Scissors

By Gloria Mindock

The scissors are all shiny, sharp and colorful standing up in the cup. Sick of being stuck and never used, they jump onto the table, down to the floor, and cut their way into the next room.
When Doris picks them up, wondering how they got there, she gets cut. Blood drips on the floor. The scissors snap closed to keep from laughing, but just for now.
They are shoved back into the cup, a band-aide is put on her hand, blood cleaned up and the scissors attack again. All because a hem was not sewn correctly. The scissors sliced through the material cutting it in strips, ruining it, then, hop back into the cup. Doris cannot figure out how this happened.
The scissors will never be good again. They love destruction and promise to keep doing this no matter where they end up. At night, while she and her husband are asleep, the scissors cut Doris’s hair…uneven, cut a streak down the husband’s hair, cut up the rugs, and sliced the drapes into long strings hanging. 
The next morning, Doris was perplexed and threw the scissors out.
At the dump, the scissors were very busy until Sue took them home. Now it all starts again. Sue’s hand was cut. The cycle repeats and repeats.
A cutting for everyone when it is your time.

The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
Without any of the arts, the world would not be a good space. We need creativity to grow, communicate with others and express ourselves in many ways. Pushing the boundaries is how we learn from each other.

What was the inspiration for your creative work?
A photograph of a pair of scissors from a project of mine.

Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
I grew up surrounded by three state parks in Illinois with hiking trails, canyons and waterfalls. All the parks were breathtaking. So many state parks are neglected when they don't have to be. I would hate to see them disappear or used for development. We are not leaving a beautiful world for the next generation. Plastic and all types of waste are ruining our oceans and land. Plastic is also toxic and it is used everyday as storage containers for food, It is poisoning us as well as pesticides. I could keep going with a list how we are destroying the earth. If things do not change, more people will get Cancer and other diseases.

Photo credit: David P. Miller and Jane Wiley

Gloria Mindock is editor of Červená Barva Press, an award-winning author of six poetry collections, two books translated into Romanian and Serbian and three chapbooks. Her poems have been published and translated into twelve languages. Her recent book is Grief Touched the Sky at Night Glass Lyre Press, 2023). Recently she was recipient of the Sam Cornish Award from the New England Poetry Club in recognition of her outstanding contributions as international publisher, activist, and poet whose unflinching eye bears witness to atrocities inflicted on people around the world. Gloria was poet laureate in 2017 and 2018 in Somerville, MA.

Words

By Elline Lipkin

The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the importance of the arts and humanities and how this project resonates with you.
I love the idea of writing about writing — tracing where creativity first sparked and where the lit fuse led. This piece (submitted) first was published online with Silver Birch Press.

What was the inspiration for your creative work?
I believe I was two or three years old in this photo, at that time living in New Jersey, before my family relocated to Miami, where I grew up. My brother and I were fascinated by my father’s old manual typewriter — it seemed magical the way words came out of the top. I think we were also just at that age of realizing the power words hold. Recently, I bought an old manual typewriter at an auction. Something about the lack of the intermediary of technology makes striking out words more satisfying and immediate.

Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
I don't wish to lose the seasons. Growing up in Miami we 'joked' that there were two seasons — 'hot' and 'hotter.' Now it seems to be hot all of the time. Now that I live in California and have been through an 'urban wildfire' I worry immensely for the wildlife and ourselves in the face of climate change.

Photo credit: David Lipkin

Elline Lipkin is currently a Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women. She also teaches poetry workshops. She is the author of The Errant Thread, selected by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award, Girls’ Studies, published by Seal Press, and Girl in a Forest, forthcoming from Trio House Press in 2025.

What Want Brings

By Bertha Rogers

What are your thoughts on the importance of the arts and humanities and The Creative Process?
I can't imagine a world without the arts and humanities. I have been a poet and a teaching artist for more than 50 years, and I am thrilled to be part of this project.

Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose.
I have lived on a mountain in New York's Catskills for 35 years. I have planted and take care of more than 2,000 trees and shrubs, a project which gives me great pleasure, as project that has welcomed bears and fishers and coyotes and birds to this land. I am nurtured every day by my surroundings, and I hope many others feel the same way.

Photo credit: Helen McClean

Bertha Rogers is a poet, translator, and visual artist. Her forthcoming poetry collection (Salmon, Ireland), is What Want Brings. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle Poems from the Exeter Book was published in 2019; and her translation of Beowulf in 2000 (Birch Brook, NY).
@bertha-62.bsky.social

A Poet Sits Down to Write After a Massacre

By Matt Hohner

Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
October 27, 2018

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
–Theodor Adorno

The dead keep piling up and all I have are poems
to wrap them in. Pockmarks across synagogue walls
are a new font in a familiar language I refuse to utter.
Men have begun again to speak in tongues syntaxed
by phonemes of caliber and clip capacity: diction I
will not assemble into sentences; sounds I cannot make
into words. What color, the stripes being woven like old
narratives into new camp pajamas? How many stars
asterisk prayers into the bluest night? There is no
metaphor for what I cannot abide; no pentameter
for the sound of earth falling from the hands of love
into a freshly-filled grave. My iambs are a pair
of backwards-turned boots in the stirrups of a riderless
horse. We measure the inarticulate grammar of fear
in the steady metronome of newsfeed updates,
punctuate the lulls between carnage with promises
enjambed in the wind. Cover my eyes with verses
if you must. Bribe the ferryman with curses and dust.
A poet’s contract is blood-inked, bone-stamped,
ratified eternal at the frontier where hope kisses rust.

Winner, 2019 Doolin Writers’ Weekend International Poetry Prize (Ireland). Published in The Irish Times February 27, 2019. From At the Edge of a Thousand Years (out of print, Jacar Press 2024).

The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
When the horrific massacre of Jews attending the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania occurred, it was the latest in a series of increasingly monstrous acts by White American males using assault rifles against unarmed citizens. I'd written poems about similar gun violence already, but this act resonated on several levels. On a personal level, the act hit home for me, because my wife's family, Italian Catholics, once lived in the mostly Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the event took place. They, like I, immediately thought of our Jewish friends, but on a global and historic level, we were confronted by the dark shadow of the Holocaust, and with how far backward our nation had fallen on that day. 

I knew I had to write about the event; as a poet who celebrates the beauty and wonders of our natural and made world, I also feel I have an obligation to use my gifts to confront evil and injustice in all of their forms, as best I can, whenever possible. I realized, through tears and gut-sick and sobs, that the best way "into" that poem was to start with my inability to make poetic sense of it, but also to declare my outrage and unwavering resolve to run towards the emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual wreckage at ground zero of such moments, and use my words to offer some semblance of healing and hope, and to bear witness so that future generations will know that someone cared. 

A few months after this poem was published in The Irish Times online, Rabbi Jeffrey Meyer, who was present when the attack on his congregation occurred, contacted me on social media to ask if he could use it as part of the first Yom Kippur activities since the attack at Tree Of Life that following fall. There is no greater and humbling honor for a poet than knowing that his words written for and about healing after a terrible event were heard and read by the people who experienced it. 

A year after that, a poet friend of mine here in Baltimore told me that his rabbi had just read my poem during service at his synagogue. Apparently, my poem had found its way onto a national database for rabbis to use for activities at their synagogues. A poem that I had written as an intensely personal and solitary act to try to make sense of the ugliness that sometimes accompanies the beauty of living on Earth now belongs to the world. If anyone asks me what poetry does, I will tell them this: poetry bears witness, celebrates life, unites, heals, and lives beyond us.

What was the inspiration for your creative work?
Historically, my political and humanitarian inspiration comes from everyone who has stood up to the forces of destruction to declare their universal right to exist freely. Poetically, Sam Hamill, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka come to mind most often, but that’s just a handful. I could list many, many more.

Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
Thinking locally for a moment, I want the next generation to enjoy a Chesapeake Bay in which one can walk across enormous shoals of oysters, just like those that the first Europeans encountered when they sailed up its beautiful, brackish, pristine, teeming waters. Copy and paste that wish across our ever-threatened world, and specify it for every place struggling to exist under the relentless voraciousness of humans.

Photo credit: Mel Edden

Matt Hohner’s poems have won numerous awards. His publications include Rattle: Poets Respond, The Baltimore Review, New Contrast, Live Canon, Passengers, Vox Populi, and Prairie Schooner. An editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s second collection At the Edge of a Thousand Years won the 2023 Jacar Press Book Prize.