Fall 

Now is the time for ripening plums and yellow grass,

maize shouldering the sky, hedgerows cut,

sharp and angular – the precise geometry of field edges.

I could lie down among vetch and rye-grass,

disturb tiny, starry moths, listen to the hungering

rooks and wait for the first leaf to fall.

I may squint at the low sun, hand-cast a shadow

over my brow, and watch the gauzy edge of autumn

fold over blackthorn, savour the chill of summer’s ghost,

let wilderness seep through veins, fill up the hollow heart,

a nest of root and twigs and stolen down, close my eyes

while drifting spiders weave their silk,

smirr my lashes to placate unfiltered light.

Stay there, ignoring tasks, the scratch and fret

of hour collapsing into hour, like scything nettles,

and maybe sleep, time marked by nothing more

than one leaf after another.

Lesley Quayle

Four Mornings  by Lesley Quayle

The Fall 

After ‘The Fall’, Hugo van de Goes, 1479

He was happy with my form

till he happened across yours.

Like any child the impulse is to play

not make; your limbs it seems

are more pliable and your hearts

more intricate.

So the fact that I could wind myself

into circles that inspired the sun,

tie myself into copulative knots,

make language in the sand,

meant nothing but more possibilities for you.

We lived together a good while – you wished

your tongue could read the air like mine,

I wished my eyes could talk.

We grew further apart.

Your hisses became syllabic,

you whispered to one another.

Tried to meet you in the middle:

hid in bushes growing legs

that lent no length, couldn’t bring me

any closer to your ear.

My face craved reflection,

stung with unread frowns and smiles.

I wish, I wish it were as simple

as a piece of fruit.

Truthfully, there was no taboo

hanging  from that tree –

it was just where we played,

but your ideas grew quicker than trees

and you imagined fruits

that would never grow here

and they still won’t grow here

just as I don’t grow and everything

without you stays the same.

Jo Brandon

Previously published in The Learned Goose by Jo Brandon (Valley Press, 2015)

specifications for an orchard

Hilaire

First published in OL’ CHANTY – Chanticleer Magazine Online.

park yourself here by Hilaire

Greek Sunset

I have developed a patience for preparing food,

scouring markets in the heat

for the reward of pungent apricots, peaches and nectarines,

plump cherries and dirt-covered potatoes.

I love adding ice to a glass of retsina as we watch the sea in the evenings,

away from the thoughts and madness of the world,

friends and family;

a place to live, and just be.

We have a nasty colony of black ants under our backyard table

and other small ants of amber;

I spend hours watching them wrestle, bite each other to the death,

as I sip cool mineral water in the shade.

I have the time to see it, and sometimes I interfere,

or ache as I watch one drag its injured body across the concrete.

Lisa Reily

nanna’s garden by Lisa Reily

Fruity Competition

1: Blackberry

I could be a black fruit poem:

richness of darkest choicest blackberry ripe,

juicy my tongue,

liquid Blueberry Delight with billberry.

A wilderness of bramble and thorn

a wicked thicket

enticing my wild dark words

with fleshy mellow flavour.

Rounding my mouth,

swelling my lips, staining

my fingers, my tongue,

guiltlessly shamelessly

announcing my appetite

for purple, for blue

and for you. 

One word of me is not enough

you will want more

and more and one more

and just, perhaps,

one more. 

You will come with fingers ready,

with buckets and with your children

and you will love me. 

I will hide me in hedgerow,

and your children will find me

love me

and eat me before I am ready to ripe me.

And many times you’ll walk right past me

because you’ve forgotten

I am free for the picking.

Kate Firth

The Yew Speaks On St Brigid’s Day by Kate Firth

Crackington Haven on New Year’s Eve by Kate Firth

Strange Spring  by Kate Firth

Gathering Mushrooms

I met her in the early morning,

muttering through a whitewash of mist,

each footprint a wet hollow of silver

leading from mushroom rings

which nudged the leaf mould

like a clutch of bantam eggs.

