2022

 

 

MAY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Stephen Anderson, David Cooke, Bob Cooper, Linda McCauley Freeman, Maggie Harris,

 Daniel Hinds, Kasimma, Gordon Meade, Maren O. Mitchell, Eugene O’Hare, Anthony Owen, Bethany W. Pope, Charles Ramellkamp, Oindiri Sengupta, Grant Tarbard,

Rodd Whelpley, Rodney Wood.

 

 

Grant Tarbard’s Poems

 

 

Grant Tarbard Tribute

BETHANY W. POPE

 

 

 

 

DAVID COOKE

 

Soul
for Grant Tarbard

 

Northern kids, their futures
predictable, they grafted dourly
five days a week down pits, in shops
and on the factory floor –
paying their way with some left
for vinyl, speed and threads.

 

Travelling miles by train each
weekend with a change of clothes
and a box of classic tracks
– minor hits and rarities
by blacks the charts ignored –
they kept the faith

 

and stormed the bouncers
– who lost their cool and didn’t get it –
once doors were opened
to another drenched all nighter
at Wigan Casino, the Highland Room,
the Golden Torch, the Wheel.

 

A four-four beat was all
they needed, rock steady,
relentless, and simple lyrics
that told the truth. Hallucogenics
and hopeless solos
warped the walls of bedsits

 

in never-never-land,
but lads in bags and polo shirts,
their girls in swirling skirts,
danced all night till morning.
Doing splits and fancy tricks,
they span around like dervishes.

 

 

MAGGIE HARRIS

 

For a Facebook friend who died too soon

For Grant Tabard

 

Do not rest in peace,

Kick ass.

Stay amongst us with your wit and irony

your depth of vision, your love of the word.

Your body could not restrain those words

through which we knew you, heard you,

solicited your imagination, your engagement with the world.

Virtual friendships are a realm all their own:

death, a realm we know the fuck about.

Condolences don’t seem sufficient;

much more efficient is the way this news

brings you closer amongst the us

we name ourselves, united in the fire

that went out too soon, the sharp realism

that we are indeed mortal and anytime

we can fall amongst the lions. All power

to you mate, I give thanks we can still

communicate, hold your words close

and let them champion us, carry us off on wings of fire.

 

 

ANTHONY OWEN

 

The death of a young poet 

For Grant Tabard 

 

I saw you in the Christmas tree of space 

bejewelled in the sun’s permanent amber  

like a dragonfly about to leap but just too late. 

 

Night’s black wing soars upon your thermals 

go warm in your dream sleep it is your time 

the Greeks said sleep is merely the twin of death. 

 

Leave us your corpse medicine in your words 

their primary colours that beautiful birds envied 

whenever your books open you take flight in us. 

 

I picture your glasses exactly where you left them 

a still vase, a moving sky and your mother seated 

not all us will be so giant in the smallness of our lives. 

 

I picture polymers kissing paper with your poems, 

dogs racing in the font-furnace of a unique mind 

today I believe in heaven, today I am trapped with you 

 

In amber.

 

 

RODNEY WOOD

 

Each Raindrop Touches Something

For Grant Tabard

 

extending and bouncing around the world like the mother of all bad metaphors

water becomes a ripple extending and bouncing around the world

water becomes a ripple like the mother of all bad metaphors

 

someone else's turn to be brilliant to go where dreams and life reside

today he's going to rest someone else's turn to be brilliant

today he's going to rest to go where dreams and life reside

 

only dancing in slow motion it's planning the Million Man Poetry Festival

the world's mad as a Ginger Baker drum solo only dancing in slow motion

the world's mad as a Ginger Baker drum solo it's planning the Million Man Poetry Festival

 

Grant was one of my guests when I launched my first pamphlet and we kept in touch over the years. He published several of my poems in the Screech Owl including this in July 2015.

 

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BOB COOPER

 

Like Philip Larkin and the cold content of pies 

 

Maybe there’s still someone like Larkin 

who puts down a pork pie on a plate, pours gin, tonic, 

deftly pulls vinyl from its sleeve, blows it for dust, 

watches the arm swing, slowly lower, so the quiet hiss 

that introduces Bechet begins before he sits 

 

and, like Larkin, he listens, relaxes, nibbles, remembers 

the gristle in a half-eaten one on a Sheffield Station platform. 

The buffet was closing so, starved, he’d stood in the wind, 

melancholically seeing a full moon as an ironic unbitten pie. 

 

He snaffles a bite. Pastry crumbs smatter his trousers 

like confetti Larkin saw scattered when in a London train 

over those who entered, sat, squirmed, giggled, sighed, 

as the train pulled away while he scribbled in a notebook, 

but, here, nothing’s brushed off, not even to jazz. Fingers lie flat 

 

unlike Bechet’s melodies, so finger deft, raunchy as pies  

shared in bed, stripped to their vests, like Larkin and Monica 

when they ate what they’d bought at a village Show Saturday 

while hands briefly felt warmth they’d forgotten they knew,

 

and now beyond Larkin’s writing he’s more than half-drunk 

before Bechet’s breathed-out jazz passes over his snores 

until the hiss-click repetition after the LP’s last track. 

The see-though glass, dull bottle, plate, all empty on the carpet 

when he uncoils, yawns, takes it all in, shuffles upstairs. 

  

Bob Cooper has had 7 pamphlets published - six of them winning pamphlet competitions. He’s also had two full length collections published, one by Arrowhead in 2002 then another with Pindrop in 2017 – see:  Pindrop   He lives on the Wirral, in the UK. 

 

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DANIEL HINDS

 

Cryptid (The Mystery of Water)

 

‘the water cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron’

– Robert Campbell, ‘Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness’, Inverness Courier, 1933

 

Let me decipher your key.

 

The neck that curves like the line of beauty

Of the poem I intend to write some-point tomorrow.

 

The slow wet grace of the snail skin shadow,

The liquid and unheard word of a gainsaid grail.

 

The water cascading and churning

Like a witch’s shimmering cauldron.

 

The taste of loud slurped primordial soup.

And the smell of the afterburp.

 

The lock of uncut hair that gets in your face.

And the blur of your finger’s quick flick.

 

A trick of black and white.

 

The high and demonic denomination

Of a cryptocurrency.

 

The password that is simply “uncrackable.”

 

When we find the beast, snacking in its nest,

Roll the soft white of our eyes over its ruminant neck,

Drag it to shore and lock it to a shape,   

 

We’ll only ask it what weird white fish lives unblinking

Beneath its slime, and, unanswered, toss it back.

 

Daniel Hinds won the Poetry Society’s Timothy Corsellis Young Critics Prize. His poetry was commended in the National Centre for Writing’s UEA New Forms Award and has been published or is forthcoming in The London Magazine, The New European, Wild Court, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, Southword, and elsewhere. Twitter: @DanielGHinds This poem was published in The Honest Ulsterman (October 2020).

 

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KASIMMA

 

I’m In a Cave

 

...not the cave where once you found me

 

Engulfed in darkness

Plastered on the rocks

Carpeted with wet sand

Dripping with the musty waters of misogyny

Stinking of rotten water

Where you found me

Your teeth shining, illuminating

Where you gave me a hand

Peeled me off the wall

Dusted me in sweet scenting powder

Painted me in blue

 

No, not that cave

I'm in a cave of refuge now

Hiding from the stones hurled at me

The perils of being a feminist

At least, I can lie on the dry sand

Until you come for me

Again

 

Kasimma is the author of All Shades of Iberibe (2021) and the 2021 Nikky Finney Fellow. Her stories and poems appear on Guernica, LitHub, Writer’s Digest, Meet Cute, Native Skin, The Puritan, Kikwetu, Afreecan Read, and several other journals and anthologies. She’s been awarded writers’ residencies and workshops across Africa, Asia, and Europe. She has enjoyed, very thankfully, the privilege of learning under the voices of Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Lola Shoneyin, and others. You can read more about her and her works on http://www.kasimma.com Kasimma is from Igboland—obodo ndị dike. “I’m in a Cave” was first published in Orbis, 2020.

 

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GORDON MEADE

 

Pangolin

 

I am snout.

I am tongue.

I am ball.

I am scale.

 

I am black.

I am white.

I am horn.

I am hair.

 

I am top.

I am tail.

I am shy.

I am still.

 

I am giant.

I am ground.

I am powder.

I am quill.

 

Moon Bear

 

I am fruit.

I am nut.

I am honey.

I am claw.

 

I am gall.

I am wounded.

I am bile.

I am maw.

 

I am milked.

I am toothless.

I am broken.

I am blind.

 

I am caged.

I am tortured.

I am out

of my mind.

 

Gordon Meade is a Scottish poet based in the East Neuk of Fife. His eleventh collection of poems, In Transit, was published in March with Enthusiastic Press in London, and his next collection, EX-posed : Animal Elegies is due for publication in October with Lantern Publishing and Media in New York.

 

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MAREN O. MITCHELL

 

Cataloging at Connemara: Rooms Quiet with Life

          Connemara was the last home of Carl Sandburg, its contents cataloged by

the National Park Service

 

Eight a.m. I enter from the side door

into the summer kitchen/goat nursery,

as servant or friend.

 

Making myself at home

I don’t go out all this rain day,

do what I like best, read, write.

 

Surrounding hemlocks droop,

luxuriant with twenty years’ more growth.

Assigning value without bias,

 

terminal entries gel artifacts into recorded history.

I’m jealous. Catalogers before me

read these words in the flesh.

 

The cursor winks green, green, green

here here here, now now now.

He wasn’t fond of television. He’d likely not like this.

 

The rain hasn’t stopped.

February, 1965, I dialed here for a friend who feared

the career of a poet.

 

She answered. Couldn’t have been more polite:

he’s at the barn, but would say, “If you want to write poems—

write poems.”

 

He kicks me on lazy days.

Each room is quiet with life,

visitors confined to clusters along worn runners.

 

Nothing ever noticeably changes.

Outside, well-fed, impudent squirrels gawk at tourists.

Off and on, I sit in the guest bathroom, where notables have sat,

 

enjoying the privacy of curtains offered only to guests.

From her bedroom the light through the bay window beckons.

Almost dead center, planted before their time,

 

the gingko tree, survivor of the Ice Age,

oversaw his going.

Plump African violets still roost along the sills.

 

Midday thunder dares me up to the crow’s nest,

where visitors aren’t allowed

where lightning strikes best

 

where most high, most alone, the house below

becomes as secure as all homes in a storm.

Casually scattered throughout, Poetry volumes

 

are thin sirens luring me to read into knowledge—

from knowledge into desire for possession.

He had no choice. He left it all.

 

The granite slopes, behind and up, born of violence,

evergreen encircled, ant inhabited, saxifrage sprinkled,

throb from sun.

 

Moss softens winter cracks.

Closest to unchanging,

their undulating mass, monument to earth,

 

is heart to this island,

where the air speaks of him here

speaks of him now.

 

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems appear in Poetry East, Tar River Poetry and The Antigonish Review. Three poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her chapbook, In my next life I plan..., is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2022. She lives with her husband across from a national forest in the mountains of Georgia, US.

 

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EUGENE O’HARE

 

Hairspray

 

after breakfast on Saint Martin’s Lane

i drink coffee in Bar Italia. the centrepiece;

a framed poster of Rocky Marciano, & above it

his boxing gloves preserved like two brown fat livers

behind glass mounted high on the wall.

 

the weather change has lifted everything

in the city. a cortege of winter was last seen

disappearing at Alexander Palace on the 16^th

and today the intrepid sun reaches long arms

into Soho cake shops, splashes lemon over

greasy restaurant bins, and through open doors

sprawls contented on pub tables and floors.

 

i feel like something marvellous is going to happen.

 

nothing says possibility like the smell of freshly

spritzed hairspray. and as the waitress pops the cap

back onto her bottle, i believe in as much as I believe

my hand around this cup, that if i look hard enough

Rocky Marciano might throw one, just one, final punch

shattering frame and glass, his black and white body

exhausted with holding our gaze could- if i willed it-

collapse onto the coffee bar and send the whole mad

world to its feet, send the whole mad world to its feet

screaming Rocky is the risen king! Rocky has risen!

 

Eugene O'Hare was shortlisted for the 2021 poetry prize at Belfast Book Festival. Recent poems have appeared (or forthcoming) in Atrium, Smoke, Spry, Dedalus Press, Invisible City, and others. His plays are published by Methuen. He lives in London. 

 

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CHARLES RAMELLKAMP

 

The Doors of Perception

 

“If we were Americans,

we’d have our guns out by now,”

the Psychonaut over-the-shoulder side-mouths,

he and his partner climbing the stairs

to the din of the party above,

ghostly in the glow

of a single dim lightbulb,

atmospheric as film noir.

“But all we have with us

is our Third Eyes.”

 

“We are Americans,”

Robin points out,

shrugging her shoulders,

eager to know what

they’ll find behind the closed door,

“just not existentialists.”

 

 

Comme Il Faut

 

« Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c’est le suicide. » - Albert Camus

 

I never understood what a “stakeholder” was
in those interminable project planning meetings
at the Information Technology company job,
or why, when the stock market numbers dropped 
like a plunging winter thermometer,
panicking investors put their money in gold.

Now I hear they are stampeding to bit coin,

cattle clattering across the plains.
 

Did it make a difference?
Would I ever be able to think

of something more pleasant?

To a screwdriver, everything

looks like a screw.

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives, and edits The Potomac, an online literary journal. http://thepotomacjournal.com. His photographs, poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals. His latest book is a collection of poems called Mata Hari: Eye of the Day (Apprentice House, Loyola University), and another poetry collection, American Zeitgeist, is forthcoming from Apprentice House.

 

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OINDRI SENGUPTA

 

Another Space

 

The shop looks wretchedly empty.

There are houses that are built inside it,

smelling of old books and formaldehyde.

Here, men come with locked sunsets

crumpling them inside their jeans pockets,

like the sound of an FM radio on a train station. 

Some of them come to sell their old cars here, 

while a few look for a used fork 

to grind their old miseries

into miniature paintings that look 

like the trail of ants.

 

Balance sheets are scattered 

everywhere on the floor, counting 

how many suns have fallen from the sky

and how many more are yet to find a home.

I come here almost everyday 

with a handful of dust to cleanse my sufferings.

Like the way you empty a can of fish,

I come here to discard this old body to fill in it-

light, peace and broad valleys of sunshines.

 

 

Inside The Stillness

 

Inside the stillness of all evenings,

when light passes through my fingers 

towards the night

I hear a voice.

It falls from the sky as music on water.

Like the last drop of dew on grass,

it builds a hunger inside

and unbinds the residence of my heart.

 

I follow till my feet touch the horizon

 

Evening bells come with the sadness of sea,

and leaves flutter in agony as the twilight

sinks beneath the soil.

Inside all that stillness grows a dream,

that the voice leaves for me

somewhere inside the scent of an evening.

 

I follow till I know how to rise like falling leaves

 

Oindri Sengupta (36years) is a published poet based out of Kolkata, India. Her works have appeared in a few online and print journals like Muse India, Kritya, Ethos Literary Journal, Istanbul Literary Review, Chiron Review, Hudson View, Poetry Quarterly, USA, Contemporary Literary Review, India, Decanto, Penwood Review, USA, Usawa Literary Review and also in a couple of poetry anthologies. Apart from writing poetry, she also teaches English in a Govt. Higher Secondary School in Kolkata. Her maiden book of poetry After the Fall of a Cloud was released by Hawakal Publishers in February 2022.

 

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RODD WHELPLEY

 

The Skies Inside our Home

 

There are two worlds, now,

in this empty-nester house. Three,

if you count the dog’s. 

                                    I wonder

if elements comprise your atmosphere;

How long your year runs, if there even is

a year. Is your planet, like mine, inhabited

mostly by the dead, nearly every man

and woman and sometimes child

a Lazarus?  

               I’ll accept it, even if you fib.

So long as you tell me in the land you are

there is no word goodbye. 

                                           If I break the quiet

when I ask Is it snowing on your carpets?

will you understand? Or,  

                                         do you know me better

on those rare afternoons when the sun

blushes our parlor like the golden hour

on a movie set, and I, on silent cue,

hit my mark 

                    with mittens and a shovel?

 

Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have appeared in numerous journals. His chapbooks include Catch as Kitsch Can (2018), The Last Bridge is Home (2021) and Whoever Said Love ( coming in December 2022). His first full-length collection, Blood Moon, Backyard Mountain, is forthcoming from Broadstone Books. Find him at www.RoddWhelpley.com, on Facebook (Rodd Whelpley) or Twitter (@RoddWhelpley).

 

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