Category Archives: Uncategorized

A beach-fairy from the strand line

A pair of sea-rolled oyster shells
shall be wings,
pearl white with opal iridescence.
Born of this sunrise,
this light and warmth,
this lap of water,
this soaring and gliding.

This piece of driftwood
shall be her body,
smooth, perfect lines,
the glitter of quartz grains.

Oh the flutter between tiny beats,
the stretch of her limbs.
Blue eyes blink open and
she flexes her toes.

This sun-bleached wrack,
washed in waves and foamed,
drifted, lifted by the sea breeze
shall be her hair.

She turns her head,
hair cascades.

 

Lynn Woollacott grew up with six brothers and three sisters – all older. She had many jobs from sewing buttons on cardigans to working as a lab technician in an all-girls school. She gained a BSc (Hons) with the Open University and went on to teach environmental studies at outdoor centres in Norfolk. Still yearning to write she studied creative writing with the University of East Anglia. Lynn has been widely published and won prizes for poetry, and has published two Poetry collections with Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2011 and 2014, and a romance novel e-book available on Amazon. www.lynn.woollacott.co.uk

Bone Antler Stone by Tim Miller: High Window Press, 80pp ISBN 9780244009595

The scope of this collection is extraordinary, and the depth of research admirable. But Tim Miller’s poetry wears its learning well enough to draw in a non specialist reader. Prehistory is a gift to the poet in that it can offer the mysterious, poignant detail as well as an intriguing archeological backdrop; it can present us with belief systems and artistic perspectives that are profoundly other to those recognised by contemporary culture. But in skillfully wrought poetry such prehistoric elements can still offer points of connection and food for thought. From cave-painting, to stone circles, to arcane and moving burial rites, Miller’s poetry here is eye-opening, often moving, and carefully mapped throughout. Each section literally starts with a simple diagrammatic map, which helps orient the reader on the European locations of the poems.

‘Landscapes and Rituals’ starts the collection off powerfully, charting imaginative turning points where landscape itself ‘was not enough’ (‘Sanctuaries’) and our prehistoric ancestors brought their gifts of honey, fruit, wine, metal, fire, and bone to sanctify and protect.  There are vivid sensory details throughout, and often the poems themselves take on an element of liturgy, such as the refrain line in each tercet of ‘The Sun Sets into the Sea.’ This section has some poems previously published in Amethyst Review, namely, ‘Sanctuaries’ and ‘Two Gods’.  Vivid, evocative poetry engaging with ancient concepts of the sacred, and a rich prehistorical resource in its own right – Amethyst recommends.

The most moving section is arguably the subsequent ‘Burials’. With life  brief and uncertain, burial rites and afterlife mythology become so much more significant. Some sites, like that described in ‘Magdalenenberg Burial Ground’, contain a buried hero who is a sun around which his lesser contemporary are laid out like planetary configurations: ‘men and women become moon and stars/ orbiting something other than the earth.’ By contrast those without fame or means have a painfully quick interment: the ‘quick unloading’ of ‘Tomarton Ditch’.  This section also contains poems on the long dead preserved by peat and earth: the so-called ‘bog bodies’ made poetically immortal by Heaney in Wintering Out and North. Some poems even have the same title and subject as Heaney’s poems: ‘Tollund Man’, ‘Grauballe Man’. Others are new subjects; in fact, several bodies in this section (though not all) speak in the first person: the poems tend towards lucid monologues rather than Heaney’s meditations on the cycles of history and the role of the poet. There is some beautiful language and imagery throughout, for example in ‘The Egtved Girl’, ‘set down toward the dawn sun’ in her simple clothing and jewellery.

The subsequent section, ‘Artefacts’ demonstrates the power of prehistoric cultural and architectural fragments to contain wonderful poetic resonance. It’s followed by ‘Orkney’ where the poet is a more tangible presence in the Scottish Isles and the poems that flow from it. I particularly liked the two part ‘The Ring of Brodgar’ where in the first of the poems an elderly couple visit the stone circle and time itself seems to buckle and stretch as they lift their aged hands to the ancient sandstone: ‘a situation of stone they’d known/ for all four thousand of its years, as if/ those hands were still proud at having put it up.’ This especially is strong poetry, offering startling insight borne of careful observation.

Sarah Law, August 2018

 

tonight Buddha burns

in my living room
sandalwood permeates the air
a flaming flickering blessings
leaving me hung…….drying
upside down…….see-ing all angles
from behind closed doors
expanding into something
I wasn’t before

forcing reflection
hesitation and preparation
like the hermit…….pacing myself
slowly…….up the mountain
questioning inner self worth
eye talking to ear intuitively
sacred rebel honouring body
shining light…..inviting my own true self
inward…….to truly see…….questions
I don’t share…….what is real?

this butterfly moon
radiates over sacred terrain
the river only flows one way
and there’s something about freedom
I don’t buy…….broken down
free…..dom…….free…..dom…….free…..dom
free dominance…….dominates free
dreams sold to the masses in the name of..,
…something to ponder while fire burns hot

Hoopoe birds bring ghostly truths
higher than myself
nature…..the beauty of all things
my friend Andre once said:

……………………………………we are all a single grain of sand in a bushel

an islander…….he married my best friend
and she wasn’t having it
no more…….of that three’s a crowd business
turned our cups upside down
built a wall that I dismantled
put that darkness behind me
daylight has come

still more questions
how the past shapes
futures…..transition shifts life
back then too many shadows
shared my light
yet I know that’s what I like
about my friend…….how her
forceful energies accelerated change

it takes courage for a flower
to sprout from seed
could’ve stayed there and didn’t
first one flourishes
nurturing a fertile future
honouring all that I am
a divine spark
who still has to come down
from the mountain

 

Ruby McCann is a creative practitioner who holds degrees from Trinity Washington and University of Glasgow.  She has published work in publications, You Don’t Look British, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gaelstrom-1 Magazine, Invisible Cities, Poetry Scotland, Journeys, Word Rhythms, and many others.  She lives in Glasgow, Scotland next to the River Clyde.  Nature and walking inspires her writing.

Blind Faith

When in doubt, study the curvature of dead ends. Note how the bend betrays even the savviest of travelers, a winding stretch of aborted circles. Stop is a pause. Yet Not a Through Street is more than metaphor, the point of no choice BUT to return. Being fooled translates to capable of trusting; one should never feel duped for believing in God’s natural landscapes. Maps drawn to scale only serve as a let-down. Yet the biggest self-discoveries result from becoming lost in a familiar neighborhood. One step forward, two steps back to where you began. Hitting the road is a question of checking one’s ego and endurance. A cul-de-sac. A suppressed prayer. A long of list of apologies.

 

Daniel Romo is the author of Apologies in Reverse (FutureCycle Press, 2019), When Kerosene’s Involved (Mojave River Press, 2014), and Romancing Gravity (Silver Birch Press, 2013). More at danielromo.net.

difficulty breathing

breathe
they are still there somewhere
beyond the vast expanse of grey
they always have been
whenever we needed
………hope
………gods
………stories
but you can’t see them anymore
the particulate matter of urban life
………nitrogen oxides
………sulphur
………ozone
left us all on our own
with exhalations of civilisation
all we can do is inhale
looking up to the stars no longer an option
breathe

 

Dawid Juraszek is a lecturer in literature and culture of English-speaking countries at a university in Guangzhou, China. His academic background is in English, translation studies, educational leadership, international relations, and environmental management. A published novelist, his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of outlets in his native Poland, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Reading and Writing

cento after Virginia Woolf

Their boat tossed on the waves,
and when he looked up,
it was not to see anything,
but to pin a thought more exactly.
Then his eyes flew back again
and he plunged into his reading,
tossing over page after page.

From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea,
there spurted up a fountain of joy,
and the drops fell here and there
on the dark, slumbering shapes
of an unrealized world turning in darkness,
catching here and there, a spark of light.

Let it come, if it will come—
the jar on the nerves, the thing
before it has been made anything.

Her thought expanded like a leaf in water
standing on its end with gold-sprinkled waters
flowing in and about it—
a little island rocked round by waters.
She gazed over the sea, at the island.
The leaf looked small and distant.
It was losing its sharpness.
Dabbling her fingers in the water,
she murmured dreamily, half asleep.

A row of rocks showed brown and green
through the water, and on a higher rock,
a wave broke, spurting up a column of drops
which fell down in a shower,
and they listened to the slap and patter,
the hushing and hissing sounds
of the waves rolling and gamboling
and slapping the rocks like wild creatures
who had tossed and tumbled
and sported like this forever.

Frail and blue, the leaf-shape
stood on end on a plate of gold
like the vapor of something
that had burnt itself away.

Anne Whitehouse is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Meteor Shower (Dos Madres Press, 2016), and a novel, Fall Love. Recent honors include 2017 Adelaide Literary Award, 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Prize, 2016 Common Good Books’, 2016 RhymeOn!, and 2016 Fitzgerald Museum Poetry Prizes

Ipseity

Construing the geniality
of waitstaff
as barometer of self-worth
is akin to grumbling
at a lagniappe.
There is reflection
during refection.
Let me-moments drive you
indoors. If intimacy is
negotiation there is need
for self-examination.
Bogarting shadows
fiscal success
as love of God
consumes the broken.
Generalities apart,
make your mixtape.
Embrace it.

Sanjeev Sethi is the author of three books of poetry. His poems are in venues around the world:   A Restricted View From Under The Hedge, Pantry Ink, Bonnie’s Crew, Morphrog 16, Mad Swirl, The Penwood Review, Faith Hope & Fiction, Communion Arts Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

the unwritten

a monk sits alone in a cellar
on the sixth floor of a castle.
it is the end of the world,
and he writes by the light
of a fish’s phosphorescent scales.
what will he tell of the world
which has just ended? his back
aches beneath the weight
of the undescribed. so much will be
unsaid in the treasured annals
of the dead, but still he says
what must be said. he writes
of flowers and their evanescent splendor,
the pale pink of petals in spring light.
the ballpoint glides from edge to edge
of the crumpled paper as he tells
of the moon in its fluid phases,
of cake with thick whipped frosting,
people passing each other on their commute
through crumbling streets, and he muses
in wonder at how so much sustained the wreckage,
looking out the broken window, a shard of glass falling
far below. he still feels camaraderie
with everything visible, all across the mangled landscape.

 

Kenneth West is a writer from Monroe, Louisiana. He can be found on Twitter @gildedchalice

Ekadanta

All I can see in my prayers
………..is broken tusks
and gods riding on the back of mice.
Their outstretched hands hold out
vermillion candies and sharp tridents

dripping poppy red.

The sky above me is gray and dense,
the skin of an elephant
stretched across the heavens.

My Lord writes his name
………….on my tongue
…………with the tip of a peacock’s feather.
He carves his face
……….. on my heart
……….. with a broken tusk.
And I—
I write my name
……………………..on smoke and fire
……………………..so he can breathe it in.
Hold me in your mouth,
…………..so everything you say
…………..is colored by me.
Let us speak only in harmonies, Ekadanta—
…………………………………………………………………………..everything under your skin
…………………………………………………………………………..will dance for us.

 

Ashley Naftule is a writer and performer from Phoenix, AZ. He’s been published in Vice, Phoenix New Times, Ghost City Press, The Hard Times, Rinky Dink Press, Under The Radar, Four Chambers Press, and The Occulum. He’s a resident playwright and Associate Artistic Director at Space55 theatre.

Kite’s Well
at Nymet Tracey

 

No more,
once a common sight
the Red-Kite hovering
over this remnant of the sacred wood,
a site whose lanes sink west toward
Devon’s Stonehenge with its bevy of sister sites,
then lead to Denbrook, blot
on mid Devon’s landscape,
where at the rooted foot of this gnarled oak a spring trickles
from under the road
then, a stream, makes its way away
from under the road beneath red earth into an edging copse.

Often now the well is a hive of forked sticks and dowsing rods.
Rod-swivelling, the diviners, like me on this anticipating page
are eager to decipher that displacement of time and space
whose yet unfathomed silences withhold from sight these ghosts
of our long-shadowed past, who regularly passed along the green-laned ways –
though seemingly left no trace before dispersing under earth
the shifting ashes of their bones, glinting shards of flints.

This place is as much stranger to me as are those of our family blood
that handful of centuries before
whose names stipple our long-lost tree –
a retreating ancestral line that
like others unfolded life-journeys within the bounds of the encircling parish.

We may not inherit a specific trait as we trawl along our own genetic-line,
yet some vestige, a hidden genomic chunk, is likely still to live in us,
flecks of our story surface from the deepest well of pedigree.
The absence at the black-hole of well’s hollow is container of sacred presence,
we’re drawn to this site of rited wilderness
as much as those once at its heart
are now love fractured to bone.

My literal visit here is simple.
I want to make a journey with other dowsers to Nymetland’s heart.
We look for rest. Solace.
Wish to listen to wisdom, the will-of-the-land,
– in the prevailing wind she catches her breath.
Where water-pepper nudges willow-herb
air’s spiced with meadow-sweets’ heady scent by the hedge,
there’s tree-speak beneath ancient oak’s laden crown,
a frisson of leaves as they dip into well’s marginal zone.

Like you, I want to believe in innocence.
But on the far bank
red hips and haws splash across day’s sunlit sky
reminding us of the solitary site’s sacral significance.
Folk-tale says Druids once
dwelt in Dumnonians’ deep-groves –
those blood-curdling caterwauls
of head-chopping head-hunter Celts’
once ritual violations.

Is it Her who haunts this grove?
Those of us who still cling to the myth of tender Dryad,
wood spirit, guardian of the Nymet-Woods
must get to know our other abandoned selves,
must have courage to look above at those
who stare back, hold us in their rapacious hawk-like gaze.
Shatter us out of the ease of our complicit complacency.

 

(Author’s note: See ‘The Sacred Groves in Devon’ in Roger Deakin’s Wildwood for an account of Devon’s woodhenge near the village of Bow, which he compares to Stonehenge. The ancient well at Nymet-Tracey is near that site. Traditionally named Puddock’s Well, I have taken the liberty of re-christening it as Kite’s Well.)

In recent years Julie Sampson‘s poetry has appeared in a variety of magazines, including Shearsman, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Journal, Amaryllis Poetry, The Algebra of Owls, Molly Bloom, The Poetry Shed, The Lake, Amethyst Review, Poetry Space and Pulsar. Shearsman published her edition of Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems, in 2009 and a full collection, Tessitura, in 2014. A non-fiction manuscript was short-listed for The Impress Prize, in 2015 and a pamphlet, It Was When It Was When It Was, was published by Dempsey and Windle, March 2018.