Picaroon Poetry - Issue #6 - January 2017

Issue #6
January 2017
Edited by Kate Garrett
All poems copyright © 2017 individual authors
Selection/issue copyright © 2017 Kate Garrett

This Month’s Rogue Poems ● January 2017
The Moment
Peycho Kanev
Blind Spot
Karen Little
The Gentle Art of Moving On
Stephen Nelson
Tremont
Mike Jewett
Tangle
Belinda Rimmer
Lost and Found
Lizzie Holden
Emily As Why the Path Is Winding
Darren C. Demaree
Your Violin
Wren Tuatha
Today, another pause
Uma Dwivedi
Correspondence
Mark J. Mitchell
Up the Garden Path
Chris Hardy
Olly Falling Short
Seth Jani
In Cambridge
Elizabeth Gibson

Angel
Harry Gallagher
Vigil
Bobbie Sparrow
Sharing your light
Stephen Daniels
Lares
Kitty Coles
Bent
Gareth Writer-Davies
Because of your problem, are you depressed?
Michael Albright
BOGO
Richard King Perkins II
On the Menu
Tonya Eberhard
Reflections of a Pop-Art Madonna
Ann Howells
electrocuting sea slugs
James Bell
Helpdesk
Paul Vaughan
The Beard Won’t Shave Itself
Larry O. Dean
Vincent Van Gogh joins the Witness Protection Programme
Shadwell Smith
The Man-kind
Rex Davies

The Moment
Peycho Kanev
That moment before
jumping off the bridge –
consider
the freckles on her face
twinkling in the indigo darkness.
The Christian kneeling before
the lions.
One more step –
There’s nothing sad in this world
or happy, also. There’s only the next
moment. And the one after that.

Blind Spot
Karen Little
Shredding urges, she steals beats from tree trunks, shapes heads.
Birds light for flight are bronzed heavy, feathers tipped gold
sag ashamed, brass taps from old bed sits sold for scrap are false
exotica. I’d rather watch than listen.
The crosses she always leaves out; absence sharpens
hidden religion. Invisible stick birds make their mark,
clumsy uninhibited claws, hollow boned, in tatters.
Feathers find their use, dipping ink as her beak dips
into everyone’s business, worming out deceit.
He is always the maternal blind spot, scratched into dirt
covered by seasons. I sway in front of her; it’s been
a long haul, drawn by magnets, compass swinging every
way. She folds wings before they spread, clips them given
half a chance. Imagine her as gull instead of sparrow
trapped in a bottle. Imagine how she’d snatch. Imagine her cry.

The Gentle Art of Moving On
Stephen Nelson
Chopped nuts make my cheeks swell and I’m tender-tongued in the morning,
resetting myself to the plastic art of living. Grey yellow dreams of ice cream
melt into the sheets, easily recollected on a particular flavour of thought.
Our eyes lock in a café over waffles, tongues of love licking up me like tasting
sundaes as a child and listening to Blondie sing Atomic. The first bite
vanishes you, and you’re on the streets again, handing a beggar a fiver for junk
as Cassandra passes and remembers her father and the dream of the sun
setting over the Firth while she sucks a hazelnut Cornetto. Her peach-pink cheeks
are aflame, speaking French to a Corsican refugee before the President resigns
and Crimea burns red like cherries. One world ends and another begins.
At night I find her closer than you, reading a book about hidden lunar bases,
a safety net of cocoa and marshmallows balancing edgily on the puffed out bed.

