HEART SOURCE & HAVEN

CONTRIBUTORS

Poets:
Cynthia Pratt * Catherine Gonick * Cathy Thwing * Sue Ann Gleason * Terry Jude Miller * Jim Landwehr * Jacqueline Kudler * Pat Phillips West * Jill McGrath * Janet Ruth * Sarah Sadie * Sarah Dickenson Snyder * Judith Sornberger * Ellen Austin-Li * Bonnie Demerjian * Susan Martell Huebner * Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca * Strider Marcus Jones * Nancy Jean Larson * Mary Fitzpatrick * John Grey * Paula Schulz * Mary Trafford * Luanne Castle * Thomas A Thrun * Nancy Austin * Anne Kundtz * Joanne Clarkson * Gary Grossman * Stephen Anderson * Emily Tee * Laura Foley * Scott Ferry * Carol Tahir * Kathrine Yets * Karen A VandenBos * Julie A Dickson * Mary Ray Goehring * Gary Thomas * Jackie Langetieg * Diane Vogel Ferri * Margaret DeRitter * Lisa Ashley * Gail Tirone * Martha Jackson Kaplan * Marsha Owens * Sara Sarna * Paulette Laufer

Artists:
Richard Havenga (cover artist) * Donna Hilbert (featured artist) * Janet Ruth * Paula Lietz * Jeannie E Roberts * Mary Ray Goehring

CYNTHIA PRATT

Forest Walk

Finally, my walk, delayed by heavy snow turning into downpour,
gloved and covered with a heavy coat to ward off winter’s bitter
chill, takes me to my favorite space, where fir and cedar soar.
In the distance I stop to hear around the bend, a northern flicker,

the sound strange in this forest of small birds, this thrum,
mixed in amongst the trees and chirping sounds of this early day.
Rhythmic, the tapping stops and starts again, the humdrum
morning awakes to common calls: siskin, chickadees, Steller jays.

Light, a yellow glow, now breaks through the trees transforming
ice to puddles, frost to glistening crystals. Above, a limb
hangs Old Man’s Beard, lichen like an aged wizard, disarming
in its rarity. A chance encounter, I look up, light, now growing dim.

A moment’s break in bird song, I lean my palm on rough, wet bark.
In the silence, brief silence, a strum, steady strum, of my beating heart.

Cynthia Pratt is one of the founding members of the Olympia Poetry Network’s board. Her manuscript, Celestial Drift, was published in 2017. She was a former Lacey Council member and the Deputy Mayor of the City of Lacey for the last 12 years, with her term ending in December 2021. She is the first Poet Laureate of Lacey as of 2022.

CATHERINE GONICK

Rituals at Canopus Lake

The beach grows larger, as the sun evaporates more
of the lake each day, yet once in the water up to my neck
the lake becomes infinite, its flat surface stretching
toward forested shores, a universe through which I ply
and splash, the full length of a soul I meet only here.

As I wade through the shallows, children
start conversations, offer to race. One boy claims
he can catch fish with his bare hands.
Their shouts as they play are part of nature,
and otherwise the beach is quiet, except
for a few adults who break the rule
against playing music/la música, although
they keep it low. I put on my bathing cap
and hear only silence, swim far out.

At closing, the instant they see the beach is empty
of humans, geese march onto the sand
in search of food. The last swimmer in the lake,
I watch them pass my towel and feel uneasy.
They move with such determination, on long,
skinny legs and broad feet, seem almost unearthly,
as if people caught in a sinister enchantment. I’m glad
they don’t stop to examine my bag, which holds
what I need to go home, glasses and car keys.

Rangers drive in from the trees, descend from their jeep,
pick up trash. At the edge of the woods, hikers
enter the trail that follows the Appalachians
from Georgia to Maine. I leave the water and walk
to the outdoor shower column, rinse my feet.

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Notre Dame Review,
Forge, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Halfway Down the Stairs, Diagram, decomP, Sukoon, New Verse News, and Live Encounters, and in anthologies including Dead of Winter (Milk and Cake Press), Grabbed (Beacon Press) and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice (Anhinga Press). She works in a company that lowers the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.

CATHY THWING

Falling in Tree Pose

They say if you knit
together your ribs,
feel that upward current
of energy, you can hold
tree pose indefinitely.
Grow roots.

It seems easy
when life flows.
But when your washing
machine breaks, drains
but doesn’t spin,
you feel yourself fall
with the sodden
clothes in a heap.

Be brave. Put
on a good attitude.
Wash your yoga pants
in the sink, hang
them out to dry.

Knit it together,
like in the old days.
The opposition of forces
pulls you back
into alignment.

Maybe the schedule
for your Zoom meeting
gets mixed up,
and you plop late
into the squares
of the sitcom,
without a script.

First world problems,
right? Then how is this urge
for flight as strong
as what villagers
felt, when cast out?

Stop running.
Be brave.
Pause. Breathe.

Close your eyes.
When grace isn’t extended
to you, find it in yourself.
Then let yourself fall
and feel the earth
rise to meet you.

Cathy Thwing has been teaching writing at community colleges since receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. Recent poetry publications include Poets’ Touchstone, Thimble, and Meniscus. Gardening, practicing cello, yoga, and playing video games fill her life’s other nooks and crannies.

SUE ANN GLEASON

each fiber a reminder

there was a skein
of crimson colored yarn
a walk
in a botanical garden
a reprieve
from the heat

there were knitting
needles in a pocket
Adirondack chairs
kissing a lake
nods
from strangers

and just like that
the skein
became a loveseat
became
a fleeting moment
of exchange

Sue Ann Gleason is a writer, educator, and nourishment guide who is passionate about poetry, language, and the role of writing as both response and responsibility. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, Oprah Magazine and Runner’s World. She is the author of one book of poetry, in the glint of broken glass, which can be found at https://wellnourishedwoman.com/

TERRY JUDE MILLER

cicada meditation

thermal waves
lift their ghostly
bodies from the tin
roof of the chicken
coop as my cousin
and I lie on our backs
on the porch that encircles
our grandmother’s house

it is the time of day
cicadas take over
the afternoon with
their cooling song
played on a million
maracas—and because
we are not heavily
thought-worn—their
quick song slows
our hearts’ beating
and lull us into a half-sleep
we’ll search for fifty years
from now as a plea from our
bodies to come and lift
our spirits like heat escaping
a sun-loved metal roof

Terry Jude Miller is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet from Houston. He received the 2018 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Prize for his book, The Drawn Cat’s Dream. His work has been published in the Southern Poetry Anthology, The Lily Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, and The Oakland Review and in scores of other publications. He serves as 1st Vice Chancellor for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.

JIM LANDWEHR

Winchester County

Outside the warmth of the cabin
I stand under the heavens
smoking a cigarette
neck craned skyward
while drags of nicotine
accompanied by the
multitude of distant stars
that make up the Milky Way
combine to lift me,
my thoughts
my past and my future
to a place of refuge,
peace and gratefulness.

