Author: Claire Walker

I'm a poet based in Worcestershire, UK. My poetry has appeared in print and online magazines including The Interpreter's House, Prole, Ink Sweat and Tears, And Other Poems, Clear Poetry, and Amaryllis, and in anthologies such as The Chronicles of Eve (Paper Swans Press). My first pamphlet, The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile, is published by V. Press. I'm a Poetry Reader for Three Drops Press, and Co-Editor of Atrium poetry webzine.

To Raymond Carver with Thanks – Abigail Elizabeth Ottley Wyatt

~ Claire Walker ~ 3 Comments

To Raymond Carver with Thanks

You are the only poet
I have ever read yet
going cover to cover like a novel.
Is that a confession?
I guess if it is then you
would most likely approve.

Also I should say I turn
pages too soon
I am so eager to discover
what will happen.
I suspect my pain,
my failures seem smaller
in direct proportion to yours.

In part I think I consume
you so greedily
because you ring true
like fine glassware.
If you are my poison,
my cup of bitter herbs,
I think I will sink you,
knock you back,
put you down the hatch
in good style.

I like it that while diving,
you sank to the bottom
and played dead with the mud
cool on your belly.
Sometimes it is easier
not to surface,
not to rise up
into the light.

 

Abigail Elizabeth Ottley Wyatt writes poetry and short fiction. Her work has appeared in more than a hundred magazines, journals and anthologies. The author of ‘Old Soldiers, Old Bones and Other Stories’, she works from her home in Cornwall.

Rehabilitation – week 6 – Stephen Daniels

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Rehabilitation – week 6

take my arm and press, open this door and pull the handle,

pull the handle, pull the hand, drag the door, open, move

and keep hold of hand, let loose grip of fingers, thump

your arms and march, bruises ask questions, of the pressure,

fingers resist, sit down, chair takes weight and force up,

push up, resist upwardly mobile, on the floor, horizontal

legs not upright, and scramble, twist arms, through routine

moves and spin, in a corner and brace legs, from laying,

precise legs, scratched in dust, scrape tiles, take tiles

and prise them, snap tiles, arm in hand, resist arm in arm,

resist, on face and leg on tile, and arm in fist, clutch at door

handles and turn away, toes on tiles, lose grip, toes on tiles,

shove, slip, toes on tiles, slip toes, on tiles, slip.

 

Stephen Daniels is the editor of Amaryllis Poetry and Strange Poetry websites. His poetry has been published in numerous magazines and websites. His pamphlet ‘Tell mistakes I love them’ will be published in 2017 by V. Press. Find out more at www.stephenkirkdaniels.com, @stephendaniels

Brum – Ben Banyard

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Brum

Here there’s no up or down,
we’re in the middle, centred.

We see missiles hurtle overhead
from north to south and back again.

We grew up in the Bull Ring,
flaunt our bab, bostin’, deaf it,
on the way to the outdoor
for a bottle of pop.

We are Julie Walters, Jasper Carrott,
UB40, Ozzy Osborne.

We’ve seen and made it all;
two centuries of sweat and beer,

Spaghetti Junction hearts.

 

Ben Banyard grew up in Birmingham but now lives near Bristol. His pamphlet, ‘Communing’, was published by Indigo Dreams in 2016, and his first full collection, ‘We Are All Lucky’, is due out early in 2018. Ben also edits Clear Poetry: https://clearpoetry. wordpress.com and blogs at https://benbanyard. wordpress.com

 

Knitting – Oz Hardwick

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Knitting

A grey woman, who should be sitting in a rocking chair,
sits instead on a straight-backed stool, her eyes closed,
knitting a scarf – yellow and blue, my first school colours.

I sit on the floor, watching as it grows, listening
to the click of the needles and the tick of a clock
echoing from an empty room at the front of the house.

She knits fast, but the scarf grows faster, billowing
in coils at her feet, crawling higher like morning mist
until it drapes my shoulders, caresses my throat.

Faster it grows, probing my mouth, snaking inside,
down to my guts, warming my belly, then nudging up
into my head, implacably pushing from my ears and nose.

There’s a gentle tickling growing behind my eyes before
it slips under my prickling lids. The needles now move
on their own, the stool stands empty. I turn to the window:

the last thing I see is the woman, framed in a small yard,
her eyes still closed, her face raised to the sun, flapping
her floral apron, casting crumbs, or seeds, to swooping crows.

 

Oz Hardwick is a York-based writer, photographer and occasional musician. He has been published widely in the UK, Europe and US. His sixth poetry collection, The House of Ghosts and Mirrors, will be published by Valley Press in September 2017. www.ozhardwick.co.uk

 

Shadows – Bethany Rivers

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Shadows

Beyond the Scots’ Pine and the Monkey Puzzle tree
at the edge of the farmers’ fields a blood-orange sun
is dying.  You always said you could cradle

the sun in the palm of your hand.
I watched you raise your hand into the sky
to prove it, your other hand on my shoulder.

The grass retains your footsteps from this morning
when you went out in your dressing gown and slippers
to check if the doves were back.  An imprinted

trail in coated frost, the sun was unable
to melt.  Later, when you’re not there, I touch
the tiny icicles on a blade of grass –

it would take me years to warm the whole
lawn, and I wonder if that’s the task
you’ve secretly appointed me with.  Sky fades

to peach melba then dusty pink , a pink
I used to love, and you don’t remember:
even Yew trees lose their greenness at dusk

I run from the creeping shadows
of all those things I should have said.

 

Bethany Rivers’ pamphlet, ‘Off the wall’, published by Indigo Dreams (2016).  Previous publications include: Envoi, Cinnamon Press, Obsessed with Pipework, The Ofi Press, Clear Poetry, Picaroon Poetry.  She teaches and mentors the writing of memoir, novels and poetry.  www.writingyourvoice.org.uk

 

 

Actual Size – Paul Vaughan

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Actual Size

The brochure hooked me
with its beach so pristine, white.
Palm trees gaily waving invitations,
with lithe coconut-clad ladies with shy coquettish smiles
serving endless margaritas to my hammock in the sky.

I never learn that beds are made of promises,
that the advert’s just a lie.

Today I looked on Amazon
and saw a model of the Taj Mahal.
Hand crafted in pink blancmange,
actual size, just nine pounds ninety nine.
I ordered two of them,
one for me and one for the guy
that said he’ll come Tuesday to build me an angel.

 

Paul Vaughan loves his cat. His poems have cropped up in Agenda, Prole, Obsessed with Pipework and Dream Catcher, among others. Edits Algebra of Owls.

Jacqueline Burdett – Michael W. Thomas

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Jacqueline Burdett

We were in the same class
at primary school.  Shared
the same birthday.  One year
were told to stand up
so the room could sing
and toast the nothing we’d done.

Slight, she was, freckled:
tawny keeps coming to mind.
Already bringing on a bit of a stoop
to oblige the afterwards.

You’d glimpse her
slipping out to play,
edging the shadows
of the manager’s son
and the town-clerk’s daughter.

She answered each question perfectly
then retrieved her stillness,
putting the world away from her
till called upon again.

She rarely smiled,
perhaps never,
certainly not the day she and I
held an end apiece of coincidence,
like a pageant-flag
golden from a brush of sun
fluttered in a pocket of wind.

 

Michael W. Thomas’s poetry collections include Batman’s Hill, South Staffs (Flipped Eye, 2013) and Come to Pass (Oversteps, 2015).  His work has appeared in The Antioch Review and the TLS.  In 2015, his novella, ‘Esp’, was shortlisted for the UK Novella Award.
www.michaelwthomas.co.uk
http://swansreport.blogspot.co.uk/
@thomasmichaelw

Coupes – Gaynor Kane

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Coupes

A stag’s head, looks down
through soulless sockets,
focuses on fuchsia,
mother-of-pearl sequins;
a gown, self-spun
from fifty yards of net.

Black gloves, holding
a single daffodil
at the Floral Hall.
In champagne coupes
baby bubbles bounce;
reflecting light
like a mirror ball.

A hand reaches over,
pulls a puff of pink
across the dance-floor;
they spin
laughing and talking
until birds sing.

Then you were caught,
contained;
the net trawled in,
constrained.
Fifty years on,
you are silent, stagnant,
unspun.

 

Previously published in A New Ulster

Gaynor Kane is from Belfast, Northern Ireland and has had work published in the Galway Review and other journals. In 2016 she was a finalist in both the annual Funeral Services NI poetry competition and The Glebe House poetry competition.

Mixtapes – Kate Garrett

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Mixtapes

Three-part punk harmonies
introduced her to poetry,
and the older boys insisted
she take their mixtapes
with their phone numbers
slipped inside the cases.

An escape into plastic castles
of folk and rock, industrial,
grunge, and hip hop. They gave
her the sound of second-hand shop
clothes. They handed over
promises of something more
than her home-grown apathy.

Promised more than the midnight reels
of pornography that bruised
like stones between her bones and skin.

 

Kate Garrett’s poetry has been widely published, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for a 2016 Saboteur Award. However, while her poetry is busy doing stuff, Kate bums around reading books and hanging out with her children. Stalk her on Twitter at @mskateybelle.

Nether Stowey – Marc Woodward

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Nether Stowey

The finches of the land stood sentinel
to grazing flocks of Suffolk Black Faced sheep.
They drove, top down, her hair tied back and capped,
past crumpled meadows strewn like lovers’ sheets.

They never kissed or held each other’s hands,
he didn’t shake and she forgot her ills,
instead they wound through undulating lands,
and headed north to hike the Quantock hills.

At Coleridge’s house they wondered where
he kept his laudanum; sat at his desk;
strolled knowing Sam and William once walked there…
A perfect day. The doctors ordered rest.

 

Marc Woodward is a musician and poet who has performed and taught internationally and been widely published.
A Fright Of Jays was published by Maquette in 2015 and he has just completed a full collection The Tin Lodes written in collaboration with renowned poet Andy Brown.
His blog is at www.marcwoodwardpoetry.blogspot.co.uk
Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/Marcwoodwardmandolin