Kali Richmond

Comfort

The doll is covered in plastic
fur and wears two black beads
as eyes. The doll is mostly orange
but is white at the tip of its tufted
ears, at the end of its tulip
tail. The doll is an animal,
found, father says, because it
yipped as he prowled the park —
a distraction, he is no hound,
his bloodlusts other. It yipped,
father says, and he cracked
open the hawthorn, extracted
the doll, told it he knows just the girl.
The doll is warmed by her body
heat, the doll rises with her breath.
The doll’s eyes follow you
across the room. The doll feeds
on secrets and shame. See its fur oil
with the grease of the living.
The doll soaks up sweet tendrils
of psychedelic smoke. She holds it
to her nose and thinks of home.
The doll reeks of child labour
and turf wars and thirty to a cell.
She breathes deep and thinks
of her father, of his vehement
belief that fox hunting is wrong.


In the nursery

the horse gifts its bones
and industrious we lash them

to arched wood
so the children may rock

towards comfort
while the skin gallops free

as a kite in the wind
dear nanny engorged

coaxing children to suckle
beneath reeking breath

beneath oracular spectre
hair straining free

legs hinged wide
embodying cold walls

so the girls may learn
what is expected of marriage


after Leonora Carrington’s Self-portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)

Kali Richmond is a writer based in York. Her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry is Gradual Reduction to Bone (Nine Pens 2021)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SevenKali

Olga Dermott-Bond

Spin the bottle

I was both meteor and desert sand
once the vodka bottle had pointed
to me. There was so much I didn’t

know – how to kiss a boy, where
Libya was on the map of the world.
Someone’s birthday; dressed up

in my sister’s make-up, scoop neck
and White Musk. I don’t remember
whose house it was, but recall my

stomach marble-tight with fear, a boy
with glasses, who had done this before.
I shut my eyes early, tried not to think

of everyone else waiting cross-legged
for their turn, that head-tilt spinning
me to moldavite, ghost of this new heat

concealed beneath bodyshop lip balm.

Borrowed light

i.
he was sitting on the bed
when she came out of the shower

the tiny rowing boat
of her belly button spilling

with water. He held her face
told her she was enough –

ii.
She listened to his absence
drank cheap wine, chose

a new colour for her bedroom
as shortening days dried out across

stricken streets, painted borrowed
light as high as she could reach.



Hare

night full of running,
half-shadowed under winter’s
tarnished moon. Dark fields

full of cracked mirrors
glance at her slender bones, face,
catching a fragment

of silver, filled with
heather, willow, thyme –
storm-body breaking

fast, scudding away,
spilling past hard promises
no man ever keeps.




Olga is originally from Northern Ireland and lives in Warwickshire. She has had two poetry pamphlets published, apple, fallen (Against the Grain Press) and A Sky Full of Strange Specimens (Nine Pens Press). @olgadermott

Glen Wilson

Buzzards over Levaghery

A buzzard, not peregrine or sparrow-hawk
moves amongst a decimated line of trees

that form precarious perch and I tense there,
with her, with vicarious eye. We watch.

Her mate approaches, a portent that essays
over the flood plain of the Bann.

He cuts the high air as some Yeatsian dark, the full
force of everything behind him at his command.

But his arrival is interrupted, harried from its endgame
by three blackbirds in concert, their crude cacophony

and furze-fury ferry him to the west, they have
recognised the danger early in their corvid blood,

how soon they could be seen as his prey, as easy
as weeds and nettles creep further up the field.

Tired of their minor violence he soars to a speck,
the blackbirds land to brag their prowess

as they check their wings on my back fence.
The buzzard on the branch is alone with thoughts,

ever-watchful for her love to come back
in another pass, in another direction.



Foxholes
For Adrian

You wrote as if you knew all things,
your body shook as if in a rush to tell us
yet you sieved them out a line at a time,

as if we could not handle their alchemy
all at once, scouting ahead as you did, blinded
by the sun, you took what you saw to the dark.

No one should see the span of their life
revealed ahead of time, though with eyes
wide with ash, I think you had.

Yet you dug like you could always know more,
words like marrow-gnawed bones skittle
near the entrance of deep underground tunnels.

I will find you in there, in a forgotten recess,
ready to pierce our downy hubris, to maul
our clever sentences with savage necessity,

all the while pulsing with your vulpine blood,
your pages ruptured with prophecy
in a language you gave your life to earn.




In a Night Forest
After Mary Oliver

She watches an owl,
full from feasting on a mouse
that was not loved.

A fox with teeth painted red
remembers the kill as he races the night
to the approaching dawn.

Nightjars find the right leaves
to camouflage themselves,
rising only to hunt.

A badger tries to warm his sett,
his partner having not returned
from foraging across the main road.

And the watcher she cannot sleep,
this empath of the wild
or perhaps does not want to sleep,

in case her dreams have no heft
for all life becomes recollections,
and their weight is eternal,

held in the claws, the paws
and temporal mouths
of a wooded dark.




Glen Wilson is a multi-award winning Poet from Portadown. He won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing in 2017, the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award in 2018 and The Trim Poetry competition in 2019.
His poetry collection “An Experience on the Tongue” is out now with Doire Press.

https://glenwilsonpoetry.wordpress.com/

Twitter @glenhswilson

https://www.doirepress.com/bookstore/poetry/

Ceri Savage

Of Fried Calamari

You told me of the lingering claws

and wise faces of a sloth sanctuary,

of bicep ache, volleyballs, of pool bars

with yellow walls, shuffling turtles

and beach huts, hitchhiking in pick-up trucks,

of cerulean-painted school buses,

guardabarrancos on the wheel arch.

When an old lady pulled onto the sidewalk,

asked us to watch her gardener’s band,

swerved up the road to the bayside pub,

bought fried calamari for our company,

I felt us create our own stories –

short and winding, like Roald Dahl’s

on a bus along the Welsh coast,

murmured into your hairline, and lasting

as ones on summer nights – restless,

one leg out the covers – whimsical,

rambling, told only to lull you to sleep.

 
Ceri Savage is a British, Berlin-based writer with a BA in English Literature from the University of Exeter. Her writing is published in The FU Review, Tether’s End, and ASP Literary Journal. Ceri is the founder of Savage Edits, an editing business that provides self-publishing services to indie authors. Follow Ceri @cerisavagewrites.

Julie Stevens

A Coat to Last

When you unzipped me, I slouched.
Arched, like ninety years had moulded me
into a wilted figure,
limping towards the final whistle.

You left no skeleton to anchor this body,
no firm muscle to strengthen my walk,
just a bowl of pulp
festering in a bag of skin.

Measure these arms, these legs
and cut a coat that can’t be unravelled.
Stitch imperishable thread into
fabric, strong as life itself.

Then I’ll wear it proud,
seize every chance waiting and
refuse obstacles born to hurt.
A coat fastened with hope.

Julie Stevens writes poems sometimes reflecting the impact Multiple Sclerosis (MS) has on her life. Her winning Stickleback pamphlet Balancing Act was recently published by Hedgehog Poetry Press (June 2021) and her debut chapbook Quicksand by Dreich (Sept 2020).Twitter @julesjumping

Angela Graham

28th AUGUST 2019, THE ILLEGAL PROGROGATION OF PARLIAMENT

That day in Kabul when the wedding guests exploded;
that other when I let a wee girl on the platform ricochet
from and towards her mother’s spew of blame
or the one when I didn’t shelter
a railway worker from a racist shower …

Some close at hand, some far.
Kabul or Coleraine station, the same acid rain.

Yesterday in Coleraine station I saw the airiness
its architect had enticed inside and a guard whose smile
kept all our doors ajar and, in the town, a shopfront
of bottles, wittily displayed.
Such things… light-filled.

These close at hand. In far
Kabul or in Coleraine, the same inherent shine?

Today, when our democracy exploded,
I was tread-milling for an email thrill when I caught
the acrid taste of tipping-point.
In the rank mulch of small misdeeds
the great ones grow. Wake up, wake up, my soul.

Some close at hand, some far.
Kabul, Coleraine, the Commons – I must reach those I can.

Angela Graham is a film maker and writer who lives in N. Ireland and Wales. Her poetry has been widely published eg The North, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter's House. Her short story collection, 'A City Burning' is longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. @angelagraham8

Monica De Bhailís

Dower House
(for my mother)

Many ghosts live here
in your fine old house on the hill
in the rookery.

Some of them you know very well -
they haunt you tenderly from certain chairs
or in prescient pauses at half-open doors
reminding you how many feelings can fit in a life
that is momentary.

Others are more hostile – cobweb squires, dowagers
seething in shadows on high ceilings
brushing against you at the turn on the stairs.
They say you don’t belong here but the house knows
You Are Mistress.

You outlive all and grow old among them
as windows fill with primaeval trees
staring and pointing at the crowds within
but bowing to your pre-eminence.
You stare back beyond wavy glass, finding the oaks
magnificent also.

Sometimes you wake in the night
to hear ghosts conversing with crows
who’ve been troubled by nightmares.
Your heart gets up to comfort them
and you start to speak but then you drift back to
uneasy sleep.

Your surviving children come and go
and mingle with the dead ones
so you can hardly tell them apart.
Their voices ring with urgency
as years pass and they all become more childlike
calling “Mother, listen – “

Don’t you remember the terror
when I would dream the future
of the house ablaze on the hill
and the screams of the family burning
inside her?

Didn’t I tell you while you hushed me
that above the flames and the canopy
rose a murder of crows’
cacophony?

This is home for many ghosts
but soon they’ll scatter scorched and screeching
our grief unspeakable.

For you, the highest branches.

I was raised in a rookery in County Wexford and, having transitioned through a number of former lives, I'm now emerging as a poet. I won the Red Line Poetry Contest in 2020 and was anthologised in "Hold Open The Door" the Ireland Chair of Poetry commemorative anthology. I'm @bhailis_de

Jane Ayres

rewilding


post-menopausal ribbons
of candied breath
follow the wildflowers
learning how to hold in joy

the crow in the pantry
iridescent
mushroomed moments marbling
luminous resistance

i never could
wear another woman’s dresses
rearranging words shaped like peaches
disrupting fish-eggs

pain crab-apple sharp
needling unhappening
let’s move to the moon
embroider the kitchen

every shade of banana silk
enamel yellowing my
skin now turmeric
ambered replicas

sulphurous malice licked clean
picking at loose threads you
speak stealing the words i
am about to utter

while severed trees
turn
a platonic shade of midnight
blue



UK based neurodivergent writer Jane Ayres completed a Creative Writing MA at the University of Kent in 2019 aged 57. She is fascinated by hybrid poetry/prose experimental forms and has work in Dissonance, Confluence, Ink Drinkers Poetry, Lighthouse, Streetcake, The North, The Poetry Village, Door is a Jar, Kissing Dynamite, (mac)ro(mic), Versification, Crow & Cross Keys, Ample Remains, Sledgehammer and The Forge.
@workingwords50

Fionnuala Waldron

Birthday

Today I reached my 67th year.
Year piled on year,
without an even measure.
Some years stand still,
guard their memories like sentinels,
let themselves be counted.

Like those long summers, in the field
beside my grandmother’s house,
where once, a new bride in this home,
she planted daffodils.

Then, at fourteen, waist deep in sea water,
I watched the silver mackerel
swim between my legs,
as white gulls swooped.

Years later, with my children
in that same place,
I watched again, as the years
jostled and collided in their forward rush.

Time is such a slippy thing.

Sometimes, heavy with the weight of water,
it sits in clumps; one falls on the other.
Sometimes, sun-dried, it flows, unstoppable,
through my fingers.

Fionnuala Waldron has worked for most of her career in the field of education. She has been writing academically for a number of years and recently began to write poetry. Two of her poems were shortlisted in the 2020 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition.

Anna Connors

Swing Set

Below my bedroom window stands the skeleton of a father,
Strong enough to carry the children on his broad shoulders
Where my sister and I would spend our summers sipping bottles of bubbles,
Letting our laughter rise and fizzle and pop until it spilled over
Lifting us higher - higher - higher -
I am with the birds now, being carried by the wind
Weightless, as if my limbs were now of wax and feather,
I soar with the belief I could cup the clouds in my hands
But before I burn I am brought back down,
For he was always more diligent than Daedalus.

Shielding me from the elements, you were worn down,
Year after year stripping you to the bone,
But all I could do was watch as you heaved and sighed
Until you could hold me to the sun no longer.
The earth reclaimed you, rooting rust at your core,
I wept at your feet, never again to leave the ground.


Anna Connors is a student from County Longford with a love of poetry and reading. She has previously been published in the Leitrim Guardian.

Geraldine Fleming

noble moments

an ancient goldsmith traces
daring veins back to the treasures of Varna
crafting at his ease-curved bench
earnestly focused
this artisan in aurum
bends and shapes
with fire and mettle
tap/ drill/ saw/ file
experience cast in solid forms

a timeline of hallmarked headlines

as lemel cradles in the drape of the bench skin
modest remains from noble endeavours
slivers of shards
flecks of flakes
grains of goldust
so capsule moments are ignored until
memories are revalued
worth exceeding weight

Geraldine Fleming retired early from an all-consuming career due to ill health. Bereft of purpose in her new life she found herself drawn back into past interests. This newfound freedom allows Geraldine to renew her interest in creative writing. She is a member of the Causeway U3A Portstewart Writing Group in Northern Ireland and enjoys writing both prose and poetry. In 2019 she was highly commended in the Bangor Literary Journal and more recently published in Pendemic.

Cáit Ní Dhonnchú

Small Animal, Mother Animal

I broke open – and
Little pieces of shell, sharp
Flew from me-
Around and fell.

Inside, the soft down
Of a young animal – I
Beak open wide
For its mother – I

Bring it gold
Bring it food
Bring it wish

And all it wants
Is – I
Promise, that has always
Been.

That I and it are one.
Small animal, mother animal
Holding each other
Throughout the storms.

Thank you the small animal says
As we lean into one another.

Back,
Back,
Back,

As
One.

Cáit Ní Dhonnchú’s recent essay The Right To Bleed was published in The Medusa Project e-book Anthology edited by Juliette van der Molen and Megha Sood. Her poems have appeared in print, online and broadcast on radio. She tweets @CaitNiDhonnchu

Nathanael O’Reilly

Crossings

I.
dart like a javelina
between mesquite and boulders
run beside the Rio Grande
through Big Bend National Park

II.
spend hours absorbed in the woods
near Bath hiking the skyline
trail, see nobody awake
on frosty autumn mornings

III.
run southeast beside the blue
waters of Port Phillip Bay
from the modest Port Melbourne
War Memorial to St.
Kilda Pier thawing in bright
winter morning sunshine, look
south-southwest towards Rosebud
remember journeys taken
in long-forgotten lifetimes


Twitter: @nathanael_o

BIO: Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian poet residing in Texas. His books include (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020); BLUE (above/ground press, 2020); Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017); Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016); Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015); Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011); and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). More than 230 of his poems have appeared in journals & anthologies published in fourteen countries, including Antipodes, Anthropocene, Apricity, Cordite Poetry Review, The Elevation Review, Headstuff, Marathon Literary Review, Mascara Literary Review, Rochford Street Review, Skylight 47, Strukturriss, Transnational Literature, Westerly and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017.

Susan Connolly

Susan Connolly has published three poetry collections. Bridge of the Ford (Shearsman, 2016), a tribute to her home town of Drogheda (droichead átha / bridge of the ford),  is a collection of thirty-three visual poems. Her poems were published recently in Beir Bua Issue 2, Otoliths https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2020/10/susan-connolly.html and in Experiment-O 13 (AngelHousePress, 2020)  http://experiment-o.com/.

Sven Kretzschmar

I came into the office early
(after William Shakespeare)

Calm is the morn,
without a sound.
Day is born,
still cold
and full of possibility.
Not quite a midsummer's dawning,
but still
a broadening into boundless day.

The seabird's call
up over my head
where only the ear can reach,
and the park already full
of all the fair flowers of the season
that fell from Dis' wagon –
such ravishing beauty
cannot but make for a moment of hope.

And now sparrows courting
on the window seat.
The almost rising sun,
the white clouds in the sky,
the melodious chanting
of blossoms and leaves
announce a promising day –
maybe a new beginning.



Daybreak encounter

The rolling hills of age-old mornings
I dipped into, that summer’s last nightshift behind.
The sky a rosy-grey above the crownscape
of trees, no human sole in the wood but mine,

tired, but joyful among the green,
the brown, the sandy ground –
and a rustle in the undergrowth.
A shote stared at me there in surprise

and I stared back wondering if sow or tusker
were reasonably near. At the break of the spell
the break of the moment, dashing off
in opposite directions. I ran that day!

Never before had I left those woods faster
to enter civilization at rose-golden daylight.
I rose uphill, out of the narrows, at sunrise
leaving green and brown and boars behind.



Afterwards
(for Kathrin)

Afterwards the strong one faltered
then fell, suddenly,
unexpected aggregation
of misery on the basement floor.

Mis-spook over, post-
consolidation set in – none of us
had seen that coming.
Her eyes water-smooth, she trembled,

shivered despite the mild weather.
Squalor, like
tears, ran down
the brick wall.

In lack of translation of shades
in the shadows of detached brick ghosts
in a dynamite-factory-turned-
apartment the welter of moving

boxes stored her past. Bricks
do not have a soul, bone
and pottery thickets of white nights
conserved her record. And confusion.

Unbox. Then pack in bones,
pile boxes till you see bricks no more.
Here – let us help you. Do not
live from a place of grief,

but in a place where
the cat will fold in
on herself. Let us equip
your place with new hugs and pottery.



Sven Kretzschmar hails from Germany. His work has been published internationally, e.g., in Writing Home. The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press, 2019), Turangalîla-Palestine (Dairbhre, 2019), Hold Open the Door (UCD Press, 2020) and 100 Words of Solitude (Rare Swan Press, 2021). Further work is forthcoming in 2 Meter Review.

Mercedes Lawry

Riverspeak


I went down to the water and the water was the river
and the water was green and swift, brightening
the rocks, the sifted moss, the deep sorrows
left by those who’d come down to wail or pray
or expel commotion.
Rivers speak in trills and babble and uncanny lyric.
Damselflies flick and sweep,
blue moments unencumbered.
I stood in the river and felt its breath.
The water arrived and departed, circling my ankles.
Only occasionally did it linger in a small pool,
ruffing the grainy sand. As trees become skeletal,
drifting leaves take passage and time
shrinks and stalls, muddles the past
with the strings of indigo clouds looped in the sky.

Quadrant of forest


punctuated by Oregon grape,
sword ferns and salal.
Heron holds time, wing-ruffle
over mud blue.
Osprey licks sky pierced by
fir and cedar and Sitka spruce.
Rivulets from spring rain
carry stones beyond the mossy log
where the salamander sleeps.

Mercedes Lawry is the author of Small Measures, which won the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Prize from Twelve Winters Press, and three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason, which was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Mercedes’s work has been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize and her fiction was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. Additionally, she’s published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.

Tessa Foley

If you say a Starry Night

If each one of the stars is red,
how can I tell which one is Mars?
when all the nearest to me have been lit,
It doesn’t screen the glassest night,
the lights are all a russet dust, all
for us to swear by love - it’s always
right to see them red.

