And s(n)o(w) it falls
Orla Cowan
rooftops and windowsills shoulder with
quiet acquiescence the flaky pinpricks
of icy ashes – and (look!) there is
an equal, fickle coating of the pavement –
nonetheless with a movement
decisive, deliberate, perhaps well-meant
Look, there is more than one captured sense
now the morning’s silence is crystallised
in clear, printed lines from eye to mind –
spiralling, soon-to-fade footfalls left behind.
Breathing the Sheets
Daniel Xiberras
A packed station
When I bolt upright
And air still carries weight
It affirms something:
I am shattered.
Beloved bone China, self sutured,
Tears sprouting through crude stitches
saturate and swell brittle twine.
In Solingen there is a flowerbed where there used to be a synagogue
Anna Johns
Johanna catches up with her mother over the phone
and I could have been eavesdropping, if things had been different.
In Berlin I stutter, mit Sojamilch, bitte.
and the waitress says, that will be twenty cents extra
is that okay?
When Thea came to England,
she must have chewed on the words like rocks in her teeth
spoken to her children like tourists.
Was English too soft a language
to talk about what happened?
When she so quietly left
did she know then that she would not go back to Solingen
and that someone else’s grandchild
would trim the vines on her sister’s grave.
She must have known,
not to go looking for God in Germany.
He was not there.
She would not find him.
I learn conjugations by rote
and write verb tables
with the words she used to pray with.
Catching a Train
Sophie Bex
A packed station
A bustling sea of loneliness
Little dream bubbles collide
Cups of tea and roaring fires
Friendly faces and tight hugs
The sea disperses, racing, jostling
Desperate to escape onto the approaching train
Leading them away to places they long for
Away from places they long to stay in.
Panic ensues –
Quick find a seat, one that’s not reserved,
space for a bag?
Chests tighten, heat rises
The sea dreams once again
The world racing by as they sit cocooned in their
little time capsule
Consumed by their own thoughts
Unaware that life continues on outside their
window.
Llysfaen
Jake Roberts
Movement in the cold stasis.
A cat hugs a smattering of
Snow-capped graves, winding
Thoughtlessly past mourners, their
Eyes fixed to stagnant, waning feet.
The chill makes to follow her path
So each visage, betrayed, lifts to breathe
A fleeting warmth: life
Pulls together what here is torn.
Unknowing, denying, the cat makes haste
Along uniform patches of past
Congregations, hard with the season,
Drooping heads and frozen ink,
Deep into balding hedgerows
And out, still further from our crowd.
Atop a mound, she halts to rest
And watch, as we did, the distant tide –
Morbid sundial, we all sense the time.
Ignorant of the love she undermines,
She pads the frost and waits for mice.
Poetic of the Going
Emma Large
Non poet, you don’t know how
maddening it is to bring back
and back and
back and back to
margin, when I want to keep my hand
where the blood is, where the throbbing starts,
the sunken place before words only the body knows.
Keep my palm to the membrane from which the heart
swells out like an embryo against its shell,
in that valley before feeling surfaces; remembering
the brown flagstones of your skin, warmed
in afternoon sun. I unravel us like threads
to keep our mess in my pocket and to touch
their feathered ends, every now and then,
because sometimes I like missing things to
feel I am living,
to dredge last blood for sake of requiem;
though your skin before me now, I wouldn’t touch.
It occurs to me that even our elegy
wasn’t written to mourn you. Sentiment
for sake of feeling, grieving the going
over what is gone; how happy I am
you do not know
all my little cruelties.
Seven Sisters of the Week
Ed Bayliss
I see it’s Wednesday. The week will inherit
Me. I’d forgotten which day had me
(it was a cloud covered night)
Until Wednesday sprung and
Nudged me into her midweek march.
We were strangers – I’d squint
At you all on primary school
Walls and tiptoe my eyes across your
Two syllables and Saturdays.
Fridays became brilliant corners
That turned always elbow first
Into weekends fat and satisfied
At home when we’d stir
From its sleep the wet blue clay
At the bottom of the garden.
Sunday’s cradle curves into
Mondays of
Digits and rows and little lit multicolours
All while standing on my toenails –
Again, looking up.
The next day’s drift tows me through
And back to the street-lighted
Midweek.
I’ll try to thumb a ride
To the rest of the week,
Star scored and unreached.
Coffee Morning
Jake Bayliss
Wait for lights at the window;
It’s coffee morning at mine.
Once all meander home
The remnants trace lines
In the leafy script-pages,
Digging, restless for replies.
Soon, a roaming carcass
Will be lit with news
Or laughter as a candle wilts
In some gloomy box room.
We live through sirens,
The hope that they pass,
Burst locks and spectral letters.
Defences
He spends the summer of ‘18 in Italy.
Returns with a tattoo of a cross,
cradled in the crook of his arm.
We argue about God until he cries.
Do you remember being
seven years old?
The boys in the field who called me a bitch?
You: this little bundle
of fury, headfirst into the fight.
They beat the shit out of you.
You didn’t regret it.
You laughed, as we walked back home:
‘It’s just a black eye, Giorgi,
some things are more important
than a bruise.’
I told my mother I hated you, that night.
And then I went to bed,
prayed I’d know you forever.
The Rock
Lawrence Gartshore
Oh rolling hills, oh grassy glens,
thy power and beauty know no ends.
Where men are bold and yet more wise;
a land ne’r ‘fraid to punch above its size
and repel foreign tyrants who e’er they may be,
from England, to Rome, those who plunder the sea.
A rock to those who know its love
and the promised land to those above
for God’s own land is not in the east,
but in Scotland does he make his peace.
