Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mark Goodwin is a poet-sound-artist, fiction-maker & re-thinker who speaks and writes in differing ways. He is also a walker, balancer, climber, stroller … and negotiator of places.  Mark has a number of books & chapbooks with various poetry houses, including Leafe Press, Longbarrow Press, & Shearsman Books. His latest chapbooks are: to ‘B’ nor as ‘tree’ (Intergraphia, Sheffield, October 2022) & Of Gone Fox (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, Clevedon, April 2023). Mark lives with his partner on a narrowboat just north of Leicester, in the English Midlands. He tweets poems from @kramawoodgin, and some of his sound-enhanced poetry is here: https://markgoodwin-poet-sound-artist.bandcamp.com  

Surrender


Will I ever stop expecting 
this journey to be a steady row 
downstream on sweetly flowing waters? 
I should know by now it’s a mixed bag.
Wise ones say we seekers 
need to surrender—
a manner of living learned with practice.  

Like yesterday when I stopped 
to watch six wild turkeys 
on my usual trek up over the hills.
For months, we had seen a group of seven 
roaming in our rural neighborhood.
Now, I counted and recounted,
lamenting the loss of one.
But then the thought— the six 
still have each other.
And I tried to take comfort in that
as they clacked along, digging up bugs 
hidden under dried leaves.

On my way home, the turkeys 
had moved their grazing to the weeds 
on the opposite side of the path.  
And I sighed with relief to see 
once again, there were seven.

Carolyn Chilton Casas is a Reiki master and teacher whose favorite themes to write about are nature, mindfulness, and ways to heal. Her articles and poems have appeared in Braided Way, Energy, Grateful Living, Odyssey, Reiki News Magazine, and in other publications. You can read more of Carolyn’s work on Facebook, on Instagram @mindfulpoet_, and in her first collection of poems Our Shared Breath or a forthcoming collection titled Under the Same Sky. 

Fratello

O, Poverello,
did your feet
with blood wounds
walk the camino
on slippers sewn
by Santa Chiara
whose golden hair
once outshone the sun?

And did the holy
lamb of God
prove more fierce
than the beastly wolf
whose feral wildness
you accepted?

What of the birds
shrieking in the square
you ordered still
while you spoke or sang a psalm
as they alighted
on your arms
and on your head?
What language
did they hear?

When the bishop
slapped my cheek,
bestowing on me
your name, Franciscus,
how was I able
to feel the wolf fed,
the palsied boy
uncoil his legs,
the shunned leper
accept your kisses?

Royal Rhodes taught for almost forty years courses on the history of Christianity at Kenyon College. His poems have been published by Amethyst Review, Ekstasis Poetry, The Heart of Flesh, Ekphrastic Review, and The Montreal Review, among others. He is currently working on a volume of collected poems.

Who Understands All the Mysteries of Life

My wife’s uncle, blind since his twenties, blind 50 years now, 
tells her that our late daughter, dead herself at 39,
has been coming to him in his dreams where she begs 
to be baptized, and I wonder if she has come 
to him as a vision, as the tall blonde athlete ravaged 
at the end by cancer pain, her eyes retreating, dark, 
her hair just beginning to grow out, the soft short coat 
of a plush toy, or does she come to him as she was 
six months before, her chemo-polished head adorned 
with wigs and hope, her pink clothes an eyesore, a badge 
of defiant pride, a challenge thrown up, a flag flown,
her mouth a cave of plans, a hive abuzz with what comes next. 
In my dreams she appears as four-year-old girl who vibrates 
with life, with tantrum rage and swing-set joy, her fine blonde hair 
a shaking flame.  She flashes through, eleven on soccer field, 
her limbs an intense blur, her hair a streak escaping.  
Or sixteen in silvery slink, corsage and laughter.  
How does she enter his dreams, this girl he has never seen, 
our daughter now dead and gone, now converted to ashes, 
now dispersed by whims of water, our daughter idea 
and memory?  Is she a voice from darkness calling, 
a disembodied entreaty, a soul trying 
to enter life once more, trying to buy by proxy
the ticket to eternal bliss if it can be had? 
I imagine her dream voice a whisper swelling
like Whitney Houston’s voice opening to miracle 
in her anthems, an angel’s wail, a declaration 
of glory’s truth though I do not believe in God 
or afterlife any more than our daughter did 
until those last agonizing weeks.  But he, the blind uncle, 
is LDS and devout and so we tell him 
to go ahead and baptize whatever has come to him. 

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has had a handful of poems appearing or forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.

Echoes of Light

 
If you walk right into the darkness, you’ll get slapped by a small light
that lingers beyond dreams and shadows of living light—
like the glint of a glass rim attracting scorpions in starlight.
I am a cluster of chemical reactions in this meat sack of photosynthesized light
riding the twelve winds of anxiety in carnival light.

You are the living hope of splintered dead light
bound to the ocean’s loneliness soaked in liquid light.
Feel through the textured darkness of prismed light
may a ragged thread of lightning
strike between two nights of dark light. 

Let’s vanish into Neptune’s rings of ice light
pulsing the heartbeat of ancestral light.
Go to it. Like gnats and flies and moths—
whatever becomes trapped finds a window towards light. 

T. Jones is a poet, cultural curator, and literary citizen who hails from a lineage of Buddhist rice paddy farmers. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a Writer’s Grotto Rooted and Written Fellow. This is their first publication!

White Things about Her on Every Side


'as thykke in a maner as motys in the sunne'
The Book of Margery Kempe, Chapter 35



The thing is, those dust-motes
aren't God, they're angels.
Thick and sticky and beaten
back by her roaring, turning
blue in dalliaunce 
as they shilly-shally
in seraphed ranks to sanctify
our girl, Margery,
God's bread box,
where he rests
his bare and battered bones:
let her field those prayers
a while
unbidden

Dr Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. Her poetry is inspired by the medieval texts that she teaches and her poems have been published in journals including Bad Lilies, Banshee Lit, Berlin Lit, and Wet Grain; the academic journal postmedieval with a creative-critical essay; and the anthologies Gods & Monsters: Mythological Poems (ed. Ana Sampson) and All Shall Be Well: A Poetry Anthology for Julian of Norwich (ed. Sarah Law). She is currently writing a book on modern adaptations of Margery Kempe’s life and Book.

I’ve got this gut feeling that inside somewhere


after Maurice Riordan

there is this hairy creature, a fenodyree 
busy naked with its chores 
a nimble mower of rough hedges
shouldering stones one way or another
with a melancholic wail
when my body crumbles like a tholtan, maybe 
it is released from its unchosen home  
to herd loaghtan sheep on foggy nights. 

Perhaps it’s a buggane, a huge hairier ogre 
ripping the roof off Sunday School 
beliefs, a bull with tusks glistening red 
eyes torched with rum until I’m gone
when it shape-shifts out of my corpse
into silver snauanee, into ferrish mist. 

tholtan  ruined cottage

snauanee  web-like covering of the ground on a dewy dawn

ferrish  faerie

Notes:

‘I’ve got this gut feeling that inside somewhere’ is from Maurice Riordan’s The Jailbird.

Fenodyree is a short, dark, uncouth, supernatural creature, usually portrayed as naked but covered with body hair. Sprite-like it is helpful to humans and can perform tasks requiring enormous strength and endurance.

Buggane is a mischievous creature with a mane of black hair and torch-like eyes. Arch and naughty, bugganes chase and frighten people and are adept at shape-shifting, and are often an evil magician’s slave.

(Manx) Loaghtan is a rare breed of sheep native to the Isle of Man. The sheep have dark brown wool, except on their faces and legs, and usually four or occasionally six horns.

Simon Maddrell writes as a queer Manx man, thriving with HIV in Brighton & Hove. Since 2019, over a hundred of his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Acumen, AMBIT, Butcher’s Dog, Poetry Wales, Propel, Stand, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Moth, The Rialto, Under the Radar. In 2020, Simon’s debut chapbook, Throatbone, was published by UnCollected Press, and Queerfella jointly-won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition. In 2023, The Whole Island and Isle of Sin, were both Poetry Book Society Selections. a finger in derek jarman’s mouth marks 30 years after Jarman’s death (Polari Press, Feb. 2024).

My Spirit Animal is a Cloud

Heat as far as the skin can crawl.
Lilac wilted at noon, mind at two.

What calls me to life keeps going-- 
taking shape, losing it, then trying again.

Nodding off, then back again to notice
the sky has retained its pure drought blue.

Carl Mayfield began writing poems because he wanted to get invited to interesting parties. That has actually happened once or twice, but the parties were paler than they were advertised. 

						

There’s an Abraham in Me

			after Ross Gay


There’s an Abraham in me
whose split wood
is so flammable
it ignites with a glance,
whose saddled donkey 
is so obedient he would sit
without thought of thirst
for days. He wields an ax,
the Abraham in me,
and cuts things apart.
He is famous, this Abraham is,
for his rigorous economy,
for his mellifluous tongue.*			*some would stop reading here
Fondly he speaks 
of the Isaac in me, the one 
he loves enough 
to kill to protect
his reputation, the one
always willing 
to take a hand, to go
together, wide-eyed
yet unsuspecting 
of the cleaver,
the kindling. O inner
Isaac – why don’t you notice
my gleaming butcher knife?
Isaac in me, why are you
willing to make of my body
an apple-dappled tree?
Are you willing to lie
on the altar to better see
the cloud-laced sky?
Or maybe you’re unwilling,
and hoping for word 
from the Sarah in me.*			*some would stop reading here
Though she’s really not 
worth mentioning. 
She stays at home
lifting one leg
then another
out of bed
taking one breath
then another
at a time, slicing
into her years
as if into a pie
which she warms
and sets on a hand-painted
pottery plate dotted with sheep
and dew-soaked hills.
She sits, this Sarah
in me, with her steaming
tea, gazing out
the window
at the Hagar in me
(whom I banished
long ago) piercing 
the dough with her fork tines.
What is she waiting for? *			*some would stop reading here
And the angel?
Is there an angel
in me? And where
would she direct me?
And would I listen?

Maya Bernstein’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Adanna Literary Journal, Allium, By the Seawall, the Cider Press Review, the Eunoia Review, Lilith Magazine, Poetica Magazine, Rue Scribe, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. She is on faculty at Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership and Yeshivat Maharat, and is pursuing an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first collection is There Is No Place Without You (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022). She serves on the board of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Skipping Stones
 
In my imperfect memory
I recall that perfect summer day,
How the sky was almost cloudless,
How an easterly breeze so slight
Cooled us but did not churn the water,
Where we stopped along the rocky shore
And skipped flat stones across the waves,
Slicing crests before they could break.
The flat dark discs caught sunlight,
Glittering as they leaped higher
To where sea and sky join as one
As if propelled by magic
To leap farther and farther still. 
 
We played until our arms grew tired,
And we laughed as we talked
Of our skill at defying nature
As we watched waves roll in and out
Smoothing rocks for future play.

Joseph Kleponis lives North of Boston, Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in First Literary Review – East, the Rockvale Reviews and other publications. Kelsay Books published his first book Truth’s Truth: Poetic Portraits in 2021.