2019

 

 

DECEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Bob Beagrie, Lucy Crispin, Katherine Fallon, David Giles, Ric Hool, Ted Jean,

 Jack Lenton, Sally Michaelson, JML Morton, Mary Ricketson, Tieka Marija Smits,

 J. R. Solonche, Mark Williams.

 

 

 

BOB BEAGRIE

 

Water Feature Beside the Bottle of Notes

 

The pigeons are mooching around the central pond

The tiddlers flick and twitch beneath the ripples

 

In one eye of the boys, who is young enough to hold

All desire in his eye, the tiddlers are crying to be caught

 

The pigeons eye the boys as they gather on the bank

With nets, a black bucket and an empty jam jar

 

The tiddlers weave secret trails through the reeds

Their liquid calls fill the boy’s ear, themselves

 

Small fry slipping through the labyrinth of canals

Riding the feather-soft purr of pigeons busy pecking

 

Gregg’s pasty crumbs dropped on the pavement

The bare topped boy fills the bucket with pond water

 

Sinks his own face, white pebble, into its depths,

Becomes a small pale fish caught up in a ripple

 

A spit, a splash, the dip of a net into his liquid cries

The bob of a pigeon’s head to the beat in his breast.

 

 

Film Poem

(based on Peter & The Wolf)

The gate to the meadow hangs off its latch

Swings over gravel in the morning wind

Eerie creak of hinges, someone whining in their sleep

Pale face behind stained nets at the window pane

What kind of a bird are you that cannot swim?

What kind of a boy are you that cannot fly?

The tabby is prowling around the pond’s edge

The old man watches ghosts from the window

The tree in the garden stands among fallen apples

Wasps gorge on the tumbled halo of over ripe fruit

The mountain’s shadow slides across the meadow

A wolf slinks from the forest’s rim, pendulum tongue

They once hung a witch from the branch of that tree

What kind of a crone was she that would not sink?

The boy remembers the shudder of the dream

The old man listens to ghosts from his window

Last year at the village fair there was a wolf in a cage

Desolate eyes, now it prowls the edges of his sleep

What kind of a boy are you that will not howl?

What kind of a wolf are you that wears a chain?

The old man is prowling around the pond’s edge

The morning wind stirs the nets at the window pane

 

Drunken wasps gorge upon ghosts in their cages

Stained face behind wolf skin, such desolate eyes

 

They once hung a crone from the branch of that tree

Eerie creak of the season like one whining in sleep

 

The tabby’s shadow slides across the meadow

They have taken to wearing wolf masks at the fair

At this time of year the village hangs off its latch

The boy is wolfing at the shudder of a branch

It sounds like a duck is quacking inside the old man

Who has taken to wearing a halo of freshly fallen fruit

The gate to the meadow creaks on the edges of sleep

A tree, a rope, a pendulum tongue that refused to sink.

 

Bob Beagrie is a poet and playwright from Middlesbrough and a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Teesside University. He has published nine collections, most recently Remnants (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press 2019), Leasungspell (Smokestack Books 2016) and This Game of Strangers (Wyrd Harvest Press 2017), his tenth collection Civil Insolencies is due out from Smokestack in December 2019.

 

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LUCY CRISPIN

 

becoming photographs

 

Of course, if we've been lucky we'll have been

those photographs already, tucked, dog-eared

from loving, into bags and wallets smooth

with use; replaced on shelves and tables cleared

 

of clutter, dusted; or (more likely now)

those wallpapers and galleries which move

round with us—talismans, or proof, at once

ballast and flight-fuel, the breadcrumbs which love

 

has left along the forest-path if we've

been fortunate, our human hungers met.

