REBIRTH
The release of being born again into a new life or form
Illustration by Mikayla Shuker
CIRCE
POETRY CATEGORY WINNER
Written by Nancy Bluebell Dowman (MA Creative Writing)
Epigraph: Circe is an Ancient Greek character and sorceress, famously appearing in the Odyssey and turning Odysseus’s men into pigs before becoming his lover.
I sit naked, staring at the horizon, picturing something,
anything, to make this less heavy, to lighten the mood,
to break the fever. I wish for a boat to break the rain.
To summarise, every day is the same, I sleep and I wake,
I weave and then I take a break, I crack herbs over the hearth
and inhale the poppyseeds, thyme, sage, and mint.
I play with the sorcery at my hands, the power of garlic
sticking to the fingers, I sniff at it – recounting memories,
and properties: nutritional, seasonal, medicinal, magical.
I wish I could tell him about it, scream into the distance
that garlic – despite its encroaching clinginess and the way
it hangs in the breath then sours, and how deadly the taste of arsenic
can be, yet how it is scented like the wilderness, garlic
growing untamed in the feet of trees in an untouched land
– resides at close hand in any and all pantries, teeming with potential.
Would anybody hear me if I screamed or would they even care?
Could I shout obscenities at the sky until my oesophagus was red?
Redder, I guess, considering the amount of entrails I’ve seen
slip down the side of an altar, offered to eternal energies, beings,
and occasionally the odd family member – my grandmother earth.
Bold to assume they would remember, how many years have passed?
How many cycles of my father and aunt, rotating the colour of the sky,
and how many mortal lives have flickered on, then off, in the way
of the simple torch, like the one Prometheus carried so many years ago?
It is irrelevant then, to carry my pitiful concerns, my ache for his mortal company.
Time will let us see whether he succeeds in his journey, home, to Ithaca, to her.
His time here will be a blur, or a footnote in his story, with little regard for me.
And I stare off to the sea, and I think. Eventually, another ship will come.
The breeze warm against my face, my smile is unshakeable at the word: Eventually.
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Illustration by Mikayla Shuker
CORNFLOWER BLUE
Written by Molly Dannan (First Year English and Creative Writing)
When I didn’t love myself
and the times were rough,
you helped me fill a bookshelf
on why I am enough.
When I stopped and fell down hard
and couldn’t get back up,
you painted me a postcard
of a buttercup.
When I had no more to give
and took all of the blame,
you taught me how to forgive
and give it a new name.
When I smashed the mirror
and scars covered my arm,
you learnt all of my triggers
to cause me less harm.
When I felt my pain increase
and needed a breakthrough,
you showed me a new peace
of cornflower blue.
FIVE FOR HEAVEN
Written by Alexandra Edney (MA Creative Writing)
Being that Watcher knew of hope,
of its tendency to reside in the soul and often sport a coat of feathers,
Watcher felt conflicted.
Should it be he who frolics in your place, for you? as you?
As a shrine of tealights or a morphed illusion – a conker now in full flight?
No.
It had been foolish to think of you as dead.
A conspiracy boiled in his stomach,
stewing of boxes with content unseen and memories of wood untarnished.
Rationality stalks home, all blazered cigar, unsealing his wax-stamp of reason.
But Watcher disputes, a sharp nod to his gut, preaching knowledge of unprovable truth.
Denial calls:
‘No conker on Earth, search higher.’
Wing tips dissolve, flossing through cloud, like avalanching snow expanding.
Bombs in haze, filtered through milky purification.
Existence, bubbles under the tease of oil-paint of blue, bleeding into amber-pink.
Windchimes ring…
Soaring higher in dream, Watcher drifted into ballet.
A striking tragedy, gutting in its allure.
Drenched in the scent of crisp water absorbing a single drop of poison.
The satisfaction of that quench, that one might crave suffocation under a warm blanket, necks curling backward in elegant submission.
The labouring of spine, the slack one might carry.
All to be seen as floating.