after “A Brief for the Defense” Speak of the many being born, their unspoiled eyes will open to a world you cannot imagine. Take comfort in those who believe in kindness and those who walk into flames, undeterred by fury, by vengeance. Amid the barren plains of scorn, bathe your […]
Joan Roger
Joan Roger is a poet and physician who currently resides in the Pacific Northwest where she writes and practices medicine. In 2024, Joan earned her MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Joan has published poems in Thimble, The Healing Muse, The Human Touch, Intima, Canary Magazine, Rust & Moth and The One Page Poetry Anthology and her work is forthcoming in Main Street Rag among other journals.
Sand Mandala
I watch as monks destroy the sandpainting— reds, greens, blues, and golds, painstakingly placed— a world swept up in fragments, swirling down river. Shivers of sand scatter to eddies, to piers, to gullies, and gorges, riding waves of ocean, stopping on shore, here in my son’s sandcastle, or in the stomach of a whale. Sand […]