Creativity - Autumn 2010

Creativity Issue three

Photo, Art and Words by Cardiff Students

l Rose' 'Beautifu ills H

by Nat 'Cou p

by T le ' om A rm

stron

g

Megan King Sub editors Sarah Pritchard Anna Grudeva Photography and artwork Sarah Pritchard Graphic Design Anna Grudeva Editor

Proof readers

Morgan Applegarth Laura Amey Emma Feloy Sarah Powell

'Roath Pa

by Chr rk' is Griff iths

Cover by Nat Hills

A word from the editor Welcome to the Autumn edition of Creativity.

After being published in and involved with the magazine last year, I was delighted to take up the post of editor. It has been a pleasure to witness first hand the immense talent of Cardiff University students, and not just those studying the subjects you would expect. Alongside students of Journalism, English Literature and all the other usual suspects have been Chemists, Lawyers and even a Zoologist. Creativity is not restricted to those you would think would put pen to paper or pick up a camera. Anyone and everyone can create and it is a delight to see people taking time out from their usual studies to act on their creative impulses. The range and quality of work made it near impossible to narrow down the entries to those you will see in the magazine. So it seems fitting to take a moment to say thank you to all those who made the effort to submit. It is never an easy thing for a writer, artist or photographer to expose their work to criticism and I am grateful that so many took the plunge.

I hope you enjoy this third issue of Creativity.

If anything printed over the next 30 pages stays with you, affects you or even inspires you, we’ve done our job properly.

Megan King November 2010

'St Fagan's' by Poti Chao

He had this map, a huge map, curled at the edges. It smelt like the sea and left my hands dry when I ran them across its breadth. Mermaids combing out their hair looked past me, dreaming, and giant fish, half an inch long, curved out of the inky waves. He told me he was an explorer. He told me that my hair was gold as desert sand dunes in the sun, that my eyes were brighter than the pomegranate seeds, that my lips were redder than the rubies of the richest sultans and my skin, as soft as Chinese silk. I begged him to take me with him soon, to take me away to see the world. And he promised.

His hands were rough, catching on my clothes and skin as he undressed me, a sail in the wind.

He was in a hurry to be on his way, rushing out the back door, hands in

Sailor

Hannah Caddick

pockets and a whistle on his brown lips, still hot. As I sat at the dresser, brushing out the knots he’d left in the waves of my hair, I saw he’d left his map too.

And his wallet; so much for the high seas, turns out he was a builder from Bracknell. Wife, three kids.

I dug out the A-Z for some real directions and soon found myself knocking at his door.

My hands were wrinkled when I left, leaving him face down in his bath. All that splashing had reminded me I get sea-sick anyway.

Photograph ‘Brighton’ by Ian Smith

Croup Whispers at the bedroom door, scratching of a latch being undressed. Sanguine eyes flinch as intense white pricks my blindness.

Shifting silhouettes eclipse hostile light, merge into the blackness of my prison.

I sit up - feeble, breathless, aching. Fat drops of sweat creep across my face, and linger on my nose and cheeks, wrapping my head in wet ribbons. A man with a thin moustache sits on my bed, disturbs precious silence with unfamiliar man-tones. Impenetrable murmurs. Who is this? My distress is cooled by the silver radiance of Mum’s soft voice:

It’s his chest, doctor.

The man with the moustache nods then reaches into a special bag – he says - to make me better.

He unearths a dangly, three-legged creature and inserts its narrow limbs in his ears.

I feel the wet chill of metal on my chest as he listens to my laboured wheeze.

His hairy palm, placed on my forehead, recoils scalded. The man turns to Mum and makes noises I can’t decipher. I can see other shadows gathered around my bed, spectators in this clammy amphitheatre.

My tongue is hard, unmoving. When I speak words sound distant, clanging like a coin dropped down an empty staircase.

Mum is given a small box and told three times a day.

Then, a kiss on my cheek: delicate, soothing. My mind unbuttons, slips casually into dreams of dark, faceless shapes. I feel a shift of weight As the blurry spectres move from the bedside and drift out, hauntingly, into unreal moonlight.

