*****
John Barron • Rachael Clyne • Oliver Comins • Nick Cooke • Mark Czanik • David Davies • Maurice Devitt • Peter J Donnelly • Clive Donovan • Helen Evans • Robert Gainer • Rebecca Gethin • Karen Green • Bill Greenwell • Sheila Hamilton • Sarah James • Sue Kindon • Nigel King • Sydney Lea • Edward Lee • Kathryn Macdonald • Greg Miller • Jean O Brien • Helen Overell • Marka Rifat • Jenny Robb • Jill Sharp • Fiona Sinclair • Mark Ryan Smith • Rowena Sommerville • Tessa Strickland • Ruth Valentine • Rob Walton • Ross Wilson • Pat Winslow • Lynne Wycherley
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*****
John Barron: Two Poems
HOWE
Now that there’s only the wind
working at fertiliser sacks,
swabs of cloud, hurrying,
and a combed field showing its bones –
Now, even though there’s only Agri Holdings plc
the shuttered pig stink of a barn,
brown-leaved osteoporotic ash,
a hedgehog’s flattened comb of spines –
I bring my stories, my mother’s wedding band,
what’s left of her small personhood,
from the nearby crem to these mounds
of buried ash within a mound –
boar tusk, beaver tooth, polished stones,
carved out bits of belonging,
little acts of defiance against death.
Round here once I ran between hedges
half-strangled by bindweed,
thirsting for some unknown source.
Or waited, hidden by fescue,
in the lees of light
for eyes and a shimmer of wings
to come out of the wind.
Now that there’s a sound like sea roar
– distant traffic moaning home –
bloodied harlequin feathers of a pheasant,
a hare in a stony furrow,
I arrive at some summer midnight of my invention
by the light of a ghost glow worm,
listen to the nightjar’s long gone churr,
a beast of the wood crashing through bramble,
search amongst dimmed fields of mallow
and the grass snake’s slow gold.
Come clueless come like a lapwing
when a crow has cleared out its nest,
carrying my heart – a jar brimful of muddy water –
pondweed, toad spawn, a stickleback in it,
listen for what speaks muffled from underground,
a tree root and running chalk spring voice.
I could sit half-absorbed
in all this open space
where knowing is a far off star,
could scan for ultraviolet light or radio waves.
I could get down on all fours
and sniff like a fox and still not find.
LONG-EARED OWL
You were a torchlit, fairy tale cut-out,
brought feathers smelling of sky,
and a hungry baby cry, just out of sleep.
You called through my childhood fever dream.
Now I hear you again,
faint at first, then louder,
as you test the growing dark,
and I call back from my ring of quiet.
Stay. Don’t go.
Don’t follow the disappeared over the moor.
Don’t ripple like a soft cymbal in blackness
to where all the trackers stop,
to the blank radar screen, the hush,
the emptiness, just the glug of a grouse.
There are snares and stink pits, charnel grounds,
drugged meats too easy that bite to the bone.
Stay – here amongst wood scrub.
Bring the soft-feathered clap of your wings.
Hide in the wardrobe of the oak, watchful,
and I will step out of my stories,
put on night’s clothes
and seek you,
awake to every heather swish
and twig snap underfoot.
You are the held breath of this place,
and I will let everything be
and wait for you and lie
like water puddling under a stone.
John Barron’s poetry pamphlet The Nail Forge was with Tall Lighthouse. He has previously published work in Antiphon, The North, Poetry Salzburg Review, Pennine Platform, Dark Mountain, Magma and Ink Sweat and Tears. He is a long time gardener and is passionate about land rights, nature and ecology.
*****
Rachael Clyne: Poem
UNSPLITTING
I took my other self to a dark place
where the undergrowth was a fierce mesh
of scrub and thorn. There, I buried
my other self and walked away.
The me who left could not thrive alone.
The earth began to tremble
until it heaved and exploded
a nail bomb of thorns.
They pierced random targets,
even the thickest-skinned.
My buried self, cried out,
demanded her place with the living.
I had forgotten the act, even
the existence of a self
that required such drastic measures.
Forgetting was my guarantee.
Bit by bit, I grew less frightened
of her pitted face. The war was over
long ago and it was safe
to be together again.
Rachael Clyne is from from Glastonbury. She has published in journals including: Iamb, Ink Sweat & Tears, Atrium, Poetry Wales, Lighthouse, Alchemy Spoon. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams), concerns our broken connection with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4word.org) explores her Jewish migrant heritage and sense of otherness. Her new collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else expands on themes of identity and otherness, including sexual orientation and relationships. https://rachaelclyne.blogspot.com/
*****
Oliver Comins: Four Poems
CONGESTION
Juniors were allowed to bring their own pens.
Earlier today, tidying nothing, I found an old
Warwickshire County Council exercise book
filled with curls and loops, strokes and dots.
My first fountain made them, letters bunched
into a narrowing gap on the right-hand side.
Those on the left enjoyed the luxury of space,
where my wide capitals expressed themselves
with random flourishes and studied abandon.
I sat on the classroom’s left, beside windows
designed to admit some streams of daylight
into the shadowy country where we learned.
Perhaps there was an element of privilege,
being trusted with that view of billowing air
above a playground, where marble fortunes
were won and lost. I would drift out and in
to see more stuff written on the blackboard,
new chalk shapes on smears of prior classes.
Don’t get me wrong: lessons could be great,
the best full of limpid news in generous time,
and over too quickly. When the bells rang,
for one break or another, a whole class leapt
heading for the door at the front, bunching
into a narrowing gap on the right-hand side.
ALTERNATIVE ROUTE
It was not a bus I would normally catch.
You were with your man – a college boy,
somewhat older than us and wiser, maybe.
All I needed to know was how I could
become a part of your world, like him,
or better than him — but you asked me
what exactly I wanted to do with my life.
You both said it would be a great help
if I had a plan of some kind for myself.
I stayed on the bus way past my stop,
until after the two of you got off together
and disappeared into the future.
LOVE-IN-A-MIST
nigella damascena
A modest gathering to start with – seeds sown
in a corner of the garden one wet afternoon
before the clocks went forward.
He was not so mobile by then.
They stopped the allotment that year,
but continued to live as wide a life as they could
while their range of movement diminished.
The ebb and flow of days changed,
became more ebb than anything else.
Entering the helpless phase, his faculties
began to disappear. The walking frame
turned out to be too complicated.
His clothes went from loose to oversize –
elegant but frayed and seemingly pre-owned.
When he was not there, the carer stayed.
My neighbour drifted, sometimes sat for hours
blessed by sunshine in a south-facing garden.
In front of her, the whole flowerbed filled
with an array of soft blues in a green haze.
If visitors came, they might drink tea outside
from azure-coloured cups, her daily china.
Who chose these flowers for this space?
Each year’s crop of dark seeds is bigger than the last,
causing the narrow clump to thicken and expand.
Ground revealed in autumn is hidden by the spring.
In the absence of controls or active supervision,
those stems leaning over the terracotta edging
will begin to spread across the lawn.
FORD ZEPHYR
Going back another twenty years, he parked
a company car here – with sharp-edged corners
and some amount of chrome-finished trim.
A degree of prestige was implied, reflecting
the years of achievement and certain progress,
but just a convenience for him, travelling
to a metro-land office with factory behind.
The car gave him back some time – to paint
for an evening class and two local art groups,
his brushes clean and, mostly, waiting to be used.
He worked slowly, with something like precision,
to show a flower or shrub for what it really was —
although he always kept a secret layer of blue
hidden beneath those upper coats of red or green.
Oliver Comins has recently returned to The Midlands after living in the Thames Valley for many years. His poetry is collected in pamphlets by The Mandeville Press and Templar Poetry, in Anvil Press New Poets Two (ed. Carol Ann Duffy) and in a full collection, Oak Fish Island also from Templar.
*****
Nick Cooke: Two Poems
W BRASIL
She lived in the ‘last house of London’,
somewhere north-west of Hatch End.
Beyond it lay fields with electric fences
where spite at some misdeed on my part
once made her get me to touch the wire –
a shaming shock for the king of fools.
I liked being on the absolute edge but not
quite out of the town I kidded myself
belonged to me, when really I was
Mr Suburban Semi and clung to my sense
of cityhood as a commuter hangs on
to a grab handle in a sardine-full Tube.
Meanwhile she intrigued me with tales
of her father, secret son of a Norfolk duchess,
later a self-made man in Sao Paulo plastics.
They lived in Interlagos and could hear
Grand Prix cars humming past a mile away
like distant bee swarms in the autumn mist.
Years after we split I went there, visiting
a friend quite unconnected; sipped coffee
with cinnamon, guzzled caipirinha, watched
Brazil win the Mundial outside the MASP,
wondering if all this could have been mine,
had I played my fool’s hand more wisely.
The home that never was: people coming to parties
at three in the morning, thinking it quite normal,
to find me dancing to Jorge Ben Jor
in an Anglicised samba that everyone
laughed at kindly, clapping me on.
