Welcome

Waking

I dreamed you were a book

hidden in a book

and then I woke up.

I dreamed the road to you

went on forever

and the road to me was short.

I woke up. No roads.

I dreamed I wanted you so badly

I waited my turn in court

to be tried and found guilty,

condemned and executed

because it was you doing it.

I woke up, still unsentenced.

I dreamed I was in hell forever

singing because you lived

but I woke up and couldn't get back to hell.

This terrible habit of the mind

is ruining my life.

The Pear Tree

This tree then, blooming silently in the corner of the yard, is what all other things are like-- volcanos of flowers, the earth's exhaled breath, a ghost rising white and ghastly from a grave. This tree, taller than the garage and with white blossoms abundant on every upward branch, is what we've been attempting all our lives with our marriages and sunrises and grief higher than the moon. This white tree in the sideways light is where we've been waiting all through our long searches, when we're finally done with houses, where we are being born before our very eyes. May the offering be found worthy: we cast all our seeing forever up into the foaming branches.

The Mineral Specimen

Reading Otto’s The Idea of the Holy,

His take on Job’s defeat by Yahweh--

Not beaten down but overwhelmed, 

Subsumed into creation 

By Yahweh’s description of it, 

Defeat freeing him from anger and fear, 

From the desire to be right 

And the desire to be safe--

Envy narrows my throat 

And I put the book down.

I would take my terror

If that would reach you,

Would take terror 

As I would take

A narrow road 

In mountains at night, 

The fall in darkness

Near at hand,

The loss of everything

Road’s natural partner.

Would gladly take awe, 

As a vast space in nature

Reproduces itself in the witness,

Making him hollow and receptive. 

But terror only leads me 

To a narrow grave

And awe is a small cup  

Filled by CGI.

I look for you and whatever I see

That could be signs you exist

Are signs that you don't

And there’s no peace for me,

And restlessness has no goal.

Once in the Museum

Of Natural History

I saw an exhibit--

A big blue crystal 

And a big red one

Grown together, 

Pedestaled and pin-lit 

In the dark gallery, 

The unlikely fineness 

Of the facets and angles, 

The way light 

Entered stone and lingered,

The happenstance of two bright colors, 

Formed far down 

In the ignorant earth, 

Through underground ages,

Intended for no 

Possible witness  

In the wayless rock.

It shone as they say  [no stanza break]

Lamps once did,

Shone through solid 

Geologic layers, 

Through years in their billions-- 

A double handful 

Of thoughtless matter

Fitting against all the odds 

You could ever long for

Into the space 

Where beauty 

Happened to be waiting.

Walking Back to the Parking Lot at Mount Angel Monastery

The stations of the cross, high relief polychrome along the path up the hill, reverse. We see Christ, the anointed, the despised, the sacrifice to his own moebius nature, taken out of a tomb and put dead onto a cross. We see him come to life there, his hands and feet yielding heavy iron nails and agony that evaporates, see him fall three times and each time rise up stronger, see the woman put a face to his face and the cloth coming away clean, see the heavy-beamed cross lifted off of him! We reach the car. As we drive away, he's moving out from us in all directions, divesting himself of anything we could know, unreachable white light of our longing, that like dark matter we can’t demonstrate, only feel.

Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist, formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. 

Rite of Passage

Bare river oak branches, gnarled at the joints, reach 

over and under each other, cover a small clearing 

waterside. Water rushes by, grey-brown and high, 

under and over bank roots, up to our feet, current 

strong from last night’s thunderstorm. We search 

for sticks to help ferry loss and dreams downriver. 

I run fingertips along the crust of a cold oak trunk, 

pull a six-inch stick laden with oakmoss from black-

berry brambles, and feel the shock of being here: 

the seeming impossibility of trees, lichen, stones, 

of us; the weird elegance and clumsiness of arms, 

legs, swinging hinge of joints, the ancient strange-

ness of lined knuckles. Perched mid-river, on a log 

anchored to branches reaching up from the brown 

beneath, a cormorant, wings folded, takes it all in

as we toss our sticks onto the water. They spin in-

side several bankside eddies before breaking free. 

Wood and lichen move swiftly, carrying our dead, 

our hopes and needs, north, towards oblivion, to-

wards the sea.

Christien Gholson is the author of several poetry books, including The Next World and Absence: Presence, along with a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. He works as a mental health therapist and somatic experiencing practitioner in Oregon. 

What is the Earth Dreaming Through Me

Since I was a child I knew,
without knowing,
that a dream was living in me;
only it’s not a dream
but a soul —
a soul that dreams.

I’m just a tool,
already thirty years old,
having done nothing but follow
the secret
and sacred song
that emerges
from the deepest part
of my soul
and bones.

I smoke ’cause I’m scared —
not of Death, but of the fire
full of life
that burns beneath my heart.

Anxiety is the price
of such peace.
A paradox,
right?

I pray to hear
what cannot be heard,
I pray not to drown
in my own dream.

And what is this dream about?

I dream of a new world
that has always been here.
A world to live in harmony
with all that surrounds.

A world where respect and consent
are the basis of freedom —
and self-responsibility
as well.

A universe where each one
can be one
and all
at the same time.

A universe living inside
each one of us.

I dream a life with meaning.

I dream my life is my dream.
I dream my dream is my life.
I dream and that keeps me alive.
I dream and that’s my secret strength
and my sacred fight.

I dream
and that
is all.

Clément D. Mondego is a European writer whose work explores spirituality, identity, and the search for meaning in contemporary life. Writing in English as a second language, he is drawn to themes of inner transformation, nature, and the tension between reason and lived experience. 

The Witness

The last fragment of skin 

is peeling away from within,

from where I never thought

I could shed – 

a last piece of self

that kept the old me together – 

the skin over my heart. 

It burns.

Behind remained 

a blurb of raw, unformed meat,

emerging wounded

into winter freeze. 

I shall allow myself to cry

beholding what I held whole

with stitches I crafted

from whatever material

I found around – 

a stick, a leaf, moss, patches of dirt – 

understanding that all she wanted,

the Heart, 

was to be witnessed

for what she is

and what she went through for me

in silence, alone. 

In the freeze of winter

I built a fire . . .

Cleopatra Sorina Iliescu is a poet living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her poems and artwork have appeared in her longtime supporters, Soul Forte: A Journal for Spiritual Writing and Mukoli: The Magazine for Peace. In her current series of sixty poems, "Within an Open-Ended Paradox," she explores the contradictions inherent in identity and becoming. The endings are intentionally open, allowing tension to breathe and vulnerability to remain visible on the page. 

Superior

Maker and keeper of cold, 

the shock is a gift.

Let me never become accustomed

ever reminded

that grace freely given tumbles in 

with each breaker

my eyes open wider

skin please become number

mercy mercy mercy 

never ceasing

my adoration

ablution

absolution.

Give me good courage to swim

beyond the swells and back

to let loose my brilliant agates 

to crumble into sand 

soft enough for my children’s feet.

Father of three and husband of one in St. Paul, MN (unceded Dakota land), Timothy Moore is a clinical psychologist by day and poet by moonlight. He is in the grip of his people, the natural world, and gratitude for the grace which pulls him by the ear out of his obstinance every day.

To Consecrate  

The other day I went out to the garden,

not to dig, or prune, or sow,

but to consecrate.

My head mocked, ‘What an old-fashioned word.’

But my body stilled, and

my heart began to lilt,

began to warm,

began to sense hope again.

c-o-n-s-e-c-r-a-t-e I spelt out on the soil,

as if on my own skin.

Each letter a poem of love to myself,

as I made holy what was blessed already.

As I was made blessed with each intention,

and breath, and every passing thought.

‘Holy’ before words formed in my mind.

‘Blessed’ before anything could be said.

And my soul sank deeper into mystery.

Deeper into love’s suffering ways,

and I wondered about believing again.

But not in some Damascus fashion,

but in the ways of gardens –

fragile blossoms on a frosty Spring morn,

tender radicles pioneering into warming soil.

I was becoming a consecrator.

David White is a horticulturist, spiritual director, Church of Ireland (Anglican) priest and is the author of The Gardened Soul: The Emotional Connection to More (Wipf & Stock, 2025). 

Circling God -- Notes from a Spiritual Philosophy

I think there must be a saint in us perpetually seeking to calm that frantic, warring figure, that naked, nervous jagged edge, nature seems to want us to be . . . 

*

How do you know if a political cause or religious belief is wrong? If it is driven by a hatred of whatever contradicts it or stands resolutely outside it. If it preaches fearfully against whatever refuses to be controlled by it. And above all, if there is more anger than love in it.

*

If you would kill for your religion, then either your religion is false, or you are false to your religion. 

* 

Don’t deny anything, not even that you are God. How do you know that you are not God, or at least a little bit of God – a little bit of broken-off God with a mist of self-delusion in your eye!

*

We all want a little courtesy, a little ceremony, in our lives. The God in all of us is yearning to be worshipped – just a little.

* 

I believe in the Necessary God – the One who sends us the murderer, the rapist, the torturer, the terrorist; who presents them to us in all the clinging filth of their unspeakable crimes and says, “Here; try these. Cut your spiritual teeth on these.”

*  

You, in the shadows there. I know you. Don’t trouble to hide. You are Disbelief. I know you’re just a hairsbreadth away. Stay close. Mock on. Do your work. Keep me spiritually sharp.

*  

I confess that I have – not a belief, but a sort of flickering sense, a raggedly rising  suspicion – that Harmony both envelops and transcends Discord, and is preparing, through waves of invisible, irresistible surges spaced over measureless aeons, ultimately to destroy it.

*  

Patience, just sitting quietly, with your mind at ease, will take you a long way, with man, with God. You can cover all kinds of distance, see all kinds of things, without moving a step, without blinking an eye. Empty your mind, tip out its rubbish: good things will come to you, through the stillness, along the path of silence – if you let them.

*

When you have God, everything’s funny, a great game, it’s not serious. But if you are brooding, dark, intense – you don’t have Him yet. Where there is strain, discomfort, desperate desire – He is very far away. When you beat yourself emotionally, crying, “Please, God, come!” – you are beating Him away. But when you are smiling, at rest, dreaming awake in His glory – where else would He be but with you? 

* 

When things seem, just for a moment, to be more than themselves, you are, just for a moment, completely yourself.

Nick Hayward took a BA in English from Queen’s University, Belfast. He worked mainly in the City of London. Retired to the Loire Valley in France, he composed poetry and prose reflections to help clarify his spiritual beliefs. These pieces are from “Circling God – Notes For A Spiritual Philosophy.” He now lives in West Cumbria, UK. 

Can You Not Find Any Good in This Boy?

As a young probation officer, I was writing a pre-sentence report for a young man who had been extremely non-compliant since his last appearance before the court. My report reflected that — it was, to put it plainly, scathing. I documented every failure, every violation, every missed appointment. I submitted it to my supervisor; confident I had done my job thoroughly.

My supervisor read it, looked up, and asked me a question I have never forgotten:

"Can you not find any good in this boy?"

That question stopped me and forced me to question the punitive lens I had been working from in my approach to juvenile justice. My focus had been entirely on the negative — on what this young man had done wrong, on what he had failed to do, on the ways he had disappointed the expectations of the system. The possibility that there was something worth finding, something to build on, had not entered my report at all. In merely “reporting the facts,” I was missing an opportunity to begin setting a foundation for him that could change the trajectory of his life. 

That moment changed the way I viewed every young person who came after him.

What my supervisor was pointing toward — intuitively, before I had the language for it — was something that the science of positive psychology has since given us a rigorous framework to understand. Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson's work on character strengths, and specifically the VIA (Values in Action) Classification of Character Strengths, identifies 24 universal strengths — qualities like perseverance, creativity, kindness, bravery, fairness, and humor — that exist in every person in varying degrees. Not as aspirational traits to be developed from nothing, but as genuine capacities already present, waiting to be recognized and engaged.

In the juvenile justice context, this is more than an affirming idea. It is a clinically and practically significant reorientation. The young people who come before the court have, in the vast majority of cases, survived circumstances that would overwhelm many adults. The persistence required to survive poverty, trauma, family instability, and community violence is a character strength. The loyalty that keeps a young person embedded in a dangerous peer network is a character strength misapplied — and misapplied strengths are far more workable than deficits, because they are real. They exist. They can be redirected.

