The Singing Ice
Some stories tell the truth.
Some stories lie.
Make sure you can tell the difference.
When the youngest sister killed the eldest for
daring to be the one to inherit
and court the man who should
by rights
have married the youngest and prettiest
as all stories say is the truth
she tied her sister’s hands and feet together
burned her clothes off her
and threw her in the lake to drown
which she did
but
come winter
people wanting to cut ice
to shore against the summer said
the ice was singing
and when a travelling poet picked up
a window of ice from the bank
and gazed through it
he saw it all happen again
made his harp harmonise
with the dead girl’s voice
so he could sing the tale in summer.
He came back
every winter to learn more songs
until his hair was too white
and at last they were wed
and that my friends is how
the ice age ended
and our children began to be born
into the golden light.
Jennifer A. McGowan, one of Oxford’s Back Room Poets, graduated from Princeton with honours, and from the University of Wales for her M.A. and Ph.D. Still Lives with Apocalypse (Prolebooks)won the Prole pamphlet competition in 2020, and Jennifer won the Scottish Mountain Writing competition the same year. Her work has been anthologised in many places including Arachne Press’ The Other Side of Sleep, and No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book. Her songs have been recorded on several labels and her most recent collection is How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager).
Miss Goldilocks
You know a body can explode with the weight
of other people’s needs all that anger
and accusations whose been
Eating ? Sitting? Sleeping?
Let’s say our Goldilocks wanted to climb into a story,
tip over a rustic chair just to prove she was there.
What if she was a bottle blond, not the child
you thought at all but mousey haired and moulded
into someone else’s idea of perfection
when all she wanted was an innocent afternoon
a toddle down the path of pretence with three old
teddy bears and a packet of digestive biscuits.
Let’s say her father was no white knight
but hid in morbid silences too afraid to speak
unloved by the woman called wife while a mangy wolf
whined at the door. And was that jam in the porridge?
You know, I think what she wanted was a safe borrowed bed
with lavender scented sheets, pillows that sigh
and no discord smoking up the back stairs. Some lives
falter, some flower into a sky thick with wishes,
our Goldilocks ran away, became not that naughty girl
in a story but a voice inside a voice intending to be heard.
Tina Cole won the Yaffle Press Poetry Competition in 2020, her second collection, Forged (Yaffle Press) followed in 2021. Her published poems have appeared in the Guardian newspaper and many U.K. magazines and poetry collections. She is currently finalising an M.A. in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
January Goals
When this grey dissipates,
I’ll skid down a muddy riverbank
in wellies, and spot brown trout
as long as my arm, slinking beneath willow.
Cold-cheeked,
I’ll scatter a crowd of dithering coots
and jostle rosehips and crab apples
dangling from witchy fingers.
I’ll stand below the angel tree
with its ribbons and trinkets,
and read about the young mother
who shared my first name.
I’ll find a new molehill,
sink a foot into its dark crumble,
then crouch to a clutch of green spears,
rising, rising.
Lucy Dixcart lives in rural Kent. She was a finalist in the 2021 Brotherton Poetry Prize and her poems have appeared in publications including Stand, Acumen, Lighthouse, Fenland Poetry Journal, Wild Court and Ink Sweat & Tears.