The Undertow Review

Robert Joe Stout

The Clerical Supervisors Eat Lunch on the Lawn  

Bathroom cleansers,

                              funerals,

pin-on lace

                 cadence

the spooning of cottage cheese

and packaged tuna treats.

They nod my presence

past a redwood       

shedding bits of bark and browning foliage

on the lawn surrounding

them with green.

I carry their whispers

up the courthouse steps

into offices where young clerk-typists

lean on cluttered desks

and dream

of children,

                 waterfalls

and the smell of new-mown weeds.

Real de Arriba, Mexico

pocked by slag-strewn openings

of long ago abandoned mines cut

through cornfields’ rustling green.

Peligro!—Danger!—warned a bent

sign pocked with bullet holes.

The bus lurched through gouged

out ruts where rains had washed

out half the curve and swerved uphill

towards swirling clouds, then huffed,

geared down and pushed through brush,

the crest surmounted. Look! The town!

Twin avenues of pink and blue veered

around a gray stone church beyond

a “V” of crumbling masonry—what once

had been a mill that processed gold.

In corners purpled by the shifting breeze

black-shawled women nodded, hands

twitching like hurt birds. Their whispers

brought the shadows of old miners through

the haze of progress onto rusted earth.

Richard Miller

Threads of Cigarette Smoke

Because we spurned the water of life,

our mutual thirst rallied against us

with greater ferocity than we thought it capable of.

In such an atmosphere, uninvited guests

are known to thrive. On the alternate side

of the alternating current, the latest trends

were coming to a head. I careened

into a realization - I hadn't ever "thought" before.

What I had believed to be thinking

was actually a sinking into the present moment,

drowning in particulars and concrete imagery.

So I bought a new suit of clothes.

I declared myself a vigilante

of the imagination. Consciousness,

startled by such a development this early

in its pupal stage, shifted in its chrysalis

and folded back into sleep.

Spirit folded as well, but on another level.

I glimpsed you as you moved

from pageant to pageant, askew,

the prospect of the infinite glinting

in your eyes, and this spectacle,

combined with the blushing breeze

trembling in the shadow lit landscape,

revealed a different view of myself

and the space I've come to occupy.

I would put it into words if I were able,

but I only have this set of shapeless sensations

at my disposal. I never did comprehend

their relation to the ensuing downward spiral,

nor why, in such a context,

a downward spiral would ensue.

Darkness moves in ways that none of us

can fully grasp, seeping through the pores

of the vast project to which we've committed

ourselves. This is part of the appeal, I guess.

The thrill of conjecture.

As it stands, however, I remain pinioned

to the fringes of that undertaking, drowsing

in the musky dusk, drifting

like a paper boat along the surface

of a muddy stream.

Forehead Lines

I.

We venerate the older miracles.

The smoldering sense of having

been mislead spreads like breath

on a windowpane. New damages

drain the sky each night,

and each day, we wake up the same

people as before. Within

the battered core of everything

we've envisioned, a revision arises,

one whose power is exercised

in the form of a cancelled stamp,

and so its existence clamps down on us,

pinning us where we are

on the far side of memory.

II.

Inevitably, a new kind of failing

thrusts its heels into the ground.

The seals, which formerly kept

the seers from running rampant

with their revelations, have finally

broken. As the unspoken ambassador

of these token truths, I've taken up

the task of masking their development

in strips of ticker tape. No matter

how you shape the scene, smog

is always present - an unpleasant

reminder of our all-too-human frailty.

Words, you mustn't fail me now.

Even if your meanings do.

The First Line

Cold cluster of syllables,

taken from the jasmine tinted sky.

A new darkness lies over the street

intending to swallow it whole.

It's apparent that I spend

too much time wallowing.

Lately, I've become quite proficient at it,

which isn't a good sign.

The bond between this thought

and its expression dissolves,

and a volatile scenario results.

Too much tumult in my temper,

too much to remember

but not enough to savor.

I ought to pay a visit to flavor country

for a sampling of cancer.

But this isn't an answer, it's an avoidance.

Tonight there's coitus in the clouds.

A heavy rain is coming

and it's likely to crush me.

Ifran Merchant

The Jellyfish

Waiting on an unlovely stretch of the shore, the jellyfish

has surrendered its own will to the will of the ocean.

The ocean is far away now, but the jellyfish trusts it shall

return, and who am I to argue with a jellyfish.

The jellyfish can live on the land and in the sea, and I

have not yet perfected either art. Perhaps its secret is in

the way it exchanges one existence for another, the life

of a fish and the life of a jelly, without seeking to belong

to either world. Water becomes air, air becomes water

the jellyfish knows, and in this knowledge alone lies still.

The jellyfish on the sand is not trying to go anywhere.

Its will is the will of the ocean. The immense power

received in such an alignment is what makes the jellyfish

curiously frightening, gives it its sting.

Carousel

O anxious International Arrivals

clustered around the baggage carousel,

watch hopefully the thick black rubber veils

which still reveal nothing! Another soul

waiting to cross the Styx, I’ll take my place.

The grumble begins. The belt shudders, drags out,

baiting the ringside crowd, a zippered case.

Soon hands reach like needles drawn to magnets

for similar luggage, browns and blues and blacks.

A lone bright red suitcase goes sailing past.

The procession meanders on to its climax

of things checked in as fragile or outsized:

an over packed valise with strapped on wheels,

held together by parcel string and tape;

a Baluchi carpet-bag jingling its bells;

an umbrella; a cardboard poster-tube;

a folding-chair; some other assorted junk

all labelled with the airline’s barcode tag;

then last of all, a Louis Vuitton trunk

goes to the lady with the matching handbag.

The crowd thins, as a windfall, down to me

and that red suitcase, left on the conveyor.

It isn’t mine. I take it on my trolley,

stroll through Customs, with nothing to declare.

Mezzaluna

The wind wrestled the city; the insufflation

down closes, knife-cold, snaking through the haar.

That night she was returning from the shops

along the cobbled crescent. The bags she held

suddenly weightless, her arms began to float,

puppet-stringed. She smiled, tiptoed her feet.

Like a leaf whirled up a vortex, she was propelled

on past the moon, to the Pleiades, where she stopped.

Her body, loved by the god, changed to a star,

can still be traced amongst the constellations.

Drew McNaughton

Scherezade Siobhan 

log #1

till your bones are fear 

log #3

speak, woman

the other woman is a pergola of cicatrices / as green as new grapevine / the other woman is a cirrus-haired nocturne / a map inked by factory smoke & spiderwebs / is the hand of jeweled verbena / is a mermaid with ribs stacked like quarter-moons/ hunted/ from the warmed mercury of the arabian sea / the other woman is a bathtub full of vintage rum / & purple candlewax / a language carved from smuggled leather / the other woman has eyelids like knife handles / has a tongue that curls around the duende of his red root / as a muscle-memory tourniquet / the other woman leaves here talon-trails / on the chipped alabaster urn of his spine / in an excavation of hieroglyphs / unearthed on a boy pharaoh’s ivory-gold grave /the other woman laughs / in an echo of basilica bells / the other woman laughs / in an anthology of wolfsongs / the other woman climbs into my bed / a mythology of mirrors / the mouth salted raw between her thighs / opening / like the sharpest venus flytrap / the other woman is i / is the eye / is endless

Lauren Pope

Memories of Baja

Bienvenidos

Yesterday came like answers on the back of flashcards –

in my pocket, a stick figure drawn on a napkin

with coconut breasts titled ‘ándale Lorena’;

my tongue rolling

against the roof of my mouth

stops the margarita brain freeze;

there are

brothers with ridiculous names

and darkness –

sweating bodies, dancing bodies

bodies like puzzle parts;

a toilet bowl, a saddle blanket

and señor cockroach outstripping my brain.

Hitchhiking

Mexican tortilla is similar to a Spanish omelet, only bigger –

a sponge of egg whites to rest my head on.

If I stand by the cactus, waving my thumb

I will wilt. This is certain.

Charles and Darwin are outside with a car.

Who the heck are Charles and Darwin?

Road Trip

Peanut butter pretzels are a triumph;

I like the way they crunch in my head,

the way they drown out Darwin's endless chatter

about ATV's

I like the way the land looks starved

tonguing the ocean,

always on the verge of drought.

4th of July

We trade fireworks for lobster on the beach.

Later, we burn the car’s Thorium engine

and dance like children

arms swirling towards the sky.

Charlie’s tongue leaves a snail trail

from my neck to my sternum –

it’s radioactive, he tells me, meaning the fire

but I’m still too invincible to care.

You Imagine A Night In Martinique

You say, ‘Look sun-kissed,

look as though you spent the day

reaping the fields,’

because –

how did you put it –

‘bedroom games are fashionable,

and you do not want to be alternative?’

