CONTENTS VOL. 1, NO.

4
04 COLUMN
Editor’s Note
by Jessica Sequeira

05 FICTION
Shah Square from Night of Terror
by Hormuz Shahdadi, translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and
Rebecca Ruth Gould
11
POETRY
On Vanessa Bell
by Fran Fernández Arce
15
FICTION
Playas de la Boquilla
by Richard Gwyn
19
FICTION
Three Pieces
by Carlos Pintado, translated by Lawrence Schimel

24
FICTION
The Fishermen Live on Thin Strips of Spit
by Scott McCulloch

27 APHORISMS
Un-Time
by Christian Hubin, translated by Christopher Clifton

POETRY
Viva
by Lucia Senesi
34 POETRY
Five Poems
by Daniel Fraser

39 COLUMN
Pith & Self-Defeating
by Josh Rothes

43 COLUMN
Commitment to Chush
by Vik Shirley

48 COLUMN
Object Crushes
by A.V. Marraccini

FICTION
50
Always Somewhere Else
by Declan O’Driscoll

POETRY
52
Pockets
by Marcus Slease

POETRY
54 Continued Nocture
by Kathleen Tankersley Young

POETRY
57 Poems
by Rocío Iglesias
62 INTERVIEW
Man is a Rational[izing] Animal: A Conversation with
Douglas Luman
by Joshua Rothes
67
POETRY
Poems from B-Flat Clarinet Fingering Chart
by Ryan Mihaly
74
POETRY
Six Prose Poems
by Ian Seed
80
POETRY
Two Poems
by Tessa Berring & Kathrine Sowerby
85
POETRY
99Tc
by Eric Williams
92
POETRY
Three Poems
by József Szabó

[REDUCTIVE GENRE TAG]

excerpt from [Title]
by [name of author]

Editor, Jessica Sequeira

Designer, Joshua Rothes
Typeset in Bernina Sans and Chronicle
All copyrights rest with their respective authors unless otherwise noted.
 Editor’s Note by Jessica Sequeira

D on’t ask what befell the madman when spring came / just look what befell the wise men in this
season, wrote Jagan Nath Azad. And thus after one year, an arbitrary division of time (for there
are arbitrary divisions of time, as there are of land, a line drawn with semi-permanent marker and
straight edge over a map of knotted topographies), it is worth paying graceful heed to this calendar,
to ask in what ways we have made a dwelling in this place that defies dwelling, this firmament. For
homes are not given, and we must make them through actions, both through repeated rites and
through acts of creativity. The firmament itself is something we cannot, indeed, do not want to
define, that we prefer to keep as an open space for friendship or freedom of being. A space we will
forever long for, in infinite and uncertain separation. Intentional precariousness. We are nomads
and err. And this distance from definition and certainty, this doubt, gives us strength. Art, despite
and because of everything. With every issue, an ongoing process of making and doing, we confirm
and reiterate our faith that all will cohere, that individual elements will come together, temporary
and real. With technique, with practice. But where is the firmament? These lines of writing, this ink
on paper? Perhaps that, or perhaps the lines of writing are slatted blinds you can look beyond, into
the blankness of another being. Perhaps you are already on the other side.

Without ceasing to speak. A silence reborn after necessary time apart, as conversation. A firmament
is not land, you cannot bury your dead or plant things here. Yet there are no borders either. It is
provisional, an ethic. A place for selves to perform, create new selves. Speaking as they wish to speak
today. Not as an escape from the world, but as a plunge into it. We provide this (and you can choose
whether or not to participate, whether to skip forward, whether to listen to this voice on the first
page). Sometimes there is an overflowing feeling in the heart and you sit and listen to the humming
noise of the refrigerator, traffic, insects. Nearby me there is a pond that changes its flora and fauna
every season, a soil kind to otters, snakes, wasps, sparrows. This firmament is also a home to the
flora and fauna who choose to inhabit it, and builds traditions that can be continued or changed over
time. A matter of patience! And love for something like (exact words fail me) an infinite generosity.
Mir Taqi Mir in his Remembrances (tr. C.M. Naim) says: "Now fires of enmity blaze on both sides,
and the common people burn like dry leaves and twigs. Let us see what appears from behind the veil
of the Unseen." He says: "The turning heavens dragged many a man through a tide of blood, and for
many the earth became too narrow a place." Yet the same man is able to write these couplets:

I compose a line every once in a while—

That is all that happens in my world.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Shah Square
(Night of Terror)
by Hormuz Shahdadi
translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian
and Rebecca Ruth Gould

Hormuz Shahdadi is a retired political scientist who emigrated to the US after the
Iranian revolution of 1979 and received his PhD from MIT in 1982. He taught political
science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, until his retirement in 2016.

Kayvan Tahmasebian is a poet, translator, literary critic, and the author of Isfahan’s
Mold (2016) and Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (2019). His poetry was a finalist
for The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts in 2017. With
Rebecca Ruth Gould, he is co-translator of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi
(The Operating System, 2019).

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Beautiful English (2021)
and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (2016). She has translated many
books from Persian and Georgian, including After Tomorrow the Days Disappear
(2016) and, with Kayvan Tahmasebian, High Tide of the Eyes (2019). A Pushcart
Prize nominee, she was awarded the Creative Writing New Zealand Flash Fiction
Competition prize in 2019.

5
Hormuz Shahdadi tr. Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould

S
hah Square is less crowded in the afternoons. I sit on the marble
slab at the threshold of Shah Mosque. A bus stops. Old, perfumed,
and colourful creatures pour out of the bus. Each carries a camera
in their hands or on their shoulders. The click of the shutter when they
take photos echoes in my ear. A deadly ray is concealed in their cameras:
when they aim at the tiles with their cameras, it shoots out of their
lenses and penetrates the tiles. Withers the tiles. The tiles grow pale.
With the fingertip on the trigger, a penetrating ray shatters the tiles. At
the blink of an eye, it burns and kills all the kufi and nastaliq script, and
all the peacock, paisley, flower buds, and termeh patterns. A woman
appears opposite me, stands, bends, kneels, shifts back and forth, and
constantly, stubbornly, shoots with her camera. Her white hair is
braided and she wears a short-sleeved shirt. Her freckled skin is
indistinct from the small florals on her shirt, and the golden arms of her
glasses hang by a chain from her wrinkled neck, below her double chin.
She must have blush on her cheeks, hidden behind her weapon. These
colourful creatures are and are not Greek, Arab, Turk, Moghul, and
Afghan. Can’t you see? They won’t stop massacring for a moment. The
shop owners, silent men and women, women wrapped in their veils,
come and go. For an instant, my body merges with the stone on which
I’m sitting. I become part of this history that has been turned into a
decorative gift. I become part of this immense building that has now
exposed herself, naked and disgraced, to the scrutiny of shameless eyes.
I become part of the body of this old woman with rouge on her cheeks,
having gone everywhere, and been touched by everyone. I become a
brick, a dust of this temple, now that it is deserted. It’s always deserted.
An architect, many years ago, arranged the small tiles together, night
and day, piece by piece. A calligrapher, a painter, a potter, a tiler, and a
creator — no, calligraphers, painters, potters, tilers, architects, and
creators — all, night and day, patiently thought, planned, wrote, mixed
clay and dust and dye, cut, moulded, heated, amorously,
enthusiastically, and magically mounted tiles on the architect’s and
builder’s work, shaped dust and clay, recreated the verses of the Qur’an
on the expanse of the sky with dye and clay, manifested the calligraphic
twists and turns and nuanced designs in skilfully assembled tiles: they
have created a humanity that nature cannot surpass; a form that cannot

6
 Vol. 1, No. 4

be found in the moulds of dust and clay and stone; an order missing
from nature’s chaos; colours that flourish only in the human
imagination; designs only imaginable in the creative mind. They have
escaped the chaos of their surroundings by creating a geometrical and
mathematical order. They have surpassed nothingness and decay by
creating fixed colours and patterns and lines. They have retold the
magnificence of the rebellious creative human being in ordered lines
and designs. Every corner of this temple is a dusty demonstration of the
creative mind. A mind in whose achievements we take pride in and
boast of. We, who can’t fill the eternal void of this space with our
presence. We, who are strangers in our own homes. We, who have
disrespected our habitations: our presence reveals the emptiness of our
homes. I have heard that they once played polo in this square. Perhaps
in the place of the muddy pool now in the centre, there was a ground
covered all over with silt. Perhaps none of these has ever been there:
these half-desiccated grimy trees, these broken iron fences, this asphalt
pavement full of trash, motor oil, empty cigarette packs, chewed gum,
and these handicraft stores with their ridiculous metalwork, wrought by
hands unfamiliar with the engravings hanging on their walls. Perhaps
on a corner of the square there once stood a horse, a carriage, or a cart.
Perhaps the square has always been a flat melancholic landscape, as in
miniatures: two small stone poles on two sides of the rectangular
ground. Above, a wooden divan is positioned on the toranj borders of
the square, drawn straight and without any curves by the painter’s hand.
On the divan, a tablecloth is spread with a footed dish filled with apples,
pears and grapes. On both sides of the dish are two crystal carafes,
symmetrically painted. The painter has seated the sultan on pillows on
the divan. He is a man with Mongol eyes and a long moustache, with a
turban on his head. The servants stand on both sides of the divan,
behind the sultan. With folded arms, without eyes, ears, or faces. Their
heads are covered beneath their big turbans. The male beloveds are fat,
big-bellied, bald, and without turbans. The saqi is a curved line that
turns around, twists, slides in circles. The saqi is an elusive striding
ghost with a cup in his hands, bare chested and drunk, offering wine to
the man lying on the pillows. The sultan feigns oblivion. His bored eyes
look at the ground and at the horses. The horses are robust. Their

7
Hormuz Shahdadi tr. Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould

harnesses are golden. Their hoofs and their cannons are lean. Their
thighs are muscular. Their muzzles are long and thin, like foxes. Their
manes are thick and the artist has tried to distinguish every single hair
of the mane. Men in boots with polo sticks in their hands hover partly
raised over or hanging from their saddles. The mallet is a long stick with
a sickle-like tip. The hovering rider snatches a small ball by the sickle’s
crescent as he grasps the saddle. The polo ball lingers in mid-air.
Painters did not usually paint the guards. Or if they have painted, we are
unfamiliar with their gestures and our unfamiliar eyes cannot recognize
the guards and soldiers. Perhaps a painter has secretly depicted the
cannibal servants too. Who knows? The painter would be so terrified
that he would have to swallow the image, so that no one would see it.
There must have been many portraits of the courtiers and the ruler’s
sons. However, when their luck turned against them, when the king
ordered their beheading or blinding, the painters had to burn the
images or cover them in plaster if they were inscribed on a wall. If a
portrait was not doomed to these fates, its destruction would be ordered
by the next king. Sometimes, you can see a painting of a polo game with
a skull painted in place of the ball. Certainly, Shah Abbas would not
deprive himself of such pleasure! Horse riders, thirsty for power and
eager to serve the King, would take the severed head from the hands of
His Majesty and play with it in the field. The polo player must have been
pleased by it too. Both sultan and the rider were immersed in this
thrilling scene. None of the painters ever painted ordinary folks.
Ordinary people were happy with their own legends. Elderly women in
Isfahan still recount that the sultan appeared in the guise of a poor man
every night. Everyone had heard that he had been seen on the street.
Everyone had heard that the palace has an underground tunnel into
which the king would vanish at night and go wherever in the city he
liked. They knew that. Or they had to believe that. Suddenly, a dervish in
dirty clothes appears and witnesses a scene of oppression. The next day,
the oppressor is cut in two. So, the nightly wanderer is present
everywhere, like God. He is the seer-of-the-invisible-and-the-secret.
The wandering dervish appears every time everywhere. In a hole, in a
pit, in ruins, at a gate, in a caravanserai, in a graveyard, in a mosque, in a
house. Everywhere, in all homes. He will know everything. He will know

8
 Vol. 1, No. 4

every plot. He will drown the plotter in boiling water. In this way, the
legend serves two opposing functions and the dervish kills two birds
with one stone: the oppressed are hopeful that one night the nightly
wanderer will arrive to punish the oppressor and the rebel lives in fear
that one night the guards will inform the king of his plot. In this way, the
oppressed naively believes that a righteous dervish is seeking him and if
he cannot find him, it is because of the corrupt courtiers. The rebel lives
in constant fear.
Now, at the threshold of the palace of the wandering dervish-
sultan, tourists stand, overlooking the square from the high terrace
of Ali Qapu Palace. They are inheritors. Shah Abbas was the first king
who permitted the Portuguese to enter Iran. It is written that he was
a master of foreign affairs. Perhaps one of these people standing on
the terrace is Portuguese. Or perhaps, American. When Mr. Jones
returns to Boston, Massachusetts, his grandsons and great-grandsons
gather round him to see the photos he has taken of the Shah Mosque
and Square. Photos of weird creatures who live outside of history. The
children who live inside history are amazed. Did you see the camels in
the streets, grandpa? How was it? Who are these barbarians? Did you see
your doctor, grandpa? It is very dangerous in those areas. Everything is a
mess over there, a mess of diseases.

Glossary

divan: a long seat comprised of a mattress leading against a wall, similar to a sofa or couch

kufi: a calligraphic script known for its clear, unadorned lines, dating back pre-Islamic
times, popular in the Hejaz

nastaliq: a calligraphic script known for its curvy lines, popular in the eastern lands of the
Islamic world

saqi: cup-bearer who served wine to the king and other members of the court

termeh: a type of handwoven cloth, mainly produced in Isfahan

toranj: an Islamic Iranian design used in illuminating the Quran, on carpets, mosque tiles,
and clothes

9
 On Vanessa Bell
by Fran Fernández Arce

Fran Fernández Arce is a Chilean poet currently living in Suffolk, England.

She enjoys writing about art, language, and the weather outside her window.
She can be found talking about these topics as @dylanblue3 on Twitter.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

T
he seconds in our day are dispersed
across your everyday beauties.
These pictures I contemplate, the picture I become
alongside you and your brushed touches, I miss them
even though I never knew them. All this while in your purse
you keep the seeds of oranges and lemons.

Paint this, I ask you. And the wavings of your

fingers conduct me across the vault of your orchestra: paintbrushes
thickened with congealed acrylics, oil jars clinking
against one another, watercolour dust bowls floating in the air,
easels, pallets, intoxicating varnishes.
You paint me like music, like a chryselephantine
melody of moods and colours. And your voice sings
with ivory and gold. Paint me a portrait
that is an outpouring of marigolds. I will not go
until it is done. I will await quietly by the corners of your frame,
engulfed under a million flowers of golden petals and ivory stems.

11
 Playas de la Boquilla
by Richard Gwyn

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator, based in Wales and Catalunya. ‘Playas de la
Boquilla’ is from his forthcoming travel memoir, Ambassador of Nowhere. Richard’s
blog, published under his alias of Ricardo Blanco, can be found at richardgwyn.me.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

T
he Tourist (A) is perturbed by the amount of dissembling he has
to indulge in when confronted by awkward situations. He defines
awkward situations as those times when he is accommodating to
someone else’s agenda rather than following his own. This happens more
often than he would like, even when he is alone.
At Playas de la Boquilla — a strip of coast near Cartagena once
occupied by fishing hamlets, now uprooted and scattered to the winds to
make way for luxury hotels — A is accosted by B, tall, wiry and knobbly-
kneed. A is not looking for distractions, even though at some point he will
be seeking out food. And there’s the rub. The restaurant recommended in
his guidebook — actually a palm thatch shack — is not yet open, and B, who
is painfully persistent, has started his pitch by telling A he will provide him
with a lunch of fresh seafood and rice.
I am a fisherman. Langoustine, crab, fresh fish. All fresh. I dive for
lobster.
B has decided to speak in pidgin Spanish, perhaps because he thinks
that A will understand him more easily. In this respect, B believes that
tourists resemble children or domestic animals, and should be spoken to
slowly and emphatically.
B tells A that he has a canoe and can take A for a ride through the
mangrove swamps, the very same mangrove swamps, A recalls, that were
used in the film adaptation of a story by García Márquez, but he forgets
which.
I will take you in my canoe, says B, and you will look at the birds.
A knows from the guidebook — or thinks he might know, as the
guidebook has already coughed up several inaccuracies — that these
particular mangrove swamps are home to, amongst other birds, Wilson’s
plover, red-knot, gull-billed and large-billed terns; grey kingbird, lesser
kiskadee, cattle tyrant, Wilson’s phalarope, collared plover, semi-palmated
sandpiper, solitary sandpiper, semi-palmated plover; black, least and
brown-throated parakeet; Louisiana and little blue herons, reddish egret
and ringed kingfisher.
Who, A wonders, was Wilson?
Although ornithology is not B’s strength, he feels he should offer some
examples of the birds to be seen hereabouts. Seagulls, he suggests, and
falters. Storks.
He’s making an effort, A thinks, but B doesn’t know shit about birds,
nor does he care for them much. After all, as a fisherman (if indeed he is

13
Richard Gwyn

a fisherman) they are his direct competitors. But B does know that other
tourists come to see the birds, so why shouldn’t this one.
A does not see any other tourists on the beach. He feels like the only
tourist in Colombia. No, no, says B. Many tourists here. Italy, Spain,
gringos. He points to a half-finished house back from the beach, next to
a couple of new builds. This house people of Italy, that house people of
Spain. That house, gringos. B hawks, and gobs onto the sand.
At this point they are standing by a group of eight or nine dilapidated
wooden canoes. Three of them are waterlogged, and half-submerged
in the swamp. None of them looks seaworthy, or even waterproof. A is
thinking: I’ve known this man for five minutes and he wants me to get into
an antique wreck with him and paddle into the mangrove swamps, alone.
A isn’t overly concerned about the possible dangers of this. The guidebook
states that local fishermen offer canoe trips through the mangroves and
this man seems safe (though you can never tell) and besides, A is confident
(perhaps foolishly) that he can look after himself in most situations. No:
A’s problem is that he knows, if he sets off in a canoe with B, that although
he may enjoy the mangroves and the birds, he will be bored senseless
having to make light conversation of the kind currently being sampled
while B paddles them both, in a rotting canoe, across the swamp.
All of these canoes are mine, B says. All of them. You choose. You look
at birds. I paddle. I give you good price.
A decides it is time to speak out.
B, he says, using the fisherman’s name to assert his authority and
intent. I do not want to get into a canoe with you. I do not want to get into a
canoe with anyone, however agreeable the mangrove swamp. Nor do I wish
to watch the birds, however gracious they may be. I just want to take a walk
along the beach and later, when I return, I will eat the food that you have
promised to cook in your restaurant.
B thinks about this, brightening.
But, he says, you cannot walk down there (nodding away from the
thatched huts).
Why not?
It’s dangerous.
How is it dangerous?
The water. Down that way the water is dangerous. And the rocks. This
way (gesturing back towards the thatched huts) this way is not dangerous.
A mulls things over. He decides not to pursue the argument about why

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

the water might be safe in one direction, but not the other; he doesn’t want
to get into an argument about riptides.
B can scent victory. He points at a couple of canvas sunshades pitched
near the shoreline. These small shelters dot the entire length of the beach.
You walk, you rest, you swim, says B. I make you food for two o’clock.
A looks at the sunshades. The sun is not shining. It is not yet ten thirty
and it is still overcast, but hot. It is always hot; there are simply gradations
in the heat and its stickiness. He could sit in a chair under the shade and
read and write, which is what he intended to do by coming to the beach.
Which sunshade will you take? asks B.

***

Installed beneath the shade — one cannot be too careful, despite the
dense coverage of cloud — A picks up his book. A seabird, quite likely
one of Wilson’s, with a large crescent beak, hovers directly in front of
A, suspended high above the water, and then, in a sudden movement, it
twists and dives, twists again in mid-dive, hits the water slick as an arrow
and plunges beneath the waves, returning to the surface with a fish in its
bill.
After an hour or more, A cannot tell how long, since he is reading and
dozing, dozing and reading, a woman approaches. She has indigenous
features, is of indeterminate age, slim build and melancholy aspect. She
carries a plastic bucket. She tells A that she is going to massage his feet. A
refutes this, but the woman already has one of them between her hands
and is rubbing it gently. A really doesn’t want his feet massaged like some
lousy white colonial potentate, but nor does he wish to ruin the calm that
has settled on him by beginning another pointless wrangle. The woman
would not be offering to carry out this humiliating task unless she
needed the money, so A relaxes and allows her to massage his feet and
before long the two of them are talking. She has two sons, she says, one
is nine, and a good boy; he likes to study and wants to do well. The other,
who is thirteen, has fallen in with a bad lot and she fears that he will end
up doing something stupid and ruining his life. She used to make a living
giving massages at the luxury hotels down the beach, but now the hotels
have a franchise with a company that brings in their own masseurs, and
freelancers like her are not allowed to offer their services and they get
chased away by security men if they even try to enter the hotels, which

15
Richard Gwyn

incidentally are built on the land where she grew up and used to live, until
everyone was moved off the land so that the luxury hotels could be built.
She is a good woman, and A feels for her. She is poor and wants her nine-
year-old to do well, so wanders up and down the beach offering to massage
the feet of strangers. She has more or less given up on the thirteen-year-
old, who doesn’t want to study and has fallen in with a bad lot.
At two o’clock, B returns, and leads A to a table under the palm thatch,
next to a shack at the top of the beach. On the table is a plate laden with
seafood, fish and rice, just as promised. The pile of food is steaming and
next to the plate sits a bottle of warm beer. A pays the man what he asks
and eats his fill. Although it is delicious, he is forcing the food down. He
cannot stop thinking about the woman who massaged his feet, and he is
swamped by shame and remorse at the deep injustice of their respective
roles; he a tourist on her native patch, the land already taken from her by a
multinational hotel chain that offers holidays for other tourists who never
venture beyond the hotel compound; she, riven with worry at what might
become of her thirteen-year-old, who, A is certain, already has his life story
scripted for him. It involves petty crime, conscription into the ranks of
some gang or cartel, prison and an early grave. He can only hope the nine-
year-old makes good, but the odds must be stacked against him.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Three Pieces
by Carlos Pintado
translated by Lawrence Schimel

Carlos Pintado is an award-winning Cuban poet now based in Miami. He won

the Paz Prize from the National Poetry Series for his collection Nine Coins/Nueve
monedas, translated by Hilary Vaughn Dobel (Akashic Books, 2015).

Lawrence Schimel is an award-winning author and literary translator based in

Madrid, Spain. Recent poetry translations include Destruction of the Lover by Luis
Panini (Pleiades Press, 2019), Bomarzo by Elsa Cross (Shearsman, 2019), Impure
Acts by Ángelo Néstore (Indolent Books, 2019; finalist for the Thom Gunn Award),
I Offer My Heart as a Target by Johanny Vazquez Paz (Akashic, 2019; winner of the
Paz Prize from the National Poetry Series), Hatchet by Carmen Boullosa (White
Pine, 2020) and Niños: Poems for the Lost Children of Chile by María José Ferrada
(Eerdmans, 2021).

17
Carlos Pintado, Lawrence Schimel

The Calligrapher
He wrote by hand. Words sprouted like islands in the dawn. Behind was
music, light, a world in flight. Put to paper, they seemed little towers
forming a kingdom. For an instant I felt that order, that need, for the
written to have the impulse of a gesture. Sometimes, trying to shake free
from a beautiful object, he looked at the things that surrounded him
in the room: a lamp, a book with golden covers, a portrait, a samovar.
Ordered without precision, jumbled one beside the next, the space
reduces. He returned to the page. The splendid whiteness, a sheet of
moon. The words sprouted once more as if everything were the visual
landscape of an impossible conversation.

The Landscape
To awaken and see oneself, not in the leaf, not in the tree, not even in the
field that stretches relentlessly. To awaken and see oneself only in the
seed, in its conscience, striving, and knowing that nothing of this exists,
that soon we’ll be consumed by the landscape, that it will rain upon us,
that a hand that’s more or less lovely, always human, will cast us into the
dust and that the dust will do the same as the hand and that no one shall
come to speak to us of tranquility, because everything will happen as fast
as a song of the stars in the sky.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

A Photo of Spencer Tunick

Between what I write and what I want to write, there is a cadaver. A
naked body that we know by heart, a mother crying, a streetlight about to
go out. You look at the posters on the bathroom wall, the photo in which
I undressed for Spencer Tunick, the books on the empty chimney, the
swords with Celtic designs; you asked if all that wasn’t an alien world,
an escape. The light entered and I played the album Ella & Louis. Soul
that will be mine, any beach will be heaven, you’ll bite the strawberry
and we’ll all fall silent. That’s how the poem will begin, but your hand
touched mine and there was nothing but the silence like a strange
serpent, surrounding us.

19
 The Fishermen Live on Thin
Strips of Spit
by Scott McCulloch

Scott McCulloch works with prose, essay, and sound. His writings have appeared
in 3:AM, Southerly, Australian Book Review, EastEast Journal, Expat Press, at the
University of Paris Diderot, at the Writers’ House of Georgia, and elsewhere. Scott
was awarded a Marten Bequest for Prose 2017–19, put toward his first novel, Basin.
He’s been living in eastern Europe since 2014.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

T
he fishermen live on thin strips of spit, river on one side and
marsh on the other. Boats have frozen into the ice of the marsh,
but they’ve dragged one out on the water. The river still moves
steady, thawed by carp and sturgeon swimming about propeller blades,
cutting reeds and frost. I take a slug from the bottle of wine on the side
of my pack, pull the liquid thick through gaps in my teeth. Blood warms
my torso against the drop of night. Watching on, I picture the triangular
bodies of sturgeon — their whiskers and multiple fins — the way people
slice them down across the spine and pickle them in vinegar.
The men throw a net out into the water. They pull it up to find no
catch. Night keeps falling as they throw the net out and pull it back in. I sit
on a stump, sip more on the bottle, line my teeth with red liquid and spit.
Flashlights move across the surface of the water as the men’s conversation
is reduced to short remarks, growing thicker and louder. Their language
sounds Turkic — dipping u sounds alongside sh sounds, projecting short
air through clenched teeth — up and around, volume shifting.
Do they know I’m watching? Pulling net in and throwing it out again
as the temperature drops. More swearing as the boat nears capsizing.
Throwing net into ice water and shadow. Ropes and torches. Hunger.
Water laps in potholes of shovel-turned earth, appears a dark green in
the moonlight. I stand and unzip; faint smells of wool mix in the steam of
piss. Blistered mosquito bites make a ring around my ankles. What is it
that these men are pulling up from the water?
They’ve caught on and it looks heavy. They bring the net in hard. A
great weight drags through the dense water; consuming their energy, limbs
and breath. The catch seems limp and lifeless. Gathering their combined
strength, the men haul the net over the sides and drop the great mass into
their boat. I see a wet brown-yellow hide pressing on the mesh.
I rise from the stump and move, here and there through the green
mud. I slip on the frozen marsh. I look to the side and see a dog kennel
half-submerged and stuck in the ice. The bank is thick with horse-shit —
making the water green; soiling whatever commerce is left on the terrain
and along the riverbanks — compost of wetland reek driving to the back of
my eyes and throat through nose. Bile burns beneath my tonsils. And the
wine slowly drains me. My shoulders feel weightless and numb as I move
through the frozen swamp. I’m surprised that wetlands freeze.

21
Scott McCulloch

I reach the spit and watch the men come in and edge to where they
moor. One of them takes a phone from his pocket and makes a call. Their
voices more pronounced now, more joyous; diction bobbing like the boat
moving into the small jetty. They tie off and struggle the heavy load onto
shore. A round and bulbous mass at least two meters in diameter. One
of the men runs a chain through a hoop in the net. Together they drag
the catch towards a small wooden hut held up on stilts. The swamp laps
beneath the dwelling. In their gumboots the men pull the load through
the icy sludge and under the house. They lift a hoop of net onto a pulley
dangling and bolted into a wooden beam on the underside of the hut
floor, and hoist the net up. They leave it there to drip and walk upstairs.
I watch the great dark shape, dripping like a mass of oil in the air. It
looks impossible to suspend. I hear the moan of a donkey, sleepless in
distant frost.
I stand in their doorway clasping a small knife in my back right
jean pocket. A fixture in their frame, they haven’t noticed and I’m
contemplating approaching as some cretin out of the trees and mud,
snarling smuggler teeth, to give them or myself a fright; a ghost, better
yet a thief, a metaphysical burglar here to rob them of their living and
their catch. The fishermen make tea in a samovar. They look similar.
Hollowed-out cheeks with strapping brows. A single dangling light
bulb silhouettes them into half-faces, as if the rest of their faces have
been torn into the black of remaining room. I hear one of them call the
other Dnies, then Dnies calls the other man Danu. Burning cigarettes
and a bitten loaf of bread sit on a newspapered table. Dnies picks at his
fingernails waiting for tea. Danu pulls an empty cup to himself. They
turn their heads toward me, perhaps thinking that they had asked me to
come but forgotten.
Danu bursts out laughing. I move closer, hands in jacket pockets.
Dnies picks up a chair, dusts the cushion with his palm and offers me a
seat. Danu puts forward a saucer of sugar cubes and a cup for me. Then
he reaches over into the unlit part of the hut, retrieves a pickle jar with
no pickles, and drinks the remaining brine.
— who put it in the marsh?
— I don’t know
— then how did you know where it was and how to catch onto it? It’s

22
 Vol. 1, No. 4

hung up out there like a lump of shit. How much is there left?
— go to the ledge and see for yourself
— it’ll be stinking rotten in no time. The cones have already started
to fall from the trees. Another lump of shit for the shit pile. Don’t you
even look at the ground?
— how should we put it back then? It’s already more than half-gone,
and half-gone is still better than completely gone
— the jewels and dolls and silkworms and prosthetic limbs all
glazed in mould, useless now. Think on the mould for a second, that
passed from that tripe you put it in and onto the product. Imagine
that. People wearing necklaces of mould; people making clothes out of
mould; children playing with it and putting it in their mouths; amputees
attaching limbs with a rod of almost-the-same gangrene that took the
limb away in the first place
— stashing product and stitching innards back together, what did you
expect? Looks the same to me as it does out here. A cave-like hole full of
people boozing anything they can get their fingers on. All kinds of traffic,
all kinds of rot and traffic
— we’re the same, the same idiocy – we’re a cage crammed full of...
— grim fucking grim fucking parasite incest ... the only...
— what of the seeds?
— even the seeds have been spoilt ... they’ll grow landscapes of more
marsh and more bacteria; hell, even Beings, urn Beings, like pouring
semen into ashcans
— just take the fucking thing down!
— and all that is stuffed inside?
— drink up and wait for the other boys to help and cut it down and
clean up
— and leave it for the other smugglers? Screw that. Dump it on the
rocks where the river drains into the sea and be done with it
— deeper, it would need to be somewhere else somewhere deeper
somewhere further out than these spits and bowels you clowns found
here, way out...
— where birds and sick dogs go to die. Such jewels laid to waste
— keep going with the way you’re talking and I’ll slice your eyelids off
— endless sky talking sky-the-limit guarantee...

23
Scott McCulloch

— bullshit! what dross are you rambling? This is a deal. This is trade.
We split it three ways
— my brain feels weary and sick
— what?
— this fuck-up will only lead to another fuck-up, and then another,
and again
— weary and sick, like bait, like a piece of meat on a stick, like
waltzing mice, like dumb little Figures pissing around in the mix. Us
pirates of milk forced to squeeze from dead teets
— imagine a whiff of that, that stench of the animal’s milk on its
limp hide, that lactating rigor mortis; the spit and the swamp mixing
with that, along with all the other livestock methaned to the arse and
trampling around in this dive
— the cattle were moved from these pastures a fucking age ago. Away
from the spits and the marsh and the sludge, not to mention the people;
the cretins and the whores and the ragged; gone like dust in a hand, with
even their teeth intact and gone and leaving us in the reeds and spits and
small boats, as corner peoples, deeper into the black and green, into the
ground, into pay
— no one said anything about you getting in on the catch. You had
your chance on the steppes further south
— fuck chances
— all right to life, to no rights, all right. We’re talking agriculture, a
slapstick pantomime of flora and fauna. That’s all that your mind breeds
here. Nose into urine-wine and feet in the mud, and again...
— I haven’t dreamt a single night since the Collapse; my dreams are
stray dogs that I can’t make out the shapes of. I can’t even make out that
they’re dogs
— cut it down before it freezes stiff in this cold and be done with it!
Before it implodes under its own weight. From dangling up there and
spilling out. This is common sense ... hygiene ... you wouldn’t turn a
hanging man into a piñata
— everything is diluting ... liquid mirror, the ooze and discharge of folk,
pouring away
— what?
— mosquitoes

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

— mosquitoes and flies

My knife drives up Dnies’ hair lip, into left nostril and up onward to
eye. Blood stains the newspapered table, while Danu jumps from the hut
into the marsh, his feet breaking through the ice, and then we hear him
gasping from being winded by the water. By the time I reach the window
Danu has gone. I look at the hole left in the ice. Dnies’ face is in full light
now. The slash from lip to brow pulses with a bright stain, as if he is
bleeding chalk on a face of crumbling paper. He gargles as his open lips
pulse and writhe. A snail moves along the collar of his shirt. He picks up a
cup of hot tea and pours the boiling water onto his open lips to cauterise
the wound. He bends over in pain, pressing his face into the newspaper.
Blood and tea drip down the legs of the table, through the slats of the hut
floor, onto the net, onto the catch of baby camel.

[Ç-Lunga, March 2017]

25
 Un-Time
by Christian Hubin
translated by Christopher Clifton

Christian Hubin is a French language poet who was born in Belgium in 1941. His
extensive body of work has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Prix
Antoin Artaud in 1975, the Grand prix du Mont Saint-Michel in 1984, and the Prix
triennial de poésie de la Communauté française de Belgique in 1991. Most notable
among his recent works include Laps (José Corti, 2004), Greffes (José Corti, 2010),
and Face du Son (L’Étoile des limites, 2017). L’in-temps (L’Étoile des limites, 2020) is
his latest volume, and was awarded the Grand Prix de poésie de l’Académie royale de
langue et littérature françaises de Belgique.

Christopher Clifton is the author of the novel Constructions (Void Front Press, 2020)
and the treatise Of the Contract (Punctum Books, 2017). He lives in Australia.

26
 Vol. 1, No. 4

As the implantation of a dead one who escorts : that tone of a voice made
of others — the parts of a plane
— who look

Real. Between what was grasped and what one conceived.

Between scarifications
and votive sutures.

Perhaps the visible is not to be interrogated. It is itself what looks, in

this instance.
Rubbing against, but not effacing

A figuration of that said : a debt.

Ruptures, syntax : breath that should be, show by withdrawing.

Eye that is not, observes

Swearing an oath — and, suddenly : vanished, non-time : its object, its

phosphorescence.

27
Christian Hubin, Christopher Clifton

Memory of a box – neither form, nor content. Its humid warmth of kernels.

Faces — conjunctive points of that which has never appeared.

The unfathomable forgetting of someone. Who recognises, who is

their leaning void, their well before being born.

As when alone, in the street : brachial, come in contact.

And between the leaves : intimation. That expected by polarity.

At random, through the frequencies that remain, which exclude us.

Through flow infra : hymnal dust.

A form of return to image : not illustrating, confirming nothing : cast

iron, hollow.

Brushing against, searching the distance with tactility ; with axial amnesia.

28
 Vol. 1, No. 4

Neither by echo, nor intra-uterine : through cracks of mourning, of pre-

thought.

Empty room, one minute of a century, fixing something on the wall.

Dead to their previous faces, which they successively go back to.

Remain. Carry a subtle emphasis on things, their implicit possible,

barely exiled.

As to many, remembering them, of having seen us.

Where things would reappear — from prior to them, still occupied.

That in all substance, itself : its fracture, barely repentant, its expiated
pilgrimages.

The lightness one breathes. The mist, sister of it, facing to it.

29
Christian Hubin, Christopher Clifton

Brief cessation of the crowd : where it shines.

The poem : its constant evasion ; its agonistic in vitro.

Foreseeing through the details. Through alone. Moved.

That which observes in the missing part of space.

That : not the I that hurries, but all that interrupts it, takes it away,
obstructs it.

That the ecstasy of the immense, the comet of Tycho Brahe. Saliva spray
in missing pages ;
parousias of that, which is not.

The synoptic excess of waters.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Viva
by Lucia Senesi

Lucia Senesi is an Italian director and writer based in Los Angeles. In 2016,
she completed her first feature-length film, Avanti, a documentary about the
sociopolitical crisis in Europe. Her short film, A Short Story, premiered at the LA
Shorts International Film Festival in 2019 and received an Honorary Mention from
the 2019 Santa Monica Film Festival, among many other awards. Lucia is currently
a member of the Alliance of Women Directors (AWD). Her writing has appeared in
Image Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Film International, and The Millions.

31
Lucia Senesi

Born at the beginning

of the cruelest month
in the old world

You walk to me,

spinning thoughts
of uncertain shape
in the late afternoon,
You see me
breathing at the window
and looking clueless
spring eyelashes rise
through the interminable instant
of pure awareness,
spoiled
by the smell kept in
your memory
/ I’m there

Nous irons encore Again we’ll go

vers la plage blanche to the white beach
dans la lumière du petit matin in the early morning light

comme une aquarelle verte, like a green watercolor,

tu seras mes yeux
la chaleur dans ma main
quand tu te promènes ailleurs
et sans mots
seulement avec du sable
tu reviendras à moi
sous un nouveau ciel
nous sourirons
you’ll be my eyes
the heat in my hand
when you walk away
and without any words
only with sand
you’ll come back to me
below a new sky
we’ll smile

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

de futurs souvenirs of future memories

des choses qui ont existé of things that existed
demain tomorrow
toutes les idées débordées all the outdated ideas
/ ressurgiront / will reappear

Poi il vuoto Then the void

tornerà estate will be summer again
e pelle bianca and white skin
nei vicoli la notte in the alleys at night
e sonno and sleep
mescolerà risa lontane will stir distant laughter
e voci che credevi perdute, and voices you believed lost,
poserai le ciglia you will lay your eyelashes
sul cuscino a fiori on the floral pillow
e baci sorgeranno da te and kisses will rise from you
Attesa Belief
sarà tormento calmo will be calm agony
piena di mistero full of mystery
la fiducia. confidence.

Tornerai ai giorni You’ll go back to the days

conosciuti e nuovi known and new
aprendo gli occhi opening your eyes
/ sola / alone

33
 Five Poems
by Daniel Fraser

Daniel Fraser is a writer from Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. His poetry and prose have
featured in: LA Review of Books, Aeon, Acumen, X-R-A-Y, Entropy, Spork, Sundog
Lit, Review 31, and Dublin Review of Books among others. His poems and short
fiction have both won prizes in The London Magazine. His poetry pamphlet Lung
Iron is published by ignitionpress. He is on Twitter: @oubliette_mag and the web:
danieljamesfraser.wordpress.com.

34
 Vol. 1, No. 4

No-man’s Land
Looks pretty from a distance, the million corn stalks
bend and sway like desperate or inviting hands.
Roots bedded in the crust of an old war:
sludge, scum, trench wire and relics now
giving succour to oscillating crops,
stems seething in a wash of chemical rain.
The wet meadows cut through
by immaculate roads, built for speed and leaving.

Ramparts and cords belt the drill path. A broken

sump leaches nourishment, the troughs of foam
feeding gulches where birds ferry
sterile seed. The air surrenders
to a hawk’s wounded stoop, plummet tracing
a feeble coil, the stalled engines
collapsing mouse skulls, poisoned voles,
maws furred, seared with dew. Eyes welded open.

