Hill Haven

The poet’s father on his tractor, by Bill Clark

By Carol Barrett:

After a poem by Craig van Rooyen

They aren’t moles. I’m told nights are too cold for moles in the high desert. Then what -- gophers? Ground hogs? Prairie dogs? In the damp soil west of the Cascades, moles were plentiful as robins. My father got his supply of traps at yard sales for two bits, some farmer having given up the harvest ghost. Whenever hills popped up, he’d dig down a few inches and lay them in, warn us to stay clear. He didn’t want an ankle enmeshed in the gears, a toddler’s curious hand clamped to the earth. When he got one, he’d announce it supper-time, bury the sleek body in the apple orchard, or along the edge of the woods, where alder leaves made for soft mulch.

I never looked one in the eye. But I spotted plenty of mounds, out digging potatoes or tearing corn from the stalk, peeling broad squash leaves back for a golden bonanza. One year a new ordinance forbid trapping them, on account of cruelty to animals. My father kept up his solution despite the risk. He figured, more humane than shooting them, and no law against that. He was especially perturbed when they dug up the lawn, clipped short for picnics of a summer evening, cedar table re-varnished every five or six years to restore what wind and rain had roughed up. The trap wasn’t an instant success. You had to wait for the critter to come up for air. It could take days, even weeks.

Here my hidden low-lifes stay quiet all winter, perhaps hibernating. But come spring, their handiwork pops up all over the yard. I scoop lush mounds into flowerpots for the pine seedlings that spring from ample cones. The soil is just right – combed and softened, free of roots, fine as biscuit dough. When I first started repurposing their primordial heaps, I feared I might slice one with the shovel, but it’s never happened. They dig their tunneled dugouts well below the planted surface. And they won’t cave in. When I tamp the excavated soil down, the lawn is flat as before the latest hill happened. In time the grass will spread across the brown moon, fill in with the help of whirling sprinkler.

We manage to co-exist. These creatures save their building frenzy for late at night when I’m already tuckered. When I open the door to a new day, I may find another hill to salvage for my tree farm, small but growing on the back deck. Sometimes I’m blessed with two or three, yards apart, a quick jaunt with the garden cart, sun on my neck. Life goes on as usual underground, my father’s ashes on a tunneled slope. He is getting acquainted with new friends, inviting them to watch reruns of Perry Mason, where it all turns out okay in the end, his pipe smoke mingling with the damp and porous earth.

***
Carol Barrett coordinates the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University. She has published two volumes of poetry and one of creative nonfiction. A former NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has lived in nine states and in England. She currently resides in the high desert of central Oregon. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, and in over fifty anthologies.

Frome Song

By Jen Green:

Pressure pulls me through pores of limestone, feeling lighter and into daylight,
where I begin overground, and half underground, I spring 
under a sycamore tree, a quiet nursery and gently, I tumble crawl, 
feel my way, joined up puddles in a green grass pasture 
where sheep nibble and drink under shade, 
young trees protected by fencing Private Property Keep Out. 
I was privatised and constrained, landscaped into ponds and pools and 
frivolous cascades, under the eye of a house made of sugar,
slave sweat sugar, stolen. I slide away to hide in depth and shadow, I go slow, 
I go quiet, glide steady, covering up with thick threads of ivy, my presence 
in the fields is given away by water-willed willow trees. 
I am a little cloudy, which suits the crayfish tickling my mud bed, two signals 
on two claws, surface sinking. Cows come to cool off, mixing mud 
with their two toes, clearing plants to let light in, warming 
my shallow waters. I am the boundary between barley, 
I am not a straight line on the map of ownership, I give to one and 
take from the other.

The suburbs grew out to meet me and I had to be straight, 
like a drainage ditch roadside, houses set up aside me, 
mills were wheeling me, now I’m more leisurely.
In Yate, houses like to look at me, people like to sit by me, stroll by 
and check up on me: ‘Slow flowing.’ ‘Slow flowing? Not moving!’ 
It’s summer, heat has taken my water, sparkling vapour dissolved in sunlight, 
roots suck at me needy, midsummer mud bed drags. 
One day I won a game and kept the prize, a tennis ball no-one could find, 
and in the town a car tyre and many shapes of plastic.

