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This issue of WORM is dedicated to Ted Slade, who died earlier this year.

Ted was Managing Editor of the Poetry Kit website, a valuable online resource for authors.

He also wrote wonderful poetry, and was a kind and considerate person. Everyone who knew him will miss him.

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~~~~~~~~~~~~ (the poetry) WORM ~~~~~~~~~~~~ 27




Sky of Iron Pyrites

Our valley wears a light frosting of snow
from the last fall, exhibits every wound
and blemish like a shaved head shows
scars of baseball bat, bullet, knife.

The tracks we left, never to follow again;
our first tentative steps, destinations lost,
revelations moribund. Our last days together,
lives suddenly packed into cardboard boxes.

I'd prayed at your altar for much more.
Crows fly singly across a yellow-green sky,
battle the wind. Black leaves flutter
the trees; I sigh, open and close my fist.

© Christopher T. George

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Yellow Bellies

It might as well be the sea, we say, and
gaze across wave after flowering wave.
These cinema skies, your eyes, the last
few days, inundated, never dry, and as

time, tide and rain play their restless push
and pull game, we are swept along to the
same sinking moment. Percolating from
every pore underfoot is the truth - the likes

of us were never cut out to cut loose. What
on earth kidded us all we needed was space,
when every molehill's a mountain in this
place? What should keep us awake nights

is not the bitterns, or the frogs, but the pumps
that can never stop. We pray, but we'll
wait for our Vermuyden until flitting day.
The huge horizon softens and dims, and

somewhere, we know, the ocean is rushing in.

© Matt Merritt

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Weather

Wind lashed debris into city streets
like a trashman avenging the worst
day of his life. Air bulged with sound,
sirens spun blue to red while the injured
stacked up in ERs. Against the televised
litany of projected highs and lows,
excitement spiked like fever.

We had nothing to lose. We called
the storm out, heckled it, shot the wind
with paintballs, tried to make it show
its face. It burgled our house of words
instead, hurled a tree through the window
and blew out the lights, leaving us small
and blind, mouths open, each moment
a windsock of breath spilling out.



© Cheryl Snell


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Kite

Flat country, where sea shanties salt the weather
summer brings inland, inflating trees and skies.
Wind at high water: cloud surfed through roaring copses,
everything aerial. Somewhere you stop the car
on stretched land between ditches, feel the rush,
cleaning of air, high freedom of larks' rising.
Let the world go for a moment and become
child again, arms wide, runwayed; poised for wings.

Kite. Still in the boot, furled tight from another time,
quickly unfurled from butterflied line to diamond.
Struts braced taut to catch West, spooled string
laid out besides the tides of whispering barley.

Small throw: a second's doubt, then yank and uplift,
line straightening from a sag, hypotenused
to grain fields. Braced, you play sky angler, testing
just for this moment one thought, lighter than air.

© Martyn Halsall

( Kite: Editor's Choice of M.A.Griffiths,' The perfectly controlled writing of this poem makes it a delight to read. Towards the close, I can almost feel the tug of the kite as it lifts into the wind'.)

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Bad Day for Kafka

He hadn't been an elephant last night,
but now he sees a trunk swing past his face.
And are those tusks? His ears flap-flap in fright;
he screeches loudly, tramples, breaks a vase.

His clumsy legs stampede him to the wall,
then fumble-turn and crash him through his bed;
he hears his parents padding down the hall,
and tries to rise but falls to his knees instead.

"All right there, son?" his worried folks exclaim.
He wants to reassure them, but his shriek
reminds them of long treks to Mozambique.

Experienced stalkers, hunters of big game,
they corner him and gore his hide with spears
and keep his tusks to mount as souvenirs.

© Geertjan Wielenga


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Love Song at 5000 RPM'S

The sun kills the moon and it is a bloodless death
in the same way a west wind strangles an oak
or thread smothers the spindle of a sewing machine.
It's over and words drop from the corner
of your mouth and pour into my memory,

blackbirds swallow the rest of my name.
Before I can ask you to dance, Ramona
climbs next to me on the sofa, rests her face
on my arm and you look surprised; the two
of us so close. She whispers yo lo quiero,
you leave the room to disguise yourself

and your motives and she kisses my cheek,
brushes hair from her eyes and walks out
the side door, every footstep a prayer.
I no longer have anything in common
with Spring and you say you want to break
the mirror and take your chances for seven years.

