2025

 

 

AUGUST

 

 

Dolo Diaz, Mike Dillon, Syvia Freeman, Norton Hodges, Shirin Jabalameli, Tom Kelly, Marion McCready, Maren O. Mitchell, Donna Pucciani, Fiona Sinclair, Susan Stiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DOLO DIAZ

 

The Case for Writing Poetry After Fifty

 

There’s a lot of material.

 

The first aggravations of a rusting body—

the estrogen, the statins, the colonoscopies.

The mounting aches. A few heartbreaks.

The heart patched up—a botched job.

The odyssey of marriage,

the improv of parenthood.

 

The divorces. Old friends with new girlfriends,
giddy love after thirty years of drought.

 

The farewells of those your age—
the orphanings, the suicides, the freak accidents.

 

The wisdom that never comes.
The regrets.

 

The memory that slips—playfully at first.
The sounds that fade—

 

except for the call of the Earth,
growing louder and louder.

 

Dolo Diaz is a poet with roots in Spain, currently residing in California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ONE ART, Rogue Agent, Right Hand Pointing, Star*Line, Humana Obscura, and Book of Matches, among others. She also has a debut chapbook, Defiant Devotion, which was published by Bottlecap Press.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

MIKE DILLON

 

Autumnal

 

Chopping wood

to the deckled chorus

of the crows

 

two days after

the first few salmon 

thrashed the creek

 

I want (yet again)

to lay down my axe

and walk away

 

just walk away

in the way

I never do.

 

Gathering Storm

 

The horses are restless, he says.

I’m not sure why.

 

They feel the storm building on the other side

of the mountain, she says.

 

How do you know? 

You mean you don’t? she asks back.

 

She approaches the corral.

The four horses turn

 

their anvil foreheads to face her.

And drop dead-still as monoliths.

 

As the first plop of rain 

pocks the dust at his feet.

 

Mike Dillon lives in a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle, from where he writes essays and poetry. His most recent book is Nocturne: New and Selected Poems, from Unsolicited Press (2024). https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/shop/p/nocturnepoems

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

SYLVIA FREEMAN

 

Given

 

Queen Anne’s Lace, Buttercups

Wild Primrose adorn this field

where the old home place once stood

where they found that will in the attic

 

Wild Primrose adorn this field

thinking of you Grace, how you were given

to my mother’s grandmother given

like a piece of furniture or lace tablecloth

 

thinking of you Grace, how you were given

a girl, barely in her teens, given

to a young mother whose family was growing

I cannot know how you were treated

 

a girl, barely in her teens, given

quietly serving, never saying

cannot grasp how hard you worked

while others took their rest

 

quietly serving, never saying

watching other slaves

labor in this very field

now wild with color

 

watching other slaves

striving to live in an unjust time

unable to choose your own life

how powerless you were

 

striving to live in an unjust time

nothing I do or say can undo this shame

still, I take a handful of earth, field flowers

symbolically lift your spirit

 

nothing I do or say can undo this shame

I long to unbind you to soar

release you to the bright sky

to all the heavens I cannot see

 

I long to unbind you to soar

to a God I can’t begin to understand

who allows so much sorrow and gives

Queen Anne’s Lace, Buttercups

 

Sylvia Freeman's poems have appeared in Story South, NC Literary Review, Galway Review, The Lake, and various anthologies, most recently in I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. She received the Randall Jarrell poetry prize in 2018 from NC Writer’s Network. She lives in Durham, NC.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

NORTON HODGES

 

Old Hippie

 

Your ideals are now the stuff of style mags,

Return of the Kaftan! Peace and Love Designer T-shirts!

 

And how to reconcile the Buddhist tech bros

with all that seeking you did on the hard path?

 

What can you do now broadband is the royal road?

Throw red paint at masterpieces in the Tate?

 

Strap on a rucksack and board your electric bike?

Watch TV and cultivate your garden?

