Monday, 6 October 2025

Deirdre Cartmill: Will You Sing?

And the word flew
from the lips of love,
and this was the first note,

and it rang through the heavens,
calling all the lost notes to it,
all the sharps, flats and naturals
that yearned to connect one to the other,

and so the souls were born
who would sing those notes,
whose very bodies would vibrate
with their own celestial pitch,                                 
 
and each note sang to the next
in harmony and con amore,
soprano, tenor, bass and alto 

until as one they grew
into figures, bars, phrases,
into a chorus,
leaping, lamenting, loving
the interplay of note on note,

and the melody erupted
into a canticle, 
into a song of songs
that filled the heavens,
and still it grew,
and so you were born.

And then the great silence fell,
as each note was damped,
was made to sing another’s note,

and the melody diminished
as the notes became a monotone,
and even the word itself was silenced.

And so the joyless time began
when each note was quieted,              
forgot it could ever sing,
forgot how to break the silence

until one day one came
who started to sing again 

– one lone note

singing out over the deserts and the barren lands,
singing out over the grey-starred darkness,

singing not just with their lips
but with their whole being,
holding their note’s pitch                    
as they breathed in and breathed out,

sounding their note, no matter the cold winds
or the silence answering back,

waiting, waiting,
for another to sing,

until another sang out,
and one note became two,
and slowly the sound spread
across the silenced land,

and a song began to build,
and the rhythm awakened the earth,
and the birds joined in,
and the angels sang out, 
and so you were reborn.

Will you sing?
Will you sing to me
of love lost and love found?
Will you sing
of each simple moment
alive with your rhythm

until my body vibrates in harmony
and a note pours from me,

and as I sing and you sing
and the word re-enters my heart,
my heart vibrates with love,

and love asks me,
Will you sing?


Deirdre Cartmill has published three poetry collections - The Wind Stills to Listen (Arlen House), The Return of the Buffalo (Lagan Press) and Midnight Solo (Lagan Press). Her fourth collection is forthcoming. This poem was inspired by her time as Writer-in-Residence for Belfast Cathedral. www.deirdrecartmill.com

Friday, 3 October 2025

Jan Wiezorek: A Vessel for Sweet

Taffy or candy corn, no,
sweeter still than a beignet
or a balanced blade of a cake knife,

a chainsaw on an ash tree trunk,
stripped from bark, peeling away,
sweet, for basketweaving.

We can remember past
and pretend our way tomorrow,
but miniscule present

weaves strip by strip,
binding permanently past us,
no matter how we try to spin it forward.

The artist, the basket-maker
could spend his month creating
and then burn the vessel of lost culture,

lost tongue, lost sound, lost words
of our sweet poetry.
How will we hold sugar, honey?

And the basket, thick at the top,
meaty, tapering:
toward a muscled thigh

bulging
black ash
and sweetgrass.

_____

* Native American basket-maker Jeremy Frey makes and burns his basket in a video titled Ash (2024).


Jan Wiezorek writes from southwestern Michigan and walks regularly along McCoy Creek Trail. He is author of the poetry chapbook Prayer’s Prairie (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press) and the forthcoming chapbook Forests of Woundedness (Seven Kitchens Press). Wiezorek’s poetry has appeared in The London Magazine, Vita Poetica, and BlazeVOX. Visit janwiezorek.substack.com.

Wednesday, 1 October 2025

Kushal Poddar: Convalescence

My old weight has returned.
Should I welcome it? Should I
regret? Still weak after
the calenture and the fever,
I take the weekend for a drive.
We talk about the skies:
Autumn hides under their broad smile.
When we reach the beach,
everyone else has left the stretch
for some shade. Thirst
is a pleasure; hunger is.
They mark the point of return.


The author of 'Postmarked Quarantine', Kushal Poddar has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of 'Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe. Amazon.

Monday, 29 September 2025

Terri Kirby Erickson: When My Father Died in Hospice

The mortician who came for my father was too big
for his suit. Young and fit, the muscles
in his arms bulged beneath the fabric like beans

inside their pods. The top of his head was glossy
as a waxed apple, his expression grave.
This is a solemn moment, after all, the removal

of the dead. Please be gentle, I told him as he lifted
my father’s still-warm body as if he was lighter
than a sleeping child. I promise you, he said,

we’ll take care of him like family, and I believed
him. Mercifully, I’ve lost the memory of my
dad being sealed like a letter in that body-sized bag,

though I tell myself he didn’t know it and wasn’t
afraid. But my father never liked feeling closed in.
So I kept my hand on the gurney

as we rolled down the long hallway of rooms where
thousands of loved ones have died—watched
as this sombre young man slid Dad’s body

into a hearse as easy as air leaving a lung, then drive
slowly away—until there was nothing left to see
of my father but the future without him.


Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven collections of poetry, including A Sun Inside My Chest (Press 53), winner of the International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has won numerous awards and has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, ONE ART, Rattle, The SUN, and many other publications.

Friday, 26 September 2025

Adam Beardsworth : The Poet in His Youth

We set sail on a barf bucket with vinyl
seats because I'd read a book about
loneliness and wanted to check the address,

and you were not otherwise indisposed,
checked in at the Compass Rose which
in hindsight seems an apt portent for

wayward youth except in every direction
it pointed to bedspreads crocheted with
seaweed, to a convenience store/Pizza

Shack combo, to drunk teens popping
wheelies on ATVs, to the ocean pinching
the island's chubby cheeks. So naturally

I wriggled away like a kid from a fat aunt,
drove us to the end of the island where
we were figures in a Friedrich painting

watching the sunset as finbacks spread
across the water like the path of a skipped
stone, and I thought that must be the way
to the real island. I will follow it home.


Adam Beardsworth is the author of No Place Like (Gaspereau, 2023) and the critical book Confessional Poetry in the Cold War (Palgrave 2022). He is the general editor of Horseshoe Literary Magazine, and teaches literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Grenfell Campus.

Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Christopher Woods: in the old days

we travelled by foot,

horse and wagon,

waiting for a promise

of great machines

to deliver us

into the future.

the machines came,

too many of them,

each with problems

and a price.

the air turned foul

and the sky unnatural.

long ago,

when I was a kid,

we watched the ghost trains

carrying the last of the dinosaurs.

they came to our town

once a year or so.

now the trains pass through

empty towns and cities

once a year or so

carrying relics of humans

no one is left

alive to see.



Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologues have been performed most recently at Equity Library Theatre in NYC, The Invisible Theatre in Tucson and the Pro English Theatre in Kiev, Ukraine. Gallery: christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/f861509283

Monday, 22 September 2025

Brian O'Sullivan: Song in the Aftermath

After "Never Let Me Go", a painting by Jenifer Follman


There is a bard at the end of the world
who is made of sand that swirls and swirls,
out there at the lonely beach at time’s end.
He plays a song that none can ken—
this bard at the end of the world.
I thought of him when your flag unfurled
over my land of tears and peril—
may my wailing not offend
the bard at the end of the world.
And when all the yarn of the fates has been twirled,
may all the spears and arrows we’ve hurled
dissolve in the song of foe and friend,
in the cordial sand that must ascend—
the song at the end of the world.


Brian O'Sullivan teaches literature and rhetoric at St. Mary's College of Maryland. His poems have appeared in Rattle, HOWL New Irish Writing, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online and other journals. 

Friday, 19 September 2025

B.A. Brittingham: Tenacity #2

for Lorraine Oman Hanover


On the receding back porch (where I no
longer go for fear of falling through) sits
a plastic pot from my gardening days. It
has long been allowed to go its own way,
absorbing any and all manner of naughty
Feral seeds blown upon it by the wild winds
of Michigan. But this year, after the passing
of the autumnal equinox, when the hours of
daylight were quickly ebbing away and
the balance of this season’s blooms were on
a flight path to dishevelment, I saw what
could only be described as the last hurrah of
warm weather: a defiant, small white trumpet
shaped flower. A morning glory? Where there
had been only a strange green item growing
all summer (sans any bud) there came a solitary
blossom as though waving a colourless
handkerchief at the departing season.

A smile and sadness rendered all at once.


B.A. Brittingham writes both poetry and fiction. She has published three novels and two chapbooks. Poetry has appeared in Kitchen Sink Magazine, the ocean waves, Words for the Earth, the Crone’s Words, Green Shoe Sanctuary, Halcyon Days, The Emblazoned Soul Literary Review, Dear You-Poems Through the Heart, Culture Cult, About Time Anthology, and The Writers’ Journal.

Thursday, 18 September 2025

Leonore Wilson: Soft Gesture

He drew me to him gingerly
telling me to walk as if I were a doe
leaving only ink drops of hoof marks;
the air in late November crisp, smooth,
a tea-coloured loveliness, and he was kneeling
as if in blessing to the small mound
of duff and matter, the leaves of madrone
and oak filtering the dawn shingles of mist;
there he brushed the deep sea
of dirt away like the oldest mystery,
as if not to awake pain, as if apologetic
or assuaging guilt; and since I knew
that he was out looking for wild mushrooms
I had anticipated a palpable find,
but there was a calm befitting
the most sublimated spirit—an ancient
dome prophetic as those of Eastern cathedrals—
and the creature was resting, its eyes
somewhere lost in its girdled skin,
its shell carved amazingly by wind and age,
as the hawk cry was heard
near the grove’s threshold, so then he immediately
covered up the beast who had forged
its own grave, temporary tomb,
as he had done for me
so often in those early hours
before leaving for work—
scooting the blankets back
over my head, his wife assailed by
her familiar depression, hibernating
each morning from the effulgence of light.


Leonore Wilson is a college English and creative writing instructor from Northern California. She is on the MFA Board at St Mary's College of California. Her work has been featured in such places as Quarterly West, Third Coast, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Taos Poetry Review, and Poets Against the War.

Wednesday, 17 September 2025

Elle Becker: Unfinished

You were on page 72.
I tried to read it for you but
I couldn't get past that dog-eared page.
Plus your clothes were still in the dryer.
I couldn't wash them again for a long time after that no matter
how much I wore them.
There’s a hair on the soap in the shower,
how could your hair be there when you're gone?
Then there’s your toothbrush.
It was brand new, and everyone knows you keep a toothbrush
for three months, so how could a toothbrush
outlive you?
I can't understand
why you didn't fix the towel rack,
the one that we knocked down when
we made love up against the wall and
after we finished
you started your new book but
you only got to page 72.


Elle Becker is a writer and speaker. Published in Prevention magazine, ACPA’s The Chronicle, Five on the Fifth, Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, The Mighty, and other literary publications. She writes essays, humour, poetry, articles, and fiction. She loves all dogs, good books, cheese, and nice humans, in that order.