Issue 12
Ian McGuire

MR12 Editorial

Welcome to the twelfth issue of The Manchester Review. This issue features our usual blend of top quality work from new and established poets and fiction writers.  We are delighted to publish wonderful new stories and poems from our old friends James Robison, Peter Fallon, Ian Pople, Gerard Fanning and Rebecca Perry, and we are […]

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Thomas McCarthy

Two Poems

CECIL HURWITZ, TADHG O’DRISCOLL Around 1943, Cecil, you dropped what you were doing Just to follow me here into the history section With my arms full to the brim with heavy Robert Fisks, Him that tries to make everything right, him that In old age thinks the world would be much better If people could […]

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Helen Cross

Who Wants Tortoise?

It was a hot summer Saturday and I had to get home to my parents. I’d had an abortion three days earlier and suddenly, urgently, needed milky tea, a super- soft settee and an endless supply of Aldi’s imitation Kit-Kats. ‘I’m thinking of coming to see you,’ I said, already at Kings Cross, my overnight […]

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Jan Wagner

Two Poems

of lake michigan Transl. Eva Bourke the whole night the storm raged around the white clapboard house held together by no more than the thin lamplight of its rooms. the autumnal crowns of the trees next morning like shattered church windows. the abandoned amusement park with the maritime snakes of its rollercoasters: in good summers […]

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Gerard Fanning

Four Poems

FALSE FRUIT I keep my eye on the love life of these solemn winter crowns and when light becomes various, return to the garden to root and mulch their tubers, like blousy beasts of kale and reed. Raking and turning the sulky pits, I nose them out like truffles, with their albino breath and stage […]

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Ian Pople

The Pied Fantail, The Magnolia

The Pied Fantail, The Magnolia Anyone who submits to his own impulses is bound for trouble  (inscription at Loha Prasat temple, Bangkok) Accustomed to live under corrugated zinc, in transparent houses, the afternoon is a gated community of silence and butterflies, finches in pairs, moving among the leaves, until the wind and rain return, moving […]

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Igor Klikovac

Three Poems

DOG-SITTING My friend’s little dog in my garden, for hours fixated on the top of the brick wall, not at all on the garden itself reminds me how, in a besieged city, less and less I noticed the streets and the people, until only the invisible fence remained. The dogs were, I remember, calmer than […]

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Theodore Worozbyt

Two Poems

Calliopes I was conscious of being handled. I must have died from love, as in the old ways. There was a certain amount of praying and lamenting. I didn’t mind, though I preferred The joking and the drinking. Sooner or later it would all be the same. The first touch was the gentlest. It was […]

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Guy Mitchell

Voices

‘Jesus, if I have to watch another PowerPoint presentation I swear I’m going to rip my own head off.’  He was looking at the ceiling, not at anything else, and she was holding his hand under the covers.  He liked it that he knew she was there without having to look. ‘Ah, remember what Clooney […]

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Rebecca Perry

Three Poems

Pepo Her imaginary friend died on the morning of her eighth birthday and what a lesson to learn as her living friends screech in the garden like mosquitoes, wearing down the grass with their flashing shoes, and the balloons stare back at her with furious eyes. Her cake was a castle she cut into pieces […]

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Christos Tsiolkas

Danton’s Laugh

The power of the image is such that I find it difficult to imagine Danton without his assuming Gerard Depardieu’s visage and physique. And that seems absurd, as it has been nearly two decades since I last saw Andrzej Wajda’s biographical film, in which the French actor plays the eponymous revolutionary.  Nevertheless, I still trust […]

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Peter Fallon

Four Poems

A Winter Hymn The snow melt falls like footsteps coming closer. You hesitate — you hear your old friend’s ‘Old too early, wise too late.’ You’ve learned his lesson. He left it that there’s not too much to forgive. You know the earth abounds with benefits and the chance to live on it’s a privilege. […]

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Tendai Huchu

Brian

The day Brian got deported we did the only thing we could do, we threw a party. They (the forces of darkness, otherwise known as the Home Office) came for him in the middle of the night and dragged him out of bed, kicking and screaming, from the one bedroom flat he rented in Muirhouse. […]

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Marci Vogel

Mnemosyne TV

Beneath the dark flutter of the griffon’s wings we dream––between gripping and being gripped––the concept of consciousness.                                                        ––Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Notebook, 1928[i]   Mnemosyne was the Titan goddess […]

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Martin Monahan

Lapse

1. Rubbing soap about his body, he thought of Rose-Maria. In his mind it was her body that his hands were moving over. But not as if she were in front of him—rather as if his mind were inside her body, as if his mind were pinioned on top of her body and her body […]

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James Robison

Charles Manson

My father is floor foreman of a casket company down in West Virginia and gets a call (as happens sadly) about a dead convict  from  Moundsville with no family, nothing, tonight’s one stabbed in the gut and heart and neck by a cellmate and the M.E. has finished with him and this time Dad says, […]

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Jane Feaver

Owl

It was Julia’s habit to stay on an hour or two after the end of school, long after the commotion in the playground had died down. She had the small office to herself, a glass box portioned off in one corner of the new library.  When her eyes were tired at the end of the […]

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