Three Poems and Four Haiku by Sue Spiers

 

Eboniza – Goddess of the half-cast

 

 

Her skin is dark as polished jet

Her eyes are pools of loam.

Of icicles her cloak is made.

It chink-clinks as she roams.

 

She strides across the winter-tide

with seeds of persimmon

to plant them deep where snow comes down,

but how did she begin?

 

Her father played the violin

and lived the tinker’s way.

He drank his fill of damson wine,

made friend of waif and stray.

 

He sat below a tall black tree

and fiddled up a storm

that echoed through the mountain side

and found a mystic form.

 

Both tree and man were buried deep

within the avalanche.

The man, he died but saved the tree,

became part of each branch.

 

In spring the tree bore damson fruit,

a strange and mobile kind,

with legs and arms and purple lips,

a wand of wood to hand.

 

The goddess wanders Northern hills

with magic in her staff

to blend and mend what’s separate

and made from half and half.

 

She welcomes mermosets to swim,

octocorns and cowbees,

oakphants, roserats and kangagos

all find her treedom’s keys.

 

Her summertime brings dandy-cups

where butterlions sprout

In her purview we all find love;

she cares for those cast out.

 

As winter comes she weaves her cloak

of ice chimes, fine and thin.

Her hand in pocket wrapped around

a nugget of rosin.

Haruto and Ishi

   After the Tongue-cut Sparrow fairytale

 

Haruto ploughs his rice field

wipes his brow and, at sunset,

trudges homeward to his wife, Ishi.

 

Fish is so expensive.

The neighbour’s boy made faces.

 

The old man talks to his pet sparrow,

gives her tit-bits from his plate.

 

You spend so much time with Enka,

I wonder you don’t fly away together,.

 

Haruto trudges to work at sunrise.

He gathers plants in weather worn hands,

feels the memory of Enka’s tiny claws.

 

My washday starch is stolen,

have you scoffed it greedy Enka?

 

The bird bows its apology, sings

for clemency, it was an honest mistake.

I’ll have your tongue! Now shoo!

 

Haruto looks for his pet at day’s end

but she’s banished to the forest.

 

Next sunrise he can bear the loss no more,

fears Enka is in pain, can’t eat, can’t sing.

 

He finds her, her tongue regrown

by some force he doesn’t comprehend.

Enka speaks, invites him to her home.

 

She is Lady Sparrow, her home glorious.

Into the night she entertains her old friend,

offers the choice of two gifts.

 

Haruto takes the smaller bamboo box,

promises to return when work allows.

 

You fool, not taking the larger box.

We’d have more jewels and gold.

Tell me where to find that spiteful bird.

 

Haruto sent me for the second gift.

Ishi’s back aches, her legs ache, she halts,

cannot wait to see inside the heavy box.

 

Out fly scary demons, ugly toads,

stinky monsters, fearful dragons.

 

There, there Ishi, don’t worry,

it’s your own fault for being greedy,

little Enka only let you see that.

 

Medusa and the Legacy

 

 

I

A scalp of writhing vipers

hidden under a beanie hat,

unless you need men stiff as granite,

kept still to halt their slashing swords.

Made monster to show Athena’s rage,

turned to stone by your own reflection,

shield decoration for the Goddess.

 

II

You flick your copious blonde hair,

draping it over each breast

drawing attention to them, making men

think of tresses on a pillow, beneath

their weight. Make of it a crown;

your sense of power over mortals.

Tragedy when the chemotherapy stole it.

