Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 34 of Allegro Poetry Magazine which sees a selection of poems both from poets who are new to Allegro and those who have previously had work published here. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.
Poems
Ode to Winter
The dead of winter
Leaves me thinking
Of my lover
He exists for me
The way the night owl
Perches on black spruce
Backlit by streetlight
grey against
the Night sky
Just before taking flight
Ramesh Dohan
Laundry
The way you hang my clothes to
dry
is your own art
sock paired with sock
each t-shirt over two rails
so the air circulates and
there’s no hard
crease.
And when you’re happy it’s dry
you don’t ball the socks
but press them flat and fold them over
one spooning the other
turn in the sides and sleeves of tops
to make a perfect square
wrap each brief into a plumped pillow
and place it all
like a display of expensive gifts
on my side of the bed.
Paul Stephenson
Sweet Leaf
The last time we hugged,
the light scruff of Jay’s beard
locked into my own in a way
I only remember much later,
when Ari, his oldest son, hugs me back
in the heat of that summer’s wrath
at the fresh edge of his grave.
*
Years pass, the needle drops,
“Sweet Leaf” coughs from the speakers
and I scroll through our messages:
memes, brief recordings
of his guitar noodling, brief
news of each other’s kids. Heart
emojis. Smile emojis. Silence.
Barely any pictures,
even less video.
Doubts cloud even
my clearest memories.
Until that moment when
under that relentless sun
Ari softly says into my neck,
“He loved you so much.”
David Karpel
Jugoslavija
The socialist republic, they said,
was Marxist, half Karl,
half Groucho, Lenin
meets Volt Dizni,
the proletarian struggle
in technicolour, the black
and white of the Manifesto
through a fantasia of cyan,
magenta, yellow.
The leader,
they said, the working class
hero, fascism’s foe,
handsome, hostile to Stalin.
Unity and brotherhood
they said, at last. The greatest
man alive, they said.
All the kings and queens
mourned him when he died.
Eamonn Shanahan
The
Calculator
When someone suggest you think of a number,
resist, think of a tree in the snow,
think of the scent of your lover
or geese in formation, slipstreaming South.
When they propose you double the number,
don't fall into the trap, rather play
like a child, or sing, that will do.
They'll coax you to halve, then add four,
but you'll be ready to rhyme or to dance
or picture a wave breaking on some distant shore.
Why subtract your original thought
as they tell you to, when you can
imagine the opening notes of a song?
The problem, you see, is their result
will always, forever, be two.
Instead, you can have the wind
in a wheat field and infinite beauty
without being told what to do.
Basil Meyer
The
Florists of Kyiv
A sunflower is the national symbol
but today it’s the tulip’s turn,
that many-coloured flower,
a sign of spring to come.
Bulbs buried in the earth
emerge into daylight after winter
in the dark, packed tight
with incipient new life.
The florists have spread tulips
over Kyiv’s central square,
a sea of pale pink, mauve and red
shaped in the country’s coat of arms,
a gold trident on deep blue shield,
the image of a falcon on the wing.
Whenever I see tulips now
I think about the people of Ukraine.
Sue
Wallace-Shaddad
I am trying
to make peace with sleep,
but the moon keeps interfering and chatting to night predators trying to
eat my mind. I offered them alternatives: canopies and crab. All they do is
sniff the offering and move to the perimeter of my machinery. I try an
alternative, a burger: but they are vegetarian; pineapples: citrus brings them
out in hives; herbal tea : they convulse at my trying to make them sleep. They
pause to probe my breathless thoughts like blown wind in a web of water. They
search to rub raw trapped truths in the always black. I laugh a whisper to
myself, my arrhythmias in tune such that I can dance on the hair of a pin. They
try to play me off the ledge. I decide I have had enough. We could be
friends, I will show you my soundless memories, if that is what you seek. Colour
is cold, strips skin as they stand as a boulder refusing to budge. I try to
make peace, offer all I have at hand, but they scoff and scream on mute as I
shove them hard down my slipway of tears.
Jane Killingbeck
She And Horse
(In Memoriam Rosie at 14)
She eases down the horse’s head.
It is summer and flies
scamper the edges of his eyes.
She fixes a bead curtain
above his lashes
that shakes with movement
like a grass skirt.
Keeps the flies away.
She talks to him,
lurks into his world.
