Interval II

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e interv( (l II First Edition Published in Newcastle upon Tyne Cover Design by Artwork by Holly Dyer and James Printed in United

Louie Pegna Argent, Daniel Longfield Kingdom

Copyright 2014 Š UnstapledPress All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any forms or in any means - by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise- without prior written permission from the publisher. CAD Designs exempt from Copyright. All CAD Designs Copyright to Daniel Dyer and James Longfield.

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Contents Ben Jeans Houghton On the Metro Deanna Smith The Ballad of the Sad Poppy Heather Reid The Interims Martin Eccles Tweed Rene McBrearty 2 Cathy Garner Cells Chrishanti Peiris A Chronic Condition Ellen Welsh Bleach Holly Argent Sub-a-Lime Stephanie Falkeis The Encyclopedic Palace and the Global Village Oliver Doe O, Heathen Here James Linton Country Roads Simon Court On Purple Pond Sofija Sutton Perceived Abandonment Jayne Dent Masturbating and Mothering Jess Maria Heywood Escape Fantasy


You Get On The Metro Ben Jeans Houghton The Metro is fairly packed. The air from the many lungs has pebbled the windows with dew, the water vapour falling in all directions to meet the cold air outside. A little boy with ruddy cheeks draws an almost perfect circle in the windows water, then continues to redraw the circle, over itself, ad infinitum. His mother pulls him away and sits him down. There will be no poetry here. The snake swallowing itself, the rain reuniting with the sea, a childless hula hoop spinning in zero gravity with no one watching. You point your mobile phone out and into the night the Metro glides through, watching the screen as a dialogue develops in and in between the black. A red-blue-green speckling occurs, blistering in the darkness, multiplying, quoting, reiterating itself as the phone camera’s sensor searches for figure or ground. A voicing of variables, articulating some irreconcilable question by forever looking beyond. Is this noise, this static some visual consequence of a miss translation. The Chinese whisper of pixels, or some creation of information at the hands of an absence of information, a filling of the gaps. A want manifest and given a multifaceted and featureless face. The phone continues searching, not for what is not there, but for that which is necessarily beyond its ability to perceive, it too may not recognise the limitless. But still the phone struggles, attempts to see as you squint at the screen. You feel a sympathy. Your eyes drift out of focus and you commune with the child’s mark, this looping question, this ill filling of the void, this circling of the inverted centre looking in at the edge of itself. A flat whirlwind, a depthless sinkhole. The Ouroboros. Where are the edges, what is the answer, does it lie within or beyond these blinking constellations that fizz on the phone’s screen. Just another question asking of itself. The Metro is noisy, the window’s framing a fluid composition of imagery, nodding to Guy Madin’s My Winnipeg and the structure of cinema once seeded in the Japanese woodblock. Your inner monologue forces a narrative on these fleeting scenes, makes things interesting. The past diminishes, shrinks and folds into the horizon. Our vanishing point, forever far away, escapes us. Rather than taking a photograph, stealing something of this darkness, you take a screen grab of the cameras looking. A document of the act not the subject, the eye not the vista. More proximal, closer to your moment, painting a distant revelation, as it sets for you and dawns for another. This thinking giving it stage and encore in your stitching of it, to now. --



the ballad of the sad poppy Deanna Smith

But she doesn’t see it at all. Her voice was the one she used for children. I said ‘No, because it isn’t true.’ They were wrong. It is for this reason lovers sleep with dead arms. But what followed soon after was unholy. The next four years were much alike. ‘Unfortunately it burnt as we forgot about it.’ She looked like death. With inner desperation she pressed the sheet close. Then I was handed back to the guards. It’s just the bunch of paper roses looked very real. She questioned why snow did not fall like rain. And thought fell like thunder. It was a strange little sound humming through the wall. I thought of mother. ‘It’s true that I offered him a coffee stained cigarette.’ I even fainted. He told me I could never give a straight answer.

I lied again.


The Interims Heather Reid

Far away you sleep at day

While I dream you Machine through days. I swell and break and rise again. Storm around inside, around You diagram and calculate Lust, crave, want, buy and have. You capsulate and pressurise and tell me what to want. I circulate and rupture, Coasting a thin tide. You stride across my honesty while I pace around, inside. Sand and tide I trod again to help me stay inside I tell you about all the spider webs that grow inside my mind. I want you to feel like roots: to ground. But instead my love comes as waves at sea: In sets that rise then crash and die Musical chaos, then long empty sounds.


