2014

 

 

NOVEMBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Tim J. Brennan, Graham Burchell, Miki Byrne, David J. Costello, Seth Crook,

 Marianne Daniels, Rebecca Gethin, Martin Golan, Todd Mercer, Bethany W. Pope,

 Angela Readman, Ben Sloan, Grant Tarbard.

 

 

 

 

 

TIM J. BRENNAN

 

Waiting for Lauren Bacall

 

On a bench outside 

the Dakota in July of 1988,

I wait for Lauren Bacall.

 

I sit quietly holding

a Starbucks and think

about far away destinations

like Key Largo or other such 

places written on the wind.

 

I occupy myself, Central Park

behind me, a green space

of Strawberry Fields, 

and Passenger Cars Only signage; 

 

there is a man nearby 

in a blue dress shirt;

I wonder if he is also waiting

for Lauren Bacall.

 

I do not know what I will say

to her if she were to appear;

hello sounds so benign; yet,

I love you seems a bit forward.

 

How does one speak intimately

to a person these days when intimacy 

is limited to black-and-white cinema?

Lauren is alluring, faint, and sexy, 

kissing other men, daring them to whistle 

if she is needed.

 

I am soon at a loss: a transit bus has stopped 

between her Dakota and my bench,

there are dead leaves blowing past my feet, 

the man in the blue shirt has been joined

by another man; I can see their mouths

moving but their words are lost

in the drone of automobiles, 

blue city trucks, and that damn bus.

 

I fear I may have missed Lauren,

as much as I once feared I missed 

the opening credits to her last movie; 

hundreds of pigeons surround me 

like lost friends; all of them preparing 

to depart at exactly the same time.

 

 

Tim J Brennan lives in Minnesota, USA. He is a past "Talking Stick" poetry winner. Brennan's One Act plays have been staged widely, including NYC, Chicago & San Diego.

 

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GRAHAM BURCHELL

 

First Date

 

After he asked to meet in the park at the weekend,

he was like the caterpillar laid back on a mushroom

and smoking a hookah.

                                          I was his butterfly

making irregular orbits about this circle of his being; 

a floppy flight where I was conscious of every wing beat,

of my plainness, brown veins and buff scales.

 

He took a long drag - blew smoke rings.

He was a master, a wizard, a taciturn hard man.

One day he’d be a moth with a death’s head

tattooed on his back.

                                      He didn’t smile

when he told me he liked my hair,

said he fancied blondes more

than browns or gingers.

                                           I was his butterfly

lost for words, wanting to giggle; his butterfly

in a soundless flutter, fluster – flushed -

looking to the ground past my fine wire legs.

 

 

Uncommon Ground

 

The best month of our marriage was November.

He led me through frost-cold castle grounds;

his grip light, connected as yellow

beech leaves to their twigs.

 

I knew his fingers so comfortably well.

Even though they were sheathed in woollen glove,

they did the talking; the occasional tighter grip.

We spoke few words.

 

I knew if I gushed too much about the colours,

those primrose and golden beeches,

the new-penny copper of oaks and silver barks

of birches, he would offer total silence in return:

 

a squeeze of my small hand would speak only

of irritation, just as he, thrilling

about the potential for death, for falling,

bouncing off rugged outcrops

into the gorge’s whispering river below,

would bother me.

 

I can hear him proposing it.

Just imagine, he’d say.

I could. He couldn’t, so we spoke few words,

communicated through touch, listened

to water searching for a sea and our boots

crushing the fallen.

 

Graham Burchell was born in Canterbury and lives in South Devon. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. His latest collection The Chongololo Club was published by Pindrop Press in 2012. He is a Hawthornden fellow and was the 2012 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year.

 

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MIKI BYRNE

 

Arthritic Hands.

 

My fingers have been hi-jacked.

Taken by a twist of nature beyond control. 

A partial dislocation-subluxation- bends them

at an angle thirty degrees from the palm.

Interphalangeal and metacarpophalangeal  joints

are displaced. Small bones pushed out of alignment.

Knuckles stripped of under-skin padding.

A scraping attrition rubs away calcified substance.

Muscle wastes. Leaves bone so close to skin

that knuckles gleam like pale ivory, rise lumpy,

distorted, showing dips and plateaus usually hidden.

Every vein traces a blue delta along the backs of hands,

tapers below skin of thinned down wrists.

Sinews are ropy, taut as narrow bungee cord.

Fine movement now a thing of the past. Skills eroded

along with bone matter, the synovial lubrication

that nature once provided. Yet all I did, and know,

still resides in my head. Holds the value

of vault-locked treasure. I continue to absorb.

Find ways to adapt. Steer away from self- pity,

the dark abyss of giving in.

 

 

First Moments on Shell Island.

 

Sweet days of doing nothing stretch out.

I am bubbling. Sea in my ears. Sky in my eyes.

Singing waves dance ashore, fling frilly petticoats

upon biscuit sand. I spin-arms out. Empty.

Fill up on peace. See all the blues and greys

in the world, painted on sea and sky. Breathe clean air.

Take the island into my arms. Grip grass with my toes.

A teasing breeze strokes me. Lifts my hair like a lover.

I am light. Weightless now. Slide into the palette of this island.

Dip into it like a brush to watercolour. Turn toward bright waves.

Gratefully shatter into sparks of light that glitter upon water.

 

 

 Miki Byrne has written three poetry collections, had work included in over 160 respected poetry magazines/ anthologies and won prizes for her poetry. She has read on both Radio and TV, judged poetry competitions and was a finalist for Poet Laureate of Gloucestershire.  Miki is disabled and lives near Tewkesbury. UK.

 

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DAVID J. COSTELLO

 

Footprints

 

Angry at the time,

he’d only noticed

when the concrete

set like steel

the little footprints

stumbling across,

 

but now her feet

have gone

he’s glad they’re there.

Each day he sweeps

them clear so he can see

the shape of his despair.

 

Autobiography

 

This was life,

typeset in Gothic Bold

so that the pages buckled up.

 

One monolithic paragraph,

so dense with words

it couldn’t comprehend itself,

 

appeared to topple

like a breezeblock wall

about the time

 

you lost your only child.

And later, on page 83,

between the lines,

 

you wept a watermark

that only I can see,

and further on

 

the pages seem more dog-eared,

at the chapter

where you mention me.

 

This book falls open

at the same place every time

along a well-worn crease across the spine

 

And though the last few lines

         are muddled by your weary hand

I read them, father,

         so that I can understand.

 

David J. Costello lives in Wallasey, Merseyside, England. He is a member of Chester Poets and North West Poets. David has been widely published and won the 2011 Welsh International Poetry Competition. His first collection, Human Engineering, was published by Thynks Publishing Ltd in October 2013. Visit his website http://www.wirralbard.x10.mx/index.html

 

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SETH CROOK

 

The Bay of Thumbs, Isle of Mull

 

Whatever it was 
that made our island's man
leave a McPhee willow-eyed,

an insult, dumped on shore, 
the withies sprouting grudges
from the sockets;

whatever it was 
that brought revenging 
raiders' boats, too eager, 

too confident from Colonsay,
and pulled them up 
too far above the tide;

whatever it was 
that kept our watcher buzzard sharp,
still careful on the dullest day,

left the raiders with no thumbs,
paddling bloody, 
named a bay. 


Leaving St Kilda

We must drown our dogs.
Leave our spinning wheels.
It's official. Seal the post box,
carry any letters on the boat to Oban.

The sheep will be so hard to gather.
Who can blame them?
Maybe a thousand on the water,
they'll pay our way. Or so some say.

We've never seen a tree
but there must be birds.
What'll we do. What will we need?
Will we still gather up the feathers?

Don't forget: inside your door, 
leave oats, an open bible.
It's the last thing we'll do before.
No need to kill the cats, they'll find their mice.

 

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before deciding to move to the Hebrides. He does not like cod philosophy in poetry, but likes cod, philosophy and poetry. His poems appear in recent editions of The Rialto, Envoi, Orbis, Magma, Gutter, Southlight, The Journal, Prole, New Writing Scotland, and have appeared on-line in such places as Antiphon, Snakeskin, Ink, Sweat and Tears.

 

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MARIANNE DANIELS

 

Spinster

 

The square of the window

gives me a sequence of birds;

they hither over each corner

where the breadcrumbs are.