‘Allo,’allo, double-u Brasil…
Anal sex is a national tradition, I was told,
with a warning about the risk of AIDS
on page four of the Rough Guide (not that this
was something she and I ever broached
in the back end of Hatch End). And the poverty?
Ignored, it seemed – because intractable?…
Or was it World Cup fever, the ocean
of yellow shirts, swelling a dream of unity
from this brooding, disparate mass?
Some unity I saw: my new friends were architects
whose only stated inspiration was
Le Corbusier. They lived for ‘functionality’,
but thought in terms of Spartan aesthetics,
not actual use: nobody asked who’d end up
living in the concrete bunkers I saw them draft.
The rich housing the poor at the cheapest
possible rate, was how it looked to me;
but who really cared? I danced and drank
and ‘admired’ the girls – Tuca, Denise,
Maria Elena. A year later I was married,
but in London, and to none of them. Three decades on
in silent memory I see them all, as dawn seeped in,
gyrating, candlelit like Hallowe’en pumpkins…
Tim Maia, Tim Maia… chamo o sindaco…
666
A double stroller with twins
around twelve months old
being pushed round Tate Modern
one murky afternoon.
The first has his eyes clamped shut
as if petrified by light,
unable to open doors lest he
be blinded on the spot.
The other stares straight out, smiling
the common enemy’s smile, his future
mind-charted to the last detail,
no scrape of doubt in his realm
as he waits for the voice
to orchestrate his mission.
The crowd parts before him
like tender meat off a sharp blade.
I assume it’s the parents
who are pushing the stroller,
unless it’s being pulled
by a demon’s will.
You can feel how they’ve
lost all control and hope
of curbing the force, their faces
helpless as fallen snow:
they are mere conduits,
the chosen executors
of a force so ravenous it
long since swallowed them whole.
Nick Cooke has had around fifty-five poems published, in a variety of outlets. His poem ‘Tanis’ won a Wax Poetry and Art first prize in 2016. Other publications include around thirty poetry reviews (of which several have been for The High Window), as well as five short stories. He has also written a number of novels, stage plays and film scripts. By day, he works as a language teacher and teacher-trainer at a Further Education College in West London.
*****
Mark Czanik : Poem
THE TROUBLE WITH LARRY
That reminds me of this cat I took in last summer.
It just sort of made itself at home on my sofa.
This beautiful grey cat. I mean, I put him out in the morning,
but he kept coming back. It seemed quite content.
So I started bringing home tins of cat food and feeding it.
And I called him Larry. I even bought him a litter tray
which he was quite obliging about. I enjoyed his company
and he blended in nicely on my sofa. I was even thinking about
putting a cat flap in so he could come and go as he pleased.
One day this builder from over the road came to give me
an estimate on some work. I wanted a downstairs toilet
and he made a nice job of Liz’s after Trevor’s stroke.
This builder kept looking at Larry curled up on the sofa.
‘That looks a bit like our cat,’ he said. So he went and got his wife
for a second opinion. And it turned out it was!
And she got quite angry with me for taking her cat.
She said they’d been looking for him everywhere.
Didn’t I notice the identity chip on his neck? Apparently
there were all these posters up on lampposts and shop windows.
But I hadn’t seen them or the identity chip. So she bundled him up
in this blanket and took him away… That’s what I said.
Anyone would have thought I’d done it deliberately.
That wasn’t the end of it. The cat came back the following day,
and they came knocking. More strong words were spoken.
They started swearing and calling me a cat thief.
I could see Larry was getting upset about it.
I had to ask them to leave in the end and threaten to take out
a restraining order. Anyway Larry still visits every day.
I think he prefers it with me. They’ve got a lot of children
and cats don’t like being mothered do they?
And this builder makes a lot of noise too. I can hear him
banging away all day sometimes. I’ve never complained about him.
No wonder Larry needed a bit of peace and quiet.
Where is he now? Asleep on my sofa. But I make sure to put him out
every evening so he can at least put in an appearance.
I don’t want to get told off again. What was I saying that for? Oh, yes.
That Polish man on the Ledbury bus. You thought he kept asking you
if you had a shoe when he was trying to say tissue.
Well, I called this cat Larry because he was as happy as Larry.
And his real name turned out to be Harry.
Mark Czanik was brought up in the sweet borderlands of Herefordshire. His most recent poems, stories, and artwork have appeared, or are due to appear, in Pennine Platform, The Forge, CommonLit, Dreamcatcher, Ink Sweat and Tears, MIR, and Poetry Scotland. He lives in Bath.
*****
Maurice Devitt: Three Poems
I’m building the Andrea Doria out of balsa wood *
Deep in the womb of winter I set myself
this tricky task, a first foray into the world
of model-making in forty years. This is clearly not
a revelation to the man in the shop,
who mimes a wry smile, as he passes me the box
making a dumbshow of pointing out
the instructions, and speaking only to cast doubt
on the estimated completion time.
Ten hours, I think to myself, as I walk home,
a welcome slice out of what would be
an otherwise hollow day, abandoning myself
to the various algorithms of adult life:
Goodreads suggesting a queue of books
that I’ll never finish, Spotify recycling
yacht rock when I expect the Sex Pistols.
The frost on the golf course has chased my world
indoors, deposited me at the dining-room table,
now Genoese shipyard in miniature.
The cat watches, feigning indifference, yet seeming
to tease each piece in turn, proffering them
in perfect sequence, a little too quickly as I struggle
to keep up. The box includes a readymade blueprint
for success, though with one page missing,
I must revert to the logic of my dusty
Meccano memory, graph paper vernacular
assimilated in one term of Technical Drawing.
As teatime approaches, I’m so immersed
in the construction of the ship
and taking care to avoid the tendency to list
(mistakenly built into the original design)
that when my wife calls me from the kitchen,
I’m lost in the fog around Nantucket,
Atlantic chill rising though my body,
scrambling in the darkness to survive.
* A lyric from the song, ‘Things I Miss the Most’, written by Donald Fagen & Walter Becker
and featured on the Steely Dan album ‘everything must go’.
ABSENT WITNESS
I remember little about him
except the bri-nylon shirts,
colour faded under the arms,
sweet smell of orange peel
as he settled into the desk
beside me. There was a story
about his brother, how he had
been cycling home from school
one lunchtime, when a car-door
opened in front of him.
It had happened in the years
before we started at the school,
yet it comes back to me, even now,
every time I open my driver’s door
and hesitate for a second,
as if waiting for the impact.
TIME
Days whistle by,
untethered and aloof.
Maybe they have been building
towards this since birth:
precocious seconds, growing
into anxious minutes,
confident hours,
yet never prepared
for the fact
that they must fade
into darkness,
to be replaced
by the boy
from the class behind
who is always in a hurry.
Maurice Devitt has been a winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland and Poems for Patience competitions. He published his debut collection, Growing Up in Colour, with Doire Press in 2018. Curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site, his Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection, Some of These Stories are True, was published by Doire Press in 2023.
*****
David Davies: Two Poems
COMMUTER TRAIN
a collage of newspaper
and faces reflected
in the window’s dim light
then like a thought passing
silently between heads
a single llama
stock still in a field
pondering fragments
of the night’s dream
a longing for the Andes
and over-dressed even
for a heavy Suffolk dew
WHITE CHRISTMAS
the fire stacked high
I wait for the slap
of tiny feet on floor boards
twine tinsel round baubles
and watch a chill strip
of magnesium wait for
the sun’s hot spark
across fields still dark
then out on the cliff path
a dog drags the thoughtful
ghost of Lowry along
a black drawn line
that’s bleeding its ink
down feint lined margins
spoiling the thin new leaf
running and staining
like a bookie’s tears
David Davies is a visual artist, born in Brighton and now living in Norfolk and L’Indre, France. He has exhibited many times as a past member of the artist’s society in London, the Free Painters & Sculptors (est.1952). He has also published short fiction and short form poetry here and internationally. He was in the final short list of four for the Staunch Flash Fiction Prize 2020. He has recently contributed poetry and artwork to The French Literary Review.
*****
Peter J Donnelly: Two Poems
BLUE TINSEL
There was never a tree,
or any presents, just money –
I didn’t want to get you something
and you didn’t like it, she would say.
Dinner was two days late,
and usually roast beef and Yorkshires
as on Sunday, which it always seemed
to be at their house – never turkey.
Pudding, if there was one, ice-cream.
Mince tarts as she called them
were made by yours truly,
cake with marzipan and icing
was from their anniversary
the day before. One piece of tinsel
they hung over the mirror in the
front-room above the fireplace –
not red, green, gold or silver, but blue.
It coloured their white wall
like the veins of Vinny cheese.
I still have their drinks trolley
on which stand their silver
salt and pepper shakers, statuette,
her mother’s Chinese vase
that was once a lampstand,
pictures of flowers and ferns
from Canada watching over them.
I’m writing this with one of their pens.
