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To the One Who Tames

By Sharon Dolin Poetry

Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé.                 —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Tame me—you whom I can never see— ——-each word I utter, each prayer I kneel for. Here I am, pacing—now wrest from me ——-a new song to find its way to you. If you…

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My Life as an Open-Air Temple

By Sharon Dolin Poetry

From cramped to roofless ——-I became—I don’t know how— ————–an open-air temple with no pillars. My walls of stone, lichen-covered, where many feet came to pray. ——-The willows shook around me ————–as mice and small insects knelt in moonlight, I could feel the breath of many spirits ——-winging through my chamber: ————–rabbis dropping pocket lint—…

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Create in Me a Clean Heart O God

By Leslie Williams Poetry

The thing I did for sorrow was silence. The thing I did for sorrow, the thing I did, the silence. I thought when replacing the pillow under the sleeping girl’s head it’s been a while since kindness. When my mother was sick I didn’t go I rolled over in my own bed I thought she…

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Crewelwork

By Leslie Williams Poetry

With more persistent stitchery I might breach the red intelligence of berries taking French-knot shapes among embroidered leaves, or bring a spirit hovering in the satin-stitch of a hummingbird’s small throat; while outlining a dragonfly I may divine its mythic origin in dragon—fiery, winged, then tricked into an insect’s form, but keeping flashes of the…

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Exodus

By Dante Di Stefano Poetry

It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.                                         —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…

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Fat Tuesday

By Dante Di Stefano Poetry

Out of exceeding gloom and out of God, I break a prayer from a growl and sing a hymn more ordinary than tap water. I pray that I might be more than my skin, this dance of atoms, this ritual of ash, this tribe of twilight and rattled angels, this pattern of epiphanies rejected. I…

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Mary, Mother

By Dana Littlepage Smith Poetry

It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…

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Domestic

By Dana Littlepage Smith Poetry

The knife was held like night— quiet in her husband’s hand. In silence, the umbilicus was snipped. The moon went on shining. A mare leapt astride a stallion. Jerusalem was drowning. A match dropped. Hay fired. Kings slunk away. The world hung heavy on her breast. —Love’s foundling. A curtain twitched: unholy neighbors. A nosey…

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