Oh ! Love I give my warmth to the scaly hands Who crush my oven and spit on it Oh ! Love, Yet, I look at them with rosy imagination And they make stinky by throwing me into a pit Oh ! Love, I give my thorny carpet to welcome you Oh ! love, I give a sandy dream to build a castle for you Oh ! love, Yet, I do not know how much unscrupulous I am Oh ! Love, I don’t want to be pardoned Oh ! Love, I want to be burnt to be alive Into a pit of ash of rotten bed Oh ! Love, Give me nectar to be dead Give me hemlock to be alive So that I can rest there alone With the fire of atonement By breaking the fundament About the author:
Partha Sarkar, a resident of Ichapur, a small town of a province West Bengal Of India, is a graduate who writes poems inspired by the late Sankar Sarkar and his friends (especially Deb kumar Khan) to protest against the social injustice and crimes against nature. His poems have been in different magazines both in Bangla and in English. Once, he would believe in revolution but now he is confused because of the obscurity of human beings, though he keeps fire in soul despite.
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If sex were a flower head, as it is meant to be, I’d respond to sunlight better than to rain. If only I could convert the positives in life to food but I’ve always gorged on the past. Maybe you’d have to have been a child whose father died to understand. You take what you have and weave story cloaks from them. I’d be a sloe berry, best picked after the first frosts. Have you ever noticed that moorland plants carry on growing however often the mists entangle them? I’m woody now, thick-stemmed and when I sway in the wind I rage up a ruckus before my fruits fall. See those moor ponies with their unfriendly ways? When I sing into the cold, they nestle against my shoulders and breathe their warmed air with mine. About the author:
Hannah Linden has struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life. She’s a survivor of multiple traumas, including the suicide of her father when she was a child. Her poetry explores many kinds of impact from mental health challenges and she is particularly interested in the way trauma, and the experience of marginalisation, is explored in folklore and fairy tale, in both negative and positive ways. She has a Northern working-class background but, for many years, has lived in ramshackle social housing in Devon. She is widely published and, most recently, won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, and was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X: @hannahl1n I have been asleep, what can I say? I missed a few years, gliding in and out of old nightmares, not always night dreams. Sometimes I’d daydream my way through months before the screams would force me back into the darkness. Sleeping was better than being awake and watching the reactions to my twitching (how horrible to witness yourself in a nightmare). I hadn’t noticed it was twenty years since I had had a thought, a real thought that breathed in the air. Sleep thoughts seemed so convincing (I do dream in colour, don’t you?) and the thought woke me and I realised I was naked (I always sleep naked, don’t you? Well you don’t have to say, you weren’t on display whilst sleeping) and a fig leaf won’t do, not after all these years, a fig leaf doesn’t even begin to cover it. About the author:
Hannah Linden has struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life. She’s a survivor of multiple traumas, including the suicide of her father when she was a child. Her poetry explores many kinds of impact from mental health challenges and she is particularly interested in the way trauma, and the experience of marginalisation, is explored in folklore and fairy tale, in both negative and positive ways. She has a Northern working-class background but, for many years, has lived in ramshackle social housing in Devon. She is widely published and, most recently, won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, and was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X: @hannahl1n ‘Downe in the bottome of the deepe Abysse/ Where Demogorgon in dull darknesse pent,/ Farre from the view of Gods and heauens blis,/ The hideous Chaos keepes, their dreadfull dwelling is’ from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. She’s finding the pattern in empty packets of crisps across the living room floor. There’s a river running through a valley between mountains of pizza boxes, a waterfall over rocks of scattered shoes. She’s not going anywhere but here is the world in miniature. One day (soon) she’ll gather it all up, put it on a boat and sail this Italy and the Alps all the way to the tip. Then the room will be the Gobi desert, lizards hiding away during the day but chasing spiders and scorpions throughout the night. She doesn’t feel ready for that yet, adds an empty sweet wrapper. She knows you can’t step in the same river twice, and as soon as the river meets the sea, there’s a reckoning. First she’ll watch how silver foil glints in the midday sun. About the author:
Hannah Linden has struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life. She’s a survivor of multiple traumas, including the suicide of her father when she was a child. Her poetry explores many kinds of impact from mental health challenges and she is particularly interested in the way trauma, and the experience of marginalisation, is explored in folklore and fairy tale, in both negative and positive ways. She has a Northern working-class background but, for many years, has lived in ramshackle social housing in Devon. She is widely published and, most recently, won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, and was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X: @hannahl1n Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end . . . —Anne Sexton Do not doubt me. Magic mirrors never lie. And do not try to break me. Magic mirrors never crack. But you will reap the seven years bad luck just the same. Controversial though I am, most of what you see in me is just your own reflection. Yet you are more transparent than you think, albeit rippled. Indeed, I am no omniscient god. On some days, cloudy skies shed no color on the waters. And some pools are murky, bogs heaven-laden with frogs . . . In the end, I could barely discern her, the troubled queen, hidden behind her demon, Arabesque. Lightning strikes where it will. I am but an interpreter of shadows. better a mile in ruby slippers . . . red hot iron shoes About the author:
Dr. Anna Cates teaches writing, literature, and education online and has published a variety of books (poetry, fiction, and drama) through www.cyberwit.net, prolificpress.com, redmoonpress.com, and wipfandstock.com. Her full-length poetry collection, Love in the Time of Covid, won an Illumination Book Award. She resides in Wilmington, Ohio with her two cats. The poisoned apple was her idea. She shunned her angel side and hooked up with a demon. In scarlet silks she loitered in the cellar, dungeoned herself like the doomed, whorled up frothy potions, cast spells that stained her dainty fingers black and blue. Yet the princess returned with a prince! After that, nothing I said could appease her. She tried to break me, hurling a wine goblet at her reflection. But when that failed-- for magic mirrors never break just as true as magic mirrors never lie—she threatened to toss herself from the balcony. I summoned a premonition into view: her body, warped and twisted in the weeds, devoured by death like Jezebel’s dogs. “What end could be worse than that?” she snapped and locked the door of her bower. a lover all in green-- the hounds smiling About the author:
Dr. Anna Cates teaches writing, literature, and education online and has published a variety of books (poetry, fiction, and drama) through www.cyberwit.net, prolificpress.com, redmoonpress.com, and wipfandstock.com. Her full-length poetry collection, Love in the Time of Covid, won an Illumination Book Award. She resides in Wilmington, Ohio with her two cats. A road seldom trod takes you somewhere strange. A shooting star, smoking in your hand, lights the woodland path, portends your axe will soon drip blood. Beyond the pine trail bobs a red hibiscus hood-- grasped in her fleshy grip, a wicker basket, wafting freshly baked bread; some would simply huff, “obese.” And yet, you know these miles too well, smell a wolf, suspect his wiles . . . Through the windowpane of the crone’s cottage, a candle flares. You limp forward, confound the old wound, fog up the glass as you peer in. There, mostly covered by a quilt, too, too much hair! That wicked goat! You splinter the door. Your blade flies through the air. Peculiar deliverer, like a fish gutter, so clever, you free her, free her! wood smoke ghosting the tarn hunter’s moon About the author:
Dr. Anna Cates teaches writing, literature, and education online and has published a variety of books (poetry, fiction, and drama) through www.cyberwit.net, prolificpress.com, redmoonpress.com, and wipfandstock.com. Her full-length poetry collection, Love in the Time of Covid, won an Illumination Book Award. She resides in Wilmington, Ohio with her two cats. May I get a boat to send the e-mail
To knock on the door of the address of the hospital? Goes here and there with the request, the depression And finds a lot of dry pin codes. It gets confused And fails to send the e-mails But starts the journey, the scribble. And none knows what will happen. But I do not go far beyond the fragrance of mother. A rainbow emerges from the blackened sky
My senses are awakened like an explosion of skittles A man calls out to me and says Why are you so shy? I reply I am autistic and I dribble like the river spittles A tall tree trembles as my thoughts triangulate the footpath Theres a cormorant fishing in the river Its wings flap feverishly as if having a bath A group of people walk towards me and I quiver The sign just ahead indicates a bird hide I look out from the hut at the delightful ducks dancing I wish I could be an animal and reside At every corner I walk along there are people prancing To immerse myself in the water blue and grass so green It is my dream to live a life so serene A curse is far more potent than a wish; a mirrored surface, tarnished with regret. You cannot counter misery with bliss when treatment is a thinly-veiled threat. A curse is envy in another guise; a copper-coated weight inside your gut. Sometimes the absence is the greater prize and that which once was open must be shut. A curse can be a masquerade of hope: a shifting silver slither of belief. We are the patterns in kaleidoscopes; we twist and turn to circumvent our grief. Infinity is malice, only worse. A lie provides the kindness in a curse. Originally published as part of the 28SonnetsLater poetry project in 2019.
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