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| Issue 26: | 1 Jan. 2025 |
| Prose Poems: | 101 + 113 |
| + 103 words | |
| & Visual Art: | Painting |
Painting by Kendall Johnson
Prose poems by Kendall Johnson,
Kate Flannery and John Brantingham
An excerpt from Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets
Prayer X
October 26, 2023
The 92nd Street Y in uptown New York has cancelled the next speaker in its writer’s center program, who has been censored for speaking out against war. The resulting writers’ backlash caused the entire program to fold. The 92NY Center thus fails its own stated mission and purpose, to help people find their voice.
A Buddhist prayer: May those who find themselves in trackless, fearful wildernesses be guarded. Peaceful dissent is freedom’s necessary voice. Help me be open to what others say, and help me speak with courage and compassion. This will define who we all will become.
Shifting Dunes
The beaches in Oregon grow and reduce as the storms attack the sand from the west and from the south. Every winter the tumult remakes the landscape. Salt and wind conspire and combine to chew at the edges of the coast, creating new dunes, new forms. But the creatures who live there persist. Elk, sandpipers, loons, beach pea and wild strawberry shift their ground easily. But the people have the hardest time of it. Because at other edges of the water, the storms give back what they’ve taken elsewhere, and houses that once had ocean views now see only high bleak dunes, strands of kelp, and broken shells forming litter beyond.
Even Before Ur
I was in among the trees off trail, cutting across the woods with my dog when the coyotes started their yammering around us, not the howling of television cartoons, but clipped yips, maybe 10 of them all at once saying something to each other untranslatable to human speech but clear enough to me and the dog.
It was like a prayer for persistence, a call from a pre-Ur language that rumbled under our skins from a group of animals that had been hated and cast out and hunted but survived for as long as humans had the words for hatred.
The quartet as it appears within the print book; click image for larger view: 
Publisher’s Notes:
- The acrylic-on-canvas painting above is from the Melting Into Air series, copyrighted by Kendall Johnson. All rights reserved. Reproduced here with artist’s permission.
- The first prose poem above is by Kendall Johnson, the second is by Kate Flannery, and the third, by John Brantingham.
- “Prayer X” is excerpted from Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets, a printed collection of prose poetry and artworks published by MacQ on Christmas Day, 2024. Appears here with permissions from the authors.
For details about the book, see New Collaboration.
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