Nutshell Magazine Issue 3 by Nutshell Magazine

image - Irene fuga

nutshell # 3 EDITOR Faye Fornasier POETRY EDITOR Rebecka Mustajärvi COVER Amy Casey DESIGN CONCEPT Mauro Sommavilla DESIGN DEVELOPMENT Faye Fornasier WEBSITE www.nutshellmagazine.com E–MAIL editorial@nutshellmagazine.com NUTSHELL MAGAZINE THE TREEHOUSE 19E CLAPTON SQUARE LONDON,E5 8HP Nutshell is an independent publication funded by donations, merchandise, and events. All profits go towards printing costs. Each issue is an achievement and the proof that literary magazines have an audience, and a loving one. Special thanks to our published and unpublished contributors, donators, helpers and friends.

editorial ΩΩΩ Welcome to your new issue of Nutshell. 2011 was a tough year: our old printers had to shut down, one of our favourite fellow magazines died, some of our team moved on to new projects or simply got too busy to work for free. For all these reasons, we have decided to skip year 2011 altogether and start afresh with 2012, which sounds brilliant and plentiful already. One really great thing we can't ignore from 2011, however, is the wonderful parties you helped us throw. By playing for us or simply turning up to have a good time, you helped us raise the funds necessary to come out in print once again. You really helped us making each event special and we are grateful for your support. Issue three contains some really special work. We had a huge amount of submissions and it took quite a while to read them all, re-read them, and select the very best. We also went out scouting for some rather amazing artists; their work is diverse and beautiful - you'll see - and we are honoured to have them here. You can have your Nutshell and read it. You just have to be a little patient. Enjoy.

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8 10 11

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36 The Poet And The Champ Ruvi Simmons

Day Of The Jellyfish /Night Of The Ulcer Ruvi Simmons

First Mango Marina Sanchez

The Wild Sea John McKeown Fight For This Love Tim Wells Silver Dagger Tim Wells Rock Hudson Visits The Most Expensive... Tim Wells

Wearing Calico Marina Sanchez 46 Dietary Requirements Alex MacDonald

The Opera House Anna Johnson 47

Conversation Piece Alex MacDonald

A Potted History Paula Faircloth

Splitting The Lights Patrick McEvoy

Morning Anna Johnson As Seen From Winter Marland George Lip Chop Alex Eisenthal

Horses Michael Simms

28 Parallel Burgess Needle

Framing The Shot Burgess Needle

Their Son Graham Clifford

30 31 Old Building Tony Vowles

Dylan Culhane Interview Faye Fornasier

images ΩΩΩ 1

45 Rock Hudson Visits The Most Expensive Whore Buenos Aires Has To Offer Francesco Lo Iacono

Wings of Desire Irene Fuga 4/7 The Poet And The Champ; Day Of The Jellyfish / Night Of The Ulcer Mina Milk

48-51 Drawings For Summer Time Matt Craven

9 In Praise of Mucha Tara Bush 13 Conversation Piece Emma Fitzgerald 18-21 Boost;Small Logging town Amy Casey 23 Untitled Philippa Walter 24-27 Untitled Magda Tranchini 32-35 Egret Wading; White Monkey; Ibis; Horned Beast Brad Woodfin 37-41 Not Quite Myself; Palms To The Moon; That Sweet Unrest; Untitled; Memory Of Former Strength Tessa Hulls

57/61 Lip Chop 1, lip Chop 2 Peter Edwards 64-69 U-Turn; Dissolution Of The Simple Life; Impossible Scene With Cows; Postcard From An S-Bend; Stream Of Consciousness Dylan Culhane 74 Untitled Rebecca Sharp here & there Dingbats from the typeface "Woodcut1" and "Woodcut2" Listemageren

the poet and the champ ruvi simmons ΩΩΩ On 23rd April, 1916, Jack Johnson, first black heavyweight champion, and Arthur Cravan, founder-editor of Maintenant, fought at the Plaza de Toros in Barcelona. Johnson died in a car crash in 1946 after being ejected from a diner that refused to serve him. Cravan was last seen by his wife, Mina Loy, sailing away from the coast of Mexico in a boat built by his own hands. This may or may not be what happened.

The champ carves his name in a tree stump and absently the heart surrounding it beats quickly, like a newborn lamb’s. On the Ramblas he buys a cheap cigar and stares at underpriced whores: the privilege of being sucked and fucked is whites-only,

so turning down a side street he hikes up his knickerbockers and empties his lungs to the walls. For two weeks the poet has refrained from red meat, liquor and song. He boasts of one day puncturing the horizon in a boat of his own design and in the cool evenings shadowboxes on a rooftop where the next-door widow airs her smalls (like many such boasts this one turned out to be true). A thin cloud welts the darkening sky. The ring announcer gilds his hair with oil and thus pomaded gives his wife a seeing to while in town a whisper gathers force that a hermit from a foreign town where bitter winds cause girls to pin their skirts with string is going toe-to-toe with the champion of the world. The pasting takes six three-minute rounds. Taking pity on the poet dangling his split lip in defiance, the champ gives him one in the belly. The crowd bays itself hoarse before dissipating to bars where hemlines rise on an hourly basis. The champ goes alone to his hotel and dips his huge hands in icewater while the announcer anoints his jacket in cologne and shunts his sleeping wife across the bed. Two weeks later the poet, back on meat, liquor and song, is still pissing blood and writing poems about the time when Oscar Wilde put him on his knee and told him first-class was the only way to travel.

day of the jellyfish /night of the ulcer ruvi simmons ΩΩΩ It could be the perpetual sickness, two summers passed completely by my reptile skin and abject eyes. Or maybe nothing more than the never-ending processions down Unter den Linden, victors with their backpacks full of unsent letters to sweethearts whose furs and stockings reek of gin, the heat of their thighs long since consecrated to later acolytes of shopping hand-in-hand for black market gifts, domestic bliss and rubbing separately against the leatherette seats in the sherbet parlour. Sunlight rakes the evening’s coals through the Palast der Republik’s bones. For months through shut eyes I saw your forehead knitted beneath the ministries of other lovers, the question of if jealousy outlives the age of victimless crime unanswered. Impossible to stop while there remained a story to confess, before your ghosts joined their heroes by the lakeside and left their elephants in the coal cellar. Silence gets the last word now. With the parades and their cheerleaders spent, we sweat out our fever on opposite poles of the bed. Call it a victory for

the sexless if you wish, but heavenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake preserve the bruises growing now in the hothouse of your body, crude maps glowing in the dark dark dark, reminding me not to forget.

image - mina milk (previous page and above)

first mango marina sanchez â&#x201E;Śâ&#x201E;Śâ&#x201E;Ś She's asked me to help with dessert holding a plump fruit that fits in her hand. She takes a knife and scrapes the skin without cutting, then as she slices it open there's sunlight in this stranger's kitchen and the fragrance of flowers. The slices fall like summer days on the plate. She peels a sliver,

Try my lips close around her fingers, sweetness lingering. When I open my eyes she's smiling. She's started on a second fruit, the same deft movements. She hands me one stone, she takes the other,

There's no clean way to do this I watch her sucking, juice down her cleavage, her eyes half closed. I copy her, biting, nibbling down to the fibrous hardness. I don't know why but we start laughing, it grows louder and louder, like sunbursts at the heart of our galaxy.

image - tara bush

wearing calico marina sanchez ΩΩΩ All that pinning and tearing, cutting, tacking, fitting, ironing, sewing, undoing and repeating till it almost fits, none of that serves me now. The gateway is a bone flower where another pattern was laid at birth. Years of dreams of cream calico waves, smoothing the kinks and creases, fabric folded in half, the edge like a spine, waiting for an opening, like unfolding wet wings. I remember holding mother's Poblana* blouse: beaded flowers in swirling reds and yellows, chaquira* whirling in leafy shades. The eagle eating the snake on the red, white and green of the sequinned skirt, calico bearing all the weight. I remember her painted portrait wearing the outfit at fifteen, the pigment coming off on my fingers, like pollen on a hummingbird's breast. In one dream, I'm wearing calico, the colours of marriage,

* Poblana: from Puebla, a town and a state near Mexico city. * Chaquira: tiny beads used for embroidery and jewellery.

dietary requirements alex macdonald ΩΩΩ We all joked about it, finding the lost glasses Inside the baked aubergine, with earth caked On to the metal frames. The cook’s earlobes Are fat and fleshy, coins where currency Is the dead weight of things. It suits me, my body is a gold mine That prospectors twitch after, salivating In long johns. I haven’t said anything During the meal, I fix my tie with penny roll fingers And tuck into a purple lung, filled with hot air.

conversation piece alex macdonald ΩΩΩ “Annie’s married to a diplomat And complains her dresses spend more time At the Laundromat, than on her back. To move in those circles, the thought of “Seeing Edward again, his hair matted With smoke, to waltz in large buildings Is a fantasy that ends in me Rubbing my temples. I sit and wait. “He had all the time in the world To arrange a visit, kiss my neck And say that ‘this was it’ and he wanted No more than me. But I know that at “Quarter to 11 tomorrow The letters will fall to my floor And I’ll read the church hall Is holding dance classes for the elderly”.

image - emma fitzgerald

a potted history paula faircloth ΩΩΩ Across Britain, in a million different homes, the credits roll on a programme about holistic healing from around the world. In the last scene, Bruce Fisher, the show’s bucolic presenter, visited an African tribe where it is believed digging a hole in the red earth and addressing the goddess within will release a body’s internal demons * John didn’t have a garden, let alone a tribe with a walled village compound, outside of which he could perform a ritual. He looked about his sparse, drab living room for inspiration and found none. Wandering his cramped flat, whisky in hand, his eyes settled on the row of cacti in his daughter’s bedroom. Would she notice one missing the next time she came to visit? Probably not, he reasoned; she rarely came to the flat and only stayed

over when her mother couldn’t find a babysitter. Which wasn’t often, as her mother was a fat bitch who was too lazy to leave the house to need one. He digressed. Focusing on the task at hand he surveyed the windowsill, pondering his victim. He’d take the large one, the one that seemed to thrive when everything else withered, getting larger and larger each year, hogging the sunlight, spawning more flowers than the other cacti. That fat fuck was gonna get it for sure. He digressed yet again. The cactus in question was housed in a ceramic pot, typically more expensive and prettily decorated than the others. This was clearly to disguise the fact that it was ugly on the inside. He decided to see once and for all what evil lurks behind a beautiful, albeit green and prickly, veneer. He spent a good twenty minutes and

ruined at least one kitchen knife hacking off the needles and dissecting the plant. He pricked himself several times, though the pain and tiny droplets of blood made the task seem even more rewarding. He looked at the green sap on his hands, jeans and carpet. Yet another irreversible stain, he mused, inspecting the remnants of what had been his daughter’s prize cactus. There was no black heart, no grotesque demon hiding within the plant’s flesh, just wet innards, cool to the touch. He found this soothing. He sniffed at it, ventured the tip of his tongue to lick a drop of the alien moisture. The taste was vague and gave him a faint memory of her moisturisers: cucumber, or was it aloe vera? He recalled a bedroom scene; the egg on her chin compelling him closer towards her mouth, the disturbed cutlery on the breakfast tray clinking on the plates, the Sunday papers crumpling beneath them. Ugh. He recoiled in disgust at his arousal, scooped the contents and dumped them in the bin, refilled the whisky in his tumbler and sat cross-legged with the potted earth between his legs. How had the presenter done it? He clawed a hole big enough for all his words to fit in and squashed his face into the pot. Feeling extremely ridiculous, he sat up again, only to be reunited with the memory of her moisturiser. The smell of soil was better than that, it was humble, honest and raw. He pressed deeper and began to speak like a lover to it: “Didn’t I make you feel like you were the only one? Didn’t I give you everything that I possibly can?” He didn’t know where the words were coming from, but they kept on: “Each time I tell myself I think I’ve had enough, well...”

John hadn’t been able to express himself with words since Mrs Matthew’s English lesson, 1976, when he had to read a poem he’d written about Sophie Atkins out loud. After that humiliation, well, now he preferred punching walls. But the words really were flowing tonight. Probably the whisky, he reasoned. He took another gulp and continued cradling the pot, “I’m gonna show you baby…” Baby? This wasn’t right. These weren’t his words. But oh, did he feel them! “... that a woman can be tough…” Wait a minute. What? Oh, fuck it! He spat each one through his teeth, “come on, come on, come on…” and sobbed the chorus into the soil. “Take it! Take another little piece of my heart now, baby. I know you will break it. Just break another little piece of my heart now, baby. You know you caught it, if it makes you still good, so good.” He snorted the last nonsensical line through thick tears, causing the soil to blow up and stick to his face. He came up coughing and caught a glimpse of himself in the TV reflection. What a massive cock! He guffawed to himself and gulped his whisky, wiping his face with his shirt. But still he was careful to refill the hole and attempted the same sacrificial hand motions as the presenter. Then, satisfied, he flicked the set on and laid back at the foot of the sofa to the calming presence of some late night news show. He fell asleep wondering if anyone else had been stupid enough to try that at home. * Ester was already hard at work grappling at the loose earth to the right of her potting shed with trowel and spade. Thankfully Stephen had been round only

a potted history - paula faircloth

a few days ago to soften the earth and prepare it for the bush she was soon to plant, a hydrangea perhaps? She hadn’t decided, but that could wait. She sat back on her thighs, her knees softly cushioned by the gardening pad that matched her tools and gloves, and took stock of her work. The hole was at least half her size, but she had many words to spill into the fresh soil. She decided to begin, else she would really be there all night. “It was just after the war and the country was as rickety as old bedsprings” she began, as if speaking to her granddaughter. The rest followed easily, like a chain of children’s hands snaking around the playground, breaking only occasionally with the lapse of memory and the drifting of old age. “The boundaries between the countries, always changing, one day to the next. The Russians advanced, shifting the blockades, creeping in on our land with their rough overcoats, stout beards and grim faces; stealing it inch by inch; flower by flower. They took and many of us fled; I fled, with nothing, to start from nothing. And these days they come and they get. They get houses, they get money and sit happy and fat getting pregnant whilst their whole family get, get, get, more flights over.” She digressed. Ester sat back, already aching from the strange position, but the strain gave the act weight. She knew that nothing helped without hurting first. Pausing briefly, having lost her train of thought, she then continued to fertilise the ground with words. “Ja, ja…yes, I was on my bicycle going to the Heinklemans’ farm, except the usual lane was closed off behind a new checkpoint that had appeared overnight.

I hesitated. There was no other way but the path through the woods. Everyone knew the woods were unsafe but we desperately needed food, so I took the road. I was fast in those days, a top runner in my division of the Bund Deutscher Mädel and I thought, well, I can outrun any danger. So, my heart beating, as hard as my mother getting dust out of the rugs, I turned off the track.” Entering the forest she remembered the chain of her bicycle flickered and made a sound like the reels in the cinema. The curtains in her mind pulled apart allowing light to streak through the canopy in violent flashes. Twigs cracking under the tyres, wooded debris hitting the spokes. “The Linden trees were so big, sehr schöne and proud. These were the ones who had survived and not yet been uprooted by the war or what came after.” She pictured them stretching upward; a canyon of colours and birdsong. “A soldier appeared, smoking a cigarette. Russian. He looked up enquiringly and our eyes met. ‘Liebchen’ a voice called mockingly, its coarse inflections poisoning the word. ‘Liebchen’ ‘hergekommen, liebchen, bitte’. Two others appeared, their arms full of kindling, clucking in my direction, but I powered fast down the hill and was soon within the boundaries of the Heinkleman property. “Inga was at the gate to greet me. She took my churn from my basket and led me to the barn where we usually sat in the hayloft. Her father, like mine, had still not returned from the fighting so to console ourselves we had been making our way through his store of schnapps. She told me such tales. Of the band of Russians that had strung the Kopfs’

Alsatian up to the church door because everything German was now evil and religion was for ignorant peasants. When Dr Kopf protested that the dog was Czech he was hit until he admitted he would soon love Stalin as much as he had loved Hitler. And of our classmate Greta who was already as friendly with several of the Russians as she had been with the German soldiers, on account of her love for the cigarettes they gave generously. But ahhh, what she wouldn’t do for an American GI! What we all wouldn’t have done for some stockings and a Hershey’s bar!” She digressed. “I left the Heinklemans' place and remember hugging Inga fondly. I remember because this would be the last time we’d drink schnapps together in the hayloft. The next time she would come with an officer and take the last of our firewood. Then Oma would tell me not to wait for Opa to return home, as he may never be coming home, and if I could get the papers I should go. I knew just the man and what I would need to do to get them… but now I took my milk and my eggs and headed back to the path through the forest. The light had softened and the leaf edges cast circles on the forest floor. It was like someone was above and beaming a torch through rows of bottles, green and brown and cloudy white, as if they were searching a wine cellar. But those men were long gone and different men had taken their place. “I felt slightly sozzled from the schnapps and began to sing an old folk song. I forget the title. By The Fountain, Near The Gate or some such. Always about nature they were, but this one, it had a haunting melody that pined like it

was homesick: In the mountains the streams run clear, In the meadows the flowers bloom, In the forests, we hunt the deer, In the forests, we hunt the deer… sang the officer as he stepped out onto the path. I stopped, startled. ‘Liebchen’ he whispered again, a broad smile across his face as his comrades appeared from the bracken. I forced the pedals down, willing the chain to move, but it was uphill this time, and they were ahead. So I turned off the path. “My bicycle jolted through the uneven undergrowth, thin-fingered branches pulling at my skirt and scratching at my legs. The wheel dipped in a hole and I flew through the air. For a moment I hovered. The wheel spinning below me, sounding again like a projectionist’s reel; the milk spilling from the churn onto the thirsty leaves, cracked egg yolk oozing through the wicker threads of my basket. I don’t remember landing, or what happened next, just the flecks behind my eyes floating round my lids like little red balloons. When I opened my eyes the soldiers were gone but my bloodied mouth kept uttering "niet, niet, niet." * Bruce Fisher, safely returned from Africa and comfortably back in his Chelsea residence, turned from the television. He snorted to his beautiful fiancée, “Well, what utter wank that was” and downed his Prosecco with complete disgust.

a potted history - paula faircloth

image - amy casey

splitting the lights patrick mcevoy ΩΩΩ During Mary’s month of May we played ourselves after evening devotions. On the way home girls were hoisted onto the bars of bikes but impure thoughts were all we had for Saturday night confessions. We put all our energy into splitting the lights. Spotting a pair of cyclists ahead we would step on the pedals bear down upon some courting couple who were riding out or two old bachelors on the gander. When we dashed between them with a whoop men would swear, girls curse like bitches as they wobbled into ditches. One night Latchico split the lights of a car; nearly went through the windscreen. He had his head bound up for weeks and lost his sense of balance. At the closing of the mission he wore his cap in the chapel; confessed his sins aloud during the consecration of the blessed sacrament.

image â&#x20AC;&#x201C; phillippa walter

image - magda tranchini

parallel burgess needle â&#x201E;Śâ&#x201E;Śâ&#x201E;Ś The man in hospice imagined a chart from childhood that elegantly portrayed life cycles. He envied the sheer simplicity of being deposited on the underside of a leaf an inconspicuous egg to emerge as a caterpillar then entwined in a protective chrysalis metamorphose to ephemeral beauty and disdain gross intake of food instead sip the choicest nectar no need for apparent genitalia, merely possess a few alar spots on the vein of each hind wing. He lightly rubbed the fine hairs on his forearms and pulled at the thin skin of his neck producing a rush of nausea, visualizing vast tides of blood barely retained, organs saturated in viscous fluids,

his body being divided into parts, head, thorax and abdomen so simple, so clean. Wings so lovely to barely think the very thought of flight and be floating. Somewhere a river remembered it was an enormously fecund tendril zzzzz went early morning dragonflies a boy’s tennis shoes sank into black slime the tender allure of a world’s heat, water and a turtle’s ripple, moisture seeped through the seat of his jeans. His waved hand caused damsels and dragons to flit for protective orbits their antennae vibrated reflexively. A stripe skirted along the dorsal side of the thorax caudal gills did respiration, a vein ran the edge of each wing, their lower lip an erotic labium. Whirring a giant dragonfly poised to send a raspberry his way froze when he spat straight at it causing a brief inquiry as to this sudden galaxy of saliva that now dripped down the old man’s chin as his flickering eyes shut head thrown back his sound was zzzzzz

framing the shot burgess needle ΩΩΩ In ’68 a Free Thai group mined the roads in dangerous Lahansai District and on a dare I went with Fred the malaria guy he called himself to see a group of med techs draw blood in that desperate region Bangkok viewed with alarm and see if a vector could be found. Who carried the disease? Farmers from Cambodia. Thieves from Cambodia. Soldiers from Cambodia. For the Thais, nothing good came from East of the border. Meanwhile, Anapholes had no Visas and drew blood on their own without assistance, completely without regard for race, colour or nationality. And I, framing the lens finder, wondered at the ease of material vectors and the terribly obscure vectors of hope, charity and forgiveness in a corner that offered rice as merit to the monks and prayed a rebirth brought a higher plane. When before all our eyes nothing bonded us all more than 23 pairs of chromosomes and a double helix. But the road to Lahansai District was mined and land mines are indifferent to one’s personal provenance.

old building tony vowles ΩΩΩ Established by former glories the paintings prop, heavily framed canvases of stature that catch golden when the lamps are lit, and a show begins: Stiff upper-lipped gentlemen riding with their beagles in tow, while the women look on taking tea on the lawn. The daughter (the one never talked about) danced away from the twists and turns of the sepia hallways and joined the suffragettes, but the silver was still polished, the pinnies busied and now, pigeons sit on the slate waiting for that day when the bulldozers come; put out to pasture on the sweeping greens; spirits free to fly with the sparrowhawks and foxes that feed. Ghosts haunt the corridors now, lost in translation with slippered understanding smiles, as the anvil of memory kneads: Horses freed of their bridle, the laughter of picnics by the bridge and the elegant rose looking on, bloomed in her summer bonnet. It tried to change but the mantle of days brought sympathy to this once great hearth; this lonely elephant singular in its own heritage, so afraid of its final breath.

image - brad woodfin

the wild sea John mckeown ΩΩΩ The sea heaving up all along the seafront, seaweed marinated party-streamers fired across the grass made wetland. Further down it rears insanely, tearing its white shirt sharply against the piled rocks. Salt flying everywhere like a fine rain of blood when bombs go off. And how fine this violence, pure as a leopard’s at the kill. A vast innocence that would snap the neck, sweep that small boy away.

image - tessa hulls

fight for this love tim wells ΩΩΩ Two Shoreditch fashion blondes are strutting it down a windblown street. 'I slept with Toby this weekend,' ripped tights tells her mate. 'Did he ask?' enquires ironic t-shirt, posh scarf, sunglasses languidly. 'Yes,' replies the lucky, lucky girl.

silver dagger tim wells ΩΩΩ She took a blade and carefully shaped the powder till, in 5 looping lines, it spelt her name. Each letter three inches high, hopeless white, and sure of itself. Across town I was writing my name in the snow. My handiwork was neither as neat, nor as measured.

rock hudson visits the most expensive whore buenos aires has to offer tim wells ΩΩΩ Rock emerges from the salle de bain in dressing gown and cravat, pauses to the plush of the carpet. The silk of his pyjamas matches the languor of his eyes. He pulls the curtains half shut, running his fingers against the grain of the royal purple velvet. Lifting a glass of champagne to the fading evening sun he looks out across the city – through the blush of it. ‘You don’t have to act so refined around me. This is not the Paris Hilton,’ she whispers and smoothes the satin sheets. Her body lying across the bed ruins it for him. But that’s fine, she only wants the money.

image - francesco lo iacono

the opera house anna johnson ΩΩΩ Waiting with guns in the pit, the orchestra is silent. They chew on their tongues in the thick dark, each man feeling for the years of kisses on their skins. How many pairs of hands have held this face? Does he sometimes flash upon their inside eyes when the Rach 2 comes on the radio? How do cells dream? When they are rinsing tomatoes slowly on a summer evening, is he there? He shifts in his seat, re-positioning his gun. Half under the stage, the silent crowd of players ripples in the mist. He cannot know where he is travelling. There may be no tomatoes, radio moments all subsumed by other people’s picnics. And the musicians smooth their oboes, cellos, drums hidden from each other now, swathed in cloud. It rolls up out of the pit, like fog over the sea, moving up the tiers of empty seats until the opera house is cloud, a curling body of silent cloud.

morning anna johnson ΩΩΩ Comes black from the first caves through the open window flaps once across the dark room to the bedpost takes the sleeper in drops down claws sinking into the musky swamp of the night quilt moves to the loose head lolling lost peers in draft of feathered breath on the slack chin beak tip to the open ear and so the black fathom eye lashless morning closes in one scintilla from the dreaming lid.

image - matt craven

as seen from winter marland george ΩΩΩ in my own way while I freeze slowly to death. I wonder which of us will die first. He used to be a banker with a fishing licence. Problem was, he owned his own bank which was a storage shed with a safe inside and a velvet-looking chair, red, in front of a dark brown desk. Only one person ever kept money in that safe and no one ever sat in that chair. Then he ran out of money for renting the shed and moved out onto the street where no one would want their money kept. He also had a little dog who bit his knees when he was sleeping. He didn’t really like the dog but the dog had already had two or three homes and he couldn’t add to that heartache. He would close his door and prop a chair up under the door knob, but the dog eventually found an alternate route to those bruised and unhappy knees. He went to the basement and climbed up the man’s brother’s old furniture, which the man was storing for him, and up into the vents where he strolled over to the bedroom and nudged aside the vent cover right under the man’s dirty laundry in the closet that didn’t have doors, and then hop! onto the bed and under the covers. The man Who’s that guy in the hat with snow was a deep sleeper and when he woke up piling on top of it? I don’t know him, so it was too late. He thought the dog had stop asking. Let me tell you about him some kind of creepy voodoo magic power It is late December and no one is around. I am alone in the snow, as they say. I am sitting in snow up to my waist. Why not? There is a man with a hat on sitting in the snow bank across the street, we are a twisted mirror image, a mirage, pavement is nowhere to be found, we are reflecting each other’s red faces in the snow, mine a reflection with a hat and his a reflection with a fake beard glued onto a thin face. “Why do you still wear that thing?” Jack said one day when there was no snow. “You still look like a girl. You’ll always look like a girl. Why do you try to look like a guy? It’s ridiculous.” He said other things too. He liked to talk more than he liked to listen. He liked to talk about other people. He also liked boats and sweet pickles. When we were younger together we used to steal cucumbers from people’s gardens and soak them in whiskey in little clear jars. We thought we were pickling them. Mom found out and made us stop because she liked getting drunk better than she liked pickles. She was my mom, maybe that’s why. His mom didn’t stay home enough to get drunk on her own whiskey.

or something that allowed him to pass through walls, and maybe skulls, the front of the skull into a person’s dreams, or mirrors, into a parallel universe. He didn’t know anything about voodoo but he knew that dog was doing things at night very quietly and it creeped him out. Now he’s out in the snow. When Jack was 14 he lived in an igloo in his mom’s backyard for three days. Then she came home and told him to come inside before she decided to send him to an asylum. He forgot about that day for a long time. Now he’s about 42 and a man with a hat and remembering it again, reflected in my eyes. Through the snow fog everyone exists in the same mirage body. The hat represents the collective consciousness and the man is me because when I wear my fake beard I am male and female at the same time and no one can really see me.

store as this teacher and bought an orange, then he went back and stole a jug of milk. He didn’t get caught so he never got to tell anyone that he was his teacher. Must be a real storm because the snow’s been going for days. Maybe weeks. I’ve only been out here for a matter of hours so I can’t tell you the truth in any way of fact, only fiction. For example, when the man across the street was my friend Jack he chased seagulls up into trees and pretended he was 9 years old again making mischief, shooting cars with his BB gun as they drove by, pissing in the gutters of houses that leaked when it snowed. He liked snow when he was Jack, maybe that’s why he was sitting in the snow bank, submerged up to his nipples and no less. The sun won’t be out for days, so no melting yet to be seen. Jack had a beard when I knew him. He was a handsome guy who liked to talk about a lot of things, like seagulls. He said that a red seagull with blue eyes flew into his hat and pulled out 15 of his hairs, scalp and all. He didn’t like that seagull very much, and never saw it again as far as I knew. He rode a seagull-shaped bicycle to the grocery store but not to anywhere else. He didn’t have to tie it up because it couldn’t fly anyway, it was a bicycle.

Enough about me. This is the obligatory stage-left-entrance of the seagull who has had many names. Tonight he is Julius Caesar and he is using a walking stick with a rattlesnake’s rattle on its end, the top end. Julius Caesar is going to fight through the snow toward the two-way mirror that I can call the street and he is going to talk about the play he is writing which is called “Nowhere People” and Julius Caesar: No more beard! is about people who impersonate each Me: It’s glued on. I can’t take it off. other for no reason. They are all named Julius because Julius doesn’t like to make Believe me, there are times when I wish I could. Like when someone tries to kiss up interesting names. me and wants me to kiss him back. The When Jack was 19 he impersonated beard never helps. his 7th grade English teacher because JC: No more beard! that was the only male teacher he could M: I can’t help it. I made a compulsive remember clearly. He went to the grocery

as seen from winter - marland george

Which face would you gnaw on first? decision that I can’t reverse. Give me a break. JC: Cocker Spaniel asshole! JC: No break! M: Who are you talking to? I’m no dog, M: Fuck you, you’re not even the real man. Julius Caesar. JC: No more shit-hat! JC: [Kills Me.] M: Oh, him. I don’t like that hat either. Now that I’m a ghost I can sit in the Bite it off, why don’t you? He’s got brain storm forever, staring at a man in a hat to spare. JC: Okay! [Chomp Chomp.] that is my head. I mean, my seagull. No, my head. That sounds about right. When Snow does not go well with asparagus he was born they said he looked like a bird, but he’s outgrown that by now. He’s on a Monday morning. I tried it once. I more like a turtle now. A turtle with no was dead. Which didn’t help the taste. balls. Don’t ask me how I determined I was living in a waist-high pile of snow, that. In the winter, like now, he has to wanting to eat something warm but no tie a sock over his crotch so it won’t luck. freeze. He showed me the sock. It was JC: Human teeth on rye! still white. (That explains nothing. I’m a M: You’re weird. Stop accusing me of girl and I don’t know much about balls, especially turtle-looking balls. Maybe he your own wrong-doings. I was never in tied his balls up in that sock. But it was the Navy! Stop asking. And don’t talk very white and clean.) When it rains a about mac and cheese in front of my kids, seagull watercress BB gun whiskey glass you pervert! JC: [CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP ON pops out of his hat and chews on his nose until it bleeds icy and hot. Don’t ask me ME’S PONYTAIL.] M: Bastard. I’ve been growing that for how I know that. I knew Jack and that’s 17 years! enough. I knew a seagull once who wrote with a grey hair, it was like a blue sunshine on a piece of glass paper. The hair made seagull words that meant nothing to me but were beautiful because they were silver-grey. At night, this same gull dressed up in nothing particular and pretended to be Julius Caesar, before he was a ghost, naturally. In death, we all become seagulls and we eat face flesh more easily à cause de tiny pointy teeth in 2 or 3 rows in our new little mouths that can belong to ocean air if we choose.

In death, we grow nothing but pasta barrels and corn dogs. Or so they say. I’m not really dead or I would be talking through a celery stalk right now. And wearing dental floss-woven slippers on my feet instead of “proper” shoes. In conclusion, seagulls are really zombies of the fourth vegetable dimension, the one where people die with hats on and only go into comas if they’re not wearing hats.

lip chop alex eisenthal ΩΩΩ 'Neither I nor anyone else ever caught a pigeon.' Kathy Acker, My Death My Life By Pier Paolo Pasolini

Here call the first take-out sent back, Found on fake shorelines and horizontals Of futures staked on grass & shimmering bends Of plastic loops contorted, means to ends, Sound that excrescence like the force-fed litter That blows the whole and rips the notes it sends. In that echo or sound-check, carelessly naked, There was shot a worse state, inflatable doll Of Comrade Sultan-Galiev, née Tweedy, Whose dialect union repaid its fee In the chair on flame and his steps on the steppes: Love of colonised hope he saw, and sparked up to flee. That, stumbling away, from party voice and eyes, Cast out in a reshuffle he is assured To be purely occidental, fraud-turned, the Comrade Lit up a sheaf of notes in mouth corner, words to teeth fade, And followed the horizon that best met All the beats shift headphones to shifty switchboards made. We watch him beat; blind man’s cane addicted To brail and one-way answers, through the unrhymable breadth That’s fate to any voice proliferated on margins of markets, Chiefly to wait for wake up in miracle hits, Your Conscious-niece, whose guilt-tinct eyes trace grease-drops from ordered chow-mein, as you eat its bits.

And so generations prevail in scornful regard Of each one’s take-outs becoming antiquarian & obese as the sofa To which its noodles, broth, commit, crammed In circuitry hooked on dealt-out soundwaves fanned To the conned comrade as his treads revoke his type, Which show his taste cast sight over the land. A journey’s feet never saved in the wings of its plan, So speaking heats its brands as capture failed, Singes its own fetters, puts songs out like laughter, And smiles soundlessly at the total dumbness of its barter. Galiev founds his table, insures, sets and dines elsewhere; A cuisine not yet Gramscian; it preserves the fruit for after To cater for the liberate cell Order shelled to its inorganic peel Clusters group back to the heart called fusion In a landfill these hands’ve never touched, in or out of illusion; Selling out too many, trout, sickle and loaves For the vanguard loving greasy contusion. The myth of a party: break five of your arms, And web the plaster, build this way Out past satellite towns to the fulgent centre votes, Seal, don’t sow, in vacuum lipids your tamed oats; Here retire, here flout, shake back, take The fuckers at their word / throats. For murder’s spills, procure landscapes Devoted to ease and ramped for exit; Float wildlife for kindness and fork it later, But the claws, the claws are mine, in greater, Prolific vocation; I call my own crawl and the party Lies fallow in the dew, rimming the crater. Paste back equally to ego-ideal and the i.d. input on screen, Galiev, inflate anyway, fulcrums the platoons at his knees Distance between chair and floor rescinds, Manifolds shield their gaping vectors from the light, but it dims, As the bass thuds out to the question: And where, if anywhere, Is the Physis to your penniless shock; who are the outs and what ins the ins?

“Movements” fizzes out as well, bone graft comes back in, Dancing mad like the double helix of chopsticks, Returning without back-turn to the statue already back-lit, The sculpture was the code’s screaming as you cracked it; The whole process folds up and dies to contract the tactic; The human as Tune, taked-out, polythene, dynastic. The hit forever is Galiev showing the colonies on camera His excess, swelling out in atmosphere till his Genitals turn parodic to the clapping A.I. Who meet E.I. in the alleyways of the day I Stop this. And turn again the world event, the Moment and shape of the coming into speech of subaltern staynight. The choice of a jacket is more than the choice of place. Will never clam back situation to the tree it grew on, Drooping under the ultraviolet, as the power runs out. My face holds its own in speech, but finally starts to pout Into the living info, the dream that it could meet Egalitarian means with the sole message Galiev has to shout: This empire is an empire, this kiss is shit. To my latex lips it tastes like the constructivist version of S.R. We failed to furnish; ~ How could the train know As it crashes twice its length, its cells, into the determined tunnel show, That your saliva is not the true while it keeps hawked back One vector, Lorentz contract, class to keep race out of the Whole? So ~ The whole is the wrong. Cannot grasp the proper collision Of blocks moving back in time and front in space to build the home. My sense is tricked to try your luck by the M.S.G. you wholesell. And who, tell, will be, now, to, as I trip, sound the knell? To echo my Arabic to your Diamat and make it show The sound of Diaspora beat in the contour of a snail shell? Galiev falls silent; falls; the clouds move in to block the trucks’ access, Males cling to the wire, climb the protest’s spike Pointed poised to graft grease and rhythm to the stem-cell spine; The plastic, with no air to shape, is fingered by the thirsy like twine Wrapped around colonnades, spiders waiting to order Caught prey from the centre, along the rock-island line,

Weave nervously. Just because the web looks like your Language doesn’t mean you leave to take a shower. The need is for air in the right place, sleeplessly construed, The construction of lining and balance, match and include The external to and in the fire of the inside, fuelling transformation Of sheet to body, one more dimension, inspiring like Spirit hefted out of its jumpsuit and into the nude. Galiev’s fall is fatal. I take over, thinking, it ain’t Senseless to try. Catch flight, one-handed. ~ Lick wings Like I do, you breathe air anyway, why not take space For the renewal of choice, make speech taste. And in capturing the flight turn the shoulder back to the front, Bad sculpture. Close your face and feathers to waste. His waist measurements were irretrievable, No cyrogeny, no monument, no franchised luck, A few pictures, bad because photos were crap, Fumble about for footholds where the crowds forget to clap. And what red, what design, would fit the hope for world Revved upon world, and suit it for a souvenir cap?

images - peter edwards

horses michael simms â&#x201E;Śâ&#x201E;Śâ&#x201E;Ś The horses stand, patient, in fields from which they have teased up all the grass. Blossom rolls. The rutted ground hard and stale. Masked like raiders against flies, they wait. Their bolster heads weighing bird calls or breeze. Then you come, feed in a bucket. Slip comforting words into their gloved ears and a cool hand the length of their necks.

their son graham clifford ΩΩΩ Their son pulls out tissue with his purse. It’s one of those horseshoe-shaped ones with a leather tongue to shake change onto and see what you’ve got, but his heavy specs are so misty with thumb prints then skin flakes and he’s overdosed on orange squash concentrate, his lips are stained. He stirs the greening coppers while his mum puts on weight. She has customised her sweatshirt with a hockey game in coloured felt. It happens all over her breasts and stomach. At last their son finds a fifty-pound note folded stamp-size. The perfected checkout girl opens it out and the smell of frying wafts up. She sniffs, bags his shopping and hands it over with all his change, careful not to actually touch.

dylan culhane. interview faye fornasier ΩΩΩ

Your work transports and steals the imagination. The colour, more than the images, seems to act as protagonist, storyteller. Is that so? Essentially the landscapes I’ve photographed in this series are quite banal. I mean, the South African landscape is staggeringly beautiful, but many of the scenes I’ve photographed would be familiar to those who have lived or traveled in the same areas. I was looking for a way to infuse a degree of magic, or at least intrigue, into the images I created; to wrench us out of the viewer fatigue that we tend to experience in the face of so many millions of images being fed into the public domain on a daily basis. There are of course artists who use the landscape as protagonist; who construct meaning from the concept of space or topography, but to me a tree is a tree and a mountain is a mountain. How we perceive the tree and the mountain is what really matters. I’m very influenced by Buddhist ideas, and my work often attempts to visualise the connectedness of all things. Colour, in this instance, serves as an aether in which form dissolves and perception arises. So I like to think that any inherent narrative in the images is communicated in an instant, as a feeling, as opposed to unfurling in a linear or logical thread. The man-celluloid-darkroom combo is unavoidably more attractive than the manphone-computer one. Do you think going digital would devalue your work? I think that the value of my work undoubtedly lies in the fact that I have avoided digital manipulation to create nonrealistic imagery. There’s a certain assumption that cameras suck in and spit out reality, and any deviation from this must be the work of computers. I love it when people assume my work is digitally manipulated… I suppose it’s the

same kind of pride you feel when you beat a computer at chess; when human intuition trumps the machine’s infinite calculations. The irony is, I would argue, that it takes far more technical ability to replicate or create this type of surrealism in Photoshop. You’d have to be pretty clued up to do so. I’m not a trained photographer, and I work very spontaneously. The technicality involved is embarrassingly primitive. I just work with my 15 year-old camera, a single prime lens, a few filters, and bits of paper, paint and colourful acetate. I collect… like a magpie, or a hobo. It’s more imagination, and a willingness to experiment with the medium, than technicality. The best part of working this way is that I get to spend more time on the road, in the street, up mountains and in forests. Is it snobbery or a sort of preservation project to keep film on earth? I don’t think it’s either. I started out photographing on film when I was a teenager simply because digital cameras hadn’t really infiltrated the consumer market all the way back in the late nineties! I fell in love with the process instantly, and was enthralled by those ‘happy accidents’ along my learning curve: light leaks, over/under exposure, blurred focus, excessive grain, accidental multiple exposure, and so on. I never studied photography and therefore had to learn by trial and error, but I was intrigued by the dualism of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ that could exist in a single image… that there was a sweet spot in which reality (as we commonly understand it) emerged faithfully, and yet the slightest ratchet of the focus barrel, or the tiniest increment of an aperture could suddenly transform a scene into the realm of dreams and abstraction. By the time digital photography stormed to the forefront I was just so engrossed in

the analogue processes that I saw no need to jump ship. It’s not about the ‘soul’ or the ‘integrity’ of film, it’s simply about the process. I think in time film photography and digital photography will come to be recognized as distinct art forms, and I happen to be interested in one and not the other. You say that your work is often a reaction to the common assumption that photography offers realism and truth. Does your photography go beyond that, reaching into the realm of visual memories and reveries? I think my work is very actively engaged with the visceral act of seeing and attempts to drill to the core of what photography is and its implications to our perception of reality. There’s also an induced sense of nostalgia in the use of paint that emulates the organic decay of celluloid over time. This alludes to the impermanence and fragility of photographic images. In a sense, the ‘fixed’ image we create is ultimately as transient as the scene or the person it depicts.

I believe that the introduction of photography has laid one of the most pressing philosophical conundrums on the doorstep of human existence: What does it say about reality that we can replicate it so accurately and that we accept it so readily as a substitute for reality itself? I think my photography reacts to some of these dilemmas by foregrounding perception and interconnectedness. In my own journey to make sense of existence I’ve become increasingly aware that the fragmentation of reality into distinct entities – him, her, tree, mountain, subject, background – removes us from the bigger picture and distances us from an overarching truth: all is connected and all is in flux. Photography, in freezing and isolating fragments of reality, is culpable in this regard. In fact, in some Buddhist literature I’ve come across, photography is used as a metaphor for the delusion we all live under: that existence can ever be frozen and categorised into conceptual fragments. My work certainly hasn’t unstuck itself from this quagmire, but

I regard it as the challenge that fuels the evolution of my work. It’s a riddle that will probably keep me guessing and frustrated my whole life.

of the chessboard; as though the abolition of chaos is the ultimate aim. Nowhere is this more evident than in the development of photography: more pixels, more definition, more faithful skin tones, less aberration, facial detection, red-eye reduction. In the rush towards the perfect replication of external reality, we seem to have abandoned (at least temporarily) the ‘loose brush stroke’, a curious inversion of the trajectory from Renaissance to Suprematism that took place in painting over several centuries. Curiously, the increasing popularity of Lomography and digital plugins like Hipstamatic do seem to mark some kind of reaction to this. Digital images are often criticized for being too crisp, too sharp (I suspect this is because we have grainy film photographs in our family albums to compare them to) and we are now enlisting technology to degrade or primitivise our photographs.

Primitive photographers immediately saw a potential for tricks and experimented with superimposition, materialising ghosts and defying reality so do you think a common assumption that realism is to be found in photography really exists? My work thrives off the uncertainty of film photography, and the idea of the unconscious at work in the creation of art. I’m totally in awe of the work people like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray were doing in the early 20th century. But the trickery you speak of seems to have shifted from aesthetics to concept in the post-modern era: “Is this merely a chair in an empty room… or it something more than that?” Some of the earliest photographic images were so haunting and surreal by virtue Your images come with rather interesting of the limitations of technology. But progress titles, which suggest anecdotes, a possible and uncertainty seem to be on opposing ends narrative. What’s the story behind 'Impossible

Scene with Cows' and 'U-Turn'? ‘U-Turn’ was the very first image I took in the series (which arose from a week-long road trip). I was going through a pretty traumatic break-up and embarked on a journey across the country to clear my head a little and ultimately meet up with an old friend on the East Coast for his wedding. I was in such a daze that I just got in the car and drove out of town on the main highway. After several hours of driving, I realized it would probably be a good idea to have a look at the map – only to discover that I had missed the relevant turn-off a couple hundred kilometres back. So, that’s the picture I took, out there in the middle of nowhere, holding up some flimsy acetate gels against the lens, completely unsure of what I was doing and, quite honestly, not in an altogether sane state of mind. ‘Impossible Scene with Cows’ was actually one of the last pictures I made on the trip. I usually make my multiple exposures within moments of each other, so I can retain the original image in my mind’s eye and then

align the areas of light and dark accordingly with subsequent exposures. But this one was different. I made the first exposure of an unbelievably beautiful sunrise in St. Francis Bay, moments before departing for Cape Town. Then, several hours later – mid-morning – I happened upon this idyllic pastoral scene of cows grazing in a field and decided to layer that over the original image of the sunrise in St. Francis Bay. Everything was a complete experiment at this stage, and I just wanted to try something different. So, it’s an impossible scene because the dawn sky doesn’t correspond to the mid-morning light in which the cows and the field are located, and it fuses two places hundreds of miles apart from each other. If you look closely you’ll notice this, though at first glance it seems consistent. A third exposure of paint effects from my battered sketchbook was then made over this, which effectively unifies the two unrelated scenes and adds to the illusion. Often your images seem to push out of the

page, seeking physical depth. Is 3D something you ever considered for your exhibitions? Actually, yes! I dabbled with the idea for this current exhibition, but ultimately decided that it might gimmickify the work. I’ve looked at my images through old-fashioned green-and-red 3D glasses, and the result is too trippy for words. There really is an added dimension of depth that emerges. In my ongoing attempts to create photography that engages with direct perception and illusion, I’m pretty sure that an entirely 3D body of work is in the offing.

