This anthology comes from a free submission window open 1 October to 10 November
To submit to this feature, click here.
The poets published so far
Christine Griffin, David Birch
, David Willis, Edward Alport, Ivor Frankell, Jacqueline Schaalje, Kate Copeland, Marilyn Timms, Sharon Webster
indicates one audio of a poem.
Look at the sun, and you won’t see no shade,
my dad always said, and yes
dad, you have left us
with this falling desire to find
the most magic breezes,
the best of both worlds, to drive
some mighty sun-shine drives.
Look back at another century, when
my parents opened shop, then
we proudly spent the money,
in big cities, on bigger cars,
and down the biggest waterfall-parks.
The sun, no shade.
A road trip, and all is grand, we all go
fast, y’all say how-ya-folks-doing.
Yellow taxis, subway steams,
rush-hush diners, sneakers’ streams.
We got culturally confused over
morning coffee with no menu,
over toppings on every sundae
at every sunshine-state sunlight-park.
No end to the eye, no end to the sights.
Wonderstruck we were
and our giant car tailed traffic lights
that swung from wires, we got pulled over
by a shiny-sunshades sheriff.
Onwards to Graceland, for the King.
Forwards to the Falls, for dear Marilyn.
Liquid silver river, blue-green falling
and no fear for borders,
or sun-yellow ponchos.
Nature is a thunderous wonder,
nature at its thunderous best.
Feeling like film-living in a mist
of rainbows, the foredeck pointing at
the caves, the hidden myths.
At sun, not shade.
Dad, you have left us
with these healing words, to hold
on to our memories, the cities and
road trips, whatever water falls.
You have shown us
your sun-tall way, and then fell, without a shade.
— To my father, October 1997
The wordings
Even on water, words become rhythm,
like pond-life, just making sense
of the sounds of the oars, of crinkles
that draft water wide,
skin deep.
The poetry, my buoy.
I remember the union of fish, kissing
the surface, the crickets
crackling down the green, and we
had our holidays in the sun,
holding stars and nights, as time
stretched out.
The songs, the love.
But time scaffolded image and
even without wings, feathers became words
like thoughts, just making way
for oars of sound, for a life
in-between, the darker trees.
The books, my beacon.
And wider than wishes, my arms wait
wide open, to words she taught me,
to songs that hold me, composing
survival when stars and nights haunt,
when fish and crickets elucidate
the times I knew.
They help to tame the time to come,
the wordings, my safe standing.
Kate Copeland’s love for language led her to teaching; her love for art & water to poetry…please find her pieces @ https://www.instagram.com/kate.copeland.poems/ & The Ekphrastic Review, Wildfire Words, AltPoetry a.o. She is curator-editor for TER and runs linguistic-poetry workshops for IWWG. Kate was born@harbour city and adores housesitting @the world.
Trishaw
i change words lives
change words lives
be the change
because life is flux
and some things
are never the same
words live changes
as we exchange words
changing
lives
forever
ii wit
is the brevity of soul
and the green is cider
on the other
so don’t stitch a gifthorse
in time
or imagine a bush
in the hand
is worth two birds
iii over
the days pass
like skittles knocked over
by an invisible force
tumbling into the abyss
the wind cannot stop
nothing changes
Epigrams
Life is too tragic to waste time weeping
But comedy is not a laughing matter
Grief is the highest expression of love
Wisdom the awareness of limits
You can’t swim twice in the same sea
Perception and memory shape one another
Politics is the art of the impossible
No mountain benefits from being climbed
Lies are more effective than truths
Smile at death while you still can
Like reality literature is all in the mind
Art is the evidence of our imagination
Every disaster brings a fresh perspective
The world is made of our mistakes
Ivor Frankell likes writing in all genres but especially poetry. He likes to experiment with translations and writing in languages other than English, such as Cornish. He has a few poems on websites and in publications here and there and is working towards publishing his own collection.
Levelling Up
Here’s an odd notion:
to be told we’re “levelling up”.
