This issue of London Grip features new poems by:
*Alison Hill *Bruce Christianson *Fiona Larkin *Chris Stewart *Emma Lee *Ian Humphreys
*Tom McFadden *Rosie Johnston *Robert Nisbet *Katherine Venn *Ruth Bidgood
*Mary Franklin *Clare Crossman *F M Brown *Keith Nunes *S J Mannion *Peter Daniels
*Rangi Faith *Nancy Mattson *Cathleen Allyn Conway *Sarah James *Wendy French
*Tracey Peterson *Merryn Williams *David Flynn
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Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors
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A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry
can be obtained at LG New Poetry Autumn 2015
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Please send submissions to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing
no more than three poems and a brief, 2-3 line, biography
Poems should be in the email body or a single Word attachment
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.Editorial
In summertime, the London Grip poetry editor’s office alternates between one cliché and another: either a hive of activity or deserted as the Marie Celeste with only a few untouched petits fours left on the tea trolley. During June, July and August the staff may be busy entertaining foreign visitors, travelling abroad on fact-finding expeditions or merely relaxing. And yet, thanks to our excellent contributors, this autumn issue of LG New Poetry has still come together on time.
Distinctive features of this edition include some short and enigmatic prose-poems and David Flynn’s haunting long poem The Ends of the Earth. It must be admitted, however, that the art department has been able to do little more than provide cover images. These relate to poems about courageous women: Emma Lee’s #EmilyMatters which reminds us of the suffragette movement; and Alison Hill’s On Such a Day and Washing our Hair from her sequence about the women pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary.
Looking back to our summer posting it is pleasing to report that the launch reading, hosted by Enfield Poets, was a great success and we hope, from time to time, to celebrate future issues in a similar way.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Alison Hill: On Such a Day
Our hearts sank when we guessed
the worst, or dared to let ourselves imagine.
On such a day, we stayed on the ground,
not wishing to tempt fate.
On such a day we looked upwards,
almost at the same minute, the same hour.
We couldn’t help ourselves, automatically
scanning for any signs of life.
On such a day we stretched aching
muscles, pinching our flesh raw while
waiting for news that never fully surfaced.
We knew in our hearts she was gone.
Amy Johnson is not only a loss to aviation: those who knew her have lost the type of friend who cannot be replaced. Pauline Gower, The Times, January 1941
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Alison Hill: Washing Our Hair
The sky was literally a washout – the day had been declared one. Some despatched to the nearest pub, others to find a decent meal. I needed some time alone and grounded, with space to think. Time to enjoy the simple ritual of washing, rinsing, towelling – scanning myself in the cracked mirror above the sink, slick a curl or two in their place, paint a smile, feign a shrug before an early night. Pears soap too, if I was lucky – Preparing to be a beautiful lady Not much time to prepare really, but now and then it did us good to remember our skin, our hair, what lay beneath our golden wings.
Alison Hill has published two collections, Peppercorn Rent (Flarestack, 2008) and Slate Rising (Indigo Dreams, 2014). She founded the reading series Rhythm & Muse and was Kingston Libraries’ first Poet in Residence (2011/12). Sisters in Spitfires, from which these two poems are taken, is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams. This collection arises from research into the women who flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in World War II, focusing on their role in the war and their love of the Spitfire in particular, and is supported by the Arts Council.
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Bruce Christianson: Romantic Novel
in the departure lounge
love sits quietly reading
a girl catches love's eye
they're on the same flight
(the girl doesn't know it but
love sees all boarding cards)
on the way to the gate
love stops off to buy a hat
as they go down the jetway
the girl finally smiles back
& about time too thinks love
glancing at the safety card
to memorise the layout
then leaning back relaxed
love enjoys takeoffs
they start to taxi
Bruce Christianson is a mathematician from New Zealand who has taught in Hertfordshire for 28 years. Love glared at him recently in an airport women-only bookshop.
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Fiona Larkin: Passport Queue
A spiralling wail tautens Arrivals, cordoning a hydra-headed crocodile. Its attention stirs at each gulping inhalation, and its many sunburnt faces, grasping pale watermarked facsimiles of themselves, are tilted by an infant puppet master, whose cries tug the strings of eyebrows, corrugate foreheads, narrow lips, draw hisses toxic to his mother.
Fiona Larkin‘s poems have been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears and The Stare’s Nest, and in print in SOUTH Poetry, The Oxford Magazine and South Bank Poetry. She teaches English in the voluntary sector.
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Chris Stewart: Masterpiece
I like crinkled edges creases that vein through the composition; they make it less pretentious. The sides of the triptych are like black batwings. It evokes a dark and mysterious mood. Twist your head sideways you’ll see the genius; it looks good. I can see a fluid rainbow behind the pall of smokey spillage. Perhaps you can make out the slightest dove soaring above the abstract landscape? That lucky paint leaks a path directs our eyes to the smile on our mouths. If others saw this work, do you think they’d see what we see? Art snobs and critics might be correct to say that any common child could have done it with their eyes closed, but they didn’t, did they? Only one person was ever capable of this. Would they really look into our daughter’s eyes and deny it was a masterpiece?
Chris Stewart is a thirty something year old man who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has a lovely long term life partner, a brand new daughter, and participates willingly in domesticated masculinity.
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Emma Lee: #EmilyMatters
I try and see this through a child’s eyes:
the awkward steps (ramp tucked away at the back),
warped wooden floor, older women sustained
by coffee flasks and gossip which I interrupt,
the booths with a small shelf and pencil
anchored by twine that’s never long enough
for left-handers. My child’s attention is drawn
by a vase: green leaves, white daisies and violets.
I tell her of a story about a race at Epsom,
and how a woman tripped in her long skirt,
her banner trampled by the King’s horse.
Her jacket had blown open revealing
green, white and violet (hope, purity and dignity);
chromatic acronym for ‘give women votes’.
She lived four days with fatal injuries,
and would never take her dreamed-of daughter
to a polling station to vote.
I give my daughter a badge of pressed flowers.
My little pencilled cross won’t change much,
but my daughter will know of a world
where women couldn’t vote, why Emily matters.
Emma Lee’s latest collection Ghosts in the Desert is available from Indigo Dream Publishing. She blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com and reviews for The Journal, London Grip and Sabotage Reviews.
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Ian Humphreys: Bruised
The bruise mutates. Blue bleeds into red. Starved of oxygen, haemoglobin fortifies flesh with iron. She knows in a day or two, a jolt of green will flood the swelling. It will burn its most toxic, brand her invisible – strangers will turn away. She calls it the jade phase, a sign the healing process is working, her body is doing something right. It will fade to yellow after eight days. On the tenth day, he’ll return with flowers. Her favourite colours in a sling of tissue paper.
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Ian Humphreys: breathless
graffiti shouts insults from walls by the chemist its colours explode like flung bottles I stare at the pavement and I’m late for the 8:22 to Manchester because I should have left home at 7:55 but I had to fix the tap or attempt to and now if I run I could pratfall like last time and hurt my coccyx and rip my trousers and Annie from sales will cluck over me at lunch and her breath smells of liquorice and I just want to sit quietly at my desk and not bother with chit-chat and it’s now 8:17 and there’s no time to order coffee from the man who grunts or grab a gloompaper for company on the journey and I need something to occupy my mind because if I don’t it ticks like a wind-up alarm clock and prick-prick-pricks the inside of my skull and the train’s pulling in now and I’m queuing politely when some idiot pushes past and I smile and I’m getting on and I’m looking round for an empty seat like that exists at rush hour and I’m squashed against a woman with a pushchair and my head weighs watermelon fat and who brings a child on a crowded train at this time of day and I pretend not to notice her or the kid but I see the strap of my bag is caught in the wheels of the buggy and my inner-Tannoy says they’re getting off at the next stop they’re getting off at the next stop and I brace myself to leave with them to avoid a scene then jump back onto the next carriage along so no one will spot me re-embarking as they may determine I’m acting suspiciously and use mobile devices to alert the authorities and guards at Stockport might actually escort me off the train in front of all these people and what will Annie think
Ian Humphreys lives in West Yorkshire and is studying for a Creative Writing MA at MMU. This year his work has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies and journals including Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Ink Sweat & Tears, London Grip, Poetry News, Prole and Shadowtrain. He won the 2013 PENfro Poetry Competition and has been shortlisted three times for the Bridport Prize.
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Tom McFadden: Somewhere Different, Out Of Sight
I am still, beneath a bridge of moving vehicles, a "still life portrait" inside a dormant car across from the Municipal Court Building, waiting to join the citizen-renderers of whatever jury call awaits. It will be time, then, to assess another's bearing upon this little square of earth. But, for now... I watch through the windshield from the parking lot-- observing a homeless man emerge from the wall-hugging bushes, tightly wrapped in a big, white blanket like a nomad in an urban desert. Indecisively, he makes his way to the corner, to the red light, where traffic streams in all directions through new day, and does not know, himself, which way to go, until, at last, he does go – responding to a random WALK sign, going nowhere: somewhere different, out of sight. The morning pigeons collect above me, on a ledge just below the highway top. For awhile, so high, they suggest a poem yet, a truck backfires and this day's poetry flies away. My tenure of stillness elapsed, I emerge from where I had slumped unseen, slipping from my car's dormancy. But the winds prove cold. So, I pull at my sweater in random directions to be more tightly wrapped, then, still distracted by the cold, exit the lot to cross at the light when, without real thought, I barely notice the sign says WALK. Inside, in time, we of the jury collect to sit together on a wooden ledge; and, for just a little while, we look so high.
Tom McFadden is an American poet whose writing has appeared in such venues as Poetry Ireland Review, Voices Israel, Journal Of The American Medical Association, Seattle Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, South Carolina Review, Portland Review & California Quarterly
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Rosie Johnston: Casca’s table
Some of the ancient buildings in Pompeii are named after what was found there. Casca’s House is home to a table bearing Casca’s name though Casca himself was probably never there. He was one of Julius Caesar’s killers and struck the first blow.
Blue pulsing heat. Geckos hide in lesions in the walls of Casca’s House. A perfect atrium draws heat’s cloak from my shoulders. Conjures breezes. Pale in the gloaming, a marble table stands: three lions’ maws, three paws. There’s his name, the senator – P Casca Long – engraved with overt pride. Words etched deep, but not as deep as Casca’s wary jab in Caesar’s neck. Did this marble come in shame from Rome cut-price, humbled by Casca’s name? Hot-blood war, chill suicide, the table keeps its witness to itself. I sway: a toga brushed my arm unseen. Outdoor torpor revives me.
Rosie Johnston’s three poetry pamphlets are published by Lapwing Publications (Belfast). She is Poet in Residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust.
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Robert Nisbet: The Bus Down
We were talking about you, much of the time, on the bus down from Aber, due to reach your cottage at about the time night comes stealing up on afternoon. And the picture of your cottage up that lane claimed us: the fox whose bark cracks across your windows two nights in five; your wealth of bramble, heavy with berry every August; the tiny summerhouse with crazy trellis-work, half in use. And your well. The handle hasn’t worked since just before the Second War, but it’s your well, rusted maybe but its depths plumb-green. Yes, your life in that clearing will please all poetry men. Say what the world will, you are our talisman, crop-tending, wood-burning, real.
Robert Nisbet was for some years an associate lecturer in creative writing at Trinity College, Carmarthen. His poems appear in magazines like The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Dream Catcher, The Journal, Prole, Scintilla and (in the USA) in The Camel Saloon, Hobo Camp Review and Main Street Rag.
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***
Katherine Venn: Liturgy for walking in the wind
– the desire to have covered this stretch already, rather than to be outside still walking it contending with your own animal softness and a force greater than yourself unravelling from you all unnecessary complications though now it seems to fight you will strip you of yourself of even the breath inside you – trust that the wind can take your weight holds you and know that it turns helper as it swings to push you home.
Katherine Venn was born in London, and grew up somewhere between there, the United States, Liverpool and Kent, before studying English Literature and Language at Oxford and then returning to London to work in publishing. In 2009/10 she took a year out to take the poetry strand of the creative writing MA at UEA, She currently works part-time at Hodder & Stoughton as a commissioning editor, and until 2014 she coordinated the literature programme for Greenbelt arts festival. She has been published in the Duino International Poetry Competition’s anthology, Roads; in the UEA anthology Eight Poets: 2009; and her work has appeared on-line in Caught by the River and London Grip as well as in Magma and Third Way print magazines. She has won scholarships to study and write at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, and was poet in residence at the Diocese of Norfolk’s Pentecost Festival in 2012.
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Ruth Bidgood: Now
Waking from a muddle of dreams to a fogbound search for meaning, one may find forming , beyond the murk of an unpropitious day, a blur of sun. Sensations proclaim themselves – drizzle whisking by as a wind gets up: drift of small leaves; clunk, settling of poles on a timber-lorry passing; click and whoosh of an opening door. There’s a jangle of notes, off-key, unbeautiful but live; tap of a pencil dropped on wood; rattle of rings as a window is bared, and sun’s rays reach at last through misted panes to light the undeniable now.
Ruth Bidgood lives in mid-Wales. Her collection Time Being (Seren, 2009) won the Roland Mathias Award 2011. Her most recent one is Above the Forests (Cinnamon Press, 2012). It was jointly launched with Matthew Jarvis’s Ruth Bidgood (UWP, 2012).
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Mary Franklin: The time of no time
It was the time of no time before the white men came with clocks that measured everything. We lived by seasons here and now: woke from winter’s sacred time of healing when spring’s wrists were wreathed in lilacs, caught summer salmon swimming upriver to spawn and dried them with berries in autumn bonfires. Always we followed the buffalo our teepees strapped to travois pulled by dogs and horses. White men watched with empty eyes. They asked no questions. It was the time of no time before the covered wagon brought the white man with red spots: my people died like ants under a bear’s paw. The white men did not die. Why? Tick tock tick tock ticks the white man’s clock. The time of no time has passed and gone. It will not come again.
Mary Franklin has had poems published in Iota, The Open Mouse, Ink Sweat and Tears, London Grip, Message in a Bottle, The Stare’s Nest, three drops from a cauldron and various anthologies. Her tanka have appeared in poetry journals in Australia, Canada, UK and USA. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Clare Crossman: Suddenly
(For Anna)
Owls have come to sit in our fir trees: they don’t often leave the wood by the river, I dislike their return. I have seen their wings as they drop, catching mice on the bright fell, carrying them skyward, screeching. Like omens, they have arrived just as you are suddenly gone. Dark eyed and serious, twenty and dead. What you were, who you might be snuffed out to be, ash, owl-pellets strewn on the lawn. I can’t ask you what it is like to be fixed in one time and place; this date in mid-summer. Vanished, to be perpetually a bright shooting star. Become a girl who hunts across heaven, with a golden bow and arrow, and comets for a crown. Enough to say we are dumb. Hooting one note like these birds with the wing-span of angels. Older. Diminished. We blink in the July dark. Unable to conjure you home.
Clare Crossman lives near Cambridge. Vanishing Point, a second collection of poem,s was recently published by Shoestring Press. She runs poetry readings and workshops in association with the Cambridge Art Salon.
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F M Brown: The Way Things Were?
Oh, Mike, yes, he’s been away a long time now.
Nerves, is it? Repressed emotion I expect. You know he never really got over Lad, his red setter, dying. I remember his mother saying to me, “He’s only shed a couple of tears. He hasn’t grieved properly.”
The very same thing happened to another friend of mine. His dog had to be put down. Lovely golden Rinty. He did Love that dog. I was the one who had to break it to him. We were very close, me and him. He howled like a dog himself when I told him.
That was me. Rinty was mine. It wasn’t you that told me.
Well, I remember I had something to do with it. I know, You were away working that summer in Finland and I heard about Rinty before you did. Your mother said I hadn’t to mention it in my letters to you.
Incidentally, now I come to think about it, Mike’s dog was A square cocker spaniel called Bridget. Lad was altogether another more modern tragedy. He wasn’t even a red setter.
FM Brown was born in Sheffield but had to come south to soft Bedfordshire to begin writing poetry
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Keith Nunes: pitiless sky
honestly, it looks like the same sky I left behind in my twenties, all mottled and angry and full of seriousness, I swear it wants me dead and it’ll get its way one day, the same sky hanging hungrily as I’m buried and me wondering how it has such staying power
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Keith Nunes: the blender is faulty
he kept trying to make it right with his wife, quietly achieving with implements and applications; and through the rooms where water ran, he accepted the blends of bitter and sweet while driving yabbering facial expressions up and down roads of stutters; but the tones of voices and the tones of skin put him in his unholy place – at the end of a barge pole with a pain so intense his soul was becoming an anarchist
Keith Nunes (Tauranga, New Zealand) was a newspaper sub-editor for more than 20 years but he now writes to stay sane. He’s been published around NZ and increasingly in the UK (London Grip, Prole, Iota) and US, was highly commended in the 2014 NZ Poetry Society international poetry competition and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He lives with artist Talulah Belle and a coterie of nutters.
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S J Mannion: Orzo
I stand by the cooker watching water, waiting for it to come to a rolling boil. I love that particular pairing of words. I love the way they feel on my tongue as I say them out loud and I love the way, though they are words about heat and hotness, they caress the inside of my head like cool glass marbles. After a while the watched pot boils and I throw in handfuls of pasta. Hotly splashing and then sinking. Like so many tiny slippers or even little toenails. This in turn reminds me of something. Something I have held in my mind for some time. I read of it and it took root. This is the trouble with words. Dangerous, damaging, descriptive things. I cannot rid myself of this image. Children’s shoes indiscriminately heaped and piled up outside the gas chambers of Belsen.
S J Mannion writes: “I am an Irish writer living in Christchurch, being middle aged, married-with-three, doing domesticity. When I can I write, when I can’t I read.”
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Peter Daniels: Slow News
For the slow burning stories, the old time newsman gives thanks. Their rumours rustling the undergrowth, their stupid perpetrators happy in their burrows. Cultivating every piece of fact, a good contact made safe and useful. The lull in the story, weeks, months, years even of space but the track continues. Dead ends will start to grow. The dormant grudges get their motivation. Some moment, maybe a distant car horn, and it breaks. You’re the one with the twanging string and the trembling arrow in a tree trunk. They like it, back at the desk. You can write it into headlines fat as sausages in lard. Breakfast with the paper, all the trimmings.
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Peter Daniels: Forget
The earth moves me. It gives me my sustenance: the place I can't escape or understand, beyond handling roots in the dust, if I remember to wait on what’s down there, underneath me. They’re playing music in the cemetery ruins. Time loosens the bodies from the strong hold of the chiselled epitaphs. Under the overgrowth, earth waits in its ivy and mud-caked pathways ready to receive us, soldiers marching into the hill, mariners back to our harbour, stuffed relics of animals lost in the glass-case forest. The earth will forget. It owns us, nonetheless.
Peter Daniels has won several competitions including the Arvon, Ledbury and TLS. He has published pamphlets including the obscene historical Ballad of Captain Rigby, the full collection Counting Eggs (2012), and translations of Vladislav Khodasevich from Russian (2013).
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Rangi Faith: Tomb-sweeping day
Now I understand this: the generosity of a river beside hallowed ground – how the waters carry the pain – and this: the spirit living in each slab of marble, each cross each unlikely offering; and how one man’s sweeping is his gift, his link to the people of the past.
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Rangi Faith: Rakaia Gorge Wind
May 2015
Below the gorge from bridge to braid it’s eye-watering stuff: this nor’wester is hellbent on cooking up a storm filleting the river clear off the bone laying the ribs of the battered bedrock bare lifting grit & pinbones into the floury sky & skinning the greywacke clean wind slices through water like the fins of big salmon sifted air powders the surface with schools of small, frightened fish.
Rangi Faith is a poet, editor and critic who has been widely published throughout New Zealand and overseas. Poetry books include Spoonbill 101 (Puriri Press, Auckland, 2014), Conversation With A Moahunter (Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2005) and Rivers Without Eels (Huia Press, Wellington, 2001). A retired teacher, he has also edited poetry books for students including Dangerous Landscapes (Longman Paul, 1994) an anthology of poetry for secondary students.
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Nancy Mattson: Scale, Skin, Hair
Braids have purposes, they know
from the scalp, their source
that they will end
in flimsiness, a tail-swish
as hair gives way
to air
Gulping salmon
beckoned through scale and skin
by a wish as strong
as mother-love
return to their natal rivers
scale rapids and waterfalls
to reach gravel-bedded riffles
spawn and die
I remember my mother
braiding my hair, the ritual
of scoring my scalp with a steel
rat-tail
I did not squirm
Skull and roots hurt
Each hair, root to tip
had to learn its place
This tarnished mirror remembers bright
fat plaits that narrowed
dwindled
faded
like feather tips
or wisps of whale baleen
for sifting krill
like the skirt of a worn-out
dancer, her ragged hems sodden
as she waded into the sea
Nancy Mattson was born near the Red River in Winnipeg, raised near the North Saskatchewan in Edmonton, and now lives near the Thames in London. Her third full-length collection is Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press, 2012). She co-organizes Poetry in the Crypt in Islington.
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Cathleen Allyn Conway: Letting Go
I make paper boats,
coat them in paraffin
to make them watertight.
I place a paper doll
on each stern
and a votive in the hold.
I release them onto the river,
a flickering flotilla of white petals,
each launching into oblivion
the girl who...,
the girl who...,
the girl who...,
Cathleen Allyn Conway is a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, University of London, researching the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She is co-editor of Plath Profiles, a peer-reviewed academic journal, and poetry editor for Blotterature literary magazine. Her pamphlet Static Cling was published in 2012 by Dancing Girl Press. She can be found on Twitter at @mllekitty.
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Sarah James: Black Market
on the 30th anniversary of perestroika
All Eva’s dolls have Russian names. Their hollow faces hide in or behind the others’, disown fault and blame. Political matryoshka, they impose fear like real presidents – scowling down with black smiles, and ears that don’t hear. Beneath the gloss of wooden-shell suits a nested space of secrets – perfect for hiding notes when bartering for food. Dollar bills still rub like gritty hunger against unvarnished splinters inside. She keeps the layered stash unplundered to remind herself of survival’s price.
Sarah James’ latest collections are The Magnetic Diaries (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press), a narrative in poems, and plenty-fish from Nine Arches Press. The Oxford University modern languages graduate was winner of theOverton Poetry Prize 2015 and a poem from The Magnetic Diaries was highly commended in this year’s Forward Prizes. Her website is at www.sarah-james.co.uk and she runs the small poetry imprint, V. Press.
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Wendy French: The Tower
It causes him to be sent to the Tower. Absent for a time. Re-appears. Another operation, more chemo. Doors locked against visitors and night. He’s hated locked doors since a child – once playing in his grandmother’s house he climbed to the attic, turned the key, smothered his hands in a trunk of wigs. The view, through an isolated room, is of London and sky. There’s not a sunflower or staircase in sight. So what is it about locked doors that make him write letters he knows will never be sent? He re-enters his grandmother’s room and searches for mannequin wigs to wear when doors open freely. He’ll walk sideways along corridors into rooms full of paraphernalia.
The Tower is the nuclear-medicine department of University College London Hospital (UCLH) where treatment and research exist.
Wendy French has just finished a Poet in Residency at the Macmillan Cancer Centre, UCLH. She is currently working on poems to reflect on this residency and the vulnerability of us all.
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Tracey Peterson : Sweeping The Porch
Like her herbaceous border the bridal store window dresses always catch her eye. As the light turns green they say it has to be love that makes people want to be together. Nothing else. Home now. She sweeps the porch. Readies for their arrival. The wardrobe door opens on a mirror of memory and disregard. Tastes and preferences. The detail everything. Cutting, the page-boy-deflation. Blatant, sharp-edged. No it’s definitely not a page-boy. She hates page-boys. So able to recognize it now. What matters. What doesn’t. Him hanging-up on her in front of them. Her trying to hide it. The writer’s workshop advises not to make the theme too obvious. That’s the problem. All of this. So obvious, it’s glaring.
Tracey Peterson is a New Zealand based writer and lover of poetry, completely passionate about it, having read, written and performed it from a young age and in her adult years having taught it to children from 5 to 16 years. She is a graduate of Canterbury University having studied English, Linguistics and Education, and is currently working on what she hopes will be her first publishable collection of poetry.
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Merryn Williams: It’s Happened
Over the leagues, through the December darkness, from two old friends, unuttered words are blown. You’re in the north, the ship canal is freezing; I’m here. I don’t, you don’t pick up the phone. Mistletoe tosses in the naked branches we view through glass; this year there’ll be no kiss. Ahead, the solstice looms, our days diminish. I can’t, you can’t believe it’s come to this.
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Merryn Williams: Do Not Disturb
Some days I switch off telephones, the iPad, radio, the ubiquitous TV, muffle the doorbell too, block out the jangling voices of all who wish to get at me, and ring you up, tell you (my lips just moving) the family news. Although the real phone’s dead and someone else has got your number, I can still activate the line inside my head. Another old friend gone. And two more married. The words are mouthed. If you were here, you’d know. The baby was a girl. No doubt some people would think me mad. I tell you, even so.
Merryn Williams was the founding editor of The Interpreter’s House. Her third collection, The First Wife’s Tale, was long-listed for the Welsh Book of the Year; a fourth collection is expected this winter. Her biography, Effie: A Victorian Scandal: From Ruskin’s Wife to Millais’ Muse, was turned into a Random House audiobook this year
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***
David Flynn: The Ends of the Earth
The Jian Zhen plowed the dark jade water of the East China Sea between Kobe and Shanghai, between you and me. Rusted and slow it paces back and forth between Kobe and Shanghai as we do not. Year after year we do not see the other's face, nor touch the other's coat, nor embrace the other's body. Now we live a thousand miles apart. But on the Jian Zhen plowing the dark jade water of the East China Sea between Kobe and Shanghai, between you and me, we stood on the same deck. I watched you in motion, braced against the winter wind that white-capped the sea. Later, lost – a backstreet of Shanghai – we touched coats. Striding, arms around the physical waists, you and I shouted Christmas carols to Chinese walls. We let go on the sidewalk in front of the Peace Hotel. Meaning: a rain of spirit wet the inside of me. The center of my body sagged. You too were water flowing by. A radio that failed. A house that burnt down. You too were water flowing by. We embraced coats, a statue, stones in a Chinese current, hugging on the sidewalk in front of the Peace Hotel. I felt you feel a second of being dead too. But you and I turned lovers flooded with touch. Millions of words from the visible lips. Night after night the radiation of your skin made red the chill of Japanese spring. Together: Cherry blossoms on the Uji River and a cup of green tea. Together: A pilgrimage to Shodoshima, an island of the Inland Sea, where we saw the priest's face flickering in red candlelight; we heard monkeys chattering on the temple roof; we felt the wooden gate smoothed by seven centuries of hands. At nights on Shodoshima, an island of the inland sea, we lay on the tatami. My skin and your skin, real, pushed to their soft limits, while our spirits, ghosts, continued in toward merger. That summer you moved to your American city. And I moved to my American city. Now we live a thousand miles apart. Year after year we talk by telephone: the news that lifts nothing. It is not enough. Your voice and your spirit arrive at my receiver. But they are not enough. Earth air water fire eyes fingers lips movement when you are not speaking expression reaction wasted time everything is what I need of you. Is what I desperately need of you.
David Flynn was born in the textile mill company town of Bemis, TN. His jobs have included newspaper reporter, magazine editor and university teacher. He has five degrees and is both a Fulbright Senior Scholar and a Fulbright Senior Specialist currently on the roster. His literary publications total more than one hundred and seventy. David Flynn’s writing blog, where he posts a new story and poem every month, is at http://writing-flynn.blogspot.com/. His web site is at http://www.davidflynnbooks.com .
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The New and The Old
August 30, 2015 @ 10:24 am
[…] these, a perestroika poem ‘Black Market’ accepted and published at London Grip, a poem ‘Slipping’ accepted for the Offa’s Press anthology Poetry of Staffordshire (edited by […]
New poem in London Grip
September 4, 2015 @ 9:25 am
[…] I’m honoured to appear in excellent company in London Grip’s new poetry edition – you’ll find my poem here. […]