The Lampeter Review - Issue 17

tLR

ISSN 2054-8257 (Print)
/ ISSN 2054-8265 (Online)

The Lampeter Review

JOURNAL OF THE LAMPETER CREATIVE WRITING CENTRE www.lampeter-review.com

ISSUE 17/ DECEMBER 2019

KIT BROPHY RACHEL CARNEY ASHLEIGH DAVIES AYSAR GHASSAN SARAH NESBITT GIBBONS CHRISSIE GITTENS CHRIS HARDY CARLY HOLMES TONY KENDREW SONNET MONDAL DAWN MORGAN NESS OWEN MARIANNE PICTON IAN TWIDDY DANIEL UNCAPHER CALVIN WHARTON

THE LAMPETER REVIEW The online magazine of the Lampeter Creative Writing Centre Trinity St. David’s Creative Writing Centre at Lampeter www.lampeter-review.com | info@lampeter-review.com

MANAGING EDITOR: Dic Edwards GUEST EDITOR: Sarah Hudis ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Rosalind Hudis Tony Kendrew Kathy Miles DESIGN: Constantinos Andronis (c-andronis.gr) COVER PAGE IMAGE: Barafundle Bay, Dawn Morgan All paintings by Dawn Morgan (www.art-dawn.co.uk) The Lampeter Review acknowledges with appreciation the continued support of Professor Medwin Hughes, Vice-Chancellor of University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. © 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.

Table of Contents

-5Editorial / sarah hudis -7The bay of quails / chris hardy -9Three poems / ashleigh davies -13Artist’s statement / dawn morgan -15Figurehead / carly holmes -19Two poems / rachel carney -22Safety at sea / sarah nesbitt gibbons -23Ballybunion / tony kendrew -27The kitchen sink / aysar ghassan

[3]

-29Taramasalata / ian twiddy -31Wait / calvin wharton -32Tidal pools / daniel uncapher -34Strange meetings / sonnet mondal -35Message / ness owen -38How not to turn into the sea / chrissie gittens -39Mother of exiles / marianne picton -45Gone fishing / kit brophy -46Contributors

[4]

Editorial

Reading through the submissions for this very exciting edition of The Lampeter Review, I kept returning to the idea of perspective, in both its senses. Perspective as where we look from (and who is looking), and perspective as distance and proximity, largeness and smallness, foreground and horizon. Carly Holmes’ prose, for instance, occupies the perspective of a ship’s figurehead nearing the end of her life, whilst in Daniel Uncapher’s piece tourists peer into the transient world of a tidal pool - and its inhabitants peer back.

The sea, certainly, has the power to put things in perspective. Standing at the shore, looking away from the land, offers an experience of enormity and timelessness, of powerful continuity which renders you very small: the endlessly ‘pulsing sea’ of Calvin Wharton’s ‘Wait’, or Dawn Morgan’s precise, unpeopled sea-scapes. Many of this edition’s poems apprehend a vast, wild sea, indifferent to the humans who paddle in its shallows or are dashed against rocks by its waves. Chrissie Gittens’ humorous list of instructions on How ‘Not To Turn Into The Sea’ identifies a sense of circular time as integral: ‘Resist rhythm,/ and the certainty that one tide will follow another/ just as surely as day-time follows night.’ Rachel Carney articulates a feeling of sea-overwhelm in ‘Sea Dream’: ‘staring out at something/ bigger than us more real than us’. In ‘Self Portrait as a Wreck’ it is the coastal cliffs which

[5]

sit immovable and ‘calm’, their ‘impenetrable bulk’ impervious to the buffets of human emotion. Such an impenetrability is echoed in Chris Hardy’s ‘The Bay of Quails’. The horizon is a ‘bar’, the sky a ‘screen’: visitors may find the bay but ‘cannot keep’ it.

But rest your gaze a little closer than the horizon and you might notice washed up on the beach are scraps of human detritus: the ‘drinking straws and HB pencil sharpening mounds’ of Aysar Ghassan’s ‘The Kitchen Sink’. Glance at the news app on your phone and you might be reminded that this is 2019, and the sea’s cool detachment from human behaviour is slipping. An island of plastic floats in the Pacific. Microplastics lodge inside stomachs all the way up the food chain. Within just a few decades there may be no more fish in the sea.

This simultaneous perception of macro and micro, a dizzying perspectival shift, is captured in Ashleigh Davies’ poems, which inhabit the dynamism of the coastline: ‘High Tide, Low Tide’ occupies the space where water endlessly meets land: ‘The tide that turns away from the shore / like the sleepless toss of a bed warm body’, whilst in ‘Unmasked’ salt-water meets fresh at the mouth of a river in a ‘pointillist/ assembly of molecular proportions.’ In ‘The Bones of It’ a beachcomber scrutinises a rock pool with ‘needle-sharp eyes’ while a shell quietly ‘pulls the earth around its shoulders.’

Such a disorientation is captured too in Iain Twiddy’s tongue-in-cheek mock-epic ‘Taramasalata’, which enlists the sea of Greek myth to articulate an experience of childhood disappointment, and Ness Owen’s ‘Message’, in which a mysterious note in a bottle has not crossed oceans but merely floated along the Welsh coast a little way. The sea has long been an emblem of travel, movement: a connector or barrier between land and land. The narrator of Marianne Picton’s incisive ‘Mother of Exiles’ gazes out towards Liberty Island, over a stretch of water steeped in a complex history of human migration, and prays for the safety of the ‘tempest-tost’.

An enormous thank you to everyone who submitted such brilliant work to this edition. Happy reading!

Sarah Hudis, Issue Editor.

[6]

The Bay of Quails Chris Hardy

The place at the end of the world was as far as we could go, a circle of calm sea ringed by mountains, sand and pebbles shelving beneath clear water, an oil drum on the beach, a young woman and an old woman who sold us coffee, eggs and bread, and shivered in the sun.

The path traced away along the mountains’ edge.

Then in a small cove stuck with sea urchins, an entrance to Hell and a place to find out fate

[7]

beside the blue meniscus in the bay’s cupped hand.

We have found but cannot keep it.

The horizon bars the narrow straight.

The sky lifts from the sea, a shining screen

[8]

Three Poems Ashleigh Davies

The Bones of It That golfer’s stoop and pluck to clasp hold of the first shell; a shale faced beach front relic.

Your arm cantilevered to the hoist, unbuckling the puzzle piece from its time carved mosaic.

Your needle-sharp eyes pick it clean of any worth; the bones of it tossed back.

The rock pool smells clay baked, fusty with its limpid haul that you dredge by hand for a piece of green blue oil slick coral; touch-tightened to your gaze, an incongruous sheet of slate

[9]

to be slipped discreetly into your shoulder hung rattle bag, a pinioned crunch of bone scree.

Somewhere in the trussed up surf that first cast shell pulls the earth around its shoulders, the insistent pound of each wave against the beach front breakers; someone else’s world knocking.

[ 10 ]

High Tide, Low Tide He remembers the warnings (the me of my memory), as he front crawls through the green-brown slop of the sea.

That breaking of the current against the breaking of his shoulders; his levered mechanism against the lever of the sea-arm.

The tide that turns away from the shore like the sleepless toss of a bed warm body turning away from the arms of love.

[ 11 ]

Unmasked No second warning to the swell and ebb of the tide; belly of the river straining against the buckle of the sea-mouth, gulping more pink fizz than can be swallowed.

A grate of iron rust autumn leaves pressed into the bank, grasping for each square foot, grit and silt wrestling the sea arm to stalemate; a dinner party trick – tablecloth of water rasped from beneath the feet of oaks.

At shutter speed a vinyl plinth of jet.

Morning wakes it unassuming, tilting heads of passers-by, wondering at this masking (or is it an unmasking?); pointillist assembly of molecular proportions.

[ 12 ]

Artist’s Statement Dawn Morgan

My paintings are inspired by the colours and moods of West Wales. I fell in love with the region as a child, when my family lived near Letterston in Pembrokeshire.

The family moved away when I was six, but we came back for holidays before eventually resettling in Wales. I tend to keep painting the same favourite places, such as Druidstone Haven, which I have loved for as long as I can remember, the Laugharne estuary, Marloes Sands and Presipe Bay near Manorbier, which has the most incredible pink rocks.

I mainly work in oils and I love the sense of luminosity you can achieve with them - they’re perfect for capturing the essence of coastal landscapes. If I want to capture a mood more quickly, I work with soft pastels. I’ve also been experimenting with acrylics lately, but I always go back to oils. An oil painting usually takes me a long time. I use layer after layer of paint for the sky and sea to build up depth and intensity of colour, and I’m a detail person, not a sketcher. So I’m not a plein air painter and I generally use photographs for inspiration. One of my cousins, Rod Smith, is a keen photographer and I have shamelessly adapted several of his pictures of Marloes.

Most of my paintings are representational, but I’m working on a series of scenes that are more abstract: light reflected onto a stone bridge from the Brecon Canal; sand viewed through the milky body of a jellyfish; rows of slumped conifers sinking into waterlogged ground. I’m looking more closely at West Wales these days and finding some incredible things to paint, when I view it from a different angle.

[ 13 ]

Tenby Castle Beach

[ 14 ]

Figurehead Carly Holmes

I’ve seen spectacles like you wouldn’t believe. Humpback whales singing lullabies to their lovers; dead men gutted and strung by their own glossy innards from harbour walls; sunsets that spray the sky with fireworks and scorch the vision to fierce white. I’ve groaned beneath the weight of sea eagles roosting on the curve of my shoulders and been gouged down to the heartwood by the scrape of a gannet’s beak against my chin as it worries fish bones from its gullet. I’ve been plunged through waves so vast in storms so wild I’ve scooped coral from the very bottom of the ocean floor. I gaze with the same unblinking come hither pout at seascape and landscape, through every season and across every yard of this water world. Reg! Oi, Reg! Is that a fishing rod in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?!

I’m not subtle, as figureheads go. My hair falls in carved ringlets down to my tiny waist. My breasts perch high and swollen on my chest, my nipples proud and plump. Haven’t you got a lovely bunch of coconuts! My hands cup a kiss blown eternally to the winds. I have no legs or lower half, and need none as I’ll never fuck or walk. My paint has faded over the years from garish red and white to a kinder overall pink that smoothes softly over my crags and wrinkles. Gull shit adds splashes of colour and texture to my torso as it trails its acid path across my curves, and bladderwrack necklaces my throat. I’m cast in the ideal of a pirate’s squeeze or saloon bar prostitute, a sailor’s wet dream, though my sparky wisecracks and eternally arched eyebrows are appreciated only by the wind and the flying fish and the other figureheads I occasionally see on my travels. Well, hello sailor! Just passing by? No time to stop and chat? It’s a sad waste of good talent.

When I was young and first formed, after I’d been hacked into fantasy shape and strapped into a hoist, heaved into position, I gazed upon the sea for the first time and it made me quake with terror. There was just so much of it. I was seasick for the first five years, green beneath the scarlet diamonds of my cheekbones. Oi! My eyes are up here! Cheeky! The salt breeze drove cracks deep into my tumble of oak

[ 15 ]

curls and smeared itself in glittering crystals across my cherry lips, my rigid stare.

But once I weathered and softened enough to let it soak into me and settle below the crusted veneer, once I relaxed and learned to find my balance on the water instead of fighting to resist its shimmy and thrust, I loved every moment of each voyage. From the start of the journey, that thrill of anticipation when we raise anchor and I point us out of harbour, to the first sight of foreign land after months of sea-glare and storms, I whoop and holler and whistle. I was made for this. Wayhay, and up she rises!

We float without purpose for weeks at a time while the men trade their goods and patch any rot in the ship’s belly. They might even touch me up with a lick of paint if they’ve got the ladder close, flick a brush leeringly over my dinner-plate nipples, the brutish swines . Layered beside each other in some strange port, bumping hulls, we figureheads use the free time to catch up on gossip or swap horror stories of sea monsters and shipwreck. Whisky whisky whisky, oh! We call out to old friends and ask about absent ones. We crack jokes and sing songs, grumble and squabble and flirt. There’s a natural hierarchy based on what we symbolise: the holy images and rich folks’ status symbols rank highest and are the least fun-loving. Pity any of us who gets parked between a couple of lions or a saint for a long lay-over. The gargoyles and good-time girls like me are natural allies, bumping along the bottom as regards commanding respect but the most popular companion through long months of nothing to do but stare at the stained stone of a harbour wall. Hey ho, below below!

This voyage I’m on now will be my last. I’ve heard the sailors talk as they prowl the decks at night; the ship is springing leaks so it’s for the knacker’s yard. If I’m lucky someone will remember to chop me down from my mounting and retire me to a nice country pile where I can spend my end days crumbling to dust in an attic or a shed. If I’m unlucky I’ll be burnt to ash or split into kindling and sold in bundles on street corners. Nobody likes a drunken sailor! Early in the morning! Neither fate particularly bothers me, and I was ready for either before today. But today I fell in love and it’s spun me right over, upside down and front to back. It’s made me shiver right down to the knots and bunches of my hardwood core. I cannot bear the thought that I’ll never see her again.

We passed as ships in the night Tra la la! as she was leaving port and I was entering.

It was a squeeze though the narrow opening, both sets of sailors muscling their way without care for their ships, and for a brief while she was almost close enough to touch. Perfection, she was. Newly cast and flawlessly painted, eyes a turquoise peep between splayed fingers, hair the exact colour of leaves the moment before they tumble from the tree. She dried the jokes from my lips as she looked at me, sent [ 16 ]

all thought but poetry howling from my mind. She walks in beauty like the night! I called, and she smiled and glided on by.

Just one kiss. Just one kiss and they can take an axe to me and drop me into the deepest part of the ocean to break apart and rot down to nothing. I’ve lived long and well, I don’t pretend to myself that I’m anything other than a ravaged old piece these days, held together by salt-stricken splinters and clots of flotsam. I’m not the type a jewel like this fresh young beauty would ever want to spend longer than a few seconds with. But if she could have turned her head when she floated past me then she would have turned it, I know that. Oh, me, my heart, my rising heart! She was interested.

I’ve become fused to the ship’s subordinated soul now, through the decades of our companionship. There’s no dividing us without force. I can move this passive vessel if I try. Mere inches over months of effort, but move it I can. Or I can use my siren cry to summon help from my old pals. Get a load of these! Ripe for the picking! I don’t have long before we reach open waters and the long weeks of spying nothing but circling sharks and dark water monsters shifting beneath the swell of our passage. Ooh, keep your naughty thoughts to yourself, Bert, you saucy so-and-so!

The warriors and mythical creatures, the trolls and griffins and bears, all love a good romance and a pretty lady. And, unlike me, they have the strength to turn their ships right around if the desire takes them. Those sudden lurches on a calm sea, that strange skewing off course for half a mile before the boat’s nose corrects itself back to true, that’ll be them playing with the sailors, having a few moments’ japes, giving the men something to think about other than beer and tail. They can’t resist a bit of drama.

I’ve been sucking down the wind, breathing in and in and in, for hours now. I’m going to let it all out in one long call for help and see what happens. Wait for it.

Wait for it. Oooooooh! Damsel in distress! First one back to me gets a close up of my tits! Last one back gets a close up of my tits! And here they come. It brings a tear to my eye, it does. About turn! About turn! Let’s be having you! Full speed ahead!

It’s a marvellous sight, a fleet of boats all charging straight for me, whooping and hallooing as they come. Chaos on board, sailors yelping and clinging to the masts.

My men forced to turn us around and head back to harbour or face collision from all sides. Good to see you again, Horatio! Harold, I knew you’d come, you bloody diamond! Flank me, my friends! There she is! My beauty, my love! Give us a kiss! This is as good a way to go out as any. It’ll be a shame to spoil my pretty darling’s looks and smash these sailors to smithereens but we all have to make sacrifices when it

[ 17 ]

comes to the course of true love. Pucker up, you young nymph! Here I come! Left a bit! Right a bit! Perfect!

[ 18 ]

Two Poems Rachel Carney

Sea Dream I awoke gasping for breath overcome with the truth of it that open space my need to be outside part of it breathing it and here we are hearts beating like children staring out at something bigger than us more real than us no room for words or photographs it is the fury we smother down escaped and free at last released to live in ways we can only imagine

[ 19 ]

Self Portrait as a Wreck on days like this you might catch sight of her out there amidst the pounding of the surf as soon as she gets close things fall apart she’s caught between the cliffs their sheer impenetrable bulk and the un-relenting fury of her own bedraggled heart observe the way she flings herself against those rocks each surge more pieces breaking falling off observe the calm resplendence of the cliffs the beam of light that turns and turns above and turn it into words upon a page a hollow warning uttered out of love

[ 20 ]

Marloes Sea before Storm

[ 21 ]

Safety at Sea Sarah Nesbitt Gibbons

A seal pup is a raindrop on a toenail from here – where Mum and I cross at Mizen Head the bridge between cliffs, to the last land before the Fastnet lighthouse, to the small, white museum of Safety at Sea. The seal pup is a blob on a rock in the gulf.

I need lenses, but this is a pup, its grey-white writhing, the strain of its pulpy neck in its never-finished mewl, that mouth, and the placidity of its tail in spite of itself.

Alone, on a rock in the choppy waves, an unreachable island vision beyond it.

In the onlooking cliff face, there’s a cutout shadow, shaped like a mother seal, whose image does not recede with each increasing wave.

[ 22 ]

Ballybunion Tony Kendrew

Julie picked Gerry up at the airport in Dublin and things looked good from the moment he strode through the glass doors: his jeans, the casual bag over his shoulder, his angularity, his twisted smile, his hug.

When they got into the van Gerry glanced in the back. “Nice little nest you’ve built. Which one of us will be sleeping there tonight?”

“If it rains at least one of us will stay dry.”

“My feet will get wet whoever wins the toss.”

Julie always worried about sleeping arrangements. She’d spent a night with Gerry a couple of months ago when they met in London, but she didn’t want to assume anything. And she didn’t want him to assume anything either. She hardly knew him. So she threw a mattress in the back of the van and a couple of pillows, and a bag full of sheets and a duvet, just in case she wanted to be on her own. It was a tiny van, not big enough for both of them. And two months is a long time.

Men can change. She may not even like him any more. As for him, she was sure he would take her agreeing to a visit as an invitation to a series of tumbles.

He tapped the plastic St. Christopher hanging from the mirror, but didn’t say anything.

“Old habits die hard.”

“Old men die hard. You were a nurse, you should know that.”

“How do you know I was a nurse?”

“You told me, remember? You kissed my little finger when it got stuck in the bottle opener.”

“Did I really? What an ass-hole!”

They were good at banter. She had forgotten that. The conversation continued easy on the drive across. The two things she had worried about - the embarrassment of how was it for you, and the silence of oh god what am I doing here – never surfaced. And after the airport car park they didn’t mention sleeping arrangements again.

[ 23 ]

Gerry’s text had been perfectly timed. Julie wanted help with her annual dulse harvest. She left her writing desk every year for the low tides of the July full moon and went to Ballybunion. It was the best place for dulse in the whole of Ireland. An extra pair of hands would make sure she got enough for herself and her customer mailing list, and save the wear and tear on her back. And now that their collecting time might be curtailed by this storm he would be even more valuable. Gerry was happy to go along with her plans. How could he not be? - a few hours on a beach in July in return for a loose-limbed road trip to the west of Ireland! Julie brought along an extra pair of scissors. Whatever additional services Gerry might provide would be a bonus.

In Limerick they stopped for a cup of tea and then set off on the final leg to Ballybunion. Gerry never asked her about dulse, and didn’t once complain about the rain. This was intermittent now, though the further west they went the stronger the wind, and every so often a gust would hit the van and Julie would have to tighten her grip on the wheel. The weather forecaster said the rain would end overnight.

Gerry watched the windscreen wipers lift off the glass. “Are you sure you still want to do this?”

“Tomorrow’ll be fine. We’ll be on the beach first thing in the morning. The only problem is the storm might make the water too turbid.”

“Too what?”

“Turbid.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know what turbid is? You’ll find out tomorrow.”

“I’ve waited all my life to visit Ballybunion just to find out what turbid means.”

“I think I’ll be using it to describe your mind before too long whether we get to Ballybunion or not.”

“Well that’s clear then.”

“That’s what it’s not.”

And so they came to Ballybunion, Julie and Gerry, with the wind rippling the puddles in the streets. In the seaside part of town they drove past crowds of men hunched about with their hands in their pockets.

That’s what Julie saw, as much as she could make them out through the saltspattered windows. They were standing in small groups, hoodies up against the wind, scowling at them as they passed, menacing. She muttered as they drove past: “Bunch of brutish men!”

“You writers are all the same! If it’s not turbid, it’s brutish. They don’t look brutish to me. They look like a bunch of film extras waiting outside a pub.

Waiting for the director to tell them what to do. Waiting to earn some money.

They must be shooting a film.” [ 24 ]

And sure enough as they turned the next corner they were met by a police barrier across the road and a view of a line of trailers and vans and more small groups of people hanging around.

“What would they be filming here in weather like this?”

“A remake of The Perfect Storm perhaps.”

“Why don’t they shoot in a studio and use a wind machine?”

“Same reason they don’t put film in the cameras.”

“What?”

“If you have a storm to film why wouldn’t you film in a storm?”

“What’s my name?”

“Gerry.”

“Right. How come I have an Irish name but don’t understand what you’re talking about?”

“Same reason I have a Roman name and can’t understand why I invited you here in the first place.”

“You didn’t invite me. I thrust myself upon you. Besides, I’m not that bad. I’m pretty good company.”

“You only arrived this morning so I have yet to find that out.”

“That’s not true. You know already.”

“We were drunk.”

“This is true. My God, Jules. We both need a drink.”

They parked and headed for the bar. The rain had stopped, but it was windy.

Despite Julie’s concerns, the crowd of men outside nodded and said good evening as they passed.

When they ordered their drinks they found out that there wasn’t a bed to be had in the whole of Ballybunion, nor in Ballyheige or Tarbert either. The film crew had booked the lot. Julie said she was not driving back to Limerick.

“Well, it’s obvious then. You sleep on the beach and I’ll sleep in the van. I’ll just lie diagonally.”

“No one sleeps on Ballybunion Beach at the full moon in July, or any full moon for that matter.”

They both looked through the window and across the road to the car park where the van was juddering in the failing light.

“We’ll park where I always park and be close to the beach for the morning. Low tide’s at 7:30, so we should be up a couple of hours before that. I hope your bones can handle my mattress.”

“Who said anything about lying on the mattress?”

“I wouldn’t take anything for granted if I were you.”

“Do you know in New York they say ‘for granite.’ ‘Don’t take anything for granite.’ I always thought that was funny, considering the whole city is built on granite.”

[ 25 ]

“There’s no granite round here. The whole place is made of seaweed. Let’s get something to eat.” * Gerry woke in the middle of the night. He sat bolt upright, eyes and ears wide open. The full moon was bright through the rear windows. He heard water lapping against the van.

“Hey, Julie. We got a visitor.”

“What?”

“High tide. Let’s get out of here.”

Julie grabbed her clothes from the back of the driver’s seat. Gerry had laid his jeans on top of the duvet. They pulled them on and clambered over into their seats. The van started first time. The headlights showed the curve of the rope perimeter fence dipping into the water. It was about a foot deep. Beyond the fence, nothing. She backed slowly out of their space and then aimed the van at the exit. Gerry rolled the window down and put his head out. There was a bow wave in front of the wheel.

“What are you looking at?”

“The water.”

“What about it?”

Gerry pulled his head in and turned and looked at Julie. “It’s super turbid.”

Julie was silent for a second. “You don’t know what I’m going to say next, do you?”

“Yes I do.”

“What?”

“Fuck off.”

“Not a bad guess.”

[ 26 ]

The Kitchen Sink Aysar Ghassan

Scissor kicks, semaphore, no time for apostrophes.

Sucker punched then ready salted. Sandwiched in the undertow, throwing unkempt silhouettes in amongst canned applause from freshly snared halibut dipped in tartare sauce.

And who the hell are you to swoop down, bear down, crank my head back and bad breath, bone dry whisper that you saved my skin? That one time; that neap tide. In Escher time.

Among close friends I stand firm on drinking straws and HB pencil sharpening mounds while iridescent fry stroke your upper lip and seahorses wring their brass necks to tear at the pupils of your eyes.

[ 27 ]

Druidstone under a Big Sky

[ 28 ]

Taramasalata Iain Twiddy

We’d done one through five, but now Mr Cattermole was asking the class for a six-syllable word.

I had a belter, a beauty, one no one knew; like a spring tide, it gushed into my filling mouth, rushing pink; the ducts were suckers sucking the rock, my tongue delicious as a fish lashing at sunset; I wanted to lick it, squidge it, blurt it all out, a hundred plump roe bursting irrevocably, as candid as those sun-flashed homes climbing the coastal hills; my cheeks bulged as if with the winds of Aeolus, my arm a mast upright amidst the Siren strain that was me willing him to ignore the others.

He picked Parker. His was responsibility.

And then we stopped. It plopped, that word, like an anchor.

Meaning I never then got the chance to say mine, to get up and write on the blackboard, to deceive, to give the impression I’d really been to Greece; meaning I had to stay exactly where I was,

[ 29 ]

my tongue the mind’s vessel in the mouth’s fresh water, my breath the wind stilled, my arm the mast snapped in two, not even a martyr to the artificial, just an Odysseus who had never left home.

[ 30 ]

Wait Calvin Wharton

the one he loves waits for clear skies

above

clear skies are also the ones he loves

but

the one he loves is hollow now she’s empty hollow

like the sky

by the pulsing sea beneath the sky by the sea sky

but waiting

like the breeze that clears the sky

to one he recognizes

to sound

she says

pulse

her

waiting

such love is clear empty sands filled wait

eyes closed

the emptiness of one

clear sound

a hollow

the pulsing sea

[ 31 ]

Tidal Pools Daniel Uncapher

Life’s not so bad in a tidal pool. The crabs aren’t interested in hurting anyone. They don’t get along all the time with each other, of course (who does?), pushing the smaller ones around, but they definitely don’t want to ruin any tourist’s day.

The tourists and the crabs have reached a kind of understanding with one another. In particular, the crabs understand that the tidal pool is big enough for both of them, especially because tourists are way too big for the cracks. The tourists deserve a decent day off. It’s been a long year for everyone, and it was such a long drive in such a smelly car to get here today.

Even the anemones cede space to the tourists because they’re pacifists through-and-through, sensitive to conflict of pretty much any kind. They really don’t love it when the children poke them in their soft bellies, but fortunately they only have to endure it once before the kids get bored of them.

Mom and dad are setting up camp in the hot sand. It’s quite the day for them with their broken umbrella—they weren’t anticipating such a strong coastal breeze, and it keeps blowing the umbrella over. They’ll probably just throw it away afterwards, maybe just store it back in the garage. Definitely going to be headed online to purchase something new.

Dad spends the next hour imagining what kind of umbrella to get and is pretty much ready to leave, but the kids keep splashing around. On the way back to the car they pass a family with individual umbrellas clipped onto the backs of their beach chairs, which she loves, but he estimates that the overall volume, cost, and labor is just as high, if not considerably higher, with those personal umbrellas than in one good, decent, brand-new family-sized umbrella, just like his own father had.

He poses a decent argument but personally even he’s starting to harbor an interest in the individual umbrellas. The problem was that ideally they’d need new beach chairs to go along with their new umbrellas, as the current ones are,

[ 32 ]

like the broken umbrella, in pretty partial shape. It wouldn’t be the worst thing, not really, to go ahead and purchase a new set of beach chairs, especially on her Southwest credit card. They only needed a few more points to send the whole family to Breckenridge, Colorado, for a weekend, to take advantage of a timeshare that her colleague in the business department offered them, her colleague being otherwise predisposed this year.

To be honest, he says, I guess I don’t really know what the market for umbrellas is like today, let alone beach chairs.

She agrees. I think it’s probably pretty healthy, especially this time of year.

I’ll go online when I get home, he says.

They leave at a normal hour and get stuck in predictable traffic, and by the time they get home the tidal pools have been swallowed up by the tide.

[ 33 ]

Strange Meetings Sonnet Mondal

Sometimes we run into someone just for once in our lives and our bones refuse to fit inside the skin the same way.

Plans proceed as waves and recede as doubts.

A fleeting joy with gnawing pangs of apprehension the stretch between experience and fear seems like the time taken by a fish to reveal and conceal itself in front of a fish hook.

[ 34 ]

Message Ness Owen

And once we found a bottle, green and barnacled, cradled in bladderwrack with a paper rolled inside.

Breath held with salt -water fingers we delivered it, not to break the glass hoping for anywhere far enough not be home. The weight of disappointment shortened our summer as familiar blends rolled off our tongues.

Colwyn Bay. Still a fair journey but not far enough to ignite our minds. When the ebb tide is at its lowest the petrified forest shows.

We chased each other laughing, jumping over ancient stumps, gaps growing between us as one of us smashed it on the rocks and somewhere

[ 35 ]

on another shoreline not too far from us, I couldn’t help but think of the man growing old, waiting for an answer, staring at the same sea.

[ 36 ]

Tenby with Moon

[ 37 ]

How Not To Turn Into The Sea Chrissie Gittens

Lean away from the pull of the moon.

Avoid the sun glittering on the surface making a glare of silver and gold.

Hush the stones which rasp in murky waves.

Don’t, whatever you do, entertain those four container ships which are waiting in line on the horizon to dock at the next port.

Dodge the urge to lash into the pier so hard that froth sprays higher than houses.

Give up any idea of lapping, or merging with the sky.

Do not invite paddling, splashing, bathers or huge shaggy dogs.

Resist rhythm, and the certainty that one tide will follow another just as surely as daytime follows night.

[ 38 ]

Mother of Exiles Marianne Picton

Let me start by saying this: I love Earth. One could come to the conclusion that I do, on an academic level at least, simply from the way I express myself in metaphor and simile, as the “lower” humans do, and with feeling. My kind chooses not to feel as the Earthens do, though the potential for feeling is there, most certainly. During the first few planetary orbits I spent on Earth as research for my dissertation, I made use of this potential to befriend its inhabitants, and understand their ways. In fact, one might say I made too much use of it.

According to my kind, I came to love Earth more than I should.

I fell in love with it.

First and foremost I fell in love with its flavours. The flavours of New York, to be precise. My fellow, so-called “higher” humans may call me deranged, but have they ever visited Bedford Avenue subway station, and had a taste of a lovelorn busker’s lowing lament as he picks at the exhausted strings of an acoustic guitar?

Or beheld the delicious neon explosion of graffiti tags layered over the crumbling red-brick walls of our block in Brooklyn? Could they possibly even perceive the nuzzling, meandering embrace of Mrs Kowalski’s ginger cat around their bare ankles? Or the perfect combination of ketchup and mustard squeezed in squiggly lines over a greasy hot dog? Do they know what it is like, to absorb the roar of Times Square fireworks, or soak in the still quiet of the New York Public Library?

I doubt they could even begin to imagine the feeling of soft lips on chapped lips as the Hudson River breeze messed our hair, and how we drew in its saltiness with each breath, and the tang of city before the smoke…

As Tony would say: don’t knock it ‘til you try it.

The morning everything changed began with us at home, waiting for our housemate Delphine to return to us after a weekend away. We were just, as they say, “hanging out”. Bored. Boredom is beautiful—it is time that demands to be filled. While I found much satisfaction running up and down the stairs, watching a helical spring propel itself down the steps, Tony rearranged our video collection

[ 39 ]

alphabetically by title, grumbling all the while about Delphine’s inability to keep our tiny apartment tidy. Some Like It Hot. The Sound of Music. Suspicion. When he reached Sunset Boulevard, half of Delphine’s leaning tower of jazz records slipped off the shelf above, crashing down upon his head.

‘Fuck!’

‘Are you alright, Tony?’

‘Yeah…yeah…not so sure about the vinyl, though. Is ‘Strange Fruit’ one of Elf’s favourites?’ As he sat up, rubbing his head, his Nokia phone sang in his pocket.

‘That better be her now...’

It was indeed Delphine, calling to say she probably would not make it home in time to join us on our trip out this morning after all, as she was having brunch with her father at his Manhattan office. Tony, muttering about how rich people like Delphine thought the world revolved around them, stood up, eyes narrowing as my slinky landed by his scuffed sneakers.

‘Bro. Seriously?’

‘Hmmm?’

‘You’re crazy, I swear. Come here.’ As soon as I joined him at the bottom of the stairs, he pulled a scarf off the banister and wrapped it around my neck, suffocatingly tight.

I pulled at it fiercely to loosen it. ‘I do not require extra warmth around the neck area.’

‘Yeah you do. It’s cold out there.’ He threw on his own scarf, an old, frayed thing.

‘We could wait a little longer for Delphine,’ I suggested.

‘We could wait for Judgement Day, it’ll probably come round sooner.’ Tony slung his satchel over his shoulder with a sudden smile. ‘Maybe it would be good, just us? The Brit and the Italian—two aliens in New York, y’know what I’m saying?’

I did not remind him that he was a second generation American, or that he knew no Italian besides “ciao”, “arrivederci”, and the profanities his Nonna would screech while babysitting him after school. I liked that he saw us both as being different. He was always my favourite, from the moment we met on campus, because he called me “Cary Grant”. I had never had a nickname before.

We left our apartment as soon as I located my brogues. The usual old ladies were perched on the stoop outside, with their smokes, and their hair in rollers, and their gossiping red lips. I loved waking up every morning to their warbling and cackling.

‘Gorgeous day, eh, Grant?’ Mrs Kowalski winked at me, and her companions shrieked with laughter. Tony pulled me away with more force than was necessary, into the early autumn sunshine, past a pair of joggers plugged into [ 40 ]

their Walkmans. He and Delphine always called autumn “fall”, though I preferred the British word in this instance, the one—performing as British—I was actually supposed to use.

Mrs Kowalski was correct, of course. It was a gorgeous day, the sky forgetme-not blue. Cloudless. The first autumn chill of New York City, threaded through the breeze, occasionally nipped at our skin in a friendly sort of way. On a day like this, we could not possibly anticipate a tsunami.

We certainly did not expect to drown.

It was still morning, not even nine. We were on the Staten Island ferry, admiring the Manhattan skyline, the very first taste that many travellers past would have had of the continent beyond. Tony had become incessantly chatty, prattling on about how his Nonna and Nonno had travelled across sea and ocean to the States after the war. Upon seeing the Statue of Liberty they had kissed, he exclaimed, and his Nonno had burst into tears. ‘Mannaggia pomodoro!’ his Nonna had cried.

Damn tomato. It was something she always said.

Tony leant over the railing, the breeze combing back his unruly locks. ‘One day, I will take a girl here, and I will tell her my story, and I will kiss her.’

‘You have never been particularly demonstrative in the company of women.’

‘Maybe I just haven’t met the right girl.’

‘Delphine says otherwise.’

‘Delphine knows jackshit. Hey—watch it!’

A small child zigzagging along the deck on clunky roller-skates stuck out a bubblegum-blue tongue at Tony before stumbling into another passenger, a well-dressed businesswoman with a mobile pressed against one ear and a finger stuffed in the other. Her scowl could split atoms, though the child only laughed and moved on, squeezing through tourists clutching maps and bulky cameras.

Tony shook his head. ‘Damn kids. And damn you. It’s like only one of us can be the tall, dark, handsome one that all the old ladies and their mothers want to fuck, right?’

‘I would not particularly like to have sexual intercourse with the old ladies and their mothers.’

‘How about their daughters? You could, y’know. Francesca’s been eyeing you up.’

‘I would rather not.’

Tony cleared his throat. A nervous tick. ‘About the other night…’

‘Of which particular night do you refer?’ I asked, when he trailed off.

‘The night after Delphine left for home, I mean. The night where I said…some stuff. To you. About you.’

‘Do you mean the night you told me you would like to—?’ [ 41 ]

‘I was drunk.’ He looked away from me, out across the river. The ferry had scraped a white trail on the blue around Manhattan. Sunlight polished the skyscrapers, made the towers shimmer. We could not yet see Liberty Island. ‘Very drunk.’

I rested a gentle hand on his shoulder. Physical contact in the form of reassurance was new to me, then, but it felt right, and I was not awkward about it.

‘It is alright, Tony. I am not angry.’

‘No?’ ‘No. I should have said then that I would like to kiss you too.’

I thought it would make him happy, to know I felt the same, but as soon as I said this he recoiled, as if my hand had burnt him.

‘What?’ he said, sharply.

I realised I had made a terrible mistake, and wanted to tell him that I was sorry—that I struggled, sometimes, to understand social cues. Yet I found myself lost for words, terrified that I had destroyed our friendship with one fatal remark.

The Mother of Exiles finally materialised to the sound of whooping applause; almost everyone on the tourist-laden deck turned towards her, cameras raised.

The commuters, identifiable as much by their apathy as their suits and briefcases, mostly remained occupied with their newspapers. Only then, with no one looking, did Tony kiss me.

Maybe it was the shock, or the relief, but in that moment I felt, as the Earthens say, as if I could fly. I doubt many of my kind have ever felt like that.

Love is too messy for them. Too selfless, when done right. Love is weakness. Trust is weakness. Empathy is weakness. Drilled into me since birth. But stars above does it feel good to love someone more than you love yourself…

I felt it before him. He told me afterwards I looked as if I had been shot, my smile blown off my face. It had been predicted, that something would happen, something big, but I had never thought it would happen here, or feel like that.

Like a shot—a shot in the back.

‘Was it really that bad?’ Tony said, looking hurt, but then I collapsed, clutching first my chest and then my head, my ears— ‘Grant!’ Tony fell to his knees beside me. Somehow I still heard him—the chattering tourists—the turning of a newspaper page—over the terror. ‘Grant— are you OK?’ All the screams were in my head.

‘Death,’ I gasped, struggling to breathe—drowning—drowning in the feeling.

‘Death.’

‘You’ve gone deaf? Grant?’ [ 42 ]

‘Smoke!’ The roller-skating child, back again at her mother’s call, came to a slippery halt, grabbing a rusted post for support. Nearby, the businesswoman raged; she had been hung up on, it appeared. ‘Smoke—there—over there. Coming out the tower!’

Death does not fill Earthens like iced water. It does not turn the blood in their veins to liquid nitrogen, and they do not drown in the screaming fear of dozens— hundreds—thousands. Yet when Tony finally followed the child’s finger to the tower, suddenly he was drowning too. I saw it in the way the blood drained from his face, and how he choked out the words, ‘Oh my God—is that a fire? In the tower? Is that Delphine’s dad’s tower?’

In his pocket, his phone began to ring.

As tectonic plates collide, there is a build-up of pressure, of tension, and then— release. An earthquake. Lunar Orbit 9, Rotation 11. Epicentre: Manhattan. Earth is taken by the shoulders, shaken senseless, as nations and ideologies collide, explode. Time stalls; the world gathers round screens, stares at the smoking towers. From the outskirts of New York to the beaches of New Zealand, everyone holds their breath.

The sky over New York took on a silvery hue that day, as if it had aged. My people will never forgive me for demanding an update from them—a forecast of incoming horrors—and then telling Delphine, over the phone, to run—to get herself further down now, before the second plane struck. Had she stayed on the seventy-seventh floor, she would have been obliterated. Not that the “higher” humans would have cared; long ago, walls were built around their hearts. This was a fascinating historical event—I was not supposed to intervene.

My kind banished me to Earth for my insubordination, though that is not the reason I consider myself its citizen. There is beauty in a world where not everyone and everything is alike, where languages mingle like merging rivers, and mismatched houses frame meandering streets. Where, over time, most have come to value love and empathy for others. Yet I fear walls are being built again around the hearts of the people here, too. Just yesterday, an American woman was harassed on our street and told to “go home” for wearing a swirl of silk about her head. I adore Earth and its people, though I can see now, more than ever, just as we have the potential to be like them, they have the potential to be like us…

9/11 was an earthquake; unexpected, irreversible, devastating. A single earthquake may rattle the ice sheets of Antarctica, crack the floor of the Pacific and steal time itself, literally, by speeding up the rotation of planet Earth. Ours sent waves across the globe which we all got caught up in, drowned in, yet I fear there is worse to come: a terrifying sequel of a tsunami, a raging sea of hate, tearing down concrete structures like sandcastles on a beach, clawing back rubble [ 43 ]

and bloated corpses as it retreats.

The President calls it “The War on Terror�, but is war not also terror?

I pray to my goddess, the Mother of Exiles, that whatever the future holds, America will always be ready to embrace the tempest-tost refuse seeking refuge on its shores.

[ 44 ]

Gone Fishing Kit Brophy

[ 45 ]

Contributors

KIT BROPHY is a freelance illustrator & graphic designer with a passion for children’s book illustration, visual development & storytelling. They received a UAL Level 3 Extended Diploma in Graphic Design & Illustration focused in Illustration from Central College Nottingham, and are currently studying for a B.A. in Illustration from Norwich University of the Arts.

RACHEL CARNEY has had poems published in several magazines and journals including Ink Sweat and Tears, The High Window Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, The Open Mouse, Sarasvati and The Wales Haiku Journal. She is a book blogger at www.createdtoread.com and has also written articles and reviews for various magazines and websites including Wales Arts Review and The Poetry School. She is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing, and has been awarded a place on the 2019 Literature Wales mentoring scheme.

ASHLEIGH DAVIES is a graduate of Cardiff Metropolitan University. His writing has appeared in Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Reader and been anthologised in Cheval 11 (Parthian, 2018).

AYSAR GHASSAN lives in the West Midlands, UK. He tends to write about contemporary social issues and relationships. Aysar’s poems have featured in Under the Radar (In Press) Abridged, The Arsonist, Critical Survey and Zarf and have been anthologised in Writing Lives Together (University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing) and Diversifly (Fair Acre Press). Aysar also enjoys participating in a range of spoken word events.

[ 46 ]

SARA NESBITT GIBBONS’ poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including the Emma Press Anthology of the Sea, Brittle Star, Magma, Obsessed with Pipework and South Bank Poetry. They have also won and been commended in competitions and been performed as theatre. She has an M.A in Creative Writing (with distinction) from Royal Holloway, and lives in London, where she teaches creative writing for wellbeing.

CHRISSIE GITTENS’ first collection is Armature (Arc), her second is I’ll Dress One Night as You (Salt). Her third collection Sharp Hills will be published by Indigo Dreams in the autumn. Her fifth children’s collection is Adder, Bluebell, Lobster (Otter-Barry Books), her second short story collection is Between Here and Knitwear (Unthank Books) and she has had four plays produced on BBCR4. She is a Hawthornden Fellow and is represented on the Poetry Archive.

CHRIS HARDY has travelled widely and now lives in London. His poems have been published in Acumen, Agenda, Stand, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter’s House, The North, The Rialto, The Lampeter Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Blue Nib, The Compass Magazine and many other places. He is in LiTTLe MACHiNe, performing their settings of poems at literary events in the UK and abroad. His collection, Sunshine at the end of the world, was published in 2017 by Indigo Dreams.

CARLY HOLMES lives and writes on the west coast of Wales. Her debut novel, The Scrapbook, which formed the creative element of her PhD, was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award in 2015, and her Literary Strange short story collection, Figurehead, was published by Tartarus Press in 2018, to much critical acclaim. Two of the stories within have been selected for reprint in Best British Horror, one in Best Horror of the Year Volume 11, and one is reprinted in the present issue. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Ambit, Black Static and The Ghastling. Carly works as an editor for Parthian Books. www.carlyholmes.co.uk SARAH HUDIS is a creative-critical writer from Aberystwyth, now based in Norwich. She has an MA in Modern and Contemporary Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she also completed a BA in English Literature. Her work has been published by Seam Editions, Poetry Wales and in the anthology Like The Sea I Think: Maritime Writing from East Anglia.

TONY KENDREW lives, writes and hikes in Northern California, where he edited the Science and Nonduality anthology On the Mystery of Being. He has produced two [ 47 ]

CDs of his poetry, and a collection, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, was published

by Iconau.

SONNET MONDAL writes from Kolkata, India and his latest poetry books include Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin 2018) and Ink and Line (Dhauli Books 2018). Mondal was one of the authors of the Silk Routes project of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa from 2014 to 2016. Director of Chair Poetry Evenings International Festival, Mondal edits the Indian section of Lyrikline (Haus für Poesie, Berlin) and serves as editor in chief of Enchanting Verses Literary Review. He has been a guest editor for Poetry at Sangam, India, and Words Without Borders, New York. www.sonnetmondal.com DAWN MORGAN is a writer and painter living in the Gwendraeth Valley in Carmarthenshire. She studied at Lincoln College of Art before opting for a career in journalism, but began painting seriously again about six years ago. She had her first solo show at Picton Castle in 2018. Her paintings, prints and greetings cards can be seen on her website: www.art-dawn.co.uk NESS OWEN lives on Ynys Mon. Her poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies including in Red Poets, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Ink Sweat & Tears, Black Bough and Culture Matters Journal. Her collection Mamiaith (Mothertongue) was published by Arachne Press in August 2019.

MARIANNE PICTON is a library assistant from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her first published short story, Memory Thief, was included in the anthology Words & Women: Four by Unthank Cameo. She is interested in using fantasy to explore marginal narratives, and has been known to predict the future.

IAIN TWIDDY studied literature at university, and lived for several years in northern Japan. His poems have been published in The London Magazine, The Poetry Review, Flyway, Quiddity and elsewhere.

DANIEL UNCAPHER is a Sparks Fellow at Notre Dame, where he received his MFA, and an incoming PhD in Creative Writing student at the University of Utah.

A disabled bisexual from North Mississippi, his work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, The Carolina Quarterly, Penn Review, and others.

[ 48 ]

CALVIN WHARTON lives in North Vancouver and is a former editor of Event magazine. He has published a collection of poetry (The Song Collides) among other work. His most recent publications include work in Project K (Sweden), and a chapbook, The Invention of Birds, in the Alfred Gustav Press poetry series.

[ 49 ]