Picaroon - Issue #7 - March 2017

Issue #7
March 2017
Edited by Kate Garrett
All poems copyright © 2017 individual authors
Selection/issue copyright © 2017 Kate Garrett / Picaroon Poetry

This Month’s Rogue Poems ● March 2017
Therapy
David Seddon
Waiting for the Number 52
Steven Bruce
Maternité
Sue Kindon
ambition
Yoni Hammer-Kossoy
‘One Under’
Marc Woodward
How to Be Lonely
Jamie Houghton
Rachel and the Seven Wonders of the World
Rachel Burns
The house near Cornacrieve
Nikki Robson
Landlords (Part 1)
R.K. Wallace
Uninvited Guests
Jennifer Lothrigel
The topiary garden
Rosie Garland
My mother speaks thorns
Sophie McKeand
the gift
Abigail Elizabeth Ottley Wyatt
At twelve
Leslie Thomas
If There Was No Sixteen
Courtney LeBlanc

Ant Logic
Scott Edward Anderson
Imaginary Mixtape #33
John C. Fitzsimmons
a munchies story
raphael d’abdon
What Not To Do
Bobby Steve Baker
Passing for Normal
Oz Hardwick
Hallelujah, The Easter Bunny!
Louisa Campbell
Sloth on the Cross
Brett Evans
Hallmark and Me
John Grey
Eve and her mother have a little chat
Robert Ford
How I’ll wait for you
Kate Noakes
Beachcombers
Cheryl Pearson
Beachlands, Hayling Island
Simon Cockle
Perfect Bound
Ben Banyard
Ghost Dance
Howie Good

Therapy
David Seddon
because slack hands poke bulbs
in makeshift ground,
tubers and corms tear iron frost;
because the worm withers the root,
snub fingers stricture the clay,
the birds peck no pistil,
the bees bear no corn.
Bulbs twist,
slow in the dark,
hanker for light they resist;
dwell in their own vegetation;
Bulbs push –
force old soil,
wait for rain explosion,
warming earth.

Waiting for the Number 52
Steven Bruce
Fuck her, fuck him, and fuck his mother
she says into the phone,
while the child flaps with excitement.
In his hands he is holding a jam donut.
He spends a few minutes tearing
at it and squeezing out the jam.
He dabs it across his smile.
And he isn’t just happy,
I tell myself, he’s carefree.
As the bus approaches
he looks up at me, wide eyed
and grubby, waving his tiny
hand in my direction.
I give him an indecisive smile.
I swear I knew him once.

Maternité
Sue Kindon
My roommate was in a twilight gang
you could tell by her entourage
the leather coats the whispers
in a language not French
plotting to snatch my boy,
my hope born of good omen
when a blackbird sang
on the boulevard.
I closed my eyes,
and her accomplice
planted a floppy effigy
in his warm crib.
When I woke
the other bed was smooth.
She’d gone
with her swollen breast milk
and my hungry child.
I tried not to imagine her
feeding him on the Metro.
The doll demanded nothing.

ambition
Yoni Hammer-Kossoy
five am
the day no more
than an open
and closed bracket
the world outside
my bedroom
an aviary stuffed
with bright plumed birds
and rare blooms
if I reach high enough
I might touch its glass dome
painted with stars

‘One Under’
Marc Woodward
Sometimes I consider drops of rain
lying on the steel girder
of a railway line.
I think of them
shaking and glimmering
as the engine nears.
As if sentient,
trying to speak
or make a sign.
Yesterday the train was late again.
Not leaves this time
but fallen tears.
*Wikipedia: "...train drivers have used several phrases to refer to suicides, such as
"person under a train", "person on a track", "passenger action", and "one under".

How to Be Lonely
Jamie Houghton
Go on social media.
Get off social media.
Say yes when the lady who runs the slow coffeeshop
asks for help with email.
Write a friend
who broke a knee. She writes back
I urge you not to burn your old journals.
Realize she just stopped you from breaking your own heart.
Talk to loneliness.
Yell into its den
(You must yell
loud as you can)
or just sing a little bit, badly.
Don’t scream now, you will have to
anyway next time
you stub your toe
jolt awake from the sleep of your thoughts.
Ajax your sink until it’s bone white
take some old newspaper and polish your mirror
look in.
Don’t look in.
Coax loneliness out of the den. Offer it beer.
It prefers milk. Ask it about the weather.
It will tell you that nothing alive doesn’t burn
to be touched. Even the sun.
It will break your fingers

if you try to keep it near you.
Loneliness is wild please do not pursue when it runs.
Do not feed either.

Rachel and the Seven Wonders of the World
Rachel Burns
From a book with my name on the cover
I read about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
and I think all the stories are about me.
I dream of gods and monsters and magical
spirits as I sit cross legged on the floor in front
of the fire. The smell of burning pine as logs
smoulder on the grate. I can hear the roar
of lions and feel the heat of dragon’s breath
on my cheeks. My father listens to his cassettes
on the old player, Richard Burton booms
from the stereo, I lost my step in Nantucket
Do you see me Captain? The white bone talking.
My father makes supper. Every now and again
I look up to watch him butter the bread
then top with rings of apple, and sprinkle with sugar.
He puts the sandwich down with a glass of milk
at my feet. I don’t have time to eat.
I read on and on, hurling myself through
the beautiful tiled Ishtar Gate, into the arms
of the goddess of love and war.

The house near Cornacrieve
Nikki Robson
He couldn’t stand to live with her and left
himself in drying canvases
stacked against the walls of unused rooms,
unglazed.
He’d planted out the garden single-handed;
she’d stayed inside and scorned his
straining back through glass, then looked
away
while birds dropped seeds in all the stony
spaces, dibbled clumps of forest shade
and the rockery went
feral.

Landlords (Part 1)
R.K. Wallace
Proud survivors of Mao’s revolution,
they come into this
Cambodian household
in the ghettos of Long Beach,
mocking Buddha with their Christian arrogance,
“he is not even a God!
Jesus loves you!
Repent or face the wrath of the Lord!”
The wee Khmer granny simply smiles,
does she still hear the voice of Pol Pot’s
will to Angka?
She softly bows her head, happily submitting
the rent cheque, without a single word,
the gentle spirit like smoke
of incense crawls with the cockroaches
playing like innocent children on the floor,
which the landlords hate,
and they offer to kill off “those demons”
one by one,
for what they regard as a reasonable
price, of course.

Uninvited Guests
Jennifer Lothrigel
My acupuncturist sometimes placed
a needle on the upper inside
of my right calf
to exorcise ‘uninvited guests’
from my body.
For 37 years I collected them
by accident
or because I felt obligated
to be available to them wanting me
or
because I believed I could help them.
Some guests never left,
and my uterus became a ghost hostel.
When I discovered that
they were marking the walls
I sent them eviction notices.
I swept the floors with my besom,
then I painted the walls
the most delicious petal pink color.

The topiary garden
Rosie Garland
She spreads the petals of her skirt, the dress of a child
two decades past its wear-by date. She kneels, peers
into the pond’s looking-glass. The water flusters
with fish, tiny as eyelashes striped with mascara.
She eases one foot from its shoe. Sticking-plaster unpeels,
heel wet with a blister’s weeping.
On the first day she spent all her money:
Hello Kitty hairgrips, a matching clutch purse.
Geese patrol the space that is not-land,
not-pool. They creak, loud as old doors winched open.
She startles; circles her lips, pats her hand over the little hole
and lets go her ice-cream. It swims with ants.
He takes her picture. He will post it
like a card of wish-you-were what you are not.
If these box trees were not clipped so tight
they would grow anywhere they pleased.

My mother speaks thorns
Sophie McKeand
My mother speaks thorns.
Twisting dense & sharp
from open mouth
her words become sparring Red Kites that
maul our secrets.
After they have shredded my guts across the lawn
she collects me back up,
fashions bright innards into
bunting –
ties them to a tree to
fight the wind.
Sometimes, when the birds are sleeping
she will call me to swim with her
in a purple lake
edged with silver moss.
But I am wiser now
with bones of coiled snakes
– thorns of my own –
and I cannot swim
for the tangle of our hair.

the gift
Abigail Elizabeth Ottley Wyatt
I bring you broken walls and shark’s fin razor wire
grown into the hard lines of my stone-scape
a handful of berries harder than a rosary
brighter than a maiden’s menstrual blood
I bring you fallen leaves and a handful of petals
steeped in salt tears to make a potion
swallow it down for its taste is quick and bitter
it is the seasonal remedy of my ice-house years
I bring you bird song and the bones of small birds
green nuts that sleep on and dream of forests
blue-violet shadows the mystery of roots
my spiked tongue the snapping of my spine.

At twelve
Leslie Thomas
She stepped out of a section eight
where they air their laundry
over the railing.
Head down, bangs over her eyes,
chewing bubble gum.
It was warm but she was covered
in a long coat, sleeves hanging past her hands
pulled a cigarette out of her pocket.
I know that tough.
Don’t need anyone
always know what’s packed
inside your lunchbox.
Pretend to be surprised at the table
with perfumed girls who squeal,
What did mom make me today?
I am under this gloss veneer,
won’t write you off or stare
such a shame.
I want to whisper into your ear
it gets better later
but never goes away.

