2018

 

 

 

DECEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Paul Bernstein, Rachel Burns, Mike Dillon, Lennart Lundh, Jory Mikelson,

Maren O. Mitchell, Ronald Moran, Robert Okaji, Angela Readman, Hannah Stone,

 Judith Taylor, Thomas Tyrrell.

 

 

 

 

PAUL BERNSTEIN

 

Grandmother Teaches the Child About Death                                    

 

Her mind fell like a leaf,

fading from red to gold

to wrinkled brown rot

eating up her breaking stem

until it cracked, and the wind

grew curious. A child listens

to her rasping breath. No one

taught him dying but grown-ups

whisper in the dark and weep,

he sees, he wants to know,

and aims his ripening wit

at grandma, to blow away

the wall between her life and his

and wrench apart the mystery.

This is not death, says the child,

there are no angels here,

no stink, not even silence,

and turns away

to the noisy comfort

of gunshots on the television.

 

Paul Bernstein is a self-taught poet with some 50 publications in journals and anthologies. He is also a prizewinning amateur country music lyricist and a published photographer. Recent work has appeared inFourth and Sycamore, Muddy River Poetry Review, Front Porch Review and Blue Lotus Review. “Grandmother Teaches the Child About Death” was previously published in Poesia, 2008.

 

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RACHAEL BURNS

 

Abecedarian for when hell freezes over

 

Angels came to my house in droves

bad angels, fallen angels, with long fingernails

cankerous angels riddled with gin and sin

decay carried them over the threshold

every day another and another

flaying broken winged angels spat out of the dark.

God! Mother curses,

hell must have frozen over.

Icicles hang like spears from the porch,

jellied snakes writhe in the yard and the

Klu Klux Clan build a bonfire on the lawn.

Lions in Zion sings Bob Marley from the broken stereo.

 

Mother takes to her bed for four weeks

nobody notices the foul smell

or the tower of Babylon, building in the sink.

People don't ask questions.

Quickly we learn to fend for ourselves

remembering what happened the last time

Sister Francis came snooping around

tutting about the mess, the state of Mother's undress

unblinking eyes taking in the decaying fruit

vegetables rotting in the fridge, the rancid meat.

We're going to take her away, ha ha!

X marked the spot. We told Sister Francis about the bad angels.

You wicked children, she cried, telling wicked lies,

Zealots! Zealots!

 

Rachel Burns is a poet and playwright from Durham City, England.  Poems recently published in The Fenland Reed, Crannog and Poetry Salzburg Review. She was shortlisted for Poetry School Primers 4 and Hedgehog White Label Competition.

 

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MIKE DILLON

 

The Search

All day I’ve rifled closets and drawers,
searched behind couches and curtains,
peered in back of the piano, in back of mirrors
and under the rug in case I swept it there.

I’ve leafed through old, beloved books thinking
I’d slipped it between certain precious pages.
Believe it or not, I combed through the ashes
of last night’s fire. And rechecked my pockets, of course.

All the while winter sunlight filled the windows,
shone upon the cedar and salal and silence of moss
while wrens and sparrows released their songs
sweet and clear as snow-melt creek water.

I searched until the brightness outside dimmed.
I still couldn’t quite make it out — what I’d misplaced.
All day some grief clung to me, vague and categorical
as the sleepy eyes of a cat I couldn’t shoo.

Mike Dillon lives on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle, USA. He is the author of four books of poetry and three books of haiku. Departures, a book of poetry and prose about the forced removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor will be published byUnsolicited Press in April 2019.

 

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LENNART LUNDH

 

Cool Stillness Evaporates

 

when the music

freezes

 

when the

long

steel

          blade

of the sax

          hangs

in the air above your head

 

when you wait for it to

          fall      and

you     wait    and

          want   and

 

you see the jazz man’s face

become a red balloon

          the image of the scream

          the wanting for release

 

it is then

          the cool stillness

          turns to steam

 

Lennart Lundh is a poet, short-fictionist, historian, and photographer. His work has appeared internationally since 1965. Poetry and fiction books may be found at etsy.com/shop/VisionsWords.

 

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JORY MICKELSON

 

When god wasn’t god

 

When god wasn’t god

he was

 

an animal like us,

but less

 

skin. Not less than

we, but

 

more leather and light,

his smile

 

a curved claw used

to open

 

possibility, the tufts

of fur

 

crowning pointed ears

primal grace.

 

How then did we pray?

for mercy

 

to never see holiness

coming

 

for us among the trees.

 

Jory Mickelson is a queer writer whose work has appeared in The Compass Magazine, The Summerset Review, The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Vinyl Poetry, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the UK.  He is  the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry. The author of three chapbooks, his most recent is Self-Portrait with Men in Cars, published in 2018.

