Brittle Star issue 35

I SSUE 35 NOVEMBER 2014

I SSUE 35 NOVEMBER 2014

EDITORIAL

T

here has been a bit of a renaissance of short story writing in the UK. This isn’t news – we only have to google ‘short story’ and we see Wiki entries, and hundreds of articles on competitions, how-to-writes, and lists of magazines that publish short fiction – but there is something interesting and exciting about how over a short space of time (only ten or so years ago people were bemoaning the lack of respect the short story had in this country) more people are reading and writing this demanding form, and how it’s been brought into the mainstream – if the BBC is on board with the short story then it’s well and truly mainstream.

What it means for the literary world is a richness of ideas that maybe aren’t quite right for poetry but are too, well, short, for the novel (which doesn’t mean they’re less demanding on the reader, or that they’re thin, it means the muscles the story uses are tighter, tougher and employ a different kind of energy – think burst-exercise rather than marathon!). What it means for Brittle Star is that we’re receiving more and more fascinating stories, especially for this issue, and so, with National Short Story week falling 17th – 23rd November, and National Short Story Day in December, we’re celebrating by publishing more stories than we’ve ever done before.

But this doesn’t mean we’re leaving poetry out in the cold, in this issue we have some wonderful poetry, a great 2 • BRITTLE STAR

article on the London Haiku project, reviews of Jemma Borg and Angela McCabe’s first collections and Andrew Bailey’s slightly angry poetry column (read it to find out why!).

Our next issue will be launched in spring 2015, so we wish you all wonderful winters and seasonal celebrations.

Jacqueline Gabbitas

Cover photo by Martin Parker: A small selection of some of the stamps that have been used to send submission to Brittle Star.

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IN THIS ISSUE POETRY AND SHORT FICTION 7

10 11 20 21 22 24 26 28 31 35 36 38 40 47 48 50 51 62 63 64

John Sibley Williams – A Dead Boy Distinguishes Proximal from Distal / A Dead Boy During the Dry Season / A Dead Boy Learns an Ancient Magic Trick Jennie Carr – B6318 Katherine Reeve – Flesh and Blood Kyle Cooper – Island Jake Campbell – 21.06.72 Michael Bartholomew-Biggs – End of Holiday / Famous Father David Frankel – The Whaler’s Daughter Kay Buckley – The Glass Mountain Jack Houston – Displacement Rose McDonagh – The Circus Elephant Estill Pollock – O Detroit Clive Donovan – And as I Wait I Temble / The Experience of Flight Simon Robson – My Bamboo Life Nat Newman – Pharaoh’s Daughter Terence Dooley – Greetings / Red Rooms Dharmavadana – My Derby Great Grandmother / Her Patch Mark Carson – Synæstheticae Kate Woodward – We don’t talk about it Jonny Wiles – Headstand Karen Leeder – Rebuking the Storm Sue Norton – Winter Teatime

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65 66 72 76 78 88 90 91 93 100

Mary Maher – Aside Dan MacIsaac – The Riddle Joe Woodhouse – The London Haiku Project Mandy Haggith – Winter Bear / Burning questions / Kindling Gary Budden – Brocken Spectre Kitty Coles – In Bethlem Royal / A Gentleman and a Scholar Stewart Carswell – Shapiro’s Ruth Stacey – Signals Veronica Barnsley – Unwound Jonathan Doering – A Fantastic Fox

ARTICLES AND REVIEWS 17 57 80

106

Andrew Bailey – Unfrustrated Sarah Passingham – Self-Belief Paul Blake – Review: Jemma Borg, The Illuminated World and Angela McCabe, Honeymoon in Coalisland Michael Bartholomew-Biggs – London Grip – the inside story

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The Barbican Library is the City of London’s flagship lending Library with books, spoken word recordings, e-books, DVDs, music CDs and scores available for loan.

Opening hours Monday, Wednesday 09.30am – 17.30pm Tuesday, Thursday 09.30am – 19.30pm Friday 09.30am – 14.00pm Saturday 09.30am – 16.00pm www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/barbicanlibrary There are particular strengths in music (including expert staff, listening facilities and practice pianos), finance, arts and children’s services. Public PCs offer Internet access, word processing etc. along with scanning, copying and printing facilities . The Library has an active events programme which includes literature and music events, monthly art exhibitions, children’s activities and reader development promotions.

The Library is fully accessible by wheelchair and has a variety of access facilities including hearing induction loops, a reading magnifier machine and enhanced computer screen viewing and listening facilities.

Membership is available to all, free of charge.

Contact the library Barbican Library, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS Enquiries General Library: 020 7638 0569 Music Library: 020 7638 0672 Children’s Library: 020 7628 9447 24hr renewals line: 020 7638 0568 Email: barbicanlib@cityoflondon.gov.uk

John Sibley Williams A DEAD BOY DISTINGUISHES PROXIMAL FROM DISTAL Whispers of birds, sometimes a memory vagued by its periphery.

Things defined by their nearness to words and how tight to center we hold what was meant.

Think of Grandfather’s hands steepled softly over his plate.

They say somber simple things like sin, I cannot undo, music.

I learned young the difference between feeding and being fed, pushing and the pushed.

Think of the unshaped birds he did not intend to release in me, that still are in the margins moving closer.

Somewhere between what his hands meant to say and what I heard, the moment our bodies passed each other into memory.

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A DEAD BOY DURING THE DRY SEASON There’s only so much water to divide between fresh and salt, to wetten a dying boy’s lips and to wash him with after.

But our rituals demand this comfort and cleansing.

Please think of me as an ocean, he said to his mother as if in apology.

I think she prayed over his body and drained the home’s well in reply.

To keep the barren sky at bay, his brothers danced the rain from each derelict cloud.

His father unburied six generations and collected their tears in a wooden pail.

The house emptied its gutters. The house empty of walls.

The narrative goes something like death must wait for the draught to resolve.

Now his lips are soft as a muddy embankment.

The earth waits hard and dusty as skin.

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A DEAD BOY LEARNS AN ANCIENT MAGIC TRICK Build from smoke a meaning that doesn’t end with fire’s suffocation.

Repurpose ash for the bowed forehead, sprinkle what’s left of us over the broken waves.

Steal the warmth from two hands rubbing, superimpose love over the firmament.

Drink. Drink all green from the forest and blame the silent winter trees for your own empty-handedness.

Read the apocalypse into unstrained tea leaves.

Read the book of your life into the book of another’s.

Read the wind’s direction as a path for your ashes.

Under this loose dirt floor bury forever the ambiguous body.

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Jake Campbell 21.06.72 ‘We do not descend, but arise from our histories.’ – Anne Michaels

June ’72, Land’s End, my Great Grandparents on a trip to the tip of England, maybe with friends, maybe family – I’d like to think alone, the way they are here, framed by a steady sea: the brightness of her eyes, him all a grin; happiness rising through their feet, ending at the sky.

It will be 39 years ’til I visit this place, 23 less for my tiny weight to fill their hands. All the things leading to that, scattered before them like the Jigsaw puzzle of the Atlantic.

But look, I must leave them now: to break pose and walk forward, deeper into my history.

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Jennie Carr B6318 The road never bends only undulates hiding itself in folds shadowing a border at the edge of an empire where lambs play king of the castle on a fragment of wall caught in a field and hooded sycamores leaves layered like scales dominate in hedges and along the roadside Northumbria rolls on wearing the scar of an old stone collar a land at the lip of conquerable.

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Michael Bartholomew-Biggs END OF HOLIDAY So we made a sandcastle.

The tide was out – and going outer, you said – so our one last swim was sucked away. A joyless beach stretched empty as a London Monday ninety miles away from you.

To make our sandcastle just so we scrabbled up a loose wide pile with spades and hands then patted down the sloping sides and our frustration with small palms.

Dry grains slid off our skin but clung to fine and sun-bleached forearm hair. Our smoothed-off mound gained turrets and its drawbridge spanned a moat that wouldn’t fill with water.

You, as usual, started it – became an aeroplane with arms for wings; your bombing run took out one tower with a passing swipe.

Adding sound effects, I followed, breaching walls while you switched sides with throat-back, anti-aircraft fire.

We took turns to precision-kick our fortress to brown sugar-spill until we both torpedo-flung our selves full length into the wreck and wrestled, laughing, limbs entangled, holding on and holding on.

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So? We only made a sandcastle.

Defiance could deflect the blame for lateness and the state of us.

FAMOUS FATHER Once his garden doors would open wide to well-trimmed lawns and adulation.

He’d welcome weekend visitors from London: imitators, rivals, famous faces he had painted, others he still hoped to.

Now his daughter keeps French windows closed; their mildewed glass rough-mirrors unmown grass.

Since his funeral, she’s left the lawns unsmoothed, subsiding into meadowness.

A roller sulks amid admiring daisies.

The overgrowth surrounds an under-cared-for house whose off-white wash is worn like last night’s makeup; window-corner paint has cracked to crow’s feet.

Callers tut at rusted gutters drooping like two puffy eyelids.

But his studio survives.

She works there now with fabric, dyes and wire – less male and academic tools than brush and pen that made her father’s name a name some passers-by still recognize.

The bolder ones who ask Are you related…? scan her gallery again with altered eyes: and if she sees pursed lips implying H’m, not quite, she always hears his photograph agree Yes, more like efforts from an evening craft class.

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Kay Buckley THE GLASS MOUNTAIN Washed in green, the bottle’s outline looked like winter bark. At its base she felt the rough scuff of hexagon combs.

Scratches that had a purpose, like the ones on her Dad’s work watch. She asked him once about his job at the pit, but he gave her his magpie eye. A look and no reply.

She’d wait for him to come off his shift.

Hear his ‘bacca whistle in the ginnell as he shovelled against the coal bunker’s tide.

She’d taste cordite as firelighters caught on twigs of print. Then he’d hump his back for the final time and feed the fire until hot eyes glowed between banks of coal.

Often or not her Dad stoked silence.

Getting him to talk was like pick up sticks.

Stilled, he’d tell her how he was one of nine with one bed to share. How his Mam used to take three of them at a time up to bed.

Once they were asleep she used to prop them against the wall and tuck the next three in.

She imagined her aunts and uncles being on runners like curtain hooks. Drawn together in ragged sleep. She knew she was lucky because she was told often enough.

And on mornings like this she felt it, when her Dad’s words made the silent house shine like vinegar and paper on glass.

26 • BRITTLE STAR

Her bottle came from the glass mountain; where rejects from Woods factory were piled high. She’d climbed it one night all on her own. With her coat as a cape, she winged her arms. Her skirt tucked between her legs and held in the waistband, as she cleared the cut crags in her clogs.

Under scarfed street lights she saw owls with blistered beaks and glass canes hobbled with heat. In the scree she looked for something whole and complete.

Until she saw a bottle so green it smelt of ice melt and pine. She breathed like a fish while her hand went under, Dad, how do they get the green in glass?

I dunno love, they mun’ bottle grass.

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Jack Houston DISPLACEMENT 1.

Watch it thrash about on the deck gasping, open mouthed in the too-much air.

Its eyes bulge as it flips up and around slipping and sliding, slapping the deck with its now less useful tail.

You could be forgiven for wondering if it thinks, ‘What just happened to home?’

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2.

Once they’d taken root there was nothing to stop their advance.

They came by using a technology that wasn’t their making, but played into their interests, if you wanted to infer a design within what was, at heart, merely more of a mindless channelling. Food left out on the table; all they did was clear up. What species will not extract every resource available? Which one of us would not cart off the pile left dumped in our driveway, straining our backs?

3.

Hey, you alright there?

Come on, why don’t we have a little sit down. What’s your name?

OK, it’s OK. Don’t worry about that now. I’m sure we’ll be able to find it.

Are you here with someone?

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Dan MacIsaac THE RIDDLE

B

orn dead I was on All Hallows Eve, delivered in front of a heaped fire by my own Ma’s hand. But she revived me, her second-to-last son, clearing the muck from my gob and spanking me hard on the hirdies. Though at my birthing I weighed no more than the runt of a hare’s litter, I thrived. For my mither was the parish midwife and knew all the ways of bringing babes round. Through the whole parish she was praised as one who never made a bad hand o’ it if she was called to the house soon enough to boil water – then she never left a poor husband a widow man. Like a seamstress, she had sure hands – even with a limp thing slick as a river eel washed up on the shore. She was so sure of my living and breathing she didn’t call for the priest or dip me in water herself. She knew I wasn’t for Limbo – she wouldn’t be following my small coffin to the killeen, the old unblessed ground where the unbaptized lie buried, their pale, unfledged souls hanging still in the mist. But to keep me safe from the fairies spiriting me away, she sprinkled salt on the crown o’ my head, then gave me names o’ power, Riley Brian Comgall Foley. So I died and was raised up on the eve haunted by rogue saints and martyrs — wanderers and vagabonds all who’d never been nailed down to a feast 66 • BRITTLE STAR

day of remembrance. And I make much of remembering now that a great sea keeps me apart from Ulster.’ ’Twas no great surprise that Ma and I were thick as thieves, more close than ever she was with her seven born afore me and the one straggler after. But then I and my sister Fiona and the wee one were the only Foley children not off to the cotton mills of England or the north woods of Canada. Sometimes after I brought Ma home from her work with the lamp in my mitt, she’d be weary, rubbing her wrists that had stiffened up like a reaper’s after harvest from all the groping and twisting to tug the child out whole and hearty. And I’d be getting the salve and I’d be rubbing it in ’til there was no trace o’ soreness.

‘A shame there’s no lineament made for the heart,’ she’d groan after a sorrowful night when she’d been called upon late and where the stuck babe came out breathless or maimed.

She’d go on, ‘God makes the back for the burden. But not always the belly for it.’

And after I’d rubbed a good while, she’d raise her spirits and mine by riddling me: ‘Long leg, smooth thigh,/ Wee head, one eye.’

‘A Needle,’ I’d chime in.

Or: ‘Has sharp teeth/ But cannot eat.’

‘A Comb.’

Or: ‘Buried alive/ But cannot die.’

‘A Tater.’

My favourite was the one she said Da had tested her with when they were courting: ‘Two and thirty white cows tied in a stall,/ Along romped a red bull and licked ‘em all.’

‘A Mouth!’ we’d shout.

Ulster was a land o’ plenty only in puzzles. So across the sea to America I sailed in the belly of a coal ship.

During my passage, riddling was my best past-time, my chief company. But it could not keep me whole and BRITTLE STAR • 67

hearty. Begor, from a country of poor fare, I cruised to New York City, a place rich in victuals and vice, whose bustling citizens had no time for confounding. But, in the midst of bounty, I craved. Bone-gnawing famished I was. And only the Divil can live on riddles alone.

So, starved and bewildered, I signed up for Lincoln.

Then I shirked on both sides – from Bluecoat to Grayback and to and fro, for as long as the fodder and the corn whiskey lasted.

My best Civil War riddles I invented under fire.

Nothing steadies the nerves like keeping the mind fixed on being clever. Here’s a sample out of my own pocket: Whistling, He walks right in, Bringing News of ruin.

– A Bullet.

Quick to kiss, Slow to go, Easy to miss, & hard to hold – A Louse.

It has a tongue, But does not speak.

It gnaws at flesh squeaks.

– A Marching Boot.

Standing he might Last the night – A Candle or A Lover or A Soldier.

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In the rifle pits and on picket duty, I missed not just the riddles from home but also the tenderness, the blethering, the queer customs, and maybe even the quarrels. When Ma and I were coming back through bog and brake from a long birth, pinched with cold, and walking straight into a blirt, rain soaking me from boot to cap, ‘twas herself offering me her wool cloak. And this long after she soothed the new mither and babe, hushing them both to sleep, happed in bed-clothes, near a fresh fire, with her soft voice crooning a lullaby and me nodding off to the tune. Faith, my ma was a saint living and true. Before I could crawl, Ma had taken me under her cloak by foot through winter fog to the kink-well in the next parish for the holy water. The cough wracked me ‘til I looked like a raven’s bit, and hot I was with raging fever. But that wetting on my brow cured me surely as the fierce touch of an angel.

I remember my Da arguing against her ‘Going out for the gets as quick as for the lawful born – and when there was no pay for it on heaven or earth, just shame.’

And Ma sallying back, ‘There’s not a spot o’ shame in a child. All are blessed-born, all the poor little grawls brought wailing into this world.’

Da harrumphing like an ox.

Ma taking a deep breath and hollering, ‘I ease their way – so what if a house is a coin short?’

Or them balyoring over me, Da accusing her, ‘Ye’ll tie a prashkeen on him with all your mollycoddling.’

Or meself guiding my sister Fiona out into the field, and her blindfolded, to pull out a cabbage from the broo with no dirt in its roots, and each boiled leaf tasting bitter even after a day’s soaking first, and no lover’s face coming swimming into her dreams that she could tell of. Or my Fiona peeling a whole apple in one go and throwing the rind clear over her left shoulder, but on its landing the peel looking like no lover’s initial at all, except maybe what a BRITTLE STAR • 69

priest could puzzle out, the apple skin being so loose and splayed. From tea leaves tossed on to a saucer, I could read no fortune for her, except for cutting peat in the bog. She had not a bit o’ luck with those tricks, though she was humble, wanting only a man who was clean and maybe a bit clever. For ’twas no matter to her whether he was a prince or a piper.

It made me lonesome, all the wishing in their letters for what I might bring back, besides my good health, when I came home from America. For Fiona, a body-glass and enough coin for a feather bed. For the wee one, a leatherbound book with the pages uncut. Da, I could see his gob twisting into a drad, as he wrote in a cramped hand how he’d take a full barrel of sour mash whiskey. And Ma swearing by all that’s holy that she only wanted a rest – with the wee one reading out loud from a book inked in America, droning like the small pipes or a priest from the pulpit, and while herself lay like Queen Maeve, borrowing Fiona’s own downy bed plumped with pillows, and maybe falling asleep to dreams of youth, hearing all those glorious words from America in the voice of the wee one, after herself downed a dram or two of Kentucky bourbon.

Then my remembering the lonesome night of All Hallow’s Eve when the candle stump lit in the hollowed out turnip glowed bravely from the window sill, keeping off Tricky Jack, the wandering blacksmith, who had once tripped up the Divil himself. Candle flame would be our sole light ’til the bonfires blazed up on the black hills – ach, the Foleys would stay up for cockcrow. And I a gorb coshering on brutteen ’til my gut swole with those mashed taters, onions and cabbages like the belly o’ our mither Eve on her first lying-in. Then somehow finding room in our stomachs for the feasting on stampy and barmbrack, and I given the first and last slice of each cake, just before sunrise. Always on my birthday, I had a flahoolagh supper served almost late enough to be breakfast. But however 70 • BRITTLE STAR

late we caroused the eve afore, at daybreak on All Soul’s Day, Ma swept the floor clean of scraps, then placed poker and tongs in the shape of the cross before the hearth, the riddle of Christ’s death and rising far more of a mystery than my own reviving.

In the New World, I’d ponder long on riddles. The greatest riddle never solved was why so splendid a thing as man should die miserably in the mud o’ war. On the ugliest of days, I’d take my comfort in one of Ma’s double riddles: ‘Up all night,/ Down all day – The Moon or A Newborn Babe.’ The same moon shines softly on America and Ulster. And for every man’s dying, a babe is born. Somewhere. In some byre or cabin or cottarhoose. 

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97 Benefield Road, Oundle, Peterborough, PE8 4EU web: www.brittlestar.org.uk twitter: @brittlestarmag facebook.com/brittlestarmagazine

EDITORS:

Jacqueline Gabbitas Martin Parker

FEATURE WRITERS: Andrew Bailey Paul Blake Sarah Passingham

PRODUCTION:

Designed by www.silbercow.co.uk Printed by Imprintdigital, Exeter

Issue Thirtyfive / Winter 2014 © Brittle Star and with the contributors ISSN: 1467-6230-19 Brittle Star is a not-for-profit magazine that receives no funding and is produced on a voluntary basis by a small team of dedicated writers and arts professionals

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SUBMISSIONS: We welcome submissions of unpublished, original work (not under consideration by another publication or competition) in the following categories: • •

1–4 poems 1–2 stories, up to 2,000 words each

Please send with covering letter and SSAE to the address above.

Submissions by post only. For full details visit www.brittlestar.org.uk. You will be notified of the editors’ decisions as soon as possible.

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