Relax, it's not that 'c' word – it's the Christmas 'c' word – and here's a photo Patsy took this time last year near Kelso in the Scottish Borders country...




JINGLE BELLS
 
I cannot, will not,
use the "C" word.
Not when it's still November.
 
I switch channels
when the jingles start,
time enough for that.
 
I sound as though I hate it,
but I love it,
right time, right place.
 
Little faces,
lots of laughter,
fat cats and dogs.


* Patsy Goodsir is a regular IS&T contributor who warns "Never sleep with an elephant. he might roll over". www.patsygoodsir.com

III - Us

There have been 18,800 days

of me and

7,035 days of us.

When I say goodbye to you,

I say goodbye to us and

most of me.

 

It was late on a Thursday evening,

early November and I was down at

the gas station helping Sara with her

paperwork and you dropped by to say hello.

You were getting impatient with me by then;

your transfer had gone through and we had already

danced and kissed and you made sure I

had the chance to run my hand down

your leg and it would have happened

that Saturday night if Sara had not got drunk

and picked a fight that Bud had to finish and

we all ended up at the jail half the night,

but with another fun story to tell, but

I never told this one,

did I?

 

I asked you where you were going as

you started to wander off and you

replied that you were going to

the Holiday Inn to drink schnapps and beer and

I recalled what you had said about

what that leads to on the night I saw

you tie a knot in a cherry stem with your tongue.

I looked at Sara and calmly asked her

what I should do.

Sara, who besides having a Psych degree,

was in San Fran in the summer of ’67 and

on a farm in upstate New York in the summer of ’69.

From the moment I hired her,

we started teaching each other.

We certainly both got each other immediately.

Sara looked at me and uttered the immortal words;

“Shit or get off the pot.”

I ran into your arms and

all of our tomorrows.

We got schnapps and beer and took it

to my place and sat on the floor and starting watching

LA Law and

never made it anywhere near the

end.

* Mike Carson lives in Tennessee. This is the third part of a much longer poem – called Goodbye – that he plans to close out his upcoming collection Sunset Memories. (And yes he is currently looking for the best publishing options.) You can find out more about Mike's work here www.myspace.com/mcarson2

Dorothy


When I hear your name,
I see a girl in red shoes.
Then, a wilted body
in a net of plastic tubes,
arms a patchwork of bruises:
blue like your summer dress,
purple like the stains on my fingers
after picking blackberries in your back yard.


* Joe Wyatt is a third year creative writing student at Norwich University College of the Arts. He co-edited and contributed to NUCA's Veto #4 magazine.

Tar, Gin
 

It was night,
the pubs were closed
 
he got me at the bus stop,
said I better give him his bus fare
 
said he’d heard the slummy
rattling in my pocket
 
and if I didn’t give him it
he’d deck me one good and proper
 
so me,
I punched myself
right in the face
really fucking hard
 
harder than I meant to
 
and he stood there
in the dark rain
lost,
 
let me walk on.
 
In the morning
I’d lost a filling,
my jaw had come up
and I had a puddle
of gin sick
drying on my face
 
but that £2.42
was still in my jeans.
 
I tried looking at them
for pride’s sake
but all those rusty little silhouettes
of the rusty little queen
made me queasy.   


* Tanner says... "Congealed Anfield, 84 ... currently festering within the shadows of society, taking verbal photos of the subsequent horror ... i am always always watching you ..." Tanner's new chapbook Alright, Squire? is out now from Last Chance Before Bath-time Publications

                       “He Was No Good At Making Bread”

                                               

                            ...BBC Radio 4,  8:30am Sunday 8 November 2009

 

 

                        Right there in the middle of carnage –

                        because that’s what it was, regulated

                        and occasionally sanctified by vigils for the dead,

                        he tried to make bread.

                        Nothing would go right, it would not rise,

                        yeast malfunctioned, flour did not respond.

                        He tried again, whenever off duty,

                        produced flour-bricks

                        for buildings no one saw.

                        Week after week he began again,

                        the same recipe not working

                        and at his vigil a comrade mentioned

                        “how he was no good at making bread.”

                        Now he is yeast to the war, proved at last,

                        but what food costs so much,

                        what discarded scraps are strewn about

                        and who washes up the mess in this dirty kitchen?

                        At home, his widow stares

                        at unused recipe books.

* Pat Jourdan's latest book is the novel Finding Out and she has appeared at the Polyverse Poetry festival (Loughborough) in July, the Sutton Hoo Poetry Festival in June and was included in the Voicing Visions Norwich Twenty Group Exhibition Spring 2009. Her website is www.patjourdan.co.uk

Intentions

There must be a bone caught
between my heart and spine.
If only I could cough it up,
like this place for which I did not ask,
but this splintered ivory lodges,
rigid, crippling love.
Shall I take a fork
and knife,
cut it out, eat it, so it
dissolves within a dark, caustic
acid?  Like I wish I could with
hapless  man  words
tossed with as much meaning as
a horseshoe that circles and clanks about my heart .
I prefer to hurl myself, alone, over unstable ledges, or wait for
those ledges to buckle beneath
me.  At least I’d be falling within
my own logic, no bone piercing, male
trickery, that extended hand
which when gripped
disappears into thin air.


* Author of the novel When the Ugly Comes, Carmen Eichman earned her Masters Degree in Creative Writing & Literature from Kansas State University and is now an Assistant Professor of English and Honors Chair, living in North Carolina. Eichman’s poetry has appeared in A Little Poetry, All Things Girl, The Argotist Online, Subtle Tea, Invisible Ink, The Dan River Review, Borderline, Thick with Conviction, and Contemporary American Voices to name a few. She is currently at work on her fourth novel and third collection of poetry.

Ugly Truths


"What is it, Granda? Is it a toad?"
 
"I’m not sure, dear. My eyesight isn’t what it was. We’ll need to get closer. "
 
"It’s very ugly."
 
"Oh, I see what it is."
 
"What? What is it?"
 
"A truth."
 
"What’s a truth?"
 
"Goodness, me. I thought they were extinct."
 
"What’s a truth, Granda, and why does it have to be so ugly?"
 
"Oh, truths were all ugly, dear. Most of them anyway. Some of them were quite gruesome in fact. That’s why they started eradicating them before you were born. I wonder how this one managed to hang on so long."
 
"What’s eradi…?"
 
"People started getting rid of them."
 
"Should I squash it? Can I squash it, Granda?"
 
"Wait! Wait. Hold your horses. Let's get a good look at it. I want to see what kind it is. There were lots of different kinds of truth. It might be something new altogether. A new strain."
 
"Well, I don’t like it."
 
"No, not many people did, my dear. Lies were much more colourful, adaptable and interesting. And there were so many of them."
 
"Granda! What are you doing?"
 
"Oh, nothing. I just thought I’d dig it up and take it home. See what it grows into."
 
"You mean it’ll get bigger?"
 
"Yes, and probably uglier. The biggest truths were really hideous. People could hardly bear to look at them."
 
"Ugh, Granda. I’ll be ill if I have to look at that much longer."
 
"Well, some truths can make you feel like you’re ill when you’re not really ill."
 
"Why would anyone want to feel ill?"
 
"It’s a kind of protection."
 
"I don’t understand."
 
"Well, imagine every time you had to go out in the rain you felt a little poorly. You’d never go out in the rain would you?"
 
"No. But I have an umbrella. You can see through it."
 
"Well, that’s good, too. But if you didn’t have the umbrella what would happen if you went out in the rain?"
 
"I’d get wet. But if I felt poorly, Mummy would make me a bed on the couch."
 
"That’s the idea. So you see why truths used to be a good idea."
 
"I think so. So why did people get rid of them?"
 
"Why? Oh, I suppose they all bought umbrellas. We should get going. Your mother’ll be wondering where we are."
 
"She’ll shout at you if you try and bring that thing into the house. That’s what she does to me."
 
"Ah, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…"
 
"I'm not a baby. I'm six."
 
"Of course you are, dear. Of course you are."


* Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living just outside Glasgow. His second novel Stranger than Fiction was published in August. www.jimmurdoch.co.uk
 

Our posting over the weekend – showing the cafe sign at Aldeburgh inviting poets to share a bowl of soup (here's the photo again in case you missed it) and prompting us to ask whether poets still starve in their garrets



has prompted regular IS&T contributor Charlotte Ghost to submit this suggested menu – enjoy...

Regular IS&T contributor Larry Kimmel has sent along two prose/flash pieces. Both are true anecdotes. He explains "I grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, where there was a time lag of a good 25 years, and so I've a lot of early 20th century Americana to draw on. I'm not sure if you'd be interested in this sort of material for IS&T, but here they  are. The first – Home of the Brave – is sort of Appalachian in nature (we lived on the outer edge of that culture, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from West Virginia), and both are family stories. The second one, a tale my dad told of about himself."


Home Of The Brave

For three days Grandma’s best milker frothed at the mouth, then died—clearly poisoned.  A year later, old Mike Kovitch, with a skin full, said:  “It a shame about that cow, someday I tell you Mister Mahler,” and so we knew what we already knew, and Grandpa spoke true when he told us a desire to see justice done would only result in something else dying or burning down, and all Grandma had said to old Mama Kovitch was: “Those aren’t your cherries to pick,” it being Grandma’s one cherry tree and she counting on the crop for preserves, and old Mama Kovitch had gone off mumbling:  “Me think this free country,” no different than any other time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Rattlesnake

Three on the path ahead of him stepped over it unawares, and he, likewise thinking it a stick, was stepping over it when it stirred—sliddered off the path into a clump of brush near at hand.  They, not wanting it on the farm, took up sticks and beat the brush (one from each of the four directions), till out it came streaking straight for him, who always ended this tale palpitating his shirt with pinched fingers—miming the fear—saying:  " ... and I'll tell you, I was one scared young fellah that day—What?—O, we got'em okay.  I came down on 'im  good 'n' hard.  He didnt last long after that, you betcha."

Visit To Lincolnshire

    About this time last week
    I was laying down a pencil
    going through the little rituals
    of finishing a poem.
    Mine include a walk,
    so I’d grabbed a coat
    and I was on the street,
    left for the river path
    or over the old bridge,
    it could have been right,
    it could have been dark,
    but that’s not the point,
    for in this town and sometime city
    the streets keep the hours
    I need them to keep,
    shaping their mood to my own.
    About this time today
    I’m in a cottage, thatch and all,
    two miles from a village,
    ten miles from the town,
    miles from any sense of space.
    South are fields of Rape, keep out.
    West are fields of Rape, keep out.
    North is an electric fence, keep out.
    East is a Private Estate.
    The track outside is hedged and straight,
    sure that I want the village road,
    a tight little road of corners and banks
    where it’s not safe to walk.
    It’s not safe to walk
    and I’ve started to feel trapped.
    surrounded by space and Out and Off,
    there’s no one in sight but I feel control
    tugging my forelock and forcing me down.
    I’d leave but I’d said I’d stay the week
    they needed a break, I’d feed the cats,
    write in peace, the perfect place,
    three days to go, in only four hours,
    it’s three days to go.


* Terry Quinn says "I'm a medical engineer in a hospital by day and present a weekly arts show on Preston FM which takes up my evenings. Well, except when football needs to be watched in a proper football ground."