*****
Poetry
Bob Beagrie • Roger Bonner • Sean Boustead • Peter Burges • A.C. Clarke • Terese Coe • Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana • Ralph Culver •Tony Curtis • Tony Flynn • Greg Freeman • Neil Fulwood • Erica Hesketh • Johan Huybrechts • Dominic James • Wendy Klein • Gill Learner • Sean McDowell • Jennifer A. McGowan • Kathleen McPhilemy • Katy Mahon • Roy Marshall • Lorna Meehan • Tim Murdoch • John Murphy • Kate Noakes • Anthony Owen • Matthew Paul • Stuart Pickford • Fiona Pitt-Kettley • Patsy Rath • Myra Schneider • Finola Scott • Emma Simon • Fiona Sinclair • Judith Taylor • Maggie Wadey • Mantz Yorke
*****
Bob Beagrie: Two poems
WHEN IT’S UNCOUTH TO ASK
The blame lies with the population
for remembering the feeling of happiness.
But it lingers in the eyes of children
too young to wield the words to doubt it,
too raw to dispel it.
Humanity sings loudest in the babble
and squeak before The Word,
God,
there are so many useful synonyms
for war, designed so it may walk with us
unacknowledged, sit at our table,
call us by name.
See how it smiles, shrugs, buys
a round of drinks and insists on a toast
to perpetual growth.
This is the way of things. To disagree is to be rude,
so, you must brush off the weight of its insults
like an old friend
who has done too well for himself.
His message is ‘Get used to it’, because
he reckons he’s a permanent fixture.
Get rid. Nuff said.
CATHEDRAL
The rainbow over the glen
is almost near enough to touch,
although it’s still spitting
sunshine paints the treetops,
the bright blair below
is flooded with the drawn-out
bubbling bleats of sheep, heads down
at their constant grazing,
punctuating the steady
scrape of the burn over rounded
rocks, and three small birds
script a line of invisible ticks
between hilltop and slow cloud,
their beaks shatter the rainbow’s arc,
we try to catch the falling
shrapnel before the light
changes the sermon.
Bob Beagrie lives in Middlesbrough. He is a poet, playwright and performer. Previous publications include, The last Almanac (Yaffle Press (2023), When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021) And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur (The Black Light Engine Press 2020), Civil Insolencies (Smokestack 2019). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Gaelic and Karelian.
*****
Roger Bonner: Three Poems
PICKING WITH SPARROWS
If a sparrow comes before
my window, I take part in its existence
and pick about the gravel. John Keats
The winter long through whiffling
wind, the sparrows have fluttered
about my garden feeder,
picking, pecking on what
has fallen onto the ground.
As I watch them, I think of Keats
and suddenly he appears on wings,
not dying in Rome at twenty-five,
but alighting to clasp the most
succulent sunflower seed.
“John, you are a nightingale,”
I cry. “Not a sparrow!”
But he will not listen,
keeps on chirping,
“All is moment. Am all, all.”
I sense what he means, tear off
my shirt and fly down to join him.
There we now are picking away.
From dark hedges the other
sparrows silently watch us.
PORTRAIT IN WHITE
Studio de Cirque, Genève, 1949
My older brother on the left, already
street wise as if he were planning
to steal the photographer’s camera.
Mother in the middle, coiffed queen,
with earrings to match the lace doily
collar embanked on her enamel throat.
And I in pom-pom innocence,
dazed, the idiot of the family,
as my brother used to call me.
The background a shadowy aura
of white, making us look like
carved spectres, fashion of the day.
Father absent. He was always
out of the picture, grubbing,
gone on a binge, sometimes for days.
But look, that session is deceptive.
The frame has imprisoned time,
freezing growth, love, pain, death.
So forever we strain to smile,
posing, poised for the shutter
to snap us back to a kind of life.
MISS BEACON
She was a beacon of fear,
our 5th grade teacher,
eyes glaring down at us
through mantis glasses.
Before skulking into class,
we’d wonder upon whom
she’d unleash her ire that day.
Perhaps Pimply Paul with hair like
unsheaved wheat, easy to snatch,
to swing against the blackboard
as if he were a saloon bar door?
Or me summoned once more
to the front, chalk brittling
in hand, to be taunted with
trying to solve math equations
as convoluted as the Trinity?
And again being kept after school
for more bullying with her
porcine pet goading her on?
Sixty years later and I still curse you,
Miss Beacon, hunched on top of
your desk, hiking up crinkled hoserie
to reveal the cavern of a crotch.
Maybe I should forgive, forget you,
be grateful that you hindered me
from becoming another Isaac Newton,
or so.
Roger Bonner is Swiss but grew up in USA. He has published poems in Envoi, The Drunken Boat, Delmarva Review, Ascent Aspiration, The Galway Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The High Window, Offshoots 13&14, of the Geneva Writers Group. He has written a book of satires, Swiss Me and a children’s book, The Lost Treasure of the Swiss Alps. He has recently started writing short plays, with some success. He lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his Canadian wife. http://www.roger-bonner.ch/
*****
Sean Boustead: Four Poems
THE COAL SHED
We talk, if we talk at all, of the coal shed,
then of the old house up the top of town,
a red-brick terraced shadowed by a mill
about the time the mills were shutting down,
then of the shed again. Then of white net
curtains convulsing, people staring out –
what on earth have the council sent us now –
they must be for that house with the coal shed –
then of not caring. Dad was being Dad,
marvelling at all the new roads named
for far-off countries, bright migration towns,
sharks muscling through the clean shallow
waters. And mum, of course, was giving off:
anything you’re up to you’ll be seen here –
do nothing – and if you must do something
do it in that coal shed – you lot drive me mad.
Listen, we did stuff – it was way back when,
no-one saw us – but never in that shed,
a thing knocked up from pillaged factory brick,
a duck-down entrance like a bomb shelter,
a blocked-drain smell, rained-on Great War trenches,
mud in Sunday morning goalmouths. Coal?
The fire in that new house was electric.
Murderer’s hide-out, kiddy-fiddler’s den,
even as kids we knew that shed was way
off, not normal, earthy but unreal, past
yet witnessed, spirit-like. I had dreams –
my own bed, empty, drifting down a stream –
and mum said it was that bloody shed. Edged
hard down the left side, loose along the right,
exactly like this poem on this page,
it lapsed just to the side of all our play
always. And we did try, we tried to sail
the shed hell-bent over imagined seas
once, we even celled ourselves within it
once, pretending there were axemen coming,
giving it the old History will be kind
guff. And we asked questions – had other
happier children tied those harvest bows –
why were rust blades hanging from rust nails –
we asked those questions every day. You know,
my kids are my thing now, and this (less so),
but I still ask questions. I Google it
(nothing). I’m even back from overseas,
back from those towns that set my dad dreaming,
a little seedy now, all busying
with bussed-in tourists, tourists with iPhones
targeting the sharks circling the shallows.
REVELATIONS
In truth I was bracing for your death, yet
there we were stood, that surgeon, you and I,
admiring your neck-wound in a mirror.
He asked for us to mark it, one to ten,
but I compared it to a lipstick strike,
a tick of stitched-up incandescent skin,
and he smiled and at last fell silent. Then
the mirror misted over with my breath,
or yours, or that surgeon’s, though I held off
from reaching out to finger-sketch a heart,
to trace new lines, to readmit us. Art
removes us wondering, I knew, from death,
the death that I, in truth, had braced for; yet
that surgeon was enchanted by something,
smiling at a mirror showing nothing.
THE EXILES
We have no ocean here, no front.
Our hometown tempers our horizon,
left, with a wire fence by an embankment,
right, with the next road down, silent.
So, when seagulls come, we are surprised –
the squealing, the doings on the car roof,
the fat one keeping lookout on the crossbar.
Their gristle legs are frightful and unreal,
their beaks are hooked like specialist chef knives.
Are they stealing the food from our songbirds?
They herd around the park, the kids are scared,
at night they make us leave one big light on.
At night we sit up waiting for the news,
we wait and wait but there is nothing,
just photographs of footprints on the moon,
just the weather, just today’s numbers.
JOHN
The man-Christ wishes he must be baptised.
And there, in the new style, before a loose
abstracted crowd, louts and veterans
chewing on something, leant or lying
at sharp unlikely angles, branches
in an orchard in the quick of winter
unleaved – there, as per procedure, John
the Baptist holds a body to the river,
cups one hand around severe ribs, gently
sidles the other round a slight girl’s neck
and speaks, lowering Jesus into cold water.
Today he is obliged to save the Son
of God. John wonders at the brittle skull,
the taut throat, that squishy beauty spot.
He knows it is a cracked shell he holds,
a shell meant to weep forever, yet
he is struck mostly by his own two hands.
It is as if his skin has turned to stone.
His fingers are familiar yet cold.
smoothed by the water, paling to bone,
the dirt and the sweat washed off in the slick
and slope of a current rushing for an ocean.
And so we are as stone, Jesus would say:
And so we are as stone yet come to life
in God. It is pushing lunchtime. Distant
fishermen lean out of coracles hauling
ropes from the water, fist over fist,
racing, raising up their anchor stones.
The first one breaks the surface like a fish
surprised by the light and its own dead weight
and the sight of it seems to rouse the crowd –
there is rabbling, there are people calling
for the saved to be lifted, just get on with it.
Honestly, the sound is such that no-one
hears as the Word of the Lord is spoken,
nobody, not even John – the sunlight
blading the river has him daydreaming
swords, hilts described with jewels and writing.
He knows he must die of the sword one day,
a sword inscribed with something like And so
we are as stone, those words with which a man
might ornament his brand. And, fancy this:
the words lend John spirit; honestly
he lifts up the Son of God as if it’s nothing.
Sean Boustead received a Gregory award in 1993 and has recently returned to writing poetry. He is a father of three, living in Surrey and working full-time in education.
*****
Peter Burges: Poem
THE BLUE FORDSON
Memories,
skittering like autumnal leaves,
end up among furballs in mind corners
while I telescope through decades,
viewing through eyes of a six year old
fat sofa, books climbing cobwebbed walls,
man with thick-lensed glasses rendering him
both alien and comforting.
All around there are mirrored reflections
streaked by green-stained light
bleeding through trees outside closed windows,
their stillpoint: boy imagining he’s a snake,
poised upright, hood open, like in the Mowgli book
he’s reading, weaving to man-voice,
watching the man obliquely ’til he’s a cobra too,
hooded by ceiling lights.
Focus drifts as boy’s eyes wander,
settle upon toy dog racing along brown track
past a house white-walled, picket-fenced,
a blue tractor parked in shed, to where
white sheep graze grassed/wooded hills.
Book set aside, hands play a duet,
’though from years away I hear only
clicking assemblage of toy pieces.
