All dragonfly photos by David Rushmer

. dragonfly .

look closely,
maybe this is not a
dragon,
maybe a may.
i am sure one of
you will know, or
will you only see
the seeds.
seeds from many years.
watch the garden grow.

sbm.

Golden-Ringed Dragonfly

There are still things
just over the fence, which can

surprise me. This mini-drone
zooms huge over the patio

bobbing and scooping
over hanging baskets

danger-striped and pencil-thick
writing summer on the air.

-Judi Sutherland

-Margaret Royall

The Wolfhound And The Dragonfly

It’s noon. The hound and fly collide, coinciding in the sun.
Her sudden blur confounds his questing nose. He splutters,

his hairy head diverts her flight, disrupting her intent.
She makes good her escape in complex counterpoint.

He follows her manoeuvres like a spy. His head is still,
his eyes beguiled. He waits. His mind is full of now.

The moment’s gone. She soars as he restores himself.
Nonchalant, they both move on, the dragon and the wolf.

-Clare O’Brien

rice grains heavy
against sky blue
red dragonflies

Plum Tree Tavern October 2019

-Christina Chin

Dragonfly Tattoo

Caught in freeze frame
Full flight suspended
Between
Time sped through days
Clear winged tears
Easily missed in mirrors
Until it disappears
On dragonbreath days

-Kate Mattacks @mypaperskin

Slow River

Cool green air
Slides over the reed beds at twilight:
Dragonfly water

-Yvonne Marjot

DRAGONFLY

She’s beautiful, beguiling, a diva.
A Hollywood superstar in her sparkling gown
of dazzling bronze and glittering gold.
Her slender body, filigree wings
transparent and yellow tipped.
She’s headstrong, obstinate, fierce jaws and fiery nature
A male drifts in, lustful, ripe
She spots his luminescence
dropping from the sky like Icarus
Clever, deceitful, an A-lister actress.

She hasn’t spent three years in water as
A little nymph waiting to bloom
To be taken and violated
She has been patient, shedding layer after layer
crawled from her own split skin
like a ragged child to stunning princess
She’s waited for her own sun to rise
before stretching her wings and taking flight

Her time is short, she knows it
Her strength already fading
Twenty or so sunrises left
She sashays over pale water lilies,
brash marsh marigolds
And waits for her own Prince Charming

-Carol Sheppard

(Note : Female dragonflies fake sudden death to avoid male advances)

Bios and iinks

-Judi Sutherland

(@thestaresnest) is a poet and wannabe novelist in County Durham, currently planning a move to Dublin. Her pamphlet ‘The Ship Owner’s House’ was published in 2018 by Vane Women Press.

-Kate Mattacks@mypaperskin–

I’m a researcher at the University of Reading with the Stories of Ageing Project. I support therapeutic writing workshops in hospitals and prisons. Trying to write more poetry, feed 3 dogs and be more human…

-Clare O’Brien

Previously PR to a politician and PA to a rock star, Clare is now trying to finish her first novel somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in magazines including Mslexia, Northwords Now, The London Reader, Lunate, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Cabinet of Heed, Nightingale & Sparrow and in anthologies from The Emma Press and Hedgehog Poetry.

-Christina Chin

is from Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Recently she won two of City Soka Saitama’s 2020 prizes. She is the 1st place winner of the 34th Annual Cherry Blossom Sakura
Festival 2020 Haiku Contest hosted by University of Alabama’s
Capstone International Center. Her photo-haiku won a Grand Prix Award in the 8th Setouchi Matsuyama International Contest in 2019. She is published in the multilingual Haiku Anthology (Volumes 3-5) and the International Spring Saijiki. Christina is published in Haikukai (俳句界) one of Japan’s biggest monthly haiku magazines. Her poems appear in many journals including AHS Frogpond Journal, the Red Moon Anthology, Akitsu Quarterly Journal, The Asahi Shimbun, ESUJ-Haiku, Presence, Chrysanthemum, The Cicada’s Cry, The Zen Space, Wales Haiku Journal, Prune Juice, Failed Haiku and Cattails (UHTS).
You can find Christina Chin online at WordPress: https://christinachin99blog.wordpress.com/. She also maintains an ongoing scheduled blog of featured and published haiku: https://haikuzyg.blogspot.com/.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Christina_haiku?s=09
Instagram:
https://instagram.com/zygby22

