  Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.org] prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), and Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), World English Poetry, and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi). Blue Nude: Anthropocene, Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over 25 languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, pbs, cnn ibn, ndtv, air & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the editor of Atlas. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.”
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Short Fiction ~ Brian Kirk One of them always calls when I’m busy. Either I’m in the bath or sitting down to a supper of smoked mackerel and brown bread when the phone bursts into life. From the moment I answer I can tell that they want to ring off. I often consider telling them it’s okay – I’m okay – that I feel the same, but I never do. They would be horrified, as much by my lack of maternal feeling as by the knowledge that I fully understand their haste to end the conversation. ‘How are you, Mom?’ they ask. ‘Fine. I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ ‘I just worry about you, that’s all. Off on your own, miles away from everyone you know.’ ‘I like being on my own.’ Silence. ‘And anyway, I’m not always on my own; I have friends here too.’ ‘But it’s not the same since you moved.’ ‘Of course, it’s the same. I’m just further away.’ But I don’t mind the phone calls too much – they never last long. And I always make it easy for them to extricate themselves: I have something in the oven, there’s someone at the door, my show is starting on TV. To be honest, I don’t watch much TV at all. Once – just for mischief – I kept my son, Jamie, on the phone when I knew he was in a hurry to be somewhere else. ‘I suppose I should go, let you get on with things…’ he said. ‘How are the kids?’ ‘Oh, same as usual, wrecking everything they touch. Anyway, it’s late, so…’ ‘You know who phoned me last week?’ ‘No, who?’ ‘Go on, guess!’ ‘We could be here all night, Mom. Just tell me.’ ‘You’re no fun at all, Jamie!’ ‘Sorry, Mom. Was it Breda?’ ‘Who?’ ‘Breda! Your old friend who showed up at Dad’s funeral.’ ‘No, not her! Anyway, she’s not a friend of mine.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘She was more a friend of your father’s.’ I knew Jamie was processing the import of that information. I sensed he wanted to ask me more about her, but he resisted the impulse. I should have put his mind at rest, I suppose. Derek wasn’t one to have affairs, but there was no doubt he enjoyed female attention. ‘Well who then? Please tell me?’ ‘Am I keeping you from something, Jamie? You don’t have a few spare minutes to spend chatting with your old mother?’ He laughed, but I could hear embarrassed anxiety in his voice when he finally replied. ‘You’re not old, Mom.’ ‘Ah, here we go! Flattery will get you everywhere – you learned that from your father too.’ There was a muffled noise on the line then. ‘Sorry, Mom, I have to go. Jutta’s at yoga and the kids are climbing up the walls – literally. I’ll call you at the weekend, okay?’ He hung up before I could answer. Perhaps it was more malice than mischief on my part on that occasion – I can be like that sometimes. It’s so easy to summon guilt, to make them feel that it is they who have abandoned me when it’s actually the other way around. Anyway, I never got to tell him about Martin, Derek’s work colleague, who called the other week. His daughter lives a half an hour away and we met for lunch in the village to catch up. I like him. He’s natural with me. We talked easily about our lives, about ourselves. Derek’s name didn’t come up. Jamie and Rebecca don’t understand why I moved here. They worry that I’ve made my life more difficult than it needs to be, separated myself from a network of friends and a supportive community. They know very little about my life, while I know all about theirs. It would have suited them, of course, if I’d stayed in the suburban family home, close enough to allow quick visits that would keep their minds at rest and their guilt assuaged. But no, I had to come here, to a secluded cottage three hour’s drive from the city where they live, work and study. Rebecca is completing her Masters. She doesn’t drive, but her girlfriend Paula does. She thinks that I don’t know about them, and that I wouldn’t understand if I did. It is a characteristic of certain young people that they cannot imagine that older people were young once. Jamie married straight after college and has twins with his German wife, Jutta. He is something in software development and she works for a PR company. The twins, a boy and a girl of around 18 months, are permitted to see them at prescribed times in the day in the manner of royalty. I shouldn’t sneer, I know. To be honest I admire Jutta. She resents the time Jamie wastes coming to visit me and I agree with her and constantly encourage him to use his limited free time to attend to his parental duties. It’s funny, when I was young, time was the one thing I had in abundance. After Derek and I married, my degree barely achieved, I stopped looking for work and spent huge swathes of time in my own company. We were living in London then, and the world seemed different and full of possibility. It afforded me countless opportunities to read and dream while he was out at work. I walked the city with my camera and took photos of people and places. I didn’t know what I was doing, but Derek was indulgent if not exactly encouraging. It never came to anything and I mislaid those stacks of photographs over the years. Within months of moving back to Dublin I was pregnant with Jamie and then the dreaming stopped. The real world crowded in around me. I lost something then, but I don’t regret it. How could I? I missed the freedom of those days before the children came, of course. I look at Jamie and Jutta now, and I pity them. I know Jamie would not approve of me saying it, but I think everyone should have some free time in their lives. Perhaps that’s what I’m doing now, attempting to get that back, to get back to myself. I walk the roads regardless of the weather and talk to anyone I meet. I cook every evening and drink a glass of wine or two each day. I’ve recently begun to smoke again, a filthy habit I gave up with great difficulty when I was carrying Jamie, but those two or three cigarettes every day, in the evening, after dinner, are like a ceremony or celebration at the end of the day. In recent weeks, Martin’s calls have become more regular. I no longer wince when the phone buzzes on the countertop. I have to make an effort to hide my disappointment when it’s Jamie or Rebecca on the line. With Martin I am happy to stay chatting for ages and he seems equally relaxed. When I hang up, I realise that I am smiling. I sit in the conservatory, which sounds much more impressive that it actually is, and I light up a cigarette. ‘Can I see you?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know, can you?’ I say. ‘You know what I mean,’ he says. ‘Could I visit, maybe we could go out for a drink or a bite to eat.’ ‘Are you asking me on a date?’ I say, knowing that my question is superfluous. He is asking me on a date. I realise that I am flirting. ‘We could call it a date, if you like,’ he says. ‘It’s a date then,’ I say. We went on like that for ages, to and fro, swapping meaningless phrases like moon-eyed teenagers. I felt weightless, overcome by a sense of great freedom from everything, after we hung up. It was so casual and so heartfelt at the same time. The first time Martin called to the house he brought his little grandson with him. The small boy poked around my cottage without paying much attention to me or his grandfather. I was dismayed, seeing the child as a kind of tether that Martin had brought with him to ensure he maintained a connection to his old life. I was finished with my old life; I wanted to be cut off from it and everything about it. I hoped he understood how I felt from our many conversations. I coaxed the neighbour’s cat with a tin of tuna and sent boy and cat out into the back garden to play together. I pulled a sally from the hedge and showed the boy how to taunt the animal with it, to trail it slowly through the grass at first, then pull it away before the angry paws could grasp it. I left them to it and returned to where Martin waited in the living room sipping tea. I took the cup from his hand, placed it on a coaster on the coffee table, and leaned down until my lips touched his. His body shivered, from the cold I’d brought with me from the garden or the electricity that passed from me to him. He stood up awkwardly, our mouths still touching, and put his arms around me. I had a sense of his breathing becoming laboured; I felt his hands move to my breasts. The boy’s whining erupted like a siren then and we bustled out into the garden. He’d misplaced the sally and took to using his finger as a lure instead. A bright red bulb of blood oozed from the perfect line of the scar while the cat looked on impassively from the vantage of the garden wall. Inside, after washing, disinfecting and much sobbing, the tears finally subsided. Of course, yes, of course, I understood. The child must come first and all that. Goodbye. Goodbye. Next time we met in town on neutral turf. No child, thank God, but still no privacy. Polite chat over lunch and a drink in the hotel lobby followed by a walk up through the town’s main street, all charity shops and take-away restaurants still closed in the afternoon. ‘I’m not afraid of getting old,’ he announced as we walked past groups of uniformed kids on their way home from school. ‘And why would you be?’ I asked. ‘I just never thought about it when I was younger. About getting older. I’ll be sixty next month.’ He stopped and looked at me. He looked sixty, I thought. ‘Sixty is the new forty,’ I said. ‘You don’t look it at all,’ I lied. ‘And you?’ ‘What about me?’ ‘Are you worried about getting older, now that you’re on your own?’ ‘I’d be getting older, regardless of whether I’m alone or not,’ I said. ‘But you know what I mean?’ he said. I thought about it for a moment. ‘No, I don’t know what you mean, Martin. I don’t mean to be evasive or anything but I’m happy the way I am now. The kids can’t understand it at all, but I thought you would.’ ‘I do,’ he said after a moment. He looked very old just then, like he’d mislaid something that was just out of reach. ‘I do know what you mean,’ he said. ‘There’s great freedom in being solitary, only it doesn’t suit everybody.’ We walked on. I didn’t speak. I watched the girls from the secondary school, huddled in groups, laughing and talking, oblivious to their own startling vivacity. ‘I was never happy after my marriage ended,’ he confided. ‘I wasn’t happy before it ended either, mind you.’ He laughed quickly. ‘You have the children, and your grandson now,’ I said, not sure of the point I was making. ‘Yes.’ ‘As I do too,’ I said. We were back at his car by now and he looked at me before we got in. ‘I’m glad we met up like this, Anna.’ He laughed again. ‘I don’t mean here, for lunch today.’ He made a vague gesture, which could have indicated the street or the town or the whole wide world. ‘I mean, glad that we met up now, at this stage of our lives.’ I was mortified. To say such a thing! I didn’t know where to look or what to say. That night when Rebecca phoned, I asked her about Paula. After a brief hesitation she told me they had moved in together and were planning a holiday for later in the summer after she handed in her thesis. Then I asked her about Jamie and Jutta and the kids, I wanted to know if they were happy. I could tell I was making her uncomfortable, so I let the conversation draw to a close. The next morning Jamie phoned before I’d even eaten breakfast. ‘Is everything okay, Mom?’ ‘Yes, why wouldn’t it be?’ ‘I just got off the phone with Becca and she said you sounded strange last night.’ ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘To be honest, Jamie, I’m more worried about you and Jutta and the kids.’ ‘We’re fine, Mom.’ ‘Are you sure? Because you married so young, and there’s nothing wrong with that I know, but the kids came very quickly. You never had much time for each other.’ ‘Mom! We’re fine. It’s what we want, okay?’ ‘Okay. If you say so.’ ‘I do. I phoned to see if you were okay. I can come and visit Friday evening if that suits.’ ‘There’s no need, son. I’m fine.’ ‘Okay. Rebecca was worried about you, that’s all.’ ‘Did she tell you what we talked about?’ I asked. ‘Well, no, not really. She just said you didn’t seem like yourself.’ I laughed quietly. ‘And who is that? My self?’ I asked. I regretted my words immediately. ‘Mom, I’m worried about you. I never wanted you to move away. Why don’t you come back? You can move in with us while you sell your place and we’ll find you a lovely home, a neat and compact place, an apartment maybe, near the city and beside the sea. The kids would love to see more of you. We all would.’ I didn’t say anything. ‘Mom? Mom?’ I ended the call then and turned off my phone. That Friday Rebecca arrived with Paula in tow. It was like an official state visit from a country whose nations had been engaged in a cold war for some time. ‘This is Paula,’ Rebecca said stiffly. Paula offered her hand, but I embraced her instead. She was small and compact and pretty with mid-length brown hair, blue eyes and a slightly upturned nose. She seemed nervous, but genuinely pleased to meet me. ‘Your house is beautiful, Mrs. Wall,’ she said. ‘Oh, call me Anna, please,’ I said. I took her by the arm and showed her around the house and garden, realising as I did so that the place was falling apart. Rebecca followed silently in our wake. I had the impression of her sulking, as she sometimes did when she was a child, when she believed that Jamie had received preferential treatment. Over dinner she was quiet while Paula and I chatted about music and books and places we’d visited on holiday. As it was getting late, I invited them to stay over, but Rebecca said she had to make an early start, so I didn’t press the matter. I imagined them driving home; Rebecca silent, Paula chatty, saying how lovely her mother was. Martin called over again today and we went out in his car. We drove to the coast and walked the empty beach. The sea was almost still and the sky blue with spots of cloud. As we walked in silence, I watched the water shimmer. Far off boats crawled across the horizon and some twenty yards away a seal’s head rose out of the water. My immediate urge was to grab hold of Martin’s arm to show him, but I didn’t. I kept walking, watching the seal until he disappeared below the surface again. On the way back I scoured the water for sight of him, but he didn’t appear. Later we visited an old Georgian house which is now a museum. I had no wish to see the inside of the house and so we went for a walk in the gardens instead. The weather was mild after recent rain and everything seemed to be growing and blossoming as it does at this time every year. Spring is always a surprise to me. I think my moods are led by the seasons, as is the case with a lot of people I suppose. In winter I shut down, close in on myself, hibernate and wait for the first shoots to emerge. The cherry blossoms were blowing in the late April breeze and the sun warmed my face as we walked side by side in the walled garden. There was the inevitable café so we had coffee and shared a slice of carrot cake. ‘You like living on your own then?’ Martin asked out of nowhere. ‘I don’t have much choice.’ I smiled to show that I didn’t mean to sound sorry for myself. ‘I suppose the kids would prefer if you lived nearer to them.’ ‘Perhaps.’ I didn’t want to talk about them. ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Me?’ He looked surprised, as if no one ever asked his opinion on anything. ‘I’m used to being on my own. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see my daughter and grandson now and then, but I like going home also.’ He laughed lightly. ‘I’m still getting used to it, but I’m coming to realise that I enjoy my own company,’ I said. ‘I enjoy your company too,’ he said, looking me in the eye. He reached across the table and rested his hand on mine. It was a harmless enough thing to say and do. A kind of flattery, or flirting I suppose, but the moment he said it, the moment I felt the weight of his heavy hand, I felt that he was no longer himself and I was no longer myself. We were acting out parts prepared for us; the lonely widow and the single man. I didn’t say anything, but I’m sure he must have noticed how the climate changed in an instant. Our day out was over. He dropped me home and I thanked him for a lovely day when he parked outside my house. I didn’t invite him in. That night I ran a bath and left my book balanced on the window ledge within easy reach if I wanted to read while I soaked. I undressed in the low light of a table lamp. I took off the expensive underwear I’d chosen earlier and wondered had I really considered spending the night with Martin. Part of me yearned for intimacy, but I was happy to be alone now. I thought of Jamie and Jutta and how little time they had for each other and I thought of Becca and Paula, relieved that they had each other. I waited until the bath was almost full and then I put out all the lights and lowered myself into the fragrant water. I let the water cover me completely. The dark house disappeared into itself and I became the animal I am, something other than wife, widow, mother, lover. ~  Brian Kirk is a poet and short story writer from Dublin. His first poetry collection After The Fall was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem “Birthday” won the Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. His short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You won the inaugural Southword Fiction Chapbook competition and was published by Southword Editions in 2019. His novel for children The Rising Son was published in 2015 He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com.
Poetry ~ Larry Wright The Hate Poem That guy behind me. He chews his food too loudly. I hate that guy. That woman. The one who wears flip flops in December? In Alaska? I hate her. That guy who leaves his car running while he runs in to use the ATM at the bank? This isn't Fairbanks in the winter. It's Sitka, and its May! Someone should steal his car. He deserves it. I hate him. Whoever it is that walks by my bedroom window late at night? Chatting merrily with the other loud drunk at full volume? As they follow the sidewalk to the next bar? I hate him. I hate his drinking buddy too. I hate that woman who calls to ask for money I don't have. I hate her voice. It's too nice. Too hard to say no to. I hate her. That guy on TV para-sailing off the back of his mega yacht? I hate him. The skinny, tanned supermodel Watching from the white sand beach? I hate her too. I stopped drinking that beer they're selling years ago anyway. It is so easy to hate when it just stays in my head. So easy when its not out loud and in their face. So easy when its not really real. Its just sticking pins in the voodoo doll Of myself that I have inside my head. I wonder what it takes for them to do it. Those people who can say it out loud Who can say it to your face. Preach it on TV while they ask for your money. Proclaim it on TV while they tell you how to vote. The ones who can unleash their monsters for real. I hate them too. ~ Bedtime Story I send my grandson off to sleep each night a hug and kiss to send him on his way gladly exchanging those small treasures while he is still young enough to think them great. Each night he slips quickly to bed, lights out head to pillow and I swear, a breath or two: asleep. So quickly he accepts the end of the day closing his eyes, eager to open them tomorrow and discover yet another new world. I think of how slowly sleep comes for me, my 60 compared to his 6 and I know it is because my eyes close grudgingly on the day I'm in; less confident today than I was yesterday that there will be a tomorrow. So I pray for him, in the humble way I do. The way that requires no church or piety. I pray each night as I look beyond everything I know and ask again that he have far more nights than I. Nights filled with dreams of bright tomorrows. Brighter dreams and better dreams and better chances of living them than I. ~  Larry Wright was born in the Sitka, Alaska in 1954 and during the half a dozen decades between then and now he’s been seen and heard in Sitka as a bad singer, a worse comedian and a mediocre actor. Those dubious skills having fled him over the years, he has returned to the pen and keyboard in a further attempt to expose himself in public without getting arrested. Poetry ~ Anna Purves Then I Was Refugee Let’s face it—this evening when the truck they’ve promised comes for me, this house —all its floors and doors— will soon die back to the earth that formed it. I’ll pack what I can on my back but really, it’s not what I own it’s what owns me. It’s this air and sun these beats and streets, scraped and shaped by granddaddies of my granddads. So small I must become to accept that nothing of all that made me will save me. To save-- ah, but you shrug, shake your head-- to play the game, you gotta pay. For this one repeating heartbeat, these two eyes, this lone pair of hands that can grasp a stone--and hurl it-- I make my so-called choice to lose everything, leave for what might as well be Mars. How long can one breathe life into memory? How many generations can a single mind safely smuggle out? It comes down to my life or my history Tell me how I live without that. ~ Once Upon a Time, During the Years of Rage There was this thing called hunger and we ran after it over the fields. We chased it through the frozen stubble of onion stalks, past the cabbage rows. On the edge of a black pine forest we saw lights hovering low to the ground. No firefly alive in that season of snow, no fox pausing to glint us her eye. The reaching branches scraped our hair, pulled the blankets from our shoulders, but deep as we went the skinny lights never lingered long enough for us to grasp. Soon we were lost, on a white carpet muddled with roots, night shadows, footprints. Our throats froze inside us, with nothing to hear but the wind’s whip whipping. There was this thing called hunger and we wanted it so much. ~ Spaces The things I know, the things I know you know the things I know you know aren't what you need to know the things I know you know aren't what you need to know about me. The things I know you know about me aren't anything like what you think you know. The things you think about me and the things you want me to know are things that we may never know. We may never know these things. We may never know these things because then we would know them. If we knew these things then we would know something that we don't want to know. If we knew something that we didn't want to know then maybe we would know that we really didn't know things. If we didn't know these things did we love what we knew? —or did we love the space between what we knew about each other and what we didn't? ~  Anna Purves is a writer and artist.
She teaches writing in the Macaulay Honors and Lehman Scholars programs at Lehman College/CUNY. Recent Poems Published Even Steven: Pure Slush Gemstones: A Tanka Quintet in Voices of the Valley Awards Team Emmy award for Best of the Bronx PSA video series: as Script writer Poetry Prize from Bronx Council on the Arts for Before and After Fiction Prize from Bronx Council on the Arts for Elena and the Minotaur Poetry ~ Chella Courington While the World My droplets fall in isolation I wrap my head in a long, black scarf Strip the past from my body Layers of white turn to dust heap at my feet Remorse rises in my blood seeps through cracks Only tomorrow’s light can mend ~ Different Kind of Spring A coyote trots through a traffic light oblivious to the red. In clear skies the sun settles near washing him in apricot. I wonder if the earth has ever been so pristine. Behind walls my solitude turns against me. Every cell of my body screams for someone to hold. I need more than my books and music intellect and memory more than my own touch. ~ In the Night You wait for the cracked bell or single crow to cry hear the clacks of your mother’s heels pass through the gate. Do you feel lost when you crawl out of bed and she isn’t there? Does inertia pull you back to her clicking on concrete in a dark station? You watch the faces (any- one else you know?) behind windows washed in grit. The train stops spreads shopping bags into the day. You don’t see her. She promised again & again to be there. You don’t see her. ~  Chella Courington is a writer and teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including Spillway, Los Angeles Review, and Lavender Review. Her novella, Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage, is available at Breaking Rules Publishing. Originally from the Appalachian South, Courington lives in California. Poetry ~ William Conelly EVEN Even the rain is hot, Even the rain, as if it took by tumult through these asphalt clouds some measure of the fusion searing endlessly beyond. A house fan merely stirs such heat, blends it with the waters of that river where we all shall bathe —oh, currents of forgetfulness-- the future our next breath. ~ BEACHED Call this place you’re waiting nowhere: your mind gone simple, your body bent to suit the waiting’s rigid chair. And where's the hire car you phoned five years ago? Turned scrap along the ways your journey might have taken? From silver plane to silver coach to a disobliging chair, sequestered some damn where, each seating’s further shrunken in the fuming tidal air forgotten selves have chosen. ~ LOWER COASTER The silver mines went bust. The ore carts left on rails five fathoms underground became cool rides for kids hot Saturdays in town, a squealing steel train trip sparking black passageways —g-forces pitching slant-- corkscrewing hollows down. Ore carts aren’t built for dates: you hunch and dodge along a twelve-inch aisle then cram in one per wooden seat. No belt. No padded jamb. A use-slick rail to grip while bouncing off the frame, some lead car teener braving her descent--no hands! -- white silk blouse flaring wind… You surge onto blank flats, emerge, roll sunlit blocks of pastel cottages before an aspen copse marks the re-entry hole. A barker dares more kids to free wheel cool black chutes in silver mountain tops-- she’s good at what she does: mining a conga line of restless souls for dough, summoning all aboard. I pay for some young schmoe. Spark up, kid. Roil the dark. Have some skull-cracking fun. I’ve gone pit free. Pastels are all I care for now. ~ ELEVEN FLOORS Do bourgeois crowds applaud your late life’s work below? No? Then why climb further up a public precipice? The best of journeys slow. Your grip is languorous. Dismal winds course by. Just go ahead and fly. Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955) ~  After Military Service, William Conelly took a Master's Degree in English from UC Santa Barbara. Unrelated work in research and composition followed before he returned to academia in 2000. The Able Muse publishes a collection of his earlier verse under title Uncontested Grounds, and it may be reviewed at their website or via Amazon. A dual citizen of the US and UK, retired from teaching, Conelly resides with his wife in the West Midlands town of Warwick, England.
Short Fiction ~ Brindley Hallam Dennis The river had overflowed its banks hours before. TV crews had filmed it pushing against the bridge arches like an impatient football crowd. The roofs of cars had showed above the water where the main car park stood. They had lifted slowly like colourful tin trays and moved sluggishly in the flow. Temporary flood defences had been erected along the riverside walk, but the water seeped beneath them. Rain continued to fall, but less vehemently than earlier in the day, and the sheet of water that slid like black silk across the tarmac was only an inch or two deep. It spilled with a standing wave up onto the pavement and passed across the front edge of the stone bus-shelter, edging into the dark interior where Schlep huddled. The wind had dropped, and residual heat clung to the stone, besides, Schlep had known darker, colder places. Sylvia had gone down on her haunches, to make eye contact, conscious of the water rippling cold against the sides of her shoes. Pale light from a still-working street lamp splashed her face. Schlep wore a dark cord jacket that folded into shadow. He smoked a thin hand-rolled cigarette, as pinched and tight as his own lined face. The tip reddened like a blown ember with each inhalation. His black eyes were quick for chances and for dangers. Sylvia forced herself to smile. She had boxes to tick and a belief that everybody deserved better. She held on to this, fearing that to let go under the pressure of fierce experience would lead her to throw out whole orphanages of babies along with the dirty waters. Come along, Mr Rogers, she urged kindly, adding, Peter. Schlep hated being called by name, but at least, he reminded himself, he knew which side of several fences each caller stood. He knew Sylvia. He recognised her face even in the dark shadows of the bus-shelter but he could never remember her name, though she told it him every time they met. The fact was that Schlep had no intention of seeking refuge in the Temporary Accommodation. He did not like the thought of the other people who were being gathered there. They would have no desire to see him either. The bus-shelter was all the temporary accommodation he needed. It was dry, and it had a bench, miraculously un-vandalised, and the water level could not rise that much further. They were on the flat lands here. Every inch it rose would be spread across miles of water-meadows. And if it did reach the bench he had on perfectly good wellington boots, with which he had been issued recently at a building site on which he had pretended to be working. He had watched all morning as labourers had presented themselves at a steel container, its door propped open by an office chair. They had emerged each carrying what was obviously a new pair of boots. Who Dares Wins, Schlep had reminded himself, and he had taken himself across during a lull. The interior of the steel box was dark, and in that gloom a man working by the dim glow of a computer screen had asked him his name. Smith, Schlep had replied. He knew there would always be Smiths. There would be Patels too, but he could not pull that one off so easily. The man had scrolled a list and demanded, which Smith?, in an irritated voice. Which have you got? Schlep had asked, trying to sound humorous. Don't fuck me about, the man had said. Are you Pete Smith, or Mike Smith for Fuck's sake? There were always Mike Smiths, but Schlep kept him for reserve. Pete, he said. Over there, the man said, thumbing a line of boots that might have been waiting for Christmas. The small ones are on the left. He took a pair from the middle and left quickly. Once, on Bank Street in Carlisle, he had seen a scrawny kid thump, bang-bang, on the side of an armoured truck outside a building society. It was the same bang a security guard had given a few moments before, and produced the same effect. The steel hatch had slid open and an armoured box, presumably holding cash, had appeared. The scrawny kid had run off with it, like Tom the Piper's Son. Schlep had walked off, not quite so fast, in the opposite direction. Running, he knew, was not the best method of escape. But you can't stay here, Mr Rogers, Sylvia persisted, reaching out a hand almost as far as his arm. It's too dangerous. Danger! Schlep thought. What did she know about danger? Danger could explode upon you almost anytime, almost anywhere and without the slightest warning. There was no subtle change in the air; no sudden atmosphere of menace; no preparatory hush. The birds did not stop singing. The people did not inexplicably vacate the street. Danger was always there, beyond the perimeter of your vision, beneath the radar of your heightened awareness. Flood water was no danger, not here, in the dark safety of the bus-shelter. He would stand on the bench if need be; clamber on the roof if he had to. Besides, the rain had eased. Who knew what nutters they would gather together in the Temporary Accommodation? And there would be questions, forms to fill in, boxes to tick, futile aspirations, unhelpful sympathies. Mr Rogers, she said again. A dark figure loomed at the opening, black against the darkening sky, bulked out by helmet and strapped gear. A torch beam lashed his face. Is that you, Schlep? a male voice said. Come on out of there and stop pissing us about. Sylvia turned to face the new figure, a look of horror and outrage on her face. How dare he speak like that to a client? But at her back Schlep had pulled himself to his feet and was shaking his head slowly. He threw down the cigarette and crushed it underfoot, stepped forward. ~  Bruce Meyer is author or editor of over sixty-three books of poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, non-fiction, and literary journalism. His next book of flash fiction, Down in the Ground, will be published by Guernica Editions in 2020. He lives in Barrie, Ontario. Poetry ~ Jim Brosnan The Last Diner in Missouri Wind driven rain sweeps across the diner parking lot where she parks her Audi, a bright red sports coupe its color indistinguishable in the torrents of precipitation now flooding the walkway near the restaurant's entrance. A crack of thunder, announced by brilliant flashes in quick succession, reverberates across open wheat fields, reinforces nature's fury, alters her evening plans to caravan with eighteen wheelers across the interstate. ~ Across Vast Prairies Elongated shadows gather along the shoulders of this asphalt ribbon as I cross the state line, blinded by oncoming headlights, hours after the sun set low in the west, a time of night when I reach for past memories-- afternoons when faded rainbow mist evaporated in a July sky over an Iowa highway. ~ Snatched Before Daylight In dreams we touch the Colorado evening sky, our footsteps echo in the shallows of half-sleep where I wonder about the fate of phrases-- secrets found in the lyrics of a song heard under gray skies before the crescent moon gets tangled in tall spruce as these moments disappear at daybreak. ~ Colorless Dreams On a June morning with a crisp Sunday breeze, I followed the paved state route curving miles through small towns and past covered bridges in Madison County, Iowa where eastern cottonwoods and shagbark hickory leaned against the eastern sky as I listened to oldies by Presley and Orbison on Sirius radio, and for a moment recalled those nights decades ago. ~ Halfway to Rawlins Under broken cumulus clouds the solid yellow line hypnotizes me just before midnight as I navigate this expanse of mountainous terrain high above valleys marked by treetops of spruce and aspen in this dark photo while I can’t bear to listen again to our song, lyrics that invade my daydreams. ~  Jim Brosnan’s publishing credits include Nameless Roads (Moon Pie Press, 2019), four chapbooks of poetry and over 500 poems most recently appearing in the Aurorean, The Avocet, The Bridge, Eunoia Review (Singapore), Nine Muses Poetry (Wales), Strands (India), Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), and Voices of the Poppies Anthology (UK). Jim has won numerous awards in the annual National Federation of Poetry Societies competition. He is a full professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, RI Poetry ~ Fernando Carrera Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Rathbun MEN AROUND FIRE We were plankton, mollusk, we were a moment in water, later on earth we searched, not to be destroyed before the name, before the flower Erect Around the fire we see each other We know the touch, in the scent we feel the presence of the other Hunger stalks and drives us In the flames’ tentacles we sense something: there we gather because where there’s no light death lives (fear of darkness makes us what we are) With blood and excrement we communicate : ochre the flesh, death always red coal is night between our hands Grease or resins bind what we feel – so much wandering our weakness on earth We paint the rock to show how we’re different : upon painting ourselves stalking we say what we are We kill in order not to die before being able to ask if like the fruit that falls we came from a tree that we adore without comprehending or are we the cadaver that rots nourishment and nothing more ~ WE ARE THE VOICE crossing the plain. The fire is a black warp we sense in the distance, between the blue mountain and the stretch of cornfields. We imagine fire that bites fire, that one day exists and confronts it. A dead animal leaves its swollen weight at the edge of the path and your hand dreams that it raises its skull in the air, like a threat used against someone, against something. The sun unfolds its fan of indifference. Thirst is another sun that scratches the throat where some words rot and erode like cadavers in the field. We march on It’s late, the path always arrives to the same side: shadows. Others by my side, now shoulder and scent, after a spot of dust and fog over the field, they extend like a flock of questions: faces like a chest of coins with which you can’t buy a loaf of bread, not even a spike ~ THE HUNGER is too much and you find yourself indecisive facing the menu. Sleep in your eye bothers you as well like senseless cramps, it reminds you of time that flows and wears you down: cynic. “What would you like to order?”, an echo says that hangs between the foam of thoughts where you slosh around: “a poem”, you would like to say with certainty; a bridge uniting the solitude of cities separated by the sea; itinerary of a once-in-a-lifetime trip, perhaps; one or two ideas that ignite something: set fire to the cadavers of the mundane, sediment of being every day. “Garlic shrimp”, you mutter. You take out a lined notebook, each line is a possibility, you think, where notes arise from the depths to harmonize the nothingness. But you’re not a musician. You barely get by with language: immature you move your snout looking to suckle something from the teat of the world Intestines don’t lie, they’ve told you: hunger is always a sign Pathetic, you think and tuck the notebook away. A nameless hand serves the dish that lets off a strange smell. You eat voraciously Garlic is proof that between pleasure and the intolerable there’s only one bite ~  Fernando Carrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1983) is the author of the poetry collections Expresión de fuego (Mantis Editores-Secretary of Culture of Jalisco, 2007), Donde el tacto (ICA-Conaculta, 2011; Là où le toucher / Donde el tacto Mantis Editores-Écrits des Forges-Secretary of Jalisco, 2015), and Fuego a voluntad (Municipal Institute of Culture of Toluca, 2018 Fuego a voluntad / Fire of Volition Mantis Editores, 2020). He has received the National Poetry Prize Horacio Zúñiga de los Juegos Florales of Toluca 2017 and the National Prize for Young Literature Salvador Gallardo Dávalos 2010. He received honorific mention in 2009 in the International Poetry Award Nicolás Guillén and in the National Poetry Prize Efraín Huerta in 2006. Additionally, he’s been awarded creative writing grants from the National Culture and Arts Counsel and the Secretary of Culture of Jalisco in 2008-2009 and in 2010-2011. Books and poems of his authorship have been translated to French, English, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Slovene and Albanian. As a translator he’s published in Spanish translation works by Malcolm Lowry, Glorjana Veber, Ravi Shankar, and Hwang Ji-woo.
~ Jennifer Rathbun (translator) received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in Contemporary Latin American Literature and she is currently a Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages at Ashland University in Ohio where she is also the Associate Editor of Ashland Poetry Press. Rathbun has translated and published complete poetic works by Mexican authors Alberto Blanco, Minerva Margarita Villarreal, Juan Armando Rojas Joo and Ivan Vergara. In 2018 Artepoética Press published her translation of La llama inclinada/The Inclined Flame by Colombian author Carlos Satizábal. Rathbun is coeditor of the anthologies of poetry Sangre mía / Blood of Mine: Poetry of Border Violence, Gender and Identity in Ciudad Juárez (2013) and Canto a una ciudad en el desierto (2004). In addition, her poetry, translations and articles on Contemporary Latin American Literature appear in numerous international reviews and journals. ~ With no time to spare, the couple made their way quickly from the church. Benjamin pulled Elaine by the hand as she held the train of her wedding gown. They ran to the transit stop where the bus was about to pull out. They didn’t have any doubts that they wouldn’t catch this bus and elude the foray. They were destined to get away from the wedding congregation and escape what was left behind, convinced that they would reach their ultimate goal no matter where it would lead. They had left the church brandishing the cross of independence. They had overcome all their basic needs to reach the top of Maslow’s Pyramid. They stood at the pinnacle, although their youthful exuberance was showing some cracks. Once they made it to the back of the bus, they let out a simultaneous sigh. Benjamin and Elaine finished the deed. Benjamin’s long journey from Berkley to Santa Barbara had ended successfully with a piercing scream that shattered the church’s window into a million shards of glass. There were only muted cries, growls of betrayal, and the howling threats made by the hungry wolves lining the altar they left behind. Their weary eyes glanced out of the open window. The sun had begun to set in this majestic coastal town of California. The sea was no longer choppy. The southerly winds had died down. The boats were docked safely in the harbor, gently swaying back and forth with the tide. Elaine’s mascara ran down her cheek in such a way that she might have been mistaken for a savage princess who had escaped becoming a sacrifice to the gods. She had managed to avoid marrying a man she didn't love, and had finished unleashing her pent-up anger onto her mother, telling her that she would never live the miserable life and the empty marriage her mother had. Now, for the moment, her mother was ancient history. In the back of the bus, Elaine was at peace and in control. No longer a naive college student but a mature young woman who knew what she wanted. The wild thumping of her heartbeat soon settled into a natural rhythm like the calm ocean waves she gazed upon on the horizon. She was holding Benjamin’s sullied hand, dirty from the struggle of trying to escape his parental expectations. It was just a short time ago when he was driving in the whir of his red Alfa Romeo, trying to save the only person he loved from a fatal marriage. He was like a man who fought his best fight, beaten and battered, but survived to tell the story. With Benjamin’s head still spinning, he asked himself, “Now what? Where do I go from here?” His blank expression indicated that he had no clue. The journey had been so long and arduous, obstacles beyond compare, that he didn't have time to think while trying to catch an elusive dream. In the back of the bus, with windows open, the salty air expanded his worldview. He clenched his pride between his gums like tobacco chew. So self-absorbed in his mission, he had forgotten to pay the bus fare. The bus driver was zoned-out, on auto-pilot after years of driving a bus, and didn’t care about collecting the fare. He kept looking straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, driving through the orange sunset, oblivious to what was going on around him. His objective was to make his way around his route as quickly as he could without any complications, then go home and sit in front of the TV and eat whatever his wife made him. Like air emptying from a balloon, the pressure of the past seeped out of Elaine and Benjamin’s bodies. They had escaped captivity with barely a scratch. Together, unified, each on a different mission but a similar end, they ran from their fears and had finally found each other. In the awkward silence of late afternoon, they sat silently on the lumpy, uncomfortable bus seat. With each breath, their souls streaked across the sky, cutting through the colors of the universe. Elaine no longer had to listen to her mother, who she now viewed as a whore and a drunkard. Her father was buried in the sauce and didn’t know if he was coming or going. What advice could they offer her? They were relics, like old black and white celluloid, helpful for the time, but useless now. Benjamin didn’t have to be trapped in a fishbowl anymore. He no longer had to gasp for air, suffocating from his parent’s overbearing presence. They were a shill for the capitalist elite. They collected things, objects, tokens of success to show them off at dinner parties, and cookouts. Benjamin was tired of being one of those things. He would not be objectified and bastardized anymore. He would not spend his precious life underwater in a pool of greed and avarice. Elaine and Benjamin would not settle for what their parents had. With each bus stop, they moved past the myths and lies. What they now had was priceless, their freedom, their ability to choose how they wanted to live, and with whom. They would decorate their own house with objects of passion and love instead of money and regret. The feeling hit them all at once as the bus turned a corner and headed toward the main thoroughfare of Santa Barbara. The passengers in the front seats with their heads turned toward the rear, wondered if the young couple had just gotten married, and, if so, why would they be in the back of a city bus looking like crap? Benjamin and Elaine felt sorry for these people. They were like their parents, their souls full of emptiness, wishing that the bus would take some strange turn to a new place and a brand new beginning. As the bus made its way along State Street, Elaine and Benjamin remained speechless, taking furtive peeks at each other, not knowing what to say but experiencing their magical moment changing before their eyes. Their future was uncertain. That’s how it was supposed to be. A big blob of potential. It could be everything, or it could be nothing. It was a chance that they were willing to take. It wasn’t enough that Benjamin and Elaine had won the battle, that they freed themselves from their parents' tyranny and their stodgy ideals--they needed more. Much more. Elaine glanced at Benjamin in a way that he understood and had always known. She felt his tight grip of desperation slowly loosen. He let go of her hand with a hangman’s regret. She was someone that he didn’t want lose, but didn't want to possess, because he loved her more than anything. She knew that if she didn’t get off the bus at the next stop, the couple would keep going in an endless cycle of longing and frustration, distracted by each other's needs, and never finding out what was important. She gave Benjamin a soft, goodbye kiss on the cheek, denying the melancholy that she felt. She stood up in her white wedding gown with streaks of eyeshadow running down her face. She was so grateful for his part of the journey but didn’t know how to thank him, except to set him free. She had to be strong, stronger than she’s ever been. He had to let go, something that was equally hard for him. Benjamin’s eyes followed Elaine as she disembarked the bus and headed down a beautifully-lined street with palm trees and blooming hibiscus flowers. For a brief moment, he wanted to run after her again. But he knew that his days of pursuing Elaine were over. There was a new dream to chase. Now, if only he knew what that dream was. ~  Mark Tulin is a former psychotherapist from Philadelphia who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife, Alice. Besides writing, Mark enjoys yoga, paddle-boarding in the Pacific, playing hand drums, and photography. A poetry publisher once likened his work to artist, Edward Hopper, on how he grasps unusual aspects of people and their lives. Mark has two poetry books, Magical Yogis and Awkward Grace available on Amazon. He has an upcoming book of fiction, The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories available in August of this year. Mark has been featured in Ariel Chart, Amethyst Review, Family Therapy Magazine, smokebox, The Poetry Village, Page and Spine, Fiction on the Web, Terror House Magazine, Trembling with Fear, Poppy Road Review, Visitant, The Writing Disorder, Oddball Magazine, New Readers Magazine, as well as anthologies, newspapers, and podcasts. Follow Mark at Crow On The Wire.
Poetry / Visual Art ~ Sudeep Sen ~ for Adil Jussawalla It’s high time the stars were re-lit — Guillaume Apollinaire  Photo Credit: Sudeep Sen I buried my body in the same soil where I had learnt to crawl. I waited until my skin decomposed so that I could rescue my bones to craft new implements to write with, anew. Imagine making bone-nibs of various sizes and intricate patterns that contain your own tissue and imprint. I waited, waited until the magic of metaphorphosis could take place. It didn’t matter whether it was in my own lifetime or not, clearly I still waited having performed my own burial. A fine anachronism — even Sophocles would be astonished, or the tales of Gilgamesh might have been realigned. As I relive, piecing my first alphabets together — elongated letters form arcs and loops — creating a score, a grand opera where bone nib-tips play a crucial part in the sonics of the composition. I am still tuning them in my mind as I wait with the dead, the dead to fill in the chorus, the dead to conduct the show. Whose imprimatur shall the music bear — what shall it be called? Fibula, femur, F-sharp — fine featured whispers layer its richness. Where is the ink, the ink familiar to every bone? Blood. There is no blood left now. But air has sufficient magic left — its slipstream modulating a script that has not been written before, notations using my DNA to code the coda. The soil says it wants to name it — I say, say it aloud. She prefers, a subtle sigh that comes with the quiet confidence of permanence. Gradually the aria begins — singing of the eternal purity of bone music. It requires music for bones to patiently heal. It requires compassion to love selflessly. The buried vatic song starts to leak, leaving the legacy of our bones. It’s high time our bones started to sing aloud. It’s high time the stars were re-lit. ~  Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.org] prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), and Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), World English Poetry, and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi). Blue Nude: Anthropocene, Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over 25 languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, pbs, cnn ibn, ndtv, air & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the editor of Atlas. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.”
Short Fiction ~ Ashley Stokes ‘It’s started.’ An Americanised, film-trailer voice crackled behind her. Suki dropped the coffee grinder. It clunked on the floor. Ivo was slouched on a stool in the corner, half-hidden in yellow-grey shadow, skinny jeans splattered with mud, eyes black as a shark’s. She’d not heard him come home, even though she’d been awake all night, arms pressed to her sides in bed as she waited for the roof to evaporate. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she said. ‘What do you mean, it’s started?’ ‘Electricity’s gone. I had to walk back from some stop somewhere I can’t remember. It all ground to a halt. Everyone, I mean everyone was off their tits. There were maskheads smashing windows and fucking up Waitrose, then Robocop-style dudes started shooting into the air, then into the crowd, shooting at literally everyone, it was wild. You know that old Talking Heads song, Life During Wartime? It wasn’t like that … there’s a bottle of Chateau Margaux somewhere. Glass?’ He staggered to the kitchen island, found a corkscrew in the mess, grabbed a bottle from the rack. He uncorked it and poured two glasses. ‘Have fun last night?’ he said. ‘Worked,’ she said. ‘Keep soldering on, eh? I appreciate the ethic, Suki, I really do, but this time tomorrow there’s going to be no one to sell your schmuck to apart from semi-sentient pizzas and two-headed rats.’ ‘Ivo, what has started?’ ‘See for yourself. Check out the Compound.’ From the kitchen window, from what Suki could make out, all of the remaining Peripatetics, the close-knit clique of long-term Coldstream Close supper clubbers and culture wonks had gathered in front of The Compound, what they called the house of Baxter Strang, the man without a face. Hilaire was obviously in charge. He didn’t need to do anything to prove that he was the eminence grise of Coldstream Close. His double bass case leant against Strang’s wall. Wren was repeatedly banging the gate’s knocker. A rather large rucksack made Lauren look like someone about to embark on a hiking holiday. Even when she was no doubt shitting herself empty, Allegra was trying to look as bored as possible. Ivo’s head appeared alongside Suki’s. ‘Look at them all. They all believe it now. All trying to get in, save their sorry arses.’ ‘And you don’t want to save yours?’ said Suki. He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She gently pressed her elbow into his chest and eased him backwards. She knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that they outnumbered Baxter Strang. Once they were in his bunker, they would overpower, lock up or do away with him, whatever was necessary. In Bunkerland, or Shelterville or Ivopolis, whatever the eventual name of the underworld dominion, Suki would be the only pre-menopausal woman left. She wouldn’t want old Hilaire with his wattles and his ears like giant puce bats to declare himself the Sperm Donor General and the Our Father who art in Heaven of the race of scuttling mole children they were going to have to breed down there if the human race was to have any kind of future, would she? This is how Ivo would finally outflank Hilaire in the leadership stakes. Either this or Ivo was wondering whether in addition to the swimming pool and the shooting gallery, were there spa and sauna facilities under the Compound, and were they free to all members? ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Ivo. ‘I doubt it,’ said Suki. What she did know was that out there the Peripatetics must now believe the stories about Strang’s bunker. Rumours of a bunker started to circulate at the weekend. Saturday night had been one of the Peripatetics’ monthly soirees, as per usual hosted by Hilaire and Wren at their mini-mansion. Hilaire was an architect who designed villas and palaces for sheiks and oil ministers and people even more fantastically minted than he was, and he played the double bass to a jazz orchestra standard but only as a hobby, to keep himself amused and nimble fingered in what he called the springtime of his senility. Wren was a world-famous jazz pianist, and talked a lot of jazz in a jive-speaky jazzish way. After-dinner entertainment at the monthly meets was thus entirely predictable. To Suki, the Wren and Hilaire Show always sounded like up-itself gastropub background burble, all twang and plink. Their light chamber jazz routines were supposed to provide the rub-down after the world had been set to rights over cassoulet and Krug by the postcode’s leading art and antique dealers; its upscale estate agents and property developers; its gleaming unsnakelike lawyers; musicians from both the jazz and classical realms; music critics from the thick and pungent magazines you sometimes glimpse on the shelves of newsagents at larger railway stations and provincial airports; drug dealers masquerading as chefs or wine importers; painters and sculptors who worked only for the more enlightened banks and green corporations; rockstar disrupters (which was how Ivo described himself, in real life and on Tinder) and, since she’d been Ivo’s lodger, Suki. The first time she’d been introduced to the gang, Ivo had ushered her into Wren and Hilaire’s hanger-sized and piano-studded reception-lounge with its what looked like genuine Kandinskys and Modiglianis on the wall, and declared, ‘Everyone, this is Suki. She’s going to be staying with me for a while. She’s a jewellery designer, and before you ask we’re not—’ They’d all rushed forward, a wall of grins. The atmosphere last Saturday had been entirely different, less Cezanne, more Blue Period. For a start, the turnout was abysmal. Apart from the hosts, and Ivo and Suki, the only shows were Lauren Salerno, the art dealer with the little concrete cube of a gallery opposite the Thai Surprise who, skittish and vigilant, reminded Suki of a tall wading bird, and Allegra Hacker, estate agent and frosted beaker of sharp lemon juice in human form. Lauren was bent double on the chaise-longue, wracked by sobs. Wren and Allegra were trying to calm her down. Handing Suki and Ivo a martini each, Hilaire said, ‘I’m afraid they of little faith have fled the capital. Back soon, I wager. Tails between legs. This is just another Cuba, you mark my words.’ With her fingertip, Suki nudged a green olive around the side of her glass. Lauren’s head burst between the other two women. ‘How can you do it, Suki, drink, at a time like this, just stand there, getting sloshed when—’ ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ivo. ‘Wren and Stinky are going to tinkle the ivories in a minute.’ ‘SHUT UP, Ivo. It’s gone on too long. Too long. It’s like the German timetables. It can’t be stopped.’ ‘I know, dearie, I know,’ said Wren, ‘but it hasn’t happened yet, so until it does, we ought to carry on like we’ve always carried on, with hep and with pep, know what I mean.’ ‘I don’t want to die,’ Lauren wailed. Suki proved to herself that she didn’t want to die either by finishing her martini and holding her glass out for another. ‘Well, if it is going to happen,’ said Allegra, ‘we might as well have some of Wren’s shepherd’s pie. And some music, raise a toast to realized lives. You can’t do anything about it, can you?’ ‘It’s easy for you to say we should be all vegan-bin-dipper about it,’ said Ivo. ‘I would have been a billionaire next year. Did I tell you I just secured some serious investment for iVo-Go?’ ‘Can I remind everyone it might not happen,’ said Hilaire. ‘I mean, who am I—’ ‘Liebling, we should take everyone through to the kitchen,’ said Wren. ‘More cosy, not half.’ In the kitchen, they all sat around the slab of a table and a steaming tray of pie ringed by high wine glasses. Into each glass, Hilaire poured two inches of what would be extortionately-priced and possibly rank wine. ‘You know who we should invite over?’ said Ivo. ‘Strang.’ ‘After what he did to me?’ said Lauren. ‘You must be out of your tiny mind.’ ‘Do you know what he has?’ ‘That dastardly dog?’ said Wren. ‘I’ll see him on the flappety flip.’ ‘Anyone know,’ said Ivo, ‘what’s under the Compound, allegedly?’ Tales of Strang had always amused Suki. It was not the tales themselves, but the way the Peripatetics told and reacted to them. Without the stories of the Strang Panic, the Strang Scare, the Summer of Strang as she liked to think of it, she would have given the Peripatetics a swerve months ago, despite the networking opportunities. Before her debut appearance, Ivo had explained that even though most of them were planks and muppets, spanners and goons, there were plenty of players at the jazz supper soul sap she could attract as investors or clients: after all, ladies like jewellery, expensive ladies like expensive jewellery, expensive men like to buy expensive jewellery for their expensive booty calls. Expensive booty calls can also double as fit-as-fuck jewellery designers. Ivo, eh? She hadn’t realised that a bespoke self-improvement and business mentoring plan would be included with the rent. Not that Ivo and his sex-pesky ways could help much with her long laundry-list of anxieties and calamities: the debts she owed various loan companies and institutions; that she’d had to sell her house to retrain and would never afford her own place again; the extortionate rent vs living back with disappointed psychoparents at aged twenty-eight; the stress and depression she’d fought off when her first-choice career was ruined by creeps and harassment, the same depression she could feel licking the nape of her neck now the jewellery game was proving a struggle; her stupid pride and desire for a clean break that made this uphill battle an even harder fight; that relationships were now impossible, or jump-cuts from cool, buzzy bars to harrowing moments of exposure and regret; the fires and floods, the descent, the shouting and the ranting and the rage of nations, the long march down just as she was trying to work her way back. Nor had she known that she would be living a few doors away from a man without a face. She’d only seen him a few times, skulking in the distance, a tall figure wrapped up in a great big black anorak with a big black fur hood even on the hottest days. He was rarely seen without a great black dog that looked a cross between a bear and a lion, a Tibetan mastiff, according to some nifty bit of mansplaining from Hilaire. Hilaire seemed almost personally insulted that Strang now owned or at least lived in the vast three-story house at the end of the close that once belonged to Milan Behallis, fine and outstanding publisher of scores and songbooks and a supper club soiree regular until he fled this mortal coil just before Suki moved to Coldstream Close. Strang was always prowling the streets and the alleys with his dangerous dog. He was seen where he shouldn’t be seen. He followed, snooped, watched as if he were keeping some sort of diabolical record. He stared in through the window of Lauren’s gallery during private views and scared the punters away. According to Allegra, he was driving down house prices just by living in the Close. Wren told an odd story that sounded confused and confusing about giving Strang a lift and being forced to pull up outside a maisonette where Strang had shouted through the letterbox, ‘I love you, Biba, I love you, Biba’. Wren, after some internet digging, reckoned it was the home of Biba Vex, a pop star from one of those TV shows. ‘I listened to one of her songs once on Spotsimiflip,’ said Wren, ‘and I turned it off quick sharp. Voice of the machine, brrrr, the future, but it did seem that Strang had a serious jive with her.’ Suki felt she ought to keep quiet about Biba Vex. Fame Heart. He Thinks I’m Trouble. She’d loved those songs, even though they made her cringe now. ‘How far away were you, Wren?’ said Allegra. ‘I’m trying to reconstruct this in my head.’ ‘Was his dog with him? Never seen him without his dog,’ said Ivo, ‘and what did you talk about on the way over? The stop-starty piano bollocks on Bitches Brew? That time you were on German TV with the Polka Dot Piss Whistles and Richard Clayderman’s jazz willy?’ Other Peripatetics at one time or another had told Suki that Strang was a drugs dealer who presided over a massive international gak distribution network. He was a Euromillions winner, some nobody handed a packet by brute and fickle luck. He was the shy and introspective rapper Chump Change, reportedly dead of an overdose during a drive-by-shooting five years back but sightings are regularly reported on subreddits and 4-Chan boards. Or Strang was the coder who created the C.R.E.E.P virus; he was responsible for the slogans that had appeared across the borough in the last eighteen months, ‘Blood Moon Last’ daubed in red across bridges and the fronts of shuttered-up shops; he was the Creature in the Hood, the Haunter on the Doorstep, the Dog Man Star, and according to Ivo, a knob-ended, mastiff-banging wankeur. Last Saturday night, Ivo had leaned forward and spoke slowly, assuredly. ‘Have you not heard the rumours about his house? You must have? You know Patel? The builder? When he was doing my loft extension, he said that he and his old man, they did a lot of work on Strang’s house. Said it was weird. All done through letters or something and he was there and he wasn’t when they were, if that doesn’t sound fucked up. Said they built some kind of panic room underground. You not heard this?’ ‘Oh I’ve heard it alright,’ said Allegra. ‘The word is that house is worth double its market value because it’s the same size again underground.’ ‘I mean, who am I?’ said Hilaire,’ but it is peculiar, now you come to mention it, I was once asked, by an anonymous but very high-paying client, all done through a middleman, to design an underground bunker, I assumed for one of these Russian or Saudi types but for a house in our corner of Eden. It could sleep twelve to fifteen families. There was a swimming pool and a shooting gallery and water purification facilities, stockrooms, refrigeration, everything you would need to—’ ‘Survive a nuclear war,’ said Wren ‘Survive a nuclear war,’ said Allegra. ‘Survive a nuclear war,’ said Lauren, ‘but trapped underground with Baxter Strang.’ ‘Sounds like a fate worse than death,’ said Hilaire. ‘I assume it’s all poppycock. It’s quite unfeasible to have constructed such a project here without us knowing it was being built.’ ‘And no one saw the work going on,’ said Allegra. ‘And, being underground, with Baxter Strang?’ ‘It’s not true, is it?’ said Lauren. ‘I’d rather take my chances up here,’ said Wren. ‘And it’s not true,’ said Allegra. ‘Are we sure it’s not true?’ said Ivo. ‘Ivo, you really are an arsehole, not just sometimes but all of the time.’ ‘Thanks, Lauren.’ ‘I thought I’d get that out into the open before the end of the world.’ Ivo drained his glass of wine. ‘So you’re not going over to Strang’s?’ ‘No, never,’ said Lauren. ‘Not after everything he’s put me … us through.’ ‘No, never …’ ‘Not me …’ ‘Never …’ ‘No …’ ‘No …’ ‘No …’ ‘Never …’ Outside, as Suki hurried up the street, the dirt-yellow sky felt low and close. Ivo was carrying a heavier bag than hers and struggled to keep up. The others still lurked outside the gate of the Compound, the first time ever in history that angry, scared aristocrats had surrounded a peasant’s castle. Wren was still banging that knocker. Back in the kitchen, that persistent crack had so grated on Suki that when Ivo unexpectedly started to stuff clothes into a rucksack, so did she. The thought of being left in the house alone with that abrupt thunk every ten seconds until Doomsday—actual Doomsday—was too much to bear. Ivo grabbed her elbow. They paused in the middle of the close. ‘I think we should get married, Suki.' ‘I’ll pretend to think about it if you stop Madam Jazz from making that fucking sound.’ ‘He’s not coming out, is he? Strang’s laughing at us, probably watching us from some observation centre under our feet. C’mon let’s go and take the piss out of Hilarious while we still can …Oi, Hilaire, you olive-scoffing, elastic band-twanging jizz limpet. Don’t believe a word of it, do you? No such structure, eh? Poppycock eh? And here you are, trying to grease your way into the love bunker.’ ‘Ivo, Suki,’ said Hilaire. ‘Joining us yourselves, I see?’ The Strang house was a black crag silhouetted against a rotting sky. Wren smashed the knocker. Every time felt like a shotgun fired point-blank into the back of Suki’s head. Ivo was shouting something robustly sexist, ageist and probably jazzist to Wren for Suki’s benefit that seemed to work. The banging stopped. Or everything had stopped. Suki felt lit up with an anger that was alien to her. She burst into tears and shrugged off Allegra’s hand on her shoulder and then realised she’d set off Lauren, too. Lauren yowled like a starved cat. Elsewhere, the city was silent, no sirens, no gunfire. Hilaire said, ‘I believe in miracles,’ and Ivo said, ‘you sexy thing’. Suki’s breathing felt like it could be the last of her breath and she didn’t want to let it out. Lauren sat down on the pavement. Wren put her hand in Hilaire’s hand. The door to the Compound garden swung open. Maybe they had been waiting for so long that when he did appear under the brick arch of the gateway, they didn’t see him. Or maybe this was down to the way the shadow of the house fuzzed his black hooded anorak so the coat seemed to bleed into the darkness of the garden. Some kind of black cowl or balaclava was under the hood. His head moved side to side, from Suki to Ivo, through Lauren and Allegra to Wren and Hilaire. Everyone stiffened, stood to attention. Suki frowned. If he had a bunker, he would surely be sitting in it and waiting to see if it held when the flash came and the air obliterated. By coming out, he risked being vaporised. ‘Mr Strang, good day to you and hail fellow,’ said Hilaire, ‘Let’s cut to the chase. Is there room at the inn?’ ‘Put it this way,’ said Wren, ‘we can provide the entertainment. Nightly and on request.’ ‘Or not at all,’ said Ivo. ‘Why on earth can’t either of you play the bassoon. You can do a shitload of cranial damage with a bassoon. We can’t exactly batter him with a double bass.’ Strang stepped slightly to his left. The great black dog appeared alongside him, its white teeth bared and its mane of black hair twitching on the breeze. ‘Play fair, Strang,’ said Hilaire. ‘Is it true there’s a survival bunker of my design under your property? If so, if you check the contract, you’ll see you cannot legally deny entry to me or my chattels.’ ‘Are the rumours true, Strang?’ said Allegra. ‘And are you going to let us in?’ The dog slinked forwards on his paws and let off three mighty bark. ‘Still thyself, Bastable,’ said Strang. Even though, in the dark of the hood, his mouth was a mere twitch, his voice sounded rich and forceful. ‘It is written that when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will divide the sheep from the goats. The sheep he will place on the right and the goats to his left. To those on the right the Son of Man shall say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you. When I was hungry, you gave me food, when I was parched, you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me and my angel. I was naked and you clothed me. I was imprisoned and you petitioned for me.” I am that son recovered. You are those sheep and those goats.’ ‘Jesus’ tits,’ said Ivo. ‘He’s a religious nutjob. Of course, he’s a religious nutjob. He’s the fucking messiah. He thinks he’s the fucking messiah. Do something useful, fucking messiah, and stop the fucking war.’ ‘SHUT UP, Ivo.’ ‘Listen here, Strang, if I get the gist of the hand you’re playing,’ said Hilaire, ‘let me remind you that my wife once gave you a lift and we come as a double act, we insist on that.’ ‘Hilaire of Jacobi,’ said Strang, ‘when you did see me as a stranger in a strange land and uncomforted and newly born among you, did you rejoice in my birth, did you offer me gifts and hospitality, gold, frankincense and myrrh, or did you stand on your own land pointing and jeering and wishing me elsewhere?’ ‘No,’ said Hilaire. ‘I did … I mean … who am I?’ Strang struck out his arm and jabbed his forefinger at Wren. ‘And, you, Wife of Jacobi, the tinkerer and tamperer, did you not, when I needed transport, when I needed carriage, deny me that carriage and then afterwards spread lies about my conduct—’ ‘I most certainly did not,’ said Wren. ‘I took you to town—’ ‘Cease, bird of prattle.’ He stepped sideways to address the others. ‘And you, usurer and temple thief, did you not once cast aspersions about me, accuse me of stealing the wealth of others? And did you, Weeping Woman of Woe not deny me shelter in the storm, bar me from your rooms, and insist to your cohorts that I meant them harm when I only bring redemption and eternity? And you, twitching lech, slave to the whip of desire, metropolis of evil, did you not when I asked for belief in me deny me, deny and denigrate?’ ‘You didn’t exactly network, did you?’ said Ivo. ‘And fuck you anyway. You’re not who you say you are. You’re some crack dealer high on his own supply who doesn’t even know how to wear a fucking coat. Take your hood off, let’s see the face of God.’ Bastable crept forward, growled until everyone took a step back. ‘When I was starving,’ said Strang, ‘you gave me no food. When I was a stranger, you gave me no welcome. When I was right, you said I was wrong. And this oncoming conflagration of the air, this war between Ignorance and Ignorance, this great purge of my Father’s world, this feast of fire, this I made for you, for you and because of you, this I did, moved the pieces, the nations and mechanisms against you, and you must all look deep into yourselves because it is there that your destruction resides.’ Strang swung his arm between Ivo and Suki, separating her from the group and urging the others to one side. ‘To those on the right, you are sheep,’ he said, ‘and those on the left, you are goats. The eternal fire is for the goats. Get thee gone.’ ‘Now hang on—’ Hilaire, probably A wail and a whimper. Scuffle of feet. Someone tugged Suki by the hand. As she was pulled towards the gate, Strang’s black anorak swirled like a cloak ahead. Bastable circled behind her. When she looked back, the dog was poking his snout forwards as he rounded up the Peripatetics. As soon as he’d scared them into a bunch he followed up behind Suki and nudged her through the gate. Strang slammed it shut. Overhead, the sky was the colour of bile. All was dim in the garden. A pale light glimmered from inside the house, a faint oblong around the front door. Outside in the street, screams, shouts, her name called, his name cursed. Hands slapped the gate. He mounted his front steps and opened the door with a key. She followed him into the house. The dog came up behind her, its paws clicking on a marble floor. The door thumped shut behind them all. A dank vestibule: Suki didn’t know whether it was safe to breathe or not, or whether she should be here or not. She was shaking. Her arms and chin vibrated. They didn’t. She wasn’t shaking. She was paralysed, fused with the air. Whatever had happened felt like it happened a long time ago, before the sleepless night, before the overtures of war. Part of her felt she should go back, to open the gate and let the others through. The dog’s collar glinted. Strang was a faint outline ahead. He could not be who he said he was. He was someone else. So was she. So is everyone. ‘I’ve been rehearsing that speech for months,’ he said. His voice sounded higher-pitched than it had outside. ‘Any second now. Follow me. Hurry.’ His coat swished and the dog’s paws slapped on the floor after him. She scooted up behind them in the gloom. ‘Strang, Baxter, why am I here? ‘Why me? … Baxter, the others were mean to you, yes, I get that, but … you hardly made things easy for them … slow down. Can you hear me? … I did not give you shelter, I did not give you food, I did not visit you, and why do you need food and shelter anyway, you live in a big fuck-off house. I live in a grand-a-month hutch fighting off Randy McSpray every night. How could I help you?’ Strang stopped. She almost ran into him. The dog’s breathing hissed around the walls. Ahead of Strang: a door. ‘You can’t leave them out there to die,’ she said. ‘We haven’t long,’ he said. ‘Can I go? Will you stop me?’ He pushed the door. It opened onto a flight of stairs down. ‘Is this the bunker?’ She shifted her weight between her feet, as if both were burnt and she could only give each of them momentary relief. Bastable scampered down first. Strang’s hood sunk and merged with the dark. Sweat webbed Suki’s head. She bit her lip. The corridor back to the vestibule was black and long. The front door was a feint yellow rectangle. She could run and, if they were still there, let them in. She could sprint back, be Supergirl, save the day, but then she saw herself obliterated in an instant, the ash of her mixed with the ash of the house as it whooshed up into the airless sky to rain down on the rubble along with the bone grit and showered molecules of the Peripatetics. She would finally be one of them. Something clicked, metallic. She wasn’t sure if she had heard it, or it had only tapped inside her head. She was halfway down the stairs before she had time to decide ifhad it come from out there or inside her. She was expecting a staircase that would take her deep underground. The number of steps turned out to be no more than in any old wine cellar. At the foot of the stairs, she couldn’t see anything, crept forward on her toes. This must be an ante-chamber. Somewhere here was a bank-vault-style door that opened onto a ladder or even the sort of elevator you saw in mines. Strang hadn’t said anything. Maybe he’d already gone down. Perhaps the door had been left open for her. All she had to do was find it. The dog was there, though. The dog’s smell wafted from somewhere. Her phone was in the back pocket of her jeans. She took it out, turned on the torch. In the circle of light, a wall hung with dozens and dozens of images: Polaroids, Internet print-outs, pages cut from magazines and tabloids, line drawings and sketches, some connected by strands of twine held tight by drawing pins, some with little handwritten notes tucked into them. The pictures in the top few ranks were of the former pop singer and reality show winner, Biba Vex. The lower ones were of Suki Caxton taken unawares, captured by telephoto lens, Suki Caxton weighed down by heavy bags in various malls and supermarkets, sat alone in the windows of franchise coffee shops, in one in tears in the street, phone pressed to the side of her face. His breathing behind her now. Rustling and the thwip of material unravelling. She turned, shone the light in his face. He’d pulled his hood down, taken off his mask. ‘I told you I’d save you, Biba, I love you, Biba.’ Up somewhere, a dull thud, far off. The second one exploded overhead. Grim relief fell through her. The ceiling flashed yellow. The dog, the walls, Baxter Strang lit yellow. Her outstretched hands swirled into a yellow haze. ~  Ashley Stokes is a writer based in the east of England. He is the author of The Syllabus of Errors (Unthank Books, 2013), and editor of The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings, and the Unthology series. His short fiction has appeared in The Shadow Booth, London Magazine, Bare Fiction, The Lonely Crowd and The Warwick Review. His novel GIGANTIC will be published by Unsung Stories in 2021. @AshleyJStokes ashleystokes.net Poetry ~ Strider Marcus Jones OVIRI ( The Savage – Paul Gauguin in Tahiti ) woman, wearing the conscience of the world- you make me want less civilisation and more meaning. drinking absinthe together, hand rolling and smoking cigars- being is, what it really is- fucking on palm leaves under tropical rain. beauty and syphilis happily cohabit, painting your colours on a parallel canvas to exhibit in Paris the paradox of you. somewhere in your arms- i forget my savage self, inseminating womb selected by pheromones at the pace of evolution. later. I vomited arsenic on the mountain and returned to sup morphine. spread ointments on the sores, and ask: where do we come from. what are we. where are we going. ~ IT'S SO QUIET it’s so quiet our eloquent words dying on a diet of midnight toast with Orwell's ghost- looking so tubercular in a tweed jacket pencilling notes on a lung black cigarette packet- our Winston, wronged for a woman and sin re-wrote history on scrolls thought down tubes that came to him in the Ministry Of Truth Of Fools where conscience learns to lie within. not like today the smug-sly haves say and look away so sure theres nothing wrong with wanting more, or drown their sorrows downing bootleg gin knowing tomorrows truth is paper thin . at home in sensory perception with tapped and tracked phone the Thought Police arrest me in the corridors of affection- where dictators wear, red then blue, reversible coats in collapsing houses, all self-made and self-paid smarmy scrotes- now the Round Table of real red politics is only fable on the pyre of ghostly heretics. they are rubbing out all the contusions and solitary doubt, with confusions and illusions through wired media defined in their secret encyclopedia- where summit and boardroom and conclave engineer us from birth to grave. like the birds, i will have to eat the firethorn berries that ripen but sleep to keep the words of revolution alive and warm this winter, with resolution gathering us, to its lantern in the bleak, to be reborn and speak. ~ CHILDHOOD FIRES late afternoon winter fingers nomads in snow numb knuckles and nails on two boys in scuffed shoes and ripped coats carrying four planks of wood from condemned houses down dark jitty's slipping on dog shit into back yard to make warm fires early evening dad cooking neck end stew thick with potato dumplings and herbs on top of bread soaked in gravy i saw the hole in the ceiling holding the foot that jumped off bunk beds but dad didnt mind he had just sawed the knob off the banister to get an old wardrobe upstairs and made us a longbow and cricket bat it was fun being poor like other families after dark all sat down reading and talking in candle light with parents silent to each other our sudden laughter like sparks glowing and fading dancing in flames and wood smoke unlike the children who died in a fire next door then we played cards and i called my dad a cunt for trumping my king but he let me keep the word ~ WOODED WINDOWS as this long life slowly goes i find myself returning to look through wooded windows. forward or back, empires and regimes remain in pyramids of power butchering the blameless for glorious gain. feudal soldiers firing guns and wingless birds dropping smart bombs on mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, follow higher orders to modernise older civilisations repeating what history has taught us. in turn, their towers of class and cash will crumble and crash on top of ozymandias. hey now, woods of winter leafless grip and fractures split drawing us into it. love slide in days through summer heat waves and old woodland ways with us licking then dripping and sticking chanting wiccan songs embraced in pagan bonds living light, loving long, fingers painting runes on skin back to the beginning when freedom wasn't sin. ~ IN THE COME AND GO, I MIND YOU in the middle, where i find you, i wriggle in behind you all the way. in the come and go, i mind you, what we were is reconciled, you let it stay. this template, for being tender, is our state to remember into grey; beyond the time of soil and ember, into nothingness's timbre- be it, play. ~  Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between forests, mountains, cities and coasts playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in publications including The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Galway Review; The Lonely Crowd Magazine. Season Poem (for Johannesburg) 1. Another Winter; each is different Each is fringed with last year’s Arthritic twigs and blackened grass, But each denies the past’s nostalgia. With half an eye on next year’s possibilities, Each day pursues the driven linearity Which brings each to an inevitable death. Always the conclusion escapes. The trees plan new strategies, More melancholy configurations Another suggestion of beauty. 2. Our measurements fail to capture The logic of another season. So we fail to understand; There is no war between progress and regeneration. Glass and concrete do not obscure the sun And a warmer time brings no hope to silent pavements. But a warmth returns – The days stretch themselves, without anticipation. Nor can we anticipate tomorrow By homage to a dismembered or imagined past Spring brings us no comfort. 3. We run out of names, So one year becomes another. The sun of summer flings shadows as seeds. They bear fruit, become the darkness By which we know the light. The roads are shadowless and sticky-hot And lead to suburbs full of silence. There, leisure falls to those Who claim it as a right. Harsh is the fear which penetrates their calm. 4. Autumn draws together the myriad strands, Forms a nexus; A waiting. As the days close they anticipate their deaths, And so are like us, who give them names. We fear the calling of the seasons to this point Where nothing is inevitable. For unlike theirs, the fading of another of our years Is a presage of some ultimate conclusion; Bloody or silent. ~ Semaphore Every morning When I wake up There's a moment When I can hear Everything. If I listen There's no longer An inside or an outside. Nor even, it seems, The faint but total Susurration of white noise. Is the pretence of silence A comfort? Have even the satellites Fallen quiet? Then a dog barks A distant caw. I go back to sleep. ~ Terra Nullius We depend On the idea Of a horizon. It shapes our understanding, Our viewpoint Both of eye and mind. With that finiteness To bound us We can make plans, As long as nothing Gets in the way. We need the picture plane To have its vanishing point Uninterrupted. The landscape of our future Needs to be empty. We cannot write Our dreams of time On the proximate walls That press in On us. ~  James Sey is a Scottish poet, writer and multimedia artist, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has performed alongside rock bands and on spoken word platforms, often in performances incorporating video and sound art. His poetry has appeared in print journals and online, and his non-fiction, journalism and academic art writing is widely published.
Short Fiction ~ Flora Jardine Dusk thickened to darkness as I drove north. On my left the hills turned black as the sun sank behind them. I longed for sleep. Why had I set out so late, so tired? But I knew why: I wanted to get this journey over with, to fall into a motel bed and sleep until noon with no need to get up early to drive to the funeral. I switched my headlights on, as did the other drivers. The highway narrowed here to two lanes with a concrete divider. The lights of oncoming cars were intermittently blinding. Up ahead, I saw brake lights congeal into red blurs. Traffic slowed, then stopped. I pulled up behind the car in front. Oh great, I thought wearily. A collision ahead? How long would this take? At the moment, no one knew. Curses would be flying within each vehicle. Those with radios would be tuning in to traffic reports and those with smart phones checking other media. I had neither radio nor cellphone. I abhorred cellphones, and my old beater of a car had silenced its own radio. As long as the car started and stopped I hadn't wanted to spend money on getting frills fixed, but now of course I wished I had. How long before the line would move again? I was sealed off in a box, knowing nothing, hearing no news. I turned off my engine when others did the same. Then came sirens: ambulance and police approached from up ahead and had to snake around vehicles blocking the two lanes which formed the highway in this section between cliffs. One cliff rose like a wall on my left and the other fell sharply to the right, all the way down to the snaking shoreline of the inlet below. I swear aloud. I have no flashlight, no phone, no radio, nothing to read, nothing to eat and little water in my bottle. I did have a pillow though, so I tilted my seat backward and tucked it behind my head. Breathe, I told myself. Stay calm. Nothing to do but wait and possess oneself in patience. The wait, I learned, would be long. Someone official-looking was going from car to car, telling drivers that there had been a multi-vehicle pile-up ahead. Do NOT try to turn around, he said at each driver's window. Someone had tried that and was now wedged between other cars and the divider. People were honking, tempers flaring. Then a helicopter appeared. “Jaws of life” were being employed. With nothing better to do, I got out of my car and walked near a group of drivers milling on the roadside. I overheard details from someone's radio. It was going to be a long night. I hadn't brought a book, not even a newspaper. I had left home in a hurry. Every time I do anything in a hurry, like the times I've rushed from one lifestyle to another, disaster follows. I returned to the car, tilted the seat and tucked the cushion under my head. Breathe, I advised myself again. I began counting down, doing visualizations. I was so tired I drifted off ... Someone rapped on the window. I jerked awake, glaring. F-- OFF I wanted to snap, but I saw that it was a good Samaritan with a tray of take-out coffee and muffins. “Sorry to startle you,” she said, unforgivably polite when I was so irritable. “No ... it's fine ... sorry ...” I stammer. “Do you know what's going on?” Neighbours from the scatter of houses up the hill had decided to bring coffee to those stuck in the jam. It would be hours before the road was unclogged, it seemed, before the wrecks were towed away and the accident analysts had finished investigating. “Thank you,” I say to the Samaritan, and she moves on to the next car. So here I was, sealed alone in a box, with nothing to do but think my thoughts. Thoughts ambush you at a time like this, savage things springing out of wilderness. I shut my eyes and began drifting once more. I think someone came to the window again, but I feigned sleep – half-feigned it, for I was half-asleep. A feeble breeze had arisen. Shadows of tree branches swayed hypnotically over the line of vehicles. I thought I heard someone opening my right-hand rear door, and remembered that the doors weren't locked. I was too tired to bother about it now. My limbs were leaden, I hadn't slept properly for days; it had been a bad week, after hearing that Jacob had died. In the distance I heard voices shouting, and someone was crying. I heard a sound behind me, as of a body dropping heavily into the back seat, adjusting its bulk. Had someone slipped through the non-locked door? Nonsense, I told myself. Breathe. Sleep, if possible. The body in the back was very still. I glanced fearfully at the rear-view mirror but saw only shadows. I heard breathing -- or was it my own? Who was there? This was a silent question; I didn't speak aloud. There's no one there, I told myself. I didn't speak, but someone did. There was a presence. “You'll miss the funeral,” I heard. I didn't answer. Jacob is dead, I thought. I still couldn't get used to it. Some people slip out of life easily, predictably – but not my ex-husband Jacob. It wasn't his style. When we got divorced he seemed strangely more inside my life than he had been for years, and now that he was (apparently) dead, he seemed more alive than ever. But why do I say “apparently”? I know he's gone. I've seen the obituary. I've spoken to his relations, colleagues, friends – the ones I failed to avoid, at least. So: 'bye Jacob. Hello, figure in the back seat. (But don't be ridiculous: there's no one in the back seat ...) With nothing to do, nothing to read or write with or listen to, nothing to make or fix or clean or acquire or throw away and no one to talk to, I occupy myself with phantoms. I encounter entities. A line of cars is immobilized on a ribbon of pavement on the edge of wilderness, tree-covered cliffs above, finger of choppy ocean below. Bats flit. Above, hawks and owls watch. Wilderness meets technology and makes edgy adjustments. A presence sits behind me. “You shouldn't have taken Leah away from Jacob,” it mumbles, speaking in unearthly tones. “And you shouldn't have abandoned Winter.” I knew the presence would be accusatory. “And why embrace poverty? To prove what?” Maybe because I was just lazy. By the time we separated I had fallen out of love with Jacob, but too late for we were more deeply entangled than ever by things stronger than love: time, shared past, secrets known to no one else, memories possessed by no one else. When we met, Jacob was a rising playwright and director, then a professor in the Theatre Department, an academic, but by the time we divorced he had become a religious “nut-bar”, as I called it. How could someone so brilliant, so sparky, fall so low, fall for all that? Become snared by a sect? His new wife was one of its members of course. It was some sort of creaking, limping, deranged Christianity blended with imports from eastern or ancient places, god knows where (by which I don't mean “god” in the sense Jacob meant god). I taught at the same university, in the Philosophy Department. A waste of time, said my relatives. Philosophy! What's that even for? But I studied the relationships between philosophy and history, art, and neuroscience, and “what's everything else for?” I'd ask my interlocutors. While I dived into the history of ideas about conservation ethics and hermeneutics, colleagues were gossiping about my husband's new paramour. Newest, that is; there had been others. Then there appeared the “charter” we had to sign at the university, for equity and diversity, only they didn't call it that back then. Same stuff though, which I called phony ideological brainwashing and was consequently called before language police on the ethics committee. I resigned on the spot. I took our daughter Leah away (named after a distant poet great-aunt from my husband's European female line whom he'd never heard of but I had discovered) to live in a small apartment in another town. There, I never found another job teaching philosophy-history-neuroscience. (It's a small niche with few berths.) I went to ground. I changed my name and became a “free-lancer” carrying my colours on a changing flag -- meaning I was poor from then on. Leah came to resent that, naturally. When in early adulthood she re-united with Jacob and moved into his big house, she too joined his sect. She would be at the funeral, of course, if “funeral” was what the sect called whatever it had. You shouldn't have taken her away as a child, said the figure in the back seat. I jolted out of my half-sleep. Who spoke? Did someone speak? Up ahead a group of stranded drivers sat on folding garden chairs which someone had produced from their trunk. They passed around a bottle. Not everyone was unprepared for disaster, I saw. Their murmurs lulled me back into a doze. And you really shouldn't have betrayed Winter. How could you? Ah, Winter, and I had loved you so much. Winter was our dog, rescued from the pound. Here comes winter, we'd say when he bounded in from the backyard, for his coat was white as snow. We said this when he first arrived and it became his name. Once Jacob got religious he ignored Winter. Animals didn't figure in his cult. As a playwright and director Jacob was used to creating worlds and characters, directing their doings and interpreting their thoughts. It was easy for him to adopt a new pantheon, a new cast of characters, to throw out the old props and bring in new. To him it was his god-like creator's right. But then, I did the same when we divorced and he re-married. Our heavily-mortgaged house was sold and the apartment building I found for Leah and myself didn't allow dogs. I found a new owner for Winter, but she found him “too big” -- she didn't like dog-walking after all – so she gave him back. I had to leave him with friends who shut him in their basement all day. Then I found a new family with a yard he could run in. When Leah and I took him there he looked at me with infinite puzzlement yet an underlay of understanding, or at least resignation. Leah was crying. Get in the car, I told her briskly, holding back my own tears. I did visit Winter once to see that he was okay. The new family were not unfriendly when I knocked on the door but I could tell they didn't want this to become a routine. It was the last time I saw Winter. Driving by the house later on I saw a “For Sale” sign, and later a “Sold” sign. It was already empty. Winter was gone. Tears streamed down my face now, as I reclined in my driver's seat. Was he okay? Why hadn't I tried harder to find him? Two hours had passed here on the highway under a starless sky. It was past midnight, the witching hour. Was there a witch in the car with me? There was something. A figure from the past, the unconscious, the world of archetypes? I had studied neuroscience, remember, so automatically I accepted all of those, while still denying anything was there. Only my own remorse. When you can't escape, when you're without distraction and night's pressing in, remorse rules. It arrives in full panoply of Latin and French etymology stemming from “morsus” -- morsels, bites. Remorse gnaws, chews at you. It sits in the back of your car when you're helplessly trapped at a scene of carnage. There was an old woman who lived in the apartment next to mine and Leah's. At first I was friendly to her, but soon found her impossibly needy. Of course she was, being old, lonely, unwell, shaky, frightened of falling, frightened of death. Her need was bottomless, and my energy shallow. Too often when she knocked on my door I pretended to be out. I turned off the phone. She wanted to talk, which is to say to complain about how hard life was, but there was nothing practical I could do for her -- until there was, because one day she actually had sunk deeper into illness. But I didn't know and didn't answer the phone. Then, she was dead. She hadn't been seen for some days when the building manager found her body sprawled on the floor of her bedroom. I had failed her too, as I failed Winter. Somebody should strangle me for moral failure. Maybe that's what the man in the back seat was planning to do. Had he slipped in under cover of the general confusion of the situation, marking me out as victim? Why not? I deserved to die alone. I sat in the darkness. When the sun had dropped behind the western hill and no moon rose I had thought about the tales I used to tell Leah. Father-sun, I said, and Mother-moon had gone behind a cloud-curtain into their private world, their mansion away from the eyes of watching humans. How easily such tales flow off the tongue, I'd say to teen-aged Leah much later: you could see how ancient cultures developed myths around heavenly bodies, and how they got elevated into religious iconography. Leah had frowned. She was forming her own views about what was myth and what was real. Loneliness was real, the need to escape others was real, remorse was real, failures of compassion were real. Jacob believed in a Judgment that came after death; I experienced it as present in this life, continuously. Was the man in the seat behind me judging just where to plunge a knife into the back of my neck? Jacob dipped and ducked and wove around us during those years of separation, assaying semi-reconciliation. I held back, censorious, dismissive, hard-hearted. I lost track of what might be going on in his traitorous head. Sleeping with actresses, stage hands, students ... all that was nothing new (not in a man who felt free to create his own worlds) but to get into bed with a whore-ish cult, a gang of mindless, misogynistic, nature-hating, corporate-sponsored, devil-fearing idiots – that was unforgivable. He'd gone mad. Yet now I in my remorse want forgiveness. I want what I declined to grant. Faced with betrayal one's first response is to betray, literally to “hand over”, like I handed over Winter for convenience, and handed over the old lady next door to loneliness, trading compassion for privacy. And now I'm the aging one. Soon I should be retiring, acquiring hobbies, going on cruises, but retiring from what? A free-lancer doesn't retire, doesn't, to be precise again, “retreat”. I couldn't retreat any further than the withdrawn position I'd already retreated to. Leah felt I'd traded her home for my principles. Yes, but I'd been preserving the principles for her too. She didn't want them though; she lives by different principles. We don't see each other, much. Long since knocked off the academic wagon I do “independent” research, outside the machine, writing free-lance on the margins of my discipline. I'm a failed philosopher (and how's that different from a successful philosopher, ask sarcastic friends). Few in the field have heard of me, but I treasure anonymity. I like to pass through crowds unknown and invisible. I only wish I was unknown and invisible to myself. And now I have a witness in the back seat, who knows things. Who is this who steals into people's cars in a traffic jam under cover of night, invading and asking damning questions? He makes me contrite, rubbing at my sins as they rub away at me, grinding down my peace of mind. Just before dawn breaks over the line of cars, I fall into a real sleep, a deep sleep. Later, at the moment of waking, stiff behind the steering wheel whose rim digs into me if I turn this way or that, I hear something shifting off the back seat, like the weight of a body. Was that the car's back right-hand door clicking shut? Is the figure who wasn't there leaving then? I refrain from looking, in case he comes back, intending to kill me. I jerk into full wakefulness and register a creeping dawn light. Then I hear a muffled shout. A cheer: the line of cars up ahead is finally beginning to move. I yawn, stiffly. I drink the coffee donated last night, still sitting in the coffee holder, cold but welcome. Adding sugar I can pretend it's an exotic summer Starbucks concoction. I am somewhat restored; released from immobility I'm free to take part in the death rights ahead of me today. Where did you go when you went religion-mad, Jacob, I ask as I slip the car into gear. Speeding up I add, and where are you now? You won't be at your funeral, that's for sure, and I will skulk anonymously and invisibly: we'll neither of us be there. Where you've gone is and will remain unknown, the after-life a blank eternity, like my this-life future. As I start driving the ribbon of highway is the very image of a long road ahead -- going where? I don't think I'll ever get there. ~ 
Poetry ~ Fabrice Poussin The Problem with the Giant Goliath may have known his fate so strong in the armor he was made yet to fall at the end, to the child. So many giants roam among the meek looking from the cloudy realms feared by those who think themselves weak. Those distant ones yet have a dream to be like their diminutive selves for a moment for their monstrous hearts hold many secrets. Multitudes race to safety upon hearing the loud footsteps trembling in unison with a weary earth unaware of the plea the colossi carry with them. There is great chagrin in those few souls housed in impregnable fortresses statues standing tall above ancient temples. If only the many could take a moment and listen to the lonely wanderer perhaps they would see that greatness comes at so dear a price. Sadly he has forgotten how to cry before them for no one will believe he suffers within the citadel and he continues on the road in cruel pretense. ~ Pain of a Child You hurt child in the middle of the street crowded with strangers rushing to other futures. You cry little girl deep within your breast abandoned in the palace seeking a warmer hand. You are so still today when others rejoice at the sun in your corner you remain the darkness your friendly dress. You must remember the laughter running through the halls carefree careless and bare feet there was no end to your light then. Open your eyes and see these roads are yours to take warm with the flow of eternity you can smile again in your hiding place. ~ Fallen Modest with his broken wing he glides softly exhausted by the hours of sufferance and hunger pondering the delay gifted by the turbulence above. Scanning the surface of the jagged world below he searches for a gentle plane upon which to land desperate in the moment of unending torment. Currents of an unseen plane carry his last hopes the body untouched remains warm with a new birth sovereign of the highest realm he ponders the morrow. Far from the nearest blade his sharp eye wonders how long until he finds the destiny written on the plateau transported by the will that guides him through his days. So close the ruby nectar begins to flow to her domain yet there is no regret to be found in the torrent of those tears only delight in the communion of earth and flesh. He will not land in the kingdom promised by blasphemers nor die where the flame ignites metal, rock, even the air but be the brother of a girl too born of all that is eternal. ~ Finality An inch away from eternity, he remains still why take another breath when the air is burning? why drink another sip when the drink is flaming? why continue the thought when the brain freezes? Wishing to slip away into the safety of memories long gone between the crack of brittle old bones he stays silent in the dormant shade of a dream perhaps the monster about will let him be… And inch away from the fulfillment of his last hope the body now unknown persists in its tremor distances away from a soul of scattered particles beats slow, mass across a desert of sand and stone. The flesh cools as the lava spewed from Hades cold as marble with its dying vessels of painful blues a mind hovers as the strangest misty companion before it vanishes into one final sublime implosion. ~ Jungle If you were a jungle I would brandish the machete cut through the vines numb the thorns and venture into the dark unknown. If you were a castle I would run to the drawbridge seek the steel curtains and part my way through the thick walls. If you were a garden I may plea for a chance to enter inhale your infinite perfumes and let you carry me on to your secrets If you were catacombs or a graveyard I may mourn the sadness of my kin change a spring suit for a shroud and disappear into your infinite abyss If you were a desert I might fear the heat of summer dusks renounce my wish to pay you a visit and sleep upon your sands as nectar. But you are an ocean deep with the mystery of numerous lives lost and I merely shiver awaiting your call to surrender to the rapture of your voice. ~  Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications. |
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