Auld Simon

A full moon casts a yellow glow
illuminating the clock face of
Auld Simon

The old cemetery sits comfortably
at the bottom of the Jonshill
A proud village relic
surrounded by cobbled stone walls

When we were children
Our nana would tell us stories
of the families buried
in the grounds

Pestilence had claimed the
lives of many
diphtheria, smallpox, cholera
and tuberculosis
Death didn’t discriminate
It came for the young, old
And everyone in between

When dusk falls in Old Lochineuch
Sometimes you will catch a glimpse of
the lost children playing
Hide and seek
in the shadows

Bird Song

The day the earth
Stopped moving –
I found my voice,
No longer drowned out
By the incessant chatter of the
world

I spread my petals
Like butterfly wings
I was blooming in adversity

My bird song
Rang out over the rooftops
Skimming the skyline
as it…

Stress
My minds in a mess
Everything is upside down and back to front
Trump
Off you go to the Florida keys
Keep hitting those wayward drives off the tees!
Complications with the vaccine
Teens
Worried about their exams
Sick of attending the classroom with their video cams
United top of the league!
A season with no fans providing some intrigue
A time in history parallel with no other
Mothers
Home schooling the kids whilst trying to avoid blowing their lids
Everybody hoping and praying this will be all over
Laughter and smiles are as rare as a four leaved clover!

Liam Flanagan is a 47 year old living in Galway, Ireland. Degree in English and Philosophy and a Teaching Diploma. Ten years experience in the IT industry. Likes Sport, Film and Music.

Old things

I tried new things
but the carcass of the old things
took up too
much space

If I ever

If I ever wonder within the realms of fantasy, 
the sombreness of your voice 
will beckon me back to reality.
If I ever get lost in the sheets of disillusionment,
the gentleness of your touch
will waken sleeping hope.
If I ever roam around helplessly in the endless maze
of life’s predicaments, the exuberance
of your smile will brighten the dark road;
guiding me back home.
But if I ever forget you:
-who-
-what-
-where-
you are;
let the unsung hymn that you kindle in
the depths of your bosom
sing loudly to my silence.
For I
-being blinded by reality-
-spurned by fantasy-
will grope onto each 
rhythm-less and clumsy note and 
find my way back.
To you.

Shiksha is a South African of Indian descent. She uses…

16.
His parents
divorce.
He can’t understand
where the love went,
how it could
end and leave
nothing but a hardened
rectangle of vitriol
and a slew of insults
that he tries sometimes to bury
in the backyard
and sometimes
in intoxicants.

22.
His first real love
ends without insults
after three years
and they part
like long lost
friends
who won’t recognize
each other when they bump
into each other around town
after months of not bumping
into each other in their apartment.
He looks for it
in photos though,
and he sees it in one
from that time at the zoo
when they bumped into a friend
from work and the secret
of their new love
became known.

34.
He says, “I do.”
His second love
says it too
and after the honeymoon
they set their pictures
about their apartment and sit on the couch
with beers
and…

Maggs Vibo (she/her) experiments with glitch films and folklore imagery in the fringes of the art
world. In 2020, her cinepoems debuted with Army at the Arts at the Virtual Fringe Festival and
her visual art showed at the Poem Atlas exhibition ‘Escapisms.’ Her latest poetry is available in
the anthology Fevers of the Mind Press Presents the Poets of 2020 (January 2021). She has
forthcoming and published war poetry in Afterwords (Spring, 2021), ‘My teeth don’t chew on
shrapnel’: an anthology of poetry by military veterans (Oxford Brookes University, 2020), and
O-Dark-Thirty, 5.3 Anthology (Spring, 2017), 4.2 (Winter, 2016); and 4.3 (Spring, 2016). She
tweets @maggsvibo and her website is poemythology.com.

THEN AROUSED, NOW DEVOTED

All dreams lie shackled in my fist
When nestled up in your arms
on a cot of supple grass blades

Goosebumps of exultation
being my sole attire
Serene under a luminous blanket
Stars apprenticed by your eyes

Paying no heed to the absence of breasts
For inside the wall that hung them
lies your most intoxicating & attractive organ your heart

Casket to Universe

A body that’s been breathing for 30+ years is only now infused with life
with your acknowledgement

My heart that was just an ash of a wing is a vibrant bird again
with your head nestled against it

Once the waterfalls that overflowed from the eyes are now priceless pearls
when brushed against your fingers

I steal a glance of your coruscating eyes & see myself more limpid
than in any mirror

Locutions like “love” & “romance”
are innominate to my soul

When I Say I Want You to Love Me

what I mean is – I want you be reckless.

I want you to throw rocks through windows of abandoned buildings,
and make love on the shattered glass
just so we have a story of how these scars covered our bodies.

I want us to spend months creating a garden,
only to rip it the heads from the flowers
uproot tomatoes and leave them to rot
and start over because we got bored.

I want you to buy me every flavor of cotton candy
because you weren’t sure that I’d like it,
but knew I’d like one.

I want you to dance with me
on top of a mountain top
in the middle of a wildfire
until smoke fills our lungs
with no guarantee the firefighters
will be able to save us.

I want to swim out so far,
my arms…

A cradle of uncertainties
are stretching out it’s limbs
to enwrap my futile heart
Embrace me
No..not enough..
Just squeeze me
Lemme melt into you
until there is no space between
this moment and the ensuing

In you
the heart perceives
it’s euphony of love
In you
the poetry finds
it’s crowning asylum
In you
the drizzle rain unfurls
and undresses its ego

You let me float in the waves,
curl up with a book and
follow by crazy beats
You ensured my own space
Now take my breath with you
Press yourself on my wilderness
Make me aware of the worth of my soul
Rhyming with the beats lemme melt into you
like a free falling never ending rain!

Akhila is from Trivandrum, India and is the founder and sole contributor of wordsandnotion.com and qualitynotion.com. By profession she is a software Quality and Quantitative data analyst. She is…

*From the Fevers of the Mind Press Presents the Poets of 2020*

All of the poems that follow first appeared in their original, unedited forms on the WombwellRainbow blog. Thank you to Paul Brookes for curating with such care, and the artists (MaryFrances Ness, James Knight, and Sue Harpham) who provided images for the month-long ekphrastic challenge which inspired them

That which can be made visible *

Sun’s first sleep-breath
sweets the dropped shoulder

of Te Puia o Whakaari, her bones
in early mistlight all grace

and delicate pickings, gulled
clavicles of a hard dancer, stilled

Coiled tension is resting. It is hard
to recognise a haunting

in the rose-gilt of a sunrise. Do you know
her name, when you recognised it

did you forget to exhale? Release
your living now to cloud

the pane we do not see – deep
scratches creep across this vision.

The guardians are…