The art is hidden for now. I have obeyed too long.
I feel frozen. While my possession eats the heat.
Where have you gone? Slid behind the clouds?
Perfumed doors. Rooms go from stale to rancid blindness.
I feel bloodless. Accidental and lost a shine. Pale funeral songs.
The black dresses are now my misery
These, that dance above me twisting. Swing dancing into a hex.
All ghosts, all witchery.
Former waves that blew the knives over us and dared us to swim the lake.
Dim are my eyes and bones that have chalked.
As Jacques sings "Ma mort attend comme"
I hold all the flowers, I hold all the crippled photographs.
Elderly and young photos. Fortune tellers in the clouds.
Deafening light from outside. I want the puniness of a weak night.
No hardening storm. No flooding streets and screaming thunder.
They, the geese she'd use to fly over me. I felt lucky to have them.
A new direction. To escape them. To escape him. To escape the cage of screams.
Those 8 Geese of Hanover that kept hovering me.
My guardian angels I would welcome them to my melting wax home.
I wonder now if they were truly demon. Explosions, the apple and all.
As now alone and severed I feel that they are the same as these hauntings.
I watch 8 black dresses hover over me now.
But they in these garments, they bite. The geese have transitioned their colours.
I awake to scissor teeth marks on my skin. So they are heaving to me the curse. Still. The Curse. Always that curse.
Do holy bibles hiss?
Is my god a blonde bombshell?
Is my god a tornado?
Is my god a magical bearded fabulous genius?
Is my god a chirping cricket?
Is my god a newborn baby?
Is my god a morphine drip?
My revelation is a promise?
Le deuxième ange sonna de la trompette
befitting. closing eyes.
staring into darkness, rippled waters I feel in the air of this room.
Leave the lake, become my misery.
In this room that pain stares at me.
Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.
Robin McNamara is an Irish poet. Hisdebut chapbook Under a Mind’s Staircasewas published in June 2021 (Hedgehog Poetry Press UK). His forthcoming full collection, Monochrome Heart is being published in late 2022. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for ‘Apple Picking Season’from Under a Mind’s Staircase.
Postcard From an Exiled Heart
I watched a documentary on North Korea
the day after you said,
My heart is unwatered.
I learnt about a different culture
in another world with another perspective
on life. It reminded me of you.
When my iPhone trills with your
good morning text. I can’t help but think
of Janus, the god of beginnings and endings.
We’ve lived lives of regrets and if we could
do it all again. I don’t think we would
have done anything different,
while at fifty we still react to half a heart.
One part eaten by men of her past the other
half, seedless and barren.
The Waste of Minds
When the light is softer in the morning
A gasp of an autumn day appears
Awoken from slumber and summer heat
Which cools to early dark evenings again.
A bed of leaves at my feet a promise
Of living room fire and books of poetry.
The seasons are changing but my words;
They do no such thing to the minds that
Refuse to flow. I could die today and perhaps
People will say he was a fine man but alas
The smartphone is more powerful than death
and has domain over lives lived / unloved
Our demise passes no resemblance to fast lives
Unthinking past the absent scrolling.
A semblance of hope remains in our poetry
In defiance of the age of the waste of minds.
Auguries in the Water
you
are an old-aged rained river
submerged in susurration of
a memory lucent
with hope
that lasted until winter
you
are a sliver of light emerging
from summer water
the jumping salmon just an augury
long gone the body is water
the flow of skin and the submerged heart
like driftwood the river floods
memories into mud silt coarse
with bone the ebb of an autumn
tide slowly tugs at the moorings
holding the reminiscences of
you
Lipstick, of course
cherries in the snow
and other pretty red things
tulips and poppies
though I’ve never written
about either, until now
does this mention count?
A birthday month, October
those Libran scales
that balancing act.
Trees, yes trees
and the sea
and the moon
always room for the moon
but what of hearts
bruised and broken
we know hearts
Sylvia and I.
For more follow Eileen's site http://www.eileencarneyhulme.org.uk/
Twitter: @strokingtheair
Eileen has Three poetry books published Stroking The Air 2005 (bluechrome) The Space Between Rain 2010 The Stone Messenger 2015 both published by Indigo Dreams.
You found your beekeeper that February morning,
in the London gray,
silencing your confessions.
Carbon monoxide just a wet towel away from your most esteemed epitaphs.
The cathodes could not eradicate the ache,
your albatross,
your only affliction that no man could climb beyond.
His grasp so dire,
you could not refrain from his grievous beacon,
succumbing to his grim demand.
Bio: Jessica Weyer Bentley is an poet, author, and public speaker. Her first collection of poetry, Crimson Sunshine, was published in May 2020 by AlyBlue Media. She has contributed work to several publications for the Award-Winning Book Series, Grief Diaries, including Poetry and Prose, and Hit by a Drunk Driver. Jessica’s work has been anthologized in Women Speak Vol. 6 (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Summer Gallery of Shoes (Highland Park Poetry), Common Threads 2020 Edition (Ohio Poetry Association), Appalachian Witness Volume 24 (Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel) and Made and Dream (Of Rust and Glass), Psalms of the Alien Buddha Part 2 (Alien Buddha) and online blogs including Global Poemic and Fevers of the Mind Poetry Showcase and a Wolfpack Contributor 2022. She recently was featured in her first magazine entitled Summer 2022 (Of Rust and Glass). She is currently penning her second collection, Down Below Where the Canary Sings slated to be out in 2023. Jessica currently resides in Northwest Ohio.
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