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.

Dear Clent – S.A. Leavesley

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Dear Clent
 
Mist unfolds from your slopes’
envelopes of valley and sky.
Above winter peaks, the black script
of trees and bird flight.

My faltering steps
and words overshadowed
by the wind’s stone-swept stutters,
lost in crackles of fern and bracken.

Past snatches of nettle burn,
Sunday morning legs, summer sweat
and vista-slapped gasps –
moments

un-landscaped
yet shaping the knit of my bones.
Distilled from your hills’ daily moods
and light filtered through leaves,

a sense of peace, essence of me.
It should be easy – to keep
in touch, write home with love,
remember,

return…maybe.
Like this land, I’ve learned to live
with distance, and never sign off
without leaving

something hanging –
a raindrop, a branch, a ledge
at the edge, in hope
of a steady handhold.

 

S.A. Leavesley is a poet, fiction writer, journalist, photographer, editor. Her latest books: ‘plenty-fish’ (Nine Arches Press, shortlisted in International Rubery Book Awards 2016) ‘Lampshades & Glass Rivers’ (Overton Poetry Prize 2015 winner) and a novella, ‘Kaleidoscope’. Her website is at: www.sarah-james.co.uk.

Dolls of Chaos – Maggie Mackay

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Dolls of Chaos

Somewhere consigned to shadow
in the nervous system of my childhood brain
a collection of paper dolls huddle,
thrawn Shikigami beings

one feline-featured with retractable claws,
whiskers varnished snow-white
another on twenty-four-hour watch,
yellow wings tucked into raggedy coal-black lining

the third, a mousey creature of tiny ears
and pencil-thin body, waistcoat of velvet-grey
and boss of those three, Fox Trot,
fur etched with blood sticky plots.

They cause mischief to haunt every hour.
Cut-outs from my infancy,
they mess with human heads,
spin them full circle.

Let me give orders,
let them steal, spy and track
the bullies, deceivers,
you enemies of my curious world.

 

Maggie Mackay has work in print and online including The Everyday Poet edited by Deborah Alma, Amaryllis, Bare Fiction, Indigo Dreams Publishing, The Fat Damsel, The Interpreter’s House, Prole, I am Not a Silent Poet, The Poetry Shed, Three Drops Press and Yorkmix.

Teddy Bear Heart – Lorraine Carey

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Teddy Bear Heart
 
He sits on a wardrobe roof
doors and drawers of rich chestnut,
whose factory glaze faded with the calendars.
Sitting heavy with fallen dust,
giving his custard coat a layer of memories.

Spreadeagled, beleaguered, amber eyes
watch my every move. I stood in the room
where carpet curled over and mould hugged the skirting.
The acrid tang of neglect stung, wrapped around me
and clutched curtains, hung in the creases.

I sat and recalled the radiator’s rattles
when she relented and switched on the oil,
even though two fires burned
with crumbly peat and nuggets of coal.
A furry master of all he surveys, in his best pose

between a home computer and foot spa – good as new.
You had to come back with all you ever owned
and dying a bit more each new day, you slept it off,
your teddy watching from his throne. I wonder is he still there,
or placed in a see through bag with all the others, missing you
like I do.

 

Lorraine Carey is an Irish poet from Co. Donegal. Her poetry has featured in the following: The Honest Ulsterman, Poethead,  Proletarian, Vine Leaves and Live Encounters, among others. Her debut collection From Doll House Windows was published in May.

A Bibliophile’s Heaven – Susan Castillo Street

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 A Bibliophile’s Heaven 

Room after room after room
of stories, lives bound in vellum
and gilded letters.  The smell of dust

and leather.  Slanting rays of sun
falling from high windows.
I would lie back on a chaise longue

feet up, while a conga line of Clooneys
pours me goblets of fine champagne
and a legion of Clark Gables

fetches every book that takes my fancy.
My fingers would caress their spines,
savour their margins,
never stop at endings

 

Susan Castillo Street is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita, King’s College London.  She has published three collections of poems, The Candlewoman’s Trade (Diehard Press, 2003), Abiding Chemistry,  (Aldrich Press, 2015), and Constellations (Three Drops Press, 2016), as well as several scholarly monographs and edited anthologies. Her poetry has appeared in Southern Quarterly, Prole, The High Window, Ink Sweat & Tears, Messages in a Bottle, The Missing Slate, Clear Poetry, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Foliate Oak, The Yellow Chair Review, Poetry Shed, and other journals and anthologies.

221 Pershore Road – sometime in the early 90’s – Matt Nicholson

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221 Pershore Road – sometime in the early 90’s
 
Waking from those too fast,
ashtray-kissed nights,
to days that fizzed
too loud, like cherryade,
to days that were almost
and yet already done.

Sitting there, in sunshine,
on brick-burst, red-dust walls,
we swung legs
in cocky syncopation
with soft, imagined,
half-learned beats.

And today,
when our song broke into my chest,
staining ragged jeans once more
with lichen and brick-dust,
I made mosaic of shining memories
from old notebooks and glue,

for my half-remembered
you.

 

Matt Nicholson is a poet from East Yorkshire…where the culture comes from…His collection “There and back to see how far it is” was published by King’s England Press in October 2016. (http://www.kingsengland.com/there-and-back-to-see-how-far-it-is-c2x21548033) Twitter:@MattPoetHull

The Swan Maiden – Stella Wulf

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The Swan Maiden

I was reared in a cob and straw clutch
a plot hatched from a jaundiced yolk,
laid on the hollow of her dead belly,
or that’s what he told me.
‘No one wants an ugly duckling,’ he said.

Pinioned by his earthly needs,
I lumbered to his call. Night
after night, I let fly my bombilations,
a trumpeting lament, taken up
by the wind, threshing on a wing chord.

A dawning sun rises in my gorge,
sears the salt lakes of my eyes,
beats at my body’s cage.
My gut unravels – knots to a skein,
catching my breath in its mesh

as I lift from his battered chest,
a pellicle of white skin and down,
a pleated vane of coverts,
the earthy scent of summer rain,
pulsing a madness through my veins.

Slipping back into the stolen shift,
I open my wings, stretch out my neck,
taste the iron in the spreading pool,
observe my reflection in the slick.
‘See now, how fair I am?’

 

Stella’s poems have been published both in print and online magazines and appear in several anthologies including, The Very Best of 52, three drops from a cauldron, and the Clear Poetry Anthology.

Imagining a Changed Place – Margaret Adkins

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Imagining a Changed Place

If it’s me that ends up alone
at our breakfast table

I’ll still eat an apple, slowly baked
the night before, with honeyed

nuts in yogurt. But I’ll focus on the wren
outside, finding tiny fragrant

spiders tucked up in rosemary
blooms – and when she sings, I’ll watch

her nebule of breath
evaporate.

I will set your chair
far enough back – for you to fill it.

 

In 2017 Margaret Adkins’ poems featured in The Fat Damsel, Algebra of Owls and three anthologies: This Is Not Your Final Form (Emma Press) A Bee’s Breakfast (Beautiful Dragons Press) and Physic Garden (Palewell Press). She had a poem commended in the Welshpool Poetry Competition.

Salt – Cheryl Pearson

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Salt

The deer steps slow like a creature
new to legs. I know that kind of care,
watch as she delicately lifts and settles
each stem of herself. I could pour
into her. Those stars on her back
are the freckles that rise – the dipper,
the bear – on my shoulder. And now,
see, as she stops by the lick of salt
I left at the fence: a slice of sea for her.
How she curls her tongue around
my world as I hold my breath in hers.

 

Cheryl Pearson lives in Manchester. Her poems have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Southword, Under The Radar, The High Window, and Poetry NorthWest. Her first full poetry collection, “Oysterlight”, was published by Pindrop Press in March 2017.

Prayer for Italian Restaurants – Daniel Bennett

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Prayer for Italian Restaurants

What happens to the ancient bottles
of Chianti and Barbaresco
congealing into stalagmites of wax?
Where shall we congregate
after the blackboards are repainted
and red sauce rusts
on discarded whites?
These portals have greeted us
beyond that regular dream
of an indifferent city. Puttanesca,
pesto, focaccia, let us count
a well-seasoned Bolognese
as a universal welcome home.
Allow us inside the glass counters
lined with cheese and salami,
bedding beside plastic onions
tomatoes and parsley sprigs,
wrapped forever in tablecloths
of red oil cloth. In Soho,
Camden and Holloway, throughout
the subtle lanes of Highbury,
leave us to the easy choices
of our younger days,
when they waited around us,
regular as sonnets on our streets.

 

Daniel Bennett was born in Shropshire and lives and works in London. His poems have been widely published, most recently in The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 from Eyewear Books. He’s also the author of the novel, All the Dogs.

The Worm Man of Dungeness – Dan Stathers

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The Worm Man of Dungeness

He scatters boot-prints
across a soggy moon,
trudges his sled on blistered sands,
clouds curdle at his feet.

Nabbed from their burrows,
he lands the salty lugs,
coils them into shreds
of yesterday’s news;

all yellow tails,
fat middles
and a squeeze
of muddy innards.

Some sell fresh
to the cod man’s bucket,
others shanked through hooks
on seaside fronts,

neaping tides
to dupe
their drownless bodies.

 

Dan Stathers is a writer from South Devon who hasn’t given up on his first poetry collection.