New Writing

How now we scare ourselves

Caleb Klaces

On cloudy nights the moon is sunk through algae blooms,
a coin half-caught under rock, flashing white
in the light of the moon, in society with hermit crabs,
anemones, things which disguise, as England would
turn off its lights to disappear from the Luftwaffe,
which, in an age of GPS–guided missiles,
girls strapped with explosives,
seems not only quaint but imaginatively bold,
in the same spirit as raising hands to vanish a face.

Because the photograph of the child we failed
always comes from within us, whose name, in turn,
becomes how we say all is not well in England,
or those of us not living daily with horror.

From this jagged and slippery rock pool,
we were hoping to extract enough tiny prawns
to make a slim meal, although we didn’t really need to.
The fun was in seeming so gigantically proportioned.

Due to the surface area necessary for gaseous exchange,
trees can’t help it if they look like lungs,
but it’s only a feeling, as it takes me between
lives, that makes a long flight a chrysalis. Then
suddenly it becomes a butterfly of flames: terror
is quiescent attack: why it keeps us awake
at night, if it does,
                            I don’t feel terrorized,
but affinity’s the thing: when my father,
having buffeted his house against the snow,
says “It wouldn’t take much to go wrong
for the country to shut off its lights: food cut:
gas cut: quite quickly we could starve”,
I assure him connections make us hardier than that,

then heroes of the Togo national football team
are shot at and everything feels porous again.
It can’t for too long. Instead,
on occasional, short trips, I take a look
at what dark lurks under these rocks, to guess
what dark lurks under other rocks.

 

Caleb Klaces is the brains behind collaborative poetry game Likestarlings. His poems have been published in Poetry, Oxford Poetry  and elsewhere. He is co-author of Eco-logical, an introductory guide to sustainability issues. He blogs.

A Music Box with a Ballerina

Karen McCarthy

It is a small cage.
There is a cuttlefish shell
wedged between the bars
so the little green and yellow bird
can sharpen its beak.
A powder blue swing
faces an oval mirror.
Droppings carpet the sandpaper.
I do not remember
how I squeezed my hands round Budgie
and pulled him out through the door
that opened like a drawbridge.
Or how I put him down
on the [...]

(Read on...)

Get Parochial!

Luke Wright

     Get Parochial!
Sling those Slim Jim drain pipes in the bin!
You’re not an indie filmmaker or DJ;
turns out you’re just a navel-gazing tit.
When you find your iPod case collection’s
into double figures – you must leave.

     Get Parochial!
Join me in my quaint provincial town.
Come and meet my barber. He collects
memorabilia relating to the War
and will scarcely [...]

(Read on...)

When all my disappointments came at once

Todd Swift

I greeted them as guests,
brought them in and settled their burdens
with footstools, olives and cool white wine.
This was a delicate stage –
they’d never met in one room before –
had circled warily in the past, strangers
to themselves if not me (for I
had often expected, if not them, then
others with equal claim on my time).
Now, none of [...]

(Read on...)