 

Can you still have solidarity with the workers

then turn the page to the book reviews?

 

Looks like while you were biting your nails

life had other plans; another tale was being told.

 

And after all this, to die at Astapovo

before the clear light of your rightful end.

 

In 1910, Leo Tolstoy fell ill and died at Astapovo station, after fleeing his domestic situation and never finishing his final journey,

 

Old Man Walking

 

This solitary walker set out early before the killing heat

and welcomes the cool patchwork of shadows and light

beneath the trees with their dark secret roots.

They knew I was coming before I reached their shade.

 

Their knowledge is older and wiser than the mind

of someone still plagued by the tinnitus of war,

autocrats, social media chatter and Spotify,

a quieter essential more fundamental archive.

 

Who are we to judge and destroy, to pillage

in the name of all that can be analysed,

monetised, surveilled every micro-second?

 

We need to see ourselves as in a Chinese scroll,

tiny scrabbling creatures on a fragile bridge

while the great forests and mountains amusedly look on.

 

Norton Hodges is a poet, editor and translator. His work is widely published on the internet and in hard copy. He is the author of Bare Bones (The High Window Press, Grimsby, UK, 2018). He lives in Lincoln UK.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

SHIRIN JABALAMELI

 

From the Heart of History  

(Written during an airstrike, June 2025)

 

I am still here.

Eight fifty-nine p.m.

I've taken shelter in the bathroom,

where resistance has unravelled

through cracks in the wall,

the ceiling's breathless hush,

even the thin shiver of aluminum in the window frame.

The glass no longer swallows screams.

The tiles remember every blast.

And I,

folded into myself,

a formless child curled

in the womb of wrath,

wet, cold, waiting

whisper prayers

I no longer know the names of,

nor which of the seven skies might hear them.

 

Right Now

(Written during a night of airstrikes, June 2025)

 

And still, humanity stands

between fire and forgetting.

There was no past, no future,

war was right now.

Through smoke, missiles, and stairs,

amidst the ruins,

only light remained

and the shadow of a voice.

Flagless, faceless,

yet still alive.

Where do the stairs lead?

And why does the butterfly

sense betrayal

when the earth

burns so fiercely

for the sake of power?

 

Shirin Jabalameli is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist and poet. Her work explores the intersections of war, memory, mysticism, and intuitive creativity. She is the founder of the artistic movement “Apranikism,” which emphasizes resistance and subconscious symbolism. Her pieces have been shared internationally.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

TOM KELLY

 

Hear

 

On the train

there is always one

talking too loudly,

wanting you, me

to listen.

They talk of strangers

you begin to know,

their silent responses,

all we have is the too loud voice

from the man I cannot see,

only hear.

 

The Way Things Were

 

on the day I was born:

Dad was stripping a roof,

ready to shout to all of Jarrow.

It was a Monday, he said.

I never asked mam. She didn’t say.

 

I have been to the back-bedroom,

in my late-grandmother’s home,

where I bawled to the ceiling.

 

The house was crowded: two unmarried uncles,

mam, dad, Granny, Granda and me.

 

See dad on the roof.

I was born on a Thursday.

 

Tom Kelly’s most recent collection Walking My Streets is the thirteenth published by Red Squirrel Press and explores Kelly’s life and changing face of his native north-east of England. www.redsquirrelpress.com www.tomkelly.org.uk

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

MARION McCREADY

 

Sitka Spruce Fallen

How the light filters through the rain-haze,

through the familial grove of Sitka spruce, Scots pine.

The pale trunks are pathways to the sky. Look up, 

tumble into their great heights, into the canopy 

of twisted needles. The root plate of the downed tree, 

wind-ripped from the earth in a great circular disk, 

is a muddied sun. Upended, it has left a pit in the ground, 

lost matrix of tap, lateral and heart roots. 

