November 29th, 2020
The Dirty Truth About Butterflies
It’s easy for a religiously bred
(misled) girl to make an Eden of
a garden, angels of winged soon dead,
repopulating in three weeks. But love’s
amino acids butterflies won’t find
in agapanthus nectar, waterfalls —
Continue reading “Womannotated – The Dirty Truth About Butterflies”
No (New) Man’s Land
His is
a life in fluid drawn,
pushed through
scar tissue, muscle yielding.
Pull. Plunge.
Inject. Extract.
New man by
needle-born in flush
of mid-life puberty,
bending forty
years of life.
Burying facts that
fail to fit.
This
This is
This isn’t
This isn’t a
This isn’t a nice
This isn’t a nice, cool
This isn’t a nice, cool dream
This isn’t a cool dream
This isn’t a dream
of a sunny day in
a Cimmerian
night
This may
This may be
This may be even
This may be even worse
This may be even worse than
This may be even worse than a nightmare
This may not be worse than
This may be the worst
This is the worst
ever
the worst ever monster
the worst ever monstrous
the worst ever monstrous, cool
the worst ever monster, nice, cool
dream, which turned into a
nightmare, since we
didn’t wake up
I can pinpoint the moment.
A sudden silence of traffic,
and voices
weaving a scary tale,
far away,
then further still.
Under the fluorescent lights,
I folded.
I didn’t catch anyone’s eye
but breathed deeply.
It didn’t help.
I’d ended up on the ceiling
looking down on myself.
My heavy blue beads
clunked and swung
with each swivel of my neck.
No one noticed.
Below, the other me had finished her tea
and was sorting change from her purse.
I called out. She didn’t glance up.
Rivulets of condensation
on the steamy window
seemed to tell me to follow, follow
as if droplets of water
could guide me home.
Continue reading “Dissociation in a Museum Café by Belinda Rimmer”
It was a surprise to see the danger red, tango orange, white mottle. All the other shellfish she had seen that day in the rock pools had been dark browns, some black elegant creatures. This was a lobster that looked like it was half-cooked, but alive and well, a naturally appealing dinner invitation.
She felt like a child squatting down next to the rock pool. How had he got washed up here, so beautiful against the wrinkled rocks and sighing sand. The day, sunny but with a wind that ran through her ankles and up her skirt occasionally, should have been about observing. She thought she would spend some time looking at the rock pools, looking at the creatures in them, grey and black and brown—crabs moving amongst the husks and wrappers of their dead comrades. Never take a step back, pick up claw from a fallen brother.
She was going to be detached today, she’d promised. She wasn’t going to get involved with anything, she said the creative writing course was helping, but there needed to be more material, more distraction. She’d been told by the tutor that she was a natural journalist, scornfully. Always ready to get involved and meddle in someone else’s story, rather than secretly skimming off the best bits from a distance.
So she would observe today. It was a bit like when she had been dumped by her boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. The idea was to stay single for a while, to observe the others doing the dance and check she knew the steps.
But here, with this orange lobster in the black bowl of a Welsh rock pool, she decided to engage with it. She started by giving it a nudge with a stick to see how active it was. It was beautiful, so could be dead. It moved and whirled around to look at her, pointedly. She was surprised, and didn’t expect it to be so forward, it was a rare thing and therefore should be shy in her world. Continue reading “The Boyfriend Pinch by Christopher John Eggett”
My mouth is a bowl full of pitted cherries. My stomach the bucket for all the swallowed bloody pits. Every word tastes sweet and dark and tart on my tongue, rolling against my blushing cheeks. And when I smile, red love dribbles down my chin.
When I speak, I am tempted to sing like the way the bright pink blossoms burst into bloom in the springtime. The air is fragrant with love and sweetness and honeybees. But at the lightest breeze, fragrant with daffodils and shadows, my flowers fall
in clusters trembling, and I remember the splinters in the black bark of the cherry tree, the amber sap dripping down the exposed inner rings. The long weeping, the unfurling of flowers. And while the axe is out of sight I fear for other trees, and my branches still shake hearing lightning Continue reading “Two Poems by Kate Dlugosz”
It was for Joanna Newsom that I left my wife and children, all of whom I adored more than anything in that world which I left behind and to which I will never go back. My defence is sound, you’ll see.
I’d checked myself into the hospital, just like they tell you to if you’re experiencing difficulties in breathing, have a tight chest and your head is spinning. I passed swiftly through triage and onto a bed where they wired me to an ECG, took blood and then abandoned me to crisp blue curtains and the metronomic beep of an ignored monitor. Continue reading “Jack by Gene Farmer”
this splintered
self, always
there and not
there—all ways
fragments
too close
to truth
his
portrait
ear-splitting
hairline cracks
eyes—iced-over
puddles
stepped
into, smashed
nose, broken
punched in
like a code
pupils;
dead flies
captured by
misshapen webs
frown thrown
off guard
skull-shatter
piece by piece
within his
lashes
a universe
on the blink
Continue reading “7yrs bad luck by Richard Biddle”
I was not formed from earth:
A dirty rib, used and scratching.
His name wasn’t on the birth certificate.
A womb of one’s own, forged in a locked room—
Nourished by sadness and
the shame they made her feel.
The sea always felt like home,
wind born waves held me.
Rocked me to sleep in a salted cradle.
Sometimes the monsters would come—
Emerging from beneath,
threatening to take my legs.
They never could, and I floated
eyes skyward.
Wishing I could row.
My younger brother just scheduled bariatric surgery.
They will reduce his stomach to the size of a banana.
He said he can’t go another decade being heavy.
He asked me to remember when our parents got divorced, when he was 10 and I was 15 and I said, “See ya later!” as he filled time and loneliness with dry cereal and Swiss cake rolls.
I tried to commiserate, even though I knew I risked insulting him, since his weight issues have always been much greater than mine — said we both snacked way too much, and paired it with convenience eating:
And award systems:
We fell into negative routines: Dad yelled at me, I yelled at my brother, and then we nursed our wounds together with salt, sweet, repeat. Continue reading “When Food Goes Bad by Kelly Froh”
There was the time she posed as a proper person,
up at seven with organised eyes,
spinning the wheel of coffee heart and computer clack,
a life in neat multi-coloured folders.
An alarm went off in her pocket—
and now the world stank of Boots’ perfume and cigarettes
she spoke in fluent Bacardi Breezer
knew every bar in South East London
flew through the day to get to the pub on the other side
until life became a barman that would no longer serve her.
Men with magnet mouths waited for her to exceed her limit
found ways to climb inside.
Now she sits like a stale buttered scone
who nobody wants to pick up or eat
or even look at that way.
She thinks this is delicious and funny at the same time.
Continue reading “Sing a Song of Ever Changing Perception by Michelle Diaz”
When I track the narrow paths which hide behind fences
where elder and trolleys and abandoned bins live
I know that this is cusp, this is a finding of a way for life
to rise from old potato peelings and discarded toys which gather there,
anticipate their transformation into something more,
but never quite catch the moment, though sometimes I glimpse
the heaving of a sigh beneath their own broken weight.
If a stag were to lose himself here he would turn golden,
summon me, and I would follow until he and I were one,
the hunter and the prey, follow where there are no fixed paths
through death, through grief. I reminded my father of a time
a stag bounded in front of his car at dusk, but he wasn’t sure
if that had been my dream or if it had belonged to him.
In Nordic mythology Sleipnir is Odin’s steed, the foal of Loki and Svaðilfari
I am fastened to the skim-race of a sly night.
Shadows fall, tin pots clank, slab-roofs trill.
My eyelids stutter. A silhouette before me – equine-like,
up-folded wings, serrations of fine spine-feathers.
A shadow-foal, a rider with a ghost-drawn face, lines
ploughed by a brazen sun or a blistering frost.
There’s the fit-fickle thunder-hiss of a merciless wind: all clinker,
the slag of irradiated soil, metal shards, eyelets, pinions,
grease, the multifarious detritus of battle. Odin seeks his revenge.
I run from the ankle-snatch of tumbleweed. Weightless. Slipping
through a crack of light, I cross the threshold
in a screech, as if all nesting owls have been released.
I am small in the sea, pushed around
by waves that care not for any grain of sand
or stuff that floats in old men’s heads.
Arms held wide and high, that reach and cling
like a child to a parent when things get rough,
when routines fail and muscles waste.
I hesitate, recoil, cower; skin so thin
these cold water blades could spill these guts
for waiting gulls and wash away this name.
I am caught like the sun, falling
and hoping to rise again, the horizon watched
from a base of arched feet, soft soles and toes
exposed to the hidden sharpness of shadows.
And though these whispered sea breezes,
with caresses would show the way,
for that bastard time waits not for me,
until I learn to surrender, immerse this body,
allow these legs to float and lay back this head,
could I ever take in the whole of the sky?
It’s still early
you’re through with work now
you go home and the streets are crowded with passers-by
there is like the deafening sound of a song in the headphones over your ears that isolates you more or less from the others
so you take off the headphones
but it is not you that I see in the street
but a stranger
and I don’t know if I am dreaming or not
as you have deserted me
so I don’t care anymore about anything
and I walk back home like a ghost Continue reading “Three Poems by Ivan de Monbrison”
Oblivious,
you pray for the cure at dawn whilst the light melts off your skin.
Icarus, hopeless bird-child,
you put a knife in your back, twist,
fall off a bridge to vex the sun, tranquil.
It is meaningless
whatever you decide to do.
Shame clouds your judgement now, it consumes you as
you feed on your soul, always: search for the heart.
Thoughts destroy structure —
on a moonless night, with two dark stars,
they are the makers of the world.
the light is
tungsten
tungsten
my incandescent affiliation
street lights emit orange
tungsten lights, bless
anoint the streets with orange haze, creates vignette
turns street in to theatre
under street light is under spotlight
glow from window illuminates intricate net-curtain-call
There is life inside, electricity
rows and rows of windows glow,
currents of electricity form circuit board called estate, village
street light snoot renders unsuspecting object still-life masterpiece
catchlight from car roof becomes moon-lit-fjord
until sun rise
garish day-time, floods night-time majesty
over-exposed
until sun set Continue reading “Night Photos of Newstead Village & a Poem by Sophie Pitchford”
It really messed me up, it did. For months after my discharge, even the sound of my own farts would send me, you know, wherever it was I went. I would just freeze up. Go into a kind of dead-face trance. I was a big lad back then, and it was difficult for people to get me moving again once I’d stopped. So I’d end up staying there for a while like, in the street, wherever, just staring at the grey clouds on the horizon. At one stage, it got so bad that when I was offered a job at the local arcade – one of them bandit places – my counsellor practically begged me not to take it. She said the flashing lights and the noise of the coins dropping would be too much for me to handle. She made it sound like I’d end my shift fitting on the mucky carpet there, like some sort of fucking fish. But I had to give it a try. It was the only job offer I’d had since landing back on civvy street, and staying in the house all day with my parents tip-toeing nervously around me, well that was sending me another kind of crazy. I was starting to feel like one of them fucking bombs I was so Continue reading “Charon’s Amusement Arcade by BR Williams”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 