Good morning, evening or afternoon, and welcome to the 2022 Summer Issue #10 of Lightwood magazine at Lightwoodpress.com. While we still face the worldwide problems that surround us, we at Lightwood hope that you’ll find safe harbor with us. This issue features poetry by Timothy Brennan, Kayla Cappe, Susan Chute, J.K. Durick, Kim Ellis (with artwork), Diamonique Gurny, Robyn Hager, Sage Higgins, Ken Holland, Stephanie Kendrick, Raphael Kosek, Ann Lauinger, Yacine Ndaw, and Stephanie JT Russell; article by and Susan Chute and Laurence Carr; book reviews by Robyn Hager, Ken Holland and Mike Jurkovic; music concert review by Laurence Carr; memoir by Brian McFadden; and another installment of our “Artists in Space” series, this month: the working spaces and tools of the major figures of The Hudson River School of painting, Thomas Cole and Frederic E. Church.
You can access all the issues of Lightwood by clicking on our “back catalogue” link and also “search” for a specific author or artist to catch up on what you may have missed. Our donation button is also available should you want to contribute to help bring the best of international writing, reviews, and artwork to you. And please help spread the word about Lightwood and consider submitting your words and art to us.
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Stay well and help bring kindness and understanding to one another across our world.
Laurence Carr, Publisher
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Welcome to Lightwood Issue #10, Summer 2022.
Good morning, evening or afternoon, and welcome to the 2022 Summer Issue #10 of Lightwood magazine at Lightwoodpress.com. While we still face the worldwide problems that surround us, we at Lightwood hope that you’ll find safe harbor with us. This issue features poetry by Timothy Brennan, Kayla Cappe, Susan Chute, J.K. Durick, Kim Ellis (with…
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Trio Getsuro/music review by Laurence Carr
Recently, I visited one of my favorite places, Innesfree Garden in Millbrook, New York, to hear an open-air concert by Trio Getsuro. These three dedicated musicians presented an hour of traditional and contemporary Japanese music for shakuhatchi (bamboo flute) and ichigenkin (one-stringed zither). Ralph Samuelson and Elizabeth Brown performed on shakuhatchi and Issui Minegishi plucked…
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Let the Dead In/ poems by Saida Agostini/book review by Robyn Hager
Saida Agostini’s socially and spiritually aware poetry collection “Let the Dead In” focuses on the duality between love and hate along with the way that these concepts integrate and clash with each other through the lens of her black queer identity in a society riddled with violence, oppression, and the objectification of black people. Agostini…
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The Poetry of Lunacy/ poem by Ken Holland
As far as poetics goes, it seems the moon has exhausted us, and we’ve exhausted the moon. Whose name, some say, should never be named again. But if so, if we are not to mention the moon from this poem forward, then someone needs to remove the moon from the sky. Or better, build a…
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How I Know the River Is a Woman/ poem by Stephanie Kendrick
If you ask her if she would rather stay put she will laugh at you in birdsong, drowning out your thoughts that she might have a choice. She moves at the will of wind and rain, gives in to the slopes of land made before she was full. She thrashes in response to thunder, spills—…
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Words Unspoken (Palimpsest)/ poem by Robyn Hager
I tend to speak in riddles That sound like normal sentences To people hearing them I like to fool even myself As I have learned to understand That my impulsive brain is smarter Then my decisive brain Chills in a warm room Cold words, long days Bare feet on wood floor I feel the breaths…
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Artists in Space: Thomas Cole and Frederic E. Church/ by Laurence Carr
One of my pleasurable, and always rewarding excursions in every season is to The Thomas Cole House and Olana, the home of Frederic E. Church. Cole, the founding figure of the Hudson River School of painting, and mentor to the younger Church, who became the central figure in the Hudson River School, have impressive homes…
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Touch Wood/ poem by Ann Lauinger
The near-sighted relax at night thinking, now everybody’s just like me, forced to hazard the known. Inquiry shines on, but torques its beam to throw freakish shadows on the turret walls. It wants to know who was making all those inquiries all day long. Bumping along north of Ulan Bator on the back of a…
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June Rain/ poem by Raphael Kosek
The rain fell and a bird fell and the world grew lighter, more resilient. The rain fell and sparrows dropped down from feeder to ground. Yes I indulge them even in summer—the doves heavy with themselves, ground feeders, but one flies up to the perch, attempts to land, gives up and lights back down to…
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I Am Only an Aimless Soul/ poem by Diamonique Gurny
winding roads at night driving wide-eyed with wonder the old composition notebook lies bloated and dog-eared as it slides across the floor of the Suburban too full of dreams I’ve grown fond of eating breakfast in forsaken diners at 4am before the world wakes up and scares away the monsters in a world that slumbers…
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Muldoon’s Teeth/ memoir by Brian McFadden
Muldoon’s Teeth (Chapter 4) When I had been in Vietnam for a few weeks a form of home sickness I’d never experienced set in. As a result, like so many other Marines, I was always looking for mail from friends and relatives. It always gave me a brief respite from my surroundings and assured me…
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“AWOSTING” launches this Summer!
