Picaroon - Issue #5 - November 2016
Welcome to Issue #5 of Picaroon Poetry, or as I've been affectionately (and unofficially!) calling it, 'the sex and death issue'. It's an unquestionably autumnal/wintry collection of poems for our last outing of 2016, bleak and unflinching in places (though there are some wry, hopeful, and funny moments as well). Still, as long as these things are being written down, everything keeps moving forward. Includes poems by Ava C. Cipri, Ojo Taiye, James H Duncan, Charlotte Ansell, Monika Kostera, Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe, Jackie Biggs, Lesley Quayle, Amy Kinsman, Derek Coyle, Cheryl Pearson, Bethany W Pope, Nenad Trajkovic, Jane R Rogers, David Susswein, Emma Lee, Jo Burns, Brett Evans, John D. Robinson, Shauna Robertson, Bobby Steve Baker, Holly Day, Courtney LeBlanc, Jessica Mookherjee, Paul Brookes, Pat Edwards, John Grey and Steven Bruce.
Welcome to Issue #5 of Picaroon Poetry, or as I've been affectionately (and unofficially!) calling it, 'the sex and death issue'. It's an unquestionably autumnal/wintry collection of poems for our last outing of 2016, bleak and unflinching in places (though there are some wry, hopeful, and funny moments as well). Still, as long as these things are being written down, everything keeps moving forward.
Includes poems by Ava C. Cipri, Ojo Taiye, James H Duncan, Charlotte Ansell, Monika Kostera, Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe, Jackie Biggs, Lesley Quayle, Amy Kinsman, Derek Coyle, Cheryl Pearson, Bethany W Pope, Nenad Trajkovic, Jane R Rogers, David Susswein, Emma Lee, Jo Burns, Brett Evans, John D. Robinson, Shauna Robertson, Bobby Steve Baker, Holly Day, Courtney LeBlanc, Jessica Mookherjee, Paul Brookes, Pat Edwards, John Grey and Steven Bruce.
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The Mending Ghost<br />
Lesley Quayle<br />
Over time, we forgot about<br />
the broken doll,<br />
even though our daughter cried herself to sleep<br />
when she dropped it and the hard skull<br />
split like a watermelon.<br />
My doll, precious, handed down to her.<br />
Her conscience wasn’t easily consoled.<br />
Her father, able to mend anything, tried,<br />
for both our sakes, but pronounced it hopeless.<br />
We laid its irreparable corpse to rest<br />
on the bed in the spare room, tiptoed out<br />
and, over time, forgot.<br />
And for months it lay, undisturbed,<br />
in the strange, cold room where we’d uncovered<br />
frescoes of woad-blue figures round the fireplace,<br />
garlands of them, bleeding into plaster, like faded<br />
paper-dolls, a child’s finger-painted depiction.<br />
No-one wanted to sleep in there. A room of dolls.<br />
And then, walking past one afternoon,<br />
the world grew small, an open door<br />
the only clear space, framing the bed<br />
where the broken doll lay – undamaged, mended.
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