If sounds of leather slapping feet
or night grunts are remembered,
they are as amorphous as surges of small waves
washing over adamantine reefs.
When the psych asks if he would like to live
on a farm, he shivers, nervous as a shadow
in the umbra of a storm.
The psych asks again and the boy shrugs,
grins, his body softening, eyes glazing
as he surrenders to draw of a turquoise-
red-green world beyond locked gates
and orphanage grey where tractors roar,
nuns don’t bark, and flipperty lambs
don’t ever wet their beds.
Soon he’s chortling, tooting the toy tractor’s
high-pitched horn as the black-white Collie
chases sheep; laughing again while taking the roof
off the house, filling its hollows with secret people,
lives he’s made for them, all the while,
even as the psych pushes him out the door,
and back in Mount Lawley Reception Centre,
returning—like a wild animal scenting
proferred morsel—to nose the man’s question
again and again
’til the day he’s translated through dapples
by a humpbacked grey-and-white FJ
into a wash of colours and emotions
that erase dark hallways, beatings, days as grey
as asphalt, and, sitting in a strange father’s lap,
circled by his and a blue Fordson’s diesel smell,
he drives ’round and round paddocks
potholed by sheep’s snouting, ploughing lines
like those of his palms—no longer bruised
by caning—seeding his own re-assembling bits
in land which binds, stops him blowing wild away
as topsoil sometimes does.
Peter Burges retired to Fremantle, Western Australia, having lived for thirty years overseas (as a Buddhist monk, teacher, company director, and business consultant), He has been published in Cordite, Poetry d’Amour; LOCUS, OOTA Anthology; Creatrix Anthology; Recoil Anthology; UNUSUAL WORK; and Uneven Floor; received a Highly Commended in Poetry d’Amour 2019 and Third Prize in The Tom Collins Poetry Prize 2019. He published his first collection in 2019, has a second one ready for the press and is working on others addressing overseas themes and his experiences in Asia and the Middle-East.
*****
A.C. Clarke: Three Poems
WAITING FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S NEWS
I have been here before. The gulf
between not knowing and knowing which is crossed
in the space of a word
the gash between wanting and not wanting to hear
which is closed by the stitch of a minute.
I have not been here before. This is not mine
to deal with. Whatever I guess
cannot be the full truth of what you feel
Your fear is your own.
Your relief too.
Sympathy can turn usurper, claim rights
it does not have. Worse still can make itself
the star. If I say that in waiting for news
I know you have had already
I share in your agony of waiting
I am a liar. I can imagine
but never share. I am not you.
Even my wish to know and not to know,
is second-hand. I have not earned
impatience. Unlike you.
STRUCTURE
I sit here wanting a reason. The definition
an illness would give me, shall we say,
measuring my day in doses and pulsebeats.
Or how some small catastrophe –
ceiling collapse, a minor break-in –
would focus my attention. Anything really
to tell me here is what you have to do
and for the rest, let go.
Anything rather than this slow abrading
of purpose, this sense of being becalmed
and at the same time pinked on every side
by Lilliputian arrows. Everything swirls
like a kaleidoscope that can’t settle,
primary-bright but nebulous.
Everything cries me next. But I crave
the solitary cell, the barred window
the steady march of days
across a chalked wall.
DEAR POEM
Or would you prefer something less formal?
We’re mother and child. Aren’t we?
Do you feel I’m controlling?
Resent my interference?
Making no promises but I’ve wondered
if I’m treating you right. People I’ve consulted
don’t agree. There’s the set boundaries school
spare the cuts and spoil the poem and the anything goes
brigade let the poem decide for itself
when it’s time to stop. It knows itself better than you do.
I try to set you free but the disciplinarian in me
soon reins you in. This push-pull technique
does nothing for either of us. I confess with shame
that now and again out of sheer frustration
I’ve mauled you almost to death,
hardly a line left standing. Poem,
I’m truly sorry. I never took into account
how you might feel. Maybe it’s too late
but could we split the difference? Half the time
I’d have you on a leash.
The other half you could run wherever you liked,
even if you lost yourself in a tangle of metaphors
even if you came to grief.
Deal?
A C Clarke has published five full collections and six pamphlets, two in collaboration. She was one of four winners in the Cinnamon Press 2017 pamphlet competition with War Baby. Wedding Grief, a series of poems about Paul and Gala Éluard was published as a pamphlet by Tapsalteerie in 2021. She is currently working on a sequence of poems retelling the story of Beowulf from the monsters’ point of view.
*****
Terese Coe: Three Poems
ORACLE
The Machu Picchu oracle had suggested he was her soul mate. That was the quaint terminology of the era. She did not ditch it nor did she inform him. He grinned at her intentionally absurd piece describing his artistic shall we say lifestyle. His brother told her how they visited his decades-alienated family for an uncle’s 96th birthday and reportedly S. would not sit down. Stood to one side of the room and allowed himself the bemused and repeated utterance, What an insane family . . . What an insane family . . . Detached, gentle, yet audible. With never a clue to its origins, she’d been a 30-year witness to his extensive repertoire of remedies and prescriptions. Only at his Memorial did that eventually make sense. A relative said he had been an orderly in the army. Neither that nor the slightest intimation of his having been in the army at all had ever escaped his lips.
NEED
The Ice King makes his share of big mistakes.
His mind is filled with poetry and drums,
with comets, clouds, the emptiness he becomes
when he’s strung out. The energy it takes
to score a fix is a drain,
a pendulum too fast on its return.
His body will plead for heat to feed a vein—
your warmth could be another thing he breaks.
RUE AND ROSEMARY
Nothing can
accommodate
desire
that can’t
be bidden.
Cannot
be guided,
wasted,
abided,
nor seen
as fated.
Nothing one
can make
of it
as it
hoves into
view.
Perhaps
eventuality,
parody,
flight
at the sight
of malady.
Whether
wise or merry,
primal
or tertiary.
Terese Coe‘s poems and translations have appeared in Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Classical Outlook, Hopkins Review, Metamorphoses, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, Stinging Fly, Stone Canoe, The Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among many others. Her collection Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize. For more details about her work, please visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terese_Coe
*****
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana: Three Poems
LAPWINGS
When we stay in the Lapwing room
above the pub, I remember when, at Aberlady,
in East Lothian, we saw these crested
empresses perform a little run up the green
beside the golf course, heading, perhaps,
to a predetermined spot. And when the lapwing
runs, it’s as if it’s approaching a hurdle.
And when the lapwing flies back to the same spot
and begins the process over and over again,
it’s like when a baby hands you a cup and you
pretend to drink and give it back, and they
squeal with delight and want to do it over
and over again, which is like you, my love,
deciding to come back to me, over and over
WATCHING SWALLOWS ON ALMOUTH BEACH, I THINK OF YOUR MUM
The last time I saw her, she was on a flat pack bed
in the lounge, considering her jewellery, decided on
a diamond-studded anniversary ring for me.
Her bed monopolised the room, but she could see
birds on the feeder. We talked of Shakespeare,
and when I began reciting ‘All the World’s a Stage’
she joined in, shouting: out damned spot! Is that Hamlet
or Macbeth? I wondered if it was the morphine.
I kissed her forehead, squeezed her hand as we left.
Each day her pain increases. She can’t sit up, has her
wine in a spouted beaker. It’s going to be a tough
few weeks, you say, as we spend our last moments
on the beach: Coquet Island in the distance, rape fields
above the estuary, orange fronds of seaweed at our feet.
GRAFFITI
Something hurt inside when Mum told me
Dad’s diagnosis. But he paid us a visit during
his chemo, lagging behind, as we got off the metro.
Mum said: of course, you know what he’s doing?
Picking up pennies for your son. But in fact, he couldn’t
feel his feet. Auntie Irene said: don’t worry darling,
before you know it, he’ll be back in the garden, and
Mum’ll have courgettes all the way up to the windows.
My dad, who my sister calls Daddy, is still here
in his 79th year. Were Mum to go first, he says
he’d still watch the cricket. And left to his own devices,
he’d cook Manx kippers without worrying about
the smell. Before the operation, he told us 3 grown-
up women: I love you all equally. As a child
I’d go into the wardrobe and bury my head in his
gardening jumper. How many times did I accompany
him with my yellow wheelbarrow and red wellies?
Picking gooseberries, green and hairy, for pocket money.
Walking me to piano lessons. Dad, who made me go
on the inside of the pavement, when I was pregnant.
On Sunday’s we’d buy a Curly Wurly and say hello
to ‘The Three Old Men’ sitting on the bench.
And today, Dad refers to himself as an elderly gent.
And still now, we laugh about his retirement do.
His speech, about the graffiti in the school loos:
Mr. Corrin needs Viagra! How he took this as a clue
it was time to leave. Everybody, three cheers for
my dad. Doesn’t he look handsome in a poem?
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana’s collection, Sing me down from the dark, was published by SALT in 2022 is now in its second issue. Her recent poems have appeared in PN Review, The Moth, Poetry Wales, ARTEMISpoetry and Fenland Poetry Journal. She was shortlisted by Billy Collins for the 2023 Fish Prize, and has performed at the Aldeburgh, Winchester and Tears in the Fence festivals, as well as internationally in Portland Oregon, at the AWP conference.
*****
Ralph Culver: Four Poems
EVERYTHING HAD TO BE INVENTED
Everything had to be invented. Coffee. Porch awnings. Grieving. The
fine golden hairs on your forearm. Salmon. What was the
order they arrived in, all of the things? No one
knows. No one knows the order, or what decreed them
to be so. All we know is that there had
to be things, and so they became. The things did
not need names, it was thought, but words had been
one of the inventions. What did the words do but
have this insatiable need to attach to things? The words
“insatiable need,” for example. “Assault weapon.” “Dog collar.” “Crescent moon.”
A FIRE BURNED BRIGHTLY
A fire burned brightly, as out of the fire another
fire burned, giving birth to another fire, a small, green
fire that a child could hold in the palm of
the hand. This fire fed on human grievances. It gave
no heat. How long before it extinguishes itself? Tens of
thousands of years? Perhaps never, for when is the end
of human grievance? Animals and birds have been seen to
shed tears in its light. It is good to come
to the conclusion of one’s life and realize that your
grievances have been released. The panther weeping before the blaze.
THE JUNIATA’S WATERS
The Juniata’s waters are high, and the dog runs far
ahead of us, clearly engaged in sniffing out the awakening
groundhogs. Here is the first forsythia in full bloom I’ve
seen this season. We each have a small umbrella to
ward off the occasional raindrops that we can see making
linked rings on the river’s silken surface. As we walk
you put out your hand, and I take it in
mine. I am about to say I love you when
you point across the water, and I see the slow
beating of a heron’s wings, making for the opposite shore.
I AM SO HAPPY B ECAUSE
I am so happy, because you told me you slept
well last night. I had to ask since I am
here and you are there, and I could not have
touched you last night if I had wanted to, and
I did want to. I won’t count the times I’ve
put my arms around you, because to begin counting means
at some point to reach an end, and I cannot
bear the thought of the end of holding you. I
imagine a lesser god, the Maker of the List of
Last Things. His quill pen poised over the parchment, waiting.
Ralph Culver divides his time between Vermont and Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in such journals as Unbroken, the New Verse News, and Gnashing Teeth Publishing. His latest book is A Passable Man (MadHat Press, 2021), which was reviewed in the Autumn 2022 issue of The High Window.
*****
Tony Curtis: A Jazz Suite
BILLIE HOLIDAY
Good Morning Heartache, Don’t Explain.
Her voice was honey and sour lemons,
smoke-filled clubs and barbed wire.
That first gardenia pinned in her hair
drew blood as it pierced her head
and all the beauty in her life
was cut through with pain.
The men had come and the men had gone
for love is a faucet that turns off and on.
Lover Man, You Let Me Down, Mean to Me.
An unlicensed singer, a junkie hand-cuffed to the hospital bed,
a roll of fifty dollar bills strapped to her thigh.
Her voice had run itself down to a bad memory –
Prez was not there to rescue his Lady Day.
The pushers, the whorehouse tricks she’d been tutored in
used her up, leaving her crying on empty,
dying in the summertime of fifty-nine
in the Metropolitan Hospital, Manhattan.
Strange Fruit, Fine and Mellow, No Regrets.
THE LAST OF SCOTT LAFARO
What survived your death on the road from Geneva
Was the Prescott double bass from 1825
Made by that master luthier in Concord, New Hampshire.
Ebony and maple inlay, strengthened neck of slab-cut fir,
Pulled scorched from the wreck you died in, going
Off the highway into trees that night towards Flint
On Route 20 that stretches from East coast to West.
The charred remains identified by your St Christopher;
Your last gig – Newport Jazz with Stan Getz blowing.
But what lives is the trio’s final set at the Vanguard
In the Village two weeks before: inspired Bill Evans,
His hands, your hands in dialogue, with Paul Motian
Teasing and brushing the hi-hat and skins,
You underpinning the melody, counter to the tune.
Oh to have been that downtown girl at the corner table
Swirling her Manhattan over ice, caught up in your playing,
Feeling your bass rhythms enter her soul,
Cold shouldering the clutz who was paying,
And sensing the promise of better things. 1961, June,
With Kennedy still reaching for the New Frontier,
Rushing towards our cool future’s glow:
Milestones. Detour Ahead, My Man’s Gone Now.
CHASIN’ THE BIRD
Bird riding the subway ‘round midnight, into the early hours,
Times Square…23rd…Christopher Street…34th and Penn,
Washington Square…Columbus, on bourbon and heroin,
Switching cars and lines without purpose or sense,
The subway rails playing be-bop as he went.
And washing up in a club where Dizzy
Was at the bar checking out a new band.
‘Help me, Dizzy, why don’t you save me?
These kids can play, but now people just come to me
To see the world’s most famous junkie.’
Then a cab to the Rothschild Baroness at the Stanhope Hotel.
She called for a doctor, but Bird refused to go,
Just kept watching tv, the Dorsey Brothers Show,
That big band cruising and a guy who could juggle.
On her silk chaise longue Charlie’s heart gave up the struggle.
Still grieving his baby daughter, gone the year before,
His life had fallen apart.
The hole in her heart was a horn he wanted to blow life into,
Until his own heart played out. The autopsy report
Described a man of sixty. Charlie “Bird” Parker was thirty four.
SCATTERING STAN GETZ
East of the sun and west of the moon
Go your ashes into the endless Pacific
Off the coast of Malibu in blazing, blue June.
Friends and family on a yacht
That rides the swell of the ocean’s swaying
Bass line. With your record playing –
Billy Strayhorn’s Blood Count
Blocking out the gulls and the waves:
Over the melancholy matter of goodbyes, life blown defiant.
‘I’ve got a big sound. It’s deceptively mellow but it carries.’
It’s night music, the sad music of the going man.
Then ashes poured from your saxophone case by your grandson.
BRUBECK AT ST DAVID’S HALL, CARDIFF
An old man walks slowly across the stage,
So stiff and tired that it seems
He will not make it to the Steinway.
The hall is so quiet: it takes an age.
He sits and as he touches the keys
The audience rises to its feet, comes alive:
Five-four, five-four, five-four, five-four, five-four
– Take Five.
Tony Curtis was Wales’s first Professor of Poetry. He developed and directed the Writing Masters at the University of South Wales (Glamorgan). His eleventh collection Leaving the Hills will be published in 2024 by Seren who published his first novel Darkness in the City of Light, which was shortlisted for the Paul Torday Prize by the Society of Authors this year. www. tonycurtispoet.com
*****
Tony Flynn: Three Poems
ARS POETICA
Such that what is well beyond
one’s grasp might be coaxed –
gentled with purposeful
abandon – and briefly
held . . . As the trout
hunkered in tight
where the bank overhangs
is happy to indulge
a certain pleasuring
for a wee while at least
before her sudden dart
for freedom – gone –
and not a whisper of betrayal.
HYMNS
i.m. Paul Celan
A string of lost words,
this chaplet of tears:
the bitter noose
about your neck
tightening slowly
year upon year. Bereft
of song, your strangled
hymns have stood
their ground – lift
us if not
heavenward yet
out of hell.
THE FALL
Hardly recognisable –
you, there, collapsed –
disassembled:
your legs
so suddenly
revealed –
so white, skeletal
almost where your skirt
has been lifted
and gently arrayed
as feathers might array
a broken wing.
Tony Flynn’s most recent collection The Heart Itself was published earlier this year by LegalHighsPress, Hull. Copies can be ordered directly from the Press.
*****
Greg Freeman: Two Poems
HARBOUR, AMBLE
It begins with identification.
My wife is right, a male eider duck
in dramatic winter plumage,
the female almost unnoticed
by comparison. Cormorants
on emerging sand remain as still
as herons to dry their wings:
dark angels of the north,
or half a dozen Batmans.
Decaying breakwater pier
across ‘our’ river as it meets the sea
is an old pirate’s gaping grin.
Seal with mouth stuffed with fish
taunts gulls, dives to escape
being mobbed. Water calm,
no wind, quay has few visitors.
Boats go on quietly landing catches.
And as we’re finishing fish and chips
a pulsating murmuration low in sky,
above the river, merging and dividing
and merging. This morning I read
of an editor who doesn’t like
poems that are just about wildlife.
I get that. I make no apology for this.
RED SQUIRRELS
Beauty of rarity. Scampering
down the trunk of a fir
felled by storm Arwen,
attracted by feeders
on a Northumberland common.
Dull red, perhaps,
but red beyond doubt.
We crept up behind
a lone snapper
who had probably
been there for hours.
Dogs caused their usual
commotion, birds fussed
about. A robin tried
to attract our attention.
We shared merry glances.
Moment of fulfilment
in the woods, quest ended.
A last redoubt, patch of flame
still burning in the far north
of England. Scattered by
destruction and grey interlopers,
indigenous fugitives
hiding out in the borderlands.
Greg Freeman has published two pamphlets, Trainspotters (2015), and The Fall of Singapore (2022), and one full collection, Marples Must Go! (2021). He is news and reviews editor of the poetry website Write Out Loud. After 40 years living in Surrey, he recently moved to Northumberland.
*****
Neil Fulwood: Four Poems
BERNSTEIN
The composer-conductor
as two-way street;
the highbrow educator
as hep-cat populist.
White tuxedo, bow tie:
podium elegance shot through
with Hollywood cool.
Surface and depth.
He conducts as if possessed
or transported. Mahler
surges through him,
an ecstasy of revelation.
KLEMPERER
The black dog has harried him
through Germany, America, England;
through illness, ill-luck and accident.
The black dog, always ready
for the paw-on-throat moment.
Now, the twilight of his years
flaring into a supernova of creativity,
one definitive interpretation
following another, he towers. His legacy
is secure; the black dog swindled.
KARAJAN
The rock star lifestyle years before
rock stars had the stones to follow
his example: jet aircraft, yachts,
fast cars. Not that a single Porsche
ever ended its days in a swimming pool,
discipline not allowing for such stuff.
The game-plan was perfection –
always that. The repertoire preserved:
a monument, flawless. A second life.
HAITINK
Observe: the moment of alchemy
where the slightest of gestures
produces from the orchestra
a specific tone, a colouration,
a shade or nuance; a reaching
and shaping that achieves the sublime.
Observe: the humanity of the man,
the dignity, apparent in ways
equally understated, equally enigmatic.
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, England, where he still lives and works. He has three collections out with Shoestring Press: No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled. He co-edited the Alan Sillitoe tribute anthology More Raw Material (Lucifer Press, 2015), and has published three volumes of film criticism with Chrysalis.
*****
Erica Hesketh: Two Poems
BIRDS
I paint a thin, wobbling branch the length of her wall.
I add a goldfinch, a robin, a magpie, a waving owl…
The first creative thing I’ve done since she was born.
I zoom in and out of Google Images on my phone,
mixing my colours with the utmost seriousness,
knowing full well it’s myself I’m trying to impress.
These are not the birds of my childhood; the birds
of my childhood lived on school exam flash-cards
or inside the TV. The only flower I truly loved
was the bougainvillaea, trailing soft magenta above
the morning traffic haze. It had a midsummer smell.
(A swallow, a parakeet.) I loved that it was hard to spell.
I was an abstract child, I think, my approach to the world
syntactical. I want things to be different for my girl.
I want her to know in her bones that she belongs.
I want her to have a beloved tree to push off from
when she’s ready to know more. With my face close
to the wall I can see my birds starting to dry. The loss
floods me then like a taste: standing at the window
all too soon – a flash of gold, an empty bough.
EPILOGUE
At the next table, a woman is speaking loudly to her friend.
‘… I knew I was being difficult but mentally I couldn’t stand
it a minute longer so I just discharged myself, of course
they were the ones who wanted to induce me in the first place,
I had to fight them tooth and nail, my lungs, all my innards
were dislocated, it was so lonely at night on the ward…’
On and on with barely a breath. The diners around
her smirk, rolling their eyes at how insane she sounds
with her torrent of detail, her reservoir of distress
disgorging onto the silent friend. Six weeks in, I would guess.
I pay attention to my response. No dull ache, no whiplash.