You're tired of abstract ideas-- liberty, love,
hate, soul, happiness--and wish for concrete
examples to live by. You'll give up your job,
family and all worldly possessions until one day
you need nothing but the clothes on my back;
then the moon will retaliate and the sun will wobble

and twist past the night sky, licking its wounds.
I will wait, is what I say, believing in that future.
You're in the doorframe, hair light red from rain;
lips in a slight pout and Ramona miles away
by now and I mouth penance to no god in particular
and think of Peru or Argentina. The rest of my

prepared speech is drowned out by the sound of Dylan
bleeding all over the walls. You smile, wrap a towel
around your hair and no one within eyeshot would be
able to tell that falling out of love was any different
than listening to a song or the sound of broken glass.

© Alex Stolis


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La Cortigiana

Portals close behind her
with a hollow thud; no stars -
the perfect night.

She adjusts her gold-rimmed mask,
causes no more commotion
than the shadow of a cat.

Pigeons coo in their sleep,
wings beat against marble;
she is swifter than they.

Beneath stone bridges,
shiny gondole sway and creak,
dreaming of lovers.

A cloaked figure hurries
across a piazza, determined steps
echo from wall to wall.

She averts her eyes,
weaves through crooked lanes
that never see daylight,

listens for the stranger's
footfall on rough cobblestone.
She never looks back.

A wild garden receives her;
statues of Cupid hide a secret,
doors to another world.

In the grand palazzo,
candles cast sharp shadows.
She slowly lifts her skirts.

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After the Affair

I returned to eating pretzels in bed.
There was something about salt
that sated my thirst for company.

My husband still read the newspaper
during meals. Conversation remained
lightly sugared over pizza out with friends.

Vegetables in the pantry tumbled like children.
I talked to them through the door until
their odor demanded soft plastic coffins.

That was when I sent my husband out
with the garbage. There was no point
in discussing what I really thought.

On rare days I put on lipstick -
the secret smile I used to wear
before slipping off my gold ring.


© Arlene Ang


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Wood. Metal. Glass.

This is not another poem
about when I was a child.
Not about sitting on the curb
in front of the house
on Spruce Street scraping
a Popsicle stick on the macadam
until it was sharp.
The stick that gave me
nightmares for a week
because it turned into
the fingers of that man
who touched me.

….Because he didn't
….and this isn't.

Nor is this a poem
about my cousin who
has the same name as me.
Or the heavy metal braces
she wore on her legs
or the way she clomped around
like Frankenstein's monster.
It's not about the way she would
deliberately step
on my fingers or toes
under the front porch
until I screamed for her
to stop oh please stop
I won't tell I promise.

….Because she didn't
….and neither did I.

And this certainly isn't a poem
about the tiny white mice
we had in a glass tank as pets.
It's not about the morning
I found my brother laughing
when he said to check it out
this is so cool or about the way
there was only one mouse
who darted around the cage
while the pink-eyed head
of the other lay in damp pine shavings
or about the pain I felt for it
or about the way I cried
or how my tears only made
my brother laugh harder.

This is not a poem
about childhood
or memories
or pain because
I'm a grown woman now
and these things
are meaningless to me.

….Yes. They are.

© Maryann Hazen Stearns

( Wood. Metal. Glass : Editor's Choice of Les Wolf,'This poem is bold and playful. The tone is commanding and, at times, the words almost seem to lift
right off the page. It also manages to be terse, but not tiresome with a diction that's both natural and economical.' )


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Within the Box Outside the Square

By any measure, sonnets gather fust
if soaked in saccharin; if clothed in hose,
peruke and pantaloon, forsooth, the must
of camphor gets right up the savant's nose;
and should the posey poetaster wrench
the syntax to accommodate the rhymes,
he well may be subjected to the stench
of burning manuscript that skyward climbs.

But-when the metre marshalls urge us dot
the i's and cross the t's, are they aware
that rhythm's final arbiter is not
some metric absolute? It's the ear.

Those times I'm heard to mutter, like a fool,
that scansion is the tool-not the rule.

© Peter Moltoni


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Ranunculus

Wm. setting off for Yorkshire,
cold pork in his pockets for dinner, Dorothy,
heartbroken, walking beside the rippled lake
until her mind feels calm again. The crab apple

coming into blossom, the new houses
she tries to juggle from her sight
looking towards Rydale Mount, a yellow flower
she hadn't seen before: a type of ranunculus.

She writes it in her journal, background detail
for another of his poems. I look ranunculus up,
lulled by the straight lines, the steady columns
of strange words blossoming into sense.

© Ciarán Parkes


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Rosa Rugosa

Rugosas bloom in a mess of bramble,
scourged with salt on a burning dune;
cans and bottles roll where humble
Rugosas bloom.

A ship was wrecked and seeds were strewn
along the shore; now roses ramble
amid New England sand and foam.

Tough and teeming still, a symbol
of our roots in shallow loam,
at home in the coastal rough-and-tumble,
Rugosas bloom.

