I had started packing up places and folding them
into pockets of dried time when I saw her burning.
I was to the north of her centre at the time, upwind
of the flames that were already ashes as they reached
my tongue. I took communion there once, years earlier,
taking the wafer onto that tongue that had yet to know
the taste of cinders. People cried their novenas below
while the flames ignited the stars above and the river
ran black as if already in mourning. C’est comme quelqu’un
était mort, someone said while I pulled the tape over
another packed box the river would carry downstream
until it forgot its way back. They all stood there,
on that street by the Seine, where les bouquinistes
sold those fading books that smelt of death, while
the ashes fell upon their heads, their eyes, their lips
and their tongues.
And so there we were- the grieving and the leaving,
open-mouthed, all of us desperate for one last taste
of what we had believed to be eternal.
The sun is setting and the house’s eyes are burning gold.
Red hot pokers, ebullient and upright,
line the stone steps like torches. Just outside the door,
someone’s cigarette smokes itself on the ground.
With the blind pulled down, the air in the room
is the colour of rye – like fucking in a basket.
She thinks of the bath she’ll run later, a different kind
of nakedness. She thinks of steam – a natural soft focus.
There’s a place down the road that sells cakes impossibly
heavy with cream. There’s a palm tree nearby so enthusiastic
the sky has had to make extra room.
She shuts her eyes so they can see her better, and becomes
aware of her own mouth. Meanwhile,
a river splits in two, stretches its lovely long legs towards the sea.
THE FARMER THAT LIVES IN A KNUCKLED HOUSE
The chin he found in a stonewall holds sunlight
for his working hours.
He grubs up another work day, pushes the tractor wheels
out of a gate.
Rooks, fetch back the blackness he hides in his head,
as they stagger across the ploughed sky,
bend the rawky air with their caw.
There’s signs of orange peel in his fingernails,
but he never eats on the whim of a hedgerow.
He catches his face in a rose petal when the morning rises
from the nest of night.
The mention of oak branches, shape his arms,
allow him to stand against the coughing wind.
Sometimes he shears sheep in a pen.
Grabbing them by the throat, he yells into their faces,
as his wife slips as a draft under the bed.
He seems to think we’re all part of his flock
as a frown escapes his whittled fringe, as you pass
him walking the dog.
The shaved wool whitens his beard fills the hair he lost
when his youth died.
He skittles the sheep with his stare, then whistles
the tractor homeward.
Unmutes the silence with sentences of a bluebottle fly.
Spotlight Poet #32 is the brilliant Sue Finch. Sue was born in Kent and now lives with her wife in North Wales. She likes all kinds of coasts, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. Her first collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in Autumn 2020 with Black Eyes Publishing UK. Georgi Gill describes Sue’s work as having “the ability to beguile and shock”. Helen Ivory says Sue’s poems are “tender and straight talking yet can catch you off-guard with their slanted pathways” and Anna Saunders comments on Sue’s “fiercely original vision of the world”.
Invitation
She says I will be able to see
Perseids tonight in her armpits,
just as I am worrying
that I cannot read binary.
I assure myself I can Google it later
hoping that the instructions
will be simple.
I plan to have a notebook
and pen ready.
I know that joke about
there being 10 kinds of people in the world:
those who understand binary
and those who don’t.
I tell her it would be great
to see the meteors up close,
nuzzled right in.
They don’t make your neck ache
this way, she says,
and you will be able to hear
the crackles of ancient fires
it is all deep in there.
I wonder if we will ever be
sociable again after this.
How many people in the world
are hankering to see
night skies in the armpits of lovers?
dystopia
in memory of sean bonney
the eagle with gold bars melting in her mind
lava over the opal mines
ashes in a bucket of ice-cream
the silk worm eating herself tail to mouth
at the centre of a roundabout is hope
philosophers gridlocked in philadelphia
eagles dropping bars of gold over opal mines
between you and me sean bonney
i’ve had enough of this shit
nothing everyone and nobody
the city is killing me
the city hates my poetry
the city is a fucking nightmare
sean bonney do not fear
we will bury the dystopia
in unreadable film scripts under the pyramids
empty space expanding into empty space
your heart beating at the centre of the earth
bluebells growing bluer in the belly of blue-whales
black banners in riots for peace
re capitalism: fuck you
golden snow dropping gently over the opal mines
the sun is one of seven stars
rays of light polish our nightmares
write to me when the war is over
write to me when we have won
(‘dystopia’ first appeared in The London Magazine)
Collections/pamphlets titles: A Poultry Lover’s Guide to Poetry (Indigo Dreams 2015)
Swing of a page to a new year.
Door yawns to first footers
bringing shortbread and sloe gin.
She must open more doors; no shut them.
Draughts prick her calves; light shafts
stab past the hinge’s stiff applause.
A chain smiles across an open slit.
She jokes with her kids to ask callers
to put a hoof through the letterbox
as proof, to beware the wolf who flours
his claws. The door’s side is pierced
with keys and bolts to keep out bad things.
Flashback : midnight in a moon-milk kitchen,
A backdoor handle turns. He is outside,
a low, spitting growl. Door plays dead.
reads the sign around the neck of the enormous Playmobil figure.
I know the feeling. I blame Red Bull and I blame the news.
In tests 70% of humans can be persuaded to give an electric shock
to strangers. I’d rather give them shortbread, or perhaps a little wave,
but those too could have blue consequences. I scan the crowd
and wonder who might push the button. This student in brogues,
wielding lilies? The yummy mummy with a fearsome ponytail?
I’m not answering further questions till my solicitor is present
or I have proof they are irrevocably bad, like at that fancy dress party
when I saw a Cyberman smoke a cigarette. Meanwhile, I’m petrified
of the thump in my chest that is four valves closing, that conjures up
a backwards Advent calendar, a door shut with every year.
I tremble, pick at falafel wraps and store each terror
like those bald eagles who save every twig they find
till their overburdened nests plummet to the ground.
I drop my leftover wrap in a bin and consider death by falling
or electrocution. Death by milk float, steered by the nemesis
I didn’t know I had. I am vastly misjudged as a foe,
I want to tell him. He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with,
how much I’m not here, startled as I am by what turns out to be
moss tumbling from gutters, by the voice shrieking and howling
in my pocket that is Kate Bush, by a horde of breakable creatures not licking or hitting each other, just treading their way
softly along the back of morning, tiny hearts jolting.
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.
First, let go of all the plans
you once had: the casual ways
we assume the right to live.
Create a box for all your future tense.
Catch yesterdays in your upturned hands,
unfurl memories, learn to read code.
Before long, these too will be dust.
Abandon sleep. Forget the clock
and roll like a wave
on dawns and dusks that drip
like morphine into days
that feel as if they could go
on and on and on, but never
look away, in case you miss
the moment that it ends.
Learn to live between the punctuated hours,
your ears attuned like the city fox
to spot an altered breath,
your eyes alert to the pallor of skin.
Juggle everything, and fail,
and tell yourself this is your best
and know this best will never be enough.
Accept you cannot change any of this,
and break, and get back up again.
Try not to let them die before they die,
try to let them stay in this world
even as this world gets smaller
every day, even if some days
you wish an end to this and when it comes
try to remember
to stop, to sit
and listen
to the silence
after
the dying is done;
watch the morning come.
Try all over again
to let go,
and live.
Spotlight Poet #27 is the enigmatic Simon Maddrell.Simon Maddrell was born in the Isle of Man in 1965, brought up in Bolton, lived in London for twenty years and then moved to Brighton & Hove in Feb. 2020.Simon writes through the lens of a queer Manx man, thriving with HIV.In 2020, Simon was first runner-up in the Frogmore Poetry Prize. His debut chapbook, Throatbone (UnCollected Press) was longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards. Simon also appeared in The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2019 (Black Mountain Press).Queerfella was Joint Winner in The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition, 2020 and will be published in December.
Collections/pamphlets titles: Throatbone (UnCollected Press, July 2020); Queerfella (The Rialto, Dec. 2020)
Bobbing in a rowing boat
in Port St Mary bay,
father recited the whole Rime
of the Ancient Mariner to me.
Some things I remember now
and some I remember then.
Me a glitter
in his half-closed eyes,
an albatross
I did not want to be.
I did not want to be
weighed by the neck.
There was a shearwater
whose wings I wanted to see
skim & break the silence.
I recall those licks
about the stern,
those slaps up on the bow,
and that smell, half-rotten,
half-new. One day
it may never return.
From port-side appeared
Gobbag vooar swimming at us
abeam, wide open
like Ahab’s foe, and all alone
I saw my life inside a mouth.
Its bulbous nose dived
and all in one breath breached
the starboard swell,
its tail fin dripping triumph.
My father smiled.
I loved the man who loved
the boy who loved men, even
though he shot me with his bow.
Struck by the starkness of the walls;
colourless and cracked like eggshells,
I notice the only decoration, a thick wooden crucifix
looming above the blackboard—
X marks the spot, my older brother once told me,
showing me his knuckles, skinned
and wet like red inkwells,
courtesy of the metre stick.
I pick a desk as far away as possible,
beside the window,
and within sight, the playing field.
Already I’m longing for the clatter of the lunch bell
when I’ll be free to run to the wet grass;
perfect for lunging tackles, diving headers
or a knee-slide when I score.
Pay attention lad, he snaps,
before finger and thumb tightly grips
the hair behind my ear,
raising me from chair to toes.
My feet scrape the floor
as I’m hauled towards the blackboard,
recalling again my brother’s warning
that the Headmaster has no favourites.
In this room, he is not our uncle.
Published in North West Words
Spotlight Poet #25 is the excellent Julie Stevens. Julie has Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and used to be a teacher and successful athlete. Her poems tend to reflect the impact MS has on her life, as well as other topics close to her heart. She writes for both adults and children. Her poems have been published in various magazines, most recently The Honest Ulsterman, Dodging the Rain and Dreich. Her debut chapbook, Quicksand, came second in the Dreich Chapbook Competition 2020 and was subsequetly published. Her poem 'If I Can’t' was a winning poem in Bespoke Verse’s poetry competition in association with National Poetry Day 2019. www.jumpingjulespoetry.com
If I can’t walk that fast,
then I’ll start a new race.
If I can’t keep my balance,
then I’ll sing as I sway.
If I can’t use my hand,
then I’ll learn a new trick.
If I get so very tired,
then I’ll run in my sleep.
If the heat is too much,
then I’ll wave at the sun.
If I forget the answer,
then I’ll find a new question.
If I can’t sleep at night,
then I’ll say good morning to the stars.
Hometown: Kingston upon Thames
Pamphlet: A Dovetail of Breath
What are you currently working on? I’m developing a couple of new pamphlets, which
might come together as a collection or might stand alone - it’s all quite fluid at the moment.
Form it from mica, a runnel of crystal. From shell, from sand. Form it from loosestrife, form
it remorselessly. From salt. Gather whatever is floating, plastic or rotten, belly-up crab.
Form it in thunder, dash it to pieces in winter derangement.
Form it again. From molluscs, in ankle-deep drifts. From bladderwrack, itching with
sandflies, memento mori of cuttlefish bone. Scratch it from cliff edge. From what is
exposed twice a day, the hood of crustacean, the foil of the eel. From rain.
Form it from barnacles, intact on the rock: from what is resisting attrition. Shape it from
stasis. Form it from creatures in soupy lagoons, quarry for egrets at the turn of the tide.
From sea-glass, herald, assurance. Form it as votary, down on your knees.
[Commended, Winchester Poetry Prize 2019 and published in the competition anthology.]
Spotlight Poet #22 is the fantastic Arun Jeetoo. Arun is a poet and educator from Enfield, North London. He is a wanderer and a compassionate soul, known for his dirty realism style, provocative imagery, and dark humour. His work appears in The London Reader and LUMIN Journal amongst numerous print and online magazines across the world. His poetry received second place in the John Hopkins Prize (2016) and was shortlisted for the Erbacce Prize (2020). His debut pamphlet I Want to Be the One You Think About at Night published from Waterloo Press is on sale right now. He tweets @G2poetry and Instagrams @g2poetry.
grandiose with colour confetti
blue whimsical
banners
Kelewele cake
and presents galore
with an open-casket service
my Caput Mortuum
in a coffin
waiting for sundown
to build myself back
in my own way
luminous like Saturn’s face
wiser than yesterday
my phoenixian renaissance
incinerates the weak me
that is why
so much depends upon.
Name: Briony Hughes
Hometown: Ipplepen, Devon
Collections/pamphlets titles: Dorothy (Broken Sleep Books), Microsporidial (Sampson Low)
What are you currently working on?
I am currently developing a series of object poems which address the 1940s and 50s testing of nuclear weaponry at the Bikini Atoll, alongside the design of the bikini swimsuit, and the 2015 development of a ‘pollution absorbing’ bikini. Within the poem, found language linkingto each of these moments is in freefall, suspended in water and subject to chance encounters, collisions, disruptions, and reverberations.
Who would you say has had the biggest influence on your work and why?
It would be criminal to not mention Redell Olsen in response to this question. Dell led the lectures in the ‘Introduction to Poetry’ course during the first year of my BA. Fast-forward four years and Dell led my MA in Poetic Practice and is now my current doctoral supervisor. She has been such a wonderful and generous mentor, teacher, and friend, and has helped me to develop my writing and creative practice in so many unexpected ways. Check out some of her collections! Film Poems (Les Figues), Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel (Sub Press).
If you could take one collection with you to a desert island, what would it be?
Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow)
What advice would you give to your young poetself?
Ignore the rules. Tear the rules down, open yourself up to different possibilities and don’t be afraid to experiment (in every sense of the word). Find the small presses. Find the indie presses. Engage with presses which champion all voices. Write and find a community and write some more. Throw rhyme out of the window and do something different. Language is fun.
centre yourself in
height or weight
of her gravity
10 days empty
outline shedding
never at speed
the trickle is
contagious red
pith or water
directed toward
a pink-cap vial
focus consciousness
car park remains
visible this room
with a view
I am the lucky
one curtain between
bodies draining
other bodies
snow white drags
your limbs under
the water hello
h ello hhh h el hello hello
hello o oh hel hello hhell
hel lo hhh ello l l l l hello
cn y ou he a me
hel lo h e llo h h ello
hell o hello hello hello
hello hello hello hello
can you hear me?
open eyes remember
to breathe
Spotlight Poet #20 is the excellent Clint Wastling. Clint’s poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies like Blue Nib, Dream Catcher, Orbis and Dreich. His novel, The Geology of Desire, is an LGBTQ thriller set around Whitby in the 1980’s and Hull during World War II. He also has a sci-fi novel: Tyrants Rex set 3000 years in the future, both are published by Stairwell Books. Clint has worked with composers as part of Leeds Lieder Festival and toured his one man show, The Poet as a Geologist.
What are you currently working on? I’m working on a series of poems charting the River Hull from its source to meeting the Humber at the city of Hull. My family farmed in the area for many generations, so it’s not just about landscape. There’s also the edits on the next draft of my novel Stalin’s Bear to do and a publisher to find!
Winter’s roar on a frosty night
would find me sitting on the sill,
in an old cotton dressing gown,
lights off.
I would throw open the bedroom window
and listen to the sounds of the sea,
with the path of moonlight
paving the way a dream might take.
Go to sleep.
The door shifted and
I’d jump between winceyette sheets
as mother’s arm eased the window closed.
She warned me of sirens
who make men weak
and mermaids who drown
the meek and good
unless you say your prayers.
Through the glass, the physics of
a wave’s increasing asymmetry
transferred energy as sound.
How shifting gravity as the moon
waxes and wanes creates tides.
Scatter my ashes in the ocean,
let my atoms drift across the
wide, life-giving sea and maybe
I will feel fingers ripple through
amniotic fluid.
Hear new waves.
first published in Dream Catcher 37
If when we die, the soul attaches itself to something half-alive,
mine will settle for forest rot,
drip its thousand spines to a pale spill.
Woodland does not pause at loss,
it lives through its buried —
another hounded fox, the wrong red.
Somewhere, a horse chestnut’s falling pulse
and in the damp, stars yawn into autumn.
Everything and nothing in this wood.
When I become impossibly light, appear as wax,
let foragers steal my ghost-meat home,
prepare a meal of it, slow as winter.
We thought the pond just needed cleaning
to make sure the fish would thrive
but you said overstocking
was the problem and not the years of silt.
We deferred to your authority
idly standing by as you labelled
so many sick, diseased and weak:
threats to the well-being of the rest.
You judged them by their colour,
despatching the unchosen
to the pile beside your booted feet
impervious to their mouthed appeals.
Afterwards we cleared up the carnage
yet the memory still lingers,
like the stink upon our fingers,
that no amount of water will wash away
published in ‘What the Moon was Told’, edited by Janice Dempsey, Dempsey and Windle, 2000.
Kingdom
Hammered gold of glass.
Golden wood. Through this door,
the sky’s blue door. The birches,
rays of light, up from earth.
Hammered gold in a high sky.
The here-ness of there.
Vantaa, Finland
Spotlight Poet #16 is the fabulous Richy Campbell. Richy is a writer based in Manchester. With language, he wishes to capture noticeable detail, dream-like apparitions and the idiosyncrasies of human beings. He has performed his work at the Poetry Cafe in London, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, and Huddersfield Literature Festival. In January 2020, his first collection of poetry, Lovely Peripheries, was published by Live Canon. In addition to his own literary pursuits, he co-edits Sideways poetry magazine. He exists digitally on Twitter (@richyacampbell) and Instagram (@lovelyperipheries).
I return to the house,
stare through the grime-smudged windows
at chairs on their sides,
at the table covered with districts of muck.
The backyard’s slabs are mottled with litter,
weeds advance through gaps in brick.
A cold fetor clouds all from the corner,
from refuse sacks that holds water in clefts.
I sit on a brick pile near the fence,
head full of the last time we met.
The silence as our shoulders touched with the last hug,
your large eyes stupefied of their sheen.
Our laughter echoes from the bedroom window.
This is what I have of you
I see colours project on the curtains
if I stare hard enough.
I leave to the street, walk under the lamplights
and wonder where you are, in some living room
the silence between the two of you
deafened by the television.
I imagine the could-haves,
they ebb from the house,
flow out of the road, to you
they break brick from cement, skid cars on roofs,
knock your fingers from lampposts
that you grab in the current.
Spotlight Poet #15 is the brillant Liam Bates. Liam is a poet originally from the Black Country, currently living in Birmingham. He’s been published in some places and not published in most places.
(from ‘Working Animals’)
A kestrel hovers above the roadside,
a wary shadow against the sky.
You are stuck handbraked staring
into the arse-end of backlogged traffic.
The sun is a yellow stress ball
out of reach. Up ahead,
a motorcyclist has come apart:
not in the way we all do, but in two
discrete parts – there’s the part that’s their head
and the part that’s not.
You need to piss and you bark
at a drive time radio DJ who isn’t listening.
Collection/ pamphlet’s title: Circling the Sun (2018), Memory Forest (2019)
What are you currently working on? Promoting my debut full collection, Venus in Pink Marble, due for release from the Hedgehog Poetry Press 8th September 2020. As I have a 9 to 5 job, I have limited time and I can’t always find the time to write. I would love to say I was working on my next collection, but alas…
The Icelanders have a word that means just that.
