Category: Issue Seven Poetry
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IN THE GARDEN OF SUCCULENTS, CHANGI AIRPORT, TERMINAL 1
By Melinda Smith You and I enter by the Barrel Cactus, and stand too close to each other at the bar. Two beers, some conversation, some digs at the flight we have just endured — we can do this, we have an air-traffic-controller’s view of pink afternoon clouds, of the Siamese Sago Palm,…
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What are your sins?
By Anita Patel. Walking to confession Bless us Father two by two in checked pinafores and straw hats – glad to escape out of the classroom into the sunshine… just a short stroll to where you are waiting to forgive us… For we have sinned mocking Sister Mary Immaculata’s bum wobble and lying to our…
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Love is a battlefield
by Jenny Blackford. The town by night packed full of girls on stilts of mouse-soft suede or shiny-shiny leather higher than mountains high as the sky. Studs and buckles hold the clue: these steep shoes are weapons in the longest-running war. Fake-tanned legs swing glossy-long, gold-burnished hair shines straight as any Bronze Age sword or…
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Art of the Deal
By Magdalena Ball i. While I grew up in lower Manhattan’s housing project the pre-dawn cusp of gentrification there was a shadow rising a skyscraper in my head sixty-nine stories growing upward with the realisation that childhood was ending prematurely. When the tower was built on the site of Bonwit Teller’s iconic department store…
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Reflections
by Jayne Fenton Keane Between cocktails, insomnia and jetlag I wonder how to measure the distance between us in kites and how to name all the clouds – not by their classifications cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, stratus but by memories. Touch me like this here no not like sin not…
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what you must do you must keep your mouth shut
By Ali Whitelock if you want to you can tape it shut with the snoring tape––he keeps it on the side of his bed sometimes it rolls off onto the carpet the cat hair sticks to it because what you must understand is how you feel is not how others feel. the important thing…
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Reflections
By Marilyn Humbert in the mirror a perfect mother of a daughter well behaved a son flawless as his father chiselled jaw, ice-blue eyes no one sees her rusted imperfections the welds cracked almost unhinged no one hears her silent screams on standby night or day her mind tattered as her breath chain store…
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Lipstick
By Magi Gibson Putting on my make-up at the bathroom mirror, – for me, a daily act, a sacrament, a quiet solemnity – I find my lipstick’s almost done – a blunt and bloody stump at the bottom of its silver bullet case. But how can I think of shopping for lipstick while food…
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*Uppgivenhetssyndrom
By Michele Seminara The unconscious is a precise and even pedantic symbolist. — D. M. Thomas All over the camps / children’s eyes / revolve inwards / like moons Their muscles wane / as minds release / cruel world They scored their grief with razors / they lit their flesh / like flares But…
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She Counts…
By Magi Gibson, She counts dead women. Not women wiped out in warzones by bullets and bombs, nor the 63 million missing in India – Rita Banjeri is keeping count of them. Nor is she counting the Korean Comfort Women, piecing together what’s left of their bones from the fire pits where they perished. No,…
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Leonard
by Charles Murray We’ll say a prayer for love tonight remembering his poems; And laud the crack which allows the light to enter and soften our rooms; The rooms where we hide all the pain in our souls, all the ache of being without, and we’ll pray for the rhyme which happens in time to…
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Walking
By Rose Lucas For KTM
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‘ME TOO’: VICTIM BLAMING
By Wendy J Dunn I don’t understand the first wave feminist said all you need to say is ‘Go get fucked,’ to be left alone. that’s what I did when I was young and I never had trouble with men When I was young I was terrified of men My six foot one father…
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A secret language
by Frances Roberts. Consider what we have here: a world with starving millions at one end of the spectrum and at the other those with a fortune in millions. Thousands of the poorest human beings are on the move from famine war or persecution. The children for the most part are already damaged by their…
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Cutlery, the Importance of
By Amanda Bell Men were supposed to wield long knives, preside at table, carve thin slices sidelong. Yet when my father handed on the role I didn’t yield my brother space, and with a small sharp kitchen knife excised the white meat from the bone in one long piece, and on a board I…
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ENDONE® Oxycodone hydrochloride 5 mg
By Stuart Barnes Blister-white tablet engraved with ‘ENDONE’ on one side, break bar the other. It does not take the place of your doctor or pharmacist: opium or morphine: Accident or Emergency. Store it below ground, above ground, in an unlocked cupboard. Store it in the bathroom, store it near the sink. Leave…
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Gaia Cries Another Ocean
By Audrey Molloy You will remember only as far as your Babushka but, girl, the songs go back further, stored in your temporal lobes, dormant until you hear them as if for the first time. They will be carried on the wind through deserts, plucked on the grasses of the steppe. Your ponies are…
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AFTER THE SHOOTINGS
By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro Words sobbed into shoulders, into sweaty hair, the clavicle, the forehead, the breast your breast is pressed against, into the vibrations of each other`s solar plexus, the pelvis, the churning belly that is shared by both bodies in that one moment, the ear—its lobe and lobule, its pinna and auricle, into the…
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Ebon Cans
By Stuart Barnes In the twinkling of an eye, in a moment, all is changed —Gwen Harwood, ‘Bone Scan’ In the twinkling of her eye, all is changed: the small blond child afraid of almost every thing — father, mother, himself especially — but books, and paper and pen, awakens in the vestry where,…
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not quite …
By Marilyn Humbert not quite the hand on her shoulder between desk and door not quite the hazer loudmouth of innuendos not quite the excuse just joking … not quite sons and daughters believing who to ignore not quite speaking up overhearing whispers not quite redundant restructured out of a job but we too…