*****
Stephen Boyce • Prue Chamberlayne • John Challis • Lynda V. E. Crawford • Neil Elder • Dominic Fisher • George Freek • Rona Fitzgerald • Greg Freeman • Bernadette Gallagher • Maria Isakova-Bennett • Sheila Jacob • Chris Kinsey • Tom Laichas • David Lambourne • Rose Lennard • Kathryn MacDonald • Kathleen McPhilemy • Caroline Maldonado • Mark Mansfield • Sadie Maskery • Peadar O’Donoghue • Edmund Prestwich • Andrew Seear and Victor Adereth • Anushka Sen • John Short • Mark Totterdell • Vivienne Tregenza • Charlotte Wetton • Gail Wronsky • Ping Yi • Kamil Zaszkowski
*****
*****
Stephen Boyce: Three Poems
WAKE
i.m. Sheena Vick
Not whether we ever wished
to possess another
or be possessed,
but the desire to live
within their orbit,
absorb their radiance a while.
It’s only a quadrant
we share, at best.
So we discover at the wake.
How rare in a lifetime
to stand at the centre
of another’s world,
to know their arc in full
– though we might sense
sometimes we do.
For knowing only that
segment that lit on us,
not the private passions,
cousins, myths, the counterpoints
and underpinnings,
the unrevealed rest, for that
we are the more bereft.
SNOWBERRIES
We never even went out to Vanlose on the metro
to discover the famous stairway,
though we had walked across Frederiksberg
in the mist on that grim day in January.
In any case I had in mind something
more Mediterranean than Scandinavian,
a narrow flight ascending steeply between
high stone walls – but whether into light or
darkness I could not say. Anyway I read later
it was an old apartment block with a broken lift –
songs are not witness statements and romance
takes many forms. Which is why we delighted instead
in snowberries, cormorants among the treetops,
pot-bellied penguins dancing on the skating rink.
TALLYING
It’s a minor marvel
quite remarkable
how often the body’s
clock is spot on,
its mechanism still
dependable despite
the inevitable weakening
of synapses, hardening
of ageing arteries:
the morning call is still
timed to perfection –
or the recall of items
on a bill surprises,
phone numbers,
remembered dates,
old reg plates,
other inconsequential
data still summoned,
needed or not, from
some dank archive
and timed to arrive,
triggered again by
recrossing a threshold,
in the very nick of time.
Stephen Boyce is the author of three poetry collections, Desire Lines (Arrowhead 2010), The Sisyphus Dog (Worple 2014) and The Blue Tree (Indigo Dreams 2019) and three poetry pamphlets. He is co-founder of Winchester Poetry Festival and lives in north Dorset, UK. stephenboycepoetry.com
*****
John Challis: Two poems
THE ADMINISTRATORS ARRIVE AT THE OFFICES OF THE GODS
When they’re forced out of the building
by the hired hands, they take
their precious cargo: photos of their offspring,
a pot plant (overwatered), a stress toy
kneaded to a pulp. Free to follow
whatever whim that duty hitherto suppressed,
they have neither humour
nor appetite for good behaviour.
Though they know they’re finished with,
their power gone, their manifestos
left in photocopiers, they wear the suit
and walk to where they used to work,
muttering the script they learnt to no one
in particular, believing in the bonus.
YOUTH
You sometimes see us
looking back, firmly there
yet gone as soon as
we are sighted.
We listen to the weather,
watch school kids unageing
in their holly-green blazers
crossing into woodlands
where fire listens for its echo
from the dried-up brook.
We witness other, older children
coming back a little less.
Pity us, our long stare.
Our world is a window.
The seasons are rehearsing
an ending to come.
John Challis’s first collection, The Resurrectionists, was published in 2021. A second, The Green Parcel, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2026. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University.
*****
Prue Chamberlayne: Poem
WHAT IS A CLOUD?
It seems a message,
demands regard, an honouring —
curlicue on cerulean
skein by a giant hand,
hair wisps of finest kind,
as when a Debussy prelude ebbs,
les sens et les parfums tournant
dans l’air du soir, fountain droplets
hover on being turned off. Is this
incipience or disappearance?
Volcanic cumuli are summer’s emblem —
this nakedness in single layer
exposes form, but does not measure
water vapour, whispered wind.
Uniqueness ushers an insistence.
Across the window one morning early
trail underside of jagged stitches
stays rigid, without displaced puffs.
Here absence of transience perturbs —
have ludic currents frozen stiff?
Note: Debussy Prelude 4: ‘feelings and perfumes turn in the evening air’.
Prue Chamberlayne lives in London and France. Poetry came after a career in comparative social policy and biographic-interpretive research. A collection Locks Rust appeared in 2019, and a chapbook Beware the Truth that’s Manacled with erbacce-press in 2022 that tackles the psychic underworld of racial experience, particularly regarding ‘whiteness’. A second collection Lizzard Looks came out with Arc in 2025, and a pamphlet, Pendulum, exploring absence, memory, silence and othering in a mixed heritage relationship, is seeking publication.
*****
Lynda V. E. Crawford: Three Poems
COLONIAL UN/BOTTLING
Find a 166-square mile island
Rub cravacious hands with glee
at the anticipation of importing
a plant/people with stamina & skill
to coax cane from fields into rum
Barrel darkness & wait—to savor
Excellent funkiness, at times, grassy
occasional woody inhale
keep the staves in place
once wood, now metal, curving
Age with slightly dry parliamentary notes
Heads flatted to capture aroma
stacked in suppressed reparations
bungholed some 40 decades in
plantation lives & lies
Expand-contract-absorb, un-oak into complex power
Form a new intense flavor through consistency
planned & persistent rebellions
(some will vinegar; some will harmonize)
1675 / 1696 / 1701 / 1816 / 1831 / 1834
Finish with a full-throated Republic: a colonial un-bottling
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT THE COLOUR
Don’t write about the blue, brilliant—
hovering over your great ìyá àgbà’s brown eyes,
her hands rubbing ancient clothes against river’s stone.
Do not write yet about that colour
how it closed its sky-ish eyes tight; didn’t blink
40 decades; pretending through precepts not to see.
Don’t write about the blue, ballasted—
its vibrance buoyed on tight-packed depths of ships,
cargo crossing salted seas, thieving family histories.
Do not write yet about that colour
how it roiled its latent insured-bounty, tossed
black gold, in panic, into parliamentary seep.
Write instead of a playful blue, bluffing—
elephant rabbit sandpiper shapes, wisped
white in sky to trap a child’s hands in skip-&-play.
Write instead of a clement blue, bounteous
guide to fishermen just the other day, home
from enslaver fish clouds on a Saturday market day.
MIGRANT/IMMIGRANT
we are music in two languages
the tightening of backside
to reach the pirouette
the swaying of hips
to entice the belly
the tingle of oil drum toned
in ocean-waving steel pan
a violin forgetting its ancestors
a kora calling-calling-calling
offspring touching, twirling knobs
to link their mothers to the eclectic
it’s about a new home, new notes
built from a piece of this and that
a piece a dis and dat
check the box that says Other
write in dingolay, socaballet
write in a bellyfull of music
Lynda V. E. Crawford was born and raised in Barbados and lives in the United States. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, ArtsEtc, The Caribbean Writer, The Galway Review, California Quarterly, and Exposition Review as well as various Moonstone Arts Center anthologies. A former journalist, copywriter, website manager, and email marketer, her debut poetry collection Washing Water was published by World Stage Press in October 2024.
*****
Neil Elder: Two Poems
WITHOUT END
I used to be so sad that I would never
know the ending of their story,
but I’ve been working hard on losing interest,
switching off and just not minding
how my children’s lives work out.
And this conditioning is paying off:
yesterday I slept through the last half hour of a film
and I felt great. Once upon a time I’d curse myself,
rewind, and watch the part I missed, but these days
I am happy to let go.
It’s the same with books; so many
I have slogged through, forcing myself to finish,
but nowadays, even with a book that I enjoy,
I stop reading halfway through,
never finding out who did it, or if the killer gets caught.
Last Saturday, with twenty minutes still to play,
I turned off the final of the FA Cup and went out for a walk,
I still don’t know who won the game.
Leaving the theatre during the interval
now seems quite natural; I don’t want
to know results of blood tests
or care who won the election.
I’ve learnt to now embrace all things unknown,
nothing needs to be tied neatly with a ribbon.
PICKING A WINNER
It took its time to get going, but by mid-afternoon
the sun had filled the day. I walked along the canal,
and between testing my uncertain knowledge of wildfowl,
I looked at the names of the colourful barges
and imagined life on board Misty Morning, Dream Catcher
or Carpe Diem. What would my barge be called, I wondered.
It’s the same game when the Grand National
rolls around. There are rules on naming horses;
eighteen characters maximum, and apostrophes
the only punctuation allowed. The glamour,
the high stakes and thoroughbreds; under starter’s orders
tension mounts. But when the horses tumble over
Becher’s Brook and DNF goes after the name,
I’m glad my horse is just imaginary.
It’s like the romance of life on the water – fine in theory,
but there are locks to open and there will be weather.
The vision disappears almost as quickly as the moorhen,
(I think it is) that has gone beneath the waterline.
Neil Elder won the Cinnamon Press debut collection prize with The Space Between Us, as well as their pamphlet prize with Codes of Conduct, also shortlisted for a Saboteur Award. He has a number of other publications, his latest work is Like This, from 4 Word Press. Widely published in magazines and journals, he is now looking for a home for his next collection. Neil occasionally writes at https://neilelderpoetry.wordpress.com/
*****
Dominic Fisher: Two Poems
WHEN THE GREAT LIBRARY BURNED
Your poem was included with those of others,
unless you had a sufficient body of work
which was thought to merit a scroll all to itself.
You wrote it in Greek of course, not your first language,
in hexameters, whether perfectly or not,
fluent or haltingly, it doesn’t matter now.
It rose gracefully enough from the library,
shone in fragments, lofty, sparkling round its edges,
neat script, near-perfect syntax, curling as it burned.
They may have been the biggest crowd you ever had,
the sailors who claimed they saw the glow and that ash
settled on their decks even miles out at sea.
In doubtful histories they’re still there, the porticoes,
colonnades, combustible stacks, the reading rooms
watched by carved philosophers and composite gods.
Your unspoken poem lifted to a silence
greater than names. It is where we are from and where
subject and object are the same and all lines meet.
PINE BOARDS AND HOUSE COAL
Pitch pine shipped
raw, resinous
from Archangel
still makes our house
creak underfoot
like a ship in a book
that omits
most of the journey.
Brickwork inside
the blocked-off chimneys
is soft black
from carbonised ferns
the dour incense
from underneath Wales
steamered here
to burn by the ton.
When we sailed home
from the excised chapters
laden with our sugar,
our timber, our coal,
our memories became
almost as pure
as raw cotton.
Nonetheless, our house
creaks under the carpet
like a ship still.
Dominic Fisher has been widely published in poetry magazines, and sometimes broadcast. He has published two collections and a third is in preparation. He was a co-editor of Raceme magazine, a member of performance group the IsamBards, and currently helps organise Silver Street Poetry, possibly Bristol’s longest running poetry event. https://dominicfisherpoetry.co.uk/
*****
Rona Fitzgerald: Two Poems
SUMMER BREAK
i.m. EF
She was happiest by the sea with her children —
wind and waves taking their weight, sand a caress,
an old friend. Seabirds sounding familiar cries.
Visiting after work, we would eat al fresco
on a small table I brought from home. We sat and watched
the sun going down; water reflecting orange warmth
then back to dusky blue. We talked about children,
school, her work. She loved being back in Ireland,
a contrast to the slate grey of midlands Stafford.
Occasionally, she confided unease, no details –
a dark cloud on a warm sunset. Even the children
freed from constraint rarely mentioned their dad.
Snug, crowded in a caravan in Bettystown, our old home
on Howth Road or light-filled west Cork, they were buoyant.
Her morning run filled her with joy.
Then breakfast for all, a brave swim in icy water,
picnics by the sapphire loch, giddy evening barbeques.
Her blanket spread wide to include everyone.
She called it her summer break. We didn’t know
it was to escape hectoring, belittling, verbal assault
and sometimes, blows.
As we drank tea at sunset, she would talk about her plans;
trekking in Africa, Europe, studying, returning to live in Ireland;
oceans of possibilities, even if just for the summer.
DOWN FROM THE HILLS
Zell am Zee, June 2025
On Lake Zee, a lone swan —
pristine against the restless alpine lake.
Last night’s storm has freshened
the hills to gemstone white.
My feet ache, my heart beats awkwardly.
Height and heat are weighing me down,
at seventy-one years, my lungs protest,
while alveoli sound an anthem of agitation.
I’ve had my time, great adventures —
climbing glaciers in the Arctic, in Patagonia.
Walking mountains that caressed clouds —
meeting peoples of the world.
Now, I need solid ground, the poetry of ordinary
days, with birds, flowers, the rhythm of the sea.
Rain-soft days walking. Music in my home,
with you. The joy and mystery of words.
Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin. She now lives in Glasgow. Rona writes poetry, stories and non-fiction. She is published in a range of online and print magazines including; The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, The Blue Nib, Dreich, Littoral Magazine, Marble Broadsheet, The Storms, Fixator Press, Culture Matters and The High Window. In September 2023, she published a book of poetry called Aftermath: Poems of Repair and Renewal, on Amazon.
*****
George Freek: Poem
ALONE WITH NATURE
The moon wanders the sky,
like a lost child.
If she cries, it goes unheard,
and the stars are like stones
spread on an unreachable beach.
The cosmos is a lonely home.
It’s a reality beyond our reach,
a reality which kills our dreams.
We’re unhappy with the world
of our inventions,
and so we constantly alter it
to fit our current needs,
but thoughts of eternity intrude
on our hopeful intentions.
That sky is a kind of mirror,
but what it reflects to us,
is never very clear.
George Freek is a poet and playwright from Illinois. His poems have recently appeared in The Stockholm Review of Literature, Signal Mountain Review, Miller’s Pond, A New Ulster and The Gentian Journal. His plays are published by Playscripts, Blue Moon Plays and Off The Wall Plays.
*****
Greg Freeman: Two Poems
1A RATCLIFFE ROAD
A blue plaque celebrates a ‘love nest’ shared by Monica Jones and Philip Larkin
in a cottage overlooking the South Tyne at Haydon Bridge, Northumberland
An unusually distant photo
by Larkin from the bridge
has Monica sitting
on the back wall of her cottage,
looking out across the river, waving.
He praised the ‘great English river
drifting under your window’.
They met here four or five times
a year to quarrel, drink, read
the papers, make up, fuck.
He found himself torn
between two women.
Letters arrived at Haydon Bridge
addressed to him
from the other one.
The General Havelock a few doors down.
Oddfellows Coffee in Shaftoe Street.
They went almost every year
to Bellingham, relished the wrestlers
he described in ‘Show Saturday,’
the Haydon Bridge allotments
reaching down to the railway.
Maybe the poem’s a love letter to Monica.
In a real letter her ‘red belt, openwork stockings’
are recalled with pleasure.
Swans, gulls preen themselves
in shallow water
after months of paltry rain.
Closed on Mondays:
Mr George’s Museum of Time.
Monica retired to the cottage
but fell down the stairs,
went to join him in Hull.
Together at last, his final years.
He left her most of his money.
What would the awkward church visitor
have thought of her bequests –
a quarter of a million each
to Durham cathedral
and Hexham abbey?
THE LAST LAUGH
after the statue of Stan Laurel in Dockwray Square, Laurel Park, North Shields
by artist Bob Olley
The statue’s expression is a tad
grotesque. It’s smiling, when
Stan rarely smiled, and doesn’t
capture his battered, sad,
down on his luck look. He stands
in a small park a short walk from
the old fishing town’s shuttered
shops. Appears a little lonely,
although his pal is inset
with him in a plaque.
He has a nice view of the Tyne,
mind, the statue close
to where he grew up.
They make more of him
at his Cumbria birthplace.
Stan always thought he knew
the answer, had a plan,
was never defeated for long.
Babe might beat him up,
yet they were inseparable.
The bowler hats, Stan’s hysterical
hair, that signature whistle,
the Dance of the Cuckoos,
the piano steps. Vintage
short reels for Hal Roach.
Beckett borrowed so much for Godot.
Their solemn-crazy dance routines
cheered cinema audiences,
still lift the spirits of those
in search of simpler pleasures.
Another nice mess. So many marriages
and divorces Stan lost count.
His duffed-up look
reminds me of my northern,
apparently browbeaten father-in-law.
That rueful, subversive smile.
He might cop it from the missus
and learn not to talk back
but I envied his ability to waltz.
Like shrewd Stan, all part of the act.
Greg Freeman spent five years in Yorkshire in his twenties, and then spent the rest of his life in Surrey until, three years ago, he returned to the north at the age of 70. He now lives in Northumberland. He has written extensively about the north-east since his relocation.
*****
Bernadette Gallagher : Poem
REPENTANCE AT KILLING A SLUG
The well is deep; rain has filtered through the soil.
The days are full of light, of quiet, of birdsong.
The snail, slug and beetle traverse the depths
with shiny backs and coloured skin as if washed
and dressed in their Sunday best.
I repent the times I killed the slimy slug,
thinking then that my hunger was greater,
more important than hers.
Bernadette Gallagher is a poet from Donegal living in County Cork. Her first poetry collection, The Risen Tree, was published by Revival Press in 2024. Her work has been published in Crannóg, Agenda, The Stinging Fly, The North, Stony Thursday, The Frogmore Papers, The Tablet, Dreich, FLARE, Southword, Cork Words 3, Tabula Rasa and in the Cinnamon Corners. As part of the Ó Bhéal go Béal, Bernadette has been nominated to participate in the 2025 Cork/Coventry Twin Cities Poetry Exchange. @bernadettegallagherwriter bernadettegallagher.blogspot.ie
*****
Maria Isakova-Bennett: Two Poems
SOUTH STACK, JUNE
The white lighthouse points to heaven.
Water, as far as you can see makes tiny
the Irish Ferry. It’s years since the last visit
when, in a restaurant, my best friend phoned.
He is gone now, not death, but stone cold.
Tonight, everyone adores the falling sun.
Lifeguards sprout from rocks.
