2024

 

 

DECEMBER

 

 

Ken Cathers, Adele Evershed, Phil Kirby, Niall McGrath, Isabella Perez, Tony Press,

Myra Schneider, Finola Scott, Stuti Sinha, Tina Tocco, Tad Tuleja, Sarah White,

David Mark Williams, Phil Wood.

 

 

 

 

KEN CATHERS

 

a poem is a poor place

 

a poem is a poor place

to call a home

 

empty rooms,  paper walls

a thin shelter

against the cold

 

all the doors and

windows broken

 

a house of leaves

when the rain blows in.

 

there is a basement flooded

and a roof

that leaks

 

a place where the ghosts

return to sing

 

a poem is

a broken down palace

 

a devious grace

that invites you in.

 

it is the echo of voices

whispered from dream

 

a language of  stains

washed over

 

a poem is a shadow

the silence of words

not spoken

 

an intricate lie

 

it is what’s lost

and left behind

 

the last place you waited

in hunger

 

the first night

you slept alone

 

a poem is a poor place

to call a home

 

Ken Cathers has just published his eighth book of poetry entitled Home Town with Impspired Press in England. He has also recently published two chapbooks, one entitled Kiefer by broke press and the other entitled Legoland Noir by Block Party Press. His work has appeared internationally and some of his recent work has appeared in Plato’s Cave, The McGuffin, Acta Victoriana, Zoetic Press, The Carried Away, Wild Words and The Blue Unicorn.  He lives on Vancouver Island with his family in a small colony of trees.

 

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ADELE EVERSHED

 

Transitions

 

Another Friday—another ‘Free Write’

as if writing is not always free.

The facilitator asks us to write about

‘the before or after moment of a transition’

using strong verbs and dialogue that makes people gasp.

Then she rings a singing bowl—it has a lovely chime

but reminds me that too many people think

writing is a spiritual thing.

We all bend our heads like true penitents and begin.

 

I warm my icy fingers on the teacup

just like I remember Mam doing

as she waited for Dad to come back from the pub.

And when she heard his key in the door

she’d wrap her hands so tightly around the mug

I could see the indigo of her veins— 

a scrawl of blue lines telling a story

without any verbs or dialogue

 

And I find myself wondering

What is a strong verb?

To have or is to know better?

To believe or to hold?

To write or to understand?

To shiver or to sweat?

 

I study the other participants—all women

their hair hanging like veils.

And the verb to let go struggles like a drowning man

to the surface of my thoughts

so I lose my correct grammar and punctuation

then I run a thin blue line like a river on an old map

through my words

and I write—to hope

as the singing bowl tells me

my time is up

 

Forgive Me for I have Sinned, It’s Been a Minute Since My Last Tweet

 

On X someone was complaining about all the confessional poetry

making a plea to turn away from I towards eyes

#itsnotallaboutyou

 

So I tried and at first it was fine—

I wrote about water

And what it becomes when it falls

Or how in autumn the trees trumpet

Like an intro to an Otis Reading song

As they loose their leaves

And how the sky was a cathedral

As vast and vaulting as my lack of faith

When I followed my mother’s coffin

To her grassless grave

So you see my problem

#allroadsleadbacktome

 

People were posting non-confessional stuff

haiku about blossoms and crickets

or stretching clouds into metaphors

I even read a verse from the viewpoint of a twig

when it lost a leaf and the spiralling of its grief

with an accompanying gif

#treeshavefeelingstoo

 

But others pointed out

the blossoms became a conceit

for the treadmill of life

and the clouds stand in for depression

the leafless branch—loneliness or empty nesting

(though the crickets seemed to be just crickets)

#soundsofsilence

 

The poets of twitter soon moved on

to debate ‘after’ poems as plagiarism

and I was left with just ‘me myself I’

#afterjoanarmatrading

 

But then I realized for me poetry is a pouring

in the hope of filling someone else up

and it doesn’t really matter if it’s done with daffodils long dead

or through the confessions of this old bird

finally flying free toward the grave

#thelithag

 

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer. Some of the places her work has been published include Grey Sparrow Journal, Anti Heroin Chic, Gyroscope, and Janus Lit. She has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Adele has published a novella in flash, Wannabe (Alien Buddha Press) and a short story collection; Suffer/Rage (Dark Myth Publications).

