Month: January 2017

Donna Pucciani – Four Poems

I ultimately became far more interested in the making of art, as a pianist, accompanist, and flutist with local orchestras and chamber groups. Two degrees later, I still had not arrived at a “definition” of beauty, in the arts or otherwise.

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Mark J. Mitchell – Five Poems

The full moon rises behind the western span, dressed in the amazing Bay Lights. The bay itself is suddenly silver, painted by the Goddess Herself and the breath is sucked out of us. Beauty should be divine.

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Annika Lindok – Five Photographs

The very moment we realise the true nature of a thing, the thing becomes beautiful. When we don´t have to explain the reasons, why something or someone is aesthetically appealing to look at, we just perceive that they are.

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Joey Nicoletti – Three Poems

Beauty is ubiquitous, and felt at least as much as seen, if not more so. It is the stuff of stoppage and revelation. It is anything or anyone that makes me cease what I am doing, take notice, and become awash with joy, intrigue, allure, wonder, and admiration.

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KB Ballentine – Four Poems

When I think of beauty, I first imagine natural images: bluebirds bathing in the feeder, cirrus clouds scribbling a blue sky, maples bursting into autumn flame.

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Faverolles – Editorial

I’m fond of those Faverolles. They come from a tiny little French town, about 10 miles north of Chartres, and they lay salmon colored eggs. They’re also a little skittish… the rough Rhode Islands and the burly Orpingtons tend to hector them, so they keep to themselves.

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Heather M Browne – Three Poems

I am drawn to what is creative or unseen, versus the typical standard, a different way of seeing, or saying, or moving, a different way of touching someone or exciting them. Beauty is the ability to see beyond. It is in wanting to look below to the pulse. Beauty is the struggle to contemplate the heart.

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KJ Hannah Greenberg – Five Photographs

More exactingly, in visual representations, notions of beauty emerge as much as from schooled and traditional foci as they do from private experience. Some artists replicate the lines, shapes, shading, and tones of classic or of Renaissance fare. Others fashion the optical equivalent of punk, reggae, or house music.

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LindaAnn Lo Schiavo – Two Poems

Beauty is each impulse that makes us drop the dishcloth, the phone, the remote — so we can pick up a pen, a paintbrush, a camera to “fix” it in some form and try to make it our own.

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Deborah L. Davitt – Three Poems

there are different kinds of beauty. A mountain range takes my breath away, as does a sea at storm. But there is also something sublime in a mother who’s fallen asleep holding her sick child–the pain of her experience, her fear of what could happen to her child, the child’s fear transmuted into rest by its trust in its mother–that’s something beyond the prosaic and the everyday. You simply have to be willing to see it, rather than to close your eyes to the possibility of wonder.

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Kathleen McClung – Four Poems

my partner and I drove past a long, long freight train standing still. Even now its beauty enlarges and humbles me: the winter sunlight, the multicolored graffiti entwined on every single car, the absence/presence of people–who drove that train? who adorned it?–and the stillness–where had it traveled already?

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Robert Boucheron – Cottage for a Clergyman

As I recall, I drift at sea in a fog. I pull on the oars of reading and research and somehow strike land. I have to leave the boat, jump in the water, get cold and wet, and flounder. As I stumble up the beach, I find I was not even close to where I thought I was.

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Silva Merjanian – Writer’s Block

It’s when there’s no turning back; you’ve tasted sweat of a dream, lips soaked in a poet’s verse, mending with his voice smoke from Parisian chimneys on an autumn evening, as the rain falls.

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Kyle Hemmings – Five Photographs

I became entranced and immobile, immersed in my sense impressions of the outer world invading the inner. It was much later that I began to love words and the way they could combine to form poems or stories. But for me, the image, and the other physical impressions of an object, the scent of a flower, the feel of a dog’s fur,

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Devon Balwit – Four Poems

The natural world serves as my most consistent doorway to it–whether through a mackerel sky at sunset, the geometry of garden flowers, striations in stones, the hover of raptors, the myriad shapes of insects, the wind swirling grass, or light playing on water. I’m awed by fractals and iridescence.

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Cara L McKee – Two Poems

To me beauty is the acceptance of oneself, the appreciation even, letting our qualities, or the quality of our creations, shine out, regardless and heedless of the opinions of others.

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Laura Madeline Wiseman – Three Poems

No drought, no summer of heat in the hundred-teens, no monsoon / or long gone prohibition against our kind will kill us. Our stoicism / lives on to offer applause to the windstorms, that seasonal ushering.

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Ferral Willcox – Five Poems

It started with a list of made up words for kinds of snow, followed by their definitions, and short poems as explication. It was, of course, strange to be writing about snow while in Thailand…

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Tim Gavin – Five Poems

The moment of the last breath lingers and silence envelops the room. The intimacy of such a scene contains a certain beauty that can only be experienced by those who are present. Beauty is art. Beauty is life. Beauty is pain and suffering. Beauty is joy and glory.

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Julie Wenglinski – Five Poems

I am preoccupied with words,with mixing them up, getting them a little wrong to surprise, in order for the reader to forget she is mortal for one split second.

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Daipayan Nair – Golden Blue

I as a poet and an impartial observer try staying in the fullness of the ‘beautiful’ where I gather. I can’t lose it. It’s too scarce to be lost.

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Katherine Hoerth – Five Poems

For me, beauty is looking out my window and finding the harmony of the world. It’s staring into my love’s eyes as my mind floods with memories of our past, our dreams of the future. It’s gazing into the mirror at my own face and finding joy. We have to explore, redefine, and reclaim beauty for ourselves.

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Anna Keeler – What She Wanted

We all, in some way, suffer in relation to beauty: in spite of, alongside, because of, or for its sake. If I had to call beauty one thing, I would call it an aesthetic; a lenient appreciation that is malleable in each creator’s hands, because what’s graceful to some is pure jive to others.

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Tom Kirlin – Two Poems

In people and artistic expression, I think beauty assembles in our spirit the perfect pieces needed to create a whole and fix our attention. In memory, these occasions may become ideal forms that we may seek to achieve for the rest of our life. Day by day, beauty is a minefield.

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Lisa Marie Brodsky – Four Poems

Some call this the “dark night of the soul,” some call it the years eaten by locusts. In my mind, such seasons lead to victory, showing how our version of ugly can rise out of the ground and become great beauty

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Delbert R. Gardner – New Wings for the Muse

In an era when many time-honored literary conventions have become extinct, it is reassuring to learn that at least one literary genius is trying to re-feather the Muse by creating a new and vital verse form.

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Michael Achile Umameh – Two Poems

Beauty is wakefulness to the alignment of things as they are in their pristine form. For me, beauty is arriving at Oneness with things: spiritual/psychical and physical. Beauty exists by the exercise of the power within and without.

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Jo-Anne Rosen – Chins Up

Beauty seems to be essential for humans. It springs up everywhere, even in the most desolate circumstances, like a weed that grows out of a crack in cement and briefly flowers.

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Nikoletta Nousiopoulos – Three Poems

I measure beauty by the rate my body changes in temperature and interior jolts. My smile widens; my pupils dilate and retract. There is always a physical experience when I encounter beauty

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Silva Merjanian – Rain Had No Scent in Geneva in November

I am hoping this poem will raise awareness to the emotional state of ‘newcomers’ and make a ripple in tolerance and kindness. I moved from Beirut to Geneva during the Lebanese civil war. Leaving everything and everyone you know and love behind takes some adjustment. There is a sense of being pulled from your roots.

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Bill Yarrow – Three Poems

That’s basically what Herrick was saying in his “Delight in Disorder” in which “a sweet disorder” or a “wild civility” is preferable to art which is not “too precise in every part.” In other words, “Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none” (Emerson).

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Daniel de Culla – Five Poems

We take as much of the whole as possible. There may be “out” and “into” for us, there may not. We do what we do and we acknowledge the mystery. The mysteries, secrets, demons, gods encountered and felt. Wo/Man Intuition: pursuing Beauty.

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Ting Wang – Six Photographs

When I was little, my dad had our walls decorated with calligraphy scrolls featuring ancient Chinese poetry. He and my mom grew different-colored chrysanthemum in dozens of pots in our courtyard. On some crisp summer mornings, he would gather me and my sisters in front of our water lily pond he built and take photos of us. Beauty then was the elegance and serenity that were surrounding me and my family.

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Alec Solomita – The Red Lights of Needham

Whatever the subject, be it clearly a thing of beauty, like the tracery of branches at dusk, or an old lamp someone discards on the sidewalk, I try in my work to shape and share my own experience of its miraculous existence in a world full of chaos and difficulty.

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Camille Grove – Where the Sun Shines

Emilie’s Audi crosses the mountain border between Western Washington and Eastern Washington. Lush greenery turns into dry desert as the sun rises above the horizon. After driving a few hours on one long two-lane highway, she turns off onto the exit Siri tells her to take.

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Naomi Lakritz – Robert’s Voice

Something of the divine spark within us connects to the divine within the beauty we are looking upon, but we cannot get any closer than the sense of that connection. And all the while that we are looking at something beautiful, we’re aware of time quickly passing

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Robert Eastwood – Three Poems

And in that revelation, in that unearthing of grace, a glimpse of the unsayable can be had, an idea of what is centered at the core of our experience, but stays veiled beyond touching until its shadow can be seen in beauteous language.

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Sayuri Yamada – My Pregnancy

Dear Mr Sinclair Randal, I would like to thank you for your enquiry about the embryo. He hatched two days ago and is already six centimetres long. Because there is no longer egg shell around him, there is no longer egg shell between him and me in my uterus, so he is able to learn better from the outside world.

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CL Bledsoe – Two Poems

It’s a search for stillness amongst the out-rushing waves of time. A flower that will die. A moment that’s already passed, captured. When that’s achieved, the result is perceived as beauty.

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Shelley Marie Motz – Two Poems

Beauty breaks the bounds of time and space. It transcends the boundaries between you and me, us and them. It is as essential to life as water, and just as easily taken for granted when we do not want for it.

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Patricia Worth – The Enchanted Ring

Three handsome, rich young princes, one named Felibien, another, Roland, and the third, Aymeril, were travelling on horseback through all the countries of the world, followed by a multitude of servants and wagons loaded with their baggage. A chance meeting at an inn had made them friends, and they set off together. Why were they travelling?

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Katherine E. Young – Five Poems about Moscow

For some, the city’s beauty lies in its geography, in its rivers and hills; for others, it is the monasteries, palaces, and bell towers. For me, it lies in the shades of people, real and imagined, who stroll around Patriarch’s Pond in June, when the nights are clear and cool, and puffs of pukh (cottonwood seed) float out across the water.

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Melissa Goode – Here We Are

(Beauty) is the photo showing the statue of Nike “Winged Victory of Samothrace” leaving the Louvre at night, two days after World War II was declared. (…) She is without a head or arms, but she is winged. She is wrapped in sack cloth and ropes and stands in a crate. She is eight foot tall. Her wings are unprotected.

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