http://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/poetry-by-lindsey-heatherly

Lindsey is a Pushcart nominated writer with work in X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, Emrys Journal and more. She is a nonfiction editor for RED FEZ and lives with her daughter in Upstate South Carolina. Find her online athttps://r3dwillow.wixsite.com/rydanmardseyoron Twitter: @rydanmardsey.

What does your memory smell like?

Cigarettes and freshly mown grass. I remember sitting with my grandmother on the back deck, ashes an inch long hanging from the cigarette in her mouth. That smell has often been a comfort to me. I’ve lived in South Carolina my entire life, and the smell of freshly cut grass is a sign that the seasons are turning, and life is continuing. It is one of the constants that I have learned to count on. Change around here is minimal, so you learn to pick up on the small things. The small things make a big impact.

What do you want your…

Marie Marchand is Poet Laureate of Ellensburg, WA. Her poetry has been published inCatamaran Literary Reader,California Quarterly,Paterson Literary Review,Tiny Seed Journal,High Plains Register, and numerous chapbooks. She has two books of poetry:Pink Sunset Luminaries(2018) andGifts to the Attentive(2022).Her poetry has been recognized by the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, Wyoming Writers Prize, and Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest. Marie is a mental health advocate with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She is founder of the new collaborative poetry spaceMaitri Poetrywhose mission is to advance loving-kindness and peace in our world through poetry. You can read Marie’s work at mishiepoet.com and follow her on Twitter @mishiepoet and @maitripoetry.

What does your memory smell like?

Sweet summer apricots, the snap of fresh greenbeans, and blooming alfalfa fields waving in the…

Never Mind That Now

James Diaz is a poet striving for light in upstate New York. They are the author of two full length books of poetry, This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha Press, 2021) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared most recently in Rust + Moth, Bear Creek Gazette, Resurrection Mag, Line Rider Press, Cobra Milk and Misery Tourism. 

1.What does your memory smell like?

For as long as I can remember, I called itthe North. I grew up down south, in a not so happy place, but the memory of the wind around my Grandmother’s lakeside house, in the woods of upstate New York, it was something, I couldn’t quite tell you what, that I would every now and again detect a memory-trace of in my unhappy places…

Two Blackbirds on a Hill

During the walk on a frosted morning,

When my breath vapoured out coldness,

And fingers became numb to the touch,

There was two blackbirds on a hill-

Poised upon a rickety farmer`s fence,

In dignified stillness.

The blackbirds plucked thebriars

and brambles,pregnant with blackberries.

It mattered not to me,the myth nor

The foretelling of their presence, as

Long shadows traced thetelling of an

Impending arrival of a late guest.

Dusk readied as I walkedtowards

The two blackbirds on a hill.

As this is only the second of these guest posts , here`s a quick introduction to the format. We start off the guest posts with a poem and five questions to introduce the poet. Then the poet, in this case Robin, can either present themselves or send me the poems with the answered questions. There will be three poems in each guest post, the idea…

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…