If There Was No Sixteen
Courtney LeBlanc
There would be no county fair,
no cotton candy carnival rides,
no walking the hot pavement
in short shorts and thinking
it’s a compliment when the 25-year old
carnie let us ride without tickets.
There would be no Boone’s Farm
bonfires, no cigarettes in the smoky
shadows, no mascara trail of tears
when some boy dumped some girl
and then kissed her friend.
There would be no friends crammed
into your car, no driving the main drag,
no flirting with the Air Force guys
who found themselves trapped
in your frozen town.
There would be no skinny dipping
in summer lakes, no jet skis, no bikinis clinging
to non-existent curves as you kissed
the boy from the cabin across the cove.
There would be no freeing from braces,
no gilding of your boyfriend’s tongue across
the sudden smooth of your teeth,
no heavy petting sessions in the dark
basement.
There would be no first taste of alcohol,
no loosening of limbs and hands and mouths,
no 2am puke sessions when you thought
your mother was asleep.

There would be no sneaking out of windows,
no fast drives on back country roads,
no laughter ringing as the gravel spun
under your tires.
There would be no pierced nose
(to piss off your mother), no boyfriend
(to piss off your father), no awkward
sex talk, no period, no breaking
curfew, no pinkie swearing.

Ant Logic
Scott Edward Anderson
There’s an ant crawling inside my tent ceiling,
meaning upside down on the fabric,
perhaps trying to find a way out.
Tiny feelers touching down in front of him,
to no effect; at least, it doesn’t seem to help
navigate the cool, white nylon surface.
Yet, I’ve seen leaf-cutter ants in Ecuadorean
forests appear to know exactly where they are
and where they are going, even how long to get there.
Once I found an unusual ant during a breakfast.
I was at a conference in Aspen. E. O. Wilson,
renowned myrmecologist, was sitting at another table.
I took the specimen to him, asking,
“Dr. Wilson, what kind of ant is this?”
He looked at me and then to the ant, saying, “Lost.”

Imaginary Mixtape #33
John C. Fitzsimmons
Side A –
Yarn Clap & the Rheumatoids – Voicemail from a Dead Horse
Edna Jerk Flint – Kick out the Skin Flints
Peetie Faceplate – My Face Still Hurts
Illegitimate Son of the Eyewitness News Team – Not Without Our Son
Glaucoma Glenn – Cornea Jokez (Live at the Third Nipple)
The Phone-Ins – Phoning it in at the Phoney Inn
Melted White Chocolate Tuxedos – Shades of Cleanliness in Glades of
Deadliness
Toilet Stilts – Walk it Off
Experimental Banking – Tax Season Again
The Inkling Ensemble – Distinctively Inclined… (from Live at the Inkling
Palace)
Merle Cobblecrumb – Cookieduster Blues
Forest Clearing Information Desk – Contemporary Actuality
Sea Battery – Unpowering the Power Vacuum
Side B –
Dickhead Slim & the Vasectomies – Drowsy Sword
Open Casket Wedding – A Rupturing of Nuptials
The Reception Environment –
Porkchop Sally – Good Luck with the Raffle
Otto Von Bisquick – Reign of Batter
Vividness Digest – That Mountain Can’t Be Real
Footnote Pajamas – Slaughter on Pajama Mountain
Abel Wanton – Ladled by a Swan Song
Frig Factory – Friggin’ Down at the Frig Factory (Frig, Frig, Frig)
Martha Wobblenaught – Table Shim Shuffle
Tree Surgeons – Knuckle Bark
Ambulatory Lozenges – Walking Down a Throat
See-through Robespiere – Your Hip Replacement is Blocking My View
of the Afterlife

a munchies story
raphael d’abdon
(based on actual events)
at steers.
me: “can i please have a veggie burger with no sauces, extra avocado sauce
and chili sauce, and a bottle of sparkling water?"
waitress: “with no bubbles?”
silence.
she laughs.
i laugh.
the burger was great.
the water too.
i gave her a very good tip.