Research on strength-based approaches in juvenile justice consistently finds that interventions which identify and engage young people's existing strengths — rather than focusing exclusively on risk reduction and deficit remediation — produce better engagement, stronger therapeutic alliances, and more durable behavioral change. When a young person is asked what they are good at before they are told what is wrong with them, something shifts in the room.

The system I worked in for over two decades was built, almost entirely, around the deficit model. What did this young person do wrong? What risks do they carry? What conditions must they comply with? These are not illegitimate questions. But they are incomplete ones — and a system that asks only those questions will produce reports like the one I wrote as a young officer: technically accurate, clinically useless, and blind to the human being sitting across the desk.

My supervisor's question — can you not find any good in this boy? — was not soft. It was the hardest question she could have asked me, because it required me to look again. To look differently. That is what I believe positive psychology, and specifically the VIA character strengths framework, offers juvenile justice: not a replacement for accountability, but a more complete way of seeing — one that finds what is already there and builds from it.

I have been in this field long enough to know that the young people most written off are often the ones with the most to offer, once someone decides to look.

Dr. Sokoyama Songu-Mbriwa is a juvenile justice practitioner and researcher with over twenty-three years of experience in juvenile probation. He is the author of "Everchanging: Contemporary Social and Psychological Issues in Juvenile Justice" (forthcoming) and completed his doctoral dissertation on compassion fatigue and burnout in juvenile probation officers at Grand Canyon University in 2024.

I am

I am the earth. 

I am so beautiful. 

I bleed and rot and feel the sunbeam 

shine down upon me. 

I am the moon. 

I am so dutiful. 

I dreamed that god would heal the unseen

wound of my reclusive ache.  

I am the flower. 

I am so whimsical. 

I seemed not real, until I leaned

upon the beloved’s grave. 

I am the human. 

I am so delicate. 

I only heal when I am seen for real

and only love 

when I am known. 

Owen Barclay is an emerging young poet from the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He uses a love of nature to transform pain into something worth sharing. Last fall, he released a full-length collection of poems entitled lightning bolt in the void. Earlier this year, he had a total of five poems published in The Avocet, a journal of nature poetry, and Mercurial Silver. 

Still

           after Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano

I keep thinking the house should still sound like it used to.

There should still be two sets of footsteps racing down the hallway or jumping down the stairs counting. 

“1, 2, 3,” my daughter used to say as she jumped down one step at a time. Every time I go up or down the stairs I hear her voice like a lullaby calling out to me. Is she trying to keep up or am I?

The walls were never this quiet before. Maybe I'm missing something. I don't think I am. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be worrying about, who I'm supposed to be caring for. Maybe it's no one. Silence sits everywhere now like dust that  cannot be wiped away even if I spend hours trying to clean it.

I assumed grief would be loud like the people in the movies: crashes, screams, sobs, and things broken.  But in reality it's much more quiet. More harmful to myself than anyone else. But there's someone i just cannot remember. My husband, yes, but there's someone else here, and I can't put my finger on them. Maybe it's because of the cigarettes and the alcohol, they make me forget about almost everything, like I'm just air. I feel like I'm just in this blank area. My mind has stopped, my heart is pumping and I'm floating.

Sometimes it ends up ruined. There's always a small sniffle or a crack in the hallway. But I can never bring myself to ask. I can hear a cabinet opening.. My name is being called. Wait. Who is calling me, I don't remember. I don't see them. I learned to drain the noise out and drown myself in my beer. Until I hear coughing. All over again. My sweet baby girl . . . 

I think of her. In her soft pink cradle. Motionless, unresponsive.

I feel the weight of failure each time.

Whenever I hear someone cough my whole world rotates and ends all over again. My world has come to a stop. But I feel something or someone rotating around me like the moon does the earth, yet I cannot identify that moon. It's not my husband. He comes back to my mind when I lay in bed and smell his cologne. Our first date.. First laugh. The first life we made together.

Here she comes. My sweet girl. I hate when she comes and I'm drinking. I don't like her to see me like this. I don't want her to end up like me. She's too precious to me. I call her from the couch. “My love.” She doesn't respond. I call again. “Caroline.”  The footsteps stop. I turn around to see why she isn't responding.. I see her brown soft hair but it's shorter. I look at her eyes, her beautiful brown soft eyes. They seem sad.

Caroline is dead, so who am I looking at?

My son William, standing in the living room doorway, his socks falling down. He's six years old. 

No, he's sixteen.  No, he's in college. But he's graduated. With a girlfriend. Not even a girlfriend. A wife. 

William's eyes disappear behind the smoke. 

Ta'liyia Thornton is a student and writer in Washington, DC.

Jubilate

             Psalm 100

As dark cannot be created, we cannot create this light.

With rubble and dust cast, dawn awakens the pasture

and vale, the vein of a glistening stream.

Envoy of vitality, nothing burdens after the light arrives.

No land lies lean, but swollen. Intimate and vivid, 

simultaneously. Unbinds midnight angst, calms turbulent gloom.

Brightens the dark tapestry with an ocean of stars.

Some mornings, light limps in, yet is never late. 

Adheres and allows gladness. Erases poor symmetry.

Smooths our ragged geometry. Melts bars from the window, 

their grid once shadows on hardwood. Enlightens flawed words. 

Sponges vagary. Salves us with clarity.

Off its tongue comes repose, and lips part in song.

Light, oh jubilant light, seize us, lead us east to west

to float like petals tossed before the bride’s white slipper.

Sam Barbee newest collection is titled Apertures of Voluptuous Force (2022, Redhawk Publishing). He has three previous poetry collections, including That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016; and is a two-time Pushcart nominee. 

Crooked Picture

There is a crooked picture

hanging on a wall in my hallway.

I must adjust that damn picture

every . . . single . . . day after day.

No matter how often

that picture is put back into place,

it always seems to go awry,

my straightening efforts erased.

This picture is worth only a few words,

and not one single word more.

I will not write those few words here,

each of their letters coming to four.

That crooked picture, it mocks me,

hanging askew, there on my wall.

No matter how many times I try,

I can't fix that damn picture at all.

Maybe the picture is simply broken,

lying utterly beyond all repair.

No . . . I bet the Maker could fix it,

if I would just take it there.

But . . . I'm stubborn.

Dr. William S. Kilgore, a sociology professor in Houston, Texas, discovered poetry in 2024, while recovering from a kidney transplant, bringing renewed contemplation. Initially writing for himself, he was encouraged to seek publication beginning in 2026, with poems forthcoming in Westward Quarterly, foreshadow, Solid Food, Step Away, and Verse-Virtual.  

In the Silence

Be still, and know.

Become one with silence

in quiet corners

of the woods. Heart slows,

I am healed. I am open

to the sacred,

tethered to the trees. 

Her secret— 

Patience.

Nature does not 

hurry, so I wait here

as seasons unfold

For Angie Kinman, writing poetry has become a spiritual practice. She finds a divine connection and healing since her daughter passed away on March 2, 2023. 

The Clay Pot

I was a clay pot

Brittle and hollow.

Shattered by a lilt --

Back to dust and reborn.

I hardened to a rock

Breaking many pots.

Till time and ants

Eroded me to dust.

I flow as water

Yielding to gravity.

Rocks birth ripples but

Frost numbs my flow.

Now I am the air

Shedding all paths.

No dam can hold me,

No bullets scar me.

Go ahead and hurt me,

I circle you to embrace.

I am always close to you

Invisible but intuitive.

The oxygen you inhale,

The air you exhale.

Then I rustle through trees

To return a million times --

For you to take breaths.

Oh lightness so lovely

And so simply freeing.

Maybe I can be less --

The silence between words

Devoid of even atoms?

No. Your breath binds me.

Meera Siva is a former business journalist who, after a career in engineering and finance, now explores personal essays, short stories, and poetry including haiku. For Meera, writing is pure joy that helps cross the intersection of the natural world and the internal human experience. She currently lives in Portland.