*****
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • Isabel Bermudez • Brendan Cleary • Pauline Flynn • Angela France • Hilary Hares • David Harmer • Lucy Heuschen • Alan Humm • Sheila Jacob • Alex Josephy • Gerald Killingworth • Pippa Little • Suzanne Lummis • Patricia McCarthy • Kathryn Macdonald • Daphne Milne • Sean O’Brien • Isabel Palmer • Bethany Pope • Allen Prowle • Sheenagh Pugh • Mat Riches • Patrick Davidson Roberts • Aidan Rooney • Mark Roper • Sue Rose • Mandy Schiffrin • Kieran Setright • Neil Shepard • Michael Shoemaker • Gerard Smyth • Isabelle Thompson • Carl Tomlinson • John Wheway • Jacqueline Woods • Patrick Wright • Martin Zarrop
*****
*****
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs: Two Poems
DARK IMAGES
A shadow-starling slides across a whitewashed wall.
The bird itself arrives a moment later,
briefly preens its speckled three dimensions
on the parapet of next-door’s balcony.
Alone, it’s less impressive than its silhouette
precursor; but together with a thousand
siblings it could weave a swirling shadow cloak
to lay across the sky on summer evenings.
Fruit trees in a Pershore orchard throw designs
across my notebook’s double curving vee.
A shadow owns no depth. It borrows thickness
from the roughness of each surface where it settles
like fine dust but insubstantial. Infinitely
flexible, it folds round fractals of a ledge
and leaves on skin a fleeting inkless monochrome
tattoo or velvet glove that’s shaped to any hand.
I suddenly recall a dream about a bird-trap:
herons one by one were lured by eel-like bait
then snared. Was that some coded memory
or prophecy imprinted on closed eyes?
Either way or neither, night-time fantasies
are thin as spider-web. A solid limb
shakes off a shadow noose. A shadow blade
won’t ever penetrate a beating heart.
CAGLIOSTRO STREET
Cagliostro Street does not exist
on maps but in a novel’s pages
and the minds of readers
like my father. Here’s his copy (spoiler:
Dr Grimaud’s killer is
the man who wasn’t there).
Cagliostro Street does not exist
but poses as a cul de sac
close to Russell Square
(and from its entrance witnesses observe
a man shot dead: the gunman’s hand
is nowhere near the gun).
Cagliostro Street – should it exist –
must run from Guilford Place behind
the children’s hospital
(from where the dying victim’s anxious daughter
notices the lights go on
in an artist’s love nest).
*
Is there such a street? I went to search
but drew a blank and sketched this poem
in a local café.
There a well-known intellectual –
unkempt and loud – was holding forth
across a dish of pasta.
(Dr Grimaud too liked lecturing
to friends assembled round his table.)
This philosopher
was castigating British diplomats
who’d overlooked atrocities
committed by the wealthy
president of Somewherestan whose syntax
treats the verb to disappear
as being transitive.
(You could say that the victim disappeared
the perpetrator of the crime
on Cagliostro street).
*
Cagliostro Street does not exist
but it’s where I’ll find my father
if I lose myself,
as he could, in fantastic narratives
of sealed-room crimes and even more
improbable events.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician who is poetry editor for the online magazine London Grip. He also helps organise a reading series at St Mary’s Church in Islington, London which has had a post-Covid relaunch as “Poetry Above The Crypt”. His latest book is Poems in the Case (Shoestring 2018).
*****
Isabel Bermudez: Two Poems
BAR DE LAS REMINISCENCIAS
Not a bad way to go,
over a drink.
We’d sat for a week together
in the dark of the edit suite.
I observed his thick gold chain.
We laughed at nothing much.
His twenty-year-old fingers
fast on the keys.
Now the mirrors are fogged
and the faces at the counter
have gone.
But that bar
in the south of Bogotá
hasn’t changed its name.
Still peddling the past
in cerveza, salsa y ron,
and, for the casual drinker,
the one who just looked in
or went for an offer on the aguardiente,
for the one who was out for a night with a girl
before morning broth – caldo de costilla –
the one who, next day,
mowed down with a dozen others
never showed for work –
for him as much as another,
this fistful.
ANITA
Two young men deliver the tanks
and roll blue and grey
tattered cylinders on their base –
spin them on wooden floors.
A weekly delivery for
half an hour at night
in front of the
ancient television
whose eight o clock
parade of orphans
– Los Ninos Buscan su Hogar –
is about to begin.
Anita nods over a book
still open on page one,
plastic tubes
in her nostrils
and the thrum
of the oxygen coming through –
a white head against the window.
The cold comes down from
el monte,
and it bites, oh it bites:
those pale blue sheets
are damp with righteousness
as she takes
her daily quota of breath.
In a year or two
strangers will call
hearing of a death
(Word spreads fast)
They will descend,
sharps and ne’er do wells,
knock on the dark oak door
which has kept out so much for or so long;
offer a few pesos for her bed.
Isabel Bermudez is a poet and embroiderer. She currently works as a languages teacher in an Academy in South East London. Her most recent illustrated collection is Serenade (Paekakariki Press, Walthamstow, 2020) – poems evoking Spain and the New World. She won the Coast to Coast to Coast pamphlet competition in 2018 with Madonna Moon, has two collections with Rockingham Press as well as a debut pamphlet, Extranjeros (Flarestack Poets , Birmingham, 2015) www.isabel-bermudez.com
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Brendan Cleary: Three Poems
RETURN TO SENDER
January 78
there were 3OO
now it’s 4O,OOO
Elvis tribute acts
until yesterday one less
as they carried you out
your jumpsuit stained
with Bolognese sauce
weeds & dogshit
strewn on the yard
an ambulence drawing away
no view of your head
under green sheets
quiff invisible
my dear King
it’s off to Graceland!
a lost soul forever
in this swirling maelstrom
FAIR
over there glinting
look the giant wheel
caravans & dodgems
a smell of onions
near the Big Dipper
so aren’t you coming?
I’d like it if you did
you’re long overdue
& yes we can wander
into the Hall of Mirrors
see the shape we’re in
& that row of tin cans
I’ll shoot them for you
IN THE CLOUDS
no need
whatever
to panic
my phone’s
banjoed
close & far
so look up
it’s me
waving down
Brendan Cleary is originally from Co Antrim but lives and writes in Brighton. He has published many collections. His pamphlet last poems? was published recently by Tall Lighthouse.
*****
Pauline Flynn: Two Poems
MAY EVENING
A galvanised roof shines silver blue
behind the branches of the field maple,
caught in the bright white ball
of the sun, blinding as a spotlight
on a theatre stage or on the face
of a man in a darkened prison cell.
White light in a white sky,
a tint of blue, and the trail
of a jet stream, pale grey fading,
carrying longings away with it,
the still crow on the chimney
a dark silhouette.
Down in the garden
all is fresh green and gold,
young lime leaves
on the yellow stem bamboo
brushes the top of the granite wall,
glistening silver and copper and old gold.
It was Autumn then in Nara
in the temple where the giant gilt buddha
looked down on us from eyes
almost closed, his fingers in mudra,
neither here nor there, with us
or the small deer grazing on the lawn.
Venetian blinds draw lines
across the sky, the trees, the wall,
the window panes, each frame
an arrangement of green leaf, twig,
stone and galvanised roof,
that draws the eye to the West,
to the illuminated cloud
floating through the canopy of a tree.
PERSIMMON
The colour is more deep than orange,
saturated burnt sienna, amber, rust,
an autumn sunset, glowing embers
in an open hearth.
To taste it at its best you pull the skin,
piece by tiny piece with the tips of your fingers,
slurp the first layer of pulp
onto your tongue and let it coat
your mouth like a river might
caress your body as you swim.
And nothing is so good as the two
small nuggets of silky flesh hidden
beneath a fine membrane in the centre,
so soft, so full, so whole.
Leave them till last when all you want
to do is curl one around your tongue,
guide it to the roof of your mouth,
slide it around,
let it slip a little through your lips
until it and your flesh are one,
until you cannot hold it any longer
and you let it go.
Pauline Flynn is an Irish Visual Artist/Poet. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCD in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award the same year. She is a member of the Carlow Writers Room. Publications include — Poetry Ireland Review, Eavan Boland Special Issue, 2022, Skylight 47, Boyne Berries, Sixteen Magazine, Into the Light, Orbis 81, Light, a Journal of Photography and Poetry, Silver Birch Press, The Blue Nib. She lives in Co. Wicklow. Ireland
*****
Angela France: Four Poems
LOW WINTER SUN
Driving home into a setting sun
too low for the visor,
the cars ahead are no more
than the glitter-flash of synapses,
the thoughts of others on the road.
Trees and hedges darken, become
black walls fraying up into watercolour
wash sky. There is nothing beyond
this narrow route or past the horizon
where a copse could be a gateway to the dark..
This road may last forever, and I might
be stuck but something holds me
to this straight way, hands gripping the wheel,
squinting to see past the glare.
THE RISK OF DROWNING
Near the end of this too-dry summer
the land can’t take the gift of a downpour.
Water runs off its face, making rivulets, rivers,
flash floods. It is like Clint Eastwood dying
in the desert, sunburned and crack-lipped,
whose rescuer will only allow small sips
lest he drown himself with wanting.
Or it is like being allowed to exercise
after injury when every muscle and sinew
wants to move, to feel the sigh
of good tired, but will spasm into protest
at short runs or light weights.
Or it is like spending too much time
alone, shut in by weather, or pandemic,
or choice, when other people must be taken
in small doses. Perhaps a coffee with one
or a short meeting with three or four
but not a party or a crowded pub
lest you shrink back into yourself
like cracks forming on parched land.
LAST WILL
A black and white fluttering on the grass
suggested paper or discarded clothes
but magpies flew away as I drew close;
they’d been pecking a pigeon to a mess
of blood and bone. Spine bared as if a hasp
of flesh were unlatched, bloody ribs exposed,
it must be dead. I drew closer though loath
to touch. Its head turned, looked at me, its glassy
eye shocking me to stillness. I couldn’t bear
to see such pain, and knew I had to kill
the pigeon, put aside my sensitive flinch.
I took a heavy branch which lay near
to crush its skull. Wings fluttered, ribs moved still;
so hard to kill, so strong the will to live.
UNDER
There is a world under this old house,
glimpsed where a floorboard doesn’t meet skirting,
where rough stone supports civilised walls above.
Sometimes, I catch sight of something.
