from Devadatta’s Poems
A star had appeared in the night sky,
it was long and pointed as an adder’s tooth.
The moon rose putrescent, bloody. All our
elephants had turned viridian-eyed, wild.
Dozens of snakes hissed as though a fierce
wind blew. Many children fell ill,
tottered on legs like blown-up bladders.
All we could do was summon the Brahmins,
watch as they poured ghee over the altars
and burnt our cattle in sacrifice. After a week
we had little left to offer, though we still
dug fields, hauled water, turned the loam.
We all felt Kapilavatthu was done for,
that not one of those Brahmins had the verses
to save us. We drank bitter herbs,
flailed our skin with twigs we bought
from the broom makers, cut our arms
with shards from the potters’ workshops.
We fingered crimson beads and performed
small dry ceremonies in the dirt. Before
that season finally turned, I’d often long
for Siddhattha, for the little tunes he could play
on his thin, twisted stems of grass.
Something about his notes, their fine weaving
through the dusk. When I listened, I thought
of our clay daub, mud brick and whitewashed
town as a grand place, one whose streets
you could walk down squaring your shoulders,
knowing that the gods supped at the flames
that burnt on our altars. I don’t know
what Siddhattha heard in the notes.
Perhaps he foresaw the rise of the rivers,
border conflicts in the west, heard the screams
of our women and children, saw the smoke
and the fires, saw Kapilavatthu overrun
with Brahmins carrying slaughtered oxen
and antelope aloft from all our fire hearths—
all that blood and dung,
all the vulture feathers in their topknots.
A disaster
Chris Edwards
Here, too, some ground has been cleared
by the square of its distance. He wasn’t specific,
but more or less conceded he had elaborated the mad
scheme that first gripped him as a student, the day he
sat down together on the sofa, fifty yards of absolute
darkness pocketing interjections as the years passed
and the stunlight flickered. He turned to Dalgliesh,
I mean Newton, and said: “What’s the matter?
What did she say?” No one answered, but the
crowd edged forward expectantly, having paid
in good faith for an admission. He said Grace
had the task of feeding the hens the details of her
physical presence, and that his own individual cells
had challenged the quantum flux to a duck race:
having found a way to go wayward faster,
he’d lost to his lucky stars — a disaster!
(‘A disaster’ borrows words and phrases from Timothy Ferris’s Coming of Age in the Milky Way and from P.D. James’s A Dalgliesh Trilogy.)
A quick drink at the bar
Dan Disney
Nothing mystical, it’s like ‘hey have an aspirin’
the crazy breeders uttering injunctions like painted blue jays.
When they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone
willy-nilly as divine accidents amid the particularity of things.
Inert as an absurdly large rule, they are
nothing mystical, like ‘hey have a complex insecurity’
categorical with basic speech, this awkward climate
of hierarchies confused with delight.
When they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone
and nobody enters the yes-no dualism of I-don’t-know … underfoot
the ground trickles with cats, trees, history
it’s nothing mystical, it’s like ‘hey have a programmatic soul’
they’re smiling back like boring paintings or a hands-on cure
rehearsing with ginger ale.
When they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone
casual as cut moonlight
and lonely as a surgical experience, pleasantly moist;
nothing mystical, it’s like ‘hey have an aspirin’
when they get to town nobody sleeps until they’re gone.
An Ordinary Evening in Newtown
Laurie Duggan
1
Camperdown’s for dogs,
Friday evening in the park off Church Street
carries a plank:
it’s like
La Grande Jatte
for Airedales
under the flight path
2
a square-faced guy
underpants protruding from his jeans
in the smoky atmosphere of the Court House
the word HOT, above the wood roof of the outside bar
(neon in daylight)
‘are you fuckin married or what!?’
3
in the Carlisle Castle ‘Crimson & Clover’,
the forty-somethings
(Church T-shirt,
dingo before pyramid)
vivid pink drinks,
a faint vomit smell from the kitchen (cheese?)
and now, the meat raffle
‘looks nice, but I’ve nowhere to cook it’
And Then a Cup of Tea
Mal McKimmie
The Captain had a kipper from a previous daring breakfast
Lodged dangerously close to his spine;
But still he led his men.
When he stepped from the wooden dinghy and waded ashore
He was picking his teeth bravely with a fish-bone.
The sun rose behind him and broke its yolk upon the New World;
It flowed golden.
Grinning, he dipped his little soldiers in it.
Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning
Ann Vickery
after Frank O’Hara
Forearmed is foredefeated,
a spragged illusion that had me forever
check the silver-leafed backing.
What seemed like a vermillion mirror of sea,
the work of rash gods competing over
nose-powder and light. Salient image
as tonnage of froth, the superficial pleasure
of being someone else for the day.
What wasn’t there cannot disappear,
so why regret that awkward kiss
over the smoker’s box
when you decided to sit and clean the turnips.
One employs colours in the afternoon glare
but my feelings remain diffuse.
Each memory from the same genre,
duly sentimental,
yet indistinguishable in the over-populated world.
Does it matter who can gauge the lapping dark
for you were everything once
returning to dead layer, a general of still life
hanging on the end of the dauphine’s stays.
As Flames Were My Only Witness
Russell Erwin
After three days of wind pounding the midriff of hills
and nights of dry lightning fracturing the sky
into the crazing of old porcelain it was no surprise
when it came. In five minutes a towering cauliflower
was spilling white curds, froth and tumultuous blossom,
a fractal coolly replicating from a moment
that was now far below, with birds
like flakes of soot tossed in its turbulence,
their cries plangent and scattering, and consumed.
Driving beneath into that apricot-soft light
was like being inside an evangelist’s blimp:
a dome of chapel stillness, except for little flames
at the hem like small faces sneaking entry under.
For a moment there was a benign peace
as is said of those hazy, uncertain states:
the womb, anaesthesia, drowning.
We think we know silence, it is our blue Pacific:
the refrigerated, drained, arrhythmical kind,
and the cupped, hill-to-hill kind, with a dog’s bark
or the crack of a breaking branch to give it scale.
This was something else—dense and pressing,
even in that beguiling peace,
vast and lonely as the space that clears
the moment before judgement.
As in the future when
Jal Nicholl
a big computer was doing the thinking
for us, but fortunately feelings
proved stronger in the end
I was feeling little except for a soggy film
brochure containing a childhood story
a forgotten dictator getting dug up and researched
still a hero to some
the light from the window lit everything a
special poetic shade of red
Snow
on the mountains behind the apartment buildings
giving the former solidity if not—
but I am carrying on
collecting the action figures before
the film’s even started
a desire to be obsolete, to retire
to one’s ancestral seat
or to have your computer write
your poem for you: these are the same
yet the mountains do return
some unassuming zest to the painting, suggestive
of low-linteled houses on the other side with plots
sprouting flash frozen veg, still green,
that will soon turn round and return the suggestion
At Lerici
David Malouf
for Carlo Olivieri
Darkly at anchor
in the roadstead, ships keep close
the secret of their journeys,
and the islands theirs.
History is made up
of nights such as this when little happens.
Lovers in their beds
whisper and touch, a new player
tumbles onto the scene.
Crickets strike up
a riff on the razzle-dazzle
of starlight, then stop.
The blissful friction and pointillist
throb of night music
is older, runs deeper
than speech. An electric
flicker the planet’s first
incidence of traffic.
Then heartbeat. Then thought.
We sit in the warm dark watching
container-ships ride
on blue-black moonlit glitters.
After long
journeying arrived at the high tide
of silence, after talk.
