2024

 

 

JANUARY

 

 

C. J. Anderson-Wu, Michael Flanagan, Tamsin Flower, Jenny Hockey, Norton Hodges,

Jill Michelle, Richard Robbins, Sharon Whitehill, Kenton K. Yee.

 

 

 

 

 

 

C. J. ANDERSON-WU

 

I Was In Line Buying Coffee That Morning

 

I was in line buying coffee that morning

when war broke out

 

In a split of a second, I decided

it was reasonable to

wait until I got my morning coffee

 

The chaos did not erupt right away

until the thunder-like bombings

were heard closer and closer

 

I did get my coffee because

customers in front of me left

When the young man handed my coffee

and took my money

we had eye contact for several seconds

He must be confused

whether he should flee

or continue serving coffee

 

I set up all my communication tools

and ran westward

While drinking my coffee

I continued receiving and sending reports

to news agencies I worked for

 

Sixteen months had passed

the war still raged

From time to time

memories flashed with an unprecedented speed

in my tired mind

 

What happened to the young man serving

my last coffee before the war?

Nothing remained the same

Especially all the coffee I had taken afterwards

tasted smoky to me

 

C J. Anderson-Wu (吳介禎) is a Taiwanese writer who has published two collections about Taiwan's military dictatorship (1949–1987), known as the White Terror: Impossible to Swallow (2017) and The Surveillance (2020). Currently she is working on her third book Endangered Youth—to Hong Kong. Her short stories have been shortlisted for a number of international literary awards, she also  won the Strands Lit International Flash Fiction Competition, and the Invisible City Blurred Genre Literature Competition.

 

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MICHAEL FLANAGAN

 

To All A Good Night (Shane MacGowan is Dead)

 

Dead Dads and Moms.

Sick elderly relatives showing

the future near. Shane MacGowan

never to sing another beauty

in cracked form. It's hard

to believe it doesn't matter,

but it doesn't. Graves can't

possibly frighten the dead.

Love never felt again

holds no meaning for the departed.

It's the living that scare you,

they are going to take a last

breath and you hardly know when.

A wife, a child, the first rock

& roller you ever wanted to be.

An Aunt you didn't grow

up around, in her seventies now,

informs you through another

her son is knocking at the door,

too many shots of whisky, sepsis,

cirrhosis, on a ventilator,

thirty-two years old and you

can say he did it to himself

but don't we all. Almost Christmas

too. The lights on houses. Gifts

wrapped in bows. A fire place log.

Makes you wish you lived in Algiers,

or Tibet, anything to escape it.

Haven't all the famous boys and girls

at microphones sang Christmas tunes?

Only McGowan wrote Fairytale

of New York. You could sing that one

every season, from the first of December

through the New Year, tears falling

down your cheeks, the foam atop

a draft beer fizzing flat to nothing.

 

Michael Flanagan was born in the Bronx, N.Y. and raised in the New York Metropolitan area. Poems and stories of his have appeared in many small press publications across the U.S. His full length collection, Days Like These (Luchador Press) is now out. His chapbook, A Million Years Gone, is available form Nerve Cowboy’s Liquid Paper Press. He currently resides in Prince Edward Island, Canada.

 

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TAMSIN FLOWER

 

Mindfulness at Kew Palace

 

I have discovered a new friend

so, we go to Kew on Sunday,

its green-fingered glass confection

all sweetness.

 

Kew Palace is open for once

so, we scope out an entrance

on the other side, George the V’s

Summerhouse waits.

 

First, we see the Mad King’s wax-bust,

rum-filled cheeks shine,

modest corridors brim

18^th century light and pictures.

 

Lilly, who has exited Hong-Kong,

her visa stamped by a corporate,

stares at pink shepherdess dresses,

and says nothing.

 

***

 

The dinner-table is set for six

including doctor-security-guards

who watch the king’s mouthfuls

in case of expressive eruption.

 

Lily likes the view of outside,

formal garden, sculpted borders,

I like maroon flowers on silk turquoise

and dream of furnishing my apartment.

 

We loiter up thinning bannisters

to an information board – his sadness,

confined across dark lofts, a harpsichord

murmurs through timber like an old heart.

 

Lily and I chat about mindfulness as

tiredness sets-in from commutes.

Rain has jewelled everything by Kew Lake,

our footprints, shallow puddles.

