This is your final resting place, post-slip through synapses of my fingertips. I wish I’d been able to sketch the easy dimension of us as we hurtled through cityscapes: its aged tin-cans promised sixty, but grated along at more like twenty. They are like grasping at gummy atoms, strands pulling fabric. So I’ll try and […]
Archives for 2015
a helium balloon overtakes us as we ride the Ferris wheel
From up there it was easy to point at things so easy to decide where to go next: we would do everything that we weren’t allowed. We would get not two but four tickets to the freak show tent and go in twice, in succession, just to make sure that the four-headed calf was no […]
Satan awakes from his fall
Shit-mouthed, trouserless spread-eagled on the bare floor his creased skin tingling and turning numb on the unforgiving carpet Satan the dazzler, the Copper King the high-wire hoofman Satan the unmistakable, sloughed in sour juices like a black spot on the sun ‘I want to feel like Hiroshima’ he had said and sipped his drink, a […]
kinks
so far I’ve amassed: an outsize brooch of an undersize beaded flamingo raising one eyebrow an intricate ink and watercolour drawing of a topless guy with way too many bulges and a speech bubble saying werk it gurrrl!! a miniature ceramic replica of the Yellow Submarine (sadly no Blue Meanies were included) a butter dish […]
Ilmenite Sands
It’s not been rough like this— the fishermen aren’t catching. At the Bank of Africa ATM this morning people queued with their eyes shut then groped for the lips of the cubicle door and some quiet to be slammed back on the ocean and all it brings.
Remembrances
Skerry the mason was balancing high on the roof of West Bilney Hall, replacing tiles, slowly making the house weathertight after the winter storm that had shattered windows, lifted roofs and flattened barns across England. The great wind of November last, 1703, had been the worst Elizabeth Freke could recall since Oliver Cromwell died, the […]
Dragonfly Weekend
There is only one place in North Dakota where the altitude requires a forced yawn to pop your ears in order to stabilize the pressure that builds during ascent. These are the Turtle Mountains. This is the only area for miles that can be described as ‘wooded’. Everything else is wheat and highway. Driving there […]
The Lark
The captive was mature when it arrived, its juvenile fluff shed for mottled brown and black plumage.[1] The lark had a whitish-yellow breast that complemented the flowers it ate from the children’s palms, drawing almost hypnotic attention. Emily, the eldest, stayed up to sketch the bird while her younger brother Mackworth straggled more daisies through […]
Finding the Octopus
“This cookie…taste….taste like laptop,” Thomas said, tilting his head and smiling at me with gap teeth. Thomas Jefferson had quite a lofty name to live up to, after all his namesake wrote the Declaration of Independence. My Thomas Jefferson didn’t speak much and when he did he usually didn’t make a whole lot of sense. […]
Caroline’s War
She charmed every man she ever met. On the fifth of January 1861 Caroline Slemmer sat down in her home, an army barracks in Florida, to write a letter to her married older sister Ellen. It was a breathless account of all the Christmas and New Year parties she had been to and the countless […]