Archive
Worship
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.
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.
The Book of Infrequent Prayer
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.
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.
Here For You to See
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.
Suburban Vespers
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.
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.
Paint Him Beautiful
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
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.
Bandit
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.
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.
Inside Pre Rup
Click on image to see a larger version
Angkor UNESCO World Heritage Site
Cambodia, August 2008
Elizabeth Kate Switaj’s first book, Magdalene & the Mermaids, was published in 2009 by Paper Kite Press. She has also published a chapbook, The Broken Sanctuary: Nature Poems, with Ypolita Press. Her photographs have appeared in GUD and Carpe Diem Review, as well as on the cover of Boxcar Poetry‘s 2006 anthology. Her photograph “Recycling in Zhengzhou” won Folded Word‘s “Freight: What Are You Carrying?” competition. She is currently an Editorial Assistant for Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. For more information visit her website.
Curriculum
The iron cord caught fire;
uncertain motions of the day
turn sharp, compelling.
A close call burns off
film that veiled sight,
reveals color, redresses
the situation in scarves
and saris, gold threads in
silky hues of earth and sky.
There’s nothing tentative about
the grass except its tone,
in transit toward summer green,
shifting through shades
in the artist’s palette,
altered by sun or shadow.
Names are motes in the I
of the beholder, must be
unsaid in order to see. The grass
has nothing to say but itself.
Philosophies are built
in the corkscrew of years.
For slow learners, Nature
reviews each year from
the ground up, patient
as a first-grade teacher,
going from letters to words
around the seasons, yet
unconcerned, detached,
a zen master, saying look,
look again, see for yourself.
God is green and gold.
Ellen Roberts Young, a California native who spent almost 40 years in Pennsylvania, is now part of the writing community in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her chapbooks, Accidents (2004) and The Map of Longing (2009) are published by Finishing Line Press. In addition to numerous journal publications, her poems have been anthologized in The Wisdom of Daughters and Orpheus and Company.
Lauds, Summer: An Antiphon
It never grows old, this sun rising here
every morning
As much as I ever wanted
anything, listen:
birdsong, a dying language
Practice
its rise and fall, its
loss, familiar
as the body
You can never
get close enough
to the ground to pray
Long blue heron, sunslant
on the underwing
armfuls of butterfly weed
and orange
Holy, holy this morning, here
and gone
Jeanie Tomasko is the author of Sharp as Want (Little Eagle Press), a poetry/artworks collaboration with Sharon Auberle, and Tricks of Light (Parallel Press). She lives near Madison, Wisconsin and works as a home health nurse in the Madison area. She and her husband, Steve, grow garlic, eat garlic, give away lots of garlic and enjoy the outdoors, venturing out often via foot, ski or a couple paddles and a seaworthy canoe.
grandfather on God and Richmond
I just ain’t sure about God.
They say divinity’s as slippery as truth these days:
harder to pin down than a riversnake.
Take,
for example,
the downtown silhouette
from across the Manchester Bridge
on a winter’s early evening, the
moon just shy of full, blushing
behind lit twelfth-storey windows, the soul-eyes
of a city half-wrapped in rivermist
and dinner plans, grinning teeth
of January jack-o’-lanterns reflecting
over rock and rapid.
Or
Fourteenth and Main
on a rainy rush hour, drops
spilling river-ward through traffic light
and streetlamp, tires
leaving splashmarks across
the footprint of cavalry and
slave.
Better yet, walk with me
through the whispers
at Belle Island, where the voices of fallen prisoners
haunt the college kids sunning like
sea lions out over the rocks.
When autumn comes,
the waters will rise in waves, creeping up
on the empty beer cans and cigarette
packs, washing them down
past Chapel Isle and the ruins of the Confederate boatyard
as the river runs home.
When
I’m dying,
take me to the old hospital
where McGuire’s successors taught
medicine with stolen bodies; no
chain-linkedSaint-named designer cure
for this oldheart. Andwhen
I’m dead
take me to
Hollywood
and a spot
where I can see the river
from a grave
without a cross:
I still ain’t
too sure about God.
Joanna Suzanne Lee has never been formally trained in any kind of writing, thank you very much. She can, however, dissect the brainstem of a neonatal mouse or diagnose your lower back pains. Her first full-length book of poetry, the somersaults I did as I fell (iColor, Richmond, VA), was released in January of 2009. She writes (semi-)regularly at the tenth muse.
qarrtsiluni 