Richard Gills Hand by Rhyn Williams

Ffion Lindsay

Yet when the fog rises up and the film shifts in the reels You are only a girl And the war is distant

In my sister’s elegance I see you dancing in sepia shades, Spinning us your stories In magnolia soapsuds

While I washed my face today I felt your cheekbones beneath my skinThe Fox heirloom, still cloaked in softness

Memory Photograph ‘Uganda’ by Megan Cumberlidge

Tiger Bay Father was always proud that we were known to handle more coal through the Bay than New York or Boston. He’d take me down to the docks in the day to see the steamships and show me the shipping line marks on their funnels; The Peninsular Steam Navigation Company, The Great Western Steamship Company, The White Star Line. Standing on Mermaid Quay tonight the only boats I can see are piddling dinghies anchored in the mudflats.

Childish little names; ‘Aquaholic’, ‘Lucky Sperm’, ‘Vitamin Sea’. Sailed by wealthy businessmen of course; on Sundays, once or twice around the Bay, or they bring their wives for ‘drinks on the yacht’ where they sit huddled together in mackintoshes while the rain drips into their drinks and eventually retreat to the coffee shops to dry off. The Bay is full now, even at night. Stepping from the Quay I pass couples walking to and from the restaurants and bowling alleys, laughing together hand in hand.

The men huddle into hoods while the women’s chattering voices jar my ears. They wear tiny skirts that show off ample thighs and are growing bedraggled in the rain – none had thought to bring a coat to warm themselves. People never used to dare to walk here.

Tiger Bay, was what it was always called. Father said it was because of the fierce currents in the Bristol channel; ‘raging’ he’d say after a night in the Captain’s Table, a real peril to ships hauling coal out to sea. But Mother said wryly that it had more to do with the Bay itself; drunken sailors rolling through the docks with money burning holes in their pockets – just paid off – and by the end of the night would have lost it all to some whore’s apron, or a cunning little slit in a thief ’s jacket. They never even stayed long enough to see justice done for the crimes.

A child in the crowd that had been quiet till now; walking along with its chubby fist clasped in its mother’s hand looks up and sees me. It stares frowning, then takes a long look up at its parent, wondering why she looks at me so blankly, as though I am not there. The dockers didn’t notice me either in this spot, just another child, boots clattering as she ran down Bute West Dock to bring lunch to her fa-

ther. The place was great hulking warehouses then.

When I peer up now at the buildings – squinting through dark flames all I see are bizarre shapes, to me a steel tube, a hulking insect, a tall hat. Only the Norwegian Church seems the same – built for the sailors of the Norwegian Merchant Fleet – though it has moved too – right across the Bay. It was my world then; all the little nooks and crannies that only a child can find that made dens for me and my playmates. This is not my world now.

I cannot remember when it stopped being mine – though I remained after the ships cast away; the likes of the Fair Rita and the Heart of Salford never to return. Those dockers left or aged and died. As did my husband – crushed under that load in the hold of the Pride of Kent in 1887 - my children, both married and long gone. Sometimes I wonder if it was time I left it too – let the flames that are always at the edge of my vision consume me and bear me away to somewhere quite different. Wait here; the meanest spirit barely clinging to its haunting ground for another hundred and twenty years; see how bizarre everything will be by that time. But then again, perhaps not.

Catriona Camacho

'Old

Leig

h' by Ian S mith

Dave Spittle

A synapse spiral staircase, images tease Until I turn - each one a self-defeating habit I struggle to unlearn.

And just as I know that each thought, each image that I find Is nothing but a form for all the formless in my mindI know exactly what I fear.

And Another

One Thought Photograph ‘Red Riding’ by Tom Armstrong

Red Flashing Lights Keep away, that’s what they told me. There’s certain people (if we can call them that, they said) that are to be kept at arm’s reach, as if red flashing lights of sense and reason flare up instantaneously when you meet one of those sorts. The lights warn you, stop you in your tracks, keeping you safe and warm in a land of cosy familiarity. But, if it were ever safe at all, that cosiness for certain doesn’t feel warm any more. It feels heartless, cold, brutal.

‘I’ve never met anyone like you before.’ It’s not exactly a chat-up line, though he and I are at the bar, shoulders touching. I don’t say it. What kind of a thing is that to say? He’s young-faced, early twenties perhaps, with clear brown eyes of the sort that look like they’ve never closed to the world: alert, but affectionate, patient. His hair falls in ruffled dark waves around the crown of his head; its the look of a gypsy, a musician; a Romantic.

