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JOY

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Welcome to JOY, a special popup edition of Temple in the City. This edition isn’t meant to change the world or make light of the darkness so many feel and see around them. But we hope it will act like a sudden sunburst. A reminder that good things, beautiful things, glorious things happen all the time, all around us. Life grows in the most inhospitable places. We grow with it, whether we like it or not.

Some of the work here is just a few words. Or just the right words. Sometimes nonsense words or nonsense use of words. Words to make you smile or laugh or feel, for a moment, the warmth of a friendly sun, the touch of a loving breeze, the touch of another being, human or animal, equally in the dark, equally looking for strength to keep going. That moment can fuel the next moment, and the next. It doesn’t need anything else. It just is.

This idea started as a single, one-off micro edition but joy can’t be captured or limited. So we’re going to keep it alive and moving by making it an ongoing, open-ended issue. When a spark of joy comes our way, we’ll add it here.

Please let this issue wash over you. Let it give you some relief amid the burdens of being alive, with all that trying. Don’t ask it to be anything more or less than it is, then give yourself that same kindness.

We hope you find joy, here and everywhere you can.

Contributors

Karen Baumgart, Denise Bayes, Jessica Coles, Kristin Houlihan, Patrick Johanneson, Rachel Abbey McCafferty, Ben MacNair, Lance Mazmanian, C. Oulens, Tracie Renee, Kathryn Reese, Slawka G. Scarso, Brigitta Scheib, Sumitra Singam, Karen Walker, Huina Zheng.

Two poems, Yuan Changming

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To depart (free haiku)

Means to move along with sunlight

& leave your shadow longer & longer

Behind, or the other way around



The Chinese Spirit: a Mythological Review 

    Unlike your legendary Alexander the Great 

None of us has come to conquer; nor are we 

To be conquered (even by God), let alone any

Human artifacts or behaviours, including science 

And tech blockades & tariffs. Rather, as Confucius 

Has taught us, we always avoid talking of strange 

Phenomena, feats of strength, disorder or sprits

Whereas we do worship our

Ancestors, especially those never accepting defeat

Such as the ever stubborn Houyi who persisted 

In shooting down all the nine extra suns as they

Made the world too hot; the determined  

Xingtian who soldiered on long after his head

Was chopped off; the old Mr. Fool who must

Remove the mountain blocking his way rather 

Than relocating his cottage; the simple-minded 

Jingwei who kept filling the East Sea with twigs

Where she was drowned; the devoted Dayu trying

To contain the Flood instead of escaping from

It in an ark as did your Noah, (so cute & creative) 

Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2149 other publications worldwide. A poetry juror for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write prose in 2022, his hybrid novel DETACHING, ‘silver romance’ THE TUNER and short story collection FLASHBACKS available at Amazon.  

Poetry, Toni della Fata

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Baby, are you a believer?

I don’t believe in God anymore.

But I believe in foxes, standing on the hood of my neighbour’s 2024 Toyota, 

in blood moons in the dead heat of summer,

in gravestones with handwritten notes taped to the marble, spelled incorrectly in a foreign language,

in crumpled birthday cards and sun-stained photos in a shoebox underneath my mattress. 

“Ci vediamo,” see you soon, I remember telling myself, 

at the foot of your bed, 

the mausoleum,

the pier,

at an apartment in Montreal’s east-end.

I believe in the text messages you sent me, 

in the accidental photo you took of yourself in the hospital, 

they sit undeleted, like cremated ashes on my phone.

“Don’t remember me like this,” you said in broken English, because you wanted me to understand,

I promised that I wouldn’t but of course that was a lie. 

I believe in the clock reaching half past noon, one April afternoon, sitting in my high-school’s music room, dread creeping like a morning glory up my throat.

I believe in early spring sadness, budding with the daffodils in the ditch off the cemetery’s main road.

I believe we’ll always be tethered together, your electric pulse in mine,


Though I spent years fighting it, 

I close my eyes,

Watch our images,

 blur,

overlap,

collapse.

Maybe if I can’t believe in God, I can at least believe in You. 

Toni della Fata is a lesbian writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is a professional daydreamer, whose work focuses on the fringes between fiction and reality. When she isn’t writing, Toni can be found in a nearby stream counting fish or somewhere on the coast collecting sea shells. 

Two poems, Peter Cashorali

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The Lover

If you’re a hallucination that’s okay. If you’re the relationship with my mother when I was two that’s fine. If you’re the product of my having been born in 1954 and living since then in a temperate zone of the planet, sure. An aspect of capitalist consumer culture? Okay! Maybe you are just a trick of the light, made of the afternoon light and Thai food. Don’t you get it? I don’t need you to “really exist.” Just be with me.

