Wednesday, 4 June 2025

Jacquie Bryson: Bloods

We appreciate the gestures: the orange and fuchsia                          
Chairs, the free tea, arm touches of soft solidarity.                           
Once we saw a woman sob into her mother’s arms while                             
The room dropped its head in courteous, paperback calm.                           

I whisper, ‘Silver fox!’ just to see him half laugh then turn                         
To me.  I see our sons in his eyes. We scan the clinic
For people we recognise or can build stories upon
As we all await the benevolent taking of bloods.

 
Today the consultant is hesitant.  To paraphrase:
The chemo could kill him.  The cancer will kill him. In time.
Her words cut kindly.  They’re running out of plans.  We understand
That the medical team will reconvene after more scans.
 
While waiting, he will seek God’s voice in the mountains
While I will listen through birdsong prayer at dawn and at dusk.
We will attune to the earth’s groaning, green liturgy,
Waltzing twirls in the kitchen to our first dance melody.


Jacquie Bryson lives in the hills outside Belfast with her family.  She has worked in education and community relations.  She began writing poetry during lockdown and has been published in A New Ulster and Poem Alone.

Monday, 2 June 2025

Howie Good: Factory

My mom almost gave birth to me
in the backseat of a taxi on the way
to the hospital. My dad, per usual,
was at work. He worked in the factory
six days a week, 10, 12 hours a day,
throughout my growing up. He was
at work when I got up to go to school
and still not home when I went to bed.
Although he lived to be 96, he would
remain a stranger to me. There are people –
you may even know some – who think
that what can’t be easily understood
isn’t worth the effort to understand.


Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose poetry collections include The Dark and Akimbo, available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. Sacred Parasite is scheduled to publish his newest collection, Dead Heroes, in 2026.

Wednesday, 28 May 2025

Jean L. Kreiling: Musicians of Spain

i. The Dulcimer Player (Toledo)
 
The tune, unknown to me, must have been old—
its phrases answering each other neatly,
its contours those of well-known stories told
with native confidence. She was completely
absorbed in it, seemed unaware of those
who paused to listen, her eyes on the strings
from which she plucked bright highs and dulcet lows
as piously as priest or cantor sings.
The grand cathedral only steps away
held precious crosses, statues, mysteries;
her poor man's harp moved some of us to pray
with gratitude for earthly victories.
And some heard solace, lilting antidotes
for grief, in her devoutly summoned notes.
 
 
ii. The Street Violinist (Madrid)
 
You don’t make much dinero there, she said,
with vino-tinto-slurred exasperation,
but he picked up the small black case and fled
toward downtown—and not much remuneration.
He knew that if he played there for a while,
the passers-by would listen, gratefully,
and some of them would nod or leave a smile
along with coins, and then just let him be.
They wouldn't see the flaws that she deplored—
his lack of wit and shrewdness and ambition;
there on the street he might not be adored,
but he'd be heard, and thanked without condition.
Years past the last time love lit up her face,
he finds more warmth outside the tapas place.
 
 
iii. The Guitarist (The Albaicín, Granada)
 
At dusk, just through that keyhole arch, he stands,
head bowed and back against the wall—alone,
but not quite: wood and string in his strong hands
respond to his embrace with blood-warm tone.
And now the evening knows how to begin:
the air can cool and learn again to float,
the fading sun can yield to its mild twin,
and calm can reclaim souls with every note.
The man plays Spanish music—heart-bent sighs
that fill the gaps between the cobblestones
and soften whitewashed walls and fill some eyes
with grateful tears and settle some tired bones.
The man just through that keyhole arch unseals
the secrets with which evening soothes and heals.


Jean L. Kreiling is the author of three collections of poetry; her fourth will be published later this year. Her work has been awarded the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honours; she lives on the coast of Massachusetts.

Monday, 26 May 2025

Cheryl Snell: Genealogy

The sofa in the funeral parlour
breaks away and I am a bird
forever blinking in the gloom.
At this banquet of death, I eat
the endings of my ancestors.
Their toxic genes garble my cells,
my misaligned synapses. Their ends
are keys to my beginning: brain bleeds
and disorganized hips ambling down
through generations. If you read
my cards, you’d stop believing in luck. 
It’s one way to hide from the truth─
there are no good deaths in this family.
My grandfather’s naked body sent
to one wife by the other, my sister
too contagious to kiss goodbye.


Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and novels. Her most recent writing has or will appear in Flash Boulevard, 100 Word Story, Bending Genres, On the Seawall, Midway, Blue Unicorn, and the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.

Friday, 23 May 2025

Jackie Chou: Far From the Balcony Gate

I had to get away 
though I knew 
you wanted me to stay

You don't know how
the jangle of your keys
makes me flinch 

Or the clang of your heels
heavy like a stone bell's toll 

My tongue freezes 
at the tip of a hello 

And I dream of becoming 
the shrinking dot
of a raven in the sky


Jackie Chou is a poet from Southern California. Her poems have recently appeared in Lee Herrick's Our California Project. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Sorceress and Finding My Heart in Love and Loss (Cyberwit Press).

Wednesday, 21 May 2025

Colleen Addison: space

in the space that exists now because you don’t write me I sit on a central American deck the yoga mat unused on the planks and a coffee cup next to me dregs dark at the bottom the room visible through the sliding doors with its twinbedspushedtogether the howling of monkeys and chitterchatter of birds I don’t know feels silent as a soundtrack without the beep of your text and yesterday the pitter of rain fell beepless onto the doors the hotel clerk called my name in the dark that wasn’t you either and now a squirrel runs from leaf to leaf like gymnastics but less elaborate I get up not to check the phone but to take a photo the squirrel leaps again and it is gone


Colleen Addison completed a PhD in health information; she then promptly got sick herself. Her recent work has been featured in Giant Tentacles, Halfway Down the Stairs, and River Teeth. 

Monday, 19 May 2025

Lauren Sarrantonio: Earthly Travels

I’m on time
at the airport gate,
where a dream’s void opens
green at the foot of my seat,

an invisible weight
speaks from it, 
Where are you, the stories we didn’t write,
the gardens we didn’t grow:
chamomile, rose, basil, thyme. 

Where are you, the hair
that never went grey, on
the phone or the bike– our simple earthly travels.
On letters folded three and a half times
inside a standard envelope sent

by the Postal Service:
“The way in which I write poetry is pretty bizarre,”
you mused, undisrupted, typewriter ink from the upstate farm;
Harvest Moon played on vinyl, and you swam
in the muddy pond.

You taught me everything, even how to stop existing,
and the terror of losing a teacher.
Who will show me the way,
or change the channel at red lights?
Who will leave books at my door in the hope of August,

bring me to the gnarly, gritty, grace of age,
and watch these fires dance to nothing?
I’m really trying to love myself this time.
Who will help me remember?
I wrap my wounds with apprehension,

brooding– I don’t want to get better.
I do want to keep going.


Lauren Sarrantonio is a certified speech-language pathologist, yogi, musician and poet. You can find her at @numinouspalms.

Sunday, 18 May 2025

Sunday Review: ‘Terminals’ by Nathanael O’Reilly

O’Reilly’s third pamphlet with Canada’s above/ground press is, as the title suggests, comprised entirely of the terminal form. As the book notes, the form was invented by Australian poet John Tranter, where "the final word of each line in a source poem us used as the end-word for each line of a new poem”. A sizeable challenge in itself, as O’Reilly maintains not only this end-words in this new pieces, but the same order of words and stanza structure for each poem.

Sourced poems come from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Jessica Traynor, John Keats, Jane Clarke and others. The terminal device opens up a second level to the collection: the reader can source the originals, read and contrast them to O’Reilly’s re-imaginings, and admire just how inventive and challenging the new works our. Repeatedly, O’Reilly has been able to craft the restriction of the end-words into his own narrative, which often explores the need for isolation, and an affinity with landscapes. In ‘Settling Down’, the poem starts off as an innocent description of a beach scene, with surfers and fishermen. Then, unexpectedly:

They do not know my remains
will be scattered on their beach, blown
out to see, the evidence of me
settling down in one place at least[.]

This affinity drives the theme of some eco-poems in Terminals: closing poem ‘Autumn Lament’ chides humanity for not taking take of the earth – “The planet won’t let us off the hook | for the debts we owe’. The phrase ‘damaged earth’ is repeated from the opening poem, serving as neat bookend for the theme.

Tied closely to this connection to the land is the want for escape, mostly from other poem. The speaker in ‘The Landscape’s Singing’ hopes “for a fertile summer | writing poetry in the turf-shed”. In ‘Archaeology’, the opening action of ‘I close the door’ double downs on this shutting away of oneself, seemingly a much needed retreat: “I dig for the ancient me | sometimes feared vanished”. Although this is some connection with others elsewhere, such as remembering studying Picasso with a friend, or dwelling over a past love, the separateness creeps in. Equinox asks the ex-lover to “wonder | in my arms are lovelier than aloneness’. ‘Equinox’ sees the speaker wishing for ‘inspiration, solitude’, the two apparently inseparable.