Now, I’m just another regular with a latte. I watch
the friend shifting in her seat – her own child waiting to ask
if he can have an ice cream – a pair of older women in masks
easing out of quilted coats – the waiter mopping up a spilled
vase of purple flowers – and marvel at life’s forward tilt.
Erica Hesketh’s poems have appeared in The North, Acumen, Ink Sweat & Tears, harana poetry, Lunate, The Friday Poem and the Mum Poem Press. She placed second in the 2022 Winchester Poetry Prize, and was commended in the 2023 Magma Poetry Competition (Editors’ Prize). She is the Director of the Poetry Translation Centre, a charity dedicated to celebrating contemporary poetry from around the world in English translation
*****
Johan Huybrechts: Two Poems
COULEUR LOCALE
Tomorrow, we visit the desert, today
we enjoy life on the beach. We have
ice cream and panic attacks (I may
have misheard this) the waiter said.
I must have made the wrong choice
for I had them, panic attacks, that is,
after lunch, just as I was about to
discover a hole (slip of the pen) world
of leisure & luxury and comfortably
lie down in the warm milky sand
like a solo of dreamy washed-up fish
full of fatigue and high expectations,
I savoured them, even saved some
for later, at night when the beach
barbecue fires were kindled and I
had one more delicious bite, and then,
the other thing, the I scream, wonderful
and tasty, fitted right in my mouth.
THE OLD MEN OF CAROVIGNO
This might have been the opening scene
or the ending of Fellini’s Amarcord.
The sound fades into eternity, no music,
the evening falls on the old men of Carovigno.
They stand in small groups on the square,
in a portico, or on the sidewalk, and converse
with their hands in their pockets.
They have become slower and produce less rumore,
and then the lanterns go on and illuminate the palm trees!
One crosses the piazza to buy a gelato,
one takes a sip from the fountain of youth,
as others keep quiet and to themselves on a bench,
single, and undisturbed by church doors
opening, couples and families coming out,
and sit and watch the life that is still there,
after all, nearly a lifetime, the old men of Carovigno,
in a forted residence ‘gainst the tooth of time,
all in all not much different, I guess, from the boys
in the abundance of light back in the schoolyard.
Johan Huybrechts has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ambit, AGNI, The Moth, Magma, Lighthouse, and Salamander, one was runner-up in the 2017 Ambit Poetry Competition judged by George Szirtes, one was a commended poem in the 2021 Ambit Poetry Prize judged by Kim Addonizio. He lives near Ghent in Belgium, with his wife Caroline, and works as a medical doctor.
*****
Dominic James: Two Poems
PLANES AND PYRAMIDS
On Brunswick Square the lofty Planes
railed-in their jagged leaves, pom-pom skirts
and patchwork bark. Taking the air
for centuries with feet in dirt, heads in smog,
they flourished in The Smoke. Now banned,
where girls reclined and boys eased off
their shoes at lunchtime, summer
would invade the square where nannies
in starched uniforms pushed the brats
of industry in the late, lamented era.
Level with the balconies and mansard rooves
from dismal heights the trees hark back
to deeply-rooted privilege, shed motley
on the tawny ground where all below
is sapless, spent. When they are gone
cemetery plans revive. White pyramids
can inhabit the idle squares, so elegant,
seating stepped below an ever-baleful sun;
the human dead sealed up, pigeon-holed
in arid cells while underground –
good parking for the people.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Much coughing then
when rats spill-out on pavements, lie
in later light absorbed by saplings
of the street –the latest thing –
green railing sticks of chlorophyll,
serum-plumped, appropriately sticky
to the touch and cost practically nothing
to us, my dears, borne on a data ocean.
BLUE MOVES
I drive by Ealing Common daffodils
which, by the way, at first recital of this verse
I heard were planted by the host
of downstairs ramblings, the open mic
at Covent Garden by Endell Street –
and what a mob we were, would rant by turn,
five minutes tops and absolutely no exception –
Niall told us he was here the year before,
laying bulbs in beds, behind which now –
behind net curtains – audiences gape
on a verge of filmy yellow: their hidden lives
are gathered-in, ramping up to isolation.
I must admit in terms of love my journeys
are departures. There never was a homecoming
and here, another door has closed: recedes
in memory. Its passage flickers to the fore.
I feel my way in blindly, find in dumb accord
my things disturbed, pictures from their place
removed like features of those friends – or strangers –
whose faces cannot show how quickly leave is taken.
As doors close, the last embrace may hold
a parting kiss; betray a show of love, the body moved
to pull away, take leave, shouldering its burden.
Dominic James lives in Gloucestershire near the source of the River Thames. Engaging with verse for the last dozen years or so, he joins poetry meetings along the M4 corridor and is widely published at home and abroad. Most recently appearing in Big Trouble on the Medway and published in Dreich Magazine, he has two collections Pilgrim Station (SPM Publications, 2016) and Smudge (The Littoral Press, 2022). http://djamespoetic.blogspot.com/
*****
Wendy Klein: Three Poems
BOARDWALK OUTING
Like a still from The Seventh Seal, he loomed in front of us,
miles and decades away from Bergman, but straight
out of the Old Testament, a pillar of a man all in black
his head framed by the longest curling payess we’d seen
in a lifetime of slipping through Jewish neighbourhoods
disguised as other. He towered above us as we sat
on the boardwalk bench, his mouth moving very slowly
enunciating each word with great care: ‘Yiddish hotel’
his tone interrogative, the question mark hovering,
and then, in response to our silent bewilderment,
the same words again, and yet again, with fading hope.
When we shook our heads, he asked our names
in a tone full of pathos, seemed further saddened by our reply.
I heard myself say, ‘You were right to spot us as landslayt,
but we do not know of a hotel like this in Bournemouth.’
Nodding, almost bowing, he turned on his heel, strode away
with an audible swish of his tsitses, leaving us to wonder
how he had spotted us, what was the shibboleth?
AFTERSHAVE
Old Spice – its whiff of alcohol and danger
that swallowed the spiciness whole – the jolt
of cloves that had nothing to do with toothache
the heat of cinnamon, like the taste of Dentyne
and Pall Malls on someone else’s tongue.
Old spice – did all the boys I kissed wear it,
or only the ones I remember?
Could my mother smell it on my hair
that had rubbed against Dave’s cheeks
or Richard’s chin for two hours,
back from Sonora on the rooters’ bus,
my own chin rubbed raw from young faces
badly shaven? Oh the sting when I washed my face
before bed – the thrill of it on my pillow
the next day – before I grew up, found out
it was cheap and kitsch, learned about
Armani, Calvin Klein, Paco Rabanne.
TULIPS IN SNOW
April 2021
Caught out in April
they hang their heads
like tropical birds
that find themselves
on the wrong continent.
Their petals, a mixture
of deep salmon
and a paler shade of pink
shiver at the prospect
of certain death when
a flash of late sun stirs
them back to uncertain life.
Their surprised necks stretch
as they upright themselves,
and we envy their resilience,
a botanical optimism,
like the crazed trust that spring,
or the powers that be,
have not abandoned
either them or us.
Wendy Klein has published 3 collections, a pamphlet, Let Battle Commence from Dempsey & Windle, and a Selected, Out of the Blue from the High Window Press. Her Pamphlet, Let Battle is available as a YouTube recording. https://youtu.be/L2JlbpAdUcU, featuring the poet, Charles Lauder. She is trying and failing to get a second pamphlet published by anyone who is interested in intense female friendship and physician-assisted dying.
*****
Gill Learner: Two poems
THE MISSING
First Tony, known from teenage years. He taught art:
his landscapes fill my walls. Born the same date
as Beethoven, he adored music of all kinds.
Left-wing passionate, his love of confrontation meant
no view could go unchallenged. Quick to rise but
terrific company, he drank until his liver couldn’t cope.
Next Val, his wife, friend since our mums bumped prams
collecting Welfare orange juice. Her home was dull:
she’d rather be at ours – concerts on the Third, the Goons;
no royal speech but games on Christmas afternoons. Grown up,
we shared the trials and fears of motherhood. Then mood-swings
and Valium dulled her shine. Her death was no surprise.
Mary, who rambled me round fields and woods, explained
Theosophy. She could scarcely see but could pick out
a goldcrest’s squeak from sparrow-babble, bluetit calls.
Her John could still stand on his head at ninety-three,
exuded Zen-like calm. They moved up north. An old
disease caught up with her; he lived one month more.
And last but most: Trevor, my ‘other half’ for almost
sixty years. There were arguments, of course: the in-laws;
our kids; his hearing aids; my politics. But oh, the holidays:
France, Cornwall, Venice, Prague. And operas we saw live:
Mozart, John Adams, Strauss, Wagner, Glass. Now
I no longer have to shout, and I fume at the News alone.
THERE’S MAGIC IN THE WEB
One autumn day when foliage is crackle dry, walk
to your nearest wood. Brush leaf-litter aside, lie down.
Press your ear against the ground. Tune out birdsong,
the shuffling of leaves, the scrape of branches moving
in the breeze. Maybe you’ll hear, not far beneath the earth,
that oak, fir, beech and ash are broadcasting, sharing
the whereabouts of water and essential minerals;
warning of attack by insects or disease so that
pheromones and tannins can put up a fight.
Electrical impulses are spread through fungal threads
finer than spider’s silk. ‘Mother’ trees, which shade
saplings from life-giving sun, feed their young along
these filaments. And the fungi thrive on sugar
from the roots. But all is not benign: species
like black walnut can kill rivals: they leak deadly
chemicals, keep nutrients for themselves.
When Tim Berners-Lee first thought of hypertext
to let machines connect for sharing documents,
was he aware that nature had a network of her own?
Gill Learner’s poems have been published in magazines including Acumen, Agenda, The High Window, The North, Mslexia and South. They have also appeared in a number of anthologies e.g. from The Emma Press (https://theemmapress.com), Grey Hen Press http://www.greyhenpress.com) and Two Rivers Press (http://tworiverspress.com); and won a several prizes. Her first collection, The Agister’s Experiment, appeared in 201, followed by Chill Factor, in 2016, and Change, in 2021 are all from Two Rivers Press (tworiverspress.com) Web pages: http://www.poetrypf.co.uk.
*****
Sean McDowell: Two Poems
ROSARY
A necklace of cut-glass beads
the pale blue of a lover’s eyes
and delicate brass links
pools in my palm with a sound
like rain against fiberglass.
Five decades of Ave Marias
she last recited five decades ago
meet on either side of a penny
medallion of the haloed Virgin
within a second oval halo.
From her feet, another chain:
one bead, then three, then one,
then the crucifix, its sinewy
Christ pegged to a cross
ornamented with suggestions
of flowers and ivy leaves.
I drape the rosary across
my outstretched hand
and hold it toward the window.
It feels as light as a handkerchief
and as cool as river stones.
