I pushed the glass door it swung open guy at the reception greeted in a flourish “Welcome Ma’am! Could you wait a moment?” I expressed dissatisfaction “You confirmed the appointment at eleven. So, why are you making me wait?” I shouted To assuage my feelings he offered a cup of green tea I accepted. Worked Soothed nerves frayed
Ten…twenty…thirty minutes went by angst inside kept rising like bile was he testing my patience? Casting off all niceties sprung up and demanded refund of the fees paid That made him sit up like Jack in the box all attentive
“You see Ma’am we are short staffed. Some haven’t turned up. Please bear with us. Someone will soon give you a hair cut”.
Just then the power went out plunging the salon in dark Somewhere a chair scrapped Someone screamed “bloddy hell! you nicked my neck”.
I felt wet Buster was on my chest on his hind legs saliva dripping from his tongue trying best to wake me up with apologetic looks
had pooped on the carpet
Snigdha Agrawal, a septuagenarian, is a writer at heart, still learning the art. Raised in a cosmopolitan environment, she has imbibed the best of the East and the West. Educated in Loreto Institutions, under the tutelage of Irish Nuns, both at school and university level, her command over the English language is commendable. She is a versatile writer, writing in all genres of poetry, prose, short stories and travelogues. An intrepid traveller, her travelogues can be accessed in her WordPress blog. She is a published author of four books of poetry and short stories. Her writings are widely published in online journals and anthologies. She lives in Bangalore (India).
Sometimes I fear memories. I don’t know why— I fear that they will take me Down shimmering halls where I don’t want to go, Down slates of eternal and composite angst and worry and regret and sorrow, Down impervious concrete tunnels of hardball unspoken thoughts and feelings, Down forgotten psychic highways and byways, Down regret-filled mosaics of images that I know form part of me and will never depart. Memories are rooms where you don’t want to go. The memories are too painful. They stir up too much. A memory. My grandmother had died. My father and I were walking to the funeral home. I was afraid. I wanted to hold his hand, but I didn’t. I thought of something. I had to express this Fear. I asked him what a dead body looked like. I asked him what Grandmother’s body would looked like. I had never seen a corpse Before, Except in movies. My grandmother’s dead body: What would it look like? We were walking to the funeral home. He looked down at me. His eyes narrowed into slits. He told me to just be quiet, please. Please be quiet While we were walking to the funeral home. Memories. They make me want to cry sometimes. Even though I was only thirteen years old. I remember the corpse well. My grandmother was dressed in one of her old-fashioned dresses, Dark blue with white polka dots. Her skin was the pigment of white—extreme white—radical white. Her skin was pale, serene. Her clear blue eyes, which were like the sea— Were closed. I was absolutely fascinated. I ignored my father. I was angry with him. It would take me a long time to get over the anger. As I stood before Grandmother’s corpse, I wanted to reach out and touch her, To bid her farewell. I was sad she was gone. She had listened. What more can one do? I came close to leaning over and touching her. But I did not. She resembled a statue with alabaster skin, And her face was marked by age-old wrinkles that spread Like the rivers on a map of Europe. There was something alive about her As she lay there dead. Her dead pale skin crawled over her inert body. Memories.
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s done a lot of different stuff in his life. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.
You can find more of Christopher’s work here on Ink Pantry.
We are calling for your soul for a benevolent autumnal source May the hoary times arrive full of sunny gloom endlessly dream!
with a fancy coming from tender sea we are conjuring you dreamer your mythical pearls
Come propitious birdies from Olympus-mountlet!
Recite my songs about the mellow dawn about brave honest hoplite-like treasure!