Who do you read? I’m a sucker for Japanese literature. Haruki Murakami is perhaps an obvious favourite, but I’m also crazy about Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Ryu Murakami, and Natsume Soseki. I recently finished Soseki’s ‘A Three-Cornered World’ and dabbled with that as a title for my show, since his tale of the travelling artist really resonated with my own experiences in the creation of this body of work. Another perennial favourite is Kurt Vonnegut. I’m rereading some of his short stories at the moment. Man, is that guy funny!

images - rebecca sharp

Amy Casey has exhibited her work regionally and nationally with solo shows in Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In addition to painting, she also loves printmaking and is a resident artist at Zygote Press in Cleveland. Casey has been awarded two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize as an emerging artist and a grant through CPAC's Creative Workforce Fellowship program. Represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago, Casey resides in a little blue house in Cleveland and is a pirate astronaut. www amycaseypainting.com

presses - including Magma, the Rialto and Smiths Knoll. www.poetrymagazines.org.uk Matt Craven is a Northern, blacklycomic illustrator who specialises in monoprint, sculpture and drawing. www.crav.co.uk Peter Edwards | Artist & Illustrator http://www.thepetersaurus.com Paula Faircloth is a member of The Read Horse Writers' Collective and therefore a strong advocate of storytime in the pub. She plays the two stick drums in a band called Quadrilles and has a three-legged cat called Jackson. http://paulafaircloth.wordpress.com

Alex Eisenthal lives in Brighton. Tara Bush is a designer and freelance illustrator. She was born in Wigan and lives and works in Manchester. Her published work involves lots of research and pencil work. www.tarabush.carbonmade.com

Emma Fitzgerald is a collage illustrator and stop motion animator based in London. Emma has directed and animated music videos and theatre projections, designed for Marks and Spencers and magazines and

Graham Clifford is a London-based poet who has published widely in the small

exhibited at wonderful places, like Wilton's Music Hall. www.emmafitzgerald.co.uk Irene Fuga is a graphic artist in love with the long coats and charming voices in film noir and has a fetish for sharpened pencils and old discarded photographs. She lives and works between London and Venice. This double life reflects on her work, which shifts between animation and drawing, sculpture and set design, always telling stories - personal or re-adapted - that allow to dream. www. irenefuga.com Marland George is a writer and artist from New York. She watches trains and rain, and keeps a picture of Richard Brautigan by her bed. Tessa Hulls is an artist and traveler currently living and working in Antarctica. She has no idea where she will next call home, and her own sense of rootlessness provides one of the central themes of her highly personal and yet archetypically familiar paintings. She plans to spend the next year wandering and painting until she has a more definitive answer to the question of how to live as a nomad with roots. www.tessahulls.com Anna Johnson is a member of the North London Forest Poets. She is published in five anthologies of new British Writing as well as in magazines such as Poetry News and Magma. She is working towards a first collection and makes a mean lemon drizzle cake. Francesco Lo Iacono is an Italian artist working and living in Florence. He studied in Italy and France and his work includes painting, illustration and photography. He's currently working as a Photoshop teacher.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/egomaniackid/ Alex MacDonald was born in Essex, and currently lives in London. He runs the website Selected Poems & the night â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Selected Poems at the V&A Reading Roomsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. His work has been published in No. Zine, OOXXOO, Talk Dirty to Me and Clinic 2. http://selectedpoems.wordpress.com/ Patrick McEvoy lives in the tranquil countryside of Co Down with his wife, Rose, and their close companion Tassa. He regards poetry as a form of incantation whereby something new is made from words. If in the course of writing a poem he is taken by surprise, he is happy with his work. John McKeown is a British poet and freelance journalist based in Dublin. His poems have appeared in a variety of British and Irish magazines. His fourth collection 'Night Walk' is now available from Salmon Poetry and through Amazon. An album of his songs in collaboration with Irish musician Leo O'Kelly, entitled 'Will' is available from Life and Living Records. www.salmonpoetry.com; www.lifeandlivingrecords.com Mina Milk is Russian, which means not only that she drinks too much, but also that she has been through the Russian education system, excessive snow, biggest traffic jams and twisted bureaucracy before getting to London where she lives, studies and works. She likes printmaking , collecting things, life-drawing and cats. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mina_milk/ Marina Sanchez is a published poet and translator. Of Native American/Spanish origins, she was brought up in Europe. She's

and partner. http://www.julliet.altervista.org/

transported by the music of Ludovico Einaudi and Gasparian. Marina is currently working on her first collection.

Tony Vowles is the author of The Astrology Blog and has been published in Dawntreader, Ink Sweat and Tears and was commended in the 2011 Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Publishing Competition. http://www.theastrologyblog.com

Rebecca Sharp lives in London and takes photographs in Italy. Ruvi Simmons lives, works, loves and sleeps a great deal in Berlin by a park where people play music or basketball and 20 years earlier border guards shot escapees from the East. He writes about art from time to time, makes art with his partner Shirin Barthel, and works on a novel in between signing on. He tries to be a good person, write well, and not make a mess of everything.

Phillippa Walter is a storyteller and illustrator from Wales. She can currently be found daydreaming in a forest somewhere in Portugal. Her works are sad yet beautiful adaptations of the strange encounters she experiences as a helplessly romantic nomad. http://phillippawalter.tumblr.com/

Mike Sims is Publications Manager at the Poetry Society. He also works for Printmaking Today magazine. Ten years ago he cofounded and is a director of The Illustrated Ape magazine, an unruly mix of fiction, art and poetry, which sells all over the world but is now published only occasionally. He also founded, with Paul McGrane, the Forest Poets Stanza group; since he joined the Poetry Society he has become a keen writer of poetry.

Tim Wells has cultivated a laugh that’s more like a caress. He walks properly. He does not slouch, shuffle or stumble about. He knows that wide, floating trousers are only good for wearing on a veranda with a cocktail in your hand. His latest collection, Rougher Yet, is published by Donut Press. Brad Woodfin. Born a son of the Maritimes in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Brad headed west in 1991 and eventually studied printmaking at The Evergreen State College. He now lives in Montréal, Québec. Brad is represented by Sloan Fine Art in New York City, The Weiss Gallery in Calgary, and work will be available for viewing starting autumn 2011 at Pertwee Anderson & Gold in London, UK. www. bradwoodfin.com

Burgess Stanley Needle’s poetry and fiction has appeared in Under the Radar, Decanto, Brittle Star, Blackbox Manifold, Connotation Press and Blackmarket Review. His poetry collection, 'Every Crow In The Blue Sky', may be previewed at www. everycrowinthebluesky.com Magda Tranchini. On her 20th birthday, Magda decides to take a bus to Morocco where she'll live for one year before moving to Istanbul for the following six, painting and teaching. At the beginning of 2011, she starts a nomadic life in a van with her two children