Ashes
They wake in the small hours in the country house, long miles from Hudiksvall.
Moonlit snow lies thick. Dark pines shelter the still garden, their shadows lie
elongated, spear-head sharp, on crystal whiteness. Dawn comes late.
Always dark here, except for a few brief hours. A wind is blowing hard
against the house, scattering the roof-top snow. He rakes the stove,
takes outside the soft, white, silken silt of ashes,
which whirl like genii, skywards from the ash-pile’s drifted hoard.
They stoke the fire, let soft flames fill the room with red-gold homeliness.
Darkness returns, lies purring deeply round the house, a sleek, black cat,
whose dense fur drinks the light. Wind drops, flakes fall softly all the night.
She opens the door, in half-light, sees that grey ashes lie- grey ashes?-
a sullen pall of lead on snow, the trees are dusty spirits in the gloom.
What is this fungal ash-fall, foul as sick-room breath ?
So far from human life, no signal on their phones, car engine dead.
And so they walk. Pale light returns, their footprints ink-black,
deep as eyeholes in the mouldered skull of some huge, fallen beast,
the fringe of pines forever on their right, the distance never getting less.
Across the endless, ash-strewn snow, their shadows, doppelgangers, stalk their steps.
Aoife McClellan is a Suffolk poet, whose poems draw from Nature, Celtic mythology, the Wiccan year and the supernatural. Sometimes, as in this poem, she explores human psychology and hints at environmental issues. How is it that our safe places, both physical and mental, can suddenly become hostile or ‘unheimlich’?
The motherless club
The world. The world without my mother became Sasha. Born the year my mother died, three days before my mother’s birthday. White socks, in the dark, across my bed. Cinderella-paw. Ukrainian-orphan: this is a motherless club. No dogs on the bed, you said. You are the duvet Sasha, the warm fur-generator. The gerbil-smell. The hall light spreads into a bearable Netflix-night of K-dramas; where the lovers take many moments to close off the world as their eyes meet, it’s snowing and they suddenly notice the snow in their smiles and the song is a single voice and it’s lost in heartbreak, ages, melancholy guitars. And your flag-ears raise as I get up to use the toilet. And fall back into the sides of your head with my sighs.
Helen Pletts: (www.helenpletts.com) (Instagram @helen.pletts) Working collaboratively as Word & Image by Pletts & Berger with illustrator Romit Berger, since 2011 (published exclusively online by IS&T. ‘The plane tree entertains the circus of doves’ won the Ink Sweat & Tears Pick of the Month in March 2019. Helen’s poetry was shortlisted 3 times for Bridport Poetry Prize 2018, 2019, and 2022, twice long-listed for The Rialto Nature & Place Competition 2018 and 2022, longlisted for the Ginkgo Prize 2019, longlisted for The National Poetry Competition 2022. She was 2nd prize winner, The Plaza Prose Poetry Prize 2022-2023.
The Saucer
Yes. The house has fallen. Yet I find shelter enough
in the ruins. I’ll stay one more summer
Now the vetch and speedwell have come, daisies
plentiful as the stars and honesty flowering
This soft rain is nothing to me. The goat still gives
her milk. The hedgepig comes each evening
Drinks fresh water from our grandmother’s
saucer. The willow pattern
Cracked now, but still it holds
Bel Wallace is a carer who practises yoga and enjoys long walks. Her writing has been published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Raceme, The Lighthouse, Allegro, Magma and The Interpreter’s House.instagram.com/belwallace_writer/