TRANSFORMATION & CHANGE

CONTRIBUTORS:

Poets:
Carolyn Chilton Casas * Emily Tee * Diana Woodcock * Susan Scheid * Karen Elizabeth Sharpe * Ann Bodling * Jill Michelle * Judy Lorenzen * Melissa Huff * Jo Taylor * Helen Patrice * Cynthia Knorr * Katrina Serwe * Tova Kranz * Jocelyn Boor * Dianna Mackinnon Henning * Patricia Nelson * Lynne Burnett * Stacy Ooi * Kathleen Deyer Bolduc * Jeannie E Roberts * Karen Paul Holmes * Lynne Carol Austin * Kirstin Eventyr * Cheryl Keeler * Sharon Fabriz * Angela Hoffman * Katherine H Maynard * Kathy Whitham * Suzanna C de Baca * Thomas John Hurley * Bobbie Lee Lovell * James P Roberts * Alison Hurwitz * Andrea Potos * Kristen Baum DeBeasi

Artists:
Fiona Capuano (cover artist) * Karen A VandenBos * Kris Gould * Scott Ferry * Kimberly Blaeser

CAROLYN CHILTON CASAS

Life Goes On

Home late at night from a long trip,
I spy a mouse sauntering
across the floor, believing
he has the place to himself.

And there’s evidence the spiders
have been living it up—
weaving webs from lamps to tables,
from paintings to door frames,

hammocks earnestly crocheted
across every corner. Outside,
some cottontails have moved
into the scrubs close to the house.

The deer in our absence assumed
the garden was now theirs.
They have indulged in their favorite
dessert—all the foliage and buds

from the top foot of every rosebush,
leaving behind a view of slender, bare stems.
From days of unexpected rains,
the plants sprouted into giants,

jasmine vines grasped onto succulents,
bougainvillea branches extended
into the salvias. The garden grew
wild, happier perhaps for its freedom

to reach out unhindered, caressing
the living beings on either side
without me here to interfere.

Carolyn Chilton Casas is a Reiki practitioner and teacher who writes articles about ways to heal for magazines in multiple countries. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies including The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. You can read more of Carolyn’s work on Facebook or Instagram, and in her collection of poems, Our Shared Breath, as well as in a forthcoming collection, Under the Same Sky.

EMILY TEE

Blessings

They say that about poets, they’re always watching
there on the edge of things, observing the
passage of the world, turning it black and white
and red and blue, writing about the birds, flowers—
tulips, what comes up out of the black dirt, on
a mission to capture the semblance of sense, the
higher purpose, tight images and metaphors, squat
words falling down the page. Words that are early pear
blossoms, the white petals the first to show, trees
snowy with them before fruit begins to grow—then blow
through like tumbleweed. Some stick, the rest fall off.
Poets, god-like, craft their worlds, suffer the sparrows
that they can save or destroy, count hairs on heads, and
move on. Sifting, sorting, panning —separating trash
from gold and making both into worthwhile subjects. In
time, with dedication and many hours of patient work, the
poet reaps the benefit of their craft, arms sun brown
from warmer days working in the open air, the grass
under foot and the trees above, shadows weighing
on the mind even while hands and muscles work, the
inner world always pressing, pressing down, a weight
of stories to be shaped and honed and perfected, of
finding the right way in, the right image to share that
will light a spark, kindle the yellow flame to burn blue white
and light a reader’s imagination like a neon sign.
The poet watches the outer world but the poem is inside.

Note: This is a Golden Shovel poem using these lines by Robert E Ray in his poem, “A Blessing.”

watching the white flowers on the squat pear trees
blow off, sparrows and trash in the brown grass
weighing the weight of that white sign inside

Emily Tee writes poetry and flash fiction. Much of her writing is ekphrastic or on the topics of society, nature, and the environment. She’s had recent pieces online in Ekphrastic Review Challenges, Whale Road Review and elsewhere, and in print in Poetry Scotland and several anthologies. Emily is also the judge of the monthly ekphrastic poetry contest run by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. She lives in the UK.

DIANA WOODCOCK

When the Day’s News Has Me Singing The Blues,

I go out to the garden and nestle
at sunset in the heart of a flower,
caterpillar-like. At the river’s edge,
I metamorphose like a mayfly,
frolic frog-like in the pond—
oblivious to the fast-approaching
grass snake.

In the evening, I bathe
in meteors, glide through
galaxies, feeling the stars
in my bones. Midnight,
I prowl hillocks of drifted sand
with Honey badger and Arabian
Red fox through tangles, thickets
of acacia and thorny scrub,
determined to rub shoulders
with these creatures of the night.

Faculty of wonder reawakened,
ever so gently shakened out of
despondency, I trade in my jaded brain
for one devoted to calling each thing
encountered by name—listening
to the toad’s melancholy chant,
I pray, Grant that I, too, may
“bear my odium with love.”*

Sunrise, I break fast with the sweet
dreg of mist. I tell you all this
because maybe you’re ready
to believe bliss is the preferred
and natural state in which to exist,
and I can testify it isn’t some
pie-in-the-sky dream. All it takes
for transformation—this is where
you come in—only you know how
this poem should end.

*Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, from The Creatures’ Choir

Diana Woodcock has authored seven chapbooks and six poetry collections, most recently Heaven Underfoot (winner of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award), Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist), and Facing Aridity (2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee, she received the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where her research was an inquiry into the role of poetry in the search for an environmental ethic.

SUSAN SCHEID

Beeswax

Buddha’s wax head smiles
even as the wick burns,
his forehead melting
over his third eye.
He smiles as the warm liquid
coats his eyes and the soft
edges of his ears fold
onto themselves.

Even as the wax drips along
the corners of his mouth,
he seems to say

Remember nothing stays.

A solitary bee, maybe the last of the season,
comes to the window and cleans itself.
He nods to the candle in recognition,
the hard work of his summer over.
Then like the waxen figure, the bee melts
away into the fall sun.

Susan Scheid is a poet who lives in Washington, DC. She was inspired by stories of her father reading poems to wounded soldiers in the medical hospital during WWII. Her book, After Enchantment, was influenced by her love of fairy tales. Her poetry appears in several literary journals and anthologies.

KAREN ELIZABETH SHARPE

The Sixth Type: A Prescription

Pain is something like being held:
an intent focus and thoroughly familiar

in an uncomfortable way
like afternoon sun splitting the blinds

its stark curriculum marking
the table in stripes. The chipped

rim of a mug a chronic ache of the lip
to maneuver around. A wooden slat of stiffness.

Virus’s rosy red bloom. Medicine says
there are five types of pain.

Stuffs us full of fixes and concoctions
to mask and cover up what hurts, pricks

or stings. Better to be numbed and doctored
pilled and salved than afflicted.

No wonder no one considers
the pain of the heart as the sixth type.

We stuff that suffering down too.
Get lost in the untidy traffic of our complaints.

What do I know of treating pain?
I know it’s better to recall the wonder

of a long ago freewheeling embrace
to conjure a dream of a lover’s reckless delight

than to cover the rift of heartbreak in gauze.
The best way is through the twinge and turmoil

past the should-haves, the regrets, the shame
to get to the tender pulp, the marrow of it all.

Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is from Rutland, Massachusetts. Karen is the author of Prayer Can Be Anything (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and a poetry editor at The Worcester Review. Her poems have recently appeared or will appear in The MacGuffin, West Trade Review, Mom Egg Review, and Catalyst, among others. Karen has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has been a member of Marge Piercy’s juried poets group and a member of the PoemWorks community in the greater Boston area.

ANN BODLING

Emergence

As cicadas blindly tunnel
through the soil that bore them,
and last winter’s buds burst
into lace on the fringetree,
the Juneberries that were flowers
a few weeks ago,
plump and color,
soon to ripen.

As tadpoles grow legs and lose tails,
and the newly hatched bluebirds
become fledglings,
the tiny balls of fluff,
tucked safely
into the vegetable garden
are looking more like the rabbits
they have always been.

As cotyledons pierce
the seed coat and arise
in the dark of night,
and snakes writhe to shed the
skin that confines them,
caterpillars, unimaginably, dissolve
themselves into the newness
of butterflies.

I recognize the wild ones’
restlessness
before birthing.
And the ways of
metamorphosis,
but what about me?
“Am I not also wild?”
“Trust the process,” he said.

Ann Bodling is an emerging poet whose poems reflect her relationship with the natural world and with the Divine. She is a naturalist, a gardener, a mother, a grandmother, a wife and a spiritual director. Most of her adult life has been working in gardens and on farms. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, three goats, and five hens.

JILL MICHELLE

Quite the Dish in Those Days
I ask you to come back now as you were in youth, / Confident, eager, and the silver brushed from your temples…. / Come back now and help me with these verses. / Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.  —Donald Justice, “Invitation to a Ghost”

I’ve gone to visit you again in the dining
room of my mind, where I am forever
twelve, and you are forever alive. I turn
the crystal knob on the slim closet door
reach inside, retrieve the tattered box
full of family photos, stacks of sepia-ed
history, stored preserves for us to pore
over with afternoon tea and cookies.

Struck by a gust of the familiar musk
of mothballs mixed with cedar, these
wood planks surrounding us, measured
and cut by the worn hands of the same
ancestors I skip over in the shoe-string-
laced books with their sober-faced figures
among them your lost mother carefully
tucked in her wool layers and lacy collar.

Instead, I pluck our usual album, sand-
colored like the beach at Lighthouse Point
where an impossibly-young-you poses
on the rocks. Mop of auburn curls and
twenties swim costume caught still
in the frame of Grandpa’s new camera.
Courting, you call it, giggle like a girl.
Yes, I wish I had asked you more about

world wars, depressions, the coffin ships
those roads to nowhere back in Ireland
but even now, I cannot resist retelling
the story of this day—Grandpa’s reported
whistle at your cabana exit, his shout of
There’s my girl that has you blush, primp
a bob of now-silver curls. The wrinkles fade.
Your back unbends, and there she is, Bill’s
gal, again.

Jill Michelle’s latest works appear/are forthcoming in Black Coffee Review, Drunk Monkeys, Lips Poetry Magazine, and San Pedro River Review. Her honors include a Best of the Net nomination and the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com.

