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?

André Naffis-Sahely

after Christopher Logue

“My mother says I have a choice:”

The world can do without my name.
Give me a happy backwoods: servants,
a palace, fleets, taxes, maybe a pet too;
a life well lived as any. Pride, I fear,
is pointless. There are no Kings, or Pawns,
only squares, and a limited number of moves.

Tell me mother: how long is everlasting?
Not long enough. Let Troy and Greece
fight on without me; no doubt they will. I,
on the other hand, once buried, shall fertilize
the green that grows around their ruins,
and like ivy choke their stones, until they crumble

and turn to sand.

_____

Image by Alexandra Parsons

Niall Campbell

Dear, on that day of spades,
engraving lines and inlets in the sand,

so that we could begin the slow
unmooring of those black shapes to the waves,

it was hard to think of anything
but how soon after my grandmother

had followed her husband earthwards. Love,
and yet so much more than. The quiet

unionship of sometimes being the one
to lead, sometimes to follow. And these

who softly climbed the aching stair
of shore together and there, stalled.

How we stood by as if we’d nothing
to say, when, love, I did, I do.

_____

Niall Campbell is one of the winners of the 2011 Eric Gregory Awards.

xxxMartin Jackson

xx(i.m. – on your 21st birthday)

Alistair Noon

‘Beside the Baltic’

Kind of obsessed with the nautical,
I noticed the scales that cling
where crewmen haul in their pay.
A matinee at the Theatre of Water
and the sun had spotlit the stage,
but the morning show had finished
as normal, without applause,

and the boats were nudging the harbourside,
blue with orange crates and red flags,
brown souwesters, green buckets,
waiting for silver at first light.
There was a grey unpainted hull
whose portholes were staring back,
and the cranes were scalpels, held high,

awkward elbows. Their pulleys plunged,
stalled. The sleeping winches.
The steel ropes and iron ballast.
But was that the crane-man coming,
in his cloth cap, leaden black jacket,
and loose laces, whistling
some radio song as he stumbled

along the chalk rim in the chill,
beside blotches of seaweed? Even
if this water is near-landlocked
the cliff stays a nervous littoral,
held back by the coccoliths,
and no friend of the beech trees,
which lean out as if sailors under sail.

The trees become fish that fall
to the gulls’ cacophonous insistence.
Pawprints continue to speak
in the dark cement of the wharf.
The aluminium sea-eagles
strafed the last boats to the West,
escaping the final performance.

Copying distant deltas filled
with loam, multiple streamlets
feed the Baltic. Jeans, boots,
Jesus, even the sea is filthy.
And the white sun looks
at the zig-zags of the steps
panting their way up the cliffs.

‘The Molecule Man’

Three huge flat figures walk on water.
Their aluminium selves are filled with holes.
They grapple with each other where the H20 flows,
once part of the solid, silent border

between the two great drainage systems,
between two special economic zones,
the mazes that millions mapped out as homes,
till the wire and walls came down, and the river

flowed over the lower, shoddier bank first,
flooded the buildings with new carrier bags,
TVs and cars, till the freshwater washed back
to the far shore and levelled the earth.

New towers were berlinned on the banks,
and new banks berlinned in the towers. No more
landscapes of flowers in the miracle talk,
but the red and green men in their Quaker hats

continued to light up the pedestrian crossings
as alternating icons, luminous ideograms:
designed in the Old East, they’re less lamps
than candles for a change that’s chanted as loss.

Now in the New West, the Molecule Man
is static at his place on the central river.
His three heads and six arms form a Shiva
turned inwards and away from the land.