Alice Stainer – Two Poems w/art by Robert Frede Kenter

The Call

She skims city streets in light ballet pumps
trailing Lancôme and impractical skirts

                                                                but yearns for a tenting waterproof
                                                                 snug thermals and four-by-four boots

She charms, over wine, vapid chatterers
while spearing stuffed olives on sticks

                                                                 but thirsts for grey tea from a Thermos
                                                                 with haphazard hunks of cake

She sits as a patient passenger
absorbing fumes and Classic FM

                                                                 but pictures intractable sheep nose
                                                                 to tail on a distant single-track road

She tolerates bus-rattle, horn-blast
playground shrieks, heavy bass from next door

                                                                 but plays curlew ripple, peep of plover
                                                                 upflung larksong in her mind’s ear

She concedes to recalcitrant concrete
the hard ring of feet on tarred road

                                                                 but pines for springiness of dune-turf
                                                                 or the treacherous squelch of bog

And still she dwells in the citadel
and smiles and smiles in the glass

                                                                 but dreams of the day on Ben Loyal
                                                                 when she’ll capture An Caisteal* again


* ‘The Castle’ in Scots Gaelic, the name of the highest granite peak of the Sutherland mountain Ben Loyal on the North Coast of Scotland

Alice Stainer reads: The Call

MOON MOODS – (Three Variants) Texts (& text layout) – Alice Stainer / Images – Robert Frede Kenter

Alice Stainer reads: Moon Moods

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Alice Stainer is a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing on a visiting student programme in Oxford, UK, and is also a dancer and musician. You can read her work in Black Nore Review, Atrium, Feral Poetry, Iamb, The Storms, Black Bough Poetry and The Dawntreader, amongst other places. She has won or been shortlisted in several competitions as well as receiving recent nominations for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize, and has recently submitted her debut pamphlet. She tweets poetically @AliceStainer.

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Robert Frede Kenter is EIC/publisher of Ice Floe Press. Widely published, lives w/MECFS. Work recently in: Otolith, The Storms Journal, Olney Magazine, Anti-heroin chic, FeversOf, Wombwell Rainbow, Cherita, and many others. Robert’s in anthologies incl. The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press), Stories from Blood and Aphorisms (Gutter Press). Forthcoming in: Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023); Glisk and Glimmer, an anthology (Sidhe Press, 2023), Recalibrating the Pain Scale (Olney Books) and others. Twitter: @frede_kenter. IG and Threads: @r.f.kvispocityshuffle.