What Not To Do
Bobby Steve Baker
after a stupid argument with your spouse do not
sit down to a large bottle of vodka and a small bottle of pills
after you have consumed a great amount of each do not stomp out the door
refusing to talk grabbing your wife’s concealed carry jacket
after you get outside in the head clearing air do not
decide it would be good to put distance to this and get in the car
after you get in the car feeling just fine to drive do not
start’er up and head down town to a great bar you know
after you get to the bar and settle in to a few drinks do not
think the knock out body at the end of the bar has been dying to meet you
after you get this woman of questionable age to the car do not
suggest a romantic drive around a more questionable part of town
once you have driven her around awhile telling lies do not
take her up on the offer to go to her place for another drink
when you get inside her run down digs do not
listen with heartfelt sympathy to her plight to pay the rent
after you fork over a hundred bucks to ease her mind do not
believe you are now soul mates as she reflexively takes off her clothes
after you have taken your clothes off also do not
lay on the bed with her for a little tender late night cuddling
after you have had unprotected sex and notice needles strew everywhere do not
give her more cash because she is screaming she is 17 and is calling the cops
after you cough up another hundred and the cops come anyway do not
open the door naked and yell no problem here go find some fucking criminals
when the cops frisk your pile of clothes and find your wife’s gun do not

scream out that they have planted that gun because they are dirty cops
when the cops tell you get someone to drive you home and leave do not
assume they are gone for good get dressed and head for your car
when the sirens and flashing lights come speeding behind you do not
try to outrun them because my friend you have created what the survivalists
call a SHTF scenario and the only question left is are you negotiating
with your wife from outside your little house or inside the big house

Passing for Normal
Oz Hardwick
An anonymous café. We exchange notes
over coffee – quetiapine, venlafaxine, olanzapine –
nod in mutual understanding of the Prozac
twitch. I shook for three months on lithium
and my body’s not my own. It’s a Top Trumps
of chemistry, but we’re not keeping score.
We’re three espressos in, and my hands are moving
in ways I don’t recognise: nothing to do with me,
though I’m faintly curious. We tick off therapies,
expert opinions, the ten month wait
to feel lost and awkward with a harassed stranger,
failing to communicate in a flaking Victorian asylum
or an unmarked terrace, a secret headquarters
with codes and cameras, where professional voices
check passwords, offer rudimentary disguises,
attempt to smuggle us back to the real world,
to pass for normal, mixing into the morning crowd,
our minds tight as suicide vests, counting down.

Hallelujah, The Easter Bunny!
Louisa Campbell
They said I should trudge to Golgotha
And kneel at the foot of the cross, looking up
at Jesus’ twisted body;
his hammered-through hands and feet;
the thorns – like crows’ beaks – rammed
into his battered head.
Crimson, so much blood, mingled with tears
he wept for all the Sin he had created
and all the Sin he had loaded
on my shoulders
like granite.
Then lo, along bounced The Easter Bunny!
Hallelujah, The Easter Bunny!
Six foot six of primrose-yellow fur,
and arched window-shaped smiling eyes:
like a cuddly toy, but real
(the way animals often seem, after all).
He said, ‘What are you doing?
Down there?
On your knees?’
‘I am weighed down with Sin,’ I replied.
And he chuckled, ‘No you’re not, you twit!’
His wondrous grin
was all the prayer I needed.
He held out his furry mitten hand
and I accepted it.
He raised me up
and stood my feet on his thumper feet
and hugged me to him.
I threw my arms around his neck
and off we bounded.
We sprang so high

I could really breathe
and the air grew soft in my lungs.
I felt his strength like the sunshine.
Even though we soared over the Arndale,
over Carphone Warehouse
and closed-down Woollies,
I feared no evil: Yay!
Verily, merrily,
his perky pom-pom bobtail,
his pearly buck teeth
and all the boingy-boinging
restored my soul.
Now I believe! I believe in The Easter Bunny!
Surely I will bounce with the bunny forever.
Amen, Easter Bunny,
Amen.

Sloth on the Cross
Brett Evans
Sloth is dredged from torpidity
by a strange breed intent on banging on
about a man dying for sins. Sloth asks
if we all aren’t, and in his wooziness
swears he hears himself a sin;
rich, he thinks, from unsolicited
slumber-wreckers.
Welcome to his sins; Sloth hopes
that they won’t wash his sleep away
yet does his best to remain alert, endure
their noon-time story. Sloth’s lazy thinking,
between belly and ball scratches,
concludes they do disservice
to the back-stabber who did himself in.
Sloth reasons the back-stabber, money-grabber,
grafted for Big Chief Slumber-Wrecker
unawares; part of His, decidedly wacky, plan.
No, a dastardly cad, and Sloth’s too tired to argue that.
Sloth’s asked about the ending of the world
and remembers a time when he thought it had;
hours before this unholy interruption. And now wishes
it would again. They drone on and Sloth daydreams
he’s permanently fixed to a timber rest
before being elevated skyward – seems idyllic,
but not for shy and simple Sloth;
all that adoration
and misinterpretation.

Hallmark and Me
John Grey
Greeting card stores
have the worst poetry
because the gaudy, feckless
hunks of bent-over doggerel
don’t conceal their ambition.
Open one up and
what is the message:
this is the love poem,
this is the ode to
a twenty fifth anniversary.
And still I buy the
tackiest of the tacky verse,
send it to a loved one.
I want them to know
that I care enough
to have some unnamed,
unknown, Hallmark copy writer
say I do.
You know,
I couldn’t have said that better
myself.

Eve and her mother have a little chat
Robert Ford
Be careful how you peel a quiet man.
Loud ones are notoriously easy;
with just the merest hint of encouragement,
everything falls away. And don’t worry;
you can be blunt. Or sharp. Or occasionally
not even in the same room, and still
you’ll find your loud man easily peeled.
Not always worth the effort, but
easily peeled (of the core and pips
we’ll speak another time, perhaps...)
His skin often being unusually thin,
a quiet man may bruise easily;
quietly too, of course, and the silence
walling in the damage may be deafening;
you may not notice the harm inflicted till
the peeling is done, so handle with caution.
Cradle the quiet man in an open hand;
begin boldly, well away from the stalk,
but keep as close as you dare when the job
is nearly done. The juice should never be shared.

How I’ll wait for you
Kate Noakes
By pitch, my tanned thighs
tensed for your touch
velvet in the dark
by star in a silk slip
crushed and rippling
on the pink breeze
by streetlight as I
glow my lips
and nipples with gloss
by crescent moon, dressed
only in a bracelet
a snake with its silver tail
in its silver mouth
or, in nothing at all
save a splash of scent.

Beachcombers
Cheryl Pearson
The Winter sun hits wet sand,
and the struck world whitens.
The sea is lightning
strung with salt. The sand is white fire.
You find a crab and lift it,
red legs clicking like worked locks.
You find a seahorse, crispbrown
and snappable, curled in a
permanent question.
But it’s my find you handle like real treasure –
the mussel shell, hinged like a fairy-door,
with its tin stink and violet folds,
the insides holding their own wash of light
like a net of pearls cast at a throat.
I watch as you tilt your palm sunward,
then away, to see the lilacs rise,
to see the goldpinks shift. Your eyes
are the crucible where magic lives –
colours from nowhere, rainbows
rinsed from dead shell.
I shift, too, when you look at me like that.
I am also made beautiful.

Beachlands, Hayling Island
Simon Cockle
1
You hold tight the memories you wish to keep;
you discard the rest like knots in handkerchiefs.
So the plastic afternoons
of my childhood,
spent cross-legged
in wet trunks on the
flea-peppered beach
at Hayling Island,
become a fairy-tale of ice-cream
and Black Forest castles as
the sun splinters,
crystalline, on the ridges
of slow-motion breakers.
I throw smooth, patterned stones at the waves;
only noise and filth are returned at my feet.
2
Close season; snow settles
in for the night as the sun,
whose journey above the horizon
had barely begun, lies low
behind its sleeve of water.
The beach has gone;
under this covering
of pale slush, it attracts
no one. Even the dogs
of winter fain interest.
Drifts collect in the shelter
of tarred groynes, making dunes
around derelict castles with

their shed feather flags
and cigarette butts for soldiers.
Other flakes fall on the slate
face of the sea – their mathematics
makes little impression;
in the moment they present,
they are nothing again.
3
My father and mother met on this beach;
they parted company here, too,
when half a century had passed.
There were no words then; the sea
had more to say that April morning.
A scattering of ashes, and she was returned
to the whale-deep of the echoing sea.
She loved its sound, its promise;
now, I hear her rush of excitement
in the constancy of her waves.

Perfect Bound
Ben Banyard
Just 28 pages
gloss cover
bright white paper
but these words
came from you
even if you
didn’t write them.
They flew in
driving frosted mornings
washing up
ironing small clothes.
They’re caught on breezes
blowing your music
scented like you
they ask after me.
Everyone should know
this book is for you;
I’d give anything
to hand you a copy.

Ghost Dance
Howie Good
Sure, God can prove to be too small, careers can collapse, lovers leave. But
then the sky is so thoroughly that sapphire blue you adored it’s impossible to
believe you aren’t still alive to see it. The genes that give humans the ability to
speak give birds the ability to sing. It reminds me of my grandmother, how
she’d pick up a spider she found in the house and put it back outside. Look up
there. Cave painters depicted running animals by showing them with eight
legs. Now, as remembered constellations float into view, the dots of fire
combine to conceive this woman carrying a tired child up these starry stairs to
sleep.

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