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Today SHINE has a unique opportunity to share a pairing of poems from two different writers, former contributor Michael Whitehead and friend, Sue Ann Kuhn-Smith. (Learn more below.) I think you'll readily understand the nice Autumn match-up of these two poems, and the tribute to tables and chairs feels particularly appropriate as we approach Thanksgiving here in America -- a chance to 'slow down' and sit together at the table (as a sort of 'temple') with loved ones. May we all 'leave full of stories' & warm hearts! SHINE will be back after Thanksgiving with more brand new Spotlights. Until then, wherever you are, be well! Tiny Red ChairAs I sit and listen to the rain fall I am amazed at all the sounds around The car tires rippling over the cement grids Slow down, slow down Splattering of the cool raindrops on old stone pavers Squirrels gnawing away at green pecans Gus at my feet, grooming his long splendid tail What a miracle I am, I am, I am This tiny red chair holds me up and the rain drizzles on with melodies of love Coffee With Patti I always come back to my table. It means coming back to Patti. I had my table before I read her But she made me understand that what I inhabit every day is not just a table, but a temple of conscious grace where I draw in the breath of fellow customers and leave full of their stories  Sue Ann Kuhn-Smith is a native of Wisconsin and a veteran of the Atlanta and national photography-world, having worked alongside several luminaries of the profession. She has resided in Covington, GA for a number of years where she is fortunate to spend much of her time observing and enjoying the natural world. Her poetry finds inspiration in that environment where moments of quiet reflection allow her to focus on simple, sensory details.
Michael Whitehead's "Coffee With Patti" sprang from mornings at a table in his local coffee shop, musing over and gaining perspective from the writing of a favorite artist. Michael read Sue Ann's "Tiny Red Chair" and gave her a nudge to submit the poem to SHINE. Finding Sue Ann's "Tiny Red Chair" and Michael's "Coffee With Patti" a delightful complement to one another, SHINE was happy to accept both poems for a unique Spotlight feature. Thank you, Michael and Sue Ann, for sharing your love of words with SHINE international poetry series! Welcome back, poetry fans! Today I'm shining the spotlight on my dear friend and previous SHINE contributor, Sylvia Green, with three poems that explore the journey of loss and recovery. Thank you, Sylvia, for sharing your words with SHINE, once again! MidstBeing with someone as they prepare to pass So thankful they were not alone How long does it take To shed the last image of them? To replace it with Past memories of Happinesses Accomplishments Unrepeatable moments Their sayings Lessons Smile Laughter Habits Jokes. It requires intense constant effort, The resurrection of their wonderment From the tomb of grief. After And Now? He is gone. Tucked away, safe, sound, whole. The void he leaves is vast. “This is going to take some getting used to,” she whispers. Worry wanes from her mind. Fear ebbs from her soul. Her mind slowly expands after The crushing pressure of Keeping track, Keeping watch, Holding up Hoping on. How to use the inner energy that remains? Will the adrenaline that has kept her guard up For so many hours, days, months, years Finally dissipate? Where to funnel all of the loving concern? May he peacefully rest in his eternity. May she patiently prosper in her transformed future. Latent PotentialLook around Sense Dormant wonder vigilantly anticipating emergence From countless sources: Fabric on a bolt Yarn on a skein Paint in a can Infant in an isolette Food on a shelf Cleaning products in a cupboard Yeast in the warm water Music on a staff, ALL hopefully expectant that Energy Talent Initiative Facility Loving care Will cultivate them into their greatest possibility.  Mary Sylvia Miller Green is a retired elementary teacher from Upstate New York. She won a New York Times Award for her high school newspaper column. Writing poetry has given her a delightful outlet for her love of language, expressing her feelings, and describing her observations of all things important to her. Mary lives with her husband and enjoys camping, reading, and spending time with their two grown daughters.
Poetry lovers, it's a new week with brand new poetry here at SHINE! Today I'm delighted to shine the spotlight on Royal Rhodes, who brings us two poems: The Magic House, and Passing. I particularly enjoyed Rhodes' closing lines. Thank you, Royal, for sharing your words with SHINE! The Magic House  Passing   Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in a rural village, surrounded by a nature conservancy and Amish farms. His poems have appeared in literary journals in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Singapore, and India.
Today it's a pleasure to shine the spotlight on the evocative work of Helen Laycock. Helen shares three poems: Watercolour in the Rain, Mindquake, and Going Deep. Thank you, Helen, for sharing your gift of words with the SHINE international poetry community! Going Deep Mindquake  Watercolour in the Rain   Helen Laycock, winner of Black Bough Poetry’s Chapbook contest and shortlistee of The Broken Spine’s Chapbook competition, has nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her collection FRAME has featured as Book of the Month at the East Ridge Review, her spoken word poetry was showcased in September’s edition of iamb, and she has recently been celebrated in a ‘Silver Branch’ feature with Black Bough. Publication includes After…, BBC Upload, Reflex, Ekphrastic Review, Lucent Dreaming, Popshot, Black Bough, The Storms Journal, Broken Spine, Fevers of the Mind, Cabinet of Heed, The Winged Moon, The Caterpillar, The Dirigible Balloon, Flash Flood, Three Drops Press, Visual Verse, Onslaught, Frazzled Lit, Paragraph Planet, CafeLit, Literary Revelations, Blink-Ink, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dark Winter Lit, and Rough Diamond, with imminent publications in the pipeline. She also had a 2025 poetry spotlight at The Starbeck Orion.