 

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PHIL KIRBY

 

Lessons In Lore

 

She said it was a Devil’s Purse

we’d found among the flotsam

on the strandline — black as The Styx,

corners set with twisted horns —

then let me think the deep held

monsters of mythical size

in regions beyond the reach of light.

 

Next she called it Mermaid’s Purse,

still hard and dark, but now

I thought it might once have

cached fantastic treasures: pearls,

jewels of nacre, gold doubloons

or secrets only those who dwell

beneath the waves would know.

 

I learned it was a desiccated sac,

an egg-case from a shark or ray —

another kind of purse, its living riches

scattered spendthrift in the kelp,

or on the ocean floor. Stripped

of a child’s romance, of mystery,

it became an unremarkable thing.

 

But sometimes now, while combing

a beach, stepping over mats of wrack

and oarweed that fizz with sand fleas,

or scraps of frayed blue rope and net,

I see another. It’s then I’m caught,

entangled in her words, wondering how

salt-winds can carry voices of the dead.

 

Phil Kirby’s collections are Watermarks (Arrowhead) and The Third History (Lapwing). Poems in Acumen, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Ireland, Stand, amongst many others. A new chapbook, Towards A Theory of Being Human, has recently appeared from Hybrid/Dreich. Writing as P.K. Kirby, a teen novella, Hidden Depths (Applefire, 2016), is on Kindle. website/shop at: philkirbypoetry.bigcartel.com

 

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NIALL MCGRATH

 

Brown’s Bay

 

A ball is thrown,

water’s smacked

as two greyhounds

vie to bring it back,

one black, one brown.

A donkey brays.

A bluebottle whirs.

A wave gushes; little smashes

as it reaches shore.

A man with a toddler

on a sunbed Youtubing

as she hokes sand

into a plastic bucket

with a plastic shovel.

My son is kneeling near the edge,

tapping an upturned mould

dreaming of castles

as I observe the whiteness of haw,

paleness of dry grass,

shocked to find space for peace

after so long rushing

from one task to the other.

I watch swimming pensioners,

nose-high dogs wading in the sea,

suspect if it could really be

that anything might be possible

as the ferry glides

silently from Scotland.

 

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ISABELLA PEREZ

 

The Gods Put on Midsummer and it Goes as You'd Expect

 

This morning, Zeus scratched a name off the cast list.

The role is Oberon, and he defends his expropriation with a thunderous recitation:

Act Two Scene One Line One Hundred and Sixty One.

It’s hard to say no to a man who believes no means harder.

 

Dionysus and Hermes both want to be Puck;

I write their arguments in my rehearsal report as general twink drama.

Hera and Aphrodite both want to be Titania, until Aphrodite is

swayed by the thought of playing a nubile ingénue. 

 

Ares leans back against the proscenium during fight call—next to his head,

a poorly patched dent reminds us to remind him to pay attention this time.

Artemis squirms during intimacy call. Don’t touch me, she states, anywhere.

I detest whoever casted her as Helena.

 

At focus, Helios asks for hot on me. He will later be bombarded by Iris,

collecting scraps of gels for some art piece he will never understand.

Hephaestus and Hestia, under the raving of chop saws, talk silently.

Their words are not needed where wood glue can suffice.

 

Isabella "Bella" Perez (she/her) is an artist based in Massachusetts. She is currently getting her BFA in Technical Theatre from Salem State University. When not working on a show or crafting, she likes playing puzzle games and gushing about pigeons.

 

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TONY PRESS

 

Life on the Border

 

Clouds kiss a brilliant sky

Tears meet smiles meet embrace

              meet sobs

There are no surprises

             only shock

             from the death

                      the surprise, the lack of it,

                      and the shock

It is a cycle we ride

            a path we walk

            a river we swim

We are always on the border

There is no there, no here

            Now, yes, and here, yes

            Here, now, this.

 

Tony Press tries to pay attention. Sometimes he does. His story collection, Crossing the Lines, was published by Big Table, and his poetry chapbook Equinox and Solstice by Right Hand Pointing. He claims 2 Pushcart nominations, 12 years in the same high school classroom, and 25 criminal jury trials. He lives by the San Francisco Bay.

