The far West of Wales, 1965

Rhys and John were Victorians, after all,
born 1892 and ’4,
so in Arnold’s café, in the mornings
(Arnold had laid the papers in),
they’d read of London and the 60s
with mounting shock. The Sun, The Mail, Express.
Permissive horrors showered on their heads.

Then came the girl and boy, in London now.
She was young Mamie’s niece, the girl,
on a history course in King’s.
(And Rhys and John would read of miniskirts,
the King’s Road, Chelsea, Rolling Stones.
Their wives damned blisters off the miniskirts
and all who strutted in them. Hmmm.)

And the boy, a nephew of Butler the coal,
and he was at that Economics place.
Demos, riots, Chairman Mao.
But they started coming to Arnold’s often,
and reading The Guardian, on holiday mornings,
talking to Rhys and John across the room.
(telling them of trad jazz and espresso bars,
of Marx and the ancient Greeks.)

He was a nice lad and, what with that,
and the lovely girl she was,
Rhys and John were radicalized,
late in quotidian lives.

 

 

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet, living a little way down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. He has published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2020 with “Cultivation” (Sparks of Calliope, 2019).

on those athletic blocks
keenly balanced
expectantly alert
she knew
her training would propel her
down that track
the moment
the starter’s pistol fired
but she also knew
there was a choice
a contested decision
regarding those left behind
and
the obligation
and insistence

others must follow

 

 

Geoffrey Aitken is regarded as an emerging poet in his home state of South Australia and is gaining increasing momentum with publishers like Underground Writers: Issue 27 & 28 (AUS), Glass Journal: Poets Resist (US), Flashes of Brilliance (US x 2), Aesthetica (UK) and Pomme Journal (Fr). He writes pithy poetry (after years of poor mentals) and is concerned about our youth and the problem of mental health along the avenues. He does not dwell. He is older and reads at open mic events in his outer suburbs when timely.

I pulled up my collar.
Discreet dark-blue scarf
wrapped around my mouth.
Dark glasses.

Right at the front.
Conspicuous
but for the camera.
Just another groupie.

Hundreds of years
after leaving this town
I had nothing better
to do than freeze
on this winter day in London,
outside my famous
ex’s town house.
And there he was.
A common sound rose,
a sonorous sigh.

His new blonde trophy
tried to make herself visible.
He remained firm.
there could only be one
point of interest.

For a moment I thought
he had seen through my disguise.
For a moment I wanted
my camera to be a gun.

 

 

 

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, one full-length poetry collection and two chapbooks, her work has been widely published in mostly US poetry journals. Her latest full-length poetry manuscript, “The Rain Girl,” has been accepted for publication in June 2020 by Blue Nib. Her poem, “Old Love’s Sonnet,” has been nominated for a Pushcart by Shark Reef Journal where it was published in the Summer of 2019.

When electric power fails, a sneer
drifts from the haunted forest
and nibbles our extremities.

The night wind rackets in shades
of dolor we otherwise dodge,
being creatures of sprightly mood.

Tonight I lie in a dreamless stupor
and dream anyway, rehearsing
my love of a tiny woman

represented by two broken sticks
dropped on a street in Cambridge
west of the MIT campus.

I don’t remember that woman
seeming so brittle, but the sticks
are undeniable. I drop a tear

in the gutter as the howling
of our deaf old cat wakes me
into dark too thick to stir with

those broken little sticks of pine.
No use explaining this dream
to you, busy feeding the pets.

No use bracing myself against
the windy dawn just brimming
with the last tatter of rain dispersed.

You wouldn’t believe how distant
the streets of Cambridge became
since I last crossed the rainbow

of Longfellow’s cut-stone bridge.
I should have left the two sticks crossed
at an intersection. Too late

to recover them. Just believe,
as I do, that electric power
will restore itself in time

to link us to the Anthropocene,
where dark fades into fresh colors
even the dirt-poor can wear.

 

 

William Doreski has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught at Emerson, Goddard, Boston University, and Keene State College. His most recent book is Train to Providence, a collaboration with photographer Rodger Kingston.

I watch you tremble.  The cracked, dry pieces
of your hands a winter mosaic—flakes
and webs of blood where fissures grow deep.
Will you lay your palm on my cheek of chiseled stone?
Sculpt my emotions one last time to mimic regret!
Icicles clink together like champagne flutes
in my hair—a toast to an extinguished flame.
Breathe steam against my lips and pretend you left
your soul within me.  Skate away on our black-glass
pond of a past, breaking through.

 

 

Jennifer Ruth Jackson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in Red Earth Review, Banshee, and more.  She runs a blog for disabled and/or neurodivergent writers called The Handy, Uncapped Pen from an apartment she shares with her husband. Follow her on Twitter @jenruthjackson.

(Robert Gordy, Untitled Face)

She appears to be Neanderthal, her face
is flat, her nose quite broad, her forehead high.
Her jaw is square, her mouth a gaping space;
a pupil seems to pop out of each eye.
It may just be the way her ancient skull
is structured, but she looks so terrified,
as if her very essence has been dulled,
and she can neither scream for help nor cry.

I see her every day, framed on my wall,
and my sadness for her cannot be contained.
I feel for her, her grief, but most of all—
I feel for my own loss, my constant pain.
I look at her and relive my own trauma;
she looks back at me, intimating karma.

 

 

Diane Elayne Dees’s chapbook, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing House; also forthcoming, from Kelsay Books, is her chapbook, Coronary Truth. Diane’s microchap, Beach Days, is available for download and folding from the Origami Poems Project site. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

There was this show on the massive amount of food
prepared everyday on a luxury ship, thousands
of pounds of shrimp and chicken and unspeakable
numbers of workers trapped on that boat,
racing against the clock to make every meal perfect.
I don’t even know if we have words to judge this.

Sometimes I don’t feel like I belong here, like I’m
different in the way a shrimp is different
from a chicken, the way they look at
the world with either feathers or from
underneath the ocean and in the end sharing
space on someone’s plate is all they have in common.

Sometimes I feel like I’m from another planet,
you know, like I’m lying there on someone else’s plate.
Then I walk down the street watching everyone watch
themselves in store windows believing the same thing,
how different they are. And I start thinking, well, maybe
we are all from Mars, or maybe we’re already on Mars,
and we’ve been here all along.

And if that’s true, then maybe we’re not so different after all.

 

 

Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Kimera, Spindrift, Rain, Slightly West, Timberline Review, COG, Common Ground Review, Typehouse,  Bangalore Review, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His book of poems, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995. He also has a book on the poetry of Langston Hughes, The Black and Blue Collar Blues (VDM, 2008). Casey has a Master’s degree from Reed College.