by Chelsea Elizabeth Samson

When I was a little girl,
My mother told me that pain was a woman’s gift.
I remembered then, she was baking bread.

Her hands fell soft, melodic
and as the flour wove through her fingers
She would hum little sounds that painted my world.

I could never figure her recipe,
but she said that I would know when I was older.
And I have tried and tried since then.

I would never forget the taste of it,
a brown smell and a salty comfort in my mouth
that lingered as I ran outside to play.

Years passed and the days have grown long in me
and many times, I have made her bread,
if only to feel that brown comfort again.

But life always colored mine with its flavors,
at times too light, and thrice too sweet to taste.
Heavy hands made it bitter, and biting to the tongue.

I felt like I would never know her secret,
But the need to feel that comfort, and curiosity,
would not leave my soul.

And so once more I made my mother’s bread,
But the salt of my tears and pain, of age
added to water, sugar, flour, yeast and eggs

There it was – it finally tasted like my mother’s.

Dr. Chelsea Elizabeth Samson works in the field of health management and technology in the Philippines and advocates for human connections in the healthcare system. Alongside her primary functions, she pursues civic advocacies as a brand ambassador of Kandama indigenous weaves and as a Global Shaper under the World Economic Forum. She has been writing poetry since the age of 12 and has continued a love affair with arts through her painting and poetry.

by Sarah Law

Welcome

God comes to me in daily irritants:
a tepid splash of dirty laundry water,
a cobweb resolute against my cloth,
a snag of fishbone in the meagre soup,
my reticence interpreted as sloth;
the cough and scrape of sisters in the choir,
a finger-smudge on cards I have designed,
a blanket gone. No room beside the fire.
A streak of pain. A faith I cannot find:
I welcome everything as bread and wine.

Dust

Since old and useless things are stowed
up in the convent loft, I wondered

whether they were nearer heaven
than our bustling nuns below –

perhaps the chill preserves them;
humility is fostered in the dark.

I crept up in my clumsy sandals,
touched rough wood, cracked bowls,

and honoured their abandonment –
my hands made holy with dust.

Sarah Law lives in London and is a tutor for the Open University and elsewhere. She is interested in saints, sinners and the twists and turns of language. If pushed, she would describe herself as a freelance Anglo-mystic. She edits the online journal Amethyst Review.

by Andy Conner

The Sikhs’ magnificent Harmandir, or Golden Temple, is the centrepiece of the temple complex in the holy city of Amritsar.

Auntie
Respected, rich
Humbles herself

Auntie
Knowing what pride precedes
Hitches her sari above her feet

Auntie
A forward thinking lady
Descends the stairs backwards

Slowly

Clears her mind
Cleans God’s house
For the pious
For the tourists
For the peasants who spend their lives
Swallowing dust

Not born to be a cleaner
She sweeps
Bare-handed
Right to left
Right to left
Gathering tiny piles
Of unholy dust

Each movement
Physically
A speck of dirt

Each movement
Spiritually
A broadstroke golden universe
Of love and hope

Sweeping
Unkind thoughts
Sweeping
Everyday sins

Sweeping
The one thing
No rug is big enough to cover

Outside
Sweet water reflects
Ten heavenly smiles
Nanak to Gobind

Inside
The eleventh
Pauses its reading
And bookmarks
The purity
Flowing in and out
Of four open doors

Andy Conner is a Birmingham, UK-based poet, activist and educator, with a long track record of performing his work nationally and internationally. His work has also featured in numerous publications. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
His credits include BBC Radio 4, Jaipur Literature Festival and India International Centre. He has also conducted workshops for The British Council.

by D. Walsh Gilbert

As soon as I dropped
my flip-flop into Charlestown’s

Atlantic, knee-deep in outgoing
tide, it was gone, and I

caught myself before chasing it,
knowing all about the undertow

and the importance of the breachway.
There I stood with the other

looped onto my pinkie finger.
I closed my fist.

Ask me if I can speak
of balance, loss, and distance.

I’ve hobbled forty years
in a single sandal.

Forty—the root for quarantine,
the weeks for full-term pregnancy,

the length of fasting in the wilderness,
of temptation by devils, floods

and wandering in deserts.
Forty years before I pulled the saved one off,

and, finally waltzing barefoot, tossed
it to the undertow and currents.

D. Walsh Gilbert is a thirty-year breast cancer survivor. She serves on the board of the non-profit, Riverwood Poetry Series, focusing poetry against hatred, and as co-editor of the Connecticut River Review. She lives in a rural setting in Connecticut with her husband and two old dogs.

by Matthew Miller

I’m sipping tea this afternoon. Some sons nap.
Another asks, Daddy, spell special for me.

I have no letters to spell special for me.
But words for him: apprentices and spaces.

Certainty spawns danger in novel spaces.
New wine demands new wineskins, not more patches.

I want to walk in soft grass, not burnt patches,
so I overwater brown until it’s smooth

and squashy. I sink in like a pen that’s smooth,
like my hand sliding across unwrinkled thighs.

I wish I was young again, unwrinkled eyes
on watermelon slices, unsure what God says.

You can’t want wrongly with me, God says.
In wells, I find thirst; sipping while some sons nap.

Matthew Miller teaches social studies, swings tennis rackets, and writes poetry – hoping to create home. He lives beside a dilapidating orchard in Indiana, and tries to shape the dead trees into playhouses for his four boys. He secretly the groundhogs, rabbits, and cardinals that share the orchard’s fruits.

by Ashley Marek

Smoky incense fills my nostrils as the
priest saunters down the aisle passing our
pew we sit in Sunday after Sunday.
We go through the readings and sing the hymns
as a middle-aged woman stares at my
bare legs and I cannot remember what
comes after the Nicene Creed. He will come
again in glory to judge the living
and the dead. I am transformed into Eve,
a shameful woman. I look down at my
exposed bare legs, my wisdom is unleashed.
My pops squeezes my hand while reciting
verbatim the old prayer his dad taught him.
All I want is to hide behind him now,
like I did as a kid, my guardian angel.

