2021

 

 

MARCH CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Clair Chilvers, Oz Hardwick, Alex McConochie, Ronald Moran,

Rebecca Myers, Angela Readman, Jay Sizemore, Sam Smith,

Julia Stothard, Mark Totterdell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLAIR CHILVERS

 

Bubble

 

She greets me at the gate in a cocktail dress, stiletto heels,

a green- flowered face mask, blue plastic gloves.

I wear a long skirt, a hat, and carry hand-sanitiser.

We sit at separate tables

drink pink Bollinger

eat individual dishes of blue-gloved-hand-prepared canapes.

 

Some living alone can form a bubble.

In a bubble you can touch people.

We haven’t touched for weeks

avoid meeting in the street unexpectedly

in case we come too close.

 

 

Clair Chilvers lives in Gloucestershire, UK. She has had poems published in journals including: Agenda, Allegro, Atrium, Ekphrastic Review, Impspired, Ink Sweat and Tears, Sarasvati. She won second prize in the Poetry Kit Ekphrastic Competition 2020 and her poems were longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Prize 2020.   www.clairchilverspoetry.co.uk

 

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OZ HARDWICK

 

Wolf Planet (A Beginning)

 

Ahead of schedule, we’re entering the realm of science fiction, strapping ourselves into reclining chairs, watching screens fill with a planet that looks something like the Earth we remember, but less detailed, less hospitable. Entering into the spirit of things, we adopt expressions of heroic concentration and end each sentence with Over. Who’d have thought that dystopia would be so mundane? Who’d have thought that parallel worlds would be stacked so tight that there’d be no room left to breathe? Rivers run black, and when we check the likelihood of a breathable atmosphere, the data’s inconclusive, winking digits demanding caution while confirming the lack of alternatives. Scans estimate a population of almost eight billion humans, but the only voice in our retro headsets, sizzling through static that blisters like boiling fat, is the Big Bad Wolf, suggesting last minute adjustments and promising a warm, warm welcome.

 

Sometimes the most important decisions come down to generic tropes and narrative expectations, and I momentarily consider a young girl running through a dark wood, a proud pig thatching his dream home, raising a licked anthropomorphic finger to test the weather; but we’re locked into our story like a rebel ship in a tractor beam, braced for a battle against insurmountable odds. We prepare ourselves for impact, exchanging steely smiles as the galaxy howls like a wolf. I wonder at what point I should reach for your hand.

 

Oz Hardwick is a York-based writer, photographer and musician, who has been published extensively worldwide, and has read everywhere from Glastonbury Festival to New York, via countless back rooms of pubs. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (IPSI/Recent Work, 2018) was the winning poetry collection in the 2019 Rubery International Book Awards. His latest collections are the chapbook The Lithium Codex (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2019), and the experimental prose poetry micro-novella Wolf Planet (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020). Wolf Planet is reviewed in this issue.

 

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ALEX MACCONOCHIE

 

Rootbound

 

J comes over with a spider plant, five stems

Exploding outward, glossy long leaves far too alive

 

For the one round pot. Pulls apart the tubers,

Sweet-smelling involute crackle, with bare hands,

 

Holds back the leaves while I shovel in dirt, sets

Five newly separate, tilting plants in the sink

 

Filled with warmish water half a catch-up hour,

Keeps one. Gifts a small jungle to heartbeaten me

 

And won’t hear thanks enough. Wipe sink, sweep floor,

Happy New Year’s downstairs—don’t ask which

 

Was the thirsty strong source. But plan ahead.

You’ll be splitting these too, if you treat them right.

 

Alex MacConochie currently lives and writes in Hartford, Connecticut. Alex has published poems in Meridian, Tar River Poetry, The Summerset Review, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere, and is the winner of the 2020 Nutmeg Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

After the third bourbon

 

she slumped over the bar

and was refused a fourth,

the bartender citing rules

of the house, but then

 

she raised her head, said

clearly and very loudly,

"I'm no more drunk than

you're a barroom legend!"

 

He poured one more stiff

drink for her, after which

she could not remember

where she parked the car,

 

and fell quickly into an iron

sleep in the outdoor couch

of the bar's patio, where six

months later, they married.

 

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

 

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REBECCA MYERS

 

Dancing and Cleaning

If we’d only turned the big light on to better see

our worries, we'd have laughed at what they were.

Those intruder’s threatening arms, protruding

nightly from the wardrobe? They were nothing

more than two misplaced baguettes. Those slender

necks were no peeping offenders, just some

bottles of rosé, blushing themselves, intoxicated.

Wine in the window and heaven knows what

in the pantry, but we weren’t that kind of hungry.

We’d been dancing and cleaning and sweeping

and shimmying from room to room never noticing

all of our stresses and strife had been put back

on all the wrong shelves, in the strangest of places.

Food in the bedroom, duvet on the living room

floor, three-piece suit in the freezer, a tablecloth

draped over us in our bed. Still, we slept just as

soundly regardless and while I admit all those

shapes in the shadows were frightening I’d much

rather cower in darkness with you than feel safe

on my own in the light.

 

Rebecca Myers is an emerging poet originally from Ireland, currently living in New Zealand. She comprises one half of ‘A Pair of Poets’, awarded 'Best Script' in the Nelson Fringe: Virtual Festival 2020. Her poetry has been accepted for publication by The Blue Nib, Popshot Magazine and Wine Cellar Press.

 

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ANGELA READMAN

 

Cooking with Marilyn 

 

And then I catch you, baking after midnight again, 

flour mushrooming a nuclear cloud in your hair. 

 

You are elbow-deep in a chipped bowl, digging 

to try on useful hands, fingertips dusting for prints  

of mothers all over America making dinner  

from the leftovers of their dreams.  

 

There are so many snowmen you haven’t made,  

standing on the hillside imagined lives, wives 

in floral aprons in marriages that always work. 

This is it, the loaf to save ours, the one to show me 

 

how a real wife looks. Sweat on your lip, the condensation  

of a smile, you clutch and release, clutch and let go. Tongue 

in teeth, you knead, need like men and breasts.  

I wait to be touched by powdery thumbs. And you wait,  

 

for the rise or fall, the moon at the bare window  

folding into the room. We watch the crescent  

of your wedding ring cut the dough and heal like a scar. 

 

 

The Misfits 

 

I feel you, witness my sleep, taking  

pictures with your eyes, fingertips  

stroking a smile onto my lips. 

Later, you say you do that  

to make sure I have pleasant dreams. 

 

I dream of pigtails, you dancing 

a slow dance in an alley with a man,  

another looking on. A big guy, pressed  

between desert and slow-motion sky. 

 

You sway as if born in a saddle, 

follow wild horses to lead you to a sun 

that makes itself flat enough to fit in your pocket. 

And when the cowboys lasso stallions 

you cry a mirage for miles. 

 

The desert rises, a swirl you are caught in,  

days leave orange dust on your skin 

my finger writes my name in. I wake  

and write none of this down. Not yet. 

 

Your ear is plugged into the stampede 

of my heart, it’s spoiler for how we’ll lose 

our own plot. The sky unclenches 

its fist. Rain strums the windows; 

behind the curtain Sunday gives up.  

 

You suck my little finger to open my eyes,  

ask what I’m thinking, voice pencilled in.  

I don’t know. My hand slips through clouds, 

your head on my chest hears the rain. 

 

Angela Readman's poetry collection The Book of Tides is published by Nine Arches. She also writes fiction, her novel Something like Breathing was published by And Other Stories in 2019. The poems published here are from her chapbook, Cooking with Marilyn- poems on Marilyn Monroe, (Blueprint Poetry, 2020), reviewed in this issue.

 

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JAY SIZEMORE

 

Fathoms of mourning

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times,
grief became the burden of attempting to wear
two hundred thousand veils,
and the dogs of the world, still needed walking.

No one knows how to mourn for a city,
for an ocean, they keep spooning up handfuls
to touch to their lips, only to feel guilty
standing at the shoreline, contaminated.

Imagine an earthquake, an eruption, a virus,
a president asking to strip-mine the moon
while goats invade the sleeping cities
and sea turtles lay eggs on abandoned beaches.

I have come to dread the morning, the sun,
the sloshing tide of science being ignored.

 

Jay Sizemore is the author of 15 collections of poetry. He currently lives and works near Portland, Oregon.

 

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SAM SMITH

 

Having paid heed to the whistling beat of a Raven’s wings

 

If old-fashioned religions allowed our imaginations greater scope than does the so-solid anchor of scientific probability, how close to religion now is a devotion to poetry? Poetry for many of us has become a ritualistic practise where we can confide, confess, give our inner selves free rein. And, if truly honest, we – this poet-flock of starlings, each with our cape of subtle iridescence – we have to know that the words we so carefully arrange on screen or paper won't change the world, only ourselves. Our many selves, multiple lives vicariously lived. In some of those lives we may have claimed to be agnostic, yet still we hang onto our need to deify. Which now has us, on occasion, surprised that those poets we have raised up on pedestals continue to do ordinary things, like eat and clean their teeth.

 

Sam Smith is editor of The Journal magazine and publisher of Original Plus books. Author of several novels and collections of poetry, he presently lives in Blaengarw, South Wales. 

http://sites.google.com/site/samsmiththejournal/ 

 

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JULIA STOTHARD

 

The Meadow

 

Beyond the fringe of us,

the brambles learn

to link their arms

and dance in ribbons,

the honeysuckle

rests its head

on the hawthorn

and the choral warm-up

chirping out

its practice notes,

composes reasons

to be here.

 

The land begins

to own us,

growing thistles

between our heels

and bending us

into the searing sun

with our eyes reflecting

the flicker of wings,

fine tendrils

stitching our lips

into silence.

 

All the eyes on us

are waiting

for the flattened earth

to spring back

into its intonation,

for our tone-deaf feet

to chant their leave.

Cluttered with burrs

and pollen-dusted,

we emerge

from amongst the trees

with the meadow

threaded right through us.

 

 

Gains

 

Our house becomes bigger

when the money runs small.

 

We turn the heat down

but the ghosts complain bitterly;

 

they spread their bad luck,

leaving letters on the mat.

 

We scatter promises on hard ground

but no-one is fooled.

 

There are other plans too.

We make dresses for dolls,

 

talk in millions, of winning

the lottery we never play.

 

Draughts close doors behind us

and we rock up somewhere new,

 

somewhere smaller, where

the rooms expand day by day.

 

Julia Stothard is a data analyst living in Surrey. Her poems have appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears, South Poetry, Obsessed with Pipework and The Frogmore Papers.

 

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MARK TOTTERDELL

 

Dinosaurs

 

You’ve heard the old story;
how a mighty rock
smote all the big dumb
lumbering peabrains,
how they perished in a fiery hell.

Here’s the new version.
Some had already
gone small and sharp-faced,
grown coats of many colours.
They ducked destruction,
inherited the air.

Tiny dinosaurs are everywhere.
One’s singing like an angel
on a twig outside my window now.

 

Obliquely

 

The deft brown blackbird

with her watchful eyes

always leaves obliquely,

a zig up to the wet slate roof,

a zag behind the bushes,

so we can’t know

where her heart is,

not I, nor the thug

in his coat of pearl and coal.

 

Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines in the UK and have occasionally won competitions. His collections are This Patter of Traces (OverstePs Books, 2014) and Mapping (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2018). http://www.indigodreams.co.uk/mark-totterdell/4594336680
 

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