This issue of London Grip New Poetry features new poems by:
*Tim Youngs *Kerrin P Sharpe *Richie McCaffery *Abegail Morley *Nadine Brummer *Patrick Wright *William Oxley *Tim Love *Peter Daniels *Teoti Jardine *J ‘Ash’ Gamble *Oliver Comins
*Caroline Davies *David Perman *Murray Bodo *Caroline Maldonado *Brian Docherty
*Jane Henderson *Wendy French *Sarah James *Ray Miller *Marilyn Ricci
*Alison Hill *Gareth Culshaw *Deeptesh Sen *Stephen Claughton
*P W Bridgman *Stuart Handysides *George Freek
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors
A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry resides at LG new poetry Winter 2015-6
Please send submissions to poetry@londongrip.co.uk (no more than three poems & a brief biography)
From the Editor
Craigie Aitchison – Washing Line at Montecastelli
What are we waiting for?
The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight
of the sons of God coming into their own – Rom 8:19
J.B. Phillips translation
We regularly celebrate
the story of an end to waiting
scarcely more than two took part in.
None bar prophets saw it coming.
But what we haven’t settled is who else
must visit what fresh Bethlehem; and when
a burst of star-shaped news will overtake
whichever shepherds, kings or tradesmen
happen to be hanging round;
and why
on tiptoe is a better way to wait
than playing with the condiments
in a cheap short-order diner
with all choices on or off the menu
turning bad for lack of salt.
. .
Themes in this issue of LG New Poetry are mostly rather sombre for what is often termed the festive season; and the above poem (which comes with Christmas greetings from your editor) contains the only Advent/Nativity reference. Other religious associations do occur in the opening few poems but these are of a darker nature. Tim Youngs offers a response to a painting (by an unknown artist) of the martyrdom of St Ursula; and Kerrin P Sharpe’s poem motivates our heading picture which is one of Craigie Aitchison’s understated images of the Cross in the midst of the ordinary. Subsequent poems deal, among other things, with loss, mourning & ghostly reappearances; echoes of war; artists & their colours and small domestic memories. We hope our readers will enjoy the resulting poetic mixture.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/
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Tim Youngs: Les archers décochant leurs flèches
Huddled at the border of their state pikes erect, arrows fingered for discharge, the men stake Ursula and her virgins whose fate, beyond the frame, is known to us though unseen. This medieval painting’s still alive with the presence of the men who kill.
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Tim Youngs‘s poetry has appeared in, among other places, The Harlequin, Hinterland, The Interpreter’s House, Lighthouse, The Nightwatchman: The Wisden Cricket Quarterly, Prole, Staple, The Stare’s Nest and Ink, Sweat and Tears. He is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University and the author or editor of several books on 
travel writing.
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Kerrin P. Sharpe: what was going on was the Cross
at school I drew cross after finger-spaced cross and learnt to carry the places I left + one Good Friday when the Priest raised the Cross Jesus walked off + my father was buried with his rosary the silver cross hugged his thin fingers like a lever the small crosses on his coffin hid the nails + once my son banged his head on a cross that like a retractor held the wound open I saw his heart + after the earthquake a man built 12 crosses from the wood of dead churches they moved the wind like hair
Kerrin P. Sharpe’s third poetry collection rabbit rabbit will be published by Victoria University Press (NZ) in July 2016. A selection of her work has also appeared in Oxford Poets 2013 (Carcanet). Her first two poetry collections were three days in a wishing well (2012) and there’s a medical name for this (2014).
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Richie McCaffery: Church
As a child I was horrified when my mother told me God did not exist. She said in time I would come to understand. Now I understand only too well, but on summer days like these I could almost be cozened back to the flock – how dark and damp this church is, yet still the pews are faded by sun.
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Richie McCaffery: Train to Edinburgh
I sit with a coffee on a pull-out table, the window reflection doubles everything – two cups yet you are not here, double quick my heart-rate and breathing. I do not seem to be so easily cloned, hardly made double the man I am, or was. In fact, I look haunted by myself, this ghostly mist around my edges.
Richie McCaffery (b.1986) recently completed a Carnegie Trust funded PhD on the Scottish poets of World War Two, at the University of Glasgow. He now lives in Ostend, Belgium. He is the author of Spinning Plates (2012), the 2014 Callum Macdonald Memorial Pamphlet Award runner-up, Ballast Flint and the book-length collection Cairn from Nine Arches Press, 2014. Another pamphlet, provisionally entitled Arris, is forthcoming in 2017. He is also the editor of Finishing the Picture: The Collected Poems of Ian Abbot (Kennedy and Boyd, 2015)
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Abegail Morley: Presence
No one saw the hollow in the bar stool, or the breath collapsing on the window or felt the shift in the air as you passed – a starched whisper hurrying to the door. No one knew how far you walked down Western Road, thoughts slack as rope. We didn’t know how drunk you were at St Peter’s Bridge standing on the edge as if looking at yourself in a long mirror. No one heard the things you said weeks before, considered your walks, at night ? alone. We were home when you climbed railings, searched the empty sky, its unspoken words smoothed by the wind. When you stepped off you didn’t know someone felt your small life heat their skin, if only for a moment.
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Abegail Morley: B1077
We spent the afternoon at a watermill outside Easton, watched it turn for a time, then willed it to stop – like pain, noticed how the trees had tipped their branches leftwards as if to let the wind through. It happened in Cookley. Your voice on the phone stretches down the line. I think of an asthma attack, a hospital, but that isn’t it you say. You insist it’s a collision on a B road, her 4x4 hit head on, how a woman had stopped and held her. At the funeral three weeks from now her mother will tell me that there wasn’t a mark on her, how she looked like Princess Diana. But now I don’t know that, just know your voice journeys through wires to reach me, stutters along cables overhead as if you control the skies, the birds and the welcome rain that clears the air.
Abegail Morley’s debut collection, How to Pour Madness into a Teacup (Cinnamon 2009) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection (2010). Her collections, Snow Child (2011) and Eva and George: Sketches in Pen and Brush (2013) are published by Pindrop Press. Indigo Dreams Publishing brought out her pamphlet, The Memory of Water this year and The Skin Diary is forthcoming from Nine Arches Press (spring 2016). She collaborates with artists on a number of ekphrastic projects including work with the Royal Academy and The British Library and is currently Poet in Residence at Riverhill Himalayan Gardens in Kent.
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Nadine Brummer: Missing
It’s easy to misrecognise loved ones, friends, family dead and gone – our eyes deceived by turn of head, a stranger’s body-shape, or his/her hair parted just so – in the street we call a name and are ignored or else, astonished, meet incomprehension, a look that hurts by its unknowing. The dead do not come back – not the cat who’d followed us around for years, though cat-flap, unused, rattles now and then or paws and tail flash by as if our once companion is palpably there. It’s in the thereness that love inheres, the presence of another holding, held, holding on, relic, perhaps, of mothering, parenting that assumes a different guise in nurture of animal or human. And those off-guard mistakes of face or sound are gifts – there is a hint in double-takes the dead are everywhere like wind, they are the breath we breathe, they are our atmosphere.
Nadine Brummer has had three collections published with Shoestring Press: Half Way To Madrid (2002, PBS Recommendation), Out of the Blue (2006) and Any Particular Day (2013)
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Patrick Wright: Ghost Story
It arrives in strips torn out of a compendium of dreams. It begins as wisteria
up the walls a boarded-up window a gable another window dark as
an eye-patch. It’s something I’ve meant to write for some time. Each night
another vignette is unveiled. as if viewing a mural by torchlight. It’s always a
darkness beyond darkness like once in the attic with a shade no photons could
escape or where such darkness festers in oubliettes undercrofts outside
with rooks and a sense of the venerable. Often it’s a house I’ve once been in
one with a tumble-down facade sheer cliffs on every side. Last night the
house of a married couple or mausoleum its door-turned-tombstone carved
in exotic ciphers. I chucked a grappling hook over the roof to the other side
hoisted myself through a spider-filled frame. All I remember was a presence of
husband and wife how I kept opening doors to bedrooms or staircases or
doubling back on myself finding rooms were running out or floral walls
closing in. Shut in the vestibule I sought the bustle of the streets. Shrieks out
of a letterbox met with nothing but disinterest.
