Issue 4 Wildlife/Nature
Page : Stephen Nolan - Landscape with Bridge ..5 Note from the Editor................................ 7 Ivy Raff- Chief 198 .....................................9 Barry McGlashan, Black Bear Thought....11 Ivan de Monbrison- A Ghost.....................12,13 Stephen Nolan, untitled...............................14 Edward Malone - Second Chance The Virgin.....15 Peter Clark - Notes on Nights in the Desert.......17 Adam Riches - chimpanzee head................18 LJ Ireton - Grey............................................19 Gabriela Halas - Owl, Daughter, Go on....21 Sam Cannon - Gaelic Blessing, Night.........23 Kate Potter - Flashcard Memory................25 Carlos González Ximénez- Fertility Rituals.........27 Joanne Olney - In a Minute.........................30 Tamiko Dooley - (Taki) Waterfall..............31 (Neh) Roots..................32 Lauren Camp - Fog.......................................35 -Inhabited............................37 Joanne Olney - Play Nicely..........................38 L. Ward Abel - Outskirts.............................39 Poonam Jain - Point of No Return..............41 J.M. Bédard - Hot -Blooded..........................43 Italo Ferrante - Smother...............................47 Hannah Allies - What Kind of Mushroom..51 Kayann Short - Velvet...................................53 Stephen Nolan - untitled...............................57 D.B.Jonas - Georgics in a Plague Year......59 Anne Louise Avery - Where the Celandines Bloomed.......63 Felicity Middleton - Bring me Shades............65 Sara Falkstad - Buckskin, Dun Roan and Dapple...67 -Early Summer Prayer............71
Editor - Anna Potter Art agent - Jen Bidding For submissions: writing and poetry: info@theamphibianlit.com Art artists@theamphibianlit.com general enquiries: info@theamphibianlit.com www.theamphibianlit.com Illustrations by Anna Potter www.annapotterarts.com Published by Amphibian Publishing. 'For the Culturally Amphibious'
cover image: Chimpanzee by Adam Riches
Contents
Scottish Landscape with Bridge mixed Media 2018 - 2022
Contents (Cont.) Page: Katja Lang - im Nebel......................74 Dagne Forrest - Natural Satellite...75 Katja Lang - Road Trip through the Ore Mountains.....77 April Coppini - Bumble Bee............78 Kanya Kanchana - Bee......................79 -Crow.................81 - Anaconda.........83 Hanna Randall -Attention (Hyperactivity).... 85 Kate Maxwell - Skin Shedder.........91 Alexandra Price - Name.This.Bird...................95 Ceinwen Haydon -Like One Possessed............97 Jupiter Jones - Two Frogs and No Goldfinches............99 Marjolein Starreveld - untitled.........................103 Lysiane Bourdon - Cheval Bleu........................104 Michelle Dennehy - From The Horses Mouth............105 - Watching The Fox...........106 Zach Murphy - Opossum.................................109 Candida Baker - Horse/ Movement ...............112,115 Candida Baker - They Will Come For Me.....113 Eleanor Page - Fledgeling...................................117 - Familiar.....................................118 Georgia Boon - The Helium Brothers...............121 Sam Cannon - Gaelic Blessing, Earth................129 Contributors........................................................130
Stephan Nolan
Note From the Editor
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Nature is in trouble, we all know this. Something that I feel the majority of humanity has forgotten is that we are part of nature, not seperate from it. A sentence that floated through my mind while I was thinking up how the theme of this issue would be best expressed, was 'The interface between the self and nature' how do you, as an individual human person, experience it? do you feel above it, part of it, do you yearn for it to play a bigger part in your life, does the environmental catastrophe we're facing terrify you? I took up cold water swimming about half a year ago and when I swim I can feel life flooding through me, I become part of the river and the plants, the mud, birds and fish. and the cold, the deep inhuman cold leaves a stamp on your body. In it lies the power and the strength of nature to reach out and stop your heart, or lurch you back into raw existence. It's a touch of wildness that has an echo of our beginnings as humans in it. Adam Riches' strong troubled portraits of Chimpanzees express perfectly to me what our relationship is with the wild, Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives and transcend the genetic differences that divide us, Chimpanzees - our cousins- make us all human. The portrait on the cover is of a chimpanzee leaning back in to the shadows, distrustful, almost wounded in their attitude, confronting us with damage that we've done, the distance we've created. Our only hope is to look after and care for we still have, and make sure nothing more slips away. The writing and art in these pages reflects this back to us by revealing the beauty to be found in everything - lichen, a dead opossum, baby birds, ghosts, bears and the remnants of pagan ritual that remind us of who we used to be.
Chief 198 Kamaole Beach, Maui Turtle-ruin breathes alive, alive, Blinking ancient black eyes. Weary. Leathered, weathered, exhausted. The shell, the shell so heavy, heavy with sea-borne perils, its plastics, its predators. She has come to rest, to let the blown sand stick on her back. It doesn’t matter here. She is marked ‘198,’ number etched on her keratin as if by chalk, as if on blackboard. She dozes, impassive. I can’t believe a creature whose single defense arches so predictable and obvious, so low-tech and easy to figure, has survived us. The conquerors. The colonizers. The ruiners, the takers, the wasters. She has survived us. She is surviving us.
Ivy Raff
Barry McGlashan
Tracks stretch behind her, rudimentary horizon-ruts. She has dragged herself here for respite and found it, hard belly flush with beach, cobblestone neck prune-specked, elongated. Rounded skull fully sedate. Stub tail blunt against earth. I know her. The tiny paddled feet thumping along her first sands when she broke the jell that held her safe once. I know the meat of mollusk where she sank her hooked beak, the satisfaction it brought her, the way the scallop’s cells built her milky eyelids and her black-hard skin and her bow-fins. The unnameable drive to persevere, to glide faster when a shark floats near, to pull limbs into dark of shell when decibels rise. I know her: Turtle Chief, her magic and her medicine, her sanctity, equanimity, memory.
Black Bear Thought 2021 oil and wax on paper
Земля в крови а не ты говоришь, на ветвях дерева плоды, в тени дерева есть силуэт, который спит в тени дерева и который на данный момент остается безымянной потому что ты не можешь понять если это силуэт фигурой животное или человек, но в конце концов это одно и то же, хотя вы предпочитаете животных людям, вы предпочитаете им лесных зверей, потому что они менее опасны, мне жаль, мне жаль, мне жаль, что твой отец умер мастерская пуста церемония состоялась тело отца сожгут потом его прах развеют на могиле матери твоя мать умерла так долго Надя мне так жаль тебя небо такое голубое но ночь так темно и дорога идет и идет во тьме, никогда не останавливаясь ты должна идти по дороге ты никогда не должна останавливатьсяне должна смотреть назад и не плачь и не думай не пытайся помнить и знать не будем вспоминать о будущем потому что будущее уже позади на дереве круглые плоды и светящиеся плоды как солнца и тот самый силуэт который всегда спит под этим деревом и ты не можешь узнать если это силуэт человека или животное, поэтому ты подходишь еще близко немного, ты подходишь , чтобы увидеть и узнать, так как небо голубое, и птицы поют на деревьях в лесу очень близко, и ты слышишь в далеке пение крестьян, которые работают на земле и после пяти шесть шагов и, подойдя достаточно близко, ты видишь , что эта форма была почти человеческой, а не звериной, тогда ты говоришь что-то тихо, как будто чтобы разбудить ее, и, слушание твой голос как это лицо медленно выпрямляется, и в этот момент ты видишь себя как в зеркале, потому что этот силуэт прекрасен и твой где-то наполовину животное, наполовину человек и ты наконец понимаешь, что тот, кто звал тебя и кто тебя разбудил это воспоминание уже это воспоминание о будущем и это голос твоего мертвого отца.
Иван де Монбризон
A Ghost The earth is bleeding it’s not you who’s speaking there are fruits in the branches of the tree there is a silhouette sleeping in the shade of the tree and which is still unnamed for the moment because you I can’t tell if this silhouette is the. One of an animal or of a human being but it’s the same thing in the end although you prefer animals to humans you prefer the beasts of the forest to them because they are less dangerous i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry that your father has just died the art studio is empty now the ceremony just took place the body of the father will be burned then his ashes will be scattered on the grave of the mother your mother died so long ago Nadia i’m so sorry for you the sky is so blue but the night is so dark and the road goes and goes into the dark without ever stopping we have to follow the road we must never stop we mustn’t look back don’t cry don’t think don’t try to remember and to understand do not remember the future neither because the future is already behind us there are fruits on the tree round and luminous fruits like suns and the same silhouette is still asleep under this tree and you cannot tell yet if this is the silhouette of a human being or of an animal so you get a little closer you approach it to see and to know since the sky is blue and the birds sing in the trees of the forest very close and you can hear the songs in the distance of the peasants who work on the land and after five or six steps and once close enough you see that this form was indeed quite that of a human being and not that of a beast altogether then you say something softly as if to wake it up and hearing you the face lifts up slowly and at that moment it’s yourself that you see as if in a mirror because this silhouette is indeed yours somehow half a beast and half human and you finally understand that the one who has called you and who has woke you up is but a memory already gone away the memory of the future and the voice of your own dead father.
Ivan de Monbrison
Призрак
Edward Malone
Second Chance The Virgin
Wicklow Mountains #3 Acrylic on paper 2021
Stephen Nolan
Men created her. The Lemovices, gaudy in their elaborate headdresses , clenched the backs of horses with their thighs. Trilling excitedly as they rode through the forest, they found the massive slab of rock that thrust up into the skyline. Accusing. Phallic. They trotted around it, slashed the Chestnut branches back with their hatchets- yes. A spring seeped at the base. Good. Chiseled from the stone, she was their goddess . Her face hacked and hewn into being, rendered her stern. They gouged out the pits of her sockets and fashioned quartz with powdered sandstone for her to see. Glaring, incandescent - she was one angry mother. The men, only the men, attended to her finery. This was their special place. They cleared the Chestnut and planted Oak and Elder. They thatched the barley straw that framed her gaze. They draped the goatskins that softened and warmed her granite shoulders. They drank with cupped hands from her sulphurous pool. Thirstily. Feared and adored, they brought her gifts; their little girls. The trees grew tall and thick and hid her . The men had gone but she was unmoved. Forgotten. From time to time a middle-aged woman would find her out and caress her lichen covered lips, then slip back into the undergrowth. Now- the priests are back. And women, many more women.They smile at her rubbed out features, seeing a benevolence that does not exist. Daughters in white bring flowers for her and dip their fingers in her holy waters. They cross themselves and kneel with their pale throats bared as young girls have always done for her. They whisper to her, again and again , of their hope and their secrets within. The Virgin, oblivious to her second chance, points up to nothing. For eternity.
Peter Clark
'I am here now.' Yearns the flesh red dawn for loving water, Softly whisper the burning winds, As they merge with the notes of memory, And smooth the scalp of past conversations, The chords of silent arias begin to play, The notes of this healed and kissed peace, All my lovers are here with me, With my hands in theirs As desire and joy are woven, Into the North Stars many tattered tapestries, And speaks softly to me of peace, Flesh can now fly away, Into all loving, Here as we merge, We nourish the burnt branches of blissful incantations, In this synthesis of vanished senses and imaginations, Grams of the heart have become the mists, As the crescent moon grins a swaddled baby nephews smile, The sands and man's passions dream here, In the earths bled beginnings.
Iain Rowan
Notes on Nights in the Desert
Lines of rain landed like soldiers from a plane - The harsher, heavier side of winter. When the roads and the sky Are water-shades of grey, Daisy desires are lost Beautiful things in hiding. The murky wind howls in defence of its place - The mightiest grey is the wolf, Fierce in its gaze at you - Colours roam the earth, Roaming smoke clouds share canine coats - You are connected to soft things, Still.
Chimpanzee oil on canvas
LJ Ireton
Grey
Adam Riches
Gabriela Halas
The owl woke me again. Not a warning call simply the unhurried notes of early morning. She calls in this place because it is her place. I tried to copy her song pace my morning breath to hers the untrained ear to the symphony of night. She calls once more. Retreats. Silence now— As I begin to speak. Wake up child, wake up— Now that we are awake and move about the house I see the first light skim under the fog of the coast. I see the slip of cliff curl under ocean.
OWL, DAUGHTER, GO ON
Sam Cannon
The owl puffs air through her down peers through those planetary saucers. The death of stars distant, offer light here. I walk outside because it feels good to be outside. I see her figure tilt in orbit eclipsed in spruce. The night place now mine to keep. You— You go on with the living—
You, at the kitchen table drawing a picture. The swish of your pencil sounds like the sea. Me, leaning against the counter eating a bowl of cereal.A dull thud at the window catches our attention. I put down my bowl and go to inspect. A female blackbird, stunned, squats on the sill, wings akimbo. We both go outside where the bird lets me take her in my hands. Beak open, her tiny body heaves every breath in my fist. She is warm. There is no weight to her. You say she needs water, so you run back in and return with a ladle and hold the filled bowl of it to her beak. Her tiny eyes, black as elderberries, look at the spoon but she doesn’t know what it’s for. She struggles. A misunderstanding, so you dip your little finger into the water and suspend a trembling drop above her open beak and for a moment I see everything around us upside down, trapped in a globe like glass before it falls into the bird’s thirsty mouth. One more drop seems to do the trick, so I loosen my hold as she wriggles from my grasp and hops onto my forefinger. Light and dark brown tones suddenly fly away in a ruffle of wings that sound like a shuffled deck of cards. On the kitchen window there was a transparent bird print with wings splayed, head butted. A perfect image of mid-flight abandon until one day the window cleaner came and all trace of our lady blackbird was gone.
Flashcard memory:
'Flashcard Memory' is an extract from Kate Potter's forthcoming novel 'The Absolutes'
Kate Potter
Carlos González Ximénez
The Harramachos are characters from the carnival of Navalosa, Ávila, Spain. Harramachos wear cowbells at their waists that ring to awaken nature and drive out the evil spirits that have been lurking among the living during the winter.
Deer, formerly this costume, was very common in the carnivals of the Iberian Peninsula. The deer is an animal that was considered renewing the forces of nature by ancient European cultures, its antlers fall from the head to be reborn year after year. It was also considered as a solar representation.
Vegetal mask, spirits of the forest. Vegetable masks are used in many Iberian and European carnivals, as a way of welcoming spring and the beginning of the cycle of life.
In Moldova, Romania, they celebrate New Year's Day with dances to the deer, the bear and the goat as the highest representatives of the fertility of nature, one more form of primitive techniques to stimulate the arrival of Nature.
Taki (waterfall)
Play Nicely mixed media
we slept in the shape of a river kawa no ji de neta worries flowing between us until they began to crest and smack against the verges i’d wake with futon drenched dreams of dread that tumble over boulders crash over the edge and plunge to the depths below, drowned. when my fingers slid open the shoji bare feet hitting the icy roka when I turned away from you and faced the sun – the water’s pace began to slow to a steady heartbeat that hummed and throbbed washing the bitterness away and I landed on the grass, dry.
Tamiko Dooley
Joanne Olney
When I looked into your acorn eyes I felt your clutches reaching towards me Digging, searching, So I turned and ran.
Neh (Roots)
You said the Shidareyanagi At the far end of the garden Could destroy the pipework under our house Neh creeping in the dark whilst we sleep Beneath the wildflowers we’ve let seed and grow All the way to our back porch. A willow root seeks out the nearest water source With its network that can stretch over thirty metres Once it unearths what it needs, it Strangles the pipes until they burst from the pressure Droplets sucked up by spindly fingers Leaving cracked metal to rust and die in the ground That’s what desire does to you Makes you travel any distance to quench your thirst You laughed and faced me Amber glasses glinting in the sunset
Lauren Camp
Fog These are the days that add up to eagles. The sky experiments on the cargo ship with its hindquarters out in the water. Part of the reason I’m here is to pay attention to clouds splayed through floorboards, but also to reckon with exhaustion. Light cinches its eloquence and wonders how long to finish. The moon is. Then decides it isn’t.
Inhabited Maybe need is the mind repeating regular steps. Leaves come in slow from the bottom. The land is liquid, low, flurried with green. Warblers muscle and feather through scrubby doorways. Sometimes the most hope is within each rustle and track. Blade of grass. Along the spur. In the strain, in gloom, in a truce with geography. The ground could be sinew, and the brine, stubborn. Typical routes; a silver train takes a chasm. What we find we find in the familiar—fast thistle, grass thickets. When the hawk rose, the sky seized it. Let the mind be most interested in a slow path, landing simple tools on molecules: girdle, pelvis, clavicle. Bone by bone. Ilium, humerus, orbit of eye, tooth form—hard dug, arranged in thrusts, and from this the body can measure permission by what again has begun.
In a Minute mixed media
L.Ward Abel
Outskirts The night is not settled. A moon so new as to sleep in its own black-out-curtain shadows belies the shuddering calm. I ride this massive speck small and gone when compared to the sum total of all mass and motion as seen from here. The simple fact of my thoughts at edges brushing up against forever is enough to prove that everything comes from something else. Darkness frames a lack of sound. But my legs won’t cease their walk because fear can’t deter its object and coyotes will never tell the truth.
Point of No Return
Poonam Jain
There are places in my mind I will not go; perhaps a void, a place of pain, of unbridled longings, even a fistful of sunshine, or surrender to some secret gods. There are places in my mind I will not go. Flying over the Hindukush mountains with the soft bloom of apricot valleys, through rivers, ravines and ridges, deodar forests, past ancient monasteries, I travel beyond icy passes and snowy peaks perhaps to a point of no return
Keren Dibbens-Wyatt
Hiraeth
A close day, you think, like swimming through a slack mouth. The hours are heavy and slumped, waiting. Damp breath clutched in a cupped hand. The brightness is oppressive despite being face down, a loud jangling of nerves rubbed raw. So too is your body, broken and blistered by the sunlight shrapnel. Heat shatters across the water, brittle as glass.
Midsummer water is velvet with lives. Quite different from the sharpness that used to cut through it in the fall, veined in steel. This is because the heat speeds everything up, billions of creatures winking in and out of existence. Sparking, burning, dying. Decomposing. Feeding and feasting. You can feel it, there in the slick film it leaves on your body. Murky echoes clinging to your hair, burrowing into your skin. The rich taste that lingers in your throat. A gentle wave rinsing you out, passing over and within as you breathe and stroke. Stroke, stroke, breathe. Kick. It is sweetness, run through with rot. The tang of old rocks rimed with new death. You feel it between your teeth, a fine grain grit. Suspended below the surface and shivering quietly, great curtains set ablaze by a hostile sun.
Hot-blooded
J. M. Bédard
You can’t say how long you’ve been in the water, limbs slick and slicing. They seem to be moving of their own accord now. Every so often a shy weed will curl along an ankle or an arm, questioning. But these are loose tendrils, severed fragments unable to bind. And so you move on. At length, you pass through a knot of leeches. Shining bits of sinew slowly dancing in the deep. You pause for moment, stroking their heads as they nurse against you, and squint back at the shore. Nothing but a lick of blue flame, slick upon the swell.
More strokes now. More kicking, more breaths. More deaths. There were many at first, then suddenly, much worse, none at all. Both times tasted of scorched hair and cooked tissue, and the air dripped with melted fat. An opal quiver, thousands of blurred oil slicks casting delicate rainbows across the sky. In the sear of those early days, when white flames took the place of the clouds they had charred, the fortunate were consumed quickly.
Their footfalls are soft and nearly soundless in the mulch, boneless bodies rippling closer. They watch you for a time, quiet and shifting as the flames beneath their skin. Then they approach. Hands and mouths borne upon a molten wave.
Others have it worse. The ones that are still burning. The meat of them seeming to fuel, but never satisfy, the flames. It lives inside them now, filling their skins. Fallen bits of sun, learning to walk about the earth. Not children, but spores. They lurched at first, the human containers, loose fire tentative in its new vessels. Now they grin while they run. You pause for a moment, fingertips brushing rock, and blink up. An island. Legs curled to the side, bowed ribs forming a gradual rise from the water. A hulking back crowned with a bristle of silent, solid pine. Not yet stripped bare. You rest your gaze, lying there in the shallow lapping water, and catch your breath, the lake breathing around you. The distant crackle of fire is almost comforting, a misplaced gasp at old memories, and the water warm and buoyant. So you close your eyes and grit your teeth. Pull those worn words out once more, running a heavy tongue along their familiar edges. Face half-submerged, you don’t see the smoke, chalky streaks twining through the green.
Dry branches, thirsting for a spark. They caught bright and fast, a brief, delicious scream and then gone, save for pale dust. It collected in graceful drifts and dunes, downy with muffled whispers. Quite beautiful, you’ve often thought, the light grey of cool mornings long since passed.
These days the sun rarely rises or sets, no longer concerned with such things. Rather, it is hungry – insatiable – burning higher and stronger and brighter and longer. All sharp shafts and jagged edges, far from the soft yellow of your youth. That honeyed glow that inched down walls or pooled lazily across resting bodies. This one has teeth. Thin needles, primed for flesh, not the herbivore’s rounded molars. This sun laughs often, the sickening clink of razorblades shattering below.
You squeeze your eyes shut. Even this far from shore the fingers find you, those naked, searching bones. Not rough (not yet) but strong. The lightness of their touch conceals no mercy. You shake your head, chipping off bubbles, rationalizing. Not true, not real, not possible. The words are comforting so you cling to them. Smoothing and turning them over and over, repeating until they fall apart. Just a collection of loose sounds then, a jumble of mismatched teeth. They rattle slightly, even tucked carefully away.
Italo Ferrante
you pick me up crusty-eyed fluffed up feathers breathing smog from a tailpipe my molecules reverse course as you pluck me with blue gloves the potency of your shoulder blades curb the symmetry
smother
of my wings half-love drains the engine within leave me in the heat vent listen my last hiccup
Reach out and touch soft thing Poised to knock you clean out Underside gills say: have a nice trip Grey blue cap to make you Cry out for your mother Crawl into the undergrowth to die Emerge in the morning light Bark under your fingernails Soil on your tongue
Earthy savoury thing The dog-eared book in your back-pocket says Delicious on its own Even better with a drink More butter than you think Season well, but let the flavours sing Fleshy, yielding stem Between your teeth Tearing the meat Trust me, this time You’re in for a treat
What Kind of Mushroom is That?
Delicate evil thing Growing in between blinks Parasite, feeding on the undead Rotting all the while Breaks through moist muck Glints in the moonlight White flesh weeping
Hannah Allies
Velvet
“Velvet,” whispered Hannie. “Velvet,” as she smoothed the yielding leaf across her cheek. “Velvet” again as she suppled it to her lips and plied its tender underside with the curl of her tongue. Hannie craved this touch, was called to its comfort every day when she slipped from the stifling house to her hiding place in the woods. As soon as Hannie finished her chores, she would wander to the creek, where she dipped her fingers in the cool stream and lifted them to her face. Her wet fingers circled her eyes, nose, and lips, resting there to suck the last drops down down down.The wetness soothed Hannie, a child who took to the shadows when company called. Most people thought her addled and tried to draw her out with questions—how are you Hannie? how are the chickens laying today?—or smiled sadly at the dark waves of hair that hung in her eyes. Her mother could not make her sit long enough to comb it, and what was the point anyway? Hannie never went anywhere, not even to school, even though she was old enough to have gone for years now.
Kayann Short
Hanniegirl, her mother cried as she waited at sunset for the girl’s return, what moves your thoughts from sky to earth, what draws you down and back again? Where will you live and how when I’m gone, when I am resting in that blackdeep you love? These questions troubled Hannie, too, although she did not know it. Every day was like the last before, but the next she did not give to herself until it was upon her like the clouds before the rain. In some tellings, Hannie grew up and left before anyone noticed she was gone. She wandered then until her silhouette became the sky, her dark hair the wind. In others, a deep pain violated her peace and took her soul away. These are the endings of fairy tales or cautions. But none of these tells the story true. The first to change was Hannie’s smile. Wider and quicker, it turned toward the sun and knew warmth. Her smile spoke when others called. It said Yes, I will and Perhaps I may, really. Her heart had grown from the roots of willows and came to her face now in shelter bidden. She was wovenweed, earthstill, firm smoothed and strong lasted. Her touch knew how to hold itself alive. The next to change were Hannie’s eyes. Unbound, horizon scanning, they beaconed blue and beyond. She saw the smallest in its burrow and the largest wing the air. She was sky shining, moon rippling, a sight to reach for when never enough was near. The last to change, the most for last, was Hannie’s voice. She sang with the birds and the brook, a harmony that murmured its own refrain. The little stones formed truth in her mouth. Earth cradles me. Sky covers me. She was sounding at last.
Sometimes Hannie startled, quietly, as was her way. “Where have you been, Hanniegirl?” her mother would ask. “Nothing, no. No, I haven’t,” the girl would confess. Her mother just shook her head. She was used to Hannie’s strange ways and let her be, as long as she did not cause trouble. Hannie’s special place, the place she called “there” when she spoke it to herself, housed nothing more than some shrub willows grown over a hollow to weave a basket canopy under which Hannie crouched and rocked. Biting her fingers, or sucking on a small stone, Hannie jutted her pointed chin into the V of her firm knees, lulling backward and forward gently. “There” was more than a hiding place; “there” grew from Hannie’s deep eyes and strong legs, pulling her to the earth beneath which darkness rests. Hannie knew that strength and lived it, loved it more than her breath or the quiet lisp of her soul. “There” the days passed one like another, with nothing to mark them but the sun and the moon. Once a tiny bird fell from the beckoning sky, a creature much like Hannie, shy and quiet and looking skyward for its nest. Watching the clouds move over the sun, Hannie had seen it fall, a bleak speck that brightened as it neared. The sky had never fallen on Hannie before, but now one small piece lay in her hand. The fluff shivered and dulled, so Hannie nested it in the grass near her willow doorway until its smallness stilled. Hannie licked its wing but it didn’t taste like clouds. She tried to put it back but the sky had moved ahead and couldn’t return for a tidbit of down. Hannie put it in her pocket, where her mother found it, embraced.
Wicklow Mountains #2 Acrylic on paper 2021
Hanniegirl, her mother sighs from the bed where she now must lay. You’re grown, strong as the wind and rooted as the willows. It’s time, Hanniemine, it’s time. As the days slant warmth and the velvet shadows grow, Hannie turns to the silence waiting. “I’m going now,” she whispers. “Ma, I can go.”
Sub-headings
D.B.Jonas
In the busy silence, in the humic dark beneath the parching surface of this orchard, the fungal fingers in their trillions reach from these arboreal hosts into the teeming duff, thrusting involuntary charity into the unseen, insinuating their air-gathered, nitrous nurture through the verging rootzones of this soil’s woody progeny, up into the canopy under which we wander each morning, drawn into the foliar shadow of this soil’s stately, ecstatic upwellings, into the sheltering, arboreal product of this ground, into the verdure that extracts from each of us a music of names as we pass, a murmur that rises as if involuntarily to our tongue: Esopus Spitzenburg, Calville Blanc d’Hiver, Brown Snout, Tompkins County King.
GEORGICS IN A PLAGUE YEAR
Thus the ethic of this world, the nature of Nature, is spoken everywhere in this garden, this Pardes, this unremitting holocaust of transpiration and expiration, carnival of fecundity, theater of cruelty and boundless goodness and nourishing waste, heedless of human sentiment, to expose the life of the living as ever the gift of another, ever an expense of the predecessor and the neighbor. And if truth indeed be beauty, whose vivid spectacle confounds us in this place, the truth of this beauty, ah my Juliana, is never ever easy.
Elsewhere in this orchard, deep in some quiet juniper’s shade, elsewhere along this dimensionless, möbial surface of living tissue that is nature’s space, a stalwart of this orchard’s prodigal pollinators, Ichneumon, the Burrowing Wasp, Specius speciosus, finds her ill-starred cicada, an ideal nursery for her own progeny, and deftly insinuates between its lovely, chitinous plates the paralyzing ovipositor, enacts her immemorial, maternal, selfless, heartless immolation, enabling her posterity to incubate, emerge, and consume the living entrails of the iridescent host in a future, for a future, she will never see.
Anne-Louise Avery
One cloudless morning in late March, Ermine found a new path to the sea from her cottage. It led through St Petroc's churchyard, past the fine eighteenth-century monuments and the fisherfolk's low stones, past the salt-scoured tombs of the Sortes and the Lewern and the Bleydhes, grey stone islands in the drifts of narcissi and primroses. Then it left the world and its cares, and meandered through the tilted field of crab apples and brambles, over the old slate stile and down, down through the steep-tiered woods, where the celandines bloomed, a path of green and gold. And somewhere, far below, through the sycamore trees, Ermine could hear the rushing brook as it curved midst the bracken, very cold and very beautiful. Spring had come at last, at long, long last after the bitter, rethey winter, and the air was full of birds. Chiffchaffs and mistle thrushes and the first cuckoos, nesting and singing high, ancient songs of the warming sun and of the ebb and flow of the pull-tide at the hem of their little woods. Ermine stopped for a moment. She closed her eyes and breathed in the rich mulchy scent of the earth, edged with the briny turn of the sea, of the tangles of sea-wrack and sea-timber in the cove beyond. She hadn't quite realised how melancholy she’d become in those dark months, until surrounded by this great pagan rush of light and life and hope. And when she reached the sea, crossing the ferny brook as it met the beach, she ran to it, as fast as she could, and the wash pulled and tugged at her paws.
Where the Celandines Bloomed
BRING ME SHADES
Bring me shades of green and brown The call of birds in the canopy Spongy leaf mould underfoot Tiny life forms hidden from me Bring the sunset filtered gold Ivy shoots that cleave to bark Rustling in the fallen leaves Each tiny creature leaves no mark Leave me here to watch the night fall See the glide of ghostly wings Creatures that attend their business Furry, prickled, timid things
Felicity Middleton
Give me sunrise in the forest In the morning chorus let me drown As the sun lights up the treetops Give me shades of green and brown. As the sun climbs ever higher Shafts of sunlight pierce the glade Dazzled by the sunlit tree trunks Now, I murmur, bring me shades
Blood mares they call them, ordinary Icelandic horses in extraordinary colours like buckskin, dun, roan and dapple, the palette I learned from horse books when I was eight as I dreamed of tending to the soft but rugged coat of a pony with a name straight out of a fairy tale. The blood mares, half wild, half tame grazing the heather and grass off the sides of trembling glaciers. Sheep flock around their shiny legs like bath foam. They live through the cycles like mares do, trotting up and down those hills. Between the fortieth day and day one hundred of their pregnancies
Buckskin, dun, roan and dapple
Sara Falkstad
to Swedish equestrians, but mostly to slaughter, horse meat is cheap and lean. I read this in a magazine the man in the photo is called Arnthor.
-unironically I think - but what do I know about the humour of Icelandic men who deal in blood, his hands are gloved the machinery behind him the metal shine of a coat of a blue dun horse. The glossy photos of the mares on the hills like the posters I put on my bedroom wall as a girl, I knew nothing about cycles nothing about the fine-tuned quality of hormones, exquisite enough to rock the meat market and made into pills and shots. I put down the article close my eyes and think of heather and the smell of sulphur, pinch the skin of my stomach and inject.
they are taken in to give blood - five litres at the time flow through tubes into small family businesses and sold as a powder more precious than cocaine. It’s exported to the European meat industry the hormones synchronising the cycles of European female pigs, making meat production more efficient. Black, bay, chestnut with flaxen mane they call it the red gold, the foals
He owns a small biotech company built a lab on the family farm, a beard covers some of his subtle smile, his arms crossed over a t-shirt print that says HAM -
a residual product, sometimes sold
Early Summer Prayer
My microbes are fighting the season fleshy lupines and rainbows. Where in the after-rain purple of the sky is there room for bottomless grief? The sweetness is worse for those of us who can’t compare with the force of the ground elder. For those of us who dig through geranium and rewilded columbine to seek in the comfort of couch grass a space for our gaping emptiness. I thread the foxglove thimble on my thumb as a shut-eye in the midst of madness. Snow bitter cow parsley the honeysuckle tease. The lump in my breast the buds of the peony. One cyst, three sisters, who knows what will come in the time of rot.
But not even in my darkness I am deaf to the brittle and weak. Glass-white the first orchid stands with all the tension of an elite gymnast who practiced since she was four. In my ear the aspen gossip of how this meadow used to look. I put my lungs to the ground until the damp chills my chest, that thin skin that always burns in June.
Dagne Forrest
Threading the needle of two humans walking at dusk is so much easier for the dog if we keep moving. It’s the shifting geometry we create -- these bodies like planets, the dog a satellite with arcane knowledge of just how to move around us, and the will to sustain that orbit indefinitely. What path would he pursue if we weren’t here, the landscape emptied of us? No longer a wolf, would he return to the wild to feed himself, follow the rhythms of the sun through ceaseless seasons instead of the sounds of his people stirring at odd hours? Would he drink from the stream in the little wood, grateful for the hours of solitude amongst creatures who registered his presence but kept their furred and feathered distance? Would he sleep well in damp leaf-filled hollows and not mind the unwavering darkness on moonless nights?
Im Nebel photogravure 30 x 40 cms 2022
Katja Lang
Natural Satellite
I tasted that animal sort of freedom once, years into orbiting my still-young family, and it terrified me that I was no longer suited to seclusion. During the day I was full of purpose and bustle. Hospital visits to see my spouse, calls home to the children, walks through a new town to forage for food, making supper as the sun slipped down. But five nights alone felt endless, the cloak of night too close and full of far-off sounds that unsettled me. Like the dog who lost his wolfish ways, I’d lost an essential thing I could no longer sum or name, unable to sleep well in a new place, alone. I sensed I’d be unable to break orbit when those closest no longer needed me. Much like the earth’s moon, I guess I’ll just drift further and further out each year. I’ll learn to sleep amongst the stars.
In all silence, the snow has piled up already three, four inches thick - Shiki Road Trip in the Ore Mountains. Drypoint 50x30 cm
April Coppini
A bee quickened, sticky with resin, fell sideways in a pine forest, and dreamt of violet flowers. Far, in the thrum and boil of the swarm, in their lustrous machinations, the old queen, distended with desire and flush with misthirst, was clairaudient. Her ravishments lay sluiced and leavened in gold. The late morning sun gentled the ruins as they heaved under the forest. Apis cerana Moganshan, China
Kanya Kanchana
Bee
To speak of a raven is to speak of ten, and all ravens now and forever. But a crow in the rain is a singularity, a cobalt drumming in a charcoal pall, not an oracle then, but an assignation. The Mekong gorges the Tonlé Sap with twice-boiled tea, and the day hides the night in plain sight. Corvus macrorhyncos Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Crow
Dogs, thieves, and me, we know this now: the potion for love is not different from the medicine for death Eunectes murinus Iquitos, Peru
Ouroboros, you ate yourself and left your skin behind
Anaconda
All things to all people, Belén, one glut away from rut or deep rot, all Camu-camu, aguaje, maracuya, cherimoya, carambola, heart of palm: in the ripe seep of plant ichor, for your crystal blood Paiche, wild pig, yellow-footed tortoise, tapir, tamarin, and caiman: in bone and writhing gore, for your rainbow flesh Agua florida, palo santo, smoke of mapacho: in rising vapour, for your humid breath
Hanna Randall
ATTENTION (HYPERACTIVITY): THE LICHEN BENCH Aubrey could eat this piece of lichen on their desk, despite the small speck of seagull shit on it. It’s dry and fragile, grey-green, almost sage. This piece is different to the lichen on the lichen bench because the lichen on the lichen bench is flatter, you can sit on it without worrying you’ll kill it. Aubrey and S live too close to the sea for lichen to thrive like it does on the lichen bench, and this lichen’s little trumpets are light and crispy now—packed like frozen food and battery hens—light and crispy now because it’s been detached from the invisible network of mycelial trails for too long. Lichen is sensitive to air pollution, to the subtle and not so subtle shifts in the climate, but even in optimal conditions they only grow 1-2mm a year. Time operates differently for them. S brought this lichen home a month or two ago, moist, wrapped in a tissue, but now she can’t remember where she found it. A pathway or beneath a tree in Preston Park, perhaps. S said it might help Aubrey to relax at home, to have something like the lichen bench close by, so Aubrey put it on their desk alongside some books, dust, strands of hair. Now, if Aubrey put it in their mouth or closed their fingers around it, it would become powdery, just dust. Grey-green particulates on tongues, in closed fists. Aubreycouldeat it. “Breakfast?” S calls from the kitchen. Aubrey taps the lichen with their fingertip, making a raspy sound on the desk. They wonder—sleepy jack the fire drill—they—release me—wonder: Do lichen networks leave trails visible to humans? “Aubrey?” S shouts. “Do you want breakfast?” “I’m not hungry.”
S comes into the bedroom and opens the wardrobe. Aubrey watches S’s careful, habitual movements, and thinks: she is our root system, anchoring, highways transporting nutrients from the soil to the rest of the tree. Then: And I am foliage. Fleeting, unstable. “How are you feeling?” S asks. “Better.” “Takeout tonight?” Aubrey brushes their hair; otherwise, they’ll vomit. “Pizza?” S persists. “Ok.” Something like gagging makes Aubrey’s throat, their voice, shake and they—get eaten by the worms—it starts to rise—weird fishes—bile and acid—picked over by the worms. Swallow— S says: “Reduce your meds if you’re still nauseous.” “I’m fine.” Better this than the alternative: chaos, lost jobs, skint. Aubrey can’t afford it anymore, can’t afford to be themself anymore, despite how glitter-POW fantastic they are without the stimulants. Aubrey waits for S to look away. Then, the lichen is in Aubrey’s mouth, crunching: teeth: spit: lichen: dust. Swallowed now, inside their system, rehydrating. Work is heavy and long. Afterwards, Aubrey circles the bench, bathing in its majesty, looking for signs of lichen trails. In Aubrey’s mind’s eye, lichen trails spread out from the bench in infinite directions, rippling energy and data. It’s ineffable, beautiful, but soft, not so fragile here—release me. Aubrey’s phone vibrates, S is calling—when are you coming home?
Slowly, grudgingly, Aubrey walks to the train station, looking for trails along the way. At home, while trying to force down a slice of the takeout pizza S ordered, Aubrey tells S about the trails. S is half-interested, slightly aloof, suggests an early night. Next to S, bodies coiled together, Aubrey falls asleep quickly, into lichen dreams. There, lichen searches for Aubrey’s trails in the earth, on pathways, tree bark. Lichen is looking for Aubrey’s network, but unable to see or conceive of it clearly. Aubrey shouts: I’m here! But the lichen doesn’t hear or doesn’t know their voice is a sound at all or maybe Aubrey is shouting silence. They wake facing S, who is sleep-whispering:Aubrey, come home. Aubrey turns over, wonders what the lichen bench looks like in the dawn light. So—get up and go. It’s still dark out, foxes prowl, screaming. On the early train to Falmer, Aubrey remembers their medication, it’s at home, but they won’t go back now. Sleep still on their forearms, they go through the station barriers and up the path to the lichen bench. Sit down, sink down. Lichen fronds against legs, wildflower patches opposite, bees and insects stirring. Slowly, the sky turns dark orange, murky clouds sweep the sky. Slowly, sunlight and lichen trails. Networks and energy, spreading outwards, connecting. Slowly, so slowly, and without realising, Aubrey’s body merges with the lichen on the bench and that means merging with the bench itself, Aubrey is the bench and the lichen, and the lichen and the bench is Aubrey. It’s easier here, nicer, a new and novel feeling. Aubrey’s limbs are simply wooden legs now, wooden arms, a back, a seat. Panels and bolts, ribs, tissue. And the lichen: rippling currents and mycelial data.A magpie lands on Aubrey’s arm and they don’t move, cannot move because they’re bolted in place. The magpie steps, arches its head and Aubrey whistles, somehow, the magpie flies off.
Aubrey’s lichen skin, sage-green, here yellow in places, sifts through oxygen particulates, reaching out along the network trails toward the city, reaching the precipice where the sea air takes over. No further: the salty sea air and city pollution forms a hostile barrier, a wall repelling Aubrey and the network. Here, Aubrey realises that the lichen will soon die off. The pollution and rising sea levels are moving faster than the network can. 1-2mm versus 3.5mm. Soon Aubrey and the lichen bench will be sucked into the sea, covered in barnacles, cockles, mussels, Portuguese Man-o-war jelly fish. But what will happen to S? Aubrey, come home. Panic, stricken, ribs and panels heaving with mycelial sweat and grey-green breath, Aubrey realises what they’ve done, realises that merging with the lichen network means leaving S. NO! Aubrey scrambles up the hill verge—Nervous messed up marionette—waves down a passing car—Floating 'round on a prison ship—can you give me a ride to the city?
Kate Maxwell
Skin Shedder
Belly up. Its tiny heart pushing silver wall of shining skin, pumping an extended mix of silent fear and panicked pain into the green hum of a hind leg rubbing day. Half crushed by stone or sole—guilt glances at my gardening boots— as black ants circumnavigate flesh perimeter: its promised chalk outline, in their flickering thrill for an easy meal. Do I leave it to slow pincer death or speed the end with a decisive stomp? Instead I turn away, pretend this patch of earth is not my steward’s duty to preserve, protect—while flashing in my periphery, the glimmer of its exposed stomach still signals weakly. And now I’m irritated with the bloody dying lizard ruining my afternoon. What am I to do? Taint my feet with the squishy weight of its cold-blooded ending or ignore its last splayed-limb breaths?
As a child, I’d catch the darting creatures with nimble fingers. Imprison them in Chow Mein containers, adapted with fork-stabbed lids, impossible liquid balls of water floating on the plastic floor. Tailless heart thumping, they’d thump into the sudden limits of their new world, where I’d leave a crumb of bread as big as the creature’s head, and give a gentle shake to check for life. In a day or so, Mum would make me let it go. Often the skinny sliver would be limp and loose-limbed by the time I tipped the container contents into a garden bed. Maybe, it might scamper swiftly free in some reptile resurrection
sometimes stiff and rigid as a corpse. Now all those lifeless lizards haunt each courtyard step each flurry in the leaf litter and whether I own their death or nature does I see their third eyelids sweep into a horror blink when they spy this ogre of last days.
Alexandra Price
The hand is here again – how I dread those bones. Cold tips prod my powder down each dawn and a voice mutters bustard. How I loathe the way your knuckles knock at the gape of my beak with no answer, my tail stretched to a violin string aching as you keep repeating sakabula, sakabula, sakabula. Oh, Grandma, shield that rock eye that blinks with the stars, who brought me these wings, perhaps all the way from Kurukupari, or Aranaputa, who smiled when my branch quivered under a quarter moon. Go on, she would say. Drop a feather in the Essequibo or the Demerara. Make a wish! You wish to call me pigeon. Seek a hole to name its darkness, and I’ll hurl a new song into the fading light.
Name. This. Bird.
Ceinwen Haydon
Like One Possessed
Her mind broils, soups with angst and anger: how dare he.She stalks through local woodland, tramps up winding paths to the zenith of a hill – tries to stamp out furnace-flames combusting deep within her heaving chest. She’ll leave him, this time, let fate sort out the rest. Her hands shake as agency and power energize her will and still she cannot free herself from loathsome thoughts. Preoccupied with hate, a wet, raised root trips her and she falls face-down in mulch-sweet mud. Covered in claggy soil, finally her tears break. She bawls until her heartbeats calm and peace claims her tired mind. She pulls herself up onto her knees, readies her legs to stand and hike back home. Wait.
There, yards away, in the glade stands an old stag. Their eyes meet, bodies freeze. Then, with a snort and a shake of his antlered head he pounds off. She laughs, released – and wonders, could she still love her prideful, wounded male – doubtless nursing his own dark hurt as he keeps watch, in hope.
Trudy’s neighbour, Sarah, was leafing through glossy-paged Homes & Gardens: ‘Listen to this article, Trude,’ she called out, ‘How to Bring the Outside In.’ Trudy listened. ‘They want their heads read,’ said Sarah, a psychiatric nurse, so Trudy took her word. ‘You and I spend half our lives keeping the outside out, where it belongs.’ True enough, thought Trudy. They worked hard at keeping the weather out of their houses: two small, old houses on the brow of a hill, standing shoulder to shoulder, bearing the brunt of wind and wet. Moss and ferns assailed their stonework; birds and beasts made homes in their homes. Jackdaws in the chimneys, starlings in the eaves. Summers brought bats, swooping through the last of the light and through windows left ajar. Then, as leaves turned and cold encroached, mice and spiders moved in. Each season brought some invader, house guest, migrant, or pest.
Once, on a hot sleepless night, Trudy went downstairs to look for a book or a drink, and on the cool flagstone floor of her hallway, her foot touched something damp. She let out a yelp, harsh like the sudden bark of a dog fox. She flicked on the light, blinked in the glare, and there at her instep, a small loathsome thing. A frog. Seeking somewhere dank, they squeeze under ill-fitting doors. Trudy wondered if she had woken Sarah-next-door with her cry.
Two Frogs and no Goldfinches
Jupiter Jones
An origami frog,’ she said with a wry half-smile. But they each had their aversions: Sarah’s was for bats, and Trudy had heard her shriek at the flying umbrella-mice in the almost-dark of a balmy night.
After the funeral, still in her best black coat, Trudy climbed over the garden wall, easily finding footholds amongst the thick roots and stems of the ivy. She crossed the small patch of grass and stole the narrow-mesh bird feeder that dangled from Sarah’s washing line and then she filled it to the brim with niger seeds from the tub in Sarah’s shed. It felt like the right thing to do; Sarah wouldn’t have wanted anything to go to waste, she was thrifty by nature. **
Another time, Trudy stepped outside, and there on the ground was a small thing. She thought at first it was a leaf, or something a nestbuilding bird had rejected, or let fall from a crammed beak, or a slack beak opened to speak or call to a mate. But it was another frog. The remains of a frog; a leathery relic preserved in the arc of a leap. She shuddered. Sarah (on nightshift), who was coming in as Trudy (on days) was going out, threw back her head and laughed, throaty and honest, enjoying Trudy’s squeamishness. ‘Ridiculous!’ she said. Sarah was right, Trudy was being ridiculous, this particular frog was brown and flat as paper. ‘
Then one day when the swifts had gone and the last leaves hung listless and damp, Sarah’s heart got squeezed flat and refused to pump, as if God had trodden her underfoot. On the morning of the first frost, Sarah was buried in earth, dug deep. Listening to the eulogy, thought Trudy, you’d have thought they buried a saint, not the bad-tempered bat-hater with the throaty laugh.
Seasons came and went marked by ripening fruits, migrating birds, raking leaves, stacking logs, shovelling snow, first snowdrops, spring cleaning, cutting grass, blooms and bees, and ripening fruits again, jams and chutneys, swapping plum for green tomato.
Over the years, Sarah, who invariably spoke her mind, had fallen out with any number of plumbers and other tradesmen, and with petty bureaucrats, and with the self-appointed custodians of polite society. She was the sort of body who would ring to complain about things. She could be quite stroppy. Trudy liked that about her and cleaned out Sarah’s gutters when she wasn’t looking.
Goldfinches flocked to Sarah’s untidy garden with its thistles and teasels. Feisty flashing parabolas of brilliant hues who shunned Trudy’s feeders of fat balls and nuts. ‘Wrong seeds,’ Sarah said, ‘niger is their peccadillo.’ And she’d stand with her hands in the small of her back bending this way and that while the sparrows in Trudy’s garden bickered and twittered, their dowdy feathers blending with dappled shade, their scat spattering below. ‘Sciatica?’ ‘It’s a bitch.’
It was a peculiar intimacy. Two old birds, sharing a postcode and a party wall. They were of a similar middle age, similar height, sometimes seeing eye-to-eye as they talked over the garden wall about nothing, everything, dandelions, hydraulics, painful joints, stray cats, medical ethics, and recycling cardboard. Every other Thursday, Sarah would remind Trudy when Trudy forgot.
Time passed, both getting older, still shoulder to shoulder and putting out birdseed. Each side of their garden wall gradually became smothered by a tangle of ivy that writhed and rooted. It insinuated itself in the mortar joints and in the crannies between the stones like a complicated relationship built over the years. They spoke from time to time, about cutting it back, about hacking out and re-pointing. It was work they put off – there might very well be something nesting in there – and they wouldn’t have cared to intrude on any small creature’s living arrangements. It wouldn’t be neighbourly. They’d get around to it sometime, and they took it for granted that they had time.
Quatre Mains
Marjolein Starreveld
Now, Trudy’s cardboard sits sodden on the kerb on the wrong day of the week. She wakes in the night listening for the sounds her neighbour doesn’t make, the muffled clank of water pipes, creak of a door, and the faint tick of hot bricks as her fire warms its back on the back of Sarah’s fire. A sigh of contentment as the old houses lean in. Trudy watches from her kitchen window. The sparrows are still twittering and bickering, but the small spectacular goldfinches don’t come. She should’ve asked if they wintered elsewhere, or maybe she should have planted teasels like Sarah said.
At the end of my longing was a dappled mare penned near Tommy Duffy’s.
Michelle Dennehy
Cheval Bleu Kandinsky
Lysiane Bourdon
I lifted my child’s h to her grey muzzle; her beautiful head lowered as though in consent; then she bit me, hard, on the shoulder.
No blood. A bloody good lesson in the anger of the kept, the danger of fences, the need of the powerful to feel their power.
d n a
From The Horse's Mouth (after Louise Glück)
Dark Fields (Watching the Fox)
The fox’s magic holds us through glass: each of my senses strains to crack from smooth, civilised skin, longs to plunge into the wild thing, her red rump a metronome of appetite as she raids the cat’s bowl. The rarest sting of happiness, this: the small fox close, you closer still. Both of us recalling dark-fields freedom. Both of us staying put. Bowl emptied, she leaves, lopes the lane, never looks back. She doesn't know we are in the world.
Opossum
Pete and Richard’s orange safety vests glowed a blinding light under the scorching sun, and their sweat dripped onto the pavement as they stood in the middle of the right lane on Highway 61, staring at an opossum lying stiffly on its side. Richard handed Pete a dirty shovel. “Scoop it up,” he said. Everything made Pete queasy. He once fainted at the sight of a moldy loaf of bread. Even so, he decided to take on a thankless summer job as a roadkill cleaner. At least he didn’t have to deal with many people. Richard nudged Pete. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. Pete squinted at the creature. “It’s not dead,” he said. “It’s just sleeping.” “Are you sure?” Richard asked as he scratched his beard. He had one of those beards that looked like it would give a chainsaw a difficult time. “Yes,” Pete said. “I just saw it twitch.” Richard walked back toward the shoulder of the road and popped open the driver’s side door of a rusty pickup truck. “Alright, let’s go.” Pete shook his head. “We can’t just leave it here.”
Zach Murphy
“Jesus Christ,” Pete whispered under his breath. Pete picked up the opossum and turned back around.
“It’s not our problem,” Richard said. “They tell us what to do with the dead ones, but not the ones that are still alive.” Pete crouched down and took a closer look. “We need to get it to safety,” he said. Richard sighed and walked back toward the opossum. “What if it wakes up and attacks us?” he asked. “That thing could have rabies.” “I don’t think anything could wake it up right now,” Pete said. Richard belched, “It’s an ugly son of a gun, isn’t it?” “I think it’s so ugly that it’s cute,” Pete said. “No one ever says that about me,” Richard said with a chuckle. “I guess I just haven’t crossed into that territory.” Just then, a car sped by and swerved over into the next lane. Pete and Richard dashed out of the way. “People drive like animals!” Richard said. “We’d better get going.” Pete took a deep breath, slipped his gloves on, gently picked up the opossum, and carried it into the woods. “What are you doing?” Richard asked. “Are you crazy?” After nestling the opossum into a bush, Pete smelled the scent of burning wood. He gazed out into the clearing and noticed a plume of black smoke billowing into the sky. The sparrows scattered away, and the trees stood with their limbs spread, as if they were about to be crucified.
They will come for me
Hoof Beat Warm Breath Sinew Muscle Stretched Two as one Dreams of this Before even Walking Talking Horses grazing Galloping Through my heart The wild ones The kick, the bite We do not acquiesce The broken In the pens Lost In their Sweet dark liquid eye Lies another world.
Candida Baker
The heroes Flying Dancing Prancing The friend Healing and healer In a sweet and liminal space The trust Lead me with Every atom of your being And in that split-second When we could fall I will fly for you Into forever. The wild ones They will come for me.
Let the last thing I feel on this earth Be the sweet smell of her warm coat Let me sense her magnificent presence Let his spirit gallop beside me as I traverse between this world and the next (Once, I travelled with a horse for three days While he crossed the unknown terrain Between life and death) But - oh To follow the wild ones To watch their Flowing movement Is to be in a moment Of pure energy To know That this Now Is all Is everything Is nothing Is everywhere Is love Is horse.
Fledgeling
Eleanor Page
A limpet child, she’d cling to grown-ups’ legs whining as they tried to heave her free though it never stopped them leaving. Always pressing friends for more, for time to riddle out their every thought – till they agreed to blot her out, all excuses and side-steps, the evil eye. She drew faces on her fingernails, smiling faces on the walls, took to naming everything: the house and furniture, the ladybirds she kept even when they puckered down to dust. Even now she coaxes mice to leech from her uneaten food; sits for hours with seeds and mealworms until birds pick them from her palms. Each year they nest in the clematis, her climbing rose; boxes hung and stuffed with moss, her combed-out hair. Come June, she counts the fledgelings, fluffy thumb-pressed necks and crooked wings so beautiful she could not let them leave.
My Familiar
It’s never gone for long. It has a homing instinct. A shapeshifter, my therapist said, that will likely never leave me. When it found me as a girl of ten it was a blackbird chakking danger whenever I thought of stepping out, at any noise at night. If I tried to ignore it, it swelled to a crow bleating shame, stupid, leaving me warning fledgelings speared and leaking. When I thought I had it tamed it became a lanyard at my neck, a smooth-snake whispering poison whenever I ate, tensing till I could barely swallow. Later it favoured a bloated rat, every surface smeared with its leavings. I slathered disinfectants, washing myself red.
I’ve tried to kill it, but it shrinks to a cockroach hissing, stitches itself together again when I cut off its head. Now it’s a bat hibernating in the crossbeams. It won’t be long till it wakes, nicks the skin at my breast and starts to lick.
The Helium Brothers
Georgia Boon
Deep into the countryside, on half familiar roads, the satnav saying he was a few miles from the restaurant, Jack saw a willowy figure, treading carefully along the bank to avoid the daffodils. He pulled over, wound down the window and took his brother in.Simon was wearing a yellowing shirt that Jack could tell from looking would be crusty around the armpits, and an attempt at a tie which looked like the scarf from an old knitted toy. How could he have come dressed like that for Gran's ninety-fifth? Jack propped his Armani sunglasses up on his forehead. 'Fancy a lift?' 'No thanks.' 'But you're miles from the restaurant!' Simon shrugged.'Yeah but the carbon and everything.' 'I'm going there anyway!'Jack felt ridiculous.Two middle-aged men having a row in the road about a lift. 'My weight means your gas guzzler will use more fuel.' Jack's shoulders stiffened. 'Ok,' he said.'I'll see you there then.'He drove off, music louder than before.
At the restaurant, Simon and Jack sat strained on either side of their grandmother.They wished their own families had been there to provide a little ballast, but football tournaments and exams had got in the way.Simon couldn't believe how much weight Jack had gained, plus he was so brown.He must have been on a tanning bed, or worse, a beach, for the last few weeks. Gran, draped in mauve broderie anglaise, her sharp wrists sticking out of the ends of her sleeves, sat back and regally surveyed the scene laid out in celebration of her.The tables before her were filled with her remaining family and friends.Silver helium balloons, with white ninety-fives on them, bobbed up all over the room between them. She turned to her grandsons. 'You look less like brothers than ever,' she said. 'But you're both your father's sons and your mother's boys.'She gripped at each of the men's arms with her talon-like fingers. Simon and Jack had never looked alike, even as children.Simon's auburn curls and chalky white skin clashed with Jack's olive glow and gleaming teeth. 'Don't you want to have a mingle before the food comes, Gran?' Simon said.'Say hello to all these people who have come to see you?' Gran ignored him.'If your mother and father could see you now.Grown men!' she said.Her eyes fogged over with age and grief.There was a quiet between them all.Just two weeks before, it had been the fortieth anniversary of their parents' deaths.On the day, Simon had wondered if Jack had remembered.And Jack had wondered if Simon had remembered too. Gran put a hand out and clutched the back of Simon's seat, pushing herself up. 'I'll have a mingle now.You two make sure you comport yourselves in a manner befitting my grandsons. None of that nonsense you usually get into.'Taking her stick in her hand, she began to smile her way around the room. 'She's amazing, isn't she?' said Jack.
'She really is,'Simon nodded.'You'd have thought bringing us two up would have done her in years ago.'He laughed, but avoided Jack's eyes, fiddling with the stem of an empty glass. 'Aren't you having some wine?' Jack picked up the bottle. 'Don't think it's vegan,' Simon said. 'Oh yeah, of course.' 'Mainwrights selling much vegan wine these days?' Simon didn't really know what Jack did at the supermarket anymore.Something at head office, to do with marketing maybe, for one of the biggest sellers of battery eggs in the country. 'No, not much.The producers don't make enough of it for us to meet our margins,' said Jack.'But it's all about demand.And if people keep asking for it and buying it when we stock it, we'll buy more.Simple as that.' A grand cake was brought out on a trolley with so many candles you could imagine they warmed the room.Gran blew them out bad-temperedly, muttering about rationing and the number of eggs that must have been used in such a colossal sponge. She straightened herself and gave a great speech, about the War and all it took and gave; about the best of intentions leading to the darkest paths; about time flowing through us being what makes us rich, as well as what takes it out of us, whatever 'it' is.
* Later, at Gran's, while she insisted on making fresh coffee, Simon and Jack sat in their old places, the low table table with the faded backgammon board inlaid between their chairs. 'I suppose you're all over the plastic lobby?' Jack said, unwrapping a packet of biscuits from their crackling wrapper.
'Not so much.If people focussed on the real threat, plastic's irrelevant.No one will give a shit about the straws floating in the water they're drowning in.' 'Tell that to all of the customers who keep leaving the packaging on our checkouts,' Jack laughed. 'Consumer demand, eh?' They laughed together. 'Here's something interesting,' said Simon, pulling one of the silver balloons that they'd brought back from the restaurant towards him. 'Yeah?' asked Jack. 'It's just funny that we use these balloons to celebrate things.' 'Why?They don't biodegrade, I suppose?' Simon's face was pinched.'Yes, it's that...' 'I guess they aren't good for wildlife?' 'Yup.That and the helium.'He bobbed the balloon up and down by its ribbon.'It's finite.When it leaves the balloon, it leaves the earth's atmosphere.Forever.With the amount that's left, and the rate we use it, all the helium on the planet will be gone in a hundred years.' 'So helium's important?For us?' 'God, that's not the point.It represents something: us, just eradicating a whole element!Anyhow, I made a petition.To make it illegal.You can sign it if you want?' 'Of course!' said Jack. A memory found Jack: the two of them at a wedding when they were children, huddled under a table with a stash of balloons, their little lungs bursting with helium, talking in Daffy Duck voices.
Later, when Simon had finished washing up the coffee things, he came back into the lounge to find gran at the crossword and Jack fast asleep on the sofa. 'Works too hard, that one,' said Gran.'Pop his blanket on him, love.' Simon tucked the blue crocheted blanket round his brother's legs and then started setting up backgammon for another inevitable defeat against Gran. * Simon was at home when the call came.The day was cold, full of woodsmoke and silhouettes.He had been sorting the recycling in the shed all morning.The Common had been busy the day before and he'd gathered heaps of debris in yesterday's dusk, mostly crisp packets and water bottles, in between the rare purple orchids and precious cowslips. Maya, his eldest daughter, swung the shed door open slowly. 'How's the revision?' he asked. She shook her head. 'What?' 'It's Gran,' she said, and everything in him went dull. * It was a late autumn afternoon weeks later, the ground soft with rain and rotting fruit, the air cold as glass, when they walked to the top of Chestnut Hill. Simon and Jack each took up fistfuls of the damp, grey powder.Simon plunged his hand deep into the box and considered the dust with his fingers, before letting the earth take it.Jack scooped up as small an amount as possible and let it go as quickly as he had taken it up.It surprised him that it remained on the ground, and didn't sink into the earth, that it just stuck there to the blades of grass.
