Parkour – Daun Daemon

 

sailing through saplings

            claws clutching first one stem

                        swinging to another and another

            paws grasping winter’s bare branches

                        tail dancing and switching

the giddy squirrel flung itself

            into the berry bedecked holly nearby

                        deftly dodging the prickles

            finally kicking with its back legs

                        launching onto a tall pine tree

scrambling up rough bark

            stopping thirty feet off the ground

                        and barking at its competitor

            parked on the poplar nearby

 

I had never thought of trees

            as vertical obstacle courses

                        for athletic risk-taking squirrels

            showing off their kinetic prowess

                        their giddy sciurid confidence

or was it joyful desperation

            to navigate the world by vault

                        and leap from here to there

            as fast as we can with as few

                        scratches and falls as possible

even then to rise and climb,

            fall and roll, crawl, and run

                        around, across, over, under, and

            straight through to the moment

 

when we must stop

 

---

Daun Daemon’s fiction has appeared in Flock, Dead Mule School, Literally Stories, and Delmarva Review among others, and she has published poems in Third Wednesday, Typehouse Literary Review, Remington Review, Deep South Magazine, Into the Void, Peeking Cat Literary, Amsterdam Quarterly, and other journals. Daemon is currently at work on a memoir in poetry as well as short stories inspired by memories of her mother’s home beauty shop. She teaches scientific communication at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh with her husband and two cats.

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January 18, 2023 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: animal, climb, confidence, creative, creativity, Daun Daemon, leap, moment, movement, nature, NC, obstacles, Parkour, poem, Poetry, Raleigh, season, squirrel, tree, US, winter, world, writing Leave a comment

Walking the Dales Way in Autumn – Ceinwen E. Cariad Haydon

 

Rain-glistened raised roots

emerald moss-coated stones

water spattered, spreading cow pats

slippery wooden footbridges

rocking, ancient stiles

with hard-sprung gates –

 

all conspire to tumble me as I walk

our old ways in these Dales

long swept by winds, storms,

artists’ eyes, mizzle and sunlight.

 

Somehow, I stay upright

and advance slowly, mindful

of the present moment

rich with overflows

of tricky beauty

as breezes waft smells of byre

and mulch of fallen, slithered leaves –

 

I find I am

unbalanced only by time

about to run out.

 

---

Ceinwen lives near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and writes short stories and poetry. She is widely published in online magazines and in print anthologies. Her first chapbook is ‘Cerddi Bach’ [Little Poems], Hedgehog Press, July 2019. She is developing practice as participatory arts facilitator. She believes everyone’s voice counts.

December 8, 2022December 8, 2022 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: autumn, beauty, Ceinwen E. Cariad Haydon, creative, creativity, Dales, elements, journey, moment, nature, Newcastle, place, poem, Poetry, rain, roots, season, senses, time, UK, walking, weather, writing Leave a comment

Copse – Yuan Changming

 

Standing tall against the frozen sky

Your skeletons are the exquisite calligraphy

Of an entire season

Your name is curly writ

 

Not in water

But with wind

 

 

Yuan Changming published monographs on translation before leaving his native country. Currently, Yuan lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and BestNewPoemsOnline, among others.

December 1, 2019 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: calligraphy, Canada, copse, creative, creativity, elements, frozen, name, nature, place, poem, Poetry, season, sky, tall, time, Vancouver, water, weather, wind, world, writing, Yuan Changming Leave a comment

Death in Spring – Ben Banyard

 

She took her last breath as we put the clocks on.

Lambs, daffodils, Easter eggs, cheerful optimism,

but a funeral to attend and relatives to console.

 

We’ll Google the church’s car park,

agree to work around that afternoon with bosses and clients.

Follow the coffin in, glance at riotous banks of grape hyacinth.

 

There will be hymns.

All Things Bright and Beautiful no doubt,

The Old Rugged Cross, perhaps.

Choke back a lump in the throat at the eulogies,

smile with damp eyes at anecdotes.

 

What will move us most are the details of her youth,

how she played nicely with her sister sometimes,

what her parents did for a living;

Spring details, when her life was beginning.

 

 

Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, near Bristol, UK. He’s the author of a pamphlet, Communing (Indigo Dreams, 2016) and a full collection, We Are All Lucky (Indigo Dreams, 2018). He blogs and posts mixtapes at https://benbanyard.wordpress.com.

January 27, 2019January 27, 2019 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: beginning, Ben Banyard, breath, clocks, creative, creativity, death, eyes, family, flowers, funeral, hymns, life, loss, nature, poem, Poetry, Portishead, season, spring, UK, writing, youth Leave a comment

Swallow – Mark Totterdell

 

To me, it makes a summer; continent-

compassing

steely blue wings,

pure breast, gorget

deep red as though still cooling from some southern forge.

Passing then fast repassing, it connects the dots

of unseen gnats,

so near to me

it makes me see;

to it, I’m utterly irrelevant.

 

 

Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines and have occasionally won competitions. His collections are ‘This Patter of Traces’ (Oversteps Books, 2014) and ‘Mapping’ (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2018).

October 29, 2018October 29, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: animals, birds, blue, colours, connection, distance, dots, fauna, flight, gnats, irrelevance, Mark Totterdell, nature, nearness, passing, poem, Poetry, red, season, summer, swallows, time, wings Leave a comment

A fist lost – Gareth Culshaw

 

The pitch was always poor in under 14s 

footie. At the start of the season the council

would send men out. Paint the lines,

mow the turf, align the goalposts.

 

I always played better when he came

standing there with his accent.

My first goal scored, smiles all round.

Jogging back, raised fist to you

 

yours pumped in the air. We got on 

back then before the stubbornness set, 

distance in years between us showed.

 

That break in the relationship a hole 

in my memory, will never be filled.

 

 

Gareth lives in Wales. He has his first collection out now by FutureCycle called The Miner. He hopes one day to achieve something special with the pen.

October 11, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: accent, break, childhood, creative, creativity, distance, football, Gareth Culshaw, goal, memory, past, pitch, poem, Poetry, relationship, season, smiles, sport, stubbornness, Wales, writing, years, youth Leave a comment

First day of winter – Miguel Guerreiro Lourenço

 

I had yet to see a mantle

that soft and sweet.

Not in its taste, but kindness.

I guess, it was in the way it fell—

No. Trickled down—but not out

of sight.

 

Gently filling in their footprints;

everyone came and went, but it stayed

hoping someone would notice.

Only the crunch of boots remained,

slowly disappearing like the morning birds

in the early fog of winter.

 

From its incessant showering of delicate

affection, perhaps, it did not care.

Blind, I persisted.

 

No amount of shovelling or running it over,

turning the beautiful, serener hail

into dirt slush, discarded mounds

of frozen mud, will stop it from falling.

 

I looked onwards, as it covered everything:

the white sheet pulled over our heads—giving

me something I longed for, for decades.

 

 

Miguel Guerreiro Lourenço is a Portuguese poet and writer, currently living and studying in the United Kingdom. He is influenced greatly by many contemporary artists and slam-poets, but its his love for music, namely hip-hop, that shapes the flow and rhyme schemes of his pieces. Miguel aspires to entertain as much as to inspire, for he believes there is always something worth writing about in all of us.

October 8, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: beauty, creative, creativity, decades, elements, fall, footprints, kindness, longing, Miguel Guerreiro Lourenço, nature, poem, Poetry, Portugal, season, senses, snow, sound, sweetness, UK, weather, winter, writing Leave a comment

Competition – Louise Wilford

 

I won a competition. Yes, I did. My fingers

drew a poetic Fall, all red and gold decay.

I know the debt I owe – Keats’ ode still lingers –

but my creation was, in its own way,

worth fifty quid.

 

Chaotic interlinkage. Velcro hooks of words,

confusing as a froth of wasps stuck in a honey pot.

Some end up barbed wire bundles, spikily absurd,

or limp on, split and wounded. I’d be the first to spot

my writing sucks.

 

Yet sometimes words escape, their goal the blooded page,

and go home, battle-weary, on figurative legs;

they mesh like lovers meeting, no griping war to wage,

and fit like Lego bricks or halves of Easter eggs,

a greater whole.

 

 

Yorkshirewoman Louise Wilford is an English teacher and examiner. She has had around 50 poems and short stories published in magazines including Popshot, Pushing Out The Boat and Agenda, and has won or been shortlisted for several competitions. She is currently writing a children’s fantasy novel.

October 1, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: autumn, colours, competition, creation, creative, creativity, decay, fall, goal, home, Keats, Louise Wilford, nature, page, poem, Poetry, season, UK, wasps, whole, words, writing, Yorkshire Leave a comment

Spring – Trivarna Hariharan

 

In the face of

a weathering river,

 

there lives a bird

whose song can be

 

heard even in

the silence of stones.

 

 

Trivarna Hariharan is an undergraduate student of English literature from India. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has authored The Necessity of Geography (Flutter Press), Home and Other Places (Nivasini Publishers), Letters I Never Sent (Writers Workshop, Kolkata). Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Third Wednesday, Otoliths, Peacock Journal, One Sentence Poems, Birds Piled Loosely, TXTOBJX, Front Porch Review, Eunoia Review, and others. In October 2017, Calamus Journal nominated her poem for a Pushcart Prize. She has served as the editor in chief at Inklette, and is the poetry editor for Corner Club Press. Besides writing, she learns the electronic keyboard, and has completed her fourth grade in the instrument at Trinity College of Music, London.

January 21, 2018January 21, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: animal, bird, creative, creativity, elements, fauna, India, landscape, life, nature, poem, Poetry, river, scene, season, senses, silence, song, sound, spring, stones, Trivarna Hariharan, writing Leave a comment

The First Year Out – Holly Day

 

Numbers of geese flew overhead and you laughed at my excitement, our mutual

relief

at the sight of the old farm still standing, the broken windmill, the

outlying buildings.

They held a future we dreamed aloud – a vegetable garden,

flocks of chickens and turkeys, thick as clouds and eager for morning.

