New Poetry by David Ades

I Am Yours Forever

Even if you never speak of me again,
if my name never passes your lips,

you will not be rid of me:

I will be the genie in your bottle, 
contained within the hold of your silence.


- David Ades 2013


Turning Back After Turning Away

It’s a trick of the eye or sensibility: 
turn away and the place you thought you had reserved 
for yourself in this life, the place it had taken 

so many years to reach, vanishes.  
It isn’t that anyone else has taken it – it’s more 
that you were fooling yourself whilst everything around you

moved at different speeds in different directions,
whilst you let yourself forget that constancy 
was just a construct, a way to absolve anxiety.  

You remember that now and wish you didn’t.


- David Ades 2013


Waiting at the End of a Lit Fuse

Contentment is a kind of death.
Let us have a little, since we’re dying anyway,
a little break from our constant wrestling, 

a rest to stretch our bodies, ease our muscles.
Observe how we ask from others what we cannot give
ourselves, how we lean in, as if towards a secret.

Observe how we want to know  
only what does not confront us
with what we seek to deny, how we look again

to the mirror, how the mirror lies.


- David Ades 2013


David Ades is an Australian poet currently living in Pittsburgh.

I am afraid that while the bush fire emergency remains critical in this corner of the world, Bluepepper will not be posting any new poetry or comment.

New Poetry by Donal Mahoney

All I Did Was Admire Her Aloud

 

“Quiet, please,” I tell her,

“I want to hear the music.”

She is sitting next to me again,

this time on a paisley couch,

a woman in a lime bikini I met

only this morning sprawled

on the Morse Avenue Beach.

All I did was admire her aloud,

not recognize her age, and an hour later

she brought me home with her.

Now she is curling into me again

and moaning at a remarkable pitch.

Finally she spits into my neck

what it’s all about

this time and every time

“Honey…I am…coming."

- Donal Mahoney 2013

Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, Missouri. 

New Poetry by Louise McKenna

Cumquats

Outside our gate she pauses to admire the cumquat tree

with its frozen juggling trick of orange balls.  It proffers

an illusion: the fruit delicious to the eye yet unpalatable as truth.

Bent double by her crippled back, she is close to the branches

as if she might hear conspiracies among the leaves.  I have

no cure for her crooked spine, only these sour little remedies

for a sore throat, or ingredients for the conserve she tells me

she makes, her voice brittle with age.  I tell her she is welcome

as I place them like ballast in her rheumatoid hands.  She fills 

her handbag then turns, shuffles away, vanishing around the street's bend.

A kind of sweetness hangs in the air, conjured from her bitter load

- Louise McKenna 2013

Nurse's Hands

Unlike angels, we have only our hands

to blunt the razor edge of pain.

We need to administer a bitter pill or needle,

to make a poultice of salve and sting–

kindness and cruelty in variable doses.  I have grafted

lightning bolts on to somebody's heart.

I have pulled out the stitches in a wound's hem.

So yes, my hands are more culpable than kind.

But look at the callus and the band of white

where I daily remove my wedding ring.

As my hands alight on you, soft as wings,

look at my face.  It will never betray the agony

of your burden.  I heave it up, like a feather.

- Louise McKenna 2013

Louise's work has also appeared in Cordite Poetry Review and Mascara Literary Review. This year she was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize.