Wednesday – Flies

The midges of Ben More

Oh the nastiest of midges are the midges of Ben More.
They lurk on the summit waiting for a bite,
and when the weather’s hot and the breeze is barely light,
they feast on weary climbers by the score.

Now the views you get from climbing are the just and fair reward
for hauling your carcass up the endless height,
but for every golden eagle, and every gorgeous sight,
a cloud of midges tries to get on board.

My back is to the mountain now, and the shimmering slopes of scree.
A cool and soothing drink is on my mind.
But my face is red and lumpy: though I left the midge behind,
I’m already scratching its itchy legacy.

I should be filled with pride because I’ve climbed my first Munro,
but the only score I’m counting is: midges thirty, climber zero

-Yvonne Marjot

Fly

A fly alit uninvited on the page
and promptly threw itself
into a paroxysm of personal hygiene
as if my words had sullied it.

I caught a fleeting glimpse then
of a poem just as finely-honed,
with all of that agility and presence,
but inevitably as I moved pen to paper

it was gone.

Cranefly

It haunted the high corners
of my childhood, skittering
erratically about the ceiling,
yet certain at some moment

to hurtle without warning
towards my horrified face,
trailing its limbs loosely
like a creature only half alive.

I forget when it grabbed me:
it wasn’t the fly that was half
alive; it was me. A slender crack
between this world & the next

had let something in, strange
and capricious, flighty yet fragile.
From that night forward
I left the window wide open.

Bluebottle

Someone cursed the fly,
breaking a blank look
to begrudge its presence.
Probably it too would have

preferred the great outdoors
to this barren zone,
its sixth surface a
painful transparency.

Me, I welcomed its intrusion;
blued-metal piece
of summer forcing
its velocity into the static room.

Warming to its mid-air
ricochets, fired up
for a chance at freedom,
I opened the window wide.

-Andy MacGregor

Bluebottle Triptych

I
In summer’s molten sizzle of days,
in a sleepy forest’s midday haze,
maggots hatch on a dead bird.
A white tide of squirming rice grains –
lords of death and excrement –
dismantle what it took years to create,
leaving a stack of fine bones,
dusty feathers to flap in the wind.

II
A leathery cocoon, contours of a cigar,
conceals elaborate metamorphosis:
a silent hum of frantic shifting
hidden inside the plain brown pellet.
Complete, a lid is lifted and out crawls
a brand new fly, unfurling gauzy wings.

III
Her wings in flight buzz like a chainsaw –
this low sibilation an irksome score
to picnics and barbecues, or indoors
as she bashes against windows
wondering why air is suddenly so hard.
The covellite-blue of her abdomen
and thousand-faceted eyes glisten
like rare jewels. Delicate leg bristles
taste nectar, pollinate flowers, bring diseases.
Freighted with eggs, she smells
a dead rabbit in a nearby field.

-Annest Gwilym (from her collection “What The Owl Taught Me”, 2020. Poem originally published in Reach Poetry)

Daddy Longlegs in the Attic

loose-limbed puppet,
crashes against the Velux
as if knocking on a door.

Hair-thin legs on stilts
write in italics;
wings diaphanous oars.

It dips where moss
blooms in a corner.
A spider’s noose,

nest of sticky filaments,
sheer as gossamer stockings,
stops its marionette dance.

A pounce. A stab.
A broken doll,
shrink-wrapped in silk.

-Annest Gwilym

Day Twenty-two

Tuesday -Cockroaches

cockroach motel
I find myself drowning
in her pheromones

-John Hawkhead

the roaches pay rent in a place I made up

although they really own it & are called princesses
they also own certain places w/warm tvs, radios,
they share a damp bathroom & clawfoot tub w/everyone
on that floor, they rent an oil painting of someone
religious that hangs above a haunted bed 3 stories up,
(like all those old roaches climb stairs marbled) cold or
travel up an ancient creaky elevator red plushed w/a
person, part cockroach, doubles as a spy on the switchboard
when your mother calls & all the other roaches look out the
stair window to a small enclosed courtyard & see windows
of other roaches, they look out one to the street & see
clothes tossed down in righteous anger splattered on the sidewalk
watch potatoes fried in a plug-in skillet & dream of them in the day

-Connie Bacchus

After by Peter A.

