DREY 3 by Kevin Cadwallender

Drey 3 – Avant Edited by Kevin Cadwallender Subscription Editor Sheila Wakefield Cover Image – Louise Dal-Cowan Design – Tenor Bull Copyright 2011 The Authors ISSN2046 – 4908 Editorial Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow. Plato The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesnʹt matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark. Barbara Hall

Submissions via email drey@redsquirrelpress.com

JACQ KELLY Cunts on the tube #1 London; train time Sam, a found hard-hat and Andre and David. Joey D, Pride, bisexuals and Amy Winehouse; my sweet heart. Finding beer and buying it, Finding food and eating it. Kisses Kisses Pizza, fish and chips Sad taxi and kisses. Home-made porn and internet porn, Old Compton, Arsenal and that fucking Angel [MIA] #2 Goldy and Guiseppi; my Amy Winehouse Best sandwiches ever and wine. Good Times! The guilt of David and My self-hatred. [new] My Amy Winehouse and karaoke; Summer nights â&#x20AC;&#x201C; those summer nights In London town. #3 Camden town,

Crying Amy; Stolen glasses Chicken pieces and beer. Pool at Candy, my Amy Winehouse, Kisses and home-made porn. Someone I can be My self-destructive self with. [limited offer] Cunts on the tube and Oyster. #4 Call a taxi Chapman Nazis, Walking the river [not even a plank] #5 Chicken and chips Beer. Toilet badness and books; Book talk. Pizza boy and pizza â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Lovely Andre. My black heart Beating. Strawberries, coffee and pancakes; Meetings and my Amy Winehouse at lunch.

t-shirts and portraits. O Canada. Kebabs. Lights. Train and hard hat. Useless list. Home and dry. Always. In need. Of a compass. #6 Unplanned confessions and early departure. Push away Push away Push away Push away Six missed calls, three voicemail, four text. I only went to sleep, Never fear. Bramble broken, but Wally dug and New Town Bar. An election And Do Not Let Me Forget Those shit lesbianas. Fuckers. You left. But not me. Yet. My black heart. Beating. Chicken and beer [hey Amy Winehouse!] And my self-destructive self, For a wee while. Kebab, sun, beer and An unplanned confession.

A party I shouldn't have come to. Cunt that I am. Shark punch; Push away. Appendix 1 Poppers Slow progress at pride Vomiting man and lame-ass lesbo folk. A good book shop and a lack Of maple syrup. Fur xxx And regrets

Chloe

CAITLYNN CUMMINGS

I burnt off my index finger pad today. I can’t pick up anything hot. My red skin is clouding, morphing into a chalky white. I feel like my whole body is a pulse. I wonder if I have a fingerprint anymore. My name is Chloe. My parents aren’t Greek. I don’t even think they know what my name means. For all they know it could be hobgoblin or splinter. My breasts are larger than most, weighty. If I were to swim naked they would buoy me up. I would need no life preserver if I fell overboard on the Titanic. My breasts get me what I want, and what I don’t.

I push them up in a Victoria Secret Supreme to get the bankers. They like the lily-white flesh at the tops of my breasts. It reminds them of corseted women in period films. It reminds them of pillows and eras before the stock market. My nipples get me older men. I wear sheer blouses without any bra underneath and my areolas peek through. Sometimes the blouse has a pattern and it’s like a game for them, figuring out which blotch of colour is my shirt and which is my tit. The protrusion usually gives it away though. My nipples harden to BBs when someone looks me up and down, when there’s a breeze in the room, when a clock chimes. My nipples are the most pinched part of me (I’ve done some statistics). But I’m getting ahead of myself. Older men, circa 60 and over, like how an un-bra’d breast hangs. It reminds them of the 60s, the 70s, the women’s liberation movement. Don’t get me wrong, not all are feminists. Some hate women. When I’m in South America, or a North American salsa club, I wear dresses with plunging V necklines, the point of the V hovering around my belly button. I know this seems cliché, almost laughable. Jennifer Lopez has made her mark on Latin men and Latin-loving men; I simply appropriate what works. In these dresses the lateral halves of my breasts are two C curves, mirror images. If you could bring them on top of each other, superimpose them, they would make the Chanel symbol. Two beautiful arcs smushed into one glob of breast. Strange. But I’m not selling fashion. My favourite tea is chamomile. I have it with honey and lemon. I curl up in a weathered brown leather chair and breathe the daisy into me. Chamomile comes from the Greek khamaimēlon,

