A Dream of Flying Over My Childhood Home – Isabel Greenslade

 

I open out my skull bones like leaves

my head a white hard dome

                     hot knife humming.

Current flows along my skin like oil

slicking rigid arms to body.

I rotate my neck as I do just before speech

gasp as I rise head-first to my element

                     a fish of the air.

 

Only then do I see them standing there

mother father brother neighbours all

gazing up by the fence, rooted as sunflowers

soundwaves lapping at their stems.

 

I flick my shoulders like fins

                    I am gone.

 

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Isabel is from and of London where she works in a museum. In a former life she was a youth worker then a tour guide. Her poems has been published in Orbis and she can be found discussing poetry, art, gardening urban history, and the natural world on her Instagram account @ijgreenslade.

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June 21, 2021June 21, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: air, bones, creative, creativity, current, elements, family, fins, fish, flight, home, Isabel Greenslade, leaves, London, neighbours, poem, Poetry, rising, senses, soundwaves, sunflowers, UK, writing Leave a comment

A Stone – Oak Ayling

 

Do you think

A stone taken up from the ground

Forgets where it is from?

Erased of place, of memory?

 

Do you think it remembers

The rough kiss

The tender current

The air, the ocean

The chatter of falcons nesting?

 

Does it still think fondly

Of the year you were born?

 

 

Oak Ayling is a young woman quietly stitching poetry into the blurry windswept border between Cornwall and Devon, England. Highly commended by Indigo Press in the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize 2018, her work can be found in Anti Heroin Chic Magazine, the fast growing lit mag From Whispers to Roars and forthcoming charitable anthology ‘Shorthand’ by author Helen Cox in support of UK homeless charity Streetlink.

October 18, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: air, birth, creative, creativity, current, elements, England, falcons, kiss, life, memory, nature, Oak Ayling, ocean, place, poem, Poetry, senses, sound, stone, UK, world, writing Leave a comment

Riparian zone – John Grey

 

The bends, the lichen-coated rocks,

dissipate the current

so that it spreads out sideways

to the banks,

before continuing downstream.

 

Along the margin,

bees drift in and out

of purple harebell lobes,

bright white arrowhead,

patches of southern iris.

 

For a hundred miles,

a modest greenery

of riffle and grass,

muskrat hole and wildflower,

pilots the flow,

unhurried and content.

 

A selfless strip of life

conjoins these waters.

Without it,

the river draws no breath

 

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. His work has recently been published in New Plains Review, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review, and is upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia College Literary Review and Spoon River Poetry Review.

October 31, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: Australia, bees, breath, colours, content, creative, creativity, current, drift, flow, flowers, John Grey, lichen, life, margin, nature, poem, Poetry, river, rocks, US, water, writing Leave a comment