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What If in Some Alternate Universe I Had My Heart & Lungs on Display?

The girl I am descends
heart-first under the last October sky.
I’m a deity of the rivers raging.
God, I’m open.
I’m a salmon swimming back upstream,
cut & bruised, leaping against waterfalls—
strong—my only dream to return
to the source, & in that thought, my iron age turns
golden & suddenly I’m a hero,
my nature seeking the nature it once had,
though wholly lost yet remembering the whole.
I, silver salmon, sparkling fierce
under the blue belly of sun,
speeding through the mountains
immovable in that same blue.

I can feel the iron & thundering,
half-moons rising in my palms seeking
to catch an echo or a rainbow.
It’s true other years bore other fruits,
there to remain forever sweet—
how my first bite of fruit always tastes best.
Year after year I’m unable to divine the good
because rain & tear are not the same.
It’s true every tale must end,
somehow remain behind,
the same dreaming never enough.
& sometimes my fear calls loud
as a sleepless owl, regenerating life
as a bird crooked at the wings.

I must dive as an anchor into the past,
though arm’s length from it,
for fear of being dragged back home.
Here, I only see what isn’t & what isn’t me.
(I’m half-hell & half-morning.)
How I fear the world for dividing & dividing
into things without ever being born.
I want to believe it’s natural to give, to generate,
to take something and make it new.
I wish I could break
& leave nothing but a kind mess.
& you’d be with me in that world.
& I’d let you touch me.

.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, twenty chapbooks, three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words.

Prayer to the High Priestess of Pain

for Frida Kahlo

o, holy mestiza
……………mirror
……………mirage!

how many are drawn
to the bedded isle
to see her lace-lined face?

pilgrims’ sighs infuse the house
reverence is a honied song
around this bright retablo

tin hands beckon from the altar
once the offering is laid
now kneel amid the marigolds

and light a yellow candle
cradled in her flaming gaze,
speak the thing you seek

i wish to make peace with pain
drape it in bright colours
and dance with its crooked form

around the portrait roots climb
caress like a lover’s rough fingers
from the cracked earth

a mystic answer echoes

some are born under a star
but others explode from earthquakes
bleeding glitter

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Jennifer Brough is usually writing, editing or reading. Outside of these wordy pursuits, she is learning Spanish and dreaming of Mexico. Her work has most recently appeared in Re-side, RIC Journal, Burning House Press and is forthcoming in Barren Magazine. She can be found @Jennifer_Brough and on jenniferlbrough.com.

San Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe

The Franciscan priest who baptized Juan Diego
could not pronounce his Nahuatl name
but the peasant didn’t mind.
His wife’s sweet nickname for him
evaporated from his heart the day she died
and many neighbors had already accepted
Spanish names to go with the cupped handful
of holy water ladled on their foreheads.

Think of Juan Diego’s astonishment on his way
to Tenochtitlan that winter morning
hearing his real name Cuauhtlatoatzin!
called into the brittle air—how her radiance
dropped him to his knees in the cold grass,
his eyes briefly blinded by the shimmer
of stars in her long black hair, how
he understood every word she said.

Of course the local bishop didn’t believe
the old man’s testimony until fresh Castilian roses
tumbled from Juan Diego’s open cape and the Virgin’s
beautiful face appeared on the cloth like an admonishment.
Of course the shrine was built and the cape preserved.
Native people walked miles to the sacred spot.
They did not doubt each other or the Virgin
who bore such hope for their lives and told them so
in their own tongue.

.

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).

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

You were a mustard seed growing great
for continents to rest on your arms.

You never abandoned anyone
but gathered flocks of outcasts

who has less dignity than mud-
matted stones or flies on

decaying bodies. You awoke the dying
to give them the last rites of comfort.

A beggar once asked you to put air
back into his lungs. Your smile

gave him the breath to bow before
God alive in you.

Your eyes glowed like cathedrals
solemnizing untouchables,

seeing their sores and stringy
rags as scarlet vestments.

No one ever left your hospice
without a spiritual passport.

Your touch sent them higher
than the pyre smoke of Calcutta

that could never cloud the radiant faces
you saw in heaven’s windows there.

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Philip C. Kolin, Distinguished Prof. of English (Emeritus) at the Univ. of Southern Mississippi has published nine collections of poems, the most recent being Emmett Till in Different States: Poems (Third World Press, 2015) and Reaching Forever: Poems (Cascade Books, Poiema Series, 2019). He has published more than 350 poems in such journals as Spiritus, Christian Century, America, The Cresset, Theology Today, US Catholic, Sojourners, St. Austin Review, Christianity and Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Louisiana Literature, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Emmanuel, and Vocations and Prayer.

Small Graces

I sit down with my lute
of Western Red Cedar and Yew,
I mother it gently into my lap,
its curved back, like the curve of the earth.
My fingers search the courses,
fumbling, breaking the melody
into fractious shards,
the undeniable broken strains
of the world’s descant ruptured.
Yet dreams of wholeness
blossom in the spaces between,
dreams of daffodils and blue bonnets,
small graces, defying their seasons,
blooming along this stony road
that is ours together.

.

Melissa A. Chappell is a native of South Carolina, USA. Besides wrting, she enjoys the outdoors and plays several musical instruments, including the lute. She has a BA in the Theory of Music and a Master of Divinity. She shares her life with her family and two miniature schnauzers. Her favorite authors are Adrienne Rich and Wendell Berry.

The Broken Tulip

For decades, no one knew
what caused the flaring
the feathering of tulips,
Parrot like,
Red on orange
Peppermint red on white
Black on tangerine —
The eruption into flame
for broken tulips like
Absalom and Mabel

What causes tulips to “break”?
The mosaic virus
carried by aphids
infects bulbs
and the flower breaks
its hold on one color,
the primary color suppressed
and lighter colors bleeding through

the beauty of a curse

.

Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and professor. Her chapbook, Flower Map, was published by Finishing Line Press (2013).  In 2014, her poem “Written on Skin” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Born in Brazil, Ms. Leipziger is the author of several books on human rights and sustainability. She advises companies around the world on social and environmental issues. Her poems have been published in Salamander, Voices Israel, POESY, Wilderness House Review, Ibbetson Street, and the Muddy River Poetry Review. She is the founding co-editor of Soul-Lit.  http://flowermap.net/

Late Night Call with God

God’s voice echoed through
every house I’ve ever lived in
and every house I’ve ever lied in
whispering I don’t know how you have done it
withstanding the waves and the woods
the knife and the night
the stillness of the void

If You don’t know then who does
I breathed into the stars
Certainly not me
I can’t even understand how I write these words sometimes
let alone live

God replied gently
Writing and living is plenty

.

Phil Goldstein is a journalist and writer who has been living in the Washington, D.C, area for more than a decade. His poetry has been published in the journals In Parentheses and The Ideate Review, and his work is also forthcoming in Awakened Voices. By day, he works as a senior editor for Manifest, a content marketing agency.

Wandering in Search of Truth

I stand before You,
Your word, Your Truth, Your people,
as a boy about to become a man,
who had stopped being a boy years before.

If that sacred space were empty
would I even be able to empty myself before You?
To stop pretending I am pure, like milk, like honey?

I want to scream out across
the generations who venerated You, who praised You,
and ask You why.

Why did You allow this to happen?
Why did You allow Your creation to be defiled?
If You are just and merciful and Your love is everlasting,
how could You allow such evil to take root in Your garden?
How could You concern Yourself with the affairs of others
while I suffered, all the while working to
earn Your favor as a man
of the covenant?

Where were Your flashes of lightning and peals of thunder
to strike him down and set me free?
Where was Your parting of the sea
while I was being torn apart?
Where were Your plagues when I needed them,
to take the first-born son so he could no longer hurt me?

Like so many others I was condemned to wander the desert.

Who are You to me — then, now and always?
I do not know. All I know is the taste of sand.

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Phil Goldstein is a journalist and writer who has been living in the Washington, D.C, area for more than a decade. His poetry has been published in the journals In Parentheses and The Ideate Review, and his work is also forthcoming in Awakened Voices. By day, he works as a senior editor for Manifest, a content marketing agency.

The Word

In this time,
when so much has been silenced,
I will speak this word.

I will make it the heroine
of the stories I tell my daughter,
so she too
can carry it with her.

I will weave it into all that I remember
and which she has never known:
the carefree play of children,
the cook-stove smell of roasting meat,
and moonlight on bloodless snow.

I will call on it for the return
of husbands and sons, fathers and brothers;
for the reuniting
of sisters and friends.

I will wield it against this ebb of sense
and civility, and I will have faith
that it will not abandon us.

.

Mary Kipps is a US writer whose poetry has appeared in literary journals and anthologies around the world since 2005. She is also the author of three Kindle eBooks: All in Vein, A Sucker for Heels, and Bitten: A Practical Guide to Dating a Vampire.

When Windows Are Not Windows

Everything in my recent life comes down to three windows. I’m looking through one right now, on the opposite wall of the room I rarely leave. Outside are two stout limbs of an old maple, the kind that used to line our street in upstate New York. I rarely leave because 1,600 years ago some desert sage told a disciple to “go, sit in your room, and your room will teach you everything.” Spirit nudged me to follow this advice. So I sit here and Spirit comes to visit and the morning sky shades from deep blue to sky blue or more often gray. And you get essays like this to read.