But the one thing I wish I’d kept
at this time of year, in my flat
too small for a tree, or at least one
to put away and get out again next year,
is the piece of blue tinsel.
YOUR SISTER SUSAN
I want to write a poem
about her as a tribute
on hearing that she’s died,
but I can’t, at least not yet.
I don’t need to buy one of her books
to read next, even one
I haven’t read before,
like I did with Amis and Weldon.
Sugar and other stories
which I found in Barnardo’s years ago
still stands on the shelf unopened.
Her signed copy of the last
in her quartet, a hardback from
Hay-on-Wye, still waits
for its second read.
Yet I head to Waterstones,
curious to see if they’ve sold out
as, I point out to the man at the till,
they did with Martin Amis
the day after his death.
She was more of a rarity,
he replies, as I pay for The Game
and wonder whether you’ll do the same –
read her, now she’s no longer here.
Peter J Donnelly lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in One Hand Clapping, Ink Sweat and Tears, Obsessed with Pipework, Atrium and Dust. His first full length poetry collection Solving the Puzzle was published in 2023 by Alien Buddha Press, as was his chapbook The Second of August.
*****
Clive Donovan: Two Poems
STATUE UNEARTHED
One arm is missing, some toes;
Yet noble still, the face remains, with chipped nose.
Your laurelled stony curls survive
The catastrophe that hid you,
Consumed your marble whole,
Reclaiming very soon those minerals
That painted you; the ochres and umbers
That tinted you – the slight swell of abdomen,
Coloured your cheeks, your eyes!
That now stare blank into the two thousand years later sun…
We will not give you eyes, nor freshened nose,
We moderns, nor prosthetic arm.
Our fashion is to value that plain damage as antique.
This second life of yours is bonus, we believe
And then, we, who respect history,
Will expose, on some museum’s stage,
All those stains and gross wounds suffered,
Labelled with your provenance and status,
The long dead flesh you represent,
Until the cyclic wave of war returns to deconstruct…
The last attendant that could defend you gone,
No priest-curator to attest that you are precious,
That this rock-carved revenant deserves fate better
Than reburial in silt and ash below,
Smothered with the unguarded treasure
Of all our ruined houses,
But safe at least from dim barbarians above
With their grim, twilight message
And savage rubble
– Hammering all the statues for their hard and stony god.
SEA DREAMS
The sea dreams
of its own weight lifting
it heaves and rolls over
and is never still
It dreams it is a faint mist
floating away casting salt off
becoming raindrops far inland
to be drunk by plants and animals
And settled years of swamps and bogs
the funfair trips through aqueducts
the nightmare slavery of dams and weirs
and icy years of glaciers
Then wet dreams of pleasurable slush
released in joyous waterfalls
surging streams and rivers
coursing ever homeward down
Through pinch of narrow canyons
underground in springs and wells
the great meld of deep lakes!
—and unfamiliar fish
It dreams of receiving a major
lifetime achievement award
just for being itself and inspiring
the ‘Blue Planet’ TV series
Making love to the shore as it slumbers
it is wakened at last
by the cool trickle of melting bergs
it rises in its increase daily
Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021] and Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannog, The High Window, Popshot, Prole and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He was a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems.
*****
Robert Gainer: Two Poems
BEACH BULLY – MAIL ORDER, 1981
So many times, I dreamt I’d thrown that punch!
I’d feel his teeth fly out, his blood and gore.
On hearing it the crowd would cheer the crunch
and stars would circle round his broken jaw:
‘A little love-tap from this bag of bones!’
The girls would drool, ‘Wow, what a man!’ A band
would play some party tunes with saxophones,
and crabs would waddle congas on the sand.
The skies would hail me: ‘Hero of the Beach!’,
and all would say ‘the bastard deserved it’.
The gulls would flock to hear my humble speech
where I would I give Charles Atlas due credit,
for I’d gambled a stamp, had no regrets.
The sun would set with palm tree silhouettes.
MODEL – MAIL ORDER, 1979
The hefty ‘Autumn/Winter’ retail slab
was left wide open on the Dralon couch.
I saw her perfect teeth, her lips, her curves,
the impish gleaming eyes that dared me stare
at her bare skin. Her bra and pants. And skin.
She surely knew her nipples would show through.
I hid my groin, ashamed for both of us.
When mum came in, I shut the catalogue,
Pretending I’d been looking at Scalextric,
not falling for a beauty on an easy payment plan.
Robert Gainer is a poet from Coventry. He is currently teaching poetry to first-year undergraduates while completing his PhD in Literary Practice on the Warwick Writing Programme. He has had poems commended in competitions including the Hippocrates Prize and Poetry On Loan, and his work has appeared in literary magazines in print and online.’
*****
Helen Evans:Poem
HOW TO PHOTOGRAPH AN EAGLE
Drive along the no through road.
Park beyond the drying peat stacks,
where the flat ground meets the hills.
Plan your journey so you’re settled
long before the thermals start.
Check each sunlit slope for movement.
Watch how other birds of prey
map the contours of the airflow.
Skimming fast – a sparrowhawk.
Hovering – a buzzard, hunting.
Floating low – a daylight owl.
Scan the skyline. Keep on scanning
till you see a larger bird
rising from the island’s summit –
this is your one shot,
however far away it looks.
Don’t think it’ll fly towards you.
Don’t pretend that you’ll return.
Helen Evans runs two projects: Inner Room, which creates space for people in Devon to be creative, and Poems for the Path Ahead, whose reach is nationwide. Her pamphlet is Only by Flying (HappenStance Press); her poems have appeared in The Rialto, Magma, The North, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Wild Court; and one was a joint winner of the Manchester Cathedral 600 Poetry Prize. www.helenevans.co.uk
*****
Rebecca Gethin: Four Poems
BACKPACKING IN TURKEY, 1972
We didn’t know what we were acquiring
that day in Konya when we sat
drinking glass after glass of oversweet tea
with the piles of kilims being dismantled
as each one was lifted and flourished
on the floor. I didn’t know each one
told stories of the weaver’s life.
Our choice was cinnamon and red,
with flashes and flickers of grey and indigo.
Down the centre, a line of dragons
or maybe scorpions, protectors
of hearth and heart. I saw fire
among the flock of birds, their wings
like flames or flames like wings?
Now it’s mine I try to translate
the intricate geometry, the plan
that could only be made in advance,
the understanding of how each throw
of the shuttle and press of treadle
would build the design. Shades
of ember and ash, dried blood,
tarnished copper were rammed
into a pattern held taut by long lines
of warp, spun from yak hairs that gleamed
in sunlight. The ends tightly knotted
in small bunches by deft fingers.
A talisman: symbols embedded in the weft –
the weaver’s signature laid on the earth.
LETTER TO SALLY
What I think I remember about you
is your pony tail that tickled your neck.
(But maybe that was someone else.)
It swung as you walked about. We were waiting
for our mum to come home and I think it was you
who sang to us. (But maybe that was our mum.)
Was it you who brushed my hair with a soft brush
and tied a red ribbon on to a kirby grip.
Even now, whenever I hear your name,
I think of you as aunt, almost-mother,
our guardian, our place of safety.
Needing someone to blame for my sister,
my father sent you away…
I never saw you again either. But then
I still can’t know what happened.
I’ve looked for your name online:
I’d like to tell you that you were loved.
I hope you had your own children,
bathed them in Matey bubble bath
and dried between their toes,
tied ribbons into their hair.
WHAT LANDSCAPE IS MADE OF
A fox’s corpse lay smeared into the ground
blurring into landscape, all that was left
was its indelible mask, teeth showing
as it stared down the path I walked along;
its front paws with its intricate bones
and the claws intact. The body was already mush,
its elements being washed away, trace
by trace. Its foxness jumped at me
but its ghost couldn’t run. Rain
was pounding and dissolving its particles.
It was dull as a dying fire, not even an ember
though from its fanned tail I could see
that it had once been flame, now sinking
like a sunset into the hillside.
WHILE WALKING IN THE MIST
I spot a rabbit hole in the ruins of a prehistoric
hut circle. The stones are wedged together
in a ring of protection. They’ve been in this form
for about 3,000 years. Only rabbits know the shape,
size and texture of those stones buried in earth
and how many others fell from where human hands
had placed them one by one. The stones are glad
that a creature with a beating heart still inhabits
their fallen walls. I understand this because the quartz
glistens and moss careers over the granite
supping on the water that collects in hollows.
The rabbit families burrow down and down,
making tunnels between rocks where
no predator can reach. Even so their noses twitch
at my scent, ears alert to my footfall.
Rebecca Gethin has written five poetry publications and 2 novels. She was a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor. Her poems are published in various magazines and anthologies. She won the first Coast to Coast pamphlet competition with Messages. Snowlines has just been published by Maytree Press. She blogs (very) sporadically at www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com.
Karen Green: Two Poems
THE SUMMERHOUSE
Last night the summerhouse flooded again. Next morning
all the leaves of grass pointed the same way. He was on his knees
in mud, muttering—what do we do now?
