Issue #32.8 A Triple Issue: Nancy Byrne Iannucci, Isabel Chenot, Harold Bowes
A Poem by Nancy Byrne Iannucci
Wuthering Heights Sounds Like Spring to Me
My mother took me back to England
to say goodbye to my aunt, who was moving to Australia.
I remember spending days preparing for her party.
I can still hear my mother and her sisters laughing like witches
in the front parlor of my grandparents’ house,
cutting square cucumber sandwiches and shelling hard-boiled eggs,
with the windblown daffodils knocking the crown glass panes
like a bouquet of restless Cathy’s.
Top of the Pops was on TV as white noise until I heard her,
a banshee in a black dress, yowling:
Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering Heeeeiiights, Heathcliff…
her eyes wide, moving side to side, seeing things only a cat could see.
I wanted to know more about Wuthering Heights and this woman singing it.
I was only six, going on seven. My aunts pulled the novel from the bookcase and held it high
like a Book of Shadows. Haworth, they said, is too far from where we are in Birmingham.
My grandmother, sensing my disappointment, took me by the hand
and walked me to the record shop where she purchased my first 45:
Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights.
We passed the silly daffodils on the way back,
but it was the rolling, grassy hills that called me, and I hummed back,
out on the wily, windy moors we’d roll and fall in green,
forever imprinting the sound of springtime
and the softness of my grandmother’s hand.
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Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a writer from New York —her work has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal, Belladonna's Garden Literary Magazine, Eunoia, 34 Orchard, Maudlin House, Gnome and Bone, and San Pedro River Review. She is the author of four chapbooks and is a two-time Best of the Net nominee. She was also short-listed for the 2025 Poetry Lighthouse poetry prize. When she is not writing, she's roaming the fields near her home in upstate NY or playing with her three cats: Nash, Emily Dickinson, and Rocky -- Web: www.nancybyrneiannucci.com Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci
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Two Poems by Isabel Chenot
Cruciferae (i)
Spun on a planet's loom and highbeams of a car, moths wear away a star.
The dry roads bloom with dust, the fieldmotes spiraling on dark. Then, boom:
it all combusts, is nebular, erupting. Mothwing
dust and vacuum argue what we are to weeds.
Nothing then sunbeads, sudden spars. Summers that blind and sear
remembering. The ardent mind engendering. Wild, detonating seeds.
Cruciferae (ii)
(for P. J. P.)
Almost there, shielding my sight, I stopped the car and nearly kneeled where a seed-spewn, naked light bore the cross beside a field.
In that glare, my hand a shield, the beams flowering where they might, I half-knelt. Someone else tilled and nailed my hand at calyx-height.
Soon I’ll carry it as slight, the lordweight, as the dust can yield. I’m learning to be other-willed. Call me a weed’s acolyte.
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Isabel Chenot has loved, memorised, and practised poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood books. "Cruciferae", "cross-bearing", is the older Latin name for mustard, descriptive of its cruciform flowering. Cruciferae (ii) is structured to imitate repeating four-petaled florets.
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A Poem by Harold Bowes
Jasper the Year after the Fire
We wake up with the sunrise, at Jasper Park Lodge, On the shore of Beauvert Lake, and see an Elk has wandered Through the drifting mist and into the cabin’s front yard,
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As startling and satisfying as when I discovered The plus sign in the top right corner of my iPad Opened another window, and another
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On the train over from Vancouver, we ate in the dining car With stainless steel cutlery, on white tablecloths Snow covered scree, in a meadow, deep in a ravine
The slogan on my baseball cap says: “Tax Wealth, Not Work”
I hear my wife and daughter talking in the next room About my driving skills, and how much they love each other, And I’m getting into the shower as we prepare to drive the
Icefields Parkway
The lake shores here go round, one half black stumps, The other half green; 180 degrees of life, 180 of death, Symbolic and liminal as it gets
I’m a burnt-out tree truck, my daughter a green shoot
On the trail around Beauvert Lake a sign describes the species of tree: Douglas fir, lodgepole pine, white spruce, and trembling aspen One burnt-out trunk looks like another burnt-out trunk, but that trembling,
That trembling
I mention to my daughter how I always forget place names after I get home But that “Beauvert” ends in “vert” and I will remember “Vert” because There is a performance venue in our home town with that name
The lake is a beautiful thing
And “beau” is easy, right! Then I had to look up the name of the lake When I got home because I had forgot the first part. “Beau”! The bowling alley at our tribal casino is named “Quaking Aspen”
Icefields Parkway is easy too, but I remembered it singular: “Icefield”
It is radio silence on the Parkway and we don’t have any good downloads I start singing to the captive audience in the car but I can’t Remember the lyrics or maybe only the chorus sometimes
I sing the one line I remember
When we get to Lake Louise, we take photographs, then turn back Returning over the Parkway, stopping at the glacier, we’re thinking that At the lodge there is one heated swimming pool,
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And one sauna, and one steam room, per gender, in among All the lakes that seemed to be named after favorite aunts (Mina, Majorie!) And 12 snow-covered peaks circling a valley
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Starting out from an old boathouse on another Lake the next day, We see an ice shelf reaches halfway to the other side, The ice breaking into wedges near the shoreline,
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The shards tumbling against each other in the waves Make a sound like God’s windchimes, or God’s bowling pins, While beyond the ice sheet the water is white capping
Snowcapped peaks arc the lake, going nearly 180 degrees around
In WWII, the Canadians built an ice ship on Lake Patricia, A prototype aircraft carrier, reinforced with wood pulp The sunken metal parts remain there, under the surface
The next lake over is called Pyramid Lake
Returning to Vancouver in the train, an overnight trip, The cars sheathed in stainless steel feel airtight And I wake at 2 am in my bunk with an anxiety attack
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Gripping the iPad, I stumble up to the Skyline car, There is no one there and I am on a precipice about to fall I hold onto a seat and watch the red signal lights
Appearing at gradually reassuring measured intervals
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Harold Bowes is the author of Detached Palace Garden (Ravenna Press, 2017). Harold’s poems have appeared in elimae, THRUSH Poetry Journal, alice blue, SOFTBLOW, Portland Review, DMQ Review, failbetter, and many others.
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