How many hours did
her hands warm these facets
as they eyed the light?
Rainstick of the old faith,
bass rhythm of the five mysteries,
comforter of days in a land
whose language never became her own,
you guided my great grandmother
for years in silence, as one by one
she pinched and rubbed your every
bead between thumb and forefinger
to count without counting
her daily sotto voce prayers.
KEEPSAKE
A tuft of fur
in a heart-shaped box—
white, grey strands
on a heart-shaped pillow.
Somehow their softness
recalls my whole hand
buried in her shaggy back
and her long tail thumping.
Somehow I hear
her impatient barks
and heavy panting.
Her ears are arched,
her tongue lolling,
and there at my feet,
her slimy ball, dropped
for the twentieth time.
I snatch it before
she can and wing it far
into the yard. She is all legs
and paws and floppy ears,
unerringly on course, as if
she knows without looking
where it must fly,
where it must land.
Somehow that ball
still soars forty years later
over that patchy ground,
and she is running,
running, running
with all she has
and all she is
to chase it down.
Sean McDowell is Professor of English at Seattle University and the editor of the John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne. He is the author of Metaphysical Shadows: The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry (Lexington Books, 2022). His most recent poems have appeared in The Madrona Project, Scintilla, The Lyric, Poetry Ireland Review, and The High Window.
*****
Jennifer A. McGowan: Poem
THIS SAME OLD GROUND
we argue
the semantics of bedtime
go over
the same old ground
till you yell
you wish I wasn’t your mum
and I wish
for a lifetime of retroactive IUDs
Then the lights go out.
Lightning forks gold and purple.
We look at each other, smile,
and me barefoot
and you in pajamas and purple wellies
up to our shins in mud and puddles
do the rain dance.
Stomp the good world new.
Pushcart- and Forward-nominated Jennifer A. McGowan is a disabled poet who has also had debilitating Long Covid for over three years. Despite this, her sixth collection, How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager) was published by Arachne late 2022. She has won a number of competitions, and placed and been commended in many more. She’s a re-enactor, prefers the 15th century to the 21st, and lives in Oxford.
*****
Kathleen McPhilemy: Three Poems
WOMEN AT WORK
Aquatint history of the linen trade:
a room full of spinners , boy by the hearth
boy you have given a blue jacket
but the white and red of his numbed hands
the chilblains he feels on his raw fingers
are not to be seen. This is a picture.
Three spinners who could be the Fates
or Graces, in Madonna blue,
young, modest, in floor-length dresses.
You don’t show the dirt that draggles their hems
we don’t feel the heat of this stifling room
or smell the bodies barely washed in winter
or know the nausea of the one in the corner
whose next child threatens and will have to be fed.
But you’ve made the fire bright, shown us a pot
hung from the rafters over its flames.
A woman is stirring what we take to be food;
but the sweat on her forehead, the flush on her face
the catch in her chest from the smoky air,
you haven’t shown those, or the dank lock
escaped from her cap, straggling her cheek.
You’ve thrown in a cat, set in the foreground
comfortably round and a half-grown kitten
dabbing one paw at a ball of thread;
you haven’t shown the rats they keep out
the mice they’ve dispatched, the butt outside
where the kitten’s siblings were drowned at birth.
AND THE MEN
The farmer… in the dead season has recourse to weaving…between the manufacture of linen and the cultivation of the ground, the working class are kept in constant employment. – OS memoirs
i
I imagine him
in the dead of winter
in the other room
space they have made
for the wide handloom.
Ground frozen hard
beasts in the barn
or eaten or salted.
Not a lot to do in the yard
so hands almost clean
here he is managing
the warp and the weft –
this is not a pastime.
For the pennies he needs
to survive the winter
he weaves brown linen
the packhorses carry
over deep-rutted lanes
into the city.
H2O
Water is
ice dragging itself over land
to round the drumlins, make fertile fields.
Water is
sea curving round sills of dolerite
formed when the earth boiled over.
Water is
rivers pouring from hills and mountains
to power the mills.
Water is
the surge of tide into bucket holes
that brings us salt.
Water is
the dammed stream or dug ditch
that retts the flax.
Water is
mother of steam
whose father is fire.
Water is two parts hydrogen
one part oxygen
55% of us.
Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Back Country, Littoral Press, 2022. She also hosts a poetry podcast magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing.
*****
Katy Mahon: Four Poems
PIERROT
There’s a clown at the bottom of the wardrobe.
The dye from his lips has seeped into the skin,
and now there’s a pink smudge rashing his cheeks
beneath felt tear drops,
and I’m not sure what to do.
White spots lift from the beige coat;
they ask me what I’ve been doing all this time.
Growing, and becoming – but I haven’t forgotten
how I used to unzip the side and place secrets
in his empty stomach, nestling them
against inner threads.
It was meant to be a pyjama holder,
bought by my mother for a fifth birthday, or sixth,
but I never used it as that. Now
I scrunch the cotton limbs against me,
inhale their woody scent, try
to determine how to get the stains out.
YOU NEVER KNOW
It had belonged to my grandmother,
nothing as fierce as her motorbike which purred
her into a coma after her accident.
But Granny always said Och, you never know
when you might need that, and so
our mother would drag out the rusted black thing
from the rusted black garage, spin
the wheels a few times, and in we’d go
to fetch the week’s groceries.
Laden with fruit and fish, whirring
under the reincarnated clouds we’d eat the sun,
one of us on the bracket, the other
on the crossbar, tipping our faces
to the cheeks of the Causeway wind.
In a grinding of chains and wheels
we’d pass Mrs Donovan’s,
stare at the flowers’ sawdust heads,
ignore her grimace at our mother
pushing down onto pedals worn
by headstrong years and the weight of us.
The Bush River would roll in open-mouthed
at the tired tick of wheel clicks on quiet roads.
It was where the fence began and Glentaisie
gaped distantly that we once fell.
Three bodies smacked the tarmac.
Bruises buried themselves in our limbs,
oil-colours spread on our Celt-white skin.
The bicycle was abandoned outside the garage,
one wheel orbiting its hub,
an exhausted metal carcass.
CARRICK-A-REDE
There’s a bridge which sways in the wind,
a coughing snake which lifts and drops in time
with sea spray and foams at the mouth. It bites,
bites at my face and hisses do you remember
at me in its old way, tosses water from below,
hurls it onto rope-knotted planks.
It was at the east side that I once stood,
sandals entrenched in dark grass.
I watched a seagull slide from the Ballintoy air
to the hand rail, watched it yield to the ebb
and flow of the adder-dance, watched
my brother stomp the laddered path.
My mother gripped the reptile’s teeth, torn
between her son and the one
whose sandals were entrenched in dark grass.
THE BRASS LADY
Above my eiderdowned bed the light of my youth
purpled the walls. A grey-tone Cobain
silently shadowed his guitar,
while you in the hallway would lift the bell,
skirt staunched against ringer, its face
brassed and ambiguous.
That’s how you’d call us to dinner; a rich
A-sharp winging its way up the bannister,
because you preferred not to shout.
That liquid sound masked motherly tiredness,
melts still the hard exteriors of our grown-up years.
And then you singing Queen Jane lay in labour,
softening the ancient story with Irish cadences
and a distant shuffle of plates and meal prep.
She hears everything still, the brass lady,
gazes permanently on the swirled tiles.
She knows there’s a ringing in my ears
which fills the night and won’t go away.
Katy Mahon is a Northern Irish musician and poet brought up in London and living in York. Her poems have appeared in various Irish and English journals, most recently Dreich, Black Nore Review, Free the Verse, HOWL New Irish Writing and Poetry Birmingham Literary Review. She was New Irish Writing’s featured poet for the Review section of the Irish Independent in February 2022. Katy’s debut chapbook Some Indefinable Cord was published by Dreich in July 2022. website: katymahonwords.com Twitter: @MahonKaty
*****
Roy Marshall: Two Poems
FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH IN A CHURCHYARD
for Joan
We took this selfie
after we had cut a square of turf
and poured your ashes in. I say
ashes; you felt more like a tube
full of gravel. We’re laughing,
because it was ridiculous, six of us
trooping through the gate
with a spade. We hid
by the yew tree,
waited for an old lady
and her arthritic spaniel
to wander away. I’m afraid
we didn’t pray, just stood
under the window
where you had sung in the choir
and joked that it looked like
we’d been robbing graves.
Then we all trod the divot
until you couldn’t see the join.
Joan, I can hear your high, musical laugh,
as if I’m showing you this photograph.
A CRACK
August, hot on my heels, follows me
as far as the porch. I lift the iron latch,
smell damp plaster, mildewed cloth.
Dusty pews and windows, veined
with ivy, that don’t let sunlight pass.
But one cracked pane casts a rainbow
on the nave, and for this, I give thanks.
Roy Marshall lives in Leicester where he works in adult education.
His books are The Sun Bathers (2013), The Great Animator (2017)
and After Montale (2019), all from Shoestring Press.
*****
Lorna Meehan: Two Poems
PÈRE LACHAISE
“Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws” Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
Sun trickled over the old beautiful dead.
Elaborate tombstones trashed with graffiti,
From fellow seekers trying
For an ounce of dangerous beauty.
He lived a little too brazenly and we couldn’t look away,
He went wild without apologising
And we bask and sway in Bacchanalian ecstasy,
Knowing people we have no respect for don’t get it.
We play records made before we were born,
Because it’s not like the bad old days
We can only imagine,
Where the devil could strut around shameless in black leather,
Claim your daughters with a grin,
Confuse your sons with a head flick,
Enrage men in suits with dirty descants.
His grave is the only grave in the world under 24 hour CCTV surveillance,
I think he would have loved the irony.
We know who we are because of his
Blood howling mangled word wisdom.
Skin still tingling from fire dances.
This horde feels like a family I never have to explain myself to.
All I have are photographs,
But my cells remember, I was there.
I was there in a place of death and I was elated.
I was there among strangers
And I knew what they hungered for without asking.
I cried at a poet’s grave as if he wrote the words for me alone,
I danced the chaos from my twitching bones
As the evening crept back down the alleyways,
And for one night,
I was fearless.
TIDE
I know why the sea makes sense to me now.
There’s no rhyme or reason,
Just lows and highs
That steal my footsteps.
As the years went by,
You made your world smaller.
There are fewer photos of your face.
But I knew when you got in your rickety white van
On another unplanned adventure,
Eventually I’d see a picture of your bare sandy feet.
It became a tradition,
“Here I am”
Rooted on a shore somewhere between the solid and the infinite,
One always getting worn down by the other.
You’ll never make another footprint,
The sea has them all now.
The trails of all your escapes.
