2023

 

 

AUGUST

 

 

Gale Acuff, Kate Gale, Charlie Hill, Beth McDonough, Lauren K. Nixon, Sandra Noel, Nikita Parik, Marka Rifat, Laura Rockhold, Megan Wildhood,

A.D. Winans, Victoria Wiswell.

 

 

 

 

 

GALE ACUFF

 

Nobody loves me and I don't blame them

 

I sometimes think and say to my

-self but it isn't true, my parents do

and my dog and maybe even guppies

and then there's God and Jesus and likely

my Sunday School teacher and even my

fourth-grade teacher though not all the time but

then again maybe deep-down in her heart,

so inside her that she's not aware but

she does, does love me that is, and maybe

I love her, too, that way, I wonder what

kind of love to call that, unconscious love

maybe, even if she's not aware but still

she is, maybe that's the strongest, like an

engine so quiet you start it again.

Sooner or later you're dead but when you're 

 

dead you're dead forever. there's no sooner

or later to Eternity, if that's

what forever is, but at Sunday School

they swear that that you rise again, that is

you go to Heaven or Hell, your soul, since

the rest of you, meaning your body, is

gone (also forever), Eternity

as well, but the kind of life to come that

I'd like is none at all--if I'm Jesus

and rise on the third day maybe I'd not

ascend unto Heaven, I'd stick around

on Earth and see just how long forever

lasts--after all, I'd be miffed that I was

sacrificed. I'd live again but stop right there.

 

Nobody wants to die and I'm alive

 

though I wouldn't mind being dead but I

mean dead as in not having been born, some

-how death by dying's not the same, don't ask

me why or why not, I'm just ten years old

and go to church and Sunday School each week,

religiously you might say--I just did

--but anyway I asked my teacher What

if God had held me back from my mother

and sent somebody else, what then for

me and she stared and stared as if she thought

I should be asleep but I was really

dead, the way I sometimes look at Jesus

on the crucifix on the wall behind

her desk. He looks a little bit of both.

 

Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. His poems have appeared  in The Lake, Ascent, Reed, Arkansas Review, Poem, Slant, Aethlon, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Roanoke Review, Danse Macabre, Ohio Journal, Sou'wester, South Dakota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Texas, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Adirondack Review, and many other journals.

 

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KATE GALE

Pharaoh’s Army

 

The pond swarms with horse flies.

We got choke cherries we eating.

 

We thick full of blackberries. 

Our legs bramble torn. We got fish to catch.

 

Enough for dinner. There’s four of us.

I already got ten fish.  This pond’s a full of ‘em.

 

You can hear bull frogs.  You can see the bull rushes

with ducklings, the cat o nine tails growing along the edges

 

some of em stripped out for duckling nests.

Them boys heads is all shaved. We got three hours

 

to catch these fish, then we cook em with the cornmeal

in the oven with grilled onions; it’s so much better

 

than when we got to eat liver and onion. 

We get big slugs up and down our legs. Them boys take off them shorts

 

down to them whities, they got them slugs up near their privates.

Huge black slugs crawling up their legs.  Me and Betty we keep

 

plucking off our stomachs and our legs, I aint about to get no

creepy slug up in my girl parts, no way.  The buckets are filling with the fishes.

 

The boys are drinking haymakers while we fishin’ and screamin’

the Lord gave me another fish! The God Almighty gave me another fish.

 

We gonna have us sugar snap peas with these here fish, and I still gots

to do the snapping so we gots to finish fishing and gutting and Betty’s

 

gonna be rolling em in cornmeal while I get the peas ready while the boys

are gonna clean up the fishing stuff which takes two minutes but they’ll say

 

takes all evening.  Right now though, we’re fishing and we got all afternoon,

the sunlight inside the pond, yellow and muddy; and these leeches

 

seem to come from inside us; they’re dragging us under.  Sing to us, Betty says,

and I start, “oh Mary don’t you weep don’t you mourn, Pharoah’s army got drowned.”

 

The bullfrogs and leeches all around us.  The dragonflies and horseflies on the pond.

We could be dragged under; or we could disappear off the surface and float away.

