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To the Forest

4/6/2023

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By Natasha Bredle

I go to the forest 
to find more of you. 
Spring is late coming. 
Naked trees compose 
a worn blanket over 
the land, softly stirring
above a leaf burial. 

Branches elongate 
as if to caress your spirit
halfway to the sky. 

The sun seems a wingspan
away. The world is not quiet,
but I can hear less of it here.
Here, where I stop 

in the middle of the trail
and hold my breath as if
my presence is what keeps
some beautiful thing 

from appearing. Here, 
where I wonder if 
my arm span can compute
the ambiguous distance
between us. Here, where I am
so close to believing you
are not so far. If a deer 

shifted amongst the brush,
I would see it. If it dragged
its hoof along the forest
​floor, I would feel it 

to the bone. If there 
was a fox, a rabbit, a robin,
I would pledge myself 

to love them while 
existing with them.
Funny, how you are both
everywhere and nowhere.
I await something new
and magnificent, only to
receive what’s 

already been given. 
I go to the forest 
to find more of you. 
I find you are so much more
than something hidden,
​instead.

Natasha Bredle is an emerging writer based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been featured in publications such as Words and Whispers, Heart of Flesh Lit, and The Madrigal. She has received accolades from the Bennington College Young Writers Awards as well as the Adroit Prizes. In addition to poetry and short fiction, she has a passion for longer works and is currently drafting a young adult novel.

Natasha's other work on
Foreshadow:
The Answer (Poetry, May 2023)

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Gritty Grace: Alan Altany and Pilgrimage (Forecast Ep 49)

4/6/2023

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You can also listen on ​Spotify, Apple, Google and other platforms. 
Listen to other Forecasts here.

Religion professor Alan Altany describes how, as a young man, he wrestled with doubt, panic and anxiety - but how that ultimately led to a deep faith. He reads his poem 'From Here to Eternity', discussing the relationship between the sacred and the secular in his life and writing. Finally, he notes how writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have strengthened and nourished him.

Alan Altany, Ph.D., is a septuagenarian college professor of religious studies. You can visit his website here.

Alan's previous work on Foreshadow:
From Here to Eternity (Poetry, February 2023)

The Seven Deadlies (Poetry, October 2022)
Grunewald's Crucifixion (Poetry, September 2022)
Habit of Being Wise (Poetry, October 2022)
 

Josh Seligman is the founding editor of Foreshadow.

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Openings

28/5/2023

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By Patty Willis​

Picture
Illustration by Patty Willis

Disasters are openings
in our armadillo skin
that keeps us safe from
cuts and scrapes
but steels us from everything else.
 
We can’t make that mighty push
that breaks the shell
or the patient tapping that takes
all our strength
until the moment we feel that lack of air
and a longing for oxygen
so great that we will do anything
to breathe.
We stop caring
that our faces turn ugly and purple
with the effort of pushing.

When we emerge,
you offer Gatorade
and point the way to showers.
Come and wash clean.

No need to speak of the passage
or our old lives.

This is where we want to be
finally, skin alive to the air,
our noses quivering with scents
like dogs and bears,
our ears tuned to the birds,

the earth revealed as holy,
calamity as grace.

Rev. Patty Willis is a minister, writer, artist and translator based in Arizona. She has also been active in immigration justice and reconciliation between white settler descendants and indigenous people. 

Patty's other work on
Foreshadow
:
Pumping Station in the Desert (Poetry, July 2021)

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Spiraling Songs

28/5/2023

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By Carol Park

At 4 a.m. on my bed I succumb.
That old and guttural hiss
--
the demon of self-accusation—summons
me, and I fall deep
into an abandoned mine shaft
where midnight waters seep.
 
But then I come to listen to the spacious
Voice, the ever-present, ever-loving
Wisdom—not that prove-yourself,
fit in with others, must get-it-right
obsession—then my subterranean
Soul truly knows Love.
 
The Spirit throws a rope ladder.
My fingers clasp its coarse fibers
to climb up and out. Embraced
--
joy in who I am, accepted
with what I’m not.
 
She points me to a staircase
for winding up immensity of
her giant tree, past gnarls, lines,
and furrows. I ascend past nests
birthing finch, crow, and sparrow alike.
They open beaks miniscule and long,
blunt and keen. I graze myself
on sharp points, but aloe
leaves bring balm. Songs of joy,
tenderness float round
the Tree of Life—I spiral up.

