2023

 

 

APRIL

 

 

Angela Arnold, John Bartlett, Clive Donovan, Tim Dwyer, Tom Kelly, Phil Kirby,

 Mercedes Lawry, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Charles Rammelkamp, Shane Schick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANGELA ARNOLD

 

Inventory While Lying Flat

 

Done:

The long breath-rasp incline.

The slippy dance with jettisoned twigs, cold-

shouldered leaves. Under a keen blustering of trees, scant stabs

of a dot-and-spot-lighting sun. Definite promise of weather,

at the top.

 

Have:

One leaden self parked, carefully unfolded, beside one howling drop.

Rock upon rock upon rock of an uplifted bed: precarious perch

for a battered spirit; for a back

that knows so intimately, substantially, basically,

the hundreds of hard feet

piled up, stood on end, underneath.

Weirdly unhorizontal views, while muffled clouds boil

the-other-sideways. Horizoning hills practice their tilt – and each

crook-angle view a perfect self-justification:

one breathful of close-grasping cloud

doing the job of ten alternative medicines.

The countless sun-snap explosions into green, into rape-yellowness,

adding honey to the sweet satisfaction of one scattered,

and partial, and prone.

 

To do:

The scrabbling to sit, reluctant normalising, so-called,

of view, world, healed self (possibly): 'Rotate to right

by 90˚'. 'Click.' And the steep plod down, attention exclusively

on battling knees. Hope entirely on being fit

human company.

 

Angela Arnold has had her poems published in print magazines as well as online, in the UK and elsewhere. They have also been included in anthologies and her debut collection In|Between is out this spring (Stairwell Books), with a second collection newly completed. She is also an artist and a creative gardener who lives in North Wales. She enjoys her synaesthesia and language/s and is currently learning Welsh. @AngelaArnold777

 

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JOHN BARTLETT

 

hidden

 

who could comprehend the lyrics

sung by magpies at daybreak

 

or understand the motives of swallows’

murmurations              the language they sketch

on a canvas sky or

 

who could conjure words for

the light’s golden moments when

each leaf and flower glows from within

 

who can parse the grammar of each

tiny weebill in the canopy of Moonah

who has measured the corners of a heart’s wildness

 

so let the secrets of this earth

stay hidden for what fragile soul

could bear the weight of the knowingness

 

that balances all planets in orbit that

carries the push and pulse of a pelican lift

 

let some mysteries remain

 

John Bartlett is the author of eight books-fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  He was the winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize and Highly Commended in the 2021 Mundaring Poetry Competition.  He reviews and podcasts at beyondtheestuary.com and lives on the southern coast of Australia outside Geelong. Twitter: @beyond_estuary

 

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CLIVE DONOVAN

 

In Search of Cash

[After Zbigniew Herbert]

 

They are drowned, then, and come to shore,

one entangled in a fun rubber ring

with a duck's head that didn't lift,

didn't save her from the hissing waves

that did for this quintet.

They will be gathered up like litter,

added to statistics – bodies, drifted, five;

this squad of uninvited visitors,

full of swallowed water they filched from the sea;

like sodden books, all un-stitched, semi-sunk,

and broken, in the golden foreign sand.

 

I would have loved to read those volumes,

probe their histories, taste their western dreams:

Of becoming a chambermaid,

opening a sandwich stall,

selling sarongs on the beach,

sleeping in a kitchen somebody's cousin knows

and whether it was best to register;

the multitude of methods to earn and remit money

home to villages, stunned with poverty,

which could be paradise for families

with soldiers evicted and a little spare cash.

 

And is it rude of me to intrude

on their cancelled lives, what dare I write of them,

having just constructed a poem about crocus buds,

what luck would I wish them?

A flatter sea, a better boat,

protection of a roof and nourishment enough

for making fast the stubborn roots of hope.

But could I, perhaps, without apology,

or any expectation of applause,

write them five flowers, twined and wreathed, freshly devised,

just opening now – each unique fragrance – an offering –

 

Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press] and Wound Up With Love [Lapwing] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannog, The Lake, Prole, Sentinel and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He is a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems.

