Monthly Archives: January 2016

Fitch by Maggie Mackay

31 Sunday Jan 2016

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Fitch

In my midnight I unhook the dust-framed painting,
a childhood spook, a haunting, a fur mask,
and suddenly there’s a polecat,
her coat a silkscreen print, soft as her starlit complexion,
the dark patches blotted. She is our solitary hunter.
From the gloam of a sand dune, out of oils,
she slouches. Musk charges the room.

She is my mother, returned to seek out
her ghost husband, reclaiming him,
he, who was always leafing in libraries.
She drags him by the scruff of his neck,
flicking her tail in the scramble over rockery and log pile.

By dawn she is back in the kitchen,
wielding an iron, as a wife might, pressing office shirts.
I rise to the taste of the polecat’s low mewling to her mate.

Maggie Mackay, a Scot with wanderlust, a love of jazz and a good malt, has been published in All Write Then’s anthology Still Me…(www.pewter-rose-press.com), was the winner of the Writers’ Circle Anthology Award 2014, and has work in various publications, Open Mouse, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Bare Fiction, The Interpreter’s House ,Obsessed with Pipework and The Lake with work forthcoming in The Screech Owl. She is at Manchester Metropolitan University taking an MA in Poetry, and is a co-editor of Word Bohemia (www.wordbohemia.co.uk)

Princesses: Where are they now? (Part two: Cinderella) by Sarah Thomasin

30 Saturday Jan 2016

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Princesses: Where are they now?
(Part Two: Cinderella)

King Charming and Queen Cinderella have been on the throne 65 years and are both still going strong. Some of the more snobbish members of the court joke that the queen, with her commoner’s upbringing, had no intention of wasting her good fortune with an early death. The king, though, attributes their long lives to the vegan diet his wife – a lifelong animal rights activist – introduced to the palace shortly after their coronation. “I never knew a hearty bean stew could be so satisfying until Cinders gave our chefs a few tutorials!” He tells anyone who asks if he misses venison and partridge. “And it’s much more fun riding into the woods to pet the deer than to shoot them full of arrows!” Cinderella, always honest with herself, and not about to enter any self delusion at this late stage of life, freely admits that the court snobs may have a point: remembering the drudgery and hunger of her youth, she absolutely revels in luxury, enjoying every minute of the life of a royal. Something she was less keen on in the early years was the transparently mercenary about-turn from her stepmother and sisters. She tolerated their simpering adulation for a few years, until her husband pointed out that, as queen, she really didn’t have to. Her relatives were placated with impressive sounding duchies as far from the palace as could be managed – with the explicit understanding that any word of her subjects being ill treated would bring about a speedy and ignoble end to their good fortune.

Her silver hair swept up in a graceful knot, Queen Cinderella still likes to play with the (much gentler) descendants of “Rucifee” by the fireside. Charming laughs fondly as she warms her hands at the glowing coals, looking for all the world like the serving maid he fell in love with all those years ago.

Sarah Thomasin is a performance poet living in Sheffield. As well as saying poems out loud at every opportunity, they have had poems published in Now Then magazine, and in two English Pen collections, three Pankhearst Slim Volume anthologies (No Love Lost, Wherever You Roam, and This Body I Live In), The Sheffield Anthology (poems from the city imagined) and Poems For the Queer Revolution. They were also commissioned to create a limerick quiz about gender which appears in Kate Bornstein’s My New Gender Workbook. You can find Sarah online at www.sarahthomasin.com.

rapunzel, rapunzel, what’s your strategy for long-term growth? by Anne Mild

29 Friday Jan 2016

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rapunzel, rapunzel, what’s your strategy for long-term growth

I wondered for so long
where you were,
what was taking so long,
if you were even coming
at all.

Finally
I cut my own hair
and climbed down
by myself.

Now I am a
small business owner
I do my own taxes
and I am seeing a wonderful man
who couldn’t be further from a prince.

 

Anne Mild is a twenty-something student with too many notebooks and not enough quiet. She likes alpacas, her pug, and space. In her spare time she works towards earning a graduate degree in History and making the perfect soup.

