Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ode to Elijah’s Laughter

Your laughter sounds
like the forgiveness
I have never been able
to offer myself.

Whole, pure, and healing.
A song of redemption—

Raise my right hand
over your heart and I might
leave it there, so I can feel
where your joy is born

and name that place
what we have no language
to contain.

 

By day, Julia Bonadies is an 8th-grade English teacher at Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts Middle, and by night she is a professional writing tutor at Manchester Community College. Her work most recent work can be found in The Chronicle, Halfway Down the Stairs, and NEATE’s The Leaflet.

“Death is the mother of Beauty”
Wallace Stevens

To know this truth
is to follow the path
of a gull as he glides
downward in the stillness
of a held breath.

To know this truth
is to linger as a silent
procession of small ripples
of waves makes its way
to the rocks where
it consents to stop
without a stir or sound.

To know this truth
is to watch the late autumn
sun brush the trees’ last leaves
of brown with a copper tint.
They chime in the uplift of the wind.

 

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.

On a Northern Shore

The shining neck creates a quivering song. The loon becomes a sound.
Its throat shimmers above the lake, and now the tune becomes a sound.

The lake takes the blankness, night’s blackness, and all sound is dissolved.
Echoes resound off water, up, and the round moon becomes a sound.

What of those old elegiac notes of dawn’s despair? They disappear.
What of desire? With the time to attune, it too becomes a sound.

Sunset once more and from a silent throat comes something that just is,
releasing the long day; that everlasting boon becomes a sound

washing away the light, the water, darkness, and desire.
Wait, pilgrim on the silent shore, listening soon becomes a sound.

.

Brian Palmer is inspired by the idea that everything lies in beauty along a continuum of emergence and decay and at any given moment has the capacity to inspire. Recently, he’s been published at The Ekphrastic Review, in Small Farmer’s Journal, and The Light Ekphrastic.

Gently does it

It takes time for the days to strengthen. We want the world to be golden and emerald when we open the door to a March morning – we want daffodils resting on clover, gilt eggs, the heat of day. But this light is lemon, the pale neutral of newborn swaddling blankets. This is still a chilly sun, but the breeze promises leaf buds and the answers to your prayers as a reward for your patience. There’s no need for a sacrifice – unless you want to give up everything that wastes your time, to make room for brighter beams when they at last shine across the path. Give thanks to the sun and the shadows while we are perfectly balanced, spinning in space. The story repeating here is undefined; the magic of renewal is one-size-fits-all. In Christ, they say, they are born again. But every spring we are all born again. Each rotation is a chance to greet the slow warming ready to run – lips parted, a mouthful of song.

 

Kate Garrett is a writer, witch, mama, and drummer who sometimes haunts 450 year old houses (as a heritage volunteer). Her next book, A View from the Phantasmagoria, is due out in October 2020 from Rhythm & Bones Press. She lives halfway up a hillside in Sheffield, England. www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk

Beads

My fascination with beads began when I was five years old. My dad
brought me an abacus to calculate my sums at school, but my
enchantment with numbers went beyond the mathematical. It became
associated with colorful globes with pivotal holes, rows of planets
whose interactions produced pleasant sounds like that of glass, with a
rapidity of motion that slides as in our playgrounds. As I grew older,
the sight of a string of beads in my grandmother’s hand gave those
orbs a mystic dimension, for they slowed their pace between her opal
fingers as she mumbled her daily invocations to God with a hushed
sound to express reverence. I thought my grandmother was making with
devotional beads her own prayer sums. Despite the slowing of their
motion and the subduing of their glass-like sound, they kept their
fascination in a child’s mind.

When I was in Australia hunting for a job, boarding myriads of
Melbourne’s trams, I always met the same old man, a very tall and
stout figure with snow-white hair and a silvery beard, covered all
over with fascinating rows of beads. He had them everywhere, round his
neck, his hands, and on his fingers. I called him the Beads Man. He
must have been a religious priest in some mystic cult. His eyes shone
with intelligence and gleamed as the beads with which he was heavily
adorned, his beaded armor.

I learnt lately that some people believe that beads ward off evil. In
some countries, babies have a blue bead attached to their clothes to
counter the pernicious effect of the wicked eye. I can understand that
the allure of a blue bead could distract the malicious eye, but can
beads defeat Satan with all his might. If they can, it must be the
power of prayers with which beads are endowed.

Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with
a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have
appeared in multiple venues including Down in the Dirt, Impspired
Magazine, Mad Swirl, A New Ulster, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Ink
Pantry, and the Pennsylvania Literary Journal.

Basins of Sound

There is no top. There are always further heights to reach.

—Jascha Heifetz, Lithuanian-born violinist

Once in a while,
the drifts of what I hear
arc above muddy sounds,
and their permanence is sensible,
I am glad to sharpen my listening.

Will I, like the young who need
high volume sound piped into their
ears until the throbs beat again,
attune my listening only to my whims?

My ears, catchment basins of sound
and filters against the cacophony
which is merely noise, increase keenly,
and reach beyond the familiar,
and learn anew as Heifetz did.

 

Phoebe Marrall, orphaned at the age of nine, was a survivor of The Depression and of a grueling childhood. When she died in 2017 at the age of eighty-four, her daughters Jane Hendrickson and Camille Komine inherited hundreds of poems she had written. They remained unpublished during her lifetime, but it is the intention of her daughters that a collection be compiled for readers to appreciate. Relief, Have You a Name? is currently a work in progress, being edited by Gayle Jansen Beede.

 

snowdrops on ash wednesday

she kissed my forehead at night
when the world was drowsy and
mrs. beasley and I were snuggled
safe down deep beneath cotton-cool
sheets and moon-yellow blanket
a lone snowdrop tickling my
furrowed bedtime brow
prophet of winter’s death
a mother’s tender-fierce
twilight touch marking me

her fingers that served our
sunday in remembrance bread
brushed my forehead
weightless as a feather
floating across my face
perhaps from a house
finch escaping the hiss of
a neighbor’s big yellow tomcat
to dust you shall return

kiss mrs beasley too i demanded
and she always did but not
without a fuss since mrs beasley
was a doll and not real at all except
her berry blush lipstick left
a puckered seal and
i was reassured since i
could never see my own
forehead but mrs beasleys
smudged face held my eyes
until night danced with stardust

.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a PCUSA minister.

Dear Dreamer

Deer singing the world into being
Deer rolling the rocks from the cave door
Antlers emerging from the chinks of the flaring woodstove
A beloved’s tracks
In my heart gathered
On the moon tonight
Eating night’s highest flowers and blue pools
Milkweed and moon
Shedding the snows of life
Quilts of seed
Coats of armor decomposed
Deer people of the shedding sun
People of the moon deer
Deer of my heart of husk
Dancing among the fallen shrouds
Deer forest of torches
Dancing into being the foxfire ground
Deer tipping its head in the foxfire forest of antlers found
Eclipsing all human tools
Deer giving the shrouds back
To the waiting moon

 

John Rock grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan in the United States and spent many years making and showing experimental films in San Francisco and on the shores of Lake Superior working on poetry.  He is the author of the poetry collections DANCING THE SOLITUDES and THE DIARY OF SNOW ARISEN and the novels REPORT THE EARTH, THE NIGHT FLYING COLLECTIVE, TO THE WELL OF EARTH and ORDERS OF THE MOON.  Books and audio recordings at www.johnrockpoetry.com

Renewal

The sheets at Frances Street
Are as soft as a lover’s caress.

I’ll just stay here today, I think.
A bed-in, protest of sorts
Against venturing out
Once again into the
Unknown of the day.

But the sheets have a serious rival.
Through the curtain gap
I glimpse golden light,
The kind that beckons
“Come, see! Look at
Paradise found!”

I obey, and sleepwalk
To the kitchen kettle.
Soon, with my inky black tea
I step out the back door.
Bask in the sun’s rays,
Dip toes in the pool.
Marvel at the jungleness of our yard.
Stop to catch the scent of gardenia
But it’s only an imposter.

Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Sigh. Sigh again.
Elusive peace lives here, I think.
How lucky am I
To have found its nest?

 

Ann Weil is a former teacher and professor. Her third act includes writing poetry that explores and honors the continuum of human emotion.

 

No Good Meditation

 

6:10 a.m. Semi-lotus, hands in lap, eyes front. Focus soft. Chin tucked. Go.

Sitting. I am sitting.

That’s what Zen masters tell us to focus on. Wait, no, there’s no I involved. Just sitting.

Sitting.

I shall have shredded wheat this morning. Sumatran coffee. Drifting. Hurt’s still there. Wonder if I can ever forgive them. Or myself, when I look in the mirror. I look in mirrors and see a woman’s eyes. Eyes, window to the soul. Cliché. Come back.

I am sitting.

Sitting.

On my forearm: stink bug? They’re in the house. Sit, goddamn it.

Sitting. Sitting.

Sitting zazen. Zazen eases depression, said that magazine. Send them one of my essays? No, not shredded wheat: the new Kashi cereal I picked up. Maybe a combination. With coffee.

Coffee.

Come back. Glance at the clock. Five more minutes. Must hurry. Sitting. Sittingsittingsitting.

No, not like that.

Time.

Bow. Up. Creak to my feet. Bow thrice: to Buddha, to Jesus, to Thérèse of Lisieux—my BFF, Catholic saint extraordinaire, who said, “I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.”

Wonder what she meant by good. Maybe she looks down from heaven and sees what I’ve done here and thinks bad. Yeah, but this is zazen: no good, no bad, just is. At least I’ve learned that much.

I think.

 

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A writer, speaker, and spiritual director, John Backman writes about ancient spirituality and the unexpected ways it can affect 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 such places as Tiferet Journal, Amethyst Review, and Belmont Story Review.