*****
Mike Barlow • Isabel Bermudez • Lesley Burt • Colin Carberry • Douglas K Currier • Hélène Demetriades • Pat Edwards • Neil Elder • Roger Elkin • Dominic Fisher • Rona Fitzgerald • Hilary Hares • David Harmer • Charlotte Innes • Alex Josephy • Annie Kissack • Wendy Klein • Patrick Lodge • Sean McDowell • Gill McEvoy • Kathleen McPhilemy • Rowan Middleton • Kate Noakes • Karl O’Hanlon • Sharon Phillips • Edmund Prestwich • Allen Prowle • Chris Rice • Patrick Davidson Roberts • Mark Roper • Julie-Ann Rowell • Robert Saxton • Sue Wallace-Shaddad • Penny Sharman • Fiona Sinclair • Patrick Wright • Martin Zarrop
*****
Mike Barlow: Four Poems
THE CHEAPEST SEATS
Hunched up there in the gods,
they’re straining to hear our lines
not quite believing their ears.
We’re deadly serious, our parts
well-rehearsed, our hearts where
our mouths are, the jokes mostly
unintended, though I suspect
they’re laughing at us all the time,
our repeated tropes, our failure
to hear ourselves or one another.
I once witnessed buddhist monks
giggling at images of street beggars.
I was outraged, but later
wondered if there was some
karmic joke I didn’t get.
But when we do, in fact, move on
it seems it’s just the same again,
the same house lights, same catcalls,
same applause, same disasters,
same wars, the script tinkered with
but punchlines always fluffed,
denouement compromised.
And so it goes, until we struggle
up the stairs behind the auditorium
to find a vacant seat among
those crowded ructions in the air –
the recently departed
xxxxxxxxtittering to themselves.
MISSING
A young man on the back of a lorry
sprawls against a tarpaulin,
one foot dangling over the edge.
A cigarette hangs from his mouth.
His uniform’s unbuttoned.
The black pools of his eyes are fathomless.
The soldier standing next to him
fiddles with her gun and looks left
as if she’s talking to someone out of shot.
There’s smoke in the distance.
We don’t know what will happen next,
whether the lorry will jerk and rumble on,
rattling the knives of unseen wounds
or whether he’ll jump off,
throw aside the cigarette, do up his buttons
and advance towards the smoke.
What will he remember of this moment?
And in a time to come
will people he’s never met recognise him?
Will he hold a newborn daughter in his arms
and give her a name she’ll wear on her uniform
when she’s old enough to serve,
or will he one day look out to sea with a son
who is about to leave home,
wanting to explain to him
what he can’t explain to himself:
how he gives thanks for each day
but still feels bad,
how there is always something missing,
how the life goes out of him at moments like this.
STORMBOUND
The lash of sleet, skitter of blown grit, squeak of hinges,
bang of an old door, as the wind, like a locked-out drunk,
throws itself again and again against stone walls:
I’m trying to imagine it, this place I’ve never been,
a ruin on the moor, roof shot, windows boarded, rubble
of smashed china, charred books choking the fireplace –
Mason’s, they called it, though wouldn’t say who Mason was,
only that something happened once, leaving us,
three under-age drinkers making our way from pub to pub,
alone with our imaginations. Hormones and bravado
conceived a plan to spend a night up there,
though when time came to rendezvous none of us made it.
We forgave each other’s lame excuses, and came of age.
Tonight, a lifetime on, I’m stormbound, grapeshot hail,
the room a stir of draughts, the sudden blaze of embers.
Sworn friends we may have been but what I’m left with
is the wind out there, still trying to get to me
as I struggle to recall events that never happened.
BETWEEN TAKES
We’re leaning against a piano
discussing which key works best.
You’re holding a fiddle your uncle
passed down, I’m carrying
a squeezebox I made myself,
on my forearm a dragon tattoo
I surely wouldn’t be seen dead with.
Key and mode are beyond me,
though I’m content to pretend, slipping
from one time signature into another.
Outside, daylight has its way
with shadows and behind us
someone moves chairs around.
We are about to record the soundtrack
to a life lived somewhere between
wish and fulfilment, though whose
is the wish and who’s fulfilled
remains unclear. Who cares
so long as the notes keep tumbling
and we have as many takes as it takes.
Mike Barlow has won prizes in a number of competitions, including first prize in the Amnesty International, The Ledbury, The Kent and Sussex and the National. His collection, Living on the Difference won the 2004 Poetry Business Competition. He has published a number of pamphlets and five full collections, the latest of which is A Land Between Borders (Templar 2023). website: www.mikebarlow.org.uk
*****
Isabel Bermudez: Two Poems
THE HILL
The hill begins to dim
in drifts of morning rain.
By dusk, it is obscured ¬-
a beacon’s vanished light
divides the fields by hedgerows;
months and years now silent in the dark.
Then, at dawn,
the ridge emerges from its empty sky;
a crown of earth, hard underfoot.
Thunder of hooves where a battle was won;
frost, a shoe-in for the snows.
THE SALE
For our lot, divided on this earth –
gold damascened helmets,
enamelled mosque lamps,
incense burners, ewers, basins,
coffee pots, amulets, daggers
and silver repousse mirrors –
provenance is assured and thence by descent.
The silent call of gold-powdered horns
will reverberate in these
nail-thin gilt glass finger- bowls
(a set of six, intact) which shall poise
for absentee bidders
( Rhajastan – 18th century?)
For the invisible hands
taking what was not theirs,
the repaired breaks
and small areas of restoration
on parchment maps;
for an Ottoman Syrian tile panel
(acquired on the French market,
from a private collection)
and these lustre fragments
from a pottery bowl,
the bidding will last
through the long night
of the counting house,
till at last, at the end of the Sale
of Days, dawn breaks
in a thin line of crimson
over empty desert and the low horizon.
Isabel Bermudez is a poet and textile artist. Her collections are Extranjeros (Flarestack Poets), Small Disturbances (Rockingham Press), Sanctuary (Rockingham Press), Madonna Moon (Coast to Coast to Coast), Serenade (Paekakariki Press) and Bar de las Reminiscencias (privately printed with Paekakakariki Press, 2024). She works in the SEN department of an Academy in South East London and is married to the artist, Simon Turvey.
*****
Lesley Burt: Two Poems
FROM A TO B
That sense of hurrying to the next place –
in town it’s one shop to the next – even
your double espresso is gone in one gulp.
Then homewards faster than a stroll until –
at the river they call a natural boundary
that divides your town from theirs
(a distinction between home and elsewhere) –
you can’t cross the bridge without taking time
to lean over railings and watch it run
towards the harbour – its corded currents
move west to east, crossing yours (south to north)
compelled, as it is, to reach ocean – although
when, earlier, you walked the opposite way
it was paused – glossy on the turn of the tide.
the day’s myth
red-sky-at-night dims
ravenous shadows swallow
a cemetery
headstones slouch among
flocks of dandelion clocks
daisy petals close
write the day for
the deep and dirty bones
of those long forgot
Lesley Burt’s poetry has appeared in many magazines and online over the years. Her first pamphlet, Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed, was published by Templar Poetry in 2023 and Alice spins her Glitterball was published by Tears in the Fence in 20
Colin Carberry:Three Poems
DEBUT
i.m Kathleen Harold (1921-2020)
It must be about thirty years ago now, I was home,
and some of my cousins, aunts and uncles came to see me;
we sat by the old turf stove in her kitchen’s cramped green gloom,
gorging on treacle bread, rhubarb tart, washed down with Barry’s tea.
Then from my jacket I produced my book of poetry,
dedicated “to Nana, with love”. She was placing it
in the dresser with the good delph when a blue bottle fly
she’d been tracking lit for a split second and she pasted
it to the table with The Crossing. Someone coughed. The clock
ticked above us. Without glancing at the grim red-grey stain
on the shiny cover she shot me a wry, impish look,
and said: Now, Colin, your book came in handy for somethin’.
BUCEPHALUS
Beautiful but high-strung—whoever tried
to mount the tall black steed with the white star
on his brow ended up on his backside
spitting dust. Hardened riders from the far
corners of the kingdom he kicked aside
with a haughty snort. Thus, the Hetairoi,
Macedon’s elite horsemen, almost cried
with laughter when they heard King Philip’s boy
announce that he, Alexander, would ride
the horse or pay his father the thirteen-
talent fee should he fail. Heedless of snide
remarks, he smiled inside, for he had seen
the cure. Speaking softly to the wild-eyed,
prancing horse, he turned him into the sun,
gripped the withers, and with a surge of pride,
galloped flat out towards the fiery horizon.
EQUALITY
after Benedetti
In the old country graveyard
there are big fancy tombs,
crypts / alcoves / mausoleums,
dressed in the finest holy
marble / but as for social
class distinctions in final
resting places like these / there
are no secrets and all
the poor wee skeletons bear
a striking similarity.
Colin Carberry was born in Toronto but raised in the Irish Midlands. His work has appeared in numerous journals, newspapers and anthologies worldwide: Poetry Ireland Review, The High Window, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, The Irish Times, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, El Norte and in three poetry collections. His poems have also been translated into many languages. His Selected Poems, Ghost Homeland (Scotus Press, Dublin), was translated into Bangla and published in Kolkata, India, in June 2024.
*****
Douglas K Currier: Three Poems
TRAIN
The storm tonight
is a freight train,
the rain behind
schedule, and we
are in the underpass
listening to the roof’s
rumble, the flaring
lights of distance,
trying to stay as dry
as the wind allows.
That warning:
howling, moaning
– that’s the wind.
LESS
espero ser amado una vez muerto.
“Amaneceres del romántico” Joan Margarit
All I ever wanted
will be easier
when I’m dead
– less abrasive,
less opinionated,
less loud – dead,
I’ll be the perfect
guest – less drunk,
less difficult,
less objectionable.
Loved in retrospect
– better than not at all.
IN SLEEP
I twitch like a dog,
muscles responding
to vagaries, twisting,
involuntary jerking
and abrupt movements.
I grind my teeth, clench
my jaw. I wake frequently
for no reason but to bark
and shudder and wonder
where I’ve been.
Douglas K Currier holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and writes poetry in English and Spanish. He has published in several journals and anthologies. Author of three collections of poetry in Spanish, two in English, he lives with his wife in Winooski, Vermont, and Corrientes, Argentina.
*****
Hélène Demetriades: Poem
GETTING TO KNOW MY GRANDFATHER
I’m hanging a painting of clematis
above our table, spot the label
at the back, The Leicester Galleries,
purchaser, Captain Leslie Williams.
