Joseph M Gant

We Play

carbonic poles

of light refracting,

dancing on a flicker stage.

time beside us,

hell beneath

our leagues of sport-like gathering.

pass the fiddle,

play the drum,

we fall in time to every sound;

electric in sagacity,

light behind the eyes—

embryonic memory

we discharge on the stage.

 

It's A Chemical Song

it's a chemical song

and you were dancing,

rhythm of the afternoon,

melodic and dead,

and you were inside me,

speaking in molecular cadence.

we frowned and then we woke up.

we drowned and then we parted ways—

the score and everything thereafter.

I Wasn't Born to Starve

I wasn't born to starve

in here 

where martyrs clamor,

breadcrumb sins

and eyes of cold 

surveillance— 

ravens' claws of steel and wire,

scarecrows packed with glycerine.

the dinner plates,

the whites of eyes

we cry before we spit and call

the course of cold anxiety.

Hellbound- David McLean

'Hellbound' by David McLean is available to purchase here

David Mac

Love, Like Death, Is Hard To Explain

The ages are limping birds

with broken wings

The ages are bones with

no place to go

The ages are your smile, my love

and all that black lipstick

But death hangs in the trees

all day long

And sometimes it sings

 

Alone You Start To Smile

 

Loneliness is

the edge of nowhere

 

Loneliness is

outside of the crowd

Loneliness is just

lost in flesh

And loneliness

is a bar

first thing in the morning

Loneliness is

nowhere to go

Loneliness is the night

but more so the day

Loneliness is a room

is dead walls

is a window without a view

Loneliness is a job

that wants to kill you

is an empty wallet

Loneliness is

mad as babies

hidden as clouds

Loneliness a stone

in the sun

cracks in a desert

Loneliness

the hills and

whispering

trees

Loneliness

my black shadows and

all they remember

But loneliness

loneliness

loneliness

is

a man

on top

of the world

She Said Hell

She said hell, or

at least she

wanted to.

She wanted to

but could not,

so we went outside.

And it was the town

that said it,

first.

It was the town

that said it, like

we all wanted to.

And everyone in it,

moved, stained red,

living for nothing,

dying for it all.

She said hell,

because we could not.

We could not.

Would not.

And the birds

stabbed holes in the skies

like

you wouldn’t believe.

White light shone

down to all this

hurt.

Like

you wouldn’t believe...

Neil Ellman

Hairy Moon

(Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, sculpture)

When you sleep

it hovers above your bed

a Medusa’s head

of venomous snakes

wailing a Banshee song

of Otherworlds and Death

with eyes that turn

your flesh to stone

and bones to dust

and dust that forms

a Basilisk.

But when you wake

it’s only a hairy moon

sailing over a canvas sea

a childish dream

not like the make-believe

you dreamed

when you believed

you were asleep.

Half Beast Half Rainbow

(Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, sculpture)

The beast that rises from the nightmare world

below the edge of here

where colors grow feathers and scales

talons and scissor-teeth

to claw their way from there

across the sky

to the somewhere where the rainbow ends

goes home to feed and fade and die.

Imaginary Friends

(Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, sculpture)

We have nothing in common

(as if the common were a good)

except that they are imagined

and are my friends.

None of them have names

like “John” or “Hildegard”

but they answer to the call

of “Wraith” and “Beelzebub”—

or not at all.

They have hair

like snakes or rope or vines

tentacle limbs and bulbous eyes—

or none of those at all.

They fly like Phoenixes

or swim like the Leviathan

they crawl under rocks—

some not moving at all.

With nothing in common

except our souls

I imagine them as I am

or wish to be, or perhaps

they have imagined me.

Daniel Scott Parker

BEGIN BY CATCHING FIRE

Within a scratching. Bloodthick radiant shale, vitreous membrane silverspun to hollow. Wind sieves through splintered bone. The skin wheezes: saw blades of light. The future, the fullness of which shiny blindness is uniformity. I came from the suburbs of this city and from an insularity.

MY MOTHER BY MEANS OF MY FATHER

The heat registered the breaking of a bone. No longer a pacifier of the body. Paint soaked into the mattress, milk spilled the presence of a waning. The paint was permanent, broken, and fresh. Kansas snapped inside its skin. Heat broke like a bed.

MY BODY ACHES WITH LOVE FOR SPECIFIC GHOSTS

 

The ashes of which, reconfigured in regularity to radical form of rust compass. Codes coiled inside my bleeding mouth. Ammoniacal debt of breathing. My recent now has been so full that it feels threadbare. The sound of eyes’ perpetual closing. I wanted to tell him about the dream but the timing never seemed right and now we are done with each other.

Jonathan Butcher

The Last

The broken shards of glass, sit patiently 

behind our eyes, as each colour begins to

flash, like a malfunctioning strobe light.

We walk just the distance needed, our feet 

in forced harmony, the green plastic bottles

stuck to our hands, that cut our lips at the

first sip, as we rest upon that rotten log, 

our refuge for the last ten years. 

And my sight seems again more focused, on

the hazed horizon, as your consistent jabbering 

carries across this breeze like racing dandelion 

seeds, my ears now responsive to everything

but your words.

Our last drop is now sunk, as my thoughts then

rehydrate the creases from the night previous, and

again under your constant guidance, I commit

to that hollow promise to make this my last.

Cemetery

Having breakfast in the old cemetery, our pupils 

now dilated enough to absorb the suns first light,

you sit, your jacket worn from last nights antics,

yet your hands remain just as delicate as ever.

And the gravestones stand grey and moss covered,

the names long now faded, like torn scrolls, and shadow 

the dying grass that form our blanket. 

Your voice now a lasting annoyance, offers the only

distraction from this hankering silence as my legs,

dehydrated, cramp up once more, that leaves me

with that lasting limp, that fails to gather your attention, 

yet still makes my journey home that little easier.

 

 

Jonathan Butcher has been writing poetry for around five years. He has had recent work appear in Popshot Magazine, Electric Windmill Press, The Rusty Nail, Turbulence and Black-Listed Magazine. He Lives in Sheffield in the north of England

Sheri Wright

Interment

 

Color withers against the faces of blooms

as they hold the weight of grief,

heads bowed like mourners

in the cold of graveyard shadows.

 

And we fold the kind pieces of ourselves

into sympathy notes passed to the bereft

as the dead are fit into coffins

too small for rest.

 

 

The Test

 

Would you let her sit next to you,

the remnants of roadsides tangled in her hair,

rest her second-hand tatters

if only for a few miles?

 

And would you spread a balm of kind words

over the cracks fissured around her eyes

where beauty has splintered away,

and the pressure of years compressed over youth

fatigues her smile,

a smile she offers anyway.

She knows that poverty is

a heart that beats time to itself

because no one else is listening.

 

Pushcart Prize and Kentucky Poet Laureate nominee, Sheri L. Wright is the author of six books of poetry, including the most recent, The Feast of Erasure. 

Chris Murray

The Zeiss

from that 13th moon you'd to fight for breath :

eyes , vagina, your lens was cold. 

But then our shadow-plays were always red.

I awoke with the word musculature in my head -

the primitive Zeiss dilated

with the mathematical implements of your pornographies : meters , lenses,

                                                             colour-charts,  grey spectrum-sheets,

                                                             and white -

all these rotated in your skull-disc, and I 

spread wide as cut-fruit onto a plate-fallen

 dilated,

            and captured you                                        

            I wondered which of your screens I was playing on ?

dead table

(stone)

black stone inscribed with a talon a wing a tide-mark 

its a bruised maybe sea-etched lucky charm that

weights the silk-back cards orange-silk purple-ribboned

they describe

a circle where those fall-plummet

a wheel

maybe it is a maybe wheel -

(the story or tale) :

a marble table in Kilkenny Castle

small hands pressed to the colding planes of it

and then a whispered legend

- it was here

here, where the noble-dead were laid out on this very table

and a curse travels through the handskin into the blood and bone of

of those of us whose skin contact its surfaces

(the legend)

we were told the legend then about :

the kitchen-caraytid is black-faced marbled-black

the limestone is soughed off her bone-face from hands wiping

wiping the death-grime from fingers

she stands holding those arches-orange-arches part of the orange-archway

alone

her companion-caraytid (opposite) is etched in limestone

grey and placid-looking she is holding up the same orange arches

alone across from -

she-who absolves the homely curse it seems

(wheel of fortune)

They plummet over the wheel out of windows in flames churches fill

those people lay a flaming-table of votive candles hand-still in the no-breeze

with wishes,

wishes ceremonies prayers the grime of it not visible in the blinking flames of the votive table

its orange however :

an explosion of twisted steel and not the wood of the inescapable circle

black stone etched with a wing picked up at a beach a building site a roadway a track in forest

a near fossil of crystallised marks but a lie 

no bird made this stone with its neat talon from his own sacrifice of blood and claw thereon

 it weights the cards as they fall orange,

- and blindfold(ed)

like petals

Amos Gideon Greig

The Time Machine

It begins almost motherly,

a return to the warmth of the womb,

a central point on the journey to oblivion,

time travel is a lie an uncaring trick of time.