A stamp of hoof lets her in
a place of power
and the intensity
of another consciousness,
a place of dream-scapes
that unfold into a restless
knowledge of war and haulage,
a history of labour
on Orwell’s farm.
He is tight lipped,
holds his ancestry close.
She strokes, hugs,
brings her consciousness
and life energy to him,
rides him bareback through
a valley of trees and rocks,
crosses the river in ventures
to a renewal of herself.
Neil
Beardmore
I Lunch
With Du Fu
He asks if people have learned
anything in the past
thousand years.
I stammer. We have made war
more horrible, use children
to detonate bombs. He remembers
a weeping cherry. How could it be
in the same world?
When he leaves, his sun cape
flaps in the wind.
Kenneth Pobo
Central Park
What I’d forgotten is how snow
has an older sister
Snow is mostly peaceful, you said –
even in New York
We walked through the trees
in the church of snow, wondering
The snow went about its work
settling differences
Kids were trying to catch snowflakes as they fell –
melting in gloved hands
Jeff Skinner
human/nature
(at berkhamsted castle, may 2024)
the
slow, slightly tipsy-
looking
stagger of the
woman
to the bench,
carefully
carrying
some
kind of
glass…
*
new
royal litter, picnic garbage
on
the keep. two geese, like hikers,
slowly
climb the rise, taking care-
ful
note, & i find myself hoping
they
don’t reach the top,
recognize
our
sign
*
slow
moat walk after
thunder:
hundreds
of
beads, snail’s-
pace
ros-
ary
*
postprandial
stroll,
goose
with
a duck-
weed
neck-
lace
Sean Howard
The Best in Palliative Care
The lift opens and the charge nurse wheels out
the next casualty of an escalating war in the brain.
(If the Patient File had been sent up first
I might have been better prepared.)
Surely not! My old neurology lecturer
diminished to a nodding head in a shawl
demoralised and hollowed out by an enemy
taking the brightest and the best.
Her first lecture provided insight into my husband’s behaviour -
brain tumours presenting as Alzheimer’s -
and I was fascinated from there on,
but her specialty field was neuroplasticity -
the brain’s ability to restructure, reorganise, heal itself.
Clearly not happening here.
I wheel her to the empty room, settle her into a chair by the window,
put toiletries in a bedside drawer.
It’s raining heavily and she watches a dismal slurry
of pebbles and garden bark pour down hospital drains.
“Dr Marjorie,” I say, pulling up
a chair beside her. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course I do!” she says. “We were lovers once.”
Jan FitzGerald
Medea’s Friends
Of course we knew poor Meddy was insane -
never quite normal since she ran away
with that adventurer – and then the strain
of life with him got greater every day
until he said, My dear, I’ve found a wife
with money, young and prettier than you.
The prenup doesn’t give you any rights.
The house is mine, goodbye. – Of course it threw
her so off balance she’d do anything
to get revenge. It was a tragic time,
and now remorse will never lose its sting…
That’s why we make allowance for her crime,
not saying even to ourselves the sad
fact
that the kids alone can drive you mad.
Gail White
Lost Property
Where
did I leave my gloves,
you
ask yourself,
and
yourself promptly provides
the
perfect visual,
but
when you get
to
the imagined location
the
gloves are not there
and
you stare
at
a brief hole in the world.
At
which point
a
rusty sub-routine will
sometimes
click in
from
a time
when
something equally certain
and
solidly imagined
was
also looked for
but
never found.
Leonard Lambert
Tuesdays
When will
Anna come? he asks.
Tuesday, his wife says: he groans,
unable to work
out how many days
must pass till
next she comes.
The day-to-day
escapes his memory,
but Anna’s
chatter stimulates him
to recount,
each time, his happiness
as an evacuee
from London’s bombs,
feeding
chickens and collecting eggs
on a far-flung
Northumbrian farm.
Tuesdays are
the days he’s bright,
as if sparks
blown from a dying fire
have set Roman
Candles alight,
giving him each
week a remission
from the
pitiless advance of night.
Mantz Yorke
What becomes of the Broken-Hearted
I used to believe people died when
their heart stopped beating.
Was it you who told me
this?
I walk through the blue
front door of my childhood and you
don’t recognise my face, don’t know
my name.
When the time comes and your
heart stops beating, will I have
forgotten you too?
