DREY 2 by Kevin Cadwallender

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HUGH McMILLAN Three Poems

Mars Last night I was mobbed by crows, felt like Tippi Hedren, less lovely though, more lost. Today puddles will join together and the world will be recast in water, beautiful, bottomless, with a mirror view of small clouds and aching blue. In the meantime, I will try and wear you down with substandard verse, look down on the town from this long window, see wet tar streaming all the way to Mars.

All in All I’d Rather When there’s traffic in my mind, I end up in Philadelphia, strolling in the Avenue of the Arts with a well groomed girl, or punching the air like Rocky on the steps of the Rodin Museum at the sight of another by line from Scoop McMillan. As I eat hoagies in the unusually mild weather this Fall, I watch leaves slowly drift to sea. At this point I’m interrupted by a bum. What is a hoagie? he asks. And what’s it like to be on the edge of a humid subtropical zone? He’s drunk again, and on Wikipedia, and soon he’ll show me, irresistibly, pictures of his home town.

Poetry Doubles, Lesbos (After the painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema)

Alcaeus Did you know Jimi Hendrix pished on this lyre? I’m behind it, hiding from those eyes of hers. We’re in the annex of the Aesculapius Memorial Theatre as Ovid’s got a translation of Rab Wilson next door. No crowd in here, just some eco-poets from Santorini, and my pal Alcetes at the back, drunk again. Who’ll win the famous laurel wreath? Not me with my smut: in Aphrodite’s Isle always, the girls win. Sappho I’m hurling love’s bolt smoking like the sea, but he’s got a sidestep like James McFadden and he’d sooner kiss a glass than me, claims drink’s part of his religion. So’s love, I say, but he’s either steaming or singing comic songs about boats, talking of which, I note, the last one’s gone. In Aphrodite’s Isle always, the girls win.

RICHIE McCAFFERY Two Poems Woodwork I have smoked a whole day down to the stub working in wood. First I cleared a dying room of furniture, mostly repro-regency stuff that I blitzed in the garden with a hammer. Cupboards fell away like jerry-built coffins. there was a sprained ash, its roots poisoned

by one of my mother’s neighbourly feuds. I chainsawed its thirty year concentric archive down to little logs. A friend came over, invited me for a pint, he asked was there any need to cut everything up so small? Then it dawned on me what I’d been doing and I told him everyman history is so crammed with important things, beyond the sceptred days of nationhood and a jaundiced tree or my mother’s dressing table segues into yesterday easily in hideable bits.

Late Red Admiral It came in with the last of the logs, a pod of l'esprit de l'escalier, a scabbed unbirth, an unhatched chrysalis. After a few days of inglenook glow, a tiny miracle happened. In the frosty Trossachs a red admiral was born in darkest winter, in a noisy pub. A little but dazzling firework that goes off when no one is looking, an applause of clapping red wings out of time with the rest of the world's good deeds. Enough to fan a dust mote from my eye.

Wetware

BRAM E. GIEBEN

Everybody was excited about WetWare. Having networked, cloudstructured brain-to-brain communication was going to be absolutely brilliant. It was a huge leap. Taking the exocortexes we carried around in hard plastic boxes and chrome-edged tablets; storing them in giant, intangible clouds of random-access memory. The extended phenotype. Removed from the physical, now omnipresent, accessible. Goodbye devices, tech... Hello quantum-linked cloud computing. A constant stream of individuals, personalities, avatars... hurtling around as you walked about the place. Everybody uplinked. Buildings overlaid with metadata – historical, cultural, geographical newsfeeds appended to every structure. Social networks, thousands of them – each with different, overlapping fields of interest and membership. Each one a place to telegraph identity from, to mark with one’s own particular stream of digitised individuality. When WetWare started to bleed into our dreams, no-one was surprised. Bury a quantum-resonance nanoscopic neural lace in eighty percent of the Earth’s population, link them brain-to-brain, and it’s inevitable that not only the designed, conscious functions become enmeshed. The dream realms were a vast, inverted version of the conscious. The logic symmetrical but opposite. On the social networking clouds, you could edit and design your profile to reveal specific facts you wanted to share. In the dream realms you were on constant, random broadcast. Lucid dreaming techniques emerged, allowing sleeping, networked users some degree of control over the topography of the dream. Social conventions sprung up – it was impolite to mention any dream contact in the physical world. The dream realm became a place of unrestrained fantasy. Heaven, until we started experiencing each other’s memories. You wake up and find that all of a sudden, rather than being a successful financial trader, you are a Harlequin entertaining soldiers; or a General leading a mechsuit unit into battle on some distant moon. Or rather, you would find that you had been these things, all of them, in some distant, chronologically warped section of your mind. It became hard to tell whose thoughts, whose life was whose. Didn’t take long for the infrastructure supporting our physical world to break down. There weren’t enough people left without the WetWare to support the dreaming, enraptured coma patients we ‘Wareheads had

become. We lie still, engorged with sensation, adrift on a sea of shared experience, unable to move.The skin stretched across my ribs is paper thin. I forget to feed, to dress. I have lived eight billion lives – fallen in love, suffered and died over and over again – all simultaneously. I cannot remember who I was before the story began. Even as my vision blurs, flickers its last, I cannot believe that this is the end.

Pictures of You

JONATHAN ROBERT MUIRHEAD

Why are these things never played out like in the movies? She wanted us to have “a wee chat”. Here we are, 2 coffees, a dark café, with The Cure wailing in the background. We sit across from each other. We never sit side by side. We need, in times like these, to be facing each other, to have this “wee chat” about the serious thing. The photographs. That song on the radio keeps reminding me of them. ‘Pictures Of You’. From one of our favourite albums, Disintegration. And it’s funny just how accurate the title seems just now. Says a lot about the way I’m feeling. Says a lot about the way she’s looking at me. All because I’ve lost these photographs. Of our first holiday together. She speaks. “Have you looked absolutely everywhere?” I nod “Yes” She doesn’t say anything but I can tell that she doesn’t believe me. Why did this have to happen now, 2 days before we’re due to head off? I try for a placatory tactic; small talk. “You want some sugar for your latte?” A small, cold answer comes back “no thanks,” That was the end of that conversation, then. And then, Robert Smith kicks in again. If only I’d known of the right words Quite.

