The world feels lost right now. But there’s one thing that I think everyone believes in (at least a little bit): Magic.
It’s not always super-natural. Magic can have a mystical, out-of-the ordinary feeling. You ever sit still in a moment and say, “wow, this is special”?
We believe that magic can be found in simple moments and that it’s everywhere.
Thank you for believing in magic with us.
This issue of From Whispers to Roars features work from thirteen talented individuals. We hope you enjoy their work.
Donation Announcement:
A part of our mission includes expanding creative opportunities to others. However, with recent changes in federal funding, we decided to do something a little different this holiday season. We’ve made sizable donations to the Food Bank of the Rockies and to Community Table, both food pantries in Colorado.
We believe in helping our neighbors and we believe that food is a basic human right. Thank you for helping us support our community.
Magic: Volume 7, Issue 1
e is for electron, e is for enchantment by Ping Yi Yee
Wise words slumber in cold silenced servers,
our learning across the ages locked
in darkest dying flint. Auburn embers swirl
within the last paper citadel, the songs
of scribes pulsing to heat and ash.
A writer wrote: what matters ultimately
is dentures, clean sheets, bathroom tissue.
Healers may stockpile saline, antibiotics,
painkillers for that zombie apocalypse;
stoics boil it down to water and fuel
while the myopic, hyperopic, astigmatic
scream for new lenses. In the Endgame,
everyone races for the final electron.
All realms lead to a want of power,
whichever shade your punk –
steam, diesel, solar, green, hope; even
Magicians need source, focus, channel.
Undone by greed, doomed by hunger,
as the world turns yet may we
reach across, delve within
to spark a song, taste magic. Fly
as one.
Loss by Mary McCoy
There were prickles up my spine
and an urge to turn and look back
but better not to know.
There are things in that pine woods
that I can’t explain
but they sugar themselves into my dreams,
just up that rise,
those trees,
those shadows,
those briar bushes underneath
that won’t allow me to pass,
and who’s to know
what lurks there
or doesn’t
or might have
before I came to notice,
to observe,
to wonder at the hush
when the birds really should have been singing.
There’s a language in there
that is lost to my ears,
to all human ears
in these lightning fast rational times.
Pentimento by James Penha
I see my brother dead
more than five years
everywhere. Not a ghost;
him. Crossing the street,
parking his car, laughing
with friends in the park,
in the stands at a tennis
match on TV, sipping
coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts,
pushing a shopping cart
from Walmart. It’s not him
of course. But so many
living people look just like
him. Until they don’t.
Day Dream by Harry James
Cunning Women by Ameythist Moreland
We come from cunning women.
We all do.
From those who knew the names of every root,
every reed—
Teas that teased out secrets,
tonics to soothe the nerves,
weather divined from the ache of arthritis.
Plant lore and charmwork passed in whispers
along branches of the family tree.
They didn’t ask for permission.
They knew help wasn’t always granted
by men in robes,
but sometimes by a warm poultice
and a whispered word
carried in the folds of a shawl.
Their magic wasn’t spectacle—
it was survival disguised as ritual.
Subtle, sacred,
and still humming in our bones.
Sundays with Witches by Ameythist Moreland
Sundays are for self-care.
For sleeping in
and sweets for breakfast.
Cinnamon rolls by the cauldron,
followed by a citrus face mask.
Primping, plucking,
pretending
I did not just find
my first silver hair,
shining in the bad bathroom lighting.
Sundays are for rest.
Reflection.
For scheduling and planning
until you charm yourself
into thinking you’re in control.
For curling up
in someone else’s magic
and losing yourself in their spellwork.
Sundays are when witches unwind,
unbind themselves
from the week’s restrictions.
Worries crackle and rise
like smoke from an altar candle—
here,
then gone.
A Bag Full of Hair by Frank William Finney
There were skunks in the shadows.
A nip in the air.
The sound of a buzzer.
A bag full of hair.
