There is a Music

by Katherine L. Gordon

By pan-pipes and Siren symphonies

our feet are led to glades that float

between the spheres of habitation

and imagination.

Not the Zen of meditation that sees or hears

alternate reality amid our fears,

but a music that changes brain patterns

into the realm of Plato’s perfection,

where Adam dwells as archetype

and all things unsullied call to us

in an art we can never fully reconstruct

but ever-try.

Music lifts the weight of seven veils -

leaves us naked to receive, pulse beats a rhythm,

the heart our drum, and we are transported -

hear the spheres in cosmic cadence

thrill to a music that once heard haunts us

through near attainment to the perfection of death

and notes of transformation.

* * * * *

"There is a Music" is from Katherine L. Gordon's new collection Wing-Wishing: Of Unicorns, Ravens and Wolves (Melinda Cochrane Publications Inc., 2019).

Katherine L. Gordon is a poet, publisher, essayist, judge and reviewer, whose works have been published internationally, translated into several languages. She is currently the overseas judge for the Reuben Rose International contest. Her latest book: Caution: Deep Water, HMS Press, was named among the best reads of 2018 in The Southwest Festival of the Written Word in the U.S. Her tribute poem to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 100th celebration is published in Italian, a current e-book. She has many books, chapbooks, anthologies and collaborations with her talented peers who inspire her work. Publications with Craigleigh Press, Lummox Press, HMS Press, Cyclamens and Swords Press. She was awarded a certificate from The World Poetry Society this summer, 2019. Katherine believes poetry is a unifying force in the world today, with Canadian poetry making a powerful impact. A review of her work is in the summer issue of Canadian Stories. Her new book with Melinda Cochrane International Press is Wing-Wishing: of Unicorns, Ravens and Wolves.

This month an additional Moon Prize, the forty-sixth, goes to Joanna M. Weston's haunting poem "The Missing Women."

THE MISSING WOMEN

by Joanna M. Weston

written in the bone of earth
lying in overflowing rivers
hair lifting in the current

your presence lost to home
feet no longer on the stairs
hands missing at the table
not there when the door opens

I hear you in the fall of rain
see you on a highway bridge
touch you where cedars hang shadows
know the scent of you in the fire’s smoke
taste you in drifting snow

you have gone I don’t know where
but you are everywhere

* * * * *

Joanna M. Weston. Canada. Has one cat, multiple spiders, a herd of deer,
and two derelict hen-houses. Her middle-reader, Frame and The McGuire,
published by Tradewind Books 2015; and poetry, A Bedroom of Searchlights,
published by Inanna Publications, 2016. Other books listed at her blog:
http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com/

For today's full moon, the forty-fifth Moon Prize goes to Alexis Rhone Fancher's heart-breaking "Tonight At Last Call, J. Calls Me His Brown Liquor Girl, Again,"

Tonight At Last Call, J. Calls Me His Brown Liquor Girl, Again,

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

his voice dark urgency, like when we were attached.

I let him grip my hips, slow dance me back to that lust,

to the parking lot, his car,

my tube top a trophy in one hand,

a bottle of Southern Comfort in his other.

He pours that sweet Joplin down my throat,

guides my hand between his legs. Drives

to the Malibu motel with ocean views,

vibrating beds, and once more, our delicious thrashing,

complimentary KY where the Gideon should be,

the insomniac waves rocking us long before my marriage,

and now after.

When I ask him which part of me he loves best,

J. answers: What’s missing,

tonguing the place where my nipple had been.

He doesn’t mind the mastectomy scar,

the one my husband can’t bring himself to touch.

* * * * *

"Tonight At Last Call, J. Calls Me His Brown Liquor Girl, Again," was first published in Rattle.

L.A. poet Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The 

American Journal of Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Diode, Nashville Review, Wide Awake, Poets of Los 

Angeles, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She’s the author of 5 poetry collections; How I 

Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies (2015), Enter 

Here (2017), Junkie Wife (2018), and The Dead Kid Poems (2019). EROTIC, New & Selected, 

publishes in 2020 from New York Quarterly. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net 

nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. www.alexisrhonefancher.com

Needing Symbols

by Katherine L. Gordon

Fire-flickering symbols in Neolithic art

attest to fairies, nature spirits intimate to man,

who radiated in those dark caves where thought was born.

Everywhere, a young mind unfettered,

not shaped by blinkered dogma,

saw the dance of animated energy

between the stones and roses,

over the bogs, unmapped paths

leading away from sterile cities

into the rare wild places preserved.

I saw them often in the ancient cliffs

un-scythed, untamed, glittering,

primordial energy yet untapped.

