The Lampeter Review - Issue 13

tlr The Lampeter Review

ISSN 2054-8257 (Print) / ISSN 2054-8265 (Online) JOURNAL of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre www.lampeter-review.com

issue 13/ SPRING 2016

ZINO ASALOR DAVE BARRETT JUDY BIRKBECK TAYLOR BOND YUAN CHANGMING SANDRA COFFEY ASHLEIGH DAVIES THOMAS ELSON ROSS ERICSON ALUN EVANS ALLEN FORREST PHILIP FRIED TAMSIN HOPKINS TONY KENDREW JAMES R. KINCAID ALISON LOCK FRAN LOCK JULIAN MCKENNY PHILIPPA MATTHEWS MICHAEL MELGAARD JESSICA MOOKHERJEE ROGER NASH JAN NORTON DAVID MORGAN O’CONNOR DAVID ISHAYA OSU IAN PARKS ANNE RYLAND POLINA SIMAKOVA ANNA SOMERSET KATHERINE STANSFIELD ROBERT JOE STOUT DANIEL TREAGUST DAVID WHARTON ANNA WIGLEY SUSIE WILD

THE LAMPETER REVIEW The online magazine of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre www.lampeter-review.com | info@lampeter-review.com

Managing Editor: Dic Edwards Associate Editors: Rosalind Hudis, Carly Holmes, Tony Kendrew ADVISORY EDITOR: John Lavin Design: Constantinos Andronis (c-andronis.gr) Cover Page Image: London Noir, Allen Forrest (http://allen-forrest.fineartamerica.com) The Lampeter Review acknowledges with appreciation the continued support of Professor Medwin Hughes, Vice Chancellor of University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. Š Respective authors. All rights reserved. None of the material published here may be used elsewhere without the written permission of the author. You may print one copy of any material on this website for your own personal, non-commercial use.

CREATIVE WRITING UNDERGRADUATE COURSES AT TSD Based on the Lampeter Campus, the Creative Writing BAs build on a fifteen year tradition of teaching Creative Writing at this location. The courses offer modules in all the creative genres and are underpinned by an element of English Literature.

MA CREATIVE WRITING & MA CREATIVE & SCRIPT WRITING The Creative Writing Degree offers two pathways - one with scriptwriting, one without.

It can be taken as a one year taught course with a further writing-up year, or part-time over four years. Modules are offered in all creative genres.

BA and MA courses are taught by a staff of prominent, internationally renowned writers and lecturers, including poets Menna Elfyn and Samantha Wynne-Rydderch, poet and playwright Dic Edwards and poet, author and critic, Jeni Williams.

PhD IN CREATIVE WRITING Trinity St David’s Creative Writing PhD has built up a reputation as one of Wales’ most successful doctoral programmes. The course supervisors are all published creative writers with expertise in most areas of prose, poetry, fiction, children’s fiction, narrative nonfiction and script writing.

The PhD in Creative Writing combines a proposed manuscript (fiction, poems or playscript) with an element of supporting or contextualising research. The proposed manuscript will be volume length (the natural length of a book, whether poetry or story collection, novel, or playscript). The supporting research will be roughly 25% of the 100,000 word submission.

Applications to: d.edwards@uwtsd.ac.uk

Table of Contents

-9Editorial / Dic Edwards -10Elona / Zino Asalor -15Chapter 3 Of “The Green Season” (The Ivory Inn) / Dave Barrett -20Burials / Judy Birkbeck -26As It Goes / Taylor Bond -27Aubade (A Parallel Poem) / Yuan Changming -28Stock Exchange / Sandra Coffey -34Who Got What / Ashleigh Davies -35Dominoes And Biscuits / Thomas Elson

[5]

-43Diaochan: The Rise Of The Courtesan / Ross Ericson -50No Time For Poetics/ Alun Evans -53Cover Artist / Allen Forrest -54Four Poems / Philip Fried -60Half A New Life / Tamsin Hopkins -61Walking It Off / James R. Kincaid -65The Forest Of Viridescence / Alison Lock -71Two Poems / Fran Lock -75Zebra / Philippa Matthews -81Eight Images / Julian McΚenny -90Maybe She’ll Remember / Michael Melgaard -98Two Poems / Jessica Mookherjee -100My Grandfather, Once A Gravedigger, Told Me / Roger Nash -101Three Poems / Jan Norton

[6]

-104Berging / David Morgan O’connor -111Gift / David Ishaya Osu -112Three Poems After Constantine Cavafy / Ian Parks -116Three Poems / Anne Ryland -120The Bosnian War / Polina Simakova -124They Called It A Suspension / Anna Somerset -125Two Poems / Katherine Stansfield -127Pedro Fuerte / Robert Joe Stout -131Dust Trap / Daniel Treagust -134Baka / David Wharton -142Passage / Anna Wigley -143Yolk/White / Susie Wild -144States: A View From The Left Coast / Tony Kendrew -149Contributors

[7]

[8]

Editorial

As a playwright one is sensitive to the power of exits. The removal of a character from a scene allows the plotting to thicken, the ironies to deepen and the treasons to rise. But while exits from a stage may grip us with their physical force, more powerful, perhaps, are those exits with a metaphysical nature: the ending of a marriage; irreconcilable differences between thinkers who were once united; death.

There is always a lot of talk about exits but rarely more than today, from the defining debate raised by the profound concerns of those who advocate euthanasia (served by Exit International), to the ugly journalese of Grexit and Brexit and the heartbreaking displacement of the Syrians removed from a country they will never be able to return to because it will cease to exist.

Exit is a profound business. It never lets you go. Here is a selection of pieces written by those seriously energised by the concept. They have risen above platitude and the perfunctory and in their different ways deepened our exposure to its challenges. * In February Red Dragonfly Productions brought their production of Ross Ericson’s DiaoChan: The Rise of the Courtesan to Lampeter. We are pleased to be publishing an extract as an expression of our support for the work of Thomas Jansen and Krystyna Krajewska at The Confucius Institute.

[9]

Elona Zino Asalor

Although Lulu’s Place was more Food-Is-Ready Buka than quality restaurant, Elona decided it was time to pay them a visit. The interior, with its three-legged plastic chairs, smoke stained ceiling boards, and eczematous walls, could hardly be described as perfect but as she had no intention of feasting on the walls Elona figured there was no reason why this should hamper her plans.

The first thing she did was gather information. As with any popular joint, conflicting reviews poured in: some patrons felt that while the serving of eba was generous it was often too hot; others complained of its being too cold. More than a few grumbled about the white garri; they wanted it fried in palm oil until it glistened a brilliant yellow, and if possible even, the Ijebu kind. The one thing the jury came back unanimous on, however, was the vegetable soup. A gaptoothed man described it as having “stock fish sticking out from every corner like the rubble of a demolished house.” Observing his smile, Elona couldn’t wait to discover for herself, tomorrow afternoon, if indeed the “house” was a bungalow or a duplex.

Lulu’s, she learnt, was owned by Benson Okpako, whom everyone called Ogombe on account of his big bottom, round and huge like a market woman’s, jiggling as he walked. Elona marveled at how much info one could unearth simply by standing at street corners where the unemployed gathered to play draughts.

“Ogombe, that poor man was dying for Aunty Fine girl that year.”

“She was my cousin, remember.”

“Shut up. Everybody is your cousin.”

[ 10 ]

“You mean that salon woman, Hair Hut or Hair Lot or something like that?”

“It’s not dying for, the correct term is infatuated.”

“Nna, dying for, infatuated, is it not the same thing? He was dying for her and he drove her away to America.”

“The man wanted to marry her. That she moved abroad is beside the point.”

Elona had all the information she needed. Later that afternoon, she fished out her blue dress and the gold ear rings Mother had given her, the one she had promised herself four months back that she would never sell, because it had once belonged to Grandma—a promise she still felt compelled to keep. Black or red? She tossed an old one Naira coin. Tails. She lifted the black peep toes and began dusting them. Occasionally, she would stare longingly at the rack where a certain pair of red high heels sat, untouched. Not to worry, she said. Next time, I’ll take you.

That evening at five she strutted into Lulu’s. Hand bag slung at the crook of her elbow, fingers tilted at just the right angle, eyelids fluttering, flaunting long lashes, she moved with a sinuous fluidity and grace that made beauty seem vital, a much sought after remedy to the ache mankind was born with. The men present were hardly prepared. All three abandoned their meals, craning their necks, their widened eyes trailing her every step. A few girls were there, each assessing Elona from top to bottom, hair-do, jewelry, dress, manicure, shoes, pedicure, scent of perfume. In grudging recognition of her superiority, they succumbed to that state of sustained glaring which precedes violent loathing, not of Elona, but themselves, their rubber slippers, their poorly applied make-up, their loud chewing noises, imperfections braided into their DNA. Across the room, a little girl of about fourteen whistled a tune as she cleared a table. Elona beckoned to her.

Shuffling over, the girl bowed. “Good afternoon, sister. What will you eat?”

“I’ll have the pounded yam, not too hot, vegetable soup, hot please … and catfish,” Elona said. “Any part of the fish but the head. Actually, I prefer the tail.”

The girl returned ten minutes later, straining under the weight of a large tray of pounded yam and vegetable soup, from which a plume of steam rose like a locomotive train. The rich aroma wafted into Elona’s nostrils. Saliva surged into [ 11 ]

her mouth, threatening to disrupt her plan to at least say grace. With bated breath, she washed her hands. Grabbing the first chunk of pounded yam, she made a ball and dipped it into the soup. It was hot – exactly as she liked it – and upsettingly delicious. Every ball of pounded yam was accompanied by rich green pumpkin leaf, chunks of stock fish, and the tiniest slices of soft kponmo. The catfish was seasoned to perfection. She would normally not venture to such a low class establishment, but Elona had no regrets about doing so now. Definitely a duplex.

Halfway into the meal, she glanced around, licking her fingers. There were still young men about, at different tables, shifting in their seats, lapping her up with their eyes. Whenever their eyes met, Elona would avert hers. The last time she had enjoyed a meal this much was at The Protea Hotel restaurant, a three course meal of chicken soup, spaghetti bolognese and cream caramel – dessert was a last minute capitulation on her part. Everything about that dinner was divine, from the crisp white napkins folded up in cute cones, to the shiny silver cutlery, set with the delicate attention with which newborns are laid in their cots – she’d stared in awe as a waiter prepared a table for a new guest – and then the chandeliers, those two floating clusters of glittering stars. That evening she didn’t even reach for her handbag. An immaculate looking waiter in a purple waistcoat had trotted over and informed her that the bill had been taken care of. By a gentleman, he said, slipping Elona an immaculate business card with a phone number engraved behind. She never ate there again.

This was definitely not Protea Hotel. Two tables away, a man and a girl threw their heads back and laughed, the girl casting Elona a long side-eye, before ordering a plate of eba and egusi soup, without. Less than five minutes later, true to the order, the meal appeared without meat, and the man and the girl, dipped with hands in water, smiling as they ate. There would be no brazen moves here, no one falling over each other in an attempt to pay her bill, no slipping of thick business cards, espionage-style. Not that Elona wanted any of that.

“You see all this Rihanna, Naomi Campbell, Beyonce, they’re prostitutes, just like the girl your father is with right now,” her mother said. “Their junior partners are standing in line, hiding behind trees in GRA, Tombia Street, Sani Abacha road, Mr Sweet hotel. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? You want to be one of them?” Elona was fourteen, and had just seen her first period. “If I ever catch you going to visit Adekunle in that Boy’s quarter again, if I hear you talk to me about party, you will know why they call me Worst Days.”

[ 12 ]

Elona eventually learned what lay behind the moniker Worst Days, but before then she was her mother’s most faithful acolyte. Her mother detested whores, and Elona learned to as well. At school, she was the girl always telling her friends that prostitutes were a disgrace to the female gender. She liked the word, gender.

It made her feel grown-up and lovely. Unlike the alternative, sex, which made her feel dirty and shy. Her loyalty to her mother, or lack thereof, was a subject of much shame to Elona, but she never confided this to anyone at school. She never told anyone how her mother died.

The rich green of the vegetable soup beckoned. Elona imagined a cloud of aroma hovering over the dish, as clouds would hover over the land and sea. Half her catfish lay unfinished on the plate. She desired nothing more than to devour this fish, to decimate it, leaving not one bone. She had arrived at a point where hunger had receded, vanquished, replaced by a humming pleasure she wished to sustain by eating more. She reached for the fish, but stopped herself, fidgeting, her eyes darting between plate, kitchen door and the face of every customer within range. Reaching out again, she permitted herself a little chunk. She chewed slowly, an attempt to extend the moment, savouring the commingling of flavours as the morsel dissolved and finally disappeared, a capsule carrying good news down into her throat. She repeated the nervous cycle with her eyes, watching especially the kitchen door. She allowed herself yet another tiny piece, although every fibre of her body screamed for more. If only just this one time, she thought, let this pass over me. Where she came from, dishes as tasty as this were accorded a certain respect, the kind she often bestowed on her mother’s soup, exiting the dining room for the solitude of the kitchen, standing over the sink, scraping the plates with her fingers, washing them clean with her tongue, her mother behind her, smiling proudly.

Elona knew how this would all end. She felt outside herself now, watching it happen. Her fear lay in the sameness of the future and the past. Would it not affect the present somehow, make it less real? Upon noticing a black speck in her food, Elona kicked her chair back. Spitting the remains of fish back onto her plate, she released a scream of fury. A head appeared from behind the kitchen curtain. “Sister!”

With a long accusing finger Elona silenced the little waitress. “What is this?” She held up a strand of hair, flicked it away and then pointed into the soup, where half submerged in the swamp of leafy green vegetables, beside the pale white of the catfish, was a large green-winged housefly. “Get me the owner of this place, now!” [ 13 ]

The little girl ran off in a fright. Elona rose, picked her handbag, slung it in the crook of her elbow, embarked on a slow sweep of the room, before strutting away.

She may have even smiled. She had reached the door when someone yelled, “I saw her do it.”

It was an old woman. On her table was a plate of fufu and ogbono soup, without.

Pointing at Elona, glancing at the other customers, she said, “She has a bag of flies in her bag. I saw her pick one out and drop it in the food.”

Before Elona could take another step, three men had surrounded her. She tried to step out from their midst, stabbing a finger in the direction of the woman.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” She screamed obscenities. “This is the last time I come to this fucking place. Now get out of my way before I deal with all of you!”

As the men bore her through the streets, amid jeers and chants of “Ole! Ole!” Elona pleaded for a chance to explain. But they had searched her bag, and the contents were explanation enough. As the beatings began, her thoughts would occasionally go to her red shoes, sitting on the rack, untouched. As they stripped away her clothes, she thought about Worst Days, and what it really meant. And as she ran through the streets, a picture would resound in her mind. She fought to dispel it, but with the persistence of a fly, it returned again and again. It was an image she and her mother had seen, on one of many nights spent looking for her father. An image of GRA Junction at night, the chain of amber lights, the broad crossroads, the girls, skimpily dressed, lurking in the shadows, hiding behind trees.

[ 14 ]

Chapter Three of “The Green Season” (The Ivory Inn) Dave Barrett

“The Lumberjack Special,” I said, leaning forward and under my breath so the men seated around me couldn’t hear. The Ivory Inn had no handout menus—just a single item breakfast written up on a chalkboard beside an old-fashioned milkshake blender: two eggs, two strips of bacon, hash browns, toast and coffee—for $8.00.

Ms. and Mr. Gloria and Harvey Boswell-Myers were the new proprietors of the Ivory Inn Hotel and Restaurant. They had me, and all the other customers, strung out along the counter like old-timers at the Veteran’s Hall for Saturday Night Bingo. Ms. Proprietor was flying back and forth behind the counter calling out for refills of coffee while Mr. Proprietor ducked in and out of her armpit to whisk away their dishes the moment they’d gobbled down that last strip of bacon, running the dishes through the wash behind the grill, then charging back out to turn the potatoes, eggs and bacon on the skillet. All the customers, with the exception of me, were fishermen. Most were dressed in raingear and rubber boots. Their beards were unkempt; their faces pock-marked; the skin greasy on the surface but dry and weathered beneath. They sat hunched over their plates, shovelling their food, absently glancing at the television game show at a far end of the counter (coming through via the 12-foot satellite dish outside the Inn).

Not many attempted to raise their voices above the brassy blare. They mumbled empty, fragmented statements to each other, leaving no doors open for response.

I heard none of the boisterous, brawling vernacular I’d always associated with roughneck fishermen types.

[ 15 ]

The Inn itself was in process of renovation. Yards of plastic wrap hung along part of the ceiling and the far wall where I figured they’d stopped sheet rocking over the old plywood panelling. A separating wall, which I guessed had once divided the room, had been knocked out. Along the ceiling, a thick razorlike slash outlined the shape of the former section. In a far corner, shoved against the wall, was what I imagined to be a piano: a grey top covering it now. A small, twelve-by-twelve bandstand/dance floor was still standing, but they’d already begun to remove the mirrors fixed on the walls behind it.

My only guess was they hadn’t gotten round to fixing the rooms upstairs yet.

On my way back downstairs after a quick shave and change of clothes, I’d poked my head through a cracked door of one of the boarding rooms. The room was merely big enough for a double bed, a urinal and wash basin (at the same level as the urinal). The walls were made of cheap plywood, so I imagine you’d hear the guy next door snoring as if he was in the room with you. There were no windows and no pictures hung from the walls. On the ceiling over the bed, a mirror covered a would-be boarded from head to foot. Strangest, and perhaps most revealing of all, the room came equipped with a small wall-sized juke box: the sleazy neon glow from the box sending me hurrying back downstairs, wondering.

Ms. and Mr. Gloria and Harvey Boswell-Myers were an urban professional couple who’d come up to Elfin Cove in the spring from Washington, D.C. The State of Alaska had closed the previous management down last winter and the couple had picked up the mortgage payments and would close the deal that coming fall. They’d come across the advertisement for the Inn in the back pages of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Although still in a formative stage, a little hand-written note taped to the café window revealed the manifest intentions of the new management: “THE IVORY INN’S JULY GRAND OPENING SPECIAL!!! TWO NIGHTS LODGING FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!!! MEALS INCLUDED IN PACKAGE!!! *PLUS* ONE FREE DEEP SEA FISHING EXCURSION ALLOWED EACH GUEST ABOARD THE IVORY INN’S OWN PRIVATE VESSEL—THE SEA WOLF!!!”

The proprietors fed all this to us along with breakfast. I took it the fishermen had heard it before by the way they rushed through their meals and dismissed themselves from the Inn without further salutation.

“Are you just visiting Elfin Cove?” the proprietors asked me, after the others had cleared the room.

All the dirtied dishes had been cleared from the counter, stacked in the dishwasher, and were running through the wash. The counter had been wiped clean so not a crumb was left to prove that the fishermen had ever been there.

[ 16 ]

The Breakfast Special had been erased and day’s Lunch Special chalked up: a cheeseburger with fries for $9.50.

Mr. Proprietor had asked the questions and I instantly realized how much more I resembled Mr. Proprietor, with his frail white Yale graduate hands cleaning the coffee dispenser, than I did the fishermen staying at the Inn. Not one of them had said a word to me the entire time I’d been here.

“Well, in a way I am,” I said, wondering if they’d noticed the shiner I’d taken pains to conceal by sitting at the far right end of the counter.

This was the summer before my freshman year at the U of Idaho, in Moscow, and I was feeling that famous freshman itch to experience the “real world.” So when a high-school friend of mine, Brian Connelly, asked if I’d want to spend the summer living out of his sister and brother-in-law’s garage in Juneau, I had my bags packed and an Alaskan map out before Connelly returned from his college placement exam. Anything to get out of another drab summer shuffling items up and down the dark dusty shelves of my father’s hardware store back in Coeur d’Alene.

“Where from?” Mr. Proprietor asked, sitting down for the first time now to smoke on a stool behind the counter. The cigarette was one of those unfiltered ones from Amsterdam so popular with the liberal crowd at college coffeehouses.

He smoked it now with his legs crossed European-style, careful not to exhale smoke in my direction.

“Excuse me?” I said.

The truth was I’d been staring at his wife. She sat in a little corner booth by the window now, reading a fashion magazine. The red and white picnic cloth curtains were drawn so every ounce of sunshine could squeeze in through the Windex-clear cafe windows. She looked up from her article as her husband repeated his question.

“Oh,” I said, smiling sheepishly. “Idaho. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The northern part of the state—” “Oh, I know where it is,” he interrupted, smiling through his exhale. Then, to his wife, he added, “Hun,”( Yes, he called her, hun!), “Isn’t that the little place with that magnificent hotel on that glorious lake?”

The Hotel Coeur d’Alene: Once upon a time there was a pretty little town on the north shore of one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Each year thousands of tundra swans and hundreds of bald eagles came to roost on the lake’s east end. There were black bear and mountain lion, elk and moose. There were salmon in the lake: trapped here decades ago when dams were built on the connecting Spokane and Columbia River waterways. Summers were the best time of year. The pungent smell of pine drifting through your open bedroom window on hot August nights. Cliff [ 17 ]

diving off Tubbs Hill into the lake in July. Lying down with your sweetheart on a bed of wild mountain strawberries in June.

A wonderful place for a kid to grow up.

Then, a terrible secret was leaked, putting an end to all these childhood things.

Heavy-metals.

Lead.

Mercury.

Cadmium.

You name it.

The Silver Valley, east of my hometown and stretching all the way across the Idaho panhandle to the Montana border, had been one of the most heavily mined areas on the planet.

The EPA was telling us that 72 million tons of mining waste had entered rivers and creeks feeding directly into our beloved lake.

Those orange and yellow and blue lake banks were not natural wonders, but the result of different metals and contaminants in the water.

Shock.

Denial.

Grief.

Enter Duane Hagedon and the great Hotel Coeur d’Alene makeover: Hagedon, a Chicago real-estate developer, with enough money to buy a town.

And this is exactly what he did.

First, the pulp mill, our town’s largest employer; then, the town newspaper.

Suddenly, the key word here was no longer HEAVY METALS but IMAGE. Coeur d’Alene, Hagedon told us, would become the Lake Tahoe of the Pacific Northwest.

He built this twenty-storey, 450 room colossus next to the City Park and Beach: the Hotel Coeur d’Alene rising Deus Ex Machina on the beach-head like Poseidon to save (or destroy?) our town. The Hotel had all the makings of a medieval castle: a nine-hole golf course and “nature preserve” attached to its west end; a freshwater dock touted as the “largest west of the Mississippi” surrounding it like a moat; and, if this wasn’t enough, an elaborate series of skywalks that reached out like tentacles from the Hotel to the downtown businesses.

He’d obtained highway funds from state legislators to widen all roads leading to Coeur d’Alene.

The Greyhound Dog Track on the Idaho/Washington border was fully operational.

Now all he needed to put Coeur d’Alene and his Tahoe of the Northwest into the 21st century was a few more legislators.

The lobby of his Hotel Coeur d’Alene eerily awaiting that day. . . electrical outlets already built into the walls at a distance of every two feet. “Well. . .” Mr. [ 18 ]

Proprietor continued, stubbing his cigarette in the tiny ashtray in his lap. “I’m impressed.” Then, getting to the quick of it, asked, “Then what brings you here to our humble cove?”

I swear, he said that.

Now his wife was staring at me. Her dark Italian eyes crawled over my thighs and hips, past my ribs, shoulders, neck, and, finally, face with a disturbingly measured gaze. I noticed she was smoking one of those unfiltered cigarettes herself now.

“Actually,” I began, blushing stupidly in spite of myself. “I’m here to find work.

On a boat. A fishing boat. A salmon trawler. . .”

