THE LAST ARABIAN NIGHT

by Constance Stadler

Tall cedars

emanate earthen aromas

with musky incense

cinnamon and mint.

A solitary oud

plucked by

ornamented fingers

sings a sad

uncertain song

to the scarlet dying sun.

The calm opacity

of old Lebanon

burns red

with fire

as dark eyes

Cry

behind silken veils

The olive tree burns black.

Constance Stadler is the author and co-author of eight compilations of poetry and has published more than 200 poems magazines and journals. She was awarded honors in the International Erbacce Prize competition for her collection Sublunary Curse. Constance dates the beginning of her relationship with poetry to early teenage years, when she was given a volume of the Collected Works of Dylan Thomas which still sits, dog-eared, on her bookshelf.

ICARUS AWAITS A NEW YEAR

by Mary K O'Melveny

We’ve long been warned:

don’t fly too close, 

that sun’s too hot,

your wings will melt.

Yet here we are.

A NASA probe,

blinking distance

from spitfire flames,

solar winds, flares,

light speed heat spots

radiating

fiery dust rings.

As a new year

dawns, the Sun will

speak its first words.

Or will it sing

a scorching torch

song that sizzles,

blisters, sears, scalds?

What did we think

when we strapped on

those beeswax wings, 

leapt out as if

we knew our fate,

the sea Petral blue,

sun gold-glazed red?

Soon enough we 

will learn how far

desire can fly

before it burns,

descending like

a blazing star.

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.

BLACK WOMAN ARRESTED FOR READING IN A LIBRARY, 1962

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S.

 

Black woman arrested for trying to read a book in a segregated library in Albany, GA. 1962. 

a dark bonfire 
roared 
step  
by  
step  
down 
thou shalt not read 
here 
she 
was 
booked 
(o the irony)  
she
the book 
her body still burns 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.”