© Rose M. Kelleher


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News

It was in August that news ceased to exist. News --
The News -- no executions in Makasib, no floods in Mozambique.
Chechnya : Groznyy is still intact, people go about their business,
shop, cook, make love, have sex.

Outside everything is almost silent. Only
the dull rap of rain, traffic and the flight path overhead.
When Concorde roars I look up for a moment, watch her nose
penetrate and disappear in dark clouds.

It's good to snuggle in my Iraqi robe, to smoke,
drink coffee, tap at the keyboard and watch the pixels
appear on the monitor like excellent armies of ants.
I am mesmerised by pixels. They dance for me.

I am reminded of Zouhair: how we cooked lunch,
smoked nargili, brewed red tea, danced and wept when Fairuz sang
Jerusalem in my Heart, Hope of my Life: Amal Hyaati.
I have no tears now. They make no difference.

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Mary, you can

refuse to cloak the dead.
Deny the stain of his life,
your sheet muddied
across prayer-laden years.
Sinners desperate for mercy
will knot hopes in the linen
you could have floated skyward,
white rising like wild swans.
Let wings and warm breezes bear
the promise of redemption.

.
© Julie Damerell

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brass Buddha

An inch tall, seated, details
smoothed by the flow
of days and nights
swallowing each other,
the whirlpool into the past:

its wisdom is being there,
from the hot liquid instants
through epochal cooling, contraction
in the mountain's massive gut,
to the skillful, bored extraction,

shaping for art and for sale
to my long-dead father.
Someday it will tumble
into a dump embellished with
fish bones, love letters, flies,

all the ephemera gathered
melting together again -
the dream: to remain,
through all dissolution,
in any way it can, here.

© J.B.Mulligan


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What You Left Me

Grandmother, I wear your favorite coat,
the one you gave me when you knew
the price of artichokes no longer mattered
as much as the cost of a live-in--
how dearly one pays for surviving a century.
An odd, flat, swirly fur -- mink was
too pretentious at the market.

When bleakness bites my skin
that was yours; olive and too thin,
always too thin for this life,
I pull up the collar and feel your hands --
at the end, the eyelids of my newborn.
Remember you said infants saw
through the eyes of God?

The only one who looked beyond
my snippy repartee, you folded
the sadness of me into sachets,
stuck them under silks and satins
with your own. Our secret.

When you died, I remember thinking
your bones were too sharp to house
such tenderness, as you knew my words
always belied my heart. Your coat warms me,
and I fold my own sorrows now,
yet miss seeing the someday me in your face.

Artichokes are two for a dollar,
and I bought four, saving half for tomorrow
as you taught me. The clerk complimented
our coat. I smiled and pulled it tighter around.
Unusual fur, but oh, so me. So us.

© Lori Williams


(What You Left Me: Editor's Choice of Gary Blankenship, 'This poem is a fine tribute to grandmothers, the elderly, lives we've left behind. I like the way the poet folds in memories. The poem's construction appeals to me - the move back and the fur coat at the end - a technique we do not see enough. A tender poem when we need it.')

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Two Sonnets

Last Orders -The Movie

I'm ordering a Hollywood decline.
The symptoms are ideal: not being sick,
the application of a pale lip slick,
some floaty scarves, a duty to recline
against silk pillows being brave, while friends
and family troop in with gifts and flowers
and wet-eyed memories of golden hours -
stock shots of surf and seabirds when it ends.

Spare me the vulgar things, like diarrhoea,
depression, pain; they're for the hoi polloi.
A dying will seems such a good idea.
I want a starry close, so please employ
soft-focus, and cue choirs' Ave Maria,
then fade me out with Ludwig's Ode to Joy.

© M.A.Griffiths


Last Orders - a Keatsian riposte

A Keatsian fate is my preferred demise:
to cease at darkling midnight with no pain,
soft-kissed by quiet Lethe's laudanum grain.
Beneath a steadfast star, the poet dies;
his garret skylight frames a pale moonrise.
On cue, a distant nightingale's refrain
o'erwhelms the fading glades of his dulled brain.
When in the arms of easeful death he lies
arrange for his companions at first light
to find him in a sweet, beatific pose,
for messy deaths belong to those who write
blockbuster novels packed with purple prose;
but poets, who on water write their name
achieve, through artful death, posthumous fame.

© Alan Wickes





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Acknowledgements: Yellow Bellies won 3rd Prize in the recent Plough Arts Open Poetry Competition
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Author's contact details:

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Compiling Editor: M.A.Griffiths (grasshopper@wordbug.freeserve.co.uk) . Associate Editors:

Gary Blankenship (garydawg@msn.com) and

Les Wolf (boticello2000@yahoo.com)