Issue 13 Space
Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 13. There is a selection of poems below which explore different facets of the theme 'Space'. It is good to welcome a number of poets new to Allegro as well as to read work from familiar names. Enjoy this issue.
Sally Long
Poems
Black Sheep
Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 13. There is a selection of poems below which explore different facets of the theme 'Space'. It is good to welcome a number of poets new to Allegro as well as to read work from familiar names. Enjoy this issue.
Sally Long
Poems
Black Sheep
Beneath this country
seat, on parkland fringed
by garden, ha ha,
woodland, wilderness,
footpath to village,
ornamental lake,
the flock’s moved in
to civilise the grass.
They’re strangers
this lot, wiry, smaller than
the sheep we know.
What’s worse, a third or more,
are black. And yet,
within one week, square peg,
sore thumb, I hardly
notice when I pass.
What people dread’s
uncertainty, their well-
worn ways at risk,
tradition, neighbourhood.
At times like this,
it’s understandable,
they beat retreat,
dig in, seek space to breathe,
habituate. Where
change is crushing like
an avalanche,
resentment breeds and thrives.
Peter Branson
The cauldron of sunset
Slight rain across the forest
A tree’s calm presence, its roots
deep under the surface of things,
hidden within earthen mold
and a mightier silence
A tree’s calm presence,
a tree’s calm presence
A mightier silence of earth.
Ayaz Daryl Nielsen
The
White-Washed Cottage
I open the door
enter the house
the bold closeness
of the silence clots
the air.
His army fatigue hangs
on a hook, elbows
creased from
use, his Donegal cap
laps over it.
At any moment you
expect him
to grab the tweed and
slap it
on his silvered head
tug the fatigue about
his shoulders
his gravelly treble
echoing,
I’m off.
Liz Rose Dolan
(Pensive)
Devon Balwit
Pensive, I hold both
light and shadow,
pass from I to I as
on stepping stones
across mirrored
water. inert,
wheeling, orbiting
the flare of my
dwarf star. One
hand tuck and
grooves between
curves to catch a
breast ripe enough
to fall. All of me,
pendant.
Composed as any
tombstone, any
orator, briefly lit,
darkness ringing
round.
Devon Balwit
Space Junk
After the breakup, our phone
conversations
become space debris, steel pieces
hardly
discernible hurtling haphazardly at
five miles
per second. Where do the scraps go?
The gold taste of summer will impact
the brain
and puncture, enflame. We wish to
assist
the start-ups who seek to construct
machines to eliminate wayward spares
of satellites trapped in the gravity
of a body,
propel its dust into the atmosphere
to burn.
We drift wary of small artifacts
from failed missions to emerge
in the distance of night to strike
and make split into fragments
we will never assemble again.
James Croal Jackson
More Moon than Moon
bamboo curtains are said to enhance the moon
I am deeply troubled
why would anyone think the moon needs enhancing
Keith Richards says that he survived heroin
when so many others didn’t
because he recognized
you can’t get more stoned than stoned
we’re not going to have the moon forever you know
with each passing year its orbit
gets a little larger
it’s just a matter of time until it drifts off into space
I say we bask romantically in the unfiltered
moon-glow while we have it
you can’t get more moon than moon
Bobby Steve Baker
Grammar
Lesson
This subject objects itself
to any verb of action or intransitive
breaking of the link to wisdom
What is space between words
except the whiteness of harmony
separable in the wind I speak?
The noun of golden October lies
beneath itself in the rotting leaves
where nostrils syllable future tense
Each of us alleges adjectives adverbially
made more or less entire
while winds speak actions with the leaves
The noun (wind) itself an acting (verb)
sentences the participles of me
into apostrophe hanging without word
David Anthony Sam
Asteroid
It will pass to the East of the Earth,
Always going East,
Singing across the sky always,
Though the sky is beyond listening to
sound,
Is beyond the song of a throat made
of dust,
Carrying dust in its song to the
stars,
Lit for a moment like a rope between
the stars,
East of the Earth, just for that
moment.