I pause, take in the rank, this unfamiliar
title for a man who loved Bedouins,
slept under desert stars, couldn’t settle
back in the family business.
Google tells me he founded a Desert
Camel Corps, Mesopotamia.
I pick up his brass dallah for coffee
with cardamon, the whisky he hid,
run my fingers along his bladed
nut-cracker, open the matchbox
with Leslie carved on to it,
imagine the beetles he smuggled
into school, and later, the shelter
he offered the needy. In a photo
he’s almost as tall and thin
as the Kennel Club high jump
where Titus his schnauzer crouches
on the top bar assessing the sharp
drop – that’ll be Grandpa in a few years
declaring himself bankrupt.
I’m seeing his oily portrait
on Mum’s wall, the carved sword
she hung at his side,
how after she died
nobody wanted them.
Hélène Demetriades’s debut collection The Plumb Line was published by Hedgehog Press in 2022. She has won the Silver Wyvern award, Poetry On The Lake 2022, been longlisted in The National, shortlisted for The Bridport, and highly commended in the Fool For Poetry Chapbook competition, 2023. She is published in magazines, including Harana, Lighthouse Journal, The Alchemy Spoon, Finished Creatures, Raceme, Envoi, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Obsessed With Pipework, The Ofi Press and One Hand Clapping. She lives in South Devon and works as a transpersonal psychotherapist
*****
Pat Edwards: Two Poems
WAYS OF WALKING
I could visualise the path but my feet were switched off.
I tried going on all fours, to gain traction by the addition
of hands and knees. Mud oozed through fingers and small
stones bruised my skin. Seeping cold climbed the branches
of my limbs, percolated to elbows, shoulders, hips until
I felt like I was closing down. The path still pulled at me,
the only saviour in this wasteland of failing body parts.
The pull of the path was like a trawler hauling in the net.
My redundant limbs scaled over and I returned to the fins
of my youth, swimming iridescent amongst blue and green,
a tiny creature in the vast ocean. Sun dazzled as it glinted
on the surface of the waves. I was lifted up, thrown high
above the spinning to a place of utter calm, my feet firm
again. I could visualise the path, remembered how to walk.
LEGACY
If I wasn’t alive I could be sea water or rain.
I could be air above an iceberg, time ticking,
or musical notes brushing over your larynx.
I could be friendship forming or warmth held
between skin and a scarf, words on paper.
If I wasn’t alive I could be a ripple in silk.
I could be the stillness on a lake, time held,
or the scent of rose petals in glowing dusk.
I could be an artist’s inspiration or the taste
of chocolate, the joy of coming home at last.
If I wasn’t alive I could be anything without
a heartbeat; moments passing, timeless,
held suspended like thoughts or prayers.
I could be significant without ever knowing,
more real than all the people who ever lived.
Pat Edwards is a writer, reviewer and workshop leader from mid Wales. She hosts Verbatim open mic nights and curates Welshpool Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies and she has had three poetry pamphlets published.
*****
Neil Elder: Three Poems
THE DENTIST & THE RABBIT
At my appointment this morning,
the dentist told me the saxophonist
playing on Jazz FM was Johnny Hodges,
nicknamed The Rabbit.
Later, intrigued and online,
I found Hodges had died
May 1970, whilst at the dentist;
a fact that struck home
more than the sound of an alto
across airwaves because
I have always believed that I will die
in the dentist’s chair –
reclining with my mouth wide open
a massive heart attack will take hold
at the sight of some metallic instrument
heading my way.
I’d rather go peacefully,
a cliché surrounded by family,
perhaps with Mozart in the background.
Even better would be to drift off,
in the midst of a slow afternoon
with snooker on the television,
the green baize and gentle clacking
of cue ball on red, my last impression of the world.
Either would be better than the indignity
of dying beneath the hard glare of a lamp,
suction tube gurgling against the shouts
of my dentist calling to the nurse
as another hot riff sounds out from the radio,
the kind only The Rabbit knew how to play.
A QUESTION ABOUT MY LOCAL CEMETERY
Who would ever think to build a school next to a cemetery?
Someone with a sense of irony perhaps; so those bored
by double History can stare out from the classroom
and see how all the great and good end up.
Other thoughts may also bubble to the top; the journey
not the destination, is what counts.
And does Michael Pollock, who rests in peace aged twelve,
feel taunted by the school bell that punctuates
the cemetery silence, or is he happy knowing
that he has the answer to the big question
all the students and the teachers want an answer to.
ATTEMPTED ESCAPE
I woke and found nothing:
no pale border of light bleeding-in
around the curtains, no outline of shapes
to interpret, not even my hand in front of my face.
No room had ever been this dark,
or had I gone blind? Panic; is this it?
Is this now me? Think. Reason kicked in –
bed-and-breakfast, a few hundred yards
from where land runs into the Irish Sea.
I had gone there to slip out of my life.
Clean air, long walks and slow reading
of books I should have read years ago.
The black room became a comfort, cocooning me,
filtering the dross from my mind
and when the sludge and silt slipped away
I discovered aspects of myself long-forgotten.
High tides and the empty sea took me
towards sharpened perspectives.
This morning, I wake to West London rain
and the tepid light of drudgery.
Neil Elder has won the Cinnamon Press debut collection prize with The Space Between Us, as well as their pamphlet prize with Codes of Conduct which was also shortlisted for a Saboteur Award.Other work includes Being Present, a chapbook, and And The House Watches On. His latest work is Like This, available from 4 Word Press. He occasionally writes at https://neilelderpoetry.wordpress.com/
*****
Roger Elkin: Three Poems
MELANOMA MINE: FROM SCARE TO SCAR
I: Shoulder Mole
For decades a flat patch,
colour-graded in shades of caramel
delicately embellishing skin,
and, for family, part reason of my being –
No mistaking that that’s Dad, they’d say.
But suddenly becoming something other
and pushing lumpily up,
it was difficult to resist slipping
my fingers under shirt lapel, over
left shoulder, and spidering down to try
its roughness – pincering and circling
the patchy crust, and trekking across
those snecked edges. Again. Again.
Till curiosity insisted on mirror-glimpsings
of this scabbed medallion,
as black as volcanic rock, and gristly-ridged,
with its own slowly growing picón
nudging to eruption,
its hidden menace evidenced
by spills of pinched blood
already wetting flesh and rooting deep.
II: Pruning Roses, the day after the biopsy
A bone-china-fine February sky.
Sun albino, and midges jigging in its rays.
Birds zipping the thinnest of light
together. The garden stirring.
Just the day for tackling ramblers
with their splayed contrariness of growth:
xxxolder woods betrayed by darker bark
xxxand scars where cuts have grown patchy
xxxlike the scabs on healing lesions;
xxxand newer limbs, springy-thinner,
xxxwith spritting nodes of fresh leaf
xxxpinkily-tipped and full of futures.
Always the riddle where to begin,
especially when it seems reckless to slice
away so much of such strong growth.
But you know it’s for their own good.
And no sense haphazardly slashing
at those inward-growing ones:
what’s needed is a clean firm cut.
To hesitate is to snag. And, sooner than
imagined, there it is: a clearly-nicked snip,
in no ways brutal. But how the sap weeps.
And how hope rises that Summer blooms
will blazon again, their spent petals
left zig-zagging over the ground
like freshly-spilt blood.
III: Excision …
a word so hard-edged it presents
no concession, its three clipped syllables
slicked into efficiency by palate, labials
and tongue to create the impression
it’s a cut-above-others – coolly-aloof
and distant as the consonants and vowels
open, then bite finely down.
Just listen to the cutting rhythm
of those plosive blows as though
warning you not to touch:
xxxxxxxxek – sizh – uhn
Yet, right from the beginning
it was a hands-on, intimate thing,
the surgeon tweaking the shoulder-mole,
and finger-circling skin before highlighting
with tip of pen the wider cutting-ring,
all the time brandishing his syringe,
and explaining You won’t feel a thing.
True to his word, I didn’t sense
the stroking blade: its push, the give,
the nick as his slicing knife parted flesh;
and didn’t feel his touch as he stitched
the skin together, but can recall
his caressing fingers gently pressing
down the plaster strips. Apart from which,
nothing else to witness, other than
the splattings of blood petaling the floor
like dead-headed roses.
Roger Elkin has won sixty-three First Prizes in (inter)national Poetry Competitions. Author of fifteen collections, and ex-Editor of Envoi, (1991-2006), he is available for readings, workshops and competition adjudication.
*****
Dominic Fisher: Two Poems
LUX AETERNA
Anonymous 17th century Jesuit astronomer
He takes his eye away from the telescope, then
both eyes closed, he sits back. The giddiness ebbs
a little. He surveys his piles of notes, observations,
the bookmarked commentaries on the scriptures,
the pagan authors alongside Copernicus, Descartes
and the volume currently causing so much trouble.
The old question: Ptolemy or Aristarchus? Now
the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, or
our Holy Mother the Church of which he is a priest.
All of heaven is turning it seems, but which turns
around the other, earth or sun? And then light.
It enters at an aperture, comes like a single thread
upon the retina, has dimension in the mind, flickers
dim in his observatory, is or is not divine, floods in
with dawn, seeps down the instrument from stars
named after heathens, their idols and their angels.
He peers again from one Eternal City into another.
The world tips underneath him, orbits shift, expand
and multiply beyond his calculations. In a darkness
he should not confess, there comes eternal light.
He holds his head to shape a tentative conclusion.
Galileo’s system, at odds with Church teachings
as it is, in strictly theoretical terms, proves correct.
KEEPING AN EDGE
I remember you sharpening knives,
testing an edge against your thumb
intently focussed yet abstracted
or on Sundays with a wolfish glee,
singing sometimes, mock-operatic
to the shlick-shlack shlick-shlack
of the blade against the steel,
to jolly us into anticipation
of an economical cut of meat.
I remember how swiftly it darkened
if we didn’t play along, the plates
passed in order down the table,
Mother serving veg. Bless us O Lord
and these thy gifts. You’d tell us
the fat was where the flavour was.
Sharpening knives, I remember you.
Dominic Fisher has been published in a wide variety of poetry magazines over the years, and his poems have sometimes been broadcast. He has published two collections. The second, A Customised Selection of Fireworks, was published by Shoestring Press in 2022. He was a co-editor of Raceme magazine until its closure last year. He is a member of performance group the IsamBards, and there are foxes and goldfinches on his Bristol allotment. https://dominicfisherpoetry.co.uk/
*****
Rona Fitzgerald: Four Poems
DÖSTÄDNING
I lay them out on my small sofa to be packed, bound.
