Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 32 of Allegro Poetry Magazine which marks a significant milestone. As always it's been a joy reading all the submissions but hard to make a final choice from my shortlist. I hope you enjoy reading the selected poems.
Poems
'John
Downie'
'John Downie', you are my dear friend.
Planted over forty years ago,
you accompany me to the end.
In spring, along each limb, you send
bouquets of flowers; how they glow.
'John Downie', you are my dear friend.
In summer, blossom falls to the ground;
fruits ripen: red, orange and yellow.
You accompany me to the end.
In autumn, leaves succumb to wind;
fall, whirl, skitter along below.
'John Downie', you are my dear friend.
In winter, you are greyed by lichen,
greened by moss, whitened by snow.
You accompany me to the end.
On each other, we depend.
I fear for you when I have to go.
'John Downie', you are my dear friend;
You accompany me to the end.
Terry Sherwood
My Favourite Shirt
has faded in the sun,
its shoulders turning lighter –
or is it greyer from the blue?
My shirt for best,
casual cotton, smart, at least
at first, the one I wore for meals
out
in June and August. This party go-to
is the shirt I choose
for the reading. A poet’s shirt.
One pocket for a pen.
Jeff Skinner
Museum Heads
A field of heads
faced us squarely
as if the trademark
of a busy executioner.
Shoulder high plinths
were topped by athletes
and goddesses who stare
at us on eye level.
Identity tags noted
who had curated
or funded the exhibit.
But where were the bodies?
Turned into paving stones?
Lost in the blue Aegean?
Or melted down
in a kiln for mortar?
Were they portraits
or only perfect types
beyond pain or lust,
turning them to stone?
Imagine they might
levitate, floating free
from all bodies, bodies
that only wear us
down.
Royal Rhodes
Muse
Each night she fakes her moans. I fantasise.
I lace her sighing prose with poetry
then hit precisely where the marks won’t show -
at line-breaks, plastering with heavy rhyme.
The paths I never took are part of me -
I’m never pulled by fate; space curves for me.
My rhythm turns her on, her moans grow real.
My body overtakes my straying mind
and once again it happens - facts retrieved
from myth. There really was a flood somewhere.
And yes, it once was love. When I invade
my privacy I find a homesick child,
a stray who wasted time by looking back,
and yet, we curl together as we sleep.
Tim Love
Sleep is a creature scarcely ever tamed,
a feral beast which must be nightly wooed
with offerings of herbal tea and food:
that’s how it is; its nature can’t be blamed.
Of course it is for you to be ashamed
of your revolving thoughts, your stress, your mood,
your sweating as you lie there in the nude;
be sure: it has you thoroughly out-gamed.
And when it sidles up and lays its muzzle
on shoulder or extended hand, do not
rejoice that it has yielded up its power;
be wary: even to return a nuzzle
scares it away, perverse and wild, to trot
beyond your reach at least another hour.
Damaris West
The Laura effect
Our street had girls with whom we shared our free
range wandering through thistled fields on days
of crackling heat to wade in idle daze
the shallow waters of a creek. The tree
lined street was ball game space where often we
would play as one, until in dull schooldays
a blonde aged ten named Laura came to faze
my world - like Petrarch's muse, bewitchingly.
I can't remember if we ever spoke;
like Petrarch's, the acquaintance was within.
Of overwhelming joy—I recall none,
but learned a fleeting vision could provoke
a quickened heart, and force a sudden spin
into an orbit round another sun.
Ron Wilkins
Noctilucent
I hold up the whites of my hands
like a magician’s gloves. the city’s
extra-terrestrial hum and diodes,
sky-glow surrounding skyscrapers
and steeples, mistaken for sunset.
I imagine the Brecon Beacons
or Galloway, the galaxy’s arm
hanging free from its plaster cast.
I follow the night-walk tour guide,
a towline of fluorescence, words
curling around twig snaps. foxes
retreat to unsleeping high streets.
on the loam path leading us back
trees arch to form a tunnel of light,
our pupils turn to needle points,
shrink with the silhouettes of stars.
Patrick Wright
Retreat
The horses
have been out each time I’ve climbed the hill
bending to grass in the paddock
or standing still watching this stranger
but not today, the day I’m leaving.
Today they’re in the stables,
only their heads visible,
softly blinking eyes
blinking goodbye.
Josh Geffin
Poem On The Underground
Sneaking out from under the wall,
hunched, stout, just an inch tall,
shock of soot in industrial light,
the perfect look of its archetype.
Long thin tail and scamper, check,
sampling the scale of grime and guck,
a speck of light in its shiny black eye.
I shuffle away like massive prey.
How many exist behind the wall,
just friends of his or thousands more?
What happens late when the humans have left,
do they all come marching to scour the decks?
Are platforms swarmed with pumping snouts,
scavenging teams snuffling about?
Does one hold court at maps of stations,
pointer-tail bent to plans of migrations?
Josh Geffin
Tunnels
Like a fairground ride, the iron stairway
rises and descends all day between
two great stone floors. It concertinas
round, and down again to where
the steps reform and people place their feet.
Passengers politely mob in rows
against the platform edge, as if they seek
some answer in the hollow absence
of the vault above the ditch of rails.
A distant rumble grows, the tracks
spit out a thin metallic hiss the speed
of sound, then a subterranean wind.
Now the hollow bangs of carriage slacken,
iron wheels squeal. Crowds bunch
knowing where the doors will halt.
Packed in so close, they need to face away,
ignore each other in the snaking train.
Warping walls race inches from the windows;
the tunnel cries by like a hurricane.
But put your ear against that steel rail
and you might hear an endless river,
one connected grid from Upminster
to Amersham, each lit stop, each journey,
every echoing announcement.
Greg
Smith
On not killing spiders
leg-hoarder
egg-hatcher
niche-creeper
shock-jumper
lurking in corners, dwelling in shadows
above and behind, look over your shoulder
gravity-spurner:
ceilings and floorboards
are equally conquered;
all the six strong sides
and their eight tight angles
of our cubic lives
are revealed as illusions,
pulled into fragments;
unspun by your spinning.
I no longer harm you,
but my Buddhist efforts
have yet to result
in the clear lotus-gaze
that sees you as you are.
living together,
I keep my distance.
Liz Kendall
Yellow
I last saw my mother in a hospital bed,
her strange yellowed skin
accentuated by crisp white cotton
and pale green walls.
Her sallow lips tried on a weak smile.
She refused a sip of water
(would have preferred a pale cream sherry,
of course none of us said that.)
She raised her fingers slightly as I left.
I looked back to see dad,
his stick leant against her bed
as he bent awkwardly to kiss her.
A few hours later the telephone rang.
It was dark. The street light outside
projected a yellow square
on my bedroom wall.
Derek Adams
Kitchen Table
Everything begins at
this table
made of two
half-circles of elm. We play it
like a piano: so many
combinations
of notes making tunes
of our lives. Everyone
has sat here at some
point - babies thumped
it, children bashed out
rhymes sometimes
with forks or knives.
Here sonatas
of dough are kneaded,
vegetables sliced
for songs and
improvisations.
This is where
announcements are made,
on the scales of
marriages, deaths
or who said what to
who; here we sip
arpeggios at breakfast
or watch and curse
the out-of-tune keys of
the news together
where every decision is
a chord,
every dilemma a theme,
every scrap of
happiness a reprise.
Rebecca Gethin
The Phone
Call
Suppose you’d
been there, observing, all that day,
you’d have
seen him tinker, clean the guttering,
sweep the
porch. For nearly an hour later on
scratching at
a note pad in the kitchen. He was quiet,
seemed used
to being on his own, but often
would talk to
himself in an undertone, soft curses
when,
cleaning, he would drop, spill or fumble.
Endearments
to a slowly simmering pan.
When the call
came, the other speaker talked
and he seemed
happy to let her. You’ll assume
“her”, but
there’s no voice to be heard.
It just seems
part of the tone, the atmosphere,
a mildness in
the night’s unfurling. He asks
about Mattie
and Bess, who seem to be animals,
and a seeming
tradesman, “he”. Her day.
She seems to
ask about his day, he tells her
of the apples
simmering. His theatre notes
are
mentioned, the guttering, the porch.
Even his
soliloquies are described,
seem
something they both know and cherish.
He nods now,
quietly (something we all do,
even on the
phone) and says, Oh yes,
everything’s
ready. By now the warmth,
the
tenderness, are almost palpable.
Yes, he’s
ready, yes. Any time at all.
Just call me
once you’re on your way.
Robert
Nisbet
Mary Wilson
Not the Supremes singer with the fake beehive
but my father’s first wife,
she’s the woman in the photograph marked Skegness
1954.
They walk along the prom, her curly hair blown
across her smile
by the east coast breeze, her hand tucked
into my father’s arm.
She has the look of a woman carrying a secret,
my half-sibling,
although my mother told me – too quickly –
there were no children.
Karen Powell-Curtis
St
Hugh and the Swan
They walked together
Through the garden,
Where she shadowed
His white robe
Like a fresh fold
Outgrowing him.
I
can see her now,
Held awkwardly in the arms
Of the adopted son,
Winding the neck around his.
The gesture is one
Of affection, welcomed
As a stranger's kiss.
Thomas Larner
Addressing the deceased
Forgiveness is mine to give
whether or not you repented
at the end
about to meet your Maker
Whether or not you repented
it cannot be forced.
About to meet your Maker –
mine to give or not at all.
It cannot be forced
as you forced yourself on me;
mine to give or not at all
standing at your coffin.
As you forced yourself on me
I call you to account,
now as I stand at your coffin
beside the victims and survivors.
I call you to account
for your death is not the end
to your victims and survivors.
Forgiveness is ours to give.
Jane
Simpson
they cross borders we cannot cross
the North Star alone their compass
even caged birds know this stirring
when beginnings feel more like
endings
when the Arctic summer arrives early
they cross borders we cannot cross
non-stop, star-struck, moon-bound
burning muscles that beat their wings
even caged birds know this stirring
the Eastern Curlew breeds in Russia’s
swamps
estuaries, harbours, lagoons &
marshes
they cross borders we cannot cross
where once a wetlands nursery
now shrill steel and concrete’s
conceits
they cross borders we cannot cross
even caged birds feel this stirring
John
Bartlett
Stamps
The stamps showing scenes of colonial
life
were the most interesting in my album
–
Windows on the Empire,
as my father said.
My favourites were vignettes of
people at work –
loading
sugar cane
(a
greenish scene framed in brown, Jamaica, one shilling);
raking
salt
(greenish
grey, Turks and Caicos Islands, two pence);
tapping
rubber
(grey
framed in red, Ceylon, two cents);
plucking
tea
(grey
framed in indigo, Ceylon, twenty cents);
carrying
mail
(orange,
India, two annas);
harvesting
rice
(greenish
grey, Sierra Leone, six pence);
bringing
in tobacco
(green
framed in blue, Rhodesia and Nyasaland, one shilling).
And my magnifying glass revealed the
precision
of the engraver’s art – the
sovereign’s head and scenes
reproduced in lines and dots,
demonstrating skills
printing technology no longer needs.
At school I was taught a vision of
the Empire
ruling the colonies with benign
wisdom – nothing
about the profits made from slaves,
sugar and goods,
the exploitation of land, the
indifference to starvation,
and the repression of communities
seeking rights.
I saw my stamps as portraying people
seeming content
to play bit-parts in a glorious
imperial design.
Belatedly, I’ve realised the stamps
were quietly political,
that the carefully crafted images
distracted from realities
governments would not have wanted
seen.
