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.
AMERICANA
Pulling strands of hair from my eyes,
I lose my dog down the beach
after gulls.
I watch her until she mottles
the rocks, small plants,
hazy things.
My dad taught me to play the guitar
with America songs.
America songs are all I know.
Yet, here I am on the coast of California,
and America is just the horse
with no name I rode in on.
I love this dog, who is
always running away from me—
a sandy flightless freebird.
I’m writing a poem about you,
I yell to her—the speck of her,
the blur of her, her feet on the wing.
Later, at the foot of the bed,
in a dog dream,
she runs in place.
*
INVASIVE SPECIES
Despicable featherless bipeds, we roost
under a threadbare sheet,
tarred together by behind-knee sweat.
Spliffed, suntanned, we count
each long day left of July,
spending it, getting lucky
in a Pasadena pool house—
its owner, a slammer of screendoors,
host to transcendental meditation parties
attended in pitch dark.
You say you saw David Lynch.
I believe you. It’s pitch dark
as lakes in La Brea.
We squawk through the night—
in the morning, the parrots talk to us.
The stalwart dachshund howls
at flowers by the mailboxes that, too, have mouths.
Something is said about the noise.
I thought my bones were hollow
and yours were adamantium—
a marvel, such mass—
but when we careen
up HWY 1 in the superbloom,
you scream into sunlight,
and I find I have taken root
in the cane cholla with the
trashed star map.
*
APPULSE
The robin has flung full
pectus and ventrum
into the window thrice.
It stands on the porch rail
not stunned, determined,
yellow legs like stalks of foxtail barley
swaying with the Diablos
as if made of wildfire.
It will try again—
the avian arrhythmia
in its sunset breast,
wills the glass to give.
I want to think I know
what unknowable magnetism
causes it to see and not see
and move anyway.
But a bird’s heart
is its own ambit.
When your elbow
bumps the window
where you sit close,
I search the ground for red feathers,
for the body wrenched
like a stiff pocketknife.
It was only me, you say, standing—
only me, clumsy—
and I pitch into your arms, exhaling dryly
into the ridges and canyons,
the firebreaks of your ribcage.
The sky opens, and I fly.
***
Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her critical and creative work appear in such journals as ASAP/J, Angelaki, Miranda, a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of Modern Literature, SWWIM, Willawaw, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, and FUGUE. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.
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 Rachel Sloan:
2000
The first time I find the canal, it’s an accident.
It’s January, I’m twenty, I’ve been in London only a few weeks. I’ve never been abroad before and everything dazzles me. But I spent last night in a crush of bodies in some West End club and this morning I’m desperate for quiet and space, so Regent’s Park it is.
Restless, I stride past the places I already know well and head north – in search of what, I don’t exactly know. I know Primrose Hill lies beyond, but before I reach it, I glimpse a snaking line of trees. Patches of water flash between the gaps. There’s a path and I follow it down and then everything changes.
The canal unspools in both directions. To my right, a long green ribbon of water and the peaks of Lord Snowdon’s aviary. To my left, a string of weeping willows, bare branches bowed toward the water like a group of mourning fair-haired giants; an enormous double-decker scarlet barge that looks like leftover opera scenery; a low bridge through which the canal bends away sharply and disappears. I turn left.
I pass gardens that spill down to the water’s edge, arbours laced in barky coils of wisteria, warehouses with windowpanes punched out like black eyes, thickets of trees and brambles wedged against brick walls. The silence is near total, the clangour of traffic sinking away into leaf mould and water. Crumpled lager cans and eviscerated crisp packets drift together in makeshift islands but when I stare down into the water I catch flashes of silver and gold tipped with red: roach, maybe bream. I round another bend and catch a heron picking its way through fallen twigs, its neck unreal, its eyes locking for an instant with mine.
I grew up thinking that the world was parcelled into boxes marked City, Suburb, Nature. As I walk I feel those tidy divisions blowing apart. In their wake is something rich and strange. Something that just yesterday I would have laughed off as an oxymoron.
Urban nature.
I don’t yet have the vocabulary to get to grips with this new kind of nature, just a bone-deep feeling of belonging, despite this being a place I’ve only known for weeks, unlike the place I was born and where I lived for eighteen years. What I find at the canal isn’t the Romantic landscapes of Keats and Wordsworth that I spend my days dissecting in cramped seminar rooms.
One day, browsing a bookshop table piled with contemporary poetry, I stumble upon Tobias Hill. The Regent’s Canal runs through his poems like a mud-flecked golden thread. Here is someone who understands this place that exists within London and yet is not fully of it, that ticks along on its own parallel time, someone who can feel and give form to what the canal does to sound and light. He writes of air ‘pressed / into white slabs of mist’, of a dying eel entangled in a sunken shopping trolley, of canal-side magnolia blossoms glowing like lightbulbs and blackbirds whose pollen-filled mouths ‘burn with it / like fuse wires’.