The room holds a lot of silence. Sometimes Spirit and I just gaze at each other. At least I think Spirit’s gazing: a warmth just behind my solar plexus serves as evidence. Sometimes I do zazen, the Zen practice of sitting and non-thinking and gazing into emptiness. Mostly I write essays like this and people read them. Other things happen in this room too—TV at night, chats with my wife (yes, some hermits have spouses). At some point in each activity, I look through the window: full moon against black, silver sky with orange wash, the views haikus are made of.

* * *

Julian of Norwich spent most of her life in one room. She too had three windows: one to see the altar in the adjoining church, one to pass necessaries back and forth (food, chamber pot), one to give people advice and counsel. She lived in her room, and her room taught her everything, and she gave it all away.

My friend Stephen got me reacquainted with Julian. This was four years ago, before “go, sit in your room” applied to me, when my window was just a window with a lovely view. Stephen and I were studying to become spiritual directors, people who help other people figure out where Spirit is in their lives. During one class he described Julian’s life and her one room and her three windows and I could feel that familiar nudge from Spirit that said, Pay attention. This is for you.

* * *
The second window, from fifteen years ago, was also for me, though I didn’t really know it at the time. It looked through the wall of a monastery chapel onto the South African veldt. I could see a long, low hill near the horizon line, mostly bare, a spindly tree on each side. In the chapel, the monks chanted the cycle of psalms and sacred texts that make up their life of prayer. As I listened, the chanting, the view, Spirit, and the monks converged. By itself the window wouldn’t have changed my life—wouldn’t have led to my current window—but the convergence did.

I wonder if the window was more of a touchstone, a place to bring the experiences of our three weeks in South Africa. The Sunday School students, a dozen silent teens wanting to hear about America. My yearning, and my failure, to connect with them. The Xhosa woman from Cradock township who had a crazy-making teen daughter, as we did, parents half a world apart with the same aggravation. The monkeys on the roadside and the shacks with tin roofs and the sheet-metal sculptures for sale at rural intersections. The very last morning when I rushed out of the chapel round the back and burst into tears. The half-conscious sense, on the ten-hour drive back to Johannesburg and the airport, that Spirit was about to shove everything aside—my business success, my rising income, my place in the community—and fill the void with Spirit’s Own Self.

* * *
I don’t know what Spirit had to shove aside with Julian, but her watershed took a harder road: seven days in bed, so near death her eyes fixed in a glassy stare and a priest gave her Last Rites. She didn’t fear death—it would bring her straight to God, after all—and the only reason to keep on living was to learn to love God better. God apparently had different ideas: the illness suddenly gave way to fifteen visions in two days. Julian spent decades reflecting on them, and we got a book for the ages to read.

* * *
I look through the third window and a person looks back at me. I have been her spiritual director for years now, sniffing around for where Spirit might be lurking in her life. I know this has changed her, focused her, forced her latent talents into resplendent blossom. You might dismiss this window since it sits on my lap, but it is no less a window. It may be more window: not just onto—onto a tree, a hill, a veldt—but into.

Julian had an into window as well. Margery Kempe, tradesperson and mother of fourteen, came to the window to pour out her soul and her visions and ask if they came from God. Julian was all comfort and confirmation—thanking God “with all her heart for his visitation” to Margery, advising her to “fulfil with all her might whatever he put into her soul.” I can almost feel Julian’s heart swell, as mine does when a face appears at my window and peers at me, or maybe through me to their own deep selves.

* * *
Julian has been gone six hundred years. We still don’t know her real name: she’s always been known by the church where she lived (St. Julian) and the town around it (Norwich). After all the good that passed through them, her windows are now just windows.

Before too long I will follow her. Someone will buy my house and discard my laptop and my windows will also lose their significance. Both of us will have disappeared with hardly a trace.

Unless I have misunderstood windows from the beginning.

Thomas Merton, famous monk, once wrote that the Virgin Mary was “as pure as the glass of a very clean window that has no other function than to admit the light of the sun.” If Mary was a window, perhaps we all are, or strive to be, with no other function than to let Spirit pass through.

Windows may be windows but we are something more.

And maybe that never ends. John of the Cross, famous mystic, spoke of the dark night of the soul—a condition where the light of Spirit is so close and so bright it looks like darkness to us. I have seen these dark nights and will likely see more. Maybe they’re preparing me for that final day, when I become a window that darkness passes through.

# # #

A spiritual director, nonbinary person, and quasi-hermit, John Backman writes about ancient spirituality and the unexpected ways it collides with postmodern life. This includes a book (Why Can’t We Talk? Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart) and personal essays in Tiferet Journal, Amethyst Review, Evolve, Sufi Journal, The Sunlight Press, and Belmont Story Review, among other places.