Catherine Graham

 
 
 
Two poems
 
 
 

Dancing with Angels

‘Is she usually like this?’
the nurse asks indifferently.

No, she’s not usually a ballerina,
I’ve never heard her sing like this, beautiful, carefree.

Perhaps I am meeting her for the first time,
perhaps this is how she wants to be,

free from all our expectations, skimming stones
across reality. I want to congratulate her,

be her first and last dancing partner
for I know in this blue moon moment

that soon her parade will be over.
I lie beside her, listening

to breathless conversations with her sisters
who step from a sepia photograph

as the room whispers the scent
of invisible flowers.

I watch as her fingers grow long,
her fingertips, turquoise, cold.

On her lips a silent song,
trials, like rocks spilling out from her pillow.
 
 
 
 

She Wishes For A Poem By Yuri Zhivago

Write me a poem Yuri, like the ones you wrote for Lara.
She doesn’t deserve them, she swanned off with Kamarovsky.
I pity you, torn between her and Tonya.

Poor Yuri the poetic doctor, left to tend to Lara’s mother.
So tell me: your poems – I bet they rhyme flawlessly.
Write me a poem Yuri, like the ones you wrote for Lara.

She had you, Kamarovsky and then there was Pasha!
Seems to me like she lived life horizontally.
I pity you, torn between her and Tonya.

Is it the angelic look, tell me, what is it about her
that compels you to write love poems endlessly?
Write me a poem Yuri, like the ones you wrote for Lara.

I love the scene where she rests her head on your shoulder.
(I’ve never read the book, I’ve only seen the movie.)
I pity you, torn between her and Tonya.

Oh I could look into your dark eyes forever
and what I would give to read how much you love me.
Write me a poem Yuri, like the ones you wrote for Lara.
I pity you, torn between her and Tonya.
 
 
 

Catherine Graham lives in Newcastle on Tyne. Her chapbook Signs (ID on Tyne Press) was one of The Poetry Kit’s top five recommended books for 2011. Catherine’s first full collection Things I Will Put In My Mother’s Pocket has just been published by Indigo Dreams Publishing.

Mona Arshi

 
 
 
 
Ghazal

Not even our eyes are our own…
– Frederico Garcia Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba

 

I want to tune in to the surface, beside the mayfly,
listen to how she holds her decorum on the skin of the pond.

I want to sequester words, hold them in stress positions,
foreignate them, string them up to ripen on vines,

and I want to commune with rain and for the rain to be
merciful, a million tiny pressures on my flesh.

I refuse to return as either rose or tulip but wish
to be planted under the desiring night sky.

I want to be concentrated to a line under the pleat of your palm
and for it to radiate opalesque under shadow.

I want God’s fingers to break and for you to watch as I
fold over my sleeve, reveal the detail of my paling wrist.
 
 

(first published in Poetry Review, October 2012)
 
 
 
 

Mona Arshi was born in Hounslow and lives in West London. She initially trained as a Lawyer and worked for Liberty the UK human rights organisation. She has completed a masters in Creative Writing in Poetry at the University of East Anglia. Mona has been published in a number of magazines including Poetry Review and Magma. Mona’s poem Hummingbird won first prize in the Magma Magazine poetry competition in 2012. She has recently been selected for ‘The Complete Works’, a national development programme funded by the Arts Council. In March of this year her collection was shortlisted by Simon Armitage in the 2012 Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition.

Geraldine Clarkson

 
 
 
 

Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra (Dali, 1936)
 

Having always used her music as a tool, a gift to stifle hurt in others, a niche into which she could stuff pansies or wallflowers, a grey to be drenched with peony or tangerine, she became pliable, perfectly responsive to circumstance, a kitten following its master, chase-and-nibble. At first she didn’t notice herself changing, so intent was she on pacifying with titbits the yawning jaw. Filling the jug of subjugation. Until she awoke in a boulder-desert, stone-faced, immaterial. Her life shrunk now to two needers who dominated: her mother and her daughter. Her music no more than a cipher, a distorted keyboard painted on a banner wrung out, flung out between her and the others, a mute offering. The godlike gift something less now than animal or vegetable. A split skewed thing. And she, a rock-musician, no longer able to please anyone.
 
 

(first published in Tears in the Fence 55)

view image here
 
 
 
 

Geraldine Clarkson’s poems have appeared in Tears in the Fence, Poetry Review, Envoi, the Grist anthology A Complicated Way of Being Ignored, and at Ink, Sweat and Tears

Eileen Sheehan

 
 
 

dangerous weather

the garden exhales       puffballs
rupture       grasses pollinate in the gilded breeze
poppies pump their milky sap       capsules
shake themselves out       the air heavy
with wind-borne seed       your blown kisses
remembered        drift of your lips       waft of your hand
my open mouth       dandelion clocks
set themselves off          my feet
their bare calligraphy       etched by the stones
this flinty path       your long absence         honeybee
dips in every flower       a black cat crosses the lawn
which is the cat?       which the shadow?        cover
cover my mouth
 

(first published in Speaking for Scéine (ed John W. Sexton)
 
 
 

Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Co Kerry. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (ed Niall MacMonagle/ Celtic Press). She tours with spiritual singer Noirín Ní Riain and actor Cora Fenton with a show entitled Women’s Voices Women’s Stories. She has worked as Poet in Residence with Limerick Co Council Arts Office and is on the organizing committee for Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival. Her 3rd collection, The Narrow Place of Souls, is forthcoming.

Graham Clifford

 
 
 

Shorn

Despite photos, up close
you are not taking care of yourself:
hair greasy as barbed-wire wool.

Your once skinny frame
is bulky at the shoulders end,
and lugworm veins bulge
on the backs of your hands.
What a thud you would make,
falling down now.

I feed the Wahl trimmer, mow
a broadening wicket
till you are Presley enlisted, or Travis Bickle
about to always be lucky with mistakes.
Your ear is rigid with sarsaparilla –
does this one hot and red mean something good?

We come across all the grey, dumbstruck as Eloi.
I steady myself on your cold, man’s shoulder
to trim straight.

You say this good weather only ever reminds you
of previous good weather
so I am sheering you of the past,
catching it on today’s newspaper
and you are morphing: victim; perpetrator.

Finally, you pose and flex in the mirror
as if entering the city for the first time:
lighter; streamlined. Shorn.
Yet another you
only, this time
 
(from The Hitting Game, forthcoming 2014 Seren)
 
 

Graham Clifford‘s pamphlet Welcome Back to the Country is published by Seren, who will also be publishing his book, The Hitting Game, next year. Graham is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA. He blogs here.

Elinor Brooks

 
 
 
 

Lines from the Creek

You thread the bait
on to the barb with
semi-circular motion:
a pink comma of prawn
robing the hook
in succulent
black- veined flesh.

Your feet sink into
the shingle shelf:
you step back, shift
your weight and flick
the line, feeling through
the rod its tautness
out over blue calm.

I watch you, shirt unbuttoned
in the Queensland sun,
a raised vine of scar
climbing your stomach:
I want to pluck it from you
where it lies
clinging like treachery.

At ten years old your gut
twisted itself in a knot
snagged like the yards of line
spewing from my reel.

I remember how it felt
to cradle your baby skull,
life pulsing in the fontanelles.

I hear a shout. You are
unhooking the first bream;
it flaps, gasping
in the ice-box.

 

(Lines from the Creek was read at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival 2011 accompanied by Stevie Gilmore on guitar as part of BlueGate Poets’ Travellers Without Baggage project celebrating the work of Valerie Clarke.)
 
 

Elinor Brooks grew up in Edinburgh and now lives in Swindon where she teaches English in a college of FE and is a founder member of BlueGate Poets. Her poems have appeared in several magazines and anthologies, in collaborative exhibitions, on the Big Screen and even on an adshel. More of her work can be read here

Clarissa Aykroyd

 
 
 
 

The Worst Journey in the World

We have not yet passed the dip in the track.
We have passed Earls Court. At Earls Court we sat for ten minutes
and I read The Worst Journey in the World.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard was reminded by an ice slope
(or an argument or a penguin) of the trains at Earls Court.
Then we crawled onward to Gloucester Road
and I asked myself about the empty platform
which one day recently lay untouched under an inch of snow.
And then we crawled out of Gloucester Road
and then nothing.
“Ladies and gentlemen – apologies for this delay.
We are being held here due to an obstruction at Sloane Square.
I will update you when I have some more information.”
A flicker through the carriage.
This is not just annoying. It’s all wrong.
What did he mean by “an obstruction”?
Why didn’t he say “We should be on the move shortly”?
It’s all wrong. And all around
the murmurs are murmuring louder and louder.
“I’m going to miss my train,” says a Russian fur hat
but no one listens. The stale air is open for conversation
but no one pays attention.
I look down at The Worst Journey in the World
and wish I were back at Earls Court
or in Antarctica. “Polar exploration is more lonely than London,
and the post comes but once a year,” wrote Cherry-Garrard.
“Ladies and gentlemen – I do apologise for this continuing delay.
I will update you when we are given some more information.”
The sighs a little louder now. It could be bad. It could be bad.
“It is so much easier to shirk in civilization,” he wrote.
We haven’t even passed the dip in the track.
That would have made me feel so much better. But now that I think of it,
the dip in the track might be on another line.
Yes, I think it is on another line.
It must be on the Northern line.
 
 
 

Clarissa Aykroyd is originally from Victoria, Canada and now lives in London. Her poetry has recently appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears and Shot Glass Journal. She is the author of a blog on poetry and poets, The Stone and the Star

Amali Rodrigo

 
 
 
Two poems
 
 
 

GaZeBo

Muggy afternoon in class, a word,
an inky beetle that scuttles across my open book.
I come to with a slap across the page.

The teacher squints at it, sari bristling,
then sends me out of class, to the principal
for doodling dirty words in geography.

Booby-trapped, it rolls off my tongue
in triple beat; Ga Ze Bo.

It’s the Ze that did it,
I’m sure of it, like a high wall you could never
see over, the absence
in the alphabet of a mother tongue.

Ga, is a shape shifter, water’s scallop
in a river or ringed in a bowl, slipping
easily from tongue to tongue.

Bo, spot-lit, is a sepoy,
eclipsed in English by a holy tree,
the tree of wisdom, the tree of death* .

Bo is a stone temple-step with the dip
worn away by generations. Bo is in the eyes
of the beggar who goes from door to door
at full moon certain of not being turned away.

In the playground girls gang, chanting
Kaduwa Kaduwa for days until
someone else slips up.

GaZeBo forever yoked, is a house that isn’t
a home. Airy, trellised as a lie
you see through and through and through.
 
*In 1985, 146 pilgrims and monks were shot dead while praying at the sacred Bo tree at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka.
Kaduwa – literally, ‘sword’ – is a taunt used when someone is thought to ‘show off’ their proficiency in English.
 

(from Poetry London, Autumn 2011)

 
 

Okapi

They said we’ll never find them,
capricious as hearsay

or dream creatures moving through
the forest like faint recollections,

a puzzle of pelt and form as if a child’s
hand had a part in it, the myth

more perfect than a long low note
of an oboe or the russet of marrow

caved in bone, makes it necessary
to strike out on narrow trails

perpetually circling back or leading
to cliffs where tracks fade

on the brink of space. The Okapi
disappears the way wind moves

leaving no vacancy, the stilling leaves,
coffers of light we can do nothing

with, that we grow into the listening
stance of a tree, and it finds us out

shoring up against a loss
that isn’t there.

(from Magma 53)

 
 

Amali Rodrigo holds a BA is Econometrics and is currently studying for an MA in Poetry at Lancaster University. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry London and PN Review. In competitions she’s won 1st prize in Magma, 2nd in Poetry London, was shortlisted for the Wasafiri Prize in 2012 and has been commended in Café Writers and Bridport prizes.

Matt Merritt

 
 
 

Two poems
 
 
 

The Mind’s Skyline

I wanted to write you a poem containing the phrase
‘the mind’s skyline’. I have only the vaguest idea

of how this might work or exactly what it might mean,
but I like the way it sounds, so please bear with me.

It will start with the image of the new-builds by the bus-stop,
currently caged by scaffold and orange safety mesh,

and quietly draw attention to the way they change almost
imperceptibly from day to day. There will be birds,

let’s face it, although more for badly-needed
flashes of colour than with any real symbolic intent.

Listen, like this – ‘lapis sky and the enervating drizzle
of warbler-talk from sycamores along the cutting,

praise-song for a sun three hours risen’. In light
of your own poem, I have some idea of tearing it all down

and starting again, but perhaps a much more general
rained-on roofscape could serve as a metaphor for my mood,

and already swifts are busy measuring the distance between
the half-completed eaves and a daylight moon.
 
 
 

The Dark Ages

Night fell and by morning
viaducts and central heating
were the stuff of wild fancy.

People went to bed early
and daylight came stained
with the fall-out of distant eruptions.

Every winter was a mini-Ice Age
that allowed barbarian hordes
to pour across frozen river frontiers.

Gods proliferated and argued the toss
incessantly, while sparrows were enlisted
in the service of ambitious new religions

and pretty soon nothing happened
that didn’t chart the fluctuations
of fickle divine favour.

Origins were invariably obscure
while endings were unhappy and generally arrived
on the tip of a broad-bladed spear.

Information backed up along
grass-grown highways, while word-hoards
grew and glittered for the few.

Cities were the work
of legendary giants, long since fled
beyond non-existent suburbs.

There was never enough money
to go round, and trade stagnated
or travelled beneath a raven banner

but here and there, salt and wine and lead
still changed hands. The poor were with us,
of course, and heroes slept beneath distant peaks,

while high-kings crossed themselves
before sailing for eternity
in the bone-cages of clinker-built keels.

Everything was shrouded in the flicker
of candlelight guttering in a draught
that could never be traced.

Facts remained in short supply
throughout, although live poetry
seems to have enjoyed a golden era.
 
 
 

Matt Merritt is a poet and wildlife journalist from Leicester. His third collection, The Elephant Tests, is forthcoming from Nine Arches Press, and previous publications include hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica (Nine Arches, 2010) and Troy Town (Arrowhead, 2008). He blogs at polyolbion.blogspot.co.uk

Kenneth Keating

 
 
 

Rhizome

a plateau in the milieu
climaxless
one long plateau
many long plateaux
tray-pan-bed
trays-pans-beds
tray-pan-beds

subterranean stem
multiplicities
without end
infinite
infinite plateaux
interlude
intermezzo

subterranean plateau
climaxless tray-pan-beds
infinite subterranean interludes
stem
without end

milieu without end
tray/pan/bed one long
plateau climaxless stem
multiplicities subterranean
intermezzo

intermezzo infinite
subterranean
interlude without end
or beginning
plateaux

 
 

Kenneth Keating is a poet and academic who has recently begun to publish in various magazines including Poetry Bus, Revival, and Boyne Berries. He is editor of Smithereens Press.