When I leave London at the end of my semester abroad, Hill’s books are in my suitcase. I cling to them over the next fifteen months as I half-heartedly try to fit myself back into the contours of a life and a country in which I no longer feel I belong, as I plot my return. When I move back to begin a postgraduate degree, they, too, retrace their journey across the Atlantic. The canal is just as I’d left it; walking the towpath is a homecoming. But Hill has stopped writing poetry. He’s turned to novels, and although I try to love them I somehow can’t. As the years pass I dip into his poems now and then and I can still sense a kindred spirit – a ghost, growing ever fainter.
Only fourteen years later, chancing across a newspaper interview, do I learn that Hill and I have something else in common besides our love for the canal: he, too, is Jewish. And only some years after that will I realise how rare the two of us are, writing about nature, urban or otherwise.
2014
I’ve been walking the Regent’s Canal for years by now, in sun, fog, veils of rain. I’ve kayaked it too, clambering from my boat glazed in duckweed. I know it – or so I think – like the back of my hand.
One Saturday in November I visit the London Canal Museum and I discover how little I really know. In the grand scheme of things, the Regent’s Canal is a bauble, a plaything beside the mighty Grand Union Canal. I’ve always been vaguely aware of its existence without having any notion of its course; now I learn that two of its arms link the Regent’s Canal to the Thames in a series of snaky, unruly bends just over 20 miles long. I need no further urging. The next morning I’m on the towpath at Paddington Basin, walking to the Thames by the longest possible route.
The Grand Union has none of the tame prettiness of the western reaches of the Regent’s. At first it’s tough, gritty, obviously industrial. It curls past windswept tower blocks, empty warehouses. Islands of rubbish outnumber waterbirds. There are regular signposts for walkers but no other accoutrements of leisured walking: no waterside pubs, no enticements to linger. London seems, resolutely, to turn its back on the canal.
And then, imperceptibly, the canal grows wilder. To my right stretches the majestic mossy ruin of Kensal Green cemetery; seen from the canal you’d never guess it was still in use, the tombstones crumbling under skeins of ivy and bramble. To my left is a gargantuan Tube depot, an unravelling braid of steel in a sea of gravel, crosshatched by wires.
A few miles on, a mobile drift of snow carpets the towpath and I blink in disbelief. The snow resolves itself into the largest flock of mute swans I’ve ever seen. I edge toward them cautiously – no cygnets in evidence, but I know how quickly swans can shift from regal aloofness to hissing and snapping. They show no inclination to move out of my way. If I try to go round them I’ll end up either in the canal or snagged in brambles. Holding my breath, I wade through a sea of swans and everything changes again. The canal spills out into fields punctuated by scrub, thickets of hawthorn, banks of water-loving willow and alder that gradually condense into low-lying woodland. According to the map I’m still in London. But I know by now that maps can be right and wrong at the same time.
By four o’clock the shadows are fading. The edges of the clouds glow pink. Despite my woollen gloves, my fingers ache. I’m hollow with hunger; there are no blackberries to scrump now, just last summer’s wizened black buttons. I curse my poor planning. How could I have thought I could cover 20 miles in a day in November? Admitting defeat, I turn off the canal path to the nearest Tube station.
Greenford is on the branch of the Central Line that goes to Ruislip, the one that I’ve never had any reason to take. I almost lose my way in the cookie-cutter drabness of the streets. There’s a Polish delicatessen across from the station but fantasies of sinking my teeth into a hunk of poppyseed roll or a slab of apple pie are instantly dashed by the CLOSED sign on the door.
The platform at Greenford is above ground. At the top of the stairs, I find myself standing under a vault of flame and pearl, mackerel clouds stained rose-gold drifting away from the setting sun. Despite cold and hunger part of me wants to stay here until the last light fades, but the temptation of the warm interior of the train is too much. As the doors slide shut behind me, I remember a snippet of wall text from the Canal Museum. I didn’t think to note down its author, but this wise person observed that the joining of the Regent’s Canal and the Grand Union Canal, and their links to the Thames, effectively turn London into an island. An island within an island.
With one last glance at the blazing sky, I let the train carry me inland, away from the canal and into the heart of the Island London that I have made my home.
***
Rachel Sloan an art historian, curator and writer. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, she has called the UK – first London, now Kent – home for most of her adult life. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Moxy, Stonecrop Review, STORGY, and Canopy: an anthology of writing for the Urban Tree Festival (2021). Her short stories have been Highly Commended in the 2020 Bridport Prize, runner-up in the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition and longlisted (twice) in the 2021 Mslexia Short Story Competition. She was also longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize; 'Canal' is an excerpt from her longlisted book proposal, a nature memoir entitled Taking Root.