If each one of the stars is me,
which one is it that you see,
are you passing by the me retired,
or the lightened brassy spot that’s spire
high, your eyes I trust to gander
all wrong bits of love - I read that you
will see me right.

Tessa Foley is a poet whose work explores feminism, sexuality and the rejection of normalcy. Her debut poetry collection ‘Chalet Between Thick Ears’ was published by Live Canon in 2018. She has recently been recognised in Ware Poets Competition, Charroux Prize and Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year.
Twitter: @unhelpable
www.TessaFoley.com

Michael G. Casey

AKHENATEN’S TREE

The cedar of Lebanon grew next door,
boughs stretching straight out from the trunk
then reaching upwards in prayer.
In summer, magpies and blackbirds loved
to hide in its fine- woven pinnate foliage.

In winter storms the tree lost many small
branches with tight clusters of leathery cones,
a form of self-pruning that did not affect
the tree’s stability, though the layered foliage,
in strong winds, acted as sails that made
the large trunk sway slightly and nudge
a wall that finally cracked and fell down.

Just now, I wake from sleep, look up,
and see the sun glide into position right
above the crown as if resting in the tree’s
top cradle; it is a moment of perfect
alignment that opens a secret door
into the sublime--the rebirth of the sun god
just above Akhenaten’s elongated limbs,
divine rays filtering down to embrace
believers moving from Thebes to Amarna.

Daisy Bassen

Daisy Bassen is a poet and practising physician who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, McSweeney’s, and [PANK] among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.

Recognition


You want so much
To be psychotic;
I understand the relief
You’d find, the quenching
Of a thirst with water
So cold, so sweet.
Someone’s been talking
To you for years, a call
No one else ever answers.
It’s annoying, company
When you’d rather be alone.
You’re never by yourself.
I said your brain was an orchid,
Rare, Amazonian, eager
For water and piranhas,
In need of designation,
An expert in horticulture.
You didn’t care for it
But occasionally, I can admit,
I am speaking for myself.
I’d love to have such a garden,
To feel the blossoms follow me,
That bees would land on my hands
As if I were a saint or a comrade,
Painting me gold;
The fragrance in the air
Chanel, Joy, the Fracas
My father despised, my mother
Wore to provoke. An orchid
Is not my favorite flower.
I prefer peonies, their petticoats
Dragging, Elizabeth Bennett
Walking three miles
To get to Jane.

Daniel Fitzpatrick

Daniel Fitzpatrick grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now lives in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with his wife and two children. He is pursuing an MPhil in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin.

Habit

You must know that the limbs
rise higher on the maple’s northern side
and when the Fish would flicker
on your end of the horizon
if you wish to see the bear.

You must go past the last cut stump
to the lightning’s final carving.
Rest your gun in the raw gash
and hang the compass and bottle
from the bark’s charred tines

and stop beside the oxbow so
your face might be the fly
the brooding bass has never seen
and let it rise. Nothing itself will swell
in its rippleless disappearance.

After months hunting woods most remote
you’ll hear a neighbor’s seen it
pawing the packed earth beneath
the feeder. Your brother, dropping by
between D.C. and Dallas, will snap

a photo up the road as he pulls in.
Keep on until its stench blinds you,
until it rises, daring your eyes to climb
to invisible stars simmering on its shoulder.
No one will know, and nothing will descend again.


Falcon

For my daughter

Some sixty moons have crested since
your nails first gripped my shoulders.
Since then you’ve grown to know
the space between the morsel and my fingers
and to delight in clattering beyond my call,
the wheels whirling you farther and farther out
to turn and race back, not to my voice
but into the wind that made you spread
your palms and gasp before you could walk.
I’ve taken the threadbare hood,
like a soul worn down to its last body,
and set it, despite a decade’s protests,
over the indelicate angle of your brows.
Without it now my eyes are sewn shut by the sun.