Conversation is communion.
Pay attention: G-d is speaking.
Pay attention: someone’s praying.
Same with poems.
Everything ends with amen.
—
Laura M Kaminski grew up in Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. Her most recent collection, The Heretic’s Hymnal: 99 New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Babylon Books / Balkan Press in 2018. More about her poetry is available at The Ark of Identity.
I end up at the same place
where I had lost myself.
I call out to me, go looking to find
those bones I had set on fire,
traces of self I had left behind
into the ether as rising smoke.
How do you find old smoke?
How do you know where it travelled?
The kite skips into the sky.
—
Chumki Sharma is a poet from Calcutta, India. She is a 2017 semifinalist of the Vignette Collection Award from the Vine Leaves Press, Melbourne and her collection of poems Shape of Emptiness has been published by them in September 2017.
the cello suites
are unsurpassed
yet something
in the way this lands
familiar yet different
every note
a leaf eased early
from a tree
—
Jean Morris lives in London, writes, edits, translates, takes photos and is a guest contributor to the Via Negativa poetry blog. Another musically inspired poem of hers was recently published in Writers’ Cafe Magazine.
—
Kris Lindbeck has been writing poems on Twitter, mostly haiku and tanka, for about eight years. A few are published in Bright Stars, An Organic Tanka Anthology, Bones, Prune Juice, and Skylark Tanka. You can see more @krislindbeck on Twitter and Haiku etc.
birds feed off of me:
break my eyes
& swallow the tide
—
Jamie O’Connell currently lives in the Bay Area, where she received her MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts. Her work has been featured in Menacing Hedge, Troop Zine, Newfound, and Forth Magazine, and exhibited in College Avenue Galleries in Oakland. She spends most of her time with her majestic zebra-striped dog, Daisy.
Missing birds –
echoes in the empty trees.
—
Steve Klepetar is relocating from Saint Cloud, Minnesota to the Berkshires in Massachusetts. His work has appeared widely and has received a number of nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, including two in 2017. The most recent of his eleven collections include A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press); Family Reunion (Big Table); and How Glass Shatters (One Sentence Poem Chapbooks).
after Iskandar Haggarty’s ‘Erasures’ in Moonchild Magazine
No angel-wings for me.
Instead, a barred owl’s.
I long to be able to move
through day and night
in silence.
—
Laura M Kaminski grew up in Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. Her most recent collection, The Heretic’s Hymnal: 99 New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Babylon Books / Balkan Press in 2018. More about her poetry is available at The Ark of Identity.
Consider pigeons
with their silly feet
and stoplight eyes
their feathers’ rainbow shine
like oil on a puddle . . .
Then suddenly
one flies
wheels and dips on silver wings
fine as any falcon
So, my poetry
—
Kris Lindbeck has been writing poems on Twitter, mostly haiku and tanka, for about eight years. A few are published in Bright Stars, An Organic Tanka Anthology, Bones, Prune Juice, and Skylark Tanka. You can see more @krislindbeck on Twitter and Haiku etc.
—
Debbie Strange is a Canadian short form poet, haiga artist and photographer whose creative passions bring her closer to the world and to herself. She is the author of Warp and Weft: Tanka Threads (Keibooks 2015) and the haiku collection, A Year Unfolding (Folded Word 2017). Please visit her archive of published work at Warp and Weft ~~ Images and Words.
a bridge
spanning a frozen river
I sign the DNR
—
Robert Witmer is an American who has resided in Tokyo, Japan, for nearly 40 years. A semi-retired professor and petanque aficionado, he looks forward to trekking again in the Himalaya mountains, where he once recited Whitman to the lovely woman who became his wife. His first book of poetry is titled Finding a Way.