Mantz Yorke
Madalena
In a country where February
incubates me on the balcony,
where boats trawl silver messages
over the river while the basilica
listens;
where eggs have status in the faith
since nuns who’d starched their robes
with egg whites had to heap and whisk
the yolks, dreamed up the
vanilla-cream
that’s still poured each dawn into
pastry cups, small and generous;
a country through whose airy language
I soar and fall and rise as I learn
to surf the vowels between
consonants;
a country where a single word saudade
fills chapters, books, with
unresolved
longing but bears the country’s loss
and happiness as albumen bears yolk;
a country where people trust the sun
–
here, in this moment, I am warmed
by a glimpse of the granddaughter
I will never have, by her
name.
Anne
Ryland
Prayer for the Bodies of Those Who
Died Violently
(Sutton Hoo)
In this place, a blank bank of sand
holds our broken bodies
like a breath.
forgive us
Acid ground has preserved us
in our final agonies, with grace;
all our sins
beached between our lives’
transgressions
our trespasses
we are stranded in death
trying to find a path
lead us
from this earth we cannot leave
to a heaven
not into temptation
we may never reach
deliver us
And what can you learn from sand?
from evil
We all become echoes;
faint whispers on air,
shadows on this land
in the briefest brush
of sun.
Thy will be done
Louise Longson
Angels
(after a watercolour by Jehuda Bacon)
Here the angels hang,
a light well in this low room,
the green and indigo
of good will. They’ve seen
such things, scenes
that would shiver us,
and still they smile, calm
as the moon.
We are not
faith and line limned
with gold, issue of godship.
Though we bring the bright
breath of winter on our cheeks,
stir the still air with spirit,
we’re not vapour, grace,
we’re ruddy, our oil,
our blood, strong as muck
in our nostrils; no coronet,
no wings at our back.
The angels stare
and stare through a shield
of glass, its back story
of orchids yawning
in the heat, throats keen
for oxygen. The angels keep
watch as those fleshy heads
turn to the street above,
their little world of soil
cracking open.
Sue Rose
Lumb
Limbless it
rises through the woodland
half-dressed
in its skirt of sycamore and oak,
warmed now
only by the morning sun
that has
bleached its blackened bricks.
A new
workforce of buttercups, campion
and nettles
crowd its base, birdsong replacing
the grind and
hammer of industry.
Everything
swallowed up by time
except the
desire lines that run through the scrub,
made by those
who come to touch
this obelisk,
monument, minaret, lumb;
a smokeless
stack that from this angle seems
to pump out
clouds and clouds of green,
filling the
whole valley with trees.
Colin Bancroft
Contributors
Derek Adams lives in Suffolk. He has an
MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths. His poetry has been widely
published in magazines in the U.K. and abroad. His most recent collection is
EXPOSURE – Snapshots from the life of Lee Miller.
Colin Bancroft has a PhD on the Ecopoetics
Robert Frost. His pamphlet 'Impermanence' was released with Maytree Press in
2020 and 'Kayfabe' with Broken Sleep in 2021. His pamphlet 'Knife Edge' (Broken
Sleep) was released in April 2022. He is editor at Nine Pens Press and runs the
Poets' Directory.
John
Bartlett is
the author of eleven books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was winner of the
2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize, Highly Commended in the 2021 Mundaring Poetry Competition and longlisted
in several competitions in 2023. His latest poetry collection, Excitations of Entanglement was
released in November 2023.
Josh Geffin is a musician and writer from Dorset, based in London. Currently studying a Masters in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, his poems have been published in The Rialto, The Friday Poem, and the forthcoming issue of Acumen. In 2023 he won second prize in the Jack Clemo Poetry Competition.
Rebecca Gethin has written 5 poetry publications
and 2 novels. She was a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor.
Vanishings was published by Palewell Press in 2020. Her next pamphlet
will be published by Maytree Press in Feb, 2024. She blogs (very) sporadically
at www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com
Liz Kendall’s poetry is published in the Almanac
2023 from Candlestick Press, and two Stickleback micro-pamphlets from
The Hedgehog Poetry Press. Her co-authored book Meet Us and Eat Us:
Food Plants from Around the World will be published in 2024. She is on
Twitter and Facebook @rowansarered.
Thomas Larner was brought up in Cheshire on the
Wirral Peninsula. He currently works as an archivist in Bedford. He has been
writing poetry since 2018 and has been published by the Coverstory Press, The
Littoral Magazine, Crank Magazine, The Cannon’s Mouth and many others.
Louise Longson, West Oxfordshire poet, widely
published in print/online, authored chapbooks Hanging Fire (Dreich,
2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (Alien Buddha Press,
2022). She won the Kari-Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize 2023 with
soon-to-be-published collection These are her thoughts as she falls.
She was Pushcart Prize nominated in 2023.
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 and prose have appeared in
Stand, Rialto, Magma, Unthology, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/
Robert
Nisbet is a Welsh poet who has
published widely in Britain, where he has two pamphlet collections
with Prolebooks, and in the USA, where he has had four nominations for the
Pushcart Prize.
Karen Powell-Curtis
has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. Her poetry has
been published in various anthologies and magazines including Welcome
to Leicester: poems about the city, The Interpreter’s House, Silver
Birch Press and Thanatos Review. Her website is karenpowellnotebook.wordpress.com/.
Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught courses on global
religions. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals: Allegro
Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, Quaci, Last Stanza, and others He has been nominated
twice recently for the Pushcart Prize.
Sue Rose works as a literary
translator from French and has published three book-length collections with
Cinnamon Press: From the Dark Room (2011), The Cost of
Keys (2014) and Scion (2020). Her fourth collection
will be published by Cinnamon Press in 2025.
Anne Ryland’s third poetry collection, Unruled
Journal, was published by Valley Press (2021). Her previous books are Autumnologist,
shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The
Unmothering Class, a New Writing North Read Regional choice. She lives
in Northumberland and leads writing workshops in community-based
settings. https://anneryland.co.uk
Terry Sherwood hails from and lives in
Northamptonshire and has taken to poetry as his creative outlet late in life.
In 2023, his work has appeared in Acumen, Orbis, The Cannon's Mouth amongst
others and is upcoming in Dreich.
Jane
Simpson, a New Zealand poet, has two collections, A world without maps (2016)
and Tuning Wordsworth’s Piano (2019). She won 2nd prize
in the NZ Poetry Society’s 2023 International Competition, Open Section. Her
poems have appeared in Allegro, London Grip, Poetry Wales, Hamilton
Stone Review, Meniscus and Poetry Aotearoa
Yearbook.
Jeff Skinner’s
poems have been published in competition anthologies and in
journals including Poetry Salzburg, Fenland Poetry Journal, Orbis,
Acumen, and The Alchemy Spoon. He received a “special mention” in this
year’s Coast to Coast to Coast pamphlet competition.
Greg Smith is a retired Technical Author. He completed the MA in
Writing Poetry at the Poetry School in 2018. He is the treasurer and membership
secretary of Ver Poets. Recently, he won third prize in the Enfield Poets
competition and was commended in the Folklore competition.
Damaris West's
poetry has appeared widely in publications such as Writers' Magazine, Snakeskin, Shot
Glass, inScribe, The Lake, Dreich, Blue
Unicorn, and Spank the Carp (featured poet). She was
highly commended in the Scottish Association of Writers summer competition
2023. Originally from England, she now lives in south-west Scotland. https://damariswest.site123.me
Ron Wilkins
is a Sydney-based earth Scientist. His recent literary work has appeared in The
Shanghai Literary Review, StylusLit, The French Literary Review and Quadrant. A
hobby he enjoys is the identification of the more than 900 species of
Eucalyptus trees. His poetry website is www.fistfulofdust.com
Patrick
Wright has a poetry
collection, Full Sight of Her (Eyewear), which was nominated
for the John Pollard Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Bridport
Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The
North, Southword, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda, Wasafiri,
and London Magazine. He has a second collection, Exit
Strategy, which will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2025.
Mantz Yorke – a scientist by training –
lives in Manchester, England. His poems have been published
internationally. His collections ‘Voyager’ and ‘Dark Matters’ are published by
Dempsey and Windle.