 

 

Haiku

stroll between bushes

translucence finer than hair

arachnopanick

 

greyhound’s sleek coat

curve of his noble neck

badger’s claret jaw

 

 

 

soil cracks open

swallows green, belches dust

cloud weeps

 

 

 

ample lovers

red wine, beef stew, herb dumplings

steamy evenings

 

 

Sue Spiers’ poetry appears on line with Atrium, Black Iris, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The High Window, and in print with Acumen, The North, Obsessed With Pipework, Stand and Under the Radar magazines. Sue is a wave 17 iamb poet. She has self-published four collections with Lulu.com and has a pamphlet A Wallet of Creature Poems with Hedgehog Press. Her 5^th collection, Paisley Horizon, will be published by Poetry Space by April 2028.  Sue edits the annual anthology of the Open University Poetry Society and works with Winchester Poetry Festival. Sue won the Shepton Mallet competition in 2024 with ‘Byrdie’, and Poem of the Month with Verve in August, 2Recipe for a Long Life’ and the prizes are funding her 4^th collection A Trunk of Creature Poems (Lulu.com) which features both poems. Sue has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and has two Pushcart nominations, and two Touchstone nominations for haiku.

The Girl on the Swing - Creative Non-Fiction by C. Oulens

 

The Girl on the Swing

Creative Non-Fiction Story

by

C. Oulens

A bed is a box is a sea is a seaful of sky is my bed.

Lying low. Curled on the bed. My pulse races on the meter…104…105…108. A brick rests beneath my head. A few twists and turns later, the brick softens its heart to goose down. With the one on my chest insistent on its existence, I detach the meter. Eyes shut. Pulse

racing. Down-down-downrightly-tightly-drowning. 

Feeling. Trying to un-feel. Un-listening voices of the living and the dead. Tracing 

peace. An eye inside my eyes. Seeing—

deprived of sight—dots of light. gathering greys—spilling bright. light silhouettes of grey amoebae. more dots—blots—un-blotting. non-shapes morphing into form constants: clouds… well… hills… vale… tunnels—the closest shape-names my mind blink-thinks. thing-like or like something. colliding—overlapping—swelling—perforating—collapsing—

like my thoughts: expansionist, reductionist. 

I chase an almost-shape. It poofs. Another. Gone before I can count two. One stays a little longer. But fluid. I try to persuade it to leave a striking—or at least sensible—shape-impression on me: a three-legged chair, Garfield, pouting lips, a pair of stern eyes. 

But every grey and every light I chase curdles—wordless—nonetheless. Evolves into some other utter undefinition: a noiseless flatulence of white noise or some useless meaninglessness. 

My pulse is still racing—still tracing peace. I need to slow its pace or make it non-existent. I roll my eyeballs behind my weighty, flickering lids and try to fix them at the top. 

Shots of light. A colour-drained straightish rainbow slowly bending into a Möbius strip of light & grey—unending without joining—at the top of my frame. I can’t see what lies below and fear losing it. I anchor it there. it relents. I stare at it. it shines back. I’m not satisfied. What's the point of this shape, anyway? a shape with a single-sided surface and a single edge? There are enough lines in my life outside the inside of my eyes. I don’t want to let this one reclaim me. If it succeeds, I’ll fall into the trap of covering up its sparseness with language. over-pulsating language. overpowering a scant static image. No, I refuse to be remote controlled by the concrete remnants of the outside. on the lookout to somehow freeze the fluid inside.

I want language to borrow words from pixels—the visual before the verbiage, the feeling before its expression, life—before its living. But I don’t want to coax an image. I’m in a room of my own on a bed of my own—pulse-impulsing—and I want an image that arrives unadulterated. without the shrewdness of experience. without the hangover of memory. without manipulation by imagination. without the brushstroke of words. 

I press my eyelids tighter. to squeeze out an impression. I wander—adjusting the focus length—and then, at a distance—something—something else that stays. stays… sways… 

a swing… emerging from a forest… or a forest frothing from the swing.

