On the Brink of Tomorrow Howden Pond, Hamlin NY
Leaning on my cherry-switch walking stick, looking
beyond yellow reeds and pearly everlastings, the pond’s
depth has shrunk, revealing its puckered banks where
belly tracks of beavers have worn a path to their estate
of young poplars that satisfy their hunger, reducing
trunks to pointed stakes; and at the water’s edge,
floating among the reeds, a few stripped branches
wait to be towed to the old den’s interior. Yet today,
construction isn’t anything more than the wind’s
ruffling of yellow leaves and the pond’s inky surface.
I am not a reflection here— not a striking shadow,
ready to prove this morning’s geometry— only
a set of eyes, wanting to travel without leaving
home— wanting to be standing here, tomorrow.
M.J. Iuppa’s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017). For the past 32 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario.Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.
Backyard High Wire Act
Ringling Brothers flying trapeze,
Circe de Soleil,
a granddaughter showing off gymnastic feats—
all rhythms of life captured between held breaths.
A performance this morning
outside my kitchen window
gave me pause:
bare, slender branches,
black, spindly outlines backed by
December dawn light
immersed in blue violet.
First one squirrel
racing with abandon
up the tallest maple, past the nest
distinguishable in silhouette
against the burgeoning sky, and soon
another close behind, and a third
following the leader in agile leaps
from fragile limb to limb, death-defying
connections mysteriously maneuvered
in spite of bobbing, bushy-tail weight.
Once on a tour a guard shouted "silencio"
nudging us on like cattle
in the overcrowded Sistine Chapel
where I craned my neck
hungry to see a spark,
to imagine the electric air
Michelangelo left there
between God's finger and Adam's.
Now, as the day quickens and long after
the squirrels disperse,
gossamer limbs dance in the breeze,
maple twigs reach to oak
and somewhere, a sacred
synaptic transaction.
Linda Vigen Phillips‘ poems have appeared in The Texas Review, The California Quarterly, NC Poetry Society Award Winning Poems 2001, Wellspring, Main Street Rag, Independence Boulevard, and Windhover. She has two published YA novels in verse, Crazy and Behind These Hands. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband.
Eschatological Logic
Estrogen ecstasy eschaton eschatological
Burning visions of the end of this world
Extirpation excision excelsior extinction deo
Metamodernist Metaphysics
What is being? Being in itself, being in all
Of its sets of Heideggerian equivocation
Does being have a ground, an essence?
Ship of Souls
Sails over the dark dharma horizon
Slipping into the Dantesque dramaturgy
Of lithium lakes destabilized in Lethe
Nothingness
Why is there something rather than
Nothingness? Why is there life
Rather a formless void of darkness?
Multiverse Shift
The universe shifts into multiplicities
Of multiverses, coreless essenceless
And infinities of nonlinear pythic paths
Rose Knapp (she/they) is a poet and electronic producer. She has publications in Lotus-Eater, Bombay Gin, BlazeVOX, Hotel Amerika, Fence Books, Obsidian, Gargoyle, and others. She has poetry collections published with Hesterglock Press, and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. She lives in Minneapolis. Find her on at roseknapp.net and on Twitter @Rose_Siyaniye
Grieve Well, Friend
May grief’s moon-round pebble imbue
thumb and forefinger with memories
that stitch your breath’s seams,
cut—honed like moon’s crescent—
through jellied platitudes.
May grief map your trek
past memories that light—
improbable—into your hands,
onto your tongue, then melt
fusing to skin and within.
And may those memories
bank a fire that smolders,
sheds mere shreds of warmth
for now, promises to dance
in the fullness of time.
Nancy K. Jentsch’s poetry has appeared recently in Thimble Literary Magazine, Tiferet, Zingara Poetry Review and in numerous anthologies. In 2020, she received an Arts Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her chapbook, Authorized Visitors, was published in 2017 and her writer’s page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/NancyJentschPoet/
If You Want the Rainbow—inspired by Dolly Parton’s infinitely wise words
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow
you gotta put up with the rain.”
But storms can hit harder than any blow.
Just when you need relief, the skies will flow
and pummel you with tears and aches and pain.
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow,
kiss your hurts and hug them close. Above all, take it slow.
And breathe! Losing your shit cannot be called “a gain;”
your storms can hit harder than any blow!
Get wet. Jump in puddles toe-to-toe.
Take a stroll, hand-in-hand with a friend. This is sane.
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow,
thank the rain! It saturates you ‘til you know
you cannot get any wetter. Head inside. Get dry again
once storms have hit harder than any blow.
Towel off. Drink tea. Cuddle. Then work hard! And throw
aside the fears that you can’t take it. Let those wane.
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow,
know storms hit hard. They’re part of getting clean and letting go.
Amy Baskin‘s work is currently featured in Bear Review, River Heron Review, and is forthcoming in Pirene’s Fountain. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, an Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and an Oregon Poetry Association prize winner. When she’s not writing, she matches international students at Lewis & Clark College with local residents to help them feel welcome and at home during their time in Oregon.
Tea Leaves in Confinement
Mornings are for finding words,
but the leaves in my tea
float orange and green
among the ginger, turmeric
dissolving in spoonsful of splendid honey.
This aroma sweetens the delicious quiet
punctuated by bursting pops of sap
from the old stove.
The mild whistle of the wind brushes
my windows. A seductress of play.
Mornings are best to write and amend
but the taste of tea lures me
to contemplate
the meadow with its brown brush
the long dark weight of Mount Emily
the nervous chirping of juncos under the hawthorn
their fleeting presence while they rummage the mullet
I placed early in the moon’s shadow.
During this plague, solitude is the gift.
Just like this morning’s tea.
Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a ‘Mexi-Rican,’ born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. She has two poetry books published, Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, and a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time by Redbat Press. A chapbook was released by Finishing Line Press in February, Fossils on a Red Flag. Currently, Amelia Díaz Ettinger is working on an MFA in creative writing at Eastern Oregon University.
Perennial
I pray out loud too.
As dune grasses pray,
with their empty, crisp, quivers.
I’m bound, like anything else
alive in winter, to attempt survival.
Torn stem. Berries. Gull prints
lonesome for life’s evidence.
Sunlight pools, wilts leftover snow and
where sand shifts ground, I imagine
warm pockets. Contained. Underneath,
new stems heed nothing, not even cold.
Lauren Carlson is the author of a chapbook Animals I Have Killed which won the Comstock Writers Group chapbook prize in 2018. Her work has been published in Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Windhover, and Blue Heron Review among others. She recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson, the first low residency program in the United States. https://laurenkcarlson.com/
Last Request
When my time has come, let the ram skin wheeze
and pipe me to rest with Amazing Grace.
I’ve only a wee bit of Scots, but please,
when my time has come, let the ram skin wheeze.
Send ashes and dirge on a fairy glen breeze,
dispatch me to heather and thistle’s embrace.
When my time has come, let that ram skin wheeze
and pipe me goodbye with Amazing Grace.
Islandia
Each hour I am stunned alive by you:
Glaciers jutting into forever sky,
how the soft sea of your mouth burned so blue
that we stood there mid-morning, asking why
we were gifted such air more pure than god--
the backbone carving through this mountain ridge,
every bird song, the pine’s gentle nod,
river rocks and mountain talks, body’s bridge
bending to the bloodless earth. A blank page
where I retrace roots, wonder what’s to come:
the clouded future, words a war to wage
like the moment ink sets in, leaves you numb.
I walk to the lake, frost silvering sheer
kiss my own wrist, woman warm, without fear.
Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, Hobart, Levee Magazine, and more. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online: www.karaknickerbocker.com.
Earlier this week I had a good old marking crisis. I was up until 2:30 am working through dissertations. As I finally collapsed into bed, I drifted back to memories of my undergraduate essay crises, the all-nighters that I occasionally had to pull. I do think of those intense, pressurised, tortured, idyllic (and pre-internet) college years from time to time, and it’s amazing how vividly the memories return.
