Two excellent online poetry Magazines

A certain amount of income is required to subscribe to poetry magazines. In the last year one of my charity subscriptions regrettably had to go, and I also had to stop  subscriptions to Poetry London, The North, and I think, though I’m not sure, my beloved Rialto.   My subscription to the wonderful New Walk hasn’t run out, so I’m not a complete modern poetry exile just yet.

Thank goodness there are excellent internet magazines which carry poetry. The great Chicago based Poetry of course,  and two more modest and recent British outfits,  The Lampeter Review and Anthipon.

The former is based in Wales and you can read from its generous and well produced copy here. I’ve a short poem in there, (page 90 if you are interested,) alongside work by poets and prose writers like Edward Bond, Alison Moore and Hannah Lowe.

Antiphon is another exceptionally well set out magazine. Its full of good work, selected and imaginatively presented by editors Rosemary Badcoe and Noel Williams. The next issue looks to be special as it is set to contain work by poets appearing at the Sheffield Poetry Festival.

That Which Grows on Trees

Happy is the blossom adored by the bees
happy is the rain to be embodied
happy the juice in virgin skin
happy the stone and the pip
happy the air laced with scent
happy the blush of the sweetening flesh
happy the fruit in the flattering breeze
happy the seduction by gravity
happy the storeroom and waiting pallet
happy the ladder and gathering basket
happy the globe eclipsing the sun
happy the worm
happy the grub
happy the fallen for they know no weight
happy the wasps in their alcohol haze
happy the windfall on a cushion of green
happy the roots and the turning leaves
happy the saliva and the teeth
happy the mouth and the beak
happy the earth at its well-earned rest
happy the moon in the empty nest
happy the man whose harvest is past
happy the sky in the fruit trees arms.

Sparrows

Sparrows

I know I’m home when I hear the sparrows
flurry and flit from the hawthorn hedge
rooted in the strip between
tarmac drive and pavement.
They whir and whoosh, spilling squabbles
and urgent calls that warn of stalking cats,
airing preludes to lovemaking and parenting
in songs winged across the centuries
to this housing estate, their lines sung over
the rumble and scrape of skateboards, a constant,
resurfacing in the receding wave
of a big bore exhaust.

Peak

Peak

in memory of C.S

We sit and eat by the cable-tethered cross
in the kind of silence you only get up here.

The air is thin and clear, calm as a prayer,
or the moment before a prayer is spoken.

A Peregrine arrows past, on its way
to terminal speed. Then a glider

circles the peak, the pilot waving
from his sun-glazed canopy.

Later, when your friend joins us,
none of us can know that in five years

a slip will take his life. He shakes my hand
and grins, his eyes bluer than the sky.

Colony

I visited my brother-in-law today. He lives in an old farm-house surrounded by dilapidated outbuildings with beams and slate roofs full of nests. The place is surrounded by fields and woods, and a path leads to some hives.

Colony

My son leads me along the path
to the neat row of hives
that house your colony.

Honey coloured abdomens
form a busy beard, fragmenting
and re-growing

as we watch.
Like that blush-chested finch
at the window during lunch,

or the stoat speeding
across the dusty road,
like those House Martins

darting under the eaves,
your presence is beyond
my collapsed belief.

Stones

Stones

Somewhere, you are resting
on the bed you chose.
Winter froze the surface,
a lid under snow. The swell came
in spring; in summer, water warmed
and slowed. By autumn I knew
what you’d said was true:
in a river, each is alone.

A new poem from John Challis

John Challis is a poet, producer and editor. He was born in London in 1984 and is currently working on a first collection of poetry. In 2010 he was gained an award to study for an MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Since then John has started a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University on contemporary poetry and Film Noir, and now works as a teaching associate. He was awarded a Northern Promise Award from New Writing North in 2012 to help develop his first collection.

I recently saw John read at Blackwells bookshop in Sheffield and was struck by the clarity and concision of his poetry. John kindly agreed to send some poems
and generously sent ‘Accident Hotspot’ which is  previously unpublished.

John’s poems have appeared in The Rialto, Clinic II, Lung Jazz: Young British Poets For Oxfam (Cinnamon , 2012). John also edits NCLA’s online journal of Creative Writing, Friction Magazine, and is the director of the Newcastle based live literature, theatre and music events company, Trashed Organ.

Accident Hotspot

Our bodies, central to this evening’s action,
are lit by streaks of rain.

The radio strains to hear its voice
under this guttural chorus.

We brave the road the dark has taken,
whittle a lane with our headlights.

We yawn past sleepers on the shoulder,
having met their mile quotas,

and when the headlights appear
behind us, and use our mirrors

to blind us, the impatient will pass,
stretching the fabric of the dark;

the dark speaks back with sirens.
Everything slows to a curve of brake-

lights glowing beneath the flood.
In the window the phosphorus smudge

of a fluorescent accident worker
is mining a car from the water.