JUDY LORENZEN

A Winter Psalm

Praise the light of late February,
the thin light getting longer and longer
each day, stretching towards March. Praise
this pristine day. Praise the little brown sparrows,
flitting from branch to branch on the snow-covered pines.
Praise the color white, these mountains on the plains—
ten inches of flakes filling the driveway and country roads
all yesterday and through the night, now pushed in
huge mounds around the farm, which will last until April.
Praise the ice-covered trees and the house’s frosted window swirls.
Praise the small paw prints from the shed to the house for breakfast.
Praise the pale blue morning sky and the ice cold sun,
beaming down on this frozen world.
Praise for the covering of all these imperfections,
making them beautiful, these second chances.
Praise for new life underneath this wintry ground. Praise
for the change that’s coming.

Judy Lorenzen is a poet, writer, and teaching artist available through the Nebraska Arts Council. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work appears in journals, magazines, and websites.

MELISSA HUFF

Talking with Trees

In the after-snowfall silence I listen
to the bare trees of winter,

lean in to hear their wisdom whisper—
this is the best time

to scan the patterns of your growth,
decide which branches need pruning,

which offshoots are heading
in the wrong direction.

In the spring
I will ask these trees how

to stretch my arms wide,
hold myself up to the sky,

allow the furled layers of my heart
to unfold like leaves—

how to use every inch of this openness
to break down toxins,

transform the air and exude
something beneficial,

something to help all those around me
breathe.

Melissa Huff feeds her poetry from the power and mystery of the natural world and the ways in which body, nature and spirit intertwine. An advocate of the power of poetry presented out loud, she twice won awards in the BlackBerry Peach Prizes for Poetry: Spoken and Heard, sponsored by the (U.S.) National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Publishing credits include Gyroscope Review, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, and Amethyst Review. Melissa has been frequently sighted making her way between Illinois and Colorado.

JO TAYLOR

Change Agents
—after Alix Klingenberg

When the world is frenzied and cold and
seems ruled by hate, turn to things that warm
you—worn and faded animal-print sneakers,
vegetable soup with beans you snapped
last summer, simmering on the freshly-scrubbed
kitchen stove, eyes sparkling, innards burned
clean of yesterday’s dribbles and spills.
Cuddle up to the hearth with a warm cup
and browse your people’s recipes for soups
and gravies, their remedies for bitterness,
their cures for sore hearts. Finally, peruse
journals, handwritten, and works of fine art
to discover you are not alone, then with more
fanfare than the jubilant brass of Schumann’s first
symphony, announce the coming of spring.

Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. Her favorite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it. In 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire, and in 2022, she was nominated for Best of the Net. This spring she introduces Come Before Winter from Kelsay Books. She enjoys morning walks, playing with her two grandsons, and collecting and reading cookbooks.

HELEN PATRICE

Queen of Cups

The transformation is overdue.
I’ve been Queen of Wands too long:
commanding, overseeing,
standing on the cliff’s edge
like the Fool,
hand gripped hard around the Stave.
Issuing ideas as though they burst
from my head like supernovae.

I breathe out,
longer than I thought possible.

My dress flows from red to blue-green,
the Staff flowers open, blossoms a Chalice
and my face softens.
I am ready to pour out tears
for my life lived hard and hot.
Water flows up my legs,
susurrating the words:
“Let me buoy you.”
I cry for the boys, the men,
who never offered so much.

Helen Patrice is an Australian writer living in Naarm. She is obsessed with fairy tales, folklore, myth, and anything esoteric and mysterious. Her new book of fairy tale poetry, In Dark Woods, will be published in 2024. Helen works in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, both literary and speculative, and is also deep into memoir. She lives with her husband, adult offspring, 2 opinionated cats, and one, small yappy dog.

CYNTHIA KNORR

Portent from the Space Between the Stars

You want to fill the emptiness
that death left behind,
the gaping vacancy on the right side of the bed,
as empty as the space between the stars

so you search the space between the stars
from your empty bed and learn, to your surprise
that it is full of something, a force so mysterious
it can’t be found, called dark energy,

a conundrum to astronomers
who want to understand
what compels the universe to fly apart,
each galaxy thrust forward

like buckshot fired from a cosmic gun,
spirals and ellipses shooting into space
and blazing a trail to infinity
propelled by an invisible tide

that pushes, pulls, and permeates everything:
the heavens, the earth, the walls
of your bedroom, the sheets on your bed,
the air in your lungs, the space between

today and yesterday, the living and the dead,
an oddly comforting something that lets you know,
in its unknowable way, that what you search for
is already here.

Cynthia Knorr is the author of the chapbook, A Vessel of Furious Resolve (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in SWWIM Every Day, Café Review, Ibbetson Street Magazine, The Comstock Review, and many others. After a career as a medical writer in New York City, she relocated to rural New Hampshire. She was recently named a finalist in the New Hampshire Poetry Society’s tribute to Charles Simic.