So…
let’s select from the deserving poor
to join the undeserving rich
on the higher steps
of the social pyramid,
where the sharp-elbowed live.
It’s a funny thing about pyramids:
there’s not much room at the top
because there’s not
a levelling down,
is there?
Anyway, levelling is levelling
as far and as flat as the eye can see.
There’s no “up” about it.
Open Day
The artful, tousled hair and easy chic
are everywhere you look. Distressed jeans
and leather, calculated cooler than the kids,
conceal the need to get ahead, to win
an English place at odds of ten to one.
“She’s been in Shakespeare – surely that must help?”
The speaker, leaning forward, hair swept back
to catch the eye, to gain a neck’s advantage,
to press the merits of her shrinking child,
falls silent, deflated by the tutor’s patient sigh:
“it’s the grades that count, the reading round
the subject, the commitment to the course.”
Outside, the mood is light but words are tense:
instructions to revise, the sudden curbs
on social life, demands to go above,
beyond: perhaps achieve what we did not
or, if we did, made less of than we should.
David Birch worked in education and lives in Devon. His poems often explore the relationship of people and their landscape. He is fascinated by what we hand down within our families and communities.
You are a hero
You are a hero
because you did nothing
you said nothing
strange men rampaged through our house
you said nothing
you are a hero
behind a stuck door
you ate nothing
you are a hero
you didn’t ask for a drink
when we had to be quiet
you are a hero
your leg didn’t stick out
you kept the door closed
you had to be quiet
especially you had
to and you
did
Shoot
Unsusceptible to the devastations of my knobby fingers,
you lie, safe behind glass from an easterly wind
that would have plucked all your brittle leaves.
Nothing that can help you, but to steep my hands
under your armpits, help you sit and breathe
beside this window ledge. Sorry, you say, I’m your child,
that I have to watch you suffer chill spells tugging
at the stark-naked prunus, my trunk-like strength
still fixed in black. I fondle your scarf for what it could hold,
for checks and dots and breezy pink blossoms puffing
around your head. If you shed the silver, your underside crumbling
away, I’m watching it bronze before it slides into humus.
I prefer the nurse take this stench. You call, Doctor, please
let us end this farce. I write your litany, without reserve,
and then your last will, which is to go by this week.
You read it, bowing your crown. You crush a twig,
letters appear, then you seem all but gone already.
I didn’t think you churning in your sap was watchable.
Mirror, mirror
I speak to my younger self
as if I own her still.
I tuck tufts of hair behind my ear
to demystify jealousy.
That light in my eyes?
I need glasses to see.
Crown of disappointment tilts.
Grey clouds flatter me fuzzy.
Jacqueline Schaalje has published poetry and short fiction, most recently in The Comstock Review, The Friday Poem, and Pembroke Magazine. She’s the winner of the Florida Review Editor’s Prize 2022. She is a translation editor at MAYDAY. She earned her MA in English from the University of Amsterdam.
Homecoming
It’s Sunday. You’re never out on Sunday!
Breakfast in bed, do the crossword,
make love and share a bath.
That’s Sunday.
Exiled by locks, I wait alone on your doorstep.
Doorbells weep in your dark Sunday hall.
Gone are the snowdrops that danced at my leaving,
usurped by the hollyhock, lupin and rose.
I expect you went out for milk; you’ll be back any moment.
The sun sips the dew from the cobwebs above me
as I settle my suit case, search the street for your coming.
It’s Sunday. I’ve come back for good on a Sunday.
Joy and contrition,
Yorkshire pud and wash the car.
That’s Sunday.
As I settle my suit case, search the street for your coming,
eager to greet you, to hold you, explain,
our cat creeps from nowhere to question my absence,
treadles my thighs in silent forgiveness.
The calling bell summons the tardy to Matins.
I relax on your doorstep. You cannot be long.
The sun reaches its zenith; slumps down in despair.
It’s Sunday. We should be together on Sunday.
Mending promises, making babies.
God in his heaven, all right with the world;
That’s Sunday.
The sun reaches its zenith; slumps down in despair,
appalled by your absence. Elation implodes.
