2014

 

JUNE CONTRIBUTORS

 

Michelle Askin, Judy Brackett, Randolph Bridgeman, Janet Butler, Claire Carroll,

 William Ogden Haynes, Marilyn Hammick, Richard Hughes, Jennifer A, McGowan,

Bruce McRae, Juan Parra, Fiona Sinclair, Jayne Stanton,

 Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Owen Vince.

 

MICHELLE ASKIN

 

Sorry

 

As sad as the heavy gray blurring the last orange of the December sun
over Lake Erie. As sad as the boy with Down syndrome, sobbing
at his balloon floating away at the mall, the one a clown
made especially for him after a Little Tykes quarterback
dumped ice cream on his helmet. As sad as the note that began, Thank you
for remembering, but... As sad as you leaving.  As sad as you staying.

As sad as the mentally disturbed woman just released from the institution

showing up at her favorite sister's house with white daffodils and a Surprise,

I am going to live with you.... only to be gently, but still, turned away.

As sad as an American movie theater audience laughing at this scene on film.

As sad as the smog and traffic in the metropolitan area. As sad as the woman

with no papers, who crossed over the Mexican border with her dying infant son

to escape drug slums and her rapist husband. As sad as her walking home at midnights from her third job washing the genitals and vomit of the bandoned elderly,

only to find the cops in her Dumfries, Va rented room with handcuffs and foster care

papers for the boy, after the grad student nanny called the cops because she thought it would be a do-the-right-thing-and-emotionally-complex  moment in her memoir. As sad as forgetting. As sad as memory. As sad as loneliness.

As sad as being told loneliness is your fault. As sad as having no friends.

As sad as the six o’clock news and pop psychoanalysts buzzing through the radio:

Beware, don't make friends with the lonely. And to the already lonely, basically 

tough shit— Studies show your life is empty and you'll die soon anyway without touch. As sad as the lonely in suicide. As sad as the lonely in living.

 

Michelle Askin’s poetry has appeared in 2River View, OffCourse, Obsessed With Pipework, Oyez Review, Fogged Clarity, and elsewhere.

 

 

JUDY BRACKETT

 

Great-grandmother Remembers the Future

 

Great-grandmother remembers the future,

even as a girl remembered it.

Saw sleek silver birds flying—

wavery mares’ tails across the blue.

Heard currents in the air—

buzzing, disturbing.

Smelled sulphur, smelled rot.

 

She sees misshapen webs—

gyres, trapezoids,

and large sitting people,

their small heads down,

their large thumbs twitching,

the familiar earth shape distorted,

clotted seas, fallow ground.

 

But she remembers children

on the foggy periphery.

Children not yet born—

dancing blue and green,

sun-haloed.

She leans to them,

wishes them well,

turns away to the pond

and the rocks, to her bread

and her linens, to the songs

the birds used to sing.

 

 

Here and There

 

Now that we’ve come through another storm—

wind-thrashed trees, frightened dogs cowering

behind sofas, hikers gone missing—we find

the afternoon hospitable, but in the Urals

the dawn sky falls, splashing into

 

an ice-choppy lake, and we hear the explosion,

feel the air and the ground vibrate

even here—

a frisson of fear like invisible glass shards

or someone walking on our grandmothers’

 

graves. There, scavengers are gathering, collecting,

measuring, will soon be hawking the poor man’s

black gold, and we will wait here for the next

explosion, trusting that Chicken Little and the boy

who cries wolf might be right, will be right,

 

eventually. Meanwhile along the creek

some bright greens are painting Douglas fir

fingertips, and in the thicket out back tiny buds

are tinged with the red of the berries to come,

come summer, though there may not be fruit,

or the fruit may be bug-spoiled,

or summer may not come.

 

 

Judy Brackett has published short fiction and poems in various journals and anthologies from About Place to Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets (Backwaters Press). She has taught creative writing and English composition and literature at Sierra College. Born in Nebraska, she moved to California as a child and has lived in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills for many years.

 

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RANDOLPH BRIDGEMAN

 

tenant

the summer she decided to leave her husband 
for good she rented the apartment above our garage
and i helped carry her things from the trunk 
of her ’68 caddy up the stairs 
watching sweat soak the curves of her cutoffs 
the sweet odor of her aerosol deodorant
just before the Ozone began to dissipate
and the polar caps began to melt
and the weather took its drastic turn
i’d watch her sunbathing in our backyard
a white plastic chase lounge striped her body 
zebra like 
like the venetian blinds in my bedroom window 
that i’d bend just enough to catch a glimpse 
of her leaving
i’d listen for her high-heels on the gravel driveway
she’d slide across the leather seat of that black caddy 
putting on her lipstick as thick as turtle wax 
and picking-out her hair in the rearview mirror
the day her husband came to take her home
i wanted to tell her everything
i wanted to tell her that she’d colored my dreams 
but instead i cracked the blinds 
and watched her
back away

 

Randolph Bridgeman graduated from St. Mary's College of Maryland. His poems have been published in numerous poetry reviews and anthologies. He has three collections of poems, South of Everywhere, Mechanic on Duty, and The Odd Testament. His fourth collection of poetry The Poet Laureate of Cracker Town is forthcoming in the Fall of 2014.

 

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JANET BUTLER

 

My Mother's Best Friend

She carried a piece of blue sky in her pocket
and would shake it out at the nearest rumble
of storm, its lace border wisping away
into mists of cloud, gathering and piling
up and up into thick cumulus that caught the sun
and shone with a fierce white brightness.

We gathered around her kitchen table, our open hearth,
she the warm fire burning low in the grate. 
Children of a home built on a cracked foundation
we shivered in the drafts that found us
in the furthest corners of an empty house.

But with her we revived, free to step out gingerly,
leave a morsel of complaint on the table

she would speedily whisk away.   With her sky of kerchief
the air again spring-like, a flutter of flute heard somewhere,
promising much.
 

Janet Butler's Upheaval was one of three winning selections in Red Ochre Lit's 2012 Chapbook Contest.  Her poem "Ode to Mars" took second place in the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's annual contest for 2014.   She is moderator of the monthly Poetry and Prose at the Blue Danube in Alameda, and, as watercolor painter, is a member of the Frank Bette Art Center.  

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CLAIRE CARROLL

 

Mare Nostrum

 

The salt does not

Transform my blue blood into

A miracle.

 

The lattice

Laced and threaded

By the lingering wind.

She pricks her finger,

Every time.

 

No better than fingerprints

Clenching onto shining glasses

Full of dark red monotony.

 

Filaments of copper ice

Wired through the islands

Smell alchemic.

 

Dark gulls stumble

Unaccustomed to walking

Over seas they usually forget

Skipped over for the freedom

To go anywhere and be wanted

Nowhere.

 

Gritty grey, blinding gaze:

It’s not that pretty, really. But, I still

Find hollows beneath crests

My yearning longs to fill.

 

Claire Carroll is living in Massachusetts and missing New York. She will be published in the upcoming issue of Transcendence. She is a published astronomer who loves to count the stars, but is too stubborn to wear her glasses.

 

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KAREN CRAIGO

 

Down Will Come

 

I’m really not much

of a singer. Tonight I rockabye

the baby in exactly the way

you might rockabye  a truck

from a snowdrift,

grinding gears over

the lowest notes, growling

the infant to sleep.

I’ll admit I get by

on the general notion

that any mom singing

is holy. Was there ever

such music as your own

mother’s voice, filtered

through the drumhead

of her sternum, rumble of song

and blood and breath?

And even if it wasn’t beautiful

it is now, in memory,

her real voice a bough

breaking crisp over the phone

hundreds of miles

from where you fall.

 

 

The Difference in Here and There

 

That the world is big enough to flood

your farm road, forty mile per hour wind

off the cove, and for me to sit in the sun

by a lake, listen for the certain splashdown

of the landing goose: This is a wonder.

I can’t even close my eyes and picture

the gray of your sky, my own sun

so insistent it makes a shadow of you.

Twenty-one years ago we took to the air

in spotless radiance, just the right

measure of wind. I never wanted to light.

Do you know how the nighthawk

lives its life in constant objection

to our war against the dark? Always turning,

evading, so unlike the methodical daytime

stitching glide of the finch. There are so many

ways to move across Earth’s face and I

would just as gladly move or sit with you.

 

Karen Craigo teaches English to international students at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. A chapbook, Someone Could Build Something Here, was just published by Winged City Chapbook Press, and her previous chapbook, Stone for an Eye, is part of the Wick Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in the journals Atticus Review, Poetry, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, The MacGuffin, and others.

 

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MARYLYN HAMMICK

 

Gertrude Bell speaks on The Alps, 1897*

 

The guides and I went up Pic de la Grave,

cutting steps in the ice,

awfully difficult rock, perfectly fearful.

 

I gave my skirt to Marius.

Mathon said I couldn’t possibly wear it.

He was quite right. I felt very indecent.

 

It didn’t seem possible I could get up

all that wall without ever making a slip but

presently it began to seem quite natural to be hanging

 

by my eyelids over an abyss  - La Garve beneath,

me in mid air. I’m as good as any man,

 I hanker after the Matterhorn

 

smooth perpendiculars,

 an ill defined couloir

upright slabs exposed 

 

Great points are continually overbalancing,

tumbling down, loosely poised stones jut out,

hang ready to fall at any moment.

 

I’m enjoying myself madly,

you go up and see if a stone falls on you,

if it doesn’t you know you can go that way.

 

Our fortnight’s bag: two old peaks,

seven new peaks, one new saddle,

the traverse of the Engelhorn, not bad going.

 

The best thing hereabouts remains Finsteraahorn

I shall remember that rock face for the rest of my life,

I thought it on the cards we should not get down alive.

 

Wonderful and terrible things happen in high places

the top of the tower gave a crack,

my ice axe jumped in my hand

 

I never thought of danger except once

- it was the only possible plan -

you set your teeth, battle with the fates

 

we tumble down a chimney, manage badly,

I can do nothing but fall

and look back with great respect.

 

*GB’s words from Daughter of the Desert, Georgina Howell, 2007

 

Is this what my Mum would call a fib?

 

After he phoned for the third time and asked if I knew what was happening would it be sorted out by the end of the week could I find out more I didn’t say don’t call again or check how many minutes of this same conversation we’d had. I didn’t mention how tired I was of not having answers to his questions or that I don’t  know any more than I told him yesterday, the day before, the day before that or last week. I didn’t raise my voice, or talk faster and faster or put the phone on speaker while I got on with my supper, I didn’t say I need a quiet evening, to stop talking about all this, I stopped trying to convince him that I’ve been telling him the truth, that I don’t know any more than I’ve already told him. I said I was going to the movies; I’d speak to him tomorrow.

 

Marilyn Hammick writes (and reads) when travelling, during still moments at home in England and France, recalling a childhood in New Zealand and years living in Iran.  Her poetry has been published in Prole, Camroc Press Review, In Gilded Frame, The Glasgow Review, The Eunioa Review and by Mardibooks and Writers Abroad. She tweets @trywords and blogs at http://glowwormcreative.blogspot.co.uk  

 

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WILLIAM OGDEN HAYNES

 

Solitaire

 

Sometimes she thinks,

if only she could wish away

all the wasted hours spent

playing this silly child’s game.

If she could only recoup the energy from the

thousands of times she shuffled the

deck and distributed it into seven piles

carefully straightened into perfect rectangles.

It begins simply enough, as a game

of dichotomies, red or black, alternating

the colors to form long lines of cards.

Red on black, either-or, as in

do as I say or get out.

Black on red. Come to my house on Christmas

or don’t come at all.

 

But then the aces begin to appear and the cards

are arranged in four piles according to family,

hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades

above the long lines of rotating red and black.

Sometimes the families reunite or sometimes not,

depending on chance and how the cards are played.

 

And this year, on the day after Christmas,

she sits at the card table alone,

like a jewel in a diamond solitaire.

She plays out the cards she dealt with her own hands

the year before and watches the Christmas lights

reflect on packages beneath the tree.

 

William Ogden Haynes is a poet and author of short fiction from Alabama who was born in Michigan and grew up a military brat. His first book of poetry entitled Points of Interest appeared in 2012 and a second collection of poetry and short stories Uncommon Pursuits was published in 2013. Both are available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback. He has also published over ninety poems and short stories in literary journals and his work has been anthologized multiple times.

 

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RICHARD HUGHES

 

Girl in a photograph

 

 

On a long afternoon in middle age

I pick one out of a packed envelope.

Here she is, in a bikini, lying

on sand at the end of student days.

 

White skin sets off the blue of her eyes.

A lifted leg shows the creamy pink sole

I once touched, tickled and licked.

 

Her elbows sink into the old lilo

she insisted on packing; her open

paperback rests face down on a towel.

 

The grin and mock-kiss blown at the lens

conceals a quip, shouted out of the blue.

After this, she says, one day, to you

I'll just be a girl in a photograph.

 

I flip the snap. No scribbled place or dates.

Just whiteness. The blank of our afterwards,

the void released when I blindly headed north

and she raced to London on a different track.

 

The sun-diluted Portugese skies.

Those days. The apogee of the “us”

we briefly became; that will survive,

until colours fade, paper curls and dries,

memory gets cranky, crankier.

 

The sun makes advances on her thighs.

We'll eat the peaches she saved, share

the bread while planning  tomorrow's route

southwards; then slip back to our tent

in the pine woods.

                             She smiles.

                                              And look.

Thirty years on, I'm smiling back.

 

Born and brought up in South Wales Richard Hughes has worked in education, journalism and as a second-hand book seller. In recent years he has had poems published in magazines, including Acumen, Other Poetry, The Interpreter’s House and Orbis.

 

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JENNIFER A. MCGOWAN

 

A Soldier’s Wife Rents Talland House
Talland House, St. Ives, Cornwall: a childhood home of Virginia Woolf


Sometimes
Virginia wanders through the hallways, dripping wet.
I am forced to go and take a launch
out past the point, just to get away.

Sometimes
when I return she is tucked up in front of the tv,
watching the news. Another thousand deaths
half a world away. Contaminated saline in hospitals.
People dying of thirst after floods.

I compose
another email full of empty space and nothing
in particular, wishing I could hear you above imagined choppers
and the laughing devils in sandstorms that drown.
In the garden, Virginia pockets more rocks.

 

Her Hands
 

are eloquent,
tracing in a single sign
the idea of a tent
blowing in the wind.
Sitting on a corner of the stage,
an unlit woman gives voice.

Give me more of this
silent unfolding of language dancing
centre stage for a thousand eyes.

Outside the theatre,
feet shuffle thoughtfully.
Come dawn, it is only when
our shoes draw milk from bruised stems
that we at last weep.

Jennifer A. McGowan was highly commended in the Torbay Poetry Competition and longlisted in the Over the Edge New Writer Competition last year. Her poetry has been accepted by The Connecticut Review, Agenda, Connecticut River Review, Envoi, Acumen, Gargoyle, and other magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. She has a chapbook with Finishing Line Press and another forthcoming in 2014and has been anthologised alongside the likes of Ursula K. LeGuin and Lyn Lifshin.  She is a peer reviewer for the arts page of American Journal of Nursing and a reviewer for Orbis and The North. She was featured at the Torbay Poetry Festival last year and several of her poems have been used as teaching texts at university level in the US.

 

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BRUCE MCRAE

 

Green Fields

 

The farmer spits into a straw hanky.

He’s pulling a plow when he dreams.

His mind is a seedling.

 

The farmer argues with the earth.

His weeds are a thousand choking words

impervious to toxins.

The dray horses have bolted.

 

He blows his nose on the soil’s sleeve,

nodding to the rain’s tempo,

the promise of rain, of rain threatening.

He leaps clod to clod,

togged out in rustic dungarees,

the county’s dirt-map

under his sweat-stained cap,

with a “how do ma’am” and bovine slur,

with the north winds ripening –

and his second mortgage on slurry.

 

The farmer’s book is a dry spell,

pages and pages of blowing sand

pouring in and out of a glass bowl.

Chickens remind him

of bulls and of bullshit.

The she-goat needs it,

a damned good milking.

 

All he knows of the world

is a table of green fields.

All he is able to think of

is the cycle of water.

 

 

Dreams Are For Dreamers

 

You’re telling me you never sleep.

Not in this world. And not in the next.

Via charts and diagrams

you explain sleep is a program

needlessly imprinted on the brain.

You’re saying sleep is for the sleepy,

for those who haunt the physical realm.

 

A yawn creeps in. You rub your eyes.

You continue charting the waking hours,

claiming sleep is a weakness,

detailing how the flesh gives in,

saying the body can master the mind.

 

What of dreams? Someone dares ask.

Without sleep, you answer,

dreams are seen in a whole other light.

It’s how the self lies, you say.

You’re telling us dreams are a flaw

in the make-up of humankind.

 

Your voice slurs. Your body trembles.

A student fetches a glass of water.

But you carry on, muttering feebly,

swooning, finding a chair, falling into it.

An ambulance comes. Eventually.

It rushes away . . .

 

In life, dreams find you out.

As if in death, sleep has its say.

 

Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on Youtube.

 

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JUAN PARRA

 

Against the Red Light

 

I liked Soviet cartoons.

Every time my father turned the T.V off

I would turn the T.V back on.

This struggle went on for some time. 

One minute I was laughing at the bunny ears protruding from Stalin’s hat

The next I was kneeling in front of a wooden, gleeful Christ,

Reading a bible infested with book lice.

 

It was my father’s birthday.

My mother boiled a pig’s heart

And hoarded the fat she trimmed for future celebrations.

My father spoke to his guests about the absurd

Stare of Marxism, and gave Lenin credit for inventing hunger.

 

I sat by the window, defeated

Reconciled with the darkness streaming from the T.V

Replacing it with the row of streetlamps outside,

That carried my eyes into a pitch darkness of a future

I was lucky never to walk through. 

 

Broken Sphere

 

My cat kills in my honor every morning. 

A belligerent stench crawls from the refrigerator

And plays on my nostrils with malicious glee.

A stew cooks slowly on top of a greasy, dirty grill, 

 And Sunlight filters through the cracked window blinds 

Slowly suffocating in the heavy cloud of smoke that grips the kitchen.

 

I throw a grenade in the lake and collect bits and pieces of fish for paella.

I sit in front of the mirror worrying about the thinness of my hair.  

I argue about nihilism like a true Karamazov with the termites on my book cabinet

And help ants pilfer grains of rice. My dog sits on top of her newborn cubs

Until they’re crushed, every time she gives birth.

I dig the graves; they see me sob once a year.

 

I bear a black feather, two broken families,

A friend’s bible, the memory of a lover who jabbed herself

Underneath the nails with a sewing needle, hours of heartache.

Light pollution has denied me, the pleasure of stars.

 

Juan Parra was born in Habana, Cuba, in 1985. He writes and studies at Florida International University. His work has appeared in notable reviews such as the Indiana Review and Basalt Magazine.

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Regeneration

 

In his mum’s spare room, a paper bag leaking photos.

Your fingers ache to scrabble amongst its contents for

the small boy with the Just William schemes,

the glam rocker dating two girls simultaneously,

the buccaneering biker always outwitting the bill...

Instead your faux casual I’ve found some old pictures.

 

On the sofa, he hoards the photos in his lap,

examines each snap with jeweller’s glass scrutiny,

leaving you sweating until he metes them out.

Dead father and step-mother are given faces now,

but you find that his face is often missing

from holidays at Pontins and family knees ups,

away on another, pin in the map of the world, adventure-      

 

Flashes of bouffant white dress and formal suit,

the room takes an in breath Do you want to see these?

The bravado of your I’d like to…

Signing the register, arm in arm outside the church,

with slicked back mullet and Zapata moustache,

features that drink has begun to lay waste,

Georgie Best lost boy look in the eyes,

You wouldn’t pick him out in a police line-up…

 

Your man, nearly losing limbs not to a daredevil

bike crash but arteries clogged like the M25,

exorcised the booze and fags,

won back the title of ‘big brother’

the clever mathematician 

with solutions to his siblings’ problems,

who tends his hair like a lawn,

is quite the dandy in Crombie and brogues.

So you are marrying a regenerated Dr Who.

 

Fiona Sinclair's first full collection of poetry will be published by Lapwing Press in September. She is the editor of the on line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

 

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JAYNE STANTON

 

The Dream

 

The dress is too big, trails behind.

A young girl in a green dress

held together with remnants

of others.  She trails behind.

 

I close my eyes to frame her.

She blurs in the shutter speed

of early morning till I’ve lost her.

 

TV news shrinks the distance

between dream and screen-shot

as a camera pans the trail

of refugees along a war road.

 

She is wearing the dress

like a fallen flag.  No rewind facility

can take her back, until the road,

the too-big dress, have dreamt her.

 

 

Handed Down

 

True gentlemen are them

wi’ theer own backs agean the wall when they kiss

gels who ain’t bin kissed afoor.

 

One on, one in t’wash and t’other in t’ drawer

me own Mam said, ‘n I’d ’ve said t’same t’ you,

if on’y ye’d bin my bairn.

 

Ye mother, she were luverly till she were two

’n then she were a rum little beggar.

I laid ’er on t’table on a pillow ’n I went fer t’ carpet beater. 

She sez, “What ye gunna do wi’ carpet beater, Mammy?”

’n I sez, “I’ll show ye what, ye little beggar,”

’n I tanned her backside wi’ it.

 

When ye Dad asked me if ’e could marry ’er, I sez,

“Now, then – ye sure ye can ’andle ’er?”  ’n ’e sez,

“Well, I reckon so”, ’n I sez, “Don’t just reckon so, be sure.”

 

Jayne Stanton is a poet, teacher and tutor from Leicestershire.  Her poems appear/are forthcoming in Under the Radar, Southword, Popshot, Antiphon, The Interpreter’s House, London Grip New Poetry, Obsessed with Pipework and others.  Her debut pamphlet is forthcoming from Soundswrite Press in autumn 2014. http://jaynestantonpoetry.wordpress.com/ @stantonjayne

 

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LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA

 

Damascus Dowry Chest

 

It must have been a feat to carry

up the old stone staircase

tucked into the hill,

side-stepping wild thyme and thorn bush

to reach the canopied shade of the bridal suite.

 

A rough carpenter’s hands forged it

a fortress against time and travel –

for damask silks, Indian taffetas, and embroidered velvets

buried in cool repose.

 

An old key keeps guard

like an arthritic finger,

and between folds of emerald and aquamarine

first locks of baby’s hair sleep silent,

love letters penned in hasty ink from far-flung battlefields

huddle inside its musky walls.

 

The front of the chest,

like a wedding dress,

is adorned in elegant symmetries.

Birds fan their fine plumes among roses and curling vines.

Paradise, carved meticulously,

mother-of-pearl inset into a landscape of wounds.

 

Copybooks

 

Our teachers were kind in the way that people

who have sipped tea or

shopped at the local bakery with your parents would be.

 

They taught us to stand upright

and motionless when important people

who had control over our lives walked in the room.

 

They taught us to chant at the daily

morning assembly, praises for the king and

the country and the right heroes and the

important revolutions.

They taught us so well some of us believed

the chants, drank them into our bloodstream

and loved the stick figure histories in the songs.

 

They taught us to copy

in perfect curlicues and lofty

upstrokes across the page beautiful

equations that they solved for us,

and facts about combustion and

the life cycles of honeybees.

 

Most of their teachings

served us well.

We live in the shadows of leaders’ palaces,

there are always long lines

so good posture and

deference are our currency.

 

But best of all, they taught us poetry.

They tucked gleaming verses into our hearts,

and let them sleep for years.

They said: “Remember these words, this

is where you’re from,

write this in your copybook.”

 

Time Management

 

What if you knew that it could all be taken away?

In the thin light between the dawn prayer call and

the full glow of day it could all go,

a tsunami years in the making

arrives at the shore of your life,

swallows the wrought iron and stone of your world.

 

What if you knew when your feet

shuffled in slippers to the bathroom that morning

that you would never shave again at that mirror,

never pat your chin dry with the blue towel

or ignore the crescendo of bird songs in the lemon

branches beyond the window?

 

Would you touch the walls in farewell

one last time as you ran for your life?

Would you linger over the tea, fill your

lungs up with the fragrance of the mint

floating in your cup?

 

Would you take things with you,

impractical things, that are

difficult to carry

because you’ll spend forever wanting them?

 

If you knew that on the other

side of the century

your grandchildren would only be able

to walk by your house,

only look at the paint peeling off shutters

from the street renamed,

would you run?

Would you save your life?

If you knew you’d die waiting

would you choose the long march

into oblivion

or the head-long dive?

 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes poetry and literary translation. She has lived in and travelled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing borders: cultural, geographic, political, borders between peace and war, the present and the living past. Her work has appeared in the journal Magnolia, Exit 13 magazine, Al-Ahram weekly, and the Seattle Times. Several of her poems are forthcoming in the online journal Human, based in Turkey, and in the print anthology Being Palestinian, to be published by Oxford Press in 2015. She lives with her family in Redmond, Washington, in the United States.

 

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OWEN VINCE

 

Your birthday at the resort

 

you were spared

the worst of it; the rain

beading against the windows,

pasting discarded packets

into wet mess on the street.

I wanted to urge you

into the light, outside,

the grey glimmering

between fat folds

of cloud. You turned

toward the mirror, rouging

lips pressed into a kiss

never meant to meet

other lips. A second

cigarette, the ash and smoke

only adding to the world smoke,

the silence. Blowing softly.

 

It rained on your birthday,

as if that explains

the way you turned to the wall

pulling the invisible skin

of stockings to your thigh,

snapping the teeth, baring

your mouth at it. Your tender sadness,

hard with anger.

 

Leaving, I bought

two pieces of cake

from the only shop open. A bakery

and the language barrier. I ate mine,

yours untouched. And in the morning,

forgotten on the terrace,

it had spread, heavy with the rain.

 

Owen Vince is a poet living in coastal west Wales. His work has appeared in The Lampeter Review, Butcher's Dog, and Ink, Sweat & Tears, among others. He is the editor of HARK Magazine.

 

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