18 Sunday Sep 2016
Posted in flash fiction, poetry, Web Journal
Tags
Daniel Roy Connelly, fairytales, flash fiction, folklore, Louisa Campbell, mythology, Noah Mendez, Orla Fay, poetry, Rachael Smart, Rebecca Gethin, Sarah Miles, Stella Wulf, Stephanie Marcellus
Welcome to Issue Three! Featuring wonderful work by:
Sarah Miles, Rebecca Gethin, Noah Mendez, Stephanie Marcellus, Louisa Campbell, Stella Wulf, Daniel Roy Connelly, Rachael Smart, Orla Fay, and Andy Brown.
Enjoy! Continue reading
06 Wednesday Apr 2016
Posted in poetry
Tags
folklore, legends, magic, poem, poetry, sayings, Stella Wulf, superstition
Pigs Might Fly
He made her a bed from fallen willow,
turned the greenwood of its wedlock head,
pillowed it plump with a bolstered sham.
He sewed her a cover of rough spun yarn,
stitched her in time to his cold comfort farm.
She smarted with the salt of his keeping,
wept buckets of tears at every squealing,
till she and the pigs were steeped in the brine.
The homespun wives came at full moon shine,
touting black cat tales, notions, concoctions.
She bought their threads, a-penny-a-thought
wove the skeins to a web of schemes
fixed it high in the wishing tree.
He said she could leave when pigs might fly
but she and the pigs wanted earthly things.
He made her a bed and there he would lie,
counting his sheep to eternity.
Stella Wulf lives in South West France. Her work has appeared in The Screech Owl, Prole, The Stare’s Nest and Message in a Bottle. In 2012 she won third place in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly poetry competition. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She is also an artist and her work can be seen on her websitehttp://www.stellawulf.com
11 Friday Mar 2016
Posted in poetry
Tags
Grandma
There wasn’t a woman alive
who was worthy of my father’s charms,
but I had his ears, his big brown eyes,
she took me readily to her arms,
and what long arms she had!
‘All the better to hug you with’,
she said, and scooping me
onto her knee she’d kiss my nose,
let me stroke the down of her cheek,
tickle the tufts on her chin.
How she’d howl, make me laugh
till I was weeping and weak,
then she’d feed me dumplings,
chicken pie, pears from a tin,
because it grieved her to see
a child so thin.
Once, when I was very good,
she wound up a hank of red wool,
cast the loops onto needles,
to clickety-clack me a cape and hood.
She’d boss me into my knitted cowl,
dust down her old fur coat,
lead me off on a flea market prowl
to sniff out bone combs, hat pins,
toothpicks and toggles,
or scavenge the remnant bins
for off-cuts of calico, dimity, chintz,
for her Forest Path patchwork quilt.
Then we’d trot home, she with her haggles,
me with my guilt for wishing to stay.
Grandma would hold my hand and say,
she was all the better for seeing me.
But when Mother came to take me,
Grandma’s big eyes narrowed with spite,
she unsheathed the most vicious of claws,
clenched her jaws for the bite.
I heard the growl maul up from her throat,
she slavered, and raged up a tempest,
that Mother could leave me without a coat!
Grandma ate her for breakfast.
Stella Wulf lives in South West France. Her work has appeared in The Screech Owl, Prole, The Stare’s Nest and Message in a Bottle. In 2012 she won third place in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly poetry competition. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She is also an artist and her work can be seen on her website http://www.stellawulf.com
05 Saturday Dec 2015
Posted in poetry
Mermaid
What a fine, strong line he spun me,
how he reeled me in with his masterly pitch,
and after the catch how he landed me,
foul-hooked and gasping. ‘A cold fish,’
he’d spat, though he held me close for all that,
a prize trophy, snarled in his keepnet.
But I was the one that got away,
and the sea like a doting mother,
gathered me into her lap, smothered me
in her salt cure, numbing my lungs,
transfusing my veins, lifting me,
light as ether, out of my cumbrous limbs.
How long I’ve gazed at the horizon,
waiting, breath bated for the billow
of sail, the cut and swell of prow,
only the moon and the tide can tell,
only the rocks can know, that time
is but a twitch in an infinite tale.
He is Hubris, as all of nature calls him,
he’ll come and when he does I’ll weight
the sky with lead, sing up a keeling gale,
spool out a maelstrom, cast a lashing squall,
and when he’s flailing in the throes,
the world crashing at his head.
I’ll wreck him with a smile.
Stella Wulf lives in South West France. Her work has appeared in The Screech Owl, Prolebooks, The Stare’s Nest and Message in a Bottle. In 2012 she won third place in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly poetry competition. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She is also an artist and her work can be seen on her website: www.stellawulf.com
13 Friday Nov 2015
Posted in poetry
Tags
environmentalism, green, lore, poem, poetry, Stella Wulf, trees
A Spell in the Woods
Wych elm, elder, aspen, oak,
badger’s hideout, hedgepig’s poke.
Dogwood, hawthorn, cherry, birch,
woodpeckers larder, roe deer’s church.
Blackthorn, alder, rowan, ash,
blackbird’s nest egg, squirrel’s stash.
Holly, hornbeam, hazel, yew,
hedgerows, meadows, bird’s-eye view.
Chain saw, bulldozer, open sores,
Tesco, Pound World, British Home Stores.
Stella Wulf lives in South West France. Her work has appeared in The Screech Owl, Prolebooks, The Stare’s Nest and Message in a Bottle. In 2012 she won third place in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly poetry competition. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She is also an artist and her work can be seen on her website: http://www.stellawulf.com
13 Friday Mar 2015
Posted in poetry
Tags
dreams, fairytales, folklore, horses, nightmares, poem, poetry, Stella Wulf
Dream Maverick
Some harness their beds to piebald steeds,
plodding cobs, workaday drays,
others to spangled roans,
spindled foals, dappled greys.
She rounds up the wilding beasts
of the straggling day,
herds them steam-flanked
through the twilight hour,
a stamping tattoo of stars, blazes,
comet tails and streaming manes,
whinnying a brumey mist,
over night’s gathering corral.
An albino moon rears up,
reveals the white of its rolling eye,
the quicksilver of its nature.
She spurs the spuming horses to a prance,
a leap, a Lipizzaner dance
of the wildest dreams,
tacks the spooked, unbroken mares,
straddles the demon stallions,
races bareback all the mustang night,
through sleep’s unbridled prairie,
until a golden palomino dawn,
leads them meek and muzzle-warm
to the sugared palm of mastery.
Stella Wulf lives in South West France. Her work has appeared in The Screech Owl, Prolebooks, The Stare’s Nest and Message in a Bottle. In 2012 she won third place in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly poetry competition. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She is also an artist and her work can be seen on her website http://www.stellawulf.com
22 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted in poetry
Tags
cold, fairytale, hans christian andersen, love, poem, poetry, snow queen, Stella Wulf, winter
Once Upon A Winter’s Tale
a cold wind rattled through the litter of the dead,
snow bees swarmed in a swirling cloud - the Queen
smothered the world in a bone white shroud.
Paths became slippers of glass and beauty slept
in a feather soft bed as deep as the sea,
for a hundred years it’s said, if it weren’t for the pea
which prodded and nosed through its berth
pushed past the roses sunk beneath the earth
to breach the crust in drops as white as snow.
Such perfection should have melted our hearts
but we are a thousand leagues apart
frozen forever in a puzzle of ice.
It seems only love can rid our eyes of splinters,
disgorge the poison from our throats,
kiss the dormant beauty back to life.
Love can turn Winter’s curse to a magic spell
an incantation for a different chapter,
put a twist in the end of the tragic tale
and we’ll all live happily ever after.
Stella Wulf lives in South West France. Her work has appeared in The Screech Owl, Prolebooks, The Stare’s Nest and Message in a Bottle. In 2012 she won third place in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly poetry competition. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She is also an artist and her work can be seen on her website http://www.stellawulf.com
