*****
Paul Stephenson • Penny Blackburn • Rose Mary Boehm • Bern Butler • Pratibha Castle • Jo Dixon • Marguerite Doyle • David Dumouriez • Rob Etty • Jeff Gallagher • Owen Gallagher • Mark Granier • Jenny Hockey • Keith Howden • Sue Hubbard • Martin Jago • Lanny Ledboer • Richard Lyons • Maggie Mackay • Kathleen McPhilemy • Maitreyabandhu • Mark Mansfield • Neal Mason • A. F. Moritz • Rick Mullin • Ali Murphy • Martina Reisz Newberry • Edmund Prestwich • Lesley Quayle • Penny Sharman • Sue Spiers • Julia Stothard • Laura Strickland • Brian Swann • Catherine Whittaker • Simon Williams
*****
*****
Paul Stephenson: Five Poems
PAIN QUOTIDIEN
She’s in again. Over there
as she is each day, looking like glass.
Upstairs. Where it’s quieter.
Not by the tables for couples or friends.
Over in the corner, away from the windows.
At the low table, on the leather sofa.
Always looking over. Not at me,
at the air in the middle of the room.
I once thought she wasn’t real
but then I saw her get up and leave.
Never noticed a coffee cup,
or any kind of movement towards the mouth.
Oblivious to laptops,
her face sits for hours.
Most of the afternoon. It begins
soon after the lunchtime trade has gone.
Weekdays it’s her listening face
though nobody’s talking.
This afternoon when they’re closing
she’ll walk towards me
and tell me her name’s Susie,
that she stopped working two years ago.
EDWARD WAS AN ARDENT FAN OF HOSPITALS
He would love this new one,
its glistening wards all kitted out,
the long floors a sea of blue
eggshell-speckled linoleum
and the space-age operating theatres
their blingy kidney-shaped bowls,
their planet-sized ceiling lights,
fresh green gowns, accoutrements.
Edward would, no wonder, skip
down its sunlit glass corridors
and the air bridge above the rose garden,
ride the boxy lifts wide as six trolleys.
He would spend his time after school
hanging about the doors of A&E
waiting for urgent ambulances,
not doing his English homework.
Edward knew hospitals like no one else.
He appreciated their tides and rhythms,
found in them enthusiasm. He would be
there at the entrance, cutting red ribbon.
THE NEW STATION
Liège-Guillemins
There’s only so much time you can walk the platform
or sit on a bench in awe of the architect.
Only so many minutes you can wonder at the monumental arch,
stretching your neck to take in the curves of the ceiling.
You might even consider if this is what heaven looks like.
Only for so long. Maybe. Then the thought is done.
Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. Heading home, it’s doable,
though half an hour till the next train is pushing it.
There are limits to anyone’s fascination with concrete.
All that white concrete. Painted white by someone.
At night, the glare, the empty platform. All that architecture.
It dwarfs the drunk, the stoned, the beggar. Was that the idea?
There’s always an arrest, two uniformed officers.
There’s always someone being escorted up the escalator.
LETTING YOU IN
The automatic door knows you are coming.
It gives you automatic entry.
It doesn’t test your strength but takes you
for who you are, just as you are.
Some slow down before the automatic door
and wonder at the glass, examine it from afar.
Others wave hello. Kids get their kicks
by sticking out in front a leg in shorts.
The automatic door complies when you come near.
It’s often happy with a forefinger in the air.
Early morning or late afternoon, closed,
it has known noses, the occasional forehead.
On Sundays the automatic door is static,
reflects on the opposite window.
ALSO OSLO
Oslo as well.
In addition, Oslo.
Oslo too.
Moreover, Oslo.
Oslo besides.
On top of that, Oslo.
Oslo additionally.
Furthermore, Oslo.
Oslo to boot.
What’s more, Oslo.
Not Hounslow.
Oslo into the bargain.
Together with Oslo.
Not to mention Oslo.
Along with Oslo.
Plus Oslo.
To say nothing of Oslo.
Paul Stephenson’s debut collection is Hard Drive, published by Carcanet. For further information: / paulstep.com / @stephenson_pj / insta: paulstep456 /
*****
Penny Blackburn: Four Poems
WHEN THE TIME WAS RIGHT
I threw out my anxiety.
Picked through the past, heaped
like church-hall jumble on wooden trestles.
Everything bagged. Each memory
pushed down firmly on top of the others,
knot tied tight to stop them spilling.
Flung the black bags joyfully at the tip.
Watched them falling, landing – duft!
on the piles of rubbish below.
Back home, I heard an echo of tears.
Searched long for the overlooked sorrow,
realised it came from the walls.
Tore the paper off – in thumbnail strips
and wall-skin sheets.
Peeled for a week and then I burned it.
Remote, released,
I lay on bare boards under bare plaster,
empty as the rooms.
IMMERSION BAPTISM
For full submersion your faith must be strong.
The river will strip away all non-essentials.
Your workaday cares wash off. Let them run with the current
or pool in stony fissures with the sticklebacks.
Griefs swim from you, become pike in deep water,
unseen by those who watch from the bank.
When everything except your belief in yourself
lies like a brick on the bottom of the beck,
you will be strong enough to get out, return to daily life.
You will move as one blessed among the unbelievers.
NEW START
A place where the air
is sharp as carpet tacks,
where the stone-boned beach
bears shingle rather than sand.
Where the questing kestrel,
high above the sparse cliff grasses,
flies furiously against the wind
as fast as the wind blows back.
His head pinned by instinct
against a rigid patch of sky,
eye scanning for small things
scuttling. He passes over us, aloof.
Insignificance reduces us
to less than beetles, less than voles.
Our whole lives stripped down,
our false dawns exposed.
SOMEONE BROUGHT A TIGER INTO THE OFFICE
We whispered as we tiptoed round her.
She dozed, rug-like, in a patch of sun.
We stepped cautiously over her twitching tail,
dared each other to touch her luscious fur.
One of the lads risked an ear-scratch. Leapt back,
scalded, by an impatient swipe.
The tiger dropped her pretence,
showed off powerful muscles,
casually, under coveted skin.
Click-clawed down the corridors – hunting
for who knew what in this concrete block.
Electric doors slid open. She left.
No-one tried to stop her.
For we had all been seen by that green-laser gaze,
had scented ourselves, rotten, on her breath.
Penny Blackburn’s poetry has been published by, among others, Poetry Society News, Lighthouse, Dreamcatcher, Phare and Riggwelter and she was awarded second place in the Ver Poetry Competition 2022. Her pamphlet A Taste for Bread was published in 2021 and her first collection with Yaffle Press, Gaps Made of Static, comes in autumn 2023. Penny also runs a local poetry group and spoken word evening and is on Twitter and Facebook as @penbee8.
*****
Rose Mary Boehm: Three Poems
LOSING YOURSELF
It’s easily done. One war, one hunger, one killing
too many; or you just travelled and stayed.
Your mum sung ‘Schlafe, mein Kindchen, schlaf ein’,
your dad read you ‘Schneewittchen’ for the umpteenth
time. Your soul knows the sounds of your language,
the melodies of your ancestors. You slip
deeper below your comforter or that witch will get you.
Gute Nacht, mein Schätzchen.
One day you remember but can’t share. You use
a line from the poem you learned by heart (and it’s one
everyone in the first country can quote, of course).
You are no longer where they ‘get it’ in one. You must explain it,
and the story behind it,
and translate,
and they still look at you with empty eyes for lack
of sharing your home world.
One day, your first baby. You sing him to sleep with the lullaby
you remember. His father sings him ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.
When the child refuses to speak, you make a decision. You learn
your new country’s songs for children, its nursery rhymes,
and you send him to ‘The Land of Nod’ with ‘Winnie the Pooh’.
Your child feels safe.
You are alone.
You make new friends, you discover riches beyond
imagining. You begin to think thoughts that were not
in your original baggage; like a chameleon you change your
colours as needed, like an opportunist you hang your coat
to fly with the winds. And yet you can’t deny your Ur…
and, like a receding galaxy, your origins are harder and harder
to see, its emissions become weaker and weaker, like a Djinn
from the bottle, it escapes and accuses across the space
of your life: who are you?
I AM TIRED OF WAITING
My appointment with the cardiologist is in my agenda for eleven.
At 12.00, I am beginning to understand
the attraction of playing a game on the smartphone.
I am sick of waiting for that one honest answer – that one
knowledgeable, wise, thoughtful answer
to my eternal question: “What am I doing here?”
Here, in the Subtropics, I am no longer waiting for autumn
to announce the gentle death of winter, for spring to sing
with the first green shoots. Getting used to eternal bougainvillea
I almost forgot about carpets of dying leaves
or the soft hue of a new beginning.
Feel the rot present in the fat bud of that first rose.
One day soon I will close my eyes
because I’ll be too tired to keep them open,
and I’ll be waiting for the miracle to begin.
EXTENDED-FAMILY REUNIONS
I can’t remember any. Not then. Not
when I was small.
There was family, of course.
We saw each other in installments.
If at all.
We were strewn all over the world,
lost to the vagaries of war and the mess
it makes of lives.
I am not even sure we liked each other enough
to wish for reunions.
Love must be nourished. There may well be
moments and good reasons why you would rely
on blood ties. It is almost expected, even though
the outcome is by no means assured. But sometimes
family surprises even you.
In my worst teenage daughter moment
I told my mother that the people you love
are in your life because you want them to be there,
not because they’re there by default.
Between Finland, the US, France, Holland,
the United Kingdom and Germany, between
death and destruction, family reunions
didn’t exactly flourish.
Now I live about 5500 nautical miles away
from those I love most.
The father of my children died suddenly.
The last time those of us who were left met
after the funeral.
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and is author of two novels as well as seven poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a ‘Pushcart’, once for ‘Best of Net’. A new collection, Life Stuff, has been scheduled by Kelsay Books for February 2024. https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/
*****
Bern Butler: Three Poems
LOCH INCH II
I learn silence from him
– its peace –
how broad its breadth
adrift on the lake
in the boat peeling paint
how well it serves
the sound of his reel
clicking like a choir
of mechanical frogs
and filament’s swoop
like a spell out of nowhere
then plop of hook
into depths the colour of tea
where the keel of the boat
grazes rocks as we glide…
Here, the buzz
of a wrong-shaped wasp
past my ear. There
by the gaggle of lilies
a snout’s sly rise
barely causes a ripple
and now, as my father
rows us toward shore
how silence is
more powerful than words.