 

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TIM DWYER

 

Turning To the Window   

                for Hitomaru

 

Snow on the lane,

old friend from my years

living in the north.

 

Remembering

old friends gone.

 

Reaching the shore,

crystals from the sky

 

touch the strand

and disappear

 

Kakinomoto Hitomaru, Japanese poet,7^th century, considered one of the ‘Saints of Poetry’.

 

Words of a Young Father

Kharkiv underground, constant shelling, 4 March 2022

 

At least

we have

Food

and

Air

and our

Children

are okay

we have

that

at least,

at least

we have

that

 

Tim Dwyer’s poems appear regularly in Irish and UK journals, recently/forthcoming in Causeway/Cabhsair, Frogmore Papers, London Grip, and a feature in New Irish Writing in the Irish Independent. His chapbook is Smithy Of Our Longings (Lapwing). Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland. Tim’s email. @Timtjdwyer

 

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TOM KELLY

 

For Those I Never Knew

 

I am returning to the part of the cemetery

with no headstones,

a hillock of unknowns

I walk so gently over.

 

See a man leaving for work,

waving to his wife

a bairn clinging,

she is not wondering how to spend days

 

each one chiselled in her life;

waiting, sometimes even patiently

for a moment with nowt

on the horizon.

 

Today I am walking over their lives.

 

Plessey Woods

I am in someone’s car at sixteen, seventeen,

not knowing where we are going.

The driver is intent on the road

as if he does not keep looking

it will disappear.

The driver’s wife

tries to keep everyone happy,

intermittently handing out sweets and biscuits,

melting on my finger tips

making me feel embarrassed

had me believing I had not washed my hands

after using the toilet.

The intent-on-the-road driver

parked slowly, deliberately

beside a parade of trees

allowing the car to settle like an excitable dog or child.

We all sat until he turned off the engine

not looking ahead

but at the cars’ roof and we may have been at Plessey Woods.

 

Tom Kelly is Jarrow-born writer and is now living happily further up the Tyne at Blaydon. He has had thirteen books of poetry, short stories and a play published in as many years. His second short story collection No Love Rations was published in April 2022 by Red Squirrel Press.

 

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PHIL KIRBY

 

Surrender

 

Call off the search. And hang

our pale banners of surrender

across a wall of night sky spread

with cold, slow stars of winter.

 

Step down from sodden moors,

their howl and dismal rain-light;

forget the riverbanks, the coastal

promenades of blue and white.

 

No sense to shout their names

down empty streets in evening haze –

we will not find them, living

or playing as they did in simpler days.

 

They’ve become the remembered,

framed pictures on undusted shelves;

their elements all rearranged into

abstractions of their former selves.

 

So come in from the dewy lawns

and darkening woodland drives;

hold on to the remnants of a hope:

that something of them may survive.

 

Phil Kirby's collections are Watermarks (Arrowhead, 2009) and The Third History (Lapwing, 2018). Recent work in Acumen, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Ireland, Stand, The High Window, amongst others. He is Treasurer of Fire River Poets in Taunton. Writing as P.K. Kirby, a teen novella, Hidden Depths (Applefire, 2016), is on Kindle.

 

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MERCEDES LAWRY

 

Woman in a Chair

 

Woman in a chair

glancing, as light strikes

her hands clasped

in her lap, not revealing

concern or contentment.

 

He painted her, telling us

little, although much

can be imagined, out the window,

next to the spindly vase.

 

We see and don’t see

the faded gray dress,

the soft yellow curtains.

 

There she sat and he saw her

in the room,

in his mind,

and when he smeared

paint on canvas,

a series of gestures,

careful then released,

a crow guttered past.

 

Perhaps emptiness,

which can’t be detected

in the elusive shadows.

Perhaps mourning.

 

Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason,was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner and she’s been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Vestiges, was just released by Kelsay Books. Her collection Small Measures will be published in 2024.

 

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ELIZABETH MCMUNN-TETANGCO

 

The Sunfish

 

If a pan could be a body, or

a bed.

 

If an oversized

umbrella thickened

 

up, or had

 

a soul.

