XXXX


A party someplace, down in the dirt
With her blouse undone and a hand up her skirt

She lays, her body compliant as clay
And softly her mind drifts to thoughts of decay.

His thoughts, to delay, are on Kevin Rudd
His thrusts push her further into the mud.

She thinks: undressed, every boy is just the same;
Her heart aches with you don’t even know my name.

But he’s done, murmuring allegories into her ear
So she sits up and swallows the rest of her beer.


* Australian-born Stephanie Davies now resides in Guildford, UK. Her inspiration, Lewis Carroll, is buried somewhere outside.

Tin Whistles At Bath Time

I’m not being funny but when he was blowing that tin whistle in my face I knew I had to go.

I mean I had to just go, it wasn’t that he didn’t play the tin whistle beautifully, it was the glinting cleaver he carried into the bathroom. It was his mad brown eyes when he was saying Bath Time! It was the mental image of mixing my blood with hot scented bath water. I head flooded with visions of my blood on the white bathroom tiles. I remember thinking I love me with my blood inside my skin, inside me and I don’t wish to see it outside, congealing on bathroom tiles. It was a knife, a cleaver, I am sure of it, in my mad drunk mind I saw him take the weapon into the bathroom and then say cheerily to me Bath-Time!

How I wound up in his Chelsea-someplace pad I really don’t remember. There I was though, my friends had gone and left me there. Together we drank brandy, Camus brandy, whilst listening to some African music. He didn’t know the work of Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus. I explained the story-line for The Outsider, I was thinking of the book Steppenwolf, I was all muddled of course the book I was trying to describe was The Fall.

I remember sitting on his kitchen floor in the glare of the fridge light eating raw broccoli, I was like a giant eating small trees. I remember lying on his bed waiting for something to pass, it did. What was I doing in his bedroom? I sobered up suddenly and wondered out loud where on earth I was and where my friends had gone. It was very beige there, you know those apartments that have those ivory carpets that stain like hotel walls get punched. Cushions were scattered like trying to remember where they would be most comfortable. But it was then, it was exactly then when he said Bath Time I knew I had to just leave.

I ran out and down the street, I had no idea where I was and it was raining lightly. I walked and walked for what seemed hours. I felt sorry for myself. I had thoughts that seemed weighty and final and then as I passed a park I burst into tears, my back to the passing traffic, facing tree bark.

I cried like I was lost and because it was not funny anymore. I wept and felt the pathetic and pitiful vulnerability of being a girl. Then I cried because the rain seemed so sad and wet. I cried because I was a million miles away from home and I was sure he had a knife. Why on earth did he take a cleaver into the bathroom?

Above me there was nothing but a wet indigo sky. I felt I was going to fall into it and there was nothing to hold onto. No railings, no comfort and nothing to be sure of. I looked through my tears at the rain. I touched some leaves and the texture of waxy green leaf and individual raindrops made me cry even harder and I apologised, I felt like I had forgotten something, something very precious and important.

The pavement mirrored a silver shimmering shadow of an old oak tree moving in the water.

A car pulled up and I said to the driver I am escaping a knife-wielding-tin-whistle-blowing-bath-fanatic, please save me. The kind stranger nodded and drove. I finally recognised Harrods and leapt out. I started laughing in the rain, as I realised how far from insanity I was and how close to ordinary I wanted to be. I took a bus that was heading to Trafalgar Square, I wanted to sit on a lion and count pigeons while I figured out what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

On the bus there was a woman eating a chunk of bread with tomato ketchup on it. She licked the tomato sauce like it was delicious. She poured more onto the bread and licked the bottle lid too. It was revolting and compelling to watch, it looked like blood.

Trafalgar square was full of tourists, even then at three or was it five in the morning. Drunks stumbled at the bus stops eating hot dogs and kebabs.

What was I doing alone and walking the streets of London? I cannot answer that. There must be something we are all always looking for, sometimes we seek something that comes only from the sounds made by the mouths of strangers. I have walked the city streets like this many times before, London slows down to slow motion for me and I can feel it all. I was miserable but now safe and suddenly I could see things quite brightly. With some newfound clarity I walked towards Tottenham Court Road and I could see the blood racing under the skin of Saturday night.


* Salena Godden's stories and poetry appear in publications such as Dazed & Confused, Salzburg Review and Le Gun, and have been published in anthologies including Penguin’s IC3, Canongate’s Fire People, Serpents Tail’s Croatian Nights and Hodder & Stoughton’s Oral. Salena regularly reads and performs on both BBC Radio 4’s Spoken Word and BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, and is renowned for ‘taking poetry into clubs’.

The squealing weekend is over

A long uninterrupted
puddle of time

as you journey home
past sprouting allotments

to the meticulous swaying
of the train.

Dandelion clocks
skim the station platforms

where gaudy teenagers
circle each other.

Here at last

the delirious
early morning sun

and an abundance
of green.


* Joanna Ezekiel says "I've been publishing poems in small press magazines for ten years. My second pamphlet Safe Passage is available from White Leaf Press. One of my poems was shortlisted for the 2009 Bridport Prize.

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