The forest—dark and dense. A plain swing, with ropes so long I can’t see where they are suspended from. There's no tree near the swing. The forest is further away. I don’t try to check where those long ropes lead up to. I’ll need to roll my eyeballs further up, which I dare not lest the scene itself disappears. Moving the frame without shaking the image is a higher-level skill. I’m a mere beginner. For now, the image has conceded to a poet’s pulse to capture it in its distilled movement. It is cooperating and I’m easy to satisfy:

a swing with thick jute ropes. a small ooden plank. just enough to seat a little girl. Well, I don’t see the plank. I’m standing on one side of the swing and there’s a little girl sitting on it. there must be a plank. Her legs are stretched but not fully. a kink at the knees. up she swings. her feet crossed—not legs. that’s what adults do—cross their legs. But thankfully she seems untouched by style. an ankle atop the other, like a footrest. as if she were watching TV on her couch. just a posture’s ease. or nonchalance. 

Her legs don’t kick back, don’t stretch out—again and again—performing the physics of swinging. But she goes on swinging. higher and higher. slowing down. speeding up. even though there’s no one behind her. I’m not propelling her either. After all, I’m a keep-aside—to be precise, facing the swing’s right side—

outside the inside of my eyes.

I’m not in the frame at all. I’m not a participant. I see the girl from this line. swinging—

on rewind—wound to something pulsing.

I have no way to tell it’s a girl. I don’t see her face. or her clothes. But she has her sneakers on. are they pink or blue? But colour gives me the slip—it’s a luxury for the eye inside eyes. Colour-uncoded sneakers. laces tied. Sometimes girls tie them differently. and I can’t see how they are tied. I won’t lace and frill the image with pretty falsities. Gender-undecided—until my mind decides otherwise. I agree to believe my mind. I must establish trust to sustain the image. and I move…

no… not my eyeballs. just shift the focus to her face. I’m getting better with it. Now! Here I’m sure she is a girl. I was right to trust my mind. Her hair is tied in two pigtails. I can see only one, but I know she has two pigtails because if there’s one pointing down next to her right ear, there’s bound to be one on the left. Done loosely. tied with a thin ribbon, like my mother used to do for me once. old style pigtails. keeping time with an old swing.

I don’t see her face, but she has a small nose, small eyes, and thin lips. Just that. nothing else. not laughing. not sad. But why is she here alone on a swing with a forest on her side? she's as carefree as if it were in the garden outside her home. But does every why need an answer? is purpose always the objective of an action—do you always tap your feet with a motive? is an image supposed to provide an answer—and will it warp or bloom if I force one upon it? She does not look lost. She’s not scared to be out there alone in the wilderness. She’s pleased without wearing its awareness. But she does not seem to like being analysed,

and so, she draws her right leg in, folding at the knee and setting her foot on the plank.

And then someone calls out to me from the living room. I don’t answer. How can I surrender my image? the one that’s been kind enough to surface inside a box. without an artist’s premeditated colours or brushstrokes. providing a poet’s moment— 

a vision refusing a foreign invasion—a vision diffusing the joy of a quiet grace into me—

of a little girl on a swing. right leg tucked in—swinging now with only one slightly bent leg to the sky—without even kicking back and forth—

as if with the lilt of her will. 

My eyes squint with hers in concentration. and I don’t see her face.

She lowers her upper body—elbows hooked around the ropes, arms cascading back—the body now a small boat with two little oars. a pendulum-boat. across a sea of forest and clouds.

But the clouds are muddy. Or dark grey. Oh, no—they are moss green! and everything else is moss green. the forest to her far left, the sky, the clouds, the undulating terrain. light-moss, bright-moss, shadow-moss. all pulsing—moss green.

A definite upgrade. Has my brain finally recruited the higher visual cortex? —the V4 they say. One colour granted—but I’m elated. Is there a sun? Is there a moon? Why do I need to know, if there is phosphorescence? and light and shadow make do with just one colour. a colour of life—of life against odds.

But meanwhile someone calls out my name again while entering my room. I shut the lid of the box. a cushion sliding quickly over the side of my face. The slight tension on my eyelids goes undetected. I can’t afford to release the tension. I’ll lose the image and there’s no knowing if it will be as kind as it has been until now in making my acquaintance. The intruder leaves, leaving me alone, 

and the girl swings. with a tiny mouth-boat springing up in a river of smile. A little girl birthing forth two boats: one riding a roguish river, the other swelling a serene sea. 

