First Tires on Fresh Snow
Emily Jensen
First tires on fresh snow, midnight December. Not deep enough for danger, just enough to enchant the world white. Headlight beams, silver cast, throw back tiny glass reflections. Silence glistens cold outside, and I am smitten by every offering.
Emily Feuz Jensen holds a BS in Creative Writing from Utah State University and an MFA from Seattle Pacific University. She currently teaches a community creative writing course through Utah State University. Her work has previously appeared in Literary Mama, Exponent II, Reservoir Road, and Cauldron Anthology. When she’s not writing, she spends time wrangling her three children, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
Making Bread
Lisa M. Johnson
You are the salt of the earth. Matthew 5:13
A meal without bread— that is a memory I cannot remember. Childhood sundays spent at MaMa Miceli's table; so large, we’d squeeze behind the chairs, then shimmy down into our seats. The women found sitting long after the others left, eating the left-over french bread, like baked doughed dessert— the discarded crusty pieces begging me to eye them from their shiny sheet pan. I’d assure them, I’m always here for you. One day, I woke to that sunday dinner smell and the gift of homemade bread that my daughter baked while I slept, as she fought the Korean clock that was still winning her sleep. There is nothing like the scent of comfort, a smell that brings the memories flooding back, kneading into our present moment. I licked my licking finger and pressed the crumbs— my favorites, then touched my tongue. I leave some in the open cookbook as a reminder that life is often messy and provision is here— both and always. I twice made my own matzah, because in the spring of the pandemic, I had a little flour and water, even if the grocery was closed. I press down deep to thin the dough— piercing it with fork in hand; a devastation I was not prepared for. Feeling the weight of Jesus' body in my hands— my hands doing the work; the crushing, bruising and the piercing, making some places so very thin. So thin, that his light shines through, even in suffering. At the mercy of my flour covered fists, I take it slow— letting the light in. Holding the body today for Holy Candlelight, it breaks, or maybe I crush it gently between my fingers just to feel the breaking snap. And I smell the weight of words. Words spoken, words penned and kneaded over and over again through ages— My body, (birthed and) broken for you. I ask the words how they felt at that last meal. I think about the Palestine women now thinning rationed noodle; stretched bread– crumbs. Silence, mine to hold, I whisper thanksgiving. And smell again— comfort; saying yes to broken places, bread-filled places, and light-filled spaces.
Lisa M. Johnson is a retired Italian grandmother, mentor and poetry writer. She enjoys discovering rest, healthy rhythms and healing through grief therapy, story-work and time in her garden. Other published works are included in the Publish Her Press Anthology, The Way Back To Ourselves, Vessels of Light and Calla Press Literary Journals. Find her on Instagram @lisamicelijohnson and Substack at In The Quiet/Lisa M. Johnson.
Lazarus
Noel Julnes-Dehner
Lazarus
Come forth –The Gospel according to John (11:43)
Tear off your breathing tube,
its stale air pumping into
your damaged heart,
and breathe in Christmas Eve,
ever green, you whooping
over your new train set, and
big sister me pulling out the
magic trick set I begged for.
I’ll make you disappear, I threatened
in my best magician voice,
which haunts me now as you lie entombed
in the intensive care unit, motionless,
except for the ventilator and heart machine.
Come back, I cry.
Part of the first wave of women ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, Noel Julnes-Dehner has served in parishes, extra-parochial settings, and co-founded a reading camp for struggling readers. She has made documentary films broadcast on television, film festivals, and been published in Sojourners, Minerva: Quarterly Report, Forward Movement, and Ekphrastic Review.
Stone Falls
Alexandria Marianne Leon
Hours of endless cries. Tear-streaked faces. Fists knotted, embers under skin. A sharp stone — hurled from my own hand. My voice ablaze; their silence heavy in the room. Eyes wide — mirrors breaking. Arms like wings, sheltering them close: a frail nest against my stones. Salt and tears mingling. Small palms open, forgiveness breathed into hair. Stones of my own voice circle me like Pharisees — guilty. sinner. condemned. Rachel weeps, and my lullaby joins her cry. Shame presses, breath falters, ribs harden against my chest. He stoops low: a finger writes in dust, tracing mercy into earth. You have heard, O mother, you have heard, keeper of law within: the stones you lift are jagged names — impatient, unworthy, unfit. But what did he write in dust? Not her shame, but mercy. He bends low — not shame but my name, and the lullaby I could not finish rises in my chest, mercy breathed into flesh. He calls me his own. Stone falls — the circle is broken. I rise, uncondemned.
