Such strange vessels, you and I,
with more than enough inside
to pour, if not overflow, but only
the smallest of openings with which to fill.
I know this because we’ve each tried
to fill others, even one another,
yet hunch our shoulders when such blessings
fall upon us, as if shrinking
from some fearsome storm.
Perhaps it’s best that we’ve always
gently shared these feelings with each other.
Not wasting what we hold so dear
in some great rush, but with the tenderness
of a mist caressing our cheeks.
And now free to feel the soft joys
of receiving as well as giving each other's love.
…is a writer and poet from Albany, New York. His work appears or is forthcoming in over a dozen venues, including Cossack Review, Frontier Tales Magazine, Pine Hills Review, the 2017 Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Anthology, as well as the anthologies Petrichor Rising and For the Love of Christmas. His poetry collections, “Penumbra: The Space Between” and “One Hundred Beats a Minute” are available on Amazon.com. He’s currently working on his first collection of stories, all based on his fascination with the American frontier, whether it’s upstate New York in the 17th and 18th Centuries or the Nebraska plains and Arizona deserts of the 19th.
Another ReCollection from the first issue of The BeZine. This one also addresses peace, from a fictional perspective and related to mythology. Joseph Hesch continues to contribute to The BeZine as a Core Team Member.
Spiral cloud mountains build in the sky, towering to 20,000 feet, I’d guess. Below, is the town of Douai, where we know Bloody Richtofen’s Jasta 11 calls home this month.
The golden disk to the west is setting and the Albatros scout planes rise to meet us. This is going to be a ripping scrap, I can tell. And then we are in a whirlwind of brown machines and red machines, red-white-blue cockades and black Iron Crosses all flashing by so fast that sometimes you can hardly keep your bearings. Like so many of these recent fights, everyone gets scattered across the sky. But I can’t look out for everyone when I have to do my other job, kill Germans and come home to Flora.
A red aeroplane with a yellow nose and tail whips past Cecil Lewis, and I take chase. I will get to 50 victories. I will get to 50. I must get to 50. He twists and dives and heads into the clouds and I know he can’t shake me. My attention is solely on his tail. I recognize the flash of the setting sun on his goggles as he glances fearfully over his shoulder at me, as I’ve seen that look hundreds of times before. I know it as sure as I know the booming of my own heartbeat in times like this.
I fire burst after burst into him, a drum of bullets from the Lewis on the top wing and 60 or 70 rounds from the Vickers gun in front of me.
I see him drop below me and I know he’s done. I see it all so plainly. The craziness and blood lust that overtakes me at such times ebbs away. And I think of my Flora, my Bobs again.
Then I break through the clouds, seeing from my altimeter that we’ve dove to only 200 feet. But the clouds are in the wrong place.
“Flora,” I cough,“ why are the clouds below me and the church steeple above me?”
“Rest, Albert, lay back and rest.”
I fight the urge to rest, I have to get back to the squadron, get back to England, get back to Bobbsy. The glowing disk in front of me fades away. It’s not the disk of the sun, or my identity badge, it’s my spinning propeller. It stops and then I only see its top, hanging vertically like that stalactite church steeple in front of me.
And then that great noise.
“What’s going on, Bobs? Can I come home to you now? General Trenchard promised me I could come home now.”
“Yes, Albert, you can come home. You don’t have to hurry, though. We’re waiting.”
I see her face above me again, so beautiful, so young. Even now when I see her I can barely catch my breath. Yet her eyes are so very sad as I lay my head back in her lap. I feel raindrops on my face.
“Don’t cry Bobs,” I say.
Fifteen year-old Cecille Deloffre had lived amid the sounds of war for a quarter of her life. She’d learned to sleep to the thunder of the big guns as if they were a summer rainstorm. She ignored the buzzing drone of the aeroplanes as they flew west-to-east and east-to-west each day, often punctuating their passage with the very unmilitary staccato drumbeat of their machine guns.
Cecille had seen some of these machines fall from the sky, glowing and tumbling like a cigarette tossed by one of those German soldiers hidden in the steeple of the nearby church in the village of Annoeulin.
This evening during dinner she had heard the fight above her home, sounding so much like someone had struck a hornet nest and the swarms spreading across the sky.
Then Cecille heard the sound of what could have been two aeroplanes directly above. Her mother crossed herself and tried dragging Cecille from the table to the root cellar beneath the kitchen floor.
She broke from her mother’s grasp and ran into the small fenced yard in front of their farmhouse just as one machine spit a tongue of fire back from its yellow shark-like nose, engine sputtering, gliding to a crash landing on the other side of the village.
She heard another aeroplane’s engine sputter and stop, just as it whooshed, upside-down, from the low storm clouds not 300 metres up the road. Its pilot wore no helmet and she could see his eyes but not his face in the growing dark.
Then the aeroplane just fell, like a an old leather-bound book dropped from a table.
Cecille stood frozen for a second to see if this machine would catch fire. But it only lay crushed on its side like a coffee-colored bird knocked from the sky by a kestrel. The pilot’s head move and she ran toward the aeroplane, unsure why, with her mother screaming after her.
As she came up to the crash site, the young man within the broken machine released his buckle and fell from the cockpit with a thud, a moan, and a faint rasping wheeze.
Cecille reached for the boy and pulled him a few metres away from his machine. She rested his head in her lap and he slowly opened his eyes, looking up at her with such longing that she couldn’t keep from crying.
“Don’t cry Bobs, Bobs, Bosshh…” she heard him barely whisper. Then stillness.
From behind them came the pounding sound of the jackbooted German soldiers from the steeple. They jabbered with delight, so sure they shot down a British flyer. But they hadn’t. Cecille noticed the boy had no wounds on his body.
Her eyes red with tears, Cecille looked down at the boy again and saw but a small bruise beneath his eye where his goggles had been. In her lap, the face of 20 year-old Capt. Albert Ball, MC, DSO, VC lay in silent repose. The sooty stain on it was variegated in white by the tracks of tears, like the half-smiling black marble bust of a saint. They were his tears and that of a beautiful young girl he briefly saw and was sure was the one he loved.
Cecille looked up at the surrounding soldiers and spat out, “Il est mort, Boche. C’est fini.”
But Albert couldn’t hear her. He had just won his 50th victory and he was flying home.
I guess this story shows when even a “hero” dies in war, he dies alone just like any other soldier. And who cries for him?
…is a writer and poet from Albany, New York. His work appears or is forthcoming in over a dozen venues, including Cossack Review, Frontier Tales Magazine, Pine Hills Review, the 2017 Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Anthology, as well as the anthologies Petrichor Rising and For the Love of Christmas. His poetry collections, “Penumbra: The Space Between” and “One Hundred Beats a Minute” are available on Amazon.com. He’s currently working on his first collection of stories, all based on his fascination with the American frontier, whether it’s upstate New York in the 17th and 18th Centuries or the Nebraska plains and Arizona deserts of the 19th.
I’m told there will come a time
when all will be revealed,
that moment just before you leave
where the Universe gives it up
to your virgin consciousness
and you go, ahhhhh….
And as great as that sounds,
you’ll note that your expression
of finally acquiring that enlightenment
comes in an exhalation,
more than likely your last.
I know that doesn’t sound fair,
but once you discover what
all this back-breaking, toil
and trouble life was for,
let alone about, what else is there
but to sound a short A?
Unless it’s a long ohhhhhh.
I suppose that’s why I intend
to hold my breath like a five-year-old
who won’t eat his Brussels sprouts
on that day when the Universe
comes a’knocking with my serving
of The Way, as the Buddhists might
intone. They call it nirvāṇa,
which is Sanskrit for “blowing out.”
That’s kind of what I’ve been saying,
only with an ahhhhh rather than an ohmmm.
Another translation is “liberation,”
which sounds so much better, because
I’d rather be freed from this
troubled coil, than blown out again
like a rotten basketball team,
or permanently, like a candle.
Ohm, shanti, shanti, shanti, y’all.
(Just in case.)
For those of us who don’t know Sanskrit, and I only know enough to get through a beginner’s yoga practice video, “Shanti” means “Peace.” So, I bid you all peace because we sure as hell need it. And so do I. So do I.
Sometimes I wonder if
I ever actually felt her warmth,
sensed her, breathed her in.
I look back and question
any place in my life where
I stood in her presence,
held her, or she held me.
I wonder if she was
nothing more than a dream I had,
when I still had dreams,
an ideal that kept me on
a path to be the nice polite boy
and good strong man, since
that was the way they said
one took to win her favor.
But I never did experience
her love and,
like most sore losers,
I have doubts now she
even exists. Perhaps, in this,
my last dream, if I stopped
searching so hard, one day
Peace will find me.
I keep some shirts at the far end
of my closet, shirts I’ve owned
for decades (since back when they fit).
I own some shoes with holes in the toe
almost worn through; shoes I’ve kept
in the dark corner of my closet floor.
If you were to ask me why I’ve kept them,
what with the shirt collars an inch
too small and the shoes a few steps shy
of perforated, I’d say, “Well, maybe
someday…”
But we know most somedays never come.
