qarrtsiluni

by John Medeiros

prostrate
like christ just before the first easter
i sweat as he sits on top of me.
receive his weight
like something that longs
to be gilded…one-
mississippi, two-
mississippi, moist
breath against hungry ear.
i cannot let this end.
this deification is
pure unadulterated worship.

my moment
of conversion.

to see his body ripple
inches from my diluted
imagination, his
torso stomach groin
pass by my adoring eyes
and press down
on me,
offering his host.
he instantly crucifies
me, hands against
wrists, knees shoulder-
pinned. we pant
and everything
stops.

his eyes reject
mine, do not let me
look where i want to look,
his soul, instead, on reserve.
our chests rise,
collapse in unison. my breath
picks up over here, his lips
part over there, a whisper, lost:
you are enjoying this too much.

we never reach the third count.

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John Medeiros (website) is a writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work has appeared in several books and journals, including Sport Literate, Water~Stone Review, Gulf Coast, Talking Stick, Willow Springs, Other Words: A Writer’s Reader, Gents, Badboys and Barbarians, Evergreen Chronicles, Second Run, Hot Metal Press, Big Toe Review, Swell and Christopher Street. Upcoming work will be featured in Second Run and Text Wrestling, a college textbook for reading comprehension courses. He is the curator of Queer Voices: A GLBT Reading Series, a reading series for queer writers sponsored by Intermedia Arts and Hamline University.

by Monica Raymond

The body is bless-ed as the sacred, the
sacrum fulcrum, yoga
pose of the rocking boat, where balanced
on the abdomen, flying arms
somehow reach the ankles, a sacredness
also of tentacles, frost
seaweed shingles which overhang caves.
Inside a vortex
of water among jellyfish sweeps in
a twister, a trunk,
lunges and sucks among those inmost
passages, dark rock

of the heart. The sacred language of
the body is
this thickness, white as water from a
hose, the pressure
making clearness a color, dense as spume,
the pouring, layers and layers
on blacktop after the fire’s
out. Temporary, a wading
till the grate swallows it, the firemen
tired, a bit
officious, roll up canvas and fasten
chutes, ladders, extenders with brass gadgets. Most

loveable when least heroic, like the Zen priests, shedding
their black
vestments, shaved boyheads emerging, the meditators after, brushing
the lint off their cushions.

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Monica Raymond is a poet and playwright, sometime essayist and photographer, general artist/teacher type, currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her play A to Z won the 2011 Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for plays about race/ethnicity. She has now had work in 15 issues in a row of qarrtsiluni, which means that her work has passed muster with 15 different editorial teams—an unprecedented achievement.

by Regina Walton

Children arch their backs against the pews,
Men catalogue pocket change.
Gold earrings catch the light,
Sparkle off the walls,

Distracting the minister as he greets
An elderly woman with lacquered curls.
Her hand caught in his, she notices
How his nose resembles a modest beak.

The organ swoops down on the opening hymn.
His shoes pinch down the aisle.
Smoothing his stole, turning to face
His flock, the minister
Inhales,

Ruffles out his neck
And spreads his tail feathers—
Brown-gray, shimmering with purple—
Spanning the Communion table.

Later some will say
He fanned them like a peacock, others
Compare it to the dignified disclosure
Of a wild turkey.

After the service they watch him
Wing over the low hills,
Wistful and relieved.

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Regina Walton is an Episcopal priest and a doctoral candidate in religion and literature at Boston University. Her poetry is forthcoming from Soundings East and Poetry East, and has appeared in Hanging Loose.

by William Kelley Woolfitt

Charles de Foucauld, 1906: Tamanrasset, Hoggar, Algeria

My friends charm wells,
gather dates, store faith
in seed-speck, tiny bulb,
tuber eye, farm
the parched, unarable.
Scab-lipped, slur-bearers,

they keep secret,
unpronounceable,
their true name,
forcing me to say
“Haratin”—dark, dirty, foul.
They gnaw gluey camel,

stringy horse—even bowel,
even hoof, Dassine insists.
They till precious dung, peddle
scrawny vegetables, unwashed,
to Tuareg buyers who point,
back away, dare not touch.

Offspring of freed slaves,
they could go anywhere,
but stay—as do I.
Nights here spur me
to praise the God
of desert skies,

starred with the blinking
eyes of my dead ones,
sheltered by God’s
sickle-shaped wings,
living on without toil,
or ache.

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William Kelley Woolfitt (website) is the author of short stories, poems, and essays that have appeared or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.  Poems from his completed book-length sequence, Words for Flesh: a Spiritual Autobiography of Charles de Foucauld, have been published in Christianity and Literature, Salamander, Rhino, Pilgrimage, and Nimrod. He has worked as a summer camp counselor, bookseller, ballpark peanuts vendor, and teacher of computer literacy to senior citizens.  He goes walking on the Appalachian Trail or at his grandparents’ farm (near Kasson, West Virginia) whenever he can.

by Heidi Garnett

Light beginning again in the east,
superstitions of nuthatches and finches,
heartbreak of robins’ eggs.

Tell me about that colour.

Not this mud-light tipped from a rain barrel,
this wet earth knotted into a rope,
loose twist of water,
loose twist of darkness.

No. This other,
this speckled light,
this fawn light born at dawn,
this sun light
peeking under rhubarb leaves
and over fences
and into windows.

Light of the meditative eye
reflective and peaceful,
hinged open.

Blessed wind breaks.
Blessed barn,
blessed animals.

Let Him come.

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Heidi Garnett has been published in a variety of literary magazines. In 2010, she was shortlisted or runner-up for Rattle and the Arvon prize. Her first book, Phosphorus, was published by Thistledown Press.

by Lois Marie Harrod

after Keith Ekiss’s “Pima Road Notebook”

No one told me there is no god.
I changed hymnals from month to Sunday–

Red, brown, dog-eared, Missouri Synod.
Sermons didn’t amount to a hill of beans

which have more protein than eggs
but lack silk and pin feathers.

The Episcopalians served coffee
and the Methodists, Oreos after the service

which I screwed apart and licked
until nothing was left but a smear.

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Lois Marie Harrod’s 11th book, Brief Term, was published by Black Buzzard Press (2011), and her chapbook Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest (Iowa State University). Her chapbook Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. Previous publications include the chapbook Firmament (2007); the chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out (2005); Spelling the World Backward (2000); the chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999); Part of the Deeper Sea (1997); the chapbook Green Snake Riding (l994), Crazy Alice (l991) and Every Twinge a Verdict (l987). She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. Over 400 of her poems have been published online and in print journals, including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and Zone 3. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey. Read more at her website.

by David King

10″x14″ collage

All of David King’s collages are constructed in the traditional, cut-and-paste method and have an obsessive attention to detail. This image is one of a series of collages that re-make the 1980s beefcake icon Scott Madsen into the Hindu god Shiva, “A god with so many powers, he can fulfill your every need.” King’s work has been shown in Europe and across the U.S., including venues such as Artist’s Space in New York, The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and The Lab in San Francisco. He was recently an artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Dump, and he was also the recipient of an artist’s grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is currently represented by Hang Art in San Francisco, where he lives. Visit his website at davidkingcollage.com to see more of his collages.

by Lucia Galloway

When flagstones’ stored heat
on the soles of your feet seems
enough, when rounding
the corner of the house
to see your cats restless in the Indian Summer
night disappearing in the glow
of the street lamp makes
you think of baked bread,
at these moments you know that no
sycamore’s leaves will fail to call
to you in their drift from the tree,
no sprinkler head forget its chant,
no lime neglect its ripening,
nor fountain-rippled, garden pond lose
ardor for the frogs and minnows
harbored in its waters. The sundial
is shadowed, useless. Night things
are pulsing with their vows. Even
the coyote crossing
the greenbelt by the swimming pool—
its long, loping gait.

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Lucia Galloway (website) has published two poetry collections, Venus and Other Losses (Plain View, 2010) and Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005). She reads, writes, and sorts her laundry at home in suburban Los Angeles, where she also co-hosts Poetry in Claremont, Fourth Sundays, a reading series. Find her most recent poems at The Dirty Napkin, The Innisfree Poetry Journal and The Comstock Review.

by Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

Bad men who love Jesus paint him beautiful, speak with him in tongues of angels
visit him in psychedelic colour of light of sound

they wait for him in trees, grab at his tunic when he passes on the side of the road if only I can touch the edge of his cloak I shall be healed

remember mercy

Bad men who love Jesus hear the cock crow three times run to the empty tomb five thousand are converted in one day

lie down in green pasture yea though they walk through the valley of the shadow of death goodness and mercy will follow them all the days of their lives these bad men who love Jesus

inherit the earth speak to mountains wither fig trees love thy neighbour walk on water

Bad men who love Jesus live forever

prophesying redemption, gathered in baskets, in nets, made beautiful

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Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt is an artist and writer who lives in Quebec’s Eastern Townships with her husband and four children. Her work has been published in Crux, Room, the anthologies Taproot II, III and IV and in the online poetry journal, The Centrifugal Eye. She teaches English at Champlain Regional College and leads classes in embodied prayer.

by Andrea O’Brien

A chef plates my supper—berries, fish,
spring greens—with the precision of a surgeon.
The meal might be my last, or the dish

might save my life. Her julienne
carrots stitch old wounds closed. Her poached pear
is a salve for skin I didn’t know was burned.

I lick the fork tines clean, declared
healed at the hands of one robed in white
(almost doctor, almost angel). Who is prepared

for such sustenance? Stars spooned like sugar light
my way home. Fatted, supernova-full, I want to make
the night last. Pleading to get it just right—

right amount of salt, right kneading—I bake
a loaf, a life, dough rising from yeast.
Who is prepared? Dusted in flour, I break

bread under the star-clotted sky, pitching pieces
into the field where a raccoon feasts.

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Andrea O’Brien’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, including The Hopkins Review, Connecticut Review, Nimrod International Journal, and The New York Quarterly. In 2007, the Kentucky Foundation for Women awarded Andrea an Artist Enrichment grant to begin writing her second collection of poems. She lives in Denver with her husband and works as a writer and editor.