Alexandria Marianne Leon is a poet and mother of two based in Oregon. Her work explores themes of faith, motherhood, and the intersection of grief and hope. She draws on lived experience and scripture to weave poems rooted in the body, memory, and the divine. Her writing has been submitted to journals such as Ekstasis and The Windhover.
The Return of the Advent Bird (on the death of Mandela, Advent 2013)
Joe Martyn Ricke
Father heard a bird one morning, from his lonely cell, "Madiba, O Madiba” she’s singing, Freedom what she tells. Singing, “Father lift your weary eyes, Father, make your old heart new, Sweet the soul that longs for freedom, Madiba, Thembalethu” Can we risk the cost of mercy After living living hell? Is the bird of hope still singing? Madiba, I cannot tell. Singing,“Children lift your lovely heads Children, make the old world new. Dance the dance of Nozibele, Rolihlahla, Thembalethu Father heard a bird one morning, from his lonely cell “Madiba, O Madiba” she singing Madiba, Thembalethu.* *Xhosa words
Joe Martyn Ricke is a poet, singer/songwriter, and essayist, now living in Seguin, Texas. His mother fancied herself a poet, his father bought him the Encylopedia Britannica, and his teachers at St. Anthony’s Catholic taught him (or tried) to think and care. He left university teaching in 2020 to write full-time. His poems have been published in Presence, Ruminate, Relief, Wisconsin Review, Cathexis Northwest Review, Cresset, Assisi, The Other Journal, other journals and in the anthology New Crops from Old Fields: Eight Medievalist Poets. His album, Little Clarissa and Other Stories, is available on “all the platforms.”
Ancestral Affirmations
Richard Stimack
This is an invocation of my ancestors.
of the past generations who generated my present,
in the same way that I, in my present generation, live
until I become an ancestor who generates another generation.
There is no future, only a past manifest in the present, forever, amen.
I do not come from kings.
I come from peasants
who moistened land with the sweat of their brow,
who buried afterbirth beneath birch trees,
who mourned newborns dead in their first year,
who watched solders’ boots trample crops,
who heeded priests’ warnings of submission or hell,
who bent their backs before the landowner,
who put their faith in emperors and patriarchs,
who grew tired of endless labor and boarded steamers to America,
a land more myth in the empty spaces of the map than a country with its own homegrown suffering.
They are good enough for me.
They stepped onto thick-beamed docks in New Orleans
where Irish stevedores and Creole shopkeepers
measured them as nothing more than cargo to consume
then toss as trash back into the brown river
in its final few miles to the brackish sea.
This is an invocation
of my ancestors,
of fathers who coughed out their lungs,
of mothers abandoned with children to feed,
of old men and women starved in their dotage,
of young men returned from war left to stand in bread lines,
of young women hired as house girls, raped, and put to the streets.
Who am I to despair
with great-grandfathers who breathed in lead of Missouri’s St. Francois mountains or the coal dust exhumed from beneath Illinois’s Great Prairie,
with great-grandmothers who boiled thin cabbage broth,
with grandfathers who stood on picket lines,
with grandmothers who kept a clean union house,
with a father who served in Vietnam only to return to a country that did not want him back,
with a mother who died at fifty-nine with the burden her grandchildren would only know her name, like a crone in a fairy tale read to children, then forgotten?
Who am I to despair?
Who am I to despair
my time of wars and rumors of wars,
my time of famines and news of famines,
my time of migrations and reports of migrations,
my time fat and wealth and solid roof,
my time of medications and arthritic hips,
my time of indulgent pessimism,
my time infinite wants,
my time of leisure to write these lines and call them art?
This is an invocation
of my ancestors
who are not dead,
who build their homes
deep inside the marrow of my bones.
Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), two poetry chapbooks, and one flash fiction chapbook. In his work, Richard explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region. He invites you to follow his poetry Facebook page: “Richard Stimac poet”.
Advent
Chuck Collins
to think He came under the arch of lights thrust abruptly into time while the world waited, sleepily drifting in and out of hope delayed stepping into our trembling, held in a mother’s clutch love at love’s breast the flutter of innocence calmed with a touch and gentle, happy murmur creation breathes now having held for this moment, barn animals and trees recognize what humans don’t, the frenetic pace continues around a stable of rest it never leaves Him, the blood of childbirth, not until the pain of crucified anguish abruptly stops with a breath, to arrange the furniture for glory
Chuck Collins is a retired minister who spends his days teaching 7th and 8th grade poetry composition at a wonderful Christian classical school. Four of his eight grandchildren attend this school. He and Ellen, his wife of 46 years, live in Houston. Chuck is a published and awarded poet and short story writer, and the author of several books on the history and theology of the Church of England.