She weren't just a Dollymop ~ Polly Peachum

"Cor! did ye hear about Cora"
I says to Judge Mortimer Plumb
He was dressed in a nappy with his gob at my dairy
Looking right nicky and then some.

"What are you on about Polly?"
He says in a right stupid way
"She's dead sir", I said, "from a knock in the head"
"Now the angels have took her away"
“I'm sorry to hear it” the Judge says
And shifts his great arse in me lap
“The wages of sin, no doubt did her in-
Still a shame she had to go like that!'

"Enough of the dollymop gossip
He then says with a petulant pout
"So sorry to disturb ye. Turn over I'll burp ye"
I says with me patience near out.

But my mind kept wandering to Cora
Her smile and her coppery hair
Her knickers were whiter, her corset pulled tighter
Than all the toffers in Haymarket Square.

She'd knick ye a ointment if your madge had an itch
A meat pie if you had a craving
She'd give her last half penny to a Shivering Jemmy
Didn't care if he was barking or raving.

She always had a song to sing
Or a joke so's to keep us all happy
And I think our Dear Lord, who Cora adored
Prefers that to some bloke in a nappy.

And then I grows right ill tempered
As I'm fixing his bib and his bonnet
She was so gentle and kind! I got it in mind
to say a few word to His Dishonor.

"She weren't just a dollymop, Sir"
I said with flash in me eye
"She was the finest friend in all the East End
And now she's an Angel on High"

"She weren't just a Judy!
and now Sir, I bid you Good Day"
And as I heads to the door, I heard then I swore
A most beautiful harp start to play!



Polly is a Victorian lady with very high standards. This is her first published poem ever.

Short Love Sonnets ~ Duane Locke

(Poems written to appeal to the metaphoric sub-structure of the cognitive unconscious of the embodies mind)

21.

Less stars tonight. Less than last night.
Fewer that a week ago. The stars tonight
Are more obscure. Not silver or white,
The stars tonight are obsidian. The stars
Tonight are not familiar, do not have five points.
Stars are shaped like dead Osiris, Osiris with
An Old Man Face, a broken back, intense desire.
Some are shaped like orphans with open arms.
These enigmatic, non-intimate stars emanate
Loneliness, walk downward, come closer, closer.

22.

The abandoned orange grove at the time
Of evening when blue becomes a glow of bruises
When the abandoned new oranges darken
With foresight, their skins will never be touched,
Will become the isolated letters of alphabets,
That although intensely longing to be a sentence
Will never be conjoined to form a single word.
The angular almsgivers are in other publicized groves offering
Illusory paragraphs to the au courant poseur paupers.
A flutter of evening light on leaves, hidden, an oriole.

23.

Submerged under morning moisture a molten silver,
Under a crystal umbrella, a color, silver,
By the silver, a yellow-lined spittlebug plays an oboe,
The music crawls in a hole to weep,
This silver has a silver color like no silver color
In the entire world, in the entire cosmos.
This silver, this unique silver, is trying
To tell me something, something deeper
That all our known profundity, something opaque.
The silver only speak silver, I only understand words.




Duane Locke lives a hermetic life by an ancient oak, an underground stream, and osprey’s nest in rural Lakeland, Florida. He has had, as of August 2009, 6,389 different poems published in print magazine, American Poetry Review, Nation, etc., e zines, Counterexample Poetics, Pen Himalaya, etc, and 21 books. His latest three books published in 2009 are Yang Chu’s Poems, (Crossing Chaos), Voices from the Grave, (erbacce-press), and Soliloquies from a High Wall Hidden Cemetery, (Differentia Press)

He is also a painter and photographer. An account of his paintings can be found in Gary Monroe’s Extraordinary Interpretations ( University of Florida Press, 2003)

More information can found in Marquis’ Who’s Who in America and Google search, 4,850.000 entries

little gallows man ~ Angie Werren

you’ll think you thought these things alone

it was early morning when that dog broke free
pulled me from the ground / up by my questionable roots
he carried me in his slobbering mouth
he laid me at your door

you wanted me then
you washed me in red wine
you fed me milk and honey

you saw in me a semblance of yourself
a thing you could cajole and
manipulate / but that hanged man
was more wicked than you knew

you’re stuck with me

now
eyeballing you
slyer than sly

dress me in white / sit me on a shelf
I’ll hop down in the dead of night
I’ll crawl into your ear until
my whispers become your words

you fed me milk and honey
you washed me in red wine
you’re stuck with me now

hanging / there was another
innocent seed dropped down
soon
that dog will be howling at the door

you’ll think you thought these things alone
and you'll think like roots / like nightshades

Angie Werren writes poetry from a little house in Ohio. She has poems published in a few lovely places like The Ouroboros Review and Bolts of Silk. She is also a bit delightful and a true sport.

rubble ~ Angie Werren

during the dismantling / feathers
were found in the mortar and
deep exhumation unearthed bricks
that crumbled like paper maché

there were no remnants of shale / no
traces of clay / simply a molded mass
of sentence fragments / hollow quills
bits of paper and / odd consonants

the structure seemed sound but
the lack of vowels mixed with
disjointed emotion proved unstable
the foundation / succumbed

it simply slipped to the ground
authorities have exhausted all leads

said someone close to the source:
she was a bird / down dripped
from her wings as she flew away

Angie Werren writes poetry from a little house in Ohio. She has poems published in a few lovely places like The Ouroboros Review and Bolts of Silk. She is also a bit delightful and a true sport.

Aeolian Skinner ~ Emily Howard

I heard

a hundred swallows

released as notes

in high cathedral ceilings

We’re up there too

in the fragrance of the leftover lilies

in organ pipes from long ago.

In the moment

I had

a little vessel to uphold

all bullying and restless edges

smooth wood

pews

a tiny ship

take me back across the ocean

Tired blackbird

Aspiring

Her spire

Her singing

as if in pain

and in fact in pain.

I heard a hundred swallows

released as notes

some of them were in my throat.

Metro Stances ~ Gareth Durasow

The rickshaw mice are all stone deaf, having spent their
youth scavenging the gap. They consider this for the best,
and the only way to skin a cat. Let’s pay them no mind,
just the racket of cash and safeguard ourselves from the
cobbled tour – we’d be fools to let this opportunity pass,
to put an arm round you but talk about me, and address
the complication posed by surgeons and students who in
waging a tug of war with my murderous guts have come
to know me best. Here’s to the evening when you’ll chip
your new nails and find bits of my blood underneath.



Scrap your plans to sell the sky for advertising space
because our new mannequins have webcams for faces,
or mirrors at least, and quash that sweatshop stigma
by telling you about a Panorama they watched where
those children were smiling – with music for uppers,
spared the indignity of raving with giants, the relative
leisure of building a polyester Jerusalem here: where
bubblewrap billows on the scarecrow trees and there
be bodies in them there hills. What we’re telling you
now is this: the model we flogged you prior was shit.



Dear Father, I’m apprenticed to the bloke in the back
whose duty is to re-adhere the flies to the replica heads
that the punters end up blundering through in the dark.
Son, imagine your city, the city of misnomers, its story
unfold in a minute or less. Consider the horror of the
populace petering off till one morning there’s nobody
about in the street – the poverty’s eaten its HD façade.
Dear Father, I hope this photo will bring you over to
my way of thinking. We met at the closure of the last
laundrette. Her washer was caput. I was just fortunate.




The swan is Jesus, tranquil atop the effluent tide I’m in
knee-deep, tipping a pail over another stranded Beluga
beached in our garden, soon to explode & cover us with
entrails. My blubber-splattered bride how we danced in
their gore, in the middle of what once was winter – till
scrawny polar bears came mewling at our door. The kids
drank the water against the party’s advice, lost their lives
beneath the ice to sharks too weak to tackle stray dogs. I
serenaded you with a passing guitar under stars restored
to the sky since the city lights sank… a hell of a divorce.



Teach me to roll, my suddenly Rastafarian friend. The
improper authorities once kyboshed this cash cow so
basement empires like this one fell under the COSHH.
Let this millennium’s successors correct the dinosaurs’
skeletons once and for all, make use of our paper and
publish this crap before time turns the trees back into
stone, the elephant departs with her keeper in tow; no
evident reason until the tsunami collapses on London
arborists undercutting one another, Domino’s cyclists
running reds for a quid pro quo. Surely must be close.



If you’d care to lend a pen then I can start learning you
a lesson or two, beginning with why we’ve switched off.
Those who don’t write have to memorise this scenario
where a sardine goddess lost in the murder she’d wrote
flashes you her hopeless Underground smile like a death
sentence: priceless, which leads you to think about how
you’d like to pick the last bits of Kabuki Queen from her
cuticles. Then you remember you’ve never once written
a love letter. Now you can’t help but resent the poor girl.
And the accordionist’s rollicking seesaw shanties begin.



Gareth Durasow is a West Yorkshire poet, performer and playwright who has a tendency to run with the mainstream hares and the avant-garde hounds. His poetry and performances have won prizes at Ilkley and Huddersfield Literature Festivals and his plays for the award-winning theatre company Horizon Arts have won nothing at all. He also collaborates with the editors of Spine magazine to host Letterbomb, an open-mic event in Leeds city centre.