Horizon mottled in nuclear fug, cooling towers

cracking a frozen ordinance
of docile cloud, their detonations haunting meagre skies.
Below this noxious ferment, dark orders
whisper from the dirt, a stately music
scrubbed on staves of bone. Traffic marches on.
Some new disaster stirs the clay. A troupe
of burning insects flits onto the earth,
almost graceful, their last twitches
giving the faint impression of a dance.

35
Daniel Fraser

Grünewald
Recycled dust blurs from the kerb as I pass,
blunt door-edge sifting shade between anonymities
of light and skin. A guard nods, directs me inside,
behind us, flame nettles dump out
on warm fountains,
contusions quenched in a spill of pools.

In the shadow chapel, everything that is, is

crucifixion. Belief falters like its opposite
against the emaciated desert pear, hung
on stone knees, lips blued with forsaken salt.
Mary weeps in white raiment, wrists
cuffed black, and lower, beyond the monstrous
inward feet, a wrecked nest lies coiled:
crown of pain transmuted
into the unwritten gesture of birds.

Across the husk of Christ, paint stains

the weight of erasure, as though colour itself
had struck a rotted note: life’s renewal falling
quiet, vacant before green’s unanswerable decay.

36
 Vol. 1, No. 4

Materialism
Some kind of big idea. As though we didn’t know
hands make the world before our minds
can see it, the word housed in its dividing keep
of bone and blood, where fingers of air search
for purchase through knotted troughs, febrile rings.
Energy chatters in the tendons, nervous lines
shift to greet the alien stone, yet even this
counter light laps from the same well, the same
damp pit-wall of time’s frantic mud. Thought jitters,
nothing beyond a spark in the coal seam sheening—
dismal kindle of not-yet fire for has-been wood.

As the tide’s pull inaugurates a painful covenant

of weight and distance, so by this long work
the body redresses cortical bonds—
industry’s declension of dust and history,
our hot drips cauterise a wound of sound.

37
Daniel Fraser

Crown of Rays
Daniel Paul Schreber Cento1

‘the end of the world is a projection of this internal catastrophe’ —Sigmund Freud

October / the last days / under the delusion of morning / light rays
of the sun / white glazing / leafy woods / already birds have spoken /
vibrations into my nerves / even the neighing of horses, the barking of
dogs is produced / evidence / fraught with certain evils / the clouded
intellect / making its sojourn in the underworld / anxiety / to no
purpose / exists / in the common / sifting of the human / the first signs
of communication / collapse / there is no need to call / the outer world
/ deteriorated / will to live / unpleasant for all parties / not-finishing-a-
sentence is consistent / in vast numbers / neurology / no more among
the living / certain forms of the not-thinking-of-anything-thought
/ achieve temporary peace / while plastic representation / copying
(drawing from nature) / a rather tasteless phrase / creates unending
monotony / let it rain or let lightning strike / I can / let a house go up
in smoke under the window / of my recollection / a glue-like and in the
latter a soot-like smell / is frequently produced / complete suppression
of the remaining disturbances / imagination / a narrow strip of land
/ impressions received / a nonsensical twaddle of voices / yet while
writing these lines, I am attempting / to find the correct key / a recurrent
crackling noise / the burden of work / a miraculous structure / attendant
constantly at my bed / the tempo is quickened by making / objects
on a surface / anterior realms / nourished and kept in living motion /
different light / on the horizon / communicating outward / to a wider
circle / glowing on the trees / heart and reins / giving up treatment /
the halo / incomparably richer and brighter / body and starry sky / in a
manner satisfactory / leaving / a small remnant of lung in between with
which / I could continue to breathe.

1. This poem is made only using text taken from Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs
of My Nervous Illness, trans. and ed. Ida MacAlpine & Richard A. Hunter (New York:
NYRB, 2000).

38
 Vol. 1, No. 4

Trust Exercise
Climb down to the chapel, its dome blue-capped,
Cut from the freckled rock where cool cliffs steepen to the sea.
Waves cast their foam, spume and froth—

Be careful, step by step descend

Toward the quiet room, a face you recognise
Wavers there, single candle in the dark.

Go on: hear the water, light the wax. Let shadows

Screen the mind’s dim cinema. You here are master.
Water spools, flames stir. That’s it, stay with me.
How long do you think this machine can last?

39
 Y
Self-Defeating ou are sitting on the forty-fourth floor of an office
building, unbothered by the vertiginous height
because you have placed a great deal of faith on
the architects, engineers, masons, etc who constructed the
building, bolstered by the large number of people who have
come and gone from the building before you, unharmed, and
further still, all of those who have come and gone in similar
buildings over many decades, with only a smattering of
stories of untimely collapse. You slide your chair backward
in order to stretch, and one of the chair legs catches a run
in the carpet, lifting it up. You curiously peel it back, and
find, to your utter horror, that the chair you are sitting on
is supported not by steel and concrete, but an enormous
stack of other chairs, wheeled and not, upholstered and not,
perhaps a stool or two among them.
This is something like language.
You have likely encountered a period piece set in the
early years of the 20th century, and in such a piece, have
perhaps come across the phrase “horseless carriage” used
as an epithet for a car. (While fictionalized and thus a poor
anthropological example, you could also substitute the
phrase “cement pond” [emphasis on the first syllable of
cement] from The Beverly Hillbillies.) These are our training
wheels for new concepts, though they never truly come off,
&

as they remain embedded even in the minds of speakers

who have never encountered them in a natural setting.
Our brains are among the most capable of any animal in
dealing with novelty in our environment, and unparalleled
at generating an increasing amount of this novelty ourselves,
unique, perhaps, in our penchant for inner novelty.
This is an idea I come back to a lot, the idea that our
Pith

minds are not merely adept at making use of recursion

syntactically, but also metaphorically, that we are, as I’ve
said before, creatures given a pre-linguistic “vocabulary”
concerned with agents moving about in space, and that all
else falls from that.

40
 Vol. 1, No. 4

Metaphors are the ultimate tool of the pragmatist;

they can be used until blunted and then cast aside,
replaced, enhanced, etc. Old ones still prove useful in
a pinch. None of them are true, by nature. But they
nevertheless explain everything.
As writers, we may begin by believing that our “job”
(the “job of a writer” being an illustrative concept) is to
shore up this stack of chairs, to devise new ways of fitting
them together, to remove the unnecessary ones, the ones
held on by flimsy tape pulled off of old packages, which
you can spot by the powedered appearance. But there is
no beginning again, no foundation to repair; we can only
stack, dive, fashion, or sit.
Today, no phrases excite me, so I take my eleventh
surname and have new cards printed, announcing it like
the birth of a child. Time has weathered the earlier ones
like runes in sandstone, clouding the etymological roots
of some and clarifying others. Turning on the lamp, I
get a rising sense that a germ of an idea might lead to
something—For many unintelligble hours, I tried lying
down, but was unable—but I am already daring myself to
abandon language altogether and give in to the terrible
pleasure of security. In the morning, the sun is mine for
an hour, before it belongs to anyone else. For that hour
it is polychrome and bloated around the middle, as if it
is slouching in a thin blouse. I think it wouldn’t object to
such an unflattering depiction,
because it knows better than Joshua Rothes is the founder and
most that art is stubborn. It publisher of Sublunary Editions. He has
written several brief volumes, including An
does not have a philosophical Unspecific Dog, The Ethnographer, The Art of
temperament, which demands the Great Dictators, and William Atlas. We
too much of everything and Later Cities, a novel written with the aid of
machine learning, was released by Inside
belittles its own reflection—a
the Castle in November 2020.
great flaw when you have only one
constituent; disastrous when they
are as numerous as we are.

41
Chush It’s fanciful, it’s even funny—but his
humor carries discomfort with it,
like all serious humor.
DONALD HALL ON THE POETRY OF RUSSELL EDSON

Russell Edson’s poem “Ape”. Once read, never forgotten.

The scene is this: a man has been served ape for
dinner, again.
The poem begins with the man’s wife complaining
that he hasn’t finished his meal.
“You didn’t eat the hands,” she says, after all the effort
to

she’s put into making “onion rings for its fingers”. She’s
even “stuffed its nose with garlic”, just how he likes it.
His wife manages to persuade, in part: “I’ll just nibble
on its forehead, then I’ve had enough”, Father negotiates,
tempted for a moment, thus showing he doesn’t find it
totally unappetising. He already has blood and hair on
his whiskers, suggesting this is the case anyway.
But he is seriously fed-up. The exasperation has been
Commitment

building. “Why don’t you have the butcher cut these apes
up? he asks. “You lay the whole thing on the table every
night, the same fractured skull, the same singed fur; like
someone who died horribly. These aren’t dinners, these
are post-mortem dissections.”
He’s really letting her have it. This is getting
ridiculous, he is saying, as if complaining about a piece
of fish not being boned properly. Escalating into the
hyperbolic, but here, of course, the hyperbolic is actually
wildly understated, in relation to what’s happening.
Then we’re drawn deeper into the revolting and the
grotesque. “Try a piece of his gum, Mother encourages,
“it looks like a mouth full of vomit”, Father says. “Break
one of the ears off, they’re so crispy,” Mother entices.
You wouldn’t think it possible to go further, but it

42
 Vol. 1, No. 4

does. Moving to the sexual, the ape’s genitals. There’s

at the age of just 36, in a psychiatric ward in Leningrad.

to chush all his life, throughout starvation, imprisonment and right up to his death
Chush is Russian for nonsense. The absurdist Daniil Kharms remained fiercely loyal
a jockstrap discussion, a suggestion of bestiality, of
violent murder!
At which point Father tires: “I’m just saying that I’m
damn sick of ape every night”, he cries, the repetitiveness
hinting at the Sisyphean.
The fact that the register of the dialogue is that of
a regular dysfunctional family discussing the food at
mealtime, is in part what makes this poem so funny.
Taking an established form, in this case, situation and
mode of speaking and “transposing the key” (Bergson,
2008) is something that Bergson talks about in Laughter:
An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. The resentment
and dissatisfaction with marriage and life coming to the
surface here is all too familiar from real-life episodes
and sit-coms, but just switching the dinner to something
grotesque makes the situation absurd. Except it’s absurd
already, isn’t it? As with most good absurd writing,
mocking the rituals we hold dear, mocking ourselves, life,
death, all of it, is a central area of play.
But what the hell is this poem about? some might
ask. What’s going on here? What’s the point in all this
grotesque nonsense? What is this?
Well, this poem is a lot of things. For one, as Edson
famously wrote with “blank page and a blank mind”
(Edson, Poetry Foundation), it is an experiment of
sorts. He played with the the unconscious mind, had
no “preconceived ideas about reality” (Edson, 2004).
He never sat down with the intention of writing about a
family having ape for dinner; it’s no fun to know what you
want to write. Writing was about discovery.
The fact that often these experiments would come
out so dark for him relates back to Breton and his
associates’ experiments with “automatic writing” in the
early 1920s, based on Freud’s free association exercises.
They realised that unconscious, uncensored thoughts,

43
Vik Shirley

i.e. thoughts “exempt from . . . any Vik Shirley is the author of Corpses,
moral concern” (Breton, 2010) The Continued Closure of the Blue Door,
contained the absurdity of dreams and Disrupted Blue and other poems on
Polaroid. She is currently studying for a
and could also be very funny. PhD in “Dark Humour and the Surreal in
The poem also illustrates Poetry” at the University of Birmingham.
how our surroundings and
environment often enter our
creative work, even if not intended. It’s no surprise that a
domestic setting features highly in Edson’s writing, as he
was notoriously a self confessed hermit.
So maybe “Ape” should be seen as a record of life and of
being human, a dark imprint of “dreaming awake ... on the
page” (Edson, 2004). The dark-chush is a way of presenting
ourselves to ourselves that deepens our understanding, and
allows us to laugh at just how ridiculous we are.

Bergson, H. (2008) - Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Milton

Keynes, Lightening Source UK Ltd.

Breton, A. (2010) ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism – 1924’ [Online], Project

Gutenberg Self-Publishing Press

Edson, R. (1994) The Tunnel, Oberlin, Oberlin College Press.

Poetry Foundation (n.d.) Russell Edson [Online]

Tursi. M (2004) ‘An Interview with Russell Edson’, Double Room: A Journal
of Flash Fiction and Prose Poetry, [Online], issue 4, Spring/Summer.