Cars keep appearing round the bend
over the hilly track. A couple face west,
eyes only for their cameras. Whole families,
one with a small baby, settle on boulders,
I want to tell them, Shade her eyes.
South Stack: https://www.rspb.org.uk/days-out/reserves/south-stack
AN ENCOUNTER, TATE, LONDON
After Bonnard, 1919
A slur of paint confuses boundaries
between jug and cup and plate –
full or empty, patterned, plain.
Here is a woman in shadow
clutching a bowl of milk.
Her closed eyes suggest prayer.
Beyond, a window to water –
river, maybe sea, like promise
or tomorrow, not words you can say.
Inside again, red: walls, tiles on floor,
her dress, a vase of anemones
and yes . . . whatever else red asserts –
love, hot, a caveat, or condemned.
Regardless – flesh, a heart sultry, alive.
Maria Isakova-Bennett is an artist and writer from Liverpool, has six pamphlets, the latest are Painting the Mersey in 17 Canvasses; an o an x (Hazel Press, 2022 & 2023), and Subcutaneous (Wayleave Press, 2025). Maria has a Peggy Poole Award (Judge, Vona Groarke), and a New North Poet Award (Judge, Clare Pollard). She creates the hand-stitched poetry journal and project Coast to Coast to Coast, collaborating with writers in the UK and Ireland. Maria is Writer-in-Residence teaching for Mersey Care, NHS.
*****
Sheila Jacob: Three Poems
EXPECTATIONS ON CORPORATION STREET
Dad steers me towards glass counters
at the Midland Educational,
asks to see some Conway Stewart
fountain pens: turns to me, surprises me.
Choose which one you want –
a present, for passing your 11-plus.
I ease my favourite from a velvet tray,
ink my name on a jotting pad;
imagine writing letters to friends,
scribbling stories in my exercise book.
Come September, I’ll be used to the weight
of its blue-marbled barrel, rolled gold nib.
A SUMMER IN PSYCHO-GERIATRIC
Mum’s scalp is a wilderness of scurf
she’s smeared with olive oil,
neglected for weeks.
The Charge Nurse hisses,
tell her to shower, use some shampoo!
I sit Mum down, start to explain
but she’s not listening,
pulls me by the sleeve
to her hospital bedroom,
points to the wardrobe.
A big bearded man
was hiding, stepped out one night,
scared me half to death.
Her voice rises.
Fear dampens her armpits.
I hold her while she trembles,
stroke sweat-stale hair.
Money’s missing from my handbag.
And the laundry’s lost my vests,
sent the wrong pyjamas.
No one believes me. Do you believe me?
LONG WALK
I ignore my body’s protest –
too tired, sit down, start blarting –
keep walking through the tunnel
under the railway line,
past the clinic I queued in as a child,
sucked my sugar lump
so I wouldn’t catch polio.
I know this pavement’s camber,
how it turns, follows the main road,
steers me from the dark
of Mum’s eyes; unexpected cries
above her hospital bed.
You’ve brought the wrong teeth,
fetch me the right ones, now!
I reach the bus stop,
backtrack to the days
Mum held my leather reins.
When my small feet stumbled,
she swept me up,
swung me into the scent
of her flour-and-Palmolive arms.
Sheila Jacob was born and raised in Birmingham and has lived in N.E.Wales for the past forty years. Her poems have been published in various magazines,webzines and anthologies. Her debut pamphlet, Spotlit Under Street Lamps, a tribute to her Brummie ancestors, was published by Yaffle Press in July 2024. She is working on her first full collection.
*****
Chris Kinsey: Three Poems
ENCHANTMENT
Long before the fairy tale it was love at first sight.
I’d crawled down the garden further than I should.
The tendrils and flowers of the tangled pea row hid me.
I hunkered to rest and there you were, slick with morning dew.
We stayed staring squat-to-squat, kindred shapes.
Wedded to your golden iris, dark mask, and leg stripes,
I was content to make you my constant friend
— never wanted to change you to a prince.
Later, when I accomplished walking and running
I followed you down the field to the joy of mud slide
and slime, the emerald seductions of duckweed.
I kidnapped your spawn, hatched tadpoles in my old tin bath
and marvelled at your super-ability to exist in three elements,
but clapped you between two dog bowls to save you
from the kitchen stove. You cymballed straight out the door.
I sat to attention when Sister Damian digressed
from chemistry to show us the taijitu. She described
the balance of opposites in terms of a black yin
tadpole in harmony with a white yang one.
I regret the dissection of one of your kind,
though the body was much more accommodating
than the densely packed rat. Your awesome legs!
Now as the earth drains, warms, dries,
I see how need increases your vulnerability.
I’m down on my knees not in prayer but in yoga
to preserve my flexibility and thinking of you
as I crunch squats to combat muscle shrinkage
as recommended for seniors –
maybe I should be digging a pond.
CLOUD CALL
If I must leave my home
grant me a window to watch the sky —
a live stream of clouds, swirling and drifting,
not a screen-soother of pixels, useless
for woolgathering.
May I continue to herd them with my lazing eye,
babble them into being by their polysyllables.
Grant me mare’s tails and mackerel skies
Pannus and incus and mammatus
fall streaks and sun dogs.
Allow me to go on seeing hillsides unpeel
from scrolls of roll-cloud – woods, pastures,
bumps and hollows revealed by strokes of sun
and cloud shadow. May they not be engulfed
in smoke, save me from wildfire and war.
Let me enjoy pile-ups of stratocumulus,
layers shifting from egret white to heron grey
and the updrafts, downdrafts and lightsplay
that makes cruising gulls glitter.
Cumulonimbus are drama enough.
OUTBACK
Go right to the bottom of the garden
past the cherry tree and the shed.
Between the slithery compost heap
and the rabbit hutch there’s a hurdle,
half grown over by hedge hawthorn.
Climb to the top rung. If the bullocks
have gathered, don’t startle them, shoo
them by shaking a sprout stalk and jump.
Try not to land in a hoof pock. Creep
under the hedge so they won’t call you back.
Turn right into the holloway
where roots knot air before grasping clay.
Dry leaves whisper, swirl and may chase.
Grab a stick and go through the gate,
hang over the red brick humpback bridge.
Throw the stick upstream and watch it whip
through and rush on towards town.
A field away, beyond the old railway track,
the tip steams – leave its treasures for now.
Turn left between the two streams.
Ignore the stink of Hinton’s chicken farm
go over the stile into Rogers’ field.
Learn lady’s smocks, self-heal
and spotted orchids by rolling down
the bank. Stop before you splash into
the slow meander and don’t do it at all
in froglet time. Lie looking into the water,
watch the crawl of caddis larvae and snail
twirl ballet. See darting minnows and trout,
fat stone-weed-guzzling bullheads.
Now, you’re only three poplars and six willows,
from the oxbow pool with its fringe of marshy,
welly-sucking, strictly forbidden mud
where brown bulrushes beat at the heart.
In spring, kingcups are grail beyond grasp.
Chris Kinsey grew up in Herefordshire but always wanted to head for the hills and landed in Mid Wales. She has had four full-collections published. Kung Fu Lullabies and Cure for a Crooked Smile by Ragged Raven Press, Swarf with Smokestack Books, From Rowan Ridge by Fair Acre Press and a pamphlet, Muddy Fox, with Rack Press. Recent poems are included in The National Trust Book of Nature Poems and The Poetry Prescription anthologies.
*****
Tom Laichas: A Poetic Sequence
ADOHR FARMS,
Tarzana, California, Autumn 1965
Mrs. Border
In kindergarten Mrs. Border helps us
memorize three breeds of California cow—
Jersey. Guernsey. Holstein.
At Adohr Farms they milk the cows.
Cows wag their tails
just like old and happy dogs.
Their jaws chew up and down
and down and up and left to right.
They chew and chew.
Do milkmen ever milk the cows?
They don’t. Machines milk cows,
their metal bright as bumper chrome.
Back in class we churn the butter:
pull and plunge, plunge and pull
until the count of ten. Hard work!
All the cows are lady cows,
happy placid cows who age in place.
Those machines at Adohr do the work.
Someone asks if milking cows
are ever sold for meat.
Mrs. Border smiles
and says nothing.
We laugh out loud, a few of us.
The milkfat grows us up.
*
It’s Gone
With the pioneers come cows. Native grasses vanish.
Topsoil blows. Dust clouds roll.
It’s not the earth that lasts. It’s cows and hooves.
Another people lived here once, says Mrs. Border.
They were here before the cows,
but we can’t see them through the haze.
Jerseys, Guernseys, Holsteins chew
and chew, right to left and down and up
and left to right.
Since the Dawn of Cows
a foot of dirt has disappeared.
That dirt’s a ghost. It’s gone.
*
We Learn About Man Cows
There are man cows,
Mrs. Border says.
In Spain.
The el toros are all men.
In English
they are bulls.
Boys and girls rode bulls
in ancient Crete.
The priest-king slit
the boy-girl throats
to feed the hungry bull-god.
It is not the earth that lasts
—it’s hunger.
*
We Visit Lady Cows
Jersey. Guernsey. Holstein.
We visit placid cows
while Johnson drops his bombs.
We visit lady cows
while Watts combusts
in black and white on all three networks.
In those years are cities that self-immolate.
Other cities drown.
