Category: How Words Play

“Needlepoint” and other poems by Erin Vance

October 18th, 2019


Hiraeth 

In the turpentine afternoon
I wanted to beat my wings— hollow

so       hollow.
  
And in the rectal evening  I wanted to be a hummingbird.
A hum   
    m      
     ing
        bird.

In the frost-swept night 
I wished you a Lamb.

Soft like cotton balls and languid 
                              with musk.

Turn me into a violent fresco,      Lamb,
and touch me like hot bricks

in the wet dawn.

I wanted to be a leaf lodged in amber.
               — — An insulin needle.
  
And at the musk-soaked August’s end 
I wanted to be hollow
                    t r a n s l u c e n        t
a hum
    mingbird 

with — — insulin — — needle— — 
                legs
lodged in amber.

My hollow wings snap
                   ping 
In your lamb’s mouth,
                  turn me into a violet fresco,           Lamb, 
                      
                    touch me like 
                       hot 
                     bricks.

Confession

After Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, photographers of The Cottingley Fairies

When Frances followed the little thing
into the shallow beck
I stayed back, watching her stockings
sag in the water, flapping at her ankles
like bloated second skins.

Frances batted her eyelashes
and the imp trusted her.
Confession: I wished to catch it
and place it in a box
like a little pet in a spider-silk dress,
pull it out at parties to flutter and tease
and spit.

When Frances giggled as its wings
tickled her rosebud cheek—
I confess; I wanted to hold
its gossamer body in my palm,
knowing that I could practically crush it
with my breath.

The waters of the beck leaked into my shoe
the cold water like tiny, elfin teeth
biting my toes. A gasp and— oh!
the thing is dead.
caught under Frances’ fat palm;
she slipped on a patch of moss like an oil slick.

The photos may be fake, but the fairies—
They were real.

Weren’t they, Frances?

Sister, Speak

I wonder where you are
where our home is
now that the skeletons of our earliness
belong to the birds

I wonder if the ground where we placed you
is infected with your dreaming

I sit in your closet
empty now, but the ghosts of your
dresses hang around me
like rainbows dripping lifeless from the gallows

I used to lay in your bed
wanted to feel everything you’d touched
for our skin cells to feed the same microorganisms

I’d lay in the dirt and imagine I was you
but when ants started up my neck I couldn’t help
but twitch awake and run back inside

Mirrors

Mother, can I have the velvet box of milk teeth
that you keep in your nightstand?
Every night I dream my teeth are falling out.
I think they miss me.

Mother, what is the combination to my middle school locker?
I rescued a bird fourteen years ago
and hid it with my gym clothes
I think it’s getting hungry.

Mother, can you braid my hair one last time before I cut it off?
Will you keep a lock of it for a day
when I am not picking up my phone
and you have bad news?

Mother, will you help me down?
This tree is much taller than I expected and this branch
is much thinner and I am much older
than I’d planned.

Mother, will you remind me
to wash between my toes and to take my glasses off
before I fall asleep
even when you don’t remember
who I am?

Needlepoint

When we were young,
Still slippery and mosslike,
Our father embroidered sparrows
Onto the backs of our necks
He held the whiskey bottle in his free hand
And like a mean waterfall the
Blue threads cut through our skin.

For our tenth birthday
Our father bought us stallions,
And after an afternoon of riding,
He added to the hieroglyphs on our necks;
Pomegranates that made our throats
Look like bloody gaps with yellow teeth.

We were fourteen when we stopped dreaming
One morning we woke up together
Our minds empty, our hands steady,
And we clutched the bone-handles of our
Hairbrushes, counting to one hundred
In each others’ hair
Careful not to pull a single stitch.

We worked like machinery and every five years
Father took the needle and we took turns sitting
At the oak table while he stitched
His memories into our skins.

Hatching

For Stacey Walyuchow

When I was six years old,
I played Odette in a Kindergarten production
of swan lake.

My movements were decidedly more
like that of a magpie
and my understudy was called in

after I broke my ankle tripping
over a gold watch.
I cried and watched the birds outside my room.

They played and threw acorns
danced and drew shapes in the dirt
I opened the window and called to them

in my best outside voice.
One by one they jumped onto the sill
and teetered on the threshold

of my world and theirs, their heads
cocked their eyes shifting their feet
twitching until they jumped hopped skipped

into my bed.

Needlepoint and other poems © Erin Vance

Erin Emily Ann Vance holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary and studies Irish Folklore and Ethnology at University College Dublin. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, including The Sorceress Who Left too Soon: Poems After Remedios Varo (Coven Editions) and Unsuitable (APEP Publications). Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, EVENT Magazine, Augur Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, and more. Her first novel, Advice for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers will be published in Fall 2019 by Stonehouse Gothic.

Learn more at erinvance.ca.

Erin’s social profiles

website www.erinvance.ca
@erinemilyann

“Poem for Kate in Chemo” and other poems by Alexis Rhone Fancher

October 17th, 2019

CRUEL CHOICES

When my husband’s two grown daughters are in town, the three of them go to the movies, or play pool. Share dinner every night. Stay out late. I haven’t seen my stepdaughters since my son’s funeral in 2007. When people ask, I say nice things about the girls, as if we had a relationship. When people ask if I have children I change the subject. Or I lie and say no. Or sometimes I put them on the spot and tell them, yes, but he died. They look aghast and want to know what happened. Then I have to tell them about the cancer. Sometimes, when the older daughter, his favorite, is in town, and she and my husband are out together night after night, I wonder what it would be like if that was me, and my boy, if life was fair, and, rather than my husband having two children and I, none, we each had one living child. His choice which one to keep. Lately when people ask, I want to lie and say yes, my son is a basketball coach; he married a beautiful Iranian model with kind eyes, and they live in London with their twin girls who visit every summer; the same twins his girlfriend aborted with my blessing when my son was eighteen, deemed too young for fatherhood, and everyone said there would be all the time in the world.

First published in ASKEW, 2016, Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, 2016 Winner of the Pangolin Prize, 2018 Nominated again for the Pushcart Prize, 2018

THE GOD FOR BROKEN PEOPLE

There is a god for broken people – Roxane Gay

This is the god for the second rate, the one who waylays you at the party, plies you with bourbon, fucks you in the kitchen, makes you walk home in the rain. This god shines in the runoff. This god hustles the night. This god mines the maimed, culls emotional cripples off the top like cream. This god is a shape-shifter, a dumpster diver, the god who loiters at the corner of Dolorosa & Despair. This god drinks alone. The god for broken people trolls the city for discards, marries the exploited with the lost. This god sweeps up the miscreants, gusts their darkness into night. This is the god of no hope. No money. This god has your back when you backslide. This god bets on you to fail, hides in your broken places. This god is willing to wait. When you’re ready to surrender, remember: this is your last, best chance. This god will not stick by you, won’t give you false hope. This god will kill you. Or save you. Choose.

Published in The San Pedro River Review, 2018

Poem For Kate In Chemo

Above where your right breast used to be
the oncologist implanted a port to make things easier.
“It takes forever,” you say. “An hour’s drive, each
way, an entire day used up, laying
there.”

But first, the tourniquet, tied to your upper arm,
the cheery nurse, tapping for a working vein,
your thick blood at last flooding into one syringe
after another. Then the weigh-in, each time
less. “Bone and skin now,” you say.

If your numbers are good, you head
to the chemo room, rows of cushy
recliners, supplicants tethered to plastic bags
held high by IV poles, a forest of metal trees.

You unbutton your blouse, offer up the convenient
port to a flush of saline – like ocean, you tell me,
like waves.

Next, the chemicals, those shimmering droplets
riding the plastic tube into your chest,

a kind red blanket, thrown
over your legs.

I tear the best New Yorker short stories
from the magazine and mail them
to you in Port Townsend.
Something to pass the time. Something non-
medical to discuss when we chat each week.

We both know you’re dying, though
your husband still has faith, and you cling to
his hope, coming back week after week because
it makes his life bearable.

When the chemo bags are empty,
and the stories read, you leave the pages behind
for a needful stranger.
In 2000, when you lost your breast,
your husband insisted you have
chemo then, too.
“It makes me feel more dead than alive,”
you confessed to me after the first week.

Appointment days, you’d leave the house,
drive to the woods, walk the trails
instead of treatment, those
huge redwood trees shading your path.

Each evening you’d return to your
husband’s innocent embrace.

You made me promise not to tell.
And I never did, until now.

For Kate O’Donnell, (1949-2014)

First published in the Nashville Review, 2016

when your mother convinces you to take in your homeless younger sister

She will date your boyfriend.
She’ll do it better than you ever did.
She’ll have nothing but time.
He’ll start showing up when you leave,
train her to make him the perfect BLT,
(crusts off, avocado on the side),
encourage his cheating heart,
suck his dick so good he’ll think
he’s died and gone to Jesus.

Your sister will borrow your clothes,
and look better in them than you ever did.
Someone will see her with your boyfriend
at the Grove, agonize for days
before deciding not to tell you.
Meanwhile he’ll buy her that fedora you
admired in Nordstrom’s window, the last one
in your size.

When you complain, your mother
will tell you it’s about time you learned to share.

While you’re at work, your sister will tend your garden,
weed the daisies, coax your gardenias into bloom.
No matter how many times you remind her,
she will one day forget to lock the gate;
your cat and your lawn chairs will disappear.

Your mother will say it serves you right.

Your sister will move into your boyfriend’s
big house in Laurel Canyon. He will ignore her,
and she will make a half-hearted suicide attempt;
you’ll rescue her once again.

Your mother will wash her hands of the pair of you,
then get cancer and die.

Smell the white gardenias in the yard.
Cherish their heady perfume. Float them in a crystal bowl.
Forgive your sister as she has forgiven you.

First published in RAGAZINE, 2015

When I Buried My Son I Became Someone Else

When I buried my son    I became someone else
the motherhood part     written out of my script;

I should have felt lighter.
			    An alternate narrative ran alongside
			    the dead kid one where he wasn’t dead.

It remains the preferable scenario. 
			
I buried my son and now 
I don’t know who walks 
on eggshells                 the living or the dead, and sometimes  
			     I think the dead one is me, especially
                             when I look 
in the mirror.
		           I am coming to terms with mortality:mine/his. 
			   I’ve dumbed down my dreams.

If you look hard enough,    you’ll see the skewed trajectory, 
the fizzle.                 the off-track, you’ll live the devastation, 
                            sip the dregs.
When my mother died, 	    I wore a lavender dress to her funeral. 

I stuffed it into  	   where it lived for thirty years. 
the back of my closet	   When I found it again, the dress still fit.

But I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.





Published in JUNIPER Literary Journal, Feb. 2019 
& in THE DEAD KID POEMS (KYSO Flash Press, 2019)

Poet and photographer Alexis Rhone Fancher has work published in over 200 literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, The MacGuffin, Plume, Tinderbox, Diode, Nashville Review, Rust + Moth, Nasty Women Poets, WideAwake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, among others. Her photographs have been published worldwide. Her books include: How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen & other heart stab poems, Enter Here, and the autobiographical, Junkie Wife. Her chapbook, State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies was released in 2015, and its companion, The Dead Kid Poems, published in May 2019. EROTIC, a volume of her new and selected erotica, will be published in 2020 by New York Quarterly. A nominee of multiple Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net awards, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly.

“Dive of the Kingfisher” and other poems by Ria Collins

October 13th, 2019

Dance of the Samurai

I danced in my Communion dress
barefoot dervish
mother read aloud from Illustrated Poetry,
I found my plastic sword.

I dreamt I was a samurai
lived at the foot of Mt.Fuji,
wore armour and mask
raven hair in a top-knot.

Princess Tsuru, daughter of Ochi Clan.
I practiced the Five Rings Of The Sword,
meditated and studied
the way of the warrior.

Father transformed an old camogie stick
to a majestic Naginata sword.
Grandmother gave me a gold silk skirt,
jacket of azure velvet
with extended shoulder wings.
I wrapped black calico around my waist
and placed my sword in the Obi.

At school, I carved a mask of such ferocity
teacher placed it in a bag,
told me to carry it home.

Now, in the evenings, I put on my wedding dress,
let folds fall over hidden scars,
I lengthen the woven rope
feed it slowly towards him, and wait.

My mask slips down. I prepare for war.

Dive of the Kingfisher

I am tired of being a woman
suckled and torn from childbirth and men,
hands wrinkled from years submerged,
I clasp at dreams that trickle through the plughole.
Forgotten, uncoffined. I must wait.

I am tired of grinding cumin,
coriander, mustard, and cardamom
while I taste only emptiness.
Children loved and well-fed have left,
I move from person to person.

I shoulder the clouds of my mother,
blackened January,
rain falls inward, time contracts,
chalk bones, weightless, skinless,
unseen madness in colourless veins.

A sparrow of small movements
I move around crumbs, claws light
ready to dance through the sky.
I should be a bird
a thing of beauty.

Perhaps a kingfisher,
with azure underbelly
cloaked with emerald wings,
a brilliant blue flash
across the Universe.

Elegy to some Mysterious Form

From Katy in Dublin to Ruby in Liverpool

Misshapen walnut
nestled hard against my palm,
as I searched for your soul
in pitted holes.

I looked for a connection
to your core,
all I saw was
mismatched joints, a jellied eel
of jumbled vertebrae.

I held your flaccid nothingness,
soft against the dampness of exertion,
translucent beads like tears
dropping from my skin.

Should we wrap you tenderly
in love and lace,
or allow you to be sluiced
In some unknown place?
I do not regret
housing your short journey.
please try to understand.

When they informed me
of incompatibility,
my body spilled,
the severed cord
my decision.

Now the jagged space
blurs without sides
where you should be,
you haunt my melodies
with your legacy.

I see you in some mysterious form,
tall and proud, watching us.
exotic plumes, unruffled,
having waged a war
of constitutional law,
about our rights
but what of yours?

You left us here to wonder.

No Survivors

Translucent shadings, surfacing gut thrusts
which threatened to choke
their broken promises.
It had to stop.

Lost in make-believe, she was cold,
hardened as ice-cubes,
used up tulips returning to the soil,
or curled magazines yellowed with time.

He never faltered, dull ink-coloured
the crushed bloom of her dreams,
no milk or honey to soothe
saltwater dabbed on the ache.

Friends safely distanced, children cowered,
insulted in his world of men,
his dammed silt anger –
she, his punch-bag.

She fought for a job, trialed escape –
sick-days, unhealed wounds
bones protruding through the stretched skin,
always in denial of one-way dialogue.

Sun glinted on flint through glass,
she grabbed her chance, danced around a shadow,
left hand raised in defence as he sniggered
the air bent blue.

In her cell, stone wrapped retreat,
memory dimmed, she stares through the edge
a closed loss, broken children in care.
– no survivors.

No glory, just burn of pain
but she loves him still.
Long before the beginning
there was going to be an end.

To Rothko

I would like a lover like you
concise, with depths of colour,
a definite touch
to reach the heart in me,
brush me with strokes,
urge me outside myself
until my breath gasps.

You would show me
how form subsides then soars
from cobalt to violet
crimson to gold
a tightrope between worlds,
absorb all fear and thought
in a perfectly formed frame.

Feet firmly planted on wood, unshaken
like a tai-chi stance,
“as above so below”.
A white line spills across canvas,
in the centre, stillness.

The Stanhopea and the Mexican Boys

In the shade of a tropical garden
under a sherbet sky,
the Stanhopea orchid stretches
purple daubed petals
emitting its scent,
vanilla and chocolate peppermint.

Hundreds of orchid bees
lured from twenty feet
by two blood maroon eye spots
beneath the belly of the sepals
suck the essence for propagation
in the sweet seduction to follow.

Twenty yards away
in parched streets,
young boys caught, waving guns,
drawn to crimson sorrow,
fall with a kiss of gunshot
while the Barons watch.

The Stanhopea ripens,
in one short burst.
Like the Barons the bees will leave
when the petals fall.

“Dive of the Kingfisher” and other poems © Ria Collins

Ria Collins worked as Director of Nursing for many years. Now living in Galway, she has read at Clifden Arts Festival and Galway Library open mic events. She has been published in Skylight 2016, shortlisted for Over the Edge New Writer of the Year 2016 and longlisted in 2017. She was shortlisted for Poems for Patience 2017 and in 2018. She attended workshops in Galway with Kevin Higgins and Dublin Writers Centre with Mark Granier, Jessica Traynor and Adam Wyeth. Most recently she has performed a collaboration of her work with music at the Cuirt International Festival of literature 2018.

“This Connection” and other poems by Shanta Acharya

October 13th, 2019

BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST

(After the painting by Rembrandt in the National Gallery, London)

In the Dutch room amid Rembrandt’s paintings,
I sit sharing my reflections with myself –
my woollen jacket no comparison with Belshazzar’s
mantle of ermine studded with jewels,
his silk turban, white and resplendent,
crowning his distracted gaze.

The room acquires the aura of a court in session,
members of the jury appear unmoved,
floating like creatures treading on the moon.
The wooden bench, the murmuring crowd,
the parched sensation in my throat,
deeper rumblings in my stomach,
tired eyes and cold feet, a bone-marrow fatigue
alienates me from the artistic feat.

The haloed hand, the writing on the wall,
offer unexpected food for thought.
Mene Tekal Upharsin: You have been
weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Belshazzar’s face aghast with such revelation!
Do not despair, one was saved; do not presume, one was damned.

I close my eyes thinking of god mercifully
adjusting the divine scales in my favour –
myself poised on one side, insubstantial;
my burden of sins on the other, weighing down
heavy, leaving me quite unbalanced.

So god kept adding extra weights of suffering
to help me overcome my unbearable lightness of being
like an ingenious doctor shrewdly intent
on restoring me to life by increasing daily
the bitter pills of my life in self-exile.

I had a vision of grace reconciling me
to myself, to see me poised and not wanting.

You may have mistaken my strength, dear God
to emerge from your gift of suffering balanced.

From Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017)

NOT ONE OF THE MYTHS

Not one of the myths we make
will outlast the muting of our breath.

What comes and goes in silence
represents time’s landscape of self.

So long estranged from myself,
I have created an illusion –

carefully camouflaged
to welcome our re-entrance.

It is like passing from the object
to its unredeemable shadow.

Like leaping off the canvas of a painting
into the gallery of free spectators –

only to dread that moment of return
to another image that would recapture us.

A plastic version of all that passed among us
or others who unknowingly resembled us.

The imageless wind is the appropriate conception,
projecting the naked self, the final relation.

There arrives a time when the fiction is a mirror
image of itself, a thing final in itself.

Unable to discern between illusion and creation,
we have stopped revolving in self-abnegation.

After the wind has gathered its unique composure
and we breathe deeply the pure, fulfilling air,

our halcyon gestures resurrect words from silence
like conjurors revelling in tricks and games.

The myths dissolve in the silence that guts
our ineffectual, self-mutilating words.

From Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017)

MY GOOD LUCK HOME

You presented me with two scarabs,
hieroglyphs etched on their lapis-lazuli backs,
from the gift-shop of the British Museum.
It’s for good luck, you said.

I survey the pieces, their sacredness
treasured in the hollow of my palm,
imagine them alive, pushing the setting sun
along the sky, entreating my heart to be pure and light.

They nestle beside a coral stone and a pearl
framed in rings of beaten gold on my fingers,
charms given by my family to protect me from evil.

I find the Egyptian scarab couple their own home
away from the crowded open-house of my Indian gods,
transforming each corner of my living room
with gifts of fetishes from around the world.

Two Chinese cats guard my speculative angle of vision.
Even Ganesha travels with me in my handbag
to help me overcome obstacles in my adopted homeland.

The seven gods of luck from Japan smile on
as you eye my marble turtle god with its fine chiselled look,
its beady eyes, hand-crafted, appraising your secret nook –

leaving us with the legacy of an understanding –
the knowledge of what it means
to carry a whole household in oneself,
to be so perfectly self-contained, poised
at the centre of all manner of creatures unsheltered.

From Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017)

THIS CONNECTION

Clusters of pods from branches of hornbeam
hang like Chinese lanterns pregnant with dream –

tales of transformation witnessed collectively
is theatre, experienced solo becomes prayer,

the journey from chrysalis to butterfly,
waking with desire, an aviator defying gravity,

a mountaineer scaling peaks drawn
out from the core of a changing world,
spinning, tiptoeing on a slippery slope

like trust in the face of uncertainties,
luck when the chapter of life is coming to a close,
alchemy turning the worst in us to our best,

unafraid of failure, taking risks, following our dreams,
seeing for the first time, eyes and mouth

opening wide with wonder, lovers swirling
in ecstasy on the dance floor, walking

on top of the world, bottom of the sea together
like earth moulded by wind, water, ice and fire,

knowing time will change all we cherish in our globe
taut as a belly with foetus becoming human

where we like gods are defined by what we are not
except Love that is everything and excludes nought.

From Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017)

AMONG THE IMMORTALS

I dream my painting and I paint my dream.
Vincent van Gogh

Reflecting on life’s many false starts –
art dealer, teacher, lover, preacher – always the outsider,
fearful of failure, loss of face, faith, family,
except for brother Theo providing a reason for living
in sorrow yet ever joyful.

In the depths of darkness,
moments of clarity bridge the gap between art and reality.
Dwelling in possibility, awareness of the one true God
gives way to insight – quest for the light within all beings.

The idea at first vague until the initial impulse,
a scribble, takes form, becomes a sketch
and the sketch a painting – mastery of the thing
promising an unexpected flowering.

Brushstrokes come alive in a rapture of aseity,
crying out with creations of flesh and blood –
self-portraits breathing, original in their view of the infinite,
touch the heart of humanity, open a door to eternity,
walk among the immortals, communing with the light.

From Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017)

“This Connection” and other poems © Shanta Acharya

Shanta Acharya - (c) Dr Sanjay Acharya.jpg Shanta Acharya won a scholarship to Oxford, where she was among the first batch of women admitted to Worcester College. A recipient of the Violet Vaughan Morgan Fellowship, she was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy for her work on Ralph Waldo Emerson prior to her appointment as a visiting scholar in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages at Harvard University. The author of eleven books, her latest poetry collection is Imagine: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, India; 2017). Her poems, articles and reviews have appeared in major publications including Poetry Review, PN Review, The Spectator, Guardian Poem of the Week, Oxford Today, Agenda, Acumen, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Philosophy Now, Stand, Ariel, Asia Literary Review, HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (2012), Fulcrum, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton).

www.shantaacharya.com

“Animals are in Communion” and other poems by Polly Roberts

September 20th, 2019

Animals are in Communion

I came home

to find him

doing nothing.

Limp armed.

Could do nothing.

Sat on the sofa

lost to the world.

I have some bad news

I’ve been seeing ghosts. Birds on water.

The day before I received the news, two swans flew low over my head. Their
wings thrummed like a helicopter.

Eyes turned to watch the rescue vehicle, and instead saw white bellies.
The sound travelled, nothing like their usual flapping, as they soared over and onto water.

Returning to my boat, a shadow shifted on the river bank. A furry creature – small, sleek – edged
its way through the grass, took a moment to drink, then slop, slipped in.

Animals are in communion for you.

As are we,

nosing each other’s armpits

as we bed in

for warm companionship.

Because you went cold.

Though the civility of civilisation frightens me, I visit somewhere populated.
A graveyard made squirrel territory. One squirrel for every gravestone.
They mount lichen-covered peaks and keep lookout.
They claim the trees, the abandoned church.
Nobody will make them leave.

That night, I dreamt the answer to the universe.
It was blue,
inside a conch shell. Spiraling
in and out of crystal moments.
Eggshell blue.
In and out of images of the hospital bed,
and these dreams.

Animals are in Communion and other poems are © Polly Roberts

Polly Roberts grew up in Devon. Three years studying Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia left her with an inextricable link to the landscape, compelling her to continue to write about the creatures and habitats encountered there.

Observations of both the non-human and human world continued whilst living on a houseboat on the River Avon near Bristol while completing her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Polly has run creative writing workshops for refugees, detainees, and young people and curated two exhibitions in response to her writing, both displayed at the Norwich Arts Centre.

In 2018, the British Council awarded Polly a Writers by Nature scholarship, during which she wrote this debut poetry collection, Grieving with the Animals.( 2019, Dempsey and Windle)

“Poem for the Female Unspoken” and “Daphne’s Riposte” by Emily Cullen

September 8th, 2019

Poem for the Female Unspoken

Perhaps you’ll excuse my lateness…I’m on my period.
– MP Danielle Rowley to the House of Commons, July 2018

This poem goes out to generations
who had to keep confidences
about the curse, clots, bloodstains,
cotton wool bulk between their legs,
menstruating in harsh climates
with minimal comforts.

This poem flies in the face
of centuries of social mores,
honours loose pelvic floors,
the sanctity of feminine secrets,
universal female fear of leaking
crimson through smalls, seeping into

jeans, onto crisp white linen. How many
women through history have shared this
worry when they slept on foreign sheets?
This poem bears witness to small,
hidden woes endured in silence: that
morning she inserted her first tampon

in anticipation of a rough sea crossing,
her acute unease, swaying back and forth
above a choppy ocean; her mortification
about that fourth-degree tear after the birth
of the baby, the soreness and weak bladder
she’s suffered ever since, secreting just

enough urine, as she coughs or sneezes,
to force her home from functions too soon
and those perimenopausal bleeds: a Red Sea
deluge that borders on a haemorrhage,
leaves her on the brink of going to A&E.
Today a fearless MP has announced

to her peers in the House of Commons that
she was late because she was on her period.
Good on her. If men had menses I venture
they would be leaning over bars and fences,
chatting about the relative merits
of moon cups, pads and Tampax.

Daphne’s Riposte

Apollo, you made me
a laureate of sorts,
sentenced for all time
to be trophy wife,
to crown the heads
or deck the necks
of your chosen jocks
and dilettantes.

Listen up Lord of Delphi,
so you think you can
define my destiny?
I’m no accessory
to festoon the victor,
delight your eye,
heighten your appetite,
garnish whatever is on
your plate, or placate
your mounting desire.

I was the huntress, not the prey,
freely scaling forest and glade
under the freight of your gaze
until I cried out to my father
and Peneus heard my pleas,
hid me in this bark, these reeds.

You couldn’t possess me,
yet still you snatched my bloom,
just as I found myself rooted.
How could you read my swaying
branches, shimmering foliage,
as consent to thieve my leaves?

“Poem for the Female Unspoken” and “Daphne’s Riposte” are © Emily Cullen

Emily Cullen teaches Creative Writing with the School of English at NUI Galway. For the past two years, she served as Programme Director of Galway’s annual Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Emily’s third collection of poetry, Conditional Perfect, will be published by Doire Press at the end of this month (September 2019).

“You Really think I wanted him” and other poems by Melvina King

September 8th, 2019

You really think I wanted him

You’ve heard the American accent slip from
my tongue and I can bet I know what you want to talk about
before you ask why I wanted Trump,
so you can bask in your
feelings of politically superiority
take a look at me don’t just focus on my
accent and use it as your entrance for your
political inquisition or bashing of me,

Take a deep look at me and ask yourself
should I ask her why she wanted Trump,
should I ignore the obvious answer or
ask?

You are probably confused as to what I’m egging at
and what I want to say since you may not
have figured out it out yet–

I am a black person,
you may be aware
of my history in America and
if you’re not, I suggest you do your own work,
educate yourself on it, people like me have been
marginalized since before the founding of America
and to this present day.

So, I don’t think it’s wise nor intelligent to let
our first conversation be about
why I supported someone
who supports marginalizing me–

I know many people who, like me, didn’t vote for
this maniacal, KKK-endorsed, GOP-endorsed, phobia-spewing-psycho
but unfortunately, there were
a few, like very few, coon black people who are in a sunken place,
like Kanye West who voted for and support him.

But, I didn’t choose him
due to knowing that my chances of being treated like garbage by the police,
being called racial slurs, being given poor medical treatment,
looked down upon because of
my skin color, dealing with defending my west African immigrant family,
seeing/being on the receiving end of Institutional racism is going to continue
till God knows when.

So when you ask me that question
you’re wasting my time assuming that I wanted
continuity of the same battle I’ve fought since day one.

Also, do not look down on me because Trump was elected
I get looked down upon enough
Which I don’t need any more of and you’re
pretty much showing me that you’re ignorant
you’re generalizing an entire
country off of MAGA fools
MAGA meaning the “Make America Great Again”
racist, bigoted, phobia ridden deplorables
or sunken place sellouts.

Your annoying ignorant question
forces me to deal with mental trauma/frustration
that I’d rather not deal with
the trauma that occurs every time
a news story pops into my feed that’s
riddled with cases of hate crimes or actions
plus legislative changes that seek to
continually disenfranchise people
these stories leave me pissed
And even more annoyed/scared of white Americans

Because overt white supremacy is back in style and no longer in hiding
In the good ole USA and its from all different angles
whether it be from conservatives or so-called liberals.

I know you may have been misled by the funneled American news that you get
but really, my black skin wasn’t a clue that I didn’t vote for him nor support him?
Instead,
ask that question to the over 60% of white American men and 52% of white American women
(small percentage for the women but still over 50%)
Cause, in case you didn’t know, or you forgot, White Americans still are carrying around that trunk of racism no matter how liberal or progressive they may say they are, or aren’t, checking their racist family and friends to not be continually swallowed up by racism.
Btw, 94% of black women in America tried to save y’all.

Belief

I no longer believe in the truths of men
they’re the over made-up friend who you
think is flawless, then see her real
face in the morning and it’s like, oh girl.
They’re the couch that you think is so
perfect then when you sit on it the spring
pops you in the butt.
They’re the table you think is so stable,
then it crashes after you stand on it to hang
some decorations.
They’re the beach umbrella that you
thought was so secure in the sand
that blows to the wind as you sunbathe.
They’re the 50 cent lemonade that
the kids assured you is so good,
but tastes tart and watery as hell.
They’re the shining star that
you realize is
actually an airplane.
They’re the $1,000 you think you won,
but is actually a promo for buying
windows.
They’re the movie that you’ve been waiting
a year for then, after watching you’re
like wtf I waited for that?
They’re the $20 cover club that you’re friend told
you was gonna be bumping,
that ends up being full of crickets.
They’re the shirt that looked so good in the ad,
then when you try it on,
You look bad in it.
They’re basically the hypes that we fall for,
That lead us to irritating annoying disappointments.

Spill your Mind

Open your Mind tell me what’s inside
tell me your everything
don’t worry nothing’s too obscure or weird,
let me see the dreamy, hopeful, happiest, darkest, deepest, wildest and saddest parts
tell me what you can’t tell others, you know the things that you bury deep inside
let me see your mind in its most vulnerable state,
spill all its contents into my lap so I can look at it more closely and sifter through it
so I can find aches, pains, worries, confusions, likes, dislikes, and most of all gems,
I promise I won’t move anything around or out of place
I’ll put them back where they belong,
I’ll handle with care your knowledge, emotions, thoughts, abilities, disabilities and memories
I promise I won’t mess with your mind
You can trust me,
So, let down your guard,
Let me find in your mind what makes a person like you my kind.

Muse

I want to be your muse
Your inspiration
The woman who brings out the genius in you
The woman who makes you produce provocative and envelope-pushing work
The woman who makes you crazy like Picasso and bizarre like Dali
The woman who makes you flamboyant like Fela and abstract like Basquiat
The woman who makes you bombastic like Hemingway then shy like Lautrec
The woman who makes you flirty like Yeats and calm like Coltrane
I want to be your muse the woman who lets you be unafraid to be whomever

Melvina King is a poet originally from Philadelphia, PA but currently studying at the graduate level in Dublin, Ireland. Due to wanting a change in life, and a breath of fresh air she decided to move to Europe to experience living elsewhere. Writing poetry is something that she’s enjoyed since childhood. Back in Philadelphia, she frequents the open mic circuit. Poetry has allowed her to communicate her thoughts, educate others and let go of her feelings. She writes about her experiences as a black woman in this world, being from a West African immigrant family, her interactions with men/people, travelling and from how she sees the world. The themes that are explored her work include oppression, love, race, Pan-Africanism, self-esteem, sexual assault and identity.

“Chattel” and other poems by Kushal Poddar

September 1st, 2019

Panther Unbound

My blind uncle asks if it is a fountain.
“Ah, a fountain!” he says.
“No, a dog licking!” I smile.
We both know we fool around a lot.

I turn the shower off and rub his back.

My mother broke my air-gun against my spine
when I failed to sum up success
with the correlatives given.
I walk with my eyes cast downwards
unless your eyes are shut blind.

I towel my uncle to sun.
“Tell me a story” he says, and I retort,
“So this one by Louis De Bernieres…”

We both know I lie.
I make this tale on my life as a panther unbound.

The Wise Rusts

Meanwhile in Texas,
a callidus gun takes us
to a street led hoodwinked
towards its end –
bricks over bricks, more bricks
opaque and thick.

They report – five demised
last night.
One rebirths as a shepherd,
one as a notorious skirt chaser,
one a sheep, one a chef.
One never returns.

A gun buried, rusts its way back
to the nidus, a reason still stuck
in its bullet-tiny hole boring for
an end of all rationale.

The shepherd is required to sing,
the beau needs to hum,
the sheep intones grass,
the chef croons a requiem.
The one not recurred holds the rust
to his heart. To oblivion.

Chattel

Even your boy street sweeper who writes you by a pet name
on a secluded corner with his warm piss and, believe me,
love smells like an empty bladder
has no inkling why you appear no more in your corroded balcony,
cannot imagine you on the same plane with a melancholic eagle.

In the pane of an airplane
sun bursts, mushrooms, implodes in orange bloom clouds.

You fear for a moment-
You are a land and the man
who promised you steady earnings in the middle east
will colonize your territories soon.

Somewhere below and behind
the sweeper boy imagines you in a well-thumbed magazine
and then not there,
not in the things he can touch or experience.

Chattel was recently published at International Times

Nothing Political About This

While we cross the jungle moon rises-
our country’s election over,
the paths all swept for the mines.

Our car screeches to a sudden motionlessness.
in a limbo, time and space both shaping into
twin headlights’ lit cones.

Someone or some gang has laid
some enormous logs on the road
to block the veins and choke the hearts.

A rabbit leaps from existence
to nothingness. Our driver lights a joint.
We wait and wait. Nothing happens

as if we are a mistake; we are insignificant;
we are cursed to survive
while the violence licks the village past this darkness.

Kushal Poddar edited the online magazine Words Surfacing. Authored, The Circus Came To My Island (Spare Change Press, Ohio), A Place For Your Ghost Animals (Ripple Effect Publishing, Colorado Springs), Understanding The Neighborhood (BRP, Australia), Scratches Within (Barbara Maat, Florida), Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems (BRP, Australia) and Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems (Hawakal Publishers, India)

Kushal’s Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

“Tracing Rivers” and other poems by Leo Kuhling

August 27th, 2019

Ambiguous Loss

She is a mortician.

You see
she doesn’t move.
No eyes open, only
ragged breath. Flushed cheeks.
Silence.

She has prepared the body
nearly a century.
Not yet embalmed
but ready.

The lipstick is a light rose,
it makes white face
seem ghostly

And glasses perch on a nose
like mine
if lids were to open
they still wouldn’t see

She is her own mortician.

I have come to the funeral
every saturday
I have said goodbye

and kissed her
lightly

I have watched
the process
of becoming a corpse

almost

Fixed Vortex

Feeble fingers have collapsed into themselves
her fist, like an infant’s
lies limp in her lap

As if made of marble
the grip won’t relax
unyielding

“What is it that you
are holding on to?”

I take her thumb
try to unfurl the claw, the nails
digging into her palm
Stigmata

she must
be searching for some sensation
some sting of pain
something

“Hello”

I am watching two blue planets
to see if they
notice the sound

if gravity can pull them,
alter the orbit,
and turn them toward me

“Do you know who I am?”

they are empty planets
they don’t move

she is here
and not here

stuck
in the fixed vortex
of this
in between

Ingrained

We took you to mass today
I can’t remember
the last time you spoke

it could have been a year ago

and yet,
the words of the rosary are on your lips
a softest kiss

you can’t forget

Multitudes

I am looking at you now,
piece by piece
to reconstruct the you
you were

I strip away
the hair, white wisps
the skin, paper-thin, translucent
the muscle, the fat,
the soft

Right down to the bone
your bones
containing multitudes
of a lifetime
and my father’s
and mine

I piece you back together
carve the muscles that would
hold me tight in your arms,
the fat that made your
embrace so warm
the skin, toughened with time
the hair as thick as mine.

I am looking at you now
and you are looking at me too.
Somewhere
in those eyes of deepest blue
I think you recognize me,
And I, you

Tracing Rivers

Your frailness
the veins, thin filaments
visible
just under the surface

I trace with light touch
three rivers
as if faintest pressure
might stop the flow

Did you know
some cacti
survive years
without water?

Have adapted
to rainlessness
still bloom

But you?

It has been years.

Would anything
be better
easier
than this?

Even drought.

Athrú / Change

Tá an seanteach seo
ag titim.

Siúlaim istigh, ar chosa éadroma
lámha sínte
chun clocha a ghabháil

Níl ach deannach fágtha
anseo.

This old house
is falling down.

Palms outstretched
to catch the stones.

Only dust
is left.

Leo Kuhling is an Irish-Canadian poet based in Limerick, and a lover of all things spoken word. His poetry has appeared in the Ogham Stone, Silver Apples, Artis Natura, Dodging the Rain and the RTÉ Sunday Miscellany. Currently, Leo is finishing a M.Sc in Psychology and working towards his first book.

“Delicate” by C. Murray

July 25th, 2019

Delicate

We trace our path from the harbour to
a dark-stepped lane opening out onto
the old churchyard. Green and blue
sea-glass, a rough blush pink is clearlit.

We find small rib bones scattered there.
I pick up the cap of a skull. Small, its
sponge ossified to a mineralized honeycomb.
I cup its yellow cream in my hand. Delicate,

a sea snail, most precious egg, as if
it had touched the ruby feather of a
bluebird. A most precious thing,
bird-egg-shattered, dust in my pores.

We place the bones down on a portico shelf.
Are they human bones, those of an infant?

We lay them under the wing of a sheltering grave,
a small bone heap. We move through the labyrinth.

An excerpt from “Delicate” was published by HiRISE (MRO, NASA) as part of the “Beautiful Mars Project” (Mars Poetica)

Image © HiRISE

Category: How Words Play

Confession

Sister, Speak

Mirrors

Needlepoint

Hatching

Erin’s social profiles

Poem For Kate In Chemo

when your mother convinces you to take in your homeless younger sister

Dance of the Samurai

Dive of the Kingfisher

Elegy to some Mysterious Form

No Survivors

To Rothko

The Stanhopea and the Mexican Boys

BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST

NOT ONE OF THE MYTHS

MY GOOD LUCK HOME

THIS CONNECTION

AMONG THE IMMORTALS

Animals are in Communion

Poem for the Female Unspoken

Daphne’s Riposte

You really think I wanted him

Belief

Spill your Mind

Muse

Panther Unbound

The Wise Rusts

Chattel

Nothing Political About This

Ambiguous Loss

Fixed Vortex

Ingrained

Multitudes

Tracing Rivers

Delicate