*****
Anindya Banerjee • Robyn Bolam • Pat Boran • Malcom Carson • • Martyn Crucefix • Peter Daniels • Mair De-Gare Pitt • Frank Dullaghan • Alexis Rhone Fancher • Marilyn Francis • Greg Freeman • Jeff Gallagher • Mark Granier • Gill Learner • Emma Lee • Alison Mace • Patricia McCarthy • Beth McDonough • Fokkina McDonnell • Maggie McKay • Ted Mico • Sean O’Brien • Tanya Parker • Sheenagh Pugh • Tracey Rhys • Padraig Rooney • Ernesto P. Santiago • Andrew Seear and Victor Adereth • Richard Skinner • Angela Topping • Mark Totterdell • Miriam Valencia • Scotia Vincent • Maggie Wadey • Rodney Wood • Mark Woodward
*****
Anindya Banerjee: Poem
A PRAYER FOR AN ANNIVERSARY
We commend into your hands of mercy,
dear spiders, and all else who live in it,
our house.
Look after it.
Spin your webs well, but not too much.
Spin them simply and softly
For flattery and deceit will get you nowhere.
Birds, try, if you can, not to fly
in through our chimney.
Build your nests, if you like,
But don’t let the young ones
fall through.
We won’t be around to
feed them baby food gruel.
Pine, grow tall.
Deer, shelter in the trees.
River, run, with the autumn rain.
Sky, shine.
And those who are not
Remember us.
Be well.
Anindya Banerjee is Professor of Economics in the University of Birmingham. He has been an academic from the age of twenty-five and has worked in a large number of universities across the world. His specialization is in the world of modelling data but his love is in art, in history, and in the poems he writes regularly.
*****
Robyn Bolam: Three Poems
THE CORNFIELD
a watercolour by W.H. Allen (1863-1943)
That year, there was a shortage of reapers.
It rained so much after the wheat was cut
that grass started to grow in the furrows,
sap green on umber; stray grains set off shoots.
Dawn after the storm, it could have been worse,
though some sheaves leant as if drunk, dishevelled,
while others, sprung out of their ties, were frail,
collapsed, like weary gleaners on the ground –
but the shorter stooks survived, bright, intact,
spiky and proud, upright as bold youngsters
fanning out gold, back to back, standing firm.
The trees were, again, in their old places,
dead branches lighter, and the nimbus clouds
that brought the storm which changed so many lives,
cared nothing for our old ways. They swept through
uneasy dreams and travelled on to town.
AVOCETS
A stray bomb on a sea wall
brought them back from enforced exile
to new marshes.
Waves burst in along the coast
as we flooded land to hamper
an invasion.
Nests were scrapings in the mud;
sometimes only one egg, or two,
but they returned –
avocets we thought were lost –
their elegant, tentative steps
on long, hinged legs;
black-tie sophistication
out of keeping with mud and reeds –
black up-curved beaks,
thin, scissoring call: we keep –
what you reap – deep, deep; their fine bills
sweep, side to side
and they dunk black-capped, hooded
heads beneath the water to sieve
and swallow shrimps.
Ruffled with ebony frills,
wings fold, spectacularly white,
feathers close-trimmed
but, spread for flight, white becomes
background for strong black symmetry:
perfect balance –
bracing backs, shielding shoulders,
marking out each bold black wing tip –
reversible
strength to see it both ways, as
black and white complete each other,
re-setting peace.
FLAMINGO
…when I die, I’ll turn flamingo…
i.m. Kathryn Bevis
A flamingo knows how to loaf,
does it to perfection – and days are long
in paradise so, when a newcomer arrives, the main
plan is to party, and no-one could fling
themselves into dancing on rose-tinted stilts, or make that goal
pure poetry, as well as you, Kathryn – resplendent in flaming
shrimp pink, you shimmer your free spirit among
this friendly, symmetrical flamboyance – it’s their great gain:
our loss for now – a flamingo will never say ‘adios amigo’
but: ‘till I see you again, dear friend’, whatever the lingo –
so stay in the pink; brave, happy, gregarious: we’ll all be along.
after Kathryn Bevis’s ‘Anagrams of Happiness’ in Flamingo (Seren, 2022) & The Butterfly House (2024), with credit to Terrance Hayes for the form.
Robyn Bolam has published four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. New Wings (2007) was a PBS Recommendation and Hyem appeared in 2017. Her other publications include Eliza’s Babes: four centuries of women’s poetry in English. She is currently completing a new poetry collection, Listening to the Future. Her podcasts include: A Breath of Fresh Air: https://wordsforthewild.co.uk/?page_id=13360 The First Swallow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmfKPmscGf4&t=36s Why I write https://www.rlf.org.uk/posts/robyn-bolam-wiw/Writers who inspire me: https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/robyn-bolam-wim/www.robynbolam.com
*****
Pat Boran: Four Poems
SCYTHE
I saw the scythe, the grim reaper’s
question mark, that great, steel, glinting,
biting blade, that number seven, biblical
in its horror, edge through the long grass,
folding life into death, the seed heads collapsing,
the seeds released and broken and spread
in a cloud, in a fog, in a veiling of dust,
folding and overlaying and overlapping, layer
upon layer, as the long bright asking of it slipped
between serried ranks of grass and chambers of air,
opened and hollowed where rabbits ran, where foxes ––
who knew? –– slipped in and out of civilisation, in
and out of view, from one world into the next,
where the scythe blade now simply swept
all in its path, all with a sound
like a summoning up of silence,
the summer’s summary, but soft as breath.
THE SITE OF THE BATTLE
The site of the battle
is a parking lot now,
a field of slow cattle
and a copse of young trees
gaunt against the sky:
birds nest in their bones,
and, year after year,
they burst into bud, leaf and flower
that few ever slow down to notice,
and nobody owns.
WATER FORGIVES
Water forgives. If like me
you wade out into fear, into the physical grasp
of three near-drownings over fifty years,
two in pools, one only minutes from here
in the sea when I panicked thinking my teenage son
was out of my reach, a horror which
Has left me struggling ever since
to go back to my depth, that small step
into nothingness as real, as profound
as the distance from the stars to here,
from the drifting body to the reaching, grasping hand.
But water forgives. It takes our breath
but it waits to take our weight as well
if we can only give it. Giving
is what it’s all about. In truth
we do not swim, or do not merely swim:
we give ourselves to water and, in turn,
it takes us, and takes away our doubt.
THE HIGH WINDOW
My father locked his keys
into the four-storey
old mill building
he used as a joinery store,
so it was up to me,
aged, I think, fourteen,
and straight out of school,
to start slow-climbing
the ladder he’d borrowed
from the house next door,
higher than its roof,
higher than the trees
that ringed and rounded
and set it back from the road,
my two knees knocking,
the ladder, spineless as rope,
bending and rocking,
bile rising in my throat,
until I reached the gaping hole
and clambered in, the leaves
in rolling waves below me,
my clothes stuck to my skin,
the huge dark craft of the place
lurching and leaning,
the river that had ceased
to flow through it
a hundred years before
now roaring in my ears.
Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise, Ireland, and has long since lived in Dublin where he’s worked as a festival programmer, a radio broadcaster and, these days, as a literary editor. He has published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose and edited or co-edited numerous anthologies. Since early 2020, he’s also been making short poetry films, many of which can be seen on his website at www.patboran.com. He is a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s affiliation of creative artists and writers.
*****
Malcom Carson: Two Poems
FROM A JACK TO A KING
Harry the dustman, always polite
in and out of drink, besuited,
Brylcreemed, and when the eyes began
to glaze, still he knew bad language
was infra dig when not in work.
Then the snatches of song as though
he’d been singing in his head the while.
…from loneliness to a wedding ring…
When he wanted to impress –
Did you ever sail the Batavia boats?
I did! – the pride in another life.
If you saw him lugging bins
from back yards, down alleys, shoulders
leathered against abrasion, tedium,
you both knew not time for recognition.
There was a question on a quiz
the other day when ‘Batavia’
called to mind Harry and
those boats he sailed, had never left,
just like rags of remembered song.
IF YOU WANT TO GET AHEAD, GET A HAT
And Tom Strahan, Uncle Tom,
knew that well enough for changing
after a ‘scrotum tightening sea’
bathe on Antrim’s coast, we’d all cram
into the booth with its slimy
wooden duckboards, to get dressed.
But Tom’s first item, not pants
or trousers, nor shirt with tails
to protect such shrunken modesty we’d left,
would be his cap, his faithful duncher,
bollock-naked, but getting ahead.
Malcolm Carson was born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. He moved to Belfast with his family before returning to Lincolnshire, becoming an auctioneer and then a farm labourer. He studied English at Nottingham University, and then taught in colleges and universities. He now lives in Carlisle, Cumbria. He has published four full collections, the last of which is The Where and When in 2019. All are from Shoestring Press.
*****
Maggie Wadey: Two Poems
NEEDLEWORK
She’s always been good at this:
darning, patching, turning cuffs,
renewing old sheets with ‘sides-to-middle’.
Making good. Washing, ironing, stitching.
In her hands, material is transformed.
Faded is fine, frayed edges, stains, even, recast
as arty, rips as drama, and yards
of shabbiness recalled as merely fallow,
as fields must sometimes lie.
Mending invisible.
But skin is different. Old scars
are stubborn, wrinkles multiply,
flesh shrinks from the needle, threads break.
Stretched waist-lines stay that way.
Undaunted, she accepts the work
of time, and, slipping off her aged pelt
refashions it with pleats and freckles,
a tracery of veins; with dimples in new places,
breasts soft as ash and swags of graceful
crepe-de-chine where muscle used to be.
Semi-transparent, textured fine as silk,
this reworked flesh will be the last,
most transient, her most suggestive dress.
I DREAMT MY DAUGHTER WAS A CHILD AGAIN
I dreamt my daughter was a child again
playing with her own children in the garden of our old house
and they were all three around the same age,
somewhere between nine and eleven, two girls and a boy.
This seemed at the same time both perfectly natural and inexpressibly
strange: mesmerizing, beautiful, and sad.
The children shared a certain gravity, and grace.
They were alike in features, gestures, cries, deeply immersed
in the searching, calibrating tasks of childhood as they found their place,
learned their moves, challenged their given status and made up
their future lives. And I wanted so very much to protect her
from something – my daughter, I mean – but in the dream
I was powerless either to act or speak out.
Her face, a stormy Bellini angel outlined against the trees,
was enigmatic, focused on the game, deep in the moment,
single-minded – a look I rarely see in her more adult repertoire
of haste, anxiety, her promise always to speak tomorrow,
or maybe the day after. Never now. And I comply.
Life happens as you look the other way.
Her own failures as a mother are, I know,
intimately bound up with mine when she, my only child,
great gift of my youth, arrived to find me riding high
on the full flood of life, too much taken up with her inconstant
father, careless, self-involved, my youthful years a fugue of hunger,
chasing after things unknown. And in my dream I understood
that what I wanted so very much to protect her from
was my own younger self.
I ached to fold her back inside my heart.
But one word spoken, one wrong move on my part,
and the spell is broken. So in my dream, as in my life,
I stay where I am, silent. This all seems at the same time
both perfectly natural and inexpressibly strange:
mesmerizing, unalterable, and sad.
