Look at this, you said.
I saw a dozen grey torpedoes hung,
such monstrous baubles, in the depths
of the ocean, motionless
and unaltered by the heft
of water surrounding them.
Scattered indifferently,
their fleshy tonnes suspended
like great iron pendants, laid bare
to the perils of foe and flow
in a thalassic slumber.
We sat sipping tea in silent dread,
to think of such cryptic bed.
Nobody screamed
not even when blackness came
and small waves bounced upward,
obscuring the shoreline from sight:
biting at the sky
not even when their necks numbed
and boreal steel filled their pockets,
with weight like loss: the rush of
fear in a vacuum
Still, nobody screamed
instead, their throats made small alarms,
guttural from behind clamped jaws;
layers of yellowing silt shifting until
they all saw sky
instead, the march of steady breath
fell out of step with each arterial beat;
one by one they hissed like matches
softly dipped in water
He’d been watching the kids play across the street for a while before the police had showed up. He didn’t know what time it was exactly, but knew she’d be here soon. She always came round after her Thursday shift.
The sun had dipped slightly out of sight, but the chill of evening had not yet cloaked the estate. In the distance, he could still hear lads kick a football outside the chippy. Washing no longer flapped on lines, but had yet to be taken in. The pubs hadn’t turned out, so he knew he had a while before his father returned, red-faced and heavy with lager.
Near where he sat on the front step, pressed into the damp lip of an discarded Tennent’s, were the spent ends of three cigs. He calculated that he must have been perched there for at least 20 minutes when he saw the blues silently flickering towards the end of the road.
The kids – two boys – were playing on a trampoline that took up the entirety of the square front yard of number 43. As they leapt about, it’s metal framework skittered and giggled across the concrete, echoing against the parallel walls of the estate. Two coppers exited the car. A man and a woman.
Continue reading “Time Spent and Trampoline”
I start with a wooden barrel
for a chest,
smoothing the planks down
with grit paper until
at long last
I put my cheek to it, to check
it feels right.
It does, so I then move on
to your arms – I strap on
thick ropes,
wrap them round,
and tie myself in
a knot that won’t break,
that holds tight.
For legs, I pile stones,
two towers,
unkickable as the sky –
straight and tall,
they hold
and do not sway or bend,
in their might.
A lamp for a head –
the light
of a mind that shines,
leaving no shadow
it throws
a yellow glow across me,
and burns bright.
Alas, for a heart, a blank.
Only space,
an emptiness,
as I have nothing
to take the place of
the thing that loved,
just for spite.
Now, when you burn,
you will burn right.
John caught the 73 bus back from school every day, except on a Thursday, when Mr Bradshaw did football training at four o’clock, after which, all the lads of St Bernard who stayed behind would find their way home on foot, roving the town streets like stray cats.
The uniformed huddles of boys saw the bus approach: the same nameless driver as they’d always known, pulling in with a precise one-half turn of the great wheel, and flexing his fat red fingers out as he hauled the bus into the stop. His arms, marked with pin up girls, blued by age, and stretched wide by nightly fish suppers and Fray Bentos pies, pressed against the plastic divider, as he put his tab back into his mouth, multitasking by taking coins and pressing the button for the machine to dispense its long ticket tongue through the feed gap.
His four gold sovereign rings had long since lost hope of escape from between joint and knuckle, wedged on tight. John flinched, imagining the pressure, each time he looked, but today he took little care to examine. It was Monday, and the worst part of his week – Geography with Mr Cairns – was once again a whole seven days away. He made his way to his usual space, in one of two aisle seats downstairs, securing the window with his bag for Liam Doyle, who was always late being let out of the labs in Block A. John knew that, once he showed, Liam would have a story or titbit for him, about Mr Murphy.
Liam was almost a year older than John, despite being in the same school year, but had been put into the bottom set for sciences, with Arthur Murphy. John had once seen Murphy tackle a first year, in a since discontinued student-teacher touch rugby match – a friendly – and, despite never having had a class with him, Liam’s stories had bolstered John’s picture of the man: that first year had gone down like a sandcastle in a tsunami, and Mr Murphy had pulled the boy up by his collar, legs like limp spaghetti plucked from a pot, brushing him down and laughing in front of the other boys, not so much in concern but in warning.
