Category Archives: Uncategorized

Twilight Hunting

As night unrolls its indigo tongue,
licking away the last rays of sunlight,
the air cools and cleanses itself,
Daubenton's bats, fresh
from tree-roosting, swoop down, 
fly low across overgrown riverbanks, 
catch midges that hover
above rippling water.
They feast, on the wing,
until the moon surfaces,
full 
and polished.

David Hanlon is a welsh poet living in Cardiff. He is a Best of the Net nominee. You can find his work online in over 40 magazines, including Rust & Moth, Icefloe Press & Mineral Lit Mag. His first chapbook Spectrum of Flight is available for purchase now at Animal Heart Press.

STRAYS AND MONGRELS

© Rupert M Loydell  

Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything(Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010)

Rachel
A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. ~Matthew 2:18


My cries climb out of my grave
like Abel’s blood shouted from the ground.  
My sons are no more, their innocent skin 
 
pierced by soldiers’ swords, their hearts 
run through by Herod. I will not 
be silenced. There is no grief like mine. 
 
I was a shepherd once. 
I know what it’s like to keep watch,
to chase after one who wanders astray, 
 
lift it from a ravine while all my muscles
scream. I wanted to save them all.
I know my flock’s thirst, how the arid heat 
 
thickens on the tongue and strips 
air from the lungs. In a moment like that, 
I met my beloved. He rolled the stone away
 
from the mouth of the well. He kissed me 
and I wept the first of many times. 
You know how the story goes.
 
I sobbed again when my scions passed 
my tomb on the road to Babylon. 
Do not wipe my tears away now.
 
Let them come violent as a peg
driving through an enemy’s head.  
Let them keen over YHWH’s fierce will,
 
for I cannot raise the dead. 
My own bones merge with earth.
This otherworldly bosom cages me in. 
 
I am every mother in Bethlehem
who knows what these men don’t. 
Hear me howl. 

A Best of the Net and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. She has also had poetry appear in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. Moore is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University in Indiana, where she is the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.

Do we have guardian angels?

Michael is 83, half Caucasian, half Native American. “There’s graffiti in Zion” he says. “There was never graffiti in Zion”. And he pronounces never ne-VE-r the way you’d imagine a teenage girl would. He explains how it took Americans a single summer to wreck the national park. 3 months during which European and Asian tourists couldn’t visit, given the pandemic. America left to its people. Zion unguarded. “Jesus loves you” scratched onto the Zion Canyon Narrows walls.

As a teen, I went to Jesuit school. Was taught to turn the other cheek. Kiss the toes of my enemies. Love their gentle crimes. A paper cut. A gun. Shoot people but with love in your heart. I let my pencils blister my middle finger as jesus – one word, all lowercase – broke into my life. The lord our father my first idea of success, a tap on the shoulder loud like a millennium, his palm on my skullcap places a white zucchetto, his lips against my earlobe whisper my mission: Redeem the world with the gums of your mouth. And I sink in grace like a small animal falling in a trap.

Like jesus, my dad died at 33. And I wake up the morning of my 32nd birthday, pinch the fat inside my bloated belly, squeeze the marbles away from my navel, onto the yoga mat, facing the sunrise, my nostrils gulping the smell of nearby basil. The young man volunteering at the experimental co-living city we’re Airbnb-ing at films the garden plants. As my triceps turn me into the prophetic cobra, I hope the camera captures this pose too. “The money shot” I think.

But all we do is hope is comb the dreading knots out of our hair, drive the ghosts of time away, shush them to the door so the downstairs neighbor doesn’t leave a note tomorrow. But all we do is laundry is witness the drying electric softness of white towels the promise of happiness, cleanliness the possibility of an island. But all these dishes, smooth and glossy clear ceramic, a silent cry for help. Help. I have lined the chapters of my life like the white pickets of a fence, I have ingested Optimism, my daily bread, my prized oppressor. But I have seen rosemary grow in the folds of the foreheads of the Mount Rushmore presidents – one word, all lowercase. And this was never meant to save the world.

Halim Madi is a queer Lebanese poet with work published in Quiet Lightening, The Racket and Lunate. The author of “Flight of the Jaguar” and “In the Name of Scandal”, they write about queerness, plants that make you see colors and the immigrant experience. He currently lives in San Francisco. You can find more of his work on www.halimmadi.com.

Mootness
 
Apotheosis is one thing: 
preferences tracked 
may be of another ilk. 
Scapegoatism is the province 
of successful communicators 
not those in throes 
of an interior monologue. 
 
I see myself in a supernumerary role 
in the film of my fantasy. 
In meatspace 
I’m the protagonist 
and antagonist. 
When vocabulary fails 
whillikers fill in. 
 
During agon 
His frame lights me up.

Sanjeev Sethi is published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 350 journals or online literary venues. Recent credits: Kairos Literary Magazine, NOON | journal of the short poem, The Big Windows Review, Life and Legends, Pomona Valley Review, Dreich Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

MOMENTARY LIGHT                                                                           
Stamford
 
Nearing sixty years,
as afternoon light
shines through the alleys
of the city buildings,
I cheer the ten-year-old boy
who races the bus 
to the corner of Hope Street
and wins.
 
 

Tim Dwyer’s chapbook is entitled Smithy Of Our Longings (Lapwing). His poems have recently appeared in Cyphers and the anthology of the Irish Poetry Chair, Hold Open The Door, and forthcoming in Atrium. He recently moved from the United States and now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland.

Unbroken
after “Dark Night” by St. John of the Cross
 
My love is caged by zeal,
a woman-warrior whose passions 
steal the vigor of men.
Yet my love is a tender thing,
a blossom of little note,
hidden beneath the rocky crag,
her hand easily bruised,
the “Hallelujah” shattered
a thousand times--
too many for her to be uncaged
into seduction’s wilderness.
Yet she seeks the face of her Beloved,
the one who will not bruise her heel.
By night she flees the walls of wire
to find her Beloved.
O Love! O magnum mysterium!
His light has guided her 
to this place.
Its flame burns, a guide deep in her breast,
as does a fire burn brightly 
on the hearthstone.
He is there in the meadow,
sleeping among the lavender,
the lavender so fair.
Beneath the fanning cypress they lay,
where she bore the wound of grace,
and the once shattered Hallelujah 
escaped her lips,
unbidden,
unbroken.

Melissa Chappell is a native South Carolinian who, along with her affinity for writing, also loves music. She plays the piano, the lute, the guitar, and is a classically trained vocalist. She is a contralto who has performed in numerous choirs. Her latest book is Doors Carelessly Left Ajar, published by Alien Buddha Press, 2020. 

As Close as a Call
 
I, on this side,
watch a calendar change,
remembering your leaving,
and keep hope for an answer.
 
Where are you?
 
You were always close as a call—
from another room or on the phone.
 
Who do you appear to when I call?
Are you telling stories 
in that place of no pain?
 
Understand…
life is different on this side—
angst and worry.
 
You are in the short place—simple.
 
When will you come easing through
with softened voice?
 
There are times I send for your memory…
with no answer at all.
 
Is it wrong to 
force you into my dreams?
 
(There is much I wonder about.)
 
So, I’ll stand here, 
patiently leaning against sleep
and wait for you to turn the corner.
 

Judy DeCroce is an internationally published poet, flash fiction writer, educator, and avid reader whose recent works have been published by The BeZine, Brown Bag Online, North of Oxford, The Poet Magazine, Amethyst Review, The Wild Word, OPEN:Journal of Arts & Letters, and many journals and anthologies. As a professional storyteller and teacher of that genre, she also offers, workshops for all ages in flash fiction. 
Judy lives and works in upstate New York with her husband poet/artist, Antoni Ooto.

Temple
 
The last word he said was “temple”
it was startling because the word was so clear
and he hadn’t spoken in days – 
I wondered what temple?
Shinto?  Buddhist?  Mayan?
 
This word, from my father, who lived his last years
in the sordid squalor of a chronic hoarder – 
new clothes stacked in piles on the floor
still in their plastic wrappers
“but you never know when you might need them”
and 15 years' worth of unopened junk mail
in heaps that spilled over every surface
mixed in amongst the “important stuff”,
and a narrow path to the bathroom
between towers of unopened CDs and DVDs
and books piled on half of the bed
because “who needs a whole bed to sleep, anyway?”
 
I wanted to say “what temple?”
but I would have had to shout
and disrupt the night quiet of the nursing home 
because the hearing aids that didn’t work
had been taken out weeks ago
and I didn’t want to wake him from this sleep
just hours from death
his breathing already so shallow
 
he’d been dreaming a lot lately
and I marveled that this last dream
was something so simple,
wondered if the temple brought solace – 
I wanted to see it with him
some last thing we could share together
and wonder at or joke about
because we had talked about sending some signal
to prove there was something on the other side,
was this it?
except he wasn’t on the other side yet,
so, I just held his hand, closed my eyes
and imagined the singing of the quetzals
at some Mayan ruin
and waited

Barbara Parchim lives on a small farm in southwest Oregon.  Retired from social work, she volunteered for several years at a wildlife rehabilitation facility.   She enjoys gardening and wilderness hiking.   Her poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Ariel Chart, Isacoustic, the Jefferson Journal, Turtle Island Quarterly, Windfall and Trouvaille Review.   Her first chapbook has been selected by Flowstone Press to appear in 2021.

Adamah 

In the garden, the squirrels pull up fat bulbs from the ground,
their fur cheeks full of tulip flesh,

I wash the sap from creases of our skin,
spoon you violet syrup from the petals we picked,

I knew your baby arms before they could hold pinecones, 
fingers open like saplings,

cherry tomatoes, plump with thick sun,
each heirloom plant as inheritance,

We watch the carousel of spring birds,
a feather fever dream of starlings,

and I hold our words with the cardinals of my tongue,
my prayers always returning, 
to nest in the greenhouse of our limbs.

Hannah Yerington is a poet, a Jewish Arts educator, and the director of the Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls. Her work has been published in Nixes Mates, Alma, and Olney, among others. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University. She writes about many things including talking flowers, post-memory, and the occasional seal.