Category Archives: Uncategorized

Apple

red and gold
variegated globe

slice in half
draw quarters

dip in salt
bitter and sweet

Fay L. Loomis leads a quiet life in the woods in Kerhonkson, New York. Member of the Stone Ridge Library Writers and the Rat’s Ass Review Workshop, her poetry and prose appear in numerous publications, including five poetry anthologies. Sunlit Wildness (Origami Poems Project, 2024) is her first chapbook. Fay is a nominee for the 2024 Pushcart Prize.

Ars Poetica
(with reference to Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, translated by Wendy
Doniger O’Flaherty) 

How clever to make of ourselves a constellation 
in a milky way, between the spirals packed with nebulae, 
other galaxies, dwarf stars and super novas, moving 
in light years against the smooth round belly of infinity. Listen,

the fetal Doppler sounds like waves. Remember dusk on the beach,
just you and the tide, the sounds of gentle crashing, the whoosh 
of foam and water at your feet? A way home, even suggested
in the Vedic creation hymn, where the poet arrives before the gods.

Taste the salty buoyancy of our place in the universe.
We did not know dark or light, we did not know the waves 
that lured us, lulled us, the matching pulses of life blood 
through the tiniest veins, pumping from the center

where expansion began, the space occupied with valves 
and ventricles, music of the spheres, heart of the poet.

Michelle Holland, Poet-in-Residence for Santa Fe Girls School and treasurer of NM Literary Arts, has lived in Chimayo, NM for over 25 years. Her poems can be found in literary journals, in print, online, and anthologized, most recently in the 2023 New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, UNM Press, and The Common Language Project: Ascent. She has two book-length collections of poetry, Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press, and The Sound a Raven Makes, Tres Chicas Press, which won the New Mexico Book Award.

Pax di Assisi 


In the Basilica,
I feel Christed—
as I watch a dove 
encircling above
San Francesco,
winging prayers 
holy heavenward,
just like his gaze
in this thin place 
where serenity 
settles upon me,
natural and pure
as morning mist 
on hills of home.

The hush here 
respires kindness—
inhale, exhale—
the breath a bridge
‘twixt earth and sky,
and faith forges
a soundless space, 
a moment to rest 
beyond doctrines,
the only hymn a hum 
of cleansing peace, 
intoning a grace
I’ll carry outside. 

Danita Dodson is an educator, literary scholar, and the author of three poetry collections, Trailing the Azimuth (2021), The Medicine Woods (2022), and Between Gone and Everlasting (2024) all published by Wipf and Stock. She is also the coeditor of Teachers Teaching Nonviolence (2020). Dodson’s poems have appeared in Salvation South, Critique, Tennessee Voices, Amethyst Review, Women Speak Anthology, Thin Places and Sacred Spaces, and elsewhere. She is a native of the Cumberland Gap region of East Tennessee, where she hikes and explores local history connected to the wilderness. For more, visit www.danitadodson.com.

Homecoming

Through cirrus clouds spread thin as stretched cotton
glued to paper for woolfell on lost sheep 
in Sunday school, terrain unforgotten:
the Columbia, wild, dark, and deep,
strewn like scrapped satin between strips of pine;
the old house on the hill off the highway;
the water-logged hills that fed my bloodline
where kin now rest in a womb of decay; 
the dam, salmon, paper mill, evergreens
all ancient guardians, once at odds, nod
to acknowledge a homecoming of grief
through layers of atmosphere, holy sod,
and troubled time.
                                         I step out into air 
thin as paper, strands of woolfell and prayer.

Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis was born and raised between the mountains and ocean in the Pacific Northwest but now writes from the Ohio River Valley. Her work has been published in Dappled Things and Salamander.

Birdsong

The way their song lifts your spirits
in the spring when a convocation
of birds returns to meadows 
and fields they favor, trees
they seem to know. Although
it’s hard to find them by sound alone,
surveying as you go
trying to echolocate
the cheeps and chirps, tweets
and whistles, clicks 
and squawks,
the piercing cries of hawks,
guttural caw of crows.
You search for splashes of color:
cardinal red, oriole orange,
goldfinch yellow, hiding 
in the camouflage of leaves.

Ed Meek is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of short stories. His most recent book is High tide. He has had poems in The Paris Review, The Sun, Plume, etc.

Backyard, Mid-May 2

Watch. The plants are coming forward,
Bougainvillea foams with flowers,
Lavender seeps upward slowly,
Orange planets on the rose bush
Burst and seed their stuff through space.
Everything is coming forward.
You can almost see the doorway
Through which each plant makes an entrance,
Come forward from the place of nothing.
Watch as nothing becomes something.
Is this what they called the void?
Who knew it was so creative?
Who knows how it does its work?
Even though you watch it happen
Mystery looks back at you.

Peter Cashorali is a neurodiverse pansy living at the intersection of rivers, farmland and civil war. He practices a contemplative life.

Shadow Theatre

I thought I saw a fly; it was the shadow of a fly
That flitted past a window full of sun
A Doppelgänger buzzing through the corner of my eye
A zero, if the fly should stand for one
Or if the fly was Word, a fiendish pun.

I thought I knew you well; it was your shadow that I knew
You dawdled for a while before the glow
My passion kindled in the night, and, blocking it from view
Replaced it with the shade I came to know.
Desire remained above, and I below.

I thought I worshipped God; that shadow fell beneath the tower
Atop whose roof a golden cross shone bright
A solemn, ancient edifice of ritualistic power
That sometimes came as blessing, sometimes blight
But always blocked whatever made the light.

I thought I found myself; it was a shadow cast by dreams
That intervened between my thought and action.
“I think therefore I am” is not as simple as it seems
For what we think is subject to refraction 
So what we are, a muddled-up redaction.

I think I’ve told the truth; these symbols printed on the page
Have shapes that seem to promise revelation
But really they’re just shadow puppets dancing on a stage.
Their shadows? Those we call “interpretation”.
Such shadows are the gist of all creation.
 

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Spectral Realms, Aphelion, Black Petals, Grim and Gilded, Ekstasis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Emberr, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, The Sirens Call, The Chamber Magazine, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.

Transubstantiation

Past depth, beyond the chemical,
Where collisions sometimes occur,
Awareness embeds particle,
Divinities themselves bestir.

Where collisions sometimes occur,
Here being from being splits off,
Divinities themselves bestir
Awake—they yawn, they stretch, they cough.

Here being from being splits off,
Reflecting essential matter.
Awake they yawn, they stretch, they cough,
They ripen into their nature.

Reflecting essential matter,
These hallowed ur-forces expand.
They ripen into their nature
In this difficult wonderland.

These hallowed ur-forces expand,
Awareness embeds particle,
In this difficult wonderland
Past depth, beyond the chemical.

Dennis Daly has published eleven books of poetry and poetic translations. A number of his translations have recently been published by Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House) in Uyghur Poems, part of Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. Please visit his blog site here: dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.

Psalm

I want to speak heaven
into earth, into the fields 
of wildflowers, into the
woodlands.
I want to braid heaven
into your hair, let you 
see yourself resplendent,
see yourself divine. 
Lit by that fire, 
I see you, you are like
no other, you are essential
as the sun, as the heart.
Look at you shine.

Erin Olson is a counselor and poet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Third Wednesday, ONE ART, and Sky Island Journal.

Meeting Minutes (Friends Meeting House, Rochester)

Hobbled by life, I searched for open doors
to escape this boastful, plug-in city.
Found one, just as the weather was coming fast. 
In here, my place was already set
with silence waiting, inviting me to sit.

Silence was a hail-fellow-well-met type
(of hitherto, I had not cared for), but
he had friends – each with eyes closed, 
messaging in their own private channels. I joined them
bringing only an elevated ear.

My blood clock listed the seconds, minutes. 
I watched shadows sit, stretch, then rise to leave – 
and then return like jealous agnostics.
Silence worked the room – a trainer breathing, 
train rails seething, the brush of frond on glass.

Silence told me, but I never asked.
Spoke with mailed fist – I considered leaving,
but silence invited me to sit.
Spoke with bare-knuckle – and I rose to leave, 
but silence invited me to sit.

With ten minutes left, silence left me to it
and when my ungummed, Wedgewood eyes opened,
something came on and came on unbidden.
Something much bigger than the rational,
something once buried, something once hidden.

Into drying weather and milk happy,
into once engraved streets (storm windows down),
into a human river – broad, boiling.
I heard nothing – and have heard nothing, since
the day silence invited me to sit.

 

Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Douglas Dunn, Ian Hamilton & Seamus Heaney.
Joseph has been published by Stand, Blackbox Manifold, The Rumen, The Brussels Review and ingénu/e and he was also highly commended in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2024.