Tremont
Mike Jewett
I.
tremont, your bones—
a theology
we pick up ripe
cantaloupe
spooning
digging
faraway land
she spreads
fat wings
or painted bellies
or bulleted crows
feet
& the look—
tremont
II.
& sometimes
they pick up their feet
sometimes
a grey autumn
clouds wince with
gradient
& glow
fog
III.
follow the curve
of your body when walking
the curve of the shore
it’s a midnight dance
hips hold each other
& feed each other fruit
& dry in a black kettle
hung over the mantel

like a different songbird
with rusted feathers
of black
IV.
(when your face
belongs,
indigenous
to the sea
salty lips
pucker up
sandcastles
& pastries built
of fine) silt
V.
& you drink your shadows
at night when they can’t
ever, ever
see it coming

Tangle
Belinda Rimmer
My father’s old donkey jacket,
cement dusted, jaggy edged.
I can picture him in it,
collar turned up against the cold,
off to the pub for a few pints
and a game of darts.
On days when his moods hung in the air
or smashed bottles littered the linoleum
I’d hide inside his jacket,
breathe in the smell of cigar.
Sometimes I’d wish for a different father.
On me, the jacket is still ten sizes too big.
I plunge my hands into its pockets,
imagine my father’s hands
pushing up through the lining.
Our tangle of fingers and thumbs.
Pitching around, I find a clump of my baby hair.
I wonder what else of me my father kept back.

Lost and Found
Lizzie Holden
Lost.
Small lesbian.
If found
please don’t return.

Emily As Why the Path Is Winding
Darren C. Demaree
Sometimes there are roots
or manmade ponds full of promises
& sometimes the city
engineer is in love with a girl
& she likes to be chased
while she serpentines
the local parks. I asked Emily
about this theory
& all she would do is smile.

Your Violin
Wren Tuatha
When you look at me your ancestors fall out your eyes–
Romania, the Camps, Zion and Lady Liberty.
You are traveling still, I may not be home.
You look at me when you’ve found a crack in
your grandmother’s violin. Your swaying and fingering
stops in the stream as your son bows still.
Your china shop bull is prancing in my living room,
and my grandmother’s candy dish clanks claps in time
or on the edge of it. You would build a village with
words or playing cards or particles, electrons, if you
could just learn the trick of pulling them through
the veil. The veil to that dimension, the veil between
the world of the living and the world of the dead.
The ancestors, reduced to Platonic forms in your head,
to the thoughts of a violin bow as she sings old notes,
and remembers leaving home.
When you pull at me your ancestors fall out your eyes
and you become all ages of a human man, out of order as
your face squints affection and worry. “Impish,” that’s the
word you prefer for the boy who makes you say the
wrong thing. And a moment later you’re a lover at my
neck or the traveler at mid-life, the highway a neck of a
violin. Thoughts veil your face and your fingers twist your
beard. I expect a Torah lesson but then you return to me
and the boy grins, hands full of liberty and my locks.

You hide in science as if God has hidden your homeland in
space time and we are to live in the house that experimentation
built. I just want to collect your DNA. For further study.
I’m a witch. I know the power of words better than a physicist.
But I’m a poet. I know words are sirens and a ship on the rocks
is no homeland. But our eyes locked, telling ages and the
myths we make to hold hurts, our eyes locked, our bellies
locked, dimensions, homelands, make me your violin.

Today, another pause
Uma Dwivedi
with Durga swallowing her words
like gasoline. Today,
another grimace
as she puts down the matches.
Durga doesn’t want the spark,
the lick of fire,
this tangled burning in her throat.
Today, Durga wants to walk under the waterlogged sky
without it falling down.
Today, Durga’s lungs interlock fingers with the air.
In. Out. In. Out.
Palms pressed together
like a prayer. Pike Place remembers her footsteps
and the rain reaches out to greet her,
swirls the sharpie
on her sneakers to watercolor,
pigments leaking together, edges blurring.
Parvati laughs next to her,
peels off her jacket and lets the rain
run its fingers through her hair.
Durga grabs Parvati’s hand
and her sister squeezes back.
Some things never change.
They duck into a Starbucks and talk about the girl
with the quiet smile and paisley hijab who gives them
their coffee. The sky
doesn’t even tremble.

Correspondence
Mark J. Mitchell
The riddle never reached
the page. This morning
no alphabet could shape words
(except that eternal, accidental article).
Paper, like a bird trapped
behind a window, despairs,
gathering its corners to itself
forms itself into a letter.

Up the Garden Path
Chris Hardy
Straight out with it before
we’d got in through the gate,
Oh I’m alright, had a good Summer,
but he’s left me for
a twenty year old escort.
(And how old’s he we wonder,
how did he manage that except
he’s loaded and will she be alright
in that big house alone?)
I uncharitably speculate on
the other girl’s dimensions,
while she stands in the morning heat
lightly sweating as the sun shines
on her large, unhappy face. I doubt if I
can let it go this time, thinking of him
(we all that instant do) peeling off lycra
after a long bike ride. Now I’ll worry
where he’s been, chafed and niffy,
running to the shower saying
he’ll wash his togs in there.
We pause before her on the path,
an obstacle of sorry anger
that we cannot pass.
She told everyone, we soon discover,
looking for a clue from somebody
who doesn’t have a stake in this affair
maybe – how to pay him back,
and get him back.
Above, birds prepare for Autumn in the trees,
feeding fast and leaving this year’s mate
for flocks that circle in the air.
She steps away and we go by,
very sorry, perhaps he’s ill.

Yes, he’s ill alright, sick of me.
Nothing can be said to that just
useless sighs and trying to
catch her eye, show sympathy.
A moment later the lock clicks shut,
releasing waves of confused remorse,
that we can’t or won’t help sort
this ancient, simple mess;
also unspoken thoughts about
our own complacent hours apart,
delayed at work,
car out of gas, too busy to reply,
missed the bus, the traffic ..
All that’s always true,
and always is a lie.

Olly Falling Short
Seth Jani
Olly fails because he’s someone else’s
Idea of an angel.
His heart’s not white, but expectation
Clouds his body.
He doesn’t belong here, not anywhere really.
Such is the burden of perfection,
Of moving beyond the trajectories
Of pain and music
Into pure sensation and sound.
He meditates with beads
His girlfriend left behind.
They are the color of misunderstandings,
Of Chicago skylines changing shape
In the past-tense of winter.
Every time he moves towards
Some sort of reimagining
The weight of those losses
Holds him like a ghost.

In Cambridge
Elizabeth Gibson
Soft lemon fudge in the rain back in time,
one small umbrella with two huddled tight.
Streets grey and gothic
frowned up at our crime.
Bridge dripping softly with tendrils of slime
led us to harbour, we followed the light
to soft lemon fudge
in the rain back in time.
Slippery cobbles accosted our climb,
skies blue and rainy gave little respite
while streets grey and gothic
frowned up at our crime.
Across sodden grass, a delicate chime
led us ahead like the call of a kite
to soft lemon fudge
in the rain back in time.
Chocolate and toffee and ginger and lime:
wet fingers brushed as we sucked in the sight
while streets grey and gothic
frowned up at our crime.
Seven years later, continue the mime:
pass me a piece, a sweet-sour bite
of soft lemon fudge
in the rain back in time.
Streets grey and gothic
still frown at our crime.

Angel
Harry Gallagher
He tracks the trails of the river
and the trickling of time,
trawls by the terraces
of an unemployed working town
and finds magic in the cracks.
Sees Quaker bricks bearing
fingerprints of outsiders;
these bridge builders who played
jointhedots across a globe,
smaller now than it was.
Headstones are logged:
marble, stone, iron, still
spattered from the works.
Reads strange immigrant names,
forgers a future now passed.
Allthewhile, blackwings feather
the frontage of borders
invisible to him. Each turn
of the light noted captive
in a pocketbook for nightfall.

Vigil
Bobbie Sparrow
Had I not been awake
I would have missed it.
Gratitude quietly lying there.
An apology too,
as I snipped her nails –
already dead
she followed soon behind.
Behind mother
yet imbued with mother.
I saw her leaving face.

Sharing your light
Stephen Daniels
Her satin body nestles, close
to breath and temptation.
Between my intentions, my desires,
alongside your indentations.
I used to care about her
movements, how she would sit
in a high corner of our bedroom,
waiting for the light.
Occasionally, I find her children
in the wardrobe. They sit
between cotton and wool,
take turns to bite the fabric,
escape the moments I would wave
a hand in her direction, avoid contact.
Now she lies next to me,
asks me to touch her.
I reach over, tease
the tip of my finger
lightly on her body,
watch her disappear into dust.

