Cover image: “Forgiven But Not Forgotten” by Vian Borchert
Below, we have featured a small selection of work from Issue VI. The full issue is available for online viewing with the link above.
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If you like what you see in the issue, you may also want to check out our ongoing Maya’s Micros feature. As the name suggests, it will be curated by contributing editor Maya Highland and will exclusively feature micro-poetry and micro-fiction pieces.
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“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?”
― Marilynne Robinson, in Housekeeping
Featured Selections
Rachael Allen
Nicole Grace
Rise Again
Familiar as your own breath spilling
into another moment the wet glow
flattens as it touches the horizon and
I wonder if it cannot recognize itself now, misshapen
in the twilight water, if it feels sorry, or confused
as it shrinks back into a ball, then a dot
and I almost expect to hear the shift, like the
ding of a typewriter – period, return
splaying now into a sighing pond
the form itself no more than a
reflection of what once was
until that too fades and all you can see is a
strip of molten ochre lining a low cloud
can you ever know in those last moments
in the crush and howl of transformation
how long this one will last
whether you will survive it
whether you are the watcher or the watched?
can you ever be certain of your
wholeness, of your utter blazing majesty
until you pass the horizon and realize it was never
there, that you only appeared to rise and fall
and rise again? and how could you ever describe the
perfection and heartbreaking
joy
of witnessing – and yet also being the author of –
all the sunsets and sunrises that have ever and will
ever paint all of life in your glorious
glorious colors?
Ashleigh Alexandria
James Redfern
breathing
enjoy the contemplation of all that is not ego.
focus on the self outside the body.
imagine yourself as all points outside the body.
breathe into all those points external.
in the fabric of your own private mind,
all that you perceive, all that you think,
these two aspects make up your entire universe.
there is nothing so vulgar as proof of anything
beyond what these restrictions permit.
enjoy the view.
enjoy the view as you create and destroy a universe
with every new thought,
every neural pathway of rediscovery.
enjoy the contemplation of all that is not ego.
breathe into the other, the outer,
breathe into the oneness outside the mind.
enjoy the view.
stop and smell the incense
spilling from the radish flowers.
take a load off.
put your feet up.
take a deep breath.
this is it.
focus on the contemplation of the breath.
this is all there is.
focus on breathing.
this is all there is.
all there ever was or will be.
appreciate it all.
accept it all.
respect it all.
cherish it all.
focus on breathing.
this is all there is.
John J. Zywar
Gina Ferrara
Mishigami
Those days she couldn’t remember
the collected collision of her name
riddled with vowels and assonance,
not to speak it or to sign it
with a momentous flare,
and across the expanse of that great lake
at times ocean blue, striated
from foreboding to minty, by happenstance,
whoever held the twine,
unwound a skein, then released it,
letting the kite with a red tail crepe cascade
fly like a warning over her body
near the rocks where the water
with its ability to brace
had an astringency
that always shocked the skin.