Month: April 2017

Diane Lee Moomey – Three Poems

I call it “Beauty” when something stops me in mid-sentence, when the only words I can find are oh, yes. “It” can be almost anything: a curious slant of light on dark clouds, tide-drawn lines on the sand, a pencil line drawn just so on paper, a passage of music, two colors next to each other.

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Karen Ginther Graham – Rose Chintz

I meander through a terrain of browns and greens amid a dappled blue and white sky. My fingers brush tall grasses and wild flowers still wet with morning dew. I hear a symphony of birdsong and inhale the scent of pine wafting on a fresh breeze.

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Judith Skillman – Five Paintings

Beauty equals light, and vice versa. To capture sunlight in motion as waves in bodies of water bounded by sand, shoreline, island, spit, or any number of other natural boundaries, provides a strong motivation for the act of creation. The process of a painting is driven at first by experimentation with colors that mimic the rep shot.

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John C. Mannone – Five Poems

I see beauty in everything. It’s easy for the natural world to bear witness to this: the smell of rain, a bejeweled night sky, the way a fallen leaf curls on the ground.

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Jessie Seigel – The Words Strike Back

I am not drawn to the familiar but to that which is different, whether a different geography, a different culture, or a different perspective; that is, a different way of seeing. For me, in writing, it is beautiful to make the empathetic leap, living in someone else’s skin for a while.

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Kyle Hemmings – Five Photographs

My earliest recollections of beauty were from when I was very young, perhaps only a few years old. I had a physical reaction to certain images or to colors. I became entranced and immobile, immersed in my sense impressions of the outer world invading the inner.

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Rebeca Parrott – Four Poems

Defining beauty is as inspiring as it is troubling. Despite the desire to infuse beauty into every poem, poets too are baffled by the challenge. Beauty exists—objectively and subjectively. Beauty can be seen, heard, and felt.

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Sonia Saikaley – The Bird’s Nest

Beauty consists of layers of memories and colors as vivid as a sunset after a busy day or as distant as the mountains of my parents’ village in Lebanon. I remember a colleague placing a beautiful bouquet of flowers at my desk when I returned to work after my father’s death. Grief made me sluggish but that beautiful arrangement helped me make it through that first day back at work.

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Catherine Moore – Three Poems

I love the souls who find beauty everywhere. Like in William Carlos Williams’ poem “Between Walls” the speaker describes a particular image, in a passageway by the “back wings” of a hospital. The setting is one of those barely acknowledged places, trashy parts of everyday life in urban societies, a place “where nothing will grow.”

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Foster Trecost – Bridges Are A Lot Like Long Corridors

The boy took a shell from the unbroken pile. “Look at this shell. It’s perfect, without a single flaw. It’s shiny and smooth, no cracks or chips. It doesn’t remind me of anyone I know. But this shell,” he said, taking one from the other pile, “is like the people in our village, this shell is like us. There are rough edges, and deep cracks. It wears the scars of a full life, yet it is still a shell. To me, this shell is more beautiful than all the others.”

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Patty Somlo – Home at the Beach

In the afternoon, sunlight hits the clear water and the rocks underneath, coloring them golden. When I gaze at the spot and then turn to look further upstream, where some Sierra peak stands in the background, I know this soars to the spiritual realm that classifies as beauty, because every way I try to describe it misses the mark.

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Kevin Davila – Nirvana

“The most musical moment” is trying to fill us up with something meaningful and everlasting, and it is trying to create, and gift us, what is probably one of our most precious possessions, a memory.

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Victoria Crawford – Four Poems

A moment of perception occurs and a glimpse of beauty caught in the seemingly unrelated. Unexpected insights reveal the entirety in the part; we have the grace of being able to experience the segment while simultaneously dreaming of the whole.

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Tim Kahl – Four Poems

Beauty is that elusive bird that I don’t quite believe in, but I have to know is out there, that ivory-billed woodpecker thought to be extinct for 50 years but turns up in the Arkansas hinterlands.

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Ingrid Bruck – Five Poems

To find beauty I step outside and stay open. I walk, tend wildflowers and vegetables, feed the birds. I watch and wait, then go inside and write haiku and Japanese short forms. I find consolation in the beauty and grace of nature. When I see something beautiful, I want to share it in a poem.

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Elizabeth Jaeger – Mattituck

Beauty is kindness. It it the boy that holds out his hand to the bullied child on the playground. It is the man who buys lunch for the homeless. It is woman who rescues animals. The parents that open their hearts to an orphan. The community that embraces refugees. The girl who raises her voice to protect the weak. Beauty is the smiles that are sustained during the storm.

