Gold
Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 35 of Allegro Poetry Magazine, the Gold Edition. After a slow start at the beginning of June the submissions came flooding in. As I'd hoped poets had interpreted a theme in a variety of ways, from the literal to the metaphorical. Having edited Allegro over more than a decade now I've noticed the quality of submissions rising which makes my task as editor both challenging and enjoyable. I hope you enjoy reading the selected poems.
Emily Dickinson Is Kissing Me At A Party
She is the first woman I have ever kissed.
Sat amongst broken glass,
nightgown clinging to her skin,
I thought I saw her beckon me.
I could not help but stare.
She is more practised at pretending not to look.
Over the turbulent crash of pop hits
she whispers the truth of my solitude.
Her voice runs down my spine like fresh ginger.
Her lips brush poems onto mine
but the lines are unfinished.
Her hands are pale and her body is frightening,
Drunken students tower over us,
seeped in loneliness and vodka lemonade.
She tastes like death and so do I.
I don’t know when I gave myself to her.
I can feel the ocean in her mouth —
Rachel Bruce
Goldcrests
It’s said they come from Norway to Northumbria
or nearly, falling short by a few North Sea miles.
The trawler men collect them from the deck,
perch them on their hats, warm them in the wheelhouse,
till they come into harbour, land their catches.
It’s said the birds are tame, so tame they can be scooped
from hedges, gathered two or three and dropped through
doorways.
They’ll hunt out insects, spiders, fill themselves
until the rooms need no more dusting – two days
and you can open doors and windows to release them.
It’s said they are the smallest visitors, undersizing
warblers, chiffchaffs, cutty wrens. Their frames, the size
of walnuts,
build nests like giant acorn cups, two broods in tandem,
staggered.
Yet still this cat, one who travels barely further than the
garden,
feels it right to dash their lemon flashes on the carpet.
Simon Williams
Song Of The Paranoid Goldfish
It feels like there’s something I should do;
I’ve felt it ever since I was a fry.
Do you ever get that sense of déjà vu
like your life’s repeating things that once you knew?
Another goldfish just came swimming by;
it feels like there’s something I should do.
A giant hand just sprinkled flakes of food.
I think I’ve found a shell where I can hide.
Do you ever get that sense of déjà vu?
I’ve noticed scary creatures looking through
and tapping on the tank, god knows why.
It feels like there’s something I should do.
A giant hand just sprinkled flakes of food.
Another goldfish just came swimming by.
Do you ever get that sense of déjà vu?
Two scary creatures just looked through;
I think I’ve found a shell where I can hide.
I wish I could remember what to do.
Do you ever get that sense of déjà vu?
Simon Williams
Careful What You Wish For (a sonnet)
The richest man, King Midas, wanted more.
The gods complied: "Your wish is our command."
More gold, he said, let coins and ingots
pour
from heaven's coffers. Everything my hand
embraces -- everything I even touch! --
should turn to gold! And so it came to be.
The king ecstatically began to clutch
a lamp, a shoe, a sword, and wondrously
they turned to gold. Throughout the day the king
enriched himself, until he thought to eat.
He reached for fish and fruit, but everything
became a lump of gold. A taste of meat!
he begged the gods. They'd have to intercede
to free him from the ravages of greed.
Paul Buchheit
The Dust Of The Street Is As Precious As Gold
You drive past the street-side prophets
Speed from Jerusalem to Emmaus in half an hour
Salem to Woodburn in twenty minutes.
It takes eight hours by foot
Eight hours of effort, stopping to rest, use the bathroom.
Knees hurt, feet
Neck
Sunburn
Eight hours to change your life;
Eight hours with the locust eaters;
With the wild honey drinkers;
The scales will fall from your eyes
And people will look like trees walking around.
Eight hours to witness the bloody birth in the morning,
Clouds lifting overhead like the refrain of a powerful
song.
The cycle of the sun being eaten again by the west
Without trying we speed ahead, 733 miles an hour, not to
mention 67,000 miles per hour, but
It is the velocity of our feet that moves us.
The dust of the road will cling to you,
Coat your feet, and legs
Baptize your face and hair
With road wisdom or at least road.
It is the road that changes us
Rarely the destination.
The way gold changes us
The way we are changed by gold.
Marc Janssen
Lord Of The Ring
I wanted to write you about the ring
I dug out of the ground the other day;
Since you are the expert on precious things
And conduct your business so far away,
You’re bound to be more objective than I.
I’ll say what I think: it looks like fool’s gold;
Though I’m easily fooled. These wandering eyes
Imagine so much that’s not there, I’m told.
But the ring: It’s more of a sphere, so it seems—
Surrounding me; yet I, too, surround it.
In fact, there’s no separation between
What I am and what the ring is. It fits
On my finger and shines like gold. Is it real?
If you’d like, I’ll drop it in today’s mail.
Lee Evans
Book of Hours
Late autumn sun
illuminates what look like torn
manuscripts –
foxed pages turning
brown, deckle edges
flicker-crisp, a carmine bleed,
with some veins
of fine gold leaf –
compiling
a bonfire: balloon-light –
the story of October
going up in flames.
Jeff
Skinner
Oregon police recover over $200,000
worth of Lego sets in massive bust
--Rebecca Cohen
U.S. News 7/10/24
Yesterday the children poured at least 10000
Lego pieces onto the living room floor. Twice.
Mostly pastels, they rolled under couches and
bookshelves
and rugs and other toys. I tried to close my eyes
to the whole process. They made blocky frogs
and cats and airplanes and rockets and even a trial
at a hot air balloon. All I could think of was the
possibility that they’d destroyed the Magic
Kingdom
Castle (399.99) or Millenium
Falcon (849.78) or
Imperial Star Destroyer (1600.00.)
Fortunately the Indiana
Jones Temple of the Golden Idol ($126.99)
still stood—
mostly—in one piece on the mantel and Hagrid’s
Hut (a mere 75.45) resided on
the top of the china
cabinet. So, oh what set had they demolished?
(Demolished is my grandson’s new favorite word.)
Please not your mother’s half-finished Colosseum
($1020.00) or your father’s just unboxed Taj
Mahal
(643.94.) And I hope I can make it into the kitchen
without slipping on a little figure of a droid or a
car.
Kelley White
Wellspring
For someone, the gold disc of the sun
that shines straight into my eyes as I drive along
this road,
that bathes the landscape in sidelight,
that seems to grow as it nears the horizon,
a seething ball of gas, is a mass they can
express
in algorithms full of Greek letters.
And someone understands the gravitational
attraction
that the sun exerts on the earth,
that keeps the earth rotating from west to east on
its axis
in a fixed orbit with a fixed inclination
that controls the seasons and measures the
years.
And someone can do the calculations for every
planet
comprising our solar system, and for the moon,
showing how each maintains its place,
so that, seen from earth, they shine predictably,
with the light of the sun, in the sky at night.
And someone knows how to explain by equations,
rigorous in their syntax and semantics,
the small place of our home galaxy
within a cosmos that reaches from here to infinity.
That someone is not me.
But the majesty of the gold disc
of the sun
and the silver disc of the moon,
and those bright diamonds, Jupiter and Venus,
and the faint veil of the Milky Way in the starry
sky
is a wellspring that pulses in my body
Philip Dunkerley
Frances
Chief Medical Officer of the Royaumont hospital
1914-1919
Beautiful, the woman in the photo;
although she does not smile, she has presence.
See that medal round her neck - it’s gold,
those decorations over her breast pocket,
given for service and for valour.
In her hands, a notebook, and look,
there are gold rings on her slim fingers.
Ah! those slim fingers, they tended les
poilus,
They cut away gas gangrene, removed limbs,
worked endlessly saving life;
even as bombs and shells were raining down,
even when the only light was candlelight.