I own a memory I keep safe at the far corner
of my mind; a memory of …something… I’ve kept
for a couple of decades (when I could remember).
I hold this hope, one I’ve worried thin like a child
would his button-eyed, floppy friend, now worn
to almost gossamer thinness,
And if you ask why I’ve kept them,
what with the way most memory fades
in each new day’s light and how gossamer hope
doesn’t spring eternal I’d say, “Well, maybe
someday…”
That's because, if most somedays never come,
that must mean some do.
In the conversation we never had, you didn’t say, “Life’s subjective. One person’s joy could trigger another’s despair. Like someone else’s woe could bring another cheer.”
“We’ve lived each,” I would’ve said. “You, often, the latter,” my eyes would blink in code.
But we weren’t really talking about Life (like I said, we weren’t really talking at all), unless you consider just getting out of bed Life. Really about living, opening those eyes, taking that big inhale, letting it go, sometimes with words strung thereto, just to get to the next gulp of existence.
“You know, there was a time I didn’t care if my last exhalation, whether preceded by a sob or a snore, was indeed my last. Go to sleep. Wake not. I wouldn’t have considered that failure. THAT might’ve brought someone solace.” I could’ve revealed.
“That’s what I’m saying,” you didn’t say.
“I wish you would’ve talked to me about it,” I wish I’d said.
“There was no point. I wanted to talk to very few people and you weren’t one of them.”
Ergo, the non-conversation we weren’t having.
“Would you like to come talk now?” I might say.
“No. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Yeah (or is it ‘No’), we’ve each made that clear,” I might whisper.
“What didn’t you say?” You’d probably ask.
There was so, so much.
“I’m not going anywhere with you, either,” I’d say.
It’d always been a one-step-toward-and-one-back thing with us, symbiotically going nowhere, needy dance partners with no sense of rhythm.
“Each day I squeeze the contents of my heart over whatever expression I’m wearing & imprint it onto a notebook page–my version of St. Veronica’s veil.”
Joseph Hesch (A Thing for Words) lives in a beautiful region, upstate New York, at the confluence of my own beloved Hudson River and the Mohawk River. It’s a nice setting for a poet.
Joe was a professional writer for forty years. Post-retirement finds him doing writing that is more creative – poetry and fiction – with publication in quite a number of magazines and literary journals. He has self-published two collections of poetry. Joe is also a member of The BeZinecore team of contributing writers and his poems and flash fiction are featured in the zine just about every month.
JAMIE: Joe, I know you worked as a journalist for a good part of your life. Did you also write poetry or did you come to it late? What’s it like now that you are not working for “the man?”
JOE: Journalist or hired typewriter and gum-flapper for Skidmore College, a three-state professional organization or the State of New York over my 40-plus years in the working world. And no, I definitely was not writing poetry until I reached the age of 55. Not in high school, college nor when I was a professional writer.
A pretty miraculous recovery from a heart condition let me know each day is a blessing not to be wasted. I decided I’d best hurry and let the writer’s heart I thought I had within me live again.
I started to write sassy essays that I shared with friends. Then I wrote a bit of memoir one afternoon about my childhood Christmases. I took a chance and it was accepted for publication in a Christmas anthology. I continued to write for the discoveries I was making in myself and my world. And then everything stopped. Absolutely dead in the water. I’d run out of those easily reached ideas and emotions. I didn’t know what to do.
A friend told me my prose always sounded quite poetic to her. “Why don’t you write a poem?” she said. So I started out with the 5-7-5 structured hug of haiku. Then I wrote a poem about not being able to write anymore, stringing together those five- and seven-syllable lines. She suggested I submit it to some journals. I did and it was accepted for publication. Poetry had recharged my life machine and put me back in the world as a writer.
I never wanted to be a poet. Never wrote a poem in my life before those haiku. I consider myself a storyteller. You could say my poems are stories with the sentences broken into bite-sized pieces, stacked like crackers. But I’ve discovered more about myself as an emotional being, as a feeling man since I began to write poetry than I could have imagined in fifty-some years on this Earth. So, about no longer writing for the man? They can’t pay you enough in any job to learn the discoveries I have as a poet.
JAMIE: Tell us about your two collections.Do you have plans for another? If so, what would be the theme.
JOE: Oh, thanks for asking. Yes, I have two collections available on amazon.com. The first, Penumbra: The Space Between, I put together in 2014. I guess you could say it’s my coming-out as a poet in middle age. I hope I expressed my impressions on life and nature from the view of a man emerging from years of darkness into a brighter personal and artistic existence, standing astride middle age. Neither young nor old, still peering at things from the edge of shadow and light, the penumbra. I’m kinda proud of it as a first effort.
In my second collection,One Hundred Beats A Minute, I hope to convey impressions and imaginings of life, love, art, nature and what I see outside or inside the swirly-glassed windows of my soul. All of its sixty poems, the number of seconds in a minute, are bound within the frame of one hundred words. No wiggle room, exactly one hundred, or my obsessive mind gets all edgy. When I succeeded at hitting 100 and putting that final period on the page, where my obsession met compulsion and life met art, I squirmed in my seat, my knees and heels tended to flutter up and down from the floor and my heart beat like I’d just run a sprint of a hundred meters. I hope readers can experience that feeling here and there in this collection, too.
My next collection? I haven’t thought very hard about anything yet. However, I have thought a for long time about putting together a collection of my short stories and flash fiction. Already have the title, the title of my first short story after I began writing for myself again—But Don’t Touch, as in “You can look, but…” So many of my stories are the opposite of my poetry. Many seem to have the theme of men who have problems reaching out to or accepting intimacy, whether it be carnal or merely the simple warm touch of another’s hand.
“Writer and poet who’s spent decades writing for The Man. Still do. Except now I’M the man.”
JAMIE: What sorts of poetic activities do you participate in and why?
JOE: Not many, and I feel badly about that. But when I go out to read to other writers, I just don’t feel a sense that I belong. Never have. Nevertheless, for the past four or five years, I’ve read at the Albany Word Fest Open Mic that the Albany Poets group holds during April for National Poetry Month. I’ve also run up the Adirondack Northway to read at the legendary Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs. That’s an interesting feeling, reading your poetry where Bob Dylan made his bones as a poet in song. But I don’t get out enough to share my work with others. Maybe I’m shy that way. Or maybe just lazy, other than writing something for someone, only lately myself, every day for the past 40 years.
JAMIE: Why is poetry important to you and why should it be important to us?
JOE: Wow, that’s a big one. I guess it merits a big answer, then. Simply put, poetry, my finding poetry as an outlet for my long dormant creative self, helped save my life, most certainly the quality of it. I don’t know how long I could go on wandering in that vast desert of empty when I knew I was supposed to do something creative to fulfill myself.
Beyond that, though, I like to think poetry holds up a mirror, sometimes cracked and refracting, others with a soul-illuminating clarity, to who we are as individuals, families, communities, nations, a world. They can bring us the great Ahh moment, as well as the Ahh-Hah! And most of the time goes for the writer—at least this one—as well as the reader.
IN THE ROOM
Here in the room the breaths come
maybe every ten seconds apart,
snoring sounds from a mouth agape,
now voiceless, beneath eyes mostly closed,
but probably unseeing.
She doesn’t hear the talk in the room.
We think. We hope.
Above the bed, a little plastic bag
of morphine perches like blessed fruit
from a swirly silver branch atop
the six-wheeled tree they’ll roll
out of the room whenever her spirit does.
Here in the room we watch, we wait,
hearing only the sounds of the family,
of the bubbling O2 humidifier,
the beeps of monitors and machines,
the murmurs and shoe-squeaks from staff
in the hallway on the fifth floor
as the hospital awakens this morning.
And punctuating it all come
the snorting gasps of a life dwindling away
every ten–no, fifteen–seconds.
We think. God help her, we hope.
This issue begins Volume 10, our tenth year of publishing The BeZine online magazine. To mark the upcoming tenth anniversary, we will run a section in each issue this year called ReCollection. In it we will post work from past issues, looking to re-collect these examples of what The BeZine has been and continues to be. We hope to produce an anthology in 2024 from these re-collected works and more other selections from the first decade of our magazine.
We open this first ReCollection section with the last writing published by Jamie Dedes, our beloved founding editor-publisher, while she was still alive, published 17 September 2020. In this reflection she posts a beautiful poem, a goodbye, and reflects on the beginnings of The BeZine. However, Jamie kept looking forward, so she ends with some ideas for the future. We haven’t yet started a podcast (online radio show), but we are planning for her idea of an anthology, finally. She left us 06 November 2020, not even two full months after writing this.
One Lifetime After Another
one day, you’ll see, i’ll come back to hobnob with ravens, to fly with the crows at the moment of apple blossoms and the scent of magnolia ~ look for me winging among the white geese in their practical formation, migrating to be here, to keep house for you by the river …
i’ll be home in time for the bees in their slow heavy search for nectar, when the grass unfurls, nib tipped ~ you’ll sense me as soft and fresh as a rose, as gentle as a breeze of butterfly wings . . .
i’ll return to honor daisies in the depths of innocence, i’ll be the raindrops rising dew-like on your brow ~ you’ll see me sliding happily down a comely jacaranda, as feral as the wind circling the crape myrtle, you’ll find me waiting, a small gray dove in the dovecot, loving you, one lifetime after another.
Meditation on “The BeZine” from the edge of eternity!
I was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease twenty-one years ago. I was given two years to live. Thanks to loving family support and excellent state-of-the-art medical care, I’m still alive and kicking. As the disease continues its progression, however, my activities have become increasing constrained. Over the past two years I’ve slowed down dramatically. I am holding the Zine back from fulfilling its wide promise. I find it hard to keep up with obligations and to honor my own ambitions and the prodigious talents and boundless ideas of my colleagues. The long-standing lung issues have evolved into respiratory and heart failure. Other challenges to productivity have popped their disconcerting heads. These include pulmonary hypertension and a rare blood cancer, incurable but manageable. There is, however, good news.
I’ve had years none of us expected I’d have, years to enjoy my family, my friends, lots of music, reading and writing. I got to see my world-class son married. I’ve been able to spend time getting to know my beautiful multi-talented daughter-in-law and to visit with my cousin Dan when he came home to the States after years of living abroad. Daniel (now Fr. Daniel S. Sormani, C.S.Sp) and I grew up together. He is more like a brother to me than a cousin. Ultimately, I had the pleasure of forming an arts for peace community.
I began blogging in 2008 (The Poet by Day) and in 2011 I founded Into the Bardo with San Francisco Bay Area Poet Ann Emerson and Rob Rossel, a therapist and nature writer. Ann had a rare bone cancer and Rob faced cardiovascular problems. Our intention was to chronical living with dying. My friends preceded me into the bardo after just three years. I had to ponder what to do next.
The Original Zine Team Partners
This post is dedicated to them
Ann Emerson, San Francisco Bay Area Poet
Therapist and Nature Writer, Rob Rossell
I decided to broaden the scope of the blog, to create a platform for the global expression of peaceable minds, diverse perspectives and cultural understanding. This was a conscious effort to create a virtual space where we could find the commonalities across borders and learn that our differences are so often benign, not threatening. I found talented high-minded folks and a team slowly emerged. We grew from three members to twelve and a subscription base of a few hundred to one that is over 20,000.
We expanded our outreach joining with Washington State Methodist Minister, the Rev. Terri Stewart, and Beguine Again, our sister site. We became a larger presence via Twitter (thanks to Terri Stewart), a Facebook Page (The Bardo Group Bequines), and two Facebook Groups: The BeZine 100TPC (that is, 100,000 Poets and Friends for Change) and The BeZine Arts and Humanities Page. The idea behind the former is to share good news, the “best practices” that are happening all over the world and can be inspiration for initiatives in other areas. The idea behind the arts and humanities page is to give people a place to share the wide range of arts we all engage with or practice and to underscore the fact that “The BeZine” is not just or even primarily a poetry site. We welcome and encourage all types of creative expression.
I have led this effort since 2011 as manager, editor, and recruiter, but it is now time for me to bequeath this grace-filled platform into the hands of the rest of The Zine Team. Some of the support we get from team-members is quiet. You may not be aware of these stalwart and mostly behind-the-scene visionaries. Hence here is a list of the Zine team members.
John Anstie—Currently associate editor, prose and music, 2023. Naomi Baltuck Anjum Wasim Dar Michael Dickel (Now [at the time of Jamie’s writing] Managing Editor, 100TPC Master of Ceremonies)—Currently editor, 2023. Priscilla Gallaso (has moved on but not until after making significant contributions) Ruth Jewel Chrysty Darby Hendrick—Currently associate editor, 2023. Joseph Hesch—Currently still a Core Team Contributor Charles W. Martin Lana Phillips Corina Ravenscraft—Currently associate editor, art, 2023. Terri Stewart (Cloaked Monk, Zine Canoness, Beguine Again founder)—Currently a continuing partner-supporter. Kella Hanna Wayne Michael Watson
WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN MY NEXT SUGGESTED BIG EFFORT?
The BeZine Educational Blog-Radio Shows
Team-member Naomi Baltuck is our resident storyteller and also works for LBGTQ understanding and rights. She’d be the perfect person to do a show and introduce other storytellers to our audience and perhaps provide guidance and encouragement for those whose ambitions include this art.
Team-member and the Zine’s Canoness, the Rev. Terri Stewart, initiated and runs a program for incarcerated youth. She could bring more information to us on these children and perhaps encourage the start-up of other efforts elsewhere in the U.S. and wherever in the world youth incarceration needs addressing.
Team-member John Anstie is a singer and poet. Music is important to him. He works with the Sheffield Music Hub as a volunteer. He’s a bass singer in Fox Valley Voices and Hallmark of Harmony. If he was amenable to the idea, I’d like to see him bring together a small panel of musicians and composers to discuss the place of music in our lives.
Corina Ravenscraft works in several areas that engage, but animal rights is certainly of key importance as is art as avocation. If willing, she’d do beautifully with a couple such shows. (By the way, Corina’s running the Zine banner art contest this year. Check it out. Info HERE. Cash awards.)
Michael Dickel, a poet, writer, artist and educator teaches English and poetry. I’d love to see him do a show on poetry writing, especially one providing youth guidance.
There are so many people for whom English is not a first language but who love writing in English. Anjum Wasim Dar is the perfect person to interview and discuss the rewards and challenges of such should she choose to do so. Many of the Zine’s contributing writers have this in common with her.
Who better than Mbizo Chirasha to draw together other writers and poets for a discussion of the new colonialism of Africa?
And who better to handle a panel discussion on surviving life with disabilities and chronic illness than Kella Hanna-Wayne?
Many of our contributors run organizations that are working for the good in their communities: clothing closets, food banks, soup kitchens, after-school programs, boys-and-girls club activities and on and on. So much good is being done.
And how about a Zine anthology? The sales might help with the maintenance of this site and its activities as well as promoting and acknowledging our talented contributors.
I’d have loved to be involved in helping to bring such work to the fore. What do you think? Share your thoughts and preferences in the comments section below. Enthusiasm is encouragement. Maybe the team will decide to move forward on these ideas. It’s up to them, of course. They probably have some other and better ideas themselves. One way or another, whatever The Zine Team decides to do, it will be magnificent. Guaranteed.
With love from the edge of eternity, Jamie Dedes, Z”l The BeZine Founding Editor, Editor Emerita
…was a Lebanese-American poet and freelance writer. She was the founder and curator of The Poet by Day, info hub for poets and writers, and the founder of The Bardo Group, publishers of The BeZine, of which she was the founding editor and later a co-managing editor with Michael Dickel. Jamie was the Poet Laureate of Womawords Press 2020 and U.S associate to that press, as well.
Johnis a British writer, poet and musician—a multi-talented gentleman self-described as a “Family man, Grandfather, Occasional Musician, Singer, Amateur photographer and Film-maker, Apple-MAC user, Implementation Manager, and Engineer”. He has been a participant in the d’Verse Poet’s Pub a player in New World Creative Union as well as a being a ‘spoken-voice’ participant in Roger Allen Baut’s excellent ‘Blue Sky Highway‘ radio broadcasts. He’s been blogging since the beginning of 2011. He is also a member of The Poetry Society (UK).
Recent publications are anthologies resulting from online collaborations among two international groups of amateur and professional poets. The first of these is The Grass Roots Poetry Group (Petrichor Rising). The other group is d’Verse Poet Pub, in which John’s poetry also appears The d’Verse Anthology: Voices of Contemporary World Poetry, produced and edited by Frank Watson and The Gospel According to Poetry edited by T. Cole Jenkins.
jsburl, MFA, is a hemorrhagic stroke survivor who lives in Northern NY. She loves her family, the mountains, gardening, writing poetry and stories, oil painting, dragons, and animals large and small. She lives with her partner and her dog Tippy, and has just finished her master’s degree in Creative Writing. She was inducted into Sigma Tau Delta International English Society, and The National Society of Leadership and Success. She has been a journalist and won state and US competitions, and has two children’s books slated for release this year. The stroke took her mobility, but not her creativity. Her favorite thing to tell people is “Make every day an extraordinary day.”
A poet, fiction writer, & photographer, Michael’s writing, art, & photographs appear in print & online. His poetry has won international awards & been translated into several languages. His poetry has won international awards & been translated into several languages. His latest poetry collection, Nothing Remembers, came out from Finishing Line Press in September 2019 & received a Feathered Quill Book Award for Poetry.
He has a chapbook, Breakfast at the End of Capitalism (Locofo Chaps, 2017) and a full-length flash fiction collection, The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden (Is a Rose Press, 2016. Previous poetry books: War Surrounds Us, Midwest / Mid-East, & The World Behind It, Chaos… He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010) & was managing editor for arc-23 & arc-24. With producer / director David Fisher, he received an NEH grant to write a film script about Yiddish theatre. He is the former chair of the Israel Association of Writers in English.
Of Reflections on Being, Healing, and Wandering was a weekly contributing writer for “Gratitude Fridays” at Beguine Again. Chrysty says, “I am a student of theology, people, and life. About a year ago, I decided to incorporate a public element to my private prayer life. I believe that prayer, at its best, can be ministry and expression as well as it’s traditional elements. I have learned from studies that gratitude is a window into the world as it could be. So I tweet a gratitude every day. Nothing grandiose. Just ordinary moments in an ordinary life with an extraordinary God. Feel free to follow me on Twitter @AuntChrysty if you would like to experience an instant of gratitude each busy blessed day.”
Dragonkatet ~ Regarding the blog name, Dragon’s Dreams ~ The name comes from Corina’s love-affairs with both Dragons and Dreams (capital Ds). It’s another extension of who she is, a facet for expression; a place and way to reach other like-minded, creative individuals.
On her blog and in The BeZine, Corina posts a lot of poetry and images that fascinate or move her, because that’s her favorite way to view the world.
Corina posts about things important to her and the world in which we live. She champions extra important political, societal and environmental issues, etc. Sometimes She waxes philosophical, because her blog is a place where she feels she always learns about herself, too, by interacting with some of the brightest minds, souls and hearts out there. It’s all about ‘connection(s)’ and I don’t mean “net-working” with people for personal gain, but rather, the expansion of the 4 L’s: Light, Love, Laughter, Learning.
Lorraine is a poet-translator-travel writer who has works appearing in over 300 journals on six continents and 23 collections of poetry–including the upcoming In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2022) and Caribbean Interludes (Origami Poems Project, 2022). Her writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net. She journeys through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.
JOSEPH HESCH (A Thing for Words) is a writer and poet from Albany, New York. His work appears or is forthcoming in over a dozen venues, including Cossack Review, Frontier Tales Magazine, Pine Hills Review, the 2017 Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Anthology, as well as the anthologies Petrichor Rising and For the Love of Christmas. His poetry collections, “Penumbra: The Space Between” and “One Hundred Beats a Minute” are available on Amazon.com. He’s currently working on his first collection of stories, all based on his fascination with the American frontier, whether it’s upstate New York in the 17th and 18th Centuries or the Nebraska plains and Arizona deserts of the 19th. You can visit him at his blog A Thing for Words. He can be found on Twitter at @JAHesch and his Amazon page is Joseph Hesch, Poet and Writer.
TERRI STEWART (Bequine Again* and The Bardo Group Beguines), resident Cannoness of The Bardo Group Beguines. I am a monk disguised as a passionate prophet. My true loves are God, family, and the creative arts. And maybe just a little bit of politics too. I come from an eclectic background and consider myself to be grounded in contemplation and justice as embodied in the United Methodist tradition.
I am the Director and Founder of the Youth Chaplaincy Coalition, which serves youth affected by incarceration.
As a graduate of Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry, I earned my Master’s of Divinity and a Post-Master’s Certificate in Spiritual Direction. I am a contributing author to the Abingdon Worship Annual.
My online avatar is “Cloaked Monk.” This speaks to my grounding in contemplative practices and the need to live it out in the world. The cloak is the disguise of normalcy as I advocate for justice and peace. You can find me here or at http://www.twitter.com/cloakedmonk. To reach me for conversation, send a note to terri@cloakedmonk.com.
* Bequine Again is an interfaith effort offering spiritual support through inspirational posts, daily spiritual practice and prayer, and community. Beguine Again and The BeZine are affilated sites.
Alison Stone…
…has published seven full-length collections, Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Masterplan, collaborative poems with Eric Greinke (Presa Press, 2018), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award.
NAOMI BALTUCK, emerita, (Writing Between the Lines)~ is a Contributing Editor and Resident Storyteller. She is a world-traveler and an award-winning writer, photographer, and story-teller whose works of fiction and nonfiction are available through Amazon HERE.
Naomi conducts workshops such as Peace Porridge (multicultural stories to promote cooperation, goodwill, and peaceful coexistence), Whispers in the Graveyard (a spellbinding array of haunting and mysterious stories), Tandem Tales, Traveling Light Around the World, and others. For more on her programs visit Naomi Baltuck.com.
Naomi says, “When not actually writing, I am researching the world with my long-suffering husband and our two kids, or outside editing my garden. My novel, The Keeper of the Crystal Spring (Viking Penguin), can be read in English, German, Spanish, and Italian. My storytelling anthology, Apples From Heaven, garnered four national awards, including the Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice. I am currently working on a contemporary women’s novel.”
JAMES COWLES, emeritus, (Beguine Again) is a weekly contributing author to Beguin Again. Married to Diane for 32 years, no kids. I retired in 2010 after 30+ years as, at various times, an engineer, software developer, and software development manager with the Boeing Co. Diane works as a librarian at the Beacon Hill Branch of the Seattle Public Library system.
I have a master’s in math from Wichita State University, a master’s in physics as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow from Tulane, a master’s in English literature from Tufts by way of Harvard and, as a Council of Europe Fellow, Oxford (Exeter College … same Oxford college as JRR Tolkien), and a master’s in theology (MAPS) from Seattle Univ.
My main current interest is constitutional history and theories of constitutional interpretation (my area of specialization at Tufts / Harvard / Oxford was postmodernist / deconstructionist interpretation theory). I’m currently auditing a class in advanced constitutional law at the UW law school, and plan to audit another class on the First Amendment next quarter, plus take a Coursera non-credit course in “con law” from one of my heroes Prof. Akhil Amar at Yale Law early in ’14. I am a “born-again” skeptic / atheist / agnostic (depending on what I ate for breakfast on any given morning) and equally “born-again” progressive who believes that anchorman Will McAvoy’s rant against the Tea Party as the “American Taliban” in the first episode of “The Newsroom” — which, if you don’t watch, you should — was far too charitable to the Tea Party and an insult to the Taliban, who are much more enlightened than, e.g., Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann.
I believe that the “minimal state” as advocated in Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” is a fine goal — but only for “minimal people”. I also believe the greatest threat to America’s tradition of ordered liberty under the US Constitution is the Christian fascism of the religious right, and the 2nd greatest danger to that tradition is the unintentional, in fact, almost knee-jerk, nurturing of Christian fascism on the part of progressives in the name of “tolerance” (see Sam Harris’s remarks on same early in “The End of Faith”). The latter group, especially, would do well to read John Milton’s great defense of freedom of speech and press, “Areopagitica”, with careful attention to what Milton says about the moral limits of tolerance.
JAMIE DEDES, emerita, passed away in 2020. She was an accomplished Lebanese-American writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She was a content editor, and blogger, the founding and managing editor of The BeZine, manager of its associated activities and curator of the The Poet by Dayjamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage outstanding but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day was dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights, as is The BeZine as we continue in her memory. See posts Remembering Jamie.
SUE DREAMWALKER, emerita, says, “I am just an ordinary woman, who stumbled across blogging in 2007 and thought to use it to enlighten people a little, to share my thoughts through my writings, poem and art. Having gone through my own experiences of depression, a break-down, and dark days of despair back in the 90’s. My Health was also in shreds, I had Fibromyalgia, among other things, so I set about self healing, using affirmations, meditation and Qi Gong.. Beginning with Louise Hays, You Can Heal Your Life Book; I set about changing my life from one of working in textiles and training for 28 years, to becoming a Support Worker, working with adults with learning difficulties, such as Autism, Down Syndrome and Asperger’s , To Mental health Support enabling individuals to integrate back into the community. Which I did for 11 yrs prior to my retirement I now spend time helping my husband on our allotment plot, and growing our own food. Between looking after our granddaughter, I enjoy writing poetry, short stories for my own pleasure, knitting, sewing, while learning to play the guitar ( Not very well ) but trying.
PRISCILLA GALASSO, emerita, (scillagrace.com), Contributing Editor of The BeZine, started her personal blog to mark the beginning of her fiftieth year. Born to summer and given a name that means ‘ancient’, her travel through seasons of time and landscape has inspired her to create visual and verbal souvenirs of her journey. From personal exploration to designated wilderness areas, her discoveries inform and shape integrated engagement with our wonderful world.
Currently, Priscilla lives in Wisconsin. She considers herself a lifelong learner and educator. She works part time as the Administrative Assistant at Cedar Lakes Conservation Foundation and runs a business (Scholar & Poet Books, via eBay and ABE Books) with her partner, Steve.
RUTH JEWELL, emerita, (A Quiet Walk and Beguine Again) is a weekly contributing author and site administrator to Begine Again. Ruth Jewell recently received her Masters of Divinity from Seattle University, School of Theology and Ministry. Ruth is currently in-care at Queen Anne Christian Church in preparation for possible ordination in the tradition of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). She is a board member and volunteer for the Youth Chaplaincy Coalition, which serves youth in criminal detention.
