Repent, Repent, Repent

listening to Chet Baker sing ‘almost blue’

(there’s a girl here and she’s almost you…)

sadness, I let it go

up, up into the terrible, vast,

Californian sky

the scarred undersides of one hundred spoons

cottons double boiled

could not get the taste of you

from out of my mouth

outside of my window the street kids line up

for watery soup and day old bread

inside the air is thick with impending death

now, years later

when I listen to Chet’s fractured,

near-death voice, I am transported

across the country,

across the years

to room 119

where it is always stifling

mid morning murder

money is always scarce

and my life is still pregnant

with terrifying

glorious possibilities

Tony O'Neill

Carrion

I used to be fascinated by dead animals.

As a child I liked nothing better than stumbling across a prone sheep on a fell-side, its torso bloated with gas and its pecked eyes somewhere high in the sky in the beak of a bird; or finding a flattened rabbit on the road side with its entrails stretched out behind it like a vapour trail.

These creatures didn’t disgust me. Quite the opposite in fact - they intrigued me the way their insides were laid bare, like the secrets of life had been unlocked and made public. Intestines, organs, blood; all were part of a puzzle that had been reversed, dismantled, demystified.

If they remained intact – a rarity - it was always the eyes that affected me the most, for the eyes are the window into a living being; and the moment in which they had died seemed to be captured in that bleak black stare, whether it was the sheep that had fallen down a crag in the night, the baby bird cast out from the nest or the hedgehog that had met its death beneath the crush of a Dunlop tyre at dawn.

Those eyes stared down through time and in each was the flash of a headlight, the panic of uncertainty, a look of surprise, the horror of nature’s violence, the disappointment at the unfairness of it all.

In those dead animals all the secrets of the world seemed to exist and the mystery of life unravelled.

The message of death as the last word in democracy - the immoveable full-stop - was conveyed and it said in a voice unequivocally loud and clear: no-one can beat me.

Ben Myers

Ode to a Smoke

I remember 1992
caressing you
in cold fingertips,
rolling you up
tight in green papers
before anyone knew
of our secret affair.

But I still want to hold you
outside shop doorways
and watch
other people
stare at your smoke.

Your smell, your taste
reminds me of nights
on dance floors in Leeds
splitting your sides,
rubbed in fresh grass
I’d wait all night
to be alone
with you under old duvets.

A bottle of vodka,
the songs of Nick Drake
just you and me
on a Burley Park bench
watching the sun
come up as I came up
these memories stay
at the front of my head.

I even enjoyed the taste in a morning
of you in my mouth
from the night before
and photos now sleep in an old pink book
with you and me
wrapped up in dry ice.

I can’t help but think
when I gave you up
I said goodbye to
the lost years of disco

I’m a thousand pound richer
a few pounds heavier
(but I still keep your wrappers in a Bob Marley tin…)

Adelle Stripe

Dog Mental Creative Breeze

SEDUCED
by the Romantic Calling.
LULLED
by a Reason to be alone.

I try to live up to it

by scribbling GASH
about my BALLS

hanging 30 years low in domestic warmth.

an Excuse to be ALONE
and something to do when I’m there.

the paper in this pad is for drawing.
this Unipen is for architects.
I brandish it like I am DERANGED,
a Saucepan Man in the Tower of Song,
writing about his BALLS
baggy in bargain pants,
his.

SEDUCED,
classic as tragedy is.
LULLED,
lushed, struggling,
a tolerated accident;
Functioning Mush.

we are classic Functioning Mush
building towers in the compost.

Mush,
high,
all dreaming . . .
I chase the MUSE,
any MUSE at all
like my functioning BALLS.

these are no Stateside badlands
I run in;
this is British shotgun marsh.
heavy with the damp muse of melancholy and weak women.
where BALLS walk tall on streets,
Urban and Deserted.

trying to be seduced His bones try an Artist's Dream

because He must
RECORD All Things.
because He must
KEEP All Things.
because All Things
CHANGE.

there seems precious else for Him to do
and maybe,
if He READS enough
maybe He will UNDERSTAND . . .maybe
fear will leave and clarity dawn with the wincing birds.
the dawn of the Functioning Mush.

my BALLS are Romantic,
like misty flowers
nodding
on an old battlefield
or weakly clenched
like an old fist
out on some memory beach.

I try to live up to it
to lay bare the foggy hours in contraband crystals.
but its horrible TIME
horrible
horrible
TIME
that peels onions here.

Ford Dagenham

The Clerk

today was mad
i woke up with a sore throat
all morning swallowing
testing my throat
still sore
swallow swallow
sore
swallow
swallow
i went to the ladies prison in ashford to see this client
swayleside its called
they keep rose west there
no one is allowed to talk to her
you get in trouble if you do
she waddles around eating chocolate and you're not allowed to even make eye-contact with her if you're new
she's the fat child-killing madonna
v.i.p bitches!
anyway this client was totally bananas
dangerous
an alcoholic
who had an argument with her boyfriend over a bottle of cider
so she took a bread knife to him
sliced him up
that's the basic facts
she says it was self-defence
it's the solicitors job to try and make that look feasible
it was revenge is what it was
no one should have treated me the way he did she says
the law says that if she wanted to get away from the beatings from this guy she should have ran away
not gone into the kitchen when he'd passed out drunk in his chair
not pulled out a knife to scratch him with
as she says
scratch him?

i'm looking at the photos taken at the scene
deep wounds in his arms, his hands and face
this is the end of a long line of abuse from men
all her life ruined
she hates them
she has an extensive previous for all sorts
and i read it to her
she doesn't like authority
she has assaulted two no three policemen
i like that about her i think
we are face to face across the table
and she repeats every single thing you say even the mistakes
so if you say
'you will see your solicitor i mean your barrister at court on tuesday'
she will say
'you will see your solicitor i mean your barrister at court on tuesday?'
her voice rising
shes enjoying something
its not a traditional horror-movie evil that she possesses its more like
like this anger inside that flashes
you have to blink and refocus sometimes because looking into her face is like staring into blackness
a stare and a smile
a hole
she is the feeling of vertigo in the room
she is inducing the panic
i got so scared that i almost said to her
-listen i'm really really scared
but i couldn't
because it's not professional
and also i was scared that if i did that then something really terrible would happen
i held it down
if i'd said that and she'd laughed i dont know what would have happened
i felt trapped
so i say to her
do you remember that night
-i don't remember anything
the night you took a knife to him
-i did it in self defence, i was scared for my life
why didn't you run away?
-cos i love him
it's not normal to stab someone you love
- he was going to kill me-you weren't there
no i wasn't there
i stare at her body
it's not nice
they dress in mottled tracksuits inside
rotten pyjamas
she was pregnant at the time
she had twins in her belly it says here
i asked her what happened to them
they are burying them tomorrow she says
they died in my womb
i had to deliver them dead
she says it as if to say it's all your fault and in a way it is i think
i'm very sorry i say
i'm very sorry she says
i read her the police statements from that evening she was arrested
this police officer says that when they turned up you were naked
-when they turned up i was naked?
she's smiling
its funny
she's on side now
and the walls were covered in blood?
-the walls were covered in blood? ha ha ha ha ha
o god
is that true? i ask
and our eyes meet
we are communicating something i don't want to communicate
we both laugh and laugh
everything reverberates
her eyes and mouth and teeth and something really horrible flashes across the table
and i realised that given the chance she would kill me
i didn't think that she had a knife
it wasn't about the possiblilty of the situation
but it was enough that she would do it
that given half a chance she would stab the shit out of me
i nearly left that tiny holding cell
the ugly walls and shitty table
not that i could leave without summoning a screw
banging on the window
i held it together
she went back to repeating everything i was saying and turning it into a question
as if i was relaying to her information she had never heard
she made me write things down
its her way of gaining control
then she folds it up and puts it in her pocket
like she has taken something from you
she should not be just sentenced like a normal person
which is what they are doing
she needs to be locked away
she will kill someone
i felt certain of it today
she will start drinking again
her mother was an alcoholic
it's been handed down
and they want to treat her like a normal person
she's fit to plead they say
what the fuck does that mean?
fit to plead?
its not something for you to worry about
she does not know what's going on
she keeps asking who i am
i dont know i say.

Mike Frankel

A Drunk Man by Free Derry Corner

Leave behind
the clambering spires, broad traitor river
full of eels and bicycles
some black surrealist arabesque.
The mountains - a flat naïve painting,
the skies - a kinetoscope in motion.

Leave behind the burn and the dream
of the drink in the blood,
the common madness,
the building sites we hid within,
the bridge under which we sang,
the lake at the madhouse,
the train tracks.

Leave behind the ghost trajectories
of lost relationships,
memories of when we were
the corner boys and the attic drinkers
drunk on rooftops beneath hanging comets
and the same mad stars,
where fortified with firewater,
we played at revolutionaries
in the clothes of our fathers,
fenian musketeers.
The nights we were invincible.

And I’ve carved my fuckin’ heart and soul
into the white of that gable wall
that roars to the world in stone
we are/
we were/
we could have been free.

Darran Anderson

Pearl's Cafe

I was in between jobs, living in a council flat that had no central heating. Above me dwelt a small-time drug dealer, known locally as Tony Balony. Pearl’s café was just around the corner and it was warm and cosy and Pearl was dead. The café hadn’t been re-decorated in decades. It was done up like a little Parisian bistro, dark and cosy, red and white checked table cloths, stucco walls, wooden beams, candles in wine bottles, etc. The only nod to modernity was an asteroids gaming machine, hidden away in one corner, and in comparative terms an antique itself.

Pearl’s daughter, Ava ran the mystery café single-handed. She was in her mid fifties and still a looker, but back in the day she’d been a heartbreaker, just like Pearl. I don’t think the café made any money, but a dead husband’s life insurance took care of that side of things. Ava had it easy. The café didn’t open on Mondays, Thursdays or Sundays, and usually I was the only customer. Well, it was cold inside my flat.

There were photos of Billy Fury all over the walls. Billy Fury was Ava’s teenage idol and often his fifties brand of rock and roll could be heard on the sound system, Halfway to Paradise, Maybe Tomorrow, Collette, Last Night was Made For love, Jealousy.

Ava thought I was a genius. I’d sit in my corner of the bistro writing, or pretending to write, but really just daydreaming. Ava would stand behind me and try to read what I’d written, but I always covered the writing with my hand. This made Ava laugh. Then she’d tussle my wavy hair and say,

‘You’re ganna make it Joe boy, one day, just mark my words!’

I marked the words and secretly hoped it was true.

Once, when drunk, I wrote a poem on one of Pearl’s Café’s red napkins entitled, ‘I Would Have Given You All of My Heart.’ When Ava discovered the act of vandalism, she let out a little shriek. It was beautiful she said. Then she had the napkin framed and hung it on the wall underneath a poster of Billy Fury in his 1950’s heyday.
Tony Balony rarely came to Pearl’s, but one day he did. He burst in like this,

‘I can’t fucking believe it!’ He cried.

I was playing Asteroids, but was so shocked by Tony Balony’s sudden appearance I let all the meteors bust my spaceship into fragments.

Ava stopped pretending to look busy, ‘What’s up Tone?’

Tony slumped into a chair and gave us the low down. His dog had been run over and killed. Hit and run. His dog was a handsome Rhodesian ridgeback called Harold. Tony Balony was in bits and it brought a lump to my throat.

Tony stayed in Pearl’s café all that night, drinking cans of Stella and weeping. He loved that dog and vowed to get revenge on the culprit. Ava comforted Tony by making love to him in the kitchen. I can’t prove this, as I drank too many wife beaters and passed out underneath one of the tables. But I reckoned they did because Tony was a ladies man.

Anyway, neither of us was lucky with our pets. At that time I had a cat called Stupid, who couldn’t walk or jump properly. She had a problem balancing and kept falling off things and breaking her legs. After the fourth break the vet gave me the low down. Another fall, he warned, and she would have to be put down. I didn’t like the sound of that and afterwards only let Stupid out on a lead, where I could keep an eye her. Still, despite all her problems Stupid was a magic cat because she could speak. No one else thought she could speak, but I knew she could. I’d ask her a question and she would meow in reply. The mews sounded like words.

The days went by like strange dreams. I frequented Pearl’s café whenever it was open with Stupid in tow, talking all the way. I was working on a novel, it was a tragic love story, and the bistro helped the writing. Did I tell you that Ava smoked like a chimney? Three packs a day, consulate. Her skin was wrinkled and she coughed a great deal, ‘There’ll be the death of me,’ she’d say, as she sparked up another.

‘You should cut-down Aves,’ I’d say.

Sometimes Ava would talk about the past. She’d once been a modette. She showed me photos of her gang of friends. They were sharp dressers and very serious about everything. All the details were correct, Italian mopeds, expensive clothes, scarce 45’s. Her first husband was a mod. They met in school, teenage sweethearts, the first and only time she’d been in love. It was love at first sight. He died of a brain tumour, at 33 years of age. When they lowered his coffin into the grave Ava swore she would never marry again.

Sometimes Ava would tell me this, ‘Life’s not fair, Joe boy, it’s all a load of bollocks. If anyone tells you any different, they’re liars. There is no god and there is no heaven, you mark my words.’

I think it was the way she said them, but I’ve always remembered those words.

One day I went to Pearl’s café and found it shut. I peered inside, the tables and chairs were covered in white dust sheets, and someone had taken my poem from off the wall. When I found it shut the next day I intuitively knew something was wrong. I found out later that Ava was in the hospital. I visited with flowers, chocolates, and a little framed photo of Billy Fury. Ava cried when I was there, but I never. I felt the tears coming and successfully fought them back. Ava had the big C.

Outside the hospital I broke down. I couldn’t help it. Some children saw me and began staring and pointing, but I didn’t care, and to top it all Stupid past away a few weeks later. I found her lying on the living room carpet with her tongue lolling out and her eyes wide open. The light of life had vanished from her blue eyes forever. I buried her in the communal garden, underneath a weeping willow tree, and marked her grave with a tiny wooden cross. Not long afterwards I left the country. As far as I know Pearl’s café is still shut and Tony Balony is in prison.

Joseph Ridgwell

That Sometimes Time

it’s in the morning
with a vodka diazepam cocktail
and the little birds
holding so much colour
purposively moving
from broken fence to wire
that things are
unconditionally clear.

Brian McGettrick

Hey Baby

It’s happening more and more these days, Baby, that thing I told you about, and I don’t know what to do anymore. I get in my car and I drive, and sometimes I barely know where I am or how I got there because I am so deep and thwarted in my head, just thinking. Sometimes I drive at night on the interstate and go into weird dirty truckstops where I don’t know anybody, where nobody knows nobody, and I sip black coffee and stare at the filthy greasy magazines spangled with fingerprints from God knows what pervert or lunatic or outright felon. I sit there and try not to catch eyes with the creepy truckers scarfing burgers or just sitting there smoking. I just don’t know what to do anymore, Baby, but sometimes I do this and it helps a little, but not really.

Visit me, Baby. I think you are the only one on this earth who knows me now, and sometimes I think you know me better than I even know myself. But there is so much space between us, all those dinky stupid towns full of hateful little people, so much distance to swallow before we can sit down and talk like we used to talk every night in the old yellow kitchen, playing backgammon and drinking tea. Those were happier times, weren’t they, Baby? Now those days are lost.

Let me tell you something awful. I keep having this dream about worms in my head. It’s such a horrible thing to think about, to contemplate I mean, especially first thing in the morning, that I wonder if I am not losing my mind a little. I have this dream, this nightmare, over and over, where my brain is a ball of squirming grey worms. What can it possibly mean, Baby? Am I losing my mind?

If this lasts much longer, this goddamn bus ride, I will scream in my chair. (I am writing you from the bus because I had a little accident with the car.) It’s not so much being on the bus that I mind. I can manage all right on a bus, even one chock full of creeps and crazies like this one, but there is a man who keeps TURNING AROUND! He has hard yellowy eyes like a snake. I mustn’t look at him.

Ah, Baby! What a world we inhabit!

I wonder if you remember something. The last time I saw you, after you met Izzy and everything changed and you went away, you told me something I will never forget if I live to be a hundred. Do you remember what that was? You were wearing your blue dress with the little hearts on the hem, and your hair was cut short and we were drinking mint tea in the back kitchen, and I was crying about something, probably about your going away because what else would I be crying about, and you took my hand, as gentle as the morning, and you said – Wherever you are, Petal, I am there too, and wherever I am, you are there with me, always and forever.

Are you here with me now, Baby, on this bus? Are you sitting here beside me? How I wish that were true.

What can I tell you that you don’t already know? I have done terrible things, things I would rather not speak about, and of course I am ashamed. I have done things in order to forget who I am – and to hurt people, to punish them. I cannot tell you what, though. Not like this, with this man who keeps turning around. Like he knows what I am thinking. I mustn’t look at him, reading me with his snake eyes. Maybe he isn’t even really there. Maybe he is just a nightmare clown, or a worm in my head. Last week I watched a circus magician change a fat man from the audience into a watermelon, slice him into wedges – and then we ate him! God, I wish I knew how to do that. I’d turn this creep into a chocolate bunny and bite his fat head off. Or maybe into an egg which I could chuck out the window and smash on the road.

What do you think, Baby? Is this it? Is this all there is? Life?

I’ve decided I will tell you everything. I will give you the truth of what I am doing here, riding on this bus. There is something growing inside me, Baby. Something foul and dangerous. They have pictures of it at the hospital, though I refused to look when they tried showing me. Doctor Pradesh says he can cut it out, no problem, but what I want to know, what I NEED to know is - how did it get inside me in the first place? Was it something I did wrong? Am I now being punished? Or maybe it was always a part of me, this thing, something that has traveled with me from the very beginning, from the womb? Perhaps I forgot to nurture it and now it’s dying. Dying and growing inside of me. A past failure of some sort.

There. That’s it. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. But if I can’t tell you, Baby, then who can I tell? You are the only one who knows me.

As I look out the window, the telephone poles are flying by with such speed, and I wonder whose voices are zipping through those lines. Maybe your voice is among them, passing through one of those wires so close to me. Call me, Baby. How I would love to hear your voice again. Years have gone by. I have no telephone, of course, but there is normally a telephone in hospital rooms – though I don’t know if you are allowed to take calls on them from the outside. After the growth is cut out of me and I am all right again you could call the Esso station on Piedmont and maybe get whoever is working at that time to run across the road. They know me over there and sometimes they let me use their telephone.

I might as well tell you that I am more frightened now than I have ever been in my life. The doctor and his team are going to cut me open on a table and God only knows the outcome of that – and where will I go if it all goes wrong?

I guess I can’t help connecting everything together, Baby. Everyone is so far away now and in my loneliness at night I have done unspeakable things, and there are the dreams of the worms in my head and there is this great big dead worm growing somewhere inside me – and this shriveled-up little worm of a man who keeps turning around! (He is looking at me now, Baby! I can feel his eyes dancing around on my face. I just looked up and he smiled right at me. His teeth are black. I mustn’t look at him again.)

The telephone poles are whooshing past my window and the wires sag so low, it seems to me – the weight of all those voices zipping through. What are they saying to one another? What sadnesses and joys are they communicating?

We are almost there now, so I had better finish up. We just passed the old car wash at the edge of town, the one with the big plastic ice cream cone on top. Abandoned now, of course.

I will be incapacitated for quite some time, Baby. I know it’s not possible for you to visit, but please save a little of yourself for me and send it on, send it on in words. I need your gentle words, your affectionate voice. I need your kind approval. Yes, Baby, you are always here with me. Your soft eyes and languorous hair shadow my every thought - but only in silence.

So call me, Baby. If you can’t reach me at my hospital room, give me a try please over at the Esso station. As I said before, they know me over there. Just mention my name.

Kevin Spaide

Orange is Methadone

Orange a fiery ball of sun against the purple mash of a threatening sky
Orange the inside of flames consuming wood and flesh and lives
Orange the color of a Corvette sports car that my girlfriend crashed
Orange the smell of rotten fruit and dead bodies we hoped might come back
Rhymes are for kids who compare kisses with an angel's breath
Orange is the fire that warm blue leathered cold hands or mix ashes with death

Orange is gold glinting in the sun, it’s weight is more than a night of fun
Orange is the Hollywood flash from a gun – a gun for play, doesn’t kill no one
Orange is the defoliant coquettishly called “Agent Orange”
Killed leaf and tree and human being, from a sky where death should never be born

Orange is a savior – wafer thin, 40 Milligrams, so I’m not sick no more
Orange is ten dollars if you know where to score
A methadone tablet, might keep me off the street
Orange is a junkie’s sweet, Christmas treat
Orange tablet, then all the urges are slight
Won’t go out on a tare tonight
Won’t maybe lie and won’t maybe steal
Orange is the color that keeps a dope fiend from being fiend real.

The tablet is harmony on a street where harmony is absurd
It’s got me calmed down – just this paper and these rhyming words.
Oh I’m not a poet, at least maybe not yet
But tonight I ain’t dangerous, without my spike, I’m toying with this pen.

Brian Murphy

Lovebytes #6

I did, didn’t I? I forgot until just now, until reading about Persephone and the pomegranate, but I gave you the pomegranate juice. Standing there in that room, sea salty, feet on the piles of clothes that wrapped up your body when I couldn’t. Seagulls swooped and cackled outside of the window. You slept. You slept with the urgency of youth that demanded it from you. I slept less. I slept just enough so I could wake rested and look at you, sleeping, for hours, and I loved you then with a silent instinct. When I could look no more, I slipped from your bed and dressed quickly and haphazardly; I stole your keys from on the bedside table and went down the three flights of stairs that led to the outside world. I let myself out of the front door, took a left up the hill, then a right to the corner shop. The wind was behind me, urging me on.

I loaded up my Sunday morning shopping basket with the tell-tale signs of good sex on the Saturday night. There was milk, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, a Sunday newspaper, crusty white bread, real butter and fresh fruit juice; pomegranate juice. I knew the spell I wanted to cast, the spell that you would return to me or me to you, forever. I checked my watch, a little after 12pm, so I added a bottle of over-priced rosé wine which made the shopkeeper smile. As you were sleeping, I loitered outside the shop and smoked a cigarette before I walked back down the hill, facing off the wind.

It had been my friend at Christmas couple of months earlier who had alerted me to the pomegranate. She’d bought me a present of a maroon velvet top, a pair of maroon socks spangled with silver threads, and to complete the trio she’d bought me a pomegranate. Research on the internet as to what to do with the pomegranate had led me to discover the story of Persephone. I wanted to feed it to you, my lover. I knew that you would be the one to leave me and I would do anything to prolong our connection.

Now, in the land of ice and snow, I wonder. I feel you strongly, although we were never here together. My first night I dream of you; my second night I hear your voice. Tonight, whilst reading a bedtime story to myself, it talks of Persephone and the pomegranate and I suddenly remember the careless, casual spell I cast. I wish those seeds had never taken root. I thought that it would bind you to me in the love of those early, heady, passionate days; but instead I am haunted by a lost, dead love that never leaves me.
Be careful of the spells that bind.

Lisa Payne

Touch Sensitive

Meg said she can’t remember the last time I touched her but I can, I know exactly, it’s right here on the photograph – 10:03:2008 01:47. It was just this morning, about six hours ago. 01:47 hours, give or take a minute or two to allow for taking the picture. See, living proof; I had to’ve touched her to make her look like that. Meg’s brain never remembers me touching her but I think her skin does. The skin is made of the same embryonic tissue as the brain apparently, which implies an intelligence doesn’t it, an ability to remember. My skin remembers everything, from decades ago: the hot fat, the first degree burns, the pain that lived in the left side of my body for years.

Meg’s brain doesn’t remember me touching her because of the drink. She’s an alcoholic, though Meg won’t admit it. She says she just likes gin, the taste of it, the way it puts her to bed every night and tucks her in. Nothing is soft enough until she has a drink. Meg drinks to take the edge off life, the corners. Still wakes up black and blue with a hangover every morning. I don’t mind her drinking. I definitely don’t discourage it. In fact I quite like it. She’s one of those quiet drunks, you know, someone who goes into themselves the more they drink. Actually, I need her to drink. I need her gin dreams, those holes in her sleep she falls into, just as much as she does. I need them because that’s when I feel closest to her. Basically Meg is a problem that solves herself in the morning when the booze wears off.

Meg believes that we can’t live without touch, it’s a basic human need like air or food or water. I’m not sure about that. Lying in the burns unit, seven years old with half my skin burnt off, I thought I’d die if anyone touched me. I kind of know what she means though, about the need to touch. When I look at my hands, I can see touches inside them, memories of how her body felt and fantasies of how it will feel the next time. But they stay in my hands untouched until Meg drowns her last drink and passes out on the bed again. Only then will I let myself steal her skin.

I like it best when I’m on the edge of touching of her, that moment beside the bed looking down at the clotted skin on her bottom and thighs, the silence of her pale hair on the pillow. In that moment I can feel every molecule of gas in the air around my hands. And that’s when I understand just how big the need to touch can be, how much room this need takes up inside us. At first it was enough, just stroking her skin, seeing it change colour when I pressed it. My hands were like thieves looting her body while she was out. But then it started to irritate me how lifeless she looked just lying there, pressing her shadow into the mattress. So I started posing her, putting her in different shapes. I even bought a bigger bed so I’d have more room to move her about. It wasn’t so I could sleep further away from her; Meg was wrong about that. She looked amazing, so amazing I started taking photographs of her, whole albums full. Meg never lets me take her picture normally. She hates photographs, won’t have them in the flat. She says they’re only ever about lies and death but I love my pictures of Meg; they keep me going till the next time I can touch her.

She seems somehow bigger in her sleep when I pose her. It’s like there’s more of her. Usually Meg sleeps curled up, almost disappearing into herself. Like now; she’s on the other side of the bed, this adult foetus with its back to me. Her cold shoulder is freezing the bed into a sheet of ice. She’s fast asleep. I envy her that, I envy her oblivion. I asked her once, where do you go when you sleep and she said, to the gone place. I can’t remember the last time I slept. Sleep just falls through me then out again; it never stays long enough. It’s like I’m an uncomfortable place to be. Meg says I don’t sleep with her, I sleep with insomnia. She makes it sound like an accusation, like I’m making a choice. But she’s right, I do sleep with insomnia, every night I sleep with it.

She’s starting to stir. It’s like seeing her dig herself up from her grave, watching Meg emerge from sleep. She wakes in this field of herself then staggers off in the direction her body’s auto-pilot tells her is the bathroom. She’s sitting up now, clutching her head, hair so shiny with grease it seems to emit its own light. A groan escapes her lips. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and reaches for her robe. It feels odd seeing her move without me doing it for her, moving without me putting her limbs where they need to go. We say nothing and this is the way of things for us now after six years. We set out on this relationship together but somehow never quite got there.

She heads for the bathroom, her feet on the wooden floor heavy, laboured. It’s like every bit of her is treading on them, you know, the way your whole body is involved when you tread water. And there is a loneliness in the way she moves that hurts my eyes. I look at the ceiling, waiting for the sound of running water and Meg splashing her face. I imagine her looking in the mirror above the sink, confronting her hangover, the grey towelling dressing gown with its snags and stains giving her the usual dressing down.

From under the pillow, I pull out the picture of Meg I took last night. In it her arms are spread wide, her whole body open and inviting. I stroke her belly with the tip of my finger, noting the contrast between the raw mottled skin on the back of my hand and the smooth paleness of hers. A loud banging noise. I scramble out of bed, pulling the rugby shirt down over my jogging pants and head for the bathroom. It’s Meg. She’s banging on the window at something in the street, banging with both fists, shouting, her breath misting the glass - why don’t you just piss off. Go on, piss off! I stand on tip toes and, over her shoulder, five floors down, there’s a couple kissing, oblivious.

Melissa Mann

Quayle's Ten Per Cent

Fucking Gordon Brown! The ten per cent cut has hit, and the temps are swapping rants about it as we hand in our timesheets.

‘Can’t believe it,’ one guy moans. He’s about six foot, leather jacket, not attractive. ‘It’s like you’re penalised for getting up in the morning.’

‘It would help if the agency didn’t take a third of our salaries as commission.’ I say this loudly enough for the consultant behind the desk to hear me. She’s a fat whore with a Daypower ID slung around a pastel shirt. ‘I should have gone into –‘

‘Well, Becks, if you’re not satisfied, you know where the door is,’ she tells me.

‘Don’t you ever interrupt me.’ I fix her with an aggressive gaze and hold it until her eyes drop to the timesheet pile. I then swish grandly through the exit.

Dining at the Tiger Lounge, I reflect that the agency holds all the cards. I never thought I’d go back to temping, but the latest restructuring swept my job away.

Walking down to Oxford Road, I consider the pulling prospects. What I tend to do, in these days of the credit crunch, is to chat up solvent-looking men in bars, give them a false name and rob them blind. You set your mobile alarm for eight and then just take their wallets. I figure it’s a reasonable price for giving these dullards an evening of fun.

The arches of New Wakefield Street cover a clutch of mosher pubs (I suppose one calls them ‘emo pubs,’ now) that spill out onto rows of smoky picnic tables in the shade. My temp colleagues are at the Space roof garden, specifically constructed to get around the smoking ban.

I buy a round: essential if you’re a lady, because it shows the guys that you can drink and are not to be fucked with. We drink a bitter toast to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and bitch about work until the sun goes down.
This is essentially a student/scenester bar and I feel self-conscious in my tailored skirt and office boots. You have to dress like this at work, even as a temp – again, it’s an assertion of strength – but I’m out of place here. My legs are drawing male stares and I’m not yet drunk enough to enjoy them.

The temp girls are reasonably intelligent and can take a drink. The guys have been sizing me up for the whole six weeks of our assignment (Alex, in particular, seems to think he’s god’s gift) but they’re all clueless, bitter tossers living in houseshares and wondering why they’re not Pete Doherty; no use to me, either fiscal or sexual.

Sean says, ‘You know the Daypower people are having a do tonight?’

‘Where is it?’

Sean is about twenty-three, reads Orwell during lunch. ‘Up in Tribeca,’ he says, faltering a bit now I’ve put him on the spot. ‘Engagement party or something. I just thought, wouldn’t that be the funniest thing, crashing a Daypower work’s party.’

‘I think it’s got potential.’ The boy struggles to hide his delight at my compliment. ‘I’ve never met a recruitment consultant off duty.’

‘I never met an attractive one,’ Julie says, ‘which is weird, cause most career women are really sexy, like you, Becka Quayle.’

Appreciative laughter from the men. ‘You flatter an old bird,’ I tell her. ‘But let’s do it!’

*

In Tribeca it’s the others who feel out of place as it’s a smart casual bar. Indeed, Alex is turned away for wearing Converse. This is a good development; he’s an irritating, lecherous drunk, and I relish his stricken look as I sail past him.

Sean hands me my glass of white and he can’t meet my eye. Is this night as prospectless as I had thought? Mind, shy kids like Sean can be a bit intense and you never know what they’re hiding. I want to do him a favour but I don’t want to get murdered for it.

Jules grabs me. ‘There they are!’

Sure enough, the Daypower consultants are sitting at a large booth at the far end of the bar. They are not too pleased to see their clients, but there’s not much they can do; should have booked a private room, recruitment scum. I install our group at the adjacent table.

‘I apologise for the intrusion,’ I tell the fat bitch from reception, ‘but we heard that one of your staff is now engaged, and I felt we should pay our respects. So who’s the lucky lady?’

‘Oh, it’s Sophie, here… Sophe, this is Rebecca Quayle.’

She indicates a weasel-faced tart in a bad shirt, who flashes a high-street ring. Sophie’s sitting next to some florid loser wearing Ben Sherman. I offer my congratulations.

Reception Whore turns back to me. ‘And have you found Mr Right yet, Rebecca?’

Her tone insinuates that she knows I’m twenty-seven and still single. That’s recruitment consultants for ya: they act like upmarket professional women but as soon as an opportunity to get foaled comes along, they take it; and that’s them playing at careers over.

I tell her I’ve been engaged a couple of times.

‘And did it not work out?’ the breeder asks me.

‘The first guy blackmailed me into carrying his child, and the second guy tried to kill me.’ A swig of wine. ‘After that, I found a new appreciation for the single life.’

Their awkwardness does not last, because the Daypower people are completely unused to drink and are soon falling all over the place. It’s nearing midnight and time to pull, so I home in on a flush-looking suit in his thirties.

High earner or not, he’s soon under my spell. I have a dim awareness of people coupling and grouping off, and ask him if he’d like to head somewhere quieter.

‘Sure, I’m in Chorlton…’ His pupils have dilated a little, as male eyes sometimes do when boning is on the cards. ‘Let’s get a cab.’

My mind dances with possibilities. This guy is quite high up in Daypower and there’s a potential blackmail operation here. Draw out his kinky fantasies, take some photos… well, there could be more than the two hundred in his wallet: there could be enough to get me back down to London.

Heading for the door, we run into a group of professional males entering for a late drink. My Daypower conquest recognises one of them. ‘Greg! How goes it?’

He’s obviously keen to show off the fine woman on his arm, and indeed his friend is staring right at me – but not in jealous desire but angry recognition.

‘You!’ he shouts, and yes, I recognise this guy too; from a bar on Deansgate Locks and then letting myself out of the Hacienda flats before the next dawn, having redistributed some of his wealth my way.

‘Have we met, darling?’ I ask him.

‘You bitch! Give me my money!’

Now, I can talk my way out of most difficult situations, but it’s getting late and I really have had too much to drink. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ I tell him in my sweetest voice, and then dive onto Canal Street.

My boots are good for jogging, but there are simply too many people around to make a quick exit.
Pushing past a drag queen on stilts, the press of the crowd against my chest, and thoughts of consequence rush in: how am I going to explain this on Monday morning? Greg knew me as Diane Kinsella, but the Daypower guy will put him straight… oh, fucking hell, how I hate recruitment consultants … my pure and beautiful hate… it’s all Gordon Brown’s fault… fucking Gordon Brown!

I finally see an opening, only to feel a male hand on my shoulder. ‘Rebecca!’

Fuck, I’m caught… I wheel round, and it’s Sean.

‘Jesus, Rebecca! Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, fine…’ I’m breathing hard. ‘Just… there was a guy in that bar I didn’t want to see.’

‘Right.’ He nods with exaggerated sincerity. ‘You looked like you were going to hit me!’

He is a sweet lad. I’ve taken a few cherries in my time, and in my experience once you get past the initial repression, these quiet kids can bang all night.

‘Listen.’ I feel for his hand. ‘Do you fancy a late drink with me? There’s a bottle of red at my place.’

Judging by the colour in his cheeks, this isn’t a frequent proposition for him. ‘Ah, sure…’

‘But no funny business, mind!’ I wag a chiding finger, laughing inwardly as his face implodes.

The rank at Piccadilly is quiet. As the taxi takes off, I get a sense that things will work out. I smile at him, and he smiles back.

The thought occurs that little Sean, dear boy that he is, won’t be of much financial benefit to me. Still, gliding back to Whalley Range, I reflect that there is more to life than money.

Max Dunbar

Fly Dream of a Casino Soul

yeah i was there cleethorpes winter gardens spring bank holiday nineteen seventy five there was me dave wake colla ossie dek all that lot while the squares were at tiffanys ballroom supping tetley bitter from chunky pint mugs formation dancing to tiger feet we were flying on chalkies backdropping frontdropping spinning and flipping to changing of the guard by queenie buckingham and the big ben chimes right on brother august same year when the squares were sitting in their bedrooms toking red leb appreciating tarkus through padded leather headphones we were at stoke torch for the allnighter sweat soaked beer towels intravenous sulph pulling stunts to your love comes on [like a bengal tiger] by elbert and the vines keep on keepin on i had the original on tall story bought it off longsight lennie for thirty quid he was a face back then that was seventy five imagine what it would be worth now i sold it so i could make the wigan weekender easter seventy six when the squares were sewing lufc patches onto their wrangler jackets and humming the theme to van der valk i was smashed on barbs tumbling off the balcony onto the dancefloor half way through scoob mcgoos second set you gotta come down if you wanna get high i perked up on powder shagged this bird from stafford round the bins out back the sweet sound of burke hare and the rabbit catchers ringing down the alley baby's slippin away kat was her name on the train ride home i got knifed by rastas good memories great times keep the faith .

Steve Ely

The Old Wardrobe

dragging the old wardrobe
up the field to burn
it disintegrates into dust
my heart heavy

I saw you change from my father
to blue veined porcelain
I heard your death rattle
and saw you spasm

I pile on some old chairs
tea chest and bureau
pile it all high
with tears in my eyes

then you relaxed
and after they’d gone
I kissed your forehead
and held your hand

the pyre looks like one of our dens
at nan's house
we’d make a hell of a mess
whilst they lay-in

I told you that I loved you
and thought of how you held me
in that photograph
41 years ago

I pour on the petrol
and toss a couple of matches
phooto of it explodes just enough
for my son to say wow

the fire takes quickly
licking around
baring the old frame
I stare into the flames

I thanked you for everything
not just for what you’d done
mostly what you hadn’t
just for being there

I kept checking, as you cooled
and when they came for you
mum asked for your wedding ring
and I got it for her

they say
“you only know what you’ve got once it’s gone”
I’d only just started realising what I had
I know now I haven’t

the fire dies
I just feel really rocked
like all my foundations
have crumbled to dust

I kick around in the ash
and I don’t care
if this is the last thing
I ever write.

Geraint Hughes

O Villain, Villain, Smiling, Damned Villain!

My friend Max got himself a bad name over that business with the pig and nearly got run out of town. It was a tragic set of circumstances, a very sad affair; at least that’s what somebody said.

The trouble had started during the summer, when Max became convinced that he was being haunted by his father’s ghost. It had appeared to him on a moonlit parapet, screaming blue murder and rattling some chains, only to fade with the morning mist like a dream. I think that’s how the story goes; Max made a song and dance about it at the time. Afterwards his behaviour had grown increasingly strange. The most unpleasant sign of this was the pig’s head that he began carrying around with him. It was one of the most repulsive things that I’ve ever seen: it had marbles for eyes and skin painted gold, a red ribbon tied in a bow through the snout. Max took the wretched thing with him everywhere that he went. Apparently his father’s ghost had taken up residence within. He said that it talked to him, long into the night, ranting and raving, crazed, bent on revenge.
Inevitably, things went from bad to worse; the pig, it seemed, did not feel the need for discretion in these exchanges. And Max, of course, could not help but reply.

At first he only talked to the pig when he thought no one else was around, surreptitious asides and tight-lipped remarks, but after a while he gave up any reserve. In the street, on the bus, it was a horrible sight; passers-by couldn’t move far enough away.

The whole disgraceful episode lasted for just over a month. By coincidence, I’d bumped into Max on the day that he first got the pig’s head. At the time he’d stuffed it into a little plastic bag which was too small for the pig’s head; you could see the snout all squashed up inside the plastic, the ears poking out from the top. It had been raining that day, too, and the rain had run down the pig’s ears into the head, rinsing out the dried blood from the skull. The blood had then leaked out the bottom of the bag, leaving a trail zigzagging back down the road.

It was the first time I’d seen Max for some weeks. He didn’t mention the pig’s head. Frankly, he didn’t look well. “Going on a date, Max?’ I asked, and pointed at the bag.

He didn’t answer. I don’t think he understood. He just stared at me, twitching, with pigs’ blood dripping on his shoes. It looked to me like he was trying to ignore something; I’m pretty sure that it was the pig. I could hear him muttering to himself as he walked away. After that, I’d see him around every so often, but mostly I tried to keep out of his way.

The next time I spoke to him he’d grown a beard.

“I’ve grown a beard,” he said.

The pig’s head was tucked under his arm. It wasn’t looking too good; the paint had begun to peel.

‘I’ve grown a beard,” he said again.

“Yes,” I replied. “It goes with the pig.”

“Yes,” he said.

There was a pause. He stared intently at my neck. I noticed that he was only wearing the one shoe.

“How was the date?” I asked him.

There was another pause.

“Yes,” he said, clearly struggling not to scream.

I left him to it.

The next day I found him down by the canal, beating the pig’s head against a wall. He was soaking wet and covered in mud, screaming loudly, half-deranged.

“Jesus, Max,” I said. “Give it a rest. People will think you’re insane.”

“Garrgghhh!!!!” he cried, tugging at his hair. “You should hear the dirty things that he says.”

He waved the battered lump of pig in my direction; it was a very sorry sight. One of the marble eyes popped out and rolled down a drain. The snout was now crooked and black.

“That’s your dad, Max,” I said. “Don’t treat him like that. Think of all the good times instead.”

Max sobbed loudly. Compassion got the better of me. I took the pig’s head from him and put it in a bin. After that, we went for a walk. I took Max for a ride on the Ferris wheel that had just come to town. As we looked down over the streets and houses, I pointed out the flats where he lived. This seemed to calm his nerves a little and he appeared much happier than I’d seen him in weeks.

It would be nice to think it ended like that, but he just went back later and got his dad from the bin.

James Chisholm

Stolen Advice

I’m taking advice on what to wash my sin down with

from a man whose lost his best friend to a personal war,

running through fields to search for a certain freedom

that’s been lost inside of me,

I dread to think of every promise I broke

while laying in the middle of the road,

as I dial your number I silently prey to myself

that you’ll forgive me for resuming the fight,

plus one let down

and carry me home to your bedside.

Hand me a battered guitar,

strip me of my clothes,

a steel coat of armor

to reveal every secret carved right into my skin,

I’ll shake as my mystery is robbed

from the outside of me,but the eyes of daggers

they stab at my insides,

I’ll convey my awkwardness in a smile

that will easily,

sweep the shocked tears from your eyes.

Chloe Dyer

Reasons to Swim Inside the Sky

The canals of upper Clapton are mustard smelling trenches of blink-and-you-miss-it spasm splatters of colour amidst tar dark pathways. Bushes bristle with broken bottle leaves, mottle cast in a sullen, diesel pallor. Warrens snake under daisy field enclosures, as rabbits jump up into patchworks of butterfly pastures in green shield stamp grasslands. Silence only broken by the magnetic hum of telegraph wires slung from giant cranes, barbing and scratching the clouds in criss-cross lines: steely map gradients for a slate grey sky.

A mugger's paradise – yellow raven's eyes peep through black balaclava pillbox heads, bronchial and hoarse against the damp thin wool – lone men lurking in barbwire crevices, torsos immersed in the marshy reed vines, aqualungs of bile and blood coursing from their veins. Punctuating a walk along the bank are police notices with fish and chip paper headlines – uptight black letters stuck like calcified felt on crude yellow metal boards – milestone millstones chronicling acts of predatory violence.

Barges rest up along the River Lea decorated in Nepalese colours – mud reds, indigo and ochre. A local pub by a redbrick council estate spills people out into the early summer evening. Misplaced pudding-faced walkers, urban and ashen skinned, clutch their pints and look out to wide savannahs of wire sharp grass that grow beyond the swamp reeds of a still distant marshland. Chewing the crisp packet fat over memories of long distanced walks: exaggerated escapes from concrete chokey and unlikely fishing exploits and tips swapped and passed on: 'put Perrier in this canal and you could oxygenate the dead.'

Fish rise like aquiline Christs from sunken tramways set beneath the fine silt bed. As if on cue, a salmon with a display of temper cruises by, belly up, rung free from its cellophane tomb wrap (courtesy of the local Tesco Superstore) – a smile of slash gut, a grinning fish coyote, its scaly skin shimmering silver and purples amongst the petrol whirl-wash of slow moving water.

You're as likely to see a discarded shopping trolley or a deserted desert boot as any living being float upon this surface; but there are lovers here. Lone couples circle in the fringes, promenading the mud banks. Held close on one side by the claustrophobic, crumbling outskirts of the city and on the other by fields of secret kisses calling, blush tinged in the spreading sunset – the promised melt of soft lips joined. They walk in twos like swooning Bobbies on the beat; their fingers interweaved behind their backs. Dusk is their time to take the air, now momentarily sweet, before the sun floats down to disappear and the evening draws in and closes out the light.

Swans form couples too, but one swims alone. Tony, named after a long necked former defender of these parts, Tony Adams. He moves with a ferocious, glandular reputation to live up to. Encased in a brick-hard armour of snow pelt, he hisses like a tomcat if you get too close.

Down river on the bank, the famous Dalston Heron poses on his stilt-like old man's legs. He is as still as night and cranes his telescopic neck, his calm shape shifting in the shadows, his presence benign and balanced, somehow comforting.

A group of red-faces nestled together on picnic tables jab their frosty tongues and shout out the odds. And from there comes a small boy, escaping his drunken mother's shackles, emerging between heavy adult legs and rubbing at his eyes. He moves towards the heron, which stands quietly by a wall, its feathers blurring in the breeze. The boy reaches out with his hands and the heron lays his long, red bill gently on the boy's shoulder. And they find a space, air cuddled in between, and slowly rock: a melancholic waltz. From the aggravated throng splinters a shard of angular spite: 'Sean, where the fuck are you?'

Bobbing close by, like a small balsa wood boat, is a protective coot who blows his tiny soul trumpet through a Burger King straw – Zoot the Coot, whose shrill call-melody seems to rest on the woman's pitch each time she cries out. 'Sean!'; blast of coot; 'Fucking hell, Sean!'; more blast of coot; and so on until the boy and the heron are suddenly gone, and all is quiet again.

In a park, a small red vixen, slim and secure, slinks into the bushes where her family waits. The moon's now a yellow friend, passing shadows and light between the clouds, as the late night rolls softly on the velvety, ebbing sheen of the canal. And there, high on the grass, are the boy and the heron – suddenly lit, finding out safe places to hide and spotlights of moon dust to play and emerge into. The heron is watchful, standing proud, as the boy runs down a slope, his arms flapping through the air.

Alan McCormick

In Loving Kindness: 20 Years and a Day

sundays were vicious
liquor stores were closed
mornings melted into
noon sweat with no wake-up
the air hurt on Sundays it
whipped me inside my shirt collar
carved a skinny size S
in the back of my neck

today is sunday
20 years and a day later
the air’s cut from velvet
speaks as soft as a friend

in loving kindness
a clean day unfolds

wooden spoon stirs cinnamon
into raisin apple oatmeal
poured into china
royal blue fish yellow flowers
sit by the window near
bamboo plants and rose
quartz healing hearts

coriander cools a hot bath
new striped towels for me
i am the guest in my house
Coltrane thanks the universe
would the sun rise the same way
without his supreme love

it’s sunday
a walking meditation
coffee is hot and
nothing hurts
i’m a 3 o’clock kid
without training wheels
i fly through dark streets
looking for spaldeens
on rooftops
if i keep looking up
everything stays clean

Puma Perl

Oh! This Screaming Hoard

It goes like this.

The black room fills to the brim with warm air. And there is mom, squeezed to the edge of the mattress with her slim mouth slightly open and always anticipating, some infant tantrum. Mom never got over the postmortem stall that having a child engenders in a woman’s sleep patterns. She was and is, perpetually awake.

Not a scream tonight though. Tonight you wake up and the balmy room is bursting with crimson light that melts to the sheets already warm and musky from Dad’s sweat.

She leaps from her back to her ass, and you are already there in her thin arms. Her mouth is moving and the red light is all over her face. It is all you can see. Then Dad on his feet from the bed to the window. Then we’re out to the kitchen, the hall, the driveway.


2.


The source of the blaze as I came to find, had to do with the man next door. A gnarly old asshole
-I’ve rarely heard him referred to as anything else-named Ron. He was too slovenly to be brutish and too boring to be any sort of personality. He did, however, poses his own talents as even I at my age had become aware.

There are those with a true sympathy for aged things and their past. And for them, the tears and slog that are carried in the smell of old things-especially of the deviant sort - give an unmistakable air of beauty.
Then there are the walking sleaze who eat and sleep and play in pools of the world’s most stinking waste. Never mind sentimentality. A true cache for them and a fire hazard for the rest.

That Ron belonged to the latter is something I say without the slightest apprehension. He was a tireless collector of anything and everything worthless and depraved in humanity. He stuffed it in all corners from the top of his three story bungalow, through to the kitchen and into that moist green basement…back up the stairs, and through to the long back lot.

And oh what treasures! From the top there was war memorabilia of all sorts, old grenades and helmets and swords next to boxes of filthy comics, junk mail, and bottles of booze. Damp old records, weapons both functional and not, video tapes, radar detectors, radios, and surveillance devices that could only have been found in the back of some radio shack brochure.

Splashed throughout the stink was an array of pornography which his son and daughter and I took in like the dirty little sponges that we were, to say nothing of the daytime sexual acts that he forced upon his little wife despite any passerby with ears.

The house held the stench of a mouthful of rotting teeth. A giant cavity in the belly of the West Side.

But the real wonderland was in the back lot. See it strewn with dozens of battered cars, tire irons, engines, lawnmowers, all wading through the Cleveland air for no thing in the world save for children dancing over the lawnmower engines, or making combat with broken bits of steal, and whipping each other with old timing belts and rubber hoses. Just rust and iron and rust and steel and big pools of oil oil oil. We road our training wheels through rainbow pools of it and raced to the tops of El Caminos and old semi cabs. The whole lot withered and flaked and would certainly have outlasted us all were it not for the Ron’s plan to torch the bastard.

For him, there must have glimmered the hope that burning up this trash heap could afford him enough in an insurance settlement to fund years more of this bloated masturbation, securing a dismal enough caricature for his children to either detest or mimic and no betweens.

So he torched my wonderland. And sent, my mother, my father, and myself into a panic.


3.


The mechanism for justice need not be intentional or even immediately apparent.

I wonder what old Ronald would have thought of my smooth face in his daughter’s crouch as it had been so placed by her very own hand only a couple years following the great inferno.

What grace. Call it moral providence!?

Really though, I cannot claim the victory as I was too young to know what that older girl was doing with my head. She, telling me to get on my knees and hold out my mouth. She was bigger, older.

But again, no victory. The faint taste of urine is all I can really discern from the incident and that alone was no match for what was left of Ron’s backyard, my playground.

Charred as is was, life went on and we played with the blackened rust, toyed with each other’s genitals. The games kept always from the parents who no doubt lead more grotesque lives than we could have ever imagined….and not in the least at the time.

Kurt Remington

Christine

Christine was a
Beautiful little punk girl.
She had an apartment
Down by Lake Osborne.
A sugar daddy
That took care of her bills.

He would pay her
Late night visitations.
I guess it got her by.

Christine was stunningly beautiful,
And photogenic.
No one ever told her that.
I was the first.
They only wanted to keep her down.
Didn't want her to reach her potential.

Christine she loved being photographed,
Feeling like a model.
She would call me,
ell me she made us a picnic lunch.
We would walk down to Lake Osborne.
I would take her picture,
Put her on the cover of my zines.

She was so happy.
It was the only time I saw her happy.
We would sit down by the lake
Eating peanut butter and jelly.

I grew to love Christine.
We hung out all of the time.
But I knew deep inside,
She wasn't the kind of girl I wanted to love.

I wrote my first real serious Poem
At the club
Sadly watching her move on the dance floor
With blank vacant eyes.

Finally I had to do it.
I told her how I felt.
I gave her the only copy of the Poem that existed.
I told her she deserved much better
Than this life that she lived.

She read the Poem and cried,
Told me she loved me too.
But love complicates her life.
She had to move to New Orleans,
She was leaving tomorrow.
She had to do it alone.
She said she would cherish the Poem,
And promised to write.

Two years I never heard from her.
It was a shock to see her one night down on Clematis.
But Christine was different,
Something had changed.
She had a baby with her.
A baby just under two years old.

She told me she regretted leaving me.
I told her she never gave a fuck.
She proceeded to pull the Poem
And my old zines out of her bag.
I was starting to see
The world did not revolve around me and my ego.

She said she was going home tomorrow,
She needed a place to crash tonight.
So we drove to Denny's so she could eat.
She explained she got knocked up by some skinhead.
She was so ashamed she just had to leave.
Her father gave her the money
To relocate to New Orleans
And start fresh again.
She said she always loved me.
Always thought about what could have been.

Christine and I shared one night.
Nothing even happened.
We just laid there and held each other.
Her baby was climbing all over us.
I didn't care about anything I just held her.
That was as close to Christine as I would ever get.

The next morning
I took her and her baby
Back to Denny's for breakfast.
Then to the bus station
Where I held her for the last time.

Michael Grover

Not a Particularly Proud Moment

I have done a lot of things I have been very ashamed of in my life like shit myself while passed out drunk, turned away from whorehouses; have my wallet stolen by salacious girls but this may very well top them all.

I am not a particularly friendly person I like to drink any free moment regardless of consequences and I generally prefer drinking alone. The last of my old friends once told me, “your like an old man you sit alone in the corner and drink gin and never say a word to anyone.”

This is what happened on one of those evenings.

I am drinking destructively trying to empty out the Bombay Sapphire bottle that sits behind a bar on a little glass shelf taunting me all lit up and whore light. I’ll get you, you little minx. I believe I drank most of it but things got hazy. I do remember a women coming over and talking to me and she asked me who I was here with.

“I was supposed to meet my Dad but I guess he never showed up.”

I looked down and dashed the straw around through my drink.

“Well should you call him make sure everything is alright?”

“No, its sort of weird I have not seen my father since I was eight years old. The other day I was walking in the city and there he was and he begged me to talk for him for just a moment and I relented. He told me how bad he has felt abandoning me for all these years and that he did not know how to get in contact with me and he wanted to hire a detective to find out where I was but that he was not sure that I would speak to him and maybe now after all these years he thought maybe it would be best if he left me alone for my own sake but he always wondered.”

The woman was taking back. She really looked misty eyed and she put her hand on my shoulder and said she was so sorry. She bought a round and asked if I wanted company and I said in my best pathetic voice, “yeah that would be nice.” I must admit that was a great story and I actually thought that up before to use at an airport bar, which I did, but I will have to give you a rain check for that story.

She sits down and we start talking and her voice is a little weird like strained as if she smoked but I have heard that before in my own family so I let it go. We are draining drinks and she refused to let me pay for anything this is the first time this has ever happened to me so I was excited. When the tab came she paid it and excused herself and went to the ladies room. Jesus I am going out every night with this story I thought.

The women said I was obviously to drunk to drive and that I could come crash at her house besides she said she had more alcohol. We walked to her house in the gay district of Philadelphia and she poured us a couple of slow gin fizzes. We hung out and talked about shit no one ever remembers and then there was that awkward pause and we kissed. A girl who is willing to pay my bar tab and know make out with me I was contemplating marriage. Things got hot and heavy and the next thing I knew she was unzippering my zipper and going down on me. I had a lot to drink so I could barely get aroused she was down their for quite awhile.

Finally after some movement we decided to move into the bedroom. We’re fooling around and I lower my hand it feels weird down there but it was dark and I figured maybe she hadn’t shaved honestly I was not highly experienced in these situations. I grew up with Irish catholic girls who had stay at home mothers. The unspoken word was a girlfriend would sleep with you after you put in like a year. I could not hang around for a year so I lived on scraps like a raccoon. Then it happened one of those moments that no matter how drunk you are something happens that instantly returns you sober.

“Let me go into the bathroom and get my lube.”

“Yeah I thought it felt a little dry.”

“You know they can do wonders with operations nowadays but that is one thing they can not really figure out.”

She was up and in the bathroom with the light on shedding some light into the room. “What do you mean operation? Like cesarean or labiaplasty?”

