2020

 

 

DECEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Ankur, Mark Connors, David J. Costello, Janet Hatherley, David Hay, Rebecca O’Bern, Fiona Sinclair, William R. Stoddart, Angela Topping, Rodney Wood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANKUR

 

The migrants

 

You sit there with delicate, strong hands

working the paddle, steeling the heart,

the jasmine in your hair quivering of itself

as we row across the moon-filled water and sky;

we do not know of a land of succour

but in pride and desperation—

this single spark of connaissance,

or is it the caesura between us?—

we cross the scenery of still life

when the fish are wide awake, the bird is yet to chirp

and the buds are just formed on the right bank;

and while you rest now, I look up to the heavens

to watch the fiercest battle raging,

for it is either the thick of dawn or an approaching storm:

both will take us away from the night's shadow.

 

 

A stay

 

It is the bird of God,

the house sparrow as they call it,

and it enters the warm sunlit courtyard

staying while the child of man builds much,

a raft, an ark, a house, a mansion—

all stripped peapods; and it flutters

and the freshly polished weathervane augurs

the animal, the blood, the sowing, the scything; and

the sunleased acres give room for proud possessions

—grass not yet overgrown, shadows not yet stagnating—

a freehold, a farm, a village, a feast;

but the river keeps running, and

the sparrow will fly away on its parabolic path

crossing domes and cupolas, minarets and spires,

only the sordid details of glittering necropolises staying

 

Ankur is from India. Some of his published poems and stories can be found in, among others, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Shot Glass Journal, and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. His first full-length collection of poems, titled The Four Colors, was published in July 2020 (Hawakal Publishers, Kolkata).

 

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MARK CONNORS

 

Watching You Without Me

 

I’m watching you without me.

I'm running in the hills

but leave my living ghost behind.

In the utility room, you drain

water into a mop bucket.

We can't afford a new machine

till we get proper jobs.

You soak what you spill

with an old pink towel.

 

On the sofa, you knit things

to put around jars at our wedding.

I can't pretend I fully understand.

You get industrious on budgets;

a good job since I lost mine.

Your needles never clack

and you manage to stroke

three cats at the same time.

 

In the kitchen, you conjure

a mountain of vegan cheese

with plate tectonic magic.

You roll pastry while spuds boil,

sing along to Courtney Marie Andrews,

in tune, louder than usual.

Later, you will leave your splendid crusts.

I won't. And I will eat yours.

 

In the conservatory, you rest your head

on your left hand, write with the other;

a poem out of nothing, as the rain

attacks the corrugated roof.

You always hear yourself think

when you love where you are.

You manage to private message

all three of your daughters

while you eat one slice of toast.

 

You worry about me, even when you don't.

I am watching you without me.

Without me, I love you more.

 

 

I’m a Loser

for Paul Townend

 

I had two bedrooms when I was a kid.

In one, I had a six foot snooker table.

I was good. I got a 56 break once.

7 reds. 7 blacks.

I used to beat all my friends.

In the other room I had an actual bed

and loads of books about birds.

I used to run a club called Bird Club.

Friends would come. I'd give them tests.

What's the smallest bird in the world?

What do blue tits eat?

Why did the dodo become extinct?

Then a friend played me some Motorhead.

 

Mark Connors is a poet and novelist from Leeds. His poetry pamphlet, Life is a Long Song was published by OWF Press in 2015. His first collection, Nothing is Meant to be Broken was published by Stairwell Books in 2017. His second collection, Optics, was published by YAFFLE in 2019. www.markconnors.co.uk.

 

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DAVID J. COSTELLO

 

Off Grid

 

This is where

the ragged birds roost

 

gossiping like children

in a playground, waiting

 

for winter’s

sound-proofing snow.

 

Sometimes you’ll hear

the fluffy thud

 

of stiff little carcasses

losing their grip

 

or their tinnitus breath, and

always the cackle of ice

 

growing its prison

inside them.

 

 

Fulcrum

 

No one remembers when.

              The date.

              The time.

 

But this is when

              we start

              to die.

 

We sleep that night

              the way

              we always have.

 

Yet as the clock fatigues

             the dark

             and measures

 

             out alarm

it has recalibrated us.

 

                          And though

             we count the years

the same

 

they count us back

             with calendars, filled

             with shorter days.

 

David J. Costello is a previous winner of the Welsh International Poetry Competition and is widely published. David’s pamphlets are Human Engineering, (Thynks Publishing 2013) & No Need For Candles, (Red Squirrel Press 2016). Heft, his first full collection (Red Squirrel Press 2020) has been placed 3^rd in the inaugural 2020 Poetry Book Awards. https://www.davidjcostellopoetry.com/

 

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JANET HATHERLEY

 

To the cows

 

I take my class to Hayes Hill Farm

and stand with the children.

 

I watch your desperate hurry

into the stalls, jostling for a place

 

as quick-gloved hands connect teats

to steel machines that empty you of milk—

 

your calves long since taken,

lowing and lost.  I look into brown eyes,

 

sick and sorry.

I have a baby at the childminder’s,

 

feel the pull.

I know what it’s like, cows— 

 

I sit at a machine (much smaller but a weight

to lift onto the blue formica kitchen table)

 

milk gushing through the tube

as I express it to be bottled—but only for my baby

 

and the in-between missing-times

before the rush-back-home-to-feed.

 

Love flows with my milk.  Your milk disappears. 

Urgent and unquiet, your udders

 

heavy and swollen—I know that too—

my breasts hard and painful, the relief

 

when she latches on.

Do you remember, cows, the unblinking tug

 

of a newborn’s suckle—

the uncurled thread

 

taut and tightening?

A life-time bond is snapped.

 

You bellow—

alarm swirls in dark brown puddles of urine. 

 

There is no consolation for your grief.                                                              

 

Janet Hatherley is from London.  She has had poems published in several magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Stand, Coast to coast to coast, The Lake and Brittle Star.  Commended in Indigo Dreams Collection Competition, 2019, she was shortlisted in Coast to Coast to Coast’s portfolio competition, 2020. 

 

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DAVID HAY

 

To the Unnamed Syrian Woman

in the Newspaper Report

 

A woman attempts to outrun

The colourless noise of violation,

That breaks landscape, tissue,

Bone.

 

She is wordless.

The syllables of blood melt into the air;

Children’s screams become as regular

As birdsong in the morning –

Maggots eat the lines of breath

And love is limited to a clichéd line,

And a retail assistants exhausted sigh.

 

She flees in an unthinking fear,

Leaving her baby,

By the stump of a lemon tree,

As a rhapsody of burning cinders fall.

Then the silence of endings of beginnings

Cups the hollow cries of violence,

Melting dawn through her impassive eyes.

 

She screams and each person near

Is ensnared by her despair

That knows no border.

Another shot is fired,

It releases heaven

Into her vacant eyes.

The covenant of grief

Is broken

And all run,

Apart from the unnamed woman

Who is denied history.

 

She stands as still as the horizon.

 

David Hay is an English Teacher in the Northwest of England. He has written poetry and prose since the age of 18 when he discovered Virginia Woolf's The Waves and the poetry of John Keats. These and other artists encouraged him to seek his own poetic voice. He has currently been accepted for publication in Dreich, Abridged, Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, The Dawntreader, Versification, The Babel Tower Notice Board, The Stone of Madness Press, The Fortnightly Review, Nine Muses Poetry, Green Ink Poetry, Dodging the Rain, The Morning Star as well as The New River Press 2020 Anthology. 

 

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REBECCA O’BERN

 

When My Father Turned Seventy

 

When my father turned seventy

I realized that seventy

is not old. It is not, in fact,

very much time at all—

especially to read the Bible

enough times. It is almost long enough

to be a modern-day Moses,

growing a beard from black to white

while blowing on a shofar,

the sound of sunset trumpeting for miles

down the river. It is, I think,

after half a night’s sleep,

just the right amount of time

to grab our fishing poles,

and thread onto a hook

an earthworm, while it is still dark.

 

Rebecca O’Bern's poems have appeared in South 85 Journal, Hartskill Review, Storm Cellar, Blue Monday Review, Connecticut Review, Helix Magazine, and other journals. Recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, she currently serves on the editorial staffs of The Southampton Review and Mud Season Review. Find her on Twitter @rebeccaobern. “When My Father Turned Seventy” was originally published in Hartskill Review, Winter 2015.

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Covid Summer

 

As the Covid curfew lifts, it’s the kids who first burst

on to The Ridgeway, tearing up the pavements upon

scooters, bikes, trikes; their chatter challenging

blackbird and thrushes’ territorial Spring songs.

 

Mind sick with gorging on Global Offensive,

their own imaginations begin to stir,

as aliens are fought between parked cars before lunch

and criminals taken down in front gardens before tea.

 

Only animal hunger drives them home for bolted food then

back out into the thick of play, until parents whistle at dusk.

And we notice that plump kids who used to puff at pensioner’s pace,

have over the summer, run themselves Lycra lean.

 

Hellos drop like cherry blossom into the front garden as I work,

boys cluster to interrogate as you tinker with the motor- cycle.

And news of our green draws posh kids from The Street

to play football or sit on the grass, daisy chain chatting.

 

September school bells toll.  The grass is downgraded once more

to a short cut to the shop and dogs are chivvied to use as a latrine.

