Image: © Charles Eastwood Ya Shaykh Heaven Hough End Fields, Manchester, 2020 here, every blade of grass,every bluetit and blackbird,grasshopper and tiny ant,the creeping thistle in summer the gorse bush and the hairy willowherb,fireweed and curled wood;the corn chamomile, the calming tea,the hailed herb chicory all are in constant […]
Current Issue
Snowfall
Claire was late to pick up her children from nursery. She worked on the tenth floor of a tall glass building in London Bridge and had watched the snow fall against the cold December sky, delicately at first, then thickly, flakes spinning, candyfloss white. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ she’d said to her team when […]
Origami
Image: © Charles Eastwood Fold the paper in half vertically, unfold it, fold the paper in half horizontally, unfold again. You were sixteen and drunk off the cheapest corner-shop vodka. You let ugly boys kiss you if they were nice enough, or if they looked your way at back garden parties. He noticed […]
if you close the door, the night could last forever
Image: © Charles Eastwood the sun rises over julia’s balcony streaming from the east, honey & lemons from the west where empty plant-pots sing for geraniums strong enough to survive the spanish summer julia’s eyes are gentled by soft blue morning light it’s stasis printed on the surface of passing […]
The Red Notebook
dImage: © Charles Eastwood One undistinguished weekday, she adds, on impulse, a spiral-bound red notebook to her online shopping delivery. Days later, amid the frugality of a set of ingredients for meals for one – a single aubergine, a small sachet of chow mein sauce, a shrink-wrapped half-cucumber – it arrives. She rests her […]
Tourism
Image: © Charles Eastwood For thirty American dollars you gain entrance to the art museum. You walk through a metal detector and fear it will beep. You imagine if it did beep, how everyone would look at you, with full attention, in tension, and how your skin would vibrate. You would reach into your […]
2 poems
Image: © Charles Eastwood postcard from atta, guyana my mother’s footprints The tales she’d tell exotic morpho mother I chase them in East Street as I search for her home find only scrubland look for clues at Kitty all trace washed away of her swims in muddy seas further on […]
Throw the Stone Down the Mountain
Image: © Charles Eastwood My dad’s got a gold tooth. My dad’s got a broken nose. My dad can do a hane goshi on you. I boasted about him, trying to extend his protection to the playground. ‘What’s a hanny goshy?’ asked the boys who picked on me. We didn’t have a TV and […]
Luca
Image: © Charles Eastwood It had been a long time since anyone in Luca’s village had seen a star. When the companies had decided to take the night sky for themselves, there was little anyone could do to stop them – and when the darkness had spilled over the sky, like oil, concealing everything […]
…for all the days of her life
Image: © Charles Eastwood She hadn’t looked for it in a long time but there it is, just as she knew it would be. Underneath her winter coat that was too tattered now to keep her warm, atop her worn out boots, which likewise had lost their ability to keep her feet warm, was […]
The Handover
Image: © Charles Eastwood i.m. Fada Mohammad Years ago, on a long-haul to Singapore, Kabul appeared on the seat-back locator map tracking our flight path: below us was a place where war never dies, but at 12,000 meters the window held only the pale brown creases and folds of The Hindu Kush. […]
My Great Grandfather’s Apron Shop
Image: © Charles Eastwood Salt, parsley, matzah I am tying my apron when he wanders in. He must be impressed, my elter zeyde, because instead of moving on again, he sits as if inviting me to make him coffee; I pull tight on my apron strings, imagine his approval, his apron shop, its […]
The Eid Dinner
Image: © Charles Eastwood On 19 March 2003, US and British forces invaded Iraq; by May the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba had become a permanent facility housing over 680 prisoners. In Europe, a devastating heatwave caused over 30,000 deaths that summer. The year also saw the launch of Skype, Linked-in and the MySpace social network, […]
2 poems
Image: © Charles Eastwood Hometown Elegy Plumstead Road is a zip in the town’s mended dress. You’d like the new half, its cleanness. The posh cafes. Though a cup of tea costs what we used to pay for a pizza and a pizza, no joke, is what we paid for […]
Drought
Image: © Charles Eastwood everywhere the land is now taken into drought mandatory water shutoffs only water your lawns after 6 pm and we let our lawns die and neighborhood after neighborhood becomes burned and the city gradually loses its color until the valley bakes down into a light brown and i drive around […]
3 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Coffee Once a currency of the colonial kings of the seas, Captain.This simple plant. It will grow and die and synthesiseSo why, sir, is it stained? Men enslaved; families separated, Killed.Yet the brew drips, drips, […]
On the Falseness of Wolves
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester wolves aren’t real She said it with the smooth-shouldered arrogance of youthful certainty. At first, I wasn’t sure I heard her right. I asked her what she said and she calmly […]
Eingang freihalten, bitte
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Perhaps motherhood is a solitarywalk down the road of an interrupted dream You point out birds, flowers, how the road arrivesat Spring. Behind you, two balloons dance their strings in your hands. You are heldback on the path, wait at corners, guard against the muffled shadows of […]
When We Were Raucous
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester It’s raining. I’m in the back of the car, Beth is in the front with Dad. When there were four of us, Beth used to sit next to me and we’d watch raindrops slither down the windows, try to guess which one would get to the bottom […]
Belief
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester “But you have to believe.” We are standing in her kitchenIn front of the stove. That urgency in my grandmother’s voice soft, yet desperate? […]
2 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester This Sunday Morning I watch you from the kitchen window, digging in, reaching for the good earth, summer-baked in suspended animation, knee-deep in love. The kids are asking for Daddy, the dog needs to pee, and the coffee has dribbled its last drops into the pot – […]
An Adultery
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester “Sex with my wife hasn’t been the same,” my lover says, “since her breast cancer.” Where bedsheets retract, the shoreline of his body emerges. Lumps of burnt pink, freckled all over. Behind him, glass slats combine to windows, and then the Mediterranean, its green light stretching all […]
Daisy’s Place
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester A scramble of hairpins, then a wedge of smooth sea. Down the coast, the Costa del something. High-rise hotels, Dan said, and street fights. But out here, he said, it was a different world. No bars, not on this trip, eating in and he’d cook, and anyway, […]
2 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Rialto Blues In May I take the train from Genoa to Venezia Santa Lucia, but I am late, and see you before you see me, standing on the bridge, face hard as Istrian stone. What irony that we should reunite in Venice with its web of artifice—wrecked […]
3 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester I Heard Her Drumming in the Spring Haw frost comesand light snow duststhe solid ground. I take paper bagsof peanuts,sunflower seeds — black, unhusked— and do the jobyou used to do. I fill the feedershung on a stumpyash tree — a pollard we cut years ago.Binoculars, yours,sit […]
The Scent of Magnolia
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Something was wrong as soon as we drove into our street. We heard the shriek of a siren as we passed through town. Now there was a police car outside our house, an ambulance with its blue light turning. Two paramedics loading a stretcher into the back. […]
The Headman
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester July can be unforgivingly cold. Walking outside, the chillness feels like multiple blades cutting the skin. He’s sitting in his bedroom hut, thinking of Mucha. In his mind he’s walking towards her. His heart is pounding. “Ndeipi” he says. “Where were you yesterday?” Mucha says. “I got […]
The Brain that went for a Stroll
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester I’m at my desk staring at a stack of forms waiting to be checked and captured on the system. It’s a busy time of year. There are performance reviews coming up. I’m right in the middle of a weekly stats call when it happens. I start retching. […]
To the Man Sleeping in the Airport
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Your arm is reaching into the carpeted walkway,where hundreds travel the gentle slopetoward the cold tile of the ground-floor lobby.Your pink stomach winks through the risein your shirt, keeps watch as the crowd followsin rippling curves to miss your hand, palm-up,your fingers slightly curled as if tied […]
Pridesongs
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Oblique Strategy #1: Is it finished? It’s morning, sometime in late 2021, and I’m standing near the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art’s river window, waiting to hear something special. Today’s a bright day – the kind where light seemingly leaks from the air itself, and the river […]
Death Robed in A Gown, So Beautiful, So Majestic
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester For my Grandfather In the old elm that crowded our backyard fence a lone magpie cawked— a woman was wading her feet through a water that had found its way into her stead, & she cursed heavily— […]
Editorial
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester After a longer than expected break, we are very happy to announce the passing of the torch to a new editorial team which is excited to bring you this new issue of The Manchester Review. In issue twenty-six, the new editorial team has endeavoured to remain faithful […]