Issue 1 - November 2007 - Poetry
Other People's Happiness by Benjamin Dahlbeck
Anne är gravid.
Anne est enceinte.
Anne is pregnant.
A French girl in Belgium.
We first met in Sweden.
We write in Swedish and in French
but the joy spans three languages.
Anne loves the father.
The father loves Anne.
Celebrate joy.
Celebrate love.
Celebrate them.
Paul & Rich together.
We met at a workshop.
We speak at all times in English
and the joy is even clearer.
Twenty years a pair.
Coupled twenty years.
A man wanders.
A man wonders.
A man ponders.
The stranger in a dream.
We haven't met before.
We have not yet found the language
that will summon the joy to us.
Will you call to me?
Will I answer you?
Amnesty by Rhys Lawson
We tread soft through the ebbing lights
Let 'lone the confines of the shore
For whilst we're still, they strip your rights.
Footfalls fast throughout these pained nights
Hide well to make them find no more
We tread soft through the ebbing lights.
Rain falls so free in sheets of white
You can but hear as wind gods saw
For whilst we're still, they strip your rights
Candle string finds flame and ignites
With barbs around that make us sure
We tread soft through the ebbing lights.
As one we cry, with words we fight,
We flock to every unquiet door
For whilst we're still, they strip your rights.
To every cell, filled out of spite
We shall march strong, hear as we roar
We tread soft through the ebbing lights
For whilst we're still, they strip your rights.
My secret by Myrna van der Molen
Hush, hush
do not tell
what some deny
but all know well
which loses meaning
once it's told
which you can have
but never hold
that gives to you
and takes away
will always be
but never stay
which rules your pen
and guides your brush
do not tell
hush, hush
One Night Only by Sarah Louise Parry
A haze hovered overhead
like barbaric morning breath
flattening the crisp of the dew.
You stomped downstairs straight from bed
a muddy trail in your wake
and a dozy drunken head.
Toast crumbs curdled in your beard
vodka-drawn halos: long gone
you looked stubby, stout and harsh
morning light made you: weird.
The cold frost rattled my bones
shaking me free from daydream
your feet under the table
frightened me more than the frost
my wits warbled in complaint
the kitchen sunk, soaked, sable
thrusting you from its warm arms
and back into your worn slot.
Every rift by James Picardo
The full white circle hides the stars
the suffering and the fusion of their atoms;
stone faced, the nurse-maid moon
hands us an eye-mask,
whispering 'sleep now'.
There is a place where you can walk on moving lava:
here it's fixed and spun in lodes.
Thrust-faulted by the heaves of earth
the granite ridges shrug off wind and salt,
forgetting more about the hot pain of compression
than the soft surrounding rock will ever know.
We crawl into the shelter of its strength;
converging, mewing, petting at the flanks which scratch
until we learn to smooth it, cut it
searching with a thousand chisels
for the smooth and static thing we can call virgin,
something elemental in our image
beyond the scrapping dogs and crawling vines
the white-armed hush-maid
whispering 'sleep now'.
'Not now,' we murmur, darkened in our dreams,
tear at our eye-masks
terrified of life without volcanoes,
load each rift with salt-peter, with sulphur;
pile it to the roof-beams of our cellars.
We need not fret. The gas giant's hidden now
Beneath it's frame, and we are giddy
At our turn to escalate
but one day it will grow
To reach for us with red and loving arms.
Static pedals spin above the polish,
Ankles - with no dog to snap at them -
Press themselves as on a lathe of
Will and magnets.
On the balcony, sandals loosely dream
Of sharp shores and the sea
The marble-bites they'd soften for your soles;
The wetting in the white sea's wash and flow;
The tidal picking-up
And letting-go.
Untitled Poem by Sarah Quigley
With my dustpan I'll sweep
the crumbs of you away
under the carpet,
I'll pick your hairs from my sheets
and hoover you from the cracks
between the floorboards.
I'll shower, scrub you from my skin,
exfoliate every last caress, kiss,
clean you from beneath my nails.
I'll trace the curves of your cursive
and toss them all away.
18 a day by Graham Rainer
18 a day
one when I wake up,
one for the drive to
get more
Is this a timely coincidence
or a manufactured recommendation?
When I was young, I
could still smell them,
had a passion for them!
yet now they're as nameless
as a careless night, a plastic
sword unsheathed too many times
Colorless monotony, greeting
the holiest of Holies
the wholest of all ends
the element of death is a deterrent
for some, freedom for others
Like jumping out of an airplane
with a half-witted parachute
he doesn't quite get the same rush anymore
from a high
to a low
to touchdown
You feel hotter on the ground
than flying in the sky
Waking up with her anonymous
I take her home in complete
Silence while
Smoking one, I explain, there's
Only enough for the ride back.
Without Alarm by Rebecca Rourke-Mooney
In spring our first year
we stood, boards splintered
below our bare feet in love
the sky, metal grey, unforgiving.
Lips softly crept
without alarm,
to depend on
your shallow water
clear as fish eyes, reflecting
the shape of my ache.
Like clams that gape for a taste
of flesh/fresh water,
have opened
and closed, interlocking.
Without alarm, you move me
in the night, press knees
into my calves and quilt
what I can't cover
in muscle, soft and skin.
The Lost Girl by Hannah Sauerwein
You shiver in the lee of a smile
and stare at passing trains
to read their graffiti. You wave
to the last caboose, but not the engines, and not
the faces lounging crushed against the windows.
In brown paper bags you carry glass bottles
half-full of apology -- you swallow a mouthful
now and then, grimacing as it claws down your throat.
For lunch you reheat promises to steaming,
the leftovers you've been eating all week.
You don't like ketchup, but you drown them
in bright-ruby ketchup.
On crisp nights without clouds
you fling open your window to the frost,
make imprints between your cheek and the screen.
You howl when you can't see the moon,
tell secrets when it's a round face, tell
lies when it's pinched into a crescent.
I can nestle in the hollow of a too-sat-on bench
beneath your window to listen. In daytime, you
perch here to write stories in a thousand
ragged notebooks, and hum broadway tunes
you don't even like. You abandoned
your body heat here, in case it might repulse
the moon.
If I could be on this bench when you are here,
or stand inside your window next to you, I'd
say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,
and it might strike you as pretentious, or religious,
but I'm talking to you,
not God,
and I really am sorry.
Brambling by Andrew Tickell
i.
In the ditch, rose nosed
Bramble tramp, his glass eyes shut
Wears a purple smile
ii.
Peaches half hearted
Split shared, juicy boots, a pair
Kiss but leave a stone iii.
Those bluebells are daft
Lilac ponces, droopy sad
"Wee silly" they say.
iv.
Talk so small I can't
See without a microscope
Its driveling lines
v.
Glass stems grow fingers
Flower footpaths into feet
I look back: one set.