Author Archives: fragmentedvoices

MOWING

The distant smoke of burning leaves
and the heavy scent of gasoline 
smothers the late-summer air. 
He stops to watch wings scatter 
aimlessly from the trees. His forearm 
glistens in silence and the mower 
grinds to a halt as he wipes his brow, 
seated on a bench in the half-mown 
grass. Nothing but the wind 
to witness his chest tightening 
like a fist around his heart. 

RED TRACTOR

in memory of David Bowring

A bright red tractor sputters and dies 
on the yellow horizon. The spider plants 

on our kitchen table died years ago—
green leaves spilling from the bowl 

like milk tongued from a saucer, 
until they folded in on themselves

like immolated sheets of paper—
the way you can almost hear them

screaming and curling like singed hair, 
the crumbling ash of something living. 

Right now, chemotherapy is tearing
at your uncle’s vitals like a controlled fire. 

The red tractor may yet turn over,
and the farmer might save his field. 

But the fire inside your uncle’s pancreas 
will never extinguish or ignite again. 

Meet the Poet!

Brandon McQuade is an award-winning poet, and founding editor of Duck Head Journal. His poetry collection, Bodies, was the recipient of the 2022 Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award. He lives in Northern Wyoming with his wife and their children. 

Had ya horses man, the day’s in no rush to start,
Mrs Kelly’s shooing next door’s cat oot the yard.

Morning still wears its dressing gown,
tied tight round the midriff,
grey and downy, soft and fluffy, Tyneside foggy.

September sighs in the back lanes,
bairns and mams bicker their way to school –

If I’ve telt yi once, I’ve telt yi a thoosand times,
don’t poke ya sister in the eye.

The weather changes when the bairns go back,
baking taties on offer at the Community Grocery,
a 45p tea, for me and Olenka, a Ukrainian refugee.

Meet the Poet!

Tracey Pearson is a poet and flash fiction writer from Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her work has been published in print anthologies, magazines and online. Tracey’s recent writing appears in Poetry Wales, Dreich, Culture Matters and Visual Verse, and is forthcoming in Briefly Write.

There was a time inside a lettuce leaf 
I found the crinkles enjoyable to walk. 

I traipsed songs lost in headphones 
found trees upside down in winter. 

Heard birds in the yawn of a cat 
and caught a train for a bus for a hike. 

It led me to this, a place of rock and stone. 
Nothingness sits outside a window 

until you leave the vehicle and walk. 
Things appear in the nostril before 

your hands have left the crust. 
Your soup stays on the lips, cola burps 

a crow, and crisps wear away fence posts. 
But each walk brings you closer, closer 

to the life you live inside. The life you live 
before you found this place in the crunch 

of a carrot one salad afternoon. 
Watching a sun biscuit-dunk into a mountain 

wait for the warmth to leave you behind 
then see your fingerprints smudged 

on the moon, the end of your nose.

Meet the Poet!

Gareth Culshaw lives in North Wales. He has 4 poetry collections, most recent by Hendon Press called Memory Tree. He is a winner of Backlash Best Book Award 2022. 

That yellowing mould of surrender

Like soft vows

Subsides on the kerb as a light wind makes the leaves

Skittish

With those most recently released from the bough

Falling through shafts of sunlight and forming, casually

A duvet against the stone, against the cold of a coming night

This heat has made the trees distress and shrug off their ornaments

Those leaves

Fluttering dependents in need of drink and so they are

Expendable. It is the rule of law. 

Long grass warped into dry and brittle threads

Susceptible to fire. All these indicators of change

Gather here in plain sight to form a queue of warning signs

Do Not Proceed. One Way Only. Danger of Death

Another turning point goes blind to history

All the common sights forgot and nothing left

But burning twigs

Meet the Poet!

Mike Doherty says: “I have always tried to express myself. School reports exhort you to “try harder”. Poetry is the only medium I have found to reach into the corners of my soul and shed some light. It’s never easy and often not terribly good. But, I love it.”

Glints in the city sun and
Town-breeze ripples rainbow
Touches in the oily film
Running behind and under-street
Brick-sided trough canals
Floated industry wall-screened
But inconspicuous door-gaps
Disguise steps down to the tight
Towpaths that shelve over
The patient loitering waters
Down-flow interrupted  
Waiting on sleeper levers
To be wrenched hinge-swing
Circulation rebooted
Veins in need of dredging
Drear-grime to dark heart’s blood

Meet the Poet!

Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Manchester, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published by Eyewear in December, 2017. 

That fall day we raked leaves from behind the shed.
Smell of earth and wet decay rose in the cold air.
We could see our breath.

Worms and beetles scattered through a fence.
I saw dirt and thought we had finished.
“Not yet,” you said.

The gray sky grew darker and the wind chilled.
When your flashlight showed not a speck of leaf,
you said, “We’re done.”

Today I look at the wet leaves below.
I kneel and clear your grave.
Again, I smell the earth and feel the biting cold.

The damp leaves shimmer like tears, not many,
that drop on the yellowed grass.
“We’re done,” I hear you say.

I say a prayer, cross myself, and rise.
I see my breath and imagine I see yours.
I should leave, I think, but not yet.

Meet the Poet!

James Mulhern’s writing has appeared in literary journals over one hundred and seventy-five times, and has been recognised with many awards. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was granted a writing fellowship to Oxford University. That same year, a story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his novels were Finalists for the United Kingdom’s Wishing Shelf Book Awards. His novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019. He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 for his poetry.

Dad died in the spring
    in the brown reclining chair, 
        without morphine, 

         before sunrise, 
    as elliptical galaxies 
retired to cosmic caves,

like whales into deep sea.

Yesterday, I learned 
     that space recycles stars—
          That when one burns out, 

           it splashes out sparks 
     of elements, that birth new stars,
traveling in clusters, like fish.

Maybe, if I look long enough

into May’s night sky, 
    I might catch a glimpse
        of Dad, swimming in space, 

       25 million light-years away:
   his giant fins causing constellations 
to sparkle, with each sweep. 

I empty my heart to Ursa Major tonight. 

For, every cell in me, 
    wants the trio of time, 
         dementia and distance

         to return Dad to me, 
    so that we may contemplate 
the minutia of our ebbing existence, 

and the edge of the universe,

and what’s beyond, 
    and what’s beyond the beyond,
        as we once did

when I was thirteen.

(April 21, 2022) 

Meet the Poet!

Katarina Xóchitl Vargas (she/her) is an emerging Xicana poet, originally from Mexico. After her family moved to the U.S, she began composing poems to process alienation. A dual citizen of the U.S and Mexico, today she writes resistance poetry and lives on occupied Tsenacommacah territory where she is working on her first chapbook. Xóchitl is the first-place recipient of the inaugural Mulberry Literary Fresh Voices Award. Her poems first appeared in Somos en escrito: The Latino Literary Online Magazine, Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal, The Acentos Review, Penumbra and Barrio Panther. Follow her on Instagram @Cantos_de_Xochitl

THEY WILL LOOSEN THEIR GRASP

As the days pass, those roses – one 
white, another red – slowly unfold their petals
from bud to full blossom, growing wider 
with each night, their scents swelling beneath
the stars, in the moon’s light …but
one day, their petals will loosen their 
grasp & begin to carpet this table.

RENASCENCE

On that distant mountain
fire snakes down its slopes
acrid smoke drifts ‘cross miles

wrapping around words we
weave in a blue house
drinking wine & feasting

on this birth day eve

Meet the Poet!

Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear in over 300 journals on six continents, and 20 collections of poetry – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019) and Caribbean Interludes (Origami Poems Project, 2022). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. Her writing has been honoured by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2011) and nominated for the Best of the Net. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at: http://www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer or https://latinamericawanderer.wordpress.com.