The Lake

We'd sit, faces wind-quivered;
your healing afternoons and evenings, stone-sat
by the lake, staring at the still wound of the water.
You'd sift hands through pebble mounds,
looking for litter fragments, prod me till I'd help,
till dusty fingers bled from skin cracks.

Days before we stopped going, you'd remind of previous times,
complain how it was better, how we should've left earlier,
how all the good stuff (the can-pulls; the used condoms)
had been taken by cyclists and joggers.

I'd humour you in the later days, pose
like we did, on the bed edge in low light,
sift through the lain stuff you kept;
you watching, blanketed, head resting on the board.

In tribute, you'd sometimes draw the quilt off
stand slowly on the mattress,
eyes moist, bejewelled through the dim
and reach upward, fingers clasping in air,
like you used to on the rim
for the flower wisps
floating by the water.

*

Richy Campbell lives, works and studies in Manchester. His work has lately appeared in INDENT, Popshot Magazine and Eunoia Review; he also had a chapbook long-listed for the 2013 Venture Award for Pamphlets. He edits Fade poetry journal and blogs at richycampbell.tumblr.com.

Blueprint

cleaning under the bed she found
a stack of notebooks, and dust enough

to build a continent. she built a city
instead, named it backwards to spell

the tree seen from the window. she turned
to page one where she found another name:

phantasmagoria. a mansion in block letter
columns, shaky from a graphite earthquake

the epicenter: a twelve-year-old writing
on a white page. this house was in the outskirts,

of the city where the inhabitants were part animals,
and drank the water of twin rivers. Old names

floated in, cryptic codes to decode dreams of
afternoons spent alone watching cats, making

story-people who never grew up. Fysti, Russet, Evol
turned into nobodies, having never seen the tail of

the end. it began raining and she realized that
these slumbering stories would not erupt like

volcanoes, layer a sleeping city with ash. as
hail stones made the rain louder, she shivered,

looked outside to find sparrows sheltered in the
old bougainvillea, and wondered, for all those years

if she ever was home/ alone. seeing the windows
open still, the rain lurched indoors, throwing in

hail stones, and she sat by her city of dust, watching
them melt into twin rivers that she would name.

Glowing

this time she found dead moths

under the bed, lying, dying,

next to the city she built. not

whole moths, but bits of sand

paper thin wings disintegrating

into whispers that resemble

voices of ancient books with

rough tongues and magic spells.

it was april, but the march wind

was still blowing. she thought of

many metaphors for the night sky,

opened her laptop, and typed out

a constellation. seeing the window

open, she lurched to shut the panes,

in case the lit-up screen summoned more

moths from the darkness to die

at the feet of her words.

Sohini Basak is currently in her final year of B. A. English Honours course at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. In October 2011, she won the first prize for poetry-writing in the Unisun-Realiance TimeOut Writing Competition 2010-2011 and four of her poems, including the winning poem ‘Attic’ feature in the anthology Songbook Circa 2011 published by Unisun. Her works have also appeared in a couple of Indian online magazines.

A STOLEN WORLD

The boys hack down the greenish menace of mosquitoes, grasshoppers, crickets,
lizards, rats and even snakes, evolving at the facade of our peace
with cutlasses, rakes, shovels and hoes.
An earthquake extirpates a country.

It’s a perishing morning, like a freezer.
The aggrieved nature clips the girls to their beds
to gain back his lost.

It’s a perishing morning, like Pluto –
we wax stronger in our compulsory wickedness.

It’s a perishing morning, like the basal of the Ocean,
their world perishes in the gnashers of our determinations,
they transfer to a neighbouring hamlet of harmless menace.

ALTER-EGO

My head is heavy with a baby: happiness is responsible.
The pursuit of happiness is not the exclusive property of
the Americans, but of the world’s if we were to be

plain to ourselves. I stretch my legs
on a smooth squared sadness, supported
with nailed wooden legs.
On my feet lies the route to misery.

A woman wears the hands of her 3 children around her waist like multiple belts.
She laughs with her budding futures, her joy cries –
that’s what I see. I see mum, me, and my
two sisters, those are who I see.
They become smaller, they go further.

I cry, wishing my honey-laced difficult childhood
could return like the Prodigal Son
and never leave and live, forever like the immortals.

LOST LIVES

The sound of the collision, like an exploding bomb,
scares us from the stadium we make with stones, at the concrete
frontage of Obinna’s house.

It’s between two cars, a beauty and a beast.
Both becomes beasts. Fires celebrate on their Aluminium skin.
Mum has gone to seek for life, Laide’s mum tells us not to
go beyond safety’s eyes, so we watch from the
bottom of our satisfaction. The neighbourhood flogs the fire
with splashes of water and sprays of sands.

The fire has finished its party, before anything can be
done. The car owners have their lives intact; they just lose their lives
in the fire.

EXPLOIT

Mum tells us stories her mum tells her under the moon,
the exploits of the delusional tortoise.

She tells us stories from dad’s heinous exploits.
“Your dad is a tortoise” Mum tells us.

A fortnight after that night, 3 detectives come home to
look for dad, for his exploit. A fortnight after that night
dad is handcuffed, locked in the Police cell for his exploit.
A fortnight after that night dad is released for grandma and
mum’s inexorable exploits.

D.M Aderibigbe is a 23-year old writer from Lagos, Nigeria, an undergraduate student of History and Strategic Studies of the University of Lagos. He writes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, plays and lyrics. His work has been published or forthcoming in the UK, Canada, Australia, Nepal, India, South Africa and the United States, by Vox Poetica, Pressboard Press, UP Literature, HUSMW Press, The New Black Magazine, Misfits’ Miscellany, Thickjam, Ditch Poetry, Bluepepper, The Applicant, Rusty Nail, Jellyfish Whispers, Wordriot, Pyrokinection, Red River Review, Carcinogenic, Deadbeats, Napalm and Novocain and Kritya. His poems have been included in the anthology On the Words of Love by the Canadian group Poets with Voices Strong. His debut novel Sisyphean will be published in America, soon. He lives and schools in Lagos.

Pink

Victorian etchings offer no clues

to what you might have been. A

harsh frown or raised eyebrow

no longer suits your face, and is as

foreign as hieroglyphics. Tracing a

fingertip over the clumsily erased

sections of an old map gets you nowhere.

We should have called you Euston, or

St. Pancras, as London is embedded in

your veins. But, instead, you respond to

Disraeli, Dickens, or sometimes Bloomsbury.

But as the quarter hour strikes, I’m left

with images of you standing by marbles,

struggling to understand your place in the world.

James Cramphorn was born in Southampton and lives and works in York, studying English Literature and Creative Writing at York St John University. His poetry has been featured in Black and Blue Magazine, and will be featured on Ink, Sweat and Tears in April of this year.

God Bless, I’m Gone

God bless, I’m gone

from places that turned

slowly like train into other ones.

Heavily I wake, feel

my unclean head against the pillow,

my fat belly, my dirty feet

at the end of the bed.

Now I need a coffee,

now I need to find a job.

The contract was violated,

I was supposed to sleep for years

in vague places or in blackness.

But here, I’m tired here,

and my eyes won’t shut.

Mo O’Mahony has been published here and there, and has not won any awards. He came from Ireland to study painting in London. He has a little website here - http://mo-omahony.tumblr.com/

Cherry

When the wanting is gone

it is gone.

When the wanting is drank

we are drunk.

When the wanting is caught

by two hunters and their dog –

the wanting rolls over

for one red moment.

Then the forest

bores. Then they

notice the frost.

They were hunting the hunt.

Slump back to their trucks.

The wanting

is a fox

best left untouched.

Rebecca Ring is a twenty-year old freshman at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. She majors in Writing, Literature, and Publishing with a concentration in Poetry. Rebecca was raised in Boston Massachusetts and attended Bard College for one semester before transferring to Emerson College. 

The Bucket.

My grandad wrote one story

about a bucket

in the army

and how it had to be kept

pointlessly clean.

I made him give it to me

after years.

Sometimes I read it

and think of him as a young man

trying to study history instead of economics.

To me it wasn't so bad,

but to him there was a big difference

which changed everything. 

Martha Rowsell works as a writer and musician in Brighton, and has one collection of poetry published by Lapwing in Belfast, called another journey like this. 

