As Above So Below - Finding the sacred in the ordinary - Issue 9 by bethanyrivers77

Photo by Jamie King-Fretts

1 AS ABOVE SO BELOW ISSUE 9 Finding the sacred in the ordinary

FOREWORD

As always, a big thank you to all the contributors, and for your patience in what has been a difficult year.

Submissions will re open on 1st October and the theme for the next issue is Blood / Water. Keep writing, keep replenishing, keep finding inspiration. BethanyEditorRivers

As usual, if you’ve had more than one poem accepted for this issue, they will be spread throughout the collection to echo the As Above So Below idiom

There are poems here to make you pause, make you smile, make a tear form in your eye. I very much hope you enjoy them.

Despite all the setbacks of this year, moving house several times and being severely ill for quite some time, I’m so pleased to be able to launch this current issue, packed full of wonderful poems, that give me such pleasure every time I read them.

Welcome, dear readers, to the 9th issue of As Above So Below: Finding the Sacred in the Ordinary.

The Pedernal Mountain Perspective of Georgia O’Keeffe Gail Grycel 26

Because I am Snow White’s Mother Pauli Dutton 14 It Might Be Like This Nan Meneely 15 Something Lives Janet McCann 16 How Trees Colour Love Maggie Mackay 17 the future is a desperate midwife Jane Attanucci 18

Mother’s Roses Chella Courington 9

The Turn of a Wing Ion Corcos 13

Hōkū Grades My Students’ Poems Eric Shaffer 10 holy spirit Morrow Dowdle 11 The Tomatoes Betty Benson 12

Concerto: Saratoga Performing Arts Center, August 2022 Kristy Snedden 27 Marmalade Rena Fleming 29 Ghost Ranch Chella Courington 30 Mindful Louis Faber 31 For Ian Lorraine Jeffery 32 In Silence Louis Faber 33 This Poem is Not Betty Benson 34 Another home for my heart Rena Fleming 35 The Sloth Kristy Snedden 36 A Morning’s Walk Nolo Segundo 37 Creeper, Brown Lucia Owen 38 Changing My Mind Merryn Rutledge 39 On the Day When I Was Empty Jean Biegun 40 For my granddaughter Jane H. Fitzgerald 41 Objet d'Art Ann Howells 42 Anchored to See Aglo 43 Acorn Marian Willmott 44 Tea and Testaments Kate Falvey 45 Amber and Snowdrops Maggie Mackay 46 Mahayana Catholic Mark J Mitchell 47 Two haiku Lori Kiefer 48 I Am a Stockholm Syndrome Pauli Dutton 49 In its Own Wrought Tenderness Ion Corcos 50

3 CONTENTS

The Renovator Katie Simmons 19 Hurt Chicks Pauli Dutton 20 Yard Girl Wendy L. Schmidt 21

Poem Author Page A September Sky Louis Faber 5 Clock Julian Matthews 6 Baldy John Brantingham 7 Southwest Easel Lorraine Jeffery 8

The Drama of Raindrops Katherine Quevedo 22 Social Contract Jean Biegun 23 First Fireflies Merryn Rutledge 24 Deer in Delaware Woods Cindy McGean 25

4 Night Hike at 7,000 Feet Betty Benson 51 grace in the midst Morrow Dowdle 52 Windward Shore Surf Tiel Aisha Ansari 53 Light Chella Courington 54 Juniper Daughter Lorraine Jeffery 55 This Dawn John Brantingham 56 Punch tuation Julian Matthews 57 Leila Louis Faber 58 BIOGRAPHIES 59

A September Sky Lie back, I said to her, just stare up that way stare into the sky without any clear focus. Do you see him now, the hunter with his bow outstretched, the belt cinched about his waist locked in his eternal search for the prey that would free him from his nightly quest. And there, I pointed can you see the great bear gamboling with her child or there a goddess reclining on her heavenly throne. Now she said, that’s not it at all, not even close, look over there, don’t you see a small child crying out for her mother, and there, two lovers locked in an eternal embrace, their lips barely touching, hips pressed together reclining as one, and there, clear as day a cat lying curled as though sleeping in the warmth of a hearth. Louis Faber

Clock by Julian Matthews

There is a clock in the room at Studio 5. It has stopped. It reads 4.49. I peek up every now and then to see if it may suddenly tick again.

My fellow voice locators are also time locked in this room every Sunday. Our tables are arranged in a large C. No one expects to ace Miss B's class. There are 11 or 10, sometimes 9 souls present. It's a minor congregation at a private mass. We come with emoji hands in prayer, hoping to receive the word, like manna from heaven. Even if the gods are silent and the choir is absent, we are typesetter's orphans, lost at the bottom of a page, like hungry Olivers, with bowls in hand, asking for seconds: Please, ma’am, I want some more... You have to be nice to get some. Every week there's a plot twist or two. Or, a howling. If our time in here is frozen then the word trapped in our tongues and minds will have to be released. We have to let it go.

Sometimes, the word freed from a thawing heart is like palms being rubbed together. They warm us on the outside and, momentarily, on the inside.

I never wear a watch. If I need to know the time I can always look at a phone. Time travels with me. It isn't stationary on a wall, even though the time in this room seems to pass too quickly.

Sometimes the word is a lump of clay on a potter's wheel, malleable, awaiting to be shaped by tentative hands. Sometimes, we fire them too early in the kiln, they come out half baked. We sit back and glaze over them. There's a thin line between the potterer and the potty. We spin the wheel. And begin again. I glance up at the clock once more. They say a stopped clock is still right twice a day. It has 1,440 minutes to give away.

I count 1,438 things in this old clock's life that have gone astray but at least, in this class, in Studio 5, in this warm place, over this potter's wheel, I hope to get one or maybe two minutes of something right today.

I'm in a writing class to find my voice. But I never lost it. I just misplaced it. I put it down here somewhere, in Studio 5. I'll find it soon enough.

John Brantingham

Baldy Alpenglow dawns here every morning too although it is easier to arc my neck in the High Sierra to and say “Oh my God” than it is on a traffic morning. I lace my fingers through chain link. Mt. Baldy’s snow fields glow orange behind the train that passes before me. The train cars bead like an endless rosary. The mountain is prayer.

