Once In 365 Days

Mistletoe needn’t.
She comes to him before midnight,
The only season they will meet,
Coiling their solitude in secrecy,
Worth the wait –
Driving their brain ‘round the cuckoo’s nest,
In mind-piercing mode,
Discard that midnight countdown,
Clothing discarded – like presents; no ribbons,
Drenching; atop
Messy sheets – bodies waving white flags,
Hard-on-their-knees
Releasing serotonin
Breathing

Deborah Wong

(Deborah Wong’s poems have been published locally and internationally, including ditch, Poetry Quarterly, Anak Sastra, Red Fez, Mad Swirl, Vox Poetica, Banana Writers, The Tower Journal and elsewhere. Her second short story is forthcoming in Inwood Indiana Press. She’s also a frequent contributor and an editorial board member of Eastlit Journal.)

Broken Cello

I recall your body
beneath a spotlight
its smooth maple shine

the smile
on your player’s face
as he drew his bow across you

I heard you lost your end pin
to some careless hands
one of your f-holes

fissured in the back of a van
string free I’m told
your bridge is now bare

unplayable
your tail piece
no longer vibrates.

Kevin Reid

(Kevin Reid lives in Scotland. His poetry has appeared in various online and printed journals, such as, Domestic Cherry, And Other Poems, Pushing Out the Boat, Ink Sweat and Tears, Amaryllis, The Interpreters House, The Open Mouse. He is the founding creator of the >erasure and >erasure ii projects and Wordless, a collaboration with George Szirtes published in April 2014 by Knives Forks and Spoons Press. He is editor of Nutshells and Nuggets, a webzine for short poems)

Gallows House

All night the cisterns whisper.
A lantern on its long chain
ticks and mutters in the stairwell,

something in the roof-light
breathes and blanches
where the crow hung.

There are scuff-marks over the floor.
The child I was crosses the landing,
a torch swings round, sudden – zoetrope’s

galloping alphabet of silverish
fingerprints – all night I pick at the roof catch
as if I could spring it open.

Pippa Little

(Pippa Little is Scots and lives in Northumberland. Overwintering came out from Carcanet Press in 2012 and she is currently working on her next collection. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newcastle University since Autumn 2015)

Mistress of the Moon

The Lady of Delight is known by many names among witches, some of them classical in inspiration like Diana or Hecate, or Celtic like Rhiannon; she is also known as Habondia, Hulda, and Herodias, and sometimes by other versions of the last name, Aradia, Ariadne, or Arianne. She is Mistress of the Moon as well as the realm of Venus.

In all your operations of romantic love it is her presence you must invoke, by any of the aforesaid names you may find significant—again a little mythological research will help you here. You should strive to contact the goddess before your spells of romantic love, by visualizing her clad in silvery garments, mantled in darkness wherein the stars dimly gleam, and with long streaming hair. She is crowned with a wreath of flowers and corn, while above her brow shines the lunar disk on either side of which rise two rearing serpents. On her right hand perches her symbolic bird, the white dove.

All flowers and blossoms, particularly those with a perfume, are sacred to the Lady, and before beginning the more complex operations of love it is as well to strew your altar with them. Apart from the associative symbolism of flowers, they also give off a subtle magnetism which is peculiarly in accord with works of this nature. No magical circle is necessary for these operations either, for the force invoked is benevolent rather than a hostile one, and as such need neither the sharp magical focusing nor the quality of incisive delineation provided by the Athame’s traced boundary line No demonic entities or unfriendly departed shades are summoned in this type of witchcraft. All that is required is the purification of the place of working, and the spell itself.

Paul Huson
Mastering Witchcraft

I just love curvy women

Especially when they sit on your face with no regard for your safety or well being. As if you never really needed to breathe air, but existed solely on the taste of wet pussy instead!

Oh, Lord, please let me suffocate in all those raging, rampant hormones once again!

What did you purchase at the weekend?

Monday with Barbie and friends…