A Dream of Flying Over My Childhood Home – Isabel Greenslade

 

I open out my skull bones like leaves

my head a white hard dome

                     hot knife humming.

Current flows along my skin like oil

slicking rigid arms to body.

I rotate my neck as I do just before speech

gasp as I rise head-first to my element

                     a fish of the air.

 

Only then do I see them standing there

mother father brother neighbours all

gazing up by the fence, rooted as sunflowers

soundwaves lapping at their stems.

 

I flick my shoulders like fins

                    I am gone.

 

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Isabel is from and of London where she works in a museum. In a former life she was a youth worker then a tour guide. Her poems has been published in Orbis and she can be found discussing poetry, art, gardening urban history, and the natural world on her Instagram account @ijgreenslade.

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June 21, 2021June 21, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: air, bones, creative, creativity, current, elements, family, fins, fish, flight, home, Isabel Greenslade, leaves, London, neighbours, poem, Poetry, rising, senses, soundwaves, sunflowers, UK, writing Leave a comment

A Chapel of Sunflowers – Marc Janssen

 

Driving out west of town

There is a field, maybe part of an abandoned farm,

Filled with sunflowers.

There should be a name for a group of sunflowers,

Rank on jumble they stand

Lion-faced their ragged yellow manes roar in a June rain shower.

Their faces a cloud confusion.

 

This field of flowers could be called a landscape of sunflowers

A beauty of sunflowers

A Saint Francis of sunflowers

A van Gogh of sunflowers

A peal

A heart

A tender

A good grove of sunflowers.

 

Then it was gone

Somewhere behind me,

And the next thing comes into view

Between rain drops

Green and colorful and new.

 

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Marc Janssen lives in a house with a wife who likes him and a cat who loathes him. Regardless of that turmoil, his poetry can be found scattered around the world in places like Penumbra, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast and Poetry Salzburg. Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly reading, the annual Salem Poetry Festival, and was a 2020 nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.

May 31, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: beauty, colours, creative, creativity, driving, elements, farm, field, flowers, grove, heart, journey, landscape, Marc Janssen, moment, nature, poem, Poetry, rain, sunflowers, US, view, writing Leave a comment