Old eyes, their spawn of cataracts

scavenging light in dismal pools,

and words, more incantations,

spooling from her lips like broken

threads.  She hastened by

with her cloth full of mushrooms.

She eats with the seasons,

gathers and garners as her folk did,

holds ancestors round her like a shawl.

She’s always known weather ways,

crush of snow on the blunt hills,

the tug and snatch of westerlies,

and spring igniting cold valleys.

Now she lives away from

the mother eye of the village,

with its carnival of light and noise.

Estranged by dogged pride,

deciphered like a seldom spoken tongue,

she clenches her world in a horned hand,

tight as the mushroom cloth.

Lesley Quayle

Fall by Lesley Quayle

Four Mornings by Lesley Quayle

sweet lemons

we climb the path, uneven stone,

reach the small wooden church on the hill;

we sit in the cool,

watch Bulgarian saints

eye us from ancient walls,

and small candles flicker

for those who have passed; I light one

for my mother,

and when I step outside, an old woman

plucks a plum from a nearby tree,

and gives it to me.

we travel on, over the railway track,

where a gypsy in a sparkling shawl waves to us

from a horse and cart,

a homeless kitten accepts my pat,                                             

and horses, untethered, eat wildflowers.

outside our apartment, there is music in the air,

sirtaki, the sounds of Greece;

outside, a stranger collects me in the rain,

and I am not scared;

a little boy talks to me at the bus stop,

waits by my side

until his mother calls him home;

the taverna owner rescues a stray dog,                                                             

washes it, indifferent                                                                                            

to his customers who leave at the sight

of fleas drowned in poisoned rivers;

and at our small room, the owner’s son

cleans our clothes for free,

hangs bags of lemons from our door.    

Lisa Reily

Greek Sunset by Lisa Reily

nanna’s garden by Lisa Reily

Fruit in the 60s

Glenn Hubbard

The Great Banded Grayling… by Glenn Hubbard

Ousel-Cock by Glenn Hubbard

Medlars

From the cupboard under your stairs

you pick one from its tray.

A sort of apple, open-ended,

on the turn.

Try, you urge, a spoon waved

like a hypnotist’s chain. Reluctantly,

a child braced for medicine I open up

to be fed a scoop of decay.

Good ? You ask, moist rot melting

to the cusp of sweetness. I tremble a nod

as you slough off your snakeskin boots;

coil yourself into a chair.

Stephen Bone

First published in The Interpreter’s House

Ode to a Giant Waterlily by Stephen Bone

Sundews by Stephen Bone

Strawberry Girl

Soon it will be time again to prepare our offering in thanks for the fruit harvest. Many belief systems teach that life is a recurring cycle and our abundant continuum of planting, reaping and celebrating through sacrifice would seem to confirm this.

We have asked that our religious practices be properly recognised through official channels. The probing, the gawking, the constant trolling and threats of interference have to stop.

Her lips this year shall be a bright cherry. Just a hint of a pout. Straw and trimmed vines for her hair. In keeping with tradition, pears and certain varieties of apple have been used to give feminine curvature to her body. I have chosen strawberries for her eyes, complete with the small crown of leafage retained so as to give an open, honest expression to the face. The verisimilitude of this year’s golem is both striking and convincing.

Which brings its own problems. You may remember the court case where our village was accused of murdering one of our earlier creations. The judge rightly ruled that: as she was not human there was no case to answer. But the stigma stuck. A pungent, fermenting stain like mouldering grapes or cider spilled on woollen clothing.

The following year we made a boy. Nature did not approve and we half-starved due to a resultant paltry harvest.

It’s a truism that even those who are spiritually unaware would still acknowledge: for things to live, other things must die. Move over Granddad and let me have the keys to your house, your job, your bank account… For everything that glitters something else must suffer in dullness.

The strawberry girl lives for a week. She moves but doesn’t speak. She smells divine and many become light-headed in her company. She seems to see, to gaze… but can she really be thinking? She has no brain. She is all pith, water, citric acid, seeds… and flesh.

