Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Splendid Ship

I remember standing
by the river
your hand inside
mine furled

our minds unwound
our drink that night

that tall black gulp of air

the ghost ships
white as paste on
onyx glass

rocking in total stillness

in the silence
we knew where
we dive

to extract a

word

our futures

flat-pressed to now.

Jill Pearlman is a writer and poet based in Providence, RI.  She has published in Salamander, Frequency Anthology, Soul-Lit, Crosswinds and others.  She writes a blog about ecstasy, art and aesthetics in wartime at jillpearlman.com

Invocation to Patanjali

O Sage Patanjali, who brought us yoga,
We sit before you, palms together, bow,
recite this kernel of your yoga sutras:
Let us study the art of yoga, now.
Single-minded practice stops the stream
of thought, unveils our true identity.
Or else we’re caught up in our dreams
and can’t distinguish truth from fantasy.

O snake-man, shaded by your seven cowls,
incarnation of Lord Vishnu’s cobra,
show us how to burn with zeal,
cut through delusion, discern what’s real,
heal our bodies, turn our minds around.
O snake-man, blow your conch and wake us, now.

John W. Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University, where he studied with Julie Kane, Earnest Hilbert and David Rothman. His poetry has appeared in Amethyst Review, Boulder Weekly, Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, Society of Classical Poets and Verse-Virtual.

Vital Signs

Each raindrop, a miniature
part of the nona stop flood

of stars. & every wound
was like an eyelash shivering—

our knowledge sadder
for its slow arriving. All history

is alive and yet historical: a clattered drawer
of knives which fall. Bloodstream,

plastic & a scattered gunk that clogs
the riverside. Fog-light like an oracle.

A torrent which casts junk aside.
A dry lake’s rot, as each monsoon

soon leaves its watermark. Nightlong
along the swollen sodden banks

through bright insistent dark’s
swift counter-spew of flotsam

nerve-springs sparing with
their shards & gloss, trash

going by, all rankled, ruin-tossed,
a circumfluent panic of the cross-

winds in their erasure-shine-and-gash.
A single dove flew off

& became
the moon.

Will Cordeiro has work appearing or forthcoming in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fourteen Hills, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Sycamore Review, The Threepenny Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere. He has two chapbooks: “Never-never” (White Knuckle, 2017) and “Opinions and Reveries of Mr. Figure” (RDP, 2016). He is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer’s Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. He received his MFA and Ph.D. from Cornell University. He lives in Flagstaff, where he is a faculty member in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.

CHIA

Is it really my brain
that with the utmost clarity
can retrieve a thought
I had the day before yesterday
in one word…despite
haste and anxiety
medicinal hangover and cloud as I sit;
or is it a voice speaking to me
precise as a needle, or a beak
alive to every cell of my being ?

Vocation: image, cave, messenger; we think it is.

29.7.18
note: ‘vocation means to be addressed by a voice’—CG Jung

Jay Ramsay, who died in December 2018,  co-founded Angels of Fire in London in 1983 with its Festivals of New Poetry, was the author of 30 + books of poetry, non-fiction, and classic Chinese translation (with Martin Palmer) including Psychic Poetry—a manifesto, The White Poem, Alchemy, Crucible of Love–the alchemy of passionate relationships, Tao Te Ching, I Ching—the shamanic oracle of change, Shu Jing—the Book of History, The Poet in You (his correspondence course, since 1990), Kingdom of the Edge—Selected Poems 1980-1998, Out of Time—1998-2008, Places of Truth, Monuments, and Agistri Notebook (both 2014). In 2012 he recorded his poetry-music album, Strange Sun. In addition, he edited 6 anthologies of New Poetry—most recently Diamond Cutters—Visionary Poets in America, Britain & Oceania (with Andrew Harvey: www.tayenlane.com), as well as many collections for other poets, also under his own pamphlet imprint Chrysalis Poetry. He was also poetry editor of Caduceus magazine, working in private practice as a UKCP accredited psychotherapist and healer, and running workshops worldwide (www.jayramsay.co.uk).

Textures

“Whisper songs” of Steller’s Jays,
those almost inaudible songs
sung for reasons no one can name.
Who are these ones, these fellows?
How do we sense the textures
of the other without limit,
let word cages drop?

M.S. Rooney lives in Sonoma, California with poet Dan Noreen. Her work appears in journals, including Leaping Clear, Ekphrasis, Heron Tree, Naugatuck River Review and Soul-Lit, and anthologies, including American Society: What Poets See (FutureCycle Press), edited by David Chorlton and Robert S. King, and Ice Cream Poems (World Enough Writers), edited by Patricia Fargnoli. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Offering

As our animal carcasses queue up one by one
in trucks, on digger-scoops,
there is no Arc, no Noah,
no dove-green frond of olive branch
to save them drowning in their blood,
from being forked dust to dust under rusted earth
or from the scourge of flaming pyre.
After all their slaughter is to keep the country
on a straight political track.

Yet, following rural ancestors,
through the mass of this ritual cull
we find ourselves retraced to Medieval fates
remembering earlier acts of violence
on local soil,
lives rendered for future ills –
St Urith from the heart of our farming land
and from the cathedral city, St Sidwell.
Severed, each saintly head is sacred.

We sip from the bowl-hollowed cranium
in the cradle of hallowed earth,
spin through the dreaming gyre of her well –
everlasting as stars
flowers perpetually teeming
from the depths of this deadly seed-bed.

Note; The last Foot and Mouth outbreak in Devon, in 2001, had a huge impact on the rural community, with repercussions that still resonate with many people. Both St Sidwll and St Urith are associated with Devon. As martyrs their severed heads possessed the power of healing: flowers were said to bloom whenever a drop of blood was sprinkled on the earth where they died.

The Desert Wind

There’s an eastern wind from the desert
that blows
dry air into a big swirl.

The wind whispers a strange
melody, a discordant rhythm,
an odd rhyme, a pause that could delay
or destroy.

It is a song of surprise and suspense.
It is a song of sorrow and dread.
It stops our lives.
It steals our families from the hillsides.

It blows the fertile fields bone dry,
engulfs our hearts, and softens our hope.
It disrupts our sense of place
and time.

It burns the browns and greens,
the yellow of the golden reeds.
It moves along the sloping mountainside,
blowing embers along the foothills,
burning flakes of smoldering trees.

It crosses highways.
It sparks old memories.
Flames that soar so high, it seems to touch
the roof of the sky.

We never know which way the wind
will head. We never know how fast or slow.
The fire is unleashed, set free.
A spirit that travels on its own accord.

Mark Tulin is a former family therapist who lives in Santa Barbara, California.  He often finds richness in the lives of the neglected and disenfranchised. He has a poetry chapbook, Magical Yogis, published by Prolific Press (2017).  His work appears in Vita Brevis, Page and Spine, Fiction on the Web, Friday Flash Fiction, The Drabble, smokebox, and Cabinet of Heed. His website is Crow On The Wire.

Last Sunday in Church
(Francois Villon)

The shunned offering basket gets even lighter
when it passes by you,
the sleight-of-hand unnoticed
as you slipped a coin
into a ragged coat pocket
while simultaneously crossing yourself.
A man of faith. No doubt.

But the bishop’s still searching
under the cushions of his overstuffed sofa
and in the black-out curtains of his cassock
for his dignity
that you pilfered and pawned
to buy a round for everyone at the pub.
They drank to you, called you a saint.
Maybe, but widows clenched their mites
tighter when you sauntered by…

I would’ve had coffee with you afterwards,
fellowshipped, as we say,
but you’d already vanished—
returned to the thin air you came from,
jittery with schemes,
the rope burns still red on your dirty neck.

Don Thompson has been writing about the San Joaquin Valley for over fifty years, including a dozen or so books and chapbooks.  For more info and links to publishers, visit his website at www.don-e-thompson.com.

When I Awoke in the Mountains

When I awoke in the mountains
I sensed the green outside before opening my eyes.

When I awoke in the mountains
Scents of toast and bacon
Wafted from a linoleum kitchen.

When I awoke in the mountains
Big white mists were clearing in wisps,
Revealing the sun
In a bright blue sky.

When I awoke in the mountains,
Elders were gathering early below
Seated around a silver-edged table,
Sipping hot coffee,
Sharing their stories.

When I awoke in the mountains
I pictured at once the beloved surroundings:
Red soil dappled with shiny mica,
Spotted cows in an old hill pasture,
Blackberry bushes, a musical brook,
And a venerable black walnut tree.

When I awoke in the mountains,
Things awoke in me
That would never be shaded or silenced:
The mystery of families and places,
Humility of moving through forms that reach heaven,
The deep silent souls of rocks and plants;
A wish to enfold creation
In my childhood arms
Forever.

Emily Peña Murphey is a retired psychotherapist with academic training in psychology, social work, and Jungian psychoanalysis. She has family roots in Texas’ Río Grande Valley and the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, and sings and plays the traditional music of both regions. She has published short fiction in several online journals, and enjoys writing from a cross-cultural perpective.  Her current projects include a collection of short stories and a trilogy of trans-border novels. She lives in Philadelphia.

Sacristy in February

What to do with the Poinsettias
when Lent approaches?
Red leaves still velvet, still sumptuous,
gathered in a group of six,
they flow together like flames in a fireplace.
What to do with them now,
when the sacristan rousts them from the sanctuary,
relegates them to a cart in the hall?
Here, in the land where Poinsettias don’t bloom outside,
I can’t keep all these refugees in my room.
I can’t consign them naked to the cold earth
where their velvet will wither into black rags.
So I decapitate them,
deflower them,
pull their rootbound potshaped soil,
snowy with vermiculite.
I dump those clumps
onto the mulch gone ground
over the tulip bulbs.

Anne Higgins teaches English at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg Maryland, USA. She is a member of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. She has had about 100 poems published in a variety of small magazines. Five full-length books and three chapbooks of her poetry have been published: At the Year’s Elbow, Mellen Poetry Press 2000; Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky, Plain View Press 2007; chapbooks: Pick It Up and Read, Finishing Line Press 2008, How the Hand Behaves, Finishing Line Press 2009, Digging for God, Wipf and Stock 2010, Vexed Questions, Aldrich Press 2013,Reconnaissance, Texture Press 2014, and Life List, Finishing Line Press 2016. Her poems have been featured several times on The Writer’s Almanac.