Southwest Easel

This head strong daughter, rooted in Carolina green, now praises red rocks, crumbling dirt hogans, and Navaho legends. Just look at the colors in the cliffs, Mom That’s what she says, as I stare at naked rocks, darting lizards and feel the unending wind from the bellows of hell. She’ll be married in some Hopi ceremony, while I sit by his stoic mother with her solemn stare. I drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, air conditioner cranked high. Ahead a dust covered jeep pulled off the side, flapping canvas shading the easel, a man leans forward, brush in hand. On the empty road I slow, peer out the window to the east, see only sagebrush, spiny mesquite, stunted cacti, a few scarred juniper trees, backdropped by barren mesas. I brake near the gray haired artist, who is not Native American, but has a chiseled, weathered face. This is a blast furnace, I say, lowering a Hewindow.nods. I see underarm stains and the beginning of his painting. What a lot of nothing! I blurt. I don’t see anything beautiful to paint. The artist’s clear blue eyes gaze at the scene in front of him, then he turns slowly to face me, and says softly, Don’t you wish you could?

Lorraine Jeffery (Previously published in Chaparral)

Mother’s Roses Grief is something you can smell like the rose petals my mother kept in a blue bowl their growingessenceover time attaching to the words she spoke so when she passed her breath gone her voice scattered through the house in particles of fragrance Chella Courington

The crinkle and tatter of paper as she gyres through pages is her joy in this assignment. Metaphors don’t move her, nor does fancy font on a perfumed, pink page. She rolls on her back among poems, a wriggle of ecstasy sparked by sun on her upturned belly. It’s Fall, classes are begun, and windows that don’t admit the summer sun are open to morning light slanting across the table and the words my students offer the world. Hōkū sniffs the tidy edges of blurred sheets, creasing pages as she rubs herself chin to chest over the lines. When the branches outside move, she leaps and spits at the shadows of leaves, and a rasp of paper is the only voice Hōkū hears in her ruminations on Emily’s light verse and Steven’s lax and adjectival ode to his own broken heart. Before I stop her, Hōkū slashes a villanelle about chickens and another Bishop spawned sestina on grandmothers. But I’m the one who rips in two the first page of an odd homage to Ginsberg’s Howl as I pull the paper from beneath her manic, green eyed symposium. Her circles as she chases her tail over the sun warmed table are comic when our little literature flies in all directions, but soon, she’s asleep in a litter of verse and scattered leaves. Beneath her paw, she’s bent one corner of a page as perfectly as a reader who wishes to remember where to begin again. Eric Shaffer (Previously published in Even Further West)

Hōkū Grades My Students’ Poems

11 holy spirit beneath the porch eave a bird has built a nest circular basket of slender twigs tufts of gray hair and unidentified detritus the size of my two hands cupped side by side but the little singer who abides within less than a shadow in the corner of the eye no certain shape or color existing only by a beating of wings when the front door opens leaving behind not even a feather i have no way to convey that i am merely incidental a squeak of hinge a draft that quickly passes it makes meaning of our meeting by its fleeing over & over rather than hiding quietly like something that wants me to know it is there but only wants me to know so much Morrow Dowdle

Betty Benson

The Tomatoes

In the empty heart of winter, after we say all there is to say. I make an olive oil cake the one we used to love.

theRememberlingersmaryrosefreshofscentedcrushtipsfingermyonfarmhouse

kitchen in Tuscany, after we shopped at the market in Rosa, when slants of lemon light fell on the windowsill where the tomatoes were ripening into fullness and, in that afternoon even shadows tasted of lavender, and then, your summer’s hand on the small of my back? There is no satisfying the logical mind. An empty heart can still be full.

The Turn of a Wing Yellow gloves on a dish rack, the drip of melting snow in a metal downpipe, winter strawberries on a saucer. You bake flapjacks in the oven, lay a seed on the balcony railing for a redstart; an evanescence of flight. The room warms, the path to the road now clear. Ion Corcos

Pauli Dutton

Because I am Snow White’s Mother

I am every forgotten woman praying to see the maiden who once stared from her reflecting pool. Instead, I see death, ugly endings. I refuse to relinquish my role as star of my stage, to be clothed in decrepitude. They’ll never steal my pearlies and aggies, assassinate my husband or me. I have no chosen headstone. No plot lies ready for shovel. No celadon urn awaits its alcove to fill with ashes. My Roth IRA reclines in a bank, gathers no coinage, only dust like a museum piece, the wish for a ticket holder’s glance, a comment, Isn’t she well preserved?

I spray paint mirrors, wear a Noh mask to conceal a face once more sublime than Snow White’s. May she grow old in a castle of shattered looking glasses. Beyond the crossed yellow tape, a “Not Dead Yet” sign will sag my bosom as a recorded message howls, There’s nothing to see here folks.

“My Own song of Fire and Ice”

Jeannine Hall Gailey

for Delia Meneely Pitkin, died 11:17 a.m. The radio switched off in mid cadenza, notes suspended in the room and this, the sounding silence where they were. Water slowly thickening at winter harbor’s edge until an ocean wrinkle holds as ice. An image on her eyelids of a tree against the sun, light where dark should be, the opposite of true. Perhaps like this for her, the dream she wants to grasp eluding memory, circus train retreating down a narrowing rail toward a cleft in the summer hills. Yes, this: she waking from a long and riddling fantasy that slips away, characters dissolving, meaning drowned in light and light her element as she pulls free of dream and rumpled sheets to rise into its width and clarity. Nan Meneely

It Might Be Like This

Something Lives Something lives in the crawl space Above my room. A bird? Maybe a rat? Sometimes it seems to be shaking out its feathers. But then there’s a scrabbling overhead And the squares of insulation quiver. I’m not afraid of you, I tell the shaking panels. We all have the right to be. And I will not pursue you with poison Or traps. I want to deal with it in person, Make a deal with it: I won’t if you won’t. What if it’s a lost angel, or some Boschian beast representing sins I cannot even imagine? What if it’s rabid Or weirdly contagious? What if I have bats In my twelve inch belfry? Bats or angels? Do they appear alike In the few random slits of muted moonlight? Scuffling, shaking, someone’s chasing something. More life up there than here. Allegory, anyone? Or a stiff scotch. I raise my glass to whatever’s up there, Towards an appendage reaching down, Half hand, half claw, As from an old cathedral ceiling. Janet McCann

How Trees Colour Love white grained oak veneer six dining chairs stand, stoic sentries a precious reddish cast maple harp crystal vibrations at a Hogmanay gathering

Granny’s red brown cedar knotted trunk packed with Ayrshire blankets and a kilt a forgotten pair of golden teak patio chairs tipped on their side in a leaking garden room pale yellow pine door frames wait without complaint for sanding his white dotted brown ash walking stick forgotten in an art nouveau coat stand a cluster of patterned cream birch bobbins gather on the Singer’s ledge when she left.

Auntie’s rich brown stained cherry cabinet plump with bold patterned china sets an eyeful of carved chocolate walnut burls his guitar sings of lost love and rock and roll that line of rosewood piano cases whose keys whisper oh, rowan tree

Maggie Mackay

the future is a desperate midwife

Jane Attanucci (Previously published by Thrush Poetry Journal)

At seventy, I can’t begin to tell you mountains of oatmeal, almonds, avocadoes & extra virgin olive oil with greens, greens, greens my astonishment that the twenty fifth reunion was twenty five years ago, my grandkids now on the runway of their own second decade. Oh, so many secular psalms read in amber tones for too many who once were close. Senses waning, how close my surrender of car keys, the unmarked turn off the grid. Daffodils thrash & trumpet through cacophonous downpours, beg equanimity & strength eagle, warrior & sphinx. If only I could tell you how fierce my aversion to horizons.

Back at the apartment, I gaze at the half papered kitchen walls, filth clinging to the peeling sheets, blackened and tacky like old flypaper. Here reside the sad remnants of a half century of cooking, the yellow film of uncle’ s smoking, all the grease and soot of family life in restless New York City. I pace, sandpaper in hand, pick up the spackling tool, set it down, grab my coat. The doorman raises one eyebrow, mutters at me. It’ s my third trip out before noon. Now I’m fetching paint and nails. Earlier I’d gone for electrical tape, and then for a better scraping tool. Yesterday I painted the ceiling white and mounted a bright new fixture. Its 100 watt bulb now shines like a small sun on a clean summer morning. The ceiling is luminous, spreading warm light across the sorry walls and catching the cabinet latches dusted with rust and residues. I spy a nail hole, fill it. I want to cover up the blemishes, fix the brokenness left behind. I want to make this big square kitchen bright and hopeful, renewed, so that its just married occupants can begin again the slow accumulation of spills and splatters from birthday cakes and festive meals, the fingerprints of children’s hands, oily layers of human touch. Katie Simmons

The Renovator

Pauli, do the bees talk too much? Innocents wail at a wall. Pauli, who desecrates babies?

Hurt Chicks

I am a locked safe. Pauli, are you a runner through the woods? I am the sympathetic stream swirling by this house.

The full moon crushes skulls Pauli, will the sins of the father ever cease? All the jails are filled with hurt chicks.

After Thomaz Salmun Jonah Pauli, are you a high starched collar?

The ocean licks pink pearls. Pauli, will my eyes ever dance again? You are a garden of harmonizing daisies.

Pauli, are you my mother?

Pauli, who will tend the tadpoles? I am the tears singing you to sleep.

Pauli, are you a ticking bomb? The sky leaps lavender. Pauli Dutton

21 Yard Girl I do not remember this place, perfect as it is now, this yard. I never knew it to be, bright green the hardness, grown out of it, and the weeds, withered and worried to death. This tree cradled my thoughts. This rusted clothesline, now slashed to metal scraps, served as my path to freedom, This roof allowed me to dream, to count the silent stars. I did not know we were needy, blissful in our simple states, quite content flying to the sky, cardboard wings, carried me home. Shakespeare on a sidewalk stage, we bowed to curious Cardinals. School chums laughed, when I wore a homemade dress. Cheapened by their cruelty, it was a source of shame. But, in our yard I was queen, and wore a dandelion crown, surrounded by knights, loyal, to my backyard kingdom. We told noble tales, and laid castle walls, stacked fallen leaves. with birch bark sleeves of armor. I miss my native days. I do not remember this place, perfect as it is now, this yard. I wish it were ruined, like the one I knew, the one I grew to love. Wendy L. Schmidt

Katherine Quevedo

The Drama of Raindrops on a passenger window racing, immortalshortofandorandorexplodepeltdownwardlightningcareening,diagonalseachother,kissflutterawayshylyelseconjoinhurtletogetherthickandthinallatinymultitudevoices,livedindividuals,enmassedestinedtoreturnagainasclouds

Social Contract How comic is simplicity in this double dealing quacking world.

Emerson’s journal, February 17, 1838

I’m an animal. It’s easier to play my cards this way, more lined up, laid straight, certain. I went to a tractor pull today, my first since moving from the speeding city. I wanted to stay in those viewing stands forever in that simple social contract with the ground, with gnarled farm accents that braided the wind like tree roots anchoring soil. A pony tailed young woman and her novice kid sister won every event, digging in at rusty controls, grinding old motors to jump like fresh pups. Restored history the announcer called one spiffed up antique 58 year old Allis Chalmers. I’m 58, I thought when he said that, but I’m an animal, and animals don’t chase restoration. We find food, warm the den, and then sleep. We welcome ordered night and stir with the sun. Jean Biegun

Merryn Rutledge

First Fireflies Fireflies, come to celebrate desire, bring me back to summer nights when we sat on grown ups’ laps lulled by the to and fro of rocking chairs, lingering heat and family voices lowing like the cows beyond the fence. In the deepening dark we cousins watch for insect flash, then rouse and run into the stardust to catch the magic bugs in cupped palms now lantern lit. Against my skin, a fluttering tickle like when my mother’s feathery eyelash brushes my kissed cheek. Opening our hands, we set the tiny beacons free and spread our arms to wings, tilting our heads skyward to the bigger lights that spin around our haloed heads.

Deer in Delaware Woods

This forest is our temple, Human. Have you come to pray, or to invade? If you insist on staying, honor the peace you drink so deeply. Near the waiting water, beneath the copious canopy, give us the sacrifice of your silence. Hold your breath. Songs belong to those with wings. When we see you, we stop. We watch. If you stop too, we may offer you one long, whispered encounter with truth. Do not disturb. Take no more steps. Hold this pause even in your blood. It is your prayer of repentance. Now enter the infinite seconds that open their blossoms to you, communion of green and golden light, air blessed by the trees. Some ceremonies we share only with those who know the sacrament of stillness.