Whether or no, becoming photographs

is what we all do in the end: time gets

 

his long way with each one of us, expels

us from the bright hall. Images remain

impressed, for a while, at their different depths

on hearts: the smell of known skin, the sought pain

 

of tenderness recalled, the stain and smart

of argument—shared tenancies of time

now lapsed to sole possessions. Even grief's

gut-grip on us will give. What feels a crime

 

at first—a breath's forgetting, when we then

remember—will more leniently be seen,

in time, as part of that sad strange process

by means of which now becomes then. In dreams

 

the presences persist, even as we

relinquish them. The photograph's blue stare

no longer sees us—itself, one day, fails

to wake a recognition anywhere:

 

we all become the unremembered dead,

in time. And so, the portrait with the name

and date scribed on the back is leant against

the wall. “Lot 12. An interesting frame...”

 

 

that pink house round the corner

 

I noticed first how the plants, no longer tended,

were flinging themselves out into wildness:

shoots flopped, unanchored, and last year's growth

was brown and brittle, the ghost of itself,

dead stems still twined in the trellis, still clinging.

 

A long time since I'd seen him, then, snipping

and grooming, knotted back bent still further

over the two pots in the yard, coaxing—

through sheer length of love lavished—a young

fat-flowered brilliance to scale the faded walls.

 

Weeks passed. Curled leaves collected in corners,

rain-sludge pooled in the paving, and the gate

('PLEASE SHUT THE GATE') swung, unlatched, in the wind.

The friend's Audi no longer hogged one-and-a-half

spaces at the kerbside. Then the sign went up

 

and before I knew it, red letters said 'SOLD'.

This evening, there's a grubby transit straddling

the pavement outside, doors casually gaping

and a life exposed inside, crammed in all

anyhow: a coatstand; a tube telly, and a kettle;

 

a worn Co-op box which once held Sago Milk

Pudding, now spilling linen; rolled rugs, and carpets,

some marshy-looking underlay; a hat, and some

secateurs. A thin rain slants into the back

until the doors are slammed, headlights flicked on

 

and the van pulls away. Down the hill, I'd heard

a great shimmer of small brown birds sing evensong

in the town square trees. Reaching home, I close my door

and sit, to weep silently and quite without fear.

Redemption comes so hard, and yet so often, now.

 

A former Poet Laureate of South Cumbria, Lucy Crispin has recently been published in The Eildon Tree, Allegro, The Blue Nib, Channel, The Selkie and Iceberg Tales. She works freelance for the Wordsworth Trust and as a person-centred counsellor. Her micro-pamphlet wish you were here is forthcoming from Hedgehog Press. You can find out more at lucycrispin.com.

 

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KATHERINE FALLON

 

The Winter We Moved Here

 

we covered my father’s funeral lily

to save it                from frost burn                 

 

and its leaves bent so low

beneath the white sheet they became      

a body          at rest         

 

to be headed off at dawn    

 

that spring a man in a semi failed to stop

at the sight of brake lights

and five nursing students    all women

some too young to drink      were killed

on their way to clinicals

 

on the raw shoulder as many crosses

sprang up      clad in bleached

lab coats       which            in the gales

of passing traffic

billowed

pillowed

snapped.

 

Katherine Fallon’s poems are included in Permafrost, Colorado Review, Foundry, Best New Poets 2019, and others. Her chapbook, The Toothmakers' Daughters, is available through Finishing Line Press, and her collection, Gold Star, is forthcoming through Eyewear Publishing. She shares domestic square footage with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses. 

 

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DAVID GILES

 

Dust

 

Maureen once was in this room

Shedding skin, hair, and tears;

Layers of memory settled there,

Adding crumbled wing and powdered web

(We are all in this together).

 

Time disintegrates, but

History reintegrates:

Things dropped behind the radiator,

Concealed beneath the carpet, are

Destined to return with interest.

 

We hoped there would be nothing.

But there in the darkest alcove,

Gnawed and rusted, buried

Beneath the detritus of years,

Maureen’s suitcase, unopened.

 

David Giles lives in the south of England and writes whenever he gets the chance, which isn’t very often because he has a young family and an academic day job, and there is always a garden to tidy up and rubbish to be put out. But he struggles along somehow.