While there on the darkening grass
my child and hers, untouched as yet by time, dance on.
Maggie Wadey is a writer of fiction, screenplays for TV, memoir (most recently The English Daughter, Sandstone Press, 2016) and poetry (Acumen, London Grip, Pomegranate) and twice winner of the Wells Poetry Competition. She has forthcoming a collection of poems and images with Paekakariki Press. She lives in Hackney with her husband and a thousand books.
*****
Martyn Crucefix: Two Poems
MOBILE CAR VALET
‘Before, behind, between, above, below’
Like a pair of lovers back-to-back bored in bed
his white van closes rear bumper to bumper
he opens the doors wide and starts to squeegee
the mucky hubs of the big black German
from a sudsy bucket he works the dusty body
with a chamois leather inscribing S-shapes
like the briefest foaming of bold graffiti over
and round wing mirrors and shining roof rails
then balanced on a tyre sweeps half the roof
now the other side and inside across the length
of the dash a pale duster the armrests especially
working the driver’s side then a jet-spray
jumps into hissing life spilling gassy whites
over the wings and the tyres his best weapon
set back in the van then out with the ancient Henry
its scarlet chess piece and snaking black hose
used to scour the seats deep into the footwells
and the chamois is back again to buff stray drops
on windows with windolene it smells good to him
now the doors slammed the remote locking chirps
as he carries the fob back into the marble foyer
like a hatchling his van waits out the length
of one smoke nothing to say to the big German
where it glitters alongside already turning away
ON SOUTHAMPTON STREET
after Bertolt Brecht
A mizzling cold fog on Southampton Street
then suddenly a market stall
with its spectral blooms
under a bare bulb preternaturally lit
a sullen frizz-haired girl cutting stems
and I’m dumbstruck as one who’s found
the thing he looked for
here—at arm’s length—chrysanthemums—
nothing but them! I blow on stiff fingers
plunge them into a pocket for coins
but between fumbling silver
and glancing back up to check the price
scrawled on a yellow card it feels as if I
interrupt myself—a dull under-voice
lifted in bleak remembrance—
since last night you’re not here or any place
Martyn Crucefix has published many volumes of his own poetry alongside highly regarded translations of poetry by Peter Huchel and Rainer Maria Rilke. Till recently he was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library. He blogs at http://www.martyncrucefix.com
*****
Peter Daniels: Two Poems
TELEGRAPH HILL WITH JASON B
The hilltop shows a city of feelings, endlessly signalling, but
their semaphore might as well be lost under mist. How do I
locate feelings – is this the gut, the heart, the head, or is it
somewhere else? But feelings are there, inside me and you.
If only I could read your telegrams, say them out loud: but
maybe this is a dance, down there on the floor of my being.
Can I make my arms and legs show who I am, how I feel
and what I want? I know what I want is this dance with you.
Now and then, love letters I’ve posted have come back, but
if I could trust how they float, I might put some in bottles
and you could interpret the tide coming your way, as if
they could answer themselves. And I could answer you.
How do I understand it all? I don’t know the procedure. But
I can rescue a bee with a saucer of sugar water to drink till
it feels alive again and free. Standing here now we can
watch for feelings, take them, hold them: I’ll say them to you.
WALLS
There are walls all around us: houses make themselves homes because
we ask protection for china dogs and tweed-filled wardrobes,
and the house is not disloyal.
Inside there are floors, which divide us upwards and down below,
staging domestic levels of threadbare carpet and linoleum.
The structure is mostly docile.
Outside, the street is a row of houses, walled and fenced: fancy bricks,
cheap bricks, railings, privet. Over it there’s this moon, like a hole
in the sky, leaking dazzle.
Peter Daniels has published four poetry collections, the most recent Old Men (Salt, 2024), and previous books My Tin Watermelon (Salt, 2019) which formed part of his PhD at Goldsmiths College, London, A Season in Eden (Gatehouse, 2016), and Counting Eggs (Mulfran, 2012). He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013), and as queer writer in residence at the London Metropolitan Archives he wrote the obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby. Website: www.peterdaniels.org.uk
*****
Mair De-Gare Pitt : Four Poems
COVER HER FACE
(‘Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle, she died young…’
John Webster. The Duchess of Malfi)
Rain dimples the surface of the bay.
Sheila’s room in the Home has a sea-view
but she can’t see it. She lies in bed, masked
for safety. All the staff are masked for safety too.
Including Shaheen, her young carer, who sits beside her
stroking her thin hands. Someone swishes
the curtains apart. Outside the sky is full of clouds,
the air purrs with fine rain. Inside, the room is brigh
with cloud-light, rain-song muted though the window pane.
The pier struts into the sea, its girders cast
dark shadows on the waves. The rainmist starts to lift
but Sheila still can’t see her sea view. Shaheen glances
at the dazzle of light that is the window.
She can’t see the sea-view from her seat
at Sheila’s bedside. Sheila tugs the duvet,
white and soft, up to her chin, sinks her head
onto the pillow, white and soft. She hears the quiet rain
and is comforted by clouds and gentle hands.
Her old dream drifts away.
Now her mind is full of the brightness of air,
the shushing of rain – white noise hums in her head.
The day grows hot and humid; sea glints
with its usual grey-brown tinge.
Shaheen recalls the interview she had
for this job. How she arrived, smiling, in her hijab.
Perhaps Sheila will be safe with her masked face.
Perhaps Shaheen will be safe with her new mask.
TEA AT THE CAFE ABYSS
They sit across a table, stare at scalding tea,
faces cold mirrors of each other,
one frozen fury, one a ghost of disdain;
one is flesh, one is glass.
Between them, on the formica,
a lake of pain has spilled.
Something has been lost from each,
dropped into that silent gap, miles wide.
Perhaps they will find it again in a joke,
a smile that will lift their lips
and their eyes; bring back a flush
of life; ignite a flash,
a flame to warm their wintry world
as they sip cooling tea.
STILL LOVELY
(An ewer from the Treasury of Saint Denis, circa AD 1000)
Soft as muslin, light whispers through crystal.
Petals engraved like ghosts of themselves
recall a day they blushed in the sway of warm breath.
Bone structure stays when colour fades.
Loveliness of form persists the longest.
Cheekbones outlast the peachy skin.
Like a woman who has borne life
it stands proud in its usefulness.
Its gold is uncorrupted.
It begs a loving touch.
CANDLEMAS
In the light’s leavening
shall I be lifted
from the lowering
of long nights.
Snow-drops, white-bonneted
shoulder through earth’s weight.
Whiteness washes
through earth’s roar.
There is quiet at its heart.
Its breath laps my lips.
The candle flame like supplicating hands
prays light into the dark.
I will be scoured clean
as a scrubbed stone step,
a white space on which
I will make marks.
Mair De-Gare Pitt has had pamphlets published with Culture Matters: Power Play, and The Gwent Wildlife Trust: Hive Mind; has won R.S.Thomas, EHP Barnard and Bread and Roses poetry competitions and has featured in several anthologies and magazines .Her children’s novel, Meadowsweet, was published by Gomer Press and her study of Tagore and Yeats, The Maya Yogi and the Mask, was published by Salzburg University Press. She has become a full time carer for her husband, and hopes to write occasionally.
*****
Frank Dullaghan: Four Poems
TWO BOATS ON THE DODDER
Dublin 1976, for Marie
I peeled wet bark from a trunk and broke it:
two curved hulls. I gave one to you,
showed you how to pierce its soft underside
with a twig, fix a leaf for a sail.
You set it bumping with mine in the shallows.
We watched them circle, move apart,
return to nudge each other.
Then, of a sudden, my boat breached
the dash of the current, sped off,
while yours, for a moment, faltered.
I remember the translucence of its leaf
alone against the glare and the glitter.
Then it too kicked into the hard run of the river.
Now here we are almost fifty years later
and still at the edge of my eye,
how it caught up, spun mine into eddies.
THE CROSSING OF WATER
Dundalk, 1960s
There was something captivating in the tales told
by old men building myths, of brothers
who had crossed water, returned made men,
heroes courted for their wisdom, celebrities
with a subtle change in accent and cloth,
kings in their own country for those two weeks back.
They were the boys. They could place name
their way around a map of England,
name the pubs and the building sites, the fights,
digs with strong tea – a people apart,
beyond our own small knowing, grown up
more than the adults of home.
And I dreamed of the exotic.
Curled within that solid circle of boots,
in the long, dancing, shadows thrown by the fire,
in the clinked grouping of empty bottles,
in the dark cave of my imaginings,
I could taste the salty sea.
SOME DAYS
It’s like that half stumbled step
I took on a stopped travelator,
like confusing the devil
on my left shoulder with the angel
on my right. It’s like knowing
by heart the wrong things and
never learning what is good for me.
It’s like the way only rain
can make me listen to the world,
all of it happening at the same time;
the way thunder can lull me
to sleep, close me into a drawer
of darkness. It’s like those dreams
when I know I’m dreaming
but they won’t let me out,
as if my heart is not right
for the world but then this black girl
smiles at me in the street
and I swear for a moment the world
is a place after all. How can we live
with ourselves when we know
so much? Sometimes we need
to shut the door. It’s as if someone
I love has gone horribly wrong.
It’s the way I believe
so easily and hold on too long.
There’s a little boy here
with his hand up.
But it’s one too many questions
when all of my answers
are the same. I’m an amadán.
It’s like I’d never been born.
Note: Amadán is the Irish for ‘fool’.
WAKING UP
Birmingham 1977
Some days she’d never leave her bed
or she’d sit, a mirror looking out of herself.
I’d come home to a room, empty,
her back drawn across the window
like a curtain; dust taking the shine
off the blank TV screen.
Other times I was early enough
to catch her unexpectedly, make her laugh.
She could be serene at the sun-flickered edge
of the reservoir, drawn to the water,
its unceasing lap and fold.
But always, after, her head locked shut
and even though her nipple hardened
to my thumb, her mind had left.
It took years.
I don’t know how they found the key.
It was like waking up, she said,
to find the screaming had stopped.
Frank Dullaghan is an Irish poet living in the UK. His most recent collection is In the Coming of Winter (2021), Cinnamon Press. He is currently working on a New & Selected collection.
*****
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Three Poems
SAFE HARBOR
Because of you, I like our bed rumpled, the sheets a scrunch at the foot, blankets tossed
on the floor. Like you’ve just been here. Or you’re soon coming back. You spoil
me, and now I crave bedclothes of Egyptian cotton, cool against my skin, their
high thread count, a reverie.
When you ask me what I want, I confess I long for a fleet of eiderdown pillows
to engulf me. You are ocean – the in and out of the tides. When I wallow
in extravagance, and dream of even more – this, my darling, is your fault.
When you’re gone I sleep kitty-corner on our king-sized mattress as if a sentry. As
if to say it’s you, baby, or no one. This constancy puzzles me. I’ve never been a
one man woman, preferred a boatload of lovers, always someone new on deck,
to add a bit of luster to my life.
I was lost, rudderless. Then you showed up, upended my world, showed me
the upside of monogamy. Now the thought of anyone touching me but you
is unthinkable.
When you ask what I crave I say bathe me in excess, give me safe harbor.
Let’s sail around the world, my love, those high thread count,
Egyptian sheets billowing, at full mast.
DEAD BOY PANTOUM
I watch Forensic Files on repeat.
After I’ve lost my only son,
I wonder how others cope with grief.
Are they rejuvenated or repaired?
After I’ve lost my only son,
How to sever that tether, kill the pain?
Are they rejuvenated or repaired?
Remember to breathe, my son would say.
How to sever that tether, kill the pain?
I watch ID Discovery on repeat.
Remember to breathe, my son would say.
I relive my boy’s demise almost daily.
I watch ID Discovery on repeat.
Get over it! my sister says.
I relive my boy’s demise almost daily.
Grief is addicting – a gateway drug.
Get over it! my sister says.
I wonder how others cope with grief.
Die Trauer is addicting – a gateway drug.
I watch Forensic Files on repeat.
DAMP
I like to get in right after you, the shower still steamy, the water already
hot. I like how it beads the shower door, trickles down. Like you trickle
down my leg after sex, that lovely gush when I stand up. I admit,.
I’m loathe to wash it away, prefer the lingering, sticky wet.
I wash myself with the same soap you’ve just touched, the bar sudsy,
slick. I want to smell like you, put that soap between my thighs, lather
all my hidden places. Sometimes when you’re gone I touch myself,
pretend it’s you; desire spilling out like lava.
Alexis Rhone Fancher is a poet and photographer. She has published ten books of poetry, most recently Erotic: New & Selected, Brazen (both NYQ Books), and Triggered (MacQ Press). Her photo book of 100+ Southern California poets will published in 2025 by Moon Tide Press. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, Alexis lives and creates in the Mohave Desert with her husband, Fancher. www.alexisrhonefancher.com.
*****
Marilyn Francis: Poem
ESSENTIAL ITEMS FOR A JOURNEY
take the coat with frayed sleeves
put in the pocket a jar of olives
and a black and white photo
of three on a bicycle
made for two
take the musical teddy bear
with one eye and one arm
who played rock-a-bye baby
until his key was lost
a book is permitted
make it a good one
it will have to last
pack life a user’s manual
pack a jigsaw puzzle
of the mona lisa
take up the magnolia
which flowers once
in spring
pick a dandelion
for your buttonhole
green gloves for your hands
pull on the boots
that wait at the door
and walk
into the night
Marilyn Francis lives and writes poetry in Radstock, North East Somerset in what was once a mining village. She had a collection of poems published quite a while ago and some other poems published in various poetry magazines both on and offline. The most recent being, The North, Poetry Salzburg Review, Dreich, Raceme, also Dempsey and Windle, The Rialto and One Hand Clapping.
*****
Greg Freeman: Three Poems
FISHING WITH TED HUGHES
A small fleet of killer submarines line up, still,
startling, shapes unmistakeable, visible
in sunlight, not far from the junction,
on a sleepy summer afternoon.
I’d heard there were plenty of pike in the canal,
but to see them like that, sunning themselves,
waiting to attack; the mystery
of the missing ducklings is solved.
The trail of offspring whittled down each day.
One left. This canal crosses Surrey
into Hampshire but leads nowhere.
Kingfishers, cormorants, dragonflies thrive.
And these, self-propelled torpedoes.
I conjure him grinning like his quarry
– me, no fisherman, a soft southerner,
he, from the north country, dismissive:
Is that all the words you can come up with, lad?
In reply, I silently cast my line, in the belief
that I’ve already netted something.
EEYORE’S BIRTHDAY
after AA Milne
A burst balloon,
an empty honey jar.
The one, nothing more
than a stumble; the other,
absent-minded appetite.
The gloomy recipient
accustomed to a life of thistles
and mild depression
felt surprised hope,
disappointment, joy.
Damaged gifts
can still mean something
when placed together.
Party time: here we go
and there we go.
The old grey donkey
lived alone in the forest,
looked down a little
on the other animals,
his sarcasm above their heads.
Remained satisfied his poetry
was superior to Pooh’s.
But affection outweighs
all else. Sentimental?
One way of looking at it.
More essentially, true.
This gentle parable
of friendship and soft toys.
THE VIADUCT
Why was it built? The line needed
to take a one hundred and eighty
degree turn to avoid
the Duke of Northumberland’s estate.
The price: a tunnel, and a viaduct
crossing the Edlingham Burn.
Blast those shooting parties!
No matter: the navvies
set to work. The curve adds
to its Grade II listed beauty.
A sign says Private: No Right
of Way. It closed to passengers
almost a century ago. It appears
much shorter than from below.
I take snaps, trudge across it anyway,
think of locos passing
with two coaches
or a lengthy goods train,
the sound of it approaching,
steam clouds over the burn.
Just imagine!
Greg Freeman is a retired newspaper sub-editor, who now works as a journalist for the poetry website Write Out Loud, and contributes to the Northumberland online and print community magazine Curious Squirrel. He has published two pamphlets: Trainspotters (Indigo Dreams, 2015) and The Fall of Singapore (Dempsey & Windle, 2022), and one full collection, Marples Must Go! (Vole Books, 2021). He is studying for an MA in writing poetry at Newcastle University
*****
Jeff Gallagher: Four Poems
FREEDOM
She holds, in her hand, all of space;
the earth is between her thumbs;
nails once grime-grey and splintered
now tap conversations, or extract
from air every note and phrase.
Knuckles that tightened, white
with the agony of childbirth,
or were scrubbed, bunched, bloodless,
the dry palms clotted with soot,
now form the clenched fist raised.
The white band on the tanned finger
is a symbol of independence;
talons are poised, ready to ravage
any who challenge this artifice,
this freedom, hard-earned, proud.
Since her first followers emerged
from caves, on song, on message,
she has waited for emancipation:
no more the mute victim, the abused
slave with bruised head bowed.
Trusting no man, her faith lies
in the bright screen’s conversation
and the mysteries hidden beyond:
the voice seduces, but there is truth
in its clear predictive affection.
Her hymns, on shuffled playlists,
promise uninterrupted joy;
her prayers are cures for ailments,
recipes, travel tips – how to reach
nirvana through connection.
Now, with her delicate blessing,
ghosts are raised from the dead;
language buckles at her touch
into crude saws and acronyms
so her blind tribe can read them.
Sensing the vibration in her grasp,
her thumbs embrace the glass;
her eyes, enraptured by the light,
give thanks for each new vision
of the world. For this is freedom.
Wittgenstein and I
I need the silent spaces. This is the behaviour
of a spoiled infant. My thoughts cannot be spoken.
The wind has caught the kite. This demonstrates
a vital law of physics. The pointless toy of a child.
We stay at the sign of the Grouse. This is a symbol
of our tribal bloodlust. A picture of a clumsy bird.
Later I return from the war: a great sacrifice
and a noble victory. No words can describe the horror.
I have given away my inheritance. My bold attempt
to be enriched. Wealth acquired to fill my emptiness.
I try to mine the meanings of words. They are written
in some letters you kept: a record of indecision.
These are my closest companions. They offend
your narrow code. They will demand nothing of me.
My brothers killed themselves. Our family were
shamed by their sin. They gave up their right to live.
Our left-handed pianist survives. Left is sinister,
gauche. What remains when all else is destroyed.
This is my brilliant teaching career. I am a man
who hits children. Proving humanity is worth very little.
Later I ask for their forgiveness: a means of
clearing my head. A parody of devout self-abasement.
I lecture at Cambridge. I am God arriving
on the 5.15 train. This statement may be a joke.
And they call it cancer, and I am a great light
snuffed out too soon. This is the language of evasion.
And this is my famous name. It describes a genius.
Or a pointless attempt to explain the inexplicable.
The meaning of a word is its interpretation.
Let us dispense with words: cease to be ambiguous.
Let us fly our kites, leaving others to explain
what we do, knowing we should not speak, but be silent.
MY FATHER’S SON
After the first few soft years
of fledgling rebellion, I learn
respect. The frown, the slap,
the flushed face, the voice
raised in anger are all to be
feared, like the darkness.
Hard work: the key to success,
toeing the line, signing up
to a smug mythology of rules,
a cabal of invisible hands
sculpting our malleable hearts
and approving our rightness.
And then, the serious obedience
in making money, of earning
a crust – the upper crust, perhaps,
or just working steadily towards
the comfortable and the bland,
always seeking your endorsement.
Ambition resides in an (almost)
clean licence, tax declared on time,
the mortgage paid, a partner
well dressed and socially savvy,
kids brought up to learn the same
shibboleths, the same lies.
I regret the fantasies that revive
the anarchist in me, or the poet,
as I play loud music alone in the car
or consider curing world poverty
by aping blessed Saint Francis.
Then I hear your steady voice.
Behave, it says. Trust the government,
believe in your country. Obey the
law, invest in your future. Devote
yourself for others, as long as
they are reasonably respectable,
and support your community.
And avoid the bad eggs: their place
is the gutter, the prison cell.
Ours is a better class of confinement,
ruled by a fear of not belonging.
And so I have followed your one
true path. Bless me, father.
FRENCH KISS
Only a hundred miles from my front door,
much more in my memory than accordions
and onions, the traffic orbiting L’Etoile
like a chariot race, the enigmatic shrug
of a gendarme’s shoulders.
Once the wind stood fair, and the French maid
lay pouting, a rite of passage for this aspiring
bourgeois, who rode on the backs of seasoned
travellers, idling hors de combat, lacking
their je ne sais quoi.
Struggling to converse with the natives, faux amis,
a phrasebook and much pointing were my only
landmarks, while I guzzled two franc communion
wine and stale baguettes like a brash Bardolph
bragging of Agincourt.
My half-erected tent, a shambolic enclave
of Englishness filled with leaflets showing places
I would never visit: as the dry earth hummed,
I escaped to find a richer dust concealed
in my Dad’s old kitbag.
Then we petits banlieusards, like two enormous
armies, met for an hour beneath a tree,
laughed, and talked of Gide, of Sartre and Camus,
la rive gauche, le fin de siècle; and then cemented
Anglo-French relations.
Proud pilgrim and conqueror, I returned with my booty
from the duty free, and Polaroids showing somewhere
abroad, having gained the required dedouanement
to be seen as another sentimental traveller,
a man of the world.
Boats make me sick and tunnels claustrophobic.
But let us continue our cultural exchange,
as we rendezvous in Canterbury: we kiss again,
and I feed your expectant mouth, your croque madame
stuffed with my fried egg.
Jeff Gallagher is from Sussex, UK. His poems have featured in publications such as The Rialto, Shooter, Dreich, Littoral and The Journal. He has had numerous plays for children published and performed nationwide. He was the winner of the Carr Webber Prize 2021. He has been a teacher of English and Latin. He has also appeared in an Oscar-winning movie. He has no handles.
*****
Mark Granier: Poem
ANYWAY,
it is the same walk
with the same friends, cousins,
our conversation a circuit
of concerns –– new aches, old
ribbing, politics–– the pattern
so worn we can trace it
with a guffaw, a full-bellied sigh
that returns us to marvel at
how easily we become what
we are, impossibly in our sixties,
putting on our new
old-men clothes with only
marginally more difficulty;
who feel, creaking beside us,
the companionship of that
baffling contraption, the past,
and how aimlessly aimed
is the approach of the great
nothing: footfalls, the wheel
vanishing under the wheel
with these tensile
silences that build
in the gaps between words,
never quite closing when
one of us takes up the thread
to let the frayed end
have its say, murmuring
our old refrain: Anyway
Mark Granier’s fifth collection, Ghostlight: New & Selected Poems, was published by Salmon in 2017. His sixth collection is forthcoming in 2025.