IN RANGOON GRAVEYARD
i.m of P.G
On our way back from the lake
while you pray by the grave
of the man you used fish with
I analyse plots, decide
I prefer Death neat
squared-off –
smart white gravel
that sparkles
over soil, inclined to give
and beneath headstones
blood-red roses
trapped under domes
that are plastic, petals
speckled with droplets
resembling tears
which would never fall
melt xxxxxx disappear
THE WOODEN BOWL MY FATHER MADE FOR ME
I close my eyes
test its weight,
balance it on one palm
like a sound fruit cake,
feel the felt underneath,
I know is green
pinch its rim, graze
the turned surface
of its body, smell
its still sweet oils, sap
– almost – the memory
of bees buzzing in branches
hear the singsong whine
of the lathe as I approach
the door to the shed,
carrying the message
from my mother
his dinner is ready
inch open the door
feel air thrum,
see him, spaceman,
in a galaxy of dust,
turn his head, see me,
raise his hand to the red button
at the side of the machine.
Bern Butler is from Galway, Ireland. Her poetry has featured in Force 10, Ropes Anthology, North West Words, Abridged, The Ireland Chair of Poetry, Dodging Rain, The Madrigal, Martello Tower, Stepping on Legos, Skylight 47, Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis. She was a featured reader at Cuirt New Writing Showcase 2021. She was placed 3rd in Poems for Patience competition 2023. She holds an MA Writing from NUIG.
*****
Pratibha Castle: Poem
SISTER CELIA INSTRUCTS
young ladies not to raise their voices
louder than a pigeon’s purr to attract
attention. Ladies clap their hands and no,
Vanessa, you must never whistle.
Ladies, seated, do not gape their legs but
tilt and cross their ankles to one side, skirt
hem modest past the knee. Clean underwear
on Sundays. Never let a boy caress their bust.
Ladies do not speak while chewing. Snort
in jest, gulp tea, but sip with lifted pinkie.
And if slopped, they do not cool a beverage
by blowing, slurp it from the saucer.
Ladies never pick their noses, flick
the pickings at a sibling. Over lunch
do not request please pass the salt. Ladies
wait till, noticing their need, a friend assists.
And when a husband, ten years later,
staggers from The Squealing Pig at midnight
ladies finger rosaries from Lourdes, murmur
Mary, intercede, please keep me pure.
Pratibha Castle, Irish born and living in West Sussex, is widely published in journals and anthologies including Agenda, Spelt, Tears In The Fence, London Grip, Orbis, One Hand Clapping, High Window, Fly on the Wall Press, and forthcoming in Stand. Longlisted and given special mention in numerous competitions including Bridport Prize, Binsted Arts, Bray Festival and Welsh Poetry Competition, her award-winning debut pamphlet A Triptych of Birds & A Few Loose Feathers (Hedgehog Press 2022) is joined by a second pamphlet Miniskirts in The Wasteland (Hedgehog Poetry Press 2023).
*****
Jo Dixon: Poem
PYLON
[from the Greek: pylē – gate, wing
of a pair of double gates, entrance,
entrance into a country]
They roost on the obelisk anchored in waste ground
behind the hoarding nailed to a sharp-pronged palisade
advertising Mike’s Repairs Best in Stirchley Village!
in Birmingham’s up and coming neighbourhood
of indie businesses, micro-breweries, and traces
of metal working and turning out brown paper.
A sparse showing for now, our starlings grip cross bars
and power lines, not touching earth. Electrical potential
even, purple-green bodies waiting (unshocked)
for last year’s migrants to boost their red-list ranks. Some
fly fast, straight, silhouettes against the clouds, like war planes
that might shatter concrete laid over leatherjackets and worms.
Beeps and clicks and sliding whistles: an electromagnetic hum
that soaks into the leaf-patterned wallpaper at number thirty,
where a boy’s forgotten hoodie hugs the newel post,
his red frisbee lodged in the obelisk, knowing
he’s not supposed to bash that discarded skirting board
against the vandal fence and fashion himself a gate.
Jo Dixon’s collection, Purl (Shoestring Press) was published in July 2020. Her poetry appears in a range of journals and anthologies, including New Walk, The Interpreter’s House, Furies (For Books’ Sake), In Transit (The Emma Press), South Bank Poetry, Brittle Star, Places of Poetry | Oneworld (oneworld-publications.com), The North and Modern Poetry in Translation. Currently, she is experimenting with approaches to translation and writing about myopia. Jo is a lecturer in creative writing at De Montfort University Leicester.
*****
Marguerite Doyle: Two Poems
GEORGIE YEATS
They say that I have visions all the time—
In this one I am standing in a black lake
of ink in my white
wedding dress, numb with shock,
with grieving for too long.
There is a man wandering in the forest,
wishing for heaven’s cloths, tormented
by his obsession
for a Carmelite girl.
In childhood I had dreams of a citadel
fit for a poet; that moment is here,
the honeymoon is done.
The white dress unfurls like the wings
of a dying swan
on the ink-black lake.
I shiver and tremble at my power
in becoming necromancer
of the automatic pen, plunge deep
into the darkness
and am reborn into the light.
MADAME CURIE ADMONISHES HER HUSBAND
What was it this time, Pierre, stepping out after rain
on to Rue Dauphine from the Science Academy?
Daydreaming past bicycles, tramcars and carts,
barrow-boys spitting in the gutter, clouds
of blue smoke from the tobacconist. Were you
blinded by the shine of wet cobbles or Madame
Palladino’s power to conjure up new phenomena
in her sham laboratory, ectoplasm streaming
from her red mouth reining you in, becoming solid,
corporeal, like something galloping in the street—
thundering at you; until too late you saw the wild eyes
of fakery and the driver’s screams woke from your trance.
Note: Pierre Curie died instantly when he fell beneath a horse drawn cart on Rue Dauphine in 1906. At the time he was fascinated by the New Sciences of the Paranormal.
Marguerite Doyle holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Dublin City University. Her work has been published in Reliquiae Journal, The Galway Review, The New Welsh Reader, Obsessed with Pipework, Dreich, The Seventh Quarry (forthcoming) and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Commemorative Anthology Hold Open the Door. In 2020 Marguerite received a Special Mention in the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Prize. In 2021 she was Shortlisted and Highly Commended for the Anthology Poetry Award and in 2022 was awarded Winner in Category for the Trócaire / Poetry Ireland Competition.
*****
David Dumouriez: Two Poems
GRANDPARENTS ON THE BEACH
Old photos of the cliché should be ‘faded’.
Not a bit: the Kodak print improves upon the life.
Within the bold white frame, I see the pair:
born ’02, not more than sixty both,
but nearer to the dodo than the elders of today.
Somewhere (Clacton?), Nanna tests a deckchair’s
depth and width. In shapeless woolly she begets
another – knitting, purling, heedless of the waves.
Beside her on the sands, now there’s a sight …
the one that sends me back and fully documents
my granddad’s annual war against the sun.
He stands, relaxed in hobnail boots,
the trousers of his suit, a shirt, a sleeveless
pully and a hanky knotted to replace
the cap that usually topped his head.
(The rolled-up sleeves his one concession to the heat.)
Baseball hats, bikinis, gold? No, none of that.
Just grandparents on the beach.
AN ANGLICAN EVENT
My mother lies before us in a box,
to put it bluntly. Closed up, it’s hard to think
she’s there. Perhaps she is, perhaps she’s not.
Beside her, facing us, the vicar stands –
a man who styles himself as ‘Father Tim’,
though not of Rome (or seemingly much else).
He is, today, the representative
of some old man who used to fill the sky,
most mentioned by my mother in a curse.
Well, Father Tim’s his broker on the earth:
the middleman who seems to think that he
can expedite a trip upstairs. He looks
around and does the words – some from the book,
some the laboured product of ‘the common
touch’, throwing in my name and Dad’s at will.
And then he calls on us, his ragged flock,
to sing those songs we haven’t sung since school.
In flat, embarrassed tones, this thing we do.
Another section ticked, he stumbles on,
until at last the curtain business comes.
And now it’s real. It cannot be denied.
Sixty-six and so much going with her.
Companion, mother, lover, woman, child.
I see the faces. This is what we get, our kind.
What we’ve been programmed to deserve.
David Dumouriez wouldn’t be tempted to blow his own trumpet even if a) he had a trumpet or b) he knew how to play one.
*****
Rob Etty: Four Poems
MOVES AFOOT
This is a land of its people’s fathers, mothers,
siblings and cousins, in-laws, insiders,
of doers and not-doers, loners and minglers,
and what’s spoken only behind these walls,
where trees that curtain the view after April
let late leaves fall so that church and houses
can watch how another November ends,
where winds take a breather before more blowing
and sheep with inherited characteristics
stand, stare and nibble along an escarpment
unrolling as far as the eye doesn’t see,
and afternoon holds a cold early sunset
at cold arm’s length for fifteen minutes
while dusk allows it a light touch for once,
and where the incomers find days slower
on these unkerbed roads than on those they left
until they adjust and reduce speed themselves,
like the removal van on the long hill
whenever someone moves in, or moves out
if two weekly buses to town aren’t enough.
THE ASH GROVE, HOW GRACEFUL
Ash dieback has bypassed the post box corner,
and there the ash trees are holding out clusters
of rained-on keys for posters of letters
to cradle and shuffle in their fingers.
Keys evoke locks, and locks evoke doors,
and doors tend to shut and open cases,
keep in and keep out, protect and expose,
hang painted in frames, flaunt gilded wreaths and jam
in December, welcome postpersons
and couriers in hurries, tolerate white-knuckle
knock-knock-knocking and programmable bell chimes.
Old and distressed doors become unhinged
and plead round the clock for closure,
while swallows nest above picture rails,
mice find a sofa they like the style of,
and sometimes a sycamore shatters a half-lite,
which happened at the semi in Eastbourne
where someone intestate was found in the shower
and tracing the nephew took seven years.
The key for the Austin A35
in the garage was in the ignition,
the first time it had been turned (so it seemed)
since its twelve thousand and sixtieth mile
and a yank on its unreleased handbrake.
Turn to the drifting rain and the ash keys,
the grass path that takes the route of the branch line
that terminated at Seaview Hotel,
and to tickets, place names, platforms and trains
of thought with few passengers in this weather.
FELLOW PASSENGERS
Paul the churchyard man’s here with his strimmer,
clearing tall growth between the old gravestones
to make them look cared for, and make a change.
The marked uncared-for lie next to the unmarked,
the lastingly unmemorialised,
whose brown bones the gravedigger sometimes turns up
and hides in his spoil heap to shovel down
under the newcomer and the water table
after the mystified mourners have gone.
Paul, if asked, thinks of online bank transfers,
whether he’s brought a spare cord in the van,
his chicken sandwiches and Tottenham Hotspur
more than his Father’s house with its mansions –
musings that no one fair would deny him,
given he spends hours on end with the dead.
And people who spend their hours with the living,
who follow their dog on the footpath through,
seem to see neither gravestones nor Paul
among the nettles and rusty railings
because of his grassy dust clouds, the sunlight,
or thinking of matters like sandwiches.
THE WIRING
This is the future your wires proofed you for
in a previous precautionary age.
Your hardwiring followed the regulations
despite the paucity of its components:
resistance, capacity, energy,
flexibility, durability,
balance, security, and the rest –
nothing in there to write home about,
although elements might be upgradable.
The job was inspected and passed as safe,
but it’s your softwiring that serves you better.
A gradual installation provided
every conductor with time to bed in
and interconnect with the wider network.
And softwiring constantly self-modifies,
responding to outages, overloads
and other ailments of circuitry
with patient resetting and maintenance.
Days wouldn’t flow the same way without wires
protecting you from shocks to the system
and taking care of your bonding and earthing.
That’s not to say they’re the whole of the story,
when no story’s whole, even finished ones,
but possibly that they’re enough of it
in any current precautionary age
to deal with an upsurge in loss or malfunction,
of which any outage seldom lasts long.
Rob Etty lives in Lincolnshire. The poems above appear in his latest collection, Beyond the Last House (Shoestring Press, 2024).
*****
Jeff Gallagher: Poem
JUST SAYING
Hidden in heart and sense,
touched by the cruel and kind –
the obstacles, the open doors,
the goals attained, the chances missed –
we seek with reverence
choice words that might be mined.
The need to frame our living
as epic or biopic,
our joys and triumphs, give us cause –
bereavements, births, our treasured list
of loathing or forgiving –
to pen our chosen topic.
We search for thought or phrase
to fix our memories,
but feel emotion soon surpass
our skill; and so with busy hands
we catch the precious days
in virtual galleries.
Or taste reluctant tears
moistening a stubbled face –
with platitudes, we raise a glass
to birthdays, funerals, rings and prams,
our fading hopes, our fears
adorned in gold and lace.
Then, as our epitaph,
we cite some clever line
from poets who have wrought with pain
profound constructions, built to name
those landmarks on the path
thrown up by age and time.
But poets cannot explain
the purpose of our season –
our influence, what we believed,
all that we failed at, or achieved,
our very being, remain
beyond all rhyme and reason.
Jeff Gallagher is originally from Cheshire and currently lives in West Sussex. More than one hundred of his poems have featured in publications such as Rialto, Acumen, Littoral and The Journal. He has had numerous plays published and performed nationwide. He was the winner of the Carr Webber Prize 2021. For many years he taught English and Latin. He also appeared (briefly) in an Oscar-winning movie. He has no ‘handles’ but can be found under his own name on Facebook.
*****
Owen Gallagher: Three Poems
THE LEITRIM GIRLS
(Alice, Tessie, Katy, and Lizzie Fox)
I listened for the clink of the quarter bottles
of whiskey in handbags as they trooped
up the tenement stairs after Friday night
confessions. Instead of herding cows
to byres, Mother’s sisters led their children
to school, pushed prams of laundry
to the washhouse and housekeeped
till they keeled over. Celebrating making it
through another week, after the obligatory
tea, the napkin on their knees, the pleas –
‘No more for me!’– the small bottles
appeared. ‘The holy water’ poured into
thumb size glasses, was taken neat
or watered down, sipped, or slung
back. The more they swallowed
the more their tongues gathered speed
until they sang ‘Lovely Leitrim’
and they were back in the lanes
and fields of Ballinamore, walking
to school to listen to Mrs. McGahern
in a classroom of all ages, or by the open fire.
Sometimes, one riled another,
tongues turned on each other and one
or two, all het up, would storm out.
Diplomatic talks took place.
One by one they returned. Separate,
but inseparable like pieces of a jigsaw.
I can hear the clink and sync on the stairs.
‘DON’T COME BACK TILL YOU’RE PERSIL WHITE!’
Everything reeked
of Eau de Bleach.
I’d queue outside Gorbals Public Baths on a Friday night.
Forty cell-like rooms
overlooked the swimming pool.
Each bath had lost its sheen from being scrubbed clean.
Each offered
a thirty-minute sanctuary
from life, a launch pad for an imaginary flight.
I’d imagine Sheila Brogan
emerging from the pool and peeling
her skin-tight, white costume off in the shower room.
Soaked and scrubbed
till I was peach-like,
I’d use a towel that could’ve served as a stretcher
and stride out
to queue at the confessional box
and cleanse, if only briefly, the lens of my filthy mind.
SUPERBOY’S LOST YEARS
I’d squint at half the world
through my short-trousered life.
My left eye was patched to prevent
the ‘lazy eye’ from nodding off.
My left hand – a mine detector,
swept a safe path ahead.
My face was orange from carrots
I was force-fed to improve my vision.
The skull drawn on my eye-patch
failed to ward off bullies.
Classmates shouted: ‘Here, Patch!’
Patted me on the head.
My ‘bad eye’ wept from overuse.
I was a safety risk, excluded
from the football team,
science and PE.
I wrote to the Pope, prayed
for a guide dog and pleaded with Lucy,
the patron saint of vision,
to intervene.
The patch was removed.
I memorised the optician’s chart
before entering high school
where I was ‘Four eyes!’ ‘Specky!’
I wore a Superboy vest
under my school shirt, and waited
for my visionary powers to kick in.
Owen Gallagher is a working-class writer, born in Gorbals, Glasgow. He left school at fifteen and worked in factories and on building sites, also as a street-sweeper and bus conductor. His recent publication is: Clydebuilt, Smokestack Books, England, 2119. Shortlisted for The Scottish Poetry Book of The Year, 2021.
*****
Mark Granier: Three Poems
ON DIFFICULTY
If its passage leaves a hum in the rails,
a twist of dust on the road,
that’s enough. I don’t mind
if it travels ahead of me
(I’m slow. I read with my ears.)
so long as there is a sense
of sinewy music. My difficulty
with difficulty is when I suspect
the accident is staged, and if
I called in the whole crew
to meticulously unpick the pile-up,
removing wreck after wreck,
I’d find nothing to rescue
but a clutch of crash-test dummies.
PUB
London, 1989
Somewhere along the Walworth Road
we stepped out of the sunny day.
At the back, chairs had been cleared.
A rock anthem clubbed at the walls.
Small and wiry, she was already
down to a gold lamé bikini.
A few punters whooped and cheered.
Others were silent, perhaps troubled
by that look: a fixed grimace
of unutterable contempt, carried
with what seemed a practiced skill,
like a trayful of foaming glasses
she must never spill.
MARK
is my first mark, a brand
sealed
with a dabbing hand:
what I became
and part
of what
I assume
will one day be read
by the rain.
The way a name
is an ark
that can contain –– head
to toe ––
a person
(Eve, Aram,
Cleo
or Cain),
is a kind of magic,
the human kind –– more
smoke than
mirror.
I rise
stretching each day
pulling the M
over
my head, pushing
my feet
into the tangled
trouser-legs
of the K.
I am a Mark.
Who
(meaning what mark)
are you?
Mark Granier‘s poetry has appeared in numerous outlets over the years, including The High Window, The TLS, The New Statesman and Carol Ann Duffy’s pandemic project/archive for Manchester University, Write Where We Are Now. His fifth collection, Ghostlight: New & Selected Poems, was published by Salmon in 2017. His sixth is forthcoming.
*****
Jenny Hockey: Poem
ENDOSCOPY
(after Maurice Riordan)
By this time the pandemic’s no longer
a thing and she is trailing up Brocco Bank,
nil by mouth and not wearing her mask,
making for a tower block hospital
on the hill. You’ll see her enter the clinic
at 9.30 am, ‘Homes Under the Hammer’,
burbling above her corner seat.
Wonderful veins, a man in scrubs will say
as he takes her hand, all the nurses
would love to cannulate you.
Then into a room where every blind is pulled
with a bed on wheels placed centre stage.
They’ll tell her to keep on her boots,
say Don’t take the finger clip.
We’ll put it in place ourselves, and then
the happy drug flows in
and it’s no time at all for a while
until we see it’s time’s up for her
as white-coated shoulders study the screen,
noises are made in throats, quiet sighs
as they turn round again, but this time reach
for her hand, this time stroke her hair. Tell her
how very sorry they are, Here, let us help you
down off the bed. Our specialist nurse
will answer your questions in full
and so her journey begins
in a drama already in its third series
where we’ve watched her weeping into her pillow,
shared her dread while Patrick slept — his affair
with Marjorie over by Episode 4, seen her toddler,
framed on the bedside table, abducted by a neighbour
in Episode 6, such a nice man, never any trouble.
So we know by now about the appointment
she missed in Episode 8, how she told herself things
weren’t really that bad and in Episode 9,
if we’re right, claimed covid as a reason for
not swallowing a camera whole, a choice
we all might have made.
Jenny Hockey j.hockey@shef.ac.uk
Jenny Hockey‘s poems range from the sad to the surreal to the celebratory. Trained as an anthropologist, she still takes an oblique view of the ups and downs of everyday lives. She retired from Sheffield University as Emeritus Professor of Sociology to write and read more poetry. In 2013 she received a New Poets Award from New Writing North and in 2019 launched her collection, Going to bed with the moon (overstepsbooks.com). She reviews regularly for Orbis magazine (jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk, familyhistoryandwar.com)
*****
Keith Howden: Four Poems
NEIGHBOURS
They claimed the moor for neighbour, etched their farms
– Rake Head, Windy Harbour – in acid parishes
where vision led. Names gaunt with truth dissenting
the seasons’ rituals, crude as wind ranting
its barren testaments. Faith’s harbingers, they preached
labour’s utilitarian religion.