There are a few flexible applications of the end words here and there: Heaney’s ‘place’ becomes ‘homeplace’ in O’Reilly rewriting; Duffy’s ‘hesitate’ shifts to ‘hesitation’; while Larkin’s ‘lace’ becomes hidden in the word ‘placed’. To this reviewer, these liberties are permissible: one would rather see a slight deviation, rather than have the language feel forced and unnatural in order to meet the demand of the original end-words. ‘Sweet Movement’ goes one step further, and retains the syllable count for each line as well from George and Ira Gershwin’s song, ‘Embraceable You’.

Looking at some of the end-words in isolation, one might marvel at the shift from the source poem to the new poem. ‘Remember’ takes from Ellen Bass’s ‘Any Common Desolation’. In one part, the end-words are ruminant, ginger, signs, mother, gathered, toes, etc., potentially unconnected to each other as the answers in a crossword puzzle. O’Reilly transforms these into a call for calmness and patience:

Wait. Become ruminant,
Meditate. Peel and grate ginger,
sip healing tea. Search for signs
of chance. Remember your mother,
how she believed in you, gathered
you in her arms, tickled your toes,
made you laugh until you lost breath,
distracted you from darkness. Sit in the yard
imbibing the moon[.]

Terminals is a work of transmogrification, with surprising and pleasing results throughout, and is certainly the strongest work O’Reilly has published with above/ground press, which is known for championing experimental and restricted writing. A rewarding read, and for fellow writers, one that will inspire them to try their hand at their own terminal form.


Terminals is available to order now from above/ground press.

Saturday, 17 May 2025

Andrena Zawinski: What Remains

...where sight vanishes into nothing...there has to be more 
than dust, wind-borne particles of burning earth... - Phillip Levine


What remains of the wooden farmhouse 
    tucked down off the road
         after the fire
is more than the blackened porch planks 
    or piles of dark cinder 
         floating across foundation.
What remains are those floorboards 
    creaking beneath bare feet 
               after the thunderstorm 
drove us in and into each others arms 
    to hover in candlelight 
         beneath its weathered roof.

What remains is a dank rattle of shadows 
            during sleepover parties
                        with children fled under beds 
from ghosts imagined stealing through air 
    and only in winter. 
        Summers they’d pump 
the well’s rusted lever that gave up 
            no more than a groan
                        having given up 
on water that could not rise 
            from an exhausted 
                        spring below.  

What remains are those days cradled
            inside a bald truck tire 
                        retrieved from the roadside berm 
and swinging from bull rope 
            looped about the muscled arm of oak 
                        lightning struck but couldn’t take down
that remained safe in its promise to stay put 
            even as it seemed to sigh a surrender 
                        under the weight of us 
and even if to wither to bloom but bloom again,
            before the landlords 
                        burned the house down 
it's worth more as insurance money char than rent.  

What remains of that old farmhouse 
            at the city’s ragged edge 
                        one that would have fared better 
out on some cape farther east
            taking on the fierceness of wind 
                        or rugged rush of waters
are the years we lived with it
            with its pantry full of what 
                        the garden gave up 
of its wild garlic, onions, tomatoes, corn 
            in air fragrant with basil and dill 
                        and the yawn of days 
filled with squeals of neighbourhood kids
            racing its wraparound porch. 
                        What remains is more 
than parch and scorch––its invisible rooms 
            still forcing themselves up 
                        into a canopy wild with leaves.

[Originally published in the collection 'Landings' by the author]


Andrena Zawinski’s poems have received accolades for free verse, lyricism, spirituality, social concern and have appeared in Progressive Magazine, Rattle, Santa Fe Review, Slipstream, and others with work online at Women’s Voices for Change, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry is Born Under the Influence.


Thursday, 15 May 2025

Mary E. Ringland: Lost Boy

i.m. Michael Hurrell, 1984-2008

Here, listen to this, you said, eager to press play 
on Tiesto’s mix for strings – stringing us along 
to Barber’s Adagio, a funeral anthem adulterated 
by sonic synth, raising us from the humdrum 
for all of six minutes, thirty-two seconds,
lost in the club-culture remix 
of your benefit-funded Ibiza.

You were a gladiator in a self-styled movie,
pulse fluttering like a moth 
beneath destiny’s paperweight – your truth 
trapped in a one-bedroom failsafe – freed 
for a moment in a techno smokescreen. 

Michael, how could you know you were 
rousing a requiem – summoning a trance 
to lure you to a place in time – more infinite 
than your twenty-four years.

Michael, how could you know those strings 
would echo like a strobe light through eternity 
– resurrect the spirit of a lost boy.


Mary E. Ringland is a therapeutic counsellor from Larne, County Antrim. Her poems have appeared in The Storms Journal, New Isles Press, The Morecambe Poetry Festival Anthology, Live Encounters, and The Bangor Literary Journal. Mary recently completed her MA in Creative Writing at the Open University.