The Ink Pods. Literary Podcast for The Blue Nib.

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James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He is the author of four widely acclaimed collections of poetry. ‘The Leviathan’s Apprentice’, ‘Walking Through Fences’, ‘Unstill Mosaics’, and ‘Abandoned Soliloquies’. His fifth collection will be released shortly.A Dairy Hand On a HillI milked a seasonin the high range near Timboonfor a Bavarian named Rudi,who built a Black Forest houseout of place against eucalyptslike those old special effects,a wobbly head stuck on the wrong bodyland so fat the kelpiespretended to bring the cows in,spent their time fossicking in earth as black as trufflethen red in deep Shiraz.His daughter would say‘Look the Sky pours into the Sea’and that she didn’t love me,was going back to Germanyso tanned she’d vanish in a paddockI had to look close to catch,an auburn dancing shimmershe drifted in light then flew byleft me a demijohn stranded,a becalmed catamaranbut sometimes she wrapped me in Siennajust for a while’ You’re my Man’.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Kate J Wilson's work has appeared in the Pendle Anthology of War Poetry, Alliterati, and Reflections. She has been shortlisted for the National Memory Day Poetry Competition, Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition and highly commended in the Red Cross Day of the Disappeared creative writing competition.Drift  We have to sit down to some lessons  again and again before they stick  a feather breath drifting to sleep  as we kiss goodbye for the last time  you wanted to make love, to pretend  we were still in it. I turned away.  I remember the tug of your hand  on my sleeve, how it felt to be needed  how you pleaded for relief like a junkie  palms pushing against walls, painfully  those splintered nights and days  cracked irreparable. It was impossible  to see the break between dawn and dusk  a drift of commuter trains, phone calls  to a psychiatrist who spoke so softly  it was as if he wasn't speaking at all  your silence, a greater damnation  and you had so many demands  I wish I could forget, select three words  instead; the finest most delicate words  whispered in moonbeam hours  when hope still struggled within us  but I had to let the feather fall  after all, we can't unlearn the past.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

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Denise was born in Rome and lives in Sydney. She has a background in commercial book publishing, manages Black Quill Press, and is Poetry Editor for Australia/New Zealand for The Blue Nib. Her poetry is widely published and awarded. Her poetry collection The Beating Heart will be published by Ginninderra Press in 2020.Before the partyIt must have just stopped rainingWhen we arrived. The road, licked for hoursBy the quiet slap of countless passing tyres,Gleamed blackly under the streetlampsLike wet liquorice. We sat for a momentWatching the mist descendCobwebbing the edges of trees and hedges,The silver turning of a leaf in the damp air,And the tenting of the telegraph wiresCarrying beads of water like fairy lightsBacklit by the moon.Feeling privileged to witnessThis heady scene, we realised(as car doors slammed and gravel crunched)That our reason for having driven hereWas, for a moment, quite forgotten.Published in Literary Yard, 22 August 2018 https://literaryyard.com/2018/08/22/pine-nuts-at-lunchtime-and-other-poems-by-denise-ohagan/Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

John Saunders is a founder member of the Hibernian Writers’ Group. His collections are After the Accident (Lapwing Press, 2010) and Chance (New Binary Press, 2013). He is one of three featured poets in Measuring, Dedalus New Writers, 2012.NeuronsMachine gunsthat shoot bullets down the road of the dendrite to land at the tiny shore of a synapse,join the army of pulses that cross the strait loaded with precious thoughts. Of what?  Anything.  The pleasures of the day, damnations of night, the beauty of life, a shopping list. Sub atomic Trojan horses carry their cargo of ideas, plans and plots that transform into actions.So much potential bound in parcels of ions to kick-start all of life’s nefarious activities or bring ecstasy. Explosions of knowledge and emotion that penetrate,leave their permanent mark on someone else,the innocents, the accidentals, the criminals, the young girl picking a flower, a blind beggar playing a violin; all victims of the intended and unintended.So much creation and disaster wrappedin the quantum of energy. And we think and we think and sometimes we don’t and always they strafe into the jungle of muscle, bombard wake and sleep time,a thunder and lightning storm, sensuous showers of touch, taste and smell, the suspicion of intuition. There is more, lands as yet unexplored, new oceans to sail,wells to be emptied. We know nothing.