You’d assume somebody else ran the place,
a hospital of six hundred beds,
there for
four years, staffed solely by women.
You’d think they’d have their work cut out,
whoever ran the finance, the
procurement,
the maintenance, the transport, the PR.
But it was her, she did all that too.
Before you commit to read her story
stop and consider: although it may inspire you,
what Frances did will force you to think deeply
about the grinding hopelessness of war,
of moral failure and the agony of suffering.
Philip Dunkerley
Dr. Frances Ivens (1870-1944) CBE, MS, CHM, FRGOG
Médaille des Epidemics, Legion d’Honneur, Croix de
Guerre.
See ‘Angels of Mercy’ by Eileen Crofton
Mesopotamia
That day we set out through barley
grown almost as tall as you
to walk in dew-soaked shoes past the churchyard
where the bats live
and across the road without having to wait,
tracks of our footsteps drying and fading behind us
over the tarmac's camber, and followed the path
all the way through the pines, side-footing
pine cones between us to hear them skitter,
and found the rabbit warren at the far edge of the
wood
where you counted the entrance-holes to the burrows
and ventured your hand in one up to your wrist.
Then we clambered up the bald mound which
overlooked
lanes chalked on grass for Sports Day, and you
raced
down the other side into the building.
Later that day or another you told me the name
means land between rivers, a flood-plain restless
with barley
day-labourers reaped and stored in the Temple of
Ishtar
where the number of bushels was tallied on tablets
of clay
with a pen made of cut reed.
Written in that language, you said, the word for
barley
looks like an ear of barley and might even be
the very first word we wrote when we learned to
write.
Patrick Yarker
Folded linen cloth found in a tomb
from Sedment, dated 2686-1649 BC
Flat pad of bandages, wrapped
loosely round themselves, like mothers flip
shirts from the washing line, or flap
sheets impatiently. Tiny rips
pock the morse of warp and weft, folds
piling onto themselves like lips
kissing for millennia. Mould
gradually invades the tired off-white –
it won’t wash out. Men choose gold
for status grave-goods, chase Ra’s light
into their afterlife, but there’s no heat.
Isis knows this, swaddles linen tight
round cooling bodies, packs something to eat,
bathes her tired children’s dusty feet.
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
Present from my father
It isn’t heavy – fourteen carats or less –
set with crystals which catch light
as diamonds would, has a tricky clasp,
the kind you want a lover to fasten
as he bends to kiss your nape.
Years since I had occasion to wear it,
the dress to match. I can’t
steel myself to give it away.
And so it skulks in the drawer where I keep
spools of thread I shall never sew with,
assorted, unsorted needles and pins,
scissors too - the wherewithal
to make a dress like my mother did -
my mother, who wore jewels then,
Guerlain lipstick, heels. This gift
was not for me, never for me.
A C Clarke
Spectrum
You leave me when I least expect it –
August, and the day is hot, you under
white sheets, naked as the day you were born.
The hospital is cool, silent as gold
circled, engraved, untold. It’s a
mystery.
There isn’t anyone who understands it,
not even Jesus, says the nurse. Not
even
He understands. The sky opens its own
gold. Later I think of Eva Cassidy, know
I’ll miss you when autumn leaves start to fall,
though it seems far off, this summer sky
receding blue, warm brick projecting red.
Stay close to joy, a friend says, though now
it is December and the river, wide and flat,
pulls out under a bridge, narrows itself
to a silver thread, goes where I can’t.
Those leaves wag yellow on their lines,
no green or bronze remains, though the day ends
in an orange blaze – my darling Clementine
you said once, unwrapping a Christmas fruit
tight and small as a jewel. I linger in the dark.
Only a waxing moon can split the night,
refract
the colour that I cannot see – your nearness
infra-red. I conjure your song, your voice,
over and over, frighten or console myself
with
the voodoo of it, indigo, ultra-violet,
gold.
