Breath & Shadow

Making Tracks, Sunlight, Battle Scars by Glenda Barrett

I couldn't stifle the urge
to hike mountain trails,
raft rugged rivers,
picnic in the park,
fish mountain streams,
swim under waterfalls
and bask in the sun
on large, flat rocks
while really listening
to the birds singing
as if it was critical
to my survival.

Looking back,
after my excursions,
my instincts were right.

Click here to read these poems

Blood From A Stone by Madeleine Parish

On a recent October Sunday that felt more summer than fall, more dense than crisp, I visited a meditation garden at the home of a physician who emigrated from Japan to Connecticut in the sixties. The friend who invited me didn’t provide much background, except that the garden had been over thirty years in the making and that it was rarely open for public viewing.

I’m not much of a gardener myself. I’ve done a reasonably good job of bolstering my little gray Cape’s “curb appeal” with a few andromeda and arborvitae. But my backyard (which I know aches with potential) swings between manic overgrowth and depressive neglect. I’m sure I’d get pleasure from making more of the little patch outside my sunroom, but lacking both confidence and cash, I’m paralyzed in perennial planning. Plus, the thought of tending a garden for three decades? Unfathomable. I stayed in my first house for over fifteen years, but since then, it’s been three years here, three years there, all in pursuit of better investment return. At least that’s what I told myself.

Click here to read this essay

Metaphor On Stage - Movie Review by Ann Chiappetta

Acting Blind is a behind the scenes look into a non-professional group of actors rehearsing the play, “Dancing to Beethoven”. The film follows the group’s metamorphosis as they evolve from a haphazard bunch of amateurs into a practiced, balanced, performance group.

All the actors are blind and all but one experienced vision loss later in life. A few moments are taken to capture each actor’s own struggle with the onset of his or her disability. For instance, one woman recalls the time she drove her car off the road: It was the last time she got behind the wheel.

Click here to read this review

MISERY: An adaptation from Chekhov by Laban Hill

The jets' relentless roar over Kennedy Airport pollutes the hearing of all nearby as the endless line of waiting yellow cabs exhaust what little breathable air there is. Flood lights positioned every few dozen feet blot out any semblance of twilight. The cold penetrates wherever it can: cracked windows, loosely buttoned coats, exposed skin. Abdullah Mohamet, a cabbie near the front of the line, buries himself in his seat with the heat blasting full force. After ten years in the city, his skin still stings when it comes in contact with even the slightest breeze. He’s a creature of the desert. His dreams are crowded with hot, violent suns that boil the marrow.

He sits immobile, hunched low behind the wheel, giving his cab an appearance of abandonment. Every once in a while a shiver, deeper than any cold could possibly bring on, undulates through his body from his toes through his legs and up his spine to his scalp like dominoes falling in a line. The engine of his cab hums along steadily and monotonously, its soft, warming vibration reminiscent of an embrace.

Click here to read this short story

The Bookstore on the Mount by Thomas Gagnon

The postcard I am pretending
to find fascinating
  is of the Virgin Mary,
  in Renaissance blue, with fleshly child.

  The Paulist bookstore's one customer,
  clad in formal blue and gray,
  quietly browses; I quietly
  envy him, in a vague, uncertain way
  that deadens my abdomen.

Click here to read this poem

Dimmer Beacons by Joanne Marinelli

By 1991 I was twenty-eight, three years past the half-way mark of twenty-five, two years before the big three-0. Not old in terms of a modern life span, but my bloom now hung heavier, my mind more impatient with aspirations yet unrealized, including the hope of a germane transformation, yet another variation on the Pygmalion myth the poet Ovid was kind enough to leave behind for Hollywood. (Think of Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller in the 1938 film of the same name, adapted from the play by George Bernard Shaw, which in turn led to the 1956 musical, My Fair Lady...) I would root out the loud and bilious working class origins, exchange them for a cosmopolitan hauteur and intellect that was perfectly cool and restrained, thus lifeless, or if not quite that, at least have a shield from the blows no one can contain.

Click here to read this essay