2017

 

 

 

 

FEBRUARY CONTRIBUTORS

 

Ruth Aylett, Joe Balaz, Stephen Cramer, Jenne kaivo, Debarshi Mitra, Kenneth Pobo, Tom Sastry, Fiona Sinclair, Sue Spiers, Judith Taylor,

Larry D. Thacker, Louise Warren.

 

 

 

 

 

RUTH AYLETT

 

Essex Ancestors

 

Often dissed these days with sneers: chavs,

white mini-skirts, gold-hoop earrings,

that simply dreadful estuary accent.

Back then they were dismissed as rural idiots.

 

But distances sat behind their eyes, inevitable

as the easterlies off the North Sea:

the straightline of brown-grey salt marshes

meeting the enormity of blue-grey sky.

 

Squelching and patched with marsh grass

those boneless fields, without stone.

They marked graves with wrought iron crosses,

built white-boarded houses with Norwegian pine.

 

Their god as definite as the bite of the two-handed saw:

Methodists were Primitive; the Peculiar People

demanded Sundays of sermon and prayer. Injury

and disease made the next world a gaping door.

 

Further over the horizon from them than Shangri-la

with my clean water on tap, mains sewerage,

centrally heated hall, I think of their capability;

feel critical eyes when I cut crooked with my saw.

 

 

True Story

 

‘I have a body in a bag,’ she said,

‘a skeleton from when I was a nurse.

It’s wrapped in plastic sheeting in the shed’.

The friend she told was not impressed at first.

 

Then cancer got her and they found the thing,

cut into it, released a dreadful smell,

revealed a hand all mummified, with ring;

an arm, pyjamas, then a face as well.

 

She’d told the friend her husband was a brute

who had affairs, was violent, never cared,

and though they knew she rarely told the truth:

an eighteen-year old murder? Had she dared?

 

They found the fracture marks across his head

exactly matched the stone frog by her bed.

 

Ruth Aylett lives in Edinburgh where she teaches and researches university-level computing, thinks another world is possible and that the one we have is due some changes. She has been published by Interpreter’s House, New Writing Scotland, South Bank Poetry, Envoi, Bloodaxe Books, Poetry Scotland, Red Squirrel Press, Doire Press and others. For more on her writing see www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth/writing.html.

 

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JOE BALAZ

 

Anadah Trip Around Da Sun

 

I nevah paid wun ticket

to get on dis ride.

 

It’s like being on wun roundabout—

 

Da only trouble is

 

you don’t know wheah or wen

you going leave da big circle.

 

 

Each orbit is wun digit

added to your portfolio

 

laying out wun timeline

to your momentary existence.

 

 

Taking stock

of all da yellowing pages

 

I can see da narrative

dat wuz added to each sheet.

 

It’s wun strange story of flight

like wun owl flying in da night.

 

 

Maybe it’s just

da yearly retrospective

 

cause I’m emptying da confines

 

and folding da contents

into wun offering of paper cranes.

 

 

I tie da creations

to hovering talons

 

and imagine da alterations

hanging dere in space.

 

 

I’m taking

anadah trip around da sun

 

on silent wings

dat no no one can hear flapping

 

as I simply glide

to watevah going come to be.

 

 

Joe Balaz writes in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole English) and in American-English.

He edited Ho'omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.  Some of his

recent Pidgin writing has appeared in Rattle, Juked, Otoliths, and Hawai'i Review, among others.

Balaz is an avid supporter of Hawaiian Islands Pidgin writing in the expanding context of

World Literature.  He presently lives in Cleveland, Ohio. 

 

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STEPHEN CRAMER

 

Sweetheart, You Make Me Feel Like a Spider

 

Sweetheart, you make me

feel like a spider. Not just

 

any old spider, but the one I saw

earlier this summer, the one

 

who manufactured a coliseum

of a web—do you hear me?:

 

a coliseum from her own body!—

between the rear view

 

mirror & the window

of my car. I didn’t have the heart

 

to swipe the web away

with a stick, not enough heart

 

to say, hey spider, I love

 your work, but you’ve chosen

 

the wrong canvas.  

So I took a mid-summer

 

road trip, & with all

the packing & hullabaloo,

 

I forgot about the spider.

& there we were 600 miles

 

& 5 states later, at 75 miles

an hour, & I checked the mirror

 

to my left & found not the flaming

red Camaro I expected but

 

the jeweled parachute of a web

warped by velocity, the spider

 

still clenched to its back side.

Sweetheart, I’m trying to get this

 

back to you. Well, for the next 100

miles I couldn’t help but see myself

 

not as a simple driver with a home

somewhere behind me & a vague

 

destination out in front but as some

eight-legged, more tenacious

 

version of myself, &—oh, that’s it!—

I remembered that that’s how I feel

 

when you step into the room:

one minute I’m just sitting there

 

watching a fly

bang its head against a pane

 

the next I’m flying a supersonic

jet without a windshield.

 

 

Key

 

I don’t know what makes

your breath more song

 

than song. I don’t know how

to teach my hands

 

to still or how dragonflies

find the frail link

 

which binds two bodies

to heaven & the underneath.

         

I don’t know why

as soon as you’re born

 

you’re old enough

to get dead or

 

how long the dog can bark

at his own echo.

           

I don’t know why

the sign behind the bar

 

says: If you ain’t got nothing

to do don’t do it

 

here, because nothing is what

I’m trying to learn

 

how to do. I know my body

awaits me, cold,

 

at the end of a leash,

but I don’t know how

 

many years long

that leash is, studded

 

with its misshapen pearls.

I don’t know why

 

the world dropped a skeleton

key at my feet,

 

but you better believe

my hand is at the door.

 

 

Stephen Cramer’s first book of poems, Shiva’s Drum, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published by University of Illinois Press. His second, Tongue & Groove, was also published by University of Illinois. From the Hip, which follows the history of hip hop in a series of 56 sonnets, and A Little Thyme & A Pinch of Rhyme, a cookbook in haiku and sonnets, came out from Wind Ridge Press in 2014 and 2015. Bone Music, his most recent collection, was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2015 Louise Bogan Award and published in 2016 by Trio House Press. His work has appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, African American Review, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. An Assistant Poetry Editor at Green Mountains Review, he teaches writing and literature at the University of Vermont and lives with his wife and daughter in Burlington.

 

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JENNE KAIVO

 

The Ending of the Advent  

 

“I am eating the days of the month,

all the days at one time”, says Rebecca.

Her patience has ended:

she flung wide the doors of the weeks still to come.

The suns go down hot.

She washes them down with the liquor of evening.

 

If I had known she was an eater of days

I’d have begged her to take all the rest of the year.

Eat all the seasons, the cicada spring,

the summer and fall when the world could not sleep

for the scratching of chicken-foot houses.

In the woods with the corpse-flowers blooming,

their talons dug deep in the dirt.

When they clawed up a snail,

they cackled, flapped open their windows with pride

and made sure that people came running.

They let the worms stay undisturbed.

 

In the spring is the hatching of insects.

(This year, I bit down on a chocolate

but my tongue touched the flesh

of a fat and white maggot instead, and I swear

I could taste its small hairs.)

One day in the spring there were bees

and they covered the city in coats of their black and gold fur.

The sounds of the traffic were drowned

by mellifluous drones of their wings.

 

In the hot days of summer,

the bees made Rebecca their queen of the dead.

To the yard, in her garden, they swarmed

just to spend their last hours.

The concrete was covered in the light crunching carpet

of their dead and dry bodies,

their black and gold fur.

 

As the sun beat my flesh, I could hear a great crack

echoing over the seas.

Like a chunk breaking off of an iceberg,

England left Europe to melt in the waves, and where

will the hungry bears live?

They swim and their fur clings down wetly to underfed bones

like moss growing on brittle twigs.

 

The fourth of July was the one day that we could tell

gunshots from fireworks for sure.

The bombs bursting in air were a solace.

The rockets’ red glare was less than the keen black-eyed gaze

of the chickenfoot houses.

 

The fall came.

Although it’s December,

I fear that the Fall’s here to stay.

If the doors of the summer had opened in spring

could Rebecca have eaten them all?

 

I now have a purpose. I’ll plan out the days

And the months and mornings and nights of a year,

and the next time a year’s going bad

we’ll open them all up together.

When she is not full of December we’ll sit by the dawn

and feast on the seasons and minutes so they do not come.

 

 

Jenne Kaivo sells hoodoo and hoodoo accessories in California, where she is a perpetual student and suspected adult. Her work can be found on The Lovecraft Ezine, SubtleTea, Bogleech, and her blog, jennekaivo.blogspot.com  

 

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DEBARSHI MITRA

 

How to reclaim a Verandah 

 

Sweep 

Remove all dust that has gradually accumulated,

let the wind in.

Remove Ma's saris , starch crisp, 

and stiff towels and unused clothing from clotheslines.

 

Do not eavesdrop on uncoordinated

Sunday 'Tanpura' lessons from 

when you were eight.

Your childhood stories do not live here.

 

Stop eulogizing the past.

No curtains part here 

for illicit glimpses of a lover.

 

Make peace with the fact that,

on the overlooking street

They are building yet another residence.

Hammers will fall on yesterday's nail.

 

When the last remnants of the evening

fall obliquely

at your window sill,

do not wait for the pigeons.

They have already flown away.

 

 

Debarshi Mitra is a 21 year old poet from New Delhi , India. His debut book of poems Eternal Migrant was published in May 2016 by Writers Workshop. His works have previously appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies like Kaafiyana and literary magazines like Tpewrite, Thumbprint, The PoetCommunity and Leaves of Ink. He is currently enrolled in an Integrated PhD program in Physics.