With the Creative Writing track in SUNY New Paltz’s Masters program in English concluding its second year, the students of the Workshop in Fiction & Memoir have launched a pilot project, an anthology journal called AWOSTING. The first issue features the works of ten members of the graduate seminar that was taught by Heinz Insu Fenkl…
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Brain Freeze/ poem by Yacine Ndaw
Licking loneliness from a wafer cone Spitting sprinkles onto sidewalks I am careful not to step on cracks that will break my mother’s back. I tiptoe between acceptance and regret. Scanning the pavement for my future¬– following the breadcrumbs to Success? In the concrete I find no rose to pluck, Only boredom that sticks like…
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NYC from the Inside: NYC Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live There/edited and curated by George Wallace//book review by Mike Jurkovic
from Blue Light Press “You aren’t the first to starve with a pen in your hand” Grisel Y. Acosta warns in this grand collection’s very first poem (Meal Plan NYC, Circa 2000). From there, all the conflicting and caterwauling realities of the world’s greatest metropolis dart out at you from in between all the parked and…
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Fairview Avenue/ poem by Kayla Cappe
Running away in circles from myself, the open spiral staircase, a close acquaintance. We would play, the ringing of nothingness filled the air. And there I was barely 10. Learning what it would be like, the beginning of “The end.” //////// Kayla Cappe attends SUNY New Paltz, pursuing a Secondary English Education degree. While Kayla…
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Before I Met You/ poem by Sage Higgins
I woke up to the sunrise floating on the lake It looked like it was on fire With the morning mist coming off of it. I take the stairs down To absorb the morning light I have been missing The smell of rain still fresh from the night before. I needed a break. It was…
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Words/ poem by J.K.Durick
Then what you said missed me, continued on, became an echo took on distance, like distance on the map of the world we have on the family room wall, so much distance that it crossed borders and bodies of water, it spoke in various languages, impossible for me to translate. What you said traveled off…
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Harmless Encounters/ poetry by Raphael Kosek/ winner of The Comstock Review’s 2021 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest/ book review by Ken Holland
Precise and fleet. This line appears in the first poem of Kosek’s latest collection. It’s a line that might prepare the reader for that which is small, well-defined, and barely temporal in its existence. And yet, throughout these poems, we’re given the expanse of heaven: “glinting somewhere when we are not looking.” And a temporal…
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Pittsburgh thoughts and poems by Susan Chute and Laurence Carr
In the late 60’s and early 70’s Pittsburgh was, for me, a place of unrealized dreams. Neighborhoods were segregated. Martin Luther King had just died. The steel mills were closing down, and the fathers of my contemporaries were laid off, their modest dreams of owning a split-level home and raising multiple well-fed children vanishing in…
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Quilt/ poem and images by Kim Ellis
Piecing a quilt invites Spirit. You must believe in harmony, that all those varied fabrics can be united ochres and persimmon, sienna, burgundy, citron, jade a meditation of sorts, a stillness of mind while hands measure, align shapes, and pin triangles, squares, rectangles. The sewing machine hums OM A quarter of an inch too short…
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Freud’s Cabinet/ poem by Stephanie JT Russell
a virtual tour ‘I cannot let myself be stared at for eight hours daily.’ —Sigmund Freud, to Hanns Sachs Small wonder it seems so petite, first time you walk into the room. Imagine the genteel women who lay there long before you, heads angled just so, raising their inner tides only high enough to where…
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Until We Find Our Coats/ poem by Timothy Brennan
Will we ever be satisfied again? We who’ve lost not only our tail-parts but the chrome plated majuscules our parents wore to cocktail parties in the sixties. You can still find one now and then online rust breaking through the shine. The past squints through binoculars as we approach in our sleighs; tries to decide…
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