Prayers for Wind

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Gleanings

Ocean Grove, New Jersey

Look at the two of them, bent
to the early morning tide.
Culling glass from the gritty surf.
Strange and wonderful alchemists,
who search for the elusive blue
of medicine bottles, caressing
emerald imitators from “Old Latrobe,”
or amber sea urchins
left there like whelks at low tide.

They discard broken bits of crockery,
forsaken jetsam of the sands.
Beach glass is opaque
with a false clarity:
Polished by sand and sea,
the edges don’t cut
like our lives, lived elsewhere,
out beyond the last sandbar,
where plate tectonics rule the waves.

—Scott Edward Anderson

(for Diane Stiglich & James Supplee)

From Fallow Field, Aldrich Press, Copyright © 2013. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Dawid Zawiła, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

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Crème Brulee

with passion fruit. Says it all.
Tapping the glassy sugar with a spoon,
the first taste—rush of wild memory.

Gentle whisperings of everything and nothing,
crash of waves against the breakwater down below.
Mellow music. Mellow sway of B and B

in a snifter to one side, his hand reaching across
for hers on the other.
How could it not always be this way.

It’s been a long while
since she found herself out with another.
Sadly, she was much too smart

in every wrong place—he was much too
unconcerned to realize she was smart.
His hand reached no further than his dessert spoon.

There was no delicate tapping, no whispers
and no blush, just a brief glance at his watch,
the same as she’d already done.

A kiss on both cheeks in an elegant way,
she knotted her scarf as they approached her car.
The cold flight of a slivered moon guided her home.

—Toby Alfier

From Goodbye Kisses, Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, Copyright © 2026. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by MD_JERRY, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

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Lives upon Lives

Contractors affix buildings on top
of buildings in Jerusalem.
Occupants below must clear out
for all the years it takes
to finish adding
to sandstone structures.

I have lived lives upon lives.
I want to go back
to when I was certain—it was my twenties.
I dismissed many great women.
Someone greater was always coming along.

I have been an inept architect.
I built for one who does not live
with the truth of others.
I built for starlight,
not shelter.

I built for ghosts
of those never born.
I built a hollow home
for howling winds.

I built a demise
in waiting
and thought it
a masterpiece
towering over
the settled lives
of others.

—Baruch November

From The Broken Heart is the Master Key: Poems, BenYehuda Press, © 2025. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Mugabi Owen, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me, 
      Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
      For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
      I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
      My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
      Looms but the Horror of the shade, 
And yet the menace of the years 
      Finds and shall find me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 
      How charged with punishments the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate, 
      I am the captain of my soul. 

—William Ernest Henley

Public domain. Photo by George Dagerotip, Unsplash license.

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At the water’s
edge, gulls
face the wind.

—L.L. Barkat 

Author of Love, Etc., , © 2014. Photo by Faran Raufi, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

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— from the desk of L.L. Barkat —

What makes you love a novel?

For me, it’s got to have poetry in prose.

Sure, I love a good story. But it’s in the telling—in the sounds of the words, and in the echoes and depths of expression—that my love for a novel is born.

Our new novel from T. S. Poetry Press uses a Coleridge poem as a frame. But that’s not the only poetry. Otherside also contains “poetry in prose.”

Something to love.

Here are a few of my favorite poetic passages from Otherside…

“Sheen and poise, a sculpture of aristocracy like an engine’s heart, and anything she pleased—given to her—while she remained untouchable.”

—Dee’s thoughts about Jan

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“… at the end of that long, impossible tunnel, like a faintly waving mirage behind mist.”

—Jason’s private thoughts

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“… realizing with the onset of wakefulness that the world was ending in slow-motion—wishing for a word, someone to acknowledge that his grief was really grief.”

—Dee’s private thoughts

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“He nodded, and turned, and walked into the blistering yellow-whiteness of the cast-down sun.”

—narrative about Jason

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“…piece by piece fitting themselves into the space they’d carved out for themselves and fought for against agonizing tides just to keep.”

—narrative about Marla and Jason

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“Somewhere, outside the cabins, outside the starsteel can that was their only protection, was the endless nothing, cold and deadly and dark.”

—narrative about Jason, Marla, and Dee

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“She could program the machines to fire off shots in a great glowing green curve which would show like a gilded flower in the computer formula…”

—narrative about Marla

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“The old saying is that it’s only those who can steer their ship who find land. Now, without remembering the patterns of the stars—how will you ever steer by them?”

—Jan to Jason

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“…and sometimes within that void, like a pinprick, he would find the quiet of the woods behind the house on Earth, before it all.”

—narrative about Jason

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About the Author of Otherside

In addition to Otherside, Sara Barkat is the author of the National Indie Excellence Awards finalist The Shivering Ground & Other Stories. She is also the illustrator of two graphic novels: The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Colour out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft. Sara adores art, sailing, random coding projects, and quantum physics. You can find her at sarabarkat.com or drawing mostly daily at sadbook.substack.com

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