2022

 

 

JULY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Frank De Canio, Agnieszka Filipek, Jeff Gallagher, Kasha Martin Gauthier, Sarah James, Yvonne Higgins Leach, Beth Mcdonogh, Mark Parsons, Tim Taylor, Rodney Wood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

FRANK DE CANIO

 

An Actor’s Lament 

               

It was in the middle of my famous soliloquy.

The one that brought the house down

in my prime. But not anymore.

I must have muffed my lines,

slurred the words, or teased them

to a tedium. Perhaps there was an edge

of desperation in my voice, or it lacked

conviction; full of empty gestures

and posturing. I should have let the words

speak for themselves, and put aside

the throbbing, sobbing theatrics.

Maybe they saw puffing under my bleary eyes,

surmised I’d seen better days, or were just

damned tired of listening to the blasted thing

for the umpteenth time! Who knows? If I did,

I would have done better, whatever that means

in a world where being good is gall enough.

It’s enough that things run their course,

and it’s not wise to push them further;

to recite the same verse time after time

to no purpose, or to a purpose that doesn’t wash

in the real world. It’s enough they’re leaving

in droves, for whatever reason, and it’ll get worse

before the season ends, and only closest friends

go scrambling at the box office, like vultures

swooping down on a mangled carcass.

 

The rest are leaving with all sorts of excuses:

wives, husbands, mistresses, children to feed,

foodstuffs on the stove. And most of them

will not return. Divorced, widowed, tired of living,

they move away, or stay and age in furnished rooms,

and die, sooner or later. I can’t hold them all,

passing through the world like sand

in an hourglass. What do they want from me?

To hold them by the wrist, feel their pulse,

and tell them which way their blood flows?

God knows it goes in all directions.

So why bother if we have the energy to move;

indeed, the wherewithal and presence of mind

to think about moving? It’s enough that we don’t

drop dead. That we can still wonder if it’s any use

to have blood flowing through our veins

rather than water, air, fire, or just the muck

of the earth where the worms keep fucking us.

 

But I’ll resist complaining.

All change is for the better

in the crazed turnings

of this ever-changing world.

So if fair weather turns foul

and the howling wind begins

its bulldog reckoning,

I know it could always be worse

than what it is. So I never die

to one dissipation without celebrating

another. And when God’s henchman appears,

advancing like a prancing cavalier,

with his chalk-white mask

and a fatal diagnosis, I’ll dance

my changes. Not like a blushing

school-girl waiting to be asked,

but like Shiva, brandishing

cataclysmic fire on the edge

of the next universe. I’ll laugh

in his face if it’s a man, kiss it

if it’s a woman, and piss on everything

that doesn’t sing its changes.

I fart for the joy of passing wind.    

 

Born & bred in New Jersey, Frank De Canio worked in New York City for many years. He loves music from Bach to Amy Winehouse. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby. As poets, he likes Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath. He also attends a philosophy group. “An Actor’s Lament” was previously published in red river review february 2015

 

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AGNIESZKA FILIPEK

 

New World

 

you’re promising a world

without diseases

or scars on my body

with no more tears

no giving up

 

we won’t get angry

that another calf was slaughtered

rabbits were tested on

puppies drowned

and a turtle died

entangled in plastic

 

you’ll collect the stars

we’ll only eat ice–cream

drink champagne

and on sleepless nights

we’ll be like plasticine

moulding each other anew

 

 

Conference

 

hiding its sweetness

beneath its green skin

 

soft and juicy

when I’m biting into it

 

the juice flows down my fingers

and up to my elbows

 

mouth full I’m remembering

my grandfather’s allotment

 

Agnieszka Filipek is a Polish–born poet living in Ireland. Her work has been published worldwide. Her poems have appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Capsule Stories, Local Wonders Anthology, Lucent Dreaming, Black Bough Poetry, Crannóg, The Blue Nib, Chrysanthemum, Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets Anthology, Marble Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. “New World” was first published in The Poet Magazine, England, 2020.

 https://www.facebook.com/polmnieapoltobie

 

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JEFF GALLAGHER

 

Semper Floreat

 

They no longer rule empire, mine gold, drink gin

or play cricket in the jungle,

they no longer brandish their guns and their Bibles

as their slaves dig another ditch.

 

Now they have public relations training to explain

how to speak to the media,

how to lie their way out of scandal while remaining

charmingly eccentric. And rich.

 

But these chaps still make friends with the natives

swapping influence for bribes,

and judge an acquaintance by the way he speaks

and the name of his former school.

 

They are taught to assume their rightful place

in the corridors of power,

setting out to maintain the old status quo

using privilege as their tool.

 

These are the high priests in whom we still have faith

while evidence points to the contrary

in the polished voices of these prodigal sons

still smiling with confident ease.

 

They have left the jungles of Africa and Windsor,

assuming control of the tribe,

spreading pride, ambition, but mostly false hope:

that peculiar English disease.

 

 

Adjudication

 

Thank you for your submission.

We have a number of points to make

Which might reduce your chances

Of facing rejection in the future.

 

Firstly, your poem is the wrong colour.

By that we mean it does not sit easily

In the white Anglo-Saxon tradition

By which we measure what is good.

 

Your poem is also too fat. It suffers

From verbosity. Your desire to express

How you feel leads to a complete

Breakdown of rhythm and form.

 

The subject matter is inappropriate.

No one wants to hear how the world turns.

We need love and joy and optimism

In these troubled times. Not this.

 

You are angry: that is a weakness.

A detached irony is the route to success,

Since you need to ensure that nothing

You write will ever bring about change.

 

Some words are hard to understand.

It may be your particular dialect

That gives these blunt lines a certain

Charm. But it is not literature.

 

We think you are trying too hard

To find a voice that is actually yours.

Perhaps you should leave the experts

To decide what is real poetry.

 

We love the fact you are a woman.

We need more women in this profession,

Provided they are clever, attractive,

Tragic, and preferably already dead.

 

But we cannot place you in a category.

You are neither mystic nor intellectual,

Escaped dissident or polymath.

Frankly you are just too ordinary.

 

So our advice is: begin again.

From birth. Then, with the right education,

And a clear understanding of how

To belong, you can become, like us,

 

Poetically correct.

 

Jeff Gallagher is from Sussex, UK. H’s poems have featured in publications such as Rialto, Shooter, Dreich, Littoral and The Journal. He has had numerous plays for children performed nationwide. He was the winner of the Carr Webber Prize 2021. He has been a teacher of English and Latin. He also appeared in an Oscar-winning movie. He has no handles.

 

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KASHA MARTIN GAUTHIER

 

Ode to My First Poem Accepted

 

The editor, in an email,

told me that he wanted you,

the poem,

for their Spring Edition.

I’m no longer aspiring-

now I’m a Real Poet.

 

I can already feel

the journal in my hands-

see myself searching

for you

in the index-

like a mother

separated from her child

in a crowded supermarket-

scrambling and desperate,

breath caught in my throat.

 

We’re page 46-

I’ll furiously clatch at pages

until I find you. Our reuniting

will be glorious, both of us

forever changed.

 

I’ll show you to my children,

who will proclaim that now,

Mom’s famous! And maybe

someday we’ll have a million

Youtube followers! I won’t

break their hearts with the truth.

 

My undoing

was the realization that

one day, after I’m gone,

my daughter, in reply to a question,

will take down from the shelf,

the book where you still live.

She’ll crack the brittle spine,

turn to the dog-eared page

and say: This-

this was your grandmother

 

Kasha Martin Gauthier lives outside of Boston with her family. A member of the Workshop for Publishing Poets, her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Breakwater Review, Pangyrus, Constellations, The Healing Muse, Slipstream, andSoundings East. Kasha’s poetry is informed by her family dynamics, upbringing in New Hampshire, and careers in business and cybersecurity.

 

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SARAH JAMES

 

Toothache Talisman

 

My lack of calcium aches, sharp-nerved
where my tooth’s enamel has cracked, exposing
a sore core; ice and heat hammer pins.

 

None of the allowed pills will shift it –
not for the first time this pregnancy, I will it,
and you, out of me instantly, pain-free.

 

Six months later, your body’s prematurely
wrapped in the plastic of an incubator.
Your tiny fist clamps onto my finger.

 

I wish us both stronger, more calcified,
though nothing will ensure bones or life
are unbreakable. I count your baby years

 

in breaths and cries, sleepless nights
and gum-gnawed teething rings,
which fail to ease your toothache.

 

When the fairy claims your milk teeth,
I string their magic into an opalescent spell –
not for you, but as a talisman for me,

 

against the slow distancing
of your growing up until your smile
is a good five inches above my own.

 

My tooth still stings every time I laugh,
or cry; I can’t close my jaw around
a single sound without love aching.

 

Sarah James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Winner of the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2020 and CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021, her latest collection is Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press, 2022).

 

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YVONNE HIGGINS LEACH

 

Upon Glacier Okjokull

August 2019, Iceland

 

A hundred people hiked in silence

To the last dangling melt of pure water

To what is now the lost language of ice.

A funeral for a dead glacier, white mass

Turned to dirt and scree under their feet.

Where is the turquoise blue, a child asks.

 

Yvonne Higgins Leach is the author of Another Autumn (Cherry Grove Collections, 2014). Her poems have been published in The South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Spoon River Review, The Cimarron Review, POEM, and others. She spent decades balancing a career in communications and public relations, raising a family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. Her latest passion is working with shelter dogs. She splits her time living on Vashon Island and in Spokane, Washington. For more information, visit www.yvonnehigginsleach.com

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

Evidently

 

His absence is present
under a crash up of cushions
hiding a spectacle collection.
 

His face is here, but not here
after multiple wipings of glass
left in a gallus greased framing of hands.
 

He is hidden in one corner cupboard
stacked up with coloured tumblers,
tidied away. Unwashed.
 

His are the elephant prints
in the fridge, fingered in butter.
Just like all the other clichés

which slipped under the door
with such ease from that first time,
and stayed, being too good to leave.
 

 

Garnethill life still

 

Scrubbed table, whitened with lemon, set

with two places in that July hot light, which filters
through rose pelargoniums and astragals,
past something of chimney pots. Glasgow sits outside.

Just a small cluttering of cutlery, made neat
beside Habitat Blue Denmark plates.
Chilli plopples on gas, as measured rice waits
for water. Parsley curls sharp on a saucer.
 

Salad, in a wedding present earthenware bowl,
mixed ready with servers, for last minute dressing.
Upstanding pepper-mill. Small dish of salt. Simple.
Laid out for a meal which will never be eaten.

 

Beth McDonough’s poetry appears in many places; she reviews in DURA. Her pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word. Recently, her site-specific poem was installed on the Corbenic Poetry Path. She's currently Makar of the FWS.

 

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MARK PARSONS

 

Your Face Burns My Hands

 

The woman on a bench across the street

fingers a lock of her red hair.

She straightens a forelock that hangs from her temple,

to examine the ends

like the dagger point of an artist's brush.

Rubbing her fingers together

she carefully

and self-consciously

lays an auburn tress on the bench.

The scissors make crisp and decisive shearing sounds.

Twirling each lock at the edge of her vision, she cuts flush to pale scalp.

Today isn’t windy.

The pile of hair beside her drifts

between the wooden slats, catching hints of sunlight.

A man in a grey boilersuit

rounds the corner and passes the scaffold.

Stops at a tree

planted in the sidewalk.

He shakes a can and sprays black spots

on the trunk below the branches.

The leaves are green and thick, the only things

reflecting light

anywhere on the street.

The man replaces the white cap

and walks to the next tree, past the woman,

who continues to cut.

 

Reflected in a shop window

I see the doorway over my left shoulder, framed

with tiles of white and blue:

someone dressed in chinos starts down

the narrow stairs inside, and turns and goes back up.

I can't remember why I’m here, neither

the reason I came nor the reason I stay—I forgot,

or never knew.

A rind of white where the woman

has cut away around her ear, she gathers a long tress

off her collar. Her head at an angle,

the man in a jumpsuit

walks past,

shaking the can as he looks at the back of her

head in the shop window.

The next tree is the last one on the block.

The woman runs her hand

over the newly-shorn side of her head,

copper strands wound tight around her fingers.

Between the man and the woman,

the bus shelter.

Standing before the final tree,

the man

shielding his eyes

with his hand as he sprays.

And again,

several inches lower.

The hem

of her print skirt

flutters away from her knees,

which are pink.

Both of them.

 

Mark Parsons' poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Ex Pat Press, Dreich, Cape Rock, and I-70 Review. He lives in Tokyo, Japan. ‘Your Face Burns My Hands’ was first published in Indiana Review, Spring 1997, vol. 20, issue 1.

 

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TIM TAYLOR

 

Blighty

 

When he returned, they were so glad

to find him whole, unblemished: four limbs,

two eyes, skin tanned but unburnt, unholed.

They’d heard the stories of what might have been,

those bodies minced and sutured back together,

faces melted, bones and flesh replaced with metal.

You made it through, they cried, wrapped arms

around the solid, reassuring mass of him,

awaiting his embraces in return. None came:

those fine, muscled arms hung limply by his side.

Such words as passed his mouth appeared

to come from very far away. So much of him

had missed the plane and was still over there,

among the bullets and the bombs that took

his friends but spared this now half-empty body.

What’s left of him is lost inside it, midway

between these caring faces and the other self

for whom there can be no way back.

 

Tim Taylor lives in Meltham, West Yorkshire, UK. His poems have appeared in various magazines (e.g. Acumen, Orbis, Pennine Platform) and anthologies. His first collection, Sea Without a Shore, was published in June 2019 and his second, LifeTimes in March 2022, both by Maytree Press. https://timwordsblog.wordpress.com/

 

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RODNEY WOOD

 

Untitled, Ms Mobile Gate

Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2009, MS Mobile Gate.

 

It’s an ordinary mechanical

residential gate, the type installed

for seclusion and safety. This one has

exaggerated iron spikes and a small

protruding metal frame in the shape

of an island or country. It swings

back and forth, banging against the galley

wall, cracking and breaking it. The gate

could be trying to escape or it could

be a crowd had gathered, was tired

of speeches and waiting so they explode

though like cannon balls and gate swings

loosely on its hinges. My old Catholic teacher

stands in the way telling them to believe

impossible things: God is indivisible yet

at the same time divided into three

and one of those parts is both fully God

and fully man. He’s talking about this gate.

In reality, it’s only the right half of a gate,

the other, missing half, is open

so we just have to step over the threshold

and grab what we believe.

 

Rodney Wood lives in Farnborough and worked in London and Guildford before retiring. His poems have appeared recently in Atrium,The High Window, The Journal, Orbis, Magma (where he was Selected Poet in the deaf issue) and Envoi. He jointly runs a monthly open mic at The Lightbox in Woking. His debut pamphlet, Dante Called You Beatrice, appeared in 2017 and When Listening Isn't Enough, in 2021.

 

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