Cindy McGean

Gail Grycel

26 The Pedernal Mountain Perspective of Georgia O’Keeffe

It’ s not her array of bleached skulls, nor her plump petunia pistils, bold colors or abstract bone holes, drawing my eye to the stilled life, but her insistence on beauty plucked from the day’ s minutiae. In the beyonddistance,theprickly pear spine, buffalo blue grama grass blades, and gambel oak acorn far above the twisted juniper and sage dotted hill, sunlight swathes the mountain silhouette that outlived her love affair with its line. Her legacy wanders the breadth of this holy landscape our shared ties to places wild. And her ghostly presence presses each new view to expand my mind to open my soul.

When1. I was eight, I found a cave just my size. I crawled in and sat on the mulchy ground. An apparition appeared. She touched my face gently. My hair rose up to greet her. I ignored my brother’s voice as he called for me to see an old bullet he’d unearthed. Once I was resting in the cave when my mother called me. Her voice was lost among the others. They knew my many names and even when I didn’t recognize the syllables, I was drawn to the cadence and the melodies, un butchered.

27 Concerto: Saratoga Performing Arts Center, August 2022

In2. 1777, American soldiers defeated the British here, despite the booming 12 pounder cannons. Bullets and arrowheads were still buried in the dirt almost two centuries later when this land became the park that evolved to cradle the arts. In 1968, I dressed in my best old jeans and tie dyed shirt to sing along with Paul Simon and his friend. When they played I Am a Rock, I felt the cool mist of the cave spirits around me, swaying to the music. Now3. my daughter locks her car and we wander to our seats in the amphitheater. Tonight it is Yo Yo Ma we come to hear. The crowd hushes as he takes the stage. I listen for the old souls. The music starts and the audience settles. In the dusk above the trees I spot three hawks flying between

28 the melodies. Their tail wings conduct notes that travel the night sky and harmonize when they find us, my daughter with me in the cave, I with her in balcony seats. The mist floats up, gentle on those who notice. Here in the country of the quiet river, in the pause between movements, we wait, for whatever comes next.

Kristy Snedden

Marmalade Cutting limes for marmalade at dusk. The azaleas are ruby. In daylight they are coral. A white pencil line is curved below Venus, on a bluebell blue sky. When the sky goes black the moon and planets shine as bright as light on a mound of sugar. Rena Fleming

30 Ghost Ranch Dust devils swirl to Beethoven’s Fifth and sun burns my eyes between Santa Fe and Española. Living in this forsaken land is unimaginable until I see shadows on desert hills and think of Georgia O’Keeffe traveling across New Mexico water colors dislodging dark NewYork her lover old enough to be her father posing her day after day in his studio infatuations in black and white. Stieglitz dies. She escapes to open plains cloud vistas where nothing presses no camera traps no skyscraper blocks her stretching into whiteness bone on red hills.

Chella Courington

Mindful I saw the sun rise this morning over Mt. Hood, the glow that announced to the horizon its approach. There should be in the life of every man, every woman, that moment when seeing dawn lift, peel back the shroud from Mt. Hood causes the sudden intake of just that much extra breath.

Louis Faber

For Ian We siblings laugh louder as we age, having scrabbled up summits, and dug furrows to earn it, our kids now plowing their own futures except Ian, my middle brother’s son. Thirty four, he rocks when he sits cross legged on the floor. Our arthritic ears hear ticking like a clock’ pendulum, as we revel in doing what we couldn’t when the yoke of parenthood rode our shoulders. My writing gets me up in the morning, I say. I get up to garden, says Art scratching his arm; I still have to go to work, the youngest grumbles. I wake up just to know that I don’t have to, quips John as our laughter rocks the room

What about you?,I ask, turning to Mark, my middle brother, who barely whispers, I get up for Ian. Lorraine Jeffery (Previously published in Goodness Anthology by Wising Up Press)

In Silence

You hear the young monk at Senso ji approach the great bell and pull back on the log shu moku, straining. You hear the laugh of school aged children hand in hand walking through the temple grounds as pigeons gather.

You hear the cat, sitting at the foot of Daibutsudan, staring out and the deer waiting at the gate. You hear your breath and that of a million others as they sit on their cushions sharing what is. Louis Faber

Sitting in stillness, the silence is at first shocking, a deafening in a way unimagined but there. Within the lack of sound lies a thousand sounds you never heard in the din of life.

This poem is not about the wild strawberries along the side of the trailer how light spills dappled patterns through the leaves, onto the ground, or how moss damp desire saturates the musk of dying leaves. It is not about the end of the portage, the new boot blisters on the heels, the weight of the pack, or the rock island, sun warmed and jutting from the middle of a lake, northern, deep and black. This poem is not about all the ways it is easy to catch the toe of a dusty boot, to stumble on rock and roots, or how map and compass offer no guarantee you won’t find yourself lost or how shadows glide across the day before you have time to light your lamp. No. It’s about how you can move into the shallows of your hunger, trailing the damages of living, how you can leave off all your lying, surrender the dread that someday you will do nothing more than vanish. And how some day you can look down, then bend and pluck, a wild red berry, right there. Betty Benson

This Poem is Not after Joyce Carol Oates

The first cave of green light was a built one in Sunville, built by my older brother when I was six or seven and he had not yet gone to boarding school. It was not a Robinson Crusoe thicket. Fragile, unrooted. I crawled in, faced upwards. Watched flashes of blue in the green. More and more sky as the leaves curled. It fell when the wind came. Ephemeral with a permanent trace memory. Later there were beech tents with skirts to the ground in Coole Park. Pine vaults with golden straw carpets near Boston, Mass. A wood of small trees in Malta, canopied in dry green and bright migratory birdsong. Here, near the house, an oblong erratic anchors a crowd of Hawthorn, Rowan, Alder and Willow. In this case, rooted like Robinson Crusoe’s thicket. Another home for my heart. Rena Fleming

Another home for my heart

The Sloth Hiking through Corcovado National Park, I fell behind the group in the cloud forest. I saw the two toed sloth sleeping in a tree. The mist in the canopy clouded my eyes. I looked again to be certain of the small brown animal, her hair tinged green, and heavy with water supporting the Chlorophyta’s growth. She parted her hair in the middle of her belly and it grew in swirls up her back, letting her slurp nutrients through her skin, while she slept, nestled in the tree, snugged in her algae comforter. She was about the size of my white dog. She sensed me looking and her neck turned 270 degrees, the extra vertebra giving her some small defense against predators. She fell into the air and landed twenty feet down with a bump on the spongy ground, as she does at least once a week. Her painted smile never moved. Her sloping eyes looked at me, surprised by the fall. Ninety percent of her life is hanging upside down from a tree. Lucky sloth, her organs attach to her rib cage. No smothered lungs for her. She moved so slowly that I almost lost her in the jungle. I didn’t call out to my group. I never even told them. Earlier, on the bus, several pestered the guide, hoping for selfies with a sloth. But this sloth her smile was fancy dress, the algae her lace, and her nervous system it sang, alone in the forest.

