Skip to main content

What I Learnt from the Owl by Anna Saunders

how to hunt in silken plumage
tooled up with talons and hooks
 
how to split the seam of the night
with saw-tooth wings
how to consume all I kill
yet stay hungry
 
how to haunt sleep
my head - a phantom full moon
how to be outcast and avenger
spectre and seraphim, winged god and ghoul
 
bladed angel dropping from the sky.
What I learnt from the owl
 
how to voice my darkness
in hisses, in shrieks
 
how to drop from the heights,
heart shaped face falling to earth
 
as if love itself were plummeting.

---

Anna Saunders is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox ( Indigo Dreams) and Ghosting for Beginners ( Indigo Dreams, Spring 2018) described by Fiona Sampson as a 'beautifully evocative read'. Anna has had poems published in journals and anthologies, which include Ambit, The North, New Walk Magazine, Amaryllis, Iota, Caduceus, Envoi, The Wenlock Anthology, Eyeflash,  and The Museum of Light. She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North  and ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts’ by Bernard O’Donoghue.  Anna holds 4 Arts Council Awards for her work.   


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Home by Jessa Forest

Home scratches at her shingles with tree branch fingers, pulls the air conditioning unit close to her grimy aluminum siding, and keens an empty song of mourning. We found her wandering the tornado snarled wild three months ago, starved and lonely. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself, you see? We fed her shards of dining room tables, kindling for the fireplace, and cast iron bathtubs clawed feet first. She was slow to recover so we gutted her plumbing, ripped out her nerves, and rewired the electricity. She let the water in every time it rained so we put a new roof on her and let her out for regular walks around the wolf pen. Let her mingle with the vultures, I said, let her feel useful and clean up the dead but no one wanted to listen. We found rot an mold in her corners, infused her insulation with antibiotics, and quarantined her for two weeks while she belched ladderback chairs, sofa cushions, wind chimes, and broken bookcases. She still has her bad days. After feeding time

“Are You So Tired Then, Stranger?” by Ace Boggess

  —Dick Allen, “B&B”    Wind exhausts with its icy fists. Knives of rain wear me down, & leaves in their helicopter swirls like leaflets dropped from a plane. October depletes me, & November. They’ve too much busyness. They send me spinning, dancing, lonely with the rake, the broom. I surrender, collapsing like an old barn, debris of me piling in a chair with clear view of the television.  News is on. It spends me. Talk of politics, also. I’d like  to shut up the voices that fatigue. They hum like a B-flat in the pipes. They bicker & scold, condemn. They expend me like carrying  groceries up a flight of stairs  until I’m too drained to care  which side they’re on. --- Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including  Escape Envy  (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021),  I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So , and  The Prisoners . His writing has appeared in  Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review,  and other journals. An ex-c

Examples Of Resilience by Jen Feroze

Look to the city’s forests. Those monoliths and museums, cathedrals and palaces  and theatres whose stories have sunk deep under the pavements, have rooted themselves in the silt at the bottom of the river. Think of the architects spreading sketches across tired wood, holding up samples of mosaic tile, wondering what sort of mark they’ll leave. Think of the tongues of flame, the sirens, the silence before the shells fall. Think of the thousands and thousands of feet that have walked here. The myriad secrets whispered across the vast blue dome, where the apostles keep them safe. Think of the nightingale you heard here that night in November, wrapping its song around St Paul’s in ribbons of winter.  Tiny in the face  of all that history.  Dauntless, nonetheless. --- Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two small sleep thieves. Her work has recently appeared in Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, Ekphrastic Review and The Madrigal, among others. Her first collection, The C