Rachael Clyne – from Glastonbury, is widely published in journals and anthologies. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams), explores our broken relationship with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (www.4word.org), concerns her Jewish migrant heritage and sense of otherness. @RachaelClyne1
Elon’s Folly
It’s tall as four whales or Victorian folly.
A knob at the top like the bud of a lily.
The rocket, some tell us, resembles a willy.
We snigger and wink at the billionaire wally.
It’s thrust into space with no weight in its belly,
the glamorous passengers wobble like jelly,
all posed for their show on terrestrial telly.
He’s looking for Martians, like Mulder and Scully,
to work in his factories and make him more lolly.
He’s touting the rides to rich guys on a jolly,
returns on investment, exploiting space fully.
His moon shots drop junk in its silvery valleys
and boosters’ debris falls dark-side without tally
His ship spills its drool in a rocket-fuel chalice.
Sue Spiers lives in Hampshire. Her poems have appeared on Spilling Cocoa, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Atrium and in print with Acumen, Dream Catcher, The North and Obsessed with Pipework. Sue tweets @spiropoetry. Don’t follow me, I’m lost too.
Circular
when the exit road was blocked
and a sign said men at work
although no men were working
and I couldn’t find the diversion
and the ring road kept on turning
when my satnav turned itself off
and the map from the passenger seat
was flapping in the footwell
and my armpits pricked with sweat
and the ring road kept on turning
when I’d forgotten the address
and I couldn’t find my phone
which had vanished from my bag
and I wanted to go home
but the ring road still kept turning
Sharon stopped writing poetry in 1976 and started again forty years later, after retiring from her career in education. Her poems have been published online and in print. Originally from Bristol, Sharon now lives in Otley, West Yorkshire.
Yes, the post-op went swimmingly
May I say... an excellent job!
Elegant at the bedside, she re-examined,
re-admired her neatly-stapled line,
on yet to purple flesh.
Damned good work!
You'll be in a bikini soon!
Residual anaesthesia and brocht-upness
kept back my awful truth. I'm more
a regulation one-piece sort of gal.
I gagged my thought-reply.
Doctor, had you carved some Celtic knot
across my abdomen, I'd be chuffed.
At last the fucking cyst is gone.
Beth McDonough’s poetry appears in Magma, Causeway, Gutter and elsewhere; she reviews in DURA.Her pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word.
He targeted Catholics, female and busty,
he donned floral shirts, his hairline was dusty.
He invited me back for an innocent drink,
when my coffee arrived I was ever so pink.
For I came eye to eye with what looked like a nose,
but noses don't dangle. It hit me. I froze.
I tried to ignore his distinct lack of cloth,
when he asked me, quite brazenly,
Do you fancy a bath?
My coffee cup fell, up jumped a splinter.
The silence that followed was worthy of Pinter.
Then he wiggled and jiggled and willied about,
turned red in the face, then let out a shout;
I'd have thought there was more chance of winning the lottery
than slicing my love sack on Portmeirion pottery.
This damn piece of crockery's stuck in my scrotum!
His penis resembled a freshly felled totem.
I wanted to help, so I looked for a bandage
to dress his split bits and damaged appendage.
But my searching was fruitless, all I found was a sock.
And what use is that to a honeycombed cock?
Defeated, I left. I suppose it was rude,
but I'd started to tire of this fool in the nude.
So beware all young things of lecturer guile.
If he asks you to dinner, just say with a smile;
No thank you professor, I'd rather be dead.
If you value your testicles, quit, while you're ahead...
Michelle Diaz has been published in numerous poetry publications both online and in print. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dancing Boy’ was published by Against the Grain Poetry Press in 2019.
She is currently working on her first collection.
My Son Teaches Me How to Dress
Last week, I staged a major wardrobe de-clutter,
expelling my dated clothes: velvet Biba frocks
flopped, sulking, in a heap; a purple boa
shed a turkeyful of feathers on the stairs.
Platform over-thighs, Mary Janes, and Uggs
trotted off to The Very Vintage Shop.
Last year, you bought sixty T-shirts at one go
from spreadshirt.com— all with geeky formulae
and puns. In astro-language I can’t speak
or type, they jokify your starry mind
and meme the passion of your working life:
a massive telescope, its sweeping audit of the skies.
I can play that game: an online jaunt to Zazzle
yields rainbow fabrics, wordy slogans in fancy fonts.
I stuff my basket—fifteen hoodies and twenty tees
should be enough to see me out: Grammar Ninja,
The Oxford Comma, and Let’s Eat, Grandma.
Jinny Fisher lives in Glastonbury. She is published in numerous print and online magazines and has been successful in national and international competitions — including first runner-up in Prole Laureate 2020. In 2019, V. Press published her pamphlet The Escapologist. She is Principal Pusher of The Poetry Pramhttps://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=The%20Poetry%20Pram
Twitter: @MsJinnifer
APPEARANCES OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
“They spoke ... in a desultory fashion of current events. The news from abroad, events in the world of sports, the latest reappearance of the Loch Ness monster.”
- Agatha Christie: ‘And Then There Were None’
The latest reappearance of the Loch Ness monster
was at a book launch by a sceptic
who had scientifically proven its non-existence.
The old saw about no such thing
as bad publicity was applicable here: the book
sold more than it might have
without the headlines and hasty, half-blurred photos
but the author wasn’t best pleased.
Prior to that, it had been spotted in a phone booth,
a call to a bookie to place a bet
on its own newsworthiness. Whether the bookie
paid out has gone unrecorded
and sightings of it dropping in at the Dog & Duck
on the way back for a swift half
and a whisky chaser made a minor buzz on Twitter
but remain unsubstantiated. And prior
to that, well it had pulled one of its remain-hidden-
from-the-eyes-of-the-world stunts,
decades having past since it was noticed
at a White City dog race, wearing
a trilby and a trench coat, a rolled up copy
of the local sporting fixtures paper
tucked under one fin. Some say it had a fag on,
others that it was a pipe smoker.
All so long ago it might have been in black and white.
Those were the days it preferred, anyway:
stentorian Movietone voiceovers, fleapits fogged
with cigarette smoke, bored usherettes
doing the intermission rounds. Walking back
through misty streets, the last bus
swallowed by distance. Night falling as the monster
disappears into familiar waters.
Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham where he still lives and works. He has published three collections with Shoestring Press. His latest collection, Mad Parade, is due out with Smokestack Books in July.
Superwoman and the mote
My special power
is removing tiny things
from the eyes of the one I love.
I say, special power, but
if I’m honest it’s just myopia
that lets me peer in close up
under my thick lenses
to examine the naked orb
exposed and vulnerable in bright light.
Sometimes there’s an obvious culprit,
a wayward lash, nestled, easily fished out
with a twist of moistened tissue.
Other times, I have to peel back lids
taking liberties with my love’s lashes
to scrutinise the angry white.
Eyeballing my beloved’s rolled back eye,
despite my tenderness this looks like terror
as he submits to my inspection.
Once I lifted the finest hair –
it just kept coming, nearly two inches
and almost invisible. That
was a job well done.
I gave my cape
a little twirl of satisfaction.
Early photos of Rose show her up to her chin in daisies, and five decades later, not much has changed. She loves arranging leaves, sticks and stones in ephemeral artworks, or arranging words, often on long walks or in the small hours.
Gowildwithrose (Instagram – ephemeral art, not poems)
Facebook Update
after Zbigniew Herbert
I am humbled (and heartfelt) to announce that, in perhaps the greatest honour ever given a poet of my little variety, I’ve been invited to read my poem ‘What Caligula Did Next’ at the Emperor’s leaving do in the Horti Lamiani Imperial Gardens, Rome next Wednesday. If only my late Mother wasn’t ten years incinerated, she’d be so proud. Surely now, National Academy of Burnished Versemakers, here I come! It’d be a red embarrassment for them if I died still outside their walls, yowling like a stray tabby with a toothache, without the official people claiming ownership of me. I can see the scene: insignificant old me being borne through those state-moneyed gold-plated gates on a small throne by six naked minor male poets of advanced years. No one anyone’s heard of. Though they’ve all heard of each other.
KEVIN HIGGINS is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway. He has published five previous full collections of poems: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), & Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital (2019). His poems also feature in Identity Parade – New Britishand Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon 2015-16. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in 2016. The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed was published by Culture Matters (UK) also in 2016. Song of Songs 2:0 – New & Selected Poems was published by Salmon in Spring 2017. Kevin is a highly experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. He has facilitated poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and taught Creative Writing at Galway Technical Institute for the past fifteen years. Kevin is the Creative Writing Director for the NUI Galway International Summer School and also teaches on the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme. His poems have been praised by, among others, Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, writer and activist Eamonn McCann, historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Sunday Independent columnist Gene Kerrigan; and have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (London), Hot Press magazine, Phoenix magazine, The Daily Mirror and on The Vincent Browne Show, and read aloud by Ken Loach at a political meeting in London. He has published topical political poems in publications as various as The New European, The Morning Star, Dissent Magazine (USA), Village Magazine (Ireland), & Harry’s Place. The Stinging Fly magazine has described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. One of Kevin’s poems features in A Galway Epiphany, the final instalment of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series of novels which is just published. His work has been broadcast on RTE Radio, Lyric FM, and BBC Radio 4. His book The Colour Yellow & The Number 19: Negative Thoughts That Helped One Man Mostly Retain His Sanity During 2020 was published in late by Nuascealta. His extended essay Thrills & Difficulties: Being A Marxist Poet In 21st Century Ireland was published in pamphlet form by Beir Bua Press this year. In December 2021 Kevin was both expelled from the British Labour Party, of which he was an overseas member, for publishing his poem ‘Tribute Acts’ in Socialist Appeal magazine and, on the very same day, awarded ‘Poet of The Year’ at the Labour Heroes Awards event at Conway Hall. Ecstatic, Kevin’s sixth full poetry collection, will be published by Salmon in March.
Prayer Before Sleep
I’d like an upgrade, please,
one with an installation wizard,
so I don’t need to go through
the pain of strict dieting,
an exercise regime,
self-improvement classes (plus homework),
or hours and hours of therapy
to convince me I’m good enough already
with no need of an upgrade,
or a wizard.
Nikki Fine used to be an English teacher but has now found better things to do with her time. She also writes, sings and runs. Mad fool.
