Issue 3

January 2010

January 2010

Cover Photo © 2004 Nautilus Cutaway Logarithmic Spiral by Chris 73 under the creative commons cc-by-sa 2.5 license.

We have walked with the storytellers, peered through their eyes, and felt their pain, knowing that what unites us all is the touch of humanity.

We learn that from journeys past, we may venture forth with a greater understanding of our frailties and our strengths.

At times, our steps may stagnate or lead us aside, but eventually, that next step moves us in the new direction of a rediscovery of self, sometimes redefined, and sometimes reaffirmed.

"The worst part was the hunger."

My cousin Helen says this

about her time at Auschwitz.

It's all she'll say.

Tina Hacker

... one cannot cure what is absent,

one cannot address the absence of love.

Ed Bennett

small deaths fill my days

and give shape to my hours,

dead tongues lick my ears

and I am counting the swans ...

Dennis Greene

Bowing

to this lifetime's wounded weight,

we have waited long enough

for sorrow's flowering embrace

Maril Crabtree

... for as they passed me by, their arms entwined,

though knees were weak and steps were never sure,

to spite the frailty the years assigned ...

Mariejoy A. San Buenaventura

The morning your hands turned

blue I thought you were angry.

Why else dunk them in the dishwater,

flexing your fingers until the soap

turned violent?

Christine Klocek-Lim

I believe in her arms, the arms she shows me

again and again, crisscrossed with razor cuts--

why I say, why and she says because when the blood

comes out the pain comes out ...

Sharon L. Charde

I lifted

a handful, smelled green

earth and thought how hard

seed-coats crack in rain,

how root-hairs uncurl, blind

and sure of finding.

Catherine A. Rogers

And every time I need to know

a plant or how to raise one, I feel

the gap my father stepped from ...

Murray Alfredson

... years ago he took my handoff,

bucked off guard, found the free field,

and heaved like a bison into the end zone.

Donal Mahoney

We can’t see it in ourselves—

the growth spiraling

outward.

Alarie Tennille

I’m wounded

wound tight around my pain.

Jeanie McLeod

At eighty-five,

she saw herself as eighteen

baffled at what time had

taken from her ...

Toni L. Wilkes

An armadillo equips itself

     with ossified plates, the hardening

of its bones over eons.

Gregory W. Randall