Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers three options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger, or an interview about their latest book, or a combination of these.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Dena Rod

is currently the assistant creative nonfiction editor for Homology Lit and the author of the chapbook swallow a beginning. Dena works to illuminate their diasporic experiences of Iranian-American heritage and queer identity, combating negative stereotypes of their intersections in the mainstream media. Their poetry and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in the recently published anthology My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, Endangered Species, Enduring Values, Forum Literary Magazine, Beyond Bloodlines (funded in part by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), and Imagoes: A Queer Anthology. Catch them on Twitter @alightningrod and denarod.com

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

I took my first writing workshop back in 2016, which was in an Iranian identity writing workshop. Initially, I planned on writing about myself in creative nonfiction essays and maybe even a YA fantasy idea I had! However, within a few writing prompts poems kept appearing. I ended up taking advantage of San Francisco County’s new “Free City” program, where enrolling in SF City College was free for SF residents and signed up for poetry classes in order to refine my technique. Poetry has taken over my brain ever since and I’m still trying to get back to that darn YA idea!

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

My father. My father bought me my first book of poetry from Shakespeare & Co on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley. He would always read Hafez late at night. He sat in our living room next to his bookshelf after we had all gone to bed and I would watch him from the crack in my bedroom doorway. I was fascinated by these thick tomes with cracked spines and metallic bookplates, they were akin to magic to me, heightened by the fact that they were written in Persian so I couldn’t decipher the words within.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Growing up as a child, the poetry I was exposed to was written by men rather than women. As an English Literature major, I was very much aware of the Western Literary canon that formed the primary curriculum with writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and T.S. Eliot holding court over the syllabus. I definitely felt like we were indoctrinated with what was considered True Literature and the canon didn’t seem like it had room for writers like me. My knowledge of contemporary poets was vastly limited since there was very little cross-pollination from the Creative Writing department that housed the Poetry Center.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I’m still working on developing one! I tend to do some form of writing daily, be it journaling, a timed free write, but the poems come when they come. I’m constantly inspired by the world around me and like to collage phrases together to describe what I see in new ways. I also just recently just finished writing thirty poems in thirty days for National Poetry Month, a goal I didn’t think I could achieve so I’m really proud of these poems.

5. What motivates you to write?

I strive to write the type of poetry that I needed when I was a literature undergrad. I feel indebted to Audre Lorde who wrote of her intersections staunchly. But I also feel called to document beauty as well. Certain sequences of words will get stuck in my head on a loop and I need to get them out of my head by painting with words .

6. What is your work ethic?

I have a very strong work ethic when it comes to other literary endeavors, such as editing submissions for Argot Magazine and Homology Lit but ultimately tend to put mine on the backburner. I’m trying to be better about that!

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

It’s hard to make a definitive list of my influences since there are so many. I grew up reading Tamora Pierce, JK Rowling, and Philip Pullman like most kids of my generation. I was attached to stories of extraordinary children who are thrust into a destiny they don’t quite want but still forged ahead.

I discovered poets like Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Mariam Rukeyser in my undergraduate classes. It was such a breath of fresh air to see that this was poetry too; something that came into being catalyzed by the need to take action. I ended up writing my MA thesis on Audre Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Homi Bhabha’s theory of the “Third Space of Enunciation.” Post-colonial theory was my first foray in disrupting Western narratives that are commonly prevalent in the English literary canon and this has molded my artistic perspective immensely in ways that I’m still discovering as a creative writer (rather than an academic one).

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

I love what Adib Khorram is doing in YA literature, creating queer Iranian narratives and complexly delving into the rich interior lives of teenagers in the diaspora. I admire Michelle Tea and her career, how she is able to write seamlessly across memoir, YA novels, poetry, and journalism. A lot of writers in the community around me inspire me daily, those who organize tirelessly to bring the work of others to public readings like Shizue Siegal, Cassandra Dallett, MK Chavez, and Sharon Coleman. I also really appreciate what Gabby Rivera is doing with her work in comics, creating the representation for her community with work like bb.free!

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

Writing has always found its way to me, rather than the other way around. I have tried to ignore this urge for most of my life. Yet it comes in waves and bubbles forth in a way that I cannot deny my true nature that really enjoys writing!
10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”
You need to unflinchingly look at your work without ego and sentimentality. Write what you want to write and nothing else. Do not write what you think other people want to read because being conscious of your audience will get in the way of your creative process (especially if you are frozen by performance anxiety!)

10. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

Currently, I finished my first poetry manuscript and submitting it to presses and publishers. I released my first chapbook, swallow a beginning, which had a limited print run of 100 copies that all sold out! I’m also working (slowly but surely) a YA Urban Fantasy novel with a queer Iranian American girl who finds out she can walk through fire unscathed and travel inter-dimensionally.

MF6

I run my hand over my past,

Where did the time go?

How trite to ask. How human.

I want to feel where a picture

Made by a child must’ve been

Until adolescence tore it up.

I want to see where a head

Chipped the paint.

Where did the time go?

#6

how I remember mama:

recumbent with cucumber slices

hot stuff on a blazing beach

between her lover,

her life, and others;

that would be her children,

playing ball discreetly

In the lathering surf

with a Portuguese Man of War

-Elizabeth Moura

Abstractions

Making sense of abstract pale green
The mind reads as moss
Which proliferates into vegetation.
Hen and chicks begin again
In repurposed terrariums
From some old Mother’s Day,
Signifying children and growth;
Elders and death;
Soil and air
Until abstract greys and greens
Are life force made concrete.

-st

Yellow Mars

Stretched beyond any story,
outside of organic memory.
Time lives without passing.
It’s life: a slow definition
of measure in stain.

When I was young
I saw a bright
yellow lichen near the sea.
I wanted to lick it
to sense and to taste it.
This bright, lives there still.

Yellow as gorse flower
orange as rust.
Lichen covers our world.

On the ISS they
breathed the vacuum
and survived.
One day they will
turn Mars yellow.

Then:
On a clear night
you may see
a lichen star.

©️ Dai Fry 5th May 2020.

Shift

When what was left of the mountain heaved
the men were stroking the ground with their tillers
and to the worried horses, whose ancestors
had been told for three hundred years
that men knew what they were doing
it seemed the infant was soothed, that the tired-out dirt
had simply sighed and turned over. And so they nodded
the great brushbrooms of their blinkered heads
and stepped forward onto the grey scree, between the lines
of unmade earth, and the unmountain wept
as she received them into her hot belly.
And swirling with their blades the motes of dust
that were only sadness, floating
the men said to each other ‘but why were the horses so stupid?’
and the trees, the only wild green left in miles
and miles and miles of neatly turned fields
shuffled close on the ridge, hiding completely
the great wave roaring in, that water
briefly the same shape as the mountain’s memory of herself

-Ankh Spice

..faceless ..

faceless

from nowhere, no name
nor eyes yet we saw the bloodied halo

angel
power and dominion

swept through silent almost biblical if you
#readthat
note how the layout is columns, numbered stanzas
unlike other books
tied away in cupboards

here
was black and smudges
then
carefully we drew her out
all tidy with reason, wearing
us down

wearing the kimono
corona
wearing the coat
corona
whatever you wear
corona

faced away

only stone
set before
set like fire in empty barns

#readthat

the social worker was a bitch back then

#didyoureadthat?

gongbi guise

painted silk or weathered stone?
where vision ends
imagination begins

artist’s paean to nature or
nature’s paean to art?
perfection neither asks nor answers

-Rich Follett

Tenalp Htrae

Earth Whispers – Light years have passed since
leaving our blue planet, only white noise echoes
remain of a world imploded by human negligence
of a fragile natural existence meant to sustain
maintain billions of our former human species
but our ancient predecessors plundered misused
abused neglected and rejected what Earth had
to offer – Yet they were destined to suffer for
ignoring existential warnings of natural resources
depleted excavated extracted annihilated – To
the point of meltdown. Now all we see are the
historical images shown to new generations born
in a new world a new existence a new consciousness.

Bleeding Earth – Any hope of ever returning to our
ancestral home is slowly burning as eons of efforts
to detect new life has come to an abrupt end – New
footage reveal a dismal reality of a tired planet bleeding
it’s waters evaporated by swirling fire tornados rocks
melting fauna and flora now long gone fossils – The
life-giving atmosphere now a toxic choking layer,
So we still mourn our forced lonely new daily dismal
Dawn on planet Tenalp Htrae, light years away…

-Don Beukes

The Many

clocks of her face tick
as the world decays and rusts.

Some say to her
your clocks have no hands.
Some say to her
you’ve no idea of time.

Your timing is all over the place,
clock arms, clock lungs, clock legs,
clock heart but no clock face.

Knows her blood and breath tell the time,
beat precision and control
her faces watch the world’s decline.

Knows within her
time is a rhythm without clocks,
a body that tells
time every month,
her hidden scars and bruises
show time passes.

-Paul Brookes

*

Bios and Links

-Alex Mazey

(b.1991) received his MA (distinction) from Keele University in 2017. He later won The Roy Fisher Prize for Poetry with his debut pamphlet, ‘Bread and Salt’ (Flarestack, TBA). He was also the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019. His poetry has featured regularly in anthologies and literary press magazines, most notably in The London Magazine. His collection of essays, ‘Living in Disneyland’, will be available from Broken Sleep Books in October 2020. Alex spent 2018 as a resident of The People’s Republic of China, where he taught the English Language in a school run by the Ministry of Education. His writing has been described as ‘wry and knowing,’ with ‘an edge that tears rather than cuts or deals blows.’

Twitter: @AlexzanderMazey

Instagram: alexmazey

Here is my interview of Alex:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/12/18/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-alex-mazey/

-Rich Follett

is a High School English and Creative Writing teacher who has been writing poems and songs for more than forty years. His poems have been featured in numerous online and print journals, including BlazeVox, The Montucky Review, Paraphilia, Leaf Garden Press and the late Felino Soriano’s CounterExample Poetics, for which he was a featured artist. Three volumes of poetry, Responsorials (with Constance Stadler), Silence, Inhabited, and Human &c. are available through NeoPoiesis Press (www.neopoiesispress.com.)

As a singer-songwriter, Rich has released five albums of independent contemporary folk music. His latest. Somewhere in the Stars, is available at http://www.richfollett.com. He lives with his wife Mary Ruth Alred Follett in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he also pursues his interests as a professional actor, playwright, and director.

-Ankh Spice

is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (NZ). His poetry has appeared in a wide range of international publications and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He truly believes that words have the power to change the place we’re in, and you’ll find him doing his best to prove it on

Twitter: @SeaGoatScreams
or on Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry

-Carrie Ann Golden

is a deafblind writer from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in northeastern North Dakota. She writes dark fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in places like Piker Press, Edify Fiction, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, GFT Press, Asylum Ink, and Visual Verse.

-sonja benskin mesher

born , Bournemouth.

now

lives and works in North Wales
as an independent artist

‘i am a multidisciplinary artist, crafting paint, charcoal, words and whatever comes to hand, to explain ideas and issues

words have not come easily. I draw on experience, remember and write. speak of a small life’.

Elected as a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy and the United Artists Society
The work has been in solo exhibitions through Wales and England, and in selected and solo worldwide.
Much of the work is now in both private, and public collections, and has been featured in several television documentaries, radio programmes and magazines.

Here is my interview of sonja benskin mesher:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/10/16/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-sonja-benskin-mesher/

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/11/02/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-don-beukes/

*

My goal in life is the destruction of 5G masts. I cut my sandwich
into triangles as a lower-middle class pretension. Back outside,
my window, one time, a cream room, a view of the street’s antenna.
The problem with David Lynch is how he makes too much sense.
Back in the simulacrum, a boy, my age, rangers in North America,
first as tragedy, then as… ironing out our balaclavas, filling out
our milk bottles; backpacks unattended on park benches, on the bus.

*

A page of Baudrillard, hides the truth
to view witnesses fraying little by little
into ruins, discernible ruined empire,
rotting carcass of the soil double ends
simulation, this fabled second-order
no longer that of a territory, no longer
saturated, a hyperreal map one must

return without origin, shreds unusable
a questionable sovereign difference –
the charm abstraction, the coextensivity
of poetry, the representation produced
no imaginary. Operational, in fact, no
longer memory radiating synthesis, no
space without atmosphere, no worse

curvature. Imitation, nor duplication;
leaving room for simulated liquidation.

-Alex Mazey

.the title changes.

there is too much interference
things could be left alone
things were alright anyway

the battery is low yet plugged
in the radio buzzes.

things are distorted

so i did what he says,
whilst running up
and down the stairs.

source to av,
only there aint no av,
not
on that one anyhow.

press my scart lead,
that is probably it.

press the sky button,
the sky does not respond.

we still has television snow.

mine are bifocal
and can distort gently
if i concentrate poorly
on the centre
i have had help a while
grateful at least that i can
see
unlike some of my family

yesterday I watched a documentary
about monkeys

-sonja benskin mesher

The new starboard

Our larvae split their skin
in the signal-fry, warmed over
by the wire-witched currents
of one filigree moon
in a hundredweight sky

and if we no longer see the stars
how do they counsel a chart for a new grub, or pull
a blood’s spirit-iron toward the dissolving north

and if we no longer feel these waves
how may we know our own water, what deeps us
for the giddy bubble of this sailing. And I know

there are rocks here still, they make chimneys of it
to vent everything we can’t burn
railing sparks against the sky-
silver that meshes none of our tides true

and it will rain hot tonight, the sizzle
pelting the new hatchlings

-Ankh Spice

Of Forest And Stick

Foe forest, faux forest
fee-fi-fo forest.
Where giants hurl
their broken stories
from broadcast heaven
to stone cast ground.
Real, this least of things.

Inarticulate metal arms
pluck down your dreams, to
place within the flakes
of soul slow dying desiccation.

Sick insects wave.
These metal poles sway
clamped to roof and breast.

All point as one, their
martyr fingers show.
As minds walk psychotic
in their circular days.

To stars and planets
that orbit our night
sleep late night
drunk deep on their
celestial milky ways.

Antennae wave hello.
Behind smudged glass walls
as we sit and stare
into this aquarium hell
of our own making.

As we spread across
our furniture of
forked cartons,
plastic and messy despair
We start to take on
our corrupt story.

© Dai Fry 4th May 2020.

Reception

Quiet the cluttered airways.
Listen.
Too many voices reaching skyward,
Clamoring for reception,
Propelling selfhood upward,

Destroys collaborative
Synergy.
And interference causes failure. After all,
Man-made towers were only
Ever meant to fall.

-st

Every Stem Is

an aerial, antennae whose signal
carries an image and a sound
of growth and bloom.

Leaves are directors,
flagellum, reach out,
test the air and vibrations.

Listen can your hear
the messages,
or is it distorted,

image overlaid on image,
sound overlaid on sound?

It processes fake news,
phishing and cyber attacks.
discerns real from false.
scents and trails.

A filter bubble,
an information sceptic
decides what diminishes it,
what makes it grow.

what makes it turn
towards warmth,
towards brightness.

More than a conduit.

-Paul Brookes

effluorescence

concrete flowerbed:
aluminium amaranths
dream of fecund earth

-Rich Follett

These gray structures loom
Like a dead alloy forest
A mill’s epitaph

-Carrie Ann Golden

The Arrival (EEN)

Blue eclipse sudden shudder silver vibrations
strange sensations mauve hues silent screams
shattered dreams rainbow screams black
void bleak skies pink cries identity hides no
way out seek beware who goes there wait stop
where no here why there marble hush turquoise
crush hide smile cry illusion confusion static
wailing connections failing conscience melting
blood moon a light alight powder dawn seek
destroy rebuild regenerate no rescue failed
sight emerald night pyramid flight incoming
yellow tongue purple feast horrible sightings
a drone atone leave us alone lavender glass
chards charge cut chaos comet rush – Reverse

The Arrival (TWEE)

Falling earth new birth cosmic boom
blast break away descend evacuate
take position brace brave pathetic beast
eject object reject investigate attack
no way back hold blinding strobe light
up get up move no room fire storm
go swerve dive testing resting make
haste chase erase record a face strange
days delete reboot reverse rethink incoming
homecoming survive surrender sharp solar
bursts the thirst implosion ration succession
orchestration new nation sinking earth
toxic rebirth black hole tar soul screeching
silence severed signals strange sour suns

-Don Beukes

Bios and Links

-Alex Mazey

(b.1991) received his MA (distinction) from Keele University in 2017. He later won The Roy Fisher Prize for Poetry with his debut pamphlet, ‘Bread and Salt’ (Flarestack, TBA). He was also the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019. His poetry has featured regularly in anthologies and literary press magazines, most notably in The London Magazine. His collection of essays, ‘Living in Disneyland’, will be available from Broken Sleep Books in October 2020. Alex spent 2018 as a resident of The People’s Republic of China, where he taught the English Language in a school run by the Ministry of Education. His writing has been described as ‘wry and knowing,’ with ‘an edge that tears rather than cuts or deals blows.’

Twitter: @AlexzanderMazey

Instagram: alexmazey

Here is my interview of Alex:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/12/18/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-alex-mazey/

-Rich Follett

is a High School English and Creative Writing teacher who has been writing poems and songs for more than forty years. His poems have been featured in numerous online and print journals, including BlazeVox, The Montucky Review, Paraphilia, Leaf Garden Press and the late Felino Soriano’s CounterExample Poetics, for which he was a featured artist. Three volumes of poetry, Responsorials (with Constance Stadler), Silence, Inhabited, and Human &c. are available through NeoPoiesis Press (www.neopoiesispress.com.)

As a singer-songwriter, Rich has released five albums of independent contemporary folk music. His latest. Somewhere in the Stars, is available at http://www.richfollett.com. He lives with his wife Mary Ruth Alred Follett in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he also pursues his interests as a professional actor, playwright, and director.

-Ankh Spice

is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (NZ). His poetry has appeared in a wide range of international publications and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He truly believes that words have the power to change the place we’re in, and you’ll find him doing his best to prove it on

Twitter: @SeaGoatScreams
or on Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry

-Carrie Ann Golden

is a deafblind writer from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in northeastern North Dakota. She writes dark fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in places like Piker Press, Edify Fiction, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, GFT Press, Asylum Ink, and Visual Verse.

-sonja benskin mesher

born , Bournemouth.

now

lives and works in North Wales
as an independent artist

‘i am a multidisciplinary artist, crafting paint, charcoal, words and whatever comes to hand, to explain ideas and issues

words have not come easily. I draw on experience, remember and write. speak of a small life’.

Elected as a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy and the United Artists Society
The work has been in solo exhibitions through Wales and England, and in selected and solo worldwide.
Much of the work is now in both private, and public collections, and has been featured in several television documentaries, radio programmes and magazines.

Here is my interview of sonja benskin mesher:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/10/16/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-sonja-benskin-mesher/

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/11/02/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-don-beukes/

May 4

.shrink.

the child psychiatrist and oh how we can spell that
lodged up the stone steps at the clinic
the air was nice that day and she was shown blobs
said they were butterflies
watched the dolls act and
said that was junk really

that father had just run off with another woman
that was how they talked then
he probably walked
maybe hurried to get away

declared sane at eleven
left at half past with the
gift of a bible kept for the ages

thought that was rubbish too

she was small in that place

shrink

-sonja benskin mesher

*

So many people give birth to nothing. This line is extremely
unimpressive, but knot ties, in some small way, to something
tangible, outside of the self, like this painting, like this person,
not waving nor drowning; Linkola’s cats, Murakami’s cats,
the cats in a Studio Ghibli animation, like the girl-witch from
Kiki’s Delivery Service, like the fading behind Mark Fisher,
a fisher man, a fisher man like Pentti Linkola, dying in 2020.

*

I am not all that impressed
with the technological ability
to view, with intricate detail,
the delicate impressions of a
wing. It seems eyes can form,
into the deoxyribonucleic acid,
into many things. Enthusiasm is
not located in a scientific word.
It is not so fascinating – really.

-Alex Mazey

Quiet Please

I take my bow,
it is really yours.
Proud bends the back
of the master.
Semaphored arms
embrace acoustic gold.

The tenants appraise,
heads in silenced rows.
Bodies rustle, anticipation is
subsumed into soft cough
and quiet creak.

All is submission
as a pin of fallen angels
sprawls across the floor.
Equations their silent recitals
while music sits patient
as an obedient hound.

So now…
To elevate a multitude
of trailing notes.
Spinning of helicopter leaves
in a brass breeze.
A syncing of vibration and desire
pitches each point perfect,
till buttercup soft
lit hard and sharp,
under home’s dull light.
Sour as summer lemon trees.
Then boom-dark crash,
as water calling dead souls
to the combe.

And all this while
in a discomfort of seats,
ears make ready to meet
the brightling core
that sits within.

-©. Dai Fry 3rd May 2020.

The Speech

Shadow Nation – We exist in cold shadows where
our fading echoes are drowned by your bulldozers
in the name of progress – Yet in the dead of night
you stalk us hunt us to delete us silence us mock us
bury us until we float away as ash a hush – Outcasts

We, the Mothers – We gave you life but your journey
crossed unknown paths, bowing down to greedy gods
sucking your soul dry but you welcomed promised riches
licked bitter molasses with gravy train false preachers,
Forgetting your inherent good essence resulting in your
Foretold death sentence. Our grief is no relief our warnings
Faded into nothing as you left us broken, eternally hurting…

Vision X – Your world is no more. You are here but
in another sphere another existence an alternative reality
because of your foolish insistence to enact nuclear
annihilation, depleting all nations. You stare at me but
your voice is muted as you attempt to explain your
existential burning pain still searing through your
perforated punctured soul – How you willingly
participated in a man-made selfish senseless
final war to claim the ultimate earthly prize – Ruling
the global village, oh how wrong you were! Thinking
you would last your nuclear winter but you melted
each other deleted each other destroyed your
earthly legacy by your insatiable hunger for power.

Well, here you are – Stuck on Planet X, destined
to find no eternal rest whilst dead stars of eons
ago further darken this existence and the light of
exploded suns now blind your new vision…

© Don Beukes

In This Place

Wings do not fly.
Mirrors do not reflect.
Arms raised ask for folk
to lie face down on the floor.

Decay is praised.
Illness is needed.
Death is requested.

Life is despised.
Nurses are criminals.
information is disinformation.

Paranoia is wanted.
Conspiracies are welcomed.
Demands are never met.

Government advice must be ignored.
All advice has a use by date.
Use by dates are decided by us all.

Control is freedom.
Take back control.

-Paul Brookes

inside my name

dream state, Monday, 2 AM
mothwing Navajo vagina;
Georgia O’Keeffe portal to an alternate universe;
Rohrschach montage of feminine puissance
with Bette Davis eyelashes and cheerleader breasts

transfixed, i plunge into its pulsing core
emerging in grade school
where I wrote my name in conté
on clean white paper
folded and then opened—
wrote so carefully, never crossing the midline—
then just as carefully
colored in the loops and angles,
folded the paper back again
(folded it like a prayer)
and rubbed it with a block of wood

we were told to expect other worlds
when we opened that fold again—
told that secrets would be revealed

i did not see other worlds
i saw only what seemed to be
sidewalk chalk art
marred by sudden summer rain

i have waited five decades
for this morphologic grace—
this mothwing Navajo vagina;
Georgia O’Keeffe portal to an alternate universe;
Rohrschach montage of feminine puissance
with Bette Davis eyelashes and cheerleader breasts

dream state, Monday, 3 AM
i wake with grateful tears,
having seen at last
inside my name …

-Rich Follett

Lockdown scored for one instrument

After noticing you have gritted your teeth
(these days contain all we cannot bite gone)
choose a tuning shape. Knot yourself closed,
or petal out your limbs
towards the constant poke of the world.
Either way you annotate a rest.
Either way you are not how you began,
and you may hear the breath
drawn at the beginning of the stave.
Music is always quivering somewhere
in the darkness of a body;
in a chamber of polished wood
in the auditorium of bone
(that same clench heavying shoulders).
Tune your knot. Turn your wood.
Poise the humming star of your frame
and play, unbowed or wound, just
play until your last string breaks.

-Ankh Spice

Entrapment

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal” –Matt. 6:19

Trapped between
Window and pane,
Moth wings open and shut
Like pages of a book. Dust

Flutters forth
From the cover
Between which words, too,
Are trapped, unable to do

Their work, live and breathe,
Seek and find, call forth action,
Convey the power to believe.
I am a moth. Set me free.

-st

The Artist, for Day Four, Part One

An artist’s mind
Unlike the rest of the masses
Is a visionary kind
Reality to him
May be pretend to others
He bends on a whim

-Carrie Ann Golden

Bios and Links

-Alex Mazey

(b.1991) received his MA (distinction) from Keele University in 2017. He later won The Roy Fisher Prize for Poetry with his debut pamphlet, ‘Bread and Salt’ (Flarestack, TBA). He was also the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019. His poetry has featured regularly in anthologies and literary press magazines, most notably in The London Magazine. His collection of essays, ‘Living in Disneyland’, will be available from Broken Sleep Books in October 2020. Alex spent 2018 as a resident of The People’s Republic of China, where he taught the English Language in a school run by the Ministry of Education. His writing has been described as ‘wry and knowing,’ with ‘an edge that tears rather than cuts or deals blows.’

Twitter: @AlexzanderMazey

Instagram: alexmazey

Here is my interview of Alex:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/12/18/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-alex-mazey/

-Rich Follett

is a High School English and Creative Writing teacher who has been writing poems and songs for more than forty years. His poems have been featured in numerous online and print journals, including BlazeVox, The Montucky Review, Paraphilia, Leaf Garden Press and the late Felino Soriano’s CounterExample Poetics, for which he was a featured artist. Three volumes of poetry, Responsorials (with Constance Stadler), Silence, Inhabited, and Human &c. are available through NeoPoiesis Press (www.neopoiesispress.com.)

As a singer-songwriter, Rich has released five albums of independent contemporary folk music. His latest. Somewhere in the Stars, is available at http://www.richfollett.com. He lives with his wife Mary Ruth Alred Follett in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he also pursues his interests as a professional actor, playwright, and director.

-Ankh Spice

is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (NZ). His poetry has appeared in a wide range of international publications and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He truly believes that words have the power to change the place we’re in, and you’ll find him doing his best to prove it on

Twitter: @SeaGoatScreams
or on Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry

-Carrie Ann Golden

is a deafblind writer from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in northeastern North Dakota. She writes dark fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in places like Piker Press, Edify Fiction, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, GFT Press, Asylum Ink, and Visual Verse.

-sonja benskin mesher

born , Bournemouth.

now

lives and works in North Wales
as an independent artist

‘i am a multidisciplinary artist, crafting paint, charcoal, words and whatever comes to hand, to explain ideas and issues

words have not come easily. I draw on experience, remember and write. speak of a small life’.

Elected as a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy and the United Artists Society
The work has been in solo exhibitions through Wales and England, and in selected and solo worldwide.
Much of the work is now in both private, and public collections, and has been featured in several television documentaries, radio programmes and magazines.

Here is my interview of sonja benskin mesher:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/10/16/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-sonja-benskin-mesher/

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/11/02/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-don-beukes/