As a self-proclaimed
once-a-year smoker
each drag seems to help
with my struggle
to make sense of the
busyness and distraction
back home in my desert
of concrete, asphalt and steel.

For me it is a reckoning,
a fleeting moment of
sanctuary and contentment
conjured among the Jack Pines
and the watch of the moon
but also among the lost moments
spent long ago
worrying about tomorrow.

Jim Landwehr has four published memoirs, At the Lake, Cretin Boy, Dirty Shirt, and The Portland House. He also has five poetry collections, Thoughts From a Line at the DMV, Genetically Speaking, Reciting from Memory, Written Life, and On a Road. His nonfiction has been published in Main Street Rag, The Sun Magazine, and others. His poetry has been featured in Orchard Poetry Journal, Blue Heron Review, and many others. He lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin with his wife and was the 2018-2019 poet laureate for the Village of Wales, Wisconsin.

JACQUELINE KUDLER

An Almost Rain

Cancel the mantra and the prayer
mat—set me, instead, on a trail—
any trail for a time. No! Let it be this
trail on a January day in an almost rain,
suspended between drizzle and mist.

Let it be the kind of small rain that
drifts down from high redwood
branches, barely brushing my face,
each leaf beaded with light, and

I follow the brown path ahead
that lifts and dips along the side
of a west-facing slope. Alone
of course, my body following

whatever story the trail ahead tells:
story of deep green moss, story of
rain-glow boulders, story of rising
action, falling action—story
with no plot at all.

Jacqueline Kudler lives in Sausalito, California and teaches classes in memoir writing and literature at the College of Marin in Kentfield. Her poems have appeared in numerous reviews, magazines, and anthologies. Her first full length poetry collection, Sacred Precinct, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco, in 2003; her second, Easing into Dark, in 2012. She was awarded the Marin Arts Council Board Award in 2005, and the Marin Poetry Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.

PAT PHILLIPS WEST

Outer Loop Trail

So familiar the red cedar and ancient Douglas fir,
how they live in groves, tribes,
families, how they communicate with each other,
care for their children, how they lean

against each other as if in consent.
So tender their soft murmurs,
syllables foreign at first, but the meaning,
somehow, comes through—deeper, clearer—

with each footfall. My every exhaled sigh
mixes with these ancient trees, their roots
entwined with soil for hundreds of years.
At the viewpoint overlooking

the Tacoma Narrows, dense forest opens
to reveal a sky that could stagger the heart—
a canvas painted by impressionists
who knew to put a certain shade of blue

behind every cloud. This high cliff,
a place to view bald eagles
feeding on salmon runs, their calls circling
down from nests in old-growth trees.

So familiar the deep and complex
troughs carved in Puget Sound by glaciers
thousands of years ago. I try to make
of this moment, a way for the world

to grow a little softer, my heart a little wider.

Pat Phillips West’s work appears in various journals including The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, Haunted Waters Press, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She has received multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations.

JILL MCGRATH

Meditation

My bones creak as I cross the ground—
sound and motion spread out
beyond the stepping. Hands
cup the air, twill,
weave between fingers—the light
airiness, the head-spin
dancing swirl of thought
and light, my feet poised
arrows, pushing the stones,
each step broken in sequence, rise
and fall cracking the air
still motion walking
frail on ground.
Energy-heat rises off skin.
My elbows, euphoric wings,
I rise and balance me
on earth.
The lifting spirals upward
when my eyes close,
shut out the visible,
this imagining
this wealth
I had forgotten.
How to move?
How now?
How to speak the chants, the rhythmic
sounds that build in momentum
that rim my thought,
that resonate in skin and blood,
that build dreams like waterfalls
around them?
The spinning begins again, I spin
in place, I step forward
up this rocky path
where trees spread out
into infinity
so slowly,
irresistible.
My knees lift up and down
unfamiliar,
my feet touch and rise.
I am in this infinite circle.
I move on and on,
over and around,
endless passage of holding still.
Far away I glimpse clouds
the wind shapes, dissolves,
my thought
a kite trailing after.

Jill McGrath is a Seattle poet, teacher, and freelance editor. She is working to finish a poetry manuscript about her travels in Asia on a tandem bicycle, and she is circulating a completed first book for publication. Jill has published a chapbook, The Rune of Salt Air, and she has also had 45 poems published in literary magazines, including The Seattle Review, The MacGuffin, Southern Poetry Review, West Wind Review, and Poet & Critic.

JANET RUTH

Unburying Wonder

. . . earth may find breath / from the open mouths of boys /
whose eyes are wide with frogs. —Amit Dahiyabadshah

With effort, we can become children of earth.
In a night adrift in blizzards of stars, we may
sit beside the pond in silence, seek and find
wonder in that which ransoms our breath.
Small things that lure our thoughts away from
pain and dismay—we hear a choir floating in the
trees—percussive chants of katydids accompany open
grace notes from unknown creatures. Our mouths
lift at the corners like crescent moons, in praise of
tiny dreams that transform us into girls and boys
again. Children—mythic beings. Whose
hearts can love the strange? Whose eyes
spot the hidden? Whose ears hear whispers? We are
children again—bodies open, arms spread wide,
fingers cupping the unknown in darkness with
gratitude—blessed by a plague of singing frogs.

(*This golden shovel got its end-words from the above three lines in Amit’s poem,
“Fear at the Water’s Edge of the Pool of Learning;” I added “girls,”
because my eyes too have been wide with toads and tadpoles!)

Janet Ruth is a NM ornithologist. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world. Her sonnet, “Invisible Before Us Untouched and Still Possible,” won a Laureates’ Choice Award in the 2022 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. She has recent poems in Tulip Tree Review, The Ocotillo Review, Sin Fronteras, Ekphrastic Review, and anthologies including Where Flowers Bloom (The Red Penguin Collection, 2022). Her first book, Feathered Dreams: celebrating birds in poems, stories & images (Mercury HeartLink, 2018), was a Finalist for the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards. https://redstartsandravens.com/janets-poetry/

SARAH SADIE

November

thinks it’s May
My daughter

is a man
I myself

might be
a ghost

I rely
on the trees

They have rooted
so deep

in their changes

Sarah Sadie lives and writes in Portage, Wisconsin, in a lovely home that serves as retreat, respite and inspiration for a fluctuating and vast community of writers, artists, and creatives of all types. As a creative living guide and coach, she helps writers and other creatives find time and focus for their best work. Her poems have been published in journals, anthologies, and book form. You can find her at www.patreon.com/sarahsadie, where she sends a small “pome” out into the world every Tuesday.