Lesley Sharpe
A lichen love affair
Where leaf and sky converse
all is vertical, lines of light
slice forests, copses, woods.
Here summer gilds the trees.
Lichen boasts it owns this space.
Its golden graffiti claims ownership.
This determined dusting, coating
starts gently, willingly, small scale,
Chrysothrix
candelaris
Insisting on light, light, even
in deepest winter, fungus seeks
a partner. While algae unsatisfied
by protection, nags for water, water.
Such commitment in this symbiosis.
Like illicit lovers they ask no
permission,
but concentrate on fulfilling the
demands
of each, through worried days and nights.
Always these bright sun-crusts of
yellow,
these Sun shields, signal to the wind,
to
passing feet to help them move
outward,
safely protected by their own
sunscreen.
Pleopsidium Flavum
Finola Scott
Kept
White peaches, bought in phrase-book Spanish, then
washed at the market tap, and carried back —
the bag in near collapse — to savour when
we’d found a spot, a winding cul-de-sac
that ended at the walls. We climbed, and sat
feasting on view and peaches. Storks had flown,
each nest precarious as an old straw hat
perched on a chimney stack. The ancient stone
had soaked itself in sun and breathed out heat.
All Avila in honeyed noon-day sleep.
The peaches’ ripe perfection made complete
one of those days your mind can’t help but keep
as sustenance, warm for the future, shining
gold,
stored against time and winter’s withering cold.
D.A. Prince
Felt Making
The wise women sit around a long table
their crepe de chine hands teasing wool
from the rovings they have chosen
or that have chosen them.
They fan open the fibres, grasp the
ends
between fingers and thumb and pluck
cobweb-light wisps of teal, smoke, ochre,
float them down to the table to lay
a featherweight lattice, a square of air
and colour; cobalt, gold, scarlet –
wisps of wool and the sky held in them
wisps of wool and the sun held in them.
The wise women are the wind, breathing
their legends into the layers as they work;
spring breezes, autumn storms, their
words
fall between the strands like silk threads.
Then they cover their creations with netting,
add soap and water and start to rub.
Their hands, unexpectedly strong, circling
circling, pressing the fibres together
the barbs on each filament regripping,
linking the familiar and extraordinary
they have created; their stories
tightening
as they rub and roll, roll and rub, wring
through hot and cold water. Then these
wise
women hang their beautiful and complex lives
on a line to dry for the young women to
see
Here, they say, this is what your
life might be.
Ilse Pedler
They Hide Her Insulin
Each dawn grandmother squats by the grey cow,
the goddess of animals. Her thumb and fore finger
pushes
and pulls the udders. Her gold bangles jingle,
the animal groans. Flies buzz around her ears. She
stands,
knees click one by one. She takes small steps,
carrying
a pale of milk in each hand. Her husband left
this world too young. She hears his voice in the
rustle
of corn stalks. His presence lingers in the scent
of rain.
She feels his fingers brush her cheek by the peepul
tree.
Her two sons at work in the nearby city,
Surat.
The two daughters-in-law talk of widows and the
elderly
been thrown out of their homes. They’re no
use
to anyone, they say. She pours them a
glass of milk
like an offering to Laxmi. One flaunts
Grandmother’s
mangalsutra, black beads with a gold pendant.
The other wears her nose ring, dangly
earrings and her
gold bangles. The women turning like
dervishes in
silvery silk saris. Bright gold sparkles and
shimmers.
The women laugh, hide Grandmother’s
insulin.
How long before they pluck the gold studs from
her ears?
Ansuya Patel
What We Call Gold
It was never the metal
but the memory—
the way her skin caught morning
like a secret
just beginning to shine.
Gold was the mango split in August,
syrup on the chin of a laughing child,
the silence between two hands
not quite touching
but almost.
In the village,
they said gold could curse you.
It weighed too much,
burned too slow.
It made men forget
the sound of their mother’s name.
I have seen gold
in the teeth of a woman who buried three sons
and still danced.
In the ochre robes
of monks walking through traffic
like fire made calm.
I wore gold once—
thin chain, gift from a grandmother
who spoke in proverbs
and didn’t believe in banks.
Now it lives in a drawer
where I keep all things
too beautiful to wear
and too heavy to throw away.
Gloria Ogo
Imbolc
The Brigid’s Cross fades hazel brown
on the wall over the fireplace.
Time to confront the fleeting winter,
stalk the fields for fresh reeds.
Golden catkin fires blaze up
on solitary hazel trees,
melt away the January frosts, keep
hands warm to make another cross.
David Kenny
Goya’s “Still Life with Golden Bream”
After the killing, the gold-eyed dead still smell
freshly hatched and enlaced in saltwater.
After they are piled, so close yet so far from sea,
somehow, the moon’s out and glints like gold across
wet scaly bodies; this moonlight
mirrors in their large, dead eyes of staring gold.
Doubtless, in a world ready to burn, that
neglects heaven’s lips of light for hell’s pyrite,
this plate of piled fish the goldsmith will eat,
shows me the apocalyptic demise of Aztecs –
for gold; Incan slaughter – for gold; worlds raped
for Gold fills no stomach, builds no shelter, warms no
soul—
Heavy, costly, dazzling like guilt, yet hungry like a god
eating his son or soldiers gunning men on the Third of May.
Akiva Israel
The back-to-school air of late September
smells of cold. A fluttering of gold along
the path snakes through the park
all the way up to the school gates,
swung wide and welcoming and
screaming on their straining hinges.
The dark morning reflects in rain-streaked
classroom windows. Coats flap in the wind,
windscreen wipers thump and wince.
Rain spatters like spilled blood across
the tarmac, darkening the concrete and
rendering the football field a bog.
But the bushes still burst
summer green in September lowlights.
Joseph Blythe
Contributors
Joseph Blythe is a Yorkshire writer published by Stand, Pennine
Platform, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip and
more. He holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently writing a novel about
memory’s shaping of the self, alongside short stories and poems. He tweets,
Instagrams and Blueskys @wooperark
Rachel Bruce (she/her) is a poet based in South London. Her work has
appeared in The Poetry Review, Propel Magazine, Atrium, and Ink
Sweat and Tears, among others. She is a rep for the Greenwich Meantime
Poetry Stanza. https://www.rachelbrucepoetry.co.uk/
Paul Buchheit is an author of books, poems,
progressive essays, and scientific journal articles. His most recent book of
poetry is Paradise Lost: A Poetic Journey, published in 2024
by Wipf and Stock Publishers. His previous book of poetry, Sonnets
of Love and Joy, which was published in August, 2023 by Kelsay Books,
was named Book of the Year by the Illinois State Poetry Society.
A C Clarke has published six collections and six pamphlets, two in
collaboration. Her sixth collection, Alive Among Dead Stars, was
published last year by Broken Sleep Books. A third collaborative pamphlet with
Maggie Rabatski and the late Sheila Templeton is due out from Seahorse
Publications in October.
Philip Dunkerley is active in the poetry scene of South Lincolnshire. He
runs a poetry group, takes part in open-mic events and is a reviewer for Orbis. His
poems have appeared widely in magazines, including Allegro Poetry.
He used to work in minerals exploration.
Lee Evans lives in Bath, Maine in a state of retirement which is not
completely unproductive, since he writes poetry whenever he cannot resist the
urge to do so.
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
(she/her) is widely published. She has been placed in numerous competitions,
received the Poetry Society Hamish Canham Prize, and won the Newcastle
University Chancellor’s Prize two years running. Her debut pamphlet, Fledglings, was
published by Red Squirrel Press in 2016, and her first full collection, Crippled,
in 2025
Akiva Israel, Prison Poet, is a poet whose voice was forged
behind prison walls. His piece, “Goya’s Goat Painting,” was awarded Third Place
in PEN America’s highly competitive 2025 Justice Writing Prison Competition,
standing out among more than 900 entries for its originality, innovative
approach, technical mastery, and emotional resonance.
