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By-Name
"Its true name we do not know. Tao is the by-name that we give it." Tao Te Ching, Chapter XXV

Sealed with impermanence, shrouded in mystery,
we call those things which are and are not 
by names we cannot pronounce, 
like pillars that stand dripping with oil beneath
eternal staircases.

The lesser lays his head on desert, dreams of life,
sees a laddered tongue linking earth and heaven, telling 
his story as it is; the word that he has lived by 
is a scratch of syllables, a distant spelling on stretching stone, 
the by-name breaking up until the word it was beside 
knows fully and is known.

Caleb Hill is a cybersecurity technician by day, poet around the clock. He contributed to the monthly newsletter until they decided he was having too much fun and revoked his duties. He lives in central PA with the trees and his family.

Looking for Words

Words upon words, for lack of words.
Each like a sand-print—
self-erasing guesses
in a thirst-driven desert tread
to find a sip, a pool, a well—
ready to spill the last drop
from one's canteen
to spell in cursive line
upon a mirage-blurred surface—
a clear thought
that quenches.

Marso writes poetry shaped by years of living in different cultures and by a practice of paying attention to ordinary life.

How To Prosper
from Psalm 1


You'd be better off 
not listening to anyone
who says 
you'd be better off.

And crowdsource your addiction.

Don't sit and laugh 
at anyone that says
"you'd be better off"
or "crowdsource".

Meditate
day and night.
Or take an age.
Where's your delight?

Mine is a tupelo tree,
next to a stream,
with unerodible banks
sipping water juleps 
green leaves 
waving merry
black and blue
fresh drupes

feeding the wildlife.

JK Miller is a former third grade dual language teacher. He lives on the edge of cornfields. He is the first prize winner of the 2025 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest.

What we call Dark

is often what we don't understand, or cannot yet
explain. Dark as in: unseeable; not observed.
The inside of the box. Beyond the boundary.

The energy stretching the universe
faster than reason can catch. The matter that,
unseen, drives gravity mad.

But these too are dark: the consciousness
that torments itself with unknowable things;
the inside of the apple; the underside

of the serpent's tongue; the knowledge that,
once tasted, darkens like fruit rotting
out of its place. Some darkness

comforts, shields from day's fire
and its scrutinising eyes. Some hides
its own darkness inside it, the deeds

that even evil shames to think of.
And some – the thick darkness
where Moses found God – is only

dark in its mystery. Nothing to fear,
although fearsome. May we
reach for You in our knowing

and our unknowing too,
prepared, like the possum with its
tail black as night I saw scampering

through the forest, sure in
its maker's nocturnal providence,
the treasures of the dark.

Matthew Pullar is a Melbourne-based poet. He has had poems published in Ekstasis, Poems for Ephesians, Amethyst Review, Fare Forward and Reformed Journal. Most recently, his collection of poems, This Teeming Mess of Glory (Wipf & Stock, 2025) was shortlisted for Australian Christian Book of the Year.

To Pet a Dragonfly

Is to be so aware of your own skin,
you feel it vibrate as it makes contact
with mystery. It is to be close enough
to observe the twitching of a tiny mouth,
and to wonder whether the iridescent
creature, shining in blue and red,
has something to say to you. 

To pet a dragonfly allows the truth
of who you are to be observed
by thirty thousand lenses. 
It is a small, yet significant, event
in your life. But for the dragonfly—
who lives mere weeks—the merging
of skin and exoskeleton is a lifelong
experience. Each day, you wonder
if you will ever see her again.

You remove your finger, 
she makes a complete circle 
above you, and lightly buzzes 
your head. Once she has blessed you, 
she disappears into the glossy 
green of the wild magnolia
on her brief journey through 
water, Earth and sky.



Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press), and I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died (Kelsay Books). She is also the author of four Origami Poems Project microchaps, and her poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

Four Elements
				for Magi Pierce

			
Air, fire, water, earth: each element 
matched with a cardinal direction.

Air with the East. The inhale is inspiration,
expanding breath, a promise not yet embodied.

Fire with the South. Breath at the apex, 
burning with creation and destruction.

Water with the West. Movement and memory,
the sinking sun, the passing of life.

Earth with the North. Emptiness and eternity,
the ground underfoot, cessation of breath.

The exhalation is the letting go.
The emptiness is what is left.

Think of an ice cube lying
on the ground on a neutral day.

The fire of the focusing mind
fed by the air of the breath

softening ice into water,
melting and moving,

unlocking memory 
petrified to habit.

