Category: Poetry

my color is Red

says the star Antares

scorpio stings one thousand deaths

leaving a breathless body

to rot in the desert

her eyes see through you

her eyes fill your soul with fear

she holds her composure

this is really the true light in her

they think it’s dangerous

it’s her only protection

from the raging sea

the storm forms a swell,

that sucks the anger from within

when she opens her eyes

her star is shining

brighter than the sun

Antares looks over her

like a protector

with a shield

the battle is over

the sting subsides

her color is still Red

and the bitch within

can finally breathe

Now we turn inward to the quiet mind,

oasis of green in a vast expanse,

blown into dunes by a warm desert wind,

each grain of sand in its own special dance.

From the face of the Earth the thin veil slips,

our protection for eons is no more.    

Some fear the imminent apocalypse,

Earth has been treated as a common whore.

Where is the reverence for our Mother

who has cared for us through millennia?

To whom should we turn? There is no other.

How to rid mankind of this mania?

Our chances for recovery seem slim,

yet, She fills our cup again to the brim.

Victoria Moo Briddell was born and grew up in South Africa before emigrating to the United States. After graduation from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree, she taught English in Ecuador. She married Don Briddell in 1969 and together they travelled to India for further studies at the Yoga Vedanta Forest Academy of Sivananda Ashram, graduating with a Yoga Acharya degree in 1971.

She lives in Maryland where she and her husband run Overboard Art, Inc. She teaches Yoga in the Frederick area and participates in two Maryland writing groups as well as several writing workshops each year. She published her first book, “Looking Out from Within” – Living Yoga with the Saints and Sages of India (available on Amazon) in December 2018. She also loves gardening, reading, meditation, walking with friends and spending time with her children and grandchildren.

I dance upon the darkness

My beauty burns the night

My life is birthed from embers

In blackness….I am light

I leap and dance each time I rise

From my sprite-hearted rest

Balletic movements, yellow eyes

My ornaments from fe’st

My frenzy show of fury

In truth, I create calm

I pray upward to heaven

And touch God with my palms

I’m flaming ambidextrous

With prism heated hues

I soar to highest pinnacle

From orange, to red, to blue

I rage with haunting elegance

Inferno breathes me higher

When born of earthly elements

I am God-given fire

Dr. Robin Witmer-Kline, Ph.D., LPC, C-PD is a full-time Psychology Faculty member at Hagerstown Community College.She also is a licensed clinical psychotherapist and Certified Personality Disorder clinician in the state of Pennsylvania with over 25 years clinical and teaching experience.Dr. Witmer-Kline earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Christian Psychology and combined her faith and her love of psychology and poetry for her dissertation in which she examined poetry therapy and faith’s effects on reminiscence, mood, cognition, and self-esteem in the elderly.She lives in Greencastle, Pennsylvania with her husband and family.

Once earth has pressed against my lips

And veiled my eyes sublime

Will face, or speech, or scented skin

Bring thoughts of me to mind

Will every there be thoughts of me,

That pause your steps awhile?

And search your mind, so thoroughly

To reconstruct my smile.

Dr. Robin Witmer-Kline, Ph.D., LPC, C-PD is a full-time Psychology Faculty member at Hagerstown Community College.She also is a licensed clinical psychotherapist and Certified Personality Disorder clinician in the state of Pennsylvania with over 25 years clinical and teaching experience.Dr. Witmer-Kline earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Christian Psychology and combined her faith and her love of psychology and poetry for her dissertation in which she examined poetry therapy and faith’s effects on reminiscence, mood, cognition, and self-esteem in the elderly.She lives in Greencastle, Pennsylvania with her husband and family.

I guess Methodist you could say,

struggling to remember more

than echoes of crowded church basements

& Jesus Loves Me & flannel-

board stories told by high-voiced pious cousins

and black-veiled made-up aunts

who always dusted their chairs before sitting down.

.

& Grandma’s—on Monday, the wash; Tuesday,

the ironing (two whole days attending to

maintenance of a meager cache of

linens and clothing, each piece handled

to last, mended when it seemed tempted

to fray away); Wednesdays, the baking, bread

and pies of whatever fruits were in season;

Thursdays, groceries, a trek to the Red & White; Fridays,

cleaning for whatever company might show; Saturdays

the odds & ends of tasks & maybe a trip to town;

and Sundays again

with the old ladies in the cold, damp suspicions

of basement rooms. Everyday there were other

things too, but set within an order…methodically,

& the men out there somewhere doing whatever

men do, and coming home on time for meals

and naps, and always seeing that the women

had a ride to and from church on Wednesdays

& Sundays & feeling saved themselves doing

their duties so regularly

.

& Mom in a factory, day in day out; life unorganized,

guilty Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, guilty

Thursday, Friday & Saturday, and especially guilty

Sunday & no man

to drive her to and from

.

So, yes, I guess you’d say Methodist.

At least that’s what I most

remember.

Sandra Inskeep-Fox is a poet, an independent scholar and co-owner of Dorley House books in Clear Spring, Maryland.  Sandra writes poetry, short stories, essays, and keeps voluminous journals. She has been published in the Chaffin Review, Facet, Cimarron Review, Commonweal Magazine, The Big Two-Hearted Review, the Aurorean, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany and others.  She won several contests, including the 1^st annual Marquette Monthly Short Story contest, and received Honorable mention in the Best of Ohio writers contests in 2001, 2004 and 2005. She is currently working to complete a manuscript on the creative process of Virginia Woolf and a manuscript of her own Bloomsbury-inspired poetry.

Old ladies lugging coffee mugs,

Books, lotions, phones,

Bundles of papers,

Come early to the pool.

Fabulous flopping hats shading

Faces: wrinkled, grooved, smiling.

They recognize each other, a certain sisterhood

Of easy hello-ing,

A common inclination to come together here before the crowd

Staking out preferences, arranging belongings, claiming

Some unencumbered space of sun.

.

Nora Ephron said hair dye

Changed everything for women,

50 now the new 30

Means L’Oreal would set me back

More than $16.50

As I wonder through this sisterhood

Of colorful, fading shadows.

.

Lord knows where our families are,

Still sleeping perhaps,

Husbands on patios engrossed in the morning news or maybe

No longer even alive to this glaring, golden day;

Daughters now middle-aged, themselves groggy with the day

And only just behind them.

Nubile granddaughters with their incessant “I’m like”

Me, me, me all day, everyday.

.

We come to the pool early,

The flotsam rubbish

Of other lives strewn on the ocean’s craters

Between this pool and the first time we

Skinny-dipped in that long-ago cool, green lake.

Alone with each other we relax, stroke lotions

Over the atlas of well-traveled bodies, and stretch out

In the early sunlight,

Shielded  under these great flopping hats of hope,

Flaunting what we have

Before, in the slim and agile presence

Of the young,

we vanish into cooler shadows.

Sandra Inskeep-Fox is a poet, an independent scholar and co-owner of Dorley House books in Clear Spring, Maryland.  Sandra writes poetry, short stories, essays, and keeps voluminous journals. She has been published in the Chaffin Review, Facet, Cimarron Review, Commonweal Magazine, The Big Two-Hearted Review, the Aurorean, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany and others.  She won several contests, including the 1^st annual Marquette Monthly Short Story contest, and received Honorable mention in the Best of Ohio writers contests in 2001, 2004 and 2005. She is currently working to complete a manuscript on the creative process of Virginia Woolf and a manuscript of her own Bloomsbury-inspired poetry.

(for mom)

I see you in the distance, moving along the curve

That Lake Superior has carved from the land.

I hear only the endless succession of waves lapping

And the constant wind rushing. I see no one else

On the beach but you, walking away from me,

Walking, head down, looking at the rocks smoothed

By millennia on the beach. You stop from time

To time, pick up one of these rocks, turn it

In your hand, examine it more closely, and

If you like this find, you put it in the plastic

Jug you carry. We are collecting stones.

Supposedly, we are looking for agates or

Greenstones to polish later. But really

we are just collecting pretty stones.

And more importantly,

We are just walking on the beach.

.

Years later, when you are in the house where you will die,

I rummage through the detritus of your life, the collected stuff

That seems as endless as the waves that lap upon the shore.

In the hallway to the garage cramped by collected bottles,

Broken appliances, and trash bags, I find a plastic jug filled

With pretty stones, some agates, all no more polished

Than the day you picked them up

And we walked the beach together.

Eric Schwartz has been teaching political science and other subjects at Hagerstown Community College since 2012. Prior to college teaching, he was a newspaper reporter and editor for about 20 years, working mainly in the northeast USA. He now lives with his wife, Margaret Yaukey, in Williamsport, MD. 

Two women, branded crone and slut,

our commonality our hung baskets

of surprise fruit each in different phases

of ripeness. I speak. Hushed, but fierce:

brilliant words about justice,

about coiled rainbows within tight spaces,

how they’ll unfurl band by band

how every balled up woman

will witness these colours of resistance

even as we pound, pound from within

our arks, one by one, drumming

on planks an incantation for fresh rain.

She grabs my hand, pulls it

to her taut belly.

Commands me to feel the sandstorm.

Cause grains are gonna fly, baby!

The mustard colored coat,

You always used to wear.

The red beaded dress,

That gave you such a flare.

That little pink cowboy hat

That smells like your shampoo.

Those gold buckled 3-inch heels,

I used to steal from you.

I’m standing in your closet,

Wearing your green cardigan;

Thinking I’d give it all away,

If I could just see you again.

Jane Dibble is a staff member at HCC. Jane developed a love of literature while attending community college and went on to earn a B.A. in English from St. Mary’s College of MD. Her writing is influenced by the works of great poets such as Emily Dickinson and Nikki Giovanni

It’s common wisdom, a chestnut of chastity,

this belt and suspenders, this notion

that we lose a piece of our soul

to every partner whose body we caress—

no, no, they say, we give it away as though

it was a party favor, bits of soul like bits

of glitter or little sugared candies in pastel

balls of netting, flints of our self, falling

stars knocked out of place in the night sky

…but wait, I must interrupt to ask a burning

celestial question of soul and heart, of lovers

who have only seen starry nights (and days)

with each other if they too took pieces

of each other’s soul each time they sighed

in those arms, if this is what love is,

the wearing down and rendering into dust,

a dwindling of the cosmic, the supernova,

or if that’s Cassiopeia winking at us now,

at our Earthly silliness and the stellar strength

we draw in the breaths we take from each other.

Jessica Gregg is a Baltimore-based poet, former journalist, and proud rowhouse dweller. Her work has appeared in Broadkill Review, Delmarva Review, Global Poemic, Rise Up Review, and the Under Review, among other publications.