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.
Not a single child about, just this single tyre swing hung from tree, one of those thick ropes that you only see in school gymnasiums that burn the palms of those forced to climb them, and the base of the tyre overflowing with two days of fresh rain, a couple old gutter leaves and the word “Bridgestone” still legible in smudged off white lettering, the tread worn down, but not as much as you would think, a littering of fresh acorns and pine needles I smell before I ever see.
Steps
One way up and one way down, ants in the cracks like a brazen tactile army forever on manoeuvres, a long railing in the middle of the steps for faltering balance, fashion before walking shoes, and at the top some say the best views and at the bottom no one says anything, elbowing past one another on the way to melting ice creams and dirty fryer grease; more steps, but not the ones everyone came so far to climb this time.
What I Need
What I need is nothing from you, what I want, more of the same, to flounce the wooden hall out of its spine-creaked incipience would be a non-starter, the way the man with the pistol calls all the runners back to their blocks, numbers pasted across sinewy thighs, a crowd for cheering’s sake; you can always tell the pleasers, the panderers, the one-night standers – I enjoy the quiet and for that no one is required, only their absence and maybe mine for short stretches, one quite noticeable, the other a stalking jaguar through meaty rubricate mangroves.
Acetylene Torch
The oxygen is important, your tired lungs could have told you that, but sometimes it takes an acetylene torch behind heavy boxcar welder face to cut through the metal-precious way a man can climb on a city bus and think himself Tarzan of the Apes or your never best lover; all those sparks that burn right through the pant leg and cause journeymen Jim to jump right out of his grunts: runaway unibrow, steel-toed clunkers, a few pints on the weekend… that numb is important, the way we chase it like a man-eating tiger just out of stripes – fall into beds imagining jungle-thick waterfalls that swallow down all the screams you never once offered.
Missive
I did not write because I felt no importance in such grand gestures that link a chain with lengthy missive, the ink still wet and already a reply, harebrained in both posture and sentiment; I wished upon silent anomalies, constructed a wall of figs for seed dispersal although I failed to ever entertain such fruitful bounties as my sense would not allow for such churlish diversions – have you seen the way the elderly grow crippled well before their time, housed and snowed and pampered into the afterlife? I am alive as this gangly spider of a soup here brought to mild simmer, a dash of pepper to pry the door, balls of tissue lying around like snotty little opium addicts weaning off the big sleep, at least that is what the scoop of scoops is told; that thick oily newsprint man trying to keep up with the times which I would hardly recommend, to you or anyone else.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Setu, Impspired Magazine, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
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.
Can you tell us about your collection, Grenade Genie?
Grenade Genie, published by Fly on the Wall Press, is very much a book for people who want to read poetry that engages with, and says something about, the world in which we live. The book is split into four sections: ‘Cursed’, ‘Coerced’, ‘Combative’, and ‘Corrupted’, and within those four sections are poems which are all very much rooted in real-life, albeit with often fantastical elements. Inside these pages you’ll find, for instance, two-headed doctors, fashion-victim gorgons, a literal library, commas that kill, a little-known terrorist group called The Pedestrian Liberation Organisation, and grenade-encased genius.
It’s a book that has a lot of variety in terms of subject matter, but with one main theme that runs through the whole of the book – namely that, ultimately, everyone and everything is expendable, and while this knowledge can generate either a sense of hopelessness or the nothing-to-lose strength to rail against it, one strength of poetry is that, even if only the former gets expressed, the latter is automatically achieved, and in a very concise way too, making it all the more effective, and the main reason really why I’ve chosen this form to write in.
I enjoyed reading many poems in the collection, I found ‘Security Pass’ and ‘Jackpot’ particularly relatable. Do you have a favourite poem in the collection?
Thank you. I’d say the title poem, ‘Grenade Genie’, is currently my favourite. It’s about someone possessing genius and wanting to use it to change the world but, finding that it’s encased in a live grenade and requiring the spark, has little choice but to pull the pin in order to release the genie inside that will grant his wish, except that, of course, the explosion kills him, and his atoms (which form into lesser versions of himself) then proceed to get all of the credit instead of him. However, by pulling the pin, this person wipes out the establishment that was blocking all progress – an establishment of atoms from a previous explosion – and so it goes on (as it always has and always will).
