The Beach of the Cathedrals – Glenn Hubbard

 

The pseeping of pipits. The ticking

of robins. The flicking of redstarts.

Is the curtain-raiser.

 

Descend to the sand to walk up

dark naves. Arches and stacks

of schist and layered slate.

 

Stop to peer into the cracks and caves,

the patient work of tireless waves. Wait.

To hear the drip of fresh water.

 

Blue mussels in dense colonies.

Clenched goose barnacles in clusters.

Safety in numbers.

 

Near the shore

note the pools.

How they shelve.

 

Imagine the sun-tempered cool

on a day in July. The slide

in from the soft edge.

 

The sand sucks at the soles

of your shoes. Ascend,

the sound of the sea dissipating.

 

The pseeping of pipits. The ticking

of robins. The flicking of redstarts.

Is the send-off.

 

---

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.

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May 25, 2022 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: animals, beach, birds, creative, creativity, elements, Galicia, Glenn Hubbard, landscape, Lugo, nature, place, poem, poet, Poetry, sand, sea, senses, shore, Spain, sun, water, writing 1 Comment

The prints you laid – Gareth Culshaw

 

The coast elbowed the land

a sea came from afar

nudged the pebbles until they rolled.

 

We walked. Left a memory

in the road. I unclipped

the lead from my hand,

 

and you cut away the distance

between yourself and a gull.

 

I followed the earth’s golden dust

as you pounded the edge of land

and water.

 

An oystercatcher flicked up into the gulp.

I watched the sun on your fur

 

that carried light, put prints

in the sand before I got there.

 

I hope they’re still around to lead me

when I go back, alone.

 

---

Gareth lives in Wales. He has two collections by FutureCycle, The Miner & A Bard’s View. He is a current student at Manchester Met.

June 6, 2021June 6, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: coast, creative, creativity, distance, elements, Gareth Culshaw, light, loss, memory, movement, nature, past, pet, poem, Poetry, prints, road, sand, senses, sun, Wales, water, writing Leave a comment

Bewildered – Ann Pedone

 

What is the body in the eyes of the body

is it nothing more than a translation

of water salt and air

an alchemy of blood and sand and lust

bones fragile anxious within

muddy flesh the nervous

desire of hips

bewildered

that you are still not here every

 

day I put my feet down one in

front of the other a child would

say that this should be enough

but the heavy box of the body asks

 always for more.

 

---

Ann Pedone graduated from Bard College with a degree in English and has a Master’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. Ann is the author of the chapbook The Bird Happened, and the chapbook perhaps there is a sky we don’t know about: a re-imagining of sappho is forthcoming in December. Her work has recently appeared in Riggwelter, Main Street Rag, Poet head, Cathexis Northwest, The Wax Paper, and The Phare, among others.

November 15, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: air, alchemy, Ann Pedone, blood, body, creative, creativity, desire, elements, emotions, eyes, feet, fragility, movement, nature, poem, Poetry, salt, sand, translation, US, water, writing Leave a comment

Canvey Island – Rebecca Metcalfe

 

We spend the afternoon playing on the beach surrounded by fumes from the oil-refineries and chemical works. With our plastic spades we build sandcastles and dig for buried treasure. There’s a picnic of marmalade sandwiches and cartons of Ribena, then a shout of “tag: you’re it” starts the running around games. The tide hisses at us if we get too close. We run up to the bulging concrete flood-barrier and take it in turns to sneak round the edge to see if we can spot the troll we know lives behind it. He’ll get us if he sees us. We climb up and jump off into the sand with a thud. We have to rub our hands furiously up and down our legs to get the sand off before we can get back in the car. The drive home smells of seaweed and factory fumes, and we sit and laugh as we pick the grit out from under our fingernails.

 

 

Originally from Essex, Rebecca Metcalfe studied first at the University of Chester and then at the University of Liverpool. She now lives in an attic in Manchester with two black cats and works part time in a museum and part time in a restaurant. She has previously been published in Spelk, Flash: The International Short Story Magazine, Peach Street Magazine, Lumpen Journal, and Foxglove Journal, among others. She can be found on Twitter at @beckyannwriter.

August 2, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: flash fiction, Prose, UncategorizedTags: beach, Canvey Island, creative, creativity, Essex, fiction, flash, flash fiction, food, laughter, memory, place, Prose, Rebecca Metcalfe, sand, senses, short, short story, story, tide, treasure, UK, writing Leave a comment

Soon the Drift of Dusk – Darrell Coggins

 

Twirls of seaweed strew

over dimpled rocks

 

quickly shed free –

across damp sand

playing off each other

 

papery filaments skitter

and flip

 

Later, washed over

crisscrossed in a half-smile

frail footsteps recede

 

disquieting behind me

ribbed with graveyard bones

limestone fragments crumble

 

wallpapered underneath

in imprecise lines

 

snippets of ochre conjure

an amoebic design

a patina stained and flecked

 

Soon the drift of dusk –

unmoored, about to weep

drawn back and back

 

both beautiful and hypnotic

a bevy of clouds merge

towards the sea

 

continuously glassy

minute waves lap

almost silent –

 

gentle against my feet

 

 

Darrell Coggins is a poet, visual artist and musician who lives in Adelaide, South Australia. His poetry has been published in Poetry Matters, Positive Words, The Mozzie, Tamba, Studio, Nine Muses, Envy – Seven Deadly Sins, The Crow and Friendly Street Poets anthologies. Darrell’s poems are of moments seen, heard and felt.

July 12, 2020 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: Adelaide, Australia, beauty, clouds, creative, creativity, Darrell Coggins, drift, dusk, elements, fragments, movement, nature, poem, Poetry, rocks, sand, sea, senses, time, waves, world, writing Leave a comment

Final Swim at Warren Dunes – Leah Mueller

 

The sun, unchained a few weeks,

direct and unapologetic.

 

Like me, ready to bloom.

 

Water surface tepid,

unfiltered rays against my cheeks.

 

Solar angle closes

one degree at a time,

until the heat extinguishes itself.

 

Wrap towel around my shoulders,

rinse my feet in water.

Cold gnaws spaces between toes.

In the distance, hills of sand

extend in all directions.

 

Earlier this afternoon,

I ran down the largest hill

amidst hordes of children:

 

more slowly than last year,

but still upright.

 

Swim one more hour

until the sand cools.

Place towel in the trunk,

turn ignition key. Listen

to the crunch of tires on asphalt.

 

Another August gone.

How many are left?

 

 

Leah Mueller is an indie writer and spoken word performer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of two chapbooks and four books. Her next book, Misguided Behavior, Tales of Poor Life Choices will be published by Czykmate Press in Autumn, 2019. Leah’s work appears or is forthcoming in Blunderbuss, The Spectacle, Outlook Springs, Mojave River Review, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, Barnhouse, and other publications. She was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival, and a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp humor poetry contest.

September 1, 2019September 1, 2019 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: August, bloom, body, creative, creativity, elements, heat, hill, Leah Mueller, nature, poem, Poetry, rays, sand, senses, summer, sun, swimming, time, US, WA, water, writing Leave a comment

remember – Lisa Reily

 

our dog came first in our relationship,

our first child, our only child,

our Henry.

remember his tongue-wagging runs on the beach,

our cabin amid the paperbarks,

ocean mist coming through our window?

remember the soft call of the butcherbirds,

the laugh of the kookaburras

the only sound to wake us?

remember cups of Earl Grey tea on our balcony

while Henry slept in his basket;

the simple pleasure of our walks on the sand,

Henry running ahead on the empty beach,

ears wagging, sand stuck to his nose;

holding hands over rocks, limpets, starfish

and crashing waves that we thought would sweep him away,

climbing to the tops of cliffs, losing our way back down?

remember the mist that went on forever, covered everything,

took with it the cliff, the long stretch of beach,

Split Solitary Island;

remember the ashes we scattered on the sand,

the beach that took them, that took

the love of our lives,

ashes forever to float to the island;

our first child, our only child,

our Henry.

 

 

Lisa Reily is a former literacy consultant, dance director and teacher from Australia. Her poetry and stories have been published in several journals, such as Panoply, Amaryllis, Riggwelter, River Teeth Journal (Beautiful Things), and Magma. Lisa is currently a full-time budget traveller. You can find her at lisareily.wordpress.com.

November 22, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: ashes, Australia, beach, birds, creative, creativity, death, dog, life, Lisa Reily, loss, love, memory, mist, nature, pleasure, poem, Poetry, relationship, sand, sound, waves, writing 1 Comment

Sunset Paths – Robert Pelgrift

 

To paint a sunset sky above a bay,

one lightly brushes a blue field on white,

then brushes pink trails from an overlay

of plaited rose clouds on blue twilight.

One paints a thin blue strand across the bay

where watery shapes of yellow and pink rose

mirror the rainbow curtain whose array

ascends behind, in colors that transpose

the waters’ hues; its pink rose valance shades

the sunset clouds above a yellow haze

that thins to bright white sun upon the strand.

On the near shore, one paints blue shrubs and blades

of blue beach grass to mark a twilit maze

of winding darkening paths of blue sand.

 

 

Robert Pelgrift practiced law in New York City for many years and is now an editor for a legal publisher, working in New York City.  His poems have been published in various anthologies and in The Lyric, The Rotary Dial, The Galway Review, The Foxglove Journal and The Waggle.

November 10, 2017November 10, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: art, bay, clouds, colours, creative, creativity, elements, mirror, nature, NY, painting, poem, Poetry, rainbow, Robert Pelgrift, sand, shapes, sky, sun, sunset, twilight, US, writing Leave a comment

Pinky Swear – Jayne Martin

 

The caustic odor of rubbing alcohol burns my nostrils, settles on my tongue. A nurse paints Vaseline on my parched lips. I can’t remember the last time I was kissed.

I am tethered to tubes, encased in a coffin of flesh and bone that ignores all commands.

The growing cries of gulls, boardwalk barkers, laughter and shrieks of excitement begin to flood the room.

I sit in the car of a rollercoaster as it chugs and bumps up the steep incline toward the point of no return. Braver kids raise their arms high over their heads. I squeeze my eyes shut until it’s over; say “I want to go again,” relieved when you do not.

The ocean breeze sends salt and sand up onto the walkway where we smoke cigarettes stolen from my mother’s purse and stroll looking for boys. We make up names, Bridgette and Marilyn. Names that sound older and sophisticated unlike our own. We fool no one.

A pipe organ bellows. With fingers still sticky from cotton candy, we board gaily-painted steeds, ride round and round, each time stretching as far as we dare for the brass ring, each time finding it just out of reach.

Our bodies distort in fun house mirrors and we wonder who we will become.

Pinky-swear friends forever.

We do not anticipate the power of decades to divide.

The nurse rolls my body onto its side to slip a fresh sheet beneath, and I see you next to my bedside. You wear our favorite sweater, the rose one we passed back and forth until it unraveled, your smile still a mouthful of braces, your hand outstretched to me. In it, a brass ring.

 

Jayne Martin is the 2016 winner of Vestal Review’s VERA award for flash fiction. Her work has appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Literary Orphans, Midwestern Gothic, f(r)iction, Blink-Ink, Spelk, Cleaver, Connotation Press and Hippocampus among others. She is the author of “Suitable for Giving: A Collection of Wit with a Side of Wry.” She lives in Santa Barbara, California. Find her on Twitter @Jayne_Martin.

August 22, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: flash fiction, ProseTags: change, creative, creativity, decades, fiction, flash, friendship, humanity, Jayne Martin, life, memory, ocean, past, relationship, rollercoaster, salt, sand, short, smile, story, sweater, time, writing 8 Comments

The Trawl – Robert Pelgrift

 

We stand on this sandy point in the bay,

where the channel races into squally seas,

knee deep in riffles that mirror the gray

of iron clouds rushed by the gusting breeze.

 

Partly clothed by the sea, I scarcely heed

the raw, bitter rain.  Balanced here, I stand,

and see schooling, swerving silversides lead

quick unseen hunters past our ledge of sand.

 

In their path, we stretch, then draw, our small seine,

and the wet, the chill, the gray, the chop recall

the old village ships, struck by gusts and spray

as they ploughed these waves.  And now once again,

we net our catch, as those ships dragged their trawl

of silver to the beach across the bay.

 

Robert Youngs Pelgrift, Jr. practiced law in New York City for many years and is now an editor for a legal publisher, working in New York City.  His poems have been published in various anthologies and in The Lyric, The Rotary Dial and The Galway Review.

May 19, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: bay, beach, breeze, clouds, creative, creativity, elements, nature, NY, poem, Poetry, Robert Pelgrift, sand, sea, senses, ships, silver, US, village, waves, weather, world, 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