Sue Burge’s two poetry collections are: In the Kingdom of Shadows and Confetti Dancers (Live Canon). Lumière and The Saltwater Diaries, both pamphlets, are published by Hedgehog Poetry Press. Her third collection, The Artificial Parisienne, is forthcoming with Live Canon. www.sueburge.uk
A Sad and Disgraceful Day
Penelope unravels her weaving
in the half-hearted winter light of the park.
At her feet, a puppet Odysseus lies rotting.
He’s walked forever to reach her
through mud and gorse
with the blinkered, unreasoned and slavish desire
with which one hopeless case
is damned to follow another.
A rasping sound—he’s trying to sharpen his nose
on a stone. Penelope fears him, she fears all liars,
but even as he decomposes
the light of the setting sun beguiles her.
She grabs him by the neck. Your fault, she says,
smashing his soft brains out
on the edge of the bench.
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.
Seeking Persephone
The sky fades to furnace scarlet and steel:
Hecate’s time, between sun and moon.
A commonplace bird flits across the field.
Starlings muster, singly at first.
A birdball fires from the misty hillside
gathers mass, explodes –
swirling, pulsating strip
ripping through dusk
whipping, for a fraction of a second,
into her form, arms raised first in defence
threshing into defiance,
her shriek shattering to
whirring grey wings beating the hedgerow
seeking out roosts in skeletal branches
remnants of copses cleared for cattle and crops,
until the birds settle and darkness falls still.
Laura Davis is an experimental poet and textile artist, based in Belgium. Her first collection, Found & Lost, came out in 2022 (Kingston University Press) and a solo exhibition of textile poetry from that collection ran at the Green Door Gallery in Brussels, 2023. Her website is poetry.lauradavis.eu