Me and Amelia. On our way to the hospital. Visiting. We are. A sick friend. But these places. Geez! Whose idea was this? Who? That hospitals should be the size of small cities? Tell me. I’d like to know. Hey. At least they allow support dogs. But still. All these towering buildings. So, so tall. All of them. All the same. And now. Of course. We’re lost. We are. Me and Amelia. Driving around. Rats in a maze. That’s us. Until, until. We find the right one. The building we want. And a parking place. Alrighty! I slip Amelia into her harness. Attach her leash. And off we go. Amelia in her pretty little dress. Pink. Of course. And me in my t-shirt. The green one. The one that says: “Emotional Support Person for My Rescue Chihuahua.” Close enough. Right? Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking.
Laura Stamps is the author of over 50 novels and poetry collections. Most recently: “The Good Dog” (Prolific Pulse Press 2023) and “Addicted to Dog Magazines” (Impspired, 2023). Recipient of a Pulitzer Prize nomination and 7 Pushcart Prize nominations. Lover of feral cats and Chihuahuas.
You can find more of Laura’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Reading the philosophers From sun to moon rise, Transcended to ages Amalgamating the Infinite pain.
Memories radiate along, With Blaring Roars and fierce Glints through the pathway of deluge. Serenity alluring through Just like, The absolute circle that radiates taking the light of gleaning flame.
Memories with their cluster of pain Gazing from the clouds Emerge to reveal the blaze Of Warmth in the dark.
Was then The moments of sight Still sharp and defined A ball of brightness In a feel of trance.
Smudged with emotions heavy A smoulder I saw Life in my hands The torment, pain of life process – Call it by any name! Was no less than bliss To see My celestial boon.
Dr. Anila Pillai is an assistant professor of communication skills. She teaches in the land of Lions- Gujarat, India. Her passion is to pen her emotions in verse. She has published her literary creations as well as academic articles with national and international publishers. Kailani is her collection of poems published in the year 2022.
Prize-winning poet, acclaimed novelist, editor and playwright, Jeff Phelps, is the author of two novels Painter Man (2005) and Box of Tricks (2009), both published by Tindal Street Press and the poetry pamphlet Wolverhampton Madonna (2016) published by Offa’s Press. He is a founding member of Bridgnorth Writers’ Group and was recently a ‘poet on loan’ in West Midland libraries. He is married with two grown up children and now lives in Wiltshire. His website is www.jeffphelps.co.uk
Falling and Flying is an impressive first full-length collection of poems. The presentation and running order of the 57 poems contained in this volume is well thought out. The falling poems and the flying poems provide a strong opening followed by a series of poems that cover subjects at ground level and beneath the ground. Further in, there are groupings of poems about the moon, birds, saints and churches, memories from childhood, current affairs, music and art.
The collection opens with two powerful poems titled ‘Cadman’s Leap’ and ‘Cadman’s Wife’ which narrate the tragic early death of an 18th century showman and rope slider from Shrewsbury and the subsequent loss felt by his wife. The second of these poems achieves through rhyme and repetition a sense of sustained lyricism in its poignancy.
In ‘An Avebury Stone’ the distant past struggles to come alive where ‘one frozen circle dancer / [is] waiting for the music to begin’ and in ‘Devizes White Horse’ the animal that may have once ‘cantered across this sweet meadow / of orchids’ is now ‘a stranger to itself’. A preoccupation with the more recent past is evidenced in ‘The Lost Village of Imber’, an uninhabited village that forms part of the British Army’s training grounds on Salisbury Plain where the entire civilian population was evicted in 1943 to provide an exercise area for American troops preparing for the invasion of Europe during the Second World War. To this day, the village remains under the control of the Ministry of Defence.
Staying on the subject of war and the ravages of war, ‘On the Bommy’, Phelps’ concluding stanza makes us think about some of the bigger consequences of history turning a poem about a children’s playground among bombed-out buildings into a more powerful statement about the futility and cost of war:
Damage brings forth damage in its turn. Each generation pays the next with interest. We plundered that barren patch with no concern for that family so cruelly dispossessed.
One of my favourite poems in this collection is titled ‘Waterway’. Its subject matter, an old canal, is only hinted at and not named. The details are sketchy and the location not given. A lot is left up to the imagination and the disconnection between what might have been there then and what is there now is handled well:
Now I haul myself up expecting water or a towpath and find only derelict gardens, no sense of direction.
For all its evasiveness, it is a poem full of atmosphere and mystery.
Other poems range widely in both subject matter and location: a visit to an eye hospital, bicycles outside Oxford station ‘ranks of them waiting, flashing / in the sun like Wordsworth’s daffs’, dowsing with a ‘Y-shaped hazel, alder or goat-willow’, poems in praise of the moon, an ekphrastic poem based on an oil painting by Joseph Wright of Derby and a poem about Cornish saints. Some pieces are light-hearted, such as ‘Gerald the Ginger Cat’ and ‘An Idiot’s Guide to Freedom’ while others are more serious such as ‘I have been a stranger’ and ‘Yes I have wished.’
Several poems make reference to music, in particular, the ‘Psalm for Musicians’ and the ‘Schubert Variations’. This is not surprising given that Phelps’ son is a classically trained musician. The prose poem ‘Schubert Variations’ is a very fine piece of writing.
Here is the opening section:
When I heard the sound of coal tumbling into the cellar under my window I imagined black notes falling from a piano in a cascade of sharps and flats. The streets were full of horses pulling coal carts, heading to the country where there were operas in huge palaces. And that was how I came to run after them, pulling up my borrowed breeches, my spectacles thumbed and greasy.
Even here, attention is paid to form. Each of the six paragraphs begins with the phrase ‘When I heard the sound of…’ It might be a knock on the door, someone’s voice, a piano or the ‘symphony in [his] head’. As a composer, every sound is important to Schubert and it carries with it its own connotations. What is more, all these sounds are already present or hinted at in the first paragraph. Each one of them is expanded upon and explored in its own right in a poetic equivalent of a set of variations on a stated theme.
Stylistically, the collection covers a variety of forms including sonnets, tercets, a prose poem and visual poems. The circular ‘Heartwood’ poem, reminiscent of tree rings, is a dendrochronologist’s dream because the exposed stump of the tree does all the talking. A number of poems follow strict rhyme schemes which are well executed. Helpful footnotes are provided where appropriate.
This is a wide-ranging collection that takes us through a good deal of history while at the same time raising questions about some of the more pressing issues of our own time. Highly recommended.
At the deepest hour of night, You, my Lord, come to me in hiding. In your strong arms, you pull me close enough – You are my bliss. You are the charioteer of my chariot moving past amidst all sorrow. You, alone, are my friend. You are my vulnerability, you are my catastrophe. You are my bliss. You conquer my enemies in concealment. You, my Lord, solely is my friend. You are the Rudra incarnation, you are the fear of the fear. You are my bliss. You are the thunder bifurcating my bosom. You alone are my friend. I bid you to lull me in death cutting me from the ties of all the bondages of Samsara. You, you are my bliss.
Had I known
Had anyone known that you would beckon me? I was dead-ignorant-asleep. Samsara had encroached on me in deep darkness. Had I known that you would pour in the bliss of grief in my soul, had I known that you would drench me in tears! I had not known when the sun of your benediction graced the eastern hemisphere, without much thought, I could feel your gracious warmth filling the innermost folds of my heart, soul, skin – You, my Lord washed off my shore with the tide of your immortal sea – You broke open all the bars that I had put across. You brought the wind of evensong, you brought hope in my heart. The boat of my existence is now anchored at your lotus feet.
At your touch
My sadness has crossed the paths of infinity. At last it has touched your feet, a summation of happiness and mirth. Since days, I have shed tears boundlessly, I have not known why it has been flowing relentlessly- Today, I have woven a string of my teardrops, to garland you, O my Lord. Your Northern Star has beckoned me in evading darkness. I have never reasoned the sadness that I have borne all the while I was still in quietness. Today, after ages, at your touch, my sadness has become a string of the lute that plays for you.
Ritamvara Bhattacharya writes from a darling’s heart, Darjeeling. She believes in what Sylvia Plath said, “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” She writes for the pleasure of it. She writes for the ‘I am in her heart’, a voice that creates ripples and sensation. She received The Nissim International Poetry Prize in the year 2020 and the Tagore Poetry Prize in 2020. Her poems have been published in some noted portals like The Muse India, Café Dissensus, The Sunflower Collective, Aynanagor, Chakkar, The Indian Periodical, Plato’s Cave and others. Her debut chapbook,’ In the mirror, our graves’ along with veteran writer Ravi Shankar N published in 2021 has received accolades. She is an avid lover of life, literature, colours and has lived in awe for the past quarter-century. She intends to see the world stricken with fear and courage, in silence and sound, in love and hatred, all. She believes contradiction adds to the aroma of living and would love to dwell in the same, giving birth to more celebratory bells. August Rituals is her first solo debut poetry book published by Writers Workshop in August, 2022.
It was uncannily quiet in the afternoon. I felt like a water sodden dead log as I walked to the summer cottage through the Whittle Thorn forest near our house, within the suburbia of Whittle Thorn. Moments ago, I heard in a news report an abduction in the suburb. Surrealistic, how some news sunk in without having any effect whatsoever, other than this parched feeling at the back of the tongue on a scorched afternoon sun. But I kept walking through the forest. A whipping bird lashed out as I slowed, I felt a whip crack my back. It did not bring a tear to my glass eye. They were a dry desert, prickly as cactus. I rubbed them a couple of times, I wish something would rub off from being with the best ones. There were the best, I tried to hang out with in their tranquil hangout.
A man ushered me into a cottage that smelt of burnt toast and burnt egg omelette. Nothing in this cottage could shepherd the delight of surging romance, a notion. Barren was not how I felt; it was a feeling of a much deeper sense of being abandoned. The abundance of hatred filled my heart from treachery and betrayal. This man whom I called ‘Uncle’ when I looked upon him as an ‘Uncle’. He shredded my childhood, put me through a paper shredder. As I recalled that other afternoon, I was at his place. Obedience was not in dearth, around the clock that was all I did. Obey, and followed him around the house until he broke. Hunger and lust were cascading like ink streaming out of a bottle. Real ink, who saw it these days, anyway? I did. I saw how his eyeliners darkened, painted with sooty coatings of coal ink. He grabbed me. I blinked and passed out.
When I woke up, it was evening. Bodily pains and shivers ran through my spine, I saw a diminishing sun over the horizon. Heavy like a dead log, I felt no remorse until I stood up and felt it, the blues between my thighs. Doors were open and I saw a few men. Jabbering away, one looked my way, I heard about the abduction then. Played the part, I was burning up, Uncle had a round head scar which I saw for the first time. With all the other men, he too was listening to the news of abduction. Play the part? What part was he playing? In the heart of it, I lay low and waited for my chance. I wish I had a crowbar.
Uncle entered the room and looked me in the eye.‘Oh, how could you? You heinous son of a bitch, how could you do this? You heard me,’ I said out loud in my mind, those lousy moments as I glared back at him in silence as always, waiting for the next instruction. Instrumental to this abduction, Uncle took me under his wings after I became orphaned. Courage failed me and I waited it out, for my turn to avenge. Uncle held me by my shoulder as he walked me to the cottage. Others didn’t. What more could they do to me, I thought.
Despicable people had vulnerability, and hubristic in thinking that no evil could touch them. Of course not, because they were all evil themselves. Evil upon evil upon evil, compounded to make a hot air bubble of ever-growing evils, when one day the bubble had to burst.
The cottage smelt of what it did: burnt toast and burnt egg omelette. Heaps of other kinds of smells entwined the space. Cocaine and alcohol staled the air, to say the least. Concern was how to smell the fresh air, still, and feel free. This was claustrophobic. Uncle’s gang was here already. They were planning something big. Uncle was hiding in plain sight all this while, playing a double part of a benevolent elder, deceptive and whimsical. It was now clear. I sighed, but not resigned looking for ways to get out of this. Burnt toasts and omelette. This wasn’t enough. There had to be dust storms and coal dust spatters; inhale to make lungs a perforated organ full of holes, I somewhat prayed. I was out of my wits.
Uncle sat me down in a chair while he negotiated with his gang. They were selling me out to the highest bidder, while oil was hotting on the puny cottage stove for more omelette. My prayers were answered. I saw a hole in the cottage floor. An object was flashing a shine to my glass eye. I picked it up when no one was looking. Sharp as a razor blade, I kept it in my fist. When a child was born it entered the world with its fist closed; it held a one-way ticket to the blue. This razor was that ticket. I began to cut myself, I screamed until they noticed. They couldn’t sell damaged goods.
Blood flowed from the cuts but they bandaged every one of those wounds, while Uncle negotiated in the other room. I lay alone for a bit, then jumped blindly through an open window like a petrified kangaroo. Uncle hadn’t counted on this; I had lost some blood and they thought I was weak. Boom. Boom. Boom, I heard gunshots coming my way; I made it to a darkly dense hedge. Camouflaged in the forest, I hid myself well amongst the browns of its plains. Charming as it was, the cottage could have been a safe house but it only housed crooks like Uncle.
The party was over, or I hoped it would be soon, but people still hopped around, lurking; my heart was thumping. I feared there were more, more like me, at risk. At least, I knew the Uncle’s hideout if I could get away I would burn the whole house down. Night owls came out of the woods, and sat on high branches, I wasn’t, not yet. Still, hiding away from the ubiquitous dance of spotlights through the forest. One of the owl’s hoots instilled in me some hope, the highways were close, and I knew, if I made it through this if I could somehow get to the highway soon.
Something was burning again. It trickled through my nostrils. Not more burnt omelette. Smoke was rising over the cottage, a spark there must have started a fire that was devouring trees and the forest denizens. More and more torches were snuffed out, useless against this fire’s luminous forces. Caught up in this towering inferno, the cottage was burnt down to a cinder too, with everyone in it before they even knew what struck them or how—raging, engulfing, a breathing dragon, and I? I was already in the firm clasps of the owl’s solid toes, as it towed me away. The party was over soon. It seriously was.
Multiple contests’ winner for short fiction, Mehreen Ahmed is an award-winning Australian novelist born in Bangladesh. Her historical fiction, The Pacifist, is an audible bestseller. Included in The Best Asian Speculative Fiction Anthology, her works have also been acclaimed by Midwest Book Review, and DD Magazine, translated into German, Greek, and Bangla, her works have been reprinted, anthologized, selected as Editor’s Pick, Best ofs, and made the top 10 reads multiple times. Additionally, her works have been nominated for Pushcart, botN and James Tait. She has authored eight books and has been twice a reader and juror for international awards. Her recent publications are with Litro, Otoliths, Popshot Quarterly, and Alien Buddha.
Where are you, Poets, You, Wizards? Let us paint with our poem This sorrowful world And people with masks, For behind the mask Even eyes are lacklustre And we no longer breathe. Let us raise voice And scrape the mud from our soles. Let us raise voice For all of those silent in their homes And isolated, Immersed in the misery Of everyday boring jobs. Let us cloak with our imagination This programmed world And keep the scent of childhood And first kisses Alive. Let us bring back love, That divine joy of life. Let us pour it over from our poems, May it flow down the streets Worldwide And may it touch Every solitary man in tears And women wearing black.
SILENCE
Silence in me strikes in lightnings of the sky, too grey and destroys my accumulated fear in the years of non-belonging. Silence in you does not know my fears and gets lost in the words of unknown people whose hands cannot touch the softness of our hearts. Don’t let me stay silent because my love is louder than your smile. The loudest one.
LIFE
This life is soaked with tears and the words are too small to pronounce all life in an instant and my love hidden in the corners of solitude.
This life is soaked with tears and the pain of the past is stronger than the impending ecstasy in the kiss of the night and my escape is stronger than the strength of your will. This life is soaked with tears and the joy gets crushed by the sorrow of the desperate and disbelief in a new longing. This life is soaked with tears but today there is a smile in my eyes so don’t walk away from my smile. Don’t let the grief to put out these embers at least sometimes when I forget that this life is soaked with tears.
HOPE
I would like to take the paths of new hope and erase my footprints behind me because your escort is superfluous before the rising sun. I would like to walk the land of solitude for years and walk on the silence of the pathlessness liberated of all your words and deeds. I would like to be born again bathed in purity of my soul and stand in front of the starry sky as a newborn. And pardon my rude words and be patient because my loneliness is your loneliness, too. You are my other self. You do what I am afraid of.
All Rights Reserved @ Jasna Gugić
Translated by Anita Vidakovic Ninkovic
Jasna Gugić was born in Vinkovci, Croatia. She is the Vice-President for public relations of the Association of Artists and Writers of the World SAPS; Global Ambassador of Literacy and Culture for the Asih Sasami Indonesia Global Writers, P.L.O.T.S USA the Creative Magazine Ambassador for Croatia; and a member of Angeena International, a non-profit organization for peace, humanity, literature, poetry, and culture. She is also co-editor of the anthology, Compassion—Save the World, one poem written by 130 world poets.
The last important award with a single nomination for Croatia was awarded by UHE – Hispanic World Writers’ Union – César Vallejo 2020 World Award for Cultural Excellence. Jasna is a multiple winner of many international awards for poetry and literature, and her work has been translated into several world languages. Her first independent collection of poetry was published in 2021, a bilingual English-Croatian edition, entitled Song of Silence. She lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
Many of her poems have been translated into several foreign languages and are represented in joint collections. Her poems have been published in magazines in the USA, Spain, Greece, Italy, Russia, India, Syria, Denmark, Brazil, Mexico, Bangladesh, Serbia, Albania, Nigeria, Belgium, China, Chile, Nepal, Pakistan, Korea, Germany and etc. Her poems are published in so many world-famous print and electronic magazines, journals, websites, blogs, and anthologies like Spillwords Press – USA, P.L.O.T.S. The Creative Magazine – USA, Mad Swirl – USA, Synchronized Chaos Magazine – USA, Cajun Mutt Press – USA, WordCity Literary Journal – USA, Medusa’s Kitchen – USA, Atunis Galaxy Poetry – Albania /Belgium, Lothlorien Poetry Journal – UK, Polis Magazino – Greece, Homouniversalis – Greece, Chinese Language Monthly – 中國語文月刊 – China, Eboquills – Nigeria, Azahar Revista Poetica – Spain, Sindh Courier – Pakistan, Magazine Humanity – Russia, Entre Parentesis – Chile, Daily Asia Bani – Bangladesh, Bharat Vision – Denmark, Litterateur Rw, Dritare E Re – Albania, Literary Yard – India, Gazeta Destinacioni – Albania, The Moment International News – Germany, Kavya Kishor English – Bangladesh, PETRUŠKA NASTAMBA, an e-magazine for language, literature, and culture – Serbia, Güncel Sanat magazine – Turkey, Cultural Reverence, a global digital journal of art and literature -India, A Too Powerful Word – Serbia, Magazine Ghorsowar – India, Al-Arabi Today Magazine, Magazine Rainbow, Humayuns Editorial – Bangladesh, Himalaya Diary – Nepal and Agarid br. 24 and 16, Online newspaper NewsNjeju, Korea, Willwash. wordpress blogzine – Nigeria.
Nappies. Knew nothing about nappies in 1965, nor 1970. Nappies in 1980 meant: Big Sis with toddler under one arm, milk bottle in her mouth and my camera playing tricks.
Yet in 1993 we bought full-size/ boy/known brand and experts in disposables within a week. Tried pull-ups, swim shorts, recyclables: sodden, all. Too scared of pins. Nappy mountain friendly; reluctantly.
Advanced driving next: ante-premature super-mini (and willie test-tube in the hospital). SCBU/humilactor/and that gentle sweet aroma of breast-fed Tinies. Experts in six weeks.
Gave up on nappies in 2000 (incontinence pads reach the parts…). Occupational Therapy assistance, a life-saver. Granny grab-rails to assist the ‘crouch and drop’ of special needs. Learnt in no time. A year for collection of discharged equipment.
So, when I say that I’m thankful: the Care Home took charge of extra-small dementia and personal care… Nappies. Nothing extra-sweet like a pure breast-fed baby.
Island Dreams
Happenstance of Zoom meetings: it was a new day, a new name, I could manage to sign in/unmute/and Leave. My dreams, like hot air balloon rising post-sleep, for friendship on a little ethereal island for a couple of hours. Memories are made… of – a name – Poet and Editor, speaking on Publication and Performance. Vibrant young speaker challenging beginners and experienced poets to move forward, floating on enriched tomorrows; avoiding drowning lands. Awaiting the fruitiest stork to fly in, select the wing- beat for a new birth; far at sea before sunset.
I wake to stacked competition, soft mess of guano bleaching the Farne Isles (post-season). Lark rise…
Polly Poodle’s View with a Room (Sestina)
I watch that awful photo fade so fast, regret the scuffs and scratches from that time no-one could imagine as worth preserving. It was just a flat, shared grounds, open-plan, somewhere to leave in daylight (leave behind). So many times returning. One day, gone.
I know it was expected, now you’re gone, I thought that bin estate would not fall fast. My memories of you are there, behind those boarded windows into frame-washed time. I had thought to improve your room: a plan that vanished – with you – nothing worth preserving.
The mantelpiece a hazard. Worth Preserving? You knocked your head; the bed-head wrong. Now gone, within such view (your things/path/grass). No Plan to catch and throw each stick beyond that fast road without a crossing, just dodging Time. Don’t cross to corner shop. Don’t look behind.
I found it on the sideboard (bills behind your lottery card). Was it worth preserving? A rug/a chew, yet dog-hairs spread in time, exacerbating your chest. Now long-gone, Polly-Poodle. Oh, such a dame! So fast, she ruled your heart (and purse), yet no Vet’s Plan.
You should have moved – for her, for you. A plan for slowing down, city living left behind, before that pooch ran out, wagged tail, too fast for doggie treat from old man. Worth, preserving? He left for hound-view heaven. Now all’s gone: the flats, the paths, the busy road. And, time.
You kept quiet (what the doctor said). Your time vanished before last visit. All cold-plan, to pack/house clearance/keys; a service. Gone: nostalgia/demolition/visits behind one scratchy late-found photo worth preserving, while I breathe peace to my view, over breakfast.
So now it’s time to leave this frame behind, within my heart. For what plan’s worth preserving? They’re gone, self too, releasing heaven’s fast.
Wendy Webb: Born in the Midlands, home and family life in Norfolk. Published in Indigo Dreams, Quantum Leap, Crystal, Envoi, Seventh Quarry) and online (Littoral Magazine, Autumn Voices, Wildfire Words, Lothlorien, Radio: Poetry Place), First in Writing Magazine’s pantoum poetry competition. She devised new poetry forms; wrote her father’s biography, and her own autobiography. She has attempted many traditional forms and free verse. Favourite poets: Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Burnside, John Betjeman, the Romantic Poets (especially Wordsworth), George Herbert, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Mary Webb, Norman Bissett, William Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
This is ice-fire, the layers of veins, crystal hard from the centuries which flowed & flow still when touched…
So us runaways, exiles, pariahs on home turf know what blood is made in these jagged streams carved between the shoves, the shaming shouts of: “Shut up & get out!”
We know there is worth here & are miners of that resource if fear won’t cripple belief, sell short the dream.
Look man, it’s all I got, got me a ticket, got me a plan though the streets took my man & I’ve got a kid comin’ who’ll need something besides skeletons I’ve been told, warned—– better left in the closet.
Hell no. These are the roots, these are the voices to be brought out in the light so as not to repeat things, so as to glean from the cracks every rough shine teaching the gift of shelter—–
Can’t hock it, can only neglect—& I won’t—the estate of love our arms deserved.
Bad Patch
To be mad as hell at God put yourself in the shoes of some dying subway runaway, some throwaway hustler.
Read, between news sheets: abuse, deprivation, the shamed spirit stripped to an armor’s shine called Courage.
Lord, wrung out by fury & then flung adrift, what luck, love will still establish anchors, a network for, if not, leprosy, the unwanted, only, a bad patch, antiseptics will come to replace caring.
This is bitter business, this death, a vandal desecrating every cell’s sanctity & then hocking what’s left.
Come on, Heaven, besides blind righteousness, cough up an explanation.
Though bile-loaded, I won’t shun it, nor surrender to numbing, the foul predator of fury.
Here, in these trenches, empathy replenishes, paints word, forges Will.
Here, witnessing anguish, the hardest, most feared moment, longing is a warrior angel for the gift of intimacy staring pestilence down.
Crab Heart
My, what a device, each a hand a hook hoisting me up to squeeze & leak out. Such a sump pump, this muscle, only central and capable of thinking like Mengele.
All day I can feel it, cramping animal fitted to size, a vice with incisors clicking worse than a clock.
I feed it minutes, all paintings wax paper wrapped in order to keep, but it peels them in self-preservation then roosts in their chips.
Oh old bulging crab heart, old warty crustacean, what do you want? To be boiled and salted, your shell picked clean too? I would do so gladly but your hide is too tough & you’d bite off my fingers. I know how you operate, every night performing surgery & regenerating like a messiah. My body’s the Eucharist with an altar for a soul. So break, humiliate me as you must & have yourself a banquet.
Smoke & Sand
Hemmed by the tender resentments, a lifetime’s invisible shroud giving a brand to the hands even so all that is touched smells of caste-marks…
Yes, I am dissolving from this with the aid of specific spices & liquefied ointment to anoint what is wrapped upon sand by light muslin.
Waves come, waves biblical as revival tents at Saks, & I smoke off into old summers, into the sensations of green.
Here is the psychology of poetry returning heat back to fluid, & I will mix it like white chocolate into a chilled cocoanut drink.
Sip, sip—– the specifics of your mouth meant for sweetness, that tang of risk, that volcano, that brook of your tongue meant for desire alone…
Is it insanity this quest that I have should you belong to another but still want me? So mad it may be, but whatever sun I now am, borne from grit & from fog, pours full for your shores as every beach waves.
Stephen Mead is an Outsider multi-media artist and writer. Since the 1990s he’s been grateful to many editors for publishing his work in print zines and eventually online. Recently his work has appeared in CROW NAME, WORDPEACE and DuckuckMongoose. Currently he is resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall.
You can find more of Stephen’s work here on Ink Pantry.
I view the five pictures on the opposite wall. I had chosen aesthetic frames to beautify a very ugly office-room and to suit their literary worth too. The idea of personal affinities between the inmates of the frames on me suddenly dawn. I begin with Oscar Wilde whose elegance is overshadowed by his doom: a two-year imprisonment followed by penury, meningitis, and personal destitution. No wonder he died alone.
Next sits on my wall the enigmatic Edgar Allan Poe, whose mysterious death has inspired so many essays and books. He lay in a heap in ill-fitting clothes, a victim to a beating, cooping, or alcohol… a riddle over which to brood, a pathetic end to a tragic figure whose demise should have taken an epic form.
Above Wilde, the self-made Brontës before Branwell pose, a universal emblem of talent, stoicism and fortitude. First went Emily, resistant to every proffered cure, eager to be rid of the house of clay that imprisoned her chainless soul, then followed Anne who died miles away from home, leaving heart-broken Charlotte to sip a few drops of happiness before quitting the world, all departed in the prime of youth.
Sitting at a table, Emily Dickinson looks into the beyond, probably waiting for the carriage to ferry her into the unknown, an obsession with death that people find morbid, but I don’t. With a fetish for white, she shunned the multitudes and died in quietude.
At the top, Charles Baudelaire, with pursed lips, looks on at a world beset with technology, materialism, and the death of hope. Abandoned by the woman he cherished most, he carried in his eyes the loneliness of the world and died feeling forlorn in a nursing home.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
When Pink Floyd sings A Momentary Lapse of Reason, I think of your lapses that extended over weeks and seasons, of your suicide that I regard as the worst type of treason.
You opted for the easy way out, left behind grieving friends, a distraught spouse, a son who scratches your tombstone with your chisel and mallet every Christmas morning and every anniversary that his mom observes.
You make us all feel guilty, and responsible for our inability to comprehend what ailed your heart, and a thousand ways that could have saved your life continuously haunt our minds.
In my dream, you beckon to me to follow you to the graveyard that is adjacent to our playground in Templetown where we both grew up. I always respond with the same words: I cannot be selfish and abandon my dog, the only friend I have, then I wake up.
DrSusie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.
Susie’s first book (adapted for film), Classic Adaptations, includes Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.
I lay in the dark. Still as a spider I haven’t yet decided if I am
going to kill. I am done giving meaning to arduousness. I could
quit my job but another will fill it. With worthlessness. The oval
mirror reflects nothing without the presence of light.
Howlers
the bar on Liberty Ave with wolf on window singing into microphone
under the moon with drinks in me I sometimes transform in daylight I am worthless
watching the impeachment plop on a walk an old man
with a cane limping down Liberty Ave wearing MAGA
the war is happening the old men are crossing the road
Wealthy Sibling Photoshoot
Stepping out of their pool, wet feet dripping onto afternoon cement– luxury sunglasses, soft and floral swimwear, perfect voluminous hair.
Over the fence behind them– the Instagram background– vines drop, dangle, gaining strength in the sun.
Skulking forward, their shadows take from their own darkness.
Rice
My mother coming home from work: you better get the rice started.
I know. This is my duty, always, and yet I forget until your call–
my father watches headlights on cars pass by.
The dark and rural road.
He makes a game: how many cars until it’s Mom?
We count one, two, three, twenty…
steam rising over everything in another room, childhood.
Bump
The world is a squirrel
in the middle of a country road
and– phone out, music loud–
I can’t tell if I ran it over.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022) and Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021). Recent poems are in Stirring, Vilas Avenue, and *82 Review. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Twitter/Instagram
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
