Three Drops from a Cauldron - Issue 21

Three Drops from a Cauldron Issue 21 Nov ember 2017 Edited by Kate Garrett Poems copyright © 2017 Individual authors Issue copyright © Kate Garrett

Cover image is ‘Woman in a Blue Hat’ by Susan Castillo Street Image copyright © 2017 Susan Castillo Street

Three Drops from a Cauldron Issue 21 / November 2017 Liath Macha by Alexandra Carr-Malcolm Pinning it on Loki by Sue Kindon The Mother Speaks by Kate Innes After Eden by Stella Wulf Coming up for air by Gillian Rule Cinderella’s pantry by Karen Little The way things are by Michèle Brenton Gretel Lost in the Forest by Nancy Scott Once upon a time by John Alwyine-Mosely Brown Man of the Muirs by Simon Williams The Wife Who Turned into a Bear by Angela Readman Cat on the moon by Gillian Rule Jack Frost makes a mockery by Alison Lock The Alchemist by Rachel Burns The Stones by Denni Turp The giving of curses by Kathy Gee

Liath Macha Here is where the silence lies, wishing on the lashes of a dead man’s eyes.

There is where death doeth break, memories and dreams are left in its wake A love like ours will never ever die, carried by the winds through a midnight sky.

Kiss the stars and brush the moon, cherish each heartbeat as they pass too soon.

Waning moons and riptide seas, facing our mortality whilst on our knees.

Breath stops short, the world goes on, the meaning of our life has all but gone.

A world without you can never ever be, an organic shift in humanity.

Broken hearts rang through the skies, the universe broke down the day you died.

Alexandra Carr-Malcolm

Pinning it on Loki The Molotov cocktail was mine.

Vain to think I’d stay chained in Kirkby Stephen church.

Rearrange the molecules, and back I wriggle as Houdini, juggler of rifts and shifting fault lines.

Count down as I spin the plates, party to my blindfold trick.

I’d sooner jig the next Martini: the name’s Bond, or is it Caliban, Madonna, Mussolini?

Bang goes my alibi.

Thereby hangs a riddled balloon.

Guess whose dabs are on the string?

Pop goes old Loki.

Sue Kindon

The Mother Speaks The marsh meets the sea, its master.

Banks are broken and the fresh blood of frogs and snakes is stopped with salt.

Waves snatch chunks of earth to chew, and all meat moves on muffled feet.

Muttering mead-soaked men who gladly condemned our kind to Cain, fearing the fiery ferment of our mere, resolved to dig a drain and dry it.

So I must send my son, my boy, armed and toothed with dread, a hothead, always hungry, to hunt for me in Hrothgar’s hall.

My incantations have thickened his hide.

Rocks are no harder, oxen no stronger.

Let them hew; he will meet no harm.

Come son, wash well in the water, with luck it will cover your smell.

Be stealthy and slip inside the circle of staves where smoke rises, and the tall posts of the traitor’s hall.

Hinges will bend in your heavy hand, so don’t wake the dogs at the door.

Creep through the sleeping thanes and slake your thirst at a throbbing throat.

Bring a young boy back and I’ll blow the keen of his death through my teeth.

But lead not the living to our lair, Grendel. Stop their groans and grief in your mighty grip and meet me here below.

Kate Innes

After Eden My birth day came with a fall of spring snow, those restless flakes, unable to settle in the pulse of a nascent earth, a dove in the flagged yard, fussing over scattered grain, broadcasting kernels like myths into the cracks of legend.

Daughter of Eve, I’m bred for domesticity, conditioned to home. Given a ring to distinguish me, I learned the cramp of being woman, lofty mother, builder of nests.

Sometimes, I fancy I’ve never known this lumbering frame, its slavish attraction to earthiness. My impulse throbs in the bloom of the dove’s breast, yet it seems, no matter how wholesome the flesh, there’s always a grubby worm that eats away at the core.

‘Whore,’ they call me, if I strut my stuff, puff out my breasts, sing too loudly, so I mapped the skies, navigated the small lives of men, through the compass of her eye, the homeliness of her nature.

It’s the need of my flesh that keeps me returning to my niche. Released, I’d beat my angel wings, let the restless feathers fall, watch them settle like snow on the garden, vaned messages of a spirit set free.

Stella Wulf

Coming up for air by Gillian Rule

Cinderella’s pantry Visiting Cinderella’s pantry, we find the sad remains of her last night, before the pumpkin could swallow her. With legs like Blackpool rock crushed by a slingshot, the snowflakes are suspended, yet animated.

Did she ever expect to spend her life sweeping up seismic liquorice? In the crushing wait before dawn Cinderella sits calcified as we pick wax from the stony bark of her rags.

When the pillar of faces appeared petrified in the doorway, she compressed her hands and flung salt at the wound of them.

Karen Little

The way things are I grew up with fairies among the flowerbeds “Look! See her hover above the daisies?

Ssssh – you’ll spook her.”

I’d look but by the time my eyes reached the place she’d gone.

I was never fast enough.

I had to paint her with my wishes so she and her friends had wings and tiny painted toenails colourless gauzy frocks (fairies always have frocks it is an alliterative imperative) long brightly coloured hair that magically never caught on rose thorns or branches

but floated nimbus-like around their pointy-nosed heads.

Then when I spent my days at school the fairies came too.

They set up home under the nailed down lid of my desk and I listened to them with my ear laid against the ink-stained oak; Fed them jelly and cake crumbs through the gaping hole meant for an inkwell and wondered at the fairyland hidden within.

Now I am old.

I shut my eyes in daylight and dream away the dark.

I know they weren’t real.

The fairies on the other hand do not know any such thing and in their ignorance they flash in the lamp post’s glowings laughing at my snoring noises and how once I almost woke up.

Michèle Brenton

Gretel Lost in the Forest Or Why Every Day Has its Challenges Bad things are going to happen.

Even the rotten turnips will get eaten.

Only the rats will grow fat. Our stepmother will insist Hansel and I are a headache, and soon our beloved father will agree.

They will take us into the forest and leave us to fend for ourselves.

My brother is such a bumbler.

He’ll have a plan, but it won’t work.

Birds will eat all the breadcrumbs.

Poor Hansel, he will just get us lost deeper and deeper into the forest.

I’ve heard that this place is enchanted, and sometimes children disappear forever.

Maybe we will happen upon a fairy godmother who will feed us strawberries and cream. More likely we will meet up with a witch in a gingerbread house and our tale will take a turn for the worse.

It’s up to me then to get us out of this predicament.

“Hey, Hansel, wait up.”

Nancy Scott

Once upon a time you’re upstairs as downstairs, the thud of woodbine tainted dancing drifts up over clinked bottles and the slur of sideway words you’re under the bed, child skin naked dust dirt covered you’ve lit a candle for the book of big words and small pictures your fingers trace out a story about girls in red hoods with bared teeth looking for a lost nan you’re eating cream rice out of a tin punched open with a knife you don’t get happy endings ogres still eat, and princes

run away when the stork flies in so you make the witch into a fairy that cackles, a giant into a tree that speaks, and the bedtime monster into make believe

John Alwyine-Mosely

Brown Man of the Muirs from a painting by Alan Lee Under cloud under the crown of the hill under ling under moss by boulders by small water he holds a dead bird rubs his chin.

He is already outside the frame contemplating bigger prey

Simon Williams

The Wife Who Turned into a Bear It’s the ache for meat that wakes me.

I venture the mirror like a hunter set to face my own personal glacier.

I dig through the glass to find the woman I was, buried under the ice.

There’s nothing here but a bear.

Night is a leveller, it flowed in while I slept and spread wet cement all over my skull. I paw at a dip in my brow, clefts formed slow as a canyon wept into being by rain.

Curiously, my breath is a muzzle, it wraps the crying man in a torn blanket, takes the edge off everything. His name is a growl in my stomach, a sinew on my fangs. Yet, even now, I’d soothe him, if I could find the uses of hands, but my heart is a den strewn with prehistoric fish, my belly is bigger than it.

After all, I’m a bear, barely used to how fast I can move, or how slow, if I choose. I sniff his pale chest and stare at my claws, a girl considering what colour nail varnish to wear.

I suppose I could’ve warned him when my tongue still knew how, that so much I didn’t digest didn’t die

but dozed in the dark, fat with doubt.

I forgave, bore with him, swallowed the yellow snow of more than I could bear.

Until, finally, our winter crumbled to spring, new light coats me with its fur.

Angela Readman

Cat on the moon by Gillian Rule

Jack Frost makes a mockery The leaves of last year’s beech rattle, clinging to memories – a scrape that irritates the mind, bleakens in the freeze.

Winter holds as Freya’s flora blackens in the frost.

The hawthorn’s dainty florets cover thorny stems, hiding their spindle pricks in a finery of lace, sweet yaysayers.

Bring in the Spring as winter holds.

New grass gives rise to the sap, a green plume over the chilled lungs of Earth. There is no breath, Winter holds as Freya’s flora blackens in the frost.

There’s no hush, no balance on this cusp, where the snap of early insects float, suspicious of the uncurled chicory.

The horse-tails are the only trumpets of the season.

Alison Lock

The Alchemist We were sitting in the street café the one we found hidden in the alleyway.

A gargoyle’s eye watched from the cathedral there were wooden tables with black singer legs.

I spun straw into gold at the spinning wheel while you ordered the coffee, mine a thin latté yours a bitter espresso, you stirred in circles.

Your silver teaspoon reflected the sunlight as you drank the coffee treacle black.

I remember you tapping out a tune on the tabletop, your fingers agitated.

What was it you said? Your voice echoes over and over in my head.

Were you playing Mozart?

You swallowed the pills as I read the label.

You the alchemist mixing medieval potions turning metal into gold desperate to find an elixir for life your soul dancing to the requiem for the dead.

Rachel Burns

The Stones Hello, Mam, Thought I’d better write to you, seeing as I won’t be coming over for a bit now.

And there’s so much been happening that I want to tell you about. Like some of the things I’d been seeing and hearing. I mean, they say that coffee can cause hallucinations, and I kind of hope that’s true because otherwise I can’t explain the message in the white stones that suddenly appeared in the garden about eight months ago now. Didn’t want to go on about it, make a fuss, like.

Wouldn’t go down too well in the village, either. Mind, I did tell my boyfriend, Ieuan.

You would like him, I think. He’s a bit of a shaman, so he says. Not really called Ieuan, is he—just chose that name for his new way of living here in Wales. He was with the tipi people first, down near Aber, before he came back to stay with me half way up Garn Fadryn. Says it’s a good place, where Vortigern’s wife fled, so it’s got links with Arthur and all that.

We met down in Stonehenge in March, at the Equinox. I’d been going for the last couple of years with Sosha and that crowd, you know. Quite good, it is, to bring in the spring. Makes you feel that winter’s really on its way out and it’s getting lighter and better. Anyway, so that’s where I met Ieuan. Don’t know his real name—he says names need to fit the person so the name he used to have isn’t his anymore. He says it was love at first sight. Not too sure about that myself, especially with what the stones were saying about my being pregnant and with a special son and all that. I felt really confused, and it was too late to do anything about it by the time I knew something wasn’t right, and Ieuan said best to go with the flow—he likes to say that a lot. Mind you, it was all a bit of a surprise at the time, even without the Son of God stuff they were saying as I couldn’t—still can’t—remember doing anything with Ieuan (if you get my meaning)—honest, mam.

Anyway, the time of the winter solstice was getting close, so we came down to near Capel Dewi, near Aber, for a bit, to see the tipi people. Ieuan had made

some friends here and also says he’s related to one of the elders, so they let us stay, welcomed us, really. I feel like I’m just about to pop, but Ieuan says we have to go down to Stonehenge for the solstice. I don’t fancy it too much. The midwife says I’m due before the New Year and doesn’t think I ought to be travelling, but Ieuan says we’ve got to go, and everyone else seems keen so we’re off in the morning. He’s fixed his old camper up, the one he arrived in last March. Been stuck outside going nowhere for almost six months before he suddenly decided to sort it out. At least it’s got somewhere I can lie down when we’re on the way.

I’m not sure what he’s said to anyone else but I was a bit surprised to find that so many people are coming with us. Be a bit of a convoy, Ieuan says—his idea of a joke, something to cheer me up when I’m getting a bit panicky about it all, he says. But lots of them have been looking at me a bit funny, like. Not unfriendly or anything, just a bit odd. And I know I’m pregnant and all that, but they keep asking me if I’m okay, if they can do anything, if I want anything. It’s been getting me down a bit sometimes.

But not to worry, like I said, we’re off in the morning. Ieuan says there’s twelve others coming with us now. I hope that won’t mean we have any trouble with the police on the way. Of course they might be expecting people there at this time of year, and we’ll probably have to be a bit careful how we go. We’ll be back before the end of the month, Ieuan says, in time for hospital and all that, don’t you worry, sweetheart. I’m not really worried, mam, but I hope he’s right. And I would have liked to come to see you for the holiday, not really be convoying down to the West Country this time. But don’t you worry, I’ll keep in touch, and you’ll be able to come and see me and Ieuan and the baby in the New Year.

Lots of love, and Happy Christmas, Mari xx

Denni Turp

The giving of curses The fires of winter solstice light the flanks of Cranbourne Chase. A sounding beats across the dark. The drop of dusk is Deity, arrived rip-roaring at her shrine.

Aggrieved by northern winds, she beats the scarp in howls of prehistoric anger.

Midnight’s hand disposes and replaces fur with all the fears of womankind.

She makes an idiot of ass, his hacking call repeating disappointment. Bats emerge from sandstone caves to tangle hair in clouds of black-leaf fluttering. She slaps them with the sucking life of vampires, sends the seal a lust for legs, commands black dogs to follow to the underworld, to bay depression over turf that’s bled for two millennia. She saves her venom for the late arrival. Treachery for goats, a malediction: randy, irresistible and rank.

Kathy Gee

Biographical Notes Artists Susan Castillo Street is a Louisiana expatriate and academic who lives in the Sussex countryside. She is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emeritus, King’s College, University of London, and has published two collections of poems: The Candlewoman’s Trade (Diehard Press, 2003) and Abiding Chemistry (Aldrich Press, 2015), and a pamphlet, Constellations (Three Drops Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in The Missing Slate, The Stare’s Nest, Ink Sweat & Tears, Snakeskin, Literature Today, and other reviews.

Gillian Rule is an Irish artist based in Donegal. Gillian takes the inspiration for most of her work from her coastal surroundings, rural landscapes, her great love of animals and Angels. More of Gillian's work can be viewed on her Facebook page 'Gillian Rule Art'.

Writers Alexandra Carr-Malcolm was born and raised in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She now lives in Yorkshire and works as a freelance British Sign Language Interpreter. Alex has been published in various online magazines and collaborative anthologies. Her first anthology ‘Tipping Sheep (the right way)’ was released in 2013, and her second anthology ‘Counting Magpies’ was released in 2015. Alex blogs her poetry as Worldly Winds – www.worldlywinds.com Sue Kindon lives and writes in The Pyrenees. She graduated from Hull University in English and French and became a bookseller, specialising in botanical books. These days, she and her husband run Valier Illustrated Books, giving her the opportunity to handle some beautiful tomes, many of which are "Livres d'Artiste" illustrating French poetry.

