The Victorian Dollhouse houses poems that take us to different times, even imaginary times.

reveries

by Grace Alice Evans

i have slain all

of my guileless reveries —

draining immaculateness onto pale plush,

soothing the bygone.

the tips of my wretched fingers and

ruthless soul wait — as the now-motionless

gardens

hush their noon-time hum, the make-believe

world turning into crystal. accepting its fate—

as time continues to stretch

my skin taut

to fit within its frame.

Lilith / Elizabeth Barton

Dark, beautiful, seductive Lilith

The most feared, abhorred woman

In the pantheon of patriarchy

Has found her laurels in sequestered spaces,

In shamed faces and forbidden places,

And emerges with her daring visage,

Perversely triumphant, courageously framed

By her tumbling mane streaming

Emerald and ebony in a star-studded dream.

She crushes men’s hearts with fear

To weaken their strut, who claim

The wombs of women for bargaining currency;

She doesn’t give a damn about the grandchildren –

They are pawns for competing sperm.

She laughs at the lineages of men, who drain

The lives of women in their ordered world.

She shapes her weapons and sharpens her aim

To take back men’s bartering with just gain.

Girls suffered destruction of discernment

All for the sight of a baby’s picture;

We had such stuff forced down our throats

Before we bloomed and began to menstruate.

We were expected to blindly copulate

With men who had no inkling of life

Or love, or how to fornicate. Or be abhorred

For wanting to choose some other path,

Rather than breed and populate, and go on all fours.

What is required to take back our life?

What is the royal road to freedom but defiance?

What about a teacher at school who presumed

I was strange because I was not consumed by boys

Although I perceived them as my equal?

How he wanted to be gallant and smart!

He wanted my attention ruined by false pursuits;

I was more in love with creating art;

To his agenda, I jarred; I didn’t suit.

Punishment follows the ship of fools

Like the tale of 10-year-old girls at a school

In ’70s Australian education, taken out of class

And lined up for internal examination,

To ensure their parts functioned for their role

As future baby-makers. No one grasped

The absurdity of the notion, or the stupidity –

Or was it a feint for a sinister motive?

How can you read a child’s seed within a child?

I trace my form in Lilith, in the rivers

Of her hair, her shadow upon the threshold,

Absorbed in her reflection, wildly steeped

In her abolished history as she forms my breath

And stipulates the drive of my incarnation, to live

At the edge of conformity, to reach for boundless

Expression, to strive for unfettered bounty;

I write my own life upon imperishable stone

To make the watchword of my imperative known.

We are born as Lilith in one form or another;

We will not be judged by our weight, our looks

Or the worth of our womb, to be bought or sold;

This is mine, the kingdom of my bodily form,

There is no price upon it; container of stars,

A closed book of galaxies to be awakened

In the finest filigree of moisture, like seeds

Awaiting the stirring of the furthest night

Imprinted, ready in the moment of life.

_{Ducking Time  / J.A. Pak}

_{If we mark time with children}

 

_{we grow old very fast.}

_{Better not}

 

_{to have children}

_{stay infantile}

 

_{mark other people’s children}

_{growing old}

_{while we loose time.}

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.