-Christine O’Connor

-Marcel Herms “All the talk about getting results”

-Kerfe Roig “I was born (after Yayoi Kusama)”

I was born

I was born
Blank slate
Touched by neither phropesy nor fate

I was born
Budding traits
Balancing on point til they meet love or hate

I was born
Curiosity great
Learned my sex should their minds prostrate

I was born
Told to wait
Stay still, be quiet, one day someone chooses you as mate

I was born
Killed as bait
Some women never get scared witless nor straight

I was reborn
To illustrate
There’s life after trauma that minds titillate

I was reborn
Myself dedicate
The right to survive and freedom to thrive reinstate

I was reborn
Souls to elate
To love and pain vividly narrate

I was reborn
Loving state
New creative and passionate adventures await

©RedCat

Nature invades the city (CO17)

It all started with moss dotting the pavement,
grass edging through the crack between the steps,
shrubs seeding on roofs and poking out of tiles.
In the distance on the hills defining our horizon
we could see the pine forest. Some days it looked bigger,
but we thought it was just a trick of the haze.
Soon, it got harder to close the door. The clematis
and jasmine wound their way around hinges
and sent shoots around the lintel, spreading inside.
One of my friends called to say a sapling had sprouted
in her living room. She has to prune it before she can
watch the telly. Apparently it is a sycamore.
Down the road they had a problem with hydrangeas
taking over the entire housing development, invading
each flat one by one like the ants used to way back.
I think we won’t hold out much longer. I opened
the window this morning to find an enormous
hollyhock blocking my view. It muscled high into the air,
its baby pink flowers raising their stamens to the sun
like satellite dishes looking for a signal. I closed the window,
but tendrils curled over the glass, spiralling out of control.
I called the police, but I think it’s too late. Just now I dared
to approach the balcony and saw that now the entire street
has turned green, disappeared completely underneath trees.

-Hilary Otto

A response to all three works of art:
“All the talk about getting results” MH17 CO17. “I was born” KR17

All the Strands Carried, Come Together and Dissolve

The talking heads talk, on TV screens
and from online streams, pontificate and remonstrate
elucidate, and then negate—
but flowers do not wait

for thoughts and prayers, the analysis of fools’ blares.
Unaware of blithering-blather, the slathering lather
of rabid madness—

feeling neither hope or sadness,
they simply do

until they’re through.

And, I am born, as are you–
in their petal-dust, scattered or buried,
river-ferried or eagle-carried,
or by winds and air brought here—again,
again, again–

then on a sigh, we’re here to live until we die,
and nourish once more the flowers that grow
and glow—
with a wave to bees, a waltz for trees—

a balm we seize,
a thread connecting bodies, earth, air, sea-
from the stars reborn, hearts, heads—we.

-Merril D Smith

I Was Born (after Yayoi Kusama) – KR17

It was the D.N.A.
That made me this way.
When I was an egg we all looked the same
and to tell me apart they gave me a name.

I found fellow beings with arms legs and faces,
I even discovered there were numerous races.
I became different, sometimes crazy, not wild.
There’ll be no one like me; for I have no child.

16,Ja,2021 for the seventeenth of.
=Alan Gary Smith, inspired by Paul Brookes and the painter Kiroji Roige.

CO17

Scrapbooking

I’m Dead, Now What? Title of a journal
pushed to the far back corner of my desk,
a work of love. I tuck in needful info
for my children to find some day. Hollyhocks
will greet them in their search for car titles.
Shelves of books, sunrises and tax returns–
Midway in this journey, a dark wood.
Location of the will, how to care for
the dogs. Deed to the hundred-year-old house,
the sea. Scraps of my life to be plugged in
where needed. Wrap it all up.
Scatter to winds I have chosen.

-Holly York

Bios And Links

-Kerfe Roig

A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new.  Her poetry and art have been featured online by Right Hand Pointing, Silver Birch Press, Yellow Chair Review, The song is…, Pure Haiku, Visual Verse, The Light Ekphrastic, Scribe Base, The Zen Space, and The Wild Word, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, Pea River Journal, Fiction International: Fool, Noctua Review, The Raw Art Review, and several Nature Inspired anthologies. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/  (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/, and see more of her work on her website http://kerferoig.com/

-Christine O’Connor

is an artist working in glass, metal, fibre and paint. Sometimes her work is based on photographs, but more often, she creates in the moment. She loves to play with texture and colour.