His tomato plants were blighted by slugs, geraniums sodden,
the pinks grey, the greens yellow. Black spot everywhere.
I couldn’t speak. My infidelity was so much greater than his.
He rose, a man of mud on incongruous pink feet.
After the first flood the Architect had warned us—
the summerhouse was never intended to be insulated. Potentially
you could make things worse. She recommended removal of the cladding
and application of a breather membrane outside the timber studwork.
Internally a natural insulating product would help create
a fully waterproofed outbuilding that should last.
The rains came down before we could carry out instructions.
We loved its terracotta tiles and creosoted timber—
the dinky windows and those thingy things
displayed inside, chosen for beauty or character.
We never believed in anything much.
We say we love each other but it just isn’t true.
We managed well enough till we became orphans
and our friends started to die.
CONSERVATORY
It’s a year since you left me, but you move back home,
the house on the Heath that we can’t sell,
to look after our dog while I’m in Nice.
You phone to say you’ve been bitten by mosquitoes—
I’m in the flower market buying you lavender bags.
You say good, buy more, buy many, but I won’t
because I’m already on my way home with my hostess
to the flat in Rue Barla—the hot windy terrace
and a view like an advent calendar, balconies
where the laundry changes daily, toy people
who watch the flicker of doll-sized televisions,
come in and out of tiny doors, silhouetted
at open windows, black against yellow,
black against peach or smudgy cobalt blue.
I could sew the four fat gauzy bags of lavender
each tied with a scrap of mauve satin ribbon
into ten or more bundles. I might also travel
down that long path to my grandparents’ house,
to my young aunt in black and white miniature
with her dark curls and pointed pearlized face,
not yet married, her whole life opening out,
sitting in the conservatory that’s piled high
with faded cushions stitched in needlepoint.
She’s shaded from the hot sun by oak and ash
and horse chestnut, sitting at the Singer
sewing machine making lavender bags
the size of teabags (which didn’t yet exist),
her little foot working the ornate iron treadle.
Karen Green co-edited Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads for The Cornell Wordsworth (1992) with James Butler. She co-edited this little stretch of life (Hearing Eye) with Mimi Khalvati. and was on the Magma Board for seven years, responsible for production and editing several issues. Her work has appeared in various magazines and has been selected in several competitions, including the Troubadour International Prize, Brittle Star (2008), Flamingo Feather Competition and most recently, the Bridport Prize.
*****
Bill Greenwell: Poem
FIRST LAST DANCE
Your hair’s shorter, perhaps. Earrings
clipped to your lobes, you haven’t had them
pierced: not allowed. You aren’t
allowed boyfriends either, not till
you’re fifteen. I will definitely go out with you then,
if you still want me. You sneak
lipstick into the dance hall, probably peach;
your feet bob across that long stretch
of parquet. I’m glad you don’t like Shakespeare,
I feel the same. You have blue eyes,
green eyes, maybe brown; hard to tell,
you’re looking down in this single photo,
it’s black-and-white. Your parents
have no phone, we’ll have to fix up
the next meeting by letter,
through a proxy. I must say
your quotations are very touching. On the beach,
sea smarms over the rock,
we hold hands again, desperate. I look into
your sad, hooded eyes, shy away. All life
is filtered and finished,
underscored by our fountain pens.
This letter is as heartbreaking
for you as it is for me, I know, you say,
first page, fifty years ago.
The music slows. We press faces helplessly
together, it’s the last dance, everyone
else is doing it too, we’re caught up
in each other, in the moment, and now
I look for you. I lie awake thinking of you too
as I do, wondering what became of you,
what life you made, finding the online index,
birthdate I never knew, place of death.
Bill Greenwell lives in South Shields. His first collection Impossible Objects was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. In 2017 he won the Magma Editors Award. He wrote creative writing course material for the Open University before retiring.
*****
Sheila Hamilton: Poem
JOHN CLARE INHABITS CASTOR HANGLANDS
while a patient in the Northampton Asylum
There’s the white-throat
with his high-pitched song,
and the coal-tit that trills.
Spotted stags, every autumn,
enact and re-enact their conflict.
Grunts reach me.
There are green places
favoured by hart’s tongue,
spaces reigned over by the lady fern.
The gipsies gather wood,
stoke their fires, tune up
for music joyful and melancholy.
I love the snipe that thrive there,
and the quail,
the violets and the rusty bracken.
On my best days,
I transport myself to the Hanglands in winter,
loving the frost when it sets the branches glittering.
Sheila Hamilton is a widely-published poet who is currently living in the North West of England. Her full-length collection The Spirit Vaults (2017) is published by Green Bottle Press. She is working on a new collection.
*****
Sarah James: Two Poems
SCHRÖDINGER’S GAFF
With its door shut and curtains drawn,
this house is both empty and full
from the foundations to chimney with life,
laughter and hoarded might-be-useful-one-days.
But doubting existence hollows a heart
in an instant, from the inside out. It turns
‘no one’s at home’ into a mantra that white-
noises with the tinnitus of lost joys.
Outside, the moon’s an opalescence.
Inside, through the closed window, a pill,
swallowed twice daily with water, drowning
or not drowning, while the door and curtains
remain tightly shut. Keepsakes are breathed
as mouthfuls of dust; memories become ghosts,
flickering past in this night that refuses
to end, rooms brimming now with regret.
Empty or full, the house stays standing –
a bric-a-brac of bricks and mortar
with a ridge jutting onto the sky. Light slips
through where and when it can, via the gaps
between rooftiles/curtains/doorframes,
to shine for anyone who cares to see.
Splintered floorboards creak with the weight
of both fullness and emptiness.
CLOSER TO THE ROOF
These days, no one keeps anything
in the basement. Our rising sea level
is too high; nothing remains submerged
for long, not even buried secrets.
Old chairs, tables and forgotten
photo albums float off
like a reunion dinner on water,
waiting for the guests to arrive.
My dreams are hidden now in the attic,
smothered in dust and rat shit,
growing closer to the ground floor
with every thunderstorm.
Each morning, I go up to be as near
as I can to the roof. I sit by a gap
between the tiles where fresh rain
slips in, listening for the flap
of wings, for a pigeon
to return with a sprig of hope.
Sarah James/Leavesley is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Winner of the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2020 and CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021, her latest collection is Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press, 2022), partially inspired by living with type one diabetes from the age of six. She was The High Window Resident Artist for 2019 and also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction. Her website can be found at www.sarah-james.co.uk.
Sue Kindon: Poem
A SKEIN OF FATES
We were three sisters, plaited together:
Emerald, Turquoise, Ultra-marine.
Our strands ran through oceans
and skies, our lives depended
on interlinked hands.
Together we braided our story,
a three-plied adventure,
now tighter, now looser,
a dark hair for sadness,
a gold streak for joy,
always together – well, almost –
strong as a fisherman’s rope
or a rescuer’s winch,
a pleached charm bracelet
to ward off change,
our wreath was immortal
until Turquoise snapped
– just like that –
and unravelled,
as if her thread had never been.
We cling closer now,
Emerald and Ultra-marine,
thundercloud frightened
in shallow ferryman waters,
fragile as cashmere yarn.
Sue Kindon lives and writes in the French Pyrenees. She has been widely published in magazines, and has had some success in competitions. She considers her greatest achievement to date to be a prize for a poem in French. She is currently working on a third pamphlet to follow She who pays the piper (2017) and Outside, The Box (2019).
*****
Nigel King: Three Poems
RECITAL
All the music in the world is shut in a blue and gold
enamel box, held in my lap. I sit beside the driver
of our oxcart as we jolt across a trackless plain.
At every rock we hit the burden heaped behind us
clanks and groans under a ragged tarpaulin.
The driver is wrapped in a dirty white robe,
scarf over his mouth against the dust. I envy
his black plastic sunglasses as I shade my eyes
with my hand. My tongue is a useless wad of leather.
It has been light forever, then of a sudden it’s dark.
Constellations pop into place, in brand new
configurations. Night creatures lift their heads
at a shower of meteorites, carry on unperturbed.
As do we. We move with no more will than a planet
in orbit, a shifting tectonic plate. The driver
looks down at the box, nods. I unfasten the catch,
flip back the lid. Chords, melodies, harmonies, rhythms
ascend to the heavens, like upside-down rain.
FANTASY TEACHERS
(After Fantasy Mother by Mary Jean Chan)
1. P.E.
You could feel the shame
of my skinny arms, sunken chest
as I unbuttoned my white shirt
in a corner of the changing room.
You distracted the other boys’
attention, with a shouted joke
at nobody’s expense.
You did not laugh
as I stalled a third time
in front of the vaulting horse.
You did not bellow across the field:
Catch the bloody thing!
2. Metalwork
You smiled at iron filings
strewn across my bench.
Your big hands
stayed in your pockets.
You let me use
the loudest, most exciting machines:
drills, grinders, lathes.
