Editor's Comments
Welcome to the first of two editions for 2022. Allegro has continued to attract a large number of submissions and I'm pleased to welcome newcomers to the journal as well as including familiar names. Allegro will open for submissions on 1st June. Details of the theme will be posted on the Submissions page in due course. In the meantime enjoy reading this edition.
Sally Long
Poems
The
molecules of heartbreak
Have now been identified. Neuropeptide
Y
is the chief offender. In the
condition
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy
the left ventricle is stunned
causing unbearable pain.
Science has not yet characterised
that chance meeting at the door
of the Zoology Library. Or that
long
late summer queue for a Beethoven
Prom,
or that note that half said
you might be half in love with
me.
But physiologists know exactly the
blow
the phone-call dealt. Not
in the first seconds, learning
you hadn’t suffered, but in the
minutes
of not comprehending,
The hours of retelling news not yet
real,
the days of confronting absence.
The months of mourning and the
years
when it is too long ago
still to be spoken of, that are still
years
of neuropeptide Y.
A website: ‘There are some
scientifically sound
methods of heartbreak healing
you can try.’ They do not include
obsessively playing over the
music
from your funeral. They do not include
this poem.
Christopher Southgate
A Place for Poetry
A high light room. Long windows
look
Down a heathered hillside to a
waterfall.
Behind my chair, tall shelves house
every book
On which I might conceivably want to
call.
On either side wall, big bevelled
mirrors
Reflect books, view, books again.
This is a place lacking all terrors
–
Absent listlessness, sorrow,
self-disdain.
I write in the mornings, in fountain
pen,
Interrupted only by my wife bringing
tea,
Or a little silver cat, demanding to know
when
I have ever seen anyone as beautiful as
she.
At evening, nurtured by much
candlelight,
I watch falling water fade into
night.
Christopher Southgate
Bathsheba
Reconsiders
even if one strayed in the still
night – blue wood smoke
coiling from
your outhouse across a precipitous sky –
and a
wrong-headed dog chased the startled flock
till they
fell like scattered pearls among the rocks –
even if you were dreaming a woman –
face like a peony,
tending hens
and a cucumber frame, playing an oak piano –
so didn’t
hear the running of the ewes, the regular violence
of their
bells ringing on the ridge of the farthest hill –
even if you
stumbled to the chalk pit – stood at the summit
where two
beech hedges make a V but don’t quite meet –
leaned out
and over the trampled banks of winter ivy
(head in your
hands, your hat pushed back)
to gaze at
dead and dying sheep – even then I would
say Yes – when
you look up, here I will be
Elizabeth Barrett
After Edgar
Degas’s 1868 painting
What is her
name? Her customer doesn’t care.
She is
now mon cheri, or worse, la Lorette – a stitch
dropped
from the
weave of a Paris street.
How white her
chemise, the only pure thing
in this
soiled life.
Her corset
lies on the floor –
a wing torn
off a Common White.
There are
closed rose buds stamped upon the wall,
a darkness
that the single lamp cannot dissipate,
a narrow
white bed, blood on the bed head,
his splayed
legs blocking a way out of the room.
In the
silence of the painting we must read symbols –
her sweet
face - a moon half eclipsed by darkness,
he stands in
a shadow, which makes two of him.
At night she
remembers her mother’s voice,
soft and
dusted with love
calling
her Mon biquet, Mon Minou.
Everything
has more than one name.
This scene -
some call it Intérieur, others Le Viol.
After
Edgar Degas’s 1868 painting Intérieur/Le Viol (
The Rape)
Notre-Dame de
la Lorette, the setting for the painting, was home to many prostitutes.
Anna Saunders
Who needs solar farms?
Giant white turbines,
still in the blazing sun,
all pointing one way
like Easter Island statues
praying to lost wind,
sadder than trees
though trees can be lonely too when wind
slips between them.
so that not even their tips touch.
Only their fallen leaves mingle.
Why take revenge on birds?
Boughs snap, destroying nests.
Blades concuss in mid-flight.
But everything’s renewable now.
Just wait.
Life will take wing again.
There might still be sunshine.
Trees will be enough.
Tim Love
Drift
anchored in
remote memories
distant
sounds wander in waves
dilate in the
rising tide
swell balancing
on the breakers
ride the
sea-foam
disperse and
die on the shore
stray
prevailing sounds carried away
steer between
lull and storm
lose their
breath
losing sail
and helm
pass in a
murmur
overboard swimming
off
to reach
another horizon
derivations
of distinct sounds
losing their
footing
plumbing
obscure depths
sounds
running against the current
taken up in
the aspiration
an unexpected
magnetic flow
sounds
melting into blue-green
songs
undulating across
floating
fields breaking
in the surf
the sea
lifting fragments and refrains
swaying the
voluble emersion
in which
words pitch and roll
unanchored
form again
Jane Angué
William
How
young he is in this photograph.
No grey in the hair
and a fullness to the face,
not quite the jut of the jaw yet, -
and
the eyes still windows
to a mind holding out for all things possible.
This
is not the kind of man
to
envisage a porch in November,
a slow rocking,
a
garden pond
misty
with ghosts.
He's young,
has
achieved some things,
will
do much more.
And if he could only speak
it wouldn't be in a crotchety voice
complaining of the cold.
No, look at that face –
there are ideas to proffer,
dreams to relate,
people to seduce,
frictions to balm.
The
camera rends him speechless.
But it cannot
mute the words he has in mind.
John Grey
One strand
as at times
before
I breathe
hard
upon the
embers
of the draft of
this poem
where they have
concealed
themselves under
grey ash
hoping for dull
red then
red then orange
flame
possibly in the
same way
an ancestor in a
highland
croft coaxed the
frugal
peat hearth into
song
only the
language
we use has
changed
Gaelic to the now
not so French
lingua franca of
the Saxon
there are moments
though still
when the turn of a
line
the mention of the
smell
of kine in the
house in winter
clicks or clacks
into place
like lichened
stones
around a curlew’s
nest
warm stones around
a fire
Tony
Beyer
Cariad
When
you spoke the one-word cariad
it
was a word shaped for lips.
Each
syllable held its vowel
like
a babe in its father’s arms
and
spoke of home
and
walls and hearth-fires,
with bara
brith waiting
on
communal plates.
Your
roughened hands
cut
the Sunday loaf
as
fine as sacrament,
with
butter twice as thick,
sweetened
with bramble jam
and
twinkling eyes.
I
sat on the piano stool
while
your voice trembled
the
do-re-mi
of
earthy tunes
and
the old clock ticked
the
wide Atlantic of the night.
Gareth Roberts
We Know We Will Be Dead
We know we will be dead, who are
alive.
But should some element of us survive -
fragment of consciousness or memory -
what value could it have? What should it be
that the whole universe might benefit?
The atom matters – what’s not made of it?
And we’re not large - not like a conscious star
(if time will let us all evolve that far).
You’re not much different in real magnitude
from an ant crushed for going for your food,
a gnat rubbed out, its tiny consciousness
a dot… but does it build the universe?
If that gnat can’t, I don’t see how you can:
there’s not much difference between gnat and man.
Robin Helweg-Larsen
Cartography of the Breast
For Malcolm
Two red plastic crosses mark the
terrain
my surgeon will traverse tomorrow
*
Territories are marked
Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, Hus
on a map on the living room wall.
*
I am vellum
a parchment
a venerable map of Northumbria
my father bought before I was born
some distance from Lindisfarne.
Cords draw me to that place
I have never seen
isotopes reveal paths
radiologists mark the Sentinel Node
chart earth and ocean –
the breast’s sudden
cartography.
Jane
Simpson
Apples
I used to like Cox’s Orange Pippins –
shiny, light green, bloodshot –
from the tree in our back garden.
One Friday night – I must have been 9
–
with Eric Jackson and Stenton
Withnall
we scrumped from our own tree
like country kids raiding an orchard.
Eric and Stenton ate four or five
each.
Next morning in the school football
match
against Hurst Undenominational
they were light green, bloodshot,
didn’t shine.
Rod
Whitworth
Museums
This field is like a clover
museum, Isa said, this sage
with five-year-old bones.
That means that
this tree
is first a gallery
of crows, so many roosting
that there’s no
tree,
only crows in the shape
of a tree. In a
moment,
they all lift at once,
& pivot as one
toward the lake,
which the wind has made
into an
exhibition
of ripples. Your body
is a museum of blood
& curiosity,
your head
a museum of fantasies
& fears. Let
us
lean close then closer,
& fog the glass
with our
breath.
Let us shatter the glass
& hold the
relics
to our tongues.
Stephen Cramer
Hortus
Botanicus
Hildegarde
You were the
tenth child, a tithe
for the
church. So far
from sight.
