In this theatre,
where the stage lights
are broken bones
that glint in the full moon,
a girl, in a walk on part, pouts,
reaches for a man in uniform.
He, now a puff of vapour,
drifts in the smoke and dust,
props loaned from an old production.
She mingles with other men.
They unearth springtime and harvest
with picks and shovels,
make homes for themselves
where worms, who make their homes
with the bristle of their bodies,
mine the perma soil for rotting leaves.
Here, men wake to Flanders’ mud,
the songs and suns
of mortar fire and canon,
the moans of fallen comrades,
while the nascent beast,
teeth brushed, claws edged,
adds the finishing touches,
rouge and ruby red lipstick,
before the curtain rises.
WHEN THE SUN GOES OUT after a Fetch painting by Mary Carmody
In the evening, when the day’s fires
have been satisfied,
their dying embers persisting
in her tresses,
she’ll don her mask,
her bridal dress,
and, picking her steps,
count the day’s takings,
the death stares
and black hands,
among the cinders.
Scorching August
In Spring, on the birthing eve,
the grass was glazed with morning dew.
Spud sprouts, barley grains, ached to conceive.
Cart horse farmers warmed to
the yarns of an ass jobber sun.
Now, the lie of a land
under a cloud cover
of brandy butter, spurs
us to dance and blather,
make love and war.
We, pilgrims, at the Puck Fair,
beneath the gaze
of a sneering sky,
give thanks for August days.
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois Ireland. His works have been published in Acumen, Agenda, Orbis, The High Window, North, Poetry Ireland Review, and in Indian, US and European journals. He is current Poet Laureate for Mountmellick.
We two staked our claim way back
and ever since
have worked the seam around the clock
with pick and shovel and no reliable chart –
always on the lookout for pay dirt,
always in hope
of stumbling across
the glint of yellow ore among the dross.
Truth be told
there never was a Klondike moment,
Ballarat didn’t come into it – our gold
came slow.
And every night, before we settled,
we’d sift the shifting contents of this pan
for what we had,
fossicking for precious metal.
Quietly we’d swirl the sediment of each day,
sluice the grit and silt
again and again, revealing in the tilt
the gleam of minute grains,
nuggets just large enough
to place in the palm of a hand.
This we treasured, knowing how –
in time – what once was dust
might make a wedding band,
or frame a gem, mend a broken bowl.
Note: a traditional Japanese ‘rocking plate’ or gold pan made of wood.
Each pan is individually hand made.
Ist MAY 2022
After so many bone-dry days a spit of rainfall.
The rising petrichor enters my mouth,
coats my tongue with its spent breath.
It tastes sweeter, cleaner than all the lies,
the ones we’re told, the ones we tell ourselves.
It speaks of thin air, of must and deep earth.
We’re learning a new language in these times.
It, too, rises unbidden from damp ground.
It, too, bears witness to the immortals:
Everything turns on a moment of beauty,
that instant the first drip is about to fall
and the frosted skeleton of hogweed
is made utterly transparent –
a glass flower –
in the hesitation of becoming.
This, everywhere in nature. And we also
are of nature, though our moments
of transition, of unfrozen grace,
may pass unobserved.
We do not readily admit to wonders,
the strange beauty of chance, synchrony,
coincidence, where mere intellect
is tested like a slowly lengthening
drip of frost-melt suspended
between temperatures,
between moments,
readying itself
to let
go.
THE PHYSICS OF LITERATURE
In this room
a speck of light becomes a dazzling beam
a heart-piercing shaft, a seam
that binds together
one world and another.
Its motes approach / recede
like stars in the far reaches
of the universe. And, look –
this one minute particle
settles now on the cover of a book.
Jude is made yet more obscure
by its unbodied touch,
its translucent shadow. Open the pages
and atoms of dust
slide into another realm,
enough to smother the child Time,
to tip his ageless mind
into something like chaos.
Stephen Boyce is a prize-winning poet and co-founder of Winchester Poetry Festival. His most recent collection is The Blue Tree (Indigo Dreams 2019), described by Philip Gross as ‘a seamless weave of thought perception and emotion’. He has also published The Sisyphus Dog (Worple 2014), Desire Lines (Arrowhead 2010) and three pamphlet collections, most recently The Unforgiving Knot (Marlott 2020). Stephen lives in north Dorset. http://www.stephenboycepoetry.com
She was meticulous, proud: a cottage
to be admired, all in its place,
as was he, so far as she knew.
He worked with horses, of course, a master
at that, treasured by owners,
the garden husbanded to perfection.
She had her pride in the neatness of her life,
tidied, folded, immaculate as
her wedding linen.
Then when she went
it was very gradual, the easing back,
the need to be observant, to know
when a thing was out of place, to see
the weeds didn’t take hold,
the cistern didn’t drip, the shirt
all its buttons. Slowly she figured
less in how he was. A sigh,
a hunch of the shoulders met each
inconvenience, until he lived
within his own comfort, closing
round him. And then the day it stopped.
The bucket tipped over, mice
rampant, the dogs going blind
in the outhouse. All let go.
‘MR WORDSWORTH IS NEVER INTERRUPTED’
‘Mr Wordsworth is working,’ he was told,
nervously grasping his not very good poems,
the little ‘Cockney’ chap with questionable friends,
who had the temerity to approach the great man.
Later they met, and, reading in his mesmerising
chant, waited for the lofty one,
hand inside his waistcoat to dispense
his dolorous view.
Even now it’s as though
‘Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted’,
his protectors keeping us from the door
of reputation. I’d rather
the apprentice surgeon who draws from me a smile
when nightingale sings or autumn mists thicken.
Malcolm Carson was born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. He moved to Belfast with his family before returning to Lincolnshire, becoming an auctioneer and then a farm labourer. He studied English at Nottingham University, and then taught in colleges and universities. He co-edited the Newcastle based Other Poetry until its much-lamented demise. He has had five collections published by Shoestring Press, the latest of which are The Where and When (2019) and Edgar, published in Spring 2023.
It appears
at my back door
and knocks three times.
I rise from my bed,
and unarmed,
I face the dragon.
We wrestle in the moonlight,
the dragon fighting dirty –
spitting, clawing, biting.
It spews filth,
swearing to devour the world.
Only when I catch its tail
and threaten to snap it,
will the dragon concede,
vanishing faster
than a political promise.
Exhausted, bleeding, bruised,
I return inside and firmly shut the door.
However, if I refuse the dragon’s challenge,
or succumb under its assault,
the dragon will fly straight through
my daughter’s bedroom window,
circle her walls like flashing
strips of L.E.D. lights,
and come to rest in her ear.
It will curl its tail around her malleus
and sink its claws
into her incudostapedial joint.
The dragon is impossible to remove
and oh, the things it whispers…
the things it whispers…
EIGHT COWS ELECTROCUTED BY FALLEN POWER CABLE
Eight beautiful Clare cows are electrocuted in a windy field
Eight wondrous cows
Who ̶ born elsewhere ̶
Would have been adored
Worshipped
Eight miraculous planets
Orbiting haystacks and a barren red barn
Constant as sorrow
Unknowable as rain
Unreachable as faith
Eight marvellous cows standing on legs of iron
Flat packed
Large sad eyes forgiving everyone everything
Floating slowly across rolled-out fields
My breath catches when I see you
Nature’s lawnmowers
The space between you always perfect
Dear gentle spirits, who knew only peace
Who never doubted the field’s narrow dimensions
Who watched each morning-skin-night
What did God know to strike you down
His arbitrary love arrived with a blackout
Ten thousand homes plunged into darkness
Only your soft eyes flared
THE WEED
What must the weed make of it all?
After a lifetime of pushing, growing,
stretching, flowering, to find itself
embedded between two concrete walls,
its feet planted in some mother crack,
the little chink through which it sprang.
The view ̶ a grey concrete garden competing
with a heavy grey sky, a modest peach house
with matching drains, a mossy chimney stack
black with soot, old bits of pipe drooling
over an outhouse roof, a shy breeze now
and then. How absurd! And yet, the weed
continues its journey upward, trying to see
over the wall and into the next garden.
What patience! Such perseverance!
Teach me, little weed, your inexhaustible curiosity,
your blind faith, your undiminished character
and infinite certainty. Look on me and share
the allegiance to which your root is tapped.
Darren Donohue is an award-winning poet and playwright living in Goresbridge, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland. His poetry is widely published in journals and newspapers including Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, Irish Times, Sunday Independent.His received the Dennis O’Driscoll Literary Award, 2020. Darren was writer-in-residence at Carlow College, St Patrick’s, 2019, and the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, 2020. His debut poetry collection titled; Secret Poets is published by Turas Press.
Manchester –
One of the Roman towns,
Whose market hives and mead inns
First made the Bee its name.
A northern light, droning
With wind from the Pennine hills
And an Irish Sea, taking each
Rain that comes, on hand
And cheek.
Industry arrived,
For the spinning mills to waggle
And burgeon with white pollen
Of cotton.
The Canal was hoist and cut
With steam and paw,
Digging tonnage of wax,
The horses breaking,
For the name of the city.
She was the queen of wealth
And squalor, the silver
And the smoke, the china
And the chimneys,
Before the Christmas Blitz.
Bombs are never
Far away
– explosive swarms
Of barbarous intent;
Yet Arndales and Arenas hold
The brimming honey of
Undaunted worker souls.
Note: The Manchester worker bee is one of the best-known symbols of Manchester and has been an emblem for the city for over 150 years. [Ed]
THE NAMELESS
They are the Nameless, shorn of label
Or tie, histories washed out, and
Legacies lost, who will not be given
Inscription or marker, to say what
They were, and how they once lived.
Death overruns them before
They bequeath
A golden identity;
They confound the rote investigators,
And town administrators,
Who would finalise their path.
They are found in houses, doss-houses,
Alleys, doorways, under arches and
On street corners; some killed,
Some self-killed; the natural causers;
Those fallen to exposure; some
Dignified, others in violent repose.
No name on the rent or bills, no wallet
Boasting a proud ID, no clue
To advise of kith or kin,
Who might claim a body and name a face,
Who can buy the ground,
The box, the Father’s words, and
Commemorate a passing.
Theirs is not the power, the glory,
But unbridled anonymity; and
It will not matter if they had some point
To prove, some lesson gleaned,
For they are the Nameless.
URBAN TURNER
It begins with a stump tugged
From the Ship Canal, whose waiting
Shape is clear, to the turner’s
Eye at least.
She swings it by the root and
Stomps across the wasteground.
The workshop is plump and eager,
Its tools holstered and
Yesterday’s parings brushed
And thrown.
In the pith of this landscape
Sprawls the lathe, bringer of murderous pace
And drum, more familiar now
In hiss and touch, than
Family or foe. The turner
Bats the stump. Mounts it
To the lathe. Each tool
She lifts in turn, and leans
Upon the tapered rest:
The chisels and the gouges,
The auger and the parting tool,
The instruments that cove and hollow.
There is easy pleasure in easy
Habit, and she’s been turning since
A child; no one will see the thing
She makes, but then no one
Has recognised her waiting shape.
THE MILL
Timid garden, full of ivy tendrils
And nodding pink-heads,
The rough barks and tender stems,
Things that may creep or stand
Quite still: life’s creaking mill.
Pruning has commenced, and the
Cropping of the grass, the cut,
The gather, while the wind is
On the hunt, and bees may sip:
The dead and the ever cycle.
Winter will be at the door within
Three breaths, delighting in
Retreat and the silver slumber;
The air smells empty, but
Memorialises the future to come.
Stephen K Easterbrook is a writer from the North of England, born in York and raised in Manchester. He is inspired to compose socially conscious poetry, with a particular interest in his hometown of Manchester, and in homelessness, poverty and the underrepresented. The four selected poems are from his recently completed collection entitled Manchester, Stephen has been published previously in Storgy, and his debut fiction novel, Beggar Bee Nameless, will be published by Arkbound in August 2023.
She thought she knew all she needed
to know about annunciation: the way pheromones
herald the fleshy alert, the sleeking of lips,
the sashay of eyes flashing and lighting, the skin
itching, the rise of desire … xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxEven reckoned
that in the raw yearning and incandescent passion
that had her stomach staggering and breath panting
she’d once heard a gossamer wing-swish … xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxand all that
in the back of Dad’s car …
Yes. And hadn’t she’d seen advent coming;
jumped from time to time at thoughts of assumption;
got high on mentions of ascension; blessed
epiphanies as a gift; couldn’t help being there
at nativity what with two miscarriages,
three births, the last surprise-twins; and even
witnessed crucifixion – xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpinned down, arms
stretched, the snickety inner nick – xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxbut, no matter
how she wrestled, wouldn’t admit to such
a thing as the immaculate conception, so couldn’t
bring herself to recite the Nicene Creed’s belief
in the Virgin Birth – xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxdidn’t think for a minute
she had absolution at her fingertips as confessing
Dad had only to throw his belt on the bed ….
And – bless me, my child! – the birth
of yet another Creation myth …
ME, MY MUM AND THE GREAT CRESTED NEWT
Plucked clear of his wet-quick element,
what fascinated me was his landlubber
slowness, that bland foetus smile, and
his silences – save that zizzing kiss
become wet squelch when I’d held him
between finger and thumb. And pressed.
Just once – for fun – while Mum winced.
But all this was second best to that crested
crenellation which wouldn’t/couldn’t cut
yet looked dragonish as if to scare off folks,
declaring Don’t you dare touch, don’t dare.
Yet did, zipping my fingers down his spine.
Even Mum couldn’t resist that underbelly
ruddiness the colour of meat-rinsed blood,
the olive-black atolls blotching down his
back, and the babypink of spreading hands
and toes plotting out the slow progress
of this toy dinosaur I’d trophied home.
Recalling she’d warned Isn’t yours for keeps,
I reckoned that no matter how I rigged out
her backyard tub, topping it up with liquorice hose,
plopping pondweed in and teasing out its flagging
fronds, she’d known all along that he’d go sad
and stiff on us: left hanging, dulled, rubbery,
colours drained away, and floating, belly down,
still smiling till I’d flushed him right away,
another stillborn child. How then she cried.
LUCKY BREAK
Didn’t have the arts of our local barber:
that swallow’s rise-and-dipping of the clippers
tracing graceful arcs as figured in the mirrors
then scissor-tipping the ends of comb-held hair
in fidgety snippings to tinless itching powder.
Didn’t possess the finesse of the country butcher,
the sheening speed of his cleaver, some snare-drum
tapping or high-hat glancing, the skilled clattering
of chopping-board, its percussive riff splitting
the rack of lamb – thud cut, thud cut – to bits.
Didn’t own the slickness of the village brickie,
his flick of wrists that finished off the splodge
of mortar, trowelling down and across, fine-slicing
its edge; or his rack of eye when nicking bricks
in half – click break – and handle-tapped till straight.
No, Dad’s excellence was in reckoning cash:
was good at sums, best at mental arithmetic –
base of eight for half-crowns, twelve for pennies,
tens for florins – and sheer magic in his hands, swiftly
riffling notes, and wrapping round in rubber bands
those hundreds and hundreds of bundled pounds.
Some irony that the motorbiking accident
fracturing his leg, and haunting his walk ever after
should give him that big break making his success;
money-lust, and laughter.
Roger Elkin has won 63 Firsts in (inter)national Competitions, the Sylvia Plath Award for Poems about Women, and the Howard Sergeant Memorial Award for Services to Poetry (1987). His thirteen collections include Fixing Things (2011); Marking Time (2013); Chance Meetings (2014). Sheer Poetry (2020); and The Leading Question (2021). Editor of Envoi, (1991-2006), he is available for readings, workshops and poetry competition adjudication.
Stopping here in the deer scrub
where bramblings panic,
you come to notice
low chaotic thickets, silent
spattered ridges cut through
with twists of blackthorn
and blackberry and small nettle
yielding nothing in the mess.
And above it all, transported
from yesterday’s once-in-a-century wind
a score of tall lives are clarified:
red pines, oaks and beeches gashed
in angled embraces, splintered
with heavy breaks, hanging on
to make sense of it all
as the sap runs out.
PENTECOST
Small snatch of air, sole white arc,
crisp handclap, then ritual landing.
All followed by cosseting and fuss
at the stoop. The laughable dance
with lots of nodding and wittering
before the tricky hop up
to the dovecote, its painted chassis
cut with arches.
The wind is picking up. It weaves
its sweet chill along the lane.
Birches and hydrangeas bustle and bend
in a fast descent of shadows.
What can we say? Our ears fill
with town music watching the show,
now it’s time to go in, to stir the grates,
to light all the fires.
WHALSAY
All I remember is that drip pour of land
and the mainland settled in a laminate sea
and loose afternoon as deep as your hair
and all that could be gripped was free
on a crisp green field—the warmth of your ribs,
the ship of our breath, when the sky burned mauve
and citrine and russet over Lunning or Lunna
with the dark birds crying, “Love her in Skaw.”
And the North Sea answered and pinned us there
with a ring for the moon and a ring for our hearts.
Chris Emery is a director of Salt. He has published three collections of poetry: Dr. Mephisto, Radio Nostalgia and The Departure, as well as a writer’s guide, an anthology of art and poems, and edited selections of Emily Brontë, Keats and Rossetti. A new collection of poetry, Modern Fog, is forthcoming from Arc in 2023. He lives in Cromer, North Norfolk.
GOODBYE TO THE CURLEW’S BREEDING GROUND ON THE CURRAGLINE
Late April, everything coming into bloom,
mornings filled with the rhyme and chime
of birds busy mating in my garden,
the cuckoo’s call in the nearby wood,
where adder’s tongue and white anemone stretch
to the shores of Lough Corrib, the ooee cry
of the curlew over the evening sky.
For weeks, the boglands awash with yellow,
a sea of furze amid tiny buds of bladderwort;
feathery leaves mingled with bog cotton,
rushes, lichen. Along the hedgerow edge,
dandelion and primrose.
I breathe in the coconut scent, let the glow of fens
into my skin, ferns rooted in a sponge
of umber, amber, pink, and purple heather. I’ve heard the lilt
of the ochre reeds, warbling geese flying back
and forth to the turlough, the chitter of breeding birds
building their nests in the peat.
Today, large plumes of smoke enveloped the sky.
Fires lit overnight, burning bushes flaring
into the horizon; flames ablaze on each side of the road
as I drove through a large stretch of black: ash, cloud, charred stumps
from burned gorse, and tons of carbon released
into the air.
A habitat for breeding waders, their nests
are burnt to cinders:
lapwing, snipe, redshank, skylark and meadow pipit
no longer there.
And those unseen; minks, stoats, bats, gone.
Firefighters battled the inferno while we crawled on,
bumper to bumper, to the end of the Curraghline.
In our bog-and-peat lands, there was more wildlife
than any green field, meadow, or lawn.
This evening, fires still smouldering, no birdsong;
no curlew. Only a long stretch of black landscape.
THE WAKE 1967
Paraded in we stood solemn at the foot of his bed
where he lay stiff in his Sunday suit over a starched
white sheet, like a ghost from ghost stories we’d heard,
his hands joined, beads wrapped through his fingers,
blue nose staring at the ceiling. Half answering the rosary
I waited for him to breathe, sit up and ask for a cup of tea.
Refusing, I watched others place their palm on his hand,
he never spoke much anyway, ‘Grand’ was all I ever heard,
as he waited at the door for the daily paper, his long, slim,
stoic body reaching over its frame.
The radio off, long drawn silence, mutterings between bursts
of prayer ‘how good he looked.’ A table to the right of his corpse
had a crucifix, holy water, and two burning candles.
A black cloth hung over the stopped clock, photos, and pictures.
The room belonged to the Holy Family.
My mother kept the kettle on the boil. Neighbours filed in
to pay their respect, his wife placating the priest,
my father’s eye on us,
cows lowing in back fields, dogs whimpering at the door,
a robin on the windowsill.
The nearby church bell rang, and the priest began the prayers.
After, the keening women arrived, and we were led out
with two biscuits each, Marietta and Goldgrain.
Attracta Fahy, is a psychotherapist with an MA in Writing from NUIG (2017). She has won or been placed in several major poetry competitions and is widely published in magazines and anthologies at home and abroad. Fly on the Wall Poetry published her debut chapbook collection Dinner in the Fields, in March’20. She received an Arts Council Agility Award 2022 and is working towards a full collection.
Reptilian rap pulses from the car beside me –
mirroring my infant heart beat as I am born
in shock. The sluice water from the old mill
roars through my head like the blood flow
of an adrenaline baby. The mother, my mother
has gone blue – as blue as the gentians
that skirt grassy edges of the monster
car park. As I blink into life, machines
thud a cacophony, distress echoes in the room –
like the elderly woman who can’t find
a parking space near the door
of the heaving supermarket.
White light in the shop hurts my premature
baby eyes. The mother, my mother
is being revived.
She heard my howl even in that floating place.
Back in my womb car, I remember shelter, warmth
as she soothed my aching heart.
Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin; she now lives in Glasgow. Rona writes poetry, stories and creative non-fiction. She has been published in, amonst others, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, the Blue Nib Magazine,Littoral Magazine ,The Arbroath Anthology 2021 and Dreich.