 

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RIC HOOL

 

If I had to Know Anything, I had to Know This

 

Sweeping Embleton sand from car mats

                             each grain glints back to origin

 

Dunes there rumped with marram

                                      hiss with golden runnels

          a transfixion to witness                 While

wind shaves sea into waves

                   my body deserts Beta

slipping into Alpha              welcoming

                   hummadruz

          My spirit / my planet

                   conjoin

 

Washing off Northumberland dust

the car paintwork dulls under a Welsh sun

                                      hung in a damp sky

 

          All doors open          still

                                      the tang

 

Duende

 

Coming at this with gusto              Keith

dragging on a fag     furnacing his draw

          a Consett-night skyline of old

John Martin             The Destruction of Sodom And Gomorrah

Nobody smokes like Keith Richards

                                                nobody

 

There’s a song out there               tugging

A powerful boat ushering a ship to safety

                   from cold sea

between piers over the bar

          into The River          stacks

in steam days flamed hot-red reeking

sky like Keith on a cig                   Nobody

smokes like Keith Richards

                                    nobody

 

Fierce flamenco

heard in peñas         en las calles

                                      high in Sierras

burned hands on sunned guitars

          fingers firing off gut strings

Keith on a roll          nobody smokes

                             like him

 

Ric Hool has nine collections of published poetry. His work is featured in magazines & journals in Europe, USA & UK. Between So Many Words (Red Squirrel Press 2016) is to be followed by Personal Archaeology in April 2020.

 

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TED JEAN

 

NE 43rd, behind Providence Memorial

 

back out in the heat, Ken is visited

by a panting black dog, possibly lost

where he (Ken) has crouched

beneath a minor street magnolia

beside the parked pickup

after attending his cosseted wife

in ICU and a couple of hours

before he is due at the airport

to fetch his son back to the house

where his Brooklyn daughter

is fixing dinner and her elder sister

is reading to his three confused grandkids

 

our boy doesn’t really want to unlock the truck

as the dog leans quietly against him

 

 

personal ad c. 1846

 

hard man hairy rarely rinsed

wholly accustomed to hardship:

wife bereavement

burnt barn

burial of babies unwept

east wind freezing new crops

west wind drowning them

partial amputations up to four

and counting, single sinful

member still intact

 

seeks woman

strong and clean, not

given to easy judgment

to share a life of wide-eyed ecstasy

Ted Jean writes, paints, plays tennis with Amy Lee. Nominated twice for Best of the Net, and twice for the Pushcart Prize, his work appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, PANK, Spillway, DIAGRAM, North American Review.

 

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JACK LENTON

 

It is said and written

that Qi Ji, the hermit monk

composed his poems

with a stalk of bamboo

onto the hides of his cattle

 

it is utterly unknown

what his patrons thought of this

there are no records - but once,

a soft, single brush

flecked over

a herd of canvas,

characters, meaning

lived and changed

dependent

on the time of day

 

imagine moments

of utter blasphemy

of reason, horror, comedy

others of absolute nonsense

(though given enough time

meaning may come)

 

in the late afternoon

at the bottom

of Mount Dagui

beneath the static pines

Qi Ji waits with his drove

for a cloudbreak

to refill his inkstone

he waits for the earth

to accept his work

he waits for the rain

to begin again

 

Jack Lenton currently works in London as a writer for Royal Museums Greenwich. Earlier this year, he had a first book published, Kingdom of Mud with Sky Burial press. His work has appeared in Vice, Time Out and he was nominated for Canterbury Festival’s Poet of the Year in 2017. 

 

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SALLY MICHAELSON

 

Visiting

 

The Jasmine flower in my cup

is a tight ball, until hot water

releases its bobbing heart,

 

we dip our roti bread in lentils

mother and daughter feasting on food

and on each other.

 

At night I fall asleep in your bed

while you read Kant :

I’m drowsily safe like you were then.

 

You’re still reading

when I wake in the morning ;

we have mince pies for breakfast

 

watching the willow outside

do a graceful limbo

under a thin cord of wind.

 

Sally Michaelson is a recently-retired conference interpreter who lives in Brussels. Her poems have been published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Algebra of Owls, Lighthouse, Squawk Back, The Bangor Literary Journal, Hevria, The Jewish Literary Journal and The High Window

 

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JLM MORTON

 

Grandma’s Prestige

 

A birthday, and the tins rend the quiet of an early summer night:

twenty-centimetre hubs of love and steel resurrected from the corner cupboard.

The patina of baked-on bridge parties, coffee mornings, a generation’s glee

- and I think how this mother bakes, as you did before me,

stirring the soft warm fat into sugar, folding in flour. 

A moth dusts the window glass, drawn to the false moon of electric light,

calming this lavish modern toil like a meditation.

 

It’s only later I feel the base left in – a clunk of the knife between layers -

your kind of joke. The kind your great grandchild won’t notice

as she shoves the chocolate sponge down. You and I

gorge on a delicious fiction: one life lost, another gained.

 

JLM Morton is a poet, writer, mother, lover, friend, thinker, doer, cold water addict. Based in Gloucestershire, England. Instagram @JLMMorton Website jlmmorton.com 

 

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MARY RICHETSON

 

Buckeye

 

When the sun shines clear on Carolina Aster in the fall,

look for a buckeye tree somewhere on a mountain trail,

five palmate leaves and a scaly bark, not the biggest tree,

but on the whittler’s bench they value it for its whitish color

and easy grain to carve.

 

If you pass people on the path, talk well of how the leaf color

will look this season, whether red and gold will be bright and bold

or simply mute, predict according to how dry or wet the weather

has been, then prove how cold the weather will be this winter,

going by the wooly worms, whether brown or black.

 

Field corn still stands near the road, morning glories take the stalks.

A brown mule may stare you in the face as you walk by.

The boards of that old barn show their age, gone brittle now and grey.

Virgin’s Bower has lost its innocence, gone from white to musty beige.

 

Buckeye trees flower yellow in the spring, drop smooth brown fruit in fall,

small like a fat quarter.  Pick up one buckeye, put it in your pocket,

carry it forever for good luck. Grab an extra one and give it away.

One look at Flea Mountain as the sun starts to set is all the peace you need.

 

Get that buckeye out, feel it in your palm when you sit outside.

Evening is pleasant.  Days are shorter, light is precious. 

Count on that buckeye for good luck. 

 

Mary Ricketson lives in the Appalachian Mountains, USA, and works as a mental health counselor. Her poems often reflect the healing power of nature. Her recent published collections are Hanging Dog Creek, Shade and Shelter, and Mississippi: The Story of Luke and Marian.

 

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TEIKA MARIJA SMITS

 

The Colour of a Conference Pear

 

She chooses three conference pears

as the subjects of her still life

because they remind her of her father.

 

When she was a girl, come autumn

the fruit bowl bore only one fruit:

the conference pear.

 

They came from the tree

at the end of their garden;

the one not good enough for climbing.

 

Her father would crunch

his way through the bowl, saying:

“We need to eat these up.”

 

Yet she had no taste for them.

The flesh was too hard, the skin too bitter,

its texture too rough, its green too brown.

 

It was only decades later that she discovered

that they soften up beautifully when cooked.

A dessert pear, they are meant for desserts.

 

As she begins to sketch the pears

she has a longing for the impossible –

to bake him her now-favourite pudding: pear crumble.

 

Later, she chooses her colours,

considers the greens and yellows and browns

she will use in her painting.

 

With older eyes she sees the colours better;

the brown is not brown but green-gold,

the green is not green but yellow with a touch of emerald.

 

The colours complement each other,

they are warm, unshowy, and subtle in their beauty.

She can see this now.

 

Teika Marija Smits is a writer, editor and mother-of-two. Her poems have been published in Atrium, Prole, Bonnie’s Crew, LossLit, Brittle Star and The Poetry Shed. Her debut pamphlet, Russian Doll, is to be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2020 and this poem is from that forthcoming publication. 

https://marijasmits.wordpress.com/

 

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 J. R. SOLONCHE

 

 The Lady of the News

 

Every night I watch the lady of the news.

I do not like the news.

But I like her.

There is nothing to like about the news.

The news is all bad.

Every night the news is all bad.

But I like the lady of the news.

She does not have blonde hair.

She has black hair.

She does not have blue eyes.

She has black eyes.

She does not have fair skin.

She has dark skin.

She is not pretty that way that pretty is.

She is beautiful the way that beautiful is.

The news is neither pretty nor beautiful.

The news is ugly.

But I like to watch the lady of the news.

I like her voice.

Her voice is not pretty.

Her voice is beautiful.

Her voice delivers the ugly news beautifully.

If one must listen to bad news, this is the way to do it.

   

The Beauty of Extinction

 

They do not know, of course.

They do not know they are becoming extinct.

The insects.

The amphibians.

The reptiles.

The fish.

The birds.

The mammals.

None of them know what’s happening to them.

None of them know extinction is happening to them.

None of them know one of them will be the last one of them.

The last one will not know it is the last one of them.

Only we will know.

Only we will know how beautiful it will be to be extinct.

No, to be extinguished.

Yes, to be extinguished.

Only we will know how brief is the anguish.

Only we will know how beautiful to be extinguished.

  

J.R. Solonche is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions),  Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough  (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), For All I Know (forthcoming 2020 from Kelsay Books), The Time of Your Life (forthcoming April 2020 from Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (forthcoming 2020 from Deerbrook Editions), Enjoy Yourself  (forthcoming 2020 from Serving House Books), and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

 

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MARK WILLIAMS

 

Daredevils

 

I am one of those guys

sitting on a bench at the mall

 

is what I’m thinking while sitting on a bench at the mall

as my wife, DeeGee, shops for shoes at Dillard’s.

Soon I’m singing

 

I am one of those guys

sitting on a bench at the mall

 

to the tune of the Johnny Cash ballad, “Hurt.” Very softly.

Even the guy on the bench to my right is no wiser.

But in my mind, he not only joins in, he sounds good—

tenor to my bass, June Carter to my Johnny.

Then, one by one, the other guys join in.

A dozen or so, easy. 

 

You’ve seen us, old guys,

sitting on benches at the mall.

 

By this time many shoppers have stopped to listen,

including the woman in a pink tank top by the fountain,

and the tune becomes peppier, modulating to a major key,

the signal for all of us to leap from our benches

and perform a well-choreographed dance I haven’t quite worked out,

though it will definitely involve the fountain. Naturally,

we’ll wind up on YouTube, going viral overnight

or, better yet, virile overnight.

Hopefully sooner.

 

Take it from me, you never know what old guys

sitting on benches at the mall are thinking. Last night,

my wife and I paused an episode of The Tudors

to watch Nik Wallenda walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

I was thinking about walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope—

by that I mean Nik Wallenda walking across Niagara Falls

on a tightrope—just before it occurred to me      

                                                                  

I am one of those guys

sitting on a bench at the mall,

 

the antithesis to walking across Niagara Falls in every way:

no mist, no great height, no great roar, no spectators (yet),

no water (aside from the fountain), no natural beauty

(aside from the woman in a pink tank top by the fountain),

no balance pole, no tightrope, no tightrope-walking suit.

No one could possibly mistake me for Nik Wallenda

walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

                              

Is the safety harness bothering you?

no TV commentator asks me

It makes me feel like a jackass!

unlike Nik Wallenda, I do not respond.

 

And though no one will ever catch me dead walking across Niagara Falls,

and if they did that’s how they’d catch me, if they caught me,

I can understand why Nik Wallenda felt like a jackass

with that safety harness dragging behind him. In fact,

no one could ever catch me dead walking across Niagara Falls

because I’d be wearing a safety harness, too,

unlike now, free-sitting on my bench,

when anything could happen.

 

Mark Williams' poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, The American Journal Poetry, New Ohio Review, and the anthologies, New Poetry From the Midwest and The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018. This is his second appearance in The Lake. He lives in Evansville, Indiana. “Daredevils” first appeared in the Brescia College journal, Open 24 Hours, 2013.

 

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