Journal

Go Gentle

Dylan, you were young. Who dares refute
the sacred words of poets who die young?
Your passion flaming into script,
you forged mores of death for august men.
I am not young, and not a man; absolve me,
fierce one. For I
have seen my mother close her eyes in peace
as her pain ebbed and I have seen my father
slump gratefully against his chair in ultimate fatigue.
There was no rage. There will be no rage. I will go gentle
into that good night. Behind my eyelids there will be
a velvet dusk to sheathe the rumples of my soul.
The wash of Lethe will cool the fevered angst
of my finality. In that dark, if there glints
a reliquary of regrets, within, the tiny heads of flagellum
will be clean of punished flesh and blood,
will tumble light like little stones enumerating
lessons learned – the thwart of kind words never spoken,
untruths told and negligent betrayals, granted
clemency in that good night. Upon my forehead
may there press a kiss, profound embrace
of all my loves. May it be I feel a hand in mine,
in that one hand the hundred hands
of those I’ve loved, the gentle loosening as I go.
You were young, Dylan, and not a woman.
Fierce one, absolve me.

Sea Change  

This calving: no bleat or blood upon the straw,
no slick newborn struggling to wobbly stance.
This is ice, spawning with abandon, its sundering cleavages
brilliant under the sun,
its thunderous drop, the plunge,
the bucking and rearing in aquamarine slurry,
now groaning in the violence of watery labour,
now whispering spindrifts, now susurrating shhh.

This park bench, waist deep: iron curlicues splash-spangled,
patient as a birthing chair, lap lapped gentle,
its wet beckons: come, shuck your shoes, you nymph in molt,
peel off your socks, skin-shedding serpent of the sea.
Succumb to lavish flow.
Beneath the ripples, cross your ankles,
twine your calves as one, a mermaid curve,
your follicles her scales.  Thirty million years
it was from fins to arms and legs
to pedicures and manicures in Pink Tutu or French.
Now glide you deep with torque of tail,
your hair like trailing weed;
From lungs to lips to wavelet,
stream your changeling lullabye
to those you leave behind, whose tears will dry
and on their faces leave a rime of salt.

Callista Markotich has been a teacher, principal and Superintendent of Education in Eastern Ontario. Retired, she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where Lake Ontario tips into the Saint Lawrence River. Her poetry appears in Arc (Award , June, 2021), Grain, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Room (Award, 2019), and in several ezines and anthologies.

Fantasies of Shepherd Life

I dream of sheep and the Outer Hebrides,
fields furrowed with linen lines and feral life:
pubs and people, a zig-zag across.

On coastal dunes, marram grasses grow
wild and tall as they’d ever want in this country
of scotch moss and croft, resting place
of the hour hand.

Here, the soils are sand and the sails billow by bluffs.
The only way to the waterfront is over God-gracing
rocks, Lewisian gneiss, its sediments of quartz
and feldspar scattered along the shoreline, glittering
up to the reed buntings and bluetits.

Daniel McGee is a triplet, poet, and film enthusiast from the Chicagoland area. He is currently an MA student at the University of Illinois–Chicago. He has been published in literary journals such as Wales Haiku Journal and CP Quarterly, and he has work forthcoming in the Minnow Literary Magazine.

 

Drift Apart

My partner and I hold hands as we fall asleep.
Occasionally it’s a handshake,
but mostly our fingers are intertwined

If she’s sitting up in bed I’ll just hold her.
Sometimes it’s her wrist or her elbow,
sometimes just my arm across her chest.

We’re both careful to not let go until we fall asleep.
Until we wander our dreams alone,
meeting strange versions of one another.

I read that otters, both river and sea,
hold hands when they fall asleep
so they don’t drift apart.

I wonder if that’s why we do it.
So we drift off,
not apart.

And when we die,
in some far-flung, theoretical future,
will we hold hands as the world closes?

Sure to follow each other,
not to drift through the ethers alone,
or apart.

Nathaniel Mellor is a short story writer and poet-in-training. He lives in the Cilento of Southern Italy with his partner.

Who will say death?

–to Seamus Heaney

He dug deep into the layered
peat of personal and collective
inheritances. His pen was the
spade which revealed the roots
which held him fast to his place
and time. But they spread from
the fertile soil of his curious mind,
with its dormant tuber thoughts,
like sly potato shoots, branching
out to infiltrate other deaths. He
saw photographic relics of other
lives preserved in print’s cold
storage, overwintering them in
the barn of his memory. He wrote
of his connection with these
enigmatic bog-mired sacrificial
victims: Tollund Man, Grauballe
Man. To him they evoked the
faces of fieldworking forebears;
embodied in his grandfather,
grounded in past and present.
He retraced their each furrowed
wrinkle and ploughshared frown-
line as if they delineated patterns
of his own familiar fields. His crow’s
eye sought leazings at the margins
of a still stubbled jaw. He saw the
dreams of sunlight that twitched
behind each dead man’s sunken lids,
eye-balls still full like ripened kernels
of their lost summers, dozing in the
midday heat. He tasted the drugged
millet gruel lying heavy in each belly’s
shriveled sack. He felt the horsefly
bite of the rawhide tourniquet that
stung their throats as their hides
shivered, as strangled breath strained
from their lungs’ spent bellows. His
unflinching gaze saw the truth of
what these other deaths were to
him. They did not stay buried in
the obtuse earth, suffocated by
its density; bundled like hay-bales
into time’s sucking mire. He was
their breath of resurrection, that
rose through his words like mist-
vapours over the fenland sedges;
calling them to join him at their
long days’ end.

Kate Meyer-Currey was born in 1969 and moved to Devon in 1973. A varied career in frontline settings has fueled her interest in gritty urbanism, contrasted with a rural upbringing. Her ADHD also instils a sense of ‘other’ in her life and writing.

Cicada

Your tambourine may be a distraction
to the other members of our
congregation but I like the raw electrical
energy of your body growing walls

of staticky feedback out of the locust
across the street. Your kettledrum is
a wakeup call, July heat rendered
as urgency. No matter how stifling,

your mother love swaddles me in sound,
a white noise machine left on
by accident, blended into the background
it has become. Before long your solo

closes, the crescendo of shrieks
we didn’t know was the end of the song,
but for now there are no deaf ears
but the ones you deafen.

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of six collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Far Other (Woodley Press, 2020). He holds and MFA from the University of Kansas City—Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and two children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.