Autoethnographic
Michael Brennan
And still the feeling hadn’t left us, something had
been missing all the while, back there, beyond
the Great Forgetting. Worse, the moments when
we could convince each other it wasn’t not there
had become fewer and further between, a daily
clutch of episodes before that great ocean of
mind would slink in, cruelling. It was a junkyard,
a shipwreck, a six car pile-up at the end of our
tongues, perfectly out of reach. Georgia suggested
we were characters in a pilot for a TV series that
never went to air. Someone had been picking
us off one-by-one since the last ad break, taking
the weakest, the meanderer at the back of the
pack, the sweaty little accountant with the pocket-
protector and broken glasses, the cheerleader in
matching Adidas skirt and mules. There had been
a series of pits, balled spikes, bear traps, bodiless
hands reaching from the brush, faces concealed
in sweat-stained hoodies looming out of the
damp forest that was otherwise so distractingly
scenic and exploitable. At night we could hear the
muffled breathing nearby, a hunter’s soft treat,
voices turned low plotting in a language all their
own. We were in a forest of cannibals, overrun
by human sacrifice, suicide bombers, terrorists,
sub-prime mortgages and hoodlum cross-dressing
freaks. Each morning we took a head count
and the two of us were still there, while the day
stretched on repetitive and overfull with promise.
The coast was just beyond the next rise, we would
meet the friendly locals who would offer us the
choice bits of their exotic cuisine and ancient folk
wisdom, then validate our parking tickets before
guiding us to the safety of a shopping mall. But
Georgia was adamant, it was a cliffhanger we
would never get to the end of. We were stranded,
facing each other with only our fear.
Basic Hut Methodology
Ella O’Keefe
take your platform boots off
Kevin
you’ve killed a deer to make your point
but our tea and biscuit sensibilities
will cope
we forgive you
you’re charming!
hiding from your vanity
likening molten glass to tartiflette
in the fresh peat you hammer a sign
‘Not Hobbit-Town’ (it’s cute)
then later tell the production crew (sternly)
“this not aspirational! This is economical!”
Marxism 101 plaything
soliloquies about the means of production
while you go on dung safari
afterwards the gang pretends to piss in a bucket
you call the result a “manly amount”
150 years of Britain’s industrial history
at the bottom of a Hackney canal
which swallows your magnet with an erotic slurp
there you go all doe-eyed
banging on the shed roof
but we’re weary
of plumbing double entendre
Kevin and the engineer boil a kettle
“shall I play mother?”
that curve came from a tree
gun powder tamped into the trunk
a certain “massive quality”
boy with a simple dream
to own a patch of woodland
(where there’s a thing there’s a fence)
you
r friends show how they feel
by building a a straw effigy
and lighting it with flaming arrows
Black Throated Finch
Brett Dionysius
By the pool, their fingernail-sized gullets undulate briskly
As if they are guilty celebrities scoffing a midnight treat,
Their black cravats panting with excitement. They can’t
Stay in this kitchen heat for long; fluent in the language
Of dehydration, a fast tipple or else they’re dumbstruck.
Their image burned into extinction’s cyclopean retina,
As if this fragile flock gazed into the sun directly, or they
Were a picnic of ants fried by a bully’s magnifying glass.
The dam water is a current running through their bodies;
It sets off the electricity of their flight, as one they scatter
To the air, like a handful of wedding rice. Their fall might
Weigh as much; in the billionaire’s thoughts he’s ripped
Out the earth’s coal-black throat; the box trees cut open
Like rich sediment. Their habitat halved like a seed cake.
Blind Spot
Justin Clemens
Slip id to lop its
nob, lost din on lip’s nil boil,
dot sin’s lid to sop.
Slits’ slop spills to list lost. Slip
lip blot to top, lob it up,
spin bits to bile, so
pot nibs to soil n sob n
lop it lop its top.
Bringing You Home
Susan Fealy
You’ve stained my sleep again and your tiny clothes
tangle their arms and legs in my washing machine.
So many headless bodies
and now your wriggly purple flesh,
two white straps on a new white nappy, wet,
wet, wet, urine soaks it, and you, and me,
before I can hook your spider legs
back into their flowered net.
Dark silk clings to your skinny neck,
yet no spider ever lifted sounds like this.
Your eyes are marbles in a slow slot-machine
and there you’ve scratched your face again.