You take me –

first in your hands,

then in your mouth,

fashioning me into Josephine

à la Créole –

my expression

as mindless as a doll’s.

‘Work harder,’ you rasp,

‘the sugarcane will sour

unless you cut it,’

your tongue circling my ear

like a buzzard

perfecting its descent.

Botanic Gardens

I held my breath,

wondering if

the Kadapul flower

would flirt

with evening –

stretch open

in one long

smoky

post-coital

yawn.

We listened

to the curator

describe flowers

as passing clouds;

mother passed

us water –

Stay hydrated,

we may be here a while –

as if we would wilt

without 8oz a day.

In the space

of her whisper

the blossom opened,

raised its head

towards death.

A churlish tongue

blinked

within folds

of fanned pearl,

a spray of pollen

perfumed the air,

someone sneezed,

a deviant cackle

trailed from sight,

leaving

in its wake,

a pile

of crumpled silk.

GS Smith

CIVIC PLANNING CLINIC

heavily-laden

eyelids

opened on

books

throwing themselves

through

windows, flapping

dead-tree wings

in sepia-shard

suicides

of Times New Roman barbs,

tall

tales

and

groundless

theories, they all land

in fragmented traffic lights.

The librarian’s face flushes red then green.

Claire Lucille Trévien

The Most Comprehensive Picture

For the Clipperton gang

This world does not behave like billiard balls.

        We are noisy images

harnessed into cooking rotas.

        Our windows shift everyday

from cliffs to sea, to an upturned boat

        with shower facilities.

Steadily, we record our ghost towns,

        buildings conjured from conversations,

streets swimming in wine.

        Some days, the tide runs strongly,

others, we hear three pieces of music

        at the same time,

a sea both too flat and too sharp.

        Approach with caution. Eat it

drenched with colour speckling

(First published in Astéronymes, Penned in the Margins 2016- reprinted with permission from the author)

Carillon

[That when we] I never thought [fizzed down these streets,]
[a twist in our gurgles,] we’d be ghosting [laughter chasing our feet]
[That the bar we were] the shuffle of weight [locked into, curtains]
[pinned to hide our boozing] dragged out of sight, [bodies from pigs.]

[That we pollinated] and the bar is burning [from seat to seat,]
[with our scraps of cash,] up with art, [That we chased]
[the right fold] assaulted by flowers [in the rock]
[to get rid of the] the specials framed [tongues we didn’t need.]

[‘Shit’, you’d say] by notes [when our neighbours]
[looked shocked] ... [‘wrong language’]

That I’m racing home,
the streets not [quite] dark enough
with an energy that’s not [quite] mine.

Brandon Marlon

Sideshow Downtime

Idle adjuncts sneer from the selvage

of grander spectacles at amused mobs,

a glut of pampered voluptuaries

overdosing on maize, sucrose, and molasses

while ogling at the presently staged array

of idiocies and oddities on offer:

ragamuffins of questionable provenance,

preternaturally tensile contortionists,

the congenitally defective, hideous ogresses

and steroidal strongmen, enflamed jugglers,

manic clowns with inane antics, ludic dyads

engaged in raillery, potboiler routines all around. 

Off-duty hours breed resentment not merely

at their contumely but at paltry wages,

meager benefits, limited opportunities

for advancement or professional development.

The tuxedoed sword-swallower, after all, aspires

to exchange his flame-retardant habiliments

for a pediatrician's attire, while the aging midget

still yearns to transcend his habitus to learn the oboe. 

Children's smiles suffice for the nonce,

miring veteran players in type-casted roles,

and ten minutes from now they'll appear

in their turn brimful of gusto

before salted popcorn aficionados

and discerning connoisseurs of the freakish,

dutifully delighting in time-honored fashion.

The Graphic Novelist

He toils defiantly, undeterred by criticasters

who label him an unrepentant man-child

at the vanguard of an infantilized generation

collectively mired in interminable nonage,

carefree and inured to the silent threat of time.

As graphomaniac and artist, he painstakingly

sketches and stencils mental imagery

until pads enliven with storylines

and characters generated preternaturally

from a combination of memory, rum,

amphetamines, and sleep deprivation.

He glances around, momentarily affronted

by the spavined condition of his leased loft

now irradiated through the pierced aperture

by the dawning amber glow catching him

red-eyed, disoriented, and stubbly.

For breakfast he sops brownies in black java

and carries on limning his newest hero,

a mysterious eidolon, ethereal and vulpine,

whose principle is the talion and whose

modus operandi takes no prisoners,

particularly when it comes to his arch-nemesis,

the underworld's supercilious demoness.

In just under six months' time,

when pens fall flat and inkwells run dry,

he will reluctantly bathe and groom

then meticulously prepare his handicraft

for submission, anonymously or pseudonymously,

steeling himself for the publishers' critiques

and casual but god-awful suggestions, then,

goaded by guilt, phone his neglected mother.  

The Academic's Confession

I'm only admitting this to you because you asked,

it's almost midnight, and that was damn good merlot.

Of course we're frauds; there's no denying it.

We spend all our days engaging in futile chatter

and immaterial inquiries ("research"), poseurs

trafficking in concepts untethered from relevance,

pedlars in abstractions and overly subtle distinctions,

nonsense mongers fixated on the trivial, animated by the petty,

captious quibblers sharpening critical barbs,

staging tensions, qualifying to death, reveling

at regurgitations in unregenerate echo chambers,

hailing logorrheic lunatics ("theorists") as gods,

purloining lingo from more consequential disciplines,

reflexively elongating words to appear more learned,

interrogating everything while believing in nothing,

motivated by the adolescent impulse to flout norms

even though our devious nihilism only hastens us into

murky clouds of thought to choke on our own noxious smoke.

Truth be told, entire departments the world over

consist of little more than pompous impostors

and their pretentious acolytes

hopelessly lost in a mist of their own making.

At best, I can only aspire to the rank of epigone or poetaster;

only six colleagues and my mother read my work, albeit grudgingly.

At one time I yearned to contribute usefully to society,

but navel-gazing proved a more lucrative sinecure.

And don't get me started on tenure, the greatest fellatio I ever had

since that fetching grad student whose theses were also persuasive.

The day they superannuate me to make room for some

four-eyed geek sniffing around for my corner office

is the day I bid adieu to the greatest gig I could have ever contrived.

Come morning, you must forget everything I said or else

I'll quash your grant applications, fail you on your candidacy exams,

and slander you throughout the field. Clout's a bitch, ain't it?

Glen Armstrong

The Afterlife

It can’t be as simple

as stupid people say it is

or as vindictive

as cruel people say.

Those who need to talk

about it most

seem completely unhinged.

They knock on my door

and then act as if

every sun-brushed corner

of existence is theirs.

They act as if I knocked

on their door,

as if they alone can offer

shelter and hot cocoa

until a black and white

squad car arrives

to take our statements.

They don’t seem to know

that their pamphlets are hideous

and don’t seem to share

my concerns about dying

or learning this world

well enough to craft

ink and paper into little

squares so intricate,

full of such lively dreams,

that anyone would be happy

to spend eternity lost

within those boxes.

The Bedside Book of Avant-Jazz

1.

City street on a handkerchief.

               Maybe an eerie green button.

               That false promise of legs

                         and pineapple.

               Otherworldly perfume.

               Candle wax

                         softened and secrets

               revealed.

               Ceiling fans

                          that slowly twist the flame.

Sun Ra at the electric piano

               wearing our solar system

               as a crown,

               excavating

               music’s future artifacts.

               The notes go backwards and forward.

2.

Handkerchief in the street.

               After-hour wanderers.

Day becoming more remote

              with each

              note:

              low-riders and scraping.

3.

Lois Lane drags

her All-American alien boy

onto the dance floor

as the Glenn Miller Orchestra

plays “Moonlight Serenade,”

but what of the melodies

         kryptonite plays?

What music spins

         in Lex Luther’s head?

                   Genius deferred

         detained

denuded

excluded chunks of green and blue

         sewage and space

        -aged outrage

uncontainable.

4.

Freedom now.

No future.

Blood.

On an alligator shoe.

Blue Monday.

Blue millennia.

Is just as bad.

Just as badass.

And beautiful.

Though scarred.

John Challis

The Third men

I follow dead men to the picture house.

The once-plush velvet chairs now occupied

by private eyes, shamed by malpractice,

by South Pacific veterans, deserters still in

shore leave whites, and life insurance investigators

forced out by legislation. They’re here to watch

their films noir. They light electric cigarettes.

But this afternoon their attitudes,

their dubious morality that no amount

of drink restrained, their incorrigible silence

troubles the modern audience who have

come here to escape with their sodas

and their popcorn from the ethical impasse

of their intellectually unrequited lives.

And although there’s half a century

and the Atlantic separating us, I can’t help

but identify with these outcast pessimists,

doomed in every future, unacknowledged

poets who have forced open the manhole

to the sewers to investigate the darkness

where their shadows roam without indemnity.

Discourse on Noir

The diner smells of black and white, of gasoline

and smoke: detectives, salesmen, veterans,

woman-haters. Men. Marie reads to read and dreams

of reading the contours of the highway’s page,

indents in tar, potholes in words, where the key

has been struck a little too hard and the letter

has burst through the paper; a bullet through the heart.

But Marie, there’s no hope of leaving here, unless,

that is, you believe in noir, and any minute

a man might walk straight in from a bus ride west

to sweep you with his dead-eye stare, and like all

good men according to the rule of 1940s film,

convince you of your worth, lend muscle to your idea:

slay your husband, the nameless chef, and take you

far away from here. A woman’s work is murder.

And say it plays out like you’ve read it, you

and he holed up in a motel beyond the county line,

the red O of its neon sign on the blink to shed

a little shadow on your otherwise success,

as an engine cuts in the parking lot, its door

shut with just a hint of pessimistic fatalism,

and a figure appears in silhouette, grown backlit

from some desert moon at the room’s blind,

room: triple six. Is this your considered present?

Or rather, is it his? His past, come from east to west,

to collect what he by rights never should have owned

or never even knew he did, his life, your kiss of death.

The Eleven Percent

I know that eighty-nine percent of Wilder’s

Double Indemnity unfolds in a flashback,

that Walter Neff is only given eleven percent

to sort affairs, and think towards the present.

What ratio of my life is spent in recollection?

I’ve cooked the books since childhood

to calculate the times I’ve prised the lid

from the old Roses tin, or started the red-book

conversation: this my life laid out in stanzas,

flashbacks to my other selves through steam

from ovens, kettles, plumes of breath

in gardens, fields, and smoke, pre-ban, in pubs.

Like Neff, I leave my typed confession

to know I’m done with before, with the ghost.

Stay for the lock-in, drink out your liver,

commune with the ages through empties,

I’ll slip out the back-way, unnoticed. From here

on it’s me and only me, and my percentage.

Sade Andria Zabala

FOR ALL THE GIRLS WITH MESSY HEARTS

Let’s be honest here –

I am not the girl men fall in love with.
I am the girl that men want to fuck.
I am a conquest. A prize. A show.

I could count on five hundred fingers
the number of people that have professed,
“I like you. You’re different. You’re an interesting girl.”
Apparently I’m not fascinating enough for you
to want to hold for more than a one-night stand.

Once
as I finished swimming a sea of blankets
and got left stranded on the shore,
I asked myself:

What’s wrong with me?
What am I doing?
Am I not good enough for anybody?

And right before I could drown again,
the sun woke up and said,

“You are.

You are enough.
Forget the men whose hands have groped your hips
in search for answers to questions
you’ve never even heard of.
Do not settle for people who do not appreciate you,
who do not know how lucky they are.
Remember it is a privilege to be loved by you,
or even just
to be touched by you, and
the warmth of another body does not define your worth.

These men –
they think that they can own you
with their drunken stares and roughened arms, but
I have circled the earth
a thousand times
to feed the light flowing inside your skin.
Do not waste it by illuminating those who
can not even be bothered
to learn your last name.”

So that night when
the moon tried once more to pin me down,
I told him:

I am made of sunlight, crashing waves, and fireworks.
You think you can tame me
and cool my flesh?
I am the girl who plays with matches,
and trust me I play it well.
Lord knows I’ve walked through villages leaving
a pile of destruction in my wake.

My heart is a bushfire
and the next time you try to control me,
darling, make no mistake –

I will burst out and ravage you in flames.

I’ll
burn
you
to
the
ground.

(This isn’t a test.) 

9 WONDERS OF THE WORLD

I. Twenty-three years ago a cosmic collision
gave birth to a child of the stars and
somehow after siren songs we discovered
the wonder of your body next to mine.

II. We undress 
as your lips play snakes and ladders
down my chest, and this is a miracle.
I breathe summer into you,
and this is a miracle.
You stay despite the fog,
and this is a miracle.
You leave and I wait, and I wait,
and THAT is a fucking miracle.

III. You come home to me for fifty-five days.
Every time you open the door
my heart goes

Doo da-do,
Do do-do da-do,
Do do-do da-do-do!

IV. When I had you I had the sunlight on my fingertips.

We drew portraits in the sky
and spat in the face of anyone
who told us we couldn’t be gods.

V. You pull the moon and I feel it sink
its teeth until my body cracks.

I am a firecracker banging against the cage of your ribs.
You fill me with such light they see
the sunset bleeding out of me.

VI. I put daydreams in your eyes and 
in turn you show me seawater and nebulae.

Your skin, it tastes like the edge of a galaxy.
The earth, it spins for you, my love.

VII. My mind is springtime for all seasons;
your room, a bed of roses blue.
We time-travel and three months seem like a year.
We were on the precipice of something great.

VIII. You cascade down my back like waterfalls.
You look at me and I am all 
shivers, and want, and yes, yes, yes.

IX. You leave. There is no darkness.

There is music and I am dancing
to the ring of your laughter in 
another lifetime. Can you hear it yet?

I am okay.

'tell me every terrible thing you ever did and let me love you anyway'

Iona Lee

Become The Rain

When I’m sad I’m going to die,

or I’m worried about bombs

and things bigger than myself,

when the strobe lights and the late nights

get too loud

and I have lost myself

I get in the shower.

I’m too tall

for every bath I’ve stretched out in.

Too much made of elbows

and pink, bare skin that I don’t like

to look at.

But I can let the steam soak my mind free

from all that grit and glitter,

all the flirting and flittering,

all the fast pace, heavy bass

“I’m so off my face” neon nights,

and all that city smoke.

I can let the sticky whiskey kisses

and all those pointless conversations

in kitchens

wash off.

Burn off bad decisions

with the strong-smelling perfumes

and potions.

The best water

can be found in secret pools.

Not like that big, brash ocean

that waltzes with the world,

spitting tantrums

and swallowing sailors.

I’m too small

for every sea I’ve stretched out in.

Too much made of bones that break

and breathing.

But I can let the tide lead

and carry me, like I’m blossom

on a breeze.

I am lighter

in the rhythm of the waves

and its consoling to know

that my crying, may,

one day,

become the rain

that I use to start again.

No, the best water

can be found in those secret pools

in Scotland.

Framed by untrodden tanglewood,

warm light and witchcraft.

Those pools where insects fly

just above the surface,

carrying the sun on their backs.

Here, the water hurries

over warm stones, or sits

quiet and content.

Its cold when you jump in,

knocks all the train journeys

and television from you.

Here, it is all green and golden

and I am the perfect size.

It Was Summer Outside

But,

we were in bed.

Fully dressed.

You still had your shoes on,

all lazy and stoned and laughing.

We were listening to an audio tape

and laughing.

That day was fresh,

like sheets,

and new and we were too

and we were so excited.

We were women

and women were

cocaine, jazz,

perspective.

We were the new craze.

And there was so much

still to find out,

out of my mind on love

for that room

and that moment

and that you.

You were sat up,

talking about feminism.

Slurring on your slow words.

I always liked your face,

so bright

and full of mischief.

Small and blonde

and your eyes so blue

and you

were electric.

The audio tape was talking

about pubic hair,

“do you shave down there?”

that sort of thing, but,

we had decided

that we didn’t fucking care.

It was a revelation,

to talk about sex

and women’s rights

and broken boys

and … wanking

Imagine!

It was summer outside,

and we were going to change the world.

It was summer outside

and we were cocaine,

and you were electric,

and I was a feminist

and your eyes were blue

and hey, look, mine are too

and you

were laughing.

We were going to move in together

and live like this always.

Bohemian,

all cheese-cloth and opinions.

Sexy to be strident

you said.

Manu Chao on the radio

I’d be dancing in a dressing gown.

A waterfall of tangled hair

down my back

I’d be beautiful.

You’d be smoking on the sofa.

It wasn’t Paris,

but we’d pretend it was.

We’d drink whiskey

with revolutionaries,

make friends with the old men in pubs

who had stories to tell.

We’d find new ways to get in trouble,

play records,

play dress up,

fuck up,

fuck pretty people

and go on walks on Sundays,

when I wasn’t working in the bookshop

or working on this writing thing.

‘Cos we were young women,

and that was so exciting.

Please Excuse Me

Please excuse me

for I am not myself, you see.

You should see the real me.

She is cool-legged and cruel

and drinks too much coffee

outside bars in market squares, where

sunshine rests in empty mugs

and music plays.

Oh, you should see the real me.

See her when she’s sitting there,

she does not curl fern fingers

round elbows, or wrap up in herself.

Rather she unfolds, as ivy does.

Fingertips tapping the table

searching for cigarettes,

she lets careless words trip down her tongue

to be caught and, like butterflies,

pinned to paper.

The real me is a muse,

a moon,

both painter and painted,

wild-haired, wide-eyed

and tainted.

She smiles and smokes and sings

celestially.

She leaves an impression, a bruise

like ink. Like footsteps in the snow

I think,

both cold and delicate.

Yet,

Not melting, more

moving on.

So no, not white as snow.

Not innocent, more

blood-red lips and opal eyes.

More precious,

and more endless.

The better me is thinner,

and will grab your waist and whisper,

and then suddenly,

a stranger.

Moved on by the fish-hook moon

that guides her tide.

I magpie, a stealer of shine

but she’s not one for sorrow,

just a borrower of light.

So, please excuse me,

for I am not myself, you see?

You should see the real me,

she is lighter and more rhythmic.

But,

I am pinned in place

by meat, and pain

and good intentions.

There are lies laced in to the lines around my eyes

and they are less like kaleidoscopes.

So, she is the better me.

Not so much human-shaped, more siren.

Not so much flesh, more air.

Not so much care, more

moving on through memory

as a wicked woman,

with brilliant mind and filthy mouth

that you think of fondly

from time to time.

So, please excuse me,

for I am not myself, you see?

Not quite the self I’d like to be.

Colin Dodds

Wrestling the Everywhere Angel

You, who I don’t command,

can’t outsmart, won’t outlast

Stern parent, disobedient child,

enemy and enemy of my enemy

Dream so strong I must

work myself into a real frenzy

just to call it strange

Space and time are intertwined

and isn’t always very kind

The consolidated father of obstacles,

for reasons inadequately or too-exhaustively explained,

disapproves, and so has removed much of the control

to which I feel entitled from my hands

And so each day promises

a death as uncertain as life itself

You, who I meet at the boundary of fortune and my will,

where unreliable ones warn of a perverse, subtle communication,

where the rules fade to rumors,

Where new rooms and strange abilities abound,

never a surprise so much as something mildly forgotten

and instantaneously recalled,

like reality, like the Kingdom of Heaven

Enough to Live

I went into the tunnel of drunk

exploring a wound

because the wound

was the only thing that gleamed.

I think I hear things no one says,

they are really saying phone numbers

and yeah and really.

In the air, I hear: “I didn’t want to drink,

but to descend on an amber rope of whiskey

into the cavern of my own heart and shout

until I was torn apart by the echo.”

But it was probably just a sprained complaint

that things are not like they used to be

or that people are not as they seem.

Phone numbers, really—questioning and emphatic.

Floor to ceiling—ghosts floating through ghosts.

I needed an answer so badly

that it was there more than anything.

Where equilibrium is impossible.

Right there.

Gleaming like a wound.

Just past the ditch and rampart of oblivion.

I ran to it, singing the revelation of it:

I may hate life

just enough

to live.

A Fractured Rapture

Maybe when a part of me dies,

it goes to heaven.

Tonight, that part, which fought every inch,

fought every moment, fought every fantasy

and fought every fact,

is at rest so blissfully.

The rest of me has only a bar before

and a breeze behind.

Every new sensation

only makes me happier.

Telling the bartender thank you,

that’s all these songs are.

Siegfried Baber

DUDDON

Am I alive, you ask me and yourself

gazing into the water the face the underbelly.

Am I aware: plaque of white froth

revolving under the bridge, flat and articulate

lace, plate of rowan blossom, every

petal of its huge flowerhead pearled foam.

Air swallows water in vast invisible

drafts where mist boils up from rocks,

a cross-section of rainbow haunts the air

where I seethe, veined and glassy, leaf-dark, viscous

boiling like jelly, green-white a molten

jade fractious to its depth with bubbles.

After rain roads turn

to rivers, paths are becks,

all of them feeding a fury.

Light clears to the raucous chime of a pheasant.

The wren finds its slit in the wall.

At twilight owls toss hoots like weightless

streams of blue glass bubbles

from one limb

of the forest to another. Timeless I hurl myself

into the stone, the one

who gathered me whom I carved

slid over pierced broke myself against, a gendering

ancient and shattered beyond what flesh conceives.

BERT JANSCH

Funny how death arrives. So quiet sometimes

like an echo that’s taken years to reach us,

or light from a star already burned away.

Finding you died four years ago, Bert Jansch, I feel it

mostly here in my hands. For it was they –

fingers, wrists, thumbs – pressing, picking,

stretching the string that little bit to get the bend of the note –

that knew you best, when I sat on St Ives

harbour, age seventeen, playing ‘Needle of Death’

or tried at home to sort out the blizzard of notes

in ‘The Waggoner’. I haven’t touched a guitar

for thirty years. But still find one in my hands

occasionally in dreams, and myself still

moulding the music, as if out of cloud or play-dough.

That’s from you, Bert. The hand I write with now

would be differently-muscled, just slightly,

had your music not been there. My left fingertips

softer, less spatulate. Now you’re gone,

and knowing it, I become different too.

I’m an onion (we all are); and one of my layers is you.

ARIL

Dare you

taste it?

Exquisite

the scarlet:

candied, waxy

as lipstick,

as cherry.

Carefully, carefully

peel back the pink skin –

gluey, glutinous,

smearing pink jelly.

Try

to pry

stone from cup.

The needled tree shivers.

The red cup is sweet,

you have been told.

It sticks to your thumb.

Taste the fruit, taste it –

a reluctant faint sweetness.

Taste it, taste it.

You have been told.

Note: The fruit of the yew is not a berry but an aril. Only the hard seed at its centre is poisonous.

CIGAR

It would have, unrolled, a small book’s

surface area. My first was a gift

from the man at the next table

of the pavement café at the Hotel Inglaterra.

He worked, he said,

at the Partagás factory, where they read

the newspaper aloud all morning,

and in the afternoon novels and poetry

while, adept as conjurers’,

the workers’ hands rip, stuff and wrap. More words

went into it than I shall ever draw out.

The tobacco-god is a bird with scarlet plumage

and mother-of-pearl eyes. His four

attendants are the green

spirit of the fresh leaf, the brown of the dried,

the red spirit of fire and the blue of smoke.

The red visits only for flaring instants;

is fickle, demands nurture. The green

is memory and imagination. The blue

is a girl dressed in feathers: lapis, lavender, sky.

When she kisses

her tongue is sharp as seabrine, chocolate, chilli.

She says the word tabaco is Carib,

from a language whose last speaker

has been dead four hundred years. But the brown

lives in my hand this moment, brittle

and crisp as a chrysalis. Filtered

through his crushed spirals,

molecular poems thread themselves

into my genes, become part of the air I breathe,

the words I speak. Both of us end in ash.

PERSEPHONE

Apple-red, streaked and speckled apple-gold:

poma granata , ‘the grained apple’, fruit

that’s mined and faceted with grains of ruby.

Garnet, your favourite stone: Latin granatum,

from the pomegranate, whose seed it much resembles.

So the names coil round upon themselves.

Like a small bomb: grenade, Spanish granada,

a pomegranate. The fuse, the flower, has gone:

at the serrated neck a brown dry powder.

All Hallows’ Eve tonight. I watch you slice

through the red ventricles, crushing out pink juice

to eat with chicken in the early dark.

Your knife blade bleared the colour of a winter

sunset, you discard the leathery membranes.

Feed me a few seeds from dripping fingers.

(these poems are re-published with permission from the author-  selected from Rebecca's first full collection Beauty/Beauty Bloodaxe, 2015).

Abby Mckenzie

Give Yourself A Slap

Larkin said it was mum and dad

Beauvoir said it was men

Miller blamed unrealistic aspirations

Hemingway whined about war

Salinger said it was society

Everybody blames someone else

Just accept it’s you.

You are the Arsehole

Poetry is full of hate and sadness

You shouldn't read it.

It’s written by narcissists

With too much shit to say.

Bob Beagrie

Predation

Between mouthfuls of beetroot and carrot salad

she tells me how she takes each day as it comes,

and how this time last year she was at The Tate,

standing beside the suspended shark preserved

in a tank of formaldehyde, the piece that’s titled:

The Physical Impossibility of Death

In The Mind of Someone Living

by Damien Hirst (who she’s not overly keen on

to begin with), when she got the call on her phone

from the hospital; and how she thought, at first

it was about her Aunt, who she knew was poorly,

but was swallowed up in one leviathan gulp

when they told her it was her son laid upon

the table and they couldn't wait to operate.

