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THREE SHELL POEMS


THE NAUTILUS SHELL


Let the eye dim with approach of twilit thought
like the opal veil of the Nautilus Shell
unlocked from its bejeweled case of Glasswork Time.

Press its murmuring to the inner ear:
the muffled mask of sandswept depths
galleons of undisturbed miasmic whorl
oceans of the earth’s crust
darkened pure within its
lampless state of indigo

The light arrives
the casement cracks.
The chambered funnel steals upon my wakeless mind
demanding consecration of my torpid soul.

What need the dust?
The glow within transluminates the coil.



ARCHITECTONICA PERSPECTIVA


I deck myself as in a shroud — in black
to kill the outer joints that stiffen pale
to cut the flow from limb and sharply angled thew
stretched out insensate on a bier.

I summon Death — and I am laced with Goldness
heavy sculpture brown with clay
ochre-stained and gilded, leaden, fixing weight
and centered Standing on the beams of light —
the eyes — held down with aurous coins that say

I am the Sundial.
Granuled Mollusk writ with Incan Scroll,
ablaze and scorched the radiance settles
on the core.



ANGEL-WING

Benediction


Descend
in an Aeolian mode of flight
benign with silver aqua-rustling
silent, voiceless chord
to join me swiftly
with the Godhead.

Wings are clapped,
and in an instant
dust-light sprays the midday blinds
like weightless jewels of opaline
the shrine expanding boundless
centers on the inward gaze.

Author of the debut novel Twelfth House, E.C. Traganas has published in The San Antonio Review, The Society of Classical Poets, The Brussels Review, The Penwood Review, Dark Winter Literary Magazine, Agape Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Story Sanctum, Confetti Magazine and countless other journals. Hailed as ‘an artfully created masterpiece’ and a ‘must-read’ by The US Review of Books, her  work of haiku & short poetry, Shaded Pergola, features her original illustrations. A Juilliard trained concert pianist & composer by profession, E.C. Traganas is the founder/director of Woodside Writers, a literary forum based in New York City. www.elenitraganas.com

The Mulberry Branch

This branch, now low enough to touch, in leaf,
come winter will sway out of reach above.
This simple fact makes no call on belief,
or, if it does, come out, reach up a glove
in January, see if you can reach
a single twig you touched here in July.
But neither of us came to hear, or preach.
The weather beckoned us; the cloudless sky,
the breeze that nudged us to the riverside
to walk awhile in sun and dappled shade.
Here where the river bends and stretches wide
and shallow, you might see a heron wade,
then, seeming not to notice you, to rise,
blue blending blue into its blue disguise.

Dan Campion’s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review. He is the author of A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024), and the monograph Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press, 1995). He is a coeditor of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press, 1981; 2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2019). His poetry has appeared in Able Muse, Light, Measure, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Shenandoah, THINK, and many other journals.

Some Rooms are Prayers

The times they wanted me 
to think their thoughts
and I went on thinking 
mine. 

The times they expected me
to hear, to see, to remember 
a certain way, and I tried, 
but couldn’t.

Those times were rooms, 
where people lived 
and worked 
and worried, 
and loved and died. 

I am surprised sometimes
to hear late-at-night voices 
through open windows 
and realize those rooms 
are still out there. 
Voices carry 
answers to questions posed 
long ago, to prayers spoken
 – and not spoken – 
in those rooms. 
‘Let us befriend fear that we 
may know what it really is,’ 
they say. And I reply,  
‘Let us find the rooms that want us, 
and learn to live in them for a while.’

Some rooms are rivers, 
winding a way. Some rooms
are repositories, keepers of secrets. 
Some rooms are circles,
always returning.  
Some are sacred sanctuaries,
others stops in stations. 
Some rooms are prayers,
some prayers are rooms. 
No room is ours.

James Lilliefors is a poet, journalist, and novelist, whose writing has appeared in Door is a Jar, Salvation South, 3 Elements Review, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald and elsewhere. His first collection of poetry will be published by Finishing Line Press. He’s a former writing fellow at the University of Virginia, and now lives in Florida. 

Spiritual Mending (To Emily D)

Daughter, 
	reach into thy heart—
		a poet’s sewing kit—

and using
	but the primal needle
		of humble language

and the liquid
	thread of grace, fix
		your doubts and fears.

Words
	overflow
		your mending box,

the daily pleas
	and psalms
		and silent prayers.

In seclusion,

devote
	deep thoughts
		to what’s felt inside.  

Be not
	uneasy
		with disbelief—

waiting for
	answers, we 

		all dwell in Possibility.

Alison Jennings is a Seattle-based poet who worked as a journalist and accountant and taught English and math in public schools before returning to her first love, poetry.  Since then, she has had a mini-chapbook and over 100 other poems published internationally in numerous journals, including Amethyst Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meat for Tea, Mslexia, Poetic Sun, Red Door, Society of Classical Poets, Sonic Boom, Stone Poetry, and The Raw Art Review.  She has also won 3^rd Place/Honorable Mention or been a semi-finalist in several contests.  For more details and links to her published poems, visit her website at https://sites.google.com/view/airandfirepoet/home.  

Glory 
	After Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory for the golden gingko leaves
that fan out on the sidewalk
in autumn, like open hearts 
after their silent fall, 
no breast-beating, 
teaching us how to let go, 
how to die with grace. 

Glory to autumn, the burning glow
it gives the world, its pink / orange
sunsets, and 
the sepia heads of dried 
rhododendron, the ones that blow
along the macadam like tumbleweed. 

Glory to autumn’s leaving, the winter
it brings when darkness comes early
and we cozen ourselves in fleece robes
and listen to the wind, what it reveals, 
what it keeps to itself. 

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published in the New York Times (Lives). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her short stories and poetry have been published in The MacGuffin, Euphony, the Iowa Review, and many more. Her poetry collection, Death, Please Wait was published by Turtle Box Press in 2023. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension. http://rochellejshapiro.com @rjshapiro

Creation


Crows caw at full volume,
one contingent in the apple tree
west of the house,
another in the maple to the east,
loud enough so that Great-Uncle Ernest,
the patriarch of the flock, 
who everyone knows dropped 
his hearing aids when flying low
over the Connecticut River last week,
can hear what they are saying. 
The crow-versations go on for long
interminable minutes,
rending the morning air,
ripping it to shreds.

And then the birds are gone
as abruptly as they arrived,
following Ernest to a new location,
leaving the morning as silent
and still as the day She created it,
before unwittingly giving
voice to these, Her winged creatures.

Mary Ellen Shaughan is a native Iowan who now lives in Western Massachusetts. Her  poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. Her first volume of poetry, Home Grown, is available on Amazon.

ordinary

you lay 
     down,
    swirl your 
     fingertips 
        in the cool 
          stream— 
       surrounded 
       by water,
          you want 
              to dissolve 
     into droplets, 
         melt into 
         brilliant sun, 
            diamonds in a 
               stream— 
               yet you 
                 stay 
               clay,
         heavy,
           waterlogged,
                     waiting for 
                    the flame 
                 that will 
                 turn the 
                wet dirt 
                    into a 
                  vessel 
                     of light 

            the moon 
           is hiding, 
            the dark
                 howls—
                   you have to 
                       quiet your 
                         own thrumming
	     quaver to 
                            hear the 
                            whispers 

                           i am here 
                           too 
                   i reside not 
                      only in 
                        the stars
                            or 
       the magic 
                of blossoms
                  or the 
                  dance of 
                  letters swirled 
                     into gold 

                i am here too 
         among the 
            ordinary—
          in the baked clay 
                that tastes 
             bitter as 
               it touches 
          your lips

             i house the 
               unseen 
                miracles 
                  of breath
                  
            come visit 
              me, i'll 
       spread a colorful 
        cloth, welcome 
         you in, welcome 
            you back 
             to your own 
             enchanted self

Diane Roberson Douiyssi is a poet and writer currently living near the earth and peoples that nourish the world in South Dakota in the United States. She’s a lifelong writer who received her B.A. from Grinnell College. Her poems have appeared in Pasque Petals, song of ourself, and World Lives, Prairie Living. She’s founder of Inner Wisdom Wayfinding, where she hosts writing workshops and mentors women who want to tell their stories.

Waves & Particles

If I could come to you uncut.
   If I could speak to you 
   in our first language
   the language of light
With all its teeming
   prisms, motes, 
   sines and cosines
   But I would probably
Have to be dead again
   to speak with
   the mouth of a star.
   At least you would 
Catch what we have been
Trying to get at all along.
 

The lightning-cracked pages of Ed Ruzicka’s third, full-length book of poems, Squalls (Kelsay Books), was released in March. Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle, Canary and many other literary publications. Ed, who is also the president of the Poetry Society of Louisiana, lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge.

It could have been a raindrop
	
Or an undulating echo of a whispered breath
more likely a fertilized ovum
that birth a universe,
not a big bang, after all.

Rippling spirals of creation.
forever reverberating cybernetics
resonating waves beyond human hearing
switching dimensions when observed
transforming into particles of white matter.

Or it may be a quantum spirograph
spinning at the rate of a universal heartbeat
pulsing with Life’s sacred geometry
endlessly out from the center and back again
suspended in the galaxy of fired glass. 



inspired by One Drop by Sheri Cox Whetstine
Kiln-formed Glass
Artwww.glassicdesign.net

Eva McGinnis, PhD has published three books of poetry, the latest Strands of Luminescence: Poetry of the Spirit’s Quest.  Her poignant poems are in several anthologies and magazines as well as on placards in Poetry in the Park in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington for the fourth year in a row.  Eva writes from her heart about her spirituality which she experiences deeply in Nature.

Torah and Dream

A few times at the breakfast table in my childhood years, my father of a sudden put down the cup of tea in his hand and declared with surprise: “Halom Halamti.”

The fresh breakfast morning unexpectedly jangled with the sound of the china teacup harshly on its saucer.

Halom Halamti.  The Hebrew words mean: “I dreamed a dream.”  

My father’s voice slightly off-key, perplexed, as if he were just remembering. 

And then he stops, made anxious perhaps by the fragment of recollection, and anxious, too, that he has spoken out loud. 

Halom Halamti, and the sound of the cup, and I, a child, am awake and alert and wanting to know more.  

But no more comes. 

The Hebrew phrasing – a rare use by my father – is from the Biblical story of Joseph, favorite son of Jacob and grandson of Isaac and great-grandson of the first patriarch of this narrative, Abraham. Joseph is imprisoned in a dungeon in a foreign land but after years in prison, one day he is called before Pharaoh, the Lord of the Empire of Egypt, to interpret a troubling dream.  

A winding trail of fortune has led Joseph to this point.  He was sold by his jealous brothers to a caravan of traders bound for Egypt, purchased as a slave by Potiphar, and when he refuses the seduction of Potiphar’s wife she accuses him of attempting rape and he is cast into prison.  Years later, word of the captive’s dream-interpretive power reaches Pharaoh.  And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream, and there is none that can interpret it.

My father never spoke of what his own dreams were, and I was left with the impression that, other than in story-telling, dreams are secrets and we are best not to speak of them at all.  

I had a vivid, unsettled dream life when I was young.  I dreamt of people I recognized or forgot, of doorways and trees, fire and snow, I dreamt of smoking chimneys and the sudden ascent from a golden field of a flock of raucous black-winged birds.  

Motifs repeated, and sometimes these images still come when I dream today.

When I was a child, often the images were vivid in my mind when I first awoke.  Other times, I had no recall but then – in the middle of the day – 

wait!  sudden, a dream fragment darting through my mind like a small silver fish. 

And then gone.

Most often, even when a dream stayed with me, it was no more than disjointed impressions. I had the feeling that I had traveled to a distant world, that there was much there that I learned and knew … but I could no longer access the knowledge once I found myself awake in my house, in my room, in my bed.  There was more to the dream than I could convert into words.  

It was as if something dense and heavy filled the passageway back from the dream world up into the sunlight of the morning, and the dream could not travel on through. 

The dream was texture, the dream was – 

My mind and tongue were thick with it, but often I couldn’t say it in any language that I remembered, on waking, how to speak.

As a child, I heard and read the strange and wondrous sagas of the Hebrew Bible as if they were the telling of a dream. I didn’t say to myself: “Bible stories are written-down glimpses from the dreams of the ancestors, from our long-ago mystics and sacred story-tellers.”  Nor did I say to myself: “These stories are the collective dream of a wilderness-birthed tribal people.”  I simply absorbed the stories in that way.  

As I grew into adolescence and adulthood, I came to know that there are multiple Jewish teachings about passages of Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament), written on parchment scroll and read aloud in the synagogue each week. 

(The Hebrew word “Torah” means “instruction,” and in addition to referring specifically to the text of the Torah scroll, as I use the word here, “Torah” also has an expansive reference, meaning any written or oral text of Jewish learning. What I am writing here could be called “Michelle’s words of Torah.”)  

The tradition says, “The Torah is black fire written on white fire.” 

The black fire is the Hebrew letters and the Hebrew words, translating from another realm the swirl of image and what is beyond-image, translating sound and all that is beyond-sound into the fixed, linear constrictions of a written tablet or scroll. 

Then, if translated further, into a language other than Hebrew, the words and sentences lose additional layers and depths of meaning, ambiguity, hints, nuance; the text loses word play, cross-references, allusions and poetry when translated out of the original alphabet and tongue.  

The white fire is the potent silence of the blank space around the black fire of the letters.   

Even for those who believe that the Torah was given whole by God to Moses on Mount Sinai: the Jewish tradition opens into manifold interpretations, expanding to include teachings that are layered, capacious, mystical or allegorical, poetic, questioning and alive to new understandings in new generations. The white space, the white fire, calls us to listen, to interact, demanding from us the challenge of intimacy, of soul-opening. We puzzle and question and challenge with our broken and searching hearts, we wrestle as our ancestor Jacob wrestled with a mysterious, unnamed being, all night, until morning, and in the morning he received a blessing and the name “Israel,” “God-wrestler,” and he walked away, limping … 

We can read and receive the characters in these ancient stories as the flesh and shadows of our dreams, recognizing in them aspects of ourselves: our complexities of longing, of fear and desire, our flawed or daring responses to life’s challenges, our troublesome or healing relationships with strangers and within our own families, and within our own conflicted hearts.

We needn’t either cling to or deny this text as literal or historical truth but, like numinous stories of many traditions, we can find truths told in symbol and the language of soul, renderings from the sacred dreaming – and nightmares – of the ancestors, the larger-than-life archetypes and energies, the encounters with the Sacred Source-of-All.

The Torah story – the “Five Books of Moses”:  let us enter as we would enter a sacred cave surrounded by murmuring, echoing voices, distinct one moment, uncertain the next, and soon we are no longer sure whether we heard what we thought we heard, we are no longer certain of inflexible words and clear meanings.  

We hear call-and-response – but who is calling? who is responding? We thought it was the voices in the cave, but perhaps it is the voice of memory, or our own beating hearts.

In the beginning: Creation and Paradise, Innocence and Bliss; 

Then The Voice, and the human  response choosing Will and Knowledge, birthing the human journey

The growth of the first brothers, new and vulnerable, unsure: immediately Jealousy and Fratricide. Am I my brother’s keeper?

The chaos of humanity, and then the Waters of Chaos, destroying all except one Ark.

Rescue, Rainbow, Promise 

A Call:

a Whole and Surrendered Self responds to a Voice that says, Leave what you know about yourself and what you know about the world, dare a journey, open to new blessing; the Patriarch, 75 years old, says “Here I am,” to this call to start a new life

Later: Two Sons, from Two Women 

One woman jealous of The Stranger-Other, oppressing The Stranger-Other to maintain the lineage of her son

Two Nations

Two Great Nations are born.

The Self who speaks Truth to Ultimate Power, daring to Question, to cry out for Justice … 

and –  

the self who accepts without questioning when the Voice commands – a dream, a nightmare? heard, mis-heard?Bind and Sacrifice Your Beloved Son … 

The Rope, the Knife – the Angel, the Ram caught in the thickets (thorns of heart or memory, of yesterday or tomorrow?) 

Later, the Son, the one dead if not for the Angel and the Ram: now grown and digging his Father’s stopped-up Wells, finding Contention, Hostility – finally: Expanse

Wayfarers and Visions, the Sacredness of Land, Auspicious Meetings at a Well.  Enemies, and Pacts of Peace 

Twin Boys at War in their Mother’s Womb, and She Calls to Heaven 

Twin Boys at War when grown 

Deceiving the Old Blind Father, for his Blessing 

the self who advances through trickery, the self who cannot face the mirror of the Twin, and must run

Escape. A Dream of a Ladder to Heaven 

Waking on Holy Ground, the Earth is Holy  

Love and Deceit: Two Sisters, wed to one man

Return to face the Twin, the Shadow

A Wrestling until Dawn with a Stranger – or an Angel – or a Self, a Face –

The face of one’s Shadow, or the Face of God?

Twelve Sons born to the One Who Wrestled with God

One Daughter, seeking the company of Women, betrayed by Men, including her Brothers

One Son, his Father’s favorite, has Dreams of Grandeur 

The Jealous Brothers Betray; the Multi-Colored Cloak they bring their Father, smeared with Blood

The Dark Pit, the Descent into Slavery 

The Dungeon 

The Telling of Dreams

The Famine, the Rise to Power – 

Trauma seeking Power in place of healing

The Reunion of the Brothers 

Forgiveness

Doubt

Trauma, lingering …

The People’s Descent into Slavery.  Servitude, Distress  

The Self with an open heart: the Midwives defy the King, and Pharaoh’s Daughter rescues an outlawed child, delivering the future

A Man sees a Burning Bush, and becomes a Prophet: “Let My People Go”

Speaking Truth to Power:  Challenging the Pharaoh, the King, the right of one human being to own another 

Let My People Go

the self that is complacent with or addicted to a hardened heart: the consciousness of a Pharaoh within each one of us, and within our tribes – today – not just the ancient Other: a self of deadened senses, solid as the rocks of Empire, of Ego, of  fear becoming  narrowness or cruelty; 

and 

the consciousness of Moses, within every human being: the courage for Resistance, moved by an Energy beyond Space and Time to act within human time to resist oppression, to believe in new possibility, to leave with urgent haste into the Wilderness, the Uncertainty of Freedom

Plague and Darkness; Blood and Flight 

The Parting of the Sea

The Women take their Timbrels, and Dance 

But what is this Freedom? Bitter Water, Sweet Water.  Hunger, then Waking to Strange Food at Dawn

The Infinite Presence, Encounter at The Mountain

Fear of the Unknown – the Need: a Golden Idol 

The Tablets Broken, then rewritten, but the shards carried in the Holy Ark – the Broken and the Whole together, part of who we are

Sanctuary and Holiness of Beauty.  Cloud and Pillar of Fire  

Sacrifice: Blood, Life and Death. Flaws, Incense, Ashes, the Human Heart 

A Voice that repeats: You shall not Oppress the Stranger, for You were Strangers

Ordeals, Rules, Complaining, Cravings, Weariness, Doubt

Passions, loosed. The inner gods and demons of Uncertainty and Turbulence, Jealousy, Impatience. Plague and Rage. Zealotry. Death

the self who doubts and falters on the path, preferring the known, the constricted, the narrow – because it is known, it is bounded, it is certainty and order and shelter from doubt and confusion; 

and the Consciousness of Miriam, fearless and joyful, bringing forth a well of living water in the desert, wherever she goes, and she and the women dance

Blessing, Breath 

Justice, Love  

Thirst for water on dry hot days and sleeping beneath the stars on desert nights.  The Wilderness, on, and on

Terror, Compassion, Despair, Brutality, and Lust  

The Voice – heard? mis-heard?

Battle, Disturbance, Possibility  

Remembering, Forgetting

Revelation, Mystery, Destiny, 

Hope, Search, and Song

Michelle Gubbay currently lives in Los Angeles, and has centered the many decades of her life on social justice activism and creative writing. Since 2013, she has been with InsideOUT Writers, leading weekly expressive writing sessions with incarcerated youth. “Torah and Dream” is a chapter in a multi-genre book-in-progress, told in the voice of a fictional alter-ego narrator. (In many places, including this chapter, there is little fictional overlay.) One of the book’s themes is the refusal to allow the brazen  actors who interpret the Jewish tradition as a vengeful, narrow legacy to claim the entire rich and diverse Jewish heritage as exclusively their own.