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.

Memos To the Great Attractor  
#7
Touchstone

Here I go again, picking up pebbles for my pocket
until I become too heavy to swim. Nostalgia.

What was a comfort, maybe still is,
turns cumbrance, possibly lethal;

but finally, just comes down to mementos of skin, of bone,
down to composing notions, the face in the glass.

Time to box some more china for Angel's Treasures
at the village church, to pitch out more old traces,

the irrelevance now of genealogies. Broken-limbed trees.
I’ve pared down the piece of precious found wood to a nub

that might yet become a pencil or be fitted with a blade
like the ones the architect fingers for models and designs,

nub round as the crown a mother shoves through into its separate possibility.
You know about all this, lover and schemer. Building up and taking down.

This touch-stone in my palm's jasperite like the Makapansgat Cobble 
the collector Eitzman found in a South African cave, seeing in it a face

that seemed to be carved — by an ancient Australiopithican,
so he thought — cradled nubbly in his palm like the touch of the ancient hand

of a sculptor reaching out to him. But no. 
A natural simulacrum, experts said, made by pressure and heat

and the pummeling of ages. Nothing more. But then they noticed
it lay nine miles from any geologic source,

so it was carried by a prehistoric collector into that cave
of human remains, someone who saw that same face

looking back, another explorer seeking connection
from a deeper antiquity, a sacred emblem

left behind, to carry on speaking the holy
into a future loneliness, a shared wonder.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Phillips’ chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Phillips has two poems nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize. and is a finalist in the current Eyelands Book Competition, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry contest.

Gruene, Texas Gift


The presents jut jauntily beneath
the Gallerie’s storefront Christmas tree,
wrapped in red or shiny foil with terrific
bows, terrific beckoning bows. An invitation

to her eye. Like a summons calling
her to dismiss the unshakeable
emptiness inside, empty as the dried up
carcass of the cicada who once sang; empty

as the wren’s nest after the hawk;
empty as the other side of the bed. And find
the presents filled, even if only with
the stale re-circulated air of shoppers

shopping, their inhalations swelling the balloon
of their chests as they canvas shelves, their pockets
weighted with wishlists, the longed for and unreconciled.
Hoping still to find the right something.

Or anything. Like the way it was that December
evening with a whiff of the Guadalupe
River in the air, running solo through a hanger
of pecan trees, crunchy carpet of shells

cracked open and already scratched clean
by squirrels. Lungs huffing like a forced laborer,
but anyone could see her heart only half
present, just trying to keep a rhythmic beat.

Then a footstrike away, weeks after the tree
gave the last of its fruit, a whole nut draws
her eye. The slight slit in its brown overcoat 
an invitation to kneel down,

unwrap it and feast on the saving sweetness
of the last pecan. Even now you dig in again
and again, reaching across the emptiness
for the unbroken goodness inside.
 

Patricia Watts is a former Language Program Coordinator and ESL teacher now nurturing her love of creative writing. She is a member of the Transformative Language Arts Network and various craft-oriented writing groups. Two of her poems were published in The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative, and she has numerous professional articles in academic journals and edited books.

Barn Owl at Midday


He remembered  
her.

He remembered her joy
at the silent flight of this night hawk
through the leafless apple trees.
Its confident gaze meeting hers.

He remembered the ladder
she made him climb
to place a roost
built for ‘her’ bird.

A gentle man.
Standing alone 
focus driving into the ground beneath a plain stone.
His shadow pooling dark round his feet,
while the sun trumpeted midday heat.

The owl made no sound
as it cut through
the force of his concentration. 
Shattering the shades that surrounded him.

His eyes lifted 
to meet, just inches away,
the dished face of the day time owl,
calm and still.

Reassuring.



Viv Longley has been writing for her own pleasure since she was a child.  Later in life she undertook an MA in Creative Writing at The Open University, specialising in poetry. As well as having one collection (Tally Sheet, Currock Press, 2021) she is undertaking a number of collaborative publications, notably, the anthology Daughters of Thyme. She is also preparing a second collection of her own and a number of essays – the latter to be called I am in a Hurry. 

Yudel Huberman is from Vancouver, BC. He grew up within Hasidic Judaism and has since pursued studies in forest conservation and ecology. He is currently a graduate student in forest conservation at the University of Northern British Columbia. His writing combines a love for the natural world, forest ecology, and Jewish spirituality.