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Oz Hardwick is a European prose poet, photographer and academic. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and was followed by The Lithium Codex (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2019), from which this poem is taken. Oz teaches Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.A Brief History of MermaidsHistory, you tell me, is written by the swimmers; by the fin-fisted negotiators of time and truth – axes which float like Pooh-sticks beached beneath a crumbling bridge. Last night I dived into our divided past, into your underwater Titanic wedding – not the Grand Ballroom, with its plucky orchestra still playing, but the limpet-strewn steerage half-light, with all its desperate bustle and rehearsed apology. You had framed your own mirror, sewn your own scales, combed your hair until it wrapped around the deep reflected moon. One of your silverslim pages was your own son, though in the bluegreen ripple I wasn’t sure which one. It was nothing like the day we lay tangled, becalmed beneath dead branches in a drifting skiff, wet limbs twisting and brittle as coral; but I woke up knowing it was still a matter of tides and their negotiations, the balance between trust and breathing, and the incessant pull of the deep.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Tim King wouldn’t describe himself as the Father of the ‘Poetry Plus’ House in the south west, but I would. And you’d be hard pushed to find anybody that disagreed. Bard of Exeter, multiple slam champion and much loved host of Exeter’s most popular poetry/spoken word night, Taking the Mic, at Exeter Phoenix, he has been supporting up-and-coming talent while managing his own successful career as a performance poet, in his trademark red plaid shirt since, well, forever.At the Poetry Reading......all efforts to include me founder  as yet another allusion is made  to something clever someone clever said  in some hallowed tome I've never read.  As all about me others nod their heads  in seeming recognition   - that most genteel of head butts -   I turn away to silently enter a post-clervid reality  where soon, I hope, you will join me  in abandoning clervidity.  It was always useless anyway, let it go!  If in some future reverie  you fall to feeling clervueless  remember how life used to be  before you learnt to second-guess.   For me, the greatest story ever told  has always been, “The Emperor's New Clothes”  in the original, vanilla Danish  of course! Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Bloomsday in AndalusiaNoonday Juneday heat hounds my shadow, raptCaptive to these dead-beat sleeping dog days.Vapour trails uncertain chords on brokenStrings, notes vanishing into distant haze.Insistent sweat prickles, trickles saltyStreams down skin unseasoned, pinkly pale. SunJades shade greenly, ushering me to view Her avocados’ roots that spread and runTunnelling in secret communion.Ragged heads droop resigned, hushed and blushingAt daydreams of skirts, zephyr-filled, fickle,Tickled by wind’s promise gushing, rushing,Whispering lies through banana frond fans,“Dance the romance of summer’s sarabande.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Deirdre Devally writes poetry and short stories for live performance and radio. She has released her debut spoken word album, ‘The Broken Timbers Speak’.  She has been broadcast on RTE Radio on programmes including Sunday Miscellany and the Frances McManus competition broadcasts. DONNACHAI met you before I met you, in your words,they fly, as you lay, they dance and run, they swim, they pray.They tell me.. just BE in this day.Friends steal you from sick bed to hiace heaven.Your chariot takes you to the ocean's side,your heart beats wildly, so scared they'll drop you,you are still in the gang, along for the ride. As your wheelchair yields you, strong arms beneath you,your feelings whirlpool, joy and fright,they lower you gently, salt water greets you,and your terror shifts to pure delight.Then the ocean lifts you and the waves anoint you.  Sea-creatures pale in your Christ-child lightand the water holds you, and the waves anoint you,the sun blows kisses on this sacred sight.Brother wind caresses uplifted face, Donnacha, Donnacha, man of grace,Last sea-float, bed, the ocean inside, no need to hide.You are of here, this time, this placethis feeling, this breath, this inner outer all one space.As your Mother sings her words, day by day,  they fly, as you lay, they sooth, they ease, they comfort, play.Remind me.