In a world that pulls you in every direction, feeling disconnected is real. Through original poetry, essays, and craft insights, each themed issue helps readers reconnect...with themselves, their stories, and the world around them.
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The Thresholds Issue
Published 29 days ago • 5 min read
March 7, 2026
Barbed Wire, Words Reversed, The Pull of Stillness, Five Lines, Doorways, and More.
Welcome to The Thresholds Issue. Today’s featured poem, The Metal Silence, comes from my archives, yet it belongs here at the edge, where freedom becomes confinement and families wait between hope and loss. This is not a political poem; it is observational, shaped by my time in El Salvador. Around San Salvador, places like El Penalito remind us that thresholds are rarely gentle. Sometimes they are the hard edges where lives quietly turn.
This issue lingers in those crossings. From the symmetry of chiasmus, where language folds back on itself, to the distilled power of the tanka, which captures entire worlds in just a few lines, to the still moment in a Robert Frost poem, where a traveler pauses between rest and obligation.
Today's poetry, essays and insights live in that narrow place where the world pauses just before its next step.
Have a great weekend and keep your eyes on the line where things change.
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Featured Poem
The Metal Silence
The Metal Silence by Jason Z Guest
I have driven by El Penalito. So much wasted youth, So much misplaced anger, So much spent intellect, So much ink.
Feral human spirits, Lost of domesticity, Lost of civility, Lost of liberty, Lost of mind,
Green faces and necks, Designed to belong, Designed to protect, Designed to survive, Designed to kill.
And thrown into the cages, They know hunger, They know abuse, They know misery, They know order.
Yet the pain in mothers’ eyes Only see the child, Only see the love, Only see the cage, Only see the loss,
Clothed in flesh stand The penalties of war, The penalties of mara, The penalties of time, The penalties of San Salvador.
Chiasmus is a rhetorical device where words, ideas, or structures are repeated in a reverse order. The second phrase mirrors the first, but flips it. This creates a balancing effect, with tension and reflection. I’ve always liked chiasmus because it feels like standing at a threshold: you look one way, then the other, and the meaning shifts depending on which side you’re standing on. It's language turning back on itself.
In poetry, this reversal can carry a lot of weight. The line moves forward, then turns, and suddenly the reader is standing in a new place. What was a cause becomes consequence. What seemed certain becomes uncertain. The threshold reveals itself, and with that, I feel it's the perfect device to feature in this issue.
“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” In this famously patriotic statement, the sentence crosses its own boundary, where the first half frames expectation and the second reverses it into responsibility.
— John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961
Check out the motion picture of President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address in Washington, D.C. where Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren administers the oath of office to President Kennedy.
On this day in 1923, Robert Frost published Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I’ve always felt the poem lives right on a quiet threshold. A man pauses in the fallen snow, drawn toward the stillness of the woods, yet aware of the obligations waiting beyond them. Frost had written the poem in a single burst after working through the night, finishing it at dawn. To me, the poem captures a moment we all recognize: standing between beauty and duty, rest and the long road ahead.
Here is a brief excerpt that speaks directly to the pause and passage:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
— Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923), Robert Frost
In this poem, I see Frost standing at a threshold between stillness and motion. The woods offer a kind of surrender to the quiet, but the speaker chooses the road beyond them.
Enjoy this video of VOCES8, the number one classical streamed vocal ensemble in the world performing Eric Whitacre's 'Sleep' with the original poetry, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, conducted by the composer at the VOCES8 Centre in London.
I first came across the tanka the way you come across a trail that’s been there longer than you realized. This poetic form predates the haiku by centuries and grew out of the earliest Japanese court poetry. These poems carried small moments. Maybe it's about weather, a passing glance, or simply longing for something.
A tanka moves in five lines, traditionally following a 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm. It begins with an image and then turns. The last two lines widen the moment, letting reflection or feeling step in. What starts as observation becomes something personal.
Writing a tanka feels like standing in that doorway between what happens outside us and what happens within. In five lines the poem crosses from the visible world into the inner one, and reminds us of how thin the distance between them. That turn is the threshold. Enjoy this tanka poem, The Lonely Tree, a scene from El Salvador and one of my earlier poems employing this form.
Of blood and blue hue, Barra de Santiago, where sky and sea kiss. A knee-deep tree reminds me the worldly beauty I'll miss.
In the 1980s a young poet, Machi Tawara, brought tanka into the daylight with her bestselling collection Salad Anniversary. Suddenly an ancient form felt modern again, and thousands of people began writing tanka of their own. If you’re curious about how this form lives on the page, you can click the link below to find her book.
I want to share a few quotes that circle around the idea of thresholds. Poetry often lives in these in-between places, the moment before something changes. Poems have a way of standing in that doorway and paying attention.
Here are a few lines that remind me how writers notice those crossings. “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” — Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” — Robert Frost
“Between two worlds life hovers like a star, ’twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.” — Lord Byron
Rediscover connection through poetry that hits bone.
In a world that pulls you in every direction, feeling disconnected is real. Through original poetry, essays, and craft insights, each themed issue helps readers reconnect...with themselves, their stories, and the world around them.
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