Deborah Binstock
Questioning a Ream of Paper
Wearing a dress at the time, I sent a
ream of paper into
outer space: the impersonation an
assumption such
feminine charm would prompt aliens to
their written replies,
no inherent macho confrontation in
expecting them to have
their own pens and ideas and a
willingness to put all of
this down on such a forthright,
archaic and twee mode
of communication. 192 GSM to survive
the flight, though
in reality it was teleported, I might
have requested all this
be handwritten in cartridge ink, like
a proper Declaration of
Interdependence – bug-eyed [aren’t
they all?] scrawls
as confirming signatures – but when
sending messages in
the dark of sleep and night you don’t
remember everything.
Why a whole ream you might well ask, but my response is
can that be the only query in such a
gendered encountering?
Mike Ferguson
The Poem of the Oort Cloud
After
King Chicago by Boo Howerdine
If I could get away with it.
I’d love to go smashing windows with
you.
Running down the empty streets
With our bats
Spraying crunchy diamonds against the
black pavement.
I love you a little bit more than I
love myself
And that terrifies me.
I’ve never really loved anyone else.
We sparkle you and I
In my mind-
The way the fuse on a
Fire cracker sparkles just before it
explodes
The way a toddlers eye sparkles
Before she tips the cookie jar off the
counter
Spraying crunchy rubies across the
linoleum floor.
What terrifies me about love
Has nothing to do with you,
It’s messy regardless
And completely about me.
I knew this is where I’d end up
Alone and cold
Broken into a thousand pieces
Floating past Pluto
While you ring door bells
And run away.
Marc Janssen
Toward the Unknown Region
After Vaughan Williams’ composition
based on Whitman’s Darest Thou Now, O Soul
As stronger palliatives eased your
pain,
you whispered haltingly about being
stranded on a sand bar in Morecambe
Bay,
like a father and son a decade ago,
and how rescuers called through the
fog
as the chilling flood rose up your
chest.
Confused, you couldn’t find the route
back across the runnels and
quicksands,
and your mobile’s battery was dead.
Hallucination or half-remembered
truth?
It doesn’t matter now. Propped
up, dozing,
your breathing is becoming
shallower,
slower, as fluid creeps further up
your lungs.
You’re casting off the ties that bind
us,
soon to sail alone across that
fathomless sea
without a further shore. Where
will you end?
In depths we cannot chart? Or,
borne aloft,
trembling before the majesty of your
god?
Mantz Yorke
Signals from the Cosmos
Seventeen years of excitement
from radio waves arriving in fast
bursts:
theory suggested they might have
fled,
billions of light years ago, from
collisions
between black holes or neutron stars.
New equipment has checked
our observations. We’ve found peaks
of signals around midday, but only
when
staff have opened the microwave
before it has properly switched off.
The kitchen’s interference has
diverted us
(and colleagues at observatories
elsewhere),
but the fascination of trying to
understand
strange phenomena is our spur
to untie the knotty puzzle of the
bursts.
Mantz Yorke
Pandora’s Box
I opened Pandora’s Box
and a terrifying new world
lay before my eyes.
I unleashed desires
I’d never
felt before.
I set free
undreamed
of emotions.
I ripped my heart open
and filled it with
terrifying new sensations.
I burnt a
hole inside me
that charred my soul.
I drowned
in a river
of feelings.
A life I’d never
knew existed was
suddenly my own.
I opened Pandora’s Box
and there’s no
turning back now.
Pamela Scott
Going Home
Falling asleep on our
journey back tonight,
you didn’t see how
the sky was starred with a thousand geese,
spearing off in
confused fragments to all directions;
some the usual south,
others west, others even north-west.
Your eyelids
flickered at the horizon instead, painting yourself a brief dream,
far away from the
violent uncertainty of these last three days,
the astonished air
still bruised with unspent cloud, above the washed earth,
Robert Ford
Empty nest
First fragile buds,
then a downy cloak of
new leaves emerged on
the old willow,
destined to rule over
the sky again, and –
hastened by the
elemental – the blackbirds
began their clumsy
dance, more like a
Friday night spat
between drunken cowards
than a lover’s
introduction. They landed
now every hour or
less, always with a full
beak of twigs or
thatching gathered from
the woods,
disappearing into the canopy,
away from cat
attention and a watchful
sparrowhawk,
patrolling regularly overhead.
Only winter’s bitter
march fully revealed it,
the home they’d made,
become all hollowed.
Wedged between the
naked branches, a wiry
hemisphere,
intricately-bound, tinselled with
streamers of silver
foil, cosied with dry moss
and found hair of the
neighbourhood’s dogs.
Resuming our cold war
of attritions, it made us
yearn to have been
the hatchlings raised within.
Robert Ford
Untitled
I
There is a crust over
the human eye,
and death is the
moment of its tearing.
But there are
experiences
of the infinite
within life—a miniscule piece
breaks off and the
light shines
the way the sun does
through a cloud—
And you become the
electric edge
in a vertiginous
machine
which turns the sky
upon its head with
levers,
cranks and gears.
I am speaking of lightning
bolts, arrows to the
heart—
your arms erupting,
goose flesh
pimpling the window
to your soul,
your body.
II
Body—as window; Window—as candle;
Candle—as symbol; Symbol—as siglum;
Siglum—as code; Code—as pattern;
Pattern—as legend; Legend—as story;
Story—as building; Building—as ending;
Ending—as a stairway; Stairway—as memory;
Memory—as sensation; Sensation—as body.
III
Not knowing the sand
from
My bones grow older
than
Yesterday I was a
blue
Bird whistles from
the
Tree roots reach like
Fingers brushing
friendly
Faces glancing softly
Nowhere in particular
But here
IV
Have I yet explained
the ways in which I
am like
sand? Alas, the
glass.
Noah Leventhal
there was death in the sun
today
a long line of recollection
images held in living tombs
eyes upon an ocean
it was life
parading for death
bumper to bumper
the graveyard near
with its gnarly
glinting teeth
and open throat
and as a spotted bug
crawled across my window
and a cyclist felt the heat
of flexing limbs
I thought of shells
within velvet wood
deep breaths at the edge
of warm earth
bony fingers knotted
against things inexorable
and those sudden
looks behind
Adam Middleton-Watts
Museum of Nothing
1
There is a shape that absence
creates.
Yours was on the bed –
the firm press of your buttocks on
the linen,
placing in it a tea bowl of
hollowness –
a broken pottery of yourself, laced
with the odd golden hair, fallen
from your shoulder.
2
A boat capsized becomes a relic
when reclaimed, whereas a man drowned
grows into a museum of nothing –
his unfettered bones calcify into
nutrients
for phytoplankton.
For body is not wood –
a piece of wood disintegrates
into pieces wooden, whereas a body
rots
into something unnameable.
This page has not been intentionally
left blank
Shriram
Sivaramakrishnan
Divorce Courts
‘Experience is what you get when you
didn't get what you wanted.’ - Randy Pausch
they sit in pairs alone
couple after couple
row after row
now and then
a sneeze scratch yawn fiddle
or the occasional murmur like people
do
at auction houses before they call
out the bid
except here the two heads sitting
beside each
other never interleave, secrets get
spoken
as a matter of fact
and they wait
with the urgency of their decisions
for their turn to confess before the
black coat
what they have rehearsed umpteen
times
and sign the dotted line on the white
paper
forgetting
that they are in fact the dotted
lines –
dots that are nearly lines nearly so
but a dotted line is a euphemism –
dot gap dot gap dot gap dot gap gap
gap
there is nothing coherent about it
nothing that says I am a part
of a whole
like the individual strokes do in a
proper
line
then they go their separate
ways
leaving the room together
one last time.
Shriram
Sivaramakrishnan
Chatting with the Void
The girl at Moonlight
Café
makes buckwheat salads with panache.
Her fingers softly brush each grain
and leave sparkles of her kindness.
Tuesdays, I wait there for my lunch,
watch her batik skirt festooned with
symbols
rustle back and forth from sink to
till.
Hope that the magic in her eyes
will dust starlight on my sandwich.
