The Charnel House Tom de Freston with Abegail Morley. Agnes Davis. Alan Buckley. Alicia Stubbersfield. Andrea Porter. Andrew McMillan. Ben Wilkinson. Claire Trévien. Daisy Johnson. Dan Holloway. Dan O’Brien. Declan Ryan. Fady Joudah. George Szirtes. Helen Ivory. Helen Mort. Jacob Polley. Jenny Lewis. Jo Hemmant. John Glenday. John Mole. John-Paul Pryor. Kaddy Benyon. Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Luke Wright. Lydia Macpherson. Malene Engelund. Martin Figura. Mary Jean Chan. Max Barton. Pascale Petit. Samir Guglani. Sarah Gridley. Sarvat Hasin. Tamar Yoseloff. Toby Parker Rees. Ghassan Zaqtan. Edited by Tom Corbett
Bridgedoor Press
Bridgedoor Press Bridge House, Bridge Street Halesworth Suffolk IP19 8AQ First published in 2014 by Bridgedoor Press Š Tom de Freston 2014 The rights of Tom de Freston and the named poets to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, with the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The poets all retain copyrights for their poems and the right to publish, print or distribute their poems wherever else they wish. ISBN: 978-0-XXXX-XXXX-X Also available as an eBook at www.issuu.com Cover Design by Paul Saunders Printed in Great Britain by Berforts Information Press
Acknowledgements My huge thanks to Tom Corbett, firstly for establishing Bridgedoor Press as a platform to allow writers and artists to explore cross-disciplinary publications, and secondly for not thinking I was mad when I submitted the proposal for this particular publication. Tom’s vision, energy and belief have been incredibly encouraging. Thanks as well to the team Tom has put together at Bridgedoor Press who have made this publication happen, particularly Ian and Paul. Thanks to Breese Little Gallery for not only hosting an exhibition and launch of the book, but for believing in what I was trying to do with this book. Huge thanks to Kiran, Henry, Josie, Daisy and Sarvat who must have been asked a million pedantic questions about various bits of horseheaded imagery. Finally, the biggest thanks go to the poets who have contributed poems, the quality of which have astounded me and have transformed this book into something far beyond my wildest expectations.
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Horsehead In 2008 I was asked by a playwright to produce some drawings of animal-human hybrid characters for a play he was putting on. I ended up giving him a box of drawings which almost all featured a horsehead character, with the head directly quoting Picasso’s Guernica. Over the next few years the character kept popping up in drawings and paintings. The compulsive repetition led to there being a sense that this character was in need of an entire world and a narrative. At the start of 2012 I decide to paint and draw this horseheaded figure almost exclusively. The aim was to produce a body of canvases, all 2 x 1.5m, which would feel like fragments from a world, in which the horsehead was the central protagonist. This culminated with two solo shows at Breese Little Gallery, where 17 of the 25 horseheaded canvases were displayed. In the final show the canvases were arranged with nods to Stations of the Cross, with the imagery working its way from the private, through the domestic, theatrical, political, religious and finally the apocalyptic. In some ways the show felt like pages from a graphic novel had opened up across the wall, which is what gave me the idea for this book. I have been interested in ekphrasis for a long time, and have previously collaborated on books with Andrea Porter and Kiran Millwood Hargrave. The relationship between poetry and painting is a long and distinguished one. My interest is not in poetry which describes a painting or painting which illustrates a poem, but rather in the ways in which poems and paintings can work together in a manner in which each is autonomous but also capable of working in synergy. With this in mind I approached a list of leading contemporary poets whose work I admire. Each poet was invited to respond to one of the horsehead paintings, with no limitation beyond being asked to avoid descriptive ekphrasis and being encouraged to use the paintings as a start point rather than a restraint. Thirty-seven poets agreed to take part, and the range of responses was astounding. I soon realised that merely presenting images of the paintings next to the poems would not be enough. Instead I decided I would make what I can only clumsily describe as a poetic graphic novel. This book is the result of that process, with the paintings reimagined in comic book format, and threaded together with the poems to form a coherent (at times) narrative and a complete world. It is a world which only works thanks to the range of voices and visions in the poetry. This book, above and beyond any of the paintings or exhibitions, is the most complete articulation of the horseheaded character and the world it inhabits. It is also, therefore, a final farewell to the character. Tom de Freston, June 2014 www.tomdefreston.co.uk
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A Note from the Editor I have known Tom for three years. When I first came across his work he had already achieved an incredible amount for such a young artist, having been Leverhulme Artist in Residence at Cambridge University and Levy Plumb Artist in Residence at Christ’s College. I was amazed by the amount of successful solo exhibitions across the UK and abroad he had already had and the staggering number of leading cultural figures who had published essays on his work, such as Sir Nicholas Serota, Sir Trevor Nunn and the Hon. Rowan Williams. In the few years since, his progress has been remarkable, he has gallery representation in London (Breese Little) and has had institutional solo shows at Pallant House Gallery, The Globe Theatre and The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Tokyo. I first came across Tom’s work when working with him and Andrea Porter on the book The House of the Deaf Man, which we published at Gatehouse Press. The success of this book was what made me set up Bridgedoor Press, with a view to providing a publishing platform for books which creatively explore the relationship between the arts. When looking for a project to launch the publishing house Tom was the first person I thought about approaching. He was already in the early stages of a project which revolved around getting a group of contemporary poets to respond to his work, so we decided to take this idea forward towards a publication. I had no idea this idea would develop into a book and a project of such staggering creative imagination. The 37 poets who have responded to Tom’s work represent a remarkable cross section of the incredibly rich landscape of contemporary poetry, including a spread of the leading poets working today alongside some phenomenal new voices. The quality of the poetry in the book has blown me away. Tom’s paintings, as seen throughout the book, are breathtaking. But the book Tom has produced is far more than a collection of images and poems. It is like nothing I have ever seen or read before, and feels truly groundbreaking in its combination of paintings and poetry in a graphic novel format to explore world building and narrative. Tom and the contributing poets have done something quite magical, and we are delighted to put this book out into the world as the first from Bridgedoor Press. Tom Corbett, July 2014
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Author Biographies Abegail Morley’s collection, How to Pour Madness into a Teacup (Cinnamon) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection. Snow Child (2011) and an ekphrastic collection based on the work of George Grosz, Eva and George: Sketches in Pen and Brush (2013) are published by Pindrop Press. She is co-founder of EKPHRASIS. Agnes Davis was a finalist in the Newfound Poetry Contest 2013, has poems in the Hetherington Young Writers Award anthology Cheval V, All Hollow and The Frogmore Papers and is due to complete a Masters in Creative Writing at Oxford University in 2014. She is a mother and freelance editor. Alan Buckley’s pamphlet Shiver (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society choice, and he was shortlisted for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize. He works in Oxford as a psychotherapist, and as a school writer-in-residence for the charity First Story. Alicia Stubbersfield’s fourth collection, The Yellow Table, was published by Pindrop Press in 2013. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, is on the Advisory Board for First Story and tutors regularly for The Arvon Foundation. Andrea Porter has had two poetry collections published and two pamphlets. She collaborated with Tom de Freston on The House of the Deaf Man, a book responding to Goya’s Black Paintings. She has been published in Poems of the Decade (Faber) and in a number of poetry magazines. Andrew McMillan has had two pamphlets published with Red Squirrel Press. He is a senior lecturer at LJMU and his first full collection of poetry is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape. Ben Wilkinson new pamphlet of poems is For Real (Smith|Doorstop, 2014), winner of the Poetry Business Competition and the Northern Promise Award. He is a keen runner, Liverpool FC fan, and among other things he works as a critic, reviewing new poetry for the Guardian and the TLS. Claire Trévien is the author of Low-Tide Lottery (Salt) and The Shipwrecked House (Penned in the Margins), which was longlisted in the Guardian First Book Awards. Daisy Johnson’s poetry has been published in The Interpreters House, Vulture and Catweazle. She was commended in the Martin Starkie prize and runs the monthly Poet’s Corner Open Mic Night at Blackwell’s Bookshop. Her fiction has also been published. She is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Oxford University. vi
Dan Holloway writes poetry and prose but is happiest of all behind a microphone. He is troublemaker in chief of the spoken-word show ‘The New Libertines’ and a past winner of Literary Death Match. Dan O'Brien is a poet and playwright living in Los Angeles. His book of poetry War Reporter received the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Declan Ryan co-edits the Days of Roses anthology series and is poetry editor at Ambit. A pamphlet of his poems is forthcoming in the Faber New Poets series. Fady Joudah's poetry and translations have earned him a Yale Series award, a BanipalTLS prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship among others. Textu is his most recent poetry collection. George Szirtes is a prize-winning poet and translator. He won the T. S. Eliot prize in 2005 for his collection Reel (Bloodaxe). His most recent collection Bad Machine (Bloodaxe) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize in 2013. Ghassan Zaqtan is a prominent Palestinian poet. His works have been translated into several languages. A selection of his poetry in English, Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, received the Griffin International Poetry prize in 2013. Helen Ivory is a poet and assemblage/collage artist. Her fourth Bloodaxe Books collection is Waiting for Bluebeard. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat & Tears and is Course Director and tutor for the Continuing Education programme in Creative Writing for UEA /Writers’ Centre Norwich. Helen Mort’s first collection Division Street was published by Chatto & Windus in 2013 and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize. She lives in Sheffield. Jacob Polley won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his most recent book of poems, The Havocs. He lives in Fife and teaches at the University of St Andrews. Jenny Lewis's latest work is After Gilgamesh for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, published by Mulfran Press in 2011 and Taking Mesopotamia (2014), a poetry collection published by Oxford Poets/Carcanet. She teaches poetry at Oxford University. Jo Hemmant lives in Kent with her husband and two sons. She runs Pindrop Press, a boutique poetry press, and writes poetry of her own. Her first collection, The Light Knows Tricks, was published by Doire Press in 2013.
