PB9 (The Covid Diaries) by PBmagonline

Contents

FRAN LOCK Reveille

NEIL FULWOOD 16 BWV 39 Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot

CLAIRE LOADER Telling The Bees

MARIE-LOUISE EYRES Incubatus

LAURA FOLEY The Scrims Between Us

ABEGAIL MORLEY Flare Ups

MICHAEL DURACK Endurance

ELLEN DAVIES Bad Things Will Happen

CHARLIE PETTIGREW Melting Pot

SIMON PERCHIK (untitled)

ROGER WALDRON Monday 6th April 04:31

TRACEY FOSTER “Hell For Loads of it”

JO BRATTEN Underlying Heart Problems

ELLA CUNNINGHAM The Daffs

ROSITA SWEETMAN Singing the Pandemic Blues

ABEGAIL MORLEY Learning How to be Alone

ROSITA SWEETMAN You, Her, Me

ZOE KARATHANASI Corvid, not Covid

THOMAS McCOLL Badge

GAVIN HUDSON 27 Love in a Time of Escapist Fiction.

ANNA SAUNDERS That Summer

MIRANDA PEAKE Three books by Sartre

MOYRA DONALDSON Beltane in the Time of the Virus

DAVID BELCHER Under the A525

GERRY STEWART Preserving

BRUCE McRAE 32 By The Light of The Silvery Moon

Editorial 1

DALE HOUSTMAN The Field

KEVIN KIELY 34 Social Distancing in the art of Georges Seurat (1859-1891) SIOBHÁN FLYNN Portrait of a Lady on Fire

MARY O’DONNELL 37 My Mother says No on Bloomsday 2020 LOIS HAMBLETON No Tennis at The End of June

EILISH MULHOLLAND 39 Getting Over it With Fanny Craddock

KATHRYN ALDERMAN Of the Master

ALAN MCCORMICK When We Will Run Free

LOIS HAMBLETON If The Chest Does Not Rise

WINSTON PLOWES Secret Affair With a Histogram

SIMON PERCHIK (untitled)

BIOS 45

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I — thought, fuck it, I’ll take the bus, and that has made all the difference’ FROST/O’DONOGHUE

iii

PB Magazine Issue Nine. THE COVID DIARIES Editors: Peadar and Collette O’Donoghue Email: buspoems@gmail.com Website: http://thepoetrybusmag.wix.com/change

COPYRIGHT REMAINS WITH THE POETS and ARTISTS Many thanks to the poets and artists for letting us publish their wonderful work. Huge thanks also to all you readers and supporters. Finally a special thank you to our Fundit pledgers, without you this magazine could not exist. This mag is YOURS!

Front cover by, ADÁL

Editorial

These are not our great days, these are the days of Covid-19, and at times like these some people turn towards creativity, as a solace, as a chink of light in the darkness. By necessity we have physically (and perhaps spiritually) withdrawn which inevitably leads to introspection which in turn often leads to the writing of poetry. These resultant lines are (at least) as good a means of assessing ‘how we are’, as any government survey, and hopefully slightly more edifying too! We are pleased to offer an outlet for these thoughts, feelings, wishes, dreads, and dreams.When we put out the call for poems for, PB9 (The Covid Diaries), our sole criterion was that the poems should have been written during a period of lock down. The response was amazing, with over 1000 poems sent to us in double-quick time. A million thanks to each and every poet who took the time and trouble to send us their work, we are nothing without you, whether you made the final cut or not. Difficult decisions had to be made and we hope the final selection makes for an eclectic slice of the current poetry zeitgeist, a creative statement of ‘how we are’ at this present time. We hope that PB9 might be a record that will be enjoyed now, but also looked back on in our better days to come. (Whilst obviously recognizing that for many across the planet, things never change for the good, but that’s another story.) For now, thank you, the best of luck to you, take care, stay well, keep safe. Collette and Peadar.

FRAN LOCK Reveille (i.m Patrick Joseph O’Connor)

come to. the wider world is strifing once again. now waking, don our seminary woes, departing into streets made corvine with the curfew. grief grows fungus over everything. the funerary affront; a mould that spreads like blame. how houses, catching drab from one another, pleat to crease to wreathe to glove. the very spores of mourning. spongy faces cluster in the sprouted dark. a jackdaw, jarring dampened ground. gulls, declaring spring, as vehement as coroners. come to. the poets been pushing the obstacledark aside like moles. and the gin-soaked suck of civil, smug. and still, the twilight, whiling at us terrors. and still, the dead, unheroic, doublecunted, unanimous-fucked. come to. to tease the eye apart with cold, fresh water; the mouth is intercepted, steamed. teach rage’s rude arousal. cockcrow sorrow mongrel scream.

CLAIRE LOADER Telling The Bees

They say you can tell your secrets to bees, that they take each, one by one, like tiny drops of pollen, dust them into the waiting arms of a petal, scatter them to the leas. I watch him there day after day, talking to the air, wonder what it is he gifts to their wings, my eyes fixed to the meadow, afraid of the coming bloom.

LAURA FOLEY The Scrims Between Us

Disposable masks and gloves, six recommended feet of anxious space from others— awkward nods to friends we pass toting groceries in depleted stores— a wartime feeling I hadn’t known before. In the hospital, corridors strangely quiet, no visitors allowed, they let me in to glimpse my wife in the cancer wing. A scrim of pestilence made visible by absence spread around the globe, a veil between the rest of humanity and me, where I sit watching an ash leaf curl in the wind, wondering how long it will stay aloft, how long before it falls, dissolves and merges with the earth.

