Don’t Let Anyone Break Your Creative Heart by Deborah M. Prum
My vocation is writing, but my avocation is painting, mostly portraits. I belong to a Facebook group dedicated to showing the work of artists who are trying to create loose watercolor paintings. Members range from people whose pieces could be displayed at a prestigious museum to beginners who are asking for comments and helpful tips on their first attempts. A self-avowed beginner posted several portraits online. Using vivid colors and bold strokes, her paintings portrayed purple bruises, blood flowing, and anguished expressions. Each portrait revealed the artist’s compassion for the difficult lives of her subjects, … Continue reading Don’t Let Anyone Break Your Creative Heart by Deborah M. Prum
New Year by Sharon Perkins Ackerman
Autumn is officially over, leaves finally cleared, trees naked, winter sky a show of planets that begins early with Venus glazing the western sky. It’s time to dwell briefly at the door between the old year and new one, beginning with the month (January) named after the Roman god Janus. In mythology, Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking forward into the future, the other looking back into the past. Often shown holding a key, he is the protector of thresholds, gates, and openings. I spend New Year’s Day flipping back through my calendar, … Continue reading New Year by Sharon Perkins Ackerman
Stealing Japanese Poetry by Robert Harlow
Stealing Japanese poetry requires great skill, almost Ninja-like stealth, especially at night when there are so many poets out viewing the moon and, in Winter, the snow. But it’s best not to do it then because your tracks can easily be traced back to the scene of the crime. In Spring there’s not enough leaves to hide behind. But if you wait until Summer, when trees are fat and thick with green, then it will be hard to see the moon when it first rises. And always be careful in Autumn— the haunting sound of … Continue reading Stealing Japanese Poetry by Robert Harlow
The New House by Dawn Abeita
It rained the day before so burying the cat wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be. She found a shovel in the shed, and wrapped her pet in an old towel and a grocery bag and put it in the hole like that, not wanting to see the life gone from his eyes. She shoveled the dirt back, then walked in the woods that bordered their two acres until she found a sufficient rock to keep animals from digging him up. She had met the truck for the delivery of the beds and … Continue reading The New House by Dawn Abeita
Mehr Licht by Sharon Perkins Ackerman
If I do a search for poems with the word light in the title, I get 12,600 hits. For dark, I get 6,000. This doesn’t scratch the surface of how many times “light” appears buried within stanzas. Can it be that we poets, blackly contemplative as we’re perceived, are at least twice as obsessed with light as darkness? After the leaves fall and days shorten, we begin to make our own light. Red and green and blue twinkle up and down my road, colored stars sprinkle rooftops of barns. We offer this glow to the … Continue reading Mehr Licht by Sharon Perkins Ackerman
Teaching by J.R. Solonche
Teaching, too, is labor. Everyday to be up to the task, everyday the master of a hundred worlds, of casual words, and of causal words, to confront the faces added to or taken from. Do you know when you add a thought there, it shows in the eyes, it shows in the mouth’s subtle creases? Do you know, when you stop a thought, when you turn it aside with a straight line, with the shortest distance from there to here, it shows in the brow’s labor? Exhaustion. Do you know that teaching is exhaustion, everyday … Continue reading Teaching by J.R. Solonche
The Trivet by Nancy Halgren
Through a dimly lit haze, I see myself in my adult son’s psych ward room, gathering his things into a paper bag so we can check out. I place his clothes, extra pair of shoes, personal items into a grocery sack because the beautiful twilight iridescent duffle bag (mine) that they arrived in seven days prior has now gone missing according to the nursing staff. On the flat wooden rail atop the half wall separating the wash sink from his sleeping area is a tiled, rectangular trivet sort of thing. “Nick,” I say, “is this … Continue reading The Trivet by Nancy Halgren
SUCHNESS and DITCH LILIES, 2 poems by Linda Parsons
SUCHNESS Unable to find a bait station, the termite guy says Call me when you’ve trimmed all this. I say It’s supposed to be this way, a cottage garden of its own making and movement, a profusion that sees beyond any preordained order. He sees only thorns, a cloud of white climbers disappearing the stone path. So much suchness is good for the soul. Lord, I’ve tried to tame it, but let me not try to suppose where or what it should be but its own labial pink, its own gallop across borders and walls. … Continue reading SUCHNESS and DITCH LILIES, 2 poems by Linda Parsons
New Cut Hay by Lawrence F. Farrar
Immigration Service Camp, Kenedy, Texas – May 1944 Nearly two years had passed since a Peruvian policeman pointed a pistol at him and declared Tadashi Yamada to be “under arrest.” The employee of a Japanese food store in Lima, Tadashi, along with hundreds of other Japanese and Japanese-Peruvians, soon found himself shipped off to internment in Camp Kenedy, Texas. Seizing these people through a deal with Peruvian authorities, the United States government hoped to use them as bargaining chips in exchange for Americans held by the Japanese. But that did not happen. Twenty-four and a … Continue reading New Cut Hay by Lawrence F. Farrar
A Bragging Humility by Fred Wilbur
“It is true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” —George Orwell “Why I Write” (1947) Several months ago (23 September 2024) Miles Fowler wrote a Street Talk blog titled “The Thinly Disguised Autobiography” which provoked me to reflect on this “courageous or foolhardy” activity. Naturally, many writers entertain the notion of writing about themselves; personal experience being a writer’s primary resource. Autobiography differs from biography in that the author is still alive! I say this flippantly as biography can be of a person alive … Continue reading A Bragging Humility by Fred Wilbur