January 2023 | poetry
The usual builders’ rubble, buckled screws,
snapped trowel-heads, small chunks of plank,
the strips of broken two by two, the bottle-caps.
(Images of blokes in spring and summer sun
drilling, fixing, tamping, swigging.)
A foot or two, a generation lower,
the first sheep’s bones. My farming cousin
confirmed their species, and this had been
the slaughterhouse field, where sheep, pigs, cows,
would wait their entry to the abattoir.
(My father’s gang, living a street away as boys,
would listen to the squeals and bleating,
before the thud. The sudden laden silence.)
I wondered about those bones. So how
did they escape the slaughter? And for what?
Then suddenly a skull, a flat crushed skull
(my cousin said a lamb of two years old).
So what obscure extinction?
My daughter, nine years old, dealt with it
earnestly, calling the remnant “Larry”.
We buried him between the compost and the beans
and raised a simple cross.
Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work has appeared widely in Britain and the USA. He won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2017 with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes. In the USA he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times in the last three years.
January 2023 | poetry
Life is and is not like a poem.
The poem enters a room with variable dimensions
And all at once I feel it sway.
My feet enter a room and its colors are always the same.
A line comes dressed with the surprise of sudden stops
And redresses itself with every turn it makes into the next;
There is no dirty laundry hanging on the line.
A day without lines is a day filled with boredom.
An average line escapes like a melodic flute or trombone
Towards the back of an orchestra;
In my everyday world it’s the only instrument I play.
I pay out the line as the poem comes near to its dock.
A poem has a theory of movement and each movement a sign;
A life has more movements and hopes for more time.
Michael Salcman
MICHAEL SALCMAN: poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022.
January 2023 | poetry
Things I Missed
I was never alone with an abalone;
I never swallowed a spoon whole.
My parents never made love in front of me-
I’m not sure if they ever made love at all.
I was a fruit not ripe yet,
but born anyway.
The allure of dogs was lost on me;
I never understood the beauty of lamps.
They took up so much space,
and I wanted to push them off tables.
I never had a brother who went to war.
There was a casualty from Viet Nam
whose shaving lotion nipped at my senses;
we ate white rice flavored with oregano
and listened to Janis Joplin a lot.
The night we saw a Genet play
was the only time I heard him cry.
My friend Sue was sleeping on a cot next to us at the time.
She rested lightly, curious and unruffled;
I didn’t say goodbye to him properly.
I demanded instead that he return my albums, which he did.
I don’t remember where he went after the hospital.
Letter To the Twenty-first Century
I’m yours, I guess.
You’re not polite.
You want me online all day,
thin and lonely.
You say, hush, pretend you’re not in chains.
You say, look up at the stars,
never look down.
The old me’s going to start running,
the old me is bending and breaking,
shaking and making a stand.
I tell my beloved
don’t be reborn yet-
you wouldn’t be happy here.
The snow starts melting
as soon as it falls.
Mary McGinnis
Mary McGinnis, blind since birth, has been writing and living in New Mexico since 1972 where life has inspired her with emptiness, desert, and mountains. Published in over 80 magazines and anthologies including Lummox IX, BombFireLit, and Fixed and Free Anthology, she has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and included in the Telepoetry series recordings. She has published three full length collections: Listening for Cactus (1996), October Again (2008), See with Your Whole Body (2016), and a chapbook, “Breath of Willow.”
January 2023 | poetry
the Waddington quins
died on delivery ~
their shared placenta
burned by local custom ~
their bodies sent to Dr Hunter
as medical specimens
pallid flaccid ghostly
water-babies hang in a tank
suspended
in solution
skin ridged like hands
left too long in bath water
liquor-steeped foetuses
with sightless eyes mere hooded slits
ribs protruding wraith limbs dangling
a chorus
of stringless
marionettes
wailing mouths gape
in soundless distress waiting in vain to hear
their long-dead mother’s heartbeat
Clare Marsh
Clare Marsh, a Kent based international adoption social worker, was awarded M.A. Creative Writing from the University of Kent (2018) and was a Pushcart Prize nominee (2017). She won the 2020 Olga Sinclair Short Story Prize. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Mslexia, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acropolis, Places of Poetry, Pure Slush, Green Ink Poetry and Rebel Talk.
January 2023 | poetry
Waterfall: Speech
Beginning things
Armed figures emerge from the falls
Beautiful destroyers
A splash-live slapdash
Bodies, shapes
not of earth
but of the vapor, air
Atmospherics of the place
Creatures of pure emergence
Emanations ghosting home
Back from everwhere/neverwhere to here-again
Figures of air, frozen waves
The message and the static
incantation of the nation
The fire-stream on auto-mation
Energies of embarkation
First love, first life, verse indication
Inspiration of the waters
In the waters, breath and life
and if heard, attended to, rehearsal predication
Emergence of the word
Stents and stems and birdlike wonder
Self-dom seen and ever heard
Translation of an endless pulse
through the rumble of the verse
Clamor of the ancient lovers
Hunters herders growers
Builders, bearers, all immerse
Always Beginning
Capable figures emerge from the falls
Heroes, children, goddesses
From the spirit fog of old talk, weary tales, twining tales
from spheres of culpable imagination
Tails still scrapping over dogs
Powder-dust foundation lays, thought-dreams of a summer day,
Bees whine in the vernal haze
Pleasure-spots of time, feeling foci, laugh-prone languors
Tiny-voiced choruses squealing jokey
Laughter of the cells, ticklish moments
Parting of the particles
Pleasure-stoppers floating fee
Choruses squealing you and me
Beautiful creatures, beasts, fork-legged and otherwise
Birds indifferently joyful in their distant, facile way
Poppies dancing in an orange breeze, a whisper of moistened breath
Winged notions, messages from fore-n’after
Saxon farmers trenching the earth at Sutton Hoo
Beginning tales told to indifferent laughter
On the banks of the Indus heroes woo
Healing mothers, earth fighters, soul-warriors
Magicking quick-silvers, bent farmers, squatting pioneers of fertility
Breathing in//out, in//out at the start of things
Where to now? Clouds briefing in a gray bowl of beginnings
Hero-makers already emergent
Silvered Celts, backdating ancestry,
mothers sewing fates in silken vests,
Sands slipping free of oceans crests.
History and geology
Hegelian phenomenology
Starting from Paumanok
Fog-lifted meres, moan of the ocean, breath on loan
Too great a falling from thought-free height
as well, a swell, swelling
Falling to our fateful night
A wave that curls at the crest, then lingers, lapping,
ever-falling…
From the bowl of endlessly thinning ions
Figures emerge, men like lions
personae dramatis
Descend, like flowers
wilting backwards into life
Time, place, and hours
from the wispy, water-bearded face of the milky stream,
A paintbox of the gods upset, apocals…
lisps and sometimes worse
Scattering the nimbus to the you-in-verse
Dicing godes, explodes
Cinematic modes
What’s this, amiss in the midst?
Some body chasing some self-likeness
about the city’s walls, men’s work no doubt
Hunting fate like beasts, a many-headed rout
Mythopoeia steamy inspirations and gastric odors mingling
after, or before, the brazen hunt for doubles singling
The mother-goddess sewing the great table-cloth of fate,
Tapestry of time, winding sheet, rushing stream,
a day too early, a day too late,
down from mountains of thunder-gods
to the banks of the Indus,
the sands of Byblos,
the killing ground of fair Iona
A lifeline-like songline born from the fires of a conflagration
Many-stepped disaster for a busting nation, foretold by asters
poking upward, inches beyond the spray of the great uncanny falls
to find, once more a flume’s foundation, earth-bound estranged,
endangered, a soul’s vocation.
Robert Knox
Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, The Eunoia Review, and others. His poetry chapbook “Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty” was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He was the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.