WHAT LIES BEHIND THE STILLNESS OF AN ETERNAL POSE?
(Pensionnat de la Mère de Dieu Garden City, Cairo)
What strikes me in this black-and-white photo of my mother’s sewing class is the stillness of an eternal pose. The nun in the farthest corner makes sure the movement of the needle is steady and no one breaks the silence. I recognize the premise, identical to when I went to school, except for the mood since none of the girls dares raise her head from her delicate labor or take a sideways glance. It is as though the person behind the camera were invisible.
They are weaving white lace altar linens and albs of different shapes and sizes. My mom and the girl seated next to her work on both ends of a large embroidered linen covering their knees, uniting them with flowing ripples. Did they dream of wedding dress ruffles as they created these intricate designs?
They wouldn’t look the sisters in the eye nor reply whenever reprimanded. Wouldn’t think of running in hallways as I often did in later years and would get grounded, forced to stay at school after hours. But it was my mom who got punished. She had to take the tramway from Heliopolis to Garden City to pick me up. An entire afternoon wasted.
The nuns would often tell us to polish our minds rather than our nails. Once, Salma, the daughter of an officer from the Nasserist era, a beautiful girl with peach-colored skin and green eyes came to class with leftover makeup. Mère St Agnès held her tightly by the wrist and dragged her to the corridor’s sink. With the rough cloth used to dry our hands, she rubbed her eyes saying “will you still repeat that makeup won’t come off with soap?” The girl’s emerald eyes drowned in tears constellated with defiance. I am not sure what happened next, probably the sisters had to make amends. After all, she was a high-ranked officer’s daughter.
UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTERS
I was going to the cardiologist though I’d never needed one. For the occasion, I wore earrings and my best jewelry. A young girl I might have known burst out of nowhere complaining about tachycardia. She spontaneously took my folder and made suggestions on my resume’s formatting then moved to critique another piece of writing. I found out that she lived in front of the house where I grew up, in that same building where my schoolfriends used to live. I told the girl that it would be great to see each other often, then rectified, maybe over weekends. At that time, a bunch of people filled the room. A man whose face is still blurred as I try to jot these thoughts caught my eye. I wanted to get a closer look to see if he was as striking as I used to think and low and behold, he was stunning but ran after a woman who rushed out suddenly in her medical gown. When he held her she was ecstatic and then as swiftly as a deflated balloon, her expression wilted like a flower hit by sudden frost, was it that person who disappointed her, or was it the memory of another lover?
Hedy Habra‘s third poetry collection, The Taste of the Earth, won the 2020 Silver Nautilus Award, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and was finalist for the USA Best Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the USA Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection,Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention. A recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award, she is a twenty-one time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. hedyhabra.com
With his last breath he uttered regret
retaining that last bit of self-loathing
over dreams discarded so long ago.
It’s an old story we repeat again and again,
and all the boys and girls know how.
It might as well be on the syllabus, really.
After all, its easier to say “I could have”.
“I failed” has a terrible ring to it.
But we watch as the ghost resuscitates the air
and we hear it in the voice of the wind
and we smell it in the breath of the sun
there’s no need for a Ouija board or tarot cards –
It’s still the light of that old memory
illuminating the grey in your old garden.
Who doesn’t know that same feeling?
My mind got lost in that labyrinth once
It left my skull; I was dancing in the wind,
dancing from the vacant garden
through a gate and into something else.
But the old church chimed me back.
There is no gate, just four walls
around a plain flower bed in autumn.
Here the gardener tries to sleep
but nothing ever happens.
There is no tragedy and no surprise.
Only the temporary dance provides an escape
But that dance does create some vision
of a different world, and that vision creates words.
And from those words uttered,
uttered at little more than a hush,
a little something may yet emerge,
something that endures the gardener,
something that might remain
after the walls have broken down.
THE OLD IDEAS
This light hit the cliffs,
reflecting and shooting into the waters
where many people, historically, have crossed.
And many still do. In the City nearby,
Holy Blood was spilled on Holy Rock –
and that gave rise to a voice
-or voices-
that kindled a knowing heart.
And that heart, if you can believe it,
ignited us all; and here we find ourselves.
I’m a bit rusty on the exact turn of events.
Detail in this line is less vital than the impact.
But I did try it, once; I visited the old town;
wrote tales of my pilgrimage;
but it’s so hard to connect these days.
Can you really find his spirit breathing
in the middle of the ancient rocks?
Even she who made the sign
as I took a photo of the tomb
showed no sign of recognition.
I wanted for essentials: to find some essence
of the ground; a leaf; a sign Something akin
to the great voice.
But whose voice is that?
The Cathedral was tiring. I found no use.
We retired to a pub,
where we had a break with a good ale
and a reminiscence over forgotten dreams.
The friends we made never spoke of loss.
We went home the next day,
travelling through towns of old ideas
and little change.
Our flat was the same as it had always been.
But we did talk about the old ideas,
and the great walls of that place.
Maybe next time we can make more of them,
and even thrive on them.
Michael Higgs is a London-based publishing editor and part-time culture writer for The Upcoming, where his theatre reviews appear regularly. Raised in Germany, he returned to the UK to study English at KCL. When he’s not reading or writing he spends his leisure time exploring the London docklands. His poetry has been published previously in magazines such as Acumen, Marble Poetry, and KCL literary journal.KCL Literary Journal.
That cathedral is dark as a barn,
with a candled cold intended to heal
by the secret things it has to tell.
At the farthest point of sight, I discern
two choristers passing each other,
and they nod – devout, seigneurial –
charting a custom which soon may vanish.
How all this incense, and this primal hush,
rubs at the corruption and the bother
which had accrued outside in the street
I’ll never be able to fulfil in word.
It’s a simple question of people together
zoning in on love and gratitude,
and muttering words like ‘Amen’ and ‘Lord’
which the outside hardly seems to permit:
busy out there, we’ve no task in here
but to strike a respectful attitude
and let that pose grow in time to respect,
and then, through sermon and prayer,
into measures of awe. I love it all:
love the clustering silence of tall hopes,
love the governing ancient slopes
of buttresses and disappearing transepts.
All the experience of the shopping centre,
of the boardroom, and of cinema,
is subservient to this, leads back to a table,
an approach designed to broach despair,
and a cup of wine which tastes different
to the stuff they pour you in the pubs.
Sometimes the understanding rubs
against what’s difficult. The mind aches
when confronted by the Old Testament,
feeling it too harsh or antiquated.
Or a certain tetchiness about sitting still
rushes in on Matthew 3:13, and breaks
its spell, meaning that we can’t be sated:
our lot is to ruin possibility.
Yet I find at some point the next day,
a burden has been strangely taken away,
some share of sadness lifted, and a portion made free.
We live in the interstices of mystery,
blind all our lives – until suddenly we see,
coming out of a night dark and cold,
a way to live, be faithful, and grow old.
NEVER SIGNED, NEVER SENT
Thus Lincoln when prompted to a rage.
Oh, there are things I could say to you,
which I’ll not commit to the page.
I’d be forensic where you’ve been untrue;
I could detail your folly, even your cruelty.
But I know that all these awful things
hurt you only, and not at all me –
and so I never give my email any wings,
never allow myself to hear that plane-zip
which the laptop makes when I press send.
I’ll not add to your pain, or try to trap
you in a lie, or make an accusation bend
round illogic to seek to strike your heart.
What I might do is pause, and write like this –
try to think it through, maybe make it art,
until in place of your pain, is the evenness
of a thing gone through and understood,
converted into dismay’s opposite.
To traverse a risk is to create a good,
and silence is always somehow apposite,
returning the sender back to their life,
the only place where change might be found,
since it contains the reason for their strife
and therefore its remedy. The rebound
of silence prompts change. The naked air
might sound at first like resentment,
but turns in time to sweet regret, and the cool savour
of: ‘Never signed, never sent’.
PRAYER #416
This meditation I learned from Dostoyevsky:
may all those toiling in extremis,
and facing this hour material decay
be lastingly consoled with this:
that in the darkest beat of time
which they shall ever strain to know,
there was one who held their hand as the lights went dim:
one who reached across to tackle their sorrow,
and addressed the higher seats on their behalf:
saying, Protect the souls confronting death,
teach them courage, lend them your staff.
And let this prayer be granted depth and breadth
along the earth until it does its good again
universally, and unfailingly,
detonating bliss where once there had been pain,
and be valid in all the precincts of eternity.
Chris Jackson qualified first as a solicitor, and subsequently worked for many years as a journalist with work appearing in The Times, Country Life, The New Statesman, Mail on Sunday, City AM and numerous trade publications. His books include The Fragile Democracy (2016), Roger Federer (2017), Theresa May (2018) and his first full poetry collection An Equal Light (2022). He appears regularly on television and radio outlets including Sky, Bloomberg, BBC Radio 4, and LBC discussing politics and literature. He founded Northside Press in 2022; he’s accepting submissions.
A hand at mah-jong and other Chinese stereotypes—
a humid day, an open window
a fly lands upon a hand
upon a keyboard full of ideograms
such a lazy wave enough
to shoo away the fly
the same suffices
to slow a triple eight Hong Kong bus
on the way to Happy Valley Racecourse
an evening’s entertainmentxxxxfireworks!
many hands clapping for
red satin circus girls
whose wrists whisking slender sticks
on whizzing saucers’ undersides
A hand at mah-jong and other Chinese stereotypes—
disappointed daughter-in-law’s
reporting home
enough complaints to fill a lacquer wardrobe
though no open show
of unhappiness
in the liquidity of those dark eyes
above a fluttering fan
her pleas set down with fingertip calligraphy
in dusty window glass
a humid day, an open window
a passing fly lands upon a hand
A hand at mah-jong and other Chinese stereotypes
WE SHOULD NEVER BE WRITING ABOUT WRITING
last night after we went to bed, I murdered my poems…hundreds of them
did you smell the blood? hear the screams?
my wife still asleep afterwards, before
the dog we’d rehomed had us walk outside
in range of those little sounds—
wattlebirds and magpies exchanging positions in the marri
gumnuts plopping on slippery road
how good it was down at the lake
a black picture window —shivering silver water
light from way off city buildings
stripes of blue, red, green crossing from the far bank
enough starlight to see lump of night hawk
perched within a swamped, triple trunked tree
reflected in the shallows
we returned through our shining suburb
yes, we could read shut-mouthed secrets
hiding behind blacked out houses
but we went straight home
unburdened by further dreams
next morning, inspired by the nocturnal
expeditionary vibe
I went into the kitchen to retrieve what I’d left in the freezer
unfroze the blood, reset the bones, re-layered all that skin
took it whole to the room we call ‘the office’
was just re-birthing this one when my sleepy wife came in—
‘How’s the writing going? ‘and ‘I thought I heard it raining last night,’ she said
LA MER
i.m. Charles Trenet
Mademoiselle’s viewing sunrise beach
from rented seaside rooms
between parted slats in bamboo blinds
wide apart eyes of chalcedony
taking it all in—
dawn wind blowing up sand
into peachiest of mists
before clearing
to reveal
a marine stage
of sparkling diamanté
beneath cerulean sky
by eight, strong breezes strafing shoreline
unpegged beach umbrellas
bowled twenty metres
into turbulent surf
transmogrified
they become undersea bivalves—
frilly anemones with water jets
squirting scallops
of frothy white lace
handsome mermen emerge around noon
mounted on bobbing sea horses
bells and whistles of a carousel
romance still flavouring
Mademoiselle’s
salty water DNA
after lunch of croissant and pâté
Mademoiselle swims fifty metres offshore
clearing her throat
gulping green oxygen
she climbs aboard
a busy little boat—
then, gently rocking
standing astride the stern
taking her cue from Charles Trenet
she begins serenading—
La mer* qu’on voit danser le long des golfes clairs a des reflets d’argent, la mer, des reflets changeants sous la pluie’
Mademoiselle
with her chosen merman
sleeping swell and complete
in her seaside rooms
tonight
*Lyrics by Charles Trenet
Ross Jackson is a retired teacher living in Perth, Western Australia. He has had poetry in many literary journals and poetry websites. He often writes about isolated characters, the experience of aging and companionship with dogs. Time alone on a quiet path came out with UWAP in 2020.
She found a pearl earring
between the floorboards of his aquarium.
She teased it out. Polished it
until it shone in her palm like a moon:
She pondered it all day,
then concealed it beneath their futon
like in the Princess and the Pea.
He was late again for supper,
complained about her bouillabaisse
and fell asleep.
That night she dreamt of mermaids,
their fishtails sliced and bleeding
into oceans, and row upon row
of oysters lying tight-lipped in their beds.
LA PETITE MORT IN THE SANDS HOTEL GRANDE DUNE DU PILAT
I fall out of bed onto the gleaming floor, xxxxxxxxits multi-coloured silica iridescent as goldfish xxxxxxxxbelow an orange sky – oh look at the moon as it sails
into view through the porthole window frame!
I am swimming through endless desert, xxxxxxxxclad in the best Agent Provocateur, young again.
Three camels pass by munching viridian blades of grass. xxxxxxxxMagnificent beasts, I ask,
looking sideways at the large exuberant one,
xxxxxxxxWill you lead me to where the oceanic tides arrive, xxxxand please, could we stop once more on the way to sample the perfect Parisian pie?
UNTITLED 1986 After John Buckley’s Headington Shark
I was vacuuming the stairs and contemplating drowning
in the blue on the walls of the hall when he came thundering
through the ocean-gray tiles of my terraced roof – unsolicited –
all head and teeth though ever such a handsome one.
So, I set to work in in the upstairs rooms, which were full
of dust and discontent, throwing out closets and clothes
and the lonely beds. I discarded the carpets, graveled the floors
(I admired his readiness to stir things up.) And I turned on the taps.
Six minutes later, he tells me this; I am a proud and very fresh fish although I’m not so keen on housekeeping. I offer him
a carbon filter and a fine sump pump to keep things clean.
He tells me more about himself. His name is William.
Amid the kitchen’s dislocation, I measure out krill,
rustle up mussels, tuna and shrimps, pan fry soles and blue
seagrass with inky squid. But the way to the heart of a shark
is a grub. I offer him bloodworms. Ask him to stay.
Six days later, he’s settled in. We swim together. I call him Bill.
Maureen Jivani has published a pamphlet and full collection of poetry with Mulfran Press. She has an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales. Recent work has been published in Alba, , Orbis, Scintilla, and The Alchemy Spoon .
A girdered road bridge like any other
Hunched in its silence,
Something predatory. We’d stopped for lunch.
Not so much for the bridge, but the heat
Had pushed us about like tides, we’d had enough
Of the Promenade des Anglais and Vieille Ville
Effervescent blue sea-light strung in the air
Like a bedsheet. Back roads,
Tree-thick sandpaper slopes so green they were black.
We parked the rented car, stir of yellow dust –
There was the bridge,
Red-ironed, miraged, clamped rock to rock.
Itself and more, a possibility
Like someone beckoning from a door, or
A mislaid thing, like spectacles, or a key.
In the viewfinder it looked
Imperfectly right, an angled set-up
Sure of itself, pure to perspective, harmony –
From its farther side, a man in earnest
There like dust on the lens,
Hurrying but getting no closer, a strung thing
Disarticulate, luxated, loose
Like a shirt flapping on a line or a flame –
Or an idea sketched in the blue air.
THE ART OF WAR
“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.” Sun Tzu
I can tell by the weight of your voice
How long this room-to-room guerrilla war will to last
If only annexation of small territories might bring an end
To hostilities, or some agreeable forfeiture
Whether it’s time to evacuate or just rearrange the furniture
Neither leaves the other a choice
But to descend to arms, pin colors to the shattered mast
Go for the jugular, find something to fortify or defend
Consolidate gains, teach a lesson, light a fire
Get the wounding done; make tea, set the alarm, retire.
NIGHT INCIDENT NEAR OULED KHALED
Hot dark and walking home through it
With grains of sand blowing on like pins of light
The tired child between us starting to fidget
Reeking oranges hung like dead lamps over the broken pavement
A week ago we were somewhere else and far and very different
The only sound, then, a vagrant tint of music
The pot-bellied bass strings of a lute, hardly strange
Here between the desert and railway yard, yet nothing Arabic
A young man by doorlight, Vivaldi’s Concerto No.1 in E major
Difficult on that instrument, not flawless, but he was a teenager
Playing outlandish music as best he could
With a young kid’s courage, a sound that stopped
Us, made us turn to his lute – more properly called an oud
And it’s almost-prayer, it’s absolute mystery
Delivering us from difference, dispute, discordance.
Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951 and educated there and Toronto, Canada. His recent work has appeared in Stand, The Spectator, and The Irish Times. His most recent collection of poetry is Rogue States (Salmon Poetry, 2019.) ‘I live in Galway, where I found Galway’s annual literature festival, CUIRT, in 1986.
When the all-clear factory siren sounds
I’m sitting at a café
in a nameless square;
the church clock
in its terracotta bricked-up tower
has just informed on midday,
and although the occupying army
left some seventy years ago,
the dust of human flesh
is slow to settle.
I’ve been inside to contemplate
the paintings on the Mairie wall,
iconic depictions
of smiling figures:
a spring wedding,
stylised trees in winter,
a sunlit apple offered
to a babe in arms
or perhaps to Eve, his mother.
In its stark shadow,
the memorial of martyrs –
unguarded scenes of the attack
in open country,
bright with blood and sorrow,
run right through
to the fresco border;
where, in black and white,
unfallen photo-faces
of the town’s young men
dally with a certain future.
My coffee’s getting cold.
Other people’s children
hop and sideskip home to lunch.
The church bells play
a tune I don’t recall.
The town goes quiet.
A FAVOURITE AUNT
I could gaze for decades, no,
over a century now
into those flamenco eyes.
Teenagers
hadn’t been invented,
yet here you are
flirting with the camera,
silver-framed, thirteen.
Thank goodness you can’t see
what’s coming in the dark room,
tiresome Spanish flu.
It’s 1918, quarantine.
You keep well, under glass.
How it plagues me,
that we have to meet like this.
LEFT
There’s a gap at my back
where you might have stood,
your palm on my spine
to steady my fears.
There’s a draught you cushioned,
a cold cold blast
coming in through the gap,
clear and loud
as your silent phone
and the future unsaid.
This gap at my back
chills my left shoulder-blade.
It would be the left,
the heart side.
Sue Kindon lives and writes in the French Pyrenees. She was Runner Up in the 2021 Ginkgo Prize (for Eco-poetry); her latest pamphlet is Outside, the Box (4Word Press, 2019).
‘Every ship has a soul, but the Mauritania had one you could talk to… She had the manners and deportment of a great lady, and behaved herself as such.’
Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States.
***
The Mauritania’s First Visit to Fishguard
30th August 1909
Word spread like summer fire through bracken.
Our old town, where nothing much had happened
since the Frenchies’ failed invasion, sparked with pride.
Every street was decked in bunting and people
from miles away poured in dressed in their Sunday best,
to cluster on the hills around the harbour .
The Pembrokeshire Territorials, brushed and polished
to outshine the sun, led the procession down to Goodwick:
big-wigs from Cunard, mayors in robes and chains of office,
tradesmen, town folk with their children, scrubbed up
and frolicking like spring lambs.
Cannon roared as she passed Strumble Head,
cutting through waves like a scythe through wheat.
Only four days it took her from New York,
and she overtook the Kaiser Wilhelm.
Such a sight when she anchored in our bay, flags cascading
from both mastheads – we’d heard the Captain was a Welshman
so reckoned a bit of her belonged to us.
We lads earned a bob or two loading luggage
into the Pullman express train by the quay – great gleaming trunks
of tooled leather labelled London via Fishguard.
My Gwen, dressed in her best red shawl and hetiau Cymreig,
handed a posy of Welsh heather to a fine lady
draped in furs and velvet with a hat she’d never seen the like of,
all ribbons, feathers and fine black netting, and gloves
of softest, pearly leather. Gwen said the rich
smell different. I didn’t envy them that, it was their travel
to the promise of America, there beyond the hard white gleam
on our horizon. It woke a nag of want in me
that grew each time the great ship stopped here.
STEINWAY
He bought it for his trophy wife,
liked to expound on its pedigree,
list those rare exotic woods
sourced for its construction –
sitka spruce from North Africa,
rock maple from North America,
rosewood veneer from East India.
She liked the way light moved
between the tension of the strings,
how it touched the rosewood’s
purple tones, its dark brown streaks,
how when she spread her hands
across the keyboard, she felt ivories
depress under her fingertips as if
the piano had memorised its repertoire
from all those years at sea
spinning light into the idle hours
of the ocean going rich.
At night half waking,
she often heard the sound of playing –
a Liszt Liebestraum, a Chopin waltz,
a Dixie Time jazz tune and, once
the melody of an old song,
A Bird in a Gilded Cage,
the muffled notes easing her away
to a place of infinite glittering horizon.
LAST JOURNEY
(1906-1935)
There was age, decrepitude,
a stripping away of substance
and so the end came as it always must,
but not in the way of man or beast,
though there were mourners,
crowds of sightseers,
rockets fired from her bridge.
There was, you could say, a ceremony,
a band playing The Last Post
and Auld Lang Syne,
a speech of farewell, a eulogy,
a telegram sent,
Still the finest ship on the seas,
to which her captain replied
To the last and kindliest port in England,
greetings and thanks.
Then to her final berth at Rosyth
where gulls shred dawn light with their shrieking,
a lone piper on the quayside
plays Flowers of the Forest,
the wail of his pipes broken and tossed
to the winds of a half-gale.
She is warped to the quay,
her turbines turned off,
greyhound of the North Atlantic passage –
she gives a dark, final shudder.
AFTER THE ROMANS LEFT
A room suffused with amber light.
An elderly couple, their evening meal
spread out across a table:
a low table laden with dormice
dipped in honey, pheasant, dark olives,
harvested walnuts and the last flask
of their Roman wine.
Dialogue seeps soft and slow
as if rising through deep water.
They wonder who will tend the vines
now old Sirius is dead.
Shortages are touched on briefly:
pepper running low,
no cinnamon to spice the apple cake.
When a neighbour stumbles in
with news of sightings:
ships in the estuary
dark smoke on the horizon,
painted people crossing the wall
and moving southwards,
the couple speak in coded calmness.
Too old to leave with Maximus,
they have buried their gold and silver
in the woods. Their treasure
will lie untouched for centuries.
Amber light sinks to shadow. Dark
spins down like ashes. Hand in hand
they walk into the almost- night.
Frances-Anne King has won a number of awards and her poetry has been published extensively in journals including, Agenda, Acumen, Poetry Ireland Review, the Rialto and Poetry Salzburg Review. She has published one pamphlet with Poetry Salzburg, edited an eckphrastic Anthology for The Holburne Museum in Bath, and is now waiting publication of a prize winning pamphlet with Hedgehog Press.
No ellipsis, no carrying on,
leaving things in the air
to see what might develop.
Just brief and bitter-sweet
and final. For all your words
I never knew about you
as a child. No photographs
to punctuate your younger years,
no family – apart from us –
to laugh at passed on anecdotes:
a first kiss, perhaps, or cigarette;
how you felt about conscription;
what events you put into
parentheses as life moved on.
We always had to read
between the lines. I have
some pages of your writing still:
a stab at poems when
you came to understand that
sometimes that’s what people do.
One day I’ll dig them out,
question once again the reason
why you felt the need to end
with such an overlarge full-stop.
CORAL
It’s no longer like the power fizzing
through the lines above my head
in this early morning haze.
And it doesn’t strike me any more
the way a ragged bolt of light can
flash to earth, dazzling and fierce.
It’s more like how the sea will
slip towards a humdrum shore
across some mud-flats, taking
hours to fill its tidal range until,
where once I might have stood
at the low-tide’s waney edge,
distracted by oystercatchers
gleaning the discoloured foam,
I find myself immersed, deep
beneath its shifting liquid weight,
surprised by such an inundation,
wondering how to take a breath.
OUT OF OUR HANDS
More than once I felt the danger
of a little knowledge, of a so-called
education, as it heaped into a drift
between us. Your lack of schooling
through the war years, which surely
taught you things I’ll never learn,
somehow dictated that you never had
a way with words. Take the time
I used ambiguous and you just
laughed, exclaimed for all to hear
‘Oh, the things ‘e comes out with!’
At seventeen, perhaps I just assumed
you didn’t understand its meaning,
started there and then imposing
distances to separate where I thought
I was headed and the simpler, homely
places you had spent your life.
By your bedside in the final hours
that artificial gulf diminished when
I put my hand on yours and you,
without sufficient strength or breath
to tell me why, slipped it from beneath
my grasp – impatiently- to place it
gently back on top of mine: a gesture
which could have meant so many things.
MERIDIAN
They saunter past, the Sunday walkers,
or teenage lovers, arms around each other,
and barely notice how it used to stand
to mark true north and the meridian.
The cold pink granite obelisk sees
all go by. A tarnished plaque recalls
the line of zero longitude being shifted
eastward by just nineteen feet; left it
to watch a new triangulation point be
cast in concrete. Since then, unmoved,
it’s witnessed countless childhood wargames
in the woods; seen two small boys
no more than ten burying a stolen hoard;
seen bikes, and dogs that bark as couples
pause to kiss; and once a grieving family
who’d come to scatter ashes near its foot,
believing it was where all days begin and end,
where the world comes round to nought.
Phil Kirby’s collections are Watermarks (Arrowhead, 2009) and The Third History (Lapwing, 2018). Recent poems in Acumen, Poetry Ireland, Stand and various UK and international magazines. He is now working towards a third collection. He is a member of the Fire River Poets in Taunton. Writing as P.K. Kirby, a teen novella, Hidden Depths (Applefire, 2016), is available on Kindle.
– the rag and bone handbag,
the National Health glasses,
clicking her teeth like knitting needles,
scaling the stairs of an evening
to a mattress moulded by 30 years.
They’ve built a micropub in the old dentists
where she used to peddle the false teeth
she made in her dead husband’s name.
A charity shop took the grocer’s
where she walked to save a farthing on tea,
heels slack, stockings drooping in the rain
or crackling in a rare humid spell.
A life pinned to mine by an accident of time,
wanting my childhood but getting a stick across her back,
the millrace, fingers reaching for a warp and weft
she couldn’t grasp. Leaving behind fifty pounds,
a Scrabble board, another sweater waiting to be made up.
Come back. We’ll take the unfashionable hat
and turn it into a crown.
OBSERVATION AT A DAY CARE CENTRE
They bring fragments,
carried inside,
each containing a sunrise,
a sea shell, a bird call.
When they open, each sunrise
slips silently to the floor,
shuffles across wipe-clean tiles
to the window
where it looks out on lined bays
that rule mornings and afternoons,
where the city starts
and ends.
Each seashell fixes in patterns
like DNA or sand
or mitochondria stained red
in the womb,
each bird call circles,
some slide down windows
like raindrops, splinter glass
on their leaving,
lie in muddy puddles
longing to be a mountain stream
or a loch, a glass of water.
Or a prayer.
Liz McPherson used to be a librarian. Nowadays she works for an educational charity and in her spare time writes poems. She has been a runner up in a Stanza Competition and her work has been published by Dream Catcher, Grey Hen and Indigo Dreams.
My wife is in her element, opening and closing
the slider, standing on the back deck, her flaxen
hair blowing in every direction, until I manage
to coax her back into the house. She is a survivor
of the Great Columbus Day Storm of the sixties
and she loves to relate the details of fury
as she carries a wavering candle from one room
to another. I think she would make a great storm
chaser. Meanwhile, I become a little more nervous
with the sound and clamor of each wind gust
as it shuffles across the top of our roof.
At least the dogs commiserate with me,
wide eyed and crouched like little figurines
on the carpet. Later, at night, she is asleep,
lulled in what she calls the symphony of the wind,
and I am still awake staring upward
toward the awful whistling and shrieking.
RIALTO
Outside the theatre, 1957,
waiting for just the right moment
when the usher turns his back,
I seize the opportunity to slip in,
then rush down the incline of pale
red carpet, into the anonymity of
darkness, a felon, for surely I am
that as I squirm in my seat, eyes
fixed on the bobbing flashlight
scanning the aisle as the greater
light reels from the projection
room, illuminating the screen,
and the MGM Lion roars.
I sink lower in my chair, aware
of the possibility that a sudden
squeak might give me away
as filtered light flows across
the glowing surface with black
and white images of Lon Chaney,
the unforgettable Mummy,
Peter Lorie, severing the wooden
stake of the vampire, the irresistible
Blanche De Boi, as Frankenstein’s
daughter, struggling beneath the straps
on the laboratory table.
PAPER BOATS
Our newspaper boats sometimes floated, sometimes
went straight to the bottom of Sampawamas Creek.
There was a certain way to form the prow. It helped
to pinch both ends even if Dagwood and Blondie
turned upside down. At times a small regatta
carried our dreams in rivulets to far off lands
we could only imagine thumbing through the pages
of National Geographic, places like Rhodesia
or Kilimanjaro, where herds of giraffe and water buffalo
drifted across the Savannah, while famous explorers
like Sir Edmund Hillary planted tiny flags on mountain tops.
Whole afternoons floated by as our magnificent vessels
negotiated crests and eddies bringing home untold treasures
from exotic lands. At times I find myself returning
to those enchanted places, navigating turquoise swells,
teems of sunfish glimmering in the afternoon, gray whales
surfacing, groups of sanderlings advancing and retreating
with each wave.
SURVEYING THE MARRIOT CONFERENCE ROOM
In the room without a window, nothing seems true,
not even the view. There’s no respite from fluorescent light,
plastic chairs that gather in pairs, seamless carpet
that never ends. No ivy climbing like tapestry,
no lady in a purple hat, no children running, and things
like that. No exit from the speaker’s voice, no shaft of sunlight
on the floor. My God, somebody, where’s the door?
No rustling leaves, no bird lifting its wings, no warbling songs.
I miss these things. The sky is absent, there are no clouds,
no solitary walker, no teeming crowds. No winter’s finger
across the windowpane, no howling dogs, no passing train.
If the man across the street has no shoes, no need to worry
about feeling the blues. The pinched face wino no longer exists,
the girl without a smile no longer resists. No dark blanket of night,
eyes that shudder from terror and fright. And if you’ve had enough
of all this gloom, just look around, you’re in that room.
Thomas Mitchell received an MFA from the University of Montana where he studied with Richard Hugo. Mitchell’s poems have appeared in many reputable journals, including The New England Review, Salt, Valparaiso Poetry Review, New Letters, Mirimar. His poetry collections
include The Way Summer Ends, Caribou, and Where We Arrive released in 2021. A new collection, Crow Genesis, is scheduled for release in 2024. He lives in North Bend, on the Oregon coast, where he can often be found walking on the beach.
Brought back from hospital
after so long away
she cannot now be certain
whether it’s night or day
but finding all the welcome lights
turned on in every room
she remembers where the house is
and calls it home.
***
Resting quietly now
she lies beneath
a featherweight of bedclothes
as the faintest breath
rises and falls
at a loss for words
in an eloquent silence
that love records.
***
Let this bedside light
stay shining on
to kindle her spirit
after she’s gone
since home must soon
become elsewhere
in the welcoming darkness
that awaits her there.
MAKE MY DAY
Asked at ninety-one
how he feels about age
Clint Eastwood answers
‘Each morning when I wake
I don’t let the old man in.’
And so this visitor
must hang around outside
not far from the door
among fallen leaves
and a residue of dust
as he bides his time
hoping that one day
forgetfulness will find him
suddenly welcome
but not counting on it.
John Mole lives in St Albans and was for many years a teacher there. He has compiled and presented poetry programmes for BBC Radios 3 and 4, was poetry reviewer for Encounter and, with Peter Scupham, ran the Mandeville Press. His poetry has received the Gregory, Cholmondeley and Signal awards, and his most recent collection is Keeping in Step (Shoestring Press, 2023 )
Arteries harden, calcify
and
narrow,
breath
shortens
words become stones.
In a few years my grandaughter’s
milk teeth will start to fall out
already she knows
the unreliability of the world.
The sorrow of a coloured
balloon bursting suddenly
with a bang in her hands,
leaving her clutching
bright t a t t e r s
and air.
A little death.
I pass a mottled mirror
where Sylvia’s terrible fish
is endlessly swimming
towards me.
A bone shell held to the ear
is silent in a soundproofed
room, no shush
of sea, no waves lament.
Perhaps the milky way is made
of millions of tiny teeth,
a bone necklace.
Everyday new horrors
reach us, floods, famine, wars,
as if we haven’t enough
on our hands.
Jean O’Brien sixth collection, Stars Burn Regardless was published by Salmon Poetry in 2022. She is an award winning poet and has recently been a 2021 Poet in Residence in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. She was awarded a Kavanagh Fellowship in 2017/18. She teaches creative writing in the Irish Writers Centre and on the MFA for Pittsburgh college. She holds an M.Phil from Trinity College, Dublin.
Enduring ice and sleet on a February day,
the flower sellers stack and arrange
cellophaned blooms, bound bunches
as the lunchtime crowd spills up the street.
Their accents are scarlet blades,
their hands old roses—Violet Carson,
Queen Elizabeth, Cher Henri—
petalling from fingerless mittens.
A man stops, casually nods towards daffodils
in buckets. One of the sellers, cigarette jammed,
points at Garden of Eden, new in from Kenya;
he sees the flush of purple, yellow, firm stamens
at the eye of the bloom. ‘She’ll like dem.’
Old Dublin confidence. When he hesitates,
she lowers her voice, as if in private,
‘Sure, can’t ya smell it?’
He reaches towards the flowers, pays quickly.
Now, waves of a fleshly scent
penetrate the fibres of jacket, shirt—
wool, cotton—through to his skin.
He hardens.
TWO YEARS ON
A line of light beneath the door.
Someone still breathes close by,
though you scarcely hear them;
they might intersect your body
as you consider the light,
the buckled door, ghosting itself.
This linear signal. As good as it gets,
falling out of language it’s a title
to consider.
Outside, seven a.m. snowdrops
dandle heads beneath the grey sky.
You paint your nails grey
one morning after breakfast,
the ring finger on each hand, silver.
Services to the self as the months fold
flat like a chapter-less book,
when what’s most urgent
is to open anywhere.
The line still glows despite your efforts
to chapterise: a year. Two years.
What of it? There are no divisions.
Now, the usual screeching crows
dance a line branchwards with twigging,
mating. What scolds, urging you
to step through a line of light!
Dear crows, dear storms, dear brooding,
cruel world, that single line,
cut light and white just where your feet
are poised. Still, you dare yourself
to push to where no echo sounds,
no signal.
IM
The odour fresh, sweet, how it enfolds the heart.
Daba ime turns crushed potato to a noble, shining melt,
Brown bread lightens to a mealy crumble with meall ime.
Insincerity on the tongue amounts to buttering you up.
But in the dairy, the python-thick stream,
Its alchemic parsing, soothes. Im, sheath on chilled innards—
Cob-yellow as it fattens the soul long after it leaves
The feed-fields, the creamery, your childhood.
How you followed through thick doors to the dairy—
That white domain where the butter-maker reigned,
Her cloth-wrapped head nodding to your father
As he showed you where butter slowly poured, down,
down, into brown boxes, from the new stainless steel artery.
Note: ‘im’ is the Irish/Gaelic word for ‘butter’.
Mary O’Donnell is a professional writer of fiction, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and essays. Her work has been published widely, and includes four novels, among them the critically acclaimed Where They Lie, the subject of which is the ‘disappeared’ in the North of Ireland, as well as recent poetry, Massacre of the Birds. A limited edition chapbook is forthcoming from Southword Editions, Cork, in autumn 2023. She lectures, gives talks, facilitates workshops, and writes journalism. Her work is translated to Portuguese, Spanish, and Hungarian. She is a member of Aosdána www.maryodonnell.com
From the new motorway we spot them
tucked away in valleys,
hidden in hollows,
concealed for centuries —
away from any roads.
Detached, stand-offish,
screened from inquisitive eyes
beyond a copse of trees…
What drives this strange elusiveness?
Others can be spotted climbing hills,
clinging to the vertiginous edge.
Living life exposed,
subject to wind and weather,
why do hill farmers
choose such a challenging life?
Is it in their genes?
Were ancestors blessed
with a reckless head for heights?
Their appeal, as such,
is their distinctiveness.
And, what of the rest?
The Home Farms and Brookfields
with their open-days,
pristine yards and level ground.
They welcome you with old stone,
local flint, old timbers
and roses round the door.
Uniform, their fields of perfect crops,
immaculate Jersey cows…
Such model farms,
almost too good to be true.
THE UNEXPECTED GUEST
Driving from our Lane, she caused surprise —
waddling towards us down the road.
Ditching the car at the Home Farm turn,
we rushed to help — her main road walk unwise!
Away from danger, in our quiet Lane,
we’d herded her from wheels and traffic noise,
hands waving, shooing, we drove her along
till safely in our garden she remained.
Containment meant we had to block her way
while waiting for our expert help to come;
knowing that a wing can break an arm
caused us some worries dealing with this stray.
Then, at last, our long awaited man
arrived to take our guest from off our hands.
“She’ll be as right as rain back on the Thames”…
And off they went, SWAN RESCUE on his van.
Patrick B. Osada is an editor and reviewer of poetry for magazines. He recently retired after ten years as part of SOUTH Poetry Magazine’s Management Team and as the Magazine’s Reviews Editor. He has published seven collections, From The Family Album was launched in October 2020. Patrick’s work has been broadcast on national and local radio and widely published in magazines, anthologies and on the internet. For more information and a selection of his poetry, visit : www.poetry-patrickosada.co.uk
the radio saying she was Jesus
at least she was discreet about it
their discussions were held mostly
in the kitchen while she ironed
not like the woman down the street
who went to buy her groceries
in a navy kilt with knife-edge pleats
holding a transistor to her ear
muttering to the cut-glass voices
on the BBC Home Service
sometimes she’d stop and wait
maybe there was static
Mum would say let’s go this way
so we didn’t pass her on the street
and she’d tug me away from shops
if she saw that woman inside
this was ten or more years before
Mum fell apart but I wonder what
she was thinking when she said
I’d never show myself up like that.
HOW TO BE PATIENT
Wake up at five thirty.
Pull a dress from your locker.
Hope they might
send you home today.
Ask a nurse if you can go
downstairs for coffee.
Promise you won’t run off.
Make out it’s a joke.
Contemplate your scan results
and snack on chocolate.
Skim the Martian Chronicles.
Fear for your sight.
Look at a crack in the wall
(at least your speech is back).
Stand at the window
and stare at the road home.
Sharon Phillips started writing poetry when she retired from her career in education. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals and anthologies. Sharon currently lives in Otley, West Yorkshire.
The internet goes down.
It flickers with warnings that we don’t heed.
In the past, in that room,
where Peter or Paul or Bruce
did their best not to seem indifferent
when I insisted we listen
to albums by Wire, The Pop Group, Gang of Four,
or they took that as an invitation to leave,
there was always noise.
Now there’s nothing.
Unhinged from the web,
the only traces of that vinyl remain
in documentaries, epitaphs
supplemented by quotes
from someone in a tank top.
Is the world better?
I doubt it.
Whatever it is that we’re good at,
we’ve not adjusted to the concept of failure –
the simple failure of technology,
of someone thousands of years ago
who reached into the fire
and pulled out a loaf,
took a bite
and declared it to be disgusting.
INDIA SONG
All of us were intent on it –
intent on finding ourselves
in Srinagar or Goa.
How we mythologised India!
And some did go –
sent gossamer airmails full
of splendours, wonders
we could only imagine
or try to piece together
from photos of rice fields,
sandalwood trinkets, incense,
deities, temples, gurus …
How little we knew or could
from homes in the suburbs,
old atlases with Empire
still outlined, painted pink.
A vast half-invented world
of sitars, crowds and car horns,
markets, mountains, visionaries,
a world of what we lacked
unlocked, verging into myth
on those long last days
of school and dependence,
our late imperial gaze.
A glazed airport terminal
sat squat at runway’s edge
was my one view of it,
passing through in transit.
No sign of much but low cloud,
that monsoon season,
and our flight lifting off
for elsewhere before the tree line
could yield up its promises
or a city assert its existence –
the reality of it – although
I swear that as we rose
and banked into the weather
those four decades ago,
something sounded distantly
like a rumoured return.
Tom Phillips is a writer, translator and lecturer currently living in Sofia, Bulgaria where he teaches creative writing and translation for Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. His writing has been widely published and recent publications include, as editor, Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work (Shearsman, 2021). A selection of Tom’s translations of Bulgarian poet Geo Milev is due to be published later this year.
Look to the west.
As the sun sinks in the sea
the star of the Mother shines in the sky.
In her bay where fish are rising
fishing boats row out with lights.
In the palace, on the great bed studded with gold,
the queen sits naked while one of her women
brushes out her hair.
Lamplight warms her shoulders.
The king will come to her soon.
Down in the kitchen,
slaves pile dishes, eat their dinners,
then settle for sleep on rush-strewn floors.
The harper sings softly
a man and boy make love in a corner.
Deer step out of the forest,
owls’ cold signals float between trees,
mice cower, and a rabbit screams.
When a badger’s white face glimmers between vines
dogs bark in the vineguard’s house.
Down in the dark
tectonic plates are shifting ,
magmatic pressure building again.
A nervous doe may turn her head,
tiny tremors startle the fish,
but these are signs no human will notice.
No pot yet trembles on a shelf
no lamp flame shakes without wind
The queen will laugh, releasing the king,
and the lovers lie still in their rush-strewn corner.
NAMIB
In the desert you see far.
Sand, rock, bare hills.
On the ground at your feet
pink beads, a squiggle
like a child’s dropped necklace. No –
they’re alive, they’re tiny
pebble-like plants, nipples
of a worn out goddess who lies
crushed by heat, her skin
scabby with broken stone.
How tenderly the sky
leans over her at dawn.
Glimmers of pink vapour,
vague memories of water,
drift in his blue brain.
Sparkling with dew, her shadowy
places flushed with gold,
she opens to him, mile
on hazy mile, besprinkled
with grasses like white fire.
THE FLOWERS’ RETURN
Snowdrops ventured first.
White heads bent, they rose through winter’s
muddy wreckage, throngs of modest
shining beauty.
Crocuses were next,
hesitant among leaf-litter,
then a carpet of rich colour
quickly fading.
Soon, with stronger light,
tulips rose by gates,
hyacinths in floods of fragrance,
delicate forget-me-nots and
bridal cherries.
When the god of spring
dressed magnolia trees – their whiteness
brighter than the Peacock Throne – our
road was ready:
flowers of the air,
parakeets, could land in glory,
Mughal princes, glitter-green with
ruby daggers.
WINTER ON THE ISLAND
Rough weather shut the sea.
Rain on rain, and bitter winds
tormented poor folk on the mountain.
Round the rain-blind bay
shutters were closed on all the big houses,
even the palace, though there
spring still shone from frescoed walls.
In the hall where the great fire blazed
the queen sat weaving with her women.
As blue-black swallows danced from her loom,
the bard wove tapestries of summer song.
The bored king drank and honed his dagger.
Winter would not last long.
Edmund Prestwich grew up in South Africa, studied English at Cambridge and Oxford, and taught English at the Manchester Grammar School. In retirement he spends his time playing with grandchildren, reading, writing his own poetry, and reviewing other people’s. He has published two collections: Through the Window and Their Mountain Mother.
I watched you that first time, my daughter,
pack each compartment of your new blue rucksack
a perfect fit for everything you’d need at the touch
of a zip: one for tubes of sunscreen, insect gel
next to your pens and journal. I’d seen you
hone your skills, ordering your room with a ruthlessness
that flattened a stack of cotton tops, squeezed flip-flops
down a side, easy-to-grab, rolled up one fleece,
just in case, tucked a toothbrush kit down its sleeve.
The front pocket held your Lonely Planet, maps of city streets
you memorised: that trick you shared: learn the directions
off by heart…stride out as if you always know the way.
You made it clear gap years were made to fill
with days, opened like presents, bright as candles.
At the airport we scanned departures, both proud
and scared. You scattered a trail of emails, returned
to file them in your archive box, printed and bound.
We thought we knew the way. Until your illness
emptied everything. This time I help you drag
the rucksack down. We breathe in ocean, jasmine tea
patchouli, tip out grains of sand, aching to go back.
You need to travel lighter. Let’s carry this between us:
I’ll gently lift the straps on to your shoulders
when your name is called.
INTERIOR after ‘Woman at a Window’ by V. Hammershoi
Early morning at Strandgade 30.
My back is turned against this empty room:
high ceiling, folded architraves, bare floor.
North light pools a carpet, lifted yesterday,
searches a frieze of blanks where portraits hung,
the wall-width absence of a heavy mirror.
I look down to the street, dawn stirring
the milk cart’s string of city cats…workmen
and beggars. He paints grand squares, unpeopled.
It’s time to close the shutters, pack and leave.
I silence my procession to the door,
glance at my shadow puppet on the wall
and wonder if this house was just his space
for questions I could never answer, why
he always left me to the end, after thought:
a blur of greyxxxxpositioned herexxxxoff centre.
Patsy Rath lives and writes in Winchester where she is involved in both the North Hampshire Stanza group and Winchester Muse, a local poetry hub. As an English teacher she has spent her working life supporting young people’s reading and writing. Now retired, she is enjoying having time and space for her own work…at last!
THE MARINERS Capel y Fron cemetery, Nefyn, Gwynedd
Here they have made landfall and while they sleep
soft waves of bluebells and forget-me-nots
wash at their feet. Y Bedyddwyr – a religion of water,
of those who go down to the ink-stained sea.
Their graves, garlanded with valerian, lie
higgledy-piggledy tossed on a groundswell
of grass and plantain. After many voyages,
the bitter taste of salt still in their mouths,
they dream in an enchanted meadow
within sight of the sea.
Captains with the names of their ships,
master mariners, widows and infant daughters,
sea-faring sons, those who returned
and those who died far from home.
They rest on the breast of the hill
as if they have just climbed the shrouds
for a better view of the town.
Their haven is amongst the living, looking down
on gables and gardens, lofts and orchards,
on houses with schooners’ names. Here at slack water
they are slatily anchored, waiting
until the land falls away and the flood tide rises.
Then they will gather their kin
for one last voyage, slip their slate hawsers
and submit to the ocean’s final authority,
bubbles of surf floating like seeds
over the drowned streets.
Note: Y Bedyddwyr – the Baptists
Mary Robinson grew up on an off-grid smallholding in Warwickshire, lectured in English in Cumbria and now lives in Gwynedd, North Wales, where she concentrates on her writing. Widely published in magazines, including Poetry Review, Artemis, Poetry Birmingham, Long Poem Magazine. Author of two poetry collections and three pamphlets, most recently Alphabet Poems (Mariscat 2019) and Trace (Oversteps 2020). Past winner of the Mirehouse and Second Light poetry prizes, highly commended in the 2022 R S Thomas poetry competition. http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/maryrobinsonpage.shtml
Little children escaping multiplication,
the cross-stitch canvas
and raps for the spelling mistake
we chatter like the twittering sparrows in the hedge
and holding hands sniff
then pick the primroses up Exeter Road,
pass the crossway at Essington and Halse Land,
by Boswells,
till at the gate with the gap in the hedge
the solitary lamb reflecting our gaze
we get a glimpse of moor, our tor,
a white whisk of rabbit’s tail.
We blow flutes on dandelion stems,
peer in the twigs amongst hedge’s thickets,
burrow fingers in a grass verge hollow
hoping to find the dormouse
or elusive look-for-ever four-leaf clover,
minutes tick away our schoolroom cares.
Sky is a cape above the high banks
guiding our steps along the crisscrossing Devon lanes.
Near Pafford an Oak straddles the road,
she harbours song, a chorus of robins, blackbirds, thrush,
beckoning us into the leaf shadows, the hieroglyphs of her green canopy.
This is our spring.
We are learning.
At Exeter Cross we turn tables,
return to open up our ink-stained desks,
what fate will bring after our next,
the nature spelling test.
Later I cross the road walk under the archway at Broad Park,
to Mrs Livesey’s,
take sponge cake and tea.
Julie Sampson’s collections are Tessitura (Shearsman Books, 2014); It Was When It Was When It Was (Dempsey & Windle, 2018 ); and Fivestones (Lapwing Publications, 2022). She edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems, 2009 (Shearsman Books), in 2009. Sampson is widely published in small-press magazines and named in various competitions, including a ‘highly commended’ (Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize; 2018) and an ‘honourable mention’ (Survision Books James Tate Prize, 2021).
Ripped from the tail-end of summer, September’s
the fastest month, rushing us to the darkness ahead, sun
down three minutes sooner each day than the one before.
Hard to believe, with untimely frost, winds, then wind-and-rain,
we’d carry our coffees outside after supper not long since
to sit on the wall, its stones holding the warmth of a sun
well to the north of west. Harder still to account for
where the time’s gone between funerals we went to
and those we didn’t. xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxThough September
can slam on the brakes and hold its breath, mist
cathedralling morning’s yellow light between tree trunks.
Maybe our own last quarters will be lightened by times
of Indian summer as quiet as this – lovely
to think so, as we hurtle towards our own darks –
yet ask anyone round here (as if casually) how they’re doing
and they’ll tell you they still work hard as they always did,
just these days everything takes that much longer.
SHELVED BOOKS
In front of a wall of shelves, my god-daughter
on her first solo visit, asks
have you read all those books?
She’s silent a while taking it in:
the moment lies open, receptive
but I know enough not to say ‘At your age…’
We sit in bed reading Mole’s
riverbank adventures away from home.
You’d think after a lifetime with books,
I’d have a take on the world
that makes sense of it all and what lies ahead.
I wangled 9 library tickets to change
Wednesdays after games and Saturday mornings,
working all the stacks clockwise from the left.
That library was alphabetic. I’d reached
Psychology 150 before I left home.
Maybe it would have come together
if I’d made it to Science 500 or Theology 210;
maybe I’d have some understanding of what it’s been about
instead of this ragbag of Latin plant names, the average
calf birth-weight on Rum, why no two rainbows
are the same, how Lady Anne Clifford
(dead three hundred years) ‘would not have liked it’,
electricity in her almshouses,
and that’s not to count the two overweight carloads
of statistics and politics and structuralism
I drove off to Clitheroe last year, doubting
any use in their outdated thought,
nor these double-stacked paperbacks,
orange novels with their unremembered plots,
turquoise Pelicans with their cutting edge ideas
passage markers for my own decades
their underlinings and margin scribbles
incomprehensible now, as strange to me as the photo
my god-daughter finds, and asks
is that you? Yes: twenty-three, head
already crammed by those books and so sure of herself
– badly in need of advice I could give myself now
though of course if I’d had it and heeded, I wouldn’t
be who I am now and able to give it.
Jane Routh manages woodlands in North Lancashire. She has published four collections and a prose book with smith/doorstop. Circumnavigation won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition and was shortlisted for a Forward Prize; Teach Yourself Mapmaking was a PBS recommendation. Her poems have won the Academi Cardiff International Prize, the Strokestown International Prize, and the Long Poem Prize from Second Light. She was a #BBCLocalPoet for National Poetry Day 2019, working with Radio Lancashire.
Just now it would be an opera.
A woman in a decline,
trilling out arias,
Traviata, Tosca, Butterfy,
dying prettily on stage.
I don’t much like this plot.
If I could call a different tune.
a woman at peak power,
I’d belt out 60s pop songs:
Bad Moon Rising, Respect, Mustang Sally
Feeling the bass in my bones
Dancing in the sunlight.
LAST
The last sip from a glass of champagne.
The last flash when the sun slips below the ridge,
paints the sky in peacock colours.
The last sweet heavy moment before we fall into deep sleep,
The last crashing chords of a symphony.
A lover’s lingering last kiss.
The sudden force and poignancy of last things
the possibility of Very Last,
grab us by the throat.
Susan Castillo Street is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita, King’s College London. She has published five collections of poems, The Candlewoman’s Trade, (2003), Abiding Chemistry, (2015), The Gun-Runner’s Daughter, (2018) Cloak (2020) and Braiding (2022).
My friends lit a circle of tealights
on the lawn for my birthday –
so many that the first had burned out
before the last ones were lit,
but, despite and because of that,
it was glorious.
All those years of friendship
flickering, faltering and blazing
on that windy November grass,
a loving nearly O
sparkling up at the distant stars.
CONTRACTURE
There is a thickening in my palm,
not yet contracting my fingers,
not yet impeding my work,
but already testifying
to age and heritage.
Some white-bearded ancestor
has played his langeleik,
strumming winter melodies,
until he found his fingers
disobedient,
reluctant to release sweet tunes
into the frosted air.
You can read my palm’s history now,
just where my
life and heart lines cross.
SHOULDERS
My shoulders were always
a particular joy,
handsomely rounded,
peachily smooth,
promising firm embrace,
encircling silk –
but seasons have
budded, flowered, fallen,
budded, flowered, fallen,
and now my arms
are deep-etched like bark.
I keep them shrouded,
as under a dust sheet,
largely to spare myself.
Sometimes,
even in a hard world,
I could weep
for this small loss.
Rowena Sommerville has written poems and made her life, the last thirty years of which have been lived in Robin Hood’s Bay. She has worked in a huge variety of community settings and arts organisations. She left full-time work in 2017, and is now freelance, both as a creative and as a project producer. She also sings with and writes for the acappella band Henwen which has been performing locally and nationally for a long, and harmonious, time. She was The High Window visual artist in residence for 2022.
You are about to set out on your journey.
What will you need? Map and compass?
Or if you’re at sea – telescope,
sextant – to track angles between you
and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter.
You are no stranger to true north.
No-one is awake to wave you off.
Suitable clothing is taken for granted—
the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable
or your blue raincoat, as light as the song
of itself, is groundsheet and sail,
folds into the size of your hand,
the hand which feels under the bed
for the shoes for departure, hands
which find shoes of pale carved amethyst.
Putting them on is like stepping inside
the earth, and as you do, the room,
your city, the galaxies, spin away
and you are the fixed point,
each foot, re-making gravity,
hardly moving at all, travelling far away.
MONASTERY PANAGOUDA
After the bone-house and the deserted village
our guide drove us further up the mountain,
to the monastery whose priest had lived alone,
apart from his cats, for twenty years.
We women covered our sacriligeous thighs
with sarongs from the boot. The men,
in trousers or long shorts, went in as they were.
We stood at the entrance in candlesmoke,
straining to see. Skinny kittens mewed
and brushed our ankles. See how the eyes
of the paintings follow you. Our guide,
pointed, excited. I wandered away
to the back of the chapel and stood in front
of praying Ignatious, ‘the horse-faced saint’,
unmoved, resolute in my secular ways.
And then his eyelids flickered.
THE LAST ADDER IN ENGLAND
Once muscular and fierce, it’s a papery necklet
in a museum case, bypassed by visitors
who prefer to stare at the last wild boar, still upright
in its skin, eyes flashing red at the press of a button.
Vipera berus – who sewed that ghostly shroud
onto its crumbling bones? The landscape has never forgotten:
crops weather in rows of scorched brown triangles
in fields struck by the lightning blast of its passing.
The wind has been hissing like this for more than
thirty-five years, or so the old ones would have it.
Each dry summer, a peristaltic heave underground,
throwing water out of the canal, cracking bridges.
Why do you think each footpath twists and ends in a fork?
That your animals run in circles, trying to eat their tails?
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. She tweets as @fierydes.
The steps to make a cup of tea.
When will we get the Xmas tree?
Check where we are re: rations
Directions to the bowling green.
How to set the answer machine.
The phone number of your son.
A list of things you have not done.
Where is my new cricket bat?
The name of City’s new player.
Words to your old school prayer.
All in the notebook in your pocket,
right next to your brown wallet.
You wonder who has written it
and what an earth it’s doing there.
THE TREE OF FORGETTING
The nurse sent you six times around the Oak tree
in the memory garden at the Safe Harbour home
and you did forget your past, people, pace of it.
A ritual rewind. Ready to sail to the New World.
HUGIN AND MUGIN
(Thought & Memory – The Poetic Edda)
Your ravens flew at daybreak for decades
casting sense nets on the yawning world
rustle of slow silk as they scudded and soared
diamond tail rudders would guide them home
these days they come back aching, confused,
weak boned, looking for long rest and release
mornings are muddled moments
unwilling to leave our family roost
they caw into the bright of day,
dream of the flight to Valhalla.
Jane Thomas is currently finishing her pamphlet on Alzheimer’s she has recently been highly commended in the Bridport, Fish, and Rialto prizes and published in: Stand, Mslexia and The ORB. She is an active member of Oxford Stanza II and Ver Poets and occasional reviewer for Sphinx. https://www.janethomas.org/@janethomas33
Sitting on the stairs
of the National Theatre,
people around you
drunk with the sunshine,
I recognise you instantly:
you are so out of place
you seem to belong here.
I wave my hand,
and my reflection
on the stairs
waves back at me.
MINT CHOCOLATE
The green candles
of the cypress trees
light our way
downhill
to the sea.
We sit
at a waterfront café,
and you sip a mojito,
while I order
Sex on the Beach.
The Mediterranean sun
is just a gleam
of copper light
on your naked shoulder.
Your skin is chocolate,
but your lips are mint.
LUNCH
It’s almost noon,
and people
start coming in.
I just lie there
and watch them
eat.
It’s an old trick
that I’ve learned:
if you keep staring,
they are bound
to look back.
Every now and then,
someone gives me
chicken
or a morsel of mackerel,
or chips
(which I don’t eat).
It used to be better,
but then
they put up the sign: Don’t feed the cats!
and that was that.
Still lying on my side,
I stretch my paws,
slit my eyes
and show
just the tip
of my tongue.
Sooner or later,
a guy comes along
who cannot read.
STROLLING INTO THE PAST
Walking by the fence
propped up
by the green explosions
of bushes and sun,
the stony road
crunching under my feet,
I suddenly thought of you:
your gentle presence
was all
that was missing.
Pavel Tsvetkov is a Bulgarian poet and writer, best known for his 2006 poetry collection ‘Desperate Love’. He has spent most of his adult life in Varna on the Black Sea coast where he works as a freelance translator and videographer. He writes predominantly in Bulgarian, but the poems published here were originally written in English.
Almost too late, a walk.
Evening’s soft moisture rising into mist
the grey vagueness of memory.
The heart’s misguided phantasmagoria
flicker into life. If these were Northern Lights
we’d dance forever –
jeweled intensity of first love
without its skin scorching ferocity.
Draped in dark moonshine, I see you.
My bed is filled by phantom men
who vanish in reality’s sharp daylight
like Psyche’s Cupid
sad delusion embedded in myth.
A poorly lit psychodrama of my own flawed making.
An old door opening only onto itself.
I no longer see the desperately found,
have no words to shape, make tangible
beloved infatuations.
What age is right for love’s thwarted syndrome?
Even an elderly robin carols
its lust song to the spring.
Once upon a time a ghost
took solid form
but was no more real for that.
Now two hollow echoes shadow one another.
How long can I continue
to give my heart to nothing?
J.S.Watts comes from London, but lives near Cambridge. A poet and novelist, she has written nine books: three full poetry collections, Cats and Other Myths, Years Ago You Coloured Me and Underword, plus two poetry pamphlets: the multi-award nominated Songs of Steelyard Sue and The Submerged Sea. Her novels, A Darker Moon – dark literary fantasy, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight – paranormal, are published in the US and UK by Vagabondage Press. See http://www.jswatts.co.uk .
The Devil knows why
everyone is so infernally happy,
grinning like snapshots
and primed to giggle at the slightest touch.
Laughter begets laughter,
a chain of happiness from jawbone to jawbone
across the spaces between houses.
The breeze smells of cooking
and eau de cologne.
I’m almost seventy
in a home with a thin wall to the neighbours’
and still waiting for life to begin.
The books I read resound with laughter,
tragedies and comedies alike.
Simple things arrange themselves
in random, patternless formations,
the simple things
simply waiting for a life.
Trees are being felled, larch and douglas fir.
Junkyards lurk behind hoardings.
Badgers have been culled
from the hill above the bend in the river.
I decided last year
to rearrange the constellations
and have spent the winter months
at a drawing board I rigged up in the kitchen.
The children fed me their ideas
and I ignored them.
I joined the dots. I drew new animals and gods:
a crocodile, a hawk, a winged avenger
—half amazon, half flight attendant—
naming them, if not for humanity’s last century,
for distant aliens with legends of their own.
Behind the carpet warehouse a patch of land
has been commandeered by trainee astronauts.
They’ve been keeping me awake with all
their motivational enchantments.
THE VIEW
I’m not concerned, I said,
with the births of the things
whose continuing existence
we take for granted.
Nor, I added,
with the understandable dread
that all or any of them, big or small,
might cease to be.
Maybe you should be, he replied,
complacently sucking on his unlit pipe.
Maybe you should pay more attention
to bulbs and compost heaps,
to origins and destinies.
The journey itself is only a pretext,
a passing condition, a frivolous mood,
a trivial sequence of calmative scenes
between the Channel and the Bosphorus.
We’d arrived at the inn
in the heat of the afternoon
and were resting on a bench
under a striped awning,
our alpenstocks discarded with our boots.
We’d been talking all day,
undaunted by shortness of breath,
but had hardly paused to claim our rooms
and order an evening meal.
What of history—
and, for that matter, what of myth?
More than the view from a sleeping-car window!
More than the swag from a dilettante’s Grand Tour!
There seemed to be an echo
against the rocks and through the trees.
The sky itself was resonant with listening.
A chambermaid had stationed herself
at an open upstairs window,
less out of curiosity
than to be part of it.
She had a name and memories and an unconscious:
identity enough for anyone.
Perhaps, I said, as if to her,
we need to take it all for granted.
The view is all the better
left unburdened by a view.
THE CAMBRIDGE MILTON
Her tongue as prodigal as Pentecost’s,
she fires a cannonade of anapests
at anyone her piety mistrusts.
Anticipating God’s Trimalchian feasts,
she stakes a claim with ostentatious fasts
and praise no superfluity exhausts:
creative types require encomiasts.
She seeks to join a company of ghosts
as insubstantial as the fenland mists,
an angel swooping down from Heaven’s roosts
to sip and then deplore our common tastes.
The more of them she drinks the more she thirsts,
her mortal pact no less perverse than Faust’s,
this Lady not so ladylike of Christ’s.
Gregory Woods is the author of We Have the Melon (1992), May I Say Nothing (1998), The District Commissioner’s Dreams (2002), Quidnunc (2007), An Ordinary Dog (2011), and Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021), all from Carcanet Press. His cultural histories include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk
The High Window 