MICHAEL DURACK Endurance

Three weeks of social-distancing, self-isolation and talking up our spirit of endurance; Shackleton’s Endurance sailed for forty-five days before coming a cropper in Antarctic ice. Four weeks without Premiership and Pro-14; Wild and Hussey, Hurley and the rest camped on the floes for five months - they called it Camp Patience. Seventeen days of drought, the pubs closed; McIlroy and Wordie, James and nineteen others sucked up eighteen weeks of darkness on Elephant Island under two upturned lifeboats, feasting on seal and penguin. Day Five of cocooning, climbing the four walls; Crean, Worsley & Co. wave-tossed for fifteen days in a twenty-foot boat, eight-hundred miles to South Georgia. Throw in a thirty-six hour hike across a glacier, three men, a carpenter’s adze and fifty feet of rope; it takes the gloss off our spring cleaning and feats of DIY. Well, in Stromness whaling station there was no lockdown and (to cut a long story short ) after some further mercy missions in the South Atlantic twenty-eight wanderers trailed home virus-free. Endurance lies at the bottom of The Weddell Sea.

CHARLIE PETTIGREW Melting Pot (For Joan)

Snow drifts had banked up, like melting starlight, along the ditches and hedgerows. The road was a mosaic of grit and frost. You had given us directions. “Look out for the two houses stuck together”. We loved that about youthe casual, throwaway poetry of your speech. Your house suddenly appeared, coming out of the hollow, after the glistening, wet trees. A picture postcard of lights and whiteness. “A winter fondue party”, you had said. A gathering at the long table. We all came, a gallimaufry of guests, only you could have assembled. Fondue, from the French, fondre, to melt. You knew its meaning and larger significance. That was your giftmelting the distance between us, that winter’s night of thaw and laughter, as the coloured dipping forks, commingled in the steaming pots, bringing us all closer than before.

ROGER WALDRON Monday 6th April 04:31

it was on a corridor like this you walked past arm-in-arm with your friend marrianne you giggled when I said hello whatever happened to marrianne you said you saw her once in a charity shop down chap buying jigsaws for times like these she didn’t know you and you didn’t put her to the test she had a child with her you said it must have been her granddaughter she held her hand as they crossed station road they won’t let me see you it’s like a nightmare I’ll wake up soon don’t ask me the time I haven’t got a clue there’s one thing you wouldn’t like their coffee you never liked jigsaws all that effort then break it all up and put back in the box wonder if marrianne got all her pieces sitting alone doing the one of thornton dale in autumn trees that wonderful colour coffee in the tea shop you know the one that’s by the stream i pay my bill “one coffee was it oh yes and you had that last piece of lemon drizzle” i don’t reply to the doctor who is trying

to tell me something a man walks passed arm-in-arm with his wife they nod their smiles

JO BRATTEN Underlying Heart Problems

It’s the day of my father’s funeral (we have to stream it because we’re a month into the pandemic) and there must be something wrong with my heart too all I can think about is my pot of geraniums how someone stole it from my window while I slept how someone eyed its red bloom thought I’ll have that and the cheap pot it’s in and walked off with it into the jaundiced night. I picture it now thirsting in a weed-struck yard on a balcony delighting a row of empty mayonnaise jars dropped on its side in the playground by the supermarket its heart of soil collapsing into dark. I file a police report [theft] [one plant] interrogate the blackened spot where it sat as if stained paint can explain the thudding absence. I should leave a note please bring back my geraniums please have mercy and don’t take the others please take them all if they bring you joy in this piteous time please send help I’m over here drowning in metaphor.

ROSITA SWEETMAN Singing the pandemic blues

It’s the hushed streets, the empty skies, the deserted playgrounds the sun hammering a silver path down the vacant Aluminium slide, it’s the unexpected casual brutalities of Twitter, the hard eyes in the supermarket queues, it’s the young lads swerving out into the middle of the road, it’s your death just days before it all started, your tiny coffin at the bottom of a rectangular earth hole a neat mountain of fresh earth puked up along side it, it’s your empty house, it’s the unknowable stretching into the unknown

ROSITA SWEETMAN You, Her, Me

Of course she gave me ‘your’ rosary beads, ‘your’ pink holy water font , bubble wrapped and discreetly placed, contactless, at my open door. They were Mum’s! Really? O yes, really, her fresh washed blonde hair tugged prettily this way that way across her face by the wind It made me sad unwrapping them later, a cobalt blue rosary with a thin cheap cross, a pink ceramic holy water font clearly never used? not your style at all Her cut-price deception using you, her pretend sincerity using that day, insulted you, her, me.

THOMAS McCOLL Badge

I found it in the loft, amongst all the toys my parents kept that used to be mine, and pinned it to my jumper, this massive red and yellow badge that displayed the statement ‘I am 9’. I smiled to myself, then heard my wife call, a little sternly, as she climbed the ladder – ‘You there, Tom?’ – and having, only half an hour before, stormed off in a petulant sulk after having had an argument downstairs, and fearing I’d be recognised as being the owner of the badge, I took it off quickly and threw it back inside the box.