What I did say, at first, was ‘You look sad, mate’, hoping that my Northern tones were sounding more kind than threatening. That wasn’t exactly a textbook chat-up line either, not that I was aiming to flirt. In case he hasn’t heard, over the heavy bass all around us, I pull down the corners of my mouth to indicate sadness, like a child’s parody of a clown in tears. He’s silent. I feel totally ridiculous. How could I think he’d want to talk to me? Why would a complete stranger be interesting to him? He’s interesting to me, though. A moment’s hesitancy, and then he looks at me, searching as if for some hidden clue. I feel that he looks irrationally nervous, while he’s looking at my face, my eyes, my arms,

elbows, veins... As if my eyes hold some secret, he catches my gaze for an instant, perhaps more, and then pulls up his sleeve, half roughly, half with caution, as though dealing with a wild animal that’s just beginning to be tamed. As his sleeve pushes past his elbow, I can’t help but register my surprise at what I see. A bandage-like structure is holding a jutting chemical feeder into his veins, the whole thing flashing traffic-light red, an ominous, obvious glow in the hazy blue-lasered hall. Methadone, or buprenorphine perhaps, is being fed into you, a faint shadow of what came before. Blankly, or with anxious numbness- I can’t tell which- the recovering heroin addict looks at me again. I don’t want to think of you like that, though. Not primarily anyway. Primarily, could you please just be another person?

I reach out to touch you and feel that you’re trembling, only next morning realising its because of the damage to your central nervous system, and not out of fear. In fact, you don’t seem afraid any more.

Now that I’m examining your needle wounds with almost scientific curiosity, you seem to realise that I’m not out to judge you. I’m fascinated by you, but not just as a different specimen. There’s fascination too for what makes us similar, what makes us human, and I find myself stroking your arm gently like a mother nursing her child’s grazed knee.

I’m in awe of you somehow, for what you’ve been through, and how you are now; the difference perhaps like living in a cave and then suddenly discovering sunlight, coming out groggily, all bleary-eyed,

'Autumn Lights' by Nat Hills

heart unfinished. I wonder what dark days you’ve had...

Already, at twenty-three, twenty-four perhaps, recovering from addictions I couldn’t imagine in my wildest nightmares? Who were you? What was your life like before then? I can imagine your girlfriend, long gone now. She fell in love with the dreamer, the risk-taker, the liberated one. All good things, all beautiful qualities, like luscious tree-lined avenues that could lead to the highest heights or the lowest lows. The highs came, undoubtedly. There’s no denying... but the lows...? I wonder if, numb, affectionless, you tried, you really tried with her, but you were like a clawed hand, that when it tried to embrace, to draw close, just maimed, wounded, and in turn, in frustration, was abandoned. And like that did she leave? With no note, saddened at the man who had long gone, missing him even while she lay for the last time cold in his arms.

So strange to think that Humanity can be backed against the wall, beaten bloody, by a mere chemical, a substance. The power they have to reach inside, and, after feeling expansive, unifying, promoting the best in all we feel, all we are, they wither and give way to a darker power. Humanity is rendered small, useless, as it’s kicked about under the mastery of the come-down. Imaginations smeared, personalities wasted. Weeks and months spent in bleak half-light. Was that what it was like for you?

All these thoughts, these imaginings, in just a few seconds, and I’m shocked to find you still here, a real person right in front of my eyes. I don’t know what I want to say to you, so it’s all ‘good luck, mate’ and ‘all the best, like’. Crazy thoughts flash through my head at all the possible things I could say to put across how much I want to help you.

People used to tell me that God could fix anyone.

Not the same people that told me to keep away from ‘those sorts’. Anyone?

What I do know for certain is that I want to give you more than I could ever be capable of giving: a new beginning, a mind that’s not been thrashed about, or a mind that’s been healed up at least. Could your mind be again a blank canvas, graffiti-less, clean of the abuse that you, and others, perhaps, have dealt it over the years?

