Houndstooth Hat
I am going to wear the houndstooth hat
you gave me at the airport when I think
of the night we went to eat Chinese food
with my brother and I drove my ex-
boyfriend's van and you were shocked
and appalled at how fake and dark that
woman's tan was.
I am going to wear the houndstooth hat
you gave me when I think of the first time
we hung out and I smoked salvia in the
backseat and laughed a lot then I stuck
my hand in your strange armpit to steal
your heat. (Or maybe it was your heart?)
We wanted to go to the hookah bar, but
then you got really pissed off, so we went
to IHOP or Denny's or Village Inn instead.
My brother slept in your big bed that night,
and we slept on the floor. You and I watched
The Little Mermaid from 1975, and held
hands platonically for a few minutes.
You told me I was surprisingly tactile,
and asked me if I agreed I told you yes
because I couldn't have told you then
that I didn't know what the word meant,
so I just pretended, but I do now though,
in case you're wondering. Seriously.
I do.
I am going to wear the houndstooth hat
you gave me today when I think of the
first time we kissed - we were in a small
patriotic bed in my grandparents' basement
and my brother was obligatorily present
when we touched each other for the first
time and your hands made little earthquakes
on my skin and your kiss was like food
and I never thought I would be so turned
on by another person and you said:
I've always wanted to be this close to you.
I am probably going to smell your houndstooth hat, too,
until every chemical remnant of you is sucked up into my
olfactories, and I'll think of how I like it when you're mean
to me, because my father was mean to me, and because
I like everything that you have and how I wish I could be
addicted to you, but how I won't be able to because I
can't call myself a heroin addict if heroin is the dust on
the moon that makes it white.
I will wear your houndstooth hat in Denver, Colorado,
Phoenix, Arizona, and San Jose, California, and remember
how good it felt to moan when we fucked drunk on your floor
after drinking vodka and eating white rice & I'll also wonder what
other women sound like when they're that drunk and fucked do they
sound like horses? I will think of the different ways I could get to your
apartment on the bus and how peanut butter makes you sick and how
often you seem to need to say, "I'm not gay." Fasten seatbelt while sedated
what I am trying to say here is: I will be thinking of you a good deal and I hope
that you will be thinking of me, too.
• Andi Kato lives in San Jose, California where she works as a sushi waitress. http://self-intoxication.deviantart.com/ + http://myspace.com/andikato
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Monday, July 7
Andi Kato has a houndstooth hat
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 07 Jul 2008 02:26 PM BST
Monday, June 2
Another new prose poem by William Doreski
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 02 Jun 2008 08:59 PM BST
Dumping my Dead Uncle's Clothes
As I dump my dead uncle's clothes in the Goodwill box the cold crawls over me and the orange tones of shopping-center arc-lamps feel brazen and fiery on my flesh, the way the glances of mourners must have felt to my uncle as he lay face-up in a suit worn only four times in life. Dumping clothes bagged in plastic is cruel as hefting bundled meat. Only when death exposes the bone can we see each other wholly naked, devoid of the cant of Freud and other sex-mongers, and determine if the forms we lived by were sufficient to sustain us against the grief prescribed by the sacred books we've devoutly avoided reading. Beyond the highway, down a slope of leafless oak and hickory, the river waddles to its fate in curves as clumsy as the handwriting of a child. My uncle fished there twenty years before I was born, his big face sunburned and innocent, the war so distant no one could hear the next crop of soldiers being born. The bags of clothes drop into the box like kittens into a pond. The silence they instantly absorb is permanent. The death of my uncle is now his dearest possession, the arc lamps brave as torches in a catacomb. The cars in the parking lot glow like the shells of extinct insects in a glass museum case. • William Doreski says "My stuff has appeared in a bunch of magazines and several shabby books, most recently Another Ice Age (AA Publishers, 2007)." Thursday, May 8
New poetry by Will Collins
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 08 May 2008 09:07 AM BST
It's the start of the fly-away holiday season, and I think we've all been here...
Please Read the Safety Instruction Manual He donned a yellow jacket, pretend blew down a red whistle. Then he pointed in front Of himself and to either of his sides. As he did so a woman’s voice spoke in flat monotone. Cramped on and around a uniform row of blue seats with seatback videos and built-in drink trays, was his section of almost nine hundred passengers. Three or four rose to switch places during his pre-flight performance. It was his first flight, so airborne colleagues placed peanuts in his replica seatbelt; they fell to the floor as he held it up and opened it but no-one laughed or even saw. Some were attending to crying children. A lot were fumbling in their hand-luggage. At his estimate over half of them had drank alcohol in the lounge before boarding. In the portion he would be tasked with the evacuation of in case of emergency nine were occupied by literature. Seven of those the overpriced in-flight duty-free catalogue. • Will Collins is studying creative writing at Winchester University Tuesday, April 29
Prose poetry by Sharon Petts
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 29 Apr 2008 08:24 AM BST
Sex With David Attenborough
Have you noticed the way the way David Attenborough says sexual? Sek-sule… He just has to put those syllables together and you're in the realms of two slugs dangling from a thread of mucus beneath a branch, glutinously entwined for hours, artfully backlit so every trail of spittle and glue is captured. You’re out on the Galapagos with the slow clamber, rock on rock, of the giant tortoises, or with the tree frog beating her bodily fluids into foam, her legs like egg whisks, while the males peer over her shoulder like children waiting to add sugar to the meringue. He might even be saying asexual, not speaking of sex but of its absence and still it’s there in the air like spores, making you sneeze. Bacteria, apparently, swap bits of themselves with any passer-by. The bonobos are bonking with one eye on the cameramen, a perfunctory fuck, sociable as an air kiss or handshake. When we're not watching, they light candles, take luxuriant baths together and coil in Tantric postures for days, festooning the trees like the erotic sculptures on Indian temples. The lust of the universe cast in stone. • Sharon Petts lives in Kent and is working on a novel and an MA in Creative Writing at Kent Uni. She adds "I'm very happy to find a magazine exploring this area. I'm studying with Patricia Debney on the prose poetry module at Kent and have become very excited about the prose poetry form and then very frustrated at the limited attention paid to it. So good on ya." Thursday, April 10
New prose poem by William Doreski
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 10 Apr 2008 06:28 AM BST
Sentimental Education
In a coffee shop in Amherst, we let the breath of students envelope us. Their faddish clothes threaten like documents held by a blackmailer, their faces raw and plain as cauliflower. How can we convince them that two old scones like ourselves have suffered the rage to wear deadly fashions, to shut books and our minds forever and wield rhetoric so large governments would puddle at our feet? Maybe, though, we overrate the children in baggy wool coats, high-top sneakers, who against medical odds smoke obnoxious foreign cigarettes. Maybe, like the "girls" Cyndi Lauper describes, they "just wanna have fun," but read Dostoevsky to find out how. Outside, the cold is painful to the naked glance. A famous professor swaggers in, his beard as cruel as barbed wire, his suit unpressed since the Eisenhower years. We've never liked his books, but now in the passion of his fame he sears like Tabasco on the tongue. Two wriggly young women compete to offer him a seat and themselves, their breasts like bread from the oven. We're too old for this. Later, in our dotage, we won't care, but in middle age it's shameful to sit among the very young and hear them rattle like stones in a brook and notice their expensive educations peeling like wallpaper in an abandoned house, their faces already trained to bare emotions far safer than those they feel. • William Doreski says "My stuff has appeared in a bunch of magazines and several shabby books, most recently Another Ice Age (AA Publishers, 2007)." We will be publishing more of his work over the next few months. Tuesday, March 25
Picture in Grey - a prose poem by Mandy Pannett
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 25 Mar 2008 06:42 PM GMT
PICTURE IN GREY
There’s the sense of a river behind a low wall; footsteps on leaf-fall, grey light through the mist. There are hours ahead for the unshed rain. This is an island of pavements and derelict blocks; a low landscape, no colour here. Nothing to do but wait for the lamps to be lit. Flies in the buttermilk whispers the song. Something is scratching and digs. On the Embankment a stone lion is lost in the fog. His paw is upturned. He begs. I detest my past and anyone else’s mutters Magritte as he sketches the lion. Thinks about gunfire and troops moving in. Adds a man by the parapet with his back to us; he is staring over the edge. Gives him black wings from the shoulder blades down to the ground. Considers a title: Pea soup, spleen of Paris, Philadelphia, mal du pays… Thickens the fog. Bats scuttle out as old lamps are lit. There are gaps in the masonry and a chill wind. A pigeon lies dead in a scatter of leaves. There are hours ahead for the rain. • Mandy Pannett runs an arts cafe, supports two local writing groups and enjoys giving readings and running writing workshops. She has two poetry collections from Oversteps Books: Bee Purple and Frost Hollow. Friday, February 22
Two works by Peter Wilkin
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 22 Feb 2008 10:36 AM GMT
The Soul's Code
"In the acorn lies not only the completion of life before it is lived but the dissatisfied frustration of unlived life" ...James Hillman My soul is a well deeper than the depth of me all my ago's oozy with echoes a sinus of imagoes and long shadows cast by dragon's breath I am who I was dredges of star spills rusted creaks of space drips of iron-drops filmy trickles, orange pools of rusting pearls My birth was a cry seeded in Eden guided by mavericks and peculiar ladies blessed by the dawdling shepherds of arcadia, high-jacked through drooly lure of central revenue I don't though I must and what fury I feel coming late to the tree and finding only empty cupules – oh when will I learn to seek not the place but to follow the itch? The mental doctor The mental doctor keeps his madness hidden in a weather-house. It is separate from him: wrapped in the sodden folds of the rainlady's skirts. He is a fine-weather medic unsplashed by delusions and grey mizzles of gloom. Sheltered by sanitary sunlight, he apricates vainly in the swell of a saneday. Should brainstorms crackle angrily and minds begin to roar, he is never under the weather. He simply smiles wrongly in a restless shift of kindness and, as the very first droplet of lunacy stains the paving, beats a hasty retreat into his cloister – always slightly too quickly to witness the pallid figure of a woman emerging from the neighbouring box. Star-still and shrinking with shame, her sallow face is whelmed with uncried tearstains and glistens of rain. Drenched in crazy showers she is ever the other: caught in a deluge of projections. Bruised blue by a physic flung with such force, she is paraded naked under the watchman's gaze. Roosting in shadows, the doctor is bone dry, safe from the howling squalls that needlesting the cheeks of the rainlady. She stands and shivers, perished with humiliation. He is weatherproof and watertight; western and white (on the inside); his asylum is a suntrap where the beauty of the rain never dawns. One bright moonrise the heavens break down and empty a torrent of water onto the weather-house. The iron gears scrape and the slippery oil-shined wheel creaks to a judder as the mechanism sticks fast. Saturated and ratdrowned, clothes clinging cold, the mental doctor stiffens like a corpse, frozen in the gaze of the rainlady. Homeless and exposed, he feels the angst driving like nails through his veins. His knees collapse under the heft of his rood as, clammy and heart-hammered, he staggers to the edge of his existence. Suddenly, his breaking eyes fix on a figure. In the soft mud under the loom of a thousand crosses, the rainlady kneels weeping. Her arms stretch out towards him and, dumb with trust, he takes from her a cup and raises it to his mouth. At once, her maudlin ceases and the doctor, humbled with passion, stumbles under her devotion. She has given him the starlight from her soul ... the very all of her ... yet expects nothing in return. The skies clear ... and a violet tingling of wisdom begins to surge through the doctor's body. He has discovered the rainlady's being. In a flickering of death he has reached out and touched her for the first time ... and she has released him from the bedlam of his sanity. As indigo shades of nightfall gather, he lies down in weariness. Though the rainlady is no longer with him, he feels the heat of her breath as he drifts in reverie between yawling trees and Galilean moons. Her shackles of difference have been snapped and her spirit rises softly, now, in his paradox of faith. Morning becomes ... ushered in by a solitary birdsong; a hallelujah feathered with grace. A dewy film has settled upon the doctor's body and the first splashes of sunrise begin to bleed over the horizon. As he wakens he feels a true sense of purpose welling within him. He is filled with otherness. He sees no single part of the breaking day but is consumed by the whole colour of it. Bathed in salvation, he whispers a stream of blessings to the rainlady (who is not there but will always be a part of him), yet he feels no reason to offer her any more than his heart-flung words. Lit by amber shimmerings of ashes, he walks the short journey downhill to the scene of all his denials ... and the weather house has tumbled down. When the rain comes again, the doctor stands among the rubble of his crumbled hideaway. He removes his shoes and walks on the wetlands, feet stained green, shrammed with the pelt and the glory ... and all around him, as far as the brain can smell, the warm floods of summer swallow his soul safely. • Peter Wilkin says "I recently retired as a nurse psychotherapist, which has given me space to reflect and capture pieces of living in clusters of words." Thursday, January 31
Two new pieces - one prose & one haibun - by Ken Head
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 31 Jan 2008 08:21 AM GMT
Keeping Company With Time
Staring out of the photograph is the face of a ninety-one-year-old former railway worker who’s spent three decades caring for a clock. Not the family-heirloom, wedding-present kind that ticked away in pride of place on mantelpieces long before the world went digital, but the massive, ten-foot, monster of a dial with gold-leaf ornamentation, cast-iron hands and Roman numbers cut from best Welsh slate that hung for a hundred years in St. Pancras station. Immaculate against the gable-end of a barn, his clock dwarfs the man whose skills brought it back from the dead, but who stands stony-eyed, grim-faced, not looking at his masterwork, amid the tangle of bramble that long ago buried his garden. Behind him, paint on a row of stable doors has flaked to exhausted grey. Creeper chokes the roof, lassoes loose tiles, its tendrils worming through space-time towards the region of two o’clock. When Even The Sundials Have Crumbled To Dust Oceans of lost lives pebbles along the shoreline one or two we keep Almost no one comes here these days, just beach bums and refugees holed up behind the dunes in hopes of staying forgotten. Met some religious folk once, from a colony down the coast where the sea’s already turned to dust, a hard place, let me tell you, to wait for your new messiah to appear with a second shot at paradise. Hot as hell and no water. Ran into a couple of sun-crazed poets, too, before my eyes began to fail. Lookin’ for inspiration in the music of the dunes, they said. But that was a while ago and they haven’t been around again or I’d ’ve spotted their tracks. In daylight anyway. At night you wouldn’t believe the dark since the towns along the coast were all switched off. Even the engineers who’ve survived don’t make the trip any more. Why bother to maintain expensive plant when nobody uses it? Like I say, the place is pretty much dead, has been since before the tour buses gave up trying to keep it alive. No diesel, I guess, leastways, not for pleasure. A tough drive, too, with the roads so broken up or buried under sand. All the old resorts are ghost towns now, almost nowhere left with water in its tanks or a drop of fuel to drive the gennies. I’ve been lucky so far, though, stayed comfortable, kept myself out of the way of the army gunships that come lookin’. It’s easy if you listen for the rotors … like Vietnam. I moved to a higher floor a while ago to stay above the sand. Not that it matters. Don’t think much about problems, damage to my eyes and skin. Makes more sense not to. Sun’s warm all year, there’s peace and quiet to ease me through however many days’re left and watching sunset shadow the world to sleep is always special. We come and we go must it always be so ask the universe • Ken Head lives in Cambridge, England. He was an invited reader, alongside Pascale Petit and Mimi Khalvati, at the London Poetry School’s 2007 fund-raiser. Monday, December 10
New prose poem by P.A. Levy
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 10 Dec 2007 11:40 AM GMT
Fivefuckingfuckoffrings
Let battle commence against the dole grey world old and charmless pull up your hood be blinkered be unseen be a rising star on CCTV with exuberant flashes of mindless violence and a passion for thievery pick up the phone I’ll let it ring five times the speed at which we nicked the sun and I know it were just a larf but yea we was quick man I mean the speed of light quick hands like camera flashes blur dazzle and it were in our back pocket then we legs it out of breath panting like some obscene phone call what colour is yer knickers pick up the phone why don’t you no good hanging about don’t wona linger yea but we got away with it stupid planets orbit round and round mental like special brew nutter like a central line cruiser got stars in their eyes gone milky way blind give ‘em the slip when we circled the solar system uranus rising little green men on mars saturn’s rings pick up the phone please we was back by three nice and tidy in time to get the drinks in but there’s old bill large as life sitting in the boozer scratching his nut trying to do sudoku yet over the top of his lager top he’s clocking us and we’re feeling iffy and we’re looking all shifty pick up the phone ‘cos I fink it’s all gonna kick off but you know what it’s like course you do spend spend spend get flash with the readdies this fing is burning a hole in me pocket I gotta get me thrills and spills and pills have a huge fuck off wad of bish bosh dosh buy me designer wear all the latest gadgets and buttons satellite tracking MP3 camera phone so pick up the fucking phone just one more ring just one more ring ‘cos I’ve got a bad feeling about today I don’t fink fings are gonna quite go my way now I might be right I might be wrong but I don’t fink we should ‘ave nicked the fucking sun for fuck’s sake pick up the fucking phone please pick up the phone ‘cos it’s all gone dark and I can’t find my way home Children of the material age oblivious to when the cornflowers bloom hang around on street corners that bare the names of former heroes who come complete with post codes but beg the question who the fuck are you • P.A. Levy says... "I'm a Cockney sparrow now living in exile in the beautiful Suffolk countryside." Wednesday, December 5
Concrete and prose by Caroline Maldonado
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 05 Dec 2007 01:49 PM GMT
Today we've got two pieces by a new contributor – Caroline Maldonado – a concrete poem and a prose poem. And, in case you were wondering, the tango is danced in a figure of eight pattern.
TANGO IS is Tango a sad thought danced. that be can UNDERWORLD A safe room. From here I can see the sky, violet before dawn, and the river, black, sucking up lamplight. Light from a neighbour's window slips through the slatted blinds and stripes the kitchen floor behind me. Somebody coughs, and laughs in their sleep. The fridge sings and the plumbing yawns like a distant train. The river below. * …air and dust tug it from her fingers: it cruises round Sainsbury's car park, dives under a departing car, where it catches on a wheel round and round and round out to the street, is blown under the 266, under lorries, under Fiat and Mercedes; it flattens, rises again, up over the pavement to slap the lamppost, catch a branch of the cherry tree, hang there one-armed, in the sunlight, waving to the world – it falls again, hovers over guttering until a final gust…. * Beneath city streets sewers swell, smell of sulphur, tunnel waste. In a rats' playground men build shelters of chipped wood and tin. Bottles and needles are a game for their dogs: tap and roll. "I've messed up good this time." He looks away. "Sometimes I feel so sad I could cry. Sometimes, I could cry." The train doors open, heave a sigh, expelling breath and passengers – sssh. And then the voice: Please mind the gap. • Caroline Maldonado lives in London and Italy and has published poems in nth position, Obssessedwith Pipework and The Interpreter's House. Sunday, November 25
Ben Borek podcast now available
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 25 Nov 2007 10:18 AM GMT
We've now got a podcast available of Ben Borek, the author of Donjong Heights, reading the prologue from the book – you can see a copy of its cover in the righthand column. Just click on the attached MP3 file. Donjong Heights
is published by Eggbox Publishing www.eggboxpublishing.com/store.html
– price £7.99 (with free
P&P to all UK orders).
 1 AttachmentsWednesday, November 21
Prinny's Eye - a new prose poem by Mandy Pannett
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 21 Nov 2007 07:12 PM GMT
PRINNY'S EYE
The Brighton Lanes are popular with tourists, draw people through them like the moon on waves. The occasional person, or small pebble, may be left behind and lost. It reminded her of a pebble, the round of it, its hard to the touch; his eyeball, just the one, copied and painted for her like a portrait but much better than that, set in gold as a locket to be worn on a chain. The fastening was intricate, a secretive catch; not many people could guess she was wearing the Prince Regent's eye. Maria Fitzherbert would keep it for ever, nestled and safe on the pulse of her throat, long after the days when his eye began wandering, roving far from her, forgot it had promised to see her as his wife, shut itself tight to avoid inconvenient vows. • Mandy Pannett runs an arts cafe, supports two local writing groups and enjoys giving readings and running writing workshops. She has two poetry collections from Oversteps Books: Bee Purple and Frost Hollow. |
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