Three Drops from a Cauldron - Issue 17

Three Drops from a Cauldron Issue 17 July 2017 Edited by Kate Garrett Poems copyright © 2017 Individual authors Issue copyright © Kate Garrett

Cover image is ‘Castlerigg’ by Catherine Edmunds Image copyright © 2017 Catherine Edmunds

Three Drops from a Cauldron Issue 17 / July 2017 Crystal Ball by Glen Armstrong Hag-stones by Lynda Turbet Slaying the Protectress by Nico Solheim-Davidson Becoming Blodeuwedd by Mel Parks When I Will Tell Children by Jenne Kaivo Meditating with St Ignatius by Sally Long Half-Cursed by Sarah Deeming The Cheshire Cat Goes To the FaroĂŤ Islands

by David W. Landrum The Landlord, a Parable by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler The Kiss by Lesley Burt Fairy Door by Finola Scott Goldilocks Dreams by David Henson

Crystal Ball Replace the devil’s horns with air raid sirens. Pull this off, and you’ll hear him coming from miles away. Stand at the gate. Talk with your hands. Imply to your neighbors that you command the winds with your every gesture.

When the storms die down, they will come to you. Receive them late in the day or, better yet, early evening. Find a way to make the light surrounding your fingernails shift. Sit with your client on opposing sides of an artifact, preferably a crystal ball that “reveals all.” It’s your turn to make it seem as though your voice comes from beyond as much as it comes from within. It helps to study the songs runaways and other unfaithful wanderers sing.

Glen Armstrong

Hag-stones Again, he finds the mare at cold dawn light, sweat-stained; flanks heave, lips curl, foam-flecked, rolling eyes white moons in stable dark.

He croons the horseman’s Word, whispers protecting rituals learned at initiation, feels her heart gallop hard, beyond his tethering.

Later, eyes down, scanning the shingle shore he seeks out stones where sea-made absences hold power; plaits lengths of sedge, weaves slips of rowan, bound with red thread.

Calmed, she snorts, blows her feed.

He hangs his finds across her stall, watches their leaping shadows twist and turn, fetches water. Waits.

Lynda Turbet

Slaying the Protectress Wintry were the skies As into the monster’s lair With silence, I stepped Her wrath, unbridled As through her halls, she stalked me Like a snake for prey Shadows danced gently Reflected upon my shield Like Hadean shades Her scream, so enraged Echoed from each marble wall Through my soul, it rang My sword, thirsted for blood Drawn for combat, drawn for death Her head would be mine In shadows, I hid My shield, to her gaze replied Loosed arrows, reversed Through her neck, I struck In one foul swing, her head fell Still live were the snakes My sword, bathed in blood For Athena, her head claimed Vae victae Gorgon

Nico Solheim-Davidson

Becoming Blodeuwedd bud splits petals unfurl limbs untangle from oak, meadowsweet, broom. i am girl woman, woman girl, wirl goman, from flowers fretty plowers was flowers, no more flowers, i touch skin with fingerends, blood throbs in criss-cross lines, hot. “eat,” they say, holding out tree fruit, free truit, juice pings zings dings my fat wet tongue swallowing swirls it down, no more sucking up through toes feet roots in dark earth, cold. people move around me towards me never stop moving always coming closer, their smells meat salt smoke choke me, their heat presses against me, burning. “husband,” they say clearing the way for a tall man boy, staring boy man moy, they touch his fingers with my fingers, hold on root ringers hair dirt still clinging. where’s the air i’ve lost the air find me air sky, with new legs i move walk run, follow wind’s breath to the sun up stone steps stretch long tall, raindrops fall.

Mel Parks

When I Will Tell Children When I am a mother my hair will be waves like the hair of my mother before me.

My children will long to lay mortar.

In the heart of this city I’ll show them a towering slender steel building which tapers, is topped by a drunkard's idea of spacecraft. I’ll tell them, “America pierces the sky with a saucer for nothing except for so people can reach it, so people can pay for the fact they have reached it.

America's captured a sky, and the sky was not always as blue as the eyes of my parents before me.”

