*****
Sue Aldred • Davina Allison • Ruth Aylett • Annie Brechin • Sarah J. Bryson• Jim Conwell • Belinda Cooke • Rani Drew • Tim Dwyer • Tony Flynn • Neil Fulwood • Philip Gross • David Hale • Robert Hamberger • Oz Hardwick • Alethia Hayden • Anthony Hill • Fred Johnston • Pen Kease • Vicky Kidd • Phil Kirby • Iris Anne Lewis • Christine McNeill • Sally Michaelson • John Mole • Mary O’Donnell • Tom Phillips • Alan Price • Myra Schneider • John Short • Marjorie Sweetko • David Underdown • Susan Utting • Michael Vince • Stephen Wade • Alice Willington
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*****
Sue Aldred: Two Poems
THE DRAWING PRIZE ACCEPTANCE
I call this piece Santorini Polaroid. Not
my best work. It wasn’t an artistic choice
to use Value biros from Tesco, it was just
they’re cheap. A large drawing like this can take
a year: I need something to do in the evenings,
something that will keep me on the go.
As an artist you get used to being turned down,
and being poor. So it’s really important
to have a daily routine, just making a thing
that doesn’t cost you very much. In fact
it’s not based on a Polaroid, but a photo
in a travel magazine I saw. The last
piece I did was much better I think,
but it didn’t get selected. What can I say.
TATTOO
my grandson the tattoo artist has carved
an image of my late husband
a perfect likeness with uncanny detail
onto his thigh
how touching
my husband moves
much more these days
than he did at the end
more than for years
having been given
a kind of life
my skin cancers fade
to insignificance while I weep
at that moving image
on my grandson’s leg
Sue Aldred graduated in English from London University. She then joined the Cambridge Footlights and went on to work professionally both as a singer and actor, and later as a psychotherapist. She grew up in North Wales, now lives in London, and her son and family live in Cambridge.
*****
Davina Allison: Two Poems
WINTER GROUND, 1965
He gave me a wood violet, said
they grow abundantly near water.
Lit a cigarette
at night, I
thread shells
catalogue them
while outside
fishermen
weight nets.
DESERT FRAGMENTS
You stay up late
write to me
about the orange tree
that you grew
from a sapling.
X
A note left under
a violet
in water.
South, there’s a garden
where you’ll find
oranges,
almost ripe.
Davina Allison’s work has appeared in a range of literary journals, including the Australian Book Review, the London Magazine, Wild Court King’s College London, The Well Review, The Glasgow Review of Books, The Lampeter Review, The Galway Review, the Australian Poetry Journal, and Poetry Scotland. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Australian Catholic University Literature Prize and the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. She has a Classics degree, two master’s degrees (one with Honours), and a DPhil in academic syntax.
*****
Ruth Aylett: Two Poems
ANGULAR MOMENTUM
You dervish-span in the garden until dizzy,
toppled over laughing into a soft lawn landing,
and sunlight sang over high-held tulip heads.
Under your feet the earth slowed
just a little with the wind of your motion,
my day a split-second longer,
though there’s no measuring system for joy.
Today light explodes red from the tulips,
the grass is spring-green and lush,
but endlessly level, unmarked.
PLAYING SIMCITY IN SHEFFIELD
Building, building, building,
on the tumbleweed East end
flattened by the 80s into
grey warehouses and emptiness.
My gleaming graphical residencies
for all the children who move away,
for Somalis and Yeminis
and everyone jammed into small rooms.
Here are virtually new roads, greenery,
imaginary new industries
on top of old steel works;
once again cars nose-to-tail parked
and the pixel-pubs heaving on
happening streets.
But SimCity mass transit always fails,
programmed by Americans;
the sim population revolts
demands low taxes,
the buses stay chaotic and competing.
And here comes Godzilla
brexiting through fragile modernity,
tail smashing the fake promises.
Ruth Aylett lives and works in Edinburgh and her poetry has been widely published in magazines, online and in anthologies. She has been known to appear at readings with a robot. her pamphlets Pretty in Pink (4Word) and Queen of Infiniate Space (Maytree) came out in 2021. For more see https://ruthaylett.org/
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Annie Brechin: Poem
THE UNEXPECTED
They fed us fire whisky in the limousine
and we started kissing
your tongue small red and pointed
like a birds eye chilli
my Irish friend had never seen me with a girl
at the club you pulled me aside
and into the ladies
on my knees you slapped me
your taste like limes
mad beating heart saying yes risk this yes
nameless your tight skin
breasts like apples
you were all the fruit
rainbow on my lips
exit: dazed by night/our friends’ unsure grins
peach of the desert
if I could find you again
I would let you bite into me
with your crazy eyes
Annie Brechin lives, writes and performs in Edinburgh. She has been published in Magma, Stand, Bad Lilies, Fourteen Poems, B O D Y, Paris Lit Up, Rising and others. Her debut The Mouth of Eulalie was released by Blue Diode in March 2022.
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Sarah J. Bryson: Two Poems
1.
LONG-SHADOWED AFTERNOON
The cat rolls on the dusty patio, exposes
her golden underbelly and stretches
in a convex curve, her claws extended.
The clump of pink Japanese Anemones
has exceeded the allocated space. Their petals
are translucent – pearlised in the low sunlight.
I’d like to ask them how it feels to be so secure
in the soil, to be certain of their ground, decorated
by marmalade hoverflies with their darting flight.
To my right the old cotoneaster, sculpted to a dome,
with exposed skeleton, stands next to the magnolia
only a few years in, starting to take up the space it needs.
This garden has seen the children grow and leave, return
and leave again. I picture the old climbing frame, the slide
turned into a water chute, the sprinkler lit with rainbows.
At dusk the rooks and jackdaws will gather as usual
for their ritual outing – a clattering cacophony, jostling
for air space in their flight over the roof and further afield.
In February they will build their nests, high in the trees.
Weeks later the parents will defend eggs and fledglings
mobbing the thieving red kites, with gang warfare.
I imagine the possible years ahead, away from here,
a smaller place with a courtyard garden space perhaps:
time to replay planting successes on a smaller scale.
But who knows what’s next for each of us?
I am older now than my mother was
when she became a widow.
BREWING STORM
There’s an an empty space just behind my sternum.
I feel it most keenly in the pause before the next breath.
You take my hand and we walk away. As we pass the field
the mower’s racket rises above the thick smell of cut meadow
and along the un-mown verge ahead, tiny patches of sky-blue
flutter amongst the grasses. We step out, reach a rhythm.
Tarmac patches have melted to shiny black treacle in places
as dark velvet clouds accumulate on the horizon.
Further ahead on the road a mirage with its shimmer
draws us forward to the hill’s summit, to the next scene
to future choices: left, right, straight on. Or even turn back.
The air is heavy. At least, soon – perhaps – it might rain.
Sarah J. Bryson is interested in words, words for well being, people and nature and the connections between these elements. She has poems in print journals, anthologies and on line.
*****
Jim Conwell: Poem
CLUTTER
I shared a house with someone
who filled it with clutter. They told
me that the clutter was not there
and that I should stop saying it was.
And then
one day, they died.
Were carried from
the house feet first.
And then
I was alone
in the house
with the clutter.
I went out to my neighbours and I asked
What can I do with this clutter?
And they said
Why are you always on about clutter?
Do something useful.
Jim Conwell’s background is London Irish and the themes of exile and dislocation are strong in his work, which is also informed by the psychoanalytic experience of his professional life and particularly by the issue of trauma. Humour is used to mitigate and gain perspective. He is published widely in magazines and in three anthologies. He has had two poems shortlisted in the Bridport Poetry Prize and was recently longlisted for the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Competition.
*****
Belinda Cooke: Four Poems
SECOND WAVE
Bayview Cottage, Skye
Waking early in this silent place,
your voice
so big it astounds me
each tiny bead of my
voice-over, carefully threaded
and held by you –
till the slow lifting
of your arms, the still-life
of your half-opened lips,
that great wall of sound
that is your dying.
GOD IS EVERYWHERE
When we were children
we were taught to believe in God,
for he was omnipotent and omniscient –
we learned our lesson well:
Is he in the tea pot?
Is he in the teacup?
Yes, yes, says the teacher,
God is everywhere.
But your death keeps
growing into all of
the spaces you aren’t,
the places you aren’t,
this flat, black stony beach,
its whitewash sky, a nowhere,
leaving me, stuck here in this
ok cottage space, not mine …
I know you won’t be there,
but I want to call you,
solid, as a shirt you’re
holding against me.
While my idiot’s tale is
now told only to the wall,
and my days of not
being judged are over.
HEAVY WINDS
Woke to heavy winds, from hesitant sleep,
half-waking dreams, intense, contents forgotten,
just the dry eye, you each day, more solid, till
I want to make that call, then the realisation …
Woke to great winds, holed up here,
in this utopia of leisurely days, rising and
breaking into my already broken sleep,
with only fatigue now to hold me back.
Touch is the one thing people seek.
What is it about the hand held at the last?
Remember, how I felt your pain,
how you said it helped?