“Ha ha very funny like you do not know.”

My mind was going a thousand miles an hour. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I jumped up and headed to the light in the bathroom and then I saw with a mixture of horror and doubt what I feared the most.

“Honey, you knew don’t act like that.”

I lost my mind. “You’re a fucking dude!”

“No I am a…”

“No you’re a faggot.”

I was in the bathroom now with a clenched fist. She jumped back and threw the lubrication on the sink and turned around very confidentially, “What you're gonna hit me?” I swear I am not making up excuses everything was still processing in my head and I was still piecing things together when a slippery fist slid off my nose and hit under my right eye. I fell back against the bathroom door.

“What tough guy what are you gonna due? You fag hag!”

I was now getting taunted as I tried zippering my pants up and picked up my sneakers to run out of the house. Outside on the sidewalk I could not believe what had happened. Blood was pouring out of my nose and I was stunned. I could not process where I was or anything I just started walking with my shoes in hand down Pine Street. After several blocks I sat down unable to think clearly. I wanted to cry I wanted to throw up but I could do neither.

Years later whenever people ask me why do I drink so much I contemplate to tell this story but then I stick with my standard line, “because Jesus died for our sins and I just can’t handle that.” Surprisingly this story never came up and I never told anyone and after all this time- after all these years I finally wrote it down and hope my children never read this.

I have absolved myself of all guilt however. I was very, very drunk. I did not go down on her/him although I do not know if it makes it any gayer or not. I was not fully hard which could be attributed to the booze in all fairness but I am going with it was because I am not gay. I was never told and honestly could not really tell in my condition it was dark everywhere we were. Shit, I would have probably suspected she was a vampire first. Hindsight is always 20/20 and of course I see some signs, the voice, the hands were a little big but not nearly as large as mine. I was taller than her/him by six inches so its not like we were the same body wise. She went home with me after about two hours that is fast even by one-night stands at least for me. Most importantly the thing that should have tipped me off the most was the balls (I’m kidding).

I now believe that modern science can be an evil despicable thing in the wrong hands.

Michael McCullough

Clockwork

This is how it goes.

It’s a party and I love that song

I sneeze and you say “Bless you.”

(“And did you know that a sneeze

Is the closest thing to an orgasm?”)

So we pull faces for half an hour

And tell the usual proud flash lies

Everybody notices

(“Oh look at them, getting along…”)

We drench ourselves in wine

At first my hands and I

We read you thoroughly before

We brush ideas across your mind

Across your trousers

I try to look coy like spring and

Summarize significance

In those sumptuous books and notes

I know you’ve tasted too

(“Well, haven’t we got a lot in common?”)

Soon come rainbow discoveries

You’ve got a pretty pebble of a girlfriend

And I’ve got a pretty grim lack of respect

As we fuck on a photocopier

It captures our elated position

Every five furious seconds

In blurry black and white

And we decorate the walls of the hall

With these sheets of intimacy

A great erotic mosaic

We made art

(“I like you” You whisper “I like you”)

Afterwards we attempt to attain

Some fleeting comfortable position

Squashed

Onto a reeking single mattress

A bed of our own making

In the dreams of the night

Everything makes sense

Reason marries us together

That tick in your brain

Matches mine

Clockwork

But when we wake up

It all reverts back to confused bloated

Simmering ugly stench reality

(“Are you ok?” “No, I think need to go home now.”)

Me too, me too stranger

Oh well

Next time I’ll hold in my sneeze

Hannah Murphy

Angel Heart

I spent three of the best
years of my life
fucked up
with insanity...
doing time in seclusion rooms,
hospital hallways
and smokers courtyards
spitting, and
pissing on putrid food
which nursing staff brought me
through hospital room trapdoors
while at night I
hallucinated the nightmares
of the dripping blood
I witnessed rushing over me
while I showered...

Alex Fatouros

Sixty-Three Years Ago Today

my father
was born
on a dirt floor
in hitt missouri,

son of
hired help
on a chicken farm.

joseph william hyde,
'buck' as he's known
to everyone
in the pool-hall.

joseph william hyde,
drinking crown royal
in a crumbling
home in iowa he
never wanted
with a burned out
pill freak
for a wife,

probably
on the couch
watching
black and white reruns
of cops
to mark the occasion.

i say probably
because i don't know,
part of me cares to
if you can follow that.

joseph william hyde,
fifty years
behind the world

five hundred miles away
from that dirt floor
in his hometown
which no longer
exists.

we've never
talked about it
never will,
but someday
i'll be out there,
waist deep in
prairie grass,

his ashes
in my fist.

Justin Hyde

Stupid Dream

Another meaningless walk to the grindstone. The same anxiety crawling up inside my stomach. My fourth soul destroying job.

This current job is behind a bar at a pub quite near my place in town.

In order to get into the till at work, each member of the bar staff has a till key (how twee), which clip onto your trousers and extends once pulled - so that you can key yourself into the till and make a transaction. Each person’s key has their name built into it, so that when you key into the till, your name pops up. This is so they can tell who did what transaction, who made what fuck up. Sometimes I use other people’s till keys: “ALEX”, “CHARLIE”, “BEV”. Mine comes up as “SPARE”.

My favourite thing to do when no punters are looking is pull the till-key this way and that, extending and looping it around my fingers. Yes, this is the most exciting part of my day.

“Another pint please, love”, comes the same cockney screech from our most regular local, Cliff. He has a pint of London Pride, but served in a John Smith’s glass, as he insists this gives him another few millimetres of ale. Honestly, who gives a shit?

I untangle my fingers from my till-key and smile, before fumbling for a pint glass.

It is 9pm, about the time when my boss’s and married couple Henry and Lucy, begin to drink the night away.

“It’s our night off”, they say, “we’ve just been working so hard – need a break. You understand, right, honey?”

I nod and smile again, desperate to kiss some managerial ass. It’s always their fucking night off.

“By the way,” Henry says, “What’s this I hear about you being in a band?” I blush. I have been in a small band for some time now but had avoided mentioning it at work to steer clear from the tedium of explaining something that would make me sound like a musical snob.

The reason I adored the band so much was because I was in love with singing, and always have been. Despite my lack of self confidence, I’d managed to hold myself together for quite a few gigs. In this band I felt foolish but wonderful.

Henry probes and questiones me until I spill my guts about every detail of the band; its members, our genre, who plays what, who our influences are (I don’t even know), when our next gig is, all that musical ‘blah blah’ that makes me feel like a child being asked about school by a distant aunt.

Then, he asks something that frankly, I couldn’t answer:

“And why are you in the band?”

“Well,” I say, “…well…the publicity is good so we get a lot of gigs.”

“Why are you in the band?” He asks again.

“I think…I think sometimes it’s nice to…”

“Why are you in the band?” a third time.

His wife, Lucy, looks at him and rolls her eyes.

“Don’t worry love”, she says, “He’s doing the whole ‘music industry’ question on you.” Henry used to be in the music business, managing bands and the like. I wish I’d known this before he’d given me the fucking third degree.

I slam down the pint I am pouring and run out of the back, not stopping until I reach the door to the pub’s kitchen. My hands are shaking and sweating and I feel a need to keep swallowing, as if when I don't, some awful combination of fear and the thoughts of my band will surge up through my throat and spew out through the gaps in my teeth.

It is here that I realise, in the back of this grotty pub, that even this band, even singing, is just another way of passing the time. Like biting your nails, foreplay, turning the clocks back, or keeping a diary. All these things just add up to nothing.

And if your stupid dream can’t satisfy you, can’t make you happy, then what the hell can?

I pull at my till key, reassuring myself by wrapping its string around my fingers a few times. I swallow one last gulp and walk back into the pub, smiling through the realisation.

Scarlett Philips

Quality Control

He usually started with the pelvic bone. Best to get the gender question out of the way first. Muscles, tendons, sinews, organs, they all came after. Slotted in beneath ribs, wrapped around bones like a gift. Sometimes he might give them a deformity then and there. Fusty lungs or a crooked spine, clotted blood or mangled limbs, the gaping hole in a cleft palette, the loose skin betwixt webbed toes. Other times, there was no manipulation involved, just sheer incompetence. The scratch across an eyeball gone unchecked, a brain dropped to the floor with a bounce. A dust-off, a rub-down, and slip it back into its jar. And occasionally, very occasionally, there would be the kind of malfunction that came from nowhere. Despite years of research he could find no reason. These, and only these, he considered his children.

Rachel Kendall

Nottingham

We walk arm in arm, drunk.

Back from your local, up the
steep hill towards the guest house
half way up. Glazed light flickers
through net curtains browned
with nicotine and indifference.

We pause and take in the tableaux
within. Cheap tracksuits, taut,
full to bursting, rippling with each rise
and fall of the ribcage. A tidal wave
of lard races from gut to face,
laughter the instigator of tectonic
forces. Lungs heavy with tar bathe
in the glow of the cathode-ray tube,
electrons winking, photons seducing.

Despair exhales as droplets of laughter
small clouds of wonder, the human
race in all it’s majesty, resplendent in
excess. Our cachinnation whilst encased
in spite and bitterness is tempered with
our incipient love and our knowledge
that humanity should be more than this.

We walk arm in arm, drunk. I fall
asleep in your spare room and dream.

Garrie Fletcher

A Lesson in Bastards and Choices

Mark only just slipped through the doors of the last train home as they were closing, the tired station attendant giving him a lacklustre glare that betrayed how little he really cared by this time of night. He took the seat closest to him and sighed in relief at the fact that he’d actually made it in time. He’d been out drinking with a couple of friends that lived in London and hadn’t realised how late it had become. He felt pretty drunk and a bit sick. He’d had to run a lot of the way to the station.

He looked around at who else was onboard with him. There were only two other passengers in the carriage, two men, obviously pissed and talking very loudly.

“Nah mate, I don’t give a fuck, y’know?” said one of them. Mark leaned his head slightly to the side so he could see them through the middle of the seats in front. The one who had just spoken was wearing khaki shorts and a white polo shirt and was simultaneously drinking from a can of Stella and swinging from the handrail. “I don’t care what they’ve been saying, they’re all just a bunch of cunts anyway.” He laughed and after a few seconds the other man joined in. This one had a skinhead.

Mark leaned back in his chair so he couldn’t see them anymore. They looked like a couple of right bastards he thought. He tried to block out their conversation but it was so loud he couldn’t help listening in. It didn’t seem to make any sense though. It had suddenly become a lot more aggressive. All he could work out was that someone had been “fucking over” polo shirt and that polo shirt, and possibly even skinhead, was going to “kick their fuckin’ heads in if they keep doing that shit”.

They continued with this conversation until the train reached its first stop.

Mark wasn’t paying much attention but he vaguely heard the doors open and polo shirt say to his friend “hey, watch this”. He only looked up at what was going on when he heard a third voice:

“Excuse me… please,” gasped the short middle-aged man who was trying to get on the train. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase and it looked like he’d almost missed the train as well from how much he was panting. He had one foot raised in mid-air to step onboard but he’d come across a problem.

Polo shirt was standing right in the middle of the open doors.

“You’re not getting on this train mate,” he said casually. Skinhead was brazenly laughing behind him.

The little man couldn’t understand what was happening but it was too late and he dropped his foot down on to the train anyway.

“I’m sorry?” he said, a look of unease suddenly clouding his face.

Skinhead was still laughing, encouraging Polo shirt who now became serious. He leaned down, getting closer to the little man’s face.
“If you get on this train,” he said, carefully pacing his words out with overly dramatic precision. “I’m going to fucking hurt you.” He stared right into his eyes.

The little man looked terrified and very slowly began to pull his leg back from the floor of the train.

It was at this point that Mark stood up. He’d watched the whole thing from between the seats and was sickened at what he’d seen. The fact that he knew these guys were only doing this for a joke made it even worse. This was the last train of the night. That little guy in the suit probably had a family waiting for him. And these two pricks were willing to leave him stranded. Well, Mark knew he had to do something.

“Hey, guys, come on, this is the last train,” he said in a daring moment of unthinking, drunken courage that disappeared as quickly as it had come.

He’d stood up without really realising it and now he was shitting himself.

There was a brief moment of horrendous, aching silence as all three faces looked at him before polo shirt moved to the side and in a parody of courteousness waved the little man on to the train. The man scurried off up to the far, far end of the carriage.
The doors closed and the train was moving again.

Mark was still standing and polo shirt and skinhead were still looking at him. He didn’t know what to do. Polo shirt looked at him and laughed and then turned to skinhead. They laughed together and Mark sat down. He knew it was over.

The two men got off at the next stop and the stop after that was his own. He walked home feeling proud of himself, knowing that he had done a trivial yet great thing.

Only this didn’t actually happen. Mark hadn’t done a great thing at all. He’d sat quietly watching as the doors had closed in the little man’s horrified face. Then polo shirt had turned around and their eyes had met through Mark’s peephole between the seats. Polo shirt had challenged him with a moronic grin and Mark had lowered his eyes.

Mark didn’t save the day, and he didn’t stand up for what he thought was right. He was too scared over getting a kicking or suffering the same fate as the guy in the suit and getting thrown off the last train. He felt like a coward as he walked home.

And that’s what’s so good about writing a short story. You get to make a fictional character responsible for not doing what you know you should have done.

Joe Roche

You Can’t Go Home Again

Raw yellow and white, the sun beat down hard and impossibly bright onto the city. Michael regretted not digging out his sunglasses as the five lads padded along the Strand in shorts, T-shirts and trainers, no socks.

This was the perfect day for it. It was Saturday, summer, 2008 too. Albert Dock was loaded with tourists. The Duck Tours vehicle bounced along the road past the group, its assortment of visitors gawping, Beatles songs blaring out.

The boys jostled each other as they went along, pulling tops and slapping arms till they reached the bridge filled with people streaming in both directions. A few tourists had stopped to gaze at the vista of the waterfront, sweating, squinting into slick digital cameras, looking for the perfect angle. Michael, smiling, eyed some of them menacingly and they cast their gaze away from him uneasily.

Leaning with his back to the dull, black bridge-side, arms outstretched along the railing, Leon quipped: “Who’ll be the first brave man to step up eh?”

Michael grinned widely at Leon, his dimples nearly reaching his narrow, brown eyes. Without speaking, he pulled off his washed-out grey t-shirt detailing some long-forgotten event, then stepped forward and mounted the wide ledge of the bridge in one movement.

He stood legs wide apart on the edge of the bridge and looked around him. Some passers-by were already stopping, shielding their eyes with their hands to look up at him standing in the sun. On the ledge he caught the wind blowing in cold and strong, straight from the river. It hit the sweat that covered his body, encasing him in a strange coolness as the moisture froze on him. He felt everything with renewed, innocent, strength. He was proud of his gym-enhanced body. They were watching him. He had power. He squeezed his toes around the edge of the hot metal bridge, feeling the sun harsh on his face and the beads of sweat sliding down slowly from his close-cropped hair to his crack.

Looking down, the water remained uninviting, a thick, slopping, miserable, green-brown. He turned around again, slower. More people had stopped.

“Stop posin Mike and fucking jump,” Evo said quickly.

He faced the river again, feeling now nothing more than the overwhelming heat of the day and the desire to escape it. He put his hands forward and leaped.

In an instant he was blinded by the full shock of the sun’s glare and screwed his eyes tight. Air rushed around him, but before he could recover his sight he was enveloped by the water. The cold sliced through him instantly. Sinking in the dark liquid, his eyes, ears and nose filled. The power he had only a few seconds previously vanished.

He carried on plummeting downwards through the drink, eventually slowing in his descent till he felt his whole body turning, cradled in the water. The darkness was total. Sounds surged in his ears and then slowly began to fade. There was nothing outside of him, nothing past or present, only the water and the cold.

Sensing danger, he struggled with his arms, thrusting forwards to what he thought was the surface in sheer panic. But he found no respite from the total darkness that overwhelmed his senses. His every movement was heavy and laboured and drained his resources further. Whichever way he turned seemed to bring him no closer to any light. He tried to speak and a pained roar flew out in bubbles.

Michael felt the slow ebbing away of his energy and began to cease in all thought and function.

As his movement became ever slower, weakened by the pressure, he felt himself begin to disappear into the blackness and accepted his fate. He knew it was right.

Then with a rush he was dragged rapidly back. Shooting towards the glare, he pierced the top of the water and coughed up half the Mersey as he broke the surface.

Through stinging eyes he looked up to see the boys cheering and tourists clapping. Feeling the sun once again attacking the back of his neck, he swam towards the old metal ladder, his vision blurred, his head pounding. He was back. He was powerful.

But he already missed the cold.

Kenn Taylor

Her Stomach is Zen in an Alley of Knives

A cat in heat howled like knives in the alley.
I looked out the window while smoking her last cigarette
and finally caught my breath. The hills of her flesh
eclipsed by a slat of moonlight breaking in
through a broken blind. I was an explorer.
In a silver conquistador helmet I steered my wooden ship.
She was a new world peninsula jutting into the asperous sea and now
she has been civilized.

The neighbor kid popped fireworks in the parking lot
and it wasn't for independence. I worried
about possible fire in the dead patch of grass.
I looked over.
Each time she took a breath the lotus flower tattooed on her stomach
bloomed. Magenta petals fierce in small doses of the moon.
Somewhere in the distance cars crashed. Twisted metal made
in America chased by sirens singing blue and red across my white wall.
I put my cigarette out in a beer can
and wondered if anybody got hurt.

Jason Hardung

Vanishing Point

Even in dreams you pull away
your flickering eyes betray you.
It didn’t seem much to begin with
just another cross on a pauper’s grave.

As we travelled through miles of desolate
Caithness marsh you were gone.
I stared at the flat roads and felt
the prickle of holly and forget-me-nots.

I watched you light a cigarette
and turn flames into a soft grey ash.
I could feel it in my veins, the way
the curlews swooped and screeched.

On the gentle slopes of Bettyhill
you picked sharpened whins
and drove them into my skin.
There were no soft drugs involved.

We came to a halt at Tongue. Alone
on the shore, I went down on my knees
to pray for cockles and mussels and pearls.
You filed your nails with a board.

Something terminal and sad was written
in the way you walked along the beach,
as if backwards, through hands of bracken.
You wore a crown of tangled gorse.

The tide was gone, leaving miles
of corrugated sand. So we waited.
Five days I counted. Then five years.
There was something I forgot to say.

Kevin Williamson

Vanishing Point is a poem from Kevin's new book In A Room Darkened (on Two Ravens Press),
SFTF is honoured to feature this poem in January's edition - Kevin Williamson's Rebel Inc imprint was a major inspiration behind many of the writers featured on this site.

To buy a copy of his book follow this link, please buy direct from Two Ravens and support the independent book publishing movement -
http://www.tworavenspress.com/HTML%20Pages/Buy%20books.htm

The Story That Changed The World Forever And Marked A New Beginning For Mankind; Saved By The Bell The People Linked Arms And Embraced Their Future With Rosy Cheeks, White Teeth And An Overwhelming Sense That - Perhaps For The First Time - They Were Alive, Truly Alive And Everything Up Until This Point Had Just Been A Strange And Arduous Test To See If They Were Ready For Such Freedoms, And They Were.

I tried to write a story that would appeal to all of mankind, a story to unite the nations.

This would be a story that would end all wars, that would resurrect all the good people who died young, that would make money, debt and credit moot concepts.

It was a story that would burn the gallows and disarm the firing squads, a story that would catch George Bush with his dong in an animal, only the animal wouldn’t mind because this was a story of love, a story where the only victims are those who didn’t heed the warnings, those who just kept pushing and pushing when all the world was screaming for them to stop, those who just got greedy and drunk on power and lost all sense of time and place, right and wrong.

It was a story written in the sky with vapour trails, carved in the golden sands of all the continents, sculpted in cathedrals of ice at both the poles, painted onto a grain of sand by a smiling China man who survived communism, survived book burnings and beatings on the soles of his bare with bamboo sticks, survived being buried neck deep in the dirty in the midday soon.

What a story it was. A real victory lap of words, a klaxon of approval; a story that read like all the world’s champagne corks popping at once. It was the story that marked the beginning of a new calendar for humanity, a clean slate. It was moment when humans awoke from their deep slumber.

This story – it made people switch off their televisions, cut up their credit cards and burn their paperwork. They flushed their pills down the toilet and made monuments from discarded mobile phones, all of them ringing and vibrating at once. Suddenly they realised they were free – truly free. The illusion was over and this was real.

As a result of this story everything of beauty was worshipped and because beauty is in the eye of the beholder everything became sacred: the trees, the ice shelves, the animals, the woodlands, the people. True equality – the likes of which was previously unimaginable by a species whose understanding of it was limited - pervaded and the people began to laugh. They laughed long and they laughed hard, each in their own unique way. At that moment cynicism died along with all the other diseases.

They re-read the story and then they ran out into the streets, laughing. “What the hell were we even worrying about?” they said to one another. “We were taking life seriously for a moment there.” Then they rolled in the grass and they swam in the Lakes. Some of them stayed indoors with the curtains shut, but that was OK too, because this new-found sense of freedom was limitless, and people could do whatever it was that made them happy so long as they weren’t hurting anyone else. Things were neither exclusive nor inclusive; they just were.

Idealism, naiveté and charity became things to aspire to. God died, but no-one mourned him because he never existed anyway, and even if he did he had died for the people’s sins, so even those of a religious bent felt good about it.

They kept the cathedrals, temples and churches and synagogues open anyway because they were building of beauty and beauty was all that mattered.

I tried to write a story that said all of this and implied so much more. I sat there thinking about it, then I wrote it down.

When the story was read and the world had changed, they said “Who wrote such a story?” and others replied “It was no-one, just some guy. I think the point he was making was, it was all here under our noses all along.”

“We should make him a God,” said someone. “Such vision deserves deification!”

“No,” said another. “You’re missing the point. It’s not about false idolatry. It’s about an appreciation of the real, a great levelling of everything. Besides, I met him once and he’s really nothing special. He just sits there all day drinking coffee and scratching his balls. He’s pretty anti-social.”

“OK,” they said and they ran outside laughing, to smell the flowers and kiss the dirt.

And the rest – as you know – is history.

Ben Myers

A Poem for No-One

you come to me with the voice of a debt collector
an unperceivable hum like shaved glass
a fatherly caress of the head

my days are full of daunting moments like these
stretching out as far as the eyes can see
i want them gone in the flash of teenage afternoons

your pale bare skin untroubled by the sun
the breath-stealing electricity of your hip
your hairs the subtle caress of spun silk

it comes to me now, too late to matter: i have spent
ten futile years chasing your liquefying ghost
across these crumpled sheets of bacofoil

Tony O' Neill

Sat on a Yorkshire Hillside Dreaming of Li Po and a Glass of Warm Beer

Inside the weeping willows
that sleep across acres of wild garlic
the afternoon battles with transparent swords

pungent and alive the scent rips up into the crisp Spring air.

Clear waters, once red with blood
fall from the valley of Marston Moor.

It is early March,
in the light’s reflections
upon Cock Beck’s glittering film
silver Chub race along the bed
to Stutton’s wrought iron crumbling footbridge

and we trace the stream
to the black towers
of the brewery cousins
silent in orange industrial glow.

Here, where long grasses reach the waist,
caressing covered legs and soil caked boots
old men with grey Lurchers course hares in the quarry
the limestone drop echoes soft rabbit feet

the only sound the deep tyke voice
no faces unfamiliar on Fawcett’s estate.

Adelle Stripe

8 Hour Job

8 hour job
8 hour job
tired legs
burning feet
a trolley rattles the corridor.
I am too lumbered for lunch today.

we live, LIVE, for 4 o’clock.

8 dog hours
then, Home,
then
mundane maintenance
FIGHTS
dreamy creativity.
I am sitting too near the fridge and the ice

but
beware the Lurid Exhaustion
that will throw you off the graffiti desk
when the music is SUDDENLY TOO LOUD.

8 dog hours
kill the story they make you live.

and I saw
a nurse taking the earrings from a dead child’s ears.
the screen hid nothing.
8 dog hours.

8 hours.
I walk them
then a lesbian drives me home.

Ford Dagenham

Science Fiction Story

I will meet you again in the future. It will be 100 years from now. We will be evolved. We will be larger. We will be gentle with each other. When I try to touch your hand, my hand will feel like water. Your hand will feel like a fish. We will be evolved in different directions. We will be so gentle and evolved we won’t even be able to lift our glasses to our mouths. We will just sit in a bar, looking at the glasses, and being incredibly gentle with each other. You will gently slap my face. I will gently say something cruel. We will gently torture each other, not saying any of the things we’ve been thinking for the last 100 years.

We will not say, ‘I’ve missed you,’ or, ‘You look good,’ or, ‘I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

We will be too futuristic to say those things.

There will be mobile phones made of water and seeds, 1 millimetre in diameter.

There will be children that look like shrivelled dogs.

Every thing ever will have a slot to put money in, and when you put money in the slot the thing will vibrate.

There will be tinfoil, inflatable shoes, and holographic statues of the cast of Friends.

Everything will be okay.

The sun will be burnt out – it will be like a black floating acorn – and it will be dark in the bar, and I won’t be able to see if you are crying.

Chris Killen

Perfect Recall

It was a long hot summer; an endless summer. Heat waves shimmered above the city streets and the nights were long and warm. And it was during this endless summer that I fell in love for the first time, and I have to confess it was love at first sight.

The experience of love at first sight is almost impossible to put into words, for although language may adequately express the normal conditions of life, it struggles with the mystical and inexplicable. All I can say for certain is that it was an epiphany of emotion, a sudden intuitive insight into the true meaning of love and life’s mysteries.

She was walking home from school with some friends when I first saw her, laughing and smiling, animated. Her long blonde hair flowing in a summer breeze and rays of sunshine streaming through each strand. Maybe it was the sunshine, shining like that, like light through a stained-glass window of a forgotten inner-city church, but instantly I felt my heart beating faster and the rest of the world faded to grey.

I was working as an apprentice upholsterer in a little Dickensien cottage in Pig alley. I wore a leather apron and worked with unusual tools. Each week the boss paid me cash, in five pound notes, but despite the fivers I earned very little. One afternoon the others sprayed glue all over me and threw a box of feathers over my head as part of some weird initiation ceremony. Strangely, this did very little for my self-esteem.

At work I thought about the girl. I’d never seen anyone like her before, she was perfect in everyway, at least in my eyes, and just the thought of being with her began to dominate my every waking thought.

The days and weeks since the first sighting passed slowly and I wasn’t the same. People began to notice and gave me odd looks and stares. Little did they know and if they had known I would have been embarrassed. For I had the love bug and for a girl I hadn’t even spoken to. At night, as I lay awake in my single bed, visions of her loveliness danced before my eyes.

Then, like a miracle, I spoke to Tara. For that was the mystery girl’s name. This is how it happened. On another sultry evening I took a short cut through the park and there was Tara, sitting on a park bench, alone. I ducked behind a tree to contemplate matters. There she was, not more than fifty feet away, the girl of my dreams, sitting in the park, alone.

Somehow this chance meeting seemed like fate, destiny, and I had to make a decisive move. I poked my head around the tree a couple of times. She was still there, waiting aimlessly, a vision of youth and beauty. I psyched myself up and tried to think of something witty to say, something dazzling.

And then suddenly, like a puppet-master was pulling my strings, or cupid was firing his love darts, I found myself walking towards her, helpless.

Halfway there, she looked up and smiled. Jesus, I couldn’t believe it, the smile, those blue eyes, so bright and alluring.

‘Alright,’ I heard a voice utter from some faraway place.

‘Hi,’ said another voice, but more ephemeral, more in tune with the universe, cosmic and eternal.

‘Fancy going out this weekend?’

‘Okay.’

And that was that. That was how we became boyfriend and girlfriend. We swapped numbers and called each other every night. We went on dates, nothing extravagant - local boozer, walks in the park, and the cinema.

That summer of my youth seemed to last forever, warm pale mornings and blue crimson evenings. We’d sit in the park under a couple of sycamore trees and talk about the future. We made endless plans, plans to elope, to travel the world, to be together forever, just us against the world.

Each night I walked her home and kiss on her doorstep, and afterwards I swung from lamp posts like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain, except it wasn’t raining and the skies were clear and midnight blue. And although the image is often better than the reality, Tara was as sweet as she was beautiful. She didn’t mind that I was an apprentice upholsterer and was paid in five-pound notes, and had once been tarred and feathered.

But someone once said that nothing good lasts forever, that life is just a series of random events we have no control over, and man’s unhappiness stems from his desire to make permanent that which is impermanent, the flesh.

We’d been seeing each other just a few weeks when I suggested a drive into the countryside. It was another hot summer’s day. We drove out to Epping Forest, away from the dirty streets of East London, away from the hectic grinding city life.

I was jumpy, anxious, filled with trepidation and wonder. Before setting off we’d both dropped an E. And as we drove along the pills kicked in - powerful body rushes, images blurring, streets melting, and cars flashing past like ghost machines. Tara whispered words of love and kissed my cheek, and for one incredible moment life was just one big sack of glittering jewels tossed across a deep blue ocean.

And then it happened. The narcotic swirling through my bloodstream altered my perceptions, and the brightness of the sun became lethal. I remember shielding my eyes with one hand, the sound of screeching tyres and then the flip, spinning through the air.

I awoke to find myself upside down. A multitude of vivid details imprinted themselves on my mind, Tara’s laughter, her screams, the faces of strangers, a leaf blowing in the wind, a fly on the windscreen. Perfect recall.

Blood dripped into my mouth, tasting rich, luxurious, and sickly. Tara appeared perfect, not a scratch, not a mark, flawless.

‘Tara?’

No answer.

Suddenly I didn’t feel good, a dull aching pain.

‘Tara.’

No answer, but she was perfect, like a china doll, not even a cut or a graze.

Sunlight streamed into the car and flowed through her glossy blonde hair, like the first time I saw her. I held her in my arms, my upside down arms, and watched as my blood dripped onto her pale blue top, drops of red appearing here and there, spreading outwards.

Joe Ridgwell

Shooting Rabbits

It was a hot, sickly day that we drove out to the country to do the deed. I sat in the passenger with my head half out the window, not looking at Dad and wishing that we had my little brother along with us to break up the monotony of the ride. Dad was insistent though, said it was a coming of age thing. Like shaving and fucking. I’d done neither of these things but Dad was making a point and there was no getting around it. The deed would be done and it would be done with just the two of us bearing witness.

After I don’t know how many hours of wind in my face, Dad pulled in to a gravel track and killed the engine. I got out first, eager to get it over with and, to tell the truth, eager to see some action. I’d never held a gun before and when dad opened the boot and handed me the old rifle I was startled by its weight, nearly dropping it. Dad gave me one of his looks and I saw him bite his tongue to stop him snatching back the piece and shoving me back into the car. Instead he took a breath and said “Careful”.

We walked into the field, as silent as we had been in the car. It was a different type of silence now though, tainted with expectation and fear and longing.

Crouching in the dirty stubble, Dad explained how I should line up the sights and then squeeze gently when I was ready. “Give her an OBE”, he said and laughed, “One Between the Ears” and he laughed again before lapsing into a watchful silence, cupping his eyes against the sun.

Before long I saw him extend a forefinger and, following its path, I saw the movement it was pointing to, about two hundred yards from where we were squatted. I pulled up my rifle in a panic, desperate not to disappoint the old man, and peered down the long barrel. As I lined up the little x with the back of her head I felt a sudden twinge of regret. I hadn’t expected her to be so pretty. Crouched naked with her back to me she seemed utterly oblivious as to what was about to happen. I paused a second longer, a second longer than my Dad could contain himself and I turned as he hissed, “do it” between furious teeth. I looked back to see her staring straight at me, stiff at the sound of Dad’s outburst. I closed my eyes and squeezed gently.

Sprinting across the field to where her body lay jumping and twitching in circles, Dad used every swear I knew and some that I didn’t. As we approached her I saw how badly I had missed. The bullet had gone through the side of her neck and blood was pumping up through her mouth and nose with each groan. I’m embarrassed to admit it but even through all the mess I remember looking at her tits in awe. They were the first pair I had ever seen in real life. She looked about my age.

Dad shattered my reverie, snatching the gun from my limp grasp and raised it up to take aim. I saw her look from the barrel to me, her eyes resting on mine a split second before Dad squeezed gently and her head exploded.

He left me standing there as he walked slowly back to the car with the gun, coming back with a shovel grasped in his fist. “I hope you can be trusted with this at least” he said before turning and walking back to wait in the car.

We sat in silence all the way home, Dad peering out at the fading light, while I stared back at my reflection in the window, dusty and sun burnt. The deed was done, at least that was something. It was all part of growing up, of becoming a man. And next time, it would be easier.

Lee Mess

Hammering the Nails In

i told her to shut up
to stop shouting at me
and she threw a plate of food
it landed in front of me
and smashed
into pieces

the two poached eggs
wide and running
like the children’s eyes
as they looked on.

Geraint Hughes

Pleasure & Pain

He was in her flat, in her front room. He was sitting beside her on the sofa. He was looking downwards at the laminated floorboards as he talked. He was sad, distant, as the words came out of his mouth in no particular order. He spoke emotions and nothing else, he explained his feelings, which were broken. Outside, his body was whole, but inside he was in pieces.

She was silent, sitting beside him, watching. She was still, listening to his words, comforting him. She had invited him over soon after he had told her that his girlfriend had left him. She had told him she was good at dealing with this kind of thing.

As he talked she had listened. She had kept their glasses topped up with wine. The glasses were never empty; at the very least they were half full. They were drinking a very dry white wine, a Muscadet. They were on their third bottle now. She could feel that she was drunk. She could feel it but she kept it to herself, not wanting to let this piece of information leave her. She looked down at her legs. She wondered if the skirt she wore was appropriate. She squeezed her thighs a little closer together.

He was saying how much he still loved her. That he would never forget her or even stop loving her. She would always be there, inside of him. He explained how she had made him a better man, how she had shown him a different side of love, a beautiful and tranquil side whose tranquillity reminded him of a giant lake. He said he could picture a lake in a valley of mountains. He said he had seen its calm surface, he had drunk from it, had been greatly refreshed from it. He said it held a beauty like nothing else, a beauty like Monet’s ‘Water lilies’, whose colours and tones were staggering.

She had not let her eyes leave him for one instant. She had looked at him the entire time. She had wanted him for a while now, she had fantasised about it. Sometimes when alone in her bed her hands ran over the surface of her body. She was like the sea in a storm as her hands taunted her own skin. Her thoughts, as this happened, were filled by the two of them – her, on her back, with her legs spread and him, on top, with his cock thrust deep inside her.

Her thighs came together a little tighter. She remembered, once, after coming back to the office after a pub lunch. She remembered that she was a little tipsy and had sat on top of a desk close to his. They had talked. They had laughed as she had stood there, smiling, enjoying the words that went between them. Her posture had been a little seductive, though it was not an intentional thing. She had not been conscious of it. He had caught onto this, momentarily, and had glimpsed her legs as he told a story. Her legs were amazing legs, eye catching, and so was her behind.

He took a mouthful of wine. He looked at her, waiting for an answer.

She gave him an answer, the right one. She then touched his arm. It was a touch of comfort, reassuring. She found that her eye line was looking down at the crotch of his trousers. Suddenly she could not help thinking about unzipping them and slipping her hand in, and grasping what was inside.

He smiled at her, and then said he had to go. He then stood up and thanked her profusely.

The alcohol had slowed the speed of their movements.

She walked him to the front door. She was nervous, nervous that she wanted to make a move but not sure how he would react. She bit her lip. She breathed in and out of her nose, feeling her heart racing. She turned to face him and then put her arms out to hug him.

He slipped into her embrace.

She could feel his right hand on the bare skin of her hip. She could feel it, against her flesh. It was warm.

She then pushed her hips forward a little, bringing their bodies closer together.

He was still talking, saying things that she did not hear.

Outside, a siren could be heard.

Inside, her lips found his neck. They hovered above them, a few millimetres away. She smelt him and then crushed her lips against his skin.

There was a vast silence. Everything was still, like a lake in the valley of mountains.

Rain could be heard outside.

They moved their heads back and looked into each other’s eyes.

It was suddenly hot and stuffy where they stood.

Their lips suddenly crashed together, their hands ignited at the ends of their wrists and burst alive with movement and motion. Their bodies pressed tighter together. They caressed one another and ran their hands over one another, feeling. Their tongues darting between parted lips.

Another siren could be heard.

The rain got heavier.

She could feel him tightly against her. She could feel his body against hers.

Gradually he began to fall apart in her hands, like wet paper. He was a mushy pulp, weeping from his eyes.

Softly she told him that it was all right, that he should not hold back and instead let go to pleasure and pain, to simply let go and to feel everything that went through him. She whispered that he was alive, that he was in one piece and that this was the main thing.

His eyes, still damp with tears, looked down at her.

She slid her skirt and her knickers down to the floor and stepped out of them.

He was confusion and lust, he was lost, overwhelmed in emotion. He breathed in deeply, silently watching.

Matthew Coleman

The Couple

In a bar, I met a couple.
He smiled and boasted about her talents
Calling my attention to her talents
Which meant, that he wanted to lull her
Into a false sense of security.

They told me about their deep connection,
And asked if I had a boyfriend.
She had large breasts and was plump.
He was balding slightly, from the back forwards,
He wore his shirt with his top 2 buttons undone.

In their hotel room, with cheap champagne,
He paraded his routine, a strut and plastic
Pose.
She changed into a shiny dress, light reflected from
The black.
He asked me to strip. Which I did, sweetly.

They unpacked a weekend bag
Plastic joy machines crowded the bed.
I said, I never obey. And chose to masquerade
As a boy, looking at myself in the mirror.
My shape shifting. I was Ovidean.

I chose a crop, and made them both
Taste the dark tang
Usually felt on a horse’s flank.
She was my glove, my seat, my bidet.

Laughter hit the back of my teeth
Which I swallowed back like vomit
If you could see me now
If only you could see me now
You would know you were right
To leave.

Heidi James

Half Standing

I am aware that I have made some wrong decisions. It’s hardly news to me. Gazing from my office window, a dozen stories high above the City, I’m most conscious of my multiple mistakes. Matters could have been handled to the contrary. The benefit of hindsight. The wisdom accrued from time’s passing. But, of course, in the heat of the moment, within the thick of the fight, I assumed I’d pull it off. Superfluous with spirit and banjaxed by bluster, I thought I’d get away with it all.

Where does the money go? All that lovely, teasing money? Every penny, every pound. Every franc, every dollar. It flashes stocking tops, full of pout and promise, but then virginally avoids your clutches. I was so close to getting this right. Provender most fruitfully in the offing. Events, however, conspired against me. The reins of projects lost. A mixture of misfortune and mishap. And now spreadsheets open across my computer screen. Column As figures disappearing as the mouse hovers to B. In the blink of an eye. At the click of a button. Hundreds of thousands gone. Sums so vast they don’t even seem real. Bad investments. Poor choices. A market unstable and ill-researched.

They’ll be here in a moment. Antagonised and aroused. Knocking at the office door. Demanding to know what’s happened. Coming to take it all away from me.

I loosen my tie and remember Mr Featherplume-Dyke. A great man. A mentor. “You have big ideas, young Simon,” he told me upon my career’s commencement. “And a jib I like the cut of. You’ll go a long way with this firm.” An outstanding character. He died with his boots on. Thigh length, they were. Six inch heels and pure black leather. “We should be judged by our business not our leisure,” he once proclaimed whilst stroking my knee and licking his lips. It’s a maxim by which I’ve attempted to live. But what would Mr Featherplume-Dyke make of this? What on earth would he think of me now?

Nearly midday. The accounts will be an end. You can’t hide the figures from Accounts. Petulant swines to a man. Poking noses in where noses most certainly do not belong. The discrepancy will scream from their software. All cards laid damningly on the table. The hunt to then swiftly commence. All those weeks spent shuffling paperwork to the bottom of the pile. Deleting emails and shredding reports. Covering tracks. Wiping off fingerprints. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. What futility. They were going to trace it to me eventually. And with me the buck must stop.

Options. I recall all the options. I’ve given favours. I’ve taken some gambles. But surely gambling is what we do? If only the clock could be rewound. Five million to those Americans seems foolish in the cold light of day, but the deal appeared so convincing after that spectacular luncheon pitch. The start-up in the Soviet states seemed risky even then, but what if it had paid off? The tax breaks alone would have made me for life. I wouldn’t be here, like this, right now. That’s for sure. I’d be sunning it up on the MD’s island. A hooker on either arm and a swimming pool full of champagne. But that’s not why I did this. Of course I wanted success. I desired a certain status. But I yearned for a life of security. Does this mean I’m greedy? Does this mean I’m flawed? I’m honestly not sure. Aren’t we all pursuing – although the paths fumbled along may differ – precisely the same thing?

The phone rings. “Accounts” presented on the display. I think it would be unwise to answer. A few further minutes required. Get my story straight. Figure out what I’m going to do. So much money owed on the second house. Charlotte spending like it’s going out of vogue. Frankie’s school fees and mother’s rest home. All banking on me. All depending on the phone calls I’ve made. It was surely never meant to end quite like this.
Mobile commencing its merry, vibrating tweet. It’s Hammonds. Probably best to ignore him. His quarter will bring no cheer. Christ, how much longer have I got? How soon before the barbarians are rattling the gates? Emails coming in on the laptop. Millions wiped out scream the subject line. Desk phone ringing again, now on all five lines. Red lights flashing like a brothel on fast forward. There are voices in the corridor. Heading right my way. Coming for the showdown. Ready for high noon.

I walk to the window, twelve stories high, and look at the City. So much depending on our currency’s confidence. So much riding on the choices made and deals brokered. So many, many lives…

The knocks commence at my office door. Furious and fuming. I stand at the window and - as the shouting starts, as the threats are unveiled, as my career disappears into dismissal, debt, and an inquest of fraud - discover myself wondering just how far the pane will open.

Mark Colbourne

Score

Mourning now.
I'm morning sick.
Better run down to the corner Johnny.
Better run down there quick.
I'm slipping into cold.
Slipping into
Cold gray death.
Skin pale gray marble.
stomach stretched tight
as a tourniquet.

It's just all dark like fear.
Crowding this one lost color out and away from behind my eyes.
I can hear my blood betraying me.
Johnny's making noise in the kitchen.
Then she's looking through her purse.
She says, "I know, just what you need.
"A nurse with a good eye, rolls up your sleeve."

And I'm afraid that even smiling is gonna hurt.

Run down to the corner babe..
She stares vacant like an abandoned car watching the street.
The street has no sun to announce the breaking of day.
But there's illumination on the corner.
Boys in bright, white tee-shirts.
Inventing language and new sports heroes.
Running from the police. Everyone keeping score.

My pain doesn't make a sound. It's old. Pain is.
Before memory.
After memory, it's too late.
Keeping score.
Pain is pity this mourning.
Morning sick.
Run down to the corner, Johnny.
Please run down there quick.

I'm slipping into gray.
Cold as death.
Pity is the score. Pain is.

Johnny says, "You were sleeping when I came in this mourning."

"It's not sleep, honey."

Johnny says, "I'm gonna be an actress. Or a poet."

Johnny works at Division and Halstead, lately. Cars stop there and when
she gets in, they take her where she tells them.
She still believes.
Sometimes she stays in. We eat Chinese and watch
old black n white movies.
She remembers still, when she was a little girl.
Nothing nice.
She says, "Baby, I'll do anything for you.

I told Johnny once, "Don't fall, if you don't believe, I'll pick you up."
That was the evening we made love. We struck our bargain.

"Yeah, please. Run down to the corner."

"You sick?"

"It's morning, babe."
It's mourning, all over the world. Well, mostly.

She's at the door smiling.

"But babe? Sometimes I hate to think I'm going to be happy."
She's keeping score.

"Why is that, Johnny?"

"Because I still have all this time to think the other things."

"What other things?"

"All the things that can, you know, go wrong."

I start to shudder once the door slams and all that's left
in the room is the patient reminder of time, coming even and steady - tick, tick, tick.
The clock, keeping score. Pain first, than mourning pity.Then, I break down and cry.

Brian Murphy

Throne Room

“And no wiping down there with me dressing gown,” Joyce shouts through the bathroom door. She pulls a face like screwed up divorce papers. “Not that you would o’course, darlin’ but we had this one bloke use the facilities yesterday. Pissed he was; couldn’t tell his arse from his elbow, never mind a dressing gown sleeve from a length o’bog roll. S’right innit Denny, love?” She peers down the ravine of her cleavage and retrieves a book of matches from her D cup.

“S’right,” says her son in a deep voice that’s been hauled up like a bucket from his beer gut. He’s wearing a pair of yellow Marigolds with black leather fingerless driving gloves over the top. Denny jerks the lead in his fist. The pit bull at his feet looks up at him then resumes licking its balls. “S’right,” he repeats, nodding then scratching his forehead.

“Y’all right in there, darlin’? Found the bog roll ‘ave ya?” says Joyce, pulling the hem of her red pencil skirt down towards her dimpled knees. “S’under the flamenco dancer’s dress. Don’t be shy, darlin’; she’s ‘ad more ‘ands up ‘er skirt than…”

“…you ‘ave ma,” says Denny, flicking his fingers. His face contorts in a silent fit of laughter.

“Oi!” says Joyce, pointing a three-inch acrylic finger nail at him, “can it!” She pulls a fag from her dishevelled blonde beehive and clasps it between glossy cerise lips. “Or I’ll can it for ya,” she adds, fag wobbling in her mouth.

Denny reaches a hand to the shepherd’s delight bruise on his left cheek, eye flinching. He smiles awkwardly at Joyce, a smile like someone’s added extra teeth to his mouth while he was sleeping and he’s only just noticed.

“If we’ve run out there’s a stash in the cupboard to ya left, darlin’; one with the fancy door knobs on.” Joyce pulls her vest top out the curled lip of her waistband and runs it round the brass letters on the bathroom door – ‘Throne Room.’ “They was made special them knobs, darlin.’ Can ya tell what they are? Hand-made by Denny ‘ere at the Day Care Centre he goes to of a Tuesday… though ‘e made a bit of a fist of ‘em, truth be told. Go on Denny, love, tell ‘er what they’re meant to be.”

Denny looks at the litter of toes huddled round the post of his flip-flops, face like an abandoned car with a ‘Police Aware’ notice stuck across the windscreen.
“The Queen’s conk,” he mumbles, jabbing at the dog with his foot. The pit bull removes his nose from his arsehole and nudges Denny’s ankle.

“S’right, one ‘as door ‘andles shaped like ‘er royal majesty’s conk,” says Joyce, clipped vowels tripping over themselves to get out her mouth. “That’s ‘ow la-de-da we is!” She attempts a curtsey on her six-inch heels, unlit fag still dangling from the corner of her mouth. “’A triumph over tastefulness’ me third ‘usband called ‘em… so ‘e didn’t last long; two week in fact cos I got ‘im annulled. Couldn’t get it up, see. S’right innit Denny, love?”

Denny jiggles the change in the pockets of his shorts then points towards the front door. The dog clambers to its feet and waddles after him down the hall.

“Ya nearly done in there, darlin’ only I needs to go meself...” Joyce pulls off a glass-encrusted clip earring and presses an ear to the door. “… what with it being me own friggin’ loo an’ that,” she adds under her breath. “‘ere, you ain’t shootin’ up in there are ya, darlin’?” She picks at the oak veneer door with her fingernail. “Cos if y’are that biscuit tin by the bog brush’s what we use for syringes.”

The toilet flushes. A young black woman in a canary yellow bikini appears in the doorway, legs encased in a large wire skirt. Joyce plumps up her breasts and steps to one side, wearing the group hug smile she uses on all her paying guests.

“Not photographing yaself on the bog was ya?” says Joyce, eyeing the camera hanging off the black woman’s slender wrist. “We ‘ad this bloke in ‘ere earlier what did that. Said it was for an art instalment or some such bollocks. Wouldn’t put it past ‘im neither, folk you get round Notting Hill these days!”

The young woman grins and bending her knees to accommodate the orange plumage of her headdress, limbos out the bathroom door. “We sees all sorts this time o’year,” says Joyce, following the hip-sway of the girl’s pert behind down the hallway and out the front door. “Yes, we sees life all right, don’t we Denny, love?”

At the garden gate, Denny holds out a meaty palm to the black woman. “S’a quid,” he says to her tits. The woman waves her boyfriend over who pulls a fiver out and passes it to Denny. Denny holds the crisp note up to the sun, eyes never leaving the woman’s tits. “S’it real?” The black guy explains he just got it out the cash-point. Denny nods and starts laboriously counting out change in twenty, ten and five pence pieces.

Joyce points at the handwritten sign hanging off her front gate and says to the man, “you wanna use the facilities too now, darlin’? S’nice an’ clean, ask ya lady friend. Do it up special for the carnival, don’t we Denny, love.” She looks at the black guy’s Bermuda shorts and tugs at her neckline. “Streets’d be runnin’ wi’ piss if it weren’t for us offering us loo to the public. So, ya comin’ in then or what?”

The man looks at the hard, brassy-haired woman stood next to her meat-head son with the pit bull growling at his feet and shakes his head. Pulling his girlfriend towards the sound of reggae music, he mutters, “Why would I want to pay them a pound when I’m shitting myself right here?!”

Melissa Mann

My Microwave Called Me a Douchebag Today

every time someone asks me
what my name is
like they’re going to
begin a conversation with me
i want to say
“i know exactly
what kind of shampoo
you use
because i have constructed a hole
in the ceiling of your bathroom
and i watch you
but not in a perverted way
more like a caring, endearing way,”
that way
the conversation
probably won’t happen.

Sam Pink

I Slept On Her Pillow and Had Her Dreams

It was a Saharan breeze off my lips, me whispering that I still loved her, and then she shot me again. And again, and again, and again, and again, click click click.

A tear rolled off my cheek. I felt neither sadness nor remorse nor pain nor passion, though her inflictions burned in me like guilt. And there was no blood; there was only the tear, my consciousness rolled up within.
Darkness washed over me then, baptising me in its cool emptiness, and I hugged this new lover to me as I drowned in it. Then I bent to him, lifted the teardrop from off the kitchen floor and wet it to my blistering lips.

Robert Prinsloo

Mae Clarke

Just to
make it stop
he pushed her
face into
her lunch.
Right down
to the
bottom
of the bowl
of tepid
chicken
soup.
She
surfaced,
face
dripping stock,
a matzoh ball
flush in her mouth.
When she bit it
in half
and spat
the remnants
across the
table
he knew
no good
was coming.

Tim Wells

So Young

It began, as these things do, with a splash of blood.

More than a splash, to be honest: about a third of the stool was livid scarlet, barely discernible through the pinkish swirl. When he used the toilet paper, it came away red. Yep: this was real.

He generally took a dump early evening, just after getting back from the uni. It was Friday today, Kiera was calling from downstairs, they had ordered in and were going out, they were due to meet the others in the Salutation in half an hour and he was shitting blood. He thought: this is not going to fuck up my weekend. It will not. He flushed, showered and cleaned the bowl and went downstairs.

Kiera was his girlfriend of two years. She had spent the last hour and a half getting ready, and she was jumping from foot to foot, eager to begin the weekend. Kiera worked for the council, as a housing officer; they had woken up together at Glasto and since then it had been more or less golden. He told Kiera she looked beautiful, as he always did at this time of the week. His knowledge about women was this: if a girl has spent hours getting ready to go out, it’s best to tell her she looks beautiful. And what made it easier was the fact that this was always true.

He did not mention the blood, and over the course of the evening it slipped from his mind. They met his uni colleagues in the Salutation and did a roster of Oxford Road bars, ending up at a house party near their home in Whalley Range. At times he perceived what could be a long term problem (he had this image of a nameless water break in the good roaring oceans of this night and his life) but there were friends he hadn’t seen for years, he was paying for one drink in three, there were St Helens stories and half-formed arguments and shouted conversations with strangers in bars. It was a great night; it always was.

Monday he spoke to a doctor he knew at the uni (he was a project assistant at the medical school). The guy said: people don’t get bowel cancer at twenty-four. Over fifty, you should be worried. If this happens again it’s probably haemorrhoids. Eat a bowl of Alpen before you go to bed.

It did not happen again until, suddenly, it did. That summer they had taken two weeks’ leave and travelled around Italy. Returning home, they had moved out of the house share in Whalley Range and into their own flat in Chorlton. He was a full project manager now, and Kiera had got an honorarium from MCC. Wednesday evening they had been eating Poppolino’s pizza and watching the regional news, they were going to Kiera’s high school reunion at the weekend and his girlfriend was worried about her weight. He told her that she looked around seventeen and weighed about a kilogram. As happy and full of life as she was Kiera’s soul echoed with insecurities from her schooldays.

That got him thinking about his own childhood in St Helens. A town still reeling from Thatcher’s decimation of the mining and glasswork industries, St Helens was full of gangs, pregnant fifteen-year-olds and a multitude of social problems. As a kid none of this had meant anything to him (when he thought of himself as a child nothing came except a sense of something unformed, a head bowed, at once alive in the town and without recognition of Victoria Square and the Needle and the municipal buildings) and then – kapow! The physical changes were fairly straightforward, and he never made a big deal of masturbation and sex. What he couldn’t handle were these new emotions invading his body. Suddenly he needed an identity, suddenly he needed to keep up with his friends, suddenly he needed to go to Liverpool to watch bands and not have to get the last train back; suddenly you are alone, and no one loves you, and yet there is a dark pleasure in this loneliness, and in locking yourself away to cry. But then he had lost his virginity and figured out, slowly, how you could make sense of these new aspirations and desires.

Thinking these thoughts, he stood from the throne, turned to flush and saw, again, that red swirl.
The doctor he spoke to the next day wasn’t as relaxed as the uni guy had been. He recommended a scan. The appointment was in two weeks. Over those weeks he got wrecked, made love, worked, saw a couple of films and then he went to the clinic and found out that this long-term problem was actually just a short-term problem. Six months. At best.

By November he was in the MRI.
Separated from the other beds by a plastic slash of curtain, within reach of a table cluttered with well wishes from the uni (from his friends in Leeds where he had studied and found himself), from his friends in St Helens (where he was born and raised), and from the great intercontinental sprawl of his own family - he slept and read and puked and thrashed out the chemo. His hair had gone, in snarls and clumps. He had lost three stone, seemingly through his arse. He wore a colostomy bag.

Grandiloquently he had announced in bars that he was going to kick the shit out of cancer. He had joked about getting the world’s most embarrassing terminal disease. Often he felt guilty when talking about it, and had registered the blank, disturbed look people get when unpleasant subjects are jolted into their minds. He had thought of shutting the fuck up about cancer; but Kiera had told him that true friends would understand, and listen.

And she had been right. Yet over the last month or so the flood of visitors had reduced to a stream, then a drip. He took no offence at this. People had their own lives.

His parents, of course, still visited, and though he loved them, he was always happy when they left, and felt an absurd guilt about what he was doing to them.

He needed only Kiera, and she was in daily. He told her he loved her, many times. He stressed that, after he was gone – and by now it was laughably clear that he wasn’t going to make Christmas – that she should find someone else. There’s no one like you though, she said. It won’t be like it was with you.
But Kiera couldn’t be there all the time. And the nights – the nights were bad.

It was on one of these long ward nights that he thought about converting to Christianity. His attitude to religion had always been derisive, when his bowels were clean. But faith offered what nothing else could: the possibility of continuation. In the end you have no choice but to delude yourself. I am sorry; sorry Richard Dawkins, sorry Primo Levi. I am not strong enough to resist this temptation when the pistol is at my head. I want to sit on a cloud and wait for others to join me. Convince me.

Yet he never quite convinced himself, and in early December his thoughts swung from death to life.
Back at the uni he had all sorts of big ideas about himself, as young men do: he wanted to be a rock star or a writer or at least something in the media. These were not so much goals as semi-articulated expressions of an intense drive to get out there, to be. He spent the summer before his final year on Big Brother. He came fourth and stayed in London for a while and partied and shagged around and did coke and eventually ran out of money and crawled back to Leeds to repeat the last two semesters.

The only documentary evidence of his life on this planet was a few hundred hours of videotape in a warehouse somewhere. How little impression we make on the world; like stones skimmed across water. And yet there were few regrets. He had been a decent man, he had known love, he had known women, and if he had not completely lived his life to the full, at least he had always tried. The only regret about his life was that there had not been enough of it. But can you ever get enough, really? If you leave nothing behind but a few Excel spreadsheets on the shared drive and a few stories told in Oxford Road bars and some fading memories and emotions in the heads and hearts of those that loved and knew you – was the whole thing just a waste of time?

What he could have told them was: it feels like sleep. And sleep is good.
But by then he was beyond talking: by the night of December 19 he could make sounds but no real words.
He had no idea of what was happening except that Kiera was there and that was good. The warm weight of her hand in his palm was good and she was saying things and that was good. But she looked upset. What could possibly upset you? Don’t you love to sleep?

It was like when you crash out in the middle of the afternoon after a heavy night in Hyde Park: pushed down into the mattress by strong, kind arms. Unconsciousness hits you like a train. In Hyde Park, in the afternoons, we used to walk through the shadows of the trees and have a pint at the Drydock. Were you there? We’ll be together in the springtime. And the sun will shine.

Tipping over from something into nothing, he could still hear Kiera’s voice. Kiera’s voice was good but he could always hear the noises on the ward and that was bad. He thought when Kiera had to go he would put his IPod on and listen to Bob Dylan. He loved Bob Dylan. He could put the IPod on or he could listen to the songs in his head now. Either way, the quality was awesome. All Along the Watchtower. Blowin in the Wind. Lay Lady Lay.

Max Dunbar

Burn

as my two daughters
chinese burn
both my arms
trying to use me
as a fire pole
my wife smiles over.
not a nice smile
of a mother watching her children
at play
but a vengeful smile,
one that lets me know
that this and much more
is expected
to make up for last night’s
drunken fight
and this morning’s hangover.
I might as well
stand naked
an inch from the sun.

Brian McGettrick

Velcro

It took time but I kept my promise. Now I can visit him, I ignore the nurse’s concern for his independence. His eyes are inverted; still that little boy waving from the back of the car. I know he’s not lost; just elongated and worn - like laces dragged too many times through muddy gutters. I used to crouch right down and tighten his shoes whenever his boisterousness had loosened them, or whenever he tapped my arm and pointed. The weather didn’t matter one bit. The straps always resounded best when saturated from the rain.

**rip**

The sound of Velcro still shifts me to those times; a flare of noise that delivers me back to his innocently smiling face. He didn’t find the straps impossible; we just enjoyed the closeness. She couldn’t give it to us; we were the only family we had. She’d only ever learned how to love bottles filled with whisky or gin – they used to say that was what was wrong with him. Something to do with during pregnancy…But I knew he wasn’t wrong at all. When they separated us; that’s when the lint set in…

**rip**

My brother remains static as I enter. I touch his forehead to mine, but only I see my face glued to his pupils. I fetch his trainers, the colour of oil spills in rain soaked roads. They match his distant eyes. He lets me kneel, and I hold his foot tight. I carefully wedge his toes into the shoes, like I always did. This time he does not smile. As I move away, he taps my arm as lightly as mist and gasps. I gently undo the hooks again, pull and tighten. The Velcro still sounds best when soaked.

**rip**

Elizabeth Rose Murray

What Uncle Louie Left Behind

We couldn’t go five minutes without giggling at Uncle Louie’s wake. He laid up there in a cut rate casket, dressed in a cheap suit he never wore during life. I couldn’t approach the coffin and the pathetic showing of flowers. I couldn’t pretend to pay my last respects for fear I’d end up rolling on the floor, laughing uncontrollably.

I sat in the back row of viewing room C, my face red and sore from laughing. I kept my face in my hands so that the few family members in attendance might mistake hilarity for grief.

"I’m starting to wish you hadn’t told me, " I hissed.

My cousin, Marky, shrugged and grinned.

"Told you what?" My brother, Walter, joined us, late as usual. He wore his navy blue monkey-suit from the factory. I could smell the grease and hydraulic oil on him. He gripped a half dozen prayer cards denoting the numerical margins of Uncle Louie’s life in his hand as though someday they might be valuable collectibles.

"You ain’t heard?" Marky asked.

"I just walked in the door." My brother looked at me, put a hand on my shoulder. "You okay, Billy? Taking it kinda hard, ain’t you?"

My shoulders convulsed. "Tell him."

"You know how Uncle Louie died, right?"

"Massive heart attack," Walter said.

"You know what he was doing when he died?"

"He was in bed, ain’t it?"

"You know what he was doing in bed?"

"Christ, Marky, just tell him already," I said.

"You ain’t gonna believe this, you remember how cheap that bastard was. How many Christmases he give us five dollar McDonald’s gift cards?"

"Nothing more embarrassing than buying a cheeseburger with a gift card," Walter agreed.

"Well, come to find out, he ain’t so cheap when it comes to buying sex dolls."

"What?"

"Shhhhh. Listen. Uncle Louie bought one of those expensive life like fuck dolls."

"Bullshit."

"I swear to God, Walt. Brunette. Blue eyes. Double D breasts with light pink areolas. It’s like a six thousand dollar model. I looked it up on the internet. Uncle Louie had the damned thing sprawled on the mattress with its head canted off the edge, and he was going to town on its mouth when his heart gave out. He collapsed right on top of it, face down in its latex labia."

"I don’t believe it," Walt whispered.

"It’s true," Marky said. "You remember my buddy, Turtle. He was one of the first EMTs to arrive on the scene after neighbor’s called complaining about the smell. He was dead just about three days. Copes thought they had two dead bodies. Couldn’t find a pulse anywhere. Wasn’t until the EMTs winched Uncle Louie’s fat ass off that they found the fuck doll underneath him, still lubed up and ready to go."

"Goddam," Walter said. After a moment’s considered, he continued. "As bad as it is, he still went out doing something he loved, which is more than the rotten bastard deserved."

Something he loved. The words reminded me of the morbid conversations we had as kids, when our thoughts often turned toward the possibility of our deaths. We all agreed that to die fucking would be the best way to go. Back then there were four of us. Little did cousin Martha know her life would be cut short four years later in a car accident before she even got the chance to give normal sex a try. She had no clue she’d die, bleeding out on the asphalt, holding up rush hour traffic. I’d since come to the conclusion there is no best way to go. But there’s a hell of a lot of bad ways to die.

Walter was correct about one thing. Uncle Louie deserved a more painful demise.

"Well," Walter said, "I don’t see me going up to the coffin any time soon."

"They gonna bury him with a lock of its hair?" I asked.
"Ha. Ha. Go look and see."

"What’d they do with the doll?" Walter asked.

"What you think?" Marky said. "They gonna wipe the lips off and give it mouth to mouth resuscitation?"

"Not the paramedics, dumb ass." He motioned to the assembled mourners, wondering as he did so how many of them knew Uncle Louie’s secrets. Or, at least, his last secret. "The family. They had to do something with it. With his stuff."

"They didn’t do nothing with it," Marky said. "I got it."

"What?"

"I got it back at my place. Goddam thing weight a good hundred, hundred and twenty pounds. Dead weight. Had to carry it piggyback to my car."
"What the hell’s it doing at your place? You don’t..."

"Oh hell no. What kind of sicko you think I am? I’m keeping it though. As a token of that cocksuckers dead. Every time I look at it, I wanna think of Uncle Louie dead. Uncle Louie lock in a ridiculous 69 of death. It eases the pain. A little bit. Not much, but sometimes enough."

My brother and I nodded, mirrored gestures of understanding.

"I wanna see it," Walter said. "I wanna see it,too."

Marky shrugged. "We can go right now, you want. But first I’m gonna walk up there. I came to see Uncle Louie dead. And I aim to do just that."
Marky lived in a studio apartment on Whiting’s north side. It was a sort of strip mall of apartments for the down-and-out wedged between a liquor store and Captain Steve’s Happy Time Inn. If no one puked below his window during the night, he could wake up to the petroleum scent of Lake Michigan a half mile away.

I hooked a ride with my brother for the companionship, but he turned up the Metallica the moment he started the Buick, letting me know talking wasn’t an option. Approaching Marky’s place, Walter turned the radio down long enough to ask if I wanted to go in half on a case of Old Style.
After the side trip to the beer store, we pulled in next to Marky’s Chevette. He waited outside for us. His eyes lit up when he saw the case of OS in my arms.

"Just like the old days," he said. "Even your taste in beers ain’t improved none."

"You could’ve put in," Walter said, "and we could’ve upgraded to Pabst Blue Ribbon."

"I got some Silver Bullets in the icebox. And a bottle of jager I was planning on celebrating with. I might come off some if you sweet talk me."
Ugh. Sweet talk me. I couldn’t tell if Marky was parroting Uncle Louie’s words on purpose or not. Walter never missed a step so I couldn’t tell whether or not he made the connection.

Marky unlocked the door and we stepped inside.

Walking through the doorway, I could tell Marky didn’t entertain many guests. Not the way this place stank. Like moldy bologna and stale beer. Breathing shallow through my mouth helped somewhat.

The front door led into the front room/bedroom. A brown and tan checkered couch pimpled with cigarette burns pressed against one wall. There were several gutted Coors troop transports strewn across the floor, the dead soldiers piled high and overflowing the garbage can standing sentry in the sliver of kitchenette. The remains of a fast food meal sat on a folding tv tray near the couch, the ketchup congealed to a splotch of red crayon. Atop two milk crates, the tv was a nineteen inch paperweight tuned in to the white noise channel.

Mostly obscured in shadow and a pea green afghan, the fuck doll sat on a bar stool in the far corner opposite the garbage can.

"Pardon the mess. Maid’s on vacation," Marky offered weakly.

"Goddam," Walter said. "I’m afraid to sit down."

"Sorry, guys." Marky bundled the fast food refuse together and, seeing the garbage can packed, opened the front door and threw the trash into the parking lot. "I’ve been having a rough go of it, lately."

"Yeah," Walter said, "but, still..."

Walter looked at me, but I couldn’t return his glance. My brother’s arms were still streaked with oil and grime from the machine he operated. His hair jutted wildly. He hadn’t shaved in a while. I didn’t look any better.
Marky retrieved the bottle of jager. He didn’t offer any glasses nor would we have accepted them if he did. Walter spun the cap and took a swallow. I took a quick black licorice taste of the liquor. We cracked open beers. Marky’s Coors never materialized.

"Here’s to Uncle Louie," Marky said. "May he burn in hell forever."

"Burn in hell," Walter and I echoed.

We drank the beer, gulped the liquor. The empties we threw on the floor near the door. After a few beers, the rank stench disappeared and with it my fear of the roaches skittering just out of eyeshot.

Finally, peering at the fuck doll, I said, "that’s it, huh?"

"Yeah," Marky said. "That’s it."

Robotic motion of our arms bringing the beer to our lips. Mechanically swallowing the liquid.

"Wanna see it?" Marky asked.

He didn’t wait for the answer. He walked across the room and flicked on the bare bulb of the shadeless lamp next to it.

Instantly I found myself staring into its lifeless blue eyes. How long had it been staring at me? No. Cancel that thought. It possessed no consciousness. No life. The smartest thing that ever came into its head was Uncle Louie’s cock, as Uncle Louie was fond of saying time and time again in reference to anything he succeeded in putting his dick into.
The blue eyes were bright and lifeless. Bright only because the orbs reflected the lamp light. Brown hair curtained down its head, hippie-style with the part down the middle. The pink lips formed a bow on top, but the bottom lip hung down a bit giving it a dumbfounded expression. A light smattering of freckles dotted the nose and cheeks. Peach-colored negligee scarcely covered the enormous, gravity-defying breasts. Nipples like a child’s thumbs poked out the fabric. The afghan concealed its lower half.

We stood there, staring, a full minute before I ended the silence and spoke what must have been on all of our minds. "It looks like Martha would have looked. If she hadn’t died. If Uncle Louie hadn’t been drunk. If he hadn’t turned right in front of that panel truck."

Karl Koweski

Lovebytes#5

I thought I would always remember this, but over time it has become blurred. Even then I rewrote the ending, the true one being so – what? Painfully bland? Poignant? Typical? Confused. It's true that I was lashing out like an injured animal at the end, but I was acting instinctively, out of reaction to my pain. If a bear walking through a forest finds her leg shattered, veins ripped open, flesh severed from bone by a hunters vice, do you blame the bear, the hunter or the vice?

For the Director's Cut I took a memory of you leaving another time, an innocuous time. I think you were traveling somewhere for work. I remember that the plane had to be held up as you ran through the terminal. It makes me smile to think of all the people delayed just so that I could have an orgasm. Anyway, that time was just goodbye, not Goodbye. You looked so good in your Fedora and RAF coat. I was so proud to be your lover, but I always knew you'd break my heart. When I first met one of your friends she took me aside and said “If you hurt him, I'll kill you.” Corny, but true. I smiled wryly and said “That boy will break my heart.” She cocked an eyebrow, disbelieving, but I turned out to be the prophet.

I can still see you now, profiled in the square glass window at the top of my front door, silhouetted in mid-turn. I was wearing my Japanese dressing-gown that you had given me. When I heard the oak door thunk behind you I went into the front room and waited for a long minute before you reappeared, framed in the large window. You didn't know that I was watching you, but my eyes never left you for a second until you turned the corner.

So that is my ending, I imagine those last kisses and caresses, you holding me in your arms and kissing the top of my head. Then I replay the scene of your leaving, your profile in the hall, your back retreating down the road. Off to war, I tell myself, that's why there was no proper end, we were ripped apart in the spring of our love. But there was no war. Our costumes were pure film noir, but this is the new millennium. The RAF coat and Japanese dressing-gown were charity shop finds.

I thought that I would always remember the true end: you non-responsive, me crying, picking up my weekend bag, stumbling down the hill towards the station, barely breathing, just a pulsating mass of nerves, raw with emotion. There was more, there were words, friends, drinks, cigarettes, but the memory is grainy. I prefer my ending anyway, no blame on either side, no divvying up the score of hurts caused and hurts gained. Just love in the afternoon, goodbye, and off to war. Love was the battle, and I lost.

Lisa Payne

The Poetry Scene

they are acting.
they are moving about.
they are talking.
they are joking.
they are flirting.
they are reaching
into their bag of tricks.
the women are full-bodied
in low-cut tops with big breasts
and big beautiful voices
speaking of poetry, art
and their "latest work".
the men are dressed in black
with long hair, goatees and glasses,
speaking of the "relevance of art
in todays society."
they are exchanging phone numbers.
making dates.
planning get-togethers.
to them
poetry is a scene,
a community,
a way of life,
as religion is to some
and bars are to others.
some will date each other.
some will marry each other.
some will plain old fuck each other.
and they will repeat the action
and repeat the action
again and again
until they die.
but none of them
will ever create
a lick of anything
worth remembering.

Mike Meraz

No Myth

adam & his rib
is pure bullshit

but hubert selby jr.
w/his t.b. & his
collapsed lung
& the doctors
sawing out 10
of his ribs

& then selby
getting addicted
to morphine
& then heroin
for 27 years

& then vomiting out
'requiem for a dream'
in 6 weeks

his battered lung-bags
rattling
over the typewriter

giving away
his demons

now that's a man
for you

Rob Plath

So Much to Answer For

It is Friday night and I am driving into the city. Lisa has gone to visit her father for the weekend. I love my wife. She is the mother of my child and she is also my best friend. We are good together and good at being apart – we have trust. I would be with her now, but she understands that I have got to get this project finished. What we have is understanding. She is a good wife, and I, a good husband.

I open the window and taste the damp metallic air. The icy blast feels good on my face – I feel very much alive at this moment in time.

I met Lisa watching The Fall at The Ritz. We fucked in the toilets.

I park the car and walk the city streets to Nitrate. The band are good and sound a bit like Bauhaus, but I watch the cage dancers intensely and smoke. I get the nod from Trix and go upstairs and hand over the goods to Brother. He has a new girl with him and he pushes her in my direction – she seems eager to please – but I find this a turn off. I go back to watch the dancers some more before leaving.

Lisa fell pregnant three years ago. I stopped tooling around with bands and put my degree to use. We moved out into the country and started having dinner parties. Lisa got a job illustrating children's books from home. The novelty of money kept us entertained. Lisa was going to call her Amethyst but I worried that if she grew into an ugly child that her life would be made miserable. Lisa's mother died and we agreed to call her Helen.

I leave the club and light another cigarette. This is my opportunity to restrict my pleasure to the voyeuristic only.

I walk to Chorlton Street and to the desperate whores.

Helen was born two weeks after Helen was buried. Lisa fell apart for more than a year. Her sister moved in to help look after Lisa and Helen. One night she made a move on me when Lisa had gone to bed. She said that I must feel very lonely when Lisa could only think about the Helens. She took of her dress and put my hand on her breast. The next day I told Lisa and her sister was gone. This was the catalyst for Lisa moving on from her grief and her guilt. We became stronger.

I skulk in the shadows until I find a girl who looks right. She gives me directions and I look at her thighs. She does not ask me my name or what I do for a living and I do not have to bother inventing these. I look into her eyes and tell her that I want to be inside her. I hold this thought until we arrive at the block of high-rise flats in Hulme. In the hallway the door is open to a room, her pimp boyfriend is talking to another man. I am shaking with nerves, but still ignore the possibility of leaving the situation. She leads me to the bedroom and goes down on me as she pulls off my jeans.

We left Helen with my mother and spent three weeks in Italy. We climbed Vesuvius, and we ate pistachio ice cream. We drank under the stars and we made love in the shadows of Pompeii. We felt like we were young once again.

The girl says that she needs the money before we can fuck. She says that she needs to buy some gear for her boyfriend and that we will fuck later. I drive her through the maze of streets in Moss Side until she tells me to pull over, lock the doors and wait. She goes inside. Twenty minutes go by. A knock on the window makes me jump out of my skin. "What you doin' here boy?" I say that I'm waiting for a girl. "Ain't we all" he says, and pulls a gun to the window.

I close my eyes.

Lisa had started illustrating again and I was given a promotion. Lisa was back talking to her sister and we gave up drinking and joined the gym set. We were moving on to a new kind of life. A better life.

Nothing.

I open my eyes and he is laughing. He's made his point, calls me bumber clart and walks off. I turn the ignition but the girl appears and gets in. We drive in silence back to the flats.

I was given a project to lead on – subliminal advertising in teen magazines – success would mean that I could retire at fifty or even before. Our dinner parties were now for Lisa's publishers and my executives – we felt that our old friends could be a potential embarrassment. They certainly did not fit in with our lives any more.

She runs up the stairs and I lose her. I cannot remember which door, but knock on several until she answers. She leads me to the bedroom again and leaves me there. I sit thinking that it might be her pimp that next opens the door. Twenty more minutes and she is back. She tells me that she has just come on and that she has shoved half a toilet roll up there and that we can't fuck. I tell her that I have paid, that I have been fucked around, and that she can suck me dry. She looks in the direction of the door, and I can see she is thinking about the pimp, but the drugs make her too apathetic to do anything other than take me in her mouth.

Lisa had left Helen with my mother. She felt that Helen made her father depressed and that it was not a good environment for Helen.

I cum in her mouth, she spits it back in my face, I zip my jeans, and leave. She stands there expecting to get hit. I carefully walk over the pimp, who is lying on the floor. I get the fear that he will reach out and grab my leg. I get in the car and drive. I cannot stop shaking. A police car follows me for a while and I feel sick with paranoia. I go to Luke's house. I need to think. I know that an ounce of weed will buy his cooperation.

Luke starts skinning up and I tell him to keep quite, and phone Lisa's father. He tells me that Lisa has left. Something has happened to Helen and she has gone to my mothers. He says that she was going to call me on my mobile. I feel in my jacket and my phone and wallet are missing.

I need to phone Lisa, but I need to get my thoughts straight, if the pimp, or the girl, has already answered the phone, then I am fucked.

I try and talk it through with Luke but he is already stoned. I phone Lisa and tell her that someone has stolen my phone. I realise that I should be asking about Helen. Lisa says that she has been taken to hospital, that she is having trouble breathing. I tell Lisa that I love her. I tell her that everything will be ok and that I will get there as soon as I can. Lisa just says ok.

I use Luke's phone to send a message to my mobile offering money for its return. I have no idea if Lisa has already called it.

Luke starts trying to tell me that self-preservation is completely justified, but he makes little sense. I try and think of Helen and Lisa but I just think of my entire life being pissed away. I try and reassure myself that the events will distract Lisa from suspicion, and cover for my agitated state. I tell myself that I do not want Lisa to find out because it will hurt her so much. I tell myself that I am a good husband but that I am just weak. I take Luke's joint. I will need some inspiration to convince myself that I am a good father.

I get in the car and put on Closer. I feel a good deal of self pity will be the new order.

Pablo Vision

Spring

a man was stabbed while I was
reading Robert Louis Stevenson
in a chair I’d painted yellow

then he sat down near my door

a crowd had gathered
around the bleeding man
whose face was very white
between his beard and hair

he sat on the curb, one arm
around a fire hydrant, the other
touching the blood running from a
meaty wound in his hairy belly

he looked at the blood,
his face stricken with
fierce and terrible wonder

the ambulance arrived and
two black men helped him
lie down on a plastic bed and
breath through a plastic mask

a woman I knew took my arm
and asked me for a cigarette
but I didn’t smoke so we went
to the corner for tobacco

she told me she’d rung the man’s
doorbell and he’d lurched out
into the street with clutching
fingers and crazy far-seeing eyes

and then he sat there on the curb
rocking and saying nothing
until the ambulance arrived and
the two black men hoisted him up

the man at the counter
asked for exact change

she didn’t have it so I
fished a few gray pennies
out of my derelict jeans
and the bitter metallic
smell of the pennies
was like the smell of
the blood in the street

I have a keen nose for blood

outside the shop the woman
lit her cigarette and said
“hey, let’s go for a drink”

“what about the cops?” I said,
“don’t they need to question you?”

“I don’t wanna get involved”

she pronounced the word involved
as if it represented some kind of
mysterious physical condition she
could see in her imagination, like
being prodded into a dark room, or
maybe something tactile and strange
like a shoehorn or an ear trumpet

it was not the word as I knew it,
it was the word as she knew it
with all her shortcomings built in

my neighbors were still
standing in the street like
people clustered together in a
room at a party, excited,
storytelling about the stabbing,
reveling in the sudden balmy
cessation of winter’s darkness

it was too late now for
Robert Louis Stevenson –-
I knew it and despaired

you are allotted only a very small
number of early spring afternoons
to sit in a yellow chair and read a
good book with the window open

inside the dank bar the usual daytime
drinkers were leaning on the
scarred wood, snorting, discussing
the stabbing which had already become
a murder because the victim had died
in the ambulance, plastic strapped
over his mouth, the clear soft
supple plastic tubes filled with his
last unused breaths from the machine

I ordered two strong drinks and we
drank them with incredible aplomb

Kevin Spaide

A Conversation About Angels

It’s the flashes that get me more than anything. I’ll just be doing something trivial and routine when I get a sudden flash of remembering. It’s usually nothing, no big revelation, no pivotal scene from our relationship, but it still haunts me a little.

Sometimes certain things remind me. My clothes do it. Everything I wear these days was either bought by her or bought with her. My favourite books do it as well. I’d leant most of them to her. I think about certain sections and lines she’d read back to me because she liked them so much. Sometimes in the morning I remember how it felt to wake up next to her, her warm feet gently rubbing up against mine, her hands slowly finding my chest as she embraced me from behind. I remember the little noises that she made when she was being affectionate, the little squeak that I found so sweet as she nuzzled into my shoulder.

These are the ones that I usually get. These are the most common. I don’t even need to think about them anymore, they’re almost sub-conscious.

But sometimes I get random flashes. Brief conversations we once had about something we watched on TV in bed at half two in the morning. Or her reaction to a song she’d heard on the radio. Or when we played a game when we couldn’t sleep where we’d take it in turns to ask each other anything we could think of. That kind of thing. Anything.

I had a random flash today as I was walking home. It was a conversation we’d once had about angels. I don’t know where it came from and I hadn’t thought about it since that day but I was thinking about it now.
We’d only been together properly for about a month but we’d been seeing each other for a lot longer. We already loved each other but she was just so scared of being hurt that she couldn’t let herself be with me. She constantly told me how afraid she was and how she knew for a fact that I’d cause her more pain than I ever could happiness.

She was talking about her ex-boyfriend from when she was fifteen. She said how she believed in angels as people who come into our lives and just make things better, even if they don’t realise it themselves. She said that she thought he was an angel.

I shouldn’t have said it but I was jealous. I loved her so much. I wanted to be her angel. It was pathetic but I asked if she thought I could be an angel. I was only half-joking. She looked disappointed in me and we started talking about something else.

The flashes make me feel like shit but that’s probably right.

Sometimes I even have flashes about the other girl. The one who I’d been so impressed with when she’d told me her story. The one that I didn’t believe when she told me I was still a good person as I lay in bed next to her.

These flashes are the most painful and the ones that I try my hardest to ignore.

Joe Roche

Truth and Beauty and Nothing About Shame

male, married three
times but still
no expert
in the ways
of woman
or flesh


hobbies include
beer, masturbation,
watching TV,
missing as much
work as possible
and not fixing
things around
the house
like the dripping
kitchen faucet
that has stained
the porcelain
inside the sink.


seeking a like
minded female
to spend the
silver and gold
years with, someone
who likes to
sit around and
do nothing, someone
who likes
sex without love
and there are
no restrictions
on the kind of
sex, all kinds
are welcome
from domination
and anal to
constant missionary.


money
is definitely an object.

David La Bounty

A Toast to Tony

It was a Tuesday, sometime in the afternoon. I was meant to be at work. Instead, I was sat in a Greasy Spoon, struggling to digest a Full English Breakfast. I was still drunk from the day before and my clothes reeked of cigarettes and this week’s alcohol. No vomit yet, but it was still early in the day for that.

My attention was taken from my beans when a 50 year old woman stormed into the café, her hair flapping somewhere behind her. She moved faster than I could comprehend. It was as if I was a cartoon who had just exploded into my 2-Dimensional world. She brushed past my table, knocking my sense of balance slightly and forcing my head to turn and see where she was going.

There was only one man sat in the corner behind me, with a colourless omelette sat in front of him. He didn’t look like he belonged in a Greasy Spoon. He wore a black jacket that would have reached down to his knees if he had been standing up, a polo shirt underneath and a well polished pair of shoes. His hair was neatly groomed into a point at the front and his face looked well moisturised. He was probably in his early 40’s.

Before even reaching the man’s table, the woman, who was dressed in a long purple jacket and high-heeled boots, addressed him. “What’s going on Tony?” she said, breathlessly, before taking a seat opposite him and sliding his omelette to the other side of the table.

After seeing that, I instinctively turned away. I felt they deserved some privacy, even if they had decided to air their dirty laundry in a Greasy Spoon.

Shortly after the woman sat down they both walked past my table, gliding supremely out the door as if they were levitating. I have no idea what the woman said to Tony, but when I turned around to look at his table I saw that his omelette had been left untouched at the other side of the table. As they exited onto the street they turned right and walked off briskly.

I had no idea what they had been talking about or where they were going. All I could gather from their appearance and the urgency with which they left was that they obviously cared for time and life. As I sat there, trying to stomach my Full English Breakfast, I became aware that time meant nothing to me and life meant very little. I hadn’t washed since I’d last worked, which was days ago. There would be no point in calling in sick anymore because there was probably no job left for me. Just another wasted opportunity.

On the way home I threw up my breakfast in someone’s front garden. It was winter and was already dark so fortunately no-one saw. I wiped the vomit from my mouth with my sleeve and headed for the nearest off-licence to buy some cider.

When I got home I drank a toast to Tony, whoever he is, before drinking myself to sleep, the only way I know how to sleep anymore.

Ben Ashwell

Letter Number Fifteen

I like mowing lawns. I can’t do it too early, because the noise would wake people up and make them mad, but if I time it right - around nine a.m. is perfect - people are already awake and it’s a good ‘start of the day’ sound for them to hear while they’re lying in bed, eyes open anyway. It’s a sound that gets them up and into the shower, and then they get to feel like the day is all ahead of them.

At nine a.m., the day stretches out before me like a perfect curve of beach against a cerulean blue sea. I have it all to come. The sky at that time, in high summer, is always cloudless, always the perfect roof over the things unfolding below.

I don’t look into houses anymore. There are windows that I get close up to, and sometimes the temptation almost makes me peer inside, but I catch it and put it away quick. I’ve learned my lesson there. It’s a scientific fact that you can alter an experiment by observation alone.

I focus on the grass: the feel of it under my shoes, it’s resistance against the blades.

Jennifer’s dress was as blue as a nine a.m. sky. Its straps were tied over her shoulders like ribbons on Birthday gifts. One of them fell off her shoulder when I stared at it, and I wondered if I had really done it with my mind or whether it was just coincidence. I tried it with the other strap, but it stayed put. But the first one, no matter how many times she slid her finger underneath and pulled it back into place, I could always manage to make it slip back down again.

I stared at the naked space it left on her shoulder. The freckles made their own constellations. She was the Universe. I am the moon: in the dark half the time, a satellite the rest, watching from the sidelines, never quite making up the distance between me and everyone else.

She couldn’t hear the mower. People who live near to the sea don’t hear the sound of it after a while, the same way those that live near railway lines soon get used to the cacophony of trains. But that’s not the reason she didn’t hear me. Jennifer didn’t hear me because she doesn’t hear anything. She never has. And so it didn’t matter that I had turned the mower off, and was just standing pretending to mow, all the while staring in at her through the gap in her curtains.

With the money I make from mowing lawns I am going to buy a horse. It will be an ex-racehorse, the kind they usually kill for glue because it can only run at fifty miles per hour now, instead of the hundred it used to. I will buy such a horse and we will become friends, and the horse will know it had a lucky escape, and will be eternally grateful for being allowed to live out its life, and for getting to breathe the air and eat the hay and run at whatever speed it wants.

Jennifer’s dress clung onto her for dear life. It wanted every nook and cranny, every curve, to be blue. I was in control of that one strap, though. I wanted it off her shoulder. I wanted the whole dress off her, slipped to the floor and her body to be just gold again.

My horse will have once won gold medals. It will know success, but see it for the sham it is. Each time it ran like the wind, when it felt its heart bursting out of its chest, after the cheers and the jubilation it still only got to eat hay, was still just a horse.

There was a boy in Jennifer’s room. I’d already made the strap fall again before I saw him, and then it was too late, by then he had got the idea for himself. He did it with his hands. He did it with the other strap, the one I couldn’t budge. He slipped it right down. I tried to undo what I’d done. I tried to make the strap go back to where it had been. But he was in the room and his fingers were stronger than my mind. They pulled at her dress the way my mind had tried to. His hands wanted the dress off, and so the dress slid down her body and made a sky on the floor. Jennifer stood there breathing. I stared at her feet, where the perfect day rested on her toes. Everything was upside-down.

I thought then that I’d been wrong to do the thing with the strap, that I had made all of this happen. Jennifer and the boy were completely silent. His hands were on her skin. His hands were in the places I’d wanted my own hands to be. Then I heard the sound, and I realised something was happening that I hadn’t understood at first. And then I knew it was a necessary thing that I had done.

In the space of her room, without words, without the mimicry of everyday, the boy was teaching her letters. He was beginning with O.

Emma Lannie

Poets Carnt Fight No More

this poem is smoking crack
with underage hookers in Minneapolis
this poem is on a motorcycle deathtrip
through the murdered backstreets of Panang
this poem was written on a beer stained napkin
at the bar of The Gold Room, Hollywood, 1999
this poem is mud wrestling Ted Hughes
and drunkenly boxing Arthur Cravan
this poem is ingesting peyote at a party
insulting the host’s wife
and making lewd comments by an exploding beer cooler
this poem slipped on a banana peel
and died of its injuries
this poem saw god
in your asshole
this poem is tongue-tied, dumb-jawed,
in a codeine haze
talking to Tom McCarthy (necronaught) in Soho
this poem has a mild kratom habit
this poem is carried on an optimistic autumn breeze
with the smell of fermenting summer garbage, 8:00am
this poem just got lucky
with one of Sylvia Plath’s poems
this poem shot Andy Warhol
this poem is in Tangiers smoking a hookah
with Shane MacGowan and Dickon Edwards
“none for me, I have asthma”
this poem is doodling in the big book
this poem is snorting cocaine with Marc Almond
this poem is in love with you,
a frozen moment, crossing the 59th street Bridge, 2002
this poem is pissing in a cup
in Homerton Drug Dependency Unit
this poem is discussing poetry with Dennis Cooper
this poem is shooting dope with Clarence Cooper Jr
this poem is contemplating suicide
at a frigid kitchen table
this poem is shy, in a Chelsea bedroom,
“you use alcohol as a crutch”
this poem was shat out into the toilets of the Intrepid Fox, circa 1996 this poem has bled over a La Rocka suit, L.A. circa 2000 this poem is longer
and harder
than your poem.

Tony O'Neill

Dream #60

I dreamt that Dan Fante came over from LA to stay and all I had to give him was bread and cheese. A large quiet girl was in the kitchen washing up. I took him for a drive and it was raining and he looked out of the window at the streets and houses and “This neighbourhood is really rough, huh?” and I said “No, this is where the middle classes live these days. This is nice for England.”

Ben Myers

Solar Flares Burn for You

Postcard of Frieda tacked to the wall
sat down is Diego, her hand on his shoulder

a commemoration of their wedding day
her hair entwined with bright desert flowers

on a Hessian mat the grand lady stands proud
I picked up the postcard in the ICA shop

spinning the stand, sat down was a face
smiling, white beard, sweet lulling voice

he asked me kindly if I knew who she was?
I answered yes and we spoke of Rivera

monumental murals, their blue walkway house
he said that he had a painting of hers

the one on the stand, Frieda in her bed
ex voto, deep ochre, skulls perched on far corners

I looked in his eyes, tranquillity shade
his soft wrinkled face held a history I knew

a masterful drummer, paralysed in the past
he wrote the tracks of a socialism lost

the death of the shipyards, political songs
music of beauty to match Frieda’s colours

I wanted to crouch by his chair, stroke his hair
place a kiss on his cheek, hold his delicate hands

and ask him to sing is it worth it, one line
but the moment had passed - he knew that I knew

who he was.

Adelle Stripe

The Birth of a Terrible Child

I was young once, naïve. Mentally and emotionally I was an infant, a terrible child, one who had savagely stunted his self.

We were on an island, in the South East Asia. I was nineteen at the time, maybe even twenty.
The island was small, quiet. It was night.
Outside our wooden bungalow the sea rolled onto the shore. We could hear it; the rhythmic rushing of water running up and down - its sound was soothing, it always was. My heart feels content when I’m near the sea. It always calms my soul. I can never feel anger by the sea, only peace.
A jungle was directly behind us; it was a thick jungle, so dense. I had never seen so many greens before - all shades imaginable. We were close to it, on its edge. We could hear it; the late night sounds of the jungle. At night the jungle was alive.
Inside our bungalow we were silent.
We sat opposite each other, naked, with our legs crossed. A mosquito net surrounded the bed. We were isolated. Alone. It was dark, except for a few candles around the room; their flames were alive; moving, dancing.
The opium hung heavy in our bodies. We were high, wonderfully high - sitting, as if on a cloud, drifting above the world, suspended.

She was then lying on her back.
Her body looked limp in the languid light. She was confident in her nakedness. There was never any embarrassment, only ease with her bared body, with the way she held herself. There were never any cracks in her self-confidence. She simply was, and that was it. Until I met this woman I was always frightened of my own body, afraid of another seeing it in full. After sex I would cover it, nervous of what they might say or see. It was not until I started to be with her that I could relax and feel some semblance of ease.

Her thighs slowly parted.
I looked down and saw the slow reveal of her sex. Her vagina was tight, compact. She had recently shaved it, leaving a single thin line. Her fingers drifted downwards, hovering along its edge, slowly swirling.
Her eyes were on my eyes; watching, waiting. Her eyes then fell away and drifted down to what lay between her legs - it was a silent command.
I sunk down on my front, snaking my body backwards as I did so. My hands hooked around her thighs, fingers holding hips.
Everything in my perception looked soft in the light. Dreamlike. It was a dream. My real dream. It felt as if nothing was real. As if all were manifesting and projecting from the depths of a vivid dream - a phantasmagoria of erotica, brilliant and blazing.
My tongue lightly licked her clitoris, exploring the delicate folds of her skin. I looked upwards, past her small pert breasts, to see her face – her eyes were now closed, relaxed; serene, like Buddha.
I wondered how she felt with the drawn out tease on her sex mingled with the opium washing gently within - opium, such a dream it seemed to me. Opium, with its waves of warmth. Opium, running ripples of wonderment through my soft and inexperienced soul.

After some time (though how much I could not gage, as there seemed as if there was no time) she rolled onto her stomach and told me to lick between the cheeks her bottom.
I had never done this before, but did not question.
I looked down at her bottom, at the way it was shaped; it was like a black woman’s; rounded, but so tight, curved outwards, but so firm; defined, magnificent.
My lips kissed along the contours of her buttocks. My hands gradually caressed and then parted her buttocks. My mouth moved in between her buttocks, my tongue went out and slowly I licked around the rim, slowly in a circular motion, slowly with pleasure, slowly with newfound joy.

It all seemed to go on for so long, like an eternity - infinite, with no beginning or end. I felt cocooned from the world, in a womb, in our womb, with nothing else but us.
There was no world right then. There was nothing - no society, no people, no government, no rules, no hate, no hurt, no envy, no greed, no violence, no war. There was nothing - nothing but flesh and sensations and pleasure and touch and taste. There was nothing - nothing but us; cut off, alone, with our bodies abandoned to each other and each other only. There was nothing - nothing but us and the invisible hands of time evaporating out of our hands and our flesh. There was nothing – nothing but the closeness towards her inevitable departure, followed by mine - her back to Norway and myself back to England to face the same rain and the same streets and the same houses, back to the same claustrophobia, to the same small southern town that I had fled from hoping to stall the death of my spirit.

Matthew Coleman

Pig Alley

At one time I was an apprentice Upholsterer. I worked in a tiny Victorian building halfway down Pig Alley. There were four of us and we each wore leather aprons that contained a variety of specialised tools. We also had a high-pressured staple gun each, which was connected to a high-pressure generator.

Being the apprentice I was put in a corner next to the generator. Often I would sneaks look at the generator out of the corner of my eye and wonder what would happen if it blew up. Instant death, I ruminated, but I never told anyone of my concerns, for fear of ridicule. The generator generated a good deal of noise, and because of the noise I always had to get people to repeat what they said, until I began to think I was deaf.

Sometimes we had staple gun wars. Being the apprentice my gun had the least amount of power. The others could fire round after round of high-pressured staples, while mine could only splutter out a few staples at a time. So during the wars I was at an obvious disadvantage. The others would gang up on me, but I was young and nimble, and able to get a few well-timed shots in of my own.

It was three days before I discovered that a woman worked upstairs, alone. No one had bothered to mention that she existed. Upstairs was really just a loft in the roof, with sloping sides. The woman sat behind a big old sewing machine. She looked to have been there forever. Scraps of material littered the floor, hiding her dainty feet, which pressed the pedals of the machine. The machine made a whirring noise. It was gloomy up there, no natural light, just a single low-wattage bulb, glowing dimly.

Opposite the cottage was a barn-like structure. The barn had two floors. The ground floor was crammed with lots of old furniture, some of which had been there for decades. The older furniture was covered in thick layers of dust. Sometimes I would blow away the dust and a golden leg would be revealed, or a patch of bright, beautiful colour.

But upstairs was an even greater wonder. It contained the foam room. I loved the foam room; it was wall-to-wall foam, all different sizes, shapes, and colours. About once or twice a day I’d be asked to fetch a certain type and thickness of foam from the foam room. I would dive into the foam, wrap myself up inside the springy sheets, and caress the sponge. And there I would lie, safely ensconced, until the cry went up from across the road,

‘Where’s my foam?’

Most of my days were spent stripping settees and armchairs, pulling staples from worn-out furniture, thousands of staples, a never-ending supply of staples needing to be pulled out. After a few weeks I began to dream of staples at night, millions of staples marching off to battle against millions of other staples, in the great staple world war of death. And one time I even shot myself with a volley of staples to the stomach. The other upholsterers said nobody had ever done that before, it was a first, and for a short time I felt unique. I showed my friends the wound in the pub, four dots, not much of a wound, but a unique wound. Everybody laughed.

Being the only apprentice I also had to make the tea and get the lunches. I didn’t mind because it got me out of the gloomy cottage, and sometimes into the sun. I would eye up the girls in the tanning saloon on the sly. Most of them had orange faces, but given the chance I would’ve poled each and every one of them. However, dressed in my funny leather apron, and with bits of foam and staples hanging from my hair and clothes, I always passed by unnoticed.

Another job was button production. I liked this job. I cut out tiny squares of material and then covered each square around a metal disc. Then I inserted the disc into a punch machine, and with a swift twist of the handle, out would pop a button. I made new buttons every week. Despite making thousands of buttons I always liked the look of a new button, perfectly formed, like a conker or a kingfisher.

Then there were deliveries, another chance to get away from the ever-present threat of an exploding generator. We rarely got tips, but if we did it was from the poorer people. The rich never tipped and always appeared annoyed, but that’s just the way of the world. We also had contracts with luxury London hotels. This meant a drive into town. I enjoyed the drive into town. I could watch the people going about their business and wonder where were they going and why they were in such a rush. And then there were the sites, the river Thames, Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, the houses of parliament, and other landmarks.

Each hotel had a tradesmen’s entrance situated at the rear of the building. We always entered through the tradesman’s entrance. Often I observed the rich hotel guests. Mostly they looked bored, aimless, senses dulled by comfort. As I moved furniture around the hotel I was amazed to see toilet attendants and cloakroom assistants, and the food delivered to the loading bay made my mind boggle. Live lobsters and crayfish and boxes and boxes of champagne. For a while I thought the rich lived off nothing but lobster and champagne.

One week I had to work outside. It was mid-winter and very cold. I had to clean the legs of five hundred chairs from a banquet room of the Dorchester hotel. It needed a special chemical to clean the legs that could not be used in a confined space. My hands got very cold. Every now and then one of the other upholsterers peered through a window and laughed at me.

It was while I was cleaning the endless legs and freezing to death that I saw a plane flying high in the sky. I swore that one day I would be on a plane just like that, flying to some exotic location far, far, away, never to return. I was paid each week in cash. For some reason the boss always paid me in five pound notes. Despite the fivers my wage was very small, well below the minimum wage. Every Monday I was broke again.

After nearly two years I decided to quit the upholstery trade. I’d found another job, which paid better, not much better, but enough to make me want to leave Pig Alley. When I told the boss he appeared disappointed. He didn’t want to lose me, he said. I had a moment of weakness then and asked if he could match the salary of my new job. It was only a few pounds extra, but the boss shook his head and didn’t look me in the eye.

After that I walked out of Pig Alley and never once looked back, and although I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to embark on a series of great adventures, which would change my life forever.

Joe Ridgwell

Augusta

Lady Augusta stands at her work station, the stained oak table her dearly beloved departed on, and squints at the stinking mess in front of her. Her apron is smeared viscous red and syrupy yellow and her huge breasts fight each other for space beneath it. Earwigs scuttle over slug trails and woodlice congregate in damp corners. Her fat, red fingers poke at ingredients, peel skin, dip into steaming bowls and needle at feathers and bones with a dexterity barely expected of such digits. Forgotten things fall from the table, butterfly wings, egg shells, tiny eyeballs, nail clippings, fish scales, the occasional snake skin that floats to the floor like a discarded stocking. In wooden cages birds cheep and squawk, pulling out their own feathers in disgust. Beside a small heap of brittle spider legs a cleaver gleams. The sound of a bell ringing draws Augusta’s attention to the door and as it sweeps open a man steps hesitantly inside, a felt hat in his hands wrung like a sopping handkerchief.

“Too early,” the woman bellows and the man visibly shrinks at the noise, if not the stench, emitted from that mouth. He backs up till he is standing against the wall and can back up no further.

“Wait.” She yells. And he does.

A scrunched up baby watches him from a hammock nailed to the wall. Its fingers clutch at something in the air, a moth that flutters to and fro. Its nose is caked in snot and its mouth is a purple pucker. A piglet runs past, over the man’s feet, curly tail bouncing. It is followed by a red-haired boy, arms outstretched, his feet barely able to keep up. The pair disappear beyond a thread-bare curtain.

With obstreperous fists Augusta plucks a petrified chicken from the confines of a wooden cage with much scrabbling and writhing and black and white shit daubed on her hands. But deftly she takes a wing in each and snaps them; lifts each yellow leg and breaks it like a twig.

The man against the wall twitches. The chicken lies still on the table, eyes open, its body rising and falling with every breath. Occasionally it lets out a throaty squawk until, with an almighty heft of the cleaver, the woman separates its head from its body. A stream of blood shoots out in an arc and fills half a glass with scarlet. She throws the scrawny chicken body over her left shoulder, perhaps for luck, and it lands on top of a pile of fowl corpses, all in varying degrees of decay, from the fresh and still-twitching at the top to the sopping putrefaction at the bottom. To the half-filled glass she adds a little of this and a little of that before stirring it with her finger and then sucking it clean.

One last ingredient. This is the part he finds the most revolting. She unfastens her apron, unbuttons the top of her dress and coaxes out one gigantic breast. It is veined like Stilton and the red nipple bulges with sores. As she squeezes it gently a good stream of yellowy milk fills the glass to the top and she hands it over to the man before forcing the tumescence back into her dress.

“Drink up,” she says almost maternally. And he does.

“Same time next week,” he says in a phlegmy whisper, before throwing his money down on the table and heading for the door.

Lady Augusta nods, lifts her skirt and tucks the notes into the crease where her stocking cuts into the flesh.

Rachel Kendall

Everything is Miniature

Everything is miniature. Everything is about 1/50th of how big it should be. Your face is the size of a marble. My hand, touching your face, is the size of a breadcrumb. Your mouth, opening and saying something, is the size of an eyelash. My mouth, opening and saying something else, is the size of an eyelash. We are miniature. We are sitting in a room (bathtub), watching a TV (golfball), under a sheet (handkerchief).

‘How big do you think my heart would be,’ I ask you, ‘if I could take it out of my body and look at it?’

‘I think it would be about the size of a fist,’ you say.

I take my heart out of my body and look at it. It is the size of a new 5p. It is beating and no longer attached to the rest of my body. It looks stupid. It looks like something dropped on the floor and picked up again and blown on.

This isn’t possible, I think. Why is nothing happening? Why are we sitting here watching TV? Whose fault is this?

Your face is sad. It’s confused-looking. There are things we’re not saying, that we probably should be saying; sad, confused things; things like two hospitalized people on drips, attempting to play table tennis. The hospitalised people take it in turns to serve and never get a rally going. They wander around the table tennis room in slow motion, awkwardly searching for balls under chairs, getting their drips tangled in the curtains. The things needed to be said are hurtful, maybe, if you take them a certain way. They are things best said with all the lights and the TV turned off. But instead I’m wasting time, acting like a twat and taking my heart out of my body and looking at it, showing off, hoping you will look at it instead of the TV, hoping you will nod at it or something. What am I expecting from you? Is it me that’s making all the mistakes, and not even realising?

I put my heart back in my body.

I don’t say anything. You don’t say anything, either.

I look at your shoelace-sized leg and need to go to the toilet.

Chris Killen

Untitled

Making Rodins with the duvet
The pale length of you
Unfurled like rope, binding me to the bed
Being my girl
I was your glove, wrist deep, a red pulse.
Hand in hand, the perfect dark of your kiss,
You found me abandoned in night-time doorways.
You stuttered - I am stuttering, interrupting
The bleak texture of a policeman’s overcoat opening old wounds
and an elegant wilt, leaning against a wall.
You were my girl, never man enough for me.

Heidi James

Perspective

She said that it might put things in perspective, but I wasn’t really sure how lying on the floor under a blanket was going to help there.

“Things look different when you’re lying on the floor under a blanket.” Said her text, well, I’m pretty sure that they do.

“Are you alright?” I texted back.

The strength of this break up had floored her. Literally. Imagine being in that much emotional pain that after the shock and the alcohol had worn off, the nicotine levels dropped back to normal, the sobs that had followed, racking her body; all this had passed until she lay down on the floor, pulled a blanket over her self and started sending texts. The second step in sending out communication fronds.

Her first step had been to pour it out on the internet message board. She had written about crying so hard and then feeling numb and then noticing that she had scratched her arms, big red marks down her arm, but still not feeling anything. She hadn’t scratched them in a self-harm way, just that she’d been holding herself in her own arms in the absence of anyone else to do it for her. And then in that way that when you are upset and someone holds you, you cry harder, and they grip harder and hold you and you cry some more, and deeper. And she was gripping herself, holding herself and crying and then realising that there was only her to hold herself from now on and the poignancy of this made her cry even harder, and it was then she noticed the scratches on her arms.

And so this is how it was that she found herself on the floor of her front room texting me. Well, ok, I texted her first when I read her post, but she seemed like she needed some kind of response, and I couldn’t resist. But she responded, and how she responded, the raw honesty of her emotion shocked me.

She had spent the beginning of her relationship with him lying on the floor; I remember her writing about it. This was before ‘us’ of course, this was when she had just met him and we had never met, and I doubt she even knew my screen name let alone my real one. But I had read her words and they were more than just words on a screen to me. I’d seen her photo as well.

I remember her describing how her feelings for him had so floored her that she spent whole nights when she couldn’t be with him lying on her back in the middle of her front room floor, high on red wine, smoking cigarettes and listening to his music. So it seemed almost apt that at the end of it she found herself floored by it all again.

The fact that it was the same floor that I fucked her on when they had broken up the first time probably never crossed her mind.

But then the piteousness of her post and the fact that she was so bereft pulled away any lasting malignancy I may have felt towards her. That and the thought that I might get to fuck her again spurred me on to greater textual platitudes; I offered to come round.

Still under her blanket, at least in my mind, she responded suddenly back to her cold, blank little texts of the end of our affair: No, she was fine; her friends were on their way round with food, wine and cigarettes. But Thank You. And one kiss. I knew what one kiss in any mode of textual conversation with her meant.

However, the thought of her sobbing on the floor under a blanket, vulnerable and slightly drunk was enough to give me a boner and sufficient material to keep me going over the next few weeks until something more substantial came along.

Lisa Payne

The Silence of Things

It's the silence of things

That surrounds me when

I sit beneath my favourite

Tree, the leaves unmoved,

The squirrels elsewhere.

You gave me a toothpick

Once to help pick away

The dead flesh from

Between my teeth and for

Some reason I kept it –I still have it in a shoebox

Under my bed with the

Other things you gave me:

A ticket stub from a play

I hated; the cork from a

Bottle of cheap fizzy wine;

Your handwritten quote

From Stevie Smith about

Forward-looking; your

Expensive turquoise earrings

(Although you never gave

These to me); the tennis

Ball we scribbled on in

Black marker pen; the

Disgusting mosaic vase I

Never gave you for your

Birthday that year; the final

Letter you ever wrote to me.

Lee Rourke

An Empty Black Briefcase

"Katie. Katie!"

Katie Lillywhite took a few minutes to remember where she was. Her mouth was dry, those goodnight bongs she shared with Casper leaving her throat feeling like sandpaper.

"Katie! Get up! I've found something."

Her boyfriend Casper was in Katie's parents' bedroom, liquorice skinned spliff dangling from his lips and depositing ash on the salmon pink carpet. He'd barley slept due to the amount of flake he'd done the night before, the weed far from taking the edge off it and instead sending him into discoverer mode, hunting around Katie's parents house for objects of wonder. He'd also masturbated so much he was walking funny. Katie never really went in for coke-sex and she's usually awful in the mornings but this was worth waking her up for – a secret, locked away in a black briefcase.

"Fucking hell. Katie!"

Casper stomped back out of her parents' room, flinching slightly at his raw cock brushing against his boxers, and stood in the doorway of Katie's room. He stopped a moment to watch her scramble for some sense of what the fuck was going on. Her hair, mousy and lank hung over her face, her half-closed eyes looking like something out of that cartoon.

Katie slowly made sense of the shape in the doorway and smiled through dry lips.

"Hiya baby… come back to bed."

She was horny. Casper couldn't believe the irony of it. But he didn't want to give away the fact he'd so disgracefully incapacitated himself. And besides, he was genuinely intrigued as to what was in the case.

"Later babes. You've got to come see what I've found."

He left her room and Katie sat up in bed. She was naked and looked down at herself. Yeah – she was looking fucking good. A strict diet of narcotics for the last year had done wonders for her figure – all of her mates had put weight on in the student bars but not Katie.

That's how she met Casper. Drugs. She'd bumped into him at the freshers' ball. It was obvious he was just another third year on the hunt for a fresher but compared to the other idiots at the ball, he was dignified. Everyone there just reminded her of home but with more money and posher accents. They were all pissed, leaning heavily into each other's ears, kissing sloppily with hands up skirts and thighs in crotches. A few of the boys were even throwing their weight around to work out their place in the pecking order. She looked at them. Christ.

It was depressing, that freshers' ball. As the whole of freshers' week had been – giddy little girls and boys running round like they were on camp or something. Spare me, she thought. In sixth form she couldn't wait to escape, meet interesting people who didn't just do what everyone around here did. And what happened? She got to university and they were even worse – much worse, because they actually believed they were smart with it.

Then she got the whiff. Somebody had a spliff on the go outside. Not the usual artificial sweetness of the local hash, or the brain fumigating funk of the skunk that she would catch wafting from the nursery at night between lung crunching coughing bouts. This smelled exotic, odd, and when she saw the boy smoking it she fell in love.

"Casper. You want?"

"What is it?"

"Nepalese. Not the best but not bad."

She took the spilff from him with a look that said she knew what he was talking about and took a toke. It was the first time she'd ever tried it. Her hatred of those she found herself placed with had her eschew all of their petty delights – alcopops, weed, whiz, pills, coke, acid, glue, aerosols. But this was different. This was Nepalese, and the boy who had passed it to her had on skinny jeans, buckled boots, and a military jacket over his skinny white chest. He also had the face of an angel.

"Good."

"Not bad."

"Well you know my name, what's yours?"

*

"Katie! For God's sake Katie you fucking sloth, you have to see this."

