2018

 

 

 

JULY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Kim Fahner, Vivien Jones, Usha Kishore, Rona Laycock, Donna Masini, Ronald Moran, Fiona Sinclair, Sue Spiers, Francine Witte.

 

 

 

 

 

KIM FAHNER

 

Tales of a Night Bird

 

Bird in a window, sliced Venetian,

streetlights illuminating sharp wings,

so that it soars across your white wall

when you close your eyes at night,

thinking maybe you won’t notice,

or that its ghost won’t perch in dreams,

etched there and ready to fly.

 

In night-hours, it slides

across the backs of your eyelids

as if across flat summer fields,

trailing echoes of framed memory:

your mother was a film star,

cinematic and grand,

glorious in black and white,

her life rippling into yours,

matrilineal, spoken, woven.

 

Just past midnight,

all moon-skied and haunted,

the blinds slice this bird into shadow,

dividing the hourglass of the year

at its waist, so that it genuflects,

bends to offer thanks for this space,

this place: rooted home.

 

Kim Fahner was the fourth poet laureate of the City of Greater Sudbury (2016-18). She has published four volumes of poetry, including her latest, Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017). Her play, Sparrows Over Slag, recently had a staged reading at the PlaySmelter New Work Theatre Festival (in collaboration with Pat the Dog Theatre Creation).  She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers’ Union of Canada. Her website is www.kimfahner.com  and she blogs regularly at www.kimfahner.wordpress.com

 

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VIVIEN JONES

 

Love and Loss 

 

It's 64 years since I was born, but

there's no-one with me here tonight.

My sons making money in cities,

grandchildren intent of growing,

siblings being grandparents -

any one of us might just stop living.

If it was me - my husband 

would just come

looking for supper or talk,

with shavings on his clothes -

he would touch my cooling body,

want to ask me what happened,

re-calculate the rest of the day.

 

If it was him - some sudden stop,

fallen over his work-bench.

I'd be mad that he was late for supper,

march down there practicing rage.

Then I would rage - how could he

better demonstrate our togetherness

than by deserting it? 

 

Though it's background most days,

it's been there since the start,

the black side of love is fear of loss,

and one of you is going to get it.

 

Vivien Jones first poetry collection was, ‘About Time, Too’ (Indigo Dreams 2010) In that year she also won the Poetry London Prize.  Her second poetry collection was ‘Short of Breath’ (Cultured Llama 2014) She has two short story collections in print and writes spoken word and drama pieces for performance. She regularly leads writing workshops and projects. www.vivienjones.info

 

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IMRAN KHAN

 

Coping Mechanisms

 

Your cigars cloyed up your senses,

My cocaine made mine irrelevant.

 

Your painted toes are headlights on a living skeleton.

My bare feet dancing are memories thundering to silence.

 

Your empty wine bottles are vials of lies tipping over,

My empty wine bottles are clutches mooned away.

 

Your lovers are trips taken to the STI clinic.

My lovers can be scratched naked in petrol stations.
 

Your singing couldn’t ghost your spirit back to visit.

My singing poises impossibly in my stomach.

 

Our smiles widen, expose the loneliness we've stitched to them,

the lips represent us, the touching and the parting.

 

Imran Khan received his degree from SOAS and teaches creative writing around South West England. His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Puritan, Across the Margin, The Smart Set, The Seventh Wave and elsewhere. Khan is a previous winner of the Thomas Hardy Award.

 

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USHA KISHORE

 

Men in Turbans

 

Few people are aware 1.5 million Indians fought

alongside the British – that there were men in turbans

in the same trenches as the Tommies…

Shrabani Basu

 

Forgotten

by the world,

we linger in no-man’s land.

Forsaken by history,

trampled by time,

renounced by a homeland

that does not honour

its imperial troops.

 

Our dreams lie scattered

across the Western Front;

our blood spilt in vain,

our memories fragmented

by empire, colony and nation.

Our lives, a redundant sacrifice

for king and another country.

 

Wear your poppies with pride,

but tell us who we are:

Brown sepoys of the Raj

or comrades, who fought

arm in arm, losing eye and

limb, when cannons roared

like thunder and bullets

hurtled like rain?

 

 

Kali

 

How can I portray you as a goddess here?

They would not comprehend your mini skirt

of severed arms, your garland of demon heads,

your serpent bracelets, your vicious fangs

and lolling tongue seeking some twilight vein,

your dishevelled hair flying across the world.      

They would not decipher a vampire goddess,

holding a decapitated head, a skull bowl,

a bloodied scythe. They would not fathom

a terrible tantric deity, anklets ringing across

eternity, marrying the sacred and the profane. 

 

Perhaps they would appreciate, if I portray

you as scantily clad, third world feminist,

flagrantly flaunting comely breasts,

slender waist and shapely thighs; your lithe

body, dark as night, revelling in sensuality;

your red eyes, as inebriate as the wine you

constantly consume.  They would possibly

envisage you as polymorphous primeval energy,

devouring time in flickering tongues of flame;

female wrath trampling male divinity, inhabiting

the fringes of liminal nature; woman boldly

crossing boundaries, eluding all definition. 

 

Kali: literally translated from the Sanskrit as 'black', 'death' or 'time', Kali is a Hindu goddess, legendarily associated with the slaying of demons and the destruction of evil. 

 

 

Usha Kishore is an Indian-born British poet and translator, resident on the Isle of Man. Her poetry has been internationally published and anthologised by Macmillan, Hodder Wayland, Oxford University Press, Harper Collins India and Orient BlackSwan. Kishore’s poetry is part of the British primary and Indian middle school and undergraduate syllabi. She won the Pre-Raphaelite Poetry Prize (2013), Exiled Writers Ink Poetry Competition (2014), and the Word Masala Award (2016). Kishore is the author of two previous poetry collections and a book of translation from the Sanskrit. “Men in Turbans” and “Kali” from Immigrant, Eyewear Publishing, March 2018, reviewed in this month’s issue.

 

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RONA LAYCOCK

 

Quantum Foam and Love Songs

 

    A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou

    Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

                                                  Edward FitzGerald 1859

 

Now they think we bubbled off another universe,

all is conjecture and theory.

Space and time – space/time – time and space,

I never seem to have enough of either

and yet out there, they say there is too much.

 

I blunder about on the edge of time;

Tomorrow will be yesterday

before I know it. No one understands,

whatever they say as they throw quantums,

play in subatomic sandpits,

speak in secret languages whilst

super-colliding the minutest particles.

 

Some whisper their names: Einstein, Heisenberg, Fermi;

like the beads on a darkly energetic rosary.

My reality excludes them and their theories

but always intersects with yours and

together we see the universe for what it is.

 

They can keep their spatial-temporal gabbling

as we raise a glass to life and love,

wallow in the memories we have made;

days and nights, the sun and a multitude

of stars and grains of sand and you

beside me, singing in the wilderness,

and the wilderness becomes paradise.

 

Rona Laycock’s work has been published in magazines and anthologies by Magma Poetry, Mslexia, Gomer, South Bank Poetry, modern Haibun and Tanka Prose, The Seventh Quarry and Roundyhouse amongst others. In 2012 she won the Ware Poets’ competition and frittered the money away by staying in a pub on Dartmoor.

 

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DONNA MASINI

 

Waiting Room

 

My sister's inside in a green gown
and I'm here twisting dread into origami
tissues, riot mind ticking wrong wrong.
Is this what's been waiting
all along? All of us carried off on a train,
pressed to a window, charting the crazy migration
of cells, disaster oaring
steadily after us like Magi
to the babe. And time, grim monitor,
screening each of us in our green toga.
One day you're drinking your first martini,
a minute later you're roaming

some hospital wing. (Why call it a wing?
Why say origami when it's a useless rag?)
Now none of it matters. My iron
will, impeccable timing.
I think of a far-off war-torn town
hiding my sister in her twin gown.

 

 

The Lights Go Down at the Angelika

 

and you press into the dark, imagine
the stranger two rows back, that fragile
chance you'll forget in the second trailer.

Now it's quiet, still
this burden of being watcher and screen
and what floats across it–light pouring out

its time and necklines and train wrecks.
What a relief to yield to the EXIT
sign red "I" blinking like a candle.

Soon the enormous figures moving
across rooms, the emphatic narrative
arcs. (There's the thrum of the subway,

its engine of extras.) Here now
the beginning of trivia tests. Warning puppets
with brown-bag faces and fringy hair.

You're almost here. But what you want
is the after. How yourself you are now
walking into the night, full moon over Houston Street,

at the bright fruit stand touching the yellow
mums. Here you are: Woman With Cilantro
listening to the rattle of the wrap,

the paper sound paper makes after you
have heard movie paper. Apples are more apples.
Paper more paper. Cilantro, its sweaty green self.

 

Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC.  She attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988. Her latest collection of poems, 4:30 Movie, an elegy for her sister, explores personal loss, global violence, the ways in which movies shape our imaginations. Her first  collection of poems, That Kind of Danger  (Beacon Press, 1994), was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poets Prize.  She next published a novel,  About Yvonne ( W.W. Norton and Co., 997)  which the New York Times called “a stunning novel of sexual obsession.” In 2004  she published her second collection of poems, Turning to Fiction  (WW Norton and Co.) 4:30 Movie is reviewed in this month’s issue.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

The Belly Putter Ban

 

The pundits of golf's USGA and R&G

banned the belly putter, affirming

that any club in a golfer's bag can only

be touched in play by two body parts,

 

the hands, of course, no matter how

extreme the conditions, a ruling

ignored until 1965, with the arrival

of the long putter, which became, over

 

the years, a favorite to a select number

of golfers at all levels, leading to a

sizable need last century for a new and

refined longer putter, soon called an

 

anchored putter and now a belly putter,

with its elongated length that nestled

in the golfer's stomach, adding stability

to the golfer for putting on any green,

 

leading to the creation of a thriving

industry dedicated to producing,

promoting, and marketing belly putters;

but as soon as golf tournaments were

 

claimed as being won, in part, because

of the belly putter, the intense pressure

put on by golf pundits to enforce the ban

was a distinct blow to the golf industry,

 

golf becoming the only sport to flag one's

stomach as off-limits on the field of play,

in this age of the active body's new role

as the icon to strive for and to reward.

 

Ronald Moran lives in South Carolina. His poems have been published in Asheville Poetry Review, Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Negative Capability, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in thirteen books/chapbooks of poetry. In 2017 he was inducted into Clemson University's inaugural AAH Hall of Fame.

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Single Bed

 

Oversleeping my 20s in chaste childhood single bed;

I learnt like a liberated battery hen to

free range my nan’s spare room double.

 

Discovered there was fecundity there,

not babies, but ideas quickened when

books, paper, formed academic counterpane.

 

Upgrading to my own double meant fancy linen

and fancy man for boudoir fun, then intimacy,

eyes meeting in the morning with a smile.

 

Our marital bed, a supersized super king

that ambushes visitors seeking the loo,

relegates my old double to the spare room

 

where to coppice space, amongst thicket of wardrobes,

dressers, shoe racks, you suggest ‘chucking’ it for a single;

my silence is miss-read as consent.

 

For when insomnia stricken you must sometimes

be lullabied by the TV into early hours,

I sprawl in this second-best bed, openly ogling eBay.

 

Your proposed downsizing has shades of the residential home; 

Aunty Betty, her life contracted to a single bed

whose only purpose now is a dreamless sleep.

 

Fiona Sinclair's first full collection of poetry, Ladies Who Lunch was published by Lapwing Press in September, 2014. A Talent for Hats (D & W Press) was published in April, 2017. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

 

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SUE SPIERS

 

Emergency Hemming

 

The hairdresser is chatting with the nine-year-old

who sits having her hair teased between fingers,

telling the hairdresser random facts about her day;

they’re going to Gran’s for emergency hemming.

 

The girl sits having her hair teased between fingers,

pulled into plaits and threaded strands of hair,

says they’re going to Gran’s for emergency hemming.

The hairdresser’s puzzled and wants to know more

 

as she pulls hair into plaits and threads strands of hair

she turns to the mother with a frown on her face.

The hairdresser’s puzzled and wants to know more,

would granny hem and har at the child’s hair?

 

She turns to the mother with a frown on her face.

Cut hair doesn’t bleed and no surgery’s needed.

Would granny hem and har at the child’s hair?

Surely it’s not threatening to life that grows back.

 

Cut hair doesn’t bleed and no surgery’s needed

or the hemming of wounds sutures can close,

surely it’s not threatening to life that grows back.

What causes a hemming emergency in this case?

 

For the hemming of wounds sutures can close

would you stop for a haircut on the way to a clinic?

What causes a hemming emergency in this case

and is Gran a retired surgeon who keeps her hand in?

 

Would you stop for a haircut on the way to a clinic –

your child in danger of an asymmetrical fringe?

Is Gran a retired surgeon who keeps her hand in

or an expert with a needle the mother can’t wield?

 

Your child, in danger of an asymmetrical fringe,

must be rushed to an elder with traditional skills

or an expert with a needle the mother can’t wield

for the party at two o’clock and a too-long frock.

 

She’s rushed to an elder with traditional skills

like the hairdresser chatting with the nine-year-old

about the party at two o’clock and a too-long frock,

telling the hairdresser random facts about her day.

Sue Spiers is SIG Sec for British Mensa’s poetry group and has been published in Acumen, Obsessed With Pipework & The Interpreter's House, and on-line at StepAway, The Lake and Ink, Sweat and Tears magazines. Her first collection is Jiggle Sac. Twitters @spiropoetry

 

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FRANCINE WITTE

 

How the trouble started

 

First, the earth lifted its shoulders

             into mountains, then flat ground

 went prickly with moss. The stars above

             buzzed electric in the nightcurtain.

 The ocean licked the land, and that’s

             when man crawled out, two-legged

 fish with opposable thumbs, fashioning tools,

             touching everything he saw, looking

 around for more when there was little left to do,

             his fingers starting to itch.

  

 

The mosquitoes show up

 

after the rain. We are grocery.

Fat oysters with moonpearls

growing inside. We drench ourselves

with bug spray. The mosquitoes

laugh. We hear it as hum.

 

Nearby, the roses go sunyellow.

The bees will be busy elsewhere

for now. We should be grateful for that.

 

 

What My Grandma Said

 

She told me life is an elevator,

and not because of the ups and downs,

the joke answer she would have loved,

but instead, she said, it’s the way it closes

on you, sudden. No second chance.

Don’t drift, she said. Don’t end up

a collection of days, then years that

finally sprout wings that won’t fly.

Maybe your memory goes or it’s

the pain in your legs, and you are left

holding a handful of unplanted seeds

and wishing you had taken the elevator

up to the rooftop garden you heard

so much about, instead of breathing

the same old promises in and out

about a million times.

 

Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two flash fiction chapbooks. Her full-length poetry collection, Café Crazy, has recently been published by Kelsay Books. She is reviewer, blogger, and photographer. She is a former English teacher. She lives in NYC. 

 

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