A murky day that you know is better
enjoyed from the comfort of a window-seat;
soft mizzle cleansing leaves shiny and bright.
When webs become crystal dreamcatchers,
or perfect drops form on the telephone lines
and slide slowly down like the oil
on the wire of the indoor rain lamp,
with Venus in pink marble,
her flowing robe revealing perfect curves
against the plastic plants.
Outside the blackbird puffs himself,
feathers rippling. He dances on the lawn.
Drizzle doesn’t bring the worms up
but his fancy seven-step has the desired effect
and he pecks and pecks and pecks;
like the drinking woodpecker did, long ago,
on the dentist’s counter, see-sawing,
a globe of red liquid dancing, as I looked
past it and through the window,
longing to be outside in the rain.
Spotlight Poet #13 is the amazing Sunita Thind. Sunita is a British, Punjabi published poet with two published collections of multicultural poetry. She is a performance poet as well as Secondary English, History and Primary school teacher and workshop facilitator. She uses her poetry as a medium to voice important issues that woman have to deal with, such as mental health, equality, cultural and social injustice, racism as well as achievements. She has suffered from depression, PTSD, GAD, anxiety and paranoia throughout my life as well as having Ovarian Cancer twice. She is a BAME, female, Punjabi, Malaysian, British writer, qualified Make Up Artist and model and writer. She is also an advocate for Ovarian Cancer and have fundraised or charities and completed charity fashion shows and she has been covered by BBC East Midlands, BBC Radio Derby, BBC Asian Network, Mirror, The Daily Express, Eastern Eye Magazine, Huffington Post and Macmillian Cancer Support as a media volunteer.
Pamphlet’s title: The Barging Buddhi And Other Poems (Black Pear Press) The Coconut Girl (Wild Pressed Books - Upcoming in November)
Odd protrusions on her body.
The darkening blood on her egg white school panties.
Was this feminine disease contagious?
Pining for her premenstrual form.
Hair tight in sequined scrunchies.
Sucking the irony blood off her fingers that she inserted up herself.
She was curious for a sniff, her new smell was different.
It was disgustingly womanly she thought.
Ignoring the wet slush gush from crimson coated nether regions.
Hand prints slaps embellished from her turbaned papa.
He was not a man of god, only a man of excuse.
Bruise shaped-malevolently coloured.
Everything her was dying.
Her legs were blood.. scarlet limbs.
Her father was jealous of her female secrets that her dainty body told her only.
Shards of the feminine.
Underwear sodden and warm.
Murdering the whiteness of her school shirt.
She has to hand wash everything.
A washing machine was a luxury that was unavailable.
The lies that bind the womanly shame together.
Garnet soaked clothing in cold water and scrubbed with a cheap plastic washer
brush before her Punjabi Papa found her.
Curdled brain, belly flop, churning body, clouded corneas.
She was an embalmed butterfly.
His anterior fury, her half former thirteen year old thoughts.
Her staccato stuttering, her bloody words, dribbling from vagina lips.
Retreating inside her head, the fractures of her feminine chronology
Adorned in a wealthy costume of humiliation by these menstrual mothers that greet her monthly.
She is thinly with a painted face at obligatory family functions and weddings.
The pitiful cosmetics daubed on, her body somehow seemed wrong
Sexual assault is erectly waiting
Her finest salwar kameez is soaking-raw silk blanched in vermillion gore.
He can sniff at her period stench.
Was she impulsive and her father compulsive in his slaps at mortification at her womanhood.
Once reveling in the palpable joy of sniffing a bloody cunt.
Her eyes blooming in fear.
Inanimate to his anger, ungracefully running with ruby prints on her thighs.
Spotlight Poet #12 is the tidal wave of brilliance that is Serge ♆ Neptune.Serge ♆ Neptune has been called ‘the little merman of British poetry’. His first pamphlet is 'These Queer Merboys' published with Broken Sleep. His work has appeared in Lighthouse, Banshee, Brittle Star and elsewhere. He is the creator and host of poetry broadcast 'Neptune's Glitter House for WayWard Poets'.
i
sea wrapped in itself like a dead bug
voyaged on sunk within its liquorish water
that once drunk burns the mouth elongated
bone-structure of the sea its drench bark
zappy whirlpool skin cosy exoskeleton even
the greatest of men here flounder
ii
how long to be lost at sea months years
hormones spiral mind hallucinates how the absence of touch dictates what one sees in a distance of waves ~~ one defines lust as a
sea cucumber wriggling inside the ear & into
the brain ~~
what factors contribute to the brain splitting
into chunks of desire a ship that wobbles this loneliness of salt that tastes like pork well
past its due date & the other sea mammals
~~ gaily swimming by
iii
brine-lustrous species head & trunk of man
ending in a tail of fish or cetacean these
beguilers test the thirst of men lips wet with prophecy which have had centuries to
practice teasing scaly Cassandras nobody
ever listens to for fear of drowning & what
is it to love a man if not to drag him
underwater to steal his last breath
every sea-faring culture reporting the cheek
of it
iv
the sun like a spell of sweat which blurs the
sight the motions of shoulders pulling ropes
vigour of firm hands make a man forget
himself how a secret peek can cause the
strongest lungs to bruise
when tempest arrives it’s a quarrel of
spinster clouds fighting over the most
handsome sailors waves become hands that
clutch & crush & when wood turns to
splinters men look for each other ~~ not
even the virile want to die alone or unloved
when you drown you can feel the brain of
the sea at work hear its synapses cling to one another like a fishnet of laughter & song ~~
v
everything so blue wish I could eat the blue
whole like a pretty blue hamburger have you
ever chewed on your own guilt how a song
pulls and twists the mind of a man so that he
wants to die to forget his home & family our
voices’ frills baroque jukebox our lips know
~~ the wants of flesh
but what survives of us once men forget
little brothers we flick our fins in spite
dissolve sperm-white glowing spume on
choppy waves first wink of dawn
Cara L. Mckee
The Island
I lived on an island once
which was sometimes surrounded by sea.
Sometimes though the island’s god
would decide the island was enough
and wrap us up in a soft grey-white cloak
of frost and feathers, take us far away.
That’s the thing that no-one tells you:
that islands can just go away.
I don’t know where they go. It’s not
something I’ve read in the physics books,
I don’t care, except it’s hard sometimes
putting up with the other islanders.
At least we can laugh together at
mainlanders who say that sometimes
they can hardly make us out
for all the fog.
Matthew M.C. Smith
After gods
He wanders, drifting, after death of gods
and kneels on rock at earth’s still pool,
where water ripples to finger’s touch.
He rises, raising eyes to starry vault,
his spirit soars through endless night,
with ancient heavens myriad on show.
He leans again at water’s blackened edge;
the graven image, stream of light of stars,
imprisoned, still, a liquid mirror.
El Duende
From Haggards
Grief lives in my house
like dry rot infesting the timbers.
It has taken up residence
in the cellar, where I do not go.
I pretend there is no such space.
But he sits there, smoking coltsfoot tobacco,
and brewing a bitter tisane of rue
and wormwood, hyssop and dill.
Too much indulgence, he says, in sweet things
like joy and kindness, all the fruit
of sunlight and fresh rain, have done me harm.
It is time to take my medicine,
time for a purge, a cleansing.
Hell mend ye, he says. And hope.
Spotlight Poet #8 is the brilliant James Roome. James is a poet and English teacher from Manchester, UK. His first pamphlet, Bull, was published in April 2019 by The Red Ceilings Press. Recent work has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Anthropocene and Iamb.
Confessional
Thank you for the lovely meal. I noticed that your name was Jennifer. Please accept this poem in lieu of payment. Forgive me, I am but a struggling artist with a taste for fine dining. I also took the cutlery, glasses and crockery.
I am so sorry. I must take opportunities as I find them. For instance, the other day I found a whole poem that had become caught in the drain at the swimming pool where I work. I was cleaning hair out of the filter and there it was. Jennifer (may I call you Jenny?), I was
astounded. Ever since, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Perhaps it became tangled in someone’s hair at a poetry reading, then they rinsed it out when they came for their regular swim. It’s either that or they are a poet themselves and keep their drafts in their hair. I have known a few who do. I have launched an investigation. I have decided to open an office in the city. It will need to be a little dingy, and perhaps the glass in the door will be cracked. I am still wrestling with the specifics. Anyway, Jenny, I leave you this poem. I have tucked it under the tiny saucer you brought with the bill. It is not the poem that was tangled in hair. Nor is it the poem I found in a supermarket trolley. I have submitted both of those to literary magazines. No. This is just an occasional poem about a meal I ate alone with a price my humble means could not meet. This is really just to say sorry.
August Rain
Mirror
Suddenly, six months later in the steam
of scalding water in the bath,
my abdomen contracts
as if with birth
and I let out a cry—more a howl.
You were the wolf
and I would have sold my grandmother.
You ate me,
then cut open your own stomach
and wrenched me out.
There I am,
that bloody dissolved mess on the floor.
There I am, that stain lying
like a dead foetus
and you have sewn shut your stomach,
clamped shut your mouth.
What use is being sated to a wolf,
what use is a full stomach
to one accustomed to tearing flesh with teeth?
I wrote you this poem
in the steam of gushing water.
I bathed you like my own infant,
with these hands I poured
water over you parted
your lips where you lay injured;
of what I made with my own hands,
you ate.
I ball this poem in my fist,
it becomes a brick and shatters
through veiled glass into shards.
The mirror above your hearth now
a glinting mosaic on your living room
floor your daughter dances across
slicing her fleshy feet
trailing blood to daddy.
Such mess and outside air
in the centre of your home.
When you tend her cut soles,
gripping fragments of glass to extract
from her feet & drop into your hand,
bloodied canines lie in your palm
and you tongue your empty roots.
You can find Arji's work over on his website at www.arji.org
Incident
from Her Lost Language
The late spring snow
catches us off-guard,
drifts against the henhouse wall,
blots out the distant fells.
And here, in this borrowed house,
we watch, transfixed,
brave the blizzard
to throw scraps for the birds,
half-wishing it could always be like this.
Just you and I
at the kitchen table—
a dog-eared novel,
the weekend papers,
the last bottle of wine
waiting on the shelf
until the sheep are fed.
Yet we know
the snow will thaw by morning,
and we’ll drive down the lane
for bread and logs,
ice-melt from the trees
pattering on the bonnet.
Then, too soon,
the workday grind will call us back
from this adopted life
to the small house in the town,
where everything is a little less bright
and a little less kind.
As we leave,
the weather will change again,
the brilliant shine of it
making us smile,
and I’ll point out a newborn lamb,
his pink ears backlit by the sun,
as he watches us drive away.
Woman of the failed state
Woman in your failed state
With wrists warm as sepia
Burnt sage between your lips
Woman your thighs speckled
As slender as communion bread
One century from today, you’ll dine
On offal gnocchi, sip on honeyed wine
Fennel seeds will perfume your breath
From your lobes two opals will hang
There is no heaven, no haven
Only retreat from that elm-ringed brook
Where the stream ran warm like bathwater
And for now no thigh to rest your cheek
For now, no sanctuary bar his iris
Friday for our funerals rites—else, a pyre
A day where it rains enough to soak the veil
Where the ground forgives, aids the spade
Somewhere the earthworms have forsaken
And I’ll see twelve girls spread on marble
And you, Woman, read the prayer cast
on the underside of all our eyelids:
Pluck
From my breast the rib You loaned. Pluck from
My breast the rib You loaned. Pluck from my
Breast the rib You loaned. Pluck from my breast
The rib—