At last she managed to make it out of bed. In just one night she had ruined the room her mother kept so tidy for her infrequent returns from university. Ash trays, pipes, barely touched take-aways, liquorice skins, baggies all littered the floor; clothes hanging from every conceivable part of the room except inside the fitted wardrobes. She had moved out of Halls of Residence and in with Casper now so she could stay at uni through the holidays as well as term-time. Her parents were nice enough, it's just that Casper and his friends were so much more. They watched films from the French new wave, read Burroughs, Bukowski, and Brautigan, they were everything she'd imagined about university. They smoked Nepalese, snorted Bolivian, drank absinthe, took methamphetamine, MDMA paste, mushrooms, and ketamine. They sometimes even smoked crack for the slum chic of it. How could mum and dad compete?

But they were at her mum and dad's. She was back on the Avenue. Her mother and father had gone away for their summer holiday and Casper thought it would be just so ironic for the two of them to go on holiday themselves – on holiday in her parents' house.

She wasn't sure, but Casper's friends laughed and hit the arms of their chairs and talked about how it would so excellent, and such a subversive thing to do, that she began to laugh with them. And so she found herself here, at home, her boyfriend rifling through her parent's private things.

Katie just hoped he hadn't found their credit cards. One of Casper's friends had stolen his own parents' credit cards and they all went shopping with them one Saturday. They laughed as they tried on outlandishly expensive labels, bought fine wines and cheeses from the food halls of the department stores, and then just took out the maximum cash advance possible to buy shitloads of gear. The boy's parents were so rich, they didn't even notice the money had gone. But her mum and dad would notice, and they'd be disappointed.

"What are you doing Casper? Let's go back to bed."

Casper ran his fingers over the brass combination locks of the briefcase. At first, Katie had been another naïve fresher to fall into his trap. Not only that, but a fresher who went to comprehensive school – she was sure to be the filthiest fuck he'd ever had. But that first night, after the freshers' ball, they didn't even have sex. She was a virgin. He couldn't believe it, where she was from he was sure she'd be one of the few members of her peer group without a pregnancy or abortion to their name, but there she was, this delicate little thing that more than anything needed protecting. He realised he liked the idea of that. Of protecting her, of opening her eyes slowly to his world, of educating her, liberating her. In fact, he fell in love with the idea of that and after a while realised he'd probably fallen in love with her too.

"Babes. Isn't you father a gasman?"

It was true. Her father was an engineer. For British Gas. He would fix people's boilers, make sure they weren't getting poisoned by carbon monoxide. He'd even been to Casper's place to check out the appliances there. God only knows what his instruments picked up.

"Yeah. He is, now come back to bed. It's cold."

Casper turned to her, the glint of a six year old in his eyes.

"Well why does he have a briefcase?"

Katie knew exactly why her father had a briefcase. Exactly what was in it. Why shouldn't he have a briefcase? He was a gasman, not a fucking tramp.

"I don't know. Important papers or something I guess."

"Come on Katie! It's locked. I've tried all the combinations I can think of – your birthday, the lot, but I can't get in."

She knew the combination for the locks. She'd looked through everything in there. But she didn't want Casper to know.

"Well then. Let's leave it. It's obvious he doesn't want anyone going in there."

Casper stood. The briefcase clutched in his hands like a shield.

"Which is why we've got to get in!"

He began to jabber on as Katie's eyes glazed over. Theories of secret government agents, wads of cash from a bank robbery, bonds, jewels, gold all washed over her.

"They might be perverts Katie! They might have all kinds of torturous sex-toys and illegal porn in here. Right now they could be holidaying at an S&M club, being buggered by Germans in leather!"

This had gone far enough. Katie snatched the briefcase from Casper. She was angry. Angry at all the assumptions he had ever made about her, about her family, the way he almost treated coming to stay at her parents house like some kind of safari, spotting the strange beasts that sat on street corners on their bikes and watching the natives strut around almost naked. He had no idea who she was, who her family were. How dare he say those things. They were good people. She was a good person.

"You want to know what's in there? Well have a look."

She ran up the combination – 151289, her birthday. The idiot had even got that wrong. She snapped back the clasps and then emptied the contents of the briefcase on the floor before storming out and downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. On the way down the stairs she spotted an envelope on the hall floor. It was addressed to her.

Casper stood and wondered what to do. Should he follow her? Should he apologise? No. He'd done nothing wrong – he was just having a bit of fun and to ignore the contents of the briefcase would just mean she had won.

Picking up the papers from the floor, he sat on the bed. Then he read the first document.He leafed through, his eyes drawing what felt like the last moisture left in his body to his tear ducts and eventually allowing a fat droplet to fall onto the papers he held shaking in his hand. Katie's adoption papers.

Slowly, Casper gathered the papers together and put them in a neat pile on the bed. He didn't want to go downstairs and face Katie but he knew he had to. He knew he had to because he loved her and wanted to tell her how much he loved her. Tell her he was sorry for being such a fuck up.

He sat up from the bed and walked downstairs. He could hear Katie crying and wiped his own tears away so he could be strong for her. He followed the sobs, the huge asphyxiating sobs that you shake with as a child, down the hall and toward the living room. Opening the door to the living room, he found Katie, head in hands and shoulders shaking. He sat beside her and put a hand on each of her shoulders.

"It's alright" he said, "It's alright."

Then he saw the letter open on the coffee table.

Matthew David Scott

Men Dying

I saw a man
DYING
in A&E this morning.
he was laying naked
surrounded
by witnesses wrapping red bandages.
he was making horrible noises
no hair on his irrelevant balls.

I don’t remember
the actual words used
but they were horrible noises too.

I saw a man
DYING
in CTC this afternoon.
he lay in a brand new ward
bubble wraps barely off his bed.
he is
just covered
– we’re losing one,
a nurse told me
she was serious and sad.

I ESCAPE
to a ward upstairs
where a girl feeds me chocolate
in her staff room.
there was life
in her eyes and calves.

later,
on the phone
horrible reality creeps in like DEATH.
I am talking to a voice
hiding in a caravan.
I’m in my pants in my bed.

I don’t remember
exactly what we said
but we made horrible noises too.

no plump nurse
watched my heart fade
irreparably clogged with whiskey
and unshed tears.

Ford Dagenham

Soapbox

Rose-Angela stands outside Sainsbury’s gripping the scuffed handles of a pushchair, in it carrier bags full of paper. Near the wheel a pigeon pecks at the idea of a crumb on the paving stones. An old man struggles out the store with four shopping bags, the elbows and knees of boxes and cans stretching the plastic. He tries not to stare at Rose-Angela, at the pushchair she’s rocking back and forth, but fails. Like a stiff breeze worrying a pile of leaves, she can feel anxiety move inside her. In this place Rose-Angela will expose them, just as she did last week at the Sainsbury’s in Acton. Just as she will continue to do until she’s visited every last store on the list, ironically the Sainsbury’s at Wormwood Scrubs. And yet in the process of exposing them, she will lose a little bit more of herself.

Inside, the bright lights create a false day; a quietless day in a suburban supermarket where all that’s happening is Monday, Clapham, chatter, destiny. She walks with the pushchair through the middle of the store. It feels like she’s inside a huge animal, the beep of barcode scanners the pulsing of its heart. Scenes from each aisle flicker past her on either side, frames from an old reel of film – a woman dying of choice in front of the deodorant section; a guy trailing after his wife, a yawn turning his head into a mouth; a little girl fishing in a pool of spilt sauce with the end of her scarf.

Rose-Angela holds her breath down the length of the Baby Care aisle and heads for the checkouts. After a moment traipsing back and forth between the tills, she chooses the longest aisle in the middle of the store. She should have picked up a basket, she realises. Pimples of sweat are breaking out on her top lip. People are staring at her, staring at the large woman in the clothes that have let themselves go: the faded jeans, black anorak and scuffed shoes.

Rose-Angela takes off her cap like she’s peeling back the ring pull from a can of soup. Her brown hair is flecked with grey, lank, in need of a wash. She fumbles for the two pieces of cardboard in the big bag hanging off the pushchair. They are identical, the word PAEDOPHILE typed in bold and the photograph of a man; a snapshot of the past that for Rose-Angela will always be the present. She lets out a deep breath; the same air she last inhaled in the courtroom a month ago when the case was thrown out through lack of evidence.

“This… this man,” she shouts, voice crackling like the start of an old vinyl record. “This… ANIMAL raped and murdered my little girl, Shelly.”

People look at their shoes, rummage in their trolleys, handbags, pockets; look anywhere but at the woman standing there in a glass coffin.

“This disgusting PAEDOPHILE lives and works in London. Yes, in fact he works in Sainsbury’s. Can you believe that?” She looks at the people not listening to her, their faces turning in on themselves with the not-listening. “I think you should know this. I think you should know that the place where you buy your Heinz beans and your wholemeal bread and your… your organic fucking muesli employs paedophiles!!”

Rose-Angela is standing on the ceiling, shouting down at the people in the store, angry words that leave scars in the air, angry words with nightmares inside them. People move away from the woman performing open heart surgery on herself at the check-out. They cough, roll their eyes, laugh nervously.

“You think that’s funny, do you? You think it’s funny that Sainsbury’s employs a fucking child molester?” She waves the signs in their faces. “You’d be happy to bring your kids in here, would you, with a fucking kiddie fiddler like that on the check-out?”
Her face is red, fringe sticking to her forehead, nostrils flared like a flogged dog; a flogged dog that has caught its own tail and is eating itself to death. Rose-Angela swallows, looks around her, realising she is telling the wrong truths, wrong because no-one wants to hear them.

She feels the security guard coming towards her before she sees him. Tremors in the floor, squeak-soled shoes running at the speed of light-footedness. When he finally takes hold of her it feels like she’s sneaked up on herself. He is gathering her up, this tall lean man in the blue uniform. Gathering up the different parts of her: elbow, arm, shoulder, and turning her into another woman altogether; a woman older, one that can’t walk… or will not walk. She pushes him away, peeling off imaginary sleeves to rid herself of the feel of him on her arms.

The security guard ushers her towards the doors. At the entrance Rose-Angela stops and turns round, shouting over his shoulder, “Sainsbury’s employs PAEDOPHILES, remember that!” She picks up the plastic bags from the pushchair and hugs them to her chest. There are six of them, orange, different sizes, all stuffed with paper. They are tied together with string in the shape of a small child.

“Sainsbury’s supports paedophilia. You fucking shop here, then so do you, simple as that!”

And then, balancing the child on her hip, Rose-Angela turns and pushes the empty pushchair out onto Clapham High Street.

Melissa Mann

Teeth

Dress it up as a map of experience
These teeth are a cubist ruin
Graveyard crockery
Each one malevolently wired and primed.
Each a substation of the nervous system.

I lost the foremost
beakfirst into the shingle
baiting the aired bull nerve
through salt-air and cervezas
in the three insomniac days before the flight.

The second was shattered
by a juggernaut left
delivered by a Saracen bouncer, Beil Feirste
four-square on the mandible
and as I was dragged from the floor
a sense of disbelief, hell admiration
that he had the sheer audacity
to bob and weave
before laying me out.

The third was cracked and chipped
on a chicken's limb
in a bar off Wenceslas Square
a piece of marble
held up to 40 volts
curiosity and disgust
for the only piece of your skeleton
you'll have the good luck
and misfortune to see.

Soon they'll be gone
ground to dust
and what then?
The soft mouth,
the half-mad cackle
of the gumpling,
spitting the pips.
Consider this an obituary,
32 chances blown.

Darran Anderson

A Crazy Van Goghish Kid

once when i was 15

five of us wanted to

see one of our

favorite bands

who was playing

the arena that night

but none of us

had money

we decided to go

and rob

the tickets

from the scalpers

we brought an

unmarked .22 just

in case

we pulled up

to the curb and

a big man approached

the car

he said he had the

5 tickets we needed

at $20 a pop

the plan was that

the driver was going

to have the car

in drive with his

foot on the brake

so we could jet off

when the time came

i was head thief

in the passenger seat

who would grab the

tickets from the big hand

and quickly roll up

the window as we sped away

i had a small dagger

in the left hand

at my side

the big scalper asked

if we wanted them

i said i wanted to see

them

he said he didn’t

want to let them

go

he let me put my right

hand on them while

he still held them

he repeated again

that he didnt want to

let go of them

i grabbed them hard

and ripped them from

his large fingers

and yelled like i was saying

a line in a movie:

"well you're gonna have

to!"

my friend was right on cue

and hit the gas

i screamed, "yes!"

as i rolled up the window

we made it through a yellow light

the guy had 5 friends leaning on

the chainlink fence

who jumped in a car and tried

to chase us

but hit the red traffic signal

we parked in burger king

and walked into the arena

during the show i was in the

hot sweaty general admission crowd

close to the stage

and my earring got caught

on someone's jacket and ripped

my earlobe in two

i remember the blood on

my denim jacket

i kept jumping up in the air

to get a fresh breath

blood on my shoulder

a crazy van goghish kid

with a torn ear who went to

any length to hear the music.

Rob Plath

Meat

The world tumbles into focus. It's the smell that hits me first; hot, carnivorous breath mingling with piss and wood chip. At least this should be quick. Low bass growls, something from a childhood nightmare. If you go down to the woods today you're in for a big surprise. Disappointingly my life isn't flashing before my eyes. All I can think of is whether or not I'm covered by my life insurance.

*
Jam is staring down at a tangled mass of severed cartilage and crushed bone and exposed organs. His boss tumbles in, a fat man with a red, angry face, yelling.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no" (takes a breath) "No! Leave Boz to do the cutting, I need you out front. Now!"

Jam looks over at Boz, a misshapen lump of a man, who shrugs at Jam.

"And for god's sake talk to the customers" (shouting again) "Make them feel welcome, give them a reason to come back. They don't come in for a mumbling imbecile to hand them their chops. Now go, quick, quick!"

Jam had never wanted to be a butcher. It wasn't what you would call a vocation. His Mother had told him in no uncertain terms to get a job or get out, put his name forward for the apprenticeship and gratefully accepted his placement for him. He had been working there for thirteen weeks and two days on the day of the accident. Thirteen weeks and two days of cutting and chopping and carving, of hosing down walls and sweeping blood into the gutter, of scraping congealed flesh from under his fingernails and never being entirely free of that smell, of raw meat and
disinfectant. Of prime cut death. Working there had almost turned him vegetarian. Anyway, he'd stopped eating sausages after the first week.

So on that day, the day of the accident, Jam was not entirely unhappy to get away from the blood and mess out back and serve customers in the gleaming sterility of the shop, its sparkling stainless steel surfaces offering no allusion to the horror that lay only a room away. It wasn't like Boz was much of a conversationalist.

The bell rings out and in comes Mrs Parsley, an overweight, morose woman with a blue rinse and a wispy moustache, a friend of Jam's mother.

"Young James", she twitters by way of a greeting, "and how are we today?"

"We're very well, Mrs Parsley. What can I get you today?"

"Let. Me. See." She stoops her bulk down to examine the cabinet at eye level, an old cat greedily eyeing a goldfish bowl. "A half dozen of your pork and leek and a quarter pound of ham please James. And how's your mother?"

"Fine" says Jam, wrapping the sausages. "She's fine. We're down to the last slice of ham here, I'll cut some fresh." Turns his back on her and switches on the machine. Secures the leg joint. "A quarter pound you said?" Turns back to see Mrs Parsley pale, jaw slack.

"James", she is trying to say, but the word gets caught somewhere and so she points instead. Jam looks down to see the tip of his finger, nail still attached, sitting on top of the slices of ham. Fresh, warm, thick blood is trickling down his wrist to his elbow and beginning to pool on the floor. Jam drops the ham.

"Hang on a second", he's managing to say calmly and holding his hand tight to his chest he sticks his head around the door at the back "Boz, would you mind coming to serve a minute please. I think I might need to go to hospital."

Leaving casualty four hours later, a large bandage wrapped around his entire hand, already beginning to unravel and grey around the edges. Pausing for a breath as he gets out of the sliding doors at the front, a man in a cheap blue grey suit, slicked hair, a clip board, approaches him.

"Injured at work?" and before Jam can nod a crisp business card is thrust towards his unbandaged hand. Jam glances down; the motto 'No Win, No Fee' embossed on the front of the card. "Not now, I'm a sensitive guy, I know what it's like, wait till you get home, till you're recovered, give me a call, you know it makes sense". Before Jam can say a word the man is gone, shaking the hand of the next person to walk through the sliding doors of the hospital exit.

His mother is waiting for him on the doorstep as he gets home "And what time do you call this? Worried sick I was. Sick." On and on and on she goes until Jam is so hopelessly lost in her moaning that the only thing left to do is go to bed. Stretched out on his bed with his bandaged hand slung awkwardly across the headboard he remembers the card. It can't hurt, he thinks.

*
Eight hundred quid he got that first time. Eight hundred English pounds for the tip of his little finger. It seemed a fair exchange. Jam never went back to the butcher's. Instead he used the money from his finger to put down two months rent on a bed-sit at the opposite end of town to his mother's and took a job at a local chip shop. It wasn't great work but he was just happy to be away from home.

A couple of months past and the rent was due again. He'd begun to hate his new job was just as much as his last one.

One quiet Monday evening Jam found himself standing watch over the deserted shop. He'd not served a customer for hours and he amused himself by dropping individual potatoes into the electric peeler, the rumbler the manager had called it, at the rear of the shop. He watched with detached amusement as the noisy machine chewed up the spuds and spewed out jagged, thick cut chips into the tray at the bottom. The smell of hot fat and boiling oil and vinegar was everywhere. Spilt salt grains crunched and slid under his boots. He bit his lip and watched the door for customers. He dropped another spud and then forced his hand into the machine.

*
Splashing deep red paint onto the walls of his new two-bedroom apartment, Jam tries not to look at the stumpy mess of his left hand. The last few months have been good for Jam, its important he remembers that. He recites a few of his favourite personal mantras he's learnt from endless hours of daytime TV. You get what you give. Speculate to accumulate. No pain, no gain. He gets on with his painting, breathing deep through his nose, chewing on the side of his tongue.

Lately Jam has been seeing accidents waiting to happen everywhere he goes. An exposed bit of scaffold; just the right height for a nasty gash on the head or even a gauged eye. A cracked paving stone; nicely positioned to trip and crack a knee cap or skull. Exposed wiring, loose tiles, serrated edges. A few weeks earlier he'd let a bus run over his foot, crushing four toes. The hospital said he'd probably always walk with a limp. He was waiting on that claim to pay for a new fitted kitchen.

As the fresh paint begins to dry and crack, Jam sits flicking the channels on his new plasma screen television while picking at dried paint residue and discharge from his mutilated hand. He closes his eyes and opens them an hour later. He gets up and goes to the refrigerator and takes out some lamb to defrost for tea. He sits back down. He picks at his hand again and watches some more television. He doesn't know what time it is when he stops flicking the channels half way through When Animals Go Wild. He doesn't move while he watches a man explain how he survived a shark attack and needed one hundred and twenty four stitches. He's not thinking anything while a disfigured man explains how he was mauled by a grizzly bear. When the programme finishes he goes back to the kitchen, puts the lamb in the fridge and orders a pizza. He watches some more television.

*
When he enters City Zoo two days later Jam is wondering whether Bears hunt sheep in the wild. Oh well, meat's meat he thinks as he feels the lamb inside his sock and under the sole of his shoe mince and squelch between his mangled toes. As he limps towards a sign, ignoring pelicans, ignoring penguins, he is slightly disappointed to discover that the zoo houses only brown, not grizzly, bears. Oh well, a bear's a bear he thinks. Ignoring limas, ignoring lamas, he is marginally surprised and pleased to find the bear enclosure deserted and easily accessible. As he slides under the barrier and dangles his leg over the edge of the pit he almost smiles, noticing a large, faded sign: Attention! Please DO NOT feed the bears. As his shoe slips off and falls into the pen with a soft splat, gaining the attention of a flash of matted brown fur, revealing the clumped blood and flesh stuck to his sock. As he feels it mince and squelch between his toes, as he thinks a bear's a bear, as he thinks meat's meat. As he feels himself losing his grip, slipping down the embankment, toppling into the pit, his life refusing to flash before his eyes, hearing his ankle snap under the force of the fall. At least this should be quick he thinks, as the world tumbles into focus.

Lee Mess

Lay This Burden Down

The Autumn sun is weak,
but on my face nonetheless.
In Christ Church Garden
volunteers are sweeping the leaves,
binning cans,
and tidying the beds.
‘Look at this,’
a boiler suited woman says
as she leans on her broom
and reaches down
and lifts a syringe.
‘No matter
how many
they scatter here,
they never grow.’

Tim Wells

At Dawn

a false light in morning
as we skulk our way home
under the drug, waves of
murder radiating from the
steep morning sky balanced
like a door on its hinges

what are we doing here at
dawn, walking past houses
we lived in five years ago,
me and you, what are we
doing here under the heavy
lacerated palm of this drug?

the bus station is deserted
and a black cat crosses the
street like we are invisible

then the sky slams shut in the
wind, though there is no wind,
and the taxis blare forth on
the early road to the airport

and we stutter our way home
under the drug, a violence
of purple energy in the sky
like a washing machine full
of blood-stained bedsheets

Kevin Spaide

Veronica

There is a gravestone
right in the middle of the walkway in camberwell
old cemetery
that takes up at least
half a ton of marble
and is fifteen foot in width


if you walk past the house
where they filmed
the joe orton play
and pretend not to think
about beryl reid
in a see through negligee
sucking on a lolly
"speak words of love to me mr.sloane"


up a few yards you will see this grave
it is the resting place
of veronica
i think she was a gyspy
because gypsies have the best graves
i have ever seen
and this one has four broken heart
stone carvings, and two
stone cushions
where you, dear pagan
can kneel and pray to your many gods
and for the soul
of veronica
the great bangled woman
whose picture graces the
carving of mary, with
christ in her arms,
bleeding in rock
the giant sized rosary
a noose around his neck


and there are prayer beads
that hang from the tree
overhead, a dirty old yew
that maybe she owns too
and a horseshoe, nailed into the bark
and a bottle of polish for
when the family come visit
and a crystal ball
with the magi inside and baby
jesus in a manger
a statue of st.augustine
hangs over the glass


and from every single
family member is a
message to veronica
the woman in lace
with big hooped earrings
whose face is on every corner
of the grave


next to her
is another gypsy grave
ostentatious and shiny
he was young
must have died
in an accident
or something like that
from the flowers that
hang fresh
on the incense and candles
on his black and gold headstone


this family have gone one better
there is a granite seat
where you too can sit
and think about him
and the person he was
and what he would be doing now
and how much money this grave
must have cost
as the family live in their
immaculate caravan


but at least he can rest
here
they are allowed at the very least
to bury their dead
in the same places
where we bury ours
but as for the living
they keep on moving
because nobody wants a gypsy
living in their backyard.

Adelle Stripe

Blood Apples

I buy apples from a man whose hands are covered in blood. An Algerian butcher down on the high street.
Knock-down Friday night specials, I get them cheap with some carrots thrown in for free. It’s getting dark.
This is how the story begins.
The blood on his apron and on his hands is bright red, so red it is almost unreal. Startlingly so. Hammer horror blood. It is under his finger nails like a forensic scientist’s wet dream. His wife must really love him to accept all that blood each night.
There are no shower facilities down here.
I look for a wedding ring but his hands have disappeared out of sight.
Outside, the high street is at a noisy and cantankerous standstill, rows and rows of dirty hunks of metal untidily angled bumper to bumper.
“What’s happening along here, boss?” he says, quite excitedly. “The buses aint moving.”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “I just saw a police helicopter circulating with the searchlight.”
“Fucking London! Something every day, man.”
I buy apples from a man whose hands are covered in blood…
The intended story – his story, which begins here with dried blood under the fingernails - doesn’t go much further than this, for the helicopter suddenly roars into sight, its imposing light sweeping the high street, illuminating the grime and dazzling everyone. We both stop what we’re doing (apples, blood, thoughts etc) and gaze up at it as if were a great Phoenix rising from the hot pits where the urban neglected live.
Its light it straight and true. It knows where it is going. And what it is looking for.
Then, suddenly it dips behind a building and it is gone, chasing its target through the warren of streets.
Armed robbery probably. Maybe a murder. Some shit.
These apples look good though. Colourful and crunchy.
The man with the blood on his hands gives an exaggerated tut of Algerian exasperation and takes his carving knife to a shoulder of pork, hacking at it with deft precision. More blood flecks decorate his once-white coat. I think of Pollock while somewhere in a darkened room his wife thinks of Russell Crowe and sighs like a winter sunset over a munitions factory.
“Be safe, boss,” he says. “Don’t take the bus.”
I buy apples from a man whose hands are covered in blood…
Each bite defies God; another day surviving in the Garden of Eden.
That’s it.

Ben Myers

The Vision from Within

Inside
my mind
I find a whole
wide
world
of erotica –
One where
ANYTHING
goes.

One where fantasies
fornicate into dreamlike
reality.

One where images of
flesh fluctuate
in the lowlight
that I cast.


I float down
the corridor
of desire and,
from time to time,
I stop
and watch
through the keyholes
and spy holes -
I see any scene
that I want,
I see secrets
slide into
erotic actuality.

My phallus rises with
the heat.

It is then that
I become obsessed
with the images
that I've retained from
Arthur Schnitzel's
Dream Story,
as well as with the images in
Stanley Kubrick's
Eyes Wide Shut.

I can see the
sumptuous surroundings
and the masked nakedness.

I can see myself hiding behind
a delicate mask of my
own making.

I can see the sights around me and
I tremble at the
visions of orgies and of
copulating couples,
perfect in their shape and form.

I float through it all,
watching,
my lust alive,
my loins on fire.

I see a woman -
one woman
who encompasses all
women.

A Goddess.

Slowly we come together,
with arms outstretched.

We are both naked and
the moment our lips touch
I am already inside of her -
Her cunt is celestial.

There is a sudden violent burst
from Beethoven.
(It sounds as it is
Missa Solemnis)
Our bodies spasm
in synch and
we fuck as one
within the motions
of the music.

After the onslaught
of orgasm
I feel empty,
so horrifically empty.

I open my eyes and I am
alone.

I am lying
upon a bed of soft
satin.

There is a painting on the wall,
it is of a sunset
by Turner.

The bed feels
as if it is an island,
one that is vast,
cut off.

I feel abandoned,
it is a feeling of horror
and there
is nothing within me
but a sadness
that sheds itself in one
solitary tear.

I see this in a
mirror,
in my mirror.

I look around my room
and quickly I drown in its
quietude.

Matthew Coleman

Cool Hand Luke

Sometime during a trip through South-East Asia a travelling companion and I arrived in a pretty little stopover in Southern Thailand, a quaint coastal town situated at the mouth of the San Song River, where the river flows into the Andaman Sea. On arrival our plan was to head to some nearby island resorts, but because the town was so pretty we decided to stay the night.
Spread out beyond the balcony of the cheap riverside guesthouse was an outdoor food market. I watched people buying and eating food and then caught a waft of hot chilli, fish sauce and other mouth-watering aromas and was instantly hungry. Tired and weary from a long and arduous bus journey my travelling companion announced he was going to lie down for a bit, while I, encouraged by such sweet aromas, decided to get something to eat.
I walked over to the market and stood in front of a food stall and viewed what was on offer. Like most take away establishments there was plenty of fried stuff and because we were on the coast, plenty of fish and seafood. I felt incredibly hungry and decided to order several items, but when I tried to order in English I was met with a look of total incomprehension by a fat cook running the stall. After that I tried some basic Thai, but because of my complete ineptness this tactic proved even less successful.
While I struggled to communicate the fat cook flipped something over in a frying pan, wiped a greasy hand across the front of his dirty apron, and did nothing. I looked around for help and saw a pretty girl watching with interest from a tour operators shop across the road. Acting on impulse I indicated for the girl to come over and help, but she just poked her tongue out and turned her back on me. Cheeky I thought, and acting on another impulse I strode over to the shop in a purposeful manner. When I got there the girl and I eyeballed each other,
“Wha you wan?” she asked defensively.
What did I want, I wasn’t sure, but the girl possessed beautiful eyes, eyes like the dead of night, and a sudden association of thoughts made me think of the song Spanish Eyes, but the girl wasn’t Spanish and Thai eyes didn’t sound as good. Then I forgot about the song,
“I wondered if you could help me order some food. That guy over there doesn’t speak any English and I don’t speak Thai.”
The girl smiled a pretty smile, a smile that revealed a row of brilliant white teeth, and instantly I wanted to extract those teeth and exhibit them in a museum for perfect examples.
“I busy,” she said, with her nose in the air. Then she tapped a pencil on the table and pretended to work.
She wasn’t busy because the shop was empty, but for some reason it felt like she was issuing a challenge and money seemed the only way to meet it head on. There were three other girls in the shop. I turned to them, flashed a wad of cash, and asked if they could help.
The sight of money excited the other girls and they began arguing amongst themselves,
I split the money into three separate wads, “Listen, why don’t you all help?”
The girls smiled like children, but then the other girl suddenly barked at them in Thai, and they stopped smiling. Evidently this girl was the leader.
“What?” I asked
The leader flashed me another dazzling smile, “They busy also,” she said sweetly.
I rubbed my chin, said nothing, and returned to the food stall. ‘Fuck her,’ I thought. The fat man saw me coming and smiled broadly like an old friend. This time I decided to be more assertive with my ordering. I pointed at several items on the menu and then pointed at one of the tables in front of the stall. Then I rubbed my stomach, made munching noises with my mouth, and flashed my wad. This time the man got the idea. He rubbed his hands together, puffed up his chest, and commenced rushing around his stall in an efficient and purposeful manner.
As the cook began chucking ingredients into his huge frying pan I brought a large Singha beer and sat at a little plastic table and waited for my dinner. One by one the cook began placing dishes on the table until there were seventeen dishes in front of me. To complement the food he added five tiny saucers filled with spices and dips, and also a huge dispenser of chillies.
I looked at all the food. There was far more than what I’d ordered, or thought I’d ordered, but I remained silent and formed my eyes into slits, viewing the situation as a tremendous challenge. Then I paid for the meal, gave a tip, and prepared to eat. The cook smiled and said something in Thai, which I took to mean bon appetite, but it could just as easily have meant, ‘I hope you choke to death you stupid farang fuck!”
Unruffled, I pulled a serviette from a plastic dispenser and tucked it into the neck of my tee shirt with a certain flourish. Then I looked to the Tour operator’s across the road. The three younger girls were standing in the doorway watching my every move.
I motioned for the girls to come over and they smiled and looked back to their leader. The leader stopped what she was doing and glared at me. Then she slapped her hand on the desk in a resigned manner and waved the three girls away. Immediately they ran over,
“You eat all?” said one, gesturing to the multitude of dishes.
I pulled my best nonchalant face, “Yep, unless you want to help.”
The girls glanced at each other knowingly and then said in unison, “No, we wan you eat, we think no possible.”
I wondered what I was getting myself into and glanced over my shoulder. There was the cook flipping something over in his giant frying pan. He looked at me and then at the food and in my mind the look said, ‘Now I’ve gone to the trouble of cooking all that shit, you better eat it all you little English prick.’ Fuck, I thought, this is now a challenge I can’t back down from, “Not possible a?” I told the girls with a brave face, “Well check this out!”
Then I got started. By the time I was on the fifth dish a small crowd had gathered around my table. I acknowledged the onlookers with a confident wave and soldiered on. After the ninth dish I ordered another large Singha beer and replaced the by now food-splattered serviette with a fresh one. Then I winked at the girls and gave the cook the thumbs up.
From here on in it became a battle of wills and I began to feel like Paul Newman in the boiled egg eating scene from the film Cool-Hand Luke. I went into tunnel vision mode and stuffed the food into my mouth and took large swigs of beer. After the twelfth dish my belly began to swell and tighten, and then it felt like the food was rising from my stomach to my neck, and beyond. After the fourteenth dish I became like a madman. My head felt like it was going to burst, my eyes bulged out, the sweat poured off me in torrents, and my extended belly made me look pregnant. I called out for more beer, I called out for more chilli, I said brilliant things the girls didn’t understand, but continued to stuff food down my gullet.
Finally, when the seventeenth dish disappeared down the same orifice as the other sixteen, I emitted the world’s biggest burp and collapsed headfirst onto the table. I could hear yells of delight, cheering, and an extended round of applause all around me. Then I raised my head and blinked my eyes like I was dazed.
The girls fussed about my person, and although I didn’t feel too bad, I decided to milk the situation. As the crowd melted back into the shadows I pointed feebly to the guesthouse and indicated they help me to my room. The three girls fussed around me even more and lifted my bloated frame and assisted me across the road.
As we passed the tour operator’s I shrugged the girls from me and addressed their leader,
“Excuse me,” I called out in a horse voice.
The leader looked up, “Ya,”
“Tomorrow, I need tickets for the ferry to the islands.”
The leader’s eyes suddenly brightened, “You wan now? You best price me!”
I shook my head, “No, no need, I’ll buy them when I come down for breakfast,” I replied somewhat melodramatically.
At the mention of the word breakfast all four of the girls looked amazed; “Tomorrow, you eat breakfast?” They chirped in unison.
“Of course, full English.”
The girls were confused, “Full English? Wha that?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow,” I replied, and then walked to my guesthouse just like how old Bing Crosby must have walked up the hill on that final round of golf and said, ‘That was a good game,’ before collapsing and dying of a massive heart attack. Only difference was that unlike old Bing I didn’t die of massive heart attack, but instead bumped into my still sleepy travelling companion emerging from our room like Rip Van Winkle,
“What happened to you? You look fucked,” he yawned.
I smiled weakly and pointed to the bed, “Nothing, I’m just tired after eating.”
My travelling companion reacted like he had just remembered something important, “Is there anywhere good to eat in town?” He asked.
Despite feeling like my stomach was about to explode, a mischievous thought entered my mind and immediately dominated the other thoughts that resided there, the reasonable, boring, sensible type of thoughts,
“Yeah, just tell the girls at the tour operator’s you want exactly what I had, from exactly the same place.”
My travelling companion thanked me and I felt a pang of guilt, but it didn’t last long. Then I collapsed onto the bed, rubbed my huge stomach, and stared at a ceiling fan revolving above my head. Outside I could hear voices,
“You wan same as your friend, really?”
“Yeah.”

Joe Ridgwell

First Trip

Was thinking of ‘my first trip away from home’ about going to New York, but that’s not right. Or about leaving and going to California; but that wasn’t it either. My first trip away from home was when I was two. My mother was getting divorced and she took us kids, me and my sister, left Georgia and went back home to Sweden. This was in the mid-fifties so we took the boat of course, no airliner service for poor folk.

I remember on the upper deck it was sunny, brilliant sunshine, and breezy. My sister’s (she was four) flat white hat with the red ribbon blew off and we could see it down there in the blue water, in the wake of the ship. I went up to this great big guy (when I was two, every adult was gigantic to me). Anyway, this guy is all decked out in shiny white uniform with gold buttons and hat and insignia. I imagine he’s the captain. I tell him about the hat in the water, and ask if he can turn the boat around so we can go get it? I don’t believe he did though.

That’s all I remember. I have little recollection of Sweden, grandparents, whatever. Grandpa’s ( Moorfaar) name is Ernst, he’s a bus driver I guess. I vaguely remember a little fat guy in some kind of tacky half-uniform, dark sweater on over his bus driver pants,maybe he took us for a ride on his bus onetime. And mother’s young brother Klas-Joren has a motorcycle, noisy; and a kayak in the cold water. That was scary to me, not something I wanted to do. But that’s about it. There are pictures of me and my sister in a park, playground equipment. Don’t remember that. I vaguely remember there were other kids our age we played with. Neighbour kids I suppose. Moormoor and Moorfaar have a dog, Pookie-Mooken. It’s a great big Boxer type, I think, with the cut, stilted ears.

I guess we were gone for months. I mean, you don’t boat over to Sweden, and stay a week or two, not like flying to Paris for a week. But time isn’t real at that age anyway, not ‘til you start counting to Christmas or birthdays and such. I Don’t remember coming home but the story is that the boat comes to New York pier and Dad is there to meet us and we’re not there. Mom had slipped by him somehow. Imagine that, waiting these months and months wondering if you’d ever see wife and kids again. Then they come back and you go to pick them up, wait hope-filled hours and agonizing hours on the pier and then finally everybody’s gone and they’re not there.

And Dad’s panicky but not that time I guess, because he remembers that Mom had stayed at the YWCA before she’d left, waiting on ticketing and what not. So he goes to the Y and presto, there we are. Apparently Mom’s got those awful decisions running through her head, like she knows she has the return ticket...but is she going to take the kids or leave them or what?

I’m thinking there was a bus or train that’s pitch black inside except for small blinking overhead corridor type lights. And Mom’s going back to Sweden and we’re going home with Dad. It seems that you don’t really emote about things like that when you’re two or three. I had my third birthday in Sweden.

So, when we get back to Georgia, to my Grandparents house - they have this room that appears to be filled with toys. Sorta make up for not having a mother, I suppose, but I never really thought about it at the time. I did notice that the shiny silver and red tricycle had one of those push to ring type bells on the handlebars. That’s cool. And of all things, these folks have a tiny little toy Pomeranian dog. I don’t remember it from before, been gone awhile. So I say to my sister, in Swedish, since we don’t speak English anymore “these people have a pet squirrel in their house.” Later Dad tells me I told him that unlike the pom, Pookie-Mooken was a stura hundt, a big strong dog.

Mikael Covey

Patrick Kavanagh Remembered

At Brendan Behan's funeral in Glasnevin cemetery, his friend Mattie O'Neill concluded his oration by saying, 'We shall never see his like again'. As he finished, Patrick Kavanagh was heard to mutter, 'Thank God for small mercies'.

This was the nature of the relationship between the two giants of Irish literature of that time; they hated each other. Not even the death of one of the protagonists was going to change that fact. It probably would have been the same if Patrick had died first, although, of the two, he was the one more likely to hold a grudge.

Patrick bore grudges; that was his nature. And if he didn't like you, he told you so in no uncertain terms. Maybe it was because of his upbringing in the back-biting, small-farmer environment of Inniskeen where, if we are to believe his writings, neighbors skulked about behind the hedges and ditches, spying on each other and running each other down, jealous of any financial or social progress the other was perceived to have made. And where, if they saw a neighbor on his way to pay a visit, they were more likely to take the kettle off the fire than put it on. Or maybe it was the way the Dublin literati turned its back on him.

Whatever the reason, when you fell out with Paddy, you stayed fell out - as actor TP McKenna's wife. Mai, found out to her cost. They had put him up for several weeks, and were worried when he showed no signs of leaving, so she approached him, only to be told that she 'was an ignorant woman'. Paddy never spoke to her again.

Patrick hated Behan for a number of reasons.

One - he was the kind of 'buck-leppin'' Irishman that he detested. He regarded him as a phony, and once told him that the only journey he had ever made was from 'a national phony to an international one'.

Two - his involvement in Patrick's libel case against the Leader newspaper, which made him look like a liar and a fool.

Three - the fearful abuse that Behan hurled at him. It was a regular sight around the literary watering holes of Dublin, a splenetic Behan following a drunken Kavanagh, taunting and humiliating him.

Patrick Kavanagh was born at Mucker, Inniskeen, County Monaghan, on the 21st October 1904, where his father was a small farmer and cobbler. He received only Primary school education, and left school at thirteen. It was expected he would carry on the family tradition of shoe-making and farming - but Paddy had other ideas. Ever since the day he had heard a girl in school reciting Clarence Mangan's words 'I walked entranced/through a land of Morn' he knew he wanted to be a poet.

Yet, he resisted the lure of Dublin for more than twenty years, content to 'plough his stony grey soil of Monaghan', publishing the occasional poem in a newspaper or magazine. In 1930 he undertook his 'long walk' to Dublin, to test the water as it were. It was 'in the slack period – after the crops were sown', and it took him three days. He begged food and money along the way, and after he met AE (George Russell) and some of the other great writers of the period, his conversion was complete. Oddly enough, the one Irish writer he didn't think much of was WB Yeats. 'I never cared much for Mr Yeets', he sneeringly remarked years later.

However, if he thought Dublin was going to embrace him with open arms he was sadly mistaken, as he discovered when he moved there permanently in 1939. To the literati of Dublin he was the quintessential bogman, the culchie who had no right being able to read never mind write poetry, and he had to endure the daily spite of that unmannerly band. He didn't know it then, but he had no hope of becoming accepted. This rejection made him bitter, so he did the only thing he knew; he attacked everyone in sight, friend and foe alike, ensuring his certain banishment to the literary deserts.

PK was an intellectual in tramp's clothing, not the country bumpkin and bogman that he was usually portrayed as. The writer, Anthony Cronin, a disciple who became a life-long friend, said of him; 'If you stood in a doorway with Patrick, sheltering out of the rain for a few minutes, you came away knowing you had been in the presence of genius'. Anthony couldn't stand the way Brendan Behan treated Paddy, following him around, taunting him with shouts of 'you Monaghan wanker' or 'the fucker from Mucker'.

Behan was twenty years, younger, physically in his prime, and Paddy was afraid of him, so much so, that according to Cronin, 'you would see his big frame shake and he would become agitated whenever Brendan appeared on the horizon…' Cronin refused to talk to Behan because of this behavior, and this led to their famous fist-fight outside McDaid's pub one night. Cronin more than held his own, which caused Paddy to remark 'I always knew the bacon would be no match for the slicer'.

What kind of man was Paddy? He always pleaded the 'poor mouth', but given his background, that was understandable. Although it is debatable if he was as poverty-stricken as he usually made out. There was always a few pounds coming in from his journalism and the sale of poems to various magazines; from John McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, who bankrolled him for most of his life; from his younger brother, Peter, who supported him during the years he worked as a teacher in Dublin; from John Ryan, the founder of Envoy magazine; and from many more friends and acquaintances. And throughout his life he harbored the belief that he would one day wed a wealthy (young) woman, who would keep him in the manner he aspired to.

The great love of his life was Hilda Moriarty, a beautiful medical student. He pursued her relentlessly, and his poem 'On Raglan Road' is dedicated to her.

"On Raglan Road of an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I would one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed along the enchanted way
And I said let grief be a falling leaf at the dawning of the day."

Hilda was middle-class, the daughter of a wealthy Kerry doctor, and twenty years younger than Patrick; he was a penniless poet, uncouth and unwashed, a small farmer, who had forsaken the plough for the pen. She never reciprocated his love, and apart from going to the occasional film or having a cup of coffee with him, never gave him any hope.

Nevertheless, he pursued a one-sided courtship, following her around the city, and even once to her home in Dingle. It ended when she met Donagh O'Malley, a flamboyant engineer from Limerick. They subsequently married and Donagh went on to become Minister for Education in the Fianna Fail Government.

To get a true picture of Patrick, the reader could do worse than read his novel Tarry Flynn. Tarry is the nearest to Patrick we shall ever get. The poet, the dreamer, the fool of the book, ridiculed by his neighbors and both encouraged and belittled by his strong-willed mother, could be Patrick himself, and the raw material for his long poem The Great Hunger runs like a river through it.

Some people have described The Great Hunger as the poor man's The Wasteland. But in my opinion it is a much better poem than T S Elliot's offering, not least being that it is comprehensible. John Betjeman saw it for the masterpiece that it is, and was instrumental in getting it published. Pity then that it should see the light of day in the narrow-minded, priest-ridden Ireland of De Valera, where it was unjustly derided as 'a filthy poem'. It was never officially banned, but the effect was just the same.

Patrick's love of the land shines like a beacon through Tarry Flynn, yet his despair at the ball-breaking futility of it all is apparent long before he takes his departure (again, shades of Patrick himself) in the final pages. Tarry was echoing what Patrick himself was to say in real life 'the countryside is a great place to write about but it's terrible place to live in'.

But Patrick could be funny as well as depressing, and there is a hilarious incident in the book where, after a fist-fight with his neighbors, Tarry fears court action, and, spying on them one night, discovers they are 'rehearsing ' the court case in the farmhouse kitchen.
Solicitor: You're a bit of a poet, Flynn, I believe? (laughter)
Petey: (attempting to mimic Tarry) There's a great beauty in stones and weeds
(more laughter)
Solicitor: Your mother bought a farm for you to keep you from the lunatic asylum,
is that the case?
Petey: I admit she bought a farm
Solicitor: What's known as grabbing a farm, isn't that so?
(Petey scratches his head in imitation of Tarry)
'Isn't he the lousy bastard?' Commented the real Tarry.

John Kilfeather said of him; 'Mr Patrick Kavanagh was a highly cultured mind with a lot of innocence in it. Not since Burns has a great figure emerged from the people who has left such a faithful record of what it is to be of the people and yet apart from them. His life was not the least of his works of art'.

Patrick died on the 30th November 1967. His monument is a seat beside the Grand Canal, not far from the Australian Embassy in Dublin. The inscription reads;

O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb – a canal-bank seat for the passers-by.

Tom O'Brien

Truth and Reality Seldom Collide

when I was younger
I wanted to be Jim Morrison
then I grew embarrassed of that dream
then I wanted to be Kerouac
but now I would settle for anyone
other than what I am
unemployed, writing in old notebooks
avoiding the tax man at the door

Michael McCullough

Stand Up

Martin… Martin…
You’d like me to talk about Martin?
You and the world, yeah? You and the whole, wide world.
Martin’s always wanted to be a comedian. As long as I’ve known him. In our spare time, we played the clubs. The two of us doing the rounds. At first it was just small slots or open mic nights. Anywhere you could try and hold onto a stage. Happy times yet hard? Oh yeah. You could say that.
And then he made it to Thursday night compere.
Martin doesn’t tell jokes. He never did. He’s not that kind of comic.
“I’m more interested in moods,” he once said to me. In fact, he’d probably say that to you even now, if you could get close enough to ask. “I set a scene, create a vibe; off the wall riffs and right angled connections.”
There were times when I used to speak to Martin and was convinced that he was making the whole thing up as he went along.
Here’s one of Martin’s sign offs: “I swear to God, I’m so unlucky. If I was in a bummer’s conga line, I’d be the bloke at the front.”
You think that’s funny? Me? I don’t know. I’m really not sure. He’s been using that one right from the word go.
Martin claims that his favourite comics are Lenny Bruce, Peter Cook, Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks.
Personally, I suspect that Martin claims this purely because he believes that he is expected to claim it.
Martin and I used to talk about comedy. Back when we still saw each other, of course. Actually, talk is an incorrect appraisal of the time spent. We discussed. Late at night, when the party was winding down and any paired off couples already slunk away, we’d find each other by the scotch bottle and reiterate our opinions. For Martin and myself, comedy was an unquestionably serious concern.
“Comedy is the picture of Dorian Gray,” Martin believed. “Comedy is our hideous truth. We can dress ourselves up. We can stay as pretty in person as we could ever wish to be. Comedy is the recognition of that hidden, buried actuality. The greed, the worry, the betrayal, the crime… every shitty effort that has ever been engaged.”
And I thought that comedy was just about making people laugh. You know. Slapstick. Set ups. Good, old fashioned jokes.
Hey – would you like to hear one?
Guess who I bumped into at the opticians today?
Everyone.
I told that at my very first gig. It raised a titter. Martin was on after me. His ten minute routine detailed with some candour a surreal Brokeback Mountain style affair between George Bush and Tony Blair. Furtive looks across the war room, the UN watching appalled from afar, Cherie’s realisation that the fishing rods had never been tarnished through use…
“Jesus, all that Blair/Bush shit,” I told him afterwards, “it’s shooting fish in a barrel, isn’t it?”
“Satire,” Martin said.
“But it’s obvious,” I argued.
“I’m making a point,” he countered.
He looked so earnest. Too earnest. Verging on self-righteous. If he had been making a point, I wasn’t entirely sure he knew what that point was himself. Meanwhile, front of house, half the room were shouting for him to come back on.
Anyway, the months crept forwards. Thursday night compere turned into Saturday night compere turned into this contract with one of the comedy club chains. Martin traversed the highs and lows of this isle amidst the gigging circuit – a star acutely rising. Now he gets mentions in the weekend Guardian. You’ve seen them, yes? Some spotter from Radio 4 went to watch him play last week in Bristol. Apparently there’s talk of a promoter subsidising an Edinburgh run.
But am I jealous?
Of course I, as I blag the odd support slot and doggedly hold onto the day job, as I sit in dingy basement dressing rooms no larger than a dog kennel with an audience of hen parties awaiting me, as I hear someone reverentially acknowledge Martin’s mastery of technique and appreciation of heritage, am going to say “no”.
But if you want the truth about Martin, then here it is.
Martin’s a fraud. Martin’s a fool. Martin’s some kind of comedic dilettante. Martin - if you discard the alleged commentary, if you peer through the paper thin polemic - represents nothing other than the simplest vanguard of the basest humour. It’s all gays and gypos and chavs and faeces. Where’s the laughs? I think. Where’s the jokes? Where, for the love of Christ, is the punchline?
And no, I do not believe myself to be bitter.
I simply look at Martin, at what’s happening to Martin -every audience in his thrall and each rung of the ladder successfully ascended – and, in the pit of my soul, just cannot bring myself to find it funny..

Mark Colbourne

Fake Baby Love

Eeh I can’t wait to get home and cuddle my little baby.
“Scuse me, come again?” Says my manager, we do a car share thing together.
Cuddle my baby.
“You’re 50 years old when did you have this baby?”
Oh no, not a real baby, well I think she’s real.
I call her a Pocahontas.
She’s a Native American baby, but I don’t let her wear that ethnic stuff.
Her skin feels lovely just like a real baby,
Weighs the same as a real baby.
“Does it wee, crap and sick like a real baby?” She asks.
Eeeh you are funny, of course she does, but I don’t mind.
Manager doesn’t believe me so I show her t’website where I bought her.
You can buy all sorts of babies, Madonna shoulda got one,
They’ve even got Cambodian babies and they come in different ages.
“So basically you’ve got a fake baby.”
Well I wouldn’t put it that way, my friend’s got five, all in moses baskets keeps them in her spare bedroom.
I’m off round her’s tomorrow night.
But tonight I’m going to sit down with a box of roses.
Cup of tea, Coro and cuddle my baby.
“You’ve children of your own though?”
Of course luv, but they’ve all grown up.
They: “Mother, you’re fucking sad.”
But I don’t care I’ve got my little Pocahontas to cuddle and she loves me.
I found my daughter’s old pram…
“You dare,”says manager lady.
I thought me and my friend Sheila, we could. ..
“Finish that sentence and you can forget our car share.”

Elizia Volkmann

Whiskey then Wine

He held the glass of whiskey like an object to be disposed of. The glass was long and narrow and he pinched the glass, his fingers overlapping his thumb and he sat there poised with the glass in his hand.

The liquid was the colour of old photographs, that dipped in tea colour, and it tasted like bitter nostalgia to him. It burned its way down his throat and there it lined his stomach, churning it and making him irritable.

He made frequent glances to the doorway, as though expectant of company. He hadn’t arranged to meet anyone, but he wore his best pair of shoes, they smelt of stiff leather; he reeked of newness and he sat there on the edge of his stool, his frame leaning in so close to the table that his chest pressed tightly against its wooden top. He stretched himself far forwards as though involved in a discreet conversation, and he played with the spent ends of cigarettes, biding his time with small and irrelevant acts.

His eyes would follow the grain of the wood, and his fingernails would pick at the lacquered finish of the table top; names had been etched in and were bound only by shards of splintered wood. He followed the curves of the letters with his fingertips and he spelt out the names, he whispered the names softly, he sees her name and he whispers it aloud, it doesn’t sound the same anymore; it sounds vacant and hollow, it sounds like an echo.

The amber liquid sloshed its way up the length of the glass and eschewed its way into his mouth, the rim of the glass propped up by his nose. His surroundings now drenched in the amber of the whiskey, as he views the room through the bottom of his glass.

He drinks it all and the room regains its colour. He sits by the table and he waits, he sits and waits with no drink and no reason to be there. A barman begins to light the candles on each of the tables; the candles are wedged into the necks of wine bottles. The barman lights the candle by his table, he watches as the flame gently licks the air and he watches how it wavers at each little movement he makes.

Wax trickles down the stem of the candle and it sets before it reaches the neck of the bottle, the streams of wax running down the glass remind him of tears. He touches the wax and he rolls it, creating shapes; he presses it into the table and then flicks away the crummy mess. He looks like a bored child.

Another man sits alone at the next table; he has been there for some time. He pours himself another glass of wine from the bottle that rests before him, he has noticed the man sat on the table beside him and he has noticed he has been sat there alone for some time, alone and without a drink.

“Care to join me?” He asks.
No response is made, he blinks and his eyes stay shut for too long.
The man with the bottle of wine picks up his bottle and rests it by the other table. He fetches another glass from the bar and begins to pour the man a drink. He pushes it towards him.
“Good day?” He asks.
Again the man doesn’t say anything, his breathing becomes more pronounced but he says nothing. He hasn’t touched his drink. He hasn’t looked up.
The questioning man does not feel disheartened, he enjoys his wine and waits, he waits for the story of the man waiting for no company; he can sense his eagerness to speak.
He finally takes up his glass of wine and he sips at it to begin with, and then the deep red diminishes fast.
In answer to the man’s question, “Awful, my day was awful. I thank you for the wine.”
They order another bottle and then another, they are the last to leave the bar.

It is quiet outside, it is late and it is midweek, in a few hours time they will be getting ready for work. They walk to a park where they sit on a bench, they read the names etched on the bench and they imagine the people who own these names, and they all seem much more interesting and much happier than them. One of the men reaches into his pocket and pulls out his house-keys, he turns to the back of the bench and he writes his name, then passes the keys to the other man and he does the same. They wonder what people might imagine when they see their names.

They fall asleep underneath their jackets, their clothes smelling strongly of alcohol. The park is near the University and in the morning students pass by the two men, they are mistaken for tramps, but nothing is said directly to them, there is just a faint hum of unease.

A girl stands by a tree a few steps away from them, she takes her camera out of her bag and she repeatedly takes pictures of them. She looks at the two men earnestly; their jackets overlapping, the sleeves connected like holding hands. She looks at the two men and she sees them experiencing something she has always wanted. She is happy for them.

They carry on sleeping, oblivious to the eyes that are watching them.

Emily McPhillips

Love me with your Eyes Closed

She looked to me with jaded eyes.
Short, silky, moving hair: to left: to right.
She explains but I don't listen.
Lips: moving.
Gaze: lowered.
Ebbing.
Neck turns.
Eyes: close.
Eyes: open.
Eyes: close.
Close.
Close.
Yes, she loves me.
Close.
Close.
Eyes: open. She loves me not.
She looks to me with nothing in her eyes.
Cold.
Discrete.
Warmth: gone.
--What's wrong?
Sweat on her forehead dimmed by the shade.
I'm in the light.
We must change places.
She is not under the tree.
She is looking to the river.
--Isn't it beautiful?
Yes, it is.
She doesn't know she isn't smiling.
Breeze: violent.
Lips: chapped and bleeding.
--No, i'm fine. It's nothing. . .
Her eyes look softly to the river. . .
I'm standing in the shade, beside her, now.
The two sides of her face add up: perfectly: symmetrically.
Yes.
--We should go. . .
Yes, yes. We should go. . .

Brian Gonzalez