Power to stronger power,
love in the abstract, God in us?
What’s worse, this thing, so intensely real
and immanent, or knowing it will fade?
CODA
I will go out at dawn to see the mountain.
I will inhale the breeze, and sea-wrack –
no longer afraid of the shifting greys,
of days when all’s concealed –
the sky disturbed so deep it seems
the mountain has all but disappeared.
Belinda Cooke was born in Reading of Irish parents. She graduated from Liverpool, and did PhD at Goldsmiths College, London. Her poetry, translations, essays and reviews have been published widely. She is best known for her work on Marina Tsvetaeva. She has a number of collections of poetry, and one book of prose: From the Back of Beyond to Westland Row: a Mayo Woman’s Story. Her The Days of the Shorthand Shovelists is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.
*****
Rani Drew: Poem
GRAVEYARDS
As places go, graveyards are not
unpleasant sites. They are well-tended and
have visitors on a regular basis. The dead
are looked after with flowers and prayers,
as they might not have been when they
were alive. Here they get the best
of both worlds: a full stretch of earth
in this one, and a stake in the next.
Silence breathes endlessly with the yews,
their long branches stretching out to shade
the graves. So much peace lives here,
the living begin to envy the dead.
As they tend the graves, clear the overgrowth,
pull the weeds out, water the flowers,
they slide into the mono world of
memories where shadows rule,
speech goes dumb and feelings are extinct.
Making peace the last word,
these graveyard-lovers find
everyday living devoid of meaning.
Life begins to imitate death, others are
absent and contact non-existent
Unless the graveyard is invaded by barbarians,
the illusion of peace will persist.
Rani Drew is a poet who has published four collections and has been widely published in journals abroad and in the UK. She is also a playwright, novelist and an academic writer. Some of her short stories have been translated into in French, Romanian and Hungarian. In 2005, Skrev Press, UK published Around the World in Twelve Stories. Her first novel, The Dog’s Tale, is set in Hungary and is published by Whyte Tracks.
*****
Tim Dwyer: Four Poems
1926 GIBSON
for Johnny G
Left in the case for months,
he holds it again— surprised
it’s still in tune.
He runs through a medley
of fifty-year-old songs, when
the world was almost new
and tomorrow wasn’t
such a long time.
Note: allusions to ‘I Remember Loving You’ by Utah Phillips and ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’ by Bob Dylan
GRACE NOTES
Walking home
after closing time
in my late sixties,
passing a sycamore tree
I finally hear
blackbird singing
in the dead of night
BEFORE THE GIG
Andy Irvine, Bangor Court House, 16 April 2023
Andy is encircled
by longtime friends
bouzouki and mandolin,
each with their story
holding them on his lap
one by one, he turns the peg
for a final tuning,
and a thrill rises
as the song begins.
AT McHUGH’S SESSION
Bay of Biscay
She sings of a sailor
long years at sea,
and deep in the night
he returns to his love
but cannot embrace,
he’s now a ghost, lost
in relentless waves.
Seven long years.
There’s no song for you
and your beloved,
who fades, year by year,
into a living ghost.
Tim Dwyer’s poems appear regularly in Irish and UK publications, recently in Acumen, Cyphers, Under The Radar, Masculinity Anthology (Broken Sleep), haiku and tanka journals, and previously in The High Window. His chapbook is Smithy Of Our Longings (Lapwing). Originally from Brooklyn, he lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland, and is a regular at local traditional singing circles and folk-trad sessions.
*****
Tony Flynn: Poem
FALLING APART
Your knitting
slips its needles
as you drift
into sleep –
a falling apart
of itself
on the floor
at your feet:
a bluish haze –
loops and swirls
of colour
commingle
in ways
beyond the ken
of any pattern
once supposed.
Tony Flynn’s latest collection The Heart Itself is published by LegalHighsPress, Hull (2023). He has previously published three highly acclaimed volumes A Strange Routine (Bloodaxe Books 1980); Body Politic (Bloodaxe Books 1992) and The Mermaid Chair- New and Selected Poems( Dreamcatcher Books 2008). He is the recipient of a number of literary awards, including an Eric Gregory Award, an Arts Council of England Writer’s Award, and an award from The Royal Literary Fund.
*****
Neil Fulwood: Four Poems
VESTMENTS
At the bench, he wore a smock.
The bench: vice clamped
at one end, the wall above it
lined with tools and attachments,
arranged according to purpose,
shape and size. The smock:
a stubby pencil in one pocket,
rag in the other. A nail
on the back of the door
for when he shucked it off,
the smock, and hung it up.
Pulled on overalls instead,
slid onto a crawl-board,
swung an inspection lamp
against the shadowy crevasse
of subframe and engine block.
NEXUS
A week on from Bonfire Night – a week
of hushed phone calls and hospital visits –
and the estate decides it’s not done
with blistering the night sky. Asterisks
of crimson, green and silver conjure
their own footnotes, location scouting
this square mile of shabby streets
in search of stark architecture
and shadowy nooks – that nexus
of brutalism and Argento homage.
Armistice was yesterday. A question mark
hangs over discharge. There is transport
to be arranged, a care package
put in place. Fun-size incendiaries
blunderbuss the evening. Speculation
slaps spin on the excess: lottery win,
whizzbang bash for a milestone birthday,
gesture of sympathy scorched in cordite.
LUNCH BREAK, LATE SHIFT
That last round trip, bus packed
with office drones heading home,
and you still an hour off your break.
The early doors crowd are getting their first in
while you’re handing over
to your relief driver. The coffee shop
you sometimes while away a break in
has drawn down the shutters.
A wander round the city centre
is a tour of closed doors, dimmed
lights, nowhere to go but the gulag
of a manky canteen down an alleyway
where crime scene tape wouldn’t be out of place.
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY
Canteen talk turns to politics.
Opinion muscles around the place,
sleeves rolled up, the tattoo
of somebody’s prejudice
misspelled and looking rough –
a cheap backstreet job.
Outside, the dull steady insistence
of a reversing horn, banksman
shouting instructions, a bus
backing slowly into a bay:
“Keep going, keep going, right
hand down a bit —“ the slap
of palm on bodywork “— you’ll do!”
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, England, where he still lives and works as a bus driver. He has four collections out with Shoestring Press: No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelledand The Point of the Stick with a fourth scheduled for publication next year. Additionally he has published a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.
*****
Philip Gross: Four Poems
valguse vaikus / the silence of the forest
xxxxxxxxxxxxA forest, a real one –
xxxxxxxxI could give you day, time,
map location, the coordinates between
xxxxxxxxxxxxthe chance of a clearing and a cloud
xxxxxxxxthat, passing, sets a shape of light
amongst us,
xxxxxxxxxxxxsculptural.
xxxxxxxxA Standing Form
of silence. Centuries
xxxxxxxxxxxxof rusty spruce-mulch underfoot
xxxxxxxxand a catch in the wind’s
breath,
xxxxxxxxxxxxurgent
xxxxxxxxas a heart beat
missed. A stillness in which if
xxxxxxxxxxxxa single thing falls, one dry needle
xxxxxxxxor this phenomenal
world,
xxxxxxxxxit would be
xxxxx(in a way that in this
life we never are) entirely heard.
*
sipelgate vaikus / the silence of the ants
If it’s the silence
of the anthill’s melée (like mass panic with a purpose)
xxxxxxxxthat impresses you (the fire ants
piling their nest-tinder round the base of trees
xxxxxxxxas if for someone’s burning at the stake)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxre-tune your senses. On chemical
wavelengths, every bump-and-twiddle meeting, ant
xxxxxxxxto ant, is shouted conversation,
an order relayed. If we could hear the code
xxxxxxxxit would be pandemonium.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAt most, we register a tang,
a pang of formic acid, rising from them like a city’s
xxxxxxxxexhalation – almost soothing,
from a high enough perspective: a great body’s
xxxxxxxxsweat, that work-worn, frantic, tireless,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxtimeless thing, the sigh of life.
from Now, in Vaikus
One duck… One other
further off. (They are not multiple)
One flip-splash, out
of being. For a long time, nothing.
Where it bobs up, you already know,
will not be where you thought to look.
Two swans, equally. Now and then a gull.
Each a separate incident, not
‘unrelated’ but related on a scale I don’t expect to see.
One crow’s croak. Across the water, one house, and another,
in the far woods; there are villages, I know, and have to believe,
but this evening’s lesson is on the one-ness of things.
Their one-by-one-ness, all together. This is more than unity.
*
There is the big voice of the forest: wind
that floods, like a river not contained
to banks or gradient, a river that can wander,
that sinks away and reappears at will. Wind
leaning onto the tops, a long slow wave
that does not exhaust itself breaking.
And there is the small voice, never
quite exhausted either: bend, bend;
a few of us break but we bend.
There is the big voice, big wind rolling
here and there, whichever way it’s marching.
And small voices, one here, one there,
not quite where you look or, when
you look, not there again.