Rachel Mann’s debut thriller, The Gospel of Eve, is partly responsible for this latest bout of reminiscence. Firstly, because I compulsively spent time earlier this week reading it, and hence substantially precipitated my own marking crisis. Secondly because, although not a traditional campus novel, it is set in the 1990s in a fictitious Oxford theological college, Littlemore, which has affinities with the rarefied world of traditional collegiate universities in decades past. Littlemore’s world is inhabited by well-bred students plus a few mature do-gooders, prissy or downright antediluvian dons, rooms in halls, scholarly jousting – and gut-wrenching disasters, all lightly doused in nostalgia.
The Gospel of Eve is also a page-turner. Characters and events shock and intrigue from the first pages when a body is found in terrible circumstances. We have a sympathetic but troubled narrator in Catherine, or Kitty, who gradually unravels as the story unfolds. Kitty had her own crisis of faith that led her to train for the priesthood and so, it transpires, did some other members of the close circle with which she becomes involved – Evie, Piers, Richard, Charlie (a young woman) and the enigmatic Ivo. Relationships within the group are fraught and intense, fuelled by mistrust, crushes, and alcohol: ‘We drank like only the young and holy can,’ (p.68) remarks Kitty. Then we find out that the group’s spiritual quest has taken a disturbing turn. There’s a chilling early scene in the novel, set on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral, that our narrator describes as ‘the blood incident’. From then on, bodily existence – its pleasures, temptations and discomforts – is placed at the heart of religious faith – for good or ill. At one point, Ivo declares: ‘Faith is not about belief or doctrine so much as the body. It is eating and fasting. It is acting in the world, in the light of faith. It is knowing God in the discipline of the flesh.’ (p.100). But Ivo is a dangerous character underneath his privileged, authoritative exterior. Should he be trusted?
Much of his and the group’s ascetic practices are born of a fervent scholarly and spiritual longing for the Medieval, where there is undoubtedly much food for thought. ‘The Medieval offers a subtle discourse, dangerous and pregnant with violence, of course, but nuanced.’ (p.98). Ivo and the others don’t comment on the poignant and affective devotion of later Medieval mysticism such as that of Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich, perhaps because this would tilt devotional practise away from endless penance and towards lyricism and compassion. We are left with the thrill of a dangerous alterity, and a certain amount of horror at how easily its violence can resurge.
Mann’s novel obliges the reader, as much as Kitty, to reflect on the implicit structures of power and gender bound up with concepts of fraternal correction and the mortification of the flesh. How much is punishment not only of the flesh, but of the feminine, requisite for the maintenance of Christian patriarchy, and what disruptive counternarrative is waiting to emerge? Hidden, subversive and suppressed currents of thought run through this novel like underground rivers. Once I’d finished the book, I could still hear them rushing along, under the surface of our everyday perceptions and (if we have any) religious assumptions.
For those with ears to hear it, this is a really notable quality of Mann’s novel. It’s a well-paced story of death, sex, intrigue and revelation in a college setting, but it’s a lot more than that too. Mann is herself a priest and a scholar, and weaves in her considerable theological knowledge lightly enough for it to be an organic part of the narrative. References from the Cummean Penitential (a medieval record of punishments for specific sins) to Phyllis Trible (a feminist theologian) appear – as do, literally, some priceless first editions, variously appropriated, bequeathed and stolen. Theft and restoration, intellectual as well as literal, is another significant thread of the narrative.
I should add that as well as drama and scholarship, the novel has its fair share of satire, both clerical and cultural. The well-meaning pastoral innovation of ‘prayer triplets’ will either intrigue or dismay you (or possibly both), and I daresay I could be persuaded to join Littlemore’s ‘Edmund Bertram Society’: ‘Ostensibly devoted to Mansfield Park’s serious clergyman, it supplied an excuse for middle-aged female ordinands to drink Pinot Grigio and watch videos of Colin Firth’s chest-hair.’ (p.71). Well!
Full of pace and paradox, then, this is a great novel for almost any circumstance, except perhaps for those of a nervous disposition, or those with urgent marking deadlines easily derailed by an imaginative mystery. If you enjoyed Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, you might like the somewhat similar intellectual and narrative energy to be found here. But The Gospel of Eve has its own very distinct atmosphere, and is likely to leave you both enchanted and troubled.
Amethyst Review 