Sometimes a wise wolf on a moon-ascent path

leads to revelation, a shaman or his raven

carrying the wisdom of our ages in a rush-rough basket.

The transformative unicorn barely seen since Marco’s

diary days, still resides in our unconscious.

When we are entrapped, we ride the wind,

the haunted hollows of insight.

Even on Mars we will need to re-affirm that we are human:

choosing timeless entities shaped by communal creative consciousness

to save us from ourselves.

* * * * *

"Needing Symbols" is from Katherine L. Gordon's new collection Wing-Wishing: Of Unicorns, Ravens and Wolves (Melinda Cochrane Publications Inc., 2019).

Katherine L. Gordon is a poet, publisher, essayist, judge and reviewer, whose works have been published internationally, translated into several languages. She is currently the overseas judge for the Reuben Rose International contest. Her latest book: Caution: Deep Water, HMS Press, was named among the best reads of 2018 in The Southwest Festival of the Written Word in the U.S. Her tribute poem to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 100th celebration is published in Italian, a current e-book. She has many books, chapbooks, anthologies and collaborations with her talented peers who inspire her work. Publications with Craigleigh Press, Lummox Press, HMS Press, Cyclamens and Swords Press. She was awarded a certificate from The World Poetry Society this summer, 2019. Katherine believes poetry is a unifying force in the world today, with Canadian poetry making a powerful impact. A review of her work is in the summer issue of Canadian Stories. Her new book with Melinda Cochrane International Press is Wing-Wishing: of Unicorns, Ravens and Wolves.

Closure

by Sheena Pillai Singh

Look at me

I'm falling apart

My eyes deceive

I can't breathe

My tired feet

Can barely walk

emotions all over

paralyzed my arms

Look at me

I'm falling apart

My head's reeling

I can hardly stand

Looking back I wish

I was there again

But time's passed

I trail behind

Look at me

I'm falling apart

Let me sleep

and rest in peace

The Street Is A Museum

by Cynthia Atkins

And all the shoes are anarchists wanting real earth.

My own shoe-strings of luck, gone south. Mine is

the face that holds breakable bones, inside a church

of moans. The party-goers left stain-glass fragments

and late-night whispers, smoky and vengeful

with buyer’s remorse. A coin-toss of loss

and old cassette tapes. Gnarled as Hell and

plastic threads are the filaments through nests.

Smelling of hot donuts, cigar smoke, late-night

mutterings. I think my ancestors live

in the branches, how they twirl to the klezmer

music—like a horse tail snapping in a gust of wind.

The sound of their voices fat as a school bus squealing

the breaks in rain. Grandmother, aunt,

cousin, uncle—I let them stamp their ‘madness stain’

upon my arm. Once I pressed a leaf in a book

and it rested like a birth mark—It carries me

into the kitchens where the maelstrom of life

happens. But no, you can’t have my son,

good night, I love you, stinging in the doorway.

I’ve walked through a few puddles to get to

the clouds, where there were door knobs

and wayward stars calling my name.

* * * * *

"The Street Is A Museum" was first published in Gamut.

Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In the Event of Full Disclosure, and the forthcoming collection Still-Life With God. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including, Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Denver Quarterly, Diode, Florida Review, Flock Lit, Green Mountains Review, Le Zaporogue, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Rust + Moth, Sweet: A Literary Confection, SWWIM, Tampa Review, and Verse Daily, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of The Net. Formerly, Atkins worked as the assistant director of the Poetry Society of America. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the VCCA. Atkins teaches creative writing at Blue Ridge Community College and lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County VA with her family. More on @catkinspoet www.cynthiaatkins.com, https://www.facebook.com/Cynthia-Atkins-190490067665164/- 

             YOU FIND YOURSELF IN THE STILLNESS OF DAWN

by Virginia McIntyre

Sea water sweeps

the slender spit

where you stand

in the shallow warm swill

of the estuary. The weight

of atmosphere presses

against your body

burrows beneath your skin

into every pore

infusing a birdness

in your collarbone

a treeness in your spine.

Bird calls

ping

in your palms.

You are inside the keer

of a hawk and the skirl

of an eagle greeting its young.

You move through

a membrane of time

through a swarm of sounds

the sea hissing across sand

small waves unfurling

along the shoreline

a low gurgle

in the throat of the river

a rattle of pebbles

clattering beneath foam

air popping

in a retreating froth

the breath of barnacles.

Time goes by before you notice

the humming. Humming shells

humming your spirit

into the small and intimate

into a colony of life

in sediments of moss

seaweed and silt.

Your eyes dissolve

your body

into the footprints

of a merganser

and you know

what it is to dive

for food with

your serrated beak.

Your bathe in the wake

of a green winged teal

in its silver script

of awareness

you call prayer.