Canvas’,
Like four-month corpse
Allow only for a
Chapter, but are more than enough
To tell.
by Richy Campbell of Stoke on Trent
Picture
Resurrection
Blue light timpani
on a stilled heart drum.
Te deum-Te deum-Te deum.
Canticle on ventricle.
That repellent pulse - still visible.
by Ella Larkin of Norwich
Walking Through a Life
Approximately 8395 nights merging into a life. I've left my boots in hallways, stilettos on the stairs, slippers by the bed and sandals on the lawn. Memories of different surfaces haunt the soles of my feet.
I woke early to an empty space in the bed. A love that should have lasted years reduced to a wet footprint on the carpet. At least you closed the door quietly on your way out.
by Aarrian Golby of Sheffield
Bloodsilk
Didn't listen to old mother tongue. Didn't listen. Now I'm thrown over posing blades, a careless stranger ending. A voice tells me not to look down but I do. Bloodsilk blooms a roadside shroud. Speed past fear, past screaming. The wait for overdue pain. A hundred links all mesh to save me. For five fresh moons I'm given trial. Life sentences are levelled. People cry a lot. Everyone except for me. I'm still just numb.
by Martin Garrity of Mansfield
Portrait of the Artist as An Epitome
Soft hands caress the jagged surface of my amorphous form. His vital eyes follow exploring fingers. A brutal blow belies the delicacy of his hands as a mallet connects with chisel. We fight. As he brushes particulates from my newly defined pupils his now calloused finger tip grazes my smooth sclera. I see my reflection in his moist inflamed eyes. Rendered in gypsum I have the form of his youth and all his vitality.
by Incidentally Bentley of Guildford
A Death In The Family
The puppy walks over to me slowly and licks my cheek. I smile and am grateful. Rascal moves over to my mother and licks the tears off her cheek. We all smile for the first time in a week and maybe everything might be alright.
Reincarnation, mother says.
I am a scientist, not a fool. When my misty eyes look into the dogs’ I know he is wanting nothing but to go on a walk. I want to say: Peter, I miss you.
by Jay Slayton-Joslin of Beaconsfield
Reptile House
My home turned into a reptile. Don’t give me that look, I’m being serious.
The walls were a smooth cream. Now they’re scaled green and sometimes they breathe.
I used to have a boiler, to pump warm blood. Now my home basks on a rock in the sun.
My home turned into a reptile. I can show you if you like, just try not to act like food.
The clock is an eye, the TV is an eye, mantelpiece lips and the fireplace has teeth.
by Martin Garrity of Mansfield
The Day is Coming
Superheroes
will bury
themselves
in their sullen
androgynies
and listen
to the world
skid along
without them.
by Steve Brightman of Kent
A Chicken Walks into a Bar
The horse bartender blows out its nostrils.
"Don’t look down your nose at me," the chicken says.
"Dude, you do know this is an equine establishment, right?" replies horse, "There’s a poultry pub right over the road."
"I ain’t crossing that death trap."
The chicken nods to a barfly who is sitting on a bowl of nuts, "D’you just throw up in there?"
The fly shrugs four of its six shoulders. "Hey, I might be dead tomorrow."
by Jo Gatford of Brighton
Only Human
Hours in archives deciphering cramped writing and archaic abbreviations, determined to offer further insight into a great man via his personal correspondence. But as I read chronologically through his productive years, imagining the interleaved replies, I found he was after all just a man, by turns great, petty, grumpy, dull, excited. Not the insight I'd been looking for - someone else can reduce him to mortal size.
by JY Saville of Leeds
Ordering Oligonucleotides
I tap out my sequence AGCACT.
I gate triplicates with my right hand, CCT, I tap them in with my left AAT. Caps lock, you are a demi god among function keys. You save me from pincer hand. Pincers indeed. You can get Scorpions now. Molecular entomological fluorescent warfare.
Will it anneal while I FRET? Will it probe or am I to be left unquenched?
Double check. BLAST. AGCACC.
Write drunk, edit sober. Thanks Hemingway.
By Incidentally Bentley of Guildford
Infinite Grace
Grace had gone to bed worrying about work, but when she opened her eyes, her head was full of stars. Not the usual spots at the edge of her vision, but the red of Betelgeuse's gas clouds and the plasma fields of Arcturus. She shook her head and looked out of the window, but her mouth filled with the high-pitched taste of the red-shift between her bedroom and Bellatrix. "Screw this," she said, "how about some toast?"
by Philip Suggars of Brighton
many tales of dead end roads
beer bottle shrapnel
crumb crisp packet wind hustle
torn poster surrender
lines of amber moons on sticks
a splash
of following footsteps...
by P.A.Levy of Suffolk
crumb crisp packet wind hustle
torn poster surrender
lines of amber moons on sticks
a splash
of following footsteps...
by P.A.Levy of Suffolk
Blood Orange
Lili Kraus, concert pianist,
passed through.
We shook hands. Her fingers
dripped with orange juice.
Though long dead,
she still remembers it.
by Diana Brodie of Cambridge
passed through.
We shook hands. Her fingers
dripped with orange juice.
Though long dead,
she still remembers it.
by Diana Brodie of Cambridge
(the epileptic fit)
the sea of woe
is made of stockings
lubed in basking sharkoil
bent over the banister
of my London townhouse
by Steven J. Fowler of London
is made of stockings
lubed in basking sharkoil
bent over the banister
of my London townhouse
by Steven J. Fowler of London
The Collector
He collects and disseminates information about his acquaintances; he feeds on it and walks taller whenever he has a solid morsel of gossip to spit out. A full story makes him happy. This is the reason I always feed him short, thought-provoking bits; to vex his mind. And he knows it. Yesterday, when I bumped into him at the local garden centre, he begged: "For the love of God, no Haiku!" but I had no mercy.
by Stella Pierides of London and Munich
Flux
We stare at the sail, beached in a wetly sulphurous tangle. Rotting, waterlogged to blubberiness, unruffled by the breeze.
It is the smell that stops me lifting a corner with a toe.
The smell, and the crescent - flipper - of canvas against the sand.
"Is it a-"
"It looks-no."
We say no more. The bloated bundle is featureless. We see only thick cloth.
Only cloth, but I know that you, like me, could point to the eye.
by Joanne Sheppard of Manchester
The Weight Of His Tongue
She went on a hunger strike
to force my proposal
(the Gandhi of marriage?)
Now she’s so skinny
the weight of my tongue
hurts her nipples
by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming of London
to force my proposal
(the Gandhi of marriage?)
Now she’s so skinny
the weight of my tongue
hurts her nipples
by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming of London
England 1 Sweden 0
by JY Saville of Leeds
3 Words
He'd only come out here to prove his manhood to her. She shunned him for the loose and louche pool hall crew. They were all the same age, but their sins and misgivings grew them into men. In her eyes he was a college-boy.
She went with the others to pay their last respects and witnessed his mother, wretched in sorrow shouting 'only a boy' over and over again. The dignity and aims of his sacrifice negated by 3 words.
She went with the others to pay their last respects and witnessed his mother, wretched in sorrow shouting 'only a boy' over and over again. The dignity and aims of his sacrifice negated by 3 words.
by H of London
