On the wind, Nara(OVP11)- Indianapolis Review.
SFM11
AB11
BB11

Brasenose (BB11)

commute commune convention conform
conservative cyclepaths
psychopaths sociopaths
chauffeurs not pushbikes
ubers not mud guards
maybe jealousy maybe fury
maybe a litany of missed opportunities
maybe I could be ruining everyone’s life right now
with one vote with one percent tax increase or decrease
eyes blind pockets lined
no fun no turning
read debrettes read hansard
bet there’s no one screwing the country
who caught the 82a unibus
to hendrefoilan student village

Jamie Woods

 

Blossoms Falling Towards the Night Wheel

For My Father Through Them Rose Coloured Glasses – A Prose Poem.

Those flowers were like hands, like wounded hands, there were hands crawling out of the eyes, the librarian’s eyes, and there were shaking shimmering hammering clatter noises of spring trees, like Geiger counters crashing and the cooling palm fronds. did you hear about the someone who was crawling on the cobblestones, the bicycle army of dandelions came to the rescue, to recuse the excised Judge speeding off in an army of two disciplined Columbines, disinclined to wake, wake, wake me up with an insulin kiss, the eyelets of the Crown’s buttons stabbing the paralyzed sleeper – me — tossing, turning did you see the seizure from the shot — strap down the patient – I/eye — the clock is ticking, ticking, ticking, the father, the patient is rising. notebooks of breathing cinema. swaying undulating eye – watch out — a riptide sinkhole of veiny protuberances. there were disturbances on the Tube today. On the Tube today, I saw – these flowers like hands, like wounded hands … crawling out of the eyes of librarians – cawing, clawing, faces transforming into singing beaks of the sunlit, sunrise shaded tree of Sir. Mr. Rooster. it’s dangerous, dangerous out there – the old stone and the windows, weeping, sweating, talking to each other, swearing, that quiet has no place in the Capital of plainsong Emptiness. after the shock treatment, I wove baskets, I wove baskets, I wove until the next one. there was a war going on, somewhere – inside, outside. i heard everything; my ears were clear seeing. no rose-coloured glasses. falling through, falling into the cracks, falling into a broken world, a bird-i’d-viewed.

Robert Frede Kenter

A place I know OVP

There’s a place I know, in a wood with a stream,
at the end of an alley of poplar trees,
in a tangled wood on the edge of the heath,
where plum trees grow and the wild pigs live.

At the end of an alley of poplar trees,
is a deep blue mere full of slow, silent fish,
in spring, scattered white with plum-petal flakes,

in a tangled wood on the edge of the heath.
The poplars are old, the alley untrod,
except for the deer come down to drink

where plum trees grow, and the wild pigs live,
and I, who in the still of the mere,
hear the slow fish-song of this ancient land.

Jane Dougherty

 

Oxbridge (IMAGE BB11

Students peddle on their bicycles
not quite as many as Beijing
but enough to fill Brasenose Lane.

Cobbled streets test the pneumatic tyres
and the sprung comfort of the saddles –
ouch!

Endeavour won a scholarship
to Saint Johns College
studying the Greats.

He didn’t own a bike
but still had a limp.
His father was a taxi driver

an occupation belittled
by his titled peers,
chauffeurs were more their mode.

Social mobility
wasn’t in Morse’s idiolect
not in his class

and the classrooms
they were never classless
but so many were privileged.

Paul Dyson

 

The One Who Crawls Out AB11

My aunt checks the green doors of her house,
shake every window, rock the shutters one by one
since the stray bullet flew in the other day.
The metal drilled a miniscule hole in the wall,
killed a part of the household, and although
my aunt didn’t realise what happened all at once
beside the breaking out of a battle in the street
a little before three, her sinking biscuit and chambré tea
she locks and relocks the house. The story is told
again and again- how the cops tweezed out the slug,
how they caught the boy who had a bad day
and a gun oh-so-cool.
She closes the openings.
Still some nights the bad dreams crawl out
through her eyes – fingers first. They have a memory
loaded and ready for the blast.

Kushal Poddar

Red Flower (SFM11)

Red flower breathes out
I take its breath in my lungs
into my red blood

Bicycles (BB11)

Bicycles, stacked and chained,
by the college gates. Waiting
under the dreaming spires
for their riders to return. Dreaming
of futures, unchained, gliding
serenely from point to point, oiled
to perfection, never blocked
by one-way streets, a path
smooth and clear to their destiny.

Tim Fellows

Well-worn Pages

 

The Seattle art therapist told me
to buy pure, clear colors.
bright. Nothing murky even

though some of what I’d be drawing
would be dark. My words, not hers.
Murky means confusing and these

drawings were supposed to clear
things up for me. Show me
what I’m feeling. Red, lots of red,

and black. and then that stop. breathe.
Not so much what I was feeling
as a reminder to feel differently.

It was easier to rush out the sunflower
with its black center, watercolor
flooding the paper, curling it, a furious

swash of fat brush. Joy in abundance,
taking up space but angry too.
And then tiny flowers with pastels,

So pale I wonder—is it peaceful or
am I suppressing feelings?
The art therapist wasn’t cheap

but sure was worth it. I drew other
pictures with felt tip, which is funny—
drawing what I felt with felt tip.

Lynne Jensen Lampe

Spring (OVP11)

As soon as the sun shines bright.

The buds begin to form.

The birds begin to sing.

The blossom bloomers white.

The bees swarm and perform.

Awakening the new born spring.

As soon as that all happens.

