Tag: Atrium Poetry

Sell the Petticoat and Go to Sea – Maggie Mackay

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Sell the Petticoat and Go to Sea

It’s a gey wondrous place and I’m lucky for tae see it and live.
(George Bissett, great-great-grandfather and ship’s carpenter, 1866)

Bleachfields spread in Clydeside sun.
Whitening sheets blink
ballooning like tides, like sails,
as Jacobina’s man clips his fortune
to a passage out of Greenock,
destined for the far east of the globe.
George is ship’s carpenter, adventurer
to places she’d never know, to sunken reefs,
uncharted water, monsoon sky, coral rock.

Here sits her little life on earth,
a China junk on the window sill,
bairns to raise and poems to pencil.
She writes of herself,
not the cutter or stitcher of silk,
but as the nation’s spy,
flying a hot air balloon across the Continent.

 

Maggie Mackay’s work appears in the award-winning #MeToo anthology while other poems have been nominated for The Forward Prize, Best Single Poem and the Pushcart Prize and commended in the Mothers’ Milk Writing Prize. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Heart of the Run’ is published by Picaroon Poetry.

Calling out the fathoms – Sarah Mnatzaganian

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Calling out the fathoms

Robin brings a finished cello back
down to the kitchen for company.
He tilts the shallow maple shell
into the calliper’s deep green jaws

and sings out each measurement
like a seaman swinging his lead line
and calling out the fathoms. I scribe
thicknesses onto a cello-shaped grid

watching my hand catch and turn
the satisfaction in his voice into bold
italics, keen as a fleet of sailing boats
on the starboard tack in high wind.

 

Sarah Mnatzaganian is an Anglo-Armenian poet.  Shortlisted for the Poetry Business pamphlet competition 2016/17, her poems have been published in Atrium, The North, Fenland Reed, London Grip, Magma, Poems in the Waiting Room, As Above, So Below, Write to be Counted and #MeToo a women’s anthology edited by Deborah Alma. She studies with Peter and Ann Sansom and Moniza Alvi.

 

 

 

The Phoney War – Thomas McColl

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The Phoney War

Our imaginations at war –
with umbrellas for rifles,
our enemy invisible –
we defended the sofa,
had it pulled out from the wall.

Inside this narrow tunnel –
with seat cushions overhead –
we hid.

With each attack,
we watched each other’s backs.
You saw the Germans
in your mind I could not see,
and I saw mine;
We shot them all too easily.

With the air-strikes, though,
we met our match.
Shells – like steel fists – struck,
and the seat cushions,
punched up into the air,
fell about us.

So, we rose and came out fighting –
shot down five fighters
and three bombers
with two umbrellas,
then finished off the conflict
in close hand-to-hand combat.

By the end,
there were a thousand German casualties
and, without even a scratch between them,
two tired Tommies,
smoking pencils, feeling tough.

And now the war was finished,
and with both of us famished,
we ran from the living room
into the kitchen,
calling for Gran to serve us up our tea,
and found her quietly sobbing at the stove.

 

Thomas McColl has had poems published in Envoi, Iota, Prole, The Fat Damsel and Ink, Sweat and Tears. His first full collection, Being With Me Will Help You Learn, is published by Listen Softly London Press.

Shoe Laces – Clifton Redmond

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Shoe Laces

Your first pair without the Velcro straps
were a thick brown leather brogue for school.
Your mother wept as I laced them up,

threading each eye and pulling the slack.
You thought the laces were half-excavated
worms, stuck between worlds.

When you stood up, tried to walk
you tripped and fell, cried when I sang
the song about the sad bunny

with abnormal ears. I watched you
unraveling, the knots of yourself
grappling the loose loops, crossing over.

 

Clifton Redmond is a student at Carlow College St. Patrick’s. His work has appeared in various online and print journals and has been placed in various competitions and awards. He is also a member of the Carlow Writers’ Co-operative.

 

 

Anne Neville’s Unknown Heirs – Edwin Stockdale

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Anne Neville’s Unknown Heirs
Penrith Castle
December 1479

You rush inside
your apartments, shooing
your ladies away.
You fear the inside,
bones gnawing,
knowing, gripe.
Your body and blood
feel wrong.

You are drawn to large
windows, but they never
let in enough light.
You touch Cumberland
sandstone: red, viscous.
Your womb shreds.

 

Edwin Stockdale has published two poetry pamphlets with Red Squirrel Press: Aventurine (September 2014) and The Glower of the Sun (January 2019).  Currently, he is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.

post – Rob Walton

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post

i
Sad news today, folks. Alan English off Scotter Bottom passed at the weekend. Not the Alan English from Cleethorpes with the unicycle, this one had a proper pushbike took the free papers to the old folks’ home in a co-op carrier bag.

ii
I’ve been asked by my cousin Maureen Burn was Shaw went to Australia with her first husband dead now that was Mick known as Pob off Plymouth Road let me know and I’ll pass messages on she’s only got months.

iii
Remember them gigs organised by them who had the pub in the precinct they had all the top bands from that Channel 4 one with her who went right off the rails and they were all introduced by him with the glasses who got done for drugs and was said to have four kiddies by four different lasses but I don’t know how he did it because he was nowt to look at.

iv
Anyone remember Denis’s Denims on Church Road used to be a church there then was a big denim warehouse not made of denim but stocked it hahaha got all the skinny ones for the kids and everyone went even my dad once lol him who had it also had a stall on the indoor market behind that second-hand bloke who was a Labour councillor who went independent and split the Labour vote and I never swear but I had him down for a right wanker.

v
Thanks to all who contributed to the site but afraid this is going to be the last post because me and the other moderators have had to put up with some abuse not from the regulars it’s just not worth it so we might resurface in some other form or we might not resurface in any form other form or otherwise.

 

Rob Walton is from Scunthorpe, and lives in Whitley Bay.  Poetry and short fiction for adults and children published by The Emma Press, Butcher’s Dog, Frances Lincoln, Bloomsbury, IRON Press, Red Squirrel, Northern Voices, Arachne and others. He collated the New Hartley Memorial Pathway text. He sometimes tweets @anicelad

 

Look At Me – Joanna Nissel

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Look At Me

Before you leave
you must know the shape of the orchid
–the narrow rod of stem,
itself held up by a green plastic pole,
too fragile to support the glut of blooms
billowing at the head.

Before you leave,
you must know that four months ago
the plant was a barren knot of stumps.
Blanched in the white windowsill sun,
it leaned against the guide-pole,
unmoving for an entire winter.

Before you leave,
you must know that when spring came,
I reached to wipe the dust from its leaves
and discovered a bud.
A knuckle of a thing, tiny,
barely a suggestion of green.

You must know I thought of you
when more buds opened and opened and opened.
I thought of how thrilled you’d have been
of the shock of cerise in each centre,
like the bright silk lining of a dull coat.

 

Joanna is an MA graduate from Bath Spa University, whose poetry and nonfiction often deals with family and trauma. She is a researcher for creative writing incubator, Paper Nations and social media editor for Tears in the Fence.

 

 

 

The Other Boy – Sheila Jacob

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The Other Boy

There was another boy
Dad confided, out of the blue.
A lovely little bab, Gran told him,
who died hours after the birth.
The priest baptised him in time-
a soul gone to heaven, Dad said,
his words a warm handclasp
I palmed under my skin
and shared, fifty years on,
with his last living sister.

She’d always suspected
something happened
decades ago, in the big bedroom
of the old back-to-back.
Gran’s bad stomach ache.
Cold supper on the table.
A neighbour’s red eyes.
Footfall up and down stairs
and later, furniture buffed
until it glared like looking-glass.

Spring-cleaning, Gran huffed
at her young daughters
as though they hadn’t noticed
her sudden weight loss
and frequent visits to church.
Things were like that in those days,
my Aunt sighed, relieved
she could claim him, at last.
The unnamed boy who arrived
at their home and never really left.

 

Sheila Jacob has had a number of poems published in  U.K.magazines and on webzines. She has recently self-published a short collection of poems which form a memorial to her father who died in 1965.

Map Gazing – John Short

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Map Gazing

In the stone age of paper maps
I gazed all day,
found a dot marked Chapel-St-Leonards
and decided I must go.
Now I’m sitting on a bench
outside Tesco,
a can of lager by the sea.
I cycled two hundred miles to get here,
to hit the coast or rather
a wall of wind hit me
shifting sand
into beach huts and a derelict hotel,
making shapes in corners
just like the abandoned Arabian palace
in a comic book when I was six
that fired dreams
of travel, but ultimately
dots on maps are disappointing,
no mystery in arrival
only in staying.

 

After spending some years in Europe, John now lives in Liverpool and is a member of The Dead Good Poets. Recent appearances include The Blue Nib, Stepaway and Allegro. Work also forthcoming in The High Window, Envoi, Picaroon and Sarasvati.

One Way – Katherine Stansfield

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One way

In the morning you will find yourself
inside a human heart. You will be warm,
and notice, with surprise, the purple and the blue.
Not everything is red in the temple
of pump and shunt, squeeze and release.

It will be loud and you will be small –
will have to be, to be there
and alive, your own heart now
flea-sized, grain of sugar-sized, at most.

Once you’re over the shock you will rationalize
and hold your breath
in case such extra air makes
the heart’s rhythm catch
or worse, cause a clamorous
blockage like the clanging
fury of the airlocks you remember
in the old house’s pipes.

By the time you’ve worried all this
you will be dizzy, need to lean against a ventricle
but lightly, in case your tiny nails tear
the walls and drown you in the rush
of this hospitable stranger’s loose blood.

So you will put your hands in your pockets
and that’s when you will find the bus ticket,
tiny too, but your tiny eyes can read
the type and then you will know
how you got there. That once again you
brought this on yourself.

 

Katherine grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. Her poems have appeared in The North, Magma, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, The Interpreter’s House, And Other Poems, and Butcher’s Dog. Seren will publish her second collection in 2020.