Tuesday: Wasps and Bees

Bee by Debbie Strange

I inhale
and my lungs fill up
with bees
though all hope is lost
there is still this hum

Hedgerow Poems 100, Dec/16

-Debbie Strange

the argument
escalates all night
inside me
these paper-thin walls
only meant for wasps

tanka published in Wild Voices, April 2017

-Debbie Strange

Bees
for David Rosenberg

Stumble clumsily into the beckoning
necks of honeysuckle days.
Sip their nectar.
Swallow powdery pollen.
Waggle. . . A little this way.
A little that.
Buzz
and electrify the air.

-Alan Toltzis

Hanging Out the First Washing of the Year

Over the rush-hour
there’s a hum –
I look up to see
many, mellow bumblebees
a community of bumblebees
a chorus of bumblebees
gathering pollen
from the catkins
of the self-seeded tree

-Lauren M. Foster

Slaughter of Queens

Swarmstorm in August
kicks dusty sunlight through trees,
shifting. Suddenly free,
bee cloud hums a summer warning.

Drenched in the feminine,
subsumed to queens,
drones wait.

Hidden sisters
pipe to each other
while implacable heat melts
even the honey.

Located, stings raised to duel,
virgin solidarity is discarded.
Only one triumphant.
As dying wings twitch,
Regina absoluta reigns
over her useful, doomed brothers.

-Amanda Bonnick

-Mark Fiddes

Live and Let Live in the Garden

There’s a bustle in the foxgloves,
white-tailed queen
bumbling in and out of poppies.
That excited keen:
buzz pollination
for pollen saturation.

Small humming cousin,
worker carder bee
calm in her fur coat,
busy busy busy
stitching my garden together
flower after flower.

Beside my back door
I hear, as I walk about,
a steady hum from the eaves,
wasps ducking in and out.
A nest in my roof space, I’d say.
A problem for another day.

– ©YMarjot for #NationalInsectWeek @PaulDragonwolf1

The ant the spider and the bee

I wonder which is best of the three
If I see the qualities of insects three,
all are unique company
each created superb in structure
form color shape and ability

All three have the sting, a
security weapon against the enemy
the ant has a hill the spider a web,
and hive is for the bee
all three industrious, restless,
focused, productive in unity

a pleasure to observe, a treasure to know,
a gift to enjoy nature creates miracles for
the benefit of mankind, a pity, if spiders ants
and bees are killed, no honey, a cause to cry;

I wonder if I were an ant what a tiny
creature I would be even if I were a spider,
even then very frail and thin I would be
Ah but if I were a bee, then I would be

the strongest of the three –

Then perhaps I choose to be not a spider, ant, but rather a bee’

-anjum wasim dar
Pakistan

August Afternoon

Bees tunnel the flowering mint
as flies fill the air like buzzing smoke.
From my chair I survey
the twin Empires of the Sandbox:
On one side the Dinosaur King,
age four, arranges his subjects
for review. On the other
the three-year-old construction
magnate intently mills sand.
A Mourning Cloak glides over
the sandbox and settles
on a spray of yarrow
and rests undisturbed.

-Gregory Luce

The Difference Between Bees & Wasps

A bee knocks at the door,
coughs shy and polite,
whispers its bee name,
has an afternoon snooze
after a very hard morning
playing Sergeant Wilson
to a geranium’s Mrs Pike.

A wasp smashes your window
with its buzzsaw hairdo,
spits in your kitchen,
gets pissed on cider
he nicked from your fridge
(which he opened himself)
then picks fights with your family.

A bee lives high on honey
in the close company
of its bosombuddy clan,
among branches and leaves.
Says thankyou and please
and in unbusy moments
hands change to the homeless.

A wasp lives for pain –
others’, not its own,
it gets off on tears.
Takes pocketmoney from kids
to buy itself beer.
Each sting-strung knuckle
is tattooed HATE.

A bee dreams paintings
of amber haywains,
of nature’s cure for all,
and of sunkissed plains.
A wasp dreams of jackboots,
goose stepping, saluting,
of nights French kissing
Vladimir Putin.