Such Is Life, Then it’s Not

After the morning’s rain

no one expected miracles

nor imminent Armageddon,

most were pegging hopes

on a sunny Bank Holiday

so it caused more than a casual

double-take when Sam

spontaneously combusted

in the corner of Centre Square

beside the library

leaving

a patch of scorched pavement

and a singed tatter of coat

coiled in the gutter

and a sulphur smell that clawed

at the back of the throat

as shock rippled out

from the spot in waves

from where she’d stood

just a moment ago –

crying

had she been arguing on her phone

her hand shaking with rage

lips drawn into a snarl

at the unfairness of it all

had she been laughing at a joke

she heard or she had just recalled

from last night’s staff party

to celebrate The Queen’s Award?

What happened

before the flash?

Meifen Jeung posed for a photo

by the fountain, smiling at Ling

who squatted to catch a low angle

neither noticed anything

suspicious

Mildred in the bus stop

expecting number 17

said she heard a sound

like a zipper, a lift door closing

saw a flash reflected in Perspex

felt the palm of a wind pat her back

The mayor, plant potting

a small housing estate

on the green belt

spotted nothing untoward

from his window of the Town Hall

No one filmed it -

The cctv cut out -

though rumour

said it was the return

of the fugitive gods

to mark a turning

among men

toward

the end of time

“this destitute time!”

“this destitute time!”

Others spoke of a suicide bomb

But here? But Sam?

This wasn't Syria or Afghanistan

But our enemies are everywhere:

Enemies within!

“We could hijack this tragedy

for our very own agenda?”

They circled, at a distance,

the black spot of absence

made mindful of their presence

by a quick police cordon -

yellow tape marking

the edge of this new abyss

drawing mortals to it

like moths to the glow

of a window at midnight

public gawpers and reporters

congregated, nibbling

on sweet speculation

INSENSITIVE HEADLINES

that swallowed

the sunny bank holiday

swallowed the sound

night’s sleep

Sam, in her absence

became a sign

that things just

weren't quite right

She wasn't the first

She won’t be the last

But imagine

freed from attachment

to the photographic self

spreading Valkyrie wings

to drift into the light.

Anna Crowe

From the Musical Instrument Museum, Berlin

(especially a violin made by Jakob Stainer in 1654)

A build-up of heat all week, and now

darkness accumulates above the Tiergarten.

A sprinkler flings, whirls, and flings its plume

over the dry lawns while, in my headphones,

Sol Babitz plays, on this very violin

in the display-case, the presto

from Bach's sonata in G minor.

Sol, Jakob, and Johann Sebastian

are playing an orchard:

bird's eye maple, pear, and walnut

rise and ramify in twigs of light;

arpeggios glitter with prefigured rain

and in the garden, thunder prowls

through patterns of lindenbloom and leaves;

between the rainbow chords, those triple

or quadruple stops, I hear the grass grow

while wind bows the branches, and birds

dive for cover like black notes on the stave.

A man comes running out to tug the hose

inside. Sprinkler and violin die

as rain spots the stones then drums

fortissimo on the glass roof.

Butterflies
            … – no, more blue than that:

like tatters of the Morpho butterfly.

                           Elizabeth Bishop: 'Under the Window. Ouro Prêto'

My grandfather, a hard-up rating, brought

this daubed and lurid souvenir of Rio

home from the war: done with childish brio,

a Sugar Loaf on dark horizon caught

in crusted paint on glass. It seems the war

has got into the sunset, for red bleeds

all over the bay, so each wave wears

a stained feather, while palm trees lean and feed

on tainted dreams of Eldorado. Stare

at sky and ocean: where have you seen a blue

like this? Think azure silk; think angels' wings:

great Morphos that once fanned the tropic air

lie pressed in petalled rows; sad residue

of beauty among dregs of family things.

Brent Terry

black is the new black

(from Monochrome Attic)

This loss of light—of appetite: long

gone the taste for blood, for blood

orange, for juices roaring red diatribes

down chin. With blacktooth eyes

I gnaw the din of bone-dead jitters,

locked in this box by a jailor who shares

my name. The trees have garnered

a gallows glow, here in woods

where once we hung our new skeletons

out to dry. You are still the throb,

racing the crimson capillaries of Earth’s

insatiable curve, while in my blackout

glasses, I am the sound of footsteps

receding: tiny echo

that beats in Zero’s hollow heart.

After the Burning Bush, the First Firefly of Summer

I'm in no hurry, what with lightning-bug text messages,

wobbly bricks in the Willimantic sidewalk, spilling moon

or glass or fragrant You-Know-Who at a party.

God be in my head, the fence ablaze; your name

doesn’t matter.  The years I begged to dig holes

as a way of working through you.  I am proud

to share my candy corn with other kids like me. 

One should have the appropriate head: orange lilies,

my co-star cast against type this time, and dangerous:

the cold, cold syllables like ripples on black water. 

And then I sprang from the yellow taxi, the driver

with the checkered past fuming with a light

corrosive breath, a half-molten microwave beef

and bean burrito in the coagulated Connecticut heat. 

There is also a dark district where one may

do whatever she tells me, and don’t ask questions. 

Behind the barn, behind the gingerbread yurt, sex,

and the city schematically conveyed. Tender ones! 

You jam love on pawnshop Stratocasters. 

I’ll mock you until I’ve had enough, like a drunk

sergeant singing in bed.   Not sin, but satisfaction

at first light.  I would want a copy of that photograph! 

Is this happening?  Or is it a mirage of parachutes

and pretty sex, precise as brushstrokes after a six-pack. 

A pomegranate. A red, red pickup truck.  People say

I’m killing myself falling into my own aortal puddle,

but they can’t see You-Know-Who and me, the volcanic

sunset, the red night clouds.  One of us dreams of water,

one of us wears pajamas made of fire.

Tishani Doshi

Undertow

I.

I hold my husband in plastic bags.

He’s whispering like a soft, worn thing,

Drop me here, drop me gently.

Everything is terribly light — incense,

ash, the thinness of his voice falling

into waves, disappearing.

II.

The sea picks up my life,

empties it across itself.

I see it spilling over, dissolving.

Here are the forgotten parts —

A pink night sky, broken bangles,

a fisherman walking away from the light.

There you are, held up with wind and sails.

If you would turn, you would hear me say,

Come back, my arms ache from all the carrying.

Underneath, you’re lost in a place

where everything is scraped together

and nothing is thrown back.

You sink. Colours dissolve.

You move hair from your forehead,

salt from your eyes. You’re left with greys —

calling out to me, bubbles

instead of words. It is a silent death: 

one I feel before it happens.

III.

Was there a child then? The child I could not have?

With hair that shakes and shines as though a sun

were gleaming under her roots. I want to stroke her.

Lean over and touch her. Come here, let me hold you.

I want only daughters — a thick rope of black 

around her neck. She calls; the beginning of your name.

If I were really a mother, I would do it quick

and painless, out of love. Take the hair —

twist, yank, drop; tilt her over like a bag of sand.

It would be done then. There would be less

to clean up. She will never be like me.

The death of her child will kill her.

IV.

If you must collect pictures, take them

when I’m looking away. Here’s a beach again —

the nets spread on the sand drying,

A fish in the corner slapping its tail.

Nothing matters then,

We’ll meet when we’re warm and dry.

Take this picture — my shoulders, the bone,

the shine, the criss-cross of white straps.

V.

I’m eight-years-old, running into the sea.

Run in, my mother says, Go on then naked girl.

Nobody cares, nobody’s watching.

The sea pulls me in around the ankles,

grabs the sand from underneath, shows me

a glimpse of my life, what it will be like later.

It was all calm once, long ago, a teardrop

between apartment buildings. But here in my life;

Hiss hiss. This one is no good.

This one doesn't love you.

This one doesn't know what you need.

Leave, let go, stop.

The frothy fingers at my throat,

the voice pouring into me,

a terrace of vanishing blue.

You will leave this one.

You will leave this place.

For a while you will know nothing.

Love in Carlisle

Girls were crying yesterday in their ball gowns;

holding each other up like poles of wilted beanstalks.

I wanted to carry them into the streets.

To the unused railroad track in the middle of town,

unwrap the past and lay before them

a fragile girl I once knew, walking towards love

in a thin, determined way. That she should live here too —

in this town of carefully-guarded houses

and old ladies in rocking chairs 

in fake pearls and printed button-down dresses.

Girls are crying in their ball gowns and boys

are holding them up and taking them to the streets,

to warehouses or backs of deserted pick-up trucks.

A troubadour waits on a wooden porch

for the faultless girl, to speak her name,

undress her, give noise to her that is new and violent.

The old ladies form a line and hold photographs

against their faces where the skin used to be unbroken.

They step out from their dresses and kick off their shoes,

cross over the barren tracks in their solitary dance.

April Salzano

Therapeutic Support Staff

Recon mission: listening outside

a closed door. The new TSS

asks my son questions in monotone.

He answers intermittently. She sighs

outwardly in

frustration. The angel has left,

the therapist she is attempting to replace.

They always go on

to bigger better things, countries

as far as Australia, grad school, jobs

with benefits, their own

children. Elsewhere. My son

never seems to notice an absence,

just a new name to learn, a new face

to touch. New Girl isn't smiling. I can

tell from my sniper’s position in the hall.

Audible anger. Hers. But he is losing

patience with her

lack of. I do not know how

I know this but I do. I tune in,

and what I hear: silence. I am

listening like my life depends on hearing

                            nothing.

Where do you

see yourself in 20 years? (Writing

prompt for first graders). The teacher,

blonde, mid-twenties, blonde,

provided some suggestion for props

for corresponding photo.

For girls: dresses, high heels, baby dolls.

For boys: dress shirts, ties, briefcases.

The teacher’s ignorance incited

a rightful rage in my kitchen where I vowed

to send my son in drag, holding a baby

to his breast. I pinned the note to the fridge

as a reminder. The exaggerated curls

of the font, probably comic sans, perfectly

articulated her gender-encoded message.

Who needs correct grammar (or punctuation)

and equal rights when you have a baby

and high heels to contend with?

Moniza Alvi

Little God, What News?

From Little God, What News?

After the nightmare, little god

(three times I was immersed in it –

slept and woke and slept and woke

and slept again) here you are,

but further off and quivering

like the high leaves on a tall tree.

Could you have threaded into it

that silver, hopeful strand:

‘This isn't really happening’?

The dread of being ill-prepared.

The horror of inspection.

                                              Little god,

like me, in fact, you don’t give up –

beak-like you tear

at the ligaments of the dream.

Little god, your sun sleeps

beneath the eyelid of the day.

Intent on waking it

the twin dogs

of the past and future

rush in from the heathland,

can’t stop leaping up.

No one can restrain them –

their enthusiasm, their ferocity.

Little god, a wordless word

could raise the eyelid of the day.

A frog squirms at the side of the field,

a dusty frog with a red gash on its back.

I daren’t put it out of its misery.

Little god, the surprise of its blood!

I thought there were so many colours -
and now I'm convinced
there are only two.

Red is for life and boldness,

everything else is grey.

A deep-sea swirl held in glass,

curling plants smooth as eels

and masses of tiny bubble specks.

What use are you to me, little god

submerged in the water-weed? A fin

moving through pale cool green.

Little god, in the frostfire of an iris

in the gunshot of a pupil

in an eye behind an eye

a miniature world is spinning.

What news from it?

What makes it turn and turn again

far far away?

An unexpected thing

like memory with its thirst for detail.

(three of these poems were published in Critical Muslim)

David Cooke

BEFORE THE STORM

At no age at all you've started to feel

how a life gets mired in memories,

the way each backward glance

is like a noose that tightens.

Across flat versts of muddled terrain

your distant city glimmers –

reduced to a few bright rooms

where you were first indulged

and then became accomplished.

Working through grammars

and the language of flowers,

your music opened

at some tricksome bagatelle.

Each week the house would echo

to the rites of the samovar,

the clack of heels on a floor...

But in this straggling barracks town

which you must now endure,

accepting the slavishness

of the overlooked, the weary,

you hear at night the cries of wolves

through birches, can sense

their luminous eyes,

their restless, circling hunger.

ONTOLOGY

On Cleethorpes beach the tide is out,
where gulls dispute their stretch
of puddled sand: a paradigm to taunt me
as they snatch what gain they can,
their broken cries a colloquy

that's tough and unforgiving,

while against each blast that freights them

I hug my collar closer. Optimism –

It's like a string of toytown lights,

painted bulbs that vie
with the elements' big effects.

Allison Grayhurst

Madness like Medicine

I have waited for you

in the hours before the bursting dawn,

smelt your metamorphosis in the

open refrigerator, while you slept,

knowing nothing of your own power,

blistering, erecting through the sheets -

flesh crying out, laying over a door that will not open,

a door that gleams like a set of false teeth, with an

unattainable aura - gleaming Venus with plump

breasts and a lustful smile or Zeus with his absolute

authority, dominating your backside, your frontside, even

the interior plane of your strangling moods. You,

I have poured everything down the sink for, not eating and not

pale, but waiting - at peace with my jealousy and my

impatience. Will you hand me your slumber of

self-defeat and bitterness? I am not a dove.

I have slaughtered millions. I have waited.

Are you spreading, gathering, ready to be stripped? Still

sleeping, my lover, tight in your exile? Still brilliant,

but only in dreams? It is time for a shower - to claim your nakedness.

We have no use for memories. We are lavish and

you are bare and brave and you do not believe it,

but you are ever so strong, at the moment just

before perishing, exposing

your warm, undeniable

seed.

Changing skins

Months behind my eyes

splicing nerves, bonds, virtues

that have kept me solid.

As I look, my desires are dilating,

taking more in, red with abandonment

and wanting to germinate but not here,

not beneath this sheet, but in the breeze,

to grow special, purer than a weed, expand,

not interacting with the elements but part of

them, geometrical, saving space, knowing passion like

a labour - confined to a pattern, somehow

boundless. Joy. I stand a virgin in your honeymoon.

I am made up of sunsets and dreamy afterglows. I am

putting this on, demanding as intoxication, kneeling in this

costume, assuming I am dependable, but

I am not. I should close these shutters, marry a

soft genuine smile. I should care more. So much

that is done is done, fatal, heavy as a hanging. If I could

dig behind my sockets and make a window, I would. I would

walk away, but lust is water, and more than lust

is worth every star.

Bram E Gieben (Texture)

Only as insecure as the eras that I've lived through,

Never achieved, my dreams are out of shape and out of focus,

Found you in those dreams and then tethered you selfishly,

Looking at parallel realities which emerged from

The death dreams of the successful. Less artefact

More anomaly. Inversely-charged mote of temporal flow

Adrift but detached in the time stream.

Disappointment exists in the faces and expressions

Of those who used to be your cheerleaders,

Youth passed by frantically like the weaving paths

Of staggering drunks collapsed in the sub-zero.

Nothing about this place inspires parabolic curves

Of escape velocity, can't even write in a straight line.

Past the point of no return policy, financially backed

For loss optimization not adjustment...

(frankly, the wilted flowers and turned earth

muddle your graveside like handprints in bruised flesh,

the stubs and spills I leave behind are empty gestures,

breathless, restless as a phone call unanswered in the grey light

of an unsecured symmetry... I was licking my wounds)

CALL THE CLONE FACTORY, this model's dysfunction

Cannot be cured with yearly doses of psilocybin

(not my fault you were so quick to sell out)

Psychological forces and certainties collapse like

Demolished tenements, poverty in the abstract,

Fatal construction: “We have built a prison-box

based upon internal kaleidoscopes for disappointment!

A panopticon for failed seekers! Gut busted

Rusted hulks in a graveyard for interstellar cruise-liners!

Mysterious action at a distance!”

I'll relinquish my obscurity for no-one,

Content to decomplexify my own structure,

Face melter, suicide strategy by inches,

Plugging the gaps: “Throw yourself down on the mattress

in roach motel architecture, bitter and scabbed.”

You have reached the midden heap where

Desolation and ideal process come to rot.

This is the place where strays go to become abandoned;

Where orphans dictate the weight of abuse to be

Measured out in the parental guidance of good fortune.

This is a crucifix of your own description;

A refreshing carbonated beverage brewed from your bones.

This is as close to home as you will ever get;

Wedged in a narrow alley between an ideal past you imagined

And a future which nobody deserves.

Spirit of the age of collapse, a psychic vampire

Feeding on vacuum souls of equal emptiness.

“No-one gets away clean.”

And when the hordes come knocking

There will be no escape vehicle waiting.

“Pare it down to essentials;

Question your right to breathe freely, are you

Just another obstacle for those more worthy?”

And if you see it differently, please tell me

How you figure, the pressure of your trigger finger

Traps me in indecision, scared to make the incision

Because “The first cut is the bleakest,”

and I'm sure you already got there.

“There is no wave because there is no future.”

Everything can be bought and sold back to you,

Regurgitated like a bird's first meal.

It's the twenty-first century,

It's fucking dangerous to feel.

