A Post-Colonial Cool Yule to y’All
Australia detained asylum seekers on Christmas Island until 2018.
It was named in 1643 after William Mynors of the East India Company sighted it on Christmas Day.
Have you seen the red crab women
of Christmas Island
before sunrise and spring tides
in the final quarter of the moon
peeling off sarongs
drifting as cirrus into El Niño?
It’s a marvellous spectacle
eggs dropping into the ocean
as wanton beads off a garland
All other stages of migration
are dependent on prevailing weather patterns
mood of governing bodies.
Conception, not especially immaculate,
takes place at low tide with the sun down
In time offspring may emerge or none
in search of a suitable location, infrastructure
like schools, hospitals, an inn
Julie Maclean is the author of nine publications including Kiss of the Viking (Poetry Salzburg). Her most recent pamphlet Was Red Was Love will be published as joint winner of the Dreich Slims Poetry Competition. A full manuscript shortlisted for Salt’s Crashaw Prize was published as When I Saw Jimi, winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize.
Little Town
Tonight my town is struggling to breathe
in air thin with the drop of four degrees
and the fumes of brickie’s and builder’s vans
going home for Christmas past Diwali lights
still up in the windows of back-to-backs.
Little children in nativity clothes skip
ahead of weary mums who carry a full term’s
worth of coloured sugar paper that framed
little Billy and Tiffany’s art work plucked
from the wall in Class 1 infants.
The library’s stained glass windows are dark
and closed and on the other side of the road
the war memorial is decorated in wreaths
for the remembered dead. Poundland
is a beacon for the underpaid; pulls them
from the streets with promises of plastic
tatt to help them make believe this year
will be a good one. The fog drops
from the moors, the moon, all big
and boastful disappears, only those
up in the hills can see it now and from there
this town is magical, lit up with a thousand
kitchen’s tea time strip-lights, tap-room’s glow
and streets of shoppers and early-doors drinkers.
It looks, for now, like anyone’s hometown,
babies asleep in their cots and dads out
for an after-work pint text their wives
to ask for just one more.
The name of a child is spelled in tealights
blinking tiny halos. Balloons and flowers wilt
in this year’s first hard frost on the railings of the park.
And through the mist a single star shines in the dark.
Gill Connors is from North Yorkshire. She runs online workshops with her husband, Mark and she is currently working on her third collection which is part of her PhD. Her two previous collections are published by Yaffle
The Boy Next Door
It is diwali night and this year too
my job has kept me from visiting
home for the festivities,
adding another to my ever-growing
list of diwalis away from home.
So I put up my indifferent façade and treat myself
to tandoori aloo paratha and dahi at a dhaba,
and have just returned to my residential society
when the aunty next door calls on me to join
the celebration on the rooftop, followed by dinner.
And I join, despite myself, getting to know
my neighbours for the first time, playing
with their kids, dusting firecracker ash
from my sleeves and the inevitable ache
of being called “uncle” by the brats.
When dinner arrives I have a heartful,
my neighbours never suspecting how
the boy next door has
smiled his way through his
second dinner of the evening.
Ankit Raj Ojha is the author of Pinpricks (2022), editor of Wives (2023), and winner of the Briefly Think Essay Prize 2023. He edits The Hooghly Review and is published in Poetry Wales, Poetry Scotland, The Honest Ulsterman, Routledge, JHUP etc.