Simon stood up. 'Dad?' said Maya. 'That's me,' he said with a forced smile.'Come on Maya.' 'You're going?' said Jack. Simon's voice caught as he said goodnight and left the bar to walk to the station through the cold night.
Afterward, the brothers sat in armchairs at a familiar pub.They were happy to sit by one another, and gossip a little about who had been at the funeral.They had both given eulogies, neither mentioning the Gran of their childhoods: label-sewing, school-book covering, fete organising, sheet tucking, night-time-holding Gran.Instead they both talked about old Gran: sharp and nostalgic.Jack laughed more than anyone at Simon's talk and Simon laughed more than anyone at Jack's. As evening came, Maya sat pretending to be on her phone, enjoying listening to them, watching her Dad get slowly drunker. He went to the bar and when he came back Jack said, 'Maya here tells me you're still at it with the crisp packets.' 'Sure, sure. I know it looks petty but every little helps and all that.' 'That reminds me!' said Jack.'Something from work.' 'Yeah?' said Simon. 'You know that thing about the helium?' 'Yeah?' 'Last week they showed us a plan to use balloons for all the big occasion weekends.I said we shouldn't do it.That we shouldn't be using up all that helium.And they agreed!' 'What?' said Simon. 'They've stopped using helium balloons across all the stores!'He grinned at his brother. 'That should have bought it an extra few weeks.' 'Yeah,' said Simon, slowly taking in the information.He tossed the last swallow of whiskey down and let it burn in is chest before banging the heavy glass down.'Just got the half billion battery eggs to sort out now,' he said, his mouth tough. 'I thought you'd be pleased!' said Jack.
Next issue is out on September 1st 2023 The theme will be 'Haunted'
www.theamphibianlit.com
Georgia Boon is an Alpine Prize shortlisted writer who lives in the Cotswolds, England. This year her work has appeared in Shooter, Popshot and The Phare and placed third in the Wells International Story Award.
Peter Clark I was drawn to writing poetry in my early 20s, I think because for me it provides the purest form of self expression.
Candida Baker Candida Baker is a well-known author and journalist, whose latest book, The Heart of a Horse, was published by Murdoch Books in 2021. President: Equus Alliance The Horse Listener www.candidabaker.com
Tamiko Dooley Tamiko read Latin and French at New College, Oxford. She won the BBC Radio 3 carol competition 2021.
Contributors to This Issue
Dagne Forrest Dagne's poetry has appeared in journals in Canada, the US, Australia, and the UK. She also belongs to the editorial and podcast teams of Painted Bride Quarterly. Dagne lives in Canada.
Poets and Writers:
J.M.Bédard (she/her) spends long runs getting lost in other worlds, and writes to find her way out.
Michelle Dennehy read English at Oxford University, and holds a Masters degree in Novel Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has featured in journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Bangor Literary Journal, Abridged and Drawn to the Light Press. Her poems have also been published in anthologies from Dedalus Press and CAP Arts.
Lauren Camp is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico and author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Two new books—Worn Smooth Between Devourings(NYQ Books) and An Eye in Each Square (River River Books)—are forthcoming in 2023.
Anne-Louise Avery Is a gifted storyteller and creator, she is the author of Reynard the Fox (Bodleian Publishing 2020) and A Fox for All Seasons (Bodleian Publishing 2021) you can find her stories on Patreon and Twitter as well as instagram - search Anne Louise Avery
L.Ward Abel His work has appeared in hundreds of journals. He is a reformed lawyer, he writes and plays music, and he teaches literature. Abel resides in rural Georgia.
Sara Falkstad Sara Falkstad is a poet, educator and artist based in the Swedish countryside. Her poetry has been published in various Swedish and international literary journals and her book of poetry De enhjärtbladiga (“The Monocots”) was released in 2020.
Italo Ferrante Italo Ferrante (he/him) is a queer poet who earned a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick. To date, his work has been selected for publication by Poetry Salzburg, Impossible Archetype, Cardiff Review, Sage Cigarettes, Inflections Magazine, Lighthouse, and Orchard Lea Press.
Hannah Allies Hannah is a writer based in Brighton, UK. She has had poetry and flash fiction published by Books Ireland, Reflex Fiction, Crowvus and Visual Verse. She writes about the natural world, friendship and womanhood. She is currently writing her first novel.
LJ Ireton LJ is a poet and bookseller from London. She has a 1st Class B.A. Honours in English Language and Literature from The University of Liverpool. Her poems have been published by numerous journals including: Green Ink, The Madrigal, Noctivagant Press, Spellbinder Magazine, Acropolis Journal, Mausoleum Press and Cerasus Magazine. In October 2022 her poetry was published in the Renard Press 'Spectrum' Anthology.
Kate Maxwell is a teacher and writer from Sydney. She’s been published and awarded in many Australian and International literary magazines. www.kateswritingplace.com
D.B. Jonas DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the mountains of New Mexico, USA, whose first poetry collection,Tarantula Season, is scheduled for release by Finishing Line Press later this year."
Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema.His chapbooksTiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press, 2021) and If We Keep Moving (Ghost City Press, 2022) are available in paperback and ebook.
Ceinwen Haydon Ceinwen writes short stories and poetry. She’s been published widely on-line and in print. She believes everyone’s voices count.
Kanya Kanchana is a poet from India.
Eleanor Page Eleanor Page’s debut pamphlet ‘Sleeping on the Wing’, which explores themes of transience and the natural world, was published by Against the Grain Poetry Press in 2021. She completed the Poetry School’s Writing Poetry MA in 2022 and is currently working towards a first full collection based upon her interests in folklore, witchcraft and superstition.
Edward Malone Eddie Malone lives far, far out in the boggy woods with his rescue dogs and his demons.
Ivan de Monbrison Ivan de Monbrison is a schizoid writer from France born in 1969 and affected by various types of mental disorders, he has published some poems in the past, he's mostly an autodidact.
Gabriela immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in northern Alberta, and currently resides in B.C. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals.
Alexandra Price Alexandra Price has written poetry, biographies and a memoir on motherhood. She has also mentored young offenders, including teaching creative writing and poetry.
She lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land and is currently completing an MFA at UBC. www.gabrielehalas.org
Felicity Middleton Felicity Middleton is the founder of Coalville Writers Group, who have just published their first anthology.
Poonam Jain I have always loved reading, but came late to writing. My poems are an exploration of my own spiritual journey, as an Asian woman living in the UK, and my response to social injustice, based upon experience of social work, counselling, and of life. I perform my poems regularly
Jupiter Jones Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the two-time winner of the Colm Tóibín International Prize, and her stories have been published by Aesthetica, Brittle Star, Fish, Scottish Arts, and Parthian. Her first novella-in-flash, The Death and Life of Mrs Parker was published by Ad Hoc Fiction, the second, Lovelace Flats by Reflex Press and the third, Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell by Ad Hoc.
Artists Websites and Instagram
Ivy Raff Her poetry appears in The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod International Journal, and West Trade Review, among numerous others, and is anthologized in Spectrum: Poetry Celebrating Identity. Currently nominated for theBest of the Net Anthology, www.ivyraff.com
Hanna Randall Hanna is a writer and artist in Brighton, UK. Having trained as a costume maker at RADA, she has worked in the London theatre and film costume industry for several years. She holds an MA in Japanese Studies from SOAS and is currently studying for a Creative and Critical Writing PhD at the University of Sussex.
Lysiane Bourdon Instagram @lysiane_Bourdon www.lysianebourdon.com
April Coppini Instagram @AprilCoppini www.aprilcoppini.com
Kayann Short Writer, farmer, and teacher Kayann Short, Ph.D., is the author of A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography (Torrey House Press) a Nautilus Green Living & Sustainability winner. www.Kayannshort.com
Barry McGlashan Instagram @barrymcglashan www.barrymcglashan.com
Kate Potter Kate is a writer and teacher, Her latest novel is The Absolutes, from which Flashcard Memory was taken. She is represented by Nicky Lovick at WGM Talent.
Marjolein Starreveld Instagram @olein1 www.fluffystitch.com
Sam Cannon Instagram @Samcannonart www.samcannonart.co.uk
Joanne Olney Instagram @JoanneOlneyArt www.joanneolney.com
Carlos González Ximénez Instagram @mask._.hunter
Katja Lang Instagram @_Katja_Lang_ www.katja-lang.com
Stephen Nolan Instagram @_stephen_Nolan_ www.stephen-nolan.com
for the culturally amphibious.