Longer Poetry

by Jan Napier inside my head a spin cycle that won’t click off.                        sideways lurch       looping swoop       eyes shut      blurry whirl throat hosts acidic rise of tide.                       glance       ceiling swings…

by Jan Napier Offshore there’s a chop, gusting Southerly knocks tops off waves, shadows above water striping it indigo, navy, white finger of the lighthouse an admonition. Beachside anglers wince at wind driven sand stinging like sunburn, cast lines a…

by Ross Jackson our Amtrak coming in through stealthy twilight most of an hour rounding red river bends in shadow from furrowed hills now gliding alongside the doomed cattle those trainsets abandoned at Grand Junction— skid row for locos and…

by Ross Jackson I scan the painted horses racing through the railway underpass at Richmond at the first corner I come to, ‘Traditional spanakopita’ chalked on a board outside Hellas Cakes local seniors already tapping drinks as I walk by…

by Vanessa Proctor the squeak of footsteps in an empty hallway sudden chill alone in a shadowy room of coffins and mummies the curled and blackened hand donated in a biscuit tin its beckoning rim keeper of dark space Grecian…

by Vanessa Proctor In a distant past of ‘there she blows’ Old Tom, the orca, king of Twofold Bay led his pod, Hooky, Humpy and Stranger, herded baleen whales into the bay. Cruising to the whaling station, Tom would flop-tail…

by Glenn McPherson Many things in you pick up colour: The chicken-hawk cry, Light rain stripping back the body’s shadow On the bridge Beside which a creel lies open, The stranger must have wanted it that way So as to…

by Jo McInerney No fool’s gold this – clay, dug laboriously out of the ground, promising only more labour, lumped and pounded and sliced into blocks, shaped into gullies and drums, U-bends and S-bends, a poor man’s alphabet, spread out…

by Jo McInerney Carving a ‘new world’ out of bluestone, your back bent, your hands swollen, you could not have known that the dark patches on the distant moon, faint like a promise of home, unsure like the smile of…

by Gerard Lewis-Fitzgerald My mind was transported to the neck of his guitar and there it hovered, as quiet and reverent as the layers of varnish and submissive frets, deeply penetrated by eons of Iberian mystique, watching his fingers consumed…