2020

 

 

 

FEBRUARY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Gaby Bedetti, David Butler, Brent Cantwell, Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana,

Michael Dureck, Rebecca Gethin, David Krausman, Patrick Lodge,

Bree A. Rolfe, Laura Stringfellow

 

 

 

 

 

GABY BEDETTI

 

Bird Photographer

 

Create a mini-diorama:

sprinkle a teasel branch with thistle seed,

arrange trumpet vine on a pole system,

plant berried bushes, hang a backdrop.

Wait in your blind for laser-triggered

close-up photos of a painted bunting,

a barn owl chilling on Spanish moss.

Capture the millisecond

a red-winged blackbird flares out his tail.

 

The diorama attracts a rose-breasted

grosbeak, one day here, next day gone.

Leave the bird blind.

Soar up to join the loose flocks in epic

migration.

You stop in wetlands

and shrubby ridges, fly over sports fields

and parking lots, highways and high rises,

until you see the golden-headed quetzal.

 

You bask in the sun,

eat tropical fruits, and sip nectar,

drink of the gods. In the town of Mexican

lords, in the heaven where roseate swans

are flying, you pleasure on flower water,

pleasuring flowers. You soar to spirit land,

where nobles reign as eagles

offering plume songs in a bird-sky.

You blossom with turquoise swans.

You are awaited.

 

Gaby Bedetti is a professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches Comedy as an Artistic Approach and literary editing. Her work appears in Still: The Journal, Italian Americana, Spadina Literary Review, and elsewhere. https://gabriellabedetti.wordpress.com/

 

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DAVID BUTLER

                      

The Irish Sea

 

That morning, the tide kept on going out. By noon,

the corrugated floor stretched out past eyesight.

‘Come on,’ my father said, ‘let’s see how far we get!’ Our tracks

meandered miles across the sand before we turned.

 

All summer, parties arrive on foot from Anglesey.

Along the way, the enterprising set up stalls. Things lost

are found: storm-lanterns; lobster-pots; lorgnettes;

cavernous hulks; the U-boat a squid engulfed.

 

Migrant seabirds coast in ghostly shoals. A distraught moon

plates all, as though searching for something mislaid.

No-one would be surprised to read dead mariners walked.

 

We’ve begun to forget the sea has ever been here -

until the rumours: low thunder over the horizon; a salty breeze;

the tracks of vendors decamping; a deepening unease.

 

David Butler's second poetry collection, All the Barbaric Glass, was published in 2017 by Doire Press. His poem-cycle “Blackrock Sequence”, illustrated by his brother Jim, won the World Illustrators Award 2018 (books, professional section). “The Irish Sea” was first published as “The Empty Sound” in The Irish Times on January 6^th ,2019.

 

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BRENT CANTWELL

 

tanka

       for Cerys

 

the dandelion

you picked droops in a jar 

on a window sill –

your smile and wee words - for mama -

stand sure on green stem

 

gerunding boulevard

         Based on ‘The Boulevard Montmartre at Night’ by Camille Passarro

  

you understand the concern: to capture such a place   

is to whip-wound a canvas   

and the fact is facts don't matter  

  

to be concerned with the shelf-life of a window,  

on the other hand’s to truly respect a moment in time,  

to desperately, hopelessly, continuously acknowledge its passing...    

  

so if the lamps of Montmartre are to be lit  

let them be lit with liberal sponge   

not the silver-bromide of a photographer’s plate 

  

leave the street to the whims of car-lamp lights  

leave the alleys to their debaucheries  

allow there what may happen:  

  

cigarettes may be jutting still from half-cut faces there  

five o'clock shadows may be seeking comfort  

and big black jackets there  

  

some may be smoking the marijuana of another arrondizement there  

so know this: no-one can enslave a starving libertarian   

you can suggest the scrapings of the well-toasted  

  

Turner's blown grit in a congealed-butter light   

the energy of a smeared and bustling queue  

the almost-combustion of being free and next in a tin can humming!  

  

now you are automobile, electric light, everything about to happen!   

The blur and illusion of movement   

is the only fact in this gerund-gerund-gerund-gerunding boulevard! 

 

Brent Cantwell is a New Zealand writer from Timaru, South Canterbury, who lives with his family in the hinterland of Queensland, Australia. He teaches high school English and has been writing for pleasure for 24 years. He has recently been published in Sweet Mammalian, Blue Nib, Verge, Brief, Mimicry, Foam: e and Landfall.

