Going Grey

 

Time streaks like thin honey in thin tea,

time wearing wings to grim rags, thinking

I am old

at last.

I can wear fat rings which

weighted our fingers from the dressing up box,

which stunned our knuckles silver-black

as teenagers,

which we padded away as grandmother’s silly gold,

silly, sunny stumps we rolled in felt –

we can wear them now,

fingers thinned out, the rings loop them

like curtain rails.

 

We hide in purple florals,

the grey and red of seaside towns,

the grey and orange of seabirds,

the grey on grey on green of those damp fields.

Well –

not yet.

 

Now, night-time bunches like dark laundry.

It is bunched in my throat and brain

where it will sour and salt and soon

rot me to grey.

 

No – my fingers still fresh, twitch like whiskers.

I will find you at the station.

We will meet in smoke and flinging,

not odd nods and squinting,

eyelids like sleeves pulled down in winter,

like leaves, like tongues, like blinds that

stamp, stamp the windowsill in the draft,

the draft in your room that still bubbles my blood,

 

But there are moments to say I will not,

can not,

which only come back when I am trying to sleep,

which sit on my chest and nod their heads

and say should have, shouldn’t have.

There are too few snaky trains to escape

this.

 

But there are some and I will not lose you.

Blinking out again

and again the skin purses with a mouthful of blood,

dribbles like an animal,

blinking back and I am still not leaving

and there is so much left

which I cannot move out and into

 

because the day before you left, you tripped on the curb

and I think the bruise is still there

like a rancid fingerprint

and I thought I heard the rain

sound like your footbeat

sound like the clock in my  parents’ room.

 

Only that I can’t see you

- there is grey in my hair in this light.

I am buying rubbery shoes from shops that smell of

perfumed formaldehyde,

from women with skin like spilled tea

who are as grey as me.

 

I am filling spoons with sugar-grit.

I am stirring sugar in my spit,

buying tan-orange tights and

stooping.

 

This is what I become.

Not bones and railway cars and thick china,

or even well-spoken and wise.

Only grey and dry and

faintly absurd.

 

Half price tealeaves, a ribbon drawer,

a closed door, a closed door,

a closed door.

 

 

Eggs

 

I think you said you’d found a park near here

which looks like the one you grew up in.

I have walked past it once

or twice –

the swings dip and drag, the slide cracks like an old tongue.

The swings I think are sagging smiles.

 

I will not tell you this –

I’ll say “I’ll stay in today,” or else

“I love you a bit.”

Or else pack my teeth like hard stones

or ornaments

then pack my tongue.

I will be thorny. My tonsils will budge with breath

but I will be still and thick as flesh.

 

I am staying in,

in these sheets that curl from the mattress

like boiled tomatoes.

I am staying in cafes alone with you.

 

There are children everywhere.

They steal sugarcubes from coffee shops,

and grit them in their pockets and there’s a man

behind the counter who talks nonsense

to the waitress

and when pretty girls come in in tears, he leers

and offers coffee and cheap cake.

Cutlery shrieks and disturbs you.

 

I will have no part in this, no part at all.

But it is difficult –

the children talk about their teachers

and tricky sums and taking away.

 

And I do not think, had you let her

swell like an egg, biting off a speck of universe

a dribble of luminous prayer, and there, in flesh,

a rush,

if you had let her,

you would not have brought her here

to talk about Miss and the lights and adding up.

You never would.

 

So when it is crushed out,

save a fingernail, an eyelash, an eardrum.

Will you, when it scatters, will you save something.

 

I will keep it in a cradle

or a beehive.

 

It will

blurt out wool and hair, become one of your monsters

sewn from teabags and glass,

but with the threads popping.

The string strangles at the throat.

 

You know this

and you are seeing children everywhere,

packed with mittens and piano music

and you see pushchairs like robots with squirming

babies for hearts.

There are these women in coffee shops.

 

And when you are scrubbed and scoured and

emptied out,

they will have missed one tiny part

which you will hold through your stomach like a cat

and hold the cat against your stomach

and still talk.

 

While we are speaking, a billion stars are broken,

you say “you know, I’ve spoken and

a thousand stars are broken.”

 

But maybe still,

when the birds meet at ungodly hours,

the birds in blue blouses and white neckties

the magpies, like their throats and chests

were torn open to show white, white skin.

They will show you stomachs as still and

unbroken as eggs.

 

 

 

Phoebe Nicholson is an 18 year old who grew up in both Devon and Minnesota but now studies English at Oxford University. She has been writing poetry for as long as she can remember, has been a runner-up of The Ted Hughes Young Poets Award, and featured in emagazines such as Ink Sweat & Tears. Besides poetry, she loves cats, exotic tea, and Virginia Woolf.

The Dome

 

Stolen, no; incarcerated,

what lies beneath your

sycamore tree. I gravitate

around its centre at your

dizzying speeds. To be

 

confined in blinkering

projections of cellar wall

green. Your wedding day laugh

peeled from the trunk,

skinned by fingernail, decays

 

into dementia-ridden years.

I let go. I let go with

laddered palms to melt, melt

into your limbs. How you told

me not to be afraid of the

 

blurred, vaporous leaves. To

build yourself up to be afraid

of nothing. But with winter came

icicles to penetrate your old

head; to burn, contaminate,

 

to tear everything that was

left. But to tell you, forgive you,

to know you never ate yourself;

the dome surrounding us

was consuming you instead.

 

 

 

Paige Richardson is 17 years old and loves reading and writing more than she loves food (she would trade her brother for a double cheeseburger). She is an avid fan of American literature, in particular the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Paige divides her time between reading, writing some more herself and fretting over university places.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Weeks of Hibernation

 

Despite the deep, pensive

midnight, I built you a peerless city.

My gift an ivory mirage,

elegiac monolith chiselled

from the lungs of silence, our

Qumran.

 

What negligence

has seen you left, dishevelled,

an unkempt lawn

curtained in the white pestilence

of slumber, denatured

By a perfunctory silence?

 

 

 

Clouds

 

If my love for you

were as straight,

as infinite

as the two blues of that horizon

things would be simple.

 

Instead it is as wispy

and deformed

as the clouds,   

 

for which I know no names.

 

 

 

 

Topologies

Oscuros cauces donde la sed eternal sigue,

y la fatiga sigue, y el dolor infinito.

 

I awoke different on the thirteenth day,

alone, the stars prostrate before me.

 

For years I would leap out of bed, night after

night, running nude onto the porch to rage at

 

their inheritance. I could

not bear it then, in those days before I spoke

 

to the gods. I clung to

my carbon as if each atom held the secrets

 

of the fading cosmos, and I was their

guardian. If I had known, in those days

 

where the dawns were my only

comfort, I wouldn’t have left my bedroom.

 

This is what I learnt:

I learnt that god’s number, like the nature

 

of the universe, is four, not three; that

deicide is more virtuous than homicide;

 

 

that to view the world sub specie aeternis

is to embody time, not to be decoupled

 

from its once fiercely linear clutches.

When I discovered this I was ready

 

to die. My dreams trailed behind me – a convex

of ambitions tending to infinity.

 

Finished. I lay trembling, invert upon

the vertebrae of the heavens, throbbing

 

in the vacuum, counting down the half-lives

of the stars.

 

*

 

O wie ist alles fern

und lange vergangen.

 

What did I whisper to you that

night on the courtyard? They were dragging

you away, and I knew the sky

would always be

more blue than black.

 

Even then all I saw on their faces

was fear, and even now – when space

has folded in on itself

one hundred times,

my own words evade me.

 

 

 

 

 

We have sat on the edge of this plane

for so long, it has been so long

since you returned to me, my love,

and the air

still smells of fire.

 

I have heard a voice calling me,

I hear it as well as I know

the dull curves of the universe,

but I have

never turned around to look.

 

*

 

Ich möchten beten.

Und einer von allen Sternen

müβte wirklich noch sein.

 

It is no strange thing for those immortal

to yearn for a mortal life. The ancients

knew this to be so. Here, at the quiet limits

of the limitless I am suspended

 

like rotting fruit at autumn’s onset,

absorbing an endless stream of light.

 

 

 

 Joel Moktar is 21, was born in Singapore but grew up in Hertfordshire / London. He is currently in his final year of studying Economics and Spanish at the University of Exeter, where it rains relentlessly. The poets and authors that have most inspired him are Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, T.S Eliot, John Keats, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and James Joyce.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spider

 

Down through the tunnel

an exit,

its spittle of light

sucking skeletal flesh

through the point of redemption,

wrapping his greasy bones

in fate.

 

Through the darkness

a prayer scuttles up

in his spider’s legs,

grasping for stars

as handles -

slips

to a prison of skin

defeated.

 

Torn ligaments

crush

through

to the empty page.

