Compassion for the Undertaker – Charlotte Cosgrove

 

His feet press gently on the pedals

More pianist than driver.

The black hearse slows to the church

An inkblot spreading on white paper.

He opens the door for the grieving

Remains solemn as duty expects.

His eyes look down at pebbly gravel

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.

 

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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.

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May 1, 2022 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: church, compassion, creative, creativity, door, driving, duty, end, eyes, grief, ink, journey, leave, Liverpool, loss, piano, poem, poet, Poetry, return, UK, undertaker, writing Leave a comment

Grief – Yvonne Gaskill

 

And there were days

Days when my chest screamed

My blood wept

And I choked on my own pain.

 

Days like empty glasses

Cold, cutting, cavernous.

 

And there were days

Days I felt so small

I could have slipped through pavement cracks

My skin so thin.

 

Days like vacant tombs,

Diminishing, decreasing, dying.

 

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An English graduate, Yvonne has always enjoyed creative writing, particularly poetry. Recent bereavements have led her to write more as a kind of therapy. A journalist for more than 30 years in print and broadcasting, Yvonne covered everything from terrorist attacks to celebrity interviews. She reported and presented on regional TV and radio stations and also for national news networks in the UK.

February 21, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: blood, cold, creative, creativity, days, death, empty, feeling, glasses, grief, loss, memories, pain, poem, Poetry, scream, skin, small, time, tombs, weeping, writing, Yvonne Gaskill 1 Comment

Jet – Claire Walker

 

So much mourning.

We brooch it over our hearts,

wear it tight around throats.

 

We fold into our rosaries,

each bead a black prayer

shovelled through aching fingers.

 

This type of coal smokes

around our wrists,

forges itself into chains.

 

We have mined so long

even gemstones grow brittle

against our grief. It splits,

cracks like bark in a blaze.

 

 

Claire Walker’s poetry has been published in magazines, anthologies and webzines including The Interpreter’s House, Prole, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Poetry Shed, and The Chronicles of Eve. She is a Reader for Three Drops Press, and Co-Editor of Atrium poetry webzine. Her first pamphlet – The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile – was published by V. Press in 2015, and a second – Somewhere Between Rose and Black – will follow in December 2017.

November 16, 2017November 16, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: bark, bead, blaze, body, chains, Claire Walker, coal, creative, creativity, emotion, fingers, gemstones, grief, hearts, humanity, mourning, poem, Poetry, prayer, smokes, throats, wrists, writing 3 Comments

Rose Tinted Glasses – Susan Richardson

 

The experts say my disease is genetic.

It spreads across families without discrimination

and taps randomly on the shoulders of children,

condemning them to a life of waiting for

the world to become shadows and pitch.

 

I stand alone with my dying retinas,

cocooned in the muslin of a fading canvas.

I have searched for a family connection,

a blood born comrade in a life of darkness,

but they tell me there is no one.

 

As the years pass and my vision

careens down a steep precipice, I

remember stories of a paternal grandfather

I never knew; a good dancer with sensitive eyes,

who always wore rose tinted glasses.

 

He was only 32 when he died, leaving

my grandmother to turn him into legend,

and my father to fend for himself

against the grief of a broken mother.

The secrets of his blood are caged in mystery.

 

Did my grandfather pass down the

genetic code that chains me to blindness?

Are my eyes a reflection of his own?

I hold desperately to the idea that he is the link,

but in my family, legends don’t go blind.

 

 

Susan Richardson is living, writing and going blind in Hollywood. Much of her work focuses on her experiences as a partially sighted woman in a sprawling urban environment. Her work has been published in Free Lunch, The Old Red Kimono, Stepping Stones Magazine, Wildflower Muse, The Furious Gazelle, The Hungry Chimera, Sheila–Na- Gig and Chantarelle’s Notebook. In addition to poetry and creative non-fiction, she writes a blog called “Stories from the Edge of Blindness”.

September 11, 2017September 11, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: blindness, blood, CA, creativity, darkness, death, eyes, family, grief, history, humanity, legend, link, loss, mystery, poem, Poetry, reflection, secrets, shadows, stories, Susan Richardson, US 4 Comments

Rondeau Beginning With a Line From the Gospel of Judas – Mark J. Mitchell

 

I laugh at the errors of the stars,

Dazzled by the impossible dance of cars

And headlights. They didn’t foresee our streets,

Our cities. They only circle and repeat

Their timeless dance and are held out too far

 

Away. They don’t remember how men are—

How they breathe, sleep, forget, love, how they eat

What they shouldn’t. How they scatter and meet

To ponder the errors of the stars.

