Unshackling into Summer.


Greetings fellow WordPressers—Do I sound like an alien addressing earthlings? Given my absence, it certainly feels like it. How are all your creative endeavours progressing?

Of late I have been subdued because I have been working towards deadlines. Also, quell surprise, a brief involvement with National Flash Fiction Day culminated in my story, Arrivals and Departures, being accepted for publication in an anthology entitled Kissing Frankenstein and Other Stories, now available from Lulu.com for a nominal price.

As I developing writer, this was my first submission and thank Rachel Carter and Martha Williams for all their hard work in producing the first edition of Flash Fiction South West, a division of National Flash Fiction Day spearheaded by Callum Kerr whose forthcoming pamphlet is due to be published this summer by Salt.

For the next couple of months, like Martha and I suspect Rachel, I will be taking time out to focus on other pleasures, like gardening, photography and ankle nippers. It’s going to be so liberating to escape the shackles of the grey slab on the desk and breathe more than poetry and prose. Wet summer days will also present an opportunity to devote some time to reading and enjoying the diversity of your your blogs and writing.

‘We do not know what is around the bend, except life itself.’

On that note, I wish you all happy holidays and for those of you who are not in the best of health, may the warmth of sun across your back bring you a much welcomed benefit.

Yours poetically and most sincerely Talia.
 

Photography: Talia Hardy.

Apocalyptically Yours


Apocalyptically Yours

When long necked cranes puncture the sky
feathers flutter and fall from its’ bladed arm
and below an overworked washing machine whirls
growling gravel in a bucket; belching.

The monsters are busy today.

In response to the carnage trees uproot and walk away
and desolate rainforests weep in despair
for their embryonic brothers
encapsulated in concrete; suffocating.

The monsters are busy again today.

Hidden in an earth layered bunker
a lava heart lies waiting for the moment
that the cockroaches set fire to my flesh.
And after acid rain baptises my grey remains,
their steel shelled cousins will return; creeping
like armoured tanks to predate on putrid flesh.

The monsters will be busy that day; retreating.

Copyright©Talia Hardy 2012 
Photography: Talia Hardy 2011.

Paying for It


Paying for It

 Anne Sommers works all day giving demonstrations
and returns home too tired to tend to him or
listen to his heated remonstrations.
Harold is hungry and cold and food is in the fridge
but risks the short trip to the convenience store
where chemically enhanced candy entices him
in and strips him of fifty dollars and more.

 And once home with his pleasured stomach sated
with guilty contraband he’ll softly say
‘had a nice day, dear’ whilst dishing up
her frozen microwaved supper he’s slaved
over all day, oblivious to the sore
developing under the skin of his penis.

 Copyright©Talia Hardy 2012
Photography: ADFFTS

Throughout her Ages


Throughout her Ages

Wedding day, a bouquet tied with silk
faces in the crowd she crushes it
a bright beginning, bells tolling.

Twenty-first birthday, another bouquet
tied with green twine from the garden
too many spaces and ethereal faces.

Their silver day, a lavish bouquet
tied with bloody barbed wire
coupled with a card, the name not her own.

Too many spaces and ethereal faces
a cloying bouquet tied with clarity
and dirty petals long blown underfoot.

Copyright©Talia Hardy 2012
Photography: Tomasz KuranWikimedia Commons

Peyote Pete


Peyote Pete

Shuttered up from smoke from the chimney   
this pallid youth chews buttons for breakfast
and shrinks back from the guy on the porch.

In sunlight his amorphous softness
is less menacing; the grimacing
and insidious sniggering subsides

 ‘He is a living gin’ Pete tells me
‘you can tell by de whites of his acid green eyes
and the thump of his Frankenstein boots’

Again he hears the voices inside and
shuttered up by smoke, his hands to his throat
curls up into a ball of asphalt screaming

 ‘agh de fumes, de fumes, agh de fumes!’

Copyright©Talia Hardy 2012
Photography: Eric Lachey
Author’s note: This Poem was concieved through the found poetry method and is derived from John Updike’s Couples p.77

Oya


Oya

Amid castellated crumbling dunes,
sage sea grass pockets and emerald gorse
cut sharp shapes along a slate path
wound around a driftwood hut.

Over its’ living roof a skeletal tree
bends low in deference to a wild dog rose
clinging for purchase on its’ rising root.
We two are like this often, he and me.

Along a mile long stretch of sand where
beach umbrellas once fluttered coquettishly,
dark racing waves explode across a wet expanse
and screeching gulls beg for mercy under shot up surf.

After the thunderous ebb where winds once whipped up
laden clouds promising Shango’s passion,
mauve mackerel clouds drift adagio
amorphously through flaccid minds.

We two are like this often, he and me,
damp flesh hidden in hollow shadows,
his head pillowed between dusky mounds
and his sweet salt like crystals on my lips.

Copyright©Talia Hardy 2012
Photography for illustration purposes: Charlie Snyder