Category: Writing
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Filth
Covered in filth, a disastrous clumsy brain excavates deep to identify causality. Distrusting and perilous, Broken mirror images echo an unsung nursery rhyme in an incomprehensible language. For unclean, as impure, as spoilt, This one is a crummy little one. She has not made any effort whatsoever, and now has the nerve to…
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Proper Burial / Clean Machines / Wheat Head
Proper Burial Each thing we take from the earth requires we bury something of equal value. Dinosaurs buried each other, where they fell, feathered, and massive. Still later, we bundle whole ships with furs for warmth, and spices to trade beneath the earth. One age buries another, patting dirt upon civilization. Dogs understand the…
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Scabies
We holidayed through its incubation. Time spent with family, the large, extended swell of us, in a rented house by a winter sea. What we shared that Christmas would burrow into our warm and secret places, causing us to begin a new year baffled by scratching. The yo-yo trips to doctors, all those different…
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The Home Hairdresser, Wakefield
Holding her hair over the sink, the water runs red; it trickles down her temple. It gets on lunch’s dirty plates. The towels are black, the floor beige. Don’t touch your head, you’ll get pink fingers! Put these gloves on, and just comb it out whilst I finish off Emma’s fringe. It splashes. Hair fragments…
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Strawberry Hill Anastylosis
Strawberry Hill House first poked its turrets into my undergraduate imagination as the birthplace of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, whose central image apparently came to him in a dream there – “of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle – and that on the uppermost…
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Of a Mouse, To a Mouse
The clean pink two back feet he has have long toes almost like a bird’s. Unlike a bird’s, the tail, a draggled earthworm, limps behind his search. Head joined on distinctly to a face but not a neck to speak of. See his oildot eyes like little fleas and yes, they’re shiny! really! Shining eyes!…
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In Richmond Park
Here is the cusp of November colour: deer in a nicotine prairie. Trunks snaked by squirrels, clouds and crows over yellow and russet leaf-rag. On thin legs, bulbous-jointed like twiglets, picking their way through the tussocks, three females pause, wary of me inching toward their group. Of the two stags, one chooses now to move…
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Open Call: Clean Unclean
Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….
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Rye’s Valhalla
Influx Press’s editor-at-large, Gary Budden, and author of Marshland, Gareth E. Rees, venture into Rye Harbour with inadequate footwear and a 1904 guide to Sussex. They discover more than they’d bargained for… BUDDEN: I switch at Ashford International. I hate Ashford. The train rumbles off. I rub my eyes, wishing I’d slept more….
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Tasked to Hear
On 30th March 2013 Mark Peter Wright made his way to a point in South Gare – a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of reclaimed land to the south of Teesmouth – and stopped. He made a note of the conditions (temperature, wind speed, humidity) and of his own body temperature. At 12pm, he switched on his audio…
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Heliotrope
For A.G. The fire called the shadows in They rushed to occupy every perimeter Crowded the mantelpiece, jostled with sharp elbows Tore up the carpets and hung heavily from the curtains Whispered their love songs with hoarse and gentle tongues Scattered in terror at the weft of the flame as it buckled…