2024

 

 

JULY

 

 

N. S. Boone, Chris Bullard, Mike Dillon, Philip Dunkerley, Bridgette James, Ted Jean, Bridget Khursheed, Annie Kissack, Faith Paulsen, Amanda L. Rioux.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

N. S. BOONE

 

Ulysses in the Spirit of Marianne Moore

 

Not the itch of idleness nor the golden

idolatry

of swashbuckling calculus sets us out to sail;

but nature fails to appoint our ways,

 

though hummingbirds can guide us across

vast sea gulfs

by their tiny beating wings or even trees that

never stop reaching out and up may

 

crudely point towards that subtle

chastity

which drives us out of bed each morning or sits us

upright at dinner with our elbows off

 

the table, or out of our seats in the

presence of

a stranger just entered the room.  These longings

will never be illicit, the substance

 

of distant stars that frames us, empty

yet upright.

So it is that ventures of seeking and finding

never yield but vessels that need refilling.

 

N. S. Boone's poems have appeared in Teleios, St. Austin Review, Cave Region Review, Streetlight Magazine, and elsewhere. His book, Understanding Jorie Graham, is forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press. He teaches at Harding University in Searcy, AR, and preaches for the Magness Church of Christ.

 

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CHRIS BULLARD

 

The Cutlery of Language

 

We hold words behind our breathe

like knives in a kitchen drawer.

Leaving them out would be messy.

Hidden, we know they stay sharp.

 

Broad ones for slashing,

parers used to take the flesh off,

carvers like four letter words –

just part of the household inventory. 

 

Washing up after their use,

trying to fit them back in their place,

we can feel how difficult

it is to use them safely.

 

Their power unnerves us.

We remember their wounds.

Yet they remain, in age no less edged.

and so easy to reach.

 

Sunflower

 

We took her from the garden 

where she had companions

and propped her up in a vase

at the center of our dining table.

 

Being around the family

seemed to perk her up.

For a while, she received us

with outstretched yellow rays.

 

Too soon, she awoke to old age,

color gone, arms drooping.

She wept pollen tears

and her water had a stink to it.

 

We had loved her for her beauty,

but, ugly and decrepit, she scared us.

 

A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Chris Bullard is a retired judge who lives in Philadelphia. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. Finishing Line Press has accepted his chapbook, Lungs, for publication in 2024. He was nominated this year for the Pushcart Prize.

 

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MIKE DILLON

 

One Silence

 

There is no silence I know of

like the silence between knocks

on a dead man’s door.

 

When I stood on his porch

an ivory cascade of white hawthorn

lit his yard filled with dusk.

 

The lovely scent of his lilacs had returned.

Above the dark wood Venus flared

high in the west.

 

And the serene countenance of silence 

like a standing stone in the tundra 

peered over my shoulder as I turned the knob.

 

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His newest book, Nocturne: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Unsolicited Press in October.

 

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PHILIP DUNKERLEY

 

Painting the Fence

 

Three of us now for each one then, though they are mostly gone and you are old.

You’re busy painting the fence to make it last a few more years. You know

that everyone wants more than ever you had - that’s human nature,

 

well, nature’s what we say. You start another board, doing the long edge first;

the only nature you can see is when you look up - two rattling magpies, 

a red kite spiralling by, and hurtling swifts - the dodgems of the skies.

 

You plumped for Medium Oak; you stretch and reach, then bend. You know

that Earth’s resilient, but it can’t keep up - three now for each one then.

What will happen? Life goes on, it must, it always does - and everyone

 

wants to consume: neater, faster, smarter. You do - we all do. How will it end?

The boards are cheapo knotty pine with holes - go on, peep through, you see

your neighbour’s washing on the line. And suddenly you’re back, a kid again

 

seeing Her-Next-Door’s astounding lacy bras and skimpy pants;

of course, by now she’s gone - popped her clogs, moved on - gone to dust.

Medium Oak tarting up cheap pine, it’s looking good - the fence - appearances,

 

pretence - isn’t that what Life’s about? But it’s no use us pretending Earth

can cope with three-times then - and rising still. The birds don’t worry though,

they’re going on, surviving, those that can, in spite of man. Going, going, gone.

 

Philip Dunkerley takes part in open-mic events in and around South Lincolnshire, where he lives and where he has run a poetry group for more than ten years. His poems and translations have appeared in various journals, webzines (including The Lake) and anthologies.

 

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BRIDGETTE JAMES

 

“Got it with the first hit.”

 

A cliché overheard. A body

encounters the barrel of a hunter’s rifle.

 

An epic demise. A rustling

of blood-soaked feathers,

an ostentatious fall, a carcass

implodes into origami patterns.

Sensational last rites immortalised

by spectators filming on smartphones.

 

The trapped spirit of a creature -

a pheasant, speaks in my dream.

 

“A roosting pheasant is good

at playing hide and seek with hunters.

I wasn’t only a commercialized plaything-

shot, hunted, roasted - a mere gamebird,

a common peasant in the avian hierarchy.”

I plummeted with the ceremonious thud

of a legend, paying homage to a sport,

fuelled by the adrenaline rush of deaths.”

 

Blood splatters its graffiti -

decorating my hippocampus.

I hear a man’s agonising croak,

see a human corpse in the alleyway.

 

Bridgette James was a Metropolitan Police Special Constable. Her work has appeared in several UK magazines and her book is in the National Poetry Library. Website- www.ellaspoems.co.uk

 

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TED JEAN

 

Mother’s Day 2024

 

she told him no flowers

no breakfast, no fucking brunch

and bestowed a peremptory kiss

 

left early for the club

for doubles with the other mothers

good group today high level tennis

 

on the way, got a drive-through

senior coffee and a tepid sneer

from the millennial weekend crew

 

parked in the upper lot

of the mega church above the river

before the believers trickled in

 

sipped her cold coffee

and cried till her heart ran clear

 

A carpenter, Ted Jean writes, paints, plays tennis with Amy Lee.  His work appears in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Lake, PANK, DIAGRAM, North American Review, dozens of other publications.

 

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BRIDGET KHURSHEEN

 

Hairst

 

The hedge, plashed but unlaid, makes a fist of early autumn hawthorn:

elder with tight berries and a bright fruiting rowan,

cans and a twist of paper or supple plastic tied up in damp beaten grass.

The Kelvin below I think:

 

its waters reveal in glimpses; tease with flicks of absent

otters and dippers. Meanwhile we are walking to Tesco’s

the big one by the tower blocks,

to buy a swimming costume. This tarmac path playing field edge

 

is maximum bird. Warblers. You picked the route;

tell me you thought I would like it.

Beyond the hedge and river, I suddenly see all the open fields of Maryhill.

Strike the harvest. Come home.

 

Potato harvest from the A1 carriageway

 

the polythene field is unwrapped

yesterday the spud conveyor rumbled

down row one its rain of tatties

falling hard into a blunt-nosed truck

 

a two-person job compared to planting

when the field was swarming

with crouched unlikely shaped figures

mining its neat ridges

 

today mucoid web strands of birthing plastic reveal

no brown tilth more like

an empty shop shelf and stranded vehicles

stopped in their tracks

 

on Monday I guess the plough will be back

 

Bridget Khursheed, most recently published in Acumen, Poetry Scotland, Paperboats, Atrium, Gutter and Stand (upcoming). Hy collection is The Last Days of Petrol (Shearsman Books). She is a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award recipient and her poem Standing on top of the National Museum of Scotland was selected one of the Best Scottish Poems 2022 by the Scottish Poetry Library.

 

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ANNIE KISSACK

 

Runic Crosses

 

In the dark church, Sigurd’s heart is frozen,

Joalf and Fritha lurk lukewarm.

Dragons writhe amid the ring, the twist, the plait,

the godly overlap.

Memorials. In runes the names are scratched.

 

And what of Athakan the smith,

or Mael Bridge and his newly Christian soul?

A half-told tale pulled from the skips of history.

Mael Lomkon raised this cross in memory of his foster-mother;

was it for her, the hound, the harp, the drinking horn?

 

Who decides our days, the what we leave, forget,

the where we must set down our complicated journeys

and who will decipher them?

Outside they’re digging up the road,

laying different tracks upon the old.

 

Wild men on horseback once roamed this land.

Lorries northbound for Ramsey rev and roar,

shake the very fabric of the church,

impatient for the lights to change,

to change them.

 

Old Women with Cats   

 

Something about these straight-backed women of great age:

how their hair holds firm in solemn knots,

how their limbs inhabit folds of drapery.

They sit below the lesser branches

of each family tree and stroke their cats.

 

Don’t read softness into this;

such women stare in black and white.

You wouldn’t mess with them or pick a fight.

They’ve done the things they’re meant to do,

produced a living child or two

for all the thanks they got.

 

So they want nothing more

but to be left quiet in the shade

with a tartan blanket and a lemonade,

a purring tabby on a lap,

no photographs.

 

Annie Kissack is a teacher, song-writer and performer from the Isle of Man. In 2018 she became the Fifth Manx Bard. Her first collection, Mona Sings (2022), reflects her interest in the stories, landscape and languages of her native island.

 

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FAITH PAULSEN

 

On Another War

After “Sin” by George Herbert

 

Trapped, this fear-fluttered wren, stranded inside 

my room– who knows how? – batters her beak against 

hard glass. Cast out of the garden, she rails,

her eye dark, hollow, like Masacchio’s frescoed Eve. 

Anguish stretches her open throat. Naked.

The fig leaf, painted-on later. Her keen mirrors 

mine. Can we even help ourselves? Despite 

treaties, pacts, Scriptures, songs that yearn 

for peace, here we are again. Land mines planted 

in our cells, trip-wired by grandmothers’ grief, 

as Eden’s once lush greenery composts into black oil.

We burn to taste iron, the sorrow-dogging sin.

At dawn, the bird seeks light. Out she flies!

While the fine net of my nature yet ensnares me.

 

Words in italics are quotes from George Herbert’s sonnet “Sin”

 

Author of three chapbooks and mother of three sons, Faith Paulsen’s day job is in insurance, Her work appears or is upcoming in Scientific American, Poetica Review, Poetry Breakfast, Milk art journal, Philadelphia Stories, Book of Matches, One Art, Panoply, Thimble, Evansville Review, Mantis and others. She lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. https://www.faithpaulsenpoet.com/

 

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AMANDA L. RIOUX

 

Sivvy

 

I.

 

That fire-red

Comet:

It pulses,

Reverberates,

Long after its streak

Has passed.

It may disappear from sight but

Its presence is always

There.

 

II.

 

Mademoiselle,

Smith girl: they tried to shock you

Into submission but

The dimming flame which

Fought to stay alit

Held the pen,

Writing Esther’s revenge.

 

III.

 

Subversive housewife singing

Your husband’s praises, typing

His manuscripts you’ll later throw into the flames;

He’ll never be Yeats but

Always your Heathcliff, lost

On the moors,

Clinging to your comet tail

As you blaze through the sky.

 

IV.

 

Your therapy: poetry and

Melatonin daydreams.

 

V.

 

Did he know when he

Found his dark-eyed muse that it would be your final undoing?

 

VI.

 

To Ireland. To

Ireland and the

Cure.

 

VII.

 

Words etched on bone,

Collective consciousness:

A ghost floating

Like a dress thrown from a rooftop.

Your Blaze of glory

More eternal in death than

In life.

 

“Call Dr. Horder—"

 

You wrote as you

Left your death mask behind,

Your manuscript on the counter—

Finally free from your

Personal Bell Jar.

 

VIII.

 

…

An ellipsis:

Not a pause but

A symbol of Eternity.

…

 

Amanda L. Rioux is a freelance writer & photographer, and adjunct English professor. Her work—which includes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography—has appeared in Red Noise Collective, The Mantelpiece, The Nelligan Review, Writerly Magazine, Wingless Dreamer, and others. Instagram: @MyLoveAffairWithTheWrittenWord

 

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