Most survive, but limp along disfigured.
Tails wag and wag.
Jaws chew and chew.
History, it never ends.
*
Field Trip
In all those years the violence
touches no one in our neighborhood
except my sister’s music teacher Mr. Oster.
One Sunday, returning to his house,
he interrupts a burglar and is stabbed.
He bleeds to death.
That’s the week we go to Adohr.
*
The Sweetest Milk
At dawn, six glass bottles of the sweetest milk
you’ll ever drink jingle in the wire basket
set out on the porch. In another wire basket,
half a dozen empties.
The Man from Adohr takes the empties to his truck.
The truck he drives is powder blue.
Adohr’s milk earns gold medallions
at the L.A. County Fair.
I believe the taste of milk depends upon
the color of the cowhide. Milk from Jersey cows
with auburn hair is sweet. Guernsey cows,
with mottled black-on-white, make milk
that’s peppery and salt. All-white Holsteins
give their milk a tongue-thick richness. I know
the breed of every pint of grade-school milk.
Only later do I learn
that I am wrong.
*
Mowing the Lawn
I dream of cows on Benton Way,
tails a-twitch, jaws chew-chewing
on the front yard’s meadow grass.
They’re relentless as the evening news.
Cows eat grass on city streets
and that’s the way it is.
*
Later in This Same Life
One day Mom drives out to Mayfair Supermarket.
It’s just opened. In the dairy aisle there are quarts of milk
in boxes made of waxy cardboard.
We don’t need the milk delivered anymore, she says.
All the other mothers say it too. Good-bye Mr. Adohr Man!
Good-bye six quarts on porch at dawn!
Good-bye you lady cows!
Mine’s a city that forgets, so my city’s forgotten. Tonight
a neighbor-child asks her mom: where does all the milk come from?
I could have told her all about the bottles and the foil tops.
They’re buried in the city dump. In that dump and smothered
in the dusty dirt are also milk machines and cows
and bone-white garbage. I am kind to children. I say nothing.
Tom Laichas is author of Three Hundred Streets of Venice California (FutureCycle Press, 2023), Sixty-Three Photographs At the End of a War (3.1 Press, 2021), and Empire of Eden (The High Window Press, 2019). His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Times, Plume, The Moth, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Venice, California.
*****
David Lambourne: Poem
ASYLUM: A SEQUENCE IN FIVE CHAPTERS
For Sophie Kühnberg
Spring
Spring is back, with its festering disturbances.
Fumes from the pigsties wobble over the black conifers
Topping the hillside like a line of spikes.
The air swarms with invisible spores:
Fine yellow dust of semen scattered far and wide
Throughout the dreary kingdoms of the world.
Fat bumblebees tinker under the hoods of snapdragons,
Little busybodies, doing nature’s bidding.
Potato peelings pulse and sprout on the rubbish heap,
Ants teem underfoot, birds race about the skies like idiots.
Nothing keeps nature down; it smashes its flag
Through pavement cracks, lost roads and roofless barns
Like an invading army, blasting a pathway
Into humanity’s labyrinth of walled kingdoms,
Raping and pillaging, merciless, bent
On making new life and wiping out the old.
I sun myself on a grassy slope
Where no one sees me. It’s nobody’s business
What I get up to, not that it matters.
I am doing nothing, only sprawling here
With my serpent thoughts coiling and uncoiling,
Feeling the damp grass thrusting against my knickers,
Watching my compatriots, the moustachioed women,
The droolers and the incontinent, my fellow prisoners.
Afternoon Tea
Teatime, the afternoon ordeal:
Three crustless triangles of curling bread
Folded over triangles of orange cheese, a mug
Of lukewarm tea, a sugar-dusted biscuit.
The old chatterbox opposite, whose name
I refuse to remember, tries as always
To lure me into conversation.
Her mind is stuffed with nonsense. Slack-jawed,
Wizened, she picks over the crumbs
As if to bring back to life
Relics that never lived. I ignore her.
I am malicious, you say. And why not?
People are poison. I have my own mind-furniture,
My own broken ornaments.
I hug them to me, my sad secrets.
If I shared them, you would only
Use them against me. I am nothing
To you, as you to me are nothing.
Therapy
My so-called therapist, Dr Cleverdick,
Allows me precisely thirty minutes
To unburden myself, air my dirty laundry
For him to poke and sniff, pursuing his routine quest
To hunt down the secret of my aberration.
He sits in a high-backed armchair, facing me.
I loll humbly on a sofa; we are not equals.
Naturally I disappoint him,
As I disappoint you, no doubt,
By confessing nothing, buttoning my lip.
There is, if you must know, both shame and grief.
The shame taints the grief; the grief is limitless.
It is the usual rubbish:
Rejection, betrayal, abuse, abandonment,
Then death, the crowning insult, which sets
All those who should by rights have loved you
Finally beyond the reach of reconciliation.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth etcetera.
Don’t expect details.
This is the stuff you can’t get over.
No one is cured, no one forgives themselves.
Peonies
It rained all night. I wake to fierce sunshine
Raiding my bedroom like a wild animal.
Look at my works, it sings, I am so beautiful!
Nature remakes the valley slopes
With its green dazzle, its embroidery
Of scattered beads of white and yellow.
I freely grant that it is beautiful.
But I am wise to nature’s tricks, her deceptive promises.
I am one with the heavy-headed peonies
Lowering their exhausted scarlet flowers
Into the wet grass, to mingle with the fallen apples,
Gorgeous with mould like jewelled balls.
I belong with the winter wasps and sodden leaves,
And all discarded things. Our time has passed.
The world has moved on: there are fresh things to spoil.
Medication
Here comes the nurse, a whistle at her throat.
Her starched cap sails in the stiff waves
Of her blonde hairdo as she advances, brandishing
Her armoured bosom and fake smile.
Oh give me pills, you nitwit, for Christ’s sake!
Grant me another night of haunted sleep.
Tomorrow the world will be the same
In every particular, as I will be the same:
The identical gloomy monster, although a day older,
A day nearer the date of my release.
David Lambourne has a PhD on the novel in the 1930s and an MA in Children’s Illustration. He has taught at the University of Maryland, ran bookshops with his late wife in York, London and Cambridge, but now writes and paints in SW France. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry Nation, New Statesman, and Shenandoah. He is the author of New Toys, a book for children and science-fiction novel The Well Deceived (writing as Isak Kuhnberg).
*****
Rose Lennard:Two Poems
WATER DOESN’T GIVE A DAMN
—just does what it does, smooths stone, wears
headlands to sand, winds snakewise through roots.
Couldn’t care less for lifetimes, never stops
falling from clouds, leaping off leaves
like a pinball game, down to the earth
to trickle and seep, seek out caverns
deep underground and there bide its time.
With a smack it shatters on concrete,
hustles down streets, gathering dogshit,
beer cans, litter and gunk,
to plunge down gullies, gargle in drains.
Just does what it does, finds its own level—
until one night it’s over your doorstep,
past the locked door, lapping the stairs.
Water plays games with your treasures, paints
mould on your walls, leaves lungs full of spores.
Leaping from heights, from blocked-up gutters,
burst dams, broken pipes, no matter
who’s sleeping, whose life’s in the way—
and makes all the noise it damn well likes.
It never frets over shrivelled crops, cattle bones,
nor topsoil, toxins, fish belly-up, scum on the waves.
Water says Go on, waste me—
I’ll slip through your fingers, I’ll turn into air!
It knows about cycles, knows it is ocean
answering only to moon, sun and wind;
it is cloud, it is mist, and sweat on a brow
or spraying from fists; now rain—
like in the beginning, rain like the end of the world;
it is ice singing to skates
on a shimmering lake, it is snow
mounding over the frozen bird.
Water’s the sea where new life turns and dreams,
that floods a woman’s thigh when it’s her time
to scream, it is the tears on her face,
it is milk, it is blood. Water doesn’t give a damn.
Water is love.
AFTER THE MEMORIAL SERVICE
i.m. George Alagiah
I walked west along the Strand, straight into
November sun, and people coming toward me
and those walking away were silhouettes
against the pure light and their shadows held
onto their feet, and streamed down the pavement
to reach across the space between us.
City pigeons paraded their sharp intricate shadows
in tight interweaving circles, and there were bikes
and pushchairs with the strange shapes they made.
Square glass bricks let into concrete in front of shops
shimmered, as if each one had been polished
in preparation for this moment, and a lone maple leaf
arched its back, standing on its points, crisp
as a crab on a beach. Sunlight made haloes
around people’s heads, and they moved their shadows
effortlessly, carelessly, up and down the street,
the sun shone equally on us all,
and all our shadows stretched out the same way,
in proportion to our height, caring nothing
for our relationship with light, each one of us
as mortal as the other; there was no one
on whom the sun did not utterly
bestow its illumination, no one
who did not cast shadow in the sun’s wake.
Rose Lennard is a retired landscape architect and garden designer who is now busy growing vegetables on her allotment, walking the hills, volunteering in a local community café and doing her bit for environmental and human rights activism. Her poems have been published in Rattle, Stand, Mslexia, Atrium, Prole and many others. She is currently looking for a home for her first collection.
