The Fig Tree - Issue 8
with Featured Poet Joe WIlliams
Welcome to the eighth issue of The Fig Tree, sandwiched between parts one and two of the Coal Mining Special, which completely exceeded my expectations and which will also be produced as an Anthology in the autumn by our imprint Crooked Spire Press. You may observe that a few poems that didn’t make the Coal Mining issues due to lack of space have sneaked into the regular issues - they were too good to not publish.
This issue’s Featured Poet, Joe Williams, is someone I first met when I had only just started writing, about eight years ago. His headline set at Spire Writes (an open mic in Chesterfield that is sadly no longer running) caught my attention with its dry wit and tight writing. His debut pamphlet Killing The Piano was followed by a verse novella An Otley Run that chronicles the (in)famous pub crawl on Otley Road in Leeds. He has had numerous poems published, and is also very capable of writing serious poems - his powerful poem about stadium disasters in football sits easily alongside his haiku, clerihews, nostalgic and outright funny work. He is also an editor, competition judge, and legendary open mic host.
The 2024 Fig Tree Anthology is now available to buy at the Crooked Spire Press website. It’s Paypal for now, but please contact us if you want to use bank transfer or cheque.
Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining over 500 people who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.
Thank you all
Tim Fellows, Editor
Contributors: Joe Williams, Stewart Carswell, Janet Dean, Craig Dobson, David Harmer, Oz Hardwick, L.B. Jørgensen, Fokkina McDonnell, Matthew Paul, Mat Riches, Jeff Skinner and Paul Brough.
The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Joe Williams
The Lowest Form
When I heard that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit,
I realised it might be an art I could excel at, so
from an early age I devoted myself
to perfecting it.
I like your new coat, I said to my mother, as a first attempt.
Being naive, she took it as a face value compliment.
I was uncertain whether to count this as
success or failure.
At school I worked hard at honing my craft,
was happy to accept the detentions I received,
never regretted the essays that earned me an E
in GCSE History.
Nor the jobs I might have had, if I hadn’t insisted
on showing off my talents in the interview room.
Having read my CV, they should have known what
to expect.
To become a great artist demands great sacrifice,
though I accept I may have gone a step too far
when the registrar invited me to say,
I do.
Joe Williams
Scheherazade
We met on the town hall steps,
dressed as agreed,
in evening wear
and the certainty of youth.
We sailed Sinbad’s ship
through the Gulf of Oman,
out into the ocean,
and over its edge.
We rode on the wind,
the young prince and princess,
held up by strings
and brass section breath.
I’d have stayed with you
for a thousand nights.
Joe Williams
Relativity
Einstein said,
and I’ll get this wrong,
because I don’t have a PhD
in theoretical physics,
that the closer you get
to the speed of light,
the slower time goes.
It isn’t time itself that changes,
but the way that you experience it.
So when they said
there was nothing they could do,
it was only a matter of time,
I knew all I had to do
was find a way for you and me
to beat the speed of light,
and we could live forever.
It isn’t love itself that changes,
just the way that we experience it.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams is a writer and performing poet from Leeds. His latest book is 'The Taking Part', a short collection of poems on the theme of sport and games, published by Maytree Press. His other work includes the pamphlet ‘This is Virus’, a sequence of erasure poems made from Boris Johnson’s letter to the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the verse novella 'An Otley Run', which was shortlisted in the Best Novella category at the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Despite all of that, he is probably most widely read thanks to his contributions to Viz.
Find out more on joewilliams.co.uk
Relativity was originally published in the anthology Lighting Out (Beautiful Dragons, 2021)
The Fig Tree Selection – May 2025
This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.
Poetry arrived
one day in the early sixties,
when I’d found a quiet corner of the yard
at Bromley Boys’ Grammar School
where I wouldn’t be punched in the face
during break, I was reading
Beatles’ Monthly and was uprooted
by Rowley the maths teacher.
Dark winged in his academic gown
a knobbly forehead gleaming,
he asked if my mother knew my blazer
pocket was ripped, furthermore
had I looked at the homework
due in tomorrow? And just how
would I tackle the problem?
As I knew none of these answers,
he asked me where I wanted
to be in ten years time?
I replied asleep on the hill
above Little Malvern Priory, where many
hundreds of years ago, a man had dreamt
a marvellous dream and once there,
I would have a marvellous dream myself.
He looked at me in disbelief,
remarked I was a clown
who would add up to nothing.
I was eleven, so I agreed.
David Harmer
Cul-de-Sac
On New Year’s Day, I’m round my mum’s again:
from her rocker, the Neighbourhood Watch spies
a man shouting and a woman gesticulating defensively.
Turns out he (Howard) is related to all at number six:
his Auntie Janine and cousins, Malcolm and Maxine.
She (Rosalyn) arranged the visit with ‘Max’, but none
of the trio is answering the doorbell or their mobile.
‘I’m sure they won’t be long,’ I venture, inviting them
into the bungalow’s warm. Howard and Rosalyn cringe
into the lounge, fresh meat for Mum, who itemises
her latest ailments, and only pauses her peroration
to peel dressings off her shins, revealing crusty sores.
Our not-quite guests grin and bear this for almost an hour
until Malcolm finally phones: they’re parked outside
Howard and Rosalyn’s house, in Effingham,
miles beyond the M25. I can’t stifle my amusement.
‘It’s like an episode of One Foot in the Grave,’ I say.
Rosalyn half-smiles. Howard’s face flushes beetroot.
Matthew Paul
A Fire in My Room
Outside, washing flaps,
catches grains of soot.
Mother tuts, brings black-
flecked sheets to wash again.
That morning’s anxious scrape,
a squeak of fear; Father came,
a bird on his shovel. Bird
in the grate, a death-omen.
Tonight I’m tucked and warm,
embers of the fire are mine.
I collapse into darkness,
the last flames lick my sleep.
Janet Dean
Designated Drivers
Motorbikes don’t care either way,
—they lack the self-control for choices,
but our fuel-based cousins continue
with their guzzling grumbled departures
from kerbs like old folks getting up
from chairs. The way they overtake
each other, those things may as well
be chariots for all the licence
they possess, forced to roam city street
rat-runs pulling rubber-strewn doughnuts
in provincial carparks. We don’t do that.
Any slamming of our boots at night
is down to humans. We pull away
sotto voce, moving in soft-soled
silence. Our engines and ignitions
have been turned down, the sound switched off
on purpose, although we’ve left our doors
clicking shut to keep you in the loop.
The skeuomorphism pleases people.
Unless asked, we won’t mention, discuss
or bring up our programmed requirements
to be at the barest minimum
one hundred and ninety percent safer
than your so-called Highway Code guidelines.
There won’t be an alarm going off
when you abandon those well-fobbed keys
to help us become the Johnny Cabs
you claim to think you really desire.
Are blind bends truly blind in an age
of mirrors and computed angles?
Thanks though for clicking on the bridges,
bikes, fire hydrants and cars in captchas;
this keeps us going more than fuel cells.
It may be marking our own homework,
so we’re staying neutral just in case
we kill someone. And perhaps, in time,
we’ll learn the meaning of sorry.
Perhaps, in time, we’ll mean it. For now,
remember to look both ways. Left, right,
and left again. You won’t hear us coming.
Mat Riches
The cab company in the film Total Recall is called Johnny Cabs. They are all standard in look, feel, and user interface. In this case, it’s a voice recognition controlled robot driver that always refers to itself as “Johnny Cab.” Said robot driver is smarmy, chatty, and every inch a creepy puppet-like thing with wheeling mannerisms and snide eye rolls.
Travel Writing
This cottage overlooking the Dart,
a daughter in her room playing FC 24.
What if we lived here all the time
stepping out each morning into
city streets from an apartment
on Via Sistina searching for that first
espresso, La Gazetta. The afternoons!
The afternoons we spend in gardens
or looking at a famous painting
in the Louvre. The moon is different
now, above the Pacific; we watch it
from a favourite restaurant terrace
before a last night, our motel bed.
Tomorrow we hit LA. Scorsese
has an option on the screenplay.
Jeff Skinner
Embroidery of the Picket Line
The street is your embroidery hoop.
Choose a fine needle and the thinnest silks for faces.
Satin stitch two-ply cotton thread in broad sweeps
for straining shirts over backs and shoulders
where the lines meet, place the couching thread
of a baton held high, arrowhead stitch the sweep
of its shadow as it falls. See the linen pull under the weight
of twine as you cross stich the blur of fists in air.
Lay fly stitches on noses, collarbones, twisted arms
where bruises will form. Place a bead of mother-of-pearl
where a tooth flies from the silk bed of a mouth.
Outline each letter of the slogans in run stitches,
the way the French bullion of broken cobbles darken,
back stitch the shine of police horses in the sun
above placards held in hands whose callouses are fading.
Pick them out in knotted, undyed wool.
With grandma’s needle, the one that worked on
the trade union banner, loop hardanger stitches
around the frayed edges where blood spatter seared
through the cloth. Be sparing with the black
as no one has been down the mine for months.
Only their eyes are dark pits.
L.B. Jørgensen
Thrift
I’m shedding my summer and learning to dress in November all year round. It’s surprisingly awkward, recalling a childhood of misaligned buttons and of shoelaces which tended towards the functional rather than the precise. Little black days go with everything and nothing, depending how you wear them, and I wear them like old records that have seen too many parties that plunged off the rails. All thumbs, I fumble after my fashion, zipping skeletal leaves over skin that’s sagged into winter. Next season’s look will be this season’s look, with more holes and creases, and layer upon layer of frost and webs. I’m shedding my expectations and learning to dress my age by cutting clothes from free magazines and hanging them with tabs from my shoulders. Shimmer? Shiver? I’m shutting my wardrobe. I’m leaning into little blackouts. It’s awkward.
Oz Hardwick
Acronyms
If someone is confused between
a minaret and a minotaur,
is that an early sign of dementia?
When I learned my brother’s diagnosis
was MCI, I remembered the MJQ,
how I sold all my LPs to the man
in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, opposite
the café where I used to meet friends.
One of them, HN, has grade 8 in flute.
My brother couldn’t recall all the details
in the GP’s story, the purple shoes. I doubt
he was ever interested in purple shoes -
they wouldn’t have gone with his metal brace.
Mild Cognitive Impairment,
not the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Fokkina McDonnell
Olive grove
I got your postcard, the one
with the picture from a small hill somewhere inland
looking out across a neat olive grove.
You said you were in Naples. I’d assumed
you could’ve found something more recognisibly Neapolitan
to WISH YOU WERE HERE by
than what you sent, the non-descript olive grove
from any arid Mediterranean postcode.
Show me the piazzas! the turquoise coast!
even the ice cream, for fuck’s sake!
Show me the Naples you still love,
send me something more appropriate,
the seafront hotels with their honeymoon suites
and Vesuvius ever-present in the background.
Stewart Carswell
Daddy Longlegs
Coming after the wolf spiders
start to appear inside
and before the autumn’s first frost,
you’re better news than both.
Sign of summer’s going, though,
your significance is lightened by yourself –
stingless, biteless, clumsy stumbler –
a tickle in the hand, no more,
you’re soft as September weather.
Sad as it, too, to watch you suffer
predation, frustration, unlimbing accident.
Guileless, unprepared one, how you cling,
every year; how you even reappear from
last year’s disasters is a miracle of winning spirit.
Without beauty, power, weapon or wisdom,
your barely functioned flight hurls
Icarus after Icarus of you tumbling
to where foot or wheel or mower
or infant’s grasp or cat’s paw or hoover
or any number of other ordinary things
condemns each unlikely attempt.
Is this, my inept, what I admire –
your hopeless, dauntless trying, your soaring ambition on such limited wings;
the thought that if you can make it through, you daft, ungainly bungler,
then maybe I can, too?
Craig Dobson
Contributors
Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here
Janet Dean was brought up in a mining village in Barnsley, South Yorkshire and now lives in York, having worked for forty years in the public and charity sectors. Her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies in print and online, and she has won prizes and commendations in several national and international poetry competitions.
Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, where he co-hosts the Fen Speak open mic night. His poems have recently been published in Under the Radar, Finished Creatures, Ink Sweat & Tears, and The Storms Journal. His debut collection is Earthworks (Indigo Dreams, 2021). Find out more at https://www.stewartcarswell.co.uk
Craig Dobson has had poems and short fiction published in various UK, US and European magazines. He’s working towards his first book of poetry.
David Harmer was born in 1952. He lives in Doncaster and is best known as a children’s writer with publications from Macmillans Children’s Books and Small Donkey Press. His work for the Grown Ups is sometimes published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Oz Hardwick is an international award-winning prose poet, who has published “a dozen or so” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). He has also edited several anthologies, most recently Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (MadHat, 2024) with Cassandra Atherton.
L.B. Jørgensen is a Danish poet writing in English. She does translation and subtitling and have had poems published in several magazines. Her debut pamphlet A Woman Travelling was published by Paekakariki Press in 2024.
Fokkina McDonnell now lives in the Netherlands. She has three poetry collections (Oversteps Books, 2016; Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2019; Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and a pamphlet (Grey Hen Press, 2020). Poems have been widely published and anthologised. She received a Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North in 2020.
Matthew Paul was born and grew up in South London and now lives in South Yorkshire. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, will be published by Crooked Spire Press in June and is available for pre-order at this link, here. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. He is also the author of two haiku collections, published by Snapshot Press. He writes reviews and essays, and blogs about poetry, here.
Mat Riches is ITV’s unofficial poet-in-residence . Recent work has been in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings. A pamphlet, Collecting the Data, is out via Red Squirrel Press. Twitter @matriches Blog: Wear The Fox Hat
Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and in many journals, most recently in Allegro, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Paperboats. He was commended in the last Sonnet or Not competition. He volunteers at his local food bank and in an Oxfam bookshop, listens to music, watches football, reads, writes.
All contributors retain copyright of their work.