… just BE in this day.As her fierce love lifts you and her songs anoint you,and she and I pale in your Buddha light.As the bed now holds you, sound-waves anoint you,and her smile rains kisses on this holy sight.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Akshaya Pawaskar  was chosen as 'Poet of the week'  by Poetry Superhighway in 2019. She was second place winner of  The Blue Nib 2018 chapbook contest.Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, and Indian Ruminations  amongst others.My country is engulfed in flames today and it is not a wild fire kindled by  a live cigarette but by arsonists spewing out mindless  words of hatred. By pied pipers hypnotizing us to jump off the cliff of love into  a valley of hate. We aren't antimatter and matter out there to annihilate. A gun, a bullet, a stone cannot annul  another, it only becomes an outrage. Replace the battle cries with peace songs only we can right our own wrongs. We aren't separate, when we spill blood it isn't disparate. We are a mohalla, we are a mélange of skull caps and forehead Tilaks of temple bells and prayer mats of Bhagwat Gita and Koran revered in the  same habitats, with a religion of empathy, while coexisting is a necessity, in the face of this spate of ferocity that we need to empty before it empties us of our morality.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Hanna Komar is an award-winning poet and translator based in Minsk, the author of two poetry collections (Fear of Heights in Belarusian and a bilingual collection Recycled). Hanna writes in Belarusian and translates her texts into English, focusing on the topic of domestic violence and childhood trauma a lot in her work.A GOOD DAUGHTERYou get kicked off the bus, drunk,I press my doll to my chestand stay silent.I smile at your friends, those drunkardsand fools, like I’m goodand stay silent.You dig the fork into the fleshof your arm. I hand you a toweland stay silent.I bang on the neighbours’ doorto protect my sister and mumand stay silent.I watch you sleep where you fell,breaking chairs and our heartsand stay silent.As you are growing oldand breaking down,I am silently healing my wounds,Your good daughter.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Poetry of Adèle Ogiér Jones appears in anthologies including I Protest! Poems of Dissent (Ginninderra Press, 2020). Her published collections include Afghanistan - waiting for the bus (Ginninderra Press, 2007) and From the Edge of the Pacific (Ginninderra Press, 2012). Her novels and poetry are inspired by people in her international work. Pacific questionswhat is peace as the wind blows gentlythrough the coconut palms?what is it as the gas murmurs softlybeneath the Chinese aluminum kettle?what is it as crickets and their friends grate continuouslyin the warm tropical night?what is it mid the cries for freedom?is it that squeal of delight of a baby in the villager’s housecrawling in the dust, laughing with other childrenin the bone-dry compound?is it the sound of the mahjong playerswith the clickety-clack of tileslaughing friends and family generationsapart in their view of the world?is it in the responding clap of the menaround the grog-potthe pepper root of the tropics which binds friendsand kin in a net so toughor the laughter as stories are retold at the end of the day?the smile and handshakeor the sword and cry of freedomthe sickle and the shared hand on the plough or over the pot on the fire?A belief that justice can be wonthat the fight is necessary for peacethat exploitation can ceasethat equality is more than a dream?is it the laying down of armsor taking them up for justice and freedom and dignity?the freedom to be rich while otherstoil and sweat for roti and dahl?the freedom to transit freelyto come and go while others remainimprisoned and bound in their poverty?the freedom to be a success whileso many remain dispossessed?the freedom to become the freedom of being alivebut at what cost?the freedom of the powerful in the technically perfect society  sweeping out of sight the misery of cardboard boxesand railway stations and public conveniencesthe passageways and alleys and deserted school buildings and caravan parksmunicipal trucks and estates which serve as home to so many young and old, girls and boys and the menwe whisper about as street kids or deroswhich world, which peace – whose?Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Siobhan Potter is an artist and emerging writer whose practice documents experience. Published: Minecraft.Inside Out and Pendemic Journals. 2020: selected for #IrelandPerforms and White House Poets anthology. Siobhan founded ‘not the time to be silent’ an online community and weekly Arts response to social distancing....I inhabit mucus and pus   so that when I laugh, I mean it I inhabit the wretchedness of birth in order to love the parasite, until it is self supportingI inhabit memory to not forget and to not do it againI inhabit hate and mistrust, so that you can experience itI inhabit lust and eat from itI inhabit love, for you to have your heart broken and thrive I inhabit exactitude because knives need to be kept sharpI inhabit sloth and the mammal in me restsI inhabit animus, that is the primary relationshipI inhabit light completely, so that all that is seen is its darknessdepending on your perspective—so moveI inhabit shame when I tire of my right sizeI inhabit silence to hear my selfI inhabit godI inhabit wolf, and lone-nessIt’s as lonely as herd-ness I method write, inhabiting a poem‘til it’s had its way, then move onI move onI inhabit words until I know what they are saying and can hear what you are not sayingI drink happiness by the neck until drunk, then drink moreI sneak out when it’s sleeping I can come back— if I leaveI’ll inhabit shit for you when you won’t  I will digest it and give it back, in edible formI inhabit good enoughI inhabit Mother...Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Beth Spencer’s books include Vagabondage (UWAPublishing) – a verse memoir about living in a campervan, The Party of Life (Flying Islands), How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House, runner up for the Steele Rudd Award) and the ebook The Age of Fibs (Spineless Wonders) which was winner of the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. Her writing has been produced for ABC Radio and she is an occasional contributor to Climactic and ArtBreaker podcasts. You can find her @bethspen on twitter, facebook and Instagram or at www.bethspencer.com.          Long weekend at the Gertrude AbbotJack and I are going out to dinnerBye bye ladies!Oh Jack, you do look so smart  Wait a bitWhile I adjust these lilacs, so thoughtfulAnd give me a little hand up these stepsThe hall so long so white so whiteWell, here we are butWho are all these old people?Old men! Old white-topped lacy ladies!Where’ve you brung me Jack?What’s this clang-clang of spoons on metalRattle of chests — old chests burst likeOld bean podsRattle bang, there’s a bed pan, cold steelAnd mops and baked beansBut Jack and I used to go to only the best CafesAh now, he’s bending over me, Jackie’s all in whiteSo gentle he lifts me, so gentle the needleWhen I was a girl I could run like a deerMy hair reached my kneesBye bye ladiesBye bye Matron Jack and I float down the hall to dinner(So white, so white) hold my hand JackHold my hand, just now,While I adjust these lilacs. Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Kevin Heslop is a poet and actor from London, Ontario. He is the author of con/tig/u/us (Blasted Tree, 2018), there is no minor violence just as there is no negligible cough during an aria (Frog Hollow, 2019), and the forthcoming full-length collection the correct fury of your why is a mountain (Gordon Hill, 2021). Transcript.The Body ArtistWhich was when we met the guy who said he was a “body artist”––do you remember? “Artista del corpo.” That he considered his bodywhich he built methodically from moment to moment, the canvas––he used a word which more closely translates as the arena––of his work. Which I thought was horseshit. The bundle of endorsements he receivedfrom a supplement manufacturer in Milan allowed him to eat very welland work out twice a day, I decided, and add to an indisputable physiquethe convenient artist imprimatur in his involved self-advertisement to the opposite sex. He was beautiful, but the proportions of his arthad been arranged in advance; and this freed him, I felt, from producing a statement of aesthetics, which was what artists are obligated to do.I was suspicious and told you so when we finally got away for lunchon the balcony overlooking the square in Lamezia––“I prefer statueswhich don’t draw breath,” I had said––and you identified his artistryof the body, of the breath, of the will to self-actualize the instrument with which we perform the kinetic aria of our lives, as worthy of reconsideration as an almost religious vocation. I admitted I thoughthe was gorgeous too, and you sneered, asking what the Buddhist monkswere doing when they sounded the bell to initiate morning prayer and sat down in full lotus to balance their limbs in such a way as to focus––the breath, the heartbeat––on unrippling the pond of consciousness. “Consciousness?” I asked. “No restriction, then, on who can be an artist?Shouldn’t time and evolution have been judicious in their liberation of individual bodies to self-select as artists simply for being what they are?”“But how many people have you heard claim body artistry?” you asked, forcing cessation. Because after all we were sitting on a balcony in Italy overlooking the smoked limestone of an ancient square dotted with whiteparasols shading carts of produce brought to the square before sunrise. “Look at the clouds just being,” you said. “Look at the blue of the seain its pact with the horizon and the sky where tufts of cloud suspend––taking in the view––disinterested in debate about the legitimacy of any one form of artistry. Look at them being what they are without this endless accordion of thought or justification.” “You are a cloud,” I told you adoringly. “I am and you are too,” you said, which was when the plate of steamed mussels in the white wine brio arrived on a brief sonata of Italian spoken by the waiter whom I didn’t understand precisely––your Italian that summer surpassed mine––and we had both said Grazi and I leaned back into my Campari and spread, on a wafer of baguette, the olive oil-doused bruschetta I was crazy about and would later fail to replicate––“It was the tomatoes,” you would say––and I thought of the body artist, beginning to forgive him. Thinking that, perhaps,bidden as our bodies are into this forceful ballet of chance and suffering, perhaps this cultivation of one’s own vessel, sole coil, mobile prison, et cetera was in fact an act of resistanSupport the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Stephen House has won many awards for his plethora of plays, films and poems.This poem won 2nd Prize Poetry at Sawmillers, Australia and was published in the Poetica Christi anthology Wonderment. Find the poem in his chapbook, real and unreal, by ICOE Press.TRANSCRIPT:driftwood mountainhe collects driftwood from the windswept beachties it up with rope and drags it through the scrub to his campsitei gather driftwood for my cooking firehe lives in an ragged tent amongst coastal gumsi sleep in an old car moulded into sand-hill bush walking todayi come across a clearing in the growthnot far from his campsitei stopsee a driftwood mountain reaching up to the skyas high as the tallest trees around iti sink to the grounddrawn into its enormity and beautyto what i feel it says about him and isurviving in nature by the seai cryi’m not sure whyi see him sitting in the scrub watching me moved by his driftwood mountainas the sun sets i stand and wave to himleave the man with his mountainhike back to my car through wildernessimmersed in the songs of settling-down birdspast grazing kangaroos and emusat my camp i make a driftwood firecook my foodwarm my bodywrite a poem about a driftwood mountain that changed my life.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

BrittleShe ran the last bit as she always did,turning at the edge of the wood, kicking up clumps of moss, ready to jump. She crouched. In a moment of release she leapt,lightly lifting her bones, feeling the freedom of it. The ditch seemed to welcome her – the nettles in their bed of green, lazy white flowers slumping to-and-fro. She emerged on wobbly legs. Skin blistered, eyes wide. She had to do it again from the other side, gathering enough pace to pitch clear but letting herself drop.  Nothing else had touched her this way.Afterwards, she dipped her arms into a cooling stream,pain dissolving in a spray of late spring. Bio:Belinda's poems are widely published in print and on-line journals. In 2018, she came second in the Ambit Poetry Competition. She was joint runner-up in this year's Stanza Poetry Competition. She is also joint winner of the Indigo-First Pamphlet Competition, 2018, with her pamphlet, Touching Sharks in Monaco.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Thomas McColl lives in London. His poems and short stories published in magazines and his first collection of poetry, 'Being With Me Will Help You Learn', was published in 2016 by Listen Softly London Press. He has performed at events in London and beyond - and has been featured on East London Radio, Wandsworth Radio and TV's London Live. His second collection, 'Grenade Genie', is due to be published in 2020.Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)

Derek Sellen’s writing has won first prizes in Poets Meet Politics, Poetry Pulse, Rhyme International, Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and O’Bheal Five Words. He has read in the UK, Italy, Germany, Russia and Ireland and is widely published. His most recent collection ‘The Other Guernica’ (Cultured Llama Publishing 2018) has been favourably reviewed Support the show (https://thebluenib.com/donation/)