Feeling Faith

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.

Slipping

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.

Rangy

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By Colette Tennant

Students get rangy
before a three-day weekend,
and someone just burned
popcorn in the lounge next door,
and hawks have been
boiling over our campus,
and I don’t like that word
for circling hawks.

Circumference of hawks would be better –
Emily Dickinson would have liked that.
I’ve seen hawks fly so high,
I think they’re nesting
near the headwaters of heaven.


Colette Tennant has two poetry collections: Commotion of Wings (2010) and Eden and After (2015), as well as the commentary Religion in the Handmaid’s Tale: a brief guide (2019). Her poem “Rehearsals” was awarded third by Billy Collins in the 2019 Fish Publishing International Writing Contest. Most recently, her poem was accepted by Eavan Boland for Poetry Ireland Review’s Issue 129. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and others.

Fruit


By Joseph Johnson


Maybe it was Milton or Caedmon who
first claimed the Tree of Knowledge held apples,
which says more about English poets than
of the preference of divine arborists.
They proposed that any great fall must be

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On Any Sunday


By Rich Hadley


I am my childhood pastor
preaching in the old time way
anointing my stubborn and defiant congregation
on their unwashed, calloused hands and eager foreheads

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“Broken White Crackers” and More


By Kimberly Vargas


Broken white crackers

Lay my sweater on a wooden pew
upholstery circa-1950
if the AC gets too cold, I’ll button the wool

Across the aisle, my boyfriend pulls his mother’s whispers
into his ears: “Do you really think it’s a good idea to date a girl
from a broken home?”

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Justified

by Gale Acuff

In Sunday School today Miss Hooker said
that everybody must die, sooner or
later, which scared me because I’m only
ten years old to her twenty-five and I
love her and want to marry her one day
and that scares me, too, love I mean, almost
as much as death, I mean almost as much
as death scares me. On the other hand, does
love scare death, too? I might pray about that
tonight, before I go to sleep, after
I say the Lord’s Prayer and the others
for my dog and my folks and for the test
I have in English tomorrow, that I
might pass it. I don’t want to die but if

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On Easter Sunday

by Maggie Babb

we bomb
them Monday
after Monday
fledglings stagger
bodies flounder
laser guided
hawks dive
we bomb them Friday
into Friday tiny
red bursting maple
buds obscure bobbing
tiny rafts rise
and fall drowning
sanctified we bomb
them Wednesday to
Wednesday
precision guided
honeybees cover
golden dandelions
fleeing bloodshed
with their thrumming
easy prey small
circular error probable
satellite guided smart
seeds breach erupt
swell corpses pile
we bomb
them Thursday
intoThursday sensitive
urban zones open mouthed
exclusive robins seek
munition worms
we bomb them
skunk cabbage unfurls
inverse cube law
reveals tender tendrils
purple green
coils
of despair

Maggie Babb is a working poet and prose writer with an interest in Investigative and Documentary Poetics. She is a member of the Hollowdeck Writers Guild in Maryland, USA. She lives with her African Grey parrot and German Shepherd.

Hydrology. Hydrophilia.

by Logan Garner

Of the moisture in the earth,
and the dark, musty soil,
ripe and rich with the film and girth
of one million earthworms:

Of the peat and muck, wet
and dripping brown water by the ounce
from a single squeezed handful:

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Mixed Praise

by James Nicola

If God makes deluges and droughts,
I don’t think I can fathom God.
Is He unbalanced, is He unwell,
cursing with plenty, blessing with less
than enough? How can I, starving, bless
the feast? Alas, I’m stolider than
that, or smarter, or stupider,
to pretend that Nothing is a feast.
      And in your absence I cannot pretend.

If God’s The One Who makes you absent,
what the h— is He, that I
should glorify? Pray? I would, sure,
except I don’t dare make a sound
for fear of cursing, for which I’d
be damned, and apart from you forever.
But then you return, and I’m insane
with joy. And no hunger, drought,
      or deluge can make me not praise God.

James B. Nicola’s full-length collections include Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), Wind in the Cave (2017), Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists (2018), and Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond (2019). His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award.