Poetry from the shepherd boy
The Spartans were today by vultures’ tone awakened the august chasms still nearby the autumn heart
light autumn wings I am immortalizing them delicately in the superbest vase as well as in picture on the wall
in a temple of a wisdom Athena’s in the isle the muser evokes miracles the helots dream very finely
the destines of perioikoi are slumbering in an ancient grotto unusual autumn-songs flying they become the philosophic hoard
the atomists find thereby the edenic afflatus in hawk’s eyes and in wings of the philosophic discharge
the natural philosophers are waking in the balmy homesickness the autumn loves all sophists it donates notebooks to Wise Men
a whiff of the eschatology the sceptics and stoics are going strutting arm in arm to the moony fire
to the purest best gleam an apotheosis – a worship become a sweaty salvation of heart from Plato full of the starry impact
in the distant cave there is an idyllic rainbow the freed caveman is drunken from an ambrosia
the troglodytes adjusted by little dew such a laurel freedom they delight in a poem in the shooting star that falls dawn
in the pond of the Becoming and Faith the meteorites down here orderly word of being for Aristotle more beautiful
he is being as a rambler led into the path of musing stars
Tyrtaeus’ lyre is musing about the experiential eudemonia
the morning daydream is picturesque Be awake and becharmed when the deduction with induction seem to be fraternized!
Paweł Markiewicz was born 1983 in Siemiatycze in Poland. He is poet who lives in Bielsk Podlaski and writes tender poems, haiku as well as long poems. Paweł has published his poetries in many magazines. He writes in English and German.
You can find more of Paweł’s work here on Ink Pantry.
After a background in Fine Art, Jim Conwell worked for over thirty-six years in the field of mental health as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist. He has had poems published in magazines in the UK, Ireland, Australia and North America and his work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize. He lives in London, England.
Conwell’s poems in Immigrant Journey (Dempsey & Windle 2024) cover difficult ground. The child of Irish immigrants, they concern his personal experience of the class system in England, attendance at a Catholic primary school and a ‘sink-hole’ (his words) Secondary Modern, his difficult relationship with a non-communicative father and his struggle to try to live a different life. In an extended Afterword which gives some background to the collection, Conwell says he was ‘part of the Counter-Culture’ that, ‘fuelled by hallucinogenic insight,’ thought they were ‘remaking the world.’ His father was furious with him. The feeling was mutual. ‘Our worlds simply didn’t touch. Except in conflict. I was thirty before my father and I began to seek to repair some of the damage we had wrought but then he died suddenly. I feel unbearable shame when I see myself as I think my father saw me and when I think how hopeless the relationship we made together was.’
Cast in the style of a memoir, these confessional poems inhabit bleak territory. If I were asked to find one word to describe the over-arching theme of this collection, it would be ‘dislocation.’ It begins with the uprooting from one’s homeland, the difficulty of fitting in with the class system and the conflict between Conwell and his father. In ‘Like a Fist’ Conwell gives us a flavour of his unflinching, plain-speaking style of writing:
My father was a tall man And I the child in his shadow. There was something dark about him Like a loaded fist. Or teeth scattering suddenly on lino With a mouth that tastes of blood.
There is a dislocation from Catholicism, a faith which Conwell describes as ‘demanding absolute adherence to rigid beliefs and practices; an unquestioned routine in rural Ireland but challenged by modern, urban life.’ In ‘Catechism’ ‘God is a sniper. / Always behind you…/ He might just decide, on the cusp / of any moment, to pick you off.’ In ‘Dislocations’ Conwell is ready to ‘live with the truth that life is a whole series of dislocations’ but then, not being able to live with that premise, he tells us that he tries to find connections between one thing and another but comes to the conclusion that the only connection is ‘grief and mourning’ neither of which are welcome at his door. As a noun ‘dislocation’ is viewed as a disturbance from a proper, original, or usual place or state. It is also a word that we use to describe an injury or disability caused when the normal position of a joint or other part of the body is disturbed. To Conwell, the whole of life seems to be out of joint, mentally, physically and spiritually.
Some of his finest poems are those which speak for others who find themselves, like him, heavy-laden. Here, to end with, is his poem titled ‘Incident in the Park’:
A woman is sitting on a park bench. And from the pram near her come the murderous and desperate screams of her baby.
Next to her sits the baby’s guardian angel. And he tells her no, she cannot leave the child there.
Someone will come shortly, she pleads. Someone who may know what to do. But the angel is unbending. If nothing else binds you, he says, then let it be guilt.
This is a powerful collection. Reading it is like being punched in the gut. Its honesty will leave you reeling.
The night our dog gorged herself on boiled sweets and lost all interest in the scent of meat — chewing and chewing the aniseed flavoured candy papers into a ball and eying me with the glazed resoluteness of an addict
I saw myself when I didn’t write — too full and crushing the poems that found me into the street’s shadows even as their journeys were rising beneath my feet —
or else I stuffed them inside letting their verses sing in and out of my other thoughts — their sounds glowing — licking the space between meaning and feeling to thinner and thinner slivers
until I finally let them tumble away from me like beetles flicking through wet grass and into the throats of magnolias, useless and rolling in the stickiness of scent.
The night our dog gorged herself on boiled sweets and lost all interest in the scent of meat — chewing and chewing the aniseed flavoured candy papers into a ball and eying me with the glazed resoluteness of an addict
I saw myself when I didn’t write — too full and crushing the poems that found me into the street’s shadows even as their journeys were rising beneath my feet —
or else I stuffed them inside letting their verses sing in and out of my other thoughts — their sounds glowing — licking the space between meaning and feeling to thinner and thinner slivers
until I finally let them tumble away from me like beetles flicking through wet grass and into the throats of magnolias, useless and rolling in the stickiness of scent.
Jenny is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats. You can read more of her poems at her website.
You can find more of Jenny’s work here on Ink Pantry.
She posts notices around town, throughout local papers, appeals for help in the investigation, promises a reward for any information leading to recovery, or apprehension of the party responsible for disappearance. Language civil, urgent, pleading. All couched in iambic pentameter. From the milling crowds, through blinds, across different sundry streets the whole of Olympus stares back at her pitifully, eyes grim with knowledge, mute to a person.
see something say nothing unwaxed floss lips’ crude stitching
Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, Kingfisher, and Presence. His first full-length collections of poetry Bathtub Poems and Funny Pages were just released by Setu and Meat For Tea press, and a mixed media chapbook showcasing his fine art photography is available now from Yavanika.
it’s tough – walking dublin with my wife now. every turn a memory; some other woman’s place. like the breaking of eggs open badly at breakfast and watching the yellow as it fries into white.
we get coffee one morning – I’ve had coffee before. I drink a lot of coffee – often on dates. or movies. ones I’ve seen and other ones which someone didn’t feel like watching. or parks. jesus, or parks.
her hands get cold – she doesn’t wear gloves and likes to put her hands in my pocket. I don’t think anyone’s done that. or wait – no; someone did. does it with someone else now. or not. doesn’t matter. we all move
and this is what comes out of traveling, seeing such unfamiliar things. everything becomes familiar. going to spain and getting a different mcdonalds. this burger a little like that one.
A pedestrian animal
sitting out Wednesday on a North Dublin balcony. watching pedestrians as they walk early quarantine.
it’s remarkable sitting; no-one ever looks up – not in the whole time that I’m watching. invisible, being here, sitting so high. you could be walking beneath falling pianos or under the most marvellous architecture. mankind, I’m afraid,
is a pedestrian animal. very ground level like dogs around corners. I watch all the movement, the steadiness of legs. the natural gait of the very best rowers. all minds on ahead, not around.
The courtyard
life given colour like blood in spat toothpaste. the windows around me all shining white squares as a lantern string hung through a garden for chinese new year. flitting thin skins across bonnets of cars, all gauze and hung willow- branch curtains; the occasional silhouette standing behind them. moving about, struggling with a blindcord.