KATRINA SERWE

What can one square-acre of prairie do?
Ice Age Trail: Greenwood Segment

In the outwash of Almond Moraine someone built a split-log
couch and ottoman to sit at the fringe of oak savanna

and breathe in the fresh air. Rest while viewing the hard work
of one-acre of prairie restoration rooted deep—

eight to fourteen feet into earth, sinking five tons
of carbon down out of the atmosphere, safe from

burning above, soaking up excess water that would erode
soil, filling it with organic matter, holding nutrients to sprout

diversity—forty to eighty different plant species
in this small space creating food for millions

of insects, birds and mammals. Space for pollinators to spread
abundance to orchards and gardens and farms, supporting

humans who may not realize their animal nature needs
roots to sink deep into the earth and hold us together.

Katrina Serwe (BS, MS, PhD) lived in her left brain until a midlife crisis brought her into balance. Now she calls herself a poet and spends her time hiking the Ice Age Trail and writing. Her poetry has been featured in Bramble Lit Mag, Portage Magazine, and Scrawl Place. Her poem “Ephemeral” took 3rd place in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ 2023 Triad Emerging Poet contest.

TOVA KRANZ

Fermentation
Each generation will give birth to a new mother, and the
old mother will thicken.  —Sandor Ellix-Katz

Nothing changes until, somehow, it starts and when
it starts it’s already in progress, lactobacilli both the halo
and the angel that brings news of the miraculous. Give

the mother food and she will make new life from old
fruit. Every generation a new mother is made, and every time
she makes anew. Nature needs nothing more than water

and some honey to make wine and isn’t that a form of God?
The sun’s heat trapped in the warmest corner of the laundry
nook is the lap of the Madonna in every triptych, the center

of gold that yields and churns and births, that is form and
forge. A practice that yields a transformation: in sacrifice
as in fermentation the action and the product are the same.

Tova Kranz earned degrees in English from Florida State University and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and was previously published in the inaugural issue of 86 Logic. She lives and farms in North Carolina.

JOCELYN BOOR

Star Eaters

Once upon a time
we took our chances
and ate the stars.

We hoped to become angels,
wanted to be galaxies—
but discovered that
we are rainbowed vaults
to be unlocked with rain.

Jocelyn Boor teaches art history at UW-Milwaukee, writes whenever a marking implement finds her hand, and has had poems published in Critical Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Calendar.

DIANNA MACKINNON HENNING

In the Collage of My Mind
I’m a Simple Design

The years are rapt birds,
trilling their delight,

no salt on their tongues
no weights on their wings,

no rambunctious expletives
in their voices,

not a single lofty sermon, only
the width of stars in their throats.

My throat is a winding river,
where words carry me

into the sanctity of all
that flows no matter flood or drought.

I’ve learned to listen with my mouth.
To make words with wings.

To carry myself without fear of what’s ahead.

Dianna Mackinnon Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program. Publications, in part: The Tule Review; California Quarterly; That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions (New Village Press, 2023); Mocking Heart Review; Artemis Journal, 2021, 2022, 2023, and The Adirondack Review. 2021 nomination by The Adirondack Review for a Pushcart Prize. MFA in Writing ’89, Vermont College. Fourth book, Camaraderie of the Marvelous (Kelsay Books 2021).

PATRICIA NELSON

Proteus Explains Himself
Proteus was a seer who could change his shape. To get the truth from him, one had to hold him still.

Remember all those times
the truth strolled past you, stroking
your blindness with its shapes?

Now you must want it, must look up
and find it in its stillness.
The truth has other things to do.

It might be the gull who enters the wind
with a sound of footfalls and goes quiet.
Or the otter in the gleaming river-skin.

Or the leopard’s hunger. How her yellow fur
slides through the drying grasses like a river
bearing the many smallnesses of the moon.

As if the truth were not a thing to know
but moonlight moving in the corners
like the whites of eyes.

Patricia Nelson is a retired attorney and legal editor who has worked primarily with the “Activist” group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a new book of poetry, Monster Monologues, due out from Fernwood Press in December 2024.

LYNNE BURNETT

My Body the Hymn

All the old lovers
and secret, once sweet loves,
long buried in my body
are aching to leave in peace.

They struggle to vacate
their joint beds,
to muscle out of a dark past
and empty the bunkers
where the blood runs deep.

No true goodbyes, no forgiveness
have spawned this subterranean unrest
and I am stopped at the border
of new ground. Wave the flag
that changes everything

or add to the body count
my ears are ringing.
It’s a dark night, I light
a candle that burns just for them,
blessing, blessing

so I can be here with you
no landmines exploding,
love flaring instead
in us, love
for the hand I could hold forever

and for the hand that flexes open—
if it must—
my body the hymn
a light heart
can be heard singing.

Lynne Burnett lives on Vancouver Island. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies in the US and Canada. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, she has won the Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit PP, the Jack Grapes PP, and was a finalist in the 2022 Montreal International PP. Her chapbook Irresistible was published by Finishing Line Press. Visit her at https://lynneburnett.ca/

STACY OOI

Transformation

We transfigured the language into something brave,
but inside we were shaking.
Leaves fell softly on the pavement outside
landing with little sounds heard only by the cats.
Little feet padded up to the doorstep
and a small voice said, tremulously
that the time for courage had come.
We put on our coats and looked at each other—
We were sure that we would not survive this.
We opened the door and flinched,
waiting for the world to end.
Somewhere on the other side of the universe
a chrysalis broke open
revealing the beginnings of iridescence.

Stacy Ooi is a writer and singer-songwriter. She runs writing circles and workshops through her literary platform, the Rainbow Fictioneers (www.rainbowfictioneers.com). She is based in Singapore.

KATHLEEN DEYER BOLDUC

Yellow

The bulb looks old.
Shrunken.
Wizened.
Dead.
Its roots bedraggled, limp.
Why bother planting you
in this field of mud, I ask.
What good can come of the grave?
And yet,
the Master Gardener
plucks you from a pile,
passes you gently from palm to palm
as if to stimulate
your life’s blood,
plants you in a prepared
plot of dirt,
sprinkles you with bone meal
and water,
closes his eyes, smiles
at the yellow bursting
forth behind his eyelids.
Yellow as real as his shovel.
As real as his boots caked with mud.

Kathleen Deyer Bolduc is a spiritual director and author. Her award-winning books include The Spiritual Art of Raising Children with Disabilities and Autism & Alleluias. Her poems have appeared in her books as well as Blue Heron Review and Abbey of the Arts. www.kathleenbolduc.com

JEANNIE E ROBERTS

Like daily vitamins

I absorb the display
admire the white light
as it separates into a spectrum of color.
My crystal ornament suspends from the window
emanates the beauty of ephemerality
as shapes splash across the cabinets
waltz along the walls
illuminate the entire kitchen.
As if an elixir
the show begins with the seven legs of rainbows
happy dancers who throw a four-hour-
boost-to-my-insides’ party.

When subzero weather reduces my orbit to indoor living
the optics of prisms transforms my energy.
Like the flutter of faeries or the alchemy
of a forest lit with fireflies
the dazzling wisps lift my being
as the jubilee takes wing
renews my spirit with saviors of radiance.

Lifelong consistency has its benefits—
I’m two-months old (or so the story goes) and Dad’s
driving past the homes decorated with Christmas lights.
The backseat bursts with laughter.

Jeannie E Roberts is a Midwesterner with Minnesota and Wisconsin roots. She has authored eight books, six poetry collections and two illustrated children’s books. Her most recent collection is titled The Ethereal Effect – A Collection of Villanelles (Kelsay Books, 2022). An award-winning artist and poet, she serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs and is an Eric Hoffer and a two-time Best of the Net award nominee.

KAREN PAUL HOLMES

Morning, Blue Ridge Mountains

Waking without a view
other than palpable gray—
an alpaca blanket pressed against
windows.

Fog born of humid-rich currents,
cooler water touching warm air
held between the ridges.

Sitting in the silence created
when sense of sight is gone.
Disappearing into liminal space.

And if a silhouette materializes—
an angler in his low jon boat—
still the silence, untouched.

Then witnessing the gift of color
emerging: scraps of blue sky
and of sky reflected in blue.

The music of waking:
geese beginning their antiphonal
oboe calls down shore.

Kingfishers flitting railing
to rigging, their telltale rattle
like tambourines.

The kettle whistling, a prelude
to cups from the French press
forming their small fogs.

The household’s hesitant hum
breaks into song.

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her second book is No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin), and poetry credits include, The Slowdown, Diode, and Plume. She’s also a freelance writer who teaches writing at various venues and conferences.

LYNNE CAROL AUSTIN

Art as Healing
Inspired by Daniel Goldstein’s sculpture, Light on the Lake, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN

Numerous turns down long hallways, trudging toward the
tattoo session for his oncology radiation, an atrium greets us
we blink at the brightness, and
notice a sense of
you have arrived

Across the expansive space, a thirty foot sculpture hangs from
the ceiling. Its intricacy halts my feet, raises my chin, my eyes
capture electric blue colors, welcoming us in artistic grace
awakening the senses
a must-do list can dull

A smile eases tension, appraising the layers of crescent shapes
there must be one thousand, each hanging by the thinnest of threads
a cause for a spider to be enamored by
the complexity and
innate planning

With air movement, the shimmering crescents undulate a wave
impersonating the breath: inhalation and exhalation, softly
the ripples cross the sculpture
reminding me to breathe

Light from the two story windows, reflect off the quarter moon
shapes, in azure, cerulean, cobalt blue: a painting by Monet, or
colors found in warm coastal water, and I remember the thunder
of the surf, the blow-away nothingness of the foam, while
the toes in my tight shoes curl
looking for warm sand

During my awed gaze, a spiritual awareness opens. We are
so suspended in “this holy place between life and death,” yet
securely held, the work toward healing continues in the
state of sacred light and
uncertainty of shadow

And what is the risk of prolonging life, but to
remember and practice deep-seated love
for our self, along with each other
in the cherished
glittering moments left

Lynne Carol Austin is a published author of two novels and three children’s book, along with single poems. She is currently finishing her collection of cancer poems, a children’s poetry collection along with artwork, and a novel that is collecting dust. This poem is from the cancer collection, written specifically from the spouse’s point of view, during diagnosis and treatment of her husband’s metastatic cancer. These poems are an effort to give voice to others experiencing the myriad of emotions that come about in response to the caretaking or support of the loved one with cancer.

KIRSTIN EVENTYR

How to Live Through the Impossible

First face the darkness.
Do not turn away.
You must know
what it is you are braving.

Next taste every loss,
let each one break you.
Forget all the old ways,
you have entered the chrysalis.

Now re-find the wild in you:
go barefoot,
growl until your eyes shine,
make a poisonous plant your ally,
bite something with all your strength,
break your dishes.

Listen for the ones who have known you
since before you were born.
Ask them what is sacred.
Promise yourself to whatever they say.
Worship it.
Stay close to the bone.

One day, wings warm and heart
clear of the tangle of pain,
you will light upon the life
you are already living.

Now you have no shield,
only an unbending
loyalty to yourself and
it can take you
anywhere.

Kirstin Eventyr is a poet from the southernmost point of the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest, where she has enjoyed a 30-year career as a heart-centered therapist. Her love of flowers, the bodies of all beings, the trustworthiness of the pain, and the tragic glory of being human inform all aspects of her writing. In her free time, she walks the wilds with her beloved husband and their 2 English Bulldogs, Coco and Buford.

CHERYL KEELER

Something Beautiful
—to my stillborn son

Beside me, the Eden Heater hums.
I have eaten a bowl of ginger granola

with yogurt and blueberries.
My gold leather chair, shabby

and torn, fits the shape of my own
worn body, scarred.

There is something beautiful
about all scars, Harry Crews says,

the wound is closed and healed.
What scar I wear!

This year you would turn 29,
the age I bore you, the age I lost

you, the age I began your scar.
See how it sits on me?

See how beautifully changed I am?
Like driftwood, its edges softened,

habitat for beetles and other tiny creatures,
pockets of soil, and lichens spidering

over the surface. I am art
and artist—silvered and silvering.

Cheryl Keeler has taught preschool, elementary, college and life-long learning students; opened and managed a branch public library; earned an MEd and MFA; and writes poems that arrive line by line in quiet places. Some of these have been shared in The Courtship of Winds, Blue Heron Review, Pulse, and About Place Journal. Her newest adventure is becoming a grandmother.

SHARON FABRIZ

years hence

sometimes it comes plastered to the sidewalk,
a five-pointed thing,
thin as paper,
red at the rim with veins the color of spring,
the leaf it once had been
now flattened,
muddied,
swept into its resting place
by the swift orbit of gravity,
pushed a few inches by wind,
tethered to concrete
then maybe the street
or drain
or the bottom of a shoe.

I fall to my knees at the sight of it,
the five-pointed thing.
Not in that moment, but later,
in my imagination,
when I become a supplicant made holy
by the randomness of all that is careless and chaotic,
made holy by the act itself of imagining
the bruised and fallen as sacred, as story, as me.

And I think of you, too, this day, my father,
when the season of golden twilights lifted you into star stuff,
into distant atoms uncomplicated by seasons,
far from the falling of leaves,
and yet here in the presence of them.

Sharon Fabriz publishes poetry and prose weekly on Medium at sharonhopefabriz.medium.com. Her spiritual memoir Circling Toward Home (2021) is her first book. She is part of the Sisters of the Pen writing group based in Sacramento and also participates in Ann Randolph’s Unmute online writing community.

ANGELA HOFFMAN

Second Half of Life

I spent a lifetime working, making ends meet.
It was about surviving, striving for perfection,
activity worn like a crown.
Any uniqueness I had to offer was lost
in a forest of busyness.

Now there is a surplus of sadness in the rain.
The bejeweled trees lose their leaves,
and I feel myself falling,
and I’m in love
with the falling, doing things wrong,
the ordinary.
The layers of sapwood are dying.
Inside are growth rings, the dark heartwood;
the strongest, original parts,
and underneath,
roots that are reaching.

Angela Hoffman lives in Wisconsin. With her retirement from teaching and the pandemic coinciding, she took to writing poetry. Her poetry has been widely published. Angela’s collections include Resurrection Lily (2022), Olly Olly Oxen Free (2023), and Hold the Contraries (forthcoming 2024), Kelsay Books.

KATHERINE H MAYNARD

Blue Crab

At last, my lungs release.
Now I breathe through gills
like a blue crab molting,
shedding the carapace that binds,
hiding in intertidal pools
along estuary streams.

I shine, translucent now,
no longer blue, my coloring
deepens to pink, then red.
Here, while tides rise and fall,
I will be soft, pliable.
I will rest submerged
while the shell I no longer need
is thinned and dissolves.

Callinectes sapidus, the gifted,
able to breathe two ways,
spanning
what was before
with what
will be.

Katherine H Maynard is originally a flatlander from Chapel Hill, North Carolina but she now lives in South Burlington, VT. Her poetry has appeared in Sojourners, St. Katherine’s Review, Whale Road, and Kakalak. The relationship between imagination, the natural world, and spiritual striving shapes her literary sensibilities. Social justice issues also feature dominantly in her writing. She teaches Humanities and Communication courses at the Community College of Vermont.

