egg

her first was almost translucent
light brown with dark freckles
laid in the pot of a dying nasturtium
a virgin birth in a pile of hay
dropped and abandoned
like it was nothing special

Geraldine Stoneham lives in South Australia after spending her working life in the UK.  She has been writing poetry for 7 years and has been published in Ink, Sweat &Tears  amongst other magazines

Matryoshka

I stop reading

but learn the alphabet again,
live on boiled eggs, phonetics,
broccoli heads,
swap my time
for stacking,
dandelions, balls,

you – gently hardening
into your whorls,
learning not to kill snails
or break
a flower’s first curl.

I button your centre,
that warm kernel of love,
knowing there is no morning
that will give me the same child.

Doll-son, lashes of feathers,
softening to night,
I’ll sing,
sing while you sleep
on all that we have accomplished.

Guinevere Clark is a poet, editor, and creative producer. A Forward Prize nominee and Hammond House international poetry prize winner, her work appears widely. She holds a Creative Writing PhD and is Founder of Poetry Into Light CIC.

Hale-Bopp

Hale-Bopp orbits the sun once every 2534 years.
The comet last reached perihelion in April 1997.

In the same space — millennia apart —  an overlay.
On the threshold of a home built of the stone she walks on,
this woman / that woman wraps arms around her middle,
watches a new brilliance in the blackness, wonders
what comes next

This woman / that woman clutches at the familiar,
the rising falling chest of a just tucked in child,
thud of cattle hooves on the sea’s backbeat,
the clench re-clench to her stomach.
blood  turmoil  sacrifice

Ears stay alert to all that surrounds
but her eyes must look up.
She is helpless under it,
this star / no star / this axe between the shoulder blades.
run her body says run

Annette Skade’s two books of poetry are Thimblerig, (2013)  and the eco-poetry book Holdfast, (2024). Poems appear in journals in Ireland, Australia, the UK and US, Current work concerns Dark Skies, and how light pollution threatens biodiversity and human relationships with the night.