In the heart of my home in the dark I will say to my children as we are all crouched in the corner, “Be silent, American hivelings. Be still lest the naked bear get thee.”

When I am an elder my hair will be sparse like the hair of the old folks before me.

I’ll say to the children, who swarm my stiff knees and who long to spread outwards, “God does not pick sides, but we chose him.

We are his choosing people. We’ve claimed him.

America’s planted a flag on the moon and has wired the wind so it billows and stands still erect in the barren and humorless silence.

America’s chosen both God and the moon and there’s still many choices before thee.”

In a bare-slatted room, by the warmth of the furnace, I'll tell them, “Ai-ae-ya, be still, O America’s larvae.

Be still lest the men of old get thee.

Lest the kings from the hills jolt awake like the tales of my bearded godfather before me.”

Jenne Kaivo

Meditating with St Ignatius I When the sky is a washed out grey turning to blackness, I reach for St Ignatius, my eyes flickering towards the clock’s slow minutes, and with demons pecking at my ankles, I know it would be better to meditate at dawn: then I would welcome the new day, striding out in the company of angels.

II Today I am up at dawn, but before St Ignatius is down from his shelf I log on, find the Devil has sent an email‌

Sally Long

Half-Cursed This ball is awful. The chandeliers and the colours of the guests’ dresses are giving me a headache. I smile through my discomfort, though. It’s my ball. Mother and Father think this is what’s best for me. Father was a lion every night, not just three nights out of every twenty-eight. Lucky for me.

Except I don’t feel lucky.

Everyone thinks Mother broke Father’s curse. If they knew it had been passed to me, I’d never find true love, whatever that is. This ball is a chance for me to meet someone without revealing what happens when I’m on my period. And there is my issue.

Mother knew Father was a lion. She saw it every day and loved him because she knew both sides of him, man and lion. That love freed him from his curse. How can I achieve the same thing if I must hide that part of me?

I’ve tried explaining this but Mother looks horrified at the thought.

She wants to spare me from the rejection and hurt Father went through. But that experience made Father the person she fell in love with. She doesn’t want to hear that either. I love Mother but she’s suffocating me with her protection.

Across the room, a man catches my eye. Like me, he stands apart while guests observe him out of the corners of their eyes. He smiles and inclines his head. A gesture I return.

Mother whispers his name. It’s familiar. The youngest of eleven brothers turned into swans by a jealous stepmother, aren’t they always. Their sister spun them coats of nettles which turned them back into men. All except the youngest whose left arm remained that of a swan’s wing. She didn’t get time to finish his coat. My nurse told me the story one afternoon. I thought she was trying to teach me something.

I look at his arm before I can stop myself. His left arm is a wing of white feathers. I gasp. Sparkling in the candlelight, outshining the guests’ dresses without hurting my eyes, it is luxurious and captivating. I never realised curses could be so beautiful.

He frowns and I curtsy an apology. I am fascinated. He could hide as Father did, but he is here, in public, vulnerable yet undeterred. There is no shame or if there is, he has mastered it. He is the owner of his curse.

His bravery calls to me as much as the wonder of his wing. How strong is he that he can come here and smile at everyone’s stares? His wing is fascinating, yes, but he is more so. I want to ask him what was it like to be a swan? Is there anything he misses? What is his favourite thing now he is human again? How does he ignore the stares and the whispers because he is different?

I must be careful, though. I don’t like the stares or questions from people trying to find a hint of Father’s curse in me. I don’t want him to think my only interest is his wing. It isn’t. It’s his story, his experience. It’s possible that, other than Mother or Father, I am the only person who knows how to talk to him.

Mother is watching me, waiting for me to do … what? A suspicion starts. Is this her plan to show me how it would feel if people knew? Or maybe that I should find someone who treats me better than our guests are treating the prince before revealing my curse?

No, that’s stupid. What does Mother know about anything? It’s my life, my curse, and I’ll own it like he does. I’ll even tell him about it. When I’m ready. I cross the ballroom to speak to him.

Sarah Deeming

The Cheshire Cat Goes To the Faroe Islands “All right,” said the cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained for some time after the rest of him had gone.

— Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland

Ketten faded, not to nothingness, but into binding mist that brooded white, cat-balanced on a peak above islets strung like green pearls set in black stone above the misty, dark whale-breeding cloak of sea.

He faded to the ice-infested shoals and to the waterfalls that cascade down from cliffs, basaltic forts, sheep-meadow swards; out to the cloud-wall etched upon the sky up where the Norns spin fate from mist and rime.

He faded to the sentient stones speaking slow thoughts that let him rest on mossy beds and in sunlight when the world-candle breaks the fog, when water sparkles, and when tern, puffin and oyster-catcher ride the sky.

He dreams the mind-plans of a cat, obscure as runes; he hears the whispered speech of rocks, sleeps safe in sheltered harbors on calm days.

David W. Landrum

The Landlord, a Parable Hades bought himself an apartment block in the boom years and he schemed in his marble office as stately as a clam absorbed in worrying his mouthful of pearls; but the years roll on and costs have to be cut; it started as a seasonal measure, turning off the heat whenever Persephone was out of town…

But bills run highest in winter, after all, so the cutting continued, plunging whole floors into darkness for hours at a time.

A dollar isn’t what it used to be, and neither are the securities he holds on the earth’s veins of bleary and compacted souls that stubbornly refuse to ferment into coal. So, he started selling chucks of his structure as scrap, his femurs shipped off to gird the spans of bridges over more promising rivers, the columns pawned to enthusiasts.

The thing was the merest outline, compiled of nothing but the chalk notes the workers had left themselves as they erected it & a few load-bearing inferences; but people were still renting, wading off the street to their appointed parts of the shapeless escarpment in their colorless galoshes, slopping black water all over his nice clean premises. He felt them as a distant whorl, the kind of phenomenon you only see in water when you have a lot of it so much that its flux’s influenced by fields of magnetism and tautology, by the accumulation of stuff doing what it would have done anyway, on a large scale, and storms, and poles, and all so much slush.

His old bony toes are curled stiff in Lethe’s shallows, his eyes still reside under the water tower and recriminate, one ear he left for his tenants’ benefit down in the super’s office, one he gropes constantly to find, the source of his bad and brittle dreams, situated somewhere near a busted faucet whose drops’ fat slow plop intrude harder on him than the chatter of complaints they provoke.

Time was, he’d drop in on every new resident, fix him to a burning wheel, maybe give him a rock to keep him busy, but these days he won’t fix anything.

Time was, Hades was a marble bath the ocean frothed in, now he only hears it when he lifts her souvenir shell to his ear.

Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The Kiss Twilit meadow and star-filled night – mirror fragments spin together, a migraine of gold-foil, crimson, sapphire; music thrums a trance of flowers, dance forgotten; entwined, until sunrise shatters Lucy-in-the-Sky’s fake facets.

Lesley Burt

Fairy Door You bought me one to bring luck, really? But it’s plastic, can’t open.

I’m sure the fairies won’t like that.

I choose a spot, out of sight, position the faux door, forget about it. Until midsummer when savouring long light I hear crystal giggles amid blackbird songs.

But I see no rowdy barbecue parties in neighbours’ gardens, only webs trembling.

Then at my feet, bright grass quivers, parts making way for a pea-pod coach hauled by a team of muscular grasshoppers.

Birds turn mute, whorled snails halt suddenly.

A ghost moth stops mid-flight when my Door flies open and the Fairy Queen steps out a silken shimmer of azure. Her firm courtiers hand her into the carriage. There I spy the dark profile of her King, come to take her.

Finola Scott

Goldilocks Dreams Big Bad Wolf finds Red Riding Hood instead of Granny in the bed. “What big eyes you have,” he adlibs, taken aback.

“Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin,” Red replies.

“What big ears you have,” Wolf says, seeing she doesn’t, but wanting some semblance of order.

“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blooowww your house down,” Red says.

Feeling displaced and his tail for comfort, Wolf pulls himself together as best he can. “What big teeth you have,” he says, wincing.