Lost voice among the forest. Disintegrating piece 

by piece into silence. Storm-felled among the grasses, 

it bridges the burn. The body of the spruce crossing 

a small tributary is the channel to an unseen doorway. 

The smooth trunk, the tree bole, moss-patched 

and recumbent. Its root plate holds mysteries within.

Coins of light splash in the river running under 

the slumped body of the tree. It is the currency 

of memories. They flash for a moment, are witnessed, 

then pass. The Sitka spruce fallen has left absence hanging 

in the air like a fracture in the days after a sudden loss.

 

Bamboo Windchimes

 

The windchimes hang in my garden,

wooden chandelier. They flicker all day,
    all night - their conversation with the air 
carries me into dreams, memories...

 

I want to leave this life 
    surrounded by apple trees,
the birch in a dazzle of afternoon light, 
    and the azalea saved
from my late mother's garden

 

Burnt yellow of the dying flowers,
the light, the fresh breeze, 
the leaves and bamboo windchimes 
        are my witnesses.

 

The chimes hang from the outer corner
            of a wood store
above a green plastic watering can.
The wind creates syllables from clattering wood,

 

an orchestra of collisions.
    And the collisions make songs 
        mysterious as nursery rhymes.

 

The windchimes harness the breeze 
blown in from the Clyde firth.
Songs, like tidal waves, 
    journeying from the centre 
        of the earth to my garden. 

 

Songs I have known from another life

and now beckons for my return.

 

Marion McCready lives in Argyll and has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and Melita Hume Poetry Prize. She is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Look to the Crocus, was published by Shoestring Press in 2023.   https://sorlil.wixsite.com/mmccready

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

MAREN O. MITCHELL

 

Baking with Bach

 

Chronically tired, to gather energy while mixing an unrepeatable

version of an applesauce cake recipe, doubled, augmented

 

by ginger, honey, walnuts, banana, coconut, chocolate,

sunflower seeds and more, I listen to a disc of the Goldberg

 

Variations by Bach, each note indented in the player piano

of my brain over five decades ago, in Brevard, North Carolina,

 

recorded in 1955 to ecstasy by Glenn Gould, whose hands

obsessed with each note to note, sporadically self-conducting

 

and self-accompanying, singing juxtapositioned notes,

caring for nothing else, and I sing with him while I mull

 

on Louise Glück’s above-the-line Vita Nova poems

and her dynamite Nobel Prize with which she plans to buy

 

a house in Vermont, where my applesauce grew and simmered,

and I remember listening on the radio to Gould’s 1982 second

 

recording, five states later in Brownsville, Texas, tempos so slow

that I called the station, a never-before-or-again action,

 

to point out their speed mistake, as I leaven on today’s good news,

my first publication in Canada, birthplace of Gould,

 

poems on the colors “gray” and “pink,” in The Antigonish Review

of Nova Scotia, while through the kitchen window and walls,

 

I see and hear the daily, hourly, obsessed hunt by our neighbors

for fallen leaves, whining motors back-packed,

 

blowers snaking repeatedly from side to side,

moving the aged hands of trees from place to place,

 

interrupted by periodic burns, as they try to control by erasure,

caring for nothing else, while Glenn Gould will continue

 

to give us his state of wonder,

repeated visions of obtainable joy,

 

until we erase ourselves from our planet.

The cakes bake. Odors of earth rise.

 

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems appear in The Antigonish Review, Poetry East, The Lake and Tar River Poetry. Four poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her chapbook is In my next life I plan... (dancing girl press); her chapbook, A Letter Opener, was a finalist for The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize; her nonfiction is Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide (Line of Sight Press). She lives with her husband in the mountains of Georgia, USA.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

DONNA PUCCIANI

 

The Poets Consider Death

 

Featured in a recent anthology on age,

we confer tonight via computer

as the coral sun sags in the western sky

and a gusty wind captures branches

in backyards from Chicago to Cheyenne.