Lares
Kitty Coles
Nine candles over the hearth, their buttery flames
attenuating, swelling, as if breathing.
The copper kettle radiating warmth,
glowing, pouring its light across the kitchen.
My jams in the glass-fronted cupboard, each pot a jewel;
blood-red, blood-dark, at each slow-pulsing heart.
The books lining the walls, their inky stink
brewing the air with must of cave and root.
The chest of linens, white and blue and folded,
lying in lavender, old stems, dry petals.
The heavy teapot, its steams, its floral curve,
holding my applemint, my lemonbalm.
The shoes in the hallway, row on orderly row,
my sturdy boots, your heel-scuffed, toe-scuffed slippers.
The photographs in boxes, the cherished letters,
scraps from the wreckage, fragments against ruin.
The potatoes under the earth, grub-pale in darkness,
growing smooth-skinned and firm as stiffening wax.

Bent
Gareth Writer-Davies
like the lips of Jean Paul Belmondo
I am ninety per cent straight
though missing
out, happy with the cards dealt me
I am the wet blanket, flung upon a fire
the early night, a cuppa
but there is something, in the eyes of certain men
that hangs, in the flex of their shoulders
and the part of me
that bends, affected by male beauty
unshapes me
like a moth, emerging
I have told you
in confidence, that I am ten per cent bendy
I will go no further
now, kiss me

Because of your problem, are you depressed?
Michael Albright
I have been on FDIC & USDA
along with peyote & then trillium
for the path free monks, & you
would have no idea how dearly still
I have been. I have many times thought
that I am trying, & yes, I've been lying.
I called prison patrol & they told
me to go to the OD & I said NO WAY!
As I went beneath, they did knotting,
but put me in the Bunny Barn for free
daze & charge me 8,000 volts. It was
absently mothering, & did no thing.
So, I called the Christ Is Worker who
said to waltz until I see the Dictator
today. Then I walked into the Harm-
acists who said it sounded like I had
that darned Sarah Toning Sin Drone.
Well, the halflight I am going Kuwait
for the Dictator to tell me I can get off!
Do I want to tell him where to go? But,
I had better take the duck tape, to cover
my big mouth. My hallucination is going
with me. It is LETHAL! You have no idea
how “drooge cockatoos” can KILL YOU!
I can't say it enough. There are altering
things to take out there. Look out for
Maniacal Progression. It is only a gold

watch. Out yourself because they will not.
They seethe to fuse a crews love noose
when it comes to what the machines
can do. I talked to the purse today & it said
“You stink of weird tit,” & I think,
“Oh my, what bridge are we coming to?”
These skies should know these things.
If we do not speak up for ourselves,
we will be dead. Enough said.

BOGO
Richard King Perkins II
A fruit fly has fallen
into my freshly poured cup of coffee;
I discover it
floating on a small white island of creamer.
Pragmatically, I pluck it out
and begin to drink without hesitation.
Twenty years ago, I would have dumped out
and scrubbed the entire cup.
Twenty years from now,
I’ll slurp down the insect
with a big sip of coffee,
happy to get a buy one, get one free special.

On the Menu
Tonya Eberhard
appetizers. stimulate the desire to eat.
no-bone wings, lumped cottage cheese sauce.
Asian pears choked in syrup. heavy dizzy spells in cold bowls.
whipped sweet potatoes. wine-battered lungs.
hummus. flatbread and white jelly spread.
crab bites. fungus, mushroomed stuffed.
bacteria-clutch diaphragm. with or without lemon aioli.
sixteen minutes till entrée order.
one of our most popular: Adam’s rib, half rack.
ulcered stomach. includes charcoaled carrots, caramelized onions.
grilled duck. mango-yogurt dressing drips from its eye sockets.
risotto. burned broth, rotten rice. body lice.
soup of the day?
the chef’s choice: catalepsy. roasted cauliflower soup.
cow-bone broth. bitter marrow. sick slaughterhouse.
spinach leaves soaked in beet blood. bulimia.
romaine. dried cherries. shriveled skin, inhumane.
please, save room for dessert.

and when the servers bring out the blackened goat on a platter,
I dare you to ask what dish they loathe the most—
corpses. those undying breeds of men.

