2024

 

 

MAY

 

 

Melanie Branton, Kirsty Crawford, Sandy Feinstein, Paul McDonald, Bruce McRae,

Gordon Meade, Sandra Noel, Miguel Rodríguez Otero,

Beate Sigriddaughter, Sharon Whitehill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MELANIE BRANTON

 

Suspension

I bought him a sausage roll
after we’d seen the doctor.
I kept my voice bright, but my fingers
shook as I ripped open the packet.
Cadaver-white pastry flakes, like sloughed skin,
littered the corridor floor. The inside was pink,
like something blind and foetal,
like I’d torn open a rat’s nest.

The cabbie drove us home
across the Suspension Bridge. He liked that.
I took comfort in that cathedral of technology,
swaggering testament to what humankind can do,
but knew a massive gorge had opened up beneath us.
Or, rather, had already been there on the way up,
 

though I’d been looking the other way.

The Connoisseur of Crumbs

After I eat my slice of dry toast,
I look forward to the grill pan,

run a damp finger into every ridge.
Nothing is wasted. It tastes of iron,

electrolyte imbalance and ketosis,
of licking old envelopes, eating egg

off a silver spoon
with the polish left on,

of starched shirts, Ash
Wednesday. I pick cheese flecks

out of the grater, the salty shock
like blood from a bitten lip, gnaw

gleanings of flesh from apple cores,
carrot tops, crunch peppercorns

between my teeth. I am the connoisseur

of crumbs. They don’t count as calories.

 

Melanie Branton is a spoken word artist, educator and recovering anorexic from Bristol. Her published collections are My Cloth-Eared Heart (Oversteps, 2017) and Can You See Where I’m Coming From? (Burning Eye, 2018. She is currently touring a poetry show about the history of the English language.

 

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KIRSTY CRAWFORD

 

Baddha Konasana

 

behind the door of this community centre

a group of women sit for their morning class

baddha konasana

butterfly pose

soles of the feet touching

knees out wide

the angles of their postpartum hips hit a variety of degrees

they would tell you that this is reclamation

of the aftermath

of folds and scars and tears and skin

of the chrysalis

of the maternal brain, forever changed

 

their hands cup the soles of their feet and

give a gentle squeeze of self-compassion

a collective intake of breath

right from the base of the belly

deep in the space where they grew fingers and gums

and felt the first flutter of a beating heart

their heads tip forwards

spines curving in

minds caving in

allowing the weight of it all to be felt

the shift of self, the body tipping on its axis

 

behind the door of this community centre

a group of women sit in neat lines on strips of rubber mat

they close their eyes

newly minted mothers

sharing the space

ten perfect butterflies

learning how to live again

 

Kirsty Crawford studied Creative Writing, English and Journalism at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow before moving to London to study performing arts. Switching career into wildlife conservation and writing features for environmental publications, she now works in community engagement for a marine charity. Recent publications have included fiction for Writerly Magazine and the Federation of Writers Scotland, and poetry in association with the Fair Saturday Foundation.

 

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SANDY FEINSTEIN

 

A Weird Funk

 

In a footnote to the Danish edition of “Sonny’s Blues,”

“funky” is translated as “smelling bad,” and while the character

is perceived as having questionable hygience,

a product of city streets and attitude

not unlike perhaps old grill grease and wisps of cannabis,

perhaps companion to accumulating body odor duly noted,

I always liked the word for its vagueness.

It could be unequivocally negative, or just off,                      

an indescribably other,

though in the story, it’s a judgment

by a narrator who doesn’t expect to encounter

a neighborhood friend of his brother’s

in the shadows of school.

 

I remember that translation from decades ago,

better than I do the details of the story.

Ever since when someone says “ooh, that’s funky”

or I’m in such a “funk,”

that footnote comes to mind, the need then

to counter the limitations

of a well-intentioned gloss.

 

My students rapped and watched t.v.

practiced break dancing to their own beats,

another appropriation to wonder at

far from home, New York,

even as the blues and its language

emerges from my own grasping hands

and I guiltily admit

it’s the only word

for how I feel,

which is why

I haven’t called you back.

 

Forecast

 

Rain, will be heavy at times even now

so ignore the light through high clouds,

shadows across the floor, a bird in flight.

 

Compliant windows display stubborn drops

unable to obscure stilled puddles.

Bare limbs sway, the lower branches shake.

 

Water bubbles balance loosely, clear against dark

absorption, mine I suppose, as I try to calculate

inches in the flower pot where one small green

leaf manages to keep its tip above the risen tide,

 

Sandy Feinstein's poetry appears most recently in Willows Wept, Pivot, the engine(idling, and Seems. Her past scholarship has looked at individual words and phrases, for example, "busk" in Donne's "Elegy 19," "sublime" in Paradise Lost," and "Screw your courage to the sticking place" in Macbeth.

 

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PAUL MCDONALD

 

Christina's World 

 

Her stalk legs are stronger 

than they look: wired muscle 

tight beneath a tourniquet of 

 

bleached pink, jack-knifing 

through the long grass. 

Its scorched yellow-green fizzes

 

with a snake's hiss. Her climb across 

this field can only be imagined,

the wake of broken spines 

 

she'll leave behind, crow-flight 

focus on her goal: the patient 

shape of home below the sky’s dome, 

 

swollen acres shrinking by inches. 

East coast winds would waft 

her back to the bottom

 

but for fingers sharp as quills 

spiked in the cool earth: 

she tugs at the grass like a lover's hair. 

 

Silver Linings

 

He reclines on a picnic blanket, rolled-up 

blazer for a pillow, wristwatch ticking at 

his ear. A Morris Minor clicks itself cool. 

 

She wears the Queen's hair, hugs her 

tweed knees, scanning clouds for 

things beyond her life. She knows 

 

he’s feigning sleep, thermos biding time 

between them on the grass, casting longer 

shadows than it should. The tea is rather tepid, 

 

but it hardly matters - she welcomes the 

ritual of reaching, unscrewing cups, one inside 

the other like a Russian doll. She takes the 

 

smallest, without a handle. He fakes waking, 

stirs to the sound of her 'being mother'. 

They talk until they flick their dregs into the 

 

undergrowth, replace the cups, fold the day away. 

The flask still exists in a fitted wicker basket, 

has gained a certain retro charm, and value.

 

Paul McDonald taught at the University of Wolverhampton for twenty five years, before taking early retirement in 2019. He is the author of 20 books to date, which includes fiction, poetry and scholarship. His most recent poetry collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange Press, 2023)

 

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BRUCE MCRAE

 

In The House of Sleep All Shadows Matter

 

In dreams there is a river

running underneath the bedcovers.

 

In dreams the fire is talking.

It's telling us that fable

about the talking dish and desultory witches.

 

Dreams include your mother's voice

and father's sense of humour.

Elvis is there. The Kaiser too.

And a lover half-remembered.

 

If you wake in a dream

you're actually falling off your roof.

If you pass water there's every chance

you're riding side-saddle

through the Land of the Dead.

 

Every dream contains a ship at sea,

which my doctor says has meaning.

 

Dreams are a box of rocks in the head.

 

Your mind is a radio or shopping basket.

 

Your sleep is a knotted ribbon.

 

In dreams the horses are green and purple.

All the letters you've ever written are there,

waiting to be opened and read.

 

Naked, you swoop over a forest canopy.

 

You're in a casino and losing everything.

 

The welts of love show blue in the morning.

 

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published

in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner

of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been broadcast and performed globally.

 

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GORDON MEADE

 

The North American Bison

 

In the beginning, it was

the gun; the gun, the gun,

the gun, and mound upon

mound of sun-kissed skulls.

 

And then, after a few years'

remission, came The Vanishing

and, once again, we were gone.

Yet, now we are back, but

 

with nowhere left to roam.

We are even larger than we

were before. We have become

a giant apology to ourselves.

 

Recreated, but for what?

Not for any lasting good.

Just because you wanted to;

just because you could.

 

Gordon Meade is a Scottish poet based in Fife. In the past, he was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Dundee. At present, he is working on a new collection The Resurrectionists, which examines the ethical issues surrounding de-extinction.

 

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SANDRA NOEL

 

Evacuation, Jersey 1940

 

Eileen tells anybody or nobody 

she’ll be back in two shakes.

 

She scoots up the road with Jean in sheet-sling, 

grabs a wad of towelling nappies

left by the half-peeled spuds.

 

Already she knows it’s too late.

 

The fading song of Beautiful Jersey,

passengers rammed on the coal boat 

with Jean’s pram, her one suitcase.

 

Sunday morning marbles

 

He finger-fumbles in the tin chest,

hooks out a Corkscrew Aggie.

 

My first keepie, 1936.

Bobbie didn’t talk to me for weeks.

 

We push shooter swirls and cobalt clearies

into the seat of his wicker chair.

 

1937 Champion of St Marks — 23 King Bumblebees. 

Won them all, fair and square.

 

He knuckles down for a double-flick at the plug socket,

hits, dead centre.

 

Sandra Noel is a poet from Jersey enjoying writing about the ordinary in unusual ways. She has poems online and in print magazines and anthologies and has been longlisted, shortlisted and highly commended in competitions. Sandra’s first collection will be published in 2024 by Yaffle Publications.

 

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MIGUEL RODRÍGUEZ OTERO

 

a Manhattan café

 

run-down dive wants a coat of paint

a new set of fixtures

probably some company too

the coffee’s good

so rain and i go in and i crash a while

 

beside me sits a girl writing on her phone

not pretty or tall or anything

holds a cup in her hand

i’d say it’s almost empty

she goes unnoticed

and i sip at my coffee

 

then cutie comes in

scans the place

rushes toward where i’m sitting

leans down and

slowly

very slowly

kisses the girl by my side

the girl with the empty cup

not pretty or tall

they look and say

something i can’t hear

their world begins

and i love them for that

 

across the room

the guy with shaky hands

is holding a baby

guy looks like he just been released

from prison or a madhouse

 

blonde hippy storms in

sees her man

amazon warrior throws herself at him

he don’t look as crazy

holds his baby and his love

 

and i wonder what it is with me

only guy in this place

who’s afraid that somebody

will come in and love me

before i crash

 

Miguel Rodríguez Otero is the author of La Mujer que Huele a Café (2019) and El Lugar del Norte (2021). His stories have appeared in Madrid, Copenhagen, NYC and elsewhere. He likes to walk country roads and is friends with a heron that lives in the marsh near his home

 

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BEATE SIGRIDDAUGHTER

 

Education

 

Eve once reached for the apple of knowledge and offered some of it to hapless Adam. Over the course of history, Adam has run with apples and withheld them from Eve over and over again. Of course, there's speculation that there was a good reason why men denied women an education for so long: so that they might catch up and maybe even get a bit of an advantage. Still, there's something infinitely sad about women who deliberately sound as though they are stupid and men who like to listen to them sing. 

 

Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives and loves in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), USA, where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers, and a short story collection, Dona Nobis Pacem.

 

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SHARON WHITEHILL

 

No Power in a Square

 

Human beings prefer gentle curves—the acorn’s

plump cup, a horse’s double-globed haunch—

over the points of a crystal or pyramid, perhaps

because the first contours babies perceive

are the curves of a face, the warmth of encircling arms.

As even the straightest observable line can never

be perfectly straight in the structures we build,

so curvature dominates nature: from massive

planets and suns gravitationally sucked into spheres

to galaxies spread into wide-ranging discs.

 

Sounds, too, assume curvilinear shapes: a chanted OM

graphs on the cymascope as an ellipse,

in imitation of the orbits of planets and moons;

other devotional mantras emerge as intricate figures

that look like mandalas. Once, when I witnessed

a murmuration of starlings in Denmark, the thrum

of thousands of wingbeats struck me

as onomatopoeia embodied: a vast curtain of bends,

waves, and curls poised second by second to tip

and transform, every quicksilver switch dependent

on each bird’s fine-tuned response to any shift

in its seven nearest neighbors.

 

Long ago Black Elk asserted that “Everything tries

to be round,” a personification of the ubiquitous urge

that causes the whirlwind to spiral, the sky and horizon

to arch like a bowl, and his people to honor the wisdom

of birds (“for theirs is the same religion as ours”)

in a circle of teepees they saw as their nest full of nests.

A culture of curves, lost to the little square houses

where they ended their days.

 

A former English professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Sharon Whitehill is celebrating the freedom of retirement in Port Charlotte, Florida. Here she’s finally achieved what she once thought an unattainable dream: poems published in various literary magazines, a full collection of poems, and three poetry chapbooks. Her latest, This Sad and Tender Time has just appeared (Kelsay Books, December 2023).

 

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