“So what about tomorrow?” I say, changing the subject. “I’m ready, are you?” Her response is as much a challenge as a statement. “Yes, I’m all packed,” But not mentally. We both sup our coffee. That black, bitter taste, coats my throat, burns down to my stomach. “I’ll never forgive you for this, you know,” I look at the table “yes, I know and I’m sorry but I don’t know where else on the hard drive these pictures could be. I thought I’d saved them,” “Well you obviously hadn’t, had you?” Her voice, rising at the end of the sentence serves as warning that there’s more of this on the way. “No, I hadn’t,” “Honestly, you were asked to do one simple thing, to back them up and put them on a disc and you couldn’t even get that right, could you?” “Well I think I might’ve done that before,” “Oh really? So where’s the disc then?” “Well I don’t know about that either?” “Oh bloody great! So you’ve lost our pictures twice, is that what you’re telling me?” “I don’t know, I’ve looked for the disc as well,” “Stop saying I don’t know! Honestly, for once in your life, why can’t you just come out and say you’ve made a mistake, stop covering things up? It’s bad enough what you’ve done without trying to make out like it doesn’t matter,” “I’ll have another look when we get home, maybe there’s somewhere I haven’t thought of that they’ll turn up in,” “Oh yeah? Like where?” And that’s the great unanswerable, so I don’t even try. She sups her latte, face blank, mouth silent, saying nothing. It was my idea to come here for breakfast. I thought I could make it up to her, a nice big fry up and a few pints of coffee each. How was that meant to replace all these memories? And then, one of these pictures I’ve lost flashes back into my mind. A simple shot of our summer holiday last year, of her, in the campsite swimming pool, face all smiles, blue sky and sun, coming toward me slowly. And that song keeps playing. So drowned you were angels, so much more than everything

I wonder what I am to her now? The people around us seem to be busier and happier than we’ll ever be. Planning things, making things happen. Snippets of their conversations hit me “Got that for 12 quid in Marks & Spencer” “We’re thinking of Tenerife in July” “That’s her 13 now, doesn’t seem like yesterday she was born,” I keep telling myself one day, this’ll all be twenty years ago. That tomorrow, things’ll be much better. She breathes in. “I’m not sure I want to go now,” I look at her. “But we’ve got it all booked and everything, you can’t pull out now?” “Well that’s just tough because I am,” I don’t know what to say, then The Cure say it for me. Remembering you, how you used to be… The rain starts to batter the café’s exterior. “Well, if that’s what you want,” “It’s not what I want, it’s what I feel I’ve got to do,” she replies. Maybe there won’t be a tomorrow.

Deep Water DEBORAH MURRAY You tell me you can’t swim I tell you I can Hold on to me You say you will To keep me happy But your trust is sinking A heart as big as yours Should not be so easily drowned.

Twelve JILL MAUGHAN

See her back there, a twelve year old kid on the run, held up in the toilets of a bus station, unstill as a green horse, catches her reflection in the mirror, sees a shaken convict, tearful but electrified by this bad seed newly sewn, steadies herself, catches a bus, is unlucky, there on the front seat the Queen is sat, regal and knowing, now the drilling looks fly between the two, the girl should confess, even if the Queen is angry and drags her back, the child screams to put words to it all, but is mute, can’t say what she is running from, wishes it was being bullied but it’s not; her words are not yet born, by Ferryhill the Queen gets up and goes, should have told her, should have told her chatter the tyres, and now look again, to thirty years on, where sat in a room is a bottle green, buttoned up woman, who has been on the run too long……..

IRENE BROWN Two poems Tap Precision that’s what’s needed as fingers press down on the black and silver keys. tap,tap,tap And The open mechanics and simple mystery; the compact form of a typewriter. tap,tap,tap,tap yes, The elegant rising of typebars writing the ribbon as it spools through the guide. tap,tap,tap I st no delete button no cut and paste no spellcheck just careful focus tap,tap,tap ill no unseen eyes noting each stroke holding your words in their net tap,tap,tap,tap love just your fingers dancing the keyboard tapping into memory tap,tap,tap you Inspired by Amy Houghton’s Typewriter art installation as part of the Taking Time Exhibition 2010.

Redolence People leave traces when they go – a scarf, a tie, a button, a book, a look, a spill , a lipstick stain, a stubbed out fag, a fingerprint, a taste left badly in the mouth, a thorny feeling sitting ill like a poor fitting shoe or well, like a jaunty hat. When lovers leave the bed that dip in the pillow still holds their heady vestige. That secret spoor that drew you lies deep in silent redolence, each change of sheet diminishing it till all that’s left is your own singular scent.

ANNA DICKIE Two poems If I could start anew I would seek the finest mole-riddled loam and grow taproots of carrot and parsnip. I would stop all dandelion clocks, but spare patches of stinging nettle, for Red Admirals, and sorrel for soup. I will graft russet apples onto old rootstock, Pippins, Pearmains, and Egremonts. I would gather dye plants: rhizomes of yellow flag to colour-wash the sky, a sea of green from its sharp-edged blades, its seeds for deepest apricot; Lady’s Bedstraw, bracken and lichen

for crimson, ochre and henna hues, to warm a cold heart on bitter days.

The Yew We found the tree, a great circus tent of evergreen, pitched in a clearing, and followed the long rent in her side to a place of shadow play and broken light, where coiled limbs sweep down to stroke a needle-strewn floor and new shoots break from a myriad of liver-spots and other blotches of decay. Anne dubbed her an old hag, while I wondered aloud about the many times she must have faltered at heart, while keeping vital at her lip. For this was not wine-red berry birth. No, this was a layering of self. Eternity by dint of sheer tenacity and zest.

