Issue 05
THE JOURNAL
WINTER
Writers Bloc
Welcome to the fifth issue of The Journal, the second issue this academic year. As with the last issue there were a large number of submissions of different forms, genres and styles while all fitting into the theme of Winter. I would like to thank everyone who submitted for making it a pleasure and a challenge trying to decide which pieces would make it into this issue. For those who were successful congratulations. For those that didn't please do submit for the next issue. This issue of The Journal introduces a new feature that will see an established writer's piece of work mingle alongside our usual contributors. It is with pleasure that I can introduce Luke Kennard as our first Guest Writer. He is not only a lecturer at University of Birmingham but also a fantastic poet. Look out for our posters, find Writers Bloc on Facebook or follow @UoBWritersBloc on twitter to follow updates and announcements for new issues throughout the year. Enjoy. Andy Cashmore, Editor
Special thanks to: Charlie Dart, Richard House, Deborah Clements and Louise Gessey 2
The Journal
Contents Luke Kennard
Parallel (Guest Piece) Elena Orde
Shoulder to Elbow Amie Pryal
Winter.
Ben Norris
The Politcian's Christmas Dinner (Feature Piece) Giles Longley-Cook
BBC Christmas Carol Ali Moore
Lonely Winter Joanna Duffy
It's not beautiful unless it's broken Ben Norris
The Great Escape April Shackleton
Christmas Dinner Lily Blacksell
Hare
Joseph Sale
Waiting for Persephone
4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
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Writers Bloc
Parallel
Guest Piece
A forty-one year old man returns to his family home for Christmas and immediately regresses. Don’t want that cup. Want Spiderman. A straw articulated into the side as part of its web pattern. A crouched image of Spiderman, solemn as a pallbearer, mouthless face damaged in the dishwasher, hairline crack in the straw. It’s ruined. As you well know, says his father. The man kicks the sideboard, which comes away from the wall. They distract him with A Muppet Christmas Carol and family-size box of Frosties, which he eats by the handful. He winches the piano stool as high as it will go, kicks his legs. Weeeeeeeeeee! he says. Stop looking at me, says his sister, an intellectual property lawyer taking one of her three days off a year. The way she finds herself talking to him... it makes her eyes feel heavy and oversized. He is chewing her iPhone. Stop chewing my iPhone! His brain is fitfully illuminated: the blinking fairy lights’ silent anthem. Thank you for the tree lights. He prays this. Thank you. The ends of cigarettes put out by a single drop of fat rain. Thank you for the parallel circuit, so that if one light goes out we know which to change, and thank you for the series circuit, so that if one light goes out we are all fucked. Is his family a parallel or a series circuit? He begins to cry. By Christmas day he is reduced to the mental state of a baby. He cries for three hours then has a nap next to the dog for fourteen minutes. When he wakes up he cries for four hours. The mother strokes his head. Help me, says the father. Help me hold him. She takes his legs. The father takes his shoulders. What shall we do with the drunken sailor? they sing. He cries harder. They rock him like a slow battering ram. His sister finds his favourite tree decoration, a silver bell. They hang it from a low branch and nudge it with his head until the ringing sends him to sleep. They turn on the radio: a Christmas service. Crackly woman’s voice reads the words of Simeon, a sword shall pierce your own heart also. And slowly, thinks the father. The man sleeps. The father knocks back a gin and tonic from the Spiderman cup. 4
The Journal No ice. He makes a face. The mother reads a Tragic Lives digest, abridging eight of the year’s best abuse memoirs into one tidy volume, bible-sized. She has not switched on the Kindle her daughter bought her. You can make the font bigger, she sighs. I thought it would be useful. The father snaps a cork in a bottle of premulled wine. He pokes it into the bottle, muttering. Look, says the sister, look, he’s laughing. And it’s true, in his sleep, his mouth a bow, the man is silently convulsing as if party to some private joke with God. They stand around him and watch. He looks so happy. Shhh, says the mother. The phone rings. The man opens one eye, a look of alarm. Hush now, they say to him, together. He opens the other eye. His lower lip trembles. Hush now, says his sister, alone this time.
Luke Kennard
5
Writers Bloc
Shoulder to Elbow He tries to remember something interesting about owls As they circle the cage where they huddle in a row Puffed up, like beads on an abacus. He threads his mittens onto her hands: Curled starfish cradled in boxing gloves. They stand shoulder to elbow Watching a zebra nose through the snow. She draws one stick man with the toe of her boot and asks Where Santa will leave her presents this year. A peacock shrieks as it stalks past Trailing its tail behind like a sled. In the background a flock of flamingos Hunch one-legged on the ice Some with heads under wings, blushing. The sound she makes Hoovering the last drop of juice through the straw Echoes dully through the picnic area: Benches and tables packaged in cold polystyrene flakes. Behind them, a penguin slides into the water Like a dropped bar of soap. Her mother collects her as lamps begin to flicker. She is ushered away, leaving One oversized glove half buried.
Elena Orde
6
The Journal
Winter. An empty field, blanketed by an expanse of perfect, untouched snow. The children yearn to play in it, stamping their mark in the world and returning home to the sound of scolding parents. A tree in an empty field, branches stripped bare, icicles hanging in place of leaves. A pair of blackbirds perch and are scared away by the sound of crunching snow from heavy boots. Drag marks pass by a tree in an empty field, carving trails in the snow that freeze in place. There is no body heat and the snow does not yet melt. When the spring returns the evidence will soon evaporate too. A small town far from a tree in an empty field, caught up in a flurry of falling snowflakes and busy activity. Reporters flock to own an item of the girl’s clothes and bang on the doors of the house. She was never found.
Amie Pryal
7
Writers Bloc
The Politician’s Christmas Dinner
Feature Piece
'I cannot comment at this stage.' Her husband only asked her if she’d picked up lemon stuffing yet. She hadn’t had the time, she said 'I can’t confirm nor deny that.' 'This happened last year too' he said, the de-ja-vu disarming him. 'Why silence and false charm, again?' 'I cannot comment.' 'Let’s call off Christmas, do a ‘you’ – turn on our heels and run, my love. You lock our bedside-table drawers in case I find reports.' He paused. 'Is new year too soon to divorce?' 'I cannot comment.'
Ben Norris
8
The Journal
BBC Christmas Carol White sand, white snow, white burning snow falls on white burning sand. Little children’s white eyes shine against the black night, scream in fright then fall silent. Silent night. Holy night. Holey bodies. Silent bodies. Onto the TV screens comes the death king’s Christmas speech Oh come let us ignore him Our comfortable lives bore him Oh there’s so much more for him Way over in the east Merry Christmas from Tripoli where the gold has gone astray Merry Christmas from Cairo where the marching’s banned today Merry Christmas from Gaza with a firework display Merry Christmas from Damascus where one man openly slays That’s not a star shining above us in the sky But stay to watch it and you’ll still hear angels cry.
Giles Longley-Cook
9
Writers Bloc
Lonely Winter There is something about the cold house, Something which isolates and suffocates, buzzing A ^ ^ which you can't quite shake, And the bulb bought for companionship, Is eco friendly, but hates you; Shadows spill from it rather than light, Whereas the metallic blue screen you stare at, I l l u m i n a te s the flaws and floor, Consumes shadows but creates more, And-then-thoughts-get-faster, Of what if everyone left you, Alone and desecrated, Dead on the bedroom floor.
It creeps up your sides and down your throat,
The house stands still for a month, The letters begin to grow And iTunes won't stop the elegy It still has 2 days and 3 hours of music to go.
Ali Moore
10
The Journal
It’s not beautiful unless it’s broken Last January I found you teetering on an upstairs window ledge like a wobbly tooth. It was dusk and I could hear dogs barking and sirens in the distance, the sounds moving past you in the window and reaching me with the cold air that you were letting in as a reminder that everything else was carrying on. I just watched you for a minute – you stared out and your knuckles bulged against your skin like wet pearls as you gripped the window frame, but nothing else happened so I thought you should carry on too. I made you get down and we went out to the pub, we got so drunk that everything became full of humour and threat and significance and deep significance. Then we got drunker, and all I remember is fractured shards of our destruction – across a bar, you were punching a man repeatedly with every atom of your face strained in fury and sweat pouring from your hair - we walked out doors and I vomited all over a wall with the shock of the icy air - a blur of boys shouted things at us across a train station as we tried to hold each other’s faces still. Last, you stopped halfway down a dark road to snort something off the top of a car bonnet and made as if to hide it from me, and it was so fucking cold by then that my tears froze on my face. When we got back I was covered in blood and I didn’t know where it had come from. We climbed into bed and tried to shut out the wrongness with kisses and the soft edges of the dark, but it crawled in with us, wrapped itself between and around us and we ended up falling asleep on separate ends, our bodies like hard little stones. In the morning, we smoked the last cigarette in my pack sitting under the open skylight and exhaling upwards. You said ‘I never show my poems to my parents. I don’t want them to worry about me.’
Joanna Duffy 11
Writers Bloc
The Great Escape The fields on every side of Aunt Carol’s house were covered with shin-deep snow, as they had been each Christmas his parents had made him come here. The most interesting thing to do at Aunt Carol’s was to watch it fall. But before breakfast, finally, Charlie had unwrapped his long-wished-for pogo stick. No footprints this time. That’s how they caught him last year.
Ben Norris
12
The Journal
Christmas Dinner I haven’t bought a turkey for Christmas this year, instead I’ve bought a disposable barbeque And a selection box of raw meat. I’m taking the man who sleeps underneath the billboard and the Big Issue lady to the park. The snow will dampen the coals, we’ll all have to eat at different times, the occasional sausage will roll out of its blanket onto the ground. But we don’t need to play Christmas albums echoing fantasies: the church bells will chime. We’ll be surrounded by trees without the shiny baubles or fairy lights that need replacing every year, and as it gets dark they will be topped with perfectly placed stars. It will look a lot more like Christmas than it would staring at a pile of unopened presents and a plate of uneaten turkey.
April Shackleton
13
Writers Bloc
Hare I love your black tipped ears like finely flocked twitching leaves of celery. Your long thin legs don’t hop skip or jump but box and lunge and run, run so fast you’re flat out, white tufted chest brushing the rubble of the stubble field left dirty when you stop just for a moment and your heart beating heavy sends plumes of dust into the cold close mist.
Lily Blacksell
14
The Journal
Waiting for Persephone Dedicated to the brightest – M. F.
How many winters must I endure; the earth growing older than its sum? Will the spring come back again? Dying planets wither as their lights abate, and trees wrinkle down into their roots: how many winters must I endure? Summers shorten as surfaces grow cold, and colours bleed into the shades of sere: will the spring come back again? Animals sink into suspended slumbers, crawling back into their burrows, uncertain how many winters they must endure. I am waiting as the world ages on, her distance starving the soil – I wonder: will the spring come back again? In truth no seer could tell, the length, the time that I would wait, or how many winters I would endure, to see my spring come back again.
Joseph Sale
15
You can start submitting to the next issue now! Please send submissions to writersblocjournal@gmail.com Maximum two submissions per person, up to 1 500 words per prose piece and 50 lines per poem. DEADLINE: Sunday 1 0th February Thank you for reading.