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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.
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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 . . . I have loved the night. I have loved its shade
Of darkly colors: a true lovely sight. I have walked in dark, and his have been made. Forgetting the light, I have loved the night. In the midnight hour, I reflected deep On promises lost, and on love asleep. The night outreached my will, all the world was ripe; Unconscious, unwilling: I loved the night. I have brought the world's hope to her altar Libations of void, death-offerings rite. I have thought despair overtook all wars; Then darkness covered the earth. And the night, Clear and radiant, bright, glorious, wrapped in light, Gave me deeper hopes, and a baby's cry. -- Yannick Imbert teaches theology in southern France at Faculté Jean Calvin. He is a Tolkien scholar and publishes books and articles at the intersection of theology and culture. He has also published online in Transpositions, Ekstasis, Macrina, Inklings Studies and other theological journals. He writes in French at delagracedansencrier.com. We have reached the brink
where anger morphs and headlong words are spiked gloves propelling us down the chute as if we are a luge veering off its line—my “How could you?” inciting your, Not again! “But you never—” Just leave it, I hate you I hate you—and how we rocket through blind curves, half-flattened by shock, and my jaw locks, maybe yours too, except, sucked into one long blur, steeled against ice, it seems nothing slows runaway pride save the tundra of self- loathing, much farther down near the end of the run, where, yes, good Lord, there . . . out of nowhere . . . hear it? A birdlike call to mirth. -- 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 . . . perhaps suggesting
test every rope (oars too) or hand over hand every day let down the anchor and catch forty winks or row row in the name of simply messing about . . . through doldrums and lightning and hold close your hope that the rabbi (who once closed his eyes in the stern) promised never to shift eternity’s gaze up and aweigh -- 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 . . . |