Assembly Lines SOPHIA WALKER My grandmother could disassemble and rebuild a car engine blind-folded in less than twenty minutes. These days twenty minutes of lucidity recedes into her disassembling and rebuilding her life with the wrong memories. At Christmas I sat with her on the dilapidated sofa that's been in our family for generations, bubbling up old memories for me, like a pan of boiling water when my grandpa used to cook home-grown sweet corn, but that sofa means nothing to my gran,

(neither does my grandfather). As we sat surveying the room of her family she pointed out each person and asked me who they were, repeatedly, for an hour. Grandmother's memories are like a forgotten birthday balloon lost under the bed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; wrinkled, withered, empty... all the air has been let out of the tyres of that army jeep she took apart at seventeen and she she no longer remembers her war, the first of many she fought in a long lifetime; She had two daughters but her house was forever filled with stray children she met as a social worker . Unable to bear to leave them to their fate. Her home was filled with American writers fleeing accusations of communism, She hid them, plied them with martinis and that same sweet corn, freshly- boiled, hand- picked from my grandfather's garden. That living room is empty now. Dust sheets have been draped over the furniture, shutters fastened tight over windows, and, save twenty minute bouts of lucidity, my grandmother sits alone in a corner rearranging her memories, too old and too far gone to rebuild them. When she goes I will rebuild them for her In less than twenty minutes.

Curfew

ANDREW MCCALLUM CRAWFORD

The sun was going down. Alex laid a bottle of Amstel on the table. ‘That’s fae auld Hector,’ he said, and disappeared back into his cubbyhole. John looked across the room. Hector was crouched over his walking stick, his chin on his hands, watching a game of tavli. He had a glass of lemonade at his elbow. He hadn't drunk much of it. John opened his jotter and started scratching with his pencil. The joys of 2H. You had to be careful not to tear the paper, but they lasted longer than HB. Such was his philosophy. The summer was at its height. The season was nearly over, but the sweet smell of peaches still hung in the air. The harvest was brought in by the Albanian itinerant workers. Three of them were sitting out the front of the cafeneio. One of them might have been called Sammy – their names were difficult to pronounce. They were living in an abandoned house on the edge of the village. John had been in it, once. The guy who might have been Sammy had wanted to see him about something. John hadn’t found out what – Sammy’s Greek was bad, and his English was non-existent. It looked like the kitchen was the only room they were using. The furniture consisted of sleeping bags and plastic bags. A battered wood stove squatted in the middle of the room, the door hanging open, plastic plates stacked on top. Flies buzzed around the window, which was no more than iron bars jammed into a hole in the wall. There was a shout from the corner. Someone was cheating. A double six at this stage of the game! Hector didn’t budge. Perhaps it had been wrong to leave the city. The bucolic lifestyle was fine for a holiday, but John had grown tired of it. There was nothing to do apart from sit in the caff listening to old men shouting at the telly or each other. Come to think of it, that was the nightly entertainment in the city as well, but at least he had friends there. Or used to. Most of them had had enough and shipped out. There would be no replacements coming in September. Things were changing. People were going further afield after university, as if South Korea would give them a more rounded perspective on Life. What was it with twenty-year-olds being so intent on finding their inner selves? He’d met dozens. Most of them had problems that were only compounded by the grind of trying to survive in a foreign country. There was no enlightenment in teaching English. He stopped writing.

A group of middle-aged men had gathered outside. Each had a pickaxe handle over his shoulder. One of the men struck the kerb a few times, then checked that the wood hadn't splintered. He came over to Sammy, who turned to his mates. ‘Let’s be havin’ yez,’ said the man. He made a big deal of consulting his watch. ‘Time tae get up the road.’ Silence in the cafeneio. The game of tavli had stalled. Everyone was looking. Even Hector, his chin still on his hands, had turned round. Alex put down the glass he was polishing and went outside. ‘Leave them alone,’ he said. ‘They’re no daein’ anythin’.’ ‘Aye, right,’ said the mouthpiece. ‘Come oan, ah’ve telt yez. Up the road.’ He jerked his thumb. ‘Move.’ Sammy said something to his friends. They got up quietly. Alex gathered the coins off the table and put them in his pocket. John felt himself getting stared at. ‘Who’s he?’ said the man. ‘Never you mind,’ said Alex. ‘Who the hell d’ye think ye are, the polis?’ ‘Ye’ve heard aboot the curfew,’ said the man. ‘Well, we’re here tae enforce it.’ ‘Away hame,’ said Alex, ‘an’ gie us peace.’ John turned back to his jotter. It is easy to hide amongst words, he wrote, especially if you can bury your face in them. When he looked up, the group of men had left. They were following the Albanians. Hector coughed and tried to push himself out of his chair. He had one hand on his stick and the other on the table. When he was sure of himself, he set off slowly towards the door. He shouted over at John. ‘Good night, Teacher,’ he said. ‘See ye the morra.’ John raised his glass. ‘Thanks, Hector,’ he said. Hector laughed. ‘You an’ yer jotter,’ he said. ‘Ah think you’re a spy!’ John watched him totter across the road. He stopped under a streetlight and leaned against it. He lit a cigarette. A billow of smoke rose straight up and was lost in the darkness. He moved off carefully, his stick making a hollow sound on the pavement.

JANETTE AYACHI Three Poems

The Madwoman and her Lover in the Attic Housed here in this street of fierce faces drain pipe veins like leather muzzles; each door growls as it snaps shut, each window an orifice entering another story. Gaudi bones, bricks and cement as skin, Demons in the hollow of walls. Many dreams of prison, as stars halo a tiara of keys above our rooftops and a light bulb balances above each organ. A gold plated watch tower stapled across the skyline, nothing moves but the silence fighting against the whistle of the wind. A different face on each building but the same smile on each faรงade. Strange how the light seems so precious when the dark ignites misery. But I do not fear the night it beckons me like an imam for prayer, saving me from a diaphanous world falsified by reflections. Sellotaped to this city crying out for the open sea the glare of gulls and the suns forked tongue. Even when I close the windows I cannot shut out the outside it sounds its way through poultice and catches its claw around my neck

pulling me though glass. Metallic stars like zinc syringed into the petrol of the cosmos cursing me with its chemical constellations. I will cut the throat of the rainbow to marvel at it bleed over the world.

