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NO DISTANCE
(for Bill Milhomme)

“I’ve been searching all my life,” Martin said. “Integrity.”

His spiritual director leaned forward. This was just what she’d been working toward. Martin had begun direction at the Center four weeks earlier, just as Lent had begun. At first he had merely intellectualized everything, rationalized his life. “But how do you feel?” his director would ask him again and again. “What are you really looking for?”

“Integrity?” she asked him.

“Oh, maybe that’s not the right word for it, I don’t know,” Martin answered. “I want things — something – to be what it says it is. No phoniness, no fake images.

“I’m not looking for perfection. I know that’s not possible. I’d settle for the least possible gap between what’s said and what is.

“I’ve spent most of my life deeply involved with my Church, searching for integrity, wanting to serve it. I didn’t expect the Kingdom on earth, just for people to mean it, to want to mean it. To take the gospel seriously, not to go through the motions. And what did I find? Careerism. Clerical professionalism, amateur humanness.

“Then teaching school. God, what a joke that was! They call it education, but it’s three-quarters baby-sitting. You can’t tell the truth. You’re expected to pass almost everybody along. And I taught art — watercolor in a riot zone! Still, they’d jiggle the SAT scores, pluck out a survey or two, and pronounce everything rosy.

“And even in my own art. I try. I try so hard to get it right, to close the gap between what I see in my mind, what I feel, and what’s becoming on the canvas. Sometimes I come so close, but . . .

“That’s all I really want. For something to be what it seems, to bridge the gap. No distance.”

His director sat back. “Have you ever seen our art collection?” she asked. “It’s quite good.”

That wasn’t what Martin had expected — it caught him off guard. “No . . . no, I haven’t,” he said.

“I think we’ve talked enough for this session,” his director said, pushing back her chair. “The gallery is down this corridor and to the right. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

If she hadn’t stood at her office door watching, Martin probably would have just gone on home. As it was, he started down the hall a little angry. He had just told this woman what he had never told anyone before. Why hadn’t she responded? Was she belittling him and his search?

In a black mood, he opened the gallery door, and . . .

Pow! The strength and loveliness of the Center’s art nearly overwhelmed him. Never in his life had he seen such beauty all in one place. He had expected the collection to be solely religious, and many of the pieces were. Still, they were unusual. In one corner, Richard recognized a work by the very young Picasso, called “Christ Forgiving Satan,” in another a Durer print of the newly risen Christ as the gardener, a straw hat tipped jauntily to one side of the head.

But there were plenty of non-religious pieces as well, at least they seemed non-religious. Each of them did possess that inner power, that glow. Several of Hermann Hesse’s watercolors were among them, as well as the mysterious Keltic knots and swirls of Deidre McCullough. A shadow so real as to both warm and cool the heart seemed to spread across the stones of an Italian tower in a Tom Martino landscape.

Over against the far wall of the room, Martin caught sight of a particularly interesting painting. He had seen it somewhere before, he thought, or something very like it. It showed the crucified Christ, suspended in dark space above the world. But there was no cross per se; Jesus hung there in space, arms extended, with nails floating in front of his hands and feet.

Martin stared at the painting a long time. It was almost perfect, he thought. He himself had made several attempts at a crucifixion scene — all failures.
The painting seemed to mesmerize him, for as he watched, it seemed to dominate the entire room. It was growing larger and larger — or else Martin was being drawn deeper and deeper into it. Soon — he didn’t know how or care — the young artist was floating right beside the crucified Christ.

He was so close now, he thought to himself. So close. He could feel it — integrity, rightness. It was pulling him closer and closer to itself. “God, finally,” he said to himself.

Still something was not quite right. There remained a gap of meaning, a wedge of some sort between himself and . . .

He couldn’t stand it! He was so close! He put back his head, raised his arms to heaven and cried out loud.

He started to move again. He was afraid to change his position even in the slightest, afraid to break the spell. With arms extended and head thrown back, he slowly drifted about the crucified figure, until the two men were back to back, suspended over the bright earth.

Closer and closer the two pressed together. Martin could feel Jesus’ struggle to breathe; the blood from his scourged shoulders ran down Martin’s back. It was terrible; it was beautiful. It was both together. Together.

And then Martin heard a great, ringing crack and, a micro-second later, a horrible pain flashed through his arm. A nail had been driven through Jesus’ wrist and into his own.

Again, that thunderous sound, and again the pain — in his other wrist, his feet. It hurt — my God! It hurt beyond imagination. But yet . . . there was purpose to it, a reason. No posturing from the cross, no pose. Not a drop of blood was futile; not one agonizing gesture that didn’t lead a symphony of worth.

Martin could feel Jesus’ head turning toward him; he moved his own as best he could.

“No distance,” Christ said.

Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, teaches Humanities at Nichols College, Dudley, MA. He publishes broadly in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His novella, Everything We Want, was published in 2018 by Bloodstone Press. A poetry collection, The Realm of Blessing, will be published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press.

A visitor wears down the lock

Not quite free
Not quite fresh
This body
Not quite empty
The house where I live
And the windows
Windows tightening
And the door
Locked but rattling
Rattling until broke
Open and
Then
Then
Out you go

.

Coleman Bomar is a writer  who currently resides in Middle Tennessee. His works have been featured by and/or are forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Plum Tree Tavern,  Nine Muses Review, Showbear Family Circus Liberal Arts Magazine, Prometheus Dreaming, SOFTBLOW, Eunoia Review, Beyond Words, Bewildering Stories, Isacoustic, Nine Muses Poetry and many more.

Spirits in the Grove

Spectators: in this painting, we see a man
Looking much like Rene Magritte,
Wandering down a row of jade leaves,
Easel on his back—around him stands
A grove of orange trees growing between
A country road and an aqua Florida lake.

Digs deep his easel in the sand—sketches
With haste, draws with the hope of getting
Down the most exciting designs of trees
That assume the shape of birds. The images
He records shows outlines of other animals,
A few of ones he’s observed before—seen

In clouds above the Rub-Al-Khali or resting
In the steamy forests of the Amazon delta
As he cruised Marajo Isle on a fishing boat.
He gazes into the evergreen branches and
Boughs of the trees, the heads of green
Parrots, yet with bodies of tigers, and

Then the head of a bald eagle with
An alligator body—he hurries down another
Row—pausing at the sight of a torso
Of Pegasus flying with branching wings.
Asking himself: how is it possible
That shapes of animals can manifest

Their images in trees of leaves? Do
These forms suggest the souls of birds
Caught in a time warp beyond what
Human beings can comprehend? Or
Perhaps they show designs of animals
From protohistory times? Or animals

To appear on earth millions of years after
The pithy page of human history has
Melted into Florida’s sands? Magritte’s
Fevered mind ponders such questions of
Metaphysics, but he knows he must
Hurry, so he dumps his easel—grabs

His I-phone and photographs more designs
He sees among orange trees—because Magritte
Has wandered these rows of citrus groves
Before and knows that with the passing
Of the night, these animal and bird spirits
That shape the orange trees will fly at dawn

To join the clouds for mythical designs that
Eternity passes along to illustrate for those
with vision keen enough to visualize.

.

Hello Yellow! (Forsythia)

Forsythia, Forsythia,
(I used to think you were “for Cynthia”)

bursting up yellow flame
sparkling lemony announcement

peeking over neighbor fence tops
exploding in car ride periphery view.

You pull forth green buds;
finally, a promise of Spring in all its

leafy wonder. Lilac leaves,
lime green, will lead into

purple flowers
and sweet, sweet scent will fly.

Gone is our late Winter lament;
hungry craving for color has been met

with yellow, yellow burst,
leaping and licking the sky!

.

Marjorie Moorhead writes from a northern New England river valley, surrounded by mountains, and four season change. Happy to have found a voice and community in poetry, her work can be seen in many anthologies, literary sites, and two chapbooks. During the current pandemic, she relies on zoom to gather with poets and writers. She is watching a pair of Bluejays brood their young.

Sonnet: On the superiority of bird song

The bird in the birch tree outside your window,
singing low from the glowing centre of his breast,
sees you now, sweating at the little, cramped desk,
trying to pull down the world’s disparate elements

to justify your hurt, rage, suffering and malevolence
on what is very evidently a blank and defeated page.
White as a dead city or a planet with no atmosphere,
you gaze into the absolute nothing of your pilgrimage.

Then yawn, shrug and cast away your pen in deference:
knowing nothing you could say would make a difference.
Words are discords, which only ever dazzle, hint or evade;
picked up, shaken at the sky, put down again in weak rage

because it’s useless and only the summer bird can say it clear,
but written words are locked in a thick ribbed ice, like winter.

.

Adam Lee lives and works as a bid writer in Manchester. Over the years he has studied 18th c. English Literature, Psychology and History. His poetry is largely concerned with time, death, loss, resurrection and renewal.

Icon

An icon circumscribed
by crepuscular sanctuary,
.                                                sober
slatted roof, mud wall—
a trapped butterfly
colors the slightness.

The lamplit aerie
inhabits geography:
antiphons, tempera,
archaic stanchions,
and finally, an elevated
wine-bearer, victor,

gilded. All-teacher, cover
Your unendurable transfiguration
in nectar, pomegranates, cloud.

Carpenter of isolation,
attentively ignite the nocturnal
presence, and anoint us
.                                             in Your immeasurable harmony.

.

Charles Haddox lives in El Paso, Texas. He has worked in fair trade marketing, and as a grant writer and community organizer. His poetry has appeared in Commonweal, America, The Christian Century, and San Pedro River Review.

HONEY LIGHT

When you wake in honey light
linger where river meets the curve
of a bay round as a waxing moon
where the pearl-feathered heron
glides with outstretched wings
alights in weedy shallows
to become just another shadowed reed
perfectly still in solitude.

Notice her concentration
how she stands on stilty legs
in harmony with time and place
like the pause between piano notes
the space that makes the music
…..the downward pause of Billie Holiday
…..Cohen’s gap that lets the light come in
stands alert and dreamy at water’s edge.

Do not rush through the honey light
but flow in the effortless action
and inaction of night becoming day
of the moon’s light giving way to the sun
and the sun’s rising and sinking
into the ebb and flow of the sea
step into the shallows
stand in wu wei.….a heron-woman.

.

Kathryn MacDonald is the author of A Breeze You Whisper (poems, 2011) and Calla & Édourd (fiction, 2009). She has a second poetry manuscript currently seeking a publisher. Recent poems have been published in Orbis(U.K.), Devour: Art & Lit Canada, and on Spirit of the Hills’ “Pandemic” literary blog. Website: https://KathrynMacDonald.com.

On Running Naked on a Golf Course – York, 2015

Well, after the predicted liberation, it is oddly mundane,
in fact. As if this is a tired old sport
like pétanque, played by confirmist Druid kids
intoxicated with their mainstream divinity

classes – I think of mysticism: being winged in flight
like a golf-ball, from a blackbird’s quivered beak
is a later extrapolation. It is the hard grind
beyond metaphor that counts, not this laboured hole-in-oneness.

.

Sam Hickford spent a lot of time in a silent monastery, and so now talks compulsively to make up for lost time.

White Shadow

Predictably, I’m alone
waiting for a server
at yet another crowded
restaurant in Buenos Aires.

As if from nowhere,
phrases rain hard on
me tonight. In case
they bring meaning,
I scribble them down:

White shadow.
Perfume without aroma.
Elephant riding a butterfly.
Where are my dead loves?

The message is grim.

The doctor says I have been
awaiting an encounter with him
that will never happen.
That I’ve been endlessly
searching this city wanting
him beside me, now
at this too-big table.

The doctor says I’m refusing
to splinter shared into single
self. Shall I emerge whole,
divided but stronger?
Shall I flee this table out
into these wild city streets
or listen to the voices:
stay, order?

.

Beatriz Dujovne is a licensed psychologist with a private psychotherapy practice. She is the author of In Strangers’ Arms: The Magic of the Tango (McFarland, 2011) and Don’t Be Sad After I’m Gone (McFarland, forthcoming) and has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journals.

Writing Poetry

To write the poems that live
in the ink smudged on my fingers
is to give form to the demons
with possession of my hands,

to draw their shapes in the corners
of the pages and watch them
stomp and shout when animated
by the breath of my thumb,

to hover over their impish dance
with an eraser, pondering
whether the strange creatures might
really be angels after all.

.

Based in Modesto, California, Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dewdrop, Deep Wild Journal, Braided Way Magazine, Song of the San Joaquin, and Red Eft Review, among others.