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.

 

J.S Watts

Monkey Night at the Circus

Monkey see.
Monkey do.
Monkey gone.
No longer my monkey.
No longer my circus.
Say goodbye to the red haired clowns,
the tension, the drama, the spangled tears.
No more balancing on an impossible wire,
spinning dizzily up high with no way down,
the world running round and round like it will never stop,
everything smooth and shiny bright,
its surface sticky with blurred rainbows.
I sleep better now at night, but the dark sparkles less.

I liked the way the yearning circus lights always
shimmered across the sequins and the glitter,
wishing on a thousand twinkly stars,
pink and gold and bleeding-heart red.
The air stuffed full of the warm sweet banquet-promise
of candyfloss and popcorn.
The crazy, ginger clown made me laugh as well as cry
and the performing monkeys with
their tiny, clever hands and winning grins,
those curling, gripping, funny tails
that wrapped around your fingers
as if they wanted to hold on forever.
I miss the monkeys.

J.S.Watts is a British poet and novelist. Her work appears in publications in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the States and has been broadcast on BBC and Independent Radio. She has edited various magazines and anthologies. To date, J.S. has published eight books: poetry collections, Cats and Other Myths and Years Ago You Coloured Me, plus multi-award nominated SF poetry pamphlet Songs of Steelyard Sue and her most recent pamphlet, i. Her novels are A Darker Moon – dark fiction, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight– paranormal.

 

William Virgil Davis

Journey

I step into my shadow
and the shadow goes away.

How many blackbirds
are sitting in that tree?

If snow fell sideways
would the flakes spin or stop?

Old cats eat slowly.

The colour I most want to inherit
is blue, colour of clouds and water.

When fog obscures the trees beside the lake,
boats disappear, are never seen again.

An evening like this
is one in a million.

Can you see where we are going?

William Virgil Davis’s most recent book of poetry, his sixth, is Dismantlements of
Silence: Poems Selected and New. His first, One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, won the
Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His poetry has been published widely worldwide.