I venture small talk. How I’d had a
rude intruder
in the dead of night, who’d walked
off with
my wallet and my Breville toastie
maker.
Oh these things happen for a reason.
The Universe was giving you a
message.
Ah.
I think next week I’ll get my lunch
at Greggs.
Paul Vaughan
Laika at the Fair
The juggling boy drops a ball
It’s one of those shows
You feel embarrassed
Hoping he’s good
Either way it’s riveting
The crowd inches in
Meanwhile a little dog trots trots
Along the edges as if lost
Around and around
It’s white a terrier
A brown blotch on her face
Like a domino mask
Like Laika the cosmonaut dog
That the Soviets shot
Into space that was 1957
Now the boy is
Juggling eight balls nine balls ten
Not dropping any
And the dog it’s plain now
Seeks her master
And the blue-eyed boy
He’s eitherhanded
He’s nimble he’s got us
So that nobody notices the dog
Orbiting orbiting
The boy catches a knife in his teeth
They say Laika in a cage alone
Perished of panic and heat
Just after takeoff
Circling earth for five months
Until the shuttle reentered our
atmosphere
The crowd erupts!
Burning
John Wall Barger
After My Divorce
Faced with hard evidence that I
wasn’t
the gentle creature
I’d thought, I learned yoga,
read Krishnamurti
& Homer. A scream
boiled in my chest
yaheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
impatient as a kettle.
The merry fop, where had he gone?
What were the new
frontiers? I collapsed.
In bed, eyes closed,
I saw something
very close to nothing, a meteor
shower
of nothing. The mind
a rock in space. I gripped the rock,
climbed it. It elongated,
shifting under me.
Unknown things—
like joy, or how fate is set
—exist, maybe,
on the other side of the rock, in
darkness.
To get there I pushed
the rough surface with my hands,
stupidly. I slept for weeks.
The rock shifted. I crept my blankets
as if through sand;
I sat upright, eyes shut.
I gripped the rock,
cursed, heartsick,
like a movie astronaut
on a digital asteroid. I opened my
eyes.
My room was a shambles:
a marsh of clothes,
papers, unwashed plates.
Out the window, a moonlit tree.
Then the room shifted.
It spun, slow.
The room was moving.
John Wall Barger
Cathedral
Underskied, glow wormed light with stars
And family constellations and
Five bright Orions belted,
To keep his belly tucked,
Only one reedy child scream
From shaking itself loose,
From Cancer to Capricorn
In the roof of one belly,
The colon of the whole
Gourmandizing Earth.
Hymns and carols here
Are meaningless as prayers
On mountaintops, empty
As night-gorged embers
Swallowed whole.
This stalagmite pulpit stands
Bishopless,
The silence of closing-time
Its only heartfelt sermon.
Daniel Pearson
Contributors
Bobby Steve Baker grew-up in Canada, now lives in
Lexington Kentucky with his family and two insane Airedales. Recently published
in, Amaryllis, Kentucky Review, Cold
Mountain Review, Prick of the Spindle, Picaroon, Cloudbank, and Into the Void. His latest book is This Crazy Urge to Live by Linnet’s
Wings Press.
Devon Balwit
is a teacher/poet from Portland, OR. She has two chapbooks: how the
blessed travel (Maverick Duck Press) & Forms Most
Marvelous (forthcoming with dancing girl press). Her work has found
many homes, some of which are: The Inflectionist Review, The Cincinnati
Review, The Stillwater Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Red Earth Review,
Timberline Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry.
Deborah Binstock has loved poetry since she was very
young. She has not written for a career, but has had occasional poems
published in small poetry group collections. Her poems will always be in memory
of her mother, who encouraged her.
Peter Branson has been published
in Britain, US, Canada, Ireland, Australasia
and South Africa, including Acumen,
Ambit, Agenda, Envoi, London Magazine, North,
Prole, Warwick Review, Iota, Butcher’s Dog,
Frogmore Papers, Interpreter’s House,
SOUTH, Crannog, THE SHOp & Causeway. His latest collection, Hawk Rising, from Lapwing, Belfast, was published 2016.
Liz Rose Dolan's first poetry collection, They Abide, nominated for The McGovern Prize, Ashland University, was published by March Street. Her second, A Secret of Long
Life, published by Cave Moon, was nominated
for a Pushcart. A nine-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of the Web, she
was a finalist for Best of the Net 2014.
Mike Ferguson’s most recent poetry is the sonnet
chapbook Precarious Real [Maquette Press, 2016]. A retired
English teacher he co-authored the education text Writing Workshops [Cambridge University Press, 2015].
Robert Ford lives on the east coast of Scotland. His poetry has appeared in both
print and online publications in the UK and US, including Picaroon
Poetry, The Lake, Liminality and San Pedro River Review.
More of his work can be found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/
James Croal Jackson's poetry has appeared in
The Bitter Oleander, Rust + Moth, Isthmus, and elsewhere. His first
chapbook is forthcoming from Writing Knights Press. He is the 2016 William
Redding Memorial Poetry Contest winner in his current city of Columbus, Ohio.
Visit him at jimjakk.com.
Marc Janssen has worked as an ad man, a pitch man, and
a salesman. Climbed the corporate ladder and fallen off it. Currently he is
employed as a bureaucrat for the State of Oregon. He writes when he can, which
is most days. You can find his work haphazardly scattered around the internet
and in printed journals and anthologies such as Off the Coast, Cirque Journal, The Ottawa Arts Review and Manifest
West.
Noah Leventhal is a gumshoe literary detective. He recently graduated
from St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he managed to avoid nasty
juniper allergies for three out of his four years. He enjoys dissolving dream
into reality, even when he is talking or eating food with his fingers.
Adam Middleton-Watts is a British expat writing out of South
Dakota. When he’s not dissolving in the midst of a savage summer or fattening
up for the next brutal winter, he’s writing poems and stories on the backs of
unpaid utility bills, and drinking flagons of dark ale.
Ayaz Daryl Nielsen, veteran, hospice nurse, ex-roughneck (as on oil rigs) lives in
Longmont, Colorado, USA. Editor of Bear
Creek Haiku (26+ years/135+ issues) with poetry published worldwide (and
deeply appreciated), he also is online at: Bear Creek Haiku poetry, poems and info.
Daniel Pearson is originally from Sunderland and studied English
Literature at Lancaster University. After spending several years living abroad
he has returned and lives in Cardiff. Having just begun to take writing
seriously, he has, so far, appeared as a runner-up in Into The Void magazine's
2016 competition.
David Anthony Sam lives in Virginia with his wife and
life partner, Linda. Sam has four collections and his poetry has appeared in
over 60 journals and publications. His chapbook, Finite to Fail: Poems after Dickinson, was the 2016 Grand Prize winner of GFT
Press Chapbook Contest.
Pamela Scott lives in Glasgow, UK with her partner.
Her poems and stories have been published in various magazines including Peeking Cat Poetry, The Cannon’s
Mouth, Sarasvati, The Dawntreader and Toasted Cheese Literary Magazine. Her poetry has appeared in
anthologies including LOVE – A
Collection of Poetry and Prose on Loving and Being in Love published by Collections of Poetry and
Prose and Crab Lines Off the Pier and Visible Breath, both published
by Indigo Dreams Press. She has completed two novels and is working on a third
novel.
Shriram
Sivaramakrishnan recently completed his MA from Seamus Heaney
Centre for Poetry, UK. His poems have appeared in Bird's Thumb, Softblow, Uut
Poetry and so on.
Paul Vaughan is a Yorkshire poet. His poems have
appeared in Agenda, Prole,
Poetry Salzburg and Obsessed with Pipework, among
others. Edits the e-zine Algebra of Owls.
John Wall Barger’s work has appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Subtropics,
Hotel Amerika, and Best Canadian Poetry. His third collection, The Book of Festus (Palimpsest Press), was a finalist
for the 2016 JM Abraham Poetry Award. His poem “Smog Mother” was co-winner of
the Malahat Review’s 2017 Long Poem Prize.