 

Faces, sophisticated or frowsy,

subtly wrinkled or creased

like an old bed-sheet, prepare to read

versed pronouncements

on widowhood, sudden tragedy,

or the inexplicable prospect of non-being.

 

Sonnets and sestinas weave stanzas

together like Rackham’s fairies at play

or witticisms at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

The tongues of poets seduce the Reaper,

confronting his ubiquitous scythe

with syllables of prophecy,

beyond dark humor about taxes

or the deep drama of Hamlet’s soliloquy.

 

Afterwards, we all click off computers

in darkening offices and bedrooms

all over America, as one by one

we welcome the gathering, wordless dark.

 

Tonight I dream

 

of Lancashire, red brick houses

tumbling down a hill, clouds

of sheep spreading among the hedges.

 

I watch my footing

while scrambling up the slopes

strewn with wimberries and heather,

not risking a turned ankle

at my age.

 

Horses wander in the field

beyond the wire fence, nodding

to see if I have a carrot in hand,

their sloping eyes gentle with desire.

 

Rounding the corner at the edge

of the meadow, I reach a roadside

row of shops— bakery, post office,

newsagent, where I chat

with the woman at the till and feel

the newsprint smudge a comforting

pattern on the palms of my hands.

 

This is the way I fall asleep

in Chicago after a day watching

autocracy spread like a leprous sore

on the skins of my neighbors—

the innocent, the hateful, the oblivious—

who hustle like sheep to work and back,

and tuck heir unsuspecting children into bed.

 

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda, Acumen, Gradiva, ParisLitUp and other journals. Her seventh and latest book of poetry is Edges.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

FIONA SINCLAIR

 

80^th Anniversary, VE Day. 

 

Back in civvies they always carried

in a pocket of their minds, 

remembrance of ‘the boys‘

for whom the toss of a coin

fell wrong side down.  

Now, 80 years on, such memories 

have one last outing for ceremonies 

and media. Anecdotes put flesh 

on the bones of names whose ages 

doubled still make a paltry span,

told with tears that freely spill

from centenarian eyes,

as if, those mates who perished 

did not begrudge their chums survival, 

rather gifted forfeit years to them as legacy. 

 

Fiona Sinclair has had several collections published by small presses in the UK. The most recent is Dinning with the dead published by Erbacce Press Liverpool,

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

SUSAN STILES

 

the appointment

 

1.  It’s the waiting that wears on one. That,

                             and the silence. And,

of course, the sidelong glances. Not to mention

the music could use some improvement. Oh,

          and the luggage that never arrived.

                   Other than that, life is good, great,

even. It just runs its course, some say,

                                                like a river,

turning onto itself, emptying, far away, from

where it began.

 

2. Someone turned up the volume. It’s been

          years since that happened. These floors could

use a good sweeping, for sure, but who wants

                                      to make that a priority.

The weather person is working hard to determine,

which size hail will fall

                             on my street. I’m not home anyway,

and I really shouldn’t care, but I cannot take my eyes

off the screen.

 

3. Chocolate would be a nice addition. Or, at least,

                   a simple bowl of candy. I realize now,

that is confusing. The bowl itself does not need

                             to be simple. Just the candy.

The rain is falling in earnest now, steady. Commodus

          exiled several to Capri. Well, he had them killed.

But still. Capri. Imagine that, as your end point. I do have

a window, onto a parking lot.

 

4. The end of life is not the end of the world. It’s just latex

gloves and cerulean masks and glass cylindrical

                             containers, filled with turpentine.

Not turpentine, of course. Things change so

much in three months. The name on the tag is the

same. But surely, this is some other person. The city rings,

                                      it rings in alarms of threes,

and fours.

 

Susan Stiles lives in and writes about Croatia. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in such journals as The Lake, The Dalhousie Review, Innisfree, Slant, Panorama, and The Westchester Review. More info, including her blog “Letters from Rab,” is at susan-stiles.com.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE