*****
Helen Appleton • Ben Banyard • Kate Behrens • Isabel Bermudez • Faye Boland • Arthur Broomfield • Sue Butler • Harry Cammish • Gary Day • Maurice Devitt • Marian Eastwood • Richard Fleming • Lorely Forrester • Adrian Green • Bill Greenwell • Timothy Houghton • Noel Howley • Doreena Jennings • Maureen Jivani • Helen Kay • John Kenny • Sue Kindon • David Lambourne • Sydney Lea • Paul McDonald • Beth McDonough • Sean McDowell • Alan Murphy • Ian Pople • Allen Prowle • Tonnie Richmond • Margaret Rochford • Myra Schneider • Finola Scott • Gerard Smyth • Marjorie Sweetko • Victor Tapner • Judith Taylor • Pam Tompson • Jenny Vuglar • J.S. Watts • Rodney Wood
*****
Helen Appleton: Three Poems
BESPOKE LOVE
I still wear your love.
After all this time,
it is soft,
and warm,
and comfortable.
And it remains the perfect fit.
It breathes when I breathe,
settles around me when I sleep so that
not an inch of skin is exposed.
Suitable for every season,
all moods and weather conditions,
your love was made to measure.
For me.
And it never wears thin or tears.
Instead, it stretches,
taking me with it, absorbing the shocks,
protecting me.
Just as it always did.
Some days, I throw it on
and almost forget I’m wearing it.
Other times,
I just curl up
and pull it right over my head.
Then, without warning,
I turn it inside out,
still wrestling with the fact
that you’re not here.
THE MEMORY OF WALLS
The ghosts of my ancestors
Stain these walls with their darkly
Rectangular shadows.
I note the damp patches
Perspiring,
And paint flaking
Like psoriasis.
Jaundiced skirting board,
The smell of old age
And natural causes.
The door echoes shut.
A single yarn of cobweb quivers …
Dust dances blindly,
Only to settle again
In a new resting place.
Outside, a car engine rumbles on gravel.
Inside, evening sunlight paints her brilliance
Across faded magnolia.
SHARP MEMORY
The brand-new crayons of childhood
Are short, vividly felt colours.
Bright, uncomplicated,
Primary colours.
But,
use a pencil
for long enough,
and it blunts and softens.
Edges blur, lines of truth smudge.
In the end, you can’t even find the one you want.
Helen Appleton is a retired English teacher. She was born in London, brought up in Buckinghamshire and has lived in Lincolnshire for over thirty-five years. She has found it difficult to retire from teaching altogether and impossible to retire from English, so she writes. Her favourite form is poetry, followed closely by short stories and flash fiction.
*****
Ben Banyard:Two Poems
KIDS
For the first nine months
as they swell and ripen out of sight
you know exactly where they are,
imagine their faces.
They arrive with a flourish,
a magician’s bouquet from his sleeve,
and begin to inch away.
You keep them close as best you can,
gentle nudges as they fledge into themselves;
it’s a pure sweet pain as they go.
Until at last they’re walking in the world,
out of sight, but never far from your thoughts;
they carry your heart in their pocket
as though it was theirs to lose.
COAST
The tide rushes in,
rakes the shingle,
claims crisp packets and bottles,
reveals sea glass and pottery.
Here, it comes right up,
mere inches below the sea lock,
Severn mud hidden
leaves only the tip of Denny Island.
At its long retreat, it exposes
worry lines near the pier,
the skeleton of a Heinkel
gunned down over Portbury Wharf.
Docks, salt marsh, a cruise ship,
bridges into Wales brave the swell.
Curlew, dunlin, redshank,
fed, sustained, renewed.
Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, on the North Somerset coast. His three collections to date are Hi-Viz (Yaffle Press, 2021), We Are All Lucky (Indigo Dreams, 2018) and Communing (Indigo Dreams, 2016). Ben edits Black Nore Review (https://blacknorereview.wordpress.com). Website: https://benbanyard.wordpress.com
*****
Kate Behrens: Three Poems
A DAY IN EARLY SPRING
i.m of Sophie Behrens
In the interim, a light comes down,
limning the last ‘flight’ you took:
something soft yet resolute,
beyond a look’s scope. The quiet arousal
of rain shivers reflected branches.
Collisions of rings expand,
dizzy on the pond, surfaces
blur from tension melting,
although it was October
back then, the sky a high silence.
I watched a moth flapping its wings
on your window the morning after,
the death’s-head on its thorax. Tomorrow
is your birthday too.
HOW THE LOST REMAINS
He said that fairies lived through an arch
in the high rise they passed each day
on the drive to school.
He gave her dew and tulips in the closed park
after they broke in for breakfasts
of hard-boiled eggs. Silence.
The red flower heads were soldiers
that edged the morning, as if he’d known then
that anything could be a talisman
given with love’s intuition, even
the glass with its clink of ice,
for a while.
When her mind logged love’s loss,
she found it locked in her greener bones.
WALK AT IKEN
We looked back across the estuary, saw
a solitary water bird slip
into mercury. It seems we are old, almost
mother and daughter now,
the shoreline is in our sights, allowing
the past to sink back. A wet silt tinted
with seaweed is sucking us
into a linked pace and rhythm,
and the usual to-ing and fro-ing dissolves
in streaks of sky at our feet,
the off-white of early evening.
There is no more to say―no,
there is no need to say more, for now―
everything to be quiet for.
Kate Behrens is working on a fifth collection of poems. Previously her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the UK and abroad, including Mslexia, Blackbox Manifold, Stand, The High Window, Poetry Salzburg Review, Acumen, Wild Court, An Anthology of Poetry, The Arts of Peace (Two Rivers Press), Axon: Creative Explorations, Rast (where they were translated into Macedonian), Noon: Journal of the Short poem, as Oxford Brookesʼ ʽPoem of the Weekʼ and in Reading Poets: A New Anthology, (Two Rivers Press).
*****
Isabel Bermudez: Poem
GRIEF
Has a papery skin
full of nicks and tiny bruises
coveting soft flesh.
Her bulk and shadow
is yesterday’s shape in a darkened room
smelling sweetly of perfume and alcohol;
a yellow glow in a cut-glass bowl
three pears which light the way –
Regret, Recall and Rue.
But diamond-edged; precise and hard
as the first blade, the first frost – or
winter setting in.
Isabel Bermudez is a textile artist and poet who currently works in the SEN department of an Academy in South London. Her most recent collection is Bar de las Reminiscencias with illustrations by Simon Turvey – reviewed in The High Window. More at www. isabel-bermudez.com
*****
Faye Boland: Poem
WEDDING SHOES
In the end they were swallowed by gorse
after I lost them in the field next door
after I crossed the briary ditch
after I’d smeared my face with her lipstick
and bruised my eyes with blue eyeshadow
after I’d clip-clopped in her shiny white
block heels over the teracotta tiles,
tripping over the hem of her sparkly purple dress
or her paisley-printed evening gown
after I’d slipped my feet in and tied the thin strap
leaving a three inch gap between my ankle and the heel
the second her back was turned
which made the taking so delicious.
Faye Boland won the Robert Leslie Boland Prize 2018 and the Hanna Greally International Literary Award 2017. She placed third in the Bere Island Poetry Competition 2024. Her Chapbook Fishing for Tea was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2024 and she was highly commended in the Desmond O’ Grady Competition 2019. Her first poetry collection Peripheral was published in September 2018 by The Manuscript Publisher.
*****
Arthur Broomfield: Two Poems
MOTHER SUN
I see it now, a peachy curve,
in the ethereal light,
from my bedroom window,
somewhere between mother sun,
calm in clouds of goose down,
and the waking earth
where insects bathe in the morning dew,
their drink and food, and leaves whisper
to platoons of ants. Queen Anne’s lace.
The ripples of a world at work, the saunter
to sleepy Robin’s wake-up call.
I pause, with the movements,
to hear the blackbird’s sung sonata,
to gaze and dance,
to count the blades of grass,
to listen to each raindrop
kiss the sacred soil.
This earth, these fields I walk
and share with the living
land, I, by chance,
in a reverie, a trance,
call my home.
This Musée D’Orsay,
this Swan Lake,
this Ode, outside my walls,
the wonder of Vincent’s sky and waves
in fields of wheaten sheaves.
Arles, where he despaired
that love alone would fail
and lovers grieve.
BRIGID
Saint Brigid’s Day 2025
They saw you churn on Croghan Hill.
The smart among them
had the dream
that you would turn it
round, and back to cream.
They found you naked on the beach
and laid you in a sapphire shell,
tied a headscarf round your head,
a habit forced on country girls.
I see you at the Imbolc,
changing water into beer,
your cloak thrown over Brophy’s Field.
The nun you saved, in a
spot of bother.
Ireland’s very Eva Shaver,
St. Mel of Longford said he’d veil you.
That’s you in the disco,
sequins in your hair,
the red dress.
You getting serious,
Dar Lugdac on your arm.
Ireland’s first abbess
bebop bops in the jazz joint,
or rocks to ‘Daddy Cool’,
makes out with Monk,
in the back seat of
Hannah’s Rolls.
You, the nun of country butter,
the stuff of saints of holy wells,
of Steve Jobs, the computer,
of flowers in your hair, and down your back,
of blinded Dara, who saw the light,
in ‘Frisco and in Ballyblack.
You wore Mel’s veil at the Puck Fair
And in the club in Greenwich Village,
for a sisterly bet, a laugh, for the craic.
Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois Ireland. His works have been published in Acumen, Agenda, Orbis, The High Window, North, Poetry Ireland Review, and in Indian, US and European journals. He is current Poet Laureate for Mountmellick.
*****
Sue Butler:Three Poems
SHELLING
I breathe wet granite
seagull shit
the tideline an odd scatter of pink seaweed
picked over by flame-beaked sandpipers
wet-suited children float above the shallow shelf
of the bayxxx smooth and shiny black as seals
or heave on sailsxxx red white bluexxx safe
in the on-shore breezexxx the rising tide
fishermen tend mussel lines fill sacks
bulky as smart cars with the shift and hiss and slither
an elephant roar of jetsxxx so low I duck
and out at seaxxx an island throws up its granite guts
a long question
the boom that answers it
CLUSTER
She is the one that makes them a cluster
she decides: her aunt, in nineteen seventy
still ravelled in panicky poverty that kept up
appearances, never called the doctor, gone
two weeks after it gnawed into her spine;
her cousin was ovary but there is a connection
she has read; her mother and her other aunt
in their nineties and already yonderly.
Would that be better she asks the old dog
as he rattles and dozes in his weeknight space
beside her on the bed. Her husband works away.
Their marriage, softer since the hormone blockers,
fine boned and frosted as a winter tree,
sturdy through many storms now. She adds
another list to the pile she keeps ready
on her desk. Birthdays, handyman for gutters,
children, grandchildren, cousins to advise
of the associations, of cluster, the risk.
It is a comfort to be a warning at least.
On good afternoons she sits on the bench
beside the church entry, stretches toward
the scars Norman knights struck into the stone,
as they sharpened their swords, the centuries old.
CHOOSING PHOTOS IN THE DAY ROOM
Care staff call the chef from the kitchen
to see how pretty you were, how slim
in that fitted bodice, exclaim at the patience
it must have taken to hook all those buttons,
satin and slithery, into their rouleau hoops.
I remember the top in my dressing-up box,
the last rags of the skirt in the duster bag
and the dog basket. You pick a photo
for your hundredth birthday album, rub
my father’s face as if to feel his beard rash,
his acne scars. ‘Is that Patrick’ you ask, hold up
your hand to show us the ring worn thin
as an old paper clip, dimpling the flesh,
make me promise not to let it go into the fire.
Sue Butler was once a GP. In retirement she reflected on the gift and burden of that intimate connection with so many lives. This was when she took up walking and creative writing, both unpredictable forms of meditation on life in all its grace, pain and peculiarity. Her work has been published in a number of journals. Her pamphlet Learning from the Body is published by Yaffle.
*****
Harry Cammish: Poem
THE THORN TREE
On the crooked tree of thorns
The top of a bird nest shows;
From the crooked tree of thorns
Violent words fly around;
On the crooked tree of thorns
Arise demented spires
Its thick leaves ripple and turn,
Twist the tree in two.
Growing higher than houses,
It spits its thorns below.
On the crooked tree of thorns
There is a child’s letter;
On the crooked tree of thorns
An old voice is speaking.
Beneath the crooked thorn tree
I have laid myself down.
Harry Cammish is a young British writer with a love of history and literature. Inspired by the work of Philip Larkin, he wrote his first poems amid the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic and has contributed poems to the multiauthored anthology After Hours and the eco-poetry project Wild Words.
*****
Gary Day: Three Poems
FUNERAL
i.m. Sallie Durham
The small Anglo-Saxon
Church is packed.
Latecomers must
Stand. On the walls,
Faded frescoes
Of Judgement Day.
Grief will barely
Let him speak;
Pulls at his throat
Like a leash.
The mourners
Are tense.
Candle flames
Flap uselessly.
She had been
The one for words,
Rescuing them
From drudgery,
Lovingly restoring
Them in poems.
He glances back
At the wicker casket,
But she can’t help him,
He’s on his own;
If words were wood
What shapes he’d make
To mark his loss; yet
Broken speech leaks love
More true than flows
In smoother sentences.
And so his tongue stumbles,
Recounting where they met,
When they married,
And the daughter they
Adopted from a cold
Crib, cradling her gently
Through the Russian snow
That followed them, all
The way home. At last,
The mourners gather
On a green hill and she
Is planted-oh so carefully-
In the damp December
Earth where, in time,
Her body will compose
All the poems that cancer
Aborted, transcribing them
As ordinary wonders: soil,
Sunflower, birdsong.
INNOCENCE
A winter’s night
And falling snow
Making the street
As silent as these
Awkward adolescents;
She admiring his jacket,
He enchanted by the flakes
Settling on her dark curls.
Her dad called her in,
His mum took him south.
Fifty years melted away,
So much of life gone
Before they met again:
Her hair still white
From that long ago night.
HOURGLASS
‘You told me you’d catch me’
She said, ‘but you didn’t’.
She showed him the small
Scar on her knee. ‘Look!
That’s where I fell.’
He remembered the day,
A couple of kids clambering
Up the castle bank, brushing
Pollen off each other,
Then flopping on the grass.
Above, wind-buffeted gulls
Below, the sea’s slow thunder.
It must have happened
On the way down – him
Encouraging her to jump.
Had he really let her fall?
It was half a century since
They’d seen one another,
And already he’d learnt
She liked to tease.
There was too little sand
In the glass to know more;
Just enough to promise
That, whoever tumbled first,
Would wait to help the other
Land safely, wherever
that may be.
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer and used to be TV critic for the Times Higher Education Supplement. He is the author of several books including Literary Criticism: A New History and The Story of Drama: Tragedy, Comedy and Sacrifice. His poetry has appeared in Acumen, The Dawntreader, The Seventh Quarry and various others. His poetry has been highly commended in several competitions, the latest being the Write Out Loud Poetry Competition, themed ‘Echoes’.
*****
Maurice Devitt: Two Poems
ALMOST FULL CIRCLE
In the muddled villages of my mind
I often wonder what happened to you,
so bright yet self-effacing, scumbling
the mordant lines of your intellect
in the dark menagerie of the classroom,
stumbling through Latin verbs
you knew by heart, while generously sharing
in the cloisters of the bicycle shed
pristine proofs of your homework,
passing them off as trinkets, your eyes blinking
self-consciously as you unplugged
the most intricate theorems, the tattoo
on your wrist always a dead giveaway,
pi to seven places.
SUMMER GOTHIC
The man across the road has been
standing at his window for at least ten minutes,
as though watching for a break in the weather,
though it’s been sunny all afternoon. Maybe
he’s expecting a friend or an important parcel,
or taking respite from something that has happened
within the greater geography of the house,
whether hardening his position for another
skirmish or lost in a dot of bad news that he fears
can only grow larger. Either way he knows
the parameters, how close he is to satisfaction
or heartbreak. My interest and impatience
grow in equal measure, tracking every delivery van
and passerby, expecting them to stop outside
his gate, check the number, and proceed up the path.
Five minutes later he turns from the window,
slips back into the well of the house
and, while I’m tempted to call over on the pretext
of borrowing a drill, I suspect this is simply
to avoid what I was afraid to do last night.
Maurice Devitt has been a winner of the Trócaire/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.
*****
Marian Eastwood: Two Poems
NICO AT HIGHGATE AND THE MOTHER FOX
Nico, at twenty two, you had black painted long nails,
a tall hat and long hair, that was how I remembered you.
We dedicated your lost shoes to Saint Anthony with a song.
It has been so long, we can’t remember your tunes,
except that your guitar was left now without you playing it.
Your mum grieved so strongly she was taken ill. With you now,
she was laid to rest on the same ground up the hill.
Your names inscribed on faded stones behind the painter
Sidney Nolan, on a mossy slope a few steps past Karl Marx
and the musicologist Vogel, who rested upon melodious grass of green.
George Michael was supreme, was he not on the West side,
his name in Greek perhaps unseen? We kissed you all
with our prayerful goodbyes. Some of us tried to catch up
with a mother fox. She was confident and found her baby
resting by a tree, she was the Highgate fox, we all agreed!
INDIOS BRAVOS
Giolo, your spirit haunted me. In Oxford, where I set up home,
I saw you at an exhibition. I searched my town but have not
yet found your unmarked grave. I saw your outstretched
tattooed forearm, but I couldn’t grasp it. Your lament
became my lament for some time. It was intense, as if we
were both lost at sea, and later enslaved as objects of curiosity.
You, a Prince, were purchased as a slave and became a prisoner.
On the sea journey with you, your mother perished aboard the ship.
You missed and longed for her and were broken with profound grief.
From 1687 to 2023, human trafficking had still not ceased. Pirate, plunderer,
colonizer – under different names, all operating like William Dampier.
Giolo, your spirit found me and it screamed from the grave:
‘Freedom from slavery!
Marian Eastwood is the founder of the Oxford Poetry Circle. She has also served as a Labour Attaché for the Philippine Mission to the UN and other International Organisations in Geneva. Between 1992-1998 she managed the Boracay Paraw Regatta and International Arts Festival, which she founded. While serving as the Executive Cultural Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, she worked with the poet Virginia R. Moreno, Chairman of the Culture Committee National Commission to UNESCO,
Richard Fleming: Five Poems
THE DANCE
Some unexpected magic that first time
we met, a lively group of four or more,
drew us together, partners in some crime
not yet committed. While they took the floor,
your husband and my wife, we sat and spoke
of everything and nothing, time danced by.
It seemed that something, in us both, awoke
and took control as we sat eye to eye.
It was as though we spoke in tongues unknown
to those around us. Suddenly we knew
that one day in the future we’d atone
for what we felt and what we’d choose to do.
The music rose and fell. We sat, entranced,
while, unsuspectingly, our partners danced.
HIGH
Estrangement plays its tricks: years slip away
yet, in my mind, the lost friends never age.
Those who were youthful then, seem to display
the changeless aspect of an unturned page.
I see them still: their bold unflinching gaze,
lithe-limbed, smooth-skinned, invincible and strong,
as though their fire would never cease to blaze,
the young who thought that nothing could go wrong
but when, in time, we chance to meet again,
their faces and their bodies aged as mine,
I feel a jolt of sympathy and pain
and search their haggard faces for a sign
of who they were, of who we were, of why
we have crashed down when once we flew so high.
STRANGE MEETING
Were Time to somersault and let me meet
the youth I was, say, sixty years ago,
with blemished skin and awkward hands and feet,
his light of expectation still aglow:
a lumpish lad, as yet unmoulded clay,
but strong, alive, abundant still with hope,
not desiccated as I am today,
still unaware, as I was, of life’s scope,
I’d slap his shoulder, as old fellows do,
and wish him luck, not offer him advice:
life’s trials are the best school, sad but true,
we learn, but education has its price.
I’d smile. I’d shake his hand and hold my tongue:
the old can rarely influence the young.
LEGO
An old man, grey and gargoyle-faced, stares down
from a cathedral armchair to the rug
where a grandson, his game played out, lies snug,
and sound asleep, his Lego spread around.
He marvels at how suddenly the child,
as though anaesthetised, laid down his head,
no bedtime tale required, the rug his bed.
Insomniac himself, he sits beguiled
by this dear child below him on the floor,
so innocent beside his slippered feet,
and, tearful, feels that life is incomplete
without this wordless moment of rapport
with the small sleeping boy, his soft fair hair
haloed by Lego pieces, lying there.
DYING LIGHT
At day’s end, contemplating dying light,
there’s no point raging: time can not be tied.
It darts away like an abandoned kite
while we must simply stand to watch it glide
beyond our reach and into that good night
where measured time and timelessness reside.
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Collections include Strange Journey (2012) and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer). His work can be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/ or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com
*****
Lorely Forrester: Poem
TOOL KIT
I often wish poems came
with a handy tool kit.
Pocket-sized, but with a range
of items included. Sometimes
I need something with an edge
to prise it open; often a gadget
with more weight and clout –
to break it apart at the seams
if necessary, reveal its meaning.
Now and then I wonder
if the words have turned opaque
as I opened the page, like that
posh glass you can have on
balconies, even in public wash-
rooms like the café in Cologne.
Is it shy, the poem?
Did it see me coming, and swivel
round so I can only glimpse it
from the rear?
Was there a password
I forgot to download
that would release its meaning?
Perhaps a clue lies in the small
print on the last page – hidden
in the Acknowledgements,
if I could just decipher it.
Possibly the poem’s title is
a secret lid, that rips off to lay
bare the glorious depths below.
It’s not that I want to beat it with
a hose, as Billy Collins phrased it,
I just wish it would talk to me,
especially when I’ve sat down
to listen, with a cup of tea.
I suspect it had a rough childhood,
was misunderstood and no longer
trusts the idea of communication.
I’d love to know, because often
and often, I get to the end
wondering what it was all about.
Lorely Forrester was born in Kenya, raised in the Caribbean, graduated from King’s College London, then worked in documentaries and magazines. She lives in Ireland and was Editor of Discover Sligo Magazine for many years. She won 1st prize (poetry) at Westport’s 49th International Arts & Lit Festival, Westival 2024. She was listed for the Kilmore Quay Poetry Prize 2024 and has been published in Mediterranean Poetry, Cassandra Voices, The High Window, and many times in The Galway Review, amongst others.
*****
Adrian Green: Poem
AT THE MUNITIONS FACTORY SITE
Now there is birdsong
where cordite was stored,
grasses and briars have thrived
in the absence of war
and insects sing, knowing nothing
of past centuries’ killing routines.
The tramway relics and wharf
by the creek all overgrown now
and warehouse footings
mere traces in soil
as the heathland and scrub and rabbits
and deer reclaim their space,
the rattle and noise of industrial chores
replaced by leaves unfolding to spring.
Adrian Green lives in Southend-on-Sea. He has published three full collections, Chorus and Coda (2007), All That Jazz and Other Poems (2018) and New Blues and Other Poems (2023), all from The Littoral Press. He has been a trustee of The Jazz Centre (UK) and has had a long association with the Essex Poetry Festival, the Southend Poetry Group, and with Open University Poets. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Britain and abroad.
*****
Bill Greenwell: Two Poems
DANCING
In those days we danced, or maybe didn’t,
preserving a distance, we weren’t
supposed to be together. The bass still pulsed,
the drums still shivered, the rooms were packed
with lovers and others. We knew the words
(or most of them), you with your sad eyes sparkling,
arms flailing. You were always
without inhibition, or maybe you were shy –
we kept at arm’s length, we held each other
like limpets. And later, when we’d vanished
out of each other, out of life, you went
dancing all the same, lighting up rooms
I never saw. You rolled yourself under the sheets
when someone came calling. But when I
imagine you, you are always dancing, maybe
both of us were, close, or even apart.
NINETEEN TO THE DOZEN
No small talk. Streets weave in and out,
as do our conversations. I take you
to the wrong place entirely, inquiring at the door
where we should be. Never
heard of it. Three streets out. And all the while
these words move through air, bees
working on the pollen of unfamiliar stories –
husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, scores
prepared for our cremations, lost concerts,
theories of food, the quirks of children,
perils of technology, and subtitles, too –
all perfectly readable, or distracting, according
to taste and preference. Steps. Ceilings. Sunlight
without shadow. Undercurrents and currents,
two frequencies, pavements and routes unfolding:
and always, chat. Later, waiting in a station,
everything looks light. It lifts away,
except for a memory of two voices, talking.
Bill Greenwell lives in South Shields. His first collection Impossible Objects was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2006. In 2017 he won the Magma Editors Award. He wrote creative writing course material for the Open University before retiring. billgreenwell62@outlook.com
*****
Timothy Houghton: Poem
DINGO PEACE
Outside a football pitch, Jazz runs
and pauses for reasons
hard to know. Clarity of air
means more
above grass stains on my boots.
Cooling wind
operates the open expanse—
it is God-speech
during his mundane
exploration of smells.
Calm and gust
are forms of silence. This is the peace
of the Dingo. Yet his silhouette
is uncontrollable
when he stops into space,
when calling him
doesn’t work. Sight behaves
like a phone call
a continent away.
Whatever he’s doing,
it’s very old. The crisscross tower
at the north end of the field
is blaring, warning of a storm
he doesn’t seem to hear.
Timothy Houghton‘s The Internal Distance, Selected Poems 1989-2012, appeared in a bilingual (Italian/English) edition from the Italian press Hebenon/Mimesis Edizioni in 2015. The book was presented in Florence at the Museo Casa di Dante. He has worked at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hawthornden Castle. His recent book is Where the Lighthouse Begins (Salmon Poetry, 2020). Of late, magazine publications include Agenda, Stand, Acumen, Poetry Salzburg Review, Orbis, and 3rd Millennium (Greece). He has been a field-trip leader for Audubon.
*****
Noel Howley: Three Poems
SPEAKING OF TRAINS
The 6.50 train is packed. There’s no room for ghosts.
The passing fields seem full of nothing else.
Along the butt of hedges, the rime turns
this morning headland green to memory.
The geometry of fields has no classical solution,
cannot divine the story of division and subdivision.
A field inundated with rainwater no more
than a couple of inches deep, yet there were swans.
After the tunnel, for a moment, the world was light
then the trees, houses, and the sky becoming sea.
At speed what do rights-of-way, wayleaves become?
A single ash tree that breaks the horizon.
They are building towns in fields, out on the outskirts,
in heritage brick golden as the February sun.
In behind everything refuse proliferates as if
hidden from the main road it can be forgotten.
A bored man should be a good walker
or at least learn to speak quietly on trains.
And you think that was easy, the morning commute,
every seat filled up with laptops, makeup, morning oats.
SPEAKING OF RIVERS
Crossing water always furthers something
– Seamus Heaney
Weary of this road without people
I turn to rivers.
When I was twelve years old
I could name
all the rivers of Ireland.
Where they rose
and where they flowed
into the sea.
I had studied
Geography.
I knew where I was
and how to get
to where I wanted to be.
Crossing all those eastern rivers,
heading north, today
I had expected something
to change.
If only the light.
The day passing always
beside me
or behind me.
Terrified of water I never
learnt to swim.
BRICKLANDS I
Even a brick wants to be something.
– Louis Kahn
I
Bricks proliferate in The Holylands,
giving a measure to every house.
You can tell the streets: Cairo, Damascus,
Jerusalem by the shape of bricks.
II
Who knows the lore of brick now?
Say what is stretcher bond
or what is Flemish Garden Wall.
Tell hand-cut brindles from common stock.
III
I once tried to lay a course of bricks
with trowel and line and spirit level.
Of course, I failed. The plasticity of mortar
too much for my soft hands.
IV
I could construct a brick wall on my computer
correct to the tenth decimal place.
On site brick will wrestle you,
twist and turn off plumb.
V
You are a brick she said.
I didn’t know what she meant.
Solid, dependable, in its place,
even a brick wants to be something.
VI
I want to stroke these walls, feel
the perfect lines of pointing.
Enthralled by specials I lose my way;
I’ve taken this too far.
Noel Howley lives in Waterford, was runner-up in the Cork Literary Review Manuscript Competition 2002. He has had poems published in various journals, including Poetry Ireland Review, Cork Literary Review, Revival Literary Journal and The Waxed Lemon. His poems also appeared in Colony Online and Silver Streams online journals. In 2019 he won the Waterford Poetry Prize and Chair of Ireland Student Poetry Prize in 2025. He is currently studying for a Masters in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast.
*****
Doreena Jennings: Three Poems
DÍSERT DIARMADA (CASTLEDERMOT)
To the right of the Romanesque doorway, a Hogs-back stone
a place to pray, a grave marker, atop a Chieftain’s burial place.
There was a swearing stone for making agreements
before seals or contracts were en vogue.
A round tower, a church, carved standing stones,
a millstone for grinding grains, found a perch there, too.
Not wanting to examine old graves, recite names or circumstances,
I looked for something other to hold me, something neither grey nor stone.
I found the casing from a ‘Lost Mary’, a watermelon-flavoured vape.
It’s online descriptor; Once it runs out, just simply get rid of it.
In the grass, a discarded can of Monster, sparkling Kiwi, lime with
a hint of cucumber, a cardboard wrapper from Belgian chocolate cookies.
I disturbed nothing, carried them in my head as I rounded the back of the church. A new, small black marble headstone with bright gold lettering caught me.
Rita, July 1956, aged two, and Christopher, April 1957, aged three months.
I thought about the weight of that mother’s heart,
when she had to bury two children one year after the other. Then, for a brief moment, I thought of you, cradled you, in my brokenness and walked away
towards the gates. There, amongst the fallen heart-shaped leaves of the lime tree, I found snowdrops already in bloom.
In the rain, they twinkled like stars, and I felt the hum of winter losing grip;
the opening song of another spring.
INNER CHILD
For her, I bought A spalted-beech half-moon
that harbours a Swarovski ball in its crescent cut-out space.
“Those crystals make the best rainbows,” the shopkeeper said.
It hangs from the bay window in my sitting room,
and when the sun comes, there is a change in me,
as I watch the interplay of prisms pattern the wall.
Colour circles calling. A new birth, a spark of curiosity
giving dimension to the flat magnolia wall, a waltz of colour.
You come in strange ways to touch me, my love.
THE MOUTH
After Eilis O ConnelL
Kilkenny Limestone with fossils, 2002
Let this be an act of love,
a work of transformation
to soften your exterior,
capture the resonance
of your voice, shape your open mouth,
echo the deep sounds
that rise up from the ocean.
Let me honour the beauty
of age that appears like fossils
on your surface. My hands soften
this rock, curved around cool lips,
for me to kiss and kiss again,
chisel out a mouth from which
your words of love can spill,
drenching the heavens,
my consciousness.
The plinth below.
Doreena Jennings is chairperson of the award-winning Carlow Writers’ Co-op. Her poems have appeared in The Blue Nib and The Irish Independent (New Irish Writing). She has also been placed in several competitions and appeared in anthologies. She was shortlisted for last year’s Introductions / Céadlinté program 2025 and is studying for her Master’s in Creative Writing at Maynooth.
*****
Maureen Jivani: Three Poems
STILL LIFE WITH CANDLES, PLUM AND PEACH
When they were peach, they were soft and bruised competing with peers for attention: wet stones in sweaty student rooms coveting plums in their bluish skins and hard interiors. They longed to wrap their flesh around each other, to feel the opposite of self: an unsure composition rolling towards the canvas edge. The need to change, imperative. They startled our breath. Now, they are happily neither plum nor peach in a body neither blue nor pink, firm and confident enough to melt those doubtful hearts, to perfume the mustiest of thoughts, to light and sing their body, if not electric, then to sing it anew.
STILL LIFE WITH FRUIT AND SKULL
Two cracked coconuts on willow-patterned plates, plump honeydew melons balled into tumblers, cool Cherryaid. A skull filled with fungating moon drop grapes, once candy-floss sweet. But look closer. Those dark orbits in the bone surely once housed eyes so bright they shamed the sun and all of heaven’s stars, just like your own the first time you fell in love, shining in the darkness of an old ghost town – its red train tearing towards the light, taking leave of the unquiet dead, scuttering skeletons, headless bodies, disembodied heads, old soul-stealing ghouls, the screeching near misses that could tease the hairs on the scruff of your neck – his furious kisses quickening the breath of your girlhood.
STILL LIFE WITH LEMONS, ORANGES AND ROSES
Note how the grey frame enhances colours of citrus and blush, the pink damask cloth kissing the surface of a pewter plate which holds and yet returns cold light against an orange glow, infusing pale lemons warmer in their peel. Consider then the lost and found: those edges where wickerwork meets fruit, cut glass meets thorns, the air. Remember how, the first time out walking after grief had settled into duller blades, you stopped before a gallery window, astonished by your own reflection the way a displayed body still greets itself despite the weight of ghosts, their shapes.
Maureen Jivani is published by Mulfran Press and has an M.Phil. in Writing from the University of South Wales.
*****
Helen Kay: Three Poems
THE DRAGON INN, BIRMINGHAM
Here in Wetherswoons, in the throat
of Chinatown, I am no longer I. I am table 28,
a copper-moon table for one by a window
that waved menus at me, those
glossy flags of peace, so awkward yet so sure.
My chips sprawl like a scene from Bosch, or
a heap of red-stained clothes by a washer.
Absorbed in a mix of chatter,
talk and beans, I become we –
the Friday evening escapees.
I squeeze in next to hi-viz vests, draped
on chairs, while seven blokes gesticulate
their day, their table a garden
of green bottles, next to two girls who unburden
themselves over house white,
next to a bus queue of empty glasses, pint
tankards chatting up slender flutes. Inside,
rings of lamps spark with copper and glass. Outside,
fairy lights kiss-catch reflections of those rings
the way they becomes we in the weave of the evening.
It is Valentine’s Day,
not much hard-core romance, no frippery
of what-if declarations,
ringed definitions or I-do conclusions,
but every man
in blurry love with every man.
When I coat my cold chip
with sticky yolk, my lips,
synching with the lips of everyone
can taste and taste a golden dragon sun.
VAN GOGH HAS A FOCAL SEIZURE WHILE PAINTING
Bristles, heavy with paint, daub the canvas
leave a lavender froth on veiny stems.
His brush drops into water, breathes out
a ribboned aura, rises clean again.
Now dipped in yellow, it blesses the sky.
A haloed sun strokes ribbons of purple flowers.
Suddenly, hazy as an absinthe glaze,
the artist is absent from the room, from time.
Light swirls recolour the plants to grey
as they quiver, then swoon in a thick breeze.
Lavender sprigs in a jar draw him back.
The drying picture calms his clammy head.
Note: Lavender helps to prevent seizures. It is the symbol for epilepsy.
LESSON FOR A SMALL GIRL
Our garden was black as Dad’s felt coat,
with a clay lining and grass trimmings.
When he scattered a dust of carrot seeds
into shallow drills, he stroked the soil.
He told me of its fertile secrets,
sandstone deposits left by glaciers,
and the salt seams and brine springs
that grew our town’s identity.
In bed I dreamed I lay beneath the coat
with a belt of frost-white crystals.
Perhaps, I felt the weight of it, the grit
in my throat, the sediment in my lungs
but then I whispered a spell for the seeds
to make them hey presto out of the earth.
Helen Kay’s work is widely published in magazines. She has two published pamphlets, A Poultry Lover’s Guide to Poetry (Indigo Dreams) and This Lexia & Other Languages (V. Press). Her debut collection, it was never about the kingfisher, was published in 2025 by Dithering Chaps. She is known on Facebook for her sidekick hen puppet Nigella.
*****
John Kenny: Three Poems
SACRED HEART OF BLEEDING JESUS
At my grannie’s house with
my mother, father, brother,
I climb the stairs for the
toilet, sticky-carpeted steps,
creaking boards beneath,
faded floral-patterned
wallpaper clinging dry and
brittle to the wall, ready
to drop away, bannister
tacky to my touch,
and on the return, air
close and damp, its dim
confines are lit by a flickering
red light encased in a small
plastic globe, an electric
mockery of a candle on a
tiny shelf under a framed
picture of Jesus, punctured
hands reaching out, eyes sad,
compassionate, and in its centre
his open chest, the bleeding
heart wrapped in thorns
that look to my youth like
barbed wire, and a corona of
light radiating from it
to highlight the suffering
taken on on our behalf.
Why did you die for us,
for our sins, when we didn’t
ask for that sacrifice?
No answer, except the
ticking of the grandfather
clock down in the hall
counting out the years, and
the ribbed plastic covering
on the picture that makes
his eyes follow you when
you move side to side,
staring at you, pleading or
in judgement I cannot say.
THE SLIP AWAY
Clothes folded neatly, conscientiously,
piled atop shoes placed perpendicular
to the retreating tide on that
grey clouded-over dawn.
Out you swim, pointed at the
Isle of Man, unseen, determined
strokes into the deepening swell until
you tire past the point of return.
I wonder do you pause a moment,
runnels of briny water coating your livid face,
to glance back at the distant shoreline
as I gaze at today’s windblown winter morning
from my cold, cold bed.
GRANNY SMITH APPLES
The scent of a Granny Smith apple
still conjures, even now, after
such a space of time,
boyhood visits to Butlin’s,
Mosney, County Meath,
and all that went with it:
apples overflowing wicker baskets
outside a cabin selling fruit,
air sweet after a dash of rain,
flowers wrapped in paper earthy damp,
a man pulling a trolley on
big ballooned rubber tyres,
loaded with crates of vegetables,
myself and my brother hanging
onto railings for dear life
in the roller-skating rink,
Red Coats drifting about the
pathways, on hand to help
with directions, offer advice,
and in the evenings, multitalented,
singing, dancing, putting on a show
while families dine,
and us dashing into the swimming pool,
splashing about, screeches echoing
in the vaulted roof,
dinky little chalets, little
bigger than caravans, wooden,
all painted in bright colours,
yellow, green, red, blue,
every year for years,
the visits, for Whit weekend,
a highlight in my calendar of youth,
vivid sights and sounds burnished
in the crucible of memory,
tiny oases in the dark and
clouded-over desert
of childhood’s distant scrubland,
awaiting reclamation at
the scent of a Granny Smith apple.
John Kenny is a writer and editor from Dublin, Ireland, working as a course facilitator and mentor for the Irish Writers Centre. His short fiction has been published in Uncertainties, Revival Literary Journal, The Galway Review, Transtories and many other magazines and anthologies. His poetry has featured in StepAway Magazine, Smashing Times, Every Day Poets and Poem Alone, and is forthcoming in Prole.
*****
Sue Kindon:Poem
A GAME OF CHESS
It’s 9 a.m. – Jean-Claude’s second coffee
outside the village bar. His first was at the Café Escaleta –
and this, his second game of chess today.
He and Broué hunch in concentration –
ample hats protect them from the Pyrenean sun.
After a lifetime, you’d think they’d be au fait
with all the moves.
Jean-Claude always wins – except on New Year’s Day
when he was rushed to Urgences in Toulouse
and it was very nearly checkmate. Now he plays
more cautiously – with the addition of 4 stents –
stops at 2 coffees – acknowledges
that on this chequered board
the best of strategists may lose.
Sue Kindon lives and writes in the French Pyrenees and is currently working on a bilingual collection.
*****
David Lambourne: Two Poems
AN UNPLEASANT SCENE
A London pub, May 1963.
Ironwork tables, snob screens, red banquette,
And drone of regulars. S– enters, right,
Her glance goes to her lover like a bee.
Blue chin, green eyes, black brows, white teeth, red pout.
His fingers fold around a mole-dark stout.
Smoke-clouded polygons of lunchtime sun
Fall through the dust, traverse the wide
Black floorboards, mount her coat, and set
One cut-glass snob screen dazzlingly alight.
Gamely she heads towards him with her gin,
Bottle of tonic and uneasy grin.
She squeezes in, her magic spoils held high,
But as from ancient custom their twinned thighs
Align and press, an uninvited ghost
Slides in between them, and his eyes
Wriggle away like fish. Such subtle shows
Startle like fireworks, and at once she knows
What must come next. She fishes in her bag,
And (fine hair tumbling) teases out a fag.
Her lighter flares. ‘All right. What did I do?’
‘Nothing at all. Things end. It wasn’t you.’
A sudden stabbing movement. ‘Jesus Christ!’
His half-full pint glass topples to the floor,
Voiding its bitter contents everywhere.
Brushing the smoking ash crumbs from his wrist,
He skewers S– with an accusing glare,
Which her pained eyes return with interest.
Her mind is stuffed with rage. Thoughts fume and hiss:
So is there someone else? Of course there is!
How long have you been fucking her?
Christ, I can smell her cunt! You utter shit!
I hope you die! But she says none of this.
Karma, she thinks. The bastard climbs his stairs,
And guilt creeps up behind him unawares,
Like a cold wraith, and steals into his bed
To share the pillow with his haunted head.
‘Goodbye for good, dear heart,’ she says. ‘Take care.
I hope that fucking fag-burn leaves a scar.’
Her long coat floats in the revolving door.
The job – thank God – is done now. He is free,
With nothing left to do or say or prove.
Counting the cost of countless acts of love,
Is pointless and helps no one. What is done
Is done. None doth offend, he mutters, none.
A massive calm surrounds him like a sea.
Fathoms below, an aimless lymphocyte
Drifts through a school of microscopic white
Plankton, and as an afterthought
Fires off a squirt of piss. The ocean winks.
T– feels the wound; and something like remorse
Collects inside his brain, and in due course
Expands to fill the universe – which nonetheless
Remains indifferent to his plight
As he walks out with it into the night.
ERASED
The drone floats over a grey plain,
Scanning a malignancy, a dark mass
masquerading as a landscape.
Abandoned dogs root through the rubble,
searching for food. Anything edible will do,
they are not fussy. Apart from these,
nothing is remarkable, there are no signs of occupation.
The horizon is a shipwreck
of twisted girders and smashed concrete.
Occasionally a broken wall remains upright,
its zig-zag wallpaper weirdly intact.
The murky shelter below
contains nothing of note:
an upended table with crazy legs,
a pair of stained mattresses flung one on the other,
a heap of clothes, a child’s bike.
These offer no reliable testimony. Their owners
might have lived here yesterday
or centuries ago. No one
will come back to reclaim them.
The place is clearly uninhabitable.
A mist of dust hangs over everything.
Whatever took place here is easily deniable.
It might be the aftermath of some natural disaster,
an earthquake or a flood. Possibly a war.
The mounds of rubble yield no answers,
Nor does the grey hand, held out in protest,
The grey foot that failed to escape.
Such objects are best left buried.
Nothing to see here. Move on.
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).
*****
Sydney Lea: Four Poems
OLD WOUNDS
He had a scar on the thumb he used to press
stamps on letters he wrote to friends in longhand–
and still does, more rarely, fewer friends still living.
It made a perfect cartoon smile, that scar.
Like all of us, he once imagined childhood
to be the age that teems with discovery.
Was that the case for him? He can’t remember.
But growing old, he finds, has meant a spate
of disquieting, unexpected, revelations.
For instance, precisely, that crescent scar has vanished.
He’s never given it a thought. Till now,
he hasn’t even noticed it was gone.
He’s mildly shocked that the skin that showed it is smooth,
or as smooth as his skin can be. The way he got it–
still clear after seven decades. The heat. The blood.
He’d never really pondered the gray-glass globes
that hung on kitchen walls, in barns, at schools,
with some unknown fluid inside them in case of fire.
They were never used, it seemed, were simply there.
It’s years since he has seen one. They’ve disappeared,
like so much does before he knows it’s gone.
He’d lit a match to withered stalks in the garden.
Late August, the growth had died so he soon had a blaze.
He broke a globe he’d taken from the toolshed
against the sagging wall behind that garden
and clearly did it wrong. The contents gushed
from the glass and onto the toes of his high-top sneakers.
A knee-high border of rocks prevented disaster:
when the flames ran into it, everything fizzled out.
But he’d somehow cut the thumb. It would need three stitches.
He doesn’t recall the lie he told his mother
about the wound. Back then, a family physician
would make a house call. Dr. Clark came by
and painted on some ugly, astringent liquid,
sewed up the gash and wrapped it with gauze and tape.
A lucky man, he’s lived more than eighty years
and like anybody, felt more wounds than one.
But even those that have faded, that have sunk inside,
are part of him now, he supposes. Whatever that means.
ANOTHER SHORE
Downed leaves raked into mounds and burning:
I loved that scent each autumn,
the way it somehow transported my soul
from the tiresome school-day season.
These chilly days would be the first
when I saw my breaths in flight
like little ghosts as I conceived them.
Unalarming, in fact they enticed.
I’d stand just close enough to a smolder
to start my own inner glow.
From the piles that hadn’t yet taken fire,
I might hear squirrels rustle, but after,
no brilliant, escapist visions stirred.
Smoke climbed toward geese that clamored
in flight from the small, pinched world I knew–
I pictured sailing off too.
In this story, I’d tend a fleet boat’s tiller.
I’d be changed into a man
with tattooed arms and hard chest bared.
There’d be bracing, salt-laced wind.
I set my sights . . . no, that’s too precise –
I dreamed up some splendid Elsewhere.
I can still almost see that other shore,
though people don’t burn their leaves anymore.
LATE MAY
The season’s here again now
when pine pollen coats so much:
like the upright piano
and our dog (I hear her wheeze,
lolling on the dust-caked floor).
All is jaundiced by the trees.
Down in the village, schoolhouse,
town hall, church’s spire– each seems
to have been sloppily smeared
with makeup by novice clowns.
My eyes burn, I gag, I choke.
I want this haze to be gone,
scarcely alone in that wish.
All of us crave full summer,
though it will land like a fist.
We’ll sweat and yearn for winter.
I notice my dreamy face
there in the dust-veiled mirror.
I’m ensnared by things that are.
I know that well yet I ache
for some pure seasonless state,
its limpid, breathable air.
PATHETIC FALLACY
Coyotes had wrenched the doe’s entrails out.
Her wounds still bled, their kill that fresh,
and her upcast eyes lay open.
Not yet dimmed, it prompted him
to whisper, birth, life, spirit.
He assured himself he could conjure more,
though what he celebrated
was the fact that he’d had to conjure nothing.
The words just arrived. He was half inclined
to consider himself a visionary.
His language’s authority came,
or so he supposed, to one with a gift
to read nature. And anything else. Later on,
the dusk hour warm, through a window he heard
a hermit thrush’s evensong.
How would a seer use that sound?
Strangely, though, if the dead deer gave him
celebratory speech, the bird
perversely summoned a dark one,
equally real and maybe more so:
stubble, ashes, dust, dead leaves.
He grasped all at once that if he intended
to use the verbs correctly,
he hadn’t seen or read a thing
The heft of his words? Imaginary.
Sydney Leais a former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize. He served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He is the author of twenty-three books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and fourteen poetry collections, most recently What Shines?, which was published in September last year. In 2021, he was presented with his home state of Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
*****
Paul McDonald: Poem
SOCIOLINGUISTICS, 1971
I was 10, and loved her.
She called her
dad Father and
her mom Mother,
like people on the telly.
When I asked her
out she told me,
No, but thank you
for the compliment.
This is when I
noticed words: their
force and complexity.
Class and classy;
hopelessly outclassed.
Paul McDonald is the author of numerous books of fiction, poetry, and scholarship. He has poetry collections with Flarestack, Cinnamon Press, and Indigo Dreams; his latest full collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange, 2023). He won first prize in the John Clare Poetry Competition, the Liverpool Poetry Prize, the Sentinel Poetry Competition, and, most recently, the Morecambe Poetry Festival Competition. He lives in Walsall.
*****
Beth McDonough: Two Poems
ANACLETO, INVOKED
She delivers kindness, tissue wrapped –
two green sheets, both slightly torn.
Wound about layers puff over content.
This woman I’ve never known, reached over two pews:
I’ve been looking for you for weeks, to give your son
this. Her fingers and expression linger
in residual incense. I receive her gift
on his behalf, help him back-chain words of thanks,
try to make him smile towards her eyes, show
due gratitude. Already, I suspect
some Catholic artefact, like those well-meant
medals and beads, pressed on us, which still sit at odds
with my Calvinist past. I praise her, courie
her treasure, cavern it deep in my bag.
Later, in my kitchen’s more intimate fit
I unswaddle her present’s well-hidden form.
My palm rocks a small Murano glass. An owl.
Internal silvers, orange lines, sliced with lime.
Long since clipped, it spikes a chipped left ear.
Cool on my skin, Owl, like a sooked old sweetie.
Aware my son might try a taste, I nest Owl
inside a wire basket. Why this Owl? No, I couldn’t
undermine warm charity by asking
Why this Owl? For my son? This OWL?
Something I wouldn’t have chosen to home.
But how do I discard generous intention, or
reject good will? Owl accuses from over the stove.
Oddly grateful, already I feel afraid.
DEDO DE DIOS
By the time I beheld the Finger of God,
it had been severed for almost two decades.
Local faith held should that basalt stack snap
hellish vengeance would be wrought upon earth.
Storm Delta delivered the damage
in this, the island’s most ancient part.
Some planned a rebuild, a touristic fix.
But by Puerto de las Nieves’ black beach
geologists cautioned against such tricks.
When the ferry departs from its harbour
to speed across to Tenerife,
it passes an amputated gesture.
And yet, our world has not collapsed.
Unless, of course, it already has.
Beth McDonough is a Dundee-based poet and artist. Her pamphlet Lamping for Pickled Fish is published by 4Word. Currently, she’s working on a shared poetry collection with Nikki Robson, and a hybrid project on outdoor swimming. Both books are scheduled for publication fairly soon. She co-hosts Platform Sessions in Fife.
*****
Sean McDowell: Two Poems
LATE MORNING ALONG THE RIVER COOLE
A light breeze rustles long grasses
along the riverbank and the turfed
floodplain strewn with rocks.
Two horses, one chocolate, one blonde,
stand beside a fence post, their tails
twitching against flies. Coole
is shallow here this time of year.
Water gushes over a line of stones
to where the lough has narrowed.
Wind ripples its shallows. The soft,
damp ground is firm enough
to tread on without sinking.
From a wall of sycamores as straight
as a hedge, the loud voices of tourists.
Their laughter issues from an elsewhere
I don’t want to be this morning.
The flood-whittled trunk of a dead
tree leans like spear pointing away.
ABOVE GROUND
Congestion, prickly throat, stinging eyes—
my daily fare until one day
an allergist proposed a solution:
soft salt water and an ear bulb syringe.
Gently fit the tip inside one nostril,
stop breathing, and squeeze. Water jets deeply
upward and inward. It warms wherever
it reaches and rushes down and out,
draining all the dust, dander and pollen
that plagued your every breath and blink
as it empties the bucket of your skull
so that you will not, cannot overflow.
So, in the days after my grandmother’s funeral,
when my uncle and cousin, both off shifts
at the Jeep plant, complained of hay fever,
I knew what to recommend. Why not? they said.
My uncle, the first to try, squeezed tentatively,
then let forth a full blast—not water but
a calligraphic ink bled from his nose.
It painted a line through his mustache,
stained his mouth, and spread across his chin
before dripping off as if from a gash
no one knew was there. My cousin went next—
the same result, the same incongruous
black ink: a soot of metal filings, grime
of tool-and-die making, particulate
grit of the factory smogosphere,
silt and ashes of Progress father and son
breathed and carried wherever they went
like coal miners working above ground.
The three of us marveled at the dark stains
on the porcelain. No one said a word.
Sean McDowell’s poetry has appeared Poetry Ireland Review, The Lyric, Scintilla, Clover, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, Fragments, and of course, The High Window. A professor at Seattle University, he also edits the John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne. A book of essays, Metaphysical Shadows: The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry, is forthcoming from Lexington Books.
*****
Alan Murphy: Two Poems
ART BEHIND THE SCENES
The sawing and the hammering are interminable,
and several coats of paint are often warranted.
Sometimes the main actor is replaced
or fails to make an appearance in the first place.
The players learn their lines, only to improvise
with rehearsals fitted in around a schedule.
A subplot may migrate to centre stage
or become the seed of the next extravaganza.
In a frantic moment of wisdom many a production
is pulled moments before the curtain goes up
but once the central song’s been ushered out
the director listens nervously for titters.
Silence leaves the fraughtest vacancy…
and applause is mainly greeted with relief.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A GLACIOLOGIST
In some subtle way I’m in love.
Drill down into the ice and you’ll find
the particulars of my passion –
a core sample of my heart.
The dazzling snow knows to reflect
an antithetical sun, for aeons in a
global game of careful give and take.
The skin-fresh sting of cold’s a salve
for Svalbard’s heated arguments
over wine and dehydrated food.
The radio burbles more bad news . . .
Simulations and satellites,
they decompress the truth.
The cryosphere’s slo-mo ballet is changing,
breaking up with the past.
In some subtle way I’m trapped in data.
In some sombre way I’m in love.
Alan Murphy’s recent poetry credits include Stony Thursday Book, The Madrigal and Poetry Bus. He is the award-nominated author and illustrator of four collections of poetry for children and teenagers. His visual art has graced the cover of several journal issues and been exhibited internationally. Recently he has taken up songwriting, and also occasionally reviews books for Inis magazine. Hailing from Dublin, he now lives on a housing estate in Lismore, County Waterford. www.avantcardpublications.com
*****
Ian Pople: Three Poems
OUT DRIVING
Out driving, up from the village on a dark night, wintry,
on my left the light blinking from a plane in and out
of night cloud, and on my right, no longer in the beam
of the car, the old inns: The Shepherd’s Boy, The Great
Western, with once a cartwheel high on its wall, and, after
you crest the hill, The Floating Light. The old inns now
are family homes, that stood along the drove road, until
the road turns right past the old Globe Bunk House,
and opposite is a paddock with grey-bearded goats,
white geese and half a dozen ducks, their wings clearly
clipped, past the ruin of the Horse and Jockey where
the last couple, locked in silence, stood at either end
of the bar, where the jackdaws flock, where the A62
separates from the road that bears down left to Uppermill,
and, in daylight, a kestrel often hangs in the waiting air.
A TENT ABANDONED IN EAST SUSSEX
We bought it cheaply all those years ago to meet
a need, made from plastic, mostly, and some parts
made from iron, the insides of the poles I guess, and
the metal tent pegs, and the little snibs which tighten
the guy ropes. And the plastic spun into a flysheet with
an outer door, a grey-green groundsheet, the inner
with the inner door, and guy ropes, and carried in the boot
of the car, in the boots of two cars to be exact, firstly
from the south Midlands and then, lately, from West
Yorkshire, down the M6 and the M1, stopping at Corley
services, or Keele services or one time even Watford Gap.
And always Cobham on the M25, our yearly pilgrimage,
we liked to joke. And on arrival at the final site, to drive
across the field, the people waving us to a space,
to park the car, and get out and stretch, and vow
never to do that again, and we, with the tent, would tramp
across the grass to get our wristbands, and then on up
to the ‘Quiet Camping,’ which mostly it was, to pitch
the tent, the poles that needed threading through the
flysheet, then fighting into the metal pegs on the corners
of the groundsheet. And the language Anglo-Saxon. And
into the tent we threw the rucksacks, the Sainsbury’s
bag with fruit, and other bags, often unnecessary,
unrolled the self-inflating mattresses and sleeping bags
and wondered what would do for pillows. Then off
we’d go, to see again the Helter-Skelter, the Chair-o-Planes,
a Coconut Shy and a Hall of Mirrors and wonder who
on earth would use them, though the fairground rides
arrived each year, then look up at the stately home that looks
down on it all. And you would say, ‘There’s the crepe stall
that the big lady runs,’ and the ‘Taste of Tibet’ was there
again, and would we find a decent coffee at all this year?
And then we went into the other tents; the big, huge ones
controlled by computer these days; and listen and nod
our heads and move our bodies in time to the music. Then
later, we’d return to the tent, having remembered to bring
a light this time, so we could see to take off our clothes
and wriggle into the tight world of the sleeping bags, with
cramps ever threatening and finally get to sleep, until
the bladder called and, somehow, squeeze out from
the sleeping bag and into shorts and a top, to tramp
in darkness over grass to the temporary toilets that had
their own lights, thank God, to piss and hear it rattle
on the plastic. And the tent listened too, to the music and
the wind that blew the music in waves from the North Downs
stage or, in the early hours, from the disco in Supreme
Standards. And we and the tent did that for three nights
every year, and the tent kept warm and we were glad
to get back to it. But this year came the rain and we left
the tent behind, and we left the things that had made it,
the plastic and metal, and we abandoned the places that
the plastic and metal came from, and the people that extracted
those resources from oil and earth, and spaces under the earth.
And we walked away from all the need the tent had met
for us, to keep us dry in sleep, to let us brush our teeth
into a wet wipe and wipe the spots of toothpaste spit that
landed on the sleeping bag, to shepherd little grass moths
out from the tent and back to their own world. And we
abandoned the tent because the morning we were leaving, it was
raining; and packing up our sleeping bags and the sleeping
bag inners and the self-inflating mattresses and rucksacks
inside the tent, which was dry, was enough, and packing up
the wet tent and separating the poles from the flysheet and
packing the flysheet and then the transparent inner attached
to the green groundsheet which would all have been soaked,
and packing them into their own bag, was too much effort.
And so we left the tent, standing on the grass, under the grey
skies and the seagulls. And there is in this that breaks the heart
for we asked the tent a question and the tent replied, ‘Yes.’
POINT OF DEPARTURE
i.m. Gary McFarland
i.
This is the village in winter, the pigeon flying above its shadow over deserted concourse and rolling stock, engines, carriages, the oil-drenched couplings, each alone assessing the night, the footfall spent, rippling away, waiting. The skull of a hook-beaked bird she kept in the Cornell box (after the glide path) balanced in her bathroom, after the butterfly has flickered over hot skin on the receding beach, the tourists gone, the streets wet, the taverna cushions roped under sheeting, the huge creature of the sea. The skull of a small to medium-sized raptor and the poetry, both in boxes; the one whose beak tore first the fur or feathers and then the flesh, and the other that first tore fur or feathers and then the cartilage; the winter village opening and shutting its doors, budgies further agitated in their wire world, bougainvillea straggling in the wind, island returning to island.
ii.
Silence, the long view under metal, the litter fall of metal, birdlife in a shifting parabola from rail to rail, and another watching on when the day would move from light to darkness and back. Ah, meaning; here on a hot afternoon at the quiet start of September, where two white butterflies jaunt together above the privet, and from the neighbouring balcony, a dog barks, bees crawl on the passion flower and that small, visible part of a house seen through the trees, a window frame around frosted glass, internal bars, ‘That’ll be us,’ they say, ‘that’ll be us,’ the butterflies together and apart for one to land, its ovipositor to glue the seeds beneath the leaf, for winter to oversee gestation.
Ian Pople‘s Spillway: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet. His Substack is: https://ifanything95.substack.com/
*****
Allen Prowle: Poem
LA NEIGE À LOUVECIENNES BY ALFRED SISLEY
When we went to the Musée d’Orsay
it was often just to stand and look at it again,
a kind of reunion of old friends. Once,
I said loudly that I would gladly give an arm
to own it, and without anaesthetic.
A lady standing nearby expressed
a sympathetic pain. I could feel her wince.
Louveciennes in the snow was always welcoming.
That woman carrying her basket will soon
turn from the lane to pick up her bread
or croissants in the village and have a chat
with the boulangère, perhaps about the snow,
perhaps to gossip, then walk back down that lane
between the hedge on one side, the garden walls
on the other. Even Sisley’s snow somehow has warmth.
I found that Isaac de Camondo, almost the last
of that family name, had been its owner
and bequeathed it with his whole collection
to the Louvre and France. Visiting him at home
in the rue de Monceau, his airman nephew Nissim,
who was later killed defending his country,
might well have seen and admired it, as might his sister,
Béatrice, loving it, like me, for its welcoming warmth.
When she and her daughter Fanny were taken
from their home in wealthy Neuilly, near the Bois
where they had loved to ride, that family’s story
was almost at an end. The last place they were to see
in France was the camp at Drancy. No friendly chat
for them with the French policeman, guarding the gate
to make sure that they would never come back.
Allen Prowle was born in Aberdare in 1940. Education took him to England where he has lived ever since, without losing his ‘Cymreictod’. He began writing poetry at Sheffield University where he graduated in French. His poems have appeared in many journals, his first collection, Landmarks was published in 1973. His Europeanism explains his interest in translation; he has translated French Italian and Spanish poems, for Magma, MPT and The High Window. In 2009, MPT published his translations of Rocco Scotellaro in its first-ever single-author collection. He was awarded the Stephen Spender prize for translations of Attilio Bertolucci.
*****
Tonnie Richmond:Two Poems
OLD PHOTOGRAPH
The grainy black-and-white snaps
are full of 1950s coats and hats,
old-fashioned telephone poles
and almost car-free streets.
Here is my mother’s oldest friend,
on a visit from the Netherlands.
She was beautiful, dark Greta Garbo hair
and Lauren Bacall eyes, vibrant
in those drab postwar years.
She’d trained to be an opera singer,
but that was before.
We’re all together in this snap,
smiling, squinting in the sun,
Mum, Dad, my sister, me,
Emmi and her husband—
and then I remember her childlessness.
A woman with one-eighth Jewish blood
— sterilised.
DEADHEADING IN THE 1960s
All those rows and rows of roses,
a vast striped blanket draped across the hillside,
bands of pink, orange, red, yellow.
The surfeit of colours; a sickly blancmange,
the sticky sweetness of the scent.
An hour or two enough to turn your stomach.
It may have been the motion—
lean in, snip, straighten.
Eight hours every day—
lean in, snip, straighten.
At night, in bed, eyes closed,
you feel it, see it still behind closed eyes,
over and over,
lean in, snip, straighten.
Once again, suppress the urge to vomit.
Tonnie Richmond loves Orkney and archaeology but finds poetry less exhausting than digging these days. She has had over seventy poems published in various anthologies and magazines. Her pamphlet, Rear-view Mirror, was published by Yaffle’s Nest in 2023. She is currently working on her first collection.
*****
Margaret Rochford:Two Poems
WE DANCE
We dance and book festival tickets
during this social unrest,
our world is in turmoil.
We dance.
When leaders stage sieges
and scream from the top,
we view from our phones,
comment on Facebook,
watch TikToks,
and dance.
Some wave flags,
march if it suits our timetable,
but mostly we watch online,
from the safety of a queue,
booking tickets to the next music festival
where we’ll sing
and dance through social
and economic unrest,
through chaos and evil,
while sirens wail,
headlines flash,
ignored.
We’ll dance,
because they cannot stop us,
because song outlives sirens,
because every step
is proof we’re still here.
And we’ll dance,
while fires burn,
while leaders scream,
while the world tilts—
we’ll dance,
because it’s easier
than looking straight at the smoke.
THIS CITY IN HIS POCKET
Tommy Shelby would have seen a reason
to walk down an alleyway like this,
with a Sweet Afton to smoke alone,
let Birmingham’s factories and food
creep into his nose—
the city’s breath, spices and steel,
heavy as an army kit bag.
No mountains or waterfalls to admire,
no tigers or giraffes to gawp at.
Cats and terriers keep the rats at bay.
Chinese washerwomen sit downstairs;
strong hands know the washboard’s rhythm.
Steamers hiss. Serge, the student doctor,
sits upstairs with his neurology book,
dreams of fishing trips in Abu Dhabi.
Polly fills the kettle for tea,
sets the table with chintz china,
alert to fallen chances.
She waits for horses to come in,
for tea to brew.
Stories crouch in twos and threes behind walls.
Threats spill from dark doorways.
Fires flame, twist upward;
smoke coils around the pitch of the church.
Birmingham’s buildings cast shadows over his footsteps—
afraid of his red right hand.
It could be dangerous
to walk down this alleyway alone—
too far from the sanctuary of the church,
too far from the safety of money in the bank.
He walks it anyway.
Smoke in his lungs,
fire in his blood,
this city in his pocket.
Margaret Rochford is a poet and playwright whose work explores the intersections of memory, place, and the quiet details of daily life. Drawn to the spaces between silence and sound, she writes with an eye for image and rhythm. When not writing, Margaret can often be found reading, tending to plants, or getting lost in second-hand bookshops in search of unexpected metaphors. When not rearranging words, she enjoys pretending coffee counts as a food group.
*****
Myra Schneider: Three Poems
IRISES
While he worked nothing existed but the brush
in his hand, the board beneath it and the blue
of the flower’s petals, a blue not found elsewhere,
a blue more beautiful than anything that had been
in the drab of his mind, a blue with dabs of yellow-gold
on its soft fabric. And he could feel the determination
of the tightly folded buds readying to push open,
the juiciness of the long spear-shaped leaves,
the crumble of dry earth. Every time I gaze
at his painting on my lounge wall I can feel
his energy even in the lavenders and pale greens
of the blades of grass picked out by sunlight
and I too am energized. I sense too that the asylum
at Saint-Remy and its inmates disappeared whenever
he was working, sense he forgot his fears and angers,
his periods of madness. He sent the finished picture
to Theo and now a century and more later, his irises appear
on biscuit tins, boxes and table mats all over the world.
Note: After Vincent Van Gogh’s Iris
CHAGALL’S MOON
It’s huge, spherical and the deepest orange you’ve ever come upon,
this moon, and so low in the sky you want to hug it. Even brighter
than the moist tropical flesh of a shiny-skinned persimmon, it pulls you
out of a windy day that’s as grey as the sodden grass
in your flowerless garden. You long to bite into the sweetness,
feel it feeding you with energy. Below, a semicircle of apricot moon
is luxuriating in the easy evening sea and creating wide arcs
of yolk yellow and lemon in the tranquil water. In the distance
you manage to make out the neat crimson roofs of the peninsula
and its two creamy towers jutting into that gorgeous sky.
Entranced by the scene, you sit down next to a dreamy
young man clothed in blue. He’s lying with his head on his lover’s lap,
and she seems to be leaning against a very tall tree.
But when you look again you discover it’s an immense bunch
of flowers growing upwards from the ground. You stare at the bluish stems
travelling upwards, revel in sprays of hyacinth-blue blooms,
fiery red ones and flutters of yellow. High up in the sky the painting
stops. Flowers, moon and lovers disappear into your imagination.
Note: After Chagall’s La Lune Rousse au Cap D’Antibes
SEASHORE
Without any warning the walls of my workroom,
the bay window, the road outside overpopulated
with passing traffic, even the padded chair
I’m perched on, vanish and to my amazement
I’m now kneeling on the rough surface of a rock some way
below the opening to a cave whose darkness stuns me.
It’s a miracle my aged body has journeyed to this place
as I’d lost hope of setting foot on a seashore again.
I reach into a pool nearby and delight in threading
my fingers through splayed strands of viridian seaweed.
On the pool’s bed is a clutch of pebbles
whose varied shapes and sizes make me think
of the buttons my mother kept in a box beside
her sewing basket. I fish out a tiny carmine stone,
another which has the orange glow of carnelian
and a long knobbly gem that’s forget-me-knot blue,
and I’m gazing at these jewels in the palm of my hand
when a redshank on a large stone jutting into the sea
catches my attention. Its long scarlet legs
are as thin as wires and it’s poised to plunge for prey.
Forgetting that the cave’s mouth seems as daunting
as the gateway to hell, I slowly clamber up to it
and once I’ve caught my breath, I press my hand
against its strange weavings of liver-red
and slate-blue strata – they’re pitted and hard
as coral. Once I’ve examined them closely, I’m certain
they’re honeycomb-worm cities and I remember
coming across them in a book: minute tubes the worms
constructed from shell fragments and grains of sand
to keep themselves safe. I sit back on my heels,
listen to the sea pulling itself back from the shore,
wish I could hug our many-faceted world.
Inspired by Sea and Stone: The County Waterford Coastline, Mark Roper, with photographer Paddy Dwan
Myra Schneider’s most recent collection is Believing in the Planet (Poetry Space 2024). Her other publications include books about personal writing, in particular Writing My Way Through Cancer. She has had twelve full collections of poetry published and her work has been broadcast on Radio BBC4 and BBC3. Her in-depth interview about her poetry and books appeared in Acumen. She is working on a new collection which will be called The Disappearing. She has co-edited anthologies of poetry by women poets and she has been a poetry tutor for many years.
*****
Finola Scott: Poem
UNTROUBLED WATER
Cadder Churchyard
Today no body snatchers, no stealthy
resurrection men night-rifling
cadavers to transport to Knox. Now
abandoned, the iron coffin turns to rust
as it listens for rock clatter to rouse
the dozing guard in the watchhouse.
No navvies sweat and swear, no boats
ply loaded between Forth and Clyde.
Yoke-free horses meadow graze,
days of hard hauling over cobbles ended.
Today only anglers patrol, sharp eyed
and eager, for flashing perch and pike.
Mistle thrushes speckle the graves,
mortsafes welcome puff balls and bees,
while bones of babes crumble to loam.
Unaware of dark secrets below the surface,
day-trippers and walkers smile at mallards
that court as the murky water slips out to sea.
Finola Scott writes to try to unravel the world. Trembling Earth, her recent pamphlet considers the climate crisis. Her poems are published widely including in The Irish Pages Press, NWS and Lighthouse. She has been successful in various competitions, winning the ASLA Hugh McDiarmid Tassie, running-up in the McLellan and Badenoch competitions. In 2024, she won the Ulster-Scots Poetry Competition, being the first woman winner. She is also quite lazy and enjoys playing mahjong and eating cake.
*****
Gerard Smyth: Four Poems
THE SILENT ERA
Now we have the witness statements,
have found the hidden graves in lonely places.
Now the orphans are not afraid to speak,
the stolen child has come back to trace her roots.
We no longer live in the silent era
and know who to blame and who should feel shame
in the old school, under the convent bell,
in the icy asylum for daughters in distress,
its brick and stone saturated with their sweat.
Kept out of sight scrubbing the sheets,
they missed the time of their lives, the nostalgia years.
O Magdalene, your name sounds feather light
but it bears the weight of crimes
far heavier than Judas’s betrayal of Christ.
SONNET IN PLAIN SPEECH
‘Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day.’
– The Mamas & the Papas
If there’s a day in the week when the waitress is slow,
her sighs infinitely deep, it’s Monday –
first day of the week when every song
on the radio seems to be sad, when the rain,
if it rains, is like shards of shrapnel.
Sunday’s leftovers are eaten for lunch,
the Sunday parable already shoved from our minds.
Winter Mondays are the worst,
by four o’clock it’s dusk on Black Horse Avenue,
long delays on the motorway.
In the park the dogs stop running and go home to sleep.
The train going west breaks down near Portlaoise.
I tell myself a new day is coming, that tomorrow
I’ll sit down and finish my Sonnet in Plain Speech.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY SERENADE
Two actors, one tall, one short,
playing two mavericks
on the streets of New York.
Two drifters in the dazzle
of flashing neon, one dressed
to sit in a cowboy’s saddle,
not walk down a city sidewalk.
The other had an ominous cough,
a sick complexion
that foretold a tragic ending.
Between both a friendship,
a love that never answered
to a name, never broke its silence.
And when it came to the denouement,
the scene on the bus to Florida,
someone in the row behind
began to weep for Hoffman’s
character, overcome
by the plaintive melody,
the serenade of the sobbing harmonica.
THE CLARITY OF MORNING
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI entered
the clarity of early morning….
– Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Late Ripeness’
Because I sleep on the east side of the house
I wake to see the light that never comes too soon,
watch it grow in every corner of the room.
Across the square it is quiet in the park,
the gates still closed.
The birds don’t bother with a dawn chorus.
The kitchen is cold but the dog’s greeting
and smell of toast is enough
to make it the place to set a new day in motion.
There are letters of demand, postcards from afar
in the postman’s bag,
addresses he could find with a blindfold on.
The gravediggers are early in Mount Jerome
digging a hole for the body
they’ll bury in the afternoon.
O passerby with clicking heels, pause for a second,
look up, you’ll see me at a window,
waiting for the clarity of morning.
Gerard Smyth was for many years the poetry editor at the Irish Times and has published many highly praised collections of his poetry, the latest of which, The Turn for Ithaca, was the subject of a special feature in The High Window.
*****
Marjorie Sweetko: Four Poems
THE MIGRATION
They rose encrypted from autumn’s tousled branches,
clouds of black dots, now
ballooning, now contracting,
probably singing, but the jackhammer
sang louder. Any towers
caught in their net were rejected.
Our range too limited to capture the signals,
all we could do was gape and ponder
the glory of a power we’d been denied,
feeling grounded. The leaves they left behind,
impatient to fall, rustle like
feathers taunting us with winter.
THE THINGS I’M TALKING ABOUT
The things I’m talking about don’t fit,
they won’t break down to building blocks,
will have no truck with your laws.
You find them slipping through cracks in the code,
dodging the millstone, shy of the filter.
Not things you covet or you lack, and never
effects, much less on some agenda.
Pacts with devils can’t draw them out,
if they come, it’ll be on angel back.
Things that take root and bloom as your mind
settles on a single note, then stills.
Things you ought to stick in your pipe and smoke.
PINK FLAMINGOS ON A GREY LAGOON
Look at them, queens in salmon trimming, glam
rockers poking the shallows to grab
tiny shrimp for a carotene fix. All swagger,
they’re flashing just enough gaudy underwing
to make the marsh button its tweeds, egret
and grey heron bolt, upstaged.
Go on, cite me evidence of their gravitas:
they’re long-lived, monogamous, lay
a single egg per annum and the Romans ate
their tongues. Here, they’re a showgirl act on stilts,
beaks lowered, dragging their reflections like boas,
thrilled to raise a blush from my lagoon.
FICTIONS
So these are the houses,
beads dangling down
a road, too ordinary
for words, well, somehow
trivial. The whole appears
frailer, less eloquent
than time’s entangled tale.
The little girl
tosses her yellow hair,
turns, asks me why
the coach has come to a stop.
Years later, her account
will vie with today, holding
the sum of search and loss.
Marjorie Sweetko’s poetry has been published in journals like The North, Poetry Salzburg Review, Magma, Artemis, South, London Grip and The High Window, as well as in anthologies One for the Road (Poetry Business) and It will happen by chance (Mosaique Press). After teaching English worldwide, she now lives in Marseille.
*****
Victor Tapner: Three Poems
OTHONA
In 654 the missionary Cedd founded a chapel – still in use – overlooking the Essex
sea marshes. When he died of the plague in Yorkshire, about 30 monks
who travelled north in homage also succumbed, except one child . . .
The abbey’s woodpile
dwindled that day
as the fire lit in his name
burnt long after sundown.
Although yet a boy,
I stood silent for a man
who came with a story
and left a hallowed house
that echoed his learning.
Those who cut timbers
and hauled stones,
who heard his words,
sailed up the coastline
to honour his passing.
That year, it seemed,
in northern reaches,
black rash was a guest
in every dwelling,
so many who mourned
laid out for mourning.
Long after winters
and summers of childhood,
I could scarcely look
at that carved cross
beside the bench
where once he taught.
BEDE’S ELEGY
Abbot Ceolfrith of Northumbria died in Burgundy in 716 while travelling to Rome
with a manuscript of the Bible – now known as the Codex Amiatinus – for the Pope
At the writing bench
you bequeathed to me
I sharpen a quill
and lay a page to the past.
An abbot who could bake a loaf,
weave wool for socks,
who knew the day when beer
was ready for drinking,
scoldings kept locked
behind your oak door,
squabbles among brothers
settled with a garden walk.
Whatever my work,
I haven’t been so fair to judge.
A monk seen sleeping
in orchard shade,
novices too keen
to finish dawn readings,
a scribe with untidy hand:
all felt the puncture of my tongue.
Though I now hold the pen,
old friend,
you are teaching me still.
WINDFALLS
A back-room table
in the Falcon Tavern,
a script of church words,
a tub of russets by the door,
ready for the cider crusher.
Faces framed towards his gaze,
those Henley Street airs
and a line in prattle
that impresses no one,
least of all her brothers.
How does he propose
to support wife and child?
Cutting kidskin gloves
at his father’s bench?
Teaching Latin inflections
to grammar-school pranksters?
So what makes him think
he can scratch a verse?
And, by the way, is it true
he’s already betrothed
to a girl from Temple Grafton?
This surety here so writ
says he’ll keep his pledge
with the Bishop’s Court
and take their sister’s hand
come All Hallows Day.
Until then he can help
harvest the landlord’s apples
and forage for sonnets
among the windfalls.
Victor Tapner‘s latest poetry publication is Plainsong from Broken Sleep Books. He is also the author of collections Waiting to Tango and Flatlands, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, and Banquet in the Hall of Happiness, winner of the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. A freelance writer and former Financial Times journalist, he lives in Essex.
*****
Judith Taylor: Two Poems
BAD GIG
He sings, and he talks between.
He sings his new songs
with the ones we know already
and he talks too long
like a person does who’s lonely;
he says too much, like a person who’s in a bad place.
The stage is barely competently lit, and the seating rattles
whenever anyone sidles out
to the toilets, or the bar.
He’s just not capable of the make-believe it takes
to create the feeling
he’s among friends. He looks at us
like he’s trying to find an exit
and we look back, relentlessly.
We’re here for the songs. We want
whatever they’ve meant to us:
the lost loves, the broken hearts
the loneliness
– that’s what he’s always brought us.
That’s what we mean to hold him to.
We can almost hear him promise himself
he won’t be back this way again.
He tunes too long, like a person
who doesn’t want to play those songs
not any more. We watch him.
The green and silver lager light
shines in the bar behind us.
FOMO
Everybody’s having a better time than you
again. Yes. A drunk howls in the distance:
adolescent seagulls squeal at one other
on their ledge, below the window
you can’t shut, the heat would be stifling.
You lie awake instead and listen.
The corridor outside your door is silent
but you don’t believe it will stay that way.
Any minute now, a band of revellers
(a word you never hear these days, except in complaints)
will crash by
talking at the tops of their voices
laughing, falling over their feet
hunting every pocket for their keycard, till they find it
where they looked first. 2 a.m.
3 a.m. Even the gulls have quieted down by this time
and nobody comes.
Still you do not sleep.
Judith Taylor lives in Aberdeen, where she co-organises the monthly Poetry at Books and Beans events. Her latest collection, Across Your Careful Garden, is published by Red Squirrel Press. She is a longtime volunteer with Pushing Out the Boat magazine, and one of the Editors of Poetry Scotland. Website is http://sometimesjudy.co.uk
*****
Pam Thompson: Poem
BEARING WITNESS
On the phone, Roz says he’s been planting bulbs
with the others and that afterwards, he chatted
for more than two hours, asking about her life.
Even on an attention-seeking day when he’s set off
the fire alarm and swears when she asks him
to bring down his washing, he’ll share cans of beer
or a takeaway. Out with his dad, he’s outgoing,
in the barber’s and the kebab shop, How are you?
Safe, bro. I am losing touch with his gentler ways.
People out there bear witness. My visits, beer
and baccy handovers at the door, only seconds.
Roz sends photos via WhatsApp of an afternoon
picnic on Vicky Park. He’s toasting the camera
with a can. Underneath, Roz writes, My favourite.
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) was published in March 2025.
*****
Jenny Vuglar: Three Poems
MY FATHER
The morning after the storm you went out and there
was one dead lamb, the weaker twin, born into rain.
‘I didn’t hear her’, you said, cursing the deafness and
the exhaustion, falling into bed and hearing nothing.
You dig in boggy ground to bury the twin. The hip,
the one that in two years will shatter, already gives you gyp.
You’re tempted to ditch the body, to let the eels finish it.
You stop for a while, lean on the spade.
………………
This morning I woke to hear the sheep calling, the lamb’s
head stuck between her legs like a gargoyle. I held her
while you slipped your hand in to feel for the buckled legs
but there was no pulling it out, nothing you could do.
We waited for the carer who had sheep of her own and it
seemed to take just a twist of her wrist. You knelt and cleared
its head of shroud, both of us kneeling as the sheep nudged it
into breath, that small miracle you could no longer assist.
And this is what it comes to. That nothing is easy. That
what we give our life to do in the end becomes impossible;
that even getting up from that sodden ground is too
difficult to comprehend and you stay kneeling in the mud
until I realise and carefully half lift you, making a joke of it,
walking you inside.
HOW THE SKY JUST GOES ON
What I can’t understand
is the way the sky calmly settles into blue,
the way the leaves insist on opening,
the scratching in the ceiling
where something is nesting.
It just goes on and on
and I wake in the morning in the harsh light
that spills from the door the cat has opened,
and everything begins again
without my saying a word, without
any complicity save that of breathing.
I don’t know if this is how the world is
small things done without a fuss
until even the small things become impossible
and there you are, struggling to hold on,
sightless, opening the second drawer down,
taking two tablets from the oblong box,
two biscuits from the jar under the window,
honey
asking me what day it is, how long.
………
Bird Cherry blossom blows across the garden;
a bumblebee batters against the glass.
I have burnt your hard high chest,
your scarred forehead;
the bone fragments and ash lie exactly
where you wanted –
under the feet of horses.
No more sheep trailing in a cloud of glory.
You are dust they walk over.
Oh the spring, the glorious unconcern of it.
How the leaves open without regret,
how the sky just goes on being blue.
MEMENTOES
As her life wore thin, she picked out objects,
mementoes, the life she had, given away.
For me, a pot of nerines, late flowering,
a slightly darker pink than common.
Their snake necks writhe up each autumn, buds
multiply. This is the place they were looking for:
a south-facing wall, the heat of summer’s sun.
The agapanthus thrives there too. Seeds brought
from my homeland, grown by an Aunt whose life
is almost as transparent as their papery husks,
still standing from summer flowering.
Jenny Vuglar has been published in various magazines and anthologies, most recently in Dark Mountain, Amphibian, Echtrai and Caught by the River. Her pamphlet, This Blue Mantle, is published by Hearing Eye Press.
*****
J.S. Watts : Two Poems
HOSPITAL THOUGHTS DURING A VERY LONG AFTERNOON
Into the vacuum of another hospital day
time stretches like a tugged tubular bandage
taut, hollow, extendable.
The incision of now only comes with the pain
and, god, how you want that to go away
but when it does any fleeting relief is sucked
back into the endlessly elastic void.
The minutes continue.
Afternoons pull themselves heavily
between morning and evening
periodically accelerated by strong brown tea and thick stew
and the slow, visible decline of the sun.
When you can, you pee.
Choosing the excitement of the slow walk to the toilet
as an alleviation of the monotone tedium
an excuse still to be human.
Rest should restore, but sleep-dark night thoughts
come demanding, dragging
weighted ghosts of dead fears behind them
and fretful premature cries of tomorrow
if it comes. Yet tomorrow
when it inevitably does come
is the same as today
and every day before and after.
Self-control, the Swiss-watch command of thought
you prided yourself on possessing
scattering like panicking chickens,
every thought numb and flightless.
You think of friends who have endured more,
crafted perfected gossamer words of hope
and silken stoicism from identical days
and wonder how?
HALF-HEARD TRUTHS AND STORIES
Memories make us
write the stories we become.
When we unlearn them,
unravelling years like wool
from a discarded old grey cardigan –
do we unlearn ourselves?
And what when the teller of the tale
is not as you narrate them
has forgotten the subtly coloured
version of self you retell
in your seamed accounts
but still recalls elements of past yarns
creating themselves as they think they were
while you remember a different pattern?
Who is recounting half-formed anecdotes?
Who is the person
only partially hearing them?
Where is the thread of the story?
J.S. Watts is a UK poet and novelist. Her poetry, short stories and nonfiction appear in diverse publications in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and America and have been broadcast on BBC and independent radio. Her published books include: Cats and Other Myths, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Years Ago You Coloured Me, Underword and The Submerged Sea (poetry) and A Darker Moon, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight (novels). See her website https://www.jswatts.co.uk/
*****
Rodney Wood: Four Poems
DAY 22: DOLPHINS
The coffee machine stutters,
jittery after three weeks
at sea.
Days blur, a watercolour
left out in rain.
Outside, the sea
repeats its slow
rise and retreat.
The horizon, pale and tight,
holds the world apart.
Frances stirs her coffee,
watching cream
bloom in lazy spirals.
This morning I cut her off
while she talked about dolphins.
She lifts her cup,
sips slowly,
each swallow
a quiet verdict.
Tomorrow, in Mexico,
someone will ask questions.
Not hers. Not the right ones.
DAY 52: FREE WINE WITH EVERY ROOM
Woolloomooloo, Australia
Frances and I dazed by light,
still cabin stiff, still sleep bent,
breath tight, tripping over suitcases,
hangers leaning like they might fall on us,
the bed a restless loop
we circled all night.
Sydney hits us bright and loud.
The Harbour Bridge flexes.
The Opera House rises, sails of white,
too bright, too perfect,
and I can’t stop thinking
we don’t belong here.
From sardine-tin cabin to
this renovated finger wharf
of restaurants and hotel,
Our room is borrowed luxury.
Tote bag, minibar wine,
tiny soap that smells of nothing earned,
a Snickers bar that gleams like a trophy
for just getting this far.
Barefoot in borrowed robes,
we watch city lights blur,
stumble over the edges of ourselves,
like painkillers
beginning to work,
piecing ourselves
together, not with kintsugi gold,
but spit.
And prayer.
DAY 81: THE LION
Durban, South Africa
At The Bush, polishing pint glasses,
Grandad told a story about a lion
he heard breathing in the dark
outside his camp,
back when he rode with the Hussars
on the plains near Durban.
He said it sounded like the earth itself
rolling over in its sleep.
Years later I read about the Prince Imperial,
Napoleon’s son, cut down in Zululand,
and thought maybe he heard that lion too,
somewhere beyond the firelight,
just before the spears found him.
As a boy, I mixed them up:
the Prince, my grandfather,
their lions pacing the same story,
each a soldier waiting for something
with teeth.
I met Grandad in his one-room flat,
the smell of beer and Brasso,
his medals dulled to a quiet shine.
Now, from my window
at home in Farnborough,
I can see the abbey
where the Prince lies in marble silence.
When the bells ring for prayer,
I think of the old man,
and the animal he carried
still breathing inside him,
refusing to lie down.
DAY 92: THE SOFTEST THING
A storm petrel falls from the sky,
feathers plastered by rain,
wings folding under the pull of gravity,
one half alert to waves,
the other drifting, chest rising in tiny rhythms.
Then Richard Lovelock appears,
hands practiced, careful,
beard salt white, eyes scanning the storm.
He kneels by the cabin door,
swaddles the bird in a towel,
feeling the pulse, the fear,
breath trembling through feathers.
Passengers angle for photos,
oblivious to the small life
he carries to the stern,
a small message
meant for sky, not sea.
He throws the bird upward,
expecting a miracle.
Gravity, that unsentimental editor,
offers no guarantees.
For three long beats: nothing.
Then instinct kicks in.
Wings catch the wind,
rain stinging, spray on the deck:
it rises, slipping into the open sky.
Rodney Wood worked in London and Guildford before retiring. He lives in Farnborough and is co-host of a monthly live open mic in Woking. He has been published in many magazines. At the start of 2024 he went on a world cruise and wrote a poem for each of the 102 days.
The High Window 