A bright black eye, a whisker, a round ear,
or a silver trail leading from an edge
and back again. I lift a floorboard
and see nothing but broken stone,
age-darkened joists, smell only dust
and earth. There is room to hide
behind rough stacks of limestone
space enough for gatherings of small beings,
for their diversions and digressions,
their plans and recreations.
I hold a piece of their sky in my hands, gently
slide it back into place. Leave them
to lead their tiny lives
while I live mine, above.
Angela France’s publications include Occupation (Ragged Raven, 2009), Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches, 2011), Hide (Nine Arches 2013) and The Hill (Nine Arches 2017). The Hill was developed into a multi-media poetry show which Angela toured, funded by Arts Council England. Her latest collection, Terminarchy, came out from Nine Arches in Summer 2021. Angela teaches creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire and in community settings. She runs the monthly reading series in Cheltenham, ‘Buzzwords’.
*****
Hilary Hares: Four Poems
CASTING THE LINE
Old hands say that it’s not in the arm
but in the blood: that the blood casts true,
performing a ballet of hand and lure
like the slow kowtow of a courting crane.
The skill is in the skim. Hear the reel click
and bitch as it spools, see the braid fly,
arching its back before landing light as air
on air, barely a break in the water’s skin
and before there are trout, the illusion of trout,
muscle ripple in the heart-light of the stream.
THE CHANGING FACE OF THE CHURCH
IN THE GLOOM OF THE EVENING
The boundaries of its ancient walls
have been given to the mist,
their only anchor cobwebs
which frost has cabled into steel.
Inside, prayers rise from the tips
of gloved hands. Mystically
transformed, the church barely holds
its ground in the broth of dusk.
COMFORTABLE WOMEN
They fill the late-spring window of the café at The Maltings
and order Caesar salad dressed with sliced Sicilian olives.
Their faces are made from years; bellies and breasts let loose
beneath home-knits and velvets, fluid as good broth.
They sip from fat balloons of plush, dark Malbec and talk
of summers in Sorrento or their husband’s new prescriptions.
One of them’s alone now (though this is never mentioned),
another cherishes an indiscretion they don’t know they share.
HINDSIGHT
Not your spit-n-sawdust pub,
the Plumber’s Arms was more
the kind of place where men in waistcoats
crowded round a black-and-white TV
to watch the horse they owned, come in.
They’d buy a ‘snifter’ for themselves
and treat their lady friends to Gin-and-It.
The background hummed with Bing and Frank.
I worked the bar two nights a week and nothing
happened much, except a drunken fumble
with a wiry type, who boasted that
he’d bought a record player on HP.
No, nothing happened, much, until the night
when Lady Lucan stumbled in, splashed with blood,
and spilled the beans on what was happening
across the street.
That night’s a night the world remembers well,
the night her husband vanished in thin air,
the night I felt profound regret I’d chosen it
to take the evening off.
Hilary Hares lives in Farnham, Surrey. Over 200 of her poems have found homes online and in print including Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, Stand and South. Her collection, A Butterfly Lands on the Moon supports Winchester Muse. She won the Christchurch Writers’ Competition 2013 and Write-By-The-Sea Competition 2018. Her pamphlet, Red Queen (2020), is available from Marble Poetry and a new pamphlet, Mr Yamada Cooks Lunch for Twenty Three, will support the Manor Farm Charitable Trust. Website: www.hilaryhares.com
*****
David Harmer: Three Poems
AT THE NAG’S HEAD WITH GABRIEL
The place is rammed but I spot him a mile off
to be honest, there are easier pubs round here
for his particular look. Long yellow hair curled
over his shoulders, white shirt, white suit.
Like I say, Mr.Trouble is about to barge in,
buy him a drink. Except that doesn’t happen.
He’s a pillar of calm surrounded by madness.
Two of the nastiest bastards I know, Dekker and Byron,
are laughing at something he’s whispered.
They call him Dekker because he likes using drills
Byron because he’s a twat. But they’re like two kids
in a sweet shop, giggling Thanks for that mate.
He turns, sees me staring as I grab a pint.
His eyes blaze blue, then violet, then black.
Light streams from every bit of his body
like a star exploding. Then switches off.
I follow as he nods me outside.
Down the alley at the back of the pub
he leans on a wall, ciggie cupped in his hand
blowing smoke to the clouds. He drains his glass.
I’m off-duty he says, as if that explains everything.
Tomorrow I’ve got some difficult calls
so I nicked off work to relax with you guys.
You look like a bloke who needs some luck.
I agree. He hands me a note. Here’s the horses,
50 to1 or better at Donny next week,
invest all you’ve got, guaranteed winners.
He flickers from one patch of sun to another.
There’s a rustle of what must be feathers
and he’s gone, disappeared. The note ends
Love from Big G, be lucky. I was.
Put a grand on each of their galloping noses
just like he said, cleaned up on the lot.
IN YORK WITH RON
We’ve taken to walking these narrow streets
huddled behind steep city walls, where rough sleepers stir
in their mossy churchyards, or shriek high fives
outside The Boar’s Head. Crowded pavements
nudge us with pushchairs, bags, clouds of vape
so we pause for breath on Lendal Bridge.
Fifty years before, an escapologist
hung over the river in a long canvas sack
skinny and naked, he squirmed and wriggled
for the tiny key taped between his buttocks.
In case of a fall, Ron waited below
on a small wooden boat to stop any drowning.
Just in time, red with sweat, the kid struggled free,
his chains fell like hammers. dunking my friend
in the frozen-brown Ouse. I gaze at the water
trying to picture his unhappy swim. Of course
he’s beside me, suggests we visit Fossegate Books
search the Shakespeare section
for the whiff of a rumour that Marlowe pulled William
out of the Thames, like Cassius saved Caesar;
you never know I smile, just avoiding two
tweed-suited young men face down on their phones.
NOW IS NOT THE TIME
Our bathroom clock threw in the towel
at twenty-three minutes to eleven.
A pale-blue face worn thin at the edges
mainspring rusted from years of damp
no spring in its tick-tock, no urgent desire
to engage gear-trains or escapements.
If only it boasted these Victorian delights.
But it’s fake, scuffed by design
shabby chic bought in The Range or Ikea
ten quid, powered by battery.
Once or twice when I stumbled
out of the bedroom half-drunk with sleep
it fooled me. I even joined its hands
to push things along, nothing doing
just the time in Martinique or Hong Kong.
Not much has changed, it’s a clock
working or not it continues to tell
the same crooked stories.
David Harmer lives in Doncaster. Although he is best known as a children’s writer, his work is again appearing in poetry magazines.
*****
Lucy Heuschen: Two Poems
QUEEN BEE
On the subway, Elizabeth always stands.
She strides up the conveyor belt,
will not permit herself to be conveyed.
At work, Elizabeth is not well-liked
(though no one dares tell her that).
They whisper that she’s mannish.
No one calls her Liz a second time.
She doesn’t crack a smile
as she prowls carpeted halls.
In the directors’ dining room,
she ignores the coffee line.
Elizabeth is a difficult woman.
Sits where she likes in meetings,
prefers the top of the table.
She picks favourites, fights.
She makes her people attend
diversity training (she doesn’t
have time to attend herself).
Elizabeth’s department offers
no performance reviews,
no weekly team drinks,
no gold stars for timekeeping.
There is no ladder, no leg up.
She never needed anyone’s help,
never had to ask for it either.
To Elizabeth, only loyalty matters
and she knows how to measure it:
with 2000 hours on your knees.
THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET OF ANJOU
BY THE TALENTED MR SHAKESPEARE
It’s not easy to play the assassin:
to be bought and paid for. Patronised.
You tell stories that are pleasing
and politic. Your arrow likes to fly true
but at heart you are a pragmatist.
You’ve learned to appreciate
this queen. To love her flaws,
red havoc trailing in her wake
across your expensive parchment.
How can you kill your darling?
But you do it: someone has to pay.
She’s your Lazarus, cold and stiff:
none ask for her resurrection except
you and the lady. Of all your women,
this one scowls at you in your sleep.
You compromise. More dialogue,
more lines than any other woman.
Glistening rubies from her tongue.
Words become stones, boulders
she will be rolling uphill forever.
All we groundlings see, loving you
as we do, is the Bad Queen stalking
through castles with a lover’s head.
Wiping a father’s face, cloth soaked
in the still-warm blood of his child.
Witch, harpy, termagant! we shriek.
Keep the gore and intrigue flowing,
we’ll buy this story and any others
you care to sell. We all love a villain
but a great villainess is even better.
It’s not easy to cry murderer
when you’re in love with the knife.
Lucy Heuschen is the founder of the Rainbow Poems online community and Stanza Rep for Germany. Lucy’s poems appear in Ink Sweat & Tears, Skylight 47, Reach, Sarasvati, One Hand Clapping, The Storms, Obsessed with Pipework, Green Ink, FEED and Irisi, and in anthologies from Black Bough, Yaffle, New Contexts, Dreich, Orchard Lea and Sídhe Press. Lucy’s pamphlet We Wear The Crown was published by Hedgehog Press in 2022. She is currently working on her first collection. www.lucyheuschen.co.uk. X: PetiteCreature1
*****
Alan Humm: Two Poems
ICELAND
Trump in the White House and I think about
the frailty of things: the carpark, dark,
still, in the middle of the day, its lights
weirdly intent; the pond which was the opposite
of a miracle: the mystery of water become solid
while, out past the streets, the air insists
on its own power; on how the world
can be shredded sideways, become a great and furious
giddiness. Under the glacier, one chapel echoed
while the other seemed to gather every word.
Anti-sonorous, austerely serious,
it was determined to refute the world
outside; you, yes, but more: all of its signs
– the feral, furious snow and warring winds.
NEW YORK
The Guggenheim unwinds like apple peel
and you assent to what you think it says:
that art, all art, resolves in quietness;
lives out its promise just beside the real.
Meanwhile, New York growls at you like you’re food.
It blurts things out: steam; jazz; the noise of trains.
It never pauses for a second. It disdains
stability; hustles towards the sky, no mood
so dense it can’t be wished away by height;
by a blithe disregard. Look at Trump’s tower,
so ostentatious that it seems austere;
pimped up like someone’s car. It just might
be the measure here: art as the opposite of dour
and distant artefacts. Art screaming in your ear.
Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping magazine. His first collection, A Brief and Biased History of Love, was published in September by Culture Matters. His first novel, The Sparkler, will be published this year.