Standing Circle by John A. McColley

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

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Standing Circle

I see you, handmaids, nymphs,
do not turn to stone when I approach.
I heard you plucking your lyres
and came to dance, but you all shy away.
I stand at the center of your ring,
smelling the pastries, the wine.
You don’t need to hide,
for I’m like you, fae, gifted.
I can see through your disguises
and brought fruit from my grove.

Fine, I shall dine alone,
listening to the wind sing through
the nooks of your lithic skin.
You can all stand and watch,
if this is your hospitality,
the way you welcome your kith and kin.

 

John A. McColley has explored various avenues of science fiction and fantasy in such publications as Crossed Genres Magazine and the Capes and Clockwork anthologies. He lives in New England with his wife and son, bird, cat, and the occasional trespassing raccoon.

Shade by Kathryn King

24 Sunday Jan 2016

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Shade

A leather-booted man took apples
from the trees –
two bushels from the drops alone.
At noon he wandered home.

He wiped pomace from his hands
and sat with me an hour
then off to tend the calves a week newborn,
mend fences, hone the scythe,
and seek the hired man.

With dinner-time and dusk we lit the lamps,
our noses pinched with kerosene –
and lay ourselves in feathers and in down,
tired to the marrow, shadowed,
sweet between the sheets.

The sky flushed red when I awoke,
my hands and face smudged grey
with ashes from a name I can’t recall.

Kathryn King is a sometime artist and poet living in south-central Vermont. The natural world in all its various expressions is probably her greatest love, and the intricacies of human nature one of her greatest fascinations. She carries a short list in a shallow bucket - mostly it reads, ‘Shouldn’t you be outside?’

Princesses: Where Are They Now? (Part One: Snow White) by Sarah Thomasin

23 Saturday Jan 2016

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Princesses: Where are they now?
(Part One: Snow White)

People often mistake her name for a reference to her hair, these days. When she tells them no, that was the name she was born with, and strokes her tanned, wrinkled, liver spotted cheek, murmuring “white as snow” the nurses smile fondly at each other. Her lips are still bright red though, the lipstick applied with a shaky hand. They call her obstinate. The prince – the king – died years ago. He was a few years older when they married, but that sort of thing didn’t raise eyebrows, in those days. Still, she’d have liked to stay with the dwarves. The closest to parents that she ever knew, truth be told. Although she never really let them nurture her – she never really knew how. Letting yourself be loved wasn’t a skill she’d needed. They would have loved her like a daughter though, if she’d let them, and that meant a lot. Sometimes she catches herself in the mirror (an old heirloom): gaunt face, dark ringed eyes, a slash of crimson, and starts, seeing her stepmother again. She wonders, vaguely, if life is really fair to widowed queens.

Sarah Thomasin is a performance poet living in Sheffield. As well as saying poems out loud at every opportunity, they have had poems published in Now Then magazine, and in two English Pen collections, three Pankhearst Slim Volume anthologies (No Love Lost, Wherever You Roam, and This Body I Live In), The Sheffield Anthology (poems from the city imagined) and Poems For the Queer Revolution. They were also commissioned to create a limerick quiz about gender which appears in Kate Bornstein’s My New Gender Workbook. You can find Sarah online at www.sarahthomasin.com.

Leda and the Swan by Meggie Royer

22 Friday Jan 2016

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Leda and the Swan

He came to me as the moon does, without warning
through fields of waning light. He was the swan
and I was his dove, water giving way beneath us
like wine.
He was a good lover, I’ll give him that.
Gentle despite his beak.
But I could only think of the wounded birds
I kept in jars as a child, how their feathers beat mercilessly
against the glass.
He was just another thing I had captured.
And when Helen went for his throat, I let her.
It snapped like all his promises.

Meggie Royer is a writer and photographer from the Midwest who is currently majoring in Psychology at Macalester College. Her poems have previously appeared in Words Dance Magazine, The Harpoon Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and more. She has won national medals for her poetry and a writing portfolio in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and was the Macalester Honorable Mention recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize.

Amethyst by Sarah Miller

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

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Amethyst

Flickering
fire haired
wise woman
witch layered
mist throated
moss coated
body a mulch
of wet pine,
dragon’s blood
and good motives.
Drums a primal rhythm
jingles a silver bell
draws cauldrons of old magick
from a deep chalice well
her words curl
like sweet smoke
from a burning incense stick
using herbs and affirmations
to honour life and heal the sick
circle dancer, truth seeker
crow lady, neighbour freaker,
tarot caster, future peaker
down to earth, plain speaker
A crone who’s watched the wheel turn
who doesn’t miss a chance
to follow the path,
embrace the craft
and dance the spiral dance.

Sarah Miller is a poet, playwright and theatre deviser living in Salford. Selkie Singing At The Passing Place, her joint poetry collection with Melanie Rees, was recently published by Flapjack Press.

The Passing of the Beast by Jane Burn

17 Sunday Jan 2016

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The Passing of the Beast

Dragons love the dark. We thrive in night – in cold, in winter-trembling
people fear. Living in the bowels of earth, we are suited to dank.
A suffocation of caves, fit for shifting; stealing, eating, biting, chewing.
Crafty, canny, covert, cunning – I am all these lurking words. I am Guo Nian –
I wait for spring to bring the lambs from mother’s belly to grass, for calves
to aim their succulent sides to the sun. I wait for spring to fetch me from
my tunnel, wake me, make me want to feast - come out with arch and bluff,
twist and skim the fat from paddocks. Mostly I like the screaming –
yes I like the sweet meat, love the lanolin shine it gives my teeth,
the beefy crack of marrow. The cries, the supersonic decibels of pain –

garnish to the lush of meat. Puny people, running amok the fields below;
aperitifs, skedaddling hither, thither, swords mere fish-bones in my gums.
They burst in cherry bombs of fruity blood, children sweet as sugared plums.
Such grub to fill me full the year it takes to sleep it off – slumber summer,
autumn winter. Wait for the worlds awakening again; get out my pit
and gorge on helpless men. Then came this beggar-man – a shuffle shamble
bend of beard and grey. They bade him flee! To mountains hie, for midnight
brings the monster! Nay, but grant me stay in your home this night
and I will rid you of your fiend. Brave fool! Yet see the colour
in his cheeks – how straight he grows! How strong his arms,

how bright his brain! The Nian, a twist of flame – I come, O fool!
You dare to stand? That was no man – but God, who bitted and broke me,
rode my bucking body to the otherworld. Bade me stay until a time
that man forgets to cast his fireworks where I wish to tread again –
forgets to fringe the coming of finer days with red. I cannot bear
this crimson cloth, nor lanterns boiling bright from every door.
Cannot abide the powder bangs – spark and crackle keeps me in my place.
The Passing of the Beast. Remember me when things are born and grass
is new – I will return when there is no Lord – when colour and noise
and festivals are dead. I am hungry. I know where you live.

Jane Burn is a North East based writer and artist. Her poems have been published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. Her first pamphlet, Fat Around The Middle, was published in 2015 by Talking Pen. She also established the online magazine The Fat Damsel in this year.

Wanton Agnes by Marc Woodward

16 Saturday Jan 2016

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Wanton Agnes

My glowing pink skin belies me
and I know that glint in your eye:
you’re hoping we might go to bed?
Would you feel the same
if I was pea-pod green instead?

Before the bang and the ringing bells
that chimed us from cave into sunlight:
that’s how I was - and my brother too.
Ah, yes, you know me now?
You’ve heard the gossiped news…

I’m Agnes, the green girl who lived:
I learned to forsake green beans
and to eat your garish food
then watch at the placid mill
as my skin took on your pig pink hue.

My homesick brother did the same
but his heart was always green.
Constant as malachite,
green as the willows
quivering by the wolf pits;

green as loyalty, green with memory,
green as the bright watermeal
that hides newts and frogs
but couldn’t conceal
his bloated pink corpse.

So take me to bed, perhaps make me your wife,
I’ll love you as any pink person might.
But you must know that when I hear
the high bells of St Edmund’s
tolling out bold and clear,

I’ll want to take the cold hand
of my brother’s colourless ghost
and walk where once a way appeared,
down by those lonely traps,
- that stranded us sun-struck and blinking, here.

This poem is based on the legend of The Green Children of Woolpit.

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