“Fee, fie, fie, fum,” Red booms and jumps from bed.

Wolf leaps out the window and, dodging an ax-wielding Granny, bounds into the woods, vowing to spend the rest of his days robbing the rich and giving to the poor.

Back at the cottage, Red explains that her methods, while unorthodox, usually get results.

“That I may climb thy Golden Stair,” Granny says, going out to plant the seeds she bought with a cow.

“That dream was just right,” Goldilocks says to her boyfriend when they awaken the next morning. Her boyfriend rubs his eyes and starts to say something, but as usual can only sneeze.

David Henson

Biographical Notes Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has three recent chapbooks: Set List (Bitchin Kitsch,) In Stone and The Most Awkward Silence of All (both Cruel Garters Press.) His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, and Picaroon Poetry.

Lynda Turbet observes the world from rural Norfolk after decades living and working in Scotland and the north of England, and is now trying to make sense of it all through writing.

Nico Solheim-Davidson, also known as Viking Jesus, is a poet and music enthusiast from East Yorkshire. He spends his free time drinking tea from a horn and Instagramming endless selfies, pranking friends of Facebook, and stroking his magnificent ginger beard. You can follow Nico on Facebook at facebook.com/NorthSeaPoet.

Mel Parks has been writing professionally for about 20 years, freelance for more than half that time. She writes web content, blog posts and magazine articles, often about childcare and early years. She runs creative writing workshops upstairs in an independent bookshop in Sussex and has just completed the first year of a part-time MA in Creative Writing at Brighton University, when she delved into The Mabinogion for inspiration and universal themes.

Jenne Kaivo grew up on old stories the world over, and has retained an abiding interest in folklore, She works in a spiritual supply shop, where that knowledge really comes in handy, and has had poetry published in The Magnitizdat Literary, The Electronic Pamphlet, The Lovecraft Ezine, and other places.

Sally Long is a PhD student at Exeter where she is investigating the influence of The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius on contemporary poetry. She has had poems published in magazines including Agenda, Ink, Sweat and Tears, London Grip, Poetry Salzburg Review and Snakeskin amongst others. Sally edits Allegro Poetry Magazine.

Sarah Deeming is a writer who has recently been published in Timeless Tales, Arthurian Legend edition. She loves fairy tales and folklore, especially those to

do with changing forms. She juggles reading and writing with looking after her husband, two children and three cats.

David W. Landrum’s poetry and fiction have appeared in journals in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe. His novellas, Strange Brew, ShadowCity, The Last Minstrel, and Le Cafe de la Mort, are available through Amazon.

Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is a poet and translator based in Bennington, Vermont, best known for his English renderings of work by great contemporary Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan with co-translator Reilly Costigan-Humes. Their translation of Voroshilovgrad, published by Deep Vellum, received positive reviews from the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Wheeler’s poetry and translations have appeared in Coldnoon, The Missing Slate, and Two Lines.

Lesley Burt’s poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies, including: Prole, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter’s House, Sarasvati, Reach and The Butchers Dog, and online, including in the Poetry Kit website, Algebra of Owls, Strange Poetry, The Poetry Shed, Ink Sweat and Tears and Three Drops from a Cauldron. Awards in competitions include first prize in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly (SLQ) competition August 2016.

Finola Scott is a slam-winning Granny who writes short stories and poems. She has won competetions at national level. Her work is widely available in many anthologies, magazines and zines. Recently she has moved into recording podcasts. She can be found performing in a pub near you! Hobbies included chocolate and tickling grandchildren.

David Henson and his wife have lived in Belgium and Hong Kong over the years. They now reside in Peoria, Illinois with their dog, who loves to walk them in the woods. His work has appeared in two chapbooks, Literally Stories, 365 Tomorrows, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Eunoia Review, and Dime Show Review, among others. writings217.wordpress.com

Previous Publication Credits ‘Becoming Blodeuwedd’ by Mel Parks was originally part of the collaboration Flowers Out of Dark with photographer Sarah Bell.