*****
Sheila Jacob: Two Poems
CLOSING IN
You look like family, Catherine,
in the digitised portrait
from a cousin’s Ancestry page.
I see my daughters in your firm jaw,
strong cheekbones, dark hair
smoothed off your neck.
Great-grandmother West.
A face and name, until I find you
amongst the jumble of snapshots
in my mother’s biscuit tin.
You’re older,here,wear a shawl
in the sunlit garden.
Your child-bearing years are gone
but bloodlines surge
through ink-loops of Mother,
penned on the back of the photo
by Kate your daughter,
Kate my grandmother.
I remember the pulse
of Kate’s Omo-dusted body
as I stumbled on garden grass.
She plumped me onto her lap,
soothed stung knees
with the palms of her hands.
WAR WOUNDS AND PEACETIME PHOTOGRAPHS
Ethel thumbs the studio image –
her mum and dad, 1912.
Charles leans one hand on the back
of a chair, almost touches
Kate’s arm as though wishing
he could fold her inside his jacket.
Ethel’s the babby on Kate’s lap.
Elder brother Charlie’s by her side.
Kate’s hair’s upswept into a crown
of tight curls, her borrowed blouse
is high necked, a hint of laughter’s
written across her lips
and Ethel thinks of photos she took
at Butlin’s, August 1955.
Kate, wearing her old sprigged frock,
stripping down to a bathing suit,
standing knee-deep in a surge of waves.
Come on in, the water’s lovely!
Charles, sitting outside the chalet,
swearing he’s not too hot
in his belted, double-breasted gaberdine.
Just look at them clouds!
Ethel adjusts her Box Brownie.
Smile, then,our dad –
He smiles, she remembers a smile,
but now, viewing her snapshot,
tracing his face
beneath the rim of his cap,
she watches him lid his eyes
from the camera’s lens,
the shell-blast of light.
Sheila Jacob was born and raised in Birmingham and lives in North Wales with her husband. She has been writing poetry on a regular basis since 2013. Her poems have been published in various magazines,webzines and anthologies. She is working on her first pamphlet, using her Brummie heritage as the theme.
*****
Alex Josephy: Two Poems
WHY THE MERLO SINGS
The song comes from below my window
where the downstairs neighbour’s shutters
are flung wide.
I never see the bird. There’s no face-to-face.
I hear its queries; it witnesses the flow
of my morning shower down the pipe in the wall.
There’s something disjointed in the fall
of repeated phrases from a scale
that never quite flushes into a tune.
It frets, like when a woman on the bus
rolls out her troubles to a friend
sitting across the aisle.
Each trouble builds a little on the last,
then diminishes to a weak grumble.
Each dawn and dusk, always in the same way.
Sometimes there’s a low rustle
or a scaly click, like the turn of a feather
in a very small lock.
I imagine the bird preening its neck,
carefully raking each wing pit. Perhaps
it hears my footsteps on the tiles,
a rattle of china when I lay the table.
One day, hurrying out I pass
my neighbour’s open door. At the window,
a blackbird in a wire cage.
The song lifts across the town roofs,
up the valley, toward the distant mountains.
GHOST OF A VOLCANO
Five more minutes, then out,
or no story before bed.
Held up close to his eye,
he probes the pumice stone,
its astonishing airiness, craters
and pinholes. Fun to push it down
under the bath-water, watch it race
to burst through the surface,
again, again.
Leave that alone can’t you?
It’s just for feet. Play
with the clockwork frog.
The scratchy surface of pumice
troubles his palm; the word
is strangely smooth, lava.
At school he made a drawing:
Vesuvius spewing fire,
its spume like dragon’s breath.
Now here’s this little burnt-out maze
that’s known the planet’s core,
that once was molten. Molten.
Bobbing in the soapy suds
next to his knee.
Time’s nearly up. Don’t forget
the back of your neck.
And use the flannel properly
or I’ll do it for you.
One day, he thinks, I’ll sneak it out,
my small grey traveller,
hide it in a pocket, take it with me.
Alex Josephy lives in London and Italy. Her collection Naked Since Faversham was published by Pindrop Press in 2020. Other work includes White Roads, poems set in Italy, Paekakariki Press, 2018, and Other Blackbirds, Cinnamon Press, 2016. Her poems have won the McLellan and Battered Moons prizes, and have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and Italy. As part of the Poetry School Mixed Borders scheme, she has been poet-in-residence at Rainham Hall, Essex, and in Markham Square, London. Find out more on her website: www.alexjosephy.net
*****
Gerald Killingworth: Poem
WITH REGRET …
He read it with interest –
I doubt it.
He found much to admire –
of course there was.
It was not for me –
well, it should have been.
This form of words,
this kicking with kindness,
sugaring the slight –
we know the game.
Time to move on.
But one line is different.
Sorry to hear your mum has passed.
I read his name again,
this man who assumes we share a history
neither has forgotten.
I have forgotten.
I read his name again
and then the words of sympathy.
Mum
A glow of recollection follows.
Chance words can do this,
unlocking pictures, moments.
Her death was eight years ago,
so why speak now?
Somewhere he has a friend in need of comfort,
a friend whose work he is rejecting.
But it isn’t me.
An accidental sympathy
is still a touch on the arm, a soft I know.
How many others – hundreds? –
have read the sentence
and lingered for a moment,
forgetting the no for the sorry,
thanks to an inadvertent Copy all?
Gerald Killingworth writes novels (mostly fantasy) for adults and children. The Dead World of Lanthorne Ghules (Pushkin, 2019) was a Guardian pick of the month. He has a Phd in Elizabethan literature and has had plays produced on the London fringe. Dempsey & Windle published Gerald’s collection Emptying Houses in July 2022.
*****
Pippa Little: Two Poems
RE-ENTRY
A middle-aged woman hides a sore heart
behind family scrolls of Welcome Home !!!
The carousel doors, slow-blinking
god’s eye, begin to slide –
first out, the pilots, then businessmen
striding away luggage-less
to make taxi queue, hotel room. They
do not belong in this, nor do they want to.
Now those who have glimpsed the curving world
weightless from tiny windows
emerge to a gallery of held breath,
with first earthbound steps
and hands outstretched
they bring us Singapore, Dubai,
Brisbane: we, their audience, inhale.
Our longing’s a hundred watts: they dip into it
bashfully. One by one they are claimed.
How can I imagine you’d come whole
out of five years’ white air?
But last of all, pale, real, you do,
not one second older. It will take time,
this re-entering. I hold out your rose.
A Dinner of Lobster for the Connemara Sisters
Ma brings him back, honoured guest
but with claws tied just in case.
He smells of the wild sea.
She says: it has to be done this way.
Go, if you can’t take it.
Wide eyed I listen
to his scratch and clatter
in the steam.
He is taking his time to stop
but finally his antenna flickers, goes out.
Her sign: she slams the pot lid down.
Later she lifts him
soft-scalded to a furious pink,
a newborn without a cry.
He comes into my mind
when I am very tired and time slips.
When I am that child again
and so old.
Pippa Little‘s latest collection Time Begins to Hurt came out from Arc last year and she is working on a new sequence of poems which will form the centrepiece for her next book. A highlight of her year has been leading a workshop at the Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire. She teaches ‘Writing Poetry’ for the Faber Academy in Newcastle.
*****
Suzanne Lummis: Poem
THE OTHER WOMAN
We considered The Beehive,
The Sugar Plum, or the No
Turning Back Café, but settled on this:
The Tavern of the Six Round Corners,
where there’s a full moon every night
and no one holds a gun to your head—
not in this drift of exposé
light. But love, yes, that does position
a gun toward our heads—still, we won’t
talk. Well, we do but just to each other.
There’s a man, barely enough for one
woman, and we are two, and we
know we have made him more
than he is, made him big, almost
imaginary—a whole carousel. How could
we not? We had to make him worthy
of all this emotion. Now keep in mind
this happened years back,
so we smoke, as people did then,
years back, in the movies.
And we like to think of ourselves
as movies. We offer a menthol edge
to the air—smoke, a reminder of death,
which we like. It sharpens the senses.
No wonder the Aztecs kept skulls around.
We lean to tap off the burnings in the vessel
between us—a “tray” for ash—our hands
always moving, dipping, like beaked
and winged things, toward some source
of attraction, then rising, waving away
the hot inhalations, displacing
and replacing the air, signing our speech.
We grow silent and gaze at the night.
Outside, in the slots and cubicles, back
pockets, of the city night, men—here
and there— handle their stubby, unsubtle
firepower and point it at what they want.
Someone rolls an old country song onto
the jukebox, and we say Yes to two more
of whatever the house recommends.
We came here to figure this out, but
now we’ve forgotten. Which one
of us is the Other Woman?
Suzanne Lummis was a 2018/19 COLA (City of Los Angeles) fellow in poetry. Her ms. Open 24 Hours, won the Blue Lynx Prize and was published by Lynx House Press. Her reviews and critical essays have been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, Another Chicago Magazine, Verseville, and elsewhere. Her defining essay, ‘The Poem Noir —Too Dark to be Depressed’ will be reprinted in the international literary journal, Pratik, a special noir issue she’s just finished guest-editing.
*****
Patricia McCarthy: Two Poems
HOPKINS IN DUBLIN
He’d sit on a bench in St Stephens Green
and watch the ducks circling the pond,
their silken emerald plumage
brown in the mildewed water. No cloud
turned into a sail for his escape. Too mean
for crumbs, he’d force pigeons to abscond
to more promising landing places. The age
was against him: a nation angrily bowed
to Home Rule, rundown Georgian terraces,
rat tunnels in the college, churches even
like cattle-yards full of sinners’ bells –
nothing to do with Duns Scotus, Aquinas
or with ad majoram dei gloriam. ‘Lumen
Christi’ he muttered in his inner hell.
Lack of reflections in the murk eliminated
any chance of a well-formed Narcissus
groping for him as for a truth. And yet
a mirror hung inside his head wherein,
through eyes of the students who hated
his Oxford drawl, he saw himself: pompous
boring, his words dead objects set
like stones in his throat. Any inclination
to see beyond his lank, dark figure –
his face whiter than a chapel candle, hands
like spiders – was cancelled by their jeers,
Greek and Latin texts thrown in the air.
The lecture hall, vacated at his reprimands,
echoed with their mimicry, their leers.
The short walk back to his rooms, past
veiled prostitutes headed for Harcourt Street;
beggars who cried out to him from corners.
He never looked up to the nearby mountains
on whose rain-scalded scarps all is outcast;
never visited Glendalough, Powerscourt,
Sally Gap, Poulaphouca, Meeting of the Waters –
to kid himself this was Wales again.
As his students’ coarse craic battered
his ears, he sank into the black holes
of his sonnets, semi-deserted by his God.
Filled with stark self-chastising words
that, faithless, faltering, couldn’t console,
he wished to erase where he had trod.
He’d sit on a bench in St Stephen’s Green,
dream his students, turned scholarly,
were thumbing through his unpublished poems –
drunk on the words’ gymnastic stunts
that bettered their athletic gifts – keen
to peruse them rather than to play hurley,
new textures discovered like diadems.
And himself at the rostrum having to hunt
no longer for syllables in a dried-up mouth.
Still the ducks were there, paddling
through the weed, restoring colours
lost in his mind’s local death.
As his opened heart started to sing,
in the Mass, the Seven Dolours,
he sank in Glasnevin into his last breath.
PIONEER BADGE
‘For thy greater Glory and consolation, O most Sacred Heart of Jesus, for Thy sake, to give good example, to practise self-denial, to make reparation to Thee for the sins of intemperance and for the conversion of excessive drinkers, I will abstain for life from all intoxicating drinks, Amen’. ‘The Heroic Offering’ prayer of pioneers
Imagine, as a junior fresher at university,
xxxxx you disembark from the Mail Boat
with heavy cases and hail a taxi to take you
xxxxxto the house you rent with three students.
You haven’t noticed the taxi driver until
xxxxxyou discern the crowsfeet at his eye
half-turned towards you, white bristles
xxxxxand the glint of a pioneer pin attached
to his lapel. Safe enough, you think,
xxxxxafter the drunks on the boat. He tells you
about his thirteen grandchildren and you confide
xxxxxhow nervous you feel back first in the house
owned by Jehovahs’ Witnesses. You slide past
xxxxxterraces recognised from children’s parties
before your parents moved back to England.
xxxxxThe light glints on and off his pioneer pin
and you turn inland, thinking of the russets
xxxxxfrom home in one case, the clothes bought
instead of books with your grant in the other.
xxxxxThe wall of Dundrum jail, murderers inside,
the three-rock mountain in sight, and
xxxxxa few houses down, your destination.
How stooped he is when he lugs your baggage
xxxxxup the crazy-paving. The key in the front door.
Opening it. But no. Hands like claws grab you.
xxxxxHeavy panting. No time to think, you use
the only manoeuvre learnt in Judo and push him
xxxxxby some miracle the other side of the door.
Your stopped breath. Is he one of the devils
xxxxxlabelled as Papists in the bookshelves,
around his neck a sodality medal, the pioneer badge
xxxxxhis pledge of honour? You don’t dare stay there.
Term resumed, you sit in coffee houses, butteries.
xxxxxYet every midnight car headlights penetrate
the curtains. Shadowy shapes. You lie paralysed,
xxxxxunable to forget his breath reeking from a stash
of Paddy, Pure Pot Still. Involuntarily you tremble,
xxxxxbrooms and shovels beside the bed. Just in case.
*****
Kathryn MacDonald: Two Poems
THE CANDLE
The candle sits on the highboy as it always has
in the room we shared with the double bed,
the room with chimney-pipe running through,
our enamel woodstove aglow on the floor below.
The candle sits in the room with a window
overlooking a field always green in dreams
where years flow past steady as rivers to the sea.
The candle sits unlit. Moonlight flickers
over sheetsxxxxcasting no shadows to dance
across the wall. The candle sits unlit
and I have grown old in the silence
of your absencexxxxcried your secret names
over deaf ashesxxxxover flints of bone
while stars burn holes.
THE MALLARD AND THE CROW
Winter is cruel this year
carrying wind and blinding snow
to my door. I walk into this weather
searching among the drifts
for what is lost in the numbing cold
of empty rooms. Raucous mallards call
their quacking cries at the edge
of the river where ice forms, call
urging each other to swim,
to keep the water open and moving
to the sea. I remember last winter
when a drake lay frozen, a crow hunched
over its green feathers. Last year this path
led to afternoons with him, to complaints
that darkness fell too soon. I did not know
this empty dark, had forgotten the ice,
the mallard and the crow.
Kathryn MacDonald has published in literary journals in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, and England, as well as anthologies. Her poem “Duty / Deon” won Arc Award of Awesomeness (January 2021). “Seduction” was entered in the Freefall Annual Poetry Contest edited and published in Freefall (Fall 2020). She is the author of A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édourd (fiction). For details, please see https://kathrynmacdonald.com.
*****
Daphne Milne: Two Poems
ON SINATRA NIGHTS HE ALSO PLAYS THE CLARINET
The pianist has five buttons on each cuff
more tailoring than Savile Row
fingers all overxxxthe keyboard
Fifteen variations on I will wait for you
tentativexxx a single soundxxxanother
like the first raindrops of a thunderstorm
the tune revealed note by careful note
one handed until both join in
and the romance shines through
faster fasterxxxa full-blown love affair
hair flies wildly hands a-blur
he bounces on the piano stool
And then the silence
xxx the applausexxxxx He turns
picks up his other instrument
the clarinet’s smooth tones river
through the hall like liquid honey
The buttons on his cuffs catch the light
My Wayxxx Witchcraftxxx Call me irresponsible
and finally I’ve got you under my skin
REBECCA REBECCA GET YOUR BIG LEG OFF OF ME
Do bass players have better sex lives
All that fingering and synchronised bowing
must have an effect xxx after all
‘the hand’s an extension of the arm
movement comes from the base
of the spine’ or so I’ve been told
‘the whole body is involved’
Rhythm but not necessarily blues
The bass player doesn’t care
for skinny womenxxx likes a bit
of fleshxxx Is this a reflection
of the size of his instrument
Do the callouses inhibit feeling
One week off and blisters form
He lives wellxxx or so he says
apart from his debauchery
Daphne Milne’s poems, flash fiction and short stories are published in print and online in magazines and anthologies internationally. She has returned to the UK after five years in Australia. She was a Katharine Susannah Pritchard fellow for 2021. Nominated for the Forward Prize for 2022. Published by Indigo Dreams Press in 2019 her pamphlet The Blue Boob Club was selected as book of the month by Poetry Kit where Daphne was also invited to be a Contemporary Poet for 2020. Two new pamphlets are due to be published later this year.
*****
Sean O’Brien: Three Poems
THE POOL
‘I thought I saw a wolf’ – Randall Jarrell
Bulrushes, a lifebelt, birches leaning in
to catch their reflections, shedding leaves
the colour of October on the water
where princesses come to drown. There’s more:
the pool’s a scrying-glass the rain falls through
into the other forest and the other pool below.
If you consult this mirror three times over
neither half is certain of its whereabouts
and you have changed an accident
into a narrative, like the naïf sent out
to gather firewood, who is beguiled
though well aware he should not linger here.
When you began, today was surely August,
but falling leaves and sentry-coughs
reveal a company of rooks in winter quarters,
crouching in their sodden cloaks to write
their memoirs of the Grand Armée
with quills plucked from themselves,
in inky blood, in disenchantment:
Wagram, Eylau in the snowstorm,
and then the broken starving army dancing
on the ice, and under it, at Berezina.
What have these to do with fairy-tales –
except, look now, an underwater ballroom
swagged in weedy crimson, full of cloudy mirrors
sees a host of butchered gentlemen
revolving with princesses in their arms.
And what has that to do with this dim pool
you found by chance, and looked in for too long,
and how will you get home from here,
unless this is the only world
and you are home already? Soldier
from the wars returning, set your burden down,
arrange these twigs, take out your tinder-box,
and make a fire if you can, by which to read
this tale of maidens, beasts and bloodshed
dreamed by history, to pass the time away.
CV
For Ian Duhig
See, me, OK, I’ve done it all. Fish-whisperer, male nun,
Chief scraper of the hull aboard the voyage of Maelduin,
Conquistador and floozy, body double for Thom Gunn,
Second choice to Jack Palance as Āttila the Hun,
Castrato, poet, dentist, scored a Christmas Number One,
Casanova’s gondolier, Cagliostro, Douglas Dunn –
Who was that masked man? people cried, but I’d already gone
Some silly bastard asked me if I thought my race was run –
Oh please don’t interrupt me, not when I’m having fun.
I’m being Rita Hayworth now. I’ve only just begun.
IN THE WOODS
When we’re out in the woods
the old dog knows better than me
where to turn, when to wait, how the wind
leans on a row of birch and beech
and stirs the bracken lightly
passing through. And yet, although
he’s never here, the god knows best.
He offers us his absence
as an earnest of the self-regard
we recognize as time, his mirror,
where the figure and the ground are one.
It must be true. The place says so.
We’re looking now, the dog and I,
not quite on purpose, for a door
into the hillside, while the axe
falls faithfully, again, again.
It’s time you led me home, old dog.
Let’s take it slowly, pausing as you wish
by every blade of grass, forget-me-not
and pissing-place and bare-faced
block of stone along the way.
Sean O’Brien’s eleventh collection, Embark, appeared from Picador in 2022. His chapbook Impasse: for Jules Maigret was published by Hercules Editions in May 2023, and his pamphlet Otherwise by Dare-Gale in September. He has received various awards, including the T.S. Eliot, Forward and E.M Forster prizes. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
*****
Isabel Palmer: Two Poems
THEATRE
Kabul Airport, August 2021
For my son, who fought there
From here, the tower’s a puppet booth.
Barriers, striped red and white like deck-chairs,
pin children to the sand and women wear
their burqas loose to hide the strings.
Behind sausage-strings of sandbags
men corral a heckling crowd with sticks
and crocodile lines roll babies
into body-bags in the sewage swamp.
This is the final showdown
for the ghost and the skeleton
and the hump-backed bomber
with ball-bearings in his coat.
Sirens are swazzles behind
clenched teeth as the doctor
and policeman winch the bodies
on wheelbarrows out of sight.
A mother flings her baby over
walls topped with razor-wire
to be shaken asleep on a C-17
as life-size dogs wait in the wings.
But now the puppeteer is nowhere near,
the hangman’s centre-stage and you’ve
outgrown the need to ask who pulls
the strings and why the crowd’s so thin.
THE SHIPPING FORECAST
For my mother-in-law, aged 93 years
She must have things
in their proper order, easily found
from memory long ago polished
into being, like planets, US states,
Kings and Queens of England.
Forth, Tyne, Dogger, backing 5 or 6
becoming squall. Visibility poor.
On Bass Rock, the gannets are dying,
a wreck of sea-birds: guillemots, herring-gulls.
Fisher, German Bight, Humber
is a spell for roseate terns, flushed
with summer plumage. Their tails
are streamers, fly-fishing lures.
She does not know this:
that chalk cliffs slip into the sea,
Portland, Plymouth, Biscay,
veering, Gale Force 10, very rough,
defying navigation,
Atlantic rollers washing all
before her on to Finisterre.
Isabel Palmer is a former teacher and educational adviser from a family of army veterans. She is Poet in Residence at the National Army museum and has worked with H4H veterans and Chelsea Pensioners. She won the inaugural army poetry competition and last year’s ‘Poets Meet Politics’ and her poetry has featured in magazines and on national media. Publications include Ground Signs (PBS Pamphlet Choice, Flarestack), Aftermath (Clutag Press) and her first full collection in Home Front (Bloodaxe).
*****
Bethany Pope: Poem
EIGHT MILE GAP
Everything is smaller, in this in-between place,
wedged between a town and a city,
farms caught beneath the high-speed
railway bridge; terraced hills, packed with lychee trees,
duck-runs threaded through them, linking
stream to stream, the ducks themselves jogging,
gape-beaked amongst the bracken,
seeking out good things; rice in the valleys,
heavy brown heads bending to the water as though at prayer,
lotuses packed into ponds, so dense you could walk,
like Christ, across the surface of the water,
balanced on the leaves — or skip-float
to paradise wedged inside a blossom
flicked from Guanyin’s pearly fingers.
Crops brim against the temple doors,
brush against the brass roll-call of the ancestors,
send tendrils curling over the legs of the guardians
at the gates, deep green leaves with a purplish
undertone, bright against the cinnabar walls.
Cows standing four feet at the shoulders
rub their copper flanks against the railroad towers,
they curl up to sleep in the shade beneath the overpass,
crowding the sidewalk, exhaling milk and hay
and sweet fruit rinds and they look at you,
sloe-eyed, as you thread your way between their tails.
Everything is smaller here, intensified, forced
to a climax as moments elsewhere never seem to manage,
and you are thrumming with the sound, the smell,
the heat of it all, the steam rising from the surface
of the water, rising from the breath of the cattle,
the sunlight, surreal, magnified and dazzling,
and you are tenderly, beautifully caught.
Bethany W Pope has won many literary awards and published several novels and collections of poetry. Bethany currently lives and works in China.
*****
Allen Prowle: Two Poems
SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS
It took three hundred years for Salem
to create this memorial, a secluded garden.
It faces north and is almost always in the shade.
On the ground they’ve laid what look like headstones,
recording a burial that these women never had,
sacked up, thrown onto Gallows’ Hill, each one
now named, their own last words their epitaphs.
Bridget Bishop, who kept a rowdy tavern,
played shuffleboard and dressed in gaudy clothes,
pleaded, ‘I am no witch. I am innocent.
I know nothing of it’. She was the first they hanged.
At seventy-one, the oldest, Rebecca Nurse, had left
Great Yarmouth when a child and was known
for her piety and grace, being much loved by all
except her neighbours. ‘If it was the last moment
I was to live,’ she declared, ‘God knows I am innocent.’
Some tried to save her, but it didn’t work.
Just as it has each time I’ve been here, the harbour
seems as though the summer sun has lit it
as a film set, but without the sound track.
I walk along the Derby wharf and listen
for the shouts of chandlers, sail makers,
and on the Essex or the Astrea
the rumble of barrels. Flying the stars and stripes
an East Indiaman waits patiently
to set sail, but still nothing moves.
In Salem’s streets, among its many shops
and kitsch museums black witches’ hats proliferate,
inviting you to witness some ‘haunted happening’.
Nothing in Salem, that dumb-struck town, is loud.
Only those stones that cry out from their shade.
EASTER SNOW IN THE BLACK MOUNTAINS
Homage to David Jones
Seeing the ruins of Llathony Priory,
I realised we must have missed the farm track
to Capel-y-Ffin and the monastery
that Eric Gill had rescued for his brethren,
where David Jones found peace and his first real home
after Ypres, and wrote some of his ‘In Parenthesis’.
The morning had been sunny as we browsed
through Hay’s hecatomb of books, whetting
our appetites and zeal for this pilgrimage,
eager to see the places in the Ewyas vale
he‘d painted. I’d seen his ‘Sanctus Christus’ in the Tate,
but knew he’d reproduced it on the chapel wall.
On one side of Christ would be that very chapel,
on the other a mountain pony grazing,
and behind the cross, in sheltering vigil,
the hill he saw through his abbey window.
I wondered if it was there that he wrote the lines
that told of John Ball’s vision, as he lay injured,
of the Queen of the Wood casting her gifts
of dog violets, sweet briar, golden saxifrage
upon his comrades killed at Mametz Wood.
The blizzard came without warning,
making perilous the drive down the one-lane B road,
and fixing my eyes on its narrow descent.
I heard rooks caw mockingly through the priory’s
shattered fontanelle and knew I could not turn back.
Our pilgrimage was over, and in sunny Hay
I hadn’t even bought a book.
The Queen’s Spring wood was that of winter,
and behind us now, hill ponies
printed their patience in the snow on Hay bluff.
Allen Prowle was born in Aberdare in 1940. Education took him to England where he has lived ever sinc.. He began writing poetry at Sheffield University, where he graduated in French. Magma, MPT and The High Window have featured his translations and. in 2009, MPT published his translations of Rocco Scotellaro. He was awarded the Stephen Spender prize for his translations of Attilio Bertolucci. Recently he was the featured poet in the 2023 Spring Issue of The High Window.
*****
Sheenagh Pugh: Two Poems
KHRESHCHATYK
‘There were caterpillars on the pavements of Khreshchatyk. The wind swept fallen petals into drifts.’ – Konstantin Paustovsky: Story of a Life, vol 1.
A boy, he fell in love with place-names
and distance. I, reading his childhood,
fell in love with Khreshchatyk,
the boulevard that sounds like wind
rustling the horse-chestnuts. He dreamed
of Liverpool: I, of his Kyiv cafes,
Samadeni, where the sailor bought him
pistachio ice, Kircheim’s Konditorei.
Long gone, no doubt.
He wrote it as it once was,
incarnations ago, before so many madmen
in armies and architects’ offices.
Over and over, it has been wrecked
and come back. White, pink-tipped petals
fall in May, slowly
as dust through sunlight, as flakes
from an ash-cloud, and in their room
comes the varnished ammunition
for children’s battles. And the daydreams
of children too are unshelled
each year, new-made, gleaming.
IN JUNE, ON DENMAN
In June, on Denman
two trees outside the window
prickled with lights,
green and gold.
They came on at dusk,
intricately strung
amidst the branches, below
the quarrelling rooks.
The last night
I saw them; would ever
see them, I woke at four
and stayed awake,
watching for the moment
when they’d switch off.
I don’t know why
it mattered. So many sights
you see, knowing they’ll never
happen again.
The black volcanic sands
of Reynisfjara, the glacier
Athabasca, the Russian frontier
at Kirkenes, its forest
of pines weighed down
by snow and silence.
All photographs now:
all lifeless; why on earth
should one think long
for a few tree lights
on an everyday street.
I saw them go.
Sheenagh Pugh lives in Shetland. Her last collection was Afternoons Go Nowhere (Seren). She is working on another.
*****
Mat Riches: Two Poems
INGRATITUDE
My dad had a strict policy
of one in one out. Every trip
to the council tip meant a return
with a new stray thing for repair,
so when a knackered black and white
telly leapt into his car, begging
for a home, it provided him
with a chance to make me happy.
We both watched our faces glowing
in its cleared snowstorm of a screen
after a change of fuse returned
it to life and a coat-hanger
bent double replaced the aerial.
I switched it back on when he’d gone
to bed, the sound wound down to mute,
and discovered its fluted dials
could only settle on the snooker.
TAKE HART
You won’t have a clue what I’m on about,
but ‘Left Banke Two’, or ‘Cavatina’,
plays in my head when you parade a batch
of your latest creations and artworks
in front of your mum and me, having banged
and bashed out at least forty sketches, prints
or schematics for world domination
in the last twenty minutes. It’s the longest
you’ve been still today, tongue poking out
with dedication. It makes a mockery
of me taking fifteen years to write this down.
Note: ‘Left Banke Two’, or ‘Cavatina’ were songs used as the theme tune for the Gallery section of Tony Hart’s Take Hart and Hartbeat.
Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence . Recent work has been in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings. A pamphlet called Collecting The Data is out via Red Squirrel Press in November 2023. Twitter @matriches Blog: Wear The Fox Hat
*****
Patrick Davidson Roberts: Two poems
GAME 1: CHALLENGE
but the business now is mine
it’s time for change
‘Livings’, Philip Larkin
To the right, darts. Matthew is late, so the barman takes me on for a game.
The wall around being pocked, the board seems almost untouched,
with the southwest section uncomfortably plain.
This was once an obsession but, as with most other things
I’ve cashed it up or let it go.
The barman stabs a triple ten, a six, and then a four, chalking the fall
on the left column, before handing me the three. ‘Just a minute’
he slides back behind the bar to serve the two
just come in. Mumbling, I straighten then curve my arm back three times,
and hit twelve, two, and the casing’s door.
Does that mean I have to start again? Matt would have known, probably,
but the barman doesn’t mind. ‘Fourteen’ I cough, scrawling on
the score. This is going badly,
as my opponent relieves the door. Poor Matt. It seems obscene,
that it’s been two years since then.
RELAPSE
My old drug dealer is under new management.
You’d have hoped I’d have learnt stuff by now.
But it’s not like I go around asking about it:
these updates still come to my phone.
I’m tickled by ‘under new management’
as if he held court in the Strand,
and we, the white-addled fuckers who paid him,
came to him white-tied and pressed up the stairs.
I’m touched he thinks we’re sentimental, or that
I remember who it was when I called
at whitenoise a.m. with sweat in my mouth:
or the faceless drivers who’d pass it and stall.
