The Bluestone Review 2025

The Bluestone Review

Made the Day My Religion Mark Vogel Doe-eyed, seeing first light, a voice of a master floats again alive inside, drifting vivid as the day’s promise in the context of yellows and reds/ a stretch of rhododendron green. The sky not yet bleached into white heat/ the whole quiet but rich/ a Biblical mosaic of love and judgement, wrath, revenge, a bucket of lust, shivering ancient fears and 42 layers of love.

In new day urgency no room exists for machine parts, dung, past sins, dusty passages repeated as a mantra. On the move in the car’s shimmering quiet on this lonely road a gentle image lingers as religion—

the first snow flakes slowing the universe, building slow the narrative, the air crisp. In wide-open air not all the puzzle pieces are here, but a habitual liturgy mouthed as a child colors in the seams of this day. The new front brings the aware ache/ the past as an overwhelming river. Out of the rushing a vision holds of last week when my best self (briefly)

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