Poet of the Month

January: Rebecca Lowe (Wales).
February: Jim Gronvold (USA). 
March: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld (USA).
April: Tozan Alkan (Turkey).
May: Byron Beynon (Wales).
June: Michelle Chung (USA). 
July: Jim Gwyn (USA).
August: Jonathan Taylor (England).
September: Beata Poźniak (USA).
October: Maria Taylor (England).
November: Stanley H. Barkan (USA).
December: John Dotson (USA).

January: Maria Mastrioti (Greece).

February: Gayl Teller (USA).
March: Mike Jenkins (Wales).
April: Cassian Maria Spiridon (Romania).
May: Simon Fletcher (England)
June: Sultan Catto (USA)
July: Vojislav Deric (Australia)
August: K. S. Moore (Ireland)
September: Kristine Doll (USA)
October: Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan (USA)
November: Christopher Norris (Wales)
December: Maria Mazziotti Gillan (USA)

2023: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 

January: Samuel Ezra (Wales)
February: Tôpher Mills (Wales)
March: Rob Cullen (Wales)
April: Mandira Ghosh (India)
May: John Greening (England)
June: Rosy Wood-Bevan (Wales)
July: David Hughes (Wales)

 

 

Novelist, poet, photographer, essayist and short story writer, Jo Mazelis grew up in Swansea, later living in Aberystwyth and then London for over 14 years before returning to her hometown. Her novel Significance was awarded the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2015. Her first collection of short stories Diving Girls was shortlisted for both Wales Book of the Year and Commonwealth Best First Book. Her book Circle Games was long-listed for Wales Book of the Year. Her third collection of stories Ritual, 1969 was long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2017. Blister and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Rubery Award in 2023. She has taught creative writing for Swansea University’s Department of Adult Continuing Education, at Trinity College, Carmarthen and for residential courses at the Arvon Foundation. 

Her poems have appeared in Abridged, The Lonely Crowd, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review and Bad Lilies among other places.  


PANDORA

A girl needs a hobby; beekeeping,
embroidery, lipstick, sheep shearing,
causing torment in the world, unspeakable
horror. Girl guiding, Sindy and her sister Patch,
a boyfriend called Paul, hatred, hunger, disease,
despair, disaster, balsa wood modelling kits,
a magic knitter, a spinning top, a toy sweet shop
with real sweets and glass jars.

Then ever after hunger: like a self-perpetuating
prophesy. It’s a short road from Dallas to Memphis
(beguile Merlin all you like) so sleep in your socks.
Oh, this hope chest, this dowry, these patchwork quilts.
Homilies drop like dry beans on the frozen ground.
The heart stops. Starts. Where nothing is, nothing
will grow. A league of angels to wrestle.
Famine and pestilence, the self bile-filled.
A stop watch, a stopped clock.
A dumb show, a prat fall and clowns that terrify.

A baby monkey with two mothers,
one hard as a metal trap that inexplicably
gives milk, the other, beloved, does not,
but it’s soft. We know which one to choose,
but neither loves us back.

(c) 2024 Jo Mazelis

PRAYER

I have shut myself unto myself.
Call me prayer.

I have made silence my friend.
Call me prayer.

I have closed my eyes, my ideas, my truth.
I have seen and thought and said nothing.

These censors I have eaten like rice wafers
with my tongue, my teeth, my soul.

There is no speaking.
And thus no truth.

Because of fear
I give only silence.

And I am ashamed
But cannot say it.

(c) 2024 Jo Mazelis

THE RED SHOES AS A METAPHOR FOR BI-POLAR DISORDER

First there are delusions of grandeur
Tip tap

Then inappropriate items of clothing
Tip tap

And extravagant spending
Tip tap

Then the endless dancing
Tip tap tip tap tip tap

Followed by exhaustion
Tip tap

Followed by depression
Tip tap

And the need to punish oneself
Tip tap

Then medical intervention
Tip tap

And fevered piety and terrible regret
Tip tap

And wooden feet
Toc toc

And wooden feet
Tic toc

(c) 2024 Jo Mazelis

WOMANISH

(for Sylvia Plath)

Womanish he said. Sentimental.
Her sprigs of hearts and flowers
reduced to black mush and leaf mold.
A fetid swamp of romance
to be stomped on.

Desperate, others said.
Trying too hard. As if that were a sin.
Is it a sin? The heart’s an empty cup
held up. Fill me.
Womanish. As in sugar and spice
which she tried to drown him in.

But when she scribbled out all beauty
and replaced it with jackboots and daggers
she became the evil one.
Proving once and for all, that poison
bile beneath the painted crib; the sunshine smile
will rise like an oil spill
blinding and choking and killing all.

(c) 2024 Jo Mazelis

DRACULA

He's been bragging on TV,
the internet, to live audiences 
how very sharp his teeth are.  
Ha ha ha. 
How he likes to watch his girls’
surprise as he sinks his fangs. 
And how mascara runs from eyes. 
By some magic of displacement 
the audience assumed irony. 
Of course, he doesn't mean he 
when he says me or I. 
That's some waggish other; 
his uncool brother who lives across the sea. 
The audience laugh uncomfortably. 
Turns out, irony and truth 
are odd bedfellows, 
inching away from one another 
to the edge of the mattress since  
the start of their marriage. 
At daybreak, the hue and cry goes up. 
red dawn glints on faces and pitchforks 
as the villagers gather.

(c) 2024 Jo Mazelis

DREADFUL SORRY

I swear I'll never curse the full moon again 
(its light sliding onto thin-skinned eyelids) 
but this ultimate darkness is too cruel. 
Comical when young; my friend and I 
accidentally scaring each other one  
star-lost night in Llanilar; me coming, 
her going, Both with weak torches. 
No light anywhere, it seemed. The rutted 
track; known, the hedgerows; dense, 
the river; (do you know it?) salmon filled. 
We both saw the silent bobbing beam 
of a hesitant stranger. The stop-start 
of a stalker, the heart beating faster,  
breath arrested, hands trembling,
until she called, ‘Who’s there?’
and I answered, ‘Me!’ 

We laughed at our foolishness then 
and passed on, on our way through 
that blind valley. We did not belong there. 
She, a painter. Me, a nothing. 
I passed the farmer's house quietly; 
his old tweed coat was tied with string, 
his wife was monosyllabic, their sheep 
gothic in their private lives. 
We saw a ram float by on the river’s  
gushing tide, buoyant as a cottonwool 
inner tyre. He got caught on branches 
near the footing of the bridge, deader 

than if he'd been free to go to sea. 

Drunker than Jonah, keelhauled 
by stupidity, but he knew more than I. 

(c) 2024 Jo Mazelis

SWANSEA BOYS

 (for Dai Fry)

There they stood,
the shrug-shouldered boys,
louche in their old greatcoats,
khaki soldiers or night-blue sailors
gone AWOL from school.

Cigarettes drooped from lips
to fingertips. Striped ties -
gold and burgundy,
rolled in pockets,
like self-conscious secrets.

Every day they loitered –
as if for display.
Hair, disreputably long,
framed faces soft
and ambiguous.

Proving nature’s tangled plot
to suffuse beauty and youth
with ungendered glee.
Young gods, dangerous
and mysterious.

Perpetually in ascent
to elsewhere. Uncertain now,
when once things were clear.
Like sunlight on new tarmac
beside a forgotten forest.

(c) 2024 Jo Mazelis