Ben Banyard

Think of the Children

I slide a photo of my children
across the pub table.

We decided early on in our relationship
that we didn’t want children.

Well-dressed couple, expensive hair.
They don’t look tired.

Children are such a financial commitment.
Nursery places, childminders, all that equipment.

We have a garage full of old strollers,
dismantled cots, baby walkers, high chairs.

We’re both very ambitious and career-driven.
I don’t think there’s ever a right time for kids.

Sometimes the phone rings at work
and there’s been an accident at nursery.

We like to go on quite energetic holidays;
you couldn’t take a pushchair trekking the Andes.

I spend fortnights splashing in the pool
eating and drinking all-inclusively.

No, we’re quite happy, just the two of us.
The house feels empty when I’m on my own.

I notice she’s still studying that photo.

Ben grew up in Solihull/Birmingham but moved first to Exmouth (Plymouth University’s old Rolle College campus – sadly now defunct) and then on to Bristol with his now-wife Natalie before finally settling in Portishead with their twins, Daisy and Jack.

Susan Taylor

The Four Fields

Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
Jalaluddin Rumi

On a spring evening
I find four fields in my heart.
I walk into the first field

it is called Jeopardy.
Then I walk on
into a field of sadness.

This one draws me across
in an irrevocable line
into the third

where the sun is setting.
A voice in here says
this is The End.

But I see a fourth gate
wide open
with you standing beside it.

This is the field beyond
wrongdoing and rightdoing
where we meet.

Susan Taylor began writing in her teens in the idyllic setting of her family farm in the Lincolnshire Wolds. An ex-shepherd, she’s a turncoat now, with much sympathy for the plight of the wild wolf. She has eight published poetry collections, including Temporal Bones, published by Oversteps Books. Susan is a keen performer of her poetry and has developed and toured many poetry shows, including ‘La Loba Enchanting the Wolf’ and ‘The Weather House’, which appeared as an Indigo Dreams Poetry Pamphlet in 2017.

Lorna Dowell

Afterwards

We could fill the gap with conversation
the way we would if you had gone out, or
not yet got back from where you were going.

We’d talked without your being there before
but never without your being, never
knowing you weren’t coming back or going

to reappear, to walk through the door holding
arms out for a hug and beaming at us
because we were there, because we had come

to see you. It was not until after
we’d gone that the sense of your absence
opened up – a swallow hole in the heart.

We came away knowing this emptiness,
your missingness – all we have now of you –
is your presence.

Following a local laureateship in 2001-2004,
Lorna Dowell has worked extensively on
poetry and community writing projects in
education and healthcare settings. She has
had both prose and poetry published in a
variety of magazines, including Ambit, Magma,
The Frogmore Papers and The Interpreter’s
House, as well as in anthologies. Her pamphlet
Crossing the Ellipsis (Happenstance) was
published in 2011.