You’re looking at me again. Am I as interesting to you as you are to me? - Not only because I’m ‘clean’, I’m relatively unscathed, but because I’m simply another human being? Are you drawn to our similarities, as much as our differences, as much as I am in you? Some would say you’re not human any more, and maybe there are times when you were like the living dead, but that makes me feel sorrow, compassion, in far greater amounts than any sort of moral disgust. The idea of a mutated humanity, crawling backwards to survive like some anti-evolutionary phenomenon, decapitating ourselves with a non-stop onslaught of feeling, sensation, experience, is ugly, yes, but tragic, tragic.

Claire Finnegan

'Love' by Rebecca Condon Hogg

Can I interest you in happiness, Madam? That pauses her.

Straightway I follows through with a grin of genuine good humour, just so she knows I’m no Holy Joe. If she moves to shut the door, I’ll say something like ‘Did you know blue lenses were used to treat insanity and yellow ones, syphilis?’

If she’s surprised into making eye contact, I’m in.

Lonely ladies are easiest. Underactive housewives buried in suburban sarcophagi – they’re dying for it. We are pleased to oblige, mes amis.

Over a cuppa, I do a bit of a demo. A stripe of front window, maybe, looking out onto the shades-of-grey street.

Madam is always amazed : “Everything seems so different….much brighter….such a pretty picture.” In the Trade, we call this a ‘forcible shift in perspective.’ “Yours will be the privilege of seeing all things through rose-tinted glass,” I promise.

The Thinkers, like Helen, hesitate. They sense sentimentality, naivety, even stupidity in a candy-floss coloured back garden. “No, no, no, my love.” I am all reassurance. “This is just a technique for seeing things differently. Betterly. An opportunity to transform your world and make it as vibrant as your desires.” They all sign up, even Helen. They want the wonder. They crave the joy of rediscovery.

Helen, here, went the whole hog, as you can see. Windows.

Conservatory. Car windscreen, even the caravan – forevermore was her holidays remembered with a lovely, rosy glow.

Passing neighbours began to wave back, pleasantly surprised by the warmth of Helen’s living-room spied through the blushed bay-window. More often than not, they stopped in for a coffee…inevitably becoming links in our ‘Recommend a Friend’ chain.

Colour Blinds

Linda Vickers

Like I said, Helen was a Thinker. She soon realised the possibilities of a lifetime’s supply of our Solution. One look at herself in a treated mirror convinced her how wonderful she was, how much potential she had. “Nick, make it last forever. I want it everywhere.” That, my fine fellows, is the Point of Sale. Wait for it. Watch for it. Be ready with the Contract.

Now, turning to the last chapter in the manual : Client Cautions. ‘It is our ethical obligation to inform you, Madam, of the following: 1.When in love or wanting to be in love, whilst wearing rose-coloured lenses, red flags cannot be seen.

2.Ayres Rock will be invisible, as too the Northern Lights.

3.Sunburn can easily occur without you realising it and 4.Snow will appear bloodshot.’

Gentlemen, you’ll receive full training in dispensing the spectacles, which is the first level of permanent Transfiguration. The Mark is allowed a fortnight’s trial period. It’s only fair. Two weeks of being tickled pink without obligation, and a last chance to return to the monochrome of reality. However, in my experience, it’s too late. By then, she is hooked on happiness and your commission is in the bag.

Our Experts apply the Final Solution directly to the lens in her eyeballs. At the same time, they extract the agreed price, the quid pro quo - straight out through the pupils or, as we call them in the Trade, ‘The Windows to the Soul’.

In conclusion, I would like you to see Helen, before and after. You will notice that in this picture, she is smiling.

Photograph ‘Wow at the waterfront’ by Joel Meredith

Pamper by Richard Jones

Love Bites Bite my lip and close my eyes.

It was- it wasInteresting… I guess…

Kind of funny looking back but now… now It hurts and I hurt and I can’t- I can’t kid myself any more.

I can’t have you and I never had you and I’ll never have you andYou’ll never knowThat when I went I closed my eyes and bit my lip and thought of youAnd prayed you’d never know. No. No more- puckered skin and painful kissesTeeth gnashing at sumptuous fleshSweet - sanguine - saccharine.

Pinned down and torn apartThis slick sinewy corpusThis pretty mess of blood and bone and Tear out my hair and scratch and scram and scream!

For acrid air Rid this crimson mouth Of bitter metallic silenceRelease me from me. Please?

Abrasive hands tattoo white skinViolet spots- the stain of sinBut I’ll never belong to him.

I was always yours.

The “nicest girl you’ve ever met”.

Bite me.

Rosie Gleeson

Woman by Ibifagha Cookey

Stories from the Sea

They told him his mother had gone to the sea. Not that she had walked into the waves, with diamonds at her throat and stones in her pockets. All they told him was that his mother had gone to the sea: white lies for a plump face and a pair of guileless eyes.

He had lived in dreams for many years after her death: gone down to the small inlet she had vanished from, thinking he could hear his mother’s voice within the crooning of the waves; or spied a loose coil of ocean weed like a mermaid’s tress, as dark as her hair had ever been. His child-self thought she lived in the sea like a fish. But that had only ever elicited silences and frowns, heavy words about things called counsellors and psychiatrists. And they had all said, he’ll go the same way as his mother yet.

He had met with coolly-sympathetic men. Men that were back-dropped by diagrams of the human brain hung on cream walls. They asked questions, played these strange games, and his eyes had shuttered, uncaring of how they tutted when he told them their messy prints merely looked like ink splodges. He spent the sessions wondering how his mother passed her time living in the sea: if she went about collecting pearls with mermaids or riding waves with the whales.

There was no closure to her death. It hadn’t been death at all to his child-self. He hadn’t seen the parts of her pale, bloated body fished out of the water, named for the distinctive birthmark on her throat and the secrets her teeth seemed to tell them.

Now, he understood. There was that frail, sun-bleached day when crimson had bloomed like roses from her wrists and as a child he had thought that one tear of her skin would let the petals all gush up from her insides. But at that time the bloom had stolen the colour from her and he had only cried before the men in white coats took her away. Rushed her to a room that he would visit every Saturday morning for a few weeks in February, when the sea was its coldest: iron-grey beyond the windows, battling up against the cliffs and bays.

She had dressed up in diamonds when she went to the sea and he had known those diamonds; often touched his fingers to the jewels as they lay haughtily upon her dresser, beside the slivered hairpins and trinkets, the little bottles that held the tablets she would force down before bedtime.

All the women in his family had owned the diamonds, vestiges of some ostentatious ancestor who had wanted them to sit prettily about her throat when she went into the ground. But they had never adorned the stem of her decaying neck, the woman’s daughter taking them up instead when the old woman passed, to be left in the velvet-lined, lily-inlaid case and never worn.

With him, the feminine ritual of acting as caretaker of the jewels had come to an end – small boy-child promised useless diamonds to remember a mother by – and he often wondered what had possessed the authorities when

the diamonds were left to him. How they could take them from his mother’s neck, where they had gripped the flesh like a decadent noose, and then easily place them into a mourning child’s hands.

He kept them hidden nowadays, buried in a chest in the farthest reach of his attic, trapped in their velvet-lined, lily-inlaid case. Only once did they make an appearance, the day he abandoned the house by the sea for one further inland, to share with his new wife. She had found them among a clutter of things he would have preferred to keep forgotten and he hadn’t liked it when she said the diamonds were beautiful, or asked what woman had worn them. And even though she could have never known what the diamonds signified, he had still punished her with a bruising silence for days.

He emerged into a dusty twilight as he hauled himself through the mouth in the ceiling, to the attic, feeling the purpose beat beneath his breastbone almost as a second heart. The dark chest sat heavily in one corner, spiderwebbed and old, and he moved towards it, lifting the lid to find the scatter of a life before his mother had gone to the sea: tatty photographs and a collection of sea shells and the lily-inlaid case beneath an image of his mother, staring out over their garden towards the cliffs.

There was a little madness in him as he pocketed the diamonds and left the house for his car and turning the machine towards the South. Towards the sea. The gulls led him away from where he parked his car, up the scraggy turf and chalk-strewn earth, to the lip of the cliff, where only a fall of four hundred feet and the sea a murky grey-green groped beyond. But he wanted to wait for darkness, for the silver eye of the moon to gaze down impassively, ice him right to the bone, so he only looked silently at the land about him. He looked down the reach of the cliff and wondered what it would be like to jump.

