Bio: Aaron Bowker – based in the United States is a super self-critical Virgo, walking a path between worlds while dabbling in art, photography, and poetry. Poems have been featured in Failed Haiku, Cold Moon Journal, The Wombwell Rainbow, and Heterodox Haiku Journal, with art and poetry featured in The Hooghly Review, The Wombwell Rainbow, and Black & White Haifa/Haisha.
Special thank you to Jerome Berglund for being my mentor and pushing me to limits otherwise unexplored.
thousands of beats
creating the hum
of music
overwhelming waves
blissfully drowning
in music
spring’s canvas
splattered with a painter’s
yellow brush
worn out six string
millions of stories to share
that are out of tune
Thank you for considering my art and poetry.
Bio: Barbara Anna Gaiardoni is an italian pedagogist, author, doodler, ex-violinist and former swimmer.
She have participated in national literary and poetic competitions, obtaining the publication of her texts; currently publishes Japanese poem on the international trade journals.
Drawing and walking in nature are his passions.
Her motto is “I can, I must, I will do it”.
@BGaiardoni (Twitter)
barbara.gaiardoni (Facebook)
*
smiling the old butterfly
emerges from the shadows -
her last supper
*
to smoke in the field
infested with nettles...
how to kill the time
*
there is only
a flight to oblivion -
little fireflies
my pretty name
on your lips–
dawn birdsong
traversing
my poem on the screen–
a cockroach!
dawnlight–
two in the care home
yelling together
the poem’s ending
also its beginning–
enso circle
living the dream–
the suburban house cat
squinting
daydreaming
in an attic room–
think outside the box
the bird
who flew in last night
dead by the coke machine
a pink tree
that's not sakura–
only pinker
Bio Note: I write free verses, rhyming poems, and Japanese short form poetry, some of which saw the light of day in journals like Alien Buddha Zine, Spillwords, and Cajun Mutt Press, Fevers of the Mind Press. I am also a Jeopardy fan.
Q1: When did you start writing and who has influenced you the most?
Mo: I started writing poetry in my teens, in the 1980s, and into the 90s after university, but I stopped in the mid-90s while pursuing an acting career (unsuccessfully). I started writing poetry again following the EU referendum vote here in the UK in June 2016, writing a bit and participating in Hammer and Tongue slams in Oxford. Between Brexit and Trump, I was very angry and scared and I started to become bitter, and the handful of poetry I wrote during that time reflects those feelings. I started writing haiku during the first lockdown after recovering from Covid at the very start of the pandemic, as a coping strategy and because it felt manageable through the brain fog, a short form. Brevity is not my strong suit, and it can take me quite a while of talking to find a way to express difficult emotions. Haiku connected me to the natural world and also helped me process very difficult feelings in a healthy, direct way. Haiku and the right friends coming into (and in some cases, back into) my life at the right time helped me steer away from bitterness.
As far as for who influenced me, there wasn’t one particular poet, I just liked poetry. I loved lyrics, too, when they are so well written they weave within the music. The first poem I remember really getting jazzed about was Shelley’s OZYMANDIAS. I love the haiku masters. As for currently, oh there are so many I’ve come across on Twitter I don’t even know where to start…
Q2: Any pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
Mo: No, I’ve always liked writing, but I’ve struggled with focus through the years, and it was difficult for me to pursue it as a career path. I write now to connect. That keeps me focused, and I feel more a part of a greater whole. Poets seem to me almost like the writing equivalent of jazz musicians.
Q3: Who has helped you the most with writing and career?
Mo: That is hard, as I don’t really feel I have a career. The person who definitely gets the most credit is my friend Dan Holloway (an amazing human all around). He encouraged me to get back into writing and come along to the poetry slams in Oxford in 2016. In my latest phase, in the past two years, I credit Nikki Dudley (MumWrite and Streetcake Magazine) as well as the many poets I have met in the poetry community on Twitter, generously sharing their work, their process and their support. Damien Donnelly and Gaynor Kane recently gave my poetry a boost by including one of my pieces in The Storms inaugural journal in August 2022, which was a BIG boost. The poetry communities on Twitter have been a pure gift.
Q4: Where did you grow up and how did that influence you? Have any travels influenced your work?
Mo: I grew up in Doylestown, PA, Bucks County, outside of Philadelphia. It was a rural area when we first moved there, which became a suburb by the time I was a teenager, a pretty but boring small town filled with mixed memories. I can’t spend more than 4 days there before my skin feels like it starts to crawl. It’s a place I left, and have no desire to return to, even to visit. I remember making my mind up at 10 years old that I was going to move to NYC and then to London – two dreams that did come true. My travels have influenced my work in that they’ve given me a sense of who I am apart from the huge Irish Catholic family I grew up in. And, of course, all the different experiences I’ve had when I’ve travelled, different customs, landscapes, experiences, etc., all got stored in my memory and are there to draw on.
Q5: What do you consider your most meaningful work creatively to you?
Mo: I’ve been writing haiku daily since June 2020, and that is a sort of creative baseline for me now, part of my DNA it seems almost. I walk every day, I haiku every day, this I feel is most meaningful because it has helped my mental and emotional health throughout the lockdowns, and continues to do so. It is like a springboard, which I am just now starting to spring a bit from.
Q6: What is a favorite line/stanza from your writings?
Mo: I don’t have one.
Q7: What kind of music inspires you the most? What is a song or songs that always come back to you as an inspiration?
Mo: I love jazz and could listen to it forever without getting sick of it. I like blues a lot, too, but my soul runs out of patience with blues after a point in a way it doesn’t with jazz. Jazz changed so much through the decades that it’s like many different incarnations of itself that also seem separate. It’s ever-evolving. It’s alive, collaborative, includes improvisation and creative freedom, and it often conjures for me distinct moods that help me write, especially in those magic moments where it seems to evoke an emotional memory that I did not actually ever experience. It gets my imagination going. I have my moods, lately especially, where I just want to listen to McCartney songs. I loved him as a teen, and sometimes I just need to hide in those old songs, Beatles, Wings, his solo stuff. He was my retreat as a teenager, and lately, it’s been helpful to retreat into his music again. I feel safe there.
Q8: Favorite activities to relax?
Mo: I’m terrible at relaxing. I am not good at sitting still. Not in a way that leads to anything productive half the time, just restless. Walking and hiking help, and I love just sitting and staring into the ocean, but don’t get much opportunity to do that, living near a river and not a coast.
Q9: Do you have any recent or upcoming books, events, projects that you’d like to promote?
Mo: Well, again, I was in the inaugural print issue of The Storms, that’s Damien Donnelly who does the Eat the Storms poetry podcasts. That was the most recent one.
Bio: I’m a ‘born-again poet’ living in Oxfordshire, UK. I started participating in writing prompt challenges on Twitter during the summer of 2020, then took some courses with @MumWrite, then participated in various other readings, launches and workshops since then, online. Since August 2020, I’ve been published in Irisi Magazine (http://www.irisi-magazine.org/healing/healing-haikus-and-senryus-by-maureen-schoenfeld), The Best Haiku 2021 Anthology and the upcoming The Best Haiku 2022 Anthology (https://haikucrush.com/), Tiny Wren Lit (https://www.tinywrenlit.com/intentions) and several times on Pure Haiku’s blog (https://purehaiku.wordpress.com/). I’ve appeared in print in ‘Poetry in 13: Volume 3 (2020)’ and ‘From One Line: Volume 2’ (2021). One of my micro-poems appears in Eat The Storms podcast’s inaugural issue of The Storms later this month, published by the creators of the Eat the Storms poetry podcast. Twitter: @MoSchoenfeld
when flies walk upon my forearm hairs
proprietorial as landlords
and the land is ripe with roadkill
extreme weather scenarios
play out in real time
climate diplomats gather
but the plenary is beached -
delegates cloyed
as wasps in coulis
we sit around
the water table
with an ashen thirst
everybody wants to make a move
but no one does
like watching the bleaching of coral
the only thing agreed on
is that all this is unprecedented
unprecedented rainfall here
unprecedented temperatures there
unprecedented use of the word unprecedented everywhere
in high summer
the deluge
the canicule
the conflagration
ants grow fat
grow wings
buzz my ears
we pick at
the brittle wishbone
of consensus
wait for crows
locusts
to draw down the dusk
with a dry calling
We Are Green
One winter’s day
through condensation windows
I mistook a withered gunnera leaf
for a heron’s wing.
Imagined the bird
coiled, primal,
waiting at the water.
Months later,
in the veiled sphere
under a summer gunnera plant,
I imagined myself
small,
deep in zoological realms
below explosions
of virid strong-stemmed leaves
as wide as the sky,
blush flower spikes
pushing up and through.
Today
in seasons of indeterminate grey
when squirrels
do not know
which page
of the nut calendar
we are on,
it is the verdure
I return to.
I daydream of a kinder world.
Daylight and rainfall
elect a parliament of plants.
An upper house of trees.
We are green,
enfranchised.
XY (No Means No)
X.
Doctor Foster
went to Gloucester
in a shower of rain.
Fred and Rose
they quit town
but left a nasty stain.
That’s Fred West -
more than a sex pest.
Did unspeakable things
in his dirty vest.
Y.
Cycling past
the rape seed fields
brings it all back.
The yellow so vivid,
you lying on your back.
The yellow, the horror,
you want to be home,
but find yourself
involuntary, prone.
He seemed ok at first,
he said he’d drop you back.
The stony ground remains
no aphrodisiac.
You shut your eyes
your demon’s back,
slow, stupid in the sack.
And No Means No
involuntary
lying on your back.
Choose Your Own Mother(for Rhianydd Daniel)
I have heard it said
the yet unborn
can choose their parents.
A strange idea, this.
Although we live in times
when nothing is
beyond belief.
If it is true..
If it is true,
I ask myself
the reason
I chose you.
Indecisive as I am,
and daresay was
before my birth,
there is a scenario
in which I am at peace.
Wherein, unborn,
I somehow hear
your singing voice.
And from that time
I have no choice.
sand in your blood
I remember when
you scraped your leg on coral..
a rose rust bloomed raw
under your skin..the
sea was a blister the moon
was a bruise.. all night
your fever rose and
fell..lava tides licked feral
flames..sand in your blood
Ad Astra Zee
I am waiting for my blood
to clot. Broad beans
block green veins,
velvet furred.
I am ripe
for it.
One day my feet
will be corms,
shoehorned
in stony ground.
My soles are up
for it.
Hey Astra Zee!
I want my
second dose
already.
I am weary
of this solid flesh
my veins
so unimpeded.
Bring on the levelling dark.
I am ready, pale horse
for your clip-clop.
For blood clots.
Bolt, beauteous breathlessness!
Bolt, cramping throbbing pain
stampeded!
the paranoia shop
sells mini cctv
for the home or handbag
sells cctv any size you need
hard-sells hard knuckle dusters
and knives all shapes and sizes
beyond imagination
for your perfect tribulation
they say carrying a knife
puts you more at risk of a stabbing
but the stab-proof vests are on offer today
see the cute hand guns
to fit your hand just so
the paranoia shop
nestled between Gaultier and Kenzo
I love to window shop there
It makes me feel so safe
worm haiku
exit wounds out of
apples, soldiers, the worm out
of one the bullet
Perfect Bed
I dream I am at Bembom Brothers
Dreamland funfair park
with Tracey Emin.
Hard by Margate sands.
I know I shouldn’t drink that Vodka
on the Helter Skelter.
Apart from that,
a Day as Perfect as the Lou Reed song.
We Kiss with Fish and Chips Lips,
Join Hips. A Turner Sunset
Going Down.
I guess it is the Golden Hour.
Blair’s Babes
and even some of his men MP’s
are busy Changing a whole heap of things
for the Better.
Back in your room
we remember that
we even Changed the Bed this morning.
The linen soft and cool next to our Optimistic skin.
(This poem has previously appeared online in iamb-wave seven)
Going back
I went back, and it looked the same.
I was not expecting that.
Expected the usual rash of
New Builds, creeping up the hill.
I went back, thinking
it would all look smaller, like
when I came back from America
aged 19, and it seemed like the train
home had shrunk
in a B movie.
I went back
looking for what?
The muddy lane where
we skidded our scooters?
The neighbour’s garden gnome
one of us pushed in his pond?
The Fish Caves, where we played
explorers? Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
or at least
some way in
to that disused tin mine.
I went back, not to look for
my Dad, just some of the places
he used to take us.
Halfway between morbid
and curious.
I went back to the old conker trees
and the scraped knees. To the
broken fence on Bishop’s Wood Road,
where it said No Trespassing
but my Dad said we’d be alright.
I went back to the old quarry
with the pond we thought was a lake.
I’m channeling a half-
remembered sense of comfort,
danger. Somewhere between
Teddy Bears and Teddy Boys.
I went back to stacking
boxes of seaside rock
at Woolworths.
Each stick had writing all the way through,
persistent as memory.
From up on the hill
you can see it all.
The only thing different
is wind turbines out at sea,
turning like time.
I remember a school master who left.
All of a sudden. The smell
of that old classroom
at the end of the dark
corridor. Scuffed floor wax.
Thanks Sylvia for the Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton Challenge
You married Ted, slapped
cobweb faced British poetry,
long overdue
Bio: Ivor Daniel lives in Gloucestershire, UK. His poems have appeared in A Spray of Hope,
wildfire words, Steel Jackdaw, Writeresque, iamb~wave seven, Fevers of the Mind, The
Trawler, Roi Fainéant, Ice Floe Press and The Dawntreader. He has poems forthcoming in
After..., Re-Side, Alien Buddha, The Orchard Lea Anthology (Cancer) and The Crump’s Barn
Anthology (Halloween). .
@IvorDaniel
Fevers of the Mind 