foliage hatching – Martin Potter

 

twitch-woods

fresh trees’ switches

sprout cocoons

along spring-necks

 

the fledge-buds

begin to fan free

bat-wing tender

in salad green

 

wing-take

flutter-leaf among

anchored branches

earth by root-claw

 

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Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Manchester, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published in 2017.

May 10, 2023 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: branches, buds, creative, creativity, earth, elements, foliage, green, growth, hatching, leaves, Manchester, Martin Potter, nature, place, poem, Poetry, roots, tender, trees, UK, woods, writing Leave a comment

fog fall – Martin Potter

 

stepped inside to sidestep

a throat-tickle chill in the air

an hour later fog fell

 

haze of night had smothered

murk-wise the tight street

only your own echoes

 

bounce off walls pavement

resonant but ghosted out

lamp-glare haunts the home-walk

 

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Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Manchester, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published in 2017.

February 22, 2023 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: air, chill, creative, creativity, echoes, elements, fog, ghost, haunting, lamp, light, Manchester, Martin Potter, night, place, poem, Poetry, street, time, UK, walk, weather, writing Leave a comment

seals’ dreamtime – Martin Potter

 

readier to roll about

than to drag seal-bulk

shingle-crunch climbing

the beach’s skirts

 

haul and lay their mass

press on the pebble bed

a bay’s broad outscouring

they bask the lull

 

when a pair of helpless eyes

pitch-bright in bristled snout

ratchets round in meeting

yours with sea-thoughts

 

---

Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Manchester, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published in 2017.

November 24, 2022 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: animals, bay, beach, creative, creativity, creatures, dream, elements, encounter, eyes, Manchester, Martin Potter, meeting, movement, nature, pebbles, poem, Poetry, roll, sea, seals, UK, writing Leave a comment

How to Photograph a Mirror – Carys Crossen

 

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.

February 20, 2022 by foxglovejournal Categories: flash fiction, Prose, UncategorizedTags: angles, body, camera, Carys Crossen, eye, family, fiction, flash fiction, frame, furniture, ghost, glow, home, Manchester, memories, mirror, past, photograph, reflection, seeing, self, short story, UK Leave a comment

How it was – Elizabeth Gibson

 

There was a storm out there, on the sea of ferns

and small spiders crept in and out of old burns.

Roaming the desert, a dog found the dusk

and in a flower somewhere, red-pink with musk,

a fairy curled up in the arms of a bee.

 

The midges were swirling like water back home

and in the sky, a jellyfish hung all alone.

Under layers of ice, a horse in a hole;

in a meadow of gold and blue starlets, a foal.

Far out beyond grounds of new comets, you saw me.

 

 

Elizabeth Gibson is a writer and performer based in Manchester, UK. She is also the Editor and Photographer for Foxglove Journal. Liz has won a Northern Writers’ Award and been shortlisted for the Poetry Business’ New Poets Prize, and her work has appeared Cake, Cardiff Review, The Compass, Confingo, Litro and Strix among other journals. Liz blogs at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.com and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @Grizonne.

June 10, 2020June 10, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: animals, body, change, colours, creative, creativity, elements, Elizabeth Gibson, encounter, home, love, Manchester, memory, movement, mystery, nature, poem, Poetry, senses, time, UK, world, writing Leave a comment

Octopus dusk – Elizabeth Gibson

 

in the hills above Vigo, Galicia

 

Perhaps I look lost up here, heavy and alone – but I have the pines and firs,

and I wander down the slopes of the mountain campus, catching Pokémon.

 

The air turns cool and soft. I catch an octopus. I take photos of the pink sky;

they will never come out right. I catch a bird, a fish, more strange critters

 

whose proper names I never remember. I stand under the chunky building

they call a bunker, but to me can only be a boat, slicing through the tree-sea.

 

Barely anyone lives up here, only us in the student digs shaped like a spider.

We sleep in its legs, in little rectangular rooms with long, tall windows

 

giving us ribbons of view: grassy mounds with orange cats, a pond of frogs,

a night full of crickets, heavy like me, and alone – but somehow also not.

 

 

Elizabeth Gibson is a writer and performer based in Manchester, UK. She is also the Editor and Photographer for Foxglove Journal. Liz has won a Northern Writers’ Award and been shortlisted for the Poetry Business’ New Poets Prize, and her work has appeared Cake, Cardiff Review, The Compass, Confingo, Litro and Strix among other journals. Liz blogs at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.com and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @Grizonne.

April 26, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: animals, colours, community, creative, creativity, Elizabeth Gibson, Galicia, landscape, Liz Gibson, Manchester, mountains, nature, poem, Poetry, Pokémon, senses, sky, solitude, Spain, travel, trees, Vigo, writing Leave a comment

Bear – Rhianne Celia

 

She kneads herself into the grass,

brooches of hay collecting on her back.

I’m on my stomach, the grass glossed

and sun-pooled, and for once

I’m not waiting for something or someone

to slip from surface talk to the big stuff

as readily as a mother forgives –

I’m watching her beard fill with buttercups

and the wet beads on her tongue nudge back

and forth as she shimmies against me.

I reach for a stick, throw it, and off she trots,

her paws a skit as she loses track

of its flight. She returns with an open

tennis ball in her mouth, a clopping ring box

she presents with a flourish. I readily accept,

placing it on my stomach like an upturned

book, and then I’m looking at the sky – a hearty

magenta block, and the remainder of my evening

appears in hob flames and final Tupperware clicks.

She leads me home, my hessian stopwatch,

urging me to live, live, live.

I swallow as the script starts up.

 

 

Born and raised in Manchester, UK, Rhianne has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at The University of Manchester. She has loved words (and arranging them) since she could put fluffy pen to paper (that’s a lot of fluff, and a lot of paper!). She explores human relationships in all of their wonderful complexity in her work and writes a lot about mental health, a subject close to her heart. You can find more of her poetry and general musings over at rhianne-writes.tumblr.com.

May 2, 2019 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: colour, evening, flight, flora, flowers, forgiveness, grass, home, Manchester, movement, nature, paws, poem, Poetry, Rhianne Celia, senses, sky, sound, sun, talk, time, UK, waiting Leave a comment

Hearts – Rhianne Celia

 

I got to thinking about hearts.

How they seem to be everywhere – hearts.

a heart fritter;

a bitter heart;

a heart-shaped spoon;

 

an up-for-grabs heart;

a not-in-service heart;

a hammock-lolling-in-the-breeze heart;

 

a slap-on-the-wrist heart,

a deep-water-flunking heart;

 

a heart with pins

and needles;

a light-blockade migraine heart;

 

a heart of gold, an at-best-bronze heart;

a slit of heart;

a bottomless heart

 

The rail of bleeding-heart

fuchsias in my sister’s garden

heart.

 

An I-couldn’t-believe-they-were-called-that

heart.

 

The ____ of the storm

The wind-swept ____

 

Writing from the ____

 

A searching heart, angling itself to catch

the height of the sun.

 

 

Born and raised in Manchester, UK, Rhianne has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at The University of Manchester. She has loved words (and arranging them) since she could put fluffy pen to paper (that’s a lot of fluff, and a lot of paper!). She explores human relationships in all of their wonderful complexity in her work and writes a lot about mental health, a subject close to her heart. You can find more of her poetry and general musings over at rhianne-writes.tumblr.com.

March 6, 2019 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: bronze, creative, creativity, elements, family, flowers, fuchsia, gold, heart, light, Manchester, nature, poem, Poetry, Rhianne Celia, search, shape, storm, sun, UK, water, wind, writing 2 Comments

Sun against Moonspill – Hannah Downs

 

the kind of dream

surprised me.

 

the bruises

are

 

r e a l f a k e

 

(lost in questioning.)

 

thatsnotmyarm anditsnotyours

 

but

she

smile/speaks

 

all light

 

 

into gone glow.

 

 

 

the lamp posts

drifting out of sight(.)

 

clouds of

atmosphere below.

 

 

everything white.

 

She smile/laughs

us

 

into ruin

 

 

you/I

 

moon still.

 

 

Hannah is a student nurse at the University of Manchester who adores reading, writing and all other creative pursuits. She has previously self published a chapbook collection called Driftlight, and had their poem “Smile(.)” selected for Editor’s choice in the online magazine Under the Fable.

December 22, 2017December 22, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: atmosphere, bruises, clouds, creative, creativity, dream, glow, Hannah Downs, humanity, laughter, light, Manchester, moon, poem, Poetry, questions, ruin, smile, still, sun, surprise, UK, writing Leave a comment

The Spider – Beth Barker

 

her hairy spindles await movement.

an eighth of the almond beads

embroidering her crown

rolls, scrolls across the green

surrounds, spots the anticipated.

she detects what she needs

and what she craves like the prayers

for breeze in heat or 

melodious noise to fill deathly 

silence.

she’s feared and she revels in

her loneliness.

 

the meagre

body crawls close, too

self-assured, thinks he can

take

take

take 

like the rest of them.

her glare deep enough to 

see every hair on his back,

and abdomen that hides a heart throbbing

with licentiousness self-proclaimed.

he oozes hopes to take his fill

and populate, as he was born to do,

birth rights plastered into clear view

by wandering legs, irritating strut, infernal self-absorption,

watering at the mouth and-

 

she strikes.

 

interlocked, one two three, a quick finish.

the deed is already done, relief

makes her hairs stand to attention like soldiers

preparing for battle.

the skies glow divine, the gods know

the main event is yet to

come.

legs steadfastly wrapped, she holds him close,

little heart beating like a little drum.

 

a warm embrace and the silent entrance

of a merciless pair, gliding through skin.

oozing supremacy complex now

swimming in crimson,

delectable.

she’s drinking him and she’s eating him

in her favourite position.

crafts a web, sticky gleaming thread,

secures her day’s work

well done.

 

 

Beth Barker is a poet, student and zinester, writing in Manchester. Whilst her appreciation for literature is now explored through her degree at the University of Manchester, her love for writing manifests itself on her blog. Her first recognition was the Poetry for Peace contest between the colleges in her hometown of Blackpool, resulting in a first prize win. When she isn’t writing poetry, Beth enjoys making zines, drinking coffee and embroidering art inspired by her words. She blogs at https://brdbwords.wordpress.com.

November 28, 2017November 28, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: animals, battle, beads, Beth Barker, colours, creative, creativity, embrace, event, heart, heat, loneliness, Manchester, nature, noise, poem, Poetry, silence, skies, skin, spider, UK, writing Leave a comment