‘Reluctant Oration’ and other poems by Fiona King

February 28th, 2018

BIRTH

The last point of the quadrant remains to be drawn,
Out on the fringe of a shadowy dawn.
The air is still, devoid of all sound,
The raven encircles the battleground.
The troops are assembled, their swords held with poise,
To face the enemy engulfing his choice.
He arrives with his foe, emits a loud cry,
The prophetic bird falls dead from the sky.
Morning’s mist begins to fade,
The child is here, no longer afraid.

CHILD’S PLAY

The couple play a childish game,
Their toys are guilt, betrayal, shame.
They scatter them across the floor,
Expose insecurities raw and sore.
Their song is angry, well-rehearsed,
A tune of sadness, bitterly versed.
Their painting, an unfinished mess,
Made in haste, under duress.
They dance a dance of hideous precision,
Wrong is right, final decision.
Nothing to lose and less to gain,
Familiar role play, hate and pain.
Their child looks on, he takes the blame,
Discarded toy in an adult game.

WOODEN SPOON

Deed is done, misdemeanour little,
Anger rises, no acquittal.
Shriek is sharp, the echo rings,
Room spins, skin stings.
Hot tears, salty lip,
‘Water please, just one sip,’
Words strangled, sound drowned,
Face of inequity gloriously crowned.
Door slams, key turns,
Legs weak, stomach churns.
Patterned flowers on the wall,
Footsteps thud and stab the hall.
Captive now in my own space,
Prisoner in this sacred place.
Fear abates, the edge is gone,
Acquiesce to what is wrong.
No apology required,
Guilty conscience long expired.

RELUCTANT ORATION

Faces staring, pressure loaded,
She fears she will be taunted, goaded.
Hands moist, mouth dry,
Self-expectation running high.
She takes a stand, she’s on display,
Composure falls to disarray.
Blood pumps, breath claimed,
The sound emerges, wounded, maimed.
She perseveres, an uphill battle,
Spectators whisper, chairs rattle.
Her colour deepens, voice shakes,
Seeks perfection, makes mistakes.
They cast their judgement, mark their score,
Perverse entertainment, wanting more.
Silence falls, she concedes,
Last remnant of strength, fades, recedes.
Emotions naked, reserve depleted,
Feigned applause, occasion defeated.

Reluctant Oration and other poems are © Fiona King

Fiona King is a married mother of four from East Cork. She is currently on career break from her job as a primary school teacher, to care for her youngest son, Adam (in picture). Adam is 3 years old, and has a genetic condition called Osteogenesis imperfecta, a brittle bone condition. In recent months, She has begun to reflect on the arrival of her precious boy into this world and has found the best way to express her thoughts and feelings through verse. From this, she wrote the poem ‘Birth’. After this creative expression, deeper reflections from my past inspired her to write further, on experiences with emotions of such gravity that they stay with her.

Irish Times report on Fiona King

‘No-one is watching’ and other poems by Nicola Geddes

February 20th, 2018

No-one is watching

Unharness your two beasts
Ambition and Anxiety
from your chariot
Unharness yourself
from all electronic devices
You will not be followed

Did you look, did you
see the tree tops career above you
in an ecstasy of elements,
smell the damp brown
leaves under your feet?
Did you witness yourself
in the middle
of all this rejoicing
and all this decay?

Or are you still stooped
under the weight of your expectations?
See the grey clouds skitter across a yellow sky
See the fat bluebottle climb the window again
See the oceans
who have carried our ships on their backs
and from whom the feast was delivered
See the oceans
Rise up
No-one is watching

star

our smallness is vast
realised in darkness
my stardust is bone

animated by light
sculpted in our sway
stone is changing still

the moon

i am the crayfish, from the murky waters of the sea of cleverness
i am the yellow dog, the moon illuminates me and i shine
i am the dark dog, the moon illuminates me from behind
and i remain in silhouette
i am the path, i wind and dip
you think you can see me but you can’t see everything
i am the two stone pillars, i am petrified
i am seas of dust and rocks, the illusion of what has become known
i am the crayfish, my wet armour gleams in the moonlight.

Stupid Cow

Do you think he can hear you,
your missing baby?
his world lurches and surges
doesn’t know where he’s heading
still thinks he’ll come back
to solid ground and your warm flank

Do you think she can hear you,
your absent mother?
latched onto her udders
gluttonous metal jaws
drain every drop of milk
her body just keeps on
making for you

The Demon

You cannot name me
yet I mould your normality.
I make a squalid mockery of
all the pretty things in your house.

I slip like an adulteress
between your soft sheets,
and suck the air from your chambers.
You wake in musty spoil.

I stack up episodes
like ill-matched crockery
Rankled by uncertainty, you
deny me; I reign.
Unnamed, I crouch
in your heart’s lower cavities.

No-one is watching and other poems are © Nicola Geddes

Originally from Scotland, Nicola Geddes studied Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art, and Cello Performance at the London College of Music. She has been based in County Galway for the past twenty five years, where she works as a cellist and music tutor. To date her poetry has been published in Crannog, the Galway Review, and Skylight 47. In 2017 Nicola’s poems received a Special Commendation from the Patrick Kavanagh Award.

‘The Salt Escape’ and other poems by Jude Cowan Montague

February 20th, 2018

Too North

Due to the severe cold
we worked continuously
just to keep alive.

Sometimes our clothing
was frozen so hard
over our tattoos

we were unable to enter our bunks
until we threw hot water
over each other.

Our skipper had been urged
not to trust the charts
but to rely on his own knowledge

after a gale off Port Barrow
had blown us into
a narrow fjord.

Steaming down pitch hardship
in perfect calm
we neared a yellow band

fat with life; our trawler shouldered
through its skin of fire.
No cod or halibut for miles.

I dropped a double hook,
without bait,
to pull up two human skeletons,

W. Hatter’s sons,
missing since warm summer rain
unsettled the penal code.

From the Steps of St John

You can see them in the corner of your eye,
then they’re gone.
Sometimes you recognise them in a body like ours,
some well-kept, some more slovenly.
some fat, some squat.
Most of them are clever.

The buzzing and flying
are side-effects of natural power.
Never try to trap one.
Leave them matches and food.
They can help us but you have to give them things.
They have control of the wind.

Who knows what’s under their coats.
I have spotted the little dog prints
at the edge of the park where nobody’s been,
the tree twisted too close to the road.
There’s a hole in the sky
affecting us all.

The Salt Escape

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘You never will find him again.’
She walked out onto the sodium plain
where sour gusts scour the crags.

She found a groove in the ground.
Her body fit inside the crack.
I lay down on top, pressed my face in her back
wrapping my feelers around

The snowlace winds whipped our flesh
to ribbons, though swaddled in fur.
I folded my legs close and breathed in her hair.
I dreamed we were eggs in our nest.

Stiffened to stone in the night
and humming to underground forces
we heard the dark whisper of runaway horses
shuddering into the light.

The Riff

Kofia-wearing djembe owners
are workshopping African merengue.
We shut our eyes. Listen to Dalston.
Close breathe sirens and exhausts, in, out.
We play the same riff for thirty minutes.
I write my own version. Not bad.
But it takes so long for me to learn
what I have written, I get finger cramp.

Folo asks me to be in his band.
I take round my boyfriend and he cooks us tomato rice.
I’m going to sing original songs
with a master guitarist from Sierra Leone.
Before rehearsals, he arranges photographs.
They are huge, severe, b/w.
My nose droops in the heavy contrast.
Folo doesn’t like the talc,
it puffs away his roguish sweat.

He knows a man in Homerton
with a very cheap motor for sale.
Above the cab office, a large blonde
half-pulls her cornblue negligee over her bosom.
Nearly everyone is in the bumpy bed,
and there’s a lot of us in the room.
A wide-eyed man clicks open a suitcase.
Out swims a school of dried fish.

Disappearance of the Body

While the ice sawed together,
the ghost story began
with the shrieking in the ventilator,
the wind always headed south.

As the photographer,
I had a dark room that used to be a store room.
My assistant ignored the long box
left on the stable marked ‘Surgical Supplies’.

Our fireman had left a chisel
and returned unexpectedly.
I thought it my bad luck
when he discovered the cut-up body.

The fireman said ghosts
do not make noises.
But how would a deaf man
hear them?

The biscuits ran out on Christmas Day.
It was time to clear off.
Some lay down on the snow
while the fireman and I walked about

while the wind hummed continuously.
Maybe it was the cold in my ears
but a crazy voice
pursued one of us.

Developing the negatives,
such an astonishing proposition
presented itself to me
that I have never ceased thinking of it since.

The Mirror

How had she come here?
That answer was easy.
She had looked in the mirror.
Then she had walked into the mirror
at which moment
she walked into herself.
Or not herself, but herself
in mirror world. Where she
was still herself.

She was still Alice.
Alice was a fixed point in time.
She was safe only in
who she thought she was
while everything
around her was changing
so fast, faster than breakfast
down to dinner and sleep
and the next day on its crazy round
of meals and conversations.

Time was backwards
but she was still going forwards
when the White Queen tried
to grab her escaping shawl,
flinched at her own blood
and finally pricked her skin
as Alice helped her fasten
the cloth around her shoulders.
Alice tried her best to help the Queen.
but Alice hadn’t understood
that it was Alice who was wrong.
‘I’m talking to myself again,’ she noticed.

She was still a child,
and her confusion was that of a child’s.
These adults, even if they were chess pieces
ran past her complaining and crying
until the knight caught her in his arms
and lifted her high in the air.
She didn’t want to be a prisoner.
She needed to cross the brook
and become Queen Alice

but the White Knight was too strong,
holding her upside down,
trapped inside her own logic.

The Salt Escape and other poems are © Jude Cowan Montague

Jude Cowan Montague worked for Reuters Television Archive for ten years. Her album The Leidenfrost Effect (Folkwit Records 2015) reimagines quirky stories from the Reuters Life! feed. She produces The News Agents on Resonance 104.4 FM. Her most recent book is The Originals (Hesterglock Press, 2017).

Three poems inspired by Ric Carfagna, Rus Khomutoff

February 10th, 2018

Vintage ghosts of
joy and sadness
a saccharine statement
the highest expression of the autopoetic force
the incarnation and withdrawal of a God
declaration of hither swarms
accretion of the torrential becoming
instances emancipated from
all anxieties and frustrations
in the anagogic phase
made dizzy by the hybris
a regular pulsating
metre of recurrence

This is not a method

O blacklist of preeminence
louder than life itself
countdown sequence
of aired mysterious booms
natural coction
the shadow of a shadow of an
obtainable new order
to bathe in the splendor
of lathe and labyrinth
as momentum grows
that bold and legitimate certainty
of endlessly repeating variations
and recollections that
erect their desire to exist
like a new sensation
articulating lifelong repeal

In this mode and vague notion
of a stay in your placeism
event horizon
a derangement of senses
dragging the echo
from the culvert
from the book of common prayer
eschewing the copula
almost like the pace of a dream
ordered fragments of a
disordered devotion
a space we can enter
the bareness of time’s passing

This is not a method and other poems are © Rus Khomutoff

Rus Khomutoff is a neo surrealist poet in Brooklyn, NY. My poetry has been featured in Erbacce, Fifth Day journal and Burning House Press. In 2017 he published an ebook called Immaculate Days.

‘The Music of Stones’ and other poems by Colette Colfer

February 10th, 2018

Stepping Stones

Here are my hands, outstretched for your bare feet
so that each step of your path through darkness
and gravel bits splintered with thorns will meet
uncalloused palms of moccasin softness.

This is your extraordinary journey
beyond mapped landscape and into unknowns
but my knuckles will jigsaw rocks like keys
filling locks to smooth roughness for your soles.

My hands will be luminous with love light
anticipating your transformation,
pulsating warmth for this your longest night
when each footstep is a destination.

Although you are alone you’re not alone,
I’m reaching out my hands as stepping-stones.

Anchors

I search shorelines at low tide
for portals that open time
to the pip of it.

Fingers like a blind man’s
on stones, periwinkles, chainies,
and drops of smooth blue-glass on sand.

I trace cat-gut through seaweed
to hidden hooks on feathers,
German baits, spoons and spinners.

Each rock a prayer bead
in the litany of belonging.
Pock-air, Connigeer, Shollister, Claim.

Worms

The graveyard was January grey and cold.
Dad was crying. I’d never seen him cry before.

Strangers spilled over mounds and dips,
around jaded headstones that tilted towards sleep.

Grandad was lying in a fresh coffin
with brassy handles that glinted like baubles.

I stood in my little girl knees at the frontline
by the open hole that gasped for closure.

A priest’s ragged voice led the chorus of mourners
in prayers that lifted up into the sky like birds.

Men used ropes to slowly lower the coffin
till it was anchored deep and still on the black.

Some one of them broke the shadowy silence
with the thud of a shovelful of clay on wood.

Nanna turned her back, took broken steps away,
my two sisters at her sides like crutches.

There would be worms now on Grandad’s face and clothes,
wriggling over his eyelids, into his ears, up his nose.

Afterwards, in a carful of adults who laughed and told stories,
I stared at the hedges so the whole world blurred green.

The Music of Stones

We tuned ourselves to skylark song and searched
the skies all summer for their high hovering spots
where birds trilled like semi-quavers
in the unlined stave of a hot blue sky.

We paused to stare, enthralled by dives that spliced
our days. Then satisfied we’d amble on
through sunburnt fields beside the sea towards
the lighthouse, stopping at the next birdsong.

All summer that summer we spied on skylarks,
climbed cliffs, found caves, swam skinny dips
and lay naked on reclusive sandy beaches
where you taught me that even stones can sing.

No Looking Back

Sometimes you’ve got to leave behind a place
you’ve loved since tumbling into time and go
for good, that is forever, go goodbye
without a looking back like Lot’s wife did
and died from turning, turning into salt
still standing, white dissolving in the rain

The Music of Stones and other poems are © Colette Colfer

Colette Colfer works as a part-time lecturer in world religions at Waterford Institute of Technology. She has also worked for many years in journalism and is an award winning radio documentary maker. She has had poems published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Caterpillar (for kids), Skylight 47, The Poets’ Republic, Three Drops From a Cauldron and Algebra of Owls.

Image: Sea shells (mainly the whirl shell, Zethalia zelandica) in a rock pool at Te Arai Point, Auckland, New Zealand. CC-By-ND: Avenue

Further excerpts from Paul Celan’s ‘microliths’

February 6th, 2018

16 He who transforms himself wants, being the same, to become someone else.

Shape = semblance

17 There is no such thing as the Ibolithic, you say! Well, where would we wind up if we agreed with that? For then the Lithic wouldn’t exist either, the basic Lithic, this idiom worked up with such great pains. And Paleo, Mezzo and Neo, so excellent, they too would then be as if extinguished — and — do I dare ask — where in this case would we be at? We, so proud to have managed to put the ice age behind us… Why, I heard it asked — and I hear resentment roiling in that question, yes indeed, resentment! —, Why? Was that necessary? We stand pretty now, we, those of today… Gone, our past, gone… And our future? Our future-bearing future? I’m asking, I’m not answering. Let the others, the anti-iboliths, answers. But, isn’t it so, Rumpelstiltskin, we two, you and I, we want into the Open once again, into the forest, and crossing the swath that leads to the nuclear reactor, and where the honeysuckle, so beguiling, rambles, we, despite the danger of falling into discredit, even here, we want to sing

18 Verbier, 6.25.57.

18.1 We were one flesh with the night.

18.2 In the gaze you throw at it, the looked at awakens.

19 10.26.57.

Poems are passageways. A toi de passer, Vie! [Your turn to pass through, Life!]

A paradise was indeed promised us, but to no one among us, not even to the fiercest believers, a vehicle with tail flukes, so as not to remain unnoticed on the roads up there, when the driver chauffeurs us to the confectioner’s.

21 For so much anguish, so much symbolism!

22 Hermeticism—

Certain “citizens” and the poem: They buy the surprise bag; one knows vaguely what’s in it, it won’t be much, but then it doesn’t cost much either, and if one happens to visit the fair and one has enjoyed the lady without lower- but with upper body, one’s amusement also demands this. And when what’s in it turns out — but here too the buyer’s superior humor can prove itself — to be even cheaper than cheap, there still remains the fun that all of that was “too” /[“zu” “closed”]

23 9.9.59.

…. and sounded off against his God.

these translations are © Pierre Joris

Paul Celan
Extracts from Microliths
translated by Pierre Joris
forthcoming from attem press in 2018

‘A Hierarchy of Halls’ by C. Murray

February 5th, 2018

This is not a universe,
it is a garden. Trees,

a hierarchy of halls,
halls, a universe to sing.

Follow wren’s sound
into the lowest corridors.

There, a huge gap, fox
-made,
is where blackbirds sing.

Stone-plateaued, daisy garlanded
ground-held.

Tree looms above it all.

Early summer occurs
in a calamity of falling
young,

petals, birds, the
bright souls of birds.

A small dead bird
is at my feet,
tree looms
over this soul-ossuary

dignifying the small
body with her dark needles,

bird-map-lost,
obliterate–

A Hierarchy of Halls © C. Murray (Smithereens Press, 2018)

Thanks to Ken Keating of Smithereens Press for publishing A Hierarchy of Halls.

Cover art by Salma Ahmad Caller.

Streaming options for A Hierarchy of Halls at The Internet Archive

‘Poet Mother’ and other poems by Felicia McCarthy

January 30th, 2018

Reading the Omens

A chorus of voices called, No!
when I reached for the latch
Don’t let her out, she’ll die.

A monarch hatched from the rafters.
Her orange and black wings a mirror
to the hot coals that waked her.

A trail of twisted cobweb sported flies
as if it were a kite tail tied with bows
and she ready to be launched to the sky.

Though we turned away,
she is with me still, as
I plan for the days ahead.

Take this as written:
when my time comes,
to hatch from this body

I want you to open the window.

First published in Boyne Berries 18, in the autumn of 2015
Published online at Trevor Conway’s website; Poems in Profile #17 (April, 2016-07-15)

Let Morning Come

(after Jane Kenyon)

Let the street lamps blink out,
the lights of Ballyvaughn grow dim,
as darkness gives way to day.

Let the shush-shush of the tides
slide into your dream, beckon you awake,
to open your eyes. Let morning come.

Let the sky lift her grey skirts,
draw up her shawl of cloud, the way
the curtain must rise before the play.

To the heron strutting along the shore,
to gulls drifting above the bay, to lovers
still in their beds, let morning come.

Let the gold disc deliver on its promise.
Let the wind come up. Let the fishing boats
sail from safe harbours. Let morning come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
keep yourself back. The world begins fresh
each day, so let morning come.

Skylight 47, issue 8, 2017

Poet Mother

(for Liz)

Don’t let the baby swallow your words,
the ones that arrive in the night
while you swaddle her, humming.
Sing into her small ears the lines
you will write in the morning.

She won’t mind what it is as long
as you talk softly and rock her gently
in the rhythm of your next poem. This
will keep the words from stifling you,
from choking her.

She loves all of your creations.
The lines you remember at dawn
become the maps she will take
away from these sweet days
and nights in your arms.

Skylight 47, issue 7, 2016

Where I’m From

(for Margaret McDonough)

I am from corn, hot Ohio miles of it. And the smell of ether
seeping from a black leather bag stashed on top of the fridge.
I am from pony men and card sharks, drunks and steam train drivers.
I’m from blue pencil marks on galley proofs, created on an upright Royal.
I am from screen doors slapping against armies of Canadian soldiers
every June. I am from the dog days of August, the ice storms of winter,
the frozen mud trenched roads of spring.

I am from a lake that died and a river that burned,
from The Erie, The Cuyahoga, and a town called Ashtabula.
I am from ore boats and the fog horns sounding long and lonely
as they herd the hulls of boats into their lanes. I am from the Bascule bridge,
the brick yards, the railway yards, and a back yard that was the lake.

I’m from The Mother of Sorrows, The Confraternity of Christian
Mothers, and the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Mary.
I’m from a ham-fisted man with a fedora and a black skirted priest;
both with whiskey breath and an enviable reach.

I am from among her effects:
The loose powder box made of pasteboard,
stuffed with letters from her Iowa mother,
My dearest girl, she wrote, and Dear grand girl.

I am from Mayo’s Foot of the Reek
to the Allegheny farm on the Black Creek
still walking on from the Great Famine of 1845.

Jenny, YSA online journal, 2016

Felicia McCarthy practices the arts of poetry and healing in the West of Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Boyneberries, Skylight 47, as well as in The Sea, An Anthology by Rebel Poetry. She was a featured reader for December 2015’s Over the Edge. She has also read her work at Belmullet’s Festival of Words and Letterkenny’s Northwest Words. In 2015, her work was shortlisted for the Bailieborough Prize. In summer 2017 her poetry was shortlisted for the Dermot Healy Award, The Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize and the Over the Edge Writer of the Year award. Her poetry was published online in September 2016 in Jenny, while four poems were published in the UK ezine, The Blue Nib, issue 14. Felicia is also an Energy Medicine teacher, speaker and therapist with a specialty in cancer support. Her articles on Energy Medicine have appeared in Perspectives in Healing, The Living Link and Positive Life.

The Blue Nib

Making ‘Den of Sibyl Wren’ by Salma Ahmad Caller

January 26th, 2018

Notes on Salma Ahmad Caller’s process for the making of ‘Den of Sibyl Wren’.

The Den of Sibyl Wren is my response to Chris Murray’s A Hierarchy of Halls published by Smithereens Press It is my response to words Chris wrote about how she feels about this poem, and what she sees in her mind’s eye.

Details of the image ‘Den of Sibyl Wren’ by Salma Ahmad Caller

Materials: Watercolour, Indian ink, collage, graphite and gold pigment on Fabriano acid-free paper 57cm x 76.3cm

My process involves an intense working back and forth with words and images in my imagination. I write a lot as part of my creative process as an artist, and these writings help me create and develop the visual image. The so-called ‘visual’ image is to me embodied, materialised, haptic and tactile. So the ‘image’ in poetry and metaphorical writing is almost the same as the visual image in art, to me. So there is not a huge gap between text and image. Not in my mind in any case. The flat 2 D image is neither flat nor 2 D – but rather it is a complex and multi-dimensional terrain of emotion, sensation and concept, just as is the written word, especially in poetry.

So it felt very natural to respond to Chris Murray’s very imagistic poetry, which I already love so much.

In preparing to make work in response to A Hierarchy of Halls, I spent time reading and re-reading the poems and reading and re-reading Chris’s little notes she had sent to me via Twitter. And so the The Den of Sibyl Wren emerged. My notes on my own thoughts and responses to reading A Hierarchy of Halls and to what Chris told me about her notion of a Sibyl that represented the wren and its qualities:

The smallness and greatness of Sibyl Wren, her green den of spaces that we cannot see and her flight paths carved out in the sky. Tiny but potent and majestic in her domain.
A shamanistic female bird being interpreting or bringing the mysteries of the other worldly to us.
A materialisation of the invisible.
A feminine nature of delicacy, strength and bravery. A guardian.
An oracle seeing into the unknown and leading the reader bravely forwards through pain and difficulty.
A garden world of tiny potent things.
A sky above that is carved into great structures and pathways by nature that we cannot see.
A fecundity and joyfulness. Spring, summer.
A soaring upwards towards mystery.
Invisibility of worlds around us and within us.
The dandelion clock telling of another time besides the time we know.
A bird shrine under a shadowy tree to the dead bird in Chris’s poem.
A tiny female presence sitting and moving in an underworld of unseen unspoken spaces.

Twitter Notes

What Chris Murray said in a series of little Twitter notes to me: “The chapbook is called ‘a hierarchy of halls’ and is about small things, flight, wrens, and huge dreamlike structures are implied. My sibyls and messengers are birdlike creatures/ the little chapbook is called ‘a hierarchy of halls’ and is about a wren’s flight through my garden, am obsessed with bird workings. I didn’t see a sibyl specifically in bodies, but the first image on the Poethead page has a little putti. This is how my head works: I see the wren as a type of sibyl, a small messenger, and female. The sibyl should represent the wren! A type of oracle who leads one into the book.

Salma Caller’s process and approach to the Smithereens Press published chapbook ‘A Hierarchy of Halls’

artwork-a-hierarchy-of-halls-srgb-3590x5000px-1 (7)

Salma Ahmad Caller is an artist and a hybrid of cultures and faiths. She is drawn to hybrid and ornamental forms, and to how the body expresses itself in the mind to create an embodied ‘image’. UK based, she was born in Iraq to an Egyptian father and a British mother and grew up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. With a background in art history and theory, medicine and pharmacology, and several years teaching cross-cultural ways of seeing via non-Western artefacts at Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, she now works as an independent artist and teacher.

The Infinite Body of Sensation; visual poetry by Salma Caller
Patterns of Sensation, the Bodies of Dolls, by Salma Caller
Website.

All images & images associated with ‘Den of Sibyl wren’, ‘A Hierarchy of Halls’, and ‘Gold Friend’ are © Salma Ahmad Caller

‘Starlings’ by C. Murray

January 25th, 2018

Poethead by Chris Murray

starlings

the sea opened its avenue just now
pearl-throated I
they call mother mother

sweet the sun-in
to walk up into it

and the starlings have come to peck the grass
round us
the young are screaming for the bread that is
at their feet

reduced palette version here (pdf) > starlings pdf

starlings is by C. Murray

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