She finds her deepest breath. The blur of wings elates with dragonfly blue, detonates such joy. How can a child decode these winged clues? My daughter flaps her arms. I translate and learn how arms are wings to dissipate winter’s hue.
Dining At The Screech Owl Inn
Hands are a giveaway, he gloves indoors and out. No fingerprints, he jokes. He consumes that juicy rack of lamb, but leaves the veg. She doesn’t ask again. Besides the eagerness with which he licks and sucks those ribs tickle her: he thinks he is a predator, a lupus to her Lilith. She smiles, almost beguiles. He scents her feral breath, flinches, innocence plucked from his lycanthrope eye. He howls. She devours him.
Outlines
Long is the forest and wide, the sisterhood of stars like dregs consumed by clouds. On the paths of relief, a multitude of pines to ink more gloom.
Lost in the darkness and waking, she lightly sighs and turns her back on time. He lies on her floor and meanders tunes for sleep. He inks a path through pines.
Phil Wood was born in Wales. He studied English Literature at Aberystwyth University. He has worked in statistics, education, shipping, and a biscuit factory. He enjoys watercolour painting, bird watching, and chess. His writing can be found in various places, including recently: Ink Sweat and Tears, Streetcake magazine, The Dirigible Balloon.
You can find more of Phil’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Nathan Anderson is a poet from Mongarlowe, Australia. He is the author of Mexico Honey, The Mountain + The Cave and Deconstruction of a Symptom. His work has appeared in Otoliths, BlazeVox, Beir Bua and elsewhere. You can find him at nathanandersonwriting.home.blog or on Twitter.
Racquets she said, even though there was no tennis going on.
Or maybe it was rackets, & she was talking about the noise up the road, or the way that local builders get their plans through council despite breaching nearly every bylaw in the book.
Could have been Reckitts, left up for me to interpret which among their products I’m in dire need of — condoms, antiseptic lotions, mustard, mouthwash, grime or pimple remover.
Then again, perhaps rickets, even though I’m not young — except in name — & any or all of the products listed above would have helped minimize or even remove that condition.
So, rockets. No, not that, her red glare tells me quite clearly.
Leaves only ruckets . . . But there’s no such word in general use, though it is a family name, & a brand of skates, &, if Google’s autocomplete is accurate, it might have something to do with tickets to the Rugby World Cup.
Though, wait. Because of this fuss I’m making over what the word in question is, I’ve just been accused of causing a ruckus. Perhaps that is what was intended all along.
Two poems from 100 Titles from Tom Beckett
27: Default Settings
Start at the end, my sensei told me, & work your way back. Then, once you’ve got there, start again & work your way even further back. Again & again, until there’s nowhere left to go. Then start again. This way or that is immaterial.
28: Spacing Out in Space
The stars have temporarily gone out, & I have drifted in the sub- sequent darkness. Am back in that art-inspired social diner in Bangkok — or was it on Tatooine? — gazing at
the wall, unconsciously memorizing the sign that states the place is avail- able for brunch, lunch, & dinner, as well as open for home deliveries between 8:00 am & 10:00 pm. Such
is life on the final frontier. Nothing to see when you’re going at super- luminal speeds, not even the imposs- ible linear light of stars passing by in the way that old tv series used to
imagine might happen. Nothing to do except tune out, or else turn on Net- flix or Disney+, because, as they say, in Space, when you’ve got your ear- buds in, nobody can hear you stream.
Amazone
Some time later, when the karaoke machines
started calling to one another, she packed up
her respirator & its axled oxygen cylinder &,
with a tetrapak of re- constituted Brazilian
orange juice for guidance, headed for the jungle.
From the Pound Cantos: CENTO XXXII
I don’t know what they are up to. It wd/ seem unwarr- anted. Read one book an hour, less a work of the mind than of affects, but enough to keep out of the briars. The people are addicted. Life & death are now equal, no favour to men
over women. Boat fades in silver; slowly. Let no false colour exist here. Behind hill the monk’s bell borne on the wind. The bamboos speak as if weeping. Of this wood are lutes made.
Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for more than sixty years, & is the author of around sixty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
She’s dead, but her Facebook page is still alive, still there, no comments, pictures, likes deleted. Her friends leave her messages today, wish her a Happy Heavenly Birthday.
I stick to the living with my birthday blessings, but pause at the names of the dead on my list of friends, eight of them gone. A few classmates from 50 years ago. An old boyfriend. A poet friend. My father.
I click on their profiles, feel a stab, as if they want something from me. I could post an emoji: a glass of wine to celebrate a loved one. A row of red hearts.
A pang, a longing—but also a lifting, as if I’m being welcomed, taken by the arm, pulled a little closer. There they are, smiling, hugging spouses, grandchildren, pets. My father in his red suspenders, my mother at his side. Happy, healthy. No walker in this picture, no sign of Parkinson’s.
I am not ready—yet—to wish him, my atheist father, a Happy Heavenly Birthday. Still, I’d rather visit him on Facebook than in the cemetery.
Missing You
You missed the war, Da. You died a month before Russia invaded Ukraine— not that the world was at peace when you left it.
I miss the depth of you, Da. It helped, in our moments of joy or sadness, to feel the warmth of you sharing our ups and downs. It helped, in this falling-apart world, to know you were there, thinking about things— able, somehow, with just the right comment, to clear a path for us through the mud, the mess.
We are making a book of your Potpourri essays: your thoughts on everything from truth and gratitude to old clothes, words, politics, aging. I am the proofreader, mostly adding or removing commas, dashes, spaces—the little things you were sometimes careless about.
Who knew your last days would be spent wilting on a bed in the hospital where you worked? Small, thin, shrunken, you lay curled like a comma beneath the blanket. I want to believe you ended your story with a comma, Da, not a period. A comma is a promise, more is coming. Your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren will continue the story,
The Language We Speak
I don’t speak her language, but she speaks mine. We bond within seconds, joking that we’re the only two grandmas in Playa Venao, haven for surfers and lovers of nature and music on the beach.
She is Fatima, who grew up in Paraguay, one of ten siblings in her Catholic family. I am American, Jewish, my second home in Israel. She laughs, says we have nothing in common.
Maybe not, but we talk and talk, share the stories, the lessons of our lives until it’s clearer and clearer: we do speak the same language, but it’s not about the English she learned from her years in England. We speak the language of coffee and cake. My son calls it a playdate when I meet her for cappuccino at her daughter-in-law’s Cafe. We agree that coffee without cake is boring, so we share a slice: chocolate, pumpkin, or passion fruit. We speak the language of walks on the beach, flip flops in our hands at the edge of the sea. The language of mothers and grandmothers, the ones who come running to help, who stay for months if we’re needed and wanted. The language of women growing older. We have seen what life has to offer: the joys and heartaches. We take what comes, as long as there’s coffee and cake and a friend at our side when discussing men or kids or the white age spots on our legs as we laugh and console and laugh some more.
I Will Remember Tomatoes
Is this how it begins? A name gone AWOL. Fog. A blank stare. Twice this week I’ve had to ask my daughter what the weird-looking vegetable in our fridge is called. Pale green, round and tough, leafy stems sticking out. Kohlrabi. Kohl-rabi. Will it help next time if I think of a rabbi? I am certain I will always remember tomatoes, lodged firmly in my mind with cucumbers, spinach, cilantro—but endives are slowly slipping away, and it takes me a minute to name an artichoke, my least favourite vegetable, bitter when I scrape each leaf with my teeth.
I remember Mrs. Mosely, my first grade teacher and how she visited me in the hospital when I had my tonsils out, but most of my college professors are hiding with kohlrabi in the place of forgotten things.
I want to remember kohlrabi the way I remember my tenth grade biology teacher— not what he taught us, but how he held his hand out and rubbed his fingernails with his thumb while he lectured. I want to remember my teacher— but not the crash that killed him when his car hit a deer. Not the sleepless nights when I couldn’t stop thinking about him and his long-haired son: my crush, a witness to his father’s death. Will I ever forget how he barely spoke to me after the accident? How he favoured someone else?
Tongue and Throat
For Irene
Sometimes my friend is a bonfire. Her laughter blazes, warms, lights the dark. Sparks mirth all around till I’m glowing too.
Sometimes she’s a wildfire, worry raging up and down the hills of her life, burning all hope—a charred earth left behind as she imagines the worst, always the worst.
I feel the first hint of heat when she fears there’s something in her throat. Hotter when the doctor spots it on an X-ray: a small, globular mass in her neck at the base of her tongue. Mass, she says, choking on terror, as if the word is poison and can’t possibly mean anything but cancer of the throat or vocal cords.
Google doesn’t help. Surgery, disfigurement. Tongues cut out. Vocal cords excised. Succumb to silence? She’d rather die, she tells me, than lose her tongue.
Five days after her birthday, she’s headed to a specialist for a scope—and, most likely, a biopsy.
Flickers! Flares! Orange leaping and dancing when I read her text: no need for a biopsy. Not cancer. Not. Not. I call her to celebrate. Balloons for her being wrong again. Still alive, still talking. A toast to her tongue, to this birthday blessing, her best gift this year: a cyst, benign, harmless. Who could ask for more?
Lori Levy‘s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Mom Egg Review, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel. Work has also been published in medical humanities journals and has been read on BBC Radio 4. Lori lives with extended family in Los Angeles, but “home” has also been Vermont, Israel, and, for several months, Panama.
Hunter Boone has worked as an attorney and private investigator, and lives and works in Kalamazoo, MI. He now concentrates his work primarily on poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in Ink Pantry, The Opiate Magazine, Rougarou, Projected Letters, Former People, West Trade Review and others. When he is not writing he enjoys playing the piano and composing music on his Yamaha P-125 keyboard.
Tell us about your debut poetry collection, Breakfast With Unicorns
Breakfast With Unicorns is a quintessential amalgam that showcases my best work over the past thirty years. Its subject matter includes poems of loss and longing, rejection and sorrow and I think its theme (if there is a theme to it) is one that invites the reader to confront our existential predicament – the predicament of being human in a too frequently inhumane world, a world that we are thrown into, ready or not.
Could you share one of your poems and walk us through the idea and inspiration behindit?
Well, yes – for starters, who hasn’t had a crush at one time or another on a brilliant, seemingly unobtainable professor? Or maybe this is just my unique, self-inflicted penchant for suffering. At any rate, I think my poem, “Ms. Alligator” illustrates the kind of frustration and disillusionment that is often the result of an unrequited love or mis-matched affection:
Ms Alligator
She had the emotional presence of a toothpick, the personality of a comatose eel . . .
A woman I desired read Antigone which she encouraged me to do, so I did. When I came upon, “Teiresias,” I said, “I can’t spell that,” she said, “Look it up.” Somewhere.
She became that woman you wouldn’t expect – out of proportion to everything else.
When she moved her body slid – of a piece – which caused a problem. The ground upon which she walked swayed and swelled people running, different directions up and down the boulevard while the other women – kinder, nobler, gentler with foreign accents showed themselves open, not nearly as dubious – yet this one stuck hardened within her molten core – sad – yet oh so beautiful in a glittering sort of way with
beckoning, surreal blue tourmaline eyes that rolled back into her head as she spoke incomprehensible
and inhuman things – enticements thick with ice from this sorry sophist and enigmatic soul you couldn’t poke through though I tried many times.
As the poem indicates, the woman who is the focus of the protagonist’s affection is cold and indifferent, reptilian. And yes, like a comatose eel.
The use of metaphor and simile illustrate the harsh reality of what the protagonist has endured as the result of this encounter and leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about the outcome; in the end the protagonist does not get the girl (or the reptile in this case).
The idea behind the poem is based on my personal experience of having gotten in “over my head” and fallen in love with my intellectual mentor, a professor who was at once beautiful yet unexpectedly cold. This is a modus operandi and course of action I do not recommend for anyone.
What’s your creative process?
My creative process often starts with a lyrical impulse, a phrase, or a poem title. The title or phrase typically comes out of an emotional experience or some intellectual matter that is yet unresolved within myself. I work out the poem as I write; it rarely comes, “full cloth.”
Tell us about your BA in Creative Writing.
I was extremely lucky (and there’s no other word besides “lucky” to describe it) to have had extraordinary mentors as an undergraduate. The most influential and helpful was Eve Shelnutt who was from South Carolina and taught for years at the College of the Holy Cross near Boston. She left me with many memorable lessons but her most valuable words, a kind of mantra I carry with me were:
“There’s nothing to replace a sense of integrity about one’s work.”
What are you reading at the moment?
I am currently reading the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I do think it’s important for a poet to find both poets and fiction writers to contribute to the poet’s repertoire. Especially with a writer like Fitzgerald, whose prose is lyrically haunting and so beautifully fluid. There is much to learn from many of these other great prose writers: Hemingway, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas Mann to name a few.
Have you any advice for budding poets?
Don’t listen to your parents. The ones who ask you to pursue and study something “more practical.” It’s fine to be practical and get a double major – like in business and creative writing – but don’t let the creative writing take a back seat to anybody or anything if poetry or some other writing genre is your first love.
Who inspires you and why?
My current publisher and friend, Trystan Cotten, founder and Managing Editor of Transgress Press. Trystan is truly an innovator and trailblazer and probably the hardest working person I know. He manages to solicit and publish new work from authors all over the world, many of whom are from marginalized communities. He manages to do this while at the same time carrying a full teaching load at Cal State University – Stanislaus where he is a full professor. And just when he gives you the impression he is “all work and no play” you find out that he has just left for a four-day trip to Maui to go surfing or is in Chicago to go “high-step dancing” with his friends. Unbelievable. I find him inspiring because he never seems to let anything get him down and he really does have this relentless work ethic and the gift (or the ability) to have fun and thoroughly enjoy himself no matter what he is doing.
What’s next for you?
I am always writing poems and will continue to write poems because they are relentless in their pursuit of me. A concept or an idea or a particular feeling or image will come to me and stay with me until I write it out and try to turn it into art or at least a meaningful encounter with language.
Alongside poetry, I am also working on a novel that has been in the works for over a decade. I am not an expeditious prose writer – far more the tortoise and not the hare. The novel is loosely based on my experience of growing up in a small town with lots of quirky characters and unexpected turns of plot. I hope to have it finished by summer of 2023.
You can find more of Hunter’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The only place it is a mountain is from our dock. Driving around, I have seen it from other angles, No more than undulations In the New Hampshire landscape. But across the pond it rises Gently, right to left, And runs asymmetrically along a ridge Perhaps a mile, Sloping down at last toward the big lake. It is the remembered view We carry home at the end of summer. In my binoculars I can see New A-frames in the high meadow On the near slope. I do not begrudge them their gated driveway, Their view of the pond, That they have taken up residence In our field of vision, Their binoculars trained, I suppose, on us.
At the Laundry
Summers I worked at the laundry, Money for college. This was in the ’50s, People still got polio then. We washed the dingy garments of the shoe towns (We still had them in New Hampshire then) And the fine percale of folk Down gated roads by the lake. The girls who did the folding (We called them girls then) Would offer coarse jokes About the bed sheets of the rich. And I, caught, then as now, Somewhere in the middle, Passed wrenches to Neil, our boss, As he straddled the ancient boiler, Expert turnings of things we chose to think Kept us from blowing up. He nursed and finally lost a son to polio. For forty years I went by his house And we would recall the ones Who ran the presses, fed the mangle. The laundry is gone, of course, Chiropractors and aromatherapists in its space; Gone, too, is Neil, my gentle friend, Who valued me in a fragile time, On hot July afternoons, Steamy with the innocent fragrance of Starch, fresh linen, decent toil.
By the Meadow: June 2007
Betsy Winbourne, now eighty, Rakes hay in the meadow at midday— You would not do this a month from now; Up from Boston, opening the cottage. No sign of the Woodleys; They say his tumour has come back, His fields thick with timothy and clover, In need of Seth to mow, If one knew where Seth had gone. I walk along the lane Gathering the winter’s news: Someone’s cellar flooded, Someone’s well has failed, Bears in the woods, taking out bird feeders. And yet: The young leaves, the greens, the light, So various, so fresh with innocent hope: It is early June in New Hampshire And the world seems possible.
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.
I have no clue what Krshna taught Arjuna but I like the name Atman a lot. Atman. Atman. Where a man is at. At all times. No matter what. Gita, get in the action, gorgeous girl, God is the answer, keep the meter.
Wisdom, none. What Krshna tells Arjuna makes no sense. I prefer mathematics. Knowledge of how things are made and done more than meditation on the Self as a manifestation of the One.
I’ll never have to leave this comfortable planet. We have this asset but can we sell it? In Paradise Lost, Satan executes his plan but God already knows all about it. Still, whether it succeeds or fails is up to Man. Same here, when it comes to nuclear armaments, a distraction from the work of making life permanent.
It is all premised on the mystery of invisible but sentient particles— little Krshnas and Kachinas nesting inside one another. Meanwhile life goes on outside all around you— WWII, the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War which we’re still fighting.
Krshna says behead your brothers without prejudice or justice. So it transpires in the nuclear fire. Whatever forever. Teacher, teacher—tiger!
On the Avenue
From marble and granite to steel and glass, we were discussing Rhina Espaillat’s On the Avenue in class, was it 1950s or 1980s NYC and were the fifties the city’s halcyon days or is it now, the 2020s, the boroughs teeming with immigrants from the round earth’s imagined corners, Hasidim and Muslim, Haitian and Russian, as we Italians and Irish in an earlier era were. Everything will be ok or not, the recombinations which make prediction and intuition fortunately hopeless and each individual an experiment gone well or wrong. On the avenue God speaks by spewing toy and clothing stores, breakdancers and ice skaters, the Brooklyn Navy Yard seen from the Brooklyn Bridge, the skyline admired when my car broke down on the Triborough Bridge. The numbers of us overwhelm, there exist powers overwhelming for the human body and mind. I don’t mind but I can’t make sense of it. Gandhi said What you do may not seem important but it is very important that you do it. By that what is meant? Linda said Why does God always have to be a man? I said He could be a She but she’s probably really a Tyrannosaurus rex. I like to be in America!
On Suffering
I waited too long to biopsy my lung yet lived long enough however long is long. Whatever. It’s not wrong to count along while busy living. Sing and stay strong absorb the sun’s photons and store them in your bones.
Those bones outlast slights and wrongs are white as lightning and strong as sticks and stones. Inside is one’s spirit, soul, the nameless one the one that’s never known. It has no cell phone can’t communicate or even moan. Therefore. Why complain? Have some fun.
Soon I’ll be undone underground my garden burned down. So what. John Donne died and so did Milton. Emerson too, and Whitman. Get over it. Vote. Love. When the train comes in the station whistle with it, wish on stars with passion or careful hesitation. Anything’s fine, within reason.
Season by season things get done. Algebra and calculus, Malcolm X, George Washington. No taxation without representation. A gun in every den. People will be governed one way or another, by a king or trusted friend. Corporation. Men are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Evils to which they are accustomed.
I’m too young to die! I cry. My generation cannot outrun the sun but I want to see what happens next, a tsunami or tornado, rain and wind beyond our comprehension hit in the head by speeding debris, irony of ironies! plastic contraptions, rotting computers and yogurt cups, pain in the baby! Moment’s notice. None, I notice, live long enough to see the end. A billion
years hence human sense has so modified and mutated under some other sun we share one mind and everything’s remembered by everyone. Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest. A perfect tan is possible, and work is fun. I’m going there when I pass on because souls will travel at warp speeds, using nuclear fission. About suffering, religion was right (and wrong) all along.
Robert Ronnow‘s most recent poetry collections are New & Selected Poems: 1975-2005 (Barnwood Press, 2007) and Communicating the Bird (Broken Publications, 2012).
The day it began; I was me. Mabel and I had fled the wages office of Tyrers department store, to the gardens in Palmer Square. We sat on the last vacant bench, amidst giggles, mid-conversations of folk out on a mid-summer’s lunchtime. Some were courting couples, office workers, and shop assistants, others, faded mothers chasing toddlers around pushchairs. The zing of mowed grass crashed with fumes of passing vehicles. I longed for a sea breeze and deckchair on Southport beach.
Mabel chattered away about her wedding plans, while I tugged a dog hair from my meat paste sandwich. I dragged my finger against the edge of the bench to hide the fur. Meat paste clogged the ridges of my palate, and I stretched another hair from my mouth, too long to be Albert’s. I glanced at Mabel’s ponytail.
“Are you not going to finish your sandwich? After I took the time to make it for you. Oh, did I mention my wedding will be in the grounds of Charles’s parents’ stately home in Cumbria?”
Mabel had finished her sandwich and sunk her teeth into a Vanilla slice. She held out a jam tart for me. I gagged on what remained of the bread and paste, swallowed hard, before I praised Mabel for making such a tasty sandwich. I took the tart. She continued to talk and talk enlightening me to how lucky Charles was that she had agreed to marry him. How he wasn’t the best-looking man, that, that wasn’t critical as he absolutely worshiped her. I responded in what I considered to be a polite way, by asking her a simple question.
“How come your Charles hasn’t been round ours to say hello?”
She’d been going on and on about Charles and the wedding since we met, on her first day in wages. That was a month ago. Within a week we had become best friends and flat mates, although I couldn’t recall agreeing to that.
Mable spat out the answer to my enquiry, her changed tone and menaced wide-eyed glare unnerved me. I felt I was the one in the wrong. She knew I hated being called Liz.
“Liz, really, why would I bring him around to meet you of all people.”
She sniggered while dabbing the sides of her upturned lips with a pink cotton napkin. My response, squashed by a battered self-worth. I retrieved the napkin she’d tossed onto the bench next to me and folded it before putting it into my handbag along with my pride.
“Oh, best be getting back, don’t want Miss Twist picking you up on your time keeping. Oh by the way, I’ve mentioned to Miss Twist you’ll do my late this Friday. Charles is whisking me away for a romantic weekend.”
“I can’t I’m…”
“You can, I’ve told your Jimmy you’re spending the weekend with your best friend, me!”
She puckered her matt red lips, pressed her little finger to the left corner of her mouth then clicked shut her compact. She took hold of my chin and told me I’d be pretty if I smiled more, before kissing my cheek. I smiled. We walked back to work, with no more said about Friday only the sound of Mable’s voice whittering on about how special she was, and that Charles knew he was lucky. She had me carry her handbag. I walked two steps behind her, as she strutted and laughed.
“I feel like the Queen with my lady in waiting.”
I couldn’t recall why I’m her friend. Betty from our office stopped to chat, Mable placed herself at the centre of the conversation and I wasn’t acknowledged by either of them. I felt myself sink to the bottom of my stomach like I was riding the front car of the rollercoaster at Southport Pleasure Land. I never returned from the pit of my stomach. Once Betty had gone Mable grabbed my hand.
“Come on, darling, we’re going to be late. Don’t you worry I’ll let Miss Twist know it was Betty’s fault.”
For the rest of that day, I was the most important person in her life in a strange unforgiving way.
I’m sat on a deckchair, on Southport beach. Sand swirls above the damp ridges formed by the tide, like fairies and elves dancing around my bare feet. I’ve shoved my knee length tights into my sensible shoes. I curl my toes down, halos form around them, dry sand rolls over pale skin. There’s a chill to the early October day, I wished I’d come in June, even though that wasn’t possible as she was still alive. I look for the sea, far away a murky greenish line forms a break in the skyline. I turn to my left and right, I’m alone. Tiny figures move up and down the pier a mile away. A drip forms on the tip of my nose. I consider wiping it on my coat sleeve but think it’s not what a sixty-five-year-old should do. I reach down grab my handbag, balance it on my knee, I pull out what I think is my handkerchief and pinch my nose. As I scrunch it up with my spindled fingers a wave of sickness hits me. The pink cotton napkin falls into my lap, I thought I’d thrown it out with the rest of her belongings. The wind catches hold of it, and it takes flight like a kite. A quote from Lauren Bacall pops into my head ‘Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly.’ The napkin descends landing like a shroud over my feet. In that moment of flight, it hit me, I rummage in my bag searching for a mirror. I pull out her compact and remember her giving it me at the end of that mid-summers day when I found her hair in my sandwich and she made me feel guilty. How have I not thrown these items; I must be going senile. I snap open the compact, a cloud of power puffs up and is lost in the sand. I hold the mirror up to check my nose is clean. A face stares back at me, I look behind me and back to the face, it’s still there. I hear a voice shouting.
“I’ve not been myself for forty-five years.”
The words echo like the distant sound of the ocean from a shell held to my ear as a child. Whiffs of salty-seaweed seep into my nostrils with each stuttered breath; brings me to my senses like a dose of smelling salts. I close my eyes and I’m sat at her bed side. Her matt red lips, faded by time and ill health. Her laced skinned left hand lies ringless and flat, dissolving into the white sheet. Her chest clicks as it rises and falls, like a young robin calling for its mother. The click is interrupted by a chilled silence of impending demise. I count the seconds to the next bird call. I’m up to fifteen, click, nothing, click. The silence crashes into my ears, I fill this gap and mute the clicks for help with the brevity of my voice.
