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Who is she who comes?

What is that coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the fragrant powders of a merchant? (Leviticus 2:1)

i

Salutations
She who is the personification of beauty
She who is all powerful
She with riches beyond compare
She who was summoned by a hoopoe bowing his golden crown
She whose intelligence and wit make her the equal of Solomon
She who came with riddles across deserts in her quest for wisdom
She who brought frankincense, gold, myrrh: in this queen from the south was the trinity of kings
She who acclaimed, sum nigra sed formosa, I am black yet comely
She who worshipped the Sun God Ra
She who was temptress, an enigma, mysterious, miraculously healed
She who was breathless after her encounter, returned home and bore a son
She who is immortalised in the Bible, the Quran, the Talmud
She who is revered by Rastafarians, the Yoruba
She who is referred to as Nicaula, Sibylla, Makeda, if never definitively given a name
She whose kingdom is unknown: Yemen or Egypt, Ethiopia or the land of Punt.
Salutations, O Queen of Sheba!

ii

Others suggest
hers was a trade mission
the Song of Songs is a celebration of life, the making of poetry
she’s a muse, from Della Francesco to Duncan Grant, to the stuff of Holywood
she can be merged with the Sibyl Sabba, Lilith, may be Hecate’s daughter
she’s linked to grandmother’s footsteps, that game of old witch
she is black yet shown with golden hair
it’s unlikely anyone would answer the summons of a bird
Solomon’s floor mirrored her hairy legs and cloven foot creating a parallel with Queen Berthe’s leg or even Cinderella who was proven by a foot
she’s no more real than Lady Macbeth, who cried out that not all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten her bloodied hands
there’s even doubt as to why her empire has not been categorically located
Salutations, salaam, Sheba, Queen of Sheba

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Mary Mulholland came to poetry after careers in journalism and psychotherapy. She has a Poetry MA from Newcastle and has been published in magazines and anthologies. She won the US Momaya prize in 2019, and has been commended and shortlisted in several national competitions. She co-edits The Alchemy Spoon.
www.marymulholland.co.uk

Heterochromatic

Hard-heartedness
is a malediction.
Let us locate the lens
to grief that has no lexicon.
No legs to stand.
Nobody to lean on:
a wail no one catches.

To cloak behind
hauteur of ratings
is a way to camouflage failings.
Let’s be on the frontline.
Let our wares be marked
by myriad forces
for their true color to flash.

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Sanjeev Sethi is published in over 30 countries. He has more than 1300 poems printed or posted in literary venues. He is joint-winner of Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux organized by the Hedgehog Poetry Press. Recent credits: Gold Dust Magazine, The Poetry Shed, Flashes of Brilliance, Rochford Street Review, Pomona Valley Review, Ephemeral Elegies,and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

If the Early Days of Our Relationship were The Holy Trinity

Jesus Christ would have to be the sex, wouldn’t He?
The attraction that crept over the both of us, fitting
us into each other, making us see somehow & spookily
what we’d be for each other, I’ve got as The Holy Spirit.
God? God’s sat in the heaven we hadn’t yet guessed
we were designing: the flat in which we’d live
with stickle-bricks & jigsaw pieces increasing over
the floor, corresponding twinkles still spooled
in our eyeballs; the framed memories up on the walls;
the British Heart Foundation Furniture Shop sofa
I’d one day swear would never fit in the lift.
But the substantive body nailed to the cross?
That has to be effort we put in each & every time –
whilst occasionally proclaiming His good name.

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Jack Houston is a writer from London. His work has been shortlisted for the Basil Bunting and Keats-Shelley prizes, the Live Cannon Pamphlet competition and was runner-up in the 2017 Poetry London Competition. His online lockdown poetry workshop with Hackney Libraries can be joined by emailing jack.houston@hackney.gov.uk

I Spoke Into Heaven

and a message was delivered. Becoming a part
of the clouds, the pale winds which
make the sky. A parting of seagulls,
white plumes

the plainest song ever sung—
prophetic diamond essence of coal.

Then I heard a vibration deep in return,
euphoria forming from the Earth—brilliant shards of
words and numbers strung together like blueprints
of constellations. A pattern of agreement, of purpose between,
among, and beyond moving, dwelling
in the essence of motion, in the fourfold of the world.

The rest was near to come and the work
began to get done—co-creator of carpentry. You gave
us a voice of wood to design and care for.

And finally, when the sun and moon came down to rest,
the four sources came to complete— we sat down to eat
our last before an answer, low and old:

a bird, made from air and light, come
to save us with one feather
soaring down upon the sunset of Creation.

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Margaret Marcum is currently a student in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. She graduated with a B.A. and her literary interests include animal rights, healing the collective through personal narrative, vegan studies, and ecofeminism. Her poems previously appeared in Literary Veganism and Children, Churches, and Daddies. 

Discontinuity/ At infinity

When I first learned about asymptotes, I puzzled:
what happens to the graph at infinity?
For there’s no dividing by zero in life,
no abrupt switch from positive almost-infinity
to re-emerge at negative almost-infinity.
Later, I stopped wondering.
I trusted the mathematics
without letting thoughts of life intrude.

But now, in this time of lockdown, I know
what it’s like to be at infinity,
this odd indeterminate state
where all that we hear is birdsong
where the skies are so clear, we can see
the secrets of the universe
where the only touch I feel
is the air on my skin

and who knows
when we re-emerge
at what point on the graph we will be?

