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

Fluttering – Heather Walker

 

I notice the fluttering inside of me at the time the earth stands still. Equal day and night. I turn to the man sleeping with his back to me. The shape of him stirs me and the fluttering increases. I lie my head against him and he does not stir.

The fluttering reminds me of a butterfly whose wings knock against a closed window, yet I cannot open up and let you out. It is not yet time. The year dips into winter. Snow lines the windowsill. I breathe on the glass and draw a heart. How I long to be out in the fields once more.

I have not told him of the fluttering I feel inside. This is my secret and I have no wish to share it. I hug my arms around my stomach, shelter you, to reassure you.

As days move into months, I have not grown much, yet I feel your kick. I caress your movement, talk to you as I shower. Surely it will be soon. I have still not told him. How can I?

Spring comes with a burst of white and yellow. I walk the fields, my feet sodden with dew. Lifting my face to the sun, I ask it what I should do. When the pain begins, I rejoice seeking a hollow rather than return home where he will ask questions.

You are restless to escape and now cramps rage through me as you shift. I hunker down and push, bearing my weight and strength through the length of me. And then the slip-slide of body, membrane, mucus and blood onto the grass. You are all legs as you flounder. Your head turns and we make eye contact. I smile and stroke your body, still wet through. I lift you to the sun and name you Solar. Placing you at my feet, you dry off, all the while trying to find your feet. I hug you, nestle into your furriness, and place you to my breast.

He will never understand. I can never tell him of this. You are mine, and we shall run the fields together, just as I did before I met the human.

 

---

Heather Walker is a London based writer of poetry, flash and short fiction. Her work has appeared in various magazines, ezines and anthologies, including Paragraph Planet, Visual Verse, Ink Sweat & Tears, Seaborne and Popshop. Her novellas, Where It Ends and The Chair are available through Amazon.

December 13, 2022 by foxglovejournal Categories: flash fiction, Prose, UncategorizedTags: birth, creative, creativity, fiction, fields, flash, fluttering, Heather Walker, London, movement, name, nature, secret, shelter, short, snow, spring, story, sun, time, UK, winter, writing Leave a comment

Passing Colours – Martin Potter

 

Rail journey

Thickset windows fix

Fleeting landscape green-chill

Outside carriage warmth

 

A winter sun’s

Tentative intense

Strikes brushwood bark-bole

Bounces lemon curd

 

Off the trees’

December slumber skin

Insinuating dazzle

Lichen imbued light

 

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

August 2, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: carriage, colours, creative, creativity, journey, landscape, lichen, light, Martin Potter, movement, nature, poem, Poetry, rail, sun, travel, trees, UK, view, warmth, windows, winter, writing Leave a comment

Hot as a log – DS Maolalai

 

cold as logs

in water, a wet

and winter

evening. a rain

which cracks

the windows,

sounds like logs

in burning

hearths, and you

here on the sofa, curling

with me around tea.

you are hot as a log,

as solid and beautiful

as a pile of dried firewood

stacked carefully next

to a fire. outside, the grass

is wet and quite

miserable, taking weight

with the softness

of age-wilted salad.

even the dog’s

feeling anxious this evening

and rubbing the carpet

with her head.

 

---

DS Maolalai has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

March 7, 2021 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: anxiety, beauty, cold, creative, creativity, dog, DS Maolalai, elements, fire, heat, Ireland, logs, nature, poem, Poetry, rain, senses, sounds, tea, weather, window, winter, writing 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

Blood Tendrils – Meredith LeMaître

 

You know nothing about

Me and that stings,

That you don’t know what I like to read o’ winter nights,

Which finger I like to stick up at sexism,

What time of year I love best;

It’s early summer when the sky’s iridescent, and I can lie on the sticky new grass, gaze at the fat clouds floating heavenwards, 

Apple blossom threaded through my hair.

But you didn’t know that, never thought to commit it to the library of memory.

The boy I’m half in love with has learnt what lights me up like a firefly, apart from being with him. The only thing that links us now, is the blood which slides through our veins, wraps its tendrils around our wrists. 

That we both have noses like the buttons in Mama’s sewing box,

Thin feet as the angels do in Renaissance paintings.

Tell me 

is blood and resemblance

ever enough?

 

 

Meredith LeMaître is a home educated writer and dancer from Brighton, UK. Her poems have previously been published in Hebe Poetry magazine, Now Then Manchester and Risen Zine, she has also been Highly Commended in Foyle Young Poets’ Award and was a Poetry Rivals 2016 finalist. You can find one of her articles on Hebe Poetry website. She loves writing, crafting, acroyoga and ballet and is interested in colour, languages and mythology.

February 1, 2018February 2, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: angels, art, blood, blossom, clouds, creative, creativity, elements, firefly, light, love, memory, Meredith LeMaître, nature, poem, Poetry, resemblance, sky, sting, summer, time, winter, writing 1 Comment

Alma Mater – Laura Potts

 

Widow-black and winter, evening took me south into

lamps burning blue in the dusk. Out and over my hometown musk

lay the hinterland hills breathing low in the dark. Still,

frostspark sharp on the city streets, holy rain sweet

in the winter and the wet, with no evening stars ahead I let

the pavement take me home. Through the town nocturnal, gloam

 

and grey, my chimney throat coughing its smoke, I saw aslope

on the city’s slow spine those old black gates, the summer of my days

inside. Grief cracked my face. Those navy girls and me, a pace

always ahead. But in the pale stairwell light the ghost of my girlhood dead

in its fresh green spring and gone. From roadside wet I looked on

at this child of light, her afterglow bright, her ashes of life

 

already black. The cold breath of loss on my face. At my back

a schoolbell cracked at the evening air. I saw Death at my table there

tipping his hat, and the years in my face that sank as I sat

at that desk at the back of the class. I remember that. And last,

on an old December evening, down hallways dark the wilting hymns

of girls turned ghosts before their time, I saw their eyes

 

like candles cold, like lights no longer leading home. Outside, to the bone

I shook and swung, the darkened seas that were my eyes done

and gone at the sight of myself. Each girl ringing her own passing bell.

Well, in that mist and half-dark morning, my face a clenching fist

in pavement pools, I saw that septic, terminal school

for what it was. No, I never went back, of course.

 

I tipped my compass north.

 

 

Laura Potts is twenty-one years old and lives in West Yorkshire. She has twice been named a Foyle Young Poet. Her poems have appeared in Seamus Heaney’s Agenda, The Interpreter’s House and Poetry Salzburg Review. She has recently been shortlisted for a Charter-Oak Award for Best Historical Fiction at The University of Colorado and also made The 2017 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize shortlist. This year Laura became one of The Poetry Business’ New Poets and a BBC New Voice for 2017. Her first BBC radio drama Sweet The Mourning Dew will air at Christmas 2017.

December 7, 2017December 7, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: childhood, city, colours, creative, creativity, dusk, ghost, home, humanity, Laura Potts, life, memory, nature, poem, Poetry, rain, school, stars, UK, weather, winter, writing, youth Leave a comment

Sleep With Dead Grass – Ken Allan Dronsfield

 

Chill in my tired bones

steamy breath follows

crispy red apples drop

firewood cut & stacked,

 

walk the dying fields

sleep with dead grass.

 

Colored leaves release

spinning down to ground

unpacked winter clothes

full dresser and closets,

 

walk the dying fields

asleep in dead grass.

 

Autumn’s song plays

a freshness of spirit

feel a harvest solstice

life’s circle goes round,

 

I walk a dying field,

I sleep in dead grass.

 

Ken Allan Dronsfield is a poet who was nominated for The Best of the Net and 2 Pushcart Awards for Poetry in 2016. His poetry has been published world-wide in various publications throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. His work has appeared in The Burningword Journal, Belle Reve Journal, Setu Magazine, The Literary Hatchet Magazine, The Stray Branch, Now Then Manchester, Bewildering Stories, Scarlet Leaf Review. EMBOSS Magazine and many more. Ken loves thunderstorms, walking in the woods at night, and spending time with his cat Willa. Ken’s new book, The Cellaring, a collection of haunting, paranormal, weird and wonderful poems, has been released and is available through Amazon. He is the co-editor of two poetry anthologies, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze and Dandelion in a Vase of Roses available from Amazon.

September 9, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: autumn, bones, breath, change, colours, creativity, death, harvest, Ken Allan Dronsfield, leaves, life, nature, poem, Poetry, release, seasons, sleep, solstice, song, spirit, walking, winter, writing 1 Comment

First Available Cousin – Ray Busler

 

It had still been dark when we were called. It wasn’t a pajama run; I was dressed, but still slept a few miles in the car. There were no cousins for me to play with this time. We lived closest, most available for urgency, first on the scene.

I couldn’t wait on the big porch, too much winter for that now. I missed the wooden swing, missed the creaking and mesmerizing motion of the thing. Last summer we rode, four cousins abreast in that swing for hours of false alarm. My oldest cousin told of broken swing chains and loose eye bolts that, in some parallel child universe sent chubby pink tots, not unlike myself, sailing in full pendulant moment, sailing loose in the air before finding the steel spikes of the wrought iron fence well below porch level. A lucky one missed the fence to be only crucified in the mock orange bush. She was saved, as the tale went, by an uncle by marriage, and merely had her eyes gouged out by thorns for her trouble. We cousins loved that swing, relished the idea of it and I longed for the day I could be the oldest cousin and tell the tale, with some improvements that I whetted in idle mental minutes.

