stag prints
an elder branch
spotted in the snow
~
Joanna Ashwell is a poet and spiritual healer. Her recent collections of poetry published include Love's Scriptures and Moonset Song. She loves crystals, angels and dragons. She searches for the joy in life and loves to empower others to do the same with healing and Akashic Records clearing.
retracing the steps
of the shadow self . . .
calculating the distance
she will go
to escape this darkness
~
Kelly Sargent is a poet, editor, and devoted tea drinker residing in Vermont. Though she writes about autumn foliage and fallen acorns, she most enjoys penning poems that reflect the multiple facets of being human. She is an assistant editor for #FemkuMag and served this year as co-judge for the HSA Harold G. Henderson Haiku Contest. The author of a haiku/senryu collection entitled Bookmarks (Red Moon Press, 2023), she writes because when a reader gives a little nod or slight smile, she no longer bears the weight of living, alone.
Where the Drum Lingers
Boom-boom. Pause. Boom-boom. Pause. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Hey-ya hey-ya hey-yo hey-ya. The sound unfurled into the air like a living thing, a heartbeat loosening itself from the earth. Dum-dum-dum . . . The soft beat of the drum drifted off and hung in the air, half breath, half prayer. By the second beat, my tears betrayed me. I had thought I'd tamed them, trained them into submission, but I was wrong. The face mask helped hide the evidence, hot rivers of salt that spilled over and traced the outline of my cheeks, like they had been waiting for permission to return. Dum-dum-dum . . . cry, cry, cry.
#
"Momma! I can hear the drum!" I shrieked once with six-year-old joy. My mother, distracted by her running list of errands and obligations, barely looked up. "We don't have time to stop. We're in a hurry," she said, her voice clipped, practical. "Pleeeeease, Momma? They're calling me!" I begged, tugging her hand toward the circle of people I did not yet understand. Finally, she let me go, and I ran forward, the sound vibrating through my ribs like recognition. I stood in fascination, my feet planted securely on the ground. Finally my mother indicated my time with the drums was up. "Why are you crying?" she asked, her face pinched in confusion. "I don't know, Momma," I whispered. "The drums made me."
#
"The drum represents some of the first sounds. It is the sounds of our mothers from the womb, the heartbeat of our mothers. The drum is the heartbeat of the nation. Heartbeat of the people. Wherever the drum is, the people will gather. Listen to the beat of the drum. As it picks up it represents the sound of the Buffalo Nation."
The words of the elder settled into me like a second heartbeat, reminding me that the drum is not just an instrument, but a living echo of our mothers, our people, and the pulse that keeps spirit and memory alive.
Years later, Google would tell me what my body already knew, that the drumbeat awakens a deep, ancient memory hidden in the marrow, a pulse older than language. It connects the listener to something buried: lineage, grief, joy, and home. The sound of the drum can open a passage between the living and the dead, between the body and the unseen world. The drum, it said, has a spirit of its own, and when it calls, something in us answers.
#
In the 1990s, while working a temporary position at the Minnesota Department of Health, I met with a woman named Rose at the Minneapolis Indian Women's Resource Center. When our meeting ended, I stood to shake her hand. Her eyes softened, her fingers clasping mine tightly as she said, without hesitation, "You have an ancient soul." Had it been the first time I'd heard this, I might have been alarmed, but it wasn't. The first had been in Fargo, after a training session, when the host, a kind woman who had gifted me a small birch canoe and a pouch of wild rice, asked what Tribe I was from. When I told her I wasn't Native, she only nodded and smiled. The third time came from a stranger at a Pow Wow, who approached without preamble and said something like, "Not in this life." Rose went on to tell me about the sweat lodge, the Madoodiswan, how it could help me meet all the ancestors I carried inside me. I wanted to ask which ones, but she already seemed to know. And wait, there are more than three? "You should go," she said. "The drum will open the door." It would take me twenty-five years to find the courage to step through.
