Autumn/Winter 22
Issue3 Family /Ancestors
Poetry Art Short Fiction Film
The Amphibian
Page 7 Note from The Editor 9 Claudia Recinos Seldeen A Dream for my Mother 14 Natalia Garbu Vadik fights Back 17 Victoria Gartner Heart Strings 21 Affly Johnson Duet 23 ....................... Little Green Tree Book 25 Andrew Kaye Kauffmann Else I could Dance Salsa 29 Desiree Seebaran The Tongues of Women 33 Suzi Mezei Sustenance 35 .................... Snapshot 38 Gina Phillips Maybelle and Lux Cloud 39 ........... Johnny Kashner, Corn Stalk and Wary Eyed Chick 41 Lani O'Hanlon Legacy 43 ......................... For the Mending 45 Olivia Payne Unearthed 53 Rosalind Moran A Poem for When I don't Feel Like Calling my Mother 55 ......................... Histories of Near Disasters 59 Abby Ledger Lomas Poor Peg 66 Rebecca Green The Visit 69 Nora Studholme The Unravelling 71 Mark Bercier Amanda Koehne and her Cat Emily 73 Lee Zumpe The Black Chair in the Family Room 75 DB Jonas On Rivington 81 Christine Grant Old as The Hills 90 Max Porter, Aoife McArdle All of This Unreal Time 99 Annie Peter They Spoke of Castles in the Kremlin 103 Charlotte Dormandy Crocks
The Amphibian Literary Journal is: Anna Potter - Editor, art director Jennifer Bidding - art director The Amphibian is on Twitter: @amphibianlitjo Instagram: The Amphibian Literary Journal @miss_merrykat Submissions to: info@theamphibianlit.com check the website for theme and submission windows. This issue made possible with grateful thanks to the Stichting Gilles Hondius Foundation. cover image by Olga Kovtun, Tree of Life, oil on canvas find her on instagram - @kovtun-olga-art Olga says of this painting: 'My use of the tree of life was not accidental, as it symbolizes the harmony between the universe and human life as it manifests in the heavens, earth and underworld. In Ukrainian art, one often sees this stupendous tree, in full, luxurious flower, decorating table runners, painted Easter eggs and wall murals. the young woman, seems frozen in the moment. Her richly embroidered gown, imbues her with the healing energy she gets from her connection with our ancestors.' © The Amphibian Literary Journal 2021
Contents
Page 107 Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán She who knows the edges of the map 111 Sarra Culleno For Fathers 113 Jessica Bundschuh Twinsome Hitchhikers 125 Ciara Patricia Langan Moylenanav 127 Anna-Marie Young The House 133 Mark Bercier Ann Bedsole 135 Kevin Brown Deva 138 Katherine Potter These Days 139 Diana Raab Dad Leaves 142 Lisanne de Witt Te Jagen/ Hunting 143 Peter Clark A Son's Thoughts 145 Mark Bercier Trouble 147 Laura Johanna Braverman Points of Departure 148 Next Issue 150 Contributors in their own Words Back Cover: Natalia Garbu from the series Vadik Fights Back
Note from the Editor Welcome to Issue 3 of The Amphibian. Just after I had come up with the theme for this issue, war in Ukraine broke out. The terrible events that are taking place there and the families being torn apart, were very much on my mind as ideas for the issue began to take shape. There is so much beauty to be found in our personal histories and pathways, the people we have loved and lost. There are poems in this issue that moved me to tears and stories that made me see the ordinary as something that holds the secret of what it means to be human. The horror of war and the fear and grief felt by the refugee, the enslaved, the colonised. They are all of us. We all have family histories and we are joined by experience as we travel through history. For the first time in this issue, we're featuring artists both established and emerging, scouted by Jen Bidding our new Art Director as well as a feature on film, Aoife McCardle's All of This Unreal Time The script is written by Max Porter (Grief is The Thing With Feathers, Lanny) and is acted by Cillian Murphy. I had seen this film installation when it was shown at the Manchester International Festival and the beauty of the sombre images of Aoife McCardle's direction, Cillian Murphy's voice and Max Porter's words were unforgettable, I am so proud to feature it in The Amphibian. All of This Unreal Time explores regret, bitterness and shame. What it means to be a man, a father, a son, a flawed human. There is always hope. In spite of everything. Thank you for reading, Anna
'Vadik fights Back' by Natalia Garbu
Beta Radio
Claudia Recinos Seldeen
The other night I had a dream: the steering wheel got away from me and we plunged into the river (or maybe it was the ocean). The car sank swiftly, water folding over us like greedy arms, dragging us down into the darkness. I looked at you and said, We’re going to have to swim! But you shook your head and whispered, I don’t know how. (Sometimes, Mother, I close my eyes and I am eight years old again, a bird, flapping in my father’s grip. His breath is whiskey sharp. His hands are knuckle white. He plucks the glossy black feathers of my childhood and turns them into shame.)
A Dream for My Mother
A year ago today I sat in an overheated office snow melting from my boots onto the carpet and I asked the question that’s been slumbering in my throat for decades: How? How could you watch the gathering waters and do nothing? How could you watch a drowning daughter and stay? But the doctor only looked at me, her mouth a black hole. There were no answers there. My father was a rip current, a tidal wave. He was an ocean spanning across the landscape of my childhood. His words whipped and cracked into my waking nightmares. His hands roved and wandered as much as his eye. And you, Mother, were a shore a harbor always just beyond my reach.
That night I lay gasping in the net of my dream. The memories pulled me under like a sinking car. Why am I dreaming of you now? The last time we spoke you turned yourself skin-side in leaving me nothing but the bones of your rage. They are too heavy for me. They are not my burden. I was just a child. (I am just a child pinned like a moth on that dirty brown carpet.) We are sinking fast. So fast. We have always been sinking, you and I. The river finds its way into the car (or maybe it is the ocean) and I turn to you and say, We’re going to have to swim.
But I wake up in another bed in another city.
I wake to the soft snuffling sounds of my own child snoring lightly across the hall.
I lie in bed and wonder for a while how the dream ends. Did you make it out? Did you swim after me? Did you survive? But it’s been years since we have spoken and the dream never finds me again.
Natalia Garbu
#Vadikfightsback
It’s 1940 in this photo, one year before the war has started in Ljustdorf, Odessa, known nowadays as Chernomorka. A Ukrainian boy called Vadik together with his mother, are sending to grandfather several photos from this location. The message can be read on the other side of this picture. I bought this photo from a vintage store in Ukraine. Fascinated by a shaman some days before, who told me that he feels all these lands are full of pain and suffering because we did not and do not honor our ancestors, I bought all the photos of people, I could find in that day, promising to work on them in an artistic way. Honoring by remembering and feeling. Art can heal, he said.
Heart- Strings
Victoria Gartner
You are here, and you have to re-learn. Re-grow. So, I sit and I sew. Searching, stitch by stitch, for something that will satiate my soul. I have found a place that feels like home, and yet – My blood is too hot, and my eyes too cold. They long for carpets on the walls, and my grandparents’ calloused hands. So, I weave. Stitch by stitch. Dream by dream. I weave them closer, tie them in. This is the only thing left now. I sit alone, and I weave. Each stitch a prayer.
I pluck, tuck and weave my way through This – a needle, some cotton thread and an old pillowcase These are the only strings my heart has now, After the rain. The house smells of fresh coffee, But the apples aren’t the same. ‘Ours’ are rounder, like my face. This is what it means to be a stranger In here and in my own land, at the same times. A stranger to the arms that raised you, the stories that put you to sleep.
With each knot, I tie my sinews to theirs, Each stem braids my hair, The vyshyvka boils my blood with theirs again, And my heart hums the songs long-forgotten, The songs of my ancestors’ land. Their rituals could raise storms, raise visions, raise bread. Their trances could raise the dead. For a price, they could make the mayor’s daughter razlubitsa – fall out of love. In the haystacks, and in the hen’s eyes, they could see war coming Now, war is here. The valleys, the birch trees, rivers, yellow fields and honey That they spent centuries loving – are dying.
There is silence in our village. The Molfàr is long gone. He knew they were coming, And he knew they would find him first. He has kept his dignity and chosen his path. Deep in the licù, his body now hangs from the branch of a tree. He is waiting for the rain.
Victoria Gartner makes and sells embroidered works inspired by traditional Ukrainian flower crowns. half of the profits go to aid Ukraine @_unfpa_ukraine @Ukrainianflowercrown
Far away, on another island, in another life, I keep stitching. My coffee has grown cold. But on my canvas, the shadow of the design has appeared. It is the shaman’s black cat. He is alone, vigilant, Roaming the village still.
Affly Johnson
Duet After 'Enslaved' BBC1
Held in the sofa watching tele, you see a crust of oyster shells, metres thick and crunchy and blanketed in tropical paradise Iguela Lagoon looks like any dream island off Gabon cushioned in mounds of green the vomit is long gone the duality of the experiment of enslaved people, white sand and the end of life. I play on the deck of the regulated ship in a Cornish harbour a few hundred years later as a child, there’s no plaque just a replica ship not even Legoland size; full span white sails, summer after summer the sails watched my skin brown and grow stronger in the wind. I hear Cornish songs in the cabin I hear Cornish songs in the gap in the harbour imagine turquoise silvery fish, crinkled eyed fishermen and mermaids They are my songs, they drown the African songs in the cabin of the ship nearby. They are my songs. After the horror, the quiet, generations of silence and an island crust of oyster shells
Shell
Mother your daughter never sleeps and has no God she is cushioned in oak trees. Trudging in step across the Heath, we archived each specimen lodged in the leaves of the little green tree book. Mother your daughter longs for the cleanness of hot lemons, to sip Empress Grey cross-legged,in step to speak of myth softly from the back of moistened throats and full bellies. Mother your daughter sits on the floorboards in the recently emptied house she is listening for the catkins of old conversations nestling in the grooves,the vocal decisions that were bad for a marriage bad for the children. I miss home the lovely lesbian couple had a baby and dug a pool in the front garden where I parked my rusty white Fiat.
she is a daughter of white gold stubborn as claggy clay on a wellyboot clinging to an internal world she is the drummer’s daughter baby-hand to Djembe drum she didn’t know the freedom of knowing herself.
