It’s the most
Raymond’s kids loved going round the neighbours with all the fancy lights. In November Raymond’s kids started to ask questions, drop hints. He put a Wanted on the local Stuff For Nothing Facebook page and got loads of odds and sods of wrapping paper. Some of it was for Birthdays or announced Happy Retirement, but he was an unchoosy beggar on a Yuletide mission. When it was the kids’ turn to come to his house for the weekend he’d just finished. He stood there, with a glass of cold mulled wine, like a Pound shop Christo. His was the only house on their street wrapped in paper. His ex-wife wound the window down, swore and sighed. The kids wouldn’t get out of the car. They passed their mum a card and she passed it to Raymond. He said, I’ve got it wrong again, havent I? She did a half-smile and they all drove away. He thought one of the kids might have waved. He thought about quickly knocking up a Nativity on the hard standing. Mimi’s poodle looked a bit like a sheep and he had a donkey costume somewhere. Didn’t he? Or was it a cow? Did it matter? Did any of it matter?
Scunthorpe-born Rob Walton lives in Whitley Bay with his artificial Christmas tree and his artificial life. His poems and flash fictions are in various places, and Arachne Press published his debut poetry collection, This Poem Here, in 2021. @robwaltonwriter
Home Fires
Two huge Chinese vases took pride of place in Nana’s best front room, where stern as sentries keeping watch, they framed her leaded grate. To the right the shell-case she made in munitions, to the left an empty scuttle wrought in brass. Next door to that, a set of irons she’d polish till they shone. In the centre the fireplace, with its nest of kindling, was laid each New Year’s Day. She’d rise at dawn to sweep the ash from our burned out Christmas fire.The rest of the year Jack Frost lived there. Our words hung in the air like winter stars/ and the stuffed leather sofa had seats so cold they bit into your bum. It was a room not for sitting but for looking at unless the doctor came. For him she’d pile the scuttle high and not begrudge the match.
Abigail Ottley is proud to have three poems in Magi Gibson’s Unbridled anthology. This year’s highlights include winning the Wildfire Words flash fiction competition and being currently long listed for the Ink of Ages historical fiction prize.
Christmas in Mexborough
That was the year I wore a paper crown
so I could play the part of Balthazar.
From tinsel and a coat hanger
I made a crooked star
and hung it from a tree.
There were no carols at our door –
no sleigh bells in the darkness and no snow.
I took a furtive swig of advocat.
Only smoking rooftops sloping into dawn,
my father’s pit sock with a walnut in the toe.
Ian Parks is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry. His translations of Constantine Cavafy were a Poetry Book Society Choice. His Selected Poems 1983-2023 is published by Calder Valley Poetry.