Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Poetry- Andrea Potos

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

My Uncle and the Undertakers

They try so hard, the work that none of us would do–the embalming, casketing, the cossetting; and the person dressed in his satin bed still seems to look like some far-fetched hint of his former self.

Yet in the chapel today, the body of my uncle– oldest and last son to go–wears the precise shape and features of his father, my Papou, gone these forty-plus years. I stand astonished at their creation–perhaps artists, workers of the spirit after all– they have made the Circle manifest.

Morning Practice

Your start is sputtery and slow, as when an old faucet is turned on and you must let it run, keep it running, waiting for the dredgy brown to wash clear from the pipes, for the water to gush clear and clearer truer to its original source.

Sunbathing in the 70s

I lay there, still as a Greek antiquity all afternoon, anointed by Johnson’s Baby Oil, I shone, my James Taylor album cover enrobed in tin foil, arced open to concentrate the rays on my face– what did I know– apprentice to beauty, apostle of light.

Visiting the Graves

They chose simplicity in small bronze plaques set into the earth, raised letters for their names: my mother, her sister, her mother and father, her baby brother – oldest and most burnished: 1935-1939. My feet sink into grass sodden from last night’s storm. The air is thick with song – cicadas strumming in tall oaks, their insistence of late summer leaving. The marigold bed my grandmother wanted gleams with orange and ochre yellow, and I think of Van Gogh, his words to brother Theo: Even in pressing darkness, There is a sun.

Poetry- Bernie Crawford

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 House Work

Since January stole my tongue and tied it into knots, the house has become a blank verse. My hands repeat a cleaning rhyme in every stanza, I pack metaphors into drawers, layer them on shelves in the hot press among folded towels.

Sparkling saucepans, spilling stolen poetry, hang from the freshly-painted bracket over the sink. The old carpet is hoovered pink in borrowed time and on the windowsill the amaryllis blooms its second bloom, overwatered with words. In the kitchen I serve page after page of tasty bites, baked potatoes filled with buttery half-baked similes. A lattice of deftly crafted pastry lines criss-cross an apple pie and even the dog hasn’t escaped. Long walks have compressed her into a revised version of herself.

Clipped Life

They all said he wouldn’t last a hurry what with Iris gone But he knocked their wind ’n all Two days after funeral He was down allotment by ten Took thermos with him That became his way, bought paper Meals-on-wheels every other day Picked up some eggs at corner shop Pension day he chanced two bob each way I went with Mum and timed those visits in cups of Lipton’s, dunked ginger nuts He said George popped in too Not regular, mind you He still went down pub early evening ’fore crowd came in Half a bitter, back home Watched telly an hour or so The only time I heard him smile was the day he told Mum and me about the colour of purple-blue flowers that came up between the cabbages from bulbs he’d dug in two days after Iris passed.

Bringing Home the Cows

He struts in the middle of the road in the middle of the afternoon His buttocks tight in blue denim jiggle like g’s in the middle of a giggle He saunters his strut all over the road No one can pass I shift from fifth to first feast on his arrogant rear end so cocksure He flicks an occasional switch off a cow’s backside Their full udders oscillate like giant pendulums and lull me In my car behind him in the middle of the afternoon on my way to Active Ageing Yoga I’m thrumming full of humming birds

Impure Thoughts and Beethoven

Confession began with an examination of conscience: telling lies, five times, fighting with her sisters, stealing gob stoppers, popping a clove rock under the tongue when Moll Foley’s back was turned. These were straightforward sins, venial things that could be wiped clean with a swipe of the clerical cloth. It was the entertainment of impure thoughts that swamped her. Her fingers played them in the pocket of her winter coat, as she dawdled to school in November rain and January cold. She tucked them up the puffed sleeves of her summer dress, and pushed them high on the swing until they hovered in the air like dandelion wisps. They entertained her. But she must have entertained them too because when she mastered Für Elise on the piano they trembled to her tune. Semi-quavers quivered her belly, notes staccatoed down below, and even more so when she glided forward on the stool to reach the pedals. Impure thoughts became interwoven forever after with Beethoven.

Quiet Please

I don’t have one kind thought in my head This is not the poem I intended to write The gnawing teeth of a bushman saw are cutting into my frontal lobe I swallow down screams The steady drip of commentary to her companion pockmark my eardrum I want to remove my silk sock and stuff it in her mouth I believed in freedom of speech I scan the bus for another seat Calculate travel time to Dublin Plug my ears with a scratchy serviette The words of her mosquito buzz penetrate I clutch the rolled-up Irish Times in my hand Brief moments of reprieve Sweetness like Greek honey trickling onto a parched palette Eyes at rest in a dark room after the dazzle of fireworks And then it starts again I look up misophonia on my iPhone Strong, negative feelings to trigger sounds Not to be confused with Hyperacusis An increased negativity to certain frequencies For me she strikes the wrong note again and again. Two hours into the journey the motion of the bus lulls her to a sporadic silence I am newly disappointed when she pauses so thoroughly am I wallowing in her lack of modulation.

Bloodline

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Buy it now

“Bloodline” Michael A Griffith

Michael A Griffith’s poems often start with a simple observation and then take that idea or image for an exploratory walk. His focus often falls on family relationships. Making a packed lunch in “Tetris” prompts musings on parental roles,

” You’re off to work as I prepare to shape thoughts that shape words that shape minds. Mental Tetris this gray January morning. Time nobody’s friend, Time everybody’s parent.”

The fragmentary shape of the poem represents the early morning mosaic of thoughts, one displacing or tessellating with another.

In “Textbook”, an old, handwritten note in a poetry anthology represents its author,

“I don’t know her now, of course, though we’d be the same age. I read ‘Her Kind’ knowing that while other things feel more important, for one semester at least, the thoughts of others were almost as interesting as her own.”

‘Her Kind’ is Anne Sexton’s poem where the poet appears to take on the stereotypical roles of women and find they all require her to disguise or suppress her true self to take on a role. The implication here is that the note-scrawling teen, briefly found interest beyond herself which may have influenced her self-discovery. It’s left to the reader to imagine how she is now, grown and in middle-age.

“Bloodline” concerns memories of a daughter’s birth by c-section (gory details are spared) and the poem contrasts the new parents sense of wonder at the newborn with the busy recording of statistics that the medical staff are focused on. Another poem looks at a line of old trees weakened by storms as the landowner tries to sketch them before they are felled. Wryly, “Listening to Johnny Cash” observes,

“I can only understand about every third word that Arthur says, but it’s alright, Johnny says enough for three men”

Occasionally the tone becomes elegiac, but never sentimental. “Bloodline” is a series of wry musings on domestic life and relationships that ask readers to look again at the familiar and question it.

Emma Lee Available now from Blue Nib Publishing

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Weightless in the Nets

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Buy it

“Weightless in the Nets” Roy Liran (Blue Nib) The poems in “Weightless in the Nets” are probing observations that explore and ask questions about perceptions and preconceived views of readers. They rely on giving the reader sufficient detail to focus attention and be guided by the poet. A similar approach is taken in the accompanying ink drawings.

“Jan and Neftalí” comes with the note that Pablo Neruda (Neftalí) used Czech poet’s Jan Neruda’s surname as part of his pseudonym in exile. The poem is set in street named after the Czech poet and observes a couple. He tells her he’s written a poem on his phone,

“Walking the cobblestone streets he talks of Baroque architecture and Art Nouveau, often examining his prudently folded map for the metro stations. She watches the river for white swans and listens. Or so she tells him. Love sweeps travelling autumn leaves through elegant boulevards. So it is told.

Readers are encouraged to doubt he’s written a poem and that she’s listening to him and think about what they might have done instead. Certainly, they don’t share their thoughts with each other: he doesn’t show her his poem and she doesn’t talk about the swans. The poem implies the couple are withdrawing from each other and their relationship’s autumn is heading towards winter. The theme of what’s not talked about is picked up in “The blindness of the world” where a couple are back in the car after a walk through woods where they “at long last do what had/ forever needed to be done” although the what isn’t specified,

“I recall gripping the steering wheel hard during one lonely stretch of the road, when you raised your head from me to ask if I was happy, which I should have been, and lied And on the long way back to where you had left your car you leaned against me and sang dreamily to the blindness of the world, and I kept my face straight, eyes fixed ahead”

After the poem is a note, “Read when no one is listening”. Most of the poems have a similar note. Readers are left to think about why the poem’s narrator lied about being happy and the implications of that lie. The adverb “dreamily” to describe the partner’s singing is a telling detail, showing her ignorance.

It’s either bravery or modesty when a poet starts a poem “Were I a poet” even when the poem’s focus is on what’s not there, in “The delusion of things gone”, where in the opening stanza the rhythm of the wind in the trees echoes the rhythm of the heart,

“But I am not, and the heart is dead, and trees are merely trees. And what is the wind if not agitated air that moves away from pressure.

It takes a non-poet to note that when the sun finally sets nothing disappears but the light.”

The disappearing light offers a different perspective on the scene. The trees and wind are still there but other senses have to come into play to realise them. The accompanying note is “best read by the sea, which is water” and suggests a reflective mood. An actual reflection is the starting point for “Reflective” where in an oily puddle,

“the liquid light gave a shiny gleam to the teeth of passers by

When did looking at reflective surfaces become an analogy for pain”

It’s a question without a question mark and the directive note is “to be read with a squint in one’s brain.”

“Weightless in the Nets” is a collection of thoughtful, provocative poems, which use an artist’s eye and architect’s focus on key details to guide readers into thinking around the poem’s subjective observations.

Emma Lee

Available now from Blue Nib Press. €10.50

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Poetry- Anne Elizabeth Bevan

By AnneBevan | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 A Girl

There was a girl Who lived in a glass mind And carried her emotions From room to room In a brown suitcase. Blackbirds pecked at her Through see-through walls, Hissing like cats at her muddled Thoughts and scratching at her Yellowing temples with steel claws. Each day she packed and unpacked At the stroke of twelve, neatly Folding her thoughts. Minutes Passed and years tumbled; she lived And died within her crystal cage.

Attic Boxes

Another baby dies and every mother cries From memory. Arms express the sentiment Not spoken in any language. Eyes drop To greet the feet of grieving mothers Whose gaze too sad, paralyses. Baby clothes Return to attic boxes and broken hearts Are swept into waiting handbags. Infant child, the headstone says Like all those other epitaphs. Old ladies walk their plastic dogs Along the pleasant pathways, avoiding Dates and names that may be familiar, Communion strong for those who laid to rest Their young, a lifetime too soon. They hold their brokenness within glass hearts, premature still.

Morning Coffee

The curtain lifts on a drippy Saturday morning Waking the city from its hangover. Seagulls Screech as they seek out their weekend breakfast From fish and chip papers, flung on the dirty pavements By Friday night revellers. Shopkeepers lift window Shutters, waking the homeless in their chosen doorways. A woman of indeterminate age stretches under her duvet, Turning to face the street, hurting as she shifts her cold Body in her concrete bed. She touches her hair As women do when waking, to check how high the bed head Is. In the reflection of the toughened glass of the shop front She sees that she is not a pretty sight, but she hasn’t been A pretty sight for a long time now. She can’t remember When she last sat in the reclining chair of a hair salon, Having her locks shampooed and cut, the only treat A woman will not give up, even in times of recession. She spits on a crumpled tissue taken from her jeans pocket And washes her face before rising to greet the city Her stomach rumbles and she makes her way to a small Coffee shop on Prince’s Street, hoping for the kindness Of some shop assistant or beautician on their way to work; There may even be a cigarette in it for her. She Checks her reflection again and rubs her hands down Her crumpled clothes, smoothing the wrinkles. In the doorway across from the cafe, she sees A man with lined face, bleeding. He’s been beaten By young men who drank themselves into superiority The night before; she gives him her coffee. No point Calling anyone to help him, they won’t have time For a junkie. She pulls her collar tighter and moves along.

No Back Door

Saturdays were the noisiest, horse racing Blaring from the monochrome set. She glanced occasionally at the screen, tutting To herself as she plucked a chicken In the kitchen sink, feathers stuck to her fingers; The boiling water she’d poured over the recently Deceased bird steaming into her face; the smell Of its innards making my stomach retch as she Pulled them out onto the draining board. The wireless, on a dusty shelf above dad’s chair, Competed with the scene. A food mixer danced On the counter beside her, as the homemade butter, Straight from the fridge, refused to blend or soften. The mixer vibrated its way to the edge, sometimes It fell, the waiting dog rushing to claim the spoils. Feathers blew around the kitchen as she turned And cursed the dog, whose turn it was to be blamed. I wished we had a back door to escape The madness unseen. On the far side of my mother A twin tub lurked. It slopped and turned Slopped and turned. An extension cable crossed The sink, the dead bird and the vibrating mixer To reach the only socket in the kitchen, Which bulged with adapters. The Rayburn Was more difficult on Saturdays, refusing To maintain a steady one hundred and eighty Degrees. “The curse of God on it anyway”, She screeched as her cakes blackened, still Raw in the centre, then cursed the cakes and again The dog for good measure; I hated Saturdays.

Dinosaurs

When did we become the dinosaurs? Yesterday we were young and brave, Emerging and opinionated, with Flared jeans and tank tops. We danced Beneath garish disco balls, night fever Was our only sickness.

When did we become the dinosaurs? With our clay spines, bent in human Stance, short armed and hungry? When did our soft skin turn to scales Of overindulgence, power making Us dangerous, obsolete?

When did our unimportant lives Of self-satisfaction kill the poets, Stifle the songsters, the cells Of our youth dying within our brittle Bones? Extinction will save the music, Our death cries echoing in discordant notes.

We were the girls who cut new roads, Who broke the old regime. We stopped The rot; the abuse ended with our loud protestations. We strengthened our daughters and educated our sons to the changes; but When did we become the dinosaurs? The Lost Poet

Blue hair and the scar knitted in her brow Gave her the air of a pirate and I felt That soon she might intone A sea shanty or lift a gilded cutlass From beneath her flowing garb.

Rather, she recited verse of her own Creation, the likes of which a mermaid Might have written, but I saw no hint Of fishtail beneath her ragged hem No flowing sable locks swept her nape.

Perhaps I was mistaken and mermaids Wore layered skirts and striped chemise With greying bra straps tumbling onto Freckled arms. I saw her eyes, Black as onyx, search my ordinary face

For signs of familiarity, or madness perhaps, Before she scanned the rest of those assembled In the thatched pub, her stance relaxed As her gaze met that of her sister And mine, not knowing yet of my existence

The Waiting Room

A grey painted chair lazes by its sisters, A comfortable crossroads in a tiny cucina. A child’s toy rests on the farthest one With wheel missing. I see myself

Move pedantically between this half life And the outer skin that is my world, faded Behind the kitchen window, framed In a hideous comedy of dishes and grief.

Wiping my hands on the already wet towel, I wander through to the sitting room, cluttered With old trophies and Clarice Cliff treasures, Dust catchers all. With arm outstretched

I clear a shelf, hearing the muted crashes In the distance. I step carefully Amid the shards of her life, struggling to release myself from that time.

Placing the damp towel on a dusty sideboard, I glance in the gold leaf mirror above the hearth. Tucking a defiant hair back into place I remember I am she.

Poetry from James Finnegan

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

salut after Iggy McGovern from afterbirth to aftermath from beetroot to bloodroot from confusion to profusion from eye-and-ear to pioneer from fission to fusion from hippo to hip-hop from income to outcome from jobless to homeless from Ku Klux to Cuckoo from lantern to lanyard from Mandela to umbrella from overseas to under siege from Pantheon to penthouse from quarterdeck to quarterback from rain check to paycheck from sickle and plough to tickle and howl from unskilled to deskilled from wasteland to waistband from xylem to asylum from yes men to Yemen from zoom in to zoom out

The Muse and Me

I ask the Muse how do I become a poet? She tells me to cop myself on and come to my senses.

Isn’t smell important? I wouldn’t bother, she sniffs. Surely sound has a place? She lets a pin from her pocket drop on the sand.

What about the visual? She says Let me see, pauses, then, I’ll get back to you on that.

Taste must have a role? No sweat, says she. You gotta have movement and touch? I say. She flaps her arms like a penguin, walks towards the sunrise, brushes me aside.

I call after her, can I come back this evening when you are in better form? She turns around slowly, looks at me and says Maybe

Thorn in my jumper – 1964

Eileen Ward called to our house: a two-storeyed, white pebble-dashed, blue-doored home, at the crossroads, in Dundalk, an eastern border-town.

A thorn caught in my jumper, as I stuck my head through the hedge, at the side of the house, to see what she wanted.

Eileen raised a hand to block the sun from her eyes, ‘Francis has been knocked down.’

In the flashing frozen stillness that followed, furl-leafed branches, above the wall, across the road, swayed in the May evening breeze: a lone bird flitted, fencing off creeping grief.

Liam Campbell

Liam walks up an incline, ever-so slightly hunched like the Hulk, carrying easy gravity on his shoulders; thick-set, kind, energised. From behind, his head is slightly bowed as if genuflecting to the world and the other before him.

There was a time he carried beer barrels and drove a lorry, but got into Tolkien and now unloads English literature as carefully as water in a desert, making minds marvel whilst helping quench the thirst of hungry hearts.

A sparkling talker who catches everything you say, and sings an original song on final day and whose Ecological Augury awakens one’s Love of Trees.

Other Voices 3: Poems selected by Shirley Bell.

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

The fading pop star

Every time I pass through the deserted station, I think of you. When the train slows I see your picture. You wear a frown as if you really don’t want to be pasted on a wall so grim and bare. Dressed in your best advertising last year’s gig, sold out pasted over dates. Already corners are peeling, revealing a well-known cleaning brand. You float amongst flotsam, Before the Dawn, your life jacket orange, a reminder of the waking sun, the passing years, the cares kindly removed from your airbrushed face. The train pulls away. Tonight I will hear your voice and remember when we both were young. Clint Wastling

No to floral racism

I seen a Rose raised high, bright red, radiant Perhaps blushing, nothing subtle about its splendour Cradled in a cluster of others, just as grand Contentedly bathing in summer sun Sharing its majesty, unaware The Bee hovered, exploring the flowering gift Doing what bees do, oblivious to all-else Swivelling from flower to flower Bluebell to Yellow Rattle and Bluebell again Natures caretaker taking care The Bee joined busy companions A chorused buzz, perhaps harmonized Celebrating natures wonderous diversity Not knowing nor caring the name of flower Captivated only by colour, adoring content I watched it dart to the garden gate Drawing my attention to a Dandelion A rogue that escaped my diligent plucking Sunburst yellow, bright and resilient But a weed, without knowing, just the same It danced with this rogue, with delicate respect Seeing the flower without prejudice of caste Accepting the invitation, wild flower or winning rose Florae connected by natures needs A mutual dependence of perfection, a lesson learnt.

Joe Lynch

Points

A five-pointed star is a pentagram With just a tilt of the head. Why are you so intent on breaking Your thumbs and fingers back To try and make the digits fit That blessed, twisted shape? What sort of pardon do you seek In the change and mutilation? A jilted heaven of your choosing Takes you firmly by the wrists. Step over the corpse of it. Pretend that it’s not there.

Jon Jack Neil

BUNKER Down in Radiotherapy This blue bunker of last resort There’s chilled laughter Like a joke blown over ice The magazines are out of date The gossip around the water cooler Is clipped like code Not just anyone enters here But here is different Here Be Monsters Scaly-backed nightmares And the wounded on trolleys Knights errant and the green grail Lights slashing the prone body in four Unholy pieces, cruciform, hapless Christs On a gurney; that’s why we whisper Not to rouse cell-deep evils To keep the unthinkable in its place Incarnate under our splitting bones A cage of calcium struts and bent beams A bomb going off in slow-motion – The architect got it wrong, left A space for this weak zone Prone to a sly inside job, self-treason.

Fred Johnston the red sky red daubs stretch from edge to edge highlight clouds like a drunken artist might try to paint a sky a final bird flies north toward the wetlands it’s silent now apart from the occasional car or neighbour in their garden this is the best time the gloaming time the moments between day and night when sky grows dark and stars appear I can stand here watch and listen as the world turns away from the sun as the air cools and a breeze stirs another sound a TV or radio some people at the end of a barbeque a door closed and bolted a window locked I wonder if anyone can hear me my heart pounds maybe I should shout I am alive as the last hint of red fades in the west

Jim Bennett Sashimi

Silken at my neck You fold I lose myself

Sashimi on my tongue You melt I drink you in

Entwined

Your nakedness entwined with mine Your breath gentle against my neck You sleep while I smile, thankful, awed.

Numbness sets in We stir Your skin moves against mine And we settle again.

I should sleep But that would be to waste these precious hours Of your nakedness entwined with mine.

Elliott Manley

All Roads

This is the terminus, Within these walls, Where shadows divest themselves. In the corner, fantasy hides its head shamefully. One tear, like a tree in a forest, falls. Then another and another, Until all the years crash in unison, To thunderous applause.

Lying two together, In our shroud of beaded sweat, We are voracious readers, As we thrall through this library of Time. Tripping each other with our playfulness, Laughing off the other’s haunting spectres, Jousting with fate, and, Losing every time.

We have arrived at the crossroads, where all roads lead to. We have paused at the point, Where all journeys commence. Reeling, in the remoteness, In this sacred hiding place, inhospitable to Future and past, We covet a sneak preview of the final destination, As we return to the fray, Through a secret door, Found, in each other’s eyes.

Dermot McGarthy

She asks if I have a special occasion, almost seems a conversation worth having. I pull out my rehearsed winning quip, ‘life itself is one!’ She chuckles on cue as though I’m funny, but hey, I’ve already denied red espadrilles in restraint, my humor is low.

There’s undeniable existence in consumerism, comradery in this therapy, forgery in the currency. Indoor palms and fraudulent heat allude to paradise, though children in melt-down should be excluded in favor of designer margaritas. Surely, I can’t be alone in going home to unpack yet another empty handbag.

Leanne Neill

Annealing Point

A dark humor of waxwings crossing campus, schooled by a wall of glass, exquisite specimens. I crouch to collect thoughts, bodies, elegant Icarus still warm in my palm, an instinct to salvage something from wreckage into the vault of memory slipped my father

Perfunctory kindness after a death, evergreen seedling rooted in tomorrow, never makes it out of the pot. Intentions, relationships pass in the night, wither, whether watered too much or too little his strength carried me up a narrow staircase, more than half asleep

Then, my younger brother, an uncle for just that one Christmas to my infant daughter who screamed, inconsolable, as if she could read a shadow in my voice, narration wavering with doubt the children believed everything until it became impossible

Shrapnel lodged too close to the heart, my most vivid image of both: our father bursts through a childhood door in unrestrained fury and hurls my brother across a room to crumple against a wall having demolished walls to escape, we framed new ones to hide behind

Survivors rewrite histories: this incident the seed of a strangling vine, that truth an early casualty of the war between forgiveness and anger, unreliable reports from the front lines. Now I sit miles beyond pain, immersed in work, oblivious, hardened is this what a heart sounds like stopping?

A thud from outside makes me find shoes to investigate, and quivering in the leaf litter below the window, a tiny olive bird, fallen flycatcher, breathing, belly up, victim of too much reflection, false sky the minister, a trained prevaricator, envisioned my brother and father, happily reunited

Maybe only a mild concussion or unnameable, internal injuries, insidious as hope. Sometimes the spirit has broken, or the neck. Brief, grounded prayers, these wordless birds, cupped briefly, then gifted back to the trees

Tim Kalbach Dick Edelstein reviews: Fealty by Ricky Ray

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Fealty by Ricky Ray. Hardcover £16.99, 146 pp. Eyewear Publishing, 8 June 2018. ISBN: 978-1912477227

While many new writers have seized on expanding opportunities for publishing poetry collections, New York poet Ricky Ray, still in his thirties, has been biding his time, waiting nearly two decades to publish Fealty. His debut collection reveals an evolved writing style that relies on a deft combination of lyricism and prose techniques as the poet negotiates a precarious path between preachiness and frank sincerity. Surreal and fantastic elements appear in these poems with some regularity, yet the verse is clear and direct, often taking readers off guard as the poems deliver a message that is always intelligible yet frequently enigmatic:

Rising from the wheelchair, my legs hold me up— two withered twigs. I love dead wood, the way it keeps daring lightning to strike again.

And I love lightning, the way it keeps reminding the heart it’s on fire.

While it is true that Ray has a unique voice, it may be more to the point to note that he makes use of a well- worn language particular to him that readers grow adept at parsing and his poetry becomes addictive as his language is more readily grasped. His poems embody a path of inquiry for the writer as well as readers, and his message is often a question although it may be wrapped in an enigma:

Being aware of awareness has become, like liquor or liking too much, hard to handle (…)

Something wants to call it wayward, then doubts what it wants.

The tongue’s a question-mark that answers itself in the mouth because the causeless cures reason, and dried-apple pies taste sweetest after too many hours flattening one’s metatarsals. A bark becomes a kind of hello one throws like stones: to see what comes back.

To describe an emerging poet as “a new voice” is a cliché. But Ray’s voice is not merely new; it recognizes itself and is recognized by others as it holds out a promise of endurance. Ray’s poems exhibit a bardic quality in that they speak for a community of readers rather than just to them, sometimes resorting to a philosophical discourse that is occasionally opinionated but never dogmatic.

In this sense, Ricky Ray is no Zen master: his poetry appeals to readers because he is a seeker on the same path and his voice is their own, addressing readers in a plain conversational tone that often suggests reader and writer are in the midst of an intimate chat. Although frank sincerity runs counter to current fashion in American poetry, Ray’s confiding tone is a cornerstone of his finely honed style, a fundamental tactic in a strategy to gain the reader’s attention. In “The Exchange”, the poet recounts an everyday encounter invested with transcendental meaning:

He sold vegetables from homemade wooden crates, used sun, soil, seed, water, and a healthy dose of ornery.

I gave him money and my face to remember. So did my wife. Our dog just gave her face.

“… [he] said there’s only one piece of advice I can give you: grow things.

And now I know there’s more to what he spoke, like: they’ll return the favor In “Preparation”, the conversational tone catches readers off guard as the verses move towards an enigmatic conclusion:

My dog bit a bee, spit it out, no sign of stung.

A lesson for the poet who bites at life eager to be bit back

Ray is frequently identified by readers and commentators as an eco-poet and this categorization is founded to some degree if we take note of the description of purpose displayed in the digital literary magazine he publishes: “Rascal is an ecology, literature and arts journal”. More interesting, and perhaps more to the point, is the journal’s more specific stated aim: to wake the inattentive mind out of its doldrums and compel the shrinking heart to care.

But if Ray identifies with the notion of ecology, it is not so much in the sense of the 1960s appropriation of this term to signify a narrow environmentalist agenda but rather in the original sense still used in the life sciences: a branch of biology that studies the interactions among organisms and their environment. Ray’s ecology should be seen in the broad sense as a way of apprehending the connectedness of all adaptive systems in our little corner of the universe, that is: what is and why; the ways in which living and non-living systems relate to and interact with each other.

Ray’s poem “A Place” is a lengthy manifesto of over 100 lines dedicated to his wife Safora and to the poet and essayist Wendel Berry. Infused with a transcendentalist sensibility, it begins as follows:

If we’ve never known home, how do we get there aside from the way we get everywhere, the way we receive looks that say keep moving, the way we understand those looks and keep going until one day, we look around, take stock and think yes, this must be what it feels like to belong

Ray continues in the third stanza.:

There must be a place where this cycle can be broken, a place where the habit of homelessness can be traded in for a habit of homemaking, but I’ve not yet found it, and the buses every day are full of others who haven’t either;

And further below: I will not sell my mind one office day at a time until there is little left of it to otherwise contribute. I will sell it only so long as it takes to tear it from the pockets of rich, unkindly men, men who will never take the time to know me

Finally, as the lengthy poem moves towards its conclusion:

I will move toward the place that I have been imagining with my heart, and the heart of my wife, and the hearts of the animals in our care, and the hearts of the children who will be born there, the children who will be raised there

Ray is a seeker and so too are his readers. Logically, in his poetic exploration of ideas and existence, philosophical inquiry provides many entertaining moments. But Ray’s philosophy is a bit like window shopping: he examines many intriguing items on display and even considers trying a few on for size but inevitably goes home without a purchase.

When the wolfwind howls and the ground whispers crystals of ice, if I wrap my feet in ideas—whole philosophies— they still freeze.

Or again, in these lines from “I Saw Myself in the Black Car”:

One truth says: goodbye to the red river of blood is all there is to dying. Another truth calls each end a homecoming, blood’s seep into the earth, where blood is washed of salt and deed, then blood runs strong and clear on the long road to the sea, where salt returns.

But if as a seeker Ray doesn’t know where he is going, he has a pretty clear idea of what he is running away from, and this is a feeling with which many readers can easily identify.

If poets tend to be fascinated with their own thought process and with events that shape their own lives, this preoccupation is often what makes them interesting to readers since what most interests people is other people. This observation is made evident by the success of television reality shows that exploit a morbid curiosity about intimate details of the lives of others.

But Ray takes an entirely different tack: he is more interested in readers than in himself. In his poetics, he is constantly on the lookout for paths that readers will be able follow and for formulations of his ineffable goals that can be communicated and ways to share these formulations.

Lately we have been returning in an alarming fashion to the Victorian notion that “a man’s home is his castle”, a sort of dime store formulation of sovereignty that cruelly turns the disadvantaged into oppressors and scapegoats. If our daily diet of texts and discourse is overburdened with half-baked truths and simplistic answers to complex questions, this is an area where the methods of poetry may give some satisfaction. And this is the territory in which Ricky Ray operates. His investigations more often than not result in a question, and when his questions yield an answer, it is likely be an enigma. In the end, his meandering, qualitative approach to inquiry may be more useful than a hyperrationality that cheerfully cranks out answers whose validity is always questionable.

As noted, Ricky Ray is a reader-oriented poet, and when he reveals details about himself, this revelation is likely to be a gambit in service of his search for ever more effective communication, a communicative move that says to readers “I’ll show my sincerity by revealing something about myself”. Something of this notion may be hinted at by the richly suggestive title Fealty. Ray is a useful poet who has achieved his usefulness by learning how to entertain and communicate.

In light of his distinctive voice and mature writing style, readers may wonder why Ray should have waited two decades to publish a debut collection but it is worth considering that every poet has his or her unique sense of time. What matters finally is what they are able to express in verse and how—not when they managed to do it. Curiously, Ricky Ray has chosen to publish his debut collection in the UK, where he is little known. While his poetry may have a noticeable American slant, as demonstrated by his frequent use of a prose-like verse style lately in fashion there, certainly a less American trait is his baldly sincere tone. In any case, his vocation is universal and a European debut amounts to a declaration of intentions in this regard.

Fealty is a book for readers that is difficult to properly do justice to in a review on account of its breadth and scope, including poems written throughout the past 20 years that nonetheless display an easily recognizable continuity of voice despite innumerable variations in form, subject matter, technique and mood.

The book’s appeal to readers should be quite broad since Ray’s verse is accessible and intelligible while embodying an impressive technique and impeccable formal qualities. At over 140 pages, the current hardback edition contains more than 70 poems, giving this volume more the feel of a collected works than a debut collection. Yet its length feels just right. On account of the abundant variations in form and content they encompass, the poems in this lengthy debut collection do not tire the reader. Fealty represents the foundation of a career in poetry that we can expect to be solid and enduring.

Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage by Nadia Wolnisty

By niwolnisty | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 To touch someone well is difficult. Saying, Here, take my hand requires courage I simply do not have. I am a coward. Physical touch terrifies me. Part of this is trauma, part is mental illness, and part of it is just my personality. I am uncomfortable nearly one hundred per cent of the time. Having a body is a mistake, and I think it’s rude to point out someone else’s errors. Please don’t hug me goodbye. That moment will feel so infinite and fragile, like a small painting in a forgotten corner of a museum.

If touch is so difficult for someone like me, then imagine me trying to touch the dead. I have never been around corpses: just the moments after and the bags of flesh that sincerely tried but wound up in hospitals instead. I don’t think I would make a great mortician. Besides being dreadful at higher learning, I know I’m not gentle enough.

