The arts and culture in Manchester have long been grounded in industrialists’ philanthropy and generosity, which have helped to nurture considerable audiences for art, literature and music, audiences who have understood that the arts have a role to play in the ways in which the city has been continuously transformed. The city’s history of philanthropic […]
Issue 13
Three Poems
Kingdom When the kingdom falls apart the turning leaves will perform acrobatics, when the kingdom falls apart it will resemble a fancy dress party with skeletons and ghosts. When the kingdom falls apart it will be on a Wednesday morning, heavy rain, thick white cloud and a light that is particular to the time of […]
Out in the Yard
Out in the Yard The terrible elephant paws at the ground like a new, drunk kitty. But it’s normal to be thrown out of parties, I say. Just don’t outstay your welcome. But what’s a caprioska without lime? We make similar mistakes, the elephant and I. We play good cop bad cop in the afternoons. […]
A Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House 1655-60
(after an artwork by Samuel Van Hoogstraten) How we like this eavesdropping with alternating eyes, and how he planned just what we’d see from either side. The dog would always be looking at us, the cat, arching its back, and the conspiratorial busts were above all this, either fixed or floating, depending on where you […]
Tea Party
It was my friend Lewis’s fault. Actually, he’s not a friend, just a person I do some consulting with, a K-street Kommando, more Facebook friend than friend-friend. Lewis was the one got the American Ambulance Assoc. to switch to Patton Boggs LLP, and parlayed that into a Venn Strategies gig. We’re talking a person has […]
Excerpt from In Real Life
Somehow Paul finds himself teaching creative writing. He is thirty-one years old. He is going bald. He is wearing black skinny jeans and a pale blue shirt and a pair of smart, real-leather shoes. He is standing in a large room on the first floor of a university building, holding a marker pen, about to […]
Three Poems
Ode to a Magnolia Tree magnolia denudata Impatient as always, you blossom in the cold March air, even before your leaves have set: impetuous hostage to late frosts, the unfinished business of winter – but what do you care, you want to cut free, feel the sun on your face, to flaunt your big creamy […]
Two Poems
THE MIDDLE AGES We were tipping over like aging trees, our roots rising, shaggy with dirt. Had we missed the storm that did the damage? What had lifted us into brittle clock hands, whittled us into slivers, rocked our boats over into murky numbness? Were we not soldiers in the active army, were we not […]
Two Stories
User Group Disco Stanley and I were happy together, happier than anyone should be allowed to be. White-hot joy. So we chose to celebrate our first wedding anniversary by renting a room at the very, very top of a posh hotel – the twenty-first floor. It was amazing being elevated like that, way above the […]
Five Poems
Horae Solitariae One lady, I recall, the relict perhaps of an insolvent rake, would sit and mutter in a temper out of keeping with her age. I saw her once, and others of the damned, take shelter under the same tree from the rain. So anxious to impress, none said a word while overhead the […]
Four Poems
A Lollipop for E.P. Stuck a Chupa Chup into the ground Beside the grave of Ezra Pound Then jumped aboard the vaporetto To lose myself in the Jewish ghetto Looking for the synagogue That kept moving in the Venice fog Like an apparition in the crowd Where Jews were sometimes allowed. […]
Making Guava Jelly
The girls had been eating guavas for weeks. Guava jams, juices, stews, tarts with latticed pastry, every day the kitchen was misty with the perfume of guava. It was the largest crop in years, the branches obscenely laden, bending under the fruit. Nana always believed the dead came out at night to eat guavas. Guayabas, […]
Three Poems
Key To A Map The stammering footpaths pull your eye across the dyslexic geometry of fields, around blue chip meres and spilling woods. A séance tap of dead lanes turning up as potato cobbles under the plough or leaping the M6 levee between hamlets and barns. All day the fast lane hums with ghost herdsmen, […]
A Son in Iraq
After Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front and Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O “We both know you’re cynical,” my son Danny says. We’re in my studio, tenth floor, big corner of what used to be a factory warehouse. I’m painting his portrait. C-SPAN on my beat old TV with sound down […]
Three Poems
Guitar, Hanga Roa, Easter Island Eight-stringed and night-long strummed, you prove yourself a necessary accompaniment on these longest of evenings. Bigger than a fishscale, smaller than the sky, how do your songs describe you? Wider than a sardine, narrower than the sea. Sing to us of how, in this world of untimely things, a man […]
1922 – Charles Bemis Dies
Polly poked the dead colt with the toe of her boot, lifting and twisting the neck. Shock, most likely. A weak heart in a working animal was rarely discovered until it dropped dead. She knelt down in the wet grass. Scavengers had exposed two of the vertebrae and a solid, tooth-white hip on the left […]
Two Poems
Nostalgia I too lived somewhere. Life had shape I dream of now: journals and Schweppes, candles stubbed in empty bottles of wine, a painted plank on two wrapped bricks lined with midnight blue vials of liniment and balms for her pulverulent arm skin, mornings spent in the afternoons reading L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune. I […]
Two Poems
Rouen The sky is milk in a late Corot at the Beaux Arts. Khaki and mustard reeds fringe a cackling stream. A peasant with a basket in her arms walks out of wetlands that part for her. When the sun comes out, the volume of the crowd appears to rise as if light were sounded. […]