Tears fight for freedom. Am I come here too late?
The fears of my dreamings and the dreads of my wakings
tangle like lovers, inviting oblivion near.
I should have come sooner. Am I damned or reprieved?
A car careers round the corner and into the street.
It’s Sunday. I should never have left on a Sunday.
Fighting, forgiving,
Doubting, daring, loving, sharing;
That’s Sunday.
A car careers round the corner and into the street,
pulls onto the driveway. You’re here, you are home!
An owl screams a death knell; nearby, something dies.
Hard hands halt my welcome and thrust me away.
Lips I once kissed loose the voice of a stranger,
GET OUT! GOD IN HEAVEN! YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.
Exiled by locks, I wait alone on your doorstep.
Phone call
We’ve lost the baby.
Yes, yes, another.
Yes, four months again.
Pardon?
Yesterday.
Please don’t cry, I’m fine,
no, really, I am.
He’s fine too.
He sends his love.
The words that broke us.
“Happy birthday…..”
Your smile, the attempt at song,
jolt, confuse, wrap themselves around me, suffocate.
In a different life, my other life, I would have shrugged, giggled,
revelled in your love, but the celebration is not mine.
And it is there now in your face, the desperate bleakness,
the dark pit of your mistake.
Nice words, nice thought, wrong day, her day.
And she is beautiful, the woman with the quiet eyes and soft grey hair,
gentle, overflowing in her emptiness. And I am noise and jobs and nurture,
your children, your wife.
How cruel of you to keep me dangling here. How flippant, how dismissive of my life.
And we are broken. I am broken.
Sharon Webster lives in Cheltenham, England. A doctor by trade her first book of poetry and short fiction ‘Shadows and Daisies’ was published by Tim Saunders in 2023.
Christine Griffin
Naming Words
She who treasured books
now calls them thingummyjigs,
stirs her tea with the doodah,
asks where her whatisname is.
Snatches of poetry,
shopping lists, nursery rhymes
colonise her, clog her days
with repetitive tedium,
fill mine with fear.
I dreaded their going, these naming words,
for without them we are fog-bound,
no light to guide us home.
and with them goes my name.
Slinking away.
No apology.
Last week I was Bobby, our long-dead son.
Today I’m her cousin
gone to Australia forty years ago.
Soon – maybe tomorrow
I will have no name.
Only her question.
A Thousand Words
The art room reeks of old brushes,
powder paint, winter damp.
Paint what you like the teacher says,
dealing out paper, paint pots, water jars.
And no talking.
Shrouded in stiff, grey uniform
the girl has a thousand words to say
but no-one to listen.
Too strange. Too foreign.
She watches in numbed silence,
hearing her grandmother’s voice
on desert-dry nights telling of
far off lands, lush gardens,
beaches, fairgrounds, now springing to life
in this freezing classroom.
She takes a brush,
paints a swirl of clouds the colour of sorrow,
sketches in faces without eyes,
houses in ruins, other things
she cannot name.
She paints a small girl
squashed in the back of a truck
scanning the ruined land
for familiar landmarks—
the smudge of dwellings crouching
in the rippling dunes,
a clutch of twisted thorns,
a crude sign, roughly lettered
pointing towards home.
Christine Griffin enjoys writing all forms of poetry and her themes are wide-ranging.
She has performed her work at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival and also at the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network event which is part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival. She is widely published in various journals.
Mattress Matters
If your memory foam mattress
had a voice, would it recollect:
The soft whispered goodnights
The angry, vulgar fuck-you’s
The gentle purr of a duvet snuggled cat
The mumbled words of long-held regrets
The post curry snorts, snores and farts
The restless nights of mental tussles
The erotic tales of sexual intercourse
The silky pillow-talk of love and desire
The discussions of bills and outgoings
The questions of locked doors and windows
Or would it stay silent, schtum, about what
it had listened to and overheard?