*****
Kathryn MacDonald: Two Poems
WILD HORSES
The night sky sheds sheets of lightning,
opens the small world of a small boat
to a circle of waves and ebony sea,
to wild horses galloping ahead
of a bitter norther.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxSoaked to skin, cold
deep into bone, blinded by walls
of pounding rain, happiness, the colour
of joy, its lusty embrace encircles me
on the edge of time, and I am alone
at the helm, riding the sea’s curve,
the bow of the sloop pointing toward
a small dot on the chart, the navigator
asleep below.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxMy watch ends,
but sleep fails, and I remain above, watch
the storm blow itself into ruffled dawn, listen
to the genoa snap, the mainsail complain,
and suddenly, on the horizon, a smudge
of island. The ozein fades with the lightning,
and the sea shifts from cobalt to navy, settles,
the wild horses of the night now only restless
waves, but the passing storm leaves something
behind, something surreptitious – something
feral.
Notes: Sailors sometimes call a certain movement of waves wild horses.
Ozein is the scent the ozone left in air that lightning has passed through.
AGAIN THE WIND
After Jane Hirschfield,
xxxxxwinds over the river
whistle through maple leaves
on the tree outside my bedroom
window, paints shadows
all a-dance on the pale walls
and once more your lips
feather mine and I am thinned
back to autumns of woodsmoke
and days undiminished.
Note: Title borrowed from “Autumn.” The last line is a twist on Hirschfield’s final line.
(Paris Review, Winter 1988)
Kathryn MacDonald is a Canadian poet and reviewer. Her work has been published in Canada, as well as in international literary journals, including The High Window. Her latest poetry collection will be released by Frontenac House, Spring 2026. Liminal Spaces is a chapbook anthology of ekphrastic poetry by Kathryn and three fellow poets (2025). She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (2024), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (2010) and a novel, Calla & Édourd 2009). For more information: https://kathrynmacdonald.com.
*****
Kathleen McPhilemy: Four Poems
BALLYCASTLE, 1798
Two tarred rope candles outside the courthouse
lit the severed head of John McIlroy
though not the hat nor the green cockade
he’d worn when he rode into town.
Ballycastle people were in the Turn Out
and Rathlin islanders signed the Oath
urged by the Man from God Knows Where
but saved by the stormy straits of Moyle.
In ’98 the people were poor
Boyd’s wealth had vanished like fairy gold
his descendants thought trade distasteful
assets stripped, pulled out the cash.
No more linen, no more salt
no more glassworks, no more iron
businesses closed, the dock silted up
no more big ships anchored in the harbour.
A miniature post-industrial society
angry, hungry, restless, rancorous
ready for riot, ready for looting,
pikes still hot from the blacksmith’s forge.
Scottish regiments, local militias
put an end to all such ructions
retribution followed, hangings, floggings
exile, pressed service in overseas armies.
John McIlroy, two days too late
rode in with a green cockade in his hat
was arrested, convicted, hanged, beheaded
between the courthouse and Hugh Boyd’s church.
DONEGORE HILL
In honour of James Orr, poet, weaver and United Irishman.
The epigraph is borrowed from his poem with the same title.
Ephie’s base bairntime, trail-pike brood,
Were arm’d as weel as tribes that stood;
Yet on the battle ilka cauf
Turn’d his backside, an’ scampered aff.
—Psalm 78,v.9
Above the motorway
outcrops of whinstone
scrubby slopes
neolithic ditches
a Norman motte;
forgotten fields
though green persists
a grassy pall.
Ten thousand came
four thousand ran
before the battle
even began.
Unblooded farm boys
in the misty sunlight
mistook sorrel and sedge
for enemy redcoats;
cottiers and weavers
bannocks uneaten
scurried back home
to hide their weapons
bury or burn
their green cockades.
So many pikes hidden in the rafters
so many words buried with McCracken
Irish, liberty, justice, united
or carried overseas with Hope and Orr
rebellion, republic, equality, brotherhood;
only spoken behind the hand
dusty euphemisms of wilful forgetting
ructions, turn-out, troubles, the burning.
Desperate Orr, on the slopes of Slemish
knew what threatened the battle survivors:
flogging, the rope, villages burnt down.
He returned with the amnesty six years later
hid sorrow and bitterness in Ulster Scots.
But the world moved on as Orange lodges
sprang up in suddenly loyal townlands
as redbrick burgeoned in boom-town Belfast,
mills, terraces, burghers’ houses –
a British city in the United Kingdom.
PLANTERS
South Antrim went to Sir Arthur Chichester
who cleared the Irish from a twenty mile radius
round the castle and port of Carrickfergus.
Small wonder when in the nine years war
the MacDonnell clan had killed his brother
then kicked his head around as a football.
So when your boat sailed up the lough
for you it was dawn in an empty land
there to be tamed and brought to fruitfulness
by settlers bringing their tools and livestock
their useful trades as carpenters, tanners,
stonemasons, brickmakers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths.
You noticed the roofless barns and cabins
you noticed how the river Owenaview –
stream in the trees the Irish called it-
flowed through a torn, deforested landscape;
the soldiers renamed it Six Mile Water
road from the garrison to Ballyclare.
The long rested land did yield to the labourers
such plentiful increase that many followed;
Hutchinson, Ferguson, Kennedy, Baird,
some came for a new life, some fled the old.
Your patron was Captain Robert Ellis
officer who served in Elizabeth’s army.
Here, on the very edge of the Liberty
you dug and built and ploughed and sowed
learning the land through fingers and skin.
Beyond your fences lurked wolf and kern
in the woods, boggs and such fast places;
after-dark stories to frighten children.
SIX MILE WATER
Twenty miles of the river Ollar
in Irish a river through woods
in English named for the stretch
from Carrickfergus to Ballyclare
the road that Jonathan Swift
lovelorn and ill at ease
would have taken to visit his parishes –
Kilroot, Templecorran, Ballynure.
His were the established churches
hardly anyone went to-
even here the stories are different:
watched by dour Presbyterians
and the residual heirs of wood kerns
he is said to have gone outside
and preached his sermon to stones
muttering in the Ballynure stream.
Or was it back in Kilroot
he hefted boulders into the aisles
followed by befuddled fishermen
he lashed with his satirist’s tongue?
How many caught in his net
were descended from the sullen Irish
who watched as Anglo-Normans
marched along this stretch of the river?
Swift knew he didn’t belong
he lasted only two winters
in a place where desire for ownership
had laid waste a fertile country
reduced to lawless scavengers
the skulking remnants of families
who saw their lands taken over
by the dregs of Scotland and England.
Scum of both nations, says my book,
felons and thieves on the run;
godless, ripe for revival
they hearkened to James Glendinning
on the banks of Six Mile Water
‘a man of limited gifts’
‘not fitted for a public place’
who won them over to righteousness.
Over years they grew into the landscape
as they dug and traded and spun
stamped their names on the roads
the hamlets and hills and burns.
The geological fault subsists
under the fields and towns of Antrim
it takes its name from the river
it cradles in its lithic arms.
I have not walked this water
nor tracked its multiple tributaries
so hard to trace to their source;
distorted and dug-over courses
of streams with a past in service
retting flax in their shallows
turning the breast wheels of mills
for paper and linen, cotton and corn.
My finger follows on Google
how the river swerves and meanders
from its source between Carrickfergus and Larne
leftwards on my screen to Antrim
through Her Ladyship’s Pleasure Garden
to lose itself in Lough Neagh
with the Blackwater, Moyola and Maine
flowing out as the Bann to the sea.
Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Back Country (Littoral Press, 2022). She also hosts a poetry podcast magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy.
*****
Caroline Maldonado: Three Poems
SCENES IN AN ITALIAN HOSPITAL
1. Screens
When the screen between our beds is pulled away
I love to watch the man with a gentle smile
draw up a chair
and attend to his son.
Gianni tackled the sea at Civitanova
and struck the sand too soon.
He now lies still, a collar
up to his chin, rigid as armour.
The father’s right arm hangs loose
but he lifts a spoon
to Gianni’s lips
and holds his hand while he sleeps.
Today the friends came to visit.
They perched on his bed
and jostled around him,
Gianni’s voice rising above the others.
Everyone’s gone now, the ward’s quiet.
The screen’s back between us.
I can barely hear his soft sobs
huddling close to his chest.
2. Giuliana
is in her nineties, and deaf.
We exchange waves from
bed to bed across waters
where all of us float, waiting.
Trolleys, unmoored, clang
nightly through lit corridors
and our time is other than
the one lived outdoors.
Her son tells me Her name
is Giuliana – to make sure
I don’t forget. She wants
no food, cannot keep it down
but he won’t stop trying. He
comes early, stays late,
smiles a lot. He strokes her hand,
encouraging, talks to her
loudly while trying
to feed her. Her skin’s yellow.
Following dialysis
she sleeps. After hours
she wakes and he pleads with her
again although he is now
so tired of smiling:
ma devi mangiare.
3. Even here you can’t escape the war
An old woman shouts out
through the long night hours.
Her carer rises from her camp bed
to adjust a pillow and to wedge
a second under the patient’s legs
to ease the chafing.
All three of us awake now.
Yana’s been far from Ukraine
for 20 years but her mother’s there
and sister with her baby.
Every few minutes she swipes
her phone for news – lights
from exploding shells
soundlessly flicker and blaze.
