Contents

Poems

Here is What Rises ..............Steve Klepetar
Call Me................................Steve Klepetar
Happy Hours........................Kathleen Kenny
Clues....................................Kathleen Kenny
Emergency Room.................Kathleen Kenny
The Contract........................Fiona Sinclair
Consultation.........................Liz Bassett

Notes on Contributors

Here is What Rises

Held in the arms of winter, we

don’t speak at all, except

in language of snow. 

We wake to a new thin sheet,

crusted with ice on driveways

and roads and on rough limbs

of oak and ash and pine. 

Caught in white smoke

of breath, even lovers agree

to see nothing that might

pull them into frozen caress of air.

We could climb into the sky

on ladders of ice, smear

its blue dome with letters

carved of rime and frost,

colonize even empty houses

of stars.  We know better

than to shake furry bodies

of sleeping trees even

when they loom at us in dreams.

Here is what rises in the east –

nothing dragged from lantern’s

heat, not dragon’s breath or

molten center streaming

through earth’s crust.  No

river of flame, not lightning

from a million eyes or hot

sparks showering down a steel

hammer’s blow. 

We have left those images

burned on the retina

of night – empty, vast and blind.

- Steve Klepetar

Call Me

Here’s where we left

your open

hand, fluttering

loose

in the morning sky. 

Call me

or send your dog

bounding over sand,

your note

sweating

in his slavering snout. 

Carve your answer

on a rock and hurl

it through my glass

it’s never

too late

to bring your tongue

against my ear.

I hope this reaches you

by noon; my lunch

is adrift out in the back

bay where gulls

circle like a closing mind. 

- Steve Klepetar

The Happy Hours that Tell Us We Are Strange

for S, L, & R

I tell them that wherever in the world

we take our rest from bad-omen-clouds

and soil erosion, they are safe with me.

And so they wait, stretching

their long smooth legs on the wooden plinth

under the table, while I queue at the bar.

But the juke-box lurches and the beer bubbles

and all the locals have thumb-shaped heads.

And a door of a man in a brick-red coat

is sticking his attention in

as I will the glass he holds to splinter,

fill him with tiny jellied-craters.

Later when the sun is pushed to the edge

I will whisk them home in my black magic cloak.

- Kathleen Kenny

Clues

There are thorns in the cells of your eyes

and skeletal hands in blood-stained gloves.

You are the totality of woman, carved by men.

He is slicing you up,

but your blood is sticky and stains his shirt.

Pinned down and weak

he thinks you have lost so much

you will never rise up, will never wash

the mess from your hair, your bed, your lino.

He thinks it’s for your own good:

a few cuts here and there,

the occasional operation.

- Kathleen Kenny

Emergency Room 

The blood seeps out

like an oily hair product

as she pokes

a finger into your head to ensure

the skull has not been fractured.

Stitching your black wet hair

in with the wound

she seems to enjoy this blend

of needlework and mending:

might even take a pinch

of malicious pleasure

in your pain, which at its source

is drink related.

I watch you whiten, wince,

lick your tears in silence.

I sit close but distant, tuck

my arms in tight around my coat

hugging you by proxy.

- Kathleen Kenny

The Contract

Silence for twenty years, then at the last minute,

the daughter summoned her mother with a whisper.

Grim giggled reference to Sunset Boulevard as the

granddaughter shakily tackled her mother’s make up and hair.

Manoeuvred somehow in to a conveyance hideous

as the electric chair, the daughter listed tipsily,

allowing her bankrupt body to lay bare the

narrative of her last twenty years.

Already partially absent, the daughter’s words

dissolved upon her tongue,

enabling the mother to adopt the role

of  sympathetic hospital visitor,

whilst the quickening disease slide diplomatically

between them like an impenetrable glacier.

A further twenty years before the granddaughter realised

the significance of the summons.

There on the cusp of death, despite mother

and daughter steadfastly remaining alien flesh,

an unspoken agreement made, that the

granddaughter was reconciliation by proxy.

- Fiona Sinclair

The Consultation

How little we know of those afternoons now

when you, who knew how to mull wine,

how to fix a bike, to wire a life for love,

sat in rooms on impossible chairs

learning to fold kind words into frankness.

Hands clasped to one side and elbows out

you were a parachutist falling to a waiting field;

fragile arms in firm parallels with the earth.

Some nights you lay like that in bed

and imagined the moment when we land:

when the ground folds up to meet our arms

as the sky turns sideways.

- Liz Bassett

Notes on Contributors

Liz Bassett lives on the west coast of Scotland and works in cancer care.  She is happiest when outside in the garden or on the beach. Her poems have appeared in anthologies from the Bridport competition, Templar Poetry Press and The Second Light Network, as well as online in various Guardian Poetry Workshops and Agenda's Broadsheet.

Kathleen Kenny is a writer of Irish parentage who lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. She earns her living as a part-time creative writing tutor at the Centre for Lifelong Learning. Her latest collection of poems, Firesprung, was published recently by Red Squirrel Press.

Steve Klepetar teaches literature and writing at Saint Cloud State

University in Minnesota. His work has appeared in many journals,

including Snakeskin, Niederngasse and Tamaphyr Mountain Poetry.

Fiona Sinclair returned to writing after a break of twenty years. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines. She found that further education then teaching English made writing feel more like homework. Having given up teaching in schools, she is looking around for a more poetry friendly occupation. Fiona lives in a village in Kent where she hoards her increasing collection of handbags.