 

If they would take, the words

would return.

 

If they would come,

I would present;

comb my hair, change my clothes,

smile my best smile

and say it didn’t matter

that the world was carrying on

outside this hot bulb of glass. 

 

The cloth is pressed

and the table is laid; a full loaf

of bread torn at the edges.

 

They will come.

 

 

River

 

Like blood

                             you run

          over cherry blossom; the March dark

and back of knee

where Women feel the press of child - shoulders

traced

through creased linen

and fallen Momo peaches.

 

From here my knees are high,

back onto my elbow -

a sneer of birds.

 

You may have running feet, they trill,

but you do not have wings; we too, are a river – each pulse

is felt in the movement of our hairs. 

 

Down the bank, women wear red

and pull pins from their knotted wigs.

They stab them into the joints of a boat

carved by a snake

where through your water

is a mile of drupe seed.

 

I am now in the middle;

face up, oars flat, summer –

the touch over my head,

a gold brume of insect skin.

 

Further –

in and under and above and below –

the moon’s vertebrae threads;

it being not you, but through you

where Pisces considers

 

you and I

to begin.

 

Marianne Daniels has an MA in Creative Writing and lives and works in Manchester. 

 

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REBECCA GETHIN

 

The House with Pink Walls

 

The children can no longer dance –

dust, rubble, a stink of broken drains;

 

in their ruin, a single white flip-flop

with the word ‘love’ across the toes;

 

only a few burnt corners of their father’s books are left –

Chekhov, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie;

 

their mother and grandmother no longer

prepare food together in the kitchen.

 

Now they will all camp here on their land

and he will teach them about the enemy.

 

 

? 

 

an opening fern frond on a mossy bank                  

rain in a gust of wind

a falling leaf

 

the last sign but the first

sensation that rises

in the belly

 

a co-ordinate in the map of language

hooked to the crumbling edge

of a precipice

 

denoting  inequality in various

differentials, the

integer

 

a finger beckoning, a hand waving

a mouth opened, poised to

swallow

 

a dangling thread, a thought

levitating above

a spot

 

an upside-down, unravelling

S, so light it takes off

into air

 

the atom that charges the weight

and molecules of what

was said

 

the tone of a rising

note, almost a semi-

quaver 

  

 

 Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor in Devon. Cinnamon Press published her second poetry collection, A Handful of Water, in 2013 and Oversteps Books published her first, River is the Plural of Rain, in 2009.  Her first novel, Liar Dice, won the Cinnamon Press Novel Award and her second, What the horses heard, was published in May, 2014. Her website is www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com

 

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MARTIN GOLAN

 

Long Distance

 

My father’s interest in the weather

always amazed me. How he’d

listen to the forecast at six and eleven

hushing the room as the forecast came on.

 

Now, in Florida, his interest has intensified.

He questions me long distance

about the highs and lows of my day.

Exact degrees are helpful.

I go into detailed weather stories:

cars skidding on frozen highways

snows burying cars to the windshield

tornadoes that wipe out towns

families stranded alone in floods

I rarely have enough for him

to give him what he wants.

 

These days I have only this:

How three days ago, clouds

were born over Canada

grew up in New England

and were lured to Long Island

to rain themselves out.

The skies are empty now.

 

 

Martin Golan’s poetry has appeared in many publications, including Pedestal, The Dos Passos Review, and Poet Lore. In addition, he published a novel, My Wife's Last Lover, and a collection of short stories, Where Things Are When You Lose Them.

 

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TODD MERCER

 

Farmsteads of Unknown Deities

 

The Goddess of the Harvest is still venerated by the

superstitious country people. They leave offerings.

Whether by divine action or by human sneakers

the baskets of bounty disappear in night-dark.

The locals laugh but half-believe, they leave

the folkways in place for the rising generation

to dismantle. There are spirits in the cornfields,

‘til the combines mow the stalks down, turn them

into the soil they rose from. Hiding places gone,

those spirits search for winter homes. You hear

of them breathing frost in orchards. They bump clumsy

against windows where parents of the parents’ parents

used to sleep away the century, their bellies

satiated by the food they grew. They slept,

they sleep still.

 

 

Revolutions, Consolation

 

First light and we’re making miles

disappear behind the car. It’s autumn

everywhere north of here, still summer

on the other side of the road.

Green grass left, leaves of heart-rust right.

The divide line between seasons,

same as weather cells’ edges

has to be somewhere in particular. So, it’s here.

The mission is that there is always

a new mission driving these arterial

circulations, cooling this car’s high-friction

engine. It’s seven-something. Hard frost’s evaporating

from the autumn surfaces. Best to straddle

double lines, one side over where it’s warmer

when there’s not oncoming traffic.

Stay alert and keep devouring road.

 

 

Todd Mercer won the first Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest. His chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest and his digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, is forthcoming from RHP Books. Mercer's poetry and fiction appear in journals such as The Camel Saloon, Camroc Press Review, Eunoia Review and The Legendary.

 

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BETHANY W. POPE

 

6.

 

New voices. A woman bent above the stove,

Observes you through a haze of chicken-scented steam.

Smile at her. This woman will aid you, though the words you

Weave your life with are alien to her. You

Enact the sign for hunger. She nods, black hair flying,

Extracts an apple from the net above the sink.

“This for you. Tell no one. He no like stealing.”

Never mind that you lack the means for buying breakfast.

Eat the sweet flesh, slicing the fruit with a two-

Sided knife, a blade serrated on one edge,

Sharp and smooth on the other, dual purpose. You will

Hide this in your bag. A symbol for something you haven't

Identified yet. The wooden handle fits

Delightfully in your hand. There's pain, a poem in it.

 

 

Secrets I Know

 

When I was a little girl I dreamt

that I was wandering, with my mother,

through a large department store. The aisles were

full of perfectly made-up ladies, dressed

like my mother in her modelling days.

They were so beautiful. I envied their

beauty, I craved it like a drug. Mother

brought me to a cosmetics counter, took

a white canister from the shelf. She said,

'Rub this into your flesh and you'll never

grow older. You will look young and lovely

forever. Like I shall.' Believing her,

I daubed the smooth substance onto my skin

and became a skull, like all those women.

 

 

Bethany W. Pope is an award winning author of the LBA, and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards, the Cinnamon Press Novel competition, and the Ink, Sweat and Tears poetry commission and she was commended for the Poetry London competition. She received her PhD from Aberystwyth University’s Creative Writing program. She is Assistant Editor at Epignois Quarterly and has published three poetry collections; A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012) Crown of Thorns, (Oneiros Books, 2013), and The Gospel of Flies (Writing Knights Press 2014). Her third full collection Undisturbed Circles has been accepted by Lapwing Press and shall be released later this year, and her fourth, Persephone in the Underworld has been accepted by Rufus Books and shall be released in 2016. Her work has appeared in many magazines including: Envoi; Poetry London;  Poetry Review Salzburg; Every Day Poems; Magma; Ink, Sweat and Tears; The Antigonish Review and the anthologies The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear); Gothic Anthology (Parthian Books); and Raving Beauties (Bloodaxe Books).

 

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ANGELA READMAN

 

The Calling of Laundry

 

We don’t wear gloves accepting your smalls, imply
there's a stain more ingrained than our hands.

The water boils, snorts like cows in the mist

running over strangers dreams, love and sin.

 

The soap we clutch froths pale as an apology

from a rabid mouth.  We can do this, see cotton

crisp as the day it was spun, apron ourselves 

foot to breast, feel the seams of our starched hearts.

 

The abbess bows her head, feels the back

of my necks for instructions of how to be a nice girl.

I pour salt on bloody sheets, loosen red in my cheeks,

draw out the shame of a man rolling off, rust

 

on the bed between my legs. Even then,

girls get on their knees and scrub. This is our calling,

a shared story, without being told we all know

laundry began with a woman smashing  

 

clothes against rocks in a river where the horses

drown, and finding the cloth, somehow, clean.

 

 

Anaemic Girls First Communion in the Snow

(a photograph by Alphonse Allais)

  

We are all waiting to blend into a moment,

my sisters and I stand, spines straight

as a blind man’s cane. The snow is dirty birds

 

in the air, circles, lands on our combed hair

to be cleansed. My little sister squirms, pressed

by a bladder into a slideshow of spokes, close-ups

 

of different sorts of snow. The sister beside her

traps a waterfall in her teeth; trickles rain sounds

into an ear. They hop in and out of their shadows,

 

rabbits evading the 1^st of the month. Laughter

is an avalanche, threatens to rumble us all. I adjust

to my corset, consider the bother my sisters

 

will have when they are older, decanting their self

into its bone vase. Snow freckles our noses, offers

the washed plates of our faces to the camera

 

like photos developing back into a blank page.

It will not do to speak, too much colour in my mouth

- we have Mother’s, he says. Our mother’s mouth

 

is an albino snakeskin purse full of stolen diamonds

and left in my custody. The snow is ash fingerprints

smearing the sky’s petticoat, flakes fornicate, build

 

communion wafers to drift over our closed lips.  

Father’s head pops up to disappear into a box.

Everything stops. Muffed hands clasp a second,

 

breath conspires with winter, tacks lace to the air.

It all hangs on right now, any girl can blur, blink,

or have a wet crotch. Forever, in a flash.

 

Angela Readman's poems won the Mslexia Poetry Competition, and The Essex Poetry Prize, and have been commended in Cafe Writers, the Arvon International Poetry Competition, and the Cardiff. She was published by Salt and is working on another collection.

 

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BEN SLOAN

 

See, Don't See

for Jena Helfrick

 

They see an elephant named Zeta and a clown

with orange hair, white face, and maroon scowl

working for a small traveling circus in Texas.

They see I don't trust Zeta and she doesn't like me,

how she trembles, rocks back and forth, sighs, flaps

her ears, and mock charges me, making them laugh.

They don't see I don't take any of it personally

because I know she doesn't like anyone. On cue

she grabs up a clump of grass and ground and

throws it at the audience, making the kids squeal.

They see how I feel sorry for her, patting her leg, but

they don't see it's because she's a neurotic creature

forced to endure a boring, lonely, meaningless life,

how I started out thinking what a fun job this will be

and ended up feeling disillusioned. They see

her front leg raised when I tap it from behind, her trunk

coiled back above her head like a cobra about to strike. 

 

 

Three of My Students at The North Carolina

            Correctional Institution for Women

 

She was pregnant and drunk in a bar

when she repeatedly stabbed a woman.

I am sure I learn more from them than

they learn from me. With friends riding along,

she was the one running the red lights

in a stolen car during the high speed chase.

Because a man driving the other car died

in the wreck, she received twenty years.

She was fourteen at the time. But some of it

I wish I had not come to know. She held a gun

on a clerk in a bridal shop while in a back room

her boyfriend, whom she loved, was raping

a customer. Later she watched him shoot

that same clerk. Because I have made mistakes

myself, I can't judge them. One wrote about

how she outwits the guards and escapes

thanks to cool rain or a breeze on her face

or the color of the light in the clouds.        

 

 

Ben Sloan grew up in the U.S. in Missouri though he has lived in Texas, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia. Currently he teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College and the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Virginia. His work has appeared in the Brooklyn Review, Connections, Third Wednesday, Transformations, The Saint Ann's Review, and elsewhere. 

 

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GRANT TARBARD

 

All His Summers Would Belong to Her

1952, outside a youth club in Havering Road, Romford

 

The outside was bare,

an avalanche of nothing.

All the tress were scratched 

 

out, all the houses

were skinless drums waiting to

be mended with hides.

 

On the altar of 

dereliction, rapture has 

a dress rehearsal,

 

he looks at her through 

a fug of Frankie Lane and

Mario Lanza

 

and the outside was

suddenly Technicolor.

All his summers were

 

ripe for the picking.

Henceforth, all his young summers

would belong to her.

 

Grand Tarbard is editor at The Screech Owl and co-founder of Resurgant Press with Bethany W. Pope.  He has worked as a journalist, a contributor to magazines, a reviewer, an interviewer and a proof reader and has published poems in many magazines including The Rialto; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Lake City Lights; The Open Mouse; South Florida Review; Every Day Poets and Bone Orchard Poetry. He won The Poetry Box Dark & Horror Poetry Magazine's Sinister Poetry Award May 2014 for his poem “Crows Feet”. His first collection Yellow Wolf  is being published by WK Press.

 

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