Dealing with Desire I unfurl the untouchable, tamper with the excess, the unspoken shrouds of chance, imagining our hands twinned with hatching shadows reaching forward in a field of trampled bluebells, fitting in to a painting perhaps so our moment could remain within a frame its secret potency and static glory locked in living on after us under the immortal marble moon. But what is desire, fleeting, chemical, once embraced it lingers then vanishes like the persistent ghost of a forgotten loved one slipping from its sonorous mantle to send spirit messages that show us stolen stars in magpie nests glinting from their cirrus coats of armour like quartz under mud-polluted sun-lit streams. Desire returns in many guises, shape-shifting over decades to plague dreams, haunt the familiar and conflict the soul. So when the day comes to close the night must dictate peace exorcising my heart of its torrent of ticks I lay it to rest with its subtle mantra as it settles in my splintered chest, back down, to its cruel and tuneless murmur.

Les Enfants de Terre

I step away from the window, its gunmetal light, and flee into the back garden of the city where a boy with lycanthropic eyes lights his reefer with filthy hands. He tells me it is dangerous to be here all alone pointing to gangs of older boys who set up rings for sheep to fight. These children of the earth with hibiscus caught in their hair they carry the smell of the sea on their guano-speckled clothes. Another summer in Algeria grasping my culture and holding my tongue. Wearing my pyjamas I join the circle of mud people an only girl amongst a herd of boys attracting ominous attention. The younger boys with dirty faces blow vulpine kisses towards my gaze and whistle up to the roof of the sky like howling wolf-cubs. Others aggravate the sheep triggering them to attack each other as they dart sideways like training matadors. Baby boys who draw stars with sticks in the dust place bets with bottle-tops fingers greased with oil viscous in the sahara sun taking my hands as they cheer. Les enfants sauvages with their teeth like beaten ivory, children who sleep under the stars, a constellation the first picture they know.

Magpie LOUISE BOYD My boss wants to talk to me. It’s written on the envelope he left for me under the desk. See me. Never good. Probably thinks I’ve been stealing from the till. If only it were that simple. Looks like I’m going to have to move on yet again which is too bad, because I quite liked working in this quirky little wine shop. I bet he’s used to people nicking wine or fags. Bet he thinks I’m a real dick for having the cheek to steal money out the till. I’m going to have to leave before he can talk to me, technically that way I’ve resigned. I had been doing so well. See, by the time I was thirteen I had swallowed more notes than I could count. It didn’t matter the denomination. In those days mostly they tasted the same to me; salty, sweet and creamy with a metallic aftertaste. Although, the odd note I whipped from my Granny’s sock drawer when I thought she wasn’t looking tasted a bit like dirt and old shoes, maybe because she was a smoker. Then the notes I would nip from my Mum’s navy leather purse would have a faint tinge of perfume, depending how long they had been living in there for. She caught me once, taking the money that is. I thought I would be in trouble, but she just looked straight through me as a Mother will. She probably felt bad for Dad leaving. I used to work in a call centre. Pretty sweet job because I got to tell people what to do and of course there was very little opportunity for gobbling up cash. On my way to work I just made do with the meagre contents of my wallet. Greedily, I would push another note into my mouth, closing my eyes, savouring the creamy texture on my tongue. As the sodden paper travelled down my throat I enjoyed the saline tang it left as I choked it down. I always wanted another. Another crumpled fiver onto my palette, then another and another, until all the money in my wallet was gone. My own funds were never enough. Whilst there was no cash in the call centre, there were still wallets. And those wallets peered up at me from bags left carelessly open around every corner. Eventually, I crumbled. I had abstained for only a short while. But the work was just so...unsatisfying. Ended up in the disabled toilet with some random persons bag, disappointed that they only had a tenner in their shiny, cheap looking purse with the bow. Call centres don’t pay well. That random person was Jennifer Smith, or so her bank cards insisted, and I devoured her last ten pound note in seconds. I left shortly after that. Stealing from a faceless company is one thing, but taking money from those who are just as skint as me is no fun at all.

It’s sick, I know that. I’m a sick man but I just can’t help myself. So I extract the remainder of my wages from the envelope, and yet another brown Sir Walter Scott looks up at me forlornly. I barely remind myself that I have rent to pay before I stuff it into my mouth. The taste is overwhelming, gorgeous and I brace myself on the cash desk, closing my eyes in a blur of ecstasy. Down they all go, an aftertaste of red wine, a feeling in my belly of total satisfaction. Nothing beats it, nothing. When I open my eyes there is a customer standing on the other side of the cash desk, a bottle of cheap rose in his hands and startled expression on his young face. He just stares at me open mouthed, glancing down at the empty envelope on the desk between us. ‘You’re well getting I.D.’ed pal.’ I tell him. The Sea Wife IRENE CUNNINGHAM When I was a girl my mother sang raucous words at the solid door. Now her old dark dress, skirt hard like carved wood keeps me from the front street and women mute as fish, leaning on the wind, omen-watching. The tangled stink of cabbage and broth drift with me up the ashen path. My nose catches the thick stench of Uncle Jack’s bed – wine and bone-yard slept into thin mattress. He meets women in doorways and their backyard perfume seeps into my mind. Mother says not to drown voices not to cook. St Mary’s bells jangle across the roof. I’m drenched, inside out delivered again from black.

Me and David MARTIN LAW I met David Beckham once. He stood above us on a makeshift stage and his hair was sticking up and he had some beard on his face. He had a short-sleeve shirt and his arms were coloured in tattoos. I need to get a short-sleeve shirt I thought, they must be the in thing right now. In the photo I have he is smiling and his eyes are squinting and his hands are hanging easy at his side. David Beckham was with Ernest Hemmingway. I know it was Ernest Hemmingway because he had ‘Ernest Hemmingway’ written on a sticker and stuck to his thick knitted jumper. He didn’t say much and he sweated a lot. He didn’t know short-sleeve shirts were the in thing. He had a large hole in the back of his head and he moved around in order to show it off to best effect and it looked like a crazy dance up there constantly moving his head to let us all see the hole. I tried not to look but he made it hard. The hole was full of small Ernest Hemmingways. They had shortsleeve shirts. Somehow they knew. David Beckham stood at the front of the stage and told me I was brave. He was talking to all of us but I felt he was talking to me. It’s his easy manner. Hemmingway was spinning behind him. It didn’t put David Beckham off. The bravest he had met, he said. And he meets a lot of people. I was proud I’m not ashamed to say. Not brave I thought, I just do what I’m told. David Beckham ignored Hemmingway as much as he could. There was a tension there. I knew he could see him, who couldn’t see him the way he was dancing around? Hemmingway pointed to the hole in the back of his head and asked David Beckham to put his fist in the hole. David Beckham didn’t want to but he’s a gentleman, he didn’t say no he just smiled and held his hands behind his back. We got annoyed with Hemmingway. We didn’t say anything. What could you say to sweating Ernest Hemmingway with a hole in his head filled with small Ernest Hemmingways? We were brave but none of us told him to stop. If someone had told us to tell him, to tell him to stop, we would have, no question. Hemmingway showed David Beckham how to put his fist in the hole and David Beckham did it just to shut him up and he put his fist in the hole and it fit well, it was a good fit and David Beckham’s fist isn’t a small fist. I could hear the Ernest Hemmingways on the other side of the hole and it might have been the sound of small Ernest Hemmingways’

screaming. I ignored it and I admired the fit, and we all admired the fit and even Hemmingway seemed pleased and David Beckham took his fist out of the hole and put his hands behind his back. He was holding the hand that had been in the hole, holding it tight at the wrist. I wore David Beckham as a holy medal and went to war. And I could not lose. Hemmingway tagged along but he’d lost most of his pep. Now he was just drifting for kicks. And I lay in dust my mouth dry my eyes sore. And I could not move. Hemmingway stood over me and took on a bad cockney accent and said you’ve really gone and done it now, int cha? His sweat fell on my face. David Beckham squinted a smile from the holy medal around my neck and his beard there and he said sorry and I said don’t you apologise don’t you ever apologise it was my own stupid stupid fault. I held him in my hand and I swear there was a tear on his face. You did everything you could David Beckham, I whispered, everything you could. And I swear there was a tear on my face too. The heat had gotten to Hemmingway. Flies swarmed around the hole in his head and the Ernest Hemmingways in there fought them off with ordinary sized pencils. The ordinary sized pencils were huge pencils to these small Ernest Hemmingways. He finally took off his thick jumper and tied it around his neck and I watched him fade to the French Riviera. He’d had enough. I looked at David Beckham and pointed to where Hemmingway had been: “your friend though?” I said, “He was no use at all.”

ROD DALRYMPLE Two Poems

The Interior Empire How carefully I build this kingdom, strategically map my borders, forge iron keys to secure invisible locks. This is the heartland I call home, a scrag of arid desert where the sentry stands alone in the ruins of old battles. How precisely I fill my oceans, conjure storms to sink passing ships, place jagged rocks, unseen, beneath the skin smooth surface. I strive to master the depths, navigate my way round this unfathomable place where lives have been lost, casually tossed overboard. Piece by piece I carve mountains, North Face first, where an avalanche awaits those who come too close to the summit. I traverse this geography, planting white flags on barren hills, while dissenters are exiled, denied citizenship by a court where judge is juror, a single voice the angry mob. In the remote, dark corners I horde cold hearted relics, treasures to be examined in darkness, hostages drawn

from my stockpile of artefacts. I am sole curator of this empire of echoes, the uncrowned King in a country with no subjects.

Girl With the Braid in Her Hair

Silently I watch you as the band play. Poised, intent on the music, unaware of my admiring gaze and all I want is to touch your skin, perform strange alchemy with your youth and beauty, corrupt that tender biology to slow this ageing procession. My hand stays, clutches my drink, going nowhere, doing nothing. It avoids your slender, italianate form. When you speak, words flow out like new currency, ready to be spent in those bright pavilions, where the future is ever present. I hear my words trickle out, the sound of cynicism, a small collection of antiquities that stain the air between us. So now I frame you in letters, hang your portrait in a paper gallery, fifteen years, the velvet rope between us.

Assimilation into the collection P.J.BUCHANAN The sky darkened and the air filled with the buzz of wings. I thought they were locusts, here in the city on a Monday afternoon, but they were jaunty little hats, little fascinators with tiny feathers and scraps of lace that struck to my fingers. Then a cloud of straw chupallas festooned with a rainbow of ribbons settled on my knees, my calves, my feet. Tutti frutti hats, with minute fruit alighted on my shoulders, and on my arms. The hats chirruped like birds. I laughed. A squadron of forage caps whirred through the air in formation, taxied up my back and perched in rows. Skullcaps, red as mushrooms latched on to each other to construct a satin breastplate. Dull tweed caps piled up on my head, skittered over my neck and chin. Steel helm carapaces crashed ponderously onto my belly, down my thighs, over my buttocks. Black fedoras fluttered onto my eyes, across my cheek bones, over my ears, into my open mouth. I tried to scream. I could not shake them off. They settled to a susurration of micro movements. I heard them whisper â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;You are part of the collectionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

Cream

CAITLYNN CUMMINGS

Apples in pies, strawberries in cakes. Baking mantras, apparently hereditary, swirled in Phoebe’s head. Cling wrap techniques and table etiquette were now the vestiges of her mother-daughter relationship. “Damn,” Phoebe said as cascades of flour chalked her already wheat white face. Boxes of tin foil rained down on her from the cupboard above, threatening blue-purple pummel stains on her alabaster skin. “Either she wins, or I do,” she said to her mixing bowl. “Four cups of allpurpose flour, margarine, baking powder and soda, vanilla, vanilla,” she said. Gross amounts of vanilla surged — galup, galup — from the cute, orange-lidded bottle into the steel mixing bowl like blood spurting from a severed artery while Phoebe mesmerically repeated “vanilla” in her mind like the skipping Etta James record her mother refused to throw away, despite its obvious flaw, and continued to play on her mahogany turntable until Number 7, At Last, at last found its way into the dumpster by means of sneaky little hands, an emergency father-daughter conference, and a familiar parade of incapacitating gin tumblers, all marching down the hatch to the rhythm of galup galup. Hallucinating chaos into normalcy, Phoebe with grace and decorum placed the vanilla bottle back on the granite countertop and began combining her ingredients with a wooden spoon, her eyes still transfixed on the scene outside her kitchen window. After Phoebe finished stirring she took the spoon to her mouth to taste. Juniper berries had become poor victims of taste aversion after a young Phoebe, confused about the effects of her mommy’s “special drink”, climbed onto the counter, opened the bottle, and had a gulp. Keeping today’s vanilla-drunk concoction in her mouth proved too difficult a task. Phoebe launched the mixture into the sink and ran to the fridge for some milk to rinse away the nauseating throat memory. Manically moving half-empty pizza boxes and chow mein styrofoam containers, she found a little carton, ripped it open, and guzzled its contents. Nasal mucous, or something like it, flowed, slowly, down Phoebe’s throat. She vomited cream into her Ikea garbage can. Phoebe slid down her wall onto the cool tile floor, like a limp rag doll, and began to sob. “Quite maladroit as usual,” the shrill voice of her mother echoed in Phoebe’s head. “Remember: cream is delicate, so use it delicately.” Sore and shaken, Phoebe wiped the tear-flour paste from under her eyes and stood up to confirm what she thought she’d imagined out the

window. The passenger door of the Cadillac she grew up with opened. Under an ivory lace parasol emerged a gaunt and stooped woman, her bony fingers protruding through beige gloves, clutching a patisserie bag. Very slowly she inched up the walk. White was not the colour to describe her face. X-rays, stomach pumps, and endoscopies had blanched the jaundice-yellow of her skin’s yesterday to an anemic ash. Yams had never seemed so vibrant. Zinc oxide came to Phoebe’s mind – baby’s bottoms, LeBlanc family trips to the beach, never-ending sangrias – and she held her breath, cream in her throat, waiting to be introduced to her mother.

JAMES OATES Three Poems Birth of Quarkboy We talk of science Get excited When we connect In trivia Amaze, As we offer differing perspectives. Weave webs Hope we snag Lips and such. We regale each other with facts about The universe and how it is all Just so much nothing That it’s a wonder anything became of it at all. Picked scab Hitching to sensibilities Bringing me back to Carbon basics I remember a time when I couldn’t tell

Where your molecules ended And mine began If I were a graphic novel You say it would be titled ‘QuarkBoy; Legend of Neutrino’ If you were in print my temptations would stray To the final page Always needing to know Where we came from And where we are going to.

The Decay of the Alpha Male (Frission) The sum of our masses Should be reciprocal Except I was emitting beta The alpha male decayed in front of you Spewed positrons and neutrinos all over your Best disposition That they decay is irreversible Conciliation in half-lives Passion can do this Yet cannot undo this…

Quarkboy and the Lost Neutrino Aspects of a single phenomenon We appeared Drifting, Devoid of gravity

Yet proof of us is proof of everything My particle, your wave. Seek to prove the zero And you may just find There was something there after all. We made so much nothing out of so much something Containment was not a viable option Consequently, That sluggish tinnitus of Life with open strings beckons. My particle, your wave W and Z going against the grain; Lolling tongues over lips Knowing this is the last kiss Nuances and recollections Saved to a digital vault Hoping another field will yield to our existence My particle Your wave Against the grain

EILEEN CARNEY HULME Three Poems

Walking Through the Door I am greeted by shoes summer sandals, winter boots fluffy slippers whispering comfort, I remember as a child you would call out â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;take off your shoesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as the school day hung

itself in the hallway home baking sweetening the air opening cupboards and drawers the years tumble backwardsa butterfly brooch bought for you in Edinburgh postcards from my European trips And a black and white photograph of you and dad in the countrypost-war picnic, borrowed car floral dress and open-necked shirtI can smell summer taste the brightness on your tongues.

While You Were Out The postman broughta DVD you had ordered for my birthday, a credit card statement (the DVD cost ÂŁ9.99 including postage) a letter reminding us of the inspection for the gas boiler While you were out the wind toppled the potted cherry blossom, the bigger of the pair, its leaves appear to be discolouring wilting falling faster than they should and the yellow rose bush that sings summer has black spot While you were out BT phoned suggesting we returnthey are certain they can beat

our current deal. Rachel from Specsavers left a message to say your contact lenses are ready for collection and your mother left another to ask how I am While you were out I called your old friend Johnhe says he will be here on Thursday, I spoke to the next door neighbour complained about the black spot, I chose an outfitpurple with a silver drizzle, remembering the pact about black and words like peace, love, forgiveness.

The Tired Ghosts After work the slow walk home, gypsy free bones loose, nothing but air and the blue day I pass the house where the doctor lives, retired now he bends to tend lavender and honeysuckletheir life force unmeasured Wind dips as the sun slips over the bay, scent of evening begins to drift, on scissored pathways I wonder how many steps to unlive the past.

An Experiment Was Carried Out HARRY GILES I want molecules detatched from you to enter me, my nasal passage, where there's a receptor for every scent of you. Also one for wet dog. And one for cinnamon (says the shape theory of olfaction). When E.M. radiation from the visible range reflects from you onto my retinas, dopamine receptors activate -- even when serotonin levels are low, have stayed low for weeks. The reliable response of my limbic system to just your presence implies your fitness for ensuring survival of my genes. I have failed to prove the null hypothesis that I do not love you.

KIKI STEWART Two Poems Neon Army They were at bay until recently, called into action in the name of fashion, 80’s babies blurred to 90’s bitching about their rations. “This bread clearly contains wheat,” they snap in espresso-fueled tongue-lashings, “did you not hear me? I said gluten-free,” as if offended, allergy-afflicted, “oh forget it. I’ll just have a pale ale, please.” Their camouflage, confusingly conflicted, uniforms that try to lie about their age “because absolutely nothing beats vintage.” At a party one night, I did my best to engage as I chatted to a girl with a menorah and Hebrew tattooed on her protruding rib cage; she explained it was from the Torah. “Oh, are you Jewish?” “Atheist, but…” “I see…Where did you get your fedora?” She looked at me blankly, replied, “my what?” I’ve not talked to another one since; neon-conversed, spandex-wearing twats, boot-marching the streets looking dense in aviators and toboggans making ownership of French bulldogs a trend. Though seemingly harmless and perhaps a bit fun, they won’t stop ‘til they’ve brainwashed us all; the granolas and the preps, every last one,

it’s in the leopard-print writing on the bathroom stall; they’ll numb our minds right under our beanies, this reckless conformity will surely be our fall. My friends, I warn you, take cover, take heed; Beware the Hipster Regime.

Finding out Your Mom’s Dead via Facebook ): I can only imagine the emoticons she felt when she looked at her iPhone, found out she was too late by her sister’s fucking status update: In the words of the best mother & person I ever knew "Live, love, laugh!" RIP Mommy. Heaven got another angel...hope they r ready 4 her!! XoXoXo She told me she’d seen that on the way to the hospital, before she got a phone call, before she got the mass text from her sister’s fiancé seconds after Angie’s last breath. I mean, OMG, how could they treat that so casually? Alert the social network before their own family? Poke empathy from Facebook friends, like comments of sympathy posted on their walls like a popularity contest obituary? Seriously? I am so not LOLing. IDK what’s next. Upload her hospital room

on YouTube? Hope her passing goes viral up there with Sneezing Panda and Antoine Dodson? WTF. I listened to her vent about her forever-dead mother, about her sister’s lack of tact, tried my best to console her, but you can only do so much on chat.

ROSS WILSON Two Poems "Again and again readers of modern poetry are dismayed by revelations, often posthumous, that their favourite poets, ‘gentle’ and retiring and ‘sensitive’ persons, admired the most ruthless politicians of their time." From The Truth of Poetry, by Michael Hamburger. “I aint ever liked violence.” – Sugar Ray Robinson, generally regarded as the greatest boxer of all time. At least one of his opponents died.

What’s in our Hands How could a man hit a man with a hammer? We know the reason – drug-money. But how could he grab and raise and swing such a thing as a hammer, and bring it down upon the head of another? I once hit a man so hard his nose burst over his trainers. Later, he laughed at it still bleeding after a shower; we’d been sparring, practicing for the real thing with big 16oz gloves. A skinny teenager done that with one left hook – my weak arm.

The hand I write with is stronger, it asks: how could a man hit a man with a hammer? And holds the answer in itself, like a pen.

A Chip aff the Auld Shoodir Ma da’ says: Politicians! Bunch ih hippokrits: thir aw the same. Ma da’ says: Wimmin! Nivir trust thum: thir aw the same. Ma da’ says: You! Yir no nae bettir thin oanybudy! Wir aw Jock Thampson’s bairns. Ma da’ says: Mind: keep yir feet oan the grund. Think yir special, Ah’ll remind ye: yir no. Ma da’ says: Mind: They’ll try n’ keep ye in yir place. Forget: Ah’ll keep ye doon tae earth. Ma da’ says: Wir aw the same son, wir aw the same. Bit see Thaym! See Thaym!

JANE OVERTON Two Poems Exodus And lo! The Angel of Death did fall upon the High Street and with his fiery sword did smite Woolworths MFI Adams Kids, yea and even the last greengrocer in town, forcing me to go unto the desert beyond the Ring Road and worship the false god Tesz Ko. And as I did approach the Altar of The Quick Checkout For Those Who Are Prepared To Put Shop Workers’ Jobs At Risk By Scanning It Themselves, carrying my pound of Brussels sprouts, yea, even in kilograms, I did cry unto Tesz Ko, “I know that thou art a false god because thou hast not a plain brown teapot (round), brass curtain rings, nor hast thou a pack of Wonderweb, and while we are at it, thou didst not part for me the waves of traffic on the Ring Road and I was lucky to get here alive”. And The Quick Checkout For Those Who Are Prepared To Put Shop Workers’ Jobs At Risk By Scanning It Themselves, did say unto me, “Thou art an unexpected item in the bagging area. Remove unexpected item.” And I did wander in the wilderness praying for manna from Heaven and seeing only the delivery vans of the false god Tesz Ko until the Angel did press into my hand a badly printed flyer and it did say, “Farmers’ Market Every Third Saturday”.

So, lo, I did betake myself and I did find hand-made soaps, all manner of frightening chutneys and minuscule duck breasts whose weight increaseth with a quantity of embedded lead shot. But still I could not find Wonderweb, brass curtain rings, nor a plain brown teapot (round). And I did cry “The end is nigh!” And Tesz Ko did reply, “Every little helps.”

Evolution After the great Paw and Muzzle Disease outbreak and the Dog ‘Flu pandemic came The Burning. When the pyres died down, I was the only dog left. My human concealed me and, being of a narrow and greyhoundular disposition, I soon cultivated the ability to walk in the biped manner and developed a nose for fashion in the sleeky, supermodel style. Baring the fangs as apesmile rather than dogsnarl took some concentration but I persisted. My teeth seemed to be shrinking. I still brought my human her morning paper, though now I wedged it under an armpit rather than carrying it in my mouth. Soon I mastered kettle, doorhandle, tray and bringing her tea in bed. “Good girl”, she said, considering the crossword while I read the stockmarket reports as a displacement activity for bone burying.

