Founder of Foxglove Journal. Writer of poetry and fiction who can be found at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.com, https://twitter.com/grizonne and https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethGibsonWriterPoet
I remember Rita in her pink kitten heels, her hair coiffed up in a lavender helmet, her lips leaving ruby stained proof of her existence on my neck. She tasted like merlot, and sounded like the sigh after a storm. I remember the pretty way she danced around my living room to the Nat King Cole record she brought over. Her hips entranced me, and I pulled her back on the couch so we could make love all over again. I remember the way her gardenia perfume settled into my pores for days after she was gone. How I could feel her skin under my hands, soft like butter, for weeks, for months, if I just closed my eyes and thought about her. I remember the taste of rain in the air when she drove away. I remember thinking that no matter what she said or believed, she’d come back. I remember finding the wedding announcement from the newspaper. Or rather, it found me. A manila envelope with no return address. No note attached. Just the announcement, snipped and clipped so sharp – a papercut right to the heart. It said the bride had been beautiful. But there’s no way Rita could have been as beautiful as she had been dancing in my living room.
Diane D. Gillette (she/her) lives in Chicago. Her work is a Best Small Fictions selection. Her chapbook We’re All Just Trying to Make It to January 2nd is available through Fahmidan & Co. Publishing. She is a founding member of the Chicago Literary Writers. Read more at www.digillette.com.
A resident of Connecticut, John is a graduate of Trinity College, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut. In the Lilac Hour, his first volume of poems, was published in 2020 by Antrim House, and it is available on Amazon. His poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in journals including Euphony, Moria, Penumbra, River Heron, Sheepshead, Third Wednesday, Amethyst Review, High Window, Poetica Review and the French Literary Review. John is also a two-time 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Christiana Sasa has been writing poetry for three years. Her work has been published in the literary magazines Poetry Life and Times, Literary Heist, Rye Whiskey Review etc. and in two E-zines called Dark Poetry Society and RavenCage. Besides poetry, she’s interested in painting, music, short films, and comedy.
Daniel Tobias Behan is a London born-and-based poet. From 2017 to 2019, Daniel performed regularly at the London Irish Centre, Camden; in 2018 Daniel was interviewed by the Irish Post as part of their London Calling podcast series, and in 2020 had a short film made of ‘The Visit’ featuring acclaimed actor Nora Connolly and directed by Patrick O’Mahony, was interviewed for Wombwell Rainbow, and commenced a poetry series ‘Findings’ on channillo.com.
Glenn Hubbard has been writing since 2013 and lives at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama near Madrid. He has written a good deal of nature poetry over the years, inspired by the flora and fauna of both Spain and the UK. Some of this work has been published in journals such as Words for the Wild, the Dawntreader and Sarasvati.
Mark Goodwin is a poet-sound-artist, and speaks & writes in various ways. He is also a walker, balancer, stroller, & climber. He has a number of books & chapbooks with various poetry houses, including Leafe Press, Longbarrow Press, Nine Arches Press, & Shearsman Books. His poetry was included in The Ground Aslant – An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry edited by Harriet Tarlo (Shearsman Books 2011) and The Footing edited by Brian Lewis (Longbarrow Press 2013). His latest chapbook – a compressed mountain travelogue called Erodes On Air – was recently published in North America by Middle Creek. Mark lives with his partner on a narrowboat just north of Leicester. He tweets poems from @kramawoodgin, and some of his sound-enhanced poetry is here: https://markgoodwin-poet-sound-artist.bandcamp.com.
Feels it within him as if made of concrete or hard minerals
Ready to decompose into the ground.
It has been just a week since he returned
After his compassionate leave came to an end.
Charlotte Cosgrove is a poet and English lecturer from Liverpool, England. Her work has appeared in Trouvaille Review, Dreich, The Literary Yard, The Broadkill Review, Wingless Dreamer, Confingo, Beyond Words and various anthologies online and in print. She is editor of Rough Diamond poetry journal. Her first poetry book Silent Violence with Petals will be published with Kelsay Books in June 2022.
I know you have cycled on the coast road where I bumped along on the bus I haven’t asked if you stopped here at Kildonan where seals are promised or whether in fact the flop of their sea adapted bodies fills you with the same glee a fortification crumbles in a dark stone on the hill a look out a warning place the first line of defence the current light house sits on an islet must be lonely have to row back and forth to find another body the sun has started to blaze and yet the sea froze my toes a swimming costume was a dare to the water the water itself is all subtle movement and glitter past the sand everything is bands of blue and white you would swim.
Anna Percy has been writing for the page, stage and publication since 2004 mostly in the North of England. In 2010 she co founded the feminist collective Stirred Poetry. She has three full length collections with Flapjack Press. This poem is from an upcoming pamphlet The Everlasting Now from Some Roast Poets.
A resident of Connecticut, John is a graduate of Trinity College, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut. In the Lilac Hour, his first volume of poems, was published in 2020 by Antrim House, and it is available on Amazon. His poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in journals including Euphony, Moria, Penumbra, River Heron, Sheepshead, Third Wednesday, Amethyst Review, High Window, Poetica Review and the French Literary Review. John is also a two-time 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Mark Goodwin is a poet-sound-artist, and speaks & writes in various ways. He is also a walker, balancer, stroller, & climber. He has a number of books & chapbooks with various poetry houses, including Leafe Press, Longbarrow Press, Nine Arches Press, & Shearsman Books. His poetry was included in The Ground Aslant – An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry edited by Harriet Tarlo (Shearsman Books 2011) and The Footing edited by Brian Lewis (Longbarrow Press 2013). His latest chapbook – a compressed mountain travelogue called Erodes On Air – was recently published in North America by Middle Creek. Mark lives with his partner on a narrowboat just north of Leicester. He tweets poems from @kramawoodgin, and some of his sound-enhanced poetry is here: https://markgoodwin-poet-sound-artist.bandcamp.com.
I cannot and I cannot and enough heartbeat and warmth enough and you won’t see him if he asks again would no doubt be shallow the lady or the tiger encouraging letter I met a man I moved to a new house at midnight excerpt bronze boy night after night screaming only listen to me this last once I thought even dreaming of being strewn with starfish and shells we also had trouble yesterday the rejection girl thought she wanted each wrapped why don’t I write? So the headlines blare the two of them in an unidentified hand
Anna Percy has been writing for the page, stage and publication since 2004 mostly in the North of England. In 2010 she co founded the feminist collective Stirred Poetry. She has three full length collections with Flapjack Press. This poem is from an upcoming pamphlet The Everlasting Now from Some Roast Poets.
This is one in a series of poems about the painter Caravaggio
Julian Bishop is a former television journalist living in North London who is a member of several London stanza groups. A former runner-up in the Ginkgo Prize for Eco Poetry, he’s also been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and was longlisted in this year’s National Poetry Competition. He won the 2021 Poets And Players Competition judged by Sean Hewitt with his poem Sitting For Caravaggio.
He’s also had poems in The Morning Star, XR’s Rebel Talk, Riptide Journal, Finished Creatures Magazine and the first few issues of The Alchemy Spoon. He is one of four poets featured in a 2020 pamphlet called Poems For The Planet. Read more at https://www.julianbishoppoet.com.
Anna Ross lives in North Yorkshire and works as a university administrator. She greatly enjoys reading and writing stories and poems of all shapes and sizes. Her short stories have been published across a range of anthologies. Though she is noted amongst her peers for writing literature with dark underlying themes and messages she is actually a very friendly person in the real world.
The mirror, undiscriminating, swallowed everything. Mel studied it, its pink plastic frame, the tarnish around the edges of the pane. It sucked in the carpet, the windowsill, the radiator, Mel’s feet and legs.
How do you photograph a mirror without photographing yourself?
Mel had tried it from several angles. Always, some body part crept obstinately into the reflection. Her hands and wrists, clutching the camera. Her right hip and leg. She’d even thrown a sheet over herself, a ghost of childhood Halloweens, but she remained corporeal. Observable.
Whenever she’d stood next to Lisa, whose mirror it had been, she’d never seen herself reflected. Lisa’s golden glow blotted out all else. Her prettiness, her outgoingness, her unassailable status of family favourite.
Now Mel couldn’t be erased. Unlike the remnants of Lisa. When/if Lisa returned, she’d find her room as impersonal as the cell she was currently living in.
Dad, whose love for Lisa had been spun round like a tarot card to reverse its meaning, had been adamant. He was selling off everything the bedroom contained and chucking what wouldn’t sell. Ripping down old photos, stuffing magazines and romance novels into binbags. Mel and her camera had been pressganged into service. Photographing the furniture for an auction website.
The dressing table, once laden with makeup and perfume. Click.
Wardrobe where the doors never shut, stuffed with clothes. Click.
The bed. The hidey-hole for the bills, the demands for payment. Click.
The chest of drawers Lisa had tried to hide behind when the police came, wanting a word. With a warrant. Click.
Click. A thousand reflections of Lisa, frontpage in the local rag. Falsifying invoices, theft, arrest, bail, court date, four years at Her Majesty’s displeasure. No need of mirrors where Lisa was. Plenty of time for her to take a good long look at herself.
Mirror, mirror. Mel stared at it through the convex eye of the camera. Wondered what it must have seen. Perhaps it had always seen her.
Mel had always been there. She just never saw. The eye lied, not the mirror.
She raised the camera. Her waving outline, her round face, camera at waist height, the mirror imitated them all.
Click.
Carys Crossen has been writing stories since she was nine years old and shows no signs of stopping. Her fiction has been published by FlashBack Fiction, Fudoki Magazine, Dear Damsels, Every Day Fiction and others. Her monograph on werewolves, ‘The Nature of the Beast’ was published by University of Wales Press. She lives in Manchester UK with her husband, their daughter and their beautiful, contrary cat.
A resident of Connecticut, John is a graduate of Trinity College, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut. In the Lilac Hour, his first volume of poems, was published in 2020 by Antrim House, and it is available on Amazon. His poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in journals including Euphony, Moria, Penumbra, River Heron, Sheepshead, Third Wednesday, Amethyst Review, High Window, Poetica Review and the French Literary Review. John is also a two-time 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee.
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