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OF YOU

We are well aware that we know
your possessions will never be needed
but we keep them in an ottoman
because we cannot let them go.

Sometimes we kneel in ceremony
handling the fabrics, trying to recall
the last time you wore a hat, a scarf,
trying to see your shape, your arm, your knee.

We slide hands into gloves and sleeves
trying to resurrect your form
hesitate in the hopelessness of it all,
scavengers, no better than thieves.

We picture the colours of you,
the meadows of imagination,
we maintain a sense of connection,
feel your red, your yellow, your blue.

© Joe Cushnan

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MUD HOUSE

Rarely, my coffee is paid for here, whether or not I print pages of
domestic pledge or derivative landscape, or another thought
answering “yes” to it amongst. The hand of my soul weather
breaks the train, stretching out to yearn, the behaviour beside experience
is given. I hear the need exaggerate the hesitation of
tackling Holy Land roads back to a cocktail. Long floor boards
fade and leak into the eyes and walls, fluttering attempts to return,
balding the stress head, the swelling of wedding fingers, void
experiments longing for faith formulating a terror turn. A symbol
imagines epiphany, wandering her danger maze. Populated self talk
conceives red sheets around the stick of white skin. Itching tight
with knees we are down onto pleading demands, cleaning out the
consistent talent to freelance and frustrate. Narrator block
vanishes, appearing sick before me and lays frightened for days.
Quick churns, bellies gastro-inject from product preaching the
port. Speechless, castrated intense traumatic. Quietly lush with life
I hibernate until dawn, early chills of October came, pine needles
blown away from the hay stack charm, dangling espresso beneath again.

© Brian Hardie

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ONE DAY IN FEBRUARY

Some days
I go whole spaces of time
not thinking about it;
    I bar the way with rods grown cobalt,
        rust-sawn in salt-struck air.
    I sandbag the doors.

These days don’t involve London.

They are active excisions of the place,
    attempts to forget bookshops
that mean the world and everything
        I wanted,
    All that I wanted and the world.

Then I remember the actuality of it,
its real-time qualities.
There you were, and there she was,
soft lights and sepia-spun because you had never met her
        (fictive but also unimaginable, somehow)
There was coffee with foam, laced like butterflies
    and interruption in the form of customisation

 –  vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chocolate –

the appalling undertone of the detergent they use there.

Then a decision, there was a chance to cover tracks,
an opportunity taken, and there were eyes

eyes bigger than saucers, and not even averted.

I did not buy you that book
so that you could convince her of it,
    measure out its merits between you.

What did I do that day,
The day that happened I can’t remember
    Because nobody told me about it.
What did I feel anxious about, or
was I fine, did I slip into lidless sleep
    thinking I knew the important things,
    wanting ways out and quietude that was non-medical
    a pill you recommended
    because I was inscrutable,
    and you were lying.

How to ensure the linear reach of time,
    how to deny days circularity
perform complete erasure
and not resent its necessity.
    Find new pace, doors without latches,
    new books unformed, unread,
    unsold;
 
 books unsullied
    and no word of February,
    the lull of empty signifiers.
 

©  Eleanor Clare

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THE LAST SUPPER

Today you will not talk, no matter how
I bruit and rattle the house to let you know
I am there, you will only have your book.
Despite the knot in my lungs, I love your
concentration, the lines above the bridge
of your nose, which tell me you know I am
watching; and you remember how the bed
scrambled and bowed yesterday, the only
onlookers two unmatched glasses dregged
by a faint cheapness of wine. No, our love
was never engineered, machined to a thou;
it was master-painted, perfect on a dry wall,
in the surety that it would fade and flake
from the first day. And, oh God, it remains
a blasphemous wonder in its own right.

©  Marie Marshall

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