CC

Elena Jones

My love, the river

I cross the bridge
between your brows,
threads of twine
drifting downstream.

With my tongue,
I tease the droplet
caught in the cup
above your mouth.

You lay your fingers
on the bow of my lip
and draw back to
shoot the rain.

Spilling between
the gorge of our
interlocked ribs,
we drink the fall.

The kiss on that street corner

I made it my mission to kiss you
on that street corner.  I would not stop for the curb,
pushchairs, mobs of teens,
shoppers, police, deliverymen,
that guy who makes a scene
and shouts, “Get a room!”
I would not stop until there was
a ticket booth, a parking lot,
a postcard of us in all the shops,
artists setting up easels around us,
each open-air tour bus slowing…
Forever, we kiss on that street corner. 

Elena Jones lives in Yorkshire and has written since the age of 5. She published her first short story at the age of 9 and has read poetry at various literary festivals. She holds a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and is currently editing her first anthology of poetry.

B.A. O’Connell

French Braids at Midnight

When I say I love you, I mean I want to love you—that I have chosen at this moment to love you; there is no hidden agenda—just aching blue sky and warm golden light; I am transforming all the time—this me is not that me nor the me before that me; I am something unbeckoned, unannounced, uncalled for in the dark night sky; 

The moon knows me, but these nights she thinks I should be out on my own. She says she can’t keep holding my hand—I have to grow up some day. I stick my tongue out at her—but I’m afraid she is right. But I still love you—even if I am childish. Even if I am afraid of being alone. I still love you.

I’d leave if you asked me to. I wouldn’t want to go. I wouldn’t have anywhere to go. But I’d figure it out. I know you can get sick of my endless need—but I love you. I know you love me too. We should stand beneath the stars together, if they see us, maybe they’ll stop worrying.

Tell the moon goodnight for me—tell her that I’m moving into daytime soon.

Young Lover, Inside Looking Out

I wake you up with an apology—this is how it goes:
I meant to love you but ended up swallowing you whole—I am a suffocating force—
I suck all the oxygen from the room—
you were a flame trapped under a glass cloche;

Yesterday I broke a teacup while trying to clean the kitchen—I did not mean to be so clumsy;

I wish I could paint the house a warmer green;
I wish you’d come to bed with me—
I wish we could touch each other without fear or anger or history;

The moon pours in while I watch TV,
I wonder where she goes when we stop loving her—
I think about calling you, but it is late, and I will wake up my parents;

this is how it goes—I text you and then I run away, forgetting to check if you answered back.

I do love you
but I’m so frightfully awkward
about it that sometimes
my own self-awareness circles back to hatred—

I brush my teeth and imagine you are in front of me smiling.

B.A. O’Connell was born and raised in Lockney, Texas, alongside a family they can’t tell you about, or they’d have to kill you. Their chapbook, Sewn, Together, Anew and their novella, As I Want to Remember It are available on Amazon. Find out more about their creative projects on twitter @OnceIateataco

Edward Alport

Flotsam

Two lives drifting down a single stream,
Twirling in the turbulence,
Sweeping so closely to the banks
That we touch the reeds and brambles.

Streams evolve, never the same,
From trickle, to brook, to river, to estuaries
Passing cities, towns and villages
Swollen by run-off and by tributaries
Fed by springs and effluent and spillages.

Never the same, and neither can we claim
That we float unchanged, but we still dream
The same dream. Drift in the same currents.
The river changes on its way to the sea.
And so do we.

Epithalamium 1

The river does not care
for times or seasons,
but scours its banks
and lays its bed out smooth.

And in its own time,
which would leave me far behind
looks to its comfort,
smoother, wider, and ignorant of disapproval.

Do not care what the world may say.
A cable is stronger for its strands.
A song is richer for its melody.
Two streams mix and make a greater whole
sport like the otters, and flow as one to the sea.

Time is not a tributary.
Make your own to join the swirl and flow.
You are not two but one, or many,
and stronger for the join.
A twisted cable, a song, a river’s flow.

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry, stories and articles published in a variety of webzines and magazines and BBC Radio. He sometimes posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

David Willis

Love In the Time of Covid

A solitary military jet plane
screamed its presence overhead
dutifully guarding open airspace 
from some foreign invasion
the skies devoid of flights to any lands
the air no longer bathed in the noise of people
traffic had ceased to flow across the nation

They built a bonfire for grandad
in the garden of his house
no undertaker to move his body
he’d sat in his favourite armchair
last night with a tot of whiskey
in his cold frail hands
a blanket around his knees

His three-bar electric fire blazing
to keep the chill away
when he died, silently
suddenly in the night.
now on a makeshift funeral pyre
fired by petrol siphoned from the family car
fuelled by wood from the neighbour’s floors

They gave them happily to see the old boy off.
A death in the time of covid.