44
Vol. 1, No. 4

45
 I
Crushes even wrap one around me when I go to drag out the
body. I weigh it down in the canal, just after the lock.
It’s raining hard and no one sees me. It will stay there
for a while, only surfacing when it’s too decayed for the
marks to show. I stand under the streetlight for a minute
with the strip of cloth twisted around my neck where mine
still are from when I was turned. Don’t hate me. Don’t hate
me. Don’t hate me. The scarves are sort of a reverse talisman.
The other Old Ones always laugh at them when I’m in the
office. Delphi sits at her desk with her stack of quartz dice
and piles of lots to cast and fifteen screens showing currency
depreciating and hisses something unflattering under her
breath in the dead speech of the Bone Oracles. Clotho rolls
her eyes at her phone.
They don’t know what it’s like. After I scrubbed down
and threw the sheets in the incinerator, I chose one that’s
a blue between IKB 176 and the lapis of virgins, cosseted
before the shock of their Annunciations on 13th century
pages. It folds and folds like the hems of their dresses. The
scarf makes me pure again. It is cold already in the early fall,
but I crank the air conditioner. I have two industrial-sized
units on the roof of my house, which is converted with steel
girders and wrapped in textured concrete. It’s a hug, like
a shaft grave in Mycenae, like a Paul Rudolph with all the
windows hidden. My whole west wall is plexiglass cubes for
the scarves.
Centuries ago, clothes somewhat ceased to interest
me, except in phases. I wear the same thin, almost infinite
series of layers out to protect myself from the world. I am
Object

in one now, a camel turtleneck made of translucent, soft

Lycra, curled up on the percale of identical, fresh sheets
in a little ball. It is like this every time I do it. Please please
please don’t hate me. The argument goes that Brutalism, and
particularly Rudolph, is about mass, and scarves are also
about mass, an inverse of the same truth. They are so light
they can become a shield from anything. I crumple a few

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

into my sheets. This is one that is a A.V. Marraccini is an art

historian, essayist, and
crushed silk-velvet brocade. I trace critic based in London.
the raised surface florals, the wine
red on the champagne ground, with
my eyes closed, and it becomes a
landscape to which I can disappear.
This scarf smells like pepper
and bergamot, Bulgarian rose, benzoin. It smells like her. She
told me the name of the scent was Eau de Protection, which she
wore daily. You’d think twenty five years would be nothing for
us but it wasn’t. I could hear the rain lashing the windows, even
behind my lightfast blinds and drapes. Tomorrow I will walk to
the Tube, wearing a black turtleneck this time, and a matching
mask in black silk crepe. I will wear a white scarf like a winding
cloth, and invariably tarnish it with coffee. The friendly women
in the elevator of our building will make sympathetic clucking
noises as we shoot upward inside the glass façade. It pretends
it doesn’t have mass. I pretend I am one of them, clutching my
laptop bag and sustainable bottled water.
When I get to my office I will burn with heat and ignore the
others. It is always like this the day after. I will wind and unwind
myself like a disconsolate mummy as I lick ice cubes from a
plastic cup. I will doodle idly on reams of acid free paper. It is
no use complaining to them, so I will lose myself in a version
of a first-person shooter from 1998, floors and floors of blocky
generative pixels. It is a hacked version with no guns and no
assailants, but I look and look around the corners anyway for
her, the hart that always flees. The frame rate is abysmal but you
can just see the ends of a shawl beyond the camera, a buttery
yellow. I wear a scarf even in newly generated worlds, in worlds
behind screens, both LED and shoji, where you can see some Late
Heian Minister for the Left seduce the Second Ladies Maid like
a shadow puppet and leave her, and she will wake with soaked
sleeves in her morning bed. Actually, I was not there then. This
is a delicious thought, the existence of a prehistory. I am lucky to
have some.

47
A. V. Marraccini

Time might be circular, if it wraps around the neck again and again.
Consider the medieval calendar, Christmas to Lent and Easter, then over
again. Christ is born, dies, and is risen every year on the dot. Or it might
be inverted into itself, like the way you reverse the folds when you are
shaping an origami crane. I have, in my collection, a scarf woven in paper
and silk that holds its form, an impression of Calabi-Yau space in three
dimensions. I do not own a watch. I make a point of this.
I listen to the rain and run my hands over the brocade, then the
inner face of the concrete. There will be another body, there always is, a
repeating pattern like a semi-abstract floral motif in crushed velvet, cut
loops shaved up out of the careful nexus of warp and weft. The nature
of time aside, the amount each kill fortifies me is abrupt and finite, like
slamming up against the hard wall of cellular apoptosis and crumbling,
dried wheat. For now, I just twist the loose end of the scarf’s fabric over
my left hand. For now it is not yet hungry, this thing I am, all twisted in
cashmere, a gentle guise for my waking, stalking feet.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Always Somewhere Else

by Declan O’Driscoll

Declan O’Driscoll regularly reviews fiction (mostly in translation) for The Irish
Times. He has also written for the TLS, Dublin Review of Books, Music & Literature
and other publications.

49
Declan O’Driscoll

A
s if James would ever be the sort of person you’d ask to go down
to the river on a Tuesday. He doesn’t know about the rule, but
he isn’t stupid yet. What he is, is unreliable. Remember when
he thought Susan could bring the nougat? “Never let them tell you to
turn back,” said Stephen. Stephen, with the haircut. He had gone to
that place where the man had scissors and the plug in, buzzing thing he
pressed into your hair which made the hair fall onto the plastic apron he
had snapped around your neck to make your breathing difficult. When
enough of the hair had fallen on the floor he showed you the back of
your head in a small mirror that faced another mirror. Stephen always
asked him to keep the mirror there for a long time so that he could see
parts of himself that he never otherwise saw. The man with the mirror
was Japanese so he didn’t mind having to wait there, letting the small
mirror look into the big mirror. In Japan they have very fast trains which
must help. James was the one who knew the priest who listened to Radio
Tirana so he would know how pleased the Albanian Communist Party
was about that year’s cereal harvest.
In Ireland we like bread too, either white or what we call brown.
Soda bread, but no fizz. Susan’s father has a small shop that we all go into
in the evening to get the sweets. Her father is called Harry because he
is so impatient. The Japanese haircutter was not impatient and was not
called Harry, but Hiro because they use those sorts of names in Japan.
Someone said it means “generous”, though how would they know?
Harry doesn’t open on a Sunday because it’s not a day for sweets.
Who needs sugar on a Sunday? Sunday is the day we go to the river to
watch the flies imploring each other to jump higher and then die. We
love seeing the way the rushes try to stop the bluey, grey-green river
from flowing on. We often look at it for hours until we have to go home
to watch The Riordans. I always have to go with my parents, in a VW
Beetle, to my granny’s house because of not having the telly. Granny
lets out a curse if you make a sound during The Riordans. Tom, one
of them is called. Granny has a bucket with the moon in it and apples
on very high trees and little plants that grow lamb’s ears. I don’t know
why it’s so nice to touch soft things. Benjy or maybe Benji, I’m not sure.
“Don’t sit too close to the television, you’ll ruin your eyesight.” But
still, granny who sits in the armchair beside the Aga, a long way away is

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

going blind. Now she doesn’t know the cake has gone off and has blue
hair on it.
“Susan, will Harry be in the shop this evening?”, asked James. There
is no such thing as being too stupid when James is in charge. He even
goes to funerals. We love jumpers. My favourite is yellow with blue bars
and shapes here and there. The shapes looked like the first drops of rain
falling on a very dry path, on a hot summer’s day when you can suddenly
smell the decay of the earth. Where did that come from? Is wood a
colour? Nougat must be the strangest word in the English language.
Nobody hearing you say the first part of the word would anticipate
what was about to follow. Bits. It’s hard work, in every way. It’s time
for some quiet. “Close your eyes, clear your mind and now, just think
about what happened to Jimmy. Breathe in . . . 3, 4, 5, and out . . . 4, 5, 6,”
said the woman with the cardigan that had a useless belt that just hung
there. Imagine her looking at it in the clothes shop and deciding thatshe
wanted to pay money for it. It wasn’t even blue. “Would anyone like to
saysomething about Jimmy?” she asked. “He was useless with chickens,”
I wanted to say. But if I had she would have told me I had to take a bath
and I hated getting everything damp. Like the Spanish. I prefer baking.
“Leave in for 45 minutes, at 180o C.” That 45 minutes was so special and
always went by too quickly. You shouldn’t play with knives while you are
waiting. We hate the look of blood, but it’s hard to manage without it.
James, as ususal, is the one who starts to talk about poetry. His father is
a plumber and his mother makes cellos. Poems always seem like such a
waste. All that space around them so you don’t know whether it would
be better if there was nothing on the page or that thin way of saying what
had happened once or might happen if you met your love in a field. All
the questions we’ll never get answered. Whenyou sleep there’s really
nobody else there. It’s like eating a raspberry. It’s just you. How could you
share it. I like Susan, but I’ll never tell her. Only I will ever know. I tried
to write a poem about her once. I wasted paper. I threw it in the river
(not on a Sunday). I.
“I bet that will come in useful some day”, says Stephen, pointing
at the glove in the middle — or slightly over to one side — of the road.
It’s black with fur where a hand goes in. It’s probably not fur. I hope it’s
not, because I have an understanding with animals. Susan once told

51
Declan O’Driscoll

me her mother can’t play the cello. I said it was okay, not everyone can.
Apparently some Japanese people weren’t very nice during that war
but then the Americans murdered a whole lot of them all at once. I like
collecting mushrooms in a field. Putting them on a long piece of grass
with the seed end keeping them from falling off. People say “animal”
when they want to say someone isn’t nice which is really unfair. “Where
did you come from”, I want to say. Susan is an animal. That’s why I like
her. She’s like a red squirrel. That’s saying a lot. My father once said I
have a “vivid imagination”. But he goes to mass. Afterwards he buys a
newspaper in a shop owned by three old sisters and a son. I’m not sure
whichof them is the mother. Maybe they don’t know either because of
their failing memories. Sherbert. Fizz. They always know the prices,
though. Nou . . . what comes next? A new thing or something that rhymes
with rude? I don’t always like people who laugh in that way. It seems
mean and I think I know what they’re thinking but it makes me feel
uncomfortable. There are five ways to go home and I’ve tried them all.
“All the things we have to do that I wish we didn’t have to,” James
once said. I agree with him. Sleep is nice when you’re tired, but does it
have to go on for so long? There’ll be nothing now until Tuesday. Poetry,
anyway, is all about saying what you mean by not saying it. You have to
make it difficult to understand and mention lots of things that are like
whatever it is you want to say, but never the thing itself. I might try one
to see if if there’s anything there. Birds being there, in the air, is always
exciting. “You’re never where you’re supposed be,” says my father,
“You’re always somewhere else.” He doesn’t know that that’s exactly
where I want to be. At my Granny’s house I prefered looking for eggs
than looking at the television. I didn’t have to be quite, so I was anyway.
The sound of chickens is the sound of Sunday afternoon. Not having to
be anywhere. The chickens playing a game by getting me to guess where
the eggs might be. But once my father opened an egg which had the
beginning of a chicken. It made me afraid of eggs.
A stranger, if you find one, can give you a fright, like the men who
laugh like that. Then, even someone you know can do something that
makes you change your mind. Like Phil bringing that banjo into school
when it was sunny outside. All of us wished we could be by the river.
Willow branches fishing but never catching anything. A dog not caring

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and jumping in anyway. We were ina room but we were all outside, where
we wanted to be. That’s the difference between us and the adults. The
wind blew in through the open windows with the smell of outside, no
matter how much they tried. “Dappled”, someone had said and I looked
it up in the dictionary. Now it’s my favourite word. All I want is to be
outside, lying under a tree and nobody knowing that I’m there. In the
distance, in the same warm air, I hear my mother shouting my name. A
little more worried and puzzled every time she says it.

53
 Pockets
by Marcus Slease

Marcus Slease is a (mostly) absurdist, surrealist and fabulist writer from Portadown,
N. Ireland and Utah. He is the author of Never Mind the Beasts (Dostoyevsky
Wannabe), The Green Monk (Boiler House Press), and Play Yr Kardz Right
(Dostoyevsky Wannabe), among others. He comes from a working class background
and teaches high school in Barcelona. Find out more at: Never Mind the Beasts (www.
nevermindthebeasts.com) and follow him on Twitter @postpran.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

The History of Pockets

Humans carried bags. Animals skin, cotton, woven plant fibers. Fold the
edges. Secure the shape with strings of the same material. Pockets were
pouches worn around the waist by women in the 17th to 19th centuries.
In this they imitate the kangaroo. There are various ways of carrying.
The hanging pocket moved to the patch pocket, our current favourite,
with ​topstitching and b
​ ar tacking on the back of a pair of blue jeans.

Air Pockets
A group of Irish teenagers were flying to America. iPods were just
invented. A magic click wheel. I listened to my iTunes, invented 8
months earlier, on my bondi blue iMac. I did not have the portable iPods.
The woman next to me was having a seizure. We landed in LaGuardia.
New York City’s finest first responders. She was taken off the airplane
and I was handed a bottle of red. Sorry for your troubles. The air pockets
were continuous over the Atlantic.

Holy Pockets
I just moved here and the ceiling is leaking. The bucket is a pocket. It
holds water. Most of my language holds water, one way or another. All
the pockets in my jeans are tearing, except the back pockets, but the
back pockets are not safe for storing. You can easily steal items from the
back pocket, but you can put your hands in your back pocket. The back
pockets are my favourite pockets. You can warm your hands and also
your bum. You can squeeze the soft tissue. Your soft tissues are holy
tissues. Your bum is the best bum.

55
Marcus Slease

Polish Pockets
Gaddu Gaddu was the messenger service. Her father was a retired miner
and her mother died when she was younger. We pushed the Maluch.
In winter, it was hunt the sock. The sock is a foot pocket. At Christmas,
her father invited other retired miners for a humble Christmas dinner.
They waited for the first star before eating. A Polish tradition. I sat there,
picking out a few words in Polish. We shot Wiśniówka (a homemade
cherry liqueur). At New Years (2007), We walked the lower tatras. It was
very cold, and snowing. We were mountain people. I bought a winter
coat. It was XXL. Big and puffy. A parachute. Blowing in the mountain
wind. Runny eggs and sex on Sundays. I put my hands inside my new
puffy. Where are you going with this? The future was not in my pocket.
Nothing was in my pocket. We broke up later when I saw her high school
friends, on the estate, pushing prams with young children. I didn’t want
one. The sirens blared for mining every morning. I didn’t know where
I was going. The inspector visited her block of flats to check for illegal
copies of Microsoft Windows. She hid her computer, a huge block of
plastic, under the bed of a widow.

Rocket Pockets
The Canadian ice hockey legend, Henri Richard, was nicknamed “Pocket
Rocket” after his older brother, another legend, Maurice “Rocket”
Richard. One rocket is passed down to another rocket. The second rocket
becomes a pocket rocket. The pocket rocket, Henri Richard, was shorter
than his brother, the original rocket. Do you have your brother in your
pocket? I have a picture of my brother in the wallet in my left pocket.
Dead from heroin overdose, 8 years and counting. The wallet was a
birthday present, from Pineapple, Camden Town market. In my right
pocket, a smart phone. It carries tunes. My pocket rocket. I’m moving
back to indie. Built to Spill and Grandaddy.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Crusty Pockets
It is 2021. The time of the virus. Millions dead and millions more
following them. I am in and out of my pocket. My pocket stores my hand
sanitiser. You’ve got to use it constantly. Old pockets. New pockets. The
hand sanitiser overfloweth and drieth in my pockets. My pocket crusty.
My skin crusty. I apply Japan Flower. A hand cream.

Eye Pockets
The pupil in prime time is very big. The prime time has passed. As you
age, your pupils grow smaller. Bags under eyes? The tissues weaken.
Puffy pockets? Fat moves into the lower eyelids. I am seeing the hill,
rolling the rock up it. I am seeing a swell time, sometime in the future. As
you age, your body changes. I am seeing my feet flatten, nose & ears grow.
I am seeing this star cross that star, it means nothing. I am seeing your
end bearing my end, it means nothing. I am seeing slapdash frescoes,
nourished on realities. I am seeing the memories sail by every evening. I
put them in my pocket.

57
 Continued Nocturne
by Kathleen Tankersley Young

Kathleen Tankersley Young was an American poet born in Texas in the early 1900s.
The precise details of her biography are difficult to piece together, partially due to her
own obfuscation, but we know that she lived in Texas, Colorado, and New York. She
served as the assistant editor of The Echo, an associated editor of Blues, and oversaw
the Modern Editions poetry pamphlet series, being the first editor to publish the
work of Paul Bowles. She committed suicide in a hotel in Mexico on April 9, 1933.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Now if you will listen, Beloved,

you will hear the inner doors of the wind
being tapped upon by thin crimson leaves;
and you may see the sullen rain treading a pathway
backward to the sleeping stars;
and if you will come (cautiously, Gold-Head),
listening over your own foot sounds
as you walk down the stair of darkness,
you may hear, persuasively,
the shell of the little moon
dribbling and cracking with disassociated music,
a fixed star-point between our microscopic hearts.

This poem was first published in the magazine Forge in 1929. It will be included
in a forthcoming volume of Kathleen Tankersley Young’s collected works, out from
Empyrean in early 2022.

59
 Poems
by Rocío Iglesias

Rocío Iglesias is a queer Cuban-American poet and multidisciplinary artist with a

law degree. Her work has been published in Rejection Letters Lit Mag, Swamp Things
Zine, and Tilted House. She lives, breathes, and works in Minneapolis, MN with her
partner, two dogs, and five little sails.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Voting with Your Feet

Every September thousands gather to pay homage to Yemayá,
or the Virgen de Regla, depending on who you ask
Devotees walk into the Catholic church to kneel at the Black Virgin’s
feet,
they offer incense, candles, fervent prayer
Once this is done, they step into the temple of Yemayá, just next door to
the church
they offer white flowers, gold, fervent prayer

This pilgrimage is an unknown act of resistance,

each step a thorn in the side of State-enforced hegemonic culture
that stamps out individuality in worship and seeks to extinguish sacred
spaces

The devotees stand in rows of hundreds at the docks in Havana ready to

boat the lanchita to Regla
Bodies mantled in shades of azure, turquesa, baby blue, and white
Black spirit dolls, beaded collares and multi-stranded ides, wooden
crucifixes, saint medallions
They hold gold coins and toss the shiny offerings into the sea
Whispering sweet nothing prayers to the Orisha of the Ocean

61
Rocío Iglesias

Traitors
We were basically the same—
little girls with long brown hair trailing behind us
our baby hair wispies blowing as we ran down the hill
our baby lips stained with duro frio, “red flavor”
we practiced State sanctioned ballet together and walked to and from
school letting our arms dangle loosely so our fingers would brush
repeatedly without a comment needing to be made about it
once we shared a kiss behind the bushes while your parents talked inside
the house
your papi waving his arms over head and your mami cradling her eyes in
the palms of her hands and then resting them on her pregnant belly
Soon after your papi was gone
they said he hijacked a ferry boat to Miami,
or he made a raft out of car tires and floated away to the Gulf of Mexico
The baby cried so loud that no one heard the cruiser pull down our road
I remember your long brown hair splayed out as you lay face down on
the street beside your mami and the new baby, three dominoes face
down ready to be shuffled
The officers warned us there would be consequences for traitors
I sobbed inconsolably telling my mother of my traitorous lips and my
traitorous fingers
she put her hand over my mouth and begged me to hush,
the walls have ears and they, too, are traitors

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Goat’s Milk
I turned 21 on the Carretera Central in a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere
My mother and I were on a road trip from one end of the island to the
other
We ate at paladares, bought cheese on the side of the road from a
stranger
slept in worn out mattresses encased in mosquito nets like mesh cocoons
and woke as parched butterflies desperate for fresh water and met
instead with warm goat’s milk

At this point I had spent a decade in exile enjoying foreign luxuries—

running water, individually wrapped chocolates, air conditioning
Cuban nationals are denied all the delicious luxuries I obsessed over as a
child
Without a foreign passport you can’t go to a restaurant and brazenly
order red meat
or lounge at the Plaza Hotel clinking ice cubes against each other in your
mojito
So by the time we reached Havana I wanted to taste the parts of Cuba
reserved only for tourists

We sat at the cafe in the Plaza de la Catedral,

gingerly stirring sugar cubes into our espressos with tiny spoons,
It was Christmas time and I noticed the nativity set of the Catedral was
in a locked cage
I pointed out this oddity to my mother, she took another sip of her
espresso and said
“they do that so people can’t steal the dolls to give to their children as gifts”
It was then that I noticed the white ladies in their wide brimmed sun hats,
the European men smoking Cuban cigars while absentmindedly
discussing futbol
I felt the espresso go down my throat like a hot branding iron
and suddenly I longed for goat’s milk

63
 Man is a
Rational[izing]
Animal
A conversation with Douglas Luman
by Joshua Rothes

Douglas Luman is a co-founder of Container, art director at Stillhouse Press, head

researcher at appliedpoetics.org, book designer, and digital human. They are an
Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Allegheny College, and the author of The
F Text (Inside the Castle, 2017).

Joshua Rothes is the publisher of Sublunary Editions, and the author of several
obscure books of obscure prose, including An Unspecific Dog (punctum books, 2017)
and We Later Cities (Inside the Castle, 2020). He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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Vol. 1, No. 4

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Vol. 1, No. 4

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Vol. 1, No. 4

69
 Poems from
B-Flat Clarinet
Fingering Chart
by Ryan Mihaly

Ryan Mihaly is a poet and musician from New England. He was an Anne Waldman/
Anselm Hollo fellow at Naropa University from 2016-2018. His writing has appeared
in The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, 3:AM Magazine, DIAGRAM, and
Asymptote. He teaches music to students of all ages online and in Greenville, SC.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

[D♯/Eb] The walls creak and

trembleThe
[D♯/E♭] in awalls
house made
creak and of D♯. in a house
tremble
Climbing
made of D♯.interminable staircases,
Climbing interminable staircases,
turning corners and walking overshrieking
turning corners and walking over
floorboards, you listen toyou
shrieking floorboards, rooms
listenthat other
visitors
to rooms that other visitors deemThey are
deem silent and haunted.
haunted – dead wood cut into parallel lines, laid
silent and haunted. They are
in a grid and painted white longs for the forest –
haunted — dead wood cut into
but they are not silent: your ears are tuned to
parallel sounds
miniature lines, laid inup
stirred a grid and
by the foot, not those
paintedsqueaks
common white longs but theforbanshee
the foresthowls in the
— but they are not silent: your
upper frequencies that carry on for long earsminutes
are tuned
after to miniature
all movement sounds
has stopped, when all anyone
stirred
else hearsup is by the foot,
silence. The not those will make
clarinetist
common
these squeaks
sounds, too, but
withthestrict
bansheetraining for
asymmetric fingerings and
howls in the upper frequencies a tight embouchure,
or a complete lack of experience, as the first
that carry on for long minutes after
attempts at sound are always met with a
all movement has stopped, when
homesick scream from the reed.
all anyone else hears is silence.
The clarinetist will make these
sounds, too, with strict training for
asymmetric fingerings and a tight
embouchure, or a complete lack of
experience, as the first attempts
at sound are always met with a
homesick scream from the reed.

Ryan Mihaly 2

71
 Ryan Mihaly

[A] Whether the universe was sung,

danced, or writ into existence, whether
it[A]
started with a bang or a little flick of
Whether the universe was sung, danced, or
the
writwrist, it seems
into existence, a drawer
whether was with
it started flunga bang
open on a whim and everything spilled
or a little flick of the wrist, it seems a drawer was
out
flunginto
open perplexing
on a whim “order”. Any list
and everything spilled out
of
intoobjects is only
perplexing a small
“order.” Any index of theis only
list of objects
abundance,
a small index but hints
of the at the breadth
abundance, but hints at the
breadth of the cosmogony:
of the cosmogony: a ceramic mug a ceramic mug
decorated with
decorated withflamingos
flamingos sits sits
atopatopa newspaper
a
that was just used to crush a mosquito. The
newspaper that was just used to crush a
tableau takes advantage of your attention,
mosquito. The tableau takes advantage
coercing you to mold it into a story. The mind,
of your attention, coercing you to mold
alight with associations, drawing arrows from
itobject
intotoa story.
object, The mind,
will also alight
devise with
a numerology for
associations, drawing arrows
A: 6 keys pressed down, one for each flamingofrom object
to
onobject,
the mug, will
onealso
for devise
each legaofnumerology
the mosquito…
for
the A: 6 keys
myth needpressed down,
only persuade theone for each
clarinetist, who
flamingo on the mug, one for each leg
should use it as a mnemonic. The audience won’t
hear
of thethis, but don’t
mosquito be surprised
. . . the myth need by only
the one
listener who does.
persuade the clarinetist, who should use
it as a mnemonic. The audience won’t
hear this, but don’t be surprised by the
one listener who does.

Ryan Mihaly 3
72
 Vol. 1, No. 4

[F] There is a child sitting in a square

basement room. Around him are
[F] of
rows There
empty is a chairs,
child sitting
orderedin a stacks
square basement
of blank books and papers, and a empty chairs,
room. Around him are rows of
orderedlooking
window stacks ofout blank
at abooks
smallandbrickpapers, and a
window looking
courtyard. Through out itathea can
smallsee
brick courtyard.
Through it he can see the grass grow and die. He
the grass grow and die. He can see
can see a wall. Every day at noon, someone walks
a wall. Every day at noon, someone
by, barefoot, and the window blazes: this is when
walks by, barefoot, and the window
the child sings a low F. The paradox of the child
blazes: this is when the child sings
with the bass voice is a metaphor for the clarinet.
a low F. The paradox of the child
The instrument manipulates the voice so that
with the bass voice is a metaphor
even a soprano sounds three octaves deeper.
forFiltered
the clarinet.
through Thethe
instrument
clarinet, all voices are
manipulates the voice
equalized and no longer give so that any
evenindication
a of
soprano sounds three octaves deeper.
age: an F is an F played by a boy or a man on the
Filtered
verge ofthrough
death. No thematter
clarinet,yourallage, you must
voices are equalized and no longer
envision the chairs filled with loved ones and the
give anyasindication
child your son. Thenof age:write
an Fhisis an F in the
name
played
blank by a boyand
books or apapers.
man onThe the verge
child and the
Youth Verge of death
ofpracticed
death. No matterwill
clarinetist your age, but
smile, youyou cannot let
must envision
the smile loosen the
thechairs
tongue’s filled
gripwith
on the reed.
loved ones and the child as your son.
Then write his name in the blank
books and papers. The child and the
practiced clarinetist will smile, but
you cannot let the smile loosen the
tongue’s grip on the reed.

Ryan Mihaly 73 4
Ryan Mihaly

[F]
[F] There
There isisnothing
nothingtotogaingainfromfrombated breath
bated
except breath
atrophiedexcept
music. atrophied
F cannot subsist on
music.
anythingF cannot subsist
but fullness, so on
fillanything
your lungs to
but fullness, so fill your lungs to
bursting. There’s no mistaking an F that’s been
bursting. There’s no mistaking explodes, it
supplied with more than ample air: it
commands,
an F that’s been it annoys.
supplied Listeners
with make nasal
associations. You are alternately embarrassed and
more than ample air: it explodes,
thrilled, like Eve in her sudden nudity. You
it commands, it annoys. Listeners
notice drops of sweat crawling around your neck.
make nasal associations. You
You start to smell. Suddenly you want to try
are alternately
something embarrassed
friskier, so you play and a song about
Krishna’s thrilled, like Eve in
finding Adam and populating her sudden the world. You
mouth nudity.
owe yourYou noticetodrops
humanity of sweat
apple-eating Eve, the fact
crawling
that you shutaround your
yourself neck.
behind You when you
a curtain
start
shower toonly
smell. Suddenly
to step out lateryou
into want
the presence of
to try something friskier, so youindifference,
a cat, who, gazing at your body with
offersa asong
play nostalgic
about glimpse
findingof Adam
Paradise. andKrishna,
meanwhile, opens his mouth and shows his
populating the world. You owe your
adopted mother Yashoda reams of dark energy
humanity to apple-eating Eve, the
Eve’s mouth bursting at the edge of the universe. Eve and
fact that you shut yourself behind
Krishna never met – they meet instead at the
aclarinet.
curtain when
F is you
the site of shower
the divineonly
in dialogue.
to step out later into the presence
of a cat, who, gazing at your body
with indifference, offers a nostalgic
glimpse of Paradise. Krishna,
meanwhile, opens his mouth and
shows his adopted mother Yashoda
reams of dark energy bursting at
the edge of the universe. Eve and
Krishna never met – they meet
instead at the clarinet. F is the site
of the divine in dialogue.

Ryan Mihaly 5

74
 Vol. 1, No. 4

Six Prose Poems

by Ian Seed

Ian Seed’s most recent collections of poetry are The Underground Cabaret (Shearsman,
2020), Operations of Water (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2020), and New York Hotel
(Shearsman, 2018) (TLS Book of the Year). The Thief of Talant, the first translation
into English of Pierre Reverdy’s Le Voleur de Talan, was published by Wakefield Press
in 2016. Bitter Grass, the first translation into English from Italian of Gëzim Hajdari’s
Erbamara was published by Shearsman in 2020. He is currently working on a new
translation of Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup, due out from Wakefield in 2023.

75
Ian Seed

Senility
For Jeremy and Marita Over

It was a clown’s unicycle without handlebars which I found myself

riding down the country lane early one summer morning. I couldn’t
remember ever having ridden one before. A sheep on the lane let out a
protesting baa. Further on, there were cows blocking my way. I had no
idea how to stop. My feet were a long way from the ground. What was
I doing out so early anyway? The farm shop wouldn’t be open yet. But
perhaps the farmer’s wife would give me some fresh milk. She’d always
treated me with the greatest courtesy, in part because of my white hair,
but also because her father and I had been friends as boys. He was a
little older than me. He had taught me how to ride a two-wheeler bike
when I was just three years old by lifting me onto the saddle, pushing
me to the top of a hill and then letting me go. I fell off halfway down, but
my small body rolled easily and no bones were broken.

Spring in Paris
The River Seine was high, only a few inches from the bridge where
people had stopped to stare. It was all I could do to get through the
crowd there.
A little later I was heading up the rue Ravignan, Montmartre, when
I heard the river rushing up the steep narrow street behind me. Its
waves flashed in the sun, beautiful and terrifying.
I reached my hotel just in time.
Mais ça c’est normal? I asked a waitress.
She wore a black skirt, cream apron and a frilly blouse with puffed
sleeves. Oui, cela arrive de temps en temps, she answered, shrugging
her lovely shoulders.
Inside the hotel foyer, was the famous poetry editor E, along with
the woman who’d given a poetry reading the night before even though
she struggled with a stammer in between poems.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

I took out my notebook and pen. I must write something down

about the river coming up the street, I said. That’s what Max Jacob
would do.
Hmmm, said the editor, putting a hand over his mouth too late
to conceal a yawn.
The waitress came up to me, put her hand over my notebook, and
said teasingly, Ah non — ça se fait pas, then kissed me on the cheek.
For once, the editor looked impressed.
The poet wanted to say something, but couldn’t because of
her stammer.

Mistaken
Apart from one key missing, the three electronic typewriters
with their little bags full of accompanying gadgets were ready for
me to consign to my boss. I had to tell him about the missing key.
If a customer came back and complained, that would be the end
of my job.
‘And where are the user guides?’ he wanted to know.
‘There aren’t any,’ I said. ‘Nowadays you just ask the
typewriter a question and it types out the answer on its screen.’
He looked at me in disbelief. ‘Whatever will they think of next?’
‘I’ll have to make a phone call about that missing key,’ he said,
and left the room abruptly.
His assistant, who had enormous false eyelashes, came
into the office with a cup of tea, and sat down next to me on the
squeaky plastic sofa.
‘Careful,’ I said, ‘you’ll squash those little bags.’
‘Oh, you take yourself so seriously,’ she pouted. ‘I thought
you were a poet, above such pettiness.’

77
Ian Seed

Geometry
Because for one moment in the sunlit park, my lips, without me realising,
made a perfect circle, Georgina kissed me and told me she was in love.
But my lips never made that shape again, and soon afterwards Georgina
left town. A few years later, when I was hiking in the hills, I saw her in a
cottage garden. She was hanging out some washing and humming a tune.
Two small children were playing by her feet. I thought of saying hello,
but then thought better of it, and continued on my trek. The sky was
going from cloudy to bright. I realised I’d forgotten my hat and was afraid
the bald patch on my crown would get sunburnt.

Evaluation
My father came to visit me at my flat. It was a great honour. I went into
the kitchen to make coffee for us both. When I returned to the front
room, he wasn’t there. Instead I found him lying on my bed, leafing
casually through the pages of one of my teenage diaries. He glanced
up and smiled, then continued reading. An old school report fluttered
from between the pages onto the bed. He opened it, took a pen from his
jacket pocket, and added a comment of his own. Then he drank his coffee
without a word, while I pretended to look out of the window so that he
wouldn’t see my tears.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Worth
At the market bookstall, I come across a large second-hand
volume of literary criticism I’ve dreamed of finding for years.
‘I happen to be the author of that book,’ says the man behind
the stall.
I look at him properly for the first time: at the threadbare
jacket covered in stains, the white hair on the belly protruding
through the buttons of a shirt too small for him, the watery gaze
of his eyes.
As if in apology, he says: ‘That was years ago, of course.’
‘Would you sign the book for me?’ I ask.
‘You can put the money in there,’ he says, nodding towards
an old shoebox with a few coins in it. ‘As much as you think my
book is worth.’
A smell of ancient sweat floats across the stall towards me
while I consider how much I should put in the box.

79
 Two Poems
by Tessa Berring & Kathrine Sowerby

Tessa Berring and Kathrine Sowerby are poet/artists who live in Edinburgh
and Glasgow, Scotland. They write, make books, and perform collaboratively as
Usual Shoe and their work can be found in DATABLEED, Blackbox Manifold, 3AM
Magazine, ZARF, A) GLIMPSE) OF) and Tentacular.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Like a Pond
Like concrete, I can’t be bothered doing anything.
I don’t think dating will help.

I saw a man with thick thighs on a bicycle today.

A man with deep crease in his brow yesterday.

I saw a woman smile at me from inside her dripping hood.

I saw about eight crows and a bee.

What ever happened to the guy from Tucson, Arizona?

I smiled at a woman reading a newspaper next to the wild flowers.

They say sales of mascara will go up, sales of lipstick will plummet.
I bought Tipsy cake for the pink bruise of its sponge. It tasted of all
this damp.

I made a blueberry and lemon loaf to use up the yoghurt in the fridge.
Scatter the rest of the blueberries on the top. Press them in gently.

I always read the recipe too late.

What is the recipe? Where is the recipe?

There is music playing and something online about gooseberries

and varieties of alpine strawberries.

Add love hearts to everything. May as well. Hello. Hello. Hello.

That gutter is overflowing again. The neighbour filmed my roses
for Facebook!

And everyone is in such trouble! Everything will have to fold —

which is what we always say. But all the grief. Where is that?

81
Tessa Berring & Kathrine Sowerby

I need to check on the Gerbil who doesn’t move much any more.
Only to shit inside its rubber strawberry. Poor thing.

The hairdresser next door is rearranging all its mirrors, so no one

can share.
One reflection. Focussed ponds. Plenty more frogs in the pond . . .
Lonely croaks.

Take your own tissue box. Take away your dangerous snot and tears.
Your watery brain like tangled spaghetti. I love spaghetti.

Walk and do lunges and punch the air. The tailor has a mask
that looks like a huge lilac hydrangea. I imagine passing out.

Make art they say. Make art!

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

People get younger and younger

Do you keep a journal? A soft yellow journal?
Speak with a French accent? Talk about newspaper?

Have you ever had your picture taken? Yes!

There was a bonfire. I wanted a plasterer to embrace me.

I said it aloud. I wanted their powdered jeans,

powdered boots, powdered hands, the thick cream plaster.

Someone said there was nothing uglier than drying plaster

and I thought, how wrong and how contrary to the popular aesthetic

of poets and artists who say, I love the colour of drying plaster.
I’ve heard them — and duck-egg blue and teal and mud,

the vouchers for fresh fish and dog food and CBD gummies,
knee pain cures, canvas prints, miracle socks. Miracle socks!

For zip up suitcases, and heady bunches of lilies, fuller hair

a healthy prostate, tighter skin. Have you read any novels today?

Any good poems? Stood in a car park in the rain? Put a wash on?
Tried to get warm? Some people have all the luck and all the products.

Press here for a new phone. Save your passwords. Save us! Save us!
Here, have some blueberries and a threaded needle, you’ll like that.

I want a new sieve. It doesn’t matter. What is the colour of crying

into plaster? Blue is too easy. Or too blue. Fuck blue. What about brown?

83
Tessa Berring & Kathrine Sowerby

What about sarsaparilla? What about don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry?
I only had to think about corner sofas for corner sofas to appear.

Wide and grey and free delivery. Plump up your lips why don’t you.
Drink apple cider. I’ve tried them all. When were you born?

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

99Tc
by Eric Williams

Eric Williams is a writer living on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in

Austin, TX. His fiction has appeared in King Ludd’s Rag, Protean Magazine, The
Molotov Cocktail, Unbroken, and Noble/Gas Quarterly, among others. A collection of
his short stories is forthcoming from Malarkey Books in 2022.

85
Eric Williams

An excerpt from Gene de Join’s The Life of Louis 9th

[lacunae] dining with the king he stopped to look in on the men I had
with me, and took away my young page, aged thrice the half-life of 228Ra.
This lad served the count so well that he eventually made him a knight1
and, afterwards, when we had returned to Novum Aachenum and he
would see me at court, he would embrace me and say “May God reward
you, my lord, for all honor I enjoy now I owe to you!” As for his three
brothers, I do not know what happened to them.
While the king was fortifying his camp near Sandia2 some people
from the surrounding hills came to sell supplies to the army. They were
Zwikyites, followers not of the Revelator’s sister but of her aunt, and so
were often themselves at war with the Relativists inside the fortress of
Sandia. They went about the wastelands unhardened, and as a result
their germplasm had long been touched by scintillation. They were of
many and varied forms most terrible, all burned piebald and lacking
uniformity in the number of limbs and eyes. But, hideous as they
were, they brought goods that the army was in dire need of: carnelians,
gear grease, shell buttons, nanocarbon filament, flints, casava flour,
oscilloscopes, selenite, ferroelectric toroids, spices and cooking oil,
orichalcum, grackle feathers, bonnacon3 ivory, mycoprotein, troglodyte
eggs, ammunition, and spun wool. All this they sold to us (at a healthy
profit) from a tent market erected in the shallow bowl of an ancient lake
on the edge of our encampment.
One day, seeking diversion, King Louis9th said to me “Seneschal, let
us go to the pagan market and see what might be there, for the Zwikyites,
heathens though they may be, are averred to be the most wide-ranging
merchants under heaven.” And so the king and I and also Olivier de

1. The phrase used by Gene de Join here is “gave him his plutonium.” As sumptuary
laws reserved the use of fissile material solely for the military aristocracy, this therefore
refers to the squire’s elevation to the knighthood.

2. The actual location remains a mystery, although it is believed to be somewhere near

modern-day Dził Nááyisí.

3. The identity of this animal remains unknown.

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

Platine, a most noble and chivalrous knight, mounted our therocracids4

and rode down to the dry lake market. We also took with us Anselm-3
the Paraclete, who spoke the language of the pagans, and Tancred of Ys,
the valiant master of the King’s Pistoleers.
The dust and heat of the day made us thirsty, and so we first
stopped at a wine merchant’s stall. The owner, draped in a robe stitched
from the parachutes used for aerial bombs, strained the wine through
a sieve loaded with dried dates. With one hand the merchant raised the
wine skin high overhead, while a second hand gripped the sieve, and
a third hand held delicate nautilus shells, pearlescent and shining in
the red sun, which they handed to us as they filled them. Noticing that
I drank my wine unmixed, the king asked me, “Why, my Lord de Join,
do you not mix heavy water with your wine?” I replied that it was on
the advice of my doctors who had told me that, on account of having a
dry and cold stomach, it was impossible for me to get drunk. “In this,
Seneschal, you were deceived,” replied the king, who was drinking his
wine mixed with one third heavy water. “If you do not learn to mix your
wine while young, then you will not be in the habit of doing so when
old, and you will have gout and stomach troubles the rest of your days.
Also, as age overtakes you, if you do not mix your wine you will become
drunk with it every night, and that is too revolting a thing for any brave
man to suffer.” In every way, the King always sought and preached
noble moderation, and had many wise sayings and anecdotes perfectly
suited to such.
Refreshed, we wandered the market, and saw many strange sights
and wonders, for the Zwikyites were indeed far-travelled and marvelous
gleaners, sifting the wasteland for treasures and novelties of all sorts.
When they realized that the king himself was among them, they vied
with each other to get his attention, calling out with hoarse cries “O king
of Outrétoiles! See this!” “O foreign lords! Peruse my wares!” They rang
bells and blew trumpets, they flashed strobe lights and sent rockets into
the air, each seeking to outdo their neighbors for the attention of one so
noble and rich.

