Month: December 2018

Ruth Asch – Five Poems

There are no short cuts to real, living Beauty in this world. Compared to Beauty, there is nothing so helpless, or so powerful.

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Anne Whitehouse – Six Poems

Is beauty the product or the process? At one time in my life, I would have emphasized the beautiful object. While the circumstances that produce a work of art may be anything but beautiful, it makes no difference to the end result. I still believe this, but as I have gotten older, I find myself increasingly drawn to the beauty of the process.

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A Temple of Iron – Our 2018 Pushcart Nominations

So there I was, minding my own business, lifting heavy things and putting them back down. I had abandoned the bear cave for an iron temple of my own making. And Brodin had turned his countenance towards this new temple, and he smiled upon it, and he blessed it for the sacred gainz and for the pursuit of the Swole. Wheymen.

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Olivier Schopfer – Landscapes

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ~Rachel Carson

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Stephanie JT Russell – Five Poems

Poets are archaeologists, charged with excavating beauty from ruins. We are watchkeepers of human frailty and catastrophes, the infirmities of age, the inevitability of death. We point to the hidden tenderness of a rusted Edsel wedged in fields of yarrow, an apple made more beautiful by a spreading bruise. We dare ask, again and again, why we don’t understand what beauty is, but are compelled to seek out its most unexpected, least obvious arising.

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Michael Skau – Three Poems

Drunk as Adam and Eve, hornets
and bees gorge on the cider of bruised apples
at Fall’s bar even as the purpled dusk calls
out closing time, oblivious of the flight
home’s erratic traffic and nighthawk patrols.

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Katherine Smith – Six Poems

Beauty smelled of tannin and it looked like the Hiwassee River and it sounded like Lucinda Williams singing “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.”  Beauty is a real place I can touch in this world.

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