AND SHE LIVES ON……

She lives on
In the music I hear, In the stars in the sky
In the food that I eat, in my dancing feet
in the perfume I wear, in the love that I share
She will never die ….as she lives on

---

Jemelia Moseleyis a primary school teacher, poet and spoken word artist. She loves all things poetry and spoken word and would love to see her work all over the world in print/word and on stage/TV. Jemelia’s poem ‘United’ will be published in ‘The Fly On The Wall‘ Magazine in September 2020, her other poems; ‘Grandma and Grandad’ and ‘Protests’ will also be published in September in a journal in Scotland, U.K. The Daily Drunk Mag has recently published her work. Twitter: @jemeliapoet, Instagram: @foryouandi3

Banner Image: City Night, a digital image by Robert Frede Kenter Tweets: @frede_kenter

Kindle

For the ritual. I am burning to ash in my desperate signaling.
In the distance. A fire burning and a man.  – Chris Abani

We dance in fire’s fulvous city.
Once, at 7, I leapt into the flailing frock of fire;
Ablution in golden libation.
My ash, a mesquite iteration of chaste dust,
Eyes, smithereens of moon Pyrex,
Yards of my beaconed feet, biblical as Sodom
Beneath the coarse current of God’s eye,
Mother perished with me, her bones unstoned,
Said death is always courting us
Till it leaves with us, it too a suitor sojourning
Like the fire with whom I fell in love,
Who crackled a late order to seize fire.
Isn’t this what love does, burn you?
Burn mother, burn your bumble-blue bubble,
Your absent wings. Burn bridges?
Without a single shimmer of flame?
And leaves a note:
If it burns, call it fire.

---

Sarpong-Osei Asamoah @s_Asamoah_

Holy Week 2017

(‘The United States dropped the ‘Massive Ordnance Air Blast’ bomb (“mother of all
bombs”) — the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal —
on an Islamic State cave complex in Afghanistan.’
Adapted from New York Times April 13 2017)

Night and day
words fell on me……
From one of them
I learned my name
Evan Boland

I

They dropped a bomb

We dropped a
We dropped

A very big bomb

on people
who do terrible evil

terrible/ people / evil

An evil bomb

An evil bomb
on evil doers

A terrible evil bomb

People / People / People

II

Something else; they
called it
‘Mother’. I

know, I know
that ‘Mother-of-all’
is just
a turn of phrase
a turn of magnitude

but

to
drop
a
bomb
and
call
it
Mother

Mummy
Mum
Ma

says what
I don’t want said
what
I don’t want
I don’t

The End of Innocence

Learning to knit, eating cheesecake and the arrival of my adopted sister, Betty: this is what I remember from the time I spent with grandma Rosa. But actually, there was so much more – I now regard this time as a defining episode in my childhood, one which marked the end of innocence, the beginning of a darker period of turning inwards, of feeling that the world was an unsafe place in which unpleasant surprises sprang from nowhere.

During my childhood, I walked past the photograph of grandma Rosa, my mother’s mother in its gilt frame hundreds of times barely noticing it. But since my mother’s passing, I’ve become interested in the chain of mothers and daughters, stretching from my granddaughter back to her great grandmother – 150 years of the female family line. I’ve been studying the photograph looking for clues to Rosa before she…

Podcast available on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Anchor, Breaker and many more platforms

This episode aired on 24th October 2020, and it was a celebration of voices from the LGBTQ+ community. I was joined on this show by Andreena Leeanne, David Hanlon, Anne Walsh Donnelly, Erin Russell, Katie Proctor, Grace Alice Evans, Ryan Norman and Peach Delphine.

The links to their websites, blogs or Twitter pages are all listed below…

Andreena Leeanne is the creator and host of @PoetryLGBT and her book Charred is published by Team Angelica…

http://teamangelica.com/71

David Hanlon is on Twitter as @DavidHanlon13 and his book Spectrum of Flight is published by Animal Heart Press…

https://www.animalheartpress.net/p/purchase-spectrum-of-flight.html

Anne Walsh Donnelly is on Twitter as @AnneWDonnelly and her book The Woman with the Owl Tattoo is published by Fly on the Wall Poetry

https://www.flyonthewallpoetry.co.uk/product-page/the-woman-with-an-owl-tattoo-by-anne-walsh-donnelly

Grace Alice Evans is on Twitter as @gracealiceevans and her website is…

In the new chapbook Quicksand, by Julie Stevens, published by Hybriddreich, there is a line in the opening poem that reads ‘I’m a factory working hard to produce a mystery, a collection of broken parts awaiting an answer…’ and this is indeed a collection of broken parts but it delivers its message clearly and its truth shines on every line, in every carefully chosen word, in the strength of each poem to be able to stand alone as well as accepting the support of the collection because, of course, what writer is not happy when allowed to sit and ponder and put pen to page. But, when the only option you have is to sit and ponder and put pen to page, then things change. Julie has had MS for 30 years now which means she cannot run or race or climb or dance. But here, in Quicksand, that is…