‘The Phoney War’ was another poem which stayed with me after I’d read it. Can you share where the inspiration for this poem came from?
Thank you again, not least because the ‘The Phoney War’ is another personal favourite of mine in this collection. It’s ostensibly a simple poem about two young children – two brothers – in the 1970s, in their living room, playing at being World War Two Tommies fighting the Jerries, but it’s the ending that gives the poem its resonance, and it took a long time, and many drafts, for me to get that ending right.
I seem to have managed it, though, as various reviews of the book have described the poem’s ending as ‘devastating’ and ‘heart-wrenching’, which was very much the effect I wanted to achieve, especially as it’s based on a true event, so the ending isn’t just a device, it’s something real, something that was really felt by the person who was affected, the grandmother there at the kitchen stove who, unlike the boys (with their ‘umbrellas for rifles’, ‘smoking pencils, feeling tough’), had actually lived through the war and experienced, first hand, how terrible it was.
Whenever I’m introducing this poem at events, I say it’s a ‘poem about childhood, and play, and when reality intrudes on play’. And though the poem represents me as a child, it also represents me now, as a middle-aged adult who’s come to understand, much more, the significance of how harmless fun for me in the past wasn’t always such harmless fun for others.
Do you have a set writing routine? How long does it take you to write a poem?
I don’t have a set writing routine as such – it’s simply writing as and when I can – but I’ll seize any opportunity there is, and always find some way of making time for it, for all I know is, if too much time goes by without me being able to get my fix in some kind of way, I’ll soon become quite grouchy.
As for writing an actual poem, the length of time it can take has, in the past, ranged anywhere from a day to upwards of 25 years! But that’s the thing, while the writing of an actual poem can be quick, the editing of it (and then re-editing of it over, over and over again) can end up taking almost forever. For instance, a poem that’s in the book, called ‘Statement by the Pedestrian Liberation Organisation’, was first published on the letters page of the Islington Gazette in December 1994 as a very short 8-line poem; then, in July 1996, it was published as a 17-line poem in DirectAxiom, an anthology put out by the direct-action pedestrian rights group, Reclaim the Streets; then, by the time it was used for a film-poem I did in March 2010, it’d expanded into a 45-line poem; then, finally, in November 2017, it was published as a radically altered 54-line poem in the online magazine, ‘i am not a silent poet’ (which, apart from a few further tweaks, is the version which appears in the book).
What are you reading at the moment?
I’ve taken to reading writers’ biographies lately, and at the moment I’m reading Jubilee Hitchhiker – the life and times of Richard Brautigan, by William Hjortsberg. I discovered Brautigan’s writing relatively recently, starting with one of his novels, Sombrero Fallout. I’d been thinking, for quite a while, that I needed to try some Brautigan, and one day when I was in the Waterloo station branch of Foyles, I decided to do just that, and picking Sombrero Fallout from the three or four books of Brautigan’s there on the shelf, I read the foreword by Jarvis Cocker that really sold it to me, and I’m glad he did as, on buying the book and reading it, I found it really was every bit as good as billed – quirky and wise, instant and profound, and about nothing and everything, all at the same time.
Do you have any books or poems you’d like to recommend to us?
The last books I read are all ones I’m able to recommend – all pamphlets, as it happens: Rodney Wood’s When Listening Isn’t Enough, Julie Stevens’ Quicksand, and Damien Donnelly’s Eat the Storms, all quite different from each other, but all three of them quality reads. I also recently read a pre-publication version of Darren J Beaney’s The Machinery of Life, and it’s now been published, complete with my written endorsement, so it’s already very much on record that I’m recommending that one!
Has the pandemic / being in lockdown impacted on your creative process at all?
It hasn’t in terms of actual writing, but it has in terms of me being able to promote my work, and I felt the impact keenly right from the off, with Grenade Genie being published pretty much just as lockdown began, in April 2020. I’d been all set to go on what would have been my first ever proper tour, having organised feature slots at various live events and festivals in London and further afield – including a 60-minute solo show at the Leamington Poetry Festival in July, and shorter headlining slots in Coventry, Birmingham, Rochester and Saltburn – but then, just as pre-orders for the book began to be taken, the first lockdown began, and slowly but surely all the dates I’d organised got cancelled.
However, I was immediately positioned to get straight into the swing of the ‘new normal’, for the organisers of Winchester Fest, who’d booked me for a live in-person event to be held on 18th April, the day after my book was published, decided to go ahead anyway with the event, but online, and so facilitated the launch of my book via Zoom with a 60-minute feature – and, with events now only able to go ahead if they went online, opportunities began to arise which otherwise wouldn’t have happened. For instance, I ended up being a featured poet in the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, based in Virginia, USA, a festival which I’d normally have had to travel to in order to participate but now could be a part of from the comfort of my home in London. And new opportunities arose regarding radio as well: Shows which, previously, I’d have had to travel to in order to talk in the studio, I was able, now, to be a part of without leaving London and, in this way, I ended up being on Rick Sander’s ‘Brum Radio Poets’ show on Brum Radio, and also on Hannah Kate’s ‘On the Bookshelf’ show on North Manchester FM, and I managed too to get poems from the book featured on BBC Radio Kent and BBC Radio West Midlands. So, while there have undoubtedly been some disastrous elements to lockdown, I’ve found, too, that it’s been, to some degree, a case of ‘what one hand taketh away the other giveth’.
What are you working on at the moment? Can you share details of any other projects you’re working on?
I’ve written both a novel and novella, and while neither of these manuscripts have found publishers yet, extracts from them have been published as standalone stories in magazines such as The Ghastling, Sick Lit and Here Comes Everyone. Other short stories of mine have been published in magazines such as Bare Fiction, Smoke: A London Peculiar and Fictive Dream, and some of these short stories, collected into a manuscript, were longlisted in the Mslexia First Drafts Competition in 2017.
Your writing encompasses many different themes. How do you decide whether to develop an idea into poetry or fiction?
Well, I’ve always written prose in tandem with poetry, and while it might be my downfall that I’ve never solely concentrated on one form or the other, one good thing is that there’s been much cross-pollination, with poems morphing into both flash fiction pieces and short stories, and vice versa. For instance, the first poem in the ‘Combative’ section of my book, entitled ‘Shopping with Perseus’, started out as a piece of prose, a 721-word story that was first published in the urban feminist literary magazine, Geeked; then, after being edited down to 500 words, it won first prize in the Third Annual Stories of SW1 Writing Competition; then, finally, after being edited a little more, was changed into being the poem that’s in the book.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Not really – as I think a lot of things were covered there in the above questions – except to say that my book, Grenade Genie, is available from my publisher, Fly on the Wall Press (and direct from me if you’d like a signed copy). Cheers!
Review of Grenade Genie by Kev Milsom
It’s always great to have an interesting quote at the beginning of any book review; something that gives a teasing indication of what is to come, like an intriguing starter on the menu of a new restaurant, yet to be explored.
In this case, the quote is indeed intriguing and succeeds in pulling us in for further exploration: ‘25 brief studies of the cursed, coerced, combative and corrupted’.
Thomas McColl has completed a collection of poetry, published by Fly On The Wall Press, who are certainly not unknown to us here at Ink Pantry, as we have also interviewed Isabelle Kenyon, Elizabeth Horan and Colin Dardis from the same publishers.
Thomas has a fine pedigree in writing, collaborating with Confluence Magazine, The High Window, Never Imitate, and Write Out Loud. He has also performed poems from the book on BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio WM, Brum Radio and London Soho Radio.
So, let’s peek into Grenade Genie and see what lurks within. We start with the ‘Cursed’ section, which contains seven poems. The first of these is ‘No Longer Quite So Sure’. This poem is very strong on visual imagery and it’s easy for the reader to sit back and relax into the words being relayed to the mind. Alongside the creative, descriptive vocabulary, here’s a message here; namely one of social observation and relevance. Metaphors fly around and each of them is related in a way that the reader can quickly interpret and identify with. In this way, a simple bus ride is cleverly morphed into likening buses to bison and citizens become grass.
‘The council is yet to cut back the branches of the trees on Newman Road, which means that, halfway through my journey to work on the bus – and always just as I fall asleep in my usual seat on the upper deck, with my hooded head at rest against the glass –’
Strong, underlying messages within Thomas’s words continue with ‘The Evil Eye’, a poem about damaging addictions to technology and different forms of online manipulation.
You’ve allowed yourself to get caught in a cobweb spun by a social spider that sucks you dry of information, then leaves your hollowed-out exoskeletal frame to rot on its website.’
Thomas uses the opening ‘Cursed’ section of the book to comment upon such powerful subjects as refugees, government cover ups and more.
Keen to explore what lay within the second ‘Coerced’ section, I read ‘Security Pass’, a highly personal exploration of how our identities become less personal and individualistic within a large company, or business – perhaps the author relating to his current job within the House of Commons, or perhaps his former career within a famous, High Street bank.
‘I’ve just been made permanent – yet already I know I’m completely expendable’.
The writing style which Thomas employs is very effective. You can ‘hear’ his voice within the poems and it’s clear that his passion for social commentary is expressed very well. While the topics are clearly very personal, the expression of his thoughts are relayed in a way that the reader can easily relate to. Thus, we share Thomas’s journey, rather than be admonished, or feel threatened, by it.
Fine, flowing examples of Thomas’s social commentary occur throughout this poetry collection and, I found that at every turn, I was intrigued by what he had to say – again, largely down to the way in which he writes and how he expresses his personal thoughts and observations so well.
In ‘Jackpot’, Thomas asks us to join him on the platform at London’s busy Oxford Circus underground station, likening the rush to get on a train to being in some form of human lottery.
‘Here I am at Oxford Circus station once again, allowing myself to be part of the human jackpot that’s released each time a train pulls in. I don’t know if anyone else ever thinks this, but whenever I’m on a train that’s entering this station and I’m watching the branded posters on the platform wall whiz past my carriage window, I’m reminded of playing a slot machine. OK, this one has a single horizontal spinning drum instead of the usual vertical three – but it’s not like the odds are stacked any more in my favour.’
We’re even welcomed into joining Thomas, back in the heady days of the late 1980s as he goes out on the town in Birmingham in his twenties. It’s clear he hates his bank job and wants some release from the pressures of working life (who hasn’t been precisely there?) that he describes so eloquently (and realistically) in his poem, ‘Nightclubbing In Brum, 1988’.
‘I look a right sight as I’m travelling into Brum on a Saturday night. It’s hard enough making the grade when still a hapless teen at the tail end of Thatcher’s decade, and though one plus about these times is that I’m able, still, to smoke a fag while swigging a can of beer on the top deck of the bus…’
‘Last week, I tore my trousers and lost a button, and being as I work for Lloyds Bank in Sutton (high standards in that posh part of town), I don’t want yet another dressing down, for it’s 1988, and though everyone says how much they hate being made to wear a suit (that’s more often than not a Mr Byrite one to boot), I at least get value out of mine, but some consolation! – Roll on 1989’…
In short, Grenade Genie is a fine collection of stylised, creative poetry, expressed in literary terms that anyone can understand. Highly recommended.
Congratulations to Sanjeev Sethi. His new collection of ‘wee poetry’, Bleb, has been published by Hybriddreich from Scotland. Here is a glimpse into his new work..
Memento Mori
Campestral locales furnish the song and dance routine with a context. Ill-lighted rooms caution me of you. When their consciousness darkles, I am snug as a bug. Why does sadness complect my cheeriness? Is alertness a curse?
Imponderables
The happy wear no brassard, nor those with the black dog baying at them. In- ternalized emotions blaze inexperienced deliveries. During the phase, it’s advisable to be wary of moonshine. It hikes the fit. Falsity obscured in papyrus will singe in its conflagration. Every deletion has its erasure dust. Weightlessness is illusory: guilt is the grief.
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.
