Tag: Poem

Jayant Kashyap

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takes the clouds to the water boats
in Venice / to the streets

in Mawsynram; the birds are gathered
into their nests / and the boys

are called to the rooftops;
the farmer holds in his hands

his bag of seeds— the breeze
takes him to the fields, scatters

them amidst the drops of rain—
the rain amidst which the breeze

is bittersweet / is ambiguous
like a sunflower that loves a day

in the sun and hates too much of it
yet /

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The last time Jayant Kashyap’s work appeared in Briefly Zine, one of the poems was nominated for Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net. Since then, his work has appeared in POETRY, Magma and Poetry Wales, among others.

Rucha Virmani

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She looks at her daughter sleeping on her lap
and smiles, her heart a hollow cave aching

with love. Outside, a fog settles in, reducing
the naked birch to the silhouette of a life once

lived, its invisible leaves rustling — the elegiac
echoes of a lost lullaby. Ravens sit still on branches, 

waiting for erasure, and the air ripens with the scent
of life turning to something else. The heat ruptures

the skin that had sewn them together. A fig falls
and bursts. — She lets her hands land on her empty

lap, while the wind traces the blurred body
of a daughter that has outgrown her mother’s arms.

Note: ‘…the air ripens with the scent | of life turning into something else’ is based on the last line of Aria Aber’s poem ‘Waiting for Your Call’

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Rucha Virmani is the founder of The Climatopia Project (Twitter: @TheClimatopia) that aims to use the power of creative writing for climate activism. She has been published by The Teenager Today and longlisted by Young Poets Network. Her work is forthcoming in The White Cresset Arts Journal. She was selected to participate in Ellipsis Writing’s Summer 2022 workshops.

Lei Kim

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Lost

I spotted something
during my morning walk
in the park
under the shadows of trees
black as the wondering night:
a wing
a single wing

I almost reached out
to hang it on a bush
just like someone did
the other day with a child’s cap
found on the grass

Cemetery Rules

No Flowers,
when the cemetery announced,
people were devastated, but a little girl
brought a pebble, flat and pretty,
with words written on it, for her grandmother.

Soon, pebbles with thoughtful words
piled upon the graves, some were tossed, displaced,
then, another came;
No Flowers and Pebbles,
Anything Decomposable within Three Days.

It’s longing that invents uncanny ways of love,
she placed an empty jar beside her lover’s gravestone,
removed the cap, waited a while, and left with it.
One asked about her ritual; speak into the empty jar,
whisper, joke, or simply my love, whatever,

then seal it and let it loose, lungfuls of longing.

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Lei Kim is a poet and translator living in France. She translated Lee Jangwook’s poetry collection, Request Line at Noon (Codhill Press, 2016), and received the Modern Korean Literature Translation Award.

Mike Farren

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Newcastle, May 1992

I am reading about twins when you walk in,
expected, but immediately part of a tableau

from myth – from an Old Master’s interpretation
of myth – where every part of the picture,

every colour, every fold of every garment,
every cheap ornament, every passer-by

are charged with meaning because they
are being looked at. I am in the picture

but I am looking at the picture, Dora
and Nora Chance are looking at the picture,

Angela Carter, though three months dead,
is looking at the picture, where I sit on a grey

sofa in the lobby of a chain hotel, in a black
denim jacket, reading about twins and look

up, and the one who will be my chosen
twin walks in, says hello and shifts the world.

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Mike Farren is a poet, editor and publisher based in Shipley, West Yorks. He has 3 pamphlets, most recently Smithereens (4Word) and is one of the hosts of Rhubarb open mic.

Molly Knox

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for gran

and so I got startled thinking they introduced wolves but it turned out to just be his dog. i think they’re gonna introduce wolves. up north. it’s yet to be approved. have to get permission from the crofters, the farmers, the great hills too. do you think it’s better now the clouds have come over?

       if we glare long enough into the patterns on beech trees, the answer will reveal itself. i’d forgotten how beech trees are. sometimes these things keep to themselves. hiding in the edges of grass with mice in wee houses. i read they’re saying tasmanian devils are dying out. i keep thinking they can claw it back. because somehow i keep reading about them.

see, we are used to counting the birds on the garden fence. we used to feed the imaginary chickens, lost your pram in the long grass. sparrows, tits, sometimes crows. those won’t be going anywhere,

surely. what do you bet we get home before the rain comes on? sorry, had to look up the difference between a crow and a whatsyoucallit recently. found out I’d gotten it all wound wrong. like trying to do a cardy up in the wind. counting foxglove leaves alphabetically. they’re saying you don’t know the difference between daffodils and poppyseeds. i can hear it now. if you listen closely enough you can tell the beech tree is hanging to the banking and no more. it’s humming between the light between the leaves: between us. in the end, I think that’s the trouble, with what comes next.

not enough hear it. the road will go down when the winter comes.

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Molly Knox is a recent Music graduate of Durham University. She is starting her MA at Durham in Ethnomusicology this autumn. They are a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net nominee. Their work can be read in The Braag, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Wrong Directions.

Dila Toplusoy

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‘the job of the living is to live,
the job of the dead is to die,’

says our teacher
in front of the village graveyard, covered with olive groves –

a place where we do not belong
yet –

we all know we are bound to change roles,
the way those olives are bound to become oil.

sooner or later, we will be the subjects
of the latter statement –

but until then, the job description is
golden clear.

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Dila Toplusoy is an Istanbul-born poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Skylight 47, CERASUS, t’ART, La Piccioletta Barca, Sky Island Journal, Needle Poetry and Amethyst Review, among others. She is a content editor at ARCCA Magazine and holds a first-class honours degree from University of the Arts London.