2022

 

 

DECEMBER

 

 

Rick Dalton, Holly Day, Patrick Deeley, Mike Dillon, Clive Donovan, Rose Drew,

George Freek, Tom Kelly, Jack Little, Beth McDonough, Bruce McRea,

 Maggie Sawkins, Eliot Khalil Wilson.

 

 

 

 

 

RICK DALTON

 

The Astronomer

 

Dear Comrade Stalin,

 

Although my cell door is locked,

And a kerosene lamp my only company,

And my greying beard droops in clumps,

I look past my eyes to elsewhere,

Escaping on the wing of wandering thoughts,

Strolling the Solar System in my prison boots,

Passing hardboiled Mercury and phosphorescent Venus,

Giving Earth a wide berth by several billion strides,

Peering over the lip of Mars, making a close study

Of its poles of white cloud like candy floss,

Then descending the Martian skies.

 

Here, I've made a home fashioned from cadged cigarettes,

The wings of moths and starlight.

Here, history has yet to start,

And the secret police are non-existent.

Missile silos sleep beyond the imagination.

 

At night, I transcend the immediate noise

Of men being hung from the ceiling like bats

And voyage further: Saturn's rings,

Like a diamond brooch the Tsarina wore;

Sailing Neptune; chthonic Pluto; presumed galaxies

Unsullied by forced confessions and show trials,

They crystallise under my nose.

I scan for signs and omens in the zodiac,

I bob for apples in the Oort cloud.

At Alpha Centauri, I think of my wife

Tying back delphiniums at dusk,

The same remote lights overhead, the same web of frost.

 

As always, your ever-faithful comrade, Nikolai Kozyrev.

 

Rick Dalton lives in Galgate UK and is a self-employed electrician. Previously, he studied English at Lancaster University. His poetry has been published widely in UK based publications such as Acumen, Dreich Magazine and 192 Magazine. He is currently looking to get a short collection published titled Evening Land.

 

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HOLLY DAY

 

Editing Notes

 

Do not try to write in the style

of 15^th century Chinese poets

except in English, where color

is some sort of metaphor, and everything smells

like sandalwood and death.

 

And do not try to write like 10^th century Vikings

because they didn’t really write anything down anyway

and if you’re too scared to get on stage

and recite your Viking poems out loud to an audience

then you haven't really written Viking poetry anyway.

 

And do not try to write like the French Romantics

or the English ones either, for that matter

if you’re just too cynical to rhapsodize about feet

or perhaps not cynical enough to gush about love.

 

The Ex           

 

Thought I'd try to look up an old boyfriend on Facebook

just to see what he was up to. After a little bit of searching,

I found him,

and discovered that he had become a professional photographer

and had all of these amazing photos and photo credits posted.

 

This made me really happy, and sad,

because apparently I'd totally misjudged and even been completely unaware

of how talented a photographer my ex was.

However, after about an hour of looking through his portfolio

and finally figuring out his address,

 

I suddenly realized that the person I was doing all this research on

wasn’t my old boyfriend at all,

but some guy in England

with the same name

who was a few years older than my ex.

 

The picture of him posing with his mom

in a picture essentially labeled, "me and my mother"

sealed it, because it was definitely not my ex's mother.

It was a different woman entirely.

 

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her hobbies include kicking and screaming at vending machines.

 

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PATRICK DEELEY

 

Prague Baroque

 

We walk the colonnaded nave, the “ship”.  

Gross statues of saints spear demons

which look reptilian, crush their warted limbs

under muscly feet thick-roped with sandals.

 

Smooth-bummed putti cling to cornices

or appear to float across ceilings

of robin-egg blue in perfect foreshortenings.  

Levitating frescoes smile.  We see Mary

 

as she is seldom depicted, heavily pregnant,

while elephantine God scowls

down the hank of his beaver-tail beard

as it swirls in multitudinous tendrils

 

to fuse among the flat pastorals of his creation.  

Tourists, camera-haltered, we saunter,

clod and shod to regal elegance.  

Our swoon is secular; we admit a weakness

 

for misery made artful. Say small wonder

the poor of the Middle Ages fell under sway

of display of church power, trembled

desperate yet ecstatic as they threw themselves

 

on the mercy of the Creator, hoping

to be swept up into the promise of heaven,

the glory they imagined beyond

even these sky-domed cathedral splendours.

 

 

To a Roller Skater at Loughrea         

 

I try to catch the lake in words, the springs

and streams that keep it chill,

the legend where a submerged town

is said to be visible, but for you –

lost and found against the speckle of rock

 

and reed and hill, roller-skating

out as if to round the sun-struck water’s

glittering expanse – words

won’t do.  Leaning in, you sweep a bend,

straighten, leap, spin.  There’s

 

a wind tunnel to the sounds you rustle up,

a wheeze, a whip which wakens

in my head the doom notion

drummed into us as children: a drowning

every seven years, this predestined.  

 

Rogue waves still rise, tides

twist a rope of communal bereavement.  

But now, over the way, I hear you – full tilt,

exuberant – smithereening

the well-meant warnings if not the risks,

 

as you mint, through swerve and swoop,

and whoop on whoop, a story

I say will last forever, though the sightseers

turning from the shingly shore

just shake their heads and smile at me.

 

Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea, Co. Galway. Seven collections of his poems were published by Dedalus Press, the most recent of which was The End of the World. His awards for writing include The Eilis Dillon Book of the Year Award, The Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize, and The 2019 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award. His critically acclaimed, bestselling memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, appeared from Transworld in 2016.

 

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MIKE DILLON

 

Tourists on Safari

 

We never had the chance to hear it laugh.

We didn’t even have time to ask

about its grave-robber reputation.

“It’s dying,” the tour guide said.

 

A safe slice of distance lay

between us and it — thirty yards, perhaps —

where the spotted, rounded-eared hyena

with a jackhammer neck hacked,

coughed, jerked and heaved

before it toppled on its side.

 

Its heavy breathing singed our ears.

“Poor thing,” the thirty-something

behind my right shoulder whispered

with the softness of a May morning.

 

She broke from our knotted group.

She strode the thirty yards in three breath-spans.

She took a knee and stroked its heaving pelt.

Her slow lips moved above the skyward ear.

 

If you must wonder what happened next

may the departed gods of good heart

make a quick return for your safekeeping.

 

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. A previous contributor to The Lake, his most recent book is The Return, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press (2021).

 

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CLIVE DONOVAN

 

Homo Neanderthalensis 

 

[If the slanderous Prof. Ernst Haekel had prevailed, 

their nomenclature would have been Homo Stupidus] 

 

They were good enough to take as mates, 

those big-brained redheads – we carry still their genes 

and we usurped their drugs and music, so they say, 

as we evicted them from caves. 

 

For five thousand years we shared their European cradle, 

but we, the crafty sapient ones, 

like goblins, deft and predatory, 

forged in the genesis of hot plains of Africa, 

 

swarmed into the vast northern continent, 

contesting for the right to hunt that harsh, meaty world 

and though they were chunky and tough, 

we were agile, had more offspring and we won. 

 

And did they morph in epic song to Titans as they died, 

dethroned by us, the late-come tribe Olympian? 

or did they stay to haunt us yet in strands of DNA 

– the bogeymen of ancient guilty lullabies? 

 

Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press] and Wound Up With Love [Lapwing] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, The Lake, Prole, Sentinel and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He is a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems. 

 

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ROSE DREW

 

Echoes

 

This is a land of war.

Guns boom, off, behind green friendly hills,

serene trees;

now the cannon;

rapid stutter of automatic anger;

rifles sniping behind termite mounds with precision;

practicing their aim.

 

This is where teens train to kill,

where the blandly handsome jug-jawed youngster,

in line polite to buy coffee,

maybe a Gatorade  

is learning to stomp over villages

lay all to waste

to glance down from a mile high window,

release detonation

to destroy, yet go back to camp & laugh at TV

fly home to hug his mom.

 

This is a land of preparation and conquest.

Helicopters with mounted machine guns & rocket launchers

named for fallen foes: Apache

Comanche

Lakota

The very roads thru the base called

Indianhead

Custer

Stonewall –

We drive along paths honouring slavers and babykillers

 

Then, buy gas or coffee

alongside the next generation

of the polite

the shinyfaced

the uniformed

the armed

 

The ready.

 

Rose Drew, an economic immigrant from America, realizes love and only love can save the world: love for each other, not for money and things. Rose is an anthropologist, co-hosts open mic York Spoken Word and is editor & events manager for Stairwell Books. She is tall on the inside.

 

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GEORGE FREEK

 

Ora Pro Nobis (After Mei Yao Chen)

 

Standing at my wife’s grave,

when I’m close to death,

I appreciate life.

Her grave is nestled

in the shadow of a maple tree,

a shadow which

will some day cover me.

Memories are all I have.

Staring at her grave, as that

shadow envelopes me,

I wonder

of what use is poetry?

 

 

My Confession (After Tu Fu)

 

I have many shameful habits,

of which I won’t speak.

When I seek solace, the moon

is a willing priest.

It will simply sleep.

At my funeral, the stars

will be mourners.

As I lay in my bier,

they’ll look on in silence.

They’ll ask no penance,

and they’ll shed no tears.

 

George Freek's poem "Written At Blue Lake" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem "Enigmatic Variations" was also recently nominated for Best of the Net. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions.

 

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TOM KELLY

 

Questions

 

I tried to find him,

looking in obvious places

quiet bars, keeping himself to himself

eavesdropping furtive conversations

not wanting to draw attention,

knows no-one to smile at.

 

Ten or more years later

different pub, half-full mid-week,

questioning himself in the mirror.

There is a pile of curling paperbacks in the corner

red on black cowboy images

he remembers from an old haunt.

 

I began to see him recently. He is slower

not in a bar but in a garden remembering

something akin to an unwanted dream,

half-forgotten memories nagging away,

questions he wants to ask

before they slip from view.

 

Tom Kelly’s ninth poetry collection This Small Patch was published in 2020 and re-printed by Red Squirrel Press. His second short story collection No Love Rations was published by Postbox Press in April 2022. www.tomkelly.org.uk

 

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JACK LITTLE

 

A Found Note

 

His letters were spiders, a curve through ‘c’, 

the snow on Nelson Hill and sledges smashing 

against the tide of uneven ground, an icy wind stroking my hair

 

as ‘m’ became just one straight line - an Eastern European beach 

and his smile to strangers, my brother’s namesake invited to play

and build sand castles - his ‘n’s, were always rushing.

 

The final line says ‘bacon’, his ‘b’ an ‘h’ 

his ‘c’, this time, a milk bottle symbol,

spilt into memories - a booming laugh.

 

I cultivate words from his tree-bark eyes

large and round, wrinkles on his forehead

their lines a story slowly becoming my own.

 

Jack Little (b. 1987) is a British-Mexican poet, editor and translator based between Bogotá and Mexico City. He is the author of Elsewhere (Eyewear, 2015) and Slow Leaving (Red Squirrel Press, 2022). Jack is the Founding Editor of The Ofi Press.

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

Pieris, now

Gallus, you varnish long nails

red into vindictive winter's coat.
This is meant to be spring.

 

Sharp in scarlets, spiking air,
in insistent Italian gestures,
you cluster-finger from wearied green.

 

Hollywood starlet glamour,
out-smashing the drab, camped up
at the backdoor step, and yet

 

your white-belled scent

isn't brazened out in a drama.
You don't say come closer. Shame. Snuggle in.

 

 

Thorn

 

Let's go to the place of small, bitter miracles,
which never stabs where you'd expect.
Don't anticipate any expansive answers

threaded through hedgerows

lapped by the Loch of the Lowes.

 

You won't glean enough
when you frame your thoughts
in some window, all gorgeously Georgian
looking down-Tay and up-slopes.
You need cheek-thinning astringency now.

 

To find this year's place of small, bitter miracles,
look closer to home, near the turbine's wind-up

and the weave of suburban deer.
None of this will recur next year.
I can promise you that, but no more.

 

Beth McDonough’s poetry appears in many places; she reviews in DURA. Her pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word. Recently, her site-specific poem was installed on the Corbenic Poetry Path. She's currently Makar of the FWS.

 

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BRUCE MCREA

 

In And Of

 

A painting of the world

as it is in the moment.

Including turtles and tax returns.

Including carnations and palo verde.

With candlewax and dog-bark and cod roe,

the myopic painter mixing metaphors.

He stirs colours.

 

In this painting are a pig’s knuckles

and thigh bone of a Chaldean general.

There’s a coin dropped down a grate,

neither head nor tails.

A child is bawling for its mother.

There’s a car crash on the autobahn,

for which death is certain.

A deft hand has shaped a horse’s mane

and braid of wheat-coloured grasses.

It’s captured light’s moody temperament,

sunsets of pinks and purpled strands.

A contented cow. A miserable coxswain.

 

Millions of years in the making, this painting

contains pocket lint and buttons of ivory.

And there are you and I, we’re walking by the mill,

the artist having it rain. Impeccably portrayed,

we seem oblivious to time and loving.

Stood defiant to death’s erasure.

 

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books include The So-CalledSonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and Like As If (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

 

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MAGGIE SAWKINS

 

Ever After

 

And one day I’ll invite them to tea.

I’ll make salmon fishcakes

with lemon and parsley

arrange slices of tomato

on a dish shaped like the moon.

 

I’ll drape the table with lace

and light a candle.

 

My mother will arrive in her lilac dress

and soft red shoes.

On her arm will be my father

in his trilby hat. For once

he’ll lift it off. I’ll kiss his head

and he’ll tell the tale

of the bald-headed donkey.

 

We’ll sit down to eat

and my brother and me will promise

not to argue over the tick-tock spoon.

 

While Toby curls and dreams in his basket

the clatter of knives and forks

will fill the room.

 

Sophie the cat will jump to the table

and swipe a piece of fishcake

from my father’s fork.

 

For a moment there’ll be silence.

 

Then my mother will smile

and begin to laugh. Then

my brother, my father, and me.

 

And we’ll laugh so loud

the neighbours will bang on the walls.

We’ll stop and look at each other

there’ll be sparks in our eyes.

 

And we’ll start again.

And the roof will fly

from the top of the house

and our laughter will fill the sky

 

will lighten our blood

will lighten our bones

will carry us up to a nest made of stars.

 

And that will be the end of the story.

Maggie Sawkins lives on the Isle of Wight where she currently runs the Brading Station Writing Group. Her live literature production, Zones of Avoidance, was the recipient of a Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Her third full collection, The House Where Courage Lives, is published by Waterloo ress. www.hookedonwords.me 

 

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ELIOT KHALIL WILSON

 

The Boobs on the Bus

 

Aww man, that girl got some fine-ass titties.

He motions with his head, grins like an ass.

It’s just me, him, and Ms. Fine-Ass Titties

on this bus and I’m hoping this will pass

as some puerile try to connect with me—

me who hears breast as cancer’s adjective.

More women board with more fine-ass titties.

The bus jolts, bounces, like something alive.

Now we’ve a bus load of fine-ass titties—

tangerine, grapefruit, rocket tits, east westies.

The guy appreciates fine-ass titties.

Discerning? Maybe, though just lewd to me.

Then off the bus, the robins, mourning doves,

the big round moon that I, suddenly, love.

 

 

The Cleaners

 

So out from under the corporate towers—

ten tired Hispanic custodians,

their brown eyes wearing every hard hour.

They ride, a dignified group, to the Mexican

part of town and home, and I wonder what

grim world they left that proves this life better—

scrubbing endless corporate floors, the dust,

then to ride this bus, in graphite light, forever.

Today someone’s daughter is sitting here,

lovely as unlikely, while her mother

slumps in the brown surround of her daughter’s

hair—her child’s back not yet a wounded chair.

The afternoon light shines pink through her ear--

a candle’s young light in a candle’s hour.

 

Eliot Khalil Wilson has won two Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has three books to his credit: The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go; This Island of Dogs; and The Lunatic's Left-Hand Man. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado.

 

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