An ogre kicked in our front door. We listened, safe in bed, while he demanded with fearsome fist meat without gristle, bread without grist. He left mother a belter of a bouquet: purple pansies bloomed around her eyes, red roses dripped from her face. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
Seven Days
I live in dark corners, a scuttling spider drawing you to my web. Ding dong dell, Pussy’s in the well, drowning in despair and dripping hair. The jerky gait on the video tape is a symptom of my pain, reflected in the depths of eyes that kill or drive you insane Kim M. Russell, 2017 […]
Kindness
We have lovely next-door neighbours, who are elderly and have suffered ill health, but they are always there for us. Soon after we moved in seventeen years ago, they invited us to a birthday party. When we go away, they have a key in case of emergencies. If I arrive home and they happen to […]
Erasing Shakespeare
Saucy and overbold beldam of death, mistress of charms, spite and wrath loves not you. Vessels and spells provide a dismal and a fatal end. Upon the corner of the moon, artificial sprites raise little spirit in a foggy cloud. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar: Look What […]
Slipping
The circus is over; curses escape rouged lips, the mask slips, dripping with clay lumpen and grey. Clown hands squeeze, poking dreams filled with screams trapped in a false face – a frozen grimace. Kim M. Russell, 2016 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics: The Metaphorical Mask, also linked to earthweal open link […]
Bay Tree Blues (or Greens)
Your branches no longer rub against the gutter, there is no friendly creak in boisterous winds; your limbs were amputated, disintegrated in the garden shredder. You still stand strong, birds sing among shiny winter green leaves, while you breathe out your noble pepper aroma. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Quadrille: […]
Do you dare…
to open the ramshackle gate and enter a shadowy place where gems masquerade as pebbles and bones; disturb the sleep of a petrified gnome; dig up burly clods of mud that turn into unblinking toadstones? Do you dare to feed them with earth-bound worms that squirm with spells cast in sifted loam; to purse your […]
Leaving the Library
Inside the library, readers are turning leaves, devouring stories and stuffing words up sleeves to ponder at their leisure, while some are just hiding from the autumn weather. Outside the library and just inside the door, brittle leaves skitter in huffs of dust across the floor, cart-wheeling freely, while some are just hiding from the […]
Ghost Nets
I read recently about an exhibition that took place in the summer at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, called ‘Ghost Nets of the Ocean’. It was created by artists from Darnley Island in Australia, and consisted of suspended brightly-coloured sculptures of fish, turtles, squid and jellyfish, all made from ocean debris, including abandoned fishing […]
Too Late for Blackberries
This year I missed the clusters, drupelets of ruby and jet that glowed with autumn lustre and others unripe as yet. I was too busy being a poet caught in imaginative rambles to pick sweet fruit from brambles. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to dVerse Poets Pub Form for All — Chaucerian Stanza or […]
writing in north norfolk 