Bio-luminescent Creatures Of The Deep – Sunita Thind

 

I wish I was a bio-luminescent creature of the deep.

Welded to lightning, conversing in sparkle.

Noxious in the dark.

Optic nerves splattering like fireflies.

This weakening broth of fire and flame.

Cavorting in an indigo sea.

These astral jellyfish glutenous from their latest neon feast.

Flippantly playful is the octopus.

Corpses of the sea.

Contemporary glamour of the synthesizing colours.

Craters of watery moon beams.

Fermenting are these sea soaked elementals.

Water gods disfiguring their oceans.

These deranged, sparkling fish with their minuet brains- melancholically wired.

See their despondent jellied eyeballs and droopy mouths.

A congregation of twinkling fish scales.

Like dress code diamonds.

Embryonic and heavenly, these fish bones.

These dreamy textures and mermaids meandering.

Prismatic light in the howling water.

I wish to be a bio-luminescent creature of the deep.

The embittered old whales.

Sonic flash lights, sonic clicks of porpoises.

Narrow beams and bio sonar.

This whale song.

Marine life habituated to incandescence, pale blue and crystallized.

 

 

Sunita Thind has always been passionate about her writing and now she has the time to concentrate on it fully. She has dabbled in many things including being a model, primary and secondary school teacher and trained as a make up artist. Make up, poetry and animals are her passion. She has recently suffered from Ovarian Cancer and is grateful she has survived it but she is not in remission yet. All these experiences have coloured her as a person and enriched the poetry she writes. She loves to sing and takes singing lessons and has a beautiful, male Samoyed puppy named Ghost.

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September 23, 2019 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: animals, colours, creative, creativity, creatures, dark, deep, diamonds, elements, feast, fire, fish, life, light, nature, poem, Poetry, sea, senses, song, sound, Sunita Thind, writing Leave a comment

Childlessness – Antony Owen

 

You and I have perfected being invisible,

to be the disappearing dot as people move on

we will always be children growing grey like shovelled snow.

~

You and I have swallowed bruises from joy at others’ children,

made chemical love with natural hopes to conceive

mourned in revelations of blue stripe tombs.

~

We wanted a baby so bad I held you like one in our Ikea tomb.

At seven PM on the dot we mixed potions dead of magic

I was so close to your skin and noticed you had gone.

~

You and I have heard it all like how one day it will happen for us

like Sheila and Tom down the road who sold a house for seed,

one night I stood naked in the firelight and doused the flames.

~

You alone knew that our spines are like hand rails on tube trains,

everyone is leaving and there is only you and I in the dark eye

the pin-prick daylight will not conceive us and we no longer weep.

~

I alone knew that my bloodline stops with me, thank god it stops

but remember the cherry tree that blossomed then died

they cut it down and the roots fought hard to keep it.

~

I alone know that you and I are sick and fucking tired of polite sadness,

to avoid the conversations that make others feel awkward because we are,

to realise that some family trees bear fruit so sweet it makes the wind smell bitter.

~

You alone know that the sharps box is Pandora’s box letting us out,

the needles mock us like talons of a crow on Jacobite earth

next week is our check-up but we are nether here or there.

~

I alone know as a man who sees our children writhing in the dreamcatcher

that there is a beach with a gate for us where the sea-smoke cools the sun,

I alone know that the manger of loving you is more than tangible life.

 

 

Antony Owen was raised in the industrial heartland of Coventry which is a notable inspiration of his work. Owen is also a critically acclaimed writer on war poems with work translated in Japanese, Mandarin and Dutch. His fifth collection of poetry, The Nagasaki Elder, (V.Press) was published in September 2017 and is already its 2nd print run. The Nagasaki Elder was inspired by direct testimonies of atomic bomb survivors taken in Hiroshima plus evacuees displaced from conflict. Owen’s work has been commissioned by BBC and National Poetry Day and is regularly taught in Hiroshima at monthly poetry workshops by Professor Klein. He was chosen by CND UK as one their first national peace education patrons alongside AL Kennedy. Owen was also a recipient Coventry’s 2016 Peace & Reconciliation Award.

January 7, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: Antony Owen, baby, bloodline, children, Coventry, creative, creativity, dark, dreamcatcher, elements, hope, humanity, life, love, magic, nature, poem, Poetry, roots, skin, tree, UK, writing 7 Comments

Occurrences – Kitty Coles

 

I think you are returning, cell by cell.

At night, sometimes, I note the air arrange

itself the way it would when you entered

a room, the floor boards stirring at

your unseen tread, the house exhaling.

 

Dark thickens and I sense you winding,

winding, its fibres tight, making a rope

to reach me, stretching yourself across

its molecules, to gift me with a breath,

a dream, a shadow of your shape.

 

You’re learning tricks for bridging time

and distance. You heat me with your eyes

when mine are closed though, when the lids fly up,

there’s nothing of you except a footprint

hollowing the carpet, some disarray

 

among the bed covers. This morning,

I opened a book and found a hair

between the pages, dark like yours, and my

heart wrenched itself free and moved around my body,

the way that only you can make it move.

 

My limbs are marked with violet-coloured bruises

like little blossoms the size of fingertips.

You send me messages in newspapers

and in the way leaves fall, the calls of birds.

My spit is thickened with the taste of you.

 

 

Kitty is one of the two winners of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, was published in September 2017.

October 9, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: air, body, breath, cells, creative, creativity, dark, dream, gift, heart, house, humanity, Kitty Coles, messages, nature, pages, poem, Poetry, room, senses, shadow, tricks, writing Leave a comment

Lexicon – Steve Komarnyckyj

 

The river made no excuses for itself,

Having known so many dead

Having known so many living

The moon drew a veil over its face

Yearning, as always, to erase

Its beauty and proffer only the dark.

The world groped for an alphabet.

 

Steve Komarnyckyj’s literary translations and poems have appeared in Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation and many other journals. He is the holder of two PEN awards and a highly regarded English language poet whose work has been described as articulating “what it means to be human” (Sean Street). He runs Kalyna Language Press with his partner Susie and three domestic cats.

September 17, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: alphabet, beauty, creative, creativity, dark, death, excuses, face, language, lexicon, life, memory, moon, nature, poem, Poetry, river, Steve Komarnyckyj, veil, water, world, writing, yearning Leave a comment

Cherries – Rachel Bower

 

Sometimes habits pull you through

and you wonder if it should be scuffed

and slack and holding hands

in the dark, bristle calved, taking

turns to spit in the sink and piss.

Or if it should gleam tight like a cherry.

 

You wonder if this is the taste of bruises

from the bag, whether the crash of juice

in your ears will stop when the rot sets in

whether it is better to shrivel as a pair

on the stalk or pluck now – softest pop –

and lick sweet sap from the wound.

 

Rachel Bower is a poet and research fellow at the University of Leeds. Her pamphlet, Moon Milk, will be published with Valley Press in May 2018. She is currently co-editing an anthology with Helen Mort entitled Verse Matters, which is out with Valley Press in November 2017. Her book, Epistolarity and World Literature, 1980-2010 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2017. Rachel’s poems have been published by Stand Magazine, BBC Radio, Now Then Magazine, Valley Press, Three Drops Press, The Stare’s Nest, Pankhearst and others, and she has had poems shortlisted for several prizes, including The London Magazine Poetry Prize and the Plough Prize 2016. She is also the founder of Verse Matters, a feminist arts collective in Sheffield.

July 23, 2017July 24, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: body, bruises, crash, creative, creativity, dark, ears, fruit, hands, humanity, juice, pair, poem, Poetry, Rachel Bower, rot, sap, senses, taste, UK, wound, writing, Yorkshire 2 Comments

Sinister – Maurice Devitt

 

*Sinister is the Latin word for left-handed.

 

At school I wanted to be

left-handed, so I told

the teacher my right arm

was broken, hitched it in a scarf

around my neck and proceeded

to write with my left – whispery

at first, but gradually I gained

strength and my ‘O’s became

perfectly rounded: pieces of art,

letters I could stand back from

and admire. That day over lunch

I drew one on the classroom

floor, pulled a rope-ladder

from my pocket and climbed

down, careful to cover my tracks.

It seems I tunnelled in the dark

for hours, until suddenly I saw

a circle of light, clambered

towards it to lift myself out,

only to be met by the cold stare

of my mother,

a stick of chalk in her right hand.

 

Runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Poetry Competition in 2017, Maurice Devitt was winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition in 2015 and has been placed or shortlisted in many competitions including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Listowel Collection Competition, Over the Edge New Writer Competition, Cuirt New Writing Award, Cork Literary Review  and the Doire Press International Chapbook Competition. He has had poems published in Ireland, England, Scotland, the US, Mexico, Romania, India and Australia, runs the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site and is a founder member of the Hibernian Writers’ Group.

July 7, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: art, chalk, childhood, creative, creativity, dark, family, Ireland, left-handed, letters, light, Maurice Devitt, memory, mother, past, poem, Poetry, school, stare, strength, tracks, writing, youth Leave a comment

The Things No One Prepared You For – James Diaz

 

You want the artifact

without having to go

through the window

to get it

 

a body untouchable

 

the

bluish

fire in your skin

casting its antibodies

on the floor

 

eleven different ways

to wrestle with the dark

inside you

 

none of it holding

things

together

 

we all fall apart

that way.

 

James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared most recently in HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak, Chronogram, and Cheap Pop Lit. His first book of poems, This Someone I Call Stranger, is forthcoming from Indolent Books (2017.)

May 5, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: blue, body, creativity, dark, elements, fall, feelings, fire, floor, humanity, inside, James Diaz, pain, poem, Poetry, senses, skin, together, US, want, window, wrestle, writing Leave a comment

Comparing Scars – James Diaz

 

the apple did fall far from the tree

and went out into the dark

with almost no light

inside

 

some places are all haunting

nothing else matters

but that you leave there shaken

 

when I was younger

I had an impossible dream

that I could grow old

and not be happy

but still be in the world

 

living in a place no one could find

I wouldn’t have needed much

a chair, a table, a bowl, a spoon

a front door

a few years of silence

of forgetting.

 

James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared most recently in HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak, Chronogram, and Cheap Pop Lit. His first book of poems, This Someone I Call Stranger, is forthcoming from Indolent Books (2017.)

April 18, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: age, apple, creative, creativity, dark, dream, forgetting, James Diaz, life, light, memory, pain, past, poem, Poetry, scars, silence, suffering, unhappiness, US, world, writing, youth Leave a comment