Even as a child, I sought rhythm like water seeks a hollow. Steel drums, bongos, taiko, snare, it didn't matter. I even watched Drumline, just for the drumming, certainly not for the plot. But none of them reached inside me the way the Native drum did. Growing up in Winnipeg, a city layered with cultures and strong Indigenous roots, I had plenty of chances to hear them. And every time I did, I cried. My mother assured me I'd grow out of it, but the older I became, the worse it got. I cried sooner, deeper, before the first few beats had even faded. Eventually, I learned to avoid them altogether. Until I couldn't.
#
At a flag exchange ceremony at work, the drums began again. I sat between a mayor and a county commissioner, pretending composure as the rhythm pounded through me. The tears came, hot, unrelenting. There was no stopping them. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Cry. Cry. Cry.
It was time.
#
It was a cool Friday when I finally approached the sweat lodge at the American Indian Family Center in Afton. The night before, I had agonized over what to wear. The photos online showed young women in sports bras and short shorts, bodies smooth and unburdened by time. I, meanwhile, bore four children's worth of evidence and a constellation of no-see-um bites from a recent camping trip. The timing felt wrong, the body imperfect, but still, it was time. I whispered a prayer that the lodge would be dark enough to hide my self-consciousness, and I began my long-time-coming pilgrimage toward the drum that had been calling me since I was six years old. The one that had waited through my detours and distractions. The one that had always known I would return. A sound older than memory. Older even than tears.
The lodge sat low to the ground, a humble dome of bent willow covered in blankets and hides. Smoke whispered from a small fire nearby, where stones glowed red as open wounds. The air smelled of cedar and something older, something I couldn't name. I stood there for a long time, feeling the rhythm of my pulse trying to sync with the unseen beat in the earth. Someone called out softly in Anishinaabemowin, and I didn't understand the words, but I understood the intention: come closer, come clean.
We removed our shoes, our watches, our illusions of control. One by one, we crawled through the narrow opening: birth canal, grave mouth, both. Inside, it was already dark, the kind of dark that hums. I knelt on the packed earth, my knees pressing into its coolness. The women around me murmured prayers, words rising and falling like the tide. The leader sprinkled water onto the stones, and steam filled the space, thick and alive. The heat pressed against my skin, against my lungs, until breath became a choice.
Outside, the drum began again. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Each beat landed like a hand on the back, like a reminder. You are here. You are not the first. The sound carried through the ground and into my spine, until I couldn't tell where my heartbeat ended and the drum began.
The heat climbed higher, and the air thickened with song. Women began to weep softly around me, some rocking, some whispering names. I pressed my palms into the dirt. It was cool, grounding, alive. The earth did not flinch beneath the weight of our grief. It took it all in.
When the last prayer faded, the flap opened and light flooded in, sharp, merciful, blinding. We crawled out one by one, slick with sweat, eyes raw, bodies trembling. The air outside was cool and sweet, the kind that feels like a second chance. Someone handed me a cup of water, and I drank it like communion.
In the distance, the drum still beat. Softer now, but steady. A pulse that belonged to no one and to everyone. I felt something unclench inside me, something that had been holding its breath for generations.
#
It wasn't lost on me that the sweat lodge fell near Sukkot, the Jewish season of temporary shelters. I hadn't planned it that way, hadn't checked the Hebrew calendar or traced any cosmic logic, but when I realized the overlap, it felt deliberate, as though something older had arranged the timing. Sukkot is the week when Jews leave their solid walls and step into the fragile dwelling of faith. We build the sukkah from what the earth gives us, branches, leaves, reeds, and eat our meals under its roof of stars and wind. It is a home that breathes, a shelter that remembers wandering. Each palm frond or cornstalk roof is a porous veil through which the heavens peer back. The stars that glimmer through its weave are the same ones our ancestors named and trusted to guide them.
The sukkah is more than a temporary shelter, it is a vessel for memory, a trembling reminder of how fragile the walls between the living and the departed truly are. To sit within it is to dwell in the in-between: beneath branches that breathe with wind and sky, beside the ghosts of our ancestors who once sought shelter in their own seasons of uncertainty. The stars that glimmer through its roof are the same ones our forebears trusted to guide them. The sukkah teaches that protection has never meant permanence; it has always meant presence.
Each meal taken within its soft walls becomes an invocation. The air feels thinner, more intimate, alive with the breath of those who came before us. Tradition teaches that the ushpizin, the ancestral guests, visit each night, but perhaps they never truly leave. They linger in the wood, in the scent of cedar and citrus, in the stories retold to keep the chill of forgetting away. The sukkah is not merely built; it is remembered into being, a fragile, holy dwelling that reminds us we, too, are shelters for memory, and that within our brief walls, their light still flickers.
#
The Madoodiswan is also a dwelling of impermanence, a dome of bent willow, covered in hides and blankets, rising from the ground like a heartbeat. Inside, darkness and heat collapse the distance between breath and prayer. In the Anishinaabe tradition, the Madoodiswan is a sacred purification lodge used for ceremony, prayer, and healing. It's a place to cleanse the body, mind, and spirit through heat and steam created by pouring water over heated stones. The ceremony connects participants to the spirits and ancestors. It is said to be the womb of Mother Earth, a place of purification and return to balance and humility before creation. The steam is the conductor of transformation; it pulls out the trapped issues or problems that the person is hanging onto and releases them so healing can happen. Like the sukkah, the sweat lodge is not meant to last. Its holiness lies in the temporary. Both dwellings call us back to what's elemental: to community, to humility, to the fragile beauty of being alive within something that will one day fall away. In the sukkah, families gather, sharing food and blessing, feeling the brush of branches above their heads. In the lodge, strangers become kin in the dark, their voices rising in prayer, their tears indistinguishable from sweat. Both traditions teach that to be purified is to be made vulnerable, to sit unshielded between the heavens and the earth and still trust the structure to hold.
As the drumbeat pulsed under the autumn sky and the air smelled of cedar and smoke, I felt the two rituals overlap like transparent layers. The sukkah and the sweat lodge spoke the same quiet language of impermanence and return. One remembered a desert, the other a forest, but both carried the same truth: that holiness is found not in the walls that endure, but in the ones that let the light through.
As I stepped out of the lodge, steam rising from my skin into the cool October air, I thought of the sukkah at the Rabbi's house in Winnipeg, a crooked little booth stitched together from scavenged wood and willow. I remembered sitting beneath its patchwork roof, watching the shadows move like ghosts across the linen walls. Maybe that was the first lodge I ever entered, the first time I learned that holiness could live in what is temporary. The wind that moved through the sukkah walls was the same breath that moved through the lodge, the same spirit that hums through the spaces our ancestors left behind.
The drum still echoes faintly in my chest, steady as a heartbeat, ancient as a prayer. It reminded me that the boundary between traditions, like the one between worlds, is thinner than we think. My Jewish ancestors wandered the desert in search of home; my spirit, it seemed, was still wandering, still circling the fire, still listening for the sound that calls the living and the dead to sit together. Maybe the sukkah and the sweat lodge were never about shelter at all, but about remembering that we are, each of us, both house and ghost, both flesh and echo.
#
That night, as I lay in bed, my hair still smelling faintly of cedar and smoke, I dreamt of both dwellings, the sukkah swaying under a canopy of stars, the lodge glowing like a heartbeat in the dark. And between them, a thin, trembling thread of light—the kind that lingers when the body remembers what the soul has always known.
#
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. You are here. You are not the first.
~
Lisa Brodsky is a writer and public health professional whose work bridges personal narrative, cultural memory, and social justice. She is currently working on a memoir, Linger: A Convergence of Family, Memory, and Superstition, that explores folk ritual, intergenerational memory, magical realism, and inherited superstition. Her writing is also shaped by her ongoing spiritual practice, which blends ancestral curiosity, contemplative ritual, and an exploration of the unseen. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Otherwise Engaged, Pictura Journal, Memoirist, and other journals. She lives in Minnesota, where she balances creative work with community health initiatives, and serves as a reader for Trio House Press.
phantom angst
i'm basking in a pool of light a torrid
self exposure immolation of
the spirit fire to wipe the planet clean
of blighted artifacts of greed oh please
sterility of armageddon smoke
to choke the huffing gods quintessence nonsense
// cardinal in the evergreen out back
a living ember pretty sure it's Dad
but I won't spook him with a cellphone snap
// this phantom angst you conjure warps your thought
oh angel i would die to hold your hand
here in this faded earthly palace bashful
fingers interlaced two pale fat spiders
making love connected & content
~
Thomas Zimmerman (he/him/his) teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. His poems have appeared recently in Cold Signal, TrashLight Press, and Trouvaille Review. His latest poetry book is My Night to Cook (Cyberwit, 2024).
~
John Hawkhead has been writing short-form poetry for over 30 years, publishing three books of haiku & senryu in that time. He lives in the South West of England.
Dasein chews on the word until it dissolves
~
Vijay Prasad is a poet from Patna, India. By profession, he is an MCA. J. Krishnamurti is his spiritual strength. His haiku move through philosophy, linguistics, psychology, etc. He draws from the Japanese haiku masters to modern haiku writers and also thinkers such as Sartre, Beckett, Deleuze, Chomsky, Rilke, Jung, Turgenev, Bohm, Heisenberg and many others. His haiku explore the porous borders of language, perception and being.
so hard these days
to avoid immanentizing
the eschaton
~
Dr. Charles Trumbull is retired from research, writing, editorial, and publishing positions at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Encyclopedia Britannica. He is past president of the Haiku Society of America and retired editor of Modern Haiku. His chapbook Between the Chimes was published in 2011, and A Five-Balloon Morning, a book of New Mexico haiku, appeared in June 2013, and A History of Modern Haiku came out in 2019. These days he divides his time between his Haiku Database and Haikupedia, the online encyclopedia of haiku.
Monocarpic
He shares little in group but talks a bit over burnt eggs and strong coffee. Mirages are real. Metal burns in the desert sun. Sometimes, the wind is a ghost haunting you.
He calls me by his dead buddy's name and leaves on a Tuesday while the wind swirls around our narthex. I don't find an obituary and wonder if my mind conjured him like a child's imaginary friend.
corpse flower I mark an unmarked grave
~
Colleen M. Farrelly is a mathematician and haibun poet who's been exploring the universe through mathematics and physics since childhood. She's an amalgam of mystic Jewish/Catholic traditions and mathematician-philosophers like Blaise Pascal, with a deep appreciation for meditation and what she learned about public health and spiritual health from South African village shamans in the mid-2000s.
vinyl albums sprawling ivy rotate to deeper pasts
~
Alan Summers is related to the first ever American best-selling/block-buster author! Plus he lurks within the shadows of the local Best Western hotel coffee lounge tapping imaginary keyboards that send messages back home.
the smidgens' pointy shoes scuffling the ceiling and floor of the Planck length
~
Michael Nickels-Wisdom has written haiku since 1990 and speculative poetry since 2008. His speculative work has appeared in horror senryu journal, Scifaikuest, Cold Moon Journal, and Tales from the Moonlit Path. In 2023 he won an annual Science Fiction Poetry Association Contest Dwarf Form Third Place award. In 2011 he began to study people's lived anomalous experiences as a serious nonfiction subject. Many of his poems have come out of that study.
magpie tidings
seven for a secret
never told
~
Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University, where he teaches a haiku course. Randy and Shirley Brooks are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent books include Walking the Fence: Selected Tanka and The Art of Reading and Writing Haiku.
The Party
Sometimes
I smell brimstone
Great grandmother's violets
Lilies over rotting flesh
They come for me
All the mothers and fathers
Embrace me in a golden light
Grandmother's song
Rose-soap-scented surrounds me
I see them
In dreams
Behind the helms of starships
Heading for the unknown
I glimpse them
Wandering in crowds
Lost without eyes
Laughing
They beckon me to the party
I feel found
Seen clearly again
By this mist
~
Anne Fox, considered a witch-child from birth, is an off-planet soul doing psychopomp work behind the scenes for our dying civilization.
lifting the curse ~
the soft rustle
of angelica leaves
~
Sarah Mahina Calvello lives in San Francisco and writes mostly haiku. She loves nature and is addicted to coffee. https://heyyouhaiku.blogspot.com/?m=1
My Names
My secret names are known
by those who love me.
My secret names are darkness, giver, envy,
happiness, laughter, pain, goodness,
malevolence, and many more.
My secret names live in the mycelia,
the blabbermouths who tell my story
from root to root, strong trunk
to weakest twig.
My secret names live in the sources
of the rivers that carry them through
rich green, concrete, grey dryness,
to become one with the oceans.
My secret names echo from peak to peak
from the Alps to the Karakorum
to the Himalayas, almost die of thirst
in the Gobi or the Sahara,
carried on the thought winds.
My Names have been engraved
in the blood of my children,
in all their beauty, all their ugliness.
Some of my lovers guessed
my names, and, like Rumpelstiltskin,
I disintegrated from the rage,
the shame, and the nakedness
of being known.
One day, when I must
ask for admittance, I shall call them out
with pride and the knowledge
that they will be accepted
as my true names.
~
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and the author of two novels, short stories, as well as eight poetry collections and one chapbook. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a 'Pushcart' and 'Best of the Net' nominee. All her recent books are available on Amazon. The new chapbook, The Matter of Words, was published a few weeks ago. A new full-length collection has been accepted for publishing. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/.
guarding the gate . . .
sweet the dryad
for golden apples
~
Sharon Ferrante is a Scottish Witch, who practices magick daily. She's also been seen, now and then, writing some poetry.
~
Roberta Beach Jacobson is an American writer in love with words—flash fiction, poetry, song lyrics, puzzles, and stand-up comedy. Her two poetry journals are smols and Five Fleas Itchy Poetry. Roberta's latest book is Demitasse Fiction: One-Minute Reads for Busy People (Alien Buddha Press, 2023).
Scott Wiggerman, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is primarily known as a poet, instructor, and editor, though he has been interested in art throughout his schooling and career. Since retiring and moving to Albuquerque from Austin ten years ago, where he was librarian at the Fine Arts Academy, he has experienced a renaissance in his love of art. Primarily a collage artist, he has expanded his media into acrylics, ink, charcoal, colored pencil, and prints. Locally, he has had work in shows at Tortuga Gallery, the New Mexico Art League, and the UNM Law Library, as well as a letterpress broadside in collaboration with Holland Hardie in a Remarque Gallery display at the Open Space Visitor Center. As someone who continues to work as both poet and artist, several times he has had his art featured in print: "Dwelling in Possibility," a cut-out paper portrait in We Talked with Each Other About Each Other: Works of Art Inspired by Poems of Emily Dickinson (2019); "Jardin," a two-sided mixed media drawing on parchment paper on the cover of David Meischen's Anyone's Son (2020), and abstract art on the covers of three other books of poetry, Gayle Lauradunn's The Geography of Absence (2020), Lyman Grant's ostraca (2023), and the Haiku Society of America's national anthology Fractured by Cattails (2023). Other artwork has appeared in such journals as ABQ inPrint, Cholla Needles, and Rattle. Other samples of Wiggerman's work can be found at https://scottwiggerman.myportfolio.com/.
wake of vultures
the ceremonial white
of widows
~
Anne Fox, considered a witch-child from birth, is an off-planet soul doing psychopomp work behind the scenes for our dying civilization.
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rusted fence how we bleed without knowing
~
Scott Wiggerman, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is primarily known as a poet, instructor, and editor, though he has been interested in art throughout his schooling and career. Since retiring and moving to Albuquerque from Austin ten years ago, where he was librarian at the Fine Arts Academy, he has experienced a renaissance in his love of art. Primarily a collage artist, he has expanded his media into acrylics, ink, charcoal, colored pencil, and prints. Locally, he has had work in shows at Tortuga Gallery, the New Mexico Art League, and the UNM Law Library, as well as a letterpress broadside in collaboration with Holland Hardie in a Remarque Gallery display at the Open Space Visitors Center. As someone who continues to work as both poet and artist, several times he has had his art featured in print: "Dwelling in Possibility," a cut-out paper portrait in We Talked with Each Other About Each Other: Works of Art Inspired by Poems of Emily Dickinson (2019); "Jardin," a two-sided mixed media drawing on parchment paper on the cover of David Meischen's Anyone's Son (2020), and abstract art on the covers of three other books of poetry, Gayle Lauradunn's The Geography of Absence (2020), Lyman Grant's ostraca (2023), and the Haiku Society of America's national anthology Fractured by Cattails (2023). Other artwork has appeared in such journals as ABQ inPrint, Cholla Needles, and Rattle. Other samples of Wiggerman's work can be found at https://scottwiggerman.myportfolio.com/.
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~
Shloka Shankar is a disabled poet, editor, and visual artist from Bangalore, India. She is the Founding Editor of Sonic Boom and its imprint Yavanika Press, and the author of the recent haiku collection within our somehows. Each day reminds her to let go of control and embrace the wilderness that is her body.
~
Stephanie Zepherelli, a former dance professor, is a long time student and teacher of Iyengar yoga, ballet, and contemporary dance; a student of Zen master Robert Aitken; and a reluctant clairvoyant descended from Romanian Gypsies. She was introduced to short form poetry via Triveni Haikai India. Stephanie lives on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, with her tribe of Madagascar geckos.
when you think
about it
life is
a pyramid scheme
~
Shloka Shankar is a disabled poet, editor, and visual artist from Bangalore, India. She is the Founding Editor of Sonic Boom and its imprint Yavanika Press, and the author of the recent haiku collection within our somehows. Each day reminds her to let go of control and embrace the wilderness that is her body.
Incantation for Release or Confinement
inside the mind
outside the mind inside the body
outside
the body inside the room
outside the room inside the house
outside the house inside
the wood outside
the wood
~
Michael Nickels-Wisdom has written haiku since 1990 and speculative poetry since 2008. His speculative work has appeared in horror senryu journal, Scifaikuest, Cold Moon Journal, and Tales from the Moonlit Path. In 2023 he won an annual Science Fiction Poetry Association Contest Dwarf Form Third Place award. In 2011 he began to study people's lived anomalous experiences as a serious nonfiction subject. Many of his poems have come out of that study.
sit a spell
fellow phantom
all are welcome here
~
Sarah Mahina Calvello lives in San Francisco and writes mostly haiku. She loves nature and is addicted to coffee.
~
Barbara Anna Gaiardoni and Andrea Vanacore, known as gaia & vana, are finalists in the "Writings Leith" competition in Edinburgh. They were shown at the "Artfarm Pilastro," an exhibition of contemporary art and performance. Douglas Pinson of "Spinozablue—An Eclectic Journal of the Arts" describes their work as "Fine art/poem." Barbara and Andrea are life partners residing in Verona.
https://barbaragaiardoni.altervista.org/blog/haikuco-2/
cleaning house
for other-worldly guests
new ofrenda candles
~
Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University, where he teaches courses on haiku, tanka and Zen poetics. Randy and Shirley Brooks are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent books include Walking the Fence: Selected Tanka and The Art of Reading and Writing Haiku.