Philip Gross has published nearly 30 collections of poetry in 40 years. His latest, The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He is a keen collaborator, e.g. with Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (Mulfran, 2018) and with artist Valerie Coffin Price and Welsh-language poet Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (Seren, 2021). The Shores of Vaikus, a creative re-inhabiting of Estonia, his refugee father’s birthplace, is due from Bloodaxe in late 2024.
*****
David Hale: Two Poems
HALF-MARRIED
Sun almost vertical, we slip through the door
of St Martin’s, find the Reverend Theophilus
Webb adjusting his surplice. Chin set, grimace
on his thin theological face, we can tell
he’s not best pleased to be officiating today
believing the groom a wastrel who shuttles
between ale-house and mill. Still, duty’s duty,
and in god’s name he’ll do it whoever comes.
Leaving him to collect himself we watch as
the betrothed step through the door, slatternly
sister, an uncle and two limping brothers
in their wake. Not exactly regulars in this draughty
medieval church, she holds a posy of campions,
cornflowers in one reddened fist, he a fixed smile,
suspecting the reverend accounts him a rogue.
Cursory greetings over, clerk in place, the Reverend
opens his book and intones Dearly Beloved,
we are gathered here in the sight of god while
trying not to stare at the boil on Ann Thomas’s
neck. John Pegler lets the words drift over him
wonders if he’s making a mistake. Reverie cut short
by and thereto I give thee my troth, he places
a ring on the book with some unclipped silver.
Silence, as clerk and priest eye the coins.
Ann turns to him, but all Pegler can do is whisper
it’s all I have. Webb later writes in the register:
John Pegler and Ann Thomas were half-married
August 11th 1732. I proceeded no further
because they paid me but one half, 2s 6d.
How I would have liked to been a fly on the wall
when Ann rounded on John in the graveyard.
MORNING TEA CEREMONY
Steam, the quietness of a sleeping eye,
oil of bergamot, the happiness of dogs.
How I wish all mornings could be like this,
devotional, rational, undisturbed
by temple bells and the direction of traffic,
just the unshakeable logic of tap,
teaspoon, solitude and the wisdom of gas.
For some reason I know that happiness
hangs from a chain, a kettle
is a blunt instrument to advance the day,
suspect only when the mind fissures
will this familiar process be broken,
at this hour everyone is equal, if
I’m not careful, heat will scald my tongue.
David Hale was born in Scotland but lives in Gloucestershire. After pamphlets from Happenstance and Templar, his first full collection Dancing under a Bloodless Moon was published by Eyewear in December 2020. He is a carer, gardener and teaches English to refugees and asylum seekers.
*****
Robert Hamberger: Three Poems
BLUE
When I half-wake at night and glimpse your back
by the dimmest bulb from a far streetlight
I know I’m safe at last. Tonight I lack
nothing, no-one. I should sleep easy, despite
unsettled dreams where the old fears quiver
their contours. What shadows can I see
if our duvet slips down and you shiver?
You might even turn over to face me
if your private dream allows; but for now
here’s the cobalt-blue slope of your shoulder,
dark hillock of your shoulder-blade, furrow
along your spine, its cleft of lavender.
When my kiss flits your nape it won’t wake you,
until our room recovers the palest blue.
SNAIL
That snail stuck to our glass door spoils my view
of the garden. I itch to chuck it, but
you won’t let me. Don’t you dare! It’s got
a right to be there – as much right as you.
I was here first, I want to argue.
Must I love its glutinous thumbprint?
This bulbous blot, glued like the stickiest
kiss on my glass, a whorled curlicue.
Do snails sleep? Is it dead already?
I pull the curtain back at night when you’re
dreaming, and squint to understand. Steady
now – it’s a snail. We’ve locked the door.
Next morning it’s still there, pebble-heavy.
Tomorrow I’ll swipe its smeary signature.
3 AM BREAK-IN
If a window is smashed it’s because
the one outside wants in,
wants whatever inside has
that outside has not.
Could a membrane between
less and more call to be broken,
for a curtain to be swept aside
to claim whatever they can grab?
Inside, a scream
alerts outside that broken glass
means injury – this is my home,
my sacred space stormed, withheld.
Scream makes the dispossessed one
run past potted roses, lilac,
where night remains
unwelcoming, without.
Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes. He won The London Magazine Poetry Prize, 2023, and his work has appeared in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. His fourth collection Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: Finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021.
*****
Oz Hardwick: Four Poems
THE RATIONAL EXPLANATION
Now, when I’m not asleep, I sense the weight at the bottom of the bed, not as witch or hungry beast, but as the care that gently unhooks language and drapes it over the nightstand. Even a child knows not to lower the covers, so I cocoon myself tightly in the coffee-coloured dark, listening to whatever gifts the wireless brings. Hourly news bulletins talk of tactics and defences, the foolishness of trusting proximity, the invisible enemy that lurks like a monster under the bed; but in between, the DJ spins mixes of Max Richter and Al Jolson set to waltz time, and I feel the bed sway to the rhythm of the form that is now leaning over me, inviting me to dance. And it could be my mother at a Christmas party, my sister in a caravan park clubhouse, or my first girlfriend at a school disco; but the blankets have turned to wet clay hardening on a fractured limb, and when I stretch my arm out into the eye-dark room, there are only witches, beasts and monsters, and the nightstand is nothing but a word in a novel that I didn’t finish.
THE END OF AVIATION
Grounded balloons dot the land, sparking alarms and choking the livestock, murmuring their memories of sky. I remember a story I read about the day they invented gravity, how everything fell and the earth, till then plump full of growing things that stretched towards the Sun, became a clutter of stones, seas, newspapers, and abandoned laundry. Out of the chaos grew sweepers, feng shui advisers, and YouTube life coaches, all shifting stuff from place to place, as if it would make a difference. And now it’s balloons we call to ground: spy balloons, party balloons, hot air balloons from the madcap family films of our childhood – there’s Jack Lemon, there’s David Niven, all falling, falling – and we can’t see the grass for torn silk and rubber, and we can’t hear our own thoughts for the cry of sirens.
IT’S ATEMPORALITY, CHARLIE BROWN
A leaf loops, perfect as a cartoonist’s sketch, and a newspaper, lobbed by a whistling boy on a ramshackle bike, lands dead centre on the doormat. It’s someone else’s memory of 1971, with Jagger in the headlines and idle talk of our relationship to Europe. World Cup, World Wars, the price of butter, and a fridge in every kitchen. A butterfly lands on a basset hound’s nose, bur it’s only a drawing, and I consider the possibility that everything I see through my tortoiseshell specs may be nothing but an artist’s impression of someone else’s flawed account. The radio’s stuck on Funny, Funny, Sugar, Sugar, and somewhere in time and space, Big Business is stripping the hearts from dying planets. It can’t happen here, I tell myself, as an old man cycles away on a Chopper Mk 1, a cartoon beagle cradled on its crossbar, effortlessly breaking the fourth wall.
RATIONALISATION: AN ORAL HISTORY
The old gods disappeared without explanation, though I remember them lounging in state in hospital beds, scorning grapes and demanding wine. It was an age of tiled mazes and dead, dead ends. Nymphs knelt and wept in unbrushed rooms, while beasts gambolled back and forth to the atrium store for tissues, ambrosia, and word search magazines. Followers would arrive with flowers and stay for hours, or at least until they turned to trees or slayed themselves in a ritual frenzy, and a Specialist dressed in tropical drabs would take notes beyond the range of human hearing. I was only there to make up numbers, though each time I did, one of the gods would sigh and say they’d heard it before. Then, one evening, the gods weren’t there, the hospital wasn’t there, and there was only a kiosk selling tissues, lottery tickets, and word search magazines. I bought a ticket, but the numbers were crushed grapes and dead flowers and, however meticulously I searched, there were no words.
Oz Hardwick is an award-winning European poet, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published ‘about a dozen’ full collections and chapbooks, most recently My Life as a Time Traveller: A Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (Hedgehog, 2023). In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for ‘a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry’. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.
*****
Alethia Hayden: Poem
KEEP ME THROUGH THE COLD
The whole night through
Our hands catch
Like willing lovers
Or children adrift
Keep me through the cold
With warm eyes
And dry hands
And anoint me in the balm that
Trickles, hot in your palms
Through the window our devotion settles
And the trees seem to blossom overnight
Alethia Hayden is twenty-six and when she is not working, she paints and writes. She has been writing poetry for a long time, but has been wary of publishing it.
*****
Anthony Hill: Three Poems
DRIFT
Having noticed how drifts incline
to silence, I have found the time
to stand by one and wait. Nothing
will happen, of course, nothing
unless you count an easterly wind
blowing a spume of snow into the wood
nearby, the way the snowflakes are blown
between the trees, tall sentinel pines.
I would call it dissipation, or confusion,
or a diaspora. Some flakes are cushioned
by the floor of the wood, its crosshatched
bed of needles. I like to stand and watch
them slowly melt. They die the death
of aspirations, singly, a final breath,
leaving only the faintest of imprimatur
before they disappear forever.
This drift is pitted with black olives,
rain which fell before I arrived,
which has given way to further snow.
Fall back and I lie like a star,
or saviour, rising only to debunk
that myth, happy to let that mountebank
remain the person I am in absentia,
the shape of no one in particular.
There is something grey and grave about
a drift, one seeded with grapeshot
like this, sullied at dusk when a flock
of redwings blows over as black
as coal, a sleet, just as you turn for home,
the drift darkening, meek as a lamb
in the half-light, the shape of who you were
growing vague, as blurred as nowhere.
KITE
On afternoons like this, the doors left wide open,
the wind bullying the clouds across the sky,
my mind turns to that kite we made
together, a crate less inclined to fly
than to crash, I thought, a crude
bamboo cross lashed together with string
and placed on the table while we prepared the skin –
brown wrapping paper varnished and allowed to dry.
Already it seemed too fraught, too highly strung to withstand
what it must, those full-bodied, tub-thumping gusts of wind
that raged outside making a mockery
of the garden. But we – no, I – was wrong, the kite soon
found its airy element, translucent when it caught the sun.
Never one to aim too high, I needed anchorage
terra firma, footholds more than fancy,
though I confess once it took flight, like you, I
felt the pull of some other language,
a febrile thrill translated down the line
when the wind tried to wrest the kite from my grip.
To make something of nothing, to give shape
and embody a blunt force I could feel
only at one remove, to create and to cull,
the string scything through the indivisible
wind. On afternoons like this I still
hear the line singing
when the wind was at its height and the string
pulled taut, a shrill treble that frayed
at the edge when the wind slackened off.
We were the instruments to be played,
lending a voice to the wind, one rooted to the earth.
THE LITTLE STREET
Het Straat je by Vermeer, c 1657-58
It will rain soon, those clouds tell us as much,
no deluge, a passing shower only,
but enough to darken the bricks
a shade or two and to puzzle the nearby
canal. They have been warm to the touch
all morning, the bricks, their ochre reds
absorbing the sun. Think how those shutters
will peel every summer, paint
lifted from the wood, blain by blain. Life goes on
as it always will now, unaltered,
a woman bending near the tripe gutter,
the children playing, and at the open
doorway a woman sewing. The artist
knows this is life pared down, mundane
even, the domestic harmonies
quietly observed, the beauty of the quotidian –
in case we pass and do not notice.
And those other lives we do not see
but know are there behind the frontage,
one trying on a dress, another crying
alone, and someone reading a letter,
all the unregarded moments of our being
here just the once, and here forever unaged,
our small concerns and yet ones that matter.
Anthony Hill is a retired English teacher who lives in County Durham. Dreich published his chapbook Chet Baker in Belgium in 2020.
*****
Fred Johnston: Poem
WOLF
I met a wolf
We encountered one another at the end of a mediaeval street
in darkness –
He was folded like a drunk creeping home head down
low to the old cobbles
He gave me one distracted glance and kept going, guilt making
him sleek.
I could see him unsteady
before a toilet mirror trying to patch himself up, pulling fierce
faces, trying to get himself
back for going home, make the old familiar skin fit
to wear over the threshold
to hint that he’d been nowhere, seen no one, done nothing
All evening.
I could understand why
he nursed the dark and would have preferred to be invisible
He was ashamed as only
awolf past his youth and his fire can be, all fight gone too –
Don’t look at me
was in his moon-yellow eyes. I am not here. And I might add,
Neither are you.
Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951. My most recent collection of poems is Rogue States (Salmon Poetry – 2019.) Recent poems have appeared in The Spectator, The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and the Moth. He lives in Galway city.
*****
Penny Kease: Poem
Pen Kease is old enough to know better, but doesn’t, despite degrees at Bath Spa, Reading, the OU and Warwick and almost twenty years as a teacher of English. She lives in Oxfordshire, in an ordinary house with an ordinary husband and extraordinary cat. Pen Kease is been widely published in anthologies, magazines and poetry websites and her first collection, This Side of the Sea, is due to be published by Yaffle Press in April this year.
*****
Phil Kirby: Four Poems
THIS SPRING
(for Beth)
I hadn’t understood the time involved,
how much waiting had to be endured before
the acorn that you planted at the age of two
turned into something we could call a tree.
We’ve proffered little care: an unchanged
plastic pot has surely bound the roots;
scrawny weeds still populate the surface soil
each spring. It must be down to us that
what should have been a sturdy oak by now
is still a waist-high sapling. It needs more space,
more years than we have left, to swell, develop
heartwood, become the stuff of galleons.
Give it a century or so. Perhaps then, some
other child playing in an autumn afternoon will
gather handfuls of its mast; ask – as you did –
if trees can grow and grow until they burst
and the parent, for a moment stilled, silent
in the weakening October light, will bend
to smooth a wayward curl, smile and wonder
what the coming thirty years may bring.
HIDDEN MATTERS
The stars are out, and though it’s clear
that none could really be
the soul of a loved one lost,
some childish whim persists,
some age-old glimmering hope.
Fool to think that anyone
looks down, or smiles on
where I stand; these are not
the mansions of heaven, the lamps
of angels aglow. Above me
there’s an endless dark, blue-black
as magpies’ wings, holding on
to darker things, guessed at
and invisible to naked eyes.
So much that matters
hidden from the telescope,
its polished convex lens.
Such uncertainties. Even
these pinholes of light, pricked
in the fabric of space and time,
could be a constellation of lies.
THE DRESSER SONNETS #1
How does a hand-carved alabaster pot,
no more than centimetres high, contain
an ancient world; the parched and tumbled scree
of ochre mountains; creature-headed gods;
the chambered tombs of all the pharaohs, dead?
This pale translucent vessel somehow holds
a dawn muezzin’s call to prayer; clear moons;
the placid waters of The Nile at dusk.
The gift-shop craftsman may have turned it out
last week, but still, the swirling brick-red veins
within the fabric of the rock, its form,
are speaking of a monumental past.
Perhaps he knows – or doesn’t know; cares more
about the sun-struck tourists queueing up.
THE DRESSER SONNETS #3:
A Second For An Only Child
It comes up every year: the second child
we almost had. The joke that you were not
enough engenders slightly hollow laughs
because, in one sense, that’s the simple truth.
Our plan (if one could call it such) was two.
But that became displaced by fate, or by
some callous trickster god who grinned and scorned
our lack of faith. Who knows, if we’d had both,
how altered life would be? The point is this:
you are our only child. Okay, at times
it’s like we’re in a room that’s crying out
for things we can’t quite put our fingers on
but see – it’s on the dresser now, for luck –
we framed the four leafed clover that you found.
Phil Kirby’s full collections are Watermarks (Arrowhead, 2009) and The Third History (Lapwing, 2018). Since then, poems have appeared in Acumen, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Ireland, Stand and The High Window, amongst many others. He is a member and Treasurer of Fire River Poets in Taunton. His new pamphlet is Towards A Theory Of Being Human (Dreich, 2023). Writing as P.K. Kirby, a teen novella, Hidden Depths (Applefire, 2016), is on Kindle.
*****
Vicky Kidd: Two Poems
DEATH OF A HILL WALKER
80-year-old man pronounced dead at scene after fall on Wednesday
He was perhaps skinny with a goatee beard and snow-white hair
and wore his everyday boots, surprisingly polished, to climb up,
his old tweed jacket and a collarless shirt worn to softness.
Maybe he paused to catch his breath at times
and paced on with the steady steps of a walker
scraping the mud off his boots in a familiar rhythm
and stepped up into a buffeting wind that took his breath;
Did the beauty of the view he saw
confirm a generous certainty,
that carried him beyond life? Or evoke
indifference beyond bearing?
Did the fear of pain without recourse,
of loss of agency, or self itself, overcome
the clutch of stomach bones and blood?
Maybe he made his peace with it, reviewed his days
summoned the son he was, the lover, partner, parent, friend
leaned into the wind and stepped into a moment’s agony.
THE SERIOUS DARK-EYED CHILD LOOKS BACK AT ME
Bedbound, bird-boned, weak, near blind,
frail in her hospital bed, at home,
She knows with what conviction
she must turn away,
withdraw connection,
affection, sink into her history
To find the space to go.
It’s hard labour
as her heart thuds to a stop,
as the last cells gutter
in random firings,
her brain falters,
her lungs heave
one last long exhale.
We wait with her
as she cools, stiffens, departs.
The serious dark- eyed
child looks back at me
and she is gone.
Vicky Kidd read Social Anthropology at Cambridge. She spent the next thirty years working in the labour and trades union movement. She recovered by retraining as a psychotherapist. She lives in the Chiltern Hills.
*****
Iris Anne Lewis: Four Poems
CLONYCAVAN MAN
They tried to show respect –
subdued the lighting,
prescribed the path to follow
around the exhibition,
displayed the body in its own partitioned cell
as in a prehistoric chambered tomb.
Like tourists window-shopping
we peer at his naked corpse.
His facial pores are visible.
He sports a goatee beard.
Standing high above his head
a shock of russet hair,
elaborately styled.
Embarrassed by our voyeurism
we tear away our gaze,
read the exhibition notes.
