2017

 

 

 

MAY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Jean Atkin, Devon Balwit, Ben Banyard, Fred Dale, Robert Halleck, Nels Hanson,

Michael Lauchlan, Angela Readman, Jo-Ella Sarich, Robin Lindsay Wilson,

 Rodney Wood, Jim Zola.

 

 

 

 

 

JEAN ATKIN

 

In The Tack Room
14th November 1916

 

For instance, the slow

Sunday to Sunday

dust of the tack room. 

The noise your boots still make

on split clay tiles, ingrained

with all this slow week’s slaw

of soil and sadness.

 

All the empty bridles  

on their pegs

don’t change a thing.

Nor bits that dangle

alone on nails:

snaffle, jointed

snaffle, curb.

 

the honest, incorruptible

horses

 

What works is work. 

You lift the stiffening

leather down. 

Twist off the tin lid,

grease the reins that slip

through your hands,

smooth as a telegram.  

 

You watch the yellow

saddlesoap turn dark

the creases

of your palms,

clog heart-line, head-line,

life-line.

You left it lying

on the dresser

in the hall.

 

will always

remember then the breath

of a horse’s whicker 

through the tack room wall

 

 

Jean Atkin’s collection Not Lost Since Last Time is published by Oversteps Books and she has also published five poetry pamphlets and a children’s novel.  Her poems have won various prizes and recent work appears in Magma, Envoi, The North, Earthlines and The Moth.  She has held many residencies in both England and Scotland, and works in education and community projects.  www.jeanatkin.com  @wordsparks

 

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DEVON BALWIT

 

War Zone

 

The gas masks throw everyone

          at first. Even the corpses

 

prefer not to wear them, wanting

          the clouds directly

         

in their eye sockets, the ravens’ beaks

          tapping their grins. 

 

Then, there are the rocks, mounded

          and nubile, awakening

 

a lust that can only be spent alone

          amidst night-scrabbling

 

vermin. The signposts cast gallows-shadows,

          while the trees, blasted

 

to stumps, loom over the roadside

          like king-clagged dolmens. 

 

We hunch and hunch again. Finally,

          what of the baby

 

beneath the end table, both abandoned

          luxuries, not afforded by war? 

 

You can scavenge either if you wish; no one

          will hold it against you.

 

(after Frantisek Muzika’s Listal)

 

 

Devon Balwit has published two chapbooks: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press) & Forms Most Marvelous (forthcoming with dancing girl press). Her poems have found many homes, among them: Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Peacock Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Stillwater Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Red Earth Review, Aeolian Harp Folio Anthology, and The Inflectionist Review. She lives with her family in Portland, OR

 

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BEN BANYARD

 

First Aid

 

We’re here as a minimum requirement.

Six hours to learn to help colleagues.

 

Pop a bandage or sling on,

run a burn under the tap;

in an office, there are few hazards.

 

But our instructor is ex-Army;

 

His smashed nose implies

he’s seen things - real gushers and gapers.

 

He keeps a defibrillator at his rural home

and one in the boot of his car because he knows.

 

Leave the tourniquet on or the potassium

building in the limb will destroy his kidneys.

 

Today we aren’t hiding behind laptops and paper clips,

we’re confronting our meat machinery,

learning how to trick it back from the brink.

 

 

Spit Hood

no direction
just movement and sirens

I lick gauze
it Velcros my stubble

she dialled 999
before the hinges gave way

could hear the kids crying
scarlet knuckles salt-slippery

can barely breathe
cuffed and gassed

maybe I should go away for good
perhaps she should

this is for your own protection
just stop resisting

nobody deserves this
we broke something in me
 

Ben Banyard lives and writes in Portishead, near Bristol. His debut pamphlet, Communing, was published by Indigo Dreams in February 2016, and a full collection, We Are All Lucky, is due out early in 2017. Ben edits Clear Poetry, an online journal publishing accessible writing by newcomers and old hands alike: https://clearpoetry.wordpress.com

 

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FRED DALE

Shopping for A Dad

 

I suggest a pair of shorts

and you say sure

and toss them into the cart.

And I say why don’t you try them on

and you say what’s the point?

I know my hips.

And for some reason

I offer to try them on for you.

And you look at me

as you might have once

through the nursery glass,

that little bundle of pants

wrapped to go, the bairn that got you

into all of this,

and you ask,

would you do that for me, son?

And I do.

I try on pants for another man,

the legs through the legs

and the mirror and all,

picturing what they’d look like on you

from the side

and the back and oh the possibilities

of what’s next for us.

It’s stunning,

the return to the atmosphere of a man

finding one fewer thing he has to do

in life. So, I say

don’t you want to know if they fit?

And you say I trust you

and I look at you, thinking,

I hope you never have to put your trust

in me.

What the hell do I know?

And that, your eyes say to me,

is the point.

And as we turn away,

as fathers and sons do and must do

I hear in the foiling sky,

Daedalus in the parting:

watch out, you! There goes my boy. 

 

 

Fred Dale is a husband to his wife, Valerie and a father to his occasionally good dog, Earl. He is a Senior Instructor at the University of North Florida.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Dunes Review, Chiron Review, Crack the Spine, Clackamas Literary Review, and others.   

 

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ROBERT HALLECK

 

Pueblo Bonito

 

The sky so blue.

The water so cold.

 

In the pool a woman

pushes her man

on a yellow raft

around the island

 

She stops at

the bridge so

he can do pull ups.

 

 

The C.S. Lewis Seminar

 

series at the church

confuses me as I

listen to the discussion.

 

At my table everyone

gets so much more than

I ever did.

 

I missed it all.

So Aslan was Jesus

and Narnia is complicated.

 

Sixty years ago I just

thought they were good stories.

I cried when Aslan died.

 

 

Hugs No Kisses

 

He ran into her

at the post office.

She gave him a hug.

He asked about her mother and

their son who ignores his emails.

She asked about the dog she'd left him.

Then told him he needed to marry again.

She gave him another hug.

I loved you, he thought,

more than I showed.

I'm sorry for that.

 

 

Robert Halleck is a retired banker. He has been writing poetry for over 50 years. He fills his retirement years with hospice volunteering, open mike readings, and racing Marlene, his old but sturdy Porsche. His poems have appeared in The San Diego Poetry Annual, the Paterson Literary Review, The Galway Review, Poets Haven, and a number of other interesting places.

 

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NELS HANSON

 

Map

 

Grip Joaquin Murrietta’s

ivory-handled .45 and you’ll

hear his fiancée scream

 

as the white men attack,

then with spurs, sombrero,

loaded crossing bandoliers

 

gallop a black horse, fire 17

times so with a single shot

each monster is dead. Outlaw

 

now you have to steal to live

until Captain Love’s posse

rides you down near Cantua

 

Creek, takes your head and one

hand of Three Fingers Jack

to display in formaldehyde

 

behind the bar in San Francisco

before the great earthquake.

Touch the trigger and a thin

 

line of smoke streams from

the silver barrel, floating

on the still air to draw a map

 

to Joaquin’s treasure you can’t

touch, that glows forever like

radium under the flat stone.

 

 

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.

 

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MICHAEL LAUCHLAN

Basement

 

Among rituals of plumbing, most rank--

lugging the sewer snake downstairs

where a fetid back-up spreading

beyond the laundry’s threshold

pours toward the bookshelves

and books that have spilled from shelves

and the desk where I perch, often

as I may. I scurry to shift books

from floor to desk, then return

to squat beside a clattering machine

and absorb its necessary noise.

I feed a rusted cable into a cleanout

as the motor rumbles and an auger turns

in the dark, descending pipe.

When the bit catches, the cable slows

and I back off, then try again.

Finally, the snag breaks and from everywhere,

water pulls and sucks toward the street,

the sewer, as all our mortal leavings

wash out with clucking, hollow tones.

After bleach and broom and mop,

I’ll sit again, almost easy

among pens and drafts, newsprint

and lit-mags, between texts pointing back

to the first human words and the hands

that will cradle these bindings

when ours relax their grip

 

Michael Lauchlan’s poems have landed in many publications including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Harpur Palate, Sugar House Review, Southword, and Poetry Ireland. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press.

 

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ANGELA READMAN

 

The Cello and the Nightingale

  

When I have spoken to no one all day,

I waltz the cello into the garden, cumbrous

as a lover relaxed by gin, lifeless in my arms.

 

The air fingers a string, hums and moves on

to arrange the wild roses by the wall.

I don’t move, I sit on a bench

 

and grow used to cast-iron, scrolling

rusty ferns into my thighs. It’s a fledgling dusk.

 

There’s still time to stroke the snow peas

under the net, reach for tendrils, soft as a finger

curled around the ear of a woman asleep.

 

I lift the bow and let the solo wind around

each sound in the garden, chip-in to the conversations

of finch, crane fly and wren I can’t get a word in.

 

The wind in the laurel offers a silk gloved applause.

My own hands ache, curved around the radio

most days turning the hours for news.

 

It hurts to sit and play for so long, wondering

if the nightingale will ever arrive. Only now,

 

when I’m about to give up, do I hear a call

to my cello. The bird scrolls his song

between the bars like an answer to a question

 

I didn't know I’d asked.  I hear it soar over 

the gables carrying my notes, pushing them 

into every locked window and door on the street.

 

 

Angela Readman's poems have won The Charles Causley, The Essex Poetry Prize, and The Mslexia Competition. She has been published in anthologies and journals including The Rialto, Envoi, Popshot, Ambit, Prole, Bare Fiction and Magma. Nine Arches recently published her poetry collection The Book of Tides.

 

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JO-ELLA SARICH

 

Where are you, Asma al-Assad?

 

Where were we when we stood, you

with your pretty hair and

just the heave of a styrofoam cup away

from the clatter-chatter

beyond the gate? That’s the sun

 

over there, the sun that looks like an egg

or a two-dimensional drone. The stars are

millions of tiny paper-cuts stretched across

an old finger. I folded

paper round my finger once, bandaged it there

scribbled eyes and teeth on it, called it a king

and you were the queen, waiting in your styrofoam castle

with the rats and bondage gear.

Paper, like leather,

that has two dimensions, then you fold it

back on itself,

and that's how people jump through space.

 

When you run your fingers through their hair

like sunlight, don’t you feel the

crumpling of their lungs? When the air

deliquesces

you become dumb ...

 

How does he like you, mute and breathing? Warm and

convivial; we are mostly just uninhabitable space. The kind

of desert that looks like a wave, or the

surface of Mercury if you can

insulate yourself well enough for that.

 

This dress has tabs on it, to remind

you of your shoulders. You remind me of

my cousin’s friends. You remind me of

a Roman goddess chasing around

the stars

like a rat in a maze. You remind me of

myself sometimes. I’d like to see

you in the mounds

of shredded paper;

all the who-did-this

and who-said-that.  All the mothers

 

who leave in gleaming security detail

back to their paper houses, their leather children

do they remind you of yourself? Is there

 

space in the universe of what a government

tells its people,

in the glistening piles of paper,

for a warm body like yours? Where are

we now, in the soft folds

of your hips, of your rib cage,

all that parts you forgot -

 

I’d like to see them mostly blown

away in the pressure waves

if I were your puppet master -

 

but then again I’m not.

 

 

Jo-Ella Sarich has practised as a lawyer for a number of years, recently returning to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of online or in-print journals, including The New Verse News, Cleaver Magazine, Blackmail Press, Barzakh Magazine, Poets Reading the News, The Galway Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, takahē magazine and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. https://mysticalfirenight.tumblr.com/, @jsarich_writer.

 

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ROBIN LINDSAY WILSON

 

The End of Anger

 

I have loosened her buttons

with square bricklayer’s hands.

 

She has worn out my silence

by talking non-stop finance -

a Housing Association form

- a front door and a garden

with what she hopes I’ll earn.

 

The hairs on my arms shifted.

I made the beginnings of a fist

but knuckles bubbled open

under her next prophecy.

 

We argued in the library

and the city centre gallery.

Her walk away remark

shocked the stone foyer

but my four letter echoes

turned people’s heads

 

later we caught our breath

in front of women in Tahiti,

holding dogs and mangoes.

 

When she tried dreaming

the island women looked away

and stared towards the reef

as if all dreaming was lonely.

 

My blunt fingers reached

into the seams of her Burberry

offering some compensation.

 

Robin Lindsay Wilson lives in Glasgow working as an acting teacher in Edinburgh. He has published a wide variety of poems in many UK literary magazines. His second collection of poetry Myself and Other Strangers was published by Cinnamon press in November 2016.

 

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RODNEY WOOD

 

My Selfishness

 

over a sea of whiteness / a solitary hand moves / with tranquillity

I write these poems each evening / over a sea of whiteness

I write these poems each evening / a solitary hand moves / with tranquillity

 

& you're close to my lips / as delicate & smooth / as an angel

streetlamps flicker over ash & oak / & you're close to my lips

streetlamps flicker over ash & oak / as delicate & smooth / as an angel

with paper pen & ink / I can never be alone while writing

if I had to choose I'd stay here / with paper pen & ink

if I had to choose I'd stay here / I can never be alone while writing

 

 

The Aegean Tercet

 

cafés spill wine / & coffee onto streets / women with pots / & wicker baskets

I sit on a bench / & see cafés spill wine / & coffee onto streets

I sit on a bench & see / women with pots / & wicker baskets

 

drunks sing from a pirate ship / & people's laughter splits the air

looking bored / biting their nails / drunks sing from a pirate ship

looking bored / biting their nails / people's laughter splits the air

 

at the hotel / you stare at me / your eyes a beacon for me who's lost

after an hour or so I go back / at the hotel / you stare at me

after an hour or so I go back / your eyes a beacon / for me who's lost

 

 

Rodney Wood is retired and lives in Farnborough, UK. His work has appeared recently in Brittle Star, The Journal, Envoi, Message in a Bottle, International Times as well as the anthology The Poet's Quest for God.

 

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JIM ZOLA

 

Trying to Come to Terms with my Daughter’s Depression

I have been here before
and don't remember this exact
line of trees, the way branches

on the ground, leaves, seem out of place.
The dog barks at nothing, her hackles
mohawk in attempt to appear

a threat. What ghosts are these?
I am thinking about
Koudelka's gypsies, how they

all have dirty hands, faces,
a sadness they seem proud
to possess. What can I say?

Sometimes you get tired of the dark.
There are songs too wide for sound.
No one easily survives love.

 

 

Jim Zola has worked in a warehouse, as a security guard, in a bookstore, as a teacher for Deaf children, as a toy designer for Fisher Price, and currently as a children's librarian. Published in many journals through the years, his publications include a chapbook, The One Hundred Bones of Weather (Blue Pitcher Press) and a full length poetry collection, What Glorious Possibilities (Aldrich Press). He currently lives in Greensboro, NC.

 

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