The January Editor's Pick Poet is Oliver Smith
Please feel free to email Oliver at oliversimonsmith@outlook.com
AFTER HIS WRATH
In flight across the empty world, they fall through molten air;
Float above the ragged weedy corn where black-eyed poppies
Hang their shame-blushed heads; their drought-slack necks
Limp in the forgotten harvest among the sun-dry grain.
Dark rivers are flowing beneath skin, beneath star and stone.
Beneath bracken fronds and perfumed leaves and soft
Black soil. There are mouths under the moss that whisper
Of shadow lovers, dead a thousand years who yet dream
On fragile wings, swift as hunting owls: ghost chasing ghost
While the fragments of the world in flames shower black petals
Upon rose grown bowers and Saxon stones
Where purse-lipped convolvulus flowers bind and twine.
Once the wood sang to violins and sweet hearts and flesh
Sought forgetfulness in the space between a bite and kiss.
Gripped now by hunger grown sharp as gutting knives
They search the empty fields and weep upon the earth’s decline.
BROKEN ANGEL
The sultry heat of sunrise stank;
Running slow and sick our river
Died and dried. We traveled years
Upon its tide to the sand worn ruins
Of this golden age; now stranded
In the gaze of the burning eye
That stared down upon the endless salt
Dissolving in the shattered sky.
Above us spread an angel’s
Broken wings, its black-bones
Dwarfing distant mountains,
Rising greater than the ruined world:
Dwarfing hope and life and time.
Where once the mighty voice
Had sung “here is love”
Decayed a golden skull.
We found the god whom each desired.
In maggot millions we dreamed
Searching for a place within
The titan’s heart. He lay rotting
In the crippled earth while all the crowds
Consumed; each man, each woman
Each child despaired and chewed
Its lonely way inside.
CALIBAN POST PROSPERUM
His captors waved goodbye, abandoned him.
But galleon upon galleon piled up on the reef:
A sea-changed ossuary in the gaping jaws
And ragged teeth, where spirits fly in the heat
And grey gulls hunt shrimp on the yellow sands.
He laughed and clapped at uproar in the waves.
He saved one eye, to look for a submarine sun.
Watched red-rimmed as the light dripped in
Through trees twisted like viper-spines.
Caliban gathered fallen fruit, but his apples
Turned to shriveled skulls, rictus grins
Mocking in the morbid orchard shade.
He licked the air with his long red tongue;
Tasted for hurricanes barreling in
From the eastern sea around Barbary.
He caulked the gaps in the cottage wall,
Crafted a raft out of Terebinth wood
And salvaged planks of Italian oak.
Just to be ready he stitched a sail
Of sailor skins with a needle-bone.
He drank his masters Barbaresco wine.
Crushed his tibia with his broad back teeth,
Sucked out the red of the molten marrow
And left shards, splinters, and fragments
On the midden mound by the split pine tree.
Expecting storms he grew scaly
As an old fish and cooked up bouillabaisse
Bathed himself with blood and lime,
In his mother’s iron cauldron spiced
With pelican feet, saffron and sage.
He tore up another old book for kindling
As the fire flinched from the keening wind.
He wrapped himself in a doges robe stained
With beach tar, pine sap, and wizard blood.
He picked meat from his yellow dog- teeth
With a splinter of a shattered wand.
Offshore clouds boiled like smoke
Over the mirror blue of a storm slack-sea.
His shadow scrambled among ossified statues
In grotesque hops and skips through ruins
Between witches hat rocks and pumice stone
Down into his mother’s twilight grotto.
Through pitch-sticky darkness, through calcified
Floor-bones and meat-ribbed walls,
Where spectral harvestman scattered
And pale scorpions glowed like tallow candles.
In her green-glass bath ghostly crabs
And blind shrimp hid among sea cucumbers.
On her cyclopean shore the sea washed
over two thousand years of tooth-crushed bone.
Sycorax towered in her throne, a thing of timbers
Twisted warps, rigging, and springs.
Skulls held in her hand clicked and rattled
As a ghost animated her dead weight.
Caliban sat by her brontosaurian knee
Awaiting the foam and the lightening crash
She smiled with teeth like stalactites
As a sail rushed in from the darkening sea.
Behind her empty eyes a wicked bluish light
Flickered, summoning ships from the gale.
Oliver Smith was born in 1966 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He has a degree in fine art painting and his writing developed from an interest in various surrealist techniques. His paintings emphasize the layered, stratified qualities because he glazes, cuts back, scrapes and rebuilds surfaces. He employs various stochastic techniques borrowed from Max Ernst.
For his writing, he utilizes an analogous approach with various cut-ups and folds in techniques, automatic writing, and formal poetic exercises. His poetry has been published in S T Joshi’s Spectral Realms journal from Hippocampus Press.
His short fiction has been published in the following anthologies: Land’s End (Inkermen Press), Cold Turkey (Inkermen Press), This Hermetic Legislature: A Homage to Bruno Schulz (Ex Occidente Press), Transactions of the Flesh: A Homage to Joris-Karl Huysmans (Ex Occidente Press/Zagava Press), Cosmic Horror Anthology (Dark Hall Press), Techno-Horror Anthology, (Dark Hall Press), and History and Horror, Oh My (History and Mystery LLC). He has more short fiction that will be published in upcoming anthologies.
He has worked variously as a bookseller, cartographic researcher, and local government officer, while continuing to practice as an artist, writer, and musician. Oliver is currently studying part-time as a Research Student in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire.