Julie Stevens – Sea Monster
How wide can the mind stretch
to hold all this water?
I’ve ridden the ocean swell
to ask its foaming mouth
but it digs its teeth in,
lures me to swim further
where wet eyes can barely see,
then throws me back down, to break.
I sink to the breakfast table
as the new morning sings,
but can never find fizzing lyrics
on a rocky sea bed.
Children propel like jellyfish
pulsing their late messages.
I try to peel them off and calm
whilst my body wrestles with their venom.
Where has our bubble gone
if they can’t hear me crying?
They moan at the overload of salt
in their scrambled eggs.
As the day drifts on above
I float in circles, trying to paddle
my feet, with so few bones
left, that are not broken.
Julie Stevens writes poems that cover many themes, but often engages with the problems of disability. She has 4 published pamphlets: Journey Through the Fire (2024), Step into the Dark (2023), Balancing Act (2021) with The Hedgehog Poetry Press and a chapbook Quicksand (Dreich, 2020). Website: www.jumpingjulespoetry.com
Artwork: Get us out of here by Nuala McEvoy
Nuala McEvoy is of English/Irish origin, but has lived abroad for many years. She started writing during the Pandemic and has had work published in Little Old Lady Comedy, Dark Winter Lit, Funny Pearls, Tap into Poetry, Lighten Up Online, The Dirigible Balloon, The Hooghly Review, Transients. Seaside Gothic and The Metaphysical Review. She has read her poems aloud on Coalition for Digital Narratives and Eat The Storms. Nuala also started painting during the pandemic, and now some of her paintings are on exhibition in Vinothek am Theater and Mío Münster, Germany and others appear online in Red Ogre Review, Quibble Lit, Free Flash Fiction and others. She was recently interviewed by The Madrid Review about her creative process, which started to flourish so late in her life. X @mcevoy_nuala