 

Of course, their mistakes are different from ours,

With deeper punishments, strange rewards.

They vanish into the hollow lands of grief

While we make up games and find relief

Laughing at the errors of the stars.

 

Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. It has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. He is the author of two full-length collections, Lent 1999 (Leaf Garden Press) and Soren Kierkegaard Witnesses an Execution (Local Gems) as well as two chapbooks, Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press) and Artifacts and Relics, (Folded Word). His novel, Knight Prisoner, is available from Vagabondage Press and a new novel is forthcoming: The Magic War (Loose Leaves Publishing). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and activist Joan Juster where he makes a living showing people pretty things in his city.

April 23, 2017April 23, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: city, creative, dance, errors, games, grief, humanity, life, Mark J. Mitchell, mistakes, nature, poem, Poetry, punishment, relief, reward, rondeau, scattering, sky, stars, urban, US, writing Leave a comment

Child Unconceived – Allison Grayhurst

 

Tomorrow may bring you nearer

            to me, but then it may cause

                        grief that no instinct nor love could

                                    rectify.

If I cannot form the dustgrain of your life

            in my womb, cannot carry

                        your limbs within my belly proud

                                    and drench my veins

with our combined blood –

(you and I merged for a time, guiltless,

            expressing the earthy essence of God

                        with each our individual heartbeats),

                                    then be damned my entrails

and this longing

                        that drives my impatient summer.

 

            When I see your face for the first time,

                        and your father and I behold your

                                    living smile, be sure

there will be a depth of welcome

            that no hardship could turn cold

                        nor ever diminish.

 

Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three times nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, she has over 950 poems published in over 400 international journals. She has twelve published books of poetry, seven collections, nine chapbooks, and a chapbook pending publication. She lives in Toronto with her family. She is a vegan. She also sculpts, working with clay. Learn more at www.allisongrayhurst.com.

 

March 16, 2017March 16, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: Allison Grayhurst, blood, Canada, child, creative, creativity, family, future, grief, hardship, heartbeats, hope, instinct, life, love, poem, Poetry, sadness, time, veins, welcome, writing Leave a comment

When The Wind Came Up – Jackie Davis Martin

 

When the wind came up she hated the world. Before that, before the sand started whirling around, before her ears hurt with the sudden gusts, she’d found a moment of peace, as slim and painstaking as the slight parenthesis of the moon, now obscured by heavy clouds scuttling urgently. Before the moon disappeared, before the wind came up, she’d considered that maybe there was some point to surviving, something to be said for living in the moment the way her grief group was instructed to think. She could see it then, standing next to her close friend, another woman old as she was, but both young because they’d known each other for so many years they carried the former selves within the old and didn’t see the new old. There was some peace in knowing that she didn’t have to achieve anything more and having the company of her friend to watch the ocean, listen to its gentle shushes. But then the wind came up. At first the women stayed, trying to discern the speed of the tide, walking backward up the grassy knoll to the parking lot that overlooked the beach. But then, with sand whipping around them suddenly, they couldn’t see well and sought shelter in the car, which they quickly discovered had a flat, and so called for roadside help and waited in howling wind and the growing dark and had nothing more to say. Now she was back in her own head, locked into a loss as solid as this car, the wind blowing billows of sand, the world too much to interpret once again. When the truck arrived, its lights flashing into the darkness, and a young man with a jack got out, she understood why people found faith.

 

Jackie Davis Martin has had stories published in journals that include Flash, Flashquake, Fractured West, and Dogzplot, as well as story collections Modern Shorts, Love on the Road, and the recent Road Stories.. Prizes were awarded by New Millennium and On the Premise and finalist placements for a novella (Press 53) and a chapbook of flash fiction (Conium Review). A memoir, Surviving Susan, was published in 2012.  Jackie teaches at City College of San Francisco.

 

March 12, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: flash fiction, Prose, UncategorizedTags: age, CA, faith, feelings, fiction, flash, grief, humanity, Jackie Davis Martin, loss, moon, nature, night, ocean, pain, peace, Prose, San Francisco, sand, story, US, wind, world Leave a comment