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Remember that words have power when spunThe way they turn spider silk into tapestriesRemember your enemies laugh themselvesOnto the floor for the same reasons as youRemember the sound of my voice as I rockedEach of you to sleep during the rainstormsIf I cannot see you off to be married doContinue Reading

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Stay close to any sounds thatmake you glad to be alive. Hafiz through the morningstill silenced by darknessyour sudden eruptionallegroarpeggioappoggiaturajoyful enoughto resurrect icarusto enjoin him nidicolousto soar forth once againairborne on wingéd rhapsodyoh songbirdyou remind usthat we can never flytoo close to the sunand i too risefledged by your warblingwhichContinue Reading

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Hello, Helen.Helen Harlot, Helen Home-Wrecker, Helen Whore. Most beautiful woman in the world, hatched from a swan’s egg, product of yet another rape perpetrated by your divine slut of a father, the “omnipotent” thunderer. His many bedfellows tell a different story.In all the myths, you are glittering, resplendent. And always,Continue Reading

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I.On a hill in the northwest corner of the ancient Athenian Agora, the Temple of Hephaestus is pocked with bullet holes. The little craters of exact proportion stand in stark contrast to the more natural degradations of time on the Dorian columns, those marks of erosion on marble like theContinue Reading

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“The child fathers the man?” ’Tis true!But note: the child is never through— whence springs so much of tragedyand comedy like you and me. James B. Nicola is a returning contributor. The latest three of his eight full-length poetry collections are Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, TurnsContinue Reading

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“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”Virginia Woolf “The creative adult is the child who survived.”Ursula K. Le Guin PrefaceIn the shadows of the marble walls,where echoes of ancient whispers linger, a dark arts college emerges,a tapestry woven with ink and pigment. Poets, composers,Continue Reading

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When I was a rather new student at the University where I first naively sought Enlightenment, a mere Idealist devoted to the pursuit of esoteric knowledge whose dimensions I could not remotely grasp, whose complexities I could only vaguely anticipate, whose truths I did not yet dare question, I devotedlyContinue Reading

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On November 22, 1963, Joan sat on the gym floor, dressed out for gym class when the news of President Kennedy’s assassination blared through the loud speakers, reverberating down the halls.Coach Mancini came out of the office to talk to her girls, tears streaming down her face. All stood asContinue Reading

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“…She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Don’t let him take those pictures when the water meltsluminous pearl around youand the last sunbathers ascend the pale ribbon trailleaving behindthe day’s opalescent heart when onlyContinue Reading

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Most of the fairgoers observed the comely womanrobed like a statue in layers of gossamer clothfair hair plaited and piled. She strode down the midway past lights that flashed and jangled, music tangledand tuneless. She paused to stare at the Ferris wheelarcing like a rainbow, tracked the buckets bobbing againstContinue Reading