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Claire J Bateman – Five Paintings

If its presence doesn’t disturb, disrupt, confound the soul, even while setting it at rest, it isn’t beauty.
If it doesn’t have something to do with love, it isn’t beauty.

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Maria Rouphail – Five Poems

Poetry is a way of speaking directly to the world. It is perhaps the most basic of the arts, as it comes out of the heart of the poet’s experience. Poetry enables the inner life of the artist to be transferred to and shared with the greater world. The shared object is the poem itself. There is no other thing than the poem.

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Harshal Desai – The Ocean of Time

The key aspect of time is its eternal beauty, experienced by us in short snippets if we are perceptive of our present time. If we focus much on the beauty of the past, or the beauty to come in the future, we would fail to see and experience the current moments of beauty surrounding us.

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Brian Koester – Five Poems

I couldn’t say what constitutes beauty, but on some level beauty constitutes everything. Writing poetry, I don’t feel so much like I’m creating beauty as channeling it, presenting the beauty inherent in the language and the content.

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Lavinia Kumar – Four Poems

There are moments when beauty suddenly strikes, a new woodpecker at the feeder, the lonely awk…awk…awk of a single goose on a pond, an early morning mist over hundreds of geese on that same pond, the quiet stalking of an egret in a brackish inlet near the sea, a red dawn sky revealed when you pull up the blinds, a row of nearly-blooming cherry trees.

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Pat Hanahoe-Dosch – Hearts

I see beauty in groups of women marching en masse in Washington, D.C., peacefully, passionately, wearing pink ‘Pussy Hats,’ while waving witty signs. Beauty is being able to breathe the still unpolluted air, before the EPA is completely gutted, on a walk through a National Park that hasn’t yet been closed or sold to a corporation for drilling rights, knowing this is perhaps a fleeting pleasure.

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Jesse Glass – Carroll County Anthology

There was a small stream cutting through our property back Snydersburg Road. When I was nine years old, or so, I found an arrowhead in the gravel by the stream. When I washed it in the water, I could see the delicate flaking of the thing as a network of lights and shimmering darks, and I found this ancient piece of worked stone to be beautiful.

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Andrew Lovely – Five Songs

Andrew Lovely, also known as Icarus, is a Greco-American musician and poet currently residing in Athens, Greece. These and other songs are available at icarustapes.bandcamp.com

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Cameron Morse – Two Poems

Water, one winter morning, awakens. Dew glistens on fallen leaves. A breeze lays her damp washcloth across my forehead. I’m still in the fever of my boyhood, sweating out cinematic nightmares below the comforter, the ceiling full of green stars.

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Elizabeth Reames – Two Poems

In a perfect world, I think that there would be a camera that sees the soul of a person, instead of just the outer layer—the camera of choice for magazine ads. That way, we would know if what we are looking at on televisions and in magazines is actually beautiful.

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Kate Garrett – Two Poems

Beauty is usually found between flaws and surprises. Beauty isn’t an ideal for me to chase, or an aspiration. It’s something you find by chance, or in an unexpected place, not by searching or questing for it.

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Mary Maroste – Two Poems

The natural world will continue to portray beauty whether or not anyone cares. Thus, as a poet, I try to make myself care and pay attention, I try to see the world differently so that I can truly interact with nature and life outside of myself.

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Lana Faith Call – Four Poems

Beauty lives in small things. In the shape and shadow of lean back muscles under his skin. In the helix of birch-tree branches exploring the upper reaches of their sky. In the feminine s-curve mouth of a teapot. Maybe that’s why my poems tend to be smaller than average. I love to discover the ways in which the most majestic of things – continents and gods and love eternal – etch their marks on the smallest of surfaces.

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Harshal Desai – Five Photographs

And just like in life, one cannot chase after such beauty. I can’t go out hunting for these images. Beauty is like a fluttering butterfly, if you chase it, it will perennially elude you, but if you stay calm and immerse in your environment, the butterfly will come closer and allow you to experience its magnificence.

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Don Zirilli – Five Poems

If you look hard at sorrow without giving up on life, you will see beauty. You will see that sorrow is only possible if you have a deep connection to something outside of yourself, and beauty is the manifestation of that connection to your perception. So, yes, beauty is also in joy, because joy is the immersion in that connection.

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Robin Wright – Five Poems

What surprises me is when I find beauty in unusual places like the grace of two delivery men, the lonely sound of a train whistle, or the thought of laundry on a clothesline having human emotions. As a poet, I feel I must always be open to what the world will offer, so that I may respond with words I hope will encompass the beauty in front of me.

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Trent Walters – Four Poems

Poetry places limits on the fractal metaphor, so you can only zoom down to, say, the word or sounds where they interplay at the sensory and sense levels, where they contradict and confirm. Pulling back to the lines, you witness the interplay within and between.

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