Christine O'Connor

-Marcel Herms

is a Dutch visual artist. He is also one of the two men behind the publishing house Petrichor. Freedom is very important in the visual work of Marcel Herms. In his paintings he can express who he really is in complete freedom. Without the social barriers of everyday life.
There is a strong relationship with music. Like music, Herms’ art is about autonomy, freedom, passion, color and rhythm. You can hear the rhythm of the colors, the rhythm of the brushstrokes, the raging cry of the pencil, the subtle melody of a collage. The figures in his paintings rotate around you in shock, they are heavily abstracted, making it unclear what they are doing. Sometimes they look like people, monsters, children or animals, or something in between. Sometimes they disappear to be replaced immediately or to take on a different guise. The paintings invite the viewer to join this journey. Free-spirited.

He collaborates with many different authors, poets, visual artists and audio artists from around the world and his work is published by many different publishers.

www.marcelherms.nl

www.uitgeverijpetrichor.nl

=Redcat

RedCat’s love for music and dance sings clearly in The Poet’s Symphony (Raw Earth Ink, 2020). Passion for rhythms and rhymes, syllabic feets and metres. All born out of childhood and adolescence spent reading, singing, dancing and acting.

Her writing spans love, life, mythology, environment, depression and surviving trauma.

Originally from the deep woods, this fiery redhead now makes home in Stockholm, Sweden, where you might normally run into her dancing the night away in one of the city’s techno clubs.

Read more at redcat.wordpress.com

-Merril D Smith

is a historian and poet. She lives in southern New Jersey, where she is inspired by her walks along the Delaware River. She’s the author of several books on history, gender, and sexuality. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, including Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale and Sparrow, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fevers of the Mind.

-Godefroy Dronsart

is a writer, teacher, and musician currently residing near Paris. His poetry has appeared in Lunar Poetry, PostBLANK, Paris Lit Up, The Belleville Park Pages, and Twin Pies Literary among others. His first chapbook, “The Manual” (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020), explores the space between poetry, prose, and gamebooks. He has a sweet tooth for all things experimental, modernist, and strange. Follow him on Twitter and his Bandcamp for electronic explorations.

-Joy Fleming

Born in County Down, Joy has studied, mothered and worked in Scotland since 1980. Brief excursions to follow her heart, back to NI mid-1990’s and England for first round Covid-lockdown ’19, Joy is currently back living in Glasgow. Joy’s first poem was accepted as part of the C. S. Lewis themed Poetry Jukebox curation A Deeper Country in Belfast in 2019. This poem, Ricochet was published in The Poets’ Republic Issue 8 Autumn 2020. A love of reading poetry is now accompanied by sporadic writing of poetic lines which spill out as an apparent by-product of processing dark and sorrowful days.   

-Holly York

lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her two large, frightening lapdogs. A PhD in French language and literature, she has retired from teaching French to university students, as well as from fierce competition in martial arts and distance running. She has produced the chapbooks Backwards Through the Rekroy Wen, Scapes, and Postcard Poetry 2020. When she isn’t hard at work writing poems in English, she might be found reading them in French to her long-suffering grandchildren, who don’t yet speak French.

-Alan Gary Smith

A Lincolnshire Ludensian living in Grimsby who built up his poetic stance after visiting Doncaster and Mexborough during his real ale and comedic music searches. Surprised to find a recent DNA check leaned heavily towards being a strong mix of Scottish, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. A sixty year old baldy who loves Julie, astronomy and chocolate; after giving up on football and telly.

-Hilary Otto

is an English poet based in Barcelona. Her work has featured in Popshot, Black Bough Poetry, AIOTB, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and The Blue Nib, among other publications. She received her first Pushcart Prize Nomination and performed at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She tweets at @hilaryotto

-Jim young

 is an old poet living in Mumbles on The Gower. He does most of his writing from his beach hut at Rotherslade – still waiting for the blue plaque

Anjum Wasim Dar was born in Srinagar (Indian Occupied )Kashmir, She is a migrant Pakistani.Educated at
St Anne’s Presentation Convent Rawalpindi she has a Masters degree  in English Literature and  History (
Ancient Indo-Pak  Elective) CPE Cert.of Proficiency in English from Cambridge
UK. , a Diploma in TEFL from AIOU Open Uni. Islamabad Pakistan. She has been writing poems,

 articles and stories since 1980.A published  poet Anjum was awarded  Poet of Merit Bronze Medal in  2000 by ISP International Society of Poets and poetry.com USA .

She has worked as Creative Writer at Channel 7 Adv. Company Islamabad, and as a Teacher Educator for  Fauji Foundation Education Network Inservice Teachers  

Educational Consultant by Profession. 

Author of 3 Adventure Novels (Series) Fiction..