Bees are:
bumbling, benign,
beatific, bewitching,
benevolent, busy
butterballed and bonny.

Wasps are wassocks

-Harry Gallagher

-Cheryl Barnes

Bee 1

Lunch Break
Sat drinking coffee and watching
a bee manoeuvre himself into a tiny hole
in the cement between the bricks,
casually brushing the dust from his sides,
like someone wiping their feet
returning home from a morning’s work.

I picture him reclining
in the cool darkness with his wings up
whilst all the other bees diligently go about
in the noon heat – their minds
on work work work.

Finally he reappears and with slow lazy waggle
pulls back into the traffic of the courtyard.
As I get up, I tip my cup
to this little bee after my own heart.

-Tom Harding

lockdown morning
the coffee blossoms
buzzing with bees

Frogpond Spring 2020, Issue 43.2

-Christina Chin

Sonnet: “Mud Daubers, Marsh Chapel, Boston”

for CEH

Outside the stained-glass window, wasps labor
on the stone lintel, building wombs. Lance-tip
jaws champ soil into mortar. Vibrissae

smooth and shape. Inside each clay pipe is hid
a chain of sealed cells; inside each cell, one
meal of paralyzed spider. Bone-white eggs

wait for the right moment to burst open,
black-bodied and blue-winged. New made. Even
I could transform my life, maybe. Become

a simple kind of saint—the sort who leaves
ripe fruit on the stone ledge for the tiny
brutal masons. They will chew away these

raw rags, to show thanks; bring dust in their mouths
to beatify and reflesh my bones.

– –

This poem appears in the Pentecost 2019 issue of Dappled Things journal.

https://thewonderreflex.blogspot.com/2020/06/sonnet-mud-daubers-marsh-chapel-boston.html

-Zachary Bos

Feast

I saw a dog’s corpse
on the side of the road
tossed beneath hydrangea bushes,
with fur painted by
dust and clotted blood
and feet caught
up in rigor mortis,
as if still racing
toward mischievous squirrels.

What I thought were
maggots turned out
to be caterpillars,
and what I presumed were
flies darting
were bees.

They took to the flowers,
thoughtlessly accepting
the macabre perfume.

-Denzel Xavier Scott

Commit

The honeycomb pockets round out
as deep and cold as the moon,
filled—now that summer’s ending—with more honey
than any hiveful of wings ever aspired to make.
It is dream honey with something called fat,
stiffened by ice and a puff of air.

My bee-vision catches it:
dozens of colors and flavors,
pollen and black stripe,
butter, caramel,
hibiscus and the hummingbird within,
the strawberry in the field.
Ice cream is for me.
The reason I crawl behind the glass is
finally to know:
if I can pick only one,
if my body will stick to the surface,
if I must die on that hill,
which one?

Time slows—
The freezer is vast enough for moons—
My wings do not hum—
(Even in summer,
something inside us pulls toward the winter
we cannot survive.)
I choose strawberry—
Face first, feelers, frost—
There is a meaning of life,
and it is—

Bee Safe

Cut eyeholes in an old bucket.
Stuck an old welder’s visor

on the eyeholes. Stuffed and taped
an ancient towel under the rim.

Got my mate to tape welder’s gloves
to my thick jacket and my wellingtons

to jogging bottoms. Put bucket on my head.
Mate stuck it to my jacket. I struggled

through the small hole. Cost a packet
for radiation suited cocker
to remove a hive from out of our roof.

I’m sure all bees are gone. Couldn’t hear them.
Couldn’t bloody breathe, my visor misted up.

-Paul Brookes

Bio and Links

-Tucker Lieberman

is the author of Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty, a biography of an early 20th-century writer. His poems can be found in Animal Heart, The Fruit Tree, Little Dog, Quatrain Fish, Raven Review, and Snakeskin. He flits around Bogotá, Colombia with the science fiction novelist Arturo Serrano and eats ice cream. http://www.tuckerlieberman.com

-Gregory Luce,

author of Signs of Small Grace, Drinking Weather, Memory and Desire, Tile, and Riffs & Improvisations (forthcoming from Kelsay Books), has published widely in print and online. He is the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, given by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In addition to poetry, he writes a monthly column on the arts for Scene4 magazine. He is retired from National Geographic, works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC, and lives in Arlington, VA.

-Harry Gallagher

is widely published, his most recent books being Northern Lights (2017) and Running Parallel (2019). His next book ‘Moulded From Ferrous – Selected Early Works’ is due out in the autumn from Black Light Engine Room Press. Harry runs the Tyne & Wear stanza of the Poetry Society.”

-Amanda Bonnick

is a Worcester writer and is currently Poet in Residence for Worcester Cathedral (2019/20). She is also a producer, director and actor with Melting Pot Theatre Company. She has co-hosted the Word and Sound open mic event and has performed her poetry at Parole Parlate, SpeakEasy, Licensed to Rhyme, and Stirchley Speaks spoken word events. She has recently published her poetry pamphlet ‘Pick Your Own’ with Worcester’s Black Pear Press and her work has appeared in anthologies ‘Voices of 1919’ (by Mike Alma), ‘Ripples’ by Jackie Summer, and several small presses (Envoi, Fire, Critical Survey, Agenda)

-Denzel Xavier Scott

is a semi-closeted black queer writer who earned his BA in English from The University of Chicago and received his Writing MFA at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in his hometown of Savannah, GA.
His prose and poetry appear in various literary magazines: Rattle, Empty Mirror, Spillway, decomP, both Euphony Journal and Blacklight Magazine of the University of Chicago, Linden Avenue, 3Elements Review, Cortland Review, Louisville Review, Random Sample Review, HIV Here and Now, a project of Indolent Books, and many others.

Denzel Scott is a past recipient of the University of Chicago’s prestigious Summer Arts Council Fellowship Grant. In September 2018, he became one of the winners of Writer Relief’s Peter K Hixson Memorial Prize.
His twitter link is: https://twitter.com/denzelscott. He’s a friendly, enthusiastic tweeter.

-Christina Chin

is from Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Recently she won two of City Soka Saitama’s 2020 prizes. She is the 1st place winner of the 34th Annual Cherry Blossom Sakura
Festival 2020 Haiku Contest hosted by University of Alabama’s
Capstone International Center. Her photo-haiku won a Grand Prix Award in the 8th Setouchi Matsuyama International Contest in 2019. She is published in the multilingual Haiku Anthology (Volumes 3-5) and the International Spring Saijiki. Christina is published in Haikukai (俳句界) one of Japan’s biggest monthly haiku magazines. Her poems appear in many journals including AHS Frogpond Journal, the Red Moon Anthology, Akitsu Quarterly Journal, The Asahi Shimbun, ESUJ-Haiku, Presence, Chrysanthemum, The Cicada’s Cry, The Zen Space, Wales Haiku Journal, Prune Juice, Failed Haiku and Cattails (UHTS).
You can find Christina Chin online at WordPress: https://christinachin99blog.wordpress.com/. She also maintains an ongoing scheduled blog of featured and published haiku: https://haikuzyg.blogspot.com/.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Christina_haiku?s=09
Instagram:
https://instagram.com/zygby22

1, What drew you to the story of Bella?

At first, it was the open ended nature of the mystery. There’s something irresistible about things being unsolved, being a mix of hearsay, true crime and folk tale. But more than this too, it’s a central piece of urban folklore from the Black Country, and I’m really interested in what makes up regional identity and sense of place – part of it is the stories we tell each other about our locales, the Bella story runs deep in the minds of these estates.

2, How do you think the telling of the story through various voices helps the narrative?

It seems appropriate to form a novel like Bella through a multi-voiced perspective, since it’s about marginal, fragmented and liminal people, cultures and customs. Again, the Bella myth is an amalgamation of half-truths, and that idea runs throughout the novel in different guises. I wanted to create a textual version of the pub conversation – people holding forth, digressing, being interrupted, repeating themselves and echoing each other, that slowly and strangely building a collective fiction, experience and memory.

3. Why did you use dialect, and knowing how dialect can be used from the occasional word to paragraphs where it becomes like another language the reader has to learn, where did you draw the line?

The use of dialect is connected with that vision of creating a textual pub conversation, but it’s also because the Black Country dialects are so gorgeous and rhythmic. It really is poetic, especially when it’s captured with that slick working-class wit. This novel is my love song to the Black Country, and part of that is a deep admiration for the way we spake.

There’s an element of archiving at play too. Much of the peculiar turns of phrase and grammatical choices are dying out, so I wanted in some way to keep it going in some way.

And politically too, there’s something subversive and politically playful about creating very smart characters from an overlooked place, talking in a way that most people assume makes them dumb.

I didn’t really put any limit on its use. I wanted to capture as close as possible the way people talk. There are, I suppose, some limits in the way I attempted to differentiate the voices of my characters – each having their own idiosyncrasies. The Pakistani characters are a good example, littering the regional voice with Urdu in the gorgeous way Asian communities do in this country.

4. Your description of the edgelands, the verges and bits of vegetation amongst the concrete and steel becomes a character in itself, almost becoming Bella, herself.

I’m so happy to hear that came through. Thanks. It’s a Gothic tradition, and I see Bella’s landscape as a sort of Black Country Gothic or Post-industrial sublime. The liminal, off-kilter spaces are haunted zones, literally and symbolically, but also ones separate from normal rules and codes, so they’re ripe for transgression. So, yes I think you’re right; there’s a sense that the very makeup of the land is responsible for the action that takes place in it.

5. It feels like an exploration of the outsider who becomes a victim.

It is many ways, yeah. It’s a feeling of being connected and dislocated simultaneously. And I think you could see that in all the characters. They’re all outsiders in different ways. And as you noted before, it’s the space itself that triggers it.

6. I love the way you weave in the myths and legends of other cultures, like the Qarin.

Thank you! It’s great to hear that landed too. At the heart of this novel is a ghost story. A lost soul, doomed to relive her tragedy forever. It makes sense to me that a spirit or being of this nature would manifest itself differently depending on the person witnessing the haunting. This then becomes another way of showing the disparate elements that make up a place, community, and especially in this case, the genius loci.

7. There is a lot about sleep (or lack of), dreams and nightmares.

Well spotted. I think this is probably down to my obsession with Sigmund Freud’s work. I really wanted the mood or energy in the novel to be soaked with the uncanny and with abjection – more examples of that in-between-ness – and a good route into that is exploring character’s dreams. It’s also good fun for a writer – working in the abstract and unusual into the realist. I hope this makes for fun reading too; it seems to help with pace and dynamic shifts.

8. Why does Bella say “Memory is difficult”?

Two reasons for this. I see Bella as a being stuck in a sort of psychic loop, in a ghostly limbo. She’s disembodied, outside of normal space-time. So it makes sense that she’d find the usual processes of feeling, thinking, sensing dislocated too. The other side to this is the sense that she represents a collective cultural memory, and one that is fractured, full of dead ends and red herrings.

9. What is it about in-between-ness that fascinates you?

As I mentioned in your other question, I’m really keen on Freud’s work. Especially the Uncanny. At the heart of Freud’s theories is the that life, being, experience is about two poles bearing against each other.  So we experience things in ambivalences. The uncanny is an experience of something both familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely. By navigating these the subject comes to understand themselves with more clarity. This is a rite of passage, a shaman’s journey, and it’s at heart of narrative.

10. The sense of touch features highly in your descriptions more than the other senses.

That’s another really astute observation. I guess there’s something about physically touching the ground, the body, the concrete floor of the myth itself. And attempting to connect with things that are beyond in different ways – through death, loss, history, repression.

11. What do you want the reader to be left with after reading Bella?

Good question!

I want them to leave with a fresh and more nuanced perspective on the Black Country, wider Post-industrial communities, and on working-class culture.

But mainly, I want them to FEEL sad, hopeful, scared, repulsed and beauty-marked in equal measure. And then buy a copy for a friend 😉

A copy of Bella can be obtained here:

 http://wildpressedbooks.com/bella.html

There is also a free ebook available

https://wlv.ac.uk/staff/news/2020/june-2020/book-a-free-copy-of-local-novel-for-lockdown-leisure.php#.XuSM45rJkIc.twitter…

*******

Readers may find the interview I did with R.M. Francis in 2019 interesting reading:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/01/16/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-r-m-francis/

https://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2020/06/saturday-good-reads_20.html