Through Yate I go along my business by roads, by industry clanging, 
where trains go by whooshing, 3 children running, 
they sing ‘Don’t Worry, ‘bout a thing’. They make a camp and tell me secrets,
of flies and gnats, sunlight sets a prism in my whole depth, alights on stones, 
but only where trees allow - they take the rest. My constant companions; 
Alder Elder Ash and Hawthorn, Alder Elder Willow and Sycamore, 
I carry their leaves, sticks and seeds. 

I see the whole sky with my whole width, opening out through fields, through 
long gold grass, wild flower weeds, flames of red dock seeds. Picking up speed 
you can call me a river, I have river weeds. 
At Algars Manor I remember wheel buckets filling for milling, wheel turning 
for grinding, but today in pools I’m resting, lily pads blanket 
where I deep sleep, when I open an eye Kingfisher plucks out my fish, 
I feed them up and give them up.
Chirrup of swallows, hiccup of moorhen, Kingfisher fly my length.

Etching out a landscape, digging little valleys; move along material, 
make a home in sandstone, limestone, mudstone, old stone from old sediment 
drifted down in shallow seas, under earth for centuries, grain by grain 
released to me, carving a story.
In Huckford Quarry the rockface shows rock time, read time line by line, 
and I’ve only read a little. Stone by stone lifted into a railway, 
arches arches arches of viaduct vibrate each time a train tracks. 

I am the song in the woods, I sing to the trees a bass line plonck plonck, 
singing over stones; trickle tur-trickle plink and plumck. Pulling a vortex, 
pushing currents through, rolling a R. Light ripples reflections underside 
leaves in intervals, mirrors of green, trunks leaning in from banks bending, 
branches bow almost in, washing robin. 
Through villages, their private gardens, under bridges, 
Frenchay and Frome Vale.

A pile of bikes in summer holidays, a raft of children shallow splashing 
with feet wet and cool, the thrill of finding out. Fishing lines tease my fish 
in the calm before the weir. Hover fly squadrons stay stationary 
between bracken and bramble.
I used to turn the wheel at Snuff Mills for Snuffy Jack, tobacco 
all down his work shirt, greasing the axle, harnessing my horsepower of 12,
I was busy for a century pushing their machinery, pushing through 
their industry, quarry blasting, hammering and horses pulling barges 
of Pennant sandstone floated down to pave the town, 
under the noses of houses, under willow river fingers.

Sometimes I feel the flow of rain pushing through earth, pouring down 
from trees, over soil over grass, I have to pull myself up, push out, 
feel a freedom from routine, I’m blind with debris, mud and trees 
I can’t stop myself. Secret sluices reduce me, weirs slow me somewhat, 
looping arcs by Eastville Park, fish slip from otter’s twilight bite.

Lifted onto concrete I can’t speak as naturally as I like, can’t sink in, 
can’t think for myself, under motorway roar. Overlaid by another flow, 
another blue map line, strictly straight. 
Caged in fencing, attractive only to rubbish and rats. 
Skateboards roll on ramps.
Brass was made at Baptist Mills, I powered the work of 25 furnaces, 
crucibles combine copper and calamine, metal molten then beaten, 
making manillas as money for slaves, cargo stowed to Africa. 
There were Twinespinners and Flaxdressers, hemp in their hands, 
spinning strands, drawing a tension to strengthen fibres turned tighter, 
walked the Ropewalk by my water.

Pushed underground, diverted into culverts, echoes in darkness, 
Frome entombed. Paved over, unseen along with history, old walls where 
I used to crawl, sewage clogged coughing. 
I made the broad meadow moat of the long-gone castle. 
Forgotten under ‘River Street’ and under a deceit of fountains.
I hear scuffles of Bristol changing, the clang of Colston’s statue 
pulled down, rolled round like a 50 pence piece harbourside and slides in; Colston, his wealth from Black lives, terror traded over the seas. 
In harbour water I hear stories of other countries, I find a tide.

