Monthly Archives: June 2015

Celebrity Deity Big Brother by Neil Fulwood

28 Sunday Jun 2015

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Celebrity Deity Big Brother

1.

An archangel with a regional accent
is on voiceover duties: “Day seven
and God is in the diary room …”

Ill-at-ease; fidgety. Restless hand
tugging long white beard. “Yeah,
I’m pleased with it, but … uh …”

Long pause. “I don’t trust the snake.”

2.

Voted out, Lucifer emerges to arc lights
and a mic shoved in his face. Fans
and naysayers alike make a terrace chant

of his name: “Loo-cee-furr! Loo-cee-furr!”
He smirks and mimes something vulgar
at the brunette presenter. Throws

a punch at a press photographer. Blazes.

 

Neil Fulwood is the author of film studies book ‘The Films of Sam Peckinpah’. His poetry has featured in The Morning Star, The Stare’s Nest, Butcher’s Dog, The Black Light Engine Room, Obsessed With Pipework and Ink Sweat & Tears. Neil’s married, holds down a day job and subsidizes several bars.

Innana’s Journey by Rachael Clyne

27 Saturday Jun 2015

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Innana’s Journey

One foot on the step is all it takes to change a life
while the other lingers in warm ochre dust.
A foot on the step presses stone-chill knowledge
from sole to knee in Chinese whispers.

That’s all it takes to the Great Below.
Neither cashmere shawl nor lapis beads
retain your dignity, memories of a lover’s kiss
on the mezzanine cannot warm you,
a chorus of adulation will not
help you face this one down.

Did I say face? Nothing prepares you
for the icy blast of meeting your other half.
Obsidian eyes cut an ego to shreds.
Less than a maggot on the flyblown arse
of a decaying donkey, all you can do is rot
and pray for release.

At last your heart opens to love
the unforgiving bitch of envy and rejection
who you once banished after all
until she reclaimed you,
so you crawl back up to the light
thankful only for the grace of breath,
your eyes deeper by three miles.

Now you are fit, she whispers,
to call yourself Queen.

 

*(from the author’s collection She Who Walks with Stones and Sings (PSAvalon 2005))

Rachael Clyne lives in Glastonbury. Her new collection, Singing at the Bone Tree, concerns our search for the wild self and won Indigo Dreams’, George Stevens Memorial Prize 2013. Rachael belongs to both local groups and the online poetry group, 52 Anthologies: Book of Love and Loss, The Listening Walk. Magazines: Poetry Space, Stare’s Nest, Interpreters House, Domestic Cherry. Collections: She Who Walks with Stones and Sings. www.rachaelclyne.com

 

The hare by Rebecca Gethin

26 Friday Jun 2015

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The hare

Gusts flood the moorside
flattening grasses.

A tussock blinks,
veined ears

catch our footsteps,
its heartbeat alert.

Through split-lips
it tastes the cluttered air –

sheep, marsh,
buzzard’s shadow.

Wired to leap, back paws
out-pacing the front

leaving a press of stalks and blades,
a furred print in the grit –

a whiplash of thinking
itself into another form.

 

First published in the author’s own collection, A Handful of Water (Cinnamon Press)

Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor. Cinnamon Press published her second poetry collection, A Handful of Water, in 2013. Her first novel, Liar Dice, won the Cinnamon Press Novel Award and her second, What the horses heard, was published in 2014. New poems have appeared in Prole, The Interpreter’s House and Lighthouse as well as Her Wings of Glass, the Exeter Poetry Festival anthology, the Battered Moons Competition pamphlet and The Broadsheet. Her website is rebeccagethin.wordpress.com.

Market Cantrip by Jane Røken

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

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Market Cantrip

Tartary talismans, tallyho spells,
tarragon, mandrake and goldenseal,
ironstone, snakestone, merry thunderstone,
blades like mirrors and fateful laughter,
flying lizards and wheels in the sky;
quicksilver, sleepsilver, mercury sovereigns,
ruby-glass lanterns, nine-angled dreams –
Don’t sell it, don’t sell it,
you’ll bind it upon you;
don’t sell it, don’t sell it,
give it away.

 

Jane Røken lives in Denmark, on the interface between hedgerows and barley fields. She is fond of old tractors, garden sheds, scarecrows and other stuff that will ripen into something else. Her writings can be seen in many very different places, most recently Antiphon, Jellyfish Whispers, Lowestoft Chronicle, Snakeskin, and The Stare’s Nest.

The Country Mouse by Maurice Devitt

21 Sunday Jun 2015

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The Country Mouse

was considering a visit to his cousin
in the city,
so he googled the train-times.
Distracted by a note on the site
that warned of possible leaves on the track,
he thought of the uncertainty principle
he had learnt at school,
that day he was chased home
by Schrodinger’s cat.

It being a dull autumn day
he decided to spend the time,
before the train,
browsing through his butterfly album,
humbled by the thought
that just one flap
of those air-spun wings
could cause a tornado in Texas
and how, on bright summer days,
their blinking motion could twist
the family cat into a gordian knot.

Using three containers of different size
he poured precisely one pint of milk,
put it in a flask,
cut a perfect cube of cheese
and wrapped it in seamless paper
for the trip. It got him thinking
of power and possibility
and how just one tooth-print
in the cheese
could claim the whole block.

He considered two routes
to the station, the first shorter but uphill
so chose the second, a straight line
between two points,
conveniently called A and B.
He arrived at the station
to find it surprisingly empty
and there, standing nervously
on the far side of the platform,
a chicken, a fox and a bushel of wheat.

 

The seventh son of a seventh son, Maurice Devitt was abandoned by his evil stepmother and raised in the forest by a poet.

From an Exclusive Interview with Anne Jefferies by K.V. Skene

20 Saturday Jun 2015

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From an Exclusive Interview with Anne Jefferies

… a suppressed giggle and six little men dressed in green crept into my garden. The handsomest of all wore a red feather in his cap. I put out my hand and he jumped into my palm so I placed him in my lap and he climbed up to my breasts and kissed my neck. I was enchanted …

… and plunged into darkness and flew through the air then found myself in a strange land surrounded by lush fruit trees with fantastical songbirds lustily singing from their burdened branches. Fabulous flowers scented the air alongside winding pathways that led to a multitude of gold and silver and ivory palaces and everyone was magnificently dressed and so, when I looked, was I …

… and would have stayed forever but was coaxed away by my true love with the red feather. Others became jealous of our happiness together and I felt myself falling through darkness and back in my own garden, surrounded by worried friends …

… but the faeries gifted me with the power of clairvoyance and a healing touch. My story went viral on YouTube and was picked up by the tabloids. People came …

… again jealousy arose. I was persecuted by the authorities, arrested and committed …

… and they say I will soon be released – if I guarantee I will not speak to the media (or blog or tweet or communicate in any way whatsoever) about my travels to the faerie realm.

 

K.V. Skene’s poetry has appeared in Canadian, UK, US, Irish, Indian, Australian and Austrian magazines, most recently in The Maynard (Canada), Contemporary Literary Review India, The Saving Bannister (Canada), The Stony Thursday Book (Ireland) Obsessed With Pipework and Freefall (Canada). Her publications include Love in the (Irrational) Imperfect, 2006, Hidden Brook Press (Canada) and You Can Almost Hear Their Voices, 2010, Indigo Dreams Publications (UK). Currently, she lives and write from Toronto, Canada.

mountain haunted by Mary Franklin

19 Friday Jun 2015

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mountain haunted

rockscwmsmorainestarnscliff-likeslopes
rockscwmsmorainestarnscliff-likeslopes
rockscwmsmorainestarnscliff-likeslopes

where a Welsh giant
sat in an enormous armchair
to stare at the stars

whenyouspendthenightontopyouwakeupamadmanorapoet
whenyouspendthenightontopyouwakeupamadmanorapoet
whenyouspendthenightontopyouwakeupamadman
or a poet

 

Mary Franklin has had poems published in Iota, The Open Mouse, Ink Sweat and Tears, London Grip, Message in a Bottle, The Stare’s Nest and various anthologies. Her tanka have appeared in poetry journals in Australia, Canada, UK and USA. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Green Man in Rocombe by Marc Woodward

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

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Green Man in Rocombe

I saw a Green Man fleetingly,
standing close by the farm shop barn.
The height of a tall hawthorn tree
in that instant - then he was gone.
For a bird song moment he stopped,
(as sliding morning vapour cleared
to wrap around the bramble tops),
then looked my way and disappeared.

Not wistful at the summer’s cease
the gentle closing of the year,
but smiling in a hat of leaves,
garlanded with rose-hip and sloe,
he vanished like a startled deer
or ermine on new winter snow.

 

Marc Woodward is a poet and musician resident in the West Country. He has been published in anthologies from Ravenshead Press, Forward Press, OWF, and in various magazines and web sites including Ink Sweat & Tears and The Guardian web pages.

Dryad by Seth Crook

14 Sunday Jun 2015

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Dryad

This forest is the only church I have.
Nothing numinous is elsewhere.
Beyond these branches
I feel no shudder to the tap root.
Only simple fear.

Not here.

Look around, it is the twist of trees,
roots exposed,
everything slow dancing with the shadows.
Most of all it is the smell,
of death and life in one;
as though fall and rise are just two directions,
rot only a paradise for mushrooms.
There is nothing above the world, or below,
I know. But something huddled holy by the side.

 

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before deciding to move to the Hebrides. His poems appear in recent editions of Envoi, Magma, Gutter, The Moth, Southlight, The Journal, Poetry Bus, Prole, New Writing Scotland, and on-line in such fine e-zines as Antiphon, Snakeskin, and Ink, Sweat and Tears.

Glamour by Kyle Cooper

13 Saturday Jun 2015

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Glamour

Time passes differently here. It’s dark, and the tables heave with the weight of fine food and drink; strange liquids in strange colours, red haunches, exotic sweets. Do not eat or drink anything. The city is full of fey. Familiar foxes cross the streets as a cabal of three shriek past in a black carriage. The horses are sweating on their plinths, and beautiful kelpies beckon youth from dark doorways, their teeth pointed and appetites sharp. Any prince you kiss tonight may wake up a frog tomorrow morning, but that will be the least of your worries. In dark parts, poisoned princes pummel raw head and bloody bones. Heroines light spoons, sending changeling children chasing up chimneys. A vast dragon sighs underground, sending warm air up through tube lines, while bogeymen bellow ‘Brownie! Brownie!’ at night cleaners, and bearded fauns wallow melancholic on the last bus home.

By tomorrow morning, all this will be nothing but broken pumpkins and rats. But time passes differently here, and there are no breadcrumbs to be found that lead away from heavy iron doors, slamming shut in the night.

 

Kyle Cooper reads, writes, walks. He has recently completed a Masters in Literature and Modernity and has been scribbling for some years now. He has been published in The Cadaverine, Ink Sweat and Tears and Brittle Star, and he reviews for Lunar Poetry.