 

Tamsin Flower is a Dramatist, Journalist and Social Impact PR based in London. She comes from Rutland, where she gained a local government bursary to attend Stamford School. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA, and one in Acting from Mountview. From 2014-2017 she made and toured three shows supported by Arts Council England. Tamsin has freelanced for The Stage, The Byline Times, The FRANK Mag and Good Morning Britain. She is a London reviewer for the British Theatre Guide.

 

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JENNY HOCKEY

 

A week from the windows, front and back

 

The 83a and all four of its passengers, snagged between cars.

5 am has overslept, left undeniable evidence,

The man with two black dogs has them playing the barking game.

its coat slung on a branch, a memory of owls, a treachery

The driver of the 83a is attempting a gap too small for a bus.

of acorns, squirreled away, orange turning brown —

The man with two black dogs has them playing the barking game.  

a gleaming shawl, the span of a spider’s web.

Raining again and six people are waiting for the 83a.

Along the leaf-strewn bank, trees on watch

The man with two black dogs has gone to Doncaster.

like grownups. Somewhere in the wings,

Children stumbling from cars, making for the swings.

the promise of sun. Snowdrops breaking cover.

 

 

Remedy for Tiredness

 

Let the earth do most of the work

of bearing your weight, let the bones

in your legs, the long and the strong,

hold the bowl of your hips,

 

let your vertebrae snake

from sacrum to skull, braiding a curve

to cradle your heart and lungs,  

 

for earth is where we make landfall,

hammocked in blankets borne by a stork,

tiny curls of spine and skull,  

 

found in gardens, so we’re told,

bedded down in the cabbage patch,

some of us under the gooseberry bush,

a praiseworthy shrub, resistant to pests

 

and others will rise out of moor-slime,

spawned by the King of the Marsh,

clasped in a bud that springs from black —

coiled in a flower’s cup. 

 

Jenny Hockey has poems in magazines such as The North, Magma, The Frogmore Papers, The Lake and Dreamcatcher, reviews for Orbis and in 2013 New Writing North awarded her a New Poets Bursary. Her collection, Going to bed with the moon appeared in 2019.   

(overstepsbooks.com, jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk, familyhistoryandwar.com)

 

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NORTON HODGES

 

Missed Call

The person you’re calling can’t come to the phone.

 

It’s a dark December night.

I’ve made my list of talking points

but you’re not home.

 

Later, your text says

you were driving back

from visiting family.

 

It was a dark December night

a few years before my death.

 

What happens to our children?

They grow up and go far beyond.

Divorce sends them further.

 

It was a dark December night

in a long line of starless nights

 

and you were driving home

from visiting

 

family.

 

Mick Jagger at 80

The pipe cleaner sex god

still looks like a pipe cleaner sex god

although his face bears the burin lines

of a life lived in deep time.

Ron and Keith, like gurning gnomes,

gesture and gesticulate for the camera

but what you see is that now we are three

and the emptiness all around.

Why be a waxwork of yourself

(you die but your Abbatar lives on)

best espouse the way we are

leave the handclaps till last.

 

Norton Hodges is a poet, editor and translator. His work is widely published on the internet and in hard copy. He is the author of Bare Bones (The High Window Press, Grimsby, UK, 2018). He lives in Lincoln UK.

 

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JILL MICHELLE

 

Parenting Lessons

 

Growing up, I hated dolls

those little porcelain frauds

 

their expressions forever fixed

in pout or pucker

 

some serene smile

a real baby seldom makes.

 

Rivulets of the green sugar drink

you pour into the bottle

 

dribble down pinked cheeks

drip out of plastic bottoms

 

ruining the few diapers

that came in the kit—

 

never enough, I thought then

but I’ve since learned

 

that having packs of diapers

and not needing them

 

is worse.

 

The Gender Reveal: A Quiz

 

We went to the ultrasound appointment:

1. at 21 weeks
2. with our 10-year-old
3. to find out the baby’s sex
4. spotting but hoping for the best

 

After the technician pressed the transducer down:

1. my body jolted without permission
2. I bit my tongue rather than scream
3. my kid’s Big Sister shirt blurred
4. the technician fled the scene

 

When the chartless doctor came in:

1. he told us to expect a call from my OBGYN
2. the technician wouldn’t meet my eyes
3. my husband, a bottled soda, fizzed and popped with the god-damn-its kept inside
4. my daughter’s hand was a warm anchor on my hip
5. I knew we’d leave, knowing nothing more than when we walked in

 

Jill Michelle's latest works appear/are forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Hawai`i Pacific Review, LEON Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Red Flag Poetry. Her poem, "On Our Way Home," won the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Find more of her work at byjillmichelle.com. 

 

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RICHARD ROBBINS

 

Stanley Spencer at Burghclere

—from 1926-1932, the artist worked on the nineteen paintings

   that would comprise "The Oratory of All Souls" and which now hang

  on the walls of the Sandham Memorial Chapel.

 

Your cartoon self has dressed the soldier's leg

then mopped the slate floor of the ward. Later

you will need to put someone in restraints

to keep him from banging wall or window,

 

from launching himself into treetop space.

And in your tiny sketchbook you will note

the way a hand comes out a sleeve, uneven

shadow at its wrist, the way an eye looks

 

up when death keeps watch above it. Each day

the chapel walls had waited. You made stencils

of the tattoos on your eyes. The scenes rose

beside, behind the altar. Meanwhile,

 

you saw angels. Angels raising each

body from its living or dying task.

 

First Postcard from Iona

 

The wagtail skitters across

stone, not needing attention.

It won’t beg. Nor the rook. The

 

ferry, on time, rocks small boats

at anchor. Over there, in

Martyrs Bay, Vikings left the

 

isle dead to tide. The coal

boat, years later, dumped its black

ton on the sand. Lines of men

 

and women in their coats hauled

a winter’s worth of fire home.

 

Richard Robbins was raised in California and Montana, taught for many years in Minnesota, and recently moved back west to Oregon. His seventh book, The Oratory of All Souls, was published by Lynx House Press in February 2023. His website is https://www.richardrobbinspoems.com

 

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SHARON WHITEHILL

 

Her September Familiar

 

Now is the season when hummingbirds vanish,

daylight dwindles, and the leaves fall,

 

a strange season of endings and losses,

colors fading to gray with a blackness behind.

 

A particular sorrow for her, this heartache,

even if shared by many, akin to the sky grief we feel

   

at losing the stars, even the brightest invisible now

everywhere but the most rural night skies.

 

Though more personal, too: a growing awareness

of how fragile her loved ones, family and friends,

 

this lingering grief for those absent, now or forever,

her people. As precious and ever-present as the invisible stars,

 

essential to her as signal fires in a storm,

yet everything seems, everything is, so precarious.

 

Each year it comes, this melancholy, her familiar,

not with the surprise of a window thrown suddenly open

 

to weather but as her September companion.

Until one day, down the road, it departs to the rattling call

 

of sandhill cranes overhead, a flurry of cedar waxwings,

and a pair of fawns still dressed in their white polka dots.

 

A former English professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Sharon Whitehill is celebrating the freedom of retirement in Port Charlotte, Florida. Here she’s finally achieved what she once thought an unattainable dream:  a full collection (A Dream of Wide Water) and three chapbooks (The Umbilical Universe, Inside Out to the World, and just recently This Sad and Tender Time), in addition to poems published in various literary magazines.

 

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KENTON K. YEE

Doppelgänger

 

He’s on the balcony across the street at his telescope again.

Stars must fascinate him as much as lying in bed with a

screen fascinates my other neighbors. If he spends an hour

on each star, he’s spent time with over a thousand stars per

year. The sky’s a vineyard of stars. Two stars here, four

there. He’s gazed over twenty-two thousand stars—a lot but

just a pinch of the stars visible in our patch of sky. But still!

My bedroom lights are off. The moon is new and the stars

are faint. My cats blink, their eyes orange. The man is

(finally!) shifting the telescope. So many stars. A cornucopia

of stars. Or mirror images of one star. What’s it like to be a

star, to have my shine be the only thing anyone can ever

know about me? I don’t want to be a star. Of course I want

to be a star. Time, space, light, and lies, cold and tense. I’m

seen therefore I’m what? If only I could shine, be more star

than cells, more intent, latent, lasting. How hard it is to not

want, regret. How hard it is to shine without being shined on.

 

Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Plume Poetry, Threepenny Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Panorama, Hawaii Pacific Review, Constellations, McNeese Review, Indianapolis Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Rattle, among others. Kenton writes from Northern California

 

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