 

 

 

Underground

 

Tonight we seem excited in our fall from power –

knock-kneed; rubbing past enamelled tiles of teeth –

pulled by a hissing tongue inside

 

without a care. Hard, rough-skinned tonsils wriggle in,

muddle out of focus as they salivate with light,

constrict us to a gulp of world where the air moulds

 

and everything is tense. Rehearsed walls clutch our laughter –

sculpt our skin through muscle, croaking bone;

the groan of gut in centripetal hunger as we slide

 

through hissing veins and slithers of motion. Our world

shrinks down to the rough skin of dust and dark

contracting to the flicker of a tail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Lemon

 

is dead. Its skin dries

to dark little holes

so we put in some screws of clove,

 

trying against the dry rot

of your hammering anger

to preserve.

                        It always preserves

in our meta-hands,

lifted in reverence from ten-year-old tissue;

 

strings of tale wrapped round

like gift-wrap and ribbon

for a child.

 

But these porcupine pustules diffuse

to aroma – the trick of the hollow;

 

the shell crusts to memories, 

acidic in absence,

 

and nothing is sour.

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Hutchby is currently studying History in his final year at university, and wants to leave to join the big, wide world. In the future he hopes to have some time and space in which to write and do aid work but for now, he subsists on a diet of chocolate and Marx.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Is the Grass

 

This is the grass, she said with her palms and cheeks,

        it is little, tall, like letters titling the low air,   

This is the rabbit, she said, grazing a stone with her fingertips

        bounding, foraging in stops, pauses, hops  

This is the pebbles,

        who goad about, dropped out as balls of glass,

This is the sea,

        she spreads out there, sizzling, like giant blanket,

This is the earth,

        squat, shrunk on itself, orange caramel core,

This is below,

        universe hung with marbled spinning globes

This is below,

        xeero, orlweigz, onwoods

chaos  

     

This is the trees

 

 

On the Treadmill 

  

                        We are on the road;

                       // ffp // ffp // ffp //.                                                                                                       

                      Grey and white marks       

                     Whip in cycles under us     

                    Like motorway cars                             

                   | szp | szp | szp |.                               

                  Our spongy soles soften        

                 Onto the fluttering belt                          

                And, in the hum, eyes forward,              

               We sprint to the decimal,        

              Against some unspoken deluge.              

             We try and we try, we think,

            And this is just it,

           Running // ffp // ffp //

          Moving nowhere,

         But (in the clearing wind

        And steam) getting fit,

       With sweaty hair,

      And an enduring energy drink.

         

     Outside of the stale-air

    And the neoprene gyms 

   There’s no timer, OO:OO,

  Only wide cold air,

 Areas for endless swims,

Dark cool-downs, lycra hero.

 

 

Hawk

 

Just outside Pecos, off Interstate 20,

South-west Texas, you jumped into Red Bluff Dam

To cool off, howling like a Cherokee, and sculled like a free bird.

 

Your big matted hair glued to your back

And your face was still dirty, but you looked hot.  

 

At Houston docks I told Richard to fuck off when he went on

About some ‘proper’ American prossy called Cherry

With tassels on her tight suede boots. We left him at Winnie.

 

At the greasy spoon some students quacked about

Bobcat Mail crashing again and Texas House Bill 588,

And laughed at a buck deer strapped to a hick’s van.

They drunk Coors, ate steak, slouched, mocked the waitress.      

 

On banks of Caddo lake I fell in love with you again;

In the mountains, in the mountains, there you feel free.

 

In the rented Cadillac your body was warm

And, reclining to feel the air over you, you said

America was bloody sparse compared with England.

 

You said the GoogleMaps van had driven all across America,

Taking in this view, but making it a little distorted,

Like a bee going across neighbourhood gardens

Soaking up the yellow sun’s heat. We parked by a grass verge.

 

‘Welcome to the Alamo,’ some tour-guide drawled,

‘Sir,’ he nodded, ‘Ma’am,’ and tipped his cap.

 

Jonny Aldridge is 20. He studies English Literature at Cambridge University and has had poems published in The Dial and The Hill Magazine. He likes ducks, Virginia Woolf and love, and is in constant evasion of his true indie self.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tempest

 

Watch the sea little girl, smiling siren,

Look down to that vast blue heart, not to me.

Can you imagine yourself far beyond this sculptured stone?

You may swing from the sun,

Catching the stars that lay upon this rolling roar,

Knotted into a tidal stitch that weaves forth

As a great herd set free to ravage.

It beats as the peal of a bell,

Rung out quivering towards its furious expiry.

Back now, coiled up by the moon

Reclaiming its savage possession.

A jealous parent, guard.

No child, do not pity this beauty, this captive,

For when she is freed she will swallow us whole.

 

 

 

 

Twenty-four Ways To Hear the Ocean

 

“Let me look after you” it cooed.

“Lie back and close those eyes of yours

And I will stroke and glide your hair,

Weaving it into an ermine cape

About your naked ears and neck.

Rest your body on the carpet there,

And I will sketch such patterns on your shoulder blades

That they shall be sand beneath my empty palms.”

 

Turning the body over, it said:

“See these breasts, they are mere crop circles,

Your stomach some hypnotic whirlpool,

Stained upon the trampled grass.

As if man had sat astride you for too long,

Trying to create, to dig, to unearth,

But finding nothing, he left a wound.”

 

Pulling roughly at one knee it hummed

“How I will give you coffee stains upon your legs,

And stones and shadows on your wrists and toes.

Your vertebrae will be the old shells of the sea,

Your bones the coral, your blood the salt.”

And cleansed as a bruise I rose and slept,

Its body my pillow, its hands on my neck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vignettes

 

I

 

serendipity

one boy and three girls frozen

in a photograph

that leaves uncaptured the warmth

of something never confessed

 

II

 

their hushed promises

echoed within this chamber

till the dawn of day

heralded the postman with

new letters from old lovers

 

III

 

the muted cadence

of a recited prayer

to the stone-deaf gods

making manifest without

the empty fervour within

 

 

 

Adequacy

 

after Thom Gunn

 

When we wake in the night

With the sheets tangled round

Our legs, we switch the light

On/off without a sound,

Just checking to make sure

Who lies beside us here.

 

Love grows by exploring

The boundaries of trust:

So we practise letting

Each other go, to lust

After other people,

Courting cautious trouble.

 

Yet we still find ourselves

Returning to this bed,

This table, these bookshelves,

To words best left unsaid.

Two people can pretend

They want a happy end.

 

In time to come, we may

Look back at these moments

And wish we could unsay

Our heartfelt sentiments,

When love is not enough

To hold loneliness off.

 

 

 

Boarding Passes

 

As you pace back and forth

in front of the displays,

I want to tell you things

will not get any worse,

that we will still make it.

Except I am not sure

what I would mean by that.

Am I thinking about

our flight to Paris or

just being literal?

So I remain silent

and watch you frown and frame

your face with frustration,

as you try to explain

to sympathetic staff

that yes, we need to be

on this flight. Suddenly,

you turn to look at me

but speaking to the staff,

‘…our anniversary,’

and for just three heartbeats,

I love you completely.

I want to tell you this

because it is something

I am certain about,

so unreservedly,

but you spoil the moment

by coming over here

and grasping my cold hands,

‘At least we’re together.

It’d be awful alone.

Now it’s an adventure.

We’ll make it through this mess,

you’ll see.’ All I can do

is look you in the eye

and smile vaguely, bite back

that part of me that longs

to scream at your naïve

assumptions or wilful

blindness, but never does.

Someone is calling out

our names now, releasing

us to our respective

trajectories. Come now,

this is a short-haul flight.

 

 

 

  

Infidelity

 

Lunchtime and the city

releases us, gasping

for unrecycled air

but lungs filling with smog,

today’s egg sandwiches

already gone soggy,

while the plaza is packed

by slim cut suits and ties.

 

Traffic swerves and screeches,

the acrid tang of rubber

fighting with the perfume

of women racing off:

secretaries who kiss

their middle managers

in musty hotel rooms,

smelling of alcohol.

 

So please will you calm down

because as you can see

through my office windows,

down there far beneath us,

the city carries on,

its interlocking gears

still grinding tirelessly

despite our nakedness.

 

 

 

Ian Chung reads English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. His poems have appeared in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Angelic Dynamo and Calliope Nerve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cleo

Young woman walked in
and all were looking big eyed at the baby
gooed up and round
Mum was bedecked in gold, Cleopatra;
when she sat down
all her rings rang like a football rattle.

Cleopatra, long lashed and freckled
told her puffa jacket friend
to watch the baby boy smile in his pram -
she swung round in her swivel chair
and the government worker looked down
his specs at her details.

Young woman clattered out in anger,
the sparsely stubbled guard
swung like a clockwork soldier,
Baby cried and cried
Cleopatra, razor lip-sticked, charged
and carved a blur of red in my retina

Then all the birds perched on the guttering of the church
Flew off at once in a clacker-shriek -

all down the street small streams of nicotine
tickled me as I ran behind
- amazed at her thick eyes, princess curls, man-stride
and a hundred bird folk
black-sprung in a host overhead
rapped at her an adulation.

