Stone Circle Review - Stone Circle Review

Hymn for a Faith Crisis

by Taylor Franson

CW: Religious violence/trauma

To say it is mindless misses the point.
~ Camille T. Dungy

Resolutely

You think about that study you read about jellyfish. How scientists proved those
tender underwater clouds can think without brains. And how these scientists did
all that research, just to exploit their findings to make money off of programming
robots. You think, also, of all the last names who died with childless women.

How unused their empty wombs must have felt. Like the empty
heads of the jellyfish, capable of learning. This, of course, makes you
think about God. You grow a granite staircase up your spine. An arrow
branded on the nape of your neck, pointed up up up. The sun carved

into the flesh above one eye, the moon above the other. The fingerprints of His
emerald gospel ruthless along your retinas. Strings of pearls round your neck,
hanging down like tentacles. How as a child you, an empty vessel, were filled,
programmed, then at 23, had the last name you loved stripped in the name of

covenant. According to the tradition of your fathers you were laid bare—
another word for vacant. If the prophets were to study your soft body now how
empty would they find you? If they took their chainsaw hymns to the back of your
head would they find a way to interpret the holy text of your mind? Or see

only the silence they’re expecting. How many times they have called
your body temple in the same breath they called it theirs?

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Taylor Franson-Thiel is a Pushcart nominated poet from Utah, now based in Fairfax, Virginia. She received her Master’s in creative writing from Utah State University and is pursuing an MFA at George Mason University. She enjoys lifting heavy weights and posting reviews to Goodreads like someone is actually reading them. Taylor is on Twitter @taylorfranson, Instagram @taylorfthiel, and Facebook as Taylor Franson.

The Editor2024-05-26T10:42:08-04:00May 26, 2024|

How We Save Others Whilst Dying

by Vikki C.

I watch you filling a crystal decanter with amber
and only hope to leave with the simplest kinds of sorrow:

The one which rides every train south, past the cemetery,
the lakes out east oiled with an exquisite colour spectrum,
or the frost on violets in the valley you cannot cross.

It is like seeing the deer passing through a white field
that was not there before us. Or claiming a miracle.

Men travel away to grow into boys with a thirst for beauty.
Women stay put, waiting for lost boys to return.

Like a placeholder for faith or something immeasurable.
Like the sting of pine air near the station where you vanished.

Where we keep falling in love through wet carriage windows
— the yellow flax beyond, giving flame to a coldness we could not hold.

When I die, I hope to be surrounded by books of poets I’ve never met.
The doors to this end left ajar as life seeks me out again—
silk butterflies whirring above my face with caution.

Because I have not drunk in ninety days, this makes it a wilderness
with no bread or warm body to sleep with. The snow is cold aspirin for survivors.
I drink it with all its traces—of blood, salt and humility.

So that in the musk of my last hour, the bees will hover above my open mouth,
motioning of honey—without entering the place where the war began.

Vikki C. is a British-born, award nominated writer, poet and musician. She is the author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press) and the full-length collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press). Vikki’s poetry and stories appear or are forthcoming in venues such as EcoTheo Review, ONE ART Poetry, The Belfast Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Dust Poetry Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, Ice Floe Press, Acropolis Journal, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Across The Margin, The Broken Spine, Boats Against The Current, Fevers of The Mind, Jerry Jazz Musician, Origami Poems, Mythic Picnic, Loft Books, Salo Press, Igneus Press, Lazuli Literary Group, The Write-In (National Flash Fiction Day) and various other places. Vikki is on Twitter @VWC_Writes.

The Editor2024-05-25T10:03:40-04:00May 25, 2024|

The Watch War

by Kyle Newman

When the sun comes up
I speedwalk backwards
to a tall cover crop.

Sprint with my wife
through a life cycle of corn
just to slow time.

Order doctors to
cut out my mind’s
eighty-millisecond buffer
so now I see in pure azaleas
and dogwoods and

horses growing old
and breakable, sons
outgrowing gloves, meteors
flaming at random over
a weathered marbleyard

and an old man
sitting in the kitchen with
a gray dog at his feet
and bare wrists

and dawn streaking through,
daydreaming about
how long it takes
a fence post to split.

KG Newman is a sportswriter for The Denver Post. His first four collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.

The Editor2025-03-16T17:28:25-04:00May 19, 2024|

September

by Satya Dash

Waking up,
you realize some passions are long
gone, and it is at once arduous to count
the ones that didn’t fall
prey to time. You teach your sister a mental
trick to calculate percentages faster and she teaches
you back—it is not all about numbers. If you begin
to self-loathe, days start vanishing right at the stroke
of noon. Every squall of rain
grows icy in your glass
of whiskey. If you go on wanting
to please everybody, a good friend said, you will grow
into a demon. A second cup of tea warms
the cinders of your first
cup of coffee. Caught in traffic, someone sneers
at their doppelganger before the odd twitch
of self-recognition; someone reveals a secret
to a stranger during a casual conversation at the bus
stop; you scroll twitter and develop
an obsession with the seven-day
moving average of deaths
in the city. You switch off
your phone and sleep, slipping painless
into dreams where you meander door to door
selling books. Once by accident, you show up
at the house of someone you used
to be in love with
and give away all
your books. The way you separated from them
is the way you shall wake up tomorrow—startling
for water by the bed, moaning softly
into damp diagonal stripes
of the pillow cover.

Satya Dash is a recipient of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Broken River Prize. His poems appear in Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and Diagram, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart, Nina Riggs Poetry Award, Orison Anthology, and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043.

The Editor2025-03-16T17:27:18-04:00May 18, 2024|

Dark Sister

by Catherine Arra

You arrive in concrete clouds.
Queen of unstable conditions:
joy skyrockets, a lightning flush. This love.

Unruly winds, low-pressure dread,
flash floods spin me down ocean depths.
Queen of unstable conditions:

you flatten in silence, salty.
The weight of water welcomes no weight at all.
Flash floods spin me down ocean depths.

I flick my caudal fin, swell fish-gill cheeks,
shine glossy green eyes. Home in undulating tides,
the weight of water welcomes no weight at all.

Doze away days above. Mask the mood.
I curl into beds of coral, commune with sea lions,
shine glossy green eyes. Home in undulating tides,

the barnacled gold of vessels sunk.
You arrive in concrete clouds.
I curl into beds of coral, commune with sea lions,
joy skyrockets, a lightning flush. This love.

Catherine Arra is the author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Unbroken, Impspired, Poetica Review, Piker Press, and Rat’s Ass Review. Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at catherinearra.com.

The Editor2025-03-09T22:35:21-04:00May 12, 2024|