Trespassed their neighbour’s cloisters, sacked his shrines
– Nut Shaw, Barley Top – where they commanded
walls built to stem or swerve his sour recoil.
Syllables relevant as famine, each name
the thing it was, security against
the moor’s revenges. They staked his land their own.
These were their lime evangelism’s chapels
– Stone Fold, Wet Head – faith’s proper prisons,
sites christened by the land’s austerity.
With pulpit vowels, hallelujah consonants
denied the moor’s religion, raised their psalms
apostate in their neighbour’s mysteries.
Bibles of picks and ploughs, they consecrated
– Old Barn, New Barn – names nodding at hunger.
From laagered missions, won among the infidel
intake some scattered gestures of conversion.
Nothing recanted. No miracle redeemed
indigenous atheism in the grass.
The bald moor holds them now. The leper stations
– Cronkie, White Riding – where vision foundered
stand sepulchres to that dead neighbourhood
gospelled in names. Nobody stayed. No labour
prospered to breach the moor’s truth. Nothing appeased
a god dissolved in different sacraments.
FATHER AND SON
I chart a ribald pentecost
to map my father. I am
the child beside him, late in frost
allotments, the moon chromium
with cold, the path’s steel tempered
to tuning fork, ringing my frisson
footsteps in tensile air. Then seized
on rigid rods, in iron
equipoise, I saw those planet
skulls of chrysanthemums, blight
icon worlds, iced element
of nowhere, their frozen orbit
stemmed higher than my breath
clouding in cold. Moon was
a brittle paleolith.
In that white starlessness,
snow spun a wafer spectrum
of crumbled glass. But nebular
and insensible, that system
burst its void paternoster
to sear my knowing. No faith
survived that existential kiss
of golem otherness, unbirth
of all pathetic fallacies.
Moon leered that orrery,
poising each automaton head
in nowhere’s primal nullity.
Till then, no miracle released
the codes of emptiness whose curse,
green in my gut, spoke parable
of nothing’s stoic universe,
of being’s ishmael babel.
From them, we mortared chapels
in different stone. For him,
the moor’s sour canticles,
scrape intake’s whining psalm,
the hill’s enigma prism,
wore god’s undoubted signature.
Two crossed sticks’ barbarism
nailed his profoundest rapture.
I map that frost damascus,
still coldly absolute,
my gethsemane dogmas
of the sprit’s vacuum transit.
ENDING
Iron and stone contending in the grab
and gouge of quarries wounding the moor
made backdrop to that ending. She tore a web,
complex and labyrinthine as our warfare,
its filaments patterning the cavities
of a wall’s decay. Near us, gossamer
linked the rusting trucks. She broke their ties,
numerous as nerves, made metaphor,
in her destruction of their delicacy,
for our disease. Around us and between us,
wrecked membranes of the spiders’ industry
told the fragility of webs. Such surgeries
of their transparent, intricate ligament
signalled the warp and weft of our complaint.
MOOR FARMS
I rant them, catechism,
those garble citadels of the moor,
names conjured in the prism
of a wry religion’s grandeur.
Grime, Limers, Bullion:
Myrtle Earth, Rush Candle, Mean Hey:
Jericho, Noah, Zion
Egypt: Slate Pits, Folly.
I name them, blackened bibles
of intake’s apostasy,
assume their gibber syllables
in a rammel psalmody.
Ratten, Feist End, Gibbet:
Nouch, Lench, Gorple, Doal,
White Riding: Old Nick, Boggart:
Wormden, Bleakholt, Bone Hole.
I chant their dearth oblation,
the fossil babels of the fells,
seized in their weather’s incantation,
germane within their vowels.
Nut Shaw, Delph Brink, Coppy:
Mary’s Chair, Tolerance, Love Clough:
Horsehold, Whittle, White Kink, Cronkie,
Windy Gate, Rake Head, Nab Rough.
I tell their gabble rosary,
blab chapels of that plangent zeal,
intone their plainsong irony,
barren and evangelical.
Famine Ridge, Further, Windy Harbour,
Wreck Beds, Bleak House, Stone Crop:
Slack Myres, Wet Head: Hard Labour,
Needless, Poverty, Barley Top.
Keith Howden was born near Burnley in 1932. He taught English and modern European fiction at Nottingham Trent University. Recently, with his son, the composer Matthew Howden, he has completed two poetry music collaborations, with accompanying discs: The Matter of Britain (PRE Rome 2009) and Barley Top (Redroom 2013). His most recent publications are Selected Poems and Mapping the Moor. All are available at http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/books/PPP.htm
*****
Sue Hubbard: Two Poems
EGYPTIAN TOES
Despite the killer-red polish,
dangling over the edge
of the Hockney-blue
pool, where chevrons of sunlight
flicker like shoals of silver fish
across the shimmering surface,
they look familiar.
Of course, they’re my father’s feet,
the body’s genetics rehashed
in these Egyptian toes angled
like the reeds of Pan pipes
in descending order.
So, suddenly, I remember
how you liked to boast
that 60s summer in
Juan les Pins, how easily
you tanned compared
to your Gentile compatriots,
office-white after an English winter.
But you forgot your feet.
How hidden for months
in city brogues they were
unprotected against
the blazing Mediterranean sun,
so they burnt, red and raw,
as Achilles’ heel.
EXHUMATION
I lift the lid of the old oak
chest as if searching for a map
where X marks the spot
that I might find you.
From beneath stored beach
cushions and gardening gloves,
a carrier bag full of string,
I fish out the tattered album,
held together with fraying cord
to discover you in black and white:
the speech you gave at your wedding,
your Cornish honeymoon
with my mother, all wartime curls
and summer prints, sitting on
the beach beside the dog.
.
But some of the photographs
have been lost
or fallen away,
so only a ghostly smudge
of dried glue remains,
a trace left by those little
golden triangles that once
anchored you firmly in place,
before you decided to slip away,
uncertain
what you’d really wanted from life,
into that other world.
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance critic. She has published six collections of poetry, four novels and a collection of short stories. Her latest poetry collections include: God’s Little Artist, Seren: poems on the life of Gwen John. Radium Dreams in collaboration with the artist Eileen Cooper on the life of Marie Curie, published by the Woman’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College Cambridge, and Swimming to Albania, Salmon Poetry, Ireland.
*****
Martin Jago: Two Poems
YOUR DEATH HAS HOLLOWED OUT THE MOUNTAIN
like water through limestone, reaching down
and branching off deep beneath us.
I know because the day you died
I abseiled in, hard hat, ropes
and harness as you lay gasping,
and squeezed through tight capillaries
of fear as if crawling from nativity
into vast and quiet chambers.
The letting go was different there,
the mineral richness of your smile
glistening through the crags
and stalactites a thousand pointed
memories pinning me in place
to the drip and echo of the past.
Untethered, not looking for an exit
but yielding to its unhuman scale
I emerged, even if one never
fully surfaces, but my hand
had touched its walls and in the mountain
hollowed out by death, beneath
the churn and puff of human life,
an exchange of sorts had taken place.
ASCENT
They’ve turned the disused church
into an indoor climbing centre
where people practice a different sort
of ascent and from the pulpit a man
in specialist gear looks heavenwards
shouting instructions at those above
dangling from a thread. How far
things have changed, genuflecting
in knee pads, parishioners in hard hats
to protect against potential damage
done to brains if they should make
the sudden fall to earth. For now,
they are their own fictional skygods
scaling the monolith of fear,
practicing flight, midway between
earth and some higher place.
Martin Jago is a British-American poet and author of four critically-acclaimed nonfiction books on Shakespeare (published in the U.S. by Smith & Kraus). He holds a Master’s in Creative Writing from University of Oxford where he was a F.H. Pasby Prize finalist. His poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as Agenda, Acumen, The Moth, Presence, LIT Magazine, The Penn Review, HCE Review, Naguatuck River Review and Artillery Magazine. His debut collection Photofit is published by Pindrop Press (2023).
*****
Lanny Ledboer: Six Poems Poems
PERSEVERANCE
Sound moves slowly on Mars.
Dry winds blow sand
into the poetry of empty places.
Faint as a memory of rain,
soft as a sigh exhaled in sleep.
Poems meant for no one,
whispered in the ear of the deep.
SANCTUS MUS
In the orchard we found a sack
of small bones cast down by the owl
from the crossed arms of the windmill,
a dollhouse skeleton wrapped in rags,
a mummy stuffed with rodent tusks
and fingernail ribs, left to wander
the earth with the next hard wind.
We pulled the skull from the pellet,
fine as an ivory pendant, and hung it
in the niche of a hollow branch,
letting it watch over the orchard
like the saint of sudden endings,
a tombstone angel to shepherd us
to the tall grass by the good water.
TESTAMENT
‘I THINK GRAVES OUGHT TO BE A LITTLE UNTIDY, THE WAY LIVES ARE’
(Edith Atwater, The Rockford Files)
Let dandelions grow on our graves.
Maybe their roots will wring
a bitter milk from our hearts,
a sap warm enough
by winter’s end
to turn the cold and dark
into little suns of spring,
flowers with the color
to make a wine in summer
light enough to lift
the blackest mark
on a host of downy wings,
letting go of bygones
in an early autumn wind.
THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE
On the mountain a rock in the river
makes a wave that curls forever,
before the water winds away to wrap
the world in its coils, circling forests
and foothills, deserts and prairies,
while the rock sits under its wave
like a stone swallowed by a snake.
Gliding between green valleys
past women with baskets of grass,
the river twists through chasms
of bedrock and slips over cliffs
in the clouds, swirling at the feet
of men bearing axes on their backs
through forests of hardwood and pine.
After a lifetime the river slithers
across the mud of a saltgrass flat
before sticking the fork of its tongue
through sand dunes to reach the sea.
But the rock below the wave remains,
pinning the tail of the snake in place,
dangling the world from this mountain.
MONET AT NAOSHIMA
The loveliest light in the world
falls on an island, on a mountain
by an inland sea, where the sun
on the lilies shines pure as paint
mixed with holy water, falling
from the sky soft as shadows
at dusk, shaded with a sable brush.