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Marian Christie was born in Zimbabwe and has lived in Africa, Europe and the Middle East before settling in her current home in southeast England. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Allegro Poetry,Amethyst Review, The Beach Hut, Black Bough Poetry and The Ekphrastic Review, and in the anthologies The Stony Thursday Book 2018 and The Bridges 2020 Poetry Anthology.

When not writing or reading poetry, she looks at the stars, puzzles over the laws of physics, listens to birdsong and crochets gifts for her grandchildren. She blogs at www.marianchristiepoetry.net and can be found on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marian_v_o.

 

 

Bonfire Travelers

We camp in the Santa Catalinas,
saturation of sage, mesquite, mackerel
sky, wind threaded bird song.
We’re office warriors, but quarantine
sends us out. We set up a twisted tent

that leans in the tough ground. Darkness
layers, we build a fire. We decide to make
mulligan stew. We take an empty coffee
can, fill it with raw burger, carrots
& potatoes. Put it right in the bonfire.

It’s a haiku: the tent, the flames,
the shawl of stars. We hold hands
& wait hungry. Finally, we pull the can
straight from embers with tongs,
pour it out onto plates. It’s juice-stained

& raw. What does it mean we can’t
turn fire to cook meat, no matter
how hot the embers? We toss it.
It’s the connection
to the flame that makes it right,

not what comes out. We trust the
fire still. We make smores: chocolate,
marshmallow & graham crackers,
crackling on sticks, like fishermen,
or women, a good supper under the pines.

We burrow into lumpy sleeping bags,
our minds awakened to the distant stars.
“We can’t cook, can we?” you say.
“What does it matter?” I say.
“The stars are here, & they love us.”

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Lynn Finger’s work has appeared in the Ekphrastic Review, MineralLitMag, Night Music Journal, Journal of Compressed Arts, and is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Feral, and Tiny Seed. Lynn also works with a group that mentors writers in prison.

Heavenly Scene Backdrop Banner – $10.37

Clouds, beams of light:
the classics.

I’ve sometimes been afraid
of heaven, and this is
the heaven of my fear –
an eternity encapsulated
in something unnatural,
static and devoid
of heart.

Who wants to live in the air?

Still, the Bible has a few
other images – cities
and banquets and rivers,
things I’ve known,
things that feel human.
But that doesn’t dilute
the fear of forever.

Any image is still a grasping
at something my hands have never held.

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Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Susquehanna University. Her poetry has been published in various publications, including The Christian Century, The Cresset, Psaltery & Lyre, Amethyst Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Gyroscope Review, and Saint Katherine Review.

The Potter’s Wheel

Creation starts slowly.
Palms surround the amorphous form,
begin molding as the wheel turns
spinning clay, soft and damp.
Each turn transforming matter,
this pliable earthy mass.
As if by magic, slight-of-hand,
when fingers press in, a vase appears.
A mere touch and a lip is added,
the vase becomes a pitcher.
Thumbs brought in pushing out,
a bowl comes into existence.
The evidence of things unseen,
something made from nothing.
Or was it there all along
waiting for the master’s hands?

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Lynne D. Soulagnet was born on Long Island and grew up in Dix Hills where she worked for many years as a nurse tending to people in all stages of life. She will never forget the influence her wonderful English teachers had on her, giving her the lasting gift of a love for poetry which has followed her all her life. She has been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Paumanok: Interwoven, The Avocet, Better Than Starbucks, The Paterson Review, Blue Collar Review, Months to Years and others. She remains active in many poetry venues in New York.

Salt in July

Grandpa brought us to his church
some Sunday mornings
after we slept over
and before he would let us escape
to the swim club,
strange in its chemical blue beauty.

Alive with the vibrating
bodies of divers
and old ladies peeling in lacy petals.
We begged to visit the snack stand
which drew us at noon from
our deep dream of breathing beneath the water.

The church was a smooth hollow
we found ourselves fallen,
where sounds and time stood strange.
The priest’s voice shrouded,
refracting stained glass.
We burned our fingers on its blue.
Mesmerized, memorized shapes in windows
of men contorted, conflicted in pleasure.

Pagan children, we melted wafers
and prayed to new gods,
imagined our exhales bent cool blue.
Grandpa bent in prayer,
his athlete’s limbs gnarled as storm-trees
sloughing off old ills.
We watched, we chased his patterns of faith,
strange as lullabies grow over time.

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Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Gingerbread House, Collidescope, and Enchanted Conversation, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Dodging the Rain and Schuylkill Valley Journal.

Giant Inflatable Whale – $19.59

“Use this giant ocean pal as part of your Jonah And The Whale lessons or have him make a splash at any Sunday School or VBS event.”

The “or”
is what interests me,
a whale able to play
two roles: either
Jonah’s doom-slash-
savior (doom because
who wants to be
stuck in whale
insides, savior
because it was dry,
it wasn’t drowning,
it wasn’t death)
or just some generic
example of God’s
creation, to be
dragged out of
the closet for any
old event.

Though, on some level,
maybe it makes sense
to play both roles at once.
Jonah’s whale wouldn’t
define herself by Jonah,
who was just a bit of odd food
she couldn’t digest, a footnote.

If the whale was being used
by God then, it didn’t know it.
What, then, of the whale’s own graces,
things for which we have no record?

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Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Susquehanna University. Her poetry has been published in various publications, including The Christian Century, The Cresset, Psaltery & Lyre, Amethyst Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Gyroscope Review, and Saint Katherine Review.