Mable, I stopped liking you on the day you made ‘me’ fade. You started the process a month before, but I was too moulded to notice. I was so happy to have a best friend. I was never the popular one, never chosen by the netball captain, or for a last dance at the Town Hall. You brightened the wages department and picked me as your friend. You separated me out from my family like a sheep dog. I took your guilt and you were the shining light that everyone flew to, like moths. You collected moths, to take the pleasure of being wanted and the glory of winning. Mable, I’m quiet for a moment, until I hear the click. Mable, you stole me, you continuously had an answer for why you needed me to stay, if I left, you’d, well, you hinted I would be the one to find you. Charles, you said died in a boating accident. I never mentioned I saw you walking alone from my deckchair on Southport beach, that romantic weekend. Charles was killed a week later. Miss Twist fell down the stairs that lead to the shop floor. It was you who found her. I didn’t tell you I’d left my handbag in the staff restroom that evening and seen you with Miss Twist. You cried crocodile tears at the grave side of Miss Twist. Her family comforted you. A month after the funeral you became Wages Supervisor. I forgot who I was, if anyone asked, I’d say I’m Mabel’s friend.
I hear another click, I count, to a thousand. I have my wish of a deckchair on Southport beach.
Sally has an MA Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes short stories and is currently working on her novel based in 1950s Liverpool. She sometimes writes poetry. She gains inspiration from old photographs, history, her own childhood memories, and is inspired by writers Sandra Cisneros, Deborah Morgan, Liz Berry and Emily Dickinson.
She has had short stories and poetry published in various online publications, including The Ink Pantry and AnotherNorth and in a ebook anthology ‘Tales from Garden Street’ (Comma Press Short Story Course book 2019).
Sally lives in the countryside with her partner, dog, and bantam.
You can find more of Sally’s work here on Ink Pantry.
My world, a dark blue in its Vastness comes with aches And pains and a cache of Visions that echo in the Ebony void, of its emptiness. My music, filled with secrets And stories couples me to Winter’s wind as it ricochets Off my nighttime memories.
I Enjoy
The sounds of waves continually rushing onto a sandy shore bringing in stories from the deep where man has no power to edit,
The rays of the sun that never end, which carry warm supplications in the ether high above where man has no ability to censor.
The chirping of colourful birds singing feathery arias high in the trees of a verdant forest where man has no capacity to tarnish.
Yesterdays of my Dreams
Like butterflies flitting in the breeze, my mind is floating in the blueness of a sky full of images, visions, prayers, and forgotten truths, that touch the quivering echoes of all the yesterdays of my dreams.
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As our thoughts rise and fall on seldom trod paths, The warbling of birds will cast new visions into Our evolving memories.
As a rusted gate swings lazily on a copper hinged hasp It solemnly warms us to loosen our emotional grasp On those things that are dark, but ephemeral.
As thoughts swim up the river to a placid pond, They go to a place where contented minds gaze, and muse upon in the lazy hours of the day,
As things plague our mind, and arrive as if designed by demons, we must understand that they are just bits of unreality, and
As each new day leads us to greater happiness, They will vanish into the darkened void where All such gloomy things are quickly destroyed.
Burning Tempo
Another day Like yesterday… Red dust Climbing Into the earth, The oceans, And rivers dry, Birds swaying In the dry wind, Ashes in The hearth, Don’t cry, Don’t cry, it’s not Over yet… Pretend my friend. Each day is a Miracle, Life is magical, It’s a beat, A pulse, An echo. Voices Bounding off the Heated land, by Drum sticks used by withered hands Hidden inside Leather: Pretend my friend, … Don’t cry, Don’t cry.
James, a retired Professor and octogenarian is a Best of Web nominee and three time Pushcart nominee and has had five poetry books “The Silent Pond,” (2012), “Ancient Rhythms,” (2014), “LIGHT,” (2016),“Solace Between the Lines,” (2019), and Serenity (2022), over 1700 poems, five novels, seven essays, and 35 short stories published worldwide in over 255 publications. He earned his doctorate from BYU, and his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO.
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