Marc Janssen’s verse is scattered around the
world in places like Pinyon, Orbis, Pure Slush, Cirque Journal, and Poetry
Salzburg also in his book November Reconsidered. Janssen
coordinates the Salem Poetry Project and keeps getting nominated for Oregon
Poet Laurate.
David Kenny lives in Wicklow, Ireland. He holds a BA in Film and
Documentary from ATU Galway and Certificates in Creative Fiction and Poetry
from Carlow College. His work features in Swerve Magazine, Underbelly Press,
and Ragaire Literary Magazine.
Gloria Ogo is an American-based Nigerian writer with
over seven published novels and poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Eye
to the Telescope, Brittle Paper, Spillwords Press, Metastellar, CON-SCIO
Magazine, Kaleidoscope, The Easterner, Daily Trust, and more. With an MFA
in Creative Writing, Gloria was a reader for Barely South Review. She is
also the winner of the Brigitte Poirson 2024 Literature Prize, the finalist for
the Jerri Dickseski Fiction Prize 2024 and ODU 2025 College Poetry Prize both
with honorable mentions. https://glriaogo.wixsite.com/gloria-ogo.
Ansuya Patel was a joint winner of the the
Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize in 2024. Her work has been
short-listed for the Alpine and Aurora Prize, won a third prize at PoetryKit,
highly commended at Erbacce. Her poems have appeared in Drawn to the
Light, Gypsophila, Ink Sweat and Tears, Black in White, Last Stanza, Rattle,
Renard, Crowstep, Cerasus, Artemesia Arts, various anthologies and
recently part of the Kensington and Chelsea Poetry Trail.
Ilse Pedler lives in Cumbria and works part time as a veterinary
surgeon. Her first collection Auscultation was published in
2021 by Seren. She is the poet in residence at Sidmouth Folk festival and is
one of the editors of Bending the Arc a magazine of Thrutopian
writing. www.ilsepedler.com
D.A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London.
Her second full-length collection (Common Ground, HappenStance,
2014) won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her third collection, The
Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.
A pamphlet, Continuous Present, was published by New Walk
Editions in 2025.
Finola Scott writes to unravel and understand the
world. Trembling Earth her recent pamphlet considers the Climate
Crisis. Her poems are widely published including The Irish Pages
Press, NWS, Lighthouse. She’s won & been placed in many competitions.
More at FB Finola Scott Poems and https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/finola-scott
Lesley Sharpe, born in Edinburgh, teaches in London.
Commended, National Poetry Competition 2024, Charles Causley, Katherine Bevis
Prizes 2025, finalist, Mslexia; placed/ listed for others including
Bridport, Cafe Writers, Rialto and The London
Magazine; her poems, reviews, essays appear most recently in Katherine
Mansfield and London (EUP, 2024), Aesthetica and Mslexia.
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.
Kelley White, a Pediatrician, has worked in inner city
Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite
Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent collection
is No. Hope Street (Kelsay Books). She received a 2008
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.
Simon Williams (www.simonwilliams.info)
has been writing since his teens, when he was mentored at university by Roger
McGough and Pete Morgan. His first collection was published in 1981. Since
then, he has had eight further books and his 10th, The
Pickers and Other Tales, from Vole, was published in February 2024.
Simon was elected The Bard of Exeter in 2013.
Patrick Yarker lives in mid-Norfolk and teaches
sporadically at the University of East Anglia. His poems have appeared in
magazines including Dream Catcher, Obsessed With Pipework, The Frogmore
Papers, The North and The Rialto. In
2010 Happenstance Press published a handful of his poems in a sampler
edition.