There was an awkward stillness as husband and wife looked at each other and then back at me, unable to say a thing.

By near imperceptible degrees, I was aware that the sights of their eyes had lowered to the shiner on my right cheekbone, probably just now coming into what would soon become a full and purple bloom. I realized that they must have mistaken me for a potential long-term boarder: perhaps a rich college kid out here to study whales and climb glaciers and what-have-you!

Realizing I’d done something wrong, but for the life of me unable to think of a fitting response, I raised my empty cup off the tile counter.

The wife got up, motioning her husband to move aside. She lifted the coffee pot off the burner and refilled my cup.

I took a few complimentary sips. Then, slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I left the cafe through a side door; letting the screen door slam shut behind me.

[ 19 ]

Burials Judy Birkbeck

Lilian chucked a spadeful of sticky yellow soil from Anthony’s grave onto the barrow. She wheeled it over the scrunchy holly leaves to the wall by the honeycoloured church, tipped it out under a warty horse chestnut tree and stood there, panting. John should be doing this, she was too old and frail, chicken-legged, her back hurt, but asking him again would rouse the volcano. A robin poured out its sweet music, as if Anthony were singing his approval. If he could see, his beardlike eyebrows would prick up with pleasure like one of those small dogs whose ears and eyebrows rise simultaneously at the sight of a Winalot biscuit. A man and woman beyond a neatly clipped yew bush gave her weird looks.

“I’m just levelling it,” she shouted across.

They looked away. She must look a sight in this tattered shirt and slacks and gardening shoes. The undertakers’ assurances that the hump would settle were wrong because after five years it was still a foot high and pure mud. The other graves were level and neat, covered in grass with self-heal and lawn daisies. She pushed the last barrowful to the wall, fetched topsoil from under a far hedgerow, tipped it out over Anthony, sprinkled grass seed and watered it.

Lastly she set the granite vase in the middle and put cut-down pungent lilies in the holes in its metal cap, because Anthony cherished lilies, some with pink petals curled under, some bold white with maroon-speckled throats and yellow stamens sticking out like rude tongues. ‘In fond memory of Anthony Lawrence Oakley,’ read the charcoal-grey marble headstone, ‘who died on 18th August 2009, aged 74. Dearly loved and deeply mourned.’ There was space underneath for Lilian’s name, or would it be John’s? Lilian had an awful vision of the ground opened up and John lowered on top of his father. In her mind Anthony’s coffin was unsoiled, unrotted after these five years. She pictured four men paying out the ropes and herself throwing a handful of slimy soil which clung to her palm, like the guilt she felt at this imaginary premature burial.

[ 20 ]

By the exit each grave had four people, all called Sister somebody, who had died within less than a year of each other. Did they save them up? And how many coffins could be put in one? They could dig deeper, or maybe the bodies were wrapped in cloth and laid one on top of the other in the earth. When she was ten the girl down the road, whose father beat his children with a cane and once stuck a garden fork through his son’s foot, showed her a book with photos of naked, emaciated bodies heaped up. They put quicklime on them to make them rot faster, the girl said. Lilian’s mother was furious when she told her about the book and said she was not to go in that house again. * Lilian crept out. John spent half the night on his wretched computer games and slept in all morning, so she had at least two hours before he appeared, ranting.

Leave my father out of it, he’d raged when she mentioned his moods since Anthony died. The white van stood in the drive, bearing the name A. L. Oakley, Florist, in proud, gold-edged black letters, but she walked, having given up driving since she had wrested the road-sweeper’s broom from his hand. On the pavement outside the shop, she trod on and flattened a grey plastic soldier. Inside, chrysanthemums with tousled russet and yellow mops had their brown edges trimmed off like a pudding-basin haircut, red tulips with pointy petals gaped like the beaks of unfledged chicks and orange and yellow gerberas hung their heads.

It would have broken Anthony’s heart. The Swiss cheese plants marched onwards and upwards, great umbrellas which John should have sold to grand hotels with mosaic-tiled lobbies, but like John they lacked lustre. In the back room mouldering bread and cheese lay on the table.

She swept and mopped from front to back and with arthritic fingers made up baskets of bright orange Chinese lanterns and quaking grass and yellow everlasting flowers. She stuck stems of faded, dried red rosebuds and lavender, poppy seed-heads and steel-blue Miss Willmott’s Ghost in Oasis floral foam. Customers came in, surprised to find the shop open this early. She should have left, but too late, Mrs Carmichael engaged her in conversation, when John appeared with stubbled chin and dirt-speckled glasses. His mousy hair, greying at the temples, was lank and greasy. He flew at his mother, scarlet-faced, and grabbed the knife used for cutting stems.

“The best thing you can do to help,” he screeched, “is die and leave me in peace.” *

[ 21 ]

The walls were cold and speechless. Lilian looked at old black-and-white photos: John on his first day at school, looking helpless, shoulders hunched, short trousers below the knees, blond chrysanthemum mop-head. If he were that age again, she would cuddle him and tell him everything would be all right, he’d soon make friends. He didn’t, though. At home he immersed himself in the Hornby railway Anthony had set up in the loft. It was still there, but spurned in favour of those computer games.

When she was sixteen, Lilian asked her parents for her birth certificate to get married. She was born Gerda Hauptmann in Bavaria and her father was named as Heinrich Gottfried Hauptmann, SS-Obersturmbannführer. The shock nearly made her miscarry, she hadn’t even known she was adopted, but when John was born she put it aside, and then the two girls came along in quick succession. * High-flying Christine flew in from Geneva, only for two nights, but Lilian was so excited she forgot where she’d put the rhubarb crumble. It turned up in the hall cupboard. Dinner was a nice piece of rump, although this was Thursday: joint of beef, lamb or pork on Sunday, joint left-overs on Monday, sausages on Tuesday, liver on Wednesday, casserole on Thursday, fish on Friday, steak and kidney pie on Saturday. John would be disgruntled at missing his casserole, but it wasn’t every day your sister came home. Between the hollyhocks by the front wall Lilian saw the taxi from which Christine stepped into a puddle. Her suede shoes lapped up the rainwater. She followed her mother into the living room and looked round at the embossed wallpaper, once cream-coloured, now taupe, peeling at the skirting boards, the old tartan rug over Lilian’s wicker chair, the television smashed because John said ‘they’ watched him through it.

“Everything the same as ever,” she said.

Later Lilian watched from the kitchen, trembling, as she greeted John at the front door. A hand emerged from his over-long coat sleeve, unlatched his umbrella and slid the tube up and down to shake off the drops before he greeted her. Dinner was a sombre affair punctuated by inane remarks. John was hunched over and it was Lilian’s fault he had no self-assurance, only this occasional spitting bravado. She’d kept him pinned down out of fear. On his better days he was quite presentable and sociable, but those days were rarer since Anthony died.

She was trapped here with him: Helen was in Australia, and last time she went to Geneva for three weeks she came back to John hurling the teapot at her, and final warnings about rats from Environmental Health. She could leave him only

[ 22 ]

if he was sectioned again, and friends had dwindled, so she relished Christine’s forays into her hermetic world.

“Your favourite pudding,” said Christine when Lilian brought in rhubarb crumble with custard. “Are you coming to Dad’s grave tomorrow?”

He grunted. Lilian stared at her ragged-edged nails, cuticles creeping up, the surrounding skin torn or bitten, the bent claw-like fingers. They shouted while she made tea in the kitchen. Her hand tightened. She couldn’t catch the words. She wished he’d never been born, then she was mortified at entertaining such thoughts. She poured the kettle into the sugar and had to start again. * John gripped knife and fork with bloodless fingers. With every mouthful he darted glances at the waitress standing idly by, which spoilt Lilian’s rack of lamb with roast potatoes. They’d come at six o’clock to avoid a full restaurant, and Lilian had her blond highlights done specially that afternoon. In the middle of the table were a single red gerbera and a candle. Her gold ring glinted in the flickering light.

“How’s your steak, John?” said Christine.

“Good. Expensive, though.”

“It doesn’t matter because I’m paying.”

John dug his fork in and sawed, tight-lipped. That hurt. While his sisters went to grammar school and university and got well-paid jobs, John went to secondary modern and only ever worked in the shop. Anthony had promised him a bike if he passed the eleven plus. She could see his little face now, eyes empty, lower lip quivering. Christine looked suave in her lacy-edged white top against freckled brown arms, hair dyed strawberry-blond, while even with his salmonpink shirt and shaven face and clean spectacle lenses John looked like a vagrant.

Lilian was wearing her best slacks to cover the hideously knobbly legs. John took the wine bottle and topped up his glass.

“Should you have more?” said Lilian.

“I know what I’m doing,” he snarled.

He kept glaring at the waitress. Lilian glared at her too until she sloped off.

John had been such a sweet boy till he reached fifteen. She blamed his teachers, picking on him, turning him into a devil-child, until Susan Williams’s mother got him banned from the youth club for trying to rape Susan. Some girls make up stories. But while Helen and Christine looked like Anthony, John looked more and more like his biological grandfather. Lilian had obtained the photo decades ago in a period of despair, then ripped it up, but the dark eyes staring into the

[ 23 ]

camera were burnt into her memory. When she died, they would all three find out. John heaped more asparagus and roast parsnips and potatoes and beans on his plate. He ate like a dog.

“It’s all right, Mum,” said Christine.

“I’m getting my revenge for all the sweets you never shared,” said John.

“The bonbons that fell out of your pocket and bounced down the stairs.” He cackled. “What a giveaway.”

“Yes, but you bought cough candy because no one else liked it. How stingy is that?”

All three laughed, though it reminded Lilian of a coughing fit she’d had, but when? There had been an awful smell, like burning, and giant flakes of soot like black snow drifted down onto her white frock, her bare arms, her face. She was small, before school age, and she was picking a strawberry. ‘No!’ a voice shouted. ‘Not with the soot. Wash it first.’ An arm had grabbed her and pulled her inside. She poked a roast potato.

“He did keep coughing,” she said defensively.

“That was a nervous habit,” said Christine.

“Because you traumatised us with your song about an old woman who swallowed a fly,” he said. “I spent all summer keeping my mouth zipped outdoors.”

They all laughed again and it seemed like old times, the banter of rival siblings, tears of merriment flowing down their faces. John was fantastic like this.

His rages slid into the past until the waitress appeared, peering at them from a distance.

He seethed. “Tell that girl to stop staring.”

Christine beckoned and the waitress came across. John stared at her shirtfront.

“Everything’s fine,” said Christine rudely. “You don’t need to watch.”

The girl retreated.

The veins on John’s hands rode up and down as he ate. Perhaps he felt guilty about his father. John, guilty? No. John felt no guilt, John only cared about John. Lilian pictured the ground opened up again, and John lowered in his coffin. The tears of grief and relief. She nibbled at a stem of asparagus. John poured more gravy over a new heap of vegetables.

“The grave looks much better now, doesn’t it, Mum?” Christine placed her knife and fork side by side next to half a T-bone steak.

“You’re not leaving that?” John snapped, making Lilian jump and spill food down her front.

Christine held out an open palm and he lunged across with his fork. The waitress chose that moment to return and ask if everything was all right. John leapt up and threw his knife and fork down on the table, where they bounced [ 24 ]

across and clattered onto the floor, then strode out. Christine apologised. Lilian dabbed at her face with the napkin.

“Don’t upset yourself, Mum. He’ll get over it.”

They took a taxi home. He wasn’t there. Lilian knocked on his bedroom door, then opened it with her secret key. A mountain of clothes stood beside the unmade bed and the centre part of the white sheet was buff-coloured. Christine dismissed her mother’s protests and stripped the bed, scooped up the mountain and carried it downstairs. Lilian followed, trembling, and a great gulp of grief billowed up and swept over her and the undertakers were paying out the ropes until the two coffins sat one above the other and she was throwing a handful of sticky soil which clung to her palm like the albatross of maternal guilt because she had made him what he was.

[ 25 ]

As it goes Taylor Bond

can’t believe that it’s been three years of scraping the sand from dry tongues and wandering deserts pretending it’s suburbia, where we once wished for escape. broken hearts seek their homes or what we know as homes the days do not erase sight so we’ve learned running bare bones into broken lights and city streets hiding from the shadows the neon signs cast aching for the hurt it takes to remember what have we learned, all these years, how many years does it take to forget to move on to learn to not remember both the good and the bad, it’s hard to tell between the two your grandmother had dementia and now I call it a gift to have lost the names of the people who died before you the plots in the ground left unfilled what you look forward to how beautiful numbness is! compared to the regret of waking up or the strange peace of having so many ghosts to haunt you look away so you don’t see my hands shaking on the counter top thinking of that loose doorknob in the hallway how it rattles as people come and leave as they always do, how it always rattles and how they always leave I’ve been listening to this sound for what seems like a thousand lifetimes but is really only a day and to some they are the same how long have I been living I must ask myself that every morning and every night that is the one thing I must never forget even once the rest has crumbled and the doorknob has broken and every one has left and it is only myself remembering to count time.

[ 26 ]

[aubade: a parallel poem] Yuan Changming

You might have stayed up All night, clicking at every link To your daydream, searching For a soulmate in the cyberspace You might have enjoyed an early dose Of original sin between sleep and wake Before packing up all your seasonal greetings With your luggage to catch the first plane Or sitting up in meditation With every sensory cell Widely open to receive Blue dews from nirvana But you did not. Rather, you have just Had another long fit of insomnia and Now in this ant-like moment, you are Imagining a lucky morning glow That is darting along the horizon

[ 27 ]

Stock Exchange Sandra Coffey

I named her Lisa. Her sister’s name was Lucy. Lisa and Lucy. I was fascinated with cows. I still am. My mother put it down to only child syndrome. I just liked cows. I had a penchant for naming animals. I outdid myself when it came to my cat. Goycochea was his name. After an Argentinian goalkeeper who was unreal when it came to stopping penalties. I liked the name too. Ah feck it, might as well give you his full name. Have a laugh sure. Goycochea Agugu Guscott Klinsmann.

Look them up. You’ll find plenty about them. All retired sports players now.

Cows were different. Cows were almost human, well the good ones anyway. If Lisa could talk, she would have. I know she would have. Many’s the time I’d talk to her. I told her about the time I got a text from my girlfriend. ‘You were filthy last night!’ That’s what the text said and that’s what I told Lisa. In the field we were.

She was chewing the cud and I was telling her how I had to confront Ursula and ask her straight out. I’d say this, then she’d say that and what the fuck should I say if she says that. That kind of talk. We hadn’t met up last night. I didn’t need the details about the other man but best to go through the motions so I have a story for the lads when they ask me. She was never filthy with me. We had bedroom basics down but nothing filthy, far from it.

I’d never seen a dead cow until Lisa died. It is up there as one of the most emotional experiences of my life. Sounds mad to say that. Most of my friends wouldn’t understand. I’ve never told them. I’d be too embarrassed to be honest. I work in a bank and my co-workers have never seen a cow. Some of them couldn’t tell a cow from a bull, swear to God. I’m drawn to the farmers that come to the counter. We are phasing out chequebooks. Our bosses are adamant that the chequebook will be history by the middle of the year. But it’s always the farmers that ask for one. I give them out.

[ 28 ]

It keeps them going. They wink when you slide it out across the counter. I can tell they are worried. You’d swear by the signs up about the place that we were warning against some deadly outbreak only we could predict.

‘IMPORTANT NOTICE CHEQUEBOOK PHASE OUT CHEQUES WRITTEN AFTER MAY 31 WILL BE TERMINATED’ I like to write it out on a cheque, they’d say. You see exactly who you’re paying and what you’re paying them for. It’s there in front of you, black and white. I don’t blame them. I’ve made mistakes paying for things online myself.

Being online in the country, to me anyway, is crazy. Look out the fucking window. That’s what I’d like to say to any of them who spend their lives looking into a screen and the countryside all around them. City folk living in the country; couldn’t afford a house in the city. They mustn’t be used to looking out windows.

They never look out. I suppose if you’ve grown up in a city, there wouldn’t be much point looking out. All you’d see is the front or arse of another house. Or someone would catch you looking and wonder what the fuck you’re looking at. They’d give you that face. Nothing to see here type of face. Then close the curtains.

There is nothing more magnificent that a field full of cows. Black and white ones, red ones, red and white, blue ones (yes Belgian Blues) and the black ones with white faces. When the little ones come along, ah stop, you’ll have me like a woman watching that moment in the chick lit movie when the man pours his heart out.

‘You had me at hello,’ type of stuff.

It’s well over ten years since Lisa died. I’ve never had any pet since. I just didn’t have the heart or the interest. I put that energy into women. I’m the kind of guy that likes to get to know a woman first. You’d think I was after asking something personal when I suggested to Majella if she’d like to look at the stars – for a second date like. Something different. She put her hand in my pocket, pulled out my wallet and opened it.

‘Do you see these?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ [ 29 ]

‘That’s what women like. Plenty of this. Money. None of your fucking stars.’

She dropped the lot at my feet and took off down the street. She was leaning forward like she hadn’t gotten used to walking in her ridiculously high shoes, those ones that have a thick sole and the skinniest heel tagged on at the rear.

Granted I hadn’t brought her out for a meal but that was going to be date three.

A converted railway carriage had just opened as a Thai restaurant.

I go home after another failed attempt. I live at home. When I say home I mean the home myself and my mum bought. A wild bull crunched my father’s spine and he lay in a nursing home barely able to get in and out of the bed. A For Sale sign went up shortly after. Neighbours rowing over who would buy it and for what price made us change the sign – For Auction. A man from London bought the house and farm and turned it into a horse riding school. Mum didn’t care much for the area. She did what every woman did in those days, move onto the farm and leave your ambitions behind. She wanted to grow woodlands and get rid of the animals. There were grants going from Europe.

‘A farm without animals. That’s a joke.’ My father shot down her idea in the way only he could. After that mum didn’t bother helping with the lambing or calving season. Dead animals meant nothing other than less money coming in.

Two Peugeot Boxer vans took away all our stuff. To a semi-detached house in Waterside with a small garden and a nearby woodland walkway. The day we left brought back all sorts of memories. The stomach churning insults to the happier summer days when there was a full week of sunshine, enough to get the hay saved and the silage cut.

The day Lisa died could have been my father’s chance. To build this connection I’d heard so much about but had no idea what it looked or felt like.

‘What are you crying over?’

I sobbed as I stood over Lisa, my best friend.

‘Men don’t cry,’ he said as he shoved me out of his way. ‘Go stand over there.’

Over there was beside a gate. He started the tractor and lifted her off the ground with the grab. She flopped over the edges and her eyes were still open. He dropped

[ 30 ]

her from a height onto the concrete yard. Conor Fletcher was going to take her away in a trailer. He ran a business taking away dead and worn out animals.

‘We can’t bury her. How many more times do I have to tell you? It’s illegal. Do you want me up in court?’

I said nothing.

‘You and your mother would love to be rid of me.’

I never gave in to any of this kind of talk from him. He had us well trained down the years. We knew when he was shouting that he wasn’t in too bad form. It was better than the silent treatment. That was torture.

The doctor says he will need special homecare. She holds a spine in her hands and she bends it one way, then another, she’s demonstrating a new product to us.

‘His back will never be the same. The gel that keeps the discs moving isn’t there.

He’s not paralysed but that could come later.’

She lists out the items that we’ll need to get to make our home suitable for him.

We drive home, silent. It had been a quick eight months since he had the accident, and we’d auctioned off the farm. With the bit left over we bought a house just. Turns out the creamery, the hardware store, silage contractors all came knocking. ‘Have you not seen this,’ said a silage man, holding a bill for 5,000 euro. Another for 10,000 from the hardware store. On and on. Relentless white envelopes.

‘He couldn’t run a fucking whore house,’ my mother said.

But we’d never thought of the day he would be moving back in with us. We’d be his carers.

‘I’m not wiping his arse.’

‘Nor am I.’ That’s all we said about it. Prime Time was on. An investigation into abuse in nursing homes. One of them had a bag put over his head and was left in a corner [ 31 ]

of a room in the dark. I felt sorry for the workers too. I pictured my father in there. He would be one of those patients, the awkward wait on me hand and foot type.

I had planted a sycamore tree close to the spot where Lisa died. The first week in the new house, I planted another. It looked lost among the worn green grass and wooden fence. The whole thing would be tiled eventually and a bench put around the tree.

My father talked about dying. My mother died. Fell asleep on the couch. She never said it but she’d had enough. She had plans to work again as a court clerk and wanted to refresh her skills. She had enrolled for a course in September. Dead at 55. My father couldn’t attend as he was too weak. She wanted to go on her final journey alone.

I met with the nurse manager at the care home.

‘We’ll need a decision from you soon. I know it’s been a terribly tough time.’

I nodded and walked out the leafy driveway. He had at best two years left. He had a disease in his spine. It was chewing his bones away.

‘There is a lot of degeneration of discs.’ She handed me a full doctor’s report. I put it in my briefcase. I was the bank manager now. Promoted with good pay. I could build an annex on to the side of the house. I could pay for him to stay at the care home and wait it out. 4,000 euro per month.

The chairlift went in on Sunday. He was giving out about how slow it was on Tuesday.

‘That’s the recommended speed. Nothing I can do about it.’

He had started to walk but could only manage short bouts. To the fridge and back. To the toilet and back. He’d leave some droplets on the toilet seat. He’d sit in his wheelchair by the window. Francesca came for two hours every day in the morning.

‘Forever thankful to you, sir,’ she’d say. She had a few stops to make in the estate.

Truth be told I would have been lost without her. I’d leave her a tip if she had a communion or confirmation coming up. [ 32 ]

‘Could you not get someone with some English?’

‘She has English.’

‘Broken and fucked up English. How could that be English?’

She’d have talked away to him if he’d stopped going on about how great he was.

100 of the finest cows. 200 sheep. Pure breeds. Had the best silage in Ireland. A man came from Meath to buy silage bales. And they have the best grass in the country. Give it a fucking rest, would you.

He was getting more adventurous. He’d walk to the tree in the back garden and back. He never sat at it, not that I ever saw anyway. One evening I saw he had deep scratches on his palms. He’d fallen. I diluted some Savlon and washed his hands. I patted them gently after. Neither of us spoke only to say thanks and you’re welcome when we were finished.

He’d begun to get tired in the weeks that followed.

‘He is a very sick man,’ Francesca said one Friday afternoon. She was vexed about something. I was going in. I nodded and paid her.

[ 33 ]

Who Got What Ashleigh Davies

Now you are on the brink And the house must be divided.

The living items; Pencil skirt, shaving mirror, cutlery.

Their novelties Exorcised to the moving trunk Etched with your name, Abbreviated, so as to save time.

Hardest to give up Are the items that documented us; Flap eared books Smudged over in pencil And the rust coloured rings Of custody battle coffee cups.

Tonight I’ll eat supper Off our best china While you hang line the phone Making plans for New Year, Acquaintances cooing their pity Down muffled over snow lines.

[ 34 ]

Dominoes and Biscuits Thomas Elson

The seminarian rushed from church, past campus, over footbridge, and stopped at the edge of a lake.

Seán Whitlock, the fourth child in a family of four sons, his first eighteen years had been spent within farming confines difficult to cultivate, even more difficult to harvest. The family farm was located two miles north of Berdan, the county seat, with its wide brick main streets that followed the same path laid down before the Civil War. From the first bell rung at 8:00 a.m. outside the three-room, eight-grade schoolhouse, until Sister Hildegard rang her final bell seven and one-half hours later, Seán sat in an cast-iron frame school desk, the students arranged in five straight rows, according to height. He studied, did what he was told, served two years on the school patrol, proudly wore his golden captain’s badge on the white sash.

After the final school bell, he ran from school to church, hurriedly pulled the white surplice over the black cassock, placed the water and wine cruets on a table next to the altar, followed the priest into the sacristy, repeated without understanding, Et Cum spiritu tuo after the priest said, Dominus vobiscum – it all sounded like nonsense syllables to him.

Each day before supper, he herded dairy cows from their barbed wire pasture through a narrow path and into the barn for their milking duty, then gathered any extra eggs the hens deigned to deposit since morning. After supper, Seán practiced singing to his mother’s piano accompaniment, then finished his homework. At ten o’clock, the dog out for the night, he walked past the Florence coal-burning stove at the foot of the stairs, its heat rising up the stairway built by his great grandfather. He turned right into his bedroom where he knelt and uttered memorized prayers, then fell asleep to the creaks of the windmill south of the milk barn.

[ 35 ]

In the morning, before he left for school, he pumped water from the well, and hauled the overflowing buckets to the house for his mother’s daily chores.

It wasn’t until Seán was in the eighth grade that the house was blessed with running water, hand pumped from the cattle trough.

On the first Saturday of each month, he sat in the front seat of the family’s Desoto while his mother drove him to confession, where Seán would kneel, and, after an examination of conscience, the priest listened to the gardenvariety sins of a young boy - the “I disobeyed my parents three times” and “used God’s name in a bad way four times” type.

Seán was the only altar boy during the summer weekday Masses. It became his routine to don his cassock in private with an unaccustomed flair, choose the correct surplice, kneel before the altar, pour water over the priest’s hands and wine into his chalice, exit after communion to light the charcoal for the benediction incense. He found peace during that one-hour of liturgical routine and ritual, the flow of the priest’s vestments, his ease of movement behind the altar. He envied the priest gliding through the rituals, and the respect the man received.

When he and his mother arrived home after Mass, his father and brothers had been in the fields for hours. After their breakfast, Seán worked alongside his mother in the livestock pens, vegetable garden, and kitchen.

Seán’s older brothers left home early, married, returned on Christmases with their pregnant wives to the joy of their mother and the short attention span of their father.

Early in his junior year of high school, Sister Margareta requested Seán’s participation in the school plays. Seán’s voice had matured into a rich, youthful baritone due to a gift from God and God’s chief assistant – Seán’s mother. “Just audition. Sister says you have a good voice.” His mother’s requests concluded with, “Singing in a play could help you get into the seminary. They like priests with good voices.” She had calculated that since her older sons ensured grandchildren, she had no reason to fear the seminary. Sister Margareta had made the same calculation. Seán complied without question.

He was chosen to play Gaylord in Showboat. Crystal, his third cousin, was Magnolia, the love interest. Her voice an emerging contralto, she was chubby, as awkward as Seán, but eager, curious, and relished the romantic scenes. Seán, stiff and self-conscious, broadcast the embarrassment of a boy whose body and voice matured faster than his libido.

During rehearsals, he walked behind the scenery, stood on stage, grew more comfortable with Crystal, enjoyed her camaraderie, and the warmth from audiences. In their senior year performance, Seán was Tommy to Crystal’s Fiona in Brigadoon. At the final curtain bow, Crystal clasped Seán’s hand and guided it [ 36 ]

toward her. He hesitated, complied, suddenly pulled away, paused, then turned, and left the stage. # Unable to make the decision himself, Sister Margareta, his mother, and the parish priest chose St. Aloysius Seminary. His fear of girls, combined with his mother’s insistence, when blended with the full-court press of nuns, priests, aunts, and uncles had been confused by Seán as a vocation.

His first two years were a blur of study, worry, avoidance; his only mishaps

were strained eyes and cramped fingers.

After his second year in the seminary, Seán spent the summer as a volunteer hospital chaplain. He saw lives of fear and pain; grew to despise his inability to call upon the divine to affect anything more than fleeting relief. Disappointed at himself, his devotion not reciprocated, he attended Mass less and less, and, after his father’s funeral, not at all. Learned he was no closer to God than before the seminary.

Early on the second Saturday in September, he drove back to the seminary one week late. He had asked for a meeting with his spiritual advisor on Monday.

As he sat on his dorm bed that Saturday afternoon, his roommate relayed the gossip about Eldon Penner. One week earlier, Penner had been a second year seminarian. That prior Friday night, his rules over reason roommate, Wilfred Huffacre, entered their dorm room, noticed a blanket over Penner’s head, left the lights off, crawled into bed, turned his face to the wall, and prepped for his nightly struggle with sleep.

Within minutes, he heard whispers, rapid breathing. Huffacre turned over, mesmerized by the sounds and undulations of a young woman kneeling above Penner. Huffacre could almost feel her. He stiffened, released, opened his eyes, listened again, looked again. His entire body re-filled, then released again.

Knew he had sinned, knew he would have sinned at least twice in thought, word, and deed were she in his bed.

The next day before the third Hail Mary of the noon Angelus, the full force of the seminary collapsed on Eldon Penner – he was expelled before the genuflection.

Seán glanced at the wall clock. Hesitated. The regulations of seminary life intervened. He had only to negotiate the weekend rules about mandatory Saturday confessions with the sign-in cards and senior monitors. If missed, his

[ 37 ]

spiritual advisor would visit that evening for a talk. It was the talk Seán wasn’t ready to face until Monday.

He crossed the street to the church, saw tanned, young women in summer shorts or off-the-shoulder dresses; he felt the energy experienced in April. Up the church steps, through the heavy double doors, and, once inside the vestibule, he shuffled through tables smothered with pamphlets, collection boxes, and candles, until he found the required attendance card, his name stamped across the top. He handed it to the monitor—a close-cropped, efficient fourth-year seminarian who alphabetized each card.

When Seán moved toward the second set of doors, Christ surrounded him.

Christ to his left, face abused and bloodied, hung at eye level, body beaten and wounded. Christ, to his right, stood with right arm partially extended, hand open, exposed heart strangled with thorns.

Both doors jerked toward him. Two young men, their Saturday obligation over, smiled and nodded, “He’s over there,” rolled their eyes and laughed as they hurried past.

The scent of the morning’s incense from the sanctuary blended with the tang of extinguished candles; the only light came through the stained glass windows. For two years, Seán had looked at the vaulted ceilings supported by white marble pillars. That afternoon, his eyes moved to the Stations of the Cross embedded into the side-walls near the confessionals, then onto the several suffering, yet labile, saints who hung from walls while others lurked as statues in shadowed corners near the side altars covered with exposed relics – the bones of forgotten saints. The wall behind the center altar with the golden tabernacle was dominated by a cathedral-size fresco of Christ dying on Golgotha. To Seán it was like standing inside a familiar store.

He walked past rows of pews in which men in cassocks knelt, their rosaries spinning between thumb and forefinger. Seán genuflected out of habit, and, since he was also out of practice, flopped into the pew, leaned back, pulled the kneeler down with his right foot. He tilted forward, rested his forearms on the top of the pew in front, pushed his hips back – half resting, half adolescent habit.

The left side of the church was Father Dauchhauser’s realm. His curtained confessional lodged, as seminarians put it, between two of the sorrowful mysteries, the crowning of thorns and the scourging at the pillar. Seminary lore held that years ago, after hearing a confession, Father Dauchhauser had stormed from the confessional, and, with the ramrod stiffness of Moses, towered above a kneeling young man in a cassock. The priest pointed toward the bloodied, halfdead Christ on the cross, shouted, “How can you come in here, and tell me what

[ 38 ]

you just did, and still call yourself a follower of that man?” The only ones waiting in Father Dauchhauser’s line that afternoon were freshmen.

The long line on the opposite side of the church waited for Father Shein – brief, safe, and forgiving. In his eighty-third year, he had accepted man’s fallen nature as something that would survive him and was now more focused on saving himself than saving the world. With gentle empathy, he dealt with the Saturday phalanx of seminarians who marched to confession – his penance after hearing confession was five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys.

After Seán’s visitor in April, he had dreamt of the magnetic rhythms of both males and females – stopped, felt unsettled, fearful of his excitement. He used confession then as a test with a vague, multi-use sin - impure thoughts toward others – sandwiched between failures to obey the rules and late to class arrivals. Father Shein passed Seán’s test when he asked no specifics, and gave his standard penance. # That Saturday in September, standing in line inside the church, Seán tried to conduct an examination of conscience. Of his sins, he carried what he was able, the rest he self-forgave. Stepped from the line, saw the confession monitors at the back door, returned to the line. Opted instead for several rapid-fire Acts of Contrition – shot-off ten in three minutes before he entered the confessional – hoped for heaven to extend mitigating kindness for speed and quantity.

He parted the dark brown curtain, stepped up into a dark room the size of an old phone booth, lowered himself onto a cushioned kneeler, faced the opaque muslin window screen; the small, dark curtain behind it remained closed. He heard the soft sound of Father Shein’s voice on the other side - the centuries-old mumbling of another confession winding-down. Then muted clicks as Father Shein closed one curtain. When he opened Seán’s curtain, habit took over, and Seán began.

BLESS ME, FATHER, FOR I HAVE SINNED. MY LAST CONFESSION WAS...

How long had it been? He had not been inside a church since his father’s funeral. His thoughts transformed into words, “My last confession was two months ago.”

SINCE MY LAST CONFESSION, I...

Time to list my sins. Seán reverted to the “I disobeyed... and I used...” portions of the confession. Minor rules disobeyed. “Used God’s name in a bad way.” Never any specifics requested. Just a quick numerical tally – three times, [ 39 ]

four times. Keep the numbers in single digits. “Failed to do assigned tasks, twice.”

No specifics requested. Seán inhaled quickly, neglected to exhale.

I AM SORRY FOR THESE SINS, AND THE SINS OF MY WHOLE LIFE, ESPECIALLY FOR...

Seán was silent as he sped through another lightning mental rehearsal.

Crystal had visited him in April. That chubby farm girl came back into his life as a slender woman who moved with the easy grace of a dancer. As he stretched to remove her coat, Seán’s eyes followed the reverberations of her blouse as they echoed the fluctuations of her upper body. When she closed the seldom-used visitors’ privacy curtain, he watched the movement of her legs as her split skirt flowed and opened. She walked behind him, touched his shoulders, glided her hand down his back, moved closer, kissed his cheek. “That’s to make up for you not kissing me in high school.”

She sat across from Seán, scooted closer until her right knee touched the inside of his left leg. “When you get home this summer, we’ll go to dinner at a hotel.” He hesitated; she added, “It’s just dinner, Seán. And, it’s just me. It’ll be fun.” She rose, opened the curtain, and, using the same motions, sat, leaned forward, made a slow gesture toward his leg, stopped, said, as she re-crossed her legs, watched his eyes, “You will; won’t you? Say, yes,” smiled, “Great, we’ll have dinner in June.”

In front of the hotel, Seán, hot, stiff and uncomfortable in his older brother’s slacks, his over-starched white shirt, and, embarrassed by the thud of his new Florsheim shoes against the sidewalk, held back a step. Crystal skimmed toward the double doors to the large hotel lobby. She turned, leaned, linked her arm in his, clasped her other hand on top. They strode over the terrazzo floors, veered around the large center table. To the right of the circular stairs rose ballroomhigh marble walls that surrounded the elevator doors. To the left stood the walnut registration desk behind which the clerk pointed to the restaurant with its step-down entrance. Crystal leaned toward Seán, rested her head on his shoulder, ran her finger down the center of her blouse, pointed toward the south window. “Tomorrow, we’ll have breakfast at that table.”

Inside the confessional that September afternoon, Seán remained silent.

Then, as if Father Shein had an infinite amount of time, “Yes, my son. Are you ready? If you’re ready, then-. If not, perhaps-.”

Seán’s voice overrode the priest’s, “Father, I committed mortal sins.”

“We all have, all of us.”

“Not like these, Father.” [ 40 ]

“Just breathe, and tell me.”

“Father, I slept with a woman.”

Father Shein’s gentle voice, “And?” “And? And, several times, I slept with her.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Married?”

“No, Father.”

“Was it voluntary for both?”

“It was.”

Seán was aware of the point of these questions. Adultery, double adultery, fornication, rape, statutory rape. Classification now in place – the sin was fornication.

“Do you intend to repeat it?”

“High probability, Father.”

“And you have not told your spiritual advisor?”

Seán’s answer hung unspoken as if he were delaying the verdict.

“Since you haven’t, do you feel the need to?”

“The need, not the desire.”

Seán heard a muffled chuckle from Father Shein’s side of the cloth screen.

“You will need to tell him. It impacts on your vocation. Your penance is to tell your spiritual advisor. Now say an Act of Contrition and go in peace,”- for years the priest had skipped the ritual, “and sin no more”, substituted instead, “please pray for me.”

Seán’s mumbled prayer reverberated with the Lord’s Prayer whispered in Latin from the other side of the cloth. Pater noster, qui es in caelis... Then he heard, Dominus vobiscum. It still sounded like dominoes and biscuits to him.

Seán had neglected to tell of his nights with two other women, and the tests they served; or his time with men, and the tests they served.

I FIRMLY RESOLVE WITH THE HELP OF THY GRACE, TO CONFESS MY SINS, TO DO PENANCE, AND TO AMEND MY LIFE. AMEN. Seán’s spiritual advisor found him on a bench by the lake. He leaned down, “Seán, you have something to tell me.” He watched Seán’s body heave, asked, “What do you want to do right now?”

“Run,” Seán said without looking up.

“Where?”

Seán neither talked, nor breathed.

“Seán, inhale. Inhale. Good, now exhale. Even better. One more time.

Again.” Then said, “Let’s begin.” [ 41 ]

Seán stood, stepped off to the side, looked down on the man, “No. Thanks, but no,” turned and walked to his car.

[ 42 ]

Diaochan: The Rise of The Courtesan Ross Ericson

ACT I Scene VI Morning DongZhou’s chamber.

DongZhou enters looking exhausted and picks up the scroll he has thrown down.

He sits down and starts reading it.

DiaoChan enters in a nightdress.

DIAOCHAN:

A girl could become jealous of the Empire when it takes you away from her

so much.

DONGZHOU: Trust me, lady, she is less of a demanding mistress than you.

DIAOCHAN: But as not as much fun I hope? Come back to bed.

DONGZHOU: You are my greatest distraction DiaoChan but there is much I need to do.

She sits on his lap.

DIAOCHAN: Do you grow tired of me already?

DONGZHOU: Of course I do not. Come on, get out of the way, I have to work.

[ 43 ]

DIAOCHAN: See you would rather scribble away on your scrolls than give any attention

to me.

DONGZHOU: That is not so, do you not understand I have affairs of state to attend to?

DIAOCHAN: But you are the Chancellor? Are there not people who can do this for you?

DONGZHOU: You would have me put off my work like an errant schoolboy.

DIAOCHAN: Hardly a schoolboy.

DONGZHOU: Maybe not, but you have made me feel like a young man again.

DIAOCHAN: Really? You don’t sound like one. All that huffing and puffing.

DONGZHOU: And there’s that tongue of yours again. You should be careful I don’t have

it cut out.

DIAOCHAN: And there would go half your fun? (She stands) So will you be going to see

the boy today?

DONGZHOU: The boy? You mean the Emperor?

DIAOCHAN: Yes, the boy.

DONGZHOU: DiaoChan, you cannot call him that.

DIAOCHAN: But he is a boy is he not?

DONGZHOU: He is the Emperor.

DIAOCHAN: Only in name. To think a man such as you is a servant to such a pale child.

DONGZHOU: Show some respect.

DIAOCHAN: Respect is earned, my lord, not given. (Pause) Do you really have to go to

him today?

DONGZHOU: There are documents I need to put before him for his seal. [ 44 ]

DIAOCHAN: Why need you do that? Can it not be left to some servant or minor official.

DONGZHOU: That would be an insult to the Emperor.

DIAOCHAN: What would he care? He is just a boy.

DONGZHOU: Damn it woman.

DIAOCHAN: If you don’t go to him you can take me riding.

DONGZHOU: Not again?

DIAOCHAN: No, horse riding.

DONGZHOU: You can ride?

DIAOCHAN: WangYun taught me. Come on it is too fine a day to be stuck inside playing

nursemaid.

DONGZHOU: Yes, alright, maybe after...

DIAOCHAN: Good. (She gives him a kiss on the cheek) I shall go and get dressed.

She exits.

DONGZHOU: No, wait, DiaoChan! DiaoChan! I was going to say maybe after... Oh what’s the point.

LuBu enters.

LUBU: My lord.

DONGZHOU: Ah, LuBu. LUBU: You wanted to see me?

DONGZHOU: Yes, the governor of Jing Du says that bandits are harassing the villages along his northern borders and has asked for our assistance.

LUBU: Can his men not deal with the situation?

[ 45 ]

DONGZHOU: He says not. He is probably making a fuss over nothing but it would be politic to send a company of men to assist him.

LUBU: I shall see to it at once my lord.

DONGZHOU: How is the recruiting of the new battalions progressing?

LUBU: Well my lord. The poverty in the Empire brings many young men to our ranks. Most of them are weak and thin and ill disciplined, but we feed them up, and train them and hone them to our purpose.

DONGZHOU: Good, good. (DongZhou fingers the documents) One more thing, I need you to take these documents to the Emperor. (He rolls up the scroll) He needs to put his seal to them and then you can return them to me.

LUBU: My lord?

DONGZHOU: You have a problem with that?

LUBU: Well it is hardly my duty to...

DONGZHOU: Your duty is whatever I tell you it is. What? Do you feel it below you?

LUBU: No, my lord, quite the opposite. I do not hold the rank to stand before his Imperial Highness in such a fashion.

DONGZHOU: You have more than enough status to stand before a child. Don’t looked so shocked LuBu we both know what he is and who put him there.

DongZhou stands and passes the scrolls to LuBu. LUBU: My lord, it would be an insult to the Emperor.

DONGZHOU: Is it not an insult that I should play secretary to a whelp? I stand over the house of Han like a giant and it would take little for me to crush it under the heal of my boot. The Emperor rules with my permission not I with his.

You heard what was said the other evening? You heard what WangYun saw in the stars? The days of Han are numbered. Come LuBu what is it that we are protecting here? The house of Han? The Emperor? No, we have a greater duty. We have a duty to the Empire itself. [ 46 ]

LUBU: I swore an oath, my lord.

DONGZHOU: You swore an oath to the Empire, as did I. By accident of birth a man is born; to be beggar, soldier or Emperor; How is it fair that it will merit nought; if he strives to make his bass lot better; For through bias of blood he is condemned; never to reach the heights he should attain; kept down and imprisoned as his caste dictates; and amongst the hoi polloi to remain; To the ground I have my desires tethered; Caged my ambition, made it small; Pulled in my horns and clipped my flight feathers; When I have the wings to soar o’er them all.

DiaoChan enters.

LUBU: DiaoChan?

DIAOCHAN: Lord LuBu. She bows and looks away hastily.

LUBU: What is she doing here?

DONGZHOU: You know her? Oh, of course you do, you met her at WangYun’s house. He sent her to me as a gift. Is something wrong LuBu? LUBU: No my lord.

DONGZHOU: Then why that pathetic look upon your face? (He grins) Do not tell me you had designs on the girl yourself. Well I cannot fault your taste. I’ll tell you what, I shall let you have her after I have finished with her - now be off and about your duties.

LUBU: My lord.

LuBu bows.

DIAOCHAN: Come lady, let us see how you fair in a proper saddle.

DongZhou exits with DiaoChan, with DiaoChan throwing LuBu a pleading look.

[ 47 ]

LUBU: He could have my life if he but asked me; The last drop of my blood and gasp of air; would be his at just one word of command; I am his man and I live in his care; My loyalty he’s owed, he made me thus; though what I have become, stands this day; wavering in uncertain opinion; and lost in treacherous and bloody thought; For my wounded pride would I turn traitor? Would I for a mere woman break my vow? And see him lying beaten and battered; Oh my strength of purpose I need you now.

WangYun enters and crosses the stage.

LuBu intercepts him and grabs him roughly.

LUBU: Why is it that you have given my intended away to DongZhou?

WANGYUN: I am sorry my lord. I had no choice in the matter. DongZhou threatened me on pain of death that I give her up to him. I said that she was destined for your household but he would have none of it and ordered me to send to him the girl.

LUBU: He knew she was for me?

WANGYUN: I told him so. (LuBu lets go of him) Oh, my poor daughter what is to become of her. As soon as DongZhou is done with her she will be discarded. But it is nothing compared to the dishonour he does to you, my lord.

LUBU: Be careful what you say WangYun. WANGYUN: I am saying nothing, my lord, that is not already being whispered at court.

LUBU: I care not for the gossip of women.

WANGYUN: But he has insulted you greatly.

LUBU: And I am his to insult.

WANGYUN: No, my lord, you are a great man, a man of honour and integrity, who should be treated with more respect. It is upon your foundation that DongZhou builds his house.

LUBU: And as his foundation I am part of it, and therefore what is mine is his.

LuBu Îľxits. [ 48 ]

WANGYUN: The seed is sown but has not taken root; Our plan is over before it has begun; He holds no resentment in his heart or; serves any spite against his great patron.

DiaoChan appears behind him in another place.

DIAOCHAN: Have patience dearest father, have patience; lustful vengeance takes time to germinate; to grow and climb into a creeping vine; and choke their filial love with hate.

[ 49 ]

No Time for Poetics Alun Evans

Her hair is dyed a savage blonde, almost white — a nuclear flash of beauty, too violent now to look at. She brushes it back from her eyes and looks at the road.

Her hands are locked onto the steering wheel and I can see the bones of the knuckles pushing into the skin with the effort of her silence.

We drive towards the windmills. They welcome us over the hill, their blades rushing over and over, waving at us, welcoming us back.

As we get closer, I realise how monstrously big they really are, their size accentuated by the small heaped figures of the straw bales, shrunken and motionless underneath. It is an easy thing to forget — the enormity of the structures built out here, supplying power to the homes we live in — when there’s plenty of other situations and other words folding themselves into brain and body. The windmills are like great white giants, silently guarding our place in the world. Guarding something, at any rate.

But I won’t say any of this out loud. I have done enough talking already and it’s no time for poetics. Hemingway had it right, when he told the girl who compared the hills to white elephants that he had never seen one.

I strain to hear what kind of noise these giants make as they slice through the air. I roll down the window but all I can make out is the hum of the engine and the whistling rush of wind as the car speeds up. I wonder briefly if she has accelerated on purpose, a minor act of rebellion in light of all that has happened.

When she hits the duckling, we’re doing at least eighty.

It happens when I’m closing my window, disappointed at not hearing the windmills. I see the duckling on the road up ahead: just this one small creature, a lost smudge of yellow in the otherwise perfect grey of road. Clearly visible.

I keep quiet as the Escort continues at its steady speed, thinking she’s trying to scare me. But when she hits that little baby in an explosion of blood and feathers, when she does this and doesn’t even blink, I start to realise, after all this time, that I still don’t know the type of person I’m dealing with.

[ 50 ]

Was it an explosion? I don’t see the impact, but that’s what I imagine — blood and feathers fire-worked into the air and spattering the bonnet like so many pieces of gory hail.

I look back through the rear window, but we’re already so far from the scene of the crime that it could have simply been a brief shudder and flattened bones burnt effortlessly into the grey concrete. Quiet bones, the size of a child’s pinkie, crushed into a chalky powder on the road.

The image is gone. He had never seen one. I try to act casual. I lean back in my seat and pretend relaxation, indifference. I can’t look at her so I turn on the radio but it’s broken. It’s been broken for months. Three months ago, I put in a Nick Cave cassette and it stuck there, permanently lodged, People Ain’t No Good playing at half-speed like some guttural and sad demonic prayer. And the radio, as if in some unanimous act of mutiny, went with it.

I know all this, but I try to find a station anyway. Static scrapes into the car and she glances over at my failing attempt.

For a moment, I think she might speak: there will be the offering - a flicker of life, a smudge of yellow on an empty road. But then she moves her eyes away, back to the windscreen that is gradually beginning to swallow up the pinkish-red sun. The tape player begins to make a strangled sound and I turn it off and let the silence crowd the car.

Up ahead: the caravan site. So many years since we last came. We rented out a rusted-down caravan from a friend’s parents, never imagining the dullness that would come when it rained. And it rained continuously throughout the holiday. We had played pick-up sticks and Dominoes and all manner of esoteric games we found in a 100 Plus Games Compilation. The highlight of the holiday occurred when we found the porn collection stashed in one of the upper cabinets of the caravan, above the bed, hidden behind a set of dirty old saucepans and some yellow-stained pillows that looked like they had been kept up there for years. The laughter we shared as we watched the dirty videos on the old portable telly they’d installed, touching one another, discussing which of the parents the collection of filth belonged to, if it was maybe a joint collection. Never mentioning to the friend what we found in his parent’s caravan that summer: a union in our preservation of this little secret.

Hedges fold in on both sides as we take a narrow dirt track down towards the site. The claustrophobic trail leads us to an old man with a patchwork beard of grey and ginger. He stands by the side of the track like he has been waiting for us all day. She rolls the car to a stop in front of him. He limps over to the passenger side and gestures for me to roll down the window. When I do I can smell burning. It is sweet and sickly. The old man leans in like he’s one of the hedges and looks at us both. First at me, then at the woman who sits beside me: [ 51 ]

my wife, her hair white-blonde and her eyes pale-green, tired and grieving. He has maroon flecks shot down over his white-grey jumper: an incongruous cravat of tubercular blood or weatherproof paint. I try to look elsewhere but he’s too close to focus anywhere else.

‘Taylor?’

I nod my head and he passes a key-ring through the window, careful not to let our hands touch. He points out a rust-coloured caravan at the furthest edge of the field. It looks exactly the same as the one of memory. Mud tracks spiral off in all directions, leading into one other and then out again into nowhere, ending abruptly like some badly executed Pollock. No-one else is around.

‘Quiet season,’ says the man. He pats the roof of the car three times, a signal that all is done here, the conversation is over.

She drives slowly across the bumps in the field. I feel nauseous but don’t say anything. She parks close to the caravan, too close, so that my door is blocked by the caravan’s side. Would she mean to do such a childish, vindictive thing?

As close as I am, I can see that the caravan isn’t rusty, but just painted like it is. Our eyes meet in the rear-view mirror. She leaves me waiting in the car and goes into the caravan. The rust-coloured door closes. It doesn’t slam, it just closes.

The rain starts up suddenly, like erratic fingers of children drumming out an irregular rhythm onto the roof of the car. I wonder if the sound’s intensified or muffled inside the caravan’s interior, if there’s any difference at all. When I close my eyes, I see an explosion of blood and feathers and know that this is what must have happened. Bones so small, crushed into a fine white powder and then nothing but a stain on the road. With my eyes closed, concentrating on the sound of the rain and what it could, or should, sound like, I hear the groan of a door opening. Reopening. I keep my eyes closed. To feel in control of this life seems like an impossibility. The rain increases in violence and tempo, the children’s tiny fingers tapping incessantly now, relentless.

I imagine opening the car door and running out into the rain, holding out my arms wide and bracing myself for the impact. I imagine all this and stay seated in the car, warm and dry and full of that nauseous weight turning in my stomach. A weight, I now realise, that is the feeling which comes with the acceptance of guilt.

[ 52 ]

Cover artist Allen Forrest

Painting is a cross between a crap shoot, finding your way out of the woods, and performing a magic act. Each time I begin to paint I feel like I am walking a tightrope—sometimes scary, sometimes exciting, sometimes very quiet, and always, always surprising; leading me where I never expected to go. Doing art makes me lose all sense of time and place and go inside one long moment of creating. Whenever I feel a painting in my gut, I know this is why I paint. The colors are the message, I feel them before my mind has a chance to get involved. Color is the most agile and dynamic medium to create joy. And if you can find joy in your art, then you’ve found something worth holding on to.

[ 53 ]

Four Poems Philip Fried

Ballyhoo hurry hurry hurry, ladies and gentlemen, I’m gonna reveal a little of what they do in the world’s big show, under the tent of sky-blue, thrill to your leader’s death-defying feats of derring-do as fingering a crimson button, he threatens to blow up the whole show alive alive alive and not on video step right up folks, this is where you see Littlest Boy, the tiniest tactical nuke and he’s so cute, you’ll want to pick him up in your loving arms and take him right home with you, $10,000 reward if not alive step right this way, this way especially gents, and come say hello to sexy Ms. N. Winter, formerly Ms. 4th of July, anorexic model clad in a Gothic bikini of ash, dominatrix with the array of gadgets you like a girl to have, and knows what to do with them, too come one, come all, to the vast presidential libraries, Xanadu archives with fun for the whole family, well-sited on the grounds of retrospect, agleam with media and rich with decision, see fiery dragons guard the wet ops hoards, the data on Jupiter Garret and Copper Dune

[ 54 ]

hurry hurry hurry, come ladies and gents, your anonymity’s safe in your leaders’ names, behold the freaks of human omnipotence, ponder Ecclesiastes, gazing at pachyderms, mock the monkeys and make one of yourself, all this, all this for a piddling pile of dimes

[ 55 ]

Hullabaloo I’m an Epidermal Cell, seeking your vote.

For years, I’ve served the body politic on the Maginot Line of the surface barrier.

Oompah! This marching band out-Sousas Sousa with its front ensemble of chime, bongo, and conga.

Vote for me, a proud Neutrophil and first responder! Although my granules are pale lilac, my tactical team comes heavy to battle aliens.

High-stepping into the future with amplification, saluting the percussive past with a trashcan.

We, the Expectorants, pledge that with every cough and sneeze we’ll deport illegal pathogens.

We’ll fund the salubrious flushing of urine and tears.

Scatter bands will never slow march in time with the music. They scramble from design to design.

PUS promises you blood, sweat, toil, etc.

When have so many owed such a debt to so few?

Our bumper sticker: No Pain and Swelling, No Gain!

The color guard crowns the bugles’ swollen blare by spinning mock weapons, tossing flags in the air.

The Complement Movement advocates stricter policing, the use of a biochemical cascade to trigger a rapid killing response to invaders.

Flugelhorns, cornets, and brass trombones, piccolos, glockenspiels, and xylophones.

Citizens, join our crusade against the selfish self-antigens. We seek them out where they lurk in any internal tissue of the commonweal.

The backward march is executed in unison, with an exact alignment of helmets and plumes.

[ 56 ]

Drone Gilgamesh, a sensor operator, incinerated (there, and a millisecond later, not) the over-pixelated image of —it was a crystal-clear perfect day—a dog? a child? no, probably the terrorist Humbaba.

We understand the magnitude of our mission.

Civilians are not an abstraction. We’re not cavalier.

Achilles, at ease, while his spear strikes from afar, cunning predator-weapon pretending to be a cell phone tower and so attract the chatter of mobile phones, which ipso facto are calling down a strike on themselves ... Achilles, relieved of the rigors of slaughter, commiserates with Priam.

We grieve and our prayers go out to the bereaved.

Our review will zero in on what to improve.

Attila, a signals intelligence specialist, pilots from his padded chair a Predator drone with a blunt and featureless nose cone.

Youthful, alert, and well-versed in IT, he aims a laser to re-create a horde’s rampage: body parts around a crater.

In targeting, we strive for near-certainty,

Mindful of our solemn responsibility.

[ 57 ]

“I bet you’ve never killed a group of people, watched on the screen as their bodies are gradually gathered, viewed the funeral, then killed them all, too ... but Dr. Asclepius, I feel I can trust you, in this dream, I’m commanded to look down from the height of computerized heaven ...” “Easy, Philoctetes ...”

Our oversight protocols are very robust, This is hard stuff. We’re committed to doing it right.

[ 58 ]

Voice “Voice is a pretty amazing thing,” said the lead researcher for an experiment to implant connective tissue and lining cells from healthy vocal cords into the muzzle of a jammed Kalashnikov, reviving the keen patter of one whose speech had unexpectedly faltered.

“We don’t give voice much thought until it goes wrong,” he added. “It’s an exquisite system and hard to replicate.” When the transplanted folds of tissue in the AK were triggered, they spoke with the same penetration as a normal forceful voice and therefore could pierce irrelevant objections of walls or of common vehicles’ metal bodies equally well.

And cogent arguments remained intact even after making contact with bone.

Moreover, scientists believe the immune systems of any faltering weaponry will soon accept vocal cords taken from dead human donors.

Best of all, high-speed digital imaging revealed the Kalashnikov had endured the scaffolds of tough elastic tissue without failing to cycle, and was uttering bursts of words on the tactics and techniques of debate; for example, I commence my case with an attention-grabber.

Or, To better rebut my opponents’ contention, I remember to cluster sub-points closely together.

[ 59 ]

Half a New Life Tamsin Hopkins

He turned up at the annual company do with a sweet young thing who made him smile and look like the man he might have been – before he met the unhappy one who I presume has kept the children

[ 60 ]

Walking It Off James R. Kincaid

It wasn’t a serious quarrel, not what you’d call a fight, but what you’d call a natural consequence of normal conditions, only that. Nobody’s fault. There was just the usual strain of being at a conference, that was number one. Also – and don’t discount this – they hadn’t yet caught up on sleep. It was a long haul from Iowa City to beautiful (less than advertised) Cape Town. No wonder they felt a little edgy. Perfectly natural. It was a spat. That’s what you’d call it, that and the issuance of sulfurous poison from Fran, who couldn’t help it, after all, any more than a scorpion could help stinging if you crossed its path. Fran hadn’t always been like this, only she had. Perhaps that’s why he had married her, some need to prove something to himself - maybe that he was a stupid horse’s ass.

But he knew he’d feel better about it soon, get things in perspective, like they say. He’d already started to cool off and see how trivial it all was, Fran’s position for sure. He tried a strategic laugh. Big mistake. Turns out he wasn’t yet ready. What emerged was a whining snarl. At least it made Fran pause.

Then she giggled. She actually giggled. Nobody could be expected to take that, so in order to avoid saying something he’d later regret, he grabbed his umbrella and mentioned quietly he would be going for a short walk, just to clear his head.

That wasn’t quite all he said. He was only human. He added – and you would have done so too – “I hope you swallow your tongue, you rancorous bitch.”

Too bad he also added – even he later regretted it – “I think you’re the worst person in the western hemisphere.”

Not that she wasn’t, very likely, something of the sort, but what sort was it?

Insults had better be specific or they’re nothing worth. He’d always thought that. I mean, talk about vague. The worst person? In what way, to what degree, in what categories? As insults went, it was no better than C- and it didn’t come close to matching the phrases that sprang to mind as he walked along the streets; streets, he suddenly remembered, not even in the western hemisphere. He also

[ 61 ]

remembered he’d been told not to walk these streets, at least not by himself, at least not after dark.

But it wasn’t dark just yet and he soon found he wasn’t alone.

“Loved your paper, Tom.”

“Thanks. It’s Thad, not Tom.”

“Oh, yeah, Thad. Short for Thadeus?”

It wasn’t, but he didn’t want to explain, so he said, “Uh Huh.”

This fellow conferencer said no more, arrested his progress by standing before him grinning vacantly. He had no choice:

“Liked your paper too.”

“Thanks.”

“Welcome.”

“I didn’t give one.”

“Oh.”

“I’m just here for the fun. Actually, I told my university, such as it is, I was on the board, in charge of something, instrumental and indispensable, you see.

That way, I don’t have to produce evidence of a paper, they pay my way, and I have a good time.”

“Do you?”

“Have a good time, oh yes. My name is also Tom, Tom Wilkinson, only your name isn’t Tom, it’s Thad. I got that now.”

“Are you taking a walk, Tom?”

“I wasn’t but now I am. I’ll just trot along beside you, if I may. Where you off to?”

“I thought I’d just wander. You know.”

“That’s a real bad idea, Thad. Remember what they said.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Keep your wits about you, Thad.”

“What did they say?”

“Dangerous streets, high crime, gangs, prostitutes, slick salesmen, unscrupulous peddlers. Don’t go unattended.”

“OK. Thanks.”

“I’ll attend you, you see, and that way we’ll be within the guidelines, violating no precautions established for our own benefit. Have a fight with your wife?”

“What?”

“Not to be intrusive.”

“Of course not.”

“So, did you?”

“Why would you think that? My wife and I...” [ 62 ]

“Fight all the time. Anybody could see that. It’s not your fault, these fights.”

“How would you know that?”

“One look at your wife. Well, more than just one, kind of studied her. A real bitch, right, a harridan, no understanding of your position.”

“Well, she’s no dummy.”

“Oh, no. She’s smart enough. Them’s the ones. She knows, she just doesn’t give a fuck. She reads you like a book and then spits on the pages. She’d shit on your clean shirts if the idea crossed her mind.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“That’s because you’re hiding things from yourself, things plain as day to perfect strangers, or those who used to be strangers before joining you on a pleasant stroll along the mean streets of Cape Town.”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot to be said...”

“That’s where you’re wrong. The only thing to be said is, ‘Good-bye, honey; I hope the door hits you in the ass on the way out.’”

“Yeah, well, it’s not that simple.”

“I know, divorce: lawyers, alimony. Cheaper just to bump her off and no less risky, really.”

“You a hit man?”

“No, no. I have many talents but only academic ones. I won a teaching award last year and I’ve published quite a bit, quite a bit by anyone’s standards except my fucking Dean’s, who won’t even let me stand for promotion, the miserable son of a bitch.”

“Yes, well, my route veers off here, you know. I’ll see you at the morning session, all about ‘Dickens and Africa’, I think.”

“Is it? Anyhow, where are you going? I have nothing planned.”

Even if it meant swimming with the white sharks, he wasn’t going to stay in this guy’s company a minute longer, not if he had to do in one of them.

“Table Mountain.” It was the first thing entered his head, probably because he’d been told not to go there.

“That’s a long hike. Way too late.”

“Cable-car.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean - just give me a minute. Here, I got the materials. There’ve been fifteen attacks on tourists at Table Mountain in the last fortnight alone, according to The Sunday Times, attacks from gangs. And the gangs here make the ones back home look like bands of Brownie Scouts. That’s the truth.”

“Well, I have a gun on me.” [ 63 ]

“Nah.”

I was silent, but he wasn’t.

“Not just gangs but snakes. Here, let me read to you: ‘The mountain and its trails are infested with many varieties of lethally poisonous snakes, the most aggressive of which are the puff adder, Africa’s biggest killer, the cape cobra, which is mistaken often for the harmless mole snake, and, of course, the deadly boomslang.’ Wait, they also say, ‘Most people think all these snakes are fat and lazy, but they move quickly, strike without warning, often from behind, and will cause both pain and death. Do not pick them up.’”

“I’ll be sure not to try and pet them. I really must be off, catch that cablecar.”

“Ah, Jesus, Thad. One more thing. Just one more, I promise. There’s been a rash of falls off those cliffs. You know those picturesque cliffs that lead straight down. Just yesterday a guy had a seizure and fell seventy meters to the Upper Africa Ledge, he did. And two others last week, not with seizures or anything, got too close to the edge and - they’re off! Slippery even when not wet and gravel that slides under your toes, sending you off into space. Why, an American schoolteacher and her sister. . . ”

“Thanks, Tom. I’ll be very careful.”

But you know what? He wasn’t. The cable-car ride was just fine, took less than five minutes and deposited him in what should have been ideal grounds for viewing one of the best sunsets of the entire summer. That’s what the next-day papers, supported by locals, reported, and doubtless they were right.

But Thad was no dummy, had absorbed enough of Tom’s cautions, exaggerated as they obviously were, to watch his step. He watched it so closely, imaging puff adders behind every rock, that he failed to notice the menacing gang until it was almost on him.

Moving quickly – Thad had good reflexes – he edged diagonally away from them and right over the edge of the cliff. Didn’t slip, really, more like plunged.

Just before hurtling forward he saw that the gang was not so much a gang as a group of tourists with hoodies, protecting themselves from the winds and drizzle.

“Well, the laugh’s on me,” he thought, or maybe said, as he descended. He also had time not only to think but undeniably to shout, “Oh, Fran, forgive me!”

Then his body broke open.

[ 64 ]

The Forest of Viridescence Alison Lock

The traders rock from side to side in their skin boots: their limbs padded, their bodies swathed in wadding. They stand hunched, in bunches along the back of the stalls, swinging their arms and slapping them across their bodies; hugging in the warmth, stamping their feet on the ground. Today’s temperature is the lowest of the winter so far.

I lay out the bric-a-brac: ornaments, lampshades, leather purses, items embossed with the names of places I have never visited – and nor am I likely to – the monickers of foreign places. At the front of the stall are the smaller items, the ones I love: shiny brass bangles, necklaces, beads, trinkets – the keepsakes of a kind that no-one keeps for long. Things that have been collected, begged, swapped, and occasionally stolen from the nests of others.

The air has a menacing, bitter edge. Even so, the sun shines through, too brightly – a searing white neither like heat nor freeze – some twist in the climate. The snows have retreated quickly, almost overnight, and the town is covered in a glaze, peaked in the corners, dripping from railings, forming a sheering of ice.

“Stay here and do not leave the stall.” Father’s last instruction.

[ 65 ]

I am left under the watchful eye of Shiri while Father tends his ‘important’ business.

“Keep an eye on my flighty daughter,” he says.

For him, there are always people to meet: deals to make and sometimes break.

He says I bring him luck, and he taps the side of his nose as if we share a secret.

As we drew into town in the first shadows of dawn, Father slowed as we neared the horses; some tied to posts, others corralled within wicker fences. Boys were brushing down the horses’ coats, slicking over imperfections; the older ones were chiding and cursing their beasts to make them walk in a perfect circle, heads up. I guess Father will be there now – at the Beast Market. It is always the same.

Father never brings home a horse or even a cow or a sow or a gaggle of geese – but somehow, a deal has been done. Some poor creatures have been bought and sold or exchanged and sold on again. He is a master of his trade. Today he has brought a cage.

The town in the valley had once been famous. Where the market now stands was a grand palace built by the King of Trin. It had tiered roofs, gardens, waterfalls, fountains and pools of rainbow fish. There were steam rooms and saunas and deep pools of icy water for visitors to steep their bodies, rejuvenate their flesh.

The king invited many and welcomed those who wished to hunt in the forests for the deer and the wild hogs. The sides of the slaughtered animals were hung in the shady hallways to dry, or were salted, or smoked in the charcoal burners.

The king’s chefs created pies and puddings that are still famous throughout the region.

I have listened to the stories. As small children, we gathered in the Great Hut to sit at the feet of Molam, the storyteller. Every year in the springtime he left his cave in the upper valley and strode down to the towns and villages to tell his stories for a few coins or a meal. He delighted us with his tales of the lands beyond the mountains, where the great rivers divided and filled the soil with sweet minerals. He told us how our country had once been abundant with flora and fauna: exotic creatures, birds of many colours, plants and flowers that contained all the shades of oil on water.

In Molam’s stories, every bird belonged to the king and it was forbidden to kill any of them. Cages stretched along the whole side of the palace and it was here that the most exotic birds were kept and bred. One day the king received a gift of a pair of rare emerald flutebirds. A special cage was made for them and the [ 66 ]

king hoped that they would breed. But no matter how much their surroundings emulated the forest, how luxurious were their furnishings, how soft was the velvet of their mossy perches, or how abundant the array of freshly cut branches, the truth was that they were unable to breed whilst held captive. Eventually, the male bird died; the female simply disappeared. But over the centuries many people have claimed to have seen the female flute bird.

By mid-morning I am almost unable to move from my stool. I am hunched inside the collar of my hair coat, my neck retracted. The cold has worked its way into my bones; the pump of my tiny heart is barely able to shift the stream of icy blood. The drip on the end of my nose has all but frozen into a sharp point.

Now I am so cold, I believe I will be paralysed – fixed to my stool forever.

Balanced on my haunches, I hug my knees. The stool rocks and almost tips. Noone has bought anything from the stall today, but that is not surprising – none have the leisure to linger over trinkets in this bitter cold.

The market cats arrive in a clowder. I have a fear of cats, and I am frozen. I pull the great coat around me as they sniff along the edges of the stalls and slip around the hallway like a team of wily thieves.

Shiri is on the next stall. She has not seen the cats. She knows how I feel about them and often she will let me hide in her barrow of rugs. Now she has a customer and she is running her hand along a bolt of cloth, showing the neatness of its weave. The customer is frowning at the price, pursing her lips, offering too little. Poor Shiri! She tries so hard to make a living. Each week she brings the items her family have collected and re-made from rags – cut up, patched or embroidered over to cover a stain. She likes to catch the eye of a passer-by, calling to them, suggesting they might like this lovely throw or that patchwork bedcover, or a pictorial wallhanging to add interest to their home.

“Go for a walk, Birdy,” Shiri suggests. “You need to move about or you’ll catch cold.”

She hands me a cup of hot maize from her flask. She looks into my face below the peak of my hood.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I will watch the stall.”

“I’ll be back as quick as I can,” I say. “You won’t...” [ 67 ]

“No, I won’t say anything.” She knows I mean Father. “Don’t worry,” she says.

“Go, little Bird, go.”

She always calls me Bird because I am so small and slight. My feet are tiny like an infant’s, never having grown out of their first pair of shoes. And once, when she brought dates and seeds for a snack, I ate the whole lot. She was not cross; she declared that I must have needed them more than she did, because I have no fat on me. Once, when she had cause to lift me up, she declared: “You’re as light as a tiny bird!”

I wander away as Shiri plays a tune on her ocarina; the tiny notes gather in the vessel and stream through the myriad of pathways that form the maze of Poco Market. The stalls around the edges are open to the sky and, like mine, they sell goods that were once owned by others. A cornucopia of overflowing stalls surrounds the established vendors – those who have a covering of canvas. Some are enclosed within large marquees where customers browse through the goods, whiling away their time while sheltering from the vagaries of the weather. There are stalls that sell fresh meat, eggs, cheese, pastries, cakes, painted tableware, glassware: everything you could need to set up a new household.

The centre of the market has a roof, of sorts, held up by a framework that once shouldered the great carved beams that made the market famous throughout the region.

I am almost through to the other side of the market when I begin to feel the warmth. The heat is coming from a brazier whose flames are reflected in daubs of orange and yellow on the flagstones. A group of men are gathered around it; they are smoking, spitting onto the ground. Some are shaking hands, some are leaving.

Several youngsters are seated on a raised plinth below a bar to which the horses are tied. They swing their legs and pass a bottle from one to the other. On one side are goats housed in pens; they nudge at the pens with their horns. The smoke that comes from the fire is bitter, almost acrid, but even so, I enjoy the sharp tang as it hits my senses. I am near enough to the stalls at the edge not be noticed. This is the Beast Market.

A man picks up a plank of tarred wood and throws it into the fire. There is a crack and a spit of tar that shoots out across the yard. It lands at my feet. I shriek. The men fall silent for a moment. They resume their conversation. Then others join them, talking in an unfamiliar dialect. But there is one voice I know [ 68 ]

well among the quick, guttural sounds – my father’s voice. He has not seen me and I duck below a stall and peer over the tabletop. The conversation continues, each time petering out until it is snatched up by the others as if it must be grabbed and tackled to the ground. These men must be from over the Purling Mountains judging by their gowns of heavy grey and brown stripes. I have heard that up in the mountains they speak few words for fear of catching cold. Perhaps, the valley air does not compare with the freezing temperatures they are used to.

Their voices are raised as if they are jostling to own the words, but still I have no idea what they are saying.

Father is at the centre of the crowd and he is arguing with a tall man. I try to slip by, but they are filling the whole space of the aisle between the stalls. They are gesticulating and their voices are raised. Then others begin to push, butting each other in the chest with open hands. It seems that something has been stolen and the tall man is demanding its return, but Father is waving some money in his face and shouting, as if it is he who has been hard done by.

A bird, the colour of emeralds, appears from between them as if conjured from the heat of the fray. The men turn towards it and for a moment all is quiet again.

They watch as the bird lands on a stall of corn dollies and scarecrows and pecks at the straw – once, twice – before a strand is released.

The bird calls in a single clear note and flutters in front of me. Its fan of soft tails brushes across my face. The feathers tickle; I laugh. A tingling sensation has spread around my body as if it is coming from the inside. My blood is no longer stiff, my limbs are free and light and I feel my heart quickening.

The stall-holders and their customers are looking up as the bird ascends into the roof. But the men are rushing around, their arms wide open, pushing each other, running in circles and from side to side. They are all trying to capture the bird. They are looking everywhere: under the stalls, behind the barrels, into the rafters. There is only one who has not moved and who continues to stare in my direction. It is Father. He is holding a bundle of notes in one hand and in the other, a cage. I look down at him from my perch on the purloin. His eyes are dark gems, gleaming. I am afraid to be so high above the ground and I call out.

“Father! Father! Catch me.”

He stares up. He does not take his eyes from me for a moment as he opens the door of the cage – the bird cage. Around my neck is a thick bristling ruff but it [ 69 ]

moves easily, each feather gliding against the other. I look at my arms and see that they are cloaked in fine green feathers and I wonder if my wings are strong enough to take me back to Shiri.

Father has not seen her. Shiri is standing a little way behind. Her hands are clasped around the ocarina; the notes flutter in the air. The tune is one I have never heard before. It rises, then floats, then lifts up as if in proclamation: Fly free, Bird, fly free. The notes curl around the rafters, over the heads of the market traders, out through the market, across the town, as we follow the course of the swift river towards the forests of viridescence.

[ 70 ]

Two Poems Fran Lock

The rural towns you never leave Early doors and we was covetous and bleeding, bleating kisses at each other. Touching, touched, by your toolkit caresses, the finite guile that vodka gives. And you was swayed by bottled fervour, yellow light, obliquely drunk.

We meant to get free, for real, go clear. The mirrored ceiling studied you. The TV broadcast filth and sport; weaponised umbrage and torture porn. The news began to float another doomed armada of sea-worthy, teetering faces, the starveling and the culprit. The news was blame, atomic folly, fallen sky. We meant to get free and far, go clear. Hashtag, drowning not waving. Hashtag, howling not laughing. We meant to run, and then, by the thumbing of spring’s green prick, we might arrive at betterness.

More likely not, you said. More likely exploded airlines, crash diets and beta testing. More likely a ravenous weeping we set to like wolves; the world and its wan barbarism, with Celtic playing at home. And what’s the point? you said. Two girls perpetually pried, and courting exhaustion in lip gloss. How could we ever outrun this? The pulverised sci-fi of cities, wars, the war as indistinguishable from the city. And you spat your words up, playing to the ashtray faces of boys with tattooed necks, like everything you said was either heresy or blessing. You spat your words up with the diseased intensity of hornets, pit bulls, and you was oiky, spoiling, riding on waves

[ 71 ]

of amber panic. I knew it would not end well.

And stood on the table, saint in the votive disarray of shot glasses and scented candles. The landlord come, a fat arithmetic of fingers, gastric juggernaut bearing down. He was kicking you. He was kicking you. And I knew we would never get free, for real, go clear. Only I would balk at spookable locals, shying like horses, bowls of rank stew, the smell of wet grass at four in the morning, your wagering blarney, the world as we knew it. I ran. You stayed.

And now the days crawl by in wheedling sufferance.

I close my eyes, but cannot green this thought of you, doing a chemical penance in psyche wards.

I skip and cringe and shoot for the moon.

[ 72 ]

The very last poem in the Book of Last Things The plug in the neighbour’s kitchen makes a little living click / like a cricket / anthems to insect separatism / Muldoon’s rank gnashers / a regular Mr Ed / Michelin-starred tosspot / canonised decrepitude / a photo-negative Agincourt, his fingers raised in silhouette / I will be here / I am always here / my sneering ennui / practiced villain in a white van veering / verily, this is my town / herringbone boys in porkpie hats / how nothin’ ever change, oh no / girls in frostbite bevies, bleak midwinter / kick up your heels / ashveloped in cigarette shelter / codename cloudy, cross yourself / the creaturely solving of bodies / meat-packing laggards with mean, clear smiles / factory lasses en masse / their visitant tradition / mouths propped open like doors left ajar / the horse has bolted / were you born in a barn? / the bible is a catalogue of baby names / girls, their considerate grip on your fancies / her head is a tawny bulge / I am here / I will always be here / insufferable fauna / lily-titted girls / the crude physics of a vigil / a surf of shattered sound / this is my town / the disciplined triage of yearning / tilt on my pivot against the custom’s post / Michael, she says, dropping her blastoff flatteries like small change / Michael, Michael / describing a delicate tightening gyre / her eye, a timid pinwheel / boyfriends pink to their pauper-core, the worse for drink / flagrant parade / pasture of flags / faces become brute totems / an imposing Porsche / a nonchalant dog / the property of civic leaders / their pert wives combination-locked with gin / swampy lips in glasshouse affluenza / dogwood coral hectic red / dowry of stars / an ovulate moon / and now the militant cripple’s syringe / an oversexed surprise / his popcorn kernel mitts, puffed like thought balloons / I am here / I am here too / and the turbulent priest with his guts hanging out and no one knowing what to say / wincing and riveted small-town boys whose north was a fertile phoneme / popped like a lightbulb / an overlit egg / Muldoon with his insider’s small-fry / flats, in their satellite diocese beaming becalmed on reruns of Dallas / oh, in the drizzled tizzy of the rain, her hair all hanging in gym-rope plaits / she crackles like a masterpiece / slack lank lather of love’s young dream / the mediocre ballast of a cautionary heart / herself in all her fetching scarcities / the mothers misfiring a nightmare into Catholic guilt and tinnitus / paying a pound for an orange sky / to quiver at a migrant Mass for the sour muddle of border towns / a decked wife is a shining lamp in the rare good giddy-up of the pub / ticklish hills beneath the tension wires / dry heaving boys / in dormitory peristalsis / cry for their mammies or profess themselves amazed / I am here / tight-lipped as an oyster, shocked-mute / the town, my town, under its drenching bell / picket of limp saints, guarding the graves / Christ is a cracked gasket tonight / a remedial

[ 73 ]

fuck with a wagging tongue / in blizzard telepathy, reaching out / I am Michael, Michael since sixty-nine / and the regulars / Spandau / twisting again / her slaked curves summing things up / a scribbled revision of falling boys / girls in concrete conjuration / jinxed cement / bleating, butterfly-stroking glass / enough, he says / she says enough / corporal dementia / gross ore, a cheekbone flayed of paint / mine / the doctrine of what is solid, clambering anger that pulls itself from pools / wishy-washy waterlogged and moonwalk-slow to move / spooning exquisites on trampled straw / that boy with ruby-slippers for stumps, I know / and kindness crows like a phone / faith, hope and Major fucking Barbara / replenished terror, infected pellets / spongiform forgetfulness / for children / for micro-chipped students / for the trite inkblots of blood / boys’ blood / the peacewall warped in the rain / rapping the city a final reminder / thug knucklebone splitting a lip / I have seen it / Michael, I am Michael / four men went to mow damp daylight into cloisters / clusters / ten men on derelict requiem blasted / went to mow / stringing along on filament’s thin trapeze / the wire that is the wire-walker / a solitaire tribute dumb as hunger / at three in the morning I am Michael, fishing the roving river clean / and every mill pond is a socket / customary tourniquet / her red hair / agile, ex-lover / I cannot unsee.

[ 74 ]

Zebra Philippa Matthews

Henry Babbs put his foot on the brakes just a second too late. He knew even before he heard the low, dull sound somewhat below the frequency of the skid, that he had hit the young girl. Her face, with its look of surprise, would stay with him for weeks, possibly longer. The eyes had widened as they do in cartoons he had enjoyed as a child, but the moment of impact was lost visually, besides, it had happened too quickly. It was the sound, the low dull thud that struck him uncomfortably.

He stopped the car, opened the door and, leaving it open to indicate he was not going anywhere, stepped out onto the tarmac, joining the melee around the prostrate body, which he saw quickly was damaged rather than dead. A fractured leg perhaps.

A woman with a green scarf around her shoulders and brown hair shouted, “Phone 999.” At the same time he heard someone already on a phone talking into it, explaining there was a child on a zebra crossing. Henry crouched beside her.

“You’ve been drinking,” the woman said, her nose wrinkling to sniff.

“If anything is broken you oughtn’t to move her.”

“It’s alright, calm down.” A man’s hand leant heavily on his shoulder and he was aware of how cold he was. He had only put on the light summer jacket, a cotton brown thing with deep pockets to buy some stamps. Now he realised how bloody cold it was. His breath was making white clouds as he huddled beside the girl, about 12 years old he thought. He wondered where her parents were and then that it was probably a good thing they weren’t here. Better that they find out after they know she’s not badly hurt. His own child, a boy, was grown up, but he’d had his share of frights. The time Alisdair had gone off to Australia - he’d never liked flying himself - he’d stayed up all night and the next day, waiting for confirmation the plane had landed safely. But this was only a broken leg, the shin, a small bone, nothing like the sort of pain if it had been the upper femur.

[ 75 ]

He looked at the girl’s face and was surprised to see she was crying. A mass of dirty blond hair spread out behind her on the white stripe of the zebra, and her eyes were streaked with black make up. Perhaps she was thirteen. He hoped she was thirteen.

After the ambulance arrived and because no one was speaking to him anymore, he decided it was the right time to make a discreet exit. Horns were tooting as they made a wide berth around his car which sat with its door wide open across the road. He wrote down his name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to the woman in the scarf even though he had already decided she was the sort of woman who might take against him. She looked down suspiciously at the writing - “How do I know...?” she protested, but he was already hurrying to his car. He dropped inside, now really very cold, pulled the door gently to, and turned on the ignition. The engine started first time which was fortunate. He put his foot down and accelerated quickly, shooting away as the light dispersed and darkness subsumed the road.

His lights were on, and his heart was palpitating. It hadn’t before, now it was rampaging in his chest. He told himself it would slow and began to count to ten, making a point of breathing out for longer than breathing in. By the time he reached the river it was doing better, though he was still concerned. There seemed to be something different about the beat. A lumpiness, a choking off... He drove slowly.

Traffic was banking up towards the National Trust house at the end of the dual carriageway. He wanted to turn left and go to the Park but he was now wondering if it was not too late to catch the gates before they closed. He tried to pass a large vehicle in front and tooted, but there was too much other, periphery noise and the car remained immobile. He put on the radio, something by Mozart was playing, a light, joyful piece that clashed with his mood. He wondered if he had smelt of whisky. He wondered if the woman had smelt it and if so would she tell the ambulance men. And the police. The police would ask why he had left the scene. Hopefully once they read his name on the slip of paper it would be obvious.

At last the traffic budged and he was able to slip through on the left all the way to the top. He skidded round in front of a cement lorry, and scooted out of the bend. If he put his foot down he would catch the gates. Ahead he could see the black glossy structures with their swirls and curlicues, glinting under the street lamps. Ah, it was not too late. He drove through, a surge of well-being returning to his body as he saw the fountain and the upright shapes of the horsechestnuts.

“Why did you say you were late?”

“I had an accident. I think I might have hit her.” [ 76 ]

“Hit who?” His daughter-in-law Elinor, still wearing her work suit, remained by the stairs.

Henry went towards the living room.

“Thank God you put the heating on, it’s getting colder. I shouldn’t be surprised if we had snow.”

“They said that yesterday. Who did you hit? Have you phoned the ambulance?”

“Yes, of course. Do you think I’d have left?”

She shrugged and went towards the back of the house.

“Where’s Alisdair?” he called out.

He heard the bang of a pan, then the fast noise of water from the tap; she hadn’t heard.

Henry now got comfortable in his favourite arm chair. He liked the feel of the soft velvet under him, and the solid wood of its arms and back. It was not exactly a comfortable chair but it was comforting, in its straightness, in its rigidity. For a moment he remembered his wife, Florence, sitting opposite him, and the two of them talking, arguing probably about some philosophical or political point. She was much more left wing than him, sometimes he had said things merely to see her fly into a rage. Mostly, they had argued with good grace.

She was the clever one, of course, he a mere amateur in those subjects, which of course was why he so enjoyed it. He picked up his pipe and knocked the old tobacco out onto the desk, then he found his pouch for a new bit. He kneaded it gently, enjoying its musty scent, leaned back and lit it with the silver lighter that Alisdair had given him.

“Al popped out. He said not to wait.”

She was at the door. He had never got used to his daughter in law. She was from a different tribe, that’s how he explained it, she was from a Capitalist family. Rich property developers, one of her sisters worked in Corporate entertainment, another in something with computers. He didn’t understand that world, but he knew he did not like it. She had, he was sure, regretted marrying his son, who would never amount to much in her eyes. He put the pipe down on the desk where it continued to smoke in a thin sly line.

“Would you like it on your table in here, Henry?” She had the tray in her hands and was holding it up to him. She always treated him as if he was an invalid.

“I suppose so.”

She brought it over, she was smiling.

“Thank you Eli, thank you.”

“That’s alright.” The words sounded curt to him and he had to stop his body from wincing. [ 77 ]

“You didn’t really hit someone?”

“Not really.” He had meant to say, Yes, he had, but there was something about her presence that disturbed him, that made the words come out wrong.

“I’m not sure. She was lying on the ground. Perhaps it was someone else.

Or she just fell down of her own accord. You know, was ill.”

Elinor looked at him as if she had heard similar things before.

“You better tell Al when he gets back, just to be on the safe side.”

“I’ll do that. Good thinking. And thanks. Looks delicious.”

“It’s only stew.”

He watched her leave the room and close the door. He heard the softness of her steps return to the large, echoing, cold kitchen. He found the tv remote and turned it on so as not to have to listen to where she went next, probably the back room or upstairs, or even the conservatory. Alisdair had said she liked it in there.

He wondered how long before the two of them moved back into the flat that was having an extra bathroom added. He gritted his teeth, another week at least.

The television sprang to life. Some sort of game show. He turned the volume up just enough, but not so Elinor could hear. She disapproved of these programmes. The colour was also too bright, too much cerise in their faces, but he liked the vibrancy of it. He’d seen this one before. A circle of people all trying to answer questions and someone in the middle who’d win a lot of money if they got it right. He found it exciting. Yet sometimes he found that he was disappointed when the one in the middle won money. After all the suspense and excitement it was a let-down; it was only money. He would have preferred a different sort of prize like a horse, or a holiday, or a new suit. He could do with a new suit, only he didn’t have anywhere to wear it to except the annual college reunion.

He heard the door bang and then Elinor’s voice. He knew that step anywhere. He called out, “I’m in the front room!”

The brass door handle turned and Alisdair walked in. He was wearing a plum coloured corduroy jacket which had seen better days, and jeans.

“Have you had a nice time?”

“Yes thanks. Elinor said something about a girl?”

Henry brushed the comment to one side with a sweeping motion.

“I think we better phone the police,” Alisdair said moving towards the large bookcase.

“How do you know it was my fault? I expect she just fell. People do, then they try to blame whoever was there and get a lot of money off them. Better to let it go, I should think.”

Alisdair wavered and frowned. He found the room insufferably hot, like a sauna. He noticed Dad’s pipe was smouldering and underneath on the walnut chessboard there was a charred smudge.

[ 78 ]

“They don’t like it if you drive off.” He went back out again.

Henry got up and rushed to the hallway. “Don’t interfere, Al, don’t stir it all up. I left my name and address. They don’t care about an old university lecturer.”

Alisdair was going upstairs and Henry thought that his son was drifting away from him. He put out a hand, he wanted to hold him, to make it right, the feel of his skin, but Alisdair was now higher up on the landing.

“Alright, Dad, have it your own way.” He disappeared along the corridor.

In the morning, over breakfast at the big round table, the debate started up again. “I should think they looked after her. She was wearing make-up. Not a baby.”

“Why did you leave your address?” it was Elinor speaking

“I thought I ought.”

“But if you didn’t hit her.”

“I said I might have done, that’s all I was saying... I didn’t want to look as if I was running away. I thought it would look bad.”

“Which address did you give, I hope it wasn’t our flat!”

“This one, of course!’

Alisdair turned to Elinor. “I do wish he’d asked us first.”

Left to his own devices he worried about the whisky, it was amazing how non-drinkers picked up on the smell. He was quite sure the woman with the green scarf didn’t drink. He decided that he would go back to the scene tomorrow. He would drive again.

It was a bright blowy day. Despite it being nearly December there were still a few leaves on the big plane trees whose branches swooped like magpies in the wind. Such a windy autumn, he’d always disliked wind. Rain, he could cope with, but winter wind cut through you.

He drove slowly. Surely, he thought, I wasn’t going any faster yesterday.

Perhaps it is all in my mind that I was going fast. I must remember to say that at the inquest: that I was not going fast. He passed the second-hand shops, the old-fashioned bakery where he sometimes stopped for a jam doughnut, the bank with its menacing blue and black flag, the row of Georgian cottages that reminded him of an earlier age, the modern medical centre, painted that ubiquitous shade of cream. At the zebra he could see a woman with a shopping trolley and a young black girl in a purple anorak waiting. The zebra was next to a take-away food outlet with a bright orange sign. He thought that he had not noticed the sign until now, and behind the sign was another pointing towards a small carpark only for users of the music shop. The shop was just beyond the zebra on the right hand side. [ 79 ]

He pressed the brakes and the Volvo slowed. The pedestrians however waited, perhaps they had heard about the accident and were not taking anything for granted, until he had stopped completely. There was a faint squeak of brakes.

He hadn’t had a service recently. They crossed. Another woman arrived on the other side with a blind dog, he waited, then a tall man ran out of nowhere, his long legs clad in pale grey jeans which looked thin and mean. The Volvo spluttered and the engine stalled. He turned the key, and again. It would not start.

[ 80 ]

Eight images by Julian McKenny

Means of Escape Means of Escape is a response to relocating to West Wales and setting up a market garden where a simpler and more honest life might be lived, satisfying our basic human needs.

The images are a sensory rather than documentary reaction to the experience of beginning a new life in an empty field.

[ 81 ]

[ 82 ]

[ 83 ]

[ 84 ]

[ 85 ]

[ 86 ]

[ 87 ]

[ 88 ]

[ 89 ]

Maybe She’ll Remember Michael Melgaard

1.

Doug sat out the side of his truck with his elbows on his knees and head hanging down between them. Larry sat out the passenger side of his own truck sipping at a coffee. The morning crew talked at them from Larry’s radio.

Doug said, “Fuck.”

Larry held his thermos. Doug looked up, then reached under his seat and pulled out a cup. He wiped it with an old rag. Larry asked, “Late night?”

Doug shook his head in a way that meant yes. They drank their coffees and listened to the hits until the DJ came on and said the time. Larry turned off the radio and said, “Pitter patter.”

And Doug said, “Fuck off with that shit,” but flicked the last drops of his coffee at the ground and tossed the cup back in the truck. They tied up their boots, clipped on their tool belts and headed over to the site.

Larry got the forklift started and lifted a couple pallets of blocks up to the top of the scaffolding while Doug got the mixer going. He hiked his jogging pants up over his belly and dumped a bag of cement in, then added the water. When it was mixed, he dumped the mud into a wheel barrow and pushed that up onto a pallet that Larry lifted up top. Then they climbed up, Doug slowly, taking one rung at a time. The sun was just coming up over the mountains.

[ 90 ]

There were four buildings going up on the site. The first was done and the tenants, a brake and lube place, had already moved in. The second building was just getting its roof. Larry and Doug had done the block work on the first two and would be done with the third building in a few more weeks, then they’d start on the fourth, which was just a hole in the ground waiting for the foundation to be laid. When it was all done, four identical cinder-block warehouses would stand in a row along the highway.

The other trades showed up while Doug and Larry worked. Some of the guys shouted hellos up to them; one said he was surprised Doug made it to work. Doug flipped him the bird. When the sun got high over the buildings, Larry took off his sweater and Doug sat on a pallet and pulled off his jogging pants. He was wearing faded fluorescent swimming trunks underneath. He scratched himself. Larry asked, “You at the George and Dragon last night?”

“Shut it down.”

“Jesus.”

Doug scooped mud onto his trowel and slid it along the edge of the blocks, covering about four feet’s worth of wall. He grabbed a block with his good arm and pulled it onto his hip. He gave himself a few seconds rest before hauling it over the top of the rebar and lowering it into place. He tapped the block in to place with the butt of his trowel, and then did the same with another. Before the mud dried, he and Larry double checked with the plumb line and level to make sure it was all square, then Doug ran the jointer along between the blocks to clean up the mud that had squished out.

At ten the food wagon came by. They climbed down and Doug bought a donut and drank two more cups of coffee while the crew all shot the shit. Most of the guys sat down on their lunch coolers; Doug ate standing up, legs apart and leaning over a skid of bricks to avoid sitting on his hemorrhoids.

They worked through the morning. Just before noon, Doug said, “Anyways, I got to head out at lunchtime today.”

“What for?”

“Doctor.”

[ 91 ]

“Again? You okay?”

“Never have been.”

“I’m serious, you good?”

“Can’t imagine it’s too good when they call you back in.”

Doug pulled his jogging pants back on and said to Larry, “I’ll see you Monday.”

Larry said, “Take care, okay?”

2.

“How long I have been your doctor?”

“I guess we started coming to you when Alice was pregnant with John. Maybe thirty years?”

“That sounds about right. And what have I been telling you all that time?”

“Usually to stop smoking.”

“And drinking. And eating whatever it is you eat that makes your cholesterol tests look like they got dropped in a deep fryer.”

“That’s funny.”

“I try to keep things light. Anyways, we both know you’ve never listened to me and now I have to tell you that it’s time to stop.”

“Yeah, I’ll cut back.”

“Let me put it this way. Keep going how you are, and you’ve got six more months before you end up in the hospital. We can maybe keep you alive for a while, but I don’t think you’d much like it there. And to be honest, I wouldn’t want to dump you on any of my colleagues.”

“Jesus. Do you talk to everyone like this?” [ 92 ]

“You’re a big boy. Your health isn’t great, but you don’t need to die. Start living clean, and who knows, you could get another decade. So, you’re done with all that then?” “…”

“John was in here with your granddaughter the other day. Maybe she’ll remember you if you stick around a few more years.”

“Jesus.”

“Up to you though.”

“I guess I’ll be seeing you.”

“I hope so, Doug.”

3.

A case slid down to replace the one Doug pulled out of the cooler. He closed the door and limped over to the checkout where the clerk said, “You been keeping out of trouble, Dougie?”

“You know it. Give me a pack of Player’s too.”

Doug pulled a roll of twenties out his pockets and handed one over. He waved off the change. The clerk said, “What’s this for?”

“Have a few on me after you get off work.”

“I can’t…”

“Sure you can. You always been good to me.”

Doug dropped the case in front of the passenger seat and took out a beer. He lit a cigarette and headed out, keeping the bottle out of sight.

He drove through town and up hospital hill. The roads there curved around old properties that weren’t quite close enough to each other to make it a subdivision. [ 93 ]

It was the first part of town that expanded back in the seventies, when people still wanted trees between them and their neighbors and it seemed like there was enough space for everyone. Doug had bought a piece of land here when he first moved out west. The contractor he worked for had given him a no-interest loan, and the whole crew had pitched in labor to put the house up. He’d done the same for them. He lived in the house a year, sold it at profit, then bought another piece of property, and did the whole thing over again.

It had been good back then, everyone helped each other with the hard work and then they’d all raise hell together when they were done. He’d got married after all the other guys did. It didn’t last, but most of the others’ didn’t either; there were years when everyone seemed to be taking turns on each other’s couches. But he had money to burn — bricklayers were the best paid trade back then. Now, even drywallers made more. He drove around looking at the houses, looking at his work, making sure it was still in good shape. It was.

He came out the far end of town on the old highway and turned off onto one of the logging roads. It took him over an old wooden bridge and up the side of a mountain. He stopped at a small lake in one of the valleys and had another beer and listened to the radio.

A jeep full of kids came out of the woods on the other side of the water, close enough that Doug could hear their music over his. They all got out and one of them saw him looking and said something to his buddies. They laughed and then another one said, “Hey man, you want a toke?” They all laughed again. Doug toasted them with his beer and headed out.

The logging roads took him over the other side of the mountain and then suddenly he was on paved roads. This was all new since last time he’d been through. There were lots marked out and for sale signs, even a few sites cleared of trees. The houses would all be up against each other, no real yards, just a strip of land between. That was no way to live. And it was expensive, all the money went into the mountain view, so the owners went cheap on material. The houses would all be vinyl sided or stuccoed. They wouldn’t last twenty years before they’d need to be redone. Brick was better, it lasted longer, but was more expensive so none of the developers wanted to use it. Better to build a house on the cheap and let the buyer deal with the repairs down the line.

Doug pulled over at a place that had a good view of the town. A couple walked by with their dog and gave his truck a dirty look. Another couple came by and [ 94 ]

said he shouldn’t be drinking. He told them it was non-alcoholic, he just liked the view. He headed into town.

The way back took him around the lake, past the old farmhouses he’d done some renovations on over the years. He drove past one property whose owners had him build a brick wall along the road. It looked ridiculous — too low to keep anything out, and he’d always thought it would be a pain to get out of the car and open the gate they’d had him put in. But they paid well and in cash, so he couldn’t complain. And it beat the industrial jobs he’d been getting the last few years. There’d been no work but warehouses and garages, cinder block shoeboxes, nothing to them but putting one block on top of another. And even that was slowing down. He was lucky to get a half dozen jobs a year.

There was a roadblock just before the highway. He threw his jacket back over the case and stashed his open beer between the seats. The line inched forward, one car at a time. Doug recognized the cop that came over to his window, it was one of the old guys. He was shaking his head, “Hey Doug, how many you had?”

“Just three.”

“You sure?”

Doug pulled his jacket off the case and tilted it to show how many were missing.

“That probably puts you over, you know?”

“I figured I’d better tell the truth, or you’d give me a hard time for lying. Besides, you wouldn’t have believed me if I said none.”

“You’re right, I wouldn’t have.” The cop looked down at Doug, who tapped the steering wheel and avoided eye contact.

Doug said, “You know I wouldn’t be driving if I’d had too many.”

“I don’t want to hear that. Listen, I’m off work in an hour. If your truck is not parked outside of your apartment when I drive by, I’m going to make things hard on you, okay?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

[ 95 ]

“Don’t thank me. And for fuck’s sake, don’t hit anyone on your way home.”

Doug parked close to the road and went up to his room. He had a beer while he showered and a cigarette in front of the TV. Jeopardy was on. He guessed a few answers and when he didn’t get any right, he turned it off. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a clean button-down shirt and walked down to the George and Dragon.

4.

“Is Lily up?”

“Dad? It’s the middle of the night, no one is up.”

“I was thinking we could go for a drive tomorrow.”

“Dad, can’t this wait?” Then, muffled, “It’s my dad.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking it’d be nice to see her.”

“You been drinking?”

“Only a bit.”

“You got to not call here when you’re drunk, I’ve told you that.”

“It won’t happen again.” “…”

“So, how about a drive tomorrow. I’ll pick you guys up around eleven.”

“You going to be up by then? It’s pretty late.”

“I’ll be up.”

“Why don’t you call when you get up?”

“I’ll be there, don’t worry.”

[ 96 ]

“Sure, dad, sounds good. Can we get some sleep now?”

“Yeah, sorry to call. I just thought it’d be nice to talk to Lily.”

“I’ll see you in the morning, dad.”

“You’ll see me lots of mornings.”

“Sure, dad.”

“Lots. I promise.”

“Sure, dad. Get some rest.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah, dad, tomorrow.”

5.

Doug hung up the phone and felt around the coffee table for his cigarettes. The pack was empty. He picked up a couple of bottles and drank the ends of them.

Then he lay back on the couch and wondered what it was going to be like now.

[ 97 ]

Two Poems Jessica Mookherjee

Our Last Winter Light fooled with us for a while on the Norfolk sands, as if we were her puppies, Wind revealed himself to us with elegant ghosts made from stone-dust; wove his way about our feet, wrote in sand, flung it at us, wanting to be tasted and as the day fled into the marshes, red-shanks rose up from murky skies.

In the sagging dusk we passed golden reeds, Cattails bowed to slow Greenland geese, you told me Bull-rush tastes like cucumber, we could eat bread made from her seeds.

You wanted to explode them like fireworks, paint the beds red like we always did, as we left salt-marshes that November, you picked me horse-parsley; cobalt light, birds roosting, everything faded.

[ 98 ]

The Neglect It began as she started glancing at another man’s dark lashes, noticing languid slow-clover lips, new pallid yarrow hands, his narrow hips, shrunken as a defeated moon sliding down the sky.

She wanted to kiss him.

In the darkness her husband stopped watering the garden, ebbed in backwash sighs, He let Bramble and Black Bryony stretch, Let Dog-weed choke.

He stuck firm to his chair, kept watching the news.

It was when tumble-weed blew through the living-room, as the windows blasted open, that she stared, accusing him from the garden.

Becoming gigantic, he spat fury at the television, at the pale man who pointed his little Bird-weed fingers at graphs, predicting floods and tidal waves; I told you this would happen.

[ 99 ]

My grandfather, once a gravedigger, told me Roger Nash

After the funeral, the gravediggers ate bread with pickled eggs in a nearby tavern. It had been heavy work.

They started to sing quietly. The song had more gaps in it than words, as they swallowed one slippery world after another.

Beer-mats on the tables flapped up and down inexplicably, as though a draft blew in through the chinks in their song.

They tried to cover it over with talk, wet lips to the rims of analogies.

It was like cracks opening up in the bottom of a herring-boat; like blow-holes in a cliff-face about to spit out towers of spray; even like stigmata unsealing in the palms of their now crucified song.

Embarrassed, they went back to the cemetery, to make sure they’d finished the job.

“Ad we filled ’er in proper like?”

They had. Still, they relaid some turf again, seamlessly, to make doubly sure the singing could go on.

[ 100 ]

Three Poems Jan Norton

Rest Bay - Porthcawl, 1967 Each August, when the Works shut down, came deckchairs on the pebbled beach, banana sandwiches and gabardines, Corona pop and Smith’s blue twists of salt.

The aunts lined up behind the windbreak, scarves over sugared beehives and Tempting Touch, Dad’s final wisps of hair blown sideways, my brother’s legs marbled blue from the sea.

On caravan steps we shook out sand from daps.

The curtains spoke of untipped Navy Cut, cod suppers in newspaper on our laps, gas mantles sputtered orange light.

Plump feet poked out from new pyjamas on kitchen benches become beds.

Breakfast milk warm from the cow, Mam smiled and days and hours stretched out ahead.

Happy then, that summer before I knew that while I slept, my friend at home had moved away. We never went again.

[ 101 ]

Fretwork You brought Grandad home in a tin of bifurcated rivets, with tools that fill the shed.

He sits under your skin, ghost in the knotted knuckles and joints of capable fingers, calls you to the oil, the steel, the wood.

He went easy, they said, idling in neutral, no warning, no time to put on one last coat of varnish, to finish off.

[ 102 ]

A Life That’s Stan, in his airforce blue, on the left, out on his own, changeling, late bloomer, robin tilt to his head and a half smile, a tower of fire, bright skin mapped by freckles.

He could do magic, conjure symphonies from this piano, whistle Cwm Rhondda in polyphonic harmony through his teeth, tell the weather by counting rowan berries, knew the names of small things under stones.

That Christmas morning, while I opened parcels, a hot vein tore in his head, razed him, scorched his shadow onto my skin.

[ 103 ]

Berging David Morgan O’Connor

I heard the lake crack open last night.

No way.

Did too. Woke me up. You know what that means.

Berging.

Yep. Berging. And you’re gonna die.

In your wildest dreams.

You gonna eat that?

John-Paul tossed a slice of burnt toast across the table onto his older brother Roland’s plate.

Call Wally, Chad, Vern and the Kobiskis. Round up the troops.

You do it, you got the big mouth.

Can you spell hy-po-therm-i-a?

Why not you go play hide-and-go-seek by yourself.

In 1983, March-break landed in April. The backyard rinks had melted and buds were fighting the frost. Spring’s afternoon sun was singing gospel songs in Southwestern Ontario, the home of Berging. No one knows where or who or

[ 104 ]

how the game was invented. The season fleeting, could last a single afternoon or three weeks, the previous year was five days, but only two rounds were completed before the local police captain stationed his cruiser on the main pier, prohibiting all Berging activity. The rules are simple; duct tape an old pillow around the end of a broken hockey stick and knock each other into the cold lake. When an opponent goes under, there is a stoppage if needed, players band together and pull the loser onto safe ground. They howl and jeer while the poor bugger runs up the snowy beach, down the slushy trail, tears turning to icicles all the way home to momma, if there is one. Normally, hypothermia doesn’t set in for six minutes, hyperventilation starts at submersion, best to keep the mouth shut if your head goes under, swallowing can be fatal, lung don’t like slush. Survival depends on how far you live from shore and how fast you get out there and if the fireplace at home is lit or not. Late afternoon games are more dangerous, but sometime the bergs are firmer. Girls never play but are not officially banned, probably just too smart for such ludicrous antics. There is no age limit, but high school kids preferred touring the concession roads drinking beer pulling donuts while smoking hash oil, laced with melted garbage bags. Or practicing to make the NHL. This is my last year, so I ain’t taking prisoners, I’m out for keeps, Roland warned the gang piling off the yellow school bus. The tires farting brown snowy mush as it pulled past the catholic church and down the single lane out of town, parting the remnants stocks of harvested winter corn.

Game starts in fifteen by the small pier. Snooze you lose, Roland commanded.

I got piano, Vern said.

Then flutter away you wuss, John-Paul spat.

Yeah. Go kiss your momma for us and don’t come back! Shosta-Wussy-kovich.

Yeah bugger off Beethoven!

The church bell chimed.

We playing teams? asked Wally.

Every Tom, Dick, Jane and Dickslap for himself. [ 105 ]

What if dudes team up?

Then dudes team up. But there is only one winner. And you’re looking at him. Roland! This is my song. I am conquest!

Who talks the talk better walk the walk, said Chad. His father owned the appliance store. He could move a fridge single-handedly up a flight of stairs without scratching the wall.

You got lucky last year, I was conned, he added.

The boys assembled at the mouth of the river, which was flowing freely between the piers under the drifting knolls of sand-blown ice. Mammoth bergs passed like ghost freighters, one skip and you would be carried away to Michigan, Superior, Georgian Bay, a slow death. Bridging these surely solid bergs, thin mirror-like plates slipped and slid just below the surface. They were the real game breakers.

Some might hold your weight, at least to push off and crack open for the pursuer.

Some might open like a laundry shoot straight into the game-over ice of hell.

Some might be solid but slick, creating advantage for the nimble to topple the powerful. Some bergs could be paddled or at least ruddered like a raft. The trick to Berging is reading the lake and so few are literate in the grammar of ice.

Count down, Roland commanded. The boys began in scattered discord.

10. 9. 8. 7... Looky there Vern’s a coming he’s...6...

Vern came screaming down the harbor path onto the big pier. Without breaking stride, he cannonballed into the gelid river.

5... Holy Moly... the guy is in-bloody-sane...

Nutter!

Loon!

3...2...

Vern’s head surfaced, the tide had already dragged him up river. He climbed onto the pier seconds before reaching open water. Shivering and shaking like a prey-less bird dog, battling to get his breath because he had something to say, [ 106 ]

something important, something memorized, but the convulsions were getting his best. The real cold came after you got out of the water.

Who’s the wussy now? HUH? Ignoramuses! You punks don’t know...

Before he could finish whatever he had saved to say, his innards iced to cubes and the survival neurons got his legs running, he was out of sight before the waves of laughter finished echoing out to the lake’s horizon, away forever. Roland blew a ref’s whistle.

GAME ON! The smaller boys ran as fast as they could, envision a rabbit on a greyhound track, to the furthest and highest berg they could reach without being swept away into serious open water. They knew the strategies which had proven semi-successful in previous years. Let the big guys come to you, keep the higher ground and dunk them on a chase. Chad, the full-grown-superheavy-weight began swinging his pillowed-staff like an Olympian hammer thrower. He caught two sleepy-headed Kobiskis in the first second of play. He boomed a Viking’s guffaw as they tumbled into the drink. Go Home to Mama! The soaked Kobiskis scrambled away to warmth.

Unintentionally, Roland and John-Paul formed an efficient duo. Roland chased John-Paul with brotherly hunger, but as the younger brother dodged and ducked staffs and pushes, his opponents were left exposed for the older brother to storm down with a cross-check, an elbow, a shoulder butt, a well-placed pillow-poke into the drink. Roland would never catch John-Paul because he stopped and watched his drenched foes find their footing and delighting in their race comic hobble home. John-Paul was fast but Roland was patient.

When the remaining players were six, they were spread equally distant around the floe. The sun, a few inches above the horizon, parents would soon be serving dinner and the fairest and easiest conclusion would have been for them all to walk home dry, yet the cardinal rule held the game in motion. There could only be one winner.

Bad luck struck Wally, as the ice berg he was peeing on, decided to roll like a sinking ship, perhaps it was the heat of the urine. He had to leap into the current and swim for shore. His pillow-staff becoming summer driftwood. The Dalrymple twins wrestled each other into the lake after a mutual slip. They ran home [ 107 ]

holding hands, leaving Chad, the natural born fridge-mover, who had not moved but a few paces from the pier, and the two brothers.

How we gonna do this boys? Chad’s stick sabered the air in figure-eights.

Come and get me big ya big-galoot, hope you brought your water-wings! JohnPaul cartwheeled.

Paddling a thin skin of ice just beyond swinging distance. Roland floated closer to distract and strike. When Roland stepped onto Chad’s berg, the tilt gave him away and Chad charged. John-Paul boomeranged his staff under Chad’s legs, tripping him into the ice water. Chad submerged and stayed under a few seconds too long. When his head popped up, there was none of the usual thrashing and screaming. His face was dopy and glazed. The brothers knew something was wrong. Momentarily abandoning the game, they got down on their stomachs and extended their sticks to Chad.

Hold my legs or he’ll pull me in, the guy’s a moose. Roland sat on the back of John-Paul’s thighs.

Come on Chad, swim a bit, you big galoot, you can make the pier, right?

I... can’t... feel... my...

Chad, you’ve already wasted two precious minutes, no messing about, move your arms and legs. Doggy paddle it. Come on buddy.

I... can’t...

I’m going for help.

No time. You have to go in.

Me? You’re small.

He’ll drag me under.

He’s gonna die, if we don’t... [ 108 ]

The guy is an anchor.

If you don’t go, I’ll throw you.

Why don’t you go?

Who will pull me out?

He’s gone. I can’t see him.

Jesus, he must be under the ice.

There was a moment of dead silence. An arrow of geese flew west.

He’s gone.

Don’t say that.

He’s gone.

There was another moment of silence. The arrow of geese flew east.

I always thought Chad could swim.

He’s in shock. He’s never gone in before.

We need to...

We need to...

We have to... get help.

The lake cracked open, and the leviathan, a natural born fridge-lifter, appeared.

His head cracked the surface, his wailing arms saw-milled as his slow tree-trunk thighs propelled soaked bones and flesh towards the heat of home. At the mouth of the trail, he turned and bellowed, CRACKERS!

[ 109 ]

Mesmerized by resurrection, John-Paul and Roland remained still on their iceberg. The weak sun dipped into the horizon. Water gushed and spurted. Minieddies patterned the lake. All they could hear was ice melting.

That was mythical. I’ll never forget that. Thank god he got out, John-Paul said.

Roland remained silent.

Guess it’s dinner time. John-Paul filled the silence.

Yeah.

So who won?

This year no-one won.

Or both of us?

Roland stood slowly as if drugged, staring at the swirling ice-water. John-Paul rolled on to his back. His older brother stood over him and extended a consolatory arm. No-one has won or we both have won together as brothers through survival we are brothers forever said the simple gesture. Or not. Roland leaned down and took his younger brother’s reaching arm, then abruptly, dropped into a squat while placing the sole of his right boot onto the center of his younger brother’s chest and rolled back, lifting and tossing his younger brother over his head and through a sheet of skinny film into the ice water. The perfect suicide throw.

Underwater, cold panic made up from down impossible to decipher. Adrenaline kicked in and when the fight for shore and warmth was clearly won, John-Paul realized he had lost the game and his brother and there would never be another season of Berging.

[ 110 ]

Gift David Ishaya Osu

Rather than cry for the broken egg or a breakfast without protein my daughter ran out to the fireside, fetched colours out of ashes and made a powder for her sister whose face covered the little sun growing in her cheek

[ 111 ]

Three poems after Constantine Cavafy Ian Parks

The modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy died in Alexandria, the city where he spent most of his life, at the age of seventy in 1933. His last act was to take Holy Communion at the Orthodox Church. An intensely private poet, most of his output was produced after he reached the age of forty. His poems were circulated among a select group of friends and his reputation as one of the finest Greek poets of the twentieth century only developed after his death.

Old Man At the far end of the bar the old man sits, his head bent to the table, lost in thought.

And from the sad perspective of old age he looks back on his life and sees how little of it gave him joy although he was possessed of youth and looks.

He gazes through the newspaper he brought.

Not only does he see the face of age he feels it creeping through his bones.

Yesterday he was still young. He knows how time deceived him when it said

[ 112 ]

Tomorrow you can have the things you want but for the present you must be discreet.

What made him pause? What made him hesitate?

In the corner of the crowded room he thinks of the lost chances, the lost life.

The opportunities he never took return to mock his cautiousness.

But the act of such remembering wears him out.

His head touches the table and he sleeps.

[ 113 ]

Ammonis They want you to produce an epitaph for Ammonis the poet now he’s gone.

If anyone can do him justice it is you.

Something measured, Raphael, and refined.

You’ll obviously praise his poems – those things of beauty that contain the beauty that resided in his soul.

You’ll need all the skill that you possess to pour Egyptian feeling into your Greek lines.

Try also to infuse them with a sense of our lives also, how we live them here.

We want you to aspire to greatness now to pen a fitting tribute to our brother so that the rhythm running through them makes it clear this is a tribute from the heart of one Alexandrian to another.

[ 114 ]

The Wine Bowl This new order I’m working on now commissioned by a rich and noble house – a patron with the most exquisite taste features my trademark waterfalls and vines.

Made of the purest silver it outshines the finest of the work I’ve done before.

The figure that I placed below the rim, the centre of the flowers and the streams is naked, one toe dipping in, an object of desire.

I needed to invoke the gods of memory to help me with the task of forming him so that the youthful face I’d loved was a true likeness of that matchless boy.

But even that was not enough.

You’ll know why when I tell you that he died fifteen years ago, a soldier on the battlefield.

[ 115 ]

Three poems Anne Ryland

The Finishing Work At the end, they’ve all pushed on with their most cherished work.

Swept further and further off course in their turbulent beds.

The struggle to conquer tasks they once performed with pride.

My mother was counting curtains, dithering over school shoes for thirsty children and whether to attend the christeningcum-funeral of someone called Mungo or send a Regrets card.

My father, incurably pinstriped, grumbled that his train was travelling backwards, while shunting his underwriter No at the nurse, the physio, the psycho-geriatrician, the chaplain.

Small wonder they linger for days, weeks, months, a breathless summer. Long after their limbs have locked and their organs grown sluggish, habits and obligations keep them tethered to the world, to us. Their anguish, ours. Mistakes and panics.

Auntie needed calming after she’d boarded the wrong bus – in a tizzy till she started knitting a mini Battenberg cake.

My father’s twin being dragged away by a red tanker-ship as his hand fretted mine: could I please transfer those four planks of wood to Barclays Bank?

[ 116 ]

My mother’s brother in his side-ward bed, pottering.

Lifting carrots and beetroot, he begged his niece to water the Spitfires. On my journey home from the hospital I sprayed Uncle’s gull-wing planes – joy, silvery.

[ 117 ]

My Father’s Letter of Reply to the Unsettled Questions One symptom of happiness is sending a reply three years late.

I had a strenuous journey here.

A long way from London, a higher region with some humour.

A simple answer to why a retired underwriter starves himself.

Without Mum I was already uninsurable. Uncoupled and commuting backwards, I abandoned caution, departed early.

In response to your question in black ink: every man is entitled to hide his cancer four feet deep in an Anderson shelter.

With its galvanized corrugated iron panels, earth-covered roof and rusted-water floor, it was the perfect spot for a tumour.

Why did I spit out those kisses you kept putting on my cheek in the hospital?

I don’t know, dear, I don’t know. They were slowing me down.

Regarding your uncensored query about having a daughter – no. I cannot say more – presume my reactions are being studied.

I am able to confirm, there were two women. Mum. And Mossie, whose instruments I mended and moods I calmed.

Herewith, I enclose a diagram I have drawn of the altimeter.

Must sign off now to prepare for sleep.

Mossie: pet name for the de Havilland Mosquito, aircraft flown during and after World War II

[ 118 ]

How to Retire for a workaholic Resurrect your battered Latin dictionary, love, and meander studently through the meanings of ‘exitus’ – a way out, a conclusion, but also a going forth, a solution to a difficulty, an emergence, a passage, a setting sail.

Remember, ‘exit’ is euphemistic or poetic for the latter end, for death. So I implore you: retire now, while it’s still voluntary. No documents are required for departure, no soliloquy. Bring your notebooks and pencils. Don’t try to leap. Take one step, then another. Hundreds of miles further along is a cobalt blue door; number seven, a threshold. There is a time to stay and a time to leave, my love. There is a time to abandon London for this home, the debatable land of Northumberland, with its peel towers and fortalices, its wind-cropped coast.

We’ll create a border-occupation for you – sea-reader, haar-guard, ruin-keeper? Together we’ll listen for the winter visitors, the pink-footed geese, as they chorus unk-unk-unk over our house at night.

Wavering skeins writing the sky by day, they come to rest on the mudflats, exhausted and hungry from their long flight.

[ 119 ]

The Bosnian War Polina Simakova

I atone for my sins in dreams And wake up to the walls of white.

I am a doll, porcelain, naked, robbed of the native robe and tongue.

He hits me. Resistance gives way to passive hate, indifference.

I am his trophy, his mate.

This cell is no gilded cage, But it brings the salvation of silence, unlike The ravaged remains of homes, rummaged through by the looters and breakers That I’ve left behind.

I am both a compliant hostage and an escapee.

The window, unlatched in my cell, allows me to hear the bells every now and then.

A Christian sign, marking time.

“This is a book about hate,” he said one night, indicating the holy artifact by his side.

“Read it.”

But to read it I needed light.

Surrounded by white, his pale Serbian hands on my breasts, I was blind, my baby blaming me from the faraway Christian Heaven That didn’t exist.

This is an alien place.

A hospital they have occupied.

I don’t know if we’re still in Bosnia, If such a country remains.

But he keeps me safe.

I should be stoned, punished by people and Allah,

[ 120 ]

Since I no longer believe.

It’s nineteen ninety-one, religion is out of place In my cell with an open door And a Satan who prowls back and forth From his military compound to me.

It wasn’t him who did this to her, But his faithful, uniformed men, Who think he’s a God, Not breaking ranks.

Everyday blasphemy, Which I saw as they convoyed me to the latrine Before I was moved to a better room.

The days are long if I stay on my own When he is away.

I am his property now: He has warned me, coldly, before he left, That others won’t bother me.

To busy myself, I lie on the floor, Knowing that it had been cleaned, Scrubbed, disinfected, Licked, just for me, by some unfortunate girl.

The lithographs on the wall Are inappropriate, Obscene in a time of war.

I’ve wiped the dust off them recently, for some reason, Feeling strangely peaceful.

I am starting to treat this place like home.

I chuckle at the thought, and I am waiting for his return with instinctive apprehension, Conscious of the masculine world in my mind.

As I lie on my bed I stare at the white that I hate, Aware of the lack of colour, so unlike the black, Which lets me imagine the things I don’t wish to see.

Her tiny head, a fragile carnation of blood on the snow.

It’s as small as a grain of sand [ 121 ]

If you look out of the window from where She was thrown By the men in the uniform.

As my eyes trace the lithograph I hope That she had no soul At three months old.

That she had never known this world.

This was long ago, And I’m glad I know that it wasn’t him, Even though He could have easily done it to others’ babies, others’ dreams.

He came back tonight, his shirt sticky and dark on the left side.

I turn away to face an identical wall As he throws the shirt on the floor And washes away the blood.

I do not speak.

But I know that after he goes away tomorrow If he comes back, I will lie at his feet and beg him to notice me.

When he returned, I could see he was mad At me or the war, or both, And closed my eyes in advance.

The blow came, but it didn’t hurt.

Only then I realized it was aimed at the wall Just above my head.

There was nothing to say.

So I let myself sway, restless thoughts Giving way to internal decay.

I woke up that morning to find him awake, too, Still by my side, oddly, And he told me the war was nearly over.

The Americans were on the move to Banja Luka, he said, Addressing the lithograph that we both knew so well.

There was nothing to say.

I could tell he was sad, his eyes dark, Apprehensive, just as mine had been not so long ago. [ 122 ]

I was free to leave, he informed me In a stiff, strained voice of someone expecting a war crimes tribunal.

But I knew that I wouldn’t go, So I shrugged, And he let out a short, astonished laugh.

I looked at the white wall, at our lithograph And suddenly saw that he was like Saint Paul A hater turned admirer.

[ 123 ]

They called it a suspension Anna Somerset

They called it a suspension Of body, not disbelief Your tongue which spoke Russian, German, your native French and the wittiest English blue Five years after your passing I still seek perspective, The background and foreground are blurry You remain vivid. Â

[ 124 ]

Two poems Katherine Stansfield

That olde-worlde charm Most days I’m glad it’s hard to be lost, I’m glad cameras catch me on each street corner, make me a ghost at crossings.

Glad that my bank maps my hops from cash point to cash point.

That my phone is a tracking device to spot me from space.

That kids can muster their pocket drones to search the river’s snags.

That police helicopters will scour the sea, the likely beaches where people are found.

But some days all I want is to go – get on that train on that unlisted line, pay cash and when that’s gone barter my shirt, my shoes, my labour.

I want that train to run until it runs out of oil, out of coal, out of track, until I get to a time no one has heard of trains.

I’ll take a horse and keep going back in the safe arms of the past.

I’ll wear felt, say things like ‘late of this parish’ and ‘withys’.

I will live in fear of God. When my horse tires, dies, I’ll walk. Blink and I’ll nip through a gap in the wall of that blesséd place I can go and have no one miss me.

[ 125 ]

Iaith/llaeth After araf, which is slow, on the long mountain roads that wound to the sea, pulling me to the town, the first word I learned to see was iaith, which is language, because it was the world: not just spoken in the new sounds around me but written, worn – iaith on posters, t shirts, on badges and graffiti

I saw but never said and when others did I mixed it up with llaeth, which is milk. Seems I’ve been putting iaith, which is language, in my tea ever since I arrived.

It’s iaith, which is language, that fed my bones and set me walking home again on the long, slow mountain roads.

[ 126 ]

Pedro Fuerte Robert Joe Stout

Under skies clouded into mashed potato mush directions cease to exist. Ten-yearold taxis striped maroon and gray, potato-chip-painted delivery vans, sputtering VW bugs—vochos the Mexicans call them—couples sandwiched together on Italicas, lumbering buses with destinations scribbled on their windshields: none of them headed in a predetermined direction. Some turn right, some turn left, a pickup filled with children stalls, a truck with a slapping canvas canopy caterwauls to a stop as a traffic light blinks red. On the hills beyond warehouse roofs I detect scattered shanties connected by crisscrossing paths.

How the hell do I get back to the city center?

Just beyond the glistening cylinders of a chemical warehouse I catch a glimpse of thatch and walk towards it. Seven or eight wooden tables checkerboarded under a high peaked roof, the smell of tortillas frying in too much grease.

I hesitate as a taxi honks its availability but I wave it away: I’ve spent too much at the feria and would rather walk. Or take a bus if I can figure out if one will take me to an area I know.

“Monte Albán?”

As though materializing out of the thatch he insinuates himself into my presence: broad-shouldered, high cheek-boned face, knobby fingers clutching a long-handled broom that Oaxaca street cleaners use. Probably my age but a hard life makes him look older: cobwebby wrinkles accentuate the way his eyes, curiously offset, twitch beneath thick upper lids. “Monte Albán,” he repeats, “allá quiere ir?”

“No, pues,” I answer in accented Spanish, “al centro. I just can’t tell, es decir, which buses go where.”

[ 127 ]

He points across the highway. The buses in the right lane turn at the light and head towards the center of the city, he says, then adds, “Turistas, they go to Monte Albán.”

“Sí pues, but I’m not a turista, I live in Oaxaca.”

“Ah!” Immediately our relationship changes. No longer am I one of them— turistas—but one of us—locals. The information seems to enliven him, although the smile across a missing incisor is more a grimace than a welcome.

“I leev…” he begins in English then reverts to Spanish “allá, on the Other Side. Six years.”

I nod. Practically every Oaxacan I’ve met has worked in the United States.

“Sí, pues,” he continues as I scan traffic approaching the corner, hoping for a right-lane bus, “muy contento pero no podía quedarme.”

“The migra?”

He shakes his head and looks away, like me peering towards zigzagging traffic. Then abruptly he begins to giggle. Some private joke? I shrug, mildly curious. He swipes the broom back and forth, stirring up dust, and coughs. “The migra no. Los antivicios.”

“Vice squad?”

“Pues…”

“Qué puta madre! What were you doing?”

“Movies.”

“Mov-…porno movies?”

“Many—many movies.” His giggles crescendo as he half-turns towards me.

“Pedro Fuerte.”

“Pedro Fuerte?”

“Sí, my name. In the movies.”

“Tú…me burlas?” I want to believe him but we’re standing on a godforsaken out of town intersection bombarded by screeches and clattering of traffic kilometers from nowhere, he’s clutching a huge handmade broom and I’m hungry and lost and…

“It was a long time ago.”

I nod. It occurs to me that he might be lying. It also occurs to me that he might be telling the truth.

“So. You were making porno movies. In Los Angel—…”

“San Franceesco. Pues, Oakland, it is near—”

“I know Oakland. I once had a novia there.”

“Bien! Many movies there. Yo, Denver Lust—big man, blonde, but no de Denver, someplace call O-high-yo, Black Tiger…” He thrusts his fist forward from his hip imitating a huge schlong.

[ 128 ]

“Puros hombres? Mujeres no?”

“Chingada sí! Muchas chamacas! Lilí, Blondie, Boobsie, Big Bette…” His grin grows lascivious as he rattles off women’s nicknames. I’m starting to believe him but the incongruity of this muscular, scarred, broom-wielding old Oaxacan screwing dozens of willing babes as 16-millimeter cameras show close ups of the action baffles credibility. “I, mira, it’s, es decir, muy—”

“No me crees?” His lip curls pugnaciously, then the smile thrusts across the missing incisor. “Te muestro, ven!” He grabs my sweater sleeve, drops the broom and heads towards the thatch. “Te pruebo, sï, claro que sí,” he insists as I wrench out of his grasp and follow him around the smelling-of-grease kitchen to an alcove where several coats are hanging on nails pegged into weathered 4x8s.

He groans as he stoops to pick up a soiled backpack, unzips the front pocket and fumbles through its contents. As he proffers a billfold-sized plastic photo holder I noticed that the fourth finger on his hand is bent and rigid.

“Ya ves!” He flips the album open and shoves it into my hand. A young stud, mustached, grins from the photo. He has his arms around two bare breasted women, both quite young. There’s no mistaking that the man’s heavy-lidded slightly offset eyes are identical to the old fellow beside me.

“Bellas,” I comment. Then, shaking my head, “Pedro Fuerte.”

“Sí!” He flips to the other photos—seven or eight of them, several showing him in sexual embraces with well-endowed if not actually attractive women.

“Many movies—many,” he repeats.

“How in hell did you--?” Realizing I’m speaking English I revert to Spanish, “cómo? Es decir, they recruited you? Here in Mexico, I mean? Brought you to Oakl-…”

“Chingada qué no! I in Oakland, need work, in newspaper—this ad say Jóven, fuerte, que quiere trabajar. I go see, four storeys up, a little office, man looks at me, woman—young, Oriental, very pretty, helps me fill out form. Behind the office a big room—well, not too big, ‘studio’ he says, four or five people there.

He asks me if I like to screw. ‘Sí!’ I laugh, I think he is kidding, no? He points to a woman looking at us. ‘You like to screw her?’ I’m afraid to say sí but he sees in my face. ‘Hey,’ he calls to the woman, ‘Pedro here would like to screw you.’ ‘Yeah?’ she says, ‘what’s he got?’ ‘Pull down your pants,’ the man tells me. Okay so I do.

‘He’s got plenty,’ she says. So we start making movies.”

“Pedro Fuerte.” It’s all I can think of to say as he tucks the photo holder back in his pack and we walk together to where he dropped his broom. As we shake hands goodbye I repeat “Pedro Fuerte” and he laughs, this wrinkle-faced old man with a broken finger and porno movie past. But on the bus as it grinds along streets growing increasingly familiar I am not thinking about Pedro but about San Francisco thirty years ago, a tiny fourth-floor office, a Vietnamese [ 129 ]

receptionist, a form to fill out. I, too, had seen a newspaper ad—in English not in Spanish Good health, physically strong, willing to work… and they had taken my form and thanked me.

But I was not Pedro Fuerte. I didn’t get the job.

[ 130 ]

Dust Trap Daniel Treagust

The tractors are silent. A body slumps in a car enshrouded in thick red dust.

Wind howls and whistles. Walter Creel retreats to his farmhouse and battens the doors. His wife sits at the kitchen table and clasps her hands, as if in prayer. The wind batters the doors, begging to be let in.

A fog of prairie dirt climbs to the sky and approaches the farmhouse with haste.

Flocks of birds flee before the bank of dirt with desperate cries. Daylight turns to darkness as the black blizzard swallows the sun.

The stubborn farmhouse is enveloped in dust. The darkness is apocalyptic and the noise is deafening and strange.

Walter and his wife wait in the farmhouse. It’s all they can do, wait, and cough.

Coughs have plagued them since the fogs began. Shortness of breath has become a way of life.

Walter’s father had arrived to lush prairie grass, shrubs, and deep rich soil.

Yet he didn’t know about the endless cycle of rain and drought. He didn’t know the great harvests would eventually cease. Walter also holds memories.

He remembers the colour of wheat, a golden yellow stretching for miles. He remembers the roar of labouring motors, the whine of the combine. Since the rains stopped, the misery and the depression have been relentless. The land is bone dry. The wheat withered long ago and the fields are bare. Snakes hang belly up from fences. Folkloric promises are Walter’s only hope for rain. He waits, and he waits. When the winds relent, a haze of grasshoppers veil the land as far as the eye can see. Farmers drive tractors to and fro across the fields, crushing the grasshoppers, and sometimes the fields cower under angry flames. People retreat

[ 131 ]

west. Their despair is betrayed by clattering chains dragged behind their cars.

A terrible sound. A sound of defeat, or deliverance. When they leave, their doors swing with the wind, and bang, bang, bang a call to others, but Walter won’t leave, not in a million years. This land is all he knows. Why go anywhere else when all he has is here? He dreams of a future. He dreams of a future rich with golden yellow fields.

After the winds and the fog, dunes of soil plague the land with awful colour.

Walter shovels dust from his porch while his wife grips a brush, leans out a window, and pushes soil from its sill. The house hoards dust in its crevices and there it remains. Its roof is shrouded in dust. Despite his wife’s nags, Walter won’t sweep it. The storms are too frequent and it’s not worth the bother. He’ll only have to sweep it again.

Eagles prey on the land and gorge on carrion abandoned to the fields. Their voice is silent in the vast plains.

The land shudders with a nuisance of jackrabbits. The farmers arrange a drive.

At the drive, the air is coarse, the sun hot, and the crowd noisy with coughs.

Men, women, and children wield clubs and sticks, and stand in lines. They move over the powder dry land clubbing the jackrabbits and corral them into a woven metal pen with wooden posts. Walter leans on one of the posts and watches the jackrabbits scurry and run.

“Remember me?” asks a woman with a wry grin. When she opens her mouth, faded yellow teeth grip deep red gums and her eyes are damp grey in withered orbits.

“You. I remember you. Get away from me,” says Walter.

“That’s not the way you speak to a lady,” she says.

Walter remembered her. The smell of her. Cows milk and sweat. He remembered when he laid in her bed and she stripped in front of him and dust pooled at her feet. She said she’d clear it when they were done, and she did, when she pushed the broom, secreting the evidence under a chest of drawers. Most of all he remembered her kisses. They tasted like grit, and when they moved, her body was rough like sandpaper.

[ 132 ]

“Get away from me. I want nothing to do with you,” says Walter.

“My husband knows about us. I told him about you and I,” she says.

“You did what? Get away from me,” says Walter.

She turns, and with a yellow smile, looks across the pen to a cluster of people.

Walter follows her eyes and his eyes meet the stare of her husband. Walter’s eyes dart into the pen and his thoughts race. Blue flames leap from the metal fence and Walter quickly steps back and looks for his wife.

Men collect in knots and bet how many jackrabbits they will kill. Then they enter the pen with shouts, and chase the jackrabbits, hitting and clubbing. Some men hold the jackrabbits upside-down and smash their heads. Most jackrabbits are killed on the run. The women and children hear the screams of the jackrabbits, but the men, caught in the frenzy, hear nothing. Children cradle the jackrabbits until they catch their father’s knowing gaze, then they let go, and leave them to their fate. Walter chases the jackrabbits but his efforts are half-hearted and his legs are heavy as he battles his thoughts.

Walter and his wife take a brace of jackrabbits home and cook a stew. It makes a change to cornbread and beans. Dust floats in their glasses of water and infests the stew. They spit into empty glasses as they eat.

Wind howls and dust sprays the windows. It disturbs the heavy silence as Walter’s thoughts ebb and flow. He fears the knock at the door, but waits. He has forgotten he is waiting for rain. He considers getting into his truck and driving west, but he won’t take the chain. He’ll make a silent exit. He’ll throw caution to the wind and if the static electricity strikes the truck, so be it. But he sits and waits for his fate. This land is all he knows.

[ 133 ]

Baka David Wharton

‘You,’ Dad said when he answered the door. His gaze fell on Frank’s luggage.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not planning on staying over. Can I come in? I’ve walked here from the train station.’

‘Railway station.’ The old man never could resist a correction. But he stepped back to allow Frank enough room to heave the pair of red plastic suitcases into the hall one at a time, dump them along the side of the stairs and wait to be invited further into the house.

‘Only Yanks call it a train station,’ Dad said.

Frank shirtsleeved the sweat from his face. ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

‘You look awful. What did you walk all that way for, with those?’

‘I couldn’t afford a taxi, and it’s a pain taking suitcases on the bus. I’d rather hike it.’ He realised he was lying automatically, because it was easier to explain in terms his father would understand—pounds, pence and awkwardness. But he hadn’t come all this way just to fall back into that kind of dishonesty. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not it. I was nervous—’ Frank became aware of daytime TV sounds churning away through the open lounge door, of the old man twitching to return to whatever programme his arrival had interrupted.

‘—I was nervous about coming home, and I had to build up to it. That was why I walked. I could do with a drink of water, Dad.’

[ 134 ]

‘Well, you know where the tap is.’ Hospitality duties discharged, his father stumped off into the lounge and turned up the volume on the TV. Static heat closed in on Frank as he entered the kitchen. A wasp buzzed around the light fitting, and an odour of decay seeped out of the bin by the back door.

It was tidy in here, though, with no signs of a life edging towards collapse: no grime on the worktops, no desiccated bluebottles on the windowsill. He opened a few cupboards, checked the contents of the fridge. You heard about old blokes slipping into filth after their wives died, subsisting on bread and jam, but Dad seemed to be looking after himself. Or perhaps there was some widow taking care of things. He could see how his father might attract that kind of attention. Some women liked rude, ungrateful men.

He filled a glass of water and carried it to the lounge. Dad sat in his usual chair, aimed at the TV, watching a game-show hosted by some comedian from the old days. Frank couldn’t recall the name. Alfie something.

‘John Wayne,’ his father said.

‘Pardon?’

The old man pointed out the caption on the TV screen: Which actor, more famous for his roles in Westerns, played Genghis Khan in the 1956 film The Conqueror?

Frank took a seat on the sofa. ‘Oh, right. Sorry. I thought you were talking to me.’

‘If I was on this show I’d have made ten grand already. Ten grand in ten minutes.’

‘You should apply.’

‘No point. They don’t let you on if you’re any good. It’s all rigged—the Elgin Marbles.’

Frank said, ‘Well, I’m out now. On licence.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘I’ve to report to the probation office twice a week.’

‘—Haile Selassie.’ [ 135 ]

‘Yeah, and there’s a few other conditions.’

‘—Potassium—.’ Dad muted the sound with the remote, but still kept half an eye on the screen. ‘What conditions?’

‘Just rules. Anyway, Abbie doesn’t want me back at the house.’

‘Her. Well, she couldn’t even be bothered to turn up when we buried your mum, could she?’

Frank didn’t blame her in the circumstances. He’d been allowed out for the afternoon, to sit at the rear of the church with an officer on each side. At least they hadn’t made him wear handcuffs.

He said, ‘That reminds me. Are there any photos of Mum I could have? Or I could get a copy made?’ There were none around the room now, he noticed. The wedding picture that used to hang in one of the alcoves by the fireplace had been taken down. His father had put shelves in there.

‘I’ve no need to make a shrine of the place.’ Dad tapped his forehead with his index finger. ‘It’s all in here. I can see her now, just as she was. Nothing wrong with my memory, thank Christ. Hey, you know Roy Baxter, don’t you? Used to work with me at Fingle’s?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Indian feller. Mechanic. Real name’s Rohit Bhatti. Except none of them ignorant bastards at Fingle’s could say that. It’s not hard to say is it? Rohit Bhatti. But he let them call him Roy Baxter. Trying to fit in, like. Well, he’s got Alzheimer’s now.

Six year younger than me, he is. Poor bugger can’t remember where to go for a shit—sits in a chair all day at the old people’s home dribbling into a bib. Not that he knows sod all about it.’

‘That’s tough,’ Frank said, for want of anything else.

‘I’d sooner be dead than lose my marbles.’ Dad picked up a paperback from the side of his chair. 1001 Memory Exercises. ‘That’s why I do these every day. Watch my quizzes. Eat plenty of fish. Have you noticed me not smoking?’

‘Now you say—’ [ 136 ]

‘Gave up two years ago. It all helps. Healthy diet and exercise. Your brain’s just another muscle when it comes down to it.’

Frank looked at the new shelves in the alcove. The top pair were full of the historical fiction his father had always enjoyed, the sort that showed how hard the writer had worked to find out the proper facts about regiments and uniforms and weapons. The remaining three were tightly packed with DVDs organised into categories: TV detective shows, war films, comedies, music performances, and an entire row of porno. Teen Fuck Party Volume 6; Sluts from Mars; Shemale Slave Mistress III. ‘So anyway,’ Frank said. ‘About those cases.’

‘I haven’t got a spare bed, that’s all. Otherwise—’ ‘I already told you, I’m not asking to stay. It’s just a few things I need to leave here until I find somewhere permanent. Stuff from the house.’

‘What about the rest of it? She paying you half?’

‘We’ve sorted something out.’

‘You mean you’re letting her rip you off? I bet she’s moved some other bloke in by now.’

‘I was fair with her. She didn’t ask to be an ex-con’s wife.’

Abbie had kept up the visits for another few months after Mum’s funeral, then she’d stopped. No tailing off, no missing once or twice, no warning letter: she just didn’t come one day, and then not once for five years after. So of course she wouldn’t want him back when he got out. Still, he’d needed to go to the house, to talk things through, to get all that out of the way.

The old man snorted. ‘What’s in the cases? All the stuff you took when you moved out of here in the first place?’

‘A lot of it, yes.’

‘None of that’s going to be any use to you, is it? I can’t see why you’re bothering.’

Nor, really, could Frank. He thought how less than an hour ago, sick of the [ 137 ]

weight of the cases on the walk from the station, he’d come close himself to abandoning them in the street.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there’s a few useful bits and pieces. My exam certificates for instance.’

Dad finally let him off the hook. ‘Well, you can put them up in your old bedroom if you want.’ He unmuted the TV. ‘The Christadelphians.’ # There was no bed in Frank’s room now: just a lot of taped-up cardboard boxes, a pair of dark wood cabinets, a drop-leaf table and some dining chairs. He sat on one and clicked open a suitcase. It had occurred to him after he’d mentioned his exam certificates that he ought to keep them with him, because people sometimes asked to see evidence of your qualifications. If he ever got a job interview for instance. He wasn’t sure which of the cases they were in, though.

Yesterday he’d arrived at the house, Abbie’s house, and found the suitcases waiting for him, full already. She’d never liked them. They’d been a gift from his parents. The sort of thing old couples took on coach tours of Austria, she said. No style to them. But after he had phoned to say he was out of prison, she must have gone up into the loft to retrieve those cases, and then she’d stuffed them with everything she wanted out of her life. Everything else.

He picked up a gorilla they’d once thought kitsch and ironic, made from a coconut shell with an ashtray in its belly. Until now Frank had forgotten it existed, and here it had somehow jammed itself into his life, forced him to be responsible for it.

The way a kid does, or a pet.

His father’s voice from the doorway made him jump. ‘You want any boxes? I’ve got a few in the shed.’

‘I thought you were downstairs, watching TV.’ ‘Show’s finished. If you’re emptying all that out you’ll need boxes.’

Frank explained how he was just looking for his certificates. ‘And I thought there might be other things I ought to take. Not this, though.’ He dropped the gorilla

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ashtray back into the case and closed the lid on it. ‘So you’re using this as a store now?’

‘Your mum wanted it to be a grandkids’ room,’ Dad said, ‘if you and that Abbie ever had one of your own.’

Frank looked around, trying his best not to imagine his surroundings as a nursery, and he saw he hadn’t been eradicated from the place after all. There were still rips in the wallpaper from his carelessly removed posters; still a stain on the carpet where he’d once tipped over a can of contraband Guinness. And dotted all over the ceiling the heads of pins, with occasional tails of thread drifting in the air.

‘I see you took the planes down,’ he said.

‘What was left of ’em.’

All one summer when he was twelve or thirteen, Frank had built planes from plastic kits. By the time the passion spent itself, thirty models hung from his bedroom ceiling, arranged aesthetically, with no regard either for period or consistency of scale. A dogfight had played out between a Spitfire Mk IV and an Albatros D.III above his bed, while an enormous Hawker Harrier approached from the West and a tiny Concord from the East.

Over the years after he’d moved on to other interests the planes grew ever dustier and more decrepit: their glue weakened steadily, and he kept bumping into them with his head. Some lost their propellers, others were missing entire panels from the fuselage. He remembered one wingless B52 whose nose-string had snapped.

All through his teens it had dangled vertically by its tail, frozen in perpetual midplummet next to the lampshade. Now it, and all the rest, were gone.

Dad said: ‘If you want to help me out you could pull the pins—I can’t reach.’

‘You didn’t keep any of the models did you, after you took them down?’

‘They were all knackered. Oh, except for this.’ The old man opened up one of the wooden cabinets and retrieved a small white model. He handed it to his son. This one hadn’t been strung from the ceiling, but was supported on a transparent plastic mount.

‘It’s pretty,’ Frank said, turning the plane around in his hands. It was very simple,

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very aerodynamic. There was no propeller. Its fuselage came to a rounded point at each end, like a space rocket or a missile. The tail fins were almost as wide as the wings, and the bulb of the cockpit was set a long way back. It looked like someone’s inaccurate idea of the future. Frank thought it could easily have been something invented for a kids’ sci-fi show. Except there was a big red dot on each side near the tail and a simplified flower shape at the nose, and he knew what this plane was.

‘It’s a Baka,’ his father said.

‘Okha,’ Frank replied. ‘That was the proper name for it.’

This was a specialised plane, designed for Kamikaze; a piloted bomb with rocket engines and a huge explosive payload. It was called Okha, Cherry Blossom, to honour the pilot’s sacrifice, but the American sailors, whose ships it sank and comrades it killed, saw things differently. They had called it Baka—Japanese for ‘idiot’. Oddly, Frank had no recollection of building this particular model.

He raised himself from the chair. ‘I’ll pull out the rest of those pins for you.’

‘No hurry. You can find all your important stuff in those cases first. I’ll leave you to it.’ # Dad insisted on paying for a taxi. ‘You’ll miss your train otherwise,’ he said.

‘There’s only one more today.’ He’d checked the rail timetables online and phoned for a cab while Frank was upstairs. The old man saw his son to the car and watched it drive out of sight. Doubtless he’d keep watching a while longer until he was satisfied Frank wasn’t coming back, and then scuttle up to see for himself what was inside those cases.

The train was already in the station when Frank arrived. He found an almost empty carriage where he could take a table for himself. On the adjacent seat, he placed the Tesco bag his father had given him. His GCSE and A Level certificates were in there and a novel he hadn’t got round to reading. Also a small stack of photos of his mother, held together with an elastic band.

He had the keys to the two red cases in his pocket. The locks they’d fastened would give way easily enough, but at least they’d present a moral obstacle. Dad

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would have to decide whether or not to force the catches and leave irrefutable evidence of his snooping. It might hold him back for a minute or two. Then he would break in and discover that the cases really were full of junk: souvenirs from forgotten holidays; a small metal teapot stuffed with treasury tags; a oneman tent that didn’t keep the rain off.

Perhaps Dad had already found the out-of-fashion training shoe into which Frank had tucked the model plane. The Okha was a beautiful little thing in its own way, and a relic of his childhood, even if he couldn’t remember building it.

But the old man had called it a Baka, and that had spoiled it.

He imagined it in his father’s hands right now: the Cherry Blossom, the Idiot— this very moment, just as the train’s movement began to shift the inertia in his body and his home town slid away on the other side of the window.

Sooner or later, he knew, he’d be home again to clear out the house. And when that time came he wouldn’t reopen the red suitcases. Instead, he imagined himself at the edge of the dump, spinning them both like a hammer thrower, rotation after swooping rotation. The cases would soar into the air, drop to the landfill and explode on impact. But Frank wouldn’t see that happen, because he would turn his back on them before they cracked and spilled—even before they reached the top of their parabola. Because he would walk away as soon as he let them go.

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Passage (i.m. John)

Anna Wigley

At last you lay translucent on the bed – a wax doll, unmuscled to the throat, brave bones gleaming through the tallow skin at knees and hips. We watched and stroked the naked labouring of your head, the soft and faded surfaces of the almost-dead – all silver-white, pale mauve and sea-washed stone.

You made no sound except the work of forcing last breaths through ragged lungs, away somewhere inside the train that carried you surely down the tracks to who knows where. We thought by gripping your hands to keep you there, as if by the miracle of touch we might stop the wheels and watch you step down from the standing carriage.

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Yolk/White Susie Wild

Now I hold the keys to many houses and the walls of this one feel brashly naked.

This sex-starved place.

The letting agent tried to sort out our commitment but our incompatibility is shelved, the fridge going the way of shared houses— all those pizza boxes, beer cans, the curdling milks.

The radishes have gone to seed, there is no loo roll or toothpaste, spiders are everywhere and the grass is dead.

The estate agent posts written requests to air the space between us before public viewings.

Sends handymen / builders / decorators in to paint over our cracks.

I clean the stains of parties and parting from threshold to hearth to attic to gate.

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States: a view from the left coast Tony Kendrew

Poetry and the Planet Breaking free from the constraints of my usual assignment I leap off the left coast of the United States and head out into the Pacific Ocean, two thousand miles to a group of islands once called the Sandwich Islands. James Cook stumbled upon them in 1793 (five hundred years after the Polynesians arrived), and to my surprise the Union Jack still occupies the top left corner of the state flag. History suggests that its presence there has little to do with any allegiance to Britain, nor does it support the idea that the British should be upset that the beautiful tropical islands of Hawaii have somehow been stolen by the United States - at least, not stolen from them. Stolen from the Hawaiians, perhaps, and one day we may see that claim in the US Supreme Court.

There are six main islands, each with its distinctive sub-culture, its surfing mecca, its tourist sights and agribusinesses, in surprising variety considering how closely the islands cluster in the middle of the vast Pacific - explained by the diversity of their volcanic topography, and the rain, or lack of it, that results.

I landed on Maui, the island second in size and density of population, and was immediately made aware of the environmental issues close to the heart of the islanders. No burn bumper stickers protested the use of fire to remove dead sugar cane leaves before harvest, and No to Monsanto sprayed on a roadside hoarding protested its attempt to overthrow a recently passed moratorium on GMOs. Both issues feature high on health concerns of residents within the trade wind’s reach of the fertile central valley.

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There is a rich culture of poetry and song among the native Hawaiians, who number about 10% of the island’s population. Many Hawaiian words have entered the vocabulary of non-natives - hale, house; lanai, patio; ohana, family; mahalo, thank you; and, of course, the universal greeting, aloha - and nearly all place names and street names are Hawaiian, so the rhythm of the language is part of daily conversation. But I am not here to learn the Hawaiian language, let alone the subtleties of its poetry and imagery, or attempt to report on the Hawaiian literary scene.

Maui is home to one of America’s best-loved poets, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and US Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2011: W.S. Merwin. On Maui he is best known for his verse novel about Hawaii, Folding Cliffs, and his nineteen-year devotion to converting a wasteland sucked of its nutrients by decades of sugar and pineapple cultivation into a nature reserve with seven hundred species of palm tree, many rare and endangered, some saved from extinction. This double devotion, to poetry and conservation, has brought special attention to him in recent years, including a 2014 film of his life project: Even Though the Whole World Is Burning.

The film’s title sums up Merwin’s personal, non-political approach to ecological activism: revolution one person and one passion at a time. As he told Edward Hirsch in an interview in The Paris Review in 1987, “We try to save what is passing, if only by describing it, telling it, knowing all the time that we can’t do any of these things. The urge to tell it, and the knowledge of the impossibility.

Isn’t that one reason we write?”

I was moved by his book Unchopping a Tree. This is a short prose essay which originally appeared in 1970 in a collection of his prose entitled The Miner’s Pale Children. It is now a slim hardback beautifully illustrated with paintings based on the cellular structure of plants, which describes in excruciating detail what it would take to undo the violent act of cutting down a tree. Merwin was one of the leading anti-war poets of the Vietnam era, so he knows about protest, but he has never been an advocate of political activism. The book is activism of a more subtle kind, for the attention paid to the process he describes, and the neutrality of the expression, its dispassion, lead us effortlessly to thoughts about the violence of the act and the horror of its finality, and ultimately to concern for the fate of forests everywhere, and the loss of the small whenever the arrogance of the big dominates.

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The film and the book got me thinking about a recent trend in publishing, no doubt spurred by our focus on the plight of our planet’s diversity, exemplified by a couple of recent books: Can Poetry Save the Earth? By John Felstiner, with the subtitle A Field Guide to Nature Poems, and the unique and surprisingly compelling Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. This meaty paperback is an encyclopaedia from “a’a” to “zigzag rocks” of entries short and long written by some of the stars of American letters: Robert Haas, Barbara Kingsolver, Arthur Sze, to name three.

Barbara Kingsolver’s take on mesa - half a page of wit and seamless prose – gives us fascinating nuggets whose focus tells us almost as much about the writer as the subject. I find that perfectly acceptable, and am happy to be introduced to pack-rats in the next alphabetical entry (by Terry Tempest Williams) on middens. This is the reverse of the colder, analytic descriptions expected of more academic treatises. It reminds me of George Bernard Shaw’s comment about art criticism, which applies equally to the art of expressing one’s feelings about the natural landscape. “It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.” (Let us forgive him the “man.”)

Further light on this trend comes from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street. This is a chronological collection of poems from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to the present day. It takes as its premise that our disregard for the world beyond the immediate knowledge of the majority of earth’s citizens – the reefs, wetlands and forests – has led to their deterioration, and that poetry is a way to reacquaint and reengage us, and ultimately to halt and reverse that process.

Browsing through it recently I wondered whether the book was just another jump onto the ecopoetry bandwagon, as in many cases the only thing that makes a poem an ecopoem, as opposed to a nature poem, is the mention of human intervention, of Adam in the garden. Ecopoetry is “connected to the world in a way that implies responsibility” (James Engelhardt), but few of the poems in The Ecopoetry Anthology ascribe responsibility. Many don’t even hint at a problem, let alone have as an additional agenda an urge that something be done about it. So The Ecopoetry Anthology is not a collection of activist poems, despite the name, which may trigger images of chainsaws and tree-huggers, though Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder’s poems are featured. Its contribution is as a rich resource reaching back more than a hundred years of the reflections of two hundred poets’ on the impact of human activity on planet earth.

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I found Patricia Smith’s first-hand poems about Hurricane Katrina especially moving in their mix of minute observation of the immediate and the imagery of stunned action. She earns the right to the title ecopoet, though it is one thing to write when the disaster is immediate and the responsibility determinate, quite another when it’s insidious and complicated.

Perhaps there are still poets exhorting, expressing their hope, or their despair, urging action in the old-fashioned way, ignoring the snail-pace of politics, longing for someone to do something, to stop the tide of destruction. Who are they? And is anybody listening?

No, we are not living in a time of exhortation, of direct appeal to get up and do something. Play up, play up, and play the game is long dead. Now and then an inspired vision or a charlatan can rally youth around a cause and make a difference – something the military has been expert at it since grunts turned to words – but make a difference to what?

Sheryl St. Germain’s poem about the 2010 gulf oil spill, ‘Midnight Oil’, also from The Ecopoetry Anthology, comes close to exhortation, asking those responsible to swim out into the blackened water, but even her lines read more like a cry of despair, a shriek of anger. It’s easier to express anger when causal links between disaster and responsibility are clear. Anger needs a target to have much meaning, and who shall we blame for global warming? W.S. Merwin again, from the same interview: “I don’t think you can get stuck with just plain anger. It’s a dead end in the long run. If the anger is to mean anything, it has to lead you back to caring about what is being destroyed. It’s more important to pay attention to what it is that you care about. I don’t want to preach about that, but that is how I’ve tried to find my way out of that impasse by returning to the things that I did care about.” One of the many things he still cares about is his rain-soaked corner of Maui and its seven hundred palm trees.

I think Sheryl St. Germain would agree with W.S. Merwin. Her lasting message, which comes in the same poem, ‘Midnight Oil’, is this: there are times we need silence as much as we need the news or a poem that creates a silence in us where we can feel again

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To learn to feel again about the things that matter, and then to get down to work, that’s the requirement. Here are the opening lines of Merwin’s Unchopping a Tree: “Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nest that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places.”

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Contributors

Zino Asalor lives in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria. He is a writer of fiction and poetry. His work has been published in several literary magazines including New Literati, Saraba Magazine, The Missing Slate, Waxwing Literary Journal and Barcelona Review. He is working on his first novel.

Dave Barrett lives in Montana, USA. Five other excerpts from the novel have been accepted for publication: ‘Miss Sue Ann Bonnet’ in the Winter 2015 issue of Watershed Review, ‘Red of 10,000 Years’ in the current issue of The Vignette Review, ‘Little Red Meat’ in the Summer 2015 issue of Wilderness House, ‘The Door-Trick Game’ in the Fall 2015 issue of The MacGuffin and ‘$4 Dollars A Pound’ in the Winter 2016 issue of Toad Suck Review. Stories from his Inland Empires collection have been published in over a dozen literary journals: most recently in Prole 13 (U.K.) and Potomac Review. Also, the story—‘Shoes’—appears as a reprint in the Summer 2015 issue of Midwestern Gothic.

Taylor Bond is a 2014-2015 Lannan Fellow and a freelance photographer.

Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Underwater New York, Belle Reve Literary Journal, The Anthem, Spilled Ink, Behind The Counter, Wimapog, Ygradisil, Foliate Oak, and The Camel Saloon.

Yuan Changming lives in Vancouver. Yuan is a 9-time Pushcart nominee and author of seven chapbooks. Growing up in a remote village, Yuan began to learn English at nineteen and published monographs on translation before moving out of China. With a PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver, and has poetry appearing in Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, London Magazine, Threepenny Review and 1159 others across 38 countries.

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Sandra Coffey is a writer from Galway on the west coast of Ireland. She has been published in Crannog, Honest Ulsterman, Incubator Journal, Silver Apples, Galway Review, ROPES and Around the Farm Gate a collection of rural stories published by Ballpoint Press, RTE and the Farmer’s Journal. Last November, she was one of thirteen to be longlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Short Story of the Year competition. She is a journalist with the Galway Independent. She tweets at @SandraCoffey

Ashleigh Davies lives in Abergavenny. He is an English graduate whose work has been anthologised in The C Word (Cinnamon Press, 2011) and also appeared in Envoi, Iota and Poetry Wales among other publications. Ashleigh has also performed as part of the Literature Wales DayLit Festival (2011).

Thomas Elson lives in California but has spent extensive time throughout the USA. From California to North Carolina, and Louisiana to Washington including off road destinations, he writes of lives that fall with neither safety net nor safe person to catch them. His most recent short stories have been published in the United States and United Kingdom.

Ross Ericson has written and directed both The Autumn of Han and DiaoChan for Red Dragonfly Productions. He has worked extremely closely with the company and has a solid understanding of the difficulties in translating traditional East Asian theatre for the wider British audience. Ericson is a published playwright with Methuen Drama. He has received critical acclaim for his play Casualties and his stage adaptation of Henry Fieldings’ Tom Jones, which has been licensed by LA Theatre Works for radio. His recent solo show The Unknown Soldier received 5 and 4 stars reviews from FringeGuru and The Scotsman at Edfringe 2015 and was shortlisted for Brighton Fringe’s Award for Excellence. He is also an actor and the founder of Grist to the Mill theatre company.

Alun Evans lives in London. His stories and poems have appeared in Structo, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Open Pen, NFTU and Éclat Fiction. As a journalist, he is a regular contributor to Vice and the Saatchi Gallery Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @quietlyitgoes or email him at evansalun@talk21.com

Allen Forrest is a graphic artist and painter born in Canada and bred in the U.S. He has created cover art and illustrations for literary publications and

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books. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University’s Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation’s permanent art collection. Forrest’s expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.

Philip Fried’s most recent book of poetry, Interrogating Water (Salmon, 2014), was praised by Carol Rumens in the Guardian as “outstanding.” Forthcoming from Salmon in October, 2016, is Squaring the Circle.

Tamsin Hopkins lives in London. She writes poetry and fiction. Her short story collection Shore to Shore launches next month with Cinnamon, who will also publish her poetry pamphlet Inside the Smile later this year.

Tony Kendrew lives and writes in a remote and beautiful part of Northern California, where he has produced two CDs of his poems, Beasts and Beloveds and Turning. His first printed collection of poetry, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, was published by Iconau in 2014. www.feathersscatteredinthewind.com

James R. Kincaid lives in Pittsburg, USA. He is an English Professor masquerading as an author (or the other way around). He’s published four novels—most recently, Wendell and Tyler and You Must Remember Thus, a couple dozen short stories, and ever so many nonfiction articles, reviews, and books (academic and trade). Kincaid has taught at Ohio State, Colorado, Berkeley, USC, and is now at Pitt.

Alison Lock’s poetry and short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals in the UK and internationally. She is the author of a short story collection, two poetry collections, and a forthcoming fantasy novella. She has an MA in Literature Studies. She is a tutor for courses on Transformative Life Writing. www.alisonlock.com

Fran Lock lives in London. She is a sometime itinerant dog whisperer and author of two poetry collections, Flatrock (Little Episodes, 2011) and The Mystic and the Pig Thief (Salt, 2014). Her work has appeared in various places, most recently Poetry, and The Poetry Review. She is the winner of the 2014 Ambit Poetry Competition, and the Out-Spoken Poetry Prize 2015. Her poem ‘Last Exit to Luton’ came third in the 2014 National Poetry Competition.

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Julian McKenny is a lens based artist who studied Fine Art and has an MA in Photography from De Montfort University. For the last seven years he and his partner have established and run a market garden based on Permaculture principles in Blaenffos, Pembrokeshire, selling produce from the farm gate.

Currently they are constructing a straw bale house and this development forms the core of recent and ongoing photographic work in the project Self:Build:Self, one of several projects exploring the land and their relation to it under the overall title of About A Place.

Philippa Matthews was born and has lived in London most of her life. She has a BA from St Mary’s University, Twickenham, in Classics & Religious Studies.

She has been working for the last twenty years in Horticulture & garden design.

Michael Melgaard lives in Canada and is an editor and author. His work has appeared in Potluck, Cleaver Magazine, and on the Maple Tree Literary Supplement.

Jessica Mookherjee is a poet from Kent, a member of Kent and Sussex Poetry Society. She has recently had poems accepted for publication in Agenda, Antiphon, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Prole. She has also been published in the Kent and Sussex Folio, 2015 & 2014 and has been featured in Abegail Morely’s The Poetry Shed.

Roger Nash is an active member of the Welsh diaspora in Canada. A graduate of the University of Wales in 1965, he edited the university literary magazine Dawn in his undergraduate years. He’s a past-President of the League of Canadian Poets, and inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Greater Sudbury.

His literary awards include the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry and the PEN/O.Henry Prize Story Award. His most recent books of poetry are Upsidoon (Scrivener Press, 2014) and The Sound of Sunlight (Buschek Books, 2012). He has a collection of short stories, The Camera and the Cobra and Other Stories (Scrivener Press, 2011).

Jan Norton is a Welsh writer living in the East Midlands. She taught English for many years, and has been writing seriously for three years since her retirement. In that time she has had some success in competitions. She often writes poetry inspired by her family’s valley roots and the Yorkshire family she is now part of. Photography is also a major influence in her writing, both her own work and those of photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Bown.

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David Morgan O’Connor for many years pursued a career in Theatre and Film and has worked on both sides to the camera and stage. Currently he blogs at The MFA Years and reviewing literary magazines for The Review Review. He is delighted to be pursing an MFA in Fiction and teaching at UNM. His work has appeared in various publications including: Collective Exiles, Bohemia Journal, BlueStem, The Literary Yard, Fiction Magazine, Electric Windmill Press, The Kite Mag, Barcelona Metropolitan, The New Quarterly and The Guardian. Running the only Irish Pub in Rio de Janeiro leading up to the World Cup was the highlight for 2014.

David Ishaya Osu (b. 1991) is a Nigerian poet. He has been published in: Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka, Birmingham Arts Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Watershed Review, The Kalahari Review, Acumen Literary Journal, among others. David is a board member of the Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation, and he is currently polishing his debut poetry book.

Ian Parks was born in 1959 and is the author of six collections of poems, the most recent of which was a Poetry Book Society Choice. He was writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2012 and Writing Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester, from 2012-2014. A further collection, Citizens, is forthcoming from Smokestack Books and his translations, If Possible: Fifty Cavafy Poems is due from Arc Publications.

Anne Ryland’s first collection of poetry, Autumnologist, was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006, and her second collection, The Unmothering Class, was selected for New Writing North’s Read Regional Campaign 2012. New poems have been published in Poetry Review, The North, Stand and Agenda.

Polina Simakova is 18. She is originally Russian but has lived in England for several years. She also writes in French, but never in Russian. The published poem The Bosnian War was inspired by Angelina Jolie’s film In the Land of Blood and Honey.

Anna Somerset graduated from Lampeter in Modern Languages in the 1980s.

She works as a charity fundraiser and has written and directed two short films.

A previous poem was published in The Lampeter Review in 2013.

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Katherine Stansfield is a poet and novelist, based for a long time in Aberystwyth and now travelling in Italy. Her poems have appeared as The Guardian online poem of the week and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre’s weekly poem, as well as on The Writer’s Hub at Birkbeck, in Magma, New Welsh Review, Planet, Poetry Wales, Poetry Cornwall, The Lampeter Review, and The James Dickey Review. She won the PENfro poetry competition in 2014 and in 2015 was the competition judge. Playing House, her first collection of poems, was published by Seren in 2014. Her novel, The Visitor, was published by Parthian in 2013 and went on to win the 2014 Holyer an Gof Prize for Fiction.

Robert Joe Stout lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. He is a magazine and online journalist and has worked for newspapers and magazines in California, Texas and Mexico City. His most recent book is the poetry volume Monkey Screams.

Daniel Treagust lives on the Hampshire-Sussex border. He reads and writes most days and is always on the lookout for a good story.

David Wharton comes originally from Northumberland. For twenty years or so he was a teacher in the state secondary system. Now he is Course Director for Creative Writing in the University of Leicester’s Lifelong Learning department.

David has previously published short fiction and poetry here and there—and co-written several books on Film Education. He is currently at work on a commentary explaining how he came to write a metafictional thriller for the PhD he intends to finish this year.

Anna Wigley lives in Cardiff. Poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry Wales and The Independent, and she has had three collections published with Gomer Press. A fourth collection, Ghosts, is due out in March this year.

Susie Wild is the author of The Art of Contraception. She’s performed her words in dives and dance halls since 2006 (Green Man, Dinefwr, Glastonbury, Hay, The Laugharne Weekend etc) and been published on websites, in anthologies, magazines and even on cake. She lives in Cardiff and is Publishing Editor at Parthian Books. Twitter: @soozerama

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