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John Glenday's most recent collection, Grain (Picador 2009), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and the Griffin International Prize. John Mole is a poet and jazz musician. For many years he ran the Mandeville Press with Peter Scupham and has been a recipient of the Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards from The Society of Authors. His most recent collection is The Point of Loss (Enitharmon ). John-Paul Pryor is a writer, art director and editor. He is currently Editorial Director at M&C Saatchi, Editor/Art Director at The House of Peroni and Editor-at-Large at Flaunt Magazine. His debut novel Spectacles is published with Seabrook Press. Kaddy Benyon is a Granta New Poet. Her first collection, Milk Fever (Salt, 2012), won the Crashaw Prize. She is currently writing her second collection during a residency at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Her work is published widely and has been highly commended for the Forward Prizes. Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s poetry is published widely, including in Agenda, Room, Magma and Bloodaxe’s Raving Beauties. Barbican Young Poet and winner of the Yeovil International Poetry Prize 2013, her third collection is Splitfish (Gatehouse Press, 2013). Kiran’s debut novel The Cartographer’s Daughter is forthcoming from Knopf (USA) and Chicken House (UK). Luke Wright has written and performed seven one man shows, touring them to top literary and arts festivals from Australia to Scotland via Hong Kong and Bruges. His current show, ‘Essex Lion’, tours throughout 2014. Lydia Macpherson's first collection is Love Me Do (Salt, 2014). Malene Engelund was born in Aalborg, Denmark and now lives in London. She is co-editor of the Days of Roses poetry anthologies and was highly commended in the Faber New Poets scheme 2013-14. Martin Figura’s Whistle (Arrowhead Press) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award with the show, which won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. He won the 2010 Hamish Canham Prize. The pamphlets Boring The Arse Off Young People and Arthur are published by Nasty Little Press. Mary Jean Chan’s poems have appeared in The Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Voyages and In Protest: 150 Poems for Human Rights. Twice selected as one of Oxford's emerging poetic voices by the Oxford University Poetry Society, Mary Jean looks forward to pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway from 2014-15. viii
Max Barton is Artistic Director of The Well and of a new season with the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Whilst Associate at Jermyn Street Theatre he has co-directed with Steven Berkoff and been Associate Director to Trevor Nunn. Poems from Pascale Petit’s sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014), won the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her last collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year, and was Book of the Year in the Observer. Samir Guglani is a consultant oncologist, writer of poetry and short fiction, and curator of Medicine Unboxed, a project that engages medicine through the arts. He is working on a collection of short stories that explores lives and instances within a single hospital. Sarah Gridley is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She has written three books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (University of California Press, 2005), Green is the Orator (UC Press, 2010) and Loom (Omnidawn, 2013). Sarvat Hasin studied politics before moving to Oxford to write. She is currently working on fiction and poetry. She has published pieces in Ladyfest, Catweazle magazine, the Mays Anthology, the Oxford Student, the Toast and Dawn newspaper. Tamar Yoseloff ’s most recent collection, Formerly, a chapbook with photographs by Vici MacDonald (Hercules Editions, 2012), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. She is also the author of four individual collections as well as two collaborative editions with the artist Linda Karshan. The Formula for Night is due from Seren in 2015. Toby Parker Rees is a writer, mostly of plays. In February 2014 he collaborated with Tom de Freston on a live art revenge tragedy called ‘Horsehead’, which debuted at the Yard Theatre (Hackney).
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The Charnel House For Emily and Fred.
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Illumination To exist is to bear forced witness to atrocity: I pray that someone will flick that switch, or my filament burn to nothing. Believe me, illumination is not a neutral act. Look at this world I conjure from darkness; look at the farcical dog, slavering wild-eyed over a butchered bone. In what way are you not made complicit? Think before you raise your hands and whisper Let there be light.
Alan Buckley
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What The Water Gave Us Aitut, kanosak, we have words for gift and gold – they are the warm, quiet children we hold to our chests, rocked to sleep by winter’s ebb and flow. We wait for the spring tide when water leaves her seabed to us; It’s Tatkret, he pulls her close, slips her body from its white coat the way we strip the skin of seals from flesh, our hands a ceremony, eyes guarded against the return of that black, almost human gaze of theirs. The ice lowers with a sigh only the abandoned recognise; she’ll be as hollow as a bird bone now. Down here, the husk of ocean, the murmur of sand under our weight; we slice the dark with headlamps and harvest it for mussels, our bodies studying the language of ice, the creaks of its rising warning leave now, our buckets spilling with the blue of those soft, guarded jewels the water gave us.
