orange it came flaring
while I was
minding
my business as always
looking at to sea hoping
for a boat

on the horizon
I got this thing whizzing round my face
warm emulsifying, wreaking havoc with
the serenity
buzzed my ears and stayed there
until defeated I moved to the wall
and sat there a while

undeniably tracing honesty in air
with one finger
pointing

it came clear later

-sbm.

*

Most people have a penchant for rocks – dry stone walls
with spiders inside. I once shook the leaves by a wall
to see what fell out, and every night, when I came home,
picked handfuls on my way, breadcrumb leaves to tear,
carefully, like prayer beads once blessed by spit, by piss,
by rain fall. Nobody knows why they do these things,
least of all, tear leaves, and tear, and scatter leaves away.

*

I have always imagined / galaxies shaped like / the inside of a pomegranate fruit. /
Authenticity interspersed with a tragic sense of irony. / Why do we write / like this?

-Alex Mazey

The Dream

I plunge into the depths of

nowhere, of empty uninhabited

space glowing like s beacon almost

beckoning like an empty womb ready

to cocoon new life – Expectant

nourishing, life-giving.

I fall further reaching unexplored cavities

of my questioning mind, witnessing

memories not even born yet, of

revelations still to come – I hear

faint whispers of familiar voices guiding

me teaching me protecting me.

My vision now clearer as I enter the
domain of forever – My former melancholy
turning into a joyous cacophony of encompassing
love. I breathe again. I laugh again. I live again…

Memories of Us

I still sometimes hear the
echoes of our laugher as we
reminisce of our shared happiness –
Our joy of creating new planting borders
Of days languishing in the sun until
the moonrise beckoned daily
reflections of love in various sessions,
of togetherness of silliness of happiness.

I feel such a fool not having shared more
thoughts with you, or not having told you
I forgive you for misinterpreted heated
arguments, of hating my foolish pride
but I cannot linger on anything bitter
as I still feel you with me in poignant
memories of us…

-Don Beukes

Wild Imagination

Yesterday I walked down a path in the woods
And spied a crumbling cornerstone of a building
Lost to past floods
Hidden in its base was a hole
Nearly encased in the shadows of hardwoods
Unsure if it was created by some mole
I moved near the edge and spotted a thick coiled string
Most of it vanished in the dried mud
Vivid images of mystical places down below
Filled my mind to the point that was maddening
With a headache I reluctantly returned to my neighborhood

-Carrie Ann Golden

Shiva’s Dance

All stones, a conglomeration
of illusion and desire.
All dawns, pre-set to rise and fall
breathe and grow
and yet…
all are followed by a drowning sun.

Not a stone story or tellers myth.
For souls so bound in greed and gold.
My house is as opium dreams…
in these whispers of life.

No movement, in still darkling corners
where life and dust move so slowly that
luxing shadows, low and subdued, can
hold a spirit in sleeping deeps.

So dance the ring of fire
without question,
for being must flow
in these meriel seas
and shaded rivers.
Apocalypse and creation
my coin.
You my currency.

Your hair is made
of flowers and death,
your breath mud baked
yet star sparkle sweet.
Your compassion always
greater than your parts.

So dance your dance
on life’s highest mountain,
in low dead seas.
No choice no chance
All else illusion’s flattery.

©️ Dai Fry 9th May 2020.

colloquy

chestnut and stone wall
speaking of patience and time
passersby know naught

-Rich Follett

Interstellar Connections

You are a small planet,
Unique in every way.
I reach out the solid branch
Of my being, as far as I can
To see if I can touch your greatness,
Learn more about the mysterious

Known and unknown parts
And the pre-existing orbit
Of my earthbound heart,
Causing me to overcome all fears,
To cross the void of space and find
What happens when we collide.

-st

Ishigaki music (the ballad of Rat and Cat)

Each day of that hot summer
the stonemason let the river sing to him
as he ate his noon meal, the moonsweet rice
the pink auras of salmon and ginger
and from his front hedge of rushes
crept sleek black Rat with his shinobue tail
and from the temple’s gap-toothed wall
ambled marmalade Cat with her koto miaow
and for a few grains of lunar rice
Rat conjured a rill of silver notes from his flute
and for a sliver of translucent spirit-fish
Cat would wail her strange ghost’s vibrato
and the inkbrush river shushed its rhythm
onto the clean white page of each day.
For a whole season the stonemason laid every rock
with songs in his head and his hands and his heart
and should you visit the temple
you will see the black Rat and the ginger Cat
who live forever in his tendered wall
and should you put your ear to the sweet stones
all placed just so, the music there
in the neat grains of them
will build and build inside you
a thousand years of comfort.