Your fingertips relieved the ache that settled into my shoulders

so many years before I’d lost count.

 

The ache set into new places, almost forgotten, for a little while longer

for a full season of wonder

as we made final promises against a sun that kept disappearing

as if into a great crack in a wall of reoccurring rainbows. You told me

about the geese

that would land in the new pond and stay, the cows that were coming soon

spoke as if we had a real destination, a plan.

 

I am still holding onto that first day, descending over barren hills

borders between states disappearing into thin spiderwebs crisscrossing a map

sacred ash in a smoldering iron pot. I remember when you laid out

your theory of the sun-scorched, explained how we

were just like those clouds of birds that came to rest on the flat, golden

plains around us

their feathers taunting us our slow, tired bondage to earth.

It all made so much sense back then.

 

 

Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center
in Minneapolis, Minnesota, since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Tampa Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle, and her published books include Walking Twin Cities, Music Theory for Dummies, and Ugly Girl.

January 11, 2018January 14, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: ash, birds, creative, creativity, earth, future, hills, Holly Day, humanity, MN, nature, plan, poem, Poetry, promise, relief, season, sun, time, US, wonder, writing, year Leave a comment

In Autumn – Trivarna Hariharan

 

If a river ever

lost her way

 

into a forest,

what upon returning

 

would she find

but a bark of flowers

 

falling at her feet,

over and over?

 

 

Trivarna Hariharan is an undergraduate student of English literature from India. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has authored The Necessity of Geography (Flutter Press), Home and Other Places (Nivasini Publishers), Letters I Never Sent (Writers Workshop, Kolkata). Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Third Wednesday, Otoliths, Peacock Journal, One Sentence Poems, Birds Piled Loosely, TXTOBJX, Front Porch Review, Eunoia Review, and others. In October 2017, Calamus Journal nominated her poem for a Pushcart Prize. She has served as the editor in chief at Inklette, and is the poetry editor for Corner Club Press. Besides writing, she learns the electronic keyboard, and has completed her fourth grade in the instrument at Trinity College of Music, London.

January 9, 2018January 9, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: autumn, bark, creative, creativity, elements, fall, feet, flora, flowers, forest, India, landscape, life, nature, over, poem, Poetry, return, river, season, Trivarna Hariharan, water, writing Leave a comment

The Easter Bunny on a Glass Elevator Going Down – Zach Smith

 

In retrospect the event seems so bizarre, that it’s more like a dream.

My aunt had taken my cousin and me to the mall.

It was in the spring, at some point shortly before Easter.

The Easter Bunny was stationed in a playful land of candies and eggs and fake plastic straw of every color imaginable. This was in an open area at the bottom of the mall’s glass elevator. An Easter variation on the mall’s Santa set up.

I don’t know if this still goes on, the mall Easter Bunny that is, I haven’t seen one in years, but I haven’t been looking either.

The setting was accompanied by music played from a DJ stationed nearby.

At Christmas there are plenty of songs to play on a continuous loop to keep the atmosphere. You don’t even need lyrics. Anyone can recognize “Jingle Bells” by melody alone. The same goes for “Frosty the Snowman,” or “The Christmas Song” (though everyone knows the latter as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.”)

For Easter, the music choices are more limited. There’s “Peter Cotton Tail” of course, but it’s not nearly as recognizable, considering DragonForce did a song using the same chord progression and nobody noticed. If you want to get real religious you could opt for the song “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)”… but that’s probably not the best choice either. There are not a lot of “great” Easter songs to play for the mall Easter Bunny. So what is a DJ to do? Why, play some of the contemporary hits of course.

The year was 1991, I was six years old at the time.

When we got to the bottom of the glass elevator to see the Easter Bunny, the song he was dancing to was… “Losing My Religion” by REM.

The argument that the song title is a southern expression that roughly translates to: “losing your temper” is weak at best. The phrase too specifically implies something else. Even the music video is very religious oriented, with fallen angels and so on. Playing that song for the Easter Bunny would be the equivalent of playing Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” at a wedding.

Consequently eighteen years later “Single Ladies” was played at my wedding, with both my aunt and cousin in attendance, despite the fact that that specific song was placed on the “Do Not Play” list. Come to think of it, it might have been the same DJ since both were utterly deaf to lyrical significance and/or irony.

At the mall, I asked my cousin the obvious question:

“Why is the Easter Bunny dancing to ‘Losing my Religion?’”

“Ah… because it’s a good song,” she said, sarcastically, as though I should have already known something so obvious.

That’s debatable… and also not the point.

 

Zach is a graduate of Chestnut Hill College and has been writing for more than a dozen years, struggling all the while with dyslexia. His work has previously appeared in Crack the Spine, Revolution John, Fast-Forward Festival, the Short Humor Site and Schlock Magazine, among others. You can find out more about him at his blog: theobscuritysymposium.wordpress.com.

March 28, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: flash fiction, Prose, UncategorizedTags: Beyoncé, childhood, dream, Easter, family, festivities, fiction, flash, irony, mall, memory, music, past, Prose, REM, season, short, songs, story, US, wedding, youth, Zach Smith 4 Comments