*****
Gill Learner: Three Poems
GEOGRAPHY LESSONS
Until I went to grammar school, most of the world was pink:
the British Empire spread from Canada to the Antipodes;
took in great tracts of Africa, all of India, and many
other countries in between. So, it was true to say: The sun
never sets on the British Empire.
Selecting O-levels, I rejected Geography for German.
Europe, apart from our neighbours across La Manche,
stayed vague: Scandinavia was north and cold; Italy
and Spain meant sun and wine. Further off, the Middle East
had oil, dates, and kibbutzim as refugees settled
in the ‘Promised Land’. But I began to pick up scraps
as lands rebelled to cast off European dominance.
So I learned the patterns of the globe in fragments
through the news.
The Algerian War flew me to North Africa and a guy
I had a crush on was enlisted to re-open Suez to the West.
Others doing National Service were sent to quell the Mau Mau
in East Africa, and soon Rhodesia threw off British rule.
We rented a TV. So it continued: my daughter was born in ’67
while Greeks v. Turks turned Cyprus into a battleground,
and Arabs tried to defend the Gaza Strip. The Balkan States
unravelled, and my ignorance of the South Atlantic ended with
the Falklands war. Now, knowledge of Eastern Europe grows
as Russia battles to reclaim Ukraine. Why do powerful nations
always need to subjugate? What a sorry way to learn.
MISS PIKE
I was hypnotised by her flatness and her pallor
like a peeled twig. Her face is now a blur
but her bobbed brown hair hung from a centre parting
white as a canal drawn on the board. In double lessons
once a week she made us trace continents,
shade the Empire pink, dot in capitals and ports.
Most compelling were the hands – thrust straight
into her cardigan’s patch pockets, elbows angled out.
One would jerk free to accuse or indicate with a bleached
and skinny pointer knuckled with a pinch of skin.
She held chalk by careful fingertips, wiped them on
a man’s checked hanky which she refolded square.
Were they once chubby? Would a closer look have
found a map of childish accidents? Did they
push a Sunday mower, roll out pastry? Could they ever
have wiped tears, stroked a stubbly cheek?
Who cared? I dropped Geography as soon as possible
and stayed indifferent to ‘abroad’ for many years.
BOTH SIDES
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now Joni Mitchell
Literal and metaphorical, they’re in everybody’s life. Despite
the saying, not all are silver-lined – some lurk on the horizon,
laden with threat. But they can bring us technicolour sunsets,
dramatic warning dawns.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAs a child, supine on the lawn, squinting
at the sky, I didn’t know that I was doing what Hamlet and Polonius
did: they saw camels, weasels, whales; for me, more likely castles,
dragons, ships. So often I was told, at home and school, I had
my head in them. Nowadays success lifts me to the one that’s numbered
nine; rejection breeds a nimbus of gloom about my ears.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxDuring weeks of never-ending showers,
I try to remember there are people who’d be glad of sodden ground
and dripping trees. No clouds: no rain and so no crops, no flowers,
no greenery, no birds to decorate the air with song and flutterings;
livestock would like dead on dusty ground, and yet more parents grieve
over lifeless young.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI’ve never formed, or even seen,
a Brocken spectre. Maybe if I did, it would soften my dislike
of clouds.
Gill Learner’s poems have been published in print magazines including Acumen, Agenda, 14, The French Literary Review, The Interpreter’s House, North, Orbis, Mslexia and South; and online in The High Window and Canvas; in a number of anthologies e.g. from The Emma Press, Grey Hen Press, HappenStance Press, Second Light Publications and Two Rivers Press and won prizes. Her three collections: The Agister’s Experiment (2011), Chill Factor (2016) and Change (2021) are all from Two Rivers Press.
*****
Emma Lee: Two Poems
YOUR HOUSE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN IN THE ESTATE AGENT’S WINDOW
But it was. The standard kerb-side photo of a bland exterior.
The spruced up lounge still had the over-sized sofa for a family
of five. None there to witness the estate agent photographer’s lens.
The kitchen taken at tactful angles to give an impression of space
but unable to filter out your cheerful touches. You gave this home
heart: children’s crafts, timetables, home-baked snacks for friends
and the “out-snark the “Strictly Come Dancing” judges'” evenings.
Traces of glitter still wedged in cracks obstinately refuse
to be swept away and linger in the dark.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxYou didn’t want black
at your funeral. You’d hoped cancer would give you enough time
to see all children reach adulthood. Your ex., your “fifth child”,
moved back in to care but reverted into old habits, drowned
his sorrows. You forced yourself up to clean his vomit in the small
hours so your children could rise to the scent of fresh coffee, unaware
of background battles before your final hospice stay. The house,
to be sold for the mortgage and hopefully leave something for your
children, put on the market by man whose name was not on the deeds.
THE APPEAL OF COLD PORRIDGE
(Korean idiom: like eating cold porridge)
On a damp, English morning, warm porridge appeals.
A quick mix of oats, milk and water, a dash of syrup
and hold the bowl in two hands for comfort and eat
before it turns cold and congeals into a hardened mass
that requires soaking or intense scraping to remove.
Swap the oats for stir-fried sweet rice with stock,
chopped vegetables, nuts and meat and it becomes
a more nutritious meal. Warm for wintery mornings,
cold for those muggy summer days when you
want something to slide down without effort.
No surprise that one country likens ease to cold
porridge, a joy to taste, a meal like a maternal hug
when under the weather. The English use cake:
enticing to eat, a treat that also takes practice,
that overnight success that had years to build up.
Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com.
*****
Alison Mace: Four Poems
THE BEDROOM CHEST OF DRAWERS
Junk City furniture for our new big house –
cheap house, cheap stuff, but spelling hope, confirming
confidence in our marriage, our two new daughters,
the future. Scuffed old chairs would see us prosper.
We’d make it work. We would.
Best of the sixty-quid load, a huge chest of drawers
for the bedroom , with a dusty, wobbly mirror –
roomy, almost majestic; rough like the rest.
We busied ourselves: third child, good prospects. But
hope did not last. We failed.
And the house began to empty: he first, in chagrin,
in guilt. The lives of my daughters were not as I’d wished.
Slowly the girls grew up, then school fired them off
all in different directions. I needed to stay.
I had always loved the house.
In solitude I cherished what was left,
began to mend and fettle, tightened things up
that had been slack too long; for the first time,
noticed brass handles, barley-sugar twists
on the old chest of drawers.
Now that I look, the mirror’s a really good one;
the drawers have keyholes lined with ivory,
and polishing’s brought out a lovely glow –
dark, rich: mahogany! How did abundance lie
so long unrealised?
HAPPINESS
Centennial therapy for Larkin
Happiness, surely, visits less and less
As ageing draws us downward to the grave
And daily living yields to daily stress –
A blessing we may no longer look to have.
When have we had it, anyway? – in youth
It’s what we all supposed that we were aimed for –
Elusive as the ‘truss-advertisement, truth’ –
But looking glum was something you were blamed for.
So forget happiness;
Your best hope now’s to manage to look brave.
It’s not quite over, though: I could be dead
By now. I’m upright, able to eat and drink,
And haven’t gone grotesquely off my head –
Not obviously at least, I like to think;
The slow revolt of joints, and eyes, and ears,
Though clearly happening, is not a curse
That cripples, or fulfils my darkest fears.
In short, things really might have been much worse.
So dare I raise my head
And meet mortality without a blink?
All other options worse, perhaps I’ll try;
‘The anaesthetic from which none come round’
Has only power to appal and petrify.
So I look up, out: see the river wind,
A shining pathway, westward to the sea;
My stripy cat basks in the sun in bliss.
A long-forgotten joy steals over me:
I learn at last that happiness is this –
A brilliant dragonfly
That comes uncalled, to flash, and free the mind.
THE YEAR’S MIDNIGHT
At the next world, that is, at the next spring . . .
I yearn towards it, allow rich images
of breaking buds to crowd my mind – feel
warm light on my skin from the soaring sun –
breathe the sharp savour of wild garlic.
And I’m counting – the days, even the dull hours,
as the year drains; dark robs day of light,
minutes more daily, but slowly, only
by shrinking increments, as we toil
down to the shortest day.
A pendulum slows to stillness, stasis,
a barely-existent halt
before again it moves,
hardly perceptibly, subtle start of its swing,
then gaining pace to hurtle, flash past the mid-point.
So with the seasons. But now
at the instant of ultimate dark
a dumb, perverse longing possesses me:
may the pendulum be stilled, let this bold moment
of darkness arrested endure, be mine for ever.
ARTIST
Now that the village is behind you
and you can smell the sea,
you come to a meadow,
neat and sweet. You could stop here,
go no further, build and be safe
among flowers and fences.
But the sea calls, and you walk on –
a stony path; thrift, brambles,
a sharp keen breeze;
gulls wheeling ahead, and a swelling sense
that this will be your place. Here
your life can be what it should.
Here is the cliff-top edge, and you stand
knowing the wind’s pull and buffet,
the wind that will tear
truth from your soul and offer you
wisdom, stature, grace.
You brace yourself at the brink.
You need not stay; turn about carefully,
go back the way you came.
The path lacks colour now,
and that faded patch, so hemmed in, so small –
can that be your lush meadow?
It seems you have made your choice.
Alison Mace’s poetry accelerated once she gave up school-teaching, and in recent years she has published a full collection and a pamphlet. She believes that there’s no subject that isn’t available for poetry.
*****
Patricia McCarthy: Three Poems
REQUIEM FOR MY OLD PIANO
I often sing to you as you sang to me.
Already in a bad way, you didn’t make
the move of three miles, trying to inhale
when you were manoeuvred through
the narrow cottage door – preludes, waltzes,
sonatas churning out of tune inside
your scratched, sun-faded frame.
I often sing to you as you sang to me,
feeling for you as you pretended dud notes
were simple rests in bars. Though your maker’s
Germanic name half-legible on your lid
was unknown, you let on, with your mellow tone,
you were a Steinway while you translated my life
and all the shades of its emotions with ease
and accuracy, confidante of my heart.
I often sing to you as you sang to me.
I remember you accompanying a violin
and flute occasionally, the crash of a metal stand
in the room where you resided, once a morgue.
How skilfully you warmed its cold atmosphere.
Yet as you were carried out from here like a coffin,
you must have communed with the ghost coffins,
your old nocturnal companions, and not minded me
singing to you as you sang to me in this new place,
reluctant to let you go. I wanted to play you
backwards, to transpose my histories
into your keys and for us both to tune into
the music of the spheres. But as the removal men,
sudden undertakers, left with your last breath,
I could only tap into the space that echoes still
in ageless ages that sing to you as well as to me.
TO MY FATHER’S FIDDLE
You appeared from a clearout in an attic
almost invisible in the dust.
And it was your wooden case I recalled
like a miniature coffin in a dream
at the end of my hospital bed
when I awoke after a miscarriage.
In its tiny hinges and clasps I felt my father,
back from sea, preparing to give a tune
to my childhood, waiting for applause.
But here there was no father, no childhood –
and inside your case lay, not you,
but the baby I had lost, your strings
taut as fence-wire around its tiny frame.
Some god I saw resting you
under his chin as he made big decisions
about who to save and who to lose.
And now I want to hold you – bowed
dessicated, cracked – a bit like me –
your neck worm-eaten, the sound-post
in your interior no longer attached.
And to feel once more my father’s life
in you– his heartbreak escaping with mine
through the F-holes in the mellowest chords.
For you have become a Stradivarius.
My father and I stretch your missing strings,
add an ebony bridge, draw rosin for tension
over the two horsehair bows, then
perform together sweetly at concert pitch
FEIS CEOIL
‘Each piece has to have a story for me. I often make them up for myself.
Once I have mastered the actual notes on the page, I just let the music take over.’
Veronica McSwiney
I sit at the piano, playing less well
pieces known by heart from years ago.
My arms sway and notes play automatically
when I sink into them. My fingers seem to know
better than me as they take off, forbidding
any conscious thought or striving. Yet
stiff and gnarled, they slur over keys
without the technique they had, forget
the scales, arpeggios, exam pieces practised
on an upright, my mother my audience.
And I wonder can I ever have been that child
clean-fingered, listening to the music of silence,
to stories behind staves that I often made up
before my performances in the school hall
or, lined up with a number in a side-room,
then out onto a well-known stage. I recall
the other nervous competitors, hands covered
day and night, unlike mine, in kid gloves,
fast, feather-light fingers from playing for hours,
classrooms on hold. My number. A shove
and I was twisting, as if on a fairground, round
and round on a stool to get a comfortable height
before the Steinway Concert Grand was mine,
its keyboard an open jaw with teeth about to bite…
A big breath and I started: Sonata in E flat
by Mozart, Grieg’s playful ’Puck’, sight-reading
haltingly – and up I stood, the judges below
like a panel of enemies, an audience clapping
from depths behind. As I retreated backstage
I did not know I had trodden the boards
with ghosts of rival tenors John McCormack,
Joyce, did not hear the rippling chords
of future virtuosos like Veronica McSwiney
who had sat beside me on a hard chair… I turn
the yellowed manuscript imprinted so often
with my twelve-year old hands. And I yearn
to be back there, the note in pencil
‘draw out the tone’ still legible from a teacher
long gone who must have known we are all
soloists from birth to death, whatever our sphere.
Patricia McCarthy, winner of the National Poetry Competition 2013,was editor of Agenda for more than twenty four years. Latest publication a pamphlet from Dare-Gale press, A Ghosting in Ukraine. Another pamphlet is due in winter 2025.The poems here are from a big collection, Round the Mulberry Bush (Waterloo Press, 2025)
*****
Beth McDonough: Poem
CERBERUS
Let us all bicker about the dog’s name,
consider if different, less loaded, titles
might collar him better for now.
Other places have faced his arrival
with matters like drought, sweat and death.
We veer towards etymologies, washed with rain.
Let us fiddle a bit, while distant Rome burns,
try to tune up some old lyre he’d like;
Charon’s ETA will be updated online.
Pack bags, turn the air con to full,
make sure we pat his three heads all at once.
Beth McDonough is based in Dundee-based and co-hosts Fife’s Platform Sessions. Her pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word. Makar of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) in 2022, she’s working on a hybrid project on outdoor swimming, and a collaborative poetry collection with Nikki Robson.
*****
Fokkina McDonnell: Two Poems
PANORAMA MESDAG
Invisible skylights let through the light.
Just as I arrive upstairs, the sun comes out
across the crowded beach I know so well.
All those horses. In two neat columns,
the cavalry on exercise, heading south.
Other horses pull the flat-bottomed boats
onto the sand. Fish is being sold straight
from the boats. Women are repairing nets.
Mesdag’s wife has been included.
I know where to look for Sientje, painting
in a folding chair, striped sunshade.
Am I hallucinating the sound of gulls?
I see the seams in the canvas, and I don’t care.
As I go round the wooden platform, here
is the washing laid out on the grass,
a plume of smoke, the empty clog.
Note: ‘Panorama Mesdag’, The Hague (1881) is the oldest surviving panorama in its original location. The painting is over 14m high and has a diameter of 40m.
I HAD TO GIVE A REASON
for deciding to learn Swedish in November 2020.
One: because of the pandemic, stupid.
Well, what would your reason be?
Two: to stave off Alzheimers.
Cheer up, love. It could be worse.
Three: to read Tranströmer poems aloud
in the original, with conviction.
This poem is already a Swedish noir:
It’s downbeat, death is running between trees.
I see a lot of water – good for drowning.
Cling to the theme music and you’ll want
to have another drink.
Om han var hemma, han skulle ha ringt oss.
If he was at home, he would have called us.
Fokkina McDonnell now lives in The Netherlands. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised. She has three collections (Oversteps Books Ltd, 2016; Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd, 2019; Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and a pamphlet (Grey Hen Press, 2020). She received a Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North in 2020. She blogs on http://www.acaciapublications where she also features guest poets.
*****
Maggie Mackay: Two Poems
MY MESSENGER DAD
When all this is over, said the telegram boy,
I want to wheel my red bicycle
right up to front doors, hear the spokes whirr.
I want to wink as I pull the telegram
from the pouch across my hip.
I want no special mark of bad news,
the signal not to wait. A smile instead,
at the sight of my navy-blue uniform
at the dry wit we exchange.
I want to chat with mates, the boys-only
about life after this Great Depression,
then go home to greet my collie,
herding me like a dervish,
as I spin into The Avenue.
When this is all over, I intend to learn,
return to what was denied me,
the turn of book pages, the scent of words.
I intend to illuminate the half-light
and become a white collared chap.
THE MOMENT I FIND MYSELF
After Picasso’s ‘The Dream’
Voices call be careful, don’t rush in,
keep your feet on the ground.
But I’m flying, hair a ribbon of liquid gold,
wings for arms, rising from leery looks,
my mother calling soar little songbird.
I’m washed in moonlight
and fellow sisters blend into me.
My soul sings. I dream that I am good enough.
Maggie Mackay’s poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ is in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection. Her second collection The Babel of Human Travel (Impspired.com ) was published in 2022. She reviews poetry collections at https://thefridaypoem.com and relaxes with her beautiful greyhound.
*****
Ted Mico : Four Poems
STOOD UP IN LINE
The rumble of Armageddon makes packing
tricky: shirts, waterproofs, brass instruments
for decrypting pollution of the soul. In stories,
there’s always a boat at the end of the world,
the kind that used to make you smile.
I wait with two one-way tickets, steep rain
bursting against the procession of fur, feather,
and scale that wait their turn alphabetical.
The aardvarks to go first. Flood-drunk,
I see two of everything except us,
but keep our place in line: H for human,
for home, for holding when more water pours.
I stalk the decks of clip-cloppers, slitherers,
chompers. I text you, call for you
before departure time. No reply.
A swallow now nests where my sternum
used to be, my ribcage doubling as a vessel
to carry you over the drowned.
IN COLORED PENCILS
My five-year-old daughter draws
enough house to get lost in.
A front door, chimney, smoke,
a lit cigarette mistaken
for an orange pencil, animals
in the yard and a dad
hot-red in secrets.
And the dad and the horses
and the pig outside look alike.
She colors our Honda Civic
inside a multistory car park,
and me leaving to meet a man,
my insides spotless from shooting speed
cut with dry cleaning crystals.
And the dealer and the horses
and pig look alike.
She draws long summers
on any surface – car seat,
windows, open paper bindles.
Her chewed-up pencil scribbles
a black mound over the house
and all its animals. she says:
xxxxxxxxThis is going to be the best mountain ever,
xxxxxxxxshe says, and we can sleep deep inside it.
Redness – for belonging.
She finds her way around more home
with her favorite crimson pencil sharp
used for special occasions.
And our house and the relapse
and the mountain look alike.
She draws her name with hummingbirds –
a bag full of loose feathers resembling
my chemical formulas for flight.
On paper I keep watch from the treetops,
a leaf-colored father stuck with yellowy eyes.
xxxxxxxxI’ll color you a ladder, she says,
xxxxxxxxso you can come down now.
THE DAY TED CAME TO CLASS
Ramada Inn’s upper floors say No Smoking
but Zeus lights up anyway. An orgy of gin
brings his head to boiling point.
Passed out at the window his
lit cigarette falls on the awning below.
Hanged men die mouths open –
burning gods with lips shut.
Zeus wakes, fire between golden ears.
He slides down to earth on ladder 57
beard a hung lantern
swinging in the dark.
The hospital bed’s missing a wheel.
No insurance means careless nurses,
catheter without Demerol. Once discharged,
Lord-of-All-Skies resembles any other
cinder-man looking for a budget suit
to wear to court.
Zeus, Slayer-of-Heavens, sits in the dock.
Old flames come to testify. Hera looks on.
she knows too well how gin
takes half the good out of a man
and took half the god out of Zeus.
Other Olympians warned:
xxxxxxxxMake enough human mistakes,
xxxxxxxxone day he’ll be mistaken for one.
But even gods grow tired of themselves.
Myth-struck, myth stuck
the next night he guzzles a forty –
xxxxxxxxjust one then forty –
Lord-of-Three-Wheeled-Shopping-Carts
spread-eagled across the sidewalk
trying to summon thunder:
xxxxxxxxnone comes.
A scorpion driven mad by fire, Zeus
is trapped inside his stinging inferno.
God-of-Hard-Landings starts his sentence –
a lifetime in fire prevention class.
Crumpled Zeus, brutal Zeus
who keeps the clouds, Zeus-the-Unprotected
signs his attendance card Ted.
DADDY, MY WATER WINGS ARE ON FIRE
She tries to remember the world’s longest rivers
in descending order: Amazon, Nile, Yangtze…
mouth open wider than the Mississippi
double-letters choking when the doctor intubates.
Seized by meningitis, fever ties her down
with tubes and monitor bleeps. Blood runs
sickbay hot as nurses try to shake bad omens
out of thermometers, look for blisters under her skin.
A body too hot to call her own, she’s gurnied-grave
and fussed over by experts with clipboards asking
about the three wasted days when I thought it was flu.
Her sheets run wet while I recite more rivers.
In delirium, hospitals are whiter at night
when specialists tell us happy endings are stories
only halfway through. We’re too busy hurtling
down the Congo to listen. The order of things
is important. My worst fears washed up
on the shores of the Amur, the cool waters
of her favorite ¬– Black Dragon River.
Her fever breaks against its banks. Together
we read A Short History of River Bends,
arms around each other rafting each curve,
her finger tracing the Dragon, the tenth longest –
China, Mongolia, and out to sea.
Ted Mico began his writing career in London as Features editor at the weekly music paper Melody Maker. His poetry has recently featured in Ilanot Review, Lumina, Slipstream, Arboreal, T’Art, Cordite Review, Blood & Bourbon, and elsewhere. He’s edited three books of non-fiction and is a regular at the legendary Beyond Baroque poetry workshop in Venice, California. His dog’s name is Larkin.
*****
Sean O’Brien: Three Poems
THE LAST PLACE YOU’D GO
i.m. Alan Brownjohn
Old age, they tell you, is the kind of place
where no one goes unless they have to,
which they also say of Hull, where I grew up
and met you climbing out of Bruce’s van
before the evening’s reading. That was ’79,
and you were hale and genial, not yet fifty,
with five esteemed collections to your name,
a presence on august committees, one of which
had recently awarded me an unimaginable
thousand pounds ‘towards the writing life.’
Where was I? And where am I now? Somewhere
I did not expect to find myself,
not least because I’d never heard of it,
yet now a slow train from Blackfriars
brings me to attend your funeral.
The time has come for rationing
attendance at these obsequies, or else
we’d keep our black ties on at night, but yours
are the imperative exception, albeit
at a venue not at first sight readily accessible
to those for whom South London holds
an air of mystery and somewhere-else-ness,
whereby the mere name ‘Crofton Park’ is charged
with the romance of the remote and long-imagined,
qualities which as I leave the station now
are manifest with homely unfamiliarity
as trees and pubs and lamp-posts
too distinctly real to be believed. Somehow
I find the turn off Brockley Road that leads me
up to Buckthorne Bridge, above a cutting
where the trains flee out of sight like proof
of London’s lying always out of reach.
I’m almost there, and it’s an hour too soon.
And here I stop, to think about these shoes,
acquired for today, although not strictly speaking
‘shoes’ as we have understood the term,
but ‘Skechers’. See, these laces are a fake,
for decoration only, since the point of buying them
is never more to need to bend your back,
a boon to those of us with rusted vertebrae.
It is this comfort worries me, in case
the aberration should expose itself to frowns,
with looks exchanged and things not said,
as if there is a list of Things and Not-the-Things
pinned up on a notice-board beside the stairs
for all eternity. So I’m still standing
looking down into the cut, where far below
the trains are passing underneath the bridge
like proofs of something words are disinclined
or not designed to say, but has to do in part
with how your poem drove the grubby length
of the A202, through districts you condemned
‘as having no recorded past except
in histories of the tram.’ Their names
were ‘echoless’. And yet it seems to me
the fatal disregard you found inscribed
on every wall and shop-front on the way,
where good intentions breed the opposite
we half-create by wishing otherwise,
somehow survives as ordinariness,
beyond the reach of hope or cancellation –
a patch of scrub, say, or a bus stop
turning up repeatedly when least we need it,
or that pub that when you enter looks as if
it’s vaguely been expecting you for years.
All this is what we lose with every death,
the footage and the soundtrack and the smell
of next to nothing, from the blowsy air
of brewers’ yards to the echo of a tap
in a back scullery that drips because it drips,
to girls in new spring dresses who can see
how we’ve been dead for ages if not longer.
‘It was the world,’ you wrote. I miss your work,
your Cavan Benthers, and your bastards
crawling from the woodwork at a hint of spring.
I miss you, Alan, in your suits of emerald and flame,
the ones run up for you in Transylvania
or (in another version) down the Old Kent Road.
I miss you in the Great Nepal in Euston
now the waiter keeps forgetting to be rude,
and on the sticky carpets of the places
books were launched and sunk in two hours flat.
I even miss that hole on Finchley Road
we ate in after Porter’s ashes were interred
among the sacred monsters and the virtuous,
in spitting distance of George Eliot and Marx,
where Ludbrook too must lie in his long home.
And now I find at last the clock’s against me
as the darkly gleaming Uber-fleet draws up
delivering your fellow ninety-odds,
who must be helped into the crematorium.
The trains are passing, passing, far below.
I have to cross this bridge now that I’ve come to it,
entirely unprepared, and in these bloody shoes.
AT THE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN
for Geraldine Paine
If Somewhere there is an afterlife
Derek Mahon, ‘Leaves’
‘…filled with an infinite rustling and sighing’,
then sometimes like applause, sometimes like laughter,
somewhere there must also be an archive.
Or so I hope. It helps me to endure
the smiling patience of these photographs
displayed on every wall and over every doorway.
Some names here I recognize and some I should,
and some return no echo when I speak them:
Brylcreem and sequins and décolletage,
old-world charm and decent vulgarity
sharing the stage as it fills with smoke
and the iron is lowered for good. Rehearsed
in a hundred dressing-rooms, if never quite
in town, the autographs are almost gone.
But anyway, smile, say the faces. Smile.
Put the future back in the suitcase and spend
next Sunday on a train to Littlehampton.
Half-empty houses. Are we downhearted?
England has died of nostalgia, caring more
than God does for these details. But these drunks
and ingénues, in their immortal monochrome,
playing in Rookery Nook and The Corn is Green,
and Night Must Fall in Goole and Birkenhead
who long since home are gone and ta’en their wages:
how could such lads and lasses cease to matter,
having lived and died in service to an art
that was our common property, where life
took shape in two hours’ traffic on the stage
while this imperfect world was made
anew, imperfectly and twice on Saturday?
BONTEMPS ROULER
So we cycled uphill to a parting of ways.
Where once we would trespass, the gate-lodge was shut.
Gate gone and wall down but never permission.
In dead ground a dewpond avoided our gaze.
Somebody somewhere must make a decision.
Somebody somewhere was doing his nut.
Bontemps rouler. Not safe in their beds.
Still smoking, the orchard had been commandeered.
There was the trench where the gardeners died
in the doorway where history and legend elide.
He who would enter, declare the conviction
that things were exactly as they appeared,
the poor fact a specialized version of fiction.
Bontemps rouler. Not safe in their beds.
Under the stones lies the lyric foundation,
England, England, with all of its failings,
not to be written and not to be lived.
If life is an exile, here is my nation.
A forest of scaffolds. Bin-fires, impalings.
Now lift up your hearts, for these you have loved.
Bontemps rouler. Not safe in their beds.
Bontemps rouler. Now off with their heads.
Sean O’Brien’s eleventh collection, Embark was published by Picador in 2022. A further collection is due in 2026. Recent publications include the chapbook Impasse: for Jules Maigret (Hercules Editions, 2023) and the pamphlets Otherwise (2023) and Juniper (2024), both from Dare-Gale. He has received the Gregory, Somerset Maugham, Cholmondeley and E.M Forster awards, the T.S. Eliot and (three times) Forward prizes. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
*****
Tanya Parker: Poem
THE RUBICON
At the Leeds Cancer Centre, St James’s Hospital, May 2024
Under my clothes, I am different.
Fewer nodes, two new scars:
another pound of flesh.
Internally, the mystery
of proliferating cells.
We expect so much of ourselves;
assuming our system will run unimpeded,
asleep and awake.
Wraps and hats, so many flags,
wave to each other in the corridors.
I’m here too, I know I’m home,
I’ve prepared for this role all my life.
In the Operations Room
no sound, no signal can escape,
but someone has a sense of humour:
Staying Alive, Under Pressure, Super Trouper.
Instantly its ABBA’s Christmas,
I’m five and dancing with Grandpa.
Yuri helps me into the space pod
(truly, his name is Yuri.)
Angel I and Angel II* circle,
taking scans, aiming their fire.
In the lift, a young couple hold hands.
Today, the piano is silent.
The gallery shows Cyprus in yellow and blue:
bougainvillaea behind a gate,
laurels under the sky.
Note: Angel I and Angel II are characters in Earthsearch, a radio play by James Follett, in which a starship has been sent on a mission to discover Earth-like planets to colonise. The present crew have been born on the ship and have never known anywhere else. From birth they have been looked after by two ‘Angels’ – voices that surround them and guide their every move.
Tanya Parker won the 2008 Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition and the 2013 Ryedale Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in Orbis, London Grip, Stand, and elsewhere. She has appeared at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome with Helen Burke and the Edinburgh Fringe with Rose Drew. Her first poetry collection, with Stairwell Books, was published in 2015. She is currently studying for an M.A in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.
*****
Sheenagh Pugh:Two Poems
SOME TRAVELLERS
Some travellers are never done,
They come off the cruise ships, wizened
but wiry, superannuated lizards
in baseball caps, still prowling the planet
for adventure, giving death the slip
somewhere between Aleppo and Damascus.
We watch them tick off our town
on their list: narrow winding lanes,
lodberries, harbour seals, old men
leaning on walls. Curious,
is it not, how many cruise ports
are places where travellers live
when they stop travelling.
Those old men, filling their eyes
with the ferrries’ to and fro, the small
business of boats, have sailed
many an ocean, but now
their horizon is drawing in;
they do not think long for places
they saw, or never saw. A yacht
leaving, a quarrel of gulls,
the light on an empty sea
absorbs them for hours.
Some travellers lose
the urge, content to wait
for whatever happens.
Out in the sound, impatient,
the cruise ship hoots. Her passengers
hurry to the boats: the old sailors
are going nowhere.
NOT SEEING AURORAS
Each wave delivers a cargo
of moonlight to the beach;
it splinters on shingle.
The full moon kills auroras.
Noctilucent, mother-of-pearl,
ice crystals scattered
through the upper atmosphere,
clouds screening curtains.
And on white nights, the simmer
dim, when the sun wanders
across the blue north,
there’s no seeing them:
one must needs be content
with the uncountable
stars stitched and glinting
in the fabric of endlessness.
Sheenagh Pugh lives in Shetland. She has published many collections with Seren, of which the latest was Afternoons Go Nowhere (2019) and is working on another. She has also published two novels and a critical study on fan fiction.
*****
Tracey Rhys: Poem
KEEPING PACE
Never much of a sprinter until the year the baby was born,
circumnavigating the passers-by, moon-roving out of the semis.
So much feedback from the feet, like old-screen interference
(white noise for the soles). I raced to playgroup. Always late
for the early start, dates with friends, mother and baby classes.
The pushchair wild (too much town for its axles, too many legs
to pick up speed beside the pavement cafes).
I wore unsuitable footwear – boots that made me slow,
sandals that slapped rhythms through the streets. The heels
that let me spy through picture bays. Late for feeds, late for naps,
late for my love come home for evening tea. Sprinting
in my blue jeans, nursing bra, cottonwool soaking up the milk.
Pram wheels whirring to the baby’s screams. Always in a state
of flux. Nagging the pavement cracksxxxx toxxxxxstop.
Tracey Rhys is a Bridgend-based writer, originally from the Rhondda. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Planet, The Lonely Crowd, Ink, Sweat & Tears, A470, Yer Ower Voices: Dialect Poetry from Wales, Lipstick Eyebrows and more.Her first pamphlet Teaching a Bird to Sing was a judge’s favourite in the Michael Marks Award. In 2020, she was a winner in the Poetry Archive’s Now: Wordview competition.
*****
Padraig Rooney: Four Poems
THE INK MONITOR
I am the ink monitor. I pour the ink.
It is Friday afternoon and getting dark.
The pint bottle with its cork stopper
pierced by a silver proboscis stands
by a stack of jotters on a middle shelf.
The clock ticks. A rose petal falls.
Holy water trembles in a scalloped font
as slates fill, letter by laboured letter.
In my mind I separate milk bottle tops
– silver and gold – collected for Africa.
In distant missions they wait on ink.
Smell of a thousand nibs scratching
between the blue lines and the red.
A thousand marching armies enter
the ink jungle, sharpening their quills,
bearing before them drums of ink.
I am the ink monitor in my infant smock,
watching the clock in the almost dark.