Now, it was winter and I waited in stale stifle too near the gas logs in the parlor. When there was a full complement of cousins the parlor was off limits, too many fragile memories to be exposed to the rough usage of youth. One was an acceptable number though. I sat on my hands deliberately avoiding the sensuous feel of Dresden figurines and the other flotsam of irreplaceable family history.

There was, almost lost in the repeating wallpaper pattern of pink roses, a painting – a woodcut really. Japanese, I suppose today, assuming that then future role of older cousin. Blue ink and black, with a touch of red in the eye of a rampant, distant sea risen dragon, an icon of the storm in the foreground. The real hero of the drawing was the wave about to crash down on a frail boat. There could be no possible reprieve from that wave. It was a wave of inevitability. I watched the wave until I could hear a phantom wind, smell spectral salt and rotting squid. I watched the wave until…

“Your Grandmother has passed on.” The words woke me.

“Do you understand? Do you understand what I mean by death? Your Grandmother is dead.”

Of course I understood death. That’s why we were here, wasn’t it?

 

Ray lives in Alabama with his long suffering wife of 40 years. That is to say she is older than 40, but didn’t suffer for the first 20.  Ray writes for the pleasure of the writing, and the joy of inflicting it upon others.

August 8, 2017August 8, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: flash fiction, ProseTags: boat, childhood, death, dragon, family, fiction, flash, frailty, inevitability, ink, life, loss, memory, past, Prose, Ray Busler, short, storm, story, wave, wind, winter, youth Leave a comment

Weekend – Jonathan Butcher

 

Hapless at weekends, yet still with that

contrived joy; in the beer gardens and car

parks, where perfume and aftershave still

smell fresh against fake fur and denim.

 

The hiss of music from the outside speakers,

that threaten to fall, but never damage conversation.

The bottles strewn across badly mounted tables

and tree torn, cracked pavements.

 

The warmth of this room blocks out winter, yet

its shell remains fragile, like rusted gates that

no longer retain the strength to block out the

weakest of imposters.

 

And again we glide without protest, our voices

placed only where needed, our feet as nimble

as ever; tripping over curbs now an art form,

that at last we have finally mastered.

 

Jonathan Butcher is a poet based in Sheffield, England. He has had poetry appear in various print and online journals including Ink, Sweat and Tears, Elbow Room, Your One Phone Call, Mad Swirl, The Transnational and others. His second chapbook ‘Broken Slates’ was published by Flutter Press.

April 5, 2017April 5, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: creative, creativity, England, feelings, fragility, humanity, Jonathan Butcher, joy, leisure, music, perfume, poem, Poetry, senses, Sheffield, shell, spirit, time, UK, voices, warmth, winter, writing Leave a comment

Prunus Pumila – Carl Boon

 

Snow lay atop the boxwoods

all winter,

lather on skin,

and shielded

the sand cherry’s branches.

Now the dead wood

splinters when I pull,

and the leaves have bronzed

early. What should be neon-

red this sunset’s

glimmerless, a girl

too long neglected.

On the south slope

January comes—

Lake Erie finds its way

and waits.

 

I read it’s part rose,

part shade, where my father

used to sit and study

the broadening pin-oak.

The final spring he lived

it shone hot pink,

the blood of the lawn

he watched grow

nights like this,

nights in a chair with coffee,

the hedge a memory,

the trellis empty

of the purples we knew as kids.

 

Today I drew away

as much of the dead as I could.

My wrists grew furious

cutting, aligning, motioning

to corners of the yard

unseen in decades.

I stood back,

then I moved forward

as my father might’ve,

at peace with what remained.

 

Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Lunch Ticket, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.

February 24, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: Carl Boon, change, creative, creativity, family, flora, growth, life, loss, nature, peace, plants, poem, Poetry, rose, sand cherry, seasons, skin, snow, splinters, Turkey, winter, writing Leave a comment

The blank page – Katie Lewington

 

Can be a snowy winter setting

duvet without a cover

love note

origami swan

aeroplane

printed work

a tissue

newspaper

for writing notes

a rag or duster

wrapper

sleeve note

receipt

-treasurer of chewed gum

flyer

manifesto

poem or story

a yes or no answer

for the question

do you want to be my boyfriend

bad news

rejection

a grave of truth.

 

Katie Lewington is a UK-based writer and has been drafting, editing and rewriting her bio since she started submitting to literary magazines and journals two years ago. It isn’t as if she doesn’t know who she is, she just isn’t sure what is relevant. Her creative writing can be read at https://katiecreativewriterblog.wordpress.com. She can be contacted through Twitter @idontwearahat.

January 12, 2017January 21, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: Poetry, UncategorizedTags: creativity, Katie Lewington, life, love, nature, note, origami, pain, paper, poem, Poetry, question, rejection, relationship, romance, snow, swan, treasure, UK, winter, writing 3 Comments