 

 

 

Lake Man

A man came out of the lake today
the moon didn’t care much,
welted as he was, thickened like a hull
dragging weed, a velvet Rastafarian.

He pulled leaves and needles
from his clothes,
rode a rusty bike to town
and drank all the whiskey in the bar

He tried to talk about the weather:
became bedraggled in tenses and sentence structure.
Words were worms burrowing into him –
challenged his silence, his water jewel

“Go back where you came from,
you slimy green freak!”
So came the fight, a grimy drunk punch;
the pavement echoed with the sound
of upturned jugs
and Lake Man thwacked Johnny
over into Asda car park.

In the station cell he unquenched slowly
and lay down flat on the flooded floor.
The moon didn’t care much,
her light reminded him of the ghost fish
who crawled silently through silt and mud.

Burning light – morning. Cautioned, then let out;
drying quickly to a husk and fading from sight,
he downed ten pints straight of tap water,
plunged his fibrous feet into mirror puddles,
headed back lake wise, waded in, then sank.

 

 

 

Palms

 

We held them over the evening news -
between our knuckles, finger nails
was a hollow space; dampening
between the lines, our skin’s silk lace

A clutching; I felt your rings -
husband gift – mother gift -
life put a carapace on you and bit.
I twist them now – around my head -

Fingers break so easily, wrinkle stumps.
Palms face upwards – unwink, unblush -
I scoop the fire light from them now
and see your gift – your look –

A gypsy saw money myths in these,
I see truths and lies that spit
in me and link me to your death, your life.
I take my hands, bathe them in the night

and the cold claws at their emptiness -
two unclutched palms, my receiving place -
redden bloodily before turning blue;
then heat leaves, then they dig earth.

 

 

 

 

James Wilcox graduated from Leeds University in 2009 with a degree in English. Whilst in Leeds he regularly attended open mics, workshops and other poetry events, and discovered a brilliant circle of writers who helped him develop his work, become a serious poet and drink lots of gin. Since then he has been living in Somerset, taking inspiration from  seaside resorts, small town degeneration and the golden light at dimpsey. He is currently preparing to leave the UK and teach English abroad. His poetry has been published in the Cadaverine, Pomegranate, Poetry and Audience and the Scribe.

View from a Window

Someone has sculpted angles

In chic, modern stone.

 

They only partly obscure the old, red wall,

where rough bricks squeeze together,

whisper secrets, laugh.

 

They are a family, and

the slices of modern marble

mourn silently, a whale who swims alone.

 

Ruffles of green leaves, tree roots

creep in with the bricks,

they want to share the joke.

 

But only chewing-gum

Peppers their flashy young cousin.

Beccy has been writing 'poems' since the age of nine and in the last
eleven years has realised that it is the only thing she is capable of
concentrating on. She is studying English and creative writing at
Aberystwyth, but is currently spending a month in Berlin, eating far too
much chocolate spread and trying to improve her German. Her favourite
poems at the moment are Gillian Fergusons' 'The Swimming Pool Ghost' and
Simon Armitages' collection Out of the Blue'

She feels his skin, his stubbly hair, touches him

as she’s dreamt of touching him through months

of not listening to the morning news, to any news,

in case of roadside bombs or choppers down.

But now it’s fatted calf and sex and visits from the in-laws,

sweet normality of getting in the shopping and trips to B&Q,

he remarks how small and light their car is.

These weeks she can’t stop touching him,

fingertips to his hand, his thigh, to check

he’s here, he’s really here, home safe.

The weeks she thinks she has him back,

when his voice, his smell, his tread on the stairs are golden fog

she doesn’t see through, drugged on sex and wonder

at his shoes by the door, his toothbrush in the bathroom.

Before the patches of time when he isn’t here

when she puts out finger-tips to check

and doesn’t find him, can’t touch him

his gaze sliding over the windows, her face.

At night, she reaches out and he’s not there

he’s up, on patrol, checking the locks.

One night she wakes to find his hand above her mouth

checking she’s still breathing.

She rings help-lines, rings doctors. Like Orpheus

she wants to travel into darkness, bring him up

but she can’t follow him, can’t see him there

sees instead, herself in the hall mirror, sitting on the floor

sobbing into the phone

he’s not here, Mum, he’s not really here.

Cadaverine Magazine, Royal Armouries 2007