The Little Green Tree Book
Varadero, New Year’s Eve Flapping like a lace fan The salsera’s yellow dress, To a sound like castanets: Picture her twisting arms Watch my pliant feet Reflecting Dad’s watching poolside In his pastel polo shirt It’s shallow— the respiring, he concedes he’s allowed to breathe Years later I’ve escaped to Madrid Over text messages, we signal our unease Puffs of smoke, dancing Heaven-bound on the wind Were Dad to get to the end In London, soon, no point in booking any trips My boyish fears might lift, or, A pair of dumbbells, you’ll hear my heavy fall
Andrew Kaye Kauffmann
Else I could dance salsa
Listening to Mia Cuerpo We came to bet on my kidney It was a stock he understood Like my many fathers’ neuroses It was gifted, from one generation— an heirloom an imprint — to the next Codependent, a confidante, name me what you will
'Please console my dicky tummy, Daddy, pretty please’ He’ll take a gun, do something before we speak Close by there’s a bridge, staring at the Thames Bankrupt: Lacking in a particular quality But that would register as a fib He always strove, like his Dad did They were never lacking in their zeal Fragile: insubstantial We’re not autumn leaves! We’re not ‘dainty’ or ‘flimsy’, but breakable A family built from sticks
I could sigh as I type Write autofiction Cut down on the daily calls Meditate, move on With my many legs, head to another land Dance salsa A Vitruvian Man I want to dance to a Latin beat.
As ice hits the glass, his blunt knife of a voice Orphan, ‘don’t you realise Soon, you’ll be’ It’s snarled, a threat Not one of life’s favoured guarantees Move to Spain. Holiday in Cuba. What we inherit travels free.
He’d be fulfilling his patrilineal destiny Age seventy-seven, the age he buried his problematic Pa A family therapist said, ‘didn’t you realise, you’re a Jew, it’s all in the genes’ ‘No records, Mr Kaye, did you say you were looking for your grandfather? Whose mind ran indelicately along our longest corridor The man with sallow skin and, not rare this, straitjacketed limbs?’
The Tongues of Women
Desiree Seebaran
II They taught me to hang my own bones picked clean; leave camphor in the corner. To tuck my bitter flesh under an ironed sheet. This tribe of gold-skinned women with plenty belly to keep truth swallowed: In their time, they held silence square, and wrapped it round swollen waists. Fingers on lips, because no one should know if your calabash break, or was broken for you; if your hands are bitten-through and bursting, chest cracked open, infested with grief and lies. This broken, bony place inside my belly has been occupied by six women before my mother and living doesn’t get any lighter. We all breathed in the same bitterness,
I I begin to understand my mother's silences and the pain bracketing my grandmother’s instructions. Now, I can interpret their scarred words, skittering crab-like over our conversations. I understand how they grew thick scabs on their palms, how they spoke softly even when their tongues were sodden with salt. I understand, in shaping my daughter’s girlhood, how the skin covering your breasts thickens with age, and anger; how fear presses lips together; how fear grows haustoria to pierce your heart.
I want this line to end with her, with the breaking of my back, offering my flowering spine to the sun. I want my gilded girl to speak with the tongues of women and angels and never learn to drink silence into herself.
all left to bleed respectably into strained days, burning our lips with caraila tea and sweat rice, holding calabashes to keep warm. We are gold-skinned women, addicted to cuscuta
that dull the skin to copper, that bind our hands with vows, planting fatigue into our skin, seeding us to stay our feet from running into fresh forest.
Suzi Mezei
My mother-in-law makes harvest trips, conveying home-grown gifts that jiggle on the backseat of her Corolla; pink-cheeked nectarines, apricots, the same fruit that sweetened her soured youth. We’ve learned from her that war entrenches frugality, instills a fear of waste; waste is made by dolts and other Nazis. But in a cardboard box her ripe plums ferment, blue buds of mould amass on shriveled purple skin. We have waited too long, failed the test of thrift, the ancient art of preservation; glass jars sit empty in the larder, their rubber lips parched in a rainless December, our kitchen mocks her pilgrimage, her small square of good earth, the way the ground yields around her. Her disappointment is vinegar above fructose rivulets on a table where the damsons have split. She uses her last white hanky to absorb their thin blood.
Sustenance
In those times, mothers turned sons into small gods, boys learned early how to hover over sisters and aunts; height was not an issue. As head of the house, it was a father’s duty to collect the tender ears of wives and imps and fill them with unethical ethics; the pungent bilge of patriarchy, hemic, rough- the stuff that seeped into growing bones, and cumbered melioration- to wrench the ears from those who failed to hear, to heed; survivors learned early to hide their broken flesh, it was not polite to make a fuss. There’s a photo of us and him, the sea breeze in Arugam riffling
Snapshot
dune grass and the grey at his temples, the women, scraped to the sides like foreign creatures emerged from a blistered sea, bite-sized halflings forced by his gaze into digestible conventions; wives, mothers, sluts, rebels with buckets and spades, we evolved from hollow tropes in the background, the serrated tips of Sunday hats, the outlines of our straight backs pushed to the monochrome’s edge. It was our place to pace the shore and watch him swim, our own return to the ocean was denied. I wonder if he knew that the carcass of his old world was built on shifting sand.
Maybelle and Lux Cloud installation view, dimensions variable fabric, thread and acrylic underpainting
Gina Phillips
Johnny Kashner, Corn stalk and Wary-Eyed Chick, installation view, dimensions variable fabric, thread and acrylic underpainting
LEGACY Grafton Street, your town, flower-sellers, blue tulips that can’t be real, though you preferred a bought show of these to the wildflowers from my garden and the ballet-dress roses I robbed in Avoca, brought fresh and scented to the Home. Coffee and a coffee-slice in Bewleys, my purse full because you danced like Cher’s mother for the money they’d throw. All the times you bailed me out; Sunday lunches in the Mill House, clothes, rent, two weddings, cheques in the post. A busker is singing; I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain... but I always thought that I’d see you again. At the Luas, a girl stops begging, shows me where to put money in the new machine. I press the screen for a ticket; Adult, Stillorgan, where my car is parked, and I’ll drive past your house, the For Sale sign, before heading south.
Lani O'Hanlon
FOR THE MENDING I touched the tears she mended, skilful darning, almost invisible; her voice shrill as a seagull's in the rooms below. A hot water bottle wrapped in a towel was near my feet. A picture of the 'Little Flower' hung on the wall opposite gazing down on the droplets of Lourdes water still on my forehead. Christmas morning, peering into the darkness for dawn; a glint of silver or gold, a crinkle of paper, newness, a doll, a pram, a tea set. Reaching for them with a child's icy hands. My grandmother, Mary Anne, once held her breath for me, crying and praying like this. Tonight we lie in our adult bed staring out. Nothing is certain — this tender, barely here baby girl. In Crumlin hospital, the doctors peer into her heart. You touch my head, my feet, John. We hold each other pleading for the dawn, for relief, for the mending, and it comes, tiny darns, almost invisible. Lying in Grandmother's bed, where earlier she swaddled me in linen sheets.
Olivia Payne
Maybe I didn’t let him outside enough. No, of course he went outside, but did he only go into that immediate bright whiteness that hurts your eyes so that you’re fleeing from one inside to the next? It’s too much, if that’s what he thought the world was, then of course it was too much. Was he ever taken to shaded places where he could feel the earth breathing? Where the boundaries become meaningless as you’re held by the air and you no longer fight for distinction. Because once you’re inside - did he remember? He was more than a child then, but still it could have passed by for him like a dream. Maybe life swept through him, bearing him quickly through the rushing channels, the glib tributaries of boyhood, until he could join the river of life and work, until he could be charted on a map and named and used. Did he remember the mud we lived in, were allowed to live in, fortunate to live in? A new home outside our house, we were exiled fifteen feet from our old rooms, our belongings, our lives.
Unearthed
Even the officer, he was following the paths of the others, well-accepted and expected. He might have been ordering my great-grandmother from her home, he could have come with a sword or a sharp stick. In whatever uniform, we would have recognised this reincarnation of death and given him his due. Inside the earth for more than a year, we slept next to each other. A mass grave, a family mausoleum. Then in the daytime the same as always: the vegetables, the cows. When he was older the metal. What I understood was that he poured something liquid into a mould and it hardened, the same shapes over and over. He was taught to take life and crush it into shape, force it where it was needed, how other people wanted it. Nowhere was he taught the extravagant, the extraordinary. You should strip extravagance down until it becomes workable, usable. His brother and sister, taken away and made usable. History will see them as spare, as extra. Abundance, rightly taken from us at the right time, to be made use of. They worked land here, they worked land there, and we don’t speak of the rest. And maybe history will see his death as the earth’s proper response to the extravagant: a furious reclamation.
It prepared him, of course, for the small spaces. For seeing life pressed into distinct shapes. But even when we got our house back. When the officer left it, when they all left, and we remained. That house followed us. He helped to dismantle and resurrect it. What could I give him that would seem like roots if I could not give him a home that stayed still, brothers and sisters who weren’t taken and returned? He saw us pulling vegetables from the land, living off it. He saw people being buried in the same ground. He never seemed disgusted by the closeness. His teachers and his friends, they tell people he was polite and caring. Easy to love. Easy knowing that we would stay behind, that even when we moved we took our houses with us, like snails, stuck to a ground and a life. All our movements only out of necessity, worn-down tracks. He could chart us like stars, like comets. Even the roaring, raging comets burn on a schedule. He could leave and come back in a hundred years and find a woman he could call mother, still growing and eating vegetables. And she would welcome him in, knowing a son is a son who needs a place to sleep.
