Lying under the duvet as cosy as a dormouse, toes snug within the solitude house.
Silence settles slowly along the wishing line: forgiveness needs to be kind, is nestled blind.
The carpenter and friend
The oldish chap naps, a gentle snore, no more than that; his rocking chair the other chap made.
When the oldish chap wakes, they play a game of chess; idle some chat, agree a draw. The other chap naps.
A Bricklayer Retires
This wall has legs. The coffin tread of bricks on grass is a stubborn stain. But walls do stumble, grass does grow. Your smile will trouble any wall.
I hear your dancing steps across the landing floor. I grip my wall. The humble grass is greening doors. Your smile will crumble any wall.
Phil Wood was born in Wales. He has worked in statistics, education, shipping, and a biscuit factory. His writing can be found in various publications, including: Fevers of the Mind, London Grip, Snakeskin Poetry, Clementine Unbound, Miller’s Pond, Allegro.
You can find more of Phil’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Our daughter and her husband Came up this year To help open the cottage And by the time we arrived Had done things we used to do: Got the kayaks from the guest room Down to the dock, Swept up the thick yellow pollen Left on the porch By a New Hampshire spring, Discarded the paper and mothballs In which the furniture had slept.
We are older than my parents were The last time they drove north.
We will pay to get some things done— Pine straw off the roof; Other things—the high windows That face the water—may not get done. I save for myself one task—I must: Putting up our sign At the head of the lane, our name, The metal loon looking down Toward the pond.
September
Our daughter came back up To help close the cottage. We sat down and watched her Wash the refrigerator.
82-year-old bones ache From cleaning, packing, lifting, From the subtle vibrations Of two days on the road.
We stood one cold morning By the side of The Third Connecticut Lake Wondering which would be The penultimate trip north.
Back at Golden Pines We are trying this morning To remember how things work, The TV, the toaster, Computer, coffee maker.
Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.
You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Leaving Manhattan, we hopped on the ‘7’ as the moon reappeared through the autumn of branches.
Ensconced in the smoke and the steam, your mid shelf cologne and acoustics of wheel clanking
screeches through the twilight of tunnels, we rode the downtown.
You got off on 3rd, leaving me hauling this vintage of books and the harvest of veggies we bought at that fair, plus you took my umbrella.
Leaning in for a kiss, I brushed back with a hand gesture, and knew the first date, would not have a follow up.
Betty’s dirty martini
Her last months, plagued with pain, tubes all in ties, and a myriad’s maladies, Betty, next door, now in hospice, whispers she’s ‘ready’.
Requesting a couple of beach days, 80 degrees, no wind, no clouds, sitting on shoreline with a dirty martini.
“Please water the lilacs on our mutual lawn, hon,”
“ and feed all the strays that frequent the cul-de-sac.”
She says she will signal when she arrives there, wherever ‘there’ is, with three yellow leaves on my porch steps.
The power of knitting
“Knit one, pearl two,” she clicked on the needles in repetitive rhythm and rhapsody, making those sweaters, afghans and baby booties.
When her hands grew arthritic and eyes clouded over, she vowed to to complete all her knitting, before her condition would doom her.
You had your first child. He went home in a blue and white cable stitch. I watched as you wrapped him in Grandma Kate’s blanket.
That super cone on the marquise
Pop says it’s the last time. It’s a three hour drive and they don’t need the aggravation. Mom says to ignore Uncle Bob; she visits to see Aunt Lenora.
They’re fighting up front, while me and the skinny sis are ignoring each other, with not much in common, ’til the big wheels roll by and we make
silly faces at them, unbeknown to her in a couple of years, we’ll we winking instead.
Dad pulls in for custard; a big super cone on the marquise, shouting in silver fluorescence.
Back in the car, the sis and I snicker, knowing too well, we’ll all be right back here again, in four or five Saturdays.
Letting go of the broom
It’s the third time it happened.
I spilled orange juice on her cherrywood floor, and she said not a word.
No sponge, no frenzied mop, no berating me to be careful.
Before that, I left fingerprints on her grandmother’s mirror.
I looked at my mom; she’s missing some beats, for the last month or so.
Six months before, she’s be on her knees, on the floor, scrubbing it silly with her tonic of brillo, bonami and bleach.
As it starts to sink in; she’s moving away from herself, as the years stop defying and become the conventional.
And maybe she is, but I’m not quite ready, to let go of that image of her and her pail full of prowess.
When not writing poetry, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting and drawing. She volunteers in animal rescue, and tends to a cat colony in the neighborhood. She lives by a beach town, which provides much of the inspiration for her art. Some of her poems have appeared in Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Spillwords, Origami Poem Project, and other special places. Her latest collection is On the whims of the crosscurrents, published by Red Wolf Editions.
your circle is a triangle this is my pile of moons
the unified heaven the name of the silence
the machine is boiling the numbers this old owl is the lantern
in the marigold half-pipe on the morning of the crying
the sound of the furniture of the brook (wear a new cape)
the slipping book of vowels is not moving thru the window the letter of the moon when I am the calm apple
a new apple for the paris & the london & that old world of the channel I become the clever alien when I see the street level world of the pines
I was the laughing huck of the old island we are here in the sweet dust of the something
another time is the layer of salt to feel a hundred more the french bread is the weather of the cardboard name
the grass in the gandalf rays
in the pines I saw a meteor shaking a glass I won a news trumpet
is that the worm of the winter dust? is that the paper of the doll?
to see a measurable nothing the breakfast of the cloud
why my copper is in the doritos that nectar could slow the earth
why it hums
J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poetry has appeared in many small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). His first full-length collection, entitled In Ghostly Onehead, is slated for a 2021 release by mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press. His work has recently appeared in E·ratio, Otoliths, and Word For/Word. Visit Madverse for more information and links to his published work. Nelson lives in Colorado, USA.
I’m ten, trying to sit still but my blinks grow long. I’m following crumbs from pew to balcony, dropping bulletins to watch them spin. The exhale of noise and rituals of hymnals begin.
I’d rather be zip-tied to the ladies room sink pipe. My Sunday nylons with toe seams make my feet squirm in my flats. I’m thirteen, hung over, my eyes too full of sun. There’s smoke in my hair like a stale hat.
Is God out the window in the parking lot? His voice in the foyer in the missionary map, on the lobby wall lined with colourful tracts? Sometimes God lives in my head, there last night when I snuck out and boys surrounded me, when I threw up in my sister’s bed.
Toss My Pics Like I Don’t Exist
Father, these years of silence I prefer to your vaults of verses and violence, words from your rotted tongue rip me for my faults off the family tree.
You scissored my form from the Xmas portrait, I took husband and sons with me.
Edges of my baby album are wavy with age. The cover’s mother duck pulls a train of chicks. I’m the one she dumped out and ditched.
Two lifetimes ago, Catherine Zickgraf performed her poetry in Madrid. Now her main jobs are to write and hang out with her family. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press.
The mist hangs heavy on the sodden fields, A shroud cloaking the world in soft grey muslin. Charcoal trees hold their bare branches up in supplication And each blade of chilled grass drips diamonds. A far off river of cold traffic is muffled thunder But all else is silence under the dead white mist; Only the sound of wetness seeping out and Stillness loitering under the trees, wrapped in cloud. Underfoot the mud is black and stiffly oozes, Half released from its armour of hard frost. Beneath the sharpness of jagged blackthorn twigs The green of returning spring flowers has faded grey And the grass shrinks back from the dark nakedness Of the tyre-ravished path and hoof-trodden mire. Only the tips of bluebell leaves and of arum lilies Stand green below the weeping hedgerow. A solitary robin hops from the blackthorn Picking its breakfast from the livid green moss And a chaffinch shouts his warning call from the ash tree. Piercing the misty shroud with the sound of light.
Sadly, Jan de Rhe-Philipe passed away recently. As a fellow student of the Open University, her poem was chosen for the first Ink Pantry anthology, back in 2012. We send our deepest condolences to Jan’s sister, Fleur.
I roll out the mist and the moon trickles down on my shoulder.
Each night I lose to another alphabet, another syllable, The slapping of stars on the mirror how all build this raga amidst chaos.
Your smile is like heart-shaped leaves and the wetness is on my palm, so many verses flower near bedside.
A solitary leaf waits with my words, stream path crossing is not as hard as you might think.
Kolkata High Street
Fine rain walks with the pedestrians, mirror halls and amber rooms shine with the shadows of back garden walls and noiseless leaves.
The flood of colours excavate the layers of the city, the allure of words collecting, from inside out, waits for a new language.
The footprints seek the light of a deeper place, commoners talk about freedom without compromise for good or evil- willing to be struck dumb.
Rumbles of cars on the street seek the meaning of memories, each trope comes close to song, the whispers write libretti, the music embraces the alphabets of evening.
A solitary flower tumbles from the long arms of the branch and then the ovation of the unknown birds splits the rainbow of night.
Like the hum of a taut string in the dark the city loves to sing his own words taking us down numerous mystic lanes and bye lanes.
Tête-à-tête
Every time we speak of darkness the metaphors are faced with the black and white lines the syllables pass through the grills with ease.
The street identifies the follicle of shadows and then becomes the domain of trivial, the tiny rafts of refuge knock the door.
Rain-puddles chisel the grey clouds the world dissects morning whispers with the weight of gravity and gravitas.
The proverbial truth hangs in a frame silent dawns rise above the bends of rivers, the soft reel runs out in haste.
Images draw the sky-blue kingfisher letting a little light in the dark chamber, count minutes to converse in sunbeams.
Gopal Lahiri is an Indian based bilingual poet, editor, critic and translator, published in Bengali and English language. He has authored 23 books to his credit. His poetry is also published across various anthologies and in eminent journals of India and abroad. His poems are translated into 14 languages.
Thwack! Performance piece disintegrates toes pointing in stubborn candle wick diary of a mad Madonna & child
Race to pomegranate shuffling board games: whack a mole!
Zeroing in on skull fracture summon enough airtight desk lamps to strut standing orange grove grooving sounds of escape blaring bam! bam!
looming diaphanous alabaster pole
Desk Drawer Enterprise
Carpenter bee dizzy adolescent scrape scrape scraping look at that woodwork! whew!
rope length hair lines criss to the crossing mannerisms spell grief X Y Z
Indifferent Lack of Initiative
Yoyo diatribe daughter of canned ham never had it so good as indifference
razor eyelash arm expanded the quiet is the pulse shivering magnetic field
Joshua Martin is a Philadelphia based writer and filmmaker, who currently works in a library. He is the author of the book Vagabond fragments of a hole (Schism Neuronics). He has had pieces previously published in E-ratio, Nauseated Drive, Fixator Press, The Vital Sparks, and Breakwater Review among others.
her hair tumbles blowing like unfurled cotton through unforgotten fumbles in vegetation of our own interpretation of each other in the dark.
my desk grown out of a tree sown from my lover where i carved these words in the bark sitting in her branches knowing what life is all about as i look out of wooded windows
and absorb it’s shows as it goes through each obscenity of extreme supremacy- a woman must not let a man forget she is a suffragette in her soul and under his blanket so never kept
or chatteled forever to the custom weather of his debt.
A Woman Does Not Have To Wait
under the old canal bridge you said so i can hear the echoes in your head repeating mine this time when it throws our voices from roof into water where i caught her reflection half in half out of sunshine. that’s when i hear Gerschwin playing his piano in you working out the notes to rhapsody in blue that makes me float light and thin deep within through the air when you put your comforts there. Waits was drinking whisky from his bottle while i sat through old days with Aristotle knowing i must come up to date because a woman does not have to wait.
The Two Saltimbanques
when words don’t come easy they make do with silence and find something in nothing to say to each other when the absinthe runs out.
his glass and ego are bigger than hers, his elbows sharper, stabbing into the table and the chambers of her heart cobalt clown without a smile.
she looks away with his misery behind her eyes and sadness on her lips, back into her curves and the orange grove summer of her dress worn and blown by sepia time
where she painted her cockus giganticus lying down naked for her brush and skin, mingling intimate scents undoing and doing each other.
for some of us, living back then is more going forward than living in now and sitting here-
at this table, with these glasses standing empty of absinthe, faces wanting hands to be a bridge of words and equal peace as Guernica approaches.
Hopper’s Ladies
you stay and grow more mysterioso but familiar in my interior- with voices peeled full of field of fruiting orange trees fertile to orchard breeze soaked in summer rains so each refrain all remains.
not afraid of contrast, closed and opened in the past and present, this isolation of Hopper’s ladies, sat, thinking in and out of ifs and maybes in a diner, reading on a chair or bed knowing what wants to be said to someone who is coming or gone-
such subsidence into silence is a unilateral curve of moments and movements that swerve a straight lifetime to independence in dependence touching sublime rich roots then ripe fruits.
we share their flesh and flutes in ribosomes and delicious shoots that release love- no, not just the fingered glove to wear and curl up with in a chair, but lovingkindness cloaked in timeless density and tone in settled loam- beyond lonely apartments in skyscrapers and empty newspapers, or small town life gutting you with gossips knife.
Oviri (The Savage – Paul Gauguin in Tahiti)
woman, wearing the conscience of the world- you make me want less civilisation and more meaning.
drinking absinthe together, hand rolling and smoking cigars- being is, what it really is- fucking on palm leaves under tropical rain.
beauty and syphilis happily cohabit, painting your colours on a parallel canvas to exhibit in Paris the paradox of you.
somewhere in your arms- i forget my savage self, inseminating womb selected by pheromones at the pace of evolution.
later. I vomited arsenic on the mountain and returned to sup morphine. spread ointments on the sores, and ask: where do we come from. what are we. where are we going.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
Acrobats abound on the benches of the transit lounge. Everyone else is staying clear, washing their hands in rosewater or anointing their brows with the blood of pygmy possums. Curtains are drawn across the picture wind- ows, dampening down the noise
of luggage trolleys, keeping out the sun. It may be we are all waiting for flights out; but since there are no flights scheduled out into the future, this may be where we have decided to make a stand.
The Councilman, in his tutu
The tractors have all escaped & run off into the forest, or so the mayor tells me. They’re John Deere, green, which makes them hard to see though I do hear them turning pirouettes at night. The elephants are annoyed, & jealous. Not be-
cause the tractors are destroying most of the foliage available for foraging. Turns out the tractors can perform a plier- retirer far better than even the most delicate of pachyderms.
The King James Version
It becomes obvious that saving your sex life is more important than saving your soul when you see in a com- posite advertisement of available titles that the price of a book on breast
augmentation is over six times the cost of the Bible. Mind you, those perky nipples on the cover do make it the more attract- ive proposition of the two.
Alpenstock
Today the postwoman brought me an elephant. “What’s this?” I asked. “Wondered if you were interested in a pet,” she replied. “It was thrown out from a house earlier on my round. A big guy
lives there, named Hanni- bal. Apparently he’s down- sizing after a trip across the Alps, & there wasn’t room in the room for both him & the elephant.”
Mark Young’s The Toast will be published by Luna Bisonte Prods in a few months time. Recent poems have appeared, or are to appear, in Word For/Word, Die Leere Mitte, Home Planet News Online, experiential-experimental-literature, Utsanga.it, Hamilton Stone Review, & BlazeVOX, amongst other places.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