Lost in the City ~ Howard Good

All the streets
go one way

the wrong way.
What’s next

but looking
for clues,

a playing card,
a swallow’s egg,

a cigarette butt,
tremendous dynamite,

and wishing
they added up.


Howie Good is the author of nine poetry
chapbooks, most recently Visiting the Dead (2009) from
Flutter Press. He is also a rather nice chap.

A Brand of Pain ~ Aristotle Sinclair

Her perfume was a melon’s
blood, a sword of suicidal
hara-kiri. An ache belongs
on the lips of a hungry kiss,
her vital leaving of understanding
want, dragged the clock’s hands
to a crawling exhibition. Youth
is this formation of burgeoning
experience.
As she walks into the door of
distance’s creation, her scent remains
a haunting voice, one lying dormant
on the tattered thread of a memorable
embrace.


Aristotle lives in California and has been writing poetry for a short time. He has recently had worked accepted for publication on Writers' Bloc and the Catalonian Review.

Layered Investigation ~ Aristotle Sinclair

At night the owl’s search is active, awake
connected to the oscillating
neck of mirrored study.
The owl asks the bodies of night:
Why do men choose this time to collect
crime’s of selfish desire, and among
this philosophy of self-sufficient paradigms,
where do the tragedies hide when
their fear of retribution echoes
over subsequent darkness more fantastic
than their disappointed shadow?



Aristotle lives in California and has been writing poetry for a short time. He has recently had worked accepted for publication on Writers' Bloc and the Catalonian Review.

merope ~ mark cobley

i will not visit

you
or your memory
over and over

blue white and dove grey
are the colours of cloud
breath on a cold morning
reflected
halo of the eye

my face never to be
touched by
fingerprint whorl
wind caught
spun
but from
here

to be gone
is not darkness
or blindness

or the treacherous sea ink
rising and falling

violet
fade light
thin away
forever
in

the hurt is within

wave
blacken
cover eyes
in shame
a spiral

cheat death wise Sisyphus

my sisters
sailors
lover

you will know me


no more.



From dove flock a work in progress

Painters’ Exhalations 499 ~ Felino A. Soriano

after José Lerma Untitled


In the correct light, her forehead
evaporates from the flaming fervor
her lips utter, sporadically. This
is why the light has to be correct,
near the farthest corner of day’s
smallest room. For here, near the room’s
tiny, crawl-through window, adequate
light can dictate an abstract appearance,
and her face, the face I find lovely
as auroras always find the eye of a
gazing fool, can behave according
to the moment, one of falling leaves outside
from the growing-beyond tree’s anecdote
for decamping.



Felino has authored 10 collections of poetry and is the editor and publisher of
Counterexample Poetics, and Differentia Press, More information at his website,

fragments ~ David McLean

fragments of dead men
medicines

scattered over heaven

rotten pears and scented apples

we cut with razors blunt
listening fingers fucked

and the scars on our arms
are from laughter

importunate ecstasy

as life scowls at the sun

murder in the victim's blood

is us, temporary

death, fragments

of love, rotten pears, thinking skin

and things written,
periods missing,

scented drugs



David has a blog mourningabortion A new chapbook hellbound can be found at Epic Rites and an anthology is due out from them next year.

The Lay of the Land ~ Andrew Taylor

Instructions have been left
take me back to where my heart
belongs

fields shorn within the day
bales are removed
soil finally rests

procession through landscape
a pace amplified against that of
the narrow boat

a house beams exposed tip
of the hill hedgerow borders
map precursors

Saplings plastic guarded
a future generation’s guidance
system


Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. His latest collection is Make Some Noise (Original Plus) and an e-book is forthcoming from Differentia Press.

Endanger Fencing ~ Andrew Taylor

blinding division walk the Brecon Beacons
amongst pale horses at Easter

creatures caught in traps shot in the back
of the head a countryside of carnage

from the beginning hotels near Heathrow
twenty four hour rolling news

a chance to study war how I’d have liked you
to walk with me around cities at night

drinking whiskey and listening to shock
radio like a bad mistake I ponder

anonymous scream pilots descend
at half mile intervals in a seated night

I was unaware that you would wait for me
like the ghost ration of a slow light I isolate



Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. His latest collection is Make Some Noise (Original Plus) and an e-book is forthcoming from Differentia Press.