Things were going quite well until the Badger ‘Flu outbreak. Finally the badgers were unarguably proven responsible for something but by then the ‘Flu had finished off the humans and there was no-one left to do the blaming. Despite history; despite kickings; despite dogfighting; even despite Crufts, somehow I missed them. When I tiptoed outside I discovered I wasn’t the only dog left after all. Anthony Worrall Thompson, for example, turned out to have been a Miniature Schnauzer all along, and Peaches Geldof came out as an Old English Sheepdog. The badgers claimed that their ‘Flu had been an act of revolution. They declared Year One of the Millennium of the Badger and national holidays for Cull Commemoration and Roadkill Remembrance. We stayed together, Anthony, Peaches and I. The badgers were accusing us of collaborating. We returned to travelling four-legged and shunned all further use of clothes, reading matter and teacups. But the Badger Revolutionary Guard came after us and we found ourselves, colons up a cul-de-sac, at the side door of the police station. We came out biting. You gotta respect creatures that can run as a pack, rip your throat out and handle a state of the art taser. Now we are in charge. We’ve made contact with other packs and we’re practising growling. Our teeth are growing longer. Soon we’ll fight to establish who is top dog. You had better be betting on me.

JACQ KELLY Ghosts It isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a ghost; Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s you. Your own mind, Chasing you around the room, Wishing you awake with whispers; Providing the slice of ice That sends the Shiver. Your ghosts are the grafitti Beneath the corporation paint. They echo a rumble In a snapshot of sound.

Drey sonnet Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) "I find no peace, and all my war is done..." I find no peace, and all my war is done: I fear, and hope; I burn, and freeze like ice; I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise; And nought I have, and all the world I seize on; That locketh nor loseth holdeth me in prison, And holdeth me not, yet can I 'scape nowise: Nor letteth me live, nor die at my devise, And yet of death it giveth me occasion. Without eyen I see, and without tongue I 'plain; I desire to perish, and yet I ask health; I love another, and thus I hate myself; I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain. Likewise displeaseth me both death and life, And my delight is causer of this strife.

ALEC BEATTIE Two Poems By Pigeon and By Seagull The Luftwaffe blitzed my own wee home town back in 1941. For two nights Germans dropped bombs on shipyards and houses. Today, in memory, still raining down are the milky turds from manky pigeons and fishy shit from greetin’-faced seagulls. It fights for space on the still-cratered ground with dog muck and shards from broken Buckfast breakfasts. Together with the human mess it makes a pavement glue that bonds those who want to live and rot in my own wee home town. My grandad said that the Nazis mistook the Great Western Road for the River Clyde, shiny and wet as it was in the rain - that and the blackout – and bombed the wrong bits. ‘If they’d been on target we’d a’ be deid,‘ he said. But I’ve walked my own wee home town - schemes, empty business parks and the dead malls and it seems to me that the Luftwaffe did a pretty good job.. But when I see in Asda old people with yellow eyes, diabetes, bus passes and bingo sometimes I wish that for only one night Germans would fly that one final mission to finish the job they started that night back in 1941. Old rubble relics and tracksuits with big scary dogs scavenge through craters for something long gone. The shipyards the Germans had tried to bomb survived until Thatcher closed them all down; the factories and the workers are gone. The only thing that’s made now is the shit

that pours thickly and daily from arses still living there in my own wee home town. Dead Space A nocturnal sky burned like a grim fuse then blew up. A mad Pollock painting made alive by countless sharp hues of something labelled a hint of primordial fear was smashed without noise. Everything froze in the stiffening light, caught like wild rabbits or escapees in flight, all of them seeking the tall sprouting cloud to see if some bomb had just cracked the sky. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I saw when the lightning flashed by. A thrum in the throat, a giant unseen ripped out a monstrous and cancerous cough, the crack like the snap of a forest of tinder, the breaking of desert-dry bones or the deafening sea rocks. Grinding its teeth it dragged iron-clad feet across the cobblestoned sky, though sensing its course was about run it stopped for a swansong and roared on, then with echoing death throes rolled on to some place between the earth and the sky. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I heard when the thunder crashed by. The sounds drummed out by the fall drowned out the stampeding beat made by the paws and the claws of hellhounds. Silent and storm-slick,

they slunk in the blackness, jaws snapping at something lost in the thundering, rain rattling and battering like old guns along the Somme, killing the howls from dogs of war and men left in the mud of No Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Land to die. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I heard when the rain slashed by.

Owl KEVIN CADWALLENDER for A.G. I saw the best owls of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, dragging themselves over the rodent streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed owlsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, You who dragged their brains to heaven You who flew all night with their wings full of blood on the starbank docks waiting You who rode the cloud and cut the rat throats with one talon You who were expelled from the academy for publishing raucous odes on the windows of the skull, the beautiful bolus of the balls and brains You who rode the streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind You who ate the dove and vole, the three old shrews of fate who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, You who bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination You who who plunged themselves under meat looking for an egg You whose eyes are a thousand blind orioles fifty more shocks will never return their souls to body again To you, who am I to speak? what might be left to say in time that comes after death bone-grindings.

Setting Fire. KARL RIORDAN

I'd notice first the amber balls of your heels as you scrunched up old news on bitter mornings planting gossip into the grate. Criss-cross the kindling, build up the foundations then strike a light. The Swan burns down too close and you flap your fingers; flecks of paper moths spiral up the flue. Scraps of tittle-tattle ash, scattered over terraces. A double page of yesterday's runners draws the fire to a roar, scorching winners and losers to a late October leaf. As flames take hold shadows dance round the walls. At nine and three quarters I needed to escape this place, but you always caught me with a finger print smudge of coal-dust on the tip of my nose, marking me for days to come.