Emma Mooney
Counting Dead Women.
[after ‘The Murder’ by Paul Cézanne]
A black river is part of the conspiracy,
feel its evil presence. They pin her down
with muscled arms and hands like claws,
it is a job that must be done at speed.
One man’s arm is raised, he holds the knife
as if it is an act of grace. Is it her
beauty,
her youth, the summer in her eyes
they must obliterate? But she is dead
before he even strikes, her arms gone limp
like broken wings, a mouth that gapes.
She fought them there but female grit
gives way to brutish force and the river
gags
the cries of ‘Shame!’- a disposer of
murdered
bodies, the children she would have had.
Anne Bailey
Deviant Burial at Littlemore Priory
In the burgeoning dark, the clay is human
Earth, the dust of bone a pigment of
Desire, desirous they lick the gristle and
Lap the fat, sleep two to a bed
Burn the stocks, they say, and bury the child
We’ve nothing left to sell for her dowry
In the broken clay, the dark is altogether
too human; buried face-down, the prioress’
Mottled teeth jut from her yellow skull
In a crooked gristle-grin
Erin Emily Ann Vance
For Homero Gómez González
Monarch Butterfly Defender,
Rosario, Mexico
Can a man be worth more
than sixty thousand wings
breezing towards extinction.
The Monarch butterfly’s
winter home is a stand of fir and pine.
Branches covered in orange,
black-veined wings sway and snap
with the weight of butterflies
fluttering the possibility of chaos.
His head caved under pressure, his pulse
stopped in the well where his body
floated for money, weeks after loggers
watched him stand with Monarchs
settled on his hand, his head, his heart.
Emma Woodford
Someone’s Been Busy in My Kitchen
for Emily Dickinson
I come home to the sweet smell of baking.
Upturned on the drainer, two bowls and a sieve.
Five unwashed cups out on the worktop, each
bears a clue: a daub of butter, a dash of milk,
shreds of coconut, specks of sugar, dustings of
flour.
Next to abandoned eggshells, a small sheet of
paper,
words in longhand catch my eye, But Joys ―
like men ―
may sometimes make a Journey ― And still abide
―
On the reverse, a list of ingredients. No mention
of method.
Graced with essentials on any venture, don’t
expect
to be led the way. A loaf tin is missing from the
open
drawer, the empty oven still gives off warmth.
The backdoor gapes, a view of the yard ―
that bit of breeze, gently rocking the unlatched
gate.
Helen Heery
The Skipping Forecast
Counting was everything whether we were steady,
rising or falling.
A light wind was fine but a strong one made it
harder
which is why we liked to tune in for some kind of
warning.
Light, moderate or fresh was best.
Winds of 34 knots or more would send our rope into
spasm.
Fog was a non-starter.
Months when the summers blazed all day
we’d long-rope skip to the well-versed chant
of Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.
This was our game, our landlocked song
that we sang out loud for all the skippers at sea.
Neil Leadbeater
Harvest Moon
(after
Samuel Palmer)
Only one field draws down moonlight,
pooling it over the corn,
a spotlit dance floor of stubble and lost
grains,
over ears of wheat, their sighs and whispers.
The fields slip into shadow, forgetting edges.
Harvesting shaves all it can from sleep.
Men, women against time, sickles scratching the
stiff stalks,
wheat rattling as the blades slice, slice,
slice.
Armful by armful they knot the woven plaits,
set the sheaves upright, listening
for the scurry of night’s small animals.
A few words catch in the waiting wheat,
a few words running out of time.
Sheep graze in the shadows, timeless,
shepherded. Night moves through the trees,
through silent leaves, masking identity.
Perhaps it is the moon that holds two
shepherds
so late out of doors, making a mystery of their
future.
Is there an owl, echoing down the valley,
wooing its mate? How far to the sea?
Night is loosening the questions.
D.A. Prince
The Mirror’s Truth
In the mirror’s gaze,
I confront the remnants of yesterday,
the shadows of choices made,
the echoes of laughter,
the weight of unspoken words.
Each reflection is a story,
a tapestry woven with threads of light and dark,
where the bright moments shine,
but the cracks reveal the deeper truths,
the hidden fears, the silent battles.
I stand, a witness to my own becoming,
the layers of time etched upon my skin,
and I wonder,
what is it to be whole
in a world that often feels fragmented?
The mirror offers no easy answers,
only the invitation to look closer,
to embrace the imperfections,
to find beauty in the chips and scars,
and to celebrate the journey of repair.
K. A. Wisniewski
Meditations with Mrs Swan in her Iced Tu-Tu on a Frozen Lake
So, your husband went away, took on a different
mind
for a while. Said it was like living darkness,
like the edge
of a sky as we gain and lose the light. How a
world turned.
How it was thunder. And you’re sat there thinking
of Leda,
and you’re not in the middle of the lake but off
to the side,
under the poisonous arch of the fallen tree. As if
your
considerable efforts at thermal conduction didn’t
signify.
(They did to me - I could see your feet peddling
like war,
like abusive relationships, like the lack of a
smile at death row.)
It warmed my heart that you’d managed to maintain
any space
in all that frozen H2O. A circle of moving
chloroplasts,
thick with life. Insects too small for my brambled
eyes to see,
fish too hungry not to dare to dart upwards,
towards the light,
risking death in the cool winter rays. You move
sedately
within your narrow domain. Water spooling out in
rivulets,
venturing towards the centre, will it hold?
Careful or you’ll flood world.
Lydia Bennett
The Park
We saw a barn owl in the park last night.
This morning, the red-tailed hawk, unsuccessful,
hunts
a squirrel, mobbed by screaming blue jays;
all these characters wanted to have their say.
This morning, the red-tailed hawk hunts
unsuccessfully.
The body of the squirrel plummets from the tree to
the ground,
all these characters wanting to have their say.
We’re not sure what the jays say, they’re too
quiet.
The body of the squirrel plummeting to the ground:
we’re not sure what this means, if it’s an omen.
We’re not sure why the jays grow quiet.
There’s a rough brown birch, a silver linden—
we’re not sure what this means, another omen?
A cardinal arching through the branches, ducks
pooling on a pond.
There’s the rough brown birch, the silver linden—
this is how it always begins and ends.
The cardinal arches through the trees, the ducks
swim in pods,
a squirrel, mobbed by screaming blue jays—
this is how it always begins and ends:
we saw the owl in the park last night.
Hilary Plattner
One True God
I have made myself into a god
with a following of one.
The sun still dares to rise above me
none the wiser to its heresy.
The crowds don’t part.
The mirror shows something human.
No power to smite,
I don’t suffer like a martyr,
stumble over undone laces
and wear second-hand clothes.
My body is a temple to other gods
who demand food, sleep and care.
I have yet to fly
or crumple buildings
like pepsi cans in my hand.
Gods don’t die; I have yet to find
that I am not immortal.
My holy texts are unwritten.
Liam Lynch
On hearing my application for German citizenship
had been approved
It’s the dead I have to thank.
I resurrected some briefly
on the application form,
translating their lives into
mine. There was no fee,
except what it cost them.
In Neuss, four bound by blood
and marriage lie buried together,
dead neat Jews in a line in the
correct section, no mixing allowed,
even in death. Four shineless stars
of David, carved into stone
the colour of persecution. Lines
of hammered Hebrew; I’ve forgotten
where the vowels go. Maybe they’re
buried too. The shoulder-tap of
reparation invites me to receive
my certificate and I thank them
in my best accent. They smile,
a welcome a century too late.
Max Terry Fishel
dear Manchester
a river never stops flowing but
the stones it picks up along the way must.
they are discarded on the shores of rigid land -
unknown, alive, lending its dirt onto my body.
there's a difference between a city you're born in,
and a city you belong to.
your home is nothing but a place to cage you,
your dreams show no one but who you will be,
you, dear Manchester, are what the scars on my skin
like constellations on a solstice night, spell out.
bear the wound like armor, your rain akin to gasoline,
you're burning me, and i was born with a thick skin.
how does it feel to be so wise and young?
there's no road that doesn't lead me away from you.
prophecies are just choices made by fate,
my heart rests in your red bricks, the wind bears my sighs,
the night grins as i run into it, familiarity bone-deep.
you, dear Manchester, have known me since before i was written,
albeit forcefully into history, and you will know me forevermore.
Sreemita Mukherjee
The little things I did
The little things I did to show I was pro-life when
the gynaecologist said,
“Your foetus is growing where it shouldn’t, unlike
other viable embryos”-
I transferred a mother’s affection to the ceramic
dolls on the top shelf of my cabinet,
little baby-replicas, accepting that my anatomy
cannot house precious living things.
I sniffed out the stench of death around my house-
to confront Thanatos’s claim
to my unborn baby, taunt him with a menacing, you
can’t kill this one or that one.
Replanted my dying Chusan palm tree in the front
garden
instead, burying its roots in moist soil like
nature intended,
to make it catch a glimpse of the British sun, like
I could manipulate events, play God,
alter the existence of a living creature I had
control over before its lifespan expired.
Masked death with misleading vital signs of
life- luscious palm leaves, a foetal heartbeat
of a doomed pregnancy that will thrive only if
either it or the human host dies.
I replied to the advert in my inbox, ‘Learn to tend
carnations, marigolds buds,
chrysanthemum petals’ - Can what symbolises
death ever bring joy to the living?
Bridgette James
Contributors
Anne Bailey is a Yorkshire woman now living and writing poems
in North Norfolk. She has had her work published in various journals. She is a
committee member for ‘Cafe Writers’ organising live poetry events in Norwich.
Her first pamphlet What the House Taught Us was published in 2021 by
Emma Press.
Neil Beardmore has performed his poetry widely including St Ives
Festival where he co-performed Painters and Painting. Published in Acumen,
Orbis, The French Literary Review and others, he was placed in the top ten
of 8000 entries of Erbacce’s 2024 competition: his interview and works will
appear in Spring. neilbeardmore.com
Lydia Bennett is currently studying for a Creative Writing PhD
at Lancaster University. She writes poetry and as someone who is Autistic and
has Dyslexia, she thinks a lot about neurodivergence. Her passions are
chocolate, dancing and her two sparkly-eyed children who she loves and loves
and loves.
Ramesh Dohan
lives in the city of Toronto, Canada with his partner and an exceptionally
perfect dog. When he is not writing in his favorite café, he spends his time
reading, hiking and travelling the world. He has also seen his poetry published
in several literary journals including Toronto Poetry Magazine (2020), Trouvaille
Review (2021), Bosphorous Review of Books (2021), Bengaluru
Review, Pinecone review (2021) & Modern Literature (2022)
Max Terry
Fishel was born in
Liverpool to European Jewish parents. Now living in London, Max writes and
performs spoken word poetry on a wide range of topics, including the Jewish
experience. Some of his poems have been published in magazines and anthologies.
Max particularly enjoys performing at open mic sessions.
Jan FitzGerald’s
poems have appeared regularly in NZ literary journals and overseas in Meniscus
(Aus), Atlanta Review, Loch Raven Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Voegelin
View (USA), The London Magazine, The High Window, Acumen and Orbis
(UK), and been shortlisted twice in the Bridport Poetry Prize. She has four
poetry books published.
Helen Heery was born in Kenya and now
lives in Manchester UK. She is published on the Ekphrastic Review
website and in Acumen, Orbis, Obsessed with Pipework and Dream
Catcher magazines. In 2020 she was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize. She
has two poems forthcoming in The French Literary Review.
Sean Howard is the author of six collections of
poetry in Canada, most recently Trinity: Tribute Sequences, for Robert
Graves (Gaspereau Press, 2022). His poetry has been widely published in
Canada, the UK, and elsewhere, and featured in The Best of the Best Canadian
Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2017).
Bridgette
James was
shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry prize and Renard Press Poetry Prize in
2024, longlisted in the Aurora National Prize for Writing, 2022. She won the
Flash Fiction Summer Poetry Prize 2024.
David Karpel teaches high school English
in New York, where he lives with his wife and their dog.
Jane Killingbeck is a new writer of poetry having recently
completed an M A in Creative Writing under the tutelage of Mary Jean Chan. Her
poetry explores belonging and place through the metaphor of memory, real,
remembered and imagined. Her poems embrace both tender and tough imagery.
Leonard Lambert (1945) is a long-established NZ
Poet. Recent highlights are a short-listing in the Bridport Prize and
a Guest Poet appearance in Acumen(UK). His
Selected Poems, Somewhere in August, (Steele Roberts) appeared in
2016, and his most recent publication is a chapbook, Slow Fires, (Cold
Hub Press, 2024).
Neil Leadbeater
is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work
has been published widely both at home and abroad. His latest publication is Cityscapes
and Other Poems (Cyberwit.net, Allahabad, India, 2023).
Liam
Lynch is a nonbinary second-year Creative Writing student who is
interested in urban fantasy, horror and queer literature. While they’re always
happy to play with formal and informal poetry, they abhor long poems – if
something can be said in forty lines, four will usually do a better job.
Basil Meyer has published poetry in Contrast, Presence, Green
Dragon and The Ekphrastic Review as well as
reviews and criticism. He worked as an English lecturer in South Africa and the
UK. He lives in Berkshire from where he regularyly participates in the
Ashmolean Museum’s Poetry in the Galleries.
Emma Mooney’s poems have been extensively published in
various anthologies, and she is the author of two novels. Emma was
awarded a master’s with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of
Stirling, and was proud to recently share her poetry at the Youth Climate
Summit 2023 held in Edinburgh.
Sreemita Mukherjee is an 18 year old from India pursuing Political Science. Her interests include watching sports, and writing articles on lesser known aspects of pop culture. Having written poetry since she was 13, she tends to echo feelings of nostalgia, optimism and longing in all her writing.
Hilary Plattner holds an MFA in writing from Columbia
University and has taught at The New School. Previously, she founded and
directed Brooklyn Writers, a community-based writing program. Her writing has
been published in numerous literary journals, including Cider Press
Review, Fence, GSU Review, Gulf Coast, and The
Ledge.
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of
twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books
include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press) and Loplop in
a Red City (Circling Rivers). His work has appeared in Asheville
Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish,
Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.
D.A.Prince lives in Leicestershire and
London. Her second full-length collection (Common Ground, HappenStance,
2014) won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her third collection, The
Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.
Eamonn Shanahan is a London Irishman. He has worked in many jobs. He
lived for a long time in Croatia and developed an interest in the history of
South Eastern Europe. He has been published in Magma, Strix, Orbit, Nine
Muses Poetry, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Sarasvati, Marble. He currently lives
in Brighton, UK.
Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and journals, most
recently in Shooter Literary Magazine, Poetry News, Acumen. He was
commended in this year’s Coast to Coast to Coast competition, highly commended
in the Sonnet or Not competition, and long listed for the Briefly Write Prize.
Paul Stephenson’s debut collection Hard Drive was
published by Carcanet in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award
and Polari Book Prize. He has three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop,
2015), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance,
2016), and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017).
Sue
Wallace-Shaddad’s pamphlets
are: Once There Was Colour, (Palewell Press, September
2024), Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press, 2023), A City
Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). With poems widely published
elsewhere, Sue writes poetry reviews, runs workshops, blogs for The Causley
Trust and is Secretary of Suffolk Poetry Society. https://suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com
Erin Emily Ann
Vance is the author of the
poetry collection A History of Touch (Guernica 2022) and the novella Advice
for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers (Stonehouse 2019). Her work has
appeared in magazines and journals all over the world, including CV2,
filling station, ARC, EVENT, and The Literary Review of Canada.
Vance holds Masters Degrees in English and Creative Writing from the University
of Calgary and Irish Folklore and Ethnology from University College Dublin.
Gail White is a contributing editor to Light Poetry
Magazine. Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is available on Amazon,
along with Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in the
Louisiana bayou country with her husband and cats.
K. A. Wisniewski’s recent poetry has appeared in the Sierra
Nevada Review, the Chiron Review, 3rd Wednesday, CAIRN:
The St. Andrews Review, Tule Review, Small Press Review, The
Worcester Review, and Coldnoon. The managing editor of Textshop
Editions, he is the author of the poetry chapbook Making Faces and
co-editor, with Piotr Florczyk, of Polish Literature as World
Literature. He currently teaches English and Digital Studies at the
University of Maryland, USA.
Emma Woodford is the author of Wingless
I Watch, (Hedgehog Poetry Press, January 2025), and has been published in
the Ginkgo Environmental Poetry Prize, the Black Bough and Red Door
anthologies and poetry magazines such as Quarter(ly) and Bindweed
Magazine. Emma is an active member of Poets for the Planet.
Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester,
England. His collections Voyager and Dark
Matters are published by Dempsey & Windle, and No Quarter by
erbacce Press.