ANNA SAUNDERS That Summer

we bleached our sinks to palimpsests washed our letters until their words bled out deified food iconised oranges, saw sliced white bread as holy leaf. That summer we were pulled from the packs or forced to hunker in hides acts of intimacy were outlawed, and we stockpiled memories of touch. And as the days grew longer (for the lucky) we shared pictures of rivers turned translucent wild boars, walking single file through city streets goats lazily nibbling privet hedges or blue skies a single cloud half-covering a blood orange sun like a medic’s mask eclipsing a savagely scoured face.

MOYRA DONALDSON Beltane in the Time of the Virus

It’s like being a teenager again, sitting out in the garden, a little hungover, melancholic, with coffee and cigarette; aimless, untethered, thinking what the fuck and the birds, the sun, the green shoots all saying just suck it up; then the breeze finding its way beneath my robe and over my body like a lover; the Green man’s lesson on the solace of flesh.

GERRY STEWART Preserving

In late summer, my mother’s kitchen boiled with a steamy assembly line. Scalded whole peaches slipped into an icy bath, their blushing skins floating to the surface like girls’ swimsuits. She said scooping out tomato seeds reminded her of nursing school, dissecting a pig uterus, tiny foetuses hidden in the folds. This is how our family talked, disease, surgeries and politics over dinner, knives poised, tipped with humour. We lifted sterilised Mason jars with tongs, filled them with golden suns. If the seals failed to pop, she made us empty them out, sweet slithering to start again. She canned for an apocalypse that came too late, jars left on shelves after the house emptied of ravenous teens, taking with them the opening sigh of a can of peaches late at night.

NEIL FULWOOD BWV 39 Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot (After J.S. Bach)

Early, before the bin lorry rumbled through the empty streets, before the postman trudged the mossy driveways with his few slivers of mail, you came to us bringing bread, freshly baked, smelling better than any perfume or summer meadow. And it wasn’t only that you gave bread to us, hungry as we were. It was that you were here before the bin lorry or the postman, on an errand we’d not asked of you, just that you’d woken early and thought of us.

MARIE-LOUISE EYRES Incubatus

Our house is a sleeping, multi-pocketed marsupial. Crab-apples dangle outside. Tucked in its hidden pouches we each ferment like old blue cheeses like sulfates gathered in the silt of bottled, mediocre wines. Windowsills buckle with condensation puddling under sailboats of glass and lead. This is a creature with rheumatic joints, curled into the damp. Not a place for storing cookbooks, old polaroids and leather brogues without the bruise-like vines of mildew creeping across them all. But it never stirs this house, it sleeps, dreamless and constant, couvade.

ABEGAIL MORLEY Flare Ups

There’s slow air tonight, the kind not strong enough to sustain life, the kind that’s freezer-trapped, sealing us like fish caught in a Nordic sea. In the kitchen, I watch the slow burn of your roll up, hear you on loop running backwards to our teenage years then forwards again us in our forties playing grown-up and air has deserted us now and our skin’s papery this morning, our bodies cathedral windows drained of blood and the ashtray is what’s left of us. I tell you this and you say, Melodrama, pull a pack of Rizlas from a pocket so you can look down while you roll up, so my voice just echoes through fog and your fingers can tap out an unknown rhythm into an air that can’t hold another vibration

ELLEN DAVIES Bad Things Will Happen (After Ellen Bass)

Bad things will happen. You will be locked inside your house.Your hair will grow long.Your partner will lose his work. It will become illegal to walk your dog.Your mother will get sick.Your life will become small, small enough to fit within four walls, tiny enough to fit in your pocket, but you won’t mind. A small life still has four walls that contain more rooms than you can stand in at once, more books than you can read, more words than you can write, more hours than you can fill with living.

SIMON PERCHIK (untitled)

First on paper then the carpenters following the saws –in the end the house was divided with borders where each wall was scented by a song still playing when the hammers were silenced the way you grip this knob then leave a room that has no place to go though you turn the radio around, sing along till the static no longer comes from nails stiffening, beginning to foam as each board draws its wood tighter around your throat –it’s a small house, a kitchen that’s gaining weight, a sink where iron drips just for the flash when it touches the ground the way the dead weigh less when the last thing they saw was the darkness, drop by drop opening the corners, the water, louder and louder.

TRACEY FOSTER “Hell For Loads of it”

Outside may be just an ordinary street, staring bleakly where the grass is greener. The dishevelled lampshade in the living room, complaining about the mundane. Or the married couple who never had a deep and meaningful conversation, not punching someone in the face, but anger channelled or -heaven forbidraising your voice. I remember the first moment I saw; sweater, white eyeliner, shiny wet maroon lip with a feather in my hair. Sublime, by which I mean “edible” Breathing down his neck as he rewires a plug. Weak at the knees for this, “a lunchtime bottle of wine” Casually used condoms. Who’s looking? Tie it up for Zooms, (yes, I am that person.) Fantasy is over before it even began. Coming to hate, not only the way the other chews, but the way they swallow as well. Drinking at home goes through the roof, you’re left standing there, soaked with one tiny bucket. One minute it’s haunting, the next one of you drowns in Fairy liquid or suffocates, folding sheets. Don’t beat yourself up when it all goes pear shaped. The end of the world, with zombies, no food and no internet. Emerged days later as a perfect blackened circle. The innards as black as night; My morale is low, starting to get annoyed with the skin but my knife is greeted by the texture of mush. The box at the back of the wardrobe can languish and blacken forever. I fantasise about traditional bedfellows such as leather, moss and cedar. To give my jelly rolls their due, they taste better than they look, unexpected like the tart Who has actually got a heart. Now she’s “in the trenches”; parenting, work.

