Christmas Day
Blackbirds here again,
hopping across the lawn,
signal that this is
a day like any other
and all is right with the world –
despite water,
coming through the ceiling,
and grandma directing my wife
and daughter with her stick,
with boxes to catch the drips.
Back and forth they hop,
pecking clean upturned apple halves,
turned to coracles of skin;
stripped to the core and skewered,
as by a mast.
The female has brown feathers
and is more diffident than him.
He runs, hands clasped behind his back,
chasing away all competition,
however familial; beak thrust
out in front, its orange
the means of telling him apart,
as if its orange-ness
is what is left when black
is washed away by apple juice.
We set off, belatedly, for lunch,
a plumber having finally fixed the leak,
Dad, head down, nose pushed
confidently in front, hands behind his back,
re-buoyed by alcohol.
Phil Barrett
Jingle bells and Highballs
it’s colder than a snow angel on PCP right now.
I’m trippin so hard. Jimmy is laughing because
I’m making tiny pimento cheese sandwiches
in my underwear. Jimmy’s kind of cute when
he laughs. He has this wicked grin and his
nose wrinkles up. Sometimes he laughs so hard
he nearly hyperventilates. We’ve been drinking
gin and tonic out of art deco highball glasses
I stole from an old lady I used to work for.
I take a bite of the sandwich after I pick off the
crust and Jimmy wipes some Pimento Cheese
from my mouth. Karen Carpenter is singing
a Christmas song on Jimmy’s flat screen.
Merry Christmas Darling… she croons.
Karen didn’t want Pimento Cheese sandwiches,
I tell Jimmy. She starved herself.
That’s her tough luck, he says,
eating another sandwich in practically one bite.
hey, I’m the queen of tiny sandwiches,
I tell him. Wheres my crown? where’s my
damn crown? Jimmy starts laughing again.
He grabs the remote and changes the channel.
Unfortunately, it’s another crappy Christmas re-run.
Melanie Brown
Romance in Middle Age??
I should like to have been the ghost at your feast,?
to have beckoned to you with a long, white,?
red-tipped finger, to come with me, away, away.??
Me in my red silk dress flowing to the ground,?
swishing as I walked, cut to the waist at the back?
framing my luscious curves, the delicate pearls of spine;
?my jet hair loose and sleek. ??
I would have taken you?
to the roof to swirl in a waltz far above the city,?
your hand firm on my waist. We would have been magnificent. ??
You would have come with me willingly, leaving?
your dull company. You wouldn’t have minded the roof.??
The red dress would have drawn favour. Revellers
?in the street below would have pointed at the couple
?roof-dancing in winter, domed by stars.
Angela Topping
*Phil Barrett trained as a visual artist, with a career spent largely
teaching Art and Design. Since early retirement he has led poetry
workshops in Primary and Secondary Schools. He has won prizes for his
poetry – most recently 2009 Barnet Open and joint 2nd Prize 2009
Ravenglass Competition – with a poem in the 2010 Word Aid Anthology
‘Did I Tell You?’ – 1 31 poems for Children in Need.
*Melanie Browne writes poetry and fiction. She is a former art teacher
now raising her three children with her husband in Texas. She is the
founding editor of a new online journal The Literary Burlesque.
She has writing at various places on
the web such as Bartleby- Snopes,Word Riot, and 34th Parallel.
*Angela Topping lives in Cheshire and has four solo collections, including The New Generation, for children, (Salt 2010). Forthcoming in 2011 is a chapbook, I Sing of Bricks from Salt, and a sequence from Rack Press called Catching On.