She brings colour and vivacity to the swiftly shortening and darkening days.

She dances with the corn dollies, stands face to face with the scarecrows. She is a country tradition that some in our country would seek to dispense with.

They are narrow-minded, urban consumer-guts who have no knowledge of and who can make no link between their fortune at endless choice and availability and the sacrifices and privations necessary to achieve such a cornucopia. I tell myself this and I share it with you now: the pulping is necessary. The few – the one – must fall so that the many survive and thrive.

She’s not real.

She’s real.

She’s not human.

She’s as alive as you and me.

There will be another year, another harvest. Another strawberry girl.

(In memory of Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2018.)

Allen Ashley

The Teatime Tarzan by Allen Ashley

Wildflo Wers by Allen Ashley

Greetings from the British Countryside by Allen Ashley

Apples

At my childhood home in Somerset, we had an acre and a half of old orchard, bound on the west side by the churchyard, on the north by a brook. In the spring, snowdrops and daffodils grew under the trees and when the weather got warmer, I took root there too, back against the bark, book in hand, dreaming beneath the leaves.

I read of saints and soldiers, wolves and witches, lost worlds, golden days. Those stories are bound in my memory with lichen growing on gnarly branches, the smell of wood and grass, earth and apple.

The harvest brought us all together. When it was fine, from the youngest to the oldest, we went out from the house in the morning with ladders, chattering and picking, gathering up windfalls, loading the trailer and hauling it back, calling across the field and bagging the yield into hessian sacks. We sorted the good fruit from the bruised, the eaters from the cookers, the bittersharps from the bittersweets. We ate bread and cheese on plastic plates without napkins at a trestle table in our wellingtons, normal rules suspended for one day, for just this one shining day in the orchard.

Afterwards, good apples were wrapped in paper and spread out in rows in the loft in the barn, gifts for the year long. The cinnamon scent of apples simmering on the stove filled the house, as my mother in her apron stewed fruit for the larder. My father made cider from the imperfect apples, the disappointing ones, with a press he built from a landrover jack just before he chopped the end off his finger splitting logs. I remember his shout and searching in the rough grass by the wood shed for a bit of flesh with the nail still attached. We never found it.

Some of the apples went to a big cider-maker at Burrow Hill. The man gave us a pound a sack and said they weren’t worth any more, apples were two a penny in Somerset. Any dreams we had of making our fortune quickly faded. He has gone now and the cider press closed and they built over our orchard, the people that came afterwards. But the apples stay ever sweet in the memory and their names remain, wonderful strange, like an old incantation – Beauty of Bath, Dunnings Russet, Curry Codlin, Fairmaid, Hangdown, Hoary Morning, Slack Me Girdle, Tom Putt,  Sack and Sugar, Kingston Black, Rough Pippin, Whittles Dumpling, Green Pearmain, Mealy Late Blossom, Burrow Hill Early, Sheep’s Nose.

Maeve Bruce

wild strawberries

two hard pears that will never ripen                                                

left on the table, beside the thermos your sister sent us.                        

outside the mountains, stolen by autumn;

it is time to move on.

there is peace here, in the river beyond the trees,

the courtyard fountain, the old bus that seems to be there

whenever we need it, and the little stray dog

alone now by the bus station,

his mother who knows where.

they were a gutsy pair who lunged into dirt

and the shadows of the day,

chased a car or two, over the night railway without fear,

barking freedom.

I pat him one last time,                                                                            

feel his dirty face pressed against my legs;                                                     

I am glad for the bus drivers who feed him,

for his nous to keep away from the mean ones

who pass him only to piss in the bushes.

I recall our walk to St Spas’ grave, the moaning it took to get me there,

our first taste of wild strawberries, the two of us

only game after watching gypsy children

crouch low in the grass, pick their tiny red beginnings.