Malene Engelund
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Raft The winter bled no light and cursed to darkness all of us. She purred and yanked us from the tit. A thirst so pure can nourish best the need to stand on your two feet. Blessed are the self-reliant, who laughed in to each coal black face and yelled O Margaret lead us to the raft A storm will claim the weakest first and there are some who won’t be helped: those frit and living in the past those moribund and dunderheaded. Boil it down to one square mile. Greed is good, get on your bike and graft. It’s hard to cycle in a flood O Margaret lead us to the raft. Sir Geoffrey Howe and anarchists ran bleating down The Mall. She tried her best, but Goldilocks had pissed upon her chips. So teary-eyed she’s driven out and gentrified while on the steps a grey man coughed what seemed to be formaldehyde. O Margaret lead us to the raft. Her memory so nearly wrecked she sipped her final sleeping draught. O let her creed be resurrected O Margaret lead us to the raft.
Martin Figura
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Apotropaic With no aid of a wall or pocket mirror, a painter has sheared away his wavy hair and set a sign on the door—Ne dérangez pas— and set up a light for supervision and mixed another with water. Light is the naked and the pinguid thing, the bird without parts, the bulb, hot for its socket. It will come over and inside of things, or won’t. Do not disturb says the door in a painter’s hand. Let my bare eyes be. We— the raft would like to shout—were its mouths not closing slots. Are we not yet—as yet—every man for himself? Cast off or be cast off? Cannibals—if it comes to that? A ways outside of outer space, in the loose entente between body and corpse, a windy light stripes the mythical sail. A painter meets its particles of salt and blood, tastes the clamber and the mass of them.
Sarah Gridley
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Untertow I leave the light on, allow the naked bulb to throb in the blackness, hang slack – pendulum, orb, blurred moon. This room’s the whole universe: walls the galaxy, ceiling the stars, plug hole a portal to another world. I glitter below the surface – the sun sunk on a lake. Calm as a nun I blink in time with my pulse, rub the plug chain as though it were a rosary, let the brackish water slip over me, whine as if it’s blood through ventricles. I feel its slow thrum around my body, hear the dull clang of my heart – a sinking ship. Stream-like it creeps over shins, along thighs, traces a line from pelvic bone to clavicle. I hear the faint splash of oars, of you rowing to talk to my untouched body, my silent wound. I wonder if you’ll tell it about dripping umbrellas in a wide hall, mad dashes from cars at midnight, trees bending in the wind like fingers round a pen. I try to make out our shadows; the misted mirror shows absent faces. I see you look at how my hair fans like seaweed, imagine how my wet limbs could step with ease into your boat, my neck slip the thread tightening like a purse string as the neglected water drains away.
Abegail Morley
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1:1 Looking like earth round the corners of the sun we were lost before we began. Words we had lobbed orbital went on waving in a vacuum. These ones kept as furniture I can stand on and gain no gravity – I step across your lap like an eclipse then face you into space.
Agnes Davis
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Swimmer of Lethe A momentary parting before water recovers water, and water doesn’t remember the blunt impression, the heroic effort, it’s flat and heartless. No mirror, no hippy-dip calm, but sharp and dark, metallic. I think I could get to like it, relinquish the vertical world: buildings, trees, my standing self; I’ve mastered surface, here everything is under. The deathy drink sweetens my mouth, floods my veins, my blood cleansed clear, I will go white like marble.
Tamar Yoseloff
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Perhaps Tomorrow I know what you are thinking. I can see you there, encased in the warm glow of your indifference, safe from the storm that rips through the universal dark. Your mother taught you to always stay indoors. This is an invitation for you to leave the premises. The fire alarm has been ringing for years, but your father muted it for fear you would never return. This is an emergency. Too few are venturing into the shadows. Too few recall the sound of critters uttering Nature’s prophecies. Too few heard the splash of grain on flesh as the last whale was beached.
Mary Jean Chan
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Father Father sitting in the chair beholds his child-homunculus, turns to mother and demands My God, what have you done to us? Mother’s absent, she’s long gone, father’s feeling pretty sick. Homunculus rolls on the rug, his shadow heavy as a brick. Out in the garden mother howls at a pale maternal moon: Take the dreadful gift away Do it now! Please do it soon! We bear our gifts, the moon replies, and what you get is what we give your sphere is the sublunary, your homunculus will live. Meanwhile the wretched creature writhes aware of something untoward. The universe is unconcerned, The stars look on amused or bored. That’s how we are, my lovely ones, croons the darkness in the soul. Beauty is ‘take just what you find’ though what you find you might think droll. Consider, sir, the dragonfly, the creature pleads, does it not glow? You are my father after all and I am that which you must know. I am that which you must know, as you have known it all along. Here is beauty in its prime. I’m here now, but I’m not here long.
