2019

 

 

 

JUNE CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Joe Balaz, David Callin, Kitty Coles, Leslie Dianne, Deirdre Hines, Luke Johnson,

 Jack Little, Beth McDonough, Katerina Neocleous, Roger Sipple.

 

 

 

 

JOE BALAZ

 

Maritime Mission

 

I’ve been shipbuilding

foa some time now—

 

I even got wun fleet in mind

 

and at da moment da vanguard vessel

is making its way through da waves.

 

 

Previously breaking

 

da imaginary bottle of champagne

on its bow                                                                

 

I watched

as it wuz launched into da sea.

 

 

No great announcement.

No fanfare.

 

No sticking out my chest

at da achievement

 

even dough I’m pleased

wit da accomplishment.

 

 

I’ve heard of many wrecks

ovah da years.

 

Egos and prideful craft

have been sent to da depths

 

wit wun good amount of regularity.

 

 

Tink of all da captains

wit dere sterns up in da air

 

before dey slid beneath da surface.

 

 

In light of dat

 

I no need wear

any golden epaulets on my shoulders

 

to heighten my position.                    

 

 

Standing on da bridge

wit casual attire

 

is alright wit me.

 

 

I’ll just wait

until dis voyage is complete

 

and all da ropes have been fastened

to da dock.

 

 

In da interim

being cool until I get dere

 

is da way

dis successful journey will be.

 

Joe Balaz has created works in American English and Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole English).

He presently lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and he is the author of Pidgin Eye

 

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DAVID CALLIN

 

Poor Robin

 

It is a beautiful evening
in Burbank, California.
You are wearing tights,

yellow ones -
seagull legs;
a spiffy little cape.

Your gloves look like
your father's driving gloves.
You are the boy wonder,

masked apprentice
to a master crime buster.
Holy novitiate, Batman.

The California starlight
creeps over the chilly hillside.
Someone checks your make-up,

everything is happening
around you, but you go
when they say go,

into the secret hide-out
to thwart a startled villain,
his stooges and his buxom associate:

cornered and remorseful,
she stands sideways with aplomb,
coveting your virtuous underpants.

After the stylised fisticuffs,
the illustrated mayhem,
the blammos and kapows,

will you unmask
in a modest caravan
and wonder what's ahead?

There will be more roles.
They will grow smaller,
and no one will see them.

This is it, all of it, now.
You'll never grow old.
You are the boy wonder.

 

DNA testing has recently shown that David Callin is barely half as Manx as he thought he was, his father's genes having moved to the Island from Scotland between 1150 and 1300. (So, about dinnertime, then, by our reckoning.) He has higher hopes of his mother's side of the family, who must have been Vikings, or at least have come to some sort of understanding with them.

 

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KITTY COLES

 

Cache

 

When we’re quiet, this house

shuffles and sighs,

a great beast soothing itself into shallow sleep.

 

Sometimes, when we talk,

I hear the woodwork groan

or faint sobs easing themselves from under the plaster.

 

Walking across the landing,

I feel the attic

crease up its face in a snickering length of grin.

 

The chimney is fleecy with soot, its throat

unclean,

but hung inside

 

is the heart of a calf stuck

through with thorns, dried hard.

It’s safe in the dark,

 

a secret,

embalmed by smoke,

shrunk tight as it draws its net

 

around the walls, through the fabric

of the building.

Wings beat – as it once beat – in every corner.

 

Kitty Coles’ poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for the Forward Prize and Best of the Net. She was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, was published in 2017. www.kittyrcoles.com

 

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LESLIE DIANNE

 

How I Rob From Strangers

 

On 7th Avenue

words punch

me in the arm

this is why

and then

he said

I’m mad

no more

not me

hello hello hello

are you there?

 

I bump into bodies

and bounce away

waves of sound

penetrate my skin

and I jump back

into my own space

and move on

 

Later I shake

words out through

my fingers

onto the page

and create a

a poem

a song

a play

this is how

I rob from

strangers

and steal

their days

 

Leslie Dianne is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and performer. Her work has been acclaimed internationally at the Harrogate Fringe Festival in Great Britain, The International Arts Festival in Tuscany, Italy and at La Mama in NYC. Her poems appear in Vita Brevis, Ink and Voices and Rue Scribe.

 

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 DEIRDRE HINES

 

The Immortalists.   

 

and they were waiting- when i dived into the wave's tunnel,

twelve jellyfish, a bloom, ballooning their skirts, their thousand tails

like broken kites blown by bladderwrack wind. Once woken,

they moved like one mind around my larval shape, touching one leg,

then the other, until i had to dive under again to swim beyond swarm,

when in the frisson of that marbling gateway, i stilled,

bobbing with the tide from left to right, like that game

i used to play where i stared into the mirror

and yelled in rising crescendoes ' You will do everything I command!'

swinging the silver chain until one of us succumbed, or lost

their voice, and knelt in defeat. The sky's gathering grey

darkened into ink blot, while their mothers ran helter-skelter

from towel to child to spade. But they were still beneath the wave,

the largest one watching the smallest ones touch the landfall

of my Medusa in their midst. And this was foretelling

of all the fabulisms to come, this was eternal covenant

between what was beneath and below instead of

reigning from above. This was our first journey,

in the waters of the seas of Ballybunion, twelve jellyfish,

a bloom, where the immortalists in me first

transformed from adult to child to adult

in wilt and bloom and blossom-

 

Transdifferentiation: Transformation from an adult medusa back into a polyp. The immortal jellyfish, or Turritopsis dohrnii, can do this.

 

 

Deirdre Hines is an award-winning poet and playwright. Her first book of poems The Language of Coats

includes the poems which won The Listowel Collection Poetry Prize 2011, and is published by New Island

Books. Other awards include The Stewart Parker Award for Best New Play for Howling Moons, Silent Sons, Several Arts Council Grants, and most recently being shortlisted in The Patrick Kavanagh Award ( 2010) and The Allingham Poetry Prize( 2018). New poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, Crannóg, Three Drops from a Cauldron Beltane Special, The Bombay Review, Boyne Berries and elsewhere. She sits on the organisational committee of North West Words. An experienced creative writing facilitator she can be contacted at deirdrehines@hotmail.com

 

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LUKE JOHNSON

 

WTR

to Dad, Uncle K, Fred and a few others

 

My father

flips flapjacks

from a gas grill,

 

while a few

of his friends
 

pass a joint 

and bullshit stories

from the seventies.

 

I’m sitting

by the remains

of last night’s fire,

 

listening to

smoldering mesquite

crawl deeper into dirt

 

its sizzle

like the grill
 

as it spits

and pops batter back

from dad’s fingers.

 

Every so often

I rummage

through ruins

of charred bark

 

to rediscover 

a blue flame

riffing like a flag.

 

I hover my hand

above it,

smile

 

as a blister

forms to an island

in the center of a scar. 
 

 

Dad dances plates 

of eggs and flapjacks

to the table,

 

rocking hillbilly hips

to Clapton’s contagious solo.

 

He says: Come sit son, 

here, by me, my beautiful boy,
 

moving a wrinkled

stack of Playboys 

and a few bottles of Beam.

 

I rise to my feet

like white trash royalty,

demand they serve me my meal.

 

Luke Johnson's chapbook, :boys, is forthcoming from Blue Horse Press. He was a Finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, and his poems can be found at American Journal of Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, Connotation, Cultural Weekly, Greensboro Review, Narrative, Nimrod, Tinderbox and others.  https://lukethepoet.ninja/  “WTR” originally published in Greensboro Review, 2016.

 

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JACK LITTLE

 

Today, an unspoken truth became evident

 

Thursday slackens to a putrid orange.

Sickly honey air yellows the cuffs,

reddens the city’s deep guts outwards

glistening their shame-made forest fires.

 

Cosmic particulates are cancerous and rotten

licking at our greedy lungs, not an Arctic ice cap

a whole universe away – this time, they breach

my aveoli, a stinging recoil in my own eyes,

 

inflamed and dry. They stroke our infant son’s throat,

cleaving sweet future-notes from his voice box,

the smog withering leaves beyond his window pane,

their castigation something I cannot rationalise

 

what we witnessed today together,

the slow death of paradise.

 

NOTE: All of the schools in Mexico City were closed by the government on May the 16th and 17^th 2019 due to the extremely high levels of pollution in the air. Officials recommended the population to stay at home and to close all doors and windows.

 

Jack Little (b. 1987) is a British-Mexican poet, editor and translator based in Mexico City. He is the author of Elsewhere (Eyewear, 2015) and is the founding editor of The Ofi Press.  @JLittleMexico   

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

Bridge to the unexpecting

A sideways curve, just humped above rail lines.
Whilst biking,  perhaps weather,  and trains'
passing rattling vibrations might hide
warning growls from all oncoming cars.

No-one knows really what's over the bridge.
Wind slap. Two ships. One flag. Or a collision.
This minute whites out in Hebrides' sand,
wide-stranded at low tide. Which is a lie,

but a good one. Live in November-low light,
wind whiffs the Firth's strange surface play with rips.
A danced interaction with surface currents and tides,
plus deeper devices this Tay only just hides.

Three days into the moon's fresh life,
some other woman may cross this same bridge,
unaware of how waters have ridden
rubbling stones, to leave just a tiny dark beach.

She may find herself, dared by late autumn sun,
oddly warm, staring out pallor. She may wonder
how she cycled to Barra. Or, after lunch
she'll arrive at yet another unearthed place.

 

 

Burnmouth
 

Just watch as she statues out
over the rat-crack breakwater.
 

Above her hat, gull clouds. Write shorthand.
Thin shapes to liar colouring book lines.

Wind rips into everything,
gores every sound but its own.

Her waterpump arm
semaphores something at tides.

Nothing in the vicious sea answers.

If you feel the sleet now, just turn.

 

Beth McDonough’s poetry appears in Causeway, Gutter and elsewhere; she reviews in DURA. Handfast (with Ruth Aylett) explores dementia and autism. A pamphlet is coming...

 

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KATERINA NEOCLEOUS

 

Vow

 

Love can wait as rocks weathering the seasons

or as continents advance, subtle but sure;

just as time forces down primeval foliage

into coal, beneath the burnt gorse on the hill.

 

The way an aged tree in new leaf reaches out

or like Saturn undertaking that long road

unerringly around the Sun again, patient

the way a forgotten idol buried for aeons

 

under the foxes den and ancient barrow

 - with alien words none can decipher

for they are all gone - waits for one raindrop

to find its emerald tongue of fire and ore.

 

First Dreams

 

A lily's brittle parts

are pressed into the

pristine pages of a book,

sealed with childish

warnings not to look.

 

These are the first dreams,

when the ancestors would visit.

From the spine, a wingless

moth makes a parenthesis

as it creeps across.

 

Katerina Neocleous has recently become assistant editor of the poetry journal, Obsessed With Pipework. She has been published in various magazines and anthologies; and has two pamphlets forthcoming in late 2019: from Flarestack/ OWP, and from Maytree Press. For more information please visit her at visionsfromhell.wordpress.com

 

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ROGER SIPPL

 

The Sweater

 

The doctors tell me the main tumor

in my chest is the size of a softball.

She uses a double strand of yarn

 

and thin knitting needles so the arms and walls

to cover my chest and back will be thick.

There are more in my bronchial system,

 

my neck, below my diaphragm, and maybe

in my spleen. The sweater will warm me

even in the wind. She had to do Catholic

 

Penance, a mother’s labor, she repeats

non-stop clicks with yarn, mostly acrylic,

so it can’t be eaten and

 

will never decay. She says it is her

fault. She should have stopped me from

sneaking onto that stupid golf course at night, swimming

 

with mosquitoes, diving the black lake for lost balls

through industrial fertilizer and green dyes, as if

she knows what caused my lymph node cancer

 

when no one else does. She tries to cure me, feels

my forehead, clicks the needles together again

and again until her fingers hurt and wrists ache

 

and she can hardly stand up from sitting so long.

So I tell her that leaves on trees blow left

then right, some rattle and flip,

 

some move hardly at all, yet some are first to fall

to the ground. I tell her the sweater

is coming along great as she watches me lose

 

weight lying in bed. The needles click as she approaches

another threshold of pain that relieves her.

 

 

So Many Stars

 

Henry Mancini opened the show, and played piano

with a full orchestra of Hollywood studio musicians,

some brass, but mostly violins, cellos and bass,

pouring out his movie-sweet love songs,

filling the outdoor Greek Amphitheater with clear simple syrup.

 

The glycerin of Moon River’s major chords,

found a spillway down the bluffs to the flat river-delta floor

and fingered up the streets

to cover the point lights, people and cars

of Los Angeles with this studio-commissioned

theme that he played from his author’s memory,

convincing me that he wrote it for himself after all.

The ooze deepened, too clear to be seen and so dense

that it slowed down time in the LA basin

and the surrounding hills.

 

Lani Hall was next, singing with Sergio Mendez

and his jazz band, seductively in her native-looking role,

as if she were eighteen again, unmarried, back in a Brazilian bar

looking and longing for a new lover.

She sang Mas Que Nada synchronously alongside a long-legged Latin beauty,

both in the same black, one-shoulder-free, one-strap dresses,

attacking each note together in one doubled voice.

 

You sat next to me at that concert

above the big valley of former farmland,

southern, warm-night lovely, young in love and locked

in that moment for sure

as music was your primary medium.

 

You could stretch your own songs from

high alto to true soprano and I wished to hear

your full, slow and rounded tones with no separate vibrations

revealed by your shy captive voice.

 

Lani finally sang So Many Stars—

 

Which one to choose,

which way to go, how can I tell
how will I know, out of, oh,

so many stars, so many stars?

 

And so many stars

were, my dear, offering above

all futures, but Lani sang of our just one choice—

so, given the breadth of our future and our velocity going through it

 

                   our chances together were humble and slight.

 

We looked up at our real stars from within her song,

not stoned, too young to drink even,

interlacing fingers, my arm inside of yours,

and you pressed against me like a drug, my drug, and

the mental image of the above shutter-clicked for my lifetime

of not knowing whether to forever choose

or to take the risk, with time slowed down as it was,

to tease the fabric of the black part of the sky into strings,

and use more than one thread

to choose more than one star,

including the one that would come back to you singing your choices

and chance to find you, after all,

 

          with some version of me.

 

Roger Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and Stanford Continuing Studies. He’s been published in a few dozen literary journals and anthologies, including the Ocean State Review and the Bacopa Literary Review. Before that he was a pre-med who survived Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which changed everything. www.rogersippl.com “The Sweater” was first published in the Ocean State Review, 2016, and “So Many Stars” was first published in Open Thought Vortex, 2017.

 

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