Parasite

Attachment
leads to all sorts of side-effects:

stunting growth,
loss of strength.
Infestation leaves

you breathless, unable
to take on oxygen,
dying of thirst and want
of life

while it thrives. And replaces

you, when you are too weak
to support it. You

who nurtured
it from a seed
penetrating deep down

in your dark veins. It has grown
away from the light

taken on a toxic slant.

A bad case can kill.

If you knew what I know,
you wouldn’t be kissing.

-Louise Longson

Bio and Links

-Louise Longson

started writing poetry in her late 50s, during isolation in lockdown 2020. She is published by One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Nymphs, Ekphrastic Review, Obsessed with Pipework, Indigo Dreams Publishing, Dust Magazine, Modern Haiku, Dreich, Black Bough Poetry, The Poetry Shed and others. She is the author of the ‘Slim’ chapbook (12 poems), Hanging Fire (Dreich Publications, 2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (18 poems) (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).  A qualified psychotherapist, she works remotely from her home in a small village for a charity that offers a listening service to people whose physical and emotional distress is caused by loneliness and historic trauma. Her poems are inspired by a bringing together of her personal and work experiences, seen through the twin prisms of myth and legend, and the natural environment.

Twitter @LouisePoetical

Gloss

Surfaces
are what we see
rain glanced, and street
lights, traffic lights, sing under them, tell
me! Green
or red?

-Dave Garbutt

The world is
full of colours,

provided the
viewer registers
the divine
display

and,

like
an involved
stage actor

becomes integrated
with the mise-en-scene

for an excited
Elizabethan audience.

Text/s. Actor/s.
Scene/s. Spectators:
Seamlessly one:
Sublime action!

-Sunil Sharma

JD24

KANE24

PB24

Come and see the World open itself

“Mr Dockray has found them in Autumn crammed with blackberries which they had doubtless gathered on the edges of ponds and ditches”
British Birds, TA Coward, series 2, pg 47, Warne & Co, London, 1920.

We feed a lot, we ducks, we sleep a lot, we ducks
But, we are not ‘ducks’ but Wigeon.

We are waiting for those who who say “Duck!”,
who say “Mallard”, to look
at our round heads, soft faces and blue-grey fine duckish beaks
we, with our whistles and our flocks cropping grass,
are waiting to be distinguished, seen.

We are waiting for March to wing in moonlight
across the Dogger sea back to our summer ponds and rivers
where we are known as markers of spring
pond possessors of March
whistlers by day and dark
yellow-crowned hope of midsummer
haapana

(haapana is Finnish for Widgeon)

-Dave Garbutt

KANE23

JD23

PB23