2015

 

 

 

JULY CONTRIBUTORS

 

John Alwyine-Mosely, Stefanie Bennett, William Ford, Cal Freeman, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Janet Hatherley, R. W. Haynes, Jason Jackson, Clyde Kessler, Laurie Kolp,

Michael Mark, Stuart A. Paterson, Maggie Sawkins, J. R. Solonche.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN ALWYINE-MOSELY

 

Preparing for fatherhood at 2.01 am in 1991

 

The starched uniform said,

      

      What can you say about pregnancy and childbirth you're a man? 

 

      I agreed, for I'm just the one who made love to the sound 

      of waves on a Cornish beach one warm day in May.

 

      I'm just watching the one woman in my life, who loves me

      enough to forgive, have flesh ripped into screams.

 

 The smile of her friend said,

 

      You don’t know about shitting a melon through a hole the size of a phone. 

 

      I agreed, for I'm just seeing midwives and doctors startled

      like Meerkats to rush her to a butchered belly or death.

 

      I'm just the manikin standing in the ward by the bed

      with no worries as I'm the father who will provide. 

 

 The touch of her mother said,

 

      You'll love your baby but we've grown the baby into life. 

 

      I agreed, for I'm just alone with him holding a hand as his face writhes 

      to wait and see who will live to see who before sun rise.

 

      I'll just cry as I look into his eyes knowing I can never 

      look away until the day he bends down to kiss me goodbye.

 

 

While waiting for toast

 

In​ each little square, 

​sits​ silverware and white 

plates ​with ​a  single

flower of ​grey plastic​.​

​You and I sit to eat

a breakfast of fried

splendour and toasted 

plenty with butter

served with trained

smiles and you wait

sipping coffee that

​I​ wouldn't scrub 

floors with at home.

Next to you, two

men flop over seats

holding cups like toys

from play houses,

with rag doll fingers.

One sighs, It's all 

about the angle'

and the other just

looks into his cup.

 

 

John Alwyine-Mosely is a poet from Bristol, England. His work has also appeared in Stare's Nest, York Mix, Clear Poetry, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Street Cake, Screech Owl, Abbreviate Journal, The Ground. Aphelion, Uneven Floor and poems of his were distributed in "Feel the Love" held in Cobourg, Ontario.

 

STEFANIE BENNETT

 

Hearts That Die Young     

 

I clutched the vision

Of the magnolia

Fine as pollen -

The coloured halo

Of your hair.

 

Some hearts die young

Without wilt or piety.

These are the ones

- Mater dulcissima,

I offer you now.

 

And this you’d known all along.

You took me walking

As a child, and through

Child eyes, you pointed

To the Imera’s silken flowing.

 

‘Ever young, forever there...’

You said. And as I fingered

Blood oranges

By the seller’s cart

And asked the whereabouts

 

Of day-stars and hermetic charts

Your smile fell upon

The Madonie peaks;

Each answer the same.

                              There was

No failed mystery in your language.

 

And now I clutch at visions; I’ve work

To do. Sometimes with

Arrows that pierce

Heart and paper. Sometimes with

Rivers seeping, changing course.

 

But memory, you remind me,

Is landscape enough.

Scars? Mended lines of living.

I raise mid-aged eyes

And the street of clouds

 

Rests on a field of white magnolias

- Ever there. Your final

Word... Mater dulcissima.

It must be so!

Fine as pollen, as haloed hair.

 

 

Stefanie Bennett has published several volumes of poetry and had poems appear with Ink, Sweat and Tears, Illya’s Honey Journal, Aleola Journal, The Camel Saloon, Shot Glass Journal, etc. Of mixed ancestry [Italian/Irish/ Paugussett-Shawnee], she was born in Australia, in 1945. The Vanishing is her latest poetry title.

 

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WILLIAM FORD

 

Mirror Man, Old

 

Done with a bit more purpose,

this looking into a face

that still has no deep lines

or a mustache that shows

more gray than brown,

a slow grower forever.

 

No more shaving cream

or triple bladed razor now,

electric only, less danger

of a cut, the immune system

never again the same, infection

as bad as the cancer itself.

 

He lets the water run.

His wife calls from the kitchen.

The machine buzzes on.

He looks at himself again

and lets the water run.

 

 

William Ford has published two books of poems, The Graveyard Picnic (Mid-America, 2002) and Past Present Imperfect (Turning Point, 2006), two chapbooks, and, most recently, work in Brilliant Corners, Cirque, Hamilton Stone Review, The Hollins Critic, Kentucky Review, The Lake, Nashville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.  He lives in Iowa City, Iowa, USA.

