Category Archives: Uncategorized

Après                                                

you hope it
will become
a cathedral
not a last
aerodome
…..vast
empty space
once filled
with solid light
now propped
hurriedly
with prayer
and Study
and more poems
than you ever wrote
before is that
enough
to hold the ceiling
up
will this cavernous
leftover air
be past tense
of flight
gape roofed
and spider glassed
or
rather
reims
(look)
sens-
auxerre
(look up,
…dear one)
sacré

coeur

Since feeling comes first …

– e.e. cummings

…………..… why bother with thought?
Ask any riled wave or wind-swept gull.
They do what they do without studying
tidal charts or Bernoulli’s principle.

Electric bees in wildflower fields
or mother seals prodding pups to shore?
No conferencing with expert botanists
or sophists on the art of parenting.

Who surrenders to Love at first thought?
Even at first sight is not exact. Try
pondering: Love, like Life and Death and all                                  
the in-betweens, feels before it sees or thinks.

Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. Her poems appear in publications throughout North America and the UK and her fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, will be released by Unsolicited Press in 2019. She serves as poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly.

Mary of the Rotten Heart

O Mary of the Lake
Goddess of the Empty Cathedral
the cathedral with roof of sky-cerulean
roof of sky-black pinpricked by far-off leaking light
the cathedral which molders
only opens for funerals and midnight masses
presided over by your acolytes
Father Turkey Vulture, choir-boy bats
how they sing so sweet and soft so only you can hear

O Mary of the Cemetery
Patron Saint of Curses and Hauntings
mother of little-boy ghosts and little girl-beasts
babes you buried centuries ago
now they roam the pioneers’ graveyard
with pennies where their eyes once were
with green-black snakes as playmates
how they blink the penny eyes in their snake-belly white faces
how they scare the tourists

O Mary of the Rotten Heart
Patron Saint of Coffee Grounds and Mouth Sores
mother who rose from the dunes
sand-burned and wreathed in algae
you bearer of bad news
harbinger of doom
bitch who cursed me to forever want what used to be
I want I want them back but O
old friends are dead to me
or dead in the red red dirt
once-lovers turned to foes
and how the landscape shifts with every northern wind

O Mary how you maim me
this peninsula is cold and full of stars
I drive into the dusty rotten heart of it
in search of talismans
in search of the leaking song of used-to-be
I hear whispers in the radio static
see faces in the fog so green
my third eye is a lighthouse
no match for you and the sea-change of your moods
how you offer me the sun then leave me with the bitter beer-dark lake

O Mary of the Porte des Mortes
Goddess of Shipwrecks and Rogue Waves
cohort to the underwater panther
you drown the sailors with your claws bared
crack the ships between your teeth
Nambi-Za spits their snake-belly souls up as offering
you festoon yourself with necklaces of tarnished cutlery
O Mary
O Death how you forget
though they played at piracy my friends were never sailors

O Mary I remember that day when the ship came
and there you were in your robes of cerulean
your halo burning black as night
O Mary I said don’t you weep for me
O mama I said
don’t leave me mama
take me with you mama
keep me safe in heaven
dead with all my friends
don’t leave me
and I fell to my knees and I clutched at your robes and O
you turned into a seagull
a flash of wing and squawk in the dying light
and I felt this lump in my throat like a penny like a stone
I coughed it into my mouth onto my tongue
how sweet it was how bitter like beer like coffee grounds like ghosts
I spit it into my palm and it was warm and wet
it was my heart
it was a lakefull of algae and rusty knives and rotten fish
O Mary how I laid it down by the shoreline
how I spelled it out in pebbles on the sunset beach
this my obituary
my epitaph
my psalm my spell my poem

Jessie Lynn McMains is a poet, writer, and small press owner. Her words have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Memoir Mixtapes, Dirty Paws Poetry Review, Left of the Lake Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She collects souvenir pennies and stick & poke tattoos, and is perpetually nostalgic, melancholy, and restless. You can find her website at recklesschants.net, or find her on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie

To Each Her Saint

Canonize? The prize
for two miracles.
Not much to ask,
considering.
Someone walks upright,
banishes unruly cells,
faces off
the voices in her head,
stops a river’s rise:
triumphs claimed
in an almost-saint’s name.

For those of us
who dismiss titles
and candles lit
on flowered altars
in a namesake church,
we elect
to venerate a dad
stacking barrels
of paint for years
on the merciless concrete
of a factory floor.

Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. Her poems appear in publications throughout North America and the UK and her fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, will be released by Unsolicited Press in 2019. She serves as poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly.

After the Funeral Service

Long-haired men lift the casket,
carry it
through the church’s double doors.

The congregation sings, “Onward,
Christian Soldiers.”
A vibration begins in my throat.

I think I hear a bat navigating
the rafters,
echolocating while waves of sound

surround it and the coffin.
Melody travels
where we cannot. Its frequencies

intersect with dusty corners,
shadows.
We sing to our beloved lost one.

The martial meter of the familiar hymn
a heartbeat
for the journey to our Creator. I sing

with spirit. We all do, as if we think
our voices
can pierce the membrane between

the living and the dead.
Singing loudly,
as if there is no doubt.

Peggy Turnbull studied anthropology in college and has a master’s in library and information science.  She has written all her life, mostly in diaries, but after returning to her birthplace in Wisconsin, she began to write poems.  Read them in Ariel Chart, Writers Resist, and Verse-Virtual or visit https://peggyturnbull.blogspot.com/  .

Hail, Sunday

It was hail out of nowhere,
sleet, slush, rain. The usual
February conversation. Not the one
where I say my brother’s friend
fancied himself in 1993 and of course
my mother tells my brother,
so then I don’t know
whether I need to apologise or explain.
If I had any sense I’d leave it.
And in a way he was trusting,
let’s look at it that way. After all
I might have driven it back
into a wall, just a few very new,
very white, expensive inches
of convertible that someone
needed to repark that hot summer’s day.
Of course he was rash to ask me,
I’ve just illustrated that. But I parked
without mishap and I gave him back his keys.
So no, that’s not the conversation I meant.
The one about the weather was a prelude.
The comic business with the car
a rather obvious play for time.
Yesterday I stood on Jumping Downs.
That’s a bit more like it,
we’re getting there now.
I’d talked about the weather,
which I’m good at. Made a few
satirical observations. Then I was up
where it wasn’t yet raining, on the hill.
But the wind was marching
over it, I was talking,
God perhaps trying
to get a word in edgeways.
When I saw the gulls
running and running
inches above the ground.
I remembered as a child
doing this, leaning back a little further,
no one there to catch me but the wind.

Carolyn Oulton‘s poetry has been published in magazines including Orbis, The Frogmore Papers, iota, Seventh Quarry, Ariadne’s Thread, Envoi, New Walk, Upstreet, Acumen and Ink, Sweat and Tears. Her most recent collection Accidental Fruit is published by Worple Press. Her website is at carolynoulton.co.uk

Reckoning

I study tinted images of children clambering onto Jesus’ lap in my compact, white prayer book, while Mom and Dad focus on Mass. As a four year old, I’m introduced to kindness, reverence, and mystery, and a lifetime of questions begins.

My first grade class recites rote from Baltimore Catechism:

Who made you? God made me.

Why did God make you?

God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.

It all sounds so simple.

Perhaps my strict Catholic upbringing cultivated my inquiring spirit. Maybe guidance in the multiple mysteries of faith led me to internal questioning, evening ruminating. Questions of truth, mystery and myth are posed to me, and I attempt to answer with humility in creative writing.

*

When we reach the age of reason, Sister Mary tells us, we have something called a conscience. If we lie or steal, we may be caught and punished by our parents. But there is another reckoning; one that will change us. It is lasting and sacred; something a child of six does not grasp.

We learn about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the apple curious Eve ate and shared with Adam. Sister says Reason is the beginning of mankind’s troubles. They were banished from Eden because they offended God. From then on, people worked and struggled. My soul is tarnished by Original Sin. Serpent, Tempter, Evil Red Man with horns and tail, Devil on my left shoulder.

Is it wrong to want reasons? To question?

My conscience—or is it my guardian angel?—on my right, protects me from the danger of offending God. To prepare for my first Confession, I’m brought to awareness of inevitable sin and guilt, and that it is remedied by contrition and forgiveness.

Where does my conscience come from?

We recite Ten Commandments, the code we must live by, the ways we could sin, what we must avoid. Thoughts, desires, words, actions are kept holy by praying to Jesus, his Mother, and the saints. In time I grow to grasp, apprehend wrong-doing. I begin to develop a moral self.

*

I should examine my conscience as I kneel in a pew with my classmates, and wait for the green light above a closed booth. Instead, I rehearse a collection of sins to confess. Why? To make my performance for the priest flawless.

Five times? Too many. Two? Not enough. I disobeyed my mother three times. Lied to my father four times.

Father’s aftershave stings, and I rub my nose. He slides the metal screen between us, and chin in palm, closes his eyes. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.” My recitation begins. He prompts the Act of Contrition, gives me a penance of prayers, and blesses me through the screen. I’ve promised to sin no more, both for fear of Hell, and to not offend my God.

*

At age ten, I begin a journal, write rhyming nature verse and compositions. As a teen, my poetry becomes angst-filled, introspective, self-critical. I liken my soul to a candle flame, aspire to truth, nature, good conscience. For me, writing is evaluation, meditation; a focus, practice. It is a quest, but not just for the right words.

If I write from memory and the child’s perspective, spirit connections come, perhaps questions of devotion, transgression, and loyalty. When I re-live her struggles, I connect with her. I hope my reader does, too.

***

Mary Ellen Gambutti resides in Sarasota, FL with her husband and adopted senior chihuahua. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in Gravel Magazine, Wildflower Muse, The Remembered Arts Journal, The Vignette Review, Modern Creative Life, A Thousand and One Stories, Halcyon Days, Nature Writing, PostCard Shorts, SoftCartel, Storyland, The Drabble, CarpeArte, Memoir Magazine, Haibun Today, and Borrowed Solace. https://ibisandhibiscusmelwrites.blogspot.com/

God’s Eyes Were Watching Theirs

God said:

they cannot be saved;
black, white, blue, grey

nature should preserve itself
elsewhere,

since peace cannot be attained,
since war cannot be arraigned…

He took an axe to the Tree, and
as it fell, every color caught
on a single bough, on an edge
sharper than any wisdom.

Cody Rukasin is an aspiring poet. He currently attends UC Santa Cruz in hopes of earning a BA in Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing.

The Door Finder

 
you can tell by
their step rather
than their voice
hesitant or barely
unpanicked they
often stop just
before or pass
just beyond me
before turning
asking “where is
the door?”
sometimes out
sometimes in
but I can show
them  I am
motze hadelet
the door finder

the walk around
the building inside
or out is usually
the most interesting
each step is auto
biography a siren
wails a toilet
flushes either
way they’re
glad to tell
it to someone
who doesn’t cover
his ears or hold
his nose then
we arrive “there
it is,” I say “your
door” you know
what happens
next “too soon”
“too late”” too
long a walk to
my car” their
today is married
to a tomorrow and
divorce is against
their faith,
as it is
most people’s.
it used to
bother me
this job
but I know
where the
elevator is
to the
basement
dARK and
bRIGHT to
the rooftop
and its
glorious vYOU

baruch ata Adonai
who gives every
soul its way

Post-Procedure Prayer
After Barbara Hamby

Comfort me, warm swarm of air, perfumed by newly mown grass–
sweetly surround my swollen jaw. In my dentist’s parking lot,

wrap aromatic fronds around my hurting places, tease me
with the hint of lavish glamour you exude. The sky swells

with romantic promise from your secret holds. Dribble your juices
over me as I resist the Garmin’s supplications, while alabaster petals

fall from Magnolia trees onto my windshield. Tempt me to eccentric
routes away from the highway’s hills and their odorless coats

of invasive honeysuckle. Allow me to be pungent and neighborly,
the way of the bratwurst I ate as a child, each butcher a conjuror

of distinct flavors. Discipline me into disobedience, shape me
into vapor, perplex me with possibility. Allay this ache.

Peggy Turnbull studied anthropology in college and has a master’s in library and information science.  She has written all her life, mostly in diaries, but after returning to her birthplace in Wisconsin, she began to write poems.  Read them in Ariel Chart, Writers Resist, and Verse-Virtual or visit https://peggyturnbull.blogspot.com/  .