A Berbice Christmas, 1962
Christmas bring back the good ole times – Guyana masqueraders
running through the town, dancing with bugle and drum, down the streets
up the doorstep, Mother Sally big face rotating through bedroom windows
frightening pickney fuh so! Xmas Eve, out come the Sunday best –
Daddy in he church suit, shine shoe with spats, we in organdie dandans
with sash and bow and cancan; Mummy in she new frock
the dressmaker copy from Woman magazine. We like a crocodile
heading for the lime, waltzing up Water St, past the peanut sellers
and flambeaux lighting up the place like is day.
Carols holler out from JP Santos and Bookers Stores, people nose
up the glass to see fire engines, white dollies, china teasets
and something call LEGO. One by one we line up to see
Father Xmas both petrify and excited bad bad.
Hohoho you been good girl? (Just like Father at confession listing your sins.)
Then all the midnight church bells ringing at once, calling the sinners, drawing
them from Babylon to squeeze up in pews bulging with bodies you neva see in
yuh life! Even stray dog come stand by the door while incense and the choir
start up perforating the Heavens O Holy Night! Rock on King Wenceslas
Rejoice!
And the baby born right then miraculous in the crib with the donkeys and
straw and Joseph and Mary and shepherds and the Three Wise Men and the
magic continue when we go home – one o’clock in the morning the other
Father had come and gone!
– he mussee slip through the jalousie because nobody got no chimney –
And there under the Xmas tree one dolly one book Jesus Lord the pleasure
knew no bounds! and when Daddy kick off his shoes and get out the rum
you know then Xmas start! Sanctified from outside where the boys
setting off their cowboy guns crack crack bam bam! on the roadside.
Maggie Harris is a Guyanese writer living in Kent. She has published 7 collections of poetry and 3 short story collections and a memoir. Awards include the Guyana Prize, The Commonwealth Prize and the Wales Poetry Award. Last year she was awarded a Fellowship for the RLF and ran a reading group in Margate. Her latest book of poetry is I Sing to the Greenhearts,(2025) published by SEREN.
Christmas Cat Car Cavalcade
Nikki and Allen live with a pride of four cats. First came a three-legged ashen British Shorthair she knighted Sir D’Artagnan D’Terrible, the Bird Butcher of Ohio. Next, she brought home Oliver “Oli” Olly Oxenfree, a buff tabby with chronic acid reflux and a missing eye. Last came a tiny, bonded pair of identical black kittens rescued from the parking lot behind Pizza Hut, which the veterinarian described as feral. Nikki asked Allen to name her rowdy boys. He called them Ozzy and Ronnie. He came to their marriage with no special passion for cats.
Every December, Nikki waits for the lake to freeze and the Christmas lights to go up. Then she begins her special project. Armed with a felt-tip marker and paper map, she traces a route to all the best holiday light displays throughout town. The route is not determined by geography. One destination does not naturally flow into the next. Rather, Nikki’s path is a gradual climb from simple to opulent, festive to blinding, requiring a labyrinthine crisscrossing of neighborhoods. In later years, she will purchase maps of adjoining counties, moving outward and onward.
After the route is set, Allen has a choice: all the cats in a single trip or four private trips for D’Artagnan, Oli, and each of the twins. Allen usually chooses the former.
The cats have no special passion for Christmas lights. They do not go willingly into Nikki and Allen’s Subaru, and Nikki does not believe in cages or leashes. The cats hiss and squirm and vanish into car crevices in the boneless way that only a cat can, secreting gooey fur balls under seats that will lie undiscovered like landmines for weeks.
While Allen drives, Nikki sits in the back and points out especially dazzling arrangements to their brood, oohing and aahing on their behalf. Allen crunches mini candy canes and listens to Christmas carols play on the stereo, tiny claws plucking at the upholstery behind him. Occasionally, he will glance back at a beaming Nikki through the rearview mirror and be struck by a special passion to keep the show going, to drive her and the cats past every twinkling house in the state until dawn breaks or the new year arrives. Because this is his family, their joy is his, and these maddening, wonderful moments together are what love is.
Keith J. Powell is a writer and editor based in Ohio. He is co-founder and managing editor of Your Impossible Voice and the author of the flash fiction chapbook Sweet Nothings Are a Diary If You Know How to Read Them (ELJ Editions). Visit keithjpowell.com for more.
Country town at Christmas
a hot day sharp shadows
and blinding white light
the street is wide and clean
two lanes divided by a dusty strip
its stumpy trees are decorated
with red gauze ribbons
a shop sign says Peace and Solidarity
there is shade Merry Christmas
shivers in the bakery window
aircon sweeps snowflake stickers
and mute blobs of cotton wool
across cracked floorboards
gingerbread houses sweat
into their cellophane wrappers
a woman screams harsh language
at a skinny, white-bearded man
squatting under the bank’s veranda
until he gets up and shuffles away
‘Hi Snowy,’ she yells at me as I pass by
unsmiling from the season’s mirage
wondering what she meant
Geraldine Stoneham lives in South Australia after spending her working life in the UK. She has been writing poetry for 6 years and has been published in Ink, Sweat &Tears amongst other magazines