 

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CAL FREEMAN

 

Song

 

Of tourniquet and needle-

socket of the sore,

of turning and turning blue,

of the Ford emblem

on the busted grill,

of the ice cube shoved up

the rectum in an attempt

to wake you from

your overdose, of failure,

of failure as the modicum.

Of dirt roads in Monroe, MI,

of tract houses

made of cinderblocks.

Of the peregrine face

I did not recognize

beneath the open lid.

 

Cal Freeman’s writing has appeared in many journals including Commonweal, Berfrois,The Paris-American, The Drunken Boat, The Cortland Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review. He is the recipient of the Howard P. Walsh Award for Literature, The Ariel Poetry Prize, and The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes). He has also been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. His first book of poems, Brother of Leaving, has just been published by Antonin Artaud Publications.

 

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ANNE-MARIE FYFFE

 

Clockhouse Terrace

 

How they long for the pallid sleep

of untroubled minds, to a man!

 

But some have the melancholy palsy, some

hazarded and lost much: there’s one on a first

floor landing who can’t decide whether to go up

or descend. The striking clock he smuggled

from Lucerne rebukes him hourly in the glazed hallway.

 

Betrayals, standard lamps, small infidelities,

wireless valves, christening gowns, are all grist.

 

The crescent’s brisk centenarian plays

Bezique in a yellow-lighted Edwardian parlour,

listens as the shades of coastwise sea-captains

pace the abandoned upper floors again.             

 

The whole row could implode on a spontaneous

sou’westered night, drag all this unfathomed history

down deep. A fortnight’s rain is all it would take.

 

 

Anne-Marie Fyfe (b. Cushendall, Co. Antrim) has four collections of poetry including Understudies: New and Selected Poems and a fifth collection, House of Small Absences, due from Seren Books in Spring 2015; has won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Prize; has run Coffee-House Poetry’s readings and workshops at London’s leading live literature venue, the Troubadour, since 1997, organises the annual Hewitt Spring Festival in the Glens of Antrim, and was chair of the Poetry Society from 2006-2009.  www.annemariefyfe.com/

 

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JANET HATHERLEY

 

Far Cry

 

I hold the spoon up to your mouth,

who once held the spoon up to mine

who once drew the finest line

with a steady hand, etched with acid

turned a printer’s heavy wheel

in a spare bedroom, Far Cry Studio,

who once held me by the hand

as we crossed the busy road.

 

I push you in your wheelchair

who once pushed me

in my seat on top of pram

above my baby brother

 

and in hired pushchair at London Zoo

with me too old to be pushed

being the best part of the day,

and you, too magnificent to be pushed

 

who once strode out

at dead of night, onto a beach

a little afraid, but doing it anyway.

 

Your nails painted pink by a carer;

not knowing that you never wore it.

I buy nail varnish remover, wipe it off.

 

I point out to you

the robin who jumped down

in front of your wheelchair

and led the way into the light

as if he knew what he was doing,

as though he knew where you were going

 

as you once pointed out to me

tadpoles in the pond in Richmond Park

planes in the sky, how grass can shine

and shine.

 

 

Janet Hatherley is a London teacher who has recently come back to poetry.  She has attended Clare Pollard’s ‘Ways into Poetry’ class and is now attending Roddy Lumsden’s Intermediate poetry group.

 

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R. W. HAYNES

 

Drying Our Best Friends, the Three Dogs

 

The rain passed us by last night, just wet

The ground enough to make certain I

Would have three dogs with feet to dry

At six thirty; Lord knows we never let

The rascals track their mud everywhere.

Why do we even hope for rain at all

Here in this desert? Why do we care

Whether it mists or whether showers fall?

Hope doesn’t work in hopeless situations,

But the heart beats constantly, the chest expands,

Blood rushes to appropriate locations,

We raise our voices, our eyes, and hands,

As though hopefully, so let it still be so,

And may rain fall, and may this hope still grow.

 

 

Late Paper for a Dead Professor

 

It was almost the moment to catch the evening plane

Back to do classics in cold St. Paul,

An exit from some messy emotional pain,

And I never thought St. Paul had spoiled it all,

We talked about a paper that I owed,

Both of us knowing a cold day in Hell

Was likelier than that hang-dog palinode,

But we talked, and--I recall it well,

For he died soon afterward--he shook my hand,  

“Send me a paper some time,” he quietly said,

And I agreed to that courteous command,

Directing sympathy where kindness led.

Forty years later, trying to pay that debt,

Here is a working draft, not finished yet.

 

 

R. W. Haynes teaches and writes in South Texas.  His chief academic task is currently the completion of a second book on playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote.

 

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JASON JACKSON

 

Graveyard

(for Ry)

 

A red helium balloon bobs

on the breath of the dead,

tethered in the wet grass

by a stranger’s grave.

 

My boy says, “Daddy, can I have it?”

and my guilty, muddied fingers hand him

the gaudy, heart-shaped thing.

                                                  

He holds it until his fingers slip,

and he starts to cry at the unreachable

swallowing sky.

 

 

Jason Jackson writes poetry and short fiction. His work has recently been featured in performance at Liars League in Hong Kong and published in the Room to Write prize anthology. Links to some of Jason’s writing can be found at www.tryingtofindthewords.blogspot.co.uk. Jason tweets @jj_fiction

 

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CLYDE KESSLER

 

Passengers

 

One train has screeched off its echo

so that it’s all stealth and rust with a track

more invisible than my great grandmother

whispering to dried up tansy canes

where she worked a flax-field forty years.

 

The whippoorwill that sneaks down here

is only two orange mean eyes teasing the lantern.

And the green frog darkening its voice into mist

has jumped in the creek like mud living under its skin.

My great grandmother might be mending quilts in a cloud.

The invisible train follows her, frozen with ghosts.

 

  

Sunrise with a Canoe in a Tree

 

A canoe waits in the middle of a sycamore

fifteen feet up, lodged, racking into the sun

so it has coiled everything into an oriole’s song.

It’s madly camouflaged up there, with bent

aluminum from a spring flood. Some heron wings

echo the metal. After sunrise, two or three canoeists

walk by laughing, and swear they’ll paddle it

down. I tell them the canoe was holding a million stars

all night for the tree. The canoeists hurry off knowing

that there’s way too much evidence of poets involved

at the edge of the old storm. The canoe is the aftermath

and it is still grinding voices through the limbs.

 

 

Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. They have an art studio in their home called Towhee Hill. He is a founding member of Blue Ridge Discovery Center, an environmental education organization with programs in North Carolina and Virginia.

 

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LAURIE KOLP

 

I Can’t Answer

 

Because it’s complex, where we stand—

you fingering that damn bottle opener while I stare at weed

overtaking our yard, the outer fence a convex lean

so far backwards I wonder if it might collapse.

 

And I’ve had enough of these clambering vines

that grow wild along the ditch

climbing over, pulling down the fence

and invading our yard. In fact, I could almost

start a business selling wreaths.

 

Or I’d make one

out of your bottle cap collection, hot glue

those suckers on braided twine

every which way, top it off

the algae- stained shed door

so you might remember

me.

 

A whisper in the air.

Stirring, purple wisteria

nudges me like a persistent kid.

Who can tell where the end begins?

 

 

Hand Sketches

 

In college art class, I had to draw

my hand. Oh, how I hated that hand

as big as a mitt and with skin so thin

my metacarpals poked through. I

almost thought I could pull them

out and make wishes.

 

Your mom said I had hands

of a model, but you never looked

at my hands. I remember holding

your grandmother’s calico kitten

in the palm of my hand, its fur

caressing my cheeks like velvet,

its heart beating as fast as mine.

Looking into the lens, smiling 

like Farrah Fawcett, you thought

I was the happiest girl in the world.

 

But I hated my cowlick, I hated

my teeth and I hated my protruding

bones. When I looked at the picture

I looked too skinny, but in the mirror

I looked too fat. You never said

I looked skinny or fat, never said

I looked beautiful, never said

those three words I made wishes on

that I’d hear one day.

 

All you wanted was my hand

in your pants.

So I sat in my apartment and

sketched my hand,

making the crooked finger

I stuck down my throat

invisible.

 

Laurie Kolp, author of Upon the Blue Couch (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014) and Hello, It’s Your Mother (Finishing Line Press, upcoming) serves as president of Texas Gulf Coast Writers and belongs to the Poetry Society of Texas. Poems appear in the 2015 Poet’s Market, Scissors & Spackle, North Dakota Quarterly,Pirene’s Fountain, and more. 

 

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MICHAEL MARK

 

Following orders

 

My father

Before he was my father.

On a bus in Biloxi, 1945.

A long, far way from the Bronx.

He liked to sit by the exit.

It was cooler there, the doors opening

Every stop.

 

“Come up front, soldier,” the bus driver said.

He hated the South, the dead slowness.

He hated being in the Air Force.

“Come up front here, soldier.”

He would do anything to get off the base.

The five mile hikes on BIVWAK and

Sleeping in a tent were not for him.

 

This time he purposely broke his glasses.

Which got him to the optometrist in town.

Which got him in this seat.

While the rest of his flight marched.

 

“This bus don’t move until you come up front, soldier.”

That was fine with him.

He could stay there until they shipped him home.

Next stop the bowling alley on Boston Road.

In his mom’s kitchen, eating her meatballs.

On the stoop, bouncing a Spaulding.

Selling bags of peanuts at Yankee Stadium.

 

“Please, Mister,” she said, “move up front.”

Her eyes were as black as her face.

“Please, Mister, I gotta get to work.”

 

 

Fisherman

 

Because now I have the time,

they’ve given me the title, Fisherman.

 

They always ask me when

I return, “Did you catch any fish?

How many? How big? What kind?”

 

Because they call me a fisherman,

they think my success is in catching fish.

 

I cannot be counted on

to catch fish.

 

I put the bait on the hook.

I put the line in the water.

 

Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer and long distance walker. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, The Lake, Lost Coast Review, Rattle, Ray’s Road Review, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, Sugar House Review, and other nice places. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

 

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STUART A. PATERSON

 

Poem for Rhona

 

Rhona's into bugs.

She's occasionally half-charmed

by stuckies, speugs, my adult witterings

on great white sharks & maybe comets.

I've not a clue. Soon after

she emerges from the garden

with a closed hand, a cheeky knowing grin

that's just this side of sin, unclasps

her tiny fist, chuckling, then revealing

deepest fears I thought, I swore

she hadn't had the chance to hear

an hour before. A spider.

Rhona chortles, plays the angel,

chases after it, ignores the grown man

spinning webs to open doors.

 

speugs (Scots) – sparrows

stuckies (Scots) – starlings

 

 

Mima's in Oban

 

My mother, aged 85, is on her holidays

in Oban. Today, I'm told she walked

the long mile to Dunollie, stopping off

en route & on coming back for 'wee refreshers'

in the heat of an unseasonably hot June day.

She's besieging pubs, lasering the Firth

of Lorne with eyes mad for west coast

greenness, mountains, boats, sea.

36 years & 200 miles apart

she is me, wears my smile, laughs my laugh

while knocking back a well-earned half

in Markie Dan's, drinks drams of island,

tots of history, sings a resolute romance

of what it is to be so near to both an end

& a beginning, toasts the whole world once again.

 

 

Stuart A. Paterson lives in Galloway by the Solway Firth. A recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from the Scottish Book Trust in 2014, he’s currently the Scots Language Society’s Virtual Poet in Residence. Border Lines will be published by Indigo Dreams later in 2015.

 

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MAGGIE SAWKINS

 

Crossfire

 

It hasn’t moved for months.

it knows its place – on top of the dresser

facing the door.

 

Arum lily

     the Afrikaans have a name for you:

 

Varkblom

Pig’s Ear

 

no wonder you poke out

your yellow tongue.

 

Calla lily

one day you will be caught

     in our crossfire.

 

Someone will wrench you

from your terracotta pot

and hurl you to the floor.

 

Names will fly.

Fists flail.

 

My little white hood

 

I will remember you

mute and beautiful –

     bite my tongue.

 

 

 

The Bruise

 

          Arrived a few days later

a bright yellow pansy

on my right arm

          then it disappeared.

Eventually

I threw away the clump

          of hair.

 

          Now there’s nothing

left to show –

no cause for alarm –

          except for something,

somewhere there’s this:

a small persistence

          a faint hiss of tears.

 

 

Maggie Sawkins is the winner of the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She lives in Portsmouth where she teaches creative writing in community and health care settings. Her new collection, Zones of Avoidance, is published by Cinnamon Press. www.zonesofavoidance.wordpress.com

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE

 

To the Rabbit I Killed on the Road This Morning

 

When I am dead as you are dead,

struck down by cancer cells rampaging

in my bladder or my pancreas,

in my lymph nodes or my bones or both,

or by my left anterior descending coronary

artery strangling my heart to death,

or by a driver driving too fast, too

carelessly on a narrow country road to see

me in time to swerve away, and if

my spirit should meet your spirit,

I tell you now it will submit.

My spirit will do anything yours will

ask of it to satisfy what justice might

be there in such a place of mingled

spirits. Except one thing. One thing

your spirit must not ask of mine,

even if it is the only price it must exact.

My spirit must refuse to change

places with your spirit. My spirit

must forever be that of homo sapiens

sapiens, as yours must be forever

that of sylvilagus cuniculus,

and this will not be my human hubris

but rather its greater punishment,

my wise spirit forever thinking

about your wedge-toothed, forest-

dwelling spirit. To forever envy it.

 

 

J.R. Solonche has been publishing in magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s. He is author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions) and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in New York's Hudson Valley with his wife, the poet Joan I. Siegel, and nine cats, at least three of whom are poets.

 

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