1

they're whittling us down to fifteen
I got the fax this morning
and promptly lost it in the stacks
of carbon copies I made of myself

2

someone told me we're switching
from screen to screen, like the optometrist asking:
"better like that?"
except the clicks
are smoothed out bed sheets we stop feeling

3

is your vision sharper yet
because when I have my own advertisement
I want you to see it

4

now you can fit people like sardines
in fisheye lenses

5

I find her in the morning
suspended in free fall
wiry knees to chest
and bent into a stress ball

Nicholas Chng is a sprinting blur every morning on his way to school. His work has been published in Softblow, and awarded a Commendation from the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award as well as the Alan Brownjohn Prize for Poetry by Newstead Wood School. In his free time, he enjoys fencing and cooking pasta. He hopes one day to be as fast as Usain Bolt.

Fluidity (or, the lack thereof)

"We have lived too shallowly in too many places."
            – Wallace Stegner ('Angle of Repose')

I was born – a breath –
At the end of a speech.

She was begging him to put down
The poker chips and come home,
Please, love, come home

And he told her
That she could have all the good silver
And the chipped and unchipped china
For forever
If only she allowed him
To sit at a three-legged table
For the better part of two – no, four –
Ahh, perhaps eight –
Hours.

That night
Her voice did not hoarse
And she did not put down her hair
And the sun should not have set
And the bar should not have opened

Her voice hoarsed. Her hair hung to her collarbone, stuck to it, and she could not loosen it. The sun set. The bar opened. And he took his moolah and crossed the street. The man looked down at his feet, at the ashes from the fireplace that had accumulated there, and tried to scuff them off, to little avail.

hit and miss

cliff swallows sweep deftly
through the night –

a trembling rain putters down
on the sidewalk as her eyes gleam
through the veneer
of the black-swathed tulip
she clasps close to her face.

"i will die in paris…
on a day i already remember…"*

cliff swallows swoop
too close to shore.

cliff swallows plummet
and fall to sea.

*César Vallejo

suburbia

you, too, have spoken of its taste:
voluminous quiet

stifling

like the pale ochre of maple saplings.
a long, seeping sip of cloth obscures my mouth,

dims the din of saws.
they cut long and close and

hard, fell a thousand
forests. watch us.

we will not be forgotten,
says the oak. i clap politely,

fail to see the forest
for the trees.

note left on an adjacent hospital bed (A Cento*)

I'm the interminable fields you can't see
(I love you more than all the windows in New York City),
Folds of all the gullied green:

I'm inside that brilliant gravity.
How can I sing of this?

one bright line
and a long coastline—
over flower beds
(intimate immensity)
and our deep cool verandah,
in the small lifting of our cups and our cakes to our lips.

How terrific it is to stand on the roof,
Watching the swallows…

It's a matter of perspective: yours is to love me
when the light strikes at odd angles
like a sea-bird.

It's not paradise I'm looking for,
but look, I must tell you:

You are my bread,
a wooden boat between
the threshold of eternity
and the rush and roar of life.

Forgive my unwritten poems;
Drink from me and you shall live forever.

*Each line taken from a different poem in the following order: Franz Wright, "To Myself"; Jessica Greenbaum, "I Love You More than All the Windows in New York City"; Gary Snyder, "Kyoto: March"; Greg Glazner, "Sick to death of the hardpan shoulder"; Dilruba Ahmed, "Petition"; Darcie Dennigan, "High and Bright and Fine and Ice"; Marina Tsvetaeva, "An Attempt at Jealousy". Translators, Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine; Lisel Mueller, "Beginning with 1914"; Joanne Burns, "reading"; Joanne Burns, "kept busy"; Alberto Rios, "Coffee in the Afternoon"'; Lisa Jarnot, "Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima"; Gottfried Benn, "Asters". Translator, Michael Hofmann; Alice Fulton, "Yours and Mine"; Lisel Mueller, "Sometimes, When the Light"; Fay Zwicky, "Letting Go"; Chard Deniord, "This Ecstasy"; Judith Beveridge, "How to Love Bats"; Diane Di Prima, "The Window"; Carl Philips, "The Truth"; Charlotte Mew, "Not for That City"; Rabindranath Tagore, "Amidst the Rush and Roar of Life"; Fay Zwicky, "The Poet Begs Forgiveness"; Ciaran Carson, "Labuntur et Imputantur"

Stephanie Guo lives in Southern California, and has been published in Front Porch Review, Hanging Loose, and Eunoia Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of the 2012 Adroit Prize in Verse and an Honorable Mention in the 2012 Nancy Thorpe Contest. Recently, Stephanie was named a Commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year.