***

Jen Green is a writer based in Bristol, UK. Currently studying a Masters in Travel & Nature Writing at Bath Spa University, she explores the role that nature plays in people’s lives; of trees, parks and a view of the sky. Jen has a portfolio website at jencgreen.com

Exercise Hour

By Oz Hardwick:

I/

Monstrous ships slump in the harbour, waiting for the Town
Hall bell. The lanes leading down are already choked with
blossoms, and the cuts we once ran down hand-in-hard aren’t
wide enough for foxes. Where last week were squares and
markets, makeshift waiting rooms wait in uncertainty, the
weight of their brutal cleanliness more forbidding than
reassuring. Already there is graffiti blaming elite conspiracies,
proclaiming the return of the Seven Sleepers, demanding
urgent but unspecified change in tortuous letters not quite the
colour of blood. What Anglican hymns parroted in school halls
didn’t teach us, we learned from B-movies and pulp Sci-Fi; so
we know that, behind one of these neatly painted doors,
something is growing, mutating. The Town Hall bell will ring,
the ships will leave, and foxes will whelp in disused waiting
rooms. For everything else, we shall have to find new words,
remind ourselves how to speak.

II/

While one door opens on wedding flowers, another opens on
raised musical instruments, each a tableau vivant representing
celebrations as we once knew them. There are flags
everywhere, and homemade bunting disgorges from beneath
porches and gables. Children have painted signs and posters
for windows, with exuberant colours standing in for misspelled
slogans they’ve borrowed from the TV, and the smell of baking
is so thick you could cut it with a silver filigree cake knife and
serve it in moist slices before it has even cooled. Every garden
has a wind-up gramophone and grandparents with tartan blankets
across their knees, nodding to Vera Lynn on 10-inch shellac. One
door opens on winking candles, another opens on champagne
stippling a picture-perfect sky; each a photograph in a History
textbook or a PowerPoint slide in a recap of our progress so far.
We stand in discrete family groups, eating hot chestnuts and
revelling in familiar details until, one by one, every door closes.

III/

So, tired of walking the same prescribed routes, I have taught
myself to fly, fashioning wings from beeswax and Marvel
comics, copying strokes from the common stock of myth. It’s
easier than you’d think: easier than ignoring the nagging
tickertape of unreliable figures, easier than falling asleep with a
head full of voices. From the quayside to the trig point, people
are still stranded in their gardens, fumbling with musical
instruments that have been gathering dust for years, and
buffeting the air with every unfocused but untamed emotion
that can only find voice once we abandon the notion of
language. I wave at weeping pensioners, blow kisses to bright,
clapping babies, and they sing back to me, songs from stage
musicals and Disney favourites. The TV people want to know
everything, from my inspiration to my insights into the current
pandemic, but my phone’s on silent in a house I can’t pick out
from here, in the pocket of a coat I’ll never need again this
close to the Sun. Wedding flowers wilt and the Town Hall bell
rings

***

Oz Hardwick is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, where he leads the postgraduate Creative Writing programmes. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and his most recent publication is the prose poetry micro-novella Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020). He has also edited or co-edited several anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2017) with Miles Salter, which was a UK National Poetry Day recommendation, and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) with Anne Caldwell. www.ozhardwick.co.uk

In Imagination's Lighthouse

By Ian C Smith:

Wind a heavyweight hullabaloo, surrounded by sea-surge, nothing dislodged on my reconnaissance, I stare back at a chill of harboured currawongs beady-eying me here in this receptor of my life’s heat.  I eat plainly, snooze through three-hourly blocks wrestling gothic dreams, jot notes of memories, some of venery, deceit, the sordor of trodden tinsel, consult an old Oxford dictionary, read. Welcome guests, a rhapsody of writers, Boland, Erdrich, Robin Robertson, conjure me to lower their thoughts to my heart recalling scenes from my kaleidoscopic past; seeing flying fish in calm conditions before later plunging through cavernous crescendos of swells coursing the Indian Ocean; collapsing in an Aden market, coming round to fanning by Arabs in an outrage of heat, gentle contrast with tempests girdling our globe here in this citadel at Forty Degrees South.