London, Toronto
I do wonder sometimes what old loves are doing. it’s weakness – please pardon a taste for nostalgia.
sometimes worry I’ll see them in the street or in coffee shops, though of course most are elsewhere, and are beautiful as elsewhere always is. that is to say
not very beautiful. London, Toronto – warts on the lip of a landscape. I finish this poem, check errors and alter some language. go into the sitting room to talk to you. you are in there, beautiful as here.
Time before motion
time before motion and time after motion. this – each moment a wonderful moment. a car parked in neutral – the clutch like small rocks under pressures, waiting for ice to grow hot. a cat crouched at the edge of a countertop – coil spring and ball- legged intention. the language you find at beginnings of novels – the stretching of arms into poetry, before obligations and plot. like dreams. the leg, clicking down like machinery brought to motion. the bird on a fencepost and startled – the instant it falls on its wings.
DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has nominated twelve times for Best of the Net, ten for the Pushcart and once for the Forward Prize, and has been released in three collections; “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022).
A paragraph of birds before the storm foretells its fury to a startled world. Above the mountains, cloud novellas form with thunder syllables and lightning hurled as markers, that explorers later on might read the pages cinders left behind. Then falls the rain. With all pretensions gone, the wind inscribes its will on humankind.
At last, the tempest closes with a sigh. A final chapter lingers in the dale, caresses drooping flowers. From on high an epic rainbow signifies farewell.
The tale is told. The book has blown away. Thus, ends the story of a summer day.
LaVern Spencer McCarthy loves to write short stories and submit them to magazines and other publications. She has written and published twelve books of poetry and fiction.
Her work has appeared in Writers and Readers Magazine; Meadowlark Reader; Agape Review; Bards Against Hunger; Down in The Dirt; The Evening Universe; Fresh Words Magazine; Wicked Shadows Press; Midnight Magazine; Pulp Cult Press, Metasteller and others. She is a life member of Poetry Society of Texas. A poem she wrote was nominated for the 2023 Push Cart Prize.
All morning Nanna’s kneads pummels and bangs make the cutlery rattle and jump in the drawer below.
She places a yellow gingham tea towel over the basin, leaves the mixture to rise like a mushroom in the dark, beats it back down, shapes it into balls, waits once more.
Oven hot, a yeasty aroma wafts throughout the house. I drool at the thought of slabs of butter on freshly baked crust.
Nanna won’t even let me try one. These baps are as round as Aunty Cynthia and just as heavy.
These baps are harder than Nanna’s Be-ro book rock buns.
Nanna won’t even put them on the roof of the outside loo.
She says they will make the birds fall from the sky.
Glut
First week back, final year at Bradwell C of E Infant’s, the sort of day when there’s been a slight chill to the morning air.
Nanna waits at the gates. Instead of the ice-cream shop or the Post Office we head to The Hills,
up worn limestone steps by Rachel’s house, past kind Mrs Law’s who left to have a baby, past the bit where the brook emerges from Hades, past the beech trees that will produce a bumper mast later in the Autumn,
up, up, up to the top of the world where gorse, rabbits heather and sheep cohabit,
along to the ridge where the Gliding Club hangs out, turn left towards Rebellion Knoll, and onto Brough Lane.
Nanna pulls out two carrier bags from her pockets.
We pluck the plumpest, sweetest, sun smooched berries, cram them into our mouths, deep purple gorgeousness bursts onto our tongues, smears our faces and stains our lips so they look like punk rockers’ makeup.
Two bags full later we continue towards Brough, then up Stretfield and back to Bradda before the sun sets,
get washing the dark treasure for jam, jelly, crumbles, vinegar.
That I will later that night have bad guts does not diminish the joy of the glut.
Soir De Paris
This miniature bottle, with its Art Deco design, is more precious to me than the sapphires which share its colour.
Empty now, I used it up before I was old enough to even go courting.
Grandad bought it for you before a show in Sheffield, a little luxury on a manual worker’s wage.
Did you ever use it? Or did you save it for best like the unworn dresses which hung in your wardrobe?
The warm amber and bergamot scent lingers though, and every now and then I unscrew the lid, take a hit.
The Rejects Club
Baked beans and a cheese and onion roll every weekday dinner, bar Monday’s Sunday leftovers.
I walk home to eat. It’s only five minutes. Bradwell Junior School canteen does not cater for vegetarians.
Besides, all I ever did was sit in the Young Ornithologists Club drawing owls and kingfishers with the other rejects. Nanna doesn’t know
what else to feed me, so every weekday dinner, bar Monday’s Sunday leftovers, it’s baked beans and a cheese and onion roll.
Pastry crisp and golden, the mouthwatering anticipation of a melted cheesy middle, beans slowly heated up on the gas hob just as I like them, served in a green and white vaguely hexagonal dish.
I love it, it’s my favourite, but every weekday dinner, bar Monday’s Sunday leftovers, eventually I have to say
NO MORE!
The Changeover
‘It changes you forever, but you are changing forever anyway’ – Margaret Mahy
I am sat by the window with the view of Rebellion Knoll.
Grandad knows he may as well talk to a phantom.
Nanna’s in the kitchen cooking tea. Oven chips, processed peas. Fish fingers for me, Finny haddock for them. She shoos the cats off the worktop, warbles along with Radio 2.
Regular as the fish van, once a week after I’ve got off the bus I go up Town Lane to the library in the old Methodist schoolroom, check out the fold-out shelves for new titles. Sometimes I am the only browser.
The squeak of sensible shoes on Parquet flooring, a faint trace of coffee mornings, Christmas Fairs, Girl’s Brigade, end-of-term plays and kid’s birthday parties I got invited to only from their parents’ sense of duty.
I take my stash to the desk to be stamped without making eye contact, renew one book over and over again.
Lauren Foster is a writer, musician and artist based in Charnwood in the UK Midlands. Published in The Journal, Leicester Literary Review, DIY Poets and more. Graduate of the MA Creative Writing at University of Leicester. Poet in residence on The Kindness Project in autumn 2023. Drummer and vocalist with The Cars that Ate Paris, a garage-punk band.
you work like you owe something to the clock the boss the bills
you sleep through alarm and leave a kiss on her cheek a post-it note
you drive home in the dark the sun already gone like a lover who left you for someone else
houses on the side of the road cardboard cutouts of a life you don’t have
you park behind her car she sleeps in a bed too big too cold too late
Driveway
You say depression revs its engine when
leaves change. It’s easy to hear outside your door.
Mine means walking the same driveway every
day until colours fade, then looking down
to find them in a hole.
A Heron Jesus
I could be walking on water down
the beach minding my own business
a heron Jesus and still at the splash
of your all encompassing wingspan
I would not know the difference
between a wave and awash
The Not-Quite Blankness
I’m desperate to feel something even as I see nothing in this moment but the buzz & chatter of the city & the wind as it crawls up my spine like a coyote nosing into a garbage can. The poem does not read like memory.
Jesse and Andrew
were two good friends in Los Angeles, and in last night’s dream, Andrew announces he quit acting, though we knew him as a screenwriter, because he found success in Ohio, and thinking back, in reality, we were journeying toward the same adolescent dream, green stars, and we pursued when we were heartbroken, worn-out, reckless, and last I saw Andrew he stuffed quarters into the jukebox at gold-lit Birds, repeating Sussudio, commenting on every woman at the bar, and I didn’t speak up. And Jesse had returned that day from Thailand. He was sad and I was in love. I had a chance to see him again– last fall, New York– but he has a kid now and I could not muster a bus, or to revisit reminiscing the dreams we shared, what we had to wake up from during our long, separate searches for meaning.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Ghost City Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Lamplit Underground. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