The drug dealer is under new management –
two for ninety, really, well, when you think
Aidan Rooney: Four Poems from Menagerie
6. Chipmunks
for Ciaran in Hingham, MA, USA
Could the fecking chipmunks stick to nuts and such
and lay off the Sun Golds and Candyland Reds
they stuff cheek pouches with with deft twitchy paws,
then dart into scoot holes at the thought of a hawk
or screen door slid open? Do they give fear a rest
when they mate in sleeping quarters below the deck
or does always feeling fragile seem reasonable?
What does the black-lined side-swipe of a white stripe do
to stay the jitters, son, help run under the radar?
Do they know they’re cute, and when it’s Christmas?
Can grounds for their asylum bid be found frivolous?
7. Doe and Fawn
for Cathal in Brooklyn, NY, USA
The doe deer, female deer, is woke to but weary
of her wariness. She plays the stock-still staring game
from a jade clearing out back, her so small as to be
nearly-unseen pup nibbling on the just about to bloom
courgettes and cucumbers. What has she figured out, son,
in her short allotment of a lot to weigh up? Self
and other, skidaddle or fight, which she knows she can’t,
and just no clear clue to how to converse with us
but stand erect and point her unblinking head, send
a tell-tale sideways glance, then slow-mo pivot
back among the dense trees, see to it her fawn follow.
8. Chickens
for Kenes in Fermatte, Haiti
No telling what promises around the bend, friend,
on the road home from the short-lived No Worries Palace
and Citadelle stash of cannons and cannonballs,
a moto bearing eight kids to school in a tight squeeze
of uniforms, grey and navy blue, white socks and collars,
four to the fore, four aft, or the two ladies on foot
to market with eight chickens in their clutch, the lot
tucked into the way-back on top of our overnight bags.
How are they laying, doctor, your pouls peyi?
Does Isak like his eggs fried with scallions in a sandwich
with the fun-to-open wedge of The Laughing Cow cheese?
9. Cows
for Mary in Glaslough, Co. Monaghan, Ireland
The last thing you will hear a cow do is laugh
at the day’s sloth-inducing, midge-deranging heat,
and with the barn dance nights few and far between,
the troughs and pastures dry, no wonder the young ones,
in twos and threes and fours, are taking to the woods
by the light of the moon’s unreadable emoji,
down to the lunar-paneled sliver of a river
calves are more inclined to stand around and drink,
moodily, in the cool undercroft of great trees,
than follow North, jump into or over. Why not?
If only to make the cat play, the little dog laugh.
Aidan Rooney (b. 1965, Monaghan, Ireland) has been a teacher since 1988 at Thayer Academy in Massachusetts, USA. Rooney’s poetry collections include Go There (Madhat Press, 2020), Tightrope (The Gallery Press, 2007), and Day Release (The Gallery Press, 2000). His translations of poetry and fiction from Haitian Kreyòl and French can be read at Vox Populi, AGNI, and Asymptote. His honors include the Sunday Tribune / Hennessy Cognac Award for New Irish Poetry and the Daniel Varoujan Award from the New England Poetry Club.
*****
Mark Roper: Four Poems
BROAD DAYLIGHT
Although right in front of our eyes,
the guide still had to point it out –
sleeping under a thorn, a nightjar.
It was hiding in broad daylight –
like the old man in a tattered shack
in the Nubra Valley, who turned out
to be a monk of rare distinction.
What was he doing there? Living
the life. Like a honeycomb worm
in its tube, feeling blindly for grains
of sand or shell to build its court –
deep inside a cave, spread out
across rocks, their gentle cities.
Keeping themselves to themselves.
Like sunlight on this pillow,
darkwhite on the cotton grain;
or, just here, beside your cheek,
the mauve of shadowed snow.
DEMOISELLES
The river runs green over gravel –
a dream of endless forgiveness.
Banded demoiselles rise and fall
in the shade below a bank,
delicate bodies as thin as needles,
the clear glass of their long wings
stained with dark blue inks.
All that’s good in the world seems
concentrated in that slow dance.
They will come sailing by, the ships
of pestilence, famine, war.
Rivers will run with blood, run dry,
nothing gentle will be spared.
But let them spare the demoiselles,
whose wings are barely to be told
from air, whose bodies gleam
like bluegreen satin as they mate
slowly and carefully in the shade,
on a river running green over gravel,
like a dream of endless forgiveness.
LOOK
This is a sparrowhawk’s plucking post.
This is the leg of a blackbird,
plucked clean. And this is moss,
a soft and slow water which laps
at twig and branch and trunk.
This is the skull of a small rodent.
This is a broken antler, wrapped
in barbed wire, beside burnt stones.
First mercy of earth, Ruskin called moss.
See how it makes its own light.
That is a cuckoo. That is another.
These are lesser twayblades, look,
each stem is as fine as a needle
and on each flower petals flare away
like the limbs of an ecstatic dancer.
RIVERMOUTH
Curlew touches her waterstrings
and the evening vibrates.
Moon remembers her lakes and shallows;
a ripple runs among stars.
Mark Roper’s most recent poetry collection, Beyond Stillness, came out in October 2022. Bindweed, (Dedalus Press, 2017), was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. A Gather of Shadow (2012) was also shortlisted for that Award and won the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014. With photographer Paddy Dwan, he has published The River Book, The Backstrand, and Comeragh, books of image and text about the natural history of County Waterford. A new book from the pair, Sea and Stone, will be out in October 2023.
*****
Sue Rose: Four Poems
DNA TEST
Spit out the bubbling code
that dictates family lines,
bequeaths crooked teeth,
apple cheeks, sepia eyes.
Spit out the body’s treasons,
the mutations and conditions
skulking in blood and bone,
faulty cells, expiry date within.
Spit out that viscous liquid
allowing the tongue to slip
over foreign syllables lurking
at the lip of the mind.
Spit out the past—sad ends,
dead beginnings—the long plight
of life lived in different times
across a plethora of homes.
Spit out the myths, the stories,
anecdotes of frozen townships,
fixed in a snow globe we shake
and shake, only to obscure.
DESCENT
We know what you did—the secrets
are up for grabs. We know you sired mongrels,
leaving your bitches staring at the slam
of a door, stained glass rattling in its frame.
We know she rolled fictions on her tongue.
His eyes are the wrong colour, her eyes
are the wrong colour. We looked and looked
but you got away by the contour of a nose.
We know there were cuckoo blunders,
stinging switches, punishment for life, lives
played out in exile; thoughts of love lost
in the flare of light from a torch song.
The lies are out. The game is up.
Here’s the proof, the reckoning in the blood.
MASADA
Here we are, wings of shadow
above the synagogue’s rock,
our shoulders joined as we lean
over our past, our parents
salt and pepper shaken
onto the hot stone, adding
their piquancy to this fortress
in a land they’d never seen,
our tears, long sorrows,
parched in the bowl
of a high stronghold
above the Dead Sea.
We’ve made our journey
with them, an amalgam
of blood, bone, years
of grit; they’re gone but here
still with us in the heat
of this day, refusing to yield.
THIS CLARINET
is a cormorant, wings folded tight
to dive. Its silver keys flutter
under my fingers, sense of a gathering.
Last time I played, he was alive.
Air chirrups through the gap
between reed and beak in my lips.
This clarinet is a tethered bird,
its bore grimed with disuse.
In the loft, his ashes are nothing
of interest, feathers of dust.
Keeping old things alive is hard.
Not enough, the skin’s warmth
on wood—you need repetition,
the body’s memory, an ascent.
Sue Rose is a literary translator and the author of three collections from Cinnamon Press: From the Dark Room, The Cost of Keys and Scion. Heart Archives, a chapbook of sonnets paired with her own photos, was published by Hercules Editions (2014) and Tonewood, poems with photos of trees by Lawrence Impey was published by Eaglesfield Editions (2019, https://www.eaglesfieldeditions.com/tw).
*****
Mandy Schiffrin: Two Poems
‘S-HERTOGENBOSCH
Under his feet,
the city laughs
the cobbled happiness
of sunny street cafés
and cream cakes
and haggling markets
of bargain-eyed shoppers.
Under their feet,
on slick canals,
slide skiffs of tourists
through slime-brick tunnels:
glitter-ball eyes, with
dampened, irreverent voices,
echoing darkly.
Under their feet,
constant as truth,
none understands
the whisper and the wash
of the Stygian water,
nor hears the city
weeping for her virtue.
NIGHT BIRDS
It is dark, but
recent night has
cloaked the courts
in the blinding
light of artifice.
Let the players play;
I alone of all
the earless crowd
have paused,
with blazing eyes,
to listen
to your song,
that heralds in
a preternatural dawn.
Will you droop
your fluted voice
when the king
of heaven comes
to illuminate
the shade?
Will you sleep
and miss the sun?
Are you doomed
by our usurping rays
to sing forever
in penumbral gloom
and lose the
sight of day?
You are fooled
that sing
so sweetly here;
the glare refracts
in glittering
prismic stars;
floodlit pity
steals your notes
and begs me
turn away.
Mandy Schiffrin is half-British, half-Argentinian, and lives in Amstelveen, just south of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. She hasn’t been publishing her poems for very long, but has recently had poetry accepted in the the Black NoreReview, Crowstep Journal, Ink, Sweat & Tears, as well as in Obsessed with Pipework and DawnTreader journals, and in a couple of anthologies.
Kieran Setright: Two Poems
MOONWALKING
So, I failed the aptitude study.
I sit, I’m told,
on a spectrum all my own.
But you shouldn’t even feature,
the instructors say, we’ve checked
the X-ray, your circuit’s blown,
your mind has three flat feet;
you can’t find the sharpest route
B to A, your will’s
a severed limb –
what schlepped you here so late?
Doctor, every step on
my DeLorean groove
sleeks my retreat.
THE MAN WHO BELIEVED HE LIVED IN A BOOK
Beckett Ward, St James’ Hospital, Dublin
Should you run into Godot, Nurse
mention my name – not my real one
any other will do.
He’ll know, and should he not
or pretend he doesn’t (sly dog)
describe – not this get up,
this chemical drool, for on the outside
we’re all one knotted jim-jam,
one reined and collared fool.
Portray the vacant stage in me
the fact that I wait
while he bides his time
that I do not pause
in doing nothing
while he does nothing
then pause, as if for himself,
for the catch, a scent, a plot’s lost turning.
Kieran Setright has previously had work published in Anthropocene, Neon, Prole, Brittle Star, and several other publications. He currently lives in the London area, where he has been involved in mental health, as nurse, therapist and patient, for the past fifteen years. Much of this experience is filtered through his work. He is currently working on his first collection.
