Journal

Prayer was Chanel No. 5

On Saturday mornings
prayer was Chanel No. 5
uncorked once a week,
a haze of sophistication
added to Pond’s soap.

Prayer was middle-aged
women in the synagogue’s
upstairs balcony, calf-length
dark wool skirts flapping
back and forth as they rocked
and swayed, fur coats collared
with mink, or fox heads draped
across shoulders, velvet hats
with short lacy veils drifting
over powdered foreheads.

Prayer was whispered,
scratching and crisping
out of creased lips
edged in red.

I never thought I’d miss
the smell, sound, closeness
of bodies, or the smooth
dark wooden built-in chairs
with hinged seats flung back.

It’s so much more comfortable
to sit cushioned at home
safe behind a flat screen
that shows only faces,
and a camera that I can turn off.

The familiar Hebrew words
rattle quietly in the empty room.
I try to raise my voice,
to swell into the ancient river
of song, to join the holy current,
but after a line or two, I fall silent.
A few high notes drizzle
from my throat, then fade.

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Willawaw, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.

Ospreys In Casco Bay

How you glared as we entered your space,
away your raised wings said, away from our nest-pilings,
or your bones we’ll break as our name remembers,
fillet you like a gudgeon in our claws,
shred you like a lovely hake for our nestlings’ dinner,

calling for sliced glut herring,
menhaden you wished me to be,
as you flexed your night-shelving wing-crooks,
your black eyeline arrowed at me.

Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he / him) has had two novels, five short stories, 30 poems, and nearly 50 essays / articles published. He lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France. He has degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills, and the requisite cat.

This River We’re Crossing

Like the day we brought the baby home,
everything seems too bright,
too large and loud, this bridge a million
miles long. Then, I wanted to go back
to Good Sam, where a star magnolia
bloomed beneath my window
and the nurses wore quiet shoes.

Today, the same thundering semis, same
gorge wind shuddering the car. I’m afraid
to take my eye off the highway,
to ask if you heard what the surgeon said.

Below us, sun sparks the whitecaps
and sailboats, the picture-book lean
of their sails. Impossible from here

to see which way the current is moving,
impossible to tell how fast.

When Carol reads her poem

with its phrase, earth’s late afternoon,
I think of birds on their way
elsewhere— geese in efficient
formation, pelicans the color of mud.
Gullets and the great engines
of their wings unevolved over millions of years.

For the first time in anyone’s memory,
they’ve abandoned eons-old flight plans
for the refuge of farm ponds, spring-fed
and clear despite drought. Carol reads
earth’s late afternoon and I think
of scorched caneberries. The hell-summer
scent of smoke.

Winter is coming.
Quince and crabapple trucked to market,
the last of the pole beans drying on bamboo.
What migrates will go.
Carol herself is leaving, her husband
is dying, and they’ve sold their farm.

She reads and I think of spiders
nesting in the toolshed, gapped floorboards
welcoming the wintering mice.
Someone else’s turn
to patch the barn roof now, to move
the pump from the creek bed
to higher ground.

Emily Ransdell lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, Terrain, River Styx, Calyx, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Award, and was the 2019 runner-up for the Prime Number Poetry Prize from Press 53 as well as the New Letters Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection, One Finch Singing, is forthcoming in late 2023 from Concrete Wolf Press.

I Am Kneeling

You are kneeling next to me.
‌          Our skins touch. Worlds are being born.

A line of kneeling bodies to the vanishing point—
‌          all our naked knees needing the earth, our bread.

It is night, sky obsidian,
‌          the iris of each star’s iridescence an invitation.

Our heads hatless, our feet shoeless—
‌          dark settles on our shoulders.

The desert is still, cautious, weighing each soul’s imprint—
‌          carbon, water, sorrow—

her beige body stretches
‌          makes room for more bodies

bending the way they do when kneeling,
‌          leaning one way or the other.

Sandwarm from sun’s singe,
‌          we wait. We wait

for our invitation from some singular star—
‌          leaning and quiet.

I, Mountain

I woke this morning a mountain.
What I mean is I woke and found
my body to be a mountain. This was unexpected
and spectacular. A mountain
breathing with a four chambered heart
holding raven’s sky. I mean
ravens are holding up the sky
and the sky is in my mountain heart
and though my heart has only four chambers
each is infinite and curious. The first chamber
holds all my mother’s kites.
Holds my mother’s kites
close to my mountain skin, wind
and ocean salt. And as the unbreakable dawn
declares herself, I, mountain, am now weeping
because I am also a body that is human
and very small, with a four chambered
heart that impossibly pumps, holds the strings and sees
the streamers of all my mother’s kites
boundless as sky and salt and let’s not forget the stars.

Lindsay Rockwell is poet-in-residence for the Episcopal Church of Connecticut and hosts their Poetry and Social Justice Dialogue series. She is published, or forthcoming in CALYX, EcoTheo Review, Gargoyle, Radar, River Heron Review, among others. Her collection, GHOST FIRES,is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press summer ’23. She is the recipient of poetry fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Straw Dogs Writers Guild/Edith Wharton’s The Mount residency.  Lindsay holds a Master of Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and is an oncologist.

One Last Adventure

Ol’ Man River, the Mississ Sip, Ol’ Muddy, Big Blue
You’ve more names than Lord or Lucifer
Your might is what draws me back, that and
a wish: can I ride you one last time?

I dream, I refreshed at an oasis far from home
I wake to find my head flatbacked
beneath the water line as a child,
birdlike, laughs me up and down.

I’m not done. I’ve still got it. I’m going to show
the Odysseus in me can still break through.
I can’t hold back. I’ve got to act as if tomorrow will never come
like when I ran the red sand hills with their crushing downs.

Do I still have the time, I wonder, to build a raft and sail the river down?
Will sweet Ginger get upset if for dinner I don’t quite make it home?

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding research career. With graduate degree from Howard University, in seven years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, plays, and hybrid in 175 journals on five continents. Writing publications include Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Lunch Ticket, Manchester Review, Newfound, The Atlantic, and Typehouse. Text-based photo essays include Barren, DASH, Kestrel, Ilanot Review, Litro, NWW, Sweet, Typehouse. He recently wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim and his wife–parents of two nurses, grandparents of five little ones—split their time between city and mountains.