Zooming in on the smaller boat isn’t an option. I continue to ride on the big boat. She’s not looking up at the sky as the boat goes up up up. Her head slightly tilts to the right. Why is she looking down? maybe it gives her a better idea of how high she is going up as the ground-distance increases. If she were to look upward instead, at the light moss-green sky with dark moss-green clouds, the distance would remain the same—sky-high all the time—at any or all infinitesimal points on the swing’s arc.

But now I feel greedy. I want her face. Everything is moss green except her. and she’s grey. Still, there’s her outline. I can improvise with that. I’m reading into her face—small nose, small eyes—ah! a hint of curiosity. And it suddenly strikes me that I know her from some place. from long ago. or not so long ago. six or seven years, maybe? She has the face of a student who once attended my lectures! barely someone who’d swing into being beyond her own being. and certainly not one with two pigtails. I can’t even recall her hairdo and yet here she is—her young adult face showing through my little girl. swinging on the swing. a leg to the sky. How did I reach there? or more appropriately, how did she reach here? I’d like to ponder over the logic, but can I indulge it as the original image teeters on the brink of extinction? —

and what a moss-pulsating joy it is to cling to a little girl on a pulse-swing. 

surrounded by moss green. despite green moss.  

But the image is already moving on. The frame has shifted—without my effort—without my consent. I stole her face for my girl, but she has captured the centre of my frame. I recollect that she was a bit of an attention seeker. and curious. and a little mischievous but not enough to become a teacher’s lasting memory. merely the owner of a mild smirk. And my own mouth’s now a boat if I were to look at it. How is she doing in life? Is she still curious? Has she retained her smirk-boat? at home? in office? or has she stuffed it in some shoe…?

At this point I realise I’ve lost the image of my own—replaced by another—through a finagling of memory. And with it, the verbiage, unmindful of the pixels, is overtaking the visual. I don’t try to conjure it back—not that it would have responded favourably to my plea. I may have lost it, but the swing is still moving—somewhere—where it does not wish to be entered. But I’m able to shake off the alien entry too and words rush in like golden morning birdsongs.

Eyes shut.

Pulse racing.

Tracing peace.

greys swell in light

shapes, non-shapes

coalesce, collapse

a swing in a forest

or a forest from a swing

no, a girl… 

a body-boat

sailing from forest to

clouds of moss

in the lilt of her will

on rewind

wound to my heartbeat

Perhaps everything breathes it's a-while—images, reflections, projections, relations—even an over-pulsating pulse. I wonder what my pulse is up to. Most likely it has returned to the mundane, to its usual rhythm, as everything that has ever breathed a while eventually does—pulsing below the pulse.

And I think it’s safe to get out of my box now or even write a possible story of a poem that my bed swung into me.

C. Oulens is an emerging poet and writer, and former academic from India. Her writing is shaped by themes of slipstream consciousness, subconscious desire, emotional dissonance, and questions on societal conformities. Winner of the 3rd Annual Poe-It Like Poe 2025 poetry contest, her work has appeared in The Broken Spine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, Temple in a City, Spillwords, SHINE International, Full House Literary, Literary Revelations, The Starbeck Orion, The Candyman’s Trumpet, The Book Bag, Sixty Odd Poets, SciFanSat, The Wee Sparrows, FromOneLine, Paragraph Planet, Flash Flood (NFFD 2026), Tap into Poetry, Black Bough Poetry, Molecules Unlimited, Odd and haiku journals including The Solitary Daisy, Pan Haiku Review, The Zen Space, Prune Juice, 575 Haiku Journal, Poetry Pea, The Wee Sparrows Haiku Nook, Haiku Pause, Folk Ku, Failed Haiku, PJCA, Heterodox Haiku and Café Haiku.

Explore her work on:

BlueSky: @owlnsquirrels1111.bsky.social

Threads: @owlnsquirrels1111

Substack: coulens.substack.com