Ruth has a long personal history of contemplative spiritual practices, which have been instrumental in much of her own discernment process. She hopes to pass on her love of sitting with the Holy Spirit.
CHARLES W. MARTIN, emeritus, (Reading Between the Minds) earned his Ph.D. in Speech and Language Pathology with an emphasis in statistics. Throughout Charlie’s career, he maintained a devotion to the arts (literature/poetry, the theater, music and photography). Upon retirement in 2010, he turned his full attention to poetry and photography.
Charlie publishes a poem and a photographic art piece each day at Read Between the Minds, Poetry, Photograph and Random Thoughts of Life. He is noted as a poet of social conscience. He has self-published a book of poetry collections entitled The Hawk Chronicles, A Bea in Your Bonnet: First Sting, featuring the renown Aunt Bea. In The Hawk Chronicles, Charlie provides a personification of his resident hawk with poems and photos taken over a two-year period. Charlie’s joint venture, When Spirits Touch, Dual Poetry, a collaboration with River Urke, is available through Amazon as are all his books.
Liliana is also the author of a novel, Solo-Chess, available for free reading HERE. Many of her creations, both poetry and prose, are published in various literary magazines.
LANA PHILLIPS, emerita, (Beguine Again) is a writer who lives in one of the most beautiful places in the world, the mountains of North Carolina. Poverty is real here too. I see and live it every day.
DONNA PIERCE, emerita, (Beguine Again) is a weekly contributing author for “Mindful Mondays” at Beguine Again. Over the years, I’ve been a college textbook sales rep, a literacy education professor, a storeowner, a social service nonprofit founder, a stay-home mom, and the caregiver for my parents during the last few years of their lives.
My husband Larry and I recently celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary, and we have two daughters, one in college and one in high school. I engaged the spiritual practices of both Christianity and Buddhism, sometimes leaning more one way, sometimes the other. Christianity tends to guide my life in community, and Buddhism helps me live more easily with myself, though the reverse is true as well.
MICHAEL WATSON, M.A., Ph.D., LCMHC, emeritus, (Dreaming the World) is a contributing editor to The BeZine,an essayist and a practitioner of the Shamanic arts, psychotherapist, educator and artist of Native American and European descent.
Michael lives and works in Burlington, Vermont, where he recently retired from his teaching position in undergraduate and graduate programs at Burlington College. He was once Dean of Students there. He also had wonderful experiences teaching in India and Hong Kong, which are documented on his blog. In childhood Michael had polio, an event that taught him much about challenge, struggle, isolation, and healing.
one day, you’ll see, i’ll come back to hobnob
with ravens, to fly with the crows at the moment
of apple blossoms and the scent of magnolia ~
look for me winging among the white geese
in their practical formation, migrating to be here,
to keep house for you by the river …
i’ll be home in time for the bees in their slow heavy
search for nectar, when the grass unfurls, nib tipped ~
you’ll sense me as soft and fresh as a rose,
as gentle as a breeze of butterfly wings . . .
i’ll return to honor daisies in the depths of innocence,
i’ll be the raindrops rising dew-like on your brow ~
you’ll see me sliding happily down a comely jacaranda,
as feral as the wind circling the crape myrtle, you’ll
find me waiting, a small gray dove in the dovecot,
loving you, one lifetime after another.
– Jamie Dedes
I was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease twenty-one years ago. I was given two years to live. Thanks to loving family support and excellent state-of-the-art medical care, I’m still alive and kicking. As the disease continues its progression, however, my activities have become increasing constrained. Over the past two years I’ve slowed down dramatically. I am holding the Zine back from fulfilling its wide promise. I find it hard to keep up with obligations and to honor my own ambitions and the prodigious talents and boundless ideas of my colleagues. The long-standing lung issues have evolved into respiratory and heart failure. Other challenges to productivity have popped their disconcerting heads. These include pulmonary hypertension and a rare blood cancer, uncurable but manageable. There is, however, good news.
I’ve had years none of us expected I’d have, years to enjoy my family, my friends, lots of music, reading and writing. I got to see my world-class son married. I’ve been able to spend time getting to know my beautiful multi-talented daughter-in-law and to visit with my cousin Dan when he came home to the States after years of living abroad. Daniel (now Fr. Daniel S. Sormani, C.S.Sp) and I grew up together. He is more like a brother to me than a cousin. Ultimately, I had the pleasure of forming an arts for peace community.
I began blogging in 2008 (The Poet by Day) and in 2011 I founded Into the Bardo with San Francisco Bay Area Poet Ann Emerson and Rob Rossel, a therapist and nature writer. Ann had a rare bone cancer and Rob faced cardiovascular problems. Our intention was to chronical living with dying. My friends preceded me into the bardo after just three years. I had to ponder what to do next.
The Original Zine Team Partners
This post is dedicated to them.
Ann Emerson, San Francisco Bay Area Poet
Therapist and Nature Writer, Rob Rossell
I decided to broaden the scope of the blog, to create a platform for the global expression of peaceable minds, diverse perspectives and cultural understanding. This was a conscious effort to create a virtual space where we could find the commonalities across borders and learn that our differences are so often benign, not threatening. I found talented high-minded folks and a team slowly emerged. We grew from three members to twelve and a subscription base of a few hundred to one that is over 20,000.
We expanded our outreach joining with Washington State Methodist Minister, the Rev. Terri Stewart, and Beguine Again, our sister site. We became a larger presence via Twitter (thanks to Terri Stewart), a Facebook Page (The Bardo Group Bequines), and two Facebook Groups: The BeZine 100TPC (that is, 100,000 Poets and Friends for Change) and The BeZine Arts and Humanities Page. The idea behind the former is to share good news, the “best practices” that are happening all over the world and can be inspiration for initiatives in other areas. The idea behind the arts and humanities page is to give people a place to share the wide range of arts we all engage with or practice and to underscore the fact that “The BeZine” is not just or even primarily a poetry site. We welcome and encourage all types of creative expression.
I have led this effort since 2011 as manager, editor, and recruiter, but it is now time for me to bequeath this grace-filled platform into the hands of the rest of The Zine Team. Some of the support we get from team-members is quiet. You may not be aware of these stalwart and mostly behind-the-scene visionaries. Hence here is a list of the Zine team members.
John Anstie
Naomi Baltuck
Anjum Wasim Dar
Michael Dickel (Now Managing Editor, 100TPC Master of Ceremonies)
Priscilla Gallaso (has moved on but not until after making significant contributions)
Ruth Jewel
Chrysty Darby Hendrick
Joseph Hesch
Charles W. Martin
Lana Phillips
Corina Ravenscraft
Terri Stewart (Cloaked Monk, Zine Canoness, Beguine Again founder)
Kella Hanna Wayne
Michael Watson
WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN MY NEXT SUGGESTED BIG EFFORT?: The BeZine Educational Blog-Radio Shows:
Team-member Naomi Baltuck is our resident storyteller and also works for LBGTQ understanding and rights. She’d be the perfect person to do a show and introduce other storytellers to our audience and perhaps provide guidance and encouragement for those whose ambitions include this art.
Team-member and the Zine’s Canoness, the Rev. Terri Stewart, initiated and runs a program for incarcerated youth. She could bring more information to us on these children and perhaps encourage the start-up of other efforts elsewhere in the U.S. and wherever in the world youth incarceration needs addressing.
Team-member John Anstie is a singer and poet. Music is important to him. He works with the Sheffield Music Hub as a volunteer. He’s a bass singer in Fox Valley Voices and Hallmark of Harmony. If he was amenable to the idea, I’d like to see him bring together a small panel of musicians and composers to discuss the place of music in our lives.
Corina Ravenscraft works in several areas that engage, but animal rights is certainly of key importance as is art as avocation. If willing, she’d do beautifully with a couple such shows. (By the way, Corina’s running the Zine banner art contest this year. Check it out. Info HERE. Cash awards.)
Michael Dickel, a poet, writer, artist and educator teaches English and poetry. I’d love to see him do a show on poetry writing, especially one providing youth guidance.
There are so many people for whom English is not a first language but who love writing in English. Anjum Wasim Dar is the perfect person to interview and discuss the rewards and challenges of such should she choose to do so. Many of the Zine’s contributing writers have this in common with her.
Who better than Mbizo Chirasha to draw together other writers and poets for a discussion of the new colonialism of Africa?
And who better to handle a panel discussion on surviving life with disabilities and chronic illness than Kella Hanna-Wayne?
Many of our contributors run organizations that are working for the good in their communities: clothing closets, food banks, soup kitchens, after-school programs, boys-and-girls club activities and on and on. So much good is being done.
And how about a Zine anthology? The sales might help with the maintenance of this site and its activities as well as promoting and acknowledging our talented contributors.
I’d have loved to be involved in helping to bring such work to the fore. What do you think? Share your thoughts and preferences in the comments section below. Enthusiasm is encouragement. Maybe the team will decide to move forward on these ideas. It’s up to them, of course. They probably have some other and better ideas themselves. One way or another, whatever The Zine Team decides to do, it will be magnificent. Guaranteed.
With love from the edge of eternity, Jamie Dedes The BeZine Founding Editor, Editor Emerita
As Alice put another cold compress on Frankie’s forehead, I had my hand on her shoulder and felt it heaving up and down.
“Don’t cry, Alice,” I said. But when I looked in her eyes, they were dry. What I felt was not sobbing. She’d been suppressing her coughs, so she wouldn’t wake Frankie.
“It’s okay, honey. I’ll take over now,” I said.
“Thank you, Frank,“ Alice said, pressing her burning cheek to mine. As she left the room, I heard her cough…hard.
For a year, I’d seen buddies die in front of me, nearly ripped in half by German Maxim machine guns, wrong place/wrong time in an artillery barrage, and now a cold that killed in only a few days. I’d seen it France. I was told by some of the boys soldiers were dropping like flies at Fort Riley in Kansas. We slid more than twenty over the side of the Liberty ship bringing us home to the States. They told me it had hit New York City, too.
I was beginning to feel guilty about how some folks were saying we Doughboys brought the sickness back to America, this Spanish Influenza. I didn’t need that kind of help. War can make a guy feel guilty all on his own.
Frankie murmured something and started coughing, a weak, choking sound, so I propped him up a little more. But I knew even that wouldn’t help much.
I’d gone to France because I was drafted, not to make the world safe for democracy.
I fought there to take care of my buddies, but you can’t take care of someone vaporized by an 88mm shell dropped on his head.
I stayed alive to get home to Alice and Frankie, to see my boy grow up. To feel the warmth of my wife again. Tonight I felt feverish heat.
I heard the bed springs ring in the next room, then heard Alice cough again. And again. And again.
You feel so helpless at a time like this, no matter who you are or what you’ve experienced in life. How do you prepare for this? How do you prepare for dying by the hundreds and thousands? Or one at a time.
Frankie tried coughing again and he sounded like he was drowning and I could barely take it anymore. Such suffering for a kid. He opened his eyes and looked at me that same way. And that day broke through the thin crust I’d try to grow over the memory.
I saw that German kid in the middle of that shell hole again. It was full of water that had this yellow-green scum on top of it – the residue of their mustard gas.
Me and my buddy Charlie Oakley had him covered with our Springfields and motioned for him to come out. But he wouldn’t. He just kept yelling – no, screaming – “Hilf mir, bitte.”
Then the boy, he wasn’t more than seventeen, I’d guess, he kind of fell over and his face went into the water. And he looked like he had shrunk by about a foot. He fell again and between the stagnant water in the shell hole and that Mustard residue, he started choking, drowning really.
Charlie said, “Shit, the kid’s stuck in there. Bottom of the hole must be all mud. I’ll fetch him.”
“Let him go, Charlie. He’s just another Kraut,” I said and spit into the water.
But Charlie was a preacher’s kid from North Carolina and it was obvious since all the way back in training at Fort Slocum that his mama raised him a real Christian gentleman.
Charlie slogged around to the far side of the crater and slid about halfway down. You could see how he was trying to figure out how he could reach the kid.
“Hey, Frank, come over here. Hold my hand and I think I can grab this kid’s collar,” he said.
The mud in France is a living thing, you know, a monster that’ll suck your boots right off your feet and then eat your toes for dessert. As I clopped-plopped over to Charlie, the mud in that shell hole must have had enough of the German kid and it decided to try an American.
Charlie’s feet slid out from under him and, like on a sliding board, he flew out over the edge and fell flat on his back in that poison water and sticky mud. I ran over as fast as I could, but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see the German kid anymore, either.
“Charlie!” I screamed. I mean I screamed. Then I saw his head bob back above the water. But that was all I saw.
“Frank! Help me! I don’t want to die like this. Help me, buddy.” Then he went under again.
He came back up, but all I could hear was this gurgling in his throat. His eyes were wild then they settled down. Just his face was above the water now. He stared at me like a yellow-green picture of Jesus in Gethsemane. Kind of pleading. And I knew what he wanted me to do.
I remembered what Jesus said that night. I looked into Charlie’s eyes and said, “Father, remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”
Charlie sort of nodded and I raised my rifle and squeezed off the most difficult shot I ever took, even though my target was only seven feet away. Charlie disappeared, but the image of his face didn’t. Never will.
Frankie stirred again, shaking me out of this memory. I saw the whole thing in but a second or two. This time Frankie’s breath came like a fingernail swiped on a washboard. It sounded so much like guys who’d caught just enough gas to singe their throat and lungs, but not kill them. Not until they got to the hospital in Étaples. Then they’d get sick, dying there a day or two later. Fever. Lungs giving out.
Like Frankie’s did that night. Honest, they did. Alice lasted two more days. I’d been home three weeks and I can’t help but wonder. Did the influenza kill them or did the war?
Last night, I had that nightmare again where Frankie and Alice are neck-deep in the water and mud of that shell hole and pleading with me to save them. I raise my rifle, but just as i bring my rifle to my shoulder, I woke up. I eventually fell back asleep.
But then, a new dream. I hear the scream of that 88mm shell and it’s falling on top of me instead. I wake up and I realize it’s been me screaming. Again. But that 88mm falling on me?
JOSEPH HESCH (A Thing for Words) is a member of the Zine core team, a writer and poet from Albany, New York. His work appears or is forthcoming in over a dozen venues, including Cossack Review, Frontier Tales Magazine, Pine Hills Review, the 2017 Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Anthology, as well as the anthologies Petrichor Rising and For the Love of Christmas. His poetry collections, “Penumbra: The Space Between” and “One Hundred Beats a Minute” are available on Amazon.com. He’s currently working on his first collection of stories, all based on his fascination with the American frontier, whether it’s upstate New York in the 17th and 18th Centuries or the Nebraska plains and Arizona deserts of the 19th. You can visit him at his blog A Thing for Words. He can be found on Twitter at @JAHesch and his Amazon page is Joseph Hesch, Poet and Writer.
“…we continue to encourage and support participation in the 100TPC global event, with the hopes that we can encourage poets, musicians and artists to stay vocal and engaged in these difficult times. It is so easy to feel hopeless and lose heart when it seems the world is coming apart around us. 100TPC hopes to counter despair and disillusionment, encourage and support celebration through the arts of peace, justice and sustainability. This is the good fight for us and we will continue to provide a global platform and venue.” 100TPC Cofounder Michael Rothenberg in a recent email to me.
There’s a lot going on around Global 100,000 Poets and Others for Change (100TPC.org) and this is the point each year when I like to share special updates along with a sampling of the posters for the event.
Yesterday Michael Rothenberg announced that there were 500 events registered for Global 100TPC (September 28) and Read a Poem To A Child Week (September 23-28). Yes! We’re jazzed about that news.
At The BeZine Michael Dickel and I are collaborating on the September 15 issue, themed social justice in honor of 100TPC. 100TPC concerns itself with Peace (our March issue theme), SustainABILITY (our June issue theme), and Social Justice (our September issue theme).
Over the past year and especially the past month or so, we’ve had some changes to The BeZine activities and publishing policy. Modified guidelines will be available soon … would have been sooner if I hadn’t been in-and-out of the hospital so much. Our Mission remains the same and you can see from it why we are so partial to 100TPC. Please always read our Mission Statement, an issue of the Zine, and the guidelines before submitting work to bardogroup@gmail.com
The BeZine blog is hosting a month long series in solidarity with the climate action events that are taking place around the world, These events include Greta Thunberg’s and also the U.N. Climate Change Summit 2019.
(Please note the first post on the Zine blog is always a copy of the front page of the most recent published issue of the Zine. If you scroll down, you’ll access the rest of the blog posts.)
And …
The BeZine 100,000 Poets and Others Banner, 2019 is by our resident artist, Corina Ravenscraft
On September 28, we’ll host our annual 24 hour Virtual The BeZine 100TPC. Everyone is invited to come read, listen, and contribute. If you want to contribute work the post that day will provide instruction for doing so. It’s easy. We encourage the sharing of art, photography, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and music videos. Michael Dickel will moderate and I’ll be present for back-up.
Here’s a sample of the banners from events around the world. Enjoy!
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BECOME INVOLVED
Register your event for 100TPC and Read a Poem to a Child Week at 100tpc.org
Freely accessible Sound Cloud playlist of 100TPC Read a Poem to a Child Initiative
– Jamie Dedes, Managing Editor
The BeZine
ABOUT
The Bardo Group Beguines are pleased to present THE BEZINE, an eZine published each quarter. The people who visit here to read, “Like,” and comment are as integral to this community as are the contributors. Visitors lend their energy, support, imagination and insights to this evolving effort. Comments are open and kindly expressed perspectives and suggestions are welcome.
The team is comprised of Naomi Baltuck, cloakedmonk (Terri Stewart), James R. Cowles, Jamie Dedes, Michael Dickel, Priscilla Galasso, Christy Darby Hendrick, Joseph Hesch, Lana Phillips, PoetJanstie (John Anstie), Ruth Jewel, dragonkatet (Corina Ravenscraft), Charles W. Martin, Michael Watson,
The goal of this collaborative is to foster proximity and understanding through our shared love of the arts and humanities and all things spirited and to make – however modest – a contribution toward personal healing and deference for the diverse ways people try to make moral, spiritual and intellectual sense of a world in which illness, violence, despair, loneliness and death are as prevalent as hope, friendship, reason and birth.
We share work here that is representative of universal human values however differently they might be expressed in our varied religions and cultures. We feel that our art and our Internet-facilitated social connection offer a means to see one another in our simple humanity, as brothers and sisters, and not as “other.”
We acknowledge that there are enormous theological differences and historical resentments that carve wedges among and within the traditions and ethnic or national groups, but we believe that ultimately self-preservation, common sense, and human solidarity will empower connections and collaboration and overcome division and disorder.
We ply our art, meditations, and prayer toward that tipping point when compromise – an admittedly imperfect peace – will overcome war and respect for life will topple resentment. That may not happen in our time, but it has to start somewhere and sometime and this is our modest contribution toward an end for which diverse people the world over are working and praying.
Follow to enjoy every issue of The BeZine. The BeZine is a volunteer effort, a gift of love.
“This is a space where we hope you’ll delight in learning how much you have in common with “other” peoples. We hope that your visits here will help you to love (respect) not fear.
“We acknowledge that there are enormous theological differences and historical resentments that carve wedges among and within the traditions and ethnic or national groups, but we believe that ultimately self-preservation, common sense, and human solidarity will empower connections and collaboration and overcome division and disorder.” excerpt from The BeZine Mission Statement
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR
Our Annual 100,000 Poets and Friends for Change Issue
September 2019
Calls for submissions of poems, feature articles, fiction, creative nonfiction, art and photography, music videos, and documentary videos on the themes of peace, sustainability and social justice is open now through September 10, 2019.
ART & PHOTOGRAPHY: Note we also are looking for something special to be the header for The Table of Contents Page.
Your original previously published work may be submitted as long as you own the copyright.
NO simultaneous submissions for September please.
Email submissions to bardogroup@gmail.com. Please note in your subject line: For Zine September 2019.
Among the guidelines: our core team, our guest contributors, and our readership are international and diverse. No works that advocate hate or violence, promote misunderstanding, or that demean others are acceptable.
The BeZineis an entirely volunteer effort. While we do not pay for content, neither do we charge submission or subscription fees.
IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE GLOBAL YOUTH CLIMATE STRIKE
CALLING YOUTH & ADULTS
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS of poems, feature articles, fiction, creative nonfiction, art and photography, music videos, documentary videos on climate change for The BeZine blog is open through September 10, 2019. In solidarity with the world’s youth, we’ll post work on Climate Change throughout September. Your original previously published work may be submitted as long as you own the copyright. NO simultaneous submissions. Please note in your subject line: For the climate change blog. Email submissions to bardogroup@gmail.com. All honors to Contributing Editor Michael Dickel for coming up with this idea.
artwork for The BeZine 100TPC 2019 is by the multitalented Corina Ravenscraft dragonkatet
THE BACK STORY:
100 Thousand Poets for Change, or 100TPC.org, is an international grassroots educational organization focusing on the arts, especially poetry, music, and the literary arts. It was founded in 2011 by poet/artist/musician Michael Rothenberg and poet/translator/artist Terri Carrion, and focuses on a worldwide event each September.
This initiative crossed my radar in 2011 when it was founded. I fell in love with the idea of it, the world in solidarity for peace, sustainability and social justice. What could be more wonderful? Since I am disabled and homebound I couldn’t host an event or even attend one. I decided that there were probably others who would like to participate but for one reason or another could not do so. Thus, The BeZine Virtual 100,000 Poets and Others for Change was born. This makes it possible for anyone, no matter where they live or what their circumstance, to join in 100TPC as long as they have access to a computer. People can do a local or regional event and join with our virtual event as well should they care to do so.
About two years after we started doing Virtual 100TPC, I “met” Michael Dickel and invited him to join The Bardo Group Beguines, our core team, and he soon volunteered to be our virtual 100TPC master of ceremonies. This has become one of our more delightful yearly traditions. Michael will also take the lead on the September issue of the Zine, which honors 100TPC themes.
Your Invitation
On Saturday, September 28, you are invited to visit The BeZine Blog and share your work on Peace, Sustainability, and Social Justice via Mr. Linky or in the Comments section. Clear and detailed direction will be provided that day, but truly it’s an easy thing. You will, of course, also be able to read the work of others, which we hope you will do. Michael and I will keep the event going for 24 hours or so beginning at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time on September 28. If you are unsure when that would be in your time zone, check The Time Zone Converter.
On behalf of The Bardo Group Beguines
and in the spirit of love (respect) and community, Jamie Dedes
Founding and Managing Editor
“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. Recognizing that sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea whose time has come.” Wangari Maathai
We are awash in righteous – and not so righteous – concerns and obsessions: race-and-gender-based inequities, war, greed, hunger, religious and ideological differences, displacement and migration, and leadership that is too often vapid, ignorant and unspeakably cruel. We think of the times as being dark and suffocating, light obscured by dense and low-hanging clouds, but maybe – just maybe – there is a ray of sunshine, a breath of fresh air. And maybe, just maybe, that’s all we need. Let’s take that sliver of light, that breath of fresh air, and build a future. This is a battle for the world in which our children will grow old and our grandchildren will grow up.
Perhaps, Wangari Maathai (1940-2011), Kenyan social, environmental and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, is right. The solutions are all of a piece: in the process of addressing our most immediate and pressing concern, the concern that is universal, environmental sustainability, we will mitigate hunger, migration, war, division, and greed. SustainABILITY requires that we work together. We’re not talking Utopia here. We’re talking collaboration and compromise, imperfect but functional.
SustainABILITY is rooted in the People (that would be you and me) who pull together to successfully tackle environmental concerns as the people have in efforts like Wangari’s Green Belt Movement in Africa, the tree-planting and intensive agriculture programs in China (including China’s Three North Shelter Forest Program) and in India.
Wangari Maathai speaking at the World Social Forum courtesy of The-time-line under CC BY-SA 3.0
“A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire we need to be grounded and that no matter how high we go it is from our roots that we draw sustenance. It is a reminder . . . that we cannot forget where we came from . . . our power and strength and our ability to reach our goals depend on the people, those whose work remains unseen, who are the soil out of which we grow, the shoulders on which we stand.” Wangari Maathai
This quarter we bring you work by talented, responsible, inspired, and sometimes discouraged artists. We also bring you fact-based hope, proven ideals and ideas, and a fair number of resources.
On behalf of The Bardo Group Beguines,
and in the spirit of love (respect) and community, Jamie Dedes
Founding and Managing Editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How to read this issue of THE BeZINE: You can read each piece individually by clicking the links in the Table of Contents or you can click HERE and scroll through the entire Zine.
“The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.” George Orwell
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” Cormac McCarthy, The Road
“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. ” Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
Down the hill Winter bleeds unabated,
leaving behind the wounds we couldn’t see.
With all the trees gone I guess we’re fated
to find a pond where a pond shouldn’t be.
The ground’s still frozen ‘neath its epidermis,
so there’s nowhere but down the hill to go.
Up on top is where the earth’s the firmest,
but down here we’ve an inch of melted snow.
It’s nothing new, just how it goes come Spring
or whatever passes for that these days.
Lately you never know what March will bring,
another blizzard or mid-Summer haze.
It could end up the latter or former,
even both, since we’ve made Earth so much warmer.
If you want to argue or troll, find another poet. I’m too old, too sick, too tired and too sad to get in a pissing match about this.
It was tough. TOUGH! If I could I would nominate everyone who has contributed, but there were constraints on the types of submissions, dates of publication, and number of nominations editors can submit. So, here we are … The BeZine Best of Net nominations for June 2017 – July 2018.
The Zeitgeist of Resistance—a Historical River Flowing
Justice is a historical river flowing to us, around us, and through us, toward freedom. The river’s current, like our current Zeitgeist, is one of resistance. In times of extreme injustice(s), people rise. This issue of The BeZine dedicated to Social Justice brings you some of the history and much of our Zeitgeist of resistance.
You will read about the current White House occupant, the state of race and gender relations, economic disparity, oppression, and more that disturbs us in our time. However, coming to The BeZine from unrelated directions—some invited, some offered, some come across by seeming chance—history has sent reminders to us that we are not alone. Others have lived in times of extreme injustice(s). And people rose up to defy and resist injustice, in the name of freedom. This river of historical struggle for justice can help sustain us in our resistance to the flood of today’s injustice(s).
The ongoing history of resistance certainly underlies the choices of music in a new album by New York guitarist Marc Ribot—Songs of Resistance 1942–2018. Ribot brings together songs from the Italian resistance, the Civil Right Movement, and new songs protesting Donald Trump—reminding us that movements need songs, and that fascism has been defeated in the past. Yes, also that we are in its shadow once again, and we have yet to get our race relations straightened out. In this issue, you can read more about the record, officially released Friday (September 14, 2018), and hear a cut from that album, with Tom Waits vocalizing Bella Ciao, an anthem of the Italian partisans.
While Marc Ribot chronicles this recent stream of freedom songs, Tamar Tracy Moncur’s poem in this issue sings of the problems facing the U.S. (and the world, I hasten to add), but reminds us that “America Still Sings of Freedom,” its title and chorus. Two poets, Michael C. Odiah and Joseph Hesch, sing to us about slavery. Odiah marks the continued echoes and reverberations of slavery today. Hesch touches on those, but in light of the Civil War—asking us if we don’t risk seeing the sacrifice of life during that bloody conflict negated as we witness democracy evaporating around us and a rise of white nationalism. Linda E. Chown sings about the mid-Twentieth Century fight against fascism in a poem about Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, aka “La Pasionaria,” a Spanish Republican leader of the Spanish Civil War. In another poem by Chown, the speaker returns to Spain in 1988, after Franco’s death. Chown’s third poem in this issue shows McCarthyism, the tactics of which continually float up in the flood of our time.
Word War II comes up in this historical river, also, in two essays in our Be the Peace section. A British Officer from World War I had a spiritual experience, so the story goes, that led him to propose during the Second World War that people in the U.K. take a minute of silence for prayer or meditation to help end—and win—the war, but more broadly, for a lasting peace. His effort was quite successful, gaining the support of the King of England and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. You can read about the Silent Minute’s history in John Anstie’s recounting, and about a recent movement to bring it back for the resistance in Lynne Salomon Miceli’s account of her own efforts.
These historical streams come together for our issue in what I have been calling a historical river at a time when the present overwhelms us and floods our sensibilities. How can we resist? How can we find peace and social justice while preserving the environment in the face of an administration that seems bent on shredding all of those apart like a level-5 hurricane stalled out just offshore? How can we protect children torn from their parents, denied health care, and deprived of a reasonable future (theirs being stolen from them in the present)? These questions help to define the Zeitgeist. The historical river perhaps offers some answers in its rushing water.
Slaves survived, rose up (see the history of Haiti), and while they often got beaten down, eventually others joined in a movement that abolished slavery. Yes, we have a long way to go to heal from that terrible injustice and to resolve the racist legacy of colonialist slave-holding mentality institutionalized throughout the West, but people continue to rise to the challenge and struggle toward equality and justice. Yes, Black Lives Matter!
The partisans fought the fascists, lost many battles (and the Spanish Civil War), but also won—Hitler and Mussolini fell, defeated. Stalin may have continued, Western Imperialism may have shifted into Capitalist Imperialism, its center moving from Western empires to a global military-industrial complex held up by the remnants of those empires—but the tide went against the fascists. Democracy—real democracy, not “open markets”—still has a chance.
And yes, we now stand with fascist flood-waters rising again, using anti-immigrant, nationalistic rhetoric throughout the world to once more inflame conflict and division. Yet, people are calling it by name, and many are saying: “No.” Despite the bleakness of the picture, people are rising up—more than ever, louder than ever, on social media, and in protests on the streets. We are filling the sandbags against the flood.
Most importantly, in the U.S., women and people of color are standing for election as progressives and winning elections. Incumbents who have not stood up to the current U.S. administration’s anti-democratic policies have fallen to new-comers / outsiders who proudly project progressive values and propose progressive policies in opposition to that administration. We don’t yet know where this will lead for the mid-terms, but the weather vanes seem to be pointed toward hope. Change can’t wait!
I hope, we at The BeZine hope, that the forces of social justice, peace, and (economic and environmental) sustainability will win and lead to freedom for all. And to get there, deb y felio reminds us that community action is the collective action of individuals. Each one of us must act, personally, for the community to function. Corina Ravenscraft opens the Be the Peace section on a similar theme, with some helpful hints for how to maintain our own peacefulness in these times.
The writers in this issue call out injustice, but they also offer us reasons to believe that we who believe in democracy and equality, who focus on humanity and our living planet, can prevail. The words we bring you with this issue come as songs along a river of resistance history, with concern for social justice, peace, and sustainability, tuned to melodies that harmonize with the song(s) of freedom.
—Michael Dickel, Contributing Editor
Jerusalem, 14 September 2018
I’ve observed in the spiritual practice of various Indian traditions that “shanti”—the Sanskrit word for peace—is invoked three times in prayer and chant.
I learned from a friend that the first invocation is about making peace with ourselves. The thought is that we cannot make peace with and in the world without inner peace.
The second invocation is about making peace with – embracing – the human community, from our family, friends, neighbors and our smaller communities to the greater global family.
The third invocation is about making peace with nature.
Thus we have three spheres of peace action: personal, social, and the natural world.
For the personal, Corina Ravenscraft offers suggestions for balance, Miki Byrne gives insight into mental anguish, and Changming Yuan’s brilliant metaphysical gift to us presents the complex interplay of elements in the search for self and truth. Kerry Darbishire and Miki Byrne call our attention to forgiveness, letting go, and accepting the gift of love. Tricia Knoll and Joseph Hesch suggest healing, the former through love and the latter through art.
The Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi and Paul Fullmer beautifully and wisely address our pathway to peace in the context of the social sphere. John Anstie and Lynne Salomon Miceli propose shared silent moment as a means to unify in a profound way, especially with the Silent Minute, borrowed from WWII England.
Our connection to nature is featured in Wabi Sabi, and in Anne Myers’ The Other World.
Yes to Blue
The work on this issue has been thoroughly enjoyable and made the more so by Michael Dickel’s genius, commitment, and hard work. This issue would not be half as good without him. His dedication each year to taking the lead on the September issue and on our virtual 100,000 Poets for Change on the fourth Saturday of September is the more remarkable because these always coincide with Jewish holy days, a busy time for him.
For my part, our editorial collaborations are fun and a delightful change of pace from the solitary endeavors of writing and poetry. I am in California and Michael is in Israel, so the back-and-forth of things is probably not as fluid and detailed as it might be under other circumstances, but there is an editorial flow, a sorting, strategizing, tossing, absorbing, updating, and always struggling with tech challenges (I struggle, Michael saves). Jim Haba‘s poem, Yes to Blue, rather captures the feel of it all…
Yes to blue after trying to separate green from yellow and hoping that everything will get simpler each time you bring an idea closer to the light which is always changing always being born day after day again and again now
So now, with love and gratitude for our indefatigable Michael Dickel, for all our wise contributors, our readers, and our dedicated core team, The Bardo Group Bequines…
In the spirit of peace, love (respect), and community, and
on behalf of The Bardo Group Bequines,
I’m told there will come a time
when all will be revealed,
that moment just before you leave
where the Universe gives it up
to your virgin consciousness
and you go, ahhhhh….
And as great as that sounds,
you’ll note that your expression
of finally acquiring that enlightenment
comes in an exhalation,
more than likely your last.
I know that doesn’t sound fair,
but once you discover what
all this back-breaking, toil
and trouble life was for,
let alone about, what else is there
but to sound a short A?
Unless it’s a long ohhhhhh.
I suppose that’s why I intend
to hold my breath like a five-year-old
who won’t eat his Brussels sprouts
on that day when the Universe
comes a’knocking with my serving
of The Way, as the Buddhists might
intone. They call it nirvāṇa,
which is Sanskrit for “blowing out.”
That’s kind of what I’ve been saying,
only with an ahhhhh rather than an ohmmm.
Another translation is “liberation,”
which sounds so much better, because
I’d rather be freed from this
troubled coil, than blown out again
like a rotten basketball team,
or permanently, like a candle.
Ohm, shanti, shanti, shanti, y’all.
(Just in case.)
Sometimes I wonder if
I ever actually felt her warmth,
sensed her, breathed her in.
I look back and question
any place in my life where
I stood in her presence,
held her, or she held me.
I wonder if she was
nothing more than a dream I had,
when I still had dreams,
an ideal that kept me on
a path to be the nice polite boy
and good strong man, since
that was the way they said
one took to win her favor.
But I never did experience
her love and,
like most sore losers,
I have doubts now she
even exists. Perhaps, in this,
my last dream, if I stopped
searching so hard, one day
Peace will find me.
“…we continue to encourage and support participation in the 100TPC global event, with the hopes that we can encourage poets, musicians and artists to stay vocal and engaged in these difficult times. It is so easy to feel hopeless and lose heart when it seems the world is coming apart around us. 100TPC hopes to counter despair and disillusionment, encourage and support celebration through the arts of peace, justice and sustainability. This is the good fight for us and we will continue to provide a global platform and venue.” 100TPC Cofounder Michael Rothenberg in a recent email to me.
“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. Recognizing that sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea whose time has come.” 
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