I will miss the spring water taps on every street,

the kitten at the tosteri drinking from a dirty mop and bucket,

her tiny face licked and satisfied.

when we arrived the air was green,

crisp with pine needles and apple trees;

now chestnuts fall, and walnuts fill crates at the markets,

the boxes of berries slowly diminishing.

Lisa Reily

sweet lemons by Lisa Reily

Greek Sunset by Lisa Reily

nanna’s garden by Lisa Reily

Pumpkin Blues

We collide at a pumpkin stall down Portobello Market.

You caress the silverblue

lustre of a Crown Prince,

I investigate the green mottle

of Kabucha, skin  craggy, crumpled 

as an old crone’s hopes 

or rocky crevices about Olympus.

Yellow peel Turk’s Turbans glower in a pile. 

We twirl, we swirl 

beneath a hunter moon

into a dew glazed gloam,

tranced by the keen of a penny

whistle, banshee yowl

of a turf-fire fiddle.                                                                                           

Mammy cautions me not 

to flaunt my heart upon my sleeve, 

so I sit till after midnight,

illumined in her third degree 

and first love’s fluster, 

embroider right across my tit, 

which you and later I will feel, 

a plump crimson pumper, 

brethren to the thorn snarled 

muscle of the plaster Christ 

enshrined beside the sapphire 

Mary on the parlour mantle.

You wild eyed Ulysses. The twang 

of your finger-lickin’ Gibson

plucks from me a young girl’s fancy

as the plight of your jeans, frayed

as nerves, suggests a stitch-up. I oblige

with bird track tack of rainbow hues infused 

with moon-curse fantasies, disenchanted 

come the morning 

when I find you gone.

Pratibha Castle

First published in Eunoia Review

Still the Apple

His mouth moon-craters my flesh,

curves tiny ribbons in flushed skin.

After gorging, he holds my skeleton

to the light, peers through small slits

between the ribs in search of a heart.

He does not find one, only the rust-

brown of the scalloped wounds left

by his teeth. Later, I’ll bleed black.

For him, little change now, except

his lips’ sometimes strained shape,

weighted down by past sweetness.

S.A. Leavesley

First published in Envoi, then in plenty-fish (Nine Arches Press)

The Disappearing River, Stream, Trickle by S.A. Leavesley

A Planet Where  by S.A. Leavesley

Ensemble  by S.A. Leavesley

Seasonal Adjustment Order  by S.A. Leavesley

Stories

Poems

A Fruit Basket 

I won it

at this year’s garden party raffle,

afterall, this is the sort of village

where fine fruit is prized above

cellophane-wrapped chocolates

and cheap wine.

Cradled in a thick-woven wicker basket,

blanketed with muslin, tied with ribbon,

the kind you can put in a drawer

and use again. Pretty as a picture,

a shame really, to dismantle

and rummage.

Frog-skin melons nestle like eggs

in their straw lining, stony passion fruits,

a rudeness of pomegranates, green bananas;

a risk, could have spoilt the whole haul,

but they knew what they were about  

putting all this together, the pears are perfect,

ready to eat, kiwis moulting softly, lychees peek

between loll-draped limbs bearing grapes:

a bacchanalia of treats.

How many markets did they visit

to accrue all this?

I had only ever seen cucamelons on television,

never held one, cool in my palm, like this.

I have a tin of Jackfruit in my cupboard,

from last year’s tombola, nothing akin

to this tight-curled hedgehog of a thing.

Sweet, putrid, syrupy, olid – a durian bristles

like a giant conker; a vanitas perhaps?

I peel, chop, slice, stew the stillness from my hoard.

I would have chosen a few more familiars

were it my role to select the prizes this year;

punnets of berries from my garden,

oranges and grapefruits, things to simply start the day,

apples too, of course, a lemon and lime for garnish,

but I am the recipient, not the donor,

I will be gracious, no point getting the pip

when I have the pith.