Real

You’re faking it, and suddenly you’re not. You’re fooling yourself, and the real thing assembles out of your foolishness and is here. Surely there are wrong ways to go but on every path here it is, the where, the what, the who you seek, and despair of finding, and always knew was fake, that dug the cellar of your grief, that was how your family made its fortune, that your father gambled away when he was young, and the fortune roamed the world, searching for you on every road in back country so no road was the wrong one, that one morning at daybreak steps up to you, clasps your cold hands in its own and says, “Oh my God. You really do exist.”

Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist

Poetry, Ronita Chattopadhyay

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Burnt vegetables and spilled milk or what I will miss when you are gone 

and, yes,
extra sweet tea
because you have always refused
to believe in spoons and
used your unaided hands 
for measuring everything
and misplaced items 
that would turn up 
in the most unexpected places 
like your spectacles in the fridge
and your ability to sew,
to patch up things 
that seemed irredeemably torn
and your smile and your face
and your touch. 

Ronita Chattopadhyay (she/her) is an Indian poet and writer. Her micro chapbook Preparing to be Wrecked has been published as part of an anthology (Grieving Hope) by Emerge Literary Journal. Her work has also appeared in The Hooghly Review, Akéwì Magazine, streetcake magazine, Porch Lit Magazine, FemAsia, among others, and anthologies by Querencia Press, Sídhe Press, Rough Diamond Poetry and Bare Bones.  She loves mountains, books, music and tea. Socials: ronita.bsky.social (Bluesky) ronita_c (Twitter/X)

Poetry, Todd Matson

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Author/Artist Todd Matson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in North Carolina, United States.  His poetry has been published Feminine Collective, San Antonio Review, The Brussels Review, and featured in Poetry for Mental Health.  He has also written lyrics for songs recorded by several contemporary Christian music artists, including Brent Lamb, Connie Scott and The Gaither Vocal Band.

Poetry, Peter Gutierrez

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Afterparty

There were tides inside, lap-rolling and full of swimmings with and

Against the waves, lagoons of shifting plastic, and seabirds fighting

With the shore birds fighting with the waterfowl, intarsial contrails

Of diving, flying over, falling into. Nearly every morning she awakens

Only partly, the slosh of dreams and the chilled saltiness of reality

Staggering her back into jumbled half-action.

The clear light and the unclear, and how the two of them liked to switch

Between the two.

The clear undercuts the unclear, which is fun in a jungle

Sort of way—you never knew what phenomena you’d encounter in the fog.

Focus on breath in, hate out.

Breath in, hate out.

Janus felt the negative leave his core, or

At least decided that’s how he’d describe it

Later.

Breath in, hate out.

Or should that be breathe? He hated those online

folks who didn’t grasp the difference. (Spells & spellings.)

In any case: in through the twins, observing thoughts

As they froth and ferment. Then: out through the lips,

Fumigating the caverns of contempt in the digestive knowledge

Management system.

Distantly, a jet plane quiet-thundering through the clouds;

On the next block, a Sonata slides by, its tread smooth and humming.

He could sit here and listen to the dawn-sounds, the sound-

Makers afar and invisible, and be happified for the rest of his

Life, he mused.

His wife, Eleanor, enjoyed a different pathway into the light:

Influenced by an influencer, she went out each dawning before

Anything else. Barely dressed, barefoot or flip-flopping along, 

Ellie followed the notion of forcing undesired action into being,

Doing that which she didn’t want to do to skill her mind into

Facing the unknown; specifically, the rest of the unraveling day.

As a strategy, this swelled and broke like an egg. Those summer

Mornings in Maryland, inches past daybreak, and she could feel 

The hint of heat, the tingly precursors of rain, the immediate world

Still coated in night’s silences. This emergent love of the pale,

Creeping minutes in a pale and creeping hour derailed the project

(As happens sometimes). Later, a post she drafted explained it,  

How what she’d avoided became what she desired, and undid all

The wisdom of the shift. Yet also brought the amor fati peace that

Newsreel chatter, sparkly cocktails, party favors, and elbow-brushings

Had failed to.    

Her husband, whose name is likely Janus, was, is, and will be

Ever unaware of the sutured joinings of her Buddha nature. 

Peter Gutierrez is a poet and writer with work in Bruiser, Exist Otherwise, Not One of Us, and Lxminxl; his books include the story collection From Bad to Worse and the novella The Trees Melt Like Candles. You can find him online @suddenlyquiet.

Poetry, Ben Nardolilli

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Waiting behind

Tonight’s stars are a bunch of people pleasers

Shining brighter than ever

And bringing out all the favorite constellations in a row

I stay inside with my lights on, blocking it out

I have no desire for their show

We do not deserve to look away from earth, not now

Ben Nardolilli is a theoretical MFA candidate at Long Island University. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Door Is a Jar, The Delmarva Review, Red Fez, The Oklahoma Review, Quail Bell Magazine, and Slab. Follow his publishing journey at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.