“earth apple”, because of the apple-like smell of its flowers. I like that idea: earth apple. Almost like the French for potato, pomme de terre. Apples of the earth. Boys in my junior high school used to compare the girls’ breasts to fruit. Some had melons, others grapes. What humiliation, either way. But apples: not too big, not too small, symbol of knowledge. That could well have been a compliment. I once saw a documentary about a man who grew breasts. After months of tests his doctors finally figured out the cause: high levels of estrogen in condensed milk, the stuff he plopped into his coffee every morning. More interesting than the milk was how the man abhorred himself for the flesh he was growing. He thought he was revolting. He said he didn’t deserve to be called a man anymore. Because of some bumps. Bumps he would have salivated over had they been on me, visible through a chiffon shirt. I’m not a hooker. Sometimes I get gifts. I have a vast network of contacts and I like a little fun. I’m not a cancer patient. Sometimes I get chemo. I have a vast network of doctors and they’re figuring it out. When some lizards are in danger they drop their tails. Literally, drop, like a handbag. The lizard then walks away from its former appendage, lying there on the ground, and goes back to its cave to rest. Two days later a new tail spurts from the old stump and begins to regrow. It’s a defence mechanism that distracts the enemy and allows the lizard to escape. I made chamomile tea today. I’m not feeling very well. When I was pouring myself a cup I put my index finger on the teapot lid to keep it in place. It was very hot. That’s how I burnt the pad of my finger. My iPhone keeps blinking. I won’t look at it.

I don’t want to know who’s texting, who’s calling, who’s asking. I’m recuperating from surgery at home today. Not for the burn. I just had a mastectomy. Mastos, “breast”, ek, “out”, temnein, “to cut”. Breast out to cut. Breast cut out to. To cut out breast. Cut out breast to… to… to what? “To prevent the spread of the malign tumour into other parts of the body.” Right. What is the chance, anyway? One in 500, 1000, 10? The probability of recurrence, does it fit a Bell Curve like our grades? Is it a nicely shaped hyperbola, symmetrical and pert, full and round? Or a lop-sided parabola, a regression, an absence. I can’t look down. Bandages and gauze, and what’s underneath. And to the left, a time bomb. Tick. Tick. TiTube tops! Tube tops, it is. They’re retrochic, no? I’m sure they’ll love tube tops. I’ll just cling wrap, cellophane my breasts to smooth. Underneath. Even out the topography, you know? They won’t even know the difference. Except I’ll sweat. The plastic will make me sweat. And my left breast, God it’s huge. It still wouldn’t be even. And, fuck! What happens when they take off the tube top? And see it. That long winding scar, pink and raw, no nipple, asymmetry wrapped in fucking cellophane? Disgusting. Disgusting. My name is Chloe. My parents aren’t Greek. I don’t have a fingerprint. I don’t have a breast. I wonder if I am a woman. I wonder if I am a lizard. My name is Chloe. It means “young green shoot”.

FIVE POEMS Karl Riordan. Made from Girders At Edinburgh International Airport Straight-backed and perched on high stools, Dougie and his son share drinks in the departure lounge bar before flying to their new home. Dad clicks open a can of Irn-Bru and the ginger fizz skooshes out, a last swallie on birth soil, a take-away feeling in the gut. Up in the air Scottish bubbles will shoogle in their stomachs, a fruity belch of rusty water bellowed from the boy’s breath. The father recalls formica tables, his mother’s head parcelled in a scarf. How she scolded him that time for his rudeness in the café, then licked her pocket hanky and thumbed the corner of his mouth like sticking postage stamps, shaping the lips he sees on his child.

