Oatleaf

 ... A golden butterfly fell from the sky At twenty four karats an hour A uranium bee fell from a tree And that season’s Honey was sour ... Mike O’Brien lives in South Yorkshire, England. He has previously been published in the Black Nore Review, the Stone Circle Review and Dreamcatcher. He publishes his own poetry online at Sixty Odd Poems (zoomburst.substack.com) and the work of others at Sixty Odd Poets (sixtyoddpoets.substack.com). He also publishes selections from these sites as physical volumes and organises regular open mic nights in Mexborough to showcase the work of the Sixty Odd project and encourage others to get involved.

 ... Start with things we know      but can’t name. Sacred things our words have failed to find, falling headlong through open fingers into a rush of sun-warmed summer rivers. We live on the suburban branch, navigating in naked vessels made by human hands, yearning to be clothed in something eternal as we turn toward cooler waters that crackle with the static of old vinyl dreams. As a child, I swam the other way, upriver, fighting the currents because I could. Life was made of named things then, things we didn’t know, some of them scary. I’ll name one: Viet Nam. But we were nourished by secret instincts: suburban rivers were just a surface thing;  underneath, the world moved in circles, a giant turntable turning too slow to make much sense to children. Still –  those who named things expected us to be part of their revolution, to let their needles make impressions, inject us, wear down our grooves, so that all lives crackled the same, eventually. ... James ...

 ... 1.   Plinths and ornaments; a cavalcade of bookshelves.   The pulsing energy                   of continuity: e-learning mornings. Rose, in headphones: jumping jacks. She smacks   a stack of paper loose, to the hardwood. A handful of pencils, scraps. Their grade two   calisthenics routine. They shake their sillies out. Across the living room, Aoife shifts and re-shifts   zoom backgrounds: outer space, blue cloudscape, a temperament of snow. She responds, when challenged: My teacher taught me.   Junior kindergarten sight words, reading: the, a, she. A writing grid of nine, for Bingo, before they launch into a story   of a springtime frog. The blank space   of theoretical clarity.     2.   Home, home. We are home. We are endlessly, truly home. Isolating daily rounds of paired coffee, corner office margins.   Scoped and paired, these opposites rarely meet. Two positives c...