While I dream of putting the lipstick on and going out with the buggy. Asked her if she was done with him, specs on a string, nylon polo under an open necked shirt a knackered one. In a dressing gown, breast feeding they held each other and he hated her more than underwear that doesn’t quite fit and lightly irritates. He unblocks the toilet to little fanfare, sporting an exuberant lockdown beard while still looking infuriating urbane. Let’s cut to the case. Marriage isn’t to be nurtured, it’s “hell for loads of it.”

ELLA CUNNINGHAM The Daffs

are out like it’s spring or something. We have about 12 walls in this place, and I’ve blu-tacked something pretty to almost all of them. Someone else’s photo of a cave in Chiang Mai above my bed. A drawing of a boy’s legs drooped over the edge of a crescent moon hangs high above my bathtub. A cartoon woman with pink tights and too-large hands types at her desk and watches me at mine. A woman sat meditating: below her crossed legs: the words Remember: right here in this moment, nothing is missing — I’m going to have to take that liar down. So much is missing, from the bulbs of the daffs that won’t sprout, despite the earth being at its most untrodden, to the bus stop graffiti, the names of first lovers remaining unsprayed. Maybe the places we usually go to are missing us back, the usually busy pathways, train stations, the airports remembering a woman coming back from Chiang Mai rigged with photos of caves. No boy’s legs dangling over the moon’s edge. Lined up along the Ghost Town’s grass banks, the daffs are out like it’s spring or something.

ABEGAIL MORLEY Learning How to be Alone

Since I swallowed my name the wind’s picked at my lips like a blackbird teasing worms from muttering earth, drumming its feet so it sounds as if rain is jabbering endlessly from sky. I’m nameless now, kick off my skin like shoes and barefoot I greet myself as a stranger might carrying a suitcase, distracted by crowds, incoming flights, conveyor belts and tannoy sounds that ring tinny as teeth. Instead of my name I carry a sparrow in my handbag perched on my purse – it ruffles feathers when I dig in for silver, eyes black-out slits. Sometimes I think it’s stopped breathing, hold a disappointed wing between finger and thumb, hope to discover the heartbeat in its worn-out chest still thrums, hauls blood from deep ravines. Sometimes I crush its tiny bones and they blur like mist on windows and I write my name as if I’ve just come out of depression and the drug-slurred edges of pills have worn off and I’m left like the absolute-blue of morning, bread in my pockets to feed the birds.

ZOE KARATHANASI Corvid, not Covid

You avian citizen cosmopolitan urban/rural guru you land on the black lamp post at the side of rue Chaudron in broad daylight looking for company is there anybody out there you are not black you are iridescent purple by the time I raise my eyes from my phone searching for the camera the lamp post shakes like the Pythia from top to bottom you know this neighbourhood better than me its density of neurons diaporama of skies absence of trees geographies of garbage now you are pecking at the windows of the Epicerie de choix armed with your best conversation starters your icebreakers

a girl sings from her open window do they know you can sing do they know you can talk caw caw you cry caaaawwww I am a corvid not covid

GAVIN HUDSON Love in a Time of Escapist Fiction.

Someone somewhere is writing a novel called 2 metres about how I met you. If they are clever about it they will set it in a different time, another pestilence. It won’t be this city or this park where we first meet. Perhaps they should set it on another planet. Perhaps you should have scales and I could grow a pair of stalkish antennae. Intercourse is had by telepaths in radiowaves. Somewhere, being physical is possible without being touched and it feels like being touched. In the novel that is being written called 2 metres there is a drawing of me on one page and you are on the next page and when they close the book I can hear you lying next to me, the dark contours of your breath in my ears and mouth.

MIRANDA PEAKE Three Books by Sartre

* The ground floor of the house seems derelict but I knock anyway. A builder opens the door and shouts upstairs. After a moment a young guy comes down and I stretch my arm out as far as I can to pass him the books. We both smile and I back away down the path onto the street, where just for a short time everybody is running. * The children are sliding off the ends of the table, almost liquid by the end of the day. I go out to get Prosecco and parsley, these non-essential items come at a high price but I’ll pay later, thank you. * I go back into the kitchen and put the dirty mugs in the sink. While I’m there, I hear the end of something on the radio – a woman looks at herself in the mirror and says, come on you can do this, you are tougher than you think. She says, these men do this every day, just concentrate. I stand there for a moment after it finishes, wanting more of these clear messages. Eventually I move away and out into the garden, where my body feels too big for the space, tall and unstable. * The expensive Earl Grey arrives and I wash my hands after I touch it and then I wash the taps and then I go into the kitchen, open the bottle of Prosecco and listen – the frantic tapping and clicking of the console, the occasional

crash, a groaning, the clashing of swords, and eventually a woman’s voice, asking to turn it down – witchy and not my own. * When finally I ring the bell of the right house, I’m wearing a pyjama top over jeans, underneath a leather jacket. The man, named Toby, is understanding and grateful. We laugh from a distance and I back away down the path. I walk home slowly, taking it in, unaccustomed to evening. * Two people pass on bicycles and I hear the woman say sharply to the man, I know, Tom, I know the way home for Christ’s sake, as they swoop round the corner. I continue on, knowing I am Tom, knowing I am the woman. * I look down and see I’m still holding the piece of apple. I put it into my mouth and crunch through the end of the news. After that we’re silent. The child upstairs recklessly drives a toy car across the wooden floor of a flat we’ve never seen and probably never will. * I walk the length of the street to put one book in the designated place, then all the way back and up the hill weaving through until I find the top, down the other side and trace the numbers, open the gate with my elbow and push the parcel halfway through. On the way home I buy lettuce and we eat it with the rest of the lasagne. Afterwards you turn on Doctor Who and time slides all over the place. 29

