2021

 

 

JULY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

John Bartlett, Mike Dillon, Sarah L. Dixon, Alan Elyshevitz, Edilson Ferreira,

Paul Jones, James McLaughlin, Ronald Moran, Tony Press, Estelle Price,

 Claudia Serea, Simon Williams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN BARTLETT

 

A DNA test

 

1.       for best results

from saliva, swab

for cheek cells, rotating

to trap clues from

accidents of time, percolated,

desiccated, refined, reduced

 

2.      taken from toppled buildings

in Gaza where all the anger

of the universe is leaking out,

families scrabbling for the failing

breath of children with names louder

than the screams of those hysterical shells

rising — rejected prayers

 

3.      from Moroccan boys swimming

towards El Tarajal, replenishing

the oceans with salty tears,

oh if only sea knew how

to shape footprints, they might

yet reclaim their homes

 

4.      all that comes from

our bodies, this spit, this rage,

this breath, these tears bleeding

from bodies on beaches

not their own

 

5.      expect algorithms to

generate your Ethnicity Estimate,

this guilty heritage, to be

as furious as you feel  

 

 

John Bartlett is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories and published non-fiction. He has an MA in Professional Writing from Deakin University. He is a reviewer, interviewer, former tutor of Creative Writing at Deakin University and a creative writing workshop facilitator. His poetry has been published in a number of Australian and overseas journals.  In June 2019 Melbourne Poets Union released his Chapbook The Arms of Men and in 2020 Ginninderra Press published Songs of the Godforsaken as part of its Picaro Poets’ series as well as his full poetry collection Awake at 3am in late 2020.  He lives in southern Australia and was the winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize and blogs at: beyondtheestuary.com 

 

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MIKE DILLON

 

After Easter Mass

 

Our fathers

stood in a knot smoking

beneath the morning sun.

 

Our mothers

gathered themselves into a bouquet

of jovial hats.

 

One father

watched a Filipino family

of three farming generations

 

sift into two old cars

and said: “They only came

for the indoor plumbing.”

 

Our fathers

laughed and returned

to their talk.

 

Our mothers,

who didn’t hear,

stayed true to their hats.

 

And I

looked up into the blue sky

 

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His most recent book is Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor, from Unsolicited Press.

 

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SARAH L DIXON

 

2020 by The Colne

 

We bring you offerings.

A cuddly otter. Sloth notebooks. Darth Vader.

We take them home,

but they now hold the lap of you,

the rush of your weirs within them.

We send these photos of ‘our family’ to school.

 

You bring us patient herons,

tempt them with your stickleback.

We watch breathless

until it sees us, dismisses us as safe.

 

We test out words on you

for sound poems,

read you stories

we have written on your bank.

You babble your appreciation.

 

You present us with a kingfisher,

goldfinch, chaffinch, mallards.

A pot-bellied pig drinking noisily. 

 

We bring seeds for your mallards,

squeal at the pig, he is now named Bernard.

We point cameras at the place

your birds were.

Too late to capture them.

But we store the frenzied

or graceful up-liftings.

 

On our way home past the Bath Factory

you hop our first Yorkshire frog

across our path.

 

We mark our days with you

sometimes racing

sometimes taking                            

detours

around

fallen trees.

 

Sarah L Dixon lives in the village of Linthwaite located in a Huddersfield valley. Sarah’s inspiration comes from being in and by water and adventures with her son, Frank. Sarah misses pubs and poetry adventures in other cities and seeing the sea. http://thequietcompere.co.uk/

 

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ALAN ELYSHEVITZ 

 

La Tienda Mexicana

 

Joaquin has been told to drive slowly.

Beside the highway, where the climate’s hips

have enlarged, various grains and pollinators

give way to desert and spacious flies.

In the mountains he comes from, three men

are dead, yet the avalanche continues

with its hard loose teeth. Just as the wind

has teeth. And dogs on guard at warehouse gates.

Brownfields are safe to pull over and sleep

while the Earth plots schisms within itself.

In the morning he awakens to entropy,

his eyelashes spiked and brittle. At 6 AM

in a sales-pitch town, he meets idle men

flexing their knuckles. There’s a restaurant job

he’s reluctant to take because kitchen blades

brush onions aside, probing for thumbs.

Joaquin values his hands too much,

especially fingertips once kissed

by homeland beauty. He drives slowly

past derelict ladders, half-hung windows.

It’s December in a posh warm-weather region.

Never, he thinks, will he know hypothermia

or be fitted for a homeowner’s loan.

Hunger climbs from the trench in his gut.

Joaquin has been told to obtain what he needs

from the Mexican store. To save money

he chooses to gnaw on whatever happens next.

 

 

Living in the Car

 

Your home is the world’s most affordable biome,

a region of outgassing and shock-resistant glass

whose hard atmosphere keeps mosquitoes out. Here,

where footwear seems extraneous, you retire at night

to the upholstered backcountry to sleep on polyester

moss. By the end of the week, the gulches are emptied

of snacks. If you find a coupon for devil’s food cake

in a sediment of receipts, you reorient the panorama

from junk pines at the edge of town to a half-shuttered

strip mall with scant resources. Since your wheels

and levers function, you choose a southern exposure

facing deeded lands with fences to prove their modesty.

Bathing, in particular, is a problem. Life in the wild

requires you to live near a river but never come clean.

 

Alan Elyshevitz  is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press) and a collection of poems, Generous Peril (Cyberwit). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the rts. https://aelyshevitz.ink

 

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EDILSON FERREIRA

 

On Speaking Of Gravitation

 

              “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

              Poem by Emily Dickinson.

 

I’m not nobody, like Dickinson was.

I know that I have a name, by which

many friends call me, having also  

ready a road I’m always wandering by.

 

So few friends had called on her and

she didn’t need roads to gain the world,    

nor knew that Amherst was naught,

gravitating around all of her.

 

Edilson Ferreira, 77 years, is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Widely published in selected international literary journals, he began writing at age 67, after his retirement as a bank employee. Nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2017, his first Poetry Collection, Lonely Sailor, One Hundred Poems, was launched in London, in November of 2018. He is always updating his works at www.edilsonmeloferreira.com  “On Speaing of Gravitation” was first published in Off The Coast, summer 2016 printed issue.

 

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PAUL JONES

 

Spiders in the Bathtub

 

Why do people get murdered

in such odd ways in England?

I don't mean in London where

Jack the Ripper was never

found, never brought to justice,

but the one-church rural towns,

places with riverside shops

where ballooned bodies can float

past to shock but not surprise

two scarved older ladies, twins

carrying flowers. They are

out of season (suspicious)—

the flowers and the women.

One twin recalls another

mystery death, the time when

striped spiders in the bathtub

played roles of clue and killer.

But who moved the swollen corpse?

Why did that body end up

riverside on picnic day,

the day the new parson came?

A busy young deep-voiced man

more concerned with ritual

than with congregational

troubles, festering feuds that

amuse our twins, he'd rather

light one candle at the right

point in a prayer than get

into any of that stuff.

They, even then, overdressed

for the warming spring weather.

Like today, they had flowers

that could only be greenhoused—

details they enjoyed but few

noticed. The twins were, as now,

undistracted by common

things. One twin detects something

in the dead body's dark hair

as the victim is fished from

the slow water. She grabs it,

an abalone shell comb.

There are things a comb can tell:

what's tangled, intangible,

yet still interpretable.

Part of the comb's bright glisten

is from spider-woven silk.

 

Paul Jones has published in Poetry, Triggerfish Critical Review, Broadkill Review, 2River View and anthologies including Best American Erotic Poems (1800 - Present). Recently nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Web Awards. Chapbook, What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common. Manuscript of poems crashed on the moon’s surface in 2019. http://smalljones.com

 

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JAMES MCLAUGHLIN

 

1969

 

When Neil Armstronge landed 

on the moon we all

became spacemen bouncing

around the playground bumping 

into one another like Buzz Aldrin floating

to the stars on oxygen 

for a tanner (ask yir gran) you

could collect three picture cards

of the moonmen and 

the great Saturn rocket and the landingship

and a cardboard chewgum

doused in holy water

that we stuck to our rosary beads

and swapped before confessions or

between ten Hail Mary’s

three Our Fathers 

one Act of Contrition 

James Mc Laughlin lives in Scotland and has been away from the poetry writing for about ten years. He’s had a couple of books and stuff published “but no great shakes”.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

A Cast Iron Frying Pan

 

Nothing worked, not wine, not

my favorite bourbon, as I was

trying to erase the all-too-ripe

memory of my mother socking

 

my father hard in the middle

of his back, while he stood

in our kitchen, behind the stove,

admiring the newly hung cast

 

iron frying pan above the stove,

as if it were a prize, his gift

to her from his last business

trip, the one where she found

 

a pair of earrings in his suit

pocket, and they weren't hers,

and now, since I wrote this,

assuring that I will never forget.

 

 

When a child

 

I shot a butterfly,

a monarch,

with my

new BB gun.

 

It exploded

into a panoply

of deep orange,

jet black, white,

 

as it became

an exotic fan.

In that nanosecond

I found beauty.

 

Ronald Moran lives in Simpsonville, South Carolina, USA.  His last six collections of poetry were published by Clemson University Press.

 

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TONY PRESS

 

That Water

 

The foghorn echoes over the lagoon

On the bay, freighters lay silent 

Freighters moored, still, distanced

No place to go, no load to carry

 

The foghorn echoes across the lagoon

The evening sun kisses the water

Reminding me of “Marisol”- 

Sea and sun, all in one, “Marisol”

 

The bay surface remains blue

Glistens with that last kiss

No whitecaps now, wind at rest

Later, likely, a different story

 

The bay surface remains blue

Inviting to boats, small and large

Inviting the act of walking, too

Walking across that water

 

With gentle steps, it could be done

Feet and ankles wet, but all else dry

Perhaps first the lagoon, smaller

Save the bay for another day

 

With gentle steps, it could be done

Skipping, dancing, shore to shore

Water was ice, and ice can hold us

Confidence required, as always it is

 

I want to walk across that water,

I want to swim up to the sky

I want to walk across that water

I want to live until I die

 

I want to walk across that water

Reach that point of silence

When I get there, 

I’ll have something to say

 

And when I get there,

I’ll have something to say.

 

Tony Press lives near the San Francisco Bay. He tries to pay attention, and sometimes he does. Please find and read his story collection, Crossing The Lines (published by Big Table).

 

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ESTELLE PRICE

 

her wrist

 

                slender like a stick

of bamboo.    its bone an unexpected

table-top balanced on a bed of wrinkles

that crease and crinkle like a plate

of over-cooked spaghetti.     the skin    

thirsty.      its texture roughed by eighty

summers to the colour of toffee. freckles    

grown bold and sassy speckle her forearm

where once a bracelet of daisies linked arms

and danced a joy-jig until dawn.

 

at the base of her thumb, a scar, napkin white,

the pigment burnt lifting a feast from the oven.   

lean in    touch     can you feel the demands

of steel cuffing her to a fence when the world wobbled

on its nuclear tight rope? today she's watch-less.

it's time to give up on earth's beating drum.

take a moment       you don't have long.     rotate.

be gentle this wrist is porcelain-frail.   there        

you've found her shy-side      split in two by a wand

of blood.     take your chance      place a kiss

where once a pulse purposed.   as you cut

through the hospital tag    set free

a prayer for your mother as her life

softens to memory.

 

 

        Safe house

 

It’s square with book shelves that float. Light gushes although I don’t know the source. In this room women come to sit, examine the wounds on their wrists. There are no windows only a yellow door between the shelves. On good days the air is warm. Fear has not fallen on the floor. There are no tears just the slow tick of words going backwards. Sometimes a glass vase has been filled with chrysanthemums. On bad days the other person in the room asks me to describe what lies behind the yellow door. I pretend I see the bright edges of a laugh but I know what waits is only a huge suck of emptiness like the pause after words smashed the hall light of our first house, the void before his hands reached for my throat. In this space it is enough when quiet soaks me up, folds me into a wing-back chair. It is enough if I can stay untouched until my shadow finds a way to cut itself out of my chest.

 

Estelle Price is the winner of the 2018 Book of Kells Writing Competition. Her poetry has been placed/listed in the National Poetry Competition (2019) Bridport Prize (2019), Much Wenlock, London Magazine, Yorkmix, Wells, Welshpool and other competitions. Poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Stony Thursday Book, The Result is What You See Today Anthology, Macunian Ways anthology and Deep Time Vols 1 and 2. “Her Wrist” was highly commended in 2017 Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition and “Safe House” was highly commended in the 2019 Ver Poetry Competition.

 

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CLAUDIA SEREA

 

When I can’t sleep, I hear the owl

 

Thump, he lands on the roof

on top of my bedroom,

 

a shadow with talons

in the greater shadow of the house.

 

He calls, first softly,

then loud—

 

the call of death,

my grandmother believed.

 

Coo-coo-vow, he says

toward my neighbor’s house.

 

Does he see his ghost in the window?

Does he see Romanian ghosts

 

in my backyard oak tree,

in my sleepless mind?

 

Or is he simply calling for his mate

dressed in white moonlight,

 

vowing to love her,

to hold her close,

 

the way you do

with your warm feet

 

that catch my cold ones

under covers?

 

Claudia Serea’s poems and translations have been published in Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Oxford Poetry, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Twoxism, a collaboration with visual artist Maria Haro (8 ^th House Publishing, 2018). Her sixth collection of poetry, Writing on the Walls at Night, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2022. Serea’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Arabic, and Farsi, and have been featured in The Writer’s Almanac. Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month , and she co-hosts The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Readings in Rutherford, NJ.

 

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SIMON WILLIAMS

 

Koala from Kangaroo Island

 

The big fellas say there used to be 50,000 of us.

We don’t have much use for numbers over five,

but it sounds a lot. Then the Redhot.

 

I don’t move fast, built for climb not run.

My feet can take the sun, but not that heat –

pain like spider bite on all four.

 

The big fellas took me, put juice on my palms,

caged me with strangers. We shared the heal.

Now they take me out, back to the island.

 

It could be anywhere, though, so much gone.

They put me in the eat trees, so I have food,

but I can see the ground, so little green.

 

The big fellas ain’t all bad; they didn’t hurt.

They say there are 5,000 of us left.

We don’t have much use for numbers over five.

 

 

Passing Over

 

The rowan fell last night,

neatly, as if it didn’t want to go.

It cracked open its trunk

and laid itself across the wall.

 

Storm Brendan brought it down,

80 miles an hour, over from Ireland,

but visiting, moved on by morning;

a random track of tired trees.

 

There’ll be more like me, says the rowan,

say the elm, the ash, the hearts of oak.

Warm air will be the death of us,

as it searches fast to find a place to cool.

 

Simon Williams has been writing since his teens, when he was mentored at university by Roger McGough. He has nine collections, the latest being The Magpie Almanack (www.simonwilliams.info), from Vole, published December 2020. Simon was elected The Bard of Exeter in 2013, founded the large-format magazine, The Broadsheet and published the PLAY anthology in 2018.

 

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