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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.
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 Alex Mullarky
***
Have you seen the wild wall
climb the fellside,
border to the clouds
where only the sky-giants' flocks
compete for grazing -
it is a nest, stone by stone
from the riverbed, the quarry
we built it, this is our home.
We do not trespass here
but tread, as we always have
on mossy turf beside sheep.
Shielded by great mountains
above dark hollow lakes,
great cliffs swelling out to the sea -
here we have carved our homes
from the trees, the earth
beneath a grey sky like the birds.
***
Alex Mullarky is a writer from Cumbria, living in Edinburgh by way of Melbourne. She likes to tell stories about adventures with animals and trees, mountains and magic.
We are extremely pleased and proud to be able to share on Elsewhere the work of Liang-Hsin Huang, an animator whose short film when the silence comes is a beautiful and poetic work about the silent moments in a relationship and the places where they are shared. A Taiwanese animator and director, Liang-Hsin Huang focuses on 2D and hand-drawn animation inspired by poetry. She says: “I love to explore how emotions can present in moving images and how they react in the spaces. when the silence comes is a film about these themes. When you are with others, there are always some awkward moments when you don’t want to say a word and the space turns silent and unreal.”
You can read more about Liang-Hsin Huang’s work via this interview with It’s Nice That, and you can explore her website and follow her on Instagram here.
Photo: Anne Wyman
By Joel Robert Ferguson:
First off, let's say that which can
go without saying, that the stony
beach is not the stretch it once was,
when my legs were brief from ground
to body and I held the mouth
of a broken shell to my ear
and heard nothing.
It's a short walk to the beach house
the one we’d always then turn
back at, ever crunching over the pebbles,
blue and pink, that outline the upper
reaches of the inter-tidal, before we return
to the town, the county hospital, where
what must happen will happen.
Prairie kid, born Winnipegger,
downplaying the duress of Confusion Corner,
your feet in the Atlantic, if
the muck of the Minas Basin
at low tide can be called ocean.
It can, if
the roofs and new asphalt
where the old folks used
to lay out the dulse with its snails
drying in the sun (to hell with toxins)
for sale or snack,
if that dredged-forest could be called land.
It can.
***
Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of the poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria (2020, Signature Editions). He grew up in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill and now divides his time between Winnipeg and Montreal, where he is finishing his Masters in English Literature at Concordia University.
By Will Burns:
Green lizards sunned themselves
on the tennis court of the abandoned chalet
with its almost-French name.
Gatekeepers hid themselves in the dying grasses.
Like the ground, the butterflies were dust –
on this island the soil is suffering its own crisis.
The steep fields had once more offered up
their customary, well-protected crop.
Before the end we would beg for rain,
having long forgotten
the words for the relevant gods.
***
Country Music is the debut collection from the poet and friend of Elsewhere Will Burns, published in April by Offord Road Books. We are big fans of Will for how his work captures a sense of place and of memory, and for showing us a way of looking at the world, of noticing things, that informs our own explorations of place and spaces.
The collection is wonderful and a fine addition to any library of place writing. If you want to know more about Will and his work, read our Five Questions… interview or our review of the album Chalk Hill Blue, a collaboration with the musician Hannah Peel.
A curtain of ferns
spreads at eye height
to a child, and parts
from the push of a hand
to expose
the shrinking clearing
and the treasure at its centre:
an ancient sleeper
laying like a sunken casket
and shrouded by a puzzle
of oak leaves. The specimen
ornamented with metalware:
rusted plates and bolts,
brooches carried by the dead
to the next station of life.
Close the curtains. Change the scene.
A figure stands at the end
of the platform, his face masked
by a flag. Steam
spirals around him,
a spire above rows of sleepers.
There is one line
drawn from childhood
through junctions to connections,
and the destination close
to definition.
I feel the platform vibrate
from something about to begin.
The figure sounds his whistle.
His flag drops
and it is my face unmasked
and time to leave this dream
and I see it now. The trackbed
has lost its track and I have lost
track of time. I get up
to check my phone
but there’s no signal
and my daughter is asleep,
habitually dreaming
of a better life to travel in
and I see it now.
The ancient sleeper
is a relic, an inherited burden,
second-hand history.
I step outside
and the first engine of the day
sets out light and I see it now:
I know what to do.
***
Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean. He studied Physics at Southampton University, and has a PhD from the University of Bristol. He currently lives and works and writes in Cambridgeshire. His poems have recently been published in Envoi, The Lighthouse, The Poetry Shed, and Ink Sweat & Tears. His debut pamphlet, Knots and branches, is published by Eyewear Publishing (2016). Find out more on his website or on Twitter.
