Mary’s without a second care Every animal’s fault The art of man Barring the Bees Ship of the streets Brutes of the field Ambulating, acquaintance, passionately Friendly fashion indubitable Making her look sideways at me Hankering new vistas Had her father’s gift Irish exquisite, variations
Sleepy Whale 248
What did you see on the range? In your father’s house Your dying sister in the kitchen Her point of junction Flow from Round wood Revivers Liner aqueduct yard exultance Did it flow, subterranean bounty Fallen below the sill Water works unshed tears Lay in the glen of the downs Prolong the summer’s doubt
Sleepy Whale 407
Granite rocky mountain’s Utah High Best Snow on Earth anywhere Gloved hand, Cast Iron pan to fry Message from Salvation Auctioneer Lime-Green-Jell-O Frog Prince lie She began to weep, wept an embrace Be-mused over his limp wet rag Shifty looking fellow playing the base Drinking beer in an Irish Pub we all brag Un-hasty friendliness to face She melt a hearts of stone, rich silk stockings nag
Sleepy Whale 427
Sleepwalk to the grave, buried last evening Wayne’s hand on his quest Brightness of the stained glass Haunting girlish shyness drinking beer Instantaneous smoking effigy Proceeding the sage sloops heard of Deer Dark woman and fair man seated at Mass Witchy bluest Irish blue eyed volunteer
Sleepy Whale 435
Shadows over her childhood’s crest Her eyes glistering with tears last evening Slightly flecked hair with gray, a long kissed guest Gazing out the window’s Azul Glass Have mercy, her end so near Holiday’s lattice window Mass Verge of tears, sighted eyes volunteer
Terry Brinkman has been painting for over forty five years. He started creating poems. He has five Amazon E- Books, also poems in Rue Scribe, Tiny Seed, Jute Milieu Lit and Utah Life Magazine, Snapdragon Journal, Poets Choice, In Parentheses, Adelaide Magazine, UN/Tethered Anthology and the Writing Disorder.
You can find more of Terry’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Fish and chips on a plate A meal meant for me But I was late Wait… I wasn’t
A misunderstanding Clear to see But fate already awaited me
Back of my head Fistful of hair Thrust my face in that plate right there
Fish, chips, and mushy peas embedded my face with apparent ease
But that wasn’t enough to vent your rage Slapping followed Head to toe Bladder reacted and let it flow
The shame, the pain, Still felt today Memories Never go away…
Gail Thornhill is a bookworm from Cheshire. Her best subjects at school were English Language and Literature. She has always enjoyed reading, fact, fiction, and poetry.
My grandmother was asked as a young woman by her young son:
What do you want for Christmas besides world peace?
The anecdote survived for decades in my family.
Tonight I realize it said more about her than I had seen:
she was born just after the First World War, her Cold War Catholic parenting
was unafraid of the Red menace—
she didn’t want to frighten her children about the Communists,
she had been able to vote, she had made something,
call it a difference.
Negation
Twilight— there are many brief hues to it—
Covid Winter
My grandmother would carefully select Hallmark cards with the appropriate words for the recipient and occasion.
I defended Hallmark for this reason— without the detail that this was my grandmother, she was a possible person in my comment—
I defended Hallmark to my literature teacher in college and he said, with a laugh,
“If you have to rely on Hallmark, you’re in trouble.”
My son’s world history teacher showed his class a Hallmark movie today at the end of the semester,
and she told them all that she and her husband love to watch Hallmark movies together.
We laughed at them afterwards in my son’s room, gentle, brief, slightly sad laughter.
And I walked in the cold darkness of December tonight and prayer graced me
and language itself died like night at the dawn and was reborn in the unspeakable pain of the dying.
Christmas Lights
I am proud of the dark houses, their hopefulness—
Letter against Anger to the Daughters of George Hoshida
Begin with the beauty of smallness: on the evening of the convergence, on the longest night of the year, winter solstice, my children and wife looked for the bright planets coming together, joining, and they could not find them in the dark winter sky.
The vastness of the universe has for decades seemed to me annihilating, the dark everywhere around us— so that meaning would become as if it never was if I thought about that emptiness for too long.
But tonight I discovered how small I am, my loves and worries, and realized that it is, despite this, more than nothing, my life, my family and my home, my being, my human body and soul, truly small though I am in the winter solstice of space.
Your father had every reason to be enraged, imprisoned as he was simply for being Japanese in Hawaii— losing his oldest daughter from whom he was separated— and through it all he kept drawing,
mostly human figures, as he had been taught by correspondence school, often three of them sharing a loose-leaf page— maybe there was a rageful healing thoroughness there, assembling families of separate figures again and again, like laughter occupying each body until its independence was complete.
Brian Glaser has published three books of poems and many essays on poetry and poetics.
