Read The Mercy Hour here:

Taylor Byas

Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is now a second year PhD student and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She was the 1st place winner of both the Poetry Super Highway and the Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests. Her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is forthcoming from Variant Lit in the summer of 2021. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Glass, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hobart, Frontier Poetry, SWWIM, TriQuarterly, and others.@TaylorByas3

What does your memory smell like?

My memory smells like Luster’s Products Pink Hair Lotion. My parents used to use it in my hair when I was younger and I can conjure up that smell at any moment. It makes me feel tended to and cared for.

Paul Ings was born in Bournemouth, UK, in 1971, and has spent the last 30 years in the Czech Republic working in teaching and translation including a course at the University of West Bohemia on English Literature Written by Non-native Speakers.

His poetry has been published in magazines including The Reader, Magma, The Interpreter’s House, Ink Sweat and Tears, Salzburg Poetry Review, South, etc., and in the anthologiesHair Raising(Nine Pens Press),The Joy of Living(Dreich),You’ve Got So Many Machines Richard!(Broken Sleep),Hildegard(Poetry on the Lake),Eternal(Hammond House),Cornwall(Palores Publications), and he was a joint winner of the Exmoor Society poetry competition in 2019. There have also been translations of Czech poetry (BODY Literature) and reviews in the Czech journal of international literature Plav.

His first collection, One Week, One Span of Human Life, was published by Alien Buddha Press on

Plein air

Find the right place and everything will come to you –Judith da Fano

The ground has been roughly applied

then smoothed by a day’s rain. Yesterday

would have been impossible. Imagine

walking over the surface and the brush

is a journey.

All morning I step over bluebells,

wind flowers, under tall sunlight angling

thin pines eager to strike open

the golden view of the Pikes

from the river’s edge.

Smell the petrichor – earth, moss,

tender ferns, ripe cones. No-one walks by,

no-one is asking anything of me but myself.

Don’t cheat. Don’t rely on guesswork. Observe.

Never make a mark without first looking –

basics learned with the tap of a ruler on my wrist.

Palette laid, I brush in woodland air.

A heron lands, sheep graze into view.

Sap green, umber, cadmium yellow

flows brilliantly through the scene.

From A Window of Passing Light

Jenny Mitchell is winner of the Aryamati Prize, the Segora Prize, a Bread and Roses Poetry Award, the Fosseway Prize, joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize 2019; and winner of the Folklore Prize 2020. Her poems have been published widely, and a debut collection,Her Lost Language(Indigo Dreams Publishing) is one of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 (Poetry Wales), and a Jhalak Prize #bookwelove.

A forthcoming collection,Map of a Plantation(IDP), will be published in 2021.

Twitter: @jennymitchellgo

What does your memory smell like?

Burnt toast. It’s the memory of coming home from school and fending for myself. It’s also a real reminder of my student days, going to clubs; then four hours sleep, before meeting friends in the common room for scones. University for me, as with life in general, was designed around food!

What do you want your future to taste like?

I want…

Matthew M. C. Smith is a poet from Wales. He is ‘Best of the Net’-nominated and won the R.S Thomas prize at Gwyl Cybi in 2018. His work can be read in Poetry Wales, The Lonely Crowd, Barren Magazine, Fevers of the Mind, Atrium Poetry and Arachne Press. He also edits Black Bough Poetry and Top Tweet Tuesday. His second collection will be published with Broken Spine. Matthew loves the Welsh mountains, a Spanish holiday, outdoor activities with his kids, The Doors and vintage Star Wars. You can find out more about Matthew here. On Twitter you can find him @MatthewMCSmith and @blackboughpoems

What does your memory smell like?

Spilt diesel in the baking heat. The green scent of spotting rain after weeks of drought. Cedarwood and sandalwood.

What do you want your future to taste like?

Sea-salt, crushed…

Differential

We cannot define voice
of absence,
teeth rattling in the cracked noggin
bouncing off my stepfather’s hand.
A child brought you flesh
flowering with salty petals
to show you her pain
you questioned nothing.

“What is pain?” asked the heron
tossing back splintered moonlight
stabbed from amber water
darkening into silence.

The cattails had no answer
what lurked beneath lily pads
less menacing than log, lightless water
or the man who smacked me
for an elbow on the table, less opaque
than silence spilling from your lips
at the breeze of violence sloughing
through your house.

It was a bandana already crimson
less obviously ruined by lacerations
coagulating leakage of an inner sea.

What is the voice, splintered
with retribution, scattered in wiregrass
burying itself beneath pine needles.

The men that loved me in my youth,
that could fold me into a letter
of pleasure posted on some shady…

Candela

                                Measure of luminous intensity

​Popsicles of foam 

& sand is warm butter On my mind:

all our ways of dying.

A bright canopy

like the breadth of sky

spreads its hands as if in welcome.

Thank you for sharing

your waking moments

with me. I never bargained

for so much closeness

with another human. Like mussel byssus,

we are hundreds of threads. As if

glued to wave-threatened rock.

Seaweed smell, its blunt

muttony stipe & kelp.

Like animals we plan a foray.

We’re living keen

as black pelican beak

which understands water

by piercing it.

Its wings embrace

the inescapable periwinkle

Two kites

rapport in the sky,

saturated & vibrant as

lemon with salt.

Anindita Sengupta is the author of Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall, 2016) and City of Water (Sahitya Akademi, 2010). She…

Amanda McLeod is a Canberra-based creative and the author of Heartbreak Autopsy (Animal Heart Press, 2021) and Animal Behaviour (Chaffinch Press, 2020). Loves: good coffee and wild places. Loathes: anthropophony. Find her on Twitter and Instagram@AmandaMWrites or at AmandaMcLeodWrites.com. If all else fails, head for the nearest river. She’s probably there. 

Homesick

The wind from the south

is an old friend,

its embrace warm

like the desert.

It speaks of home,

carries to me

the scent of mint tea,

sweet and soothing,

tells me the

figs are ripening

into black sticky

sweetness

and need to be picked;

whispers that my olive trees miss me.

Beth Brookeis a retired teacher, living on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset and drawing inspiration from its landscape. She is a Quaker. She has had poems published in a variety of journals and is currently working on her first poetry collection.

What does memory smell like?

Figs! Well to be properly accurate the smell of fig leaves when the temperature reaches that certain point that the scent oozes out and pulls you to it. I was born in Yemen and spent several years of my childhood in Libya. We had fig trees…

This poem is from my debut collection Eat the Storms published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press, you can listen to an audio version of it here and see the beautiful video of it here

DamienDonnelly, 45, Dublin born, returned to Ireland in 2019 after 23 years in Paris, London and Amsterdam, working in the fashion industry. His writing focuses on identity, sexuality and fragility. His daily interests revolve around falling over and learning how to get back up while baking cakes. His short stories have been featured in ‘Second Chance’ Original Writing, ‘Body Horror’ Gehenna & Hinnom, his poetry in ‘Nous Sommes Paris,’ Eyewear Publishing and The Runt Magazine. Online, he’s been featured in Black Bough Poetry, Coffin Bell, Barren Magazine, the Fahmidan Journal. His debut poetry collection was published by The Hedgehog Press in September 2020 when he also began a poetry podcast Eat the Storms…