Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fern Canyon

Beneath towering big leaf maples,
huckleberries tempt me with their translucent red.
A salmon berry’s bumpy 
bright orange pricks my fingers.
Beside delicate maidenhair fern,
I wander the cobbled stream bed 
lined with dusty sword ferns.
Spring proclaimed by snowy trillium.

I walked here fifty years ago
holding my mom’s freckled hand,
carrying my infant son on my chest.
Moved by the hallowed sound 
of our family’s footsteps,
I called this place a cathedral.
Now she is gone and his son is cherished.
I find myself consecrated anew
in this lush dwelling of the holy.

Now retired from teaching as a community college English professor, and having raised three children, Pat McCutcheon and her wife live in the redwoods of far northern California. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Fish Poetry Prize Anthology , Pisgah Review, Ship of Fools, Sinister Wisdom, and other journals and anthologies. In 2015 her chapbook Slipped Past Words, was published as a winner by Finishing Line Press. Her debut collection, Through the Labyrinth, was published in 2023.

The Threshold of Night

Compline is the Church’s night prayer, facing the danger at the edge of darkness, rendering time holy, quieting minds for rest.


Compline starts with stillness.
Silence. Candlelight flickering.
Shadows dancing on ancient
talismans: wait for it—

          The breath of air brushing
          past, the presence, the cloak 
          of darkness spread gently in

the silence. Holding back the night.
Voices rise, a chant written in the
stars, transcribed centuries ago when
the world trembled with fear.

The breath of air
the presence
You are not alone. Wait for it—
	 
The prayer rises with the incense:

          Be our light in the darkness 
          deliver us from all perils 
          and dangers of this night.

Candlelight flickering
Holding back the dark:

This is how we live on the threshold of night.

Jeannette de Beauvoir is a poet and novelist who lives and works at Land’s End—Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Emerson Review, the Looking Glass Review, Avalon Literary Review, the Blue Collar Review, Sheepshead Review, On Gaia Literary, Merganser Magazine, the Adirondack Review, Perception, and the New England Review, among others; she was featured in WCAI’s Poetry Sunday, and received the Mary Ballard Chapbook Prize and the Outermost Poetry Contest national award. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com

I Have Felt a Presence*

Not up there, out there, somewhere
separate from the reality around us.

Nothing foreign like some great power
leaning over the universe

tweaking the force of fate, casually
dispensing life and death.

Not the Other, a stranger to our nature
but something that shares our Being.

I feel that great Familiar, the life
force itself that wears us as its flesh,

holds us nearer than breath, 
as vital as blood and bones.  

     *from Wordsworth’s 'Lines Written 
        above Tintern Abbey'
 

Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor (humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website of original music and poetry (www.freeprintmusic.com). She is a church musician still active at 90 as member of a piano duo. Her poetry chapbooks (Seasons, Remains, Timescape) are available from Amazon Books. Individual poems are current in Gyroscope Review and Rockvale Review.

Philosophe 

What shocked me 
was not the January snow 
that covered the live oaks, 
but that day in September
that should have been brutal. 

Walking by the bayou,
you spoke of the leper 
the Lord made whole: 
told to show the priests 
though not to say 
where he had been.

You also recalled
what the thinker said:
when the risen Christ
told Mary Magdalene 
not to touch, 
he was showing how presence
and the need to verify it
cannot coexist.  

Turning back, I noticed 
the sugar cane was high. 
The heat had obscured
the year’s lateness. 
I thought of calendars,
lost your word.   

As big trucks rolled past, 
you said accounts differ 
about where she was 
when he told her this,
when he said noli me tangere,
and it is very likely 
she was already clinging. 

Chris Monier lives with his family in the Bayou Region of south Louisiana where he teaches French and English at Nicholls State University. He has published poetry, literary criticism, and translations of several French-language writers.

Perpetuity


Neither grief nor belief serve me.
A tap-dance around doubt, never a curtsey.

To differentiate between prayer
and a prayer’s answer provides me a thud…

Heartache in a vacuum throbbing 
amid both contrition and infinity 

of faith—every soul’s footnote for forever. 
Apparition fraught or ashes wrought, 

the imaginable beckons, as a dial 
on a radio makes it easy to rescue 

golden oldies with a twist.
Their renewed soundtrack bolsters 

a vigorous voice eager to craft questions 
coiled in my cranium, earning answers 

without cliché, not passé—
You’re Out of Order / Your Ship has Sailed, 

or Your King is Dead…Checkmate!
Perpetuity probes my failed certainties.

I listen for further instructions…eyes and ears
encouraged by a next step beyond Stalemate.
 

Sam Barbee‘s most-recent collection is titled Apertures of Voluptuous Force (2022, Redhawk Publishing). Three previous collections include That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016. Also, Uncommon Book of Prayer (2021, Main Street Rag) which chronicles family travels in England.

His poems appeared recently in Poetry South, Salvation South, Dead Mule School of Literature, and Streetlight Magazine, also upcoming in Cave Wall, among others; plus on-line journals Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual, Grand Little Things, and Medusa’s Kitchen; and is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

Poem to Be Read If It’s Night Where and When You Are Right Now


My advice? Stay up later: it’s not late enough 
unless the moment feels—with a tiny twinge 
of fight-or-flight-or-freeze—too dangerous
for wakefulness, unless you get a sudden shiver 

energizing along your nerves, a shocking 
bolt of electro-jolt realizing what concocted 
hour, minute, second you find yourself in since 
units measuring moments are human made, 

are totally tied to our far-out Sun-revolving rock,
are relative to each earthling, so no one tells 
the same time as another. When it’s then, go 
outside and stare up at the Moon (or the place 

in the sky where it should be) beside intergalactic 
spangles, and count your lucky stars, and hold 
your breath, and take a blink of comfort, aware 
you’ll need to give our Cosmos comfort in return.

 

Matt Zambito is the author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities (Cherry Grove Collections), and two chapbooks, Guy Talk and Checks & Balances (Finishing Line Press). Other poems have appeared in Poetry International, North American Review, Writers Without Borders, and elsewhere. Originally from Niagara Falls, he has lived in Ohio, Idaho, and Washington. He now writes from Wilson, New York.

Pinhole Chapel

I make a chapel of the pupil:
a round nave where light kneels
through a pinhole, contrite and clear.
The slit lamp hums its psalm,
fluorescein flares like incense
on the corneal altar.

A child’s eye opens, a stained glass rose:
green shard, gold flicker,
a moving parable of sight.
The retina waits, patient and merciful,
to turn radiance into record,
illumination into proof.

There is confession in the flash:
the cataract’s slow surrender,
a scar’s pale Amen.
Outside, the hospital hums like choir practice;
inside, a single pulse translates light to vision,
vision to memory, memory to grace.

When I step back, gloves powdered with light,
the child blinks, astonished by color:
a face, a wall, a blue coat,
the world restored by filament and faith.
I close the instrument, whisper thanks
to the small, unwavering cathedral
that lives inside us all.

David A. Lee is physician and an emerging poet based in Houston, Texas, whose work explores memory, human connection, and the liminal spaces between perception and reality. He holds a background in medical science and philosophy, bringing a reflective and inquisitive lens to his writing. His poetry draws inspiration from both contemporary and classical literature, emphasizing vivid imagery and emotional depth. His poems are forthcoming in Mobius, Eunoia Review, and Unbroken Journal. David is currently developing a collection of original poems examining time, identity, and place.

Palmetto Bluff

Dragonflies above the path, the alligator, and gar
loitering beneath the bridge
their bellies longing for prey.  
Side by side, piece by piece; this harvest of land 

that begs to be seen, the mighty oak 
and cypress, tupelo, and pine
a cathedral of silver shadows, shimmering
in dewy sunlight.  The reach of men to factor 

in the wealth of nature’s story; the glories of God  
where falcons climb, and eagles soar
and naturalists speak of sightings-- 
the timber rattler and beaver; the red fox

the chalk board lectures a kind of fantasy.  
And lurking in the distance, in the far waters
of Daufuskie and Buck islands
the evergreen dreams of youth survive in the shadows.

No cars allowed.  Eons of sediment, the ruins of settlers
in tabby, and stone; oyster shells in the muck 
the countless insects, a mob of  
no see-ums, and hummingbirds quick as light.  

Swallow, and gull, pelicans, and eagles
dolphins in the tides, deer mingling at dusk; 
the marsh trembling with shrimp, and bass.  
The lost and forgotten towns, in the quarry of time; 

the pillars of ancients, long quieted
yet, somehow speaking from the ground.
The Cree and Cherokee and their African brothers
the whisper of sudden spirits, in the trees, still alive.

Keith Melton holds a Master’s in City Planning from Georgia Tech and a BA in Economics and International Studies from the American University. His work has appeared in Amethyst Review, Agape Review, Big City Lit, Compass Rose, Confrontation, Cosmic Daffodil, The Galway Review, The Lyric, Kansas Quarterly, The Miscellany, Monterey Poetry Review and others.