Kate Innes lives in Shropshire and writes fiction and poetry. Having trained in archaeology and museology, she also feels at home living in the past. Her first novel The Errant Hours, a medieval literary adventure, was published in 2015, and her first poetry collection, Flocks of Words, in 2017. Kate collaborates with the acoustic band Whalebone, performing an immersive, hypnotic blend of

words and music. She runs workshops and undertakes residencies and commissions.

Stella Wulf’s work has been widely published both in print and online.

Publications include, Obsessed With Pipework, The High Window, Raum, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears, and many others. Her poems have also appeared in several anthologies including, The Very Best of 52, three drops from a cauldron, and the Clear Poetry Anthology. She has an MA in Creative Writing, from Lancaster University.

Karen Little trained as a dancer at London Contemporary Dance School, and as a Fine Artist at Camberwell School of Art, London. She has performed and exhibited internationally. Her poems have been published in over fifty magazines and anthologies. 'Tentacles', ten Poems, ten Illustrations, was published in 2016. The novella, 'Filled with Ghosts' was published in December 2015, and shortlisted fora Saboteur Award. The sequel ‘Ghost Train Leaving' was published in July 2017.

Michèle Brenton is getting old and spends more and more time these days away with the fairies and likes it that way.

Nancy Scott is managing editor of U.S.1 Worksheets, the journal of the U.S.1 Poets' Cooperative located in New Jersey, USA. In addition to the work of Cooperative members, the journal has published poetry from around the world. Scott is also the author of nine collections of poetry. Her most recent, Ah, Men (Aldrich Press, 2016) is a retrospective of the men who have influenced her life. A collage artist, Scott frequently exhibits her poetry and art together in local shows and online venues. For more information, visit www.nancyscott.net John Alwyine-Mosely is currently working as TEFL teacher after 20 years of working in UK policy and service development for early years. He has had poetry published in many paper and on-line journals. These poems can be found at publishedpoems.wordpress.com Simon Williams has been writing since just after the meteor hit, when he saw an opportunity to fill a niche left by the sudden departure of all the main Cretaceous poets. Perhaps as a result of the rise of the mammals, he’s particularly fond of unusual animals, like the pangolin and tardigrade (he was keen on tardigrades before they were trendy). He also likes graphene and looks forward to its application in new battery technologies.

Angela Readman’s poems have won the Mslexia Poetry Competition, The Charley Causey, and The Essex Poetry Prize. Her collection The Book of Tides was published by Nine Arches in November 2016. She also writes stories.

Alison Lock's poetry and short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals in the UK and internationally. Her first poetry collection, A Slither of Air, was winner of the Indigo Dreams Poetry Collection Competition 2010; her second, Beyond Wings, was published in 2015. She is the author of a short story collection; and a fantasy novel, Maysun and the Wingfish (Mother's Milk Books 2016). www.alisonlock.com Rachel Burns is a poet and playwright living in Durham City, England. Poems published in UK literary magazines. Shortlisted in competitions Mslexia, Writers' & Artists Yearbook and The Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize 2017.

Denni Turp works as the North West Wales Regional Officer for Disability Arts Cymru. Her poems have been published in a number of magazines including Prole, Tears In The Fence, Popshot, The Dawn Treader, ArtemisPOETRY, and Southbank Poetry, and online with Writers for Calais Refugees and I Am Not A Silent Poet. She was the winner of the 2012 Tŷ Newydd Writers’ Centre for Wales Poetry Competition.

Kathy Gee lives in Worcestershire and works in museums and heritage. In 2016 her first poetry collection, Book of Bones, was published by V. Press, and she wrote the spoken word elements for a contemporary choral composition – suiteforthefallensoldier.com.

Previous Publication Credits ‘The Mother Speaks’ by Kate Innes was first published in the author’s collection Flocks of Words (March 2017).

‘Cinderella’s pantry’ by Karen Little was first published in Twice Upon a Time (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2015).

‘Gretel Lost in the Forest’ by Nancy Scott was first published in the author’s book The Owl Prince (Aldrich Press, 2015).