Kristy Snedden

My wife and I walk every morning, a mile or so it’s good for us old to walk in the cold, or in the misty rain, it makes less the pain that old age is wont to bring to bodies which once burned bright with youth, though now I wear braces on ankles, braces on knees, and I walk slowly with two canes, like an old skier, sans snow, sans mountain. We passed a tree whose leaves had left behind summer’s green and now fall slowly, carefully one by one in their autumnal splendor. My wife stopped me, listen she said, but I heard nothing Hush! stand still, she said, and I tried hard to hear the mystery... Finally I asked her, knowing my hearing less than my wife’s (too many rock concerts in my heedless youth), what we listen for? She looked up at my old head, and smiled only she could hear the sound each leaf made as it rippled the air in falling to the ground. Nolo Segundo

A Morning’s Walk

Creeper, Brown Indexed so in Sibley’s splendid bird book as if there were other Creepers, Blue and Red or Iridescent. It lives, vertical and shy, on tree trunks, minute, quick, and to say what I saw takes longer than the instant a Brown Creeper took a bath in a still place in hillside run off near dusk on a December day. It splashed and flut flutted its wings, shook itself so droplets flew and caught the low light and for a nano second it bathed in a misty rainbow. So utterly small and private with no need of me to see, or say its name it flew up, landed, fluffed itself twice, preened and flew away. Lucia Owen (Previously published SPIRE: Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability)

I get to feeling crazy at the end of a long day when folks on the bus use their cellphones to rattle on, fuss and wrap me in their deals. The prattle inside my head already sounds like a phone call back in the days when conversations collided on what was wryly known as a “party line.”

But today in a nearby seat a baritone on Bluetooth murmurs in om like hmms between peaceful pauses that close with a coda I love you.

Da capo with variation: the bus motor hums while my mind chants love you, love you, love you love you all the way home.

Merryn Rutledge

Changing My Mind

On the day when I was empty, I let life give itself to me. I had surrendered, you see, arms outstretched, ready for spikes to palms. But the pulsing sun and fresh eyes of young walkers on the winter pavement… their happy hope for an open café on this New Year’s Day…and the hard seed that landed on the roof of my car… They all chorused together (sun, eyes, hope, seed) to sing to me: Wake up! Look! See what you are part of in this moving world. Eat your bread and breathe. Jean Biegun

On the Day When I Was Empty

We gardened in our beloved patch of green, a private haven shielded by fence and tree. Tiny tomato plants staked with wishing prayers. I puttered, fixing worn out wounded treasures, you and your joyful abandon at my side. The tomatoes continued to grow mature and tall like the newly emerging teenager, a stranger version of the vanishing child. Now, I lay on the couch at dusk, tired out and sadly pensive, no longer having the strength to tend my garden. The withered tomatoes hang drab on the vine. Memories shower sorrow on my darkening years. How can I help you understand the changed colourless garden? And that growing old means I have to leave. My prayer for you: to believe in heaven, as I don’t know how to apologise for dying.

Jane H. Fitzgerald

For my granddaughter

of all? Ann Howells

Objet d'Art Turtle carapaceshellsand plastron. Fish flaredvertebrawings,three inches across. Raptor skull beak a quarter moon, crushable as eggshell. Cow ivoryskullpatina unmarred by gaudy florals of gallery displays. These hang my walls. Whatever my children spy goes into a knapsack. Carried home. Skulls adorn bookcases: coyote, armadillo, goat, bobcat, even mountedjavelina,assculptures.Justconsiderthiswho'sthegreatestsculptor

43 Anchored to See The moon is sitting on the sea, barely above it all for a Fromsecond.asecond class train seat, moved and movement, glass and steel, diesel theBarelydriven.risen,bashfulmoon:anchored2C. Algo

44 Acorn I’m nestled in the shade on the edge of a salt marsh where a blue heron fishes. Distant dunes blaze pink in early light. An acorn just dropped by my foot it’s all the company I want. I hear a door shut, someone yells. I try to curb mind’s ticking warnings Did a car just pull up? Is the door locked? Is anything wrong? Did I leave the stove on? The heron glides to another spot leaving ripples of light, the blue of the distant bay intensifies as the dunes turn to Anothergold.acorn drops.

Marian Willmott

Hot Peppers, of course. Anyone knows that. Tricky, I dissemble, because they clash terribly with lightning

Rituals abound but we’re not having any unless they’re made instantly, in the rough, on the fly, claimed as we trot through the rain, searching for likely pre made picnic sandwiches.

Though, in truth, hot peppers go with anything at all. She counts the seconds between booms and says we have some time if we eat between the claps. I knew she’d get her way. And so sudden jars are added to our store and icy bottles of sweet capricious tea which are clinked, salute, in our humid car as the sky defends itself from harm and heat enflames the sea. Kate Falvey (Previously published in Mundane Joys: A Poetry Anthology.)

Tea and Testaments

Pickles are a must, but do they go with rain?

To be at once artless and snide, one must be fifteen. Sure, I play, blubby mother who’s made up all the games, but what goes with thunder?

Maggie Mackay

Amber and Snowdrops

One glance, a moment of Hogmanay hush as twilight shuttered the path, a roe deer and her young, silent. We took leave of the year. Now, in the drift between winter and spring, seeds stir, wild garlic sprouts, first lambs grow in the belly. Fire lights the gloaming, candles the home. Sun’s rebirth. Folk sup bannocks and colcannon. There’s a budding in the air.

