A Magazine of Many Arts

Mary Soon Lee

At the center of all things,
a fountain in a garden.

Five yards from the center,
beneath a willow tree,
Ling Hua, Empress of China,
sat cross-legged
listening to the water
chattering to itself
in the hour after dawn,
the hour of consecration.

Her left knee ached.
She wished for her youth, long gone;
wished for a cup of green tea;
wished she could sail
right round the Earth's rim,
to see, as the great navigators had,
the line where ocean became sky.

A sparrow hopped onto the stone wall
of the fountain, bent down,
splashed busily.

Ling Hua, Empress of China,
watched the sparrow
while she sat beneath the tree,
five yards from the center of all things
(according to the astronomers' measurements),
that small separation a token
of her own imperfection.

For the stars and the sun and the moon
swept each in their perfect courses
around Earth's great disc,
but all who were born of women
were fallible.

Three hundred and eighty-two years
since China proved that it centered
not merely the Earth,
but the Universe.

Ling Hua bowed her head,
promised to safeguard China
from the least sparrow
to the oldest man.

Her knee ached as the stars spun round her.

Deborah L. Davitt

I never thought of bread
as a living thing, but it is,
a colony of yeast bacteria
given living space and food
in a matrix of earth-given grain,
sea-born salt, and sky-born water;
they exhale their own breath
to make their city rise,
and we freeze them in place
with fiery oven heat.
 
Little wonder then,
that the Romans brought bread
and wine for libation
to the graves of their ancestors,
and sent the living food
down feeding tubes
to the bones and ashes
to appease the hungry ghosts;
 
little wonder, too,
that on Dia de la Muerte,
people for whom that language
hangs richly on their tongues
set out living bread for the dead,
marked with bones,
or Chimalma’s tears.
 
Maybe the ghosts can sniff out
the life in it, the bacteria
still struggling to survive
their own cremation,
entombed in the rigid shape
of their own mobile grave;
maybe they have to respect
the struggle to endure,
so like their own;
maybe, like the living,
they just like the smell
of hot, buttered bread,
fresh from the oven,
and cling to the heels
as we bring the last pieces
to our churning mouths.
 
Maybe they slide lusciously
down into our gullets,
ingested with the bread
and perhaps the wine
that we pour into glasses
instead of on the grass;
maybe they become a part of us,
and leave the graveside
nestled in our hearts and bowels,
instead of lingering
to stare at futile plastic roses
left to fade in the sun.

Jenny Blackford 

That blue-silver
origami thing with wings
inside the graceful ribbonned
globe of Christmas glass
was doubtless meant to be a swan
 
-- or maybe it's a more peculiar bird.
 
In mediaeval times
monks taught that hungry mother pelicans
would pierce their feathed breasts
to feed their young on their heart-blood,
urging their often half-starved human flock
to more self-sacrifice.
 
I’d really rather
that the silver-paper bird was anything
but a starving pelican
feeding herself to her brood.
 
Luckily, the more I look into the globe
the more the origami thing with wings
looks bony, ancient, wild.
 
Could it be the fabled
Christmas Pterosaur?

Robert Borski

Both me,
with my 278 Neanderthal variants,
and the Monarch butterfly

with its hidden payload
of vespine genes
being finer examples of this,

the latter being a "gift"
from parasitic wasps,
but repurposed through time

to confer immunity
from the predations of a virus
deadly to the survival

of both insects.
But as for my own blended
heritage, I'm still waiting

to see what advantages
the commingling has
bestowed --

the ability perhaps to subtract
from the world's noise
the approach of a saber-toothed cat,

or how best to prepare mammoth milk
so it's digestible.
In the meantime, however,

sans revelation, I continue to daub
paint in animal shape
on the prefab walls of my cave.

Deborah L. Davitt

You tore down our mother’s temples,
fearing that to give glory to her,
the Queen of Heaven,
she who treads the sea, Asherah,
would take glory from him
who was her husband,
who divided his land from her sea,
Elkunirsa—more lately El
(which means Lord to those who remember
their Hittite—most don’t, these days).
 
You preferred to wander the desert
far from her shores;
you forgot her forgiveness, tenderness,
when faced with his wrath.
 
We forgot nothing on her shores,
transformed to guardian pillars
licked with her salt;
 
you abandoned our mother, your mother,
so we came for your daughters
with all the tenderness you’d forgotten,
taught them to find their wings within.
 
You called yourselves blessed
when you saw the grandchildren,
so strong, intelligent, and noble,
but as we slumbered, stone once more,
you forgot, and they forgot.
 
We never forget.
 
Awakening inside our descendants,
daughters of men and gods,
we wonder why you fear us so—
is it for the divine grace
burning under our skins?
Is it for the wings of flame
you cannot see, but surely sense?
 
This time, we won’t let you forget,
searing our mother’s name
into your souls
with a brand
of molten salt.