-Jim the Poet

Cockroaches by Lynn Valentine

Cockroaches

In dark wet safe. Lowness my leg hairs tell.
If Else moves I know change in this tight Air.
My young molt, as I did, get harder shells.
Company is good. In dark am aware

food with my two long, long noses that come
out of my head, bounce, dangle, flick in front.
Good grub I tell others when I find some.
All will be eaten always on this hunt.

My young eat my waste among mounds
of cast
skins, egg cases and the dead. A crack let
me in to snuggle in warm corners fast
settle in your grease, droppings, food for pets

You horrify me with your pure cleanliness.
Live in shittip, I’ll join you in the mess.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

Constance Bacchus

lives in the Pacific Northwest with her daughter and often writes about nature. She has 3 self-published books, Swirl, RV Parks & Politics and the most recent is Secret Dam Things

Monday – Beetles

An Amazing, Alliterative, Incredible Insect Invasion

Big buzzing bees blagged my bananas
Hornets hid half of my ham
Six scary spiders scoffed my spicy sausages
Four flies filched my fruit flan

Ants ate all my apples (as always)
Crazed crickets crunched my carrot crisps
Beetles bit bits of my brown bread
Chiggers cheerfully chewed my chips

While wiggly worms whipped my Wotsits
Roaches removed and ran away with my rolls
Many maggots munched my mango, Mum
Twenty-two tiny ticks took my toast

That perfect picnic I precisely planned
A wonderful one-off occasion
Was decimated, demolished and destroyed
By an amazing, alliterative, incredible insect invasion

-Neal Zetter

Beetle by Marcel Herms

Beetles by sonja benskin mesher

Whirligig beetle

You think me superficial
but a surface is where
two worlds collide. Yes,
I look on the bright side
but my other half
eyes the depths.

You see stillness

but I’m on edge:
disturb me & I’ll scatter
like spilt quicksilver,
spiralling wildly
as a charged particle
in a bubble chamber.

-Andy MacGregor

Green Tiger Beetle

In a marram forest sweetened by lilac trumpets
of shore convolvulus, a tiny sun-crazed tiger
lies in wait, coiled as a steel spring.

With the sky as sharp as a blade,
in full lustre, this gaudy long-legged lady,
in sea-green dress and purple stockings

scans the dunes in fearful symmetry;
still as the breath of a foxglove
until fast as fire in parched moorland

she sprints after a spider, tears across crumbs
of silica and seashell. Six-legged slayer, she grabs,
decapitates, gorges with guillotine jaws.

-Annest Gwilym (from her collection: What The Owl Taught Me, 2020 and previously published in Poetry Space)

A Stag Beetle

Scratch decayed wood until it splinters. Hunt
these spikes for soft white wood swallow inside.
Indigestible I make a hard front,
swallow soil ready to throw back up outside.

Create a smooth cover, give myself horns,
six legs, two wings all soft and white. Don’t know
how I know how, where, and what shapes to form,
nor what light is, till lust makes me go,

shift this bulk, these wings buzz into hot bright.
There can be a few in battle for her.
My heavy horns twist, locked in long fight
to straddle her. Must turn them all over.

Hungered in dark most of my life.
Brief lusty flight, fight and sex in the light

-Paul Brookes (from The Insect Sonnets First published in David O’Nan’s Fevers of The Mind)

Day Twenty-one

-Mike Stone

-photo by Jim the Poet

-Neal Zetter

Photos of her barefoot niece by Maggs Vibo

Father’s Day

-Jenny Mitchell (from her debut collection ‘Her Lost Language’ pub. by Indigo Dreams. )

-V M A Gaskill

the good scout

jupiter and saturn in the southern sky
son and father each the other
now mute glowworms
late gas giants
courted by the stars
in their silent perspectives

on my back on the hard ground
of a barren mountain field
listening to my father
as we lay encamped
as he named the astral bodies
in their myriads

earlier that day he sent me to the village
to buy bread in a language not my own
he supplied me with a word in the arabic
khubz that the baker understood
and i returned with enough for ten
thus we make men of our sons

now comes the goddess with her golden lamp
now comes the reckoning of merit
much have i heard about illusions
much have i learned about deception
long will i remember the good scout
who named the morning stars to me

-W V Sutra

My Father as a Zephyr

Lightest of all things,
he blows in light of a perpetual spring,
scatters the salty Clyde with early summer breezes,
with seaweed fronds on soft foam,
fruit of our childhood holidays.
His soft stirring smile greets aquamarine.
His wind-song dances on fiddle strings, sotto.
The west wind restores dear ones
with a tease, a coorie-in, a purr.

-Maggie Mackay (from her collection ‘A West Coast Psalter’)

Their Father’s Business

Their father in an important mood
would roll up two starched shirts
and a pair of grey flannel trousers
all the time saying how tight
in those capsules he designed
for spacemen.
He shined and buffed
his black shoes, discussed the heat
on Mars, livable planets,
claiming he went just to watch,
to feel the rush of air
along his neck, the lift off.
But as the soft cloth carefully
worked his shoes
in single glossy motions
under the bright lamp,
his children thought that given a chance
his very own hands could force
a rocket from the launch pad,
cradle of fire.

-Moira J. Saucer

-Jim the Poet

-Kitty Donnelly (from her collection “The Impact of Limited Time”

I will never forget
The first time
You skimmed a pebble
Across the sea.
You reassured me
Stones could bounce
I listened disbelievingly
But as I watched
The sleeping rocks
Come to life
Riding the waves
I fell in love with the
Timeless sea
I’m still in love today.

-Jill Webb

-William Thirsk-Gaskill from his collection “Throwing Mother In The Skip”

-Tristan Moss

-Tristan Moss

-Tim Fellows

A TRIOLET TRIPTYCH : Halloween Revisited
In memory of my much-loved father Edmund Joseph Browning

Ready or not, dark memories take me there,
To that bay-windowed room where he would play
His old piano, perched on a cushioned chair.
Ready or not, dark memories take me there.
I hear him sing that hymn, I cannot bear
Reliving the slow film spool of that day.
Ready or not, dark memories take me there
To that bay-windowed room where he would play.

I see the double rainbow in the sky,
Seek to make peace with Fate, caught so off guard.
Dead at the wheel, on Halloween, but why?
I see the double rainbow in the sky,
Mop up October’s tears, resolve to try
And come to terms with this, but life is hard!
I see the double rainbow in the sky,
Seek to make peace with Fate, caught so off guard.

Relieved, I find his hymnal on the stand,
So clearly highlighted with words of hope.
‘I feel the promise is not vain’, his plan!
Relieved, I find his hymnal on the stand.
I realise he’s here, he holds my hand.
I know that somehow I’ll find strength to cope.
Relieved, I find his hymnal on the stand,
So clearly highlighted with words of hope.

-©️ Margaret Royall
From her poetry pamphlet ‘Earth Magicke”

-Neal Zetter

-Neal Zetter

-Kola Tobuson

-Simon Zec

-Neal Zetter

Grandad. Incomplete by my dad

portrait of my grandad by my dad

Never Only Considers Most

relevant part of a map.
When he gets lost, he stops,
at the entrance to the busiest junction,
sometimes, before a roundabout,
and unfolds a view of the world
to its fullest extent to find his way.

Perhaps, at work when he changes
one tiny part of the system he traces
its effect on a detailed drafted whole diagram
of council offices, hospitals
or nuclear subs where he has installed
new heating waste management services.

And I at work or home cursed with the same
need for thorough deliberation,
find bosses, wives and workmates sigh
at my slow, detailed examination
of an issue, that had I rushed,
as when angry, only find confusion.

My dad and I bring the whole going on
to a brief stop as others
who wish to get on, hoot, cringe,
whistle and toot their dismay.
We ignore them all to, quietly,
stubbornly, slowly map our way.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and Links

-Moira J Saucer

is a disabled poet living in the Alabama Wiregrass. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, (Fayetteville) Creative Writing Program and an MA in English from the University of Delaware. Her poems have been published by Fevers of the Mind, Floodlight Editions, Burning House Press, Visual Verse, Mookychick, Fly on the Wall Poetry Press, and Ice Floe Press. Her debut – a full length poetry collection – is forthcoming in 2021-22 from Ice Floe Press