2023

 

 

NOVEMBER

 

 

Fizza Abbas, Ken Anderson, Maria Berardi, Jennifer Blackledge, Clive Donovan,

Matt Gilbert, Elizabeth Goodall, Maren O. Mitchell, Ronald Moran,

Jason Ryberg, Fiona Sinclair.

 

 

 

 

FIZZA ABBAS

 

Self-portrait of a Pakistani child bride

 

Let me introduce myself:

I'm an artist who delights in fashioning intricate portraits of women.

I begin my work by drawing the face in three equal parts for the chin, nose, and eyebrows

and checking the lines and angles between these features.

With a rough sketch inlaid, I add shading to create shadows on the skin and behind the head,

making the darker parts even darker.

Once the shadows are in place, I draw the shape around the eye

to create the eyelids and socket.

I also work on the nose and add highlights to the nostrils.

After that, I focus on drawing the mouth, ear, hair and breasts.

The last steps involve adding more details and making any necessary fixes.

 

While the women in my portraits are beautiful, they don’t have shoulders

but a hollow area in the spot of the upper part of each arm.

Their eyes are deeply set, with dark patches beneath their lower eyelids

giving the impression they have never fully opened or closed.

Their ears, like delicate seashells echo with waves of resilience

crashing along the jagged rocks of society's disapproval.

Their breasts heave with the weight of burdens,

each heartbeat a reminder of the intricate balance they bore.

Marital pressure, an invisible shackle, pressed down upon them

like the weight of an iron chain,

while the tender act of nursing creates the fragile fabric of life

within them.

 

The portraits lack bright colors,

but the bold black strokes bring out the striking white spaces,

giving life to the sketch of a woman in the making.

As the shadows and light dance together,

her journey takes shape.

My hand, like a compass, follows the path of her essence,

every stroke an ode to the profound beauty

hidden in her monochromatic existence.

 

Many visitors come by,

consistently spotting unique elements in my work that even surprise me.

When they ask, "How did you do that?"

it's like tracing the footsteps of my own life as a child bride,

a tale etched in both pain and the art of resilience.

I respond, "I can draw them because I’m them” –

A colorless painting in a house of broken dreams.

 

Fizza Abbas is a writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her work has appeared in more than 90 journals, both online and in print. Her work has also been nominated for Best of The Net and shortlisted for Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021. 

 

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KEN ANDERSON

 

A Wiccan God Visits The Rodmans Late At Night

 

A Wiccan god in the guise of a heavy bull elk

appears from the dark in front of the little glass gaze

of a doorbell camera: his white-hot eyes peepholes

in the lustral kiln of his blinding, incandescent divinity.

 

His brown pelt fades to the luminous gray

of a ghost— his crown, bent antlers branched

at the top like sticks, and as he turns, his hoof’s crunch

the only sound in a snowbound world— prints

like a row of tiny rabbits, rump like a patch

of smoldering snow in spring.

 

He glances through himself

in the glossy window, sees the two asleep, propped

with pillows, snug in quilts. How calmly they dream

in their warm, south-facing lair.

 

Maria is weaving migrant Latinas

into a Ute blanket. Rich is painting a brown adobe

with a blue door, a red horse with a white mane….

Their love— the somber hush

or the mauve, heart-shaped vase

he stuffs with roses on their anniversary

or Gracie, the old rescue Lab nestled

in feet at the foot of the bed. She too is dreaming:

a dog-heaven feast of delicious smells.

 

The Elk God sniffs the windowsill

for sprouts, the civilized wall for bark. But I think

he visits them to bless them, not in the names

of great religions, but the simple names

of sacred things: immaculate water, land, and air,

a dormant lichen, a dried-up mushroom,

a stiff, yellow cottonwood leaf.

 

In short, he’s a big, dependable security guard

who’s checking on the couple and their dog

and, seeing good, moves on, casually strolling back

into the vast still of night.

 

Ken Anderson’s poetry books: Intense Lover and Permanent Gardens. Coffin Bell Journal nominated his poem “Blood Quartet” for the 2024 Best of the Net anthology. British and Irish publications: Alba, Dawntreader, Impossible Archetype, Impostor, Journal, Littoral, London Grip, Orbis, Powders Press, Red Ogre Review, Sein und Werden, Sideways, and SurVision.

 

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MARIA BERARDI

 

Enlightenment

 

There is a crack, and that is where everything comes from. The universe is like a bird’s egg. There is a jolt, a crash, a shift, and a stream of new creation emerges, so fertile there are entirely new primary colors and integers. This happens inside of people every day; it is called vision, or breakdown.

 

The banker continues his lunch hour journey down 17^th St. and does not realize that over on Larimer St. I just got enlightenment. The dazzling blue October sky is a sea in the fine thin air, a sea in which the locust leaves are a school of fluttery fish, swimming. The daily business, the steamed hotdog vender and the bum cupping for a living, continues, and has been transformed into twelve million pixels, I see through them to their blinking hearts and the space beyond. I see them shimmer and realign, the universe a breathing thing, opening and hugging down upon itself. I read the meaning of color and light like that necklace that dances, our DNA, and the gladness and grief ingrained in existence like amino acids, integral and shifting, each link a new message.

 

I see and know this, and go to get some Chinese food. The restaurant’s lacquer and lanterns glow like the heart of a poppy. I eat cold sesame noodles and taste this wisdom of cells, of molecules, chemistry reunited with alchemy. To eat is blessed. Buddha grins.

 

Paradise

(for Kathryn)

 

Don’t fear. I tell you when you die

your heaven will be all your moments

again, engrossing, endless,

 

again the sweet desirelessness of becoming

in the womb, and then the gut-stuffing ecstasy

of warm milk after the shock of birth, of light;

 

again the addled imaginings of childhood,

with the gift and test of consciousness, again

your first damp-smelling stargazing night,

 

and your first dive into the mineral cold of lake water.

And this time you will see with the vision

of radiance, I mean to say you will know

 

the atoms’ jangled cha-cha even as you feel

what we call heat. Truly, your fingertips

will bloom out leaf buds like cat’s paws,

 

you will become everything in its specificity.

We will inhabit each moment as God

fills empty space, we will

 

feast on each memory with the fabulous abandon

of eating mangoes, bare feet on smooth wood,

ribcage bumped over the sink,

 

slimy pine-y peach flesh filling our mouths,

drips dawdling down our necks, sun-drops,

raindrops, tounged, tasted through to resin.

 

Maria Berardi's poems appear online, in print, in university journals, meditation magazines, newspapers, and art galleries. She can be reached at maria-berardi.com

 

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JENNIFER BLACKLEDGE

 

OK, Miss Dictionary

 

I’m too lazy to be fluent

in another language,

I joke, but in my head

I’ve always had my own

I couldn’t speak. It had words like

concatenation, obsequious, verisimilitude:

they had a delicate cadence and made

a sentence move like a jeweled automaton.

They wanted to fall into place like a

precision-tooled puzzle piece

but I had to keep them in their case.

 

I always knew

the hair’s breadth between

compliment and complement,

censure and censor,

which meant doom felt imminent, not eminent,

every morning of elementary school.

I wanted to relax but had to keep

words furled tight as dry umbrellas –

my only other talent was reading the room.

 

Now I’m paid to put words together but still

the multitudinous, multifarious, multisyllabic

must be extracted, reduced.

I catch the latinate in my filter before

they trip people and anger them, or worse,

make them feel bad.

How dare they take up so much space when a

hypernym will do, when two

or three blunt Anglo-Saxon words

hammer the point home, pack a real punch.

 

I am always careful to only let the

small, smooth words through;

my badinage light as pebbles.

I can offer obnubilate, mansuetude, veridical

but to whom?

Is a language still a language if it’s never used?

When my kids were little we would play

the fancy words game:

What’s the fancy word for talk? Converse. Communicate!

The fancy word for echo? Reverberate!

The fancy word for alone? Solitary. Isolate.

 

Scorpio Season

Everyone knows you can’t trust November:

its last desperate gasp stirs

the stiff twigs like a rattlesnake’s warning.

It’s a bad day for old bones, cold and damp,

the dark season dropping around us.

Time to pay bills, square the ledgers,

count the heads at the table.

Branches tap the glass,

and beckon us outside, impatient.

Spooked, we look over our shoulders to the

dark window but see only ourselves.

Click, click, whoosh.

An icy morse code

taps at our scapulae:

come out, it says, let’s get this party started.

Let’s see who makes it out of here alive.

 

Jennifer Blackledge is a poet who works in the automotive industry and lives just south of Detroit. She holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from Brown University. Her work has been published in JAMA, I-70 Review, Medmic, Red Cedar Review, and the Impercipient. 

 

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CLIVE DONOVAN

 

The First Stone

 

The first, murderous, bloody stone.

Someone had to do it.

Clench it. Throw it.

Break a human brain.

 

Nothing like that grounded feeling

slopping around all day

with the cybernetic power extension

of a palaeolithic hand-axe:

 

A weighty matter

to be parked with care

whilst eating or resting or making love.

Then, taken up again, the comfortable lump

 

fitting there, just so, like a chick in a nest.

Or, shot, perhaps, from a sling;

a nice, aerodynamic, smoothish rock.

Was it a child?

 

A teenager most likely

– In those harsh times when to be forty

signified ancient and finished.

And did trees nod and sway in the glimmer

 

the sun gives a knowing glint, a fiercer glow,

the bears and lions grunt in acknowledgement,

that long ago first and desperate day

when somebody's skull got bashed and the light crept in?

 

Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press] and Wound Up With Love [Lapwing] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannog, The Lake, Popshot, Prole and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He is a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems. 

 

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MATT GILBERT

 

The Political Wing of the Weather

 

Would you scream if you thought the weather was woke?

Would you howl, like the wannabe killer at the end of a gun,

in Iowa, scrawling a letter, taking up arms to see off the clouds?

 

I suppose through his window, nothing has changed.

Storms are not coming, land is not burning. Those climate

Cassandras should shut it, or pack up and quit town.

 

Not unlike him, I didn’t like what I heard on the news.

Death threats and abuse had driven a TV weather reporter

out of the state, for adding context to conditions outside.

 

Seems facts are not wanted, by those who can’t take the heat,

don’t like the big picture. Convinced meteorologists must

have an agenda, as part of a deep-state socialist plot.

 

So, hands cover eyes, ears are blocked, heads stuck where sun

isn’t shining. But libertarians raging are not wise monkeys,

they don’t stop up their mouths, they choose their own truth.

 

Anoint oil our very last god. Keep faith in the money. Casting
doubt right up to the end. Left only to wonder how wild fire

and drowning can be anything other than business as usual.

 

Matt Gilbert is a freelance copywriter. Originally from Bristol, he currently gets his fill of urban hills in South East London. He has had poems published in various places, including Acumen, Finished Creatures and forthcoming in Stand. His debut collection Street Sailing was published by Black Bough Poetry in 2023.

 

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ELIZABETH GOODALL

 

Allocated View

 

I am sat in a seat

I did not reserve

on a train to a city

I cannot pronounce

 

I am between windows

my view, beige aluminium wall

I see a glimpse of grey

from the reserved seat in-front of me

 

the flesh of the field

has been skinned

the sky scraped

by trips to Benidorm

 

the glooming clouds

forcefully cry for crops to grow

spat back

into landfill

 

I have never wanted

to see it more

than when I am sat in a seat

I did not reserve

 

staring at beige

hoping to see

something

 

beige doesn’t describe

 

Elizabeth Goodall is a twenty one year old poet from a small fishing town in Scotland. She has recently graduated from The University of Chester where she studied Creative Writing with Drama and Theatre Studies. The key themes of her poetry are grief, mental illness, love, and growing up. 

 

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MAREN O. MITCHELL

 

As They Go, So Go We

 

Being dazzled by June bug iridescence, in June or any other

          month, is beyond my recall, and at least six years have passed

 

since praying mantis youngsters climbed our garden plants

          with their gravity-defying sticky feet. Now wasps only

 

build duplexes, a shadow of their former eave condos

          that extended our roof line; hornets used to hang their mansions

 

in nearby trees, and invade the living room nightly through

          a secret entrance. While outside, they would eye me, hover

 

close, their frequency never mistaken, as I pretended I neither

          saw nor heard them, my only care the poem I was writing. Both

 

threats required diplomacy: move gently, (if at all), don't trust, pray

          quietly. It must be ten years since snakes traveled from the forest

 

to give birth in our shaggy yard, and I barely remember the shadows

          of turtles, their audacious road crossings, their compressed view

 

of life, and the slower snails, now only an occasional dot,

          Buddhas on stems. After my ankles, yellow jackets would chase me

 

down mountains as if they knew I had to stay on the trail to get

          home; fall spiders draped our fall house with softness to shelter egg

 

sacs, their plan for eternity. Yet, gnats still bite me with a dog-like

          clamp down, as though they hold a grudge, and mosquito specters

 

I see too late still inject me with viruses and bacteria. But, most

          upsetting, from bumble to sweat bees, (those little darlings who

 

spelunk into flowers and zap me as I deadhead), drop in less

          and less often. It is getting lonely outside. I don’t take it personally,

 

but eventually, absences will be personal: I like to know

          that unseen ants are aerating earth, I like to fall asleep, windows

 

open to the strum of insect bodies, wake to diamonded webs,

          and be illuminated by bee flight pointing out that I am alive.

 

 

The Theory of Everything

 

Every thing is always busy

becoming elemental elements:

 

red supergiant Betelgeuse of Orion,

is busy living while dying,

 

with irregular contractions

and expansions that were noted

 

by Aborigines and ancient Greeks;

my heart is busy with contractions and expansions,

 

finite beats

that began before I was aware;

 

unanswered phone calls

are busy being unanswered, synchronize

 

with activities of the callees;

insect oscillations fan out through air and earth,

 

and who notes them is a personal matter¾bacteria,

insect neighbors, redwoods, sand;

 

my fears, thoughts and complaints,

always busy¾

 

despite my occasional claim, I am not busy¾

beam out, intertwine

 

with all other busyness, expressions

that slam into paper,

 

but what the messages and what received?

And, as Jack A. Howard said, You're more

 

important to yourself

than to anyone else.

 

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 is In my next life I plan... (dancing girl press, 2023). She lives with her husband in the mountains of Georgia, US.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

On the Way Up

 

In a number of respected journals,

an alarming number of recent poems

signal a redirection of poetry in America,

and suggest the following question.

Why does this poetry try so hard to be

unique in diction, allusions, syntax,

and structure? Sometimes I feel it dips

into the back waters of meaning to create

lines floating in currents of confusion.

 

Are these poets trying to send readers

to the Internet or, for example, to Bulfinch

and Hamilton, to understand such cloudy

materials? Are their goals to write poems

obtuse enough to be accepted by these mags,

then including them, rife with ultra poetics,

in books of their own that they hope will be

chosen to ride the elevator to major awards?

 

 

Sipping It Easy

 

In early evening, my first sip

of bourbon with a kiss of water

tingles the back of my throat

and arouses a light sensation

like I'm breathing in thin air,

and I begin to cherish its taste.

 

Before I finish my drink, I start

feeling a gentle buzz, an invite

to make my second and last one,

so I add fresh ice, some bourbon.

The tingle at the back of my throat

returns, and by slow increments,

 

I seem to be led to a gradual loss

of objectivity, but seasoned sippers

recognize these changes and know

what should be done without losing

the lovely benefits of an evening's

excursion into a life of feeling fine.

 

Ronald Moran’s most recent book of poetry is Eye of the World, published by Clemson University Press. He lives by himself in the Piedmont of South Carolina.

 

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JASON RYBERG

 

Monday, October 30          

 

That cold-blooded bastard, the wind,

is having his way with

the house tonight

 

while some surly, third-rate deity

is dragging a dark blanket

of clouds over the city.

 

The gnarled and spidery trees all

rattle and creak like Halloween’s

cracked and splintered bones

 

and the crows

have folded up their

feathers for the day,

 

morphing into

the slippery black shadows

of early evening.

 

So, Old Man Winter has just now decided

to send his heralds and representatives

in across the state line,

 

each one trailing

long flowing banners like haunted

rivers of gray weather.

 

And once again

the good people of Kansas have been

caught with their short pants on;

 

for the wind, the clouds,

the trees, the crows;

they are telling us

 

that school is officially in session

and that our love for each other

will be tested.

 

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters. 

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Oakworth Station

 

The train’s arrival is the clapperboard cue 

for another middle-aged woman

to recreate the film’s scene. 

Not the giddy romance of Brief Encounter,

but that fierce first love, for a father.

The happy accident of the actress’s words

reverberates in endless echo down the generations, 

the frequency touching every girl who watches, 

so that tears spring to the surface.  

The simple phrase ‘my daddy’

perhaps recalling first words. 

The scene cuts all daughters keenly,

many mourn dads who fell for them at first sight, 

others yearn for the fathers that might have been. 

 

 Fiona Sinclair lives in Kent. Her new collection Second Wind is published by Dempsey and Windle press

 

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RODNEY WOOD

 

THE CALL

 

I need to warm up first and ready my muscles before the soft violence of punching numbers and ramming a speaker against my ear. I’ve read about this. Lots of things are involved. Legs, buses, trains, vans even airplanes and sometimes wooden ships carry the message. They kneel at your feet with all the pomp and colours of arrival. Meanwhile I wait and wait as it ring-a-rings, and wait thinking what she has to do. Pull it from a bag or back pocket. Perhaps though, she’s lost it. Left it on a bus, train, van even an airplane or sometimes a wooden ship. I can’t see her punch something green and accept my call. A click. Her message travels back to me on legs, buses, rains, vans even airplanes and sometimes wooden ships. They kneel at my feet with all the pomp and colours of arrival. Her voice creates a 3D image before me, of flesh, of breath, even the exhaust from her lips but I can’t make out what she’s saying though because of all that traffic.

 

Rodney Wood lives in Farnborough and worked in London and Guildford before retiring.  His poems have appeared recently in Atrium, The High Window, The Journal, Orbis, Magma (where he was Selected Poet in the deaf issue) and Envoi. He runs a monthly open mic in Woking. His debut pamphlet, Dante Called You Beatrice, appeared in 2017 and When Listening Isn't Enough, in 2021.

 

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