I try to cover my ears with floating images of you
But on the stage of boring energy, I can’t escape from the applause
I don’t know what to sing I don’t know how to dance
The applause never ceases
It looks as if endless discord dives into me
Lips of Summer
Lips of summer kiss my eyelids fiercely
I feel the heat I feel the beats
Waves of vehemence and ripples of softness mix on my eyelids, then, I’m soaked in a curtain like fire
Yuu Ikeda is a Japanese based poet. She loves writing, reading mystery novels, and drinking sugary coffee. She writes poetry on her website. Published poems are in Nymphs, Sad Girl Review, and JMWW.
Parts of the morning collide with the eventual winner
of the home & away series. Not much is left. A few shards
cause craters in the eyes, a part- pennant does pennance as it
wraps around the nearest set of ankles. Then a dog sled ar-
rives, still moist with snow. We welcome it with closed arms.
elephant cup cakes
‘ Pachyderms and pastry! I love it.’ Tom Beckett
That a pachyderm is highly comp- etitive in the global pastry market does not adequately capture the true sense of how unlikely scenarios such as this are. Those Instagram influencers who talked this up were all probably tickled by the ivory. Money may have changed hands. But the natural attri- butes of the animal are ideal for the task — tusks, tail, trunk; all master mixers — why be surprised? & those feet! Pancakes galore. The perfect size for carving out cheesecake casings.
A line from Billie Jean King
An exciting update is coming. A chart’s been prepared to illustrate the main points. Small popups will appear that use
colour & typography to provoke a psychological reaction. There’s certainly a place for that, simple or complex, since we are both
made up of energy & used to the use of icons to represent emotions. It won’t be that long before you have command of
the update, can use all parts of it intuitively. Savour the small win — this victory is fleeting. Another update is now only days away.
Hosomaki
The queue outside the sushi bar melts into one another as the bagpipes suddenly arrive. Raw fish & rice is no match for tartan, even one only rarely worn. That’s the
problem with living in a garrison city — too many con- tradictions, too much bias. Too few true conflicts. Which is why the military make what they can out of what’s available.
A Paumanok Picture
Later, when the road had opened,
Walt Whitman was allowed to pass.
Mark Young was born in New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for over sixty years, & is the author of around sixty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, creative non-fiction, & art history. His most recent book is The Sasquatch Walks Among Us, from sandy press, available through Amazon.
You can find more of Marks’ work here on Ink Pantry.
the almost and the always and the never and then everything in between
close yr eyes
do you see now?
let the map take you from here to there
let the desert be your starting point and your destination
no walls and no water
no true purpose
you’ll live and you’ll die just like the rest of us
you’ll be forgotten
maybe you already are
golgotha postcard
pilate shot through the throat and then the crows at his heart
the dogs drinking his tears
grow up fast or not at all, right?
a lifetime of dying played out in the space of an hour and i forget if i ever told you i loved you that summer
i forget if you were the one who taught me how to bleed
was too busy making promises that turned without effort into such heartfelt lies
muted splendour
and then dali grows old and then dali dies and i am left in this room with your sister
says she’s cold, but she won’t get dressed
won’t get up off the floor
just tells me she hates me while i kneel down to kiss her feet
modigliani’s gun
barefoot on broken glass at the end of november and maybe it feels as good as a bullet through god’s filthy heart
maybe only children will be killed in the war
each tiny death made into a movie and all of them playing in another room while we’re trying to sleep, and so how can you claim to be famous if no one wants to see you naked?
why would you keep on bleeding all over the carpet when it’s all you’ve been doing for the past 30 years?
there’s a got to be a better way for you to waste the rest of your life
first attempt at escape
late winter snow from dull pewter skies, driving west but never fast enough, laughs & tells me he’s the one who took the pennies from christ’s blind eyes
says he’s looking for a girl named jennifer to fall in love with then says the heater’s broke
tells me i look like shit
asks how long I’ve been bleeding to death
turns the radio up way too loud while i’m trying to think of an answer
westward
and then you and i and the sleeping face of christ, all of us radiant and each of us alone here in the sudden warmth of november, in the flickering shadows of falling leaves, beneath the ominous web of powerlines, blue sky reduced to meaningless geometry, startled birds, endlessly crashing planes and the children laughing, screaming, running home across barren fields or down haphazard sidewalks, the memory of their motion, the way i tell myself over and over again not to forget this moment and then the ease with which i forget it
the reasons i write these meaningless poems
the idea that maybe even one of them might find you
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A FLAG ON FIRE IS A SONG OF HOPE (2019 Scars Publications) and A DEAD MAN, EITHER WAY (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).
You can find more of John’s work here on Ink Pantry.
We have taken to living life as if it were jazz rouging wan days with bright notes born from barren weeks
hollow as the tin-can lanterns recycled and strung up in the spindly birch trees by kids, next door. Each cylinder’s dark interior is pierced with geometric patterns so they gleam with empty space marking out the night with absence, as death is cut into our lives.
We philander from the garden and let it straggle, feeding on its own leaves, drunk with fermenting sugars set to sweeten autumn without us.
Grief’s time-signature surges days in eight bar riffs dubbing evenings to waves of past voices – ghosts we drink to extinction – and stand at last in the darkness of a new street awake and broken with dawn.
Unbearable Lightness
I lent Kundera’s novel, and then separately, a pair of daisy spotted culottes (smart enough for an interview) to friends light enough not to return, their words, ceiling trodden and walked to air.
I find I still wonder where the pages spore their print in absence from my shelf as if they were chilli pepper seeds – papery and disk like skimming ideas to flame even after they are eaten and gone.
And whether clothes absorb memories with their wear to larger shapes, stained and stretched to age.
The rails of thrift shops hung, heavy and spooling sky, touched, scraped with the beyond of these days.
Somerset
The plough’s metal ribs are turned to the sky. Rust flakes in fingernails from the iron core of abandoned machinery amongst the unmown grass sprung with daisies and summery warmth. Flattened clouds rule the sky, pulled taut as clavichord strings that hum with a storm’s jigger at the afternoon and its wobble of espaliered peaches. We run barefoot with the children, laughing, circuiting the field, drunk with exertion, feeling the rub of damp roots fleck with the music of first rain.
weather charts blue sky to numbers rain blurs us
False Advertising
Billboards feather boa the street taxiing minds and high balling eyes to palm tree spas kissed with sangria and sunshine’s strut in snakeskin thigh highs.
The adverts promise the everything of lies to anoraked pavements apace with slow stepped lives loitered with the fur of Friday night zooms and the lurch between stops to and from home in buses pelted in more soft sell.
the earth a dream mumbled in pentameter curved, foetal and asleep beneath a tarred city’s rumble
Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. She lives in London with her husband, two children, and two very lovely, crazy cats.
That line, that grey smudge, in the sky—like a shadow of something moving out beyond the world Was it a passing ship? A sail wide as limbo The mind reels at the distances, knowing they can only be fiction, that only the self is real
Lost now (because a petrified forest is really just a field of rocks) I sit down in the shadows of the palm fronds reaching over me with dagger fingers What am I—but a sinking wetlands, methane-rich refuse rotting into usefulness? Or really I think I am the output of some formula—a reductive algorithm Definitions slip through the cracks between their own words, eel-slick and mucosal It’s June now, and this too must pass, this uncertainty Things do, pass, always
Richard Helmling is a teacher and writer living and working in El Paso, Texas.
A morning shower barely has left a print on dry earth
& now a bright breeze dances joropo around us, around
Mónico playing mandolin his aged-mahogany face wrinkled in a tranquil smile Around cuatro & guitar caja drum & maracas
A bottle of cocuy passes ’round an anciana sings, her cinnamon hands clapping Women chat, adjusting costumes a child cries & is comforted
Rosa the singer & Luis the spoon-player begin to dance amidst us Fine soil billows ’round their steps & twirls
joropo – traditional music & dance of Venezuela, originating in the llanos region cuatro – a four-string instrument like a small guitar caja – box cocuy – an alcoholic brew of a cactus plant anciana – old woman
Golfo de Morrosquillo (Tolú)
Full moon rises above tejas & thatch roofs The gulf rolls evenly around the breakwaters onto the grey sand A crab flees from the rising tide
Families take a dip in the night-darkened waters stroll on the seawall, the beach Three boys play kickball with a plastic bottle
Along the malecón scented by grilled foods people eat & drink Bicycle taxis pass & horse-drawn carriages, the clop of hooves lost to Music blaring from restaurants & discos Vendors spread their cloths with jewellery, incense under streetlamps Women yet corn-row hair with quick molasses- coloured fingers Sunglass salesmen walk café to bar
& the musicians still wander accordion ’round neck, caja drum, guarachaca stick in hand
Magdalena Sunset
(Mompox, Colombia)
Waterlilies float swiftly by on the river’s current. Bells clang for mass at Santa Bárbara church.
In front of a colonial house on the river walk speakers blare music, Inside, amidst balloons & streamers children sing a birthday.
Dressed in vivid paisley, shoulders stooped with passed generations, doña Julia sits on the steps to the río, talking to herself.
Two Scottie dogs laze in a window niche of their ochre home trimmed melon & jade. One rests his muzzle on the wrought-iron grill.
With a splash of water, a man jumps from the jetty. Dulled light of almost-evening sheens on his tanned skin.
The boats have abandoned this narrow channel of the Magdalena & this terminal stained white concrete & brick flaking, vacant windows staring.
In the cool evening sung by gecko, toad & cricket, a boy sends his kite aloft. Families chat outside in caned chairs, a foursome plays Parcheesi on an iglesia patio.
The disappeared sun paints loud indigo & purple reflecting in the swift water. Shadow-treed banks reflecting waterlilies still floating by.
& some other church clangs its bells for mass.
Enter Iris and Luna, Stage Front
In a momento the town is plunged in inky darkness.
Scattered whistles & cheers echo down the streets, echo the groans of men, their TV soccer game disappeared before their eyes.
These lanes fill with families & couples who watch the
Stars emerge, now freed from the glare of streetlamps, sparse clouds brightened by the full moon.
A chubby-cheeked boy points at her, Look, la Luna has an Arco Iris!
Surrounding her, a moonbow paints this chill night, auguring rains to come before the dawn.
La Boca Summer Day
I. On the Caminito
Corrugated tin of ex-convetillos is painted in a circus of colors.
Artisan stalls umbrellaed beneath the clouded sun.
Tourists sip wine at café tables.
A couple is packing their jambox & CDs. Slight wind flutters high split skirt, caresses her legs, fishnet stockings.
II. Behind the Façade
Along the cobbled streets the tin of shacks is anemic. Crumbled balconies, rickety steps, eaten bannisters. Doors with missing slats open to the breeze off the rotted Riachuelo. Glimpses of cramped rooms beyond curtains.
Upon littered walks sit families at card tables, bottles of beer & mates at hand.
In an empty niche of the Bombonera, a man sleeps on a broken vinyl couch, zipper open below his bloated paunch. A caked glass set on a crooked table.
Across a high-weed lot, boys kick a soccer ball & there yonder a group plays volleyball over a frayed net.
On this humid summer day in La Boca …
La Boca – a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires; birthplace of the tango
Caminito – “the little street,” name bestowed by a tango song; now a tourist hub, frequently portrayed in photos of Buenos Aires
conventillos – tenements with small, cell-like rooms in which late-19th / early-20th century immigrants lived
mates – a mate is the container (often made from a gourd) from which yerba mate (Paraguayan tea) is sipped through a bombilla (a metal straw with a strainer)
Bombonera – “the candy box,” the nickname of the home stadium of Bocas Juniors, the world-renowned soccer team of LaBoca
Wandering troubadour Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear in over 250 journals on six continents; and 18 collections of poetry – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019) and Escape to the Sea (Origami Poems Project, 2021). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. In March 2011, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada honored her verse. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful travel companion, Rocinante (that is, her knapsack), listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.
i wait on the stairs for the police to come they arrive and take a statement from me
they don’t seem concerned or shocked and say there is nothing suspicious about it
it happens daily with foreigners and locals and at this guest house all the time
and that there is a batch of gear in Delhi from Pakistan that is extra strong and cheap
two young guys died in the tunnel before and last night a tourist in a five star hotel
i ask them if i can leave the city now that i was heading off when i found him
the two cops look at each other and one says it will be easier for me if i help them out a bit
he puts out his hand and i know what for i pay the baksheesh with a fifty dollar note
they thank me genuinely and wish me luck i pick up my bag and walk down the hall
the guy’s body is being taken out on a stretcher Om Namah Shivaya i say and walk away
at the train station i wonder about the guy’s life and if anyone will tell his family he’s dead
i reflect on the two times i smoked heroin decades ago at the same Delhi guest house
i never touched it again as its power grabbed me and i knew continuing it was wrought with risk
magic
he smiles
i smile float my eyes into his
he walks to my table amongst the people and booze clutter doesn’t say anything when he gets to me taps my shoulder gestures me to stand i do
and heart banging follow him mesmerised into a small room off the back of the bar where an overhead fan clicks
we don’t speak a magic sits in the silence between us a mouse scampers behind the sideboard he ignores it and turns the key locks the door stands still looking at me steps into me stares into my eyes
we are joined by an unseen force
his phone gives a church bell chime he says a few words into it in his language clicks it off
touches me lightly on the shoulder unlocks the door
we go back out to the bar
crowds separate us in a flood of bodies and voices.
Stephen House is an award winning Australian playwright, poet and actor. He’s won two Awgie Awards (Australian Writer’s Guild) , Adelaide Fringe Award, Rhonda Jancovich Poetry Award for Social Justice, Goolwa Poetry Cup, Feast Short Story Prize and more. He’s been shortlisted for Lane Cove Literary Award, Overland’s Fair Australia Fiction Prize, Patrick White Playwright and Queensland Premier Drama Awards, Greenroom best actor Award and more. He’s received Australia Council literature residencies to Ireland and Canada, and an India Asialink. His chapbook real and unreal was published by ICOE Press Australia. He is published often and performs his work widely.
