Issue 07
THE JOURNAL
HAIKU
Writers Bloc
Welcome to the seventh issue of The Journal. This creative writing publication is by Writers Bloc and is the final issue for this academic year. Thank you to everyone who has submitted to The Journal and thanks to everyone who has been reading over the course of this year. I hope you've had as much fun reading these writer's work as I have editing them. There is no Guest Piece for this issue, so instead submissions were opened up with a specific call for haikus. For those that don't know haikus are three lines longs and made up of 1 7 syllables, traditionally following a 5-7-5 pattern. If you submitted but did not manage to get a piece in this issue please do not give up! The Journal will return next year with more opportunities to get published. Enjoy. Andy Cashmore, Editor
Special thanks to Charlie Dart for haiku illustrations. 2
The Journal
Contents Ben Norris
Haiku
4
Death Throes
5
Fatalist
9
Haiku - Eden
10
Echoes
11
Date
13
Haiku
14
Tom's House
15
Genocide (What did we say?)
16
Haiku
17
The Great Vacancy
18
A Community Project in New Orleans
20
Haiku - Joe Pesci Support Group
21
Britain
22
High Ku
24
Walking on Cobwebs
25
Chat-show (Feature Piece)
26
Ben Jackson
Jonathan Pearson Giles Longley-Cook Geoff Mills
Lily Blacksell Elisha Owen Amie Pryal
Giles Longley-Cook Amie Pryal
Samuel Parr
Elisha Owen
Ben Jackson Ben Norris Ben Norris Elena Orde
Alana Tomlin
3
Writers Bloc
Street’s monotony briefly disturbed by pigeon’s kamikaze flight. Ben Norris
4
The Journal
Death Throes *Diary entry, unnumbered, anon.* The plains are the most dangerous. This is the fact that Inua continues to repeat. It is difficult to see at all. So much stretches out from every direction that it is difficult for the eye to grip whatever it might see. If there is anything to see. Generally, there is nothing to see. So overwhelmingly total is this desolation that we feel like intruders on a Great Quiet. The Great Quiet is hot, heavy and dark. The horizons are lost; the heat haze blurs together with the fog. The horizons dance away from us. It is dizzying. *Recording, item #002 Jackson’s possessions* 0738-0739: This is everything, t-take everything, everything, look. ...Hmm? She is dead. She, she- I would like a knife. If it's not-t-t-too much trouble, I know. ...Who is the knife for? It’s forLfor- I don’t know. *Diary entry, unnumbered, anon.* Michael and Koops are trying to remember the dialogue from Some Like it Hot. They have run out of new ideas. We have stopped, in the middle of these plains; halted in the Great Quiet. Being out here makes people more introverted, more tense. The only conversation comes from Michael and Koops, the two men running together in an inaudible rush – something that will, no doubt, become another performance in time. How much time, no one asks any more. Michael doesn’t know, neither does Koops. They would probably tell me now that it will be ready tomorrow. They are both deranged. 5
Writers Bloc Koops and Michael are the writers. Or so they would have it. Indeed, they were the writers when we started, but I wasn’t even with the troupe then. Gradually, more and more duties started falling to Mr Jackson. Eventually, it was too much for Mr Jackson and it became the duty of everyone to put together a show. From the day I arrived, Mr Jackson told me: 'Steal stories.' He told me: 'Steal them from the steps of any building we come across, whether the walls still stand or not. Steal them from the pools of liquid that throb into the Earth and steam into the sky. Steal them from the wrinkles of the old men who still cling to breath. Steal them from your fellow travellers here, if you must.' The show needs stories. That means the troupe needs stories. That means I need stories to survive. And Mr Jackson, and Michael, and Koops, and all the rest. The Great Quiet doesn’t tell stories, so while we stand out here all we have is the scrambled memories of an old film. *Recording, item #002 Jackson’s possessions* 0746-0747: I’m ok now. YesL Huh? No. No. But-but-[loud thump] I’m sorryLI’m sorry [weeping]L *Diary entry, unnumbered, anon.* It is wondrous how science is lost to us. Diagnosing mental health is a farce. Physical health is simultaneously the most and least important thing. Most important because well, you die; and if you hold people back, they’ll leave you. But it is least important because everyone is ill. Dying. Rotting. I hear the troupe used to be much more ruthless. When I joined I had a cold. And Inua said to me, 'two months ago, Mr Jackson would’ve had your throat slit.' Like the others. Now, everyone just has to accept that illness will spread. You can’t just cut 6
The Journal infections out – you wouldn’t believe how fast they travel. So now it’s just another thing everyone shares. I do remember leaving an old man. We left him in an old town. No one there any more, of course – no one we noticed, anyway. The old man was blind, and it was pretty obvious after a while he had no other use. So we left him. We’d only picked him up the day before. He managed to convince us for a full twenty four hours that he could see, and was healthy. I wonder how many other travellers he tried that on, stumbling up to them in dust, before he succeeded in fooling us. There’s no doctor. Grady has some tools. Sometimes he does makeshift operations, but there have been too many unpleasant incidents. Inua is full of wisdom. He practically defecates wisdom. But his diagnoses have only ever led to Grady’s unpleasant operations. The one person you can go to if you are ill, is Leopold. He tries to help. Most of the others never do. *Recording, item #002 Jackson’s possessions* 0747-0748:[weeping] Tell me. What could I do to you'that would hurt you most?