Patrick Wright was born in Manchester in 1979 and completed a PhD in English at the University of Manchester. In 2014 Wright graduated with an MA (Distinction) in poetry from the same university. He has been shortlisted for the 2015 Bridport Prize, and poems from his pamphlet Nullaby have been published in several magazines, including Agenda and Allegro. He is a Lecturer at The Open University and teaches Creative Writing.
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William Oxley: Interlocking Worlds
Light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets … V. Nabakov.
Noon shifts itself down Keats’ Grove, comes to rest under historic oaks, chestnuts by South Hill Ponds. Sky peers between floppy-haired trees, sees its own cloud-gaze in motionless water. A figure stands in rippling shade. Young and nonchalant, his face catches the passing glitter of up-struck light from the pond’s surface. Then watching a fat mallard disturb its watery patch he sees the sun’s emissaries dancing with delicious water nymphs, feels he has looked right to the edge of things, glimpsed imagination’s interlocking worlds that light and shade effects reveal ? feels he has witnessed oh-so-much. In fact, he has seen poetry in action and inaction: grasped for a moment the meaning of light that is the honey of being and the shade that is its undoing.
William Oxley‘s New and Collected Poems was reviewed in London Grip in 2014. A pamphlet, Walking Sequence and other poems, has just appeared from Indigo Dreams Publishing.
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Tim Love: Mousetraps
Before you go, we trawl charity shops,
buy all the Mousetrap games and fill the floor
with one long chain of consequences.
We don't need the instructions to part as friends.
Our rule's to keep the small talk rumbling
like a cement lorry or a shark flapping
in its sleep so water's flowing over its gills.
Jaws. Film sequels, how Puzo
based the Godfather on his mother,
the different types of pasta – butterflies,
radiators, flying saucers.
I'm getting hungry now.
You can find the speed of light by microwaving
a pizza. Trouble is, you have to keep it still
so you can measure between the melted stripes.
The formula's simple but I can't remember it.
Amazing how few parts were missing wasn't it?
Enough though.
Silence.
Points off for silence.
You go to the toilet. I hear the front door slam.
Easier this way. The least I can do
is make some complete sets and take them back,
throw in some spare elastic bands.
Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Journal of Microliterature, Short Fiction, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/
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Peter Daniels: Greenwich
Stretched up the sky like a heap of scribble, the rigging can’t surely have kept a ship pushing on the wind over the waves, but it’s there and it did. With people who know and tell you all the names of the ropes, it’s just as alarming and no, you’d never get me up there. Yet I live as if I knew one day they’d yank me out of my tavern seat and give me the whole world tour, for a very long time – and how shall I get by, and suppose they take me somewhere I never come back from? I don’t suppose I’ll ever get used to it. I’m sitting in a garden picking my smallpox scabs till they bleed, thinking of nothing. A messenger arrives and I’m distracted by his codpiece but he draws my attention to the letter that calls me before the king. I wonder what he wants me for, as I pack my best which is not very fine but will have to do, and the messenger is trotting off to visit the next on the list. I expect this will be changing my life. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it.
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Peter Daniels: The End of the Street
Leave forever, dump the street like an old coat: had enough of bent lamp posts, and faded signs painted on the sides of old houses. Old friends, like cigarette butts that got you through, but only till you lit the next. Even the buses are old, and don't go where you want to. It's been home too long: every brick and paving stone says go away, the place has had enough of you, too. Put them behind you, take the other end of the street wherever it goes. The old district won't ever sit up again. It's too old to get through, clutching its cornices, its ornamented mantelpieces, never knew different. Leave it to mad people, to the hopeless, to fanatics for their hideout. If you come back, come back to flatten it, build new towers for the people who look to the sky. When you're rid of the old quaint neighbourhood, why should the future even thank you – let it speed away.
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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Teoti Jardine : Moving
The room is open, warm and sunny, glass doors display the garden clearly. Amie’s kennel looks at home there, and my writing room is just next door. Glass doors display the garden clearly, I’m hoping we’ll be happy here. My writing room is just next door, the window sees the sea breeze blowing. I’m hoping we’ll be happy here, our third move, in as many months. The window sees the sea breeze blowing, through the dunes along the beach. Our third move in as many months, yet, this one feels like coming home. Through the dunes, along the beach, she chases, while I walk on waves. Now I feel I’ve found my home here, his handshake warm and welcoming. She’s chases while we’re walking waves that seek to settle in the sand. Handshake warm and welcoming his stories ride the waves ashore. They whisper as they find their settling, telling me to look no more. The room is open, warm and sunny, sheltered by the garden’s wall, Amie’s kennel looks at home there, my longing place has found me.
Teoti Jardine is of Maori, Irish and Scottish decent. His tribal affiliations are: Waitaha, Kati Mamoe, Kai Tahu. He attended the Hagley Writers School in 2011. His poetry has been published in the Christchurch Press, London Grip, Te Karaka, Ora Nui, Catalyst, and JAAM. He has short stories published in Flash Frontier, and Te Karak. He reads at Catalyst ‘Open Mic’ sessions. He is member of the Canterbury Poets Collective Committee, and reads at their Springtime Sessions. He is member of the Kai Tahu Writers Whanau. He and his dog Amie live in a beautiful old house in the Linwood suburb of Christchurch.
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J ‘Ash’ Gamble: Routines
there are carved ruts for us called routines so that we do not forget what we are about, hell, we could die and not stop this routine until at least two days later
J ‘Ash’ Gamble is a late in life poet from Florida. His poetry currently appears in Dead Snakes, The Poet Community, and Ancient Hearts Magazine
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Oliver Comins: Fishponds (3rd Hole, 185 yards)
Distance is not the problem. Something else is. It begins with tension, created by a pond on each side and a monstrous bunker gaping behind the green. How the wind blows can amplify the effect, while pin position varies the degree of threat to the well-being of your shot – between very high risk of calamity and inevitable disaster. Finally, there is the moment your routine starts – the flex and grip, you turn your hips and hands in tight unison, followed by a splash. The sound of something entering water or leaving it behind.
Oliver Comins lives and works in West London. A short collection (Yes to Everything) published in February has been followed by a slightly longer collection, Staying in Touch, which won a Templar Pamphlet Award and was published in November.
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Caroline Davies: What Louis Doffman knows
What Louis Doffman knows That his father is foreign. That being sent to the front is a strange kind of homecoming That he loves being with the rest of the lads who have him figured out as one of them, have shortened his surname to Monty. That he chose Mountford for its English ring. That he has lied in his letters home. That he is afraid. That he can sense his blood and it thuds in his ears as the artillery booms. That he has no faith in the advancing barrage going ahead across open ground to destroy the enemy. That he does not know how he will kill when he gets into the German lines. That he hopes they will all surrender. That his company must advance towards the sunken road, they’ve nicknamed Gloucester Street. That there are lots of enemy machine guns. That as he climbs out of the trench with the rest of the lads he feels lifted up as if by angels.
In memory of the 228 men, including Louis Doffman (who served as Lewis Mountford) of the Second Battalion, Worcester Regiment, killed in Pigeon Ravine, 29th September 1918
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Caroline Davies: One of the Honeybills
It must have been taken in 1917. The photographer has chosen a mottled background reminiscent of rain and clouds. Nothing detracts from your white sergeant’s stripes. Your eyes are like my grandfather’s and you have his way of gazing past the photographer as if you can see into the future. I see you, Percy Honeybill, but you could never imagine someone would come a century on to send your grandson into the attic where he will find your diary and the jotted notes in the back. Joined up Dec 1st 1916 Sent to Prees Dec 11th 1916 and the careful details during 1917 of promotion to lance corporal to lance sergeant. There are no entries after September 1918. So much is missing; the rest of your life and even your body. But in this photograph you do look happy.
Caroline Davies’ Voices from Stone and Bronze will be forthcoming from Cinnamon Press in 2016. Her first collection, Convoy, based on the experiences of her merchant seaman grandfather was published in 2013. She blogs occasionally atadvancingpoetry.blogspot.com
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David Perman: The Skylark
It might as well have had no body like Shelley’s blithe spirit, for as a child I never saw or heard a skylark. They did not chirrup above the London traffic or hover over our soot-sown park. I first heard one on a firing range where we aimed at plywood men with unwieldy bren or stuttering sten and there it was in the lull – of guns and sergeant’s shouts – a trill as high as cirrus. Vaughan Williams too was thinking of guns as he watched soldiers leave for France and sketched as the theme of The Lark Ascending, the spirit of its agitated call without the endless repetition – of bird or guns. Now it’s only you that hears one: “There’s a lark up there somewhere.” I strain eyes along your extended arm – in vain. But bless you, VW, for the compensation of your music for the bird now to me silent.
David Perman was born in Islington but now lives in Ware. He has had three collections published, the latest Scrap-Iron Words (2014) from Acumen Publications. He is the publisher of Rockingham Press.
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Murray Bodo: Skirl of the World
The shooter then shoots himself These quick kills so many – my country why don’t you hear their cry, skirl of the world of guns The theater I loved as a child cave noir but safe Now rank blood scuds into my fading celluloid dreams A flurry of talking heads who could have stilled the easy staccato of what they said was defending their country Instead a gothic film squall suddenly lights up the screen A turbulent tide’s loud with skirls of more than many gulls
Murray Bodo is a Franciscan Priest and Poet. His most recent book of poetry is Autumn Train, 2015. Fr. Murray resides in inner-city Cincinnati, Ohio, and spends two months of the year in Rome and Assisi, Italy, as a staff member of “Franciscan Pilgrimage Programs.” He is presently working on a memoir, Gathering Shards: A Franciscan Life.
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Caroline Maldonado: After the cease-fire
What can I say to Kostya when he comes to paint my kitchen, his son living in Debaltseve right near the border, third child on the way and their neighbours loading carts ready for flight? All night the leaders met together. They may have reached an accord though soldiers and rebels still shell homes to rubble. Once they start it’s hard to stop. The leaders’ eyes are blood-shot, can a cease-fire hold? Black’s a colour to go with red.
Caroline Maldonado’s pamphlet What they say in Avenale has been published by Indigo Dreams Publishing (2014). She co-translated, together with Allen Prowle, poems by the Southern Italian poet, Rocco Scotellaro, in Your call keeps us awake published by Smokestack Books (2013).
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Brian Docherty: How Love Comes Out Of Our Pens
It comes out thick & black like our heart’s blood after our mouth has dried up at last or a blue of the state flower in a country we have never visited and seen only occasionally on TV or the purple of a sunset where Clark Gable is always young and the music is Art Deco but if it flows thick & green that might be a fine madness or our lizard brain waking up and a fine yellow line is not something we would put our name to unless we were a visiting alien while brown is that old Country favourite, faded love, something that was black or blue, but still true; now red, a strong, unbroken line of scarlet; we know what that is, we are all Robert Burns for a day and while we can hold a pen and hold our thought, love comes out, if true, without hesitation, repetition or deviation.
Brian Docherty was born in Glasgow, now lives in north London; 4 books published, including Independence Day, ( Penniless Press, 2015).
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Jane Henderson: Portrait of Francis Bacon at Reece Mews
Shot in his own studio an expression of mild surprise he presides among the debris sleeves rolled up as if fresh from combat exposing the meat of his forearms. Stilled in this cadmium aftermath just the ticking of his wristwatch over-rides the turpentine silence. Visibly he is unscarred: eyes like flints in that avian head, hair slicked back with forelock. Behind him the tainted mirror never reflects an undistorted image.
Jane Henderson is a gardener and sculptor. She is a regular reader of her poetry at venues in Sudbury and Bury St Edmunds
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Wendy French: Cancer Speaks of Painting a Garden
Teenage and Young People’s Centre, Macmillan
time then to escape to the garden where palette colours change the season on this huge expanse of paper but I remain fairly constant don’t always like what I do, the pain I cause, Shit, the young girl says as she throws down her brush – a heron painted, ready for flight, and the girl sketched reading her book never turns a page. Stories emerge in the head of the girl yelling Shit, shit and more of it the ornate gate opens and closes in between blood tests, weight checks but I’m there, hovering over this garden for it promises some certainty. Uncertainty. It’s never night here stars are blind, they wait children make their own light, mix paints the fern stays yellow my colours change with intensity I have no place in this garden minnows swim round and round In between blood tests and appointments another colour’s added to the garden, a haiku written, a text received and sent, while parents sit, clutch letters. In this expansive painting with the hint of grey, stickle-backs swim and the swan’s neck stretches I want to be a wall in that garden. Strong, dry, stone. Stone upon stone. A wall that won’t crack in the cold. Borders wander through children’s medication. One path leads to another through toxic pollen lilies. A felted blackbird with a bright orange eye.
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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Sarah James: Thick-skinned, Thin-fleshed
on diabetes type 1
In the old young days: piss on diastix, and a glass syringe twice the length of her palm. On the children’s ward, she practised on thick oranges. Pushing a needle through the fruit’s peel was so unlike the ice-cold sting of pressing it through her own thin-fleshed skin, the weight of glass in her hand, pushing the plunger home. This sterilised in her Mum’s special saucepan, while she played houses, and childhood. Later, lighter plastic for injections, then a cannula and pump. Blood tests now, for precision. Fingertips pricked to a scarred numbness. For thirty-five years, the red of life with a glint of steel. Each needle’s slither etches her mind; her body’s rubbed hard by time. She carries the disease’s sharp sweetness in her blood; its other daily stabs as invisible as genetics. Look! She shows me her fingers’ scabby black braille, soaked in manmade insulin. Her wet dependence is survival.
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 the Overton 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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Ray Miller: Looking After You
The stabilisers are squeaking and your head is still too tiny for your helmet. We’re taking aim at August and the cycle turns as clockwork as a comet. Your new parents have got previous experience of death, disease and sickness; but they haven’t got dogs, frogs in a pond or slow-worms on the top of the compost. I’m looking after you – to when I’m stationed at the wrong end of a spyglass, when the shed is cleared of a pink car and scooters, and Cinderella hasn’t left behind her slippers; when the time strikes for writing rhyme and rhythm, not dwelling on the dreams of orphaned children; to when I stare at all this empty space and wonder if it’s appropriate to watch Rastamouse alone.
Ray Miller has had poems published in many magazines. He won the Inter Board Poetry Contest in September 2013 and finished 3rd in the 100 metres sprint at Trescott Junior School in 1965. These days he can only walk as far as the bookies and back.
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Marilyn Ricci: Night Rider
The steady shush of his bicycle wheel with its mudguard bent a little too close; I push back the duvet, look out to see in flickering streetlamp my father coast by, flap of his raincoat, framed eyes squint, pushed along by an unearthly wind, bike clips glint, like he’s in an old movie and when I wave he salutes his trilby. There’s that ghost of a smile as he pedals away, not looking back, determined, grim. Thirty years dead I wish he would settle, be at peace with himself, make that old frame stop dead in its tracks, sins forgiven, let blessed mortality finally reign.
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Marilyn Ricci: The Way Things Often Go
Six a.m. and he’s sweeping up after the night shift, thinking of his finger tracing high cheekbones, warm lips, hands running through her brown curls at the bus stop next to the Palais de Danse. God knows it’s been a hard walk against the wind since that first shy meeting: sucking a mint to hide beery breath, holding open the door, the apple smell of her perfume as she high-heels onto red carpet covered in dead ends, plaster cupids looking down on them. Later, he wants another drink, she’s a little edgy. The last bus still half an hour away they linger in the smell of frying chips, joke with the old man behind the counter, stroll towards the stop, sharing the chips, the vinegar soaking the paper apart. He goes to kiss her. She flashes: Not yet. Pushes him. It’s an old story, he thinks: early whiffs of fatal flaws – his drinking, her temper – the inevitable cracks, split. But it wasn’t like that. He has loved her and, he thinks, she has loved him and that endured through the kids, the arguing, his drinking, her temper, the lack of jobs, the constant worry about paying the rent. It’s an old story about dead ends, plaster cupids, chips, vinegar and love. An old story about the way things often go.
Marilyn Ricci lives in Leicestershire. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and many magazines including Magma, The Rialto and Modern Poetry In Translation. Her pamphlet: Rebuilding a Number 39 was published by Happenstance Press.
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Alison Hill: Brooklands Swing
They’re in the mood – swirling the dance floor, hands skimming hips, scarlet lipstick glossing, all eye-linered nylons & vintage chic. They’re hovering at the stalls, clustering rails, rummaging period pieces, yellowing maps offering up roads still to travel. From the clubhouse balcony classic cars slip into easy mono, as Diana wafts by, Lettice strides the other way, ready for the sky. Spring sunlight dances back into Brooklands, crowds lap nostalgia, the glitz & glamour of bygone days cheering races, applauding flights.
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 this poem is taken, was published in October by 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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Gareth Culshaw: Dress
She is making a dress, shaping fabric around herself. The snip snip of scissors snapping the threads of a sheet. A coloured sheet that will envelop her body. A curve under each arm, a straight down each side. Under stitching and using a machine. The chugging tap, tap, tap of getting the stitching right, straight. She is making a dress, using inches, pin and fit to keep things together. Seams tidied to give a finished look she is also making herself look new knowing what fingertips have touched the inner parts. Chugging tap, tap, tap snip snip of scissors. Occasional ironing out pins sit in a small pillow on the table coloured heads, sharp points, waiting to swim under a piece of fabric and lie in wait.
Gareth Culshaw is an aspiring writer who has had poems published in various magazines and online journals. He hopes one day to achieve something special with the pen. He lives in North Wales
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Deeptesh Sen: Scrambled eggs
hair tied up you were cooking scrambled eggs for dinner your wrinkled face buried in solitude threw up the ghosts on arched windows past continuous as the yolk sizzling in oil spluttered out and you stood sucking your thumb there are no ghosts, you had told me once only accidents that stop short of being a miracle the persistence of your body rising, falling with breath was a miracle back then the casual glance of accidental unease caught me off-guard and left a winding trail now the heat receding winter having shrunk in, there are no more accidents unpaid kerosene bills and metacin tablets jostle for space with noisy children even the old photos cling to the wall like strangers dissipating rheumatic memory don’t tell me death is better not even the moth that dances on fire can afford such a brittle supposition the spluttering of the yolk now opens up a dangerous precipice — the brittle skin of the night flaking off into a mechanical lump of flesh some nights are beautiful when we don’t make love
Deeptesh Sen is currently pursuing his M.Phil. in English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His poetry has been published in The Statesman, Kolkata, the Journal of Poetry Society, India, Aaina Nagar, the Stare’s Nest and Crab Fat Literary Magazine. He blogs at www.deeptesh.net
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Stephen Claughton: In the Restaurant
If Dad were here now, he’d be flirting with the staff, archly raising one eyebrow to indicate mild surprise, the mimed equivalent of some corny chat-up line, beginning perhaps with: “What’s a dish like you...?” The waitresses, well trained and used to that sort of thing, didn’t seem to care. I’d be the one going red, digging my heels in hard under the restaurant table, sticking my head in the menu and mumbling my order to them. When it came to getting the bill, Dad would crook an eyebrow again and give the lop-sided grin he called ‘a winning smile’. It seemed to work for him. Maybe he had the knack, unless the knowing girls just humoured him for tips. I stick with the standard gesture, miming – I’m not sure which – their writing me the ‘check’, or my signing a cheque to them. In practice, we do neither. Perhaps I’m just drawing a line, a limit to everything: the meal, the evening, Dad.
Stephen Claughton’s poems have appeared in print in Agenda, The Interpreter’s House, Iota, Other Poetry, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Warwick Review and on line at Agenda Supplement, Ink Sweat & Tears, London Grip and The Poetry Shed.
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P W Bridgman: The Nobility In That, Or Not
Helen, a twelfth grader, would have done it with him,
an eleventh grader,
but his best friend advised against it.
(Not fair to Pam.)
Pam, his Pam, wouldn’t have.
(No need even to ask.)
Helen would have,
but he thought he shouldn’t
because, in truth,
though he won’t admit it,
he feared he couldn’t.
There’s no nobility in that.
For greater certainty:
Helen would have, as might he,
but they didn’t,
because he wouldn’t
out of a fear he couldn’t.
Then came Pam’s change of heart: she would.
He still feared he couldn’t,
still thought they shouldn’t,
but as it happens,
he could,
and they did,
and straightaway he wished they hadn’t.
By then, Helen wouldn’t.
And while his Pam would,
and though he knew they could,
he wouldn’t,
because she wasn’t … you know … Helen.
Ever since, though he could have,
and with many,
he hasn’t.
And he won’t.
And he thinks there’s nobility in that.
P.W. Bridgman writes short fiction and poetry from Vancouver, Canada. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and in anthologies that have been published (or are soon to be published) in Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland and India. His first book of fiction, entitled Standing at an Angle to My Age, was published by Libros Libertad in 2013. You can learn more about his work by visiting his website at www.pwbridgman.ca.
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Stuart Handysides: All an act
This is a rehearsal; I am rehearsing, like changing vehicles on the way to my funeral. The actor pauses to corpse. Perhaps too early in the piece’s evolution to call it rehearsal, too much yet to do – build character, develop text, block moves. This is workshopping, storming the brain, creeping up on it to see what’s going on, where it’s got to, where it’s going, if it knows. This is a rehearsal. Don’t believe those who say life isn’t, because it is. The best you could say is, ‘work in progress’. Make no mistake, your performance, if you insist on calling it that, leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps that is what keeps you going – inserting, deleting, transposing, scribbling, rehearsing, trying out new lines. Are they sound? How do they sound? I’m taking soundings. These words are foundlings – sent out naked, defenceless, on trial. So yes, this is a rehearsal. No you don’t get your money back. Preview, press night, the run – all rehearsal. A new inflection, a look that comes because this audience got that joke, because I got the joke. Now, perhaps, I can tell it with conviction, get the timing right, know what it means, what I mean, as far as I know, so far. Try to improve every night or go stale – either way the final curtain falls and the corpse is hearsed.
Stuart Handysides has worked as a general practitioner and medical editor. He has published haiku in Presence magazine and short stories in anthologies. He has run the Ware Poets competition for the past three years.
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George Freek: Weak Wine
After Su Tung Po
The weaker the wine, the more you can drink. An ugly wife is better than an empty house. One hundred years seems a long time, but eventually it ends. A rich corpse is no happier than a poor one. Every corpse is blind. Poetry is its own reward. Witty lines last a long time, when complemented by a clever rhyme. When I look at the abyss, of all things in this world, it’s wine and poetry that I will miss.
George Freek is a poet/playwright living in Illinois. His poetry has recently appeared in The Missing Slate; Off Course Literary Journal; Mud Season; The Chiron Review; The Tower Journal; and The Samizdat Literary Journal.
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Festive Greetings
December 7, 2015 @ 12:33 pm
[…] ‘Thick-skinned, Thin-fleshed’ (about living with diabetes type 1) poem in London Grip; ‘Means to an End’ published on The Curly Mind; ‘King of Paroles and Histoires‘ (a homage to Jacques Prévert after the style of Geoffrey Hills’ Mercian Hymns )published on The Curly Mind; Connected poems ‘Firestorm at Yosemite & F r st rm t Y s m t published on The Curly Mind; ‘What it is to be a leaf/woman/layers of metamorphosis‘ published on The Curly Mind. […]
The ‘D’ Factor: What they don’t tell you!
June 25, 2017 @ 8:32 am
[…] Over the past few years, I have come to realise too that the depressions which I get from time to time aren’t just linked back to the childhood trauma of my initial diabetes diagnoses. There are the teenage years in which my Grandad, who lived with us, lost his sight and one leg through diabetic complications. On top of this, the bigger part of my depressions may itself simply be the exhaustion of 35 years of diabetes – trying to do not just anything but everything a ‘normal’ person can do. (My poem about this – ‘Thick-skinned, Thin-fleshed’ can be found in London Grip here. […]