Lugged around
Perhaps depression compels those words
to be written upon the pale blank pages
that portered coprolite which weights down
the grubby, too deep pockets of retention
never resolved, calcified, solidity incarnate
cumbersome deposits of thoughts and feelings
none help to negotiate that darkened room
the one upstairs inside the gore filled head.
It is becoming a groped second nature to walk there,
that’s until the overpainted cupboard falls open,
a gaped swallowing mouth of defaecation
to reveal half unmade jigsaws and puzzles,
those voices that confounded you at the time
and still do.
Shadows
The distant utterances of one-time lovers,
deceased mothers, parents, and brothers,
captured, alive, in the craggy recesses
of your fuzzy-blurred, failing memory.
Their recall plays like a jittery VHS tape,
the images out of sync with their voices.
The words you hear give you the melody
the timbre, the rhythm of their living speech.
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 others. Published on The Guardian obituary page and in Northern Gravy and Wildfire Words as a poet. Recently long-listed by Butcher’s Dog.
Report Card Grades
This landed at my feet, but I
should not be seeing this, without a teacher to explain the grades.
Working Towards:
it says to me a gang of railroad workers,
mauls heaving in a dusty landscape,
laying the track to a bare horizon.
Within:
corralled and restless pintos,
circling round and round the rough-cut fences
while knowing types, in dusters, point out points
and settle prices in their heads.
Securely Within:
a pinched and saddened face
behind stout bars, staring with resignation
at the road that leads away, so dusty,
so close, but so untouchable.
Above:
standing on a rocky ledge
of the high sierra. Stretching below
are endless plains of
dust and tumbleweed.
Here, the air is thin, but pure,
and touched by the sun.
A slip of paper whisked by the wind out of its owner’s hand,
and dropped at my feet
I can read it in the playground of my mind’s eye.
But what will she tell her parents?
A Man I Never Knew
He was in the background,
always in the background.
Not behind the scenes,
an unseen, unsung hero.
He was shifting scenery
while other swanked their lines.
He was a quiet man,
a smiling presence,
loping from quietly vital task to vital task.
And he was always there,
wherever vital tasks
waited to be done.
It took me years, decades, centuries
to learn his name,
Whenever I looked, he was there.
Unobtrusive but there, radiating bonhomie,
being useful, carrying things, washing up,
making sure that all was as it should be.
And then he was not,
and all the centuries
collapsed into a few decades
and the decades into years,
and on the cold, hard day of memory
I knew that I had never known him.
But, when other voices stood and said
their words, they opened doors to a life
so rich and packed with derring-do
that I could only stand with open mouth,
but saw that every soul who heard the words
were gobsmacked too.
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.
Exploring Words Change Lives
Words causing major life change.
Do you want to move in? | Will you marry me? | I want you out of this house. | I want a divorce. | We have to move home.
You’ve got the job. | Will you volunteer? | Could you help me? | Will you just . . . ? | Help! | Please.
You need pills. | You need more treatment | This is for life . . . | You only have X time to live.
Words causing smaller change
I’m going to give up this . . . | What I’ve learnt is . . . | From now on I will . . . | It’s stopped raining/hurting/being funny/being irritating/being any use
Words that mean nothing, but show something about their source
Brexit means Brexit. | Make America great again. | Capitalism doesn’t work. | Communism doesn’t work. | I can prove God exists. | I know there is no God.
Words that make us remember useful things
Thirty days has September, April . . . | There’s no “I” in team. | The harder I work, the luckier I get. | Look before you leap.
Mantras – words that help concentration, or express and reinforce belief
Focus! | Om | God is good. | Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. | Hari Krishna |
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We’re looking for writing on this theme that grabs our attention, pulls our heart strings, leaves us open-mouthed or holding our breath, makes us think, makes us laugh or cry, and/or is strikingly original. In short, words that excite us enough to share them with Wildfire Words readers. More on our submission philosophy
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One submission to this window per writer as a single file containing 1, 2, or 3 items Each can be poetry, flash fiction, or a mixture and no longer than 30 lines or 300 words. Also, please supply a biography of yourself in 50 words maximum.. You are welcome to submit an audio recording.
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