i take the open top bus for the aquarium to bring snow to the seahorse in tank 56 who never believes me it would be gone by the time you arrived i explained again wiping my eyes and powdering my nose before emerging from the submarine I click the compact closed and fail to notice the glimpse of a seahorse determined to stowaway and see the snow from the top deck
the journalist
reporting from the frontline
wears no poppy
Sara Winteridge
You stay by the swings waiting for my covering fire. ‘Run’ I shout, before you thunder over, my oak rifle keeping the soldier on top of the slide occupied for a few seconds. Hiding by the tree in the corner of the park we ready ourselves for action. The Bolivian Army gathers at the park gates; outnumbering us, two against two hundred. ‘I suggest we go to the beach if we get out of this, Sundance’ I remark. ‘They have any ice creams down there, Butch?’ you answer before we charge from our shelter….Fuego! Fuego! Fuego!
freeze frame…
I wish we could hold the pose
a little longer
Tim Gardiner
Tonight I am bothered by the ticking clock. There must be a trick to counting sheep that I’ve not been told. To resist the nagging noises of a house worn down—its creaking 2-by-4s recite the reasons to keep standing, which may include a wrong one. I’m just the sort of madman to slip down the hall and rewrite iambs into allegories—hey old man poet, old Metronome clock, something has gone wrong tonight, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
outcast sleepwalker
climbing over barbed-wire dreams
into America
Bob Haynes
Ye Olde Cock Tavern –
I order fish & chips
and keep my hat on
I ask the young waitress:
“If I were a British gentleman should I take my hat off?”
“Don’t know” – her lovely Russian smile
Next day I meet Bill.
Bill is British, born in Cornwall, his father is Welsh, his mother is Scottish.
Bill is a lawyer.
I present to Bill the “hat in the pub” case.
Bill looks down at my hat (he’s 7 feet high) and pronounces the verdict:
HATS, ONLY OUTSIDE!
Ye Olde Cock Tavern –
I order fish & chips
and take my hat off
Freddy Ben-Arroyo
There’s a bug on the window. It’s very small. So small, in fact, I can’t see if it’s inside or out. With a kleenex, I squeeze hard into where the bug should be. But it remains. On the other side. Like nothing had happened at all.
lunar eclipse
I leave another
message
Dave Read
Dreams flash on the screen of my half-shut eyelids like multi-coloured slides mounted on an automated reel. In a conical beam of grey-white light; illuminating each blood corpuscle that comes in its path, the way sun rays light up the dust motes.Through the narrow slits of my sleep-doused eyes I watch them escape. They appear as masses of cloud-shaped white candy floss with specks of silver here and there…fine knit with gossamer strands of desire and wisps of wishes. During the REM each of these are being pushed out by the darting eyeballs: one fluff after another.
These dream-clouds seem to be looking for a way out of the house. Some lay flattened as white splotches on a window pane; some get lodged in the ventilation ducts of the air conditioner while some get choked in the chimney. The tinier ones make it through the door gaps or key holes. Floating upward like helium balloons, all of them attempt to cross the clouds before sunrise, as if they glow only while it is dark.
In the charcoal skies, higher they soar till all that remains of them is a tiny twinkling speck. Now such run-away dreams defy gravity and orbit somewhere in the cosmos where nothing can shatter them.
clay pot
the night drips away
in quietude
Yesha Shah
wings once spread across an open ocean
now you’re all at sea
a slick-wrecked mariner
floundering in filthy lacquer
coated like a toffee apple
pitched onto a foreign shore
tarred and feathered by crude causality
frightful and forlorn
down to earth
the unhappy medium
David J Kelly
A dragonfly is inside me. I usually don’t notice it. Sometimes though, its crisp wings brush my ribs. I feel the vibrato and, if it is quiet, hear the tiny, xylophone chimes.
heartbeat
white noise
in the o.r.
Dave Read
You would follow the sound of my voice.
Hey, how was your day?
You are in a field of swaying grass.
Just the usual, nothing new or exciting. How was yours?
The colour of fresh green caresses your skin.
Pretty much the same. Listen. I know this might be a wrong time but I have been meaning to ask this . . . Is there someone else in your life?
Bathed in the soft sunlight, you open your eyes and there is a lake in front of you.
Please. Say something. Just say that it’s a figment of my imagination. That we have been married far too long and this mundanity is . . . I don’t know. Just natural!
Look at that stone by its embankment. You are that stone.
It’s not. I didn’t know how to say it. But I can’t lie anymore. I met her on a flight.
Can you feel yourself basking in the warmth of the sun.
And she makes me want things and do stuff I never had or did before. Never even believed I could have.
Now you would enter the lake with me. Feel the water enveloping you.
Somehow she makes me feel excited about life itself.
And there is nothing in the world other than the coolness of water all around you. No sound, except the deep silence.
She is everything you and I could never be.
Let yourself sink deep.
Are you there?
Deeper
Can you hear me?
Deeper
Deeper
spring cleaning –
dusting the cobwebs
from my shadow
Paresh Tiwari
Helen Buckingham
(‘colonoscopy’, The Asahi Haikuist Network, 20th February 2015; ‘results limbo’, Sonic Boom 3, August 2015)
the other bunny 