Whether his body would glide down the coast like a fish afterwards or if the tide would idly lap at him down there until the chaplains came and found him.

He found himself intrigued by the quality of death, the physicality of it. That all those obscene secrets inside himself could be on display for the south coast of England if he jumped. If he chose the sea, like his mother had. But he was not here to jump. He rested his hand upon the diamonds and brought them up out of his pocket, lifting them until they flashed in the light.

Then, acting between one creep of the tide and the next, he drew a chilled breath deep into his lungs, curved his arm behind him and sent the diamonds hurtling from his hand, staring until distance and water swallowed them away.

‘My mother has gone to the sea, the sea, my mother has gone to the sea.’ He sang as he looked down into the gulf, like a rhyme he could find no meaning in.

Sinead Rooney

'Pier' ui Brooks cq

by Ja

'Untitled '

by Har ry

Sutton

In Devon, you bought a rickety boat.

She resented the sea; refused to swim.

Named me after that drowned heroine: Rebecca. Fateful; at five years old, the ocean tried to claim me for its own.

Wave-tossed and choking, brine in my nose.

No salt in my blood, not a pinch.

I remember watching you winch the barnacled anchor into the deep and wanting to scream. I hated the sea.

I hated its cold depth below my feet.

You married Mum, had two children.

Posted to a frozen island; for half the year there was no daylight and nothing grew but rough grey grass.

You leant off cliffs into the wind, relished the spray of the bitter Atlantic.

Mum cried in the kitchen.

Rebecca Pert

Never learnt to swim; too afraid of the water.

I think Mum’s spite at the sea’s deep gloom seeped into the fluid I breathed in her womb.

I’m sorry Dad. It’s nothing you did.

I am my mother’s daughter.

A three-hour drive to the mooring, and I was your unwilling crew.

You urged me to love the slap of the water, the grinding ropes, and the waves’ iron-blue.

I disappointed you.

Your blood is saline, I’m sure.

On that dull peninsula you’d cross the flat brown estuaries, sit on the sea wall.

Watch the tankers and trawlers crawl across the mouth of the Thames, tasting the wind and the gulls’ harsh calls.

Anchor Photograph ‘Bay’ by Chris Griffiths

Newcastle by Tom Armstrong

Daisy Chain

It was one of those sleepy Sunday afternoons when nothing really happens and that, in itself, is wonderful. Alys and Daisy were both lying in the back garden, young faces turned towards the pink blossoms of the apple tree above them.

“If you could be any day of the week, which would it be?”

“Oh, I don’t know” sighed Daisy “Friday, I suppose.”

“Yes?” Alys didn’t sound surprised. “And why is that?”

“Hmm…because everyone loves Friday” “Would you like to be loved by everyone?”

Daisy frowned. The conversation was suddenly getting too deep for such a languid summer’s day.

“What sort of fruit would you most like to be?”

“Grapes” Alys didn’t pause to think “Although they get turned into raisins and wine, don’t they? I don’t suppose I would very much fancy bring dried until shrivelled. Or squished, for that matter.”

“I think I should rather enjoy being an avocado” Alys pushed herself up on her elbows to look down at her friend who was smiling dreamily up at the clouds.

“Very few people know that avocados are fruit at all. I would like being so unusual and exotic.”

“A shame” her companion said dryly “That you are neither” Daisy merely shrugged. It was far too hot to argue over the matter and Alys would only win, anyway, as she had a tendency to do.

“If I was a tree, I do think I’d like to be an elm.

They have such lovely flowers this time of year” When Daisy finally ventured inside, Alys’ mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her own. This was not terribly unusual; their mother’s tended to enjoy a cup of tea together while their daughters spent hours outside, but today was different. It was as though something heavy hung in the room, making the warm summer’s day seem suddenly cold.

“Mammy?” Daisy approached the table nervously.

“Not now, darling. Why don’t you take Alys up to your room, hmm?”

Her companion’s face screwed up. “But that’s so BORING! Can’t we go down to the shops?”

“Alys!” With one word, the child was silenced. The power Mrs. Jenkins held over her daughter never ceased to amaze Daisy. Her best friend she may be, but Alys was insolent to just about everyone. Even teachers. But NEVER her mother.

“Oh fine! Come on, Daisy!” stomping petulantly out of the room, Alys made it as far as the staircase where she took a seat. “Sit down. You know, the only reason they want us out of the room is because they are talking about something interesting. Come on. SIT! Don’t you want to know what it is?!”

Daisy sat down next to her best friend. Her doleful eyes were reflected in her patent shoes as she hugged her knees to her chest. The conversation

between their mothers soon picked up again.

“All I’m saying on the matter is that her life is ruined. What man would want her now? And what a reputation.”

“Our Ffion’s age,” tusked Betsan Jenkins. “And your Lily’s! Can you imagine?”

“Don’t say such things,” Megan said wearily, as though the conversation itself exhausted her.

“She’s just got herself a cracking little job as an apprentice to Mrs. Evans. You know, the old dear that runs the wedding shop?”

“How lovely!” sighed Betsan. “Our Ffion is so flighty…I think she still has her heart set on University, you know.”

“Well, Cardiff is very good.”

“I suppose. And at least she’d still be in the country. To isn’t happy about it all, as you can imagine.

Keeps going on about how neither of us holds a degree and we’re both just fine” “I wonder what that silly chit will be doing with herself now?”

“Keeping it I’ve heard. Her poor mother. Devout Catholic. In church three times a week. Sunday school teacher and all.”

“You can’t imagine the shame though, can you?

And him, a married man!”

“Not just that, but her art teacher! It’s completely misusing his position…Ooh, it makes my skin crawl just to think of it!”

Alys looked at Daisy and raised an eyebrow. Daisy shrunk back into herself. She didn’t know what was going on, but disliked her mother’s tone. It was the same one she’d used when her big brother Dylan announced he was moving to London for a girl he’d met when they went over the border to watch the Rugby. Daisy still squirmed to think of the confrontation.

“Why can’t she come and live here?”

“Because, Mam, all her family is over there!”

“And yours, you dwp boy? What of your family, eh?” Her father’s gruff voice had accused.

“Nothing EVER happens here! At least in London I feel alive!”

“Ha! Give it six months and we’ll see” Daisy always felt they were a little too hard on him that night. The day he left, she couldn’t stop crying.

Merthyr was their home and always had been. It was a little country in its own right where everything and everyone was familiar. Why anyone would ever want to leave was something she couldn’t understand at all. People didn’t DO these things unless they had been bad. Your family was your family, same as your neighbours were your neighbours. It was the way it was. It was the way it always would be.

Aimee Wigley

Becca Justice

Handlebars are monkey bars When nails are bitten and sighs heaved fit for Romantics and drunks and travellers and liars.

The road wants soles not souls, not tears but tyres.

So hang off your handlebars and keep starting fires And strip the plastic off milk vans and buses Like industrial dancers, vehicles shedding skeins of bruising.

Tarmac is wine dark but it is not the sea, it is so much the shore, The Rubicon cannot bisect it, but a cheekbone can.

And there’s the rub, the friction, the smashing plate tectonics: A clavicle and a hip are junctions of destruction.

Amateur, amateur, amateur cartography combustion We sit with our steering wheels, lives full of punctures.

Ballard says we can marry technology, But I just want a home that’s homely.

Frankenstein has raised tradition from the dead A Lazarus love, plus bandages, plus baggage Plus barely know each other.

Lazarus Love Photograph ‘Portraits’ by Chris Griffiths

Great Grey Owl by Joel Meredith

The feather stadium, Standing in the empty the open roof my mother looks up at r falling and points at a feathe greens. She tells me through the reds and s a message a white feather signifie grampy is smiling from an angel. ‘Your we propitiate at us,’ she says. Just as wers on their graves, the dead by laying flo d on cold concrete I watch the feather lan f, with certain hope and smile without belie nes

Dar ren Freebury-Jo

Owl

Pinpoint presence Balanced on a branch Of the dark vastness Each vane of your plumage Tense to the air Ears attuned To the resonances of night And at the centre Your eyes your eyes Bright planets Whose gravity Pulls the fields of galaxies Inwards To the core

To this moment When you arc your wings Lift Release And plumb The windstream Haunting the terrain Silent Shadowless Homing in On the breathless being Waiting All yours For the taking Robert Walton

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