Postcards, posters, books. Nothing
looks like this, the whole dark hall
of the universe pierced by a sunburst,
firing the lilies like diamonds
held up to the light of the moon.
IN SPRING
The hose on the grass
leaves grace notes engraved in green.
A cursive haiku, etched in the lawn
for a day or two.
The grass grew tall here
in the gray length of winter.
Deep as a whisper.
This briefest of poems, penned
for the blackbirds gathering grass
to bind the future. A promise,
in longhand, of plenty.
Lanny Ledeboer is an old high school history teacher in the state of Washington, USA. He has been reading and writing poems ever since he took Mr. Powell’s Intro to Poetry class back in college.
*****
Richard Lyons: Poem
PICARESQUE
Hoarse with sincerity,
poking my nose in a hundred corners,
I paint the night. I can’t tell
if this one is memory or dream:
Two strangers Giovanni and Luna
let us sleep in a little courtyard.
There was a hutch
from which rabbits watched us.
Their pellets dropped through the mesh
like freeze-dried raindrops.
I’ve recently begun to erase
my sketchy lifetime. I haven’t a back-hoe
to plow all the trifles into the ocean,
but who’s to speak for the dolphins,
not to mention bait balls the orcas encourage?
Animals move toward the one watering hole
for hundreds of miles just as seven decades
of my flesh move beneath the sky
and across the earth. I’m pretty sure
it’s way better to dodge one’s fate than become it.
Richard Lyons is professor emeritus at Mississippi State University. He has published four books of poems. The most recent is entitled Un Poco Loco, Irisbooks.com, 2016. He has published two chapbooks entitled Heart House, Emrys Press, 2019 and Sleep on Needles, Finishing Line Press, 2023. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and The Nation, among many other venues. He is a former winner of the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets
*****
Maggie Mackay: Four Poems
THE GLISK OF A DRAM
It pours honey-hued, bringing back the crisp sea air, peat
smoke of the hearth, that feeling you’re home, a smile
budding, a lump in your throat, reminiscing as the burn
hits the spot. Wildflowers shoogle before your eyes,
waving haste ye back. They light your insomnia, sit
in the treasured lustre jug. You feel beach pebbles
under your feet. They relive the walks to low tide, the crisp
salty scent of kelp, the tart coastal gales and gusts. They
buffet long and lingering yearning, upset the applecart.
Apples. Whisky aroma. Glimmer in the tumbler. Green
apples. You sink into sleep after crunching on one.
Citrus, woody, crisp. You don’t know about toffee.
MY DREAMTIME BIRTHINGS
I am born a greyhound,
a waggling puppy bitch
at the feet of Anubis,
jackal-headed God of the Dead.
I hunt into the court
of Plantagenet and Tudor kings,
until waking as a woman
touting for punters on Danube Street.
I am born an adult
on the day my father dies,
the first Christmas
of my first year
as a probation teacher.
I walk into my classroom
days after his funeral.
It’s decked out
with Japanese rising suns and phrases.
Suddenly I’m a little girl and it’s Saturday.
Dad’s walking towards me,
a James Thin’s paper bag
tucked under his arm.
I find it, a Puffin story book
slipped under my pillow.
Miss Grainger, guru of the children’s
department, stands
in the bookshop, right beside my bed,
delighted at his choice.
He turns to the first page.
DREAM WITH PEGS
I loathe camping, but my dreams are
thick in canvas and tents. I join
forums, befriended websites, pack the Toyota
with the best recommended durable tent of 2023,
and the sleeping bags from my Malawi trips.
I think in navy blue and Gor-Tex.
What about your dog,
the nae-sayers shout from the sidelines.
I’m turning up for lunch
in Meindl Respond Lady Mid walking boots.
Walls tilt with the weight of equipment
Neighbours complain with angry notes.
The powers-that-be turn off my utilities.
In the dream-after-dream treadmill
bailiffs pound fists, read me legalese.
I was possessed. The house was possessed.
On the last night I dream
camping for one night. They take me away to heal.
NEVER HAVING BEEN TO THE BOTTOM OF A HOLY WELL
I’m an enigma. Healer to some,
portal to other worlds. Underground
and heavenward. Entrance crowded
with offerings, coins, a flower, a shell
white pebbles. A hawthorn stands guard.
Beyond moss, ivy, bracken, violets
women pray in fluid tones
to saints, St Mungo, Ronan,
Bernard, Margaret, Cuthbert, Our Lady.
Maggie Mackay’s poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ is in the Poetry Archive’s WordView 2020 permanent collection. Her second collection The Babel of Human Travel (Impspired.com ) was published in 2022.. She reviews poetry collections at The Friday Poem.
*****
Kathleen McPhilemy: Four Poems
ALL THESE THINGS I WILL GIVE THEE
I imagine you climbing KnockLayd
when you inherited, aged 21
looking out over all you’d been lent
fields, farms, collieries, salt pans
the salmon fishery at the river’s mouth
watching small boats on a sea calm day
plying between rickety landing stages
and coal wherries anchored further out.
Did you plan then to reshape the coastline
move the rivers, dredge the harbour
build piers as shelter against the tides
lay roads for iron, salt and coal
link port to market, make a town?
Who did you meet up on the mountain?
Whose hand did you shake, what deal was struck
amid those standing and fallen stones?
ARTIST’S IMPRESSION
Geology and a man made the moment:
coal, sand, lime, even iron ore,
abundant sea water, Colonel Hugh Boyd;
too busy even to pause for a portrait,
developing the colliery, enlarging the salt pans,
building a harbour, building it again
making his pitch for Government investment,
starting a bottle factory down by the harbour
inventing a tramway, moving to a house
he built to be closer to work every day.
300 men in the colliery and salt pans
drawn in by the promise of cheap bread
baked on site and sold at a discount.
Stop for a moment, Colonel Hugh Boyd,
See how the sand has choked up your harbour
see how the mines have run out of coal
see how grass has grown up round your salt pans;
see how your grandson has gone off to London
to hang out in coffee houses with Garrick and Sheridan.
Understand that no-one really knows you
though they know your parents, your birth
when you died. Were you the man on the bay horse
the artist imagined, there on the foreland
overseeing your colliers, your glass kiln
your ships in the bay, your new manor house?
Who were you, Hugh Boyd, and who were your miners?
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS
My father took me to the Linen Hall Library
named for its place in the White Linen Hall
and after in the Lanyon linen warehouse;
founded by artisans, hungry for reading,
as the Belfast Society for the Promotion of Knowledge,
its stacks were a haven of quiet and bookishness
built on the bones of factory workers,
the millies whose children were always small,
like another race, there to be laughed at.
The roads and carriageways of Linenopolis
the tall churches, the tranquil reading rooms,
musical soirees in those big brick houses
were carried on the backs of pregnant women,
of children raised on white bread and jam;
rickets, consumption, lichen leg
rewarded the migrants who came in thousands
to the cramped back-to-backs, the steamy halls
the dank and fibre-thick breath of the mills.
Unaware or unthinking, I bought for my nephew
a never-to-be-used linen tablecloth
as a wedding present, token of heritage.
THE PRINCESS AND THE SHAWLIE
Flaxen-haired as they say in the stories
colour of flax retted in water
dried, combed, gathered in hanks
smooth and sheer ready for spinning.
What should she wear, this light-haired princess
but an undergarment of the finest linen
an over-mantle woven of soft new wool
deerskin slippers and a cloak of ermine
the best of all her land can offer.
She’s drowned in the dam, my bright-haired maiden:
see the flax stream out in the water
though they trod it, tramped it, pressed it down,
buried its river in a city culvert.
What should she wear, this raw-fingered girl
but ragged cotton from the backs of the dead
a hand-me-down shawl, patched and darned
clogs if she must, but she’d rather go barefoot,
ankle-deep in water as she doffs the bobbins.
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 https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy.
*****
Maitreyabandhu: Five Poems
CHILTERN
With laptops open and cases stowed, the train
at Marylebone is full (some have to stand).
The man across the aisle unzips his sandwich,
a woman mirrors makeup on her phone.
London jolts, drizzle-grey and bland,
as bridges stride a black canal, apartments
adjust their balconies for warmer days,
cranes salute the prosperous parts of town.
Wembley’s arch gives way to cattle fields
and sheep standing next to their shadows,
parked cars and traffic islands seen through
woebegotten trees, a road stretching
over the horizon like something out of Ruisdael
and love, I suppose, bringing us back
to the things of this world.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxMy mother’s scrap
of garden fulminates unshaven stubble
as Brook End Drive and Swan Croft lose direction
with winter drawing in. In black and white
on the mantlepiece, my three older brothers
grin at the camera, each a head above
the other on their first day back at school.
“But it was like a spring day yesterday”
my mother says. “I walked to the shops and back”
(using her tripod wheelie-walker with brakes
and a place to put the shopping). I leave her
to Midsomer Murders and fairy lights, the high street
strung again with childhood’s coloured bulbs.
ALL ALONG THE ROMAN ROAD
Outside, a football team in matching kit,
shorts and shin pads, joins tourists and commuters
entering and exiting at Shoreditch
with sodium in their hair. Nothing matters
or so it seems. Lightheaded, in a daze
of endings, I wander home dumbstruck. I might be
someone else. The stairs lead me, flight
by moon-lit landing, to the paraphrase
that is my life (my bedroom). I close the blind.
Seated on my shrine, the bodhisattva
holds aloft a sword that cuts across
my thought. The wound (for now at least) is painless.
I gaze into the fridge for something something,
then flip my laptop open to buy a V-neck
(grey, they tell me, is the new black). Sleeping
friends surround me, windows open to summer
or rather closed to block the sound of traffic.
Roman Road is quiet, at least until
blue disco lights flare briefly round the blind.
THE MUNICIPIUM OF THAGASTE
Late August and last songs. Autumn starts up
like the introduction to a theme in music,
andante, quiet enough for now, a thrush
singing from a plane tree by the flats
in can’t-believe-it sun. It’s your birthday
or would have been. I want to say a prayer
Be near me, be next to me, ‘I have been
the author of my own downfall’ (Augustine)
but my words fly up… Joggers, families.
Late summer, like a thought’s elaboration,
a bright thought that contains its origin,
ripens into sweetness, except a dark thought
bears it down (I’m trying to think my way
out of thinking by thinking such as this).
COVID SONNETS
I go downstairs to buy a coffee – the pavement
marked where we can stand, masked intruders
on a foreign land turned sumptuous green
and blackbirdy – and wait two metres off
to check my iPhone: NATURE GETS HER OWN BACK:
a herd of mountain goats invade Llandudno;
swans return (fake news) to the Grand Canal;
hospitals fill up for Götterdämmerung.
I wait my turn. My middle brother, sporty,
sweary, sends the family four pieced-together
pictures of my father’s desert war
in a WhatsApp conversation I don’t join in
about what plane, Spitfire or Hurricane,
he leans against, so tanned and battle-thinned.
*
A bus blocks out the sun; my thumb hovers
over Barcelona and Beethoven, the class
I’m due to teach, then deletes them, iCal
asking Do I want to delete all future events?
(I’m tempted). Upstairs I join a Zoom meeting –
its struggling pot plant, bit of shelf, half
an opened window – in which a 50’s prom queen
phones her friend in the lip-sync bedroom
three blocks down while up and to the left
her boyfriend sings. “You’re muted” someone says
as marooned in bedroom scenery
we rehearse our common lot: the toilet paper/
hand sanitizer scare, Deliveroo,
distraction-fit of Facebook, cleaner air.
ELIZABETH BISHOP IN PUKERUA BAY
Listening (online) to Elizabeth Bishop
read at the Library of Congress
in 1974, her ‘sorrowing
cheerfulness’ and description of the sea
might as well be the sea beyond this bach
where we watched from the canoe I paddled out –
Ria in her child-sized lifejacket –
the muddy angel-wings below of stingrays
stirring up the sediment of time.
The poet stops short after the first half-line
to sip water from a glass. She swallows
unabashed, then resumes her soliloquy
with a muffled tap, putting the water back.
Maitreyabandhu is a Buddhist teacher, poet, critic, and writer. He has published three poetry pamphlets and three full-length collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Crumb Road (2013), a PBS Recommendation, Yarn’ (2015), and After Cézanne (2019), a sequence of 56 poems about the life of the painter. He was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1990 and has written three books on Buddhism (Windhorse). He lives and works at the London Buddhist Centre.
*****
Mark Mansfield: Two Poems
LAMP MOTHS
Remember summer days when from the sand
we’d race to roam the shore’s arcades—
ghostly gamins, whose madcap laughter
filled the boardwalk stands?
Soon dusk would fall as lamp moths strayed
too near the carny neon while we perched
beside the Haunted House. Those times
were like a bonfire’s blaze
from which arose what life would cage and prod
till memory’s whirligig slowed to a hearse.
Yet silently, invisibly —
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwhose wand
still sweeps over the moonlit clouds and earth?
FIRST KISS
Last night I walked down to the docks
and watched the few lights gleam.
A breeze was warm as love’s first kiss,
and the sea appeared a dream.
And I thought of dreams, those I recalled
no one may buy or sell.
Rare dreams that haunt like faithful friends
betrayed as regrets knell.
And thought of time, how swift it sails,
still anchored in one bay.
Then saw above a port-holed dive,
its clock marked my birthday.
From out of nowhere, calm and clear,
a soft voice spoke two words—
“Remember us?” as the salt air
filled with a rush of birds.
Mark Mansfield’s most recent poetry collection is titled Greygolden (Chester River Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in The Adirondack Review, Anthropocene, Bayou, Fourteen Hills, The High Window, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Iota, London Grip, Magma Poetry, Measure, Obsessed With Pipework, Orbis, Potomac Review, Salt Hill Journal, Sarasvati, Vita Poetica Journal, and elsewhere. He is a former musician and publications specialist, and has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. Currently, he lives in upstate New York.
*****
Neal Mason: Poem
Passenger Announcement, Reading Station, 1919
‘The train that departed from platform one –
or was it two? – isn’t due
the abuse passengers are claiming it warrants.
People who missed it, staggered
it left on time, should reflect that on board’s
an unaccompanied briefcase, in it
‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by Lawrence.
‘Great Western wishes to apologise
for the loss of this no-doubt-great work,
but would like to point out it’s not their fault;
Lawrence himself forgot the manuscript.
Anyway, the English don’t read history –
and it’s no great loss if you’re a Turk.
‘Lawrence will have to write it again
from memory, despite his evident amnesia.
At a quarter of a million words, we suggest
remembering one paltry briefcase,
or what day it is, or the whole works
of Shakespeare, or Bradshaw, would have been easier.
‘The national newspapers have been informed
of this shocking event. By their figuring,
publicity will aid retrieval, the editor
of the literary page of ‘The Daily Mail’,
who publishes much poetry, being keen
to alert the – why are passengers sniggering?
‘After completing his manuscript, Lawrence
tells us, he destroyed his wartime notes.
Passengers who served under him in Arabia
are requested to provide the stationmaster with memories
and dialogue – trains are delayed as usual –
but to excise Dahoum from all quotes.
Great Western also suggests
that Colonel Lawrence is a wonderful advert
for camel trains. Steam, he could grow to like,
given familiarity
with platforms, tickets, flexible timetables
and beautifully delivered announcements. Otherwise
it’s safer to travel by motorbike.’
Neal Mason has had collections of poetry published by Peterloo Poets, the University of Salzburg Press and Holland Park Press and has another collection looking for a home. He spent six months as Writer in Residence in a Welsh valley, attended a masterclass at the Hay-on-Wye Festival and was a member of the Arts Council’s Grants to Publishers Panel.
*****
A. F. Moritz: Four Poems
TO THOSE WHO LIKE TO SAY ‘I’M NOT MUCH FOR POETRY
I don’t mind that you scorn or ignore my beloved vocation.
You don’t live without poetry.
That statement, in the way of poetry
that you scorn or ignore, means several things.
You don’t live if there’s no poetry: you don’t live
at all, or if you appear to yourself to be living, you’re not.
You really are living, though, even if you’re dead,
because you do have poetry, poetry’s with you
whether or not you know it, whether you think so or don’t.
Poetry’s there in the earth and waters and light and wind,
a shelf too high for you, bawling child, even to see what’s on it,
but there are always people who, for some reason,
love you so much
that they hand it down for free.
and your sentence. That is a living history.
That is a tragic drama of a world.
A FLOWER GIVING NAMES TO EVE AND ADAM
Here is this striking flower, love—what shall we
call it? We came out here
and tramped these unbound meadows, in and out
of copses of larch and elder, and met things
we knew of—coreopsis, the golden prairie tickseed: one example—
and many we didn’t. We came out here
without a dictionary. If we want to call this thing
or recall it between us now, as long as we’re here,
we’ll have to make it a name of our own,
like the ones we’ve made each other—
there are so many! One for every freak
of every season and hour of your heart’s weather
and mine, so many designations of each ripple
and gust in our inner wafts and storms,
tender nicknames for every bodily tic
of eyelid or lip. You have so many names
between us, you’ve given me so many! Will we give
this striking flower just one? Maybe for now, so we
can talk about it now, while we’re alone here.
Maybe when we go back we can look up
what they all agreed to call it, and then it will seem just
to have a certain word. But never
in our hearts. We’ll go farther—search
and research!—and we’ll learn the list
of the flower’s ancient labels in a thousand small
lost tongues—what grandmothers
and grandmothers of grandmothers called it
in many countries. But we’ll know
its secret name, the one it took for then
when we were with it in ignorance—our name for it,
its name for us. We know and the flower knows
how it’s a fountain of names, all one,
for everyone who comes.
CREDAL STATEMENT
I’m not a modern man. I never believed
that all is torture, loss, frustration because words
fail to attain what we love, fail to save it,
to carry as in a beautiful rush basket
woven by the girls of our tribe all the incomparable
beauties, a dandelion by a fence post,
a night with stars as big as honeydews
whirling in the sky once over southern France.
Over Great Zimbabwe. Over humid Ohio
four hundred million years ago when it waited
on the yet unshifted rock three hundred miles
below the equator. Words are beings, are
for being, not to be
adequate to things. Things are not adequate to things.
That groundhog I love isn’t adequate
to this grasshopper, to that slow creek, to the sky
in its configuration above this spot
years ago in a crystal January night
as I walked up to the doors to enter and hear
Maynard Ferguson. Things are not adequate to words.
A phrase is a body among bodies.
One of your bodies. This gives life, gives life
even to your doubting the adequacy of words:
you said it so it’s a pit
you truly did fall into, you
A WOMAN IN A PAINTING BUT NOT SO
She struggles with her lumpy bulk,
something in a whitish rope-shut sack
of grey cloth—vegetables? clothing?—
and her thick-heeled shoes don’t help her
nor her heavy skirt, slate blue, that shows
the hems of heavy underskirts, bemudded.
She drags—burden, costume, body through a mist
sand-fine, pin-pointed in November wind
that pushes back along the way she comes,
strong but not strong enough
to stop her or even bend the dry
branches. Just strong enough to make
the river choppy, flowing at her right hand,
water like clay, as she reaches
the village houses. The painter
never saw her. Corot was not there
that torpid dawn—when was it, 1750…
1350? Only the squelch of her footfalls,
slap of small waves, wind ruffling. Still,
Corot was with her and took her up
whenever, later, elsewhere, he took up the fields,
the rivers, paths, and people. She was there
before him and he also painted her things
that can’t be seen. Her rote prayers
to the Virgin that had redoubled her pity,
had been her wisdom. And something else,
unheard but part of the quiet
of the vision of her
in which she does not appear: the trudge
of desire. There
is desire past eagerness, past expectation,
joy in her heart who can’t feel it
in the present and expected pain.
NOTE: Cp. Corot’s Fleselles, une Rue avec une Paysanne et sa Vache (Flesselles,a Road with a Peasant Woman and Her Cow), ca. 1862-65. The poem resembles this painting but is a composite of various Corot paintings and the scene is primarily an invented one. That is, the poem describes a Corot painting of a scene and person that Corot did not have the opportunity to paint but that, more essentially, he did paint in all his painting of this type. So the particular woman in the painting is in Corot’s painting but is not.
A. F. Moritz‘s most recent books are The Garden: a poem and an essay (2021) and As Far As You Know (2020). His 2018 selected poems volume, The Sparrow, was reviewed in The High Window. His poetry has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has appeared in The High Window, Poetry (Chicago), Paris Review, Partisan Review, Hudson Review, and elsewhere.