And the barber pole twirled
as the crowd stopped to stare
at the clean-cut corpse
in the barber’s chair.
Splinter the Distance by KB Ballentine
A confession of fireworks peppers the sky, blisters
the darkness with sparks and flares, showers of fire.
In the pauses, shadows flirt with a silver maple,
Buck Moon leaping high in a hazy sky.
At dusk, rabbits came to munch the clover,
now they are long gone as are all the wild things.
Only coyotes keening tell us there is more to the night.
It’s my first summer without you.
Last year, sparklers in hand, I remember you
sketched my name in the air like you spoke it when I was born.
Booming echoes, pops and sizzles shrivel
into silence. Now katydids and crickets wrap us
in creaks and kriks as if they had not been fugitive
from the noise, from the violent surprise of light.
At dawn, an egret will rise
from the river fog, a pale phantom
vanishing into all that mystery.
When the Segways Lost by Brian Dickson
Rats stole the two-wheeled
terrors at the end
of their time, dragged
pumpkins from front porches
to the flooded creek
splitting the city.
The rodents ditched
the Segways, rafted
on the gourds tossing
stringy guts
at tourists
like Mardi Gras beads
to celebrate
the end
of anything.
Cadence by Jean Wolff
How to Disappear by Kersten Christianson
i. Magic Cloak
Felted wool, silver
stars. Drink morning’s
high-cragged coffee.
Disappear in abyssal
folds of hood, stack
of papers, click of heels;
still here, or perhaps
Iceland.
ii. Silent Voice
Open door, chatter
and run. Light pours
in, seeps through open
windows. Flag snaps
in the wind, frozen
broccoli breeze cools
annoyance. Bite
my crazy tongue.
Say nothing.
iii. Walk Away
No boxes. Leave
behind the books
of tabbed pages,
torn-from-magazine
poems, sharpened
Ticonderogas.
Carry your wry smile,
the under watered
geranium.
Run.
Moonrise by Cleo Griffith
For some the day begins with rays
of morning sun outside their narrow window.
For me those days are gone,
I am a night hawk, most alive when my moon
first pushes up from whatever horizon I am near,
flat plains, city towers, redwood trees, ocean’s
seemingly endless grasp upon this planet around which
that golden, or silver, orange or shadowed, sphere
revolves, the one to which I am equally anchored.
Having heard from you, moon is your real home,
I seek each night a message, an invitation,
fearing your words may come only once again
and should I not respond I will be doomed
to spend forever here alone among day-people
who do not understand your attraction, my destination.
Theatre Ghosts by Anna Bonjour
There’s something in the smell of it
the musty dust and paint of it
the hollow frame of bulbs unlit
the ghost-lighting the motes adrift
the skeleton of shadow bars
cast starkly on the concrete walls
that line the maze of backstage halls
all bluelit till the curtain call.
The polish past proscenium
the sacred hush when house goes dim
but rough and raw behind the rim
all function, formless—cut the trim.
Costumes in the blueness glitter
nervous, pace the floor unbidden
borne on shoes with black heels clicking
hairspray like a smoke cloud drifting
mixing with the ghosts of flowers
tucked beneath the seats for hours
stretched to decades by the power
of the tales, so many showered
night by night across the magic
woven from the chalkboard blackness
stories of romance and madness
dancing, sing of grief and gladness
Curtain shakes off truth and dust
it falls like snow in myths that must
be told again, again to us
to keep our hearts beating off rust.
Assent by Christopher Watkins
If only you could read the tea leaves in my eyes, you’d see
this will all be behind us soon. Illness and injury can be
left to the sea. It’s our particular magic to regrow
from whatever remains when we’re well again.
Do you remember getting engaged? Who knew
it would feel so different. That may have been
when I first grew up. Still, all the definitions
of what it means to be a man have been erased.
This will be another one of those trips.
When the radio connects us to the road.
When the rapture is prophesied
at the left side of the dial. When Steve Miller
sings, “You can do magic,” and we give,
by singing along, our assent.
