The Victorian Dollhouse houses poems that take us to different times, even imaginary times.
When Matryoshka Dolls Take the Runway / Rikki Santer
Like the Morton salt girl, they never wavered from a belief in infinite regression. Thou shalt covet the trajectory of babushka. On the shore of the Volga, past daydreams of Venetian blinds, a pair of silk stockings with tender black seams curled through forest branches luring woodcutters from their benches. Finally they settled around the neck of a rooster girl like a timid scarf with a broom & basket thesis. It was then that the Matryoshka dolls ripened into their universe:
When the Matryoshka dolls take the runway
they whirl to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring & cup the borders of empty— dream of gauzy negligees, saucy slippers & catwalks carpeted with hay—
nest robin eggs from government corruption—
beckon endangered leopards to drink slowly from their halves
When the Matryoshka dolls take the runway
they masquerade as spice jars—
pose as proletariats in the pantry—
shimmy over Twiggish waifs while chanting fertility spells
When the Matryoshka dolls take the runway
their long black lashes launch like butterflies working attitude
as they wear folktale embroideries of magic rubles, sacred valleys
When the Matryoshka dolls take the runway
it is their red of reds that hums the hum how easily we hide in one another.
Rikki Santer’s poetry has received many honors including five Pushcart and three Ohioana book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her eighth collection,Drop Jaw, inspired by the art of ventriloquism, was published by NightBallet Press in the spring. Please contact her through her website: www.rikkisanter.com
Kings, Queens, Jacks and Jokers
KINGS
QUEENS
JACKS
JOKERS
Chaff / Barney Ashton-Bullock
The chaffy froth,
Fragments of the screes of anti-radar debris
In fathoms a-churn, dashed to smash in briny breeze
‘Cross foam-headed Esplanade flagstones,
Immured in sea’s brawny brio, yey!
But winds’ll not upturn
This coastal defence and yet…
Quayside tramlines, tarmac sunk, traverse the years;
Transient, ever radiant in oxidising rustability
Or as new laid, sunlit, laser bright, fresh rail sheen
Keep clear o’the edge o’the seawall!
Don’t drop litter!
Don’t feed the seagulls!
Don’t fear the reaper!
The yawling, soaring, craw, craw, scraw!
My shrunken head, pom-pom hat dressed,
A swooping gull’s mess just misses my shuffle and yet….
In cooing, cyclonic collective,
In snippy, simper squall
Around a sea-sprayed, smulching, loaded, chip ’n’ dip cone
All hover; hover then dive; dive, gobble, gobble, go!
And whose hand then fed?
And whose hand now held?
And whose hand thence dipped?
Presently, these eve-tide shaky hands
Grapple grip the bloomed ironwork; my surety.
This blanched, sepia promenade crossfades
To greyscale, to a bleak, blank, anonymous, at war austerity
Where now wan, throttled gulls shed their ack-ack frenzy
To merely bob steady.
Would it be this cross-haired breeze might ask,
“Should this cratered town not crumble cry?”
I am sanguine ready for sallow tearfall,
To salute the mist, to sea-spray effervesce, to expire, to die
As, brimful of recollections oft’ told too tall, I
Elect to atomise from endgame life.
Then something belch-parps that the future’s as bright
As the coastguard’s archaic cordite signal flares
Which suddenly burn again in sparkly, plucky array
Through all the knuckling klaxons of memory
To illuminate, strings of fêted future nights,
Tacked through all my rags of yesteryears
On which, though presumed drowned,
Though seen shot down,
I thought you might yet come back to me.
Barney Ashton-Bullock, is a ‘regular contributing poet’ to the Wellington Street Review and has had poems published (or pending so) in the New River Press Yearbook, the ‘Avalanches In Poetry’ tribute anthology to Leonard Cohen, SPAMzine, Scab Mag, -algia Press and in the ‘Soho Nights II’ and ‘Soho Nights III’ anthologies published by The Society Club Press who also published his debut collection ‘Schema/Stasis’. He is the playwright/poet/librettist in the ‘Andy Bell is Torsten’ queer music-theatre collective and narrates his own verse on the current Downes Braide Association album ‘Skyscraper Souls’. His current poetry pamphlet ‘Café Kaput!’ is with Broken Sleep Books.
Kirkgate / David Walshe
Ancient trodden trackway,
‘a way’
for the country folk
A journey of over four miles
for coffin, babe or bride
from the end of Birtle Common
Until St.Cuthbert’s reside
Emerging
out of Charnley’s Hills
towards Snuttering Lane
Halting
for reflection,
at the Breeing Stone
they take its rain
Romana Vistula trackway
dissecting North Meols
within sight their steeple
as it cuts through the Steeles
‘Kirkgate’
The Kirkgate or Churchgate was an ancient trackway believed to be one of the oldest in Lancashire and which connected churches in the South West of the county and linked up to others beyond. This poem focuses on the section which existed in the parish of North Meols (modern day Southport, UK) and how people that lived on the southern fringes of the parish had to walk almost four miles to baptise their newborn, attend weddings and carry the coffins of their dead. Birtle was a dialect term to describe Birkdale. Snuttering Lane is the name of an old Lane that followed part of the path. The Breeing Stone was a large boulder close to the Birkdale/North Meols township boundary which had a hole in it large enough to collect water which they sprinkled on the coffins. The Steeles was an area of open land of which the Churchgate passed through before arriving at St.Cuthberts church in Churchtown, the centre of the old parish. Part of the old track still exists today, and is still called Churchgate.
