Month: March 2017

Mary Jane White – Three Poems

White Buffalo is an attempt at song. How Is It Enough To Say is a quarrel with certain tenets of Confucian thought—carried forward in song. Apex is a meditation—in the now near-erased voice of prayer—written in fragments of song. Beauty is a lasting song. In some form.

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Alfred Corn – Syllable Count Verse

Beauty attracts. And not just organic forms of beauty. The motion and reflective properties of water; the arresting formations assumed by igneous rock; the vague, protean fleece or domes of cloud, the variable and mysterious lights in the night sky, and the regular rise and fall of ocean waves approaching the shore.

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Laura M Kaminski (Halima Ayuba) – Four Poems

I think perhaps “beauty” is the term for what we experience in those moments we escape our ego-community, the ones when all the energy tied up in whether or not we are doing what we should be, whether or not we are going to be able to get what we need or accomplish what we feel like we must, whether or not others are treating us equitably

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Don Mager – Five Poems

Beauty for me is the essence of now-ness. In poetry my task is to find language and context that invite readers into the quirks of my ravishment. If my language can startle or disorient perhaps it can invite.

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Wong Wen Pu – To Marie, With Love

It is the tremble of anticipation, the held breath. It is found in the exact second when the parachute does’t open, in the lingering space between fingertips when lovers part. It is the infinitesimal moment between my girlfriend’s sleepy eyes lighting on me beside her and her first morning smile.

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Jean-Yves Solinga – Two Poems

Beauty exists, but demands to be discovered by the artist. Like the passing of invisible soothing hands over his eyes, he is now capable to superimpose passion and creativity over the mundane of this world in an alchemy that transforms mere notes, basic colors and inert words into the language of the eternal.

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Richard Peabody – Three Poems

Beauty is the tuning fork of the universal. We seek it out, we feed off of it, and we desire more. We want to chain our hearts to beauty, to possess beauty, hold beauty closer than life itself. Inner beauty runs by different rules. Though I believe beauty is a force, an aura, an inner light, the mind of God, what have you.

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Lorette C. Luzajic – The Violet Hour

In my youth I was forever moved by Leonard Cohen’s poem, “Suzanne.” I wanted to be her, to be the one who showed others where to look for beauty in the garbage and the seaweed. Because I saw it, too. More than three decades later, I am still blinded by the beautiful in chaos, in clutter, in the flawed, the noisy, and the broken.

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Seth Jani – Five Poems

I think of beauty as a superfluous grace. It’s an unpredictable and spectral light born out of our perceptions. It livens and freshens. It need not have any calculable form or ethical value. It can appear differently to each individual. A symbiosis between the world and the perceiver.

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Mary Ellen Talley – Three Poems

First, I conjure visual beauty, the paintings I share with children as an art docent in my granddaughter’s class and some amazing photos that friends share over social media. I’ve become aware recently how photos get doctored and how famous art has faded. Visual beauty changes across time. Acoustic and linguistic beauty changes less.

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Kelly Cherry – Two Poems

The more deeply we think about our world, the stronger we feel about it. We experience the world’s pain. We experience the artist’s pain, the scientist’s pain, the child or parent’s pain. And this pain, which resides in our hearts and souls and even our bodies, gives rise to joy.

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Joy Riggs – Interlude

I often find beauty when I’m not actively seeking it. It’s like glancing sideways at a star. I take my dog out for a walk in the frosty January morning and look up to see brilliant streaks of pink and orange announce the rising of the sun.

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Chris Hardy – Five Poems

If you say the night, or a woman, is beautiful you mean more than ‘attractive’ or ‘appealing’. Beauty contains those concepts but is deeper and wider. Something that is beautiful is mesmerising, inspiring an emotional response that leads to reflection and even revelation.

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Joan Leotta – Three Poems

Beauty is an idea, a seed planted watered and that blooms only in an abundance of love. Kindness, compassion, truth, and the twins justice and mercy, cultivate her. The measure each of these gives to her care shapes and forms her within the soul.

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Eva Wong Nava – The Everlasting Face

To capture beauty is to restrain its infinity, its abundance and its multiplicity. My story is about the transience of beauty as manifested by Antonio’s successive failure at capturing his lover’s face. What we have left of beautiful things is their essence and our memories of their existence but even that eludes most of us sometimes.

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Kaori Fujimoto – Pints of Beer

I believe beauty is something we each have deep within and surrender to, rather than create. It is the affirmation of the self that loves and hates, and lives well and badly, at his/her/its own discretion. And anything created out of such beauty moves people, sometimes to the extent of changing their lives so that they will embark on the journey back to their own beauty.

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Elizabeth Spencer Spragins – Five Poems

Beauty revealed through music, art, or literature can catch our breath in such a way that time stills and we want to linger in that moment. Thus, for the span of a heartbeat, harmony with ourselves, with each other, and with our world prevails. That is the magic, and the power, of artistic expression.

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Jeffrey F Barken – Tucked In

Our concept of beauty stems from our consciousness of the passing of time. The five senses guide us through our days and every so often a composite image, person, or scene has the capacity to activate our emotions and blind us with desire.

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Kim Whysall-Hammond – Two Poems

Beauty is something that grasps and transfixes me. I stop to stare at the way a chickens feathers catch the light. I point out the rainbows contained in the roadside oil spill. Many sunsets are colourful, but some truly arrest my attention, so that I cannot stop looking at them. This is, I admit, a grave problem on my evening drive home.

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John Richmond – Good Clean Fun

For humans, beauty is chance and randomness, but, still, even without our witness, beauty is forever present. It is made from the various combinations that exist within and around us, and just as the possibility of experiencing beauty is a function of the aforementioned, so too is its creation.

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Jan Day – Three Poems

Through some unknown process, it gives our spirit a reason to grow and understand more, to find our own creativity and fire. It’s then we begin to feel a greater spiritual connection to beauty, manmade or natural.

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Sneha Subramanian Kanta – Three Poems

Beauty cascades from in between curtain pores as the first rays of sun pass through. It resides in the folds and gaps of lovers holding hands, in the comfortable silence that passes between their souls. There is beauty in the dust jacket books, signed by an unknown person for his beloved, in the way he dots his ‘i’s’ and puts a dash on the ‘t’.

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Matthew Friday – Three Poems

Under a leaning yellow willow tree, a Czech woman in a red coat sits still, staring into her Sixties, long black hair like the fine, forlorn branches, tickled by cold March fingers. Two boys walk past, just cubs testing strength: elbowing and flicking each other; never still with never-men giggles.

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Diana Lee Mazor – Four Poems

It is hearing rain falling after a drought, the sound of a donkey’s braying, the scent of cardamom and cloves, the sight of the first slim green fingers of new grass in Spring, the knowing that old scripts in one’s mind are being replaced by new ones.

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Cordelia M. Hanemann – Three Poems

It derives from the gifts of the universe and the gifts we give back. Beauty in its complexity moves us to celebrate life in its vagaries; its simplicity and resonant harmony enables delight and understanding, our making peace, our moving forward.

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Peggy Turnbull – The Pilgrimage Home

I wept when I heard Brahms’ Requiem. Beauty pierced me, tears flowed. My stomach dropped when I watched the Joffrey Ballet. The empty space was filled with awe. We think our responses to beauty are personal, individual, but they are not. The shared experience of beauty links us to other humans.

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Peggy R. Ellsberg – Four Poems

On a bright but cool summer morning, my father is casting a fly rod out over the pond, his fishline arcing across the napoleon-blue sky; Shubert’s “Trout Quintet” swims softly from an open window; in a nearby field, my beautiful horse with the golden mane stops grazing and stands at ease, his ears relaxed as he connects effortlessly with the music, and I know that he is at prayer.

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CJ Muchhala – Four Poems

When I’m open to it, all my senses are engaged and combine to create an experience beyond each individual sense. In my work I try to recreate, not the subject, but that effect, which is beauty. This planet is its epitome.

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Ashley Parker Owens – Five Digital Collages

I’m a sky watcher. I’m looking for aliens, but what I get from the experience is a rabid awe and excitement of something new, visitors from another realm. While the images I present are not meant to be aliens, I hope to capture the beauty and acceptance of the unknown.

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Erin Wilson- Three Poems

I found art. I found language. I found essence in the natural world fortifying itself into form. I don’t know how I did — a lucky sequence of accidents, I guess. But when I saw beauty pushing up and into moments, I was startled alert. Alert and activated. Hungry for what feels divine.

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Anthony ILacqua – Funeral Tea

What I do know about complex things like beauty is this: when we reach the silence of ourselves, and really listen to it, I hope it becomes an instant which spawns enlightenment, clarity and comprehension.

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Beth Copeland – Five Poems

Beauty is found in the paradox of the ephemeral and the eternal: of flesh and spirit, of breath and bone, of the broken and the whole, of the flower and the stone.

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Kate Lemery – Cecilia and the Seurat

True beauty is recognized by a physical change in us – a quickening of the pulse, a short intake of breath, a jolt of excitement followed by deep tranquility. Beauty inspires lofty thoughts and provides joy upon remembrance.

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Darren C. Demaree – Three Poems

It strikes me that I write poetry the same way my four-year-old boy drinks grape pop. I love the taste of it, the mess of it, the attempt to control it, and once it’s done I love to talk about it all happened. I have other, bigger picture thoughts on poetry, but right now I’m enjoying the delightfulness of this idea.

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James Owens – From the French of Rilke

Beauty is mystical in the strict sense — that is, it is knowable by direct experience that inspires awe and fascination, without necessarily being susceptible to definition — and also involves the notion of limit. Only that which comes to an end is beautiful.

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Nina R. Alonso – Double Rainbows, Translation for Mortals

Part of what we do as writers and artists is generate and focus perception. At times it’s an ordinary thing that catches me, the amazing shape of a strawberry. And what about the textures of music and dance, the emotional angle of a painted glance, words that express what’s beyond words?

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Karen Greenbaum-Maya – Five Photographs

I take photos to honor the beautiful moment that no one else notices. A psychoanalyst friend thinks that beauty is proof of God’s love. His God is kinder than mine; for me, beauty is recompense for being human in the face of God’s love, which surpasses my little understanding. Beauty shows the connection between inside and outside, the possibility of human wholeness in the indifferent world, the grace of getting a cosmic joke.

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Alex Evans – Baptism

the sort of beauty that intrigues me is a smaller, more skittish idea. It’s something that appears in unexpected moments and disappears before it can be adequately captured. It is subtle, intangible, and easily missed.

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Ruth Asch – Three Poems

It is seen in the loveliness everywhere around us, heard in inspired music, felt when we witness a noble deed, when we experience ecstatic or self-forgetful love. Beauty is not different for the sake of it, though it often seems to strain at the boundaries it heals rather than breaks, but wherever it is found we feel uniqueness, a specialness (even if it is the nth sunset we have seen!) which is the mark of the personal… for me, beauty is the breath of God flowing through his creation.

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Anna Evans – Five Poems

Can poems about a famous disaster which caused a tragic loss of life truly be called beautiful? In contemplating this question, I am reminded of two very different poems. The first is an excerpt from a poem by the fictional Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, which begins “The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.”

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