A paragraph of birds before the storm foretells its fury to a startled world. Above the mountains, cloud novellas form with thunder syllables and lightning hurled as markers, that explorers later on might read the pages cinders left behind. Then falls the rain. With all pretensions gone, the wind inscribes its will on humankind.
At last, the tempest closes with a sigh. A final chapter lingers in the dale, caresses drooping flowers. From on high an epic rainbow signifies farewell.
The tale is told. The book has blown away. Thus, ends the story of a summer day.
LaVern Spencer McCarthy loves to write short stories and submit them to magazines and other publications. She has written and published twelve books of poetry and fiction.
Her work has appeared in Writers and Readers Magazine; Meadowlark Reader; Agape Review; Bards Against Hunger; Down in The Dirt; The Evening Universe; Fresh Words Magazine; Wicked Shadows Press; Midnight Magazine; Pulp Cult Press, Metasteller and others. She is a life member of Poetry Society of Texas. A poem she wrote was nominated for the 2023 Push Cart Prize.
All morning Nanna’s kneads pummels and bangs make the cutlery rattle and jump in the drawer below.
She places a yellow gingham tea towel over the basin, leaves the mixture to rise like a mushroom in the dark, beats it back down, shapes it into balls, waits once more.
Oven hot, a yeasty aroma wafts throughout the house. I drool at the thought of slabs of butter on freshly baked crust.
Nanna won’t even let me try one. These baps are as round as Aunty Cynthia and just as heavy.
These baps are harder than Nanna’s Be-ro book rock buns.
Nanna won’t even put them on the roof of the outside loo.
She says they will make the birds fall from the sky.
Glut
First week back, final year at Bradwell C of E Infant’s, the sort of day when there’s been a slight chill to the morning air.
Nanna waits at the gates. Instead of the ice-cream shop or the Post Office we head to The Hills,
up worn limestone steps by Rachel’s house, past kind Mrs Law’s who left to have a baby, past the bit where the brook emerges from Hades, past the beech trees that will produce a bumper mast later in the Autumn,
up, up, up to the top of the world where gorse, rabbits heather and sheep cohabit,
along to the ridge where the Gliding Club hangs out, turn left towards Rebellion Knoll, and onto Brough Lane.
Nanna pulls out two carrier bags from her pockets.
We pluck the plumpest, sweetest, sun smooched berries, cram them into our mouths, deep purple gorgeousness bursts onto our tongues, smears our faces and stains our lips so they look like punk rockers’ makeup.
Two bags full later we continue towards Brough, then up Stretfield and back to Bradda before the sun sets,
get washing the dark treasure for jam, jelly, crumbles, vinegar.
That I will later that night have bad guts does not diminish the joy of the glut.
Soir De Paris
This miniature bottle, with its Art Deco design, is more precious to me than the sapphires which share its colour.
Empty now, I used it up before I was old enough to even go courting.
Grandad bought it for you before a show in Sheffield, a little luxury on a manual worker’s wage.
Did you ever use it? Or did you save it for best like the unworn dresses which hung in your wardrobe?
The warm amber and bergamot scent lingers though, and every now and then I unscrew the lid, take a hit.
The Rejects Club
Baked beans and a cheese and onion roll every weekday dinner, bar Monday’s Sunday leftovers.
I walk home to eat. It’s only five minutes. Bradwell Junior School canteen does not cater for vegetarians.
Besides, all I ever did was sit in the Young Ornithologists Club drawing owls and kingfishers with the other rejects. Nanna doesn’t know
what else to feed me, so every weekday dinner, bar Monday’s Sunday leftovers, it’s baked beans and a cheese and onion roll.
Pastry crisp and golden, the mouthwatering anticipation of a melted cheesy middle, beans slowly heated up on the gas hob just as I like them, served in a green and white vaguely hexagonal dish.
I love it, it’s my favourite, but every weekday dinner, bar Monday’s Sunday leftovers, eventually I have to say
NO MORE!
The Changeover
‘It changes you forever, but you are changing forever anyway’ – Margaret Mahy
I am sat by the window with the view of Rebellion Knoll.
Grandad knows he may as well talk to a phantom.
Nanna’s in the kitchen cooking tea. Oven chips, processed peas. Fish fingers for me, Finny haddock for them. She shoos the cats off the worktop, warbles along with Radio 2.
Regular as the fish van, once a week after I’ve got off the bus I go up Town Lane to the library in the old Methodist schoolroom, check out the fold-out shelves for new titles. Sometimes I am the only browser.
The squeak of sensible shoes on Parquet flooring, a faint trace of coffee mornings, Christmas Fairs, Girl’s Brigade, end-of-term plays and kid’s birthday parties I got invited to only from their parents’ sense of duty.
I take my stash to the desk to be stamped without making eye contact, renew one book over and over again.
Lauren Foster is a writer, musician and artist based in Charnwood in the UK Midlands. Published in The Journal, Leicester Literary Review, DIY Poets and more. Graduate of the MA Creative Writing at University of Leicester. Poet in residence on The Kindness Project in autumn 2023. Drummer and vocalist with The Cars that Ate Paris, a garage-punk band.
you work like you owe something to the clock the boss the bills
you sleep through alarm and leave a kiss on her cheek a post-it note
you drive home in the dark the sun already gone like a lover who left you for someone else
houses on the side of the road cardboard cutouts of a life you don’t have
you park behind her car she sleeps in a bed too big too cold too late
Driveway
You say depression revs its engine when
leaves change. It’s easy to hear outside your door.
Mine means walking the same driveway every
day until colours fade, then looking down
to find them in a hole.
A Heron Jesus
I could be walking on water down
the beach minding my own business
a heron Jesus and still at the splash
of your all encompassing wingspan
I would not know the difference
between a wave and awash
The Not-Quite Blankness
I’m desperate to feel something even as I see nothing in this moment but the buzz & chatter of the city & the wind as it crawls up my spine like a coyote nosing into a garbage can. The poem does not read like memory.
Jesse and Andrew
were two good friends in Los Angeles, and in last night’s dream, Andrew announces he quit acting, though we knew him as a screenwriter, because he found success in Ohio, and thinking back, in reality, we were journeying toward the same adolescent dream, green stars, and we pursued when we were heartbroken, worn-out, reckless, and last I saw Andrew he stuffed quarters into the jukebox at gold-lit Birds, repeating Sussudio, commenting on every woman at the bar, and I didn’t speak up. And Jesse had returned that day from Thailand. He was sad and I was in love. I had a chance to see him again– last fall, New York– but he has a kid now and I could not muster a bus, or to revisit reminiscing the dreams we shared, what we had to wake up from during our long, separate searches for meaning.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Ghost City Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Lamplit Underground. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
After a sleep Along with tangled hair To unravel yesterday’s pain It takes time.
Open eyelids slowly Remember Broken dreams bit by bit And stitch them up.
Fix the body, Lift earth with your feet, Words of glass wings That hurt heart Must be separated from body.
For survival, For living A sad string wrapped around body Let go like snake Shedding its skin.
After sleep, Find yourself, Know your path, destination and walk.
Johny Takkedasila is an Indian Telugu Poet, Writer, Novelist, Critic, Translator and Editor born on 08.06.1991 in Pulivendula, Andhra Pradesh, India. His literary journey, which began as a Telugu poet, has seen the publication of 26 books.
He has received numerous awards for his contributions. The Central Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for 2023 (National Award) was awarded to Vivechani, a criticism book in the Telugu language.
His poetry has been featured in many international anthologies, and his stories and poetry have found a place in international magazines. In addition to writing in Telugu, Hindi, and English, he is also involved in translation.
His literary style appears to aim at making readers contemplate and sensitize society through a compelling narrative. His other works Tiny Treasures, Puberty, Kattela Poyyi, Siva Reddy Kavitvam Oka Parisheelana, Akademi Aanimutyalu, Tella Rommu Nalla Rommu, Nadaka and Soochna were published by Ukiyoto Publishing House.
I have met a man who used to smile only, before he repented caught in guilt. I have met a man who used to be happy simply in vain, without ever explaining himself why the world bursts out in tears.
I have asked him how does he know the world, which seems upside down! And after every question I have received tens of answers that convinced me not!
So I have waited that one day he would ask himself, simply in vain a question made public! But I was afraid he would not reply, so I have run and in the silence, I have seen the world undressed, naked!
You will change
You will change what is the point of an evening that comes, and your shadow and the end of a day that leaves, when the sun stays distant and the moon does not draw near. The dusk stops for a while waiting to decay, the dusk falls in the darkness the horizons close in the meantime, the absences collapse in nothingness. Slowly even your shadow abandons you, and here comes the hour when there is no evening left! What the dusk is speaking today, everyone thinks is meant for tomorrow, a new dawn where you have to change and you will change no matter what!
Nikollë Loka was born in Sang of Mirdita on March 25th, 1960; graduated as a teacher at Luigj Gurakuqi University of Shkodra; Master’s degree in Pedagogy at the University of Tirana, Doctorate in History of Education at the University of Tirana. He worked as a teacher, principal in a high school and education inspector in the district of Mirdita, then a teacher in a high school in Tirana and a lecturer at Aleksandër Xhuvani University in Elbasan. Lives in Tirana. Author of nine poetic volumes in Albanian and three poetic volumes in Italian (two of which with co-authors); included in the anthology La Poesie contemporaine albanaise, L’Hartmattan publications, Paris 2024. In addition to Albanian, his poems have been published in Italian, English, French, German, Arabic, Romanian, Swedish and Mecedonian. Invited to television and radio shows dedicated to literature. Editor and reviewer of several literary works, mainly in poetry. Winner of several literary awards in the country and abroad. Member of several national and international literary associations. Ambassador of culture in the organization International Foundation Creativity Humanity (IFCH)-Morocco. Included in the Lexicon of Albanian writers 1501-2001, editions Faik Konica, Pristina 2003 and in the Encyclopedia of Italian language poets, Aletti Editore, Rome 2021, then in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mirdita, editions Emal, Tirana 2021.
it is a dead nativity that the burned, blind berries stand serried on the trees, and the scuttered, flittering fields in the rafters of the grail, and the angelus that floats in a spineless, furling sea, with the nailed crests of children raining on the dales, and the priesthoods raving madly, and the swell smell of snow within a wood, and the taraway stars warming down upon a wombless world, and the booming babies harpstung with the maidens whose wildness floams and scars in the bullring laid bereft by the oxened lady.
once, when the lord rode lowly on a cloud of bitter butter pure as molten lead, as the food of god was lovely, a flare from herald angels fell, where, roving gaily, the scrolls of fire burned up their beds and tore across the crucifixion’s cells; and there, in the sun-slicked fields, burning then as now, the tyrelit, crazy isles of jacob and his sandalled ladder roared and rose and fell from east to west, across a fairied, occidental smile that combed the crypted yards for angelled drums and banged back dearly, with the cattle purring and the rousering cats alight and the scuffled birds and the spheres of music clearly varnishing into the beards of night. Oh, the maids of molten minions lunged in red delight!
and the lord set forth and strayed in his mused career: in the city marshes, levees, and the banging nights on the hill, he strayed and shaped a roman rhythm from his ovum-pealing hands as time, ignobling, bouldered up the graves. but only the wind sang.
the hunger of the birds was thrilled into the swording spine, and the waters, crossing, crushed upon the holy lungs and brought the curs of eden into nether, knocking crimes that none could spring. No, to deliver, to be slaved, in losing life, the lord above must always seem as careless as a warbler! how the mazy, granite grave crashes round the mind and breaks its native scheme blows maniacally back against the world in nave and yields no prayer
and the minstrels, who, once flowing in their regalled song, pared the ravens down with the runes of open love, and the weals on the winds of the glowering and strong who, once certain, aspired to hand in glove, and the passion of the floaming ecstatic scream that hires the word above; none, nobody here nor elseways, could save nor shore nor restore the love of jesus to the buds, nor the war of loving to the grievance of the good. but the red wings are raised and the carved limbs of spiders throe and flock – webs of age on moving stones are spun and always spurned and the cancer in the oat of sin is defrocked; and the heavens, burning, furnish into fens the simple words of immortal stains –
Jim Bellamy was born in a storm in 1972. He studied hard and sat entrance exams for Oxford University. Jim has won three full awards for his poems. Jim has a fine frenzy for poetry and has written in excess of 22,000 poems. Jim adores the art of poetry. He lives for prosody.