SHINE is pleased to put the spotlight on bilingual poet Michael DuBon, with his poems: Mañanas Ambientes, Ambient Semiotics, and Ambient Season. Thank you, Michael, for sharing your words with SHINE international poetry series! Mañanas Ambientes Good morning is an early morning sweat chased by a blueberry spinach protein shake. Buenos días es un deseo de ti para mí sobre el desayuno de huevos con tomate y cebolla. Good morning is the dawn twilight for we the crepuscular ones who steal our moments under the sun and moon simultaneous. Buenos días es el agua, la agua, elagua, laagua, de nosotros juntos, dos cuerpos de agua con una sola alma de agua. Good morning is a Guatemalan coffee with a sweet human tasting of honey, rose, lavender, cacao, cinnamon, guajillo chile. Buenos días es la ventana a tu alma renacida, a tu espíritu de limón-amor. Good morning is the relief from the great weight on my lungs of missing you while we slept, and the sweet chance to miss you while we are together. Buenos días es el inicio de cuando anhelo anhelarte y claro que sí te anhelo y te deseo y te extraño y te adoro y te amo. Good morning is a drive where we chat about cats and Hoagland and Seuss and house of our dragon and feline selves and us and we and us and we and we laugh and laugh and laugh together all the way to work. Buenos días es una comunión y commute con el cielo y los árboles. Good morning is a reprieve from a nightmare of cruel words and tragic goodbyes at CMH. Buenos días es el amor feroz y salvaje sobre la pila limpia sin platos– rosa y sal y yogur, tan rico, tan lindo, tan so us. Good morning is the very best part of my day–I always await para thee, para thee I await, por thine belleza y por thine brillo y por thine brillantez. Buenos días son millones y mil millones y billones de besos y besos y besos, cada beso más delicioso y más delicioso– Bésame por favor, para siempre, mi amor. Por la mañana, siempre, kiss y kiss y kiss, dear one, sweet one, mi mejor, mi última. Buenos días y good morning, querido amigo. Good morning and buenos días, querida amiga. Ambient Semiotics How wild we grew in middle age, like a sweet and thorny blackberry bush bowling fence after fence. Yet all this only in the wake of a state of para-stasis where we felt like cracking icebergs and overripe red dwarf stars over heat we had expended long ago, the interpersonal labor of doing dishes, the fuchsia of our patio bench, the house and property taxes and all the taxes unseen in the course of a day. We emerged from the cocoon of one another, a metamorphosed metaphor for time abandoned without abandon, so high school in each other's whiskered words and scaly arms. Marry, kiss, or kill held the only options, for the centre overwhelmed from friction, from fragmentation, from our atoms splitting at the seams from the gravity of the hour. And so we toss our car keys into some elementary park boxwoods, drunk in the middle of the morning night on Kirkland High Noons, learning to recognize the selves we do not recognize any longer–yo ya no soy yo y tú ya no eres tú–buzzing as neon gas through newly configured shapes of light, something that flashes MCDB, a humming like a podcast about being seen, some synesthesia of what our brains tell our body that love is–a taste, a touch, a sound, a sight, a smell all blended into us together at the same time–all spicy on our lashes like a freshly cut jalapeño, all pungent on our eyes like a wheel of cotija cheese. Something like all these things and things and things, but also some thing entirely different, some thing newly reconfigured, some thing removed from the first and second and 119th things. Ambient Season Oh the summertime is gone, and I wonder when this wuthering longing will leave me; oh, so like the molten ghost of my bonnie love to leave me sweating awake by night, twixt dreams where thou art the christened vision of the one for whom great deeds are done. The leaves sweetly turn and turn and turn again, their rustling and rustling and rustling shifting an echo of pigment change and brain change and change change, and I cling like a purple orchid to her windswept petals, sinking ever over a stone fountain of grey blue cat eyes. Three seasons of unparalleled warmth relived ad infinitum, such mirth and honey mead, such echoes of heartfelt laughter among our stone corridors, such flowers of paradise never lost were we who bloomed and bloomed and bloomed for ‘nother, a conflagration of pollen against the hoary rapture of the world beyond in our beflowered tower by yon cool cosmic waters, and now thee, lassie gone, hast been raptured away and so I must touch the vibration of thine touch in the hollow crunch of prickly pinecones falling to rest upon their pine needle beds. Thou art the purple heather crying in the gales that there will be wild violet mountain thyme and verde que te quiero verde time. I smell thee, mi amor de chocolate y chile perfume, in the prism of an amethyst rose, an unfound key, leading to other worlds than this– Some in which we are together and have always been together and will always be together–cleaving like the green ivy to the purple heather.  Michael DuBon is a first-generation US citizen of Guatemalan descent and a first-generation college graduate. His poetry has appeared in The Meadow, Rising Phoenix Review, and The Museum of Americana, and others, and his creative nonfiction has appeared in The Plentitudes, Heartwood, and Under the Gum Tree. He holds an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California and an MIS from Southern Utah University, and he is currently Tenure Track English Faculty in the English Department at Everett Community College. He also volunteers as a board member at large for WTAW Press. He is working on publishing his memoir: The DuBonicles and his poetry book Ayersterday y el Arte de Free Dissociation. At his most natural, he is laughing and smiling like no one is watching—because he’s usually by himself anyway.
Poetry lovers, thanks for stopping by SHINE to read the latest in a series of phenomenal writers from around the world! Today, we're shining the spotlight on Northern Ireland poet, Ewen Glass. Ewen brings us his prose poem, "I Finished All the Podcasts," and a short but poignant poem, "Making Up Stories." Thank you, Ewen, for sharing your words with SHINE! I Finished All the PodcastsTrue Crime exhausted truth and crime; I was exhausted by two people discussing something like it’s the first time they’ve encountered it; the edgelord comedian fell off the edge (the earth is flat after all); with no people left to interview, hosts turned to pets, albeit articulate ones; Couch to 10k ran out of legs; the history shows reached now; and I did the dishes alone. Walking the dogs became an everyday tragedy. I finished all the podcasts and all I’ve been left with is me. And I’m awful. Making Up Stories It’s a rare kind of joy making up stories for your kid, building a world every night, peopling it with characters, and resolutions, just as your kid develops their own world. In our stories, people are flawed but kind, lessons are learned, there is justice. These stories aren't for the kids.  Ewen Glass is a screenwriter and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise, and a body of self-doubt. His poetry has appeared in the likes of Okay Donkey, Maudlin House, HAD, Poetry Scotland, and One Art. Ewen is on BSKY/X/IG @ewenglass
Welcome back, SHINE poetry fans! Today, I'm pleased to re-introduce the talented John Grey, who brings us: Tadpole Man, Swollen Finger, and Silent Moments at the Wake. Thank you, John, for once again sharing your work with SHINE! Tadpole Man As a child, I had my peculiarities, scooped spawn from creek beds, tadpoles that swirled in cloudy mason jars – my boyhood repository. I watched legs sprout like secrets, eyes bulge out of tiny heads. And just as wonder met form, I unscrewed the lid, plopped them back into the brown muck from which they came. Later I’d sit by water’s edge, pondering whether they recalled the one-eyed god with the gaze of glass. Did those denizens of the sludge wonder at the newcomers in their midst? How they reacted to threat automatically as if they had been schooled in it? Maybe my proteges re-entered the reeds oddly fluent in something vaguely human. Such was my imagination then, my regret now. Swollen Finger Something red is oozing from my swollen finger. It may not be blood. Being alone in the house like this provides plenty of opportunity for self-disgust. It all the result of possessing a body. A guy may have class but it has none. When I was young, it was only partly mine. According to parental instruction, I could touch my nose but not my penis. The finger in the ear was verboten. So was the picking of a scab, the squeezing of a pimple. Today I stuck a needle in that bulging digit. For some reason, it made me think of a rupture in the crust of the planet raining pus all over the countryside. Looking around me at the wretched landscape, I find the bodies of my loved ones charred by fire, smothered in ash. There’s gore everywhere. Crows dive in for a feast of charcoaled flesh. They nibble away for as long as they can stand the steam. I want to apologize but the hiss of the ground is too loud. It’s no pleasure being in your own body. There’s tasks it must perform that are repellent in even impolite company. Even the heart, mythologized, romanticized down the years, is a gruesome chunk of bloody flesh. And this is not the only volcano. There’s others that could erupt at any moment. I kneel down on that bed of steamy silica in an attempt to comfort an old friend. I see my mother’s face in the gray clouds. She admonishes me with a fiery glare. The volcano is spitting out more flaming rock and it’s rolling my way. Those who live by magma must die in its searing unguent. Silent Moments at the WakeThe long silence at the end of life is greeted by many moments of respectful quiet, as we come together, pause our own lives, to participate in death. A hush rises between mourners, accompanied by handshakes and hugs. Then we break apart like bread on waters, slow and muted, alone even if we leave with people, tongues silent, as if they were the dead man’s.  John Grey is an Australian poet and US resident, recently published in Shift, River & South, and Flights. Grey's latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters, and Between Two Fires, are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review, and Trampoline.
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SHINE - International Poetry Series
Click here for submissions and more
From the international poetry community, we have a "luxury of stars," as Sylvia Plath might say, and it is SHINE's honor to provide a home for their words with the online Spotlight series as well as SHINE Quarterly. Click on the logo above to learn more. And...keep writing, keep shining!
In poetry, Samantha Terrell, EIC SYLVIA PLATH
Stars Over the Dordogne Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy
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