Funny, how midlife crises start in smoking lounges. You look done (God’s sake, you’ve no make-up on) holding your forty-year lungs up, a flag of tar. And who’d think, with all the life and bustle outside, you’d flee into a glass coffin, willingly, for peace? But you’re met with an ashtray vaudeville as Rodrigo y […]
Hamish Canham
First Year
Oh, Tom, I’m wearing my lucky pants in the reading room but you still turn away. Come back. I’d like one night with you. I’d like every slow day in your arms. I can’t read this Bible; I’m taking my time but the lines run away into the rain. I’m a cat on an ice […]
Chess at Baden-Baden, 1925
In those days, the grandmasters wore suits, hired, borrowed or family heirlooms. Waiters patrolled the lines of tables, bearing espresso, hock, small packs of Camels. Spectators sat in velvet armchairs, some making notes, some waiting for the orchestra. Army cadets manned the demonstration boards, watching for the signs that a move would soon be born: […]
‘My name is Legion: for we are many’
My favourite miracle – the casting out of devils from the cut and howling man who lived in tombs above the town. It cast them into swine, a panicking that sped the herd to drown themselves like lightning in the sea. I feel for the townspeople, the lawful, who thought the madman unbearable trouble until […]
Zebra on East 55th and 3rd
Unfazed, he grazes on popcorn and nachos from a Keep New York City Clean litter bin, shrouded in a canopy of cloud that leaches through the steel bars of a subway vent. Sneakered commuters steam by, too busy to notice, too drunk on mobile devices. Outside P.J. Clarke’s, a woman’s whistle lassos a yellow cab, […]
Goldfields
for Wol When our children ask how we met, I’ll tell them about the fork in the river, where a carpenter called James found flakes of gold. I’ll tell them this all happened long ago, before Great-grandmother was even born, and how the story passed from mouth to mouth to bind a seam around the […]
Ellipsis
scrabble I explain the rules again in no particular order no need for logic I lay a blank tile tell her it’s a D five minutes noises in the corridor she asks about tea I say that nice young man from the kitchen will be here soon let’s listen out she asks is it my go asks about the blank I tell her it’s a […]
Changing Shape
Her passport describes her as five feet three but that was fifty years ago when she was as slim as an iris with a river of red hair. Now the stem of her spine has shrunk, she barely measures four foot ten. Slack flesh hangs from her manicured hands. Her lillied feet are bunioned and […]
Loudness
After bad news, and its pulled-back fist, flows in a sound that’s not a sound. It’s not the brain’s tide beating blood in propped and shored-up workings, not the tapestried texture of attended silence, the goffering of quiet air folding and unfolding in a house where nothing is happening. After bad news, you tell the […]
The Sore Thumb
When the water in the bay is flat, and clouds come off the Table like chimney smoke, we walk along the shore and up through fields of grasses, and find ourselves near his place, so white it seems the stone is newly cut. The breeze there drives the midges away, and the outer isles, dark […]
In Your Shoes
In your shoes, I’d have wondered what I’m like, as woman now, and how I was at school. Did you not ever ask yourself, awake at night perhaps, if I was beautiful or clever, happy, mother now to boys who looked like you, as handsome, tall and blond, or if, for want of funds and […]
About the Olden Days
Tell me how water magnified the surfaces of leaves or skittered off. How it spilled from tiles, gargled along gutters, dropped into echoing butts. How earth absorbed and hoarded it in lightless caves, returned it at springs where women left offerings. Talk about cumulus, cirrus, stratus, and watching thunderheads approach: how light thickened from gold […]
Jack Lattin of Morristown
A wager dreamt up on a noisy evening with him back from Paris talking in French in a Kildare accent, calling for oysters, the candlelight there making everything mauve but the jet on his waistcoat and round wigless head black-fuzzed, his huge eyes as bright as a frog’s. Cloncurry was there, Rahilly the poet, Lady […]
Victor
‘True Stories of Men at War’ As fathers stroll home from work there is no birdsong and the November light is all but gone. Small boys run amok in avenues, take cover behind privet hedges – the smell of cordite, heavy in the air. Over the traffic, the sound of battle: grenades whistling […]
17
We thought it would be ours – shy-on to the street, inadequate fence, blind corners. We learned it by night – its Braille of angles and doorways, its patois of rattle and crack. We dismantled the chimney stack, offered up wiring and roof slates, carpentry. We brought it a child. It bristled with splinters and […]
Muslim Girl
When they had finished with her and with her mother she climbed a tree and hung herself – a girl in a red sweater that her mother had knitted. This is one front page image I remember from the Srebrenica massacre. If we could live inside the memory of ‘Once there was a village that […]
Conversations With my Father
Sometimes you call me on your own, now Mum, drugged up, sleeps more. I ask you how it goes; you speak of broken nights, pain’s ceaseless hum, new side effects. But what I want to know is how you’re doing. People rarely ask the carer how they manage all the tasks dictated by an illness […]