A cold, grey, Lockdown Sunday has been brightened up for me by having my poem “Superman writes down his dreams” published in issue forty-two of The Cabinet of Heed. You can check out my take on the contents of Clark Kent’s subconscious ramblings by following this link.
Big thanks to Simon Webster, Chief Polisher of The Cabinet for taking this one.
Hope you’re keeping well.
Towards the end of our knowing one another
that infamous whisky-hour conversation ceased
its looping flight and fell from out of the clouds,
becoming more a string of painful retreats
from the same old mountain, with no guide
to navigate a way between the boulders,
the only choice to keep on going down.
But then I remember you telling me how
you always really preferred the plateau,
the big-sky possibility of the high moors
or the wide-open silence of the desert,
with the comfort of its horizons. How it
bathed you in a bottomless pool of space.
Where did it all disappear to? The quiet
sine-wave of your voice circling my ear?
Sharing your untold versions of the darkness,
pointing them with the tired light of our stars?
first published in Cacti Fur, 2020
My poem “First Overseas Christmas” is appearing today over at Dodging The Rain, as part of the 12 Poems of Christmas series. It’s an honour to find one of my poems in amongst so many high quality pieces, and I’m very grateful to the crew at DTR.
Hope you’re enjoying the holidays.
Best wishes for the festive season.
Holly
All this time cowed in shadows,
stunted and contained, or else
straggling desperately through gaps,
her thick-set leaves have become
as dark as the longest night, and
glossed well beyond necessity.
Each has grown a ready fist of teeth,
defending her hard, blood-blister fruits.
first published in Northampton Poetry Review, 2018
I’m really honoured to have had one of my poems selected by Dodging The Rain for their annual “Dodging The Snow – 12 Poems of Christmas” feature.
The series kicks off tomorrow and runs until New Year’s Day. My poem – “First Overseas Christmas” – is up on December 29th (and not just before Christmas, as I posted here recently – my error!). Very, very grateful to Neil Slevin and the rest of the team at DTR.
Seasons greetings to you all.
Holocene
The shoreline has no recollection of the ice;
only the genetic memory of suffocation, smothering,
of cold, silent fingers playing at the clay of the Earth,
sundering rocks. There are only echoes, hearsay,
the whisper of older waters – receded, replenished –
forests, hills, a whole continent swallowed below.
Becoming a pixel in the image, a word of the story,
I press footmarks through a knotted dunescape
to arrive, human, upon it, eyes finally registering
only in the present tense, shouldering my own tide.
first published in Amethyst Review, 2020
Chuffed to report that my poem “Superman writes down his dreams” has been accepted for publication by the fabulous thing that is The Cabinet of Heed, and will be appearing therein come January.
My gratitude to Simon Webster, Chief Polisher of said Cabinet, for this particular vote of confidence.
Get out your brollies. It’s a great feeling to have your writing accepted by any publication, but there’s something even better about having a whole slew of pieces appearing in the same place.
So I’m really, really grateful to Neil Slevin and the rest of the editorial team at the wonderful Irish poetry journal Dodging The Rain for taking on four of my poems. (Truth be told, it’s actually five, as I have yet another due to appear there just before Christmas).
You can check these poems out by following this link. And if you’re not already familiar with DTR, it’s well worth a follow.
I’m very grateful to the editorial team at Backchannels – Mary Elizabeth Bardsley, Leslie Caton and Laura Johnson – for slotting my poem “Adieu” into their Fall 2020 edition, amongst lots of great writing.
You can dive right in here.
Oxalis corniculata var. atropurpurea
Trying to put a solid name to every colour
you think you can see in those posies
of three-hearted leaves, you scribble down
a recipe calling for Verdigris, a spool of
old-style camera film, liver (both cooked
and uncooked), the persistent stain left
by berries on your fingers in late summer.
And all the while they are taking over
your world, starting – naturally – at the
front doorstep before flouncing off at
right angles towards the alley, the off-white
cones of their roots somehow deriving
sustenance from its mortar, slowly working
loose the mass of its hundred year stone.
first published in Envoi, 2018
