Gary Allen

The letter.

And soon the trees will be bare again
and someone will bring a letter –
for that was when a letter was important
not just a buzz in your pocket
or a badly digitised classical tune

and you could see the letter coming from some distance
off
leaving you time to imagine or fret

so, what was in the letter?
I don’t know, but it could be a summons or a confession
or a relative who is already dead
a gesture of love or ending
stretched between opening and reading

if your world should suddenly collapse between finger 
and thumb
there would be an eternity

and the footsore messenger on the causeway
and the rain breaking open the sky
and the sad trees beginning to sway and moan
postmarked Amsterdam or Berlin.

Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co.Antrim. He was born into a large working-class family, received a basic education in primary and secondary schools, before going to college, where he studied mechanical engineering. Many of his poems are written about Europe, focusing on the poor, the misaligned, the victims (usually women) in society, often charged with a sexual connotation. Other poems use metaphors for ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the cruelty, viciousness, randomness of two opposed positions that destroy the lives and the society around them, making him one of the most important and distinctive poets in Ireland of his generation.

Terence John

Remembrance As Soliloquy

Now the world is simply
me and not the two of us together it’s harder.
This light is of a harsher degree,
its remedies

in flux, its Autumns keener
to approach, its Winters sharper, its sounds
a grinding of knives. And when I try
to support these clouds

their weight is heavier than before
and silence is vigorous in its intent, but makes
no sense when I attempt to question it.
My poems are whispered

laments at night, my soft cushions
intolerable rocks.
My clocks you’ll find unwound and what was
once amusing to us both has lost

its original edge. Memory is less clear
than it was, my ambition to survive vacillatory,
weakest on Sundays, my rooms
a poor example

of life after the event :
the burnt-out ruins of a struggle, with nothing
left to impress but odds and ends
like a photograph, a hair brush and brooch,
an embroidered cardigan across a bedroom chair.

Terence John lives in Scotland. He was short-
listed for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2018
and his poems have appeared or are forth-
coming in  Southlight,  Orbis,  The London
Magazine, Acumen, Glasgow Review Of Books,
The North, The Poetry Review and Stand.

Rachel Carney

Survival

Her knots pull tighter as the day wears on.
She finds fine traces of him in the light,
and searches for some thought to lean upon.

Is it too soon to clean – just one day gone?
Her mind aches with the memory of that night.
Her knots pull tighter as the day wears on.

She wonders where to get her meaning from
and wrestles with her hope – a vacant fight –
and searches for some thought to lean upon.

The radio begins to play their song –
a surge of words that sound so plain and trite
(her knots pull tighter as the day wears on)

and so she turns it off, and then back on.
The silence afterwards is frail and white.
She searches for some thought to lean upon.

The day fades into grey, the cleaning’s done.
Her grief won’t go, the chords of pain stretch tight.
Her knots pull tighter as the day wears on.
She searches for some thought to lean upon.

Rachel Carney has had poems published in several magazines and journals including Ink Sweat and Tears, The High Window Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, The Open Mouse, Sarasvati and The Wales Haiku Journal. She has written articles and reviews for various magazines and websites including Wales Arts Review and The Poetry School. She is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing, and has been awarded a place on the 2019 Literature Wales mentoring scheme.