POEMS of SEVEN POETS
(Fall/Winter 2018-2019, Volume 6)
(Fall/Winter 2018-2019, Volume 6)
George Moore
Our Mothers after Anna Auziņa Our mothers, both our mothers are women of the earth, deep into the ashes washing plates like saucers of galaxies no one has seen, no one is likely to ever see those ones who drank in stand-up bars and smoked unfiltered cigarettes our mothers of the earth, creeping into us like the insects in the small child’s dream the factory moll and queen, her hair pinned up during the war years, the odd and off years dusting and sweeping, our mothers pretty as pictures before old Oldsmobiles with men in olive uniforms pressed clean their lives laid out like butter knives our mothers of the war years, the in-between times when we were seedlings, we whisper of them waiting behind white screens in hospitals where they washed out eyes and carried limbs, those princesses and queens our mothers, the earth welcomes them in Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Julie-ann Rowell
The Westray Storm Witch They call her spae-wife, those others, with her lick-spit potions, her do-good healing. Late at night, I’ve eyed her going about busy when the moon splits heaven, cold as glass, and a hare stops meadow-wise with a frozen shadow, eyes like bronze coins against the loaming. I tell them I’ve seen her seek out storms, her predictions win their wives – keep the men safe on shore for another day or more; no one’s earning a living, except her, the Finn. So I looked for her on the Mermaid’s Chair, girl with a hook for a smile, and took a club to that fair brow and minced her out, to see if she’d raise darkness on me, but she fell where light winks in the ocean and aaks stand to attention. I saw her blood run dark as I battered her again and no one stopped me. No one said, Thou Shalt Not! Listen, for the World is Upon Thee. aak: Orkney dialect for guillemot. [First published in Poetry News, by the Poetry Society, https://poetrysociety.org.uk/] Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
William Conelly
Sketching north along the Kennebec Array the sun as a white coal above the riverside where alder leaves are hotly, limply hung. Add texture to a mossy shoal as shingled waters lap in shoreward from the dark, ensilvered flood. Midstream an anchored raft must tug its dripping painter, heat drenched like the boulders that it bobs among, while young, recumbent swimmers shrug their weight against the downhill shove of rapids tinged with river mud. What else absorbs a studied gaze? Cliff swallows skimming drinks? The gnat hoard orbiting a berry bush? Noon’s incandescence building haze through a thin, reluctant shade, stirring long wisps of it beneath grey trees like higher, whiter river flow? And listen: there’s a sound beyond the children’s calls and water rush, the sudden, eerie tremolo of fisher loons, dispatched it seems, from nowhere by a failing breeze. [From Uncontested Grounds by William Conelly (Able Muse Press).] Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Julia Webb
no sister no sister she ring me when i say i tell her Mama is used up gone and she say oh crap oh deary my word but she also say she not come and i use up the train to travel tracks and track over the airwaves mobile and she still insistent not come and all the friends of mum blame and isn’t it no happy time already blame blame suck them tears back in and sister no want and no one want but someone have to bad bad business friends flicker flicker in the hospital rest and i undertake to the outside woods with the carry on heavy and the ice feet and the sing earth hole rain shiver friends them no sister no in the wooden hall guitar nephew and the music music eat eat art and the full food trestles then blam blam back in the van filled for the motorway long excavate home and the real wide end of something and still at the end no sister no Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Paul Stephenson
Baltic Woman Land-locked. A body bounded in the still of the sea. Each time I look she’s just as slender, the neck long, head in profile facing eastwards. Deep in prayer, she appears so obviously to me. I prefer her kneeling, not on a hassock or tussock, but the exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, her ankles in Malmö, her shins in Gdańsk, both narrow feet slippered off the Copenhagen coast, nicely snug. I like to admire her discrete Bothnia breast and Oulu fringe, her hair bunched in the Arctic Circle, the way the bay of her back arches up from the faculties at Uppsala. Her chin is round, tucked in low on a plain chemise, her hips bustling with freezing tides. She’s taking warmth from bonfires near Kokkola. Small breaths inside a Stockholm corset. She has shaken her lace handkerchief out, tucked it at easy reach inside the Gotland pocket. Upon her left wrist a sober bracelet, a fine silver link that sparkles from spires of Tallinn’s old town to the White Church at Helsinki. How delicately her finger indicates St. Petersburg, though she is not accusing Russia. She holds her pose, keeps her stature, fails to fluster when a page of her Lutheran bible gets carried by gusts, and swirls, flutters, amen coming to rest one day on far shores of Lake Ludoga. [From Selfie with Waterlilies https://paperswans.co.uk/product/selfie-with-waterlilies] Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Christopher James
Farewell to the Earth We buried him with a potato in each hand on New Year’s Day when the ground was hard as luck, wearing just cotton, his dancing shoes plus a half bottle of pear cider to stave off the thirst. In his breast pocket we left a taxi number and a packet of sunflower seeds; at his feet was the cricket bat he used to notch up a century against the Fenstanton eleven. We dropped in his trowel and a shower of rosettes then let the lid fall on his willow casket. The sky was hard as enamel; there was a callus of frost on the face of the fields. Dust to dust; but this was no ordinary muck. The burial plot was by his allotment, where the water butt brimmed with algae and the shed door swung and slammed as we shook back the soil. During the service, my mother asked the funeral director to leave; take away some hair and the resemblance was too close; and yet my father never looked so smart. I kept expecting him to walk in, his brow steaming with rain, soil under his fingernails smelling of hot ashes and compost; looking for fresh tea in the pot. [From Farewell to the Earth, Arc Publications: https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/christopher-james-farewell-to-the-earth-417] Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Preeti Shah
The Yellow Car (Dotted road lines piercing a soul to adrenaline ecstasy) 70 miles per hour as she licked the road dry, when Bollywood became feelin’ good, sixteen years old combusting cyanide, shooting out as fireworks from a Philadelphia skyline. In the clarity of intermittent street lamps, inexperienced existential moments replaced by inhaling young love as the coolest drug, when impulse gave in, loquacious lips that grew distracted from what they were speaking of. The boulevard, less reserved than the moon, too drunk from consuming a million cars, was her sort of friend at 11:39 pm. Always willing to listen to the language of hormones revving… racing… raging. The road that led home told her stories of life cut short, with teddy bears and flowers on random street corners and how the fast life under midsummer stars would lead a teenage girl toward an unmarked grave in a yellow car. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |