It is a truism that Elizabeth Bishop was in the habit of waiting for decades for her material to discover an apt form, something her friend Robert Lowell celebrated in a poem: Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase– unerring […]
Issue 22: Part One
Three Poems
Sorting Stockings, Italy after The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance, Ezra Pound, 1915 Soon as the balcony Benedictus is done, the pigeons in St. Peter’s Square rise as one. My love and I take the overnight to Pisa. Climb its angle of lean: The higher you go, the nearer to ground. The paradox of effort in a […]
Beehives
Beehives “Cartwright, Patrick, 2nd January, 1982, aged 28, Hewer. Killed by a fall of stone. When filling coals at a longwall face, a large stone fell between two slips and killed deceased. The place had been carefully examined by the deputy, and was found to be insufficiently timbered.” If an asteroid hit […]
‘For a Child of 1918’: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old
‘For a Child of 1918’: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old by Jonathan Ellis 1 ‘Bishop is parenthetical. Her parentheses create emphases even when their purpose is to hesitate not asseverate.’ These are Maureen McLane’s words, not mine, from her astonishingly sharp essay on Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein in which she reflects on how she came […]
Three Poems
SURGERY DURING THE ECLIPSE The surgeon swings, a spider on his thread across the oak. The chainsaw glints and sings arm’s length as he reaches for a bough, dark on the sun, to slide his gleaming scalpel through the first limb. It totters, shedding spray, dropping askew into encroaching shadows. The land stares nighttime in […]
My Family and Other Immigrants
My Family and Other Immigrants (Mixing Memory and Desire) The other day I heard someone say that one should treat all recollections with suspicion. *** In 1892, nineteen-year old Adolf Ondruš, travelled from his native Brno in Bohemia to Zagreb. In this town of 80 000 inhabitants, the capital of the autonomous […]
Three Poems
And Mars Passed Close To The Sun I’m writing this in a hurry, bringing its two ends together to keep the oil from the water, closing it in on itself then watching it wriggle. I’m hoping to pip her at the ribbon, before her own bomb drops in the next number of Nature. […]
Book Learning
BOOK LEARNING A young man emerged from the Tube station looking positively heroic. For a moment, Gareth was uncertain, not quite believing his eyes, but, yes, it was Sebastian stepping into the sunlight, tall, tanned, and desperately handsome—more his mother’s son than ever. Here was Gareth’s only child, back less than a week from […]
The Fates Visit A House Which Is Not Charles Darwin’s
THE FATES VISIT A HOUSE WHICH IS NOT CHARLES DARWIN’S I The Fates stand by the crib. It is midday, but they have darkened the room for effect. The baby’s mother stands opposite them, her hands folded over her apron. First Fate: This child is destined for great things. Second Fate: This child will change […]
The Life of Roberts
The Life of Roberts hello! I’d forgotten it was you today. I’m all over the place this week! What’s that? No, no, nothing to worry about. I’ve just changed my blood pressure meds and I’m not sleeping so well on these new ones. It was like that when I started on the Statins. Yes, […]
Three Poems
The Telling Perhaps the drummer, cymbals parallel with the floor, hi-hat swishing, left leg tricking to the side to hit a rack of bells. We’d like to think his story linear, that we, too, could tap our fingers, pivot beat upon beat, run tippy-toe across the drum-skins, bass drum providing floorboarding. It’s sometimes the bass-player. […]
‘I know I’m from here’: An interview with Anne Compton
‘I know I’m from here’: An interview with Anne Compton by Evan Jones Anne Compton was born in Bangor, Prince Edward Island. A two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize, she won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Processional, her second collection; and the Raymond Souster Award for Alongside, her fourth. In 2008, […]
Four Poems
New fashion surprise parties Because surprise parties can kill, especially in the over eighties, a new way of surprising has been devised, approved by health advisors. The celebrant tiptoes into the room – this averts heart attacks among her friends – while they, in reply, leap imperceptibly from their seats whispering surprise surprise without any […]
Transfiguration
Transfiguration An indifferent god raised his fist and before my eyes crushed my son. I stood frozen in the yellow light of the tiny spare bedroom I’d made into a study, breathless at the cruelty. I’d failed the first test. I felt sorry for myself, stunned by rage at the corruption of my new father’s […]
Family Traditions
Family Traditions It was February 29 again, and I was wondering which member of my family would try to kill me this time. An hour ago, cousin Luke attempted to murder me with a rope. My guard was down, damn it, giving him just enough time to creep up behind me and wrap the […]
Time to Murder and Create
Time to Murder and Create I see it all. I see it all, but who sees me? You could say I run the show. Well sure, you nod. From a technical point of view. The lighting-guy gets the cues wrong or goes AWOL, the actors perform on a dark set. But that’s not what […]
Two Poems
Paradise is a Bullet Train The slice of a parted mouth. The white peafowl on a manor lawn. Honeydew steeped in its own sugar. Cold front in a high rise town. Paradise is a man like plaited wire. Stripped to his bowstring back and fevered lungs. Superb, elegant hands. I […]
Vincero
Vincerò I love my job. I love standing in the darkness taking in the smell of their cooking, a whiff of perfume, or a trace of lemon fabric conditioner on a clean tea-towel. Tony and I stand very still for a few minutes to make sure we haven’t been heard. We come in the […]
Flowers Are Prettier When They Grow Wild
Flowers Are Prettier When They Grow Wild Some people find reading hard. They can’t finish a book in one month, one year, if at all. Some people, and Jonathan knew these people and he liked them, didn’t read any books at all, wearing it like a badge of honour. It wasn’t a problem he […]
Callow
Callow The girl who brought the tea trolley leaned over their mother’s chair. ‘You’ve got visitors today, Mrs Lindley,’ she said. ‘that’s nice, isn’t it?’ Their mother tilted an emaciated face in her direction. ‘I’m slim now,’ she said. ‘You are,’ said the girl, whose name, according to her badge, was Jade. ‘More than […]
Commission
Commission Jameni, I lost the silver bracelet my nyanya had given me when I was a little girl when I heard the news that he would appear on the Goldenberg Commission. I ran around our small shamba and through the fence to his clan on the next shamba to tell everybody and the bracelet fell […]
The Art of the Body: An Extract
Chapter 1: An Extract from The Art of the Body by Alex Allison Maintaining one person’s dignity comes nearly always at the expense of someone else’s. I have learned this for you. My morning ritual begins in the bathroom. At the sink, I wet my hands and lather, dancing my fingers through their trained routine: […]
Claiming Home
Claiming Home Under light drizzle, a cable TV reporter stood at the corner of Burdett Avenue and Quadra Street, leaning onto her camera like a pilgrim resting on her staff, alert for signs of movement. “They have a spokesperson, but so far I haven’t gotten her to talk with me,” she whispered. When a […]
(Not) Keeping Kosher
(Not) Keeping Kosher By Sharon Goldberg I was eighteen and a freshman at Northwestern University when I ate my first slice of pepperoni pizza. That saucy crust smothered with mozzarella cheese and topped with bright red chili-peppered circles marked the beginning of my deliberate departure from Kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws with which I was raised. […]
Two Poems
Offers These aisles of unlikeness a kind of perfection as if here we might be, when it’s all over, walking through fields of Lidl finding among the lawnmowers and beetroots what we always half knew we half needed but blind to the instinct and quelling desire yet failed to achieve and this is what carried […]
Three Poems
We are gathered here tonight You wear your wedding dress to bed, the happiest day until he didn’t show. We thought he was dead but he was driving to the coast, still in love with the idea of being in love but fallen out of love with being in love and I am […]
Two Poems
A Future Bot Replies to Ms Mott Remotest mother, two hundred years old, lost but most at home among Gunnara leaves some thirty feet across, (…in a microclimate flush with butterflies) you must, I think, be appraised of the dream that over and over I dreamt in the bright light of my insomnia and saw […]
Three Poems
Men Hours from Victory About war, they say, there is nothing new to refute. It is as common to drain a swamp, as it is to redirect it. It is the child’s fib concerning the broken saucer, and by equal turns, the bald man’s poorly fitting wig, that may create the holes into which we […]
Two Poems
Wake Above the carriageway a black plastic sheet glides like a ray, becomes for a blink, the sun’s eyelid. For a mile or more, cellophane twists in hard-shoulder turbulence, snags roadside hawthorn. I’m closing in on this blinding vision; a white flatbed with a cargo of sun-blazed ribbons, gossamer shreds lost in slipstream, a polymer […]
Three Poems
#27 Nerys Harris blows through a drinking straw into a basin of bubble bath mixture. The drizzle wrinkles Dustin Mostyn’s writing paper. Mayflies get into the maple syrup. Angus Mingus tips his chair backwards. Natalie Chatterley aims the spraycan at a lighted match. Hank Strunk’s beer sours. Audrey Chaudri unwraps the clingfilm from her hands. […]
Uncles
Uncles I went into the living room suddenly to find one of my little nephews scrubbing his arms with an eraser – huge livid weals had formed. I asked him what he was doing and he replied he was trying to rub himself out so he could be drawn all over again. I said it […]
Two Poems
Milk and Honey The calf smells like good strong cheddar cheese, like my baby son does sometimes – he is one year old and not quite on a tractor yet. I am feeding the calf two litres of milk from a bucket by hand, and it is pulling on the two fingers I have in […]
Under the Bridges
Under the Bridges 1. I’m growing under bridges. Looking up at bridges, looking through one bridge to the next. Different shapes making different shapes. Trying to name all the shapes but having to make up names for new shapes. Octohedragon, climbadecadon, redrangle. The bridges don’t look like they move, but they do. Cars and trucks […]
Two Poems
Emblematic The night was moon-bright and I was so hopeful when I got to the party. There was music and three types of cheese, many beautiful people were there, and you were there too. You took up so much space, you were all I could see, and still you were distant. I tried to speak […]
Excerpt from Forgotten Work
Excerpt from Forgotten Work Like all young bands, they bandied names about All evening. Lou, the lead guitar, liked “Lout,” A word that clubbed you like a cord of wood. It’s dumb, said Lou, but arty dumb, like blood- Smeared dolls deployed as drumsticks—Henry Rollins Does Dada. Jim, on keys, preferred “The Dolphins,” After […]