Constable Country ~ Alec Newman

Suburbia rises
over the charred
offering of the orchard

Smoke surrenders to
the odour of summer rain
and roses
and climbing jasmine
and fresh stained decking

Houses made homes
with
Panasonic Sony LG
Griman Noresund Groland
Gravyr Stockholm Vaxholm

Homes unhoused --
the apple leaf’s cockchafer
unboughed -- the fly-catcher on the bough.

Come Basisk series lights
come mourning for darkness
come the eternal twilight.

Let cocks crow
with owls at
(the)
dead of night



Alec Newman was born in Essex in 1975, but now lives in Bury. His first chapbook, 'Earthworks', is due out with knives, forks and spoons later this year.

fragment (part 5) ~ Richard Barrett

painted the colour of water
the city leaks

we can say a heart is
a regeneration zone. badly publicised

same old yuppie-scum frisson
from buying up history

the Sea Life Centre. the I.C.C.
compass us back / my nineties mixtape

my hometown is called Christine
and I am a redrawn map



Richard is currently in transit

fragment (part 1) ~ Richard Barrett

extra-terrestrials crash
bubble-pods disappoint.

Selfridges blistered exterior as
distance broken feet.

walked multi level, not built
shush. on the flat. meet at

the planet’s simulacrum
sidelined, toppled
‘take a photo of that’; a
representation of a representation

ripples backwards
from promontory sweats

ambition and capital




Richard is currently in transit

the bridge ~ mark cobley

when you are gone

and i lie alone.

my mouth tastes of odd things

old pyramids
lost packages

those bits of wood
that railway lines run on

yachts. that is the end of yacht trips

sometimes exotic fruit.

fun fairs after fun fairs have gone

diesel colours in the lake following the boat.

reeds, cardboard cups, ice cream sticks

token polystyrene


floating


i am afraid to kiss.

when you approach


a derelict house
in an acre of field
the red hair
grief is a terrible monster.

Scarecrow ~ Emily Howard

Position yourself widely over the tan checkerboard

land and tell me if you are feeling better.

I had a hope that you could be hawk by now -

it's not romantic. It's all still an exhausting flight and

lonely. Still you didn't have to do any of it. Didn't have to hang

martyred over the fields in wheat too still to even look like paintings, but

still moving imperceptibly and sensually under your silly sandbag shoes

You were a fine walker, even better runner. If flight is now the order

then let the crows eat your insides, your liver until you are not bound

to representation, to book or to emblem. This boulder dissolved and only

your clothing drifting down the valley into some neighboring farm, pretty

patchwork into patchwork. Then, I'll remember your enormous

former eyes and how you drew them on to take this in.

Rob's Tattoo Studio

lighthouse ~ mark cobley

lighthouse.


sterope, merope, electra, maia, taygete, celaeno, alcyone

sailing.

mercury as an evening star


secateurs
twine
trowel

the house
the mirror is musty and crazed
the streaked brown coffee



sweetpea.



up the steps 199
in my garden mermaids mock lack of land

tsunami fossil (the big dipper) the ear orion corn.



stopped now It has been passed safely safe tied



strength
strengthen
strengthened
strengthener
strengthening
strengthens
strengthless
strength
strengths
strenuous
strenuously
strenuousness.


sirens. cygnus



polish jet a glossy black as night
at night the lamp strokes the quiet sea


longitude seagull blown inland
you walk along a path


all that was ever wanted was an orchard
to whisper in the ear.

decorated with pomegranates, a crown of stars, a rod, a heart-shaped shield with the symbol for venus, a field of ripe wheat


the weeds could be constellation.

waves. diamond. veronica.

stars like orchards



heavy with fruit

The Mason's (ii) (the elder tree) ~ mark cobley

tomorrow will always be better


I will lie in bed

think of plums, orchards, trees

then I will walk up the hill

my hands clasped firmly behind my back.




Once I thought I saw them all on a coach



they were having a ride out


visiting the seaside.


I remember the punch and judy show



the yellow surf.


But now you never txt

hawthorn (the elder tree) ~ mark cobley

A craving for nicotine.

Then the fire


the sun dawns when sleep is impossible. quick


they come back

not holding hands or in groups

but every way you turn your head

they are beneath your eyelids like heartbeats.

recording, derbyshire (the elder tree) ~ mark cobley

Twelve Vein, Old Dining Room, Bull Beef, New Dining Room,
Five Vein, Organ Room New Cavern and Landscape.

Blue John mines.

fluffy clouds.

hang gliding.


Disley. Marple.


We fell asleep under the oaks at Lyme Park

the fine gardens.


Who was to know.


I love your silences.


the pause


and it is all black. Elder Black.


rich black.