Jo Brandon

Previously published in The Learned Goose by Jo Brandon (Valley Press, 2015)

The Fall by Jo Brandon

Poems

Stories

Moules en Provence 

I can’t explain it all in French, but I

can show you, just as the old man

at the table next to us did that day.

How to take the first long shell

and use it like a pair of tongs,

scooping each mouthful out

and bathing them in cream and wine.

We were unprepared. For eating

seafood in the proper way, for the

heatwave which called for swimsuits

when all we had was jeans.

We marvelled as we drove past

actual olive trees and drank perfect

co-op wine at four euros a bottle.

If I could remember the name

of that restaurant, I would send you there

and show you that not everyone

will be bored and roll their eyes

at green young travellers, that some

will understand that this is just

the beginning of something.

Diane Mulholland

The Crab and the Gull by Diane Mulholland

Before the First Bite

From beneath grey tarpaulin

perched on upturned crates

we push back our hoods

and inspect the fruit

both breathless. I was certain

we were lost forever, enchanted by

endless rows of jewelled giants until

we stumble upon the treacherous

ladders of our mothers. Harvest for them

is serious work; reaching precariously

stretching income. Neither can pick

the greater nuisance – us or the weather

The rustles, creaks and squeaks of our

waterproofs chatter sporadically

with the torrent as our tiny fingers chase

rain futilely from blushing contours

writhing at the cold trickles worming across

skin, growing branch-like tributaries under

gathered cuffs. Nowhere sees escape from

the damp.

              We raise apples to wide mouths.

Stephanie Stanton

Jam Tomorrow 

No need, these days,

when freezers heave

with tubs of glassy fruits

but something primal still propels us

down barbarous country lanes

basket in hand.

Discarding gloves, we offer blood

sacrifice in exchange for this

rich blistered berried abundance.,

Mouths seeping juice, baskets filled

to the brim, we bring them home

to be boiled, pulped, preserved

for colder days

when we will unfrock

each pot of its lacy frill

and release the genie of summer.

Eileen Farrelly

Taste of Childhood

Shanta Acharya

Song of Praise by Shanta Acharya

Possession by Shanta Acharya

Blackcurrants

Lizzie Ballagher

Fieldfares by Lizzie Ballagher

Stories

Poems

LEBANESE FOOD CENTRE, ACTON, NOVEMBER

Persimmons peaches oranges
defy the rain.

Inside
chips and kebabs
tabouleh and Coca Cola ™
the fiery unfamiliar script
small armies of tins
press against each other
pickles and preserves
Nescafé® and halva.
Steel skewers
sheathed in ground lamb
line up.
The brass trough
the red-hot charcoal.

He wraps the salad
tight in the thin bread
anoints with the lemon
tahini olive oil mix
cuts in two.

Swarthy silent men
draw their over-patterned knitwear
closer to their bodies.

John Lanyon

The Whit-Horn is Calling by John Lanyon

Stories

Poems

On Slicing a Quince

Steve Xerri

Stories

Poems

Nectarines! It’s a Heckuva Fruit!

Diana Rosen

Previously published online by Poetry Super Highway

Stories

Poems

My Giant Bladderstone

Accretion year after year

my unknown companion,

should I be proud,

my very own pregnancy?

If I had known would I

have talked to it like a friend?

Torn meniscus, cracked vertebrae,

hemorrhage in the right eye,

I adjust as if there is no deficit

but peeing is another matter.

As my prostate grows, I think

only of the next bathroom,

when to pull over on a country road,

when to search for Depends

like my forgotten days in pull-ups.

Today my surgeon blasts it

with the newest laser leaving

sand fine as a Caribbean beach.

Now I have infinite time

before that bathroom stop.

I listen to a torrent in the bowl.

Have I grown younger?

Steven Luria Ablon

Stories

Poems

A Better Berry

“Doubtless God could have made a better berry,

but doubtless God never did.”

Dr Boteler quoted by Izaak Walton

Duncan Forbes

Cellar Dweller by Duncan Forbes

Stories

Poems