The people next

 

to us say oh! It is

so ugly! Because

 

you hear the word

sunfish

 

and think

sun-tan oil

 

and sand, and that’s

not this. But no

 

one really sees

 

just what the sun

is doing. Boils

 

itself. 

I read they put the sunfish

 

back when it gets

stressed. I read that it can weigh over

 

a thousand pounds. That it

is docile. Do

 

we know what docile means, I

sometimes think,

 

as strategy.

 

We make a shadow

with our hands, all palms

 

and thumb.

 

Lake Photos

 

You want to make

this about summer, and

 

you do: the sound of

laughter and the rough lacework

 

of water. Someone’s father

with a beer can on his knee. His now-lost

 

thoughts. You take 

a breath, dispelling

deserts, feel for slime-spots

 

with your toes. All of us,

 

in our cheap

swimsuits, leaving

wet marks

 

on the boardwalk. All of us, gambling

for drinks, holding them up

against our necks. That cold wet

 

ache. Even now, there is the heft of those vague

mountains, their names gone.

 

You are too

old now, zooming in to look at faces. The free child

 

is on a tightrope, and you can’t say

where it’s tied.

 

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley and works as a librarian at UC Merced. She co-edits One Sentence Poems and First Frost.

 

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CHARLES RAMMELKAMP

 

The Original British Invasion

 

Still grieving about the assassination 

of its president three years earlier,

America welcomed us with open arms.

We took New York by storm,

with our risqué jokes and saucy costumes.

Our six month-tour lasted six years.

 

Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes –

Alice Burville, Lisa Weber, Rose Coghlan,

Pauline Markham – we charmed America, 

but while we never claimed 

to be more popular than Jesus,

a wave of anti-burlesque hysteria swept the press, 

frightening away middle class audiences

with descriptions of our “jiggling and wiggling,”

a “disgraceful spectacle … indecencies of the hour.”

 

When Wilbur Storey of the Chicago Times 

questioned our virtue, we demanded an apology,

and Pauline and Alexander Henderson, my husband, 

and I horsewhipped the bastard at gunpoint.

We were arrested and fined, of course,

but the publicity made us more popular than ever.

 

We finally returned to England in 1874,

after crisscrossing America.

Nobody knighted or assassinated.

I went back to the stage.

 

The other British Blondes?

Lisa died in Buffalo in 1887 after a declining career.

Rose, whose father was Charles Coghlan, the writer,

went back to England, too, starred 

as Countess Zicka in Diplomacy and some others.

The last I heard about Pauline,

she’d married a former Confederate Civil War officer 

named McMahon, while she was playing 

at Niblo’s Garden on Broadway, in the early Seventies.

They had to skip town to avoid

arrest over a huge unpaid hotel bill.

 

What a life! 

it was exciting being a star!

All you need? Love.

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives, and edits The Potomac, an online literary journal. http://thepotomacjournal.com. His photographs, poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals. His latest book is a collection of poems called Mata Hari: Eye of the Day (Apprentice House, Loyola University), and another poetry collection, American Zeitgeist, is forthcoming from Apprentice House.

 

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SHANE SCHICK

 

Museum Hours

 

other than the ones open to the public.

Early, early mornings when the sunlight

hops over the turnstiles to get in for free.

Renaissance portraits locking eyes

across walls without windbreakers,

backpacks, ballcaps and blue jeans

constantly coming between them.

A respite from the voices of docents

trying to talk all the mysteries away. 

Opportunities to forget the gravestones

next to each frame reducing the contents

to names, countries and dates of death. 

Or late, late in the evenings when brooms

create long brushstrokes across marble

floors, covering the faint treads of sneakers

as though they were mere underpainting. 

And later, save for an occasional visit

from the moon, the chance for sculptures

to curate a temporary installation where

the corners of their glass boxes vanish 

into beautiful, unseeable abstraction.  

All the still lifes a little stiller still.

 

Shane Schick has had work appear in Juniper: A Poetry Journal, Stanchion Zine, South Florida Poetry Journal and many other publications. He works as a journalist and content marketer covering business, technology, fashion and more. He is based in Whitby, Ont. More: ShaneSchick.com/Poetry. Twitter: @ShaneSchick

 

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