KATHY WHITHAM

In an Airbnb

In an Airbnb on Alki Beach in West Seattle,
I watched myself surrender to my re-forming
from scattered pieces of love
conflicting with love.

I watched my heart,
a nautilus shell,
coming in to go back out.

In the morning breeze
a tease of hair glanced one side of my face.
Delighted, I saw myself smile,
begin to soften to that gentle touch.

All the fish in the sea
are no more able to feel the water
than I was to feel my naked skin.

From the beach, I watched distant
blue-gray watercolor clouds
reorganize into snow-bright
peaks and jagged shadows.
The Olympics, as visible as day.

Look, oh look!
Parting the curtain, there’s the full moon
splashing like milk across my face!
A steady heartbeat of
more more more more.

Kathy Whitham is an active member of the Boston writing community, having worked with leading teachers in the area, including Barbara Helfgott Hyett, Tom Daley, and Eric Hyett. A registered nurse turned Parenting Coach, with a focus on non-traditional families, her poems explore human connection in its myriad forms. She recently finalized a chapbook collection, Drawing The Big Dipper, and current work has appeared in what the poem knows: A Tribute to Barbara Helfgott Hyett, Alchemy and Miracles: Nature Woven Into Words and Thriving: An Anthology. She can be found at parentingbeyondwords.com.

SUZANNA C DE BACA

Waxing Crescent Moon

The moon was full
the night before you died,
beaming so brightly I had to
look away from the brilliance
of the glowing sky.

By your birthday the moon
had emptied itself inside out,
the night sky hollow. I looked
to the heavens for reason
or direction, but clouds
covered the stars.

Time will heal, they say, but
I disagree. Time simply passes
and the moon keeps moving
in her phases, pulling us
along from shadow to light.

Today she has reemerged,
a sliver, a glimmer, a tiny hook
hanging in the darkest night,
taking a first step toward fullness,
expanding, increasing.

I can gaze at her now,
so small, so sweet, offering
a gentle invitation to return
to the living, a comfort
looming in the dusk, beckoning
quietly, a hopeful moon.

Suzanna C de Baca is a native Iowan, proud Latina, publisher, author, and artist. A member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, her poetry has been published in numerous literary publications and anthologies, including Best of Choeofpleirn Press, Our Silent Voices Anthology, The Letter Review, and Black Fox Literary Magazine. She is the recipient of the Derick Burleson Poetry Award, winner of the Fox Tails Contest, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

THOMAS JOHN HURLEY

Initiation

The time has come.

You have passed through every gate
and done all you can to prepare,

though nothing truly readies you
for this threshold.

Now you face the unknown
with only trust.

Soul-friends step from the darkness
and lead you to the mirror, saying,

Leave self-judgment behind.
Healing happens in not holding on.

Let the masks fall away
to disclose essence.

In the eyes looking back at you,
only love. You are understood,

forgiven. Bodies glow
with an inner light.

Outside, the jet-black sky
glistens with other worlds.

When you take a step, the ground
comes up to meet you.

Thomas John Hurley is turning his focus to poetry and photography as he completes his work as an executive coach and leadership consultant. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, and his Celtic heritage manifests in a deep love of nature, a gift for story, and passion for the unseen dimensions of life, soul, and spirit. He and his wife are rewilding land in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

BOBBIE LEE LOVELL

Decluttering

Last summer, before the kids moved out
to their respective colleges, they cleaned
their rooms of their own accord. I said,

“Put everything you don’t want in a pile,”
when they asked what to do with it all,
and out came the leavings of youth:

outgrown jerseys and T-shirts, estranged
stuffies and dolls. I sorted the sell-ables
into bins labeled Shoes, Games, Books.

It’s autumn now, the season of letting go.
I rummage through closets and cupboards,
consider what else I could live without:

the flute I haven’t played since 10th grade,
the too-fancy wedding-gift serving dish
that stayed years longer than the husband,

a blanket my mother knitted, beloved
but hopelessly unraveling. A new pile forms
in my oldest’s empty room. I don’t know where

I’m going, or when—but surely, better to be
lighter, nimbler, to fit into smaller spaces.
This isn’t quite Swedish death cleaning.

I’m making room for the rest of my life,
for my children to circle like comets
with whomever they might bring around.

Bobbie Lee Lovell is the author of Proposition at the Walk-In Infinity Chamber, and her awards include a 2023 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Muse Prize. She works in a corporate marketing department and assists with the Appleton, Wisconsin-based Poetry Unlocked reading series. More at bobbieleelovell.com.

JAMES P ROBERTS

Drinking Dandelion Wine With a Delightfully Dotty Dalai Lama
at the Deer Park Buddhist Center

Would you not say
true joy is found
in the opening of a flower?

A clown may laugh
even though inside
they are really crying.

Does the bee feel a strange joy
in gathering honey
from the clover?

Death makes me laugh:
Knowing a beginning
has come from an ending.

What kind of joy resides
in the quiet contemplation
of a whiskered hermit?

Follow the path of laughter
until it ends
at the ocean of peace.