SARAH DICKENSON SNYDER

Driving North

It starts at a curve
in the highway
when land begins
to unroll into mountains
when trees and meadows
on hillsides replace all signs
of humans. Just drive that ribbon
of road and you’ll get here.
Follow me up Jericho Street
until the steepness dips;
our driveway is on the right.
Look to your left as you pull in
and you’ll see what I see:
a field, a pond, and beyond
cloud-banked mountain waves.
Feel your breath lengthen.
Close your eyes—
you are home.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019), with Now These Three Remain forthcoming in 2023. Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com

JUDITH SORNBERGER

On My Mother’s Birthday, I Wish the Dead Could Glimpse Us

I’d want you to find me on my deck—
my version of the patio where I often
found you on an early autumn afternoon.

To see I’ve swallowed
every drop you fed me
of your love for being outside.

To gaze on the outsized,
orange-red suns of the hibiscus
blooming their hearts out

like late afternoon’s gold glare
on the scarlet maple leaves
in our backyard,

the ones you turned me toward
one tearful teenage afternoon when
my heart thought it would never again open.

I’d want you to view what is good
in my life, even though, like you,
I was widowed too soon—

goldfish darting like fleeting dreams
in the pond my new love made me
from a discarded clawfoot tub

disguised by boards and stones
and potted palms, where a bronze
heron’s spurting stirs the water.

Books, tablets and pens
on a stand beside me
as I write on the chaise longue—

sister to the cushioned, redwood one where
you’d lie smoking and sipping Diet Pepsi,
almost purring in the elegiac sunlight.

Judith Sornberger’s full-length poetry collections are: Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas (Shanti Arts, 2020), I Call to You from Time (Wipf & Stock, 2019), Practicing the World (CavanKerry, 2018) and Open Heart (Calyx Books). Her prose memoir The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany is from Shanti Arts. She is professor emerita of Mansfield University where she taught English and Women’s Studies. She lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, PA. She recently played a middle-aged former mermaid in a community theater production. www.judithsornberger.net

ELLEN AUSTIN-LI

Adirondack Forest

Balsam. I enter the understory.
Tiny pine needles soften the path,
muffle solitary footfalls—golden
sunlight dapples the canopy, sky peaks
bright blue. Branches rustle
in a wave, a percussive brush accompanies
the hollow drum of a woodpecker,
the lone flute of a distant wood thrush.
The forest floor swaying with vibrant
green fans. Moss climbs granite
boulders, decaying trunks. Emerald drapes
fleece—the green I remember over-
growing my childhood home. Alone,

always alone, I walked out
onto the flat garage roof from a door
off my bedroom, half-sat on a wrought iron railing
near the angled slope, eye-level
with the leafy crown of a linden.
I spent hours imagining I lived in the castles
of my stories, the muted gray and rose slate
made ancient by patches of moss. My dream-

scape, these woods, too beautiful to be of this
world. A visitor to this magical place,
I won’t disturb the fronds of lacy ferns.
Instead, I gather a bouquet of remembrance,
the verdant mystery fixed inside my mind.

Ellen Austin-Li’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Rust + Moth, and other places. Finishing Line Press published her two chapbooks—Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). She is a Best of the Net nominee. A recipient of the Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen lives with her husband in a newly empty nest in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can find more of her work at: www.ellenaustinli.me

BONNIE DEMERJIAN

Come Away Home

Once more to the island, childhood home from which they flew
eager to be away like bubbles in champagne,
a rising, swirling cumulus of longing.

Their small-town life a trap, they headed south.
They weren’t bluffing; they’d never return;
they’d served their time in that airless place.

So,
is it serendipity that these fledged birds return year after year
bringing their own brood? Or,
does something in this cedar net woven of joy, disappointment, surprise, and story
pull them again to the house, the street, the ocean, beach, and trail?

Today they’ve flown again, sated with
pushing logs from the beach,
foraging for blueberries,
fishing for salmon,
soaking up sun,
crowding the table, and
sleeping under one roof again.

They’re away
but they’ll be back,
back to the island.

Bonnie Demerjian writes from Southeast Alaska at the mouth of the Stikine River in the Tongass National Forest. She has written as a journalist and then as the author of four books about Alaska’s history, human and natural. Her poems have been published in several print and online publications including Alaska Women Speak, Tidal Echoes, Blue Bird Word, and Blue Heron Review.

SUSAN MARTELL HUEBNER

Tracking Progress at the YMCA

I watch a young girl run the oval track,
ponytail swings a happy song across her back
she flies, swift and quiet, a shearwater skimming
the floor’s padded surface

I drop into memory, a time
when my hips swayed easily like hers,
when I possessed unconcerned knees
and tireless feet eager to roam, a time
when my body was unaware of its treasures

Now, there is stiffness, and more—
a back which requires a bench or a chair,
fingers that fumble with buttons and earrings
feet that find solace in wide toe box shoes

And in the mirror, even more—
on each kneecap, a pale scar like a zipper,
on my chest, tattoos of tiny blue dots, a trail
to guide radiation’s long arm, and
on my face, spots larger than freckles
chart constellations across my cheeks
— a question arises:
What treasures might dwell in this body,
today walking slowly, counting each lap?

With a hymn of awareness
every cell answers:

This body is shelter
for ancestors’ wisdom, for resilience and sorrows,
for joys and for dreams

This body is life,
sacred vibration, a vessel to love

Susan Martell Huebner lives and writes in Mukwonago, Wisconsin. Look for her upcoming chapbook, Gathering Sticks for the Fire, to be published late fall by Kelsay Press. Her work can be found at Cawing Crow Press and Finishing Line Press, as well as on Amazon and in many journals online and in print.

KAVITA EZEKIEL MENDOCA

Driving Through Glenmore Park (in the days of the virus)

There were no ducks on the *Sastrugi that evening
In my imagination I could see them bobbing
Mother duck with the ducklings trying to balance
On the hard surface, tumbling tumbling,
The wind had made poetry and art on the snowy lake
Shaped furrows with deft wind brushes
Up and down, up and down
Like gently rolling hills
Sculpting the snow drifts.

A lone skier on the lake
Stayed his distance
From the *Sastrugi,
The sun had begun to dim
We shivered a little with the same wind
Mesmerised by the amazing landscape
Transported beyond our anxiety
For tomorrow.

*Sastrugi (NOUN) — parallel wave-like ridges caused by winds on the surface of hard snow, especially in polar regions.

Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca was born and raised in a Bene Israel Indian Jewish family in Bombay. Her first book of poems, Family Sunday and Other Poems, was published in 1989 and Light of The Sabbath is her recently published chapbook. Her poem, “How to Light up a Poem,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has taught English, French, and Spanish in private schools in India and overseas, for over four decades. Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including the Journal of Indian Literature published by The Sahitya Akademi. She holds a Master’s Degree in English and American Literature, and a Master’s Degree in Education.

STRIDER MARCUS JONES

On the Road to Serendipity

i came by love
one evening
in a cathode rectangle,
through clouds of ether
on the road to
serendipity,
on The Great Wheel Of Time.

then alone in the forest
of old Lothlorien,
i wove a tapestry
from her infinite beauty
and timid nature to
time then, time now, time on
composed of smiling pixels.

I feel it now,
wet and wild and warm—
entering my essence
to its hearth’s heart’s core;
but stop the words
before they say too much
and return, like empty echoes.

Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His poetry has been published in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine, The Racket Journal, Trouvaille Review, dyst Literary Journal, Impspired Magazine, Melbourne Culture Corner, Literary Yard Journal, The Honest Ulsterman, Poppy Road Review, The Galway Review, Cajun Mutt Press, Rusty Truck Magazine, Rye Whiskey Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, The Huffington Post USA, The Stray Branch Literary Magazine, Crack The Spine Literary Magazine, A New Ulster, The Lampeter Review, Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine, and Dissident Voice.

NANCY JEAN LARSON

Keeping

You believe—

in Great Grandmother’s cut
glass dish;

in cloudy flutes
that toasted a wedding,
perched like birds in dust;

in the dress folding
to its musty resting box;

in scuffed baby shoes.

We lean into
your papery words.

We answer, yes,
the family china is not lost,
and you will come home soon.

Nancy Jean Larson lives in Drummond, Wisconsin in the north woods. She finds sanctuary all around her there. Her poems are published in several regional journals.

MARY FITZPATRICK

Advent

One.

I think we asked you for a way out but no
you said it had to be day to day
standing on the cusp of winter
with bright leaves still falling even
while being swept away. We wanted that.
Wanted the first heavy rain in years
to fall on our shoulders, to smell
the plants’ relief. Instead, news reports
from the one or two who’d left
flooded our imaginations with what
release could possibly hold for us
who had waited so long for what
might possibly save us.

Two.

We were all singing with candles
and then the family party shifted
to wine and buffet: the Posadas,
the wandering ones, found a home
high in the hills, naked of vegetation —
it was after the fires
and in winter’s lunar gray.
But inside
comfortable, with beautiful things
pink artifacts, clocks and comforters
more than a stable with straw. We talked
and moved rooms, the wine poured.
So good to see cousins we never see — they
heart tender still from their brother’s death
and as we were all sated
and the food was put away
and another window opened on
midnight’s calendar, we looked to the east
to see how we would drive away
downhill, not wandering. Open doorway.

Mary Fitzpatrick’s poems have been finalists for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and the Slapering Hol Chapbook Award; short-listed for the Fish Publishing Prize; featured in Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review and North American Review as contest finalists; and published in such journals as Agenda (UK), Briar Cliff Review, The Paterson Review, Pratik, Red Canary, Silver Birch Press, Terrain, West Trestle Review, plus ten anthologies. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz with an MFA from UMass Amherst, she is a fourth-generation Angeleno who lives in Pasadena and feels at home in Ireland.

JOHN GREY

Deer Island

The breakwater dark
splashes as gently
as a soft shoe on sand.

Tonight,
nature’s glass
holds almost steady,
only spills a little.

And, out in the bay,
the fishing boat candles
burn below deck.

Everything is recognized
by gentle glow
or easygoing sound.

Other than that,
the clouds are breaking.

There’s a twinkle
in the moon’s lidless eye.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Rathalla Review, and Open Ceilings.

PAULA SCHULZ

Taking in each sharp clarity
Pike Lake State Park

What a conservatory!

Each branch I walk beneath balances its twin
of snow, wearing its soul on the outside
and, beyond all expectation, I can

touch that startling cold. Here is a kinship
beyond kind where self cools to a skim
of ice, senses gone to the moment.

This is the place I leave behind the day’s
dull demands. Footfalls blend with the sound
of wind rush, bird call, tree rustle: a toneless

percussion. The trunk of my body splits
to branches. Rooted to the world, I wear
my unblunted attention close to the air.

Paula Schulz lives in Slinger, Wisconsin with her husband, Greg. She loves the nearby state park.

MARY TRAFFORD

Bright and away

I come to this place,
breath-held from long
climb, curve and rut
of trail through dim
forest, rising.

I return here,
where tumble of rock
overhangs small lake,
slices of light
vein water’s surface.

I am here. Now.
Seize this vista:
rock, pine, water,
light. Hold on.
Cherish lick of sun:

sudden, light-glimpsed
sweep of heron wing
arcs across one
swampy curve of lake,
bright and away.

Mary Trafford is a retired speech writer, medical illustrator and riding instructor whose writing has appeared in several publications, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Canadian Woman Studies, CV2, Gone Dogs, Up the Gatineau, and several chapbook projects. Recipient of the 2002 Arc Poetry Magazine Diana Brebner Prize, Mary won second prize in the 2020 Vallum Award for Poetry. She lives with her partner and their dog in Chelsea, Quebec.

LUANNE CASTLE

A Very Specific Opening in the Woods Near Caledonia

The road lilts through the thick woods on either side.
There are no mailboxes to denote location, but
that heart-shaped patch of lupines marks the entry
if I remember to balance across the moss-covered log
and bend down to pass under the sugar maple leaves.
Follow the burbling creek down past the grasses
nestling the tree trunks and saplings and when
I’m lulled into the rhythm of the path, it appears
in front of me—an open meadow sparkling with
sunlight on the kaleidoscopic array of poppies,
Sweet William, and phlox—hummingbirds
and butterflies—even dragonflies—rising amidst
the motes of pollen and seed, a bluebird’s chest
pumping its song, and an alert squirrel scolding.
At the top of my basket is the tablecloth—red
and white checkered, natch—and I lay out the wine
and chocolates, the ginger cake and oranges.
Later, I drowse with my head on my doubled sweater.
That’s when they arrive in their gossamer tutus
and green tights, with their silvery voices. In the haze
of my half-opened eyes, I watch them for memory’s
sake. I will paint them later, as if they are a dream.

Luanne Castle’s poetry collection, Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press), was published fall 2022. Kin Types, a chapbook of poetry and flash nonfiction, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her first collection of poetry, Doll God (Aldrich), won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Luanne’s Pushcart and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, American Journal of Poetry, Pleiades, River Teeth, TAB, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, and other journals.

THOMAS A THRUN

Patio Chair Vigil

So still,
the air tonight,
having blown and
worn itself completely
out earlier today, has fallen
asleep. So, I am keeping vigil.
These days are so fragile.
I will wait out here, in my
patio chair and listen
for any bombs that
may fall and then
throw myself on
them, for you
my love, for
my world
so still.

Thomas A Thrun, currently retired in Oconomowoc, WI, draws upon his Wisconsin farming heritage for a great deal of his poetry, as well as on the poetry and prose of Robert Frost. Thrun worked as a weekly newspaper editor for many years in Wisconsin and Washington State. His poetry has appeared in the 2022 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, WFOP’s Bramble and other local, regional and international anthologies.

NANCY AUSTIN

Shinrin-yoku (Forest Bathing)

My summer sanctuary has changed.
Moss stars that border the soggy leaf’s path
are snow-dusted, the bog’s boardwalk looks
briny, bobcat prints sleuth across.
I scan the bog of spent cotton grass,
see tufts of white, like meadow flowers.