David Willis attained a Masters in Creative Writing and was awarded The Ictus Prize for Poetry in 2022. He has written articles for Cumbria Police and Age Concern amongst other publications and ezines. Published on The Guardian obituary page and in Northern Gravy and Wildfire Words as a poet. He has since been longlisted by Butcher’s Dog and Bad Betty Press. Accepted by Dreich for publication next May, 2024.

Howard Timms

Have you brought me some tea?

No? Then why are you here?

I don’t know that name.

You can’t be, I don’t have children.

What? Twelve and three-quarter pounds?
I gave birth to you?

Oh yes. You nearly killed me.

I was very proud
of my big boy
big brother
big … mother?
Big Dad!

What lovely hands.
Wedding ring.
Did I … give you … that?

Greek fighting ship
After a painting by Albert Sebille

Powered by naked testosterone,
the galley streaks through the waves.
Its barrel-chested sail
inhales wind and holds its breath,
adds strength to the kicks of the oars,
ignores scars on the sea and blisters
on slaving oarsmen’s hands.
A battering ram, the grim ship surges on.
Eighteen rugby scrums of men inside,
strong-bodied, but chained inside their minds,
propel themselves to their final crash with fate.

Danny the Plumber
after Danny Boy, song lyric by Frederic Weatherly

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are freezing   
Because our boiler’s on the blink once more
The summer’s gone, and all the family’s sneezing.
‘Tis you, ‘tis you, messed the plumbing up before.
Oh please come back, ‘cause all our throats are drying.
The water’s off, except what’s on the floor.
Oh please come back, your mother keeps on crying.
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, we need you so.

But if you say you’ll come and you are lying,
And I am dead, as dead I soon will be.
Facebook will show the place where I lay dying
Because I’ll post my very last selfie.
And I will comment that your plumb work killed me
You’ll be on U tube and on Instagram – and BBC.
You’ll never get another job in plumbing
Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, please come to me.

Howard Timms is publisher and editor of wildfire words and Frosted Fire. A playwright and actor with production credits in the U.S. and Britain, on retirement he followed his wife, Marilyn, into writing poetry. After gaining an MA with merit in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire, Howard focussed mainly on poetry. He has had many poems published in journals and anthologies.

Rose Lennard

Lumberjills

I don’t recall I ever felled a tree before
and it’s not as easy as you think.
We only tackled slim ones, maybe one hand’s width
near the roots, but in their fight toward the light
their upmost twigs stretched fifteen feet or more
above our heads. What tools to use
and how to wield them, we had to guess,
but the bowsaw’s bold keen teeth
cut sweetly through the green wood, if we just
went easy, let the blade do all the work.

It’s lucky they were so closely spaced
with nowhere to fall, as in our greenness
we were eager but erratic, and cut-through trees
surprised me once or twice with their sudden weight.
No-one got hurt. We learned to work together
one of us leaning on the tree to open up the cut
and let the saw blade run more smoothly for the other.

We only worked an hour or two, plenty for two women
of our age, unused to this activity. Pete came by
and we warned him not to say a word, but there’s
no shame in our clumsiness—no-one’s born knowing
how to fell a tree, use a saw. Some, mostly men,
learn to wield tools to make a task feel easy,
and practice till their bodies know the dance.
It felt good to handle bigger blades
than scissors, secateurs and kitchen knives,
easing back some boundaries in our lives
letting in more space and light.

Body heat

I brought home the book
another woman browsed before me.
She moved to one side while she leafed
so I could scan the titles, or maybe
she was fearful of proximity
as we have learned to be, these days–
either way, she put it back and I
spied a name I knew, slid the slim
volume out, felt the smooth covers
radiate the other woman’s warmth.
Her stranger’s body heat spreading
from the poems; my hands
where hers had been.

Once, walking barefoot in long grass,
through my soles I sensed
an animal just moments before had lain
in the flattened nest where I now stepped
before slipping wild and unseen
into the tangled stems.

Rose Lennard is a rewilder, environmental activist and writer, rooted in a lifelong deep connection to the natural world. She has been published widely online and in print, including Stand, Prole, Phare, Ink Sweat and Tears, Poetry Village, Atrium, Snakeskin and The Lake, and shortlisted for a number of competitions.

David Birch

In the Botanic Gardens, Oxford

Seven of them against the river’s smoky green,
where two paths meet. Betula Utilis: parchment pillars
leaning together, silent in the creeping dusk.