Tarzan. Knee deep in fronds I make my own path towards the ‘Tarzan’ swing, hung like a plumb bob and line dropped from the cool canopy, lasers of sunlight rain mottle the ground. Initials carved into the calloused bark span the years when we last played in this spot, I finger the letters of my young hand. We lit fire and roasted stolen potatoes taken from the stall of Dunn’s corner shop, on leaf moss we talked and swigged warm cider, reddening too close to the dying ashes. I decide to scramble up the eroding bank, thread the watch-chain stick between my legs. Letting go I leave something of myself as sideways I am flung out to sketch an arc then spin like a drilling sycamore seed. Walking through the backdoor of my mother’s she notices moist red mud on my knees Your dinner’s in the oven, we’ve had ours.

After school and weekends Aggie fussed in and out of the kitchen, bringing in floppy bread and butter. The tension started to build on Saturdays, she’d wear her pinny with pockets so deep she could pick out a wish by fingertip. I’m perched on the black-leaded shelf, back pressed against the oven. Crowds start to boo from the television as Giant Haystacks stomps into the ring, how we all hoped he would fall through. Big Daddy fetches a stadium roar, his sequined leotard catches the light – throws it back. Aggie, rocking in her chair now, shreds the Radio Times to coleslaw. Andrew is cross-legged on the floor having to be lifted since age ten when Muscular Dystophy took hold. His limbs are twisted in grey marl school socks as if someone had applied heat and moulded his ankles into hockey sticks. He still manages to bray the floor holding his opponent into submission three, two, one.

Me Old Flower. So there I was the other day chasing Charlie Williams through the Barnsley precinct. He dribbled his way through shoppers, a spin on the heel, eyes forward he kept a straight line parting crowds like Moses and the sea. I kept my distance, noticed folk nod, point. Haven’t you learnt to live with this by now? The distance between us was kept constant, like the north-north field of a magnet. He noticed my reflection in Greenwood’s shop window, I looked down, appearing interested in a tuxedo. Tha’ll look smashing in that me owld flower. He always had the last laugh did Charlie.

Stars. I am sat at the table with Kieran, helping him make a spyglass out of cardboard toilet roll holders. I keep the scissors out of his reach but let him hold two tubes in place while I wind tape around clockwise. We’ve got enough to see into the future. Will he focus on the way he’ll fold his suit, lining up the creases of his trousers before having to feel his way around her listening to tomorrow’s bus fare drop onto the floor of a darkened lodging room?

Or the way he’ll walk past his door counting up his loose change, whistling past two braying heavies and a suit, have to push himself through the back privet getting his best fucking jacket snagged? The pans he’ll have to scrub ‘til breathless, stealing a piece of cutlery each day, slipping a piece of Sheffield Steel up t’cuff or the time he’ll explode at the funeral for the priest referring to his mother as Dot. Talking of dots, we couldn’t skip over the art room and the way Indian ink will blemish his knuckles like dice pips, tugging cuffs years later at interview pinned to the wall by a panel of twats. He’ll get a laugh in the assembly hall though, as his hand slips through the neck hole of an emu glove-puppet, poking through the curtain behind the headmaster and police officer, addressing cross-legged children drawing snakes and dots on their mate’s back. Maybe he will find someone held by another, at nearly thirty he might climb up trees shouting out at her, never to be heard. I know that echo can last for years. Tea-drinking wraparound hands have gone cold, Kieran whacks his telescope in two.

SHANI CADWALLENDER The Function of Criticism at the Present Time Abstraction Street; Derrida’s blind Twitches At my approach Like an eye Run on no sleep. Sharp face obscured By French windows; He’s right to be curious. My hobnailed boots On Eliot’s Delphiniums, The conserved lawnsContrition And the individual Latent, while I Play with stray words; He’s right to be furious. Mr Arnold Nose pressed against A frosted pane, Earnest whiskers Bristling, at The nerve of the sweet Philistine, who's Stealing his light; He's right to be serious.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m moving in Ramshackle house Built on Sand and flat vowels, Drama in the Kitchen sink, With a roof that Lets the sky in; There goes the neighbourhood.

JAMES OATES Conversations on Sand I have no hypothesis For the origins of mass Though life may just be The multiplication of cell division Over the will to live. We ponder the shape of the universe Coned, Saddle, Multi turtle, Reverse Cowgirl. Thrash out proposed constants Explode our theories Discuss the malleability of Soul Damn it all to heaven.

We sought desolation in beauty and Beauty in desolation You remind me of the time of singularity When air flowed freely And our lives complied with all the known laws. I remind you of a time when you sang pretty songs To the ‘candyman’ Traded your faith for trumpets and trinkets An early compromise Before we could understand ‘Visceral’ So bury the dead under driftwood Tie it off with bladderack Leave it to the tides. A piece of Byron died on these sands He sang of dead dogs and shipwrecks This is no place for resurrections.

THREE POEMS Suzannah Evans Portrait a portrait of her breathing was made. the air was not allowed to escape the painterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brush as it was inhaled exhaled in blue clouds past the gold gold hairâ&#x20AC;Ś breath frozen on a canvas.

View the raised white of a neck: cool, elegant shadow across the bright green of the earth.

Voice the fragrant night air is crushed by your mouth as you speak: words hummed upon the horizon in a blaze of blue and winter and carried away in whispers

THREE POEMS Amy Anderson

i)In Rehearsal He said sing the word whole; make it an ellipse; seal it like a bottle and high notes should come from the stomach, not the head count always, but keep the signature if there is no adagio and do not climb the stave, rise instead like orioles. for emphasis, stress the unstressed (shade requires light) and remember to draw symbols to tell yourself to breathe and watch for the sign to come off your note as four, as one and high tongue, all of you high tongue.

ii)Alto A kind of tiny orienteering it was and when I found my line, there was knowingness, a communion, a song of braille. How he taught us was like a finger on

the cheek, it was new but familiar, working the ligaments in the mouth, it was instinct and claylike, we learned our first words again new warm utterances, they vibrated in my sternum and nostril. It was innate, the way skin falls in repose, it was memory, and pilgrimage, it was vowels and breath and intention.

iii)Listening Like the sea playing to basalt, he plays to the hearts of metronomes, a brocade of sun on his back he has the nobility of an ivory horse, rising to another cresty firework and wild punctum mane. He listens to the voicing tides; (his silk ear seldom rests) his ballet is storm and stained glass his seafloor old dialect and sonar.

Birthday at Kelvingrove with every note a hologram ripples open and all I can see is the music draining like tears or halogen birthdays are such wide dances so you sit me quiet and blue-eyed plait our hands to a love knot

Central earlier I touched salmon skin, silica to palm considered histories I was leaving dark and undiscovered, ghosts squashed into common spaces no-one really owned I half felt their memories sometimes in lowish light or when exploring high up shelves a cab breaks the quiet of rose and terracotta its diesel carts me and my spare parts through streets of blonde soot Canaletto and potholes I now look upon as pals my last glimpses are of Argyll Street’s black grease, West George’s meteoric rise to pearl later under Central’s sky, I glide away a return ticket glowing orange at my fist

THREE POEMS AJ McKenna Alarm Clock Briton I sit by the harbour and I wake in bed cursing the moment when I realised I could set any tune on my phone as my alarm clock noise, and my own laziness for never changing it after our summer trip to Whitby, where we ate breakfast in the Caedmon Cafe, poky, basic, vaguely disappointing (so appropriately named after a poet), wondering if Raoul Moat would be shot or Shakineh Astani stoned, lying in a four-poster bed, in a courtyard hotel, with sun streaming in through the nets, and Julianne Regan singing Martha’s Harbour seemed perfect to wake up to there, but now, on working mornings in the winter depths, dark outside and cold beneath the duvet, Julianne’s voice has become the soundtrack to my oppression, a reminder that I am a galley slave, my love, in the trireme of late capitalism, and the nearest thing to freedom is a fumble for the snooze button and ten minutes of half-sleep wondering if I’ll have time to shower or shave, deciding to do neither, fuck it, take an extra ten then drag my filthy self to work,

this isn’t BO, this is olfactory terrorism, propaganda of the smell, and I hope that it gets up your executive nose as much as your anal timekeeping rules are a pain in my arse, and I somehow make it to the bus stop, start reading my tweets in the queue, and find that fucking dickhead, Clegg, is saying how much he admires alarm-clock-fucking-Britain? What does that Westminster posh-boy know about the hopelessness of waking in the dark before another day of toiling for a boss that you think is a twat, every minute of the working day a betrayal of all your ideals, a punch in the face from a pair of brass knuckles sculpted to form the word compromise? Probably quite a lot actually, but a deaf guy in a Chilean mine could hear the dog-whistle he’s making, same as that crap about curtains closed all day, demonise the disabled, the unemployed, the casualties of a neoliberal war on the idea of universal human dignity, the notion that you can be worth something other than a salary, an arsehole’s idea of Sparta, where you can throw people out to die and still be the hero, turning beings into burdens, and we all know where that leads, the first Nazi posters showed ‘cripples’, not Jews, and I wonder how far Alarm Clock Britain really is

from Kinder-Kirche-Kuche-land, and I wonder who the next group will be in Nick’s purely-rhetorical crosshairs, trans people who cost the NHS less than it takes to lance one boil on Thatcher’s arse, old people who’ll be told that Dignitas is the only way to ease the pension time-bomb that’s ticking like the clock that Clegg’s so fond of? Asian men or long-haired ex-English teachers with a ‘creepy’ taste for poetry? And the Nescafe turns sour in my stomach, I gag to keep my bolted cornflakes down, and I hate that scheming right-wing scum are trying to say that getting out of bed puts me on their side somehow, when it’s only rage against their fucking world that stops me staying on my arse forever, and I realise that I have to change my tune. Julianne’s acoustic melodies will have to be replaced, and tomorrow morning, I vow that I’ll wake to a voice shouting Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.

Criminally Fragile She writes down all the answers but she doesn’t raise her hand. She bites her lip to keep her mouth from moving. She never stays behind to ask a question after class: she comes and goes and sits there, just achieving, pushing up the school’s league table ranking, never acting out or showing signs of EBD. Her Belsen ribs, her jutting hipbones, are the things you’ll never see. Her baggy jumper hides the fact she’s starving. Long sleeves conceal the calendar of pain marked on her arms, the scars in laddered red and pink and white, and so you kid yourself good girls like her will never come to harm. You never see her on the streets at night because she knows to shun the streetlights and the places people gather. She knows the paths that she can safely walk, where girls won’t glare, boys won’t see her as sport, whose emptiness reflects the wound inside her, the rift between her body and the things she wants to feel, the dawning knowledge that she cannot do enough: that no matter how much weight she drops, she’ll never be a girl; that she’s criminally fragile in a world that wants her tough.

Eggshells You tell me you have to walk on eggshells and I wonder what eggshells you mean. Is it the fact you can’t call me a fag because the same blood flows in both our veins? Is it that you can’t say how much I disappoint your sense of your own manhood when I paint my nails and talk like I’m a girl? Is it the thought that all the other men laugh at you behind your scrum-half’s back, snickering if I’m the best you managed there must be something wrong with you as well? Let me tell you something: I wake up each morning wishing for a love that I can’t have in this hair-armoured skin, your poison-gift to me; this body which I cannot move to music as I want to, because I fear fingers which might, first, just point and laugh, but later curl into ‘corrective’ fists; because when I sit on the bus, knees together, hands in lap, I keep my eyes from making contact, scared of being dragged into the aisle and kicked to death by boys who’ve never doubted that a boy is what they are,

while the passengers look on. And the one thing that would make that trip home worth it, the strong hands of a tough and boylike girl enclosing mine, and giving me a place where I can yield in ways that your man’s world won’t let me, making me feel safe enough to let my body tumble without fear into joy is just a fantasy that I spin to myself in my failed husband’s bed, a boy again, trapped in this house where every move is policed. And you tell me you’re the one who walks on eggshells.

TWO POEMS Matt MacDonald Lover I can hear your breathing in my ear Like a lover in the depth of sleep Or the grip of orgasm With the neon sweat running down your back Silence Dripping on my face “I don’t know the meaning of the word” You light up another imported cigarette Blow smoke rings at the ceiling I’m in love with you Even though you’ve never looked at me Like you know

Afterwards II After the planes After the fires After the angels threw themselves at heaven After the rainfalls of glass After hiding in the smoke After the explosions After the collapse After the bleeding of a nation After the rage Came the waiting for instructions from a world that no longer knew what to do

Departed ARTHUR ALLAN ‘Just dump me in the sea.’ That’s what you said. No pomp – you made me swear. No bitter tears. ‘Or in the woods or something. I won’t care.’ You were so sure then, sitting up in bed, Laying down the law, until you died. And now you’ve changed your mind. You make it clear There should be sonnets, horses, wailing kids Who’ll beat your lacquered box and tear their hair, A brace of wreaths as plump as giant squid. You beg for veils and trumpets. I comply. ‘Don’t mope,’ you said. ‘Live, flourish. Seize the day.’ You meant it then, but now, as each day spills Into my room, you ache to seize it too. You sit there silent, sobbing, all the way Down to the coast. United in despair We stand above the tide, amid the din Of seagull scream. And then you shove me in. I’m breathing brine, I flail against my will. My arms betray me, beating at the blue, I slump ashore. Avoid your cheated stare. ‘Do what you need to do. I won’t be here.’ Not true, it seems. The solitary cell Reserved for you could not be borne, so now You’re back, though your location isn’t clear: There, lurching from the drier, in a pile Of Oxfam clothes; here, too, as I allow My teeth to push inside a caramel, You watch me with a sweet and brittle smile. Your passing only nudged the status quo. I pity you, my dear departed. Go!

FIVE POEMS Tracey S. Rosenberg Grisette Make me your secret girl, a ragged dove barefoot and loose. Lure me through the coils of this withered medieval town. Shove me against a stone wall coated black with soil. I'll whimper and writhe in your hot gloved hands. I've no coins, no protection, no soul. Within your domain falls half of France's lands; beneath the iron-ringed wheels of your carriage roll the heads of a hundred well-born girls who risked their virgin necks for you. Did you ever ask why you have the right to defile with a kiss? Do you wonder where those lost girls go, cast out for sin in filthy camisoles? I have a crude blade tucked beneath my skirt, and I'll clutch its handle as you take all I've left to give you, grovelling in the dirt. One moment more of the pleasures I adored too much, that night I claimed you as my lord.

Teatime Circling emptiness like a vulture too sick of rot to care to look for home I pace as this kettle bubbles and broods. The dregs of his castoff tea swirl out â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I pluck stray drops with my parched, peaked tongue. Refilling with steamy water is a breathless blessing, snug return to a tub scarcely round enough for my limbs.

No matter how tightly I claw the spinning spoon, dark waters overwhelm. If only I tried harder, disappointed less; if only I could trust, or halt these pointless turns until I can't distinguish nest from storm. I force my cheek to pause against the cup's chipped rim â&#x20AC;&#x201C; white nick cradled within smooth, forgiving brown â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to teach myself, by hint of tea alone, the moment when his lips will come to rest.

Poisonous Trades We pillage our nerves with arsenic and lead. When we suck yellow phosphorus, our jaws rot, and mercury shoots us lightning mad. Glass-blowers turn deaf while their lungs collapse. Cramp twists the typists' fingers to painted stone, and the coal miners gulp cheese and jam to clamp down the gorging dust. Even the clergymen, bloodless and mild, awake to find their throats clawed, so they cannot stammer their sermons on the virtues of work.

Stardust His arms blaze with the hand-picked constellations of an inky universe. He draws every bright molecule into his body, claims each splendid dawn. Rigid within voids, stars sink into the cores of their own numb weight.