The Tweed:

Martin Eccles

140 miles in December 2013

On Lowry’s Trail. The line to the sun is white across the sea. ~~~~ Low tide. Muddy cones wait to divert lost traffic. ~~~~ Over Lower Pool Curlew and Redshank call. Tree top crows caw. ~~~~ Random patterns. The dropped leaves carpet the wood ~~~~ Winter wheat. Clods lie like Partridges or Hares ~~~~ Looking back. The missed path through the trees is obvious. ~~~~


I cross the border, the pavement stops. Welcome to Scotland. ~~~~ Into automatic. Easy marching along Scottish tarmac. ~~~~ Lichen greens estate walls. Coping stones cap off red sandstone blocks. ~~~~ Winter fodder. The sheep wander the field quietly chomping. ~~~~ Rough ground, slow going. High tide floods the path. ~~~~ Whiteadder meets Tweed. The Ord steps are hard ten miles in. ~~~~ Street lights and marker buoys. The navigation lamps wink at the stars. ~~~~


2. Rene McBrearty when i looked down to the matt the slugs decorated the border you

w

kno

-

-the different types of slugs:

their colouring  their latin names 

i didn’t want to eat them.

i don’t.

but i’ve heard there is some nutritional value.

make a longitudinal slit in the tail. pull the skin back. cut off their dark coloured gland. you can use them as you would clams.


Cells Cathy Garner

Between our two minds there is skin, space and approximately half an inch of bone. Even with our scalps pressed together, there is an unbridgeable divide between your you and my own me. A void which no amount of trepanning can cure and a silence that no amount of screaming can shatter. It seems to me no wonder then, that we get lost in translation long before either one of us deigns to speak. I used to think permutations meant possibility. Now I know it means imprecision. We are burdened by semantics. I spell a vowel; I hear the ocean whilst you cry wolf. You tell me you miss me and I say, aim a little higher. Are you lonely on that ten pound planet of yours? Are you lonely?


A Chronic Condition Chrishanti Peiris

This is an exaggeration. But as authentic as possible. Considering the chronic liar within me, the child who creates stories like they’re her lifeblood. The threads of reality draping across heavy lids as she hunches over her computer, typing fervently over kisses drawn out in the rain, unresolved sexual tension spreading across ten chapters of longing and angst. Two characters, staring at one another across the dinner table, five hundred words dedicated to a glimmer of lust. This girl wraps herself around the possibility of a future with fictional characters, of people, men, women, beings that surpass the definition of human kind, colliding into each other with lips on lips and fingers tangling in hair like grasping for silk. This girl, my girl is a chronic liar. And a romantic. A beautiful romantic, such a wonderful term- she dreams of the love of others, the warmth in her blood and the burning she feels between her legs from an elec-


tric toothbrush and the image of her characters sharing the briefest of touches, of hands brushing against an elbow. The orgasm is rushing, like a flood ringing in her ears thud, thud, thud as she laughs hysterically and screams up at the ceiling yes yes yes oh fuck her yes This girl, this girl strokes over her belly and her thighs, pinches her nipples in the mirror and thinks about how much she loves herself. That she could marry herself, could love herself so wholly you wouldn’t matter. You would be a speck upon her lifespan, a mere dot smeared across her existence like a stain she’ll wipe away later when she remembers. She wouldn’t of course, this girl is caught in a time where nothing moves on and nothing exists outside her sphere, where she stands on the palms of someone higher and doesn’t move an inch My other girl, my talented other girl cries when she’s on the toilet. She cries against the sink when shitting out her motivation and energy, she spits her zeal along with her gums and toothpaste. My other girl eats painkillers like skittles, she swallows them up and throws up bile later, staring at a sterile ceiling, plugged in every orifice with wires that lead her to believe she’s an entity not fully from this life. She is a robot, a cyborg, her skin is not her own, she wants freedom from this life from herself. She is Motoko from Ghost in the Shell, she is Neo from The Matrix, she is a protagonist stuck in her own repetition of loathing. She is a glitch upon herself. The first girl licks pages of Tank Girl and writes out scenarios in which people fuck each other so creatively. In which the man with the glasses cries over the man who eats people so eloquently. She files her nails down into points and laughs to herself under the covers. She meets the second girl and sketches colourful lines in her skin, beautiful women adorned in dragons and snakes and otters and tentacles that wrap around her thighs and suggest something so sinful and perverted. The second girl loves this, the second girl draws on her face and shaves her head in clumps and patches. One is a robot, one is neither human nor being- neither made of flesh or bone or scale. These girls are in pain. Chronically. They surpass the need for definition, disregard reservations and unfold back into their bodies. And in the half truth that is my life, the cognitive dissonance that eats away at me until everything is balanced upon one word, it becomes nothing but a giggle heard a mile away. Like the sound of wheezing when I am struggling for breath. These girls devour and I am merely fuel.


Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Bleach Ellen Welsh

2 don’t come in the bathroom because there are liquids and fumes i am seeping new colour into myself everything rises and i sit in my green pool. 1 first you must strip it colourless, until it’s porous, and where the thick strands touch your skin prickles and burns. exhaling upwards. looking to the ceiling, mouth open.


Sub Holly Argent Sub-a-lime Sub, below the lime, so we are under a lime or are we SU the blime, or will you subli me. I think I’d like that, for you to subli me…go under my li, you will be under my li, you’re less significant, less formal. Substitute the lime for a lemon perhaps. s ’blaim - that’s how you pronounce it – ‘ ’as in as in about, item, edible, common, circus. Do you get it? Can your small braaiii e

e

I mean can your Sick/tick Lip/lick bag/gag and palatal-velar/swoller

squalor

holla

Beckoned by a head jerk, the mountain is listening Sideways slightly backwards the rivers are leaning ‘twise’ ‘three times’ the meadows are scratching Readily puckerd-up the rocks are lip-smacking

SCATTERED SULPHUR JINX


An extract from: The Encyclopaedic Palace and the Global Village: Analysing the 55th International Exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale

Stephanie Falkeis


In the context of globalisation, the biennial has evolved as one of the most important exhibition formats for international contemporary art. The number of biennials has risen exponentially in recent years. It is situated at the centre of the international art market, and the perks of globalisation are at the core of every biennial’s marketing pitch. By attracting cosmopolitan curators, an eclectic range of artists, multinational capital and a global art spectatorship, biennials sustain the development of a globalised world. They arguably make us all ‘nomadic subjects of globalisation’. The biennial is unique in its anatomy as it evolved as both a cause and a consequence of globalisation. Arthur C. Danto described the biennial as a ‘glimpse of a transnational utopia’. Many, like Danto, praise the biennial’s inclusive and cosmopolitan character. In opposition to the traditional linear museum structure, the biennial supports the postmodern idea of the multiple, fragmented narrative. It seemingly looks beyond national, geographical or political boundaries. In contrast to Danto, Carol Becker identified some inherent conflicts and paradoxes of biennial culture in her acclaimed essay ‘The Romance of Nomadism’. Becker notes that uninhibited travel and the dissolution of geographical boundaries are core concepts of the peripatetic lifestyle of the contemporary art spectator and curatorship. Many art-travellers, living the abstract ideal of trans-nationalism or postnationalism, fail to acknowledge the elitist nature of their nomadic lifestyle. They consequently overlook the geographical restrictions and locational realities of less privileged groups. National identities have become the focal point of discussions surrounding globalisation and post-national theory. Increased interconnectivity and fluidity of information advanced the ‘normalisation of difference’ and identities have become readily marketable. It can be argued that the biennial inverted some of its core principles of all inclusiveness and hybridity into a culture of exclusivity and elitism.