Utilis:  the ‘useful’ tree’s pale bark bore text
in Sanskrit, was bound around an injured limb
and stretched tight against Himalayan rain.

Walk towards the bridge to meet their cousin,
Albosinensis, the Chinese red:
elegant at a fork on the frosted gravel.

Enjoy the generosity of trees:
here’s one to heal your wounds and keep you dry
and one to make you long to stroke his copper skin.

David Birch worked in education and lives in Devon. His poems, several of which have been published in Wildfire Words, often explore the relationship of people and their landscape.

Angela Arnold

you are a man

mensch | woman | fellow human being
I  draw this circle around you

a good strong circle | to keep you
sacred | within | your own lived story

keep out | the too brute politics of it
the raw statistics | of what’s labelled

asylum | refugee | status | status?
vagrancy? | migrancy even?

I draw a line | to banish
the blight of misunderstanding

keep hope as alive | as you are
a line | sure as the imagination

if true | if untwisted
by deaf prejudice | blinding malice

a line | to align | together
         against shadows | that ever gather

so many more | besieged circles
in need | of being | kept | sacred

Angela Arnold lives in North Wales and is also an artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner. Her poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and online, in the UK and elsewhere. First collection In|Between: ‘inner landscapes’ and relationships (Stairwell Books, 2023).

Brenda Read-Brown

Consensus

I once had a friend –
what sadder way can there be
to start a poem?
As if I had a friend, once;
just the one, and none now.
But I had a friend once,
who thought we could all find
consensus:
that the man too weary to buy
his third yacht
and the woman too tired to carry
water home from the well
could shake hands,
find common cause;
as if the town where every person
carries a gun, openly,
could be twinned with Totnes,
where you can try twenty-seven
types of yoga;
as if the couple on a farm
surrounded by wire fences
to keep out kangaroos
could adopt as their son
the professor whose studies are in
Sumerian dialects,
and expect him to take over
when they die.

We will all die –
those of us who want unity between countries,
and those proud nationalists;
those of us who welcome Starbucks
because they make good coffee,
and those who will not buy anything
from outside our own village;
those of us who seek consensus
and those who don’t give a damn.
I had a friend, once,
who thought we could all find
consensus;
but we never really agreed about anything.

Brenda Read-Brown is trying to retire, and failing miserably. She’s still touring her one-woman show, But I haven’t finished yet! and working for Artlift, and as Poet in Residence in Cheltenham Hospital Oncology Unit. It’s high time she put a collection together to follow Arbitrary edges and Like love.

Martin Rieser

Youth

I wanted to become a bad habit                                                             
I wanted to be  a small light in a vast sky                           
I wanted to forget the other half of the argument                                  
I wanted to be as perfect as the sun
I wanted to grow as wide as the future                                                  
I wanted to run and run                                                                                   
I wanted love, but could not find it                                              
I wanted everything, but discounted what I already had:                      
so I grew in a circle                                                                               
grew with a Mobius twist.

Martin Rieser is both a poet and visual artist. His interactive installations based on his poetry have been shown around the world, including Understanding Echo shown in Japan 2002, Hosts Bath Abbey 2006, Secret Door Invideo Milan 2006, The Street RMIT Gallery Melbourne 2008/ISEA Belfast 2009, Secret Garden, Phoenix Square 2012/Taipei 2013 and RUR at Glyndebourne in 2014 for REFRAME at the University of Sussex. He has developed mobile artworks using interactive text and image for Leicester, London and Athens and exhibited the Third Woman Interactive film in Vienna, Xian and New York. He runs the Stanza poetry group in Bristol.

Wendy Webb

Sweet William’s Jazzy Jewels

Jostaberry, thornless hybrid between
large gooseberry and vitamin-rich blackcurrant
vigorous, cropping heavily, a purple grape’s
abundance dribbling from summer mouths.
Clearance section of the Garden Centre
reduced £8  reduced £5
such fulfilment in vital growth.
Dug and settled in pride of place beside apples
broad beans, French beans, runner beans
can run off elsewhere.
Cineraria reaches the parts that only grow
in Winter, while aster clearance pots glow purple.
Plugs trowelled into line  to brighten
silver dust to shine
tall and fat and popping yellows next year.
Viola’s pink wings dance in brash eye candy
almost good enough to eat in salads.
Sweet William’s royal jewels adorn his wife
worth perfumed summer sheets in dynasties.
Plugs planted in gaps to raise  hopes as they fall
driving all round town in a Honda Jazz.
The boot, a perfect fit
                            what else to test?
Relaxing into Autumn with a new car.