4. Members of the extinct Suborder Neobathornithidae (Osmolska 1041)

87
Eric Williams

We were watching a mechanical ape perform tricks while

accompanied by its master playing upon a trinitite5 armonica, when a
merchant approached us and tugged on my tabard.
“Most noble and warlike sirs,” said the merchant, bowing low to the
dust. “If you would see true wonders, leave off this childish display and
follow me to my master’s tent.” The king nodded his consent, and we
followed the merchant to a tent raised on a sandy shingle on the far shore
of the dry lake. There, seated before a ragged tent, was an immense man
of great age, clothed only in a breechclout and covered head to toe with
coarse white hairs that waved and wiggled all on their own in the still
air, like things alive. He had one eye in the center of his forehead, and
it sparkled like a lens in the sun. Without a word, the merchant began
bringing out such wonders as he had for sale.
First he brought a stone that, with a blow from the thin edge of a
mason’s hammer, would split into thin flakes. This stone was marvelous,
for upon the flakes were the forms of fishes, perfect in form and scale as if
it were alive, but dark in color and made entirely from stone. There were
also leaves, the same black color but delicately veined and stemmed,
as if they were fresh fallen from a great forest. The king was mightily
impressed and asked the merchant “Where did these come from?” to
which the merchant answered that they were found right here, in the
neighborhood of Sandia itself. The king asked to be shown more, and the
merchant brought other things from out of their tent.
There were coils of wire made of a clear material. Tancred of Ys
took one end and I the other, and we stretched it out and it caught the
light of the sun and broke it into a rainbow all along its length. There
were cylinders of some dull substance, heavy as lead and so deadly
cold that hoarfrost rimed their surface, even in the heat. These could
only be handled with gloves. There were delicate crystalline flowers
emerging from pots full of porcelain dust, roses and amaryllis and
magnolia blossoms, all made of glass. The merchant showed us tattered
parchments covered with the indecipherable symbols of ancient and
forgotten writing. They brought out buckets of strange pale slag, greasy
to the touch and, when held, whispered such strange thoughts into ones

5. Glass formed from sand melted in an atomic explosion.

88
 Vol. 1, No. 4

ears you might think you’d gone mad. There was the head of a man,
perfectly formed and beautiful to look at, but made entirely of metal. The
eyes of this metal head were blue and sparkling, and they would follow
you whither you went. More and more things they brought before us,
too many to tell or describe, and all the time Olivier de Platine’s Geiger
counter rattled and clicked and screamed while Anselm-3 counted on
his rosary. In the end, I loaned the king ten thousand bezants (he had
brought no money of his own with him) to purchase some of the stone
fishes and the metal head with the wandering eyes. We all agreed that we
would return to look over more of the strange merchant’s goods, though
we never did have the chance again; later, in an attack from Sandia,
the Zwikyite camp was overrun and everyone killed. For all I know,
the merchant’s wonders lie now in the vault of the Sultan of Sandia, or
scattered to the palaces of his generals.
When our fortifications were finished, the king ordered all to
prepare for an attack at the conclusion of the octave of Ēostre, at which
time we [lacunae]

END

89
 Three Poems
by József Szabó

Tessa Berring and Kathrine Sowerby are poet/artists who live in Edinburgh
and Glasgow, Scotland. They write, make books, and perform collaboratively as
Usual Shoe and their work can be found in DATABLEED, Blackbox Manifold, 3AM
Magazine, ZARF, A) GLIMPSE) OF) and Tentacular.

90
 Vol. 1, No. 4

“Once there was, where there wasn’t . . .”

(an ontology in hindsight)
for those “certain [noon]lights and certain [suburb]s”, and the “[perpetual]
imminence of a revelation”

[“Wanna see something cool that I can actually do?”,

said a little girl, who (now) miraculously appeared,
and does a perfect cartwheel, right (t)here,
on this lonely side-walk (of ours)

“Now you try!”,

so i botch my landing:
slipped off the curb,
scraped my big-boy knees
in sparkling streetsweeper-debris

but i laughed, then we laugh,

and twinkling in the corner of my eye:
i turn to see, across the road, a retired old-man who,
sitting in the chair on his veranda,
(dis)appears (forever) like a Cheshire cat]

(she (was a) spoke in pure poetry

(“children are not so foolish as we think they are!
The surface becomes a volume, a body, a world”))

([Santiago], look at [our lives], [we’re] a lot like you were.)

(“Stumbl[ing] between [(]two[)] stars”
(kintsugi))

(“The most comic animals are the most serious — monkeys, for example,
and parrots.”)

91
lost (and found) in translation(s)
for ..., Celan, Pizarnik, Stănescu, ..., Epidote Press, and for the Péter Farkas
who suddenly came back to mind, esti kornél, and i renewed our old friendship

i still remember this moment,

this poem written in(to) my childhood:
[the playful wind
re-animates a dry,
curled-up leaf,
causing it to scurry
like a mouse
along the curb]

a recent self-translation of that moment:

[[startled by a mouse scurrying along the streetcurb—
no, just the wind and a leaf playing together,
inviting me to join]]

a translation i once read by Robert Chandler:

“A dead, fallen leaf lay beside Voschev’s head; the wind had brought it
there from a distant tree, and now this leaf faced humility in the earth.
Voshchev picked up the leaf that had withered and hid it away in a secret
compartment of his bag, where he took care of all kinds of objects of
unhappiness and obscurity. ‘You did not possess the meaning of life,’
supposed Voshchev with the miserliness of compassion. ‘Stay here —
and I’ll find out what you lived and perished for. Since no one needs
you and you lie about amidst the whole world, then I shall store and
remember you.’”

Maria Jolas’ translation, found (pressed) in the pages of another book:

“They had brought with them the companion of their free time, their
lonely little child. When the child saw them begin to settle in the spot
they had chosen, he unfolded his little camp stool, set it alongside them
and, squatting down on it, began to rake the ground, making piles of dry
leaves and pebbles.”

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

a feral Hungarian translation:

(k)ő: könny, könyv, költő: kötől
egy lap mozog és marad
(egy (v)érzés)

((st)one: tear, book, poet: from stone

a leaf moves and remains
(a poem))

an older translation:

(“i shall store and remember you”, said the stone to the fallen leaf)
(“i shall store and remember you,” said the stone to the fallen leaf )

93
(look at all the “lonely [featherless bipeds]”
(the companions of time))

(“it was good to sit beside the sea

to let the waves wash over me
my whole life has been that way
to be lost then found again”)

(“In the river Maeander there is said to be a stone called “wise” by

contradiction; for, if one puts it into anyone’s lap, [they go] mad, and
murder[s] one of [their] relations.”)

(lost in a forest of mnemonics)

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 Vol. 1, No. 4

why are elephants so sad?, and the horses that come to mind
for Rózsika (Halmos), and [all of ] my family (scattered by the wind ( from
Tarr’s Sátántangó))

i remember now that here in Canada my parents found decorative

plates of foxhunts for our home, and that my (ten-year-older) brother
had a small collection of figurines depicting equestrian events, and that
my (twelve-year-older) sister had a painting in her room of a unicorn
overlaid on a young woman’s face, and that the first novel i read was
Black Beauty, which i found at the St. Catharines Public Library, and its
story was about a horse and its story was not just sad, and afterwards i
would ecstatically call black-winged grasshoppers “black beauties” as i
watched them jump in and out of the tallgrass of a nearby field in then-
undeveloped land which shimmered like gold in the light of a
childhood’s sunset;

i now remember that at the age of 9, after 8 years in Canada, we flew

back once to visit where we came from, and that i met my (great-)
grandparents, and that i petted and loved the Szabó-farmstead’s ashen
horse: Villám, and then we flew back here, and several years later we
were startled awake by long-distance ringing to learn a cousin we’d yet
to meet, my dad’s youngest brother’s son, was slowly crushed to death in
front of his dad who was also pinned to the ground by the carriage which
had tipped over when their horse was startled;

...

now i remember that during a visit with my brother in the sanatorium he

said, when he gets out, he would like to stop being a tool-and-die maker,
and, instead, buy a little land up North, and raise horses, and start his life
over again;

...

95
and now i remember that for many years it only seemed i had forgotten
about horses, because they kept surfacing throughout my commonplace
life:
...,
the dappled horse in the Hagakure and Light in August,
...,
Ady’s story about the man whose horse dies at the end of their journey
back home,
...,
Ottó Tolnai’s sparkling footstools and the “Diamond” mare,
...,
Murnane’s “Green Shadows” and “blanket finish”;

and i now remember another (ancient) friendship:

Vasko, Vasko!,
they pulled
our whole world
into being

their eyes, encircled sadness;

[we should]
beg the circle[s] for forgiveness;

...

and i remember now:

why are [Hungarian]s so sad?
because they never forget [the horses]

(“sírva vigadni” and “(majd) eszedbe (fog(ok)) jut(ni)”:

“sometimes [i] think of the fact that perhaps the only [heirloom] of
Hungary is this kind of sadness”

96
 Vol. 1, No. 4

and “the(ir) threat of memory: the pain from [that impossible place
where the so-faraway is so close]”)

(we all know the story of [what happened to Seinfeld’s Manya],

but what happened to the [actress (who performed the role so
convincingly)]?
(the character shuffles off its mortal coil;
the endemic, unthinking calculus of utility;
these [word]s pulled our being(s) into being(s)))

(beloved be the people who can die from, or be saved by, a (few) word(s)
(kuboa(a)))

(ez a (sok, sok) három plusz kettő

egyszer volt, hol nem volt, Etéden is túl,
(“. . . Olyan kicsiny, mint ez a tengerszem . . .”)
és mi lenne most ha Ausztrália elfogadott?
(“. . . Not, of course, all the things that happened, but just how what
happened happened . . .”))

(a human life is a series of childhoods (of increasing lengths)

(ask Strauss or Findlay: “[was he] a mathematician [or a poet]”?,
because if all knowledge is remembering
then no wonder we only get sadder))

((records) stuck in (strange) loops

(throw yourself in front and embrace the eternal recurrence))

(drawing circles in the dirt and in the [Sanatorium] of Forgotten Dreams)

(“But you are not stone, O horse!

You are not stone!”)

(a transcendental etude and a pilgrimage (Dorothy’s, too)

(mal du pays))

97
 from

[title]
by [name of author]

[name of author] was born in [#### Anno Domini], in [major metropolis/rural

outpost/overseas] and was educated at [prestigious university/notable MFA
program/public library]. He’s written a number of other books, several of which
were [praised/ awarded/ banned/remaindered]. He now lives in [university town/
upstate village/parts unknown] where he [academic post and/or marital status]
and where he continues to [etc., etc.] or recently perished in a tragic [etc.]
 [Resonant excerpt from Jacobean drama…]
[questionable attribution]

chapter 1

It would open with a formulated flourish (ideas rather than things),

which is not to suggest an absence of the conventional flora and fauna,
fabricated objects, location with human figures in it, etc., but merely to
admit the immaterial evidence of any such mise-en-scène. Presuming
this caveat’s taken as read, the flourish would leave it foregone and
proceed with unremarked artifice to its point of departure.
At this particular point (for narrative’s sake we’ll posit particularity)
the volume would open into a well-lighted room. There (here), you’d
comprise the only organic matter (the ersatz human figure), drawn in by
the aforementioned flourish and then:
Fictional Character would make an appearance. Or rather, you
would (he’d presumably have been where he is). An arrival met with no
niceties (you’re not greeted, asked in, etc.). There’ll be no interlocution,
nor human contact, but you’ve made such visitations before and are
familiar with the protocol. Fictional Character would take you for a fly
on the fourth wall and go about his business.
Who is this Fictional Character? you’ll wonder as a matter of course
and make the preliminary deduction that since he is solitary, he must
be Protagonist (by default). And pronominal evidence suggests male.
Over the course of the narrative you may begin to question the efficacy of
deduction, but for now you’re decided: Protagonist. Male.
And what race is he? What faith? What socio-economic class? you’ll
need to know because you’re intrusive and exacting in this role. Here
(there), minding your own business would be counterintuitive.
And what’s he look like? You’ll want his hair, eyes and skin colored
in, informing a visage of tone and contour. You’ll want his build built
(will want his body). You’ll want a full measure of “flesh” and won’t be
satisfied until you get it.
 You’ll want the time of day, month, year (past, present, future?).
You’ll want his whereabouts divulged (and by association, yours).
All in due time (one can only imagine).
For now you’re compelled to situate Protagonist in the
Anglophone world.
You don’t know where you are in this world, could be literally
anywhere or more precariously, elsewhere. Protagonist’s failsafe
being that he won’t, strictly speaking, be where he is, whereas you’ll
have no such exemption.

[Title] by [name of author] is forthcoming from [independent “prestige” press],

December 2021.