 

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MYRA SCHNEIDER

 

Bridge and Boat

           After Hokusai

 

1

 

The semi-circle of the bridge looks almost weightless

and I expect to see it echoed in the water below

but there’s not the slightest hint of a reflection.

 

Wooden piers hold it high above the calm river

and there is a finely-cut hand rail on each side

which tempts me to try to picture hauling my body

 

up its narrow steps but I know I’d fail. Yet stalwarts

in heavy coats are doggedly making the steep ascent

as they’ve done daily as far back as they can remember.

 

At the top two of them have stopped to gaze at the water

and mutter about aching bones. Even if there are floods

after torrential rain surely the water wouldn’t rise so high

 

that it endangers this bridge? It takes walkers to a tiny

rocky island where green bushes grow and, tantalizingly

I can see part of another bridge cut off by the edge

 

of the postcard I’m holding. The flat landscape grows

grows paler and paler into the distance – it unnerves me.

In this huge whiteness where is certainty, meaning?

 

2

 

I’m mesmerized by the inky shapes of fir trees

which have crept up the shoulders of Mount Fuji

towards the creamy white snow near its summit

 

until I spot a fisherman in a small boat far below

trying to catch fish in the Tama river while his mate

struggles to untangle a heap of fishing nets.

 

Suddenly I am in the boat too, staring at the water. 

It’s a stunning sapphire blue and I’m breathing air

so pure I want to trap it in a bottle and take it back

 

to the car-bludgeoned road where I live. We are about

to enter a thick layer of mist which swallows

the glorious blue, kills it. The journey is daunting

 

but maybe beyond the murk I’ll see the mountain rise,

maybe I’ll reach its foothills and be able to believe

it’s still the guardian of our troubled and needy world. 

 

The Gold Mask

After Mask with nose ornament, British Museum

 

I stuck a postcard of it on the bathroom wall

but it follows me round the sunless house every day   

and pushes its way into my dreams at night:

 

the funeral mask of a man who lived in Colombia

more than three thousand years ago, long before

human beings began creating problems

 

they don’t know how to solve. That this relic is gold

shows it covered the face of a person

of high status. I stare at the moulded ear lobes

 

and the slits for eyes, the mouth that’s muted

by a long thin triangle. To me the mask is an image

of the sun god who was worshipped at that time

 

even though the nose ring reminds me a door knocker.

I imagine it buried in the lower slopes

of the Andes among palm trees and lush bushes.

 

Higher up, mountains of sheer rock covered with snow

slant towards the sky. How strange, how beautiful

our world is yet we’re too preoccupied to preserve it.

 

Myra Schneider had her first collection published in 1985, by John Killick. She has read widely at poetry festivals and many other venues, been published in well-known newspapers and journals, and shortlisted for a Forward prize in 2007. Her work has appeared in a large number of anthologies and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in Poetry Please. She is a consultant to the Second Light Network of women poets founded by Dilys Wood in the late 1990s, and she write reviews and articles for their twice-yearly magazine for women poets, ARTEMIS poetry and occasionally for other magazines.

 

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FINOLA SCOTT

 

The blindness of prayer

Camas Cuil an t-Saimh,  Iona,

 

Columba returns, his curragh shudders

against the angry tide. While oyster-catchers

wrestle the whipped air, he gives thanks

to this ancient highway, to this rosary

of isles and sea that links all supplications.

At last alone, he will rest

and converse with his God.

 

Soul lightening, feet solid, he blesses

the shingle, the sweet clams of this rock.

While wind-tangled bladder wrack holds fast

he praises the hungry cries

of geese south-skeining.

He sings halleulia to the rescuing gift

of this isle, his sanctuary.

 

He doesn't know

to pray against the Warming,

that will shift the Stream over time.

He believes in the heavens,

the promise of light.

Knows nothing of ozone layers,

of coral reefs dissolving,

of the whirlpool

of plastics swirling,

of oceans rising,

of drownings.

 

Finola Scott’s, work is published widely, including The High Window, Lighthouse and numerous anthologies. Successes include winning The Hugh MacDiarmid Tassie and being Runner-up in the McLellan Competition. My turn now was first published in Atrium, 2022, Inscription: Letters from people who are mostly dead was first published in Scottish Writer Centre Tenth Anniversary Anthology, 2018. She welcomes you to fb Finola Scott Poems. More at https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/finola-scott/ An earlier version of ‘The blindness of prayer was first published in The High Window,  Nov 2022.

 

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STUTI SINHA

 

Under My Banyan Tree

 

When my world expands beyond

the supple weave of Amma’s saree

I anchor myself to my other mother.

Within her glossy pleats

I graze elbows and knees

crawl, and fall, then

find my feet. From the tassels

of her arms I swing

into a different world;

 

Under her canopy, 

amongst brambly bushes bursting 

from the dusty red soil.  I cluster

with kids, in matching cotton pinnies.

She sways, urging the wind to lift

our paper planes in flight.  They invade homes

through smashed window panes;

glass shattered by cricket balls.

 

We strew her seams

with colourful confetti; crayons,

bubble blowers and yo-yos

and fill crumpled pockets

with soggy soil.  Curved leaves smile

while we chase

opalescent-winged dragonflies.

She pokes my curiosity 

with her crackly twigs.  I slide one 

into the soft chambers

of freshly formed ant hills,

and watch the little soldiers

bustle back to their resting place.

 

I rest here too, in the shade

of her silken cape,

in a state of all knowing certainty,
She is mine and belongs to only me.

 

Stuti Sinha is a published and award-winning Indian writer, who lives in Dubai.  She writes immersive narratives about the human experience and emotions.  Being passionate about travel, she loves to weave different cultures and her heritage into her writing.  She has been published by various international literature magazines and presses.

 

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TINA TOCCO

 

GONE

 

A toad cracks her breast

like a thunderclap against

river stones I packed

 

near her home, that patch

thick with clay mud and June bugs

down by the runoff

 

pond, where her eggs will

hatch without her, or lay still

without a mourner,

 

snapped in a woodcock’s

beak, or cupped lightning-bug style

in the mothering

 

palms of a child, an

oddity for a moment,

then shaken off, gone.

 

Tina Tocco is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, River Styx, Roanoke Review, Passages North, Potomac Review, Portland Review, Italian Americana, The Comstock Review, Stand, and other publications. Tina earned her MFA from Manhattanville University, where she was editor-in-chief of Inkwell. ‘Gone’ was originally published in Glassworks, Fall 2015.

 

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TAD TULEJA

 

The Idealist

 

“A series of footnotes to Plato.” You might think

that line had settled Plato’s reputation

so he could RIP forever muttering gnothi seauton,

trading bon mots with Socrates, sneering at Sophists.

 

But I feel sorry for the toast of Athens.

hobnobbing with Sofia in the capital of the world,

acolytes shadowing him tipsy as moths,

yet never truly easy in his own skin.

 

You give the guy a peach, he doesn’t eat it. 

Observes, omphalo-skeptically, “This particular

peach, besotted with attributes, lures us from the

changeless peach of the mind.”

 

Wouldn’t a man so furiously rankled by matter

have been chafing nonstop at his own physicality?

I ate a peach today with my ephemeral molars.

I did not question its peach-ness. It was delicious.

 

Small Matters   

 

How well they understood detail, the old

masters. How in Hawthorne’s terrifying story

excising the birthmark leads through

a moment of triumph to beauty’s

demise.

 

JMW Turner at the eleventh hour

put the cherries atop his canvases

to the consternation of his Academy rivals

as he conjured a grey sea to life with one red

buoy.

 

Ladies of fashion under the Old Regime

dotted their porcelain cheeks with artificial moles,

catching the hungry eyes of periwigged suitors

in a trap of what they imagined to be

humility.

 

Just so did the epicene models of Vanity Fair

don the shredded jeans of heroin chic,

dreaming that gawkers might blink

and momentarily mistake them for real

women.

 

Should not such telling touches be happily

fugitive? The marjoram in the marinara,

the frogs of Salamanca, the suspended fourth

instantly resolved—these Lilliputian

delights!

 

Just so does the cat in the corner

compose the scene. No matter that few

can distinguish it from the upholstery.

It is there, like Van Gogh’s ear, saying pay

attention.

 

Tad Tuleja is an American folklorist with fond memories of student days in London and Sussex. Primarily a nonfiction writer, he also writes poetry and lyrics. His song cycle Skein of Arms received a grant from the Puffin Foundation, and as “Skip Yarrow” he performs his songs on You Tube. 

 

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SARAH WHITE

 

“Poetry Makes Nothing Happen”
 

 Ever since he wrote that— Auden,
 brilliant, boozy, Catholic poet—
 critics have carried on about it—
 naming things a poem
 might possibly make happen:
 inspire a revolution, win a lady’s love,
 get a Pulitzer for someone.

 

 Yes, but those things take time,
 the poem will already have happened
 all of a sudden like a crack
 of thunder, an orgasm, an infant’s
 breath at birth.
 Dickinson’s one question
 was “Do these poems breathe?”

 

 If they do, that is enough, and if they don’t,
 you may as well go
 hit the booze. It worked
 for Auden. For you I’m not so sure,
 

Sarah White, now living in a Western Massachusets retirement community, has published 7 books of poetry and memoir, most recently The Poem Has Reasons, dos madres press, 2022 and Iridescent Guest (Deerbrook Editions, 2022).
 

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DAVID MARK WILLIAMS

 

The Ink Machine

in memoriam David Gestetner 1854-1939

 

What keeps him up here drifting on darkness

at the lit window, awake in the small hours,

his shadow rolled over the ceiling,

 

scratching words into wax coated paper,

the scent of mulberry on his hands?

 

Will it work, his bright idea, his flatbed?

No thought now for tomorrow’s hullabaloo,

its froth and frenzy, a floor unsteady as an ice floe

littered with paper slips,

the day’s compounded errors.

 

He’s got something else to prove.

Ink glistens through the cut letters

and with each sweep, copy after copy will hold true.

 

He’s cranking up a revolution no one

will feel inclined to throw their hat into the air for,

his name now a machine recognised everywhere,

 

once only a spark, a gleam from the time

he stood on street corners selling kites

for children to tie their hearts to.

 

Walking to the Tinker’s House

 

This was my house of good stone, said Noman walking under the big sky to the Tinker’s house. This was my house until its bones showed long after the tinker had departed without so much as a word taking only his tin violin.

 

And still it plays a birdsong tune, the sweet notes drawing a body on no matter how weary or footsore, a body naming everything and the nothing that is.

 

Will it still be standing, my house, asked Noman of no one but himself, or smothered in a copse of alder and elderflower, razed to the ground, the land ploughed up for pigs to root in, or given over to grassland?

 

I am walking under the big sky, said Noman. I am walking to the Tinker’s house following the line of the dyke, by grazing marsh and reed bed, over the ground soft as a mattress.

 

Top heavy cumuli stacked over water meadows, the shine of the salt marshes edged with pink, the dark grey ball head of a seal sliding down the river, the flash of silver that was a fish.

 

Every stretch of water a dot dash of light, bulrushes and sea barley, grazing cattle on wet grassland, the old wind pump shorn of its sails, sea barley whispers, sway of bulrushes, shallow pools of open water, deep water channels.

 

All the names rising in a murmuration, a cloud of signs over his head, a parabola of names woven over him, a cloud script to read the names from aloud, a silver wind of names rippling through everything that lightly bends and is stroked in the reed beds and water meadows, all the many and various modes and flavours to sing out about, Noman would see and take in, shooting only with his eyes.

 

David Mark Williams writes poetry and short fiction. He has been shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and won Second Prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Competition. Two collections of his poetry have been published: The Odd Sock Exchange, Cinnamon, 2015 and Papaya Fantasia, Hedgehog, 2018. ‘The Ink Machine’ was previously published in Northwords Now.

 

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PHIL WOOD

 

The Curator's Confession

 

And then I swept the dust away

with Jenny's trusted broom. Besides

the pot was not a fitting tomb.

No antique could bury that lust

for laughter, thirst for gin, that spice

of briny tales. An urn's no shrine

to foster ghosts, to web a hush

of her. She was the crash of waves

wetting the shore, the rush for more.

No ornament could bin our Jen.

And when I swept her dust to air,

and when I smashed the artefact,

I heard that blue blush of sea

dashing pebbles against my door.

 

Phil Wood has worked in statistics, education, shipping, and a biscuit factory. He enjoys painting and learning German. His writing can be found in various places, most recently in :  Byways (Arachne Press Anthology), The Seventh Quarry (issue 39) and Noon Journal of the Short Poem (Issue 25).

 

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