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SENTINEL LITERARY QUARTERLY

The Magazine of World Literature

July - September 2017

SPM Publications

London


Sentinel Literary Quarterly Publisher & Managing Editor

Nnorom Azuonye

[email protected]

Poetry Editor

Mandy Pannett

[email protected]

This version of the magazine is Published by SPM Publications

An imprint of Sentinel Writing & Publishing Company

(a division of SPM Publications Ltd)

Unit 136, 113-115 George Lane, London E18 1AB

United Kingdom

www.sentinelquarterly.com | www.spmpublications.com

Copyright ©2017 The Authors

The contributors named in this book have asserted their moral rights

under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as

the editors and authors of this work.

ISSN: 1756-0349 (Print)

ISSN: 1753-6499 (Online)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning,

recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the

above-named copyright owners and the publisher.

Typography, magazine & cover design by Nnorom Azuonye

Cover image: ‘Early Spring’ ©2017 Nnorom Azuonye.

Set in Palatino Linotype 9pts – 16pts


Contents

Editorial Note

SECTION 1: SENTINEL CHAMPIONS

David Canning A Souq in Damascus

Lazarus’ Lament

Gabriel Griffin Young girl gazelle-eyed

Chris Barrett Progress

John Lindley The God of Dogs

Inheritance

Richard Westcott Field Mushroom

Angelena Demaria Spider Times

Anna Wigley At 55 I still fancy Sean Connery

Tamsin Cottis Every Time I Pack a Case I Cry

Richard Craven Sonnet 142

Christine Coleman Witness

SECTION 2: SLQ POETRY

A C Clarke Gas Mask

Samaritan

Lorenzo Berardi The Maunder Minimum

John Grey Elizabeth

Sheikha A Lord of Light

Michael Brownstein A festivity of Leadership because…

Holly Day Untitled

Jeevika Verma Spreadsheets

In Rome I Inhaled

David Lohrey Making Trouble

Indecent Exposure

Kitty Donnelly The Woodcutter’s Daughter

The Click of the Lock

Glendalough Monastery

Michael McCarthy Elijah

Karen Ankers Hero


J.J. Campbell With every step I take

Andy N Europa II (VIII)

Lachlan Brown Stillblue

Lachlan Brown Loss

Ranald Barnicot Two Poems translated from the Latin of Gaius

Valerius Catullus

Natalie Crick Tulips

SECTION 3: FICTION

Chris Mason Twitcher

Sujovit Banerjee Fireflies

Nick Sweeney The Emigré Engineer, Paris, 1926

SECTION 4: ESSAYS & REVIEWS

Mandy Pannett Review of John Freeman’s What Possessed Me

Review of ‘Estuary’ CD of Music and Poetry

SECTION 5: DRAMA

Diana Powell Why, Delilah?

BULLETIN BOARD

Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition

SPM Publications Book Stand

SPM Publications Poetry Book Competition 2017

http://www.spmpublications.com/competitions/2017.html


Editorial Note

In a recent conversation with an old friend the question arose

about how much longer I intended to publish secular literature

whilst actively serving as a Christian preacher. ‘As long as there

is breath in my lungs’ was my immediate response. If I can read

the Holy Bible and be entertained, enriched and instructed by the

fine prose and poetry in it, so will I be entertained, enriched and

instructed by the creative work we consider every quarter for

publication in Sentinel Literary Quarterly.

I explained to my friend, when by the grace of my creator, I

founded the Sentinel Poetry Movement which now exists as a

trading style of SPM Publications – publisher of Sentinel Literary

Quarterly, freedom was the foundation upon which the

movement was built. The Sentinel slogan was and remains ‘Stand

firm at the gates of your heart’. At Sentinel, we look for literature

that is honest, written in the way the writer is happy to express

what he or she receives. My heart will dance to the music in the

poetry of Sean Street as it dances to the psalmist’s. The paradigm

of eclectic voices has been and will remain the character of this

publication.

The July – September 2017 issue of SLQ pulls in poetry, fiction and

drama from across the world in ways that celebrate the triumph

of human creativity and I find it refreshing that our contributors

don’t hold much back. This issue is enchanting.

In the world of Sentinel Champions this quarter celebrating the

specially mentioned, commended and prize winners from our

May 2017 competition judged by Anthony Watts. We are pleased

to present the poetry of David Canning – A Souq in Damascus (first

prize winner), Lazarus’ Lament (specially mentioned), Richard

Craven – Sonnet 142 (second prize winner), and Christine

Coleman – Witness (third prize winner). There are also our highly


commended poets; Gabriel Griffin – Young girl gazelle-eyed,

Tamsin Cottis – Every Time I Pack a Case I Cry, and Anna Wigley –

At 55 I still fancy Sean Connery. Our commended poets include

Richard Westcott – Field Mushroom, Angelena Demaria – Spider

Times and John Lindley – Inheritance. Lindley also has a specially

mentioned poem; The God of Dogs as has Chris Barrett – Progress.

Every one of these twelve poems stops the heart for a second. In

his round trip to the astral plane and back, in Canning’s poem,

Lazarus does not appear to share the feeling of wonder and

amazement that Steve Jobs expressed when he gasped ‘Wow!

Wow! Wow!’ as he set out to introduce some great Apps to St

Peter. I particularly like Gabriel Griffin’s ‘Young girl…’ a short

piece that raises many questions in these days of self-slaughter

and terror.

Talking about self-slaughter, our short play this quarter, Diana

Powell’s ‘Why, Delilah’ banters about the rationale behind

Samson’s decimation of the Philistinians, as she explores the

burdens our names place on us.

If you have been equally intrigued and horrified by cryogenics,

you may be disturbed but challenged by Chris Mason’s short

fiction ‘Twitcher’ in this issue. No spoilers here but I will welcome

reviews of this story, get a free copy of the next issue of SLQ if I

like your review – up to 1000 words, of Twitcher. Two reviews

will be published in the October – December issue. Send your

review to [email protected]

Welcome to July – September. Enjoy the great feast of poetry

Mandy Pannett has prepared in the SLQ Poetry section.

Happy Reading

Nnorom Azuonye

mailto:[email protected]


A Souq in Damascus

DAVID CANNING

Take a good look around, feel the quality,

it’s the best I have but it all must go,

I need two thousand dollars for the journey:

I’ll try for Berlin, it’s easier there,

I have family, my cousin is a doctor;

yes, I’m willing to talk about the prices.

There are some bone china plates with a fine, gold rim

that would add a little glitz to any formal affair,

and a book of insightful dinner party questionnaires

as used by Ivanka Trump, an elegant tray

adorned with flowers and hummingbirds

on which you could serve coffee, dark and sweet;

there’s a fruit bowl in Italian marble,

blemished just a little from where something went bad,

four pillows tasselled with the finest gold braid,

bearing only the slightest of burns, my wife’s

dining table with the splintered leg

from where the ceiling caved in;

this rug is Persian, it belonged to my mother,

I removed most of the stains,

a full-length mirror in which to admire oneself,

frame of sterling silver, broken below the neck,

an executive chair and ottoman in kid skin,

just a few small holes in its back.

Please take a look around, feel the quality,

it’s all I have and it all must go,

I need two thousand dollars for the journey:

I like the idea of London, they say it’s better there,

I have family, my wife’s cousin is a teacher,

yes, I’m willing to talk about prices.


Lazarus’ Lament

DAVID CANNING

I thought it would be like passing through a doorway;

it’s more like entering a corridor lined with locked doors.

I feared it could be a void, black, a hole down which to fall;

really it’s white like snow beneath your feet, melting.

I believed it might be like setting out on a journey;

it’s actually like missing your last train home.

I hoped I would meet up with friends and loved-ones;

it’s more like arriving at a party after everyone has gone.

It’s not a land awaiting discovery, but an overcrowded track,

rutted and chewed by the dog-weary feet of travellers.

We call it the closing of a chapter, the turning of a page,

but it’s a book in which the last words are missing, unwritten.

It’s coming back to a house occupied by clocks,

where there’s still washing up to be done, memories

lie unswept on the mantle, ash gathers in the grate

and the edge of your cup still wears the red lips of your smile.


Young girl gazelle-eyed

GABRIEL GRIFFIN

When the ten-year old,

packed like a Macdonald’s

take-away, explodes

in chips and nuggets

over the market place

the question coils

in your mind like

a charred wire: just what

did they promise her?

Houris?


Progress

CHRIS BARRETT

April 2013

Evening comes to the spring sky

we can see jaggedly through

cold grey buildings, tied down with pipes.

A bird flies past into the sun we cannot see.

‘Ruskin Park is just round the corner’.

My father knows Ruskin Park,

knows Denmark Hill,

knows all the routes and roundabouts

that lead away from here.

Yet his pale blue eyes show

he cannot take them, cannot go now.

His swollen legs would not carry him round Ruskin Park,

would not let him see the living green trees,

the allotments full of vigour and the same old hope.

His breath is short and weak.

The nurse comes and does little for his dignity.

A catheter, a backless robe.

He looks into the beautiful evening sky

and says little of meaning.

2007

Our bean poles stand firmly planted,

the seeds to come.

Years have passed since we played here,

treading down the soft-turned earth that fed

the green-crunch runner beans.

Now, under trains running rattling at the back,

I start to grow vegetables again.

In the late spring sun,


my father ties the poles together,

Remembering as he goes.

Midway through he stumbles, and falls.

A long second’s struggling,

but he can’t get up.

I offer him my open hand, silently.

We make no more of it,

and bury the coming future for another day.

1980s

It wasn’t until later, when my parents had more money,

that my father bought a two-volume dictionary,

sent from Oxford, the thinnest paper, tiny type.

Even then he used the other, older one,

the one he’d taught us how to use.

A torn dustcover, faded from the sun,

finger prints had left their marks

from constant use.

I’d thank my father, if I still could,

for not telling me the answers,

for sending me alone

wandering across the old pages,

in search of one thing, then another and another,

infrequent illustrations if I was lucky.

This book, having outlived him,

carries this delicate memory

of a beginning for me.


The God of Dogs

JOHN LINDLEY

The God of Dogs knew a thing or two about design;

knew how to make the rolling shoulder's plates

attractive whatever the pace,

how to fuel the head with purpose,

the Dunlop snout with scents unsniffed by us;

knew how to pattern a paw and patent it

so the copycat cat would stop dead in its tracks

and require those tracks made new

copyright of the God of Cats.

The God of Dogs flopped ears or perked them,

lathered His work in fur,

hinged the cocking leg to perfection,

metronomed tails.

To Him goes credit for the wolf cousin and fox

but most for the eyes, the blessed bright eyes

of dogs where the dog lovers melt,

where the world reflects a more finished glow.

To Him give thanks for the warm-scented saints

who walk by and amongst us.

We, dizzy with dyslexia, praise the Son of Dog

for deliverance and he has made a home for us

on the plain of his lolling tongue.

To Him we owe the music of claw tap on wood block,

the complex calligraphy of hair in the shag pile.

Dogs with their valves and varieties

pumped or puffed into being by that God of the air

who fastened those fluid flanks and haunches –


here, the one who punches above his weight;

here, the one who gentles down to size.

God of Dogs, who lies down with the lion and lamb

and outshines them both, what a clever hound you are,

drilled yet disobedient, dropping your depth charge dogs

into a sea of troubles, letting their newly-blown shapes

muscle and fawn and make sense of it all,

make sense of us all.


Inheritance

JOHN LINDLEY

Our Aunt left us a cottage.

She didn't mean to but she did.

Slate it was. Neo-Gothic with chimneys like turrets,

gargoyles in her likeness

and a gash of gate where the fence gave out.

You couldn't have shifted that place

for love nor money

and there was sod all of either

in its low rooms when we got it.

Everything about it was her: its mean light

and narrow views, its fittings that didn't.

We poured nowt back into it but resentment,

shuttered it up the long winter long,

Havishamed her memory in the gloomiest room

she left us, stuck the Viewing by Appointment pitch

on a sign too big for its boots on an angled pole

in the given up ghost garden.

Empty, you'd think you saw smoke

shimmying out of the chimneys

but it's the light round here plays tricks;

something to do with steam on slow drying slate,

weather fronts and sea air. It's a mystery to us,

like the way it was left. To us, I mean.

The cottage, I mean. Not like her that.

Come Spring we think we hear the eaves dropping

the way she would through the bedroom floor;

open the windows wide the way her heart wouldn't.


Field Mushroom

RICHARD WESTCOTT

Unexpected – this is no plant

but machinery made from flesh

discarded in the grass.

Here’s an air intake from a jet

with several soft fins crumpled.

I turn it over in my hands to see

a scabby disc, rust flakes peeling,

scorched, as if exposed to radiation

one flattened breast excised complete

with areola. I rotate it

heavy on its shaft and flick

the gills which never breathed.

Unexpected – here is life –

seething in the flesh

coggy maggots twist and turn –

little wheels inside an engine

working in their darkness

to transform flesh, recycle scrap,

digest the meat and make new growth –

unseen soaring spores pour forth

out of this rotting fruiting body –

not plant, machine, nor breast, or fish

but mushroom, which you might expect

I could have picked and eaten.


Spider Times

ANGELENA DEMARIA

Full grown, and shiny brown as hazelnuts

they’ve slung their skeins of silk between the bushes

and the garden chairs, the leaves and roses.

All the garden glitters with desperation.

In their skeletons they feel its coming.

Soft pads taste the ancient bitter tang.

Waking will be harder every morning

and the stone of sleep heavier to carry

as they spin and weave.

The greenfly is long gone, the last late bumblebee

blunders through their sticky traps with ease.

Dimmed diamond eyes can only watch

the inedible rose bay seeds bob

in their unwilling captor’s shrouds.

The web’s gone, and my spider isn’t hiding,

waiting to spin again. Usually we’d snuggle up together,

he/she more comfortably than me perhaps,

although the spider drew its eight legs in,

its small brown body round as a scarified seed

and then I’d think to hold it, almost kill

it with inspection, as it hung webbed up for combat

between the Victorian whorls.

We’d sat together since the start of June

on the black arbour seat


sniffing the cool white jasmine,

my nose, its waving feet, tasting

the sweet bright air. But now September’s in.

There’s just one filament of web,

fine on the ironwork like baby hair,

breathing my in/out breath until it breaks.

‘Spider Times’ was commended in the Sentinel Literary

Quarterly Poetry Competition (May 2017)


At 55 I Still Fancy Sean Connery

ANNA WIGLEY

After I thought I’d risen above the naffness:

all that nonchalant throwing of the hat onto the stand,

the eyebrows like handlebars, the licence to pun.

Sean still floats my leaky boat.

Perhaps it’s that scene in From Russia With Love

where he’s alone, undressing for the shower,

slipping off polished shoes and flinging

his shirt behind him like he hates it;

all big-cat arrogance and slumberous grace.

Then there’s that hairline crack

of tenderness when he asks the woman be spared;

the complicated gun-sling under the evening suit.

I know at 55 I’m meant to hate

the way Sean grabs at broads as they sashay

close enough to be caught; the swift

up-down-up first look that skims

with practised ease over stockinged legs, dewy lips.

Instead I turn into hot fudge

at the growl and purr of that voice

that can say take off your dress in six languages;

the love of Turkish tobacco blends,

the knowledge of fifty shades of dryness

in a vermouth; the room service order

for thick chilled yoghourt and green figs for breakfast.

At 55 I want all these things back again

as if I’d ever had them.

Aston Martins trembling in the shadows,

iced caviar on silver trays, and Sean –

padding across his hotel room in his socks,

checking for bugs the paintings, the light fittings.


Every Time I Pack a Case I Cry

TAMSIN COTTIS

I uncouple

from the preparing of my trunk.

I do not get on board

with the choosing of tuck,

the sewing of nametapes,

the stowing of an extra blanket for my bed.

My train set fills the floor.

While you are busy packing

I decide to stage a crash. A landslide

is triggered, derailment follows,

then crossed signals, fractured

lines, lost children.

You fold my pyjamas

and press my ties.

Roll all my socks

into tight grey balls.

To save on space I wear my blazer,

worry at the silk lining

with finger and thumb

in the taxi back to school.

A screen slides shut

inside my head,

a fire is damped.

Home shunts into a siding,


Sonnet 142

RICHARD CRAVEN

It’s katabasis for the French school kids,

and he’s the psychopomp, decoding tags

with the chutzpah of Pound libelling yids.

Appropriately lame, his flat feet drag

along the sidewalk, past the gurning drunks

and jaundiced ghosts outside the pharmacy.

The overwhelming reek of Mendip skunk

betrays the junction with Jamaica Street,

where Murakami’s Wave was haply sprayed.

String ties to rail a fleabag Cerberus

under the calvary where Christ’s been made

to spin upon his head. Our Virgil must

now take his leave, for chums of his slouch here

with Stowfords cider and, he hopes, some gear.


Gas mask

A C CLARKE

No-one I knew ever owned one

but there they were

pig snout, insect eyes

rubber tube a cyberborg windpipe

meant to make you feel safe

like armour - as awkward

to wear; like armour

useless against doodlebugs.

Those that survived, if not

museum pieces, hung

in Army Surplus Stores

like bizarre trophies culled

from entomologists' collections

of near-extinct species.

Not issued to the residents

of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau.


Samaritan?

A C CLARKE

The lambs have sobered in the fields.

Wheat’s cut and rolled,

brambles are glutted.

I can’t help but smile.

And here’s a vole

not scuttling away,

so close I can pick out

flaxen whiskers, ripple in the coat

as if the wind had shivered ripening crops.

Why is it circling, circling

the same patch of tarmac –

like our old cat when her brain was dying -

deaf to my efforts to scare it

to the safe verge?

I think of the diver I saw

trailing its wing among reed-beds,

the lamb with barely strength to lift

its glazing eyes to mine that baking day

in the hills. Both times

I passed on the other side.

How would the snap of small bones feel

under merciful feet? Could I face

the brief struggle, the blood?

A rising wind

raises the hackles of water

drives clouds into grey huddles.

I zip my parka, go forward.


The Maunder Minimum

LORENZO BERARDI

What the naked eye can see

is

many things at once and

itself

with the aid of a mirror.

But all that is shown is

not

everything there is to be

caught

by the click of an eyelid.

This phenomenon happens

when what really counts

is hidden

on purpose, left unseen

in order to conceal remorse

for a wrong once committed,

and now to all but one, perhaps

invisible.


Elizabeth

JOHN GREY

She dressed in blue and drove

Buffalo Bill's old automobile,

God, America, in the passenger seat

whispering, "may we feel..." –

not refined, a pretty low grade,

doomy rattle to the engine,

smell of something dead in the trunk,

Plato striding by on a gold stallion,

bucking and biting at her straw hat –

sunset, fir trees badgering the unburied,

car humping the road,

light and shadow, spit and eyes,

nothing quite coming together,

blood needling flesh, stir and squirm,

more fart than art –

people in houses,

how do you compete with this,

small town riddled with lights,

wild cross carvings,

gold valley moon,

one kind of everything,

the thought that it's not her

no matter how –


Lord of Light

SHEIKHA A

Summers in my country are

heralded by power outages;

the eagle’s nest is abandoned,

around it have grown green

glimmering leaves;

mother eloped with her freedom

shortly after they hatched,

on the first feather she left them

with a claw-ful of worms

and pithy instructions on flight,

the light in their eyes premature,

the eldest sufficed faster,

the youngest breaking out slower;

summers, here, boil down to hunger –

the power of famished ambitions

the outage of ineptness.


A Festivity of Leadership because Silence ...

MICHAEL H BROWNSTEIN

All right, leader of the sand. All right, he who eats his followers.

All right, Catherine of the wooden raft with wheels and, all

right, Cleo of the heavy carpet and its intrigue in court.

Darkness is not night falling over us mid-day clouds roiling in,

electric unease. All right, the misuse of power, blood lusts

and scars, the cutting away of limbs. All right everyone

who cannot contain the promise of their years,

all right all of you with no memory of money and all right

those of you who do. All right avengers of blood, soothsayers

basking in its texture, its taste, the way it feels between fingers,

phlegm and sticky. All right, you who are jealous of shadows,

you who have jealous breath. When the sky wakens to the colour

of leaf, the ground littered with autumn, when the sky wakens

to the lines in clouds, the wind calm, the water calm,

when the sky wakens to a pause in the noise of the living,

the predators asleep, when the sky wakens and everything

has ended, a brake in men, a disturbance of depth and fiction,

the collapse of what is allowed (and what is not).

All right, enough has been said—and we continue—one bloody

festival, then another, a feast for the grand birds,

another for the grand maggot.


Untitled

HOLLY DAY

There once was a woman who

prayed for just one little baby

she didn’t care what it was

but the only baby that came

fit in her palm and would not move

small, too quiet, curled tiny

it did not cry. morning came

she sat by the windowsill, rocking

the quiet cradle with the tip of her finger,

singing songs about all the things

her child would never see.


Spreadsheets

JEEVIKA VERMA

all un-done this summer

like a mask, once removed.

Last night, I did not sleep.

A sidewalk at downriver turned

to muck, then salt, then numb.

A wasp clung to left-field

due to sweltering protest by the monks.

A cabinet slid open to reveal

an endless supply of cocoa mugs.

Some news or the other. You see,

I am not warm.

I am as bitter as a gloomy day in July.

I am resting on a cloud that is heavy with give, heavy

under my smallest toe. Always,

at any moment, I will turn

to puddle. I will be stale

and still. I will not contain a single breath

and still evaporate. If I do sleep

my eyes will not close, only darken

to an older me, by which I mean me:

much younger and confined

to Granny’s old bell jar, reading

The Bell Jar. From my jar I will watch

the dogs bark, the lights go out, a man curse,

and still I would be safe,

away from vapor, wasps, the cold –

this formula does not work.

In fact, a calculated response

requires me to first fill out the empty


columns and rows. Each fearful cell

takes time. I must be

like the seasons: freshly categorized

with a fair chance of return.

So, now, I carefully step out

from under the jar

(as Sylvia did once or twice)

and onto the table, again.

Tomorrow, when I smell sweetness

everywhere I go, I will hope

it is me.


In Rome I inhaled

JEEVIKA VERMA

a door

a dawn on the

city like a crucifix

by the crucifix

of Vatican City

here an olive oiled jagged terracotta clunks by the cracks in my feet

a floor

a fountain of

gold and white

and white

and white sheets

here my wine leaves a ring by the napkin in this napkin ring

a façade

a fresco of

cannibals eating

their way

to me

here a fresh pomegranate juice handed to me for free

a street

a slaughterhouse

dirt now cobble

stoned away

the full feat

here some tripe for you and tongue for me

a corner

a carved pyramid

around an

urn of pull


and intricacy

here two coned pizzas with meat

a piazza

a Parentalia

for wine-soaked tombs

and dead bits

of bone

here another table for one

a neighborhood

a narrowing passage

up 551 steps

just the size

of a neck

here a little sweat


Making Trouble

DAVID LOHREY

Don’t you know the difference between a potato and a lion?

That’s odd.

They put lions on pajamas but not potatoes. You’ll never see

potatoes on your brother’s pajamas. Lions roar. Lions are not

called spuds. Lions are fine and dandy, like petunias or

dandelions.

Your mother could make potato and dandelion soup, if she

cared to, and you could help.

All you’d need is a dandy lion and an ideal potato.

Potatoes grow on trees. Just tell your favorite farmer you’ll need

a bushel this year. He’ll know what to do. But they’ll be fewer

apples if he grows potatoes this year. You’ll have to think it

through.

Of course, some say potatoes don’t grow on trees. Some people

get quite angry about this mistake. My father used to shout,

“You’re always forgetting to turn out the lights. Do you think

potatoes grow on trees?”

When I was young, we were poor. Father would turn over

the ketchup bottle to catch the very last drop. My family liked to

put ketchup on our potatoes, but not on our lions. Ketchup

grows on trees, too. Put in your order at the start of the year.

But when it comes to lions, I’d be careful. I wouldn’t get too

close. Lions are reluctant to swim. You’re probably thinking of

dolphins who can swim very fast. They swim as fast as crows


can fly. But I wouldn’t put ketchup on the crows either. In point

of fact, you’d be better off keeping the ketchup to yourself.

So, where were we?

You’ve got the ketchup, the lion, and the potato, not to mention

the dolphins and the lights. What are we forgetting? The crows!

And the trees. Don’t forget to turn off the trees. And the apple

sauce. If there is any left.

Now pick the petunias before it is too late. Add them to the

soup. Stir. When it comes to the boil, you’ll have chicken soup.

(Serves 4.) Enjoy.


Indecent Exposure

DAVID LOHREY

Saul Bellow knew a thing or two.

He was a jack of all trades.

Adrian, Michigan was the capital of America.

If you were rich, you had a Packard and a driver.

People kept the radio on as they made love.

Sears & Roebucks was the shit.

The aroma of hot cashew nuts and Chanel No.5 hit you

as you walked through the front door.

It was nice to leave home back in 1965.

It was before women started lifting weights,

back before men started checking out each other’s

bums. “My, he has a nice ass.” That sort of language

was unheard of back then. People ran porn movies

in the back of their minds, not in shop windows.

Women lost weight easily. It wasn’t cool at all

to look like Ethel Waters or Aunt Jemima.

Aisle-blockers were shamed as were their shamelessly

sexy sisters. Shame was the name of the game.

We were all raised to be ashamed of ourselves.

I know I was. I was ashamed of everyone I knew.

I was ashamed to be alive.

I was ashamed of my mother who never combed her hair.

I was ashamed of my father who sported a beard.

I was ashamed of myself for losing a wrestling match

and for being an incompetent baseball player. Had I been Jewish,

I would have been ashamed of getting B’s.

When the neighborhood boys chose up sides,

they always skipped me. I got picked last.


Sports wasn’t my thing. My father’s shitty Plymouth

embarrassed me, too. We were poor.

My father was white trash in silk underwear.

I was never sure if he was a fag or just a showman.

All I knew was he was a fake.

I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, a funny town, an odd place.

20 years on, it was a laughing stock. They not only killed Martin

Luther King, they let Elvis die.

We ate chow mein from a can. We put butter on our white rice.

We salted our watermelon. Some of us were racists.

Memphis is on the Mississippi, but nobody knew how to leave

town. The horizon was on the other side of the river, but nobody

dared to cross that bridge. We were stay-at-home types, little

chickens. Everything in Memphis was thought the best.

I believed the art gallery in Overton Park was bigger and better

than the Met. Second rate was not only good enough, it was

described as fine. “Who do you think you are?”

My best friend Matt was accused of having combed his pubes

and the boys at school almost drove him to suicide. I was told

at a middle-school party to stand up and kiss my so-called

girlfriend on the lips, but that year at age 13 I didn’t know how

or why. I stood in the middle of the room and died.

One day I was singing the lyrics to the Stones’ “Satisfaction” as I

entered class. One of the girls sniffed, “How would you know?”

If you were not a stud, you were a dud. I felt surrounded by

wolves. It’s a miracle I survived or maybe I didn’t.

I still can’t sleep at night. I still wet my bed.

And yet when I look back I wonder how I ever left.

I left so much behind. I gave up all that for this.

I gave up Faulkner for Vogue. I gave up the blues for rap.


Shit, I gave up barbeque for tacos.

I gave up everything I knew for the unknown.

It is still unknown. It will always be so. I will always be lost.

I will never find my way home.


The Woodcutter’s Daughter

KITTY DONNELLY

Sky’s dull, low-clouded, numb to expectations of July.

I swat at flies in the conservatory, scrubbing dishes, wondering

why

summer’s again a series of storms, no tranquil season.

I have a gin. Another. Shedding rubber gloves to feel glass on

skin.

A late breeze is wakening puddles, pooling in dips

where the weight of passing freight splits earth in concrete,

concave rips.

Weeds thrive like unwanted thoughts, ripening undergrowth.

The woodpile beckons. Stacked high against yard walls, its

presence

testifies to a cold hearth.

Time for my father’s axe: Its language

sharper than tongues. No miracle’s

instantaneous. It’s graft, graft fells the forest.


The Click of the Lock

KITTY DONNELLY

August. Very late.

The moon hangs like a plate above the gardens.

Your movements in the hallway

contain finality I can’t attribute

to anything but instinct.

I call out expecting

lilted reassurance.

A fortress of silence has risen in darkness.

Then the click of the lock.

I pad down, cat-footed, afraid to disrupt

a house already dismembered.

Then garden-dew on my feet.

My pine’s whispers, once comforting,

are hollow as wind in a lightening tree.

I look up at darkened bedrooms –

one pillow free, undented.

A moth flings its dusty wings against the porchlight.


Glendalough Monastery

KITTY DONNELLY

He just dropped off the earth

as one might fall from a cliff.

His named was erased from records.

He chose a cave, building a life

without survival manuals.

His heart rhythms

skipped to fit the river’s rhymes,

became perfectly attuned.

He knew the pause of fish in the current.

When to strike.

Time told itself by light:

by owls whose emergence,

hoots and disappearance,

mirrored different stages of the dark.

My wildness is bred out,

diluted by generations.


Elijah

MICHAEL McCARTHY

I

No rain. Not even dew-fall for half of seven years!

Ahab had not taken to my warning.

‘Hide’ God said. ‘Go east.’ So east I fled.

The Wadi beyond the Jordan was an unfamiliar place.

The Ravine at Cherith, a cutting deep in the rock.

I found a small space underneath an overhang.

That would be my hiding place and bed.

The river still ran, though everywhere around

the land was parched. After I drank my fill

I lay awhile in the water, cooled myself,

washed red dirt out of my beard.

The birds were strange to me. I did not know their songs.

When I saw the ravens I thought they’d come to steal

what little food I had, then pick my eyes out.

I scared them off with stones.

As darkness fell the movements started,

wild animals creping down the gorge to drink.

A large blue-tongued lizard rubbed along my leg.

The water’s murmur continued in my dreams.

In the morning the ravens came again. Then

the meaning of the promise dawned on me.

‘The ravens will bring you bread and meat.’

Twice daily they fed me, as if I were their young.

During that first moon the flow of water waned.


By the third moon the river was completely dry.

I had no choice. I headed out for Zarephath.

That’s when I set eyes on her.

II

She was dragging a tangle of sticks

with the child resting in her hammock.

I asked for water, then bolder for a little bread.

Her shoulders sloped, her eyes were empty.

This was a woman who was close to giving up.

A widow! I asked her? She told me yes.

Her husband! Killed in someone else’s war.

She didn’t speak his name. ‘A good man’ was all she said.

The child, when she put him down, was two years old.

He ran around babbling to himself, and laughing.

He pointed at me, reaching up to pull my beard.

Her home, down in a hollow among trees

had been luxurious once, but that was in the past.

Her last morsel of flour was almost dust.

A blue jug held the last few drops of oil.

‘I’ll make a meal of this, for you and for my son,

and after that we’ll die.’ As if having me die with them

made some sense. With her smooth long fingered hands

she kneaded that meagre little mound of dough.

She watched it rise, then handed me the scone.

She baked another one with what was left

and shared it with her son. She did this

not thinking of the next day or the next.

Her loss had taken her beyond smallness, beyond


the hoardings that grip us when we have too much.

She reached inside herself and kept on finding more.

The flour did not run out, nor did the oil run dry.

I grew fond of the widow, and I came to love the boy.

Time and time again that child drew us from despair.

She, seeped in sorrow would let him pull her back.

The sickness came on him suddenly, he fell into a faint.

I saw her holding his limp body. Her voice cut through me:

‘Man of God, did you come here to kill my son?’

His eyes were glazed. His lips went purple as

his breathing stopped. I took him in my arms

and went upstairs where the air was clear.

I prayed as I have never prayed before.

‘O Lord let his breath come back. Let him live.’

I lay over him, trying to give him body heat,

three times. Three times I thought he’d gone.

At last the seizure left and he grew warm again.

The Lord had heard my cry. I gave him to her then.

She laid him down, asleep, then looked at me.

‘Now I know you are a holy man of God.

The truth of God comes from your mouth.’

III

Fearing Jezebel I fled again, this time heading south.

From Beersheeba I went on alone

a day’s journey into the desert.

I stopped beside a broom bush, its flowers

white with purple hearts. I sat there wanting to die.


My life seemed a long succession of failures.

I asked the Lord to take me.

I lay down to sleep, and in my dream I was awakened.

There was an angel who said I should get up and eat.

There was a cake of bread baking over hot stones.

There was a jug of water. I ate and drank.

The angel touched me a second time, saying

unless I ate the journey would be too long.

To this day I cannot tell whether the angel

came in my asleep or my awake.

All I know is, I lay down wanting to die

and I awoke restored resolute and strong.

I walked each day until noon, took shelter

from the desert heat, then walked on ‘til late.

I took sustenance from the juice of berries.

Evenings I gathered sticks and made a fire.

I roasted morsels: edible roots, grubs,

once, a snake whose throat I’d cut.

You must remember I was no longer young.

At night the desert cold got in my bones.

Sometimes waking stiff, I’d stir the embers

then watch for falling stars until first light.

I reached mount Horeb on the fortieth day.

I climbed slowly until I found the cave.

I thought of Moses then, and knew

I was on holy ground.

IV


The question nagged. What was I doing here?

The covenant had failed, the altars smashed,

and except for me, all the prophets dead!

‘Go out and stand there on the mountain’ God said.

There came a powerful wind. It keened and swooned.

It almost tore the mountain down. God had often come in wind

its grip and grind, but God was absent from that sound.

And then an earthquake came. The very mountain shook.

I’m not afraid of tumult. I like being in the thick of it.

I’d meet God on my own turf. But God was not

shaken loose in the shaking of the earth.

And after that a raging fire. I remember being on fire

in the days before my hair grew white. When the call

of God first fevered me I was a ball of flame.

But here in this fire, there was no sign of God.

Thunder, wind and fire, had never frightened me.

But silence did. I went to the mouth of the cave

put my cloak about my face. I was afraid.

That’s when God’s whisper came.

Soft as the breeze, and gentler than a flower.

-no sound of waving tree, or beast or bird

-the deepest silence I have ever heard

and in that depth God spoke the quiet word.

No longer earthquake, wind and fire. Now

God would speak in the whisper of a lyre,

in ordinary things and ordinary speech.

This truth I now must learn and teach.

My prophesying days are done.


Three tasks are left. The final one:

Anoint a prophet who will do the same.

Elisha, son of Shapath is his name.

V

Looking down the valley, the air was

intimate with spring. Birdlife drew my eye

to the teams of oxen, their strength harnessed exactly.

The young ploughman schooled the leading pair.

One, an elder with the necessary slowness of gait,

the other young and raw, his strength not yet refined.

My approach when at last I made it was badly timed.

He saw me coming but before he recognised my purpose

I swung my cloak around his shoulders. It was too sudden.

First he’d have to finish ploughing, and then put in the seed.

He’d have to wait for harvest. He’d have to ask his parents.

Maybe that I took him by surprise was just as well.

A prophet’s life is not for one too easily persuaded.

Even as he was recoiling from me I tried to put it right.

‘You don’t have to leave all this, unless you choose.’

I walked back up the hill to a sycamore grove and waited.

It was late afternoon when he came from his parent’s house.

He told the workmen to unyoke the teams, take them home.

The young ox he took himself, slaughtered it on the spot.

He built a fire and turned his plough into a spit,

the workmen gathered round the tang of herbs

the smell and smoulder of the roasting meat.

They left the bones strewn along the headland.


The fire smouldered as the plough’s hard wood

blistered into blackness. A soft glow embered

in the darkness. When at last he came walking

toward me, his gait was absolute.

Epilogue

It was clear that God would take him soon.

There were many rumours: Bethel! Jericho!

When he mentioned the Jordan, we were ready.

He wanted to go alone, but Elisha wouldn’t hear of it.

In the end they went together. We watched him part

the waters with his cloak. We saw them walk across.

Then a storm blew up, enveloped them in whirls of dust.

A sirocco from the desert which didn’t envelop us.

We could see their shapes filtering in and out,

heads close together talking, next thing blurred,

like ghosts of trees, or birds in flight. Suddenly

we saw it all, clear as moonlight: the horses

of heaven, ears pricked, eyes opened wide, flame

flaring from their nostrils in snorts of scorch and burn.

Their shod hooves were clustered sparks, their fetlocks

fine-boned streaks of light, their hocks a smooth

brown flame, their manes of yellow flowing fire.

Their bridles, the reins held tight, their collars of

matching purple bands tackled to a chariot of fire.

The carriage was a solid block of cobalt blue,

its doors a burning orange glow. The wheels

were spins of crimson, the shafts primrose pink.

When the storm cleared Elijah’s cloak was lying


in the dust. Elisha tore his garment, placed the mantle

around himself, then headed back to us. Some insisted

on setting up a search. They scoured the hills, thinking

he’d been kidnapped, or that walking in a trance he’d fallen

down a cliff. Elisha let them, his mind was somewhere else.

Three days searching convinced them he was gone.

Now everywhere God’s spirit is, Elijah lives.


Hero

KAREN ANKERS

history will not name you a hero

a boy who fought dragons

grew to a man

put away a plastic sword

and took up a knife.

the dragons grew within you

unchecked by medication

curled around your bones

hid behind the grey scaled shadows

of your eyes

breathed fierce fire in blood betraying

self-made wounds.

hero is a name without a face

courage painted by numbers

stories honoured in history’s roll call

but your battle has no timed beginning

no ordered end

no truce

no ceasefire

no catalogue of reasons

no pages map the trench line scars

on your arms.

and when it ends

if it ends

there will be no flags

no cheers

no banners raised

if the dragons sleep


those who love you will not wake them

and if it is you who sleeps

I will remember you

in secret silence


with every step i take

J.J. CAMPBELL

the joy of farting

in public and watching

someone catch a whiff

at exactly the wrong

time

it's that little moment

that keeps me from

putting a gun in my

mouth or taking a

knife to my throat

sometimes the

loneliness is a pile

of bricks on my back

that breaks me with

every step i take

if hope is supposed

to keep me going

i fear for us all


Europa II (VIII)

ANDY N

Choked in a rising panic

one of the few survivors

said afterwards

no birds ever flew

over the camps

Never stopped on the roofs

at night

Stopped moaning like lateens

in the distance

across wind fed barriers

Flapping over flags

almost like they knew

what was going on down there

and there was nothing

upon nothing

they could do about it.


Stillblue

LACHLAN BROWN

After David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash

You are swallowed by the scene

the pool’s water a deeper shade

than the cloudless sky it reflects

& the house like a pair of ray-bans

& everything cut straight at noon

where shadows drop down & almost

don’t exist in that rectilinear moment

where you have to leap to stay cool

& it’s as though the world has forgotten

that the horizon could bend the edges

of a calendar so that days even hours

or minutes are now stretching out

like empty vacations you squint you

feel the heat radiating from the concrete

and there is only now & there is only

everything (existing): the empty chair,

the palms, the edge of the diving board,

the glass doors that slide like easy breathing.

You know now that things (are only)(will never)

surface for this white spray is all

we can ever have or want.


Loss

LACHLAN BROWN

We must become attuned

to those very objects

that slip from existence

for a short while: a key,

a knife, a single fading leaf.

I am not saying that all things

are held in place by our own

apprehension, a noble gaze

that attaches like string so that

this chair might persist during

the times of our observation.

Rather, consider those tiny moments

when something excuses itself from

the world. Small absences, but true.


Two poems translated from the Latin of Gaius Valerius

Catullus

RANALD BARNICOT

Arrius (Catullus LXXXIV)

‘Ambush’ to ‘hambush’ Arrius turned and made

A ‘chash’* of ‘cash’, hoping to have hereby displayed

His helocutionary magnificence, heven hambushed

His haudience. Hastonished thus and hover-hawed,

What could they do but hin their hearts happlaud?

This trait runs in the family, can be pushed,

Oh, several generations back, accord-

-ing to my informants. Well, he’s abroad

Now and all our ears can rest, relax

In restful h-lessness, devoutly wished.

How sweet our language, safe from his attacks!

But, no, I spoke too soon! We’ve got the fear!

Hugly haitch, *ghape not! *Chome not, Harrius!

But Harrius hurries near!

Hi think he means to harry us

(ha, ha!)

Ha wind of haspiration drives hour waters frantic,

Hionian, Haegean, Hadriatic,

Heven beyond Hercules’ P-hillars far

hout hinto th’Hatlantic!

* Pronounce gutturally as in Scottish – RB.

Note: Arrius has been identified as Quintus Arrius, a ranting and self-

made orator of low social origins who, according to Cicero, played


second fiddle to Crassus (Cicero: Brut. 242) and may have gone to the

east with him in 55 B.C. Alternatively, he may have been a rather

boring neighbour of Cicero mentioned in a letter to Atticus (Att. ii.

14.2)

There is an interesting discussion of Arrius’ peculiarities of

pronunciation in C.J. Fordyce: Catullus – A Commentary, Oxford,

O.U.P. (1961), pp. 373-5. Apparently, in many dialects of Latin, as in

various dialects of modern English, initial h- was dropped. This,

however, was looked down on by the intelligentsia. In consequence,

some speakers over-compensated by supplying an h- where there was

none.

My version is greatly expanded from the original.

To Caelius (Catullus LVIII)

Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia,

That Lesbia whom Catullus

Loved more than self or kin,

Now cruises crossroads, slum-alleys –

And, great-souled Remus,

How could you bequeath

Your city to such descendants,

Dangling fruit she plunders,

Peeling back the skin

With ….. fingers? …….. teeth?

Notes:

1. Possibly Marcus Caelius Rufus, a politician and outstanding orator,

who supplanted Catullus as Lesbia’s lover. Clodia Metelli (the former

wife of Metellus Celer and the real-life personage probably represented

as Lesbia) accused him of attempting to poison her and he was


brilliantly defended by Cicero in his speech ‘Pro Caelio’, in which he

picks up Caelius’s memorable description in his own speech of her as

“quadrantaria Clytemnestra” (a four-penny Clytemnestra). This is an

allusion to the counter-allegation that Clodia had murdered her

husband.

5. Remus and his twin brother Romulus were mythical joint founders

of Rome.

9-10. Catullus uses the verb ‘glubit’, ‘peels’, but leaves it open in what

sense she peels them.


Tulips

NATALIE CRICK

The Tulips have wilted.

Petals fall and light

Bends, grotesque,

Like a secret splayed open

At the seams of a wide

Black mouth.

The crowns remain lush,

A bouquet of teeth

Gleaming bright in a smile

As if to say:

“I am not dead yet.”


Witness

CHRISTINE COLEMAN

The trees are doubly bright and upside down

dangling from the ceiling of the lake

the day they see the swans.

Something unspoken between

them is starting to grow – a mirrored

tilt of head, a certain look, an open palm.

They watch them glide together side by side

into a kind of dance, their necks precisely

matching curve with curve. And now

those thick white ropes are intertwined.

She sees the gesture as a knot of love

and he, a biological imperative -

what they witness next is violence.

She bites her lip to block the words

no wonder myth interprets that as rape.

He slips from her. She doesn’t fly away, or

dip her head to forage in the mud. What

follows now becomes a further truth -

face to face, they rise up from the surface

of the water - their gleaming breasts are

resting on each other’s. Their necks

are craning up towards the sky, and beaks,

upheld like palms in greeting, touch.

It takes a while before they realise

where that deep-throated call

is coming from. Their fingers lock, until

the final echo of the swans’ duet has faded.


Twitcher A short story by

CHRIS MASON

‘Their belief in their immortality is as follows: they

believe that they do not die, but that one who perishes

goes to the deity Salmoxis, or Gebeleïzis, as some of

them call him.’

- Herodotus, Histories IV, 94

The wind burned and the air was thin and miserly. A twitcher

trod pine needles underfoot. The twitcher was Aidan Simons. He

headed towards a hide; a small shelter partially visible between

the gaps of tree trunks. Aidan’s cheeks were ruddy and there was

a rip in his jacket where he had snagged a branch. White innards

spilled from his arm and a clump of wadding, caught by the tree-

percolated breeze, detached and tumbled across the forest floor.

It was quiet in this section of the park, deep in the forest.

The ideal habitat for a bird who did not want to be found. The

clean Swiss countryside carried the scent of old living things and

spoke to something furtive and atavistic within him, but then he

would catch sight of a discrete device fused to the bark of a nearby

tree and it retreated once more just as quickly as it came.

This is adulterated nature mate, don’t you go thinking any

different, Aidan’s inner-voice dutifully reminded him.

He reached the hide and stopped to look up at the sign

above the entrance which read: Enjoy your visit to New Life Park but

please do NOT feed your loved ones. Written four times in English,

French, German and Italian.

He would spoon feed her in the end days, when she was

weakest. He regretted doing it now, he knew she hated it. The

palliative care staff at the New Life Clinic would ordinarily feed

the patients, but Aidan had insisted. The staff allowed it, only


seeing an affectionate gesture from a loving husband. They were

unaware of the malice in it. They made the beds and cleaned

whatever needed to be cleaned and fed whoever needed to be fed,

it was not part of their job to consider the ways people hurt each

other for the sake of self-interest and fear. He would feed her and

make cheery comments about his recent sightings from the

visitor’s lounge window, ignoring the resentful white-eyed stare

that she gave him as the puree slopped down her chin or as he

wiped the blood-mucous from the corners of her mouth after she

had been coughing.

The hide was a wood-panelled box just big enough to stand

up in. Daylight streamed in through a thin pillbox opening, the

shutter was propped open by a hinged arm and the weathered

edges of camouflage netting crept into view. There were spent

tabac cartridges wedged between the floorboards. The far wall

was scarred, here and there, with graffiti written in the distinctive

angular script of pen knives. Those words which Aidan could

read were suggestive of declarations of love or lustful requests

from those yet to pass over, left in the hope that their post-life

mate would chance upon this place on their bestial wanderings.

Aidan lowered his collar, grateful for shelter from the cold.

He sloughed the pack off his shoulders and set about arranging

his equipment: folding out a small chair and locking off the legs,

setting up a tripod in a similar fashion and attaching a spotting

scope. He brought out his lunchbox and thermos, arranging them

on the ledge beneath the pillbox hole. Finally, he took his

notebook and pencil from the inside pocket of his torn jacket.

Aidan preferred to use a pencil and paper instead of comms-

paper, which was prone to glitches and wipe-outs.

‘You’re a luddite Simons,’ he said to himself with a wistful

burr as he stared out at the slit of forest and waited.

‘You’re a luddite Simons,’ said Ava.


She was sat up in bed next to him. From where he was

laying the morning sun illuminated the downy hairs on her cheek

as she laughed at the notebook.

‘Where did you even buy one of these?’

‘A specialist supplier,’ said Aidan.

‘Expensive I bet,’ she said.

He feigned a careless shrug.

‘I can afford it.’

‘Well, I think it’s a sad affectation,’ said Ava. ‘You’re

clinging to a past you never had. You know, I always associate

nostalgia and nausea with each other. To me they sound very

close, there must be a reason for that...’

‘Think what you want. It’s reliable – like me.’

She laughed and her eyes creased.

They had been together for just over six months at that point

and for Aidan her fragile laugh was all that he needed or wanted.

It made him feel satisfied and hopeful at a time when he had no

conception of Goodpasture’s Syndrome, a rare autoimmune

disease that attacked the lungs and kidneys, or of the power it

would have over their future. Ava was a vital, determined woman

that he saw as a rare species: an idealist of the kind that was

capable of achieving all she spoke of. He loved her.

Again, she laughed.

‘Look at all these names – Gropper, Sprosser, Oyk, Paper

Bag, PG Tips… you’ll have me in here one day,’ she said. ‘What

would I be?’

‘SOB,’ he had said.

She raised her eyebrows in that way which excited him.

‘Spouse of Birder,’ he said with a smile.

In his opinion, it was as good a proposal as any.

You’ll have me in here one day… was it just a joke or did she

somehow know, even then? Aidan was torn out of his

ruminations by a noise to the left of the hide, a harsh, human

noise. He placed his eye to the viewer and searched the tree line.


He settled his scope upon an old elk standing in a clearing. Visible

just beneath the creature’s ear was the metallic sheen of a

Zalmoxis node. The elk was surrounded by a family and stood

passively as the father lifted up his little girl. He took her weight

on his hip as she leant in towards the elk and spoke into its ear.

Aidan watched them for a while through the lens – they seemed

happy. Their voices carried through the forest towards him but

his French was poor and he couldn’t understand what they were

saying.

He and Ava often talked about having children but it had

never happened and then it was too late. Still, he would have liked

a son, a little twitcher with keen eyes. He lifted his gaze from the

eyepiece listlessly. He reached for his lunchbox and unwrapped a

sandwich. His gut welcomed the decision.

Halfway through the second quarter of his sandwich, Aidan

noticed some movement high up and to the right, partially

obscured by the overhanging camouflage netting. He held the

sandwich in his mouth like a gag as he moved the scope with a

practiced quickness. Under the collar of a scaffold branch he

sighted five or six birds fighting. They were small mousey-brown

specimens but an easy spot due to the aggressive flapping that

gave away their position. The majority had that tell-tale glint

about their heads. He watched the brief scuffle of wings and how

easily the post-life residents dominated their territory. It was

inevitable when you had so many creatures of one mind, able to

coordinate against any threat. That often quoted Darwinian

maxim had become a rigged game – fitness was no longer enough,

here it was only the survival of the synced. The thought made him

uneasy.

His purchase on the sandwich weakened as the bread

disintegrated with saliva.

The feathered fight continued.


Mankind has really outdone themselves, his inner-voice chimed

in. They have created an entity far beyond their own understanding and

turned a god into a business concern, be damned the consequences.

Beneath his feet in a vast underground complex stirred

Zalmoxis – the synthetic superconsciousness woven together

from the minds of thousands of New Life clientèle who paid for

the privilege of engineered reincarnation.

But how much of them, Aidan wondered, becomes subsumed by

Zalmoxis and how much of the individual remains? Could it be like the

call of the lyrebird, nothing more than a mimic echoing through the

woods?

The fight came to an abrupt end, the conclusion of which

was expected: a small brown body tumbling to the forest floor and

another taking flight. He struggled to see the remaining group

clearly, he wanted to know if she could be among them. He hoped

not.

Finally, he reached for the spit-sopped sandwich hanging

from his maw.

There was a nearby flutter and as he looked away from the

scope he found a bird perched on the ledge beside his flask. It was

a common treecreeper, certhia familiaris, and the artificial

protrusion from its head made it plain that this bird had once been

human.

The little bird tipped its head from side to side with skittish

movements as it appraised the twitcher and the sandwich he was

holding.

Aidan remained still, breath vapour drifted about his head

and then broke apart in the air. Those black button eyes stared at

him with an intelligence that would have been charming if it were

an ordinary bird, but instead made him break out in goose flesh

beneath several layers.

The bird hopped closer now.

‘A-va?’ He said falteringly, coaxing each syllable from his

throat with great effort.

The bird chirped.


He leant forwards on his chair.

Then through an integrated speaker in the Zalmoxis node

the bird spoke to him: ‘Bread.’

‘Ava is that you?’

‘No.’ The voice was tinny and robotic but the inflection of

the words made it clear this was not a machine. ‘Will you give me

some food?’

‘Who are you?’ asked Aidan.

‘My name is Sonja and I’m hungry.’

Aidan placed the half-eaten sandwich on the ledge beside

the bird and it began pecking ravenously at the layers of bread.

‘Why are you so hungry? Don’t the rangers feed you?’

‘Zalmoxis preserves, Zalmoxis provides. We are all one but

there is competition for every morsel.’

‘I’m looking for my wife.’

‘The park is very large,’ said Sonja, pulling a crumb down

her gullet.

‘She’s a bird, like you,’ said Aidan.

Two more treecreepers, fresh from their battle, swooped

down and joined her.

‘It’s difficult to find any one bird here.’

‘I’ve spent half my life finding birds.’

Sonja paused for a moment and ruffled her feathers. Still

more birds came, reducing the sandwich to nothing in seconds.

‘Not all of us take kindly to visitors from our past lives,’

Sonja said. ‘We have a right to move on.’

He stared sternly at the bird reading the speech patterns

behind the artificial voice.

‘She died- I mean she’s been here about three months. Her

name is Ava. Do you know where I can find her?’

The bird said nothing more. She considered the man and the

empty space where food had been, then took a few backward

hops towards the edge of the opening.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Aidan. ‘I need to tell her I’m sorry.’


The treecreeper flew off into the forest, the rest following

her.

Aidan watched them go and added the treecreeper to his

life list. Old habits and all that...

When Aidan had arrived at Bern airport he arranged for a

car to take him directly to the New Life Centre. It was a scenic

journey through Fribourg to the spartan clinic which sat at the

entrance to the park. He had not been back there since Ava’s

passing.

He stayed overnight in the New Life Centre’s visitor

facilities. He did not have the same room he had stayed in when

visiting his wife, although it was identical in every detail down to

the painting on the wall and the pattern on the curtains. His sleep

was sterile. In the morning he felt hollowed out. He dressed,

packed and made his way to the waiting area. Every corner of the

complex stirred with the ghosts of memory. He purchased

sandwiches from the canteen and had his thermos filled with

coffee.

It took two hours for Aidan to get through the security

checks and have a ranger take him into the park in an all-terrain

vehicle. The ranger introduced himself as Tobias in a heavy

German accent. Tobias explained that security at New Life had

been tightened since Aidan’s last visit, due to an incident back in

December involving anti-New Life agitators.

To enter the New Life Park they had to pass through a large

gate. Aidan looked out the tinted window at the towering mesh

fence that matched the height of the trees it enclosed. A bird in a

cage, his inner-voice suggested ironically. Ava had done all this

because she had wanted to be truly free; free of the disease, free

of him and free of death, but looking up at that fence he doubted

true freedom existed anymore and if it did, this wasn’t it. The

vehicle rolled slowly along the narrow track and Tobias stopped

at the gate to talk with a colleague.


Aidan stared at the small metallic node that glinted beneath

the ranger’s hairline. All New Life staff were synced with

Zalmoxis, it was marketed as a perk of the job although it was

mandatory. The rangers concluded their banter and the barrier

opened. The sun was high overhead as they drove into the forest,

her sanctuary.

The sun had sunk behind the tree line and cast bars of

shadow across the ground. Aidan abandoned his thermos of

coffee, which had lost its effectiveness against the lowering

temperature, in favour of the hip flask of vodka which had sat in

his back pocket. The searing liquid helped ease the numbing

discomfort as his limbs became ghosts of themselves, strange

appendages in the persistent cold.

He had spotted many species: red kite, great spotted

woodpecker, fieldfare, common cuckoo, chiffchaff, European

robin and his heart would lurch in his chest with every sighting.

She could have been any one of them. So, he waited, diligently

recording each new species in his notebook.

As the early evening drew closer the forest became dark and

ill-defined. Time passed, an hour or perhaps more. His world was

punctuated only by the murmuring of pines. Then came the

jarring crunch of brittle nature beneath tyres and the forest was

stripped of its nocturnal safety by a bright glow. Aidan listened to

the thud of a metal door and the light seemed to split apart as a

smaller beam began to creep its way in through the pillbox,

throwing a dark form across the wall, looming over Aidan’s

shivering frame.

‘We call it the experiential gap scenario,’ the New Life

councillor had said, ‘These new experiences often push couples

apart. Fidelity can become a problem as the patient develops an

affinity with those who are undergoing the same process.’


She was a broad-shouldered woman who must have

suffered regular tension headaches from the tightness of her

scraped-back hair.

‘I don’t think that’s-’

‘It’s best to talk about these things now Aidan, before the

process starts,’ she said.

He didn’t like the way she used his name, at once a gesture

of placation and sly authority. The councillor’s office seemed

measuredly disorganised, with the knick-knacks on the desk and

the timber bookcases crammed with science journals and self-help

guides. Ava had remarked on the homeliness of the space but to

Aidan everything smacked of cynical manipulation.

‘How common is it?’ asked Ava.

‘It is very common, so common we named it,’ said the

councillor with the twitch of a smile.

‘And what do you do to prevent this from happening?’

asked Aidan.

‘Prevention? Yes, like any big life event, the process can be

a strain. That’s why we recommend that couples go through the

process together.’

‘Well, no one is putting that thing in my head,’ said Aidan.

‘Now I see the problem,’ said the councillor, arming her pen.

‘I take it then that this was not a shared decision?’

‘It’s my decision,’ said Ava. ‘I’m thirty-two and best case

scenario, even with renal replacement therapy, the drugs,

everything – I’ve got three years. That takes me to thirty-five, best

case they say. They caught it late and the immunosuppressants

haven’t been working as they’d hoped... I’m not ready to fucking

die. So yeah, it’s my decision.’ Ava’s cheeks were wet and her

expression one of long sustained anger.

‘And how do you feel about it Aidan?’

‘He’s scared of being alone,’ said Ava, ‘he would rather I

died, than continue on without him. That isn’t love, is it?’ She

turned to look at him. ‘If you really loved me you would let me

go on.’


‘With your brain stuffed into an animal’s skull?’

The councillor sat back in her chair, fingers in a steeple arch,

pen acting as a bridge. ‘It’s not unusual for people to have a

negative perception of the process, we find this is often due to a

misconception or lack of understanding of the Zalmoxis system…

perhaps if I talked you through the pamphlet-’

‘I’ve read the damn pamphlet,’ said Aidan.

‘Sometimes I feel like this disease is a good thing,’ said Ava,

‘an opportunity to start again.’

‘Eating worms,’ Aidan quipped.

‘Well it’s eat or be eaten,’ said Ava. ‘Seriously, what the fuck

Aidan? Can’t you see-’

‘Ordinarily, emotions can rise to the surface and take hold

of the steering wheel in these sessions,’ the councillor interrupted.

‘Let’s remain calm shall we Aidan? Aidan...’

‘...Simons?’ The voice was full and fleshy, he recognised it

as Tobias. Aidan asked himself how the ranger found him? How

did he know to look here within the many acres of forest? They

had parted several miles away, but of course Zalmoxis knew

where he was. Zalmoxis – the omniscient god of this forest. It had

seen him through Sonja’s button eyes. All it would take was a little

subconscious signal through the nodes and the ranger would

instinctively know where to find him.

The torchlight flooded in, blinding Aidan.

‘Mr. Simons?’ said Tobias the ranger. ‘Come. No one is

permitted in the park overnight.’

Aidan raised his hands to his eyes.

‘I’m not going,’ he said, ‘I need to see her.’

‘Please sir, cooperate.’

‘I won’t.’

A silence fell and Aidan could dimly follow movement

beyond the light. The torch beam shifted and illuminated the

floor, emphasising the pooling shadows between the boards as

they creaked beneath heavy boots. A uniformed figure emerged


from the doorway and grabbed Aidan, strong-arming him out of

his chair.

‘We must go back sir,’ said Tobias. ‘You are not permitted

here any longer.’

‘No! No, let me go. I have to stay, I have to see her.’

In the struggle Aidan kicked out an uncoordinated foot

which sent the scope smashing against the wall.

Tobias dragged him out of the hide, into the burning wind

with no sun to temper it.

‘Ava!’ he shouted, his voice sore and tearful.

In the clearing up ahead was the all-terrain vehicle behind

the glare of multiple headlights and bar lights. Tobias marched

Aidan towards it, one hand clenching his neck the other around

his upper arm. Nearby a small tree sparrow, almost imperceptible

in the moonlight, dropped down on a low hanging branch and

regarded the scene. Aidan noticed the creature watching him and

with a new-found strength resisted the momentum of the park

ranger.

‘Ava? Ava is that you?’

The bird considered him and said: ‘Aidan?’

‘I’m sorry. I should have come with you.’

‘You shouldn’t have come,’ said the bird.

Another sparrow swooped down and joined her on the

branch. To his horror, Aidan saw that this one also had a Zalmoxis

node in its neck. The second sparrow preened her affectionately.

His mind became fogged, choking his inner-voice. He felt

foolish and bewildered. Faced with a truth which he had long

denied a void opened up in his stomach. The numbing cold

subsided as a warm pulse of adrenal rage began to course through

Aidan’s body.

He pulled free from the ranger and swiped his arm out at

the birds with such speed that it took them by surprise. Ava

sprung off the branch and flew into the higher canopy. Her

partner was not so quick and Aidan fell to the floor with a muffled

thump and more loose wadding spewed from his jacket on


impact. He held the struggling bird in his hand; it felt hollow and

warm in his palm.

‘You son of a bitch! I’ll gouge that fucking unit out of your

head...’

Aidan’s fingernails gained purchase on the Zalmoxis node

at the back of the bird’s skull.

‘Release him!’ said Tobias, panic in his voice. ‘Stop, now!’

Tobias moved closer to Aidan with his taser drawn.

‘Why shouldn’t we both be alone?’ Aidan cried blindly to

his wife somewhere in the trees overhead.

He began to pull at the node and the pulling was

accompanied by an unbearable scream that filled out the night.

The scream of a god through a tiny speaker.

Tobias pressed the trigger of his weapon and the small

hooks latched onto Aidan. He began to twitch on the end of the

thin wires like a badly operated marionette, his feet churning up

mulch.

It was another fine morning incongruent to the suffering of

the patients at the New Life Clinic and Ava had requested to go

outside. Aidan wheeled her out onto the veranda overlooking the

forest and La Berra mountain, with the Bernese alps beyond.

He put a hand on her shoulder feeling the bones flush

against her skin. She was very weak and with great effort she

placed a bruised, needle-pocked hand on top of his. He looked

down at her and watched the node blink on and off and on.

A flock of geese flew across the spotless sky, their wings

reflecting the sunlight.

‘One day I think I’d like to migrate, but first I have to

transmigrate,’ she said, laughing. He could remember a time

when that fragile laugh was all that he needed or wanted.

She turned her head and he expected to see her look up at

him, but instead she looked past him. Aidan turned in the

direction of her gaze towards the slight-framed man beside them.

Their bright eyes surrounded by the same dark, sunken rings. The


man smiled with a thin curve then tipped his control lever and

wheeled towards the open door.

‘Have a wonderful morning birdie,’ the man said as he

passed.

‘Who was that?’ asked Aidan.

‘Let’s just enjoy the view,’ said Ava.

He took a seat beside her and they watched the Swiss

landscape living in that still, constant way that everything seems

to from such a distance.

‘I’ll come and find you,’ he said, he meant it as a comfort but

he saw her body tense.

They just sat together, sharing that moment and all the

while a silent observer recorded each thought and emotion,

breaking them down and replicating their patterns for a future

when this memory would be recalled in the dark canopy of a

forest, alone but for the grace of Zalmoxis. SLQ

****

Chris Mason’s short stories have been performed by White Rabbit

and published by The Pygmy Giant and Mnemoscape Magazine.

He collaborated with Genius Sweatshop theatre company as the

writer of 'Lab Rat', which premiered in March 2015 and had a

London tour in the Spring of 2016.


Fireflies

A short story by

SUVOJIT BANERJEE

A dirty yellow light spread itself in the gray streets below, and in

its pallidness succumbed without being of any use. The constant

noises of buses and trams and auto-rickshaw and bikes and

human beings of the city roads didn't bother to enter these alleys

that run like mazes through the heart of a concrete jungle, often

touching the lower canopies where the saddest of people lived.

Once in a while, when the moist wind blew from the poisoned

river, the windchime in her balcony produced a tinkling sound

that reminded me of a lost church bell that tried to find the

cathedral every dusk.

I was but an admirer of curly hair and beautiful eyes. Not the ones

that I saw in daylight, chirpy and expressive, neatly tucked into

the facade of school uniform. My rendezvous with them were

during sudden summer norwesters, when the balcony was a

bedouin finally finding the glimpse of an oasis. She used to sit

there with her arms stretched open, and all my wishes used to

pour on her. During power cuts, when the entire world only saw

through greenish glows from fireflies, she sat there in the cement

steps of the balcony and hummed tunes unknown. My entire

existence was trapped in those rambunctious curls, and the

mesmerizing eyes that hid beneath them.

Seasons changed and the city became sadder, finding solace in

talking cats and wise dogs. Every bird was leaving this nest and

big memorials were being erected for them. False war-heroes were

being lauded. Cars were becoming smaller, but the dense smoke

that they coughed out were getting blacker.


The curly hairs and doe eyes were still there, sometimes looking

at my helplessness and laughing, sometimes just ignoring my

universe altogether. By this time, I was a nightcrawler, addicted

to those sudden visions next door, loathing the mundaneness of

the day and the sunlight.

Then came the wildfire. On the night when the city was at its

quietest, a ferocious fire rose and razed it to the ground. People

killed other people, violent cries snubbed by the falling of

madness.

On that night I saw the eyes tremble with fear, the curly hairs

wild, and the face pale. I had been an introvert all my life, but that

night I had the courage of Achilles onto me as I pushed towards

her, trying to prove that I was a friendly light.

But when I had dragged myself and reached her, the flash of

lightning had shown me that whatever was left was devoid of any

warmth at all. She had fled, like all those other souls, to another

place – where my eyes won't catch her reading in the balcony.

Rivers of blood flowed through her body in all directions, and

looked in perfect harmony to my crazed mind.

The moist wind that rose that night was slowly undulating her

curly hair. Her eyes were still open, but the fear was gone. I had

sat by her, writing another poem, another of my scribbles about

her that made no sense in this world.

I loved curly hairs and beautiful eyes. Eons later, whenever I

heard windchimes on a silent night, I searched fervently for that

balcony, for that playful bubble of curly hair and beautiful eyes.

But they were never to be found. The city was a cruel maze, and

it trapped me forever. SLQ


Suvojit Banerjee is from India and the United States. His works

have been published in many Indian and International journals

and magazines and featured in several anthologies. He currently

works in a software company, and has worked as a lead

writer/reviewer for a technology website.

He observes, sometimes giving up consciousness in return. It is a

dangerous thing, this silent stalking of nostalgia, but he has a

maddening urge. He follows the trail, from decaying jetties to

swanky corporate buildings, picking up little breadcrumbs of

memories and then giving them their due place in white and

yellowed out papers.

He continues to juggle between poetry and prose, not deciding on

where his heart lies.


- The SLQ Review -

Title: What Possessed Me

Author: John Freeman

Publisher: Worple Press

ISBN: 978-1-905208-36-4

Pages: 136 Pages

Reviewer: MANDY PANNETT

Price: £10.00

There are various sections in What Possessed Me with similar

themes at the heart of them all – memories, journeys, encounters,

joys and sorrows in life and landscape, insights of a visionary

nature, moments of epiphany.

Memories predominate in the first section with reminiscences on

parents, childhood, homes and family life, school days and

friendship. I particularly like the details in My Grandfather’s Hat

where, in hindsight, the grandfather’s character assumes a larger

than life, significant quality. He is ‘his own archbishop’ as he

leaves the house and makes the two front steps ‘more like a

staircase in a stately home’ as he holds on to ‘a handrail like a

sceptre’. There is affection and humour as well in New Year’s Eva

where the poet’s mother has the ability to get through electric

kettles ‘faster than other people /get through packets of biscuits or

cigarettes.’ One of the strongest and most poignant poems in this

section is Brought to Mind where the author remembers singing

Auld Lang Syne with his parents and ‘Dad gripped so tight it

hurt./He might as well have said in words, if I/press this hard

can’t your longer future flow/into mine? I’m terrified. Keep me

alive./If you can’t, at least keep me in memory./This may be the

last year I shall see in.’ A moving poem among many about

remembering which seems to me to be summed up in the last line

of The Exchange by the Stile: ‘We live in so much more than just the

present.’


A couple of poems in the first section of What Possessed Me

parallel this theme. Paintings, especially those that show people

or events, catch and pin down specific moments just as memory

does. I love Interior with Red Linoleum where the poet’s mother,

‘bending intently over the step’, resembles a figure in a Dutch

interior although the flooring is lino and is ‘a pinkish red flecked

with white/I’ve seen nowhere else’. Peasant Girl Hanging Clothes to

Dry has this same quality of focused intensity, a shared epiphany,

where ‘the sharp air and sunlight outside’ give the girl a feeling

‘of being twice as alive as normal’ and of becoming ‘complete’.

Poems, in the second section of What Possessed Me, take us on

journeys – specific ones to France and Hampshire but also life

journeys though day and night, seasons and time, landscapes

filled with light and the singing of birds including swallows,

seagulls, magpies, blackbirds and robins. Keats’ nightingale is

heard as the poet cycles across London early one morning and he

is reminded of Delius’s On Hearing The First Cuckoo In Spring when

memories of school recall a boy named Poupard repeating his

own two-phrase name as well as that of the chiff-chaff: chiff-chaff,

Pou-pard, chiff-chaff’. Swallows that ‘explode out of nowhere’ to

silhouette ‘their slink grace’ on stave-like telegraph wires, bring

music ‘into the darkness/ of memory’ (Swallows) and an overheard

fiddler in Sea Air makes ‘a music of the land, the sea, the

sky/joining blood to spirit, forever to now’, an experience that is

welcome and ‘transformative’.

Among my favourite poems in this beautiful collection are several

about Edward Thomas and the Hampshire landscape where, John

Freeman writes, he feels ‘borrowed’ by the earlier poet in order to

share and express his vision. Possibly the most memorable piece

in this sequence is A First Visit to Steep where a long walk and visit

to local landmarks has a backcloth of war and death – that of

Edward Thomas himself but there is also a funeral taking place in


the church and on the morning news there has been a report of

‘six young soldiers/killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan’.

This more sombre note continues in the third section where recent

memories and encounters include anxieties about health and fear

of ‘the onset of the winter of the brain’. There are hospital visits,

concerns about overcrowding and care of the aged, the death of

friends. Giving Up The Keys is about the nostalgia of retirement

and feelings that contain both loss and acceptance in letting go, in

using a key ‘for the last time’.

Visions of Llandaff is the next, short section of What Possessed Me

and is imbued with landscape and nature in all its forms. Birds

are here, of course, ‘going on singing’, but insects get their turn

such as those ‘halfway/to wasps in size but softer, quieter,/like a

ladder of angels ascending/and descending’. How welcome they

are, says John Freeman, ‘as part of the livingness of the world’.

There is sycamore growth as well, young leaves ‘open and

opening’,/not yet full-sized and more russet than green’ and there

is ‘white water’, bright sun, a cathedral to visit and the whole

‘puddled earth’ to rejoice in.

What Possessed Me is a visionary collection. There are shadows

as well as light but there is an overwhelming sense of

transformation and the connection of things in the

‘undeniable/fellowship, whatever it means, of being.’ (Morning in

the Parc Lefèvre). One passage that illustrates this quality is from

the last section, Attic Interlude. They are the concluding lines of the

collection and need to be quoted in full:

We came out at last from Terminal 5

at six in the evening BST, to face

a fierce cold easterly and blinding glare

from the westering sun. When we’d found the car,

and you were sitting inside already,


I called you out to see, close by, a skylark

dipping and rising, singing his skylark song

against a daylight moon more than half full,

and as we gazed and listened the bird rose,

still singing, and became a dot and then,

though we were watching very carefully,

suddenly was nowhere to be seen, though still

the clear, enchanting music fell on us.


- The SLQ Review –

‘Estuary’ CD of Music and Poetry

Poems by Sean Street

Music composed by Neil Campbell

Voice- Perri Alleyne-Hughes

Reviewer: MANDY PANNETT

‘We are never far from the water’ is a comment in the CD’s notes

and we, as listeners, are brought even closer, sharing the

movement of many tides including those of Liverpool, Donegal,

San Francisco, Essex, Newfoundland and Novia Scotia.

Everything in this collaboration connects. We are given poetry,

instrumental music, spoken and singing voices, soundscapes that

evoke the ‘diminishing longing’ of memories and dreams. Music

in ‘Estuary’ brings a ‘sea wash’ of moods, atmospheric and

melodic, patterning the sound of falling rain, distant thunder, the

heartbeat. On occasions the tone is restless and fast, elsewhere the

mood is soft, slow, elegiac. High notes sustain a feeling of light,

almost appear to sing words although the phrase itself is

wordless.

Estuary is about ‘the singing of sounds’, is sound. There is the

soundscape of curlew, plover, redshank, seagull, fulmar and

razor bill – but equally there are air waves, signals and high

frequencies, the ‘cold poetry of information’ in fragments of

transmissions and the shipping forecasts which are fragmented

and faintly heard.

Throughout there is a feeling of ritual, a sense of ‘first light at

communion time’, of ‘prayer compressed by the air’s change’. We

journey through seasons, elements, times of day and night,

changes of weather where fog ‘soaks the loudest sound’ and


where, after the singing ‘that had not foreseen silence’, all that is

left behind is ‘only fog’ and ‘only silence’.

There are many tides in Estuary. Physical ones across continents

and depths that are beyond tides where one may ‘see as a fish

sees’ or sink ‘below drowning’. There are the tides of symbolism,

the ‘invisibles tides’ of life and death where the hospital ward

‘dusks’ and later ‘the monitor sings on solo’ about ‘the routine of

mortality’. There are tides that are narrative – ‘every name’s a

story’, says the poet, ‘but weathers change, tides overwrite and

meanings ebb.’ Finally there is tide as memory, incoming and

outgoing, the sea wash of departures but also of return. Three of

the tracks on the CD have the adjective ‘Redux’ which contains

the idea of bringing something back, of safety and good fortune.


The Emigré Engineer, Paris, 1926 (An extract from the unpublished novel

The Last Thing the Angel Said)

by

NICK SWEENEY

The Paris Witold Glushchushin knew was a place of terrible

truths, and of mishap, a place of unfortunate lives, and diasporas.

There were Greeks from the ashes of Smyrna, Armenians from all

over the ruined Ottoman lands, there were Jews from every place

in the world. There were Russian princesses flaunting their bodies

in can-can spectaculars, Ukrainian countesses peeling potatoes in

the bowels of grand hotels, and Hapsburg princes pulling rabbits

out of hats at salon parties, or playing trumpets in burlesque

shows, when not dueling in the Bois de Boulogne. It was a place

where new lives were sought, or where bitter revenge was forever

plotted.

“Krasski has disappeared,” the Paris exiles crowed, and

their eyes gleamed. “No longer exists.” They claimed to

remember this Krasski fellow as a regular joe. “Though I always

knew he had a streak of ambition,” some affirmed. “And of

malice,” added others. They remembered him when he was a

clerk at some ministry, remembered him when he feared God,

kissed icons in church. Remembered him then when he became a

Red, a political officer, whatever that was. “He kissed their boots

instead,” they laughed. “And now he’s gone. And that’s what will

happen to all of them. They’ll all kill one another. And then we

can go home.”

The émigrés read voraciously about their oppressors, read

the official communiqués, and then between the lines. They

sought gossip and rumor, and the sensational tales brought out of

the Soviet Union from recent arrivals. Witold had too much of

village Galicia about him still, and was in any case too young to

remember any of these temporary Soviet bigshots in their pre-


revolutionary careers. Nor would he have cared to. They were

people he preferred not to think about at all.

He thought of the Red Guard looter whose eye he had shot

out in a village storeroom, before stealing his Nagant revolver, his

overcoat and, after a glance at the man’s muddy boots, the

diamonds he’d cached in a tin of shoe polish. That one used up all

the thinking he was likely to do about those purveyors of dreams

and cruelties.

Paris was a place of rumors, which suited a particular type

of émigré, one who deep down enjoyed basking in intrigues and

paranoia. There were rumors of riches, beloved family jewels for

sale at knockdown prices, of stupendous bargains looted from

mansions. There were rumors too of bogus aristocrats on the

prowl, eyes out for the con, channeling money raised to help the

Whites liberate Mother Russia into financing their Monte Carlo

lifestyles. Witold saw them coming a mile off, avoided them just

as he avoided the Soviet agents.

Imagining those all-seeing agents everywhere, the exiles

wandered down Paris boulevards to secret meetings in side

streets. What they did at them, mainly, was get drunk and

reminisce about the boulevards of Petersburg, Lviv, Moscow,

Odessa, Minsk, Vilnius, Chisinau and any old town they’d hailed

from. “Home,” they toasted tearfully.

They were kidding themselves, Witold knew, but had

learned not to say so. They would never go home. Some of them

had gotten so used to the living martyrdom of exile that they

would have been very out of sorts at home. The truth of their

predicament, and it was truly terrible, he saw, was that they loved

their exile too much to give it up. The nostalgia they felt for their

homes conveniently missed out the poverty, the backwardness,

the priests on your neck with their beery beardy breath, the

sporadic electricity, the cold, the bad diet, all of it. They longed for

the kvass, the vodka, the songs, but they could recreate all of them

in Paris if they wanted to. And they did, after filing in and out of


their churches saying prayers for the souls of the Tsar and Tsarina

and their many unblessed children. They kissed their icons,

beatified, righteous.

They threw a party when Lenin died. “Things will change,”

they roared, in a collective euphoric hysteria. In the silences in

between, some warned, “No. Trotsky will take over. He’s a beast

of a man.” Others said, “No. It will be Stalin. And he is worse even

than Trotsky.” The Georgians among them begged to differ,

violently. “Stalin is a Georgian,” they reminded everybody. “And

we Georgians love life.” Stalin, they promised, would flood the

Soviet Union with wine, song, cheese and cake. To a second of

silence, followed quickly by thrown bottles, glasses, shoes and

fists, the Georgians toasted the man with the mustache.

Witold cared about none of it. The thing to do, he knew, was

to junk all that homeland business and become a citizen of

someplace else. France was a good enough place to start. Hating

the French had become a favorite exile pastime, but only until the

cops made a swoop and deported them back to the Soviets, to

freezing hard labor in camps or to nine grams of lead in the backs

of their heads. Then they loved the French all over again, too late.

Witold decided that either love or hatred for the admittedly not

very likeable French was too strong an emotion. He was neutral

about them, he was affable with them, he was… philosophical,

seeking out the good ones, spurning the bad.

At least the French seemed impervious to the rumblings

of more revolutions happening in Europe, all to do with men in

shirts of various hues. Over in Italy they wore black, while brown

was the favored color in Germany. The French weren’t having any

of that. They would go on, eating their overrated food, drinking

their sometimes dreadful wine, making their often hysterical

Latin-style love, and living their lives without murderous men in

shirts roaming their streets and telling them what to do. Or, at

least, they would for a while.


Witold was relatively content in Paris. He repaired

bicycles and car engines, set dying watches and clocks into motion

again, brought radios back to life. He sharpened knives. He

machined parts for any gizmo imaginable. He fitted doors,

painted the apartments of the central Paris middle classes, stole

electricity and diverted it for the poorer classes. He worked in a

factory in Aubervilliers, making sleeping bags for the French

army, to keep them warm on their Maginot Line. He slaved as a

vegetable carrier at the markets at Les Halles. He waited tables in

not-so-good restaurants, and washed dishes in those where he

wouldn’t even be allowed in to wait tables.

When he could, he joined the city’s night-time crowds in

the dance halls and watched bike races in the streets and at the

velodromes. He sometimes thought about the bike ride he’d done,

tracing a line in his head from the flames engulfing Galicia and

Poland to the relative quiet of Prague, and then to Paris, his heart

beating out a mighty pulse. He remembered that he had left

Galicia a boy and come to Paris a man, the blood of other people’s

wars and revolutions on his hands.

He made cautious friendships in Paris, pursued cautious,

doomed affairs with showgirls and store assistants, secretaries

and the daughters of concierges. These affairs were heartbreaking

and traumatizing to Witold only because, try as he may, he was

unable to be heartbroken or traumatized by them.

If he could, he avoided the society of the exiles, as many

different peoples as there were under the sway of the Soviets. He

mostly couldn’t. He had suffered enough of their histrionics,

though, both at home and in Paris, and joined them in their wish

that they could go home. He’d have bought them their tickets if

he could.

Those people had forced him into murder, he never forgot.

They had stripped him of the status of a civilized man, he thought

savagely, at least one time a day. They had unmasked him. Not a


day went by for Witold without him seeing the carnage their wars

had brought to him.

He managed to commit murder only once in Paris. It was

remarkable, really, as there were plenty of people crying out to be

murdered. It was an accident. The victim, an ageing and pathetic

lifter who went by the name of Riko, tried to steal Witold’s billfold

in a crowded dancehall foyer at chucking-out time, full of people

with their overcoats half-on and half-off. Witold had punched him

hard on the temple, snatched his billfold back indignantly and

lifted an admonishing finger to a face that had, to Witold’s

appalled consternation, switched off, eyes seeing only an eternal

nothingness. He had allowed an overcoat-seeking couple to

squeeze into the space he vacated, leaving Riko lolling and

leaning, and headed for the doors. He’d reached the street just as

a woman’s scream pierced the hubbub.

So passed Witold’s life among the exiles around the

Boulevard Sebastopol; he was with them, but not of them. He had

come to like France, and yet knew deep down that his heart, and

the rest of him, belonged someplace else. Even in the peace of

post-war France, Witold could see that Europeans were hell-bent

on destroying themselves.

He came across the ID card of a dissolute Belgian who had

managed to scatter most of his belongings throughout the quarter

before getting himself stabbed, then dying, poisoned by a filthy

coat button forced into his wound by the knife. Witold spent a lot

of money to engage the best forger in town, a Jew name of

Solokov, to furnish him with a doctored version of the Belgian’s

merchant mariner’s license. Solokov was later press-ganged into

the Nazis’ audacious plot to manufacture phony British

banknotes in an attempt to ruin the British wartime economy, and

survived to tell the tale and spend some of the money. Witold

never forgot him.

His belongings reduced to a change of clothes, a pouch full

of liberated diamonds and a Nagant pistol, Witold took to the


ocean. He was confident that at least some of the workings of a

ship’s engines would be familiar to him. He would be spending a

lot of time among them, he guessed, and the thought filled him

with darkness for a second. He paused on the gangplank in Le

Havre to take a last look at the daylight, and then felt a wave of

happiness wash through him. He walked on, a Belgian, but

aiming to shed his European skin, all the nationalities that

summed up the chaos and destruction of Europe, and become an

American. SLQ


Why, Delilah?

A play by

DIANA POWELL

Cast:

DELILAH 1 (Biblical)

DELILAH 2 (Sixties-style) – voluptuous, but disheveled.

The two women are sitting at a plain wooden table, with a knife

embedded in it, between them. The play opens to the strains of Tom

Jones’s ‘Delilah’ in the background.

Delilah 2: (tapping her fingers on the table in time to the music, and

humming.) Why, why…why? He asked it so many times, but

wouldn’t wait for the answer. Because there was one – there

always is. Another side to the story. My side. But he didn’t want

to know. Nobody wants to know. Nobody cares. Nobody cares

that he knew what I was like, that he knew I was no good for him.

I never pretended otherwise! I never said any of that ‘you are the

only one for me’ kind of thing. ‘I love you!’ ‘I want to spend the

rest of my life with you!’ No, none of it. I wasn’t that sort of

woman. But still he wanted me all to himself, and just wouldn’t

listen when I said it was never going to be that way.

So, I started playing around and getting careless – almost on

purpose. I wanted him to find out. I’m not stupid, after all – to

leave the lights on behind a thin blind. I thought ‘if he sees us,

he’ll get the message. And he’ll either accept how it is, or we’ll

break up.’ I just wasn’t expecting him to kill me.

Delilah 1: Are you sure?


Delilah 2: Am I sure of what?

Delilah 1: That that’s the reason? That that’s the answer to the

‘why’? Shouldn’t it be, rather, ‘Why ‘Delilah’?’

Delilah 2: What d’you mean?

Delilah 1: You were called ‘Delilah’. You were called after me.

Why would any parent call their baby-daughter that? They were

asking for trouble. What else was going to happen to you? What

else were you going to do but grow up a slut, and betray a man?

With that name, it was written in the stars; it was your destiny!

Delilah 2: Oh, I don’t know… I always thought it was rather a

pretty name…

Delilah 1: Pretty? You’re joking, of course!

Delilah 2: …and it’s quite popular – although more in America

than here. A ranking of 154, I heard somewhere. 529 per million

babies, at its peak. And it’s got some nice meanings. ‘Delicate’.

‘Delight’. The Puritans…

Delilah 1: Yes, and it’s got some not-so-nice ones, as well. Weak,

poor. And let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. To tease, to flirt.

Seductive. Queen of the Night. Whatever it started out as, that’s

what it turned into. And all because of me! I am a definition! I

am in the Thesaurus! A loose woman; femme fatale; temptress –

a ‘Delilah’!

Delilah 2: Floozy; flirt; tart; easy lay…

Delilah 1: You see! What hope did you have? You got labelled;

you got burdened with me. You are what you are because of me.

You had no choice.


Delilah 2: So, what about you then? If you were the first, it can’t

have been the same. You must have had options. What were your

reasons for doing what you did? What was your ‘why?’

Delilah 1: Why, why, why? People think it’s all so simple. And

it is in one way. Money, of course, 1100 pieces of silver from each

Philistine leader. So much money, to run through my fingers, to

buy jewels and dresses, to go where I wanted. That’s why I

betrayed Samson – to get rich. An easy enough decision to make

- I didn’t love him, after all. And he didn’t love me, though the

Bible uses the word. He lusted after me, and what he wanted, he

got. How could anyone refuse the strongest man in the world?

True, in the beginning, I think I felt flattered – proud, even – that

such a powerful man had chosen me. But I didn’t love him – or I

loved money more. You could say that the Philistines made me

an offer I couldn’t refuse. Yes, as simple as that! Except it’s not…

Delilah 2: What are you saying?

Delilah 1: Think about it! Think about who was really in charge!

We’re talking about control, here…

Delilah 2: Well, it was like that for me, too, you know. All that

‘I was his woman.’ Then that he was my slave. Whichever way

you look at it, we were locked in a battle for supremacy.

Master/mistress – it’s true of so many couples. It’s about

ownership, who has the power. Not love, not lust, even, but who

has the control – which, by his own admission, my guy lost

completely.

Delilah 1: You think I’m talking about Samson, here. And, yes,

perhaps there was something of that in it all. My bid for power!

My revenge for having to be with him! (So perhaps not just about

the money!) I made a fool out of him! Not that it was hard – he


was quite stupid, really. I mean, the way I kept on asking him to

divulge the secret of his strength to me? And each time he ‘told’

me, the Philistines appeared! Did he think that was a coincidence?

Three times? But then, men are more stupid than women. Look

at the Philistines – they let his hair grow back!

So, yes, it seems I won. That I used his desire for me, coupled with

my cunning, to defeat the great Samson. And off I went, with my

hundreds of pieces of silver, while Samson and the Philistines got

killed. Off I went, into quiet obscurity. Except I didn’t. Instead,

I went down in history, and there’s been nothing quiet about it at

all. As if it were all planned…

Delilah 2: Planned? How could it be planned? And why? (Why,

again, so many ‘whys?’)

Delilah 1: Don’t you see? I was no more than a puppet, played

by the Grand Master. No, not Samson! God! If anyone is to blame

for what happened, it is surely Him. I have said your fate was pre-

ordained. Well, isn’t it the same for all us? Aren’t we all just doing

whatever He wants? God wanted his particular religion to

flourish, and, for a while, Samson helped it along, with his

‘judging’ and killing a few of the unbelievers every now and then.

But there were still too many Philistines, so – how to get rid of

them on a grand scale? Get Samson really mad – get them to put

out his eyes and imprison him, and then he’ll go berserk and kill

even more. It says so in the Bible – in his death, he killed more

than in his life. Just what God wanted.

So…how to get all this to happen? Who to get to defeat him – this

man so strong that he could not be defeated? Shall it be some

other great warrior? Shall it be a whole army? Shall it be magic?

No! First of all, let’s put his strength in his hair (which is a laugh

in itself). And then, device how to get his hair cut off? ‘Oh, I

know, I know – a woman; let’s use a woman. Let’s kill two birds


with one stone here. Let’s turn it into one of those stories – yet

again – of a cunning, wicked woman. Make woman the ‘bad guy’,

like we did in the very beginning with Eve’. A tale for the Great

Patriarch, and all the lesser patriarchs who followed, to use for the

‘enlightenment’ of the men folk. ‘Leave women alone! No matter

how much you want one. Be chaste – or just use a harlot, if you

can’t. Don’t get involved, because this is what will happen if you

do! Trouble! Women are trouble! Women are man’s enemy.

Women are deceitful, mercenary, unfaithful, liars, manipulative,

plain evil. Best to keep them down, subservient, knowing their

place. And never listen to them – most of all, never listen to them,

or do what they ask!’

Delilah 2: But at least you survived, and had your money, and

your victory. And went off happily into the sunset…

Delilah 1: But I didn’t! Yes, the Bible never mentioned any more

of me – a ‘use and discard’ metaphor, surely. But I was already

tarnished. My name and what I had done went before me,

wherever I went. So, for all my beauty, charm and riches, I could

never get another man. And women didn’t want me around, for

fear of what I’d do to their husbands. So, I was hounded from

place to place. Rich, yes, but never happy. No peace, at all - then,

or since. Not even after I died and came to this place. Because the

myth had to be kept going; the moral message had to be plugged

away.

So, that’s why I became an eponym; why I became a motif for the

seductress; the traitorous harlot. The scarlet woman. Queen of

the strumpets!

Delilah 2: The prossie; the bitch; the slut. Scrubber, slapper,

anybody’s.


Delilah 1: …the painted whore! And, yes – painted I was!

Painting after painting, by some of the world’s greatest artists!

Rembrandt, Rubens! And sculpture; opera; film – so many films;

they still make them! All changing the story, to suit. I didn’t do

the cutting! The Philistines fetched a barber for the task, thinking

to do it properly, using a razor – yes, a razor! Not me, with a knife,

at all. But most people think that’s how it was, because of all those

false representations…

Delilah 2: …and because it’s far more dramatic that way. It

makes a better story. And gives you all the blame. ‘It’s all her.

It’s all Delilah.’

Delilah 1: And look how long it’s lasted. 1960 whatever – and

they still use my name for you - ‘Delilah’ for a slag in a song!

Delilah 2: And now we’re stuck here, for all eternity, caught in a

never-ending soundtrack of why, why, why!

Delilah 1: With no answer… Except, perhaps, one.

(They both put their hands on the knife.)

Delilah 2: A knife. A blade in the hand, significant for both of

us.

Delilah 1: Though different…

Delilah 2: Yes, different.

Delilah 1: Not a knife for me. And not in my hand.

Delilah 2: Well, not in my hand, either. His hand. And as soon

as I saw the knife in his hand, I knew that was it.


Delilah 1: There’s only one end to it all.

Delilah 2: Shall we?

They run their bare wrists gently along the blade.

Delilah 1: But it won’t really end it, will it? Not while they keep

painting those pictures…

Delilah 2: Not while they keep playing that song…

Ends with music of ‘Delilah’ fading away. SLQ


SENTINEL LITERARY QUARTERLY

Poetry Competition

This competition is for original,

previously unpublished poems in English

language, in any style, on any subject, up

to 50 lines long. The poems are always

judged anonymously by poets who are

accomplished in their own right.

Poets of any age, nationality, or gender

living in any part of the world are eligible

to enter.

Current Prizes:

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£20 x 3 (high commendation)

and £10 x 3 (commendation).

All winning and commended poems are

published in the print and online versions

of Sentinel Literary Quarterly.

Current Entry Fees:

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£11 (4 poems), £12 (5 poems),

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