Why Not? – Tessa Foley

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Why Not?

Why not be your biro?
And be held between your dryish fingers
On a Tuesday, on the train
When you do your quickest thoughts
Over clues in black and white,
Be rattled on your teeth,
Sit on your diary, on your desk and
Wait for you to use me.

Why not be your fancy shirt?
And be fluttering against your chest expensively,
When you are feeling great at dinner till
You spill black, vein wine on my stitches,
And swipe at me but leave a mark,
Be thrown in to the dark, hanging
Till you’re too fat
To take me out.

Why not be your holiday?
The space that you lie down in,
Be the time that you exhale on windows
With pretty scenes beyond,
When everything goes fast and messy,
Be the place you laugh and sleep the most,
Or the place you wish you hadn’t come,
The plane you missed to Gatwick.

Why not be your wedding ring?
Slide up and off your hand
When it’s time to soap the bowls,
Call out in a cinema when the movie light
Bounces off you and your popcorn,
Be dumped off the bridge over the creek
And dwindle to the silt
When you can’t stand the sight of me.

Why not be your sorry?
The thing that appears when you are weak
And tired and when your skin is bad,
The thing you feel deep in your lap
But can’t quite put your lips to,
I’d make you a torch of embarrassment
And strap you to a lifetime,
Of looking like a fool.

 

Tessa Foley is a writer whose work has been featured in Agenda and the Fredericksburg Literary Art Review and been recognised in several competitions such as the Verve Poetry Competition and the Bristol Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection ‘Chalet Between Thick Ears’ was published and launched by Live Canon in November 2018 http://www.livecanon.co.uk/publications.

To all of us – Karen Hodgson Pryce

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To all of us

what if one night
my brothers and sisters, each
being miles apart, got up
took a mug, heated milk
in that same moment, thinking
of the others

what if one night, each
stood barefoot in a kitchen
a mug in our hands
a clock behind us, blinking

what if we thought of all the things
that had happened
in all the kitchens
in all the rooms
and from our mugs of milk
we drank
to all of us

 

Karen Hodgson Pryce lives in Aviemore, Scotland. Her poetry is in Lighthouse, Northwords Now, Black Bough Poetry, The Poets’ Republic, Butcher’s Dog and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She won 3rd Prize in the Café Writers Open Poetry Competition, 2019.

Field study in wildness eradication – Marcia Hindson

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Field study in wildness eradication

Begin with a house.

Fill it with thunder, always turned loud.

In the back bedroom, trap seven octopuses to swim
two sisters’ ceiling so neither will learn to dream.

Introduce gardens of books that ladybirds
will crawl from all over the murky hallway.

Encourage mother’s shadow to construct
haunted castles from the pages.

A wolf dressed as a buck rabbit should be let in
on a Friday night to sleep on the wrecked settee.

If he decides to strangle mother whenever
she sings, do not be alarmed. She’s unnecessary.

Construct the first dad as a fairytale ogre
all the faraway cousins will fawn over.

Have him lock oldest sister in a bible
when she reaches ten, forget to feed her.

Arrange for an owl-faced man to swear
she is as dark as Sylvia Plath so she has
to fuck his older brother inside a bell jar
at the front of a ruined chemistry class.

Do not chase her when she runs away
with a vampire after he convinces
her cracked head to become a circus.

Ban her from making friends with her heart
in case it is an unfenced field grown
specifically to home runaway horses in.

Let one of their childhood friends belong
to the moon so when it takes her body back
at thirty the sisters will blossom sadness.

Do not laugh when one of them falls head over
numpty in love with her dazzling best friend.

When the pair of them begin to write beautiful stories
on each other’s toes force him to feed hers to gulls.

Teach the oldest lass that puddles
can also be oceans where she will have
to watch an antlered man drown.

Wrap the whole experiment up in cotton,
place in a drawer at the bottom of a pantry.

Pickle for decades so the vinegar can strengthen.
Unscrew the lid and watch the glorious mess coagulate.

Then the important part:

Find the next naïve ingredients.
Keep performing this, on repeat.

 

Marcia Hindson’s work has appeared in The Interpreter’s House, Obsessed With Pipework, Bare Fiction, and also regularly published in Vext Magazine. She has recently learned that her garden is not a scary place, so is currently coaxing a myriad of root vegetables to come and live there. She will, of course, end up naming them all.

Moonrakers – Richard Westcott

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Moonrakers

Lunatic, Sir?
Come and see for yourself – here is the moon
in all her silver glory.  Full to the brim
and shimmering, as real as you and me.

Afflicted, Sir?
How can that be, for there she rests
all ready now for harvesting.
I simply need to rake her in.

Be gentle, Sir
as there are times you must stand back
to let her find herself.  And then
surprised, the prize is yours.

Moonraking, Sir
that’s what we do.  No fatuity
though I admit, she must be filled
and you be careful with your tines.

And so farewell
there’s work for all of us to do
you must search for brandy smugglers
while we sane people rake up the moon.

 

Wiltshire yokels, raking a pond for kegs of smuggled brandy, feigned lunacy when surprised by the excise men, saying that they were trying to rake out the moon, which was reflected in the water.

The Lunacy Act of 1842 defined a lunatic as someone ‘afflicted with a period of fatuity in the period following a full moon’.

Richard Westcott, for many happy years a GP in north Devon, now has no excuse not to get down to writing. He blogs at richardwestcottspoetry.com and he’s been pleasantly surprised to win a few prizes here and there. His pamphlet is published by Indigo Dreams – https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/richard-westcott/4594230918

Phone Call – William Thompson

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Phone Call

The news of how you’d stepped out of the pub’s
milky puddle of light on New Year’s Eve
to meet the swerve of a car’s headlamps
arrived with the same muffled shock
I imagine in your face just before impact.
So, natural teacher I’ve been told you were,
writer of long letters, pedaller through downpours,
this was the final lesson that you gave,
unsettling, life affirming: leaving my dad
gripping the kitchen worktop, the hand
that holds the phone gone almost limp
as my mum, in tears herself, props him up,
his shoulders slackening against her weight
his lovely head against her collarbone.

 

William Thompson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. His work has been published in Lighthouse, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Cannon’s Mouth and is forthcoming in The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2020. Twitter: @willthompson237

Next up is the asteroid – Allen Ashley

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Next up is the asteroid

and although several countries have space programmes it turns out no-one has the right equipment in terms of guided missiles, which leads to a huge verbal fallout from the international blame game.

When the rock crashes to earth the news media salivates once again. Beasts from the east, war, floods, famine, Brexit, Covid and now this… our cup runneth over!

The resulting dust clouds gather but the President tells us, “I’ve got this big stone thing covered, it’s fake news, folks, just a hail shower.”

Primed by the pandemic, we all return to lockdown in our homes hoping the sky won’t stay dark for too many months because the Premier League season’s only just got started.

Sure, there will be food shortages: tomatoes, flour, bananas, cranberries – basically anything that needs a little sunshine in order to grow. Still, we’ve learnt our lesson and already stocked up on toilet roll, so that’s all good. Just a shame that the water supply has been turned off.

 

Allen Ashley’s poetry has recently been published at “Oddball”, and “Bonnie’s Crew”, in  “Indigomania”, and in his collection “Echoes from an Expired Earth” (Demain Publishing, 2020). Allen is President Elect of the British Fantasy Society. www.allenashley.com

Snowdrops – Richie McCaffery

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Snowdrops

After being open to the elements
for years they finally put
a new slate roof on the old chapel
at Warkworth graveyard.

No-one is using the building though,
just the diocese trying to make watertight
their case for God. The edges
of the yard are dotted with snowdrops.

If I believed, I could convince myself
it’s the dead putting
their skulls together,
recalling white winters.

 

Richie McCaffery lives in Alnwick, Northumberland. He’s the author of two poetry collections fro Nine Arches Press – Cairn (2014) and Passport (2018) as well as two pamphlets, including Spinning Plates (2012, HappenStance Press). He also has another pamphlet due out later this year from Mariscat Press. His blog / website also hosts poems by fellow poets and can be found at: https://richiemccafferypoetry.wordpress.com/

Chester – Stephen Claughton

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Chester

He was from Chester, you said,
the builder who swindled you,
as if that made everything right.

Chester was where you first taught,
where your father died,
where you met and married Dad.

It has its famous Rows,
a Norman cathedral and castle,
a racecourse and a zoo.

Yes. I remember Chester.
As kids, we’d have lunch in Quaintways,
then walk along the walls,

or take boat trips on the Dee.
Years later, I rowed my wife
as far as Eccleston Ferry.

Let’s hear it for the place
that the Romans called Deva Victrix.
Is there anywhere else you know

that can boast a hypocaust
in the basement of Spudulike?
Chester, home of Hollyoaks,

the Chester Mystery Cycle,
the Jolly Miller of Dee
and the Deva Ladies’ Choir.

Home, too, of whoever he was,
that scheming, Cestrian crook,
who ripped my mother off,

a rogue roofer who called on spec
and got her to change good tiles
for ones that didn’t match —

always a sucker for charm.
He was from Chester, you say?
So, don’t they have criminals there?

 

Stephen Claughton has published two pamphlets, The War with Hannibal (Poetry Salzburg, 2019) and The 3-D Clock (Dempsey & Windle, 2020). He reviews regularly for London Grip and links to his reviews, poems and pamphlets can be found at www.stephenclaughton.com.

 

 

This is what happens to poetry after years of under-investment – Tim Love

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This is what happens to poetry after years of under-investment

Depression’s a shadow that doesn’t fade
when you turn the light off in this cheap hotel.
Extras are paid more here if they speak,
so they go “Uh Uh Uh” in the next room.

At least it rhymes. Unable to sleep, you take a walk
in the snow where the cable-cars keep going all night.
You’ve never seen stray dogs with such expressive eyes,
or roads so bright with moonlight.

If you could hold back the tears
you could write about how you’re not always
like this – it’s just that some reactions
bypass the mind. You don’t know why.

You’d prefer to sway between cafe tables
singing about how sad love is, your
heirloom accordion keys yellowed except
for one you got a grant to mend, brilliantly white.

Back at your hotel they’re still at it next door.
You sit on your bed, your boots dripping, wondering
why you wrote a poem instead of a prayer, though
you’ve always been confused about the difference.

 

Tim Love’s publications are Moving Parts (HappenStance) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Magma, Unthology, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/

When it’s all over, I’ll go to Thailand – Catherine Baker

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When it’s all over, I’ll go to Thailand

I will walk down Soi Suanplu 8, again, in the early morning,
when the tuk tuk drivers are eating and laughing over their rice bowls.

My granddaughter will be wearing a dress printed with forget-me-nots,
I’ll wear my long shorts and old red flip-flops.

We’ll wander through the scent of frangipani and fried egg
and examine every bright flower in the pavement cracks,
notice stones and insects, puzzle over the water drains.

I will hold her hand as we look at the carp in the hotel pool
and nod to the three-legged dog outside 7 Eleven.

When we reach the banana lady’s stall, she’ll be there
shining in her wrinkles, she will call “Sawasdee kaa, hallo”,
to Lyla, who will be shy and cling to my bare leg.

Then she  will choose a small, perfectly cooled,
grilled banana and place it on my baby girl’s golden palm.
And I will bow and say thank you.

 

Catherine Baker has been published by Stand, Snakeskin and Amaryllis. She was highly commended in The Prole Poet Laureate competition in April 2020.  She has poems in anthologies such as Poetry from Gloucestershire and Ways to Peace. She was runner up in GWN poetry competition, 2018, the poem was read at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.