2022

 

 

AUGUST CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Jaya Avendel, Ben Banyard, Edilson Ferreira, Erica Goss, Robin Houghton,

Fred Johnston, Laura Lind, Carolyn Martin, Diane Pohl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JAYA AVENDEL

 

Settler

 

She gave us a rusted pail one year

She called it an ash pail

This old woman from the hills

With tree bark for skin and

Roots for nails and

Eyes full of nineteen twenty-one.

She gave us the pail dented with wishes and

Lives embalmed in rust

When the sun was strong enough to fade our clothes and

Burn our skin and

Her trek back up the mountain

The trek that made her feet bleed

Was worth it to give us her tin heart

Though it would be five months before

We could burn enough wood

To make ash

To make lye

To make soap

To wash the gathering complaints from our bodies and

Become the clean slate upon which to carve

Letters that make our spins tingle

While she fades in her cabin

Where the glass windows are

Polished with raindrops.

 

Jaya Avendel is a word witch from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, passionate about life where it intersects with writing and the dreamscapes lost in between. Her writing is published diversely online and is included in print anthologies on everything from climate change to women's empowerment. Find further work on her website at www.ninchronicles.co “Settler” was previously published at Vita Brevis Press & Free Verse Revolution.

 

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BEN BANYARD

 

Bleeding

 

I find it at the bottom of my toolbox.

A brass key, like a piece of Victorian ephemera.

The annual ritual, moving from room to room

feeling like someone’s father

as I experience that thrill of finding

each square valve in the radiators.

They give with a little force, yield a hiss,

some sigh longer than others

as they exhale last autumn’s stale air,

then a dribble of black spittle into my rag.

Later, central heating on against the first chill,

I retrace my steps, give every heater a gentle stroke.

 

 

Back to the Future

 

In the shop doorway,
cross-legged on cardboard,
she calls to me
any spare change, please?
 
I rummage in my bag and pull out
a Flux Capacitor,
think that if she could only
rewind her life
like Marty McFly,
make changes wherever she
came to forks in the path
which lead her here this morning,
she would snap my hand off.
 
She coughs,
shakes her head.
 
That’s kind, but you’re alright.
A couple of quid will do me.

 

Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, near Bristol. His latest collection, Hi-Viz, was published by Yaffle Press in November 2021 and is available from his website: https://benbanyard.wordpress.com/hi-viz. Ben also edits Black Nore Review, an online journal of poetry and flash fiction:

 https://blacknorereview.wordpress.com 

 

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EDILSON FERREIRA

 

Another Language

 

I don’t like soft-spoken people,

with unhurried speeches and 

calculated talks and gestures,

conveying thoughts and doctrines

with professional and doctoral air, users

of attentive audiences and easy applauses.

I get bored and cannot hear them.

I’m aware that time is running out;

our life short, finite and imponderable,

and so inaccurate our common insight,

that pompous speech becomes suspicious.

My words are little heard, in fact,

I was born a poet and I talk on paper,

where they are written, to be read by people 

with all the time and right to refuse them. 

My family and friends look like me,

our eyes speak more than words.

But with some lovers I have had,

I spoke not only with looks. 

I created a crazy language,

mad and infatuated one;

not from mouth to ear,

but from mouth to mouth.

Edilson Ferreira, 78 years, is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Widely published in international literary journals, he began writing at age 67, after his retirement from a bank. Has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his first book Lonely Sailor, One Hundred Poems, was launched in November of 2018.

 

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ERICA GOSS

 

Caesura

 

There’s beauty in the line break,

like pausing at a river’s edge,       

where thought and breathing merge.       

 

The reading eye needs empty space,

dry land between two oceans.       

There’s beauty in the line break,

 

a rest between calculations.

The rain of print dries to a blank

as thought and breathing merge.

 

Let the weather in your head subside.

Go still. You’re in the storm’s eye,

where beauty is the line break,

 

a lighthouse-flash, the gift of sight,

the longed-for letter from overseas.

Let thought and breathing merge,

 

a soothing spot of white noise        ,

more profound than words.

There’s beauty in the line break,

where thought and breathing merge.

Erica Goss is the author of Night Court. Her flash essay, "Just a Big Cat," was one of Creative Nonfiction's top-read stories for 2021. Recent and upcoming publications include The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, Redactions, and Consequence.

 

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ROBIN HOUGHTON

 

Wife of the above

Bristol Cathedral, 30-10-21

 

And also Mary, wife of the above

who died November 14th, 1835.

 

Mary, engraved on a white slab

passed over by how many feet

 

she lies above and below the above.

Above being one cryptic, nameless

 

husband immemorial who lies

unmemorable,  a few self-effaced

 

words smoothed to a shoeshine finish

his name well trodden in, forever

 

missed and no-one to certify

who he was and which were the lies.

 

And also Mary, wife after death

half here, standing out on her own.

 

She took his name, he took it all

with him, the sentiments, the sentence

 

his story and also hers. Mary, several

feet below my feet, hello.

 

 

The Day I Walked On The Moon I Set Myself Up With Oats

After a Quaker Oats advert on YouTube featuring Buzz Aldrin

 

Nineteen breakfast bowls at least, that lunar

module ran on porridge power: oats

and milk, no water, no cinnamon, no sir.

Armstrong called it gloop. But Neil I said

it's gluten-free. Perfect for space, or a walk.

 

The day I trod on the moon I stirred the cream

in my part-reconsitituted dish

my dreamy mix of wholly oaty grain

grainier than the TV coverage that day

and since you ask, it wasn't a set-up.

 

The day I kicked up moon with my bigfoot boots

I was totally stoked on cereal, starchy

as that stiffened flag we planted poked

into the moon-rock yessir I was carbs

through and through fueled and tanked.

 

The day or was it night I moonwalked

my footprint set to last a million years

I knew in my fully-breakfasted guts behind

the glass dome of my helmet that I was rich

in fibre, and fully set up for mooning.

 

That day I was a man on the moon marooned

on a dried-out dot of not-a-planet my mind

turned to earth and how I was set up for life.

Ask me anything you like. About the oats

I mean.  Or the footprint.  Or the stars.

 

Robin Houghton's fourth poetry pamphlet Why? And other questions was a joint winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition 2019. She co-hosts the Planet Poetry podcast with Peter Kenny. Poems in The Rialto, Poetry News, Agenda, Stand, Butcher's Dog etc. Full collection forthcoming. Blog: robinhoughtonpoetry.co.uk

 

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FRED JOHNSTON

 

What Is Not Said In Old Wedding Photos

“The bells rang, and everybody smiled.”

                               - Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey

 

In their black and whiteness they allege to tell

Something more vital than pixels can define –

We eye them and praise them for their weight of better times

Everything framed in the church portico that we need to see

The ‘Forties – he’s in uniform; the ‘Fifties – a hint of sass

 

There is no frozen image of his waking in a sweat

No cancers shaping through. You can’t hear her shout.

They’re not X-rays; if they were we wouldn’t

Be eager to ikonise them in albums. Nor can we read

The heat of her unspectacular lust for the still out-of-frame

 

Young man she sees most days on the ‘bus.

He takes the sudden kids to a museum and pauses

Too long with the girl in the ticket kiosk –

Those photos on the church steps erase the human

She is stone, he, a mannequin, they have one smile

 

Between them. Age drips like an obscene torture.

They are happy-melting-to-content, they believe

In less. Children become annoying neighbours begging

For sugar or a cigarette. The photos fog with longing,

We call it nostalgia, at best. The camera always lies.

 

Fred Johnston was born in Belfast in 1951, recent poetry appeared in The Spectator ('Jubilee' issue,) The Guardian, The Irish Times, Cyphers, Crannog, The Dalhousie Review. His most recent publication is the collection, Rogue States (Salmon Poetry, 2019.)

 

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LAURINDA LIND

 

Carpenter’s Daughter

 

It is a plague year with three

strains circulating. The two

of us are wrapped against

the ravaging, stricken from

within. On the other side of

the house sleep my parents,

not yet sick, though at ninety-four

all my father needs to make him

fall off the earth and disappear

forever is one fraught molecule

from over here. Earlier years,

when he had to hide he did it

in the garage among generations

of hand tools and fasteners half-

sorted, and the air, so full of ferrous

oxide, oil, and cement dust, sought

his brain center where reassembled

elements somehow kept him

brave and safe. I don’t dare go

over there, even with gloves and

a mask, so into his inert hands

where he has lain in bed a month

and a half I imagine a hammer

and a hacksaw, hoping he will bash

his way out, escape to another

outbuilding. Or dig through to

a cellar where once he gets there

he stays and stays, secret, whole.