He was a wealthy man,
his hair coiffured with pomade
of resin harvested from pine trees
growing in the Pyrenees.
A king, perhaps?
Three axe blows split his skull,
slit his nose. His nipples sliced
off his breast.
Pitched into an Irish bog.
And there he lay preserved
in peat, until, plucked from his earthly tomb,
he’s prod and pierced once again
by scientists in pursuit of knowledge.
And now he lies glass-coffined,
a leather-skinned Snow White.
Such unsettling beauty.
AN EVENING WALK ALONG THE RIVERBANK
How patient the river is,
as it carves through rocks
How insistently it gnaws away
at stone and banks of earth
How undaunted
by the scale of the task
Rain patters a percussive threnody
for the ageing day
In counterpoint the muffled drumming
of hooves on pasture
The animal grace of a cantering horse
blends into the lengthening shadows
From a window a flare of light
looms through the darkness
THE MISSING GODDESS
after the Seasons Mosaic in the Corinium Museum
Spring
She pricks through hardened earth,
dangles catkins from birch and willow.
Her budded eyes peep through hedgerows.
Coyly, she unfurls her leaves,
flaunts her fresh young growth.
Summer
Petal-crowned, she scatters flowers,
casts scented charms upon the air
Dancing with the sun, she shakes
her brazen skirts, spins
green fields to gold.
Autumn
Bramble-eyed and drunk on grapes
she sharpens sickle blades,
scythes through corn,
and, howling, whips the wind
to strip the trees of summer skin.
Winter
There’s mischief brewing in her hooded head.
Sly, she slips through cloud and incantation,
vanishes into void.
The wheeling year is locked
in frozen time.
The seasons cannot turn.
MRS GETTY LIES IN STATE IN
THE CORINIUM MUSEUM
A fair likeness, though in life
her face was never tallow pale
but blushed from summer sun
or, sitting by winter hearth,
flushed with mead-warmth,
fireside tales, companionship.
Now visitors keep their voices
hushed. Sound ebbs and flows
as, phantom-like, they drift
through galleries of time
until they see, with sharp surprise,
her mocked-up tomb,
her body robed in madder red,
her cloak stained blue with woad.
Intrusive eyes inspect her jewels
gleaming in the crimson gloom.
At close of day, the doors lock out the living.
Silence turns museum into mausoleum.
She looks serene but lies here wakeful,
feels again the trowel-scrape on bone,
the soft brush swishing soil from skull,
fingers probing spine and pelvis,
relives the shock of resurrection.
In the grief-dark hour
before slave women with mop and broom
announce a new day dawning,
she wonders on the wyrd
that exiled her from her earthen home,
bestowed on her another woman’s name,
gave her this waxen after-life.
Note: In 1985 archaeologists working in Lechlade excavated the grave of a high status Anglo-Saxon woman buried with rich grave goods. They nick-named her ‘Mrs Getty’. Afer expert reconstruction of her head, ‘Mrs Getty’ is now exhibited in a replica grave in the Corinium Museum.
Originally from Wales, Iris Anne Lewis now lives in Gloucestershire. She is featured in Black Bough’s Silver Branch series. Winner of the Gloucestershire Poetry Society competition 2020 and the Graffiti competition 2023. She was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2022 and the Stanza competition 2023. A runner-up in the 2023 Gloucestershire’s Writers Network competition, she read her work at the Cheltenham Literary Festival for the seventh time as a prizewinner. Twitter: @IrisAnneLewis
*****
Christine McNeill: Two Poems
THE WISH
Ensnaring the words with shaky hand,
you wrote a birthday wish
on the back of a photograph
showing the house where you lived in old age.
In the freeze of 1923, you birthed my father.
Wood crackled in the stove like reckless witches.
Leaving the bed soon after, you returned to the kitchen
cooking dumplings for half the village.
Smoothed out a dough on a table the length of a corridor,
peeled and chopped in long silent hours
apples cherished for their taste, sprinkled with sugar and flour,
chapped hands cutting the strudel to fit into the oven.
Loving a teacher considered too poor to support a family,
you married a hotelier and his work.
I see your hand faltering at the word love:
aiming too high at l, dropping v down the line.
Love, complex and pure. Startling and sad.
It is all I have. A wish from you for my life to go well.
The word happy in a spidery web.
Fallen apples and rich mulch.
TIMING HER COOKING
She timed boiling an egg
by singing Bach’s
O sacred head, now wounded …
Each verse an exact minute –
after five, the egg was hard.
She sang slowly,
keeping a dialogue with the stove,
the bubbling water,
willing the egg not to crack.
She sang each word unmusically
but with devotion, not focussed
on meaning but clear diction.
Never mentioning God,
she believed in his guidance
when mixing a dough
or frying meat. Immortality
and eternity were mere dreams,
but the present she could control
with the measure of a hymn.
When the sun was behind a wandering cloud
that merged with other clouds,
she stirred a pot to the words of Christ’s wounds
until the sky shed what had obscured.
Christine McNeill has had six collections published; the latest Sehnsucht (Shoestring Press 2020), as well as German poetry translations in magazines and journals.
*****
Sally Michaelson: Three Poems
SEVEN DAYS IN STEERAGE
Eiderdowns in our knapsacks
turn us into hunchbacks
as we tramp up the gangplank
sneezing at stray feathers –
boiled potatoes from our pot
roll across the deck floor
the Corvodaro like a stiff bear
stalking the Atlantic
When the ship’s horn sounds
we’re first on the bridge
to spot the Lady of Liberty
hidden in fog
on what’s left of our sea legs
we stumble ashore
The Captain has tricked us
this is Hull with seagulls!
FRIDAY NIGHT ON CUTTER STREET
Six Michaelsons downstairs
Four Lusigers upstairs
get to work on the kitchen —
Joel’s scissors oiled and bagged
his calico apron sprigged
with tufts of his customers’ beards
exiled to the broom cupboard
Minnie’s spools and needles
spirited away under chalked twill –
two challot and shabbos candles
in pride of place on the table,
all huddle up, there’s space for ten
LONG SHOT
Give me a band knife
I’ll cut you thirty lengths
says Chaim to Barran
outside the factory gate
Hasn’t seen a band knife I
but Jimmy has told him
its taste for devouring
workers’ fingers and thumbs
Thirty lengths x one Jew
equals a sea of Sailor Suits
Sally Michaelson is a retired conference interpreter living in Brussels. Her poems have been published in Lighthouse, Algebra of Owls,The Bangor Literary Journal, Hevria, The Jewish Literary Journal,Squawk Back,The Lake, Porridge, London Grip and The High Window. Her debut collection The Boycott was published by The High Window in 2022. Her poem The Ledger was published by Ink Sweat and Tears in Jan 2024.
*****
John Mole: Three Poems
A COMPANIONABLE LIGHT
( for Poppy Iden )
Unloaded after its journey
into a hardware store
in 1880s Melbourne, Florida,
a precious concert grand
was reunited with its owner
who lost no time in welcoming it
with the reassurance of her repertoire
then, suddenly overcome
by summer heat, stopped playing,
unaware that moving in
behind her back from all sides
was a group of Seminole Indians
whose shadowy approach
intensified the silence
and the sense of threat
that surely would have gripped her
had she turned to witness it
but as it was, enchanted
by an unfamiliar music,
the shadows’ tender curiosity
became a curious tenderness
as they gathered round the piano
and replaced those fingers
gently on its keyboard,
stepping from darkness
into a companionable light.
SWINGTIME
( two jazz sketches )
ERROLL GARNER AT THE KEYBOARD
Jazz has been called
the sound of surprise
which as soon as he hears it
lights up his eyes
along with that almost
mischievous grin
while the notes start cascading
and he listens in.
BEN WEBSTER ON THE TENOR SAX
When a melody ends
his breath is tenacious.
as the very last note
that it almost releases
holds on to silence
as it swings in the air
and watches him thoughtfully
still standing there.
AN EXPERIMENT IN PROCRASTINATION
Miles Davis once asked
‘Do you ever get tired
of playing music
that always sounds like music?’
I sometimes ask myself
‘Do you ever get tired
of writing poetry
that always sounds like poetry?’
Miles Davis’ answer
was to play a few bars
to demonstrate
exactly what he meant
while my answer
is to write these few lines
to leave the question waiting
for another day.
John Mole lives in St Albans. He has been a teacher, reviewer and broadcaster and for many years ran The Mandeville Press with Peter Scupham. He has received the Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards, and the Signal Award for his poetry for children. His most recent collection is Keeping in Step ( Shoestring Press,2023 )
*****
Mary O’Donnell: Two Poems
LESSONS IN INTIMACY
Summer after summer, we wedded ourselves
xxxxto their traces, Roman sites, cities,
roads and amphitheatres, first the red-tiled roofs
xxxxof Istria, discovered in forest chinks where trees
gave way to fragments and a shape of walls.
xxxxIn Tunisia, an arena here, an amphitheatre there,
feet sandy as we wandered, sensing gladiators
haunting the midday, both of us sweating
xxxxin t-shirts, my hair coiled beneath
a white scarf. I was driven, as if to catch up
xxxxon things I believed I ought to know—
the guilt of early daydreamt education,
xxxxwhen, half listening to history lessons, I imagined
outcomes for a future far from school.
Tricky times, outwitting myself,
xxxxmy pores primed to travel for ‘experience’,
to shed innocence by entering the unknown,
xxxxpeeling myself back, with him, layer on layer
to circle dance in the afternoon sun,
xxxxsit on the yellow steps of Ephesus
after trailing through the ruins.
I haggled with a man selling Aphrodites,
xxxxdidn’t buy, instead fastening my eyes
on a terracotta water jar, its painted heroes
xxxxwhere the neck narrowed.
It sits in my workroom as if necessary,
xxxxa talisman to ground my wild seed.
Impossible not to love the bones of those places
where exhausted men trooped through,
xxxxto desire their divinities, not so different
from our own, more heated perhaps, vengeful,
xxxxsensual, but none of that mattered
as we schooled ourselves in love and tokens,
xxxxsometimes letting suns set on anger
after an evening meal and wine
in some humid coastal town where lights,
xxxxflickered around us and we’d run out of money.
But the universe is indifferent. What I took
xxxxto be passion for the unexplored, sometimes wasn’t.
That lay here, between us, as we roved, travelled,
xxxxmade love beneath pine trees, or walked mile
on mile, searching out our marriage,
rooting in its essences to fortify ourselves,
xxxxThe true meaning of intimacy? How secretive,
how still it is, not hastily undressed on trips away,
xxxxnor at work, only in the interstices,
light years from any wedding or romance.
xxxxWe retrieved slowly, alone, on the flat plains
of our own, unremarkable, sunless island.
MY DAUGHTER CODES THE CAMAC
The river flows fast and grey
beneath the bowed bridge that breaks
the stone-and-boulder race towards the Liffey.
From a kitchen desk she writes episodes
linking wilder places to her city,
where grandees of water reveal themselves
on distant weirs and banks—
herons, geese, swans in pairs.
The notations of ducks and shags suit best,
a programme of games with feathers
and yellow feet grows by the day
as she watches during morning coffee,
crumbling croissants at an oval table,
then scraps to the flurry below.
March watercress, beaks and fast feathers,
the thrusting feet of a brown frog—
her cyphers make bright script
into the fast, grey flurries.
Mary O’Donnell’s work has been published in Ireland and internationally since 1990, including nine poetry collections, four novels, three short story collections, essays and journalism. Her collection Massacre of the Birds (Salmon) appeared in 2020 and in 2023 she was awarded Poem of the Year in the An Post/Irish Book Awards. Her latest publication is the chapbook Outsiders, Always (Southword Editions). She was editor of Poetry Ireland Review from January-April 2024 and is a member of Aosdána. www.maryodonnell.com
*****
Tom Phillips: Four Poems
EUROPEAN RAIN SCENE
Not dark yet, but falling,
a hesitant kiss
before the taxi’s gone.
Connections
disperse through
streetlamp columns.
How easy to write
off so much so quickly.
The orange-lit door
swings open
and she goes in
taking the steps
of the block’s staircase
at a pace
I can only imagine
as being two at a time.
THE PARROT
Awkwardly squawking,
it stakes out its new home,
whistling at pigeons
that take one look
then take themselves off
to flock in the cusp
of rooftops and eaves
away from such presence,
such pretence.
No human passing can help
but turn their gaze
on the anomaly:
a parrot on a Sofia balcony!
Red-capped, green-feathered,
it is raucous. Our dark
and heavy winter clothes
slink like shadows
across these pallid facades
while it shrieks
at its impossible situation.
And yet it will always have an audience.
Even our neighbour who’s not smiled
in more than six years to our knowledge
smiles when she glances up and spots it.
The parrot digs deep
into its repertoire of trills
to unleash an atonal jazz.
Only the Maths Gymnasium kids
are too intent on their kebabs and mobile phones
to wonder at the squalling.
Assuming a magnificent disdain,
the parrot shifts along its perch,
as sleek and smooth
as the metaphor
I mustn’t let it become.
IN THE TRAM YARD
Depot Iskar, Sofia
For Sevdi
Easy to forget skulking hulks squat
at the edge of the city: cooling towers,
pipes that bridge the road beyond financial districts.
Satellite-guided, we switch to scuffed lane.
Tram yard dogs yap at the end of the line,
standing in for a gatekeeper’s suspicion
as she signs the forms for our visit
to examine reconstructed machinery.
No museum this, though, or wrecking yard.
What worked once is working still –
old beasts, you’ll hear them
wheeze through first light
and count them off – 20, 21, 22 …
splaying out to satellite districts.
The airport’s kerosene insistence’s not so far
nor the modernity it insists on –
the upgraded, the updated on sale
in the terminal’s duty-free shop.
Not knowing better I might translate
graffiti on the workplace basketball court
as If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*
Derelict concrete invites
someone’s tale of past cares
in those disingenuous years
lurking behind IT advances,
neighbourhood regeneration,
the ambitions of that tower
on Tsarigradsko Shose.
The latest tram pulls out
and we drive back to the centre
and its multiple diversions.
We’re held up so long, the 21
we watched leave the depot at Iskar
crosses Levski on Dondukov
while we wait at the lights
and the SatNav complains
we should have taken a different route home.
THE LATE WOUNDED
i.m. Arthur Phillips and Eric Butler
1924
Hard even to imagine how it was:
soft breeze rising in the north;
burring reconnaissance flight;
sharp dawn re-whitening chalk
you’d dug those trenches into.
No surety in the stillness,
but trace of the wholly other:
turning over known earth,
inspecting expansive sky,
planting out the cottage garden.
Or by-ways of courtship
with that girl who’d outlive you,
my grandmother – what
brevities crossed your mind,
awaiting orders in France?
You weren’t killed at least,
though the damage was lodged
by that expansive spray of soil
and pulsing shock that tore
through half the regiment.
Surviving that failed advance,
you had seven years more –
although the shell that burst
beside you in the attack
would one day burst your heart.
1942
Pints lined up on the piano lid –
they’re from admiring punters,
come to hear you every night,
the commended seaplane pilot.
A sure hand for jazz, it shook
when you took your daughter
to the theatre, she recalled,
but knew better than ask why.
Long hours over the Channel
hunting for U-boat traces,
their hulks below the surface
like deadly basking sharks –
they’d take their toll,
though hardly noticeable
in your swift gallantries,
ebullient syncopations.
Never put down on record,
it’s plain what shades drove
and caught you unguarded
as another war ground on.
It’s plain you had no choice
but to let run in your veins
what washed out residues
of every mission you’d flown.
Tom Phillips was born and spent most of his adult life in the UK, but now lives and works as a writer, translator and teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria. His poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, as well as the full-length collections Unknown Translations (Scalino, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (Firewater 2003). Since moving to Sofia, he has published four online pamphlets: Scenes from Unfilmed Cinema (2021), And Now Rousing Music (2020), Foreign in Europe (2019), Present Continuous (2018) – which can be downloaded from his blog.
*****
Alan Price: Two Poems
BARBARA
Always more scatty by day than by night.
House keys left in the fridge;
driving in the middle of the road;
buying a dog nobody could ever train
then leaving credit cards on a toilet seat.
After sunset her lawyer intellect
would strike, forensically erasing
such forgetfulness and drift.
Barbara’s driving was put on trial.
Dreaming of ice cream she crashed
into a traffic island.
Her husband held onto the dog
to prevent it eating the takeaways.
All escaped injury save two curries
and the headlights.
Sorrowful Barbara retreated to her bed.
Kept warm, safe and entertained
by the pattern on her duvet,
journeying her finger along a route
that avoided disasters.
The builder husband built a wall
in the living room.
She loosened a brick, smashed a mirror to gaze
at her reflection and a dozen scatty others.
Laughed and dressed to accept
her husband’s hand and the leash
of their puzzled dog.
She walked out quick,
less the acquitted,
new variant, Barbara
disappeared in the cracked glass.
TAMANA
You were drawn to mindfulness
in a house on a Welsh hilltop.
Instructed to love a guru,
not quite as severe as Krishnamurti
offering nirvana via the comfort
of platitudes.
I tolerated my forceful rival
until other men flitted
through your bedroom in Hackney Downs.
You left a trail of free love.
I was your mid-week Camden guy
at the bottom of a further hill.
You dropped the name Jill for Tamana.
But no affectations.
Just warm invitations
as your long freckled arms
were wrapped round master and lovers:
an indiscriminate clinch.
A caring fleshy blonde.
Poor, schematic, cautiously dreamy,
yet assured of our attention;
wearing damp slippers,
pacing up and down a spongy carpet;
laughing at poverty in a squatter’s flat.
I challenged your beliefs and desires,
to be left blank-faced.
Men stopped ringing your bell.
One day the guru was imprisoned.
His medallion image worn more proudly.
I stopped needing Tamana, even passed on Jill.