But one dead person I try to touch over and over is Kay Sage. She’s an obscure American Surrealist painter. I don’t know where she’s buried, and, of course, my desires are not literal. We’ve never even met.

My first encounter with Sage was with her painting I Saw Three Cities. I was around fifteen, I think. It was during summer break, and my parents took me to the Phoenix Art Museum to see the Surrealist exhibition. (What pretentious fifteen-year-old doesn’t like Dali?)

I’m not sure what I wanted to do, exactly, but it involved my body. Perhaps I wanted to peel off my hoodie and jeans that I was wearing despite the Arizona heat and jump in, as if the painting were a cool lake. Perhaps I wanted to crumple the painting and shove it into my mouth. Or just give it a good lick. All I did, though, given the security guards, was look at the plaque and tell myself Remember this; this is important.

Sage was born in 1898 in Albany, New York. She lived with Danger, Construction Ahead her mother in Paris and moved around Europe. After fair use Kay Sage Date: 1940 World War I, she studied in Rome at the British School and the New School of Fine Arts. In 1925, she married Prince Ranieri di San Faustino. During their ten year marriage, Sage was reportedly miserable and painted only a little. By chance, she met the poet Pound and the sculptor Henghes, who encouraged her to keep painting.

After her divorce from San Faustino, Sage had a celebrated exhibit at Paris, where she met fellow surrealists Breton and Tanguy. Soon, Tanguy and Sage became romantically involved and later married. The lovers moved to New York when World War II broke out and then relocated to Connecticut. Sage had exhibitions at the Guggenheim and Wadsworth Antheneum.

Despite her success, Sage was reportedly an unhappy woman. She was described as difficult and high- strung. Furthermore, her fellow Surrealists did not welcome her into their ranks. Breton, in particular, used her wealthy background and privileged lifestyle to try to undermine her legitimacy as an artist. Tanguy was also known as being difficult, frequently shouting at his own guests. Rumors of domestic abuse circled the pair.

Between 1937 and 1955, Sage produced the bulk of her paintings, honing her signature style of austere landscapes, gray-green tones, architectural elements, and a somber stillness. In 1955, her husband Tanguy suddenly died, and Sage fell into a deep depression. She also started developing cataracts and had undergone several botched surgeries. In 1959, she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. Her maid found her and drove her to the hospital. In 1963, she shot herself fatally in the heart. Her last diary entry reads There is nothing left to do but scream.

Those are the facts, as I understand them, insofar as someone’s biography can be summed up and solidified. Sage is not one of the artists like Dali or Tanguy where you can find dozens of articles on Google or an affordable used book. (Last time I looked for a book on Sage, Amazon’s price was $200.00.) I could speculate why she hasn’t risen to the ranks of a household name, but, again, the information of anything having to do with Sage is incredibly sparse. The fact that the other Surrealists did not accept her could not have helped. Being married to Tanguy could not have helped. I don’t know why she means so much to me, so I cannot possibly know why the public all-but forgot about her.

But I don’t want people to forget. Every year, I give myself a poetic project, a poetic goal. 2015 was to perform my poetry publically. 2017 and 2018 were to get one hundred rejection letters as a way of forcing myself to submit. In 2019, I want to write a book. I have published a few chapbooks, and I stand by my work, but I want to try something different.

I have a tendency to rush. I am profoundly ungentle. I know I can churn out an okay book in a month or so. But I don’t want that. I want to give this all I’ve got. Furthermore, I want to write as not-me. People have told me I have a strong personality, and I always blithely say Thank you, even though I know it’s not necessarily a compliment.

The bulk of my poetry up until now has been highly confessional. It’s had odd ramifications. People assume they know you because you are so frank. They don’t know you adore the color yellow and have an impish sense of humor. They don’t know that you memorized everything they’ve ever told you about their grandmother because you could tell it was important. All they know is the hospital rooms you’ve talked about, the massive fracture in your tailbone, and that you have difficulty touching people. They will never guess that there are things you will never, ever write about, because you’ve told strangers so much shit already.

The editor asked me what this project is and why Kay Sage means so much to me. I’m writing a book. One poem for each painting and whatever else to get the page count. I’m doing it as a way to lie and tell the truth about myself at the same time.

I don’t know why Kay Sage means so much to me, and why I want to hold her in my mouth gently, but I would like to leave you with an image. I’m more of a doodler than a painter, but I want to give you this.

In 2017, you publish your first chapbook. You write about the time your mother tried to kill herself and said it was your fault. You write about what it was like to orgasm while being raped. You write about how it hurts so much now to touch anyone. You write about therapy.

In fall of 2018, your publisher invites to Kansas City, Missouri and read to a crowd of strangers and friends. From Dallas, you drive up with your friend and listen to Janelle Monae to keep awake. There are two jammed packed days of beer and cigarettes, and, of course, poetry.

You joke with your pressmate that you’re siblings now and that your publisher is your dad. Hey, you say, Dad, tell me you’re proud of me, while laughing.

On the third day, it’s your turn. You read a poem about OCD, a poem about being beaten, a poem about a Kay Sage painting and what it’s like to not have a face. You end on a poem about not being able to touch.

You look up, and the whole room is crying.

Your publisher is leaving the day before you are. He packs up the unsold books into boxes you can get at dollar stores. He hugs you goodbye. He says I love you, and I’m so proud of you.

You think of it days later, driving home from shitty office job that fires you the next week. You cry the whole way home.

Works Referenced Blumberg, Naomi and Chakrabarty, Sonia. Kay Sage: American Painter and Poet. Encyclopedia Britannica, 3 Sept. 2015. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kay-Sage . Accessed on 23 November 2018. Suther, Judith D. A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Wolnisty, Nadia. Manual. Buffalo, CWP Collective, 2017. Wolnisty, Nadia. A Zoo. Georgetown, Finishing Line Press, 2018.

Poetry – John Short

By [email protected] | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 AQUARIUM

I dreamed of an aquarium fixed into my back a miniature box with tetras and an angel fish, its glass sunk deep instead of memories, I had to ask each day if they were still alive framed there in that wall of flesh. It was necessary to watch out for these delicate creatures, cradle this transparent cube of life while treading carefully to avoid spillage as police tracked me through the rain-washed streets of a dismal foreign town. Why? I asked. You’re just the kind, they said. A typical demeanor that gets us to our feet every time.

DEATH OF A BAR (Barcelona 2012)

The warmth has gone, the boar’s head taken down all fireplace brick surrendered to the sledgehammer; that old woman who punished fruit machines denied her home-bound pleasure, the jaunty evening crowd now scattered like funeral ash.

The barmaid with her optimistic hair left stranded, the perennial inviting smile subdued by silence. I’d like to ask what you make of all this murder – what led them to decide that these cold grey walls were somehow more appropriate than the pulse of Life. NIGERIAN VILLAGES

Some writers marry other ones it seems the natural course but she has never read a book in fact she hardly learned to read. In Nigerian villages, they say, you have to pay to go to school. Her father was a teacher too. In time I’ve come to understand that this is just an economic irony of life down there, however, she can handle a sewing machine, make clothes, cook plantains, construct wigs from human hair, dismember a goat in record time, balance a suitcase on her head. After seven years I’m comfortable with these skills, this situation, living without literary discussion.

OPEN ROAD

I tread an open road in Spain with walking boots and canvas rucksack, fresh loaf, cheese and wine.

The pebble track unfolds ahead then leads to unknown towns and villages up north.

A stream runs to my right. It sparkles in the morning sun and follows the road forever like a faithful companion.

Romantic at heart, I dream of Don Quixote, Laurie Lee, Platero y Yo, but get instead a dust cloud raised by packs of cyclists clad in Lycra.

Yet it seems the clear waters sing for those with time to listen: onward towards the distant hill.

That hill on the horizon I know I have to reach if only to see beyond. THE DRINKER AND THE STATUE

Evenings sometimes he drinks sitting on a bench in the petanque arena. There’s a Christmas tree 4 meters tall, with coloured lights (it’s nearly April but that’s not his problem).

Near the tree and illuminated by the light stands a curious statue: a tarnished metal goddess, life-size mottled green, her right foot rests upon a Corinthian wheel which in its turn rests upon the belly of a baby satyr.

The satyr with horns and cloven hoof squirms among nineteenth century flowers and grapes, its mouth open and full of rain. It seems unjust to be forever under the feet of Universal Justice; small hands pushing vainly against the wheel.

Which makes him think that satyrs, like Lucifer and the Djinn must be abominable in the eyes of God (for showing signs of individual will?) and suffer accordingly for their diabolic ebullience.

Poetry- Megan Stratford

By Megster91 | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 buried she’s just where you said i’d find her half-way buried underneath the pendulous trapeze to hang off of on afternoons that couldn’t move days like this one when i smelled these collapsed parts before befuddling onto sleep which was kept tidy & in the shape of comfort without cushion blessing misplaced in evenings umbra my name is christened in a far off city just as the fallen seraph descends capsizing my shaft for at one time been suitable for glory today contrived to squirm its way through and into me a spirit not that of the three in One Yahweh but spirit which robs me out of time spirit withholding claim what was rightfully upper G’s to accept to whisk away on chariots which gleam and not be subject to such servitude belly forth and tagged to trespass against a night such as this of song and dance homicide if i should go before your mother then sit fast & redraw her hands off the combination for minds of their own have inkling on where the stash of bullet casings are kept clanking with homicide be it mission impossible to follow & enter into a place i won’t be place where belief isn’t prayer enough place i pipe dream we walk through with one accord if only i could be certain of who should go & when

Future Father in the beginning says He who created the terrene in six days, resting on the seventh to admire it as good, to see it for what it was, foolproof— however lacking the body, which even by name had not been formulated though through grit & animation rose husband, future father & without exception nation, which superseded son of the Almighty Providence, brother of no one rose he rose he, bare & unashamed, overseeing all that was finished in the beginning

Poetry- Chris Hardy

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Pass

A strip of linen with my name, sewn into a shirt by my mother who was no seamstress.

Taking care but not enough to stop her thinking why she had to do this – so when I was gone and someone who was not her washed my shirt I’d find it ironed and folded on the bed.

To be without a shirt on my back, my mother would not have wanted that, who would clothe and feed me first, before herself, instead of her.

Tight stitches along the edge, a finger down the seam, to check it’s smooth, won’t catch, and I‘d not know her touch was there as I walked about in the world, knowing my name if asked when she could not speak for me.

After sewing, packing, checking lists, she picks up my coat as I chase outside.

I’ve never thought of this before, how as she waited for the day I left she gave me everything she could except her tears.

Jacob

Some early morning when you wake, a ladder of light up the wall where the shutter is still closed.

A bird, maybe a dog far off, and quiet waves.

What you hear is the sun, holding its breath.

Written in Water He said he’d open me up, pull everything out and have a look. After that I came to you, adolescent in a flowered dress. Your father offered whiskey, cigarettes. Your sister said she liked my languid convalescent.

Standing by the Usk we read the river’s lesson, salmon seen then gone in the clear concealing stream that hurried to escape the valley’s entanglement, and touched no longer than a minute.

Before I left I combed lice from my hair, a hospital memento, with the centipede scar which I still bear.

You called to say it’s her turn now. Like a cut it was so quick she had no time to be afraid. I’ve kept that detail to myself.

One Way Ticket

Standing, where the sea reaches and plays then with a rush catches you out. Look up along the beach – a few wanderers, everyone else asleep, or going to work, the mountain lying on its side awake with light.

Check the time, twenty minutes out, twenty minutes back to where you wait untroubled by the clock, knowing we will always be on time.

Seeing, like a gold coin that cannot rust in the sand between my feet, that we will leave and like so many places, everywhere, never return, and pick the coin up though it will burn an empty circle through my hand.

You thanked me for leaving the window open so you could sleep in the waves’ unceasing whisper, knowing the sun wakes me early before I’m done with the dark.

Solstice

A magpie crackles on your roof telling an old story and old true truth. Your neighbours sit on chairs for sale outside your door, peer down the cellar, under beds. The hall is piled with crocks, your lease ran out, you are buried, the sun is shining, no one’s sad.

A bunch of spoons in an elastic band, a box of china sold unseen. Your kids have put a price on every sideboard, frame, cup, knife. A pocketful of cash for fifty years in hardware shops, general stores, Saturday afternoons on Wandsworth road. Each bargain shoving last week’s snip to the back of the shelf.

Poetry- Kirsty A. Niven

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Murderer

Dead poems ooze from my pen, my bloodstained fingers refusing to drop the weapon, this implement that has inflicted so much damage, drained so much life-force.

Inspiration mutilated and disfigured, beautiful moments slaughtered in my rough butcher’s hands. Their corpses litter the floor, expressions pallid and vacant.

What a waste of life.

The Old Bar

Midsummer, and the steam of the day’s sun hisses into the moth-eaten pub. I sip on the last of the tepid bourbon from an unholy grail that ages, the fresh faces washing over me.

Their voices rise in bubbles of laughter, bobbing about in the expired air. Igniting sparks so effortlessly while my decrepit lungs deflate and shrivel under increasing pressure.

I have never felt so ancient. They are filled to the brim with life, vivid flames that dance and flirt. It hits me in a dry choking wave – the only thing I am too young for is death.

As Time Goes By

There were thrown gifts and burned letters, secret meetings and shrouded kisses. An affair to remember, a weepy, intended for black and white.

It ended, typically, in disaster – a cataclysmic event, unravelling our entire past like an old tapestry. But we’ll always have Paris.

February Snow falls like feathers, light and airy, asthmatic breaths that catch in the sky.

Shirley Bell Introduces Issue 36

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

First a huge welcome to Issue 36, our second print issue, which is bigger than ever and is a huge cornucopia of poems, fiction, essays and reviews.

Because Issue 35 was such a big adventure, we did have a backlog of submissions and I am very aware that waiting for a reply is really frustrating. Therefore Dave has helped a lot in selecting poems for Issue 36, and I am very grateful for his help. We are now up to date, and submissions are now reopen so please don’t hesitate to send in work for Issue 37, out on 15th March. It is already beginning to fill.

Alongside Issue 36 we are also launching Chapbook 3, with the winning poets from the last chapbook contest each having 8 poems featured to showcase their fine work. Additionally, we are very pleased to be launching Bloodline by Mike Griffith. Readers of the magazine will have seen and enjoyed his sharp, observational and wide-ranging poems and his chapbook is full of wonderful poetry. Roy Liran’s Weightless in the Nets is being launched alongside this magazine on December 15th, and his poetry rich with ideas, and his polished work is succinct and thoughtful. He has also illustrated and enriched his book with sensitive line drawings.

So the magazine is a bumper issue.

We have got poetry reviews from Jane Simmons, Emma Lee and Brian Kirk, while Mimi Gladman, our fiction editor, has reviewed a short story collection, Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine. Imogen has also provided essays on contemporary short fiction and the Goldsmith’s Prize. Other essays talk about the “how” of poetry, including poetry in collaboration and the (mis)teaching of poetry in schools, along with the senses in poetry and surrealism. Last but not least, Samantha Maw continues her picaresque and sometimes nail-biting Ugandan odyssey

Sadly I cannot talk about every poet I have included in the magazine but they are all full of talent and dedication and I am proud to publish them. It is invidious to pick out individuals but Mark Tarren’s elegiac poems stand out along with Chris Hardy’s precise and moving pieces which pin down his thoughts so meticulously. Bob Beagrie has a really original voice and a great vitality. I enjoyed the evocation of the civil war and the apposite quotations. Dana St Mary has a laconic, edgy and sometimes funny style. Bernie Crawford (2nd prize winner in the 3rd Chapbook contest) has written poems which are fizzing with their content-filled narratives! I love Deborah Harvey’s poignant narratives, and Tim Kalbach’s poem, with the interweaving of memory, the sudden shocks, the precise observations of the fallen birds and their metaphorical weight.

I featured high school student Nora Cornell’s work in Issue 35, and I am pleased to publish Lucy Mackarel ” a teenage aspiring writer from rural Ireland” in this issue. Nora’s poetry was perceptive with a maturity beyond her years. Lucy’s passionate poetry, on the other hand, is full of anger and betrayal. I am very keen to see more work from this particular demographic.

There is also a huge presentation of stand-alone poetry in this Issue, in 3 separate sections. I have said before that there are occasions when the whole submission does not make it, but there is a standout poem that really deserves to be published, one that really resonates with me. I think you will really enjoy dipping into these!

Please keep on sending your work, which I always read with close attention. Also do think about submissions for the website, which welcomes news, views, reviews and edgy poetry and short fiction for Intermission – our online alternative magazine.

Best wishes

Shirley Bell, Poetry Editor and Editor in Chief.

Michael A. Griffith reviews The Last Stop by James Fountain

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

James Fountain The Last Stop Original Plus

ISBN 978-0-99558025-1

A common line of advice given to poets building a chapbook manuscript is to stick to a single mood and unifying theme. In this, James Fountain has done an impressive job in his chapbook Last Stop. The mood is melancholy, and the theme is loss; familiar bedfellows to each other and to most fans of poetry. By the time the reader gets several poems in, it is abundantly clear Dr. Fountain knows well of which he writes.

Flying over Basrah and thinking of her, the smile she wore a few hours before. a kiss remembered, the sound of rain, lying beside her again.

—from Flying Over Basrah.

This is but one example of the emotion the poems’ speaker expresses and reflects on in the poems in the three sections of The Last Stop, Away, Home, and The Last Stop.

The feelings of sadness, longing for a lost love, and that loss are powerful and palpable throughout, but what first struck me as I read Dr. Fountain’s poems was the importance of place in his poetry. At several points I very much became enmeshed in the settings of the poems, and while—as with most writers—the senses of sight and hearing are most-commonly used in his poems, Dr. Fountain does such good work in description and word choices that I could feel the temperature outside his speaker’s window, smell the air where his speaker was walking. The world the poems’ speaker inhabits becomes the reader’s, and for this, I greatly admire the skill Dr. Fountain exhibit in the best works in The Last Stop.

Terms such as “best works” are troublesome when dealing with art, since we do not share a common reference by which to judge the works we are examining. I questioned my choice of “best” vs. “favorite” works before writing this review. In every case the poems which I enjoyed the most in The Last Stop seem to me to be the most unique, most well-developed pieces from this book. These poems feature phrasing and line breaks that show very realized and careful intent on Dr. Fountain’s part and the pieces have left deep seeds in my memory which will remain for a good while. These are also mostly poems found in the book’s first and longest section, Away. The places and those who populate the places of which the author writes are given life.

Section II, Home, is comprised of a long three-part poem full of memories and ruminations with some admirable uses of poetic devices, but the overall impact of this section is dampened by instances of overused terms and clichés and, while I admire what seems to be Dr. Fountain’s goal of this piece, it ultimately falls flat for me, as his observations are not as novel as perhaps he feels they are. For as unique a vision the reader is rewarded with in section I, Away, Home comes off as a bit heavy-handed and disappointing.

The third section, The Last Stop, is three short poems full of loss and longing, and we come full-circle in this book’s mood and theme.

From my small room’s skylight comes the blue, faint streak of cloud crossing it.

As my eye wanders, I lie in early morning, conscious that you could see that sky from the other side of the world, three hours ahead, but devoid of cloud.

And how I wish I could see you as it does, whenever it likes, lazily.

—Skylight

In my re-reading of The Last Stop I carefully considered the progression of Dr. Fountain’s skills as a poet. Of course, I have no insight on when which poems were written, some perhaps years ago, some maybe days before the manuscript went to press. In that, some may have been revised numerous times and others may have been hot off his pen. I get the sense that some of the poems in this book are better-realized, better-revised, and simply better reads than others.

Overall there is real merit in what Dr. Fountain offers readers, especially in his poems featuring setting and other people, mainly those poems found in his first section Away. His powers of description are worthy of praise. His ruminations and loneliness, his statements of melancholy and discontent, featured mainly in sections II and III of The Last Stop, don’t seem to come off quite so well in comparison.

Emma Lee Reviews Bind by Christine Murray SB

By Emma_Lee | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Bind Christine Murray

Turas Press https://turaspress.ie/shop/bind-by-christine-murray/

ISBN: 978-0-9957916-4-0, 72pp, €12

Christine Murray uses minimal, impressionistic language to convey images from the natural world. bind is split into sections, bind , a hierarchy of halls , babel, wintering and Dawn, the name of the last section rocks convention by having an initial capital. The lack of capitals signals to the reader that all words are important and the reader has to consider where the focus should lie. In narcissus, from the opening section, a flower is on the bank of a storm-blackened stream, narcissus flower is a cut-out, it has shut in the cold skeining it back into bud. echo and, outbreath breathe – the thread skeins back, the blind buds are always. step (not-step) back then step (not-step) back then, back |back from the black river nets|

In Ovid’s version of the myth, Narcissus was tricked by Nemesis into falling in love with his reflection after rejecting the nymph Echo who faded until she was only a voice. The flower’s bold, yellow colour stands out against the bank where it’s trying to flower despite the March storms. It’s caught in this curious dance of trying to open its buds despite the storm. The spacing of words offers the reader to draw metaphors into the poem. The images are revisited in onyx which ends birds swipe, swirl through black, black, and back then. they split and pool, nonetheless they persist as mirrors.

Nature continues to face a struggle for survival in a hierarchy of halls, orchid ends, five-fingered-orchis bark clung / its webbed finger takes meat from hidden-streams a glint of stone | iron the divide

Those hidden-streams are about the ability of the orchid to seek sustenance in places not visible to the casual observer and how life survives in an apparently hostile environment. The poems in babel look at how the natural world is full of language, if only observers were patient enough to learn it, in without title it wheels upon, (it falls) a leaf fallen is always a poem

Reading and interpreting that poem depends on readers’ willingness to do so. The theme of patient observation continues in the wintering section where in winter in (erasure), a stone is held in / hostaged to dark water cold a (s)tone riffle skips skin surfaces

The final section, Dawn, brings a promise of spring from the previous landscapes of black water and seasonal cold, in part 10, slowly she seams a glitter. slowly, the hollow(ing) black-mirror foots the mire slowly, the tree at dawn. slowly sleeps’ corridors, opens out their hierarchy of halls.

The minimalist, impressionistic approach takes the risk that the reader is prepared to make a bit of effort but the poems in bind reward that effort. The images remain in readers’ memories after the book is closed because they are suggestive of mysteries and hidden depths that the reader can choose to explore. The graceful control of the poems demonstrates skill and understanding of lyric and subject. bind is a book to dip into and return to with the possibility of seeing something new on each visit.

Other Voices 2 : Individual Poems Selected by Shirley Bell

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

STREET MINUTE

You’ll remember their faces when you look not glance, not fixed-forward stare stiff lipped lying about having no change You’ll notice their gaunt stubble, smiles with careless teeth ingrained hands on curled dogs pressed pack-tight on weary blankets

You’ll see them huddled, mute within a depression as heavy as the anchor-weight of the streets submerged in a bleak world of knees, legs, feet passing in intimate indifference

You’ll see their defiant bruises purple yellow flags of abuse, scars like rusted grilles on abandoned properties from drink, screaming fights, falling, frozen in the insular flow of spice

You’ll see them and answer the rote enquiry with a smile, an affirmative and a question on wellbeing, hand over something enough, chat and pet an off-white dog share a joke and a rare moment of common humanity

You’ll remember them, when you look, remember their name, the person behind the face and you won’t pass blithely by, again

Rick Howe

The Picture

I’m walking up the trail to get a signal from a distant cell tower wanting to send you a picture of the mimosa tree the one where you had to dig out that red sandstone some ancient monolith clinking against the shovel until you pried it up rolled it hulking in black dirt to leave a hole deep enough to set the sapling into heap up the rich loam from the yellow wheelbarrow how you placed the red rock then to protect the slender trunk encircled it with wire fencing constructed from old hardware cloth you found in the barn in the hope of warding off marauding deer today I want to send you fans of pink cerise stolen from swaying coneflowers dotting the pasture where the one-eyed horse still holds court this picture between us like a long book with pages exceeding those thousand words we never got around to saying.

Pat Anthony so, I’ve said ad libitum over the decades, love doesn’t freeze well, its Inuit duvet ices over – not that we can’t walk in a hefty Canadian blizzard hand (glove) in hand (gloved) – but love, honey-combed and fabric- softened, tends to crystalize into bite-sized cracks like thefoie gras of chocolate icing on a Magnum, consumed quickly before nightclub jazz musk oils slightly dampen greenish tinder striking a poorly stacked bonfire, marshmallows melting into a gooey slop like adolescent first kisses that nonetheless augment trial- and-error sensations of heat [i.e. heartthrob (that sweet aching (a mimic of cardiac arrest instability)) – ah! its innocent fluttering – ] although later it will take much more to extinguish passion’s grip, the lust and the wunderbar lightning bolts (otherwise known as the swift tango between Cupid’s arrows and Venus) that nurture love; and deftly, in (throughout, beyond) love, permafrost or desert love, two-hearts-that-never-fully- touch love, story-board comic, hope, or dramatized TV love, their embrace a leit-motif of imaginary, fleeting, manic-depressive, phantasmagorical, life-sustaining and every other word-painted thing poets invent to give sustenance to that which sustains the non-sustainableness of life – yes, we, heartbroken poets, prefer to call all this aforementioned glossary “love” – and we pray (how we pray (especially weekend stained-glass pray and the revelations found in its outspoken mirages)) that its first touch sticks like the first, thick, skiable snowfall before we squander it, bear-hugged, lush and slippery, and we vow to pawn off anything reasonable (the beloved?) not to damn ourselves (or condemn ourselves to celibacy?) not knowing if, when or why its lost rendez-vous turns up years later, unreasonably white-washed and musty, in a post-office lost-and-found bin without a proper return-to-sender label legibly written and pre-stamped, yes love – with its ships- crossing-in-the-night, star-crossed whys and wherefores – gets forgotten

…

Other Voices 2 : Individual Poems Selected by Shirley BellRead More »

The Contemporary Short Story by Fiction Editor Mimi Gladman

By Imogen Gladman | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

A Pick of the Best Contemporary English-language Short Story Collections

Short stories appear widely in literary magazines, as well as in the relatively small number of mainstream publications that publish literary short stories, notably The New Yorker. There are also plenty of anthologies and single-author collections of short fiction published, and the form seems to be becoming increasingly popular.

Short fiction should not be considered as a somehow “lesser” form than the novel: as the Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy has noted, short fiction is “small, in the way a bullet is small”. The short length that defines short fiction means it can be more accessible in our internet-heavy, information-overloaded times, while it also has a sense of immediacy that the longer form can lack. Moreover, where a novel may be too time- consuming to read twice, a short story demands to be read again. A good short story often benefits from a second reading, as the abbreviated form means that information that could be spelt out in a novel must instead be deduced. The short form is constantly evolving, and I’ve listed here some examples of the best collected short fiction written in the English language in the last decade.

British writer Sarah Hall is a past winner of both the National Short Story Award and the Edge Hill prize, which was founded in 2006 to recognise outstanding single-author short story collections. Her most recent collection Madame Zero was published in 2017, shortlisted for the Edge Hill prize in 2018, and appeared on several “book of the year” lists. The collection opens with the award-winning Mrs Fox, and continues with tales from a wide range of genres, both realist and post-modern, which sometimes lean towards the surreal or science fiction, and are never less than rewarding and entertaining.

The debut collection of short fiction by writer and playwright Lucy Caldwell, Multitudes, was published in 2016, and is set in Belfast. She skewers the experience of, in particular, girlhood, and her characters are so real, it’s as if she crawled inside their skin. The subjects of these stories, with their moments of teenage epiphany, resonate with my own memories of growing up. You don’t need to have shared her characters’ experiences to enjoy them: Caldwell is an insanely talented writer. I’ve also recently really enjoyed reading Irish writer Kevin Barry’s collection Dark Lies the Island (2012), described by the Financial Times as “a shot of joy in the dark”, a description that really can’t be improved upon! These stories are, in a way, the diametric opposite of Caldwell’s tales, with male voices, sometimes bawdy — and again, consistently brilliant.

There are many excellent American short story writers. George Saunders is never not innovative. His dark, well-characterized and often mordantly funny collection Tenth of December was published in 2013, and is an accessible introduction to this brilliant writer, whose Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Lauren Groff has been shortlisted for the 2018 US National Book Award for fiction for her collection Florida, set in that state, is full of evocative and lush descriptions, and she writes in eloquent prose. An honourable mention must also go to Ottessa Moshfegh’s collection Homesick for Another World, published in 2017, in which a motley collection of disconnected and lonely misfits try to find their place in the world; often shocking, sometimes grotesque, these stories are completely unique.

Renowned writer Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (2009) is a collection of five stories predicated on the subject of musicians and the night. They largely document the fragmented lives of self-absorbed, sometimes narcissistic, always misunderstood and misunderstanding characters, who consistently fail to fully connect with those around them. The stories are sometimes very witty, and indeed the second story, Come Rain or Come Shine, I found laugh out loud funny (I hope it’s not just me). Stand-out collections also include Jon McGregor’s This Isn’t The Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You, published in 2012. This, McGregor’s first short story collection (he is best known as a novelist), is a confident and accomplished book composed of haunting and ominous stories set in the fens of eastern England. Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is also known to most people for her novels, notably Half of a Yellow Sun. Her 2009 short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck discusses the lives of predominantly Nigerian women, often US migrants, and usually middle class. Stories such as Cell One are quietly devastating and humane, as the narrator’s ‘golden boy’, privileged brother experiences a moment of revelation in a Nigerian prison.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and there are many other authors out there waiting to be discovered. Of course, the fiction discussed here has all been published very recently. Next year I intend to revisit this theme, focusing on some of the vast amount of excellent work published a little longer ago.

The Goldsmiths Prize by Fiction Editor Mimi Gladman

By Imogen Gladman | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 The Man Booker Prize was won in October by Anna Burns, with her Northern Ireland-based novel of sexual coercion Milkman. There’s always a lot of media attention on the novels listed for the Man Booker, but I’m often equally or even more intrigued by the lesser-known Goldsmiths prize list. This is a British award launched by Goldsmiths college in London in 2013, which recognizes fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. So, an award for novel novels, with a prize pot of £10,000. Chair of the Judges Professor Adam Mars-Jones described this year’s six-strong shortlist as a “tasting menu of all that is fresh and inventive in contemporary British and Irish fiction”.

The ultimate winner, announced on 14 November, was Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, which I discussed in the last edition of The Blue Nib, as it also featured on the Man Booker list. Robin Robertson is a Scot who works in publishing in London, and has been described as “one of the finest lyric poets of our time”. The Long Take is a noir “narrative poem” set in both verse and prose about a traumatized World War II veteran, and is dark and strange and apocalyptic. Mars-Jones described it as “full of blinding sunlight and lingering shadows, formally resourceful and emotionally unsparing”.

Also on both the Booker and Goldsmiths list was In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne, again discussed in the last edition of the magazine. This novel is set in and around a London estate as it descends into race riots, and seems timely given the difficulties in some parts of London, the most unequal place in the country, where poverty sits alongside huge wealth. The remaining four novels on the list were: Crudo by Olivia Laing, Kudos by Rachel Cusk, Murmur by Will Eaves and The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici.

Olivia Laing has a written a number of well-received non-fiction books, including The Lonely City, an examination of loneliness and creativity, and The Trip to Echo Springs, on writers and alcohol abuse. Crudo is her first, short, raw novel, essentially a work of autofiction, or fictionalised autobiography. A state of the nation novel, she has revealed in interviews that it was written in a frenzied-sounding seven-week period, during which she made it a rule to write every day and not to read back or edit her prose. Her website describes Crudo as a “A Goodbye to Berlin for the twenty-first century”, as it catalogues the first summer of the protagonist’s marriage in 2017, in the year following the election in favour of Brexit and the rise to power of Donald Trump. The book is written from the perspective of a character called Kathy Acker, although the experimental novelist and punk poet of the same name died in 1997. Laing has explained this by stating that the novel is an effort to “plagiarise” her own life, with the Acker character a sort of cypher. The book is often funny, but also intensely serious, as it captures the feeling of living at a time of political crisis, while life ostensibly continues as normal. So, political developments are interwoven with the pervasive use of social media (the book is a peon to Twitter), everyday sensual pleasures and romantic entanglement. This book demands that we bear witness to political events unfolding around us, and refuse to allow ourselves to become numb to them, and recognises the value of art in challenging the political status quo. I enjoyed, if that’s the right word, Rachel Cusk’s motherhood memoir/meditation A Life’s Work back in 2004 after the birth of my first child; for that brutally honest account of the loss of selfhood Cusk received both adulation and opprobrium. Since then Cusk has also tried her hand at autofiction, which I admit to being fascinated by; the poster boy for that mode of writing is of course Norwegian author Karl-Ove Knausgaard, who is compelling and tedious in equal measure.

Cusk’s Kudos is the final instalment in a trilogy. In this third book the female narrator is a middle-aged writer who travels to an unnamed city in an unnamed Southern European country to attend a literary event, staying in a hotel in “a grey block surrounded by other, taller blocks of apartments, all of whose windows remained covered day and night by metal shutters”. It is the opposite of plot-driven, but piercingly observant of human frailties and female effacement. I have read the entire trilogy, and I loved Kudos. Cusk’s main character, if she can be called that, becomes a conduit for a succession of monologues by the people she meets on her travels, who share their experiences, largely of personal disconnection and disappointing and unfulfilling relationships. The book takes a fiercely feminist and intellectual perspective, underpinned by a thread of bleak humour and a flowing, dry style that make it an unexpectedly compelling read. And, although I always find it maddening just how many authors write about the literary world, I did enjoy playing a game of “spot the Knausgaard”. For example, here is a description of one of her minor characters, Luís: “This year he has won all five of our major literary prizes for his latest book. It has been a sensation, she said, because the subjects Luís writes about are subjects our other male writers would not deign to touch … Domesticity, Sophia said very earnestly, and the ordinary life of the suburbs, the ordinary men and women and children who live there … I write about what I know, Luís said, shrugging and looking over our heads at something in the distance.”

Murmur, meanwhile, I found intellectually challenging, dealing as it does with the very meaning of consciousness. Its focus is a character based on the gay, socially awkward (possibly autistic) mathematician Alan Turing, who was criminalized for his homosexuality and chemically castrated. He later committed suicide (though some, including his mother, maintained his death was accidental). The book is divided into three parts, the first and last sections being fictionalised journal entries, and with the middle, longer section made up of letters and dream sequences. The first section was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2017.

Finally, the amorphous and labyrinthine A Cemetery in Barnes is a deceptively quiet book that would reward a close rereading. It is very short, and should, I think, ideally be read in a single sitting, to immerse oneself in the musicality, loops and rhythms of the prose. Unfortunately, I did not do this, and read it in short bursts over several nights! The main character looks back on his life, the repetition of his days living in Paris, his marriage to his first wife in Barnes, and his time in Wales, amid descriptions of his love of his favourite classical music, in a work that mirrors an orchestral composition. The book has been described as a “stream of remembrance” and the protagonist notes that “In the one life there are many lives. Alternate lives. Some are lived and others imagined.” It becomes gradually clear that there may be more sinister facts underlying the deceptively smooth unspooling of the past. “That is the absurdity of biographies, he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadow over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death.”

Poetry- Cathy Bryant

By CathyBryant | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Unasked, He Teaches Me Photography

Keep your horizons level, he says. And not in the middle. Upper third or lower. But I don’t want a postcard, nor art. I just – that is – I mean – to catch that moment when I looked up from the sleeping sand, warm on my back, and saw, and saw, and saw, angles dancing in water and sky, lines and corners made of light and liquid sliding into each other, and they shone with brilliance. A seagull, he says, must either be a focal point or a counterbalance. Why counter? Why not just a balance? I ask. If something balances a composition, then it’s doing it to something anyway. The ‘counter’ is irrelevant. He looks at me sideways. The wind grows cold on the beach. I know then that I’m no longer in the frame.

Doggy

This will stay, I think, though I’m not doing much thinking. The feeling of the thick cock, that clockwork sex-toy sensation, only warm and human – that might melt into other memories of sex and joy. But this – not something we’ve done before, being new to each other, and not something repeatable, given my crumbling knees. But this sight – I turn my head and see you lost in bliss, lost in me. Your shadow is on the wall. Its head flings itself back as its perfect bottom pumps into the shadow of mine. A moving masterpiece on a white bedroom wall, in a rural village that rolls with the urges.

Crow Folk

Born at the time of falling leaves, I am a Raven of clan butterfly, soaring through the best blue. You saw my head twitch; that was when I caught sight of deer, dappled in trees, and otters slipping out of the azurite river. My husband, my mate, is a passionate creature – also a Raven, fighting off a falcon to win me on a Friday afternoon. Our desire for harmony gives us the persistence of ivy, as it fights up to where we nest. We need this southwest land, these western winds that bring us songs of hope; that show off our charm, matched though it is with the odd shrug of realism, as we eat the leftover dead.

The Wild Mother

I’ve played the wild mother for many a year and dealt with infections of throat, chest and ear. I’ve loved, fed and washed them with heart and with heft, and now I’m delighted because they’ve all left.

(Chorus) And it’s no, nay, never No, nay, never no more Will I play the wild mother No, never no more

I went to a clothes shop I used to frequent And all that would fit me looked just like a tent. I flirted with hot men, they answered me nay, your wrinkles are showing this bright summer day.

(Chorus) And it’s no, nay, never (etc)

I took from my pocket my Beamer’s keys bright and the hot young men’s eyes opened wide with delight They promised me loving and time of the best and their earlier words had been ironic jest.

(Chorus) And it’s no, nay, never (etc)

When my children come home I’ll confess what I’ve done, and enjoy the expressions of daughter and son. I’m sure they’ll forgive me as often before As they know that I’m good for a few cash gifts more.

(Chorus) And it’s no, nay, never (etc)

A Different Sort of Miss

When missing the sea and the plovers who peck tiny holes in the sand and such, it’s hard not to hold your husband’s hand, and check – that he feels it too, paying the coins of memory. What he says, with a look at your wedding band, in a kind of sad-snake-hiss: did you ever miss me as much as the plovers on the pebbles, did you ever miss me as you do the sea? It’s a different sort of miss, I say. You are my land. And you take me to the sea and pee by the groynes. I could not live every day with plovers, though to see their tiny hopping is something. Don’t be jealous of a wave or sand. The sea is only the sea because we see it, hand in hand.

Poetry- Susan Castillo Street

By Susan Street | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 TEST MATCH

We watch the cricket. Clueless American, British man. Tomay-to Tomah-to doesn’t even come close. I blink at the screen, hesitate but think, what the heck, ask sorry, but, er, what is a wicket? He smiles back, tells me gently, explains the meaning of leg in front, googly.

I remind myself that after all, he has passed the Elvis Test, cunningly designed to root out Americanophobes, though right now there’s a lot to hate us for. Still, a man who’s Sound on Elvis and a woman who strives to decipher cricket may indicate a willingness to speak and maybe even love each other’s language.

THE MUSEUM OF SOPHISTICATION

Cole Porter tinkles in a corner. Ava Gardner’s feather boa prickles, tickles. A dummy of Coco Chanel is corseted in tweed and pearls. Grace Kelly’s glamour’s sheathed in ice. She drives men wild. They think they’ll be the one to make her thaw. Marlene Dietrich’s hat and cane sheathed in seductive cruelty, nicht wahr? Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick puckers pink. ooh-poo-pa-doo.

I wanna be loved by you

Alone.

READING

I touch your skin read you with my fingertips sense your close-grained texture feel the warmth that seeps between the cells. The current shoots up my arms makes me want to live and live and live.

Poetry- Harold Ackerman

By HaroldAckerman | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Three Poems Starting with ‘W’

Written on a Torn Package for Eric and Chris That time I stepped to the blackboard to draw a shape with chalk as I spoke, trying to illustrate some notion of unity among a race of humans who were no more to raise up children that their words might hold against the spatter not of time but greed, as my arm moved I saw their faces blanch, their mouths shape awe, breath audibly rushing in, “What?” I said, “What wrong?” and turned to see how quite by chance, or grace, with no line or stencil or rule, I’d made a ring perfectly true, full, this one time, like a dream.

Where

They rumor where it ends, perhaps at night when we climb the cellar stair, shutting the light as we go, then we go; they rumor it where we least expect. What would that mean? We are never where we cocksure seem. So June distills to planting one river or black birch: its sawtooth leaves flutter like perfect tongues. Are they speaking to call us back? We rise, a little spoken, a little spent, staying for a moment Earth’s sure stop. We rise, have risen, here overcome the Earth’s sure weight. Where not?

What Matters

The first photograph would be historic in any case even had a mad lover of light and exact distances only bumped his awkward contraption to the floor capturing brokenly in its fall three gerber daisies dying unwatered in their workshop gloom; such gerberain any case would live preserved in every treatise, handbook, museum hall, studied by neophytes in every nation gloria mundi coacervatus while the sparrow, passer domesticus, at that same critical instant beating against the glass, furious to get any pale dried stems for its nest, that fluttering, would escape all history, like your voice today, like my longing for your voice today. Poetry- Kieran Egan

By egan | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

About the writer

Kieran Egan lives in Vancouver. He was shortlisted for the Times Literary Supplement (UK) Mick Imlah prize in 2017, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Canadian magazines Quills, Literary Review of Canada, Dalhousie Review, Qwerty, Antigonish Review, Canadian Quarterly, and, in the US in Tenth Muse, Foxglove Journal, Snapdragon, Shot Glass, Sheila-Na-Gig, Raintown Review, and in the UK in High Window, Orbis, Envoi, Acumen, HQ Poetry Magazine, Interpreter’s House, Dream Catcher, Dawntreader, and Times Literary Supplement on-line.

Cultural Confusions

A deserted diner off the highway; watched by the dark-haired, heavy waitress I ate alone and uncomfortable. Something wrong with her right eye so craning round to see me better with the left. Her Wyoming vowels offered pie Alamo-ed, or so it sounded to my English ear. After we sorted that out she returned to lean and watch. The coffee I ordered she placed down hard, bending over me to ask, “Do you scream?” Somewhere behind my ears splayed images of weary torturers in Russian cellars, racks, blades, pointed metal, Vlad, and Torquemada. But here chainsaws for American carnage in some slaughterhouse behind the kitchen. Fight or flight, in turmoil to evade her half-closed eye. Awareness seeping through my rising panic of a small jug by my cup and hearing the Wyoming, ‘Do you use cream?’ My brief panic is nothing. The sagebrush hills outside the window have known more brutal cultural confusion. I can see red hills in the distance, the scratched line of a road, some cultivated land, other lines that might be fences, where Red Cloud had imagined it stretching unboundaried for ever.

Everyday Choices

You are preparing to turn right to your mother’s where we are expected soon for tea, but let’s consider. I have a credit card; you could drive on straight ahead and within two hours we can catch a chunnel train, then head south through France, a night in Paris, another in La Rochelle, still reeking of history. We’d inspect the occasional castle or chateau, lunch with local wines by quiet roadsides, dinners on balconies with trailing plants, intimate times between crisp French sheets. Then we’d drive down the coast of Portugal to Lisbon, where we might spend a day and visit Jerónimos monastery again, hand-in-hand along the wide double-decker cloisters, ornately designed for the swagger of decadent abbots. Then winding west along the coast road to Sintra, taking an English tea above the glittering Tagus in Cascais, imagining those ships heading out on the wind to find new worlds. In Sintra we can take a shaded room for four days at Lawrence’s hotel, where—is it a recommendation?—Lord Byron stayed some years before. Or would you rather turn right now to your mother’s? I thought so. I left some items out of the equation.

Portrait Of A Lady

What choices had she made, what mistakes, that led to her sitting with a Mythos beer looking down at this gleaming yacht— easing into Hydra’s horseshoe harbor— at those people lolling with champagne looking up at her, a tourist at a bar? The man she married and the man she longed for were not the same, and the latter fool assumed the marriage vows he’d made when he married her best friend were to be kept. And the former fool she’d married and divorced had left her barely comfortable. A yacht and champagne might offer consolations but the bikinied girls, trying to look languid as in ads, were hardly older than her schoolgirl daughters. She’d have to settle for the crowded ferry back to Spetses, where dinner loomed at her hotel with contestants for Olympic boring gold. She’d splurge some Euros for a horse and carriage ride from harbor to hotel along the coastal road. The grizzled driver would reach to a bougainvillea and with practiced charm hand back a flower for her to tiredly smile and slip above her ear, which nobody she cared about would see. Hard, in the warm and fragrant evening, to see what choices might have made the difference of her glancing incuriously up from her yacht at the tourists looking enviously down, wondering about their mistakes, opportunities lost or unavailable. Still these islands must have known women who’d wreaked revenge on fate. Though the ones she could in fact recall seemed to finish up deserted, dead, or worse; turned into laurels, strangled, raped by gods, left by heroes off to better gigs. Surely some women unsung by bards got the right man and the yacht? But, as it was, the fool she’d married and the fool she longed for were cycling together round the west of Ireland; resistant saint and dreary scholar happily pedaling away.

Water Puzzle

We do not understand water, whence it comes, where it goes, and why the sea moves so, receives the great flood of rivers and fails to overflow. My village sent me to observe where river marries sea. I have studied and prayed, walked the shores alertly watching, paddled, swum, measured, weighed. It cannot flow, as some have said, into a vast abyss at the edge of the world, as the ocean, like our breathing, simply curls and uncurls. Water begins in the dark clouds, but I do not know how clouds hold so much, release so much as they float on the winds and yet do not decrease. I will return to our village, say there is no abyss, for the rest, no one knows. I do not understand water, whence it comes, where it goes, but I have grown to love the many ways it moves.

Whispers Of Caesar

Why would the branches whisper to me of Caesar? These coastal woods not those through which he rode. But, locals say, in the shelter of this hill trees from acorns from trees from acorns from trees can span a thousand years. So maybe, seven oaks ago, he sat under wind-articulating branches like these that whisper to me here today. Seated in a tent with his general, Quintus— some wine, some strategy—two impulsive men, both with disaster in their eyes, but now just laughing at the risks of this brash expedition. Later both wrote to Cicero, Quintus’s brother: letters that marched along the Roman roads, writing Britain into Europe for the first time. The kings he left behind were now in fee to Rome. With legions, horses, baggage, he’s long gone over sea and mountains and the Rubicon. I hold in my pocket as I listen to the branches a silver denarius from a field in Kent, which, seven oaks ago, Caesar might have spent.

Poetry- Jean Taylor

By jean.tay1 | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

About the writer

Jean Taylor belongs to Words on Canvas – a group of writers who work in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland. Her poetry has been published in a range of publications including Orbis, Northwords Now, Eildon Tree, and Envoi as well as online on Snakeskin, Amaryllis and Ink, Sweat and Tears.

Death’s Signature

Maybe I should have known, it rained so hard, that you had gone. Maybe I should have known that yellow tulips spilling from the vase reveal black-triggered hearts. Maybe I should have wondered, seeing the glass with its green edge, who we would kiss when there were no more frogs. Maybe I should have recognised your flourish in that splash of red.

These Are the Elements: some lines on the pathway a park bench a pale blue pram an old man a Madonna and child an unmarried mother some lines on the pathway an old man a park bench a pale blue pram a hooded perambulator an unmarried mother a park bench some lines on the pathway an old man a man with a long history a hooded perambulator some lines on the pathway an unmarried mother a park bench a dilapidated bench a man with a long history an unmarried mother a hooded perambulator a cross-hatch of shadows

Black and Blue

She was born into a landscape of bing hills and pitheads. Coal sequinned the pathways from sand dunes to the edge of the sea. Now she flinches from black as a child might draw back from a moment of hurting, chooses soft secondary colours amber, moss agate, amethyst. Wears blue to funerals. Other Voices 1: Individual Voices

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Seasons of the poet

Young Poet You lick pre-gummed words; first by mistake then nightly – love letters unsent.

Publication How to see your breath without a cold morning’s shock. Watching your soul fade.

Visiting Poet When critics mugged you, all they got was a guidebook to their own city.

Letting go Each poem unwinds more fuse-wire. One day you’ll be at a safe distance.

Love is like grass

It sometimes has rhizomes that you can’t keep out, and makes do with drab green flowers. Its main trick is to grow from a hidden place, not a bud. Even consumed by flames it returns as strong as before. You can find it wherever you go. It’s never alone – only tufts maybe, but never alone. It gathers where people gather – open-air festivals, football matches, or bursting up between paving stones. You don’t notice how new growth keeps replacing the old, you think it lasts forever. Don’t walk on the bare patches. Tim Love

Davoren Hanna A poem for one of Ireland’s greatest poets and, once, my friend the wheels of his wheelchair squeak along my femur he taught me how words are an upturned collar against it all he planted shame behind my ear when I let him go before he went my body shared my thoughts borrowed and words, these little, late words broken piano keys on the ocean floor

Steve Denehan

Glacier

If we call it fissure is it any less broken, the ice? the glacier slimming down, divesting weight. We invited the great blue crags to partake of our warm bath, merging our saltiness with theirs, with the multitude of lives within and around them; none were invited to our table of consequences, there never was consensus on black fuels, flooding. It will happen; ask some island paradise now. Its people will tell you, as they go under.

She Says

That’ll be enough of that for now, the hurting. I’ve let it have full sway for as long as it might need, pressing heavy to the plexus, niggling, contriving to not pass away. I’d like some plainsong now, some sweetness, marzipan. Perhaps to recall a scene seven centuries old, pealing of bells, bread, a startling strip of crimson. Come out, to be under the sky, feel delicate rearrangements of dusk, night time; attend. Still, the cords pull tight and hard in my shoulders, the perennial ache persists. So listen, I know that none of this inheritance is in my gift, I have nil right of surrender. I understand the imperative of no easy forgiving, the impedimenta of having existed. Only now…the sheltering dark, the hum of a small plane seeking to land safely, scratchings and bumps of nocturnals on a low, flat roof.

Linda Stevenson

Away But Not Gone

You are away but not gone your touch remains that personalized house to home

The line of cups peg hung in varied colors like song birds on a branch waiting above the feeder

The perfect fold of my shorts and T’s basic geometry in a bureau drawer socks neat rolls, each tucked to its place

Left overs portioned for your absent meals balanced, food not touching, each marked for oven time.

The scent in your pillow, Spring year round shoes in ranks and files

Sticky note reminders, calendar on the fridge bills, medicine, dentist birthdays, your departure, return, all marked

None enough, my dear, emptiness unfilled withal my longing near hurts, I am incomplete.

Jack Mullen

Treating shyness They gave him energy: Left meat, bowls of amber Lucozade built character through the application of pumice stone to any incidence of hard skin, insisting on the wearing of woollen trousers left outside his room when he dreamed of the light touch of cotton. His shyness? Imagine a big cat in a zoo, aloof, draped on a low lying branch, looking away. They were the gawpers, giggling, rattling sweet papers throwing sharp cans into the enclosure. His branch was the top of the stairs. They would toss up pants, socks, shout: “Come and say hello to Auntie Doreen”. He would stay put, growl, prowl the carpet bare, trapped in a captivity of his own making. Who he was, who he could be, was there for the taking.

Hermit Gaucho

The wind, relentless in its daily mugging, sharpens the creases in the silver lake. The mountains topped with snow even in summer, the polar light shines strong and long. He has horses, he is not a man without legs. He feels their comforting bulk riding the Patagonian plains. For 40 years he has been six months adrift from the newspapers, brought on a silent raft that ghosts through the lapping waters, say is happening. He survives on smoky cattle, their skins peeled off like a sweater. Horses help draw the water of life from the well. Horses, sheep, a distant bounty on his head Will all decide his fate.

Neil Clarkson

Bruce Lenny

There is no greater love Bruce. You just might be a pallet of paint left on the moon Or a pint of bootleg whiskey which was dropped on that weary floor by a careless drunk. Don’t look for greater love Bruce. You’ve inherited the worst lucks this generation has ever seen. Your skin burns at the break of dawn. You might mark an end to this great civilization! Buddy. …..“My face! Look at it a 100 times and tell me what do you see?” …Nay! Seems like I’m gazing at a short cripple who uses his trumpet as his cane. ……”You’re a moron, an idiot, a fool. I had been raised by the trees and the sun. Come with me to the park some night along with your band at the 4 adjacent benches near the leftover cement.” ……Oh okay. There is no love for you Bruce. God forgot to put you on a list son, Look how you lisp and skip while you chase angels of the heaven. My servants burst with laughter when you race for the bus station. They say it’s hilarious. They feel bad for you. You are one of those toys that children despise, mothers avoid buying. A rock compressed into dust. A lonely swing that may hurt the happy kid. There is no purpose in finding greater love, Bruce …..“I’m sure Idiot.”

Adil Sami

Sunburnt.

I remember the taste of tomato sandwiches on the beach the journey down to there was always stressful and long the heat of summer burned my skin.

The prayer to St Christopher was said before the engine was started I used to ask who he was and argued about the proof I was given. the heat of the slap burned my skin.

The tide was in and if not it was out a long walk from the promenade wall to the water edge my feet splashing in the tidal puddles on the sand the heat of the hand burned my skin.

The texture of the sand between my toes cleansing and sticking the waves above my chest splashing salt water between my lips the coolness eased my burning skin.

The call for tea and those tomato sandwiches was heard from a distance accompanied by the promise of the consequences if I did not return I imagined the soreness on my skin.

Lukewarm orange and barley water felt good against my throat sitting on the edge of some towel the sunshine blazing down no protection on my burning skin.

A walk along the tide the expected after picnic activity gossip heard but not understood before a greeting to a familiar face cheeky comments resulted in more burning skin. Dried roughly with a sandpaper towel but it tore between my toes sand still stuck in places that dared not to be touched but still I felt my burnt skin.

Days passed and by midweek the flakes were being picked rawness and sometimes blood appeared like bubbles on red raw burnt skin.

Brendan O`Neill

Consciousness and Control – Room Little Darker by June Caldwell reviewed by Brian Kirk

By Brian Kirk | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Consciousness and Control

Room Little Darker by June Caldwell 978-1788542906

Apollo (11 Jan. 2018)

When Room Little Darker was published last year it immediately grabbed public attention because of the dark subject matter of some of the stories. Some reviews hailed it as a book which pushed the boundaries of the form, seeing it as setting a benchmark for the short story of the future. In a recent interview in The Irish Times, Ashley Stokes, founding editor of Unthanks Books, told short story writer Aiden O’Reilly that his experience is that the short story is becoming darker, weird, twisted-out-of-shape, dripping with fear of the end and apocalypse.

Caldwell’s collection, at first glance, appears to be an exemplar. We have gothic stories that feature ghosts, a talking tree, a foetus with a consciousness and voice, sex fetishists, sex robots designed as therapy for paedophiles, abusive relationships and drug abuse. But at the same time each story is firmly grounded in place and time: Dublin in boom or bust, Belfast, London, Jersey. The situations as evidenced by the above examples are extreme, but it is in the quality of the characterisation that the stories move beyond the mere gothic and offer up to the reader layers of narrative meaning and emotional punch.

In the first of the eleven stories which make up the collection, Upcycle: an account of some strange happenings on Botanic Road, the female narrator downplays the story she proposes to tell. It is hardly worth telling, this story of mine. But, of course, it is worth telling; an uncomfortable story of an abusive father who continues to haunt the family home after he is sent to a nursing home against his will. Even after the narrator’s mother dies and the house is redecorated, she still cannot exorcise his ghost. He continues to haunt her, and she ends up feeling an affinity she didn’t expect, feeling strangely sorry for him. To think we were so petrified of him all those years ago when he was the one who was clearly so terrified of us.

In the story the father’s ghost takes on different animal forms. This deterioration into feral states appears in other stories also, such as Leitrim Flip and Imp of the Perverse. In these two stories the degeneration into animal nature is firmly linked to sexual appetite and desire. In Leitrim Flip the female narrator enters willingly into a subservient relationship with a man she does not even like. She is seeking ultimate control through sexual abasement and becomes irritated with her Master who really does not measure up. I’d already explained I was an ‘alpha submissive’, a different hybrid to the pain sluts and gormless kneelers. When things take a turn for the stranger and they are caged in a kitchen in Leitrim for weeks, Master (despite his military background) falls apart while it is left to Slave to take control.

In Imp of the Perverse Caldwell uses Poe’s story of the same name as the jumping off point for a study of the narrator’s self-destructive tendencies. A student pursues her professor even though she knows he can’t stand her. But when they kiss she is amazed to find that There was love in it. She becomes obsessed, mooning over him during the Christmas holiday, finding out all she can about him. He wants to control her, but even as she acquiesces she maintains her own limits, which infuriates him.

‘Get down on the floor, crawl around,’ he said.

‘I won’t,’ I told him. ‘I’d feel like a total plum doing something like that.’

Their sexual relationship also becomes animalistic; they nuzzle, they yip and yap. They size each other up; they bite each other’s muzzles, nibble at each other’s coats.

But he has made a complaint to the University about her. Her flatmate warns her, but she will not be told, and she is forced off the MA and embraces the feral state she has been gravitating towards. Loneliness stirs, shy and submissive, among the branches. Anger rises.

But it’s not all female protagonists struggling to take control of their lives in extremis. There are four stories where the male voice is central: Dubstopia, The Man Who Lived In A Tree, Natterbean and BoyBotTM each feature a man who tries, with varying degrees of success, to keep hold of a life that is on the point of spiralling out of control. Dubstopia, appropriately enough, achieves Joycean flights of language as Gonzo makes his way around the city on a doomed mission.

Brenner in De Joy on the left, IRA prick, dying for Mother Ireland in a 15×20 exercise yard. The Mater Hospital with its wheelchair morgue; militia of swollen ankles.

In The Man Who Lived In A Tree Rashi is an Indian immigrant and alcoholic who, in an attempt to find some peace, makes a bed for himself in a willow tree, but the plank bed was hard as destiny, and inevitably official society finds its way to him in the form of police and social workers.

The taxi driver in Natterbean seems to be in a much better position than most of the characters he encounters; he has a wife and child and a steady job. Driving a junkie around the city all day he vacillates between self pity and resentment towards his passenger. By the end he is touched by a shared humanity – surprised by the simple tenderness he witnesses between two friends: The way Breezer hugged yer man as if he was a warm marshmallow. Never seen anything like it.

Of all the stories in the collection perhaps it is BoyBotTM that attracts the most lurid attention. Michael is wrongly convicted of paedophilia while his ex-lover John is the actual guilty party. The story commences on Michael’s release, which is dependent on him undertaking a new type of treatment: a dynamic new domestic-environment therapy with 100 per cent effectiveness demonstrated in trials across twelve countries on three continents.

The story is cleverly structured around the Five Stages of Grief and utilises an impressive array of literary devices including letters, dialogue and dynamic prose, including a particularly violent dream sequence.

SOMAT was first published in the anthology ‘The Long Gaze Back’, edited by Sinéad Gleeson, and is perhaps the most direct of all the stories in its intention. In an online interview with the author in May 2017, novelist Catherine Dunne described the story as: a howl of outrage against the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution which can reduce pregnant women in Ireland to the status of incubators’. Through the voice of the foetus Caldwell also manages to convey the anger and distress of the family concerned: “It’s about dignity”, Grandpa Brian informs the table. But there is very little dignity left for anyone as the weeks pass:

No visitors allowed in to see Mama now under any circumstances, because she is, let’s be very clear about this, not in decent fettle. Stew meat that’s been on too long,. In The Glens of Antrim we are in similar territory to Leitrim Flip. Emails are exchanged between the protagonist and her former lover and a picture of a onetime sexually adventurous relationship emerges. The mundane tone of the emails is at odds with the excesses of the past. And yet again, there is that tension between desire and need, between control and submission. As with so many of these stories, despite the excesses and the psychological hurt, a dark sense of humour is never far off: I’ve read Freud. Got a better longer lingering understanding of the human condition (through yet another dead man).

The Implant is unusual as it’s the only story told in the second person. The timeline of the story runs from the installation to the final removal of the implant, describing in visceral terms the physical and mental suffering of the woman. The second half of the story is a transcript of information gleaned from the contraceptive implant’s video sensor, where the protagonist is designated as SUBJECT and her boyfriend as MAN, giving the story the feel and immediacy of a drama. A dark humour pervades, throwing up many memorable exchanges between the parties. “Isn’t it great how suffocating you are while always managing to be utterly neglectful,” SUBJECT remarks.

In the final story of the collection Cadaverous Moves the story unfolds in reverse chronology from the death of the narrator’s older brother and proceeds back through time spent together in London, Jersey, a teenage holiday in Blackpool and back to their childhood in Dublin. The tone here is markedly different; there is a real sense of familial love throughout. It is telling and touching that the author chooses to end the story (and the collection), not at the point of death, but at the very outset of their lives together, closing with the voice of her six-year-old brother speaking: “I am your brother, I am your brother, I am your brother.”

There is no doubting Caldwell’s gift as a writer, particularly the way she can inhabit the mind of her characters and bring them to life with such vibrant immediacy. In what is known as literary fiction sometimes the story or plot can be sacrificed on the altar of language and style; and there is no doubting here that Caldwell’s facility with words and stylistic brio is impressive, but her preoccupation and engagement with story is equally important as can be seen in these eleven impressive stories.

Ruth Ennis- The Senses in Literature

By Ruth Ennis | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

In creative writing, the author caters to the appeal of the targeted readers. As every audience is as diverse and complex as the people that make it, there are very few factors that can apply to everyone. One factor we can – almost – always take for granted is the ability to connect through basic, instinctive, human senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. The author utilises this common thread in various mediums of literature. They are used to complement or to contradict the thoughts of the characters, or audience, or events, or places. They are used as a fundamental familiarity in an unfamiliar context; when a reader opens the first page of a new book, they rely on the comparisons of senses to translate the unfamiliar into the familiar.

Often, though far from always, these five senses are deliberately descriptive and comparative; intertwining the known and unknown combinations to create a hybrid that is a simile. Subjectively, the most common of senses explored in these similes is sight. However, it would be negligent of anyone writing literature creatively to deny the other four senses. Yes, we can indulge how Nana’s old blanket is “as colourful as a bumblebee hugging a flower”. But how does it appeal to the other senses? Is it “as soft as kittens’ fur, as familiar as a mother’s perfume, as comforting as homemade bread, as nostalgic as the forgotten nursery rhyme”? It is the duty of the author to encapsulate the reader in as many senses that is practical and engaging. The senses are an authors’ tool that enrich the narrative with its presence, and denies it of intimacy with its absence.

It is important to recognise certain senses are more apt to certain literary mediums than others. In film, we are told repeatedly to “show, not tell”. Subject to artistic choice, film is attributed to encapsulating perspectives in a unique and physical way that is not as applicable to other mediums. In film, sight is displayed, edited and manipulated to give us a very calculated perception. When Johnny is scripted to walk into the room, and the next shot zooms on the decorative teacup in the corner, we, the audience, immediately translate that sense of sight to portray importance on this now-significant tea cup. However, if this context was set in the theatre; Johnny is scripted to walk into the room, and looks at the tea cup. The visual impact of this action is lessened due to the ambiguity of sight on stage; the audience can translate the entire stage generally, but without the direction of the writer, cannot translate acute impact as intently. Sight is deliberately more meaningful in the medium of film than it is in theatre. Theatre relies on the combination of senses more equally. Alternatively, and arguably, the medium of poetry, particularly slam poetry, relies on the sense of sound. This essay focuses largely on the role of the senses in creative writing of prose and poetry.

Sight

Broadly speaking, sight is the sense catered to the most in prose. It takes an incredibly brief amount of time for the eyes, as the receptor, to accept information, transfer this to the brain to be rationalised, and transfer this information as a reaction in the body. It is instinctive, instantaneous, and impulsive. It is also, potentially, the most familiar of senses, which can be used to the advantage of the writer. A writer can provide the generalised visual information in a scene; “Charlie walked into the classroom”. The reader, familiar with the sight of a classroom, can use this information to make generalised assumptions; the classroom has chairs, tables, a blackboard, etc. The writer can use this rapid assumption, based on familiarity, to develop the visual information that is considered more relevant and more unique to the scene; “Charlie sat at his desk, where his most recent game of hangman was etched into the wooden table”. The writing is enriched by the strategic use of sight, what is visually familiar, by focusing primarily on visualisation that can contribute to setting, character or plot development.