The earth cannot suffer extravagance to live. It teaches us the only thing it knows: circular movement. The comet rages in its path but its light will fade and only the bare rock remains to go around. You wake up inside the earth, and you go outside, and you stare at the earth, pull life from the earth, return in the evening to the earth. Was he shielding his eyes from the sun when he saw them in the sky? If I had woken him up, and made him watch the sunrise, gradually introduced him to light and day, it might have allowed him to keep his eyes more fully on the ground. He didn’t see the stars then, but even the day-lit sky proved too much for him. One mile away from home is too far for a boy to dream of.
Men in a dogfight. He saw death, airborne and a novelty. I should have said to him, see how their bodies come once more to the ground, like yours will. I could have said what they do in the air is no more than what we do here. They’ve taken their shells with them. They are still snails, snails captured by birds before they are dropped and broken. Meteorites colliding, splintering, in what is not glory but simply the will of the earth. What he might have later called physics. Their shattered corpses drift eternal and predictable. Don’t come between the earth and her sons.
He knew how to use what was about him. He was resourceful. Polite and caring and resourceful. What words to describe a son. I heard his breathing in the dark underground, that premature burial mound, his body leaking air and warmth and moisture. Already seeping back into the earth. Perhaps I could have frozen him, left him outside at night, to find him perfect. His body the mould for his life. Instead he moved and used his movement to find them momentum. He let them once more indulge in the illusion of escape. He moved and thought he was helping. Up back into the air with his help, foraged fuel, the help of a boy who slept in mud. Perhaps they said: 'Here is what fits into what. You slot them in, you put in this fuel and get energy out' And he might have said: 'That’s different from anything I’ve known, teach me more' But he could have said: 'So like the food my mother gives me'
And when he came down, he found us all the same. It was another woman, one my twins, my great-grandmother or my daughter, but he still found me alright. The sky birthed him and left him on her doorstep, reborn and returned to me. Two birthdays, and more mothers, brother to all.
They saw that he had spun in old grooves and drove him off-track. They knew that the earth had pressed him into shape for their hands. The year, more than a year, eternity, in the ground had kept him short. He was plucked from the river, and his head bashed against the stones just to make sure. This was a man who could be used. This was a man who could eat ambitions and regurgitate onto them his success.
Polite, caring, resourceful, paradoxical. If he had moved far enough away, would he be like the stars? They say they’re dead and alive, seen and not there. He had tried to explain this to me. What I wanted to know was if he had died up there, would there be a point where your dead body, Yura, would be looking back and be able to see - if it could see any more - a time when it was still alive? Or could you be alive in two places at once? If you timed it right, could you deposit yourself throughout time and space and when you look back see a universe of selves? Could time and light find you immortality? He never went as high again. It was just a test, a start, something to improve upon. A game to be played again with other players and new toys. But when he finally came down, they put him in a wall. Just to be sure. Once more into the mud. Bricks are mud disguised as permanence. He is shut away again. And in the wall could be his brothers, his sister, sleeping next to him as always. Ashes pressed to the soil. He follows the laws of the earth again.
When it came time to choose, they chose him. 'We have unanimously chosen Comrade Gagarin for the honour. Yuri is well-loved by his team. You should be proud.' But what they loved and chose was the earth in him. Ballast to bring him home. Up there, nothingness held him alone - apart in the familiar moulded metal. And he told them he saw earth. Pressed and rounded, moulded, set in the sky. He left to confirm what we already knew.
When I roll a coin down the gullet of memory, I now try to hit the buttons that matter. These rarely gleam brightest; however, once found, I cannot unsee them. Most are plain: letters, colours rubbed away from me leaning on them for years, unwitting. Who’s clever now? Take teeth-cleaning. I take it for granted, that I can perform this brushing motion and look after myself, even as I frown at mirror reflections and projections. Yet despite being righthanded, I brush with my left. Daily, your lefthanded fingers, shadowy, hold mine.
Rosalind Moran
I used to focus on what my mother had not done. A failure to listen; her shortcomings in empathising at length. Me feeling let down: snakish like a garden hose, gushing into the earth. You gave birth to me! Hissing into the damp soil. Why can’t you be perfect? Now my attention shrinks further with every year – meaning I am less inclined to feed it to slot machines in the dim private games arcade of my own rumination. Playing the pokies of my emotional disrepair is costly; an addiction. Part-fiction. And no-one grows younger.
A Poem for When I Don't Feel Like Calling my Mother
Her approach is marked by the swish rattle of tall grass She pushes stalks aside to wade a path through a grey sea She has been out shooting foxes. I watch, my mind a stage Her pressing down on the rust-brittle fence to create a gap Stepping through – then a crack. A gunshot. She hangs like a marionette, held half upright in her tangle of wires We almost died in the 1920s: my mother, me, my descendants The fates hacked at a string, but with blunted scissors – for the puppet did not fall, sending all her ghostly future selves tumbling like dolls from the fingers of a somnolent child. Instead, we waited, watching Grandma’s body as her family ran To investigate the leaden sound; we, mere spectral possibilities In the eighties, the worst almost happened again. This time It was my mother: a jillaroo, rounding up cattle and children Her employer the son of an English aristocrat; hatter-mad, he piled sawdust around his four-poster bed to ward off drafts. A loaded gun in the kitchen fired one day, bullet ricocheting off concrete floor. My mother spilt hot water; her hand scarred.
I did not aspire to be a dentistry-inspired poet. You – did not always wish to be a mother. Yet these plants have grown. We electric-wire kisses across oceans; worry about each other’s shots. I cried today at my left hand’s dexterity. Where are you in this empty light?
Histories of Near Disasters
Outside the window with its grime-streaked non-transparency My daughters and I pressed pale fingers to small panes of glass We did not hold our breath, for we had none yet to speak of Nor shuddering gasps to translate into teary condensation. My mother rode the next day over hills ridged like knuckles; we whirled giddy like dervishes in the yard, set dogs barking
Me? I’ve not been robbed at gunpoint – though who knows… I have been chased in the street and grabbed in the street; groped off the street, in a safe and civilised conference room run from streetlight to streetlight after a wedding in Rome, shadow following; tasted gusts of fumes, underworld breath as I nearly stepped into a bus lane by accident. What kept me? One wonders what intervenes in such times. I do not believe we are priorities – I do not believe we are so different from leaves drinking from damp soil, or soil digesting the leaves. Sometimes, however, as I boil water, climb through fences and perform the various rippling acts that say hello, here – my muscles twitch with generational memories of evasion The grass, the fence, the water, the yard: all are textured with the fingerprints and staccato hearts of echo ancestors Spinning around our encasements, whispering warnings and hopes, lips brushing skin. A single shot firing paints a sound like the rings of a tree. Our descendants, blind, can hear it.They place threads in our hands. Hold tight.
Sub-headings
Poor Peg
Abby Ledger- Lomas
On the first, third and fifth day of each week, the square is packed with straw-roofed stalls that fill your nose with a sweet dampness. On these days, the air shimmers with the warmth of bodies. Men and women and dogs and horses and pigs, all warm blooded and breathing and brushing up against each other. Children crawl beneath tables, sending apples to fall and bruise against the cobbled ground, their knees muddy and the dirt piling up beneath their nails. There are fathers and husbands and brothers and mothers and wives and sisters and there are lambs in their stalls, bellies full and fat and bartered over with friendly back slaps.
But today is not the first, third, or fifth day of the week, and the air is different; clear and crisp at the mouths of Beth and Winnet as they enter the high-sided courtyard, the bones of their bodices cutting at the rips, their boots shined, their cheeks pinched pink. It is not the usual market crowd that carries them forward. And it is not the usual square that greets them. The people are the same people that had browsed the shoulders of mutton and fingered soiled turnips and heaved sacks and counted out coins only days before. The square is the same stone and timber and dirt and dust. But all is entirely different now: changed by the sense of occasion. The hum of the day-to-day is replaced with a low reverberation, one that groans in anticipation. The hawkers and hagglers are gone - their faces now scrubbed, shirts tucked, ribbons tied tight, eyes glinted.
From poverty, no poetry, but weird spells, half-prayer, half –threat: sharp pins in the little dolls of death [...] Away from castle, judge, huge crowd, rough rope, short drop, no grave and future tourists who might grieve. - The Lancashire Witches, Carole Anne Duffy
“Yes, poor Peg,” she says, quickly, chasing one thought from her head with another.“But we didn’t see, did we? She might have slipped. And Mistress had gone to bed. We saw her take a candle up.”
“There’s no point going over it now. Not today.” The sun moves from behind a cloud and Beth squints as she speaks. “Besides. It can be done from afar. They can do that. Man from the Sheriff’s said.” Winnet thinks of the man with the wide hat and the gloves thrown down on the table; how he’d knocked her tea cup, the milky brown seeping into the wood. She’d stood for a cloth, but he’d taken her by the shoulders, held her in place as he described the body: the crack to her head. His breath had licked at her, warm and sour on her face. She’d wanted him off her. “I know he did. But Beth, don’t you think? She slipped, maybe.” “It’s too late for all that now. It’s best this all comes to an end.” Beth gives a nod of recognition to a woman flanked by three small children, their eyes wide, one of them hiding behind her skirt. “Morning, Amy,” Beth offers, her voice fluttering: “John, Catherine, Peter. Don’t you all look sweet.”
“They say the guilty do, at the end.” “What choice does she have?” Win seems to start at the loudness of her own voice, glances around, tucks a curl behind her ear with a small duck of the head. Beth responds with a shrug, but her tone is defensive: “We all heard her say it, Win, including you. This is her doing.” “Heard her say it, yes. Saying something’s different to doing it.” Win tries not to think about the times she has wished Beth harm, thought angrily of her after some argument or another. She knew she had. Must have. They’d been arguing since they were old enough to pull each other’s pigtails. “She’s a fire in her. She says things.” “She said it. Wished for it. And then it happened.” “A coincidence, surely.” “Poor Peg,” Beth says, with some drama, Winnet thinks, but she echoes the sentiment anyway.
“Winnet!” Beth mimics Win’s tone, smirking as she does it. “Do you think they’re thinking bad things about us?” Win can’t help wondering if James Cutter is thinking of her, whether her name has passed his lips, if he’s imagined her doing what they say they’ve been doing; dancing in the darkness, their petticoats whirling.
Beth and Winnet crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the wooden stage erected at the other end of the yard.
The woman nods back, waves quickly, fingers reaching no higher than her waist, as if she wishes the gesture to go unnoticed by the growing crowd. She hurries her children on. Winnet winces. “People are staring.” Her voice is thin as cotton thread. “I know. I saw James Cutter just then, with his mother. He was looking at you.” “Beth!” Winnet’s cheeks flush. She touches her hair.
“She’s made her peace with it, then.” Winnet looks down at her hands, notices a small red smudge where she has picked at the cuticle of her thumbnail.
“They say she walked without fuss to the carriage this morning.” Beth’s voice is hushed despite the crowd and it’s solemn, though Winnet notices a small curl at her lip.
“You did.” “We both did, Beth. You, Peg and me. We all danced. But it wasn’t-” “I know what it wasn’t, Win. But people will think it was. Now quiet about it.” “It was just a few times,” Win says beneath her breath, a scolded child. “Win! Hush. Think of Poor Peg. She told, and now she’s dead. That’s what happens when you speak of it, so don’t.”
“Thomas,” Beth giggles. The sun is right over the square now, and there are men busying themselves with the wooden struts. Two of them heave a thick coil of rope up onto the deck and there are some cheers and whoops from the crowd; a collective tightening as shoulders rise and breath is drawn.
“Peg didn’t tell. Someone told, but it wasn’t Peg. If nobody had told-” Beth turns to face Winnet so quickly she almost loses her footing, grabbing her by the shoulders to keep her balance. “It doesn’t matter who told.” A man with a downy beard and greased hair brushes by. He gives her a light shove. “Beth,” he says, tipping his forehead toward hers, his voice already thick with the anticipation of a whole day off and beer to carry him through it.
“What’s there to write about up there in that old house? Nothing of interest. Not enough to fill a book.” Beth is facing forward, staring at the stage, a smile on her face, eyes darting to those around her. “You’re going to make a scene.”
“No.” “Some people are saying-” Beth cuts her off: “And they’ll keep saying it if you carry on with this. They’ll think it’s true.” “But we did, sometimes. We danced.” Win whispers it so quietly she isn’t sure she’s said it aloud.
“I saw her writing spells in a book.” Beth is pulling Winnet as she speaks, guiding this way and that, moving too quickly for people to hear much of their talk. “She kept a journal.” Winnet thinks of the leather bound notebooks on the desk, the pressed flowers neatly tucked to mark the pages with the best poems, the ones that were read aloud sometimes when all the jobs were done and the girls were allowed to take their shoes off and warm their feet by the fire and unplait their hair from their heads as she recited words too long and luxurious for them to really understand. Win had thought they sounded as pretty as the pressed pansies; delicate and fragile.
Winnet turns to Beth, takes her hand. “We could stop it.” “Win. Be quiet. You’ll have us both up there with her.” “Is it too late, Beth?” Her breathing has become quick and shallow, and the pretty rose has drained from her cheeks. Beth pries her hand free from her grip, guiding her further toward the front, bringing her up-close, arm in arm, so that she can talk in her ear as she marches her on. Her voice is calm and even and Winnet can’t understand why Beth’s shoulders are not also shaking. “She’s not what we thought, Win. We didn't know.” “She was hot-headed. But she wasn’t what they’re saying she is.” “Enough.” Winnet looks up at the sky, the clouds torn across it. “I just don’t think it’s true.”
“Just in case.” “In case what?” Her eyebrows raise, she beckons her friend to finish the sentence. “In case she is. In case it is bad words. It’ll stick with us.” Beth is triumphant. “So you do believe.” Winnet’s cheeks flush. She reaches for words, but they don’t come, and she finds herself pushed further into the square, allowing Beth to lead her into the din. The crowd has swollen and spread right up to the wooden platform, which is decorated with embroidered flags that carry the Clitheroe crest. Winnet wonders which of the local women has spent her evenings stitching the crested feet and curled tongues for the occasion. Beth has on her Sunday bonnet and Winnet tries to focus her attention on the curls of black hair that have fallen loose as she trails behind, but the sight of her bare neck is too much of a distraction, and she is unable to fight back the prick of tears in her eyes. Finally, they are at the very front, and Beth leans up against the platform, tips onto her toes and looks up at the rope.
Refugee Homecoming
Win mutters beneath her breath: “Just ‘cos she can write.” Beth bristles, raising her voice so that others can hear. “She was chanting.” The crowd echoes the words back to her in whispers.
There’s a roar from the crowd and a horn plays and Beth turns to Win, her face fixed with a trembling smile. Their mistress looks up to the sky, the same sun bright on her face, though she doesn’t squint, only turns her face up to it, her eyes closed lightly. Win prays she does not look down, doesn’t see them in the crowd, their washed bonnets white in the ruckus. They hear the creak of the boards as the men walk their prize to the centre. Someone shouts “this is for poor Peg” from the crowd, and the square is suddenly awash with her name.
Win is staring at the stage too now, watching as the men take it in turns to throw the rope over the bracket, the crowd jeering each time they miss. Eventually they manage to loop it over the top, and the people in the square erupt. Win wonders if she can hear them from wherever she’s waiting, if she is silent or if she is speaking, saying some lines of her poems, maybe. Maybe she is sobbing. Maybe she screams or stands or paces or crawls into a little ball on the ground. “She’s children up there at the house. You’ve raised them as much as she has. You’ve tucked them up at night. We both have. They’ll be motherless.” Beth has had enough. She fixes her with her small, dark eyes. “I hope you fall and break your neck.” “Beth!” “That’s what she said. A mother wouldn’t say that. Not a good one.” “Don’t say it out loud.” Win covers her ears instinctively, “Don’t say it again. Not ever.” Beth straightens herself, senses the argument won. “Why, Win? Why not say it out loud?”
Anna Potter
“She was reading what she’d written. Out loud. She did that sometimes.” “It rhymed. Diaries don’t rhyme.” “They were poems.” “That’s another word for spells. What’s the lady of the house doing writing poems? Nonsense. Women don’t write poems.”
“Poor Peg,” says Beth. “Poor Peg,” says Winnet. And then the scrape of the stool as the legs are kicked away, and then a gasp, the air sucked dry.
Rebecca Green
The Visit
illustration by Rebecca Green
Lightbulbs blown soft hands on my head try to quieten my thoughts. My father visited me. Between us a gulf. I silent moved to anger he, noticing my husband is a good father inside I nod. Nod. he was not good. Is not now though he tries. Silence swallows me for the rest of the day maybe for the rest of my life.
The Unraveling
I never thought my life would look so ugly in the end. A tangled gray-brown ball of twine in my hands, lumpy and fraying. It bulges with knots and beads and seeds, tombstones of choices, missteps, and triumphs; of probing joy and pulling sorrow. Of things I’ve broken or that have broken me, all in the name of love. I am tying on the last bead today, a blue stone polished smooth by my worry. And it will be the last – how could I continue after? My life has become a performance with only one listener. The bead is blue for joy in a wedding, the blue of renewal, of sweet clear water. We called you mool-mool as a child for the little burbling noises you’d make, the sounds of a spring burbling life cheerfully from the ground. You brought us life, little one. It’s hard for me to remember that you are not little anymore. Tomorrow you will wear white, not blue; you will celebrate life in the new hues you have learned from your soon-to-be husband and his people. Your people.
Don’t worry too much about the people you are leaving behind – even our name is a lie now. Growing family, pregnant ones. But our people are shadows, thinning and shrinking. It is no wonder you left our language. For a moment I wonder if I made the wrong choice, sending you to the modern school, the “melting pot” that promised to unite us but managed only to transform you. They made whiteness and womanhood from your innocence, an irreversible alchemy. A colonization of the soul.
Nora Studholme
In the name of love. I should be grateful that you found love. A wedding is a day of joy. But the eve of one is heavy, a moment crouched on the threshold of memory. The blue bead affixed, I slowly unspool tattered thread. There is something I need to remember. I peel my life back one curl at a time: a brown clay bead tied on when you left home, fired with a prayer and misshapen where my thumb pressed too hard; a shard of wood, powdering now but still whole, from the cross over your father’s buried body; a seed, the arrival of the white men and the long debated treaty between us, a new hope planted, waiting to be nurtured. There. My fingers catch on a tiny tooth, its brittle edges still sharp. The first thing you ever lost.
Mark Bercier
It is fragile against my skin. I remember the look in your black eyes as you handed me this part of you. You looked sad so I told you we could plant it and when it had grown into a tall white beech tree you would be a woman. But you shook your head and said, with the grave wisdom of children, “It’s for you. Now you will always have a part of me. Just like I have parts of you.” Slowly I wind the string back up, carefully tuck in the loose end beyond the last blue bead. Your bead. They’ll bury my ititamat with me when I die and that will be the end of our story. Then at last, my little one, you will live life unmoored from the things you have lost.
Amanda Koehne and her cat Emily, scientist, art collector Gouache on handmade paper 30 x 48 inches
the black chair in the family room
he sat in the black chair facing the television a knot of neighbors stood on the front porch, frowning afternoon fumbled with its gray clouds pushing them low over rooftops I stood in the kitchen while they put him on a stretcher mother kissed his forehead, gently, waiting for the silence.
Lee Zumpe
And one evening, homeward, by the well-head, there was suddenly thunder in the road, and among the screaming horses the shouting the laughter, we were trapped in a sudden thicket of shiny stirrups and long, long black boots, the heavy hooves pounding, and all around us, the reek of vodka and horse-sweat. And my arms then, though strong as steel cables,
DB Jonas
From where do you appear now, my sparrow, little Wolf, always fiercest among your playmates, tousling in the road, sidecurls bouncing, or squatting among the bright-eyed chickens in the puddled yard, declaiming your endless sermons, but dutifully leaving off that congress whenever I’d called for you to help carry our challah to the baker, in hopes we’d stop by Chatzkel’s on the way back, so you might linger by the slaughterer’s yard, holding forth before your captive audience of laconic goats and cows? Where in earth or heaven do you come from, mir shoyn, mayn sheyner, mayn kleynes, nebeches yingele mayn?
Lashinke, vaysinke, avu bistu geven? (Little boy, little boy, where did you go?) Yiddish lullaby
ON RIVINGTON
This is not Lvov any more, I am aware, but a busy place called Delancey, or Rivington, I honestly don’t know which. But I do remember those jostling weeks in the cart, soaked among the bundles and huddled little ones, and the frightening, tumultuous docks, and how your brother somehow, who knows how? secured us passage, and then the steerage, reeking of toilet and vomit. Then everyone was sick, but I was never sick, yet added to my many refusals a refusal to eat the thin grey soup and moldy crusts. Twice or three times they offered oranges, and the family forced me to eat.
and your sisters hauled us up into the daylight, and we made our way to Dudel’s, where the challah was waiting for us, baked bright copper, and on past Chatzkel’s, where the cows calmly regarded you with their great brown eyes and seemed to wonder
Leaning against the stack of coat-sleeve bundles here beside me, I slept a little this evening, little sparrow, and dreamed my dream again. I was falling down, down through stony darkness to land softly beside you, all the water vanished from that well now, and you were playing quietly at the bottom with some sticks and string,
Was it not so, my little one, mir shoyn, mayn kleynes, mayn shayner yingele mayn?
were helpless to hold you, you, snatched up and swung round, and oh the well-curb, my sparrow, the unyielding well-curb and you, and my lurching, my lurching to the well-curb and you, and the forest of lathered flanks around us in every direction.
May you not remember how this was mir shoyn, mayn sheyner, mayn kleynes, farlornes Velvele mayn.
And in that enormous hall, the biggest room on earth, I overhear some evenings now, when the lamps are lit, how they told the officials I was deaf and could not speak, but was of sound mind, and so we all emerged into the sunlight and steady ground, only to plunge again into the deep shadow of the tenement houses where I sit now beside the woodstove, gazing mutely over all the loved ones busy at their machines, the window at my back, in the sweet noise rising from the pushcarts,
Your nephew Mowszo came to sit beside me last evening, grown far older than you now, my sparrow, speaking softly, so as not to be heard above the thrumming of the Singers, and talked again, as he often will, of his Italian girl in the cotton dress, of her father the grocer, and of her god, a murdered Jew from long ago, who was said to exclaim Lama sabachthani?
and in summer the aromas of herring, pickles, bread, melons, onions and apples. But no, this is not Lvov, is it, mir shoyn, mayn yingele Velvele mayn?
at your fanciful stories, do you not remember, mir shoyn, mayn sheyner, mayn tayerste Velvele mayn?
at the hour of his death. But this was no ordinary Jew, in my estimation, or perhaps this account is badly mistaken, for no real mensch would so lament his own humiliation, torture or demise, but far sooner the loss of another, of one another, it seems to me, for loss is God, is it not so, mir shoyn, mayn gedungener yingele mayn?
So remind me, little one, once the machines are quiet, and this room is dark, to serve you some of that fine soup your sister made today, of cockerel and cabbage and turnips, and potatoes and squash, eyne goldene hindl yoikh to make you grow up strong, and someday soon to take your place among the men at shul, and just perhaps to chance a quick glance upward, from time to time, to catch a glimpse of this old meshuggene, this left-over madwoman behind the screen, who long ago lost all speech but the muttering, all but a song that no one hears but you, the sound of one who gazes proudly down, down onto the sea of hat brims,
The Jews proclaim their Shema, their knowledge that God is One, not a god of goodness and justice and triumph alone, opposed by evil, but God of all, embracing all, with no exceptions, and thus we harbor in our breast an unrequited love leavened always by bitterness and sorrow, yet open-eyed, like those trusting cows in the slaughterer’s yard...ay-lyu-lyu-lyu.
humming a song of nothing. “Nu, mir shoyn, shlof zhe, mayn sheynste Velvele, shlof, shlof…ay-lyu-lyu-lyu.”
Old as the Hills
Old as the hills was my first thought as I caught sight of him moving up a steep slope, arms and back working in harmony as he scythed the deep grass. He showed no signs of stiffness although his thick hair was iron-grey. I wanted to sketch him, capture something which had persisted against the odds.. I drew the car into a passing place and called up, “Excuse me. I’m looking for a cottage, Ta-ig Mairi?” He walked down towards me, his face long and solemn, like one of the Viking chess pieces in the museum in Edinburgh. I wondered how old he was. “You must be Miss Laurie.” He held out his hand. “I’m Donald MacLeod. We spoke on the phone about Taigh Mairi.” As his fingers closed over mine, a jolt of energy shot through me. I forgot my automatic response, “It’s Ms, not Miss,” and only managed, “You can call me Janis.” “It’s the second house on the right. The door’s open. I’ll follow you down.”
Christine Grant
Taigh Mairi, he pronounced it like tie, was a low, whitewashed house. The kitchen contained exactly four of each place setting, there were no cushions on the living room sofa, and the shelves were bare apart from a few guidebooks. It felt soothing after the over-stuffed house in Edinburgh full of keepsakes from the places Jamie and I had visited together. “Let me show you the porch,” my landlord said. He opened a door at the end of the hallway, and I followed him into a small glassed-in space. “Do you think you’ll be able to paint here?” he asked. I took in the view of the grey-blue sea and the smudged shapes of the mainland mountains. “If I can’t paint here, I won’t be able to paint anywhere.” Conscious of how close I was standing to him in the tiny space, I tried to make small talk. “Have you always lived here?” He shook his head. “I’m from Achaltdearg further down the coast. We moved to Camuscille when my wife’s father was getting old and needing a bit of help with the croft.” That night, I lay in the unfamiliar bed listening to the creaks and sighs of an old house settling down for the night. I thought about Donald and how the Gaelic placenames slipped off his tongue more easily than his slow, deliberate English. Only a dwindling minority of Scot’s spoke Gaelic. I shouldn’t have been unnerved by meeting one of them, but it was like being confronted with an almost-dead thing, a half-crushed insect waving its remaining legs, or a bird with a shattered wing flapping its whole one with no idea that it would never fly again. The thing had no chance of survival. Why couldn’t it just give up and die rather than fixing its gaze on me with a glint of hope?
When I stepped outside the next morning, a tiny, white-haired lady was pegging up washing in the neighbouring garden.
She hirpled over to the fence. “Are you the artist lady? I heard you’re going to be here for a while.” She held out a wizened hand. “I’m Mairead. Come in for a cup of tea.”
It was more of a command than an invitation. I mentally pushed aside my plans for the rest of the morning and followed Mairead into her spotlessly clean kitchen. She served me scones slathered in butter and declared. “I’m ninety-one next week and still baking. I’ve kept some scones for Domhnall Angaidh. I promised Effie I’d keep an eye on him.” “Who’s Dol Angy?” “You know. Donald Angus who owns Taigh Mairi.I was at school with his wife.” Mairead sighed. “Effie was a good friend to me. It’s seven years now since she passed away.” From Mairead’s window, I caught sight of Dol Angy and his dog striding up the hill behind the croft. Surely, he couldn’t be older than Mairead. “Was he younger than her?” I asked cautiously. “There was a big age gap.” Mairead’s blue eyes focussed on something far away. “I found it strange when she wanted to marry a man as old as her father, but she wouldn’t have anyone else. Ah, but they were happy together.” “If Effie was the same age as you, that would make him … what… at least one hundred and ten.” “Would it?” Mairead crumbled the scone in her hand. “I was never good at maths.” She must be confused, I decided as I set up my painting materials in the porch. Rain showers shivered across the bay obscuring the opposite side, until the sun broke through revealing mountain tops and a glimpse of blue sky. Impossible to capture, but I had to try.
The librarian leant forwards to read the entry. “That must be his son. This Donald is only 54.” “His son was called Alasdair.” “Hmm. Let’s have a look to see when Donald MacLeod died.”
The librarian started me off with the croft histories, a row of slim volumes which showed who had lived in each village. Under the entry for Achaltdearg, I read that a Donald A. MacLeod had worked croft number 7 from 1946 to 1978. Surely that wasn’t my landlord. If he was eighteen when he got the croft, that would make him over ninety. Interestingly, croft number 7 was held by a Donald A. MacLeod from 1916 to 1931 and before that it was worked by a D. Angus MacLeod. I showed the librarian. “This croft was held by three people with almost the same name.” “People often name their children after a father or grandfather,” she said. “I can show you how to look online if you want to go further back.” She set me up at one of the computers and when she came to see how I was getting on, I was surprised to see that an hour had slipped by. I peered at my scribbled notes. “I found a Donald MacLeod living on croft number 7 in 1851. He was 54 and his wife Christina was thirty years younger. Every census, they added a bit less than ten years to their age. Donald should have been 104 in 1901, but he gave his age as 82.” The librarian laughed. “People often did that. They weren’t sure when they were born.” I clicked open the entry for the 1911 census. “Donald MacLeod is still there, but his wife’s gone. He would be 114, if he gave the right age in the 1851 census.”
By evening, I had a series of watercolour sketches. None of them came close to what I had seen, although I had caught the aqua-blue of the sea. # The wind howled around the cottage that night keeping me awake. I got up in the half light of dawn and peered out. The felt on Dol Angy’s shed was flapping in the wind and he was up on a ladder repairing it. A man of over ninety couldn’t work like this, not even a Hebridean. Mairead must be getting mixed up. Clouds clung to the mountains across the bay obscuring the view. It wasn’t a day for painting. I brought out my latest illustration project, but the little girl I was trying to sketch came out looking like a precocious witch. I put down my pencil and it rolled off the fold-up table I had set up in the porch and fell to the floor, shattering the lead. The cup of tea I made to clear my mid was almost black as I was down to the last dregs of milk. A trip to the supermarket meant a drive of over twenty miles, but perhaps I needed the comfort of the town. The road was a narrow, winding band between the grey sea churned up by the wind, and the steep slopes of the hills. Mist hung low on the hillside and at times the rain was so intense that I had to crawl along with the wipers on full blast, unable to see more than a short distance ahead. What possessed me to book Taigh Mairi for the whole winter? A part of me wanted to flee back to the familiar streets of Edinburgh.
When I reached the town, I took refuge in a coffee shop, and then went to the library to register for a card.A sign at the desk caught my eye: “Interested in who lived where and when? Do a family history search.” I thought about Dol Angy. Perhaps I could find out how old he was and prove to myself that Mairead must be confused.
With a few swift clicks, she searched the death records. We found Christina right away. She died in 1904. However, we couldn’t find Donald MacLeod, even when we widened the search to include the whole parish. “Maybe he went to live with a relative in Glasgow,” the librarian suggested. “At his age?” “My grandfather was from Achaltdearg. There was a story …” She tapped her fingers against the mouse pad. “Just a silly thing people said about a man who didn’t die when he was supposed to. Excuse me. I have to get back to the desk.” She hurried away. I crossed to the rain-streaked window and the blurry view of the harbour. Could the Donald MacLeod of 1911 be the same man as the Donald MacLeod of 1851, simply resetting his age at every census? Had he stayed on throughout the 20thcentury, changing the way he wrote his name, until he married a girl from Camuscille? The library door opened, and a little girl and her mother came in dripping rain onto the carpet. As the mother issued commands in a language I didn’t understand, the girl took off her canary-yellow rain jacket and shook it out, chattering to her mother in the same language. “Was that Polish?” I asked. The girl hid behind her mother’s legs and peeked out. The mother gave an amused smile. “No, it’s Gaelic. Our native language.” Her words sucked away my platitudes about how nice it was to hear a child learning her mother’s language and how useful another European language would be for her.
Sheets of rain swept inland as I drove back with the car boot full of fresh and dried food. A campervan passed like a large, ungainly bird too late in the season and a hollow ache settled in my chest. Was it for the child James and I couldn’t have, or for the utter futility of passing on a dying language? It would be much better for the child to learn a language people actually used, like Spanish or Chinese or Urdu. Just as I reached the house, the evening sun broke through the clouds leaving patterns of light and shade on the mountains. I threw on a smock and began brushing colours onto canvas, smudging and layering to capture the sun straining through the clouds. By the time the light died, I felt I had the faintest hint of it. I thought of the little girl and her mother. Their language was as ephemeral as a glimpse of light through the clouds, but did that mean that it couldn’t be beautiful or had no value? Who was I to say something was hopeless? The language was a wounded, wild thing, gasping for breath. It would be so much easier if it would just die, so I could pretend it had never existed and that I had never glimpsed what might have been. I didn’t want to have to look at it, because I would have to ask what I should do. I wandered through to the kitchen and switched on the kettle to make tea. The socket flickered electric blue, and the lights went out. I pulled on my jacket and groped my way down the drive, heading for the light shining in Dol Angy’s house. He greeted my arrival with a slight raise of an eyebrow. “Everything okay?” “The kettle blew. I need some help finding the fuse box.” “Come in first and have a cup of tea.” He helped me take off my jacket. When was the last time a man did that? Jamie’s idea of equality was letting me do everything myself.
“Tapadh leat.” “Tapa lat,” I repeated. “And what’s the word for …” There was so much to learn. The rain was back, running down the window pain. “Rain?” “Uisge.” “Ooshka.” His solemn face transformed in a smile. That was my first lesson in the persistence of language.
He held up a pint of milk. “Bainne?” I nodded. “Siucar?” He pushed the sugar bowl towards me. I took a spoonful. “How do I say thank you?”
“I was just talking to my grand-daughter.” He led me into the kitchen where a laptop lay open on the table showing an attractive woman with blonde hair piled on top of her head. “That’s Eilidh. She’s a presenter on Gaelic TV.”
He said something in Gaelic to Eilidh. She bubbled a reply and cooed “Tioraidh” as Dol Angy closed the call. “You know how to use Zoom?” “Why not.” His mouth turned up in a smile. “Got to move with the times.” While he made the tea, I wandered over to a wall covered in pictures. A black and white wedding photo showed Dol Angy much as he looked now beside a slender girl with curly hair. I scanned along the wall seeing her grow into her husband’s age, with a shorter hairstyle, glasses, greying hair and wrinkling skin. In the last photo, her hair was a white halo. but in all these images he stayed the same. “You don’t get any older in these photos, do you?” I said to Dol Angy. “I looked up the census for Achaltdearg. Someone with more or less the same name as you was living in croft number 7 from 1851 until the late seventies.” “Sit down before your tea gets cold.” As Dol Angy steered me towards the table, a rush of energy surged through me. I’d never felt anything like this, not even when I met Jamie, who promised forever after and left me when he got his post-grad pregnant. “If the Lord allows something to persist, who are we to question it?” Dol Angy’s eyes slid away from mine. “My father looked very like me.” Was it the same person in all the photos? At this distance, I couldn’t tell. But Dol Angy hadn’t answered my question.
Directed by Aoife McArdle written by Max Porter played by Cillian Murphy music by Jon Hopkins
A dramatic and immersive film installation by Aoife McArdle, first shown at the Manchester International festival it was nominated this year for Best Narrative Short atTribeca. All of This Unreal Time was born from conversations between Max Porter (Author of 'Grief is The Thing With Feathers') and Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) about different themes of honesty and performance, the conversations grew organically to become something else entirely. A poem, a film, an installation. It is transmutative. We follow an unnamed man dressed in a black hoodie through deserted city streets at night and into the fields as dawn breaks, bringing hope.
The film installation is beautifully shaped and visualised by Aoife McArdle (director of 'Kissing Candice', and 'Severance') and conveys the experience of poetry, seeking to encompass your heart beat, your physicality - to have your whole body be involved. It is a profoundly moving experience to go on this journey, Jon Hopkins deep tones and uplifting sound moving through you and carrying the words, bringing us out of darkness towards the dawn. Cillian Murphy's 'Everyman' is performing a 'species deep act of apology.' to the Earth, and those he loves. The following pages are film stills and extracts from the text.
I came out here to apologise. You know, I find myself at the midpoint of my life in a dark wood. And now I’m here in the forest of my mind, and every tree is shame. Every living thing is a reprimand, and I realise I must speak freely now. Before I lose you. In a room years ago I hid, waiting for some adult weather to pass, and I looked at a jug on a shelf, and the jug had written on it these words: 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, for quickly time is flying.' I think there was an image of death; embodied, grinning, pointing at time. To the left of death was a little old lady standing by a cottage perched on a cliff. I think she was breathing deeply, gazing at the grey slab of lazily painted sea... ...Out to sea there were little human specks, and it was apparent that these little marks were me, many terrible times over. Me. Countless, indistinct, beyond the woman’s grasp. A full sky of hopeless cut out boys, dreaming of teams .Bad haggard, jumped up flat assembly dream braggarts. Hundreds and thousands of little lads. Bad. Pretending to fight.
Gone off somewhere with his comedy packet of nuts and pecker. Playing no doubt violent games in his supposedly prone to kindness mind. And to her horror the child, or me, or you are hundreds of feet out to sea. Stranded on a shingle bank, barely recognisable as human. And all the better for it. Sorry little old lady for being so far out to sea that you couldn’t tell if we were people in your care, or dancing specks across your iris.
I think the image was suggesting that she fell asleep one afternoon and on waking she searched for us for me, and called for me, for us, screaming: 'Boys men lads fellas, you there? Anyone?' Yelling at the suddenly futile idea of a small male human. Pathetic. A wrecking ball in waiting.
Look; The Earth is stitched together by rivers, I see that now. Silver veins. I'm just sorry I didn't walk more. I swallowed poisons. Things I can hardly imagine, let alone describe. Sorry I couldn't tell a hazel from a willow, or a falcon from a buzzard, or a weevil from a longhorn. I'm sorry I took and took and took. Enriched myself without pause and left deep scars on the skin of the Earth and on the replenishing flesh of those I helped create.
...And while we're on the subject of lost men, here is my Dad, drunk, leaning on the door frame of the tiny cottage on the cliff's edge. In the last year of his life... ...Calling forth the soon dead me with his passions, his borrowings and his own Dad not long gone with less good taste and greater debt. He who wishes his name meant 'I'm outta here' or 'I am hiding in here playing at being a child reading my future on a junk shop jug' 'You can't reach me,' he smiles, this character playing Dad, 'Where I'm going.' Beyond the driveway, into the road into the fields, beyond the woods right out of this small world which is named. I'm running away from the hard work of staying. Sorry I flinched, doubled back and attacked when you kindly told me I was become him. That I was become Death.
