Waymarks by Mavis Gulliver

Not a goose in sight
but all around are signs
of last night's roosting,
half a mile
of sea-smoothed sand studded
with droppings, the dune edge
flecked with feathers,
scatterings of breast down
heaped in hollows, filling
the small spaces
between sand sedge
and sun-bleached driftwood,
or trapped on tips of marram,
a flurry of restless pennants
fluttering.




Mavis Gulliver, Scotland, UK

The Upkeep of Canaries by Andrew Spacey

No one any longer imagined us as real,
we had to imagine ourselves

Joe Wenderoth

I
Were we once dreaming, like men,
of curly clawed ancestors
who inhaled day, exhaled night
long before skin became song?
Now all of us
are amongst subdued musings chewed innuendo
between gobs and baccy.

The black wheel blurs, silhouettes alter shape,
a gruff choir on concrete finding themselves.
Long gone are children of wax who would melt away
in winter sun, leaving ponies, patterns in grass.

Light is a pinhead or a mirrored star they drop
us towards, like larks in steel introduced to rock.
All continuous song, deep song, transmitting finch.

Work mystifies.
Hold us up against definite warm roof space.
Wait for the planet to twitch.
Breath, breathe, brain, men, main, methane, all the voices
buried in their eyes.
Lemon yellow cravings when we turn to stone.

2
Fleshy Elwell of the Lamps,
(his wife had decamped
years ago)
hums electro

magnetically, speaks hendiadys in the foul air of cabined nights,
sucking coal egg shaped, the mind labyrinthine.

Is it a bit of fresh pippin? Seed time, fink sunflower, sip the dew it’s only awkward legislation.

He brews tea in a kettle that steams we delicate exiles, we’re inspired,
filigreeing apprentices and veterans alike until hessian blankets our sky.
Only the wheel and its umbilical feed this faked existence.

Wings make much of wild whilst we build music
compatible with each colour.

Andrew Spacey

The Dogs by Helen Calcutt

Tonight the heat invites them
to sing: they stir in their tears
the moon’s light,
tonight she is touching on doorsteps
in the streets. They in another place
hear their voices remember. Sounds

crawl to the red edge
like fingers through gates, we invite them
with our silences. our long stares
of the nowhere darkness sounds
replacing our own.
and we could never say

how sad. how beautiful sad
they sing themselves into the dust
of the day’s ruin



Helen Calcutt, Birmingham, UK

Benevolence by Michael Keshigian

Fall approached
with tender kiss
and startling display

gently unhooking
the verdant dress of summer,
who blushed

and dropped soft petals
to the ground,
emerging pale and tired

in the unfamiliar setting,
then curled
to keep herself warm

till a bearded man arrived
with white garb
to comfort her.



Michael Keshigian