Radiance stammers and drops like sparklers dying on a November beach, capitulating to the dictator gravity. As I nuzzle his blue-black hair he shares his secret brilliance, leading me up into the naked heart of a starburst cascade – the rise, the glorious shatter, exhilarating light.

Puppy Love My heart springs like a puppy. Stupid heart. I should abandon you to shiver in a splintered doghouse till you learn your part: He's not coming. We live in this garden alone, every moment. Stop it. Wait for nothing. Don't hurl yourself against the walls, yearning to glimpse him pushing through the side gate – freezing in hope – ears perked for his call. Perhaps, dumb pup, you know what I should know is wrong. Certainty holds no relevance when men brush past to abandon you, no matter how much you sob or spring or dance. You wait. You pant for him, anticipate. You know – you know – he'll stroll in through the gate.

THREE POEMS Elizabeth Rimmer The Territory of Rain This is the territory of rain. It is king here, more than cold or wind, and all living is by negotiation with flows and falls of water. Earth and sky are heavy with it. Peat grips it like a miser's fist. River runs muddy as rain sloughs the silt from bank and hillside. It winks between grass stems, silvers pot-holes in the tarmac, attacks roofs with soft persistent fingers, slips like sorrow between slate and timber. And yet, the heart lifts at the sound of falling water. It ripples and sings like a lullaby, even when the river is at the doorstep, even when the soaked ground gasps for breath between the grass stems. It is king here and we serve it with macs and umbrellas, catch its least drips in water-butts, watch it punch small holes in ponds delighted, even as we wish it elsewhere.

In the Church Descendant, he once told me from Grace O'Malley, the Irish pirate queen, the little Irishman bustles the laggards in to church. Now he dusts, with a handkerchief from his pocket, the statues of St Joseph, the Little Flower, St Anthony who cuddles Baby Jesus, and, standing on the spilled intention cards, the one he needs most of all, St Jude. In the quiet after Mass, the heavy scent of someone's wedding lilies blends with paraffin from night-lights on the stand winking red and blue. Twin grooves score the treacly varnish of the pews, where children, unobserved, cut second teeth, and pick the blebs of candle wax from Easter. In the sanctuary, a constant flame flickers and remains, like who he is, when conversation fails, and memory, and all he knows, dusting familiar statues, is here, the last place where he is known. Muse Once they dreamed this, the quiet domestic room the lamp on the table where he will work, the soft scrape of his pen as it bleeds black ink over the flat cream page, the fireside chair where she will sew and read and check his proofs.

He will write her, she will read him. They will be complete. Now he to her is stone, a tall rock, and she in its shadow, she to him a thin high voice constant, on the edge of hearing. He to her is burden, she to him is web. They no longer talk. He has written her. She has read him. They have eaten each other.

THREE POEMS Fiona Lindsay

Deer Paths I was never a wild child in the contemporary sense just a tad unusual in my inability to conform to the obviously idiotic and with a tendency to prefer deer paths over pavement.

The Boxer the railing’s spikes pressed sharp in my chest as you rammed blunt at my back on Calton Hill while the city spread herself below us with silken sighs of seven veils sparkling as you ground yourself oblivious to all but need, pulsing hard in the balmy air while she – she sang a lover’s song soft in my ear and I caressed her heart easy and safe in her distant lullaby of Friday night madness broken beats blended with space as she gave herself and I named you King for a day on Calton Hill where your memories lay blankets of Poland on your sight as I kissed away one small piece of night you carry in your gloves of punch.

Bling I heard you can buy a star pay to name it for someone you love and thought it sweet but also strange and frankly stupid for anyone to think stars can be sold so I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t buy you one just noted quietly, to myself that we share a constellation which is more than enough.

TWO POEMS Sally Evans A Gardener Every poem will have an i.d. card. Its fingerprints will be taken. Its iris will be photographed. It is impossible that we could mistake it for any other poem. We will know where every poem has been and its history. We will know how many parking tickets it has had. We will catch it before it commits a murder. We will record its proclivities.