When I walk the shoreline,
With those waves
Playing around my feet as they sink down,
But never so deep that I can’t keep going,
I realise,
I’m bigger than the trap I’ve locked myself in,
Deeper than the cracks I’ve carved into my skin,
Built to withstand endless hits and retreats.
I won’t drown just for stepping a little lighter,
Trusting the pull of an unpredictable tide.
I’ll wash up somewhere that looks like love,
Take photos of my feet and remember
“Here I am”
Slowly but surely,
The sea will have her way,
Whispering…
Everything that happens in you happens in the cosmos too,
And it can unravel without dropping a stitch,
Missing a beat,
Thinking it through.
And if everyday
As the sun rises,
The world learns how to begin again,
So can you.
Lorna Meehan has been on the national performance poetry scene for many years. She has headlined various acclaimed nights such as Hit the Ode and Jawdance, toured with Apples and Snakes and performed at festivals like Glastonbury, Ledbury, Shambala and Moseley Folk. Her debut collection, Caterpillar Soup, published by Verve Poetry Press is out in March. https://soundcloud.com/lornameehan
*****
Tim Murdoch: Four Poems
A FARMER DISPOSSESSED IN HOLIDAY HEAVEN
for Joan Ripoll at Ses Arcades
The beginning is the time of few mistakes.
Little real wealth but enough to go round.
What fruit remains uneaten is dried and packed
in wild thyme, or falls to the root of the tree,
father and mother to a following harvest.
The water-table, though shy, remains generous.
it brims only feet from the surface of the land
or ascends by aquifer to a well higher up
on a hillside thick with umbrella pines.
The water has crossed under the bed of the sea,
unbegrudged to the island by the mountain rivers
of rainfall and snowmelt in the Pyrenees.
When antique man and his wife with an earthen jar
approach the wellhead, they feel its presence
as a gentle birdsong in their vital bodies,
not envisioning yet, as their descendant will,
how to steal a watercourse away to an ugly hotel
ten miles to the north by his paradise beach.
A primitive life will not protect innocence, yet
the beginning is the time of few mistakes.
BINDWEED
The bindweed is rewarding my tolerance,
suspecting laziness, though giving me
the benefit of the doubt as to whether
I do or do not mean to uproot it.
It coils itself up a bamboo stick
left in the corner, and to my surprise
has put forth two little white flowers,
pretty trumpets announcing to the world
that even a weed has redeeming features –
ones contrasting modestly with
rampant pinks and reds of the geraniums
growing alongside, sure of their ground
and nonchalant perhaps – of their belonging
in the garden; their right to be called
flowers; resentful of bindweed and yet
resigned to, admiring of, its resilience.
The criminal, shocked to be in prison,
may yet turn his or her life around
and be a valued, responsible citizen.
Whatever character stains remain
appear only to the finders of fault,
while the optimists encourage, move on,
mindful that a lesson learned is a page
thrown to the wind, a white petal waving.
FAITH OF A KIND
Faith of a kind outlives a dictatorship.
As I stand in a queue at the Ayuntamiento,
slightly ashamed of my imperious frustration –
amazed how long the sole functionary takes
to handle the request of the first in line,
the very old, very small and wizened lady
in front of me, is waiting patiently,
as if prepared to wait all day or longer.
When at long last it’s her turn to be served
she hands in a small plastic bag of light bulbs –
their light gone, their filaments burnt out
and dangling, dancing inside frosted glass.
She smiles sweetly, beautifully, as if time
were a curse the Authorities could manage.
UNDER THE SEA, DARK SIDE OF THE MIRROR
Beside the coastal lake at Harambol,
you’re dancing sand circles around me,
acting with fake spontaneity,
knowing I long for the act to be real.
Though some ordinary common sense
could tell the way you swing your hair
and look out to the far horizon
considers my role as an audience,
I wait and wait on you for
the sickening jolt of each encounter,
my feet wrenched from beneath me
by undermining waves of hindsight,
each theatrical turn of your contempt
leaving me grazed and floundering,
a novice diver snagged of a reef
of translucent beauty.
Tim Murdoch lives in a remote hill village in the Alpujarras, south-east from Granada, in southern Spain, where he reads, writes, grows lettuces and walks the dog. Previously he has lived in Australia, India, the US (where he taught and practised yoga and remedial treatments such as shiatsu and herbalism), plus Mexico and Ibiza, as well as Surrey. He has published poems in various magazines over the years, including Acumen, Agenda, PN Review, Pulsar, the London Magazine and The Spectator.
*****
John Murphy: Two Poems
WHISPERS
Bending to the clamped block of wood
he sights along the grain, runs a finger
to its length to feel the plane’s ridged cut.
He blows dust and shavings from the bench,
holds the plane face up to light, squints along
the plate to the blade’s slight proud edge
to judge cutting length.
He smells the blend of history in each
curled shave winding out of the plane,
which sighs with each stroke,
a quieter voice heard from the wood,
like the wind though leaves, a whisper
at the back of the mind, of sun-filled glades,
dappled light, deep rounded curves
of snow-humped branches bending
like tired arms holding the weight of nature.
He revels in the wood, its warm memory.
Rising from the bench he sees
a fox through the shed window.
Lean and bone bare it stands
and stares out from its nature,
looks to move off, turns and
stares hard at the man, then
follows its path into another night.
WAITING FOR TOMORROW
Today the grasscutters came
and mowed the verge by my car,
coating it in small grass bits
that dry as hard as superglue.
Today is Friday and it looks like rain.
I hear them cutting and know
that my car will be covered in grass bits.
Then my phone pings. Another email.
Hard clouds appear. Is it ok
to cut wet grass? Are the cutters
warm in their hi-viz jackets?
Their truck’s light beacon
strobes and flashes, orange,
orange, orange, the hypnotic
purr of the mower dopplers
as it moves along the verge and back.
And I see the trees, they also are pruned.
Over the years, branch by branch.
I have seen them grow to the sky,
through their leaves into my years.
I have seen them cut down
when pruning doesn’t work.
I see the slight hollow in the ground
where a tree stood, a tree that grew up with me.
I ignore the email. The grass cutters
pile into their truck, leave in a cloud of diesel.
The grass starts to grow. The trees
continue to grow. And it’s still Friday
and it starts to rain.
John Murphy is a retired lecturer. He has published poems in many journals over the years and is the editor of The Lake, an online poetry magazine.
*****
Kate Noakes: Two poems
EGYPTIAN BREATH CURES
A libation for a magic sculpture
unleashes the power of its words.
They fly up into the air, become rain
or birds, dissolve in your in-breaths
as spells for healing sadness or pain.
Or suppose, bottled as a liquid amulet,
they slip into water, imbibed
one drop at a time to the same effect
for restoring your breathing.
Or you can take up the soaked soil
and keep it in a jar, decorated
with the baboon god’s head,
for sprinkling on your hearth
or burning as incense to release
the sounds of deep, long-held breath.
AN IDLE QUEST
There’s no such thing as a blue rose, he says
while I don my electric linen dress
and give him a look.
He says this with all the self-assurance of one
who buys flowers from plastic buckets
at petrol stations.
Here, my petal lips, soft-painted for protests
find there way onto the news and are not likely
to kiss him anytime soon.
Veins thorn my legs here, legs most
certainly not going to wrap themselves around
him in bed tonight.
Back now, my lips have turned blue for real
and are beginning to fade as I’m a child
too stubborn to dress.
Here’s my first eye shadow from Woolworths
and weird nail polish for a mysterious flourish.
All this to tint a rose
as necessary as a grower choosing to dye-dip
whites or engineer a ‘blue.’ OK the result is
mauve, but this he doesn’t need to know.
Note: The title comes from Rudyard Kipling’s terrible poem ‘Blue Roses’
Kate Noakes’ most recent collection is Goldhawk Road (Two Rivers Press, 2023). She lives in London and when not writing is a printmaker. Her website is www.boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com.
*****
Anthony Owen: Poem
THE LAST MINUTES OF HIROSHIMA MARKET
You recalled the last minutes of Hiroshima market
how sugared locusts spangled in the emperor’s sun
until his new clothes hung as skin from fingernails.
Your daughter and you made rice balls the old way,
too many sunflower seeds would split apart the grains
you scolded her for this in softly spoken wisdom.
Aflame in your uterus a babe would scroll your skin
its palm fanning warm waters where he arrived silent,
still as koi in black ponds of bludgeoned palaces.
You recalled cantaloupe rinds aglow on black souls
anything was moisture would be consumed and
anything with moisture would consume them in return.
For seventy years you kept the rice-ball your daughter made
freckled in seaweed from the mouth of old Hiroshima
its waters cool your feet each hot cruel August sun.
Antony Owen‘s new and selected poetry collection will be released in Summer 2024 by Broken Sleep Books.
*****
Matthew Paul: Two Poems
MUSIC
In the Juniors’, we fashioned shakers out of washing-up liquid bottles,
by funnelling in fistfuls of dried peas. For most of us,
our mothers provided the necessary; for one or two, newly-qualified,
Miss Cadbury discreetly did so. We shook those shakers
with gusto, counterpointing rhythms, call and response; a rare change
from our customary sing-song: ‘The Deadwood Stage’,
leather belts cracking each whip crack-away; or ‘Camptown Races’,
every doo-dah murdered by the loudest boys.
*
Fast-forward forty years: I’m in a work meeting with Ms Cadbury,
in another school, in her last week before retirement.
I mention that she taught me in 1975. I see her memory cogs rotate:
‘You were a quiet boy, with a teeny-weeny mum.’
Her deputy interrupts us: Ofsted are coming tomorrow; to rootle
like pigs let loose into woodlands for pannage—
will, in their wisdom, downgrade ‘Leadership and Management’
from long-held ‘Outstanding’ to ‘Inadequate’.
SPURN
Red admirals in command. Flute bands
of sandpipers behind the dunes. The black-
and-white-banded lighthouse never moving
any closer, much like my fiftieth, when
you and I trod the mile of Southend Pier
to where the North Sea clinches the Thames,
just as it does the mighty Humber here.
We practised our foxtrot over the tropical
hardwood planking—ekki from Cameroon,
renowned for its durability. Our wedding
was months away; even so, muscle memory
studded our footwork. Every hundred yards,
signs ask, ‘Have you left enough time
to safely return before high tide?’ I dunno,
but others are plodding far ahead of me.
2
Six years I lived on the North Antrim coast.
Oystercatchers Bolisha-beaconed the clifftops.
Where Ramore Head rises to its peak, I caught
a shiver of twitchers awaiting a once-a-decade
sight: white-winged wandering albatrosses,
so far from their range, they could’ve been
reclassified as a new subspecies, like peas
hybridised by Friar Mendel in his Augustinian
hothouse. No falsifying scientist, the wildest
twitcher divined from wings: her auguries
were followed by slate-lifting winds abruptly
becoming Mariachi blizzards bleaching sand
so thoroughly that rollers no longer rolled in
but indistinguishably melded into snow,
blanketing first the West Strand, then the East.
