A thud against patio doors; on the other side, a sparrow totters on matchstick feet, striving to keep upright like a boxer caught by a hook to the chin.
Deceived by the glass infringing its flight path, it staggers on paving slabs fighting to regain full senses, whilst the neighbourhood cats, claws sharpened, lurk in the gardens.
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David Thompson is a poet from Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire. His work has featured or is upcoming in Magma, Orbis, The Cannon’s Mouth, The Seventh Quarry and New Contexts: 1 (Coverstory Books, 2021).
Our featured publication for December is Dawning by Mary Ford Neal, published by Indigo Dreams Publishing.
Dawning is an uncanny landscape in which people, events, and places are charged with magic, danger, and confusion, and nothing can be trusted. Against this background of fragmentation and threat, the poems lead the reader through a tender narrative of damage, grief, enlightenment, and alteration.
“Dawning is full of delicate dances with ghosts; not just the departed, but the never-were, the should-never-have-beens. Mary Ford Neal sketches these moments, of grace and sometimes redemption, with elegance and warmth, reminding us that magic can be found in unlikely places: a pavement, a coffee cup, a glance.” Rishi Dastidar
“The poems in Dawning ‘boil here quietly’; with a sure use of form, they channel undercurrents of unease with a deft touch of craft and an intelligent use of white space. Meetings, departures, journeys to and from, the most brutal of truths find their home in the everyday and the strange. This is a significant debut.” Claire Dyer
“Intriguingly, this collection starts and ends with the question I told the world I didn’t love you. Why? We’re drawn in to explore the intensity and often contradictory complexities of desire, intimacy, and love. Neal commands an impressive range of poetic forms, deftly capturing passion and regret with a wry touch.” Jay Whittaker
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My husband is losing his shit
Previously published in Dodging the Rain
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The Sea-Wife
I tried to marry a wave.
He came so softly, twice a day, bringing me gifts, seaglass and songs, and his devotion to me was a wonder of the world. And over time, through painstaking erosion, he gently shaped my heart into a small boat.
I found a ring left lying on the sand, and knew he meant to marry me. But next time, he came in as weak as water, towed by an emaciated moon, and somehow his devotion was lethargic, and lacked the power to lift my boat and take it.
I tried to put my arms around him, vainly, and as he washed away I tasted saltwater; he must have wept at being made to leave me. And he whispered, and I caught it on the breeze, that I should place the ring on my own finger, and take great care to keep my heart in boat-form.
And he is out there now, swirling and crashing, his crest festooned with broken bits of boats; then calming, gently finding foreign beaches that remind him of the beach where he once found me. I know how it must pain him not to find me now,
and I sit here, sea-wife for fifteen years.
Previously published in Janus Literary
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Street magic
I don’t believe in magic. But something hovers along these streets, something like dust not settling hangs just above the slippery cobbles, and it’s more than the messy flash of reflected streetlight and it’s more than the colourful spill from some long gone car, lying now in the gutter as though someone had pierced a rainbow and let it fall sighing down to die here in the dark, by a drain, with the swollen fag-ends and the dog urine and the spit of the loud lads. This is something else – our shoes splash through it whatever it is, and I swear it makes our stepping lighter. My feet might fly, and any second I might be gone unless I grab your arm to stop myself, which I never would.
Previously published in Dodging The Rain
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Mary Ford Neal is a writer and academic from the West of Scotland, where she still lives and works, teaching and researching Law and Medical Ethics. Her poetry is widely published, and has been Pushcart nominated. Dawning is her debut collection.
Dawning is available to purchase from the Indigo Dreams Publishing website
peel curls freezes mid-air apple puree overflows in mother’s hands rest powers unknown
tuck me in tell me to turn sideways pull up my knees hug blanket
yellow bucket by the bed
a voice drifts out into morning air looking for the way home
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Nora Blascsok is a Hungarian poet based in the UK. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. A selection of her poems titled ‘Headspace’ is out with Broken Sleep Books imprint Legitimate Snack in September 2021. Her Twitter handle is @NBlascsok
Here on my lap a long sheet of paper, foolscap, flowing away at the top, full of phrases I no longer understand yet seem almost to grasp.
The scroll, a shadowy animal, slides from me to the floor and I recall, in the act of its fall, my cat, who moved in just that way from lolling about on my chest.
I know that both are lost and all I have is the moment when briefly I still held whatever it was the words meant and that black ghost.
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Mark Valentine lives in Yorkshire near the Leeds-Liverpool canal. His poetry has been published in PN Review, Agenda, Volume, ink, sweat & tears, Poetry Bus and elsewhere. A chapbook, Astarology, was published by Salo Press in Summer 2021.
I am inside. Walls are my biscuits. I could eat them all day long and never be full.
The carpet is the weave around hundreds of pockets. I have put myself inside them piece by piece.
Wind howl down the chimney tells me about the moon. Full outside comes with a shaft of light if I take a peep.
A silver stripe across the sea spreads triangular towards me. I am an unbalance of atoms caught in a time box.
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Hannah Linden is published widely including or upcoming in Atrium, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Prole, Proletarian Poetry, Stand, The Interpreters’ House, Under the Radar and the 84 Anthology etc. She is working towards her first collection. Twitter: @hannahl1n
Jennie E. Owen’s writing has won competitions and has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She teaches Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children.
This was a house of piano keys. The clocks kept fairy tale time, dinner was a guess, no one wore pockets. I wove a nest of straw, placed inside it a brother’s curl, which one? buttons from a midden, scraps of paper where I wrote my name in ash, charcoal, blood.
My new husband said leave it, it’s worthless. Why buttons, here’s beads, that’s not your name anymore; a house of straw will always blow down. But I hoarded the treasure; stored it in a crevice I carved into a Bible, hid it in the attic against judgement day.
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Linda McKenna’s debut poetry collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, was published by Doire Press in 2020. She has had poems published in a variety of publications including, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The North, The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg.
When I look back, I see a multi-million pound Formula One pit-crew, making snap decisions at break-neck speed, but instead of shaving seconds off, their goal is to add precious time onto precious lives— underpaid NHS nurses and midwives rush around the motionless bodies of my wife and new-born child, their engines barely ticking over, me, an open-mouthed spectator, but today there will be no final lap or chequered flag, as light reappears in my wife’s eyes, and our son’s first cries fill the room. Our race goes on and just like that our pit-crew has gone, leaving us to celebrate upon our podium with rounds of buttery toast and hot cups of tea.
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Niall M Oliver lives in Ireland, and is the author of ‘My Boss’ by Hedgehog Poetry. His poems have featured in Acumen, Atrium, The Honest Ulsterman, Fly On The Wall Press, Ink Sweat & Tears and others. Twitter @NMOliverPoetry
Laura Varnam is a Lecturer in English Literature at University College, Oxford. Her work is inspired by the medieval poetry that she teaches. She has poems published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Oxford Magazine, Green Ink Poetry and forthcoming in Dreich. Twitter: @lauravarnam
Falling in love with a second PE teacher was reckless
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Galia is a British-Israeli writer, musician and crafter, who works full time as Head of English, media and film at a secondary school in North London. She has lectured at the Shakespeare Institute, the British Library and is on the committee for the London Association for the Teaching of English. Follow her on Twitter @galiamelon
atriumpoetry.com 