I’ll use the tan leather case from home – past its prime
awkward, full of scars.
Those burnished chains will go on the bottom –
your love and beliefs, children broken
before they were born.
I fold that brooch in old newspaper –
scratchy reluctant to bend, the pinpricks of its sharp point
reminding me of our once shared room.
Rain has washed away some griefs –
even that radiant scarf didn’t comfort my wounds.
I’ll wrap it around the case to bind harms, charms.
I have to decide whether to keep the letters;
so much of her, of home and family stories.
I swaddle them in old silk with photos of those I loved.
And yes, that weighty red necklace must go too!
I use lots of tissue, shroud
my hurts and tears into visceral gems.
In the harsh landscape of ageing,
trinkets and totems are too much weight.
I’m travelling light.
Note: Döstädning is the practice of Swedish Death Cleansing
BY DESIGN
In Raheny library, we look at magazines –
I’m allowed in the adult section with you.
You trace your finger across the page, memorising
the sleek cut of a Vogue dress in midnight blue.
Wool and silk you murmur; ‘I could add sleeves,
change the buttons.’
My eyes find Austen’s books and the Brontës,
stories of spirited women.
On our way home we walk through a canopy –
beech trees, in summer’s sharp green.
You name flowers, ferns. A yellow butterfly flutters.
We move briskly, chatting, observing.
At home jobs await, setting the table, tidying,
bustle. The rhythm of an overflowing house.
I didn’t manage to follow you –
to settle in the tight lines of a pattern.
VIGIL
Bull Island Bird Sanctuary, Dublin
Forget me nots are out on the edge
of St Annes Park. A flimsy border of blue.
Away from the hospital – machines
whirring, lights flashing, your breath rasping.
I savor the sounds of the park, children’s laughter,
dogs yapping, low hum of conversation.
And, beyond the wall, the Irish sea lapping
on the shingle; gentle, regular, rhythmic.
How many times did we come here, sisters;
dashing along the beach, cascading choppy waves.
Carefree.
Today, I take solace from the water’s calm,
as kittiwakes screech and cry.
I offer a prayer that your heart revives,
returns to beat with ours.
ON MY WALK
January 2024
A baby snug on her mother’s back,
small hand resting on warm skin.
Her mother reaches up, catches tiny fingers.
In Gartnavel secret gardens, gardener Paul
is playing soothing music to indoor plants
to stall their eager flowering.
At byres road corner, unkempt men
like untended flowers. They almost speak,
nod hello to my smile of recognition.
On great western road, wind-bent grasses,
tufts of sprightly stems. Slender snowdrops cluster.
Soul light, sentinel, hope.
Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin; she now lives in Glasgow. Rona writes poetry, stories and creative non-fiction. She has been published in, amonst others, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, the Blue Nib Magazine,Littoral Magazine ,The Arbroath Anthology 2021, Dreich and The High Window.
*****
Hilary Hares:Three Poems
FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE
I miss the men the most – young Bridley,
Sam and Tom and Little Ed and Frank
and Billy Goat – so named because he had a beard.
Six of the best, who trimmed the wick and set
the flame and never ducked a shift. How well
they knew the sea, its tides flowed in their blood.
I miss the sounds their boots made on the iron stair,
their laughter as they shared a round or two of cards,
the smell of bacon in the pan, the softer scent of Irish Malt.
The row of cottages that were their homes have long
been repossessed and redesigned as Get-away Retreats
with bijou kitchenettes and graduated slate en suites,
and office types from Oldham and Dundee queue up
to pay a grand a week to take a break and catch
their breath and stare, and stare, and stare at sea.
These days the lads are stacking shelves. An algorithm
fifty miles away now does their jobs. Its unseen force
will throw the switch that lights the wick, much like a god.
RECIPE FOR A NEW GARDEN
First let it heal, recover from the broken bricks
and splintered wood the builders tossed aside.
Applaud the curious creep of moss and vetch.
In every split and crack, thistle and buttercup take hold,
dandelion roots bore like drills into the under-realm
where worms are moving, sightless, through the loam.
Let the new lawn sit, breathe, accept the weeds
that come to run their fingers through its hair.
Let the birds cool their feet in its green, dip and peck,
dip and peck – magpie, bluetit, sparrow, wren.
Let it rain. Let the grass feel air on its skin.
MY NEIGHBOUR@S CATS ARE NOT MY FRIENDS
Here they are, squaring up like Samurai
as they cling to the tarred roof of a nearby shed.
They’re dressed, as always, in their finest furs,
one in orange, black and white, a robe fit for a catwalk,
the other keeping his powder dry in subtle tones of grey
and taupe. Ready for the fight, they have sharpened
the swords of their claws on my fence. One takes
a practice swipe, the other counters with a hiss.
Tonight, each will curl into the other’s lap as
they watch the fire spit, but now, no-one moves,
each pinning his hopes on the depth of his eye.
Hilary Hares lives in Farnham, Surrey. Over two hundred 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 recent pamphlet, Mr Yamada Cooks Lunch for Twenty Three, supports the Manor Farm Charitable Trust. Website: www.hilaryhares.com
*****
David Harmer: Poem
DAREDEVIL
On her nineteenth birthday,
she ran away from the circus
not wishing to live in a field enriched
by elephant dung and the stink of clowns.
A sister and her no-safety-net husband
one evening slipped from the flying trapeze
cracked like eggs when they hit the sawdust,
her uncle prised open the mouth of a lion
dived in head first, a snap of the jaws
and that was that. Her father the strongman
flexed his biceps and waxed moustaches
in late night excursions around the camp site.
Mother’s long beard kept out the cold nights
knife-throwing suitors were not encouraged.
But both parents insisted on high wire training
from the get-go she failed.
Had no sense of balance, dropped the pole
quit the Big Top and said goodbye
for a job in the bank and a seaside bungalow.
This was years ago, although last weekend
I called in with some shopping and found her
stepping along the garden fence
crying, laughing, as the tears flooded
Mother, Father, look, I can do it!\
David Harmer was born in 1952. He lives in Doncaster and is best known as achildren’s writer with publications from McMillans Children’s Books, Frances Lincoln and Small Donkey Press. A lot of his work for the grown ups is published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.
*****
Charlotte Innes: Poem
GEESE
Two geese saunter along the lake’s grassy edge
with five goslings, a line of little cadets, marching
slowly into mystery they can’t envision yet.
The playful ones dive quickly into still water,
popping up, dipping down, beeping and splashing.
Others forage for grass, but when they see me watching,
they scurry my way—till adults honk and hiss me off.
Back among the trees, I honor the tight-knit gaggle.
Once, I craved a crowd like this, the oneness of it.
Of all the infinite ways we torture ourselves, geese
know nothing—but, mourning the loss of mates or eggs,
they know despair. All too often, the offense is ours.
Geese, I’m sorry, I say to myself. I wonder if
you know how beautiful you are, your sleek black necks,
ribbon of white at your throats, your rich browns and greys.
One of them, I swear, can hear me think. She’s watching
carefully. The air’s as damp as just-washed sheets,
the clouds dark. There’s rain coming. She turns away.
Charlotte Innes is the author of a book of poems, Descanso Drive (Kelsay Books, 2017) and three poetry chapbooks, most recently Twenty Pandemicals (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in many publications in the U.S. and the U.K.
*****
Alex Josephy: Two Poems
AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN TOMB CLOTH
Unfolded in a Brighton loft,
an afterlife. Not of fine stuff,
more like a rag torn from a garment
used beyond wearing, repurposed
as a noblewoman’s comfort
in that long waiting silence.
Flax strands eroded to a golden buff,
all it had to offer was threadbare warmth,
a breath of nature beyond
the blank stone door of the dead.
It huddled close beside the mummy,
wedged in tight to hold her still
against earthquakes, raiders,
or to absorb the distant vibrations
that rocked the centuries.
Conservators peck at its margins
under cold north light, tease out
a blue selvedge, a tattered fringe.
Fragments of neckline, hidden slit
for a pocket; it’s a servant’s tunic.
They don’t try to fill gaps,
and can’t heal it, darkly stained
by balsam: the indistinct outline
of five splayed toes.
An embalmer’s footprint.
Here’s no resurrection,
but a woven bridge has opened
into the vanished past; a mistress
who thought herself immortal
and her forgotten maid.
ROBERT HOOKE CONSIDERS A NAME FOR HIS DISCOVERY
(acknowledgement to Jack Cooper for the prompt)
When I first observed them,
they had no word.
They were so very small,
little rooms next door to nothing.
Into the no of them, I breathed
my softest calling tones
to see what they might answer to.
In uncertainty, I named them Bittles.
Seeing them slide in tiny shoals,
I tried Swimmunculi.
For their vanishing, I whispered Waiflets.
I sang Pinpoints, I warbled Mattermites.
Tickled by the way they gathered
in the depths of the microscope,
I sighed. Oh, these smallest purses,
rich beyond all expectation,
surprising as the store-chambers of bees
or music in the silence of a nunnery.
I’ll call them Cells.
Alex Josephy lives and writes in East Sussex and in Italy whenever possible. She has worked as a teacher and university lecturer and as an NHS education adviser. Her most recent collections are Again Behold the Stars, a Cinnamon Press pamphlet award winner, 2023, and Naked Since Faversham, Pindrop Press, 2020. Her poems have won the McLellan and Battered Moons prizes, and have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. You can find out more on her website: www.alexjosephy.net
*****
Annie Kissack: Two Poems
APPEARANCES MATTER
I swear the things we put in
are not those emerging.
That single lime-green gladiolus for instance;
all unseasonal, screaming its way into October.
The winds will get it. Perhaps I planted it
the wrong way up and hoped for red.
Or those wild teasels eye-lining
on the step right next to the back door.
Birdsown. No laggards these.
Blink and they’re sky high
coming over all architectural
and unwise in such close cat territory.
Once in the middle of a rough lawn,
a peony popped up its pale pink heads
right where the kids play football.
We viewed it cautiously,
as a passing traveller might view
the appearance of some globular goddess
in the squalor of a shanty town;
the forgotten marker of an older,
different kind of garden.
AIRBORNE
Look up but do not look too close
at mad-edged summer mountains,
with occasional pine trees like stray hairs
pressing awkward up and out.