Caroline Maldonado is a poet and translator. She has four poetry collections translated from Italian published by Smokestack Books (2013-2022), a pamphlet of her own poems (IDP 2014), a collection (Vole Books 2022) and most recently a hybrid of translations and her own poems in collaboration with artist, Garry Kennard, Mirror and Stone (GVart 2024). Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The High Window, for which she has also curated a selection of Italian poems in translation.
*****
Mark Mansfield: Four Poems
SOFT NOTES
She was a gentle woman
and when she spoke her words
touched calm and barely summoned
soft notes I’d never heard.
She had this way for showing
how deep her silence ran.
She’d surface—laughter flowing
then whisper “Understand?”
And still, I have no answer
for what I did that day.
There is none. But the chance her
future bloomed from what I betrayed.
ONE BY ONE
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.
—Charles Lamb
One by one, each fell away,
old bandmates from “back in the day,”
fellow souls lost to the road’s grand spell,
women I knew for a night or a week
still wink in dreams and far off speak.
One by one, each fell away.
One by one, all gone for good,
friends I knew, some since childhood,
classmates or comrades. While chance held
a stranger who became most dear—
who months before, just disappeared.
One by one, all gone for good.
One by one, that’s how it’s done.
The family was till there was none.
Life seemed a wheel spinning itself.
An obit wed a name to a face
that I knew well—years, we embraced.
One by one, that’s how it’s done.
LET ME STAY (The ‘80s)
I’d hop a bus from Trailways in DC
to the Port Authority and start to hike.
One time the exhibit was de Staël, or I
remember making it to the final day
of a retrospective of Saul Leiter as
it was about to close. They let me stay.
Then I would slide from one bar, two, three . . .
last stop, The Spiral down on Houston, stroll
and score a pint, stopping somewhere to roll
a joint and watch Manhattan slip from dusk
to twilight’s purple melody. Perhaps
a room—or have one more, then catch a bus.
LORD SMARMY
Dead men, it’s written, tell no tales
except the lies those living do,
stuffing them down some corpse’s throat.
And that has worked quite well for you.
A character assassin nonpareil,
were there a prize for selling folks
downriver on the trusty sails
of gaslighting, you’d win, come Hell
or high water. Plus this detail:
you’ve got that knack for holding court
down pat. Nine out of ten, you pull
in like a carny barker—for
who’s the wiser when Lord Smarmy
starts whipping words
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and egging on the charm?
Mark Mansfield has been widely published in magazines and is the author of five poetry collections: Strangers Like You, Soul Barker, Notes from the Isle of Exiled Imaginary Playmates, Greygolden and Tales from the Winged Chariot Inn (all published by Chester River Press). He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and is a former musician and publications specialist. Currently, he lives in upstate New York.
*****
Sadie Maskery: Two Poems
CONFIRMATION DAY, OR WHY I HATE BEARDS
Pious grape juice, platitudes,
the pride of my family and
your hand upon me if I screw
my dishonesty to the point of it.
The beard will make me retch.
In gloria patri, forgive me,
but the messiness of tufts
over your lips, where crumbs
of wisdom lodge with crusted spit
to mingle with the holy writ-
et spiritu sancto – the suck
on your moustache as you kneel
to pray to the fisher of men?
Something died and rose again. Holy,
holy mackerel for breakfast,
no fasting for a Protestant.
I protest too much, am I a hypocrite
to bitch about the breath from you
stinking in saecula saeculorum
as you free me from my sins,
through the waft of sanctity
and patriarchal bullshit?
VISITORS
It has receded to this –
a baby bird mouth gaping
for yoghurt to be popped in.
We stand in the baby aisle
and discuss finger foods,
the independence that banana
and strawberry puffed snacks
might suggest without the risk
of spills or choking.
We make bibs from old dresses,
flannel backed, for dignity;
source expensive blankets
designed to hide accidents
and the telltale crackle of plastic.
There is a smell to the corridors
in this place, we don’t comment
or make eye contact, just drag
chairs from behind the bin
labelled Clinical Waste Only.
God knows how old people
manage nowadays, she says.
Life is so complicated.
We smile and she tells us
what we are doing wrong.
Sadie Maskery lives in Scotland by the sea. Her latest collection, The Usual Apologies, is published by Red Ogre Press. She can be found on Bluesky at saccharinequeen.bsky.social
(The Usual Apologies https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DYVL2PZC )
*****
Peadar O’Donoghue: Four Poems
SHANEY MAC
Fucking hell, talk about the best of times,
the worst of times. I’m a kettle
of boiled emotion and I’m leaking like a sieve.
Something’s cooking in the kitchen.
It’s my brain. My heart. My liver.
I am done, I’m overdone,
I’m fat, fooked and fuct.
Could (turns out couldn’t) have been
a statistic yesterday, another
dope at the end
of his rope in the rain,
no coat, no hope, no chance
of making the river,
let alone drowning in it.
Tosser.
Then goodly news,
an overdose of goodly news.
And you, you cursed blessing,
die the same day as Oscar,
the same day
as all the joys,
sure, why not?
And to think,
had I the bottle (Ha!),
I’d be there first
welcoming you
this cold cold day,
into heaven, or hell.
And I bet you’d ask tell me
(if at all) ‘Who the fuck are you’
‘Where’s Jesus, or Brendan,
or James Clarence Mangan
or the pub,
where is it,
where’s the pub?’
LET US MEET
In Atlantic City,
no, Paris, no, Berlin,
no, that deserted beach
in Corfu where one of us
ran naked, no, on the
last bus home from Piccadilly, no,
in that shit pub in Withington, no,
on platform 6 in Milton Keynes,
no, along the Heron Path
where the old ghosts roam, no,
at the columbarium in Glasnevin,
no, in Bewleys on Grafton Street,
no, in Afflecks Palace, no,
at the Meeting of The Waters,
no, in Avondale, no, in Covent Garden,
no, outside Marks and Spencer,
number 7 Market Street,
yes, right there,
let’s meet again.
THE RUNAWAY TRAIN
Distorts the wind,
passengers jump to the rails,
brains like hope dashed,
a whistle blown, heard, ignored,
the air is sucked out,
windows smashed in,
tickets of blood are collected,
buckets of sick are projected,
iphones capture the scene,
the obscene, the sun,
the moon, the stars,
the collective, the objective,
it’s a human race, a disgrace
and everyone is losing,
I shut your mouth,
you shut mine,
the crazy factory
wants more mince.
MY HEAD
An electric light,
switching on, off,
light darkness,
darkness light,
my heart a radio,
live transmission,
beat by beat.
My soul,
tethered by
mile-long wires,
floats above.
The beat, the darkness,
the light, the dark,
pull the wires, until
dancing, terrified,
my soul a puppet,
I spew words,
truth, not lies, truth,
on, off, on,
off.
Peadar O’Donoghue is a poet, photographer and co-editor at Poetry Bus Press with his wife Collette.His poems have appeared in many places including THE SHOp, The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, Culture Matters, The Morning Star. His first collection, Jewel, was the best-selling title on the Salmon poetry website.
*****
Edmund Prestwich:Three Poems
WHITE
Pure white flowers look cold,
blank as marble statuary,
till nuances of ivory,
hints of coral or pale gold,
breathe life into their whiteness.
To build a solid garden
you need strong colours too.
Muscles of green leaf and stem,
waterfalls of orange fire,
royal blues and purples; reds
darker than wine or blood.
Twilight is the time for white.
At the bottom of our street,
tier on tier, magnolia blooms
gather unearthly light.
SNAKESHEAD FRITILLARIES
Four crept onto our lawn.
Blown in from god knows where,
they stood on thin-grassed mud,
skinny, drab, unlovely,
hanging their heads, until
as weather changed, the sun
shone through them, and its light
showed what they really are:
stained glass windows alive
with the quiet life of flowers.
GREEK LIGHT
Though I’ll never see Greek light again
its memory glows in my brain:
day’s light, when sun
lay on skin like heated iron,
when our children in the shallows
were younger than their children now,
and under water’s brightness
every marble pebble shone.
At each day’s end
we watched how the sun descended
down a saffron sky to the sea,
then stood among speechless gods.
Even stones were alive
breathing that softer light.
Edmund Prestwich grew up in South Africa but has spent his adult life in England where he taught English at the Manchester Grammar School till his retirement. He has published two collections: Through the Window with Rockingham Press and Their Mountain Mother with Hearing Eye.
*****
Andrew Seear and Victor Adereth: Three Poems
SEAHENGE EXPOSED AT LOW TIDE IN HOLME, NORFOLK
The low spring tide’s at ten past ten;
Don’t miss it – it may never come again.
The light of the full moon clings to your feet and stinks.
It’s an hour’s soft plod through sweet sublunar mud
Down to the henge, there at the turn of the tide:
A circle, twenty feet across, of fifty-five split oak trunks,
Inward facing, sunk deep and shrunk to a low
Unmoving ring of patient, wizened elves
Around a shallow pool – spectators who dedicated themselves
To long-form entertainment four thousand years ago.
Then they were a stockade ten feet tall; an outer ring
For Club-Foot John, the one-legg’d slow-motion target-diving devil,
To spot as he dropped from the upper sky, his fall scheduled
To take five thousand years. But this was no climate for loitering.
As the sea rose, his imperceptible downward crawl
Became an imperceptible rush for safety. The creature
Watched his blank become a wink, a tidal feature,
And adjusted the aerodynamics of his fall
To make a headlong dive. When his terrified vague fingers
Touched the surface of the pool – 1912’s
The date recorded by the watchful elves –
The cheer was so profound the echo lingers
And returns at these deep tides. His fall goes on.
Now John is an inverted oak. The root, cut flat like an anvil,
Juts from the middle of the pool – it’s the diving devil
’s club foot. Very very soon it will be gone;
John will be lost under the sand beneath the sea,
But tonight he’s here, my love, and so are we.
THIS WAS ONCE THE BED OF A VAST OCEAN
Out on the Old East Road, where error can undermine
The necessary journey, the Careful Reader pauses,
Determined not to let necessity define
Purpose, or compromise his independent clauses.
A system of coordinated piles, with trusses
Slung between them, once supported meaning and intent
With such clarity and consistency of style that buses
Full of passengers who knew just what each other meant
Would race along the causeway with the rising tide
Debating use and usage and abuse, that and which,
And what could be accepted, what denied –
The angry ghosts that poison, the bodies that enrich
Our tongue. The Careful Reader sniffs out those who died
For a rotten ladder in a sweltering ditch.
THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL: A PASTORAL
The loyal squeak of the garden gate;
The sigh of the blue hydrangea;
The decent bleat of the unseen sheep;
The smile of the unseen stranger.
The years come up the garden path
Like herds of hungry cows.
The unseen stranger understands
Our fleet of rusting ploughs.
Death in its little yellow boat
(A gift from the unseen stranger),
Forever becalmed on the village pond,
Imparts no sense of danger.
Wandering cattle wander home
And low at the empty manger.
Eternity must be endured
And so must the unseen stranger.
Andrew Seear and Victor Adereth have been writing together since they met at school in Brighton several decades ago. Although Seear has lived in New York City since 1995 and Adereth has been teaching in the East End of London, their collaboration seems to have thrived in the last thirty years.
*****
Anushka Sen: Poem
UNCLAIMED
It must have fallen with a plop, the way
it spilt its pulp across the grass, or maybe
it was firmer then and landed with a thud,
the bumpy shell unclasping slowly in the rains.
No doubt it had the time to rot. It sat,
fat and tempting, by the school gym,
its flesh more golden by the hour,
its potent scent fermenting
as the skies continued
to pour.
No one claimed it, uncertain of the school’s
law but the school left it where it was. Squirrels
ate from it, and crows, and mynahs and sparrows.
Even a mongoose sauntered in for a taste.
The bounty, now slack and browning,
lasted for days until two girls
jostled with more joint and limb
than usual and one windmilled
onto the mess of mud and thick
juices, toppled by its slick
force till she finally rose,
shaking, the stain of jackfruit
across her plain white uniform,
and glaring back with venom
at her petrified friend,
ran inside to cry
and clean it up.
Anushka Sen is originally from Kolkata, India, and now teaches English Literature at Loyola University, Chicago. She occasionally translates from Bengali to English, and her poems (original and translated) have been published in Rust and Moth, Rat’s Ass Review, The Dalhousie Review, Asymptote blog, and Eunoia Review, among other places.
*****
John Short: Four Poems
MAN OF STEEL
Gori, Georgia
From the walls of its fortress
through harsh winter wind
you can scan the hills for miles,
while the pearly grey river
swells and cuts through town,
a stone’s throw from the museum.
I imagine him idealistic here,
a shock of youthful hair
on a home visit, scheming,
mocking the seminary priests
but unaware how power corrupts;
the paranoia it engenders.
Oppose the Tsarists’ regime,
organise insubordination
raise funds by extortion, robbery,
unrepentant in mugshots,
escape from exile when required,
return mostly to Petersburg.
STORM SEASON
Batumi, Georgia
Along the pebble beach
people are pottering around
a low-key barbecue,
profiting from a clear day
as when it rains it hammers down
with tedious persistence.
In the wake of your leaving
I lived a new solitude,
hopped coastal towns for weeks
but found no companions.
At a desolate bus stop
some workers gave me hooch,
a curious experience,
noting the world transform
in instant inebriation,
the possibilities manifold.
Turn round now or continue
until I reach another sea.
TIBIDABO
Catalonia
Often when sat on this balcony
I recall that Yorkshire town
where I spent some years,
am transported to a cobbled lane,
perhaps the one visible from
my study window in those times.
I look beyond the supermarket
with its huge bright name
to the spectral hills of Tibidabo
in silhouette through a thin smog
some kilometres to the south,
and the sky is an evening blue.
Playing guitar, at a certain passage
on the fretboard come images
of a girlfriend back in Yorkshire
who moved to a distant shore,
remains there painting till this day
and knows nothing of Tibidabo.
THE OPTIMIST
Sevilla 1983
She jogged along the avenida
conspicuously out of step
with the pace of Spanish life
to my vacant room for rent,
its invasive clang of street noise.
Striped socks theatrical,
she said the sombre local girls
should see something new
but I was not convinced
and too cynical for happiness
or that constant tapestry of music
existing to release the soul.
A chance encounter years later,
optimism still undiminished
as we talked and recalled
the open-throated postman
pausing for a flamenco moment,
how he failed to cheer me.
Note: It has been claimed that flamenco singing is derived from the tradition
of North African open-throated singing.
John Short lives near Ormskirk, Lancashire after a previous life in southern Europe. He’s been published most recently in The Galway Review, Mugwort, The Fig Tree, Morphrog and StepAway. A Pushcart nominee, his fourth collection is: In Search of a Subject (Cerasus 2023) which has had reviews in The High Window and Dream Catcher.
*****
Mark Totterdell: Four Poems
PARIS
The gallery has been created, from heaps of money,
to look like a being that’s evolved from nothing.
Inside, huge oblongs have been transposed from songs,
every emotion squeezed from tubes of colours.
Outside, the parakeets are shrieks, bright streaks of green,
bold brush strokes on a blank sky, the stretched city
is a canvas on which the young masters may dazzle us
with the blinding love of their spray cans,
and soft shells of pastel polyester are wedged
into sad corners in colonies of the unseen,
while by the canal, tree-mounted cormorants
have pollocked the pavements with stars of stinking white.
CHAFER
It’s late in the day and late in the year,
but the cold hasn’t hit the clifftop yet,
and the rose chafer still squats
on its umbel of wild carrot,
a small neatly lacquered box of secrets,
or a full hunter pocket watch
in a case of deep and shifting greens.
The smooth styling of its elytra
shades into an inky blue
that could have been captured from the sky.
The dark patch on its pocked thorax
must be a mirrored me,
crouching against the evening.
There are hooks on its jointed legs
and its head is set with gems.
Its intricate workings tick silently.
How have eons of mindlessness
conjured this perfect being?
I grip the exoskeleton of my camera,
fingers around the moulded polycarbonate.
Its body is packed tight with tiny tricks,
its intelligent design is quite beyond me.
I zoom to take the chafer in, the lens’s eye
sharper than my own and my mind’s eye.
Is it a miracle to have this image here now,
larger than life, and in a future
when its subject has become a husk
blowing in intensifying winds?
BUTTERFLY
The damsons that I missed lie on the ground,
bletting to death, letting off ethanol
that pleases insects as it might please me.
This butterfly is a concoction of
the darkest chocolate with black and white
and bands of scarlet, highlights of bright blue.
I’ve sawn off splintered branches of the tree
that dropped the fruit, pruning the prunus while
the sun shines, so the rot won’t get inside.
The butterfly’s on the saw handle now,
for warmth, perhaps, to suck my own fresh sweat,
or something in it craves the tang of rust.
LONG MYND, 1990
He’s climbed beyond the isolated houses,
he’s high on sandstones in the ancient hills.
Among the hoofprints of horses and cattle,
his tent is like a pop-up Celtic church
botched from polyester and tubed aluminium.
He’s pitched it among acres of toxic bracken
in deep July green, the fractals acrid in the air.
He gazes back over the plain to the north,
to the steepled town where all day his tin whistle
slowly sucked coins from the pockets of the crowds.
He’s hitched to neighbour nations, beyond the waters,
seeking their musics and their mysteries,
and now his mind is as full of squirming things
as he imagines the teeming soil to be
beneath his groundsheet. He’s pegged to this land
for one night only. Tomorrow he’ll drift on.
The sun has sunk behind a mile of bedrock,
but far to the east, beyond the burnished fields,
it still illuminates, in fading gold,
the tiny tower blocks of the peopled world.
Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines. His collection Mollusc (The High Window Press, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize. His latest collection is All the Birds (Littoral Press, 2023).
*****
Vivienne Tregenza: Poem
FOR A WORK IS BEING DONE IN YOUR DAYS
God was in the name of every room
in that house. He walked among
the blue peacocks. God was
the breeze moving the curtains.
He was the hawthorn scratching
the window like a ghost.
God was the window (and the ghost).
God roamed the woods by my side
like a dog with a scent. He rolled
among the ferns and mosses.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled
God was in the brown linoleum
and in the long corridors. He hid
in the dusty corners of the larder.
He was in the breakfast cups
shining like saints on the draining
board. God was in the Grace. Jesus
at the High Table. Jesus in every mouthful.