 

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MAREN O. MITCHELL

 

Falling Toward Winter

 

In the time of seed pods and spider egg sacs, leaves shift from

one language to another and insects chorus,

 

as I’m caught between hypnotic purples, hot orange, the safe

languor of summer and cold weather’s fictional

 

and numbing safety of indoors, while all skies seduce my sight:

high to me, buzzards arc and at dark the truths

 

of space and placement sparkle taunts; yet the close of night

by sunrise saves me from too much brooding on

 

baffling majestic possibles, like the curtains we pull to cover

windows prevent others from seeing in and us

 

from seeing out. We’re confined to look up and never see far

enough, far enough to answer questions we do

 

not know to ask—children all our lives, we grasp and squabble,

lie and whine, petty thoughts among petty acts—

 

and, at best, when crumbling back to earth, accept this comedy.

Long after sunset, as winds continue

 

their intermarriage around the planet, outside, on the prow

of our deck, side by side, my love and I adjust

to night’s repeated revelations, heads back, mute with shock.

 

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems appear in The Cortland Review, Hotel Amerika, Poetry East, POEM, The Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, Town Creek Poetry, The Pedestal Magazine, Appalachian Heritage, Slant, Still: The Journal, Chiron Review, The Lake (UK), The South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Journal and elsewhere. Work is forthcoming in The MacGuffin. Two poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives with her husband in the mountains of Georgia.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

Ascension

 

Rarely before in poems was sex used

by poets ascending the requisite ladder

of success, in any form it might assume,

as in the metaphor of one snake locking

its seductive mouth on a prey, or another

wrapping banded coils around an innocent

 

struggling for relief, then thriving on it,

since young poets want readers to feel

carnal openings, the synthetic passing

for life, in concert with an attendant urge

that may be like lust, a word long avoided

by seasoned readers as outdated, common,

 

but overused, as when the young poets

try to suggest sex by arcane, mystic tropes,

hoping audiences of readers will, in time,

be caught up in nets of words by the new

and young poets, whose truths are loosed

on innocence, ingested, and then digested.

 

Ronald Moran lives in South Carolina. His poems have been published in Asheville Poetry Review, Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Negative Capability, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in thirteen books/chapbooks of poetry. In 2017 he was inducted into Clemson University's inaugural AAH Hall of Fame.

 

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ROBERT OKAJI

 

My Mother's Ghost Sits Next to Me at the Hotel Bar

 

Blue-tinted and red-mouthed, you light a cigarette

that glows green between your lips and smells of

menthol and old coffins, burnt fruit and days carved

 

into lonely minutes. I mumble hello, and because

you never speak, order a tulip of double IPA, which the

bartender sets in front of me. Longing to ask someone

 

in authority to explain the protocol in such matters,

I slide it over, but of course you don't acknowledge

the act. The bartender shrugs and I munch on spiced

 

corn nuts. I wish I could speak Japanese, I say, or cook

with chopsticks the way you did. We all keep secrets, but

why didn't you share your ability to juggle balls behind

 

your back sometime before I was thirty? And I still

can't duplicate that pork chili, though my yaki soba

approaches yours. You stub out the cigarette and immediately

 

light another. Those things killed you, I say, but what the hell.

As always, you look in any direction but mine, your face

an empty corsage. What is the half-life of promise, I ask. Why

 

do my words swallow themselves? Who is the grandfather

of loneliness? Your outline flickers and fades until only a trace

of smoke remains. I think of tea leaves and a Texas noon,

 

of rice balls and the vacuum between what is and what

could have been, of compromise and stubbornness and love,

then look up at the muted tv, grab your beer, and drink.

 

Robert Okaji lives in Texas, where he occasionally works on a ranch. The author of five chapbook collections, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sleet, Lost River, The Zen Space and elsewhere. Visit his blog at https://robertokaji.com.

 

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ANGELA READMAN

 

Hush

 

Fuming, I step out of the kitchen and the quiet

introduces itself. The swallows freeze, gulped by the shed.

Now, the barn owl arcs beneath the contrails, a compress

 

on a graze.  My husband’s not far behind, dustpan

of wood ash in fist rising snow on rewind. I point up,

along. No gasp but fox tail and cocksfoot swaying us to be still.

 

Dusk pulls apart to reveal a pale satin lining, a flashlight

of feather blanking a stone wall of cloud. I thought I knew

what silence is. For hours, we’ve dragged a hush

 

through the house, flung it across our hearts. We have fought

over nothing that’s everything, turned our mouths

into locked doors, the key chained to pride. And here it is,

 

a soundless now dropped across us. The owl plots

the boundaries of buckthorn and bramble in chalk, a wing

hammering a hundred windows to the mouse glutted hedge.

