Welcome to Lightwood magazine and our Fall 2024 Issue #19. This edition holds memoir, poetry, and reviews for you to enjoy and share with friends. (Lightwoodpress.com)
We creative writers, artists, and makers in this world understand there is positive energy that we can tap into and that we can send out freely to others. Our artwork is part of the earth’s healing process, emerging directly from all of us who inhabit this planet. We also know that our art did not magically appear to us one day, and that it was planted in us and nurtured by those who came before us.
We bring you a quote from the American writer Edith Wharton (1862- 1937):
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.”
So, whether we are mentor or pupil; master or disciple; patron or creator, publisher or writer; we each have the important task of helping to define and realize our process of artistic creation. Each of us plays a part in getting our work in its many forms out before the public.
Stay well and allow your creativity to come to the surface either in your solitude , with your support group or with your mentor. Breath in the ideas, then exhale. You’re part of the great creative structure that we continue to build.
Stay well- and happy creation.
Laurence Carr, publisher, Lightwoodpress.com
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Welcome to Lightwood, Fall 2024 Issue #19
Welcome to Lightwood magazine and our Fall 2024 Issue #19. This edition holds memoir, poetry, and reviews for you to enjoy and share with friends. (Lightwoodpress.com) We creative writers, artists, and makers in this world understand there is positive energy that we can tap into and that we can send out freely to others. Our…
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Poem for Baldwin’s Birthday/ by Zigi Lowenberg
We mourn James Baldwincrave his language, that skewer pulpit of interrogatorysyntax. Writhe and burn, baby burn …syllables roast the ridiculous, expose the bloodthirst corrupt corpusya’ dig … furious to unbury the treasure bone of our backs, all the tossed and thrown the broken and misplaced, the stolenand forsaken—unbury that smooth ancient back bone now slick…
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That Was Then: The Old Johannesburg: memoir by Alan Sive
When I was a child, I attended synagogue services with my father on Saturday mornings. I don’t think he was religious at all, but he liked the ritual of the service and the familiarity of the congregation. He would greet everyone and chat, even though he generally wasn’t a particularly sociable person. When my parents got engaged my…
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Brought and In the Apple Orchard/ 2 poems by Gregory Abels
1.Broughtto this placeon a wooded riseby yearsspent and goneNot able to see themBut to lookat the treeSilentlike a painted presenceAnd beyond itto other treesTo other risesbeyondMy body nowrippling with gratitude/////2.In the apple orcharda very old branchdry, stronggnarled, pockedPerfectwith a four-day beardof grey-green somethingA twisted tribute To old age/////Gregory Abels is a Zen Master who taught…
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One Hand Clapping, Paul McCartney and Wings/ music review by Mike Jurkovic
The Rock n Roll Curmudgeon Rides Again One Hand Clapping Paul McCartney and Wings Paul McCartney, just like all the rest of us non-Beatle, non-genius, non-knighted types, ain’t perfect no matter how hard he tries to convince the world otherwise. But this is an old problem for ol’ Macca. He always wants you believe that…
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Sometimes I Ride the F Train All Night/ poem by Bruce Weber
Sometimes I ride the F line all nightHuddled in a corner seatSandwiches and chips and sodaAt the ready for 3 a.m. hungerI love the rattle of the trainCrossing out of lower ManhattanInto the splashing darkness of the cityThe world is so big thenThe panorama adrift in boatsMaking their murky wayBeyond safe harborsAnd toothless old menDreaming…
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Spotlight on Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows/ poetry by Tana Miller and Jan Zlotnik Schmidt/ review by Laurence Carr
“Poets Jan Zlotnik Schmidt and Tana Miller have reflected upon American artist Joseph Cornell’s life and works to create their own literary “Cornell boxes.” Each poem is a stand-alone piece of art, but when collected here in their volume, Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows (Kelsey Books, 2024), the poems create a gallery show examining…
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no matter/ poem by Laurence Carr
no matterthe number of branches and boughs stacked on the stickpile fence it neither rises nor sinks—a palisade of broken trees cut short by hail and wind the weight of snow the clutch of disease and boring bugs the eastwest fence has retained its height, its length and breadth throughout the years—a certainty through times…
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Finding Mae/ food memoir by Penny Freel
Squinting into the sun, I would scan the gaggle of sunseekers and swimmers for a sighting. “There!” I would say to my partner. She would emerge from far down Koh Samui’s Chaweng Beach, an apparition she seemed at first, heading our way out of the silence of the sea spray and the sun glint sand. Her uniform…
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Three Bottles/ poem by Cheryl Rice
Three bottles of Kewpie, late night Amazon rampage, too anxious to wait for a trip to the Asian store an hour away. Three bottles of Japanese mayonnaise, different because of sugar and egg yolk.I’ve tried to replicate it, ever the DIYer, and it’s not the same. Three bottles of mayonnaise with a doll on the…
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Receding and Specters/ 2 poems by Ken Holland
RECEDINGI’m receding from you A flashing step A blinding scrim of rainI’m. Receding from you Your voice no longer carries Your figure a shadow playReceding now Solitude fixed Along a berm of silenceReceding swiftly. From you now Whoever you are Whatever you meant to me SPECTERSI saw you thirty years from nowSitting on a subway,…
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Bernadina: My Great-Grandmother’s Journey/ memoir by Lisa Rost Lewis
When the four young Buddelmeyer sisters lay down to sleep on their wadded straw mattress on a damp gray evening in 1871, they expected that night to be the same as all the others. They would wake up in a few short hours, after squeezing together, front to back like spoons, trying to wriggle their…
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Running the Shawangunk Ridge Years Ago/ poem by Matthew J. Spireng
There were places on the trailsI slowed for the hills, downshiftedas if a car so I wouldn’t sputterand stall, and on warmer days the shadeof hemlocks was welcome, the few placesin sun on cooler days in fallor early winter. I’d surely rememberthe spots where runoff gullied the trail,sometimes places I stutter-steppedand made short leaps to…
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2 poems from Eighty-One Plus One/ based upon the Tao Te Ching/ by Steven Klepeis
Twenty-Seven Tao is the only glue to hold each other fast within each other. Care brings our Tao. Onelearns another, and both teach each other. The crux of the mysteryis how we allow our care to dwindle, how we allow confusionto arise, how the Tao is no longer seen. Go back. Go back. Walkwithout tracks.…
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Fear Slopes into Hope/ poem by Lucia Cherciu
Anticipation leans into the fat of satisfaction:steal the thrill of waiting, visualizing the arrival, the way a dream maps its owngeography and I have barely begun the journey. Take me with you when you fall intoa dream: I am crossing a frail bridge for one and you hold out your hand on the bank of…
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Mary K O’Melveny’s : Online Album, If You Want to Go to Heaven Follow a Songbird with artwork by Kent Ambler/ poetry and music reviewed by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
The Artwork in this project is by Kent Ambler. Copyright by the artist. I read with great interest and delight Mary K O’ Melveny’s online poetry album, If You Want to Go to Heaven Follow a Songbird, featured on the Jerry Jazz Musician’s website. It was a pleasure to read a multi-dimensional, hybrid work that includes music,…
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