 

Kate Gale is the co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press. She has six published books of poetry including The Loneliest Girl and a few published short stories including one in Glimmer Train. She also has a few librettos including one that was produced by the Florentine Opera, Rio de Sangre.

 

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CHARLIE HILL

 

Piano Lessons

 

In our new front room stands an old piano,

that came down the road

when my mother-in-law died.

In the reverberations of its strings,

its timbre, I hear stories of faraway worlds,

of Port Glasgow and shipyards, and swimming

in the Clyde, of need and want

and children orphaned by TB

– Thank god for Father Peter!

 

My wife never learned to play

– like me, she was dismissive,

had better things to do –

but our kids take lessons on the old piano,

and one day, when their teacher leaves,

I ask if they can hear the stories too.

 

'He left his tea again' they answer, 

and 'I don’t want to practice scales'

and although this makes me love them more,

I’m reminded we have to work

at grasping what makes us, who we are,

the harmonies and discord

of blood and class and time.

 

Charlie Hill is a novelist and short story writer from Birmingham, UK. His poems have appeared in Under the Radar, Prole and Ink, Sweat & Tears. His website is here: https://www.charliehill.org.uk

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

The Met Office tries to tell us the difference between mist and fog

Apparently, these are sharply cut matters
divided by the density
of water droplets in air.
A distance visible from less
than one thousand metres off
means fog.

But fog is also realising you're lost
in increasingly threatening woods.
What's now rarely found here, at least,
is that foul viscous and vicious
soup-thick tubercular wrap-round
of towns.

Then again, fog might be that kindly music
drifting longing across the Tyne,
just remembered and soon hummed,
sung by some Northumbrian band

you can't quite name, but are sure
you like.

Fog is a veil of condensation, on glass
asking to be drawn through, fingers
cold-tipped. A free medium, used
for the ribald sketched grinning face
all too soon unning with tears –

wiped out.
 

Fog is that ribbed knitting inside your head
after Chemo, or with Covid,
when fog no longer offers
anything as ethereal
or likely benign
as mist.

Mist is thinner, yet it quickly fills with words
ready to express the almost
invisible, and which are
perhaps too unfashionable -
or even fashionable -
to use.

Mist is possibly not
where you think,
as you become aware

it might leave

in the whim
of wind.
 

Beth McDonough's poetry is widely anthologised and published. She reviews for DURA and elsewhere. Her first solo pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word. She has a site-specific poem on the Corbenic Path. Makar of the FWS in 2022, she's working on a hybrid project on outdoor swimming.

 

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LAUREN K. NIXON

 

the way home

 

the road is loud, busy, throat-choking with fumes.

far better, far more preferable to drop a street lower

and cross the bridge to walk along the canal,

where everything is light and shadow.

 

gravel crunches underfoot beside murky water,

glinting with colour captured, fractals fracturing in the

wake of a passing houseboat, a steel impressionist:

the blinding white of the pair of swans,

nesting again, precarious; the flash of dragonflies,

airborne emeralds and sapphires, glistering the air;

ranks of soft yellow irises, or hot pink foxglove spears;

the scrumptious, burnt orange of fat factory bricks;

creamy Yorkshire stone; the scribbled rainbow

of graffiti; dipping boughs of willow and fluttering beech;

the artificial green of phosphorous gorged lawns;

wind-dancing laundry hanging at the ends of gardens,

like Sorolla’s fisherwomen,

ducks squabbling noisy underneath.

 

it is all deliciously repeatable, until something rarer

steals my gaze. there: a flash of dark fur –

a weasel darting into a bank of rosebay willowherb,

liberating a flotilla of dandelion seeds,

which venture upwards, weaving ponderously

among the thermals of the sweet evening air.

 

it is not a place of mystery, this flat, orderly ribbon,

winding languidly through the land,

but it is – quite often – the way home.

 

Un-derstanding

 

She is kind and clever and good and she’s raising her son the same,

so, it floors me when she says it would be better if all these immigrants never came.

I think, she does not understand!

 

And ask if I can show her how this island came to be a place where everyone is from,

how thousands of years ago we were part of an amber trade

that stretched from Norway to Mycenae.

I tell her about the ‘Celtic’ diaspora, Beaker people, Stonehenge, the ‘Tin Isles’ of Herodotus,

the waves of incomers since AD – all of them, becoming us.

I talk trade routes, connections all across the globe, all across time,

and she says, well, we were never part of Europe anyway!

And I think, she doesn’t understand.

 

So, I show her maps of Empires and shifting territories,

how ‘countries’ are invented over and over, redefined by conquest and greed.

How we fly from conflict and run towards faith and shelter.

I show her the cobweb of places in two continents 

whose words share the branches of a common tree,

but she shakes her head at me,

and I think, she doesn’t understand.

 

I talk about Sikh soldiers in the First World War,

fighter pilots in the next, from Greece and Poland and the Czech Republic,

folk from all over a Commonwealth built on blood and stolen lands;

the Windrush generation who came here to make lives for their children –

children we went to school with – children who are our friends

(we live in Bradford, for fuck’s sake).

 

She sits there with her Roman nose and Norman hair

and the blue eyes of Danes that came and made this place their home,

wearing paper armour that no one else can see, cut out and kept from the Daily Mail,

talking to her friend, with wild Saxon hair,

and tells me that no, English is still as English as it has always been.

And I think, yes, it is, that’s the point! But she doesn’t understand.

 

Across the kitchen table I see a chasm opening in the polished French walnut.

I wonder if she knows it’s there – a deep fissure splitting the grain.

The Caribbean sugar has already fallen in, and the bowl of cherries from Spain.

Her coffee cup teeters on the edge as she says,

I’m not a racist, but… this is our country, for people like you and me,

and I wonder when it left us, our tradition of hospitality.

 

I say, Technically, the Welsh are the only genetically British people left.

She laughs. Tells me I will believe anything. Says, if people didn’t want to drown

in rubber dinghies, they’re welcome to go home.

Her little son claps his hands and says, Funny! Funny!

 

And I think, I do not understand.

 

An ex-archaeologist who swapped the past for the present, Lauren K. Nixon is an indie author and poet. She is the author of numerous short stories and several novels, along with three volumes of poetry (Wild Daughter, Marry Your Chameleon and umbel.) and two largely accidental plays.

 

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SANDRA NOEL

 

Rage takes Dad’s hands

 

He yanks the Nazi poster from a town hoarding,

 

speeds up the street with his crime underarm —

his brain catching up.

 

Seeing him fly past, his mother feigns her faint

at the feet of a German soldier.

 

Dad hides a death sentence in tomato crates

where it stays with the wireless for fifty years.

 

The fate of the condemned man is unchanged.

 

Velo YouTube says he needs that electric bike

 

Mike tells the IPad he could have it for summer.

Wendy sees the advert from across the sofa,

Go Wild Gardens multi-buy,

a must for wise gardeners.

 

She knows the postman will deliver.

Mike will be out the back for hours,

Maximising insects for a better world.

She thinks at least it’s not Stay Stretch —

wash tabs for Lycra-honk.

 

Glad she doesn’t succumb to algorithm lies,

a Facebook post catches her eye,

book release, Live Your Best Life. 

The text-box alongside,

Discover Your Mature Match,

hoovers her brain.

 

Sandra Noel is a poet from Jersey writing the ordinary in unusual ways. Sandra’s poetry appears in The Phare, Flights, Black Nore, Yaffle, Indigo Dreams and others. She has poems on Guernsey buses and is highly commended in the Yaffle competition 2023. Sandra is working on her first collection.

 

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NIKITA PARIK

 

To Woman is to Witness

 

changes in set semantics,

the word guilt, for instance.

 

Guilt. /ɡɪlt/. Noun.

Definition:

 

a grenade

bombing this side of 20s

for not having understood

our mothers sooner-

 

not having,

for instance, held their overwhelmed

gazes,

 

scanned that the fatigue

lining their eyes

was frustration,

 

was helpless anger,

was a silent plea,

was the chipping

of the body and soul

into exhausted bits,

 

was a question mark

on other nouns such as

dreams. purpose. worth.

 

To woman is to watch

 

emotive history

repeat itself:

 

these days,

after the sun slips off the horizon,

this house explodes.

Things not picked up after

 

their owners

feel like arson; garbage thrown into the bin

without the lining in place,

incendiarism.

 

Nikita Parik is the 2022-2023 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Stirling. Her third and latest book, My City is a Murder of Crows (2022), has been nominated for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and shortlisted for the  Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize. She has recently presented talks, readings, and workshops at SOAS University of London, University of Kent, and University of Stirling. She has also read her poems at the Off the Page Book Festival, Stirling (Stirling Council Libraries and Culture Festival), and at the historical Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Scotland. Her books have been reviewed/featured in The Sunday Statesman, Business Standard, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Outlook India, The Wire, Indian Literature, and Kavya Bharati. You can read her interview with Kitaab (Singapore) here, and listen to her poetry podcast with Rattle magazine (USA) here.  

 

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MARKA RIFAT

 

Jazz among the scones

 

If pints were Pernods

and afternoon were night,

if this bright room were a cellar

and rows of chairs a shamble,

if iced fancies were amandes salées

and fresh air a fog of Gitanes,

we would be there, we would,

at the Hot Club de France

in berets and shades, but

snell winds whip the granite

so we keep on our coats

for the concert, too cold

to be cool.

Then they strike up and we

are aflame. Timeless jazz and memories

of the perfect pair, gypsy and fiddler.

Our Django is a lanky Scot,

Stéphane sports a dainty dress.

They embrace us in thrumming chords

and joyous violin, in compelling beats

and dancing notes, the thrilling rhythms

and improvisations pure delight.

They swing, we swing and we are there,

really there, at the Hot Club, entranced.

 

Dürer und die Seuche

How did Dürer evade the plague as he explored

what would one day be Europe?

Did siblings, parents and new wife wave a cheery

wiedersehen at his fleeing back as die Seuche

raised a pustulant fist to

hammer Nurembergers’ doors?

The master chronicler never said.

He was busy heading

to the very home of quarantine,

fine art and hub of nations

in the midst of war and then

returned enlightened and unscathed.

 

On his second venture, the worst he feared

was poison from envious Venetians.

And once again, he kept his health to

cover many countries in his quest for

gold, renown and novelties, assured that

God’s hand directed his unrelenting course

as wisely as his own created light and shade to amaze

beyond his century.

 

He marvelled at a lump of turf, a roller wing,

a hare, and delineated all with utmost care, yet not one

depiction of seizures and seeping sores, which swept his city

so many times. He would only show

the beast who brings the Plague:

the Conqueror, thinly smiling on his pale horse,

leading three fellow riders and levelling a steady aim.

 

Marka Rifat’s written and visual work appears in UK, North American, Australian and Indian anthologies. The Dover Smart Jubilee winner, she was also commended in the Saki, Toulmin and Janet Coats prizes and twice featured in the John Byrne Award. Marka lives in north-east Scotland.

 

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LAURA ROCKHOLD

 

Paradise Parade

 

The snow is waist-deep the winter we move to the wooded lot.

We like what we see despite not knowing what’s growing

 

          underneath the frozen crust. Spring thaws

          all that sprouts and coils of its own doing:

 

Jack-in-the-pulpit, blackberries, grape vines up trees.

Hosta, sedum, iris, tulips, bleeding hearts push up from brush

 

          and decay. Summer too, has its way of raising

          every buried thing. I tend to it;

 

black nightshade, creeping Charlie, garlic mustard.

My fingers blister and my throat burns

 

          in the upheaving. I uproot

          twelve hundred square feet of buckthorn

 

in the hours of the days my daughter naps. It no longer

chokes this light or poisons this earth with its noxious spikes.

 

          My sweat is in the soil now.

          I accept autumn’s deaths:

 

in nights at the campfire, in coyotes’ unseen

shrieks of the hunt, scent of the kill,

 

          in handfuls of mulberries

          dangling in liminal spaces.

 

Their warm purple stains my fingers,

unravels sweet in my mouth

 

          after a season of drought.