Matthew Paul’s collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. His two collections of haiku – The Regulars and The Lammas Lands – and co-written/edited (with John Barlow) anthology, Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku, were published by Snapshot Press. He lives in Rotherham, writes essays and reviews, and blogs at matthewpaulpoetry.blog
*****
Stuart Pickford
SPIV READER
Mum knew nothing about him,
her Grandad Reader, standing to attention
in the picture above the stairs;
though she knew they called him Spiv,
perhaps as he was a handsome devil
and polished the underside bridge
of his leather brogues.
Cousin Randall, and she checked
both shoulders for anyone listening,
stole his Boer War medals
and sold them to a pawn shop.
She recalled the police being called
and we all knew Randall ended up
inside in, of all places, Leicester.
Mum thought Spiv became a builder
and was rich—she liked the rich—
but she didn’t know anything
about his battalion, wooden rifle
or where the medals are now.
Ah yes, he cut his throat in the bath.
AMSTERDAM MARATHON
Trams and trains deliver us here,
a huddle of heights and numbers
and languages. Soon we’ll be away.
Once the body calms, we’ll notice
the lamps on the Van Loon museum,
the other houses tall and thin
like books on a shelf. We’ll try
to recall the history of sugar.
As the Westerkerk notes the hour,
ripples will play out on the canal.
A world map over a door on the stairs.
A red fire blanket. A girl’s height
measured each year against the wall.
We’ll look up at the sky and feel
what’s been given, what we’ve come
to know. In our pens, the runners
shake hands, wish each other well.
The countdown; bright colours
waiting together in a long line,
prayer flags in the wind.
Stuart Pickford lives in Harrogate, and taught in a local comprehensive school. He is married with three children. His second collection, Swimming with Jellyfish, was published by Smith/Doorstop.
*****
Fiona Pitt-Kettley: Two Poems
CARIDAD LA NEGRA AND THE BLACK ROSES
I see her painted as a Magdalene.
I climb the pulpit stairs to get a look.
She’s on the wall, placed high with her long hair,
slightly décolleté, with arms half bare,
allowed to show more flesh than other saints.
A Cuban painter settled in this spot,
provided all the paintings in this church,
A politician’s mistress, prostitute:
just perfect for that portrait on the wall.
In time she kept a brothel of her own
but always had a soft spot for this church
and some devotion to the Virgin there.
The Civil War begins…
A planned destruction of the church is stopped
by prostitutes. They´re led by this Madame.
They´re armed with scissors and knives. The rioters
back off. They know these ladies of the night
won´t hesitate to strike and draw first blood.
And so, this church endures, untouched by bombs
and saved from that attempt at vandalism.
A pretty church, it’s loved by all of us.
Concerts and services beneath its dome
perfect acoustics in a tranquil space.
Black roses for the girls who saved the church
were offered up Monday of Holy Week.
I go to look for them, but nothing’s there.
The women kneeling are respectable.
The flowers are every colour except black.
Caridad still looks down across the aisle.
Back home I hear the news of Notre Dame.
“Our Lady” burning through the night.
I see black flowers, but the church is saved.
CINDERELLA BY THE UGLY SISTERS
We meant well. We just wanted to be friends.
But she could not share her widowed father with anyone.
She had to tell the world that we were villains.
She prided herself for her daintiness.
Small hands and feet do not make you beautiful.
She sneered at us for being a larger size.
She told everybody we had enslaved her
after she had offered to help us.
A two-faced bitch. And the hell she gave mother
who tried to be good, but nothing was ever enough.
Then she took up with a Ghislaine Maxwell type
who called herself her Fairy Godmother.
Not half as rich as she pretends to be.
Just look at the facts. Any coach and horses
that vanishes is rented by the day.
The procuress told her just what to leave.
A tiny glass slipper is not much good
for walking but a lure to a fetishist prince,
one who wants a useless little wife
to do nothing but thank him for rescuing her.
And now she lies about her family.
Not enough to be a royal bride.
She wears her pious badge of victimhood.
Fiona Pitt-Kethley is a poet, novelist and travel writer. She lives in Spain. Her prose book on collecting minerals in the Sierra Minera, Washing Amethysts in the Bidet is due out soon. She also has pamphlets in the pipeline from Dreich and Hedgehog.
*****
Patsy Rath: Four Poems
WRITING OURSELVES WARMER
for Kathryn
Another cold day. I light
the fire, hear poems
crackling into life. Whatever’s
been sown unknown, or buried
once, stirs one line at a time.
Dour winter stares back
behind glass, my mind
as blank. The frozen ground
hides what I planted. But,
look! Iris tips have broken
through, become green nibs again
in eager fingers. They dream
their rush of blue as I do,
gripping the ink-hot point
of pen and paper:
kindling. Tell me it’s the same
with you, that verses uncurl,
purple on your page, flame
flowers on strong stems,
tongues of gold at the centre:
each stanza ablaze.
DISPLACEMENT
At the centre of remembrance stands my grandmother
alongside darkening furniture, rescued from the Blitz
to this cottage: her best life, spacious town house, left behind.
Four high oak chairs with barley-twisted legs tuck
under a table, three press against the wall, a rosewood sideboard
leans towards the hearth, holds up the ceiling.
Light squeezes through thin panes, catches in nets
enough to see the path we both weave, feeling our way
past padded arms, carved feet to the ladder stairs…
We set off in her sleigh bed, rich mahogany,
inlaid with leaves: burr walnut’s heavy veins.
A matching wardrobe barricades its corner.
In the small hours I watch her silent rosaries
for family who would not leave, took a direct hit,
speaking to them the only way she can. By heart.
For years she made deep shadows gleam, polished rough grain
until she died…I wonder what was carried out
unbroken, how high and wide the pieces left, well-seasoned.
A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY GRANDDAUGHTER ON HER SIXTH BIRTHDAY
She captures the room, head turned to the right,
eyes, cheeks and mouth caught in a wide smile
at the call Look Nina! Her arm pins down
a new art book, green pencil snugly tucked
in a cup of thumb and fingers.
She’s sketching Stegosaurus in a circle
of breakfast bowls, gift wrap, cards open-mouthed,
wearing her special dress: pink, pearl trimmed,
glitter-threaded, party plaits poised to go
and it isn’t even eight o clock.
She always works this way: lines don’t wobble;
shapes lie happy in the skin she gives them,
broad-brushed with her colours, strange and true;
unicorns, a rainbow bridge, jelly-fish stars,
dangling spider sun. It’s what she’s here to do.
Was I like that once in sharp focus, facing
this world without blinking or flinching,
striking a pose without knowing how,
a picture…close up…borderless
filling my whole frame with such confidence?
IN THE WINGS
A girl stands, sticky and hot, in her back street,
north facing, a strip of cobbles, solid
bubbles that floated under canvas shoes,
balancing.
She’d left her brothers fighting to the death,
carries a paper bag to run away with,
leans against a high fence, curled nails that grazed
her sunburn.
August mid-afternoon but dark by the shed:
a wigwam of planks, a bike made of rust,
towers of frilled paint pots, all propped up
and hopeful.
She hears thick bumps from the house
as if through a velvet curtain. Up ahead
lies the main road: bus stops, sweets
from strangers.
Behind there’s a path to the beach
where dragon-back dunes prickle skin,
sand blisters with seaweed, the tide’s
always out…
No one can see. Nobody knows
she is there on a day that stands still
as she has always done, still waiting
to go on…
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!
*****
Myra Schneider: Poem
AT SUNRISE
after Annie Soudain
Because I can’t see rolling hills
from my house, because I doubt that I’ll ever
visit hills again, every day I look longingly
at the broad-backed Downs on the wall calendar
in my kitchen, longing to clasp the circle
of huge sun that’s just risen behind them.
It’s pale as a full moon and shedding
light on the gentle slopes and fields below.
Between the fields and a hedgerow
two trees have raised naked arms to the sky.
The sun appears to be resting
between them and the hedgerow seems
so near I feel I could touch the teasels –
their spiney heads are somehow satisfying
and they vie with fescue and parsley stalks
which lost their white flowerets months ago
but still hold out blackened spokes
tipped with dry seed heads. In our park
truculent brambles compete
with uncut grass but I long for a hedgerow
that’s home to ragged robins, bugloss,
speedwell, wild roses. And now, in my head,
I’m walking among spring flowers.
Suddenly I see a long-legged hare
tearing over the fields and, easy
in my body again, I follow it towards the hills.
Myra Schneider’s most recent collection is Siege and Symphony (SLP), 2021. Poet Marvin Thompson, Literature Officer for Wales, listed it in Poetry Review as one of his choices for 2021. Her other publications include books about personal writing. She has had eleven full collections of poetry published and her work has been broadcast on Radio BBC4 and BBC3. A new collection Believing in the Planet, is due from Poetry Space in 2024. She is consultant to the Second Light Network for Women Poets and has run poetry workshops and seminars since the mid 1990s.
*****
Finola Scott: Poem
SNAIL MAIL
Gleaming tangles snag my eye,
this dank morning.
Celtic knots vow eternity,
love glistens, loops tight on my wall.
Nearer than yesterday.
How many were here
shivering on my path
and when?
The stones shimmer with tracery
inscribed under moonlight.
I think of those Lindisfarne monks
heads bent committing faith to vellum.
I wonder at the purpose of this
sign writing, of this whispered effort
scrolled as I snuggled deep
under duvets seeking heat.
Could it be more than romance?
More than names of beloveds?
Is this graffiti political, a silken call
to arms for other molluscs?
I wish I could decipher
the language of this
silver slime.
Finola Scott confesses poetry is an untreated compulsion. She’s grateful that her work appears in magazines and anthologies including New Writing Scotland, Spelt, Lighthouse and Gutter. Politics, environment and relationships concern her. Although she knows poetry won’t change the world, she continues to write. She enjoys performing, finding the writing community welcoming. A slam-winning granny, appearing in St Giles Cathedral, The Scottish Parliament and the Glasgow Underground, she can be heard in a pub near you!
*****
Emma Simon: Four Poems
A MERMAID’S COMPLAINT
I told the therapist, these aren’t my legs.
Mine shouldn’t be so solid. I never thought
they’d root me to the ground like trunks.
A man described them as a sturdy set of pins
and he was right: like upturned skittles,
waiting to be bowled over. Look at this spread
of knees, how my thighs stick together
on a hot bus, skirts ride and wrinkle,
trousers cling. These bloody legs are mutinous.
Sometimes I try to punish them, make them run.