Reflections of a Pop-Art Madonna
Ann Howells
I don’t remember my mother’s face
just taut, bloodless lips,
as she recited Shalt Nots,
dressed in bath or closet,
unable to bare breasts to her daughter.
The 60s caught us unaware.
I stumbled, blind, from her Eucharist box,
burned my bra, knelt and took The Pill.
Later, I wrapped my daughter
in motherhood’s voluminous apron,
taught her sex was neither totem nor taboo.
Yet, she named herself Immaculate Conception.
Left me wobbling on a pedestal –
pop-art Madonna swaddled in fluorescent light,
gold wedding band my halo.
She wrinkled her nose,
sounds, she said, filtered from my bedroom.
Embarrassing. Unseemly.
She tucked me back in Mother’s Eucharist box,
and though she professed no religion,
it reeked of frankincense and myrrh.

electrocuting sea slugs
James Bell
remember when we did it –
the set up the organisation was immense
each only with twenty thousand neurons
at a millimetre diameter makes them big
doo-doo
hard to miss
strands thick as a high E guitar string
ugly creatures of bulk
though tuned by their synapses for a floppier purpose –
question mark cerebral cortex
of which primates have with neurons in their billions –
hard to see even if you lose a few
to bacchanalian delights –
no animal rights types protested –
much easier than monkeys –
an experiment to test for memory
wasn’t it –
I’d forgotten about that until now

Helpdesk
Paul Vaughan
Her jaw dislocated
when they got the ‘phone bill
charging eight hundred and eighty-two pounds
for a forty-two hour call
to Bulgaria at premium rate.
In small print,
if you need help, please contact us,
we’ll see what we can do.
She rang, explained that she had not called up
Annie’s Farting Fetish Line and,
having checked with him,
neither had her husband.
She got upset,
when the customer service officer
sounded oh so bored by her repetitive insistence
that something must be wrong.

The Beard Won't Shave Itself
Larry O. Dean
Place your face
right up to the TV,
flush to the screen
for as long as possible,
low-frequency radiation
expelling hairs which pop right
off.
Smearing honey
instead of shaving cream,
hurry to the zoo
and seek the nearest bear's cage,
jam your face between the bars,
let nature take its course.
Affix multi-blade razor
to doorjamb, cupboard, or coatrack,
bobbing head up and down
as if nodding
yes, yes, yes...
Epilate cheeks
with bikini wax.
Find something flammable,
marinade beard
and light a match.
Caution: have bucket
full of water nearby.
Or when falling asleep,
keep repeating,
“I need a shave...
I need a shave...
I need a shave...,”

dreaming of barbers
stropping blades to such extremes
of acuity
with steaming hot towels
and adjustable height chairs
that the mere thought
makes follicles
recede overnight
back into pores.

Vincent Van Gogh joins the Witness Protection
Programme
Shadwell Smith
March 10 th , about 11:20 am
The Van Gogh Exhibition at The Royal Academy –
thirty five letters
(one blood stained)
sixty five paintings
and thirty drawings
but I could have told you Vincent
Still Life with a Plate of Onions
was never meant to be a decoy
for the sledgehammer raid on the Rolex shop down the road

The Man-kind
Rex Davies
Chief science officer
I have to report:
The Man-kind was here.
As usual, the world itself is recovering.
Small mammals dominate the ecosystem
Which once having purged herself with plague & pestilence
Luxuriates everywhere, even the dead zones.
The customary close sift of digital detritus, however
Revealed this document describing
How, when archaeologists
From the future arrive (like us, sir!)
Long after the man-kind died
Then our extensive analysis
Of flora, fauna and fused file-space
Will conclude that “the poets really nailed it”.

For writer biographies / web links, please see the
‘Contributors’ page on our website.
Thank you for reading!