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O Maker, who threads morning through our shutters,
teach me again the art of staying. They said the feast was finished: bread gone; wine thinned to story. But leaving is not the only sacrament. I will sit. I will run my thumb along the rim of what remains: an oily seam, the ghost of salt, a single stubborn crumb. Outside a crow takes up the sky like a psalm; the house exhales. Open the doors that want to close. Let hospitality be slow: hands held in the dark so the other hand remembers how to hold. If blessing counts in leaving, let mercy count in staying: the stubborn charity that keeps a place warm for someone who forgot to come. We are taught to give and then step away; here, at the table, I learn otherwise. The bread remembers who it is; the cup remembers its maker. Teach this kneeling heart to offer itself like the table: set with plain things, a lamp, a bowl, a place for the poor to come and learn to break. To open is to be opened; to offer is to accept the gift of being offered. So I stay, and in staying receive the impossible gift: to be grateful. -- David Anson Lee is a physician and writer whose work often explores the intersection of faith, memory and the healing arts. Born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he now lives in Texas, where he writes poetry and fiction grounded in gratitude, attention and the quiet movements of grace. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals.
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Every morning I set a cup at the sink
as if to hold small absolutions: coffee grounds, a lemon rind, the slow drip someone promised to fix. Light finds the basin in a single clean sliver, an incision opening the dull lid of the world. I cup it: not like a creditor, but like a child who knows how to return a gift with both hands. I give the water its brief work: to soften, to loosen, to take the stain away without asking for fame. The sink is a small altar: porcelain wide as a palm, and I, half-robed, invent a liturgy of rinsing. When the cup fills with used things the house keeps, I do not mourn; I bless. Soap-slick fingers, a dishcloth folding like a petition, the quiet way a body allows itself to be cleaned. Everything offered is also opened toward being received. If the day asks what I will bring, I press the cup to my lips: a dribble of humility, a mouthful of thanks, the thin music that cups and hands make when they meet; an antiphon: leaving something behind and coming forward are the same prayer. -- David Anson Lee is a physician and writer whose work often explores the intersection of faith, memory and the healing arts. Born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he now lives in Texas, where he writes poetry and fiction grounded in gratitude, attention and the quiet movements of grace. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. Litanies lift
as lost gases cold, spitted mist hovering above the rise of fogged doubt that thickens, and drifts-- before a breeze collects its flecks to amass my haze into something sound; its weight squeezed to dense disk what later floats until it’s fixed into the black of forbearing space where prayers constellate . . . re-membering themselves into dapples of decreed light, luring my gaze to new orisons of storied spark, tales lit from dimming dark. -- Lee Kiblinger is a Texas poet who loves to travel with her husband, laugh with three adulting children, play mahjong and enjoy words with Rabbit Room poets. Her work can be found in Ekstasis, The Windhover, Solum Journal, Heart of Flesh, Calla Press, Clayjar Review, The Way Back to Ourselves and others. You can read more of her poetry in her first collection, All the Untils (Wipf and Stock) or on her Substack at www.ripplesoflaughter.com. She broke the flask and poured . . . Mark 14:3
yet I still tilt mine in a slow-drip-- fingers grip the oily stave of world-waste only to spare mere drops for all is a cost too great (to smash what I’ve stored, to loosen the clench of my cracked, what I hoard) and brave the bust of my broken the burst and spill of soul-pour . . . baring to dregs what I save bleeding it hallow . . . preparing us both for the grave. -- Lee Kiblinger is a Texas poet who loves to travel with her husband, laugh with three adulting children, play mahjong and enjoy words with Rabbit Room poets. Her work can be found in Ekstasis, The Windhover, Solum Journal, Heart of Flesh, Calla Press, Clayjar Review, The Way Back to Ourselves and others. You can read more of her poetry in her first collection, All the Untils (Wipf and Stock) or on her Substack at www.ripplesoflaughter.com. My wails warble through the birdsong;
wept words flutter between flights of lighter feathers that soar as chorus over the grass-- longings shriven to larks, chants of wrongs to wrens, bleeds of cardinal confessions, dripping heavy over distant creeks where herons rise in winds of groans and I listen for the mocking: a cry sounded as reflection blown laughed through the leaves-- instead I hear the coo of my kind confessor, the dove’s return to these trees where, together, our calls lift their song . . . a harmony of howls hovering as a strain of hope. -- Lee Kiblinger is a Texas poet who loves to travel with her husband, laugh with three adulting children, play mahjong and enjoy words with Rabbit Room poets. Her work can be found in Ekstasis, The Windhover, Solum Journal, Heart of Flesh, Calla Press, Clayjar Review, The Way Back to Ourselves and others. You can read more of her poetry in her first collection, All the Untils (Wipf and Stock) or on her Substack at www.ripplesoflaughter.com. I. HAGAR — The Unseen
Hagar’s knees buckle in the blistering sun, her thin cry swallowed by rust-colored silence. A woman slips out before dawn, violet shadows blooming beneath her skin, child’s breath warm against her chest, mercy waiting in the thin mattress and the clipboard’s blank lines. II. THE WOMAN WHO REACHES — The Dismissed Dust swirls as a woman slips through the crowd, twelve years of ache gathering in a single reach, confession of touch enough to turn Him. A woman waits in a cold clinic chair, her hands folded around a quiet plea. Stale coffee in the air-- keys clicking her dismissal, “everything looks normal” typed without looking up, a door clicking shut behind her. III. HANNAH — The Longing Her whispered prayer mistaken for madness, grief trembling in her throat before she speaks. A woman anchors herself to the cool bathroom floor, knees drawn in, a name breathed into the tile’s cold, prenatal vitamins unopened on the counter, pink-tinged water swirling down the bowl. IV. BENEDICTION — EL ROI El Roi, who traced every tear in desert dust, who found the bruised, the bent, the woman bowed beneath loss she could not name, still gathers the overlooked. The God who found her in the wilderness sees His daughters where sorrow bends their bodies low. He lifts their faces, naming them Beloved. -- Alexandria Marianne Leon is a poet and mother based in Salem, Oregon, where she writes about motherhood, faith, embodiment and the quiet, sacred moments of ordinary life. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Parousia and Radix. Cold gel spreads across my skin.
The technician’s voice cuts– into that hidden hollow where dream and waking meet. The plan dissolves like mist: first percentile. high-risk. Induction. Bones braced for if. Her heartbeat, once a cradle-song, now a faint signal across the screen. A faltering hymn rises– weaving through machine’s hum, a shield against if. I wait beneath wings, but the shadow constricts. Wires hum. White sheets glare. Whispers: stillborn. small. sick. Yet he speaks another: Yada: known. named. held. The drip begins. The womb groans– echo of creation. a constellation pulsing behind the glass. Almost lost, yet every star He names is gathered, held, kept. Wires. Strangers. Pain summoned. A cry. A Breath. The hollow bears down– The veil splits: dust and breath Selah. The weight lifts. Bound by breath and gravity. The cord is cut, gravity released. Small, yet knit, a brighter star breaks forth -- Glory -- splitting silence like dawn. -- Alexandria Marianne Leon is a poet and mother based in Salem, Oregon, where she writes about motherhood, faith, embodiment and the quiet, sacred moments of ordinary life. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Parousia and Radix. Sunday worship
songs about Pentecost the oak tree waits for our visit and when we glide down into the ravine the jubilee shakes through her leaves these cattails beneath her were once woven to hold baskets of food on the day the Creator built His bridges over creeks and deep into our hearts -- Casey Mills writes poems early in the morning while his kids sleep. He lives in Northern California next to a creek he enjoys spending time with. His poetry has been published in Heart of Flesh, As Surely As the Sun, Ekstasis, Radix, Spirit Fire Review and elsewhere. You can read more of his poems at caseymillspoems.com. The pull that flesh exerts
this season feels suspended. For days the rain sheeted, damping the cold dirt. Dry and dormant things gasped for air underground in tunnels running near and around buried roots. A line of leafless trees swayed at a meadow's edge; a field of pale grass lies flat in shearing winds, a low, hollow lallation against a stinging silence that smothers human sounds. Cold to the touch, this land of immense disappearances, where dusk had stalled and squeezed breath from the sky, encompasses us, alone together, turning our senses, the broken bits we use to know ourselves, the raw force, tight as a bud, we feel will burst out in full, seducing flowers, sprung alive from our bodies. -- Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught courses on Early, Medieval, Reformation and Modern Christianity. He lives in a small village in the heartland of Ohio, surrounded by a nature conservancy and Amish farms. Picture an empty rowboat
under the night sky: a refuge, our means of escape in a vessel yet to be filled—rocking, beckoning—nudged along by invisible currents . . . Or perhaps, the kingdom is more like a man in the boat, flat on his back in a dark place, broken, alone—his oars, shipped—taking in saving light from a heavenly body that died before reaching him . . . And this, as well: the kingdom of God is a stranger kneeling beside him, who says, Friend, we are water stirred with love and the siftings of spent stars. It is like saying, Let the waves come . . . then grasping a hand, becoming, together, a constellation—perhaps the next dipper, spilling quicksilver, shore to shore. -- Laurie Klein is the author of a chapbook (Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh) and two collections (House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life and Where the Sky Opens). A recipient of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred and a Pushcart nominee for poetry as well as prose, she lives on the brow of a rural hill overlooking an ancient apple tree and mercurial woodland pond. For the first time in thirty-four years, small green apples festoon the limbs. It feels like a sign . . . |