Samantha Walton

Winter Code

Once you switched on your winter code

I called electricity beauty

the swabbed mystery of the connection

between your body & the gross

understatement of your environment

made us cooperative at last

against the best judgement of science &

art. Flowering in winter, just once at nightfall

as the cold snapped my filament & style

I passed my life, trunk, soma, memory

over to a collective hush, acquired tics still

discharging down neurons to be bathed in

the living body of the collective earth

harmonic seed bed fed on jelly

& black earth turned. We haven't attained

light or transparency, just the competance to flower

bedded in error I wear my winter weeds, ears & organs

sprouting madly from dumb plans & unwritten nature.

BONEWORK

Granite swept

steeple lights pierce

a collagen-silted sky,

the badly drawn pencil line

before dusk

in a softly thrumming now.

There's no easy way to explain

how architecture withstands

cannon and shot thumped

into grass

and leather, civil war renegade

short change disinterred

by football, swollen geographies

splintered from parish to parish.

Distempered beacon:

shipwreck strategy is

the tidal symmetry of

the boneworks ablaze.

Atmosphere: bone dust,

glue, the breath of housebox

balance sheet neat

and stretching to the sea.

Gig lamps catch

the pig's bladder stitch,

lampblack strips between each

fret of gas light.

Strobe beacon, time ball,

the beep of stocks and stones

under the scolded

boots of the Poor Law

press the kissed field.

Lit air, hum ash lagoon.

Neither sunk nor swept

but blade-thumbed

government parcels paced-out

with the beaten bone and ear from the

inside glueing.

Will Stone

THE SINGER

Her voice is

black ice forming

and when the note is held

she is slender, a wind-heaved poplar,

a dark vase with one pale flower

about to drop its last petal

on the blue lips of the dead.

Her body is the corollary

no one dares touch.

She is all the time left to us,

suddenly declaring itself at once.

Her voice is candlelight

feeling over brickwork

in the deepest wells,

she is the one to follow,

drawing us out like poison

from the last deep excavation.

A BRUSSELS PARK AT WINTER’S END

After the drawn out winter, the sun

ordered people back into the park.

For them the swans languidly applied

make up to the plain pond.

A few on benches opened books.

They had an armed guard of dreams.

The peacock tossed its tasselled head

and a child overcome with the smoke

of its birth careered into the mesh.

A few climbers appeared

on the summit of a certain happiness.

Two donkeys in an enclosure

stood side by side, so still, Balthazar…

the eyes dark wells where the moon

will later stoop to drink its fill.

Eyes that vainly record the human,

dark slates on whose surface every

atrocity is chalked up, every joy.

Watch the little ones leap the low fence

and run through the blown litter of doves,

maypole dancing their curiosity

around the burbling aviary,

educated by each explosion.

Stephen Watt

Coma

The woods secreted clues.

Golden clusters of seasoned leaves

swayed like Shakespearean pages

from the chartreuse branches

of dense trees; medallic decorations

carpeting the entombed weeds.

Her midnight walks were new.

A raw mourning had convoked

since he died; bereavement

was in vogue and occupied

the mind like a demonic night-shift.

Wild-flowers appeared crucified

under the bewitching, lightship moon.

Hunting hounds habitude

led them to babbling gullies,

jabbering calumnies like the follies

of their youth. The truth hid

inside the bell mouth of the wood.

Tossed cautions of cheyne stoking wind

waltzed with star-shaped driblets

falling from thunderclouds.

Helicopter light hiccuped erratically

like religious vows in the name of God

then enshrouded in doubt,

the search party was called off.

Cinema Redundancy

Doyenne of the picture house chattels, the cleaning lady

nestled into adopted kinship, bereft of a crumbing castle

where the fountain-heads of a thousand relationships

had inaugurated; greenhorn pupils to tried and tested.

Evangelical signage detonated bulbs, clanking goblets

of illuminated glass fruit. Beheaded skulls

exposed the bloodroot of circuit boards, metallic wires.

Crowds absorbed the seductive fires.

In thick, congesting smoke, she drifted upon rafts of chronicles

into wistful head-notes. The year-long pong of popcorn

lodged in her throat, and the sultry, viscous of used condoms

forsaken in the back rows of neglected raincoats.

She beamed at the time she moonlit as a counsellor:

A pretty young thing left behind, assembling mascara

in a dinky, compact mirror, whose veritable tears

were as black and white and beautiful as any actor.

Rain shaped seaweed from her hair.

Reception’s jukebox wheezed as silver tongues

of millionaires melted, squeezed into rock n’ roll purée.

Elvis was digested by an ageless eternity.

Lunatic hoses ran amok, snakes lashing in pagan frenzy.

Swarms seethed in the aftershock, absorbing official liturgy

about failed smoke alarm batteries and overheated movie reels

while the cleaning lady vacuumed the black char of her thumb,

still raw from the heat of the lighter’s wheel.

Caleb Beissert

The Cats in Lorca’s Garden

Huerta de San Vicente, Granada, 2013

Grand sweeping park,

high apartments rise

and enclose pomegranate trees,

beer cans, benches, flies,

and cats

sleeping in the bushes,

empty waste bins,

and ledges of a home

where a family

never can return,

a fountain

with a wedge of swans,

pear trees and weeping lilacs,

stale roads built up

around,

their constant ocean wind.

Lines Written in Wax

In the dark,

the unrest of the trees.

Misconceived violins sing through rain

while dogs bite patrolmen in defense,

and the roots intertwine with my heart.

All the leaves

disconnect with the wind.

Rare Moon

No one wants the machines any more—

they’re writing music scores in rust.

Wilna Panagos

Red

1. the long version

step 1: memorize: red = subversion

step 2: do these exercises:

red = revolution

red = happiness

red = love

red shoes for Tom Waits

red square for Malevich

Roxanne's dress

the inside of a plum [not the outside, the outside is plum]

Macbeth's hands

addendum: powder:

cadmium paprika cinnabar quinacridone li hing sindoor

step 3: now believe:

red = melancholy

red = nostalgia [or grief, because it burns]

imagine: red sunflowers

think of a red planet [I remember]

red chocolate or red coffee

a powdery red elephant wandering soundlessly through the night

red neon signage for water

a red road with a white dashed line in the middle

a Pushkin poem about red snow

red spring leaves

oh, but you get those, Ficus ingens, Bridelia micrantha

then imagine an unspeakable rainstorm washing all the red away

leaving everything clean and grey

rushing down a torrid river

staining the river mouth red where it kisses the sea

smearing red around the ocean's lips with this abandonment

addendum: liquid:

blood tattoo ink

addendum: vapour:

the breath of love desire a prostitute's porch light

and then this love abates

laying down a thick red sediment over the knees of the ocean floor

red shipwrecks

red red crayfish

red sole and manta rays

red humps of lost treasure,

leaving the telephone booths postboxes hearts

grey and bereft

addendum: solid:

brecciated jasper carnelian corundum a gibbous moon a werewolf's teeth

addendum: other:

tongue after eating a raspberry popsicle

Amelie's kitchen

flags feathers junk sails stigmata

all the red things not named here but that you thought of when reading this

all the red things not named here that you didn't think of when reading this

the one last red thing hidden underneath the rubble in the aftermath of the rainstorm

location unknown

addendum: plastic:

it's forever

2. the short version

red and beautiful

then

not red

Emily Pettit

THE SKELETON OF OUR OBLIGATIONS

A request that feels like an ambush. 

You name it. You hope to know it

and know how to stop it. One day. 

Today a complicated conversation

regarding literal and figurative bears. 

You name these years The Bears. 

Sometimes you change the name. 

Sometimes what is hard is that you 

don’t. You are looking for an expression 

of peace. An expression of space. 

An expression of goodwill. Of grace.

Find more learning. In this hallway 

there are nine doors. One that leads 

to nowhere. A region of knowledge. 

The precinct, the province, the area, 

the line. A line of bears. A bear behind 

each door. A turn of the mind. Another 

turn of the mind. Take a tone. Make a 

tone. I’m all alone. Another thing I have 

said. So many have said. You are the lion 

part and the cage part, but know you are 

really the lion part.

DREAM WATER

You lifted me by the door by the deck.

It lingers in my back. Your back.

You express a reaction to the action. 

Every once in awhile a reaction

that compliments the action. 

A unique location, this memory. 

The science of sharing belongs

to a certain kind of sharpness of mind. 

Or sometimes it does. I want to refine 

what I said. What I say. You’re back.

But the deck is gone. Gone with 

the water that once was there. 

What can I do? Take me to the signs 

and symbols section. Let me live there 

for a little while. In the water.  

I don’t like it when water is in the way.

I like it when water is the way. 

FAMILIAR QUALITIES WE ADMIRE

To be praiseworthy and principled.  

To be kind and caring. To be perfectly

daring. What if you could sense a magnetic 

field? An electrical field? Some animals can. 

To recognize magic as magic. It’s time-

sensitive. Your sensory input of stimuli 

tells you one thing and your basis of 

knowledge tells you another. It is good 

that some astronauts love David Bowie. 

I am eating a biscuit very slowly. Drinking 

the old water. It’s over a billion years old. 

The recognition training a broken photograph. 

Cool, smart, and nice are commonly used ways 

to describe someone likable. Seems simple 

listed like that. Enormous language! Enormous 

music! Please make me a summer storm. 

Change becomes a chance. Draw a circle. Draw 

a line. Draw another line. Draw a triangle. 

I said to do these things. Do these things. 

Now explain how to do these things. 

Simon Rogghe

DRUNKEN GOLDFISH WALTZ BLUES

(For Zarina Zabrisky)

Drunken twilight, city lights turn into goldfish.

Eternity has fallen from the sky and dies

As a black beetle on the sunken pavement.

The boulevards have swallowed up the destination

And I drift past endless windows lit like billboards

In which laughter advertises anti-solitude.

Never-ending rooms where people stand on ceilings,

Grinding out the same refrain in different keys

And drinking reassurance in a different color.

I butt my head against the concrete sky

And cry for help, but no one seems to notice,

And I wonder how they know which way is up.

I stumble every time I try to face in their direction,

My feet refuse to grip their common ground, so I go down

And hug the chandelier to keep up the appearance.

Invisible, I float from room to room,

Deciphering encrypted meaning

In the smiles, the winks, the fluttering of lashes,

[But see their heads filled up with bumblebees,

Their veins pulsing like horny octopi,

Their stomachs tense as frantic wildebeest.]

Forever doubting when the water started rising

And never sure if I will drown with my next breath,

I track the years to look up days when things were normal.

I trace the steps inside my head and see the sun

Nodding approval as I skip with both feet on the grass

Where leaves and petals don’t betray their colors.

Never a day of solitude went by in this green wonderland

Where rabbit holes could lead to treasures and where

Freedom let you take its hand to dive into adventures.  

The dive was hard. The green spilled out as seaweed.

When frazzled stars had settled on the bottom of my eyes,

Freedom lay motionless inside a pile of debris.

Black bug eternity had always rested on the pavement.

The water had been surging since the day I didn’t look.

People had been glued to ceilings since I started breathing.

Goldfish, goldfish. You’re my kin. Waltz me into infinity

Along your boulevards that only know how to descend.

Find me those who speak my language and resuscitate my dreams.

Richie MacCaffery

Maze

My father went out to hunt a beast nearly extinct,

a vintage Triumph Bonneville, his boyhood dream.

He took it up the street twice, then chained it down

like a chrome Minotaur in an asbestos roofed garage.

I could show you it if you want - it’s easy to get to.

The maze it resides in is all in my father’s head.

Andrew F Giles

Munich

‘To this day sometimes I dream about her, arriving fresh from Germany in full gaiety’

Letter from Jessica Mitford to Debo Devonshire, 1960s

 She attuned herself to the clockwork of traffic

on Ludwigstraße, thrilled that each car

could conceal him & his steadfast

entourage.

Days Unity spent in her room

with toxic glues & paints, sticking armed

birthday warriors in tiny howdahs

on elephants – his card,

the hard work placating her. The midnight

bent of her mission comes to us in

these archived, or lost, images -

Hannibal, sitting wolfishly astride

a misshapen beast in the foreground,

swearing blind farewells to the Alps -

the prow of a craft

schlepping strange sciences across

the oceans - a brain of flint or metal,

a brand-new machine that will read

the degenerate code of the past.

There are the distant souls of her sisters too,

whispering a fanciful boo at her reflection

trapped in the glass of the Osteria Bavaria.

But the mirror is always full of heady days

of amateurish zeal, of whoops of praise -

of our slavishly immutable love of change.

February 1935 - their first Osteria tea

& while this particular shard has lost its place,  

Unity sits apart with tears in her eyes as,

for a moment, time seems blissfully

unchallenged, bright in his uniform.

Agnes Marton

Wakewalker, Naked

'Nothing exposed, it is just flesh,'

that's what I heard, outstripped,

the Wakewalker,

by men, staring

from behind their Morning Star

on a beige Tuesday, was it November?

I kept nibbling with

the sugarcubes on the saucer,

grasping the cup for fear of breakage,

slurping bitterness for heat.

Come to think of it, nakedness

reminds me of the lion park.

Everyone wanted the rare, white goddess.

The tamer called her The Empire of Closed Eyes.

We were taught to stroke only her back,

keep fear away when playing.

Some visitors came loud,

but went suddenly, silent.

Some crept hidden, left bitten,

told later tales of heroic fights.

I felt I was The One, tingling

like with palms on the spine of the Pine King.

Lions don't purr, she was just smiling,

then yawned, 'Haaaaaahhhhhhhh… You should go now,

learn how to touch the human skin;

how to wear yours,

without shame, wide awake.'

Pippa Little

Kindness Enough

Persians love all things sour and bitter

best of all bergamot’s green rind

and cut scent of rain

that pricks my eyes with tears.

We only have

my fine bone cup’s spiderlings of light,

your horn spoon, freckled with thistledown -

and shared grains of an unseen coast,

whisper of perfidious winds.

Longer than old-womanhood

and the moon’s recede/return, apogee/perigee,

longer than all desire our journey:

the brew is hot now, perfect,

let there be kindness enough and time

until the end of it.

How The Honey Changes

Snowdrops and crocus work into a first dark dew,

then blackthorns’ fume, plum and sycamore’s

spoonfuls swell and glow so that slow, winding

and intense, all  brood upon the spell, and early year’s

my stranger’s introduction:

summer’s for servants, then,

bramble, clover  and last days’ drowse

brew  miasma  of limpid ambers

and bruises  bloodwarm,  

haunting finale:

lightning infuses at the window,

stormy autumn transforms and deepens

these sad kaleidoscopes.

Somewhere out of the rain

my queens are sleeping.

Rob A Mackenzie

Chanson

If tomorrow the cigarette you would have smoked

in February’s doorway lies in the packet

unused, and if the morning rush becomes casual,

without a pitched plate, without laughter afterwards,

and if our neighbours stop scraping their bread-knife

down the body of your Ford Fiesta for a crime

you may not have committed, at least let me hear

you sing that outré French number you learned

from Piaf herself, or so your story goes, the one

that casts you as a waitress in a low-life bar

in Paris, where I mark time below the stairs

among empty bottles, my nerves frayed by

your vintage Irn Bru’s frisson in the flute,

which stirs my tongue to chant against the cold.

Rhian Edwards

Hitched

Violent tiredness has stripped

our mouths down to this skeletal

talk and grimacing silence.

Tongues once swaggered

with muscles of mirth, now flap

at the table, starved of all rapture.

In a bootless attempt to replenish

Lost joys, you pluck from the napkin

a tale for the telling.

With a flurry of arm wags and plasticine

face, you spill all the beans

for a flicker of awe.

I dispatch a dim smile and spy

on the gossips, as the swelling dead air

rots the menu between us.

Back to Bed

You rip off the blankets

to stop me losing the day.

I dream in epics, you see.

Sometimes you think I won’t wake

and might adventure without you.

I’m a drawer fully open

now something has to be touched.

You list my bits that you prize,

drop a kiss to the belly.

What a waste of good fawning

when the flattered is sleep-swooned!

Instead it’s the chill of your spit

and the wind you’ve let in that shudder

me back to the room

and this ordinary morning –

all thumping in sunshine,

I wish I could bin.

I abandon your bed for the bathroom

and the griffin-clawed tub

which squats under the window,

cupping the punctured clouds of your lather.

I pussy-foot into the tepid,

the yellowed porcelain squeaks as I slide,

wheel the hot tap with my toe,

veil my face in damp flannels

and in the snug of the soap-swamp,

No Place

Painted roses and ivy scratch

a tangled stairway up the wall,

twist an arch around a false

front door, perfunctory and sealed.

The windows are criss-crossed

clown eyes, paneless frames

shedding black silence.

Unhook the face of the house,

peel it open like a page,

every room surrenders itself,

perfectly furnished for no one.

A tall lamp mourns an unused

armchair, a hat stand presides

in the corner like a winter tree.

My hand is the ghost and god

of this home. Fingers drift –

intent for the solid, skate over

the hexagonal table, the velvet

dining room chairs, roll back

the eyelid of the bureau,

pinch open famished drawers.

Fingers scramble through a hatch

into a mock mahogany bedroom –

where the wardrobe is cluttered

with air and a mirror has forgotten

how to watch. The hand pauses –

shrinks from a familiar bed

where a spider closes into a fist.