M58
ISSN 2044-9151 editor: Andrew Taylor, @dradny. Visual submissions as jpegs, poetry in the body of an email. Please include a short bio. No simultaneous submissions, please. Send to m58poetry@hotmail.co.uk @m58poetry.
(c) copyright remains with the authors.
Deep into the dreaming of it floating out on a lilo wanting a
definition of phenomenology by night. It
takes a character
in the making like a tailor to allow for growth. Menageries
of blue birds a chimera or two two unidentified snakes in the
grass they’re usually enough to be going on with. A vessel
without compass or crew to reminisce about how the future
works on a good day. Waking up to learn
what’s died out.
ELUSIVE CONTEMPORARY
Spell it in rectangles like gravestones for one thing and an-
other there’s no going back. Stain-resistant revisions on
a fading canvas. I’m unexpected to be here showing
disproportionate levels of jubilation. Findings suggest an
origin long ago and forever on appeal. Like weather and
whatever crosses the sky. I’ve been solitary and the
worse for wear. It shows it reducing
commentary to cries
of ‘unfair’. Celandines light up
shadows – discord steals
them and smuggles them home. Seeing all
of us are at
it I offer my excuses: you’ll recognise us when you see me.
The one at the back applying colours and asking you out
to play – hulks of container ships happier blocking in sky.
Peter Dent’s latest collection is Yarn published by Leafe Press in November 2021.
waiting for my food the diner is crowded— i look out the window
future plans
cold rainy night— let’s kiss and draw straws on who will catch pneumonia first
bloodlines
shallow narrow minds teeth gnash like old rusty nails— tonight, dreams run cold
it happens every time
no matter where I go or what I do, psychotic people find me
treasure trove
your lack of evidence makes me laugh as your children smile at my jokes
Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, zines, and online publications. He has published 13 chapbooks. He runs Between Shadows Press.
three from Lucy Furlong. ‘Talismans I’, ‘Talismans II’ and ‘Warning’
Lucy Furlong is a
writer, poet and walking artist, whose work has been featured in Magma, The
Guardian newspaper and on BBC Radio 4. She has published two poetry maps
(Amniotic City and Over the Fields), a pamphlet (clew) with Hesterglock Press,
and chapbooks (Villiers Path and Sward) with Sampson Low Ltd. She moved from
the suburbs of London to Wexford, Ireland, as it locked down in March 2020, and
is currently documenting her walks there. www.lucyfurlong.com
three from Michael Sutton, taken from ‘Superpositions’ (Beir Bua Press).
Michael Sutton is the
author of three books of poetry, the most recent of which being
‘Superpositions’, published by Beir Bua Press. He also edits Overground
Underground, an occasional magazine of art and literature. www. michaelsutton.co.uk
five from Austin Miles (click to enlarge) Austin Miles
is from southeast Ohio. He has poems forthcoming in SAND and published in
Misery Tourism, Nauseated Drive, and elsewhere.
Five from the ‘Maze Poems’ by David Harrison Horton.
David Harrison Horton is
a Beijing-based writer, artist, editor and curator. His poetry has recently
appeared or is forthcoming in Ethel, Otoliths, Variant Literature, Noctua
Review, and Pennsylvania English, among others. He edits the poetry zine
SAGINAW.
Texas
Fontanella publishes a lot at Otoliths, though also, say, Utsanga, M58, Uut and
Ex Ex Lit, and is temporarily an Uber delivery rider. It’s really fun.
Snagged on the silver hook of a pendulum,
the iris lolls and beats.
You imagine it omniscient,
wind the bony cup with a key –
when it won’t bat cilia for looking square,
crack the pupil with a mallet.
You imagine it blind,
ticking in abstract caliginosity.
CUBIST PAINTING OF A SELFIE STICK
Semblance of a carbon whip antenna,
prosthetic arm, or telescopic soup ladle –
multi-axis,
omni-directional,
compact
trekking pole
salutes the firmament,
but dare not point
to something more
than itself.
BLOOD ORANGE
The copses swell with sacs
of dimpled flesh, like cellulite –
hunching over mongrel fruit
which gorged itself on our water.
You must palm the swelling –
roll your wrist to sever cord.
Dig a nail into the bastard crease,
and its meat will be lung-shaped;
split the pustules with your bite –
let bitter plasma drain
into the red, wet hole
of your throat.
THE AUTOMATIC CAR WASH AS A CUBIST
PAINTING
spit a whip antenna from
a hole and flatten glass to body wake and whir and whoosh the apparatus into
neutral a wan blue whining where bristles whip and whistle automation for the
tunnel is a cyclone it circulates spittle in pulling wheels and pounding doors
in neat analogous whips it wants for nothing in propelling bodies through a
hole and in the semblance of whooshing or wailing or whirring android splutters
blue and swallows bodies spinning wants and nothing wants in cycles where beads
where beads fly off at obscene angles wailing when the body goes beyond
automaton and whirs and waits to veer beyond the track to spit a whip antenna
from its hole and the tunnel is no more a cyclone in the absence of another
body’s neutral apparatus to whine and whip and whistle and wheel and whoosh and
wail and want
Lauren Terry is a poet and associate lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. Lauren’s critical-creative research explores the synaptic connections between (neuro)psychoanalysis, modernist poetic language, and material objects. Her poems have appeared in various anthologies and online journals, including Molly Bloom, Litter and Anthropocene. Lauren’s debut pamphlet, Museum of Lost and Broken Things, is published with Leafe Press.
Apples warmed atop the stove, just right for pork
and cornbread stuffing, celery, and so forth.
What day is this, what month, what fever of a season,
do you happen to have her number anymore?
He keeps reciting someone else’s elevator speech
because he’s heard it quite apart from need or source.
The pinking shears, wedged in the second to the bottom
drawer, beside the least used implement we own.
Pure pearls in a row against my neck, so far I have resisted
deep sea fishing or served any kindred mission.
2/
Absolution clears the sand of salt foam.
Footprints hold still mid-recollection.
This is my corpus, my clematis, my curfew.
The sole infringement of a code breaks ground.
Chapters to be thumbed through, rest.
The mind allows for rearrangement.
Career miniature artifacts
have been touched by a capsized emotion.
Numbered worlds caress their likely forged ideas,
variations theme themselves by recollection.
3/
“Our life together,” I heard her channel
from eternity in my mother’s words.
I am holding a stopped watch, absorbing
tension I have always known, misunderstood.
All the keys fall from the piano.
Quaint faith in the source of melody.
One infant at a time, a place behind the eyes
no one has reached or tried to find.
Lamps, barely discernible behind cloth
in every window that is left.
4/
Germane to the nth reach of the chimney
grew a random vine that laced itself round all sides.
He arrived, invited, grew gregarious, and proffered
pandemonium for those who found it difficult to wake.
Summer happens almost apart from an awareness
that the skin, no longer cold, releases new endorphins.
Woodwind players resolve to grow accustomed
to the nasal tones of mothers calling children after dark.
Heresy reputed to be less-than-obvious,
remains the truth in minds least fastened to dogma.
5/
Blooms with smoke against each petal blend
in mind, confederate with beauty.
Overcast adornment capsizes close decisions
when a single stroke would make the quiet parch.
What is a synonym for chaos in the buff?
Resoundingly the traffic noise makes brass ache.
Cloud cover repeals the last mistake I think
I will have made, a briar patch my home for lunch.
Vastly overrated sushi limits friendship to a fad.
Emaciated fauns inside the space behind a lens.
6/
Contralto beneficence curtails Modesto
in a lounge room filled with dowagers just once.
Companionable silence needs a virtuoso
fully furnished as a temple vivid in hindsight.
Curvature stays with the spine, apart from the denial
of infinity, as if only sonority.
Eyelashes in bloom revert to self-containment.
“He’s a type,” she told me in hushed tones, as if to clarify.
Commercial value functions as an oxymoron
hyped in the vernacular of sudden West Coast dalliance.
7/
My voice has been shuttled from service to sales to tech.
Thirteen syllables of free-range market slavery.
A relative speaks half in French and half in swaddling clothes
a message of seemingly connective tissue hinging.
“Upon my word,” goes the expression, an espresso
for young lunch, a brioche, maybe a sandwich of leaves.
Which semester bulges with learning principles,
the fall with scent of burning, or a feeling of uplift?
Upholstery looking bracketed, whole brocaded vein
against the mud room caked with history marked wine.
Sheila E. Murphy is an American poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. Murphy is
the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to
Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Her most recent book is Golden
Milk (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2020). Reporting Live from You
Know Where won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from
Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Also in 2018, Broken
Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from
the Ivory.
Rory Waterman’s third collection is Sweet Nothings (Carcanet, 2020), and his other books include Poets of the Second World War (LUP, 2016) and (as co-editor with Anthony Caleshu), Poetry and Covid-19 (Shearsman, 2021). He co-edits New Walk Editions, and works at Nottingham Trent University.