Carol Park’s homes range from suburbs to wilderness. Six years in Japan altered this California girl. Hiking, gardening, mentoring and reading bring joy. She teaches ESL, writes and involves herself in Christian worship and service. Her MFA comes from Seattle Pacific University. The Haight Ashbury Journal, Black Fox Literary, MiGoZine, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, The Cider Press Review, the Monterey Review, Viral Verse: Poetry of the Pandemic, and New Contexts: 2 and 3 have published her work.
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The Answer

21/5/2023

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By Natasha Bredle

I almost had the answer.
But as I held it in my hand,
it fluttered away. I thought
that might have been it, the fluttering.
Each whisper wing beat displacing
a breath of air. The absence.
The fullness. I didn’t have the gall
to reach out and grasp for it,
for fear it would have turned to mist.
It was enough to almost have it.
Watching it flutter away.
It was enough to almost have it.

Natasha Bredle is an emerging writer based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been featured in publications such as Words and Whispers, Heart of Flesh Lit, and The Madrigal. She has received accolades from the Bennington College Young Writers Awards as well as the Adroit Prizes. In addition to poetry and short fiction, she has a passion for longer works and is currently drafting a young adult novel.
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A Pilgrim's Song

21/5/2023

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By Royal Rhodes

My body, broken
like old bread
that kept me alive,

bears the sound
of this last song
I learned on the road,

behind and before me.
It was food for the way
that each day provided.

And when it is gone,
none will remember.
But what will you do

with my heart?

Royal Rhodes taught religious studies for almost 40 years. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Ekstasis, Ekphrastic Review, The Seventh Quarry, and The Montreal Review, among others. His poetry and art collaborations have been published with The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.

Royal's other work on
Foreshadow:
A Road Through Ohio Spring (Poetry, April 2023)

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Valediction

14/5/2023

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By Charles Hughes

​from a history professor’s remarks
on the occasion of his retirement

I couldn’t draw a clock face at the doctor’s.
Mistakes—small ones, but I got angry, trying
To freeze an old-style clock in my mind’s eye:
Black circle, its twelve numbers and two hands.
This happened several weeks ago—six weeks?
(My wife is nodding, my long-suffering wife)--
An April day. I gazed at a cold sun.
 
Marine biologists who study dolphins
Must think at least as much about the ocean
Where dolphins live. How else to understand
Their diet, travels, language, their diseases?
You might therefore suppose historians
Would give more thought to time, that vaster ocean
Enveloping the history of the world.
 
Historians too often take time for granted--
Marshalling evidence, telling our tales--
And tend not to acknowledge time as such,
Leaving the subject to philosophers
And poets. Wordsworth warned that “ye who pore /
On the dead letter, miss the spirit of things . . . .”
All creatures may be such embodied spirits
As we all are—all waiting—each a sign--
All creatures creatures of the Incarnation,
The angel’s shocking news, God’s tryst with time.

Less purposefully perhaps than dolphins, more
Like clouds blown by the wind, like logs on water,
We move from murky pasts to unknown futures,
Our present moments much too quick for our minds.
We know so little. I know less and less.
I’m saying these things, believing them, but then
Faith isn’t knowledge in the usual sense.
 
Especially now with spring in bloom—the scent
Of lilacs, the pink flowers on redbud trees,
The clouds bright white again—I feel things more
And more. “To her fair works did Nature link /
The human soul . . . .” I fight for words I want,
And it’s getting worse. Is there some mechanism
Buried deep in the mind’s dark recesses,
So that when words, like dying leaves in autumn,
Dry up and drift away, dreams come to life?--
Fraught images make living memories?
 
Sometimes I dream about the London plagues,
Plagues in the London of the 1590s.
The stench and filth, the screaming suffering. Shakespeare
Gone from the city to a country house.
Donne fishing in the Thames. And Julian!--
Long dead by then and not a Londoner--
Still mercifully writing in her cell.
 
“His love suffrith us never to lose tyme”--
Though as I’m learning, time will do its work,
Time being redeemed, being liturgy, a flood tide,
Rising, inflected toward eternity,
Prospero’s towers and palaces in reverse,
Becoming not dissolving—time, our sea,
Drowning us, uncreating us to be.

Charles Hughes has published two books of poems, The Evening Sky (2020) and Cave Art (2014), both from Wiseblood Books. His poems have appeared in the Alabama Literary Review, Amethyst Review, The Christian Century, Literary Matters, the Saint Katherine Review and elsewhere. He worked for over 30 years as a lawyer and lives in the Chicago, Illinois, area with his wife.
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My Wonder

7/5/2023

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By Abigail Leigh

               Pulled
back,
              this skin reaches—rounding too long the past
corner, it sags.                
Pushed
              forward,                                                                                                            
                           these eyes search—hounding too far the future                     hill
                                                                                                                      they go          blind.
My body rotting—rots
yet declines each offer
to die.
 