47 Mahayana Catholic Each morning I stonesit still on a pillow and recite the Sutra on Loving Kindness, then oftheandonstickIAfternoonsbreathe.sitstiffmycushionintoneHeartUnderstandingandbreathe.AtnightIliewormcurledhidingfromfearsanddemonsandretreattomyoldmantra:HailMary,fullofgrace...thensleep. Mark J Mitchell

48 Two haiku by Lori Kiefer

wildflower walk leading me back to myself

Alpine hut all night long, one cow bell echoing the other

I Am a Stockholm Syndrome

I live inside a cold city unable to survive without the communion of my perpetrators. A key has no purpose without its lock. A house cannot stand without its walls. My mind cannot endure without its captors. It’s useless to rail against the sun for hiding, the moon for disappearing, my kidnappers for fleeing. The day I forgave them they deserted me. Pauli Dutton

A red fox stills in a stitch of rubble: far enough to be obscure, close enough to poise statuesque. In the dying light over the Pirin Mountains, the fox takes an intense stare at us, incalculable, then skitters off. The archaeology of scope, smooth stones, and the Glazne River. No astrologist, no violin, only an obscure papyrus, and forgetfulness. At the entrance to the underworld: a slight recollection, a twitch, and the vixen returns to her cubs. I hear a cry over the other side, Orpheus turning back to Eurydice. Another fall, the non eternal devotion of earth, irreligious: the fox, in her own wrought tenderness. Corcos

In its Own Wrought Tenderness

Ion

When I doubt the world, I remember: Alone, I once walked among ruins, lost in a place unafraid of its own bleached bones. There, I let the loose pebbles clatter beneath my feet; there, in the company of piñon, quaking aspen, fragrant juniper. To catch my breath I slowed my pace on the steep pitch of the trail, raised my eyes past high desert, over the dark silhouette of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In thin air I saw clearly under a midnight sky. Suspended in darkness as deep as the final vibration of a temple bell. From a nearby pueblo, beating of drums rhythm and sound traveled through the clear and the dark and over the stars, and held me still until I could accept thin air and dark. Held me still in a womb of sound, until the wreck of my bones let go their searching. Betty Benson

Night Hike at 7,000 Feet after Nathalie Handal

52 grace in the midst a white car surrounded by three police vehicles in the road a young woman who looks old and an old man who is blind the cops talk of erratic behavior and open containers the woman screams and curses lost to herself she cries out for the father as if she is again little and innocent and he still has sight she spits on one officer who patiently takes it another helps the moaning father out of his seat and into the street where he relieves himself into a cup the officer holds steadily as if receiving something holy Morrow Dowdle

A wind driven, moon hooked, gnasher at the world’s edge, a brass band Hallelujah in the world’s biggest church.

Your feet feel the shred and the suck, crest curl undertow, shaking the breakwater It rips a rip tide all along the coast, boat tosser, slam bang, spurts from the clifftop like spoutingwhales

Windward Shore Surf

It throws spindrift half a mile inland, salt glaze your windshield, lick your lips and taste it It’ll chew you and spit you, slap you and hit you, sing about tradewinds and batter you to bits

It’s a shouter, a braggart, a wall of green thunder, a stone splitting giant with black sand for teeth

It hammers. It hollers. It’s a rage of white tigers, a pack on the hunt It gouges. It grinds. Strips sand from the shoreline and flesh from your bones

Tiel Aisha Ansari

Makes opihi pickers run for their lives

It’ll drag you and drown you, shake, shatter and roll you

Light Sight dims after twenty years sewing cotton under fluorescence. In fingerless gloves, she threads the eye, prays for easy passage. Glint from the silver thimble reminds her of glow worms in a Texas summer.

Specks of light on pinewood, brown iris rimmed in white. She longs to be above the factory glare where sunlight rolls through mist. Rising from her bone, warmth spreads like manna’s sweet, clear juice. Tamarisk petals fall, barely touch her body, blinking like fireflies. Chella Courington (Previously published by Anti Heroin Chic)

Prickly juniper roots suck errant dew from chalky alkali in high mountain deserts. Raised among scrub oak, mesquite and sage, our Goshute foster daughter’s roots shared their source, the muddy river crawling lizard like through the Ibapah Reservation. She saw her first reservoir with us: each trickle captured to parcel out to thirsty crops, the dam creating a lake for recreation she hadn’t imagined. We plan a trip west, where only Japan lies beyond the horizon, to see salt water surf crash the rocky Oregon shore.

Juniper Daughter

What’s the ocean like? she asks. I pause and purse my lips, saying nothing. Like a river? No, I slowly reply. Like a lake? I shake my head, Not really. She sees I’m thinking too much again, and walks off with a shrug. The kid cramped car, has taken the road of bored irritation by the time we catch a whiff of seaweed tang. Still, before driving to the sandy campground, we pull onto an overlook, high above the ocean. She stands on stick legs while wind blows her thick ebony hair away from her face, surveying black rocks and cresting waves. Her eyes on the horizon, she blinks, then stares up the beach to the north, slowly turns her head south and squints. An errant gust almost blows away her soft comment, It’s not like anything. Lorraine Jeffery (Previously published in Segullah, on line)

piss on the track and laugh and howl, but at dawn what’s left of them are stains and broken forties. Brown eyed susans are here too My dead point to them, untrampled even respected by teenage feet, and my dead call me to see them dawning. Today, I watch and listen imperfectly. It’s the only way I know how. John Brantingham

56 This Dawn The rhythm of the train that runs 100 feet from my front door (wheel on track) draws out my dead who call me out and across the parking lot COVID empty for 7 month now to the chain link fence falling Attoenoughapartforteenagerspassthrough.night,theydrinkand

Perhaps one question mark was about your near suicide

It irks you that others still can't see there is more to you no one has really peered close enough, right into your soul, to uncover the beauty of your exclamation marks

Or perhaps you are hyperventilating trying to re invent by hyphenating: Journalist writer freelancer author editor teacher lecturer trainer speaker columnist artist poet drama queen

Perhaps you haven't felt them yourself for sometime

Perhaps some nights you would no longer feel that engulfing emptiness that comes with the unfinished poem Grappling with stanzas that have lost their rhythm the rhymes that seem so forced the climax of a faked sonnet the words that do not come and perhaps, the next time, you will no longer take the long drive back home alone feeling like the last dot in an endless trailing ellipsis... And all this needy punctuation will finally end in the warm embrace of your own true self. Julian Matthews (Previously published by Delhiwallah Poetry Collective's Anthology)

The question marks sit on your head like seahorses Their eyes in mock terror, silent and drifting with a soft tide

Perhaps you are tired of being labelled with air quotation marks that suggest you are "someone" you are not So you stand at the microphone, breathe in and stretch tall and straight, hoping others will exclaim and see the point of you

Another, your tentative sexual awakening

Another, your parental purgatory that drifted between hell and heaven

Punch-tuation

It is quite obvious you consider yourself a question mark

So that others will be curious about you Even romantically curious maybe

You feel in between sometimes like the pause in a comma of this sentence, of your life or perhaps the forgotten, less often used, increasingly redundant semi colon; that longer pause that separates two equally worthy thoughts

Perhaps your inner longings are for the pregnant pause of a period

Perhaps the search for you; who you are; would end finally with a fullstop. Perhaps all you ever wanted was to be a good lover or spouse Maybe even a great mother or father

You like the mystery of it You want to be an enigma

Another, the depression that led to it Another, was the search for your identity Another, your dilemma with your gender

58 Leila At the left click of the mouse my granddaughter appears barely a week old and with a right click she is frozen into the hard drive. I remember sitting outside the Buddha Hall of Todai Ji Temple in the mid morning August sun the smiling at a baby waiting in her stroller for her mother to bow to the giant golden Buddha. I recall the soft touch of the young monk on my shoulder, his gentle smile, and in halting English, his saying "all babies have the face of the old man Buddha." In the photos, the smile of my son is the smile on the face of Thay, the suppressed giggle that always lies below the surface of the face of Tenzin Gyatso. There is much I want to ask her, my little Leila, there is much she could offer, but I know that like all Buddhas she will respond with a smiling silence and set me back on my path.

Louis Faber

Ion Corcos was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969. He has been published in Cordite, Meanjin, Wild Court, The Sunlight Press, and other journals. Ion is a nature lover and a supporter of animal rights. He is the author of A Spoon of Honey (Flutter Press, 2018).

Jean Biegun, retired special education teacher, lives in California after a lifetime in both large cities and small farm towns in the Midwest portion of the U.S. Poems have appeared in many publications including Amethyst Review, Mobius: The Poetry Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, Soul Lit, Eastern Iowa Review, World Haiku Review and many other places A chapbook Hitchhikers to Eden will be published by Kelsay Books in 2022.

John Brantingham was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and his work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including his latest fiction collection Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He lives in Jamestown, New York.

Chella Courington: raised in the Appalachian South and now living in Southern California. She is a writer/teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including DMQ Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New World Writing. Her recent collections of poetry are Good Trouble, Origami Poems Project, and Hell Hath, Maverick Duck Press. Lynette’s War, a micro chapbook, will be issued by Ghost City Press June 19. Twitter: @chellacouringto; Author Page: chellacourington.net

Algo is from Ireland. In self imposed self isolation, Algo only wears black and enjoys studying the school of Austrian Economics, reading comic books and meditating. He believes organised religion is a club, but is not nihilistic.

Sufi warrior poet Tiel Aisha Ansari has been featured by Measure, Windfall, and Everyman’s Library. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High Voltage Lines, Country Well Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and Dervish Lions. She hosts Wider Window Poetry on KBOO Community Radio.

BIOGRAPHIES

Jane Attanucci’s poems have appeared in Common Ground Review, Mom Egg Review, Off the Coast, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review and Thrush Poetry Journal among others. Her chapbook, First Mud, was released by Finishing Line Press (2015) and her full length collection, A River Within Spills Light, by Turning Point in August 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Betty Benson lives and works in the United States on traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of Indigenous people. She is dedicated to honoring the tangled stories of the places where she and others have lived.

Jane’s poems have been included in journals; Your Daily Poem, Dreamers Creative Writing, The Beautiful Space A Journal of Mind, Art and Poetry, and more. Rena Fleming was born in Co.Limerick, on a farm near Ardpatrick, which she left at sixteen. She studied and worked in weaving, textile design, and painting. She began to write a few years ago and has been writing a poetry for two years, encouraged by the members of Martin Vernon’s Friday Lunchtime Poetry on Zoom. She now lives in Connemara.

Louis Faber is a poet and photographer living in Port St. Lucie, Florida. His work has appeared in The Poet (UK), Dreich (Scotland), Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Erothanatos (Greece), Defenestration, Atlanta Review, Glimpse, Rattle, Borderlands: the Texas Poetry Review, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among many others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A book of poetry, The Right to Depart, was published by Plain View Press.

During Pauli Dutton’s career as a librarian, she founded, coordinated, and led an annual poetry anthology and a companion public reading series from 2003 through 2014. She has been published in Verse Virtual, The Pangolin Review, Better Than Starbucks, Altadena Poetry Review, The Cherita, Skylark, and elsewhere.

Gail Grycel travels solo, with several pairs of dancing shoes and hiking boots. Her writing responds to the details of place inner and outer landscape, and has been included in Vermont's PoemCity, S/Tick Magazine, Anthology of Women's Voices by These Fragile Lilacs Press, Writers Cafe Magazine, and Burning House Press. When not on the road honkytonkin’ to Texas two step bands, or hiking in the high mountains, she teaches woodworking to women.

Kate Falvey's work is published in many journals; in a full length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co founded (with Monique Ferrell) and edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City University of New York, where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review

Jane H Fitzgerald is a retired middle school teacher who now enjoys writing poetry. Jane has written four books including, Notes From the Undaunted, which can be found on Amazon. amazon.com/author/janefitzgeraldpoetry

60 Morrow Dowdle has been published in numerous journals and anthologies and was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2018 and 2020, as well as a Best of the Net nominee in 2020. She edits and critiques poetry for Sunspot Literary Review and is an organizer for the NC Living Poetry collective. In addition to being a poet, she enjoys her “day job” as a physician assistant in mental health. She lives in Hillsborough, NC.