 

Laurinda Lind lives in the U.S. in northern New York State, near Canada. Some of her writing is in Anomaly Literary Journal, Stand, and Spillway. She is a Keats-Shelley Prize winner and a finalist in several other competitions, most recently the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. Originally appeared in Red Earth Review, Summer 2018.

 

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CAROLYN MARTIN

 

Not a Pastoral

‘These things/Astonish me beyond words.’

William Carlos Williams, “Pastoral”

 

Without a rural itch, what I know of sheep

could fill one line. I prefer milkmaids

invested in the Dow, shepherds who own

        Victorians in town, and local news

        bemoaning the death of malls.

 

*

When you asked me to take down

the star magnolia tree, I took you literally.

To the ground, I heard, although

I loved its flowering. You yelled,

A trim! too late. We bemoan empty space.

 

*

Beneath the ragged edge of fall,

leaves lose the lyric tint of cherry, maple, plum.

They’ll fossil on lawns and concrete unless

some poet rakes them into a lasting line

like Letters spelling ‘death’ are not a death.

 

*

We’re warned: a frigid sea will crash at dawn.

One day to shut gardens down before icy snow

smothers dahlias, mums, roses, and bamboo.

I’ll cut and rake urgency as daylight shivers out.

We’re warned: the world is shutting down.

 

*

It goes with saying––the way a willow’s wave

says wind, rain says bounty or flood, fire says

death and rebirth––Earth is uncertain

she will endure. Perplexed by our complacency,

she yearns for the grace of requited reverence.

 

Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening, snorkeling, feral cats, writing, and photography. Her poems have been published in more than 150 journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK.  Currently, she is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation. Find out more at www. carolynmartinpoet.com.

 

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DIANE POHL

 

Chores

 

Breezes all nectar-ed.

 

Waiting for hummingbirds gets lonely.

 

Thistle hung.

Sunflower and millet

a-sway in their open-windowed swing-vehicles.

 

Last night a possum was trying to cross the road in front of me and I stopped,

but she scrambled back to the woods.

 

Now please just let the rabbits have their celery and lettuce

and the coyotes their cabbage rinds

 

while I shuttle soft bananas to the leaf pile

and cry when it rains.

 

 

Dishwasher Times

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I love the sound of the dishwasher at night

its rolling rhythmic roils 

and occasional long line breaks,

rogue waves and rain-sound.

 

I also love the next morning after the dishwasher-night.

Like right

now

hot-to-touch clear-white

steam-clean

tabula-rass’d

 e-ras’d, pristine,

sinfree.

 

I remember washing dishes with my dad early that spring and the bubbles that were rose-scented

and spigot-steamed and iridescent above-water, that floated and birthed ever more and smaller bubbles and also mist. The sink was stain-less.

 

There had been a quarter stuck in the drain and it rattled whenever the motorized grinder was on.  I was able to clear it, surprisingly easily,

just before my sister and I sold the house later that year.

The quarter was battered but still silver and round,

kind of like a moon.

 

Diane Pohl’s prose poem ‘When you were 9’ won an Allen Ginsberg Award and appeared in the Paterson Literary Review.  Her most recent work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Main Street Rag, Slipstream and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area.

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

The Middle Finger

 

The Greeks started it,

this katapygon,

 

this noble gesture,

this single-fingered lecture of contempt,

 

the first to leave it standing alone

upthrust from the fist like that,

 

nail in their faces.

Then the Romans,

 

who imitated all things Greek,

called it digitus impudicus,

 

while in America, brought by the Italian immigrants,

it first appeared in an 1896 photograph

 

of a baseball player giving it to the rival team.

I don’t use it much.

 

It loses its effect if used too often.

Like the word fuck in a poem.

  

Nominated for the National Book Award and twice-nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of twenty-six books of poetry and co-author of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

 

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