The boardwalk beckons, I cross over,
passing pitcher plants, bright green vessels
with blood red veins, shark-like mouths
that await prey. I step over a fallen birch branch
colonized with whimsical mushrooms,
tan polka dots on bright yellow.

I enter the open arms of this old growth forest,
its entrance dark, dank with summer’s decay,
its interior lit in greens and gold by rays that dapple
and dance off hemlock and pine.

The trail leads down to a clearing, a wild lake,
its periphery thick with sun-sparked trees,
russet, orange, crimson. The loons are gone,
but birdsong, now dampened by the season,
swells to asks who I am.

I hike to my talisman tree, a winter-hushed hemlock,
ancient giant whose base looks like twisted licorice,
as though a great wind twirled it, dipped it low,
laid it to rest in canopies of sister trees.

With heightened senses of shinrin-yoku
I give thanks for this dear old tree,
somehow still here, like me.

Nancy Austin was born in Whitefish Bay, WI, has lived on both coasts, but prefers the land between. She relishes time to write in the Northwoods. Her poetry collections include Remnants of Warmth (Aldrich Press, 2016), The Turn of the Tiller; the Spill of the Wind (Kelsay Books, 2019), Something Novel Came in Spring (Water’s Edge Press, 2021), and a collaborative anthology with the PaperBirch Poets called Stitching Earth to Sky (Water’s Edge Press, 2019).

ANNE KUNDTZ

Out to the Fine Line of Bright Sea

Light plays with dark where sea meets sky.

We wander along, like wood pigeons
across Scottish footpaths.

Moods move through me
as the wind across the moors

tossing whitecaps across the bay one moment,
then still as glass the next.

I wonder, how are we together
through these 40 years?

Then, when the sun breaks
over the jagged thumb
of Old Man Storr
and waves lick glitter
between Rona and Culnacnoc,
I think ours is an old love
fitting into this ancient land—
its worn hills craggy with basalt,
sharp with gorse, purpled in heather furrows
along Skye’s roads.

Wind splits the clouds,
allows sunlight to sweep in,

warms us as we share soup
and a sandwich in a cottage yard,

stone walls weathered centuries before we came.
Dark plays with light where sky meets sea.

After teaching for 20 years, Anne Kundtz found that youth voices were often the most honest and interesting edges of life. In retirement, Anne returned to crafting her own poetry and, in that ripening, to submit. Her poetry is published in Ars Poetica NW, Counting Stars, Poems for Las Vegas, Under the Basho, and Poet’s Choice.

JOANNE CLARKSON

The Library on Market Street

Child with no address finds herself
in an adventure with the dog
she always wanted. It is afternoon
and she is locked out again.
But this place is always open
when it says it will be.

She found the library when she
visited with her fourth grade class.
Was allowed to check out a book
to take home. A book about
Egypt. But they moved from the car
to the shelter and she couldn’t find
Egypt to return. The librarian said

she would save books behind the desk
so the girl could read on weekends
or after school. Like the one called
How to Draw Horses she could use
to create her own mustang and a mare.

When the librarian gathered the class
for a story, a silly story about magic
animals, the children joined
in the refrain and the girl laughed
for the first time in this town. She

has never been to Disneyland or Six Flags
or Yellowstone, but she comes
to the public library all summer. Scratch
paper and pencils wait on a shelf
and a new paperback about a girl
and a puppy. No one else has read it
yet. The pages smell like clean sheets.
They welcome her within them.

Joanne Clarkson’s sixth poetry collection, Hospice House, is forthcoming from MoonPath Press in January 2023. Her poems have been published in such journals as Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Western Humanities Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She has received an Artist Trust Grant and an NEH grant to teach poetry in rural libraries. Clarkson has Masters Degrees in English and Library Science, has taught and worked for many years as a professional librarian. After caring for her mother through a long illness, she re-careered as a Registered Nurse working in Home Health and Hospice.

GARY GROSSMAN

Blessings

Five thirty AM, November eighth,
and my yard owl, a barred male, has
woken me with his high reverb
“who cooks for me”, or perhaps it was
the full moon, last night’s eclipse—looking
like an abandoned pumpkin hanging
on the black vine of sky—most likely
it was the fall back to Standard Time—
old body slow to adjust—sleep,
elusive once you’ve woken—maybe
that should be called resleep—while
the sparse silver forest on my arm is
roused by the cold emptiness of our
room—my wife visiting her siblings
minus one across the continent,
and I could kvetch about missing
her—a bit of me gone—together
forty years, it feels like the solid part
of my smile has faded these last few
days, but then I consider the sister-
in-law who passed one month ago,
and what a blessing it is to watch
the moon turn from silver to orange—
hear that owl, unfulfilled, but
still calling—feel the hair on my arm
stand up in the chill of our November
bedroom.

Gary Grossman is Professor Emeritus of Animal Ecology at University of Georgia. His poetry has, or will appear in 30+ reviews including: Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Poetry Superhighway, and Delta Poetry Review. Short fiction in MacQueen’s Quinterly and creative non-fiction in Tamarind Literary Magazine. His prose poem “Mindfulness” has just been nominated for inclusion in Best Short Fictions. Gary’s first book of poems is Lyrical Years (Kelsay Press, 2023), and his graphic novel My Life in Fish: One Scientist’s Journey is available from todaysecologicalsolutions@gmail.com. Hobbies include running, music, fishing, and gardening. Website: https://www.garygrossman.net/ Writing: Blog: https://garydavidgrossman.medium.com/

STEPHEN ANDERSON

An Ode to the Moon

The moon is still
a snow color
as it shines its majesty
with a sober air,
there distant but
omnipresent in its arc,
whether in quarter sliver,
half-moon,
an imposing three quarter
form or full-faced and bold,
it radiates a magical spin
on our insignificance,
and our moody dance
with life — insinuates
its presence over
our fondest dreams,
our never ending folly.

Peace be to thee,
oh moon of always,
there nestled
in your shelter
of night black.

Stephen Anderson is a Milwaukee poet and translator and the author of three chapbooks and three book-length collections, In the Garden of Angels and Demons (2017), The Dream Angel Plays the Cello (2019), and High Wire (2021). His poetry has been featured on the Milwaukee NPR-affiliate, WUWM Lake Effect Program. Anderson’s work is being archived in the Special Collections section of Raynor Library at Marquette University.