Now we will write it all out in neat
in our best handwriting. Now we will
slide the lids of our inkwells quietly
across and dip our nibs, tongues out,
licking our lips, our blue eyes waiting.
I rise to fill the empty wells, cupping
the bottle tipped in a small hot hand,
gaping mouths astonished, replenished.
This porcelain O. This brimming blue.
This tipping point again topped up.
I am the ink monitor. I pour the ink.
SUMMER OF LUST
The old theater was here. And the wrecking ball
poised just so. And on this spot stood a kiosk,
one of those Belle Époque pepper-pot affairs
selling porn – magazines wrapped in cellophane
behind the glass, one overlapping the other
in a multiple tease. You had to point and ask
in stilted German – ich – ich – möchte – möchte –
from the battleaxe Helga brooking no nonsense,
the price stickers strategically stuck, their names
unmistakable in sinuous summer-of-love scripts,
like dolphin-boys or mahouts, waifs in the outback,
straw-haired runaways from the classical world:
Kim, Jimmy, Pan, Piccolo, Johnny come latelys
you couldn’t afford. Besides, you were too young.
BYRON AND SHELLEY PLAYING BILLIARDS
AT THE PALAZZO LANFRANCHI IN PISA
‘And all seemed to dissolve into a mist,’
the younger poet quoted, potting red.
Everything, everything becomes grist.
Once beautiful Byron took aim and missed,
scowled at the baize. He shook his greying head
and watched his life dissolve in mist.
He heard the golden voice of a boy he’d kissed
in the choir stalls at Cambridge, and in his bed.
Now all the golden boys are grist.
Shelley chalked his cue and made a victory fist
to shake at the world. We see where that led.
The Arno meanders into mist
along deserted quays. The tower lists.
In a few short years our poets will be dead.
Everyone in time becomes grist.
All swim against a current none can resist
but these two poets play billiards instead.
Around them the world dissolves in mist
and everything, everything is grist.
THE GRAVEDIGGERS
for David Burleigh
What drew us was the sound of spade on stone:
two indentured labourers in coolie hats
were busy washing the small bones
of children, laying them again into
cheap red plywood coffins
to be taken away under cover of darkness;
and when they’d sluiced the basins
out over the remaining graves
and cleaned their spades,
one rolled a furtive cigarette under an obelisk,
the other picked his nails with a sliver of bamboo.
Smoke drifted through the cemetery
where small quick lizards played
in and out of cracks in the masonry;
then the men weighed the coffin lids with stones
against marauding dogs.
Padraig Rooney’s The Gilded Chalet: Travels in Literary Switzerland was described in the TLS as “Brilliant. Thoroughly absorbing.” He has published four books of poems and won a number of prizes. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Scotsman and The New European. His biography of Swiss writer and traveller Annemarie Schwarzenbach will appear from Polity Press in 2024. Website: www.padraigrooney.com
*****
Ernesto P. Santiago: Poem
RED CANNA
My one and only heart
tested positive for lust, the grip
of sin and tragedies,
not once but countless times.
This love was most likely
unmindful of my thirst
entertaining la douleur exquise.
My body only learned
about the conscious choice
after the first seeds were already in,
and the gods are unbearably loud
like the sun, because I opened
your innocence early,
spoiling the sanctity of surprise.
O my faith, my faith,
why not remain tight-lipped?
Why the call-out?
Why was not this kept
under the skin of tolerance
when flowers like the black rose,
the gardenia, and the equinox flower
faced no stricter scrutiny
from your living taste living out
the consequences of their hidden lustre,
but who am I, who am I
to damn the mercy
in your searching eyes?
Ernesto P. Santiago for a long time had believed that poetry is his flowing (es)cape to a higher understanding of the wor(l)d. He spends all his free time between here and there, trying to learn something. He is too small for his ego. He is enough for himself. As a poet the shape of words interests him. He is fully confident in his identity with a Filipino heart.
*****
*****
Andrew Seear and Victor Adereth: Four Poems
OLD SARUM
Generosity, unchallenged fortitude
And a wealth of unrecorded history;
Flowers and birds and men with pointed hats;
Pretty girls with grave accordions
To accompany their songs of golden lads
Who will forever break their mothers’ hearts
And write the sweetest elegies known to man
And die alone in droves for love of women
Who died alone two thousand years ago;
Always late August, always half past five,
Dust and insects in a stagnant haze
Over the long grass where the bodies lie
Unburied in a dream of perfect joy.
We’re locked in honey here; we’ll never reach
The bottom of the jar. When Jesus died
It’s almost true to say the world rejoiced.
I was enchanted by your disbelief;
I want you fresh from hell and raw with grief.
from THE TOWER OF SILENT WATCHING
I came secretly at night.
Six of my stoutest men bore the pony
Upright, four feet from the ground. His stillness
Was regal; his silence astounded us all. Old Leung,
Whose memory was full of ancient wonders
That put our petty prodigies to shame
Declared himself completely at a loss
To name a pony who had borne himself
More nobly or exhibited a discretion
More heroic than this pony on the night
I brought him to your sleeping father’s house.
He was my gift to you.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxHe bore you on his back
Through many long late summer afternoons,
Wandering the Valley of the Orchards,
Where the fruit ripens among shadows
And the birds are always just about to sing;
The insects are perpetually asleep
And small black pigs wait in the long grass
For windfalls and for the sheer luxury of waiting.
Your father’s hand was always on his reins.
A race-built galleon in full sail, intent
On imperial glory – the pony uttered
These formal compliments as if they were
Spontaneous effusions; your father smiled.
It was four months since I’d seen you
When on New Year’s Day you rode into my garden
And threw green plums at my bedroom shutters
Until I woke and opened them and saw you.
You were standing on the pony’s back
And he was trotting round and round in circles in the snow.
GRIEF IS SO BRACING!
A bitter wind from the Caucasus
Whips across Streatham Common, whistling in the trees.
It is March – and I have come to say goodbye to a friend.
A ring of magnolias surrounds me and I’ll wait
Until it’s safe for me to leave.
It snowed here yesterday, and patches remain
Like something they forgot to clear away.
Everywhere I look the air is blue, colder
Than anything I have inside me. And I remember
All those things we can never remember forever,
Which he will never forget.
The magnolias surround me like sentries. I should know
More about flowers – when they bloom and when they die,
And what they mean to those who know.
But I will know when it is time. I feel the light
Fading, folding into evening,
While he is where there is no change.
And being here, I know it will never be time
To turn from the shadow and slip from the silhouette
Until I learn to be still in the light and forget.
THE ACCOUNT
There are many ways to achieve greatness, said Brodie,
Acknowledging the applause like a man holding up traffic –
This is one that worked for me.
I’ve been lucky. Death always followed me
At a respectful distance, like an accomplished spy,
And my secrets have never been desperate enough
To die for. I always knew how it would end –
The way it always ends when you live like a lunatic.
Nobody feels confident enough to mourn
And only comedians remember you.
The Great Receptionist looks up from his desk
And asks the usual questions. His understanding smile
Says he’s not afraid of parables.
I tell him about the things I hoped to achieve
And he gazes at me through the sky, patiently
Waiting to hear how it always ends. He checks the form
And says: Occupation? He’s pleased to note
I have no regrets. And then he picks up his quill
And writes: Unemployed.
Andrew Seear and Victor Adereth met at Brighton Grammar School and have been writing together since they were sixteen. Every poem is a joint effort, even though for many years they have lived three thousand miles apart. Adereth teaches English in Tower Hamlets and Seear is an editor in New York City.
*****
Richard Skinner: Three Poems
THE DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST
Ambricourt, France, 1936
Master precision. Be a precision instrument myself.
Between them and me: telepathic exchanges, divination.
One single mystery of persons and objects.
Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.
Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.
Unbalance so as to re-balance.
Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.
Draw the attention of the public (as we say that a chimney draws).
Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I regard them.
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
The true is inimitable, the false un-transformable.
They want to find the solution where all is enigma only.
Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.
One must not seek, one must wait.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW
Judea, 70 AD
I came to you, born of light, a wail of joy.
I have walked in light, in the wake of your flame
every act proved itself
and life was beautiful.
The confession, at first, was from you
let them accuse me of every passion
let them say I am a dilettante
you give me the certainty of life.
I am on the stake
I win this immense goodness
this infinite piety.
I return to you as an emigre
destitute of black rage.
Once your joy was confused with terror
now you are truly close to me
part of my obscure hunger.
I have had everything I wanted
I have gone beyond the world
emptied, within me.
And now… the desert.
BLACK NARCISSUS
The Himilayas, 1930s
i. Sister Clodagh
In this wind-haunted palace, Ireland’s green
came flooding back to me. I couldn’t help it.
It made me feel the vertigo. Flooded me
with shame and guilt.
The Mother Superior
had a word for it – hamartia.
She warned of the reasonable errors
of leadership
but I have failed even those.
I had no wicked intent, but I was ignorant.
Sister Ruth is an anagram of me.
You might think I am Jekyll
and she is Hyde,
but it’s the other way round.
ii. Sister Ruth
Was Christ a Man or a Person?
He’s a brute. I am a chameleon
in the dark arches. I am a harlot.
Cinderella. Caliban.
This place used to be a harem,
after all.
I am so tired of the oatmeal sacks we wear.
I love peacocks. Kanchi got hers,
why can’t I get mine?
I will drag her to the brink of the
abyss and watch her pride fall.
I have never been more sure of anything.
I will run the risk.
I am sublime.
Note: The lines that make up ‘The Diary of a Country Priest’ are quotes from Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson (Quartet Books, 1986).
‘The Gospel According to Matthew’ is an erasure of ‘Fragment: To Death’ by Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Francesca Valente (Roman Poems, City Lights Books, 1986).
Richard Skinner: These poems are taken from a forthcoming collection entitled Flickers, a playful collection of visual poems, ‘psychic snapshots’, sonnets, erasures, remixes & list-poems, all inspired by cinema.
*****
Angela Topping: Two Poems
HOW TO DISPOSE OF THE DEAD
To read a book of marvels, wander an hour in a graveyard:
stone angels clutch headstones or fold carved wings;
old tombs like tables spotted with lichen; gilded letters
of new graves. Whole families, stacked like bricks.
Some graves are weeded or glow with fresh flowers,
others covered in gravel, couch grass and dandelions.
Historical documents to withstand time’s labours
but future generations will not read ours there.
In Japan now, are Buddhist temples, where you
can visit the dead. Swipe in at the entrance,
under their names sign the public book,
then enter a room of cells. Each holds a Buddha
the size of a phone screen: brief illumination.
Neat technological solution, taking little space.
The rest of their cremated dust is given back to earth.
And so the dead are tidied away and memory kept.
Rose gardens at crematoria are fertilized with human ash,
far less permanent than tombstones. For one summer
buds grow their scent, then next year someone else’s.
An hour’s stroll there tells no sad tales.
Perhaps it’s enough to keep a record: dates, names,
who loved them and why, a sense of getting something right.
LEARNING TO WALK AGAIN
So many strangers looked after me
some better than others. I don’t forget
the ones with kind hands, magic hands,
those who treated me with respect.
But what a relief it was to come home:
to be encouraged over the threshold
in a borrowed wheelchair by my daughter
while husband tips me back over the step.
I shook for days. Only felt safe in my chair
or downstairs hospital bed. Watched
a whole summer pass from my window
six months before I could sleep upstairs.
My husband built me practice steps,
took me on holiday to safe places,
pushed me on the glide-about commode
pushed me in the wheelchair.
He still has to do the washing, cook
every meal and drive me places,
though I graduated from gutter frame
to Zimmer frame, to crutches, to a stick.
For months after weight-bearing
I walked like a bride, one step, stop.
We have found a new rhythm. I do
what I’m able and he does the rest.
Angela Topping is the author of nine poetry collections and four pamphlets. Her most recent collection is Earwig Country (Valley Press 2024). She is a former Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library. Her poems have been widely published in journals including Poetry Review, Magma and The Dark Horse, as well as being placed in competitions and anthologies.
*****
Mark Totterdell: Four Poems
WOODPIE
Tchik from the trees, then tchik, another tchik,
and then, unseen, but very high and near,
he’s drumming on the wood, machine gun quick,
a signal to a foe or to a mate,
a crisp, precise one-second-long tattoo
that makes the hollow timber resonate.
Stiff-tailed, sharp-billed, with four-clawed saltire feet,
jaunty in black and white and neat red cap,
he drills deep now into the tree’s pale meat.
Now he advances to another tree,
dipping and rising, bounding through the air,
a swift self-guided missile on a spree
to seek out ants and beetles, life so small
and simple it could surely never feel
terror or anything like pain at all,
but now he finds, within an ancient oak’s
deep-fissured bark, a nest of treecreepers.
His bayonet bill prods and jabs and pokes,
then, blanking clamour from the frantic mother,
he flies off with one limp and lifeless chick,
then comes back for another, then another.
THREE BRIMSTONES
Patches of sunlight somehow made animate,
two butterflies dance beneath high oak trees.
He’s yellow as a primrose freed from the earth,
she’s whitish like cherry petals in the wind,
and now they’re joined by another shimmying male.
You watch them fluttering their leaf-shaped wings,
forming an airborne triangle that shifts
between the slow-unfurling heads of ferns
and drops from sight beyond a riot of green,
leaving you to guess the end of the story.
Under their wings their bodies looked soft and frail.
You wonder what might occur in their small minds,
imagine joy for the two who came together,
bitterness for the unsuccessful suitor.
THE SPARROWS IN THE SEEDHEADS
The flock flies up from the dried-up autumn seedheads,
and at once the air is alive with small brown birds
that, until that moment, were just more dead brown seedheads.
At once, my mind is alert to the sounds of words,
and I’m overcome with a wish to find the rhyme,
and I need to name the plant that held every sparrow,
and for one sweet moment, the world and my poem chime,
as, because that’s what it is, I write down ‘yarrow’.
AUGUR SHELL
The delicate heft of this tower in my pocket,
a spiralling cone formed of calcium carbonate,
hard pointed tip in the flesh of my finger,
this tide-carried thing with the name of an auger,
this pseudo-construction, this tiny thin turret,
too light to be metal, a self-making object
where something soft-bodied once whorled its home wider,
unthinking, creating this helter, this skelter.
Its far and strange kin in unthinkable years
crawled as big as a room over cold ocean floors,
while the relics on mountain tops, misunderstood,
are mistaken for signs of the make-believe flood,
but we know what we do, though the consequence will
be the souring of sea and the softening of shell.
Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines. His collection Mollusc (The High Window Press, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize. His latest collection is All the Birds (Littoral Press, 2023).
*****
Miriam Valencia: Four Poems
THE PIANO LESSON
The world outside
was alive with blue.
You sat at the piano
serious as a child-king
tracing the strange movements
of the left-hand part.
Miss Main sat at your shoulder
paper hands folded
white hair airy as a ghost.
When you were finished
and looked up at the silence
her white head had sunk
to her blackbird chest.
The second-hand moved
around the clock-face
and round again.
Above you a dog barked
a voice called out.
You sat at the piano
behind death’s locked door.
Then she looked up and said
it was time to go. You ran
up the tenement steps
out into the light.
LA GRANDE PROSTITUÉE SUR LES EAUX
His job is now to lay the weft
for the skirts of the Whore of Babylon.
It is cold in the clattering workshop
and the fine-spun wool
frustrates his stiff fingers.
He is not used to how
the folds of her dress
halt the shuttle’s progress
having woven these weeks
the motionless ocean floor
and the orderly waves
that pass across it
thread pressed upon thread
a soft kind of sediment.
Last night he dreamed
he saw himself dead
his shoes filled with crimson dye
his feet the bloodied
feet of Christ.
As the days warm
another man will weave
her pale neck, her face
twice reflected, another
the green oak, strong
in the salt water
whose leaves will not fade
never drop
into the muted earth.
THE SUNKEN PATH
Along the sunken path
beside the graveyard
on the other side of the wall
the dead lie sleeping
at our shoulders
and our knees
stacked in threes
as in the bunkroom
of an emigrant ship
full of souls leaving
a failed crop
a grasping landlord
memories stowed with them –
long grass, heather
and the sound of birdsong
the astonishment of yellow.
We feel the weight of them
ballast for our own lives
gone before us
on a long journey.
CRAZY FOR YOU
When Mrs Black introduced
Connor Mullan to the class
I could see he was different
from the other boys. His freckled
cheeks were soft as sleep
but his green eyes were hard.
At lunchtime he crossed
the road by himself
without waiting for Mrs Thompson,
climbed to the top of the Witch’s Hat
as it tilted and turned.
His nylon shirt was wet with rain.
By Friday we’d discovered
we both loved Madonna
and wrote the words of her songs
in the fallen leaves.
What I knew about him
was what he knew about me.
Within weeks he was gone.
On his last day he sat at his desk
looking straight at the teacher
tearing pages of his jotter
into small pieces, throwing them
in the air like confetti.
The next day I stood alone
in the playground shelter,
picking at layers of blistered
paint, and saw
how everything is exposed
eventually.
Miriam Valencia has previously had poems published in small magazines including Obsessed with Pipework, Equinox, The Seventh Quarry, Fire and Poetry & All That Jazz. She works for a legal advice charity and lives in West Sussex.
*****
Scotia Vincent: Poem
CANADIAN ODYSSEY
The fields are merely a thin layer of snow
spread across a glacier
that stretches to the middle of the earth.
Red-and-white farmhouses
litter the dirt roads,
their wooden skin hanging in shreds.
The ghosts of forgotten afternoons
lie parallel with the mouse bones in the wheat fields,
lovers’ battlefields abandoned at armistice,
left for dead in the winter.
I awaken at dawn,
then dusk, then dawn
as the train winds through the Rocky Mountains.
When I open my eyes, there’s
a golden-eyed ram with curled horns
staring at me through the window,
standing breast-deep in snow.
In the prairies,
fires lit by unseen hands
burn low at strategic points along the railroad
while a premature sunset at midday
scars the heavy clouds.
The ravens say goodbye to the barren earth
and leave it for the telephone wires
to nurse electricity into their weary veins.
It’s the heart of winter, the golden-eyed ram
says to me in a dream,
and it’s precisely here
that the last train collapsed upon the rails,
heaving the souls
of the more fortunate passengers
into the icy white sky.
Scotia Vincent (pen name of Scotia Gilroy) is a writer and literary translator from Vancouver, Canada. She has been living in Kraków, Poland, for over a decade, where she works as a translator of Polish literature. Her writing and translations have been published in various literary journals and publishing houses in England, Canada and the USA. Her translation of the Polish novel Heksy by Agnieszka Szpila is forthcoming (Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House). She divides her time between Kraków, Vancouver, and the off-grid wilderness of Northern California.
*****
Rodney Wood: Poem
DAY 98: PUERTO DE LA CRUZ, TENERIFE
As the coach idled by a hotel, gearing up
to rumble back to the ship, the internet
stuttered to life. I checked my WhatsApp
messages, saw one from my daughter:
Your brother passed away a few days ago.
The words struck like cold water, numbing
but not freezing and before I could even
absorb it, the coach lurched forward,
leaving my grief to scramble after me,
like a dog shut out in the rain.
Earlier that day, we’d wandered through black beaches,
the sand fine as ground bones underfoot,
gardens sprouting greenery so vivid
it seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat
and an old town that felt borrowed
from some gentler past, all cobblestone and quiet.
But my mind kept circling back to his words:
“You only get one chance in life, so do your best.”
He’d said it offhand, I think, on a Sunday
afternoon, the two of us sitting in our parents’
living room, eating crisp sandwiches.
It sounded like something from a late-night guru
or one of those glossy books by Deepak Chopra,
wisdom that hovers between profound and absurd
like trying to catch fog in your hands.
The scenery blurred as we drove,
the landscape a wash of green and grey,
roads snaking through ruins that whispered
of other lives, other endings. I was just another
passenger on this bus, hurtling toward
the inevitable, every mile a reminder
of how the world keeps spinning,
so indifferent to our small, private catastrophes.
As the coach bounced along the uneven road,
I wanted to howl like some grieving animal,
to rage against the fact that all the beauty
we had seen today could not console,
could not fill the sudden hollow
that had opened up inside me,
a hollow as vast and unfeeling
as the sea we were returning to.
Rodney Wood worked in London and Guildford before retiring. He lives in Farnborough and is co-host of a monthly live open mic in Woking. He has been published in many magazines. At the start of 2024 he went on a world cruise and wrote a poem for each of the 102 days.
*****
Mark Woodward: Poem
THE FORGETTING
Moses lifted the hatch, let out the hens.
The fluffy Buff Orpingtons bustled down
after him, haphazardly scampering.
Moses sang softly, some old soul ballad
unknown to poultry or those under fifty.
Later he’d muck out the chicken house,
scoop up and barrow their shitty hay
before shaking out fresh, making the nests
a warm and cosseting place to lay.
Accountancy eluded him, his old trade,
rules and rates playing hide and seek.
Sometimes mid-sentence he’d number away,
free range. Mostly he chose not to speak,
as if he’d been born with an allowance,
whittled back now to a settled account.
No longer bound by paper clip chains
to software updates and late returns,
he wandered the garden’s perimeters
checking for weak spots, faults in the fence.
He wore jeans, t-shirts, slip on shoes,
nothing with buttons, all of it blue.
On sunny days he might lie on the ground,
lost to the sky’s hovering vacancy
while the two big hens clucked around.
It wasn’t so bad. Neighbours believed
the fowl seemed fond of him, genuinely.
Could it have been the birds’ morning feed
occurring more often than scheduled?
This Easter weekend Moses spent gently
trembling about in the wildflower margins,
worrying the hens had started to lay
somewhere away from their nesting boxes.
While he leaned, head bowed in dandelions,
prodding a cane at the end of the plot,
His poor wife went quietly up to the run
to come back with three days’ cold eggs
cradled inside the crook of her arm.
MarK Woodward has been widely published, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and commended for the Acumen Prize and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. He lives with early onset Parkinson’s which is reflected in some recent work. His collections: A Fright of Jays (Maquette 2016), Hide Songs (Green Bottle Press, 2018), The Tin Lodes (with Andy Brown. Indigo Dreams, 2020), Shaking the Persimmon Tree (Sea Crow Press, 2022), Grace Notes (with Andy Brown. Sea Crow Press 2023).
www.marcwoodwardpoetry.blogspot.com
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