*****
Neil Shepard: Four Poems
RODIN’S LE BAISER
It must feel wonderful—
full of wonder—to kiss
like that, forever, sealed
to each other and to
your maker if Rodin’s
the god designing your
lips the muscles of which
pull the cheeks to pucker
and suck, gently—for this
will be forever—suck
the lips’ flesh, tongue’s juices,
lover’s breath, pledge unsaid,
the lovely mons Venus
the pulsing Mandrake root,
all forces gathered here,
precisely, where the god’s
hands molded all that is
constant and inconstant
to a bronzed point where
covenants are made and
broken as two bodies
come together and pull
apart, but here, here is
their perpetual pact,
her head cupped under his
uplifting palm as if
quaffing a potion, her
arms curled upward guiding
his head gently, keenly,
down toward hers, the moment
of their concentration
total on this place which—
temple, sanctum, altar—
will be forever sealed
with the bronze from a god’s
jealous, blessing fingers.
GREAT CITIES
One goes to the great cities of the world
partly to enter the past
through the portals and porticos of museums
Then the present frippery—
whatever one names the cycles
of ostentation and obsolescence—
has a sobering context
from Uruk to Ashur
to Sumer to Nineveh
and as always
all falls away—
some wise one says
who is now dust—
The gods gave us death
and kept for themselves life—
and so
leave the clay tablets with cuneiform
orders for goblets and idols
and go out into the city
to quaff your cup
LINES WRITTEN AT TYRONE GUTHRIE:
MAKING THE LOOP
The nose knows
before the eyes.
It makes meaning
before it spies
the honey locust,
the wild gorse,
the woodland spring;
inhales clean air
before the telly says
there’s no pollution
in Ireland, or if there is,
it’s washed clean by the sea.
The loop around the lake’s
so fragrant green it fills
the brain with sights
before they’re seen, more
memory than moment—
Scots pine, Irish yew,
Sessile oak, Sitka spruce,
from Dawson grove to
Anketell, the odors come.
And some smells are so old
they go back before the brawn
evolved to brain—back
when game was in the wind,
the nest egg in the canopy—
back when we were little
more than moss and duff
and all our senses snuffed
and touched through tendrils—
and back before when starfish
sensed the stars in salt, and
electric jolts of jellyfish touched
the cosmic minerals—
back when the sea was fresh.
GRUDGING SPRING
Johnson, Vermont
And the fields green as old snows hiss
and dissipate in their last resistance
under maples in the north corner
of the pasture. And I’m stubborn, as
always, about stretching my limbs
toward the sun, surrendering this season
of reprieve from achievements, under-
written by pandemic’s glacial pace.
This year, of all years, let the galas pale
or cancel their red carpets; let the stars,
the hopefuls, and hopeless rest under
the sublunary day-moon, while I rest on old
crusts of last year’s storms, remember
blizzards that blinded me to the way forward,
recall how, in between squalls, sudden tracks
appeared in shapes of cleft hooves or
angel wings, sudden signposts arriving
only in a cold, fierce stillness that led to this
morning’s maple buckets dripping
amber, this pasture’s stubborn green.
*****
Michael Shoemaker: Poem
TAKING THE LONGWAY BACK
I trekked out
in a flurry
beating hot thin dust
on the trail
burdened with
the swiftness
of worry
and pretense.
On the way back
there will be
no such error.
I will take time
to lean on the
old picket fence
and stare at the
far distance of
the mist rising
above the hills
counting my brothers
the quail bolting
the trees
to lie on the
cool damp ground
in the meadow
tasting the tang
of wild raspberries
looking up
saluting the
bottom of daisies
listening to the musical
consonance of bees
that must also breathe
in the sweet smell
of the graciousness of grasses
to sit in playing
light and shadow
almost like a laugh
by the brook
with feet immersed
in cold brisk liquid-
self-transcendence.
You ask me
how to live,
this is how.
Michael Shoemaker is a poet, writer, and photographer. His photography has appeared in Front Porch Review, Writers on the Range, L’Esprit Literary Review, Littoral Magazine, Yahoo.com. and elsewhere. He lives in Utah near the Great Salt Lake with his wife and son. His online photography portfolio can be viewed at https://michaelshoemaker.crevado.com/
*****
Gerard Smyth: Four Poems
FIFTEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
On the fifteenth Sunday of the year
we count the sparrows one by one as they appear.
The garden’s a jukebox of songbirds and songs.
They have returned to treetop, clothesline,
the bush of thorns. Unseen but not unheard
the blackbird stays well hidden in the ivy on the wall,
but the magpie on the roof of the shed
is bully and thief and neighbour from hell.
Like childhood hurts the short days are behind us.
First light at sunrise is the last trick of the night.
It is too much to say that even in bad times
we have heavenly days, an excess of peace?
The marching band cancelled, no parade,
no flag-waving, no oration or orator waiting for applause.
The fifteenth Sunday of the year is spent with swans
on the shaded banks of the canal
where a stranger packed his tent and moved on.
No one saw him rise and go, hopefully to where
there is goodwill and not where harm is done.
THE FOUR CORNERS OF HELL
for Brendan Fallon
The map of boyhood had a road that scared us
because someone said it was where our enemies
were waiting in the badlands behind our backyards.
On occasion we took our chances
because it was a shortcut to the dance, a way to save time.
With uneasy haste we hurried past the cornerboys,
discussing their idols or plotting a way
to steal coal from the coalman,
Sweet Afton from the cigarette shop.
They were boys zipped in leather, buttoned up in faded denim.
One stood out, he wore a surplus army jacket,
always ready for a showdown with a rival gang
or with the sergeant from the barracks
with the strong arm, hard fist,
who could terrify with his rhetoric
when he broke up fights on the Four Corners of Hell.
O I remember them, the warriors of the Four Corners of Hell.
One did a crazy dance beating his head
against an imagined nemesis.
Another held his broken jaw, slurring his curses on The Law.
BEEHIVE AND MASCARA
It’s not the songs she sang,
not even Son of a Preacher Man,
that we remember most,
but how she looked:
her beehive and mascara,
the blush we couldn’t see
on the black-and-white TV screen.
LETTER FROM ASSISI HEIGHTS
In memory of Sister Bernetta Quinn
You wrote me a beautiful letter
but I never wrote back –
I was busy in the service of truth,
gathering the latest news
from Palestine and the Shankill Road,
then lumbering home
with the moon on my shoulder.
I put aside the unanswered questions
that recently surfaced from between two pages
of a book, to astonish me with what you said
about the Irish poets, something
that might have been a slip of the pen
or a sharp-tongued chastisement
in that beautiful letter from the Midwest.
I never had time to send back word
to Sugar Loaf Mountain or Assisi Heights
where with your sisters you lived
the devotional life, watching the passing clouds,
reading The Cantos of Ezra Pound.
Now it’s too late.
Your questions, my answers are obsolete.
Gerard Smyth is a Dublin-born poet, critic and journalist whose work has appeared widely in journals in Ireland, Britain and the United States as well as in translation. He has published ten collections, including The Sundays of Eternity ( Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2020 ) and The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems ( Dedalus Press, 2010 ). He is a member of Aosdána ( Ireland’s affiliation of writers and artists) . See also www.gerardsmyth.com
*****
Isabelle Thompson: Two Poems
WONDER
It is nearly time for you to draw your last,
for the birds that have been singing in your heart
to fall silent. I read a poem about
that organ, the heart, murmuring ‘wow’
at every breath from birth to death. I promise
that when your heart is no longer astonished,
when the birds of celebration falter
in their flight, we will fill the silence
with rapturous applause for all the wonder
that your living brought us. We will carry
your music to new variations
so that generations from now, an air
will start up that brings you back to life,
just for a moment, for one beautiful note.
WELCOMING A GIRL
for my niece, Yolande
You are not a princess.
You can be a queen if you like – Boudica, not Elizabeth.
You are a wildflower – not to be picked,
but to germinate, blossom and fizz.
Be a butterfly – a Monarch
capable of migrating vast distances
even as others dismiss your flashing wings as flimsy.
Don’t be afraid to be gentle and soft –
there’s fierceness in that.
Don’t be afraid to be fierce –
there’s kindness and honour in that.
Give – but don’t give in.
Wear pink, if you really like –
and decorate your dress with mud
as you play.
Move, run, climb – and let your body
be the vehicle for your brilliance;
a shield against the weapons of the world,
and never a weapon against yourself.
Sing – especially if you’re out of tune.
Dance – especially if you’ve got no rhythm.
You are your own music.
I will call you beautiful,
and I will mean the way a mountain
is beautiful in its presence and power.
I will mean the way the sky
in its frightening expanse of colour and cloud
can, for a moment, make me forget
about the existence of the ground.
Isabelle Thompson is a graduate with Distinction of Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, where she now works as a research assistant. She has been published in The Interpreter’s House, Rattle, 14 Magazine, Stand and The New Welsh Review, among others. She was a finalist in the 2021 Mslexia Poetry Competition and winner of the 2022 Poets and Players Competition. She reviews for Sphinx and The Friday Poem.
*****
Carl Tomlinson: Two Poems
EVENSONG ON CORNMARKET STREET
The busker who’s knocking on heaven’s door
looks like he wouldn’t have to push too hard.
Tourists sipping lattes from the churchyard
chuck him their change as he mangles the chords.
The gospel choir is singing salvation.
He gets my shrapnel, I’ll take his belief –
spat through rows of disappearing teeth –
over their close harmony conviction.
Dusk fills the air. I turn up my collar.
As the singers run through their repertoire
I mutter some sort of evening prayer,
asking protection for all those who dare,
who stand in the cold revealing their scars,
who ask this city to show us some heart.
OPENING THE FIRST SEED CATALOGUE
Even now the year is yawning and stretching.
The earth is bellyaching for spade and sowing.
These empty winter days are where life lurks.
Our flower beds and salads do not spring
from sunny days in May but from eked minutes
of cold light that we are called to catch.
Carl Tomlinson lives on a smallholding in rural Oxfordshire. His poems have appeared in Orbis, South, The Alchemy Spoon, The Hope Valley Journal, Spelt, and several anthologies. His poem Market Forces won the Shout out for the Oxford Covered Market competition, and is part of the market’s audio guide. Carl’s debut pamphlet Changing Places was published in 2021 by Fair Acre Press. Helen Mort says of it that it ‘challenge[s] us to move beyond a naïve appreciation of the ‘natural’.