*****
Rick Mullin: Two Poems
MR. MACHINE
A devil-red and plastic toy for boys
endowed with a transparent gearbox chest,
he masters locomotion and destroys
the world. Of all my toys, I love him best,
this robot golem of the living room.
His top hat makes him angry and in charge,
his crooked grin both sinister and wise.
A wind-up evolution while at large,
he makes the day seem plausible. His eyes
foresee the perfect future. I resume
on track behind his cranky adamant
advance. It hurts to put the man away.
I’d like to say I know him. But I can’t.
I trust him as I trust the state of play
at Ideal Toys, the architects of doom.
THE OBSCURE
‘Everything else can wait.’ — George Harrison
Trapped in a world, a world he never made,
no wonder he was called the quiet one.
He slept with every instrument he played.
He wasn’t really in it for the fun,
he wasn’t in it for the Revolution.
In separating art from politics
he placed no stock in politics per se.
He laid his burden on a bed of sticks
and timpani. The bells rang breakaway.
Religion on a field of Evolution.
He danced among the consorts of the Lord
and photographed their gardens in the fall,
expressing his devotion. There’s a chord
that’s seldom heard, responding to a call.
A gesture that defies its resolution.
Rick Mullin is a painter and poet living in Northern New Jersey. His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, Ep;phany, The New Criterion, The Shit Creek Review, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. His books include Huncke (2nd edition, Exot Books, 2021), Transom (Dos Madres Press, 2017), and Soutine (Dos Madres Press, 2012).
*****
Ali Murphy: Two Poems
SHILLINGS AND PENCE
I find your early married life
in a box, a well-worn account book
listing each item needed for your home:
the ironing board, curtain rails,
twin tub and carpet sweeper.
All listed in your angular script.
you never scrawled. You counted
each coin, saved stamps,
kept all sums in the margins,
gave Dad his beer money.
You boiled pig head into brawn,
crossed the square to get pears
a halfpenny cheaper, darned,
stirred jam, cut coupons,
put on an extra layer,
all so we could have a better life,
fly to university.
I throw my socks away,
let avocados go brown,
buy clothes left unworn
leave too many lights on,
go overdrawn.
I imagine your dismay,
the pinched lip
as I only use a tea bag once,
I take a sip and thank you.
I recycle plastic, glass and guilt.
I still have the ironing board,
wooden sticks wobble as I
steam my son’s school shirts.
I can’t get rid of it.
It cost you nine and six.
FOOL TRAP
He made me gooseberry fool, creamy and thick.
Slick down my throat. I swallowed memories
of the bush behind my dad’s greenhouse,
sweet explosion of golden in my mouth.
I remember his terrace house in Heeley,
door down the ginnel. Slugs in the kitchen
squished between my toes, cold linoleum.
I moved in, dreaming him into a man
he was not, re-made myself from the words
I heard him say, over and over. Each
syllable swelled inside me, filled me up.
Weighted me down. No choice but to stay.
Ali Murphy was shortlisted for Leeds Poetry Festival 2023 and published in their anthology, Out of Time. She has also been published in Bread and Roses (2021) , Sheaf (in 1980s!) and is about to be published in Ink Sweat and Tears. After working for decades in NHS as a family therapist, she is now focussing more on poetry workshops with Gill and Mark Connors and mindfulness teaching. She has written all her life and draws on personal and professional experiences.
*****
Martina Reisz Newberry: Two Poems
1. SADIE, BLUE AND QUIET
All the times
and all the days
and all the eyes
and the mouths…
all the air around me
fell blue and quiet.
Sadie and I walked up
that ohhhh-so-steep hill
(one evening
one July
sometime.
We talked
of the hollowness
and the enchantment
that makes up an ocean
(or a sky filled with waiting
and wishing for everything there is.
She wondered to me
How can it be
that out
into the frightening spaces
further and further
out there,
darker,
quieter,
fragmented–
how can it still be
of one piece?
She held out her hand
as if offering me
a peach.
How
can we account
for that? she asked.
The air around us
was blue and quiet.
Something large
flew over our heads
and made a sound
like an angry cat.
We had no idea what it was.
2. ST. RITA CONSIDERS
You, the faithful servant of the Church of Rome,
yelled at me as I lay in bed,
saying the rosary beads silently
so as not to be heard by anyone
but the Theotokos herself.
You dont’t lie in bed to say the rosary! You spat out the words
(they landed on my face like a soft mist of tepid tea).
You grabbed the beaded chain,
made a fist around it,
and threw it in my face.
It left a small beauty mark above my left eyebrow.
When my friend asked about the purple-y red mark,
I said “Would you believe me if I said it happened
while I was saying my prayers?”
She laughed.
“You have such a weird sense of humor,’ she said.
I laughed with her. She was right.
I do have
a very weird
sense of humor.
Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book is Glyphs, available now from Deerbrook Editions. She is the author of Blues For French Roast With Chicory, Never Completely Awake (from Deerbrook Editions), and several others from other presses. Newberry has been widely published in literary journals in the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Los Angeles.
*****
Edmund Prestwich: Three Poems
SAND WORLD
Imagine a dead world. Only water moves, and the sand,
wind-rippled under birdless skies, that drifts over lifeless land,
sterile beaches, endless dunes, boulder fields, exposed fahlband,
the shadows that in vacancy revolve, contract, expand.
It’s not like our earthly deserts, where, catching the moon’s cool gaze,
a shadow slipping between boulders is a desert fox in a hurry;
oryx dream on a dune defined by blazing stars,
a blind mole, swimming under sand, makes hair-trigger scorpions scurry.
Nor even our deep oceans. In the dark abyss,
under crushing miles of water, over mud where nothing grows,
cold-blooded seastars crawl, fish with soft bones slide,
hagfish and anglerfish are food for the giant squid.
There, in toxic thermal vents, weird forms of life evolve.
Even if we destroyed ourselves, their world would live.
NIGHT WALK
The sand is darker than the sea in its long curve nowhere.
There’s a cold wind. Tiny fires
burn on the beach where fishermen sit in parkas.
Half hidden in darkness, hugging a blanket,
a boy walks stumbling, lost in a dream.
Far from his village, alone,
he doesn’t dare lie down. On his feet till dawn,
he’ll hear the night with its sirens, wind,
a woman screaming, whoops and laughter,
water endlessly rising to fall,
beating down, breaking on sand.
CLIMBING MONT VENTOUX
Sunlight splintered
on stone, cicadas,
clinging to trees
shrieked, the lizards’
tiny hearts beat
over paths of burning dust.
Under that splintering light
Petrarch walked, his gown
sweeping grass. He heard
sheepbells panic, saw
how the frightened girl of the mountains
tried to hide among rocks.
At noon, alone
in shuttered shade, as his pen
scraped out old agonies
of hopeless love,
through lacerations of desire
the bright streams flowed.
Edmund Prestwich grew up in South Africa, studied English at Cambridge and Oxford, and taught English at the Manchester Grammar School. In retirement he spends his time playing with grandchildren, reading, writing his own poetry, and reviewing other people’s. He has published two collections: Through the Window and Their Mountain Mother.
*****
Lesley Quayle: Four Poems
GOOSEFEATHER
After heavy rain, the river
steals into dried up creeks
and green soaks.
See how it runs before the wind,
flows over pasture,
insatiable,
rises through lanes and gardens
until the village is an island,
bridges submerged.
One white goose feather,
in slow suspension on the dark tide,
migrates southward.
STORM
She loves oceans and wild weather,
skies punctured by squalls,
thunderheads inflating.
She kens the time of moon and tides,
the sluice of waves, cries of vagrant gulls,
jostle of dune grass.
ll
These last months,
housebound,
life lashed to four walls,
a scratch of air,
the in and out
through squinting windows.
Pressed to the glass,
making the most
of lengthening days,
the hard, hot light –
and she could barely breathe.
lll
Full summer elbows in
with a fuck-you swagger,
celebrating freedom in an orgy of filth.
Shores fill up with ordure and human wreckage
while sly currents settle scores,
cull drunken voyagers and their flimsy vessels,
cough them up later, along with plastic bags
and broken bottles, pickings for
the mocking gulls.
lV
Storms lour, sky and sea
roll up in navy blue and black.
Bone cold breezes,
fierce with hail,
scour sand and tideline.
The ocean shrugs, marks time.
ENCOUNTER
I see you,
vixen,
limping towards me
on the Roman road,
jaws slung with a fresh kill.
Heading for a den
in the oak woods,
sanctuary for your
skirmish of cubs,
away from dog
and gun,
among dowries
of wild garlic,
bluebells, aconite.
There’s a beacon
of blood-lust
in your amber gaze
preserving the space
between us.
You catch my grey mood,
my thunderheads,
see a scaffold of jackdaws,
like rags in the sycamore,
and the sky purple,
about to burst.
We weigh this encounter
between us, alert to the
tok, tok, tok
of a solitary windmill,
then you veer away,
fleet, over the broken wall,
instinct like a klaxon,
musk shuttling the breeze.
BROWN HARES
I spot them
two jacks
upright in the long grass
a flurry of punches
the annual squabble
left hooks
southpaws
cudgel and flail
arc of breastbones
tight and lean
thrusting forward and back
sidestepping curlew nests
on the summering pasture
fat ewes ruminate
like grey clouds
clinging to the fell
and milky lambs
outrun the breeze
through a mosaic
of dandelions
Lesley Quayle is a poet, editor, short story writer and folk/blues singer. Her work is widely published both online and off and has been nominated for a Forward Prize and placed first to third, as well as being shortlisted, in many poetry competitions, also featuring on BBC Radio 4 and local radio. Living half way up a fellside in the Yorkshire Dales, she is contentedly retired and very happy to be a grandmother and nature watcher.
*****
Penny Sharman: Poem
MY GRANDMA NELLY SANG SONGS
She showed me the tips of her fingers,
said they were white and numb because
the devil sucked them at night when she
forgot to pray.
I only recall her soft skin on her cheeks,
how they were never pale, were quite
yellowy, tanned. Weathered, I guess
from the toil of feeding her six kids,
all that washing by hand, wringing
out socks, pants, dresses and trousers.
She sang Daisy, Daisy and Ask Old
Brown to Tea, that one about celery,
made no sense to me. But what she
told me about mirrors haunts to this day.
She had a thirties dressing table
in her bedroom, made of dark wood,
with three mirrors, the middle one
and one each side that you could
move to see every side of who
you were, the ultimate perspective,
even the back of you.
She told me that sometimes if you
walked past the reflection quickly,
the face you saw was another girl,
like Alice, Goldilocks, Rapunzel,
a girl from another world who
only looked a bit like me.
Penny Sharman is a, photographer, artist and therapist. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University. Her books Fair Ground. Swim With Me In Deep Water, The Day before Joy, Catching the Heather, and The Ash of Time are available to buy from her website: pennysharman.co.uk . Penny is Co Editor of Obsessed with Pipework.
*****
Sue Spiers: Two Poems
DANDARABILLA
Oxyuranus microlepidotus
I camouflage in dapple, hide in hollow jarrah,
hunt kowaris and mice, seek solitude.
I’m kind of chill, reflective, mellow;
a certain sangfroid, unless trapped.
No malice in my venom, it’s tool
enough to snuff a hundred humans.
Drowsiness is a pleasant way to go;
pillow vision like you’re drunk.
I make it difficult for you to swallow,
swell your tongue, slur your sounds.
Paralysis numbs your muscles,
gums your heart as blood congeals.
I’m rarely found, some think I’m extinct.
Poor fellow who wants to touch me.
A FOX POEM
after William Carlos Williams
the cub follows
his nose to a ring
of yellow paving
sits under an iron
table and sniffs
leftover turkey
sinks his teeth
into a chunk
pads to a shrub
and disappears
his black-slash
muzzle returns
a few times
after the turkey
is gone
Sue Spiers lives in Hampshire and works with Winchester Poetry Festival. Sue supports Winchester Muse, T’Articulation and Pens of the Earth groups. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Artemis, Dream Catcher, Fenland Poetry Journal, The North, Prole and South magazines and on-line at Atrium, The High Window, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Lake and Spilling Cocoa. Sue has worked with photographer Janey Devine on the City Space project writing poems to compliment art work. Sue Tweets @spiropoetry
*****
Julia Stothard: Poem
SYMPTOMS
I have felt a chill in my limbs lately
as if I’m defrosting, meltwater
flowing the length of my spine,
my extremities greening.
I can hear the swarm of bees in my chest,
their honeycomb nest dripping
and sticky; sweet mucous
sequestered inside my lungs.
I have found myself rooted to earth,
silent witness to violence
that leaves me dumbstruck,
unable to run; I sway on the spot.
Doctor, I’m tired enough to wilt
when I’m standing, afraid the needles
will drop from my fingertips,
if I slip into REM.
When I fall sleep, sylvan dreams
pare back my bark and I ooze
with amber resin, cedar scented;
I think I’m becoming a forest.
Julia Stothard lives in Shepperton and works at Royal Holloway, University of London in the Business Intelligence team. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Ink, Sweat & Tears, Atrium, Obsessed with Pipework and the competition anthologies for Dempsey & Windle and Ver Poetry.
*****
Laura Strickland: Two Poems
HELIUM IS NOT A LAUGHING MATTER
The police found him
at 6 in the morning
in his black ford fiesta,
a gas bag tied tight
round his head.
*
When they read out his letter
a friend said my face turned grey.
I didn’t have a paint chart
for the colour of grief –
perhaps it was the grey
of a pigeon feather seen on my run,
or the grey of fag ash just as it falls.
It’s only now that I find a match,
when I see it in the face of another.
IF ONLY HE’D CALLED ROUND
that day and delayed her
by five or ten seconds
he could have saved her
like a thousand other times –
when he stayed at home
and gave the pub a miss,
used the zebra
to cross Canal Road,
had a week in Wales
and not France,
got lost and bypassed
the crash on the M6,
turned left at the lights
and not right,
walked her home
when she was drunk,
checked the gas was off
and missed the train.
Out of a thousand times
he got unlucky once –
we all get unlucky once
Laura Strickland is a poet, MA student and carer based in North Yorkshire. Her work has appeared in The North, Northern Gravy, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dreamcatcher, Write Club Open Mic Podcast, Yaffle Press, Black Cat Poetry Press, Leeds Poetry Festival’s Anthology 2023 and has poems in the forthcoming issue of the Frogmore Papers and Morecambe Poetry Festival’s Anthology. Laura is a member of Settle Poets and is working on her first pamphlet.
*****
Brian Swann: Two Poems
DANCER
In our high Catskill pasture, wind whistling under rocks, twisting
like a dervish round sculpted trees and lightly-anchored bushes,
rich shadows reminding me of those in Egypt where Flaubert wrote
and loved the sun and the bronze dancer stripping to the rebecs
of blindfolded musicians, here where a turkey-buzzard banks up
a thermal into a steep turn of sky’s path, stalls, rights himself,
takes in scents clear as guiding stars, earth’s fragrant smokes rising
like delight, until he’s lost in all that sky, leaving me to startled cows
as I step out into the sun, eyes shut, find myself free, leaping about,
arms beating, shirt flapping, flying wordless to the wind’s wild rebec.
SPRING
Sunlight will go on forever now,
struggling through weeds, by seedlings,
going where roots go, sliding along defiant defiles
of winter, down gullies, through decay,
no such thing as a wrong turn, catching
up with itself, balancing itself out,
ploughing through frost and snow
to stream, lake and ocean, opening
and shutting like fish sucking heaviness
out from the air, light as laughter
passing through days’ doorways to break
on rocks with spray, diving down with
currents’ grab and thrust, back and round,
huge as held breath, taut as breath
suspended, bulked with all the creatures in it,
their thrum and strum, light with eyes everywhere,
the full-on force of the land under skies
swooping like Van Gogh’s over fireflies
blinking in blue-eyed grass, light the infinite,
forever catching up with itself in the
echoic cathedral of desire everywhere
you can look, and even where you can’t,
before bubbling up as the yeasty blow
of flowers, the joy in broken shells,
the defiant heft of nothing.
Brian Swann‘s latest collection, Imago, was published in March by Johns Hopkins University Press.He was born in Wallsend, went to Cambridge (BA,MA) and Princeton (PhD). He has published over sixty books in a number of fields
*****
Catherine Whittaker: Two Poems
DINNER
She banged pots with metal spoons
scraped and swore,
burnt vegetables, scolded fish,
scattered prayers over the hissing pressure cooker.
Cried, head down on the Formica table,
when we sauntered in arguing
and my father slammed the back door
on our shrill voices, vowed never to come back.
We rallied round her, ashamed.
The oily air turned blue with curling smoke.
We doused pans with damp tea towels,
helped her clear the table, scrubbed away her tears,
tempted her with tea and bourbon biscuits,
guided her to the threadbare sofa,
a safe raft for her to sail away on, said,
sleep for a bit, he’ll be back soon enough.
CALL ME ROSE
after Names by Wendy Cope
The name her mother gave her,
scrawled on her Birth Certificate
was Margaret Agnes Coles.
No father listed.
In the orphanage they called her Maggie
but she stared at the bars on her cot,
didn’t say a word.
When her new parents arrived
they called her Jean, surname, Watson.
Just before the second world war
started, she was Nurse,
hurried round the wards
with syringes and bedpans
laughed with the patients
and became Sister.
At a party she fell for a pilot,
he had gold wings on his sleeves.
She leaned into her new name.
Mrs Margaret Armstead,
learnt to praise the mountains
that he took her to.
She was called Mum next.
One morning she woke up
to Rose– her new name –
it arrived fast as a comet and lit her up.
She said to everyone,
Call me Rose. That’s my name.
after Names by Wendy Cope
Catherine Whittaker won The Second Light Poetry Competition and was short-listed for the Bridport Prize. Her poems have been published in Under the Radar, Dreamcatcher, Sarasvati, Obsessed with Pipework and many others. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, This Place I Know, (a new anthology of Cumbrian Poetry) edited by Kerry Derbishire, Kim Moore and Liz Nuttall, amongst others. She is currently working on a pamphlet of poems about the Lake District.
*****
Simon Williams: Two Poems
SMALL STONE
Dorug found the stone on the hill,
napped it to an arrowhead,
bound it to a cedar shaft,
added it to his quiver.
Out hunting boar, he missed a big’un,
shot the arrow over its head,
shot it in the woods to some dark place.
Cassia found a heart-shaped stone
in the middle of the forest.
She shouldn’t have walked there,
her father would have frowned,
but the lapidarii bored a hole, fed a thong
and she slipped the cord round her neck. Much later,
it dropped by the stream when the leather broke.
William picked a stone by the river,
was about to skim it on the water,
when he saw a hole, obviously drilled.
He took it home, kept it on his writing desk,
rolled it in his palm
stuck his quill in it, as a stand.
He wondered where it went when he moved house.
Laura oiled the boards in the study
before the carpet arrived.
Tucked under the skirting there was something
like a stone. She got a kitchen knife –
slipped it out. A flint arrowhead
the museum confirmed, though with an odd hole.
She had it as a broach, until the clasp broke.
WHY WILLIAM CAXTON DIDN’T PRINT A BIBLE
The press is working well;
clean print, time after time.
We can do a thousand sheets a day,
when we can get the paper.
It’s the type that holds us back,
particularly ‘b’s. How
can you print Genesis 5
without the ‘b’s. Begat. Begat.
Dozens of them on a single page.
We need a shorthand: ‘All these
Biblical blokes (three ‘b’s just there)
fathered all these others.
They didn’t think about production,
when they wrote it. All scribes, see;
‘b’s come so easily to them,
regular gang of apiarists.
Type comes from the continent,
Gutenberg’s best, costs a fortune,
but they never provide enough ‘b’s. And
don’t get me started on long, sodding s’s.
Note: A long ‘s’ looks something like this ‘∫’
Simon Williams (www.simonwilliams.info) has been writing since his teens, when he was mentored at university by Roger McGough and Pete Morgan. His first collection was published in 1981. Since then, he has had eight further collections and his tenth, The Pickers and Other Tales was published by Vole in February 2024. Simon was elected The Bard of Exeter in 2013, founded the large-format magazine, The Broadsheet and co-published the PLAY anthology, in memory of his young grandson, in 2018.
The High Window 