Category Archives: Uncategorized

Air

All that moves is the air that quivers between us
All that moves is the air that quivers between
All that moves is the air that quivers
All that moves is the air
All that moves is
All that moves
All that
All
All that
All that moves
All that moves is
All that moves is the air
All that moves is the air that quivers
All that moves is the air that quivers between
All that moves is the air that quivers between us

 

Sara Epstein is a clinical psychologist from Winchester, Massachusetts, who writes poetry and songs, especially about light and dark places. Her poems are forthcoming or appeared in Silkworm, Paradise in Limbo, Mom Egg Review, Chest Journal, Literary Mama, and two anthologies: Sacred Waters, and Coming of Age.

New Year’s Eve

For a friend who died, a friend who used to love me
and a friend who taught me something about silence.

People don’t talk about death.
She’d wanted to come on that walk.
Keep changing the subject
when it’s suggested
again and again.

This is a stage
of silence, its edges
chipping where thought
breaks off and dries
scratched faint, unreadable.

The Christmas card
that gives up saying Will
be less rubbish this year
will remain unanswered.
No one will notice.

This is where words
land and break on each other,
dusty as blood. But silence
is where it will happen
if it’s to happen at all.

I covered my friend in words
I couldn’t see through.
God just whispered Ok.
Years later I saw exactly what
I’d been holding in the dark.

 

Carolyn Oulton has been published in magazines including Acumen,Artemis, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, from the edge, Ink Sweat & Tears,Nine Muses, Orbis, The Poetry Village,The Moth and Seventh Quarry. Her most recent collection Accidental Fruit is published by Worple Press. Her website is at carolynoulton.co.uk

Beatitudes of January

Blessed is the staying in bed cold winter darkness.
Blessed is the booming and breaking river ice.
Blessed is the speeding street scraping snow plow.
Blessed is the punctual growl of the newspaper man’s broken muffler.
Blessed is the dutiful bark of the neighbor’s dog.
Blessed is the biting and whistling north wind.
Blessed is the scurrying roof squirrel.
Blessed is her soft and heavenly breathing.

 

Fredric Hildebrand is a retired physician living in Neenah, WI. His poetry has appeared in Art Ascent, Bramble, Millwork, Tigershark, and Verse-Virtual. He received the Mill Prize for Poetry Honorable Mention Award in both 2017 and 2018. When not writing or reading, he plays acoustic folk guitar and explores the Northwoods with his wife and two Labrador retrievers.

Spin Out

Kabir said, “Friend, please tell me what I can do about this world
I hold to, and keep spinning out!”

The mystic poet curls inside the cup of lotus blossom tea.
The steam, his breath, clouds my breath.
(Persia kisses my mouth)

His bones, a mist that fogs my spectacles
In a dervish of desert mind.
(Was that me holding tight, spinning out?)

His voice, a storm of rabab strings made of sheep gut
Plucking away with eternal questions that sound like prophesy.
(Was that a riddle? Birth, old age, sickness, death?)

What can I do about this world tangled in my hair,
And its DNA woven in my heart?
(Impermanence and the endless highway, a cosmic joke)

Even Kabir spins out like a teenage boy in a hotrod
Bound by curiosity and the lute strings of love.
(Be here now, says Ram Dass)

But, what does one do with vision and desire beaded with hope
Now birthing in my teacup?
(Wake up!)

Abandon all hope! Don’t be fooled, my friend!
Kiss the eyelids of hope and watch it sink to the bottom of the cup.
(Toss out the tea leaves)

Kabir and I will ride the wind over the lands.
We will watch one another’s back and tap the shoulder of samsara.
(What can I do about this world I hold onto and keep spinning out?)

 

 

 

Patsy Kate Booth is a lifelong adventurer, poet and writer. Her work has been published in several anthologies, including Lummox Press, The Sandhill Review, Willow Creek Journal, A Walk Along the River, and recently prose in Why We Boat, a compilation of river stories. She is currently working on poetry and stories of her life in the upper Rio Grande of Colorado. You can visit her new blog at patsykate.wordpress.com.

ICHTHYS

‘…so go down to the lake and throw in a line.
Open the mouth of the first fish you catch, and you will find a large silver coin.’
Matthew 17:27

Words are like a human body, meaning that they are the outer skin of one’s potential. The constitution of words wait heavily pregnant with symbol and associations if processed. Writing is the bait and subsequent interpretation is the fish biting so it can be drawn up to be eaten. It is the symbolic partaking of the body of Christ or Holy Communion or in psychic terms, an assimilation of a part of our true nature which inspires a coalescence with the sacred.

Metaphorically, a liminal writer who travails on the shore endeavors to unite the sea with the sand, that is, to scrutinize the debris which washes up in order to understand old attitudes so patterns of behavior which are no longer serving one’s needs dissolve. In other words, the shore is a resolution zone which soothes ambivalences by shifting perceptions so nascent consciousness merges with already imbibed material.

The unconscious sphere is a scaffolding of language which can be expressed and explicated if one learns that the spiritual world is not guided by Aristotelian logic but rather a multifaceted one because it is structured as a rotating, shifting and expanding plexus of associations.2 Through a controlled abaissement du niveau mental, it is possible to start lifting and sifting through layers of meaning.3 With mastery, this is substantially identical to falling asleep to spotlight one’s unconscious life-course through the dream. It should be remembered that the drawstring of this sea-like inner Self is not knotted and choked so repressed contents are free to bubble up to surface. Initially, it will appear like gold found in a trunk so heavily obscured in mud, it is almost unrecognizable.

A writer becomes more adept at breaking through the sensory and goal-focused world as they learn to trust their own intuition and value-system. Incrementally and in manageable doses, a writer will learn to climb down into a more murky and unconfined Self by dismissing the temptation to squeeze into a mold or a conventional-type container so they are more boundless, fluid and honest because to contact the sacred is to simultaneously acknowledge one’s parts which are dreaded and denied. This process should feel synonymous to trusting someone with one’s seedy and underground components without worrying about repercussions so that the dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ can be integrated.

Allowing oneself to flow more uninhibitedly, gestates writing in its most raw, purportedly tangential and experimental form so swimming around in it begins to unhook doors to the nebulous staircases of the mind. One’s androgynous being buds into life after the feminine ‘liquid’ qualities and the more masculine attributes of ‘action and execution’ merge. Working behind the scenes of language stimulates rhizomes of meaning relationships since communicated words are impacted and motivated by one’s past experiences and ancestry and have been bent and reshaped so that at times their ingrained idiosyncratic meanings deviate from the traditional dictionary meaning.4

The mind has to be supple and malleable enough to filigree around mainstream definitions to jig-saw the more aberrant but relevant interpretations. In this way, more weight is given to the person’s reality rather than their desired ego image which in turn dances towards wholeness through a recurrent process of reconciliation and consciousness.

References:
1. Skodo A. (Ed). Other Logics: Alternatives to Formal Logic in the History of Thought and Contemporary Philosophy. Brill, 2014
2. Blanco B. M. The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay on Bi-logic. Karnac Books, 1998
3. Mattoon M. (Ed). Personal and Archetypal Dynamics in the Analytical Relationship: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress for Analytical Psychology August 28-September 2, 1989. Daimon Verlag, 1991
4. Lidz T, Fleck S, Cornelison A. R. Schizophrenia and the Family, International Universities Press, 1965

Annie Blake (BTeach, GDipEd) enjoys experimenting with Blanco’s Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Logic to explore unconscious material and consciousness. Her work is best understood when interpreting them like dreams. She is a member of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne, Australia. You can visit her on annieblakethegatherer.blogspot.com.au and Facebook.

Dancing the Wheel

I was meek
as I picked up river stones,
deep gray, some quite large,
others quite small.
These millennia old stones,
smoothed and polished by chilled water
for thousands of years,
each one, heavy in my hand.

I danced the wheel without jade for wisdom,
without amber for strength,
no peridot for renewal.
Only my opal offered me guidance
from the edge of Raven, the coordinate of the spiritual.

I danced the wheel hesitantly
unsure of the order of the rocks,
unsure of how the others wove between me,
and I zagged between them,
the ritual smoothing like the waters over the stones.

The gray stones took formation
balance and purity
something sacred that I felt was not mine to take.

I was given the last stone, begged
for the others to tell me where to place it.
They said it didn’t matter.
But it DID matter.
All of those patterns,
one had to show me my path.

I walked in the candlelight.
placed the stone nervously into the inner ring.
The ancients were with me, circle and cross completed perfectly.

I had laid down my fear with that stone, and my shoulders light.
Each stone was placed back into the bag,
to be freed back into the river.
I bowed and thanked them
and took the power that they gave me.

 

 

 

Kim Malinowski earned her B.A. from West Virginia University and her M.F.A. from American University. She studies with The Writers Studio. Her chapbook Death: A Love Story was published by Flutter Press. Her work has appeared in Faerie Magazine, War, Literature, and the Arts, Mythic Delirium, and others.

In my understanding, how writing and the sacred are connected

I can speak with hindsight only in relation to my own pilgrimage and companionship, as one won over by the gospel witness statements to Jesus of Nazareth. He himself of course was highly critical of the interpretation, exclusivity and practise of his own tradition by its elders, and praised numerous practitioners of other faiths. He did not intend to found a new religion, but breathe life into fresh understanding of life’s purpose, pose questions as to how our humanity might best be fulfilled. Those with insight of other faiths may empathise with aspects of my manifesto, though promote other emphases, or even demur from my core sensibilities. So be it. I remain confident in my uncertainty.

Poets seek to express, with the tools of their craft, questions drawn from their perception of where their humanity mixes with the divine in that thin atmosphere offered in the sacred moment. The mix pervades everything, whether recognised or not. The moments occur repeatedly. Whether that glimpse is grasped, briefly, or passes by unnoticed is, like the wind – a murmur, breeze, gust or gale – beyond our control, yet more readily to be realised in the common round of life – a given for all, and celebrated by divine creation – rather than the presumptuously religious.

But as I search to re-set gospel, release its forged boundaries, limited by my own hinterland, I explore more freely the communities of Galilee and Jerusalem, and on to the ends of the earth, and maybe beyond. When I remove, as far as I am able, the theologies imposed upon them, I see more clearly The Man and his questions. I re-type The Type. When I recognise that searching for the historical Jesus is as one staring down a well and seeing a reflection of themselves, then I am better prepared to discover fresh images. Am I prepared to excise assumed models? Have I the courage to dismantle the framework buttressing my assumptions? Do I risk the declined permissions of others who thus far tolerate my idiosyncrasies? I am after all, in good company, following the way of one despised by leaders of religious orthodoxy.

So, in the face of humanity, individuals and community; in the interactions of living things within its scenery; in possibility and despair; in these I find the yeast for reflective poetry.

All I would welcome, posing questions to myself, is to have others looking over my shoulders, those who might themselves further my enquiry through their own probing, interrogations, examinations. What ‘eroteme’ marks will I permit to hang over each conclusion that I thought I had reached, journalist of life? Am I ready to be disciple – learner, in companionship – sharing bread, with my fellow pilgrims?

The good news I read relates to a second sight, a grace of blindness replaced by insight. However poorly that light filters, though we may need a second touch, and countless further ministrations, we may seek to record through pulse, breath, sound, economy of codes, seams mined at different levels, the rhythms and revelations pumped into our blood.

Stephen Kingsnorth, retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had pieces accepted by a dozen on-line poetry sites, including Amethyst Review, and Gold Dust, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawntreader & Foxtrot Uniform Poetry Magazines. https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/

This essay is part of an occasional series in which contributors reflect on connections between writing and the sacred. Please send in your thoughts if you would like to contribute a short piece, I would love to hear them!

Constancy

It happened again this year
on the shortest day
when the temperature rose
above freezing and the adhering snow
made everything Christmas:
Two pussy willow catkins slipped
through their husks. But there were just those
teasing few.
The next weeks saw glimpses of more light –
and by March, enough,
until finally this evening,
I saw what looked like strung pearls
lighting the willow’s branches.
And I remembered.
It is in the days after
this doubling of light begins
that catkins must emerge,
seeming to know
what we should know, too:
That it takes a constant light,
rather than what dazzles us
on a single blinding winter’s day,
to push aside what holds us contained.

Margaret Krell lives in suburban Boston, and on occasion still  teaches privately. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Providence Journal and The Boston Globe.  Her most recent publication was an essay in the anthology, Family Stories from the Attic

The Meaning of

New Year’s Eve: the last clouds burning
down behind South
Mountain; traffic on the freeway
already slowing toward midnight
and a neighbor asks
about meaning at the end of a year with low crimes
in high places. Time to reflect
on a night in Agrigento, when Alfonso, a local
man with bad teeth,
threw a bottle full of wishes
from the church steps into
the future and the future
became glass and stars with just enough
regret to give the moment poignancy. Alfonso
wasn’t the type to care
about philosophers. He wouldn’t share
Prosecco, only toast friends of the moment
with a glass of Sicilian air, glad for a second chance
in his only life. From then
to now a long journey, and the Curve-billed
thrashers are working
at the cactus in front of the house, with much
to do before springtime. It’s been
a year to separate
those for from those
against, and meaning doesn’t take
a theory. It takes last week’s rainfall
that made a dry river flow. It takes
a sign at the door to a bar that says
Militia not welcome here.
As for religion
even the gods are undecided
over which of them is real. The javelinas
who came down the street last week
knew they were real, the soul
that wakes up at two am
and worries its way to six
is real, and the flinching back
from TV morning news
is real. Then there was Keats
proclaiming beauty as truth, though
the truths currently circulating
are anything but. The stony, winding path
through the universe
leads to the next sunrise. A glow rippling
westward. The blue ring
around a Mourning dove’s eye. The water
left out in the desert
for someone crossing to a better life. The stamp
in a passport that allows
a spirit to go
where the body is forbidden. Even as
we contemplate the mysteries
men are drafting laws
to make them insignificant, evangelists
select chapter and verse
to justify their love for money
and the military budget’s been in orbit
so long nobody
can bring it back down. But a dollar
is still a dollar to the homeless,
tempest-tost who are tired, poor
and huddled who never read Nietzsche
or Schopenhauer. Australia
is on fire tonight while they are cold.
A voice comes from the sky
to say There’s nothing you can do, as
another one leaves its place in the mind or
heart or wherever in the body it rests
to ask Did you ever hear
that Leonard Cohen song? You know, the one
about Democracy in which
he says he’s junk but still is holding up
this little wild bouquet.

 

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant, and a long poem, Speech Scroll comes from Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library.

The Same Privacy

These I saw: small onions laid
with their root discs punctuating
the longitude poles. Polar caps,
yes, navels to the earth where
their buried unions still hold.

That space along the stalls,
unpeopled on this damp morning,
stops me (for it insists), with the
white parking lines leaping
to the distant edge of gray asphalt,
and to the gray and black
of my mind’s caverns.
There is beauty and there is
the comfort of isolation,
desolation remembered.
Why (I ask myself)
should I crave this comfort,
which would seem black, dead?

I walk in this same privacy
where the dead black
chicken house vibrates in the stink
of manure, and winds from the west,
and the dead black of a remembered
gas tank rising by the road?
Does the pensive void pull me
to the empty, and therefore personal,
paving, begetting a sage
from my wilderness to give life
to the vacancy?

 

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.