After the blow, then wreath of cloud whiteout, three small dead sharks in my kelp-covered cove, casualties of net fishing.  I couldn’t see the fish factory for its floodlights, heard its thrumming, an invasion force before the clamorous wind chased it off.  Electronic communication limited to a forsaken spot away from comforts, also limited, sand, not sea-wyf, at scratch of day in my bed, I ritualize chores; bonfires of rubbish, smoke waft evocative, brew tea thinking of Alexander Selkirk, neither of us patient sufferers of fools.  Seldom speaking, I sometimes shout, sing, trim wild whiskers, resemble a derelict castaway by Robert Louis Stevenson, that tubercular tale-teller who sought the faraway. Imagination in solitude salves wounds that can never heal, invisibly stitching emblazoned banners torn in battles past.   

***

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, cordite, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Everything I Didn't Find in Vancouver

Painting by Jase Falk.

By Jase Falk:

Warm light and wanting circle in through my earbuds. Patterned question marks and safety lights line the aisles of the plane. I’m missing you already as you write poems and drink matcha in Winnipeg. We weren’t steady in our love then and we aren’t now either, but in this distance and exchanged letters it felt like there was a growing—we wanted there to be a growing.

I stepped off the plane, my gender caught up in tangles of hair. The way you used to run fingers through the knots and listen to the slow hum of my heartbeat pulling up through veins traced down the length of my forearms taught me the meaning of safety. A latticework of language formed the shape of us. I needed shape to myself; had I no shape to myself? Years passed through me like how grandma used to whisper stories while the world slipped by, our cups of tea shimmering to its beat, leftover paska bread, eggs dully cooked, yokes a disintegration of yellow in the pan.

Float through Vancouver like a ghost; spectres of me dance down alleyways in graceless imitation of you. I’ve always envied the way linen hangs differently on your shoulders, like soil grew and wove it there. No lack of confidence in your cursive. My stumbling into coffee shops, penning words like you penned down words. My wanting you bore such resemblance to my wanting to be you. Your letters gave me form like the inside of my bones.

Flashes of red and yellow as I travel through the underpass. Loud sigh of my bicycle break’s un-oiled song. This city’s grid is not interrupted by muddy water. I kept peeking over the boardwalks on Granville Island only to see faint ripples of my face return.

Drift back from apartment on Davie street to wet lines and rainbows sliding down Commercial Drive. All is queer at night, but in the day we hide ourselves. All is poured out here, but back home I hide myself.

Night of fairy lights, soft guitars paired with words falling petal-like on the small crowd bundled up in wine stained blankets. There is a kind of softness that knows how to cut out space in a world which does not want it. I’m all broken open up in tasseled fissures. Never knew words that could work their way through such a thicket of skin. Afterwards, a woman shares her smoke with me. We talk by the fence while groups of warm bodies move aglow like candle light nearby. I hope to find identity. I don’t quite identify. Her words cluster and form hickeys above my collar. She knows but doesn’t say. I know, but don’t know how to say. I told myself I would not serve, but here I am passing wine amongst loving faces under porch lattice, vines carry their long bodies down to play on our shoulders. We are graced. We sing grace though we don’t know it. Don’t know who we’re singing to as wax spills over tablecloth, the light almost out. She would have asked for a kiss goodnight, but saw my unknowing for she had known it before. Warm arms fasten body to ground then fall away like the smell of rain carrying me into the night.

Your wanting spurts out in a phone call, alone with its uncertainty. I change my flight and leave a week early. The seat buckle tightens around my waist and the flight attendant asks “sir, would you like a drink?” I gather question marks from around my feet, tattoo them onto skin. You curl loose fingers around my shoulder and don’t know me. I grow into you—toss my questions in the messy corners of your room. Return the fullness of myself; put this body in motion. We tangle into one another, we still don’t have the right words, but brush chalk dust off and name each other till we find a stillness. Vancouver listens, patient in the distance, for anything to awake in the absence of its cedar.

***

Jase Falk is a non-binary writer who spends time in archives daydreaming of cedar trees and different futures where we have a chance. You can find them on Twitter here.

Countdown

By Ian C Smith:

In nocturnal limbo, untethered from sleep since 2.30, body aching, checklist of not-to-be-left-behinds reducing like ended experiences sintering away, months morphing into years, or waves washing below the light aircraft he boards in hours and minutes counting down, he can’t stop check-listing a spun out life.

Averse to a homecoming of smelly rot, tiny insects swarming in decomposed matter in the silence below his sink, he deposits kitchen scraps in the compost, balancing this by removing some for scabbed garden spots, trowelling through a fecund reek writhing with worms before leaving for his beloved place, a shimmer of memories.

Repositioning items in two battered bags, he mulls over squeezing in a book he is nine-tenths through, a literary heavyweight as big as a best seller with a title of reducing numbers by a favourite writer, a rich rendition of possible paths taken in an artistic life.

Immersed in its saga, he is unable to leave the book behind, checks another item off, medication, considers arithmetical probabilities, how happiness can remain a hairsbreadth away, loved photos, angled light blessing an island, shrouded reminders of a life, prowling his mind’s distant alleys, treading softly through the dark stables of the past. 

About the author: Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, Australian Poetry Journal,  Critical Survey,  Live Encounters, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two-Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

College Students on Saturday Nights

ARTWORK: UNTITLED. JASE FALK

By Kell Xavier:

Held in a burst of fluorescent lights that wear the cloth of pinprick stars, pink petals of luminous shops sell kebabs, korma, train-over-rail harmonious sounds. Yellow glows on faces turned down low. Empathy sits with me; self-enveloping. Restaurants pool with comfort, a warm bliss that I gather and fold under my armpits, over my unoiled spine. Through windows, my softened flesh, my stillness is retracted. A chew of gluttony is sawed off of this list: acceptable ways to carry love. A mother teaches Marilyn in cinched phrases for wide blond lashes. A portrait, a funeral. The blue iris young, their bellies are not fond of ice cream, so they sup orange cream sorbet. Disguised in the paint of stereotype, curly happy locks unfurl on the shoulders of these sprightly boys; their sureness is high winds, is palm trees timbered. Little voices chaperoned by temple bells and seaweed. I'm sorry for labels stuck to matted house cat fur. Scrape my waxed ears, I want to hear these young boy sounds: burgeoning, lively.

Today stutters over the neck with cold fingers. Language hangs on the air like plants wired from the ceiling of a stained glass garden. Cloudy greyness mixes in the murk of my mind with the Valentine red laid out for tomorrow. The body prepares to exhale, content with the current disharmony, its prophecies of coming pleasure. In the domed expanse of oncoming night, I wonder, Why feed tonight? Why not tomorrow’s now instead of today’s? Nanaimo sits in glitter

@ 9:10 on cutaway benches, on two-lane roads, on a rusted tuning fork statue, on a smoke dance caught midair. My bench is cool, my back warm, the clubbing music loud, and gnats are scarce so far. Nanaimo cups around lights; it looks through windows, listens under the pop tunes for a hint of a hint. We here are something, we have made a monument. In burgundy and pale green  and ink blue colour blocks, here: the could-be-ness of home.

About:
Kell makes meaning with words and movement. He is non-binary, likes film and dandelions, and resides on Treaty One territory. Kell is on Twitter: @icebox_clouds

Island

Artwork: Untitled, by Jase Falk

By Kell Xavier:

The house is at the top of a long driveway, paved years ago and strewn with gravel. On this hill, one can see the blue mountains, rain like steam in a different city. There are candy cane lilies in the front yard, and delicate yellow flowers hang from a twist of a tree. There is green grass by the campfire, the mint plant, the badminton net, the orange trees with their waxy leaves. I climb for tangerines, my fingers digging into orange skin on a fresh-plucked fruit.

I touch my hip bones before I sleep, a reminder of physicality and the thought of beauty. Lately, when I touch my body to the floor to roll in trials of choreographic magic, I find bruising peeking through my skin. I massage fingers into the looseness of their purple pain, calling it into me and alive, like an incantation. I hold my hip bones like knobs or handles, to propel me on.

He is king of everything the ocean touches. He says so. Once or twice a year, I beg the blues, the waves— spaces he believed in— to keep his spirit alive. Every now and then, I beg something— what do I believe in?— to keep my spirit warm to him.

In a poem, years ago, I compared my father to a candle flame. What I mean is: my fragile energy is a candle flame, I don't want to think about my father.

The warm silver of a siren calling, death with desire; the cold iron of a banshee, death with petrification.

About:
Kell makes meaning with words and movement. He is non-binary, likes film and dandelions, and resides on Treaty One territory. Kell is on Twitter: @icebox_clouds