by Sanket Mhatre

Words are seeds

we sow for tomorrow

Where an axe can melt into the navel of axis

emerge as a flower on the other side

by Jonathan McGregor

The little foxes stalk the garden’s edge,
grinning with green needle teeth.
One is eyeless; one is hairless;
two are tied together by the tails.

by Jonathan McGregor

What’s the caloric density of grass?
I never thought to ask
until I gnawed it to its roots.
I had cattle by the thousands –

by Alan Altany

God loves atheists,
His unknowing images,
loving them to death
for rejecting ideas
of God so convoluted,

by Mildred Kiconco Barya

I’m sitting with a laptop at the dining table in my living room.
The backyard door is open, ruffled leaves sway in the breeze.
A hummingbird flies in, pecks my cheek with zest, and buzzes out.
I am astonished and relieved it’s not smacked my eye instead.

by Daniel Thomas

Once in awhile, I see a white-
crested mountain and think of snow.
But distant snow is abstract and aloof.
It doesn’t frost your hair, smudge
your glasses, crunch beneath your feet

by Sharon Scholl

A long night with an upset stomach
and you become acquainted with creatures
who carry their own lanterns,
those whose eyes are luminous,

by Natalie M. Schubert

for Dr. Meloche

As boys, we would go out to the shore
of Lake Ontario and poke
at dead things with sticks,
watch maggots procreate from cardboard.

by Stephen Kampa

That saints love murderers and perverts shocks
Those sensible adherents to decorum
Who swear by choir and quorum
And keep their ad hoc courts well-stocked with rocks.

by Stephen Kampa

a theologian on God

Immediately, I think of mysteries.
Hard sayings. Prayers that pittered in the void.
Translation flubs. Lost phrases. Paranoid
Yarn-links from headlines to old prophecies.

by Stephen Kampa

These Christians shell me with apologetics,
Their moral mortars whistling through their airs
With disappointment’s low diminuendo,

In the curtain-shrouded womb-room
Of a séance, fingers, evolving, separate from hands,
Heads from necks; even breaths levitate
Though the peripheral
Vision goes last. Everything’s non-gruesome.

by Alina Gharabegian

 My West, when I inhabited the East,
Shuddered in fear at the muazzin’s call—
A Christian child, happy but frightened,
Living under the turquoise domes
Of Osman’s crescent-and-star. 

by Alea Peister

Beneath a jacaranda and dusk’s powder-pink skyI sit on a curb, watching a deserted streetflooded with purple blooms. A bee wanders by

St. Andrew’s Abbey, Valyermo, CA

by Alea Peister

On the refectory’s cinderblock wall light gatheredover Mary’s eyes. Leaf-shaped shadows rustledon the bricks beneath her feet. Mother of God

by Hilary Sallick

After the negotiations
the emails and phone calls the effort
to reassure or defy after
the rolled eyes the lack of compassion

by Hilary Sallick

Into this light I comenearer not yet
(what was I dreaming)

water from the tap the world
through the pane

by Kath Higgens

In winter light, gum-booted,

we gather, scan trees and sky.

We walk and talk,

surmise where they might be,

note perfect habitat,

tufty tussock-grass, dead trees.

by Michael Sandler

My mother wasn’t Italian, and her marinara
not from the old country, but noticing
how I slurped spaghetti, she made a sauce
from nowhere but a sense
of what a child liked, asking me