Wendy Webb loves nature, wildlife, symmetry and form and the creative spark. Published in Reach, Sarasvati, Quantum Leap, Crystal, The Journal, The Frogmore Papers, Dreich, Leicester Literary Journal, Seventh Quarry; online in Littoral, Lothlorien, Autumn Voices, Wildfire Words, Atlantean; broadcast Poetry Place. Books: Love’s Floreloquence, and Landscapes (with David Norris-Kay).

Emma Wells

Airless

Breathing the same air,
we sway on familiarity;
feral desires whip us clean
as bonded brethren.

Yet.

Somehow, somewhere,
we broke loose,
building urban jungles
on tigger-treaded earth.

So.

Exploitation turned gold
in mostly male pockets
and we mis-remembered pacts:
to protect and defend them.

In lockdown, they revolted,
reclaiming tarmac roads;
Venetian canals, once more,
held dolphins, rekindled,
to nostalgic watering grounds.

But…

We rose again
from covid ashes;
placing gondolas back
within fish-filled worlds.

Pushed back gazelles,
stamping human feet,
instilling territorial, possessive fear,
morphing into adversaries.

Then…the seas cried out:
a depressing dirge for us to answer.

Emma Wells is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry published with various literary journals and magazines. She enjoys writing flash fiction and short stories. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story entitled ‘Virginia Creeper’ was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Recently, she won Dipity Literary Magazine’s 2024 Best of the Net Nominations for Fiction with her short story entitled ‘The Voice of a Wildling’.

Helen Openshaw

Do the stars shine just for us?

Jumping in time with the air guitar,
Ice-cream sugar pop high.
Dancing to the old songs,
the sky cracked light
reflects off the sea,
our disco glitter ball.

The memories trip off our tongue,
candyfloss light in our mouths,
clouds of teenage dreams.

Nostalgia a melting pot,
different flavours surprise and
spin the night,
love and laughter full to the brim. 

Helen Openshaw is a Drama teacher from Cumbria. Words are in a variety of publications. Her first chapbook, A Revolution in the Sky is published by Alien Buddha Press. Next year Helen will have a pamphlet published with Hedgehog poetry.

Theresa Gooda

Soap

The scent of lavender or rose           
on the breeze also means
to smell pink carbolic soap,
to notice on the window ledge
the tangibility of making do.

Beyond the window,
are snapdragons and their bees,
the buddleia and butterflies,
and crabapples and cuckoo spit
and cooking apples and shady vine.

Inside, slivers and scraps join together
to make a new bar, marble-edged
though nobbly and cracked.  
A sudless impossibility smelted
together with the dirt

of other people’s hands
to purify the convergence of toil,
a kind of love in a grimy dish.

Theresa Gooda is a writer, teacher and educational researcher. She is the ghostwriter of a series of Sunday Times top ten bestselling memoirs published by Mirror Books, Thrown Away Children. The ninth book in the collection, Marilyn’s Story, is due for publication in May 2024. Her poetry has been published by Sentinel, Wildfire Words, Dempsey & Windle, Vole Books, Slipstream Poets, Cannon Poets and English in Education.

Karen Tobias-Green

This House

Sometimes we just run out of things to say
Sit here together and watch the evening slowly creep
Its fingers round the edges of our doors and windows
And the sound of the trees creaking idly outside.
This is a favourite spot for walkers, climbers, lovers
They pass by the back hedge on their countryside trips
This is our home where moss laces walls and spiders weave.
We are start fires under old logs, silver birch.
Warm half-light, the moon stuck in the leaves
And sometimes the crackle of ice breaking underfoot.
We have been here all weathers
Every day is new old loving
Nothing harms or hurts us here.
Our warm limbs stretch from bed.
Our boots and sweaters wait patiently
By the door to be let out.
In the winter day-tripper traffic lessens
Leaving the pay and display car parks behind.
I make tea, you empty biscuits onto a plate;
We curl our feet beneath us, socks pulled well up
The hiss of the kettle, the gurgle of the fridge
The shiny coated cat and damp eyed dog.
Nothing will move us from here
Only the final episode of our real-life drama
When the screen’s off and the red light goes out.
Then we’ll disappear into the nooks and crannies
Seep into the brickwork and under the floors
Take up our places in perpetuity.
The silver birch dripping rain drops
Drip, drip, drip.

Karen Tobias-Green is a former creative writing teacher turned life coach. She writes poetry, short fiction and academic essays. She has been published online and in print. She lives in Leeds and travels as much as she can.