Due to the speed we can process visual information in a text, the reader doesn’t not often need to translate the sense to a comparative. Rather, sight is the default comparison. It is not unrealistic to assume that most average readers are visual learners. That is to say; they can relate and remember informational imagery more consistently and detailed than other senses that may need to be translated. This speed can be used to the advantage of the writer. When articulating pace in an extract, an author can utilise the intense speed of visual processing to make the pace of the narrative faster. This can be particularly useful for, but far from limited to, action scenes. In an extract, the physical and visual description of an act and events can be understood at the pace as if the reader was experiencing the sight themselves; “She saw that black hat and coat combination. She ducked her head. He waved to her. She blushed and rushed past him”. Whilst other senses contribute to the emotional state of the scene, sight is undeniably a practical tool for providing fundamental information at a lifelike rate.

Sound

Sound is just as familiar as sight to the average reader. However, it tends to be recognised in a less conscious manner. Whilst sight can be subjective, sound is more universal; you can close your eyes but not your ears. Information is less filtered and is more of a continuous flow of information. Therefore, it is the duty of the writer to distinguish what is relevant; how it can contribute to the understanding of a scene.

For film and theatre, sound and sight go hand in hand with each other. In film and theatre, just as it is as with sight, sound is dictated in the script to manipulate the audience’s attention. In a home setting, the “insistent ticking of a clock and the tapping of a sibling’s foot” reflects the building emotional tension of our angst-driven teenage protagonist. The screenplay or script intentionally heightens the importance of these ticks to establish and contribute to the “show, don’t tell” aspirations of the writer, in a less literal sense. General “background noise” is not, and should not be, limited to script. The establishment of the sounds surrounding a scene can offer that constant flow of information in seconds; both to replace sight and to compliment it; “The rush of the river made it difficult to hear Susie’s giggle behind him, but Fred recognised it nonetheless”.

Arguably the most common use of sound in writing is dialogue. It can be utilised across film, theatre, prose, poetry and more. In dialogue, the writer is expected to maintain a consistency in dialect, phrases and mannerisms in speech. In preparation for this, the writer must know the history, personality and objectives of a character in incredible detail. The sound of a character should be so clear to the reader that is comes as naturally as the flow of information that sound provides. Often, writers will create the sound of their characters with the phonetics in their speech; a southern Belle speaking as so: “Ah said t’wad be the end of mah mamma”. Arguably this is something of a crutch. If the emotional, physical, social and environmental setting of a scene is established well enough, the reader can create the sound of a voice with this information. When it comes to dialogue, the reader is not always given the liberty of establishing a voice of a character themselves, inhibiting a closer connection to said character.

Whilst dialogue credits a much deeper insight with its relationship with sound, it is important to recognise non-verbal sound and its attributes. Sound is important, not only within the narrative, but also the external of the narrative. In an age where audio books have grown to be a more common, potentially more convenient, means of enjoying a text, it corresponds with the importance of oral pronunciation. How a text sounds, how it is paced, is more significant to a reader than is always understood. Take for example in poetry and spoken word. While Shakespeare’s sonnets are meticulously constructed, they are designed to be spoken aloud. It is when a reader, or rather, a listener as your audience hears how perfectly each syllable is placed does it truly become a work of art. In slam poetry, the entire objective is how the words are paced, emphasised, iterated; the sound external of the narrative determines the reality of a text. It is the fine line between what is paper and what can become a reality to an audience.

Touch

For an author, to have a tool that can accurately convey emotional thought on a physical level is in valuable. This tool is found in the description, application and connotations associated with touch. Touch has a credible relationship with sight; in which we can see a touch on script, film or stage, and can immediately find meaning in it. Touch is an action; the physical representation of a conscious or subconscious internal state. Through the script of theatre and film, when we see a mother gently push her child into the classroom door on their first day, the reader and audience can comprehend the state of nervousness, apprehension and unease of the child, and the support, encouragement and determination of the mother. Touch is potentially the most instinctive and the most intimate of all senses in literature.

Touch can be experienced instantaneously, and, as a result, cannot always be translated in an articulate or otherwise sensual manner. It is based on instinct and appeals to the experience the reader, as a humane character. In prose and poetry, touch is described and used to replace articulating instinct. When “the boiling water from the kettle spills on Robert’s arm”, the reader can immediately intellectualise the intense pain that Robert can only articulate through profanity. Touch is also a significantly more ambiguous sense. You may notice that touch often can be subjective to the emotional and physical state of those experiencing it; attempting to impose literal reasoning to literary comparatives. Touch can momentarily dissolve the context of the world the characters exist in. Its immediate nature demands the attention of the reader, turning the focus from the “beautiful red sunset” to the notably smaller sensation of “bare legs grazing against each other, nothing between them but grains of sand”. Touch can enrich a piece of literature, arguably translating the unknown to more humane contexts.

Smell

Smell is notable for its intense and polarised nature. When driving on the motorway at top speed, we are not told how “neutral this road smells”. It is only when we reach the back, country roads do is the silage highlighted. Smell is an extremity, as in it demands recognition of its presence and cannot be ignored once realised. Therefore, smell is effective in setting a scene, particularly in prose and occasionally poetry. Because theatre and film are more visual arts, it could prove redundant to apply the specialised sense of smell to a distinctly different specialised medium.

Smell brings a heightened awareness to the character. When our daring protagonist walks into the factory and “the stench of gas floods him, he remembers James smoking outside the door”. A sense of danger is implied in a manner of seconds, without the physical description of the danger. Similarly, when “Kelly brushes past an older woman in the street, she catches her perfume. It is the same perfume her mother wore, and her eyes well up”. Smell holds close ties to our memory. It is not always easily articulated and is often used as a comparative to aid visual concepts; “The fireplace exuded the air of the oak tree it was patiently burning”. It is not necessarily as instinctive and as quickly recognisable as touch or sound. However, it does allow the author to assume intelligence in the reader, to make links and associations with the scents described.

It can act as a tool to memory, a reference for the present and a warning for the future. In the experience of scent, it can be found to be the most translatable of all the senses across the physical and literary medium of time. It is not easily tainted, or confused, or manipulated over time; unlike, for example, sight and sound. It is invaluable in interchanging exposition and developmental strategies in the progression of a narrative. Smell is unique in the limited attributes it can bring to a text, and it is up to the author to dictate the time and place to introduce it.

Taste

Both taste and smell intertwine with each other, in how they are associated with emotive responses in the reader. When you smell the homemade bread in the nearby bakery, you can vividly imagine the taste of it, warm in your mouth. A trope commonly displayed on film, the odour of a dead body inspires the desire to rid of the taste in the mouth, through spitting or, more dramatically, vomiting. Taste often acts as a product of smell; enhancing a sense to induce a fuller experience in the reader. However, it can also be utilised as a storytelling medium on its own.

The most obvious opportunity to use taste in a text is in relation to food. This is one of the few exceptions taste can be applied through several textual mediums. In poetry or prose, the author can detail “how sweet and welcoming the juice was, after a long day playing in the sun”. However, taste can be combined with sight to create a similar concept. The reader or audience does not need the taste to be articulated, because the piercing of the lips can tell us how spicy it is after “Carl spiked Tom’s coffee with red sauce”.

Taste is applicable to a careful variety of experiences. The taste of poisons, of a lover, even on a metaphorical level; the taste of freedom. Just as it is with the more ambiguous senses, touch and smell, taste can be indulged as a metaphor to iterate the unspoken. It is an effective tool to capture the instinct of desire; a taste is never enough and leaves us wanting more. Describing taste in a text, even through sight and smell, is a clever way to articulate “this is a beginning, and a middle, but there is more to come; the end of this taste will be worthwhile”. Because taste often collaborates with other senses to improve a narrative, it is not of less significance, but equal.

The senses are the greatest tool of a writer to any genre to humanise and make a text more familiar, and relevant to the reader. It can detail a character’s age, experience, maturity, intent, physical and emotional intelligence. It can describe the tone, risks, possibilities and consequences of a setting and action. The practise of exploring these senses in unconventional contexts should be encouraged; write an action scene using primarily touch, or a fight scene primarily using sound, or a love scene using all the senses. Exercises like these will encourage an awareness of the senses, that you can apply with a more natural flow to your story that will resonate with your reader. And whilst some senses may be less familiar to translate to the reader, they can result in a richer reading experience. They are vital to the credibility of the world the reader is exploring; as valid and sensual as their own world.

David Butler Reviews Maurice Devitt’s, Growing Up in Colour

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 MAURICE DEVITT completed the MA in Poetry Studies at Mater Dei, won the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition and was placed or shortlisted in many other competitions including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Listowel Collection Competition and Cúirt New Writing Award. Selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions in 2016, he was a featured poet at the Poets in Transylvania Festival in 2015 and a guest speaker at the John Berryman Centenary Conference in both Dublin and Minneapolis. His poems have been nominated for Pushcart, Forward and Best of the Net prizes. He is curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site.

Maurice Devitt Growing Up in Colour

Doire Press 2018 / 80 pages / €12 ISBN: 978-1-907682-63-6

Purchase Link

Pronouns are tricky customers. Much ink has been spilt on the degree to which the ‘lyric I’ in poetry can be read as corresponding (or not) to the ‘real life’ poet, if it be allowed such an entity exists. But as those of us of the Soundings generation whose schooldays were spent wandering the half-deserted streets of J. Alfred Prufrock are aware, the pronoun ‘you’ is, if anything, more slippery. Is ‘you’ intended to mean the reader, real or ideal? Is ‘you’ the absent addressee of a so-called ‘apostrophe’? Or an addressee of a private communication the reader is allowed to overhear? Is ‘you’, as one suspects in Prufrock’s opening invocation, somehow the obverse of the lyric I, a sort of second-self? And what of a poem sequence – is ‘you’ consistent, or is it variable?

The question is worth considering in relation to Maurice Devitt’s Growing Up in Colour. Of the fifty-nine poems, no fewer than thirty-three address ‘you’, while a further five contain that eternally ambivalent pronoun, ‘we’ – (Does ‘we’ include ‘you’, as in ‘hurry, we’re late,’ or exclude it, as in ‘we miss you’?) Indeed ‘you’ might be said to frame the collection, in that the opening and closing groups of seven poems all revolve around the pronoun. In a poem like The Consolations of Wool the ‘you’ is unproblematic – it is a chunky knit in red and green that has been the poet’s companion for thirty years, and which now causes quasi-parental concern: I worry / who will look after you when I’m gone. If the tone here is whimsical – and there is much whimsy and fantasy throughout the collection – that shouldn’t mislead us. This is a book haunted by absence and loss, and in the majority of cases, the ‘you’ is best understood as the absent addressee.

Growing Up in Colour is dedicated to the memories of the poet’s parents, Brian Devitt (1920-1971) and Pauline Devitt (née Kennan) (1927-2014). The dedication allows us to decode the Miss Kennan addressed in the opening poem, whose first job was sales assistant in Arnott’s, 1945; and also to guess at the owner of the eponymous watch that closes the collection, which stopped one day / at two-fifteen / and held its breath / for thirty years. The dates further help us to identify the bedbound ‘you’ of the second poem A Football Dynasty as the poet’s ailing father, particularly given the shared memory of watching Geoff Hurst score in Mexico, 1970 while I’m curled / like a dormouse / in the lea of the bed and hearing the accompanying cough / replayed / for forty years. Likewise, the ‘you’ of the poems in memory of Greg Leddy and Br Terence Hilary Devitt are unproblematic.

But who is the ‘you’ of the collection’s title poem, whose first tattoo is a small red heart / waiting for a name? Is this the same ‘you’ who disappeared for hours At the Beach, and is presumably the ‘Anne’ of its dedication? Or the you of the disturbing Truth or Dare who slipped through a hedge during a game of hide- and-seek which takes a nightmarish turn? Or of Missing, which begins You disappeared on one of those bright, / geometric days when everything is visible; or the ‘you’ found hiding in a well in the sinister Incident at Fallow Water? This can hardly be the you of Letters from Australia who had met someone and would not be coming back. Nor the ‘you’ who left the eponymous radio on a chair two years ago while tidying, a radio which has, since then, filled the gaps / in my crocheted life…pin-pricked my memory / with the song // that was playing / as you left. Is this addressee also the absent you of Noises Off, which opens Troubled by the silence / when you left, the heating coughed politely? Which of all these addressees is the owner of the old cardigan of Cornflower Blue that the poet leaves casually / on a chair, as though expecting / you to walk in anytime and put it on? At one level of course none of this matters – we have no entitlement qua reader for the matter of a poem to be made explicit. But how differently the words you left resonate in a poem about a deceased parent, an absent or abandoned lover, or a person who has disappeared or been abducted; how differently resonates that phrase as though expecting / you to walk in anytime…

If Growing Up in Colour is haunted by absences and the melancholy of abandoned objects, Devitt’s impish imagination never allows the collection to become mawkish. The fantastic has free-rein, here. In Hanging the Mirror, the ‘you’ who arrives to help, perfectly-equipped – inflated hammer and rubber nails –, steps into the mirror as though it were a lake and disappears. I have never seen a swan / smoking after sex, begins Forbidden Swan, but suspect they do; while (in a nod perhaps to the Monty Python sketch), another is titled The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’ In some, a surrealism akin to Angela Carter’s nudges the imagery in the direction of the dark fairy tale. Lost finishes:

Could we trust a man who stepped into our path – eyes the colour of hedging, haberdasher’s hands – and spooled the road like a ribbon, deft fingers smoothing every crease, scissors leaving just enough to get us home?

Debut collections have, very often, a ‘greatest hits’ quality – Maurice Devitt admits to two hundred poems composed over the eight years since he retired from the world of finance – and in addition to memories of parents, poems responding to artworks tend to feature liberally in them. In Devitt’s case, it is perhaps unsurprising that two of the tutelary artists are Magritte and De Chirico. If the you who paints while we swam in The Melancholy of Departure, which ends knowing that when you left, the sky / would never be the same may or may not be understood as de Chirico, in The Human Condition, the addressee of so you set up a canvas / and begin to paint the past arguably conflates Magritte with the poet himself in their concern to re-present (in this case) a tree that is no longer there.

Unlike oil-paintings, poems are constructs made of words, and it is in his imaginative lexical choices that Devitt excels. Of the tree of The Human Condition …a hectoring / but indecisive wind swags it this way / and that, until the roots, giant guy-ropes, / snap. The Single Twin’ lies in the jailed shadow of your cot, while the oystercatcher of the poem of the same name scurries across the mudflats like potassium on water’. A Slow News Day gives us a sky that is still undecided. A placeholder / of pesky grey; in Noises Off, a fridge hummed the grace notes / of a tune I vaguely knew; A Caravan in Kilkee has survived / the delinquency / of winter; while in Incident at Fallow Water we read of the freight of time experienced by the ‘you’ found inside the well. For this reviewer at least, it is the surprise and richness of image and imagination throughout that makes Growing Up in Colour stand out from so many other debut collections.

Jane Simmons reviews Anne Bevan’s first collection of poems

By Jane Simmons | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

TESTAMENT

ANNE ELIZABETH BEVAN ISBN 978-1-910855-82-9

£10.00

Lapwing Publications, Belfast.

Testament, Cork based poet Anne Bevan’s first collection of poems, has already received praise from reviewers: Anne’s poetry gets straight to the heart of the matter – whatever subject matter she alights upon. Her words transport you on an inner journey of the mind and soul; you find yourself connecting willingly and easily with her as she lays bare her emotions. John Dolan, Holly Bough Editor

This collection is loud with female strength: the strength of women delivering babies into better futures, and of beautiful, monstrous fertility goddesses who deal death as carelessly as life. With her fine, raw, visceral lines, with her interrogation of the interplay of gentleness and brutality, Bevan finds a way to ‘weep a song’ for the past which is also a battle cry of survival. Kathy D’Arcy, Poet

From the opening poem, A SONG FOR MOTHER, women are the heroines of the collection:

She ground her teeth, watching me, unshakable, ready, each word a reddened scar across my soft white skin. Bleeding salty tears and good intentions, emptying my childhood treasures carelessly to the orange carpet. Silent then, she shook back her dark hair, reddish in the evening sun. Dancing leaf patterns stitched her mind together, raw threads reflecting that other time. Each year clicked roughly into place and burned softly at our feet. I didn’t notice her turn grey, it happened while I slept in daydreams and doorways; her voice continued not to reach me. I waited ‘til her mouth stopped moving and left; behind me a limestone woman, her colour seeped into a faded orange carpet and I wept a song.

The poems show women facing hardships, in domestic settings and family relationships, and in a range of circumstances. We see them when the wider world impinges on their domestic lives, in times of economic hardship or time of war. Female strength, in this range of different settings and circumstances, is described and celebrated throughout the collection

The short poem APRIL 1945 provides just one example of their determination and resilience:

She sits at the pavement cafe sipping her coffee, inhaling her habit, the dilapidated shop front framing her perfect pout, fiery red lips, firm and brave in the face of wartime sounds. Stockings painted on bare legs shimmer the illusion coloured by lies; a brilliant actress in a bit part.

The women Anne Bevan presents to the reader are survivors: they survive personal tragedies and disillusionment, their dreams half-forgotten, and a pile of disappointments. Some are forced to extremes to provide for their families: Woman holds her skirts up high, to the landlord who calls to collect the rent, and to pay for food to put on the table for their families. They battle until they are little more than pain and nothing more than breath on winter window.

The poet presents an equally vivid depiction of the children who are caught up in the domestic struggle against hardship. She shows typical childhood fears whisperings in the dark that keep you awake at nights, but also those specific to the hardships of their particular domestic world. This is depicted movingly in the poem BROWN LETTY, where a child fears for the life of a favourite hen:

Letty hops into my arms, a loving chicken and I warn her to avoid the yard on Saturday mornings. That day we have chicken for dinner, always chicken.

Mother wrings their feathered necks with hard strong fingers, hands wrinkled and dry from work.

Every Saturday I cry.

The progressively shorter lines used in each stanza give a strong sense of time running out – for the chicken, but also for childhood innocence.

This is a world where brutality is contrasted with gentleness: a child’s back can bear weals and a corset of scars; a mother can provide benediction, but also retribution. Respite from hardship seems ever all too brief. Mothers struggle to raise their children, and wish a better future for their offspring. A daughter sees her mother as a woman with a proud face and a strong stance, a brave and powerful warrior woman.

The poet uses descriptions of domestic animals and everyday objects to provide ‘testament’ and bear witness to the lives of her characters: a chair, a table, plaster ducks on a parlour wall, a carpet, a hearthrug, chipped red paint, a jacket that smells of turf fires and cigarette smoke, a Massey Ferguson tractor. Dead parents appear in the grooves in the peeling paint of a doorframe. A prowling cat and feeding chickens appear in several poems – language linking the poems together.

In some poems the use of a more regular rhythm or the use a rhyme scheme can appear intrusive, detracting from the power of thought and language. More successful is the use of a list, as in SHE:

She was palest chardonnay, bitter sweet, delicate. She was smoky rooms, alive with laughter. She was brown earth, damp and rich. She was kindling, sharp and dry. She was bronze, shiny and robust. She was melody, breathed deeply. She was dewdrop, sad and transitory. She was kitten, barking. She was flightless bird. She was passion, greyed.

Elsewhere, the characters are brought to life by the use of dialogue: girl’and old fool – give a sense of the relationship of a long-established couple; sure, I’m alright and cheers sis convey the familiarity of other relationships; do you think the hens will feed themselves captures the exasperation of the mother, bringing the reader back once more to the powerful presentation of the female characters which is the stand-out feature of this promising first collection.

Emma Lee reviews “Afternoon Drinking in the Jolly Butchers” by Rachel Coventry

By Emma_Lee | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Afternoon drinking in The Jolly Butchers feels like being invited to join in a casual conversation with a group you found yourself sitting near to in a pub or café because the conversation sounded interesting and the participants noticed your curiosity. That’s not to say that the conversation doesn’t tackle darker or intricate topics but the starting point is one of welcome and engagement. The title poem shows how each decision has an alternative option that would have led to a different conclusion, so now you and me as we turned out are galaxies apart from the last time we agreed the last time you asked me shall we have another one?

The poem had a colloquial tone but ends on a note of regret of separated friendship. The third and fourth quoted lines, are galaxies apart/ from the last time we agreed stops this becoming a nostalgic poem about that lost friendship but keeps the focus on the separation. Nostalgia is kept away from Poppies, a prose poem, which examines a memory of taking opium with a now dead friend,

I cannot say how long we stayed but one night the moon was more full and more beautiful than it has ever been since. It lit you silver, you in your Pony Express leather and your army boots. It lit me too, shining right though the bullshit to the single pearl at the centre of all existence.

The next day it rained. We woke to the grey. The cicada now singing under my skin. I could not bear to talk, could not bear your English drawl. We got on the bike and you found the road north. It too explores how decisions can separate people who were once friends. The detail of the memory of the silvered moon has lasted longer than the memory of exactly where they were or how they ended up taking the drug. It contrasts with the dismal weather the following day and the reluctance to converse. The pondering over decisions made and their aftermath continues in The Lilac Falls where a storm has felled a tree,

Standing before every choice I made now unfurled paper snowdrops cut on the fold

all beginning with you, mother cycling home from the market a baby tree in your basket

every eventuality happened, near infinite versions of myself all doing something else

The poem moves from the concrete image of a mother planning to plant a sapling to the abstract of multiple parallel universes where every decision the poem’s narrator made sent clones of her on multiple life journeys. But the reader doesn’t know if any of the alternatives were preferable or if the narrator is pleased with the choices this version of her made. It lacks the engagement of the earlier poems.

To an absent parent looks to the dumb O of an open mouth and the struggle to grieve when the parent passes away. The poem ends,

I’m a fraud at the graves of other people’s parents. I wear black like Amy Winehouse in a music video

The poem’s narrator did her grieving when the parent left her so struggles to grieve when the estranged parent dies. I’m not sure how much the reader is to invest in the Amy Winehouse reference. The singer/songwriter didn’t wear black much of the time so it seems to be a reference to the Back to Black video which was a song about infidelity where the singer watches her lover return to his partner/spouse while she, the mistress, is discarded. It could be a suggestion of how a child feels being picked up by an absent parent when they feel like playing at being a parent for a short time while the child knows they will be discarded again. Or it could be the reviewer reading too much into an image. A reader unfamiliar with Amy Winehouse’s songs would respond differently.

A later poem comes across Two swans on the pond at UCD who are

dipping and lifting, imperfectly mirroring articulating some silent thing

and I too dip and lift in the mirror of myself drift again, some impossible question of you I guess

when I come back they too are drifting apart on the water’s flickering imperfect glass.

The narrator avoids questioning herself too deeply, sticking to safer surfaces. The poem brings the reader back to the collection’s theme of separations and what could have been if a different route were taken. Reading it feels like having an afternoon drink with a friend where you keep the conversation light, ask questions but skim over tricky answers until you find yourself at home, thinking about what wasn’t said but shared nonetheless.

Poetry- Pauline Flynn

By pauline flynn | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

About the writer

Pauline Flynn is a Visual Artist/Poet. She lives in a small village in West Wicklow. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UCD, was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2010 and is published in various literary journals in Ireland, US and UK, including Light, a journal of poetry and photography.(NY) Orbis,(UK) Skylight 47, The Boyne Berries, and Sixteen. She enjoys travelling and lived for four years in Japan on a Japanese Government Scholarship. Pauline is a member of the Carlow Writers Coop and enjoys the challenges of this active group of writers.

INTERLUDE

At twilight by a low stone wall, a small boy in pyjamas holds a glass box full of fireflies, points to his father swinging a net in wild choerography in the ricefield under the roard. He lifts the glowing cube to the faces of the strange couple who pass by, skips away with delight. From their guesthouse the man sketches the scene across the water, the woman reads ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn. Beneath the veranda the sea pulses its ostinato, laps the moored boats, the harbour wall.

LOVERS

In a bar in Kyoto she sips at the edges of a man’s elliptic eyes. He draws her to a love hotel and says, “I want to take you somewhere special” as he closes the door behind them. Hairless skin smooth to touch. The Karaoke machine silent.

Somewhere in the empty streets the slow roll of a shutter sounds the beginning of a new day. Outside, they pass a woman showering her potted plants in the early morning sun. Soothing trickle of water.

They enter a small cemetery en route, visit his ancestral graves––a miniature high rise city for the dead. Smoking incense heady in the cool air.

In an old Kyoto’s coffee house their hands brush lightly, soft as an exhalation of breath. on her young pale face she rubs nightingale droppings winter turns to spring

THE ROUTE HOME

I pass the Police Box, walk through the gates of Zoshigaya Cemetery, take the path for home. An old woman makes her way through graves, her back bent, flowers in a pail of water, a bundle of smoking incense in her hand. Inside parked cars on the tree lined avenue salary men sleep. Boys loiter with fireworks, a dog strains at its leash, a women jogs by. Between two grave stones a line of washing sags in the warm evening air.

SOJOURN

Carrying a suitcase he hitch-hikes through the night, reaches Kyoto by noon. At her house he climbs the stairs two by two laughing. In her room, he scatters camellia petals – a quilt for her bed.

LEAVING

Through a crack in the shutter a sunbeam catches a rip in the tatami in the empty room, its interior stripped of its treasures –––fusuma, shoji, tokonoma, the sasanqua and the maple tree from the garden transplanted to a communal park in the suburbs, the stone lantern returned to the mountains. Soon the bulldozers will flatten the ceder wood frame, smash the soft grey roof tiles, bury all trace of your touch beneath the rubble. For one last time you slide the door along its track, turn the key in the lock.

Poetry- Melissa Mulvihill

By melissamulvihill1967 | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Fata Morgana

I am lost on the Lake deliberately at sea tossing about in moody waves raging in storms of fictive selves struggling for a critical angle ebbing in the middle of my life suffering from erratic life sources changes in speed and direction not steadfast vanishing occasionally absconding on the horizon haze a fata morgana my light passing obliquely through the illusions of blazing beginnings and conjured endings casting about and reeling in before I come to naught dispersed and scattered unable to gauge apparent height remembrances so heartrendingly raw my breath catches I choke on my small eternity an infinitesimal blip on a temporary horizon in the presence of so much unproven promise an untamable energy unconcerned with time remembering delivers me while the island on those far shores evaporates my forgetting dismisses me moments disintegrate their traces lost taking everything in the end

Inspired by West Sister, an island in Lake Erie, that can be seen from the shore occasionally because of the refraction of light

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Time Will Spend Us

Time will spend us Like sands infinitely tiny and forever Scooped up, held sweaty in fist Blowing, rolling, grinding down ever towards the earth the sea the forgetful waves

Time will spend us Like decrepit fingers clutching at the clay Slumbering, waking, roots shooting forth Green swaths sparkle, over harvested, logged, dwindling when viewed from satellites from planes from drones

Time will spend us Like vivid colors drifting, swirling in our oceans Spilling forth from stomachs of animals Who nurture, who speak, who remember where to give birth where to gather where to die Time will spend us Like drinking water unprotected from Corporations who are people they say With invisible chemicals, with wicked greed, with bottom lines to protect in court in print in commercials

Time will spend us Like amnesiacs who named flowers weeds Confused religion for facts Forgetting our history, forgetting our past, forgetting science is about correcting flaws about admitting mistakes about human discovery

Time will spend us Like pits of waste reeking of run off and protein consumption and ballooning populations Pumped full of steroids, antibiotics for masses Saturated with antidepressants, alcohol, and frenzied calendars wondering what to eat wondering where to seek relief wondering about moderate to severe illness

Time will spend us Like we spent it, in fear, in corrupt blindness, in thick denial That Proxima Centauri or any other remote star holds our truth Another earth to be raped, to be pillaged, to be ruined in ignorance in exchange for entertainment in a bargain for convenience

Time will spend us and The earth will devour us, exhaust us, and reduce us to our smallest parts Cosmic dust shifting about mingling with background radiation Until democracy is a memory, until cooperation is an afterthought, until we are weak until we are broken until our stories are forgotten until science is story until the enlightenment is myth until myth is truth until no one even recalls quarks and leptons until the carbon cycle is ridiculed as lies until the air dancing and skimming across the land is magic until we are at the mercy of ourselves once more until we concede to men who ordain and declare until are undoubting that we are the center of the universe until we are digging up ancient architecture battling each other raising walls and amassing weapons.

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The Mark of the Empty

We are the same species that banned as heresy at the council of Myassia the idea of Zero despite humans flirting with nothingness thousands of years before in a world of constant change violently cataclysmic and delicately paced it is the work of culture to make us feel special but we are here to bear witness as material creatures in a material world

We are the same species that struggled with the allure of absolutes and our place in infinity under the limitations of declarations such as god is in everything that is and everything that is not is the devil

We are the same species that sanctioned the illegal and secretive use of zero the same people able to count the totality of what is not there but we cannot manage to respect the shifting cycles of nature

We are the same species capable of debating if numbers exist outside the human mind but we cannot convince the most skeptical or the ignorant to name the solution set to making peace with endless permutations of survival

We are the same species who eons ago carved the ideas of zero in the temple wall of Gwalior and who etched the Bakhshali text on birch bark exploring nothingness blankness non-being We are the same species who gave birth to Aczel whose odyssey to Find Zero led to an old shed at Angkor Conservation that sheltered a stone stele, K-127, inscribed with “The Chaka era reached year 605 on the 5th day of the waning moon.”

Maybe the oldest invention of place holding ever found

We are the same species to name the void then fill it with Descartes and Hawking but we cannot remember the lessons of learning by comparison by empathy by compassion

We are the same species to know happiness as the deepest thing and sadness as the other deepest thing but we cannot lay hands on the emptiness left by fear and hate

We are the species gazing at the unloveliness and inelegance of ourselves in increasingly larger numbers that are not practically countable not the quality of being 1 or 2 or 3 together not named as distinct we are in danger of leaving nothing but the Mark of the Empty to demonstrate on this day in the 8th month of the 2018 cycle in the age of digital that we took out an unpayable debt and defaulted because we could not hold and name our place.

Poetry- Anne McMaster

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Lost and Found inspired by Robert MacFarlane’s The Lost Words

You might think we lose these words as one may, casually, lose a small cool coin behind the sofa – or as a sweet that melts into a sticky mass in the corner of that pocket of our favourite winter coat.

But this is so much more.

We first forget the shape of the word in our very mouth – that thick curve of tongue pressed against teeth, pursed lips shaping now unfamiliar syllables spitting words out like rough, unworn pebbles only to hear them fall into dead air flat beside our feet.

Then we forget their meanings – these words that tied us to our moments, our memories, our seasons and our way of life. A door quietly closes. A light gradually dims. Before we know, both the explanation and the experience – the meaning and the moment – are gone.

To lose these precious words, is to lose relationships; stories that should be both our connection and our currency – our link to the present and the past.

Share these words even now. Seek to explain and to understand. Offer them generously to others like a strange, familiar fruit. One that blossoms in hidden corners, still. Taste. Remember.

Waiting for rain

A soft, pressing warmth tonight. Birdsong threaded Like a skein of fine gold through the quietening evening air now marked by beauty of a single season’s song. The air hangs still tonight – bearing down – all scent from the hedges, settles where they grow, lies limpid. Still. Only the cushioning hum of autumn bees, collecting, now, moves beneath the air. No leavening breeze, no movement from the sky. no coolness next my skin. No sound to carry towards me now but the evening paused and still, heavy with scent. Waiting for rain.

Evening Fog October is the month the mists draw in. These calm and freshly silent mornings settle summer and draw reluctant autumn to our door. The evening fog falls low on crop-shorn fields as rolls of rich, mysterious white seep through the emptying hedges and fall in ragged scraps of soft, pale mist that scatter loosely at our feet like something worn. The animals will walk within this now – a second skin – shielding themselves from hunter and from prey while we, preparing for the still, small death of winter’s blast mourn what is concealed – soon to be lost.

Poetry- Mark Tarren

By Mark Tarren | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 In Memoriam

Here lies his naked body, like a baroque Christ.

Long pale arms at his side, it is not Shakespeare’s Adonis.

Nor is it the carved strength of Achilles that sleeps in the papyrus of the Iliad.

He wanted to have his life marked upon his body.

To have Homer scar him somehow with some veined memorial, for his life’s journey.

Three birthmarks where his children once lived.

Dark markings beneath his eyes for the sleep that never came.

Two ancient cuts in the thighs for the empty pockets.

A black bruising for the wine. A blood red discoloration, on the chest, for the love that he gave, borrowed, or sometimes stole.

A blotched tongue for the words that he spoke.

Etched fingertips for the unwritten words.

His body carved with the calligraphy of his life.

His skin the parchment of remembrance.

Like a god on his tattooed Olympus, a stained Prometheus.

Here lies his naked body, in all its quiet magnificence.

Pale, cold and prone.

His words forgotten as Keats fevered Grecian Urn.

No small villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome.

A toe tag for the coronation of this ordinary king,

Yet, in this new country, Yeats’s wild swans, swim at his feet.

She Sings The Song Of Heaven

She sings the song of heaven as we craft our ongoing lives.

We shape our life movement carefully, with surgical precision in the hope that death will not notice our quiet stoic grief.

It is time now to stop the tomorrows.

Time to dismantle the sky, cloak the moon and unfasten the sun.

Time to pull down the stars with our bare hands.

For we are immortal, forever pressing on, moving on with our thinglike act of living.

How brave and strange we are to turn our faces from mortality.

Yet, still for us, she sings the song of heaven.

Leaf Light

There is an ocean in the canopy, wind like the sea. These trees arch, bow and break like hearts. Their air, living in my lungs cracks with mist from my breath to part us. There are fields of leaves that watch me carefully to see if I will hurt them. They live with this intimate knowledge as a perpetual unseen act of grace. I am disassembled in their perfectly crafted arterial design. All at once, in a blaze of simultaneous colour. Green, rust, red to silver ash. I am merely passing, a forest shadow. They do not die as we do, with ceremony, memorial and gravestones. They simply fall.

I have mud underfoot upon this walk and I am tired. I wish to sleep now away from the shadows. Away from the pathed rock and stone beneath this crisp blue sky. After I die I want to have the earth buried beside me and pretend she will live forever.

Poetry- Simon Perchik

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

And though the stars came by what you hear stays wet for your hands on the rope waiting till it’s dark –you hang the wash at night, sure the clothes will dry –by morning you’ll fill the tub again with her dress and stir till the water turns black smells from sleeves and the same shoulders that were always there with grass that you add later.

* You listen the way this stone senses when its prey no longer has a pulse and swallows it whole though your ears work like that widen for the embrace and quiet that afternoon still wandering the Earth as rain and those pebbles a child finds on the beach –one by one tossed at the sun or something in between taking so long to die –what you hear is losing its breath is crumbling and in your arms.

*

You can’t stop, talk and far from your mouth wait for the grass as the same sound between your fingers lowering for lips

–you talk the way rope takes so long to die –over and over and over empty your mouth filling it with thorns with shoulders, afternoons.

*

Wild from the cold each splash is already driftwood and though you lean into the sink a single cup anchors on its own needs to stay in the center the way every statue is filled with stones, smells from flowers and your chest held close, naked for stars to scatter what’s left and the afternoon –petal by petal you pour from a night longing to cover your body as a single shell, around and around with nothing inside but the ending always in the same place.

*

Half iron, half oak, the bed all night honed on what went wrong –it’s an axe, striking upside down though you sleep facing north side by side an empty dress shaped into bulls and chariots with your mouth wide apart louder and louder getting ready for the slow descent –you sit on the edge, trying to bleed to open the sleeves still reaching out in the dark.

New Surrealism: The new revolution? by Arthur Broomfield

By arthur broomfield | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

‘We must not hesitate to bewilder sensation’. Andre Breton

If we say, ‘how does one write surrealist poetry,’ we are asking the wrong question? Insofar as it’s possible – if we exclude the necessary resort to aids from the practical world, pens, paper and computers – Surrealist poetry, in the words of Andre Breton, is written by ‘that part of the mind which aspires to leave the earth’ [ Breton The Manifesto of Surrealism], to resort to the cliché, Surrealist poetry writes itself. It ‘refuses any image that could have a rational meaning or any memory or culture’ [Luis Bunuel]. In short it ‘asserts our complete nonconformism’ [Breton].

Andre Breton is the Messiah of Surrealism and his 1924 Manifesto should be studied by all who are interested in the movement. It is written with the zeal of the believer, though, for one so dismissive of the conventions of the real world, he is arguably too willing to accept Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Breton’s assertion that Surrealism can be accessed through the unconscious places too much credence on a theory that is unprovable, especially in this age of quantum physics, string theory and parallel universes, areas of speculative science which we can substitute for the unconscious that may enhance, rather than distort Breton’s thinking. It is especially important in the writing of Surrealist poetry to locate one’s mind in a state where it has left behind the prison of the trappings of the earth; reason, belief, ego, culture, and specific to poetry, the slavish addiction to form, the anguished quest for the ‘right’ word, and overthinking, for Surrealism, is built on images…’that man [sic] does not evoke, rather they come to [ the poet] spontaneously, despotically’ [Breton ]. Breton’s seemingly meaningless images are evoked, he claims, without ‘the slightest degree of premeditation’. For example, in

‘the bed hurtles along on its rails of blue honey’ [‘Fata Morgana’] and

‘A seated man Whose eye is like a cat prowling around a pot of couch grass’ [‘Run Them All ‘] two distant realities are juxtaposed that seem to owe nothing to thought. It is from, or in this juxtaposition, where the mind has seized nothing consciously, that ‘the light of the image has sprung’ and the principle of the association of ideas is discredited.

So, the key to writing Surrealist poetry is to access, bearing in mind the reservations already noted, what Breton calls ‘the unconscious’. But the point here is to open one’s self to the ‘unconscious’ rather than to see Breton’s Manifesto as a formula. In this writer’s case the Manifesto is absorbed as a vital tool that will guard my work against lapsing towards the futility of making sense of the ‘real’ world, against writing what could be called ‘Old School’ poetry. So how does the Surrealist poet reach this ineffable ‘state’ where the mind – that is beyond thinking and feeling – can be visited by juxtaposing images – images from what Reverdy defines as ‘ two distant realities ’ – that will open a portal into the beyond, that in the occasional sublime moment, reveal a beauty that dislocates us from tired explanations of reality ? Breton has proposed some extreme measures such as sleep deprivation and fasting for forty-eight hours as a method of accessing the unconscious, not at all to be sneered at. I have first-hand knowledge from a pilgrim to Lough Derg who endured thirty-six hours of this type of experience and who can vouch for its effectiveness. Any plans I may have to undergo such an ordeal are, at the time of writing, Augustinian. Of course, one needs some help before ‘sitting down’ to let the images come. One needs to be in a stress-free zone to start. From this, not always obtainable state, I usually begin the process by completing about ten minutes of automatic writing that might be sparked by a hook or entry point from which I would go on to write, free from thinking or feeling, the words that present themselves as they present themselves. I would then listen to music, preferably jazz – John Coltrane or Miles Davis – for up to fifteen minutes. I find meditation an important part of the process as it trains the mind to let go, so I would usually meditate for up to ten minutes. After a period of pottering, maybe doing a few chores or going for a walk, I finally sit down and write the Surrealist images that come to me. An example like Hailstones and gas light and the Eucharist of the mark of the beast swam in unison with bats in oily wells may present itself during a series of images that will become a poem. For Surrealist poetry is primarily the replication of images in words; images, however, that are distorted and challenged through the juxtaposition of the language normally used to describe them. It could be argued philosophically that Surrealism is driven by an intense will to refute the accepted version of ‘reality’ that can’t be refuted through logic or discourse but must resort to extra-world visions or revelations that can only be accessed through other methods. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt in your philosophy. Such a hook sparked my poem, ‘The Giant on the Rock of Dunamaise’. The ‘Rock’, which is located near Portlaoise, is notable for a number of historical reasons, and for footstep type imprints near its top that are known locally as ‘the giant’s footsteps’ ,which I had in mind when I sat down to write the following images, that I speculate, came to me from other dimensions, through quantum physics or from ‘the Gods’. In any case, other than taking the bother to write them down I can take no credit for their creation, nor did I intend to imply any meaning to them or the poem at the time of writing. It may be that through the freeing of the perceptive process, visions of other realities, that seem not to make sense in this one, are allowed through. This poem is comprised of a succession of these type of images.

You bebopped on the Rock, iced cakes with the smashed cubes and the waltzing bogs. Your shoulders chafed above the weight of the rising frogspawn [sanctified in the blessed dawn of rags and bluestone], your colic buckled as you moaned the first Te Deum to the fourth fairy of the black mass. Others prayed in purple and see-through confirmation habits. Your songs were sandpaper, your nose was the key to Yellowstone Park, your boots were putty to the cream-topped cappuccino. Our false eye lashes were prison bars that galloped across the range to the holiest moonbeam beneath your footsteps as they whipped the harnessed woodlice towards the final round of the knitting contest.

You may ask how much time do I spend writing a poem, do I revise, or intervene in the text given to me, and if the answer is yes, under what circumstances? Normally I would spend 10 to 30 minutes writing the first draft, which would be close to the finished poem, unlike the first draft in Old School poetry [in my case], which, normally, would need serious revision. In revising I would look for grammatical or syntactical errors, and lapses that would indicate descent into Old School type ‘well made’ poetry e.g. form, meter, insistence on the ‘correct’ word – rather than the juxtaposed image – respect for norms etc etc. Revision could be done on the day of writing but if not soon after the first draft has been written, for the mind is then still open to the process.

People may take exception to my use of the term ‘Old School’ to describe the poetry being written and published at this time, and I can understand why. But poetry has gone through many revolutions since Homer’s time. Each revolution has given us fresh insights, but each has been superseded when its vison was seen to be fatigued and inadequate. New Surrealism may be the revolution of this era because its approach resists all attempts to confine its poetics to the vision of the outdated which, though once the beacon of liberty, is now essentially repressive. It too may assert our complete nonconformism, but from a vision that has been enhanced by new insights from speculative science. Surrealism is not new, you will argue, didn’t Breton write the Manifesto in 1924? New Surrealism will differ from Surrealism in two vital areas

[1] Surrealism was aborted by WW2 and, for example, the post-war realistic and naturalistic display of life in Philip Larkin’s poetry and the rural realism in Seamus Heaney’s, that responded to its aftermath.

[2] Breton was too convinced of the truth in Freud’s notion of the unconscious, that, possibly understandable for the time, would have been challenged by a later, vibrant discourse, had not the war intervened. New Surrealism has the capacity to assert our complete nonconformism, but from a vision that has been enhanced by these new insights, and to go on, not merely to question our terrestrial, but our extra-terrestrial existence as well. In its full flowering New Surrealism will be inspired by the closing lines to Breton’s Manifesto:

This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression on me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

Poetry- Caron Freeborn

By CaronFreeborn | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Red plums

I bit into the unnoted plum, expecting sharp disappointment or at best, tolerable near-sweetness. My thumb left an indent which gave me some hope – bruised fruit isn’t a violent assault on the tongue. But that bite – I’ll never forget that bite – flesh sliding against gum, the fruit neither resisting nor clinging – and the surprise, oh that, of a world where a nectarine isn’t a plum.

The daughter that you wished for was younger than I am with longer hair and certainly prettier. She was smart but not as clever as I am nor as interested in esoteric books and words like esoteric though she’d read 50 Shades of Grey. She went with her godmother to have her nails done and cooked a huge roast on Sundays and had three or four babies by the same man and none of them had any kind of abnormality congenital or willed. She voted obviously for women died but she wasn’t what you’d call political not as such. She drank dry white wine but never to excess and her skin showed she’d never smoked or used drugs or had her baby cut out by a surgeon listening to YMCA. She didn’t trust women like me but had loads of girlfriends mostly from school and she never slept with them and they all had babies too. And the daughter that you wanted wanted you.

I can’t conjure that daughter from this pile of straw. Can’t plait her golden hair as it grows from this wheel. Didn’t have one name to guess but so many I swallowed my bag of chicks like a snake. On my life, I did try. But I pricked my finger fatally – I think fatally – in the attempt. She will never come now.

It is late, even on this longest night. Still I sit here in the dark, in the light; I sit here still and I spin and I spin and I spin.

Murder ballad

I remember the apple.

The knock could have been anybody’s knock, the voice an indefinite pitch but I can describe each line of red, the way it still races the green in calcified blood down the inside of my eye.

I’d been half-expecting you.

They’re trained, those voices those soft bland hands – God forbid knocks might sound homesick or demanding or in any way specific. So I agree that yes, those aren’t your three sharp raps and yes, I understand that distant enunciation and I run to wait for a bus which might or might not come.

A woman squeezes into my shelter so close, I can smell her apple sweet and unbearable as hope. Saliva soaps my mouth and I nearly lean over to take a bite as though she were my lover. I would bite her for one taste of that apple. But then it’s gone the core flaccid, brown, already over. I could buy an apple but it wouldn’t be this one.

I take out my half-bottle of Jack to rinse my teeth, my tongue to murder this dead impulse to bite, have bitten an apple that doesn’t, never did belong to me.

At Glasgow Airport

We shuffle queue oppressed until I place socked feet on two yellow approximations hot as panic when that greyed woman who keeps her smile deep in her pocket or maybe the leg of her knickers tells me I can change queues. Number one’s free, she unsmiles. But I can’t see number one and I can’t understand where I’d splay my feet and I can’t make myself move into that space and I have to live here now.

All my life that rolled-tight gaze above the missing smile. I’m autistic, I say. I’m autistic.

Invisible Ink

The man on the Citi 3 leaned in to chat and I could tell he was reading my ink – his nose about a centimetre from my tattooed collarbone. Then he spoke, as if reading aloud though I can assure you he wasn’t. The kids all say fuck now, they get it from them foreigners I don’t think that’s likely what with English not being- Yeah, you might be right. I feared he was going to claim blindess and go for braille. I’ve had a brain haemorage, he told the hornet on my right shoulder. The hornet didn’t reply, so I murmured something to cover its rudeness. I don’t think he noticed the difference. Timmy, he told me his name was – a name for a dog or a little boy a name shockingly comical a name in which I didn’t quite believe. He was one them, you know, who wants to be a spy. Secret cameras everywhere. Was so funny. But all I could think was that Timmy wasn’t the name for a grown-up man.

Collaboration- Caron Freeborn

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

An editor at Abacus once complained, reading a draft of my second novel, that it didn’t have enough flags to help the reader through. ‘We don’t all live inside your head you know,’ he said. Adding, ‘And thank God for that.’ Harsh, but fair.

I’ve told that story against myself for years, but it’s only recently I’ve understood what it means. Only recently I’ve come fully to understand that I’m different from you. My writing, poetry in particular, has become strongly informed by an urge to examine how words make us who we are, and especially in personal relationships, where the difference between me and you matters most of all.

As a performer, writer, teacher, as an autistic (though when younger, I just thought I was weird), I’ve never once had to a 9-to-5 job. Never had a permanent contract. I have, for most of my adult life, taught in universities but always on the periphery, always the maverick, always the one who can be slid from the scale when the financial going gets tough. But I’ve always too been that teacher who gets some fantastic results by forging genuinely collaborative creative communities. Art, it seems to me, is not solitary or institutional but created in relationships between work(s), sometimes even explicitly.

Some artists find this a more fruitful place than others. This heavily tattooed woman no-longer-young but rejecting middle-aged convention, this working-class presence among the middle-classes, this autistic mind in a neurotypical world, is in many ways an outsider, which is no bad thing. It can mean having to collaborate with your own life at its variant points. Certainly it can be an advantage for a writer to be neither fowl nor good red herring but always flesh, and fit in everywhere and nowhere. To be someone who must find the strange connections between things, because their own life involves having to find those in order to be integrated at all. Those strange connections become then a form of sanity.

I was talking last Sunday, over weak tea, with a Regius Professor of Divinity I’d just met, about inclusion in the church. I mentioned that I’d not been to university until I was 26.

Him: And what were you doing until you were 26?

Me: Drugs.

Photographer Steve Armitage and I both grew up in the working-class new town of Basildon, Essex, where I’d been part of an alternative crowd. I’d had no choice really: the mainstream and I didn’t understand or want each other. When we met again, after many years as exiles, Armitage and I discovered or perhaps created a shared passion to document what had happened to the place where we’d been young, where I’d played bass in a goth band called The Hints and he’d been often to see us on a Friday night. ‘New town builds decay at all one rate’ as I say in one of our pieces; ours was a conscious decomposition against youthful memory that we wanted to build inside a balance between his pictures, my words. Into the pictures’ lovingly documented bleakness, I poured what happened to the members of a fictional local band as they, too, moved slowly and at the same time towards death.

Schizophrenic south-eastern soul

That’s not him. That is him. That’s not him, man. That is. We peer at the buffering image: pudding-basin hair, brown dad jumper, crazy feet, moving to music we can’t hear, though I think it’s probably outside his head.

Oh, my wild frontman. He’d spit green at sentimental and yet secretly (as though passing a note to Karen Clifton as though filtering off Dad’s Piccadilly as though letting my coldsore weep into communion wine) I hope broken minds don’t hurt too much.

Many of the Basildon pieces have been published in journals, although we envisage, ultimately, a book. That joint project is nearing completion, and we sometimes collaborate on stand-alone pieces or shorter sequences as well. The photos don’t illustrate the poems or vice versa, though it’s crucial that Armitage’s pictures have no people in them and that my poems are narrative/character-based, so are all about the voices. The meaning of what we call our photopoems exists in the relationship. This does, of course, raise the question of who is driving any given piece. What’s the difference between what I see and what I show? What’s the difference between what you see and hear and what I think I’ve shown or told you? Who decides? How do we negotiate? It’s a kind of conversation, constantly shifting. And it’s peculiarly interesting for us as I’m not a visual person at all and Steve finds words difficult, so we fill the gaps for each other. Perhaps defining yourself is always going to depend on others.

I wonder as well if it’s helpful that we don’t see each other very often, and when we do the time is very intense, focused exclusively on work followed by alcohol – and even over beer, wine, whiskey, we talk work, only work. The physical distance in our lives allows this focus without any of the distractions of the domestic or sex or pedagogy, and I would say (for us) makes for more concentrated art. Any fights are about who is more committed, who might be doing more – in other words, who is serving the art – not over who does the dishes, which can never matter to us.

This is a photopoem from a seven-piece death cycle, most of which has already appeared. It’s really about what it means to have death captured by life and defined by it, I think – though Steve talks more in terms of these being the pictures that insisted on being taken and therefore would insist on being written.

He might have spoken a foreign language

I gave birth to a boy without a face. Your component parts were there – eyes, nose, mouth, the usual things – but they didn’t make a face. Still, I’m not sure why. Others almost always saw it, too and tested their humanity on you. You were a tough marker, man. That English guy in Limoges – I saw what he said to you. Didn’t hear his words or your reply, but I could read his face. You couldn’t, your not-eyes soft black pits. So you smiled without a mouth shrieked till his real ears bled speckling his shoulders and he shivered as though his blood were iced. It was hardly worth translating. But France was warm. We gave a local seer five cool francs to discover you’d be glad of being special. You ate the soft parts of crusty bread, had salt on frites. You cared that the pool was cold and the lizard dead and one day bit his corrugated tongue where you learned to ride a bike. Unimpaired. Later, when you’d died, we went to the desert and saw a cow corpse who had your eyes.

As often in our joint work, the picture came first though within the context of Armitage seeing with my vision as well as his own; clearly, our collaboration means finding a joint metaphor. Some of his work appears in my collection, Georges Perec is my hero (2015), but that was early in our collaboration and there, we fit pictures to pre-existing poems more literally. But now, his lens intuits what I might see. I should add that he never sets up a picture; despite his work being used on mainstream book covers, he’s an opportunistic photographer, prepared to walk for hours through urban estates or desert terrain to gain a couple of usable shots. I have only once been on a photoshoot with him – except when he did my publicity shots, making me part of the brickwork he so loves – and was wholly redundant: I sat, cold and miserable and full-bladdered, on benches or prowled deserted rows of shops, while he pointed and clicked, distracted by nothing in the detail of what he saw.

And that is the key to our collaboration, perhaps: my autism means I am interested in detail that others often simply walk past; Armitage, though neurotypical, has a special interest in detail to rival many autistic focalizing eyes.

While Steve Armitage is my main collaborator, I have worked with others. The Voice was commissioned as a performance piece by artist-curator Jane Boyer, in response to the Phantom exhibition in 2017 at the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge. She’d invited artists to submit a work from their back catalogue, then to make a new piece based on their current response to their original work. In each case, both the original and the response would be shown. In her curatorial statement, Boyer says she wanted ‘all the impossible combinations of things to link and take voice’. Boyer made a cento (work made from the quoted words of others) from the titles of the original pieces, and I responded both to this and – despite my lack of visual expertise – to the art. Then the performance of my long poetic piece was to take the place in a symposium of a keynote address. I knew Boyer only professionally, so my words didn’t come out of a relationship with a person, but with the work alone.

That response wasn’t ekphrastic, but (unsurprisingly I think) my contribution to those combinations of things. My neurodiversity meant being challenged by sensory overload from some of the work, all of which was non-representational but much of which my brain tried to make representational. It was also a class response: a working-class voice inhabiting the privileged art forms of the highly educated. And because humans need stories, what started as a metaphor for my relationship with specific visual art became, subsequently, something else: the first-person tale of two cleaners, Helen and Bill.

Perhaps to offset the shapes and colours and wilfully shifting focus of both the static and moving pieces, I chose to use blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter offers the concentration of formal devices with the malleability and rhythms of natural speech. It isn’t directly representational but the ear tries to hear it as naturalistic. Because I was inspired to make the characters neurodiverse but with conditions not the same as my own, I had to move away from the art I’d spent so many hours contemplating (both digitally and when hung) to research, including with generous real people. I’d researched one of these conditions for my third novel Presenting…the Fabulous O’Learys (2017), yet it needed re-research: I wasn’t attempting a generic picture of Tourette’s Syndrome (how could I? I’m neither a Touretter nor a believer in medicalised uniformity) but telling one, very specific, story.

The Voice runs at about an hour, which takes bottle to perform – easy to lose your nerve and wonder if you’re boring them into a coma – but it can feel good to be two people so different from me for such a long time.

That said, neurodiverse artist/poet Harry Dell and I recently performed The Voice as a two-hander; it had then to take on a different vibe. We’re wrong for Bill and Helen both visually and in age, but that’s unimportant because The Voice is about what people do and don’t, can and can’t, say of themselves. Harry is from Cumbria; in rehearsal we found ourselves having to change some Essex lines to make them sound in his voice authentic rather than cod. So Bill’s ‘Helen talked / as if my ears was worth anybody’s / words’ became ‘Helen talked / as if my ears were worth anybody’s / words’ and so on. Bill’s idiolect, sociolect, dialect had to shift; who he is changed. This stuff isn’t cosmetic – Shaw was right that we make value judgments based on how someone sounds. Working with another poet in performance subtly changed the fabric of the piece. Jane Boyer came to see the new manifestation; she also said that originally, me performing as a man and a woman exposed a weird kind of transference, observably a reaction to the visual art; in the version with Harry, it became a no-less-powerful but more public and therefore much less strange piece.

On a personal level, I’ve been Harry’s mentor for years, first at university and then informally, so helped form his words. This complex chemistry added impact to our performance. People have wondered if there are elements of the maternal or the sexual or whether ours has morphed into ordinary friendship; none of that is close to the truth. We think the world of each other but our relationship is based on our position to our work. Even though these days Harry reads for me almost as often as I do for him, that relationship has a definite hierarchical structure. Of course now, he works to shift the dynamic, that question of which of us defines which, as I did with my own mentor – who convinced me at first meeting that poetry is beautiful and true. Harry wrote about this and surprised me by performing the poem at a gig before I’d read it, throwing some of my ‘banned’ words back at me (relate, flow), taking ownership of them. My response is naturally complicated because although a fine piece, it talks about mentoring becoming collaboration becoming overtaking – and I’m not ready to wave him past.

Words I could Never Write (For Gertrude)

How do I tell you that I want your legacy to be my shadow. My name will leave lips first while yours is the hipster rebuttal ‘He was nothing without her influence’ ‘Yeah, but who are we talking about’ I could paint peace on this and tell you you’re The Joy to my Jack but I know it’d mean nothing to you So here’s our field of blossoms My Big Boss rank and you’re patriot shot

Let’s try a stanza for you-

Remember teaching this one Around an oil drum for a snapshot of why a list of fish left nothing but frustration and spite in sequence, three tones and my friend with blue lips

I hope you can relate to the flow here because tomorrow is spelled out in metaphor fear for the rest reaching for my eyelets

Maybe I never sent you arrogance in gold.

The words have sunk in like ink, mind you’ll be proud when I leave you behind.

Harry Dell

The difference between you and me. Between one collaborator and another. Between mentor and mentee. Between pictures and words. Between performance and the page. Concomitance and separation inhabit each pair. The collaborator becomes a contributor to philosophical discussions of identity and difference or sameness and otherness. And when we return to make art as separate entities, we bring experiential evidence of those discussions into that new solo work. I’m a stronger poet for sometimes working with the work of others; I hope those others feel similarly about me. Though not the same. Two doesn’t, despite the reunion of the Spice Girls, ever become one.

Poetry- Vivien Jones

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Allotment

I just have to see those rigs, those bed-spread patches, to see my mother sewing fragments of grown-out-of clothes, to make a summer skirt.

She laid the colours like plants, like rows of summer blossom, the cup of tulips, the tuck of roses, the corduroy of new turned rigs, I wore a garden in the sun.

While outside, my father lined up wigwams for beans, telling us wide-eyed children they were magic, would grow to the sky, where giants might sing to a magic harp. One by one, we lost belief until there was only the little red flowers, the curling tendrils, the fattening pods. Breathe in and hide in the leafy tent, runs a thumb down the seam, pop the pods, catch the beans, now that was magic.

Kiltimagh Homestead

They’re brave, these native builders, to throw up gorse yellow houses straight off the pattern pages, four pillars or six, all the same, in sight of the old place with its creeping damp, its rotten tooth boundaries, iron roof still corrugated, perforated with rust aertex, stones now green from grey.

But for all the stripe of the lawns, the curve of Spanish arches, a water feature trickling over copper bowls, solar lights that curve towards the house, there is gorse scratching at the stucco garden wall to get in amongst the flowers, thorns beneath a coconut cloud, flowers not for picking.

On the hillside beyond, gorse shows its tenacity, a horseshoe of flame scours to the root, and it’s dead for a while.

‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ at Polmaddy * ‘Maisie Barbour farmhand and herbalist’

‘So, what can you recommend for a raw Galloway hillside upon which an abandoned settlement sinks in its own echoes?

A whaleback horizon, black at dusk, guiding soft constant rainfall onto earth pocked with rocks and fibrous grasses tough enough to capture soil in plaited roots, our own shit for manure.

We plant in rigs, sharing the sweet west lie, only the toughest crops will throw themselves skywards, defying the slashing wind, onions, small as marbles, cooked whole, make pungent soup.

I gather the healing plants, for bitter gruels and poultices, called to wounds and vomitings, my wealth in my apron folds, I keep them from the earth with the fruit of the earth.

The children dig granite stones, stacked in cairns with which we build an inn, we stop the pilgrims in their path to Whithorn, faith makes them thirsty, we are rich, we have many buildings. No more, one summer they brought the sheep and we, like sheep, were herded away to the barren towns. Will you make a garden here where once the stripe of the rigs told where the fruitful earth lay ?’

* Polmaddy is the site of an 18th century ‘ferme-toun’ almost lost among the tough grasses of the Galloway countryside. ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ is a very long-lived BBC Radio 4 programme

Steve Cawte – how children learn to avoid poetry.

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

They learned by rote what the poets wrote, then in the exam have to write. But is it right?

In the late 90’s I found myself at school, sitting in English lessons learning about poetry with teachers that I can now confidently say ‘knew their stuff’. They all did their best within the confines of a curriculum that was straining to make it engaging. For me they hit the mark with a varying degree of success, for many it missed entirely. The result? Another generation that left school with a limited understanding, passion and a distinct lack of love for poetry. It was to remain for many the torturous experience of trying to decode the often stale and dry mind of a long dead and totally un-relatable writer.

Fly forward the best part of two decades and I still find it hard to believe that that same disengaged child now adds the words Poet and Playwright to my CV. How did that happen? Why did that happen? What does it have to do with schools and kids today?

I often joke when there is a young person on the front row of a poetry gig by asking them their age. They will reply all eager and keen like a child who chose the front row of any performance normally does. They will say for example ‘8’. I then ask them all wide eyed and surprised how old they think I was when I wrote my first poem. With a little bit of stage craft and a heap of good fortune they reply with their own age. I then say ‘No! I was 24’. It’s not true entirely, but it gets a laugh (sometimes) and allows me to remember the line to the first poem. It might not be entirely true, but it isn’t too far wide of the mark.

Aged 15 there was a brief spell where Paul Cookson held writers workshops in my school and he helped to inspire me to have a go. A couple of the pieces I still cherish to this day. When I was at school my English poetry exam consisted of two unseen poems that I had to compare and analyse. This meant I had to understand poetic construct, form and meter and be able to highlight other poetic devices detailing why a poet may have chosen them and their impact on the poem and reader. A pretty good poetic foundation I think you would agree. However, the source material was dry and stale. Was written in a language a 15 year old boy would struggle to connect with, and often had a subject matter I had no interest or experience of. Furthermore the unseen element of the exam meant I didn’t spend time learning about specific poets, their story or any of the details of their work that could have made them more human. The disconnect between the skills being taught and the ability to engage myself and millions of others like me was huge.

Fly forward a decade or so and the exams evolve. Students are now presented with an anthology of 18 poems. Covering a range of topics, styles and writers. They now only focus on these 18 poets and poems. They spend time learning the back story to the poets and the poems. They learn every detail of the plethora of poetic devices being employed by some of poetry’s grandmasters. It is a fantastically more well rounded look at not just the A-B functionality of poetry, but also of the people behind the words. In many cases a fully holistic look at how life inspires creativity, and how writers craft can be so efficiently deployed to craft a refined work of art.

Yet we seem to be failing students again with the way we deliver it. Still the problem of presenting a room full of students with dry material, although brought to life a little more by its origin stories and context it is still often discussing emotions and feelings that students just haven’t experienced, and therefore cannot hope to draw upon.

Yet this is not even the biggest flaw. Now from this anthology of 18 poems they are only presented with one printed in full. The exam still expects them to compare and contrast, to reference and quote from two poems. They are expected to memorise all 18 poems from that anthology, along with all the details of each aspect of the meaning and poetic devices in use. For many the simple act of, under exam pressure, recalling 18 titles is a step too far.

So why do we want this? What benefit is the committing to memory of these poems? What is it they are actually being tested on? Most of the professional and talented poets I know read from their book. THEY read, THEIR poems, that THEY wrote, that THEY understand more than anyone. If they are not performing from memory what value does adding this to the exam pressure really have? Especially when 16 of the 18 that are studied so hard will not even be used. All we are doing is creating a new reason for yet another generation to grow up with a twitch at the word poetry. A new generation of young people who will at the first opportunity disengage entirely from an art form that has so much to offer.

Poetry- Maxine Rose Munro

By MaxineRoseMunro | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 About the writer

Maxine Rose Munro is a Shetlander adrift on the outskirts of Glasgow. After spending the first eighteen years of her life exclusively on the islands, without even a small break for the holidays, the culture shock experienced on eventually seeing the wider world rocked her to her core and is still rocking some decades later. However, as the end result appears to be poetry, she is fairly ok with this. She has been writing poetry in for a few years now and her work has been widely published, including in Northwords Now; Glasgow Review of Books; Pushing Out the Boat; and The Eildon Tree. More recently she has begun to publish poetry in her native Shetland Scots, something very close to her heart and much, much harder to do than she would ever have believed when she first started out. Forthcoming Shetlandic poems will be found in Poetry Scotland and Three Drops from a Cauldron. Find her here www.maxinerosemunro.com

The wild time

It took me years to find others didn’t see music like me – as a space to enter, in which to move between/with colours and shapes; a place to drop off the edge and explore with your fingers, hips, shoulders, moving around sounds, reaching out to embrace fizz-violet snare, swivel-hips encased in treacle-dark base, spine snake-snapping fuzz-twitch electronic chaos, acid-squelch staining skin neon, tasting feel-good pastel bubble-pops or heavenly gospel brights; feet attacking the floor causing cracks to crash across to meet in the middle, drop you into smoke filled depths, so easy to be lost in the wild time. And the mix begins over, builds bridges that take you further, to die and be reborn, faster, harder, better, a million ways again and again, stretching through all lifetimes, all chances there are, to be taken, to know you’ve surfed waves of potential, you’ve touched the intangible. And when it ends, to know you have been alive.

The behaviour of sheep

I remember a heatwave, and when the rains came, sheep in brittle yellow fields stood with heads raised, miles and miles of them, saluting the flood, holding their parched faces up, stock still in bleached grass patches, until the deluge passed. Stuck inside my ailing car, too hot to breathe, too wet to open a window for fear of soaking ancient upholstery, I felt an envy of sheep I have never felt before, nor since, and more, I saw that sheep had secrets they keep hidden from me.

We will cover your expenses

Please, if you have a heart – take a poet to the disco. These poor people, ignored so often, derided, even, for lack of rhythm – love to dance. Each to their own beat. Some poets pay particular attention to their feet, intricate patterns flashing over disco-lit floors. Others love to strut or strike a juxtapose – placement is all. Or nothing. It varies really what your poet will be like though many have obsessive-compulsive fixations and might, embarrassingly, take notes. I’m afraid your poet could dance all night striving for that perfect move/tune combo. Best leave him/her to it. It’s probable she/he knows what he/she is doing. But maybe not. Poets are a rare breed and should be protected. So please – support our cause, take a poet to the disco.

(we will cover your expenses) Poetry- by Mike Griffith

By Michael A. Griffith | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Your funeral is on Friday.

Today is the heart attack.

Yesterday was the two meetings, dinner with Tony and Kat, then bed with the wife (while thinking of Kat).

Day before was that argument over spending too much time at the office, then that round of 9 holes snuck in before getting home. (Tony still has your golf bag, by the way.)

Prescription refills, some new dress shirts, your son calling from college, the boss giving you four more clients than you can really handle, and that sudden pain when you put your golf bag in Tony’s office are all of last week worth remembering.

So much more worth forgetting.

The Things Which Remain With Us (For Rebecca Askew)

There are certain things that were meant to remain behind:

That gold ring we will not wear again, though to once have taken it off would have seemed a sin Notes, lists, movie stubs, and fortunes from cracked cookies tucked between and inside shelved books

Photos too engraved in ourselves to even be thought to become garbage

Songs, night music from drives and bedrooms you sometimes listen to to cry

Unused, unfinished things from both big stores and little stores, little things, really; all just little things

Scars which tell stories to outsiders’ guesses that are deeper than words

Odd socks, mismatched gloves, that hat I never really liked

Marks where you left them, accidentally or not

A voice I hear in the latest of night and a name I use at the least good time

An ache – ache of cold empty ache old damn ache

These things…

Acclimation

Have I changed for you, a better fit, a better fate?

Have you changed for me, a bitter taste now an acquired one?

Do we absorb and expand or retract and regroup?

Melting pot never quite hot enough, never stirred in the right ways for all spices to become flavors.

Dance and swirl, centrifuge of life a song we only sense, never really hear, never quite get those words out right.

Mix, stir, many-to-one yet alone at day’s end in skins our own unique shade.

Stripes, spots, splotches, clean as ivory and teeth beautiful as any trophy and kept as pure as the dance will allow. Do I move to your rhythm or do you come for my words?

Will I misshape you to my desire or will you mold me to your will?

Exterminator

The exterminator was here again today, mumbling, grinning like he’d sniffed his own chemicals or killed the neighbor kid’s noisy dog.

Handed me a Watchtower and receipt, blessed me in Jehovah’s true name, and thanked me for my business.

Took his hoses and tanks, tossed them in his white van, and rumbled off to his next stop, gangsta reggae low-dub bass pumping hard.

Ten minutes later the roaches and ants held me at bay and I couldn’t get safely to the toilet or the sink.

Could be I’m not a believer in one true name, a meme of the rapture waiting to happen.

Rx

Child-like scrawl, serpent’s belly run through ink, a prescription for another pill.

Nine orange bottles now on the kitchen table next to vitamins, pepper, and napkins.

Will this new drug betray any of the eight others I now swallow? The two I inject? The foods I ingest? The body and blood of Doctor, how well do you heal me? Heal thyself (as you would heal those who trespass against thee).

Doctor, how do you know so well, prescriber or describer?

Doctor, how well do you know me? Do no harm (that you care to know about) Doctor, how do you make me well healer or preventer?

Doctor, how child-like nine orange bottles snakebelly ink.

Photo-poems: visual art and poetry combinations for a high-tech age by Sarah Leavesley

By s l | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Although my working and creative life has mostly been as a writer, I’ve always loved photography. As a poet, the initial appeal for me in combining photos and poetry on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram was to try and reach new audiences – people who wouldn’t normally read poetry but did respond to visual art or photography.

Using art as inspiration for poetry has a long history. The word ekphrasis – from the Greek term for ‘description’ – is often used for such poems. The amount of interpretation, development and new ideas incorporated into an ekphrastic poem’s describing of a scene or work of art varies. The Poetry Foundation website summarises this as: ‘Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.’[i]

John Keats’s early 19th century poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ [ii] is a particularly famous example and the Poetry Foundation has links to others. Looking at the contemporary scene, the poems in Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010) mix elements of biography, close interpretation of the Mexican painter’s work and parallel or version homages.[iii] Another recent painter/painting inspired collection that I’ve enjoyed is Tamar Yoseloff’s The City with Horns (Salt Modern Poets, 2011) inspired by Jackson Pollock.[iv] (Yoseloff also founded Hercules Editions with designer and art editor Vici MacDonald in 2012, with the aim of bringing together new poems with visual imagery.)[v]

But, although examples may be found online, these are essentially print or pre-online ekphrastic poems about artworks and/or artists, rather than a merging of words and artwork specifically for sharing online.

In 2012, I held a combined-media ‘An Eyeful of Words’ exhibition in the gallery at Droitwich Library.[vi] The exhibition – with work inspired by life, nature and local Worcestershire surroundings – was aimed at using art and photography to open up poetry to wider audience. The project was part of my masters in creative writing with The Manchester Writing School at MMU. It included short seasonal haiku and longer more reflective poems, pairing poems with separate photos or artwork. The main idea behind this was to offer a visual route into the world of words for non-poetry readers, while providing long-standing poetry-lovers with an added dimension to my poems. My accompanying essay also explored the exhibition space as one that combines some elements of public poetry experience (such as spoken word) with aspects of private or lone reading from the page.

bird bath reflections turn our world upside down, help us swim in the sky

While I was preparing for my 2012 exhibition, I discovered the research project Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text + Cognition.[vii] The project looked at many things, including concrete poetry, digital poetry, text film and generally exploring how responses to poetry are affected by contact with visual art forms. For me, the whole website is full of inspiration. Although many exhibits here are physical, the website extends the project’s reach, and points towards the way my thoughts would develop in thinking about future online possibilities. One piece that I was particularly struck by is ‘The Wren’s Egg’ by Deryn Rees-Jones and Alice Maher featuring a very large egg with an ink drawing upon its surface. The long cast shadow from this includes, very faintly, Rees-Jones’s 7- line poem.[viii] The resulting piece is a merging of art and poetry to create a completely new piece of art that is more than the sum of its parts.

Once I’d started trying to create photo and poetry combinations specifically for social media platforms rather than general website usage, I quickly realised that there were several important considerations, and restrictions, to this as a means of increasing poetry’s appeal and audience reach.

Firstly, this combination doesn’t suit all poetry. Beautiful poems that read wonderfully on the page may require the white space of the page, rather than a potentially distracting visual image. This may be because it’s a complex or multi-layered poem, or simply that it’s one which needs room to breathe and for quiet reader reflection. If circulated on social media in their entirety, these poems might be better served by a photoshoot of the printed or typed poem, perhaps, with a simple interesting but un-distracting shadow falling on or from the page.

Alternatively, I decided, short snippets might be combined with a photo to encourage people to look at the full piece in text form in an online journal or printed book… Quote from ‘Facts of/for/against Survival’, How to Grow Matches (Against The Grain Press, 2018)

But what about other poems that already naturally work well for photographic circulation on social media?

Trying to conclusively define Vispo (visual poetry) is a PhD level endeavour. It’s perhaps inherent in the visual element that such work is more likely to be shareable on social media platforms without much adaptation for the medium. Examples that I’ve particularly enjoyed on Instagram include Tom Jenks’s sharing of work from his Flip Flop collaborations with Catherine Vidler, [ix] and similar work and postings from Hesterglock Press[x] and poet Rhys Trimble[xi].

Vispo is a good point for looking at differing ideas about what photo-poetry might be. One kind of photo- poem could be an image of beautiful typeface or writing – perhaps prioritising the art of the letter forms’ visual shapes over their meaning or other visual imagery. (A short piece on early ‘photo-texts’ – pictures of beautiful fonts, typefaces and textual layouts then photographed – can be found in Federica Chiocchetti’s The Photocaptionist Manifesto: ‘Phototexts: A History in Theoretical Perspective’.[xii])

But it’s possible to question whether photo-poetry needs any text or words at all. Instead, poetry principles – like appreciation of beauty, compression, the ambiguity, mystery and multiple connotations or interpretations offered by any space or artform allowing reading between the lines – might apply directly to the textless photo. A small sample of such pieces can be found in Nick Scammell’s ‘Photo-Poetics: An Anthology’ at Photocaptionist.[xiii]

As it turns out, photo-poetry has a longer history than I’d realised when I started thinking about combining poems and photos for transmission through social media networks.In a fascinating article ‘What is Photopoetry?’, Michael Nott records how the term ‘photopoem’ appears to have first been used in 1936 – pre-Internet, let alone social media.[xiv] Key words for me in this Photocaptionist article are reciprocity and tight-linking (of photo and poem).

Hands up here, as a poet, when I initially started sharing photo-poem snippets on Twitter and Instagram, I was completely missing an important point. I was placing emphasis on getting poetry texts to visually orientated audiences without fully processing what ‘visually orientated audiences’ might actually mean. In other words, I was overlooking the full relevance of the fact that such viewers (and hopefully then converted readers) respond to the visual before the poetry – so the photo shouldn’t be secondary to the text. Together, they should form something greater, that’s also complete in itself. It’s this latter observation which makes me want to mark photo-poems as a form. (My thoughts here as similar to I view ‘poetry pamphlets’ when used as a form. For me, such poetry pamphlets are more than just a selection of the best poems, there’s something extra that comes from reading them placed together in this way.)

What does this mean in terms of my creative practice? It varies, as arguably all use of form should, from photo-poem to photo-poem. Some photos combine better with one kind of poem, others with another. Whether I start with the poem or the photo first, or both in the same moment, once I start combining them, both image and words often have to shape-shift to complement each other.

With my own photo-poems I usually tend towards haiku-inspired lines: short, accessible but including a potentially resonating observation or epiphany. I like my combined image and words to be immediately impactful, with a haunting or thought-provoking wake that lodges in the mind, memory and/or emotions, so that the effects are still felt long after the brief moment of seeing and reading. (Yes, arguably, all poems should do this; it’s just that the material and tools available in any particular form bring both particular opportunities and certain constraints.) Extended examples of my nature-inspired photo-poems include my photo and poetry slideshow essay ‘photo syn thesis: an eco exploration of future light earth water’ on Molly Bloom.[xv] But, like social media itself, my photo-poems can also be snapshot pauses in a busy home or urban lifestyle, whether that’s outdoors in a city, in the office or even on the way out for partying.

As I tend to take my photos with a compact camera or DSLR and then use software to combine words and image, my own photo-poems rarely have the full true instantaneous element of Instagram-created poetry using images or video taken and edited there and then on a mobile phone. ‘Instagram poetry’ is perhaps one particular example of a potentially broader internet/social media-shared photo-poetry form.

My work tends towards trying to open up a restful or uplifting space in reader-viewers’ busy or stressful days. But, as a reader-viewer myself, I also enjoy other styles of visual and text combinations shared on social media. These include vispo, collage and subversive combinations like the Harry Man (and his robots) ‘autogenerated #instapoem’.[xvi]

A National Poetry Library podcast with Jess Atkinson and Chris McCabe about ‘instapoets’ and ‘Instagram poetry’ in particular highlights that these lines often have melancholic or confessional element, with themes including relationships, the political and found text within city spaces.[xvii] In terms of how this is presented, approaches include photographing handwritten notes, erasure of found text, collage, and using marker to write on perspex then photographing this with a particular landscape or scene behind this.

I joined Instagram in 2016.[xviii] The same year I also did an online Graphic Design Specialization with CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), which included looking at typefaces as well as many other aspects relevant to using images and words together in photo-poems. After playing with all these thoughts and possibilities, and trying things out with my own poetry, I decided in 2018 to set up LitWorld2 – an online journal combining photos with others’ poems (Pic Pocket a Poem) or very short fiction (Snap Up a Flash).[xix]

Can photo-poems in the virtual sphere change the way people see the poetry/photography/real-life world in the 21st century? I’d certainly like to think they might – and at very least enjoy the artistic aspects of exploring the possibility!

ENDNOTES [i] [Accessed 21 September 2018] [ii] [Accessed 21 September 2018] [iii] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [iv] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [v] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [vi] ‘An Eyeful of Words’ online gallery: [Accessed 21 September 2018] [vii] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [viii] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [ix] Tom Jenks is @zapnuby on Instagram . Flip Flop at [Accessed 21 September 2018] [x] Hesterglock Press is @hesterglock_press [Accessed 21 September 2018] [xi] Rhys Trimble is @rhystrimble [Accessed 21 September 2018] [xii] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [xiii] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [xiv] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [xv] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [xvi] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [xvii] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [xviii] [Accessed 20 October 2018] [xix] LitWorld2 journal is at . It’s on Instagram as LitWorld 2 on Instagram at , on Twitter as @LitWorld2 at: and on Facebook at . [Accessed 21 September 2018]

Review of Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine

By Imogen Gladman | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 A review of the short fiction collection Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine

Mimi Gladman

Wendy Erskine’s excellent debut collection of short stories was published in September by The Stinging Fly Press, based in Dublin. The British publishing industry weekly The Bookseller reported in October that the international rights to the collection have since been acquired by Picador, and Sweet Home is set to be published in the UK and internationally in mid-2019.

The 10 stories that appear in this collection are set in Belfast, and they largely tell of the lives of apparently ordinary people. The opening, and longest story, To All Their Dues, is an enormously assured three-hander. This piece reveals the insecurities and emotional baggage underlying the unknowingly interconnected lives of a beauty salon owner, a local thug and racketeer, and his long-suffering girlfriend. The cover quote, taken from this story, is indicative of Erskine’s style: “There was pain and there was passion and there was no God. Some people had to wait a lifetime to find out that kind of thing, had to study and read books, gaze up at the stars. But it had been made apparent to her when she was young, it had come all in a rush when someone was whacking her with a porno mag. You might never experience that intensity of revelation ever, ever again.” Erskine has a dry wit, and an often very humorous turn of phrase, which lighten these stories, which are not afraid to acknowledge the dark side of life. In coming-of-age tale Observation teenage schoolgirl Cath becomes increasingly obsessed with her best friend’s tales of illicit sex with her mother’s much younger boyfriend. Kim, the mother, is vividly described: “She had a tattoo of some text on her shoulder and when she turned Cath was able to read it. Only God Can Judge Me. She was a badass and mortal opinion was of no interest to her.” Erskine is adept at throwing in an acerbic and seemingly effortless killer phrase: in the title story, Sweet Home, for example, a husband, reflecting on his marriage, notes that, while he doesn’t really fancy his neighbour’s wife, at home “with Susan it was all about those dreary and micro-managed handjobs”.

The everyday is beautifully described. The protagonist of stand-out story Last Supper is disillusioned church café supervisor Andy, who has taken on the role after a questionable religious experience on his brother’s stag do, and the piece is imbued with pathos. Shopping locally for groceries, “He sees the bank of sweets in front of him, the garden ornaments to one side, scales and sandwich makers to the left. There’s the polyphonic sound of a row of animatronic fish, flexing as they sing … There’s a spangled sign saying that raspberry cava (non-alcoholic) is on offer … There’s a range of cakes, discounted, that the label says have been baked in a country kitchen.” Erskine recognises the ironies present at the heart of daily life, and has an awareness of the potentially disproportionate impact of seemingly incidental events.

Her characters are sympathetically drawn, no matter what their foibles or major fault lines, so that the collection never tips over into bleakness. Characterisation is all too often neglected or sacrificed in short fiction, due to the essential brevity inherent to the form, but these stories display emotional depth throughout. Erskine has an ear for the rhythms and cadences of everyday speech, and her characters always ring true. She is psychologically astute, and makes efficient use of her recognition of the somewhat Freudian disconnect that can exist between the internally fragmented personality, swarming with inchoate and perhaps irrational desires, and the person as presented on the outside. Arab States: Mind and Narrative is instantly relatable for anyone who has ever lost touch with an old school or college friend made good, and wondered how their own life might have been different. Paula is a woman dissatisfied by life who happens upon Ryan Hughes, who has restyled himself Ryan Kadrov-Jones, on a political discussion show on TV. “He ruffles his thinner hair and begins an answer full of qualification and proviso. Even though Paula doesn’t know much about Beirut, she can tell it’s a nuanced response. But then Ryan Hughes used to answer like that even if the question was, ‘you wanting tea or coffee?’

The penultimate story, 77 Pop Facts You Didn’t Know About Gil Courtney is more experimental in style. As suggested by the title, it is in a ‘fact file’ format, cataloguing events in the life of a fictional rock star. This one I felt didn’t work quite as well, but this is a minor gripe.

Sweet Home is undoubtedly an enormously enjoyable collection of short fiction, which also packs an emotional punch. Erskine makes reference to the writer Lucy Caldwell in her acknowledgements, and Erskine’s style is somewhat reminiscent of Caldwell’s work in both its setting and perspicacity, without ever being derivative. Erskine deserves to be widely read, and has demonstrated herself to be adept at picking apart the quotidian to reveal the moments of strangeness and profundity that lie beneath.

Get it on Amazon Here.

Mimi Gladman -on this issue’s fiction

By Imogen Gladman | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Over the last three months at the fiction desk I have had the opportunity to read a wide variety of new short fiction, much of it of an extremely high standard. The very best of it is contained here, in the 36th edition of The Blue Nib. The longer, darker, colder winter nights always seem the perfect time to stay at home in the warm and get comfortable with something good to read, and there is plenty for you to enjoy here.

Love and relationships, both familial and romantic, are an eternal theme in fiction, and are the focus of several of the pieces that I have selected. The short works published here include a moving piece of flash fiction by Yong Takahashi. In this story everything remains opaque, except for the pervasive sense of loss and yearning. Meanwhile, Kate Ennals has contributed a story that somewhat wryly acknowledges the fact that complications inherent to the parent-child relationships do not lose their potency once the care-taking roles are reversed. Jude Alexzander vividly evokes a feeling that many will relate to, whatever their sexuality. In her story, The Realisation, a friendship teeters on the brink of becoming something more. Frances Browner also writes, in emotionally rich prose, of the growing awareness that a personal relationship has changed, this time from an entirely different, darker perspective.

The protagonist in Philip Dean Brown’s work Flyer is also living through a time of significant change, in a vividly drawn coming-of-age tale set in the writer’s native Tucson, Arizona. And, finally, for something completely different, from Scottish writer Alisdair L R I Hodgson, an intriguing and highly imaginative piece of work with a sci-fi bent.

As promised last time, I have written an article for this edition of the magazine in which I discuss some of my favourite writers of short fiction. For this piece, I’ve discussed only contemporary short fiction written in the English language over the past decade or so. I intend to revisit the theme next year, casting my net more widely to include both earlier work, and a number of different genres. There are so many excellent writers whose work has been collected in contemporary short story collections that selecting a few to discuss has seemed in many ways both impossible and unfair, as inevitably there’s a lot of work that I have never read! Nevertheless, I think you will find useful and interesting recommendations there.

In the last issue I talked about the Man Booker prize, which was won in October by Belfast writer Anna Burns for Milkman (variously described as both “brilliant” and “unreadable”). However, equally interesting, I find, is the Goldsmiths Prize list for experimental fiction. This prize was launched by the London college of the same name in 2013, and it announced a very interesting shortlist this autumn. I’ve been reading the six books on the list and discuss them, and the prize itself, in this issue of the magazine.

Finally, I’ve also reviewed Wendy Erskine’s debut collection of short works, Sweet Home, which was published by The Stinging Fly Press in September of this year.

Once again, the new year is nearly upon us. My resolutions, aside from the inevitable exercise- and diet- related ones, are to fill in some of the gaps in my reading and to make a dent in my teetering piles of books bought but still not read. (Interestingly I recently discovered that there is a word in Japanese for this affliction: tsundoku.) Do make it one of your own new year’s resolutions to send us more of your exceptional short fiction. I’m looking forward to selecting work for inclusion in issue 37, which is due for publication in March 2019. This seems a good time to remind you, too, that if you have written a review of a significant work of recently published fiction, or have written a book that you would like to see reviewed by The Blue Nib, do let us know and we’ll be sure to consider it. Importantly, too, if you’re enjoying reading The Blue Nib, whether online or in print, do consider taking out a subscription. We’re a not-for-profit venture, and every cent or penny counts in helping us to launch and promote the career of new and emerging writers.

Mimi Gladman

Fiction Editor Poetry- Marcy Clarke

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

SUET, SUNFLOWERS AND HAY

Winter is at our gate and a dozen crows, like trespassing bandits, raid our slumbering garden

The sun is a hard shadow bleaching bony limbs, casting dull silhouettes on a sea of rustling leaves and corduroy trousers, tucked in boots, scatter crushed memories filling the sky with gray notes whispering snow from the hills

Homesteaders, roots deep in the last century, have already hung suet, like wind chimes, on knobby branches, spread sunflower seeds for winter visitors and put up hay for the horse found wandering on the Old Blue Ridge highway three years back

We pitched in and raised a barn on well mannered acres, a cozy hostel smiling under mountain weather and farm kids, spoiling a creaky mare with carrots

First storm, we tuck beneath our own quilts, dogs and cats scattered on mats before the hearth, thankful that tattered bay now sleeps in straw

END OF DAY

I wait at the edge of the stone wall built before we were born, listen to the birds settling in oak and maple and the owls, leaving their lofty evergreen perches to begin their hymns at sunset

The wind breathes, rustling leaves and tall grass whispering against mortar and still, I wait, quiet beneath the rising moon, the lonely sigh of a tugboat on the river fades and the last trolley rumbles down the hill scattering echoed footsteps laughing on cobbles, flooding the silence with light and we walk back to the cottage together

SHARING SECRETS

A woman, bundled in flannel, unveils her pottery on a roadside stand ribbons of peach and sea glazed hues pose beneath a cool autumn sun, squatty hand-thrown physiques whispering a lost art

I fall in love with two azure pots and a chubby terracotta blushed pitcher

Cradling my three treasures, memories sigh in the wind, as if I cupped the last clay artefacts on earth and this woman’s hands sculpted them for you

MUSINGS OF A LOST PATH

We trace the footpath from our home, across the meadow, to the creek meandering an edge of woods

Drifting on soft breezes, songs whisper there, lazy shuffles of water playing over cobbles and stretching across its shallow drink, bridging field to forest

We picnicked there in summer’s shade, tiptoed the icy wash dancing below our knees and in autumn, gathered russet and gold beneath branches to press between waxed paper One threadbare winter we uncovered an evergreen withering beneath giants and dragged it home to dress in treasures and dreams

You grew up on that footpath, rode bicycles to the creek and built low-slung tree houses in a tousled oak, wallowed in wildflowers with the dogs, rescued baby birds and once, from a distance, in the hush of twilight, we stood silent watching a doe teach her young to cross our creek, like we did you, so many years ago

A PRIVATE CEREMONY

Pale moonlight traces our journey over crushed shell paths winding through sea oats, footprints sketch gritty memories in the sand and salt water laps our toes

Your ashes slumber in the ebb and flow of teardrops drifting beyond the horizon and on hidden shoals and coral souvenirs playing along shorelines you colored on maps

We set adrift a bouquet of bluebells and your silhouettes gather the scent of lost gardens on holy water crooning beneath our silence

Whispered benedictions slip a translucent moon behind clouds of psalms and the surf buries our lament in autumn’s breath

Poetry- Lucy Mackarel

By Lucy Mackarel | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 In Memorial

I have never been to a funeral, I have, however mourned a body. In a room with brown walls and a window to the road. It was his bedroom and the body was my own.

Knees on carpet as though I were praying. This act though, was anything but holy. A position of submission, how fitting. I felt like I had lost.

What was I supposed to do? He was begging me. How could I say no to my own boyfriend? When he was begging me.

Thinking back I realise, He was begging me.. While he pushed me to my knees and forced my head down silently.

I would shake my head and gag. As he laughed. I would carry on though. He’d be annoyed otherwise. He already had so much he’d criticise.

I couldn’t do it. I fell backwards with a thud. I was blinking back tears, I was apologising, I was fighting back bile. I have never been to a funeral. I have, however felt part of me die. In a room with curtains always closed and an iron bed painted white. Where he violates me, telling me he loves me.

He orders me to open my legs, I ask him to stop, He asks if it hurts, That’s his concern. I say no.

Because

It doesn’t physically pain me, But he is hurting me. I want to go, I make excuses that his mother will be home. He says she won’t. Suddenly he has time.

I am haunted by brown walls, The floor by the door, I will not, I cannot forget.

Side Road

I do not hate you nor do I blame you. Although you have hurt me, and if I never have to see your face again, It will still be too soon.

I have to see your face.

So I am forced to remember a dark side road, That you refer to as ‘our place’ But I know this as a place where I do not feel safe. I do not feel safe.

Let me walk you through my shame.

You remove my top though I tell you no. You put our hands places I do not want them to go and I tell you so, I told you so! But you’re the one in control and my hands, My hands are not my own.

“Just the tip” you later tried, I said no; you asked me why, Why? Why? Why do I have to justify?!

We are interrupted when your friends ring, I don’t feel disappointed I feel relieved! But.. you don’t pick up, put the phone on silent, I am silent. I want to scream. I want to go, instead I ask you ‘can we leave?’

We’re still standing there.. On this dark tree lined side road, You push yourself against me you have decided, If I won’t do it you’ll use me to do it yourself.

I ignore it. I am divided.

Finally we have no choice but to run, You laughing, asking do I feel alive, As though this is fun. I feel like crying. I do not feel safe. I feel ashamed.

Listen to me. I have to look at you. You must listen to me, Relive this with me.

We are not even. We will never be even. With the pieces of me that you have taken, And I am broken. I am broken.

There Are No Words

She sits in silence, Having discovered my poetry online, She has nothing to say, she wouldn’t know where to start.

But I do, These poems are my silent screams. When I want nothing more than to scream ‘Rapist!’ across the room at you.

That is not the right word. But I don’t have a word for boys who push their girlfriend’s head between their legs, Or put their fingers in places they are not wanted.

I only have your name. I have your name and I must swallow it. Because if I say it, This becomes real.

And it leaves my nightmares, It enters everyday life. There will be no escape, And I am already so ashamed. There are no words, That they can say, To wash away what has been done,

So we sit in silence.

Poetry- Bob Beagrie

By BobBeagrie | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Chiromancy

‘The great Sage as high as Heaven visited here.’ Wu Cheng’en – Journey to the West, 1592

High staggered moorland crossroads too few trees, the big wide sky fresh roadkill and opportunist crows turning turning turning turning, The Roda Cross by the roadside scattered offerings in the grass Hogtenberg’s summit beyond Westerdale Crouched friars, Rosedale Abbey, Cockayne Ridge Roundhead recruits resting sore shanks, tarmac’s scrape and sweep through crimples: Life line, Fate line, Heart line, Sun line. The cross’s shadow pointing arrow straight at Boulby Mine, turbines and the sea turning turning turning turning, sheep picking paths through cropped heather, fleeces marked with red or blue splodges, lichen forests spreading over dry stone walls.

I stand, one hand on the cross, turning, aiming names at horizon markers knowing the words can’t reach them, how the crow-wind strips them bare, how history is deciphering our footprints.

The Weigh-In

“Their wisdom’s profound, to cheat us of our ground.” Gerrard Winstanley – You Noble Diggers All, 1649

Take your share of tree moss and rock fur The whistle of grass and dry poppy seeds Nettle stings and tiny dust tornadoes Take your share and store it safe Take your share of new hues from bulbs Splitting casings of sap-sticky buds The golden petals of wee-the-beds Take your share and garner it well Take your share of a curl of river mist A flat stone’s skim and its final splash A pupa dangling from its silken path Take your share and keep it ripe Take your share of the crumble and flake A drip and its echo off in the dark A shadow to wear as a shawl at night Take your share and wrap it up tight.

The Reaping

“Each regiment in order grows That of Tulip, Pink and Rose… But war all this doth overgrow We Ord’nance Plant and Powder sow.” Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House, 1651

“Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerative one…” Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais & His World, 1965

“The aim is, here in Britain, to create a really hostile environment…” Theresa May, 2012

Remember when you dwelt within the Garden of Ecstatic Ferocities where horticulture warped your frame into frills and petal folds? Where your arms were burdened with clusters of ripe berries drooping in a pulping sweetness that dripped through your scarecrow fingers? Where you passed through splitting fruits and tangles of old growth, lost yourself in explosions of colour from accelerating seasons? How you left a litter-trail of new cuttings scattered upon the sward, pollinated vacant, sticky stigma in casual acts of propagation? How you romped in joyous abandon, spilling over deadwood, trampled mulch, spliced and grafted unruly foreign bodies? Do you recall the frenetic fight for light in the Garden of Exquisite Furies where you learned the savage nature of predation? How you conducted the rites of naming, suppressed weakness, buried impoverishment, harvested fungal blooms in an iron helm? How, daubed in charcoal and loam, you repelled invasive pests, how poor Priapus’s severed stalk re-seeded fallowed soil? Where you were whetted by his semen, how you dug a trough in earth-flesh and laid down within it to receive resurrection? How could anyone fully suppress these exquisite ecstasies or forget the furies and ferocities of this ever returning Eden?

Procession

“…for I see the dirt of the Slough of Despond is upon thee; but that slough is the beginning of the sorrows that attend those that go on in that way.” John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678

Tinker John is tramping in the train of boots through porridge spills of freezing fog a lousy sun crawling from its make-shift cot sick-bed, scruff-basket nest up on Ravenscar; is only aware of something groaning deep inside himself – it tells him he is still alive. They clomp across the underside of clouds their pikes and helmets scrape furrows in the fields beside The Lion’s beer garden – you can glimpse them passing in the bull’s- eye bevel of the remote pub’s snug window. John remembers that one day he will beget a daughter, blind-born meadow flower, who shall inherit the Earth, like him, through suffering, in this topsy-turvy world he’s learning how to live on the invisible.

The Passenger

“rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” Samuel 25.23

“we have also multitudes of witches among us…More, I may well say, than ever this Island bred since the Creation, I speak it with horror.” Epistolae Ho-Elianiae: The Familiar Letters of James Howell, 1646 Hunched like a sack of black powder, on the horse drawn wagon that holds the roped-down minion, sits the witch or that’s what Will Coppe claims she be They’ll not leave this up to the might of men, arms and God, but of witchery! although the tinker boy has his doubts. So, as their boots eat the heathland miles John keeps an eye on the shrouded one, spots strands of smoke beneath the veil one wizened claw, his hackles bristle when he senses her glare swing his way, discounts a snatch of some incantation like plague-soot adrift on hoar draughts.

Aunt Anne’s Canticle for Calm

“Lay by your pleading, law lies a-bleeding Burn all your studies down, and throw away your reading Small power the word has, and can afford us Not half so much privilege as the sword does” The Dominion of the Sword, Cavalier Ballad from Rump Songs, 1686

Close your eyes, my dears, to the wailing turn the locks, my loves, to your hearing to rumbles that run through the ground an anthem of gunshot and mortuary swords hoof beats, orders, the barking of hounds the lengthening quiet between roars, the stricken chewing churned grass in the field our doorway is sealed with a scouring of thistles and stinging nettles. Lie still within the darkness, covered by a sheet pay no heed as night limps from Ruthergate to settle on a log to catch its breath, stretch its legs and count the day’s cost in a volley of owl hoots across the clearing, turn the locks, my dears, to your hearing.

Poetry- Nadia Wolnisty

By niwolnisty | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 On “Self-Portrait” by Kay Sage

To be a woman is like this now. Scrub it off as if it were a stain— all traces of your face. Use bleach if you must or dish soap if you have time to scrub. You’ll know when to stop.

The lattice work where your nose used to be won’t hang vines or go inside pianos. The cloth won’t swaddle any infants or stifle any urges.

You are no longer meat dumpling, no pleasant little pouch. You are sad machine. Do you remember the toy store you went to as a kid? One day, the Jack-in-the-Box turned inside out when jerked too fast, too far. All springs and splay. This is you now.

And yet without eyes and mouth and nose, you are not beyond reproach. You thought machine indelible, but they are saying you’re mid-twitch. A woman should not shudder in fear or orgasm. A woman with or without a face shouldn’t move. The only good victim is a corpse. On “The Upper Limit of the Sky” by Kay Sage

Here, you can see what love is. The prosaic is far below. There are no bills to pay, no eggs to carry, and no diversions. Trifurcated and before you, you must make a choice.

The first is a yellow and a fleeing. How your lover is like coattails, their body just out of reach. The things you can do to fruit when no one is looking. The bright melon a stand-in for real flesh and underwear.

The middle is a hinge that doesn’t go anywhere. When folded in half, a body becomes so solid, it no longer feels corporeal. Is that what you thought the first time I folded for you on your bed? I hope you didn’t feel absence, feel hole. I am not a sack of meat; nothing leaks. I am as certain as marble.

The third is a city. It goes higher than the upper limit of the sky. Is this a place we can walk together, holding hands? Windowless and too high for pigment, life goes watercolor. It can wash away.

I do not know which one is best. Love without touch, touch without bodies, bodies without life. Lover, all I want is to write letters and get lost in grocery stores. My heart is not a bird but a frog. All I know is, my favorite safe word is you. Jane Simmons reviews Claire Williamson’s Visiting the Minotaur

By Shirley Bell | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Claire Williamson: Visiting the Minotaur

Jane Simmons continues her series of reviews of contemporary women’s poetry

Published by Seren ISBN: 9781781724439

Claire Williamson has an MA in Literary Studies, (UWE), and is a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy and Programme Leader for the MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes at the Metanoia Institute in London. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. She has worked closely with Welsh National Opera since 2003, writing the words for Cardiff City Songs, Billy and the Dragon and The Merman King, all WNO MAX productions. She is also involved in musical collaborations including ‘Home by Christmas’ which was performed by 350 singers at Colston Hall to commemorate 100 years since the outbreak of WW1, and she was nominated for the British Composer Awards in 2015. Claire has written chapters in academic books on themes of creative writing and health and well-being. She is the author of two previous collections: Ride On, and The Soulwater Pool. Individual poems have appeared widely in magazines. Her third collection, Visiting the Minotaur, was published by Seren in April 2018. She regularly gives readings around the country, and she also leads poetry workshops in the Bristol area.

‘Visiting the Minotaur’ has received an enthusiastic reception from critics – as can be seen in these examples taken from the publisher’s website ‘At once heartbreaking and comfortingly human, with the skill to make your spirits soar.’ – SkyLightRain

‘Claire Williamson’s poems are beguiling hybrids – self-assured yet emotionally raw, mysterious yet not precious, meditations of wonder and exorcisms of grief.’ – Michel Faber

‘Rare is the collection that possesses such a boundless emotional palette, but in Visiting the Minotaur the reader is called on a journey that explores the frontiers of feeling and sutures opposites – past to future and trauma to recovery – in a dazzling display of linguistic imagination and lyrical adventure.’ – Carolyn Jess-Cooke

‘What grips and astounds is the writer’s ability to bring the material, the substantial, the solid alive on each page with startling force.’ – Jenny Lewis

‘With each book, Claire Williamson’s poetry draws closer to the true and unselfconscious marriage of the mythic and the personal. The sometimes painfully raw material of a life gains depth and resonance, while the figures of myth draw closer, to inhabit tender, energetic bodies in this world – bodies that may be endangered, may be dangerous, and may be our own.’ – Philip Gross

Initially, I was intrigued by the title ‘Visiting the Minotaur’, with its reference to Greek mythology. What could the monster and the labyrinth be in this collection of poems by a 21st century woman poet? Who or what was the monster, the minotaur? Did the poet see herself as Theseus, or as Ariadne? As I began to read the poems, I began to solve the puzzle: the labyrinth is the poet’s family history, and the poet herself is on a quest to unravel family secrets and lies in order to understand the past and, by understanding it, to come to terms with it.

On her quest, Claire Williamson does not just explore myth: she also explores histories, and develops detailed observations of nature, natural landscapes, cities, and city life. Through these detailed observations, she crafts poems which are carefully constructed meditations – not just on her experience of life, but also on mortality.

The opening poem ‘Swimming with the Bull’ begins:

The animal is bookended by two women floating on a Cretan wash of silicate copper, their blanched skin soaked into walls by hydrate of lime

Then, as the description develops, details such as, ‘the whip/of a tail’, ‘clamped,’ and ‘stamped with’, hint at the violence which is to come in later poems such as ‘My Mother and Brother as Horses’. Here again, the poet uses an intriguing title, suggesting a surreal vision which is then described in detail in the poem itself:

They sit at a green plastic table with me after all these years, enjoying a pot of tea in May sun.

I stand up to pour, ignoring that they are horses. How else would they return?

My brother still wears the blue noose, now loosened like a hippy necklace, drawing attention to the deep-ridged cuts under his chin, like a tree trunk sawn by an amateur. I try not to stare.

I couldn’t grasp hold of the rope with these hooves. Once I’d jumped it was too late. He waves them about, knocking his teacup out of its saucer.

I grab a napkin, mopping up, no use crying over spilt milk. A silence follows – lit by the white of his skin shining through close-cropped hair.

My mother, a blood bay, is shy, her forelock flopping over her forgive-me eyes. I say, I’d love to see more of your face.

She thrusts her black muzzle into the cleft of my torso and arm and I feel her warmth for the first time since she drank that poison. Her trembling mouth tugs the highwayman’s hitch in my ribs which I’ve had since she left me three months raw to the world, chewing my thumb to its bone.

That knot which I’ve pulled tighter and tighter lets go with a slip, a fall.

They both reach out to catch me, but I’m the only one with hands.

The tea set wobbles as if a steeplechase is passing.

The surreal and brutal transformation of the poet’s mother and brother into horses seems to be a device which allows the poet to distance herself sufficiently from the double suicide in her family history to enable her not just to contemplate it – exploring the emotions of all three characters – but also to accept what has happened.

Every poem in Visiting the Minotaur’ is – in some way or other – about human relationships, and it is the poet’s concentration on the personal that gives the collection its intimacy and its intensity. It is certainly true of the poems inspired by the physical aspects of motherhood – labour, birth and breastfeeding. In ‘No Man’s Land’, Williamson develops the idea that giving birth is like warfare through her use of language, ‘gasp of gas’ and imagery ‘It’s like the Somme’, ‘my personal trench’, ‘a white battle-field’. In ‘Breastfeeding’, she juxtaposes ideas of pain, surgery, music and nature to startling effect:

It feels like I’m being sliced with a scalpel as ever-soaring scales of pain pull piglet-squeals from my throat

Williamson does not limit herself to the personal in her subject matter – but when she writes of current affairs, she still focuses on the human, the personal, in her choice of detail. This can be seen in the poem inspired by Picasso’s painting of |Guernica, ‘On Guernica’s 80th Anniversary’ which she dedicates ‘for the people of Aleppo, Syria’:

A mother’s breasts exposed, neck bent in a guttural howl, catching the bull’s breath as she cradles her dead baby.

Elsewhere, William surprises the reader with her choice of subject: ’Laika’ – a poem about the first dog in space or ‘On Not Being Able To Write About A Dog Without Sounding Sentimental’, and the equallly surprising and unexpected ‘Cows’. Nevertheless, it is the immediately personal poems – those about her adolescence, her family tragedies, her experience of motherhood and family life that have the greatest impact. Poetry- Dana St Mary

By dana st. mary | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

the flag keeper he walks slowly to the place with that solemnity that cadavers bring, and leans the heavy ladder on the mast-like pole. a tilted head and gooseflesh show that today is windless, breezeless, grey, and dumb. the climb is short, just twelve foot or so. the turnbuckle holds the night in its iron hand, and unwinding the stiffened line makes his fingers ache. he looks out at the highway. all the kindly folks are speeding home, or not. to work? to hide? to smile and nod? to cry and clasp? the lanes are full. the blacktop, busy. he looks up at his flag, limp against the dawn, this cloth. he lowers the thing, just bit by bit, to not overshoot the halfway mark. the flag tender’s walk, part two again he shuffles, drudges, to his task, the president did not have time to even ask; his tears will always wet his tired cheek, and solace is not anything he seeks. the rain will hide his crying from the guests, but rain will fill and swallow up, his chest. it is an honor, owned to raise the flag, this limp and lifeless, tone-deaf filthy rag, but come next monday, up he’ll haul her high, and watch the blood dry quickly, in the sky. the flag tender is nothing, not a thing, and children shouldn’t crumple, they should sing. flag tender, redux he tilts his blooming head back in this miserably perfect day peeking out from under the brim of his ballcap that old flag pole they won’t let you just toss one up these days making this here, one of the tallest in portland this here she needs a coat of paint and the fly end could be whip-stitched maybe a washing too, who knows he looks up on this beautiful monday and wonders how many kids it takes to get the official decree to lower the bleeding rag half way again. over the fence i. over the back fence, doug is dying. he’s got my dad’s name, and my dad is dying too- just not as fast as doug is, over the back fence. he left his porch light on for a whole month last year. i was afraid to walk around to his street, only to find him decomposing in his recliner, or broken in the shower, or heart-burst by the shed, over the back fence. doug doesn’t get much company, just the guy from church who mows the yard, and weeds the garden. i guess he would have turned off the light if he had found doug, dead. back there. over that fence. in doug’s yard i. over the north fence hides jack’s vodka tonic nose, and his liquor lawnmower cut job, and his rattling trailer, and his don’t throw your frisby in my yard, shitheel, chin. over the north fence. ii. the south fence is falling over, and andycap steve wants to know when we will be ready to spend our money, and time, letting him decide how to rebuild it properly. his wife is a pack of cigarettes and romance novels, with great casserole skills. we love steve and ester, over the south fence. iii. the east fence hasn’t been built yet. so fong, sometimes lang, doesn’t have any trouble making it to the front door with those spring rolls, and fried rice bowls that they insist on bringing us every time i bring them over a nice crisp trout. the butt-crack of dawn i rise in the light that is barely light and mostly dark or dusk i rise i stare at the inside of a cat box and measure out Splenda hoping to sweeten my day i stare i drop my soap, twice washing my old man feet and barely recognizing my balls i drop a hint to my wife but she is sleeping and never hears because the butt-crack of dawn is showing and i like toast. abigail always did make good bread compared to my wife i feel very insignificant she washes bodies and cleanses our very selves inexorably day in and day out she never stops to wonder what may be her reward, reward, is there ever a reward? compared to my wife i feel very cheap like a pocket full of tin nickels when my girl has mercury dimes and she doesn’t even want to spend them she just jingles their silver coats while i count by fives and yearn. compared to my wife i am a coward and not just in the manner of she died to make a family but more like she rises every day without rancor knowing there will be no thank you’s. i read your poem (for mike rollain) i read your poem on the side of a mountain, not the side necessarily, but kinda half way up and kinda half way down. i read your poem twice at the lake, not at the lake necessarily, but on the lake, more specifically, i read it twice. i think i will read your poem a third time if only i can find an appropriate venue. beaker you would say you were all kinds of phosphorus and sulfur or caustic soda with a gunpowder tongue some such chemistry as makes pretty flames and bangs. i say you are milk of magnesium and chalk, or just plain old lead, but not any heat no fire no match. i am iron without a magnet pushed. you are oxygen without lungs. never give your poems gas money i. i sent this poem to the store to buy some eggs and corn on the cob and banana bread with walnuts and dates, but the damn thing never came back now i hafta write another one. ii. i sent this poem out to check the raccoon trap to see if we caught that goddamn skunk yet i hope we didn’t, because i hate how slow them fuckers die even when you put a pellet straight in their eye. iii. i sent this poem to the pond i think they must have stocked it because it’s not home yet and my tackle box is missing. she said i she said i loved that painting more than i loved her. but i only loved the painting because it was of her. i had painted every curve of her meticulous body with the care that she failed to receive in person. the shower curtain, the porcelain tub the tiny window letting in morning light that dazzled her wet, brown hair. the shining curve of her dripping leg. that particular eye under her proud forehead. and the metal rod halo around the claw foot basin. she said i loved that painting more than i loved her when she envied the hours that i stared a brush in my teeth her colors on my thumb and wine at my feet in the bay window room of my place. i finally burned it in the back yard in a fifty gallon drum with everclear and an acetylene torch. i loved that painting more than i did her. every poem needs a paterfamilias, maybe (sharon’s poem) every poem is a child i send out into the world to be raised by hillbillies, and convicts, and church-ladies in hats and hairpins. i would write that previous image, but it takes a mother to write something like that. every poem is another nest i’m building on a wobbly, narrow beam, in a barn full of abandoned attempts at home building, as practiced by a father. every poem is a bit of homework that i will never take the time to make my child do. yell my son’s face crumbles the wet sand leaving no prints of the tiny gigantic heart he has that only wants to touch mine my time my hand my bent back to call a horse or a tool on the workbench standing on his little ladder tiny voices in my head all his echoing the sweetness of a child’s question and his face crumbles the wet sand leaving only my angry foot prints where the fine ocean of a pure heart had washed itself flat and perfect with the power to wipe everything smooth again his face crumbles into clumpy tears and a screwed up face the tiny hands shake the purest skin not ever needing angry tears or frightened cries and the sand crumbles where only steps of wisdom and joy and loving guidance loving scratches and ripples loving ripples awash with oceans of patience where only sun should warm his cooling plaster beach my yells wash away these prints and the sand crumbles.

Poetry- Deborah Harvey

By Deborah Harvey | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Understorey

Your father in his fawn windcheater names the song of each bird we hear points out fox holes and fungi, pulls to one side an elder branch explains how those dollops of blossom became this darkening fruit.

As he lets go the branch swings back like the beams of cranes overhead building conference halls, brand new departments or the CCTV in these MOD car parks that monitor visitors, trespassers, swivelling on their plinths. Splatts Wood presses up against its fence like a rescue dog without a home, it has a Committee of Friends, a down- loadable Management Plan. A survey of birds takes place in the spring, the ride on its southern edge is a bats’ commuter route.

One night as I’m walking to my car I hear a roe deer plunging through its understorey and the next time I happen to see your father the skin of his arms is elderberry purple, his face is a cliff.

************************************** The Good Dogs of Chernobyl

‘Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good dog.’*

So they stayed where they were told, they never lost their faith not even when the buses left and the fallen star hissed flame and cracked the air was thick with ash, the rain burned black, when no one told them what they were no one stroked their crackling fur or scratched their ears.

Now they come through underbrush on paths of wormwood, cinder, dust, their paw prints brand the bitter earth and none of them will sit or stay, these dogs that know no human touch that do not answer to a name.

* Note pinned to the door of an evacuated house in the Exclusion Zone during the cull of pets and domesticated animals that followed the nuclear disaster of April 1986.

**************************************

Eleven o’clock in Leningrad

We wake to colourless sky look at our watches, look at each other wonder how many hours we’ve slept, the best part of the evening, or round the clock into tomorrow. Through our hotel window the streets are empty, they offer no clue

Soon, as we exit the metro this milk-light will deepen into dusk there’ll be red suns to the east and the west the bridges will lift their arms over the Neva, fail to reach either

Caught in this blue night we’re outside of time in a city of shifting names built on bones and water

The original 18th century city of St Petersburg was built by slave labourers, at least 100,000 of whom died in the process.

****************************************

Red Kites Over High Wycombe

I know they’re here before I see them my eyes on the road, the car in front then snatching at sky for that russet skirl, daubs of white underwing, riffled pinions, twisting tails. There must be eight – no wait – a dozen overhead.

The first time I saw one swoop as I stood at the window of your room I thought it an omen. Now I know they can’t be owned, won’t be diminished to fit my need I’m a visitor here, shifting boxes and bags from one drab impromptu lodging to another, and unfamiliar with this town, the suburbs these natives survey with ferocious intimacy. When my job’s done I’ll travel back home where red kites are rare and the air trembles at their whistle.

****************************************

Herons Green Bay

Sometimes perfection’s too much like on early autumn mornings, parked by the lake in the space between daybreak and dawn when you know without counting there’s seven swans, four calling crows, one eponymous heron feathered in gold. Write instead this rain-smudged dusk bent and rusted railings breaking with you convinced you’re plunging through them and fifteen feet under you gasp and flounder through ruined farmyards, orchards, mills, fields of mangelwurzels sown for winter fodder, past the twice-drowned ghost of a village girl dripping and squelching upstairs to her bed not understanding that she’s dead as she glances at headlamps on the causeway mistakes them for falling stars

Catherine Brown drowned in the mill race at Moreton, Somerset at the turn of the 20th century. The same fate befell the entire village fifty years later, when Chew Valley Lake was built to supply water to Bristol.

******************************************

Jerusalem – fiction by Kate Ennals

By kateennals | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Propped up against goose down pillows, her face is ravaged and pallid, strung together with skeletal bone. In one hand is a lit cigarette. With her other, she picks at dry skin on her lip, gazing into the grey ether at the end of the bed. Her eyes glitter the gloom of the room. The burning cigarette tip fades as the line of ash grows between her two fingers. Eventually, ash drops on to her white duvet. It rolls down a crease. “Bother.”

She shakes the duvet and smudges the ash with her finger.

“Shit.” Her voice is laced with curlicued anger. I feel her rage tremble in her bloodstream. I remembered how it used to erupt. She would rant and scream, her voice stumbling in its darkness. I feel it now, again, as she rubs the ash into the linen; frustrated.

“Don’t worry, it’s okay,” I say.

I hear the plea in my tone, ‘don’t lose your temper’. She does too. She doesn’t like it. She looks at me.

“Who are you?”

Should I name myself? Describe my relationship? Neither get recognition and, eventually, it becomes evident that you are, in fact, nobody. You are no more than the ash at the end of her cigarette. I decide to distract her.

“I printed out the words to Jerusalem,” I say.

Yesterday, on the radio, we had listened to John Humphreys on the BBC discussing the bi-annual discussion that the BBC has about changing the current national anthem, God Save The Queen, to Jerusalem, the poem by William Blake. Now, she leans forward, eager, a glint in her eye, lifts her chin and starts to sing.

“God save our gracious queen. Long live our noble queen. God save the queen.”

It is 8.40am. Her voice is reedy, tinny, high pitched, off key, flat. The glint in her eye is golden. My mother was a Welsh nationalist.

“Very good,” I say, “Do you want breakfast?”

She looks at me suspiciously.

“Do you know how I like it?”

I nod. “Fifty-eight Cheerios, three chopped soft dried apricots from Waitrose and not too much milk.”

“Alright then.” She lapses back against the pillows. I feel like we have a truce. I go out to the kitchen. I pour the Cheerios.

“Only fifty-eight Cheerios,” I hear her call.

“I’m counting now,” I call back. The lie makes me feel uncomfortable. I return with the bowl on a rubber lined tray and a cheery false smile plastered on my face. “Here you are.”

She peers into the bowl, suspicious, looks up at me and smiles. Her one tooth at the bottom, front right of her jaw, seems ginormous.

“I need my teeth.”

I get them from the bathroom. She shoves them in and eats greedily, slurping and slopping the milk down her chin. She finishes and fishes around the bedclothes for her pack of cigarettes, takes one out and offers one to me. Back in the day, we used to sit, smoke and drink while discussing affairs of the world, along with my failed love affairs.

“Go on.” She proffers the packet of cigarettes.

It is 9am. It is my fifth cigarette in an hour. I take one. I light hers and then mine. She falls back against the pillow, her cigarette sending tendrils of smoke into the darkened bedroom. I lean back too and rest my legs on the side of her bed. Now there is an almost comfortable silence. I draw on the cigarette and tap the ash neatly into the ashtray. She watches me.

“Who are you again?”

“And did those feet…” I start to sing.

I find that hymn is particularly difficult to sing with no musical accompaniment after breakfast. I wonder if John Humphreys has taken that into consideration.

True Places – fiction by Frances Browner

By Franner | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Veronica watched the snowflakes drift onto the grass, in a thin white gauze. April was always a tease; just when you thought winter was over, there’s that final fall of snow. She could hear Frank shuffling about in the garage. “Wouldn’t ya think the bloomin’ realtor would’ve told us this was a snow zone?” he’d been muttering every year for the last fifteen. Hauling out the snow plough again, retrieving it from behind the swing-set and patio furniture he’d pulled to the front in preparation for summer. “If it’s not fricking leaves I’m raking, it’s bloody snow I’m shovelling.” The engine started to whine and tick along the driveway. Veronica could’ve told him he’d stowed it away too soon. Instead, she pulled an imaginary zip over her lips.

She’d had the notion to move Upstate, to surround herself with trees and flowers and the Catskill Mountains. Frank had been content in the Bronx, their view a dirty courtyard with raccoons and squirrels jostling over neighbours’ leftovers. A man in the apartment opposite had dumped a saucepan of spaghetti bolognese out of his window once, and the rodents had chewed with relish, long strings of pasta dangling from their chins, their mouths dripping red sauce. Made her stomach churn, it did. She’d been embarrassed when her cousins came over from Ireland on a shopping trip, but sure they thought the squirrels were grand. She’d forgotten they’d be considered cute at home; recalled her own delight when she’d first met the mites scurrying around Tibbits Brook Park. Everything had been exciting at the start; even meeting Frank one night on a high stool.

“Would you like a cup of coffee,” he’d asked and she eyed the empty pot behind the bar, its hotplate now stone cold. It was two o’clock in the morning, after all.

“Where would you get coffee at this hour,” she’d asked him.

“Back at my place,” he replied, sliding off the stool.

By evening, there was a thick film of snow on the lawn and small piles of slush edging the driveway, like miniature pyramids leading up to the front door, like the haystacks on her father’s small Irish farm long ago. She’d hoped this rural life would transport her back, but there was nothing here to remind her of home. There hadn’t been a word out of Frank in a while. He had probably flaked out in front of his new 50 inch HD digital TV, cursing at some baseball, American football, or basketball team. The wide, flat screen dominated their living-room, the players like giants flickering on the wall, the commentators’ voices echoing through the house. Veronica hated it but never said a word. Men were more liable to give in when a woman didn’t put up a fight.

She stole into her den here beside the kitchen and settled into the bay window seat whenever she wanted to be alone, a book unopened on her lap. The bookcase was made of distressed wood. It even had holes, as if the woodworm had been at it. She’d filled it with old hardcovers slightly scuffed; the pages nicotine yellow. Books she’d never read. When she moved to New York, she’d spent most of those earlier weekends up this part of the State, rummaging around antique stores, had even collected some first editions. Finally found a home for them, here.

After years in rented accommodation, herself and Frank on their own until Alan came along, then the three of them squashed into a one-bedroom apartment on Katonah Avenue, she’d been dying for a place of their own.

“We’re grand the way we are,” Frank had argued.

He hadn’t wanted another baby either but still insisted on the fumbling in the dark, his hand clamped over her mouth, for fear she’d make a sound. Afterwards, she tiptoed over toys and teddy bears to their boy’s bed, listened to his breathing, and kissed him lightly on the head.

Sundays she had followed the realtor through two-beds, condos, co-ops, townhouses. All the time progressing up the Saw Mill River Parkway or the Deegan Expressway; all the time edging farther away from Woodlawn.

Frank accompanied her on only a few of these excursions. There was always a football or hurling game from home being televised in the Three Counties.

“Show me on the map,” he’d insist. “I’m a builder. I need a map.”

When she saw this two-acre property in Hopewell Junction, she knew it was a steal. Even Frank had agreed. He’d been looking for an escape route back then. Had been involved in some shenanigans with the big boys in the city, needed to lay low for a bit.

Family outings to Home Depot were spent choosing light fixtures and doorknobs; picking out paints; selecting wood for the decking. Alan got a Thomas the Tank Engine bed, matching curtains, and a comforter. Frank was all about ‘flipping over.’ He saw dollar signs in every nook and cranny, his way to pay off the boys, he said. Then, he got the job with UPS, complete with a brown uniform and benefits. Veronica had been able to see herself far into the future, an old lady in the window, reading and watching grandchildren carve footprints in a lush carpet of snow.

Alan was a sophomore in Fordham University now and had informed her he wasn’t coming home for the summer. Too boring, he said. He’d have a better chance of getting part-time work in Manhattan; where there was a better social life too. What would he be doing in this ass hole of nowhere?

Veronica had winced at his words; her heart clenching. At least, Frank had gelled with the place, despite his complaining. They’d settled into a rhythm, the two of them, side-stepping the gulf between them, which was as wide as the one he’d ploughed through the snow, scattering the pyramids of slush.

A few weeks later, she took a drive up the Thruway, car windows open to let in the sun, the radio cranked up and a container of iced tea on the dashboard. Her favourite time of year, the long climb out of winter over. Every now and then, she took a random exit, drove around colonial hamlets like Peekskill, Carmel, and East Fishkill; places she imagined Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne writing about if she ever got around to reading their books. She drove through the small towns, without stopping, and took to the highway again.

She’d been roaming around for hours when she came upon one that felt familiar. Roxbury, the sign said. She’d been here many a Sunday in the early days. Had even brought Frank with her, when he’d been in a playful mood. At a red light, she noticed a shop she’d been to several times. Scanning the window display, she saw a garden table similar to the one she’d bought in Fingers Lake Mall. Lime green retro, sixties. Next to it was a wooden swing-set, like the one she’d had handcrafted in Poughkeepsie. Alan had long grown out of his, but she was keeping it for the family she hoped he’d have one day.

Like her mother had done for her. Mam had carted over Veronica’s baby bath on an Aer Lingus plane after Alan was born and the Christening robes her great-grandmother had sewn. Had mailed over Veronica’s first pair of wellington boots for his third birthday. Had even made them take the rocking cot that Veronica’s father had made; that all of his six children had slept in, even some of the grandchildren. Frank was furious when they’d had to pay a small fortune to have it shipped all the way over here.

“Clutter,” he’d snarled. “More rubbish.”

Could that be the cot crammed into the window of Rick’s Barn, three thousand miles from their barn at home, where her father had painstakingly put it together? The car behind her beeped. She pulled over, wrote down the phone number from the shop door and headed for the highway again. Her mind was racing with all of the things she would say to Frank. This called for a confrontation, whether he liked it or not.

She took the exit for Hopewell and turned onto Cypress Drive. The street was called after a tree. Trees produce leaves. Shouldn’t that have been a clue? Hundreds of them cascading to the ground every October, needing to be raked. The branches were laden now, forming an archway over the road, casting shadows on the ground, concealing the houses on either side. She didn’t notice the bare windows until she drove into the yard. Felt her heart unravel and drop, drop, drop to her toes. Vacant black eyes glared down at her, as she stumbled towards the door and jabbed her key into the lock several times. Watched it turn. Eventually.

She saw the note on the worktop before she noticed there was no kitchen table. “Can’t stick it anymore.” The words were fuzzy. “This country life is not for me.” No indication of when he had gone or where he was going, but it wouldn’t be too hard to track him down. Try any Bronx bar on a Sunday afternoon. She took a deep breath and pulled open the door to her den. The armchair was how she’d left it, alongside the window-sill, a stack of books on the floor. The bookcase was still there, complete with worm-ridden holes, its books with the parchment pages, hard protective covers. She skimmed her fingers over them. Brushed off the dust. Browsed down to M. Pulled out Moby Dick. Took her seat in the window and looked across at the Catskills.

Noticing an old tricycle of Alan’s lying on the lawn, she drew the crumpled scrap of paper from her jeans pocket, smoothed out the number for Rick’s Barn. She wouldn’t bother with the swing-set or even the garden table. She might retrieve the rocking cot, however.

She sat there through the night; slipping in and out of sleep, dreaming about selling up and making enough money to take her back to Ireland, to take her home. Alan could visit on vacation. She finally awoke to banging doors, revving cars, schoolchildren chattering, their mothers reprimanding them, the book still open in her hand. She’d fix herself a cup of coffee, make a few calls. If there was any coffee; if they still had a phone.

As she rose from the chair, a car screeched into her driveway and a uniformed man alighted, clutching a sheet of paper, his metallic star badge gleaming in the sunshine. The Dutchess County Sheriff kicked Alan’s tricycle aside and strode towards her hall door. She heard him rap on the knocker, rat-tat-tat-tat, or was that the hammering of a nail?

Veronica tried to recall a sentence that had leaped out at her the day she bought Moby Dick. She flicked open the book. Found where she’d underlined: It is not down on any map; true places never are. The only words she’d read of it, so far.

The Sighting – fiction by Yong Takahashi

By Yong Takahashi | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

The Sighting by Yong Takahashi

I see you again – walking towards me – with your confident stride. I notice your closely-shaven beard, white, button-down shirt, and neatly-pressed slacks. You always took so much pride in your appearance.

I wipe my palms on the dress you bought for me. The blue silk soaks up the moisture and I curse myself for ruining the dress you never saw me wear.

I leap from my seat as I try to close the space between us. The other workers glide past me, slowly, in fragmented snapshots, like charred pieces of glass falling from the sky. It reminds me of the day you vanished from my life.

My vision is fuzzy and I try to make out their faces.

I can’t.

Not yet.

My brain stalls, trying to process this impossible information. Do you finally remember where you belong?

Flashes of our wedding, life, and love flicker in my mind. We were so happy, weren’t we? The flood of memories is unbearable and my legs buckle from underneath me.

The sun scorches my eyes. I blink, praying you do not disappear again.

A face materializes.

I rub my eyes.

I smile but it is not you – again.

Flyer – fiction by Philip Dean Brown

By Imogen Gladman | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

We approached the door. It didn’t hurt to have me be the one they saw first. I was with my uncle, Walker, who claimed to be a natural born salesman. Could sell a Buick to a blind man, he’d said. I wasn’t sure yet about Chicago. I wasn’t sure about this uncle. But after Dad found a beam to swing from — and Mom, who wasn’t all that together herself, hooked up with a steroid-built bouncer, they thought it best for me to get a fresh start. This uncle did. And, in the end, Mom did, too.

This house was roofing. If my uncle noticed something better — lawn work, a new driveway — then that would have been the pitch. The sell.

“Missing shingles,” he said. “Hell, another year and they’ll all be gone. Easy peasy.” “What?”

“Piece of cake. Easy peasy. You never heard that?”

“Not from someone your age.”

“Age smage. It’s all in your head.”

Probably it is, I thought. I was discovering you could sell someone any old thing. Make people, who, if they stopped to think about it, would say, Hold on, this sounds a little too good. But that was the problem. People don’t think. They believe. They want to believe. Easy peasy.

“Morning, mam. Sorry to bother you, but I was checking up on a job we finished. Not far from here. The Woodwards. You know them?”

“Who?”

The woman was wearing what they call a housedress. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard the word, but I guessed it to mean something a person wouldn’t wear outside the house.

“The Woodwards,” my uncle said. “Nice couple.”

“What it is you said you wanted?” she asked. “I can’t take any more magazines.”

“No, mam. No magazines. That’s not my line of work.”

The woman waited, blocked the door.

“What I noticed was — because this here’s my business, is that your roof could use some work.”

“How’s that again?”

“Your roof. I noticed some of the shingles missing. Told my nephew here that’s going to be some trouble right there.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“Leaks, mam. If it isn’t already, that roof of yours is going to let the rain drop right on through. Notice any spots on your ceilings?”

The woman turned her head. Looked back inside the house. A dog that moved slower than any dog I’d ever seen nudged her bare leg.

“Isn’t he the cutest thing,” my uncle said.

“It’s a she,” the woman said.

“Well, she sure is something.”

Walker had a sheet of paper in his hand. The woman was signing her name. Handing over a check. He’s good, I thought. I’ll give him that.

Walker drove north on Pulaski. News played on the radio while I studied the streets like a foreign country. In Tucson I knew where everything fit. Where I fit. Here, I was still trying to learn.

“I’ve been thinking,” my uncle said. “The fall.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“School. Where you’re going to go.”

“What if I took the GED?”

“That ain’t gonna happen,” he said. “How do you feel about Catholics?”

“Nothing, I guess. We never went to church or anything.”

“Me neither. Not since I was a boy. I was thinking St. Gregory’s over on Addison.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. School’s school, I thought. What I wanted to do was work. Find a job. Make enough money to not have to count on people. People are a disappointment. Probably to themselves first. They can’t help but spill it on whoever is closest.

“Why that school?” I asked.

“I heard the brothers run a pretty tight ship. They’ve always have a pretty decent football team. Plus, you went through some pretty tough things back home. Your dad and grandpa dying like that.”

“They killed themselves,” I told him. I left out the part of me helping Grandpa along. That was between us.

“Yeah, I know. That’s some pretty tough business.”

“Maybe it runs in the family,” I said “Suicide gene or something.”

“It ain’t like that,” Walker said. “Don’t be thinking that. Anyway, maybe we can go to a game or two over at St. Greg’s.”

“Sports are stupid,” I told him.

“Yeah. I don’t like them much myself. Except for The Sport of Kings. That’s a whole ‘nother matter.”

“Kings?”

“Horses,” my uncle said. “Not the trotters. Thoroughbreds,” he said. “Most beautiful animals on earth.”

I’d only been on a horse the one time. Out on the western edge of Tucson where the saguaro stood tall as a house. A rattlesnake, thick in its middle, crossed in front of us, and that horse tossed me flat to the ground. Broke for safer ground.

“This doesn’t seem like a horse kind of place,” I said. “You know horses?”

“I do,” my uncle, “Been studying them my entire life.”

It was July and the nights were heavy with the city’s wet heat. It felt like I wore a blanket that never dried. School didn’t start for a month. St. Gregory’s waited all clean and shiny. What’s one year? I told myself. I’d been in Chicago for more than a month. The northwest side where my uncle lived was almost familiar now. The street names. Pulaski. Kimball. Western. The stores and restaurants. Middle Eastern, Filipino, a deli Walker told me had been there sixty years, since when Jewish families crowded the neighborhood’s bungalows. I’d started to recognize faces on the sidewalks. The old couple who lived next door in what my uncle called a duplex.

The woman spent her days in her backyard garden. A chain-link fence separated her house and Walker’s. Her husband sat on the stoop in a sleeveless t-shirt and kept an eye on her. Once I saw him sitting in his car parked in front of the building. I knew he was smoking. I smelled it as I walked by. Everyone has a secret.

“You go to school soon,” the woman said. I wasn’t sure if it was a question. She was out front sweeping the sidewalk. She wore what looked like an apron over her dress. On her, it looked right.

“Another month,” I told her.

“School’s good,” she said. “Get good job after.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Like your uncle,” she said. “He’s a good man. Smart man. Hard worker.”

I didn’t know about all that. Walker was smart. But work? I knew he found other people — mostly Mexicans and men from Eastern Europe to do the actual work.

“What a contrast, huh?” his uncle said. Men from a place alive with color and others from somewhere whose only color is concrete.

“He reads a lot,” I told her.

The woman nodded her head.

I didn’t mind talking to her. I hadn’t made any friends yet. It was good to listen to someone other than my uncle. “We’re going to the track tomorrow,” I told her.

“Track?”

“Horseraces.”

“Why you do that? You like horses?”

“Not really. My uncle wants to show me how to pick winners.”

I hadn’t expected the racetrack to look so — pretty was the word stuck in my head. Not a word I used much. The surrounding green grass, flags flying their colors, the white of the buildings even whiter in contrast. Families carried coolers filled with sandwiches and cold chicken, drinks in plastic liter bottles. It looked like what I imagined a picnic looked like. Men in plaid shirts walking with women in sun-dresses and wide- brimmed hats.

Inside there were other kinds of people. Men whose clothes did not fit right. Pale skin and sunglasses. They stood at tables and wrote things down with small, wooden pencils. It seemed they all knew my uncle. Walker had his eye on a television screen that listed the horses and their odds.

“Watch the numbers,” he said. “How they change as the bets sort themselves out. The late money is usually the smart money.”

I didn’t understand a word of it. My odds of understanding the man were maybe twenty-five percent. If that. It wasn’t like I wasn’t interested. I thought maybe I’d learn how to get by without any kind of real job. Find a way to live outside whatever normal was supposed to be. A job, the two-week vacation. It didn’t seem like a fair trade-off. It hadn’t worked out for my father. The game’s fixed, my uncle told me. You need to cheat a little to beat it.

“You ever feel guilty or anything?” I asked. I remembered the woman and her roof. If that roof would be leaking the next time we got a good rain. What were the odds of that?

“What about those Mexican men who got a little money in their pockets?”

“Not a lot, I’ll bet,” I said.

“It’s all relative. Didn’t hear them complaining. That roof will hold some.”

“If you say so.”

“Let’s get some coffee. We’ve got time. You hungry?”

“I could eat,” I told him.

“Walker,” one of the men in sunglasses said. “You like anything?”

“Not today. Just showing my nephew around.”

“Degenerates,” his uncle whispered as we walked away.

“What?”

“Bunch of degenerate gamblers,” he said.

“I thought you bet on these horses.”

“Listen,” his uncle said. He had his coffee and had bought me a hot dog. “Listen,” he said again. “There’s smart bets — bets where the math is right, or the tip is solid. For most people it’s just harmless fun. Spend a couple of bucks at the track. Play a little blackjack in Vegas. But guys like those back there? They’re just sick with it.”

“Sick?”

“Yeah, sick. Win, lose it doesn’t matter. They just need the action.”

Walker took me outside to watch the horses come in for the next race. The jockeys sat like toy men atop the shiny, brown horses. I saw the ease with which they rode. Reins in gloved hands, how the horses accepted the directions they were given.

Walker had what looked like a newspaper but wasn’t. The Daily Racing Form, he called it. Shows the horse’s recent history, he explained. How they ran their last times out. Track conditions. How many furlongs. Jockeys that rode them. The trainers, of course.

“You read all that?” I asked. “I do,” he told me. “Trick is to figure out the real story behind the so-called facts.”

“You can do that?”

“I got a sense for it. You know what subtext is?”

“Subtext?”

“Never mind. Sometimes I get a tip. When a big favorite’s gonna hold back. A ringer whose numbers don’t add up. It’s sweet to beat the game, I’ll tell you that.”

I wasn’t sure which part of my split-apart life was crazier. Growing up in Tucson where Dad had a job at Raytheon until he hung himself in our garage. Mom going to work in a strip club. Not to mention my grandpa who died off as well. The plastic bag over his head sealing it. Caught up in offering a hand with that. That life fully unravelled.

Or this new life in Chicago with this Uncle Walker. Mom took me to the airport for the once-a-day direct flight to Chicago. It’s only for a while, she told me. Finish up your senior year. Just one year, honey. By then things will get settled down. Back to normal. You’ll like your uncle, she told me. He’s smart like you.

What’s normal? I wanted ask, but knew she didn’t have a clue. Except she was right about Walker. He was smart. Just not normal smart. I was seventeen years old and knew there was a road I was travelling. I was worried what I would find. What I would miss. I didn’t miss Tucson. There wasn’t enough to miss. If I never saw Mom again, how would I feel?

“That’s a fine looking horse,” my uncle said.

I looked where Walker nodded his head.

“Look at the rhythm in his gait. See his foot fall patterns? Calm as can be. Another day at the office for him.”

I didn’t see any of it. The horses just looked like horses. “That’s a good thing you’re seeing?”

Walker turned his head and winked at me. I was pretty sure no one had ever winked at me before. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

“It is,” he told me. “Means he looks too good for the price they’re setting.”

“He’s for sale?”

“Might be. But I’m talking about the odds to bet him. Eleven to one? Not this horse. Not against this field.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“It means something doesn’t add up. Come on,” Walker told me. “Let’s see if I’m right. You have any money on you?”

“Money?”

“Never mind. Thought if you had a fiver we could turn it into a couple of Jacksons.”

I looked at the man. I’m related to him I reminded myself. “Twenty dollar bills,” Walker said. “Andrew Jackson our seventh president? Survived the first assassination attempt? They teach you anything down in Tucson?”

“I’ve got five dollars,” I told him.

“Come on,” Walker told me. “Let’s go make us some money.” The wink again. I hoped it was lucky, this winking business.

We stood in line waiting to reach the window where people handed over their money.

“Let me have that five dollars,” my uncle said.

“I can do it,” I told him.

“You twenty-one all of a sudden? Gotta be twenty-one to place a bet. Eighteen this year, right?” I nodded my head.

“Eighteen you can go get yourself shot in some stupid-ass war. But you still can’t bet.”

“How much are you betting?” I asked,

Walker had his eye on the television screen, watching the numbers change. “Three thousand,” he said.

“Dollars?”

“Dollars. What else?”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“Money’s just numbers you hope will add up. He’s eleven to one. Probably drop to ten. Thirty thousand if he comes in. Fifty for you. Know who’s on the fifty?”

“No.”

“Ulysses S. Grant. Liked the bottle, they say. Gamblers think the fifty is unlucky. Casinos won’t even stock them.”

We were almost at the window.

“You believe that?” I asked. “Luck and all that?” I watched as Walker looked for an answer.

“I don’t. But why take a chance. Never met a gambler who wasn’t superstitious. At least a little bit.”

Walker handed me my ticket. Five dollars to win. Seventh race. Carmella was the horse’s name. A girl’s name. But the horse wasn’t a mare. “Who knows what the deal with that is,” Walker told me. “Long as he’s first to the finish line, they can call him whatever they want.”

Walker wanted to go up to the top deck. The glassed in rooms and real furniture. A bar where you didn’t have to wait. I wanted to get as close as possible. Up tight to the rail. I’d seen people yelling down there when the horses made their turn for home.

“All right,” Walker said. “We’ll rub shoulders with the hoi polli.” “Who?”

“The plebian. Common folk. Sure hope St. Gregory’s teaches you something.”

It was crowded down front. Sunburned women and sunburned kids. The children running here and there. Men sitting on benches. Waiting. Walker elbowed his way to the front, and I followed.

The horses entered the gate a little further down the track. I watched as the jockeys guided the muscled shapes into metal chutes. Some of the horses seemed reluctant. You could see it more clearly on the screen across the track. The hard-set faces of the jockeys. The horses ready to be let free. To run and run hard.

“Do you see him?” I asked.

“Third from the end. Our side. The jock wearing purple.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. Purple silks. Color of royalty.”

“Silks?”

“That what they call what jockeys wear. Our boy’s wearing the color of kings. You study any history?”

“I took history.”

“Well, that’s something at least.”

I held the ticket tight in my hand. “So, you get thirty thousand dollars if he wins?”

“Less. I played him across the board. Plus the late Daily Double. Boxed for that.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“My ticket pays if he comes in first, second or third. Win, Place, Show. Or if I hit the Double.”

“My ticket just says Win,” I told him.

“You’re only in for five bucks. Gotta go for it. All or nothing. Me, I’ve got a little more in play. Need to hedge it a bit.”

“Hedge?”

The start. I missed it. I heard the noise, but I had my head turned looking at this uncle who talked in a language I didn’t understand. The horses bursting from the chute. The distant roar of it. By the time I turned around they were full out, a quarter way down the track.

On the screen I watched them bunch up as they made the first turn. All the colors. The green of the surrounding grass. The bright white fences. And the jockeys crouched low over their horse. Loud colors on their backs.

I counted the money. Fifty-one dollars. Two twenties, a ten and a single. It felt like magic. Something that wasn’t real, but looked real. “How much did you get?” I asked.

“Twenty-one and change,” Walker said. “If that Double had come in — now that would have been sweet.”

“It’s still pretty sweet,” I told him. “We didn’t do anything and they gave us money. Gave you a lot of money”

“True,” Walker said. “We didn’t break a sweat. Weren’t working for the man.”

“The man?”

School started, but by Halloween I stopped going. I met two boys and together we spent our days along the lakefront. Meredith came along too. Meredith wore her hair short and dressed like a boy. Black Dr. Marten boots. Never any makeup. Bangs covered her eyes as if she were hiding. She walked right up and talked to men who had lines cast out on the lake. Nets at their side. I liked her. The first girl I’d ever really liked. Felt comfortable with.

I’d been in Chicago for almost three months. Mom and Tucson felt far away. It seemed you could choose a home anywhere, and if that didn’t work out, choose another. Place another bet. For now, and maybe longer, I wanted to — what did Walker call it? A flyer. Take a flyer on this Meredith, this place. See how I landed.

Anne Bevan Q&A with Dave Kavanagh

By Dave Kavanagh | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Does writing energise or exhaust you?

I am never more energised than when I’m in the middle of a writing project. It’s like a battery charge that keeps me going for hours after I finish. I even forget to eat, which is very unusual for me.

Has publishing your recent book changed your process of writing?

Only in the sense that I now have an expectation that something else that I write may be good enough to publish in time, and that keeps me on my toes editing, I’m less complacent about the finished product that I used to be and pay far more attention to editing.

How many unpublished or half-finished books are in your desk drawer?

Four, one finished novel, rewritten many times but definitely finished now. There are two others that are partly written and one unfinished collection of poetry which I add to regularly. I’m feeling like a bit of a slacker now after writing that but it will spur me on to finish those projects ☺

Do you Google yourself?

Definitely not! That’s a terrifying thought. Head down, stay writing and don’t look on Google.

What does your family think of your writing?

They’re very proud of me. They tell me they don’t always understand my poems but they read them. My daughter reads my stories and novel chapters for me. She’s an avid reader and not afraid to be critical in a good way. They’re a supportive bunch, particularly my husband, he’s my biggest fan and he feeds me ☺

What period of your life do you draw most of your inspiration from, or write about most often?

So far, this has been from my childhood but that’s possibly a common thing when people begin to write seriously. It may even be a form of therapy or a necessary rite of passage. In the second collection of poetry, which I’m currently working on, I find myself writing more from my adult experiences than I did in the first collection.

When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?

As a child I think but I also didn’t feel it was achievable so I didn’t pursue it. It’s taken me a long time to get back to me.

Who is your favourite under appreciated poet?

I don’t know if he could be described as under appreciated by anyone but me, but a few years ago I was given a book of Dermot Healy’s poems called A Fool’s Errand and I fell completely in love with his work. I would like to have met him.

What works best for you, typewriter, fountain pen, dictate, computer or longhand?

I either write longhand or I type. I find that poetry often comes to me in little waves while I’m out and about and I write it down and later type it up to edit it, if I can read my writing! For novel writing I type but if I’m having a problem with a chapter or character then I write it longhand to try to free up some ideas.

Do you carry a notebook and if so how do you use it?

I always carry a notebook. The only time it happened that a story idea came to me that I didn’t have a notebook was in a pub in Bray on a weekend away, so I pulled the back off beermats and wrote the ideas on them; went home with a handbag full of beermats! I’ve never travelled without one since. I’ve discovered that if I think I’ll remember the idea in the morning, I definitely won’t. If I was stuck I’d send myself a text message with a few notes in it to remind me but it isn’t as good as a notebook. I usually just write down the bones of an idea or a few phrases of a ‘would be’ poem as they come to me.

How critical are you in your evaluation when you are reviewing your own work?

Much more so than I used to be. I’ve discovered that if I write a poem or chapter or story, then I need to leave it aside for about a month and go back to it with fresh eyes. It’s usually very obvious when I read it again where a bit of pruning would help. Maybe that’s just me but I seem to need to chop some off the beginning and the end, if not more. I’m getting better at it but reading out loud helps a lot. You can’t hear rhythm when you read in your head and it’s difficult to spot repetition when reading silently.

Did the thought to give up writing ever occur to you?

No, now that I’ve rediscovered it. I love writing so even if I’m dodging finishing a project or not doing the editing I should be working on, I’ll still be writing something else. I find writing enjoyable and writing poetry emotional.

Writers are often believed to have a muse, your thoughts on that.

I’m not sure that I ever considered this before and I don’t know that everyone has a muse but if I was to say I had then it would be nature. If I find myself getting stale or unable to continue a piece of writing, then a walk in the woods or by the sea usually sorts it out. A full poem could form in my head while out walking on a quiet beach.

Are you a member of any writing groups? If yes, define their importance to you.

I took a UCC short course about eight years ago facilitated by Kathy D’Arcy, and five of us from various seasons of this course write together. If possible we meet once a month in the South County pub in Douglas, Cork for a couple of hours and try to be disciplined, which we’re not at all, but we keep up a good pretence. It’s a very encouraging and fun group of writers to share work with and Kathy still joins us when time allows. I find I am energised after meeting the group and more inclined to be disciplined in my writing the week after. It’s also important for me to have writers to bounce ideas off who will be honest with me regarding my work.

Do you have any suggestions to help me to become a better writer? If so, what are they?

I would suggest taking a course or finding a group to write with regularly, to get you in the habit of sharing your work. Find a group where you are both encouraged and kept on your toes; we’re all lazy sods at the back of it. Good writers emerge and need to have the space and time to do so, there’s no rush. Try to share your work with others, they will see things in there that you didn’t see when you were writing it; they’ll see that spark you have. Don’t be afraid of open mic nights, they’re a great place to gain confidence. Read all the time, a variety of writers and genres. Carry a notebook and pen everywhere, you will forget that beautiful phrase or story idea if you don’t write it down. Be brave and write whatever you want, it’s your poem or your story and if people tell you it isn’t in vogue at the moment, take no notice and write it anyway, but write it well. Enjoy it, when you’re having fun amazing things can happen.

Do you see the writing gene in your family members?

I see story tellers in my family. Both my children and grandchildren are artistic and creative, so it’s possible that writing will happen organically at some stage, in one form or another, for some of them. If they take after me then they’ve lots of time yet ☺

Do you set a schedule for writing, or are you one of those who write only when inspired?

Most days I’ll happily write for a couple of hours in the morning but there are times when I’ll do anything to avoid it, especially when I’m grappling with a difficult character, or a poem that just won’t behave. A little walk or a nice cuppa usually sorts it out. I find I write the best material when the mood takes me though.

Shoot It – fiction by Alisdair L R I Hodgson

By ByronicZero | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 Shoot It by Alisdair L R I Hodgson

Everyone is constrained by the little things. I imagine walking down this street – not just any street, but the city centre high street – with a plastic carrier bag swinging by my side. Nobody looks twice. I mean, not unless I start spinning the bag around screaming bomb!, but that’s another story about dangerous devices. No – I am one of them. I fit in perfectly with my plastic bag, like every other evening shopper. Maybe it’s a five-pence supermarket bag with the logo on, or maybe it’s a heavy-duty one that the colours are scraping off, with warped sides from the Argos catalogue of items I’ve put it through. Bag for life? Right. Anything to get that extra twenty pence out your pocket. Granted, the choicest choice is cotton or hemp, something canvas that’s sustainable and doesn’t kill every shape and size of animal where it winds up.

A bag is fine, acceptable, comfortable; no issues there. But what about something bigger? I can see myself walking down the high street with something distinctly different, let’s say a pole, in hand. An eight-foot aluminium pole, held straight up in the air. Now I get looks and second looks, photos, text messages, knitted brows and comments shielded behind hands. Would I be better if I held it straight out, jousting with the street at large? Maybe. But I wouldn’t get away with it. There would be a social price to pay. What if I take it down a notch instead – keep the metal pole, sure, but give it an inch diameter and three feet of length. What the French might be inclined to call a baton. What do the French not call a baton? As if by the divine magic of imaginary pole manipulation, we’re back in Cosyville, cruising down easy street, mostly unnoticed by everybody and their devices.

The police are herding the high street, but I’m not one of them. Never mind the militant stare, the black and white, the cap, the epaulettes – I’m not. But I do have the aluminium baton – the inch-by-three-feet pole: aircraft grade, swivel head mechanism, slip noose on either end. This ought to attract some attention – and it does – but the real show is further up the road. That’s what draws the crowd, that’s where the phones are aimed. For a brief time, the public consciousness has centred. This is where I go to work.

“Are you who we’re waiting for?” a senior female officer asks on approach, as I disengage the safety of the shop-lit pavement and brim the horde.

“Someone has to be,” I reply, navigating a crowd that thickens by the step. The mob are too distracted to observe my authority, awaiting a miracle on the other side. A younger officer matches my pace, demonstrating the desperate need to explain himself. The female, his superior, stands back, allowing junior more than his length of tether so he can learn not to care the hard way. “We tried the vets. They were closed. I – We have never dealt with anything quite like this before.”

I want to give him a reassuring pat and tell him that everything will be okay. But everyone in the town centre knows it won’t. Instead, I wave him down and he stops, lost, dissolving into my peripheries.

The police – teams of two at either end of the crowd – are here for civilian control and traffic diversion as much as anything else. They’re not here to deal with the situation, only contain it. Like Orwell and his elephant, I am who they call when things get out of hand and no-one else can do what must be done.

The thing is stranded in the centre of a large circle of people spanning wider than a school fight but not quite a circus ring. It has been reported as male, but how anyone can know that beats me: the infected genitals swell, chewing gum-pink, puckered and unrecognisable. Not that they will be on display. In times of terror, mammals protect their weakest points.

I part the crowd, breaking an imperceptible barrier, entering the arena. Now I am noticed. Now my baton becomes the eight-foot weapon, the unavoidable centre of attention. Every detail is amplified as the limelight vies between myself and the creature I’m here to contain. To some, I am the hero of this piece, to others a necessary evil. To the group of students at my back, I am the villain. Girls and boys and everything in- between, sporting tunnelled ears, pierced noses, twirled moustaches and top knots. They spit and screech obscenities, starting arguments in the crowd. I would have thought them natural allies, but instead it’s the old guard coming to my defence, men in flat caps waggling rubber-ended walking sticks, telling them to show a little respect and common decency. They’re only making this harder for everyone.

But nobody looks away.

A woman pulls her infant back with one hand, filming the occasion with the other, inspecting every grim detail through the safety of a well-trained lens. Even the kids who, I could swear, when I was younger used to be possessed of a natural urge to get up close and personal with things, are watching the beast on their screens. These are creatures of spectacle, drawn to the bombastic – unable, in their superiority, to escape that particular piece of primal coding. Unable to look away from the flash, the crash. Prone to ridiculing what doesn’t conform.

The road has been temporarily closed and he’s sitting lopsided, isolated on his own new intersection, a lucky back paw thumping the damp tarmac, communicating danger in something more fundamental than Morse code. His eyes and mouth are engorged, housed in mucus and barely open, looking like he’s been stung by a bee or seized by a violent bout of conjunctivitis. To him, this is no spectacle. The fear and madness are right through his bones, symbiotic, supplying each other in profusion. The matted, white-flecked fur on his chest heaves laboured breaths – deep in, quick out – and the tumours peek out from beneath, black and crusty. At this point, he’s not even a danger to a car bonnet – if he ever was. Maybe a danger to rush hour and shopping and a trip to McDonald’s. He’s brought an entire city street to a standstill for little more than not yet being dead.

So often the smaller ones do the most damage, because we don’t see them coming.

A woman with no teeth is navigating the scene, selling snacks from a tray, and the crowd is consuming everything from protein bars to steaming cartons of takeaway. One man is six inches deep in a meaty footlong, and I would swear a little girl down the front is clutching a bag of microwave popcorn. When I was a child, I couldn’t even watch Watership Down to the end without stopping to hug the pets, but now … they’re bold and unflinching, mouths cast ajar and big doughy blank faces just staring out from within. Desensitised from their beginning. I suppose, if you look at everything through a screen, nothing is real.

Someone shouts “shoot it”. With what? Another camera? That’s the global influence for you: dirty tricks and US tactics. The quick fix.

I approach sidelong, as though I’m not interested in the animal but something parallel. He’s edgy, erratic, like he knows he shouldn’t be here, wherever he thinks he is. How he got here is anyone’s guess. I’m sure his friends are all dying painfully in an idyllic country field right now, somewhere green and peaceful amongst the hills. This is a celebrity he never asked for.

The noose eases over his head, catching below the ears, and he thrashes just once as it tightens, knowing the game is up. Silence draws in, holds, then exhales, dissolving into coffee shop chatter.

Someone laughs.

I walk him out, the crowd parting in a flash-lit blue and white sea. Migrating through the teeming mass, I lead the furry eyesore to my van, his march to the end, past shops and eateries with eager faces and camera eyes lining their windows. The sky opens in our wake.

I glance back, aware of the need for haste now that I’ve become a worthy equivalent of the bag-swinging bombster. A man stands alone in the beast’s spot, head tilted back like a dancer, arms wide, eyes shut (not screwed, but peacefully, openly shut), unconstrained, letting the rain wash something away – and the crowd with it. If everyone wasn’t running for cover – police into their vans, shoppers into their shops – perhaps he would be their next attraction. But I suspect not. He might be ridiculed, but he will not be remembered. They won’t close the street for him.

He is soaking up the sensation, the area’s aura, before it is gone.

Nobody sees him but the animal and me.

The Realisation – fiction by Jude Alexzander

By iudin | Issue 36, 15th December 2018 No one single thing had caused the Realisation. Like the rest of his life, no dramatic events led up to it; rather it was as the dripping of a tap. Soft. Unnoticed. Mundane. Barely audible amid the monotonous clamour of everyday routine.

Drip. It was just a smile, a laugh. A cheeky comment here and there, and the habitual smack on the arm that followed.

Drip. Gradually seeping through the cracks to pool innocently at the bottom of his consciousness.

Friends. Colleagues. Lads. Football banter. Heads bending close together over the desk to plot against their pompous arse of a supervisor. It was commiserations, congratulations and a quiet bit of good advice when one or the other was too close to taking a customer’s head off. It was sympathy and practical jokes on sleepy, hungover Saturday mornings when nobody in their right minds should be calling Tech Support.

The tittering jibes of their colleagues had been dismissed without a thought. That silly shower of bastards, he told himself. They were so starved for excitement in this godforsaken place, they’d latch onto anything.

Drip. Nothing to be aware of, until chill comprehension finally soaked through. Everything has a saturation point.

One dreary Friday evening, after all their macho-talk, the other flaky buggers from Team 4 hadn’t shown up for the customary “lads” drinks after work. Suddenly it was just the two of them, idling the evening away amongst the cheap lights and cheap pints. Two friends sitting alone in a sea of people, setting the world to rights, complaining about work (the supervisor really was an arse). Talking about everything and nothing at all.

Drip. That smile at some bitchy comment he’d made. The hysterical laughter that left them both wheezing and breathless over something so foolish that he’d never be able to remember later. A hand casually ruffling his hair. The lazy pressure of a knee against his thigh as they shuffled over to let some reeling punters past.

The tilt of that throat in the gaudy flicker of the games machines, all highlights and hollows and five-o’clock shadow. The Adam’s apple working as he drained his pint. He caught himself staring and forced his eyes away. Drip. Saturation point. Realisation. Perhaps the teasing hadn’t been so far from the mark after all. His chest ached. Two friends? Two blind idiots who couldn’t see what everyone else could, in the end.

The walk home was quiet and bittersweet. Sometimes their arms bumped gently as they crunched along the icy pavement to the taxi rank – the longest and shortest street in creation.

One last hug. A strong grip on his shoulder, lingering for just a moment. That wonderful smile again, gentle now under the muted glow of the streetlights.

Then it was over. He did not ask to share the cab and all too soon he was standing alone.

Snowflakes fell; cold, damp kisses on his tired face. Eventually, he turned towards home.

Poetry- Carla Scarano D’Antonio

By carlascarano | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

Sailing North

We left with cherry trees blossoming, people arranging polished horns in a window. Opposite to south Vegetation grew rusty, gold, scarlet red silver grey, brown. Inhaling thro, branches torn bare frozen. North: thorn, torn, horn ton, not. What the world throws at me she loses the world in her belly her thighs are fractions of petals her face is a riot rain and smoke smile in a window wood and sea water listen to the civil war her hair is a rope out of a refugee camp old and new things burn cautiously without breaking anything nothing that matters she bends the rake the hook and the shadow ties continents in small colonies her body marked by the seasons

In touch with my daughter in Tokyo

I would like to have you near me to touch you now to be sure we are part of the same bond of friendship and care – a family. But you are far away – busy busy, engaged with better chances, confrontation and confusion, hard work, swift changes. Photos on the kitchen shelves beam, heart-warming smile in a Howl’s-moving-castle mauve t-shirt, your favourite movie, and Italian red pepper earrings on the V&A background. When I feel sentimental, ache ticks spreading under the ribs; I send you a smile with hearts instead of eyes clapping hands a dancing lady and a hug a pumpkin for Halloween or a halo for your name day. The impersonal networking warms me up, though infertile, reminds me of the importance of imperfection in our infernal autonomy.

From dawn to dawn

Moon at sunrise fading lamp in pastel sky birds jet high – dive Sun rays hit blanket clouds hide shyly Rainbow wet against leaden heaven dissolves in haze Dusk tinges the horizon air stops breathing the earth releases its humours Firefly halos flicker dust sets quiet a willow chants its rhymes When blackout strikes candle light shrouds our intimacy Full moon casts long shadows makes day of a night Gleam filters the shutters in the morning blind sleep wakes up

Poetry- Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon

By Ceinwen2 | Issue 36, 15th December 2018

The Skater at the local rink her skates cut trails fingernails scratch wooden handrails she clings on for dear life. out in the woods a lake mute swans skitter on floes mis-footed and beautiful iced crust water surface strength deceptive hair cracks creep beneath her weight icicles dangle Damocles blades pierce down from rocks frozen air swells her lungs stretches them shapes blue-veined balloons pained her breath freezes to death

Backtrack

Our afternoon hangs, heavy with heat. You left, we split. Breakages ripple through the creek. A mud road cracks open, a cart loses a wheel, a boat springs a leak. A bang. Another. You’re back. The door shakes. Stupefied, I unlock the door, let you back, toxic, to fester. We snack on leftovers, entrails of suffocated affection.

Afterwards, we lie side by side. Gauze nets float through open window panes, slack on their wires. We rise. Weighted, wet, we part for good. Still hot, frantic with lack of connection.

Bill

He stands there, wooden, dark-shadowed by the sun. His large, plated feet jam the door. ’You’re going nowhere,’ he says. His steepled height, corn-sack width, block my escape. I grab his hair. His curls twist tight around my fingers, cut off blood. I withstand the pain, pull hard. He yelps I wriggle free and tear across the yard. The sun hides, obscured by fret and slated clouds.

Empty

You’re gone, I stand alone once more. Stranded on shingle, ocean’s cusp, in wild weather keening memories and loss. Today, I throw crumbs to gleeful, gorging gulls, drawn by my hand, opening and letting go. You offered me scraps, Leftovers. Ravenous, I’d lusted to eat full meals at your laden table. Despertar

In transit I walk the length of this day on shards of glass and blood blooms from my ribboned feet eventide reveals you by the roadside my new lover I sit in your shelter rest you bind my soles and sip from your offered cup – hibiscus flowers swirl in agua fresca a shot of lime juice turns trumpet petals from dried-dusk brown to moist red wet