CONTENTS

3 Julian Stannard Eau Sauvage

8 Ella Jeffery ReSpimask
10 Ben Ristow / John Strover Of Evening and the Butcherbird
21 Helen Charman The tenancy
22 Harry Guest Stone Islands
25 Mandy Kahn The Everyday
26 Fiona Curran The world is larger in summer
36 Fady Joudah Bloodline
39 Lesley Saunders Drawn
39 Rosa Campbell Small Rectangle of Light
40 Ahsan Akbar Offshore
42 Rushika Wick Theatre 7
45 Jee Leong Koh From Snow at 5 PM
46 Summer Salon
56 Lorna Elcock / Shih-Hsien Hsu The White Sail
65 João Anzanello Carrascoza (translated by Ilze Duarte) Lines
66 Karen Solie Whose Deaths Were Recorded Officially As Casualties
of ‘The Battle of May Island’
68 Sholeh Wolpé The World Grows Blackthorn Walls
70 Rebecca Watts Glamour
71 Lauren Clay Wavy Window
80 Declan Ryan The Bachelors
81 James Woolf One Slightly Crazy Night on East 52nd Street
84 Will Burns Cheap
84 Jennifer Edgecombe elastic bands
85 Robert Selby XVIII: The Daylight
87 Niall Campbell Goodnight
88 Andrew Nightingale Twelve Espressos
92 Abdulla Pashew (translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse)
The Red Notebook
94 Rachel Levistky Against Travel
87 James Needham Cusco Park

ISSN 0002-6972
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 POEMS, SHORT STORIES, ART,
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Julian Stannard

Eau Sauvage

For Charles

Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (born 18 December 1934; presumed dead), commonly
known as Lord Lucan, was a British peer suspected of murder who disappeared in 1974.

I get an unexpected Miss Craven.

text from Lord Lucan:
I read the poems
Will you read my poems? with trembling lips.
Yes, Lord Lucan, I will.
I read the poems
Tomorrow, when I look with trembling thighs.
for the message it isn’t
I read the poems
there – I mean his part with widening eyes
of the message isn’t there.
and then ring Charles Boyle
Just, Yes Lord Lucan I will. ex-poet of Shepherd’s Bush.
It sounds like a song.
Is that Charles Boyle
Yes, Lord Lucan, I will. ex-poet of Shepherd’s Bush?
Yes, Lord Lucan, I will.
Yes, says Charles
A week later a package as – indeed – you well know.
drops through the letter box –
I want to find the right ton
22 Landguard Road
into a communal hallway, I want to suggest
that in a previous life
full of envelopes
addressed to neighbours I rubbed shoulders
with interesting people.
who’ve long since disappeared:
Miss Moon, Miss Pinkerton A little hushed, throaty, I say,
The poems of Lucan have landed.
Miss Reckless, Miss Raven
What are you talking about?
and the loveliest of all says Charles, are you demented?

3
I think you should take a look. and Charles is making a noise
I think you should publish the book. at the end of the phone.

Actually, I rather enjoy thinking The ex-poet of Shepherd’s Bush

of Charles Boyle in Shepherd’s Bush. the most insouciant publisher

Charles says, Read me a couple, in the city of London

read me a poem by Lucky Lord Lookey. the most audacious publisher

Read me, read me. Alright, alright. in the city of London

I’m sifting through the poems the most charming publisher

and the room is zinging with in the city of London

the aroma of Eau Sauvage. is making a strange noise

Read me a couple, read me a couple. at the end of the phone.

I’m reading them to myself. Oh read me a couple.

I’m not reading them to Charles. Oh read me a couple.

I’m reading them to myself. No! No! No!

They’re so louche and so elegant
so decadent and so intelligent.
In fact they’re not poems at all.
They’re too good to be poems.
It’s like putting one’s hand in a glove.
It’s like smoking a little Tina
Bonjour little Tina. Bonjour.
They’re not poems at all.
Poems which are better than poems
ought to be called something other
than poems. Read me a couple
says Charles, read me a couple of poems
that are better than poems.
And then I pretend
someone’s knocking
at the door.
In fact I go to the door
and start knocking on it
knock, knock, knock:
Charles, I say, someone‘s knocking
at the door – You’d better
answer it, he says.
I think he might be thinking
it’s Lovely Lord Lucky.
Knock, knock, knocking
at the door.

Charles is making a strange noise Who’s knock knock

at the end of the phone. knocking at the door?

I have the most extraordinary Virginia Woolf.

non-poems in the world Miss Photo-Synthesis.

4
Frederick Seidel. at the door!
Charles Manson.
I mean someone
Charles Boyle. who is not me –
Not even Charles
someone who is not me!
can be in two places
at the same time. The jazz police are leaning
on my shoulders.
Professor Kiss.
Miss Reckless. The Poetry Foundation
is going through my folders.
Arthur Rimbaud
with only one leg. Blah, blah de blah
blah
Salvador Dalí
Lord Lucan. Charles is making a strange noise
and someone’s knocking at the door.
alleged killer of Nannies,
And I have seen enough
holding some black and white films
lead pipe and
to know that the person
a mediocre bottle in the shit – which happens to be me
of vodka.
(how did that happen?)
Oh Lord Lucan
needs to be fleet of foot
is knocking at the door! and I would be happy
(Obviously he isn’t,
to flush the poems – I haven’t
I’m putting on a yet thought of another name –
show for Charles!)
for the poems other than poems –
Hang on a moment, I say down the lavatory:
walking round the room
the flusher is a spitter
in a euphoric circle. rather than a flusher
Hang on a moment, I say
the flusher is a spitter
walking round the room rather than a
in a euphoric circle.
I called the plumber
Sweet Lord – sweet Lord a hundred times.
someone is knocking
His name is Trevor.

5
 Oh, he’s subtle.
I called the plumber
a hundred times.
I know he’s there
at the end of the phone
feigning a psychotic attack
in the back of his van.
You can stick your little pins
in that voodoo doll.
I cannot flush
the Lucan poems.
I cannot burn the Lucan poems
not a log in sight.
OPEN UP! OPEN UP!
Lord Lucky has written
his poems on exquisite
parchment and I realise now
I will have to eat them.
That’s what they do in France
when the Gestapo comes
knocking on the
door.
The young woman who
everybody loves drinks
a glass of Beaujolais
and swallows the name
of the agent which slips down
her throat
and lies in the pit of her stomach.
We know the Gestapo
6
will not break her –
they will torture her
and they will kill her.
She will die, having
swallowed the name
of a very important agent.
She will save France.
They will not break her.
There will be a statue of her
in Rue Julien-Lacroix
Je ne regrette rien/ everything.
I am now eating the poems
of Lord Lucan
what a pity he wrote so many!
The Gestapo are knocking
at the door
and I am eating the poems
of Lord Lucan.
Eat eat eat.
Eat eat eat.
And I say – in a muffled voice
I’m coming! I’m coming!
Give me some extra moments
Meine Herren
I’m just getting out of the shower!
As if.
I called the plumber
a hundred times.
Maybe I should pretend
I am merely a piece of paper
and rustle, rustle
or maybe I should just lie doggo

for a while –

I’M COMING! I’M COMING!

I don’t want the Gestapo

to think I’m some

dirty, un-washed poet

floating on the Oh là là

of drug-fuelled auto-erotica

so I’m dabbing
my neck with Eau Sauvage

and slipping on
the silkiest of dressing gowns

as if I’d just been putting

the final touches to

Blithe Spirit

Dabbing on a little Eau Sauvage.

Eat eat eat.

Eat eat eat.

I’m coming! I’m coming!

Julian Stannard teaches poetry at the University of Winchester. His most recent collection is What
were you thinking? (CB Editions, 2016). The Italian publisher Canneto will bring out Sottoripa, a
bilingual publication of his work, later this year.

7
 Ella Jeffery

ReSpimask

People always tell me Shanghai’s not real

China, not real China as stadiums burst
open like volcanic craters and the neon strata
of freeways double and triple. I hear
they’re building a beach in the calcified streets
of North Jiading. Twenty-seven new metro stations
this year, all sides of the city strapped
with tracks. Lately I feel myself sinking
like an office tower, some days I feel tall and taut
as a crane under floodlights. The view
from the Pearl Tower’s clotted with smog
but only at sunset or when there’s a queue.
I hear they’ve got plans in place to clear the air,
purifiers in every store, and today I saw new ReSpimasks
that come in patterns called Arctic, Cobalt
Venus, Hummingbird, Lightning and Paradise.

8
Flat Earth Theory

I can’t believe in a spherical earth. We move

rung by rung. Stars like a spray of spit

between terse tangents of planets. Nerves

in their new-shoelace neon have a start and end,

linear as logic. Laid on our backs, we can trawl blood

from foot to brain to recover from a faint.

And whatever slow turns the planet makes aren’t part

of some larger reasoning: the earth’s blue zero

carried over while meteors glance us in the dark.

We were afraid in our beds but that time has passed.

Weather never repeats. Each year we revise our vocabulary

of storms: this summer there was sleet where we lined

our towels on the beach. Rain does not recognize itself

in puddles, does not give birth or die. It moves on.

We are not coming back to any place.

Ella Jeffery is an Australian poet. Her work appears in journals and anthologies including Meanjin,
Cordite, Island and Best Australian Poems. She lives in Brisbane.

9
 Of Evening and the Butcherbird

Ben Ristow

My parents were ready to drive north to a Rhinelander motel to enjoy brandy

old-fashions and sex at more rewarding volumes. In the car, before our
surrender to Aunt Cherry and Uncle WC, I could see my cousin Jerome’s
eyes dance the jail break, the count of strides and the line he’d take sprinting
out of the barnyard. He’d bottled up a holy fear of WC and was willing to
survive my parent’s vacation outdoors among the dangers of the neighbor’s
toro bravo and the personal famine that would lead him to shake the trees for
crab apples and shagbark hickory nuts.
The suffering in wilderness was better than facing WC, and when Jerome
cut loose for the woods he made off with provisions from the barn: a tarp,
baling wire, horse blankets, and a skinning knife. Vacations for Jerome were
tests of abandonment and the torment of WC. For me, these vacations were
another matter entirely, and what Uncle WC had in his hands was a grand
nephew to do the labor he wouldn’t. He had me who he could shove under
the farmhouse foundation among the antiquity of barn cat turds to replace the
knob-and-tubing and feed new romex to old outlets. Other days he grunted
me out to a spot adjacent the outhouse trap. There I dug the new dirt hole
and felt my feet descend into the shade of afternoon, where and when I saw
the flow of sewage from the adjacent hole come rivering in over the lips of
my goulashes.
Uncle WC hosed me down like a circus elephant in the garden bed. Then
naked except for soggy drawers, Aunt Cherry marched me upstairs where I
was given a union suit to fit a grown man. Dinners were venison or less and
sometimes Braunschweiger and cream cheese on butter crackers. Before
the garden was ready the only vegetable was a can of sauerkraut or boiled
potatoes poured into a white bowl. Television was where we went after dark
to see game show puzzles, the no-news from Wausau, and murder mysteries
with Angela Lansbury. What sleep I was permitted came upstairs in a Marine-
issued sleeping bag. I could hold my breath and have the sound of Aunt
Cherry’s snoring tickle my heels through the floor planks. There were times
in sleep when I dreamt dreams of those held in bondage, those whose souls
crash against the shadows of their captors, and who search and flail for liberty
in the delusions of night.
In the morning darkness that is more sound than sight, there would be
the reveille of coffee drifting up the stairs. I plodded down, and then in a
stupor I sat for sunrise. I was slid a pair of soft-boiled eggs on a heel of
blackened toast. Their kitchen décor was not dated but old-timeyness headed
for rot. The floor had been laid with an unfortunate mustard linoleum and
the cupboards were stenciled with tulips that looked like bloody crowns. The
wallpaper was in dissolve and the stock images of wood spoons, wire whisks,

10
and butter churns were visible only when the sunlight found an angle through
the picture window. So I sat and chewed. WC and Cherry came to the table
where I tried to keep the chair from its creak. WC coiled his green eyes into
thought and in his pickerel snout his wickedness could hide its method.
Cherry was herself plump and she picked through her oats like a chicken with
a broad sense for the limits of the world. Each of the pair regarded the other
without eye contact, not a glance to share between them.
WC leaned back in his chair and Cherry took his plate away. He drew his
suspenders under thumbs and began to survey my face for signs of rebellion.
He desired my conversion from moral corruptions and to undo what the city
had done to soften me. For Jerome, WC planned to flush him from the woods
without a bird dog or buckshot. To watch WC’s jaw going was to see the
work of dictators who chew tooth-for-tooth through the machinations of a
day. Why he hated Jerome was not at all clear, though as the half-nephew
of the Sommerfelds, his brother’s city relatives, WC wanted to rule Jerome
more than capture him. The boy was to be domesticated, and WC went at
the project like he was whip and tongue grafting Jerome onto the family tree.
My days were spent outdoors. The farmhouse was white and refusing
the red paint of the outbuildings: the barn, the machine shed, and the coop.
Where Jerome must have watched me from was a windrow of scotch pines
separating the pasture from the apple orchard. Jerome ventured near the
farmhouse only after dark and he must have spent daylight worrying for
WC. My great uncle was in spirit an improvisator, and he kept weapons in a
coal bin framed onto the side of the house. From the bin he drew all forms
of hand weaponry, artifacts from which he argued had a direct relationship
to justice. Looking into the vastness of this armory, I saw a contorted pile
of primitive mallets, welded crowbars, slingshots, and larch batons. From
the bin he would extract an instrument to discuss its relationship to civility.
He had firearms but they weren’t the cherished sort and he used snares for
rabbits and a .22 rifle for poaching whitetails.
WC’s version of a free society was one in which violence was directed
against those species of flora and fauna he labeled as invasive. His vision
was such that any European starling that stole a bluebird nest or any patch
of hawkweed that swept across his sight line was judged as an enemy and
dealt the according blow. He was a naturalist who took cues from the acts
of mercenaries and he strode through the barnyard and pasture dreaming
of ways to disrupt parasitism. He raved about the culprits, about English
sparrows and glossy buckthorn, with an encyclopedic knowledge, mingling
ecological histories with Glyphosate. By conviction WC created divisions
between native and non-native, and Jerome for his error was swept into the
clan of invasives where WC had to recalibrate his animal control plan for a
human nephew. In my loneliness without Jerome, his fleeing drew my heart
to the sentimental, made a hole there that left a tang in the evening well
water, that taste of heartbreak that is sorrow or Atrazine.
WC admired the way troubled boys sought reform on Bart Starr’s
Rawhide Boys Ranch. In the summer heat, crews of boys in orange jumpsuits

11
 chested into roadside ditches to kill purple loosestrife by dotting each plant
with a paintbrush’s dab of herbicide. Because he couldn’t give me or Jerome
over to Rawhide, WC worked me in their tradition, sending me out to shear
Christmas trees to symmetry with a machete or wheelbarrowing soil to food
plots for whitetails. While he watched me work, he used the other eye to
make a sport of Jerome. He canvased the perimeter of their hundred acres
spying for Jerome with a rifle scope he used without the gun like a pirate’s
monocular. When he found Jerome, there was bleating and the screams
of the whipped caroming through the trees. Later I would see the welts
on Jerome cracked with the heat from a cedar bough and the way his skin
plied itself over with the scars of WC’s abuse. Hope was not lost though for
Jerome because he managed to escape each time with blind speed and the
recklessness of young prey. To think of Jerome before dusk came on was
to feel the approach of night as it came on in the loneliness of frog songs.
My burden became nothing in the face of his. And days before my parents’
return, Aunt Cherry would make a feast outdoors in the barnyard. She built
a fire in the pit and poured over venison back straps a mixture of Red Owl
canola, honey, soy sauce, and red wine. The rest of the bottle vanished with
Cherry inside the smoke.
Dinner was set on the picnic table. Their only vanities were those
tenderloins grilled rare, hen of the woods and wild rice, asparagus from the
culvert spot, and cranberries more red than blood. When the dinner ended
Cherry stood and went to do the dishes inside. WC opened the garage door
and rolled an upright piano onto the teardrop swath of green lawn. The piano
had a lion carved into its back, a church donation to WC and Cherry. For
a bench he sat on a chest cooler, rocking himself into tune with the clank
of beer bottles beneath. Beyond WC, I could see Jerome emerge with the
whitetails in a hypnotic dusk, nibbling with them at the shoulders of the
garden, its half-born radishes and pickling cucumbers. The sodium light came
on humming white. Wild turkeys moved shadows through the field. Coyotes
followed them. Jerome would eat his fill from the garden without rebuke.
It was watching him picking mutely through the leaves, his face dirty and
vanquished, that brought me to a love for Jerome. Love is a pity. For that love
of him I might’ve tossed him a ribbon of fat, but venison has little to surrender.
WC might’ve seen Jerome eating in the garden, but by then he was bent
to melancholy and playing a roundabout through memory. He sat on the
lawn and rode bottles of Point beer to one of his namesakes, the pianist W.C.
Handy. His given name was Irish, Walter Cavanaugh, but the blues served
better than Irish lullabies. Upon a rhythm he set the way a train finds direction
on a rail, pounding out, pounding away slow. Each tune ended with a whistle
from his pickeral snout. His playing brought new life to the summer’s air, and
I could see Jerome climb a stump the height of a man to listen. Aunt Cherry
would come out from the house wiping her hands in a flannel around her
waist. Her face was like a platter filled on WC’s playing. She could sing herself
but would not rush her voice and instead sat on the edge of the cooler with
WC. Her heaviness had a radiance that seemed to warm her throat. When her

12
voice was coming it was like the breath from inside a stove pipe when the flue
is rocked open. It began as a leaking hiss, and then she’d straightened up, set
her breasts high, and belt out – oh love, love, oh loveless love.
There were nights in this mood that it seemed that WC and Cherry might
turn from their browning cores. Nights for believing in symbolic passivism.
Christian forbearance. Monuments to the enemy dead. But whenever mercy
seemed to grow in their hearts, WC would pivot like a turret gunner and flip
on a spotlight of two-million candlepower. Hit with that beam they used for
poaching, Jerome would dive off his stump and race for his life back into the
woods. Seeing in the light the dirty bottoms of Jerome’s feet was to see the
ragged version of childhood each of us keeps. Jerome ran away from Chicago
to Pacawau before the state could foster him. Here he became the same
scourge as his parents who were bath salt addicts and nickel thieves. The
sheriff knew him on a first name basis as he tailed him from hunting shacks
in Iola to supper clubs on the Tomorrow River.
. The sheriff was on a first name basis with Jerome as he tailed him from
hunting shacks to supper clubs on the Tomorrow River.
Vacations were survived back then. My parents would appear like
hallelujah rolling down the driveway. I was in the car, doors locked, before
they could cut the engine. By then it was all laughs, and Jerome was like
Mother Earth herself when we found him up the road huddled over a dying
fire and grown into the pungency of muck. In the car, we had to be careful
not to break laws of propriety by telling stories that painted Uncle WC or Aunt
Cherry in a poor light. The graciousness of Aunt Cherry and Uncle WC was
a fact immovable in their hearts. In their gleaming faces was the freedom of
childless days. Vacations on the farm had to be endured until me and Jerome
grew out of sitters and the years cut through the flesh of the awful pair. Cherry
was diagnosed terminally. And then my mother called on me to visit – to help
as the Bible says –
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to
give his life as a ransom.

Because Jerome is fresh from a stint in Waupun for possession with intent
to distribute, Mother asks me and not him to take the ride out to see Cherry
dying. She won’t say how bad it all is. Jerome is full of that rare light of those
released from prison, and this last week, from the accounts of cousins, he
has been stirring meth in one of those hungry shacks in the woods. I get him
on the phone and he speaks in slobbers: Brother Bear, you know [inhale] the
crystal ship is being built, a thousand pills, a thousand thrills. I hang up on the
asshole then drive out to their farmhouse. They don’t map the dairy roads,
and it’s better to drive this way, to go by memory past the cannery and the
Weisbus farm through the rhythm of potato flowers and butterflies of the
same pale yellow. Rain falls short and heavy. On their back road and through
the sumac, the wild grapes and cucumber vines hang low in the canopy and
pop the car antenna.

13
 No one comes out of the house when I pull in. It seems a long war is
being lost. Knapweed and Queen Anne’s lace have rooted to height in the
garden behind the house. The doors of the outbuildings have dropped off
hinges. The chickens are a memory and rust has made holes through the
water tank where I can see through to the field where their dogs are all buried
under white painted rocks. Along the flowerbed of the house, walking up to
it, there are mounds like the Ojibwa effigies down by Prairie du Chien and
underneath I can see garbage bags spilling out and the mark of vermin teeth
in the TV dinner trays and frozen pizza cardboard.
There is no way to knock that doesn’t feel intrusive. I go through the door
and into the flat smell like the emptiness of a tin can. There is an unbreakable
stillness in the house. Through the kitchen, toward where the carpet of the
living room starts, WC is leaning against the wall. Beyond him in the living
room there is a new cloud of white billowing marijuana smoke.
‘Whatever you’re bringing, we’re not the goddamn needy,’ he says,
choking it out.
‘I’m just here,’ I say. ‘I didn’t bring anything.’
In the living room there is the sound of Cherry pitching her body around
on the couch.
WC takes up his eyes into mine and steps out from some secret he’s
keeping. He won’t say, but it seems he will. Age hangs him down. Hair
sprouts white out if his ears, the rims of his eyes are full of pulsing red sties.
His nose has blued with a complexity of threading blood vessels.
He whispers, ‘There isn’t a prayer left to say that we haven’t already said.’
Cherry hacks into convulsions and he moves back toward her. When I go
in, she’s lying on the couch propped up on her elbow and smoking the end of
a joint with needle-nose pliers.
There is a towel over the television. Ice cubes melting in a cereal bowl.
A plate of fried potatoes, catsup hardened to the plate. Cherry is bone thin.
Sickness has made her thin enough to drop into a sock, and it shows in her
neck, the tendons and collarbone framing her head up.
‘You didn’t tell me someone was driving out,’ Cherry says.
‘I didn’t call or anything.’ There’s something of an apology in the way I
say it.
Cherry points to something on the floor, and WC spins, lost for what she
wants.
‘Right there, right under your nose.’ She points to a basket of bathroom
miscellany and WC begins pulling out tubes and bottles of makeup until he
finds a compact of rouge.
‘There you have it,’ she says. WC almost smiles, his lips keeping his teeth
back.
‘I was a house painter once upon a time,’ he says. He pries open the case
and dabs the brush. Cherry sits up and leans her face out while WC shoots a
swath across each cheek.
Cherry tries to reach a soda down over the couch arm. WC rushes over
and grabs the can, cracks it open, and then gives it back to her trembling

14
hand. There are recliners on either side of her couch. WC and me sit and
begin to look out the picture window to the field.
‘She’s not supposed to have those – because of the sugar – but I let her
have ‘em.’
The window takes up most of the wall and faces the soaked green
outside. The long grass of the field lies beneath the windrow of scotch pines.
Raindrops bead together and then streak down, racing along the pane of
glass. The bird feeder swings, something has just flown off.
‘We’ve had more rain this June than I can ever remember having,’ WC
says.
‘There we are.’ Cherry snaps her eyes toward the window.
‘Is it our little friend?’ WC rocks forward on his recliner.
‘No, it’s that devil the rat king.’ She smacks her lips in disgust.
In the window on a bird feeder tray full of sunflower seeds arrives a rat
of the sort found walking the lids of garbage cans on train platforms down
in Chicago. The rat licks the seed and then pries apart the shells, glancing
between the window, the ground, and the field.
‘The mistake I made was leaving out sweet corn,’ WC says. ‘Sugar
brought him in.’
‘And now he’s here to grub from everyone alive,’ Cherry says.
‘What do you do for rats?’ My curiosity is somewhat manufactured.
‘We haven’t thought much about it because of this bird, you’ll see him,’
WC says.
‘He’s our little hero,’ Cherry says, a kind of motherliness in her voice.
‘A miniature Zorro,’ WC says.
‘Watch this, watch him,’ she says. Urgency pulls her up from her lean to
almost sitting.
For a minute there’s nothing to hear but Cherry’s curdling breath and the
sound of the rat working on the other side of the glass. It pleasures in each
seed, licking the shell clean before it cracks another seed open like a book.
Its little fingers work and its pink tail wraps around the chain of the feed tray.
From the windrow facing the field, there is a flash of a winging bird that
disappears beneath the sill. The bird appears with speed, colliding with the
feeder tray from below and spilling the rat to the ground and out of sight. WC
stands and flings a book into my lap. The photo is of a black and white bird
and the caption reads: BUTCHERBIRD.
‘Lan-ee-us ex-cubitor,’ WC says, sitting down again.
‘You see how the other birds vanished,’ Cherry says. ‘He’s no friend of
theirs.’
The bird is bigger than a meadowlark or a robin. It flits upward, hovering
above the rat on the ground, before it drops like a hammer. Then it flaps
upward in the air, drops again.
‘A guy could poison him or snare him the way you would a rabbit,’ WC
says.
‘But then there’s no action,’ Cherry says.
‘Right. No warfare for us to watch,’ WC says.

15
 From out of the sumac atop the hill of the driveway, a red car appears
cornering down toward the farmhouse. Cherry and WC don’t see it from
where they’re sitting. The butcherbird perches on the mesh tray, flicking its
tail, perturbed. The car skids to a stop in the gravel driveway loop and the
doors spill out three men wearing Halloween masks and carrying bats and
machetes. One is a goblin, another is a devil. The third one wears Jerome’s
sneakers. His mask is the face of a lab animal that’s been fed the wrong
hormones and turned a kind of creature-ugly.
‘The bird impales big old grasshoppers and even mice on barbed wire,’
WC says.
‘He kills everything. Imagination, he has that,’ Cherry says.
I rise a little from the recliner to see the three men racing through the
outbuildings like shrews in a woodpile. Jerome has taken off his T-shirt and
his chest moves faster than his feet. He seems to stumble with wildness for
undoing the place. He pitches his bat into an outdoor thermometer and then
bashes apart a string of cheap resin chairs lining the mouth of the garage.
Because of their age, Cherry and WC can’t hear the sound of the men
wrecking the farm.
The rat has climbed up to the tray again. The butcherbird has flown away.
‘You expecting someone?’ I know the question will invite WC up and
surrender him.
‘Who’s that?’ WC cocks his head, thinking of the driveway.
‘Someone’s here.’
WC stands in disbelief and looks through the window to the driveway.
The butcherbird returns and dive-bombs the rat. It aims with precision at the
same spot on the rat’s neck, and the rodent begins to twitch with anticipation
of the next blow. Cherry knows the routine, has sweetened to it, and she
follows the movement as though she were listening to music.
‘I don’t have the foggiest who that could be.’ WC leaves for the kitchen.
‘Ever seen a bullfight?’ Cherry asks.
‘Not except for Bugs Bunny,’ I say.
‘There’s a Spanish matador named El Juli. We found VCR tapes of his
bullfights at a rummage sale in Rosholt. He’s a man that’s as beautiful as a
woman. Bullfighters can be.’
‘Isn’t that all a bunch of running around so the guy can just stick the bull
dead?’
‘You’d think. But there’s more to it,’ she says. ‘When you watch a bullfight
you’re learning a dance. And I used to dance a lot when WC played weddings
out in Polonia. Years ago. I’d take about any dance partner. Some were
strangers. The bullfights when I watch them remind me of those dances, the
clomp of barn floors, the hay dust drawing up, anyways, WC jumps up each
time toward the end of the bullfight like he thinks I don’t know how it ends.’
‘So you never see the bulls get it,’ I say.
‘Not from what he thinks.’
‘Huh,’ I say.
‘But when he pitches back in that recliner, you know any time his feet are

16
above his heart he’s out cold, and so when he’s asleep, I get this out.’ She
pulls out a yardstick she’s been hiding. ‘And then I hit play on the VCR and
watch those bulls get stuck through the withers.’
Her eyes fill with tears, the beginning of a cough. She hacks out of her
lungs and the cough charges up louder and louder until the grating of it runs
up my nerve endings.
I stand. WC is alone in the middle of the lawn. Three men surround him.
One of them chops distractedly at the branches of a young apple tree with
a machete. There is no reason to them, that’s the danger. Jerome thumps a
fist into WC’s chest, drags him by the front of his undershirt, brings the old
man to his knees. The shirt stretches, winds up WC’s arms into the air like a
hockey player blinded into a fight. The other two men swing lazy kicks into
WC’s ass before they run back to the outbuildings to rummage for more shit
to steal.
Jerome is a river in its swell, his mask craned and spun around on his
wild head. He doesn’t beat WC right away and instead he makes for the lilacs,
snapping off a branch, and takes it back to WC. The old man kneels without
moving, his head comes back out, white hair crazed. There’s defiance in him
that Jerome sees and so he lashes him hard until WC is rocking and shrinking
away from the blows. When WC doubles over, Jerome pulls him and delivers
a beating that is appropriate for an elderly man. Punches swung with yielding
power and a loping speed.
Cherry finally stops hacking. She’s coiled on the couch and has seen
nothing outside.
I move to the screen door adjacent the picture window. ‘Does this open?’
She has to rally for the words. ‘It can.’
Calmly I unlock the door and head out. Jerome has WC on his knees
facing him, the point of the branch is set between the old man’s eyes. Jerome
has to hold up his shoulder to keep him from tipping over. The other two
men are straining to load an air compressor into the car’s trunk. Jerome is
breathless and wiping his mouth as though his teeth were eating up his face.
‘What the fuck?’ I say.
‘What do you mean ‘what the fuck?’’
‘I mean what’re you doing? Beating his ass, trashing the place.’
‘It was time for evening it.’
‘There’s nothing left here to make square.’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t remember.’
‘You’re a fucking hormone, man, you know Cherry’s dead on that couch
in there.’
‘Dead,’ he repeats.
‘Like taking her last breath. And you bring this shit here. You fucking
idiot.’
The car’s engine sputters and then revs up hot, snapping the pipes.
Jerome moves in the direction of the driveway, but the car flies by and up
the hill past the sumac before it spits out on the road with power tool cords
trailing and bouncing along out of the back of the car’s trunk.

17
 ‘Fucking lying fucks,’ Jerome says, looking toward me. ‘Aunt Cherry’s
dead?’
‘Dying, I said.’
Jerome lifts WC by the armpits. ‘Help me with this asshole,’ he says.
We shoulder WC up and toward the door. His breath is a wheeze and
blood is drip-dropping from his nose and gaping mouth. Jerome takes most
of the weight going through the screen door and into the living room, where
he flops WC down, rag-dolling him into a recliner.
Cherry is asleep, though Jerome may take her for dead.
On the feed tray, the rat appears again taking up a handful of seeds in
both hands.
‘Is that a fucking rat?’ Jerome asks.
‘Yah, they’ve been a problem they said.’
Jerome sucks in a breath and then goes back out the door, letting it snap
shut.
WC is leaned back, nearly parallel to the ground, smearing the blood
around on his face with the back of his hand. The neck of his shirt is torn and
limp around his chest.
‘You want toilet paper?’ He doesn’t hear me or doesn’t want to answer.
Jerome throws the rat he’s killed onto the feeding tray, probably stomping
its head with the heel of his boot. He’s back through the door, wheeling his
stare toward WC, then Cherry.
‘Let that fucker bleed for awhile,’ Jerome says, pointing his chin at WC.
Jerome kneels near Cherry and settles his lungs for air. I don’t know
about the corners of his life, but I bet this is the closest to a dying person he’s
been. His whole head seems to swallow the room and the moment. ‘We’re
all here for you Cherry, if there’s anything you need.’
Her eyes flicker open and look past Jerome to the picture window. The
butcherbird has landed in the way only birds can, its feet grasping the chain
sideways. It looks down and swivels its neck to survey the dead rat laid out
flat on the feeding tray.
She doesn’t say anything but there’s a smile in her that is broken by WC’s
snoring. The old man is starting to chop up the air and Jerome sits in the
recliner on the other side of Cherry.
I take the towel off the TV, pluck out a VHS tape, and slide it into the VCR.
The video is grainy and there is only a circle of yellow sand. Trumpets garble
out an introduction.
‘A bullfight. Cherry watches them when WC’s asleep.’ I pick up the
yardstick and tap the glass in front of the butcherbird. The bird notices but
looks unalarmed. I reach the yardstick out to fast-forward to the ending.
Cherry hacks herself awake and turns to object.
‘Leave it here. This is the boy’s masterpiece in the Plaza.’
‘Does the guy get – what do they call it – stuck with the horns?’ Jerome
asks.
‘Gored,’ I say.
Jerome pulls his T-shirt out of his back pocket and moves toward WC

18
who’s sleeping hard already. He wets his T-shirt on his tongue and wipes at
WC’s cheek where the blood has dried.
‘Nope. He gets an award they give,’ Cherry says.
‘There’s a reward,’ Jerome says. WC’s face is more smeared than clean
of blood.
‘No. She said, ‘aee–ward’,’ I say.
‘I’m ruining it but the King of Spain stands up and waves his white hanky
in the air.’
‘Means surrender,’ Jerome says, babbling out a guess.
On the television, a black bull races to the middle of the sand. His head
swivels and darts, looking for movement around the rim of the circle. It seems
a game of distractions, not a dance.
‘There’s nothing to surrender. Just watch,’ I say.
‘See when the bull’s heaved over, the crowd will go on and on, hollering
up to the king.’
‘Begging. Like they’d die without it,’ I say.
‘And it happens you’re saying at the end,’ Jerome says.
‘It already happened. She’s seen all the endings,’ I say.
‘I’m ruining it – ’ she says, losing steam.
‘No, you’re not. What does the king give?’ Jerome asks.
‘Let her sleep for God’s sake,’ I say.
‘The boy gets to cut off both ears and the tail,’ she says.

Ben Ristow is a writer based in Ithaca, New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB
Magazine, Indiana Review, Terrain, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and elsewhere. His work has been noted
in Best American Nonrequired Reading and shortlisted for the Mississippi Review Prize and The
London Magazine Short Story Contest.

‘Of Evening and The Butcher Bird’ has been illustrated by John Strover. For more information,
please contact johngabe888@hotmail.com.

19
Helen Charman

The tenancy

I think of him as a house and as an ordeal I think of this:

if you’re stealing your opening lines the cause is lost. Is
the cause ‘poetry’? Or is it: myself, as a poet. My outward
appearance is not that which needs to be subverted. Desiring
catcalls. Fears: domesticity; women; desire. Desires: a house;
a woman; desire. I’d like to moon around a garden barefoot
and rosy, instead I wake with night sweats I dedicate to my
landlord. A house is a kind of ordeal anyway: all that cleaning.
Mooning over house keys and antiseptic kitchen surfaces I
watch myself leave the plates out again. Fear of dirty cutlery
(fear of other hands). Rosy and barefoot in the dirty city, no desire
to touch a stranger on the tube I ride bus routes end to end all
day, I have got too much time on my hands. I think of you as a
house and as an ideal. I do not think you should want to marry me.

Going nuclear

Crisis precipitates but elsewhere as my sister shells

beans in late sunlight. I catch myself wearily thinking I
hope she sleeps through the night but the ‘she’ is . . . me.
I am my own crotchety newborn. Raw,

mother lost among the lavender, squawking at baby robins honestly darling no
body minded you leaving the party in tears, no one expected the Care
Home to keep you. Meanwhile, your

father, with the

perfect timing of a selfish man, casts his own claim
on sleeplessness / is surely mired deep in a real sickness.

Helen Charman’s poetry has been published in Carcanet’s New Poetries VII, The White Review,
para·text, Blackbox Manifold, Hotel and Datableed. Her debut pamphlet, Support, support, will be
published by Offord Road Books in August 2018.

21
 Harry Guest

Stone Islands

B.C.

One mile-long chasm tilting to the sea

scraped for millennia by springs, downpours
and time. Dry now.
At the parched mouth
above some curling waves storm-petrels whirr
outside this so-called grotto. One huge leg
of limestone stamped in to these hardly ever tides
to cause a cave never inhabited
like elsewhere long ago, a given space
of ecstasy, blue mirror shimmering for
a beckoning sun.
Between this standpoint and
horizon juts a danger-isle far-flung,
the fifth one in the archipelago
named Filfla, rarely visited, too barren.
Back,
up left, along the cliffs, two temples wait
built there before the pyramids, before
Stonehenge, much added to from centuries
to next. All hefty stones, some giant slabs
bigger than wardrobes and far heavier,
dragged to the sites it’s thought upon round stones
not logs, not many trees to waste, half-inched
by inch, then further, roped perhaps, pulled, that’s
enough, phew (mopping brow), wait for new sun
and start again, no hurry.
Quâ phallic (really?)
sloping slightly, two tall pillars hinting at
a doorway or a gate to emptiness.
Once inside, enclosed, lesser trilithons
offer sometimes an entrance to low altars
for what to whom.
Some orthostats have holes
and, wider, ‘letter-box-slits’ for
delivery of what again – food? gifts?
objects in homage? pottery? figurines? Who
across the æons can decide. At times

22
a tiny gap prised out might just allow
a shaft of sunrise through at winter solstice
or midsummer dawn to hit the further wall.
It’s all conjecture, pliable, of interest though
all stays unproved.
How did the builders come?
From where (when’s known) and why? To slay
all pygmy elephants who’d grazed there for so long?
Escape from enemies? Pushed off in exile?
To find somewhere that’s not as far as where
the sea’s finality ends tumbling down
to nothingness?

A.D.

Some coasts spread broken areas

harsh underfoot but genuinely fine
to stumble over, hearing waves some five
feet lower lap, see lizards vanish in
a flick. No gulls surprisingly. Too far
to fly for scavenging? Unlikely. Pools
in sunlight dry so fast they leave
pale salt where water was. Given the long-
drawn hard unwelcome rock small wonder that
the travelling apostle got shipwrecked.
We had the privilege of watching his
dark distant statue underneath the sun-
set each evening across the bay.
Elsewhere
quasi-forgotten fields and rough stone walls
stagger down slopes to keep the earth and grass.
Two sorts of limestone underneath and used.
Coralline’s durable. Smooth yellow slabs
are easier to cut.
These days and sadly
there’s more ‘development’ as on
the Channel Isles, less landscapes than
there used to be. Yes people have to live
somewhere. Roofs over heads. Hotels
for tourists like ourselves. There’s no
solution but all could be well without
unworthy millionaires and second homes
filled just a week or two per year.

23
 Grey on the land.
Thick heat each noon. Uninterrupted azure
overhead. One town upon a hill is called
the silent one. These streets of golden stone
disappear intriguingly round curves too
narrow happily for traffic. A sort
of loveliness, a kind of calm. Church towers
bristle from parishes. Each cross, a plus,
gives eight enlightening rays out. On a shield
a prancing horse bright red would like to reach
the crescent moon. A rebus probably.
Which language?
Well, we surely will one day
set out aglow again and possibly return
with nothing less than zero. Now we leave
the darkest blue of sea patched here
and there with green that lies a while
or swirls. One falcon glimpsed, inland.
Some red-capped sparrows in a hedge.
To go
back home with dreams and photographs
taking some wonders barely understood
to ponder on at dusk beside the fire,
pass over snow draping the Alps and take
at last the train from Gatwick skimming past
thick foliage and running water once
again.

on Malta and Gozo, April 2016

Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932 and educated at Malvern College, Trinity Hall, Cambridge
and the Sorbonne where he wrote a thesis on Mallarmé. A Puzzling Harvest (Collected Poems
1955–2000) was published by Anvil in 2002. In 2009, Shearsman brought out his long poem
‘Comparisons‘ together with a selection of translations called Conversions. His collection, Some
Times, was released by Anvil in 2010.

24
Mandy Kahn

The Everyday

Old friends, old loves, I celebrate

the day-to-day you’ve found: the favored cup,
the dog, the child, the husband, wife –
the hat rack by the door, the bowl of keys,
the chair in sun,
weekends with your omelets made
just right. You graduated into
the encyclopedic pleasures of the everyday,
that brighter vision –
the sharp phantasmagoria you enter
when you watch your child through sprinkler water:
that moving prism.

Didn’t I always tell you, lover, roommate,

there were portals by the dishtowels?

You think you left your dreams.

You’ve entered
the Basilica of the Present
by its common causeway.

This, your striving earned.

Mandy Kahn is the author of the poetry collection Math, Heaven, Time. In January 2016, former
US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser featured a poem from the collection, ‘At the Dorm’, in his syndicated
newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. Her second collection, Glenn Gould’s Chair, was
published by Eyewear in 2017.

25
Waiting For The Perfect View, 2013
Tapestry, oriental rugs, cardboard tubes, sand, clay,
etched metal, glass and ostrich feathers
125 x180 cm (tapestry dimension)
Photo: Peter Hope
Fiona Curran

The world is larger in summer

Ambit: Fiona, you described your work as looking at the poetics

versus the politics of landscape. Can you explain this specific phrase
and elaborate on how these ideas translate into your work?

Fiona Curran: I don’t think it’s a question of the poetics and the politics being
in conflict with one another so it’s less a question of ‘versus’ than one of
entanglement. The notion of poetics relates to landscape as site and material
and how it might activate the senses and engage us at a visceral level. The
reference to politics considers the different histories that are bound up with
place and with representations of landscape. I am particularly interested in
how landscapes reflect colonial, gendered, ecological and technological
narratives. How spaces shift in relation to power, cultural formations and
unexpected encounters between human and non-human worlds – animal,
vegetal and mineral.

Ambit: It is interesting for us that JG Ballard (an Ambit editor once

upon a time!) has been an influence on your work. Your art fuses
real and imagined spaces, as does a lot of Ballard’s writing. To what
extent has Ballard shaped your practice?

FC: Ballard has been a continual source of inspiration in both the richly visual
nature of his writing and in terms of method. His works repeatedly confront
and explore the instrumentalised parameters of contemporary existence
where the promises of science and technology to move ever forwards on a
trajectory of continual ‘progress’ begin to break down. His fictions present
alternative narrative structures where reason sits alongside unreason,
progress with collapse, order with chaos, disorder and violence. He uses
collage, assemblage and repetition as disruptive strategies to unsettle any
sense of linear flow. In his work landscapes act as agents or ‘characters’ that
are as important as the human protagonists. During my PhD work at the
Slade I used Ballard as a central reference point in my thesis.
Ambit: We understand that you have been influenced by 19th century
panoramic wallpaper. What was the significance of this historic
interior decoration and how did it become the inspiration for The
world is larger in summer?

FC: 19th century panoramic wallpapers focused on the depiction of

landscape scenes rather than traditional patterned repeats. They provided an
intense spectacle within the domestic setting, wrapping around the interior
architecture to bring the outside world in. This set in motion a play between
real and imagined geographies. Later, panoramic papers show elaborate
landscapes devoid of people containing increasingly exotic and spectacular
flora that exaggerated the natural world in a fantastical splicing together of
plants from different continents. This process can be seen to mimic, mask
and reflect the real movement of plants and people through global trade
networks and the expansions of Empire. At the time I was interested in the
digital screen as a similar ‘portal’ into other worlds and the lure of its coloured
and illuminated surfaces. I recreated a section of the wallpaper ‘Isola Bella’
using paper collage and fragments of commercial paint cards that had
glimpses of their names still visible – African Adventure, Delhi Bazaar and
Nigerian Sands for example. These curiously colonial references take on a
darker significance however, when considered in relation to the geographical
context of this installation in Liverpool which was a major slave trading port
during the 18th Century.

Ambit: The small embroidered paintings you are currently making in

your studio highlight the importance of textiles and decorative arts in
your work. What role do they play in your art?

FC: The ‘refusal’ of the decorative within the history of Western fine art
practices has always intrigued me. Textiles’ historical and current significance
within global trade networks and its links to colonialism; its connection to
expanded ecologies of the animal, vegetal and mineral; its close links to the
development of computing technology (via the development of mechanised
systems of production and binary code), and its overtly gendered associations
make it a rich territory for exploration. I also enjoy the fact that sewing is
transportable so I can take it with me when I travel, whereas painting is more
static.
 The world is larger in summer, 2006
Cut paper collage with commercial paint cards, blu-tack
 Above: Radiator Assembly, 2018
Needlepoint, fabric collage, walnut frame
53 x 43 x 3.5 cm

Left: Borrowed Nostalgia, 2013

Metallic photographic print from found image,
acrylic on linen, glass, ostrich feathers
119 x 90 cm (wall based photo)
123 x 92 cm (floor based painting)
Photo: Peter Hope
Ambit: You recently completed an ambitious site-specific sculpture
Your sweetest empire is to please at Contemporary Art Gibside (on a
National Trust site, commissioned by Newcastle University). What is
the story behind the work and its intriguing title?

FC: The commission explores the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes, who inherited
Gibside from her father at the age of 11. She was a central figure within
Georgian England’s elite society and her life was the subject of society
gossip. After an early marriage to the Earl of Strathmore at 18 with whom
she had 5 children, Mary was widowed at 27 and enjoyed a brief period of
freedom before being tricked into marriage by Andrew Robinson Stoney,
who was apparently mortally wounded in a dual defending her honour.
On his deathbed he asked that Mary Eleanor grant him his dying wish and
marry him. However, he made a remarkable recovery and it became clear
that the dual had been staged in an elaborate ruse to get his hands on her
fortune. With no recourse to protection by law there then followed a decade
of physical, sexual and psychological abuse from which Mary Eleanor
eventually managed to escape (she was posthumously granted a divorce
which permanently altered the marriage laws in England).

I wanted to engage with something from her life that was more positive than
her depiction as the “unhappy countess”. I did this through focusing on
Mary Eleanor’s love of botany, her building of the Orangery at Gibside and
her sponsoring of a plant-collecting trip to Africa. I researched the means of
transporting plants on board ship, which led me to the 19th century Wardian
Case which I scaled up dramatically filling it with brightly painted artificial
plants that are defiantly spilling out of the roof and the sides. Seeds and
plants, especially ‘exotic’ ones, were a form of currency in the 18th century
as both objects of exchange and symbols of status. Although botany was
seen as a ‘polite’ feminine activity, women were excluded from university
education and also from being members of institutions like the Royal Society
that gave public validation to ideas. They were therefore restricted to the role
of hobbyists or amateurs in their pursuit of knowledge. However, material
knowledge of plants, their medicinal properties and dyes, had long been the
traditional preserve of women passed down through generations primarily
through oral means.

In the 18th century linguistic conventions linking women with flowers

and pastoral notions of purity, beauty and fragility were common. Mary
Wollstonecraft appropriated and subverted this language to draw attention
 Your sweetest empire is to please, 2018
Wood, artificial plants, water-based
paints, soil, rubber tubs
Commissioned by Newcastle University and the National Trust for
Gibside, Northumberland as part of the AHRC funded research
project Mapping Contemporary Art in the Heritage Experience
to society’s neglect of women’s educational potential. Substituting images of
enlightened growth and cultivation with those of their opposite – curtailment,
restriction and decay. Wollstonecraft suggested that women were reared like
exotic plants, superficially valued for their physical beauty alone at the cost
of their broader rational and intellectual development. The title of the piece is
taken from a line in the poem To a Lady with some painted flowers by Anna
Laetitia Barbauld, which is reprinted in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1782), and this line – “your sweetest empire is to please”
– seemed to pull together the different strands of the project.

Ambit: How would you like your work to evolve? What’s next?

FC: I am enjoying the movement between the larger scale site-related projects
and the more intimate space of the studio. Both demand a very different way
of thinking about the work, its production and reception. I am developing
a new body of painting and textile work in the studio that is evolving from
my research for the Gibside commission into women and botany. This work
will be about plants, seeds and weeds, about women becoming plants and
plants becoming women.

Left: A Cosmetic Problem, 2018

Needlepoint, fabric collage, walnut frame
53 x 43 x 3.5 cm

Fiona Curran (b.1971, Manchester, UK) is a current studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge. She
completed a PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2016. Recent exhibitions include: Exeter Contemporary
Open, Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2017), Creekside Open (Selected by Alison Wilding, RA), A.P.T Gallery,
London (2017) and Love, Peace and Happiness, Kristian Day, London (2017). Recent sculpture commissions
include: Your sweetest empire is to please, Commission for Newcastle University and the National Trust
at Gibside, Northumberland as part of an AHRC funded research project Mapping Contemporary Art in
the Heritage Experience (2018) and The Grass Seemed Darker than Ever, Commission for Kielder Art and
Architecture, Kielder Forest, Northumberland (2016). See more of Curran’s work at www.fionacurran.co.uk
 Fady Joudah

Bloodline

A beetle with phosphorescent indigo wings

I had assumed would be radium yellow
cascaded down the glass of God to the table
by your right arm

and I said that a painter friend of mine

with inflammatory vessels in her mind
(an ailment whose choice of flesh
is blood-vessel muscle)

had told me that indigo

is like the untranslatable in every language:

synonym overlap too low for coefficient,

Rothko’s chromatography
or electrophoresis in and out of his Chapel

– A Mexican rabbi doctor from Aleppo

had recently shared with me
that he’d seen the work
but didn’t get the art in it

I told him he’d have to go into it knowing Rothko

didn’t see the spirit bright
and didn’t see it hurtful either

though it could be that it’s Rothko retro days

and Twombly’s mausoleum across the street
under a Whitman oak
and the city’s grackles at sunset

on treetops and ledges

on traffic lights and wires
along feeders and highways
wild song and murmuration

36
Then the rabbi said that once as a boy
his father had reproached him for mocking Arabic
which his father spoke and loved

‘And my father knew love’ he said

So maybe that’s indigo I said –

You said your beetle had landed

and was wholly tranquil
for a second before it buzzed off again

I said yesterday the signs were many

you said perhaps I’d seen
too many millimoles
of someone else’s life

that anyone passing through

might own a share in
someone else’s dying

I said that too

a Jewish doctor from Waco
told me years ago
‘Sometimes people survive in spite of us’

Sci-Fi Meditation

It’s a year in the future we’ll catch up to.

In some location we call home
or a safe tourist destination with the option to expatriate.

For a measure of plurality, calculated

by the day’s best minds, a coefficient
kind of pi. Disaster after disaster
led to an amendment to be

installed in phases. To be fair,

fairer than what had passed, this evolutionary leap
would be simultaneously implemented
on an impoverished island people

and the people of the empire of the day. Phase two

37
would move rapidly to include
two thirds of the world,
leaving only the third that can’t say No.

At random, melanin is modified,

and the tweaked sequence injected
into embryos at the stage
of skin expression, so that no child’s born

with his parents’ skin color or any color

previously known on skin. A few generations
and the wheel of fortune would roll free
of the pipet’s interjection.

Cyan, magenta, yellow

focused prejudice
on the next frontier of whatever returns us
to particles in nonstop travel toward

another coalescence or universe.

Colors mutated spectacular still.
Lineage recurred. Nostalgia groaned. The wealthy
and addicts demanded chameleon shots

in black markets though this was a different age

in which shades would only pass for shadows.
The rebellious, pure-bred, or damaged goods,
were a small minority and everyone

had equal access to health.

We sit back, enjoy the journey,
lose ourselves through a love story
in which we examine our appearances.

With some success,

we’ll catch up to that year,
call things of that nature
by their author’s name.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas,
and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic
(2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His other books include Alight
(2013), Textu (2014) and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018).
Lesley Saunders

Drawn
for Tom Cartmill

With any treatment we’re never far from the sea, its attention to detail, its
stargazers and myriad transparent bone-eaters, the way it calls out in the
night – the sound of wet black ink on paper, suitable for being sung aloud,
is the true devotional nature of the work, chthonic as well as benthic. (I can’t
tell you why it made me so happy, I just know that it did.) Width, height,
depth; perception, perception, perception, patinated as if change was
always this narrow border of aging and exposure, or else a carpet of gallant
exuberance. Every league of the way, Sicily, Spain, Aotearoa, the sequences
and tessellations, peaks and troughs, arabesque and pungawerewere, how it
all fits together and falls apart. Horror vacui: no serious artist should ignore
this. (I was full of something, the day could not contain me.)

Lesley Saunders is the author of several books of poetry, including a new collection, Nominy-Dominy
(Two Rivers Press). The prose-poem in this issue is a response to the extraordinary and award-
winning drawings of Tom Cartmill: http://www.tomcartmill.com/#work

Rosa Campbell

Small Rectangle of Light

For Sean Robinson

stick yr hands into the tray of chicken yr flatmate cooked:

cold grease isn’t new but it’s accurate, & it makes you think
of Daisy & Tom through the window, how nothing
ever sounded better than leftover chicken & cold beer
in a big house on a hot night after a long day, how Fitzgerald
made yr stomach swish with want, picturing the pattern
on the plate between them (no silverware, that’s important),
salt on the puckered skin, shreds pulled from skinny bones,
slick fingers & the condensation on the brown glass bottle
you don’t want to read it ever again – like Gatsby you want
the mirage of it, want it through a window always, but this
is a different kind of perfect: you & the fridge door,
lifting the canopy of tinfoil to tear at the carcass, ferret out
the garlic scraps, the crispy bits – you are so lucky

Rosa Campbell is the Managing Editor of The Scores (thescores.org.uk). Her poetry has previously
appeared in Icarus, Haverthorn, Dead King Mag, JoLT, the Oxonian Review, and Queen Mob’s Tea
House, and was shortlisted for the Berfrois Poetry Prize. She tweets as @rosaetc.
 Ahsan Akbar

Offshore
The Brahmin speaks English remarkably well, and is a very intelligent,
interesting man
– Queen Victoria’s Journal, July 8, 1842

When I came to Britain

It was 1842
I wanted recognition
for I had worked hard:
I came to London with a grand entourage
In my pocket, I had Robert Peel, the PM
And Victoria, the Queen.
I have served dodgy-yet-tasty curries
All the way to owning a club of curry
I have paid HM Revenue
My due;
I have worked hard.

II

Not like the lazy immigrants

Those workshy
Good-for-nothing newcomers
With their 13 children family
Walking into social security office
And waltzing out, plundering the public purse

It’s a problem – you see Britain has opened its doors

To drones of angry men
who wish to blow up our country –
The newspapers call them re-fu-gees.

I like my refugees like my money: Offshore.

40
III

Let me correct a few things tonight.

Definitions:
the unemployed – the unemployable
the disabled – the undesirable,
the working-class single mothers,
oh you mean the scroungers
and the dodgers,
the chavs,
the chisellers, the cheapskates, the cheats

Amalgamate them: you have the re-fu-gees.

They disrupt the very fabric

Of our English society
(It ought to be members-only)

I like my refugees like my money:

Offshore.

IV

I want to walk down Piccadilly

And feel like it’s my country
Everyone speaks with RP
Everyone sips high tea
And not a nation lost to foreigners
They scare your grandmother and me,

And so,

I like my refugees like my money:

Offshore

Ahsan Akbar was born in London and subsequently grew up in Dhaka, before moving back to the UK
at 16 on his own. His debut book, The Devil’s Thumbprint, has been recently included in the English
literature programme at SOAS, University of London. He is a director of Dhaka Literary Festival.

41
 Theatre 7

Rushika Wick

Part 1.
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost.
– Dante Alighieri, Inferno

1.1 It is recommended that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is used only to achieve rapid and
short-term improvement of severe symptoms after an adequate trial of other treatment options
has proven ineffective and/ or when the condition is considered to be potentially life-threatening,
in individuals with:
• severe depressive illness
• catatonia
• a prolonged or severe manic episode.
– NICE Technology Appraisal 59 (2003)

Sylvie has severe symptoms including anorexia resulting in weight loss which
is now impacting dangerously on renal function. She has not agreed to I.V.
feeding. Heart function is currently stable but at risk. She previously listened
to the music of Nick Cave for most of the day but has lost interest in even this,
which is taken by staff to be an indicator of extreme deterioration. Sylvie has
previously attempted suicide on a number of occasions and these had been
assessed as being of ‘high risk’ with clear intention. She is, however, currently
deemed at ‘low risk’ as lacks motivation.
Sylvie is reluctant to get out of bed and sleeps for most of the day and
night, citing poor employment prospects and a phobia in relation to living
with her mother. She has stopped verbally communicating with her key-
worker, a previous confidante.
Sylvie is an attractive girl who refuses to wear daytime clothes and wears
inappropriate nightwear for the ward from Agent Provocateur. We have been
forced to place her in a side room owing to the associated risks, as this is a
mixed occupancy unit.
There was some initial diagnostic debate as Sylvie had shown evidence of
thought delusion including holding a strong belief that eating flowers would
be an effective substitute for Olanzapine. On one occasion, she had shared
Dahlias with a number of more vulnerable patients during an occupational
therapy session with reduced nursing coverage which lead to unnecessary
blood tests for all involved. She also believed that meat was contaminated
and that politicians were trying to poison her, leading to her conversion to
veganism and complete avoidance of sugar. However, over time, the mood
disorder element has clarified, now making her eligible for ECT during this
deterioration.

42
 In the past history, Sylvie has been accessing specialist mental health
services since childhood where she was initially referred by her school for
challenging behaviour at the age of 5 years. She was known to Social Care
and was subject to a Child Protection Plan at the age of 6 years under the
category of sexual abuse (her father was the alleged perpetrator).

When the savage spirit quits/the body from which it has torn itself,/then Minos sends it to the
seventh maw/ . . . It rises as a sapling, a wild plant;/and then the Harpies, feeding on its leaves,/
cause pain and for that pain provide a vent.
– Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Part 2.
Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
– Dante Alighieri, Inferno

1.2 The decision as to whether ECT is clinically indicated should be based on a documented
assessment of the risks and potential benefits to the individual, including: the risks associated
with the anaesthetic; current comorbidities; anticipated adverse events, particularly cognitive
impairment; and the risks of not having treatment.
– NICE Technology Appraisal 59 (2003)

Sylvie is otherwise healthy and has tolerated anaesthetics previously. The

risk of starvation-related death outweighs the increased cardiac risk during
the procedure. Previously, when Sylvie had full mental capacity she made
it very clear that even during stable periods in her life, she could rarely
experience ‘happiness’ of any sort and felt ‘in stasis’. She argued that
society places inflated value on happiness. She also demonstrated insight
during previous CBT interventions where she was able to clearly map out
her mood expectations as being limited by child maltreatment damage and
identity fracture. Whilst she had been very capable as an undergraduate
at Cambridge, she was unable to complete her course owing to catatonic
depression. Our current assessment is that cognitive impairment is a risk but
unlikely to impact on her quality of life.

Part 3.
To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel;
. . . Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
– Dante Alighieri, Inferno

1.6 Clinical status should be assessed following each ECT session and treatment should be stopped
when a response has been achieved, or sooner if there is evidence of adverse effects. Cognitive
function should be monitored on an ongoing basis, and at a minimum at the end of each course
of treatment.
– NICE Technology Appraisal 59 (2003)

43
 Sylvie has regained appetite and is wearing more conventional clothing. She
is taking care in her appearance. Her heart is stable and she has a boyfriend on
the ward. Cognitively she appears intact in non-verbal and language domains
but has lost recent memory recall with a memory gap of approximately 2
years preceding treatment. Sylvie is currently inhabiting the point in her
autobiographical memory where she was at university and appears to be
experiencing some happiness. This mood state is consistent with her history
prior to the first major psychotic episode. She is, however, able to have insight
that she has experienced memory loss and chooses to view the experience as
time -travelling of sorts. She has asked staff about what occurred in her lost 2
years and we have referred her to a ‘Life Story’ specialist.
Whilst she has certainly made more gains in Mood and Anxiety scores
than ever seen previously, it must be noted that the deteriorations in the past
were clearly associated with her confronting her personal childhood history,
and that this now remains uncharted. There is a slight chance that she may
cognitively repeat prior responses i.e. relive processing trauma. It may be that
further ECT is needed at that point.

Sylvie has been stable for the past week and is due to be discharged home to
her mother’s address tomorrow. Her mother has visited her on two occasions
now and they have a peaceable relationship. She will be able to support Sylvie
with activities of daily living as morning can be a time of disorientation. We
are delighted with Sylvie’s progress and wish her all the best. We will review
her in clinic next week.

I had my memory taken away . . . there’s a blank space. With nothing there.
I can laugh. I take joy in birdsong. I am momentary, and held by the
brightness of the present but I recall little of yesterday’s tenderness or the
sweet sorrow of the fog that hangs . . .
Who are you when you cannot recall that your father died or recognise
your own living room? A prized chair my best friend once made for me as a
thank you for my work – means nothing. It could be from a hair salon. I am
surviving – all things are anodyne. I am on an even keel of safety and insulated
from myself. I am happy but I am not who I was. I feel like a simulacra – a copy
of myself. Static. With no direction. I am strangely fearless, and utterly lost.

Rushika Wick is a doctor and writer who has had recent poetry and prose publications in Cold Lips
magazine, MIROnline, Word-o-Mat and Urban Strange amongst others. She is currently a student
at the Poetry School London and is exploring how social contracts become embodied in her work.

44
Jee Leong Koh

from Snow at 5 PM

This is a selection from Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese

poet by Jee Leong Koh (2016), with commentary by Sam Fujimoto-Mayer
(2066). A half-burnt sheaf of haiku was found in a New York apartment and
translated from Japanese into English. Published in 2016, the slim volume
Snow at 5 PM met with increasing acclaim, followed by a growing tide of
commentaries. On the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, an idiosyncratic
literary scholar Sam Fujimoto-Mayer releases his own commentary, which is
also a last testament and a love letter.

In the green pond

sunning turtles point the way
to Mecca

The Turtle Pond under Belvedere Castle in Central Park was redesigned in
1997 so that no single vantage point can reveal the true extent of the pond. In
this aspect, it resembles the famous Zen garden of Ryoan-ji.
¯ The stones in the
dry garden are placed in such a manner that the entire composition cannot
be grasped at once. At any human vantage point one can only see fourteen
of the fifteen stones.

Looking at the turtles sunning themselves on rocks, our haikuist was reminded
of the green color of Islam and so extended the unknowability of the pond to
Mecca, where the Kaaba, the ancient central building of the Grand Mosque,
holds the Black Stone in its eastern corner. The sacred Stone supposedly fell
from heaven to show Adam and Eve where to build a temple. It is not one
stone but many, held together by cement and a silver frame.

Some would call the stones fragments, but since the Stone itself is a fragment
of a larger stone, and the larger stone a fragment of an even larger stone, and
so on, we can safely call the sacred relic The Black Stones instead. In the
same way, one may think of a haiku as a fragment and a whole.

Konrad Boguslawksi points to this haiku as another example of the collection’s

impurities. What does Islam have to do with Issa, or Mecca to do with
Manhattan, he asks alliteratively. The question smacks of racial prejudice and
betrays cultural ignorance. The Black Stones are held together as the Black
Stone by a technique that resembles the Japanese art of wari modoshi, or
splitting and returning.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial
Times, and a finalist by Lambda Literary. Koh has published three other books of poems and a book
of zuihitsu. Originally from Singapore, he lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-
profit Singapore Unbound. 45
Summer Salon

Above: Alex Culshaw

Untitled speedboats: I just wanna go on holiday!, 2016
Still image from HD Video with sound
3 minutes, looped
Courtesy of the artist

Right: Katharina Wulff

Untitled, 2016
Oil on canvas
Painting: 118.7 x 95.4 cm
Frame: 121.6 x 97.5 x 5.4 cm
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
 Above: Cristina BanBan
MAMAS, 2018
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
185 × 150 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Left: Joakim Ojanen

Downward Facing Dog, 2016
Oil on linen
32 x 42 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Please visit
ambitmagazine.co.uk/download-artwork
to see An Enduring Motivation by Jane Hayes
Greenwood.

This artwork was made for Ambit’s Summer

Salon and will be screened for the first time at
the Ambit launch at Tate Modern on 17 July
2018. It will be available to download from
Ambit’s website from 18 July – 30 October 2018.

Above: Jane Hayes Greenwood

An Enduring Motivation (detail), 2018
CGI animation
4min (looped)
Courtesy of the artist

Right: Jane Hayes Greenwood

Going Steady, 2018
Acrylic and oil on canvas
160 x 180 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Above: Oona Wilkinson
A Turgid Touch, 2018
Plaster, Cardboard, Paint
27 x 46 x 52 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Right: Alex Becerra

Flamingo, 2016
Oil and acrylic airbrush on canvas
52 x 42 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Weiss Berlin
Above: Hans Hemmert
o.T. (gelbe Skulptur passend zu Bierkasten/
yellow sculpture fitting to beercrate),1998
Latex balloon, air, beercrate
100 x 75cm
Courtesy of the artist and VG Bild Kunst Bonn

Right: Alex Culshaw

Untitled speedboats: I just wanna go on holiday!, 2016
Still image from HD Video with sound
3 minutes, looped
Courtesy of the artist
 The White Sail

Lorna Elcock

In summer, they lay on their fronts at the boat’s nose, faces over the edge.
Up went the nose over black wave hillocks beneath. Down it came again,
close, so that Leonie saw the loch’s top inches, light-filled and speckled by
tiny insect swimmers pushing their way under to blackness below. It was very
black, down there. The bridge of the nose cut the water so that white curled
out as they went.
‘Are you children still quite happy in the front?’ called Gloria from the
back.
‘Yes, Mum, we’re fine in the bow,’ said Alasdair.
‘You too, Leonie? Still better out here with us than back on shore with
your mum and dad?
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Leonie, ‘Still better.’
‘Quite right. And what a day we’ve got for it!’ called Gloria. ‘We’ll go
about soon.’ Then, a moment later, ‘Ready about!’
The wind pulled them round, and Leonie heard the white sail empty,
come to a halt and then pucker up full with wind again as the boat finished
its turn. Wires on the mast dinged and, at the very front, the small red flag
poking out the wood there strained and clapped, then furled again. The island
was in front now.
‘You’re not allowed on the island,’ Alasdair always maintained. ‘It’s only
for the estate people, and anyway there’s nothing on there. It’s tiny.’
But for Leonie the island exerted an uncommon fascination. You could
sail around it in less than a minute, if you got your turns right on a windy day,
and all Leonie had ever seen on there – the whole thing could be seen, flat
and grassy as it was, on any given circumnavigation – was, once, an empty
petrol canister, black, without its top, and, another time, a blue and white
striped Tesco bag. The island had a tendency to disappear completely when
the water was high from the rain, and Leonie’s father, who named things,
called it ‘The Occasional Isle’.
On the island as they sailed by now was grass, and, as they approached,
nothing more than that. It gave out to the loch from a tiny, perfect shore,
pebbled with stones the size and colour of birds’ eggs; at the very edge there,
the pebbles glowed pearly through the brown of the water; Leonie longed to
put her feet in.
‘We’ll go along the edge and then about again,’ called Gloria, and the boat
slipped along the shore. Leonie lost sight of the island at that; she couldn’t see
it past Alasdair’s humped body rising up off the planking beside her, wrinkles
and clips on his life jacket standing tall like temples on a hill above the water.
She closed her eyes and felt the boat dip and rise. The water clapped against

56
the sides, and a bottled, sloshing noise came from just beneath her chest,
where the buoyancy tanks were tucked below the boards.
‘Ready about,’ called Gloria, then, ‘Lee ho,’ and the boat turned again. It
was better, at the moment of the turn, to be at the front like this; when you
were sitting back there on the benches holding a rope, waiting for the boat
to cross the wind, for the boom to swing and the sail to crack, you knew
there was something dangerous coming, and then you had to dart across the
middle of the boat, putting your head down under the boom, making sure you
didn’t get a foot caught in the elasticated cord which held the centreboard
in place. There was always water at the bottom, too, and you’d be too busy
keeping your head down and trying not to fall to remember to dodge it, so
your feet would soak – and maybe slip – and then you had to sit back down,
on your bench on the other side, and take a quick hold of the other rope, for
the sail’s other side, and pull it tight to catch the wind properly, and all the
while the boat shuddered and went through its change from here to there
and, for that long crossing moment, there seemed like nowhere to stand on
the earth at all.
Now they took a long tack, straight down the middle of the loch towards
its western tip. It seemed, lying on the planks and low to the water, like rolling
along the bottom of a valley; by half-blinking, the hills rising up on the north
and south shores could come down around and under you; the sky, blue
today, rolling over it all like a coat. Boat, water, hill, sky; so they went on.
Halfway down the loch, the splashes against the hull became gentler, and
the white sail dropped its shoulders. They came to a stop.
‘Well, dears, we’ll just have to wait a bit,’ said Gloria. ‘What a nice day to
be becalmed!’
Soon, the loch turned to glass. Impossible, to be in it, when so much light
came off it that it stood solid. Leonie put a hand down, just to make sure; her
fingers under the surface glowed in the brown like the island pebbles, but the
water wasn’t warm, and her hand, when laid out to sunbathe dry, had gone
quite white from its immersion.
Alasdair, lying on his back with his eyes closed, had curled his neck so
that his head would fit into the point of the boat’s nose, and Leonie sat up,
cross-legged, to look back down to Gloria in the stern. She had a book down
there, and, having put down the tiller and let go the sail, she had her bare legs
stretched out on the benches down the side. She sat there reading in just the
same way that Leonie’s father might while sitting on a train; it was as though
the boat and the loch and her son and his classmate were views going past
the window – none of them really there, at all.
‘Gloria,’ said Leonie, ‘I’m a bit thirsty. Is there anything to drink?’
‘Ah, there isn’t – sorry, dear,’ said Gloria. ‘Never mind. It’ll be like a Sahara
trip.’ She lifted her spectacles, tinted dark from the sun, and gave Leonie a
wide-eyed look. ‘When you get back, you can tell them all how dangerous
and thirsty it was.’
Gloria did seem to like them being dangerous and thirsty. Once, in
the winter, minding Leonie when her mother and father were away for the

57
 day, Gloria had taken them up the mountain after lunch; there had been no
raincoats, nothing to eat or drink at the top and, on the way down, it had got
dark far too early. When they had got back at last to the cottage where Gloria
and Alasdair lived, there had been baked potatoes for dinner. But they weren’t
the usual brown sort; these ones had taken forever to cook in Gloria’s cast-
iron stove and had been the wrong colour, bright red, and Leonie had turned
hers, miserably, around her plate, and gone home hungry. ‘It’s because Gloria
has been places,’ her father had said of it all, after. ‘It gives you ideas.’ But
Leonie hadn’t understood that at all.
The boat sat still, and Gloria turned her pages as the sun made a
blackening line of the mast. Puffs gusted, now and again, and Leonie and
Alasdair would sit up and urge them on, but it was never enough to trouble
Gloria off her bench and there they all waited, stranded in amber.
‘It’s like Shackleton,’ said Alasdair, who agreed with explorers. He had
been given a video on the topic for his eleventh birthday – and so he had been
agreeing with explorers since June. ‘Except I’d like to know where my dinner
is going to come from. And I am thirsty, Mum.’
‘You can always use the bailer,’ said Gloria, fishing around the boat’s
bottom and coming up with a four-pint milk carton, halved. ‘Loch water isn’t
deadly.’
‘Fish swim in it,’ said Alasdair. ‘Fish live in it. There’s maybe even a pike.’
That fact of the water, black and deep, came to Leonie in a wave
sometimes when they swam. To get into it properly from the sailing club
shore, you had to wade out a while, first over grass growing underneath,
which gave way to pebbles, which got bigger as you went until, usually
about chest-height, they became boulders, at which point you breathed in
and slipped under, your whole head right in and your feet off the ground,
until your hair pulled upwards as you sank down to the bottom. Leonie liked
to open her eyes underneath, where everything went larger, somehow, and
green, like being inside a bottle. At the bottom of the bottle, sitting on the
loch floor, perched between boulders and looking up, you could follow the
bubbles of your own escaping breath right up to the surface as the water,
cold and green and silky, blended around you and you became it; your space
fitting it, it holding you. But if you swam out, only a few metres more, you
crossed a ledge and the bottom dropped away, and there beneath you was an
abyss; you could feel you had crossed over without looking down, the water
suddenly nipping colder at your toes. On the far side of the ledge, Leonie kept
her eyes closed. Opening them to blackness, floating on the surface looking
down, was a thing you only did once.
‘Take a drink,’ said Gloria. ‘It’ll not do you any harm.’ She threw the
bailer up the boat. Alasdair picked it up from where it landed and wiped at
it with his shorts; loch residue, slimy, clung to its sides. He leaned over and
dipped it, and brought the full bailer into the boat.
But, ‘Ladies first,’ he said, once he’d looked at the contents, and placed
it firmly into Leonie’s hands. She inspected its water – it was, perhaps, a bit
speckled, but clear, brown and smelling of outside. She took a drink.

58
 ‘Any good?’ asked Alasdair, and Leonie swallowed and nodded before
drinking again. ‘Not so much!’ said Alasdair. ‘It’s not as though we’ve got a
ladies’ toilet on here. I don’t expect Shackleton had to think about that.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Leonie, wiping her mouth. ‘I bet there were
ladies on his boat.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Alasdair. ‘Ladies don’t go on boats.’
‘There’s the wind,’ said Gloria. ‘I knew it!’ She shut her book and took up
the ropes just as the wires began to sound out against the top of the mast.
‘Your positions, children.’ Alasdair drank down the last of the water and they
lay down again, resuming their course towards the west.
‘We’ll go in,’ called Gloria. ‘They’ll be ready for us with the food soon.’
‘Just as well,’ said Alasdair, sidelong. ‘You’d have a hard time getting
your shorts down while we’re moving.’
‘I wouldn’t. I’d easily go over the side. Just you wait.’
They squabbled as the boat went on, but it was the idle, sunlit argument
of two fat bluebottles circling on a slow, hot day. And further down the loch,
the sailing club’s pointed roof appeared on the south shore, the boats and
families there a coloured smudge on the shoreline. ‘It’s sausages for dinner,’
said Leonie. ‘My mum brought a big packet.’
‘I’m so hungry,’ said Alasdair. ‘I’m going to have mine with barbecue
sauce. On a roll, with butter.’
But just as they began to imagine that very smell reaching their nostrils,
the wind dropped again, and the boat came to a halt, settling inert and
obstinate on the surface of the loch.
‘Just our luck,’ said Alasdair. ‘Thwarted again!’
They had stopped very close to the buoy which marked the furthest point
of the training waters, and could now make out the shapes of people moving
on the shore; two figures, standing, were very distinctly using their arms
beside a smoking barrel-shape.
‘That’s your dad cooking,’ said Alasdair. ‘You can tell by the clothes.’
Leonie’s father spent afternoons on the water in a shameful old wetsuit
which clung to him in all the worst places and gave off a soaked, thick smell.
That way, he floated better and didn’t get cold when he came off his sailboard,
again and again, dropping the bold American sail and parting company with
the board, backwards, always backwards, and always with a great adult
splash. Afterwards he would change into land clothes and could never be
tempted back in for a last swim. That was because of the beer, Alasdair had
assured her, but her father had a different view. ‘I make a plan and stick to it,’
he would say. ‘You plan, you decide, and you do what you’ve said you’ll do.’
But looking at Gloria there, lounging brown-legged and sunny at the other
end of the boat, a plan seemed to Leonie a rather plain thing.
Her father could certainly be made out now beside the cooking barrel,
in a pale Sunday suit, with someone in an orange life jacket standing next
to him. Across the water came the tinkling sound of tongs hitting a grill. The
smoke rose straight up. There was a definite smell of cooking.
‘It’s such a pain to be so close and yet be stuck out here,’ said Alasdair.

59
 ‘Can’t we row?’
‘Afraid not,’ said Gloria. ‘The oars are in the car.’
‘But I am hungry, Mum.’
‘Well,’ said Gloria, ‘Look how close you are to getting your dinner.’
‘Everyone will have eaten all the sausages by the time we get there.’
‘That can’t be helped. There’ll still be rolls left. Think of it like Shackleton.’
‘Shackleton wouldn’t have been denied his dinner,’ said Alasdair.
‘In times of crisis, it is important to keep your morale up,’ said Gloria.
‘Have some more bailer water.’ She took up her book again.
Lying on her back and waiting for the wind to come, Leonie made an
exercise of cataloguing body parts, waking every bone and muscle while she
looked upwards to blue sky. She started at her toes, clenching and thinking
of each: the lightning impulse moving, the unbelievable connection between
the decision to think of them and the feeling of them wriggle. Some parts, like
the tops of her feet, were hard to create a movement for, but still, she could
feel a flicker, the veins or the skin there tightening while she thought. It made
her pleased and grateful each time a movement happened; ‘Good old feet,’
‘Good old knees,’ ‘Good old tummy’ – all the way up. At the top, blinking, she
remembered her eyelashes; she shut her eyes so she could feel them, their
leaves intertwining, and once she felt that, she wondered if they’d always
come apart again.
Like this, the air stayed blue and still and windless until ––
‘Honestly, Mum, how long are we going to have to sit here? It’s torture.
You can see them eating.’ Leonie sat up, and saw that Alasdair was right –
there was less activity behind the smoking barrel, and the heads of the figures
were low to the grass. ‘They’ve even got picnic blankets.’
Gloria sat up and lifted off her glasses. ‘I tell you what, Alasdair, you could
do with complaining less, and doing something about your situation. You’re
hungry. The food is just over there. You’ve got a good brain in your head.
What are you going to do about it?’
‘You don’t mean, swim?’ said Alasdair.
‘Well, why not?’ said Gloria.
‘To the shore?’
‘You’d be there in five minutes.’
‘In my clothes? With the life jacket on? They’ll get in the way.’
‘You’ve got your swimming shorts on already, you take the rest off. Easy.’
‘But how do we get in?’
‘Over the front.’
‘It’s “gunwhales”, not “front”. And I don’t know if I like the idea.’
‘Isn’t it quite far?’ said Leonie.
‘About three hundred yards, I’d say,’ said Gloria. ‘I’ve seen you both swim
further than that.’
In contemplation, the sun beat back at them from the water. The shore
loomed, green and near. Leonie looked at Alasdair, who looked at his mother,
whose eyes, black and glossy like the surface of the loch, were opened up
wide and waiting; it was as though she was deciding whether or not to

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 abandon ship altogether and swim herself.
Eventually, Alasdair said, ‘I think Shackleton would be all in.’
‘For love and sausages!’ said Gloria.
‘Right, Leonie?’ said Alasdair.
The figures on the shore were near enough; there they sat on their
blanket. Boats were lined up by the launch area, where concrete tyre tracks
led into the water. When you were launching your boat, you pulled it on its
trailer down the concrete tracks until the boat lifted itself, a miracle, off the
trailer beneath; the land thing separated from the water-dweller, and the boat
became itself. There were four boats on their trailers there. All of their sails
were down, and they stood, land-bound and without mystery.
‘Alright,’ said Leonie. ‘For love and sausages.’
They took off their extra things sitting down, unclipping the faded life
jackets which belonged, really, to the sailing club but which Leonie’s father,
for safekeeping, stored in the garage at home.
‘In you get,’ said Gloria. ‘No point putting it off. And save me a sausage.’
But, ‘Ladies first,’ said Alasdair, now it came to it, so Leonie did go, in
one quick slide off the edge, feeling the boat’s front rear up behind her as
her bottom parted company with the wood and her feet dropped down. She
was in, with the cold of it squeezing out her first breath in a squeal – ‘Oh!’ –
and, mouth full of loch, nostrils burning, with the pain of them shining all the
way up into her brain at the same time as her lips felt like they were swelling
out huge, she struck out ahead of the boat to let Alasdair come in after her,
waiting nearby and treading water to keep her hands and feet from freezing.
She could see from here that the red flag at the tip of the boat’s nose slumped
down to one side. It didn’t know what it was to jump.
Neither did Alasdair, who was making hard work of his disembarking and
was trying to lower himself feet first while lying on his stomach; ‘Come on,
Alasdair, it’s fine,’ called Leonie, ‘Cold, but fine.’
Gloria was invisible now behind the sail but Leonie heard her say, ‘You
know, you don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ and then she heard Alasdair
say, ‘I don’t want to.’
There was a silence, and then some shadow behind the sail, and then
Gloria called, ‘Well, we are encountering a change of plan, Leonie – off you
go, now you’re in; you can keep the flag flying for all of us.’ And Leonie,
treading water still, took a good look at Alasdair’s feet dancing just above
the water as he tried to squirm back on board. It did seem better to be in the
water than on the boat.
‘If you’re sure,’ Leonie called back.
‘Of course!’ called Gloria. ‘You’ll be there hours before us!’
And so she swam for shore.
It was good to be going. She swam breast stroke but raised her head out
the water to save her face from the cold, bending her neck up and watching
her hands shoot out white in front. The water stayed flat, except for where
her own progress broke its surface and turned the blue reflected there to
black. By the time she reached the buoy she was reaching her stride and so

62
didn’t stop there for a breath, although they had always talked of wanting
to touch the bright orange thing when they sailed past it. This close, it had
green strands clinging to it, and a black handle at its top which gave it the
air of a tow-headed friend; but she swam past. After that, she heard Alasdair
shouting, ‘Save me a sausage, Leonie!’ over the splash of her breast stroke,
and then she was properly away.
At the top of each stroke, hands down deep and head sticking out high
from the surface, she locked her eyes onto the brown point of the sailing
club’s roof, where she could see the flagpole rising up. And after a minute
or two – well, thirty-five or forty-five strokes, above twenty she had lost
count – the flag up there had furled out. And the glass surface around Leonie
shivered, and then waves came up from under it, like when the porridge pot
was coming to the boil.
From flat nothing, the waves came as a series endlessly repeating, the
water lifting and lapping against and over her; she made to progress down
the insistent runnels towards the shore. There was no top or bottom to a
stroke now, just keeping going – and soon her arms tired. She stopped to try
a float to catch her breath. On her back, toes pointing down the loch, she rose
and fell with the waves, breathing, fixing an eye on the boat. It had sailed on.
The wind had taken it.
The cold reached her insides while she floated, and her bare feet poked
yellow and rubbery out of the water. She twisted over and began again
against the wind with a front crawl. Very quickly (having flooded her mouth
by opening it on the left, straight into a wave) she remembered that you could
opt to take your breaths on one side only, and (having begun with a motoring,
wake-splashing kick) that to become tired was a mistake caused by over-use
of feet – so she rationed the kicks as she progressed down the runnels, her
slow heels clearing the surface sometimes and soaking up a glint of sunshine
like a porpoise coming up.
That was the one shadow of warmth. Her toes had begun to burn numb,
and the immersion ached her head just as a hat on too tight does after an
hour or so, the kind of ache that only lifts once the hat comes off. The meat
of the arms and legs, those strong parts, were turning stringy as they chilled
inwards. The cold inside made her blood feel thicker. Altogether, it had begun
to feel as though she wasn’t so much cutting through the waves as hoping
they’d choose to be nice to her; the water had started to feel quite empty, not
like sea water which is friendly and holds you up – this water, she could feel,
went straight down.
But thinking of straight down was a mistake, the same as kicking too
much. The thing to do was put your face back in and draw yourself on.
Each time a shoulder lifted back and round, each time a haunch propelled
a kick, you should think to yourself, ‘Good old shoulder’, ‘Good old leg’. You
breathed, and rested, and continued, and catalogued. ‘Good old feet’, ‘Good
old hands’. Each part did its part, taking you together towards the shore.
Except when it came to the eyes. These she’d kept closed in the water so
far but now, when it came to ‘Good old eyes,’ thinking about her eyelashes,

63
 their wet lattice protruding downwards, she wondered if they would ever
come apart again. To prove that they would, she opened them up wide, to a
world stretching out black below.
She shut them again quick but it was too late. It was an abyss, downward
and hungry and impossible. It was her body which felt that emptiness: her
stomach, overturning, filled with things leaping and threshing, and this spread
outwards in a flash so that breath and mind and home and water became
a nothing, and the blackness, all. And just like that the thread between
thought and movement broke. Legs dropped down and feet reached for cold
emptiness. Arms decided not to paddle. Then all contracted and repelled;
she became a knot, then a spider, and then a tiny, dying insect swimmer;
her mouth filled with water; she went down. Her hands thrashed above the
surface and her head jerked up and under – a true breath or two did get
hauled in – but it was as though the bottom had become a plughole and all,
everything, was sucked towards it – hills, flagpole, sailing club, boats, blue
sky, Shackleton and all – she felt her feet leading the way. And nobody told
you about the noise of a drowning, the way the ears picked up on each splash
and echoed it right down inside, the noises – not through the ears but from
inside, where you are – of your body trying to get its air in, of your mouth, in
its despair, become a wordless, numb and horrible hole.
But, above, something bashed against her breaching arms and she
grabbed for it on a lightning impulse, and, catching that something and
pulling on it, somehow, her face came up. Clear of the loch, her head began to
stream like a squeezed sponge, loch falling out through her eyes, it seemed,
and her nose spraying out a bruising jet of sour white bubbles. Her legs
dragging along behind the floating thing she lay half-on, Leonie registered
first the onward movement and, only then, water dripping out of needle-holes
in leather shoes with, black to the knees, a pale Sunday suit above. Tall on his
sailboard stretched up her father who, holding his sail up tight and straight,
was leaning to turn them round towards the shore, and who didn’t speak
except, finally, approaching land, to say: ‘That woman’s a bloody fool.’
Leonie’s legs pulled along behind them until her feet began to brush
through the grass growing below the loch’s surface. She let go of the
board and stood knee deep while her father dismounted neatly, lifting his
centreboard with a leather-clad foot then, at the very edge, casting his mast
down onto the gravel above the waterline. She waded through the shallows
after him and stood at last on the land. Her father took off his suit jacket and
put it around her shoulders. He drew the fabric tight around her body and
held it in place there with his arms.
Then, on the lochside, they waited for the white sail to come ashore.

Lorna Elcock grew up in Scotland and lives in London. She is studying for an MA in Creative & Life
Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. As well as writing short fiction, she is working on her
first novel, Belmont House.

‘The White Sail’ has been illustrated by Shih-Hsien Hsu. See more at www.hsushihhsien.com.

64
Lines

João Anzanello Carrascoza , translated by Ilze Duarte

Evidences are not deceiving, no. That one over there? No, a boyish face, it
doesn’t speak to me. Look at the nose, too perfect . . . He’ll please one and
all, look at our neighbor under the red umbrella, she even turned around to
look at him, but I won’t give him a grain of this sand. You know those spiraling
shells between the rocks? Those white ones all over the edge of the beach?
Exactly! They’re beautiful, but they break like nails. Now – they’re only good
to look at, and from a distance! Look, nothing that’s divine interests me. Only
flaws attract me. I like Jupiter for his foibles. Not his victory over the titans,
but his weakness for mortal women. Which one? The muscular guy in the
black trunks coming out of the water? I agree, a rock, we have to explore it
little by little, we can’t see everything at once. The legs are like Mercury, a
nicely sculpted piece. Biceps like Hercules, notice how they glisten . . . But
he is a false shark. He’s coming this way, he’s going to walk by, watch him.
What’s wrong? Why, you didn’t notice? He’s just a shell, a hard valve. His
eyes belie the rest of his body, his eyes have dunes only, they have no ocean
in them. What? Ah, the one back there, swimming? Yes, I noticed him, who
wouldn’t notice a drifting boat? His skin scorched by the sun, caiçara.* And
like every caiçara, he makes his living showing off to tourists, will never set
foot out of this landscape. If he were an Argonaut, who leaves everything
behind for an ideal… But no, he’s just like those pinkish shells, we get smitten
with them at first sight, then push them aside. My type? I prefer a man with
strong facial lines. No, not lines. Grooves. I like that guy over there, you see
him? No, not the one with the tattoo, tattoos are a boy’s thing. That one, with
the scar on his face. Knife or glass shard, what do you think?

*Caiçara refers to descendants of native peoples of Brazil and European settlers. Caiçara
communities live in the coastal areas of Brazil.

João Anzanello Carrascoza is an award-winning writer living and working in São Paulo, Brazil. English
translations of his short stories have appeared in World Without Borders and Granta. Carrascoza has
also published several books for young readers and two novels.

Ilze Duarte writes short prose and translates works by contemporary Brazilian writers. Her translations
appear or are forthcoming in Your Impossible Voice and Massachusetts Review. She lives with her
husband and two daughters in Milpitas, California.

65
 Karen Solie

Whose Deaths Were Recorded Officially As

Casualties of ‘The Battle of May Island’

1918, last of January, not late, but dark for hours

Sliding under the Forth Bridge toward the North Sea
Cruisers, battleships, destroyers, and the K-boats

Big, steam-driven pigs

Wallowing in the troughs and undulations
Under radio silence, and no lights
Pursuant to worthless intel
To a system of opinions made more probable than each would appear in
isolation
En masse, you can’t see past them

Is he still a boy

Sailing under the flag of error

And, as it happens, low cloud cover
On a collision course with the unforeseen minesweepers

On board K-11, or K-17, turning hard to port

If not exactly on a dime
Or K-14, whose rudder jams full right, K-22 who slams into it
Then is run over by the oncoming HMS Inflexible

Who hears his name called, as if in twilight sleep

A second flotilla, led by HMS Fearless

Unaware the ships of the first have turned around
Increases speed to 21 knots

They meet head-on east of May Island, which barely looks up from its desk

Intuition breaks in two and heads for the bottom

Along with the wreck of the K17, whose crew is in the water
Feeling the warmth of the self against cold abstraction
No group of people has more in common
More fear in their blood than oxygen at this point

66
Unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light
As it was in the chaos at the beginning of creation

Behind Fearless, and to avoid HMS Australia

K-6 rams K-4, which rolls, sinks with all hands
Remaining capital ships and destroyers of the 5th Battle Squadron
Bear down on the scene
On the men in the water
Whose eyesight has never been clearer, how cruel

I saw not it, but the place where it dwells

Chains of the wake around their ankles

Propellers tearing through them
Seven stars of the plough obscured by weather
Badly discordant atoms in the one place night seems to be pouring out of

Whose grandfather was a shepherd

How can he sleep in such cold

Face up or face down
In sheets of fuel
The unbreathable aftermath

105 killed, a conservative estimate

No enemy engaged but error
In the historical present, the modest commemorative monument
With its back to the sea

Karen Solie is the author of four collections of poems, most recently The Road In Is Not The Same
Road Out. A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, was published in the UK in 2013. A new
collection, The Caiplie Caves, is due out in spring 2019. She lives in Toronto.

67
 Sholeh Wolpé

The World Grows Blackthorn Walls

Tall, stiff and spiny.

Try to make it to the other side
and risk savage thorns.

We who left home in our teens,

children who crossed boundaries
and were torn by its thousand serrated tongues,
who have we become?

We who bear scars that bloom and bloom

beneath healed skins,
where are we going?

I ask myself
is home my ghost?

Does it wear my underwear

folded neatly in the antique chest
of drawers I bought twenty years ago?
Or nest inside my blouse that hangs
from a metal hanger I’ve been meaning to discard?
Is it lost between the lines of books
shelved alphabetical in a language
I was not born to? Or here on the lip
of this chipped cup left behind
by a lover long gone?

Why do they call us alien,

as if we come from other planets?

I carry seeds in my mouth,

plant turmeric, cardamom, and tiny
aromatic cucumbers in this garden,
water them with rain I wring
from my grandmother’s songs.
They will grow, I know, against
these blackthorn walls. They are magic.
They can push through anything,
uncut.

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I left home at thirteen.
I hadn’t lived enough to know how
not to love.
Home was the Caspian Sea, the busy bazaars,
the aroma of kebab and rice, friday
lunches, picnics by mountain streams.
I never meant to stay away.

But they said come back

and you will die.

Exile is a suitcase full of meanings. I fill up

a hundred notebooks with scribbles.
And when I am done I throw them into fire
and begin to write again; this time
tattooing the words on my forehead.
This time, writing only not to forget.

Complacency is communicable
like the common cold.
I swim upstream to lay my purple eggs.

Spirits urge and spirits go,

but I write postcards only to the future.
What is a transplanted tree
but a time being
who has adapted to adoption?

They say draw sustenance from this land,

but look how my fruits hang in spirals
and smell of old notebooks and lace.

Perhaps it’s only in exile that spirits arrive.

They weep and wail at the door of the temple
where I sit at the edge of an abyss.
But even this is an illusion.

Sholeh Wolpé was born in Iran. Wolpé’s awards include PEN/Heim, Lois Roth Persian Translation
prize and Midwest Book Award. Her literary work to date numbers over 12 collections of poetry,
translations, and anthologies, as well as several plays. Her recent books are Keeping Time with Blue
Hyacinths (Univ. of Arkansas Press,) and a translation of Sufi mystic poet Attar’s masterpiece, The
Conference of the Birds (W.W. Norton).

69
 Rebecca Watts

Glamour

Life isn’t glamorous

for the hawk employed to circle landfill –

deterring the scavengers that flock here

to feed and nest in the nearby villages.

For us – released from the office – this

frenzy of birdlife in the midst of
dystopia has its appeal: against
the rubbish’s mishmash of colour
and the grey sky

clarity of white and black:

seagulls and crows.

We see it by chance,
the hawk patient on its perch while a handler
squirts disinfectant from a plastic bottle
all over it, drenching its feathers,
disabling it from flight.

We see what looks

from the minibus like beauty in its
bedragglement, born out of trust
and pragmatism

as it waits, growing dry

amid concrete and dumper trucks.

Rebecca Watts lives in Cambridge, where she works in a library and as a freelance editor. Her debut
poetry collection, The Met Office Advises Caution, was published by Carcanet in 2016.

70
Lauren Clay Wavy Window
 Left: Wavy Window, 2018
Oil on paper pulp and plaster, on panel
127 x 76 x 15 cm
Right: Small Screen, 2018
Oil, paper pulp, plaster,
aquaresign, wood
56 x 38 x 7.5 cm
 Left: Arrowslit, 2018
Oil, paper pulp, plaster,
polystyrene, wood
76 x 76 x 15 cm
Right: Narrow Screen, 2018
Oil, paper pulp, plaster, aquaresin, wood
129.5 x 89 x 15 cm
Lauren Clay uses enlarged marble patterns to create wallpaper installations in order to distort and manipulate
space. As well as challenging the architecture, they act as a background to her sculptural work. In this feature,
Ambit creates a print-friendly-version of Clay’s ambitious and immersive installations.

Lauren Clay (b. 1982, Mississippi) lives and works in NewYork. She received her BFA from Savannah College of Art and
Design, Savannah, GA in 2004, and her MFA fromVirginia Commonwealth University, Richmond,VA in 2007. Recent
exhibitions include: Porthole Portico, with Jaime Lee Bull, Camayuhs, Atlanta (2018), The Glorious Object, Patrick
Parrish Gallery, NewYork (2017), Staccato, Sometime Salon, San Francisco (2017) and a solo show Field of the Knower,
Philip J. Steele Gallery, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver (2017). Her artist book, Subtle Body, 2016,
published by Small Editions, NewYork, is included in the library collections ofThe Metropolitan Museum of Art,The
Whitney Museum of American Art, andThe Brooklyn Museum of Art. See more of Clay’s work at www.laurenclay.com
 Declan Ryan

The Bachelors

For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor,

turn a few corners and bump into marriage?
– Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Their wives have ‘gone out shopping’, and will be back

anytime now, these men whose only recreation is the radio
– a little news, enough to know who’s having a good season,
the budget. The weather. There was no problem with work,

when they worked, it didn’t matter; digging footings, maybe,

a machine license, sandwiches in the van at teatime. Still a few
pints of ordinary in the evening, among strangers, mostly,
cabbage and bacon free on saint’s days. The paper for the racing

but rarely a punt, the Gold Cup, sure, why not, and watch it in
the shop. There’s always a nephew somewhere who’ll visit
every few weekends with photos of his kids, leave some gadget
or other, to gather dust. And dinner at his for Christmas

now they can’t fly; the complications, the difficult circulation,

the old house long closed up, now, anyway. Mice multiplying
where their mother cried them off, and was laid out soon
enough, legal questionmarks over deeds never resolved, probably

it’ll be the forestry’s. They break their heart crying once or twice
at an unlikely funeral, these men, then head home for the long
evening, a one-off whiskey before bed become habitual.
All that sperm, useless as the priest’s, who eventually visits.

Declan Ryan’s debut pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. He reviews
regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and others.

80
One Slightly Crazy Night on East 52nd
Street

James Woolf

Imagine it’s the mid 1970s, and that you’re flying high above the earth –
you’re unfamiliar with its terrain – and you come across the narrow strip of
land known as Manhattan, its dense mass of tall buildings jutting irregularly
like crocodiles’ teeth. Probably, you’d reduce your altitude and take a closer
look, no?
You might even, as happened on the night of 23 August 1974, hover right
over East 52nd Street. And from there you would have seen a man on a roof
terrace, blinking in his glasses, a naked man calling to his girlfriend, ‘May, get
out here will you? NOW! – bring the camera too.’ But you shouldn’t be too
surprised by him, his bare body, or anything else you see that night. The world
wobbles during the summer months in New York City – things become a little
febrile on balmy evenings.
There are others too, in and around the island, who witness the low
flying craft and contact the NYPD. Whether the police do anything with the
information is doubtful. Perhaps an officer makes a careful entry in a ledger.
Maybe there are conversations in canteens; jokes about drugs, excessive
lager consumption in warm weather.
Years later, the naked man’s girlfriend, May Pang will recall the space craft
tilting as it flew over their heads; presumably the occupants were angling
for a better look. She and John took many photographs as it drifted like a
disorientated tourist through the skyline.
The following week, the film is returned blank by the developers: ‘Are you
sure this didn’t go through the radar at customs?’ the young boy sniggers to
the man in sun glasses, not recognising the ex-Beatle, which was often the
case.
The week after the sighting, John Lennon gets to talk on public television
about what he saw. Dressed in a yellow and black striped scarf and corduroy
newsboy cap (you’ll find the clip on YouTube), he points upwards to the tall
block of flats.
‘Up there, I saw a UFO. It turned right at the United Nations, then left
again, then carried on down the river. It wasn’t a helicopter. And it wasn’t a
balloon. And it was silent – completely silent. I could hear the traffic on the
streets below.’
The interviewer nods, and – hell, yes! – wasn’t that a wink to the camera?
‘I know what you’re thinking!’ Lennon says. ‘I’d just finished Walls and
Bridges and I was straight as a die. It was a good clear summer night and the
UFO was dark, shaped like a spinning-top, with these bulbs going blink blink
blink, and a red light on top.’

81
 The interview is watched by Karl Stevens, the agent still nominally
assigned to John Lennon’s case, the FBI having assembled hundreds of
files as part of the President’s effort to deport him. Nixon believed Lennon’s
support of left-wing causes could jeopardise his chances of re-election. Then
Watergate made it academic.
Karl meets his manager and the two briefly discuss UFOs.
‘Whether they exist or not,’ the manager says, ‘that screwball Lennon
claims to have just seen one. Make a report, Karl! We may need to calm a
hysteric public.’
‘The public doesn’t need calming – and we don’t need to record this
bullshit either! Haven’t you heard? Nixon resigned two weeks ago!’
He was right. Post Nixon, the authorities became less fixated on throwing
Lennon out of the country. A judge will soon reverse the deportation order
against him, an event which will coincide with him moving back into the
Dakota with Yoko Ono after their eighteen month ‘lost weekend’.
For the time being, he and May Pang are of course widely ridiculed in the
press and on television, which Lennon knew would happen. He is used to
being the media’s favourite clown.
‘That’s why I didn’t want to tell anybody, May. You know how frustrating
this is? To be practically the only person who sees extraordinary things?’
May doesn’t exactly answer the question. ‘I saw the space craft too,’ she
says.
‘That flying saucer was so quiet! Why can’t we make anything so quiet?
I’m going to start a new campaign: Give Silence a Chance.’
‘Don’t do it, John. The world has already labelled you a lunatic.’
‘Too right they have. Those aliens should’ve parked on our roof and taken
me on board! I’d have gone just like that.’
We may wonder if the occupants of the flying saucer had any idea about
the rumpus they’d be creating as they sped vertically and silently away from
Manhattan. What we do know is that their first reports were met with more
than a little incredulity.
They’d been familiar with the Beatles on Planet ║╗╗╧╧║║ since
successfully capturing radio waves in 1965. And their first surveillance trip to
earth yielded a fanzine found in a suitcase floating in the Atlantic. Opinions
varied on the peak of the group’s creativity, though it was agreed the White
Album marked a particular low point.
‘So you fly over New York, right? And who is the first person you just
happen to see, ╓║╓╓╓? Oh, it’s John Lennon!’
‘It’s the truth, ║╬!’
‘Of course! And I forgot the other choice detail. He’s stark naked! Not
even shoes? Really, ╓║╓╓╓ – really?’
‘Not even shoes.’
‘The surface of those New York roof terraces heat right up in the summer,
you know!’
‘Sure they do.’

82
 ‘So he’s naked – apart from his glasses of course. Just like that crazy
album cover they discussed on the Andy Peebles show!’
‘Why’s it so unbelievable? His girlfriend had clothes on.’
‘So why film the sky, and not him? That’s kind of crazy too!’
‘We were so mesmerised we forgot to point the camera.’
‘Let’s agree on one thing. We won’t mention Lennon by name in the
report. We’ll be the laughing stock of ║╗╗╧╧║║.’
It’s likely that rumours of the sighting began circulating in any case,
knowing the planet’s obsession with anything connected to the Beatles. But
they will remain unaware of the small printed note that Lennon added to the
Walls and Bridges album cover:

On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock

I saw a U.F.O.
J.L.

James Woolf was shortlisted for this Bridport Short Story Prize 2016 and highly commended
in the London Short Story Prize 2015. His work has appeared in various publications, including
‘Good Morning, Azar’ in Ambit 229 and ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Blanche’ in Ambit 227. He recently
completed his first novel, Three Steps Behind, a psychological thriller set in 1970s Yorkshire. He also
writes plays. Read more at Woolf.biz.

83
 Will Burns

Cheap

It is the frontier itself, built on the violence of sugar

and grain-calories, the groundwork
of horses, cattle, dogs, that made things
cheap as we need them to be – cheap enough to travel.
But of course eventually travel exacts its own toll.
It has taken all manner of man hours
(horrors) to get our natures down as low as this,
bellies in muck, faces in the dust
and lower still, in the subsoil, everything just
cheap protein, cheap motive, cheap material.

Will Burns’s debut pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. A second
pamphlet was issued by Clutag Press in 2016.

Jennifer Edgecombe

elastic bands

my brother died with elastic bands in his pocket 15 of them yellow or green
small hoops for banding daffodils together my mum has kept them since in a
plastic pot with a red screw lid that we used to keep drawing pins in or other
stationary when I was young she wrapped five around her pocket diary and
uses the others rarely last week one flew off across the lounge and I watched
her crawl on the carpet eventually she found it intact not snapped still the
same small yellow circle perhaps he would have stretched one out into a
bigger circle deep inside his pocket with his thumb and forefinger while he
was bored or talking to someone

Jennifer Edgecombe grew up in Cornwall and now works in publishing in London. She has an MA
in Creative Writing from the University of Exeter.

84
Robert Selby
from East of Ipswich

XVIII: The Daylight

Leaving the mason with his cement gun

to glue down the desk-style headstone,
we enter the church. The door thuds shut.

A musty silence but for our footsteps,

the immortal draught in the tie-beamed roof
harrying the candles we light,

the harried light setting the font’s lions

and wildmen dancing. Along the south wall,
the Great War memorial bears more names

than Orford has roofs, a congregation

that would cram the pews long since ripped out,
replaced by Victorian schoolroom chairs

with little bible-holders on their backs.

We go among them, admiring the knitted
hassocks depicting local landmarks, crests:

the WI; the Methodist church; the Scout group;

the houses in the road he grew up in,
the road shelled by friendly fire.

We’re given the all-clear. Against the wind

we arrange favourites in the inkwell
to soften the newness of the sandstone:

pink tulips, white narcissi, purple speedwell.

We take photos, then all cram in for one:
a family with two members un-there.

Divining the smokehouse by its smoke,

one of us buys eels;
we watch the fish boats and tugs clank

against their moorings on the glittering ness.

Time, and a long pilgrimage, narrows
the daylight between mourner and tourist.

Robert Selby’s debut pamphlet was published last year, in the Clutag Five Poems series. He edits
the online poetry journal Wild Court.

85
 Ambit news and events
The end of summer will be busy for us with festivals and events – please join
us for some of them.

Ambit will be at The Milton Keynes Literary Festival on 2 August. Join us

at the MK Gallery Event Space, 900 Midsummer Boulevard, Central Milton
Keynes, MK9 3QA, 7.30–9.30pm. https://www.mklitfest.org/small-press-fair

We are always delighted to be represented at The Poetry Book Fair on 22

September at Senate House in London. The event is free and a must-stop
for any poets who want to meet editors of all the publishing houses and
magazines. For more information visit http://www.poetrybookfair.com

On 4 October we will celebrate National Poetry day in partnership with

The Wells Maltings, Staithe Street, Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk. There will be
several exciting events with Will Burns reading during a lunchtime harbour
cruise as ‘Poet in a Boat’, Cheryl Moskowitz and Briony Bax running workshops
at Alderman Peel High School, and a ‘Strictly Speaking’ extravaganza at 7pm
where everyone is encouraged to sign up to recite a poem they have written
or love in front of a panel including Kevin Crossley-Holland and Simon Daykin.
There will be cash prizes for the best recitation and a people’s choice award.
https://www.wellsmaltings.org.uk/

Save the date for the Celebration of Ambit 234 with our competition
winners and Malika Booker on Tuesday 30 October at 7pm. Details of venue
to be announced via Facebook and Twitter. If you haven’t signed up for our
events newsletter please email us at contact@ambitmagazine.co.uk or sign
up at www.ambitmagazine.co.uk

The Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk will run from 2–4 November this year
and we will be hosting an event on 3 November. We will send you further
details about the itinerary, venue and times in our next newsletter. Read more
at http://www.poetryinaldeburgh.org

Next year sees our 60th Anniversary and planning is already in the works.
We want to continue bringing you the best of emerging and established
talents so please think about subscribing or supporting Ambit by signing up
as a friend or angel.

Thank you for your readership and enjoy your summer,

Briony Bax, Editor

86
Niall Campbell

Goodnight

No curtains should be open at that time

but ours weren’t drawn – and the cold world looked in;
three years into his life, come to the window,
sleep hadn’t found my door, again – so up,

I watched the morning’s morning open out,

the frosted ground, clean as an envelope.
Awake, so tenderly awake, I felt
like the lamp-lighter of some old city

when the city’s lit, and the crowds dispersed:

so much was love, so much was work – I took
the small spark post to post, I cradled it
and let it guide me to my darkling house.

Good morning, here’s the brightness in the dusk;

goodnight, here’s love like a blur of snow. Good night.

Niall Campbell is a Scottish poet originally from South Uist, one of the Western Isles. Moontide, his
first collection, is published by Bloodaxe, and was named inaugural winner of the Edwin Morgan
Poetry Prize (2014), and received the Saltire First Book of the Year (2014). First Nights, a first US
collection, was published in autumn 2016 as part of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.

87
 Twelve Espressos

Andrew Nightingale

A medieval hill town. The ancient specimen that moves behind the counter is
a trope. There are no witnesses. What do we want? With hot water? Like this?
Here you are, is this what you want? No, I forbid it. Our fingers inches from
the saucers. No good. Our lovely coffees are dashed down the sink.
There was a massacre here in the war. Twenty-seven villagers dead.
English? Two escapees were hiding out in the mountains, Thomas and
George. They taught the children boxing in the snow and one-two-three hello
please thank you. Now try this,

caffè
sweet and Mephistophelian
a treacle with a golden halo of foam
death is always close and heaven
weeps over espresso

The best coffee in the world is found in Trieste, the home of Illy. Joyce used
it to sober up, Burton to sharpen his skills with the sword and the Futurists
to divine the future. In Yemen (which is coffee’s Eden) they call the euphoria
coffee induces marqaha. You think in epiphanies, wild typography and
perfumed gardens.
Head straight for Piazza dell’Unità and the well reputed Caffè degli
Specchi. A wise old man will step up to serve you – this is a good sign. You’ll
be half expectation and half eerie calm. The tray will jingle-jangle in his hands
as he approaches. But oh

cleaning product
the nasal smack of detergents
a turquoise chemical liquor
alien mint on burned kidney beans
this is the end of all civilisations

A trailer-load of logs arrives behind by a small orange tractor. They’re lobbed

straight through the wizened cellar door by invisible hands, falling to a tune
on chaotic marimbas. Gemma, seventy-two and five foot nothing, bends,
gathers and stacks smartly in crosshatched rows against the wall.
The passage of bark gradually numbs the fingers, leaving them warm
and swollen. The sharp smell of sap in the freshening tramontana is giddying.
But the wall of wood is finished, a new spring has been stowed away. At the
hearth in her kitchen Gemma dispenses a resinous liqueur and

88
 sticky amber balances
the gurgling of tarnished
octagonal aluminium autumn bouquets
roast snug liquorice tipped
stories stored for winter

That classic moment of Goethean revelation descending from the Alps had
been brief and subdued because it occurred in the early hours. By dawn I was
twelve hours through the eighteen-hour drive, my eyes were dry and closing
involuntarily, and I was in the no man’s land between Parma and Modena on
the E45. Gift-wrapped service-station pasta dispossessed under bright lights.
Romanian men driving freight.
It was so long since I’d been in Italy that I forgot I just had to ask for
coffee. The dead pan pump attendant didn’t flinch and served it up with pit-
stop rapidity. Then

perfection delayed
tears the relief
thick and friendly chocolate
the old welcome democracy of coffee
because the Madonna appears in lorry parks too

Gemma has told the story before. The doctor is offered coffee. How many
sugars, one or two? None. Because life is sweet enough already! How many
sugars, Gemma asks me, one or two? If I say one I get two. She watches
my methodical stirring. The cartoon espresso cup, designed as if to corrupt
children. The clinking spoon. The hunk of ciambellone on a paper napkin.
Diabetes. Dry flat biscuits for her. Half a glass of milk. Gemma loved her
coffee really sweet. At the age of nine she watched the soldiers from her
bedroom window shooting dead twenty-seven villagers. How many sugars?
Take

the first spurt

from the Moka pot
she sometimes whips it with Demerara
and the smell of her kitchen
is medicine older than doctors

Bar Necci in the up-and-coming Pigneto district where Pasolini filmed the
street fight in Accattone: the postgrad barista jokes slyly, ‘No, Maestro,
there’s no soya milk, only latte di mucca.’ We eat lentil soup prepared by the
fashionable English chef. A screen-print Pasolini, Warhol-style, gazes down
with the sublime gaze of the Ray Ban Wayfarer.
If Pasolini were alive he wouldn’t be here. He’d be with the Libyans
huddled in tents by the Tiber. And he would be vegan. The barista’s kung
fu on the Gaggia co-opts an ancient drink with an evolved precision that
contains hints of Eritrea and subtle Syrian overtones. Meanwhile

89
 under canvas the scorched beloved
black oil is used and exchanged
to spur the lifting of the rucksack
and talk of dreams of a new life
on hopeless afternoons

The taxi driver in Genoa has a son who lives in London and works as a carpenter
and has made a custom fifteen-metre couch for Lady Gaga and he’s a taxi
driver only because he gave up the sea and he used to be a maritime engineer
and he always took a camping stove and a coffee pot to sea and did you ever
hear the Genoa Cricket and Football Club sing, ‘You’ll never walk alone’?
No change? It’s only a euro. Ah! That’s a coffee, says the taxi driver, and
already it’s a coffee we might have had crouched together below decks on
Tyrrhenian swell,

purple meths silent

blue flame summoning
casa from a pouch of dry powder
the potent elixir that bends
the rudder to its home port

The flight is early and the sky cuts open a fresh apricot that only sparrows can
taste. Then the sound of shutters opposite rolling up. Light from Gemma’s
kitchen. Hasty preparations but on a tray with a lace-edged tray-cloth.
There’s no traffic on the road down the mountains, only seventeen wild
boar crossing in a line, nose to tail, young and old. At the airport kiosk a
thousand coffees have been measured out to get us airborne, each a molten
cigarette, each a three second hug machine, in short

jet fuel liquid

punctuation nostalgia and water
the sweet fruit the dark void
that sustains life
in inhuman human worlds

Snow, the first snow. Nick Cave, we said it was like a Nick Cave song,
Ammazzacaffè, Murdercoffee, the anise to ward off the cold. In the morning,
at eight, half past. A hedgehog, we scooped up a hedgehog from the middle
of the road in a velvet Baker Boy and delivered it to safety. Industrial strength,
the barkeep said, made by his grandfather in the cellar. Another? Another two.
Three thousand feet above sea level, three. Tremble, the edges of objects.
There was murdering but no hedgehogs died in the making of that coffee,
it was

murder coffee on virgin snow

violence in white china
catalysis by aniseed and
the pines the pines the pines
tiny black whirlpools where sugar spirals

90
The first time we had coffee at Gemma’s was after waking to her vigorous bell
ringing in the church next door. We had temporarily been hooked up to the
church mains with a precarious drooping cable because we were young and
all about Puccini’s O mio babbino caro. The sound of that bell carried in the
wires and broke our kettle.
The last time I had coffee at Gemma’s her hands were shaking too much.
Her Polish carer was visiting friends. I’ll do it. It was the first time I made
coffee at Gemma’s. It was late summer. It was Lavazza, but not the red, the
blue, a fresh pack for a shared sniff.

Repetition
is a form of change
(Oblique Strategies) and why
let the sibyl turn the card
let the wind turn the leaves

Suddenly I am thinking of the crypt for broken Moka pots I can’t throw away
at the back of the cupboard. Guzzinis without seals, tanned and handleless.
Bialetti families, sorry and scuffed with unhinged lids. The urns congregate in
gloomy limbo. Past selves or previous lives or files of half-forgotten poems.
To what do they amount, these filled and filed pages, these vessels that
have lost their ashes, whose grinds are feeding the wild mountain thyme?

Squat baked beetles

limbless mandrakes empty shrines
marking the seasons
at the end of a row of cypresses
sloes turn slowly into fairy lights

At Bar Centrale alongside the usual pastries there are biscotti dei morti, whose
shape is designed to evoke the broad bean, because it’s already nearly the
end of October. I am thinking of Gemma shelling beans in her kitchen. ‘Have
you lit your fire yet?’ she asks.
Too much. When the Moka pot splutters, Gemma has a trick, she
suggests you balance an upturned teaspoon over the internal spout, with the
spoon handle sticking out. A kind of cupped palm to conserve the last few
precious droplets.

Eternity black eternity

resides in the bean it lasts
three seconds and click
the saucer catches the lowered cup
they were made for each other

Andrew Nightingale’s poetry has been published by Oversteps Books, Shearsman and Knives Forks
and Spoons Press, and has appeared in journals and magazines such as The Rialto and Shadow
Train. Andrew works as a web developer in the charity sector.

91
 Abdulla Pashew, translated by Alana
Marie Levinson-LaBrosse

The Red Notebook

The satisfied countries of the world

have a red notebook
for those birds and animals
whose killing is forbidden.

I beg UNESCO,
in its red notebook
record my name as well.
Save my skin and fur
from hunters and merchants.

What can I do?

I’m not reptilian: I can’t slither
into the gorge at a rustling,
crossing ditch and ridge like a wind.
Neither am I a brute
who can grab his cub with his canines
and make a cave his den.

What can I do?

I am not a bird: evicted from earth
I can’t open the door of the sky with my wings.
Neither am I a fish: when the whirlpool rises,
I can’t descend into the ocean’s depths for shelter,
where not even imagination’s eyes can discover me.

I exist and don’t on these two feet

and drones, on their two feet, sting me,
swarm me,
right and left, up and down.
Head to toe, I am all wounds.
Shelter me,
give me refuge, red notebook.

2.6.1980
Moscow

92
Monologue
It is dawn:
my arm is your pillow,
my head is on the wings of the storm.

It is dawn:
I see off one flock of questions,
but another flock is on the way.

It is dawn:
one moment, a beloved friend yet alive
rests in a coffin, his face draped in crocus.
Another moment,
a friend long dead and buried
stands before me with open eyes.

Now,
when I shut my eyes,
I shut a small window on the past.
I pinion the hawk
who hunts relentlessly
in the atmosphere of the future.

I do understand
that what is past can’t be captured,
that what will come is death.
I am satisfied now
with your head on my arm.

Had Eve obeyed God,

had she seen the forbidden fruit
and not taken a bite,
who says you and I
would have been
you and I?

Who says the skiff of my arm

would softly rock you
on the waves of this evening?

Who says that in that paradise

there would be a little paradise like this one,
which you and I have now?

8.10.1993
Moscow

Abdulla Pashew is widely regarded as the most popular living Kurdish poet and regularly draws
audiences in the thousands when he gives readings.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a poet, translator, and the Founding Co-Director of Kashkul
(www.kashkul.com). She has lived and worked in Iraq since 2011.
93
Rachel Levitsky
Against Travel
Oprah, our president, gives perspective. A little dirt. She says. No. Wait.
What she said was it’s a catastrophe, but not for me.
The neighbors, who were then my lovers. Not the ones eating (my) salted liver.
Those with bodies upon which I request the steer of (your) sweetened attention.
Seriously. Please. Think about them. You walk down my street. You wonder which of us comes
from here or how this all began. Pleistocene. Walmart. Look exactly. The zeros on her shoes tell
you all the parts of her story. More than her rosacea, gnarled hands, the gouged out glass eye.
Here’s how we do it when we love you. In California. Greet the sniper who replaces you. Eat the
snails they leave on your outhouse stoop. Air kiss signals abdication or death by condominium.
In the canyon we reassemble broken bones we built the steam room on. An erotic of mistaken
triangulation.
Rachel Levitsky is the author Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009) and the poetic novella, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013) as well as
numerous chapbooks, most recently, Hopefully, The Island, part of an ongoing collaboration with the artist Susan Bee. In 1999, Levitsky founded Belladonna Series which is now
Belladonna* Collaborative, a matrix of feminist avant garde writing, events, interventions. She teaches writing for Pratt Institute, Naropa Summer Writing Program and lay institutions in
NYC.

94
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95
 James Needham
Cusco Park, 2017
Digital photograph
Courtesy of the artist