Category: Alphabets
-
“The Other Side of Things” and other poems by Robyn Rowland
I. The Other Side of Things. from the sequence Sky Gladiatorials Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop aerial crossing of the Atlantic, Newfoundland to Ireland, 1919.Previous to that, they both flew for Britain in World War I. Alcock ‘was the first man to bomb Istanbul’; then, with plane trouble,…
-
“Tarmac” and other poems by A.M. Cousins
REDRESS After Junichiro Tanizaki. Give us this day your problems. Allow us to torment ourselves about shadow and beauty and good taste and we’ll swap all that we’ve got for one hour in the life of a tortured artiste who wants to sit in a fancy lav and listen to a mosquito. We’d leave the…
-
“English Breakfast Love Song” and other poems by Rhiannon Grant
English Breakfast Love Song I am longing to pour out my soul to you in words which show my creativity and let off my head of steam but my soul is not so liquid it comes out in funny lumps uneven like old-fashioned sugar ready to make sure your tea is always too sweet…
-
‘Siegfried’s Homecoming’ and other poems by Suzanne Stapleton
Siegfried’s Homecoming You come home from the war at least a third emptier than you were, Like all the words were scooped from your head with the butt of a rifle that you constructed with your own hands and demolished too, leaving so much of yourself in the barrel. The teeth in your gums white…
-
“Backward Glancing on a Tehran Street” and other poems by Lynda Tavakoli
Game On In Syria the shooters choose themes for target practice, a living video game of entertainment for the week. On Saturday it’s chins – anything below the nose, above the neck, and rifle sights explore a quivered lip as points deduct for errors – cheeks and ears are left for Sunday’s sport. On Monday,…
-
“Fabric” and other poems by Kate O’Shea
Fabric Italians hunt song birds, gawping silence, decaying rope from where a small girl hung in the rubber hoop of an old tractor tyre a lifetime ago, no limits on adventure growing up to carry the fire not knowing about box files, computer monitors the prescribed texts and reading lists that deformed desire replaced it…
-
“The Infinite Body of Sensation”: Visual poetry by Salma Caller
Sound is a shell Sound is a shell An ear Curves of sound Vibrating and condensing air Echoes in a curved space An ocean in the shell of sound Pearls Things that stand in for other things The Witches Pouches Bags of velvet black Nets entangling objects Bones of birds The insides of shells Spells…
-
‘I wanted to tell you, but there was no time’ and other poems by Csilla Toldy
Kitchen With hot chilli in my eyes I read between the lines, a coded message of noises: A child’s scream sheathed in wind blasts, gashes through the cracks. The mandalay porcelain clock, riveting, ticks between my shoulder blades. I carry my life like a snail. The fridge sighs, a boiler roars into…
-
‘Cry Oceans’ by Mary Cecil
Cry Oceans Cry oceans and weep the seas Where waves flow over The endless motions of life The swimming perfection that flees The Armageddon of destruction By all means possible The mechanisation of death The beginning of the end For whales and tuna to consume The mercury to garnish The insatiable greed…
Chris Murray 