Tag: THE NEST ISSUE

Tracy Gaughan

THE NEST ISSUE

Incubation

When winter comes stalking
it clings to the rib of a tree.
An abandoned nest. A heart.
A rejection of myself by myself.
After the wind, I find it rolled up
in the sleeve of night, in the leaves.
A solid deep cup of lichen, spider-silk,
a length of blue yarn I pull like a worm
from the earth; trace back to the secrecy
of myself. I wait blind and helpless.
In a few hours, I will spread my wings.

■

Tracy Gaughan‘s poetry and short fiction have featured in The Blue Nib, The Bangor Literary Journal, Spillwords, Pendemic, and others. She recently completed an MA in International Literatures. She lives in Galway.

Anatoly Kudryavitsky

THE NEST ISSUE

Cul-de-Sac

Blue cucumbers pause at turnpikes.
They can’t waltz any farther; they can only
yodel their discontent.
My financial advisor told me he grasped
a meaning to this. Like using the best lives
to create a proper life
(or shall we go primordial?)

Newspapers’ advice is vice.
Newspapers’ advice is, At any voltage,
be luminous.
Sounds bingo but newspapers
are not very luminous either.
Where can we hide our limitless thinking
if not behind a wall? And what do walls separate
if not different kinds of madness?

We flatten clay to make more clay.
Then we create an alloy of a hound and a mound,
a genius of grey (who is he allied to?)
The frankness of the fractional. One brain
that fits all…
Blue cucumbers pause at turnpikes.
And it all begins again…

■

 

Lockdown

A tapestry of your fingerprints on the dreampane…
Existence stems from its end.
It teas like coffee, a limited edition
of a wave-crimp, a patented crib taunt.
This sternum of yours, a roadblock
against obloquy.

Today I wear quarantine grey.
The sun whistles a star-college song,
somebody gets stapled to his CV.
This smily hotel, its gaping wi-fi hotspots.
Bring me the mothball necklace
of credulous warnings.

Crystals of vision promenade with masks on.
A cemetery tune: the earth is at its roundest
under the cross. Children’s Crusade ends
under the sands.
Would you prefer a wall of music
or the music of the walls?

■

 

A Hand-Shaped Reality

A part-time memory cell says yo
Enter the rambunctious ocean

I once was a knife making plans for human flesh
Now I am an agricultural romantic
See my garrison eyes?

You can discover a small approximation of the world
in every pigeon hole
Even in a cashmere goat, as no one
is too big for his corral
Hand-shaping a reality
is like driving through the Sonoran Desert
on banana tyres
and then burning them for the smell

A hand and a heart
pastures of electricity
Say a beam of light pursues me
say it with the moon

■

 

A Collage Has a Thousand Mouths

Yes, we knew that cats have a dozen eyes, but we
    never heard about matchstick horseracing.
We knew that politicians are cathedrals, but we’ve
    only just learned that mouths prefer solitary walks.
Go talk to the scissorman,
    to sperm flamingos.
Flap your headwings; tell this caterpillar dog
    all about leg space.
Hide your target face
    among spiderflowers.

Shadow, thy name is symmetry.
Gravity is overstretched.
You may think
a collage is an octogenarian,
but, in fact, it’s an octopus.
It hides its ink.

■

 

Ship of Fools

Find a storm in the tree
the devil in the ribbon
Check if the bottom
still keeps the abyss at bay

Remember: you’re not the captain
you are the captain’s captive
Your soul, rank grass
your day, eyeblend

The mad sail flaps
with a delayed collapse
Have a glass of ice peas
watch the bible boat downsize

These weak men of winter
their red-alarm noses

■

Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. Between 2006 and 2009 he worked as a creative writing tutor for the Irish Writers’ Centre. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, The Literary Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cyphers, The SHOp, Stride, Otoliths, etc. His latest (fifth) poetry collection is The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019). His latest novel, The Flying Dutchman, has been published by Glagoslav Publications, England, in 2018. He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.


Caterina Stamou

THE NEST ISSUE

lockdown poems



■

Caterina Stamou studied Cultural Management and English & American literature. She mostly enjoys writing when she sees it as a process of radical self-honesty and self-acceptance. She lives in Athens, Greece.

Daniel Whelan

THE NEST ISSUE

Fiber Optic

Salaud! This system of gay abandon,
A crosshatch of switchblades and branded skin.
The gorgon eye does not choose at random,
Her silent witness, her fresh bloodless kin.

A crosshatch of switchblades and branded skin
Philtre Primavera in knotted sun.
Her silent witness, her fresh bloodless kin,
Molest the bandwidth wherein she is spun.

Filtered praestate in knotted sun,
Fucks through fiber optic, inviting those
Who molest the bandwidth, dopamine overrun,
To this rite of spring in binary clothes.

Look through fiber optic. Lo! I say. Lo!
Useless hagioscope, a useless cup.
In this rite of spring, binarily clothe,
The dogman finds he’s just run out of luck.

■

Covid Spring

Hard to place ourselves
‘tween the toilet paper diagnostic
Of the elderly dead,
Their pus-filled alveolar sacs
And the fecund feed.

Where the code’s made flesh
And the flesh made code.
Are you short of breath?
For the dope bell tolls.

While, talon upon branch,
The cherry blossom’s blooming bird
Sings
At the turn of this Covid Spring.

■

Chaps

Cock young house sparrows incessant
Bookend poor mademoiselle
With gross dimorphism.
Golden tresses and a colour fair
Bless this Alpine lake.
Mec, gros, ferme ta gueule, frère.

■

Carrion

Carrion crow
My carrion carcass
Hooded crow
Secrets understood
Jackdaw
Happily ever after
Magpie
The morning of the flood

Phoenix Park
For the lark
‘spite malignant Tuam
Same river
Never twice
Memory lost upon the loom

■

Daniel Whelan grew and developed as a musician and poet in the rural idylls of Southern Carlow, Ireland. In the foothills of Mount Leinster, he learned finger style guitar and developed his literary taste using the early 20th century as his portal. His writing style developed out of a stiff Catholic upbringing and an inherent desperation to outgrow its fettered approach to love, human nature and emotion. Now at a point of departure, he attempts, in poetry and song, to find a place for true human experience as the waves of the digital age encroach.

John Morgan

ΠΟΙΗΣΗ, ΤΖΟΝ ΜΟΡΓΚΑΝ, JOHN MORGAN, POETRY, THE NEST ISSUE


■

I am here at home in Bow Street, a village two miles from the west coast of Wales. As a visual poet, the call for Nest came as rapidly as the collapse of my design programmes caused by updating computer operating systems to cope with the communication needs of lockdown. “here” visualises the surrounding landscape and sudden silence through a face to face encounter with a badger, whose eyes I’d like to think trace the events of centuries past; an experience I can never hope to share in a world we are struggling and failing to understand. You can find plenty of other visual poems on my website to keep you busy in lockdown: http://users.aber.ac.uk/jpm/visual/words.html

Clara Burghelea

POETRY, THE NEST ISSUE

Quarantine love

I hear time trickle alongside walls, ghost
fingers prying through the yawning door,
a splotch of red in the tall grass. Lichen
buds sprout inside the creases of the mind.

The thawing of your hunger fills the cheek
of the blue tit, my eyelids parched with light,
no tongue to smooth away the strips of silence.
Days in fossilized amber, lactic acid surplus

in the hissing of the rested limbs. Lopsided
want cradled in small places – a scab, white
of the eyes, lips of blueberry, map of the face.
This earth is quick with moist cartilages.

■

Έρωτας σε καραντίνα

Μετάφραση ΔΗΜΗΤΡΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ

Ακούω τις σταγόνες του χρόνου έξω από τους τοίχους, φαντασματικά
δάχτυλα να ψαχουλεύουν την ορθάνοιχτη πόρτα,
μια κόκκινη σταγόνα στο ψηλό γρασίδι. Ανθισμένες
λειχήνες ξεπετάγονται στις σχισμές του μυαλού.

Η πείνα σου λιώνει καλύπτοντας το μάγουλο της
γαλάζιας ρόγας, οι βλεφαρίδες μου ξηραίνονται στο φως,
δεν υπάρχει γλώσσα να λειάνει τις λωρίδες της σιωπής.
Οι μέρες απολιθωμένο κεχριμπάρι, γαλακτικό καυστικό πλεόνασμα

στον συριστικό ήχο των λυμένων μελών. Η επιθυμία γέρνει
και λικνίζεται σε επιμέρους τόπους – την κρούστα μιας πληγής, το λευκό
των ματιών, χείλη από blueberry, τον χάρτη του προσώπου.
Αυτή η γη δεν καθυστερεί στους νωπούς χόνδρους.

Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other is scheduled for publication in 2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the Translation/International Poetry Editor of The Blue Nib.

This is a poem inspired by a current piece of news: https://abc7news.com/entertainment/love-is-quarantine-lets-users-date-online-without-seeing-each-other/6032819/ and informs on what love might feel like during confinement or when one of the partners is in quarantine.