Maggie Mackay’s full collection ‘A West Coast Psalter’, Kelsay Books, is available now. In 2020 she was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection. Her poems were highly commended in The Liverpool Poetry Prize and longlisted in the Yaffle Poetry Prize. A jazz loving drinker of a malt, she reviews poetry pamphlets at https://sphinxreview.co.uk (Happenstance Press) and for The Friday Poem The Friday Poem

Cindy McGean is based in Portland, Oregon. She is an educator, writer and theater artist whose work has appeared in publications such as VoiceCatcher, Kaleidotrope, The Saturday Evening Post, SQ, NVQ, Coffin Bell, and the anthology Opening the Gate.

Lorraine Jeffery has won poetry prizes in state and national contests and published over one hundred poems in various journals and anthologies, including Clockhouse, Kindred, Calliope, Canary, Ibbetson Street, Rockhurst Review, Naugatuck River Review, Orchard Press, Two Hawks, Halcyon, Healing Muse, Regal Publishing and Bacopa Press. Her first book, titled When the Universe Brings Us Back, was published in 2022.

Lori Kiefer was born in London, U.K. of Irish and Greek parents. A retired adult education teacher, she runs creative writing workshops for community groups and charities. Lori has a passion for haiku poetry and her poems have been published in The Poetry Pea, The Haiku Dialogue, Lynx and elsewhere. She has created five comedy scripts in her work with mental health charities.

Julian Matthews is a former journalist finding new ways to express himself through poetry and short stories. His work has been published in the American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Borderless Journal and various other literary publications. He is based in Malaysia. Link: linktr.ee/julianmatthews

Janet McCann’s work has appeared in: Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou'wester, America, Christian Century, Christianity And Literature, New York Quarterly, Tendril, and others. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she taught at Texas A & M University from 1969 2016, is now Professor Emerita. Most recent poetry collection: The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press, 2014).

Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years. Her recent books are: So Long As We Speak Their Names (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Painting the Pinwheel Sky (Assure Press, 2020). Chapbooks include: Black Crow in Flight, Editor’s Choice in Main Street Rag’s 2007 competition and Softly Beating Wings, William D. Barney Chapbook Competition winner (Blackbead Books, 2017). Ann’s work appears in small press and university publications including Plainsongs, I 70 Review, and San Pedro River Review.

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.J. Carber, became published in his 8th decade in over 70 literary magazines in 5 countries and 2 trade books: The Enormity of Existence [2020],and Of Earth and Ether [2021]. Both titles and much of his work reflect the awareness he's had since having an NDE at 24 whilst almost drowning in a Vermont river: that he has is a consciousness that predates birth and survives death of the body.

Lucia Owen moved to rural western Maine fifty two years ago to teach high school English and has lived there ever since. At 80 she is an ‘emerging poet’ because she began writing and publishing in 2019. Her work has appeared in The Cafe Review, Rust + Moth, Prospectus: A Literary Offering and several anthologies. She is a horsewoman, tai chi player, gardener and caregiver for her 91 year old husband of 48 years.

Nancy Fitz Hugh Meneely's first book, Letter from Italy, 1944, was noted by The Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books published by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio composed by her sister and performed twice in Hartford, CT. Her second book, Simple Absence, was nominated for The National Book Award and was a Grand Prize Finalist for the 2021 Next Generation Indies Award and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. Mark J. Mitchell has been a working poet for forty years. His latest full length collection is Roshi:San Francisco published by Norfolk Press. Another, Something to Be (on the subject of work) is due soon from Pski Porch, and a historical novel is on the way. He lives with his wife, the activist, Joan Juster. A small online presence exists. https://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/ A primitive web site now exists: https://www.mark j mitchell.square.site/ I sometimes tweet @Mark J Mitchell_Writer

Merryn Rutledge is a poet, teacher, and reviewer. Poems have appeared in Pensive, Muddy River Review, Multiplicity, Speckled Trout Review, Aurorean, Mass Poetry, and elsewhere. Essays have appeared in peer reviewed journals and book chapters. With two degrees in literature, Merryn taught literature and writing and then, after earning a doctorate, she ran a consulting firm helping leaders realize their potential. She teaches workshops on poetry craft from her home in New England, USA.

Wendy L. Schmidt has been writing short stories, essays, poetry, and producing collage art for the last ten years. Pieces have been published in Verse Wisconsin, Chicago Literati, City Lake Poets, Literary Hatchet, Moon Magazine, Rebelle Society, and a variety of anthologies.

Katherine Quevedo was born and raised near Portland, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. Her poetry received an honorable mention in the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award. Her poems have appeared in Honeyguide Literary Magazine, NonBinary Review, Songs of Eretz, Kingdoms in the Wild, Pastel Pastoral, and elsewhere. Find her at www.katherinequevedo.com

Marian Willmott is an artist and writer living in Vermont, enjoying both the solitude of the mountains and a vital artistic community. She strives to stay present to the mystery and deepen the encounter. Her work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Turnings, a poetry chapbook, was published by Pudding House. Still Life, Requiem and an Egg, a poetry chapbook, was published by Prolific Press.

Bethany Rivers was shortlisted for: Overton Poetry Prize (2019); Snowdrop Poetry Competition (2019). Published pamphlets: ‘Off the wall’ from Indigo Dreams; ‘the sea refuses no river’ from Fly on the Wall Press. Victorina Press published ‘Fountain of Creativity: ways to nourish your writing’. She is founding editor of As Above So Below. She received a Pushcart Prize Nomination in 2016. She has been teaching and mentoring writers for over 15 years. www.bethanyrivers.com

Eric Paul Shaffer’s Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems will be published in 2022. He is author of seven previous books of poetry, including Even Further West; A Million Dollar Bill; Lāhaina Noon; and Portable Planet. Shaffer teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College.

Kristy Snedden has been a trauma psychotherapist for the past thirty plus years. She reads and writes poetry to feel fully alive. Her poem, “Dementia,” was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 90th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition (December 2021). Her work is forthcoming in Amethyst Review and Book of Matches. She is currently a student at Writers Studio.

Katherine Simmons moved to the Hoosier state from New York City a dozen years ago to live on the land and with people she loved as a child. In Indiana, Katherine has found a community of poets with whom to study and share the craft. Her poetry has been published in the Still Points Arts Quarterly, the Anglican Theological Review, Mayfly, Flying Island, Dis Order, Of Rust and Glass, Me as a Child, and Through the Sycamores.

As Above So Below - Finding the sacred in the ordinary - Issue 9

Articles inside

Because I am Snow White’s Mother Pauli Dutton