God crept under my skin
as I sweated out the chemicals.
He was in the sleepless hours.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
Jesus was in the heart
of the psychiatrist who couldn’t be saved.
God was in his eyes, blue as speedwell
by the railway track. God was there
beside the still waters of the stream
and in the bowed heads of trees. He was
in the hospital corners of our shaky hands.
He was in the beeswax smeared
on old oak tables. God the Father
swam in our gleaming cheeks.
The Lord make his face to shine upon you
God was the anorexic girl
who fell down in the spirit
and began to speak in tongues.
He was in the wagging tongues.
God the Word was in the library
of Religious Texts. Jesus was
in our heads and our enunciation:
I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back
Vivienne Tregenza is a prize-winning Cornish poet whose first collection is Conversations with Magic Stones (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2025). She has been placed in many poetry competitions and is well published in UK poetry journals. Vivienne is working on her second collection.
*****
Charlotte Wetton: Poem
THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER
In this story, I’m the miller’s daughter,
(Caucasian, female, size 10)
but I might not have been.
I know, in another story,
I was the one who packed the van,
purchased duct tape, a sack.
It might have been me driving,
someone else blindfolded, attempting
to count lefts and rights.
But it’s me with the pushy dad
and the silent mother; the Millers
getting above themselves.
So it’s me he drags out the van
at the industrial estate, me sobbing,
protesting, and him who cable-ties
my ankles to the spinning wheel,
points to the pile of straw,
the big man is waiting for his gold.
And yes, I’m good at spinning but not this.
He’s a funny little man, hunched
and wizened but sort of capering,
and I’m pleading, trying to buy him off
with my H. Samuel necklace, promising
anything, when he says he can make it alright.
He lifts the bowl of honey
above my head and pours,
a blurred sweet vision, then
rolls me in straw, lights the lamp,
and with the straw sticking to my fingers
and honey on my lips, I find I can do it,
the gold spooling over the bobbin;
the depot is open 24-hour.
The sugar keeps me going; I start to think
maybe things are not so bad.
But the pile of straw gets bigger.
The door is always locked,
the lamp always lit in the windowless unit.
I give him my rose quartz ring
and he says he’s on my side,
he’s the only one who is.
He pours the honey, rolls me in the straw.
The man up top is waiting for his gold.
But the pile of straw gets bigger,
I can never spin enough. I promise
anything, my first born, why shouldn’t I?
People mortgage their futures all the time.
When I stumbled out, eyesight failing,
limbs numb, the recovery was slow.
It isn’t easy to wash that stuff off,
hours of my friends tweezing
strands of straw from my skin,
red scratches on every part of me.
People said I’d done well
to keep it together, that I’d shown
great resilience. But even now
I can feel the scratching, still sometimes
dig seeds from my nail beds,
go to speak and cough up a glint of straw.
And as for the first born,
my periods had stopped,
three rounds of IVF and nothing.
I never did guess his name.
Charlotte Wetton’s first publication I Refuse to Turn into a Hat-stand won the Michael Marks Award 2017. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and at the Manchester Festival of Libraries and she received a New Writing North award in 2019. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University. Her second publication, Accessioning, is out with The Emma Press.
*****
Gail Wronsky: Poem
HOW TO WRITE POETRY
You just can’t know
What road to take
Out of here
Or how to start again or
What about the end of the world
Always looming around
Like Rome or like your memories
Of Rome feverish
With looking for images
For solace for the secrets
Buried there their undoing
Long ago dissolved into river water
Death butts in
But don’t let it
With its ingratiating clockface its
Easter lilies its pockets full of saccharine
Packets its flatulence
It’s not a question of praying
Am I strong enough
You are strong enough
To slay the suicidal urges
That are terrible
That are born in your brain like
Lab rats only to be food for stronger
Impulses keep that in mind
Read the poems of our heroic
Pilgrimages our imaginary adventures
Where do they lead what do they
Reveal about ecstatic delirium
About parade routes strewn with rose
Petals about the absence of remorse
Remember when you write to wear
The magic necklace that leaks
Milk and poison like sap
Remember to visit the travertine
Monument in the old part of the city
It’s covered in bird shit and
Dedicated to the stranger the transient
The interloper the party
Crasher the new kid from out of town
Who came here long ago and rid the place
Of a ruinous lethargy with their
Poems did you know
That person was you in a past life
Joy didn’t scare you then
Neither did sadness
Neither did love or kissing or
Your own rent-a-body in its flimsy skin
Gail Wronsky, recipient of an Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council, is the author of eight books of poetry, three co-authored collections of experimental poetry, and two books of translations from the poetry of Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy. Newest titles include Mockingbird’s Proverbs, Born in a Barn on Venus, with artwork by renowned artist Gronk, Some Disenfranchised Evening, winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Prize, and Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems. She teaches creative writing at the Catholic Workers soup kitchen in downtown Los Angeles.
*****
Ping Yi: Two Poems
GRINDING A STONE
Scooping a mouthful of Dad’s red bean soup:
warm, gloopy, fresh from the steamer,
dipping into hearty gooey goodness,
puréed merlot fuming in black polypropylene.
Spooning his rice: powdery, gossamer, alabaster,
with atomised fillet of salty filigree chicken
and milky, orangey mash moulded back
into slices of pumpkin – GentleFoods,
courtesy of Gentle Dining Private Limited.
I gulp down Dad’s food for my dinner; mustn’t
waste good grub. Mustn’t waste money like that.
Dad can’t taste, can’t eat, can’t swallow anything anymore,
I whisper and cross myself, mortified
to utter what should be kept silent, safe.
Choking between breathfuls, wrestling to rein in Time,
to reassemble life as it was, for each of us.
Dad in his community ward, me in my kitchen
calling off tomorrow’s meal delivery.
MICROCLIMATE
Pressing my hours to the grindstone,
fingers shredded to the bone: distal
phalanges, intermediate, proximal, the lot
dry-bleeding tan hope. But ultrafine
sandpaper for my minutes, the highest grit;
laser scalpel for seconds? Sledgehammer
to my weeks and months, the no man’s land
that is cutting-edge lucre, clouding
flashes and rumbles beneath my skin.
Through seasons living no war, nor strife,
save trench fever in my mind, fetid bogs
of my crafting. The path to salvation
through self-harm, other-harm, family-harm;
choosing the greed-bound, needbound
speedbound. Over the top then, this blindself
burntself lostself hateself.
Till shells shock and shatter my veil,
eyes unpeeling to winds afresh. Fog lifting.
Ping Yi writes poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction. After a three-decade detour in public service, he resumed his lifelong interest in speculative, humour and travel writing. His work has appeared in Orbis (nominated for 2025 Forward Prize), Litro (Editor’s Pick), The Stony Thursday Book, London Grip, Meniscus, La Piccioletta Barca, Harbor Review, Vita Poetica, Eclectica, Litbreak, The Bangalore Review and Aimsir Press, among others. Ping Yi lives in Singapore with his spouse and their son.
*****
Kamil Zaszkowski: Three Poems
ONE THING I KNOW
I know that a dream sometimes becomes
reality, and at times reality falls asleep,
and that the moon steals the sun’s light
offering it back as its own.
I know how to sink into a world that trusts
only the silence of stones. I know silence
favours reflection, or else
prompts abandonment of thought.
I also know that one needless word can
transgress the attenuated bounds of decency;
one unspoken at the right time creates a void
impossible to fill.
I know that seas are full of plastic; soon, after
eating a fish or some other bilaterally
symmetrical vertebrate, we will—picking at our
teeth with a toothpick—pick synthetic polymers.
I know freedom lies beyond the borders
of fear and desire; here one must
always win—here, where there is more hope
than certainty.
I know that you can adopt a cat online
with a single click . . . of a mouse.
I know mirrors reflect saints and murderers alike.
The only thing I know with the painful
certainty of tactile knowledge is
what it is to be: to be both a tree and an axe.
GHOST
Visit me sometimes in this corner
of the universe. Knock; come in.
Don’t shine a light – you’ll frighten
everything I am not yet afraid of;
it will slip under my skin
and I’ll have to peel it off.
Say nothing – you don’t even have to
listen; just look in to see if I’m still here.
Open your arms; let me into the deaf pulse
of the heart. Rise as an idea arises
from luminous sight — where blood hums
with red and breath tastes of air.
Whatever you do — just be.
DREAMCATCHER
I once used to record
every one of my dreams – meticulously.
I was fascinated by supposed
prophecies, illusions, surreal visions
of the dream-world; sometimes so vivid
that I felt gusts of wind on my skin,
pain, and a clear surge of joy or fear.
When I lost interest in jotting down
every half-conscious delusion,
my only wish was to get a proper
night’s sleep without any
extra out-of-body adventures.
They say the best thing about having
dreams is that you can tell
them to someone.
The worst, however, is listening to
others wailing on about
what fascinating visions they’ve had.
Kamil Zaszkowski, born in 1978 in Poland, and currently lives in the UK. He has published in his native language in Polish literary magazines and newspapers. He is the author of poetry collections: Oscillations (Miniatura/2014), Visions (Anagram/2019), On the Brink of Twilight (Anagram/2020) and a prose book titled Inner Man (Anagram/2023).
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