 

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KENNETH POBO

 

Cowardly Lion Now

 

I quit Oz after eight months,

hated paperwork, wanted to be

back in the forest

where I ate too much. 

 

No one called me King.

 

I guarded secrets of ferns,

rescued flies from spider webs,

sired kittens that left me

as I had left my mother.

I shake my mane, fully gray,

lap starlight from

a marshy pond. 

 

When I see my face in the water,

I know this world

isn’t black and white.

Color keeps sneaking in.  

 

 

Passenger Pigeons

 

We largely did them in--

toss a bird,

wait for the bang.

The last two,

George and Martha Washington.

Martha outlived George

just like human Martha did.

 

Alone,

a caged social bird,

all her ancestors

roosted in her brain.

 

Martha, a collective memory,

her wings,

history.

 

 

Kenneth Pobo has a new book forthcoming in May from Circling Rivers called Loplop in a Red City.  In addition to The Lake, his work has appeared in: Orbis, Mudfish, The Fiddlehead, Cordite, and elsewhere.

 

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TOM SASTRY 

 

Misenchantment (noun)

1.  The exact amount of fear required
     to beautify a lonely place at night;
 

2.  a voluntary absence from the body;

3.  the desire not to return;
 

4.  the desire to live underwater;

5.  the flavour of longing 
     associated with that desire;

6.  the letterbox and its hanging tongue of bills;

7.  the music of inkwater
    at the lip of the moony pool;

 

8.  the view of lilypads from below;
9.  an obsession with the undersides of things.

 

 

How to assay love 

If you are sure your love is pure, simply weigh it.
Otherwise, it is proved

 

most simply, by fire: 
wrap a sample in lead and silver, cupellate

 

and watch base emotions separate.
This will unmix duplicitous alloys. To extract

 

feeling from its ore, dissolve in iodine,
then use nitric acid to separate the elements.

 

These are the traditional
techniques. Increasingly, x-rays

 

command confidence. The attraction
of non-destructive methods

 

is obvious. Whatever process is employed

its end is not the purification

 

of the sample but, by engendering trust

in the quality of the material

 

to ensure the untested remnant

commands the market price. Always,

 

therefore, engage a professional

to verify and hallmark.

  

Tom Sastry was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate's Choice poets. His debut pamphlet Complicity was published in 2016 by smith/doorstop.  

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Trouncing Turner.

 

At first an exile’s tone when you recall

Whitstable’s Turner painted sunsets

admired each evening from sash windows

in your old flat with ‘best view in town’ of sea.

Decades working and playing continents away

from home town, but it is the ten-mile move

to my village house that makes you home sick.

 

Late afternoons I sometimes find you

standing staring out of front windows.

Initially I Interpret your stance as

entrapment, regret, boredom,

and my happiness stumbles.

In reality, you are comparing sunsets,

expecting to find the village efforts inferior.

But my home’s serendipitous geometry 

creates unrestricted views of horizon.

And you have grudgingly begun to concede that

most evenings we have show-stoppers here.

 

I brush down my happiness at this unexpected

finding in the village’s favour,

its virtuoso sunsets some compensation for

my semi’s dubious décor, small bed, no shower…

Yet in truth, twenty years teaching had me

head down over marking until 6pm

then tucked up in the back bedroom.

so I took such spectacles to be rarities

caught by me on weight loss walks

or when drawing the front curtains.

 

Now each dusk you turn away from TV

to enjoy the more compelling show,

call me from kitchen to share;

sun suspended like a giant J Arthur rank gong,

clouds massing in ark builder’s validation,

water colour, washed in Taj Mahal pinks, peaches, gold.

So whilst you refer affectionately to Whitstable twilights

like an old lover you still have a soft spot for,

superlatives are switched to Our sunsets in the village.

 

  

Fiona Sinclair's first full collection of poetry, Ladies Who Lunch was published by Lapwing Press in September, 2014. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

 

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SUE SPIERS

 

Wiping the Slate Blank

 

So can you tell me what went through your mind

about the crash that crushed your cranium

at eighty miles per hour into a wall?

What made you risk your life and loss of limb?

 

A surgeon drilled the holes to make some space

for swollen tissue, limbic gland damage

that makes remembering the time too hard

and leads to rage or disruptive changes.

 

Medulla responses keep heart and lungs

in rhythm.  Motor skills; finger to thumb,

some words to name your wife and basic needs.

The slow recovery of smile and frown

 

at appropriate times as you discern

correct responses.  Wonder how you look

to other patients, do the scars stand out?

The ones you hold inside and can’t recall.

 

In dreams you grasp what consciousness restrains.