EMILY TEE

I root myself in this tree
(from the painting Evening; Red Tree by Piet Mondrian, 1908-1910)

I am this tree
and this tree is me
I am earthy, earth-grown
from clay, peat, loam
my heartbeat slow, sure

this tree earths me
heavy at the base
solid, rooted deep
my trunk grown thick

time and experience
may scar my bark,
seasons come and go
leaves grow on fractal fingers
I preen in summer richness
breathing in the life at
the heart of the forest
till fall’s final red showdown

when cold creeps, seeps,
caresses with snow, frost, sleet—
even on the shortest days
I’ll raise my ruby red face
embrace the wintry sun traces,
the ghost of warmth
a memory of plenty
still I endure

Emily Tee lives in a semi-rural part of England. She writes poems and flash fiction, and has had recent pieces published online in The Ekphrastic Review, Visual Verse and Unbroken Journal and in print with various Dreich publications, Poetry Scotland and elsewhere.

LAURA FOLEY

Why I Drive Five Hours to Maine

To immerse in a sprig of light
who sings and hums while falling asleep,
or when she wakes, at dawn.

To feel her presence on a mountaintop,
as she prances from rock to rock,
as the leaves bluster and blow,
as we run to catch them.

To breakfast on an old stone tower’s roof,
tea, roasted almonds, milk, string cheese,
the sun haloing her head as she says:
I like spending time with you Grandma.

To be with her as the sun rises
on a cloudless crisp Sunday morning,
blue islands dotting the bay,
churches, houses, small streets below,

and we, like two birds on a high perch,
gazing over the wide expanse of sea.

Laura Foley’s most recent collection is Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino. Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review, was among their top poetry books of 2019, and won an Eric Hoffer Award. Her collection It’s This is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Her poems have won numerous awards, and national recognition—read frequently by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac; appearing in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Society London, Crannog Magazine (Ireland), DMQ Review, Atlanta Review, Mason Street, JAMA, and many others. Her work has been included in many anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope.

SCOTT FERRY

i feel strung between the layers of things

the sun through the dew on the web
which is more real?

this piercing light this glassy mind
this pulsing lattice?

i am stretched between planes—
a stain of atoms spread on an agar

the growth the fruiting the decay—
the song inside the song inside

the song

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His latest book, The Long Blade of Days Ahead, is now available from Impspired Press. More of his work can be found at: ferrypoetry.com

CAROL TAHIR

To Wait

Lying in a sunlit shallow creek
with water streaming around,
I wait for salvation.
Eyes closed and filled with red auras,
body melting into liquid peace,
I wait for redemption.
The cradle of a car ride
swaying softly towards sleep
with the lullabies of tires,
I wait for the distance of trauma,
stepping onto the coolness of grass blades,
I wait for the safety of home.
Falling asleep under a speckled sunlit tree
cushioned with a bed of leaves,
I wait for my phantom lover.
To walk amidst a tranquil forest
to ease a tormented mind,
I wait for silence to still my heart.
Running in puddles after a summer rain,
I wait for returned innocence.
To be gifted with these moments of wonderment,
I abide in the sanctuary of being.

Carol Tahir is a poet and painter who lives and writes in Southern California. She is a retired cosmetologist and a visual artist of many years. She now uses words to paint the world around her. Carol’s work has appeared in The Poet anthologies, Sweetycat Press anthologies, a few online journals and blogs. She hopes to publish a book of poetry sometime in the future.

KATHRINE YETS

There and Back Again

Cast your sorrows on him
because he cares for you.
What about the joys?
Give up your jewels and fancy lamps.
Forget the Malibus and macchiatos.
Let’s live that simple life
without designer jeans and dresses.
Back to the garden,
naked and in nature,
and stop Eve from ripping the rind
of the pomegranate to crunch ruby seeds.
I want to be holy again,
baptized by the ocean waves.
But here I am with heated seats
and hats to match all outfits.
There is too much.
There is just too much
to go back again.

Kathrine Yets lives in St. Francis, Wisconsin, U.S. She is an avid educator and poet. Her poetry can be found in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Blue Heron Review, Universal Oneness Anthology, River & South Review, and 5th Wall Press. In 2018, she won the Jade Ring Award from the Wisconsin Writers’ Association. She has three chapbooks, So I Can Write (Cyberwit), The Animal Within (Unsolicited Press) and iLearn, iTeach (Cyberwit). When she is not teaching or writing, she can be found on the shores of Lake Michigan, taking walks with her husband.

KAREN A VANDENBOS

Holy Sanctuary

Nature, sanctuary,
holy ground of Mother Earth.
My body a temple,
hands cupped as chalice
drinking deeply of the rain.
Baptismal water of still creeks,
breathing hymns on the wind.
The ebb and flow of the seasons
teach me to drop my worries like
autumn leaves and witness
resurrection in the green leaves
of spring.
The sun rises with the fire of
angels and monolithic trees
reach to touch heaven.
Stars of wonder light the darkness
and mountains rise with painted
steeples.
Petals of blood red, crowns of rose
thorns and the paternoster triangle
of the open iris bloom in the garden
of Mary’s womb.
I face uncertainty at the cross in
the road where the forest becomes
an arched cathedral and rainbows
shimmer like stained glass.
My fingers stain with the wine of
grapes and break bread with the
tendrils of wheat, beckoning me to
holy communion.
I count sunflower seeds like rosary
beads and leave confessions in the
burning bush.
Pine needles ensure my knees have
a soft place to land and my hands
are clasped in prayer for answers that
seem impossible.
You ask me where is God in all of this
and I respond he is right here beside
me, weeping.

Once upon a time, Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She can be found unleashing her imagination in three online writing groups and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Blue Heron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Rye Whiskey Review and others.

JULIE A DICKSON

September on the Lake

Ontario is calm today, sun warmed
waves lap at rocks in quiet rhythm

I hear a lone goose call,
Canadian black markings clear

it glides lazily – far away
from the chattering flock
as if to say I need a few minutes

Perhaps he is like me

I sit on a rough-hewn boulder
that edges grassy outcroppings
peppered with goldenrod, leather leaf
where the old public pier once stood

Glancing east to a row of cottages
dark dormered windows wide-eyed
over blue-green expanse, trained on the
great lake, watching past a calm surface

I remember days when white-capped
thunderous waves crashed against break walls,
toppling boats, eroding the shore

but not today; we are both calm

Julie A Dickson first put pen to paper as a young teen, writing stories and poetry for her school paper, entering contests and for her own enjoyment. Her poetry appears in over 50 journals including Ekphrastic Review, New Verse News and Blue Heron Review. Dickson holds a BPS in Behavioral Science, having assisted seniors with dementia and working in healthcare IT. A Pushcart nominee, past poetry board member and guest editor, she shares her home with two rescued feral cats.

MARY RAY GOEHRING

Finding Sanctuary: a modern sonnet

How far has this glacial erratic, big
as a Volkswagen bus, where I sit and
read this book, this fiction, how far, has it
traveled? Torn from its home, entrained by ice,
weathered, tumbled, scratched then dropped by some-
thing as soft as water. Record keeper
of the flow. How many freezes? How many thaws?
How long, how long, buried in that sand before
we uncovered it? Moved it to this place
next to this pond? Where something sometimes lives
in a fresh-dug burrow underneath. Let me put
down this book and thank it for its patience,
for holding this place I call home and that
place of its home for me, finally, ready to listen.

Mary Ray Goehring is a retired landscape designer, now a snowbird who migrates between her prairie in Central Wisconsin and the pine forests on the border of East Texas and Louisiana. She has been published in several journals and anthologies, and is a multi-year member of the Connection and Creativity in Challenging Times poetry group. Her poetry is heavily influenced by nature, friends and family.

GARY THOMAS

Seated by a Window in Southwest Seattle

The mountains are out, they say here on these mornings
the sun deigns to make distance visible.
The snowpack sketchbook of the Cascade Range reveals
the peaks now, and more things seem possible.

Crows, then ravens stir the firmament.
Red cedar treetops blink and twitch,
stretch themselves all the way down
so gruffly even the sorrel at their base shivers.

I suppose I should be out and about
my own mountain of métier,
so I position my clumsy pinions,
flap, blunder, twinge a bit,
heft my lumbering way at a horizon
I can just now make out.

Gary Thomas grew up on a peach farm outside Empire, California. Prior to retirement, he taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years and junior college English for seven. He has presented poetry workshops for literary organizations, festivals, and conferences. His poems have been published or accepted for publication in The Comstock Review, Mocking Heart Review, Monterey Poetry Review, and River Heron Review, among others, and in the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. He is currently vice president of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, a member of the Curriculum Study Commission and of the local writing group known as The Licensed Fools. A full-length collection, All the Connecting Lights, was released in August 2022 from Finishing Line Press.

JACKIE LANGETIEG

Getting Away at the Monastery

Bee Balm, Sneezeweed, Culver’s Root
wave to me as I walk to the main building.
for lunch with the Sisters.

One lone Day Lily, the color of butter
blossoms and yawns each day, greets me this noon.
Others haven’t opened yet—winking from green stems.

I‘ve found Lost Lake. A bench waits in front
for gathering dreams. I’m a little lost myself, so maybe
I’m here, too.

I’m getting into the rhythm of this place with its bells
and soft speaking women. I could live out here
if I didn’t have to work in the garden in the summer.

This is my place of renewal, only a few miles away
yet so different, the wild flower garden, quiet halls
yet emanating a feeling found nowhere in average life.

Jackie Langetieg has published poems in: Verse Wisconsin, Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Ekphrastic Review, and Persimmon Tree. She’s won awards, such as WWA’s Jade Ring contest, Wisconsin Academy Poem of the Year and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She has written six books of poems, most recently, Snowfall and a memoir, Filling the Cracks with Gold.

DIANE VOGEL FERRI

Together

We sit by the burning
pile of sticks that broke
somewhere above us, from
some weathered tree and
landed on our piece of earth,
this little acre we place
our pride and future in.
Our hair fills with smoke,
white ash touches our shoulders
and we don’t speak
as we turn our heads
and move our eyes
along the perimeter, never
tiring of the view, never
ceasing to wonder
at this sudden summer,
always acknowledging
that this is ours, this place,
this gift, this life together.

Diane Vogel Ferri’s full-length poetry book is Everything is Rising. Her latest novel is No Life But This: A Novel of Emily Warren Roebling. Her essays have been published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Scene Magazine, and Yellow Arrow Journal among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Wend Poetry, Blue Heron Review, Rubbertop Review, and Braided Way. Her previous publications are Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), and The Desire Path (novel). Her poem, “For You,” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net prize.

MARGARET DERITTER

View from a Deck in Northport

Monarchs race through stands of aspen
as the Manitou islands hover at the horizon

and whitecapped waves ripple Lake Michigan
like fingers fluttering a giant keyboard.

This is a place where dream states linger
till mid-afternoon, or a bracing swim.

Where Petoskey stones tell ancient stories
and sand grains whisper of infinity.

If I could stretch my arms as far as Milwaukee,
I’d play this lake like a beachside busker,

collect snail-shell coins in my Tilley hat
and sing to the salmon and lake trout.

But here on this deck, in the gold of morning,
I settle for tea. And the music of quaking leaves.

Margaret DeRitter, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, is the author of the full-length poetry collection Singing Back to the Sirens (Unsolicited Press). She also won Friends of Poetry’s 2018 Celery City Chapbook Contest for Fly Me to Heaven By Way of New Jersey. She is the copy editor and poetry editor of Encore, a feature magazine for Southwest Michigan. Her work has appeared previously in Blue Heron Review and in a number of other journals and anthologies, including Take a Stand: Art Against Hate (Raven Chronicles) and Surprised by Joy (Waking Up Press).

LISA ASHLEY

Milkweed

Monarchs, common as weeds all summer,
slow-flap their wings on the milkweed flower heads,
geishas waving orange and black fans
on pale pink blossom cushions.
The butterflies float south one day
leaving the plants forgotten.

The pods summon me, moth to candle flames
covered in soft green barbs. I can’t let them be,
crack them open like shelling peas,
flat brown seeds anchor soft white sails,
gossamer floss the prize.

I scoop down from the pod’s hollow,
puff hard, let feathers fly in silver flight.
I reverie across vacant pastures,
crush milkweed rhizomes,
tug pods from dusty stalks
one after another, after another.

What did I know then about pesticides,
endangered pollinators, the mowing
of milkweed along roadsides and railroads?
It was the feel of smooth silk,
the puff of light,
the release I wanted.

Lisa Ashley, MDiv, is a Pushcart Prize nominee who descends from Armenian genocide survivors. She has spent eight years listening to and supporting incarcerated youth. Lisa navigates her garden and life with physical limitations, help from her husband and unlimited imagination. Poems can be found in Blue Heron Review, The Healing Muse, Amsterdam Quarterly, Gyroscope, Thimble and others. She writes in her log home among the firs on Bainbridge Island, WA, having found her way there from rural New York by way of Montana and Seattle.

GAIL TIRONE

Saturday Mornings

A dove on the fountain
outside your kitchen window –
window adorned by cowboy cutouts
colored by a seven-year-old
and poems penned by a twelve-year-old
window that sings of children
and their need to be heard

Two children asleep in their beds
– safe and fed
children whose plans for the day
include painting their lemonade stand
bright yellow

A house replete with six ceiling fans
those unrecognized icons of normalcy
rotating reliably helping you
cool down in a hurry
live your life comfortably
entertain graciously – survive

A white pitcher of daisies
on your round wooden kitchen table
greet you – still looking good after a week
who more grateful for this – you or they?

Being served steaming hot coffee
by the man you’ve been sleeping with
laughing with crying with holding
for nearly twenty years
who still likes you enough
to make coffee

Yards of shelves
filled with volumes you’ve read
sampled, savored, memorized, recited
some in which you are published
some in which you yearn to be
and books unread –
full of promise and potential
awaiting a future Saturday

Relishing the morning quiet
no phone rings, no email dings
no car engine revs
the faint whir of the ceiling fan
punctuated by small dove calls
outside your kitchen window

If you listen closely
you can hear the children breathing
hear your husband stretching
before his morning run
hear the sunlight flickering
through the kitchen window
hear your home
purring and content.

Gail Tirone is originally from New York and now lives in Houston. She’s a Best of the Net nominee and finalist for the Red Mountain Poetry Prize, 2020. Her poetry has appeared in NDQ, Hawaii Pacific Review, Mediterranean Poetry, The Hong Kong Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Weight of Addition Anthology (Mutabilis Press), Silver Birch Press and elsewhere. She has a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. in English from The University of Houston. See more: www.gailtirone.com

MARTHA JACKSON KAPLAN

Where northern lights shimmer

I left my shoes beside the old canoe
and the cabin in the north woods
where I imagined you and longed
for saltwater, though here osprey fly
with eagles, and once a pileated wood-
pecker knocked at a white pine that
loomed over the lake. Loons call
as if wolves, small things tremble at
a bard owl’s whoop–– out on the lake
in a night canoe, bat wings whisper stay.

Martha Jackson Kaplan is a recipient of the Zylpha Mapp Robinson International Poetry Award, two Editor-in-Chief Awards from Möbius the Poetry Magazine, both a first and a third place in the Poets’ Choice Contest from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and is a Pushcart nominee. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she writes both poetry and flash fiction. She has recent publications in Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Nixes Mate Review, and forthcoming at Unlikely Stories Mark V, and at Bending Genres. More at: marthakaplanpoet.com

MARSHA OWENS

Daddy and I

We rode the waves together, you sat in the skiff’s stern,
left hand steadying the motor under hot sun, and I straddled
the bow, holding the anchor rope in very small hands, pretending

to be Neptune’s daughter flying across the sea, fifty feet above
bottom as the east wind off the Bay grabbed my face, my short hair
blew fiercely but I had no fear—though had I fallen, I would’ve drowned.

I remember the thrill of those boat rides, your wind-burned face,
how you navigated rough seas with callused hands carrying
death’s sting come-too-soon for my mother, your young wife.

I remember, too, your soft hands that lifted me high to touch the star
twinkling atop a tree on a cold winter night, and somehow I knew
another summer day would bloom again, over there, somewhere.

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The New Verse News, The Sun, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Dead Mule, and Streetlight Anthology. She is co-editor of the poetry anthology, Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook, She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning has been recently published at Finishing Line Press.

SARA SARNA

Hyacinths

Blacktopped and loud,
my childhood.
Naval squadrons
of arial dragons
overhead,
aptly named Intruder.

My mother grew hyacinths
in our tiny garden,
synonyms for small pleasures,
sunny days, open spaces,
things reserved for
our brief escapes.

I collected mountain vistas
and rocky inclines
in the Blue Ridge,
wooded trails in Connecticut,
sandy beaches
on the east coast,
tucked them away,
pressed like flowers.

Now I choose a life
that mirrors my collection
of hyacinths for my soul.

Sara Sarna is an actor, poet and military brat who put down roots in southeastern Wisconsin with her husband and a rescue dog that runs the family. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in print and online, as well as being heard on stage and radio. Her chapbook, Whispers from a Bench, was published in 2020.

PAULETTE LAUFER

The Secret of a Window

The secret of a window is to hold
daylight or moonlight in a frame,
to ground you in the room,
to whisper to you: here. There.
It would be hard to find your way there,
sitting here in this nagging desk chair,
to permeate a window, to navigate to and fro,
seemingly fluent, from a frame, a window, a light.

When you step outside today,
brown leaves will curl along the path
like mysterious seashells
of an ancient beach drift, your hands
burrowing against the shoreline
of your jacket pockets.
A rock glints in the sun like gold,
submerged treasure of a workaday walk.
Tonight, through a window, the moon
offers you a slice of the lightest citrus.

Linger there. Here.
Without the frame, within it.
Unfold the map you imagine you know of the room,
its familiar square, the window’s rectangle.
Open your hands, sit or stand again.
Let who you are flutter down;
let who you are branch outward.

Paulette Laufer received an honorable mention from the Wisconsin Academy/Wisconsin People & Ideas 2017 poetry contest. Other poems have appeared in Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Halfway to the North Pole: Door County in Poetry, Island Intersections (celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore through the intersections of science, art, and poetry), and Bramble. Her work has also been seen in the 2022 Poetic Visions of Mackinac exhibit on Mackinac Island and previous ArtAsPoetry/PoetryAsArt exhibits in Two Rivers, WI. She was the featured poet in the Dickinson Poetry Series (Door County) in August 2022; a poem will next appear in a 2023 issue of Moss Piglet.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES:

RICHARD HAVENGA (cover artist) ~ Richard Havenga is a writer, nature photographer, poet, teacher, naturalist, speaker/presenter, and author of the ten year old blog, “Walk With Father Nature.” He’s been married to his loving wife Mary for 51 years. They have two children, Sarah and Aaron. Richard and Mary live on ten wooded acres on a designated “Natural Beauty Road” near Cannonsburg, Michigan.

DONNA HILBERT (featured artist) ~ Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Threnody, from Moon Tide Press, 2022. Earlier books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in Braided Way, Cultural Daily, Chiron Review, Gyroscope, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, ONE ART, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing, and featured on Writers on Writing, The Writer’s Almanac, and Lyric Life. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home. Learn more at: www.donnahilbert.com

JANET RUTH ~ Janet Ruth is a NM ornithologist. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world. Her sonnet, “Invisible Before Us Untouched and Still Possible,” won a Laureates’ Choice Award in the 2022 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. She has recent poems in Tulip Tree Review, The Ocotillo Review, Sin Fronteras, Ekphrastic Review, and anthologies including Where Flowers Bloom (The Red Penguin Collection, 2022). Her first book, Feathered Dreams: celebrating birds in poems, stories & images (Mercury HeartLink, 2018) was a Finalist for the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards. https://redstartsandravens.com/janets-poetry/

PAULA LIETZ ~ Paula Lietz’s creative talent knows no bounds, whether in various genres of art, writing, or photography. Her work has been showcased around the globe, all but the Antarctic. She resides in Canada.

JEANNIE E ROBERTS ~ Jeannie E Roberts’s artwork and photography appears in online journals, magazines, and print anthologies, including Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Heron Review, Braided Way Magazine, Bramble, The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Art & Poetry, Portage Magazine, Quill & Parchment, Silver Birch Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Synkroniciti Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. She’s worked as a freelance fashion and professional portrait photographer. She’s also the author of several books and serves as a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs.

MARY RAY GOEHRING ~ Mary Ray Goehring is a retired landscape designer, now a snowbird who migrates between her prairie in Central Wisconsin and the pine forests on the border of East Texas and Louisiana. She has been published in several journals and anthologies, and is a multi-year member of the Connection and Creativity in Challenging Times poetry group. Her poetry is heavily influenced by nature, friends and family.

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