O,

Heathen, Here Oliver Doe Holy spectres wail through walls Reciting pornographic poetry for barman or Blake, Telling tales of canine visions Of tooth and nail on Sinai Of rooftop aftermath or Of becoming in ecstasy. Screaming through cities on train howling thoughts of now And what their people might have lost. Losing their minds through country, Embraces burning; Love is no longer love Paranoid love as body turns to dust. Lamenting Rites across ocean Of Spring, of Passage, of War Of roads through endless corridor Lined with its rooms of violence of sex of spirit… Bleeding out nationality on borders to dance in parts unknown, But purely as self-defence, Surely as self-defence? Talking songs belie tuneless ideals of Ebullition and fate, So whispering poems to themselves So now tried and tired seated high on white noise In the in-between times feast Luscious in their angular edgeless form and On emeralds or autobiographies or Baulking at the absurdity of their plane, The bruised cores of windfall fruit of knowledge Spirits pour themselves out on thresholds of houses, Not giving in b’espredel society staying My doorstep littered with the ashes of Phoenix White-handed, God, of greater machinery Taken down by burning bottle. To watch down on He, tearing at temples Across county court debates their existence To reach the naked and hairless body of desire Unsure of tongueless practice Mensch That forever lies behind Him – Crying incomprehensible psalms The public friend of one-eyed tragedy. As evidence of their alcoholic sanctity. All this while the atheists kneel to the East, Placeless and displeased without structure – Lighting fires in their mouths to protest their mortality. Salesmen set up empty pitch for Jehovah, Tired of their suits and silence. Teenagers trying to get some in parks or parents’ Playing easy and inept over dead grass at dawn, Laughing nervously in the backs of black cars, Or hauling down back steps when Howe calls. And younger, gaining education from billboard-saint or flyer Whose immoral message sits high and magnified Above those in tattered brick and blue, Wrapped in cellophane celebration for coming of Cash – Swallowed – Or eaten whole by whole-heart wheat grass. In public zoo, homeless and wretched dreaming Harvester Moon, With fox seated at right hand of gold-brown bench-throne, Lie painless full of vision wordless world-less, too, Under Autumn trees at sunburned dusk. Grounded by flightless white plane in ash With great azure obligation hanging from tired shoulder.


Even sacred collapse down Dead Sea sink-hole, Dragged by Damien or dissident; More likely home to Holy Men than Heathen, Bound to walk in circles amongst We the many: We the many who suck the fat from the torso of life, Prying blood from the veins of Gaia (for pleasure or wit, carelessly). Even the drunken Adonis of London and New York Cannot smoke out their lovers, all neutered here, So non-descript as to lose all sense of self Left to touch bare indiscriminate bodies and souls. Roots spread from naked feet to fiery ground, Locking lamenting corpse to womb of soil or sewn Into the fabric of intent patched together by DantĂŠ And then torn apart by Milton. Left to pour over a non-existent land Which is still surrounding our book-bound shackles, Pulling up the tender roots of civilisation To ensure that none can truly grow, Tortured into erasing our only hopes that it might just be Purgatory, or dusk-land before dawn, Still driven by mad ambition to escape Concrete confines of tower and teeth. Sunday Mass Sacrament to burn as the books in Leningrad, Mass appeal, mass market, mass murder. Meat - kept warm by heartfelt paranoia Lust naked flesh flies plead ignorance To the very best of their waning ability, Dragging bodies at feet sighing and weeping At the very thought that something might come Of their hollow businesses.


Country Roads James Linton All roads lead to nowhere, except for the one that takes me home, my favourite one that stretches into fields of nothingness. Bare land whose only inhabitant is an idyllic peace, held by generations gone by. Sitting in the field’s centre is a creaky, comforting farmhouse, that’ll always exist even as an everlasting memory. Mind your head! Watch the rafters, which hang as lazily as the farmer does, on a long, long, so long Sunday afternoon. His only companion is a Sheep dog and the Murder of Crows that are sheltering in the stables. Why not? All of the little ponies have gone out to play. People always say that there’s a difference between loneliness and solitude. A rocking chair endlessly sways, as the chirping of cicadas fade into silence. The farmer stares into serenity, as the wind dances through the corn and barley. The Murder of Crows take flight from the stables and fly into the silhouette of the dying light.


Simon Court On Purple Pond

We are told to explore. Work harder towards your next mistake, Fail but fail better. I have started so you should finish. There is always another way - but was it the beginning or the end, the start or the finish? It looks the same but smells and feels different. Viewed from the other side, You return and see it differently, no glory. Hand on the plough and all that! Sniff the air and watched her go. It was not a cheap smell as she walked past. We are instructed to reach beyond our grasp, Reach for the long view, greener grass. A broad portfolio. Your bowels register the time. The metronome has long gone, The thirty minute organ recital has taken over. The rough cloth is folded round, I keep the bottoms of my trousers rolled. The women had been discussing Michelangelo. They came and went talking of Masaccio.


Perceived Abandonment

Sofija Sutton

After a few hours, the sugar high had worn off and the sun soaked day had taken its toll. The girl had grown tired from smiles, introductions, small talk, eggshells, and friends of parents that had only a theoretical interest in her. She had played and politely listened to the customary exclamations of “Such lovely girls…” or “Look how big you’ve gotten!” followed by the frequent prompts from her mother of, “…you remember Mrs. H- and M-.” Well past being ready to sleep on the car ride home, though a third round of drinks and bits of food had just been passed around, the girl had sought out her mother. After hovering a few feet behind until she was allowed to express her fatigue, her mother had sent her away with some water. Unsatisfied, the girl had found her father. He had snipped at her to stop whining and told her everyone else was still having fun. She did not understand how that related to her lack of enjoyment. Flushed and straining to hold back tears, the girl attempted to find refuge in the front yard. She spotted a wooden slat bench with ironwork sides on the right side of the looped driveway. Lying down on the bench, she looked back at the great, white house that was seated heavily in the yard. The girl inhaled the scent of the freshly manicured lawn before rolling on her back to look at the cloudless sky. The girl’s thin legs bent at awkward angles trying to fit completely on the bench. Her long skirt twisted up to free her knees to the air. She inspected July’s freckles on her forearms. The batches of leaves from the maple above provided pleasant patches of shade, cooling her slightly. She looked up through the leaves, then at the leaves. Patterns emerged from the various clumps of branches. The open air started to numb the ruddiness of her skin and ease her clenched fists. No one would notice her absence for some time. Too angry to sleep despite her fatigue, she turned to look at the pebbles that formed the looped driveway: coloured ambers and rust browns. Her resentment shifted seamlessly into lethargy. A previously unobserved caterpillar came into focus. The spring green, sluggish bug inched parallel with the bench slats, moving up the driveway towards the great house that currently murmured unintelligible conversations. It was some common type of caterpillar with red concentric circles dotted with blue and brown eyes along its back. The girl watched it passively, shifting focus from the insect to the leaves as she rolled back and forth, altering the pressure on her back caused by the edges of the board gaps. Sometimes, she closed her eyes while her breathing would slow. She breathed slower still, nearing a calm indifference. The caterpillar progressed, reaching the point where her knees currently hovered over the driveway sticking out, off the bench. Again the girl looked back to the pebbles, this time she noticed the movements of handfuls of tiny black ants scuttling about, appearing and vanishing under the shadows of the rocks barely longer than their bodies. The sun caught their sheen transforming the black ants into a lustrous russet, turning back to black again in each passing shadow


along their paths. The ants scurried seemingly without weight in spastic, jerking motions. Their speed unsettled the girl just enough to awaken her gaze and have her mind reenter her body. She looked back to the sky, and when she looked down again at the increasingly numerous creatures, they had transformed from lost runners into a unified hunting team quickly encroaching upon the caterpillar. The girl watched. She leaned in more closely as the attack formation progressed. A few ants had now mounted the caterpillar. The girl sat up and brought her face low to the developing spectacle. She recognised that the ants were attempting to kill the caterpillar. Her loyalty to the previous moments of shared isolation with the caterpillar’s companionship provoked her into action. She dusted off the ants trying neither to harm them nor the caterpillar. She picked up her caterpillar and placed it the length of the bench ahead of the ants. Lying down, she rolled on her back worn out, ready to be comforted by the still foliage that entertained her without effort. Soon compelled, she turned back to check on the caterpillar’s location and with dread, saw the ants reformed around the caterpillar in even greater numbers. They, too, looked fragile. She tried to blow them off, but their grips held strong. The caterpillar was so slow and the girl, so tired. She dusted off a few of the ants that had reclaimed the caterpillar. The girl tried to stop herself, but she continued to watch the ants’ attack. The caterpillar reared its head in defiance of the burden on its back; spiked lines of inward marching soldiers now encircled the caterpillar. The creature wriggled and curled its body, briefly rolling off a couple of ants. The caterpillar continued to try to inch forward in an attempt to outrun the inevitable. The girl did not realise that they were covering the caterpillar in small bites ripping its flesh. She only knew that they were trying to kill it. She saw the spikes of single-filed lines around the caterpillar head all the way across the pebbled driveway to the grass of the front yard. She felt heavy; she bent around to look back to the party, and then straightened to look at the leaves again. No longer finding solace on the bench, she stood up. The girl finally released the tears that had been prepared nearly an hour before. Looking at the slowly dying caterpillar, she knew the ants had their meal. She did not know how her pretending to be happy would make others happy, her breath spasmed as she swallowed air and salted tears. The ants took parts of the carcass over the pebbles as the sun changed their bodies from black to russet. She looked at the bench, considered a small passing cloud, and rubbed her face. It was smudged with dust and red blotches, but the tears stopped. Her breathing slowed to normal and she turned back to face the white house. She tested out a grimacing smile, cracking the set dirt and breaking the tear lines as she flexed her muscles before returning to a neutral expression. She knew she was expected to smile and enjoy herself. The girl left the consumption of the caterpillar to the black ants, and she ran back to the party.


Masturbating and Mothering


Jayne Dent


Jess Maria Heywood Calming Down

Skin

I imagine when God looks at us it hurts him the way the bathroom light hurts our eyes in the middle of the night; but we force ourselves to see. I’m vouching for a God I don’t believe in. Because I know he does not expect me to calm down, he will never ask me to lower my voice.

I have not met you yet but all the poems are about you. Even the ones that have been whispered into other boy’s necks, clawed into their backs, kissed into the sunset. Some nights I stay awake and tell the moon about you; we all know that she is good at keeping secrets.

So here’s an open invitation to the fury in my veins. Let them burn patterns in your flesh to remind you that you never have an obligation to silence the storm in your chest. That screaming until you vomit is not weak, it is testimony to the fight in your heart.

I’m growing my hair whilst I’m waiting for you. It is teaching me patience. As soon as I see you I’ll chop it all off. It will teach me loss. We grow our hair long to cover us – there will be no need with you. You’ll peel all of what I am away from me. I will not have to wash my bed sheets three times the morning after you tell me that I am too broken for any man to fuck. Attempts to remove the smell of your shampoo. I will strain my tea through the open pores of your skin until I am entirely infused with your scent.

Do not hide your anger at the world. I for one, trust those that rip open their throats in the heat of the moment a million times more than anyone trying to sit on life’s sidelines. By the way, there are no sidelines in love or war and there is no better way to love your enemy than when it lives inside your head. When it is your own scared voice, your own hot blood.

Boy I have been dressing myself up for you. I am straps and lace and sweat. Boy I am dressing myself down for you. I am skin and skin and skin.


Escape Fantasy I think I’m hurt, friend. The old scars have burst and maybe I’ve been bleeding all this time. Perhaps you’ll never understand but your smile became the exit wound. When my friends ask me why I held on so long all I can say is, “the boy on the bridge. The boy who stopped me jumping off the bridge.” The things we invent when we’re scared and want to be rescued. My parents hate fantasy you more than they hate my tattoo, but your permanence I’m less certain of. I have been trying to make snow angels in your cold shoulder for almost a year now and my fingers are so badly frostbitten they won’t thaw on a candle of hope. Stop holding onto the open blades of memories, girl; they do nothing but slice your palms. Your silence is easy, but mine was broken by the din of his next girl’s nightmares. So the next time anyone doubts me I will bind my breasts so tight that the word of my pain can never be identified as “woman.” Let me give it the gravity of a male voice so it will no longer have to run from the dark the way girls do. If I could go back two days ago I would. If I could go back farther and never meet you I would do that too. You are last week’s poem, love. It’s not your fault you never showed up on time; I was a broken clock but your hands kept ticking. Maybe I’m a wild thing, chewing through its foot. You are already running. Limping fast enough to keep up will do nothing but hurt and bleed. I cannot keep cutting up my own white flag to form bandages for every wound you have dyed red. I drank about you until I thought I’d drown in whisky and crooked truths. But we all teach ourselves how to swim if we want to live hard enough. Promise me this; if I ever turn up at your door, wild-eyed and sleep deprived, you will not let me in. Promise you will not tempt me with the slightest relief on your shoulder. Make sure you will tell me to go home. There is nothing left but ghosts and crime scenes. I have to stop visiting the cemetery where I tried to bury myself. Monsters have bitter mouths and I have nothing left to say.



About UnstapledPress UnstapledPress is a contemporary arts based publishing house situated in Newcastle Upon Tyne. We’re interested in text, including but not limited to poetry, performance, spoken word and critical writing. UnstapledPress was imagined and established by artists. We’re dedicated to showcasing new and upcoming writing. UnstapledPress is always excited to receive feedback, comments, and enquiries so don’t hesitate to contact us. Keep an eye out for open calls for submissions.

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Managing Director Charlie Dearnley Designer Louie Pegna Media&Events Coordinator Daisy Billowes Treasurer Rene McBrearty Editors Holly Argent Cathy Garner Deanna Smith

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