I'm sorry I was trapped in hours when there is no such thing
I yearn to backwards flood my impatient cells with a wordless sense of smallness and timelessness.
I'm sorry for forgetting how small I was in relation to an inlet, to a cove, a nautical mile. To the ripe glowing turning of an evening as the sun smiles over the lip of the day.
Next to me out here, calm in the light, is the apology I crave the closest. The species deep sorry that I didn't dedicate myself, all of this unreal time, to you. You who grew beside me. From here all I am is the urge to tend for you, as the rainfall tends to leaves... From up here which is underneath the root system, countless you and countless me, as all there is is trees, drinking all there is is water, and so in the folded plant heart of my sorry. Is a thank you. I just came out here to say; every day is a last day, as every day will always be. And it is more than enough.
Annie Peter
A German in the Russian motherland, They taught me all the ways of dying, I count them when I go to bed. They tore my hair out, but no tears were shed. I heard of castles in the Kremlin, They are painted red. Dear widowed father who is newlywed, She showed us all the ways of dying, I count them when I go to bed. He’s gone to war under the famine’s threat. I dreamt of dancers in the Kremlin, They were wearing red. To keep her children fed, she’s starving us instead. I know all the ways of dying, I cannot eat them when I go to bed. My brother is the hungriest, I beg. Are they still dancing in the Kremlin? They must be wearing red. Five fingers each were intertwined as ten. I know all the ways of dying, I don’t pray rosaries when I go to bed.
They Spoke of Castles in the Kremlin The Soviet famine of 1931-33 from the perspective of a Russian German woman looking back on her life
You ate your pinkie, ate until just two were left. I know the colours of the Kremlin, They are different shades of red.
Do you remember, optimistic striding on together, how we used to synchronise our steps? It taught me all the ways of dying, I chant them so I won’t forget. I grew old, a single daughter in a single bed, I’ve never seen the Kremlin, But I’ve seen all the ways of dying, And only one is left.
I think we did once have some gold-rimmed plates And none was ever smashed, I’m sure – or Resounding down the years The sound would still be trembling: Lost in dust or wrappers, Somewhere glaze and gilt must be Defying friability. The oatmeal ones with brown rims that I bought To take to university, we Have used for four decades, Their sturdiness frustrating. Still, the brown’s a strong one: Dark as coffee east of Greece, It whips a form from mealiness. But from our cupboard (where I have to grope These days now squatting is a pain) mainly Colour comes, and shine From Southern peas and peppers, Garden fantasies That wink around repairs and chips, Survivors of a thousand slips:
Charlotte Dormandy
Crocks
The precious singletons, the bunch (The wars, the boom, the pill, the crunch) – Each makes the sun a wheel of rolling gold As, arcing past, it boldly blots the hub; Then, flanked by borrowed streamers It streaks across the sky, Shooting – falling – gone To build an unseen rainbow’s end Where lost are found and fractures mend.
My granny’s kitchen crockery – one bowl; The gayer, deeper shades my mother loved; Islamic blues and French; Sweet cake plates bought for callers Welcoming our daughter; The ones and threes and fives of sets Combining into makeshift fits.
And in the time a clutch of plates is held In knobbly, squabbling fingers, wrist a twist Of straw that slews the floor Towards them with a roar, They also seem to fly, Spun deftly, rhythmically and high Through yielding ceiling to the sky - A spring-green for my mother, blue for you; Three cousins – turquoise, orange, pink; your father’s Mauve; a tiddly-wink Of red; a glinting grey. Five of us and three –
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán
She who knows the edges of the map
Late, your canoes come. Messy, misplaced, your footsteps upon this shore, erase. More mouths, mutinous, for me to feed. Great, the generosity, hospitality expected of me. Hover host, another hour in the diplomatic day. The sun never sets on sovereign soil. I stand, island in an ocean, your babies needing lotion, not cheap, this colonial couture. Our babies’ hair plaited in two-rows, wampum eleganza, extravaganza. Slow-mo hoes try to come for me, I, pedestal-footed, push past the pedestrians. Too curve, I serve, they fail, to swerve. Set, I spike; blocked, they dig their own graves. End up dusty, musty, have no time for them. My clock, ticking, I, around them, laps swim. Drowning, leave them in my wake. Fish friend them, no bake. Not the only nets I know. Tossed back and forth, sticks send teeth flying. Crying, there will be no thread. Nothing, to your eye, visible.
for lakowi:he'ne' (Melissa) Oakes, Snipe Clan, Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Take heed: Each bone-broken, shell-shaken bead, was aligned fine by a woman’s hands. This song sweetgrass for the bereaved: This is how we weave.
In formation, we assemble, flocks of birds v-line. High time, murmurations pace with me, warp and weft, concave and convex, this prance. Some new bloods try to step to me. Stump-footed, they lumber as I quick step, drawing arrows. Quick-quivered, soon they appear as sad trees: blooded branches with no leaves on wizened snags. No crones, only hags. This door I funded, this floor, the very one from which you deplore, not knowing any score. Uncouth. Let me sing for you this truth: Each treaty, mine, even though swine wrote their names over my own; we know, each peace brokered was spoken from behind this choker.
I bend. You will not see the labor, thousand in hours, except lines, invisible along my skin, raised. Yes, everything I brought here, I made. That child, this dress, this nation you see dancing darkly before you. You have no idea how busy my hands were. You ask about self-care. I am well when my people are well. Perhaps one day, eight generations from now, I can rest.
For Fathers
Sarra Culleno
It was a boiled sweet. As tempting as a trophy (There is one) gripped in gold and circling your finger. You bit down (thing uglier) hard with abandon- half sure of its goodness- on the crystalline jewel (than a cruel) Your tongue was pleasured enough to tune out alarm (father:a mother) when shards splintered into tender gums between your (offering no) molars. By evening it had bothered you all day. (protection) A generational trauma, centuries passed. (from iniquity) Desperate to limit the damage of poor choices (visiting the sons) You wedged it further in. Tampering floss corkscrewed (of the third) deeper still the pin. And now the dentist is less (and fourth) refined than that sugar. The sharp tools bigger. The incisions deeper. (generations)
1. June 18, 1972, Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon: The body of an unidentified woman, believed to be between 18 and 20 years old, was found shortly before 1p.m. Friday, two miles south of Halsey on Lake Creek Road –about 100 feet west of Highway 99E…Hers was the second body found along area highways this month…
Jessica Bundschuh
-a double remembrance of murder, after Richard Kearney
Twinsome Hitchhikers
Dear Niece (my gravedigger), That summer Ma archived articles— …continuing investigations into the mysterious deaths of three young women whose bodies were found alongside public roads during a 20-day period this month… —of girls found dead along Highway 99E in the hot, humid wet of June 1972. The tragic precision of dates typewritten on each newspaper clipping was her habit as a life-long secretary documenting this emergence of a Wagnerian heroine, this: my ring cycle. Dear Aunt (my hitchhiker), We’ve been waiting decades for you to speak! Come closer. …The head and hair were caked with mud… Closer still! Join our long-planned picnic— …police would rule out death by gunshot, beating, or stabbing… —a midnight feast for exiled ancestors: horseradish root, head cheese, home-cured ham hocks, pickled tripe, potato dumplings, and blood sausage (a survivor’s favorite).
Dear Niece, Don’t fall in! All graves are started by hand. Ladders are to gravediggers, like milk to mashed potatoes. Put the ladder in, then cut a hole of 10 x 5, 4 feet deep, neatly edged (please!). You’ve been groomed to dig holes and cover them up, a mound of earth suggesting the unspeakable: —— . As a teenager looking up suicide statistics in Sweden, to the disgusted tsk tsks of elderly library patrons; as a school child perfecting sloping rooftop jumps (kid brother looking on) to gather courage for a vaster leap; as a latchkeyer drinking down the narrow flask of Tabasco, a liquid bullet meant to burn the insides out, you were in training—though you didn’t know it: an apprentice gravedigger. Could you turn me over please? I’m tired of the pearly worms loitering in my sticky earth. The men tried to take me away, but I persisted in spirit—a matinee star in a B movie.
Dear Aunt, After much circling (eagle-like and ravenous), we’ve come for excavation! Your ditch—alternately drought-cracked and storm-dampened—is unimpressive, but you dug in. After the autopsy, still a Jane Doe, the uniformed men buried you in Mulkey’s children’s plot, side-by-side among stillborns likewise denied names—baby girl, baby boy. Innocent and untethered, you joined their tribe, washed of the farmer’s mud. Maybe your name never left the ditch from the start. Like a stillborn bounding suddenly up, a helium-filled balloon heavenward, you relinquished the weight of a headstone.
2. June 19, 1972, Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon: little new information on the apparent murder… Dear Niece, This, a lesson in the art of grave digging: ...she was lying generally faced down in the ditch…nude except for shoes and ‘an outer garment’… Take up your ladder, your shovel, your spade, your pick, and your wheelbarrow. You found your way to my field, my ditch—my open grave—a gulch, a gully, a trench for soldiers, their bellies earthbound: Me, nude like Marilyn Monroe, a trench-coat striptease. Dear Aunt, My mother hoped you’d wait for the underworld escort of your dead grandmothers, Ida and Lena, German immigrants of the late 19th century, experts in reaching untenable destinations (across sea and land) and in traveling through terror— …the body had still not been identified Monday morning and the cause of death had still not been determined… their exile was yours.
…the partially clad body…was found in a ditch Friday afternoon by a farmer driving a tractor on Lake Creek Road… They later misspelled the presumed name, too, in the sextant’s burial record. There it is: No name, no tether.
Dear Niece, I’ve been waiting in this ditch almost four decades, if you must know. You may be surprised I address you, since I spoke so little—nothing to say. But, I am (still) yours. Your tether. Your destiny. Witness your blonde hair dyed to match, mine now thinned from years of windswept neglect. Isak Dinesen wrote all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Here’s mine. Dear Aunt, Tragedy is more than a lithe female corpse, laid bare for all to see. Tragedy is the taut and quivering pull of a levy shaped by hands into this intricate rope of intimates (the lover revealed in the light), woven for an escape route, you stuck below. I’ve made note, as a good detective, of the (long ago) depressions in the mud: the body was found here.
Dear Niece, I chose this open ditch for sunlight—no darkness grows here, unlike the cemetery overgrown by cypress and dogwood. …police identified the farmer who discovered the body as Frank Miller of Halsey, ‘who was working in the area and who observed the body as he was driving his tractor along the country road.’ … I am the seed that splits too early. Cracked open in water, I wait for grace, for faith, for the re-entry of joy. At first I called pleasehelpme, pleasehelpme, please. Dear Aunt, You were lost to us (and your fellow seeds) until the farmer and his sunburned lot of sons peered into your ill-fated ditch. Afterward, they felt cursed. In the mud, I see you set out figs (a peace offering)—no good. You can’t coax them back. Dear Niece, I started calling you, eight months my daughter’s senior. You come at sundown—invoking my name?—with a gravedigger’s tool kit (as your apprenticeship taught) to discover a hungry shoot of green in its blind journey toward arterial moisture. I’ve stayed close to my farmer, Frank Miller of Halsey, ever persevering—optimistic the rain will come!
Walter, Edward, Ada, Louisa, Ernie, Elsie, Gilbert, and Florence. Even though they’re German Lutherans, I sung their names as a Litany of the Saints, praying for their intercession: Have mercy upon us. Holy Lena. Pray for us. Holy Ida. Pray for us. Holy Anna. Pray for us. I needed witnesses in starched shirts and honest grins. Come, make note of my loss, my tragedy—and my harvest.
3. June 20, 1972, Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon: police are eager to announce the victim’s Identity…bringing out witnesses… Dear Niece, My ruin was a late-coming privilege. It gave me a shape, a form out of clay. The unshaven man with tobacco-stained fingers who brought me here denied me nothing. Nothing. Hitchhiking once from Boulder to Anchorage, I knew the drill. …she may have died while hitchhiking; her closest relatives, living in Alaska, have been notified and that final confirmation of her identity was been withheld… I am not repeating the lie of the rape victim: she was asking for it. No, hitchhiking along this country road, I saw the chance for an EXIT (lit up with an explicit arrow), and I took it. Dear Aunt, Such an off-stage exit let you escape an Ophelia-like funeral, the custom for a poor maiden hitchhiker: a funeral refashioned as wedding festival to carry the lost soul not to her husband’s wide bed, but to her final residence, a buggy palace of strewn roses and freshly dug earth. But, where there is a heroine, there is usually tragedy: the crimson bruises ringing your throat won’t fade, unlike cheap paint in sunlight.
Dear Aunt, Farming’s the profession your grandparents claimed for the New World’s long hibernation of many a Minnesota winter: snow drifts, hand-knit shawls, sticky salve for cold cow teats, eight and twelve children a piece, each taught the bliss of molasses on black bread and snow, and the solid practicality of unspun wool stuffed in the drawers for warmth, for Gesundheit. Your name was your last possession of heft, spliced and stretched—a grim smile—along the long wound of your field, where you watched the parade of seasonal tractors, a clutch of ancestors you remember only in stories. Dear Niece, I called the names listed on a handwritten census form (hands cupped, an upturned bowl) to animate their desire for a harvest of rhubarb, sweet corn, squash, and Red Baron apples: William, Wilhelmina, Anna, Lena, Ida, John, Herman, Otto, Frank, Emma, Martha, Henry, Julius, Mary, Hugo, Olga,
4. June 21, 1972, Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon: there had been no apparent attempt at concealing the body… Dear Aunt, Evil is fraught—but an enemy grants her nemesis a companion (its own Doppelgänger). In this weave of light and dark, there is just enough space for your inhale and exhale to meet and part (partings being the sweetest): imagine the sweet lick of a postage stamp, square and neat as a hospital’s first-shift waiting room, and solid as a steel lung that locks and unlocks you in its own knuckled efforts—a hollow box, with pre-recorded messages of encouragement, tailored especially for you, running on an endless loop over loudspeaker: this is where the abandoned hitchhiker lives on to tell her story.
Dear Niece, Here, the twins lodge: between the shaft of your rib cage (touch it!) and the tip of your hipbone. If you could watch the raucous waves of breath, you might recognize this as the place of witness, …she is believed to be a 19-year-old Seattle girl who had recently been staying in Eugene…identity was being withheld pending a check of dental records which had to be obtained from a dentist in Alaska… where heaven and earth meet, where you and I, twinsome minds of double fidelities, cross narratives: in a state of vigilant attention, please play my witness! Score and scar these scratches of commemoration on a dance card penciled in many times over: from the polka, waltz, or Virginia reel, to the quadrille’s dignified promenade. Come close enough to feel Strauss’ hot breath cool with exhaustion (and then heat up again) during an intermission of lemonade and slivered cake. Dear Aunt, I’ll be the partner in this dance between the poles, North and South, each uninhabitable long term, as long as you promise to pin on my lapel a corsage of neither poppies, nor lilies. Rather recite Joyce in that booming voice of the dead: Lettucia in her greensleeves and you too and me three, twinsome bibs but hansome ates, like shakespill and eggs! Me, too! Me, three! Let us meet (decked out in twinsome bibs!) in a grand and messy reunion of many generations, and then twine together, finger to finger, gorging on this picnic to which we’ve invited the sensual, duck-webbed to the tragic: the sense of the tragic gains and wanes with sensuality.
Dear Niece, He held my fingers to the end. Tender, really. I felt the weight of his eyes on me, searching. He was trying to look through me, like a child who had just learned to read, no longer satisfied with surfaces that don’t yield the treasure of meaning something. Once an unsolvable mystery, the world—a great alphabet—suddenly could be inhabited, savored, drained of its salty marrow. For that brief hour, I was his depth, his moving text, a flaming sign, suddenly weighted with some meaning: sandwiches, milk, sale, hot coffee… S – T – O – P! If you must know, I take comfort that part of him remains here. Dear Aunt, After years of living diffused (a fetal alcohol baby), like a bulb indiscriminately sharing its light, you found your form in resisting him. …she had been dead at least a week, decomposition made it difficult to conclude whether her death came violently or whether foul play was involved at all… Afterward, buried among Mulkey’s stillborns, you slipped back into a state of wispy candied floss, moth-like. Distraught, I understand why you returned to your ditch, a place of certitude! The highest accomplishment of the imagination is empathy.
6. June 29, 1972, Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon: her mother lives in Alaska and she has a brother serving in the U.S. Navy…The only other close relative is believed to be a sister in Seattle… Dear Aunt, That last season, your sister Madelon wrote your name and street on your pregnant belly, lest you forget your way home. Washed off too many times, she hid it then in a bracelet difficult to take off, overlooked by officials in a pocket of the coat that protected your naked backside from the sun. With your sister, a biologist, you chose your unborn daughter a name from the well of nature—an aquatic crustacean with more freedom than you were ever granted: Daphnia, Daphnia, Daphnia. Traveling along that long highway, your weeks-old baby was safe in the arms of a good-willed aunt, who afterward stripped her of your only gift, Daphnia. Repose in the ur-lesson of grave digging: the apex of naming the dead: The body was identified Wednesday afternoon as 19-year-old Geneva Joy Martin (also known as Geneva Joy Irvin) of Anchorage, Alaska…she had been staying during the past year at various addresses in the Eugene-Springfield area…
was not, he thought, Germanic enough. Assured of incantation’s grace—not to be undone once spoken—he re-named her (to their surprise): Florence Albertina-Lena Boldt. The new name, shaped as the female corollary to Clarence, the choice had she been a boy-child, was given up to the heavens. Call now your Ma’s abandoned child, dear Aunt: Marcella, Marcella, Marcella!
5. June 22, 1972, Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon: this initial identification was apparently made after the calling card of a Eugene Police Dept. juvenile officer was discovered in a pocket of the coat found on the body… Dear Niece, On my last evening, I appeared to Ma in a dream: she met me in a twilight game of tether ditch-ball—the world of things, affixing names and trinkets with the trick of spittle, horse glue, and sealing wax. My advice to you: hands bear your destiny—they’re truthful craftsmen: a firm handshake’s the signature of a committed gravedigger. Be less earnest; remember lines my grandmother Anna, eldest of twelve, recited for her siblings on selecting their professions: There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers. They hold up Adam’s profession…the houses that he makes last till doomsday. You do play an important role. But even if your job sets a fold into eternity’s arc, please don’t be loud about it, quoting Hamlet to a theatre in the round. Stand twinsome: a silent figure facing action from which you are personally absent, but document in prose and verse, line and letter, harvest and recollection. Dear Aunt, The gravedigger and the grave robber honor the nameless and named alike, and then they play a jig (not on the dance card), and a lullaby for good measure. …the coat and a pair of shoes were apparently the only clothes…other sources have been more specific, identifying the garment as an overcoat and the shoes as tennis shoes… Incantation is a messy rite of combustion: speak the name aloud and the engine will sputter to life in an oily spray! Your mother carried her own name—sturdy and wide-hipped—in front of her like a shield: a tall, Germanic warrior with a single blonde braid across her head, she was fond of naughty beer-hall jokes and filter-less Lucky Strikes. The minister at her christening—unknowingly anticipating in her the wild pioneer Of Alaska’s vast horizon, raising four children alone—initiated that irreverent fate early: the name Anna and William chose, Marcella,
Dear Niece, I’ll go if you carