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Canto II

In the earliest age of the gods, existence was born from non-existence (Rigveda X.LXXII.II )

Extended leg pistol squats, CCTV robberies —
Think oft’ truly well, the days before Anna and Olly
They made lemonade popsicles and fed waterfowl oats.

…………..Deep entombed, the austere was always subtle.
…………..Paint fence posts white and paint the barn doors — SOS.

Says it’s old and new.

…………..SHOWTUNES™ before predawn drill patience / cadence called
…………..to sing-song rhythm, the march of six feet locust. Un moment de faveurs idiotes.

No fear to beget.

Simply play in the sprinkler and pick tulips by the overpass.
Pass out lunch baggies: “Porque de tal manera amó Dios al mundo, que ha dado á su Hijo unigénito, para que todo aquel que en él cree, no se pierda, mas tenga vida eterna.”

Tire not, in trying-times to see a glowing.
For what it is —          silly fox, here is summer. There is spring.
Here was the henhouse; now see what you’ve done?
All the feathers —
scattered?

Lift the restriction on taboo interlocation. It is also a prescription against trying-times.
Na hanamacha caillte
 
Press to ground. Ear and eyes and matted hair in the amphitheater.

…………..So there was no relief in the mountain ranges or the desert landscapes?
…………..No — the air was too thick to manage.
…………..The grey clouds stayed for days.
…………..But underground some found refuge.

…………..Before the shovels hit granite, that is, there was no room left to bury.
…………..The sea was the next bet.

Here we find the captain, surely stable. Held-high himself,
gathered up a crew for the garish vessel.

Set sail for an open ocean mutiny.
Flying under a red flag —
…………..…………..…………..Nous mourons en Christ

.

Andrew Hutto is originally from north Georgia but currently writes out of Kentucky. He recently graduated from the University of Louisville with a degree in English. His sonnet was selected for the Hands and Feet Poetry Derby at Churchill Downs. In the summer of 2019, he served as a preliminary judge for the Louisville Literary Arts Writer’s Block fiction prize. His poetry appears in Thrush and is forthcoming in Barnhouse and Eunoia Review. For more information visit www.andrewhutto.org

A Song for This Morning

I saw the baby Robins being fed
in their nest this morning.

Little head/beak shapes pointed skyward
and mother Robin depositing food there.

Upstretched yearning was met
with just what it needs. Just what it asks for.

And nothing expected in exchange.
No bargaining or requirements in payment.

Nothing expected in return except for growth
and development and a carrying-on of life

in the skies, on branches; just an eventual soaring
of wings on air. Feathers, nests, eggs, song.

.

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.

the space between us

for now we see through a glass dimly
but then we shall see face to face
so said a man called paul in holy writ

what manner of crystal ball did he peer into
and see how I wait today by a window to
glimpse like mottled koi beneath murky water

broken eyes familiar and strange
looking back at me through a glass dimly
that is me watching myself watch others

in a house of mirrors set in virtual rows
where I can touch my own face and
not feel a thing—but the space between us

and the tenderest of hopes that
for now we see through a glass dimly
but then we shall see face to face

.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, NC. Her poems have been published by Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, Panoply, Poets Reading the News, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice.

After Reading a Poem Titled “The Entrance to Purgatory” by Iain Lonie

The architecture of isolation is something about air around everything, the way light encircles the first daffodils, encourages their singular golden opening with a bit of space between each of them on their hollow stems. The architecture of waiting is something about dropping down like a tap root, how to trust the deeper water, earth’s dark heartbeat, how to trust time as if it comes from a god who offers Purgatory as a resting place, a take-your-shoes-off-and-lie-down place while mistakes, oversights, sins, ordinary trouble can be sorted out elsewhere. And the architecture of forgiveness is the house with the soft bed where you rest for a time, safe. And alone.

.

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Florida Review, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Trampset, Amethyst Review, SWWIM Every Day and other journals. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag).

Vespers

Thunder over Ontario
echoes so deep that

no one hears rain, or
the silence before rain

dimples the lake that
mirrors a dark sky . . .

Standing there, on
the lip of sand, looking

up, or is it down—rain
fills the cup of my hands.

.

 M.J. Iuppa’s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017). For the past 31 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.

Mystery

The second step we take in AA
is to believe in a power
greater than ourselves.
Newly sober, I tried to trust

in a peaceful alpine meadow,
then the love of the AA group itself;
later I embraced the eastern pantheon,
so different from the trinity

I had tried and failed to love.
I learned Sanskrit chants and poems.
But one day in meditation noticed
that no matter how many verses

I sang to the guru’s sandals,
it was always You who showed up,
looking like Charlton Heston
in The Ten Commandments,

and maybe a little like my dad:
tall, feet planted, eyes on the horizon,
the true man taking charge.
Though I am grateful to know

You at all, I would really like You
to show up as someone else:
Xena the Warrior Princess perhaps,
or Helen Mirren looking lovely—

a smart, strong woman in her 60’s.
But I seem to be stuck with You,
the right-wing guy with granite
tablets in one arm and a rifle

in the other. You are not a God
of compassion or comfort,
but You are the God that has kept
me sober all these years.

.

Kali Lightfoot‘s poems and reviews of poetry have appeared in journals and anthologies, and been nominated twice for Pushcart, and once for Best of the Net. Her debut collection is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2021. Kali earned an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, find her at kali-lightfoot.com.

Jazz Is
For my brother Nat, 1925-2017

“Jazz is…” I heard your recorded voice
on the airwaves last night.
In a short, deep breath I caught
it steady and smooth as a gull passing
by my window, or a slow wave
coming in to shore. I heard it rising
like a mast after I told you good news.
I heard it bracing as the winter air
when long ago you looked up
and explained, “The bare tree is not ugly.
Its limbs dance with the wind,
stand strong alone against the sky.”

I heard your voice stretch out
like Tibetan prayer flags hung
high across a rooftop, their colors
holding fast when you said,
“I love you very much,”
the last time we were together
before you could no longer speak.

 .

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, “Borrowed Scenery,” Yuganta Press, and “Through the Trees of Autumn,” Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild.

art of enlightenment

We walked to the
pond and the island
the day dad died
I said “I think I’ve
found the meaning
of life — Art. Merton
says it enables us
to find ourselves
and lose ourselves
at the same time. I’m
writing my best poetry
right now.” You motioned
toward the pizza box the
chipotle bag the bud cans
scattered beyond the over
flowing bin. “You get
those over there,” you
said. “I’ll start here.”

 

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.

Salt and Song: If Mother Braids a Waterfall by Dayna Patterson, Signature Books 138pp

Review by Sarah Law

This beautifully written collection is equally beautifully structured and presented, as voices and time periods are carefully overlaid to evoke and explore the profound contradictions of female experience in the Mormon tradition. Poet Dayna Patterson traces her own lineage through more than a century of ancestors, and while both male and female figures are vividly sketched, it is the role of women that is highlighted – and interrogated – the most; these female voices create the braided reams of water, language and light making up this collection’s essential energy. ‘Dear Ancestress, Matriarch/ Root: I want to taste your song, hear your salt,’ declares the poet (‘Dear Ellen, 1863’). Fine historical photographs and a helpful family tree will help the reader feel at home too with a  complex weave of character and narrative.

The book is loosely divided into sections, each of which begins with a particularly strong piece, a prose poem or lyric essay, engaging or disengaging with Mormonism – the overarching historical, cultural and religious framework which informs the work. I was won over by the very first of these: ‘The Mormons are Coming’ is a piece crackling with imagery and imaginative tensions and the autobiographical threads which also play an important part in subsequent unravelling narratives. Narratives, rather than narrative, not least because plurality and multiplicity are essential to the Mormon past traditions of polygamy.

The outer and inner lives of Mormon women equally fascinate in these poems. In one, Patterson asks her grandfather about his experience of having three wives: ‘Was it like trying to read three books at once/ shelving and reshelving/ the plots entangling?’ (‘Dear Charles’). There is humour in this poem, and a hint that polygamy may have its advantages for women as well as its obvious downsides. Patterson’s metaphor of entangled plots doesn’t detract from the poem’s acknowledgement of the youth of these teenage brides and the ‘hierarchy of heartache’ that will inevitably set in. Each wife has her own formidable qualities, and a necessary will to survive.

The survival instinct of the wives, of Patterson’s mother in particular, is passed on to the speaker herself, a ‘grandgirl clacking her claws’. (‘Dear Grandpa’). Childhood experiences of growing up Mormon provide some resonant vignettes: daunting responsibilities such as door-to-door evangelising are re-cast through childhood eyes as the visiting of harmless dollhouses in the soft blurring of snowfall (‘Missionary Work in Kanata, Canada’). This poem is poignantly followed by ‘Proselytizing by a Marian shrine in Quebec’, where we meet, by contrast, a Catholic flourish of femininity. The encounter leaves an impression: ‘In my mind/ a feminine goddess, throneless/ wanders.’

Patterson’s attention to language equals her attention to narrative fragment, and I particularly liked the way familiar imagery is subverted, re-purposed: ‘Apples’ is a sharply-sweet lyrical piece of juxtaposed sections, using the fruit, ‘Eve’s calling card’ to mark the painful stages of a woman’s life. ‘I can’t wrap my hands around this dolor – white/ weight, skin smooth, cold core. Blood and sweet.’ (‘Apples’). Apples are not the only figure of speech to receive a visceral re-imagining. The collection’s second section opens with the prose-poem ‘Post-Mormons are Leaving’ and describes them bearing family trees ‘on their shoulders, the weight of generations, roots raking the earth.’

This stand-out piece explores the differences between being ‘ex’ and being ‘post’ a heritage, a belief system, a way of life. To be ‘Post-Mormon’, Patterson suggests, is to acknowledge your roots, to mourn and move forward rather than simply discard. There are further wonderful poetic metaphors throughout this poem to tease out the concept, with sounds and syllables called into performative service: ‘Post-Mormons are leaving the harsh x (like hex) of the Ex-Mormons and gathering their sorrow into the O of Post.’ In ‘Ring Tricks’ comes another beautiful Post-Mormon statement: ‘Our orthodoxy/ changed, etched over, effaced// by our palimpsestual selves.’ I loved the neologism ‘palimpsestual’, suggesting a plurality of textual, not just sexual, transactions.

Patterson’s Post-Mormon perspective has not effaced her sense of the Divine completely; merely changed it – in some ways reversed it – from the patriarchal reverence that all too often dominates religious systems. Instead, her ideal deities are childlike and celebratory, ‘the smiling kind, the rolling laughter, the squeal and clap after candles/ blow themselves out,/ cheering for our little light.’ (‘I Could Never Be a Jehovah’s Witness’). With this perspective, entering your sleeping child’s bedroom becomes a visit to a hallowed place, a nightly act of ritual in a ‘quiet sanctuary’ (‘Moses Removed His Shoes’). Post-Mormon spirituality also allows for a wide-ranging catechistic celebration of various faiths and spiritual figures, a wonder-filled plurality (‘Former Mormons Catechise Their Kids’). Then again, there is the intensely practical but also deeply symbolic shedding of Temple garments, the all-protective Mormon underwear, eventually discarded ‘like the carcasses of doves’ (‘The Disposal of Mormon Underwear’), leaving the non-wearer experiencing both freedom and vulnerabilities hitherto unknown.

Interwoven with these Post-Mormon observations are poetic reflections on personal relationships, including love and marriage, and how they bring a unique joy. Surprisingly, one of the best love-poems in this collection (‘Pon Farr’) draws its language from Star Trek mythology, later matched by the wonderful ‘Study for Belief with lines from Star Trek: the Original Series’. Perhaps the juxtaposition of sci-fi, faith and poetry should have seemed odd, but to me (a fellow – should that be sister – Trekkie), it felt instead quite delightful.

Patterson’s experience of her mother’s own earlier sexual rebellion (read the book to find out more) prompts an open-minded, daring revision of scriptural certainties, a ‘queering’ of gospel narratives that juggles risks and insights in ingenious poetry such as ‘Vestigial’ and ‘Our Lord Jesus in Drag’. Nothing is sacred, finally, in the traditional sense, perhaps, but in a wider, poetic sense, shot through with grace, everything is. The collection ends with the glorious ‘Still Mormon’: in this superb list -poem of imaginative similes, there is even an echo of the previous Trek-based poems: ‘The way a tethered astronaut turns to face the deep black of space while loving the sun on her back…’

To conclude: I thoroughly recommend basking in this unique collection – it will leave you vertiginous with Patterson’s poetic talent, and deeply engaged as a reader.