* You write again to the neighbours in google translate Spanish. It reads like a love letter – you mention the cry of the fox last night, the midnight hour, these difficult times, the walls – so very thin. But you don’t explain how late it was when I woke and found you roaming the rooms, hungry for something we don’t have in the fridge. * I have walked this this hill from every direction now and always on the way back down, I am un-done by the city, the shiny science fiction, standing there unused. Three of these unfurnished weeks have passed, during which we have learned so many things.

DAVID BELCHER Under the A525

The road’s supporting piers are hard-edged intrusions— concrete details I hold fast to when thought and emotion lock down. An unexpected holiday stretches out into unemployment. Missing five shifts of drudgery every week, I feel less and less like myself.

BRUCE McRAE By The Light of The Silvery Moon

Another full moon skulking round the yards and gardens of our sad little town, shining its grey lamp over human ignominy and human invention, picking the lock of our church’s back door, highlighting the cures displayed in the pharmacy’s window, scarcely enough illumination to read the poster there announcing last summer’s circus. Come one, come all, it excitedly insists. See the friendly giant juggling kittens and midgets. Stand and marvel before the world’s unhappiest clown. Ogle our beautiful sword-swallower. Witness the disparity between animal and man.

DALE HOUSTMAN The Field

I walked to the field at midnight.It wasn’t frozen, as expected. Sleep promptly descended, as I wished, claiming me in her wingspan of white feathers. I woke in a different chapter with a logic of its own. The stars talked of what they had borrowed, not stolen, while the wet autumn leaves bloomed into tiny wooden boats. "We are going somewhere," they said. It wasn’t merely a new chapter, but a different book altogether; a partner book to the primary articulation[s] / essential narration[s] of imaginary facts; always proliferating. There were so many, and my pockets housed no pens. Thinking quickly, I pulled the thin ribbon of creek water; rearranging its droplets of cool water into new sentences that might explain. All this work with delicate material made me quite thirsty, so I drank all the verbs. It’s gone quite late or early, I should say, and the trees still have much to tell. There has been a lot of cutting behind the neighbours’ sheds. When trees bleed, the hawks gather from neighbouring towns to drink the blood. I know it all sounds crazy, but I wanted you to know.

KEVIN KIELY Social Distancing in the art of Georges Seurat (1859-1891)

Awake a second time, the digital clock at 04.11 EuroNews (on mute) slides countries and statistics across the screen. Gothic trees beyond the window sill with the sad still life, iPhone and two stray books Nineteenth Century French Artists and When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chödrön) Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte may be breaking the 2-metres social distancing, his perfectly painted parents catcalled their kids (obviously) to order like those on a break from lockdown who waddle nervous as ducklings in the local park where joggers wearing sunglasses endlessly circle the artificial lake, and elders are like mourners staring into the water their dogs on leads (by order), while the volleyball mixed-doubles seems to be the only fun in the sun— Seurat’s cosmopolitans pulsate in sombre sensual haze beside the glittering river, yachts, boats, Paris on the horizon— but it was the hats, umbrellas, the dreamy relaxation that made me grab the red marker and graffiti ←2Metres→ between his two dragoons, the freak playing the trombone, the guys rowing, the pipe smoker snooping on the family picnic— A Star Trek episode Planet C-19 would lack action about an invisible virus that kills at random (weak storyline) ‘It’s life Jim but not as we know it’ (Got it in one, Mr Spock) I wilfully ‘destroy’ Seurat’s beautiful painting with plenty ←2M→ (Chödrön) offers Buddhist heart advice on ‘intimacy with fear’ and ‘this very moment is the perfect teacher’ as the kettle boils making morbid music. The label on the Yogi Organic Sleep Tea bag says ‘Patience Pays’. ‘Healthy lockdowners who are fed and fed up are never heroes. Frontline workers are the heroes’—the local free newspaper proclaims.

EuroNews attempts to evade the horrors, shows people talking balcony to balcony, shoppers zig-zagging to the safety of their cars and then lots of hospital footage, South American lion coloured graveyards with JCB diggers on standby. Drink your tea and don’t touch your face. It may be years before children in school-playgrounds chant: ‘Ring-A-Ring A-Covid. Cough Cough, Spit Spit. We All Fall Down’. And how long before the pharmacies sell Covidox and Covidox (Extra Strength):‘don’t take while driving your electric car.’ Or there may be no more schools, as once there were cave dwellers, animal skins for clothes, flint utensils and bone needles— Someone messaged around midnight with laughing emoticons: ‘If you hear the sound of one hand washing in the sink, you’re not staying safe.’

SIOBHÁN FLYNN Portrait of a Lady on Fire

That was the last movie I saw before it happened. I didn’t know how special it was, how wonderful, to sit in a room with strangers and be transported. I went alone, I like to go alone, something always happens, something other than the movie. Once, I was the only one in the cinema, a cartoon was playing instead of Nightcrawler, I thought it was a trailer but when it didn’t stop I went and found a man to help, he said, “For you I’ll skip the ads and go straight to the main feature.” which sounds like a euphemism or some sort of extended metaphor. Another time in the summer; hot, sunny, proper summer, I should have been outside, but outside wasn’t precious then. I was late, the movie had started, my eyes couldn’t adjust, I was blind, reached out, grasped a seat back which was a man’s shoulder. A hasty apology, I continued to the next row, sat down, put my bag on the seat beside me which was a man’s lap. An exasperated “Jesus Christ” and he moved far away. That was A Most Violent Year, when it was over the lights went up to show only two other people there, both of whom I had touched. I am beginning to wonder about those men my mother warned me about, maybe they were unlucky, maybe it was a trick of the light.

MARY O’DONNELL My Mother says No on Bloomsday 2020

It is not easy, it is not easy to wheel an old woman to the shower on Bloomsday, when the world and Molly cry yes, yes, yes, and she is saying no, no, no, because what’s left of her life depends on the freedom of No. How Joycean of her to resist the cleaned-up conscience of filial attention, your need to fix her taints and odours, wash hair and teeth, attend to toes when all she wants is to float on the lily-leaf of her own green bedspread, drowsing Molly in a tangle of snow-white hair. Now, dreams enclose her more than talk of showers or meals, the flowing waters of memory rise and touch her skin just where the mattress eases spine and bones in that yellow-walled room. Hello, my darling, she greets his photograph, flinging kisses towards mottled frame. To her then, the logic of love, to her, the logic of No, her tongue untameable.

LOIS HAMBLETON No Tennis at The End of June

Blossom at each window but no tennis at the end of June. No dazzling whites, no breathless rallies. When I heard the gunshot, meant for the gentle pheasant in the uncut field, I found the bullet in the ground and curled my fingers tight around its weight. Warm from the mechanism, that mortal chamber, reminding me of fissions, separating, splitting up. But then of fusion, thrust aligning with the April sun and warm, just like the blood, the flesh the missile would have torn, if just an atom further … The peaceful pheasant, gentle at my door takes cake from out my sparrow hand and stands bewildered of that lethal force, devoid of atoms yet it runs its course. One shot, it’s spent, unlike the little viral sprite that dances, joyous, atom bright. Don’t breathe the air… Deprived of anatomic bind, of sons and daughters that have left the nest, I seek to catch their colours, keep their blood, their flesh, their feathers. Perhaps the pheasant fills my void but here’s the main and only thing, no tennis at the end of June …

EILISH MULHOLLAND Getting over it with Fanny Craddock

There’s a loneliness to it I am watching her And she is watching the camera High necked and rosy cheeked One eyebrow arched In her sealed snare of schematics She’s stuffing a chicken And I am stuffing myself with sadness Listless in its lethargy There is nothing to do with myself Except to stare and stutter At her blitz of utter romanticism. Truly, a turkey has never seemed More beautiful than under her red nails That scrape confectioners custard Is her plastic tub of premonitions. Slowly rolling This booklet of fantasy Is a hymn sheet for the henpecked Yearning for peace And peas for Christmas. Nipping and tucking These imperfections are edible Boxed brains of petit fours And chloroform That melt in two Redgreenamberblue It won’t do fanny it won’t do— 39

KATHRYN ALDERMAN Of the Master (After ‘Pulmonary Tuberculosis’—Katherine Mansfield)

I heard a mumpsimus coughing in a tulgey English wood: coughing, dry as the quietus. ‘I hear you’ I said. ‘This isn’t your home!’ A cough; dry as a thousand oaks cleaving. ‘Come out’ I said. ‘Your house is ablaze and you’ve blighted the trees!’ A cough; the rasp of a chainsaw snickering … and the whole wild wood held its breath … until I thought the canopy of boughs was a topsy-turvy sod and the earth, a rabble sky of rock and stone and I, a bums-up chicken trying to roost. (Title—origin of Dominic—AKA Cummings (advisor to UK PM Boris Johnson)

He and wife had Covid-19 and drove with their child, 280 miles to family plus 30 miles to a wood to ‘test his eyesight’.)

ALAN MCCORMICK When We Will Run Free

When billionaires blew rockets to burn, we filled balloons with spittle, and flew like Icarus towards the sun, skinned up palms to escape ourselves, to rescue a neighbour’s cat, shouted in cones, ranted from rooftops, held umbrellas just to caress the currents. Once we mingled, cycled in an umbilical cord, a lycra chain-gang, in parks, in cities, crossing squares, linking hands on skyscrapers, thoughts of jumping banished by who we might fall on, a lonely road now with just our breaths, and memories. After this, the clamp, the civic shut in, will come the release, the new build, going into shops like entering a circus, the shrill cry that follows the roar, the kiosk sign that says all fear gets left inside, we’ll find each other then, clowning around, ignoring hoops for the air outside.

LOIS HAMBLETON If The Chest Does Not Rise

I suppose as you have always said, I tend to think without my head, all jumbled up in abstract ways and you, ex copper, father of my kids, you tend to see things in the blinding light of day. No areas of grey, no merging lines. Sometimes I felt I was a label, female, no previous crimes. Endless shifts you worked back then, late seventies the shirts were baby blue, designed for easy care, drip dry, warm iron. The early turn, two in the afternoon until the stroke of ten. Through nights and watch about I learnt you dealt with raw emotions, sometimes extreme. When you returned sometimes you’d turn the cupboards upside down to find a cigarette when shops were shut.You, who had unearthed a rotting body hidden in a loft. What morbid monsters had your fingers touched? And other times, just at the highway’s edge where you would sweat until the paramedics came, you couldn’t cease while others watched, that mouth to mouth resuscitation game. Would then your mouth be more or less inclined, to place itself upon this mouth of mine? The whole world stops, you’d say, when someone dies. One breath, the chest might rise … The ambulance strike of 89, it saw you shield a cot death infant in your six-foot frame and until then, no other thing, no fist, nor ignorance or greed had brought you helpless to your knees. But I was all about the flowers, the fairy land that was my world. That baby, lodged forever in your breast would smile at how I felt about the dreadful things. But nothing ever haunts your dreams, not rising chests, or baby breaths.

WINSTON PLOWES Secret Affair with a Histogram

He was lung red from the blood bags a hypoxia sunset from the mask marks the fading light above the door. Hits you like a new swear word precipitous yet lush a cherry-red wall of death. His, was the stairway to hell a tearaway curve that couldn’t be flattened by love or hugs. Pillars looming like tombstones in the clouds devouring the stats like a hit-and-run driver going through the gears 250 – 500 – 750 smashing the magic 1,000.

SIMON PERCHIK (untitled)

All that’s left is the rain tossed overboard as the silence now falling on her forehead –you are sailing too close to the ditch covered with dirt filling this harbour and night after night though there’s so little wind –nothing moves in this sea except as an armada :flowers that steady each ship with the rocks mourners leave as those voices you hear coming to an end.

BIOS.

ADÁL, as baptized by legendary photographer Lisette Model, is one of the most innovative and celebrated artists working in the early twenty-first century. Trained as a photographer and master printer at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s, he was co-founder and co-director - with Alex Coleman - of Foto Gallery in Soho, NYC; an experimental gallery solely devoted to photography and photo-derived works as a fine-arts medium. Kathryn Alderman is an actor-writer from Gloucestershire, U.K. She won Cannon Poets’ Sonnet or Not competition and runner-up in Gloucestershire Writers’ Network competition in assoc. with Cheltenham Literature Festival. Publications include: Ink, Sweat & Tears, Atrium, I Am Not a Silent Poet, The Cannon’s Mouth, Eye Flash Poetry Journal, Hedgehog Poetry Press,Amaryllis, Bonnie’s Crew and artist Luke Jerram’s ‘Of Earth and Sky’ exhibition. Kathryn chaired GWN from 2016-19 and is studying an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at UoG. David Belcher is aged over 50, he lives on the north coast of Wales, and his most recent work has appeared in The Ekphrasic Review, Ink Sweat and Tears and Right Hand Pointing. David reads and writes poetry for enjoyment, and because he can feel it doing interesting things to his brain. Jo Bratten is a writer and teacher, originally from eastern Ohio in the USA but based now in London. Her work has appeared in Ambit, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears,The Interpreter’s House and MIROnline amongst others. Ella Cunningham is a poet/writer currently studying for an MA in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University. She also works as a care assistant in a nursing home. She often writes about LGBTQ relationships, family, ageing, nature, and anything else that inspires her. Her work has appeared in Porridge Magazine, Honey & Lime Lit, Paragraph Planet and elsewhere. She tweets at @ellamadalene.’ Ellen Davies is a poet from the Rhondda, south Wales. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. Her pamphlet, Accent, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2015.

Moyra Donaldson is a poet from Co Down. She has published nine collections of poetry, including a limited edition publication of artwork and poems, Blood Horses, in collaboration with artist Paddy Lennon. Her most recent collection is Carnivorous, Doire Press, 2019. In 2019, she received a MajorIndividual Artist award from Arts Council NI. Michael Durack lives in Tipperary, Ireland. Poems in journals such as The Blue Nib, Skylight 47 and Poetry Ireland Review. Publications include a memoir, Saved to Memory: Lost to View (2016) and a collection, Where It Began ( Revival, 2017.) A second collection, Flip Sides, has just been published by Revival Press. Marie-Louise Eyres (Hogan) lives now in the US. In 2020 her poems appear in Agenda, Portland Review and thrillingly, Poetry Bus. She’s finishing an MFA with Manchester Writing School. Siobhán Flynn’s poetry has been published in Wild Atlantic Words,VisualVerse, The Pickled Body, Amsterdam Quarterly, New Irish Writing and others. She was shortlisted for the Hennessy Awards in 2016, highly commended in the Patrick Kavanagh award in 2018 and selected to read at the Poetry Introductions at the Cork International Poetry Festival in 2019. Laura Foley’s, Why I Never Finished My Dissertation, was among Kirkus Review’s top poetry books of 2019. It’s This, is forthcoming from Salmon Press. She lives with her wife among the hills of Vermont, USA. Tracey Foster has been a school teacher for over 30 years, teaching Art and Design. She recently completed a Comma Press short story course and had her work published in a collection called ‘Tales from Garden Street.’ She is currently studying an MA in creative writing and lives in Leicestershire. Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published two collections with Shoestring Press, with a third forthcoming in early 2021. He also has two pamphlets with The Black Light Engine Room Press. Lois Hambleton is from Solihull in the West Midlands and she has always worked in adult education, focusing on inclusion and supported learning. She taught for many years at a Birmingham college, eventually managing their inner city provision for learners recovering from mental ill health. She has

