Ellen the Elder by Laura Varnam

I’m older now.

More winters have clawed

my bones than Beowulf

or Hrothgar ever

weathered.

When they speak of me,

if they speak of me at all,

little boys snicker and point:

dragon-raiser, cup-pincher!

I’m that old story.

Before the ashes were cool

they’d whizzed up a new hall

–bone-strong, iron-belted,

just like the last one– but

they don’t see the shadow

of my dragon crackling in the

hearth, hissing up the chimney.

They say my mind wanders,

but in truth I send it out

into the forest to ask the trees

if I did right in my youth.

When it returns, pilgrim-swift,

bringing talk of sisterlands,

of raven goddesses and

dragon-queens, I am certain.

I couldn’t have done anything else.

---

Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. Her poetry is inspired by the medieval texts that she teaches and her poems have been published in Acropolis Journal, Atrium, Crow of Minerva, Dreich, Green Ink Poetry, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Oxford Magazine and forthcoming in After…Poetry, Bad Lilies, and MIR Online. A selection of her poems, plus a creative-critical essay, are forthcoming in the academic journal postmedieval.

Comments

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...

Why Men's Judgements of New Clothes Shouldn't Be Trusted by Simon Williams

I join four men outside the fitting room, while women try on size 14 with 16 in reserve. We’re trying to look in place and failing. It’s important not to let your eyes settle on any racked garment for over 30 seconds or any racked customer for over five. This is especially true if the fitting room in anywhere near lingerie. Nobody is interested in our slight discomfort; five expressionless faces keen to compress time, urgent to breathe less material air. People want to read Big Thoughts on how we were misused as boys, how we were louts on bikes. But it has come to this; such a longing for a brief appearance from the cubicle, a show-off of prospective wear that all clothes look wonderful on you. --- Simon Williams has eight published collections, his latest being a co-authored pamphlet with Susan Taylor, The Weather House , published in 2017 by Indigo Dreams. Simon was elected The Bard of Exeter in 2013, founded the large-format magazine, The...

Prints by Penny Ayers

A child’s mark before letters— sticky red palms, ten tiny petals, two flowers patted on white. Already they’re telling her story— the whorls of the thumbs, the dips and stretches of lines of life, of the heart. She’ll leave them everywhere— on the skin of lovers, knives in the kitchen, the riffled pages of library books, on window glass, wiping raindrops. Will she reach out to touch things no longer there, make her mark for others to find like her sisters whose hands were caught in crushed ochre on cave walls, among running horses, the haunches of bison, 35,000 years ago?* *It’s now believed that many cave paintings were made by women, judging by the size of the handprints. --- Penny Ayers lives in Cheltenham. She has been published online and in various magazines, most recently in ‘Ink, Sweat & Tears’, ‘Snakeskin’ and the summer edition of ‘Spelt’. She helps run the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network.

Dear Reader

Search This Blog