~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (the poetry) WORM ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 14
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Biology

Day after day, her heels click on the wooden floor,
the thick cotton of the labcoat rustles
as she reaches for jars behind glass. She knows
them all, the snake skeleton, bleached
slender and white, the rat pinned open like a tent,
the frog displayed and labelled, the skull
with the hole in the forehead, though she jokes
that brains come out best through the nose.

She keeps her scalpel greased and sharp, can slice
clean through the white of an eye of a cow,
pick out the lens with forceps, hold it like a prize
between finger and thumb of her thin rubber glove,
knows the best way to catch worms with soapsuds
and the best way to kill them, watches them coil,
tight-lipped. In the freezer, there are fish
the lungs of sheep, the hearts of cows.

Each night she leaves the coat with its nameless smears
on a peg, throws the gloves into a bin.
At home she changes her shoes for boots,
walks the dog, smiles at the way his hind legs quiver,
throws him sticks and stones, feeds him treats
of chocolate and yellow strips, lets him lick her face,
scoops him into her arms, thinking nothing of the mud
thinking of nothing at all, but his heat, the smell of skin.

© Helen Clare


The Man in the Hi-tech Mask

He comes but doesn’t see. He camcords.
The Mona Lisa smile is required evidence
of his having done The Louvre. He records
impatience, slaps a bulge, gold-frames his dense
curse, You wonderful bitch! Now he’s had her
two-faced goddam smile as his little television
picture, AOK? A guard with an intruder
in his bowels. He clicks, blocks the escape run.
He has her undigested. Her icon will sustain
home movies, the stunted art of the shaman.
Lisa’s visual power is gone
shrunken-headed, no more than a stain.
The tour-guide’s leash of words dissolves.
The free eye opens. The door revolves.

© Philip Burton


tanrenga (untitled)

…………………at my back ..the sunset
and the slow wave of the city ..breaks

blowing free ..the grey hairs ..bid goodbye to me

© John Edmund Carley


Sheets

Someone rob me of sheets someone
eat the last egg someone make me

so angry that I can't see straight.
Someone use all the soap someone

leave the seat up someone laugh at
my hair-do and leave out the milk

and be late for dinner or bring
me along. Embarrass me when

you remember our song and nudge
me in bed call on the phone gaze

at the stars while you're holding my
hand and be close to me. Someone

care too damn much someone
fix the screen door someone
eat these burnt pork chops and

ask me for more.

© Maryann Hazen-Stearns


The Gardener Listening to Eroica

Copper leaves darker than holy wells
spin down from soundproof trees
where days' eyes burn the contour of the slope.
Indoors, amid cool corridors,
a gardener listens to Eroica.

Late outside, he is copper leaves
darker than holy wells.
He has given over gardening, listens
from his narrow shed,
in the space by the great purple tree.

© Sally Evans


silent house

the silence in the house is stern and intimidating
like a punishment administered in absentia

I have paced the rooms to search for you
but there is no sign or trace
only the stuttering of the refrigerator motor
and imagined echoes rising
from my bare feet on the carpet

my head is full of things done and not done
mea culpa
hurry back from where you are
I have become afraid

© Frank Faust


Ghosts of a low moon

strippers in mid-noon bars
whisper love into five dollar bills
their jasmine nipples tassel-tight
around the neck of jack daniels

tipping dime and dollars to bus boys
and the chalk outline of forgotten lovers
that stick with sweet-sour perfume
to the edges of their tongue

and four blocks west, there are songs,
and fields of tulips with trains cutting through to nowhere.

as the drunks in downtown tanks
slash their i’s, dot their t’s
across the back of an empty cheque, they sing
to the low moon; the bottle that has left them.

and on fourth and main, there are angels
throwing empty buds at their wives,
as they leave with their wings and suitcases,
stapled to their sides.

and one block east, there are songs and
dreams and greyhounds going nowhere.

© Andrew Oldham


Caring

I

Helping you to dress
I note your smile,
a momentary break
in the stillness of your face,
as if you recognize
this stranger
drawing the silk
down over your breasts.

Or is it up?
You shove me away.
I wait for you to forget.
Then we begin again.

II

In the High Street
I want to buy a crystal owl,
to remind you of the way we met.
But it reminds only me
of the woman I’ve lost.

So I leave the owl in its cabinet,
safe from your sudden rage.

III

At dinner you greet me
as a welcome guest,
call me by the name
of a lover, long dead.
You touch my hand,
gaze into my eyes,
raise your glass to our future.

But when I don’t leave
you turn nasty,
threaten to have me thrown out.


IV

Lying together
in this familiar bed
our bodies touch,
much as before.
We breath in unison,
much as before,
in a world of sleep
where nothing has changed.

Except in this dream,
where you are the one who’s run out,
and I’m the one left crying.

© Ted Slade


Motorbike

I saw in a Hollywood film
that you can outrun
a tidal wave
on a motorbike.
I thought of Steve McQueen
who never made the great escape
but still revved and bucked
like a true hero.
I dream of easy riding
the wide open road,
an aery highway
that spans huge country.

No need to fear nature
when we can mount a metal steed
and fill the night with noise.
Behind us, the water crumbles
buildings, streets, bridges.
Beneath us the throb
of the engine;
ahead as much freedom
as we can swallow.

© M.A. Griffiths


In the Garden

Must have been more than a year
since I sat beside this table
with books of poems and sipped
cup after cup of green China tea.

My date with the table is late, for we now
inhabit the rays of an autumn sun,
where the breeze is cool as I sip green tea
and hear children's voices in the distance.

It enters my mind that Emily Dickinson
would have spent time like this -
realised one thousand seven hundred
and seventy five universes in small compass.

The cats, both ours and the neighbours,
have come out to share my quiet time of day.
Apart from maintaining our skin and fur
we have briefly shed all responsibility.

I have tended to things in the garden,
shaken up snails and wood lice who are
reorganising their lives in pots and borders.
I switch off the Dvorak that I'll listen to later.

Though, even here, there are small dramas
where the cats stalk birds in the honeysuckle
and call each other out to claw down a debt
or grudge like gunslingers in old movies.

What I read is Homer in a free translation
where Hector and Achilles go for it again,
and again I ask myself, was it only Helen
or something bigger they could not refuse?

The tea is fine, though I've been here a while
trying to exclude the pressures of the world
with just the solitary table, a chair, the cats,
along with me and a poem from long ago.

© James Bell


Ghosts

He heard a howl cut through the wind. "Who died?"
he asked his mother, focussed far away
from college friends who’d just arrived to stay.
"Poor Hywel Jones this morning" she replied.

The guests had read of spirits that abide
in Celtic lands--those keening ghosts who stray
when souls are crossing--and they felt the fey
forebodings carried where the cold wind cried.

Across the road a carpenter once more
bent to his task. The same old man who made
cots for the village babies, now must build
a thing to hold no hope. The power saw
started to turn again. Its cutting blade
declared an ending with a howl that chilled.

© David Anthony


Acknowledgements: Biology has appeared in First Pressings, Faber and Faber; The Gardener Listening to Eroica in The Red Wheelbarrow, No 5, 2001.
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Compiling Editor: Christina Fletcher
Associate Editors: Bob Cooper, Helen Clare
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