And I wonder if these threads of play will be picked up at weekends,

or replaced by virtual games again, leaving the green, pied piper silent.

  

Fiona Sinclair's new collection Time Traveller's Picnic was published by Dempsey and Windle in March 2019. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine From the edge.

 

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WILLIAM R. STODDART

 

Through Such Blue

 

I ride my bicycle on the slippery stone sidewalk

after a summer rain, past the town doctor

 

sitting on his front porch reading the newspaper.

I smell the dirty brick street from mist rising

 

from yellow ingots and think it odd that I remember

this one ride after the rain now that I’m old in comparison

 

to when my red bicycle took me everywhere I could

dream, from whitewater rivers to steamy jungles,

 

through a sky so blue that I ache thinking of that silent

glide through a mute town.  It’s quiet after the rain.

 

The dark clouds are followed by white galleons dragging

shadows like weightless anchors.  No one speaks to me because

 

I cannot hear them. I do not remember ever hearing them:

who would stop to listen through such blue.

 

William R. Stoddart is a poet and story writer who lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. His fiction and poems have appeared in journals such as Adirondack Review, Ruminate Magazine, Pedestal Magazine and The Molotov Cocktail. Recent and forthcoming work is in Third Wednesday, Maryland Literary Review, Iris Literary Journal and The Orchards Poetry Journal. “Through Such Blue” first appeared in The Adirondack Review, Winter 2014.

 

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ANGELA TOPPING

 

Mastering the Guitar

 

The mysteries of tablature yield

shape by shape. The strings sing their metal

sentences. None of this is enough.

 

                              *

In Clarksdale once, a man

sold his soul for mastery,

to be King of the Blues.

He found a totem place, crossroads.

 

Take the bone from a cat, black

as a shellacked guitar, black

as the skin of Robert Johnson himself,

the devil’s slave now. Unwrap your guitar.

 

Start to play the only way you can.

Keep pickin’. Sense another’s breathing.

Hear the pluck of unseen hands,

press your fingers without cease,

 

frets stain with blood

blue as the Blues in the ghostly dark.

Let the whites of your eyes show

white as bone, in full moon light,

 

playing your immortal soul away.

You’re branded now, master.

You can play any tune, embellish

and syncopate like the devil himself.

 

Go home in morning silence

and astonish your friends. It will be enough.

Any tune you like, remember.

 

                              * 

Travellers to Clarksdale, where

Highway 61 and Highway 49

cross one another in the night,

find only a bricked-up Laundromat.

 

Squatters’ rights, on Johnson’s corner,

lye soap to wash away the blues.

Too many poor folk here, the devil’s

long moved on.

 

Angela Topping is the author of eight poetry collections and four pamphlets, all with reputable publishers. She is a former Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, and journals including Poetry Review and Magma. “Mastering the Guitar” was first published in her 2007 collection, The Way We Came (bluechrome)

 

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RODNEY WOOD

 

Hats

 

“The problem with a wish list was what it told you about the person who wrote it. If it's honest, it's a rock-bottom, barebones, clear shot all the way to someone's soul. Hats can do the same thing.”

Charles Martin, Where the River Ends (2008)

 

1

 

a hat is the barometer of emotional life

I started with a blue scally cap

someone stole it

then I met Bill who told me a hat is magic

 

I need a hat

a special hat

puff the magic dragon hat

magic dust hat

tragic magic hat and hidden magic hat

 

a hat hives you an identity

a personality

I’ve always wanted to be a poet

so I bought a special poetry hat

 

where I keep thoughts & everything I’ve seen

 

2

 

it’s my cowhide hat

it’s not a

baseball, ascot, flat, trilby,

coonskin, newsboy, fedora or ben hogan hat

 

it’s my oiled & waxed cowhide hat

it’s not a

beanie, beret bowler, bucket,

bush, cartwheel, stockman or hard hat

 

it’s my oiled & waxed cowhide hat from Maderia

it’s not a

panama, porkpie, homburg, mosh,

planter’s / santa’s / trucker’s or sun hat

 

but the linen band comes from a charity shop in Southampton

 

3

 

a hat helps people remember me

it keeps the rain off my hearing aid

it hides my grey & messy hair

 

they might forget my piercing eyes

the way I move like a dancer

the way I speak & write like an angel

 

they might forget I value everyone

the way my heart’s so warm & kind

the way my jokes release tension

energy

 

but they won’t forget a hat in a hatless world

 

Rodney Wood lives in Farnborough, UK. His poetry has appeared recently in The High Window Press, The Ofi Press, Magma. and Envoi. His debut pamphlet, Dante Called You Beatrice ( Red Ceiling Press) was published in 2017. He is also joint MC of the monthly open mic nights at The Lightbox in Woking, both of which are now Zooming.

 

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