Alan Price was born in Liverpool and now lives in London. An ex-librarian who writes film and book reviews for the websites Magonia, and London Grip. Three poetry collections
Wardrobe Blues for a Japanese Lady, The Trio Confessions and The Cinephile Poems have been published by The High Window Press. He’s presently working on a chapbook called
The Women.
*****
Myra Schneider: Two Poems
THE GARDEN ROOM
After Gotthardt Kuehl
How relieved I am to come across this room.
Once I’m in it, I forget the news which strikes
like a missile day after day and glad to feel safe,
I drink in the green of the leafy trees and the coral-pink
of blossom as the garden seems to drift indoors
through the open doors and windows.
A tabby cat saunters into the house, sniffs
its way to the bowls of food on the floor, ignoring
the young woman intent on laying the table for lunch.
In her orange dress and cobalt-blue apron,
with several plates lodged under her arm, I see her
as the gentle, non-judgemental mother I wish I’d had.
Her absorption in readying the table for the meal
breathes life into the room and while I bask
in her warmth the distressed world outside disappears.
DECEMBER
Sycamores and other trees are still wearing
leaves as if reluctant to let them go
and flowers are in bloom: geraniums, a daisy,
a dandelion, pink roses vying
with yellow jasmine. When the sun goes down
it spreads red and gold across the sky
and the sturdy arches of the viaduct slowly
soften to the misty mauve of dream. Beyond
my study window the busy street is unsightly
but above the agitated homebound cars,
above roofs jutting into boundless sky,
I suddenly see the silent moon’s globe.
For moments the stress of living disappears
and peace slips into my tense body.
Myra Schneider’s most recent collection is Siege and Symphony (Second Light Publications), 2021. Poet Marvin Thompson, 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. Believing in the Planet, is being published by Poetry Space this May. She has co-edited anthologies of poetry by women poets and is a poetry tutor.
****
John Short: Four Poems
ABOVE GROUND, UNFORGOTTEN
Mevlevi Lodge, Antalya
I enter, remove my shoes,
place them on a wooden shelf,
tread soft, spongy carpets.
It’s peaceful here. I note
a video of dervishes whirling
their way to enlightenment
then some rowdy kids
shout and swarm all over
until the teacher calms them
and they settle onto the carpet
to listen to her lecture.
In the Sheik Room downstairs
a life-sized model dervish
reads a holy text, aiming
to graduate to the highest level
after cell meditation for days
while across the courtyard
under gold-embroidered cloth
the sarcophagus of Mehmet Bey
famed for re-taking the city
is housed in an octagonal tomb:
above ground, unforgotten,
still with us in the modern world.
PEBBLE PATHS
Sabadell
I navigate the airport exit
in standard hiking gear,
progress to humble streets
that bear her daily print
no matter how often
she dreams of escape.
The narrow staircase tunnels
upwards like a mineshaft
through rough damp stone
to our tiny flat where
a chugging fridge of imports
tries to last the month,
and after lockdown restriction
pleasure walks are suspect
for a woman used to journeys
of intent; she tags anyway
surprised to meet a horse,
trek unknown pebble paths
forget the daily hassles.
THE DOGS OF UNYE
Black Sea
Feral dogs are playing on the beach,
they come here to be out of reach
of park attendants chasing them
and policemen in the central square
where head-scarved women
chat at the cake festival, contestants
in the precision craft of sponge.
Banks are not dispensing cash,
you get your Lira at jewellery stores
as the owners squirrel currency
and later I climb a cobbled street
where the rich and famous used to live,
then through the spooky graveyard.
I’m travelling because ambitions
have diminished with time
yet still a desire to see the world
while me and the world exist.
I ponder sea: the thoughts it triggers
of madness and destruction to the north,
but here, peace prevails for now.
MILLAU
He descended from hills
a seasoned traveller,
noting the clay roof jumble
and later, stone statues
of Occitan poets; four churches
each with its own beggar.
In every park an eccentric
and grandmothers outside for air
with their children’s kids.
At dusk, old street sodium
but he imagined diode
lighting the portent of bridges.
We’re near a new century
the lamps seemed to whisper:
we need to be futuristic.
Note: The Millau aqueduct bridge built in 2004. Incongruous with the landscape but said to reduce commuter time by one hour
John Short lives near Ormskirk again after a previous life in southern Europe. He tries to stay in touch with the Liverpool poetry scene, reading in the city and beyond. He’s had poems recently in Dream Catcher and London Grip. His fourth collection is In Search of a Subject (Cerasus Poetry 2023).
*****
Marjorie Sweetko: Two Poems
A FEW QUESTIONS ABOUT DEATH
Which me will breathe the last consciousness?
How far will the process resemble falling asleep?
Assuming it’s going to go dark, will I miss the light?
Who will be waiting to greet me when I arrive?
Will I take anything with me apart from a sense
of departure, perhaps of return? Will it feel like rising
or falling, or melting into the whole?
What will I recognise you by?
DOLOROUS
The word evokes a wasteland
littered with mist and scraps of lives,
a vast, unredeemable
windy plain.
Dolorous, the syllables drip
church Latin solemnity,
unctuous, cosmopolitan word
intoned in a rich voice
to monolingual folk,
who tuck the corners in,
smooth it flat and whistle
through missing teeth,
loud enough to muffle the sobs
of the marching wounded, softly
whimpering in time with the tune.
Unfit for family listening –
mask them, edit them out!
Dolorous,
drawling and
musical,
hollow as
sympathy.
Marjorie Sweetko is now settled in Marseille, after having taught English language in the UK, Europe, Asia and North Africa, Her poetry has been published in journals like The North, Poetry Salzburg Review, Magma, Artemis, South.
*****
David Underdown: Four Poems
ROAD TRIP
Maybe I took it by mistake — it’s Kodachrome
and the colours are what grab you: turquoise,
milk chocolate, terracotta, fudge, slate grey.
No sky, not a breath of air, but every corner
lies in shadow cast by unseen slabs of light.
And heat, heat trapped behind shut blinds.
They’re selling ice, by the bucket for chrissakes,
a dollar twenty-nine. No one around,
they will be somewhere out of sight
across the road perhaps, in some airless lounge.
I must be standing on the sidewalk.
If I look behind me there’ll be vacant lots,
a chapel with a corrugated roof.
In the distance the drone from a freeway
and, nearer, the buzz of a persistent fly.
Years back, just passing through alone,
maybe in ninety-two, driving coast to coast?
I have no notion why I stopped or what comes next.
Not one face, no names, just cloying heat,
that buzzing fly that will not go away.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GLASS
Do you know where this might lead?
What are you thinking, superimposed
between pyramids of teas and panettone,
across scarves and vintage jackets?
Another half a lifetime may spool out
and us, here, at the still pivot, the crack
between what’s done and what’s to come.
Might you already know? Is it written there
where you linger in the glass unwatched?
You mingle with shadows of passers-by,
cars cruising, a taxi pulling up,
the pause before the door swings open.
She’s there, glancing to adjust her beret,
leaning forward to pay her fare.
From across valleys and cities music
passes through walls. Scenes accumulate,
some face to face, some in silhouette,
or transparencies, half indiscernible.
The news says scientists have made atoms
of anti-matter. They are testing them for gravity.
But are you there? Are you still there?
SOME RULES FOR THE LONGEST DAY
Forget the rules. You won’t survive for long
without a little craziness.
Throw away your list! After all the fuss, at last
the roses show why they are here.
Listen, the giddy stretching out of grasses, of stems,
of each hair from its follicle, of bones, of nerve endings.
Feel how our whole planet is being caught red-handed
helping itself to too much sunlight.
It does not work on the equator, so be as far North as you dare.
It is why swifts come screaming, bats materialise and de-materialise.
Because of elderflowers. Because of wild strawberries,
the procession of butterflies, meadow browns and green-veined whites.
Suspended through the small hours, remember, a quiet disturbance.
Outside neither dusk nor dawn but a silvering.
And do it now, while there’s still time
before the horizon slips, before the slow tilt back.
GROUP PORTRAIT AROUND A YAK DUNG STOVE
In snow and thin air, you stand four square among sparse bushes,
among thorns, to tear at oily leaves and fibrous branches.
You masticate to set in train your mechanisms,
ingest, ferment, turn rough stuff into fuel
that keeps you on the move, that keeps you part of the herd.
There will be milk and wool and ultimately meat
though as we pass you eye us up, burdened by unnecessary baggage,
and snort and turn away to wade across the stream.
And later we humans, around this stove in four-thousand-metre cold,
grateful for the desiccated sculptures that your body made,
detritus stacked sack upon sack to stoke the flames sustaining us,
you out there your jaws, tearing and grinding, tearing and grinding.
David Underdown has three collections published by Cinnamon Press, Time Lines (2010), A Sense of North (2019) and Jigsaw (2022). He also has a pamphlet, Snig, published by Calder Valley Poetry in 2021. A Mancunian by birth he lived in London and, for over forty years, in Scotland where for seven years he was an organiser of the McLellan Poetry Competition on the Isle of Arran. Since 2019 he has lived in the Calder Valley.
*****
Susan Utting: Three Poems
BEYOND THE URBAN
This is where I’m living, where I live
among cacophonies of birdsong, fox howl,
dog bark, jet and petrol engine, diesel fume;
here’s no rural idyll, this is urban sprawl,
commuter land, estate.
But there are trees,
green spaces, playing fields and recs,
footpaths, mud and stone, potholes, rabbit
holes and thicket. Summer’s cherry-blossom
pink, apple-blossom white, Autumn’s glorious
with gold and titian amber, Winter’s bare-branched
lattice, Spring is crocus verges, daffodil, muscari.
*
There’s thankfulness in green blades that push up
between cracked paving stones, weeds that ramble,
tumble, sprawl down railway track embankments.
There’s hope in felled trees that shoot again, defiant
as they coppice themselves, refuse to bow to vandals’
chainsaws, to give up the ghost, lie down and die.
STEVENAGE RAG
Too young for the saxophone, I syncopated on the triangle
to Peterkin’s brash cymbaling, while the silly shaking
tambourine girls jangled randomly. My toe taps kept
my heartbeat steady – I knew what I was doing when
it came to six-eight time. Peterkin, he of the green eyes
and floppy forelock, crashed on, swiping brass against
brass, his fingers snug through their leather thongs.
I progressed to piano lessons, grades and theory, heard
intervals precisely, earned merit then distinction, left
green-eyed Peterkin behind for solo flute, then third violin
with dark-haired Doreen Jesson, pizzicato and glissando.
WILD GARLIC
Grow it against the foxes;
sweet chamomile for the bees,
for the smell of it as you tread.
Grow buddleia for the butterflies,
a cherry tree for its blossom,
its April petal showers, then
for cherries for the birds,
for pigeon, collared dove
and magpie, their battle
to be the best, the greediest
at stripping cherry flesh; for
cherry stones in uncut grass.
But first, grow wild garlic
for every creature, bird and bee
and butterfly; and for its pure
white bells, their pungency against
the howl and stench of foxes.
Susan Utting’s poems have been widely published, including in The Times, TLS, Forward Book of Poetry, The Poetry Review, Poems on the Underground, and Poetry Salzburg Review, and were broadcast at London’s South Bank Centre for Poetry International. She has published several collections with Two Rivedrs Press including Half the Human Race: New & Selected Poems and, most recently, The Colour of Rain (2024, her fifth full poetry collection. www.susanutting.com
*****
Michael Vince: Three Poems
GENEROSITY
Greek mountains
Is to be generous to give freely
of the many things you have,
or to willingly offer the last
of what little remains? I think
only of a day on a rackety bus,
music playing, descending
from a mountain village, the road
twisting between rocky outcrop,
patches of dried grass and heat-struck
sweet-smelling shrubs. The driver’s
girl sits beside him, and all the way down
they touch and laugh and kiss
as everyone wonders whether
he’ll lose control on the next hairpin,
until with a shudder the bus suddenly
pulls in beneath a fig tree
jutting out from the rock, branches
laden with fruit embracing it:
out leans the girl and begins to gather
the ripe figs, keeping them safe
in her bunched-up jumper, as if
it’s an apron. What might happen
now? The couple peel back
the skins of their figs, laughing,
juice running from their mouths,
as the girl walks up and down
the bus, handing out the fruit
to everyone. They’re warm,
those figs, and their purple skins
sticky to touch. So we eat
with syrupy hands and chins,
an unexpected community,
when the bus starts up again
and lurches its way down as some
applause breaks out at the back
while the driver and his girl wave
and exchange sweet generous kisses.
FISH
Some ideas behave like those
big golden fish in the deep pond
near the entrance to the National Gardens:
there’s nothing there in the murky water
until they appear with open mouths
as if in search of food: up through
the cold floating green fronds
unbidden onto a page in a flash
of colour, and shape that resists touch.
Other ideas swim about
in the glass-walled Aquarium,
where the novelty flat fish
in the wide pool, circle and pass
the fringe of children whose hands dangle
in the water to touch the fishy backs:
deft wing movements that search
after pleasure in the touch of a human hand,
that seek for an answer, then vanish
into their dim yet shiny world,
but re-appear over and over
unwilling to stay still.
PASTORAL
Northumberland, 1970s
I’m holding grimly onto the sheep
by its front legs, its back curved
into my lap, as Jimmy the farmer’s man
trims round its splayed hoof: Foot rot,
he says, they get it on these wet hills.
When we get ’em down, we’ll walk ’em
through the wash I reckon, and we let
the beast stagger up and off it bounces
with sheepy voice, across the hillside,
weeks later to be be packed with the rest
into a truck, that warm panting
woolly beast whose legs I hung onto,
trying hard not to get kicked
or give away signs of my ignorance.
Jimmy mutters that his boss should spend
fewer nights out, argue less with his wife.
Sunday lunch at the house is a leg of mutton
roasted, propped up among the potatoes
like the one between my knees, its flesh
to be absorbed into the activity of Jack
just back from a night-club or a visit
to his point-to-pointers, Helen picking
at her plate happy they’re all eating
not talking, Joe and Susan pushing
peas around in the gravy: but now
after the half century since I splashed
through the low pasture, and froze
on the hill, some of them have gone
as the sheep has with its hot flanks,
its wool curled tenderly down its back,
its life taken into their lives, flesh
and appetite taking the same path
across the pasture, percolating down
through the hillsides, nourishing a few
tough plants, a memory of daylight breaking
across the moor, surging energy plaiting
sheep-kind, humankind and grassland,
cries of lapwings, dogs barking, rattle
of tractor and trailer, and Jimmy,
a roll-up stuck between his lips, his grin,
as he watches me stand with a muddy arse
and a foolish look, seeing that I’m getting
the hang of it, like the sheep, pressing on,
head down, uphill, into the experience.
Michael Vince has a long publishing history, with two volumes from Carcanet, and three volumes from Mica Press, plus various pamphlets. His next collection, Legwork is due out this year.
*****
Stephen Wade: Three Poems
LISTENING TO RAVEL
At first, there is a delusion. The search for home
fails, you think. All the notes dissolve from quartet
to perhaps a garden, or a wood, where we trap
peace, caught like a butterfly, and doomed, an imago.
Every note works softly to make a nowhere.
I’m longing to join the quest for escaping place,
but then the hidden spot I’m carried towards
closes in to reveal that bower of forgetfulness,
the one where anywhere is nowhere and we long
to arrive, displaced, free from geography.
This world of footnotes for every statement,
this world of reasons and questions, impossible
to answer, is left somewhere, abandoned.
The music builds to that harp behind what
accrues as the account of a dream journey,
and I have followed without questions,
hoping I will know the faces greeting me.
Every sound closes a door of reason.
Every rise and fall kills off a humming tune.
We so dearly long to be led away to worlds
of no sense, yet not nonsense, like reading
when all feeling of the world itself melts away.
LOST SOUL
They worked the looms, dug the pits,
told the landscape what it had to be;
I was a wife and so a witness, feeding
the hunger of exhaustion. So now
my soul flits around like a wise owl
hunting for dinner. Yet I’m meant
to circle forever, until their spirits
settle into eternity, no longer restless,
burning to tell their tales of trial and loss.
Look hard in the dark and you’ll see me,
staring you into guilt, that you refuse their pleas.
ELEGY
Some place became no place. Nobody’s fault.
Yet once I simmered hatred and despair:
You took it all away. But I don’t know who you are.
I only know that I could weep for the loss, the theft,
of what was taken. But should a poet weep, dish out
blame, when no-one walked away with gold or trophy?
But then all was not taken. The stars remain,
and the chill Yorkshire evenings and hungry wind,
the same wind that tore through their pains,
the ghosts that still may be sensed there,
loitering in Low Fold, now free from brick-sharp
cobbles and horse droppings, smells of blood:
these still live, if you know where to look.
some place became no place. Nobody’s fault.
Stephen Wade is the author of Rejected! Literary Failure and My Contribution to It (Odd Volumes). His most recent books are a poetry collection, Stretch (Smokestack) and a novel, The Lovers on Asphodel Way (Inky Lab).
*****
Alice Willington: Poem
THE MONSTER SIPS A CUP OF COFFEE
He sits at a table outside,
his mouth a straight line,
skin pulled tight, scratched.
Will they hurl spite today?
his eyes ask, moving quickly.
What will you have?
the waitress asks.
He doesn’t know
what to do with fear,
hatred, just a filter coffee.
He knows his face is thunder.
Passersby gather like clouds,
she brings shimmering white
thin bone china, they
wait for its breaking.
The scent is love.
He cradles it in his paw,
his sip like a kiss.
He drinks as if it were breath,
the clouds moving.
Alice Willington won second prize in the 2009 Ledbury Poetry Competition and in 2012 was included in Lung Jazz, an anthology of British poets under forty. Her poems have appeared in Briefly Write, Magma, Under the Radar, Lucent Dreaming, The Harlequin, Horizon Review, New Linear Perspectives, Molossus, and Avocado. Her pamphlet Long After Lights Out (Eyewear) was published in November 2015.
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The High Window 