The given world is shifting.
We force ourselves to smile,
all strung out across the view like lights,
like afterthoughts.
Please sit down. But you don’t.
You’re too new to this world,
laughing, darting about,
freshly shod and proud in little blue boots.
You wave to the faces staring out
from other cable cars;
I see you. Look what I can do. I’m flying!
Indifferent cattle graze below.
Up above, closer, dare to peep,
stand harsh reaches of ridges
holding snowslides
and bones of mountaineers.
Please do not press your two-year-old face
against the thinness of this glass.
Do not pitch your tiny weight
against the universe;
better not to rock the box,
not here, not yet.
Annie Kissack is from the Isle of Man where she has taught at the Manx language primary school. She became the Fifth Manx Bard in 2018 and has subsequently has been published quite widely at home and further afield. Her collection of Manx-based poetry, Mona Sings, was published in 2022.
*****
Wendy Klein: Three Poems
HIS MIGHTY BACH
Schwing dich auf: I translate it for him:
Raise yourself up, Daddy (to your god
is implied), your troubled soul, or alternatively,
to swing yourself up. Too late to be proud to
show off my German, my barbaric German,
because he’s long gone, and I am turning into him,
turning into my father, faster and faster,
the tacky old sword of Damocles no longer
hovering inches above my head, but falling –
falling sharply, blotting out our squabbles over
the merits of D.H. Lawrence, his character
vs the magnitude of his work, tactfully forgetting
the time we nearly came to blows over the TV remote,
unable to agree between high culture, baseball, or Top of the Pops,
until years later when we wept together listening to
Bach’s mass in B minor, our sobs in the same mournful key.
And it’s back to Bach today when I open the yellowing pages
of your old fallback – ‘Cole’s Universal Library, Simplified Music
for Solo Piano’ — when I approach Schwing dich auf
on my new/old piano, my clumsy fingers slipping inside
the unwieldy gloves of your hands, picking out all
the wrong notes in all the same places, missing the same
fingering each time, the thumb that goes under, over
and over again, the same mistakes I had to endure
when I was young enough and deft enough to slip
onto the bench you’d warmed, smirk as I sped through
these same old pieces at tempo, impervious
to your audible sighs, not bothering to question
whether they signaled approval or resignation. Today
the truth assails me with each stumbling note –
schwing dich auf, Daddy; swing yourself up,
swing me up.
THE DINOSAUR’S DESCENDANTS
In our crazed desire to encourage wildlife
we’ve filled the pantry with bird food.
Bargain bags of peanuts spill
onto the floor when I reach for flour
or sugar. Sunflower hearts crumble underfoot,
while the musty smell of fat balls rises
from a torn cardboard box wedged
into the bottom shelf. Even the dog
is bewildered as she looks for her packet
of treats, buried now under bulging bags
of dried mealworms. The garden birds,
glutted with plenty, have been joined
by three young pheasants from a field
nearby. Woodpeckers feed upside-down
from a fat ball cage hanging from
a cast-iron hook. The word is out:
a buzzard or some other raptor, strides
through the garden gate, casing the joint.
Soon they will be tapping at our windows
like a Hitchcock revival, these winged beasts,
archaic theropods, returning to rule again.
THE TRUTH ABOUT CANNIBAL LADYBIRDS
Like a domestic version of the plague of locusts,
they come in through cracks and crevasses
we didn’t know existed.
Orange and black and sudden, their dots too tiny
to count, to determine whether they are
foreign and should be squashed or deported,
or domestic, to be welcomed and admired.
They play dead so deftly, we can’t decide
whether to attempt rescue,
or sweep them away, hoover them up,
but when I trap one between my fingers
it oozes yellow in protest,
and placed on the back of my hand
it bites, leaves a wound, small
as a pinprick, harsh as retaliation.
Wendy Klein, a retired psychotherapist was born in the U.S. but left it in 1964. She has since lived in Sweden, France, Germany, and England. She has published four collections: Cuba in the Blood (2009) and Anything in Turquoise (2013) from Cinnamon Press, Mood Indigo (2016), from Oversteps Books, Out of the Blue, Selected Poems (2019) from the High Window Press, and one pamphlet, Let Battle Commence, (Dempsey & Windle, 2020).
*****
Patrick Lodge: Three Poems
THE MASTER CARPENTER OF KINDOS
(“their hands in craft excelling have the mastery”, Pindar)
They will swoon up the temple slope in thousands
to pray to my work, hoping their needs are met,
their fire-less offerings rise to the goddess.
Some say the carver’s skill is grey-eyed
Athena’s gift – my talent is hard-won though.
My father’s plane and chisel were his father’s
before, blades still sharper than a sucked lemon,
swift eaters of wood. No pilgrim can be excited
over a dull, cave-born plank that’s not seen a knife’s
polish, not been warmed by my teasing touch.
There can be no good in a bored god that sits
and moons. My Athena will stand tall, out-stare
all; unblinking, a pole star solitary and matchless
in the night sky. Better than something scraped
together, she is wrought by a sculptor’s soul.
All begins and ends with wood; cedar, olive,
oak, pear – all turned sacramental under my hands.
The chosen block will nag and splinter me day
and night until I work it, work it to loosen the deep
memory of the goddess that lies in its heartwood.
Each tap of the mallet, each curl and sliver of wood,
each gentle gouge and fluted rasp, disrobes,
seduces, unveils the woman in the grain. Tyrants,
emperors, priests may offer votives and drop
baubles at Athena’s feet – but who is god here?
LA GOLONDRINA
(for my mother)
Early evening they gathered
outside. Play it, play it,
they cried; my grandmother
wound the Victrola, set in place
the needle, let swallows
fly free through the window,
down Quay Street to the sea.
See, there is my mother
in the scene; not woman,
not girl. This song of exile
she hears and wonders.
She is stilled, now fatherless,
will soon lose her country.
Her heart is hollowed:
she has learned to speak
a new language whose lexis
is ache. Speaking fills
her mouth with chalk. A line
will be drawn under this;
she will leave this place of music
and sails, will never know home.
También yo estoy
En la región perdido.
Note: La Golondrina (The Swallow) was a song written in the 1850s by Mexican refugees. It was very popular in the late 19th/20th centuriesand was much recorded. My grandmother had the only wind-up gramophone in Kinsale in the early 1920s – an object of much interest. The poem ends with a line from the song which translates as ‘I am too in the land of the lost’.
BREATHING OUT: LEAVING THE HEBRIDES
(with thanks to Ramakhrishna)
Flitting day, all goes weird.
The gale tries to take the roof off,
let the moonlight pour in, sheets
of sleet to steep the duvet.
At the edge of the world, the tide slips
in fast – flipping the island would
make no difference to the view. Water
rises up, water falls down, repeat.
Here’s a deluge as pitiless as a banked fire.
Let’s burn the bedding, raise a flame
to the memory of warm and dry;
time to leave – I’ve had my day.
But stay, says the sea, see how deep I am,
be lost in my dazzle, my shimmy and shiver.
A salt doll pays a high price for such
a dance – a toe dip must suffice for me.
This meander is now over, we must fly,
and below, the floating world recedes.
All roads end nowhere on an island
or return to their beginnings.
We go out in a mist…
Patrick Lodge lives in Yorkshire and is from an Irish/Welsh heritage. His work has been published, anthologised and translated in several countries and has read, by invitation, at poetry festivals in the UK, Ireland, Kosovo and Italy.
*****
Sean McDowell: Four Poems
CURE FOR LONELINESS
When you feel as if you’re forgotten,
take this cure with sad songs and red wine:
nine long walks along a storm-tossed shore,
nine missed sunrises, nine falling stars,
nine drams of whisky, nine drunken prayers,
and nine candles left to gutter out.
But never consult her photograph,
the one with sun and wind on her face,
lest all your forgetting go to waste.
MOLD-O-RAMA
The Field Museum on Saturday,
clamor of crowds wherever I go.
All I have time for are fossils.
They thrilled me as a child.
Pteranodons suspended in
an endless glide, titanosaur
stretching its impossible neck,
mammoth forklifting its tusks.
A guided tour of mass extinctions
spills into a Jurassic hall,
staged scenes of skeletons and what
traces the long-dead dinosaurs
left in stone. I look up from a fossilized
footprint, and there by the doors
to the T-Rex Sue, a different ghost
calls me over—a Mold-O-Rama,
jukebox of magic—and forty-five years
vanish in the rainbow glow of its name.
A glass dome exposes its workings.
The pay slot sucks in my five-dollar
bill, and Mold-O-Rama rumbles awake,
rattles and clacks, revs and hums
like it wants to fly. Two arms
piston together—namaste—
a hiss of pressure and plastic. The mold
splits and—surprise!—there it stands,
a shiny red T-Rex, hot from its making.
When I fish it, fragrant, from the drop
chute, I fear I’ll leave fingerprints.
Ten-year-olds shout and laugh, voices
echoing in the vaulted hall,
and I am one of them again.
CIRCUIT
for Tyler and Sam on their wedding day
Your work to-date has been meticulous.
All the outlets are where you need them,
all the fixtures too. You threaded cable through
the walls of your every day, plated each
joist and stud, and left enough play for life’s
accidents, those nails that go astray
without a thought of what’s beneath. No bad
splice, no loose wire will break its sheath.
Sure, there’ll be brownout and blackout days
when the power cuts off, and all the light
seems squeezed from your home as if from a sponge.
But these won’t last past a candle’s lifespan.
Your current is strong, your breakers infallible.
Your years together ground this circuit.
No storm, no surge, no overload now
will fry the wiring or cause it to fail.
DISCARDS
Some have yellowed pages, some brand new,
these tomes, anthologies, paperbacks
culled from shelves in lifeless offices.
A purge, not by bonfires per se but
by heaps in ninety-five-gallon bins, books
like bricks rubbled by a wrecking ball.
No more Grecian urn or snowy woods,
no more leaves of grass or cold sloe gin.
No Western wind or headlighted moose.
No tempests or dew to send roots rain.
Now Paradise Lost is lost again
and Austen, Hemingway, Shakespeare, too.
Readiness is not all anymore,
nor will hands enough set many free.
Roads not taken are the most worthwhile,
yet few find their solitary way.
Who will teach them to speak what they feel,
not what censors deem they ought to say?
Sean McDowell is a professor at Seattle University. He is the author most recently of the poetry collection Learning to Jump (Resource Editions, 2023) and of Metaphysical Shadows: The Persistence of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell in Contemporary Poetry (Lexington Books, 2022), and his poems have appeared in The Madrona Project, Scintilla, The Lyric, The High Window, and Poetry Ireland Review, among other places. He continues to find inspiration in his travels to Ireland as well as in his home ground of the Pacific Northwest.
*****
Gill McEvoy: Four Poems
DECEMBER 13th, ST LUCY’S DAY
In the garden the white camellia
has flowered, pure as snow,
its boss of yellow stamens lit
like the Saint’s bright candle crown.
You died on this, St Lucy’s day,
Lucy, the bringer of light.
I pick this one white flower
to keep me company, since you cannot –
I would give my eyes to have you back,
but not as Lucy did –
plucking out her eyes to deter
the man who lusted after her.
I look hard at this white bloom,
its stamens yellow as the sun
and see as clearly as St Lucy did
when God restored her sight,
that there is only walking forward,
out of the dark and sorrow
towards the future and the light.
ON EXMOUTH BEACH
At the end of beach, where they’re allowed,
a large brown dog is busy digging, scattering
sand behind him like a storm of yellow rain.
Every now and then he stops to see
how far he’s got, his tail madly wagging
in delight at what he’s done.
He’s down to wet sand now, the outfall
of his work a river darkening the strand.
He steps into the hollow that he’s dug
and vanishes to shoulder height. Enough!
He backs out, shakes himself, then races off
to gallop in the tide, hurling spray around him,
up the beach then down again, uttering his joy
in loud and happy barks.
PRACTISING TAI CHI UNDER THE BIG MAPLE TREE
High winds were pruning twigs
and hurling leaves into my hair.
I had just performed a pattern
known as ‘separating clouds’ and
as I raised my hands
I took the chance
to brush the leaves away.
But one remained.
How clean it looked,
how yellow.
I flattened it out on my palm,
measured its small fingers against my own
then gave it back to the elements:
the wind whisked it up, sped it away,
a tiny shooting star.
THE ANCIENT BLACK POPLAR IN NEWTON POWYS
I’ve listed all the words that might
describe your venerable estate of tree,
counted the paces it takes to walk
round your vast bark-padded girth
you Falstaff of forgotten woods,
your stubbed branches like stained tobacco pipes,
blocked and blunted by dark hollows
of moss and dirty water.
But rage is what kept surfacing:
they’ve built a car park round you.
I wonder do you think sometimes
of releasing one great branch, smack,
on the next town-planner’s car
to shove its nose against the kerb
beside your feet?
Gill McEvoy‘s recent publications: Are You Listening? and Selected Poems, both from Hedgehog Press. A pamphlet Summer to Summer, Looking is forthcoming from Cinnamon Press in 2025.
*****
Kathleen McPhilemy: Three Poems
1911, 1912
In the year of my father’s conception
that ship was still on the water
the women from the mills were striking
James Connolly was in Belfast
the girls were out in the streets
singing and combing their hair
the workers in the band were marching
playing whistle, bodhran and fife
banging the Lambeg drum
two shillings a week for the strikers
women and girls were solid
on the Falls, the Shankhill, in Lisburn.
In the month of my father’s conception
that ship was still on the water
the band ran out of breath and money
the women from the mills went back
James Connolly was in Belfast
he told them to go back singing
laughing and combing their hair
the marchers went back to their flags
banging their different drums
not a penny went on to the wages
of the spinners, layers and doffers
but they sang as they sucked their sweeties.
In the year of my father’s birth
that ship sailed out to Southampton,
women working in the mills
sucked sweeties and combed their hair
my father’s father read the news
in his office or perhaps his morning room
as the sun shone in on the pages
of the Whig or Belfast Newsletter
that ship that had sailed to Southhampton
to Queenstown and then to Cherbourg
that ship with its architect and captain
had sunk in the icy Atlantic.
In the year of my father’s birth
millionaires on that ship and deck hands
fiddlers and passengers in steerage
especially passengers in steerage
were drowned in the icy Atlantic
James Connolly stayed on in Belfast
my father was two months old
when men following Lambeg drummers
men who had winked and paid the drummers
signed their covenant in workers’ sweat
in Connolly’s blood and their own
in the seething ink of the Somme.
CAITLÍN NÍ UALLACHÁIN
Irish women have their own names
hidden in landscape, masked in lenition
and, for the most part, not written down;
Irish women have their own stories
passed on in the folk tales
held in the place names:
Taisie, beautiful Rathlin princess,
fought for by kings of Ireland and Norway,
leaves her name to the glen by Knocklayde.
Gormlaidh, illustrious blue princess,
faithless wife to Brian Ború,
daughter of Leinster, high queen of Ireland,
her name is hidden in grubby amber
Glengormley, suburb of North Belfast,
houses,motorway, industrial estates.
Names aren’t recorded of girls and women
before the spinning wheel, before potatoes,
who worked the land, plied distaff and spindle,
and, challenging English sumptuary laws
tucked their overskirts into their girdles
exposing an abundance of saffron-dyed linen.
THE O’NEILL OF TÍEOIN
(Séan mac Cuinn Ó Néill; c. 1530 – 2 June 1567)
What was he wearing, Shane the Proud,
when he met that woman/Good Queen Bess?
Linen, no doubt, in colours and quantity
Henry the Bigamist had ruled illegal.
Hairy men, he and his gallowglasses,
we guess at locks down to their shoulders
or trimmed at the front or cropped at the back
full beards below and above the lips.
Memorandum from Sir William Cecil
1562, that ‘he be procured
to change his clothes and go like an Englishman’
which he did not but I don’t know
where the linen was made or how they dyed it.
Was the saffron colour crocus sativus
or a native blend of boiled bark and urine
or maybe the whin we used for our Easter eggs?
Usurper earl or rightful king of Ulster
a wily, cruel, lustful man
expert in internecine warfare
who still is other in his saffron shirt
his knee-length tunic, his furred mantle;
evasive, foreign, then and now
he shakes his glybb forward over his eyes
hiding his thoughts, trusting no-one.
NB: A glybb is a long forelock or fringe of hair.
Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Back Country, Littoral Press, 2022. She also hosts a poetry podcast magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing.
*****
Rowan Middleton: Three Poems
CLEEVE HILL
My fingers trace the ridges
of shells from the warm Jurassic.
Lodged in this escarpment,
they face the vale’s acres of air.
A winch rusts above spoil heaps;
the afterbirth of Georgian villas
that glitter in the sun. The trees below
are frothing in the wind.
I fit my hands in crevices,
and haul myself up twenty million years.
A single harebell on a scrap of earth
nods in the wind, luminously blue.
CIRCUS
She drove through life
with her lights on,
revving through the suburbs.
Every glance a performance,
phrases balanced on the line
of a lifted eyebrow.
That parched field
behind the church
became the coolest place.
I watched from the shadows,
waited in the back yard
behind the fuel tank.
When the frost came
I could only guess
where she was.
Someone said they saw
caravans, heard
dogs and hammering.
Someone else
thought they saw her
in Tesco Express.
COMMERCIAL ROAD
A man in shirtsleeves leans against a car,
a pile of paper stacked upon its roof.
The air is saturated with sounds
of engines, horns, and people talking.
Light glints on chrome and glass.
Two friends stop to talk to the man.
They laugh, shake hands,
before he gets in and pulls away.
The papers erupt in a plume
that billows in his wake.
The two men cry out and sprint
after, dodging cars and lorries.
Passers-by proffer sheets from the pavement,
but there are too many. They stream past lampposts,
Captain Cod’s, Wetherspoons, the Ritz pool hall,
until the men can only stand and stare,
shielding their eyes against the sun.
Rowan Middleton teaches English and creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire. His pamphlet The Stolen Herd is published by Yew Tree Press.
*****
Kate Noakes: Two Poems
EGTVED
Teenagers, the same the world
and time over – if you can’t wear
a crop-top to show off your slim waist,
and a short skirt your legs, when can you?
Egtved, the dancer, was no different,
her skirt of knotted cords flying
to a summer drum beat,
her bronze bracelets clanking.
For the binge there was wheat beer
flavoured by cranberries, bog myrtle,
honey. It kept them going
all night before the solstice.
Egtved fingered the solar disc
on her belt, had it settled and centred,
ready for the gasp of sunrise
over field and mire.
Teenagers up all hours, nothing new,
but a sudden fever and in days
she’s traded the barefoot, point-toe grass
for an oak trunk coffin,
is tucked in with her horn comb
and an ox hide. Her friends add
a bark pot of beer – you never know,
she might be thirsty – and a sprig
of yarrow, yellow like her hair.
At her feet her parents fold the bones
of their grandchild in a cloth,
mourning again their lost legacy.
LUTTRA, THE RASPBERRY GIRL
That was the summer he said
stealing raspberries and gorging
myself till my stomach bulged
was the last thing I’d ever do,
that I’d live to regret my greed,
except, I didn’t, live that is.
He was never much good with logic,
but he was handy at a wrist knot
and strong, so strong.
Thus bound, he threw me in the tarn,
held me under as hundreds of tiny
water snails somehow, impossibly,
gathered and swam around my head,
making a black necklace.
And you wonder why my new
twenty-first century face
is fixed with a raised eyebrow.
Kate Noakes’ most recent collection is Goldhawk Road (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Her pamphlet, Chalking the Pavement, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. For more details see www.boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com.
*****
Karl O’Hanlon: Four Poems
From HERRON’S DREAM DIARY
i.m. Benjamin Fondane
XVII
Pigeons break from the rooftops to magnetise a coming storm,
Bucharest draws into itself like pupils on pigeons’ eyes.
Before the break, dryness—a city of regretful dybukkim,
ghosts confected from vain memories of dust and spies.
Then rain plays like a zither, an insinuating jaunty leitmotif
from some half-forgotten film. A widow’s jangled nerves
untwist. Headlamps are climbing the hill; a car of youths swerves
into a layby. Firefly raindrops flit in the lamp-glare, a votive
on the sad hill. The young men, in sombre suits ripped
at the shoulderblades by archangel wings, bashfully bury
a thing. What did Ionesco see in those hygienic merry
student digs and cafeterias? The skin bubbling into rhino hide,
faces sharpen to horns, and evil become another mere puff of air.
The strength of youth is a sword of fire, armoured disorder;
failed scholars and curdled poets conspire in doss-houses, torture
metaphors to death. Who pulls the strings of these legionnaires?
In the library with its dull gleam of brass and embossed spines,
what goes slinking between the stacks and the terrible pyre
of our imagination? And do we know for certain that lovely lines
of verse committed to the page cannot save us from the fire?
XVIII
It’s not like Herron didn’t know he was asleep and dreaming;
if only minutely, he sensed eye-level sunlight streaming
through the airplane windows, the flabby sinusitis of cabin air,
his body that, so prone in the aisle seat, gestures towards maggotry
and the finely spun lacework of decay: what’s live earthed,
flesh purged. His schooldays binged on silvery old photographs
of shaven-headed huddling men. Aesthetes too well-versed
in atrocity, they cultivated boredom, bluebottle psychopaths
pressing pen-nibs into the seeping crops of resigned insects.
The same day the McFaul boy rammed Herron’s gums carefully
into a cloakroom hook, a bomb killed four children on Weaver Street.
The savagery is almost discreet, as if it too wants peace and respectability.
Out in the respectable suburbs of Neuilly-sur-Seine, rhododendron
slathers itself in dusk and counsels calm, harbours without
judgement the blackbird crying wolf. No intimation of summer’s ending
can shake from its blousy branches such ferocious lack of doubt.
Herron crammed for the academy’s examination: Grotius and natural
law, the alien acts, the precise weight of a dead royal mistress’s rustling
petticoat. He took breaks in the cool Ursuline gardens. Snuffling
shadow cast by apple trees embroidered the red bricks in brocatelle.
History, cack-limbed yet cunning, whistled past the scene of disaster,
refusing to accept change, the disastrous crash of reeking coins,
moving through the placid young novices with birdsong
clawing in their mild throats, hosannas for their pierced master.
XIX
As a new cadet, Herron mastered the formalities,
with a good trouser rise and a few scraps of High German,
a seat at the big do by the lake at Évians-les-Bains.
They chewed over the refugee crisis. His notetaking was exemplary.
If he could only steer Ben off certain topics (roadblocks,
the razor tenseness of Alsatian guard-dogs), and back to Poetry,
its gorgeously irresponsible macaw-wings, the probity
of iridescence, et cetera, et cetera. Soap boxes
and parish-pumps were for politicians, and paled into chatter
next to Verlaine’s sanglots longs, Keats’s last oozings
hours by hours… He didn’t deny the in-tray/out-tray Muses,
however: the art of mental reservation, lukewarm water-cooler patter,
meticulous froideur drafting and re-drafting memoranda
in his mind’s consulate of amethyst. Renunciation the mot juste,
his spinal cord tingled when civilians hung on his every comma,
and his good eye meted out an exact tear on the unjust and the just.
XX
Perhaps all Herron’s little poems scribbled between meetings
were an attempt to burgle into childhood’s earliest
memories: the coniferous waft of tinsel from the loft,
the beefy savour of trickling run off from his nose bleeding.
He quickly learned the importance of little gestures: stylized
futility, rote impotence; that timing was everything—
remorse came after; before, well, it would fuck everything
up… Like going on the drink again in that respect, surprised
each time by the same dull consequences and aftermath.
He dreamed in sandalwood during hours of drunkenness,
his lost-love move in white-green patches of light like cooking fat,
light painted by Renoir, and her vanish in the fading brightness.
Karl O’Hanlon‘s poetry has appeared in The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement, PN Review, Poetry (Chicago) and The Stinging Fly. He was shortlisted for the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award in 2023. He lives in County Kildare.
*****
Sharon Phillips: Four Poems
LEXICON
I was washing up and wondering
why Germans used to call fine weather
Kaiserwetter, or, years later, Führerwetter.
It seemed so unimaginable that anyone
would attribute sunny days to Hitler,
I thought I might Whatsapp her to ask.
I’ve owed her an email since we lunched
in Hanover — two middle-aged women,
both thinking about retirement, laughing
as we called each other Frau Professorin
and Frau Direktorin and chatted about
the teenage summer we spent together,
the heatwave, long games of Scrabble
she’d won every time we played.
We glossed over the night we fell out
when she saw me reading Katz und Maus
and told me to forget about the Nazis.
It’s all in the past. The world’s moved on.
TO THE HAPPY COUPLE
21st August 1956
They are sitting at a small round table
in the Broad Plain Football Club.
Here is my father’s hopeful smile,
his brylcreemed quiff, his windsor knot,
the carnation in his button hole.
His hands cover my mother’s left hand.
Here is his bitter and her snowball.
Here is her cream costume,
her freesia corsage, her juliet cap.
Here is her right hand
gripping the arm of her chair. Here
is the curve of her belly,
the dreams she gave up, the gin
she drank to abort me.
REVISION CLASS
Stefan beat iambics on his desk
as we read Volpone round the class.
I can’t help it, miss, I’m a drummer.
My scrawl tattooed the whiteboard.
Introduction. Analysis. Conclusion.
Memorise the cherry quotation
for your exams. How did it go.
Knock a cherry against their lips.
Draw it back. Something like that.
The claggy batter of cold clafoutis,
a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick,
four ounces of cherries in a bag.
Careful, don’t swallow the stones.
De la Mare’s ‘Bread and Cherries’
in Mrs Thomas’s first year juniors.
I shook when I stood to recite it.
Come on now. Speak up.
ROLE PLAY
Grey or navy suits will help you
look the part. Soften them
with discreet earrings or a scarf
but avoid seeming too girly.
Style your hair in a mid-length bob,
cover any grey with a mid-brown dye
and add a few auburn highlights
to give the impression of warmth.
Don’t overdo it. Make-up should
always be muted. Beige or taupe,
a hint of rose on cheeks and lips.
Keep a smile on your face.
Learn to project your voice
without sounding shrill or strident.
Remember that your male staff
have never had a female boss.
Sharon Phillips started writing poetry when she retired from her career in education. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals and anthologies. She lives in Otley, West Yorkshire.
*****
Edmund Prestwich: Two Poems
LOCKDOWN MADE THE SHY BEASTS BOLD
As if disease had killed all cars
they lay by houses in unstirring sleep.
Traffic lights changed pointlessly.
Three doors from our house, a chiminea
budded a fox. The owners,
finding it curled in the cast iron belly,
posted a picture to our WhatsApp group.
When I went on my morning walks
absence filled the city.
Leaves and flowers breathed clean air.
Birds sang loudly through the human silence.
IN A PLACE OF PEACE
Here, the purple acer alive with light
becomes the jagged wall of a wine red rockpool.
Shining sea creatures go drifting past it:
yellow aquilegias
trailing tails or tentacles tipped with pale pink.
Some, face down, survey the sea floor, while others,
angled up and seeming to swim much faster,
go dancing across them.
All our neat front gardens are touched with wonder.
Bright-eyed May has flooded their beds with colour.
Now the potholed asphalt sparkles as bird songs
echo across it.
Edmund Prestwich is a retired school teacher and admirer of other people’s gardens who lives in Manchester. He enjoys reading, writing and watching things grow, especially his four lively grandchildren. He has published two slim volumes of poetry, and his poems and poetry reviews appear in a number of magazines.
*****
Allen Prowle: Three Poems
READING CICERO’S LETTERS
Flies fastidiously dismantled his visions in the forum.
He should have stuck to writing. But even after he had retired
they were afraid he might still speak against them.
So they hacked off his head at his villa in Tusculum.
His own words had gone to his head; he thought he’d made it
when he became consul. Not bad for a boy from Arpinum.
His triumph, exile and return were part of school’s boredom.
Things livened up with his purges of Verres and Catiline.
Now I read his letters: his concern for Tiro whom he had freed
and was too sick, he was told, to travel;
an assurance to his brother, posted abroad, that the work
on his Manilian villa was all under control:
He had told them to move the bathroom somewhere else,
but the stucco was fine and he liked very much
the tasteful use of ivy in the cloisters; apologies to Atticus
for using in a new book an old preface.
Words that did not strike fear, move troops or the odd frontier.
Instead, to a shifty builder, “Not here, over there”,
to a bookish friend, “I’m sorry for such carelessness”,
and to an old slave, “Do take care.”
STILL THERE
The weird metal bars were still on the windows, as
when she lived there all those years ago.
At school she stank in her rags, was volatile,
a freakish side-show no one would sit near.
That day she came, we couldn’t believe our luck.
We chased her home, jeering as she slowly
dragged her feet, and then she turned and just spat back.
I know there has been greater cruelty than this,
but she’s still there behind those bars,
mutely defiant and reeking in her piss.
I stand there wishing she could spit at me again,
as I remember now my shame, my guilt.
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
Unfamiliar with this place where I was born
you mentioned it again: a window open,
and now on a cold night such as this.
I remembered the old retired miner
who still lived there on that hill which now
we labour to walk up and which
I used to run up as a child. When I lived here
I was used to seeing the windows open
in the houses in our street, and only now,
passing this old man’s house, I began at last,
after all those years, to realise why.
Later, back in my mother’s house,
within the darkness of our room, unable to sleep,
I thought I could hear him gasp for breath,
stuck half way up that hill, his lungs turning to stone.
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.
*****
Chris Rice: Two Poems
NON-SWIMMER
I watch you swimming from the bank. You beckon me
to join you. I lie back, feel the meadow slide beneath me
like a tray; sunlight on my face intense as any dentist’s
grimace, wondering which part of me is root. However
long I lie like this, the part of me that never sleeps sits up
in constant vigil, watching those that float or fly but
never down at where I lie, face up on this me-shaped
patch of planet. Panicked by the flaking thinness of its
pastry crust (all that keeps its molten core from turning
you to steam and me to cinder), the part of me that never
sleeps is howling me awake. I sit up in the nick of time;
catch the world that, like a dog forever pleased to see me,
leaps into my outstretched arms, sparkling in the spray
of water shaken, as you surface, from your hair.
RAVEN
Don’t pity me my broken wing on Dylan’s
window sill. My silhouette’s still flying,
blacker than its shadow, sending shivers
down the spines of scarecrows everywhere.
I am what is invisible: the shape of your
oblivion awaiting you with wings,
and in my voice the echo of the deepest
silence it contains. I smell your death. I settle
on its rooftop long before you hear it call.
But my greatest trick is getting you to pity me
my broken wing. It mended long ago.
Though in a way, beneath the crazy paving
of his jagged voice, Dylan gets it right.
Think of me the way you think of love:
flapping mutely at a window, in a song
an old man’s long forgotten how to sing.
Chris Rice started to write poetry again in 2011, after a 20-year silence. Since then, his work has appeared widely in magazines, including Acumen. The London Magazine, Magma, The Poetry Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. It has also been placed and short/longlisted in several competitions. Three extracts from a literary memoir, Diary of a Pembridge Poet 1976-1983, can be found online at The London Magazine. His latest collection is In Transit (Pindrop Press 2024).
*****
Patrick Davidson Roberts: Two Poems
SAMSON
Unpacking the passengers from the boot of my car,
I considered the nearness of dawn: ten minutes away, at most.
Once I’d both cages on the ground, I went round with the milk,
gently pressing the teat of the bottle into each snapping, white-furred mouth.
With the wrecker I smashed the lock of the gate
and hefted the two loads into the field. They nipped at my fingers,
tails fired already in reddish ochre, down to the white tips,
where I started to bind the trailing lengths of stinking wet rope,
pulled one at a time from the bottle of meths.
In the pub I’d claimed I’d equal the Spartans, with a hundred and fifty pairs
of destruction flaming their way through the foreigner’s fields.
But getting twelve foxes was hard enough: the hours spent
in people’s back gardens at night, pulling the fuckers apart;
the scattered fried chicken I’d litter in parks, coasting smackheads,
cottagers, fights, to lure the skinny red creatures to me.
Then into the cages and finding a car – changing the plates, buying the gloves.
With all of them done and their legs bent to action and ready
I whacked the lighter open and turned the creatures incendiary.
The screech of the animals lighting a path that raced the sunrise
to the top of the field in a Rorschach of smoke, a scorch of sweltering air
and the burst of the foxes into the olive grove, over towards
the farm in the distance. And then more light; at windows, the loud noise of sight,
the gaping horror of a screaming field and the hanging cries
of those oily trees dropping curtains of flame beneath the wide mouth of the full sun.
I drove back the long way, leaving the cages, tomorrow roaring before me.
THE TWO NATIVITIES
From Matthew
After he’d been taken away,
and our receptionist was checking my face,
I looked over to her, where she sat between
the gaggle of officials around her, come from the state to see,
to hand her priority, ritual, care.
Their reflective clothes, their alien words
to the pregnant girl on the stair.
What glories of tribute, these,
such tales of visitation,
that she might tell the child
when he asks who his father once was.
from Luke
‘We don’t have passports. Why would we ever need them?’
Three hours into the conversation of the age of the sudden bride,
of whether my work had space, and the story was starting to tremble.
A note-perfect account of the London Olympics Opening Ceremony,
with some quick mistakes thrown in, and the man behind her was looking
pleased. She was looking nowhere but into her hands.
She was holding nothing but herself
and whoever swam inside her.
I counted the cost of a life
were she left to live one outside of her own.
I looked at their application for accommodation at this speed
and at the man because of whom she was learning memory.
‘I can remember Brexit, Trump,’ she shook ‘…if that isn’t enough.’
What do you mean remember, I wondered more than asked.
At my quiet the man turned huge, and I wondered how loudly I’d scream.
And then she looked up, having found it,
and with the last of her old life released:
‘I can remember the Financial Crisis.
And Obama’s first inaugural.’
He began to shout. She looked past me.
She looked into and out of me.
and I saw that small victory as all that she had
to keep them warm throughout
the long walk to another country, where passports wouldn’t help them,
and the weight of what would follow.
Patrick Davidson Roberts was born in 1987 and grew up in Sunderland and Durham. He was editor of The Next Review magazine 2013-2017, co-founded Offord Road Books press in 2017 and reviews for The Poetry School and The High Window. His debut collection is The Mains (Vanguard Editions, 2018), and a chapbook, The Trick (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), was recently published. His poetry has elsewhere been published in 14 Magazine, Acumen, Ambit, The Dark Horse, Eyot, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, The Quince, The Rialto, and on Atrium, Bad Lilies, The High Window, One Hand Clapping and Wild Court, as well as in anthologies published by Culture Matters, Two Rivers Press and Vanguard Editions.
*****
Mark Roper: Three Poems
HEN HARRIER
She’s white stone and bracken
until she isn’t. And then in air
she is the gentlest complication –
a soft flame ghosting the lowness –
a flare and fold of feather
holding steady the head’s reckoning.
And then she’s part of white stone
and bracken again. And then,
across a ridge, is gone, the sail
of a wing raised as if to bless
the watcher in the valley.
EGRETS
The channel at Clohernagh,
a whiteness at first light –
egrets, twenty or so,
picking at their own shadows.
For just that moment,
across a thousand years
they had come, Tu Mu,
from your poem. Startled
into flight, they scattered
across the bay – blossom
of a single hawthorn tree,
shed by a morning wind.
SUNBITTERN
Engine cut,
we drift quietly in,
Manuelo mouthing
your soft call.
From a tangle
of root and creeper
there, sunbittern,
at last you are,
fashioned from dusk
and current, twig
and silver. It’s dark;
even so, bird
with the wings
of a butterfly,
were you now
to open them,
their beauty
might blind us.
Mark Roper’s most recent poetry collection is Beyond Stillness, (Dedalus, 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, Comeragh and Sea and Stone. From The Japanese Gardens, with images by the photographer Margaret O’Brien-Moran, will be published in early 2025.
*****
Julie-Ann Rowell: Poem
TRANSFORMATION
She was a guest and is now my love
warming this cold bald head that’s as smooth
as marble. Alone, without her, I stare
at my changed self in the mirror and grasp at emptiness.
No one has seen me like this, except the wigmaker,
a woman of potency and hurry, who wove magic
from hair sold in South America, probably Brazil.
My Rock Chick pale brown straight hair
classic nineteen-eighties cut, strikes a pose, think
Toyah Willcox, except orange or purple is out.
I’ve never had straight hair, or a fringe. I pull her on –
the other me, and instantly the world’s my friend.
Guys romance me on Facebook, as if I’m not sixty anymore.
If only I’d known a wig would do the trick, to be fanciable.
I was never the fanciable type, my blond curly hair
always looked blow away, messed up, no matter
how much I spent on products, hairdressers.
Can I say a wig saved my life? Alopecia started
like a monk’s tonsure and slowly spread; it knew the way.
I felt how women looked at me, not prettily.
I’m in love with the woman who sold her hair,
maybe to earn money for her kids. I bet she’s beautiful,
she might be sad, or not. She can’t know
what she’s done for me. How could she?
I hope the pay was worth it. Can I say the wig
is difficult too? It’s tight and hot, itches
in hard-to-reach places. And friends must guess –
for so long I had only sprigs of curls clinging.
Now it’s fancy hair slides and silver clips.
If I’m with my love too long, I get a headache,
swallow painkillers and place her on a pedestal of glass.
Julie-Ann Rowell is a multi-award-winning poet. She won first prize in the Grey Hen Press Poetry Competition, in the Frogmore Poetry Prize and the New Writer Poetry Competition Short Collection prize. Her pamphlet collection Convergence was selected as a recommended read by the Poetry Book Society She was a runner-up twice in the Bridport Prize. Other poems have been included in anthologies and many magazines. Her latest collection, Inside Out, was short-listed for the Welsh International Poetry Collection competition 2023.
*****
Robert Saxton: Two Poems
THE GOSPELS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE
Late 6th century; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Inside a prayer of plain oak boards
with a spine of creamy goatskin
in simplest Arts and Crafts style
a lancet of soul-searing words
points sinners again and again
to the star path out of exile.
Precious beyond words, even breath,
if any book were shown to be
missing at the annual audit
such negligence would warrant death,
the bequest in its entirety
to a rival college forfeit.
So it was locked up, like a shard
of the True Cross, and anyone
who petitioned for a viewing
was not only denied but barred,
forever under suspicion,
a flask of wild trouble brewing.
Wormholes, of course, mine any apple
of the Tree of Faith. On one leaf,
amidst those filled with fragrant balm,
a widow has pledged the chapel
to enrich her family’s afterlife
by lifting to heaven a daily psalm
secured by her legacy, ‘one bull,
six cows, four sheep, three pigs, one ox’,
and there’s a relic-list (nails, toes,
hair – mementoes of several
saints the Abbey kept in its black box) –
all unilluminated prose.
And here’s a contract the monks deemed
more enforceable, more auspicious
set in the gospels it was sworn on:
encompassed in this way, it seemed,
like writing your dying wishes
on your skin, conclusive – an amen.
*
At the Archbishop’s enthronement
these gospels, open on their cushion,
poised, wise, mystically awake,
about to lift like a prophet’s tent
in a desert wind or a wild swan
turning westwards on its icy lake
before launching its migration,
felt upraised voices, all around,
funnelled by ancient stone, excite
their atoms to a warm vibration,
two pages in the stream of sound
delicately fluttering into flight.
ON NOT CLIMBING BEN MORE
In memory of David Best (1952–2021)
The sea loch offered the mountain to my gaze
across the mudflats of its narrower, landward end
where I’d parked on the opposite shore,
next to the little post office of Pennyghael.
In front of me, beached, a rotting rowing boat,
and far beyond boat and beach, as complete
a view as I could hope for: three thousand feet
of shapely mountain, rising through summer haze,
from sea level, the peak not too remote –
but then layered views like this extend
for deceptive distances. Climbable?
Yes, if I spent the whole day on Ben More,
pushing with each hopeful step against raw
nature, wearily forcing myself to compete
against my limitations – my heavy haul
of years – for views of islands, lochs and bays
and a glittering sea, in honour of my friend
who one day last July, until his heart
gave out on the cloud-enfolded summit,
besieged this highland citadel, at war
with what the doctors said, unwilling to bend
his freedom to the contours of defeat.
Exhausted, he fought for breath, his days
collapsing into themselves as he fell
down the abyss of the unthinkable.
Commemoration can’t be an antidote,
only a tidier frame for grief that stays
forever at a loss to recognise more
than this absence leaving us incomplete,
this icy blast on the north face of the mind.
I could have left a tribute of harebells behind
on the cairn. Or down below, at Pennyghael,
more lazily, perhaps I should have bought
a postcard to lay in the ruin of that rowing boat –
I remember they had no flowers in the store –
to bless his voyage with some fluttery phrase.
My life, I find, is changed in countless ways
now that I rate so many hopes as obsolete,
as memories call from their far, receding shore.
Robert Saxton was born in Nottingham in 1952. He lives in north London and the author of eight books of poetry. In 2023 The High Window, published his version of Rilke’s The Book of Hours (2023). He has two further poetry books, Not That I Know and Earthrise: Songs of Love and Nature, ready for publication. In 2001 he won the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association’s poetry prize for ‘The Nightingale Broadcasts’. See www.robertsaxton.co.uk for more information.
*****
Sue Wallace-Shaddad: Two Poems
LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER
after Terrance Hayes
Sometimes I almost see, looking
at my daughter, the youth I left behind,
that fearless approach to trying things out,
the belief decisions can be delayed. I know
experience, hard won, cannot be dismissed,
fabric can unravel, one thread at a time.
Age creeps up like unforgiving ivy,
the chances of motherhood fade.
My daughter feels family expectations rise
as birthdays career past thirty. Nagging voices
pick at her sleeves, urging her not to delay,
wishing her marriage, plenty of children.
She knows with new-found experience,
age cannot be dismissed or denied
WOMAN BATHING
After ‘Nude in an Interior’ by Pierre Bonnard
She is half in, half out.
Her body drips, water
pooling at her feet.
Arm raised, she adjusts
her hair, lets it flow
onto her shoulders,
where it sticks on weeping skin.
She cannot expunge the hurt
though she bathes and bathes.
It lays trails across her breasts,
channels salt tears
in runnels down her legs.
She could dissolve
like sugar in warm water,
finding invisible form,
but the damp stain
left by her footprints
would continue to seep.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad has three poetry pamphlets: Once There Was Colour, (Palewell Press, 2024), Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press, 2023) and A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). Her poems have also been published by London Grip, Second Light, The High Window, Poetry Scotland, The Ekphrastic Review, Fenland Poetry Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears and Finished Creatures among others. Secretary of Suffolk Poetry Society, Sue writes also poetry reviews, runs workshops and blogs for The Charles Causley Trust. https://suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com
*****
Penny Sharman: Three Poems
AT THE TROUT INN BY THE THAMES
The bridge on Godstow road is narrow,
single traffic only, a go slow in a car,
you can’t see what’s coming over its hump.
I’ve walked from Wytham to Wolvercote
a few times, past the nunnery surrounded
by purple thistles and cowpats, to sit in the
pub garden, watch chub swim by the weir,
listen to peacocks scream out another drama.
The last time was years ago just me and dad,
silence sharp as cut glass, the empty chair under
the parasol where mum used to sit. Not much
was ever spoken between the three of us,
no evocation of our histories of joy and pain.
What I treasure most is the silence of those moments,
where spray from the river came over the wall,
where the busyness of the pub melted into summer air,
where the red admirals gathered on the buddleias,
where the spired city was over the meadows,
where mum and dads’ faces are still vibrant.
MARGORIE FOUND DUSTING EASY
when she ran away from her marriage bed.
She lifted each vase and ornament like a feather
as she sobbed for her kids.
She carefully dusted underneath each
candlestick and mantle clock. My aunty
always laughed and sang loud like a jackdaw.
She loved Dixie Dean my cockney uncle
who coughed and wheezed a lot.
But when she came round to watch
dad play cricket or when they both
went fishing by Radcot Bridge, she stood
on the bank, watched her float bob up
and down, caught dace and rudd like the men.
She always left her yellow duster behind
at home, made us laugh at Christmas,
a joy like carols and stars in a night sky.
She never told anyone about her pain,
her sadness deep under her duster, years
of missing out, kids hugging her tight.
THE DANCE, HOW A BODY REMEMBERS
I’m watching Michael Longley
on the iPlayer, sway on the spot,
move the joy of Billie Holiday’s
voice around his lymph and blood,
through his bones; I think of my loss
now I don’t dance the rhythms,
release my sorrows to a wooden floor,
barefoot, every cell of me lost
to a guitar riff or lilt of vocal harmonies.
My grief like a lost limb, a ghosting,
an ache for flying like Billy Eliot, me,
a swan dying. Oh God, these knees
unbendable, these hips breakable,
this heart uncontrollable.
Penny Sharman is a poet, photographer, artist and therapist. She was artist in residence for The High Window in 2019. She has an MA in Creative Writing and her poems have been published widely. In 2003 she was shortlisted for The Bridport Prize and
The Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Prize. Her sixth book Sunbathing with Fishermen is now available from her website is pennysharman.co.uk. Penny is editor of Obsessed with Pipework poetry magazine.
*****
Fiona Sinclair: Poem
RELATIVE STRANGER
A foundling photo,
difficult to age
but baby beaver teeth,
suggest pre-brace, so 6 or 7 .
Formal portrait commissioned
by nana no doubt.
The sole survivor of my childhood,
others shed like leaves over
Intervening years .
I study this image of a stranger child .
Only the eyes perhaps ,
genes shuffled and dealing out
grandmother’s brown.
And the look ,
no faking for cameraman’s command,
but mischief, life’s still a lark.
Staring long enough, a treble exposure,
mum’s merriment,
gran’s glee .
A Sibylline knowledge of this little girl’s future,
but powerless to prevent snarling fate
putting pay to that expression.
Still an instinct to mother her , myself.
I carry the photo in my purse
like the child I never had .
Fiona Sinclair has had several collections of poetry published by small presses. The most recent of which was Erbacce Press Liverpool. She is just beginning to write prose .
*****
Patrick Wright: Four Poems
SOMNILOQUY
in a field of marigolds, we met desperately
we were talking, talking
you asked: really, my belongings in storage?
no words for the casualties reported
this clusterfuck of a morning
dawning light on blister packs, serotonin
last night i bled my stomach with aspirin
slowly. this morning
the duvet afloat with tidings, unanswering
my mind a press junket of nightly
wanderings. still talking, talking
through my pillowcase
while in my room, the fading lavender
unfurling orchid, quicksilver rain on glass
you saying i am deathless
with no kill switch, no fail-safe surrender
& then i mention it
SUTTEE
After Joan Didion
This is the raft on which I float —
& yes, a boy
can feel this much.
Pariah dog
or leper,
shunned behind the city’s walls.
To deny the beautiful
is mutable
leaves me a turtle shorn of its shell,
& with the look
of coming out
the ophthalmologist’s —
dilated eyes in daylight.
Spoken of
like an invisibility cloak,
at times I drift, incorporeal.
Widows we’re told
don’t throw
themselves on the burning raft
out of grief.
The burning raft
is rather the place
where grief
would have them pulled.
STIMULUS
DISCRIMINATION
as I exit the Uber
and everything is different
from the day you came out of
theatre
and we picnicked on the verge
the grasses all different
mowed slightly different
each blade of grass different
this despite
the flashback of stitches
smell of antiseptic
screech of equipment
the weather too is different
drizzle on ambulances
the road’s pigment
and of course I’m different
having journeyed through
a different job and love
different clothes different shoes
different hour different
then what’s different
makes you seem further
away
VESTIGE
We all have a room of scattered possessions.
A house once lived in, now a mausoleum.
Even trees push against our window latch,
fingering their way in. Maybe slug trails
or snails, following no clear-cut threshold.
Things belonging to mum that dad kept:
the broach handed back after the funeral.
How come we are here and our parents not?
In the workshop hang the mechanical wasps
we made together. Where is love if not here?
It’s in the space of the now sold Volkswagen,
or in the lopped-down forest area.
It’s through the caved-in floor of the pantry.
It’s in the sideboard where she’d parcelled up
my baby hair.
Patrick Wright’s poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland, The North, Gutter, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda and The London Magazine. His debut pamphlet, Nullaby, was published in 2017 by Eyewear. His debut full-length collection, Full Sight of Her, was published in 2020 by Eyewear and nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His second collection, Exit Strategy, is scheduled for publication by Broken Sleep Books in 2025. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Open University.
*****
Martin Zarrop: Four Poems
STRING THEORY
The cosmic craftsman will not stop knitting.
He’s worked through a universe of patterns
since Big Bang spewed out skeins and swatches,
Goldilocks a pale blue stitch in his catalogue.
The cosmic craftsman will not stop knitting.
Tricoteur Suprême, he has no time for Defarge
who displayed little stamina or aptitude for
knitting, knitting, knitting,
and now he contorts me in ten dimensions
as I try to thread recalcitrant shoelaces
while explaining the standard model of reality
using fermions, bosons and a cat’s cradle.
He gives little away as he works the void,
wefting dark matter into each sleeve
of his latest galaxywear. Panache
may please yet clash with curvature
but you can’t fault him for his flare.
It’ll take a lot of energy to find him
out there in the dark, needles clicking
cast on purl one knit one purl one…
THE HERON
Silent as a totem in the summer rain,
a sculpture in wood perches
on the edge of a landing stage.
Slowly, the boat moves across water
and I am close, too close to believe
in this effigy of feather and beak,
the probing stare of a knowing eye
like yours, old friend, frozen in a past
where we both breathed air and rain
and talk. All gone, but I stumbled
across your Facebook page, that grin,
and left a brief message, just in case.
Now, there is movement in the wind.
Reeds wave in wordless welcome,
reflection shimmers at my intrusion
as, like a wraith, plumage unfurled,
the heron rises on great grey wings.
DRACULA IN THE LOOKING GLASS
My yellowed hands reach up
to touch a face invisible, alone.
Thin eyelids open to the glass;
no one will tell me what they see.
Each photograph displays
an empty space in which I sit
and portrait artists all decline
my fee for rendering a likeness.
Between my drinking bouts
with bats and wolves, I muse
on youth and wonder if my face
is still as handsome as it was
now that I am longer in the tooth.
See, I’ve kept my sense of humour
contrary to rumour, myth and lies
but, given all the blood and hate,
I’d love to look
xxxxxxxxjust once
xxxxxxxxxxxxxinto my eyes
QR CODE
‘Whatever you say, say nothing’, Seamus Heaney
Who can read them, these patchwork
messages from faceless drones?
Maths and Pollock, Morse and braille
only the initiated can decipher
what runes proclaim in black and white,
the purdah’d thoughts behind each grille.
A housefly buzzes unseen glass
hums open sesame without reply
and never sees what should be clear:
there’s no escape.
Beside unsmiling regal heads
lurk snail mail patterns, wormholes
to a Matrix universe where watchers
know your soul’s address and more.
Mind the gaps!
Someone will be checking
keeping score.
Martin Zarrop is a retired mathematician who wanted certainty but found life more interesting and fulfilling by not getting it. He started writing poetry in 2006. He has published three pamphlets: No Theory of Everything (Cinnamon 2015) which was one of the winners of the Cinnamon Pamphlet Competition, Making Waves (V.Press 2019), 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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