A crowd may erupt in joy
when the batter
hits a home run …

Or the pancake is nicely brown.

Well, darn, he laughs.
We have run out of wine.

James P Roberts is the author of six previous collections of poetry. He is the South-Central Region Vice-President for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and since 2010 has organized and hosted the annual Winter Festival of Poetry. He lives in Madison where he has accumulated an impressive collection of “doll-o-ramas.”

ALISON HURWITZ

Weathering

At fifty, my eye periphery
scripts rivers: topography incised
with days of changing sunlight
and surprise, instinctive as the squint
before a flash of photograph. My life
plays out while each new act writes lines;
each day repleating curtains as they open.

At fifty, I am advised how I should
blur and blend into elision,
smooth out the place where years
have pressed their corvid feet, yet I
would rather read my story in this skin,
allow each runnel room to tell its time:
dragonfly calligraphy in lapis and carnelian, nib
of winged cartography, the blur of passage.

I would rather be a slowly sinking river than a dam.
May my life be fluid, with eyes that watershed
their tributaries where there’s still room for flow.
Wind: carve each echo of a listen here. Cranny
every yearning. Make me
a map of yesterday, of yes, today,
of yes.

Alison Hurwitz has been published in Rust and Moth, One ART, SWWIM, and is forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, among others. She lives with her family and rescue dog in North Carolina, officiates weddings and memorial services, and hosts Well-Versed Words, a free monthly online poetry reading. See more at alisonhurwitz.com.

ANDREA POTOS

How She Might Have Left

Through the revolving door,
the turnstile,
past the swinging gate,
through the sluice gate,
across stepping stones over water,

over the threshold
into the next element
past air and water
and sight–she has stitched herself
with seams of light.

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length books of poems, most recently Her Joy Becomes from (Fernwood Press). Another collection from Fernwood entitled, Belonging Songs, is forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

KRISTEN BAUM DEBEASI

Learning to Float

When I first learned to float,
I would hold my breath,
feel a catch in my lungs
that would whisper I’m afraid.

When I learned to float, I could feel
the world in a softer way. I would close
my eyes, feel the push-pull of ripples,
hear the waves lapping, testing boundaries.

I could feel how everything on earth
is beneath that expanse of blue
always painted fresh
for my cloud-gazing imagination.

Now, as I recall the day I learned to float,
I greet my old friend, fear. Hello, I say.
I feel you still, any time I leap
into some new adventure. Even now,

I must still my body, trust
my head to rest, quiet every part
of me and allow my legs to dangle.
When my breath stops guppying

and I look around, I see this foreign world,
my world, and yet it is not mine.
This floating world belongs to creatures
that can breathe where I cannot, to schools

I can never fully enroll in, and yet
when I float, I hold within myself
a bubble, a belief, a possibility of becoming.

Kristen Baum DeBeasi writes poems, stories, and music. Her poems have appeared in Fairy Tale Magazine, Menacing Hedge, a moon of one’s own, and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net nominee. As a composer, she loves setting fairy tale poems as art songs. A native Oregonian, she frequently splits time between Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville. You can find her online at www.kbdebeasi.com.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

FIONA CAPUANO (cover artist) ~ Fiona Capuano was born in Istanbul and raised in New York City. Fiona has an MFA in Fiction Writing from The New School and BA in Clinical Psychology, Art History, and Creative Writing from NYU. She uses her connection to nature and wildlife as phototherapy. Her photos are displayed in exhibits in New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, and on permanent display in Village Hall and Ridgewood High School. Her photos have been awarded by the Ridgewood Arts Council (2016) in Ridgewood, NJ. Fiona’s New York City architecture photographs are in print (It Happened in Manhattan, Penguin Putnam, 2001). She shares her daily nature photos on Facebook. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, two kids, and a dog.

KAREN A VANDENBOS ~ Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She has a PhD in Holistic Health where a course in shamanism taught her to travel between two worlds. As a photographer she has captured close-ups of nature and her photos have been published in Blue Heron Review. She unleashes her imagination in two writing groups and her poetry has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Blue Heron Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, One Art: a journal of poetry, Moss Piglet, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Ekphrastic Review, Southern Arizona Press, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Panoply, and others. Karen has been a recent Best of the Net nominee.

KRIS GOULD ~ Kris Gould is a nature photographer who focuses on the beauty of the Wisconsin landscape. She has a particular passion for native plants and pollinators. She is currently interested in using her photography to support conservation and environmental causes. Her work can be found at https://www.krisgouldphotography.com.

SCOTT FERRY ~ Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. He has published nine books of poetry, the latest is a collaboration with Daniel McGinn titled Fill Me with Birds from Meat For Tea Press. A book of prose poems, Sapphires on the Graves, will be released in late spring 2024 by Glass Lyre Press. His photography habit began as a response to the senseless violence still pervading this world, and he found solace and inspiration from looking up and looking down. Like his poetry, he sees it as an act of reverence to all that is holy.

KIMBERLY BLAESER ~ Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, is a poet, photographer, and scholar. She is the author of six poetry collections—most recently Ancient Light, Copper Yearning, and the bilingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist whose accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Blaeser serves as 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College, an MFA faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

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