Slowly through rheumatic eyes the present,

fades away, sound, cold, future,

all these are frozen,

waiting release..

The first signs of possibility,

appear bubbles in the stream,

each a window, a doorway,

into the past,

Here a child did not fall out of bed,

their sudden awakening saving the lives

of those dwelling within.

The Time Machine is a lie.

Rather than showing the past,

each portal leads to a distortion,

a prison for the unwary,

Here he went to university;

sought his dream as an artist,

there is a tightness now,

sudden desire to breathe,

The Time Machine will not allow it.

The traveller realizes,

the trap they are caught in,

Focused so tightly on the

journey they did not notice the;

failing strength in limbs,

there is an urgency now,

a burning now time seeks,

to consume them.

A sound, a voice, a mothers distant

cry, the present has almost faded to black,

Hairy thews pluck the traveller from,

the machine breathe life back into;

fragile body too weak for time travel,

too weak to be left unsupervised,

in the local pool the boy opens his

eyes and cries.                  `

The Wilding Path

I see the hidden spheres which over lap our own,

not all of the time but there are moments,

of crystal clarity/

                         in the rain/

                                                 a sudden ray of sun.

There are places where the doors are open ,

the tiniest whisper of a forgotten past,

previously/ I stood near one,

The whispering wood to many this overgrown,

tree choked with vines is a part of nature,

I have seen beneath the veil/  to a stone wall

An old mill my hands traced the stone work,

in the deepest shadows where man isn't welcome,

The silence was deafening/

                                                 I opened my mind to,

Vistas past.

 A hard working miller busy grinding

corn as children played in the waterhole,

women busy drying clothes laughing at their antics.

I stepped back into the warmth of the day

the chill seeping from my bones,

I look down and see the waterhole now filled with -

sediment natures cruel touch has scoured it away

slowly overgrown as the angry waters surged past,

I walked onwards reflecting/

                                                I played here as a child.

My path crumbles before me/

 seemingly the ground smashed by an angry god

huge rents make it difficult

to cross.

I came to a tributary a place where I once waited for seven hours.

 lost as a child frightened tears and snot smeared my face in the dark/

I waded across the stream passed the lying rocks.

Skipping across bleached stones the bones of mountains past,

I slowly approach the coldest of places,

The chill settling in I can feel your uncaring gaze/

                                                                                    lingering

                        hungrily/

            your/

                                    feminine form/

trapped in the stones which  formed  a perfect  circle around you.

Our/

            eyes meet/

                                    I was but  a child then/

                                                                                    you pointed the way back

for a price.

A single/         

                        tear/

                                    a promise/

                                                            to return

Did my mind play tricks?

did you really  move to

stare?

wood  rubbing  against  wood/

                                                the cackling of a hag?

the ivy flowed like a/

mane of unkempt hair down your back.

A single ray of sunlight breaks the silence/

                                                            Bird song/

                                                                        like children's laughter

soared out the moment passed,

I see you for what you are a tree twisted by a quirk of fate,

to a child's eye/

                        a feminine form/

                                                languidly stretched towards the sky

pleading, placating.

I turn and walk away from the cackling tree,

I hear a peal of feminine laughter and run home

away from that accursed tree.

Dark's Parasite

Your dark birth has long been prophesied,

My dark parasite needed yet twisted

Far  beyond your original purpose.

You have shared this flesh since infancy,

Your dark touch has left its mark,

Ravaged my body stained my soul.

Sadly your parasitic presence is

Needed, serves a primary function,

A function carried out grudgingly.

 

That touch a constant reminder,

Flares, the rage cripples,

Draws blood, steals breath.

Entropy approaches our parting

Inevitable I wait for that day:

Torn, your functionality important.

 

A caged beast you punish:

Your host lashes out blindly,

Rage and pain all consuming.

I am consumed, clutch

Just below the ribcage,

Your prison,

 

God but there are days

I find myself asking,

Why life's parasite? Why birth?

Amos Greig is a recent graduate from Queen's where he studied English and Ancient History. He has studied at the John Hewitt Summer School in 2001 and James Simmons Summer House. Amos has designed covers for Lapwing Publications, designed their logo , provided portraits for James Simmons, Desmond O'Grady, Sabine Wichert, Padraic Faicc and created children's murals. Amos has had work published in Poetry in Motion's The Poet's place, Speech Therapy, Papergirl Belfast and Solstice Poetry. He is currently editor of a literary and arts magazine called A New Ulster. His first book of poetry called Lord's of the hill is with a publisher pending publication.