Ashley Marek is a winner of the 2020 Manitou Fellowship sponsored by the Literary Arts Institute of the College of Saint Benedict. She is currently working on an essay collection about her experience with self-induced anxiety. She is obsessed with cats and has a large, orange tabby nicknamed Pat the Fat Cat.

by Martha Kahane

Down here on earth we
have grocery stores and love
affairs, garden plots and snowstorms,
toilets and telephones. Conversations
there don’t need words at all and colors
come alive, way beyond azur, crimson
and celadon.
And the love.
Even the maddest, deepest love down here is
cardboard by comparison.

Martha Kahane is a psychologist and an avid choral singer. She misses choral singing terribly since singing in groups has become lethal. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband of forty years.

by Juleigh Howard-Hobson

Praise winter skies for winter snows,
For clouds and cold,
For frost and freeze,
For summer’s close,
For autumn’s end,
For spring to come
Revowed.
Praise winter skies for winter snows,
For clouds and storms
For hail that falls
For ground that holds
The ice that will
Melt into spring’s
Green rows.
Praise winter skies for winter snows,
For clouds and cold,
For frost and freeze,
For summers close.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Noir Nation, L’Éphémère, Able Muse, The Lyric, Weaving The Terrain (Dos Gatos), Poem Revised (Marion Street), Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (Great Weather for Media), Lift Every Voice (Kissing Dynamite), and other venues. A Million Writers Award “Notable Story” writer, nominations include “Best of the Net”, The Pushcart Prize and The Rhysling Award. She lives off grid in the Pacific Northwest next to a huge woods filled with shadows and ghosts.

by Laura Ohlmann

Day of Atonement

We were sisters once, bound together
by your hands crafting plaits of braid in my hair,
wrapping them into buns.

We chased a rainbow down Stirling Road
towards University, where the intersections crossed
like a railway sign. This is it, she said. We pulled
into the Disalvo’s parking lot as the rainbow meditated
above us, an ethereal presence where we hoped Mom would
hop out, like gold before us.

It’s Yom Kippur now, but we still haven’t spoken.
How long will you cast me out?
I’ve tossed crumbs of bread down a river for you,
but they stay afloat, puffs of sourdough
disintegrate in the water, polluting the clear surface.

Afikomen

My father splits the baked square of matzo
and places it in the paper towel Mom has prepared
for him. They wrap it carefully, her cradling it like a demigod
in her spread palms, Dad curling the edges around the makeshift
bag. I cover my eyes and it’s a festival now, our stomachs are bloated,
full of charoset and matzo ball soup, and Dad whispers to my sisters
about the hiding location. Mom puts our dog into the master bedroom
or she’ll forage for it too. It’s Pesach and we’re honoring
our liberation from Egypt, my family celebrating
the search of afikomen, the money my father will
ceremoniously hand me, the dark chocolate macaroons
that Mom bought and the slipped shards of matzo that
I’ll secretly slide to Care under the bedroom door.

Laura Ohlmann is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida. She enjoys sleeping in her converted Honda Element and biking up mountains with her partner and dog.

by Adam Que

The stomach virus was gone and I felt much better,
but it was like I was on rollerblades on a raft the way my legs wobbled
down the street named after a state or the last name of some person
that made a difference in some way but we will never know about—
needless to say I wasn’t fully recovered.
He brought up the conversation we had yesterday—
pulling me aside like he didn’t know of me but about me.
It’s God we’re talking about and I tell him:
“Before, when I had more youthful arrogance and smart enough
to not believe in fairy tales,
when I thought prayer was another way of forcing me to eat my vegetables
and I thought belief was too rigid of a word and sometimes still do,
I felt God couldn’t be near me.
Like I was supposed to deconstruct and incinerate
everything I was and am to know God,
but I was wrong—too wrong—
I didn’t know what I know now…”
“Which is?” he asked.
“That I don’t have to bash away my individuality to understand
God is never the receiver but always the caller,
you just have to listen very carefully.”

Adam Que is a writer from New Jersey. He has competed as an amateur mixed martial artist. After he stopped competing and working to become a professional fighter/athlete, Adam started to share his writing. Besides writing, he is pretty handy with a camera and enjoys long walks on trails.

by Clare M Bercot Zwerling

Some scurry there directly
I’m more an edge skirter
mincing little footsteps
too cautious to publicly dip in that big toe
watchful watchful
near those slippery slopes

C’mon they urge
c’mon
their honey coated beckonings
send ripples
through the soul

Yet its easy then
to be holier than you
fun to say
sorry not me
fun to hold my head
up high and play at
better than

But inside the life
long battle lives on
oh     just for now
to slip a little
a smidge

To look them eye to eye
those lovely
allurements
and slip
just a little

Taradiddle or true
so cute those small half-lies
half-truths along the way
of every honest effort
to avoid the garden path

The climb back is oh
so dreary and
grows harder each
little slip
and quicker to smite
the transgressor

       G-d is chuckling at me-

Clare M Bercot Zwerling is a newish poet with five poems published to date in glassworks, Halcyon Days, Night Waves Anthology 2019, Red Sky Anthology 2020 and Coffin Bell Journal. Her forthcoming poetry publications include The Oakland Review, Horror Before it Was Cool, Poetry South and Gyroscope Review. A recent retiree and transplant from Deep South Texas, she resides in Northern California and is a member of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast.