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Conclusion of a Report into the Condition of an Urban Graveyard
 
In conclusion, the condition of the graves themselves
Makes mockery of the permanence to which the stone aspires.
A considerable number are suffering from ‘heave’,
As if the occupants were impatient for the Judgement Day
And suggests a degree of subsidence which would
Imply that the land was unsuitable for alternative utilisation.
 
Crosses are littered around the graves
As if the deceased had laid their burdens down
As they stepped into their final receptacles.
Angels had indeed fallen on their faces
But we doubt that the Lord in whose worship they fell
Was that for whom the memorials were originally erected.
 
The paths, however, were in good to fair condition
Suggesting a significantly lower level of utilisation 
Than was originally envisaged for them. They represent 
In our view, a reasonable amenity value. 
All in all we would recommend, in the absence of commercial interest,
That the present policy of benign neglect be continued.

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry, stories and articles published in a variety of webzines and magazines. He sometimes posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

Lazarus Dies

My brother died in my arms the day I
thought of you. He saw you once, asked for you,
called to you, in his dying days. Sick as a pup
without his mother— drunk again, high again,
tearing his love and childhood memories of
sweet-sassafras hugs into tiny
indistinct pieces scattered to the four 
winds to evaporate with time. He replaced her,
he replaced you. Felt you once, your
warmth, your talks of forgiveness, of love.
Closer than a brother. He let it go 
somewhere down that bumpy road, or
someone thieved it, shattering it, sticking
the shard of doubt in his brain like the glass
you missed with the dustbin. I wrap him in his
burial clothes and somewhere the shard sticks
me. Lord, if you were here, my brother’d be alive.
Lord, if you’d a been here, he’d a healed. If
you’d a been, he’d a believed. If you were
here, if you were here.

Veronica McDonald is a poet, fiction writer, artist, mom, and editor of Heart of Flesh Literary Journal. Her poetry, fiction, and art have been published in Lost Pen Magazine, Jersey Devil Press, and Five on the Fifth, among several others. Find out more at: VeronicaMcDonald.com.

Old Trout 

Somehow beneath all this 
weaving under the graft and the forms 
I swim merry as a trout 
gilded by God, I gleam 
and slide away from  
the reach of Midas 
I cannot hear envelopes crammed with fear hitting the doormat 
fish do not pay bills 
(except when drachma leap unexpectedly into their open mouths 
along with hooks and sinkers)
fish only swish and let holy water 
pass over their waiting gills. 
time to breathe, and glimmer 
and let good things pool.  

Keren Dibbens-Wyatt is a chronically ill writer and artist with a passion for poetry, mysticism, story and colour. Her writing features regularly on spiritual blogs and in literary journals. Her latest book is Recital of Love (Paraclete Press, 2020). Keren lives in South East England. 

Wherein Old Tom, Bent with Age, Imagines
 
Sit here and conjure what
your life might have been. A sip of English
 
craft to steady—now see yourself not
a glimmer of stone, but a grizzled 
 
man of words, as book-smart ladies listen, 
aflutter with your magnum 
 
opus. The unwritten, like a London 
fog hangs on dang’rous mews, obscures 
 
like fingers of a phantom limb to read
the secret face in the what-if crypt, where you 
 
suffer the eternal doddering of Horace 
the Lesser, who grasps your ankles 
 
as you raise your ink-stained fingers above
your head, ready to ascend.

Author’s note: this poem is from the book Cheapside Afterlife (April 2021, Longleaf Press at Methodist University). The book reimagines in 57 sonnets the life of the 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton. At age 16, Chatterton invented the imaginary persona of a 15th-century poet he named Thomas Rowley and tried to pass off the poems as the work of a previously unknown priest to the literati of London. When that and other attempts to help his mother and sister out of poverty failed, at age 17 he committed suicide. Decades after his death, he was credited by Coleridge and Wordsworth as the founding spirit of Romanticism.

George Rawlins has recent poems in The Common, New Critique (UK), and Nine Mile. He has a BA from Ohio University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His book, Cheapside Afterlife (Longleaf Press at Methodist University, April 2021), reimagines the life of Thomas Chatterton in 57 sonnets.

Sun on My Back
 
Holler from a distance
hhh-ear the voice’s elastic echo
stretch for the sun as long
 
as lungs expand 
and 
hang pregnant
 
belly howling, beckoning 
forehead throbbing
sweat shining like HoneyCrisp 
 
apples, the savory juices of summertime. 
It’s the hunger to roam, stratospheric 
air simmers down into the soil, the deeper 
 
into the dwindling night
worn shoes stumble. Breathe in grass 
with exhausted feet, exhale through the ears, 
 
forests have elderly eyes and reaching limbs
like a grandparent letting you in, listen
to crickets tapping like trumpets, 
 
lured by starlit steps 
luminescent lines and
glowing symmetry, you 
 
may lose grip and slip 
into the sticky tar of darkness, 
a dead, starless sky of absence,
 
an itch to stop is swatted on the neck,
senseles clock, 
the sun’s brimming face
 
setting into bed, not settling,
still rolling ember down
a naked back like a golden robe
 
unfolding new specks, now you
cease digging arduously 
holes in the head. Crickets
 
hop and
frogs croak, singing to you 
the nursery rhyme cycles of day
 
without nebulous haze
as they ride steady rhythms,
you listen 
 
to their circadian songs 
on the moonstruck road
rubble between rubber 
 
and as for the sun,
she is a rebel with good intentions
on the run 
 
and it’s only a matter of time
until she comes back 
around.

Maria Kornacki graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a BA in Creative Writing. Her work has been featured in Sonder Midwest, Local Wolves, Remington Review, and Genre: Urban Arts No.8 Print. She’s working on the manuscript for her first poetry book. 

the whip-poor-will chimes 
 
The oaks and pines swallow me 
             as I walk into the woods. The air is spiced and
                          tangy, a single breath of bloom 
 
and death against my skin. Sprawling moss and
             outstretched ferns absorb me
                          in their belly of green; enzymes digest 
 
my guises. Aged trees, wooden bodies 
             crossing in the canopy, groan 
                          at guard. The whip-poor-will chimes and I—
 
Cellar spiders float on glimmering
             tines; copperheads, camouflaged, 
                          glide—and I—
 
The whip-poor-will chimes
             and I—
                          I can no longer spin
 
or molt this haunted, 
             holy skin. The whip-poor-
                          will chimes.

Natalie Callum is a writer and poet living between St. Louis, Missouri and Wyoming. When she is not writing, she can be found outside free climbing and exploring with her much beloved husband. 

 Phenomenal 
 
Across Italy’s Romanesque lines 
between Tyrrhenian and Adriatic seas 
saints seed themselves in ploughed fields, 
silt with mysticism  
the blood of builder and artisan, 
dash rebellion over the crepuscular  
hours of the two flanking shores. 
They thrive on terracotta hills 
as wild as poppies, 
as persistent as weeds, 
their ignited souls branding 
the clement sky 
with a tirade of wings. 
They come of age  
impulsive and beautiful. 
  
A see-through grove of trees  
gloves a crest 
with a lace mitten of sun and shade. 
There the top branches 
entwine with tender silence, 
far, far distance nears  
and bequeaths humility. 
Magnified fragments of the world  
touch the heart of penitence. 
Animals become disciples. 
 
Light slips into satin, 
shows to advantage 
barrel-vaulted woods 
sheep-cropped slopes 
ivy niches of romance 
where rock admonishes 
in fresh trickles: 
“Poverty kill the flesh!” 
 
They grow old from unsolved mysteries 
cradling sacrifice like progeny 
to whom they continue  
to serve miracles like gelati.  

Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroin Chic, DASH, The Dawn Treader. The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson published by Adelaide Book 2020.

Point taken
 
Luang Phor Sod Dhammakayaram Temple, Ratchaburi
 
So
do I collapse in my finery
at the first notes of Nessun Dorma.
Or stir a memory, compulsively,
to sip courage from a pot of years.
Or have my crowd raise its arm
for justice in a street.
 
He tells me,
pain is but a book to be read.
 
The dagger in my back does not belong there;
it’s a roaming radio wave. Adjust the dial.
How do I know this?
Each time it shifts place slightly,
unaware what it’s looking for, like
the random frisking at some frontier. 
And yes, let it rummage, I’ve packed 
my own bags, am bringing nothing in.
Rather, I should ask questions of my own:
What is the pain looking for?
What will it say when it’s found nothing? 
How can it explain that 
to the long queue forming behind?
Every question has it chasing ghosts, 
my mind the moving target.
 
Pain is a thief, he says
as I sit awhile cross-legged before him,
 
and posture the law.
Turn like the labourers, rice-pickers         
crammed into an open Toyota truck, staring
backwards at the landscape behind,
falling softly away.
 
 

Christopher M James, a dual British/French national and retired HR professional, lives near Paris. He has published in Aesthetica, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Journal …. and in numerous anthologies (Live Canon, WoLF, Canterbury Poet of the Year, Verve, Dempsey & Windle …). In the past three years, he has been a prizewinner in numerous competitions (Sentinel, Yeovil, Stroud, Poets meet Politics, Wirral, Hanna Greally, Maria Edgeworth, Earlyworks…). He is also a musician, a translator and, some would say, a failed journalist.

 
Permeable
 
Each New Year
the watering ceremony
on all the Buddha statues.
Crowds spill over
holding bowls fragranced
with flame of the wood, yellow
gardenia, cape jasmin…
for the righting
 
of thought, deed and word
from the swell of the past.
I pitch forward to the front
to come out in the wash,
use two lotus flower stems
to dab the drops
awkwardly, fastidiously,
in the spirited jostling
 
as if finely patting
with small swabs, like
a pointillist painter
honing in, out, in
for a clear perspective,
like
the burns patient I was,
the nurse I’m becoming.
            
 

Christopher M James, a dual British/French national and retired HR professional, lives near Paris. He has published in Aesthetica, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Journal …. and in numerous anthologies (Live Canon, WoLF, Canterbury Poet of the Year, Verve, Dempsey & Windle …). In the past three years, he has been a prizewinner in numerous competitions (Sentinel, Yeovil, Stroud, Poets meet Politics, Wirral, Hanna Greally, Maria Edgeworth, Earlyworks…). He is also a musician, a translator and, some would say, a failed journalist.

The Nature of Things
 
Our lives, spirals,
grooves in soft earth
like those behind a plow
in freshly-turned field, 
 
each path unique but similar,
a labyrinth we all follow.
Our mothers, the starting point.
Our loves and losses become
details etched in stones 
lining our walk,
leading to the stopping point 
where a final breath holds itself
at journey’s end.
 
Perhaps we are like water
hurtling toward, then over the falls.
That we are allowed even once
to crash into pools,
curl ourselves around rocks,
and overflow banks 
is enough.
 
 

Peggy Hammond’s poetry is featured or forthcoming in The Lyricist, Oberon Poetry, High Shelf Press, San Antonio Review, Inklette, West Trade Review, Rogue Agent, Ginosko Literary Journal, and Trouvaille Review.  Her full-length play A Little Bit of Destiny was produced by OdysseyStage Theatre in Durham, North Carolina.