The Birds
by Craig Taylor-Broad

Biro drawings circle the clouds
aeroplanes telephone wires,
blotches on a light blue
dabbed ever so carefully by the painters brush
the composition perfection
aside from these black indiscretions
moustaches on the aqua faceless.

We are filled with wonder
as the canvas evolves,
two dimensional three dimensional
and we're in real life
ink spillages floating
consuming the sky until it feathers like a models dress
cawing a love song to those below
covered in white brown abstract artistry shit.

Drawn to the pied piper tones of a throat
I find myself hunted lassoed dragged to the borders,
women are vultures
and I refuse to allow my guts to be another of your meals.

______________________________

 

The Green Man of Druitt Gardens

 by Lesley Burt

 

(CCC, Trinity Saturday 2010)

 

Today, not snowy-bearded

and wrapped in red winter gear, but naked,

he shows his mischievous spring face.

 

Clouds hover until festivities start

then explode: threaten mayor, audience,

electrical equipment.

 

Rain pastes the marquee roof

with brown catkins, twigs, battered blossom;

weighty puddles collect in corners.

 

Crowds, unaware of his presence, shelter,

gather to write community poems,

celebrate the company of friends.

 

Curious, the Green Man rattles the sides,

pokes fingers like a hand of chestnut leaves

through joins; peers through gaps.

 

Rain stops, poets read; he listens,

laughs hard enough to make

the marquee’s sides shake; then retreats.

 

___________________________________

Fiction

by Geoffrey Heptonstall

 

Always there is a story to tell.

Narratives float through the universe.

One may land on fecund earth,

And there become the spirit in the stone.

 

The fossil remains

Discovered, decoded and disclosed.

What is found is fabulous.

Writing, like love, impels

Ordinary things to be other.

Everything is more than itself.

 

Shadowed by parapets,

Sheltered from the seasons,

Confessions stir the soul.

There are tales worth the telling.

 

In the reading room

By sunlit windows

Diligent dreamers

Read their secret histories.

 

Words are for winter light.

Distanced by choice,

Peopled by silence,

The writer is alone,

Especially in a crowd.

 

There are voices not his own,

Though they speak what he has seen

When the candle of fiction flickers.

The story is never the same.

 

_______________________________

 

Chip shop, Ebbw Vale by Saul Hughes

 

With faces like the undersides of those

Steak and kidney pies they will be eating,

Tattoo on the neck and hair harshly dyed,

They palpate notes in tracksuited pockets.

The boiled eggs revolving in vinegar

Upon the counter in a cloudy jar,

Outside a boy digs into a deep nostril

And watches the seagull tear at chips

Scattered over the drizzle-drooled steps.

A toothless lady twists her bearded mouth

Around a thick white mug of brick red tea,

Stained-glass spectacle lenses sending

Spokes of sunlight through the fat-fumed room.

Then off to carry those warm papered packets

To thin houses shipwrecked on dead estates.

 

__________________________________

 

Making My Own Acquaintance by Raud Kennedy

 

I used to smoke, crave it, enjoy it.

Now it’s something people do

who are ambivalent about life,

not sure if they want to live or die.

I used to drink a lot.

It was the high and low of my day.

Now it’s what people do who are in pain.

Their pain has taken on a life of its own

and needs to be fed and cared for

like a lost soul they’ve brought home from the bar.

I used to feel sad and needed that sadness

to have something to escape from

because without it I’d be left alone

experiencing an uncomfortable silence

with a stranger.

 

_______________________________

 

THE REED by Thomas Land

 

I am the reed

translating the crude,

the boundless whine,

the pleading sigh

of the wandering wind

into formal song

in praise of the wonder

of wounded nature.

Kindle the wind

and stir up the storm:

the fiercer the wind,

the finer the sound.

 

 

_______________________________

 

MAGPIE NEGATIVES by Ciarán Parkes

 

How we might notice one then glance

around for another or, more relaxed,

anything black and white: a cow

in a distant field, an occasional priest

 

in full uniform. The reassurance

of joy ahead can be enough to lull

us into complacency. The single magpie

can set the day on edge.

                     

We can look away,

pretend we didn't notice. Larger gatherings

can have us muttering beneath our breath

the stations of the rhyme: gold? A secret

 

never to be told? Such precise

predictions lead to doubt, our eyes

past ominous birds to a clear

patch of sky, a revelation

 

of how things go beyond us, flying off

in all directions. Closer in we see

the green blue feathers dazzling.

 

 

 

_____________________________

 

Henry and Susie are Missing By Hilda Sheehan

 

1

Susie. This is the bed speaking, a wanted moon blew broken kiss words mostly blink-spelt.

Soon an open window throws cold on the speaking bed: brake last night spoke who is missing? Manic-squashed sheets fly east and miss-speak.

Groan the spring and sponge down the on and ins of falling. Henry! Not your bed, not your duvet spill and dry the change back. Susie is coming, she is coming and nearly, nearly came.

Tuesday the bed is a yellow duck fed from Henry's childhood. It gulps hate shut, all feet sink south. Wednesday cannot happen until Thursday gives overview messages. Thursday, Thursday come in: you are all words and covers of Sunday Observer.

Henry and Susie are missing. Love shakes the sheets for evidence of guilt, kiss, embrace, lust and disappointed crumpled doing crumpled searches finds a shoe. Blow shoe, seek shoe, Henry and Susie are missing!

When found darlings cope better. A cluster bomb drops sheet mess and sweet nothing surprises them asleep. Henry and Susie like aliens on a hill look bright ships away. Their mothers call in soup to throw the home made kitchen guilt. Did Susie? Did Henry?

Unmarried guilt fuck. What for tea is scovel and fruit to be like. Not pip in the tunnel who knows the deepness of crawling back in naked spokens. All customers meet the counter: hello the door in, the door shut for next week to cook a missing couple on gas.

The missing mess is nothing. Compare a price tag lip sulk. The missing mess tidies up tights and weeps a chronicle letter that love is about: weddings loom a shirt tale, a great big dress of white nasty.

Henry, Susie did you know the word found you under here? Describe for me the hidden danger of clean worktops and Hoover smooth coping. What did your love go missing? Did your love find out in a word?

2

Henry: I want to take you missing in that dress. I want your slippers last night.

Susie: My slippers have no voice, never want the voiceless, here the bed speaks moon kiss. Want the bed!

Henry: I want to be missing longer.

Susie: Do not go missing too long: guilt, kiss, embrace, lust and disappointed throw true love on the sheets.

Henry: Quietly, we have been missing, the neighbours think a postman murdered our mail for ink and rain junk.

Susie: My voiceless missing envelope stuffed through a next door hole. Glass bit the postman. All flesh is glass. Feel my see-through self, the rain on me, the junk on me smells a paper coming in.

Henry: Afterwards then, on Thursday, Thursday come in.

Susie: Wednesday is now. The sheets are missing us disgusted. We are home done out in pink-blue.

3

After the missing: the paper hole got bigger words on it. Michelle listened to the not said each night in case Henry and Susie escaped. She invited tea and cakes more often, she such a friend told the neighbours a safe thing or two about missing lovers. The such listened to the often. The often said more.

Everyone looked. Windows wide open a glare of don't dare. No one went missing. The cat guarded the door flap for humans coming home. The dog guarded the door flap for humans getting out.

Everyone was cooked overdone for safe living. Chickens never bled on plates loved their own juice cooked more this way. Henry missed being missing. Susie lost her voice. She hid her slippers from Henry and shushed her feet say nothing.

Feet blurted the whereabouts. Susie cried voiceless screams that only machines registered. This is an unfair world where men walk first, I must step out in my own fur naked animal vest, I must be missing and damp and scream a human loud.

Henry was here all day. The chair sat him straight. No Henry. No Henry. Not that football result. Wait, think how the voiceless feel. Tight shut your man!

How found was what? Love was in the biscuit tin. Kiss was in a kitchen cupboard. Guilt was under something under something else. Embrace was nowhere. Embrace they thought was dead behind the fridge but nothing looked straight. Lust laid out its whole body on a rug and waited for more. Henry definitely found disappointed.

Susie sneaked out missing. The cat was worst after letting her back in to unmiss the night she left behind. What if I came back really, never to be missing? My slippers shout a heart burst in a vanish. Who is Susie? Did you know a more missing story? 

________________________________

 

 FAYETTEVILLE TO THE COAST by Sam Silva

 You huge season of cool cool fullness
in the harvest rounded Sun!

 ...you are approaching within a modest month
with  resplendent spirits
who come to mingle with our fair domain.

 In a soldier town surrounded
by acres of farmside remnant
...nailed tin houses of the past
and still good enough
to gaze on
where the old roads wind
and disappear
on our way toward the coastal breeze
warmed by the last vestiges of Summer.

 You should have brought your sketchbook, Rachel,
to capture these images
which haunt my tar heel memories
whose fear and madness
in the State Hospitals
with their IT jobs
and wild acres
of State owned wisteria
led me to such general stores
as we pass in relic now.

 With highways in this soon to be Fall weather
I have extracted something otherworldly
now suffused in a nation of ice brewed beer and computers

 ...something of times before now and forever!

 

 

________________________________

 

Housewife Kate by Amy Standring

Across the kitchen table a
bizarre mouth
opens and closes like an elevator, and her voice drones
as if there is a fly trapped inside.

In a perverse happy tone,
she tells tales about the troubles of friends of a friend,
scuttling out from her tongue like cockroaches
each bug screaming Schadenfreude, Schadenfreude.

It is as if I am reading her face as the Rosetta Stone –
three scripts of the same text
ancient greek, demotic script, hieroglyphics.
Except this face is harder to decipher,
it is all greek to me and reveals
nothing of the blonde Nefertiti in front of me.

I want to ask her if what she really wants is
to peel then crush her shell of a home
like a garlic clove,
grate off her high heels
with a pumice stone
then run flat-footed
like an infant or the wife of an ape?

I picture her after I leave, still sat at the table
like a salt-cellar
exposing a white skull of crystals,
clothing her black torso of peppercorns looking
like millions of small dead hearts
thrown into one body-pot
never ground hard enough to disappear.

______________________________ 

 

Contributors

 

Craig Broad

 

Craig Broad is a young writer from Cornwall, UK, whose experimental work covers the inspiration of both the morbid/destructive and also the beautiful elements of his home county.

craigtaylor-broad@hotmail.co.uk
http://craigtaylor-broad.tumblr.com
http://broadcraig.deviantart.com/

 

Geoffrey Heptonstall

Recent fiction for Cerise Press, Litro and Sunk Island Review. Recent poetry includes work for Adirdondack Review, Decanto and Turbulence.Recent reading for Cambridge105fm avaialblea s a podcast.

Saul Hughes

Saul Hughes is Welsh,  42 years old, and lives in Toulouse, where he teaches English and does translation work.  His poetry blog can be read at http://saulspoems.wordpress.com/2011/08/

Raud Kennedy

Raud Kennedy is a writer and dog trainer in Portland, Oregon. To learn about his most recent work, Portland, a collection of short stories, please visit www.raudkennedy.com

Thomas Land

Thomas Land - poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. My poetry has been published by you and The Spectator, my reviews and polemics by you and The Times Literary Supplement.

Ciarán Parkes

 

Ciarán Parkes lives in Galway, Ireland. He is the founding editor of the Galway literary magazine, Crannóg. His poems have been published in a number of magazines.

 

Hilda Sheehan

 

Hilda Sheehan's poems have appeared on the BBC Website, The Rialto, National Poetry Society Website, The New Writer and South magazines. She performs her work at Bath Literature Festival, Bath Poetry Café and Corsham Poetry Festival and at other poetry events in the South West region. She gained a distinction in creative writing with the Open University. Hilda is also the founder and organiser of BlueGate Poets and assistant to Swindon Artswords Literature Development Worker. Hilda runs workshops in prisons, councils and schools based on inspiring others to discover the joy of poetry! She is the MC of Swindon’s popular Open Mic night at the Arts Centre in Old Town.  Hilda, as Mabel Watson, is the performance editor of 'Domestic Cherry', an annual published each year as part of the Swindon Festival of Literature, www.domesticcherry.co.uk

 

Sam Silva

He has published at least 150 poems in print magazines, including Sow's Ear,  The ECU Rebel, Pembroke magazine, Samisdat, St. Andrew's Review, Charlotte Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, and many more. Has published at least 300 poems in online journals including Jack Magazine, Comrades, Megaera, Poetry Super Highway, physik garden, Ken again, -30-, Fairfield Review, Foliate oak, and dozens of others. Three legitmate small presses have published chapbooks of his, three of those presses have nominated work of his for Pushcart a total of 7 times. Bright Spark  Creative of Wilimington purchased rights to his first full length book EATING AND DRINKING and put the book out through author house at there expense. He now has many books and chapbooks available as print and kindle books at Amazon.com And his spoken word poetry is avaible at the major digital markets such as Apple i tunes.