The future’s inconceivable. The past is irretrievable. So all we have is now: that’s it, yet half the time we miss that bit.
*****
Richard Fleming writes: “Four short lines, two rhyming couplets, succinct, hopefully not preachy, just something that we need to take to heart and not forget.”
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/
Remember rage the way we used to love it and what mad masks we wore when we began. Think of the shrieking eagle on our van, the decal, with its wings aflame and our prophetic name, The Downward Spiral, the viral expansion of it, the perks and packed arenas before the groupies got between us, the label dropped us, and the fad wound down.
Boys, since this bar is in a nowhere town let’s pound out, with our amps cranked up to ten, sincerer tribute to the angry art than we could handle at our start. The blasphemy we hurled against the world back then was out of season. Now we have damned good reason to smash things up like ruined men, and all my lyrics will be from the heart.
*****
Aaron Poochigian writes: “I played in punk bands in high school and college and wrote that poem after I had gone all-in on poetry. I imagined what it would be like to get back together with my former band-mates at a later age. ‘Reunion Show’ is one of the first poems in which I let the nonce form discover itself with various line lengths and rhyme scheme. I tried to just let it all come together. Here is another later one like that: https://newcriterion.com/article/happy-birthday-herod/“
Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and Poetry. aaronpoochigian.com americandivine.net
Half of my favorite works of fanfiction are stories that anesthetize the pain produced by the original’s depiction of harsh events: the person whom the main character loved who met a tragic end is resurrected in the fan-made sequel; the star-crossed couple gets a chance to mend, and consummate, a bond that has no equal.
The other half are stories that prolong the pain and also boost its magnitude deliciously until my nerves all tingle: near-misses multiply, and roadblocks throng; epiphanies loom close yet still elude; misunderstandings keep our heroes single.
*****
Jenna Le writes: “I believe there’s been a fair amount of published scholarship in recent years about fanfiction and fanfiction culture. I admit I’m not up-to-date on any of it, really, and am only really conversant with such aspects of it as I have personally chanced to encounter. I can only say there seems to have been recent movement toward increased legitimization of the field: in 2019, one of the prestigious Hugo Awards for speculative fiction was awarded to a body of fan-work/transformational work, for instance. Just as for other flavors of fiction, there are probably infinitely many ways to classify and subclassify fanfiction. Novelist Naomi Novik‘s work and interviews are maybe a good place to start looking, for people curious to learn more.”
You are the butterfly whose wings stir up a rainfall in Peru. The tropic fern unfurled that brings an earthquake in Tibet is you.
The cry bursting from blackbirds’ throats that turns the tide on Iceland’s shore is you, and Sahara’s dusty motes rosing the sunset in Lahore.
Who is the breath of an infant’s sigh that sparks the heart of a unicorn? The rock streaking the moonless sky that wafts a feather around Cape Horn?
You, the invisible silver thread between Zanzibar and Amsterdam. Even by thought unlimited, whatever the you may be, I am.
*****
Barbara Loots writes: “On my way to copy out the poem I meant to send you, I ran across this one. It has appeared only once in print, so I decided to give it another chance at immortality. Love is too small a word to contain the energy field of creation, evolution, and eternity. But this little verse (published in my second collection Windshift, from Kelsay Books, 2018) helps connect me with ‘whatever the you may be‘ right here and now.”
Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. She is a frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her three collections are Road Trip (2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020), at Kelsay Books or Amazon. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com
The sun is always setting, always setting on your day; you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away. Do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn? Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?
The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled; but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world: it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land, and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.
The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds; and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set, and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.
The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice; I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.
*****
The winter solstice and the turning of the calendar drive a feeling of sunset that I can’t shake. I may be fit, still climbing trees and running on beaches, but at 74 there is both an awareness of gradual decline and a recognition that you can only hope for another 20 years with a fair amount of luck. “And of my three score years and ten, / None of them will come again…” as it were. That’s the personal bit.
Add to that the strongest country in (and quondam leader of) the world, breaking everything into pieces and throwing them all up in the air with no idea of how anything will land and what will be broken; taking all branches of the federal government (including unfortunately the Supreme Court) and those of half the states and just piling them up for a bonfire.
Add the possibility of runaway AI (such as concerns Harari) being jumpstarted by the Luciferic billionaire firestarter… and it feels like the End of the World.
But let’s be reasonable: it always feels like the end of the world, at least to those no longer in their youth. Because it is, for them. (For us. For me.) Jesus saying the end of the world would come within that generation… Last Days prophecies bubbling up in all religions… Preppers expecting nuclear war, ethnic uprising, climate catastrophe overnight… Doomsday is always imminent, and yet things keep going; just not as before… This is the End of the World as we know it, but will not be as we expected it. (And always the unfortunate eternal evils, regardless of era: Israelis committing genocide on Palestinians since the days of Deuteronomy, and so on.)
I swear there is a highly ambivalent poem in there somewhere, but I haven’t dug it out yet. But hey… Happy 2025!
The seasons flow from much too hot to warm; the moon balloons from farther south to north. I struggle with myself to catch sunrise; I shiver at sunset as darkness dawns. Two clouds drift by in stillness as in dream. My mind makes small confessions in the dark. I wander through this ordinary night discovering new doubts about myself. The weather of my moods, not too extreme; the climate of my life in crisis blooms. The winter days grow short; my life, too long. My understanding pales beneath the moon. We creatures who’ve evolved to change the world have not evolved enough to change ourselves.
*****
Peggy Landsman writes: “It did take me quite a while to make the transition from Berkeley, California, but now, after twenty-one years in South Florida, I’m finally over my culture shock. I love walking on the beach and swimming in the ocean when the water temperature is at least 80°. I love the birds I see more of here than in other places: ibises, egrets, herons, ospreys, pelicans, etc. And I get all the culture I need for free from my local public county library. If they don’t have a movie, cd, or book on their shelves, they order it through ILL (inter-library loan). I spend most of my time writing and hanging out with my favorite other person. What more could any septuagenarian poet want? Also: The poem was first published under the slightly shorter title “Before Another Winter Solstice in South Florida” in the Winter 2024 issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal. And, by the way, that’s a very friendly journal for formal poetry. Thanks, Karen and Jenna!”
Peggy Landsman is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2024), and three other books, including the poetry chapbook Our Words, Our Worlds (Kelsay Books, 2021). She lives in South Florida where she spends as much time as possible at the beach. To learn more about her and her work, visit: https://peggylandsman.wordpress.com/
If this isn’t what you’ve yearned for or indeed what you are craving then cup your hands, drink deeply of a sweeter misbehaving.
If you cannot find your wine inside the glass that you were given, taste the new with eyes and thighs and dye your lips a deep vermillion
with a juice that has been pressed from vines let grow out of control that taste of summertime and sex and drugs and rock and roll
because if you…
find distaste in your final breath dressed in another’s ill fit clothes remember, this did not just happen sweetheart, this is what you chose.
*****
Lindsay McLeod is an Australian poet that has won a few things and is widely published. He just had to start messing about with words again lately. You’d think he’d know better by now, but oh no. Some of his most recent work can be found in DILLYDOUN REVIEW, GRAND LIL THINGS, DRAWN TO THE LIGHT, POETiCA and MORTAL MAGAZINE.
RHL: In addition to Mr McLeod’s self-description, let me add that I have been trying and failing to contact him. I don’t even have permission to post this poem. If anyone can put me in touch with him, I would be grateful.
Dog-skinny, winter’s mangy sun Slinks between clouds. A West Indian dog – there are none such here in the UK …. Nor, there, such mangy suns.
*****
Some people equate a good Christmas with a family walk in the snow, others with family time on a beach. It all depends on what you grow up with, doesn’t it? With my first twelve years being on islands with palm trees, it has remained difficult for me in my decades of climate exile to appreciate more than a month or two of bleaker weather at a time. ‘Home Thoughts from the North’ was originally published in Snakeskin – thanks, George Simmers!
Best wishes for an appropriately weathered Merry Christmas to all… and apologies to Eliza for subjecting her to non-Canadian winters for so many years!
The shortest day is soon. Time for a pact. I don’t mean with Saint Lucy (Lucy’s day falls earlier in the month). But hey let’s meet and talk and counteract such darkness of the heart as coincides with winter’s formal start. We can read Donne’s ‘Nocturnal’, view its art, its provenance and what on earth it means. Location doesn’t matter. We have screens.
Nobody writes a poem now like that — not something so precise and well controlled. Of course, we hear what we are told: the world is round, a rhyme is flat, ‘poetics’ have moved on and these days no-one wants to write like Donne who was amazing, right? But dead and gone. Or not that dead. I’d say he’s still alive in stanza three and certainly in five.
They call Donne ‘metaphysical’, you know, a word still popular in jacket blurbs for living, writing bards where verbs (or verbiage) propel the flow but hard now to be sure whether they mean what Johnson meant. The more ‘meta’ you get with blurbs, the more obscure. When ‘metaphysical’ foretells a treat it might be true; it might be mere conceit.
But in ‘Nocturnal’, metaphor leans out and mystifies. It’s not the usual thing like glass or compasses or string. It’s nothing. No thing. Less than nowt. He says what he is not in several different ways. In fact, the knot of nothingness becomes his central plot. The poet in him can’t forget that ‘none’, his rhyme for ‘run’, echoes both ‘sun’ and ‘Donne’.
So he’s the sum of everything he feels: annihilated by the loss of one without whom he is not a man, just numb. And yet he still appeals to logic to make clear how dark existence is. Yes, she was dear. Each syllable recounts her loss, his fear, and this is now and then and now, since this both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.
*****
Helena Nelson writes: “In 1617 when, after the death of his wife, John Donne wrote ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day’, St Lucy’s Day coincided with the winter solstice in the author’s hemisphere. Then they changed the calendar, and these days, Saint Lucy’s Day is 13 December. But the winter solstice falls over a week later (this year 21 December).
“Every year on the solstice, I think about John Donne’s solstice poem, every year it gets more apposite, since it is essentially about death. Last year, I did a formal online discussion about it, and I wrote an invitation using the form that is Donne’s, though obviously for a less serious purpose. It allowed me to think it through. I’m thinking about the poem again today, so here’s the invitation.”
Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.
The neighbor’s child has built a muddy shrine to Satan in our yard. And I’m supposed to cut the lawn? OK, but look at those croquet clubs that she used (good God, they’re mine) to pound her pentagrams of chicken bone into the ground. The handles are unscrewed from all the hammer heads. It’s kind of shrewd the way she placed that PlayskoolTM telephone.
Still, little girls should not touch garden tools or take the plastic rake out of the shed– she’s tied it with those jump ropes to the tree. A shattered flower pot. The Barbie head. Horrific how this child has learned the rules of Belial for sculpting in debris.
*****
Rick Mullin writes: “The little girl, A., is a friend of our family and was one of three girls that spent most days playing in our yard. One day they split up, each doing their own thing in their own corner of the yard. The Shrine to Satan, as I called it, was crafted by A. The architect of the horror described in this poem is getting married today.”
Rick Mullin’s poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including American Arts Quarterly, Measure, The New Criterion, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, Epiphany, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. ‘Shrine to Satan’ is from his chapbook “Aquinas Flinched”, Exot books, 2008. His books include Soutine and Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle (Dos Madres Press, 2012 and 2014), Lullaby and Wheel (Kelsay Books, 2019), and Huncke (second edition, Exot Books, 2021). He is a painter and retired journalist living in northern New Jersey. His website is rickmullin.com and his art blog is onlyofobjects.wordpress.com
Form in Formless Times 