[weeping] What?
What could I do to you'to cause the most suffering? You’re lying in rags. Your toes are deformed. You have few teeth. You have no one. What would it take for a man like you to suffer more?
I’m ready to die now.
*Fragment #036* 'Idiot broads! We’re all packed and ready to go. And what happens? The saxophone runs off with a Bible salesman, and the fiddle gets pregnant! I ought 7
Writers Bloc to fire you!' 'I'm the manager of the band, not a night watchman!' *Recording, item #002 Jackson’s possessions* 0748-0750: Why would I want you to die? You want me to suffer. Precisely. It seems like dying is the best option. For you.
[Dull whine]
Stop that. You sound like a dog.
Kill me you fucking prick. I want to die, I want to die!
Ben Jackson
8
The Journal
Fatalist We listen as duck heaves out garrulous hoots that crack the russet corpses of brittle digits like golf balls chipped wildly. The cat drops prone, head lopped by shoulder crease, a swell of decapitated fat like a sack of drunken bumblebees lolling on the wet of the grass - evergreen cat piss scents. Feline preens, sound of a knife through carpet, tongue flattens fur damp as a wound. The scene: tired from clods of wine in Sunday gravy. The acoustic barrel of garrulous should be Neolithic grunts not the pub-crawl gossip of geese and coots. I told her that and she said 'What the fuck?' I nod in pale acceptance with winter's morning yawn through the clouds, off panned puddles of veg, from the jut of the window shouldering the garden the cat and the duck and the bracken. The crescent gape of sprawled dictionary approves; intransigent assertions. I place my head on the block of my palm, Cat wedges then pounces in periphery.
Jonathan Pearson
9
Writers Bloc
Eden I walked through Eden Then a man came and told me To keep off the grass Giles Longley-Cook
10
The Journal
Echoes And so up and up and up we went, the air thinning our breath thickening. Our twenty-fifth, our Silver Anniversary. Her hair was a little silver now, her walk a little slower, her speech a little heavier. But still she was she, her, the one I wanted, the one I married – and yes, still. Still. The one I loved. The wind bit, snapped at our faces, sky sea spaces opening up before us: a grey abyss. I reached my arm around her duffled shoulders, pressed my lip up against her silk thin cheek: a smile. A kind of smile. A trying to be smile, but not quite being. We edged closer, closer now, terrain behind, soupy emptiness ahead. And then. And then she was gone. Lurched forward, dropped plumb line, swallowed up - feet first - by the mists. A dull thud - maybe a crack, or a smack, reporting her arrival, her departure. I heard the seagulls squeal their insane soliloquies to the rush and roil of the shoreline. Screaming seconds scoured my world. **** I felt your smooth skin press against the length of me, and your breath burn my face. You were there for only a second. You disappeared before I could respond. That brief charge of heat has passed through chilled days since. You came to me again, on the bus as I went to work. My cheek was resting against the cold glass, the rain’s insistent patter hypnotizing, and the humming vibrations of the bus rocking me into dull oblivion. You sidled up and brushed a hand through my hair, an electric thrill tickling my skull. You whispered soothing susurrations, caressing the hollow of my ear, echoing with a meaning I could not grasp. I have replayed it again and again, sought its heat against the bare backdrop of my days. And more days I waited, days cold and interminable: your echoes 11
Writers Bloc resounding around a life scooped empty. Today I saw your face. I was at the supermarket. I stood at the till staring towards the aisles and took you as another customer, but then you turned and looked straight at me. You wore a smile I could not read. What was it exactly? I was staring at you long after you had disappeared, the cashier calling out at me, to bring me back to her world. She asked me if I was ok. Yes of course, I said. Yes. Of course. I’ve been feeling strange lately; things have been jolted out of place. The world I inhabit now seems more like a sickly projection. These days I go through the motions, follow a script I must have written in my saner days. But what would it matter, if, on the tube, I were to take my clothes off, start gnawing on the ear of the man sat next to me, tell my boss to go screw his fat face? Sometimes I think I will do these things to see if it will, to smash through the numbness of my life. Tonight you came and stayed a while. I was staring at the television when you came into the room and sat down beside me. I had been expecting you. We did not speak, I did not even look at you, but you placed your arm behind my head and I sank onto your chest. You stroked my hair. You did not tell me, but I knew this would be the last time. I understood you perfectly. You’d decided that I had better go it alone, that these febrile visitations were doing me no good. You’re right of course. Sever and progress, cut lose and float free - leave me with only the echoes of that other life by which to remember you. I see then, if that is how it must be. Tonight I shall sleep alone.
Geoff Mills
12
The Journal
Date ‘I’m all out of raisins. How about a date? It’s sticky and soft and covered in dust, how can you resist? I’ll pick you up at seven. A small brown brain, you are always on my mind. I had an oozing lobotomy, your love, my love, has got to me.’ Shrivelled though, and ugly, an old man in a new bar sweet talking young ladies. His future’s brown, their future’s bright, his teeth are rotten, his life air tight.
Lily Blacksell
13
Writers Bloc
The baby monitor crackles. A cat’s meow in a forgotten drawer. Elisha Owen
14
The Journal
Tom’s House A clock strikes in the house. The kettle whistled its tune hours ago and nobody moved. Nobody breathes or whispers or mutters. The smell from hundreds of flowers lingers in the silence, drowning the spaces between people with the scent of lily and rose. In your room dust has collected on the empty picture frames that never got filled. Pillars of music sit untidily on a desk never used for its actual purpose, the brown rings from several mugs stain the wood with varying sizes. The book borrowed years ago is stashed between piles of old papers. But I don’t take it back, it is no longer mine. The carpet still bears the red candle wax from the Ouija board gone awry. Do you remember asking the dark for a sign, our breath fluttering the candles so they cast moving shadows on the walls? I have placed my hands on that wooden board so many times, made requests to an empty room. Where was the white-sheet ghost I expected homage to the images of ghouls from countless Halloweens spent collecting candy thrown carelessly into our pumpkin shaped pots? Where were the whispers and taps that signaled your reply? When did the clock stop striking the hour? I think there were tears a few days ago, but there is no memory on my part of the last thing I said to you. Sometimes a reminder comes in the face of a passer-by in the street, in the snippet of a stranger’s voice carried over the crowd, in the forgotten objects of a room not mine, and not really yours, that nobody comes to claim.
Amie Pryal 15
Writers Bloc
Genocide (What did we say?)
Never again
and again
and again
and again
and again
and again and again and again and again and again and again and again...
Giles Longley-Cook
16
The Journal
Wind shakes the tree-tops Pulling leaves from the branches And thoughts from my mind. Amie Pryal 17
Writers Bloc
The Great Vacancy I
We asked him to point us to the desert. The adhans whispered Prayer is better than sleep, but the city was loud as it woke. He asked us why now, of all times? Could we not feel the sand, dancing the Awash in the air? This heat was like the whip on the donkey’s back, and the roots of the desert were rumbling as it readied itself to exhale. Do not worry, he confided, this city is the verrucae on my heel, and all of us together will not be rubbed away by that great palm of dust.
But you could see it in the whites of his eyes. He knew that ten miles out the desert was beating and beating and he had been feeling, as we all had, that dreadful urge to go further in, to get away, to go deeper.
18
The Journal
II The dunes are brush-strokes on the horizon and then as if the tide has come in we are among them. We travel first in a jeep, then on a camel called Ismail, and finally on sandals. At night I can see the sky’s whole empire, but down here there is only wind, flowing like canvas. To remind myself what people look like I explore your face, a ruined city slowly filling with sand. In the morning we arrive at the Sahara’s womb, the desert’s wings spread either side. I climb up the dune on bare feet, with this heat like the scimitar on the Black Guard’s back, and as I begin to pray I rest in this vacancy, far bigger than the one bottled into Ben Youssef, where the minarets couldn’t quite sing us to silence while outside men whispered Hashish as a morning prayer.
Samuel Parr
19
Writers Bloc
A Community Project in New Orleans After Candy Chang
A public artist stamps the city’s derelict buildings with pockmark stickers. She asks each citizen, ‘what would you do with this land?’ They emerge like crabs from a barrel. Saxophones and Mardis Gras beads for permanent markers. Each word is a wrecking ball. I wish this was: a house full of nymphomaniacs writing their PHDs. A grocery store with free-range eggs and fresh pumpkin pie. A dog-walking garden, vegetable lots and timed sprinklers. A place to lose car keys. Centuries of mildewed kisses rise from cracks in the sidewalks. The city’s proud spires twist like the river bend it is tucked in; reading each urgent scrawl. Sandbags become stepping stones to reach the cardboard window panes, where there is still room to make an impression. I wish this was: the world’s biggest sand pit. A planned parenthood centre. Somewhere to rock back and forth in an old wicker chair. A parking lot. A taco stand. My art gallery. A community centre with a chess club, karate class and pensioner’s ballet. A place to change my name.
Elisha Owen 20
The Journal
Joe Pesci Support Group
The following should be read in the voice of Joe Pesci:
A Fire-fighter should rescue babies and broads, but of course – it’s wiseguys.
Ben Jackson
21
Writers Bloc
Britain
after Allen Ginsberg
Britain it is you who taught me to ride a bicycle. Britain why are you embarrassed by your own naked body? Britain you are beautiful. Britain would you kill me if I told you I voted Lib-Dem? I told my friends I thought Nick Clegg was the most convincing and compassionate in the first Leaders' Debate, despite the fact that I didn't watch the first Leaders' Debate. Britain will you kill me? Britain why don't you click for me like America clicks for her poets? It is too quiet. America is too loud. But it is so far away it sounds just the same. Britain I need validation. Britain leave me alone for one day. I think of you more than you think of me, I know it. Britain you don't write me anymore. You have gotten cynical, Britain. It's contagious and now my old college friends ostracise me at reunions. Britain do you know what time it is? The clocks on the office wall tell me what's going on everywhere but here. You look stupid in that blazer, now. Britain you are malleable. What do you sound like? You sound like the last person who touched you. I sound like the last person who touched me.
22
The Journal Britain stop pretending. Let's watch a film together, see if we can't work things out. Britain if you save me just one cinema, I'll save you a seat. We can buy Nachos if you want but I'm having a battered sausage. Britain I miss not caring. Touch me again. Like you did before you got scared. Yeah. Now can we go home? Britain let’s spoon. You are the perfect shape. Cradle me like the Isle of Man, like the Channel, France. Lace cold feet with warm streams. Please. Britain whisper. I prefer you when you're thinking. Britain stop thinking that much. You and I think too much. You should keep your head screwed on. Britain imagine how much that would hurt. Did you learn nothing from my accident? I prefer you when you're listening, Britain when you’re resting. The sun never set on your arms, so I know they can stretch to hold me Britain sleep.
Ben Norris 23
Writers Bloc
High Ku A friend, Ku, took drugs last night, then breathed helium before trampolining Ben Norris
24
The Journal
Cobwebs In moonlight we enter the door by the climbing roses and pad along shrunken corridors to find her feeble as a newly hatched bird, nestled among the downy bedclothes wrapped like wings around her delicate frame. I spend the night in the small attic room the Noah’s Ark poster stretching up the wall. I find my mum’s school books in the bedside drawer and trace the handwriting with my finger. Before falling asleep, I count the gaps in the plaster where I used to think the spiders hid. In the morning, she shows me the new sweetie box, the days of the week raised, like nettle stings, on the lid. She clutches beta blockers in shaking hands and says they leave her feeling like she’s walking on cobwebs. I run my big toe along the deep grooves in the doorframe left by the scrape of her electric wheelchair. She drinks tea from a Tippy cup as we look through photo albums, forehead creased in almost-recognition at the young woman in hiking boots as I remind her, too brightly, of my name. We tip-toe a half breath away from a sob and she calls old age ‘this nuisance’ again. My mum follows suit, and asks if she’s ‘having a wobble’ and, with a nod, we are trapped walking on cobwebs, playing a word game called understatement.
Elena Orde 25
Writers Bloc
Chat-show
Feature Piece
It's late at night. The television flashes its neon light into the snow. A set of twins are on the panel of a chat show, both wearing black-rimmed Ray-Ban. One says, I can only get to sleep with the light on. The audience laughs. The host's ruby lips refuse a smile, her peach blouse jitters as she adjusts her papers. I can only sleep with a film on quietly, the other says. The twins take their glasses off to sip water from underneath the glitter desktop. So do you miss being joined together? A picture montage shows when they were joined at the shoulder blade and thigh. The audience clap.
26
The Journal I miss the tailor, one replies, who made all our clothes. He used to measure us with two separate tapes mine was yellow. The twins are invited to spin the prize wheel for the audience. The audience cheer. They stand either side of the wheel leaning on the scaffold with their shoulders without arms. A tweet flashes on the interactive studio backdrop Soo inspiring #canIhavethemboth?
Alana Tomlin
27
The Journal will return next year! You can find all of the previous issues at www.uobwritersbloc.wordpress.com Thank you for writing, submitting and reading.