The Winged Moon Magazine

Issue Two

Image - Anni Rannisto

From the editor:

We arrive at the sound of bells, unheard by the ear yet founded in the union of unearthly and earthly substance, yet the chapel of our dreams is boarded up, unencountered. The poets that gather here for this issue are all born out of a void, spilling their precious art for us to read, see, feel, amaze at. The theme for this issue, ‘Exile’ was seeded in early winter, as the skies here in the northern hemisphere fill up with winter and the trees lie naked in the sky. What exile means to each artist is subjective: is she Bloedeuwedd the Welsh myth of a woman exiled as an owl to a forest, or is it the scars of childhood endlessly calling us out of our hiding place? Does it run in the blood of heartache and chronic illness, reaching out to you across the water? You will be journeyed here, in and out of exile. Come, take your cloak and sit by our fire.

Emma Tyler - Birched


In and of itself, the timeline begins. 

The hand that reaches for the peach is
brighter than the bite.
                     
                                         The kettle tings,
a bow quivers,
                                an arrowhead passes

through the night, undetected a small
tear sprouts. Each window is 

a fall.


Rusted copper, mill of ore, blink,

and a season ignites.

From my own life, a flicker 
of past,     a blinkered stranger studied
at traffic lights.


To thine own self be true,  instrument 

of breath,            seamed to a stage 


                                                 of peppered

grey dreams.   Victorian snow whirls,


Heckle me now, abstraction of what was,
                                                         
                                                         forward

dive out of chiffon, into the


bloodless blue of my waiting mouth.



Clara Little - Parable

When my father cursed
drove me out from Eden
he promised death - 
though my eyes were opened
I did not die. Understand
that I challenged him
the serpent he created
allowed to lead us all astray. 
Why does my accuser
suffer a lesser sentence?
Has fear become
an expression of love?
Was I not created
in your image
or could you only love me
when I was blind?


Through A Mist that Binds the Swans - Anni Rannisto

Through a mist that binds the swans,
the thought of you
pulls me with its spiraling ropes
and grey unfolds its night-wide hand
over the sleeping lake, where the swans lie stagnant like
forgettance,
their blood acquiescing to foregone,
to the worlds far gone.
Tell me,
how long must this body
keep
echoing your dark like burn marks:
chalk-wing, sun’s sickle, devil in light’s feather suit—
How long must I keep
returning
without ever even leaving?

Image Anni Rannisto

The Bellhouse - Shane Coppage

They,
             the marigold souled,
             say that the better the love
             the better the hate,
             but the rest demand 
             bitter lives anyway;

             so she made herself walk the middle,
             and let time become a dream with no outlet.

They,
             the empty cloaked,
             say let them sit in their shape,
             but spring sparrows will jangle
             and the corpse lady’s smell 
             make the snakes bite; 

             so with back against the wall, he shows
             the winner of the wraith’s red cincture.

They,
            the psychic veiled,
            say prop the dawn upon 
            the sill of the Bellhouse;

            so the children will come
            and wait a lifetime to hear the ocean say, No. 



the glory of ranunculus in bloom - Jai Michelle Louissen

there were no more answers

the seers hands engorged
pale in excruciation,
worked in some strange violence

my body, a logos of bells
lured by the sea's black ardour

and I remember

in this hour, an arrow quiets without mercy
the veil, thickened on the maiden's brow

is this where I leave the past, clinging
to Medusa? much of who I am 
still writhing under stone?

and my hands, an effigy
touch the current beyond my face

forgive me, forgive me



Untitled - Claire Booth 

Harebells
Peeped out
Of her headdress,
Sunken,
As if sent away,
And raining tall flowers
For every day she rehearsed
Her return.
Full of white hooves
Of berries rolled in snow,
As if pulled like reeds
From ponds of eglantine
And Freesia ,
She mourns.
For every day she rehearsed 
Her return
A flower dropped
From her petalled head
As if made of clay
And in the pond
Trees pressed like floating gold
Into the quiet dagger
Of solitude
Where harebells
Peep out of her headdress,
Sunken,
As if sent away
As she rehearsed her return.

Blodeuwedd - Marleen Fey

Circling - Kira Lyonet Collins

Dark
Pull the covers up over my head,
	stay beneath 
I am circling 
Tracing old steps in the snow, 
	around and around 

What am I looking for, you ask?
I’m not searching—
I know where home is,
I can always find it, I am always near it—
a small house snug in deep snow, 
chunks of yellow light in the windows
A trickle of woodsmoke rises in the falling flakes

		I shift under the blankets seeking a bit more—
	I know it is—
		warm inside, 
		I don’t ever go in, though 

Cold feet cold wrists cold nose
Hunched to winter wind 
	because circling is all I know how to do 

The night is dark and 
	the only one keeping me out here is—

the circle, surely it is the circle

The house has a door, I’m sure it would open to my hand
Hmm 
	Wizen to wind and plod on 

Confusion and spitting snow
Dark and determination 
Round and round 
	I go 
Circle become ruts, my own tracks keep me
A circle without a door is a trap
and it has already turned me into an unwanted wild thing

I rise from bed to another day 
still a stranger to myself 


From Bukowski’s Belly ~ A.M. Troester

i have never read a book of poetry from page 1
then all the way through
i read poems like fortune cookies or horoscopes
looking for synchronized, chaotic bits of wisdom
but it’s a new year so
i’m out on the deck smoking
trying to read Bukowski from page 2
i open a fresh pack of your Parliaments
and sit down to read, really read
but none of the words make sense
and it’s not Chaucer so it’s me
i mark the book with your lighter
and try to write, really write, spill my guts
hang, string, and quarter
the deepest, darkest parts
but my soul is wet wood
it occurs to the pyro kid in me that I could
set fire to the book
then it would be true to its name
but my mother is lonely and keeps calling me
from the belly of the whale
where i left her
i tell her i love her
and i do
i tell her she is a good mother
and she is
now

i don’t tell her about the poems
i don’t tell her the awful things i’ve shared about her with my daughters
i don’t speak a word about the shame
instead i inhale the cigarette, really inhale
like my daddy and like her and like you
take in the smoke
like it’s life
drown the cottonmouth
with beer
and move my arm away from the cold metal of the chair
you’re inside cooking
i’m not hungry for words or food
i’m hungry for you
but you are lost to yourself today
just like me
beer and hopeless Sundays and cigarettes
ingredients for writing
but following Bukowski’s recipe
feels like tracing a Kahlo painting
i take a drag from the cigarette
and read out loud

smoke rushes out of me with words
i’m not sure what is smoke and what is words
but i pray for fire in my belly
someone’s celebrating
with fireworks in the distance
i’m reminded
it’s all smoke


Untitled - Adeena Mansoor 

the room is static where I lost you. 
I didn’t move the furniture, hoping to find you behind an overlooked corner.  
your imprint on the walls swallowed our echoes, never to be heard again.  
but I remain still, there.  
the world asked me to sterilise it from the thought of you. but I stood bewildered, wondering when was the last time I spoke to you without hurting myself. 
the oneness of the last time you left me to the first, I evolved. heart break is still heart breaking apart, but less lonely — I have my past self to solace my last self.   
white noise turned into echoes turned into ghosts. our carcasses reek of an almost exile. I revive myself with grief. I revive myself with everything but you. I revive myself wishing to let you go.  
I leave your body on the surface of an invisible ocean, because I am tired of washing you away and still see you, standing on the shoreline, waiting for me. waiting for me to take you home. but how do I tell you, I don’t know where that is, when I know you don’t, too. 



Submerged - Conny Borgelioen 

We drifted towards each other through the smokey pub air. He told me that he knew immediately when he saw me for the first time: he wasn't going to let me slip away. 

The north-east wind is the coldest wind we get here on the Flemish coast. In summer, it brings much needed cooling on hot summer days. In winter, it feels icy and wet. Sometimes it seems like the ice sheets that once covered the region between here, England, Denmark and Norway—before the land was flooded—are still there.
I confessed to him I’d never had a good relationship, and he explained his deep respect for women having been raised by a coven of them. He spoke earnestly in his charming Celtic accent.

I crossed two seas with him, but I never took root in my new home. We moved from place to place and I grew progressively more fatigued. 

At the end of the 19th century, Clement Reid, a British geologist, found traces of an old woodland on the beach and in the sea on the South England coast; thick, weathered tree trunks sticking out of syrupy marshland. The tree trunks weren’t interesting enough for geologists at the time to study. They preferred to focus their efforts on the earth’s crust. Archaeologists also declined an investigation. Their interests lay with objects left behind by humans.

I was plagued by unexplained allergic reactions and other bodily symptoms, and he tried to fix me by paying for ever more expensive doctors. None of them had any answers for us, for me.

In the 1930s, research in the region called Doggerland took a more serious turn, after similar findings on opposite coasts. Scientists assumed that Doggerland was flooded by a tsunami caused by the
Storegga Slide, a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway in 6150 BCE More recent investigations suggest that climate change, not the tsunami, doomed the now-submerged territory.

Yesterday’s path makes for unsure footing as water presses in. Meadows flower with mussels and whelks, old footpaths silt up and disappear, the coastline creeps forward.

How can no one know about this illness? My mind was in a perpetual fog, I felt heavy, had sunken eyes, my breath felt swamped, I was dizzy all the time. We moved from the centre of Ireland to the coast near Dublin, because we both felt trapped. But I could hardly make the ten minute walk to the nearest convenience store by then, my body salt-stiffened and cracked.

Muriel Rukeyser said: “I see the patterns of waves in the cross-sea /advance, a fog-surface over the fog-floor.”

Living with someone who’s hiding that they’ve fallen out of love with you is like holding hands with a ghoul in the dark.

He’s dropping me off at the airport and he’s crying silently. It’s hard for him too. The crowd carries me along the corridor behind the security checkpoint, and he’s getting smaller and smaller, until I can’t see him. I’m alone and at sea.

How can being at sea only mean being confused or lost? Adrift—yes, misplaced, a kind of frantic forlornness.

I’m back where I started, and I’ve learned that my illness has a name: chronic fatigue syndrome. There are still no answers forthcoming though.

Now tall wind turbine structures have rooted into the seabed offshore, the salt water already eating away at the metal, through cracks and rivets, just like it will scrape at the planned barriers that will protect the coastline. Rust blooms out of chipped paint, but the blades attached to the rotor convert wind energy to low speed rotational energy.

A sea of clean energy is an island, a marshland, a forest, an ice field; and I wait

Image - Anni Rannisto

This Is What I Mean - Onike Fruean

When I say exiled

All of me remembers
In a skin cleaved from the motherland
with a heart removed from it's place

That I was born

Foreign in foreign spaces
Feet stabled
The winters raw at the end of the world

With blood that remembers

Voluminous, brown
Everything tendrils, reaching for the sun
Fire memories
Singing songs water to the oceans swimming in
my veins
My name being all of us now and before

Stay tender

And so I

Needled into the thread of this place
stay 
facing the sun

Singing with the waters of my love
Palms open
Open hands and limbs
Here and not here

Beautiful
Tender

Artist Bio’s

Emma Tyler

Hailing from Cornwall, UK, I am an avid reader, writer, and business graduate, my work has featured on Spotify podcast, The Shadow Eraser Poetry Hour, Episode 2 - "Reverberations" and I have pieces published in print elsewhere. My love for poetry blossomed in my late twenties, swiftly becoming one of my greatest joys.  You can find me down by the sea chasing an unruly but nonetheless loveable dog or curled into a soft fixture book in hand drinking tea. IG - Emma Tyler e.writesx 

Clara Little

Clara is an Australian writer. 'We Grow in the Dark Like All Good Things' is her first paperback collection published by Time is an Ocean Publications. Her poems have also been featured in anthologies including The Dream Gods: A Pantheon of Unknowns, Calliope's Eyelash: Egg Issue and in Sunday Mornings at the River: Spring Anthology 2022. You can find her writing @clarainyourpocket.

Anni Rannisto 

(she/her)

is a 34y old poet from Finland.

Her debut collection of poetry “Moonbeam Sentinels & Sunbeam Forgettance”was published in February 2022 by Time Is An Ocean Publications.

Some of her work has also been published in poetry journals.

In her free time she takes long walks in the nature with her camera—photography being one of her passions.

You can find her on Instagram under the handle @reveries.of.atlantis

Shane Coppage 

Shane Coppage is the author of two books of poetry. He has dedicated the last fifteen years to exploring free verse and grasping short poems in the Japanese tanka style of Basho and Ryokan. A survivor of chronic illness and cancer, he lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his fiancee, Sarah, and their French bulldog, Lola. He also enjoys painting, feeding squirrels, anime, and arthouse films.

Jai Michelle Louissen

Jai-Michelle is a Scottish poet, singer songwriter, musician, recording artist, therapist, editor and workshop leader living in The Netherlands. Writing in hypnagogic, meditative states, yet rooted in her celtic culture she writes of trauma through an imagist, mythic and natural lens. Published in various journals, her first chapbook ‘A Vision of Orchids’ was released in July 2022 by Sunday Mornings at the River. She is also the editor of The Winged Moon magazine. You can find her on Instagram at bornonadarkmoon and in the windy dune forest near her home discovering new quietness accompanied by her dog Luna.

Claire Booth

Claire has written two books of poetry

‘Let's make tea out of roses’ and ‘Roses in the tea caddy’ and a third book

‘Tea and afternoon roses’ is being published in February/ March 2023.

Claire has had a bipolar illness and writes about spirit and survival.

Marleen Fey

Marleen Fey is a 24-year-old artist, vocalist and writer (mainly of poetry), currently based in Cologne, Germany. Her works are frequently influenced by mythology, old book illustrations, the darker kinds of music as well as nature, exploring both awe as well as grief at the imbalances in human relationships to the natural world that often manifest in destruction.

A.M. Troester

A.M. Troester is an American poet and songwriter residing in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry is sometimes lyrical as she often draws from her poems to create song lyrics.  As she is equal parts reader, music listener, and writer, she loves discovering unique, powerful voices in all art forms.

Kira Lyonet Collins

Kira Lyonet Collins was once a small quiet girl always reading a book. She wandered all around the world before finally taking root and settling, by synchronicity, on the street in Michigan, USA where her great-great-grandmother once raced her friends driving horse and buggy

She is fascinated by the cycles of the earth and moon, she loves trees and rocks and runes and stories. And writing. Especially writing. The poetry is always coming bit by bit and she is also slow-growing a novel series in a fantasy world

She is wed to her true love and spends her days close to the soft warm bodies and many needs of her two young wildling children who grow and change every day, capturing bits of sentences when they come to her.

Adeena Mansoor

Hi, I am Adeena Mansoor, I don’t have much to tell about myself other than my name. But if I were asked to tell the top three things about me, I’d say, I love to learn, I want to become a poet all my life, and I want to find my place in this world before I leave it. 

Conny Borgelioen

Conny Borgelioen lives in a seaside town in Belgium, where she works part-time in a social grocery. Her poetry has appeared in Rogue Agent, Feral, Babyteeth, Nightingale & Sparrow, t’ ART, and the Emma Press Anthology of Illness. She makes erasure collages, which she posts on Instagram @tender.rebellion, and blogs on tenderrebellion.com. Her new poetry and essay collection "Waking up to Thrutopia" is coming out in the summer of 2023.

Onikē Fruean

Onikē Fruean is a Samoan Tongan born and bred in Auckland. She teaches 10 year olds, and loves helping kids find their own voice and storytelling potential.  Her writing often explores her experiences as a brown, queer woman growing up and living in Aotearoa. She spends her free time fussing over her plants and losing to her teenage nieces in Monopoly. You can find her on Instagram at notes_from_onike.

Thank you for reading this beautiful issue. I have been so lucky to come across these poets via Instagram and know their work. You may be surprised to know that IG has a thriving poetry community where talent and creativity are thriving. As evident there by these amazing writers and artists. You can search under the names or handle if they offer it in their bio if you are drawn to their work. And if you would like to support me for the magazine, please consider a paid subscription. It is so greatly appreciated and tenderly received.

Until next time, feel free to share with others to find spark new streams of inspiration.

Jai Michelle Louissen

Editor

The Winged Moon