Archive
Entering the forest with your back
to Bell Common, skip out of your other self.
You are not who you were on the High Road.
In two hundred yards, ignore the waymarker.
Despite what they say, you can take this path,
that path, it doesn’t really matter.
By Richard Skinner:
i. Over Mevagissey Harbour
from pitch-black night
the first to encroach
the horizon
a strip of milk-blue
seeping in minutes
into electric cobalt
then comes peach
bleeding into pink-white, thus
re-enacting day
growing, glowing light
develops the harbour
spots of red & orange buoys first
then boat names, shop fronts
no clouds yet manifest
the last to drift from
darkness—
the gift of granite
& gneiss
*
ii. At Chapel Point
Or sun rising
is a bath of
golden acid,
pure voltage, it
baffles us with
its infinite patience,
the great silence
yellow turns to blue
the day peals by
autoharp of light
later
curtain of winter
light, stopped
(hush/bloom)
into the simmerdim,
solvitur ambulando—stride side by side
into the west
Come
*
iii. Polkerris Bay
coming down
off the cliff
through the trees
a bundle of stone buildings
tantalise below
the setting sun
scintillates
through a tangle of
miraculous leaves
and the whole scene
is an abstract painting
of green on red
the wood spews us out
onto the beach
the small bay is a tight curl
with one harbour wall
tiny waves break like ripcords
on virgin sand
there is no depth, everything is on a flat surface
the bright sky is a pulsing membrane
the kettle drum sun
hums and all the world
could plunge into it
at any moment
***
Richard Skinner has published six books of poems. His next collection, White Noise Machine, is out with Salt in June 2023. A great deal of his work has to do with his love of long distance walking and a sense of place. He and his wife spent December 2022 on retreat in Mevagissey, where these poems were written.
The poet’s father on his tractor, by Bill Clark
By Carol Barrett:
After a poem by Craig van Rooyen
They aren’t moles. I’m told nights are too cold for moles in the high desert. Then what -- gophers? Ground hogs? Prairie dogs? In the damp soil west of the Cascades, moles were plentiful as robins. My father got his supply of traps at yard sales for two bits, some farmer having given up the harvest ghost. Whenever hills popped up, he’d dig down a few inches and lay them in, warn us to stay clear. He didn’t want an ankle enmeshed in the gears, a toddler’s curious hand clamped to the earth. When he got one, he’d announce it supper-time, bury the sleek body in the apple orchard, or along the edge of the woods, where alder leaves made for soft mulch.
I never looked one in the eye. But I spotted plenty of mounds, out digging potatoes or tearing corn from the stalk, peeling broad squash leaves back for a golden bonanza. One year a new ordinance forbid trapping them, on account of cruelty to animals. My father kept up his solution despite the risk. He figured, more humane than shooting them, and no law against that. He was especially perturbed when they dug up the lawn, clipped short for picnics of a summer evening, cedar table re-varnished every five or six years to restore what wind and rain had roughed up. The trap wasn’t an instant success. You had to wait for the critter to come up for air. It could take days, even weeks.
Here my hidden low-lifes stay quiet all winter, perhaps hibernating. But come spring, their handiwork pops up all over the yard. I scoop lush mounds into flowerpots for the pine seedlings that spring from ample cones. The soil is just right – combed and softened, free of roots, fine as biscuit dough. When I first started repurposing their primordial heaps, I feared I might slice one with the shovel, but it’s never happened. They dig their tunneled dugouts well below the planted surface. And they won’t cave in. When I tamp the excavated soil down, the lawn is flat as before the latest hill happened. In time the grass will spread across the brown moon, fill in with the help of whirling sprinkler.
We manage to co-exist. These creatures save their building frenzy for late at night when I’m already tuckered. When I open the door to a new day, I may find another hill to salvage for my tree farm, small but growing on the back deck. Sometimes I’m blessed with two or three, yards apart, a quick jaunt with the garden cart, sun on my neck. Life goes on as usual underground, my father’s ashes on a tunneled slope. He is getting acquainted with new friends, inviting them to watch reruns of Perry Mason, where it all turns out okay in the end, his pipe smoke mingling with the damp and porous earth.
***
Carol Barrett coordinates the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University. She has published two volumes of poetry and one of creative nonfiction. A former NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has lived in nine states and in England. She currently resides in the high desert of central Oregon. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, and in over fifty anthologies.
By David Murphy:
Along the very tip of the Olympic Peninsula—
harbored by sea stacks,
washed by the ablutions of frequent rain,
and scrutinized by the salmon-keen eyes of fierce eagles
who sit perched with feathers made wet and salty by ocean spray—
lies a beach spliced by piney evergreens and the wintry Pacific Ocean.
It wears as its mantle a cloak of becoming fog:
wide filaments of thick mist wreathe the beach’s shoulders,
narrow wisps tuck into the crevices of teeming pine,
and, like a stole, that pale brume softly embraces
the necks of the majesterial, protruding stones.
The beach’s curvaceous, serene form lies upon its side
with its back to the land, knees tucked up against the tide,
with its stone lips ever kissing the briny, icy waves.
Water is its heart. In the rain, in the sea and spume,
throbs the lifeforce that begets the beach’s growth and decay,
shapes its projecting stone fingers, and creates its austere beauty.
In the night, the wan moon with its grey craters
beams down on sword ferns glowing nearly phosphorescent
and flashes on the bottle-gold eyes of great horned owls.
The moon turns milky the evergreen forest that adorns
the beach’s hips, and the moon tints the bleached driftwood
from day’s ivory to an iridescent alabaster of night.
That moon casts upon the beach’s cliffs a lustre
that speaks of shining rock, and, with its hushing silence,
it seems to make the surf’s voice boom.
With wind, the beach’s trees move sinuously and with susurrant song.
In the moonlight, upon the beach’s damp and footless shore,
lie whips of bull kelp, washed up and drying,
with algae blades like Medusa’s chaotic hair, their origins
in the marine forests of stone mantlepieces and rocky shelves.
The crows cackle madly in their rookery, the wind whishes,
surf roars, eagles scream, seals honk and bark and cry,
clouds morph then rework their hues, tides ebb and rise,
marshy mushrooms rise and rot with the sun’s circling,
the fragrance of evergreen sap freshens the air, salmon run,
gulls bed their island colonies with bones, osprey preen and fish,
glossy baneberries bear fruit like murderous scarlet pearls,
and purple mountain saxifrage color the cliffs.
In antiquity, the Makah resided here
using yarrow for childbirth, red cedar for dugout canoes,
yellow cedar for clothing, spermaceti for candles,
stones buffed by water to high polish and wound
by withy willows for anchor stones, having halibut for dinner,
sea otter teeth and whale fins for art, cherry bark for basketry—
which tightens as it dries—and bones for awls and adze handles.
They used tides and stones and fences to catch fish,
laid white clam shells on the tidal floor for better contrast
to see the fish in their traps. On a crisp, windy spring night
six hundred years ago, the tribe gathered on the damp beach
after partaking in a feast of salmon, octopus, and halibut
for a sacred ritual conducted to send its rowers and harpooners offshore
in a twelve-seated canoe to hunt whale. A chief chanted,
sang, worked the crowd into a frenzy before the night fire,
and when the throng felt most animated, the chief
poured whale oil onto the fire, so that it soared, crackling to
a crescendo, rose like the wave of a tsunami, and
in the dark night the bellowing and shrieking
of the Makah were swallowed up by the forest.
Over this desolate beach there is a kind of peacefulness:
gently lapping waves, the soft pattern of rain,
the rustle of a crow’s wings. It appears desolate, Shi Shi,
here in winter.
***
David Murphy was born on Easter Sunday in a small town in northern Oklahoma. He attended public and private schools in Oklahoma and Louisiana. He graduated from Oklahoma State University and Kansas State University, and he studied abroad on scholarship at Lunds Universitet in Sweden. Later, he worked in Afghanistan during the war as the Administrative Director of a project funded by The World Bank. He worked in Riyadh, then he won two English Language Fellowships from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. He was posted to Mexico. He then worked for four years in Washington state government as a Program Supervisor for Title III funds. Now he lives and writes full time in a small Mexican pueblo near the Pacific Ocean.
By Sarah Frost:
The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.
A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor.
***
Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head.
In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.
Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not.
***
Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.
At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash.
In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.
Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light.
***
Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides.
***
At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze, intensifying light.
***
Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current.
A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins.
This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.
As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise.
*
About Sarah:
Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.
By Andrew C. Kidd:
Dimmed lampless and housed upon split shells that anchored
a cast iron mass, bedded to the seabed. Waves rolled across
and based its sailless mast, part-sunken, parting the sea.
Along the gantry, silent cormorants dotted mussel-black.
Their feathery cloaks ruffled gently in the sea-facing wind.
From this angle, it looked like a glassless aviary, iron-wrought,
emptied. On this rocky outcrop, fresh water basined to fill
and veil the rock beds and broken shells, yielding new life
after the lengthening advance and retreat of the diurnal tides.
Through its birdcage structure, the winter sun dipped to shroud
as evening that descended blue-violet, blanketing the day
and birds that disappeared from sight upon this windswept sound.
***
Andrew C. Kidd has had poetry and flash fiction published in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, Journal of the American Medical Association and Friday Flash Fiction.
By Kenn Taylor:
The city has its grids
This is one where the sun is absorbed
The disc itself fades
far off in the distance
behind towers
behind seas
Here though,
bookended by two busy roads
of bars, restaurants, entertainment halls
Are running
as warps to their weft
smaller streets
Taking you up and down
one of the city's few hills
A rare space of peace in the city
Quiet streets
some still Georgian
cobbled, mewsed
Punctuated by pubs nestling in corners
Pubs which give it lifeblood
Boxes of energy
in otherwise
often silent
throughfares
This is one of those places in the city
though,
where the energy lies buried
waiting to be dug up
All the faded red brick
Cracked paving stones
Black painted iron
Even occasional marble
and contemporary pre-fab
capture the sun as it retreats
As the gold and red bounces off surfaces
Reflects in dark glass
and double yellow lines
Brings brief heat to alley beer gardens and
casts shadows
long and lean
Sweat pricks brows nearing the top
High enough to watch the disc
slide away from view
Leaving only the vast
blood and honey glow
As you look back down the
long straight vista
and up beyond it
to the distance
the buildings step down beneath
That energy though
flowing through the streets
warp and weft
The ghosts of dwellers and idlers,
prophets and priests,
of the past
Remains even after dark
***
Kenn Taylor is a writer and creative producer with a particular interest in culture, community, class and place. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and City Monitor to Caught by the River, Entropy and Liverpool University Press.
www.kenn-taylor.com
By Frances Jackson:
There is nowhere
to go
on holiday,
so they swap
which side
of the bed
they sleep on.
It is his idea,
but she has
the better night's sleep.
The pillows
on the left
are,
it transpires,
superior to the right.
She may
refuse
to leave.
***
Frances Jackson is originally from the UK, but now lives in Bavaria. Her translations and poetry have appeared in places such as Asymptote, London Grip, Panel and Your Impossible Voice.