Behind
Benedictine walls you turn over
soft earth,
plant bulbs in narrow beds.
Madonna
lilies. Seeds of milk thistle, sweet
columbine.
You’ve come to understand.
Veiled in
each leaf the face of God.
Ōhinetahi
Plantings of
oaks pattern the land
one hundred
years in growing
one hundred
in dying.
The homestead
is as old
as the oaks.
When the earthquake hit
they stayed
upright,
the house toppled.
Beside the
folly we overlook bay
and bridle
path. Walk past roses,
read names we
mean to remember.
Virginia, at
Monk’s House
The Fig Tree
Garden is brick-paved, you kneel,
scrape weeds
with a blunt knife. At night
he takes a
lantern, goes outside, collects snails.
Darkness
filled with the cracking of shells.
Together you
plant for dry shade in the Walled Garden.
White
forget-me-not, narcissi, wood anemone.
Wild
strawberries scramble between gaps.
You write
that L is doing the rhododendrons.
Walk to the
Ouse with its steep banks
and
fast-flowing water.
Still he waits for your footsteps.
Knows it’s the last page, still
turns it over.
Marjory
Woodfield
Two Bullets
Who could have imagined two paths of
flight
would suddenly converge at that one
spot
and effortlessly intersect
to occupy the very same moment
in empty sky over Gallipoli?
Alike, but closer inspection reveals
(like a hornet connected to a bee)
the clear differences between the
two,
although coupled: one passive,
pierced through
by its grooved twin’s tip, bent
ninety degrees.
Some think it an impossibility
collisions like this could ever
happen,
citing odds of many thousands to one
and postulating complex equations
that pivot around angles, space and
time,
the chances of co-obliteration.
But let’s avoid, for a moment,
tangents
of trajectory and spatial accident,
marvelling instead at an impact
caught
forever, and this tangled miracle
that two such things found each other
at all.
Simon
Smith
First Class
If my CAT scan shows my term on earth
is short,
I’ll quit my job and fly first class to
Paris,
and drink in the cafes in
Montparnasse—
Dom Perignon, absinthe, vintage
port.
then I’ll board a first class train and
sightsee Europe.
(This time I’ll hire a gondola in
Venice.)
I’ll cancel my appointment with my
dentist,
quit exercising, give cocaine a
snort.
But if it turns out that my gut’s
okay,
not riddled with metastasizing
cancer,
I’ll meet my first class, scheduled for
next Monday,
and assign them this discussion
question. Please answer:
Is it best to live a brief life full of
bliss,
or a tediously long one such as
this?
Richard Cecil
It's As If You're In The Next Room
Why do we always say that?
If you were in the next room
it would sound like you were on
the other side of the world
talking on a landline telephone.
There'd be a pause after we spoke
before you heard what we'd said,
as if the door was shut
between us and the next room
even if we were leaning against it
with a glass to our head
like a telephone earpiece.
What it really sounds like
is that you're in the same room
and it's the same time of day,
not several hours behind, or
ahead,
and you're not hundreds
or thousands of miles away.
Peter J Donnelly
Spectres
Ghosts are not persons.
They’re the haunting echoes
of encounters and confrontations,
of passions and hatreds with those
once close to whom we refuse death,
the reverberations of intense identity
with our lives that we cannot neglect.
We are our own apparitions.
Ed Ahern
Arrival
From the Bangor Carnegie Library
I collect a slender book of poetry
entitled History of Rain,
tuck it under my arm and slip back
fifty years to grey, overcast
East Village.
Walking through a downpour,
my feet carry me to Fourth Street,
1972,
the narrow storefront
chapel
of the little brothers of Jesus,
their mission
to care for the poor in spirit.
I kneel in muted candlelight and wait
for what is still unseen.
History Of Rain is a poetry
collection by Conor O’Callaghan (Gallery Press, 1993)
Tim Dwyer
Bare and beautiful
Yes, they're beautiful
clothed, especially when
the fresh new quivering
leaves first throw
modesty to the winds,
flaunting multiple tones
of green, while other trees
erupt in flashy blossom.
Discreet in summer's
bounty and fecundity,
soaking up sunshine
to store as juice in fruit,
hiding squirrel, bird or cat,
sharing shade or whispering
secrets to the breeze.
Showy in autumn
their leaves resist
the urge to
fall
then, when the fight
is
lost
weep yellow, red
or russet
tears.
But now, and for the last
five months, I've traced
their finer lines
silhouetted against
the sky
and when I pass
in train or car,
the twigs and branches
in the foreground move
to interact with those behind,
creating diverse patterns
of a challenging complexity
that constantly achieve
curious kinetic harmony.
Alwyn Marriage
The Kiss
A lone swan bows.
Scouts
the river bed
for weeds and worms
rises
as if by an invisible cord
at its crown –
its orange and black bill
lifting
the water like drapery;
and within the glassy folds
another bill
tip to tip with the first,
another white
head
the swan and its watery self
fused
in a vanishing kiss.
Hélène Demetriades
In the Silk Market, Bursa
Reaching for a sheaf of colour
to spill across the polished counter
he knows the answer already. Before I
speak
he’s spread silk shawls,
self-patterned,
and spun their rainbow. Stone walls,
narrow windows concentrate the light
to brilliance, deep pools; outside,
enclosed,
a small mosque waits. In this
watching space
centuries have handled their
traditions
and silk has rippled, flickered,
danced.
They warm the room, these shawls;
each whispers
a touch-me, take-me pulse
of longing.
Only one is the right one, my hand
hovering like a dowser’s wand,
closing at last on this—or this? But,
yes;
on this.
And though he knew, that moment
my shadow entered, which I’d choose,
he holds his silence. It’s the
trader’s skill
bred in the han where
the Silk Road ends.
Soft as breath the shawl settles at
my throat,
a curl of heat, journeying on.
D A Prince
Red Car
A prowling climate
of worry and he works
in the clean poverty
of snow. Songbirds
muted and no cats.
He clears the drive
and car, his face
flushed and puzzled.
Don't you see?
his son asks.
Phil Wood
Between
Berlin 9 November 1989
I was sleeping
when the wall fell
the core
of the city cracked
in two
we stumbled
over the open scar
just like crossing
the road
no prickle of fear
over Bose Brucke
straight into the east
side it had snowed
white rubble
in no man’s land
we could taste
unfamiliarity
on our tongues
like a first visit
you discovered
raw
earth strange
transparent streets
vast hollow
factories
creativity stretched
its fingers
in the cellars
in the churchyards
towards a new
kind
of light
Julie Mullen
Quadriga
After the surface was steam-
cleaned
revealing a bronze patina
underneath
the green corrosion, then only if
you were
up on the plinth or, better
still, high
on the scaffolding during
restoration
would you be able to view each
detail:
how the sculptor had added a rose
to the bridle of one horse, his
precise
modelling of artery and sinew,
and
the animals’ coats, their combed
texture.
You have to step back to see the whole
quadriga, four horses rearing,
driven
onwards by a young boy, reins in
hand,
and only when you are much
further away,
approaching the city maybe, can
you see
that what you may take for a
monument
to war is a chariot carrying an
angel,
her arm raised, holding a wreath
of laurel.
After The
Quadriga on Wellington Arch (1910) by Adrian Jones
Caroline
Maldonado
Contributors
Ed Ahern
resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international
sales. He’s had over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six
books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits
on the review board and manages a posse of nine review editors.
Jane Angué teaches
English Language and Literature in France. She contributes in French and
English to print and online journals: Amethyst Review, Ink, Sweat and
Tears, Acumen, Erbacce, morphrog, Poésie/première, Traversées,
Mille-feuille and Arpa. A pamphlet, des
fleurs pour Bach, was published in 2019 (Encres Vives).
Elizabeth Barrett’s
poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. Her collections
include A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc Publications,
2010), The Bat Detector (Wrecking Ball Press, 2007) and Walking
on Tiptoe (Staple First Editions, 1998). She has been the recipient of
an Arts Council of England Writers Award (2000) and a Northern Writers Award
(2018).
Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand.
Richard Cecil has published four collections
of poems and has won a Pushcart Prize and a Pushcart "Special
Mention." He teaches at Indiana University.
Stephen Cramer’s first book, Shiva’s Drum, was
selected for the National Poetry Series. Bone Music was
selected for the 2015 Louise Bogan Award. His ninth and most recent book
is The Disintegration Loops. His work has appeared in The
American Poetry Review, African American Review, Yale Review, and Harvard
Review.
Hélène Demetriades'
debut poetry collection The Plumb Line will be published by Hedgehog
Press in February 2022. She was highly commended by the International
Poetry on the Lake competition, and shortlisted for the Wells Poetry
competition, in 2021. She is published in numerous magazines and webzines.
