Erik Kennedy, Sally St Clair and Catherine Edmunds: Day 1 (re)place feature

by | Sep 28, 2024 | Featured, Poetry

 

 

 

Animals on Leads

We entered the town and the first thing we saw
was a woman taking her ferret for a walk.
‘Nice day for it,’ I said significantly. The ferret
was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine

producing the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet.
And us, should we visit the town’s oldest church
with its medieval eagle lectern and greensand voussoirs,
or should we ramble to the squinty, stony seafront, walled in

by white gin-palace-style hotels? Let’s let the twitchy ferret
be our compass needle, straining against its bonds,
the confident quadrupedal scamperer pulling its minder along
until she’s going north and south, finding nothing and God.
 

 

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand.

 

 

 

Potting Quinces

This morning as I walked into the kitchen
I tripped over the folded rug
you had left in my way,
and as I tripped I righted myself
but in the long second
between the tripping and the righting
I saw myself shrunken
and old and broken
brittle and alone
my hair a white dandelion
my eyes bright with fear
knowing I would never again
walk on high muddy cliffs with you
hand in hand in the rain
looking at the jutting veils of land
between Dancing Ledge and Portland
where we will walk today when you
have finished the vacuuming
and I have potted the quinces.
 

 

Sally St Clair has been writing poetry and short stories for thirty years and was first published in the mid nineties. She lives in the Alpujarras (high pastures) of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Granada, Spain.

 

 

 

Lost in Newcastle
the words on the wall spell ‘Central Arcade’
she can’t read them
tiles sparkle green-black-red and gold,
gold-red-black-green, red, more gold,
Mariah Carey and Wizzard ring out,
plate glass windows reflect a person
she doesn’t know at all
people push past her laden with parcels
red-blue-white-silver-silver-white-blue-red
she remembers brown paper and string
long time ago in a little town called Bethlehem
but she can’t remember which bus goes to Gateshead
and no star guides her way

 

 

Catherine Edmunds is a writer, artist, and professional musician from the north of England, whose poetry has appeared in many journals, including Aesthetica, Crannóg, Poetry Scotland and Ambit. She was the 2020 winner of the Robert Graves Poetry Prize.