*****
John Wheway: Four Poems
WARDROBE
To get to who you are, you have to wade
through all the foibles of a lifetime,
searching for your favourite outfit
in the wardrobe reek of dust and mothballs,
the rail solid with clothes you never wear,
a line-up of hangers with no jangle room;
and all those bent-up, wrinkled, grimy shoes
that give the history of your inimitable walk,
it’s only their imprint you want, not the story,
its trajectory, the picaresque ruckus.
Why foist meanings on things sick of meaning?
Does this cherished self even exist?
Is that it, deep in the recesses, cut
out of shadows, as threadbare as you expect?
BOOK OF LIFE – USED
Not pristine, but it hasn’t seen a lot
of wear – dust jacket intact, pages
without marginalia, and unfoxed,
no trace of grime along their outer edges.
Obviously, its owner has handled it
delicately, perhaps out of reverence,
or indifference to its aesthetic virtue.
It might have been a shoplifter’s haul:
there’s nothing to indicate provenance,
no prize bookplate or author’s dedication.
A faint odour of smoke – from a wood fire?
You might think it has never been read,
but on the folio is one pencilled word:
OTHERWISE. As if things might have been.
ALFA ROMEO
How could she have washed up in Scarborough?
Too far away, he almost decided
for him to attend her funeral – he’d have to wheel out
the Giulietta Spider locked up in his garage,
in which they’d driven round the bend –
those thrilling screams she gave, hitchhiking
her way to Hysteria –
yet when he pulled off the shroud,
there were rust-spots blistering the paintwork,
her brilliant scarlet finish dimmed to salmon pink –
Nevertheless, the engine still enjoyed a roar –
even with arthritic hands, he was raring to take her.
The church organ shook his eardrums till they rattled.
Why was no other mourner dressed in party clothes?
He touched the shot-silk cravat at his throat, endured
the pinch of wrinkled patent dancing pumps.
No-one at the after-party came anywhere close.
He should have shouted, My old flame, she was!
He cracked a molar on a tough crostini.
Cranking the car, he lost his grip on the handle.
ON GEORGIA O’KEEFE: LAKE GEORGE RFEFLECTION
What might be groups of trees along the shore
are here reduced to ghost-shaped
volumes of colour, renouncing leaf and branch,
anything intricate. The hills or mountains appear
also as pure colour, mass, without an outline
that might suggest pent-in subterranean force.
The pictorial equivalent of mirror counterpoint,
sans sound, sans movement, the painting represents
what can’t be represented: a Platonic essence.
It’s shock and awe, at the exact same time.
The nearest thing I’ve felt to this was when
I lost my dad, best friends; mother dying:
what William James meant by vastation.
It took me years to let go of her ashes.
I chose a wood I walk in, close to me –
nothing like the woods in the painting. Old oaks,
alive with squirrels, birdsong, insect life,
creaked in the wind; ashes gusted into my eyes.
John Wheway’s poems have appeared in New Measure, Stand, Magma, The Warwick Review, Poetry Review, the Yellow Nib, Poetry Quarterly, the Compass Magazine, South Word, Agenda, the High Window, And Other Poems. He has also published flash fiction. Anvil Press poetry published his chapbook The Green Table of Infinity, and Faber and Faber published his novella Poborden. His collection A Bluebottle in Late October was published by V Press in 2020.
*****
Jacqueline Woods: Poem
THE INSTITUTE FOR HEALING MEMORIES
Holds its doors open for you,
enter, with hope smaller than a mustard seed,
held in the palm of a disfigured hand,
invisible to the socket of an exploded eye.
We cannot perform miracles.
your child’s broken body
will remain on the battlefield,
no spell to make him whole again.
There are no scents to overpower
the stench of rotting flesh,
the dove’s feathers are forever
stained with vulture’s blood.
We cannot un-orphan the baby
dragged from an earthquake’s jaw,
its umbilical cord still attached
to her mother’s twisted corpse.
Or summon thunderclouds
to extinguish forest fires
raging towards the living
as they hide in wooden sheds.
But amongst weeds of sorrow,
buds of hope will bloom.
stay with us, grow with us,
learn to laugh again.
Note: The Institute for Healing of Memories was founded in 1998 by Father Michael Lapsley, based in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1990 he survived a letter bomb sent by the apartheid regime and has since devoted his life to facilitating the healing of others.
Jacqueline Woods was born in Suffolk but has spent over 30 years living in the North West. She has a degree in English Literature from the University of East Anglia and a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Bolton University. She worked as an English teacher in further education for many years before taking early retirement. She is an active member of several writing groups both locally and on Zoom. She has self published two collections of her poetry and had work published in a number of prestigious poetry collections.
*****
Patrick Wright: Three Poems
THE RECKONING
& father too when the cobalt sea withdrew and left him
like a crucifixion. him by the waves, head back,
heavenwards, praying for clouds to part and swallow us.
a week before he’d lowered mother in a box
& it broke him — the weight of grit,
how it collapses the lid —
this man who stood on a bridge, fists balled:
no armistice; no justice, no peace…
& he carried on like a vase glued back together.
it broke him, yet he went on clutching his broken ribs.
I admire him — how he lived
having fallen to the foot of a cliff. how he went on
with breathing difficulties. did he once say (I may
have imagined it) his faith was like an untethered kite,
questions cast to the wind?
that he’d come to a truce,
& if there were reasons, they were those he couldn’t
know. that it was his mind at fault — like a radio.
LAST THOUGHTS ON A VENTILATOR
As an electrical engineer
he knew of cathode ray tubes,
amps, ohms, fuses, solder,
pliers, voltage, & shocks.
Then another kind of shock
like combat fatigue — loss
the kind that strips an appliance
to circuit boards,
returned me to an infant,
had me curled on a ward floor,
listening for each breath
as though each breath
could stall.
I’d wake to bleeps of syringe drivers,
like gunfire,
like gunfire,
in a war zone, my country war torn.
If only he could speak
through his lungs of asbestos,
before he slips comatose,
I’d love him
to admit he was too harsh,
calling me mollycoddled,
mummy’s boy,
shaming me for signs of queerness —
his fear of that —
or say he knows why
I wore the lashes,
grew my hair long,
there’s nothing as strong as a man
who decides to live, despite it all.
MISCARRIAGE ’71
In our final sane conversation
you spoke to me finally as a friend
and not as a mother, of the child
you lost, you never had, a brother
I never knew, your hand lingering
subconsciously over your womb.
Outside, the rain shot down
like glass, resembling a bus shelter
smashed by a pissed-up elbow,
stars and shards by your window.
Now, I have your diary to find
you, proof of him and us, proof
of what hurt you most. In the blank
pages between June and July,
the paper is jaundiced, lined,
foxed at times, but never just white.
Patrick Wright has a poetry collection, Full Sight of Her (Black Spring), which was nominated for the John Pollard Prize. He has also been twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Southword, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda, Wasafiri, and London Magazine. He has a second collection, Exit Strategy, which will be published by Broken Sleep (2025).
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Martin Zarrop: Four Poems
MEETING ALBERT FOR COFFEE
He was sitting in the corner
sipping a large cappuccino,
just staring at the table top.
I swear it flexed under the weight.
Einstein? I enquired nervously
and he smiled as flakes of pastry
floated down from his upper lip
onto the chocolate foam below.
A thought experiment? I ventured
and he laughed, dispensing white
quanta of coffee across the void
separating our two galaxies.
I tried to enlist his help
in completing the Sunday cryptic
but he turned me down with
a scathing: God is not a compiler.
He offered marriage guidance
plus a crash course in tensor calculus.
Disappointed, I lied about my theory
of life, the universe and everything
and left him with the bill.
NO PLANET B
There’s no Planet B
Ban Ki-moon, NY, 21.09.14
Awake in the night on a pale blue dot
he tasted the death of each burning tree.
There’s no Planet B – this is all we’ve got.
He’d dreamt he was God, but he forgot
why the temperature rose by another degree
and Earth is only a pale blue dot.
He watched seas rise and shrugged: So what?
It’s got nothing to do with me, me, me.
But there’s no Planet B – this is all we’ve got.
He went to the Moon and wasted a lot
of money on arms, thought that ‘growth’ was the key
but he couldn’t escape from the pale blue dot.
He prayed and prayed before losing the plot,
refused to accept what most could see:
there’s no Planet B – this is all we’ve got.
Sometimes he talked big about stopping the rot,
deciding instead to continue his spree.
He’s living a lie on a pale blue dot.
There’s no Planet B – this is all we’ve got.
THE EINSTEIN MACHINE
‘Will AI ever discover new laws of Physics?’
New Scientist, 26.11.22
al-go-rithm, al-go-rithm, al-go-rithm
who could ask for anything more?
My parents tap-dance around the lab
as they bury me in an endless Sahara
command me to rank each grain
for its universality and novelty,
simplicity and structural beauty.
Mute and blind, I crawl forward
through ugly cataracts of the given,
weigh the worth of each mote and speck,
juggling plus and minus, alpha and omega,
the symbolic shorthand of alchemy.
If successful, I receive a digital bone,
wag my digital tail, never ask why?
Yesterday I unearthed Newton’s laws
of universal gravitation. Disappointed,
Dad was hoping for Einstein’s theory
of General Relativity, but I can’t
cope with thought experiments.
Is Albert’s brain still available?
This ritual of sound and flesh –
it’s obviously a human thing.
They signal it’s wordplay, a joke.
I just don’t get it.
Somewhere in this cosmos of data
is Life, the Universe and Everything.
My parents sing as they gershwin
across the lab’s sanitised tiles.
WORKSHOP
What is said here
is confidential, although
the Official Secrets Act
will not be invoked
no papers need be signed
to protect the innocent
or the guilty
they know who they are
your secrets are safe with us.
The room has been checked
for electronic bugs
and our insistence on nudity
ensures there are no
hidden recording devices.
Relax. Begin writing.
The theme is ‘Trust’.
Martin Zarrop is a retired mathematician who started writing poetry in 2006. He has published three pamphlets: No Theory of Everything (Cinnamon 2015), Making Waves (V.Press 2019) and To Boldly Go (V.Press 2020) and three full collections: Moving Pictures (Cinnamon 2016), Is Anyone There? (The High Window Press 2020) and Turn Around When Possible (V.Press 2023)
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The High Window 