Philip Rush

TELLING THE BEES

Dad was in his plush red
dressing gown.
He had been half-asleep all day.
The television was on
but the sound was down.
I held his eyes closely.
I hugged his eyes.
Phyllis, I said.
Your wife. My mum.
This all very slowly
like dictation
in a Shanghai
English lesson.
She’s not been very well.
A faint nod,
a faint agreement.
This evening, I said,
she has died.
The priest has been.
He gave her the sacrament.
We have said prayers,
made peace with God.
But mum is dead.
Oh. He said. Oh.
A slow motion screen
of the innards
of a mobile phone
showing the electrons
and their binary decisions
was being played
on his face.
Oh. He said. Oh.
And then,
I am a little
unstrung about that.

Philip Rush is the deputy head of St Peter’s High School, Gloucester, where he teaches in the English department. He has taught theatre studies for 20 years and for seven years led the postgraduate training scheme for trainee English and drama teachers at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. He has a degree in English from Westfield College, University of London and an MA in drama from Bristol University. He has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Philip Rush is the deputy head of St Peter’s High School, Gloucester, where he teaches in the English department. He has a degree in English from Westfield College, University of London and an MA in drama from Bristol University. He has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at the Torbay Poetry Festival.  His poetry has won prizes and, as he remarks, made a profession of coming second in competitions.

Daichi Ishikawa

Art

Between my bureaucratic brain
and your bucolic train of thought
are shady spots of time called art.

Will anything so uncertain
in the world in which we live
remain intact? You say it will
though I cannot believe.

If we, behind your velvet curtain,
could hide a vague voluptuous idea
of our own interrupted works of art
then, I should be relieved.

The beautiful, sublime, at times
suspend my mythopoetic piety,
and autocorrect our cringing crimes
of imperfection, influence, anxiety,
of lasting lyric listlessness, a sense
of loneliness immense.

I swear and pray, in silky solitude, perusing Baudelaire,
and sup again a cup of emptiness, ennui, a symphony
once gold, now cold, before our time is up and down I go
and fade away into the restless realm of art for art
as though – I know – nothing really falls apart.

Daichi Ishikawa was born in Japan and has been an Anglophile since before
he started learning English at school, years before his first authentic British
pub experience. He read English at university while in Tokyo, where he
acquired an incurable habit of book-collecting and cat-stroking, as well as a
taste in British Aestheticism through reading Walter Pater’s The Renaissance. He has lived in London since 2014, currently completing a Ph.D. in English at Queen Mary University of London. In the art of poetry, he constantly aspires
towards what Pater called ‘the condition of music’.

Art.mp3

Sally Sandler

Precious Seconds

A single second ‒only one,
“one one-thousand” ‒that is all.
And in that void, a race is won,
a hawk strikes, the dove falls;
the rain begins, the drought is done,
the atom splits, the future calls.

Time enough to say, “I do,”
and seal a love against the fates,
or, beseeching, “I love you,”
regardless of the vow that breaks.
A falling star fades from view,
the night swallows fire it makes.

Cars crash, a bone breaks,
the cat jumps and milk is spilled.
In the little time that takes
the addict takes a deadly pill.
A spirit reaches open gates,
leaving dust upon the hill.

A button’s pushed, a bomb drops,
a final suture ‒healing starts.
The tiger dies when gun pops,
a muttered utterance breaks a heart.
The midwife cries, “Push, don’t stop,”
and in that time, a life embarks.

Much begins, and so much fits
within a second ‒easily.
The space inside is fathomless,
a window to eternity.

Sally Sandler is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has lived in San Diego for over
forty years. She is a docent and historian at the San Diego Botanic Garden, as well as a wife, a mother, and a grand-mother of four. Her writing is informed by those personal journeys and by a deep connection with the outdoor world.

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