The man who hovers in the corridor;

that want-of-death was stronger than her love,

than frontal lobe perception of her faith.

 

 

Sue Spiers has a BA in Literature with the Open University and is SIG sec for British Mensa’s Poetry Workshop.  Her work appears in the Bloodaxe anthology Hallelujah for 50ft Women and in Paper Swan’s The Best of British (2017). She shared 3^rd prize in Brittle Star’s 2016 competition judged by George Szirtes.  “Wiping the Slate Blank” won the Hampshire Writers’ Society April 2014 competition and was included in its 2015 Anthology of the Best of 2011-2014.

 

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JUDITH TAYLOR

 

Zen and the art

 

 

Sparsity in a garden

                   that gravel walk,

                   those carefully-tumbled river pebbles

 

spaces between the sleek greenery

                   for the thinking eye to rest upon

                   to fill with philosophy:

 

all this depends (if too pure

                   for a poison drench) on feudalism

                   or however you call it.

 

On someone there

                   whose lot in life it is

                   to go invisible

 

                   every day

                   on hands and knees

weeding among the stones.

                  

 

Ballet

 

He hasn’t much to say for himself in the play

but the way they dance it

 

the County Paris loves the girl

as much as the man she loves.

 

The almighty nerve him!

- it carries him

 

right down

into to the grave, and there he finds

 

Romeo, who asserts exclusive rights

in all the harm he’s done.

 

Paris’s heart, already breaking,

will stop on Romeo’s blade

 

and the way they dance it

Romeo gives himself

 

to the same weapon, his Juliet

left to scavenge the darkness

 

and find her genuine death

on a dagger Paris threw away.

 

Poor sap, he would hardly notice

how we pity him -

 

he would be glad to have been

of use to that ungrateful child

 

– if he only knew it

there where he lies

 

alone, down

stage, outside the circle

 

of pale, beautiful moonshine

around their bed.

 

 

Judith Taylor lives in Aberdeen, where she works in IT. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines, and in two pamphlet collections - Earthlight (Koo Press, 2006) and Local Colour (Calder Wood Press, 2010). Her first full-length collection will be published in 2017 by Red Squirrel Press. www.http://sometimesjudy.co.uk/

 

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LARRY D. THACKER

 

A Rune Gone Fallow    

Blush purple and white morning glories yawn up,

stretching thin green that feels a self-innocent

and natural, but chokes

 down the stunted laziness

 

of the late September crow shuffled corn stalks,

slow, slow, but inevitable,

                          like the failing confidence

of summer Kudzu’s reach along the back fence,

 

tiring finally in last year’s forgotten dead netting,

 

now long-vined too far to breathe,

     short-gasping,

 

a broad leafiness waning to light brown,

the season’s ebbing on, inch-by-inch or even less,

the giant sunflowers’ week-long story of wilting

                   under their own

 

impressive memory of yellow glare and memory.

 

The secretive bulge of sweet potatoes,

still buried

in huddled dirt prayer mounds, await

the cool winds of first night frosts

 

to reckon in some mutual relief.

 

All is ripe in a trick of stillness.

 

 

Honeysuckle     

 

A chain link fence runner,

sweet yellow strangle fingers

slow balling into a fist

of invasive wandering,

 

white trimmed to

wild grape and kudzu vine tangle,

veining juice tempting 

the honey bee’s Haiku buzz,

 

machine of fertile elongation,

tender tendril testing

false gravity’s pull, 

 

longing for anything’s next touch,

the twisted reach, aura scent

puffed into the windless day’s thought.

 

Come a bit closer. Spread

our little dream to the next field, lover.

 

 

Larry D. Thacker’s poetry can be found in over seventy publications including The Still Journal, Poetry South, Mad River Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Mojave River Review, Mannequin Haus, Ghost City Press, and Jazz Cigarette. His books include Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia and the poetry books, Voice Hunting and Memory Train, as well as the forthcoming, Drifting in Awe. Visit:  www.larrydthacker.com

 

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LOUISE WARREN

 

Owl Strike

 

That night the owl printed a ghost of an owl

as it slammed into the window

the moon held its breath

a frozen

 

oh

 

but my Mother did not cry out

as she burrowed deeper into the leaves

she was not caught by the owl’s metal hooks

 

that night she was safe from harm,

from his sudden yellow glare.

He spied her small bones wrapped up in the bedroom dark

but the window stopped him-

 

he spilt his white heat onto the glass

the night rushed in, all the stars

blazed and froze inside that tiny skull      

 

then flung him back off kilter,

sped him somewhere other

I searched for the smallest feather

found nothing.

 

 

Louise Warren’s first collection A Child’s Last Picture Book of the Zoo won the Cinnamon Press first collection prize and was published in 2012. A pamphlet In the Scullery with John Keats also by Cinnamon came out in 2016. She has been widely published in magazines and lives in London.

 

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