2015

 

 

 

OCTOBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

Colin Bancroft, Maggie Butt, Seth Crook, Edilson Ferreira, Jane Frank, Kathy Gee, William Ogden Haynes, Elise Hempel, Deirdre Hines, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco,

Ana Prundaru, Claudia Serea, Fiona Sinclair, Sarah White.

 

 

 

 

 

 

COLIN BANCROFT

 

On Seeing some Bones Laid out in a Museum

 

They lay, like loose change in the pocket of earth,

Below a snarl of nettles, pepper grind of stones,

And the ragged cut can lid of turf.

A defabricated corset, a trellis of bones

Collapsed in like the cross beams of some storm

Riven church. Then picked up, a new born child

Cradled, brushed clean, abluted, reformed

As a jigsaw, reclaiming the wild

Primordial blueprint, a sail-less mast

Bleached white underneath museum lights,

While visitors in their hundreds file past.

A lying in state, a passage of rites.

This is not a glass case. No, what you see,

Is a mirror reflecting back what you will be.

 

 

Colin Bancroft works as an English Lecturer at a College in the North-East. Originally from Manchester, he completed an MA in English at MMU, under the tutelage of Jean Sprackland. He has previously had poems published in Acumen, Agenda, Allegro, Ariadne’s Thread, Black Light Engine Room, Broken Wine, Cannon’s Mouth, The Copperfield Review, Elbow Room, LondonGrip, Message in a Bottle, Neon, ScreechOwl and Tellus. He has also been shortlisted for both the Manchester Bridgewater Prize and the New Holland Press competition.

 

MAGGIE BUTT

 

Time Travellers

 

The sick are well, dead smiling, old are young,

framed photos bloom on windowsills and walls,

I am a baby, arms aloft to be picked up

time zig-zags like a running man avoiding bullets.

 

Framed photos bloom on windowsills and walls

I am veiled bride, gowned graduate, new mum,

time zig-zags like a running man avoiding bullets

listen to the echoes of our laughter.

 

I am veiled bride, gowned graduate, new mum,

we are in Venice with our grown-up daughters

listen to the echoes of our laughter

I am a girl, in cotton frock with poodle-print,

 

We are in Venice with our grown-up daughters,

three straw-haired nieces squint into the sun,

I am a girl, in cotton frock with poodle-print.

Faces unwrinkle, hair turns luxuriant and brown

 

three straw-haired nieces squint into the sun,

a bunch of snowdrops, roses, autumn leaves.

Faces unwrinkle, hair turns luxuriant and brown

he’s in a de-mob suit, leaving the war behind,

 

a bunch of snowdrops, roses, autumn leaves.

Mum is a red-cross nurse, dad like a movie star

he’s in a de-mob suit, leaving the war behind

futures latent as a roll of undeveloped film.

 

Mum is a red-cross nurse, dad like a movie star

I am a baby, arms aloft to be picked up

futures latent as a roll of undeveloped film,

the sick are well, dead smiling, old are young.

 

Degrees of Twilight  is Maggie Butt’s fifth poetry collection, following the illustrated, themed books Sancti Clandestini- Undercover Saints and Ally Pally Prison Camp. She is an ex-journalist, BBC TV producer and chair of the National Association of Writers in Education, who has taught creative writing at Middlesex University since 1990.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

SETH CROOK

 

Pigs can't fly

 

except in gales,

when also

sheep have flown as far as Skye.

 

Destinations are uncertain,

though some will land in Tobermory,

by the pier

 

or fall on heads of baffled gnomes

fishing in the fishpond

of Mrs Meg MacKay.

 

And though love's still possible,

and truth will triumph in the fiercest gusts,

the sex is iffy,

 

more the iffy,

downright tough,

when love's out-rattled by a slipping tile.

 

 

Highland Cows on the Road

 

Not made for brisk plans.
  Young Dougal, he’ll push them along,

though no quicker for your groans.
  Has his own swearwords, thank you.

He'll pass, 

  eventually: reminding you of his father,

mother, grandfather, all shouting,
 growling down the drovers' road.

 

 

Not Easy To Read

 

The only map of love is a fragment,

   making sense only of stretches.

What lies further along the road 

  is often omitted, cut out or lost 

under a stain or spread of muck.

  Frayed edges appear with age.

The treasure is, of course, where

  she is. But bogs and cliffs abound.

 

 

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before moving to the Hebrides. He does not like cod philosophy in poetry, though likes cod, poetry and philosophy. His poems have appeared in such places as Gutter, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Scotland, Southlight, Causeway, Antiphon, Snakeskin, The Lake, The Poets' Republic, Rialto, Magma and Envoi. One of his poems was selected as one of the Best Scottish Poems of 2014.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

EDILSON FERREIRA

 

Rejoicing on her 50^th  birthday.

To my spouse, stepmother to my two daughters.

  

You were born to blow into three souls,

giving them life that was prompt to vanish,

packing up, leading ahead, making new ones.

While with us, you have appeased and healed.

When they take you to the bottom of the earth

and your soul rises to the heavens, be careful.

Touch us and the planet gently, so enlarged

will be your power we cannot even dream of.

 

 

Zola’s Mission.

 

Two years ago, my wife brought home a dog.

Her name, Zola, a black female, smart and active.

Then, I scold and inveigh, for I had never liked dogs.

Unwilling by me, she remained in the backyard.  

We have three beloved sons, and, last week,

by a big muddle, they fought and thumped.

My spouse, nervous and strained, abandoned home,

leaving me and going to one apartment we posses.

By night, I phone her and ask why she did not take Zola. 

It is an apartment, she said, really a big one, but

Zola does not fit here.

Take her, I said, it is a matter for you to solve.

Then, eleventh, she passes by the corridor and says:

I am back home, will remain with you.

I learned, once more, that, in my life,

all has had a reason to be,

even and just an animal.

Zola rescued a thirty-five years’ marriage.

 

 

Edilson Ferreira is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than Portuguese in order to reach more people. Published in British Anthologies, printed or online reviews in USA, Canada, England, Israel and elsewhere; shortlisted in four Poetry Contests. Lives in a small town with wife, three sons and a granddaughter and began writing after retirement as a Bank Manager. See more of his poetry t www.edilsonmeloferreira.wordpress.com.  “Zola’s Mission” was first published in TWJ Magazine.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

JANE FRANK

 

Lost

 

The scarf with the marbled patterns like a

child’s painting must have been lost somewhere

between the car and the Japanese garden,

a last gift from someone I loved gone

so it felt like losing them a little bit more

 

and then I noticed when I went to check which year

I graduated that the diary from 1998 is missing

from the red leather box and the realisation hit me

that I’d lost a year of my life, not just a dog-eared book

with paintings on each page from the Portrait Gallery

 

and it occurred to me soon after that all the warmth

is gone from this house which is not unusual for winter

but no matter the number of blankets

or how many pancakes I make or how bright the sun

shines on the russet bricks, I know it won’t come back

 

and neither will the funny brown skinned boy I’ve spent

a decade watching, cataloguing every thought, 

capturing on film every smile, who would rather

skype a friend, he says, rolling his eyes, than walk

with me to the park which would bore him to tears

 

so I set off alone and catch myself wondering what I really

ever had now that all these things have slipped away

and decide that everything lost is together somewhere

with the healthy glow I had on the beach up north

and my father’s carefree laugh, and any chance to start again.

 

Dusk

 

She opens her heart

and bookmarks it

at the spot

where the missing starts,

wonders why it always

falls open at this page,

at this time,

when cicadas throb

through ebbing light,

moraya blossoms

overpower

with their sweetness,

the velvet sky

whispers in a sultry voice.

Darkness will come soon,

stealing away the beauty,

closing her cover gently

so the wish stays

pressed inside.

 

 

Jane Frank’s poems have recently appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, the Bimblebox Art Project and a number of other journals in Australia and the UK. Jane teaches a range of writing disciplines at Griffith University in both Brisbane and on the Gold Coast in south east Queensland.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

KATHY GEE

 

They never said

 

If you’ve never done a funeral

a neighbour said you’d better start

with distant friends, prepare yourself

for unexpected deaths

of relatives and lovers.

 

They never warned me of the grave,

how much it shocks,

or how a friend was first to go

at thirty, how his wife

would coffin-cling the aisle

and grief would hit me sideways

though I hadn’t known him well.

 

I never knew I’d kneel to clear

my mother’s chest of drawers,

exploring spaces banned to children,

finding in her biscuit tin, my letters,

everything they never said.

 

 

 The impossibility of 3am

 

Everything is almost. Not quite
light, no longer just up late.
Awake in street-lit darkness,
time suspends the tipping point 
between today and yesterday.
The click of an alarm clock, 
halted on its way to dawn.

 

With pillow gripped in mid escape,
she cannot take the risk of sleep, 
recalling half-forbidden faces,
banished from the day.

She hears the dog stir in his basket, 
dreaming he is off the leash 
and free and free and free.

 

 

Kathy Gee lives in the UK and mentors museum and heritage organisations for a living. In 2011 she was an unexpected finalist for the Worcestershire Laureate and has since had some fifty poems published in online and print magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Obsessed with Pipework, Ink, Sweat and Tears, And Other Poems, Antiphon, Acumen, and in three anthologies. Her first collection will be published in 2016.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

WILLIAM OGDEN HAYNES

 

A Busy Day

 

His brother Ray called early that morning from across

the country to tell him their father died.  It was a short

call and there was really nothing he could do because

dad had been ill for a while and didn’t want a funeral

or ceremony of any kind, just a quick cremation and

 

burial in the family plot with no fanfare. So, he mowed

the lawn and cleaned the garage. The gutters were full

of fall leaves so he got the extension ladder and went to work.

After that he trimmed the bushes and blew off the drive.

He decided to make a pizza for dinner, but needed

 

the ingredients, so he went to the grocery store and

on the way stopped at Lowes to get a new mower blade,

after all, it was two years old, dull and nicked up.

His phone kept buzzing in his pocket with unanswered

phone calls, but he was too busy to take them or answer

 

the dinging text messages. After he ate, Bailey, his old

black Lab, came into the living room and joined him in

her usual place on the couch.  But she didn’t turn in a circle

to find a comfortable position and go to sleep.  Instead,

the dog sat there, cocking her head, looking at him as if

 

she were listening to a faint sound in the distance.

And then the stories began to slowly leak out, one at a time.

You know girl, my dad taught me how to ride a two wheeler.

 She looked up at him with those hazel eyes, attentively,

 as if she were about to get a treat. And later he showed me

 

 how to drive a stick shift. The dog pushed her nose under

 his hand so he could pet her head. One summer we went

 on a trip to Minnesota to fish for muskies. Bailey sat

 there listening as if she understood what he was saying.

 And for that evening, he believed she actually did.  

 

William Ogden Haynes is a poet and author of short fiction from Alabama who was born in Michigan and grew up a military brat.  He has published three collections of poetry Points of Interest Uncommon Pursuits and Carvings  and one book of short stories Youthful Indiscretions all available on Amazon.com.  Over a hundred and twenty of his poems and short stories have appeared in literary journals and his work is frequently anthologized.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

DEIRDRE HINES

 

A Recipe

 

may take its name from the country of birth

or from the author, but depends on

the right amount of ingredients in

the right order: no higgledy piggledy.

Although tastes have proved as fickle

as simile, the seas dishes sail in

are groups that rise and fall in frequencies

that follow whales feeding in plastic fields.

Between the poetry and metaphor,

between our finger and our mouth,

hangs an image of a starving child

above rivers of uneaten flavour.

The lost recipes of Eden live

in golden grains of singing wheatfields.

 

 

Deirdre Hines is an award winning playwright and poet. The Language of Coats,

her first poetry book, was published by New Island Books in 2012. New poems

have been published in Deep Water Literary Journal, Abridged, The Bombay Review,

The Screech Owl, and in s.w.collective. Her website is www.deirdrehines.com

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

ELIZABETH McMUNN-TETANGCO

 

Paper Doll

 

On the tape

you are so thin –

a paper

 

doll.

 

It is raining

(on the tape)

 

and you are

dancing

 

with a boy

on tilted

streets, and your hair

 

is like soft yarn,

stuck to your shoulders.

 

I can’t tell

 

how old you are.

 

It is raining

(in our town, outside my window)

 

and I’m tired, and I’m

watching

 

these old movies, one by one.

Versions

of you

 

skate

around me, leaving

lines – long

 

lean scars –

 

on everything.

 

At North Shore Medical Center

 

You think of Salem,

its forests thick

with wolves. Firelit

 

rooms

and cold wood floors.

 

In your room, a woman waits,

with her hands threading your hair,

stroking your face.

 

Your memory has been burning

photographs, culling

the weak. You hold

 

their hands.

 

You think of Salem,

frozen

grass and the Lord’s Prayer,

woodsmoke rising

 

like a dance you don’t

remember.

 

Out the window

is the ocean with its lip

crushed white with frost.

 

The sun is frail

as an old woman.

 

You think of Salem,

with its roads

 

its muddied knees,

 

the light

like sticks beneath its doors,

and then the dark.

 

 

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California with her husband, son, a big black dog, and a three-legged cat. Her poems have appeared in The Lake, Hobart, Word Riot, The Kentucky Review, and Paper Nautilus, among others.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

ANA PRUNDARU

 

Radio Never House

I've never been kidnapped by pirates, but if I 
were, I'd become the best of them, emptying my 
scent into endless waves. Quite sure, I've never 
been condemned to a life in an aquarium, but 
if I were, I'd sing songs of the sea and 
taste the blue, unchaining history from my 
wrists. I've never attempted to dig for my
prince’s soul, which is likely anchored where the 
thunder sleeps. But if I were to break the spell, 
I'd scratch awake the sky with my fingernails. I've 
never stopped haunting the window of the cottage 
in the forest, where a fairy promised 
to light eternal liberation in my eyes but if I 
am to deviate from life’s horrors, I'll be spreading 
dark and proud, a prisoner of the night. 

Ana Prundaru is a writer/photographer with an interest in overlooked people and places. Her work is forthcoming from Vignette Review, Ragazine, Yellow Chair Review, Litro Magazine and Rattle. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

CLAUDIA SEREA

 

The paper children

 

I sit on the floor

and decorate the room

with paper cutouts.

 

Silhouettes of children,

snipped from a folded newspaper,

fall from my hands.

 

They float around the room dancing,

playing, pretending

they aren’t gone.

 

Who remembers their names,

parents, birth certificates?

 

The children paper the walls with voices

and hummed songs

 

the stone bridge

is ruined

the water came

and took it away

 

holding the words from the newsprint

inside their bellies,

meaningless clumps of letters.

 

Gone from their villages,

gone from their mothers’ arms,

names gone from their lips,

 

floating above the room in ruins,

still holding hands,

still singing,

 

pretending they don’t know

until they get to the stove.

 

A red tongue shoots out

and licks them

into oblivion.

 

 

 

The girl at the window upstairs

 

Night rises like smoke

from the branches against the sky.

 

Down the street,

someone walks a lion on a leash

with a smoldering mane.

 

It’s the night’s fault,

the way it curls

in the upset hair

of the girl at the window upstairs

 

and coils in the wine glass

in front of her father.

 

Above the house,

a flight of starlings shapes

an indecipherable ideogram.

 

Night throbs,

a wail in the girl’s body,

 

a heat wave,

the need to fight.

 

Like gasoline, it fills the room

 

until it catches fire,

setting the window ablaze.

 

Tonight, she’ll run away.

 

 

 Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, 5 a.m., Meridian, Word Riot, Apple Valley Review, among others. A four-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky (8^th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervena Barva Press, 2015) and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, forthcoming). Serea co-hosts The Williams Readings poetry series in Rutherford, NJ. She is the founding editor of National Translation Month. More at cserea.tumblr.com.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Tribute

 

Seville sight -seeing in 40 degrees, stokes up fever heat in me.

Leant arms sweat slew off table as if tipsy.

Folded legs slide apart as if 1950s gran on Margate sea front.

Bottom sticks to seat as if sitting on drying paint.

 

White deflects heat I learn from chic Sevillien women,

Q tip thin in linen shifts; they cat walk the city .

But after six months dieting to make the wedding dress weight,

I have honeymoon troughed on tapas, artisan ice cream, paella,

growing a 2^nd trimester belly in 3 weeks that old ladies smile and pat.

So I sit in the café in emergency purchase dress whose loose

folds do not camouflage but balloon me to morbidly obese.

 

She is Spanish siesta fresh, sleeveless dress skims a trim body

middle age has not troubled with ‘problem areas’.

Her partner, returning from the bar, drops a kiss on her neck’s nape,

not the lust of breast or bum fondle,

but spontaneous reminder she is adored

which the woman accepts with a private message smile.

Envy prickles as I dig into my chocolate pudding.

 

 

Fiona Sinclair's first full collection of poetry, Ladies Who Lunch was published by Lapwing Press in September, 2014. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

SARAH WHITE

 

Beatitudes of Food

 

Blessed be the lime, for its juices allow you to cook, without heat,

the meat of a scallop.

 

Blessed be eggs, for the yolks do one thing, the whites, another.

 

Blessed be cilantro, whose seed is “coriander,” whose leaves are “Chinese Parsley.”

 

Blessed be those whose taste buds recoil from cilantro.

 

Blessed be flour, which thickens the gravy provided you stir to prevent formation of lumps.

 

Blessed be the lumps, for they shall be known as dumplings.

 

Blessed be the tooth that first bit into a fresh tomato, ignoring the warnings.

 

Blessed be the gardener who came upon long, pink, edible stalks behind the dark, deadly leaves of the rhubarb.

 

Blessed be Pilut Gib, the Indonesian mime, who cooks and eats a tulip, then writes his name backwards on a linen screen.

 

 

 

Boy and Girl on a Porch, with Woodbine

for Bill Melhado

 

A boy of nine lays his arm along the shoulder

                             of his two-year-old sister,

 

            “It doesn’t matter what you teach a boy…

 

He believes she is the child most treasured

           

            as long as he doesn’t like it,”  (Winston Churchill)

 

while she thinks her brother is the favorite.

 

            Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes, are playing

 

Neither, when they’re grown, will befriend the other’s spouse

           

            I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.

 

Neither will frequent the other’s house

 

            The boy stood on the burning deck

 

until, in time, orphaned and alone, they’re surprised

 

            Boys and girls together…

.

by a picture of two children side by side

 

            me and Mamie O’Rourke,

 

with long strands of woodbine all around.

 

 

Sarah White's most recent published collections are The Unknowing  Muse (Dos Madres, 2014) and Wars Don't Happen Anymore (Deerbrook Editions, 2015). She lives, writes, and paints in New York City.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE