INVITATION
“Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love.” Psalm 143:8
Rise. As we wake, enter a psalm. Gaze, notice, pray … when we shift mindless routine into sacred ritual, our days (and our lives) can joyously open to divine synchronicity. This project, beginning on January 27th 2024 and ongoing, involves meditation through the psaltery. Every morning, sit with a psalm, God and the gulls — paint a word or phrase that becomes mantra. One series or mahzor (Hebrew for cycle/returning home) moves through the psalms five times, each round exploring an element: air, earth, fire, water, & ether. Movement through this series returns us home to our living communities, often through windows, in watercolor, coffee, clouds and mulberries. It is one of the many ways that art can be a series of small gestures of radical intent.
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Kumi oari, rise & shine.
ARTIST
Michelle Pushkin Cicillini is painter, poet and publisher. She is the author of Avian Aria (Alien Buddha Press), Windway (forthcoming from Fernwood Press) and Riverettes (forthcoming from Bottlecap Press). Her collection, Liken, cowritten with Toronto-based writer Tanya Fenkell is forthcoming from Fig Leaf Press. She is the editor of Moonlove Press, publishing poetry chapbooks by women. Her work can be found at Hyacinth Review, Sunday Mornings at the River, Cold Moon Journal, Snapdragon Journal, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. She teaches High School English at a Catholic High School in New York where she lives with her husband and two sons.
BOOKS
Bird-by-bird, the heartfelt flutters of Avian Aria, focus on a strong woman loving her family. Michelle Cicillini’s debut is superbly crafted. Open. Vulnerable. Cicillini is not hesitant about sharing her private world with readers, whether via prose poetry, or short and long-form verse. As her professional background involves not only poetry, but also editing, every word of Avian Aria is finely tuned. If this eclectic collection doesn’t make you want to dance in the rain, nothing will.​
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Roberta Beach Jacobson
Editor, Cold Moon Journal
Amorance offers an exploration of the lived “open textures" of domestic holiness. This chapbook functions like a spiritual hourglass where 150 psalm-like meditations converge to "tend heart’s sanctuary" amidst the shifting currents of motherhood and mortality.
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Forthcoming May 2026
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