Why? Between withered lips, weeping
acquires appetite: only bitter
waters of
              what was,
                           what is,
                                         what if?
But despite the acid ache within
my cracked       chest  
its apathy at brewed breath, I find life
                                                                                  still
                                                                    lifting,                                            
one more from this neglected heart
of weeds—in
                            then out
like fog
              after a promise
of a new day: thick with honey
of sweetened streams and green
undying meadows, lush
with root of revival;
 
for the worn—a whisper of warmth       woven in       wind
 
And I wonder at my wonder’s
              ability to survive
even amidst shadow-steeped days,
what once appeared
a hallowed-out-husk
—the tender bud of my body                                 rising
                                                                    again,
 
toward light.

Abigail Leigh is a harpist and poet from Oregon. As a self-proclaimed paradox, both a creative and analytical being, she draws inspiration from life's dichotomies: the belief that light and darkness, growth and decay, and joy and sorrow travel in tandem. Every season has a story to tell, and she writes because she is committed to unveiling truth from learned experiences. Her poetry has been published in Darling Magazine, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Equinox Biannual Journal and Clayjar Review.

Abigail's other work on 
Foreshadow:
A Deeper Calling (Poetry, October 2022)
The Mountain Sermon (Poetry, October 2022)
The Fruitless Tenant (Poetry, October 2022)
This Side of Heaven (Poetry, November 2022)

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I Know Not Where I Go

30/4/2023

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By Michael Stalcup

          after Charles Spurgeon
 
I know not where I go, but know with whom
I brave these bleak and beauty-broken lands
and know that though he leads me through the tomb
yet even there my life is in his hands.
 
Like Christ, I cannot see around the bend
of death except believe the Father’s call
and pour my life out, trusting him to mend
this tattered soul so ravaged by the Fall--
 
for all the paths of God will end in pure
unmingled good to every heir of grace,
and though the world would with its fires lure,
its warmth cannot compare to his embrace.
 
So lead me through the valleys when you must,
my Father — only this: help me to trust.

--
Author's note: Christ knew the resurrection would follow his self-sacrifice and, similarly, we know that we will rise again at the resurrection. Here I am emphasizing Christ's shared humanity with us. Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine... and so, in a certain sense, he had to go to the cross in faith that God would raise him from the dead. This is a great mystery, of course, but by "I cannot see," I am emphasizing that, although Christ knew he would rise from the dead, Jesus, in his humanity, could not "see" around that bend until he lived through it. Jesus was the firstfruits of the bodily resurrection of all humanity, and in his full humanity, I believe it is well within the realm of orthodox belief to speak of Jesus modeling faithfulness for us who also must follow in faith, knowing of our resurrection--and living toward it--without yet "seeing" it with our eyes.

Michael Stalcup is a Thai American missionary living in Bangkok, Thailand. His poems have been published in Commonweal Magazine, Ekstasis Magazine, First Things, Presence, Sojourners Magazine, and elsewhere. He co-teaches Spirit & Scribe, a workshop helping writers to integrate spiritual formation and writing craft. You can find more of his work at michaelstalcup.com.

'I Know Not Where I Go' first appeared in 
Resolute Magazine. It has been republished here with the author's permission.

Michael's other work published on
Foreshadow:
Sometimes Mercy (Poetry, September 2022)
Covenant Prayer (Poetry, September 2022)
Lines Last (Poetry, September 2022)
Cultivating (Poetry, October 2022)
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A Road through Ohio Spring

30/4/2023

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By Royal Rhodes

          after Basho

conifers nearby

make me look up from my book
lost in translation

I wanted to write
to find love with life again
here were better words

now cherry blossoms
that like snow cover Spring boughs
show impermanence

layered breaths of clouds
moved by the arc of a fan
become narratives

I know I am watched
by eyes in a peacock's tail
that blink when I move
​
the ink that darkens
outlines how my emptiness
cannot be contained

all that passes here
as theatrical backdrop
shows and stops my world

our isolation
helps nature imagine us
in our long absence

nature was foreign
until I swallowed its soul
my mistakes teach me

Royal Rhodes taught religious studies for almost 40 years. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Ekstasis, Ekphrastic Review, The Seventh Quarry, and The Montreal Review, among others. His poetry and art collaborations have been published with The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.
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