          The birds come:

 

goldfinch, blue jay, bluebird, cardinal, chickadee, nuthatch, raven,

bald eagle, oriole, owl, woodpecker, sapsucker, tanager, robin,

red tailed hawk, red shouldered hawk, broad-winged hawk, turkey,

blackbird, cedar waxwing, junco, hummingbird, indigo bunting—

 

swooping in with more than praise. Swooping in with

rejoicing—what it is, I believe, to not just know a song,

but to sing.

 

Seasons go on

and days grow long like a child’s paradise—

         

          in the importance of a stone,

          the world unfurling in a leaf, 

 

in this naturing toward untamed.

 

Laura Rockhold is a poet and visual artist in Minnesota. She is the inventor of the golden root poetic form and winner of the Bring Back The Prairies Award and Southern MN Poets Society Award. Her published work can be found on her website at: www.laurarockhold.com.

 

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MEGAN WILDHOOD

 

Light for the Blind

          attending an open-casket service

 

Grief, you are like God quite the giver.

I want to beg your day breaks its tarry.

So many, so much, is being lost.  

Did you consider I am still a child?

 

But more might collapse 

if you grant my plea. 

so in this slow time, I ask for my trust 

to receive its sight.

 

My childhood friend’s stand-in vessel, 

now this imposition of ashes, 

means we can now only speak 

what we do not know.

 

People who love acutely 

have this habit of dying violently; 

does everyone else simply shoulder 

on their fill of emptiness?

 

Stiff suits, standing-room only 

at the service. The light fresh-laundry 

soft, buzzing like flies. Spears of too-soon 

winter pierce the hot blanket of summer sky. 

 

Emptiness so barren not even 

an echo can survive. 

I prayed the way my friend’s 

foolhardy hope taught me to pray:  

 

Dear outside world, from the pending one: 

the body is like the soul, 

and the body, like God, likes the soul.

 

Some come by church; others come through the bars.

Whatever way, no avoiding the storm 

with a mouth full of hate and rain.

 

No answer is the full light, 

not even when God speaks artillery shells

and the grace smells like sweat.

 

Trees poured from sky that day; 

everything was sound.

Everything is held back 

 

as long as it can be and then is nowhere.

The headstone is chiseled, 

my friend is now earth, 

 

a bright disappearance. 

Her museum is full of visits 

and I pay homage to stones?  

 

Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.

Light for the Blind was first published May 21, 2017 in the now defunct Bottlecap

 

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A. D. WINANS

 

Memories

 

No more jazz at the Black Hawk

No more jazz at The Cellar

No more jazz in the Fillmore

Just ghostly boarded down doors

Gone the clinking glasses

The waitress who always knew

When your glass was empty

Casting her spell

On your inflamed nerve ends

The black female crooner

Hitting her notes

Like a midnight train

Her sultry smile imbedded

In your skin

Long after the closing hour

Leaving you sweating

Limp like the first minute

After a wet dream

 

A.D. Winans is an award-winning San Francisco poet and writer and the former Editor/Publisher of Second Coming Magazine/Press. The archives are housed at Brown University. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. His work has appeared internationally and has been translated into twelve languages.

 

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VICTORIA WISWELL

 

Corner Stop

 

Her lips sink into the absence of her teeth. 

She doesn’t care. 

She smiles at us anyway.

Proud.  

Friendly. 

Standing on the corner

where the Honk 4 Choice people live

mere feet and somehow worlds away,

peacefully, though,

from the Murder Isn’t Healthcare people, 

sharing space. 

With the liquid of time passing between them,

they exchanged glances.

A smile?

A hurricane conversation gone back to sea? 

 

Across the street the Korean men, 

two spirals of smoke,

stand together.

Bones resting beneath the Greek Market sign.

Hiding from the sun. 

Waving to everyone.

Then, the street light,

impatiently waiting,

slides from red to green.

The coins,

four shiny quarters,

forgotten in an astray,

 slip from my hand, 

drop into her cup

and bounce against nothing.

She twitches.

I nod.

Everything changes.

 

Victoria Wiswell is a writer who lives outside of Seattle, Washington. Victoria’s work has appeared in Writing In A Woman’s Voice, and her first novel is forthcoming in 2023. Victoria lives with her husband, sons, and animal family.

 

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