You can find more of Jim’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Sitting alone on a bench as fog covers the lake hidden, lost, below.
Hearing a lone goose honk in the sky still too far away to see.
Feeling an October breeze against my face while awaiting sunrise over the horizon.
I smell newly mowed grass and breathe so deeply green salivates in my mouth.
The bench creaks in relief as I stand and wander through my mystic sphere rolling somewhere else.
Between White
Dressed in white between a white umbrella and white shoes the woman strolls beside her golden retriever tethered together by a black leash.
Like a gossamer-winged dragonfly alight on a fishing line draped into lake waters hoping all fish are fully sated when night falls upon them all.
Fence Slaying
Tree trunk falls across the wooden fence slaying the wooden soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder in attention formation ordered to hold the line under any circumstances.
No need for a firing squad for disobeying orders as slats lie splintered on the field of grass like bleached bones from a dead-cow carcass.
Eye Play
Like an eye closed to a slit pretending sleep but seeing all, the shutter closes out the street and reveals nothing inside.
The stucco wall wrinkles cracks along its façade and permanent dimples dent the stone like a great grandmother weathering the next generation curious if she sees at all
Upward Guides
Potted plants guide the stairs upward like the blind woman’s cane tapping one, two …
At the ninth tap turn right immediately before a tangle of greenery brushes like spider web across your face.
The door awaits the final tap, the entrance passed the plants’ gauntlet now swept by stems cheering in wind.
Diane Webster‘s work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Verdad and other literary magazines. She had a micro-chap published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023 and 2024. One of Diane’s poems was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022. Diane retired in 2022 after 40 years in the newspaper industry.
You can find more of Diane’s work here on Ink Pantry
Maybe it’s because October nights on the East Coast can still be sultry; it was still reasonably early, 10:30; us three in our usual semi-stupefied lethargy got a rush of energy, decided to take a walk over to Fresh Grocer at 40th & Walnut, get some grub, often in short supply at 4325. I got French bread, Mary got vegetables for stir fry, for Abby too, & as we walked home what awaited us was little we didn’t want. We were too stoned to be self- consciously anything, but you can bet we were stared at, with our symmetrical features, sculpted cheekbones, & yet West Philly had glitter all over it because everybody hit the street simultaneously, we walked, levitated with everyone, & everyone levitated with us—
the house party a few nights later was beyond levitational. Every young painter in Philly crowded into the lived-in, yellow lit kitchen to do whiskey shots, & drove a bunch of points home about how the city was now working together, firing off on all cylinders at once, even as Mary abstained, as usual, from alcohol, which took her nervous system & trashed it. The painters were obliging about the poet’s participation, as laughter ricocheted into the grassy backyard area, with its rusty fence, small concrete plots, placing us in a city space with real green in it, even as trees began to yellow, & as the warm weather held. When the door to Mary’s room shut an hour later, we took the starlight in with us, painted & owned it.
Adam Fieled is a writer based in the Philadelphia area. His books include Equations, Opera Bufa, Cheltenham, Apparition Poems, and Beams. A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he also edits P.F.S. Post.
In the murky hours are the murderers, freshly convened, flippant and fickle, with whines and snivels.
Malevolently intent on revising the rules, and lopping off the light. Deeply resentful, always resorting to cunning, enabling complicity in their crime.
Crushing an incalculable number of vexing secrets set for the future to be told or heard. Their annihilation all enacted with feverish haste.
A sacrificial onslaught of hostility, the appointment of a shadowing stab, leaves them rapidly breathing around the stench of bloodshed from wounds to be overcome, leaving graves shaped like bulbous domes hidden under silk.
They try to beg meaning from haphazard blackbird dreams that burst into flames upon awakening.
They hone mosaic transmissions, coded in sombre shades within the gloom and seep of murk, encrypted to discredit legends.
When all is torn, crushed, spilled, when fume and reek have become the prize sought, it is the poets’ job to exhale inky breath across paper landscapes, to bring back life to thought, to find the almighty past man’s destruction.
Express Mark
In sunlight, we pass through gates, hung in the middle of rush-clad walls, gates which once bore the bruise of broken door hinges.
Everyone observing stones cut into concrete images, brimming with geocentric activity.
The once imposed form of empty vessels, strewn about long ago, currently to be filled with a bioluminescent blue-violet thick jet of light, unconfounded, in its aim toward an express mark of interwoven destinies.
There’s apparent understanding hoped for, and to a considerable extent, we relish the recovery of our strength, after the feel of shipwrecked bodies, and we will complete a sojourn rather than be held in complete confinement.
All due to the impressive profusion of one large empire of artists.
I Paid A Visit
I paid a visit to a person of certain origins, who, after hearing the clarion call, became determined to get past vague language, and dip us into a charming melody, using an eloquent speech.
From the brushing of clouds comes that melody, an etched rhapsody, once confined by a back door locked, where a few of its remnants were left on a stoop, the entire symphony now recovered..
The majority of those troubled and alarmed by the liability of war, by the havoc of battle, those clad with a doctrine of fear, those who have theorized some popular notion of who is to blame for the catastrophes, to them goes this speech.
Live to be better off emotionally, with a higher sense of people’s’value, than corruptible vicars, sultans, chancellors, and counts, causing formidable misfortunes.
Live to hear more tender strums within all seasons than all the above who forget the names, by sterile fail, of all the living and the dead.
Live to burn hotter in the quest to cleanse one’s soul than these short-sighted, who will trade music and science for occupational malevolence.
Let them not be those who lead the charge. That being said, you now know what we need to do to preserve the peace, and win the song of the world.
Linda Imbler’s poetry collections include nine published paperbacks: Big Questions, Little Sleep First Edition, Big Questions, Little Sleep Second Edition; Lost and Found; Red Is The Sunrise; Bus Lights; Travel Sight; Spica’s Frequency; Doubt and Truth; A Mad Dance; and Twelvemonth.. Soma Publishing has published her four e-book collections, The Sea’s Secret Song; Pairings, a hybrid of short fiction and poetry; That Fifth Element; and Per Quindecim. Examples of Linda’s poetry and a listing of publications can be found at lindaspoetryblog.blogspot.com
The sky remained closed all day and without much success we invoked Satan. None of us knew how, so to pass the time until we could start drinking in earnest we talked about people of old and how they were crushed by the elements, the planets in their eternal orbits, the moon in its orbit and the sun that rose time and again, shining on us and then setting again, each time at a different time, boys we were, almost men.
Manual for cleaning a bunch of sprat
With a wooden handcart we brought bales of wood shavings and sawdust to the smokehouse where my uncles hung herring and mackerel on skewers between blackened brick walls over smouldering fires.
Herring swam in dense schools beyond the Dogger Bank, mackerel closer to the coast. Boats brought the catch ashore in wooden barrels for further processing in the semi-dark shadow realm that since disappeared like its ghosts.
Winter in Holland
Displaced trains, orphaned rails, travellers lost, the despair of forgotten platforms, drivers hibernate, gates frozen solid, ticket machines of no further use, announcements once announced fail to materialize, no one can get a signal here, everything is snowed over and wild animals play on abandoned tracks throughout the whole of Holland.
After the storm
On the beach, the high-water mark, Unrecognizable fragments connected in a deathly grey tangle under a sky swept clean. Seagulls. Some movement left in the surf, remnants of storm and gusts of wind extinguish in the white breaking of waves as far as the eye can see skeletons of ships thrown on the beach, sea monsters, shells, carbide white as snow, planks eaten by the salt seawater. Ship’s wood. Flotsam.
Enno de Witt is a published Dutch author and poet, an artist and musician, webmaster and editor. For him, writing poetry is a sheer necessity, like breathing, sleeping, drinking and eating. His poetry is founded on the bedrock of the classics, Dutch as well as international, and revolves around the Eternal Questions, often using imagery pertaining to his younger years, growing up on the seashore amongst wild heretics.
You can find more of Enno’s work here on Ink Pantry.