-Ankh Spice

Stars

Stars, are they the lost group of family?
Mists as memories, I long to see their faces
The navy sky lit by a sparkle of joy
ancestors in their glowing blessings looking
down, as the perfumed night air wafts gently.
A rare manuscript, an album of belonging
Generations bound by dna blood sweat and tears
A remembrance this darkest day of November
I turn the pages of love and belonging
a feeling of euphoria before the melancholy
sets in clinging like the frost on a rose bud
remembering ancestors, the stars in my eyes.

-Leela Soma

My Night

is a bag of nerve dripped stars
under lit lamposts.

Silence is a window strummed
by shadows.

Stone is a cloud announced as married
to dizzy soil.

Walls are rainbowed unicorn skin and bone
petrified by virgins.

Sugar is a grumble made by galaxies seen
by cardboard homeless.

Darkness is the locked door of a whisper
you cannot fully hear.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

-Alex Mazey

(b.1991) received his MA (distinction) from Keele University in 2017. He later won The Roy Fisher Prize for Poetry with his debut pamphlet, ‘Bread and Salt’ (Flarestack, TBA). He was also the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019. His poetry has featured regularly in anthologies and literary press magazines, most notably in The London Magazine. His collection of essays, ‘Living in Disneyland’, will be available from Broken Sleep Books in October 2020. Alex spent 2018 as a resident of The People’s Republic of China, where he taught the English Language in a school run by the Ministry of Education. His writing has been described as ‘wry and knowing,’ with ‘an edge that tears rather than cuts or deals blows.’

Twitter: @AlexzanderMazey

Instagram: alexmazey

Here is my interview of Alex:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/12/18/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-alex-mazey/

-Rich Follett

is a High School English and Creative Writing teacher who has been writing poems and songs for more than forty years. His poems have been featured in numerous online and print journals, including BlazeVox, The Montucky Review, Paraphilia, Leaf Garden Press and the late Felino Soriano’s CounterExample Poetics, for which he was a featured artist. Three volumes of poetry, Responsorials (with Constance Stadler), Silence, Inhabited, and Human &c. are available through NeoPoiesis Press (www.neopoiesispress.com.)

As a singer-songwriter, Rich has released five albums of independent contemporary folk music. His latest. Somewhere in the Stars, is available at http://www.richfollett.com. He lives with his wife Mary Ruth Alred Follett in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he also pursues his interests as a professional actor, playwright, and director.

-Ankh Spice

is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (NZ). His poetry has appeared in a wide range of international publications and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He truly believes that words have the power to change the place we’re in, and you’ll find him doing his best to prove it on

Twitter: @SeaGoatScreams
or on Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry

-Carrie Ann Golden

is a deafblind writer from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in northeastern North Dakota. She writes dark fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in places like Piker Press, Edify Fiction, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, GFT Press, Asylum Ink, and Visual Verse.

-sonja benskin mesher

born , Bournemouth.

now

lives and works in North Wales
as an independent artist

‘i am a multidisciplinary artist, crafting paint, charcoal, words and whatever comes to hand, to explain ideas and issues

words have not come easily. I draw on experience, remember and write. speak of a small life’.

Elected as a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy and the United Artists Society
The work has been in solo exhibitions through Wales and England, and in selected and solo worldwide.
Much of the work is now in both private, and public collections, and has been featured in several television documentaries, radio programmes and magazines.

Here is my interview of sonja benskin mesher:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/10/16/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-sonja-benskin-mesher/

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/11/02/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-don-beukes/

*

There’s an office, twelfth floor, in Shenzhen, I have stared,
many times, I think, looked as far as the South China Sea.
These are not the branches of a cathaya forest, three conifers,
from this window. I cannot order a happy lemon in the mall,
cannot recite Matthew 4:9 in the people’s square in Chengdu.
Some days, I read Leo Tolstoy at the back of the public library,
III times translated, first to English, then to Russian, and so on.

*

Two eyes appear
from a bug
detecting misanthropy

forming the same
colours as the
Khmer Rouge.

-Alex Macey

Mobius musing

those who inhabit cubicles
and those who dwell among trees
have little in common
but there can be no doubt
each is necessary
to reflect upon the other

-Rich Follett

Pantoum for an isolated princess

In her glass coffin, what had flowed in the bone set sail alone
Beyond the bright vault the tree-crowds nodded
And meshed their long toes around the bubble
That carried the fallen log on down the stream

Beyond the bright vault the tree-crowds nodded
The wind stirring branches and passing the message
That carried the fallen log on down the stream
From synapse to synapse until every leaf knew her

The wind stirring branches and passing the message
Threw leaves on the glass to crew up the ship
And synapse to synapse, every leaf knew her
So the sky caught her name, turned her glass to a star

And the leaves on the glass who had crewed up the ship
Of her glass coffin, where what flowed in the bone had set sail alone
Saw the sky catch her name, saw her glass as a star
And fell to the earth to drift deep in the wound

-Ankh Spice

Gamma-Alpha-Light

Under glass I stretch,
out life, not to
smell tree sap or leaf.
Or breezing wind.
Catch rain that drops
on tipped toe tongues.

No horizons
lead crystal walls.
And beyond,
tangled imaginations,
a hunger of beasts.

I see my knees and
look in vain,
for the grazing
of a life not lived.

Under glass, dry tears,
await night’s shadow
to take the trees away.
Now danger only song in
this apocalyptic dark.

Hunters eyes dwell
beyond the confines,
of my glass walls.
I read and watch,
food bottled and tinned.

I gather up fear,
a glowing landscape
into which
I can never venture.

Soft song, sang a requiem.
Last of my line.

-© Dai Fry 8th May 2020.

Objects of Reflection

Reflections in windows in our hearts
Bring us closer to the pain of
Mirror images in those panes
Until, noses pushed against glass,

Seeking so hard to see,
With the steam and the strain,
We lose the imagery
Altogether, viewing

Only what’s inside.
Of course, it’s not what we were looking for.
We’re forced
To turn around, and find

The truth
Was always
In the object,
Not its likeness.

-st

Hum of the Drones

Society now an alternative reality

long adapted to forced acceptance of

a new dimension a stoic domination

of a higher order with murderous

intentions controlling a lockdown human

nation – An evolved consciousness

advanced through carefully engineered

experiments so with the arrival of these

deadly drones spying listening all-seeing

recalculating scheming deleting controlling

a fading tired humanity.

It happened gradually, unseen unheard

Their walls came down surrounding

Major cities concealing a doomsday

Countdown with the intoxicating deadly

Hum of the Drones…

-Don Beukes

parakeets in the park, wild now
holds up his hands and they fly
to take seed

clearly reflected while we stop
while we take coffee
while we breathe

deeply
thinking

of the things we have seen
whitworth

it came with fire with ferocity
depth that left me floating
isolating
isolation from the other
scheme of things. it was
red
very very red

he said it was his favourite colour
I have never seen him wear it

-sonja benskin mesher

Windows

are single eyed.
We move the back projection,
make clear the eyes corners.
What lies ahead, what lies in wait?

Enter house with hollow eyes
Inside its eyes fragrant as bad breath,
a dead leaf
delicate structure
crinkly soft, and wet
wallpaper peals like unheard bells.

Doors are mouths,
mothers polish,
lovers hump over,
by which decisions enter or leave,
from which dead leaves are brushed aside.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

-Alex Mazey

(b.1991) received his MA (distinction) from Keele University in 2017. He later won The Roy Fisher Prize for Poetry with his debut pamphlet, ‘Bread and Salt’ (Flarestack, TBA). He was also the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019. His poetry has featured regularly in anthologies and literary press magazines, most notably in The London Magazine. His collection of essays, ‘Living in Disneyland’, will be available from Broken Sleep Books in October 2020. Alex spent 2018 as a resident of The People’s Republic of China, where he taught the English Language in a school run by the Ministry of Education. His writing has been described as ‘wry and knowing,’ with ‘an edge that tears rather than cuts or deals blows.’

Twitter: @AlexzanderMazey

Instagram: alexmazey

Here is my interview of Alex:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/12/18/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-alex-mazey/

-Rich Follett

is a High School English and Creative Writing teacher who has been writing poems and songs for more than forty years. His poems have been featured in numerous online and print journals, including BlazeVox, The Montucky Review, Paraphilia, Leaf Garden Press and the late Felino Soriano’s CounterExample Poetics, for which he was a featured artist. Three volumes of poetry, Responsorials (with Constance Stadler), Silence, Inhabited, and Human &c. are available through NeoPoiesis Press (www.neopoiesispress.com.)

As a singer-songwriter, Rich has released five albums of independent contemporary folk music. His latest. Somewhere in the Stars, is available at http://www.richfollett.com. He lives with his wife Mary Ruth Alred Follett in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he also pursues his interests as a professional actor, playwright, and director.

-Ankh Spice

is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (NZ). His poetry has appeared in a wide range of international publications and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He truly believes that words have the power to change the place we’re in, and you’ll find him doing his best to prove it on

Twitter: @SeaGoatScreams
or on Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry

-Carrie Ann Golden

is a deafblind writer from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in northeastern North Dakota. She writes dark fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in places like Piker Press, Edify Fiction, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, GFT Press, Asylum Ink, and Visual Verse.

-sonja benskin mesher

born , Bournemouth.

now

lives and works in North Wales
as an independent artist

‘i am a multidisciplinary artist, crafting paint, charcoal, words and whatever comes to hand, to explain ideas and issues

words have not come easily. I draw on experience, remember and write. speak of a small life’.

Elected as a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy and the United Artists Society
The work has been in solo exhibitions through Wales and England, and in selected and solo worldwide.
Much of the work is now in both private, and public collections, and has been featured in several television documentaries, radio programmes and magazines.

Here is my interview of sonja benskin mesher:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/10/16/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-sonja-benskin-mesher/

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/11/02/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-don-beukes/

fajar

silver yew bows to
war-torn stone and brick patchwork—
alhaya renews

-Rich Follett
*

Ash-coloured trees, a forest, a liquidated referential, perhaps
against the valley wall. There’s a thousand-year-old olive tree,
somewhere, in a mountain town, where a child serves coffee,
and burgers. Outside, grandmother’s goat stew – blow it first,
child, with a cold spoon, intricate handle, intricately handled.
There are some parts to this world we will never understand.
Ash-coloured trees in the night are like, I don’t want to say it.

*

A page of Baudrillard is a fatal strategy
avoid meaning indefinitely, bore them
with a senseless finality – reverse evil.
Poetry as ecstatic object, secret qualities,
sworn to extremes and quiet synthesis,
the visible to the hidden, more hidden
metamorphosis, (Kafka as a lonely man

laughing at the still living, the digitalised
still life – still born). Illusion plays speech
instantaneously – the nature of seduction,
nostalgic slowness as a merry-go-round.
Silenced once; the silent dialogue of signs.
Fashioned vapid character, aesthetic form,
immoral form, fragile, sentimental desire

shapes superlative power, the objective;
an achieved attraction, our only passion.

-Alex Mazey

..albert & Victoria..

how to tell a picture in words?
egfrasic & I cannot spell
it only in placid moments.

do we describe what we see or maybe
tell the tale inside

albert and victoria
a safe place now
yet round the corner on the wall
are the bullet holes while in dublin
the same on a statue

blood shed
they killed horses too when they
fired their guns, dropped the bombs
what then oh butterflies wing?

I can spell ekphrastic here
but not up there

today there is no image
nor a recording of the voice
just look at the holes in walls.

-sbm.

Life after all

This is where it happened.

You weren’t there,
not that you were ever there

whenever I needed you there.

I’ve often dipped my fingers
in the hollows grief makes.

Here is where it happened.

We climb, but our feet slip,
we don’t fall, but we dangle.

How I needed you there,
to save me from
being myself being there.

Whose life was it, after all?

-Elizabeth Moura

Walls Are

Bed bent wall bound,
less human now as
broken into this square.

Run five fingers
feather light, to
feel walls behind
these closed eyes.

A stony glance
holds a soul
eternal captive, hate
an emotional geometry.

Stone four squared.
Secrets whispered
ear to ear.
Shed tears, wet straw.
Awake, a greeting of
dawn light under the door.

Dream in winds
and creaking trees,
a soul free to run
and run,
until breath is not sufficient.

©️ Dai Fry 7th May 2020.

The Institute

White noise cracking in my headspace

Phantoms in their nightly forced circus

A horse dancing on a rainbow beckoning

Me to follow – I just want to lie my head

down and crawl through my safety tunnel

where I can hear myself think maybe whistle

my favourite tune – Where I choose the paths

in the backstreets of my mind, master of my

own symphony unlike the invasive unwelcome

poking into my private psyche room where

my mental defences are muted by unstable

needy self-elected pharaohs enacting random

healing punishments – I am so done with this!

Dear Self

I am slowly drowning in this mental haze choking

me repeatedly – I need to hear your voice

again even just a faint whisper to remind me

I am still here. Here comes that choking red

Mist again, darkening my vision – My existential

Failed mission no escape… Are you there?

The Trees are Dead

Sour earth neglected responsibilities

toxic oxygen the result of inaction by

Clueless wise men waving their untested

theories yet ignoring increasing revelatory

fatalities from untested remedies meant to

heal nations – Our mortality affected by

inept irrational policy makers hoping to

gain one more vote but we are all in the

same boat – Frantically trying to stay afloat

but worrying cracks are deepening our

livelihoods darkening, so we gather en masse

to finally protest along a charred boulevard

hoping in vain but it is of no use when the

guilty refuse to attempt to reverse recalculate

regenerate for future generations all nations

so we keep the faith even though the trees are dead.

-Don Beukes

Take Me Around Again

Carousel horses,
Are all your circles meant to comfort, or to mock?
And, where will you take me today?
To that bustling park
In West Endicott,
Near the house we almost bought?

Or maybe, all the way back to my childhood dinner time,
When everyone else had moved from home,
And you were three sad napkin rings,
Trotting repetitively around the lonely table. You know
Your steady pace marks time perfectly, while I’m distracted by the bright colors and scenery,
Until I’m caught between once, and today.

-st

For #1 of Day Eight:

The Shaft

Within the mine’s walls
I hear the dead’s calls
As my feet pound these halls
Blinded by charging fireballs

#2 of Day Eight:

I remember as a child an elder spoke
of a ghost town deep in the mountains
where a single wall’s all that remained
Its crumbling façade brimmed with untold stories
Of former residents trapped within the wailing barrier

-Carrie Ann Golden

My Olive

tree is a horse whose mane of leaves
shakes in a gust, whose bark whinnies
when she moves. When I press myself
into her flanks she is the oil
that brightens my meals.

I am calm under her canopy of mane.
Her favourite place is beside the pitted wall.
A Roman wall with close knit red bricks and stone.
The stone is sculpted by round ammunition holes,
but has not fallen. They did not break through here.

I look down at my horse, the olive tree beside the wall
from my balcony. History is always here.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

-Alex Mazey

(b.1991) received his MA (distinction) from Keele University in 2017. He later won The Roy Fisher Prize for Poetry with his debut pamphlet, ‘Bread and Salt’ (Flarestack, TBA). He was also the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019. His poetry has featured regularly in anthologies and literary press magazines, most notably in The London Magazine. His collection of essays, ‘Living in Disneyland’, will be available from Broken Sleep Books in October 2020. Alex spent 2018 as a resident of The People’s Republic of China, where he taught the English Language in a school run by the Ministry of Education. His writing has been described as ‘wry and knowing,’ with ‘an edge that tears rather than cuts or deals blows.’

Twitter: @AlexzanderMazey

Instagram: alexmazey

Here is my interview of Alex:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/12/18/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-alex-mazey/

-Rich Follett

is a High School English and Creative Writing teacher who has been writing poems and songs for more than forty years. His poems have been featured in numerous online and print journals, including BlazeVox, The Montucky Review, Paraphilia, Leaf Garden Press and the late Felino Soriano’s CounterExample Poetics, for which he was a featured artist. Three volumes of poetry, Responsorials (with Constance Stadler), Silence, Inhabited, and Human &c. are available through NeoPoiesis Press (www.neopoiesispress.com.)

As a singer-songwriter, Rich has released five albums of independent contemporary folk music. His latest. Somewhere in the Stars, is available at http://www.richfollett.com. He lives with his wife Mary Ruth Alred Follett in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he also pursues his interests as a professional actor, playwright, and director.

-Ankh Spice

is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (NZ). His poetry has appeared in a wide range of international publications and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He truly believes that words have the power to change the place we’re in, and you’ll find him doing his best to prove it on

Twitter: @SeaGoatScreams
or on Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry

-Carrie Ann Golden

is a deafblind writer from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in northeastern North Dakota. She writes dark fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in places like Piker Press, Edify Fiction, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, GFT Press, Asylum Ink, and Visual Verse.

-sonja benskin mesher

born , Bournemouth.

now

lives and works in North Wales
as an independent artist

‘i am a multidisciplinary artist, crafting paint, charcoal, words and whatever comes to hand, to explain ideas and issues

words have not come easily. I draw on experience, remember and write. speak of a small life’.

Elected as a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy and the United Artists Society
The work has been in solo exhibitions through Wales and England, and in selected and solo worldwide.
Much of the work is now in both private, and public collections, and has been featured in several television documentaries, radio programmes and magazines.

Here is my interview of sonja benskin mesher:

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2018/10/16/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-sonja-benskin-mesher/

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/11/02/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-don-beukes/