Janet Joyner

July 2019 | poetry

Swamp

is all about

quiet death

and the slow

cellular work

of decompostion

in a wet

dark place.

Say it. The word

itself, breaching

with that swishing

sucking, sibilant

swooping its

big wings

around an ample,

nasal-vowelled body

detonated by a plosive

that lifts

like a long-legged bird.

After the rape

of the three little

girls in the grass

by the Maoist

army, there was

no grass left.

Janet Joyner

Janet Joyner’s prize-winning poems have been honored in the 2011 Yearbook of the South Carolina Poetry Society, Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council in 2010, 2011, Flying South in 2014, and in 2015, as well as anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina, and Second Spring 2016, 2017, 2018. Her first collection of poems, Waterborne, is the winner of the Holland Prize and was published by Logan House in February, 2016. Her chapbook, “Yellow,” was published by Finishing Line Press in November, 2018. Wahee Neck, her third collection, will be published this summer by Hermit Feathers Press.

DS Maolalai

July 2019 | poetry

The explosion.

the earth bursts and curls

with february yellow. daffodils,

cruel colour

and abundant

in freshness and reds. we didn’t plant them –

the person who lived here

before us did – but still,

I’m glad

they’re there. drinking

from his coffee cup, summer

coming out of the ground

to surprise us,

tapping the windows

with a long thin hand;

the first spark

of a slow explosion,

set to expand

all year.

A sign of respect.

it’s a small cove,

and I stand at its center. wind crawls

the cliffsides,

cold as rivers

in high altitudes. and a river flows

at a low one

over to my left –

barely a stream, really,

though perhaps it was this

which cut the cove

at one time

out of rocks. I think

I think this way only

because today

I am in the company

of geologists. they climb over the cliff-face

and search for interesting seams. I

was mainly brought along

as a driver. me and aodhain,

showing them the countryside. but he

is a geologist also, and just as interested in rocks. I stand

with my shoes off

and watch the surf

as it grabs handfuls of sand

and collects crabs

like a commuter

bus-service. high on the dunes

a dolphin decomposes, dropped

in the last storm of autumn

and dragged up there – I guess as a sign

by someone

of respect.

it stinks salt

and dead seawater

and flies swarm the carpark. there were seagulls too,

flapping all over, until we pulled up and threw rocks at them.

DS Maolalai

DS Maolalai has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His first collection, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden”, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, with “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019.