Peter J Donnelly lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a
degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the
University of Wales Lampeter.
He has been published
in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich and Writer's
Egg, and recently won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival
Competition.
Tim Dwyer’s
poems have most recently appeared in The High Window, Live
Encounters and the Dedalus Press anthology, Local
Wonders. His chapbook is Smithy Of Our Longing (Lapwing).
Originally from Brooklyn, he now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland.
John
Grey
is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review,
Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves
On Pages, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself are available
through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and
International Poetry Review.
Robin Helweg-Larsen's
poems, largely formal, have been published in the Alabama Literary Review,
Allegro, Ambit, Amsterdam Quarterly, and other international magazines. He
is Series Editor for Sampson Low's Potcake Chapbooks - Form in Formless
Times, and blogs at formalverse.com from his hometown of
Governor's Harbour in the Bahamas.
Tim Love’s publications are a poetry
pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance) and a story collection By all
means (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry has
appeared in Magma, Rialto, Stand, High Window, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/
Caroline
Maldonado
is a poet and translator with four poetry translations from Italian published
by Smokestack Books, most recently poems by Laura Fusco in Nadir (2022)
Her own poems can be found in What they say in Avenale, (IDP
2014) and Faultlines (Vole
Books 2022).
Alwyn Marriage's
fourteen books include poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, – recently Rapeseed and The
Elder Race (novels), and Pandora's pandemic and Possibly
a Pomegranate (poetry). Formerly a university
philosophy lecturer and CEO of two international literacy and literature NGOs,
she's Managing Editor of Oversteps Books and research fellow at Surrey
University. www.marriages.me.uk/alwyn
Julie
Mullen is a poet and
writer living in Hertfordshire. She spent her working life in a library and has
a love of reading, she also sings and attempts yoga. She has recently completed
an MA in Creative Writing with the Open University and has work published
online.
D A Prince lives in Leicestershire and
London. Her third collection, The Bigger Picture, will be
published by HappenStance Press later this year.
Gareth Roberts' poetry has appeared in various publications, including: Orbis, Acumen, South, Envoi. He
was awarded joint first place in the Torbay Open Poetry Competition (2009); and
has published a collection, What’s Not Wasted (Tawny Owl
Press, 2016). His website https://garethalunrobertspoetry.weebly.com/ features examples of other poems and
publications.
Anna Saunders is the
author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck,
(Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne
Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams), Ghosting for Beginners (Indigo
Dreams) and Feverfew (Indigo Dreams). Anna is the CEO and
founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Anna’s forthcoming book is called
Jane Simpson,
a New Zealand-based poet and historian, has two full-length collections, A
world without maps (2016) and Tuning Wordsworth’s Piano (2019),
and a world-first liturgy, The Farewelling of a Home. Her
poems have appeared in Hamilton Stone Review, London Grip and
in leading journals in New Zealand and Australia.
Simon
Smith is a teacher, poet, nature
writer and angling writer living on the Welsh coast. The author of two books of
angling essays and verse, his poetry has appeared in journals such
as The Dawntreader and The Journal, as well as online in places
such as Creative Countryside.
Christopher Southgate lives on Dartmoor. He has published four
collections with Shoestring Press, a verse biography of TS Eliot A Love and
its Sounding, and a ‘new and selected’ Rain Falling by the River. He
has been commended in the National Poetry Competition. He teaches at the
University of Exeter.
Rod Whitworth has had work published in, amongst
others, The North, Magma, Poetry Salzburg Review, Fenland Poetry
Review, The Journal, Pennine Platform, and some anthologies.
He has had some success in competitions. He lives in the Garden City (aka
Oldham) and is still tyrannised by commas.
Phil Wood lives in Wales. He studied
English Literature at Aberystwyth University. He has worked in statistics,
education, shipping, and a biscuit factory. His writing can be found in various
publications, including: The Wild Word, Abergavenny Small Press, and a collaboration
with photographer John Winder at Fevers of the Mind.
Marjory Woodfield is a New Zealand writer and teacher, who has lived in the Middle East. Recent work has appeared in Meniscus, Orbis, Pennine Platform, A Fine Line and takahē. Awards include first prize in The New Zealand Robert Burns Competition, and placements in Hippocrates, Yeovil, Ver and John McGivering writing competitions.
