Murmur
by Denise Rue
What brings you back from the brink—I mean,
what stops your heart in its habitual dictation?
Apples at the market flushed with wine?
Light sluicing down from the overpass?
This morning, it was starlings, wheeling
from the west, one great breath of black.
An inky dervish, gusting and dipping until
they dominoed down on the phone lines.
Is that all it takes—
absolute, unmixed attention?
What some call prayer?
This
By Adele Kenny
The air is luminous, rare—I sit on the old stone bench that
was my mother’s and think of her pearls—the fragile
string—how everything rolled into a crack between the wall
and floorboards.
Here there are sparrows at the feeder, crickets in the ivy.
Sound over sound, and bees humming. On the fence beside
me, a spider’s web is strung with dust. When a cricket jumps
across my hand, I hold my breath for a second (a way of
stopping time for something perfect).
Everything that needed to be done is done. All shall be well,
and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. *
The branch above me trembles after a bird for which I have
no name; the bird turns and becomes the sky. This is the way
your eyes take in the light, the way you clear the ruins—this
is what saves you.
* Julian of Norwich
Acknowledgment: from A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing at All (Welcome Rain Publishers, 2015)
Planting, Nearest the Prayer
by Tina Kelley
You, new garden, have all the charms of a seven-month-old baby.
For a few short weeks you stay where I put you, sit up and smile.
You haven't confounded me yet. I haven't fallen behind, failed,
or felt regret. See "verve," "new ambition." See "various hopes."
What tricks will you do? Attract bees, give me edible blue flowers
to freeze in ice cubes, produce blooms for each room and for hanging
from attic rafters, herbs for a summer of dishes, seed heads for finches
in the fall. I'm curious, what will thrive and reseed and naturalize,
which will the squirrels eat, the drought singe, the trees overshade?
With compost from three years of dinners, night crawlers from the bin,
not-yet-spaded soaker hose dug in to bathe roots, you may turn marvelous.
My wine, you erase the thump in the gut, turn me capable and desired.
I want to visit you, parse the dusk birdsong, feel the spring rinsing,
the possibility of jewels, ever unmined, deep under the ocean floor.
Plein Air
by Carole Stone
I wish I were a plein air painter.
But my hand won’t obey my eye;
I can only tell in images
what painters copy --
the heron taking flight
the nesting cormorants,
the Queen Anne’s lace,
leaning into the wind.
A woman paints at the shore,
her colors touched by rain.
Will I blur like the watercolor?
A gull flies in an empty sky.
Tina Kelley’s third poetry collection, Abloom & Awry, is coming out next spring from CavanKerry Press. She also wrote Precise and The Gospel of Galore, which won the Washington State Book Award, and co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope. She was a reporter at The New York Times for a decade. Here's a link to Tina's Poetry Blog.
Adele Kenny is founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series and poetry editor of Tiferet. Her poems have been widely published in the U.S. and abroad. She is the recipient of various awards, including NJ State Arts Council poetry fellowships, Kean University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and recently, her book A LIGHTNESS, A THIRST, or NOTHING AT ALL was named a 2016 Paterson Prize finalist. www.adelekenny.com
Denise Rue's poems have been published in Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, Inkwell, Alimentum and Miller's Pond, among other literary journals. She received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003 and has taught poetry in schools, nursing homes and a women's prison. She is a two-time finalist in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest and her chapbook, A Small System of Belief, was a 2011 finalist in the Copperdome Chapbook Contest. She lives in Metuchen, NJ and works as a psychiatric social worker.
Carole Stone: Distinguished Professor of English and creative writing, emerita, Montclair State University, Carole’s most recent poetry collections are LATE, Turning Point, 2016, HURT, THE SHADOW, Dos Madres Press, 2013, AMERICAN RHAPSODY, CavanKerry Press, 2012. Her most recent poems have been published in Slab, Exit 13, Cavewall, Bellevue Literary Review and Blue Fifth Review.
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