Satyajit Sarna

Two drunk sailors sat
on the prow of the ship and sang
a long song of travel and adventure.
Jonah spoke of Natural History with aplomb.

Sucking on lemons,
Their voices were sharp and salty
Vibrating through the purple night.

It seemed to them that the ship was piloting itself,
Ploughing towards the horizon,
The sails neatly trimmed
And they waited and the ghost ship went on south.

Twenty years later, on an acre in Bruges,
Ploughing the dark soil,
I met Jonah, whose eyes were tired and needed rest
Before he knew where he would go next.

Riddle

So what do you say to a five-year-old
who’s realised that everything will die?
You fight it, but no matter how you try
you still repeat the lies that you were told.

It was last year in summer, the fields were gold,
etc. Had there been cotton, it would’ve been high.
His frame is retching with the question why.
But soon the old words work and he’s consoled.

And as the clever lies dispelled his fit,
arrived here with great speed, now at his back,
a towering black wave was about to hit.

I held his eye and the wave froze in the air.
He wandered off to play. The watery stack
remained for anyone who had a care.

______________

For Evan & Jonas, Brewers

…tant ilz me firent boire

1.
I remember a saucepan of such size
that you could boil a large-ish dog in it
with room to spare. I remember my surprise
at the copper element shaped to fit
its depth, on both ends garden hoses tightened
that slapped and slathered across the work top.
I remember how a two-year old recited
the recipe, how his father at the sink
smiled but corrected him with Cascade hop,
how snow was coming down (it was December),
how I said yes to all suggestions, the clink
of glass on glass on glass. I remember
little else, so much they made me drink.

2.
Next thing I’m lying on the soft hillside.
(White rugs have been spread out in my neighbourhood.)
I’m watching snowflakes in their millions glide
out of some origin in the space above.
I’ve moved from the cold edge of everything
to the centre, radiant, suddenly
at one with truth. I seem to hear it sing.
The night. The snow. The city. It’s all good.
Then I realise as yet more snow descends
that if I don’t get up eventually
I won’t get up at all, which seems profound.
But before I prise myself from the ground
and shake the snowdrifts off my cloak and shanks,
I make a note to set down these events
as fully as I can, by way of thanks.

______________

Justin Quinn’s latest collection is Close Quarters (Gallery). He lives in Prague.

Image Copyright: Ann Kristin Kåsin

Shivani Mutneja

Fashion dirt on my feet

———————-one night we will rob decades of memory

Clock-time conspires erasure

———————-the cars will run without fuel

Focal sex knuckles imagination

———————-we will kiss breaths out of each other

Cohen nudges it

———————-the skies will trickle down photographs of mobs

Towns spill over cities

———————-we will make love to vanishing landscapes and smother the roots.

I

to the corporeal so then beginning

scenes: QC, defending,

possibilities of the trial

be everything clear

then splice security

from the depths to the known sign.

Trickled through to critical mass,

a staid life,

fortunes courted then daily.

Quit school for a bruise tip harrow

low, dead or going.

II

Climate wane, not worthy

repetition, don’t like

but then coupled to your hide.

Grown to use to feel to desperate

or alone by the spare and the charm

dust of a folk lyric. What a country

and what a country.

Stop ears with the wedges or

endeavour or wadges or scrap book.

You and impressed on with the walls

and ways in hard runnings, the heart

is idle contagious and near stable –

all the other towns are hung collective

not a penny in the pocket not a trembling

hand but out –

all is not well then exterior hurt

then there’s the guidance

systems Jehovah gave

shreds of devotion

buried deep beneath the

red still earth

fixed aspect of time

kow-towed to rest

bed and wake Jacob, they are knocking heads too.

To gather be sure in response

or repose. Time: that there’s

simply nothing for it

we’ll simply out endure.

III

Interesting size, slight foxing

we’ll channel the blood to what

then that’ll be a .

Far side

on elective then

it always looks grim.

sit tight and

so, here you are! Coming

country stomped and pleasure-trip refreshed

long johns trailing the streets

like hell you’ll stand for this.

Iain Britton

be like this – be transitory

a gateway obstacle

to the next apartment

where a sigh escapes in a roll-your-own breath

where a stool takes the sudden shift of my weight

and a late-night monologue

loads

a listener’s request

to practise walking

down a long tunnel

gutted by ancestral burnings

<>

I offer my version

of events as they happen

you aren’t sure about the rain

its coldness

the integers         parenthesised

on your arms               or the inked letters

of a name

tattooed in sunsets

recapitulation is all talk / dredge work / more talk

you’re into the habit of quickly

shutting doors

<>

but who’ll step up         make

altar-suggestions

of stained-glass jabberings reflected on the mount

who’ll request a right

to what I’ve hung drawn and arranged

in every room

<>

a water-colour shoves a church

through my window / monuments

crumble into drunks
xxxxxxxmixed gender
xxxxxxxxxxxxangels in shabby clothes

a crowd xxxxxhacks at the air to get a look in
they knock at places with rooms to let

you pick up another man’s junk

we are witnesses to things as they happen

we make apes of ourselves

leave slag heaps for neighbours
turn our backs on backs

we avoid confrontations

zeroing-in

on the mischievous cackle of a river

______

Iain Britton’s upcoming collection, Druidic Approaches, can be previewed here. It will be published by Lapwing Publications.

Image Copyright: Foomandoonian

Alistair Noon

Keats Somewhere or Other

Turquoise torso with silver apples in your hands,
your skin all polished, a jewel behind glass,
your arms extend like a pair of seabed fronds,
as if you were stretching your slender shoulders
or performing Javanese temple dance,
your eyeless head thrown back, perfectly bald.

You live in the basement – but, what a basement! –
with a rapid reaction force of handbags.
No daylight falls to this gold-rimmed place,
its chessboard marble floor with darker streaks.
And all this time I’ve been eating green apples
and stirring jasmine tea with stainless steel.

So in what unseen workshop were you born?
Is there some resounding production line?
How many think your non-existent thoughts,
hold those silver apples, and make that shape,
stiff, blind, half-human figure with no mind?
Hold on, sorry, I’m going to have to take this.

Any idea where we are? No, me neither.
But let me cavort you down the long street,
down that line of shops wherever it lies.
Clifford Geertz will be swinging by later
to talk about tools and cultural meaning.
We were thinking of meeting in Happy Asia.

The Persians in Europe

There’s a socialist somewhere in the family,
or someone too close to the Shah.
Be neither the wrong revolutionary
nor an associate of the Tsar.

An approach to this group would rework
the Germans in the hills of Los Angeles
or the Huguenots on the plains of Brandenburg,
which annually melt and refreeze.

They breeze by with festival passes
or stand in the international line,
holding their lists of films in Farsi.
One’s waiting to see her home for the first time.

To hear a live reading of the whole of ‘Ode to TL61P 5′, click here.

Thomas Ellison

Ruing athwart ort

Infinitesimal as scintilla

Chersoneses malodorous as miasma.

Lacunas soupçon brumous

Annealed besoms rend

Enfilade steppe

Et veldt as naphtha

Febrile annul blitzkrieg albeit

Gormandizing tellurian Elysium.

Richie McCaffery

We are about to be evicted from our flat
where the sun is a regular, welcome voyeur.
We have paid every bill, never broken the peace
as if it were a brittle bakelite 78 unplayed for years

I have loved you in ways I never imagined
within these walls of off-white fondant.
The ceilings have always been high, aspirational
even, the spare room we hoped to colonise

with colic and cries if we’d ever got up
the rungless Swarfega employment ladder.
Here are the drafts of a good life for the buyer,
we have too much luggage for our old suitcases.

This tenement was built in 1896 and since then
has only served as a bus shelter of flaxen sandstone,
a stray house martin has settled in our phone meter,
its nest an upside-down bowler hat of garden daub.

When I leave each morning it is always alarmed
and weaves a coronet of shark-fin wings around
the Coriolis of my thoughts, we feed each other’s panic,
born or hatched as exiles, we are tamed into tenants.

Adam Crothers

poetry’s part of your self

— Frank O’Hara

or a gift from God. God’s gift to you might be that you are God’s gift.
The message on mý T-shirt makes that T seem more a crucifix:

I SPILLED MY GUTS FOR YOU PEOPLE AND ALL YOU GAVE ME WAS THIS.
See, not to show off but I grew up enjambing the two parts of the confess-

ional. My mind a grille. What goes in one ear comes out ‘Mother,
I am stranded here on one side of what I think is a river,

and could never forgive myself for failing to be the leader
of men from the supercontinent to the isle of alders.’ The grille is a ladder,

and although that grass might not be greener I am somebody who believes
us all entitled to believe ourselves laid upon its leaves.

I can tell you can tell I am very well informed. I write no sonnets;
do not attempt to second guess me. For ‘no sonnets’ read ‘one sonnet’:

otherwise what hope in explaining the beautiful
woman’s being beautiful like a bridge is beautiful?