Continue reading “Conkers On The 73”
the trees have long since popped
their soft confetti trails
mingled with the dirt
trodden brown
no longer pink
tiny tissue papers dropped in a quarry
and I think
why do I worry?
As they sat in the garden
with sun on their shoulders,
they saw two moths mating:
Elephant Hawks, enormous,
olive winged and brightly tipped –
pink as a kiss,
their bodies tail-pinned
in a union older than them.
Both gawped and tutted
at the audacious clasp.
This is a family neighbourhood,
he said, smirking, and
they left the Fornicators to it.
*
What she didn’t tell him though
was that, later that same night
as she went out to lock the gate
she saw them again –
still stuck together,
one dead, the other not,
but flying low, unable
to breach the garden wall
or free itself from bondage
as, in frantic flutter,
it dragged its cold mate
through the blue light
of summer night.
do you remember
when we
had to cancel
our very first date
because I had a
last minute shift
at the bar, but you
came to see me
anyway and
asked me about the
movies I love and
drank gin and winked
when I walked
back and forth past you
serving other people
but how
I’d always
circle back
and another time
you asked me
to get free drinks
for you and your mates,
got hammered
hogged the juke box
broke the top
button on your shirt
and called someone
a fucking rat
lost a tooth
threw a glass
and got
kicked out
and I had to quit
later that week
standing up
for you
I just remember
that’s all
and wondered
if you might too
Dream
The other night I dreamt you came into my house and wouldn’t leave. At first, I didn’t mind – we were just sitting together in my kitchen – but as I neared the dregs of my second cup of tea, I started to wonder when you planned to go. When I woke, I considered the parallel universe where we now somehow coexist: your keys in my fruit bowl; your hands on my bath taps; your feet on my couch. And in the haze of my morning I wasn’t sure what it had meant or whether it had even been a dream at all, and half expected to see you pass by, step-less and slight, like a ghost on the landing.
Shark
Finally! A good one. Can’t remember who asked. Who knows how these things come up, just go with it fast. Which creature would you least like to be killed by? If you had to. If you just had to. Doesn’t matter why. We dipped into silence, underwater in thought, each seeking an answer in the fashion we’d wrought. The lot of us sat in a circle of green bottles and spent ends, barely friends in a debauched fairy’s ring – and, for a second, not saying a thing. Godzilla doesn’t count. Then one spoke out. A grizzly bear. Why? You could just run. From a bear? You’re fucking joking, son. A few others offered and we talked through the zoo. But I didn’t have to think – I already knew. How, being frozen in the deep, I’d die thinking of you, as it swam, torpedoed steel, and took what it wanted. It’s eyes gloss and haunted. I wondered if you’d feel it burst you apart. Turn your organs to mulch. Teeth through the heart. After a while, we spilled beer, and turned to something new, but I sat for a while, and thought of the blue, of the dark and of death, and of it, and of you.
Secret
Later on, as I’m walking back to the station, I remembered when she used to do her lists. They started years back, before she started ditching mass, before she started pinching things – even before Nan. She would spend hours somewhere secret, because I never saw her do it, writing list after list of all the families we knew – our neighbours’ families, our teachers’ families, our friends, their mothers and fathers, families off the telly, their names, their ages, aunties, uncles, cousins – all the many ways in which they belonged to one another. All the families we had ever known, all but our own, hidden away in drawers and under mattresses for years. In that quiet house, I always found them, and when she didn’t think I was in, or if she didn’t think I could hear her, she would cry, and no one ever came.
It was like lugging a dead cow, and that was the way we would forever describe it. All four of us had heaved it, the great patterned reject: digging our fingers into the threadbare fabric of the arms and sweating, our faces red and determined. Two at each end, and another – less of a help – trotting along near the middle. Every dozen yards or so, we’d stop, taking loud, open-mouthed breaths of chilled October air and grinning at one another, before tackling the next stint.
Shaun and Luke had calculated that it would take us about an hour to cart it from the layby outside Victoria Wines, where we’d found it, to Broan’s Field, behind Shaun’s house.
‘An hour. How’d you work that out?’ Siobhan had scowled.
‘Just worked it out like. Maths.’ Luke had shrugged.
‘You’re in red group for maths and your mam says you still can’t tell the time.’
‘Fuck off.’
Siobhan winked.
Continue reading “Carrying”
ataraxicat 