Month: December 2016

Toti O’Brien – The Candidate

To me Thomas’ proportio suggests beauty is made of parts. Bits and pieces, found objects, scraps, remains you lift from the floor, collect, dust off, repair. Then you mix them, delicately sew, glue, polish, repurpose.

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A. Elizabeth Herting – The Intruder

“Merry Christmas, Charlie,” he chuckles, his eyes bright with amusement. “The next time you come home to visit and stay out all night with your friends, please do remember to bring a key.”

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C. Ann Kodra – Two Poems

It could be the music of the Universe that shapes itself into the notes of everything we experience—terrifying, lulling, devastating, joyous. Beauty could simply be the gift that one hand gives and another receives, both reaching toward the same heart.

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Sarah Sadie – Four Poems

I am convinced we cannot live without beauty. We may exist, or survive, but we will not live. And it is entirely possible that beauty may be dependent upon us as well. A tree may exist in the forest without humans there to see it, but it will not be beautiful if its beauty is not perceived.

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Milton P. Ehrlich – Two Poems

Love is the music of rain. In a drenching downpour body and soul mesh. I once swam from water to land from an ancient part of my brain. Please bury me at sea.

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Samara Golabuk – Five Poems

Creating beauty may be one of the most subversive forms of cultural activism, because it is powerful enough to shift paradigms. To unite us.

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Gareth Culshaw – Four Poems

A snowy top is only what the mountain allows, a waterfall is what the mountain says it is, an horizon is what the mountain directs. Everything else is added to these things but nothing is more than a tree or mountain.

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Paul Beckman – Five Photographs

As a photographer I consider myself a street shooter–my photographer’s eye shooting an old building, rusted bridge, interesting faces or groupings of people and nature in all its forms. There’s a beauty in the texture, color, and subject matter that calls out to me and I’m never without a camera whether I’m out for a walk or a drive.

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Sylvia Ashby – Three Poems

Rather than grandiose scenery, fabulous effects, spectacular costumes, I prefer simplicity. Give me an empty stage with simple, honest acting–that is beauty.

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Sergio Ortiz – Four Poems

Beauty is looking into the eyes of a baby only to discover that s/he is smiling back at you. It’s watching a person carry themselves so lightly, so gently, you think they’re an angel.

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Tikuli – Two Poems

I believe that beauty reflects both strength and vulnerability, and that sometimes shadow, whether in terms of light, sound or emotion is necessary to enhance the vibrancy of the things we find beautiful. Just as the beauty of life lies in its mystery, so the mystery of life lies in its beauty. In art we call this Chiaroscuro.

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Sanjeev Sethi – Five Poems

Beauty is a celebration of concinnity. At first blush it makes us cognizant of nature’s bounty. This can be in the form of an image or an idea. Beauty is a blessing and as with all divine sanctions it makes us worthy of ourselves and our whereabouts.

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Jared Carter – Five Poems

If we cannot define beauty, perhaps on occasion we may point to its embodiment. The most beautiful architectural interior I have ever seen is in the Pazzi Chapel in the first cloister of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.

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Catherine Arra – Three Poems

I believe beauty lives in each of us as generosity, kindness and love. It’s part of our physiology as are heartbeats and breath. I find beauty in the interstices, the pauses, in the experience of stillness and sight. When outer reality and beauty connect, beauty is. The canvass on which we can practice and paint is as endless as spirit.

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John C. Mannone – Four Poems

Even the physics of nature displays its beauty: the diffraction of waves on a rippled lake, the august sunset colors of a Rayleigh-scattered sky, the photochemistry of fireflies flashing their yellow green luciferin.

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Kim Bridgford – Five Poems

Beauty is always my first choice, along with form, emotion, surprise, and imagery. However, over the years, I have learned that it is the re-combination of these elements that makes me re-define, re-read, and re-consider.

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Duane L Herrmann – Four Poems

To create Beauty from the pain, chaos and disorder of our lives is a high accomplishment that transcends our physical limitations. It demonstrates that we are capable of transcendence. It demonstrates our spiritual nature.

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Tony Press – Full Circle

There is no greater gift than full attention. That is the deeper beauty. And if it happens in a cafe in Bristol, England, or Oaxaca, Mexico, or Brisbane, California, so much the better.

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Jen Davis- Two Poems

Two trees stand together in an otherwise naked field, branches linked like young lovers’ fingers, roots twisted into a labyrinth of nourishment and survival.

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Michael Ratcliffe – Five Poems

Thunderclouds building on a hot, humid day. The whirr of the bicycle chain and the rhythm of the cranks, well into a long ride. The still small voice that need not announce itself with ornamentation. Beauty is all possible things.

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Aubrey Ann Laughlin – Five Photographs

And for a moment, we as readers or viewers enter the artist’s world, which is our own, and we are filled with the wonder of that space. And by repeating these experiences, we expand and notice beauty regularly and discover that we each have the creative ability to express it ourselves.

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Jennifer Lunden – Five Poems

When we see, we connect. We connect with the thing, and we connect with some deep part of ourselves. We connect with some kind of longing, some kind of love.

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R. Bremner – Four Poems

But then, I might feel that the cycle of life is itself beautiful. For me, I’ll take a drizzly, grey day, and a walk with my dog over grimy streets. Now that’s beautiful. That and my beautiful wife.

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Jose Sotolongo – Four Poems

… to be in the presence of, or to witness and be moved by, a calming, lovely experience (even if it’s vicariously created with words on a page) is to reaffirm our humanity in the deepest possible sense. There is nothing greater.

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SuzAnne C. Cole – Four Poems

… an impromptu flower arrangement composed of a handful of garden flowers and some dried weeds contained in a plain glass vase. Beauty just feels right on its setting.

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Bruce Robinson – Four Poems

I grant you that my interest in ugliness is subject to unfortunate collisions with Studebaker Larks. But you know what I’d do to Baudelaire’s vitres de paradis….

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Harry Youtt – Five Poems

The truth is I never learned to explain the meaning of beauty. When I try now, I discover I can’t do it. But I realize it isn’t going to stop me from going down to that beach, even on blustery days, to find stones for Mary’s table.

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Aliesa Zoecklein – Two Poems

Beauty is that quiet messenger of grace that both startles and reassures. Whether an ordinary apple resting on a kitchen counter or scenes flashing from a train window, beauty stops me, makes me whisper, Yes. This!

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Becca Menon – Three Poems

Let comfort come like the prayer of a goddess, / a great sacramental surrender, a promise / that quiet will blossom, that comfort come.

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Sheila Wellehan – Three Poems

Beauty interrupts and disrupts routine as it slows me down and suspends me in its force field. Beauty holds my senses, heart, or mind hostage. The most powerful beauty demands all three.

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A Wilderness of Bears

“William,” she began as she arranged herself in the big emerald arm chair, “you need to pick our Pushcart nominations. Right now!”

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Jody Kennedy – Five Photographs

“… Beauty can be categorized in much the same way—as a fluid and dynamic experience rather than a fixed and preconceived idea. In its truest form, beauty moves us beyond multiplicity toward a deeper sense of oneness and unity.”

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Terry Blackhawk – Two Poems

I need beauty in my surroundings. I crave art, and spaciousness. I need light and windows and the play of sun and wind on leaves to feel that my spirit is alive. I need to be close to visual art.

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Harriet Riley – Bottled Up Women

Long afternoons in the Royal Theatre on Eighth Street in Meridian, Mississippi, sitting in the dark watching bright images on the screen with the loud blare of sound in my ears was the only time I would allow myself to cry.

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Annie Stenzel – Three Poems

Endlessly-altered view from my window; phrase of Chopin from the piano in a house I walk past; touch of the salt air on my cheek from a southerly breeze; fragrance of something delicious baking next door; first sip of my morning cup of tea—the supply knows no end.

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