George Szirtes 26
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The Hunger Moon In the beginning the sky was a half-formed thing; all rabbit skin glue and chalk; no place for fireworks. But when the night was ground from lapis rocks she gave birth to the moon and presently the moon came home with me. I am not saying I’m the chosen one, I’m simply the narrator. And she has lived with me one lunar month for I have notched a tally on the leg bone of a cow. We have passed a year inside this month my flesh reformed as shadows, my blood as tides. We do not talk – we have no common tongue and whatever quarrels I had made with myself are half-formed creatures shaped from clay. Sometimes I hear the barking of her dogs. Sometimes my shadow is a dancing bear. Sometimes I feel my body purr with electricity. This fasting seems to suit me; I am light with it and she has dressed me as her Prince.
Helen Ivory
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Penny Broadside I sang a feather bed sang a mare of milk I sang the bricks of castle walls torn like yellow silk I sang a little knife sang a severed head I sang small rooms and marble halls I sang the dead to life and when I’m safe inside the song my face is many men’s and when I’m safe inside the song my voice is many men’s but now I’m fixed on this white sheet and all the tunes are wrong
Jacob Polley
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The Horses’ Hymn The horses the horses that have stirred the dust in the valley’s calm the horses the horses whose gallop splits rows of date palms the horses that drag the east by the scruff of the sand the horses in mirrors and hair guarded by shadows the horses that cross the horizon etched on a crescent the horses that released our kin from the garments of smoke then tossed their turbans in time did not wait for us to say the horses the horses the horses
Ghassan Zaqtan (translated by Fady Joudah)
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The Catch Everything you can imagine is real. Pablo Picasso
For you, the catch wasn’t something caught: not cold or contender, attention or fire. Not the almost-missed train, or the sort of wave surfers might wait an entire lifetime for. Not the promise that leaves the old man adrift for days, his boat creaking, miles offshore. Nor what cleaves the heart in two, that left your throat parched and mute for taking pill after yellow-green pill, the black-blue taste the price you paid to finally kill the two-parts sadness to one-part anger. No. The catch was what you’ve forever carried, tight in your fist, and still do.
Ben Wilkinson
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Mules Revisited Should they not have the best of both worlds? Paul Muldoon
Or say we have the worst of both – creation’s also-rans, ambivalent as service stations, motorways and chain hotels. We’re always in transit, somewhere south of somewhere else. We grow into the aged bodies we were born with. Incestuous manes and ears like hessian sacks, our tears recycled from stale rain. We walk in silence, baring the tiny gravestones of our teeth. Our parents hedged their bets and lost. Don’t ask us how we fell but how we rose: pit children slick with earth, we shrugged the ground off, followed you into the world you promised us.
Helen Mort
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Concentrate on the Snowdrops not on blowsy sunflowers in a hospital vase or on red Spanish earth where hope was hot and possible, before drink, before the sack, before the heart attack in the pub. Try not to imagine trauma, accident, catastrophe. My father’s death was not the answer I expected to my hopeful prayer please make him better. How do I ask God not to respond like that again? Concentrate on St Jude who sticks in there with his hopeless cases, doing his best to turn things around, yes this time will be different and believe it because what else can we do? I don’t blame Pandora for using the tiny key, for letting the ills of the world fly like pigeons forgetting the way home, hope’s scaley claws scratching at the last seed or the papery bulb. Don’t lose patience: a spill of skimmed milk will appear under trees in the garden’s corner. So much effort needed to push through that darkness, that cold. But now, the flowers.
Alicia Stubbersfield
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Overgrown Song Yesterday, when you yelled, my love, your breath impastoed my brain with old masters. I walked in a fog of paint to Tesco’s to find some drain blasters, but there were none. Oh! the plug is full of your copper weeds! We lack nails, our fingers misread our bodies, and yet I know that this ossified foot is mine, frozen forward, disinclined to dissolve in your bathtub. Oh my love, shall it warm up?
Claire TrĂŠvien
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Why I Must Kill My Double She is fettered to something bad, like a beating strung inside her or something hungry tied up in her gut. She is taut with intent, like a God who swallows his children, thinking he will take their strength to murder inside him. She will sucker under the skin of my reflections, shuck me out of them easy as eating. That’s her in the deckchair, in the iced over garden, drinking whisky and ginger, thinking stolen thoughts. It is easy as eating. It is simple as slipping down children instead of stones.
