In a Time of Crisis
Not all the small things you can do
can save the world.
Never say “It couldn’t happen here!”
It could.
Put on your best face for the future
and take heart.
Rescue those you can and leave the rest –
the boat has only so much room.
The choices that we make will haunt us.
We must make them.
When the fire comes,
you will feel its heat
leave everything behind
but keep the children safe.
There is no cure for hubris, it will kill the arrogant,
wilfully ignorant, those with closed minds.
We will outlive their prisons
and starvation camps
their economic fallacies,
their drowned cities.
Not all the small things you can do
will save the world.
But every kindness,
every act of grace
will keep alive the things that make us.
We must save ourselves. Each other.
Kathleen Jones spent ten years living in the middle east and Africa and now lives in the Lake District and writes poetry, biography and fiction. Her most recent collections are Mapping Emily (Templar Poetry) and The Rainmaker’s Wife (Indigo Dreams).
Origins
She would not have the mini bag
of Haribo, even though she loves them,
because they had been handed out
in her classroom for the birthday
of a boy she did not like.
She’s going to hold grudges
which eventually will hurt her,
or hold the origin of all things
above her wish to have them:
the type of person we will need
if the world is to be saved.
Tristan Moss lives in York with his partner and two youngish children. He has recently had poems published in London Grip, Snakeskin and Poems in the Waiting Room.
Under an Ochre Tree
Days passed without writing days
passed days passed and passed.
Then some rain in my throat.
I stood under an ochre tree.
It was the end of autumn, I remember.
It was almost the loneliness of winter.
How desperately I wanted somebody
else’s life, how miserable this
desire was I remember now,
wanting to be in another body.
But I stood still under an ochre tree.
Within the beauty of fluttering leaves,
I craved to leave the labyrinths of my body.
How lost I felt, how vain, how small I was
asking myself: how would you be
you in this world of chaos and glory?
Would you still be under an ochre tree?
Would you still be?
But who would you choose to be?
Özge Lena (she/her) is an Istanbul-based writer/poet and English language teacher who has a published novella titled Otopsi (The Autopsy). Her poems appeared or forthcoming in Green Ink Poetry, Fragmented Voices, Fahmidan Journal, One Art Poetry, Off Menu Press, and elsewhere. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize 2021, judged by Mary Ruefle.
Bucket list
I want to learn to drop in
without breaking something
I want to get invites to housewarmings
from friends half my age
I want to be offered drugs I’ve never heard of
and feel it’s cool to refuse them
I want to learn a new language
just to read something that hasn’t been translated
I want to descend to the deeps
blow a kiss to the ugliest fish
through the poky porthole of bulletproof acrylic
I want to test breatharians in laboratory settings
I want to feed the makers of motivational posters
and mountain-top yoga-teachers
to the glory of nature, like leeches and hyenas
and see if they still find beauty in everything
I want to coin a new SI unit of schadenfreude
maybe call it the milligloat and wonder how to measure it
then use it as a form of renewable energy
I want to be there when light’s held still in a cloud of rubidium
get skyhooked by entanglement
catch a tube on a gravity wave
and fly away by naming an asteroid ‘Dave’
I want to hold the first antimatter construct
and not be annihilated
I want to watch as the first homegrown lungful’s taken on Mars
I want to feel I can trust Elon Musk
that he’s isn’t the bringer of dystopian cyberpunk
and my spacecraft-based nerdgasms aren’t misplaced
I want to
I do.
In 2019, Dave Hubble won the Bread & Roses poetry award and founded the Ghost River poetry collective. He wrote the Style & Technique chapter for Spoken Word in the UK (Routledge, 2021). He is based in Hampshire. Navigational Array (Dense Weed, 2017)Blog: davehubblewriter.wordpress.com