 

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ALEXANDRA CORRIN-TACHIBANA

 

Kiss Goodnight

 

I thought you were going

to knock my teeth out

she would say

 

or comment on the

metallically-ness

of my breath

 

whereas Dad would

just laugh as our

glasses clashed

 

and we crashed noses

and we would always

say sorry.

 

Hallowe’en & FaceTime

 

Look at Auntie Alex’s hand

 

mum shouts, tucking Jake and Chloe

under her arms in the FaceTime frame.

I’m part of their entertainment

like their pumpkins, which look at me

with wonky eyes and crenellated mouths.

 

Look at Auntie Alex’s hand, Mum says again.

You could go Trick or Treating! 

 

She’s pleased with her joke

as they check out my broken thumb

in a black cast the nurse pasted on

like the tarmac that I can never decide if I like

the smell of. My hand’s puffed up.

Jake’s intrigued — he broke a leg at soft play

once — but Chloe’s unsure.

 

She’s sensitive.

Blondes often are, Mum insists.

And they’re more susceptible to illness ––

Fiona Bannock had whooping cough

much worse than you and Christina —

she was a platinum blonde.

 

Christina enters the frame.

Well, you can still wave, she says.

Then the advice comes:

the muscle will weaken while it’s in the cast

that’s what happened to Jake.

 

Dad dips in and out.

He’ll be drying dishes or checking rugby scores.

He doesn’t say much. But smiles.

 

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana taught in Japan for 10 years. She has Master’s degrees in Writing Poetry and in Japanese Language. She is published or forthcoming in Fenland Poetry Journal, The Ofi Press, Snakeskin and elsewhere. She will be performing at the XIII Annual International Poetry Festival Stranou, in Prague this year.

 

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MICHAEL DURACK

 

The Sun Still Rises

 

Before The Age of Science and Reason,

before The Enlightenment, there was light.

Before astronomy and astrophysics

mapped the flight paths of the planets,

the sun came up and the sun went down.

Before optics and prismatics, the firmament

was arched with gold-bearing rainbow.

Before the lighthouse and the Fresnel lens,

beacons steered our mariners safely home.

Before the long eye of the Galilean telescope,

the northern sky was ploughed by silver stars.

 

Electric light now seeks out dusty corners,

our fairies scattered to the four strong winds.

Taper and lantern, torch and flambeau

give way to floodlight, flashbulb, neon, strobe.

Newspapers divine the spot-on times

of sunrise, tides and sunset; our screens

give notice of arrival of comet or meteor shower

so that a grandchild spread-eagled on the grass

can witness for free a primal fireworks show

and wish upon a choice of shooting stars.

In our post-modern heliocentric world

the sun still rises and the sun still sets.

 

 

Light Verse

 

Made aware of Robin Robertson’s allergy to light verse

(because it seems a betrayal of the purpose of poetry)

and concerned for the value of my shares

in the volatile literary stock market, I reevaluate

my catalogue of less than heavyweight poems,

the nimble ones that bob and weave, scrapping

in the featherweight, bantamweight, flyweight divisions.

 

I resolve to add ballast to my free verse,

affix sober iambics to my tripping villanelles,

apply the shepherd’s hook to puns and punchlines,

send my parodies to the gym to bulk up,

focus on the big themes - War, Death, Armageddon.

My sonnets will henceforth weigh 10 kg or more.

 

On reflection, Robertson’s antipathy to light verse

may have nothing to do with avoirdupois; perhaps he is

allergic to verses that are garish, flashy, effulgent.

In which case I will remove the spotlight from my poems,

reduce the wattage, keep them in the dark.

 

 

Minor Victories

 

The world and his militant wife hammer and tongs,

competing in the arms race, the space race,

the gender race, the race race,

the race to the bottom, the race to the top,

to rule the sea waves and the airwaves

to beam the good news, the fake news,

the no-news-is bad news, to claim

the bragging rights and the high moral ground;

their fingers on the pulse, fingers on the button

to wage the war to end all wars, to end all.

 

No longer young and not renewable,

my boots hung up, the towel thrown in,

I count my blessings, and settle for minor victories -

the grass cut, the hedge clipped,

a loan cleared, a mole successfully removed,

a poem accepted by a magazine,

a night of untroubled sleep.

 

Michael Durack lives in Tipperary, Ireland. His work features in journals such as The Blue Nib, Skylight 47 and Poetry Ireland Review.  Publications include a memoir in prose and poems, Saved to Memory: Lost to View (2016) and a collection, Where It Began (Revival, 2017.)

 

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REBECCA GETHIN

 

Orison

 

I keep looking, binoculars

to eyes, at the rosaries of kelp. 

A priestly cormorant is alert on a rock.

Another dives and emerges

blessing with drips.

 

A blip of nose breaking slackwater

strikes and my heart clutches

but it’s a young seal rafting

who sinks back into

the nave of water.

 

On the shore it’s all wetglitter

wrackfidget, the tide awakening

and gruntling at edges.

Slopflick of bladderwrack

skitters along edges of fronds.

 

(On my way I saw a spraint

and when I knelt to sniff 

it smelt musky as incense.

It was here.

And a smeuse led from the beach.) 

 

Every flitjink sets me on edge.

The harder I look

the less I see.

It might be wherever

I’m not looking

 

For me to ever see one

it mustn’t catch my scent

the shine of my face

nor sense my shadow

as if my body were erased.

 

Rebecca Gethin has written 5 poetry publications and has been a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor. Messages was a winner in the first Coast to Coast to Coast pamphlet competition.  Vanishings from Palewell Press is due in 2020.  

 

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DAVID KRAUSMAN

 

The Tell-All

For Jaxson

 

My nephew is writing his memoir;

his four-month years-old tell-all,

 

and I am waiting with bated breath.

 

Tio, he tells me, you will not believe what my dad tried to feed me the other day.

And my mom?                                Don’t even get me started. 

 

I encourage him endlessly,

slipping twenty dollar bills into his tiny hand, to help during these tough times,

when his mom says his next bottle isn’t for another hour, and a half, he adds.

 

To help him through the long, tumultuous life he’s had.

To spoil him rotten.

 

I was there when this all began, I tell him.

 

The parking stub is still on my dashboard,

from when his mom and those mean women up and yanked him from his perfect contentment,

and dad would not stop holding him,

when his perfect world was turned inside out,

and the outside was him, the inside gone,

our world now the perfect one.

 

I have seen so much, my nephew tells me, and I am so tired all the time. 

 

You really have, I say, kissing his head, feeling the soft auburn halo

on my nose, so unbelievably light,

my smile so big, he looks at me twice.

 

I am going to tell it all, he says,

 

You will, I say, before my sister comes, asking us what we’re talking about.

 

David Krausman's work has previously appeared in Oyster River Pages, Helen Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Southern California.

 

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PATRICK LODGE

 

Song of William Greenslade, Marine

 

Here, I crave those purging moments

when I hang between past and future.

The cold scraping air will rasp me clean;

a scaled fish leaping back to the water.

 

My Sunday devotions this holy day – 

to step from the ship in prayer,

shriven spotless. No stain of thief,

no William Greenslade, no Marine;

 

not striped, not broken – all sloughed off.

My service is over, sin is pardoned; 

again a raw lad who watched soldiers drill.

Still my duty must be done. Sentinel

 

at the steerage door, a soldier boy, 

alone as always on this passage.

Baited and bullied by my comrades,

an outcast shunned or mocked.

 

In my pocket is the mark of my sin – 

a sealskin patch, stolen for a purse, 

smaller than my palm it drags me down.

I will be made to pay in full for my shame.

 

They say land is near but no honour

comes of desertion, a life with heathens.

Soon enough I will take my ease,

offer myself for the voyage’s good luck, 

 

stride out from the forecastle into the water, 

dazzling as ice. I will float in my purgatory

long enough to watch my life fade into shadow.

Not lost overboard but found again.

 

And all that remains is the limitless sea.

 

Note: Song of William Greenslade, Marine: Greenslade was a Private in the Marine detachment of twelve. In March 1769 he was thought to have stolen a piece of seal’s skin, used for tobacco pouches, and reported to the Sergeant of Marines. It was thought that, filled with shame, he waited until his guard out was over and then jumped overboard and was drowned in the Pacific. One explanation is that his mind was affected by scurvy.

 

Dr Patrick Lodge lives in Yorkshire and is from an Irish/Welsh heritage. A retired academic, Patrick now devotes much of his time to writing and to reviewing poetry. His collections, An Anniversary of Flight, and Shenanigans were published by Valley Press in 2013 and 2016 respectively. His third collection – entitled Remarkable Occurrences - was published in October 2019, also by Valley Press. This includes a long sequence inspired by Captain Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour in 1768. A poem from that sequence was put to music and performed at the 2017 Leeds Lieder Festival. Remarkable Occurrences is reviewed in this month’s issue.

 

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BREE A. ROLFE

 

This is how it is

for Matthew who was kind enough to share his “nerd journal” with me

 

In the young adult book turned movie

about my disease, they keep

describing the tubing, how the main

character still looks cute

even with cannula in her nose.

 

The author labors over vials of hypertonic saline

and strategically organized med carts 

with cupfuls of Creon, pages 

of Flovents and Afflovests 

to ensure authenticity. 

 

When they kill the unnecessary

character to prove that the disease

is terminal, he is just a slight blue on the floor

unmoving while the nurse weeps over his body.

 

But there are only two mentions of phlegm

and even those are treated like delicate

renderings— nothing deep green

or thick or bloody or draining

down someone’s face. Or coughed

up so hard someone vomits

all over themselves while sitting in traffic.

 

I wonder why there is no scene where the main

character shits herself while using her shaky

vest and has to shower and clean her sheets

before rushing to work where her student

shows her his “nerd journal,” where he catalogues

the daily care and lives of his tropical fish.

 

And I think, yes, this is how it is

as I read his description of a molting

porcelain crab who is swarmed

by Nassarius snails because they smell

death and so they rip both claws

from his soft-shelled body.

 

The ever-present pink sky 

 

In a coffee shop,  

a man says,  

the girls  

at his daughter’s  

kindergarten are  

 

slicing each other up.  

 

One minute Suzie  

is her best friend  

and the next,  

 

she’s over it.  

 

The boys,  

they start then—  

one day she’s all  

about Liam and Solomon.  

And the next,   

 

they’re over 

Liam and Solomon.  

 

In poems,  

God’s hand reaches  

into your puppet body  

before you die.  

You have no control.  

 

Somewhere on a balcony— 

of a once glorious hotel

now with toilets  

that run too long 

 

you’re trying to find where  

a relationship ends.  

 

At your feet, neon pink  

Mardi Gras beads,  

a discarded plastic tiara.   

 

Crickets,  

dead in corners— 

beautiful  

crystalized shells.   

 

You try to relish  

cracked paint on doors. 

 

And shouldn’t cracked paint  

be enough? 

 

Something splintered,  

from its intention  

to stunning pattern. 

 

Having children  

makes you think  

of your own mortality.  

 

And I think, dying  

makes you think  

of your own mortality.  

 

Bree A. Rolfe holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Her work has appeared in Saul Williams’ poetry anthology Chorus: A Literary Mixtape, the Barefoot Muse Anthology Forgetting Home: Poems About Alzheimer’s, the Redpaint Hill Anthology Mother is a Verb, and 5AM Magazine. Originally from Boston, she now lives in Austin, TX where she writes poetry and teaches.    

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LAURA STRINGFELLOW

 

Unclasp

 

Pain and memory

are coiled

like tight, braided hair.

Long ago,

 

I loosened

one strand, not knowing the other

would follow.

I gradually forgot

 

the year unravelling, falling

from me the way they say skin

falls from us

 

every seven years

in the concentric procession

of pebbles in water, or the rings

of thick trees.

 

Now, the fog

of forgetfulness is dissolving.

and all I see are the grey

faces of the dead, the old

 

yearbooks where, at thirteen,

we stare into the sterile eye

of a camera, unceasing

insistence of memory,

 

which regards us as coldly

and deliciously

as the polished

telescope lens of a killer.

 

Letter

 

You write,

"The sky is the color

of smeared newsprint."

 

What I would give

for a day filled with absence,

with the erasure of words spilled

 

over the horizon, a cloud

the color of granite, not passing

but held in the fist—

The sun wastes itself,

not believing in reserve.

It grows dull with grief—

After all, too much yellow

in painting, in the stroke

of heat across the sky

is too much—

A picture without darkness is dead.

 

You believe in the type of chagrin

which sinks in pity.

It has no searing quality, no

quick stab to the heart—

Pain does not live there.

 

"In Amherst, the sun hesitates,"

you write—it is without hope.

Wrapped in white,

the hillside plans its next move.

Restraint binds itself

like a mental patient.

 

Here, everything is scalded

brown and yellow. The sun

is a volcano held motionless

against a wordless sky

with no shade, no dark lava,

no grey ash.

 

Laura Stringfellow writes both verse and prose poetry, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, and hails from the Southern US. Recent publications have appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including Right Hand Pointing, Clementine Unbound, Déraciné, Neologism Poetry Journal, Coffin Bell: a journal of dark literature, and Nine Muses Poetry.  

 

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