To pay me back they trudge with all their weight
round supermarket aisles, complain and ache
up stairs. Lowered in a bath they sink,
all stubbled shins and razor rash. I cover up
their shame with foamy bubbles. Some nights
I dream of knives filleting a bream or bass,
pressing the sharp point beneath the skin
to lift away the excess meat, leaving just
a clean curve of bone. The kind of legs
ballerinas pirouette on, sequins on their tutus
glinting in the light, hard as silver fish scales.
GRANDMA FRANKENSTEIN’S NEEDLEBOOK
It prickles with old magic. The kind used to bind
castles in thorn thickets when years fell silent.
A glitter of needles. Points sharp as frosted stars,
trailing their loose threads across each felted page.
All those faded blues and yellows, an unravelling
of picnic rugs and petticoats, the last tie
to lost buttons. And there’s grandma sitting
in the armchair by the fire, gathering night
about her in thick pleats, patching torn knees.
Mouth full of pins, as she warns my sister
her lips will be sewn shut if she says that again.
I step up onto the stool so she can lower hems,
let out darts on dresses that pinch under arms,
pull across the chest. The girl who can’t stop growing.
We watch her frogging princess seams,
laying out a different paper pattern in its place.
She teaches us slip stitches, to work the wrong
side of the cloth, tuck messy ends away.
How to mend. You just need the right tools.
There are needles for everything, lace and linen,
leather, skin. She shows us how to quilt
a coat from offcuts, lose ourselves inside
embroidered details. Sometimes she complains
about poor light, borrows our eyes again,
says she needs their cat-like quickness,
those flecks of green that she had once.
One swift lick of thumb and forefinger
to smooth cotton ends, twirl them to a point,
guide thread through the black hole
at the centre of the needle, still staring back at you.
NEST OF SCARVES
They’re still there
twisted round each other
like floral-printed snakes
in a carrier bag.
Purple silk ones, tasselled reds
in some rich material
I want to call damask,
workday blues and greens
from Next and M&S.
I fashioned one into
a shepherd’s headdress
one Christmas and when
I opened up the bag
the perfumed scent
was like her voice
speaking in tongues.
It shocked me back years.
Afterwards I folded up
the plastic carefully
to stop what particles
remained drifting,
being lost in the stale air
of shoes and handbags
on my wardrobe floor.
I eye the closed bag
from time to time
too scared to open it
and breathe the last scent,
or find the last scent gone.
The scarves knot inside
the scent of a memory
with the memory of a scent.
AN EMPTY BUILDING AFTER SUDDEN RAIN
This is the state I’m trying to achieve:
breath like breeze through windows.
A structural sense of things held in place,
all clutter cleared from air-filled rooms.
No trace of the person who once lived here
or thought to where they’ve gone.
A door open to the rain-soaked grass,
sunlight and shadow patterning the floor.
A house changes when a guest enters,
the way people do, walking through doorways
into a new room. How they suddenly
forget what they came in for, stand
in the moment, marvelling at this space,
all the possibilities of blank walls.
Emma Simon‘s first collection Shapeshifting for Beginners will be published by Salt in September this year. She has published two pamphlets, The Odds (Smith|Doorstop, 2020) and Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017). She has been widely published in magazines, and has won the Live Canon, Ver Poets, YorkMix and Prole Laureate prizes.
*****
Fiona Sinclair: Two Poems
DINING AMONGST THE DEAD
As the trickle of worshipers dried,
the chapel was sold off to developers
who converted sympathetically.
However, no garden since old bones
cannot be evicted like squatters.
Family plots bare old village names,
still extant amid the influx of newcomers.
Graves maintaining social segregation,
landowners with handsome memorials
in prime positions, whilst labourers consigned
to dark corners. Separation too between
certain families who bare a feud into the afterlife.
The old car park becomes a makeshift patio,
tables and chairs suggesting al fresco dining,
beside the remains of death’s great feasting.
Graveyard grass is kept under, but ecumenical law
also precludes removing moss clad tombstones,
so stacked against walls like a grim garden feature.
Baronet peers over baker; Hogben elbows Wanstall,
an eternity now to settle their differences.
MIDWINTER MONDAY
A heron grey sky all day,
when nature seems agnostic
about Spring’s resurrection.
Each pub we find is mothballed
during the week. We persevere down
B roads that are narrow as minds,
waltzing the car around pits and pocks
that would take out a tyre.
Easier to contact the dead
than get a signal on your phone,
we pray no oncoming traffic,
as pull-ins are sticky with mud.
Each strike at conversation fails
like damp matches, until silence
creeps into our mouths.
20 years friendship banked
we have no need to fake fun.
Eventually settle at Faversham,
a tumble-weed town on Mondays.
In a café, door open to welcome
the chill, we are the sole customers.
Sandwiches and coffee manage
to fuel low burner chat.
We slag off the government and Putin.
But our usual gallows humour
is slack as an empty jib.
We have had such misfire days before,
like that time at Brighton races
when the rain pissed on us all afternoon.
And as a pair of melancholics we rather
relish this day’s pathetic fallacy.
Fiona Sinclair‘s most recent collection, Second Wind, was published in March 2022 by Dempsey and Windle press. She lives in Kent with her husband , a feral garden and a Yamaha Goldstar motor bike.
*****
Judith Taylor: Two Poems
REVISITING
One more time, as drought shrivels the reservoir
they come to see the house that she was born in
see the chapel she and her brother were baptised in
and her parents married, and their parents, and back before
– and the small school
she would have learned her letters at
if the water hadn’t intervened.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAll ruined of course:
the roofs long gone
and only the lowest courses of the walls keeping their outline;
the narrow street and the doorways clotted, blurred
with wreckage and black mud.
In ’76 she cried to see it
broken-down and dirty. Today she only stares
wondering why they’ve come.
Mother, she says towards her daughter, is it a picnic?
Then, I’m cold now.
I’m cold. I want to go home.
MUSCLE
Weird how the body remembers.
When I’m tired it brings me back
the controls of my first car
no matter what I’m driving now.
When I’m lonely it wants to stand close
to a heat source: like the one in the downstairs bathroom
that was the only warm, lockable room in the house that I grew up in
and when I’m walking home
by a certain street, it lifts my eyes
to check for light at a window someone lived behind
long ago, and doesn’t any more.
Muscle memory: deep, wordless,
it returns, and never explains itself.
The heart is a muscle also.
Judith Taylor lives and works in Aberdeen, where she is a co-organiser of the monthly Poetry at Books and Beans events. Her poetry has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies: her first collection, Not in Nightingale Country, was published in 2017 by Red Squirrel Press, and her second, Across Your Careful Garden, is out now. She is a longtime volunteer with North-East literature and art magazine Pushing Out the Boat and is one of the Editors of Poetry Scotland. http://sometimesjudy.co.uk/
*****
Maggie Wadey: Two Poems
THE SCIENCE OF COLOUR
The boy reads tides better than faces,
keeps silence better than he speaks.
This is his spot, and this the track his feet have made
down to the promontory below the monastery
and, as he scrambles into place, a faint scent of incense
is released from his hair and clothes.
He has come to gift the sea with colour: blue.
Not that it’s only him; others come here, too,
including Spyros, the cat, but he sees only
grey and white, maybe black, shadow and light,
while the others can’t be trusted, having
neither prayer nor vision on their side.
Letting slip into oblivion
the sea’s wild metaphoric spectrum,
they pick out bright or dark, or, with a nod
to the cat, grey flecked with white;
whereas the boy can name precisely:
turquoise, sapphire, hyacinth,
cobalt, cerulean, ice, Nile Green or even
– granting the shallows of the sea
some small autonomy – lemonade-yellow-over-sand
or, under storm clouds, navy-next-to-black.
So, with his eyes as tireless as the tides,
he paints the shifting waters of the ocean.
Only sometimes
he longs for the impossible
to see what happens when he turns his back.
SALUTATION
My heart in my boots
my head in the clouds
wearing a dead girl’s shoes
sporting my father’s hat
dressed in regalia I had no right to,
with my coat of many clichés
and underwear that no-one, sadly, ever saw,
I stood before my Maker, tongue-tied.
I was not myself.
Not much of a doer, still I was never lost for words.
‘Where are you?’ She asked sternly.
‘Come close,’ She said. ‘Look into my eyes.’
Trembling, I did so. I saw stars and endless skies.
There was a long, long pause.
‘Yes,’ She concluded. ‘You’re still there.
Just about. Somewhere. Take off your clothes.’
‘They are not mine,’ I whispered.
Never-the-less, piece by piece, I disrobed.
My Maker smiled at so much unseen lace,
forgave my misuse of her gifts of time and place
as with her sweet breath She fanned my naked flesh
and I fell back through time.
I had forgot the pale plump softness of my skin,
forgotten just how small I was, how sweet
– or once had been – how helpless and how innocent.
And now, cradled naked on Her tender lap
I laughed, raised up my chubby hands
turning them this way and that, awed
by my own neglected loveliness, my rosy knees,
my little feet, my eyes made to reflect the world
in all its powerful glory.
‘Begin again’ She said. ‘Begin.’
Maggie Wadey is a writer of fiction, screenplays for TV, memoir: The English Daughter, Sandstone Press, 2016 – a memoir of her mother and Ireland and poetry: Canary Literary Journal, Acumen Poetry, Pomegranate and this summer’s anthology by Vole Books, Washed with Noon. She lives in Hackney with her actor husband.
*****
Mantz Yorke: Two Poems
THE WINDOW
The window offers merely abstract art –
no people, greenery or sky – just slats
filleting the black, grey and white panels
on the building opposite. Crossing
the horizontals are knob-topped railings
whose verticals arch like a bar-chart:
the metal spacer’s arc is the only shape
not parallel to the x- or y-axis of a graph.
This austere aesthetic draws my eye
out of the dreary ward. I doubt it lifts
the man who doesn’t know why he’s here,
the man pining for his care home room,
or the man awaiting the results of tests,
but it will do for me. I’ll soon be gone.
RADIO 2
He’s delirious –
not in this city hospital
but in some complex
by a boating lake,
with boats hauled out
on grass.
For two days and nights
we’ve been disturbed
by his frequent alarms
and shouts for the nurse
to take him back
to his care home room.
Today he’s been quieter,
listening to the radio
for hours on end –
pub chat interspersed
with pop-songs
and summaries of news.
Utterly boring,
but the monotony
is far less stressful
than shouts and alarms –
it’s almost relaxing,
even though it intrudes.
So, just for now
(and probably never again)
I’m loving you,
Radio 2.
Mantz Yorke is a scientist by training and lives in Manchester, England. His poems have been published internationally. His collections Voyager and Dark Matters are published by Dempsey and Windle.
The High Window 