Scarlet Ibis Variations
NOTES:
Three Yoga Poems, from the sequence Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha
‘Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha’ writes through the yoga manual Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha by Swami Satyananda Saraswati (Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, Bihar, India, fourth edition [2008]) and various news articles published in The Guardian in 2017.
Pranayama
‘the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE’: Charles Olson, Projective Verse (1950).
Mudra
1) ‘I suddenly see that the gesture of a hand could be a poem –
like the mark it might leave impressed in a surface.’
Scott Thurston, Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (2011), London: Veer
2) ‘I offer flowers’ from ‘Offering Flowers’ in Technicians of the Sacred (2017) ed. Jerome Rothenberg, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, p71.
Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha is part of the forthcoming chapbook, Atha, Knives Forks and Spoons Press (2019).
Sally-Shakti Willow researches, writes and performs utopian poetics as ritual to open up [r]evolutionary space for positive transformation. She teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Westminster. Her poems have been published by Adjacent Pineapple, Eyewear, The Projectionist’s Playground and Zarf. Chapbooks to date: The Unfinished Dream (Sad Press, 2016) and Atha (forthcoming with Knives Forks and Spoons). Sally-Shakti’s other writings and reviews are published in The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, The Contemporary Small Press and Northern Review. Find her on Twitter: @Spaewitch
Yvonne Litschel is a writer from Cambridgeshire, England. Previously she has read as part of the European Poetry Festival. Her debut pamphlet Moth Dust was published January 2018 by Sampson Low. She has a forthcoming pamphlet entitled Immurement set for release in March 2019 with Broken Sleep Books. yvonnelitschel.com @yvlitschel
feature image: Bob Modem
Is it dirt or healing?
Here we are now, standing in generalised anxiety. Our buildings are losing breath at the aorta and feeling phantom pains in the basements and where the urapaa (grave) used to be. Your child has muddy hair and long hair and hair now bedraggled to the ground, calling for a reckoning and sounds, (not to be suppressed). We could have been a compost pile, giving up our bodies to grow healthy weeds as limbs. Instead, they pull the plastics out of whale stomachs while clutching our own.
Continue reading “Sol Marco Duncan: Is it dirt or healing? & Volatile Ground”
In City Parks, In the Sour Void
I am seven skulls screaming
about seven smaller screaming skulls.
Please take my boney hand
& Celine Dion my sinking ship.
Near the capharnum of microplastics
an animal vigils a similar corpse.
By 25 I had figured out fire
but not much else: maybe anatomy Continue reading “Patrick Williams: In City Parks, In the Sour Void and New Age Downloads”
Douze, twelve stakes from these Dark Ages
1: At dawn, in the mist, Paola gathers porcini mushrooms, freshly-sprouted on the Landaise forest floor. Earthy clusters. Ash clay-colored caps. Undersides of bright yellow moss. Paola calls them cèpes.
2: In 2012, in a referendum, the British people voted for Brexit. Brexit is an abbreviation for “British exit,” referring to the UK’s decision, in a June 23 2016 referendum, to leave the European Union. The word ‘exit’ was first a C15th theatrical word, meaning a way of departure from the stage. Leave the network. Continue reading “Susanna Crossman: Douze, twelve stakes from these Dark Ages”
kamikaze grappa
(the day peace broke out)
it felt like love
the day peace
broke out
yet the painter
chagalls goat
still played a violin Continue reading “Neil Sparkes: kamikaze grappa (the day peace broke out)”
Lucia is a poet, an environmental scientist and a quiet observer. She writes and makes video-poems. Her video-poems have been screened in the UK and internationally. Her latest poetry publication is The Quiet Life of Walls.
Bárbara Mesquita is an architect and an artist. Twitter: @barbararrm
DISCONNECTED
What fire hath wrought.
Melted wires, sparks. Cables
litter the machine-room floor.
A surfeit of color,
coded chaos strewn
over gunmetal grey concrete. Continue reading “Robert Beveridge: Disconnected”
Bossa Nova for the Turchin Twenties
To the tune of “Para Machucar Meu Coração”;
after Peter Turchin.
Wouldn’t change a thing is what you said, habib,
to coffee as
you danced with your girl—
in dining rooms, Continue reading “Josh Lipson: Bossa Nova For The Turchin Twenties”
‘Página 28 de la Gramática General Española’, found file, 2018
Bruno Neiva is a text artist. This is a found, unaltered piece, a page Bruno took from a Spanish book on linguistics. It’s a piece on the (supposed) European solidarity towards refugees. Curiously, the original book was published a long time before the crisis. The author used the theme by accident just to illustrate an example of a basic syntactic structure. Website. Twitter: @umaestrutura
Four photographs by Jefferson J.W. Wayne
These four photos were taken while Jefferson was working along the Houston, Texas ship channel and are apart of a collection he’s building to present along with prose under the title As Dawn Breaks Over the Cancer Factory. As an industrial firefighter and process operator he is privy to these sights every day. They are an attempt to showcase the current future of industry as it moves forward to its slow death in the world.
Turkeys for Christmas
The future is stupid,
The past is a bastard,
The present, coalescent.
So what’s left?
‘Bout 52%
Mark Coverdale is the Art School Mod Poet. Born in Darlington the year Elvis died. Now in London via Oldham writing and performing socially and politically observational poetry. Published by Penguin. Twitter: @cov_art
David Turner is the founding editor of the Lunar Poetry Podcasts series, has a City & Guilds certificate in Bench Joinery along with the accompanying scars, is known to the Bristol, Kristiansand and Southwark Community Mental Health Teams as a ‘service user’ and has represented Norway in snow sculpting competitions. Originally from London but now living in Bristol. No greater current ambition in life than to achieve Grade 1 in piano. Widely unpublished. Working-class. Picket line poet. @Silent_Tongue
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 