You left your sparking temper
outside the workshop door.
3. Art
You told me it did not matter
that I could not draw
an apple from life. You
showed me Picasso.
You were not bemused
by the strangeness of the features
copied from the mirror.
You said:
Don’t worry about perspective.
It will come.
IN THE HOUR WE GOT BACK
you made tea and cleaned the kitchen floor.
A mile away your mother breathed her last.
And in that same hour a berg calved
from the iceflow, and the solar wind
rippled around the earth like a river
around a mossy boulder.
In that hour a man sat on top
of such a boulder and watched frogs
in a clear pool, more frogs
than a heron could eat for breakfast,
and a woman crossed a dusty road,
saw seven vultures circling overhead.
Nigel King is originally from Billericay, Essex, but now lives in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, where he is a member of the Albert Poets group. His poems have been published in a range of magazines; his first pamphlet, What I Love About Daleks, was published by Calder Valley Poetry. For many years he lectured in Psychology at the University of Huddersfield, but is now (semi) retired and enjoying a part-time MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
*****
Sydney Lea: Three Poems
SHADOWS
i.m. my brother Mahlon (1944-1980)
The shade our tamarack throws
Grows paler every day,
Just as its needles do.
Each last needle will soon have fallen.
An evergreen, in short, that’s not.
How can you be more than forty years dead?
I look up from writing this,
and it’s painful, my perception,
as though I had some something
in my eyes, almost
like a needle itself.
Those eyes, against my will, go blurry.
Again. The rain’s a subtle drum
on every tree in the forest,
but I focus on the one.
I’ve gotten so used to it.
It’s stood apart for most of my life.
Four decades and more without you now.
That single tree is spilling itself
on the ground but in mind, the dark shadow
of its canopy will live on
even after it’s gone.
HIGH NOON
Long gone now, our tiny Ambler theater,
where a matinee show cost a dime. We’d gladly have stayed
forever. Popcorn, Raisinettes, whatever,
and on the screen, men more impressive and brave
in righteousness or evil than any we knew,
including our dull, hard-working, temperate fathers.
We hadn’t been long on earth in ’52,
when we watched that famous walk of Gary Cooper’s
down the dusty street after every lesser human
had hidden or fled. How we three boys all jeered
his Quaker wife, who’d foolishly tried to restrain him
from sacred obligation, and how we cheered
when the marshal plugged the villain, and at last we praised
his woman for getting over her pacifist twaddle,
for shooting a bad guy dead, then clawing the face
of another who used her to shield him. As soon as he dropped her,
her lanky, laconic husband did what was needed.
I don’t have to say that those two or three slaughtered men
in High Noon weren’t much compared to the masses we read of
each day destroyed in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan,
nor were we the least concerned with the relegation
of certain patrons we’d see from a distance in line
for a place upstairs some adults called Colored Heaven,
though we boys were never moved to understand why.
But if you’d asked us back then, as we left the show,
as Dougie fired his remnant Milk Duds at Kent,
as I ran my tongue along the upper row
of my perfect new adult teeth in a vain attempt
to scrape off some stubborn Jujube, as we stood
in wait for my mother’s boring station wagon–
for all the preachments on peace we’d heard in that morning’s sermon,
if you’d asked how to right any wrong, I’m sure we’d have said,
Give Gary Cooper a gun. Or Alan Ladd in Shane,
or in film after film, that black-listing racist, John Wayne.
There were villains and tribes who remained to be extinguished
by such heroes so kids like us could stay entertained,
could applaud everything that was good, and white, and unblemished.
DEAR FRIEND DYING
Bright, sweet, absent
are three of the words she whispered.
She poured out a slew of others,
but only a few have stayed
in my mind. I remember, say,
how she muttered two pillows, a bed,
and a silver day. Was that
a recall of first love, or some other
great change? What was she trying
to tell me on that last visit?
I knew I’d never know,
and I found myself slightly sickened
at my own incomprehension.
Was she raving, my old friend,
her random terms a jumble
of this or that mad metaphor?
Of course, my own terms are clumsy:
her voice was as soft as before,
too calm for a label like raving,
I think how the complex story
of any colorful dream
for the most part gets erased
by our waking. Did her dying
bring a kindred sense of loss,
expressed in unfathomable words?
That’s what I half-supposed.
I didn’t know, still don’t.
She’d been so wise a woman.
Was what she tried to recount
somehow her truest wisdom?
Like anyone else, my friend
had known her share of grief:
a cousin gone in girlhood;
her husband; her drunken brother,
the only sibling she had,
a boor whom she cherished no matter;
no children– she was infertile.
At one point during my vigil,
she breathed, Sweet by-and-by.
She’d never been one for cliché.
Did her lapse imply she’d unite
with those vanished loved ones someday?
Maybe not. Maybe that was the loss.
She’d lived for five years longer
than I as I write this down.
I soon felt the ugly oppression
of a thought that had lain there in waiting.
Do you know the kind? In an instant,
you understand that you never
gave enough to someone dear,
and now there’s no time for amends.
Soon she slept. I thought of my failures.
In that death room, I found myself loathing
the man who looked back from her mirror.
Sydney Lea was a Pulitzer finalist, founded New England Review, was Vermont’s Poet Laureate, and received his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines).
*****
Edward Lee: Poem
FIRST TIME
We look at each other,
countless secrets
in our eyes, secrets
even we don’t know
but which form all
that we are,
nervously dancing
from foot to foot,
waiting for the other
to speak first,
so we might finish the sentence,
get us through the door
and up the stairs,
undressed
and in bed,
where our secrets will be revealed
for as long as
our hearts might allow,
or perhaps no longer
than our bodies can endure.
Edward Lee‘s writing and photography have been published in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. He has published several collections of his poems. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.
He blogs at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com
*****
Kathryn Macdonald: Poem
YELLOW
Our yellow house perches like sunshine
on a hillside where a pond shimmers,
a pond deep enough for goldfish to overwinter,
a pond where thyme spreads in the cracks
between the rocks at its edge,
where trumpet flowers tumble over an arbour,
protecting a wren in a tiny house,
a place where the notes of Summertime float.
In Arles, Vincent van Gogh painted
yellow sunflowers, wheatfields
(one with crows), painted his yellow house.
But yellow is not always the colour
of sunshine. Sometimes yellow spreads
an ambience of…pale sulphur.
At our yellow house where you once sat
in the garden in the evenings, sat
in a yellow Adirondack chair near the wren
who raised her young to the rhythms of jazz,
time stopped. Now in our garden,
a tangle of colourless weeds, now
the house looms ashen yellow.
Note:
“Summertime” by George Gershwin, from the musical Porgy and Bess.
Vincent van Gogh qtd. by Anna Gruener, “Vincent van Gogh’s yellow vision” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693787/
Kathryn Macdonald is a Canadian poet who lives in Belleville on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Her poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall, The High Window and other Canadian and international literary journals and anthologies. She is the author Far Side of the Shadow Moon (chapbook), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édourd (fiction). For more information, please visit https://kathrynmacdonald.com.
*****
Greg Miller: Poem
THE GUILD
When I was a kid on Maple Avenue
with my little brother and sister,
our babysitter, Mrs. Jewell,
lived at the block’s far end
near the tarpaper purple-shingled church
with the friendly young pastor and wife
who visited once inside my parents’ house.
I associated Mrs. Jewell’s name
with her clear crystal diamond-faceted
candy dish from which she asked me to take some
once or twice. I was alone when I came around,
as I was wont to do, in the neighborhood,
unannounced.
White haired, thin, sweet,
she would swing around unpredictably.
I didn’t want to take my eye off her.
They call this confabulation.
(Well, we were supposed to tell our mother everything.)
A few times Mrs. Jewell, double-dipping,
babysat us, drove us with her middle-aged daughter
to the Red Hill Cemetery
where we watched her and her daughter dig graves
now green across the narrow,
curvy road from the bluffs
on the Nolin River’s South Fork
where I caught bluegill and longear sunfish
with my grandfather and father.
We were supposed not to tell our mother.
Of course, we did,
despite being more than a little afraid
what our gravedigger-sitter might do
with us when she found out we’d told on her.
Mom closed her Accordion doors
to her formal white living room:
thunderous quiet talk!
We were brought in together later
to hear things that flew over my head.
Proof of something on a swallow’s wing
came to me when my friend Mary Woodward
posted herself online last night with a pickaxe,
digging a grave by night
(part of the Chapel of the Cross
Gravediggers’ Guild)
in the obdurate Yazoo clay
after a four-month crazy-hot drought,
under the flood lights’ atmospheric river,
adults milling around up top,
chatting and laughing,
children peering at the top of Mary’s head,
all of this came to me,
heat lightning, Mrs. Jewell’s magnifying face
unlocked in a raindrop,
out of my deep grave of nowhere
as she swung and the rock soil cracked.
Greg Miller’s first three books of poetry, Iron Wheel (1998), Rib Cage (2001), and Watch (2009)—were published by the University of Chicago Press; his most recent collection, Now and Then Here and Now: New and Selected Poems, was released by Sheep Meadow Press (2022). Miller’s translations of the poetry and prose of the freethinking French poet Théophile de Viau are forthcoming from Études épistémè in Paris and his next book of poems, Green Runs Through It, from Sheep Meadow Press in New York.
*****
Jean O’Brien: Four Poems
THRESHOLDS
There is a god of thresholds and doors,
two-faced Janus looks both ways –
backwards and forward –
I too stood a long time on thresholds –
coming home from school
trying to learn the weather within.
Our mother’s moods set the tone,
the light would dim with her despair.
Outside the world was often harsh,
hard to negotiate but simple enough
when compared to her exquisite pain
that seemed to fuse itself to the very air,
grief with no relief grows inwards.
So I stood in the cold until my feet ached,
hand on the door knob
trying to read that threshold,
harder than any lesson
learned in school
there was no right or wrong,
just greater or lesser
and in the end no final exam.
MENAGERIE
old yellow bones in a bog,
the colour of butter long buried
in wet peat.
A raw white moon
nodding in the heads
of bog cotton.
A chorus
singing the flesh
flensing wind.
On the shelves
above my desk
I keep;
A china skull,
ruffled swan feathers,
an old empty inkwell
a carved ebony figurine
charms against time,
against dank rivers
flowing secretly underground.
A weir to catch the tidings
dispel hexes
a shell for the ear
to net the ocean,
scatter pain-pocked air
making it thrum
with a spate
of glittering words.
PROBE
Faint at first like the doppler echo
in a submarine. Sonar pings
lighting up the screen in a flicker
of yellow and green waves,
a cajoled and captured aurora borialis
decorating my inner sky. The technician
annoints with jelly the wash of my skin,
her wand pushing out within
my body’s horizon. I lie horizontal,
try to keep still as my heart
shudders. A leaky valve is hiding
in the shadow zone
blood seeps, unsealing
a door of my heart.
THE STEPPING STONES
Look slippery and some seem too far apart,
others are half submerged as river water eddies
and flows on. I hesitate, try to weigh up the danger.
I know these stones and this river,
they buoyed me up as a child
seeking the escape that nature gives;
the happiness of seeing minnows swirl in
my tied jamjar, the delight of wind in the rushes
tall enough to brush my shoulders as I imagined
another life, like George in the Famous Five
and leapt fearlessly from stone to stone.
Now years later a breeze brushes my back
and the sky looks like rain, currents race,
pebbles on the river bed rumble.
The divine is everywhere and
I am unsure of my step.
An air of unease stirs the atmosphere
these rocks attract like lodestones,
taking a deep breath I straddle them
launching myself to the far bank.
I feel exiled from my past
Jean O’Brien’s latest poetry collection, her sixth, Stars Burn Regardless was published by Salmon Poetry. She is a prize winning poet, coming first in the Arvon International and the Fish International and been placed or highly commended in many more. Her most recent being highly commended in the Bridport Prize 2023. She was awarded a Kavanagh fellowship and was the poet in residence in the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris. She tutors in cw/poetry at post graduate level.
Helen Overell: Poem
BEREFT
Griefs perch on my shoulders – owl-feathered,
wings hunched, glint of beak, scrape of claw;
the mother grief, raggedy, time-worn, decades old,
peers through sparse grey pinions, far-sighted;
the father grief sits, dazed, bald-headed as a dove,
haloed by ruffled shimmer of plumage;
the mother grief shifts her weight, raises, lowers,
one foot at a time, rocks her cradle of bone;
the father grief blinks, dazzled, bemused by sight,
clears his throat with bewildered cough;
the mother grief tidies a lock of my hair, nibbles
my earlobe, nestles into my neck;
the father grief grips tight, stretches up, tilts my chin –
tears drip, dampen – waits for my smile;
griefs roost on my shoulders – owl-winged, ringed,
hushed comfort of star-fold souls.
Helen Overell lives in the Mole Valley, has published widely in magazines and anthologies, and takes an active role in the Mole Valley Poets, a Poetry Society stanza group. Her publications include her collections Inscapes & Horizons (St Albert’s Press, 2008) and Thumbprints (Oversteps Books, 2015) and a booklet Measures for lute (The Lute Society, 2020). Her website is: www.overell.co.uk
*****
Marka Rifat: Two Poems
QUINCE, OR THE WINTER PEAR
Too small for fine art –
still life cascades of nature’s abundance –
these pus-yellow fists,
gleaming malevolence amid dark thorns,
sparked fears of gall, of tumours set to
wreck my young japonica.
Research revealed the Ancients valued quince,
that Pliny ate them raw,
that Chaucer called them coines,
that they were thrown to Greek brides,
not from spite but for fertility,
that Orleans’ first gift to Joan of Arc was cotignac –
the quince marmalade of kings –
that it once grew in all New England gardens,
and now, as paste,
denotes the best of cheeseboards.
My winter pears are teak-hard, battle-scarred and stunted,
full of pips and bitterness,
do not yield their paltry bounty without a fight
with peeler, knife and tender fingertips.
My blood joins their eerie reek of sharpness,
spice and old leaves,
and even suffused in mounds of sugar,
the compote is acid sludge.
So, I leave cuisine to those who know
and feast my eyes on plump beauties
by Cotan and Caravaggio.
RING OF BRODGAR
I saw you first on a shortbread tin,
quite a shift from stags at bay and Scottie dogs,
a fleeting thought.
Years later, streaming eyes, hair flailing
in the island’s relentless winds,
I touched your unyielding slabs,
while children ran in circles, with no
care for yesterday and no concept of
millennia past. But then, who has?
It is all conjecture, a narrative fashioned
from scraps of bone, burnt seeds, faint
indentations from long-vanished paths
worn by reverence or racing abandon,
a mixed media work from shreds of cloth,
puzzle box splinters, a scrimshaw line,
thermoluminescence and vaulting leaps of faith.
Better to preserve the mystery and let
each person listen in gale-whipped
solitude to the stones, to their own stories,
or keep digging for meaning?
Marka Rifat’s written and visual work has won awards and appears in more than fifty North American, British, and Australian collections. Forthcoming work will be in an anthology on place and belonging. Recent publication includes three poems in Dreich, a photograph and poem in The French Literary Review, and a story in the final edition of the John Byrne Award website. Marka lives in Scotland.
*****
Jenny Robb: Poem
THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER
after Rebecca West
The world they tell him is real fades in and out.
Its rooms are peopled with women he’s never met.
But the cannon fire in his head ceases to shock
when he sees his first love.
She wears a creased lavender dress with dirty cuffs,
and no rings. He has little speech, stutters, hello.
Her eyes reflect the fire but the flames
are not for him. For him there’s sympathy.
Her voice is liquid morphine,
measured, not what he wants.
There’s another woman. They say she’s his cousin.
She dreams his dreams, wakes choking
on gas and mud, holds his hand when it shakes.
She follows him around the country mansion,
and doesn’t let him enter the empty nursery.
A third woman says she’s his wife. Her hair
is golden, her clothes silk. She chatters
about the house. Nothing she says interferes
with the replay of battle.
And yet spring returns.
His first love looks at him,
sees the man she used to know,
wants but cannot have.
He picks up a red ball and remembers.
He hears his son shout, Daddy, I’m over here.
Battle cries are silenced. There is no boy.
Only the smell of coconut,
a yellow spray of gorse.
A cuckoo calling.
Jenny Robb lives in Liverpool. She retired from a social work/management career, (mainly in mental health services), and started writing poetry. Since 2020 she’s been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her debut collection is The Doll’s Hospital, (Yaffle Press, 2022). Her new collection, Hear the World Explode, is due to be published by Yaffle Press later this year.
*****
Jill Sharp: Three Poems
POSTCARD FROM THE START OF TIME
Wish I could remember a single minute
of the day I bought this to remind me of our day.
I know we never saw that beam of light –
how it seems to melt through walls
and illuminate the line of Prime Meridian –
because we visited in daytime. Must’ve loved
the drama of its turquoise ray slicing
the darkness, the sombre cobalt sky.
I think you balanced along the metal strip
that marks out longitude zero. It’s the sort of thing
you would have done, wobbling on a tightrope
like a clown. But I can’t be sure. West
and East lay yesterday and tomorrow –
but here was now, the two of us high
above Town on Observatory’s hill.
Did we laugh at how imaginary time zones
tether planet Earth in invisible thread?
Mean Time: miserly measure of the planet’s
spin and orbit, parcelled out in seconds, minutes,
hours, all tallied and accounted for.
But that day we could do as we pleased:
head into Greenwich for a pie and mash,
visit the Cutty Sark (or maybe that was
another day, years later). Wish
we could turn the clock back, but time
marches on, we’re told, and waits for no-one.
The beam of light that’s captured here
must still be travelling through the darkness somewhere –
bright as the moment this photograph was taken –
far beyond our galaxy by now.
Can’t remember when I last looked at this postcard.
It’s clean and shiny as the day I bought it,
the reverse an empty space:
Wish you were here.
SCRABBLE WITH MY AUNT
A fiction
Thinking a game much safer than conversation
I set out the board, open the calculator
on my phone. She rummages round for paper
and a pencil, insistent on keeping score.
In her day they were taught to do their sums,
so she’s not afraid of a bit of adding up.
She starts, and quickly gets into triple digits
while I stare at a tray of vowels.
A lengthy pause, and when I manage TOE
she slowly unpeels and removes a laddered pop-sock
to show me her fungal infection’s nearly gone.
I hesitate when my letters spell out GENDER –
should’ve known it would set her off.
They never had all that nonsense back in her day:
if you had a working willy, you were a man.
I can read from upside down that I lag behind,
with only a few tiles left. Then she gets TAXI,
the X on a triple letter, and grins with glee.
I shift the unpromising letters on my tray –
and there it is: SEVENTY, her age.
So that’s S on the end of TAXI, Y on a double letter,
the whole thing a double word, plus fifty more
for getting all seven down. Talk about chuffed!
She checks and adds my score without a word.
Even from upside down, it looks more than enough.
OVERDRIVE
Parked close, but in the opposite direction, he steps
back to let me open my door first: a smile, a gesture
like a bow, which has me fumbling in my bag
under that grey-eyed gaze, alarmed by his
unlined face, the soft flesh of the throat.
And then, as I slide the cold key
home, a glimpse of those Michelangelo feet, flexed
in their leather straps, one chino hem rucked
back to reveal an ankle. The years
fall from me like a gown, but as I buckle
up and start the engine, I remember
the secateurs I’ve bought to dead-head the roses,
my bumper pack of glucosamine, and I wink
at the blushing face in my rear-view mirror.
Jill Sharp’s poems have appeared in Acumen, Envoi, Prole, Stand and Under the Radar and online at The Lake, The High Window, and the Mary Evans Picture Library poetry blog. Her pamphlet Ye gods was published by Indigo Dreams in 2015 and she was one of six women poets featured in Vindication, an anthology from Arachne Press, 2018. Her poem ‘Cemetery Crow’ was placed joint-second in the Keats-Shelley Prize, 2020.
*****
Fiona Sinclair: Poem
DANCING ON A MOTORBIKE
First date you declare I don’t dance .
so no performing bear shuffle to
some power ballad at parties or ‘dos ‘ .
But come November my own condition,
each Saturday the ‘Strictly’ * glitter ball will
illuminate a sullen autumn night .
Your commentary no heel leads,
nice fleckerl, irritates like a blow fly,
yet inexplicably tallies with the judges.
Turns out your parents were taught ballroom
by Frank and Peggy Spencer* .
A boy with a talent for detail ,you grasped
the theory of fox trot and tango
readily as the outside edge, offside rule .
A questioned remains stoppered in my mouth.
Did you ever shed jeans and leather jacket to
don threads and take to the floor?
Later, answered by the glancing blow of your revelation,
at dinner -dances would sometimes partner
your mum when dad had danced his fill.
Keen enough now for me to partner you
on a motor cycle as perched pillion.
In my head a siren scream ,
but am ransomed by your
I won’t buy unless – so nod assent.
First ride , as HGVs and buses pass like dinosaurs
I white knuckle grip onto the bargain
struck with self , just this once.
Shut my eyes and trust physics
to deliver me at each bend,
Yet there is point on a rural road
when my fear is suddenly taken by the wind.
And whilst friends may shamble
through ‘their song’, this is our dance ,
to the bike’s raucous soundtrack.
At times a wild quick step
with a whoop at every turn,
others , an audacious waltz that
slaloms past stationary traffic at lights,
or pulled up at a railway crossing
the idling engine croons ,
as you settle back against
me in slow dance intimacy .
glossary
*Frank and Peggy Spenser legendary ballroom dance teachers
* ‘Strictly’. A celebrity dance competition aired each autumn on the BBC
Fiona Sinclair lives in rural Kent. Her collection Dining with the Dead was published in January 2024 by Erbacce Press. Fiona’s hobbies include gardening , buying handbags and riding pillion on the back of her husband’s motor bike . Her ambitions are to ride once on a motorcycle trike and be nominated for a Pushcart prize . Each seem as remote as the moon!
*****
Mark Ryan Smith: Two Poems
MEN’S WARD
The old man gets up again.
He drifts through the ward
in a white shirt
and pyjama bottoms,
until a nurse helps him
back to bed again.
‘Did you know my son?’
he asks me, the next time he rises.
‘I did,’ I reply, then try
to make something
of an acquaintance
that didn’t amount to much.
There’s just enough
for a memory,
a coin dropped into the dark
of a well that a dead son
has opened inside him.
The deep, quiet splash
wakes another patient.
He looks through scared eyes,
then resettles as best he can,
while the old man walks on,
searching for remembrance.
SAILING RACE
When they reach the last turn,
two of the boats are ready
for the wind.
Spinnakers
jerk up thin masts and fill:
there’s a race for the line,
leaving the wooden spoon
for boat number three,
whose extra sail puffs and crumples
like a lung
refusing to breathe.
Mark Ryan Smith lives in the Shetland Islands.
*****
Rowena Sommerville: Three Poems
MODERN LAUNDRY
We are breakfasting at La Croisette,
Phnom Penh.
I eat muesli (global, standard)
and drink coffee (local, bracing).
A soft kitten-dab of breeze from the river
does not lessen the heat.
A sign opposite brightly proclaims
MODERN LAUNTRY
and I consider the possible histories of this.
The rinse/spin of life
has delivered both my boys to unexpected places
and I’m visiting,
folding myself into new shapes,
wrung out with sweat and emotion
and marvelling at the world
in all its steaming colours,
while I try to work out
where I might belong.
Others have been hurled by harsher forces,
washed up and spat out
into new landscapes.
Last night we ate Lebanese –
think of the swirl of catastrophes,
the pressing will to survive –
allowing me to enjoy hummus
by the Tonle Sap.
I so admire the valiant spirit,
the gallant refusal to drown in the whirlpool.
I want to shout it –
MODERN LAUNTRY!
Let it shine out
into the turning sky.
TURNING UP
I am not the future of poetry,
this much is clear.
I am neither youthful nor sparkling,
I don’t have big socials,
nor a strikingly unwise facial tattoo.
I don’t have a painful back story
xxxxxxxxxxx– well, I might actually have
a bit of the latter, but, you know,
the story just goes too far back.
I am not the future of poetry,
and I wasn’t much of its past, TBH.
As we speak, unless remarkable research
or creepy cryonics
suddenly take a mad leap forward,
I am well past the half-way mark –
so can’t even claim to be middle-aged –
although, my de-cataracted eyes
are surely just the tiniest bit
bionic?
I would call myself a veteran,
but my poetic achievements
hardly justify that
and probably are too obscure
and done for the wrong sectors,
the wrong markets,
and in the wrong ways,
to qualify for that – and
iconic
is obviously
out of the question.
But I’ve had fun along the way,
and I’ve entertained a few people
a little of the time,
and myself quite a lot of the time,
so, I’ll continue my poeting
and the future must elect and destroy
its own poetic gods,
as it sees fit.
I am not the future of poetry,
but, for now, I will keep on,
turning up.
DAWNBIRD
The dawnbird stitched the light
to my bedroom curtains,
needling in the sunshine.
Its jabbing beak
daisy-chaining the new day
into manageable flowerheads.
The bird sang and darted,
too quick for me to name it,
too fleet for me to pin it,
too sharp for me to be wholly sure
of its sunlit agency.
And now daylight is fully here,
illuminating all intentions,
and must be faced,
even welcomed,
shining through the ashy silhouette
of feathers.
Rowena Sommerville is a writer, illustrator, singer and project producer, and she lives on top of a cliff looking out to sea in beautiful North Yorkshire. She has worked in the arts for all her life, sometimes successfully! She has had numerous poems published in magazines and her first collection, Melusine, was published by Mudfog in 2021; she had five poems published in a Stickleback leaflet by Hedgehog Press in 2023. She was the Visual Artist in Residence for The High Window in 2022.
*****
Tessa Strickland: Two Poems
THE TWO WHITE HORSES OF PRADO DEL REY
Once, they were beaten and starved,
diminished, body and soul, to living skeletons.
It was Jacob, the gardener’s son,
who saved them from the slaughterhouse.
Now, they grow round as they grow old,
their bellies as shapely as oranges.
Cobweb-quiet, they survey the high sierra
ancient olive farms, goats, herdsmen,
ghosts of Moorish soldiers.
At siesta, they arrange themselves like clock hands,
head to haunch, swish their tattered tails
to protect each other from bluebottles.
When the moon is full, they are waterfalls of light.
At sunrise, they are pools of white fire.
FOUR-POSTER
The bed was a reckless mistake.
They’d planned to buy six kitchen chairs,
but my dad bid high, profligate
with hope, paid more than he could spare
for an oak four-poster. Dear heaven,
that bed nearly killed them, laid bare
all the fractures in their union.
And yet, every year, a child came
tumbling in, until we were
a mass of thirsty mouths, a shame
we were so many, but what could
you do? The Pope was to blame,
the way he banned birth control. Should
have known better, been far kinder
to faithful couples who just could
not feed, clothe or properly care
for so many children. They did
not understand why their prayers –
hers for less sex, his for a quid
or three more in the pay packet –
went unanswered. Was God stupid,
mean, deaf or all three?
Worse – was he a fallacy?
Tessa Strickland was born and brought up in rural Yorkshire. After a career in publishing, most notably as originator/editor-in-chief of Barefoot Books, she started to write poems. Her work has been published by Frogmore Papers, Grey Hen Press, Magma, The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg and others. She was awarded third prize and highly commended in the Chrysse Morrison Poetry Competition, 2023.
*****
Ruth Valentine: Poem
DEEP WINTER BLUES
When I die, when I die
there will be frost
on the copper leaves on the path
one rose by the fence
parakeets flying lime-green between the trees
a fox on the garage roof
watching
what happens
when I die, when I die
there will be war somewhere
the lifeboat launch in a gale
there will be frost
a surgeon will peel off gloves
a woman start singing
all my trials, Lord
a child will come
running across the park
into someone’s arms
in the shed my poems
will settle back in their files
complete
accepting
When I die when I die
the garden will keep growing
the fox-cubs sleep
the books
will be a little dustier, till someone
loads them in boxes
drives them away to Oxfam
only my coat will mind
blue tiger-print fake-fur
I bought one morning
thirty-four years ago
on my way to work
Ruth Valentine has published several poetry collections; the latest is If You Want Thunder, with Smokestack. She also has a novel, The Jeweller’s Skin, and various works of non-fiction. She lives mainly in Tottenham, and sometimes in Boston Massachusetts.
*****
Rob Walton: Poem
THE QUESTION OF CORNWALL
Two bunk beds, too much red wine.
To go to Eden or not to go to Eden?
That was one of the questions.
Two families, two chalets.
How many pot-bellied pigs snuffling
outside your accommodation is too many?
That National Trust place
or more red wine outside?
Or more red wine outside?
There is absolutely no bias in these questions.
Swim three awkward lengths
or buy over-priced tat in the camp shop?
The choice is yours.
Either way, bathing costumes must be worn.
Let me drive on the narrow roads
with high hedges and blind bends and crying
or leave it to a proper grown-up?
So, next year – Cornwall again?
Rob Walton was born in Scunthorpe but now lives in Whitley Bay. His poetry and prose for adults and children has appeared in anthologies and magazines in the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. Arachne Press published his debut poetry collection, This Poem Here, in 2021. He has also written scripts, gardening articles and columns for a football programme.
*****
Ross Wilson: Two Poems
THE HUMAN IMAGINATION
‘The exciting thing is to see somebody who is doomed to die, live and be happy.’
– William Kolff
I slumped in a staff room chair,
coffee in one hand, phone in the other,
and Googled ‘dialysis machine’
to discover who the hell thought that up.
The human imagination!
It was like some mad professor, sci-fi shit:
removing the bodies blood, to clean it?
Then pumping it back in? Aye, right!
Back on the unit I cleaned the machine
three times: hot soapy water; Achticlor;
hot soapy water, and thought of Kolff
and how the war interrupted his progress.
He’d used laundry tubs in his prototype:
trying, failing, trying, failing, and then
finally giving his machine like a gift
to those in need of it. No talk of profit.
Then my mind cartwheeled four hundred years
to Renaissance Italy and the imagination
of Leonardo DaVinci drawing war machines
to fund his art and scientific research.
Some claim he sabotaged his own designs
so wicked men could not make use of them,
or so I hoped I remembered reading,
as I switched the machine on an internal clean.
Note: Willem Kolff (1911-2009) developed the first artificial kidney utilising wooden drums, cellophane tubing and laundry tubs while a member of the resistance in the Netherlands during World War Two. He donated his machines to hospitals around the world and would later be involved in developing the first artificial heart.
FORT WILLIAM
1990. A family road trip
through Glencoe to Fort William.
We watched Sean Connery play a Russian
submarine commander in a swelter
of a summer night, so hot
in the cinema there was an intermission.
In our B & B I sketched ideas for a novel
using the Back to the Future movie
as my template:
William Wallace in 1988.
1992. December. A bunch of lads sat on
opposing benches in the back of a van
dipping and ascending,
bobbing and weaving
along Highland roads,
until we reached a venue with a ring.
Two, chatting friendly on the journey,
were in opposite corners.
I lost a split decision:
for days afterwards, my forehead stung.
2002. Backpacking solo.
My bus went by Fort William
and dropped me at the youth hostel
at the foot of a big hill
I discovered three quarters of the way up
in t-shirt and trainers,
the sky darkening, rain drops mixing
with the sweat beading my brow,
was none other than Ben Nevis:
I took a blister as a souvenir to Oban.
2024. We are here, just the two of us.
Two nights away from responsibility.
You are sleeping as I look over
Loch Linnhe with a cappuccino and a pen
like a rod reeling in fragments
dumped in the dark of my brain,
their only connection this place
and me in it, as significant as the rain
I watch absorb into Loch Linnhe:
footsteps no one will trace.
Ross Wilson works full-time as an Auxiliary Nurse. His first collection, Line Drawing, (Smokestack Books) was shortlisted for the 2019 Saltire Poetry Book of the Year. His second collection, Vital Signs, (Red Squirrel Press, 2023) is partly based on his experiences working in ICU during the pandemic.
*****
Pat Winslow: Poem
NIGHT CATCH
I forget the name of the bird
that calls at night repeatedly
when the cloud’s skulduggery
clasps the stars to its nest
and the wind wrestles
everything to its knees.
One flame outlasts others
to hurl gold and red at the glass
when the rest fall black
and silent into ash.
A wire coiled in the night
is an hour gone amiss.
No matter. Its turn
will come again.
Grains of sand on the stairs
a crust of lichen on the spar of a boat.
Someone found an old boot
to plant a story in.
How tall it’s grown
how like itself
striding off into the
tussocky future.
Pat Winslow worked for twelve years as an actor before leaving the theatre in 1987. She has published seven collections, most recently, Kissing Bones with Templar Poetry. A winner of several notable competitions over the years, she has been enjoying commissioned collaborations with filmmakers, composers and artists both before and during lockdown. Pat also works as a storyteller and is a celebrant for Humanists UK. For more information see http://www.patwinslow.com
*****
Lynne Wycherley: Two Poems
A COVEY OF FIELD-NAMES
Last night the tithe-map
talked in my sleep,
coppice, arable, long furze
a chant of roods and coulters.
I walked its ink-scratched
acreage and panes, searched
its scattered tesserae
for grain, a tenth of my being
tendered. For a song.
In this morning-before-morning,
sleep ever thin, I hear
the rags and tatters
of a poem: field-names,
they waft in quarterlight,
copper-plate lettering
brushing the grass,
pre-green, pre-rust, earth’s
pigments not yet painted.
The Back’ern and the Fallands,
curve of Westcott and Mr. Pin’s.
Benjy’s Field and Little Sood.
A hay scent: Brake Linhay
twitch-ears: Little Warren
that riverside eel: Long Cropley
and high as our eaves,
the sky’s first scarves,
Home Down.
If I adopt them, will they
adopt me? Relieve
my frayed impermanence
with their own? Pay out
their silk to swathe our bones,
patchwork cloak
of a borrowed home,
tithe-panes and our soul-wisps
gauged in mommes?
Forgotten birds,
brushed-sandstone made wing,
come settle in my
vagrant heart and sing.
‘HILLS AND HOLES’
Barnack, Cambridgeshire
Tumbleweed, how we’d
skip and run! Each dell
a novelty, each small
horizon, cup of ’squash,
haplessly sufficient.
Fray Bentos tin, a picnic’s
rumpled blanket; our
mother’s hair a magnet
for sly wings. You tell
your father: we’re not
coming here again! As we
fluttered, ran. Still forming,
how could we selve
those yet-to-name flowers,
Pasque, early orchid,
dark mullein? How delve
the hollows’ miracle?
Unspoken stone –
sunlight-made-stone –
hauled to dazzled water,
inky barges sliding to far rims
where transepts grew
to towers, grew to dream.
Trancing. Ely’s bloom.
Note: ‘Hills and Holes’ – medieval quarry (now a floral nature reserve),
supplied Ely and Peterborough cathedrals
Lynne Wycherley was born on the edge of the Fens, a recurring inspiration for her poetry, and now lives by a nature reserve in the West Country. Downstream of her new & selected poems (Listening to Light), her forthcoming collection is Songs from the Garden of Time, due from Shoestring Press this autumn.
The High Window 