work included in - A Wild and Precious Life, a recovery from addiction anthology being published in April 2021 by Unbound and also – Last Stanza Poetry Journal (October 2020) Dale Houstman says, Where I was born and where I’ll die are unimportant. Was born over there (near some people) and moved over here (near some other people) And yes - writing is rude to interrupt what might otherwise be a life of pure insensibility. And behind every “good” man there is a “better” absence. Gavin Hudson is a poet, writer and restorative justice trainer based in Sheffield, United Kingdom. He trained in poetry and creative writing at Warwick University. He also writes board game reviews. Zoe Karathanasi is originally from Greece but now lives in Paris, France. She has an MA in Poetry with distinction from the Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various online and print publications, such as Ink Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Tears in the Fence and Under the Radar. She is working towards a first collection. Kevin Kiely poet, critic, author: UCD Belfield Metaphysical: a retrospective (2018); Seamus Heaney and the Great Poetry Hoax (2018); Harvard’s Patron: Jack of All Poets (2018); Arts Council Immortals (2020); Cromwell Milton Collins Carson (2020); Endgames: Good Friday Agreement & Missus Windsor’s Hitmen (2020) Quintesse (St Martin’s Press, NY); Breakfast with Sylvia (Lagan Press, Belfast) awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. 5 Arts Council Literature Bursary Awards; Bisto Award for A Horse Called El Dorado (O’Brien Press). www.kevinkiely.net kevinkielypoetwiki Claire Loader is a New Zealand born writer now living in County Galway, Ireland. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Crannóg, The Cormorant & The Cabinet of Heed. Fran Lock is an associate editor at Culture Matters, the author of seven poetry collections (the most recent of which, Contains Mild Peril, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize) and has recently completed her Doctoate at Birbeck college. Her eighth collection, Hyena!, from which this poem is taken, is forthcoming from PB Press.

Thomas McColl lives in London, his latest collection is Grenade Genie, published by Fly on the Wall Press. Bruce McRea, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,600 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets’ (Silenced Press); ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’; (Cawing Crow Press); ‘Like As If’ (Pski’s Porch); ‘Hearsay’ (The Poet’s Haven). Alan McCormick is a fiction and memoir writer from Wicklow. He also writes short pieces (like his poem ‘When WE WILL RUN FREE’) in response to pictures by London based artist, Jonny Voss. See more at www.alanmccormickwriting.wordpress.com Abegail Morley’s fourth collection is The Unmapped Woman Nine Arches Press (2020). She is a Co-editor at Against the Grain Press and Editor of The Poetry Shed. Her debut was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Eilish Mulholland is a literary graduate based in the North of Ireland. You can find her on twitter @Plath&Co and on Soundcloud at The Plath & Co Podcast. Mary O’Donnell’s eighth collection, “Massacre of the Birds”, is due from Salmon in October. She is also fiction writer and member of Ireland’s affiliation of artists Aosdana. Miranda Peake is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been published in magazines including, Ambit, Banshee, Bare Fiction, Oxford Poetry, Magma, The Moth and The Rialto. In 2014 she won the Mslexia Poetry Competition and in 2018 she was placed second in the Poetry and Psychoanalysis Competition. Her first pamphlet was published in November 2019 with Live Canon. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway and is part of the Hornet Press. She is the owner of independent bookshop, Chener Books in South East London. Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris,The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Rosenblum Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020.

For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. Charlie Pettigrew is originally from Armagh but now lives in Barcelona. He began writing poems in late 2019 and is delighted that many have been accepted and published in literary magazines he admires, such as Abridged, Honest Ulsterman and PoetryBus. Winston Plowes shareshis floating home in Calderdale UK with his seventeen-year-old cat, Sausage. He teaches creative writing in schools, universities and to local groups while she dreams of Mouseland. His latest collection, Tales from the Tachograph was published jointly with Gaia Holmes in 2018 by Calder Valley Poetry. www.winstonplowes.co.uk Anna Saunders is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press), Kissing the She Bear (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox, (Indigo Dreams) Ghosting for Beginners, (Indigo Dreams), and the forthcoming Fever Few, (Indigo Dreams due 2021). ‘She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything.’ Wendy Klein,The North, Issue 53 Gerry Stewart is a poet, creative writing tutor and editor based in Finland. Her poetry collection iwas published by Flambard Press, UK. In 2019 she won the ‘Selected or Neglected Collection Competition’ with Hedgehog Poetry Press for her collection Totems, to be published in 2020. Her writing blog can be found at http://thistlewren.blogspot.fi/ and @grimalkingerry on Twitter. Rosita Sweetman is an author and critic began writing poetry in her teens, stopped for forty years then started again. She is a founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, and her memoir ‘Feminism Backwards’ will be is published by Mercier Press. She is the mother of two adult children, Chupi and Luke. Of everything she has made these two are way and above the most precious. Jane’s husband (Roger Waldron) lives & writes in retirement in Sheffield, head gardener to his daughter’s garden, gig attendee with his son, last poems published 30 years ago.