A poem will have to fill in a form to exist in the first place. It will have to acknowledge its nationality it may not indulge in acts of treason It may not criticise this wise and powerful government it may not cross borders. A poem may not rhyme. If it sings it will be under suspicion. It will be published with advice and assistance. It may be read in the presence of approved audiences. If it is not satisfied with its situation, it may ask for an appeal hearing in the presence of ten other poems, its equivalents. The last known poem was seen drawing the dole, though it is whispered that it was secretly working unofficially as a gardener.

Kathleen Raine remembers Sandaig I lost Gavin Maxwell's otter. It walked out one day, a passing scoundrel clubbed it down, dead in a ditch it lay. Gavin wanted travel and fear, he wanted sex with men in Tangier and in Agadir

where the pains of death are ten. Our great affair was fate, not love. His lover I'd never be, and to prove it I refused him when, to prove it, he once asked me. Now I am dead and Gavin too, we shall not meet in heaven (this death-pain was unknown to him, I know there are eleven). His books sold tens of thousands, my poetry books sold tens. Now on the beach at Sandaig let other lives make sense. Now on the beach at Sandaig let other otters run, and on Northumberland's bleak moor our double past be dumb.

STEVE URWIN (This Is Not A) Prose Poem Ruin their reasoning, spoil the page, kick the telly, scrawl the words across your chest with felt tips, sit in a puddle and burp at a passing car. East last night's porridge, pick your nose on the bus, fart in a jar. Chew the corner of your nephew's newspaper, laugh

at an ant. Sit on a stepladder and gargle Vimto, write your name backwards on a crisp packet, poke your fingers through your button holes and laugh out loud. Give false directions for the happy zone to the next stranger you see at your local bus stop. Buy a packet of smash and sprinkle it in your washing machine. Fill your haversack with potato peelings and used tea bags. Ruin their reasoning, reverse the neatness, paint your nose with toothpaste. Eat your next door neighbour's horoscope, fill the bath with Lego and washing up liquid, tell your local MP to get a proper job. Move the novels from the 'A' section to the self help section and vice-versa. Go to the Post Office and ask for half a pound of mince, ask the green grocer how much it costs to Fed Ex an onion to Buckingham Palace. Nail pork chops to your sister's wardrobe door, creosote a broken shopping trolley and draw a large butterfly on the seat of your mountain bike. Wear a logo t-shirt back to front, use your socks as gloves, leave a square inch of stubble on your cheek or plait your pubic hair. Sellotape your toenail clippings to an Easter egg, lie on the pavement with a sack of carrots on your chest. Mud-plodge in your best shoes, give yourself a dead leg, sell your car for six quid and fill a shoebox with fresh cream. Get over yourself, run around Asda in a gorilla suit with an ironing board strapped to your back. Spread strawberry jam on your suitcase, fill a C90 with the shipping forecast and sell it on ebay. Frame a portrait sketch of a dung beetle and wear it as a cod-piece, fill your pockets with feathers and tuna fish. Burn your blouse and paint a smiley face on your blazer. Photocopy your sister's school report and Blue-Tack it to a skateboard, Gaffer Tape a Space Hopper to a wheelie-bin. Tell your late uncle you once swallowed

a dozen knee-scabs for a bet, invite the local football team to a dinner party in a knocking shop that doesn't exist. Say you're getting married to a cauliflower and intend to adopt a snail for lent. Cancel all your direct debits and send IOUs scrawled inside paper cups to all your creditors. Mess it up, change it round, art as its own excuse, mishap becoming miracle. Live it up, tear it down, turn it inside out – it's geet good, man!

THE DREY SONNET Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) Written near a Port on a Dark Evening Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore, Night on the ocean settles dark and mute, Save where is heard the repercussive roar Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone Singing the hour, and bidding "Strike the bell!" All is black shadow but the lucid line Marked by the light surf on the level sand, Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land Misled the pilgrim--such the dubious ray That wavering reason lends in life's long darkling way.