the brick. I’m guessing it was a bored child. A stuffy child, probably a spoiled kid with a pudgy face, and an ill demeanor.
……..Now, I too am peeling the plaster. The white flakes coming away in my hand are not more than half a centimeter thick and are leaving a powdery white residue on my palm and under my nails. Beneath, the brick is tangerine orange.
……..And what is this I see? A psychedelic greenish-blue blob about two inches long. I extend my finger to investigate.
……..It moves! A caterpillar: plump and feisty, living under the plaster. How on earth did such a juicy fellow fit under that packed space?
……..The caterpillar makes its way along the crease of the brick towards the gap. Oh no. No you don’t! No quick escape for you when I’m in such an inquisitive mood!
……..The thing wriggles and, afraid it might drop, I encourage it onto my hand. My, oh my, what sticky legs it has; I needn’t have worried in the first place.
……..Did this little beastie spin the silk threads? This squishy critter knitting tiny oven gloves at the minute spinning wheel, and who knows what other things that fill the space between bricks? Oh, the things Canadian geese would only know if they looked below on their journey!
……..I’m glad I wasn’t inclined to transcend that gap. How easy it could have been to not look inside. When you’re en-route from A to B, a straight line is the quickest way. Not to mention the least complicated. I’d like to say it was coincidence, but I’m not so sure. If you bother to look inside a world, there’s another smaller world
tucked inside it.
……..Blue-green caterpillars only happen on a crescent moon. When the sky is a backwash of clouds swept away by a tide of silken thread. Sometimes, if you focus too much on the path to the moon, you might miss all the heavenly glory.

Cathedral II

Garnet gleam and well-deep blue–
thorn-kissed blood on each thick pane,
a story leaded and stained.
The feathered gold frescoes are burden;
our art betrays.

Would you sit here in silence and do nothing
but note the design? I have
glimpsed arches contracting
as though choreographed, supine
movements centuries old and timed.

This is the house that God built–
a layer cake of death and resurrection:

crypt …….nave……. tower,

rooms large enough to hold sister sin,
such a beautiful bride. Take her satin train,
and all her pretty maids, amethyst organza-dripping
down the aisle past perfectly straight
pew soldiers. And then you’ll kneel,
and open your mouth to God,
pray in your black orchid tongue.

Jen Rouse’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Pretty Owl, The Tishman Review, The Inflectionist Review, Midwestern Gothic, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Up the Staircase, the CDC Poetry Project, Parentheses, and Sliver of Stone. Rouse’s chapbook, Acid and Tender, was published in 2016 by Headmistress Press. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

A Broken Stone

…..The stone has several walls, at least eight or nine depending on how you count certain angled declivities. To further confuse matters, some are dark and some are light, as if a shell or veneer of a rusty tan color has been shucked or shocked from the stone’s exterior to reveal a thoroughgoing darkness.
…..On closer examination it’s evident that the stone’s interior gloom isn’t unrelieved. Tiny glittering particles like sawdust or brown snow swirl the night sky of the stone. At this point the eye asks what exactly it’s seeing: primordial organisms swimming in the first dark ocean? intimations of galaxies beyond counting in the farthest range of our best telescopes?
…..Ask instead which vision best suits the human scale. The answer: something in-between, light flecks lying upon the face of the darkness as grass seed lies scattered on black soil. As if some greenness is waiting to grow there.
…..Held between the thumb and fingers, the stone undergoes a miraculous transformation, as though a premonition of an entirely different existence it may know after being broken down, the ultimate end of all stone, reduced to the life-giving grains of mineral nourishment a grass-root can absorb.
…..To those who despair of the hardness of certain hearts and fates in the present moment, I say: One day even this stone will become a nurturer of grass.

Thomas R. Smith lives in Wisconsin, USA, and have seven published collections so far, and was included in DIAMOND CUTTERS, edited by Jay Ramsay and Andrew Harvey. He has also edited several books, most recently AIRMAIL, the correspondence of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, published in the UK by Bloodaxe. WINDY DAY AT KABEKONA: NEW AND SELECTED PROSE POEMS is forthcoming in the Autumn.

angel and sage

“because I’m crushed
in this!” she said. “I
have to get out.”
“but I’m so happy,” he
said. “how can
this be?” The angel
of om heard, and with
a brush of only one
of his uncountable
wings opened them
………both up.
skulls fell like
berlin walls, minds
moved through
hearts unchambered,
and feelings rushed
between, unarrested.
she was his joy and
he her
horizonless leadenness,
both infinite both
all. thank god
the angel’d left him
the soles of his
keds or he would
have plummeted
to gehena and
she (capless)
would have never left
the top of the
christmas tree.
“enough!” sniped
the sage of samsara
and pushed them
apart like reddening
seas; their separateness
passed through
intact.
“you’d have
had to kill me”
she caught her
own breath.
“and then who would
have been my
dealer?” he
sighed.

Not Finally Separate

The plants and grasses don’t seem to care
if I gaze upon them or pass indifferently by,

too hurried to pause long enough to see
the slender shadows they cast in their

swaying forms; neither do the beetles
who scratch about in the dirt and scuttle

across the worn rocks, bathing their hard-
shelled selves in the warm mid-day sun.

With them we wander as best we can
beneath shadows of drifting clouds, and

it could be though while their innocence
is deeper than ours it’s not finally separate.

Perhaps they’re gathered by dreams as
singular as those that shape us, too,

shifting like the winds at play with
the shining flock of clouds above.

Mark S. Burrows is a theologian, poet, and translator. A longtime resident of New England, he currently teaches religion and literature at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum (Germany). His recent publications include Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart. Meditations for the Restless Soul, with Jon M. Sweeney (2017); a new book of his poems, The Chance of Home, will be published in March, 2018. http://www.msburrows.com