Nyx, A Noctournal

My new short story, 'K Draws A Plum', is in the latest issue of Nyx, A Noctournal. I'm really excited about this publication and encourage you all to pick up a copy. At the moment though the colour version is only available on pdf but will be available in print soon. If you want it in print I'd really recommend you wait for the colour version as the art work in it necessitates being seen in full colour glory. This issue also features work by Tom Moore whose work you should absolutely check out here.

An extract from my story:

The small purple-red plum degrading before her, transitioning and subtly shifting, demands her attention. Not only because it holds her interest and allows her to locate herself in the world, but because it tells her that change is commonplace, ordinary, necessary and constant. To know that though it is dying (encroaching mould threatening the purple) it is also still alive, edible even. Its juice would still bead down her forearm and drip off her elbow if she bit into it. Its small spherical form sits perfectly in her palm, fitting without complaint, its weight is just enough, its texture pleasantly abject. So she draws it.

There is no future plan for this or any of her other drawings. They feel no need to live long and prosper or become prosperous for themselves or anyone. They have no value and yearn for less. They do not need or want to be seen.

To draw a line. To draw a line from me to it, K thinks, from it to me, between us. Life line. Constant edges tremoring under passing lights and shadows. Head line. Pupils shrinking and expanding with each unknowable atmospheric change. Heart line. The bliss of all that. 

April

Raindrops trill and shivering on the window

being blown simultaneously away and towards by the impact of the wind firing towards us as we fire towards or through it

bullet feathering through space

shrill as the same point over and over with still no response and so still shriller and shriller

This could be the saddest dusk
I've ever seen
Turn to a miracle
High alive
My mind is racing
As it always will
My hand is tired, my heart aches
I'm half a world away here

white cliffs

dissections

sudden at the window

jutting like a hipbone pressing in

sinking in digging

a whole four and a half days since those hipbones sweet and matching (I pray for their symmetry)

sitting tight on the blue sofa waiting

a grumble here at something else

unloading the dishwasher to kill the time

I look into the sky wanting his comfort and symmetry

for the knots to ease in his lower back for a good night’s sleep for a bowl of oats for forgiveness again and again

the sin repeats itself like the sun

Litro

I wrote a thing. The thing is here.

Irrelevancies

Weeks pass...

Flag hanging out of a window curling and uncurling in the wind, dog tongues, fruit roll ups, curl uncurling. The image of a red towel as revolutionary signal in the book I am reading, it rolling out of the window – a sign.

Feet, ankles, knees pressed together, red hair, book open, straight back.

Ink spill tree branches multiplying against the blue, later against the pink and orange.

Billion pound panini.

Bread gets cold and heavy, a preponderance of wet sandwiches for the guests.

Drunk too many times, I can tell by the stumble of my boots against the concrete. Hollow heels reverberate in my spine. Other spine tingling things; new smells of new people.

Cheese cracker grape cheese cracker grape.

Sometimes all my friends are crying.

If asked I would tell all my secrets. 

I trace my finger around the embossed one six six four, around the rim of the wine glass, praying for seduction. The table outside is a good a surface as any.

To not be the widow, hunch backed and smoking in the corner of the yellow sofa, clutching the purple hot water bottle perpetually to her chest.

Rock Steady Eddie’s

Radio’s out of tune, fuzzy, loud too, they can do the safe option, I do think investment’s a good idea for when you understand and want to take the risk...

A cough, deep, old and full of mucous,

Welcome to Lambeth sign, zero romanticism, no scrolling italics, no upwards slanting place name full of hope for a new life, a new place, a new start,

filthy blue fans, heavy smell of frying oil.

Two women, I’m one, the other’s older and sadder, well she looks sad but who knows, I look sad too, her fringe strings over her forehead, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, booth no. 5, sitting across from a man who’s ignoring her.

Americana memorabilia, golden age, 50s and 60s, or alluding to that – a giant framed Grease poster (grease here too is the word), but none of us were there for that, no teenagers here with two straws in one shake,

...if you get anything from the 50s or 60s, if you get the right thing, the value could be colossal, better to put your money in vintage memorabilia than stocks or shares – how many guitars you got? – well I’ve got 141.. 141!

Five white bald heads popping out of the booths.

Elvis posters too, one taking up the whole wall, black and white except for his blue, presumably suede, shoes. In full Elvis mode, primed, young, powerful, beautiful, knees thrust, passion pulling him to his toes. Above the frame one of those American road signs: Elvis Presley Blvd. Around the cafe: James Dean Drive.

- Happy birthday son, happy birthday, you’re 50 again this year are you?

- 49, 49, maybe next year...

- (Another man) 49?

- Haven’t lived yet. You?

- 55. Funny enough my birthday’s the same as my mother’s and my brother’s is the same as his daughter

- Yeah but that happens sometimes doesn’t it?

The man whose birthday it is is the owner, or at least the guy behind the till serving. He wears an old fashioned 50s diner hat, white, boatish and dirty. White coat too, nice. His shoulders don’t move when he walks, he floats as he walks between the booths to serve the customers.

Someone sings, it sounds good though I can’t make out the words because the radio’s so loud.

A Beatles poster, some Marilyns, tin pictures, little frames. An Elvis doll hung mid hip thrust behind a bell on the wall.

The man opposite keeps looking over to where I look when I’m not looking.

She is good to me

she knows where I’d like to be

but it doesn’t matter

Bob Dylan’s best song ever... The people on the ground floor let their rubbish blow around and I don my rubber gloves and pick it up and in full view hoping to shame them,

There she goes

there she goes again

racing through my brain

A man, fat and old and white again wears a wonderful brown cowboy shirt. The points of its collar are silver capped and he has something like a sheriff’s badge on a chain pinned just above where his belly begins to paunch.

A mysterious sticky substance coating the wings of birds on the south coast...suspect it maybe due to a ship washing out its...

Four small wooden rectangles, each bearing one of the following words: What Would Elvis Do? Hung on a vertically descending chain.

A picture of George W Bush with Osama’s beard, hair and clothes: Wanted.

I feel so real

I feel so real

and I owe it all to you

love is such a wonderful thing

freedom from the chains that held us back for all those years

With the cowboy sits a woman with extremely black hair and a very neat straight fringe. Her voice is extraordinarily high and squeaky. I adore it. What is it about women with these voices? Like the girl in Twin Peaks and Audrey in the 80s Little Shop of Horrors.

- Is it really your birthday today? I ask when I order my second tea

- No, I don’t know why he said that, my birthday was last week

- Oh well happy birthday for then then

He stands and listens to the woman’s complaints and helps as much as he can. He then floats to table 6 – the numbers are written in pen on red paper sellotaped to the tiled wiles above the booths.

There is no political assumption

to our revolution

we are our spirits

in the material world

He is caretaker, mother, father, priest. The costume, the uniform, the outfit. We ask politely for food. We confess our needs from our booths.

Money money money money, mo-ney!

Arnold Schwarzenegger floats past on a bus with a a giant gun.

Marlon Brando is here too.

Many wild birds have been affected by the ‘waxy substance’ and heterosexual men eye each other up just as women do

A woman: middle aged, clean, well dressed, a brown furish coat, bright pink scarf, skinny legs, cute ankle boots, a bag from Risky...

So whatcha doin for the weekend? Email me, text me...

The woman talks to herself: no one, she’s wrong, a friend of mine, a casual friend....(her blue earrings)...stupid...I’m putting more away....and they told me Jake and Colin, you’ll be kicked out the kingdom...

You’re giving me a heart attack

trouble maker!

The woman stands to drink her tea: people just use me. She puts her scarf on, her mug down, and shuffles out.

The cowboy looks gentle, touched as they used to say. All these people are touched. I guess I must be too.

Albert Cossery [for MR]

from Proud Beggars
1955

It must be said in his favour that Yeghen didn’t consider himself a genius – a rare characteristic among poets. He found that genius lacked gaiety! The immense enterprise of demoralisation that certain supposedly superior minds undertook against humanity seemed to him to stem from the most harmful criminality. His esteem went, instead, to ordinary people, neither poets not philosophers nor minister, but simply people possessed by a joy that was never extinguished. For Yeghen, the real value could be measured by the quantity of joy contained in each person. How could anyone be intelligent and sad? Even in front of the hangman, Yeghen would be irrepressibly frivolous – any other attitude would seem hypocritical and stamped with false dignity. It was the same with his poetry. It was the very language of the people among whom he lived, a language where humour flowered despite the worst miseries. His popularity in the native quarter equalled that of the monkey trainer and the puppeteer. He even believed he wasn’t as deserving as these public entertainers; he would have preferred to be one of them. In no way did he resemble the man of letters who worried about his career and his posthumous reputation; he sought neither fame not admiration.

p39-40

Two from Edna St Vincent Millay

Departure

It's little I care what path I take,
And where it leads it's little I care;
But out of this house, lest my heart break,
I must go, and off somewhere.

It's little I know what's in my heart,
What's in my mind it's little I know,
But there's that in me must up and start,
And it's little I care where my feet go.

I wish I could walk for a day and a night,
And find me at dawn in a desolate place
With never the rut of a road in sight,
Nor the roof of a house, nor the eyes of a face.

I wish I could walk till my blood should spout,
And drop me, never to stir again,
On a shore that is wide, for the tide is out,
And the weedy rocks are bare to the rain.

But dump or dock, where the path I take
Brings up, it's little enough I care;
And it's little I'd mind the fuss they'll make,
Huddled dead in a ditch somewhere.

"Is something the matter, dear," she said,
"That you sit at your work so silently?"
"No, mother, no, 'twas a knot in my thread.
There goes the kettle, I'll make the tea."

---

An Ancient Gesture

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:

Penelope did this too.

And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day

And undoing it all through the night;

Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;

And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,

And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.

Suddenly you burst into tears;

There is simply nothing else to do.



And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:

This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,

In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;

Ulysses did this too.

But only as a gesture,―a gesture which implied

To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.

He learned it from Penelope...

Penelope, who really cried.