Daisy Johnson
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The Urinal Wizened-chopped and barrel-gutted grimace well and truly shuttered flies unbuttoned, chap in hand his wife will never understand the ritual he must now perform. He hauls the bins, he cuts the lawn and staunch and still he stands like this to wheedle out his malty piss. All rictus necked, eyes fixed ahead no glances stolen, nothing said. With solid gait and grisly grace he reads the adverts in his face: GATSO scanners, Tena pads, and those with balding, beaming dads who boast with measured, manly gumption of restored erectile function. Wistful eyes and empty gurn ahead he looks, he never turns. A corpse could tumble from a stall his eyes would never leave the wall; an orchestra could shamble in catch-up, tune-up and then begin with Wagner’s Ritt der Walkuren it won't disturb such stoic men. Stood stock-still as a snoozing cow with pincered penis, sweaty brow imagining the river’s lap, a waterfall, a dripping tap, a roman fountain’s bubbly tune he heard once on his honeymoon, until (Sweet Lord!) his waters come and with it thunder from his bum.
Luke Wright
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Look it in the mouth So art is failure & so failure’s art & everything we have is just a feeling. Pull out of it – pull out & pull apart & watch the shadows settle on the ceiling. It’s quite unwise, you’re thinking – so you start Again. Remember gods, remember kneeling. The world is in her ears, she understands. You’re happy and you know it. Slap your glands.
Toby Parker Rees
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The Grain of Truth Grows poorly in rich soil. Ripening demands an exceptional season. Blights more readily than us, even. Sow it, you'll reap a fine harvest of sorrow. Each head clings grimly to husk and chaff, mills the stoutest millstone to a gritty pebble, kills all yeasts brutally then sulks in the oven like its own headstone. So never offer me something I cannot refuse and expect thanks. Don’t bring me this gift then question why I cannot thrive.
John Glenday
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A Wedding Horse A Met Office graphic shows the path of a storm that has brought Saharan dust to the UK. It is most apparent in parts of southern England, the Midlands and East Anglia. BBC News, 2 April 2014
You can see India from here, its wet press of monsoon air, then, undressing by the window you wonder if ghosts amount to this: exact margins and surfaces of bodies or land lifted and thrown place to place. Time unclear, incipient morning or seeped dusk, just some first spring light attaches lustre to you. Even the streets, you say, look, are decorated overnight with shrines. Blossom stirs in a thought of rain, a hundred bonfires glimpsed from a rickshaw at night, faces in the dark, a sudden white horse caught cantering through traffic to a wedding, lost but kept like lightning on the retina. Surely the same one still carrying my father, in sepia, to his bride, England, all of this – bejewelled, in silk, eyes dressed red, blood-lined with a bright, contained pain. You draw close again, become breath held at my mouth. Past you, further out, cars recede up an erased hill, rising slowly through the dust, like fireflies.
Samir Guglani
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White Noise I dig and dig but I forget myself. The effort makes me ill. The Earth is shifting down below, My mind is ever still. Lethe, lethe, lethe I swim and swim ‘til I forget your smell. Your perfume’s lost at sea. The tide keeps crashing in and out, But gone is you and me. Lethe, lethe, lethe I laugh and laugh but I forgot the joke. I can’t recall the pun. The worms are nibbling at my flesh, And all my colours run. Lethe, lethe, lethe I drink and drink just to forget myself. My cheeks burn hot and red. I’ve never lost my sense of self, But all I was is dead. Kill me Kill me Give me second death.
Max Barton
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Wolf Nocturne with a feather light upon her thigh, I place a kiss upon her rose, and the blood moon cries for passion, of two such angels in repose, yet upon my dancing soul, the devil makes his flight, and our bodies writhe like cat snakes, in the warmth of endless night, with lips as red and sensual, as new dawn in nature’s sight I burn forever brightly in her patient and slow light
John-Paul Pryor
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Last Judgement You’ve been thinking about whether it’s a good idea for me to stay tonight. Your decision so far is that I shouldn’t, but I’m not sure it’s your final one as I face the floor, tie my shoelaces, ask you to choose some music for this sombre chore. You've opted for Allegri’s Miserere – the opposite of a ‘taking clothes off ’ song. It's funny, my smile admits to the floorboards, almost as funny as the length of time I'm taking to finish this simple task. I must think all these voices capable of moving you to relent. If I’m still here when they get to the high note who knows what’ll happen? Or perhaps I’m already thinking about what comes next: you at the top of the stairs in your silver hairband, and me in the dark, looking up, not knowing what sort of sacrifices it would require for me to surprise the morning, holding you on the covenant side of your door.
Declan Ryan
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Fool’s Gold All hail and grime, flecks and spores as though smeared by mucky fingers sucked and dipped in pollen, sulphide, the gold pots. Everything wanes without her: the folds of my belly, tufts of my pits, those thumbed-in eye sockets, a lupus itching my pod like the mottle on a looking glass no vinegar can touch. Feel it like a man, they say, dispute it like a man. Yet I’m wedded merely to impotence – shrunk to the nothing of a blind writhing bairn frantic to scratch at the lustrous face of its distant/present mother, the full-milked white of her, she who raises tides and men to her puppetry of lips and nipples and gorging. O gentle lady, why must I keep alone? Hide my fires, extinguish such desires, banish this pair of wrestling fools hell bent on their primal scene. I’ve become strange, a stranger to myself, cast out in gilt and furs, smoked mirrors, unable to see what’s precious besides a crown now barbed and hollow. I keep my shadow tethered to a chair leg, have no agency with the need to rule all that I crave or run from, spend small tortured hours (little murdered sleeps) dreaming then dreading moments given over to delight; destruction. Come you spirits of the fetid air, come you three of poisoned cups, I conjure you maidens of mirth and vituperative deeds to spit on this king and make him shine, please?
Kaddy Benyon
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Pandora And in the end it all came down to this: a pre-dawn Moscow club, the basement Ladies lit by a designer piece, its Perspex shells giving up their ghosts. Head down for one more line, she found some it-girl’s chequerboard clutch. Thumbed the catch and then it all kicked off: the rush of hooves, pelt of envy, heaving sickness, hate. She shrugged as they balled past – the usual stuff. Nothing to what was in her head: hope bought out, trust fund bled dry, love on zero hours.
Lydia Macpherson
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The Ridding They take your lungs gut liver brain, peel out the blood-rope twitch of every nerve and vein and they wed you to his bed. Then they cut suck and lift the heart from your eyeless pelt, with such hurt I mewled like a child. It should be a mercy, but now my body’s absence is only an echo chamber waiting for music. I can remember nothing of your face or touch, no voice or ways that you used to learn me, but I am full of your songs. They rise through the jink of my ear to the scoop of my sex until I am dizzy with melody and can almost know the mouth upon the tune the pointed cut of tongue through teeth. Tonight I dreamt I spilt dawn into the webbed chambers of the Underworld with a look. The sun chased back the endless alchemy of cold, and all the shrill shattering ways of ice chattered into mouthfuls of water that I drank cool and deep and in perpetuity. How will I tempt another summer to seek me here, in this well of embalming dark, kept hopeless in taxes of a body’s blood. My feet root in mimicry of the slow ways of a seed – I plant myself on a thin scraping of dusk, waiting for the break and spill – the night’s full extravagance of stars.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
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Inana he fathered her then left a void planted a seed in the dark but the womb grew darker his absence a poison that ran down the walls like damp seven times seven she shed herself arched backwards hung from a hook through her belly button a flower of muscle peeled from the entry point and round the tip a flesh cushion covered in scales to hide the wires in a rush she entered the light eyes polished wet leaped upstream the hook embedded still: unseen
Jenny Lewis
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Pieces Strings of sharded Lyricalities that start and choke Pull tight Over A century’s skeletons, Plasticizing into transparency Over Skulls Bone Teeth Of atrocities whose Pleading finger pads Pull plaintively At the semiotic skin. Lost grips Moral slips YouTube clips Anointed icons, blips, Points that never tip From silenced lips. Exponential ugliness Races With a reassuring shoulder To embrace Everything.
Dan Holloway
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The War Reporter Paul Watson Prefigures the End Have you thought about it? You should. Watch it on YouTube. You won’t be the same after, probably. Or you will and that will become your problem. If I were you, Dan, I’d cling to life. Most everybody would. Your child deserves the splendid world. The temptation is what you failed to mention: your own eyes roiling in her mother’s face. A table between you in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Blessed with the air of a classicist. Copper -colored ringlets. Depressive. Passionately decoding your codex. And what have you become? a ghost? As they’re laying the knife against your throat. Will you thank them? I will giggle like Gandhi. Slyly, perverted with pride, they’ll presume. I’ll forgive them when they slice my skin, snap sinews and larynx and gullet and spine, carotid arteries spraying like pinched hoses while I’m calling in a drowning gibberish for this cup to pass my lips. I won’t believe it and neither should you, my friend. As they string me up like a Biblical scapegoat and oh never mind the blood and gore. I’ll have gone into that dangling bulb and sinking sun in this land where all trouble began, the Cradle, don’t they call it? the Cradle of Man.
Dan O’Brien
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Le Sang des Bêtes From the métro aérien I glimpsed our apartment – the French windows flung to the night, light blazing like slaughter. That tumble into the past had the impact of a bolt-gun. Did my father hang there like a horse, headfirst, back legs strung from a beam? Did my mother freeze at the door, her whinny shattering the lightbulb? My carriage moves on, past the dangerous work of the mind as it sorts through memories – those that must and must not be remembered except as flashes from the train-tracks of history, or only confronted in animal form. My parents in their horseheads as if dressed for a masque. The knacker can’t return the foal’s head to its neck but he whistles as he cuts.
Pascale Petit
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hung the women are preparing to leave work they are tying their scarves in knots around their necks braving themselves for the swollen insides of the city they’ve been in uniform for eight dull hours and now they split like cells eager for new warmth they become singular the one who forgets the milk the one with classes and a skill for never looking at her watch the one who reads the one who coming home momentarily forgets but immediately sees him strung up by the ankles from the light fixture hair at attention and below a dog tongue rolled out waiting for the ceiling to crack for something to give for the whole beige architecture to come down she clicks the door shut she wipes her feet on the rug unbuckles and lays out the heels that point like arrows into the room she keeps the scarf on
Andrew McMillan
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A Script for Satie I want to compose a piece for dogs, and I already have my décor. The curtain rises on a bone. Erik Satie
The curtain rises on a bone, A canine chorus gathers round Then one of them steps out alone To tell the audience what’s been found. Although his aria sounds off-key, A mix of growls and whimperings, We know that it's of mortality, Our common dog’s life, that he sings. We come, we go, and in between We try to please, get told we’re good, Until what remains of us, licked clean, Is bone bereft of flesh and blood. So let us gambol while we may As fate keeps whispering in our ear To warn us all that any day The terminal hangdog will appear. He passes the bone across the stage. The young dogs toss and worry it. Against the dying light they rage With angry barks then bury it. The curtain closes on a grave. The bone is now where bones belong. The dogs know just how to behave And exit with a charnel song.
John Mole
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Mother Wept And then, suddenly, for a dead body, everyone wanted to help me. Fatima Khan (im Dr Abbas Khan)
He was tortured for eight months, we think every day Once when he was a boy of ten or so, he and his brother Beaten with rubber pipes, blindfolded and burned with cigarettes climbed the back wall, sat on the top in the sun to chat, kicked and punched, given electric shocks I watched from the basement window as I sewed, His weight dropped to five stone, he was like a skeleton the mother in me nervous but overwhelmed with love His nails had been pulled off but he said that was nothing for these dark-haired boys I’d given the world. They even arrested children, 12- and 13-year-olds And then Abbas lost his balance, toppled backwards, disappeared – and when they were crying for their mummy they were beaten so hard terrified, I raced out to the alley, certain I’d find him with a broken neck, they were told they would die if they cried again cursing myself for allowing him to do such a dangerous thing It was a dark chamber, underground. He was in shackles, couldn’t walk properly but he was only winded, a little bruised. Your son committed suicide today Stupid reckless boy, you only have one life, I shrilled my heart going crazy as I held him to me and cried. Italicised text taken from Fatima Khan’s account of her son Abbas’ death whilst in prison in Syria (The Guardian, Tuesday, 7 January 2014)
Jo Hemmant
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Borne They are never still First they cling to the bars of a crib, navigate a home without a map, slip from opened arms into worlds that happen and turn despite them. They are the blur on photographs taken on seaside holidays, the empty clutch of sand in beds, uncollected shells on window sills. They are never still Birth days are unopened envelopes, white drifts melted from a doormat. They blow out every unlit candle on unmade cakes with stolen breath. They tap on closed bathroom doors, slip through keyholes into sanctuaries, plunge into a deep ocean of numbers yet remain tied to a thousand shores. They are never still They ride on the tumbled nag of days. They slop out their time in buckets full of not having and not being. Each year is mopped clean of history. They fill sieves at the village well, till unplanted crops, milk the ghost of goats, dance in unfallen rain, pack their hope into tattered sacks. They are never still They neither wake nor sleep, they whisper unbecoming spells that raise the life from living. There is no seep of fear in never. They are never still
Andrea Porter 102
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Travel Guide to the End of the World On a map, trap the route you mean to take with your fingers. If you pencil a line through your journey, do it twice. Double the line back to make sure it brings you home. Stitch everything you bring to your back. Bury the rest. Do not leave your clothes on the side of the road or on the train tracks. Empty your glove compartment of battery fluid and holy books. You might walk for days eating nothing but the breath in your lungs hearing nothing but the grit in your shoes. When you find the others, do not look them in the eye. Weave your way through the crowd, this parade of dancing knives. Everything here will sound like your name even the start of rainfall. When you begin to mistake your fingers for someone else's you will become the city. Your ribs cathedrals and your belly great halls. Unzip your stomach and let the railways of your gut spill the tiles. They will eat your body like your bones are bread, flesh slicked on like jam. Remember that you left your keys in a potted plant by the door. Just in case.
Sarvat Hasin
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Kindergarten I’m more exhausted than a crossroads the horses I never rode the magnetic fields filled with souls of past riders and the horses’ past souls or the plastic horses I lined up for my childhood windows Soon thought will be found out a necktie tenderness in treeless terrain The dead proliferate like capital or are a spawn I’m more exhausted than a crossroads thought will be found a chromosome and grief a brief allele where victims and who isn’t today console me and say Your heart’s still beating you’re still dying
Fady Joudah
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