 

Side by side, we stare at the soar lifting whatever we thought

was so important out of our heads. His hand reaches for mine

at the dip, all this business of living by so many small deaths.

 

Angela Readman's poetry has won the Mslexia Competition, The Charles Causley, & The Essex Poetry prize. Her collection The Book of Tides is published by Nine Arches.

 

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HANNAH STONE

 

Twelfth Night

 

The sledger needs mending; his hands hold a space

for the inch-high tree which bristles in its box.

One cardboard skate is loose

and the drummer boy has lost a stick.

 

But back into the packet they go,

till the next round of winterval jollity,

each piece slotted into place,

all stretching out their arms in vain.

 

They have their cheery props

(a golden keg, a wrapped-up gift)

but no-one took the time to paint

a smile on any of their faces.   

 

Off they shoot into the dark recesses of the attic,

with the redhatted snowman,

the winged angel and the bells

which hung unrung on the desiccated tree.

 

Downstairs, the final tot of sloe gin is poured,

last crumbs of fruitcake savoured.

By bedtime, the tree’s twice felled,

sap evaporating from next year’s Christmas kindling.  

Hannah Stone has two collections of poetry, Lodestone (2016) and Missing Miles (2017). She convenes the poets/composer’s forum for Leeds Lieder, comperes the Wordspace spoken word event, and is a member of York Stanza. Her Penthos Requiem (penthos.uk) received its premiere in October 2018.

 

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JUDITH TAYLOR

 

Contemporary Bassoon

(Sound Festival, November 2017)

 

These airs come by a long road:

from your player's lips

down, almost

below the knee

 

to rise through all your slow-

opening bore, your darkwood phonics

the mechanical interference

of your chrome keys

 

to reach at last

above our crowns

that white O

the mouth from which you speak to us.

 

Your breadth contains

multitudes:

tradition allots you

two voices

 

one, the grandfather

- gruff, chuckling, dry - and one

the thin cry, that shivers and brings the young year

to dance herself to death again.

 

What work there is

between these two extremes:

 

what breath, what tension

ascending your range as if

a range of mountains;

then the cool rapelle

 

down

the compositional ropes, the hard-

tried technique to tie

your heights and your depths together.

 

What risk-filled oscillations

what impossible new glissandos

you are asked for now.

And in what song

 

you respond, sounding your whole

core: speaking these new

these raw, these rich and strange

these brittle harmonies

 

with your tall self

alone.

 

Judith Taylor comes from Perthshire and now lives and works in Aberdeen. She is the author of two pamphlet collections – Earthlight (Koo Press, 2006) and Local Colour (Calder Wood Press, 2010) - and her first full-length collection, Not in Nightingale Country, was published in 2017 by Red Squirrel Press. http://sometimesjudy.co.uk/

 

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THOMAS TYRRELL

 

The Same Man in Another Key—A Coupling

From Beautiful Wales by Edward Thomas.

 

The best way into Wales

and the writing of poetry

 

is the way you choose

to take, after however long a hesitation,

 

provided that you care. Some may

scrawl down subconscious shorthand, or

 

like the sudden modern way

of writing in shocks and fragments,

 

of going to sleep at London in a train,

waking briefly for the body on the line,

 

and remaining asleep on the mountainside

because Nature as a theme is all tapped out,

 

which has the advantage of being

for those who flit between the bookshelves

 

the most expensive and the least surprising way.

Scant nectar in slim volumes steeply priced.

 

Some may like to go softly,

down the autumnal aisles of paperbacks

 

into the land among the Severn,

under bridges, high and white as gates of dreaming,

 

on foot, and going through sheath after sheath

of diaries, nature notes, books brimming with the love

 

of the country, to reach at last

its purest expression,

 

the heart of it

in pulsing verse.

 

 

Her 49 Separate Dreadlocks

 

number among them the questing tendrils

of jellyfish, vines and liana from

the virid jungle, abandoned

tails of iguanas, the lithe

proboscis of the elephant

and the waving fronds of sea

anemones. Pinned up

they are a nest that cockatiels

could roost in; a coil of

rope, string and multi-coloured

thread; hemp, jute, hair, silk

unpicked and entwined

together in glorious jumble: let down,

they are a flail, a veil, a beaded curtain

through which her laughter

rattles. Alarming

as it is to see them flex

and writhe and luminesce, there are

no snakes among them

and her two blue eyes

have nothing of stone about them.

 

Thomas Tyrrell has a PhD in English Literature from Cardiff University. He is a two-time winner of the Terry Hetherington poetry award, and his writing has appeared in Spectral Realms, Wales Arts Review, Picaroon, Lonesome October, Three Drops From A Cauldron, isacoustic and Words for the Wild.

 

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