The Instinctive Drowning Response Colin Dardis

The Instinctive Drowning Response

It starts off white; it always does: the day holding on to an idea of purity.

Yet the sun and moon are in constant battle, the skies, a warzone.

A tuft of cloud fights against a sunbeam, warriors suspended.

Consider the energy spent in forming the sky into a fist of lightning.

Against such fission the oceans are charged with postcard wilderness.

Churning threnodies for lost sailors, she receives the flashes and the falls.

Engine and heart go down, softened together, twofold interment. Colin Dardis

Vanishing Point

The sunless sky compressed into an iris black Black BLACK black boundless bottomless cleft between sour-faced canyons acutely cutting loose-rocked lemon-lipped each glimmer dropping ECHOING drop ECHOing drop Drop DROP scrambling from the depths a thousand shades of longing cauterised grey shaping memory single-file dreams creeping up behind with pockets full of surprises a little bleat an ephemeral star in the ever-expanding sizzling and falling achingly fragile vanishingly small Giles L. Turnbull

As a boy I used to

taste the metallic sweetness of a coin on top of my tongue & I’d be in the eighties. Twisting. Running Up That Hill. shouting for the central park five. small silver coins brought the nineties pregnant technology & grunge mobile mercenaries; unanswered messages I could draw the sweat on my tongue swill time in my mouth like a sea carrying a small boat. the brimstone face of my father penniless seared into my subconscious, always while we walked over weekends; no money for the bus. no car. cracked ice pops – cobalt blue sauntering through summer heat in silence and surrender. Like a prisoner of war throwing palms to the Lord in front of a man he does not hate but does not understand. It wasn’t until later in life when a fist burst blood from my nose I thought Wow, how fitting that blood tastes like money. Dylan Benjamin

No burial for little girls

You said, It’s a disease, or abuse, whichever’s worse, and I swallowed pan-hot chillis whole to keep my throat thick, keep the words in my bones.

You said, It’s fine, I don’t care, I just don’t want to see it, and my stomach boiled searing lava soup.

You said, It’s not that they deserve it, it’s that they can’t control themselves, they have no self control, you see, and my lungs flamed, belching spice and smoke like a fire at sea, drowning and burning at once while gulls circled warily, diving occasionally, hoping for blood.

There are many ways to smother a bonfire but you can’t bury a volcano, mother. No amount of damp soil and landfill will stifle that heat and when it reemerges, shedding its grave fingers first, dirt under its nails, it will gather the twigs and the leaves left by those who died alone, the hot bones of birds and ghosts, press them into itself and grow, relentlessly, stalk you on glowing embers, shove capsicum down your craw, screaming and crying at once, hoping for blood, hoping you will say nothing. Liz Chadwick Pywell

Hope

It's not real A word often used to fill a space – marking the unsure bend in a sentence not the real McCoy. Like hope when we’re sitting in hospital waiting for results, or hope when the flat line happens it’s not the end it is what it is. Hope a word slotted in when there isn't any. Antoinette Rock

Duolingo

Tha mi ag iarraidh Glaschu, mar sin tha mi ag ionnsachadh Gàidhlig. I want Glasgow, so I am learning Gaelic.

It tastes of the salt and sand of the islands, but its music draws me back to my first Glasgow's streets.

I pay 75p on the bus to Pollokshaws to sit in too small desks in Sir John Maxwell School, our laughter making the new words sing like being in primary again.

Sorley Maclean reads his poems in a Glasgow University hall and I follow the dark sounds with silent lips.

We slake our thirst at the Halt Bar, earwigging for the drip of a few phrases that fill the night with song.

Almost three decades on, I stare at my screen. My tongue dances and stumbles until Finland is far away and I am home. Gerry Stewart

December

In the funnel of torch light the chill of our breath coiled close together. Like the wise men we crossed fields

far contours glittering with frost, mother and I, bringing cows in for the milking.

We hustled them between scattered cow pats stitched stiff by mid-lands weather.

Seepage of straw-coloured light from the barn door guided us under cobweb strung rafters.

I placed hay offerings in the manger as she hunkered down, a foaming milk-moon rose in the enamel bucket.

Our warming byre dissolves frost specks on my black boots, tears of the newborn against this winter night. John Noonan