2025

 

 

FEBRUARY

 

 

Pratibha Castle, Christian Emecheta, Diana MacKinnon Henning, Jacqueline Jules,

John K. Kruschke, Beth McDonough, Yvonne Morris, Charlie Pettigrew, Kenneth Pobo, Marilyn Ricci, Richard Stimac, Kate Young.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRATIBHA CASTLE

 

Padraig – Who Drove the Snakes Out of Ireland

 

At the allotment, the Daddy forked the crumbly black earth 

till the air quaked with anticipation of excess, me 

sifting stones in search of treasure; the robin sat, pert,

on the lip of a bucket which was meant to carry spuds 

or cabbages, the occasional giggle-tickle carrot back 

to placate the mammy. 

 

The bird’s eye bright with a lust for worms, his song 

a cataract of merry, though none of the seeds we sowed 

ever showed head out of the sly earth and we saw 

nothing of the slow worm daddy promised, so that,

his name being Padraig too, I guessed he must be a saint,

especially when he himself vanished. 

 

Though he turned up months later at the end of school 

again and again and again ‘til I had to tell the Mammy 

where the books and toys came from. That got me sent off 

to board at St. Bridget’s where the head nun was nice 

if your mammy gave her fruit cake in a tin, bottles of orange

linctus sherry, a crocheted shawl like frothy cobwebs,

 

none of which my mammy could afford,

Padraig having banished more than snakes.

especially when he himself vanished. 

 

Pratibha Castle, Irish born, lives in West Sussex. Widely published, her work has been acknowledged in numerous competitions including Live Canon Single Poem, Southwords pamphlet competitions, Sonnet or Not and the Bridport Prize. Her second pamphlet Miniskirts in The Waste Land was a PBS winter selection 2023. Her full collection is forthcoming.

 

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CHRISTIAN EMECHETA

 

the return

 

every year, the river swells,

swallows the banks,

and spits them back

changed.

the mud remembers

the shape of its leaving,

but the water insists

on forgetting.

 

standing at the edge,

my feet begin to sink into the silt,

while I think of all the ways

we return to ourselves;

not whole, but reformed.

the way a scar remembers

the knife,

but not the pain.

 

change doesn’t travel a linear path.

it moves in spirals,

a folding in and out,

a return to the source

that don’t occur

twice.

 

the river has a voice, it says,

you are not who you were,

but you are someone better.

I wade in, let the current pull me

toward the next

layers of myself.

 

Christian Emecheta is a writer, illustrator, and computer scientist. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many online publications and magazines such as Arts Lounge Magazine, Writefluence Anthology, Synchronized Chaos Journal, The Decolonial Passage, Mocking Owl Roost, and elsewhere. He enjoys reading, watching movies, and getting lost in his imagination.

 

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DIANA MACKINNON HENNING

 

From the Northeast Kingdon

 

1

When the black bear skin hung from the tree,

flapped like a rug drying on the clothesline,

 

the hunter recounted how he started an incision

below the anus, cut upward to the head,

 

stopped at the mouth’s corners. From the rear paws

I cut to the elbow, crossed to the chest incision,

 

all the while his voice razzed the youngster who watched,

Are you sickward, Child? It wasn’t until he

 

got to the head that fuzziness rocked her.

Between kerosene kerplunking into the cook

 

stove, and her grandfather’s graveled voice,

she silently wept for the ears turned

 

inside out, pressed back. The bear’s

 

2

life spoke to her of fresh droplets

coating his fur tips, and the scent of blackberries rose.

 

Inside his berry thicket, paws reach for vines,

and he pulls leaves, thorns, berries towards him,

 

meshing them into his mouth—such sweetness,

and only when he satiates himself,

 

turning in his dark poetic cape does the hunter

bring him down—a moment of beauty and taste

 

supremely merged, and he falls, as only a black bear falls, king

of his forested kingdom, crowned by the rainfall.

 

 

Old age drives up in a renovate Greyhound,

with an expired license plate,Hop in, says the driver.

 

There are other people already rounded up,

slouched on chipped, bruised benches,looking

 like old field maps to the Strange.

 

Where are we going? I ask the others,

but they glance down at their folded hands

with puzzlement, with sleepy indifference.

 

I bite my lower lip as proof I’m still alive.

I might be old but remain defiant as hell

and won’t be carted off without explanations.

 

Who knows where we’re going? I ask

the bearded man across from me who strokes

his hearing aid like a man rubbing his dog’s ear.

 

Passengers shoot me their Nerve of You, frowns.

(Something I’ve grown accustomed to.)

The truck bounces down the pot-holed road.

 

We pass clapboard homes with patriotic flags,

flapping like destiny’s wings, chickens pecking soil.

I want to blow my nose, but have no Kleenex.

 

I tap my fingers into a tango—while the sedate

passengers, their hands at peace, stare out windows.

Leaves somersault air. I ride inside the life I’ve led.

 

Diana MacKinnon Henning. Nine-time Pushcart Nominee and awarded Eastern Washington University’s Fellowship to the Dublin Writers’ Center. Dianna taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program where she worked at the infamous Folsom Prison. Publications, in part: The Tule Review; California Quarterly; That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Poetry & prose by artists teaching in carceral institutions, New Village Press, 2023. Poet News; Voices; Red Rock Review; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Artemis Journal, 2021, 2022, 2023 and The Adirondack Review. Latest nomination for a Pushcart 2024 by Blue Heron Review. ‘From the North East Kingdom’ was published in the Naugatuck Review, Spring 2019.

 

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JACQUELINE JULES

 

An Image So Bright

 

The sun knocked on my window

today, calling me to leave my desk

and visit the seagulls at the pier.

 

They are screeching.

Angry too, at bombs in Ukraine,

a Black man beaten at a traffic stop,

the daily toll of disease.

 

So many bury their dead

while I watch two ducks glide

side by side in the sunshine. 

 

A man parks his red bike nearby

and lights a cigarette.

 

His smoke floats over my bench.

 

No moment is pure.

 

Yet my legs carried me here, two miles,

where I lift my phone to an image so bright,

I can’t see the view I’m clicking.

 

It can’t be captured.

 

This sun dropping stars in the water.

The shimmering presence of pain

and joy beneath a feather-filled sky.

 

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

 

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JOHN K. KRUSCHKE

 

Open Mic Night

 

The poet steps up to the mic,
looks at us in the audience,
then reaches deep inside
and pulls out
a seashell,
twisted with finger-thick whorls,
lined with life ridges
and broken heart spires.
Cradling their seashell in their upturned hand,
the poet opens their mouth and exhales:

 

I can almost hear the ocean.

 

People lean forward
and cock their heads,
then lift their cupped hands
behind their ears.
I examine my hands
for cuppability,
and notice my palms
with fingerprints whorled,
life-lines ridged
and heart-lines broken.
I cradle these palms behind my ears
to amplify the poet’s keening.
But gradually
I turn my clam-shell hands
to cover my ears completely:

 

and now I hear the ocean.

 

The Power of Poetry for Climate Change

 

When you consider
the carbon footprint
of butt sitting,

 

manufacturing text for hours, flushing
wasted words up the delete-key smokestack
while the glaciers and ice caps melt,

 

then you realize
this poem has
enormous power for change

 

because the depth of its impact
is how much
it made the oceans rise.

 

John K. Kruschke has poems published or accepted in Blue Unicorn, Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, Stickman Review, Flying Island Literary Journal, Discretionary Love, Grand Little Things, The Tipton Poetry Journal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Pine Hills Review, and Sage Magazine (x 4), along with 25 quatrains as chapter epigraphs. He has also published numerous articles in scientific journals on topics ranging across moral psychology, learning theory, and Bayesian statistics. He is Provost Professor Emeritus at Indiana University in Bloomington. johnkruschke.com/poems.html

 

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BETH MCDONOUGH

 

Golden Apple 1
 

Cord your days, plait them between places,
knot them to where you didn't quite intend to go.
Travel drum-down dual carriageways, trunk roads,
accept sat-nav demands. Pass grime-plated plates, banked
cars with 'police aware' notes, diversions, delays,

tail-gated flyovers, underpass chaos, signs, signs.

 

Glimpse litter drift lay-bys, hurled carry-out verges,
matters caught up in taut thickets, flagged blackthorn,
turned feral enough to argue with winds, to spit
rain-bloated sloes, split to their pits for fumed flies.
October's long gone, ripping leaves from the dog rose,
and planters' intentions just snag bad news, then gold

 

lights the first frost from the hard shoulder. One
apple tree, grown from some chuckaway core.
Huge-fruited, light-bulbing colours.
Inedible splendour, which no-one planted,

no-one picks, no-one prunes, is now allowed
to fry in the cold, brilliant through twistings of dirt.

 

 

Wakened by the screaming of all those foxes she could not hear,

 

mislaid arias severed night, which rifled
that caverned sleep beside her,
thin air tripped them into fast action. He clipped the window
tight, tried to contain that hot September's black,
and count out all the melted coins of noise
minted by invisible foxes she couldn't hear.

 

All the circling foxes' sounds she failed to hear
marked their strange place around. A braided path,
some current's long-passed track, carved in the river bed.
These couldn't be voices of the posed and poised, lank
unorthodox foxes, lounged on synagogue grounds,
but the squalling, brawling foxes she couldn't hear.

 

Foxes, whose voices she had to blot, which screamed
beyond houses, quested, stressed from their unseen den

which must be near, and still be unknown.
Crying the blanked news of suburban foxes,
backlit by the hairst's great moon. Calling of what?

Of loss? Of what she should not hear to comprehend?

 

Dundee-based Beth McDonough co-hosts Fife's Platform Sessions. Her pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word. Makar of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) in 2022, she's working on a hybrid project on outdoor swimming, and a collaborative collection with Nikki Robson.

 

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YVONNE MORRIS

 

Floodlight

 

The moon’s blank tambourine

amplifies the drizzle’s guitar—

 

fragile droplets bruised become

sunlit wires of rain. The rising

 

world finds ruined fountains,

broken stonework converted

 

to carry running streams.

The wounded sleep to dream

 

again, when the day’s pain

assembles then disbands.

 

Loss stretches forward

to its instruments, unpacks

 

the stars, unravels the tide.

Morning pools the night.

 

Yvonne Morris is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: Busy Being Eve (Bass Clef Books, 2022) and Mother Was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Swannanoa Review, The Main Street Rag, The Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Kentucky. ‘Floodlight’ Previously published in As It Ought to Be, March 2023.

 

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CHARLIE PETTIGREW

 

The Old Callan Bridge

 

Memory

Below, a delta of pebbles,

across whose colours, white and brown,

indolent minnows glide,

dazzled by the translucence of a summer’s day.

 

The noisy river, now shallow

and limpid in the light, eddies

in the dark, stilted arches,

that echo, oracular and mysterious,

to the chants of children down the years.

 

Art

In John Luke's painting,

the bridge is a stone drumlin, melding

into a landscape of lush topiary-

green, billowy trees and hedges.

Nature, groomed and benign.

 

The scene is a summery idyll,

where children and their dogs

play, run or laze in the sun’s warmth.

A prelapsarian pastoral of innocence,

painted in 1945.

 

Perception

I have stored this picture in my mind’s eye,

since art and my childhood first intersected:

the eggshell sheen of its tempera skin,

the goldfinch colours of the children’s clothes,

the defiant optimism of its narrative.

 

It is a world far removed from my experience,

of dog rose, hawthorn, blackberries,

scabbed knees from the thorny hedgerows

and the bridge’s weathered, rough stone-

centuries old, pockmarked, and craggy.

 

But I admire Luke’s deception.

A longing, in a time of war and horror,

to make numinous an ordinary summer’s day.

This I saw and cherished. The impulse of art

to be both a mirror and an emanation.

 

Charlie Pettigrew is a retired teacher, originally from N.Ireland, now living in Barcelona. He has had poems accepted in literary magazines, journals and poetry festivals in Ireland, the UK and the US. His poetry reflects both his former life in Ireland and his new home in Spain.

 

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KENNETH POBO

 

Town With Lakes

 

Much has changed in St. Germain, Wisconsin.

The lakes change too, slowly, as old trees fall.

We’d eat at Eliason’s, now long gone.

Much has changed in St. Germain, Wisconsin--

I visit, unsure of what town I’m in.

My childhood there died yet I still feel small.

Much has changed in St. Germain, Wisconsin.

The lakes change too, slowly, as old trees fall.

 

At Milly’s Diner

 

I’m wearing a lavender tie-dyed shirt.

From the counter, someone sneers “Are you gay?”

His angry eyes say that I’m less than dirt.

I’m wearing a lavender tie-dyed shirt—

some can only relax when they cause hurt.

His beard, like his shirt, is dishwater gray.

I’m wearing a lavender tie-dyed shirt.

From the counter, someone sneers “Are you gay?”

 

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections.  Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press) and Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers). His work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere. 

 

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MARILYN RICCI

 

Raymond Foster

 

Aged four, with me at the childminder’s, Raymond Foster

is under the table always sniffing and only the smell 

of beef stew and jam roly-poly drags him up.

 

Aged eleven, in the school hall for country dancing, Miss 

puts on the Gay Gordons and I get a whiff of Raymond Foster 

before he arrives holding out black fingernails and snotty cuffs.

 

When he puts his arm over my shoulder, the stink from his armpit 

makes me want to gag. But we stand together, me and Raymond,

and: forwards two, three, four; back two, three, four: a couple 

of council estate kids expected to stay in the same place.

 

I hope you moved on, Raymond Foster, and kept your nose clean.

 

Marilyn Ricci is a poet and editor living in Leicestershire, UK. Her poetry has appeared in many magazines. Her first pamphlet was published by HappenStance Press and further collections have come from SoundsWrite Press and Quirky Press. She was one of three poets selected for Mariscat Press’s first Sampler pamphlet.

 

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RICHARD STIMAC

 

Moon

 

Who doesn’t love poems about the moon?

Or verse on constellations of the stars?

Even atheists read poems on heaven.

Materialists grow tired of the earth.

Things like sick children, bills, wars lack the gravity

to turn our eyes from shadows to the sun.

 

I go to the park in summer and sun

myself to golden brown, and love to moon

over fantasies of peace, like the stars,

there, but hidden in the day, as if heaven

were nothing more than to lay on the earth

and let my body bear the weight of gravity.

 

I’ve read there’s only consensus on gravity,

sole effect, no proof. It seems the sun

bends our space and our time more than the moon.

Size, not distance, gives power to our stars.

That’s how it is with everything in heaven:

it’s we who give weight to the things on earth.

 

If angels, in fact, did visit the earth,

they’d find in us a lack of classic gravity,

we, who think we’ve seen all under the sun,

and, Christ’s sake, nothing new under the moon.

We measure life with pop charts, movie stars,

clothing store sales. Consumption is our heaven.

 

When I buy quinoa at The Gate of Heaven,

an old hippy store, once called Sacred Earth,

the store clerk, long white beard, spine bent by gravity,

always tells me, “Be grateful for the sun.”

That’s it. Never, “Be grateful for the moon.”

He nurtures a prejudice for the stars

 

in me. I prefer the moon over stars.

Honestly, I favor earth over heaven,

though, in familiarity, the earth

is more like prose, the words with too much gravity.

Not poetry, where words hide from the sun,

give meaning like the shadow of the moon.

 

I love the moon over the stars in heaven,

earth over the gravity of the sun.

 

Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), two poetry chapbooks, and one flash fiction chapbook. In his work, Richard explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region. ‘Moon’ will appear in a moon-themed anthology published by Spartan Press (https://spartanpresskc.com/) later in 2025.

 

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KATE YOUNG

 

Cooking up a Rainbow

 

Ingredients aligned on the kitchen side –

silver-tongued knife, a pestle and mortar

stony faced, speckled, expectant.

 

He grates rose petals with rusted flakes

from an iron gate, combines with passion,

careful to separate from ferric of blood.

 

His palm sinks orange flesh on the dome.

He inhales the scent of juice and joy

like a small boy squeezing the zest from July.

 

Yellow slips through fingers, its oily film

clinging to skin like a buttercup held beneath a chin

or sunshine spread on dampened sand.

 

He sifts the clippings of a new-mown lawn

with mint and the glint of a black cat’s eye,

the assault on his nostrils an ambush.

 

Lifting the spoon, he stirs a blue sky

into solitude, listens to Gershwin’s calm

and feels the rise of it soaking his bones.

 

It is April; he remembers a church, indigo cloth

like the bruise on her womb that consumed her.

He tastes it, accepts the clot on his tongue.

 

He adds Parma violet and hyacinth scent

to sweeten the sour –it cloys on teeth.

It is complete, he is pleased with the bake.

 

Standing back, he waits for the arc to rise

dyes blending with steam-filled lungs.

He drinks it in, feels fizz in his belly.

 

Kate Young’s poetry has appeared in journals and online. It was also included in Places of

Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School

Gate have been published with Hedgehog Press. Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her

website kateyoungpoet.co.uk

 

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