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01FE811 ISSUE 251
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THIS ISSUE, WE INVITED SUBMISSIONS BASED ON THE THEME LIE STILL' ••••
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::r Birdless
N ight Wanderers
We built the ca r park, and the industrial estate but still they come Despite the mess we make, movement like light from a quivering mirror
We'll wait here until they're gone . We'll hide here amongst the trees .
Always present if you bother to look, but untouchable. A flutter As you put your hand on the door. Only remnants: a gem blue egg, a feather Their bodies crack into w ings that meet at the tips Like last-kiss lips, barely daring to touch Virginia! white beneath, wrapping themselves unbridled Into their own robes . We are castrated at the shoulder blade And always just slipping under their wake, again . Deaf To the Earth's low song set in metal, magnetic chords .
We'll lie still until everyone's asleep and gone . We come out at night. At night we come alive . We'll climb out into moonlight, Ghost-light, that's right . Skip like young children . Break the silence, make up neat words. We burn like spirits, Borrow wings and fly for 7 hours at a time . We come down like meteorites. Now everyone's awake . We'll lie still with half-smiles in our sleep.
They taste the iron of the air on their oyster tongues, Try to garble it out to the morning sky but by winter the pressure gives
Jamie Sykes
Blind and lovesick on the serenade they will fly till they die Because they knew how to live all along
All you kept was the idea and nothing less of seeing the devil in her new dress.
And I will slip seamlessly under their wake, again
So that was that, you hoped, but in the press of darkening thoughts, only you could suppress the fear of waking with the dawn to see her wandering across the lawn as you sunk deeper into the austere feeling of being wrong in being here .
Ella Chappell
En Route Waking with the taste of last night in your mouth, and here and there flashes of a gritting lorry soundtracked by the beeping of its slow reverse Plugging in your iPod to drown it out, finding it midway through your favourite song and remembering where you were when you stopped listening to it sat on a bus, ignoring the man tutting, thinking of her and wishing you were not. In the morning, she is a thought fading like music from a car passing
Blocks of Colour
'All I am trying to do is order the nightmares of my thoughts, trying to escape the stares'. And so you planted yourself in the maze, stumbled from session to session till the days folded into one another and you had to revert to blathering about light and floods and hurt, wondering why putting something together involves breaking it up and you never realised how much this would ache or that she could come to you when awake . it all seemed so different to how it would again and you would often think of that moment when nothing had more colour than the flurry of traffic when walking alone and the hurry of her footsteps on the pavement interrupting what had at the time felt like something RobertVan Egghen
Sebastian Middleton
Hangover
QUOTE OF THE WEEI<
Bag rumbling as phone is stirring because Steve 5 is flashing up and suggesting 'Drink soon ? xx'. Was he the one from the club with long hair and a funny voice ....
" I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there's a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette . You wait and see ." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author of The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, chronicler of the Jazz Age, husband of Zelda Fitzgerald, notorious alcoholic and all-round hero .
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Three cups of coffee later and it feels like your teeth are melting into your cheeks . You scratch at your eyelids and take the pin out your head .
And Then and then I watch the clouds churn down blind channels transform into a dog a cat a cup with six handles and then the rain writes letters on the pane to the moth who circles up the light folds in and dies a tiny black eye and then I st and outside to see me pale and then
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Jennifer Grey
Breaking the Labyrinth Lie Still. The labyrinth is sealed . Its bloodhound snout will track The lost pup . Snarls by the door. Unconquered, the shadow master Makes its minions choke the floor. Frustrated fingers find her next. The child's house is home no more . By morning, blank faces Catch her periwinkle flush But that is all. The moonlit curse She was forced to never tell Grew her heart a concrete wall That waits to be decoded, For a door to be unsealed Till then nothing she can do but Lie. Still. Rachael Lum
Jamie Starr
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