Day Twenty-two

Tuesday -Cockroaches

cockroach motel
I find myself drowning
in her pheromones

-John Hawkhead

the roaches pay rent in a place I made up

although they really own it & are called princesses
they also own certain places w/warm tvs, radios,
they share a damp bathroom & clawfoot tub w/everyone
on that floor, they rent an oil painting of someone
religious that hangs above a haunted bed 3 stories up,
(like all those old roaches climb stairs marbled) cold or
travel up an ancient creaky elevator red plushed w/a
person, part cockroach, doubles as a spy on the switchboard
when your mother calls & all the other roaches look out the
stair window to a small enclosed courtyard & see windows
of other roaches, they look out one to the street & see
clothes tossed down in righteous anger splattered on the sidewalk
watch potatoes fried in a plug-in skillet & dream of them in the day

-Connie Bacchus

After by Peter A.

-Jim the Poet

Cockroaches by Lynn Valentine

Cockroaches

In dark wet safe. Lowness my leg hairs tell.
If Else moves I know change in this tight Air.
My young molt, as I did, get harder shells.
Company is good. In dark am aware

food with my two long, long noses that come
out of my head, bounce, dangle, flick in front.
Good grub I tell others when I find some.
All will be eaten always on this hunt.

My young eat my waste among mounds
of cast
skins, egg cases and the dead. A crack let
me in to snuggle in warm corners fast
settle in your grease, droppings, food for pets

You horrify me with your pure cleanliness.
Live in shittip, I’ll join you in the mess.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

Constance Bacchus

lives in the Pacific Northwest with her daughter and often writes about nature. She has 3 self-published books, Swirl, RV Parks & Politics and the most recent is Secret Dam Things

Monday – Beetles

An Amazing, Alliterative, Incredible Insect Invasion

Big buzzing bees blagged my bananas
Hornets hid half of my ham
Six scary spiders scoffed my spicy sausages
Four flies filched my fruit flan

Ants ate all my apples (as always)
Crazed crickets crunched my carrot crisps
Beetles bit bits of my brown bread
Chiggers cheerfully chewed my chips

While wiggly worms whipped my Wotsits
Roaches removed and ran away with my rolls
Many maggots munched my mango, Mum
Twenty-two tiny ticks took my toast

That perfect picnic I precisely planned
A wonderful one-off occasion
Was decimated, demolished and destroyed
By an amazing, alliterative, incredible insect invasion

-Neal Zetter

Beetle by Marcel Herms

Beetles by sonja benskin mesher

Whirligig beetle

You think me superficial
but a surface is where
two worlds collide. Yes,
I look on the bright side
but my other half
eyes the depths.

You see stillness

but I’m on edge:
disturb me & I’ll scatter
like spilt quicksilver,
spiralling wildly
as a charged particle
in a bubble chamber.

-Andy MacGregor

Green Tiger Beetle

In a marram forest sweetened by lilac trumpets
of shore convolvulus, a tiny sun-crazed tiger
lies in wait, coiled as a steel spring.

With the sky as sharp as a blade,
in full lustre, this gaudy long-legged lady,
in sea-green dress and purple stockings

scans the dunes in fearful symmetry;
still as the breath of a foxglove
until fast as fire in parched moorland

she sprints after a spider, tears across crumbs
of silica and seashell. Six-legged slayer, she grabs,
decapitates, gorges with guillotine jaws.

-Annest Gwilym (from her collection: What The Owl Taught Me, 2020 and previously published in Poetry Space)

A Stag Beetle

Scratch decayed wood until it splinters. Hunt
these spikes for soft white wood swallow inside.
Indigestible I make a hard front,
swallow soil ready to throw back up outside.

Create a smooth cover, give myself horns,
six legs, two wings all soft and white. Don’t know
how I know how, where, and what shapes to form,
nor what light is, till lust makes me go,

shift this bulk, these wings buzz into hot bright.
There can be a few in battle for her.
My heavy horns twist, locked in long fight
to straddle her. Must turn them all over.

Hungered in dark most of my life.
Brief lusty flight, fight and sex in the light

-Paul Brookes (from The Insect Sonnets First published in David O’Nan’s Fevers of The Mind)

Day Twenty-one

-Mike Stone

-photo by Jim the Poet

-Neal Zetter

Photos of her barefoot niece by Maggs Vibo

Father’s Day

-Jenny Mitchell (from her debut collection ‘Her Lost Language’ pub. by Indigo Dreams. )

-V M A Gaskill

the good scout

jupiter and saturn in the southern sky
son and father each the other
now mute glowworms
late gas giants
courted by the stars
in their silent perspectives

on my back on the hard ground
of a barren mountain field
listening to my father
as we lay encamped
as he named the astral bodies
in their myriads

earlier that day he sent me to the village
to buy bread in a language not my own
he supplied me with a word in the arabic
khubz that the baker understood
and i returned with enough for ten
thus we make men of our sons

now comes the goddess with her golden lamp
now comes the reckoning of merit
much have i heard about illusions
much have i learned about deception
long will i remember the good scout
who named the morning stars to me

-W V Sutra

My Father as a Zephyr

Lightest of all things,
he blows in light of a perpetual spring,
scatters the salty Clyde with early summer breezes,
with seaweed fronds on soft foam,
fruit of our childhood holidays.
His soft stirring smile greets aquamarine.
His wind-song dances on fiddle strings, sotto.
The west wind restores dear ones
with a tease, a coorie-in, a purr.

-Maggie Mackay (from her collection ‘A West Coast Psalter’)

Their Father’s Business

Their father in an important mood
would roll up two starched shirts
and a pair of grey flannel trousers
all the time saying how tight
in those capsules he designed
for spacemen.
He shined and buffed
his black shoes, discussed the heat
on Mars, livable planets,
claiming he went just to watch,
to feel the rush of air
along his neck, the lift off.
But as the soft cloth carefully
worked his shoes
in single glossy motions
under the bright lamp,
his children thought that given a chance
his very own hands could force
a rocket from the launch pad,
cradle of fire.

-Moira J. Saucer

-Jim the Poet

-Kitty Donnelly (from her collection “The Impact of Limited Time”

I will never forget
The first time
You skimmed a pebble
Across the sea.
You reassured me
Stones could bounce
I listened disbelievingly
But as I watched
The sleeping rocks
Come to life
Riding the waves
I fell in love with the
Timeless sea
I’m still in love today.

-Jill Webb

-William Thirsk-Gaskill from his collection “Throwing Mother In The Skip”

-Tristan Moss

-Tristan Moss

-Tim Fellows

A TRIOLET TRIPTYCH : Halloween Revisited
In memory of my much-loved father Edmund Joseph Browning

Ready or not, dark memories take me there,
To that bay-windowed room where he would play
His old piano, perched on a cushioned chair.
Ready or not, dark memories take me there.
I hear him sing that hymn, I cannot bear
Reliving the slow film spool of that day.
Ready or not, dark memories take me there
To that bay-windowed room where he would play.

I see the double rainbow in the sky,
Seek to make peace with Fate, caught so off guard.
Dead at the wheel, on Halloween, but why?
I see the double rainbow in the sky,
Mop up October’s tears, resolve to try
And come to terms with this, but life is hard!
I see the double rainbow in the sky,
Seek to make peace with Fate, caught so off guard.

Relieved, I find his hymnal on the stand,
So clearly highlighted with words of hope.
‘I feel the promise is not vain’, his plan!
Relieved, I find his hymnal on the stand.
I realise he’s here, he holds my hand.
I know that somehow I’ll find strength to cope.
Relieved, I find his hymnal on the stand,
So clearly highlighted with words of hope.

-©️ Margaret Royall
From her poetry pamphlet ‘Earth Magicke”

-Neal Zetter

-Neal Zetter

-Kola Tobuson

-Simon Zec

-Neal Zetter

Grandad. Incomplete by my dad

portrait of my grandad by my dad

Never Only Considers Most

relevant part of a map.
When he gets lost, he stops,
at the entrance to the busiest junction,
sometimes, before a roundabout,
and unfolds a view of the world
to its fullest extent to find his way.

Perhaps, at work when he changes
one tiny part of the system he traces
its effect on a detailed drafted whole diagram
of council offices, hospitals
or nuclear subs where he has installed
new heating waste management services.

And I at work or home cursed with the same
need for thorough deliberation,
find bosses, wives and workmates sigh
at my slow, detailed examination
of an issue, that had I rushed,
as when angry, only find confusion.

My dad and I bring the whole going on
to a brief stop as others
who wish to get on, hoot, cringe,
whistle and toot their dismay.
We ignore them all to, quietly,
stubbornly, slowly map our way.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

-Moira J Saucer

is a disabled poet living in the Alabama Wiregrass. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, (Fayetteville) Creative Writing Program and an MA in English from the University of Delaware. Her poems have been published by Fevers of the Mind, Floodlight Editions, Burning House Press, Visual Verse, Mookychick, Fly on the Wall Poetry Press, and Ice Floe Press. Her debut – a full length poetry collection – is forthcoming in 2021-22 from Ice Floe Press

Day Twenty

All photos by Anne McMaster

The daisies close their tired eyes
Wild bluebells call the fairies home
The tulips point up to the skies
The parks and fields at dusk I roam
The spider weaves a silky maze
Puff balls in flight to hope and health
Round Emley Moor a distant haze
A cat looks up then moves with stealth
The time to pause. The time to hear
The time to breathe. Not time for fear

-Jo Fear

Above and Below

Cobblestone daisies
rise from stubborn roots
and tongued leaves
bright stars against
the ribbed slate night.

An ant creeps along
the herringbone road
while overhead green shanks
support milkwhite openness,
yellow pinheads of pollen.

-Angela Topping (from Paper Patterns (Lapwing 2012))

Dandelions For Mothers’ Day

“Pee-the-Beds” and “Mother-Die!”
“Pick it and your mam’ll die!”

“Faces like the sun.” she said
Plunged them in a jam-jar.

But they caught up with her: –
Stained her skin yellow,
Turned her hair to seed-clocks,
Blew away her years.

-Angela Topping (from her first collection)

All photos by Anne McMaster

Cowslips

I wanted to write a poem about cowslips, because, taking
my Covid 19 exercise, I saw some on a grassy bank
beside the beck and thought Oh they’re not extinct at all,
remembering fields of them on walks with Dad,
those freckled yellow bells where Prospero’s sprite
Ariel couched, wobbling above tooth-nibbled green rosettes,
scent similar to apricots, petals distilled to pale wine sipped
by country maids, bucolic vicars in Elizabeth Gaskill novels.
St Peter’s Keys, the rustics called them – they sprang up
from where he dropped the means of getting into Heaven.
Then I discovered the most likely origin of their name.
Cowslip.
They like to flower where cows have slupped or slopped,
bob among the pats, the crusty mottle wobbling above
liquid green, where skinny orange flies paddle and probe.
I remember plodging a plastic sandal accidentally in,
watching white sock soak up the viscous sludge.
My kids, out on the same walks, would taunt each other,
threaten to drop stones – plop – into the shite,
spray it up legs, up backs, sometimes did.
Cowslup, Cowslop. Cowslip.
I still like them though.

-Ann Cuthbert

LADY CONVOLVULUS

Pretty as a picture in white and pink
Lady Convolvulus lifts up her head.
The jewels of the morning adorn her cheeks
and her green gown winds about her legs.

And my lady creeps and my lady runs.
On a summer wind she blows.
When she tilts her chin to kiss the sun
she will follow where he goes.

Yet my lady sighs and my lady weeps.
My lady cleaves and clings.
Till she binds her lover where he sleeps.
A green and fecund web she spins.

(first published Hysteria Poetry Competition, Winners’ Anthology, 2014)

THE HONEYSUCKLE

The honeysuckle hides her jewel
in hedgerows thick with thorn.
And blackbird sings most tunefully
where weeds in wheels conceal his song.

To blossom and to sing we too
require a privacy.
To flourish occurs best
in hearts attuned to mystery.

CAMPION

Sweet campion comes late in May
when golden king cups raise their heads
and all about the tawny carn
a merry May-time madness spreads

As bluebells fade like ghosts away
and bow their faces to the dust
while hedgerows sing and daisies dan.e
and grass leaps up because it must.

It’s then in pink and white and red
this spring-time’s maiden green is dressed.
And all through June she lingers on
as summer’s modest, lovely guest.

VALERIAN

Once pretty in pink
you are innocent no longer
but frowsy now
under the sun.

Your head lolls
like a drowsing drunk’s
towards the lulling,
oblivion of sleep.

Briefly you flourished
where the old wall cracks,
your slender roots
fingering this dust.

Now you dig down deep
for the cooling dark,
grimly holding out,
holding on.

-Abigail Elizabeth Ottley

Late dad’s wildflowers

Daisies

Pluck all on the lawn, turn my back and more
appear. I should poison them all, be rid.
But, I do not want to open the door
of making our cats ill, which is sordid.

Whenever a child dies God sprinkles earth
with Daisies. Freya’s favourite flower.
I would slaughter innocents for the worth
of a pure lawn. It’s within my power

to purify the green destroy yellow.
I deem, dictate what’s a weed and what’s not.
Perhaps, I should rewild a bit, allow
Daisies in only one part of my plot.

Delusions of grandeur, an obsessive
space manipulator, an oppressive.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links
-Abigail Elizabeth Ottley
writes poetry and short fiction. Her work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines, journals and anthologies. A former English teacher with a lifelong interest in history, Abigail lives in Penzance where she cares for her very elderly mother and is currently writing her first novel.