The east wing gathers momentum.

The blossoms begins to flutter.

The birds get involved with passion.

The wind creates bedlam.

Spreading virgin petals with bluster.

Frank Colley

Bios and Links

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

is an Indian-Australian painter, poet, and improv pianist. She is a self-taught artist who has been painting and exhibiting for over 20 years. Her work has been featured in several journals including Amsterdam Quarterly yearbook, Pithead Chapel, Two Thirds North, Kissing Dynamite Poetry,  and Stonecoast Review. She has been nominated multiple times for the Best of the Net. She lives and works in Sydney on the traditional lands of The Eora Nation.  Find her @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings

Sara Fatima Mir

Born on the 26th of July, 2007, in Islamabad , Sara Fatima is a Pakistani of Kashmiri origin. Gifted by nature with an inborn aesthetic sense, she is passionate about art. It is not just a hobby for her, rather it is a well settled heart and soul, way of life which inspires her to visualize the fine beauty and form in the world around. She has won numerous art competitions at school level. She is a natural artist and has completed the following two Courses : a) Graphic Designing -2020 b) Resin Art Skills -2022 from the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) Finishing School, Islamabad Capital Territory Pakistan. This learning has further enhanced her artistic skills . International Participation in Art and Poetry Project: Rucksack A Global Poetry Patchwork 2022 A Poetry Project by Ms Antje Stehn of Italy and Mamta Sagar of India. Sara made a Teapot with the help of dried teabags. A requirement .Its image is on display at the Poetry Museum Italy. Sara Fatima Mir believes Art connects people by portraying their lives. Different people, different drawings, different stories. Using all sorts of mediums, she flaunts her amateur talent and aspires to learn more to become the best version of herself. Please Follow her on Instagram @sketchfilez

Beth Brooke

is a Dorset-based poet and her writing is grounded in the Wessex landscape and history. Her debut pamphlet, A Landscape With Birds was published by Hedgehog Poetry in July 2022. Her second pamphlet, Transformations, will be published by Hedgehog next year. The poems are all inspired by the work of Dame Elisabeth Frink, the sculptor and artist.

Aaron Bowker

based in the United States is a super self-critical Virgo, walking a path between worlds while dabbling in art, photography, and poetry. Poems have been featured in Failed Haiku, Cold Moon Journal, The Wombwell Rainbow, and Heterodox Haiku Journal, with art featured in The Hooghly Review, The Wombwell Rainbow, and Black & White Haifa/Haisha. Special thank you to Jerome Berglund for being my mentor and pushing me to limits otherwise unexplored.

Robert Frede Kenter

is a writer, pushcart nominee & visual artist with work in many venues, on line and in print, incl: Storms Journal, Anthropocene, Fevers Of, Acropolis Journal, CutbowQuarterly, Anti-heroin chic and many others, as well as books including EDEN (2021) a visual poetry collection, and Audacity of Form (ice floe press, 2019). Work in anthologies: Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022), and Seeing in Tongues, an anthology forthcoming from Steel Incisors (2023). Robert is publisher & EIC of Ice Floe Press, www.icefloepress.net.

Jamie Woods

Swansea-based Jamie Woods is poet-in-residence at the charity Leukaemia Care. His work has been published in Poetry Wales, Lucent Dreaming, Ink Sweat & Tears and more. Jamie’s debut pamphlet Rebel Blood Cells is out in June, and can be pre-ordered from https://www.punkdust.com/shop
https://www.jamiewoods77.com

Jane Dougherty

lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.

Paul Dyson

is from Swinton, Rotherham, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
He says –

“We all have an urge to be creative
whether it’s art, poetry, music . . .
or just putting together flat pack furniture,
being creative keeps us alive and feeling human”

Paul gave up his day job 5 years ago to dabble in art, poetry and music, and hopes the passion in his Art reaches and touches the hearts of fellow humans too.

Merril D. Smith

lives in southern New Jersey near the Delaware River. Her poetry has been published in journals including Black Bough Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Acropolis, and Humana Obscura, and anthologies, such as the recent Our Own Coordinates: Poems about Dementia (Sidhe Press). Her full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts, was published by Nightingale & Sparrow Press, and was a Black Bough Poetry Book of the Month.

Twitter: @merril_mds  Instagram: mdsmithnj  Blog: merrildsmith.org

Tim Fellows

is a writer from Chesterfield in Derbyshire whose ideas are heavily influenced by his background in the local coalfields, where industry and nature lived side by side. His first pamphlet “Heritage” was published in 2019. His poetic influences range from Blake to Owen, Causley to Cooper-Clarke and more recently the idea of imagistic poetry and the work of Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez.

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s

debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022) concerns mother-daughter relationships, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear in many journals, including THRUSH, Figure 1, and Yemassee. A finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, she edits academic research in mid-Missouri, where she lives with her husband and two dogs. Visit her at https://lynnejensenlampe.com; on Twitter/Spoutible @LJensenLampe; or Instagram @lynnejensenlampe.

Frank Colley

lives in South Yorkshire and has been writing poetry all his life. He is an active member of the Read to Write Group and has performed his poems at a wide variety of venues including CAST in Doncaster. His poems have appeared in several anthologies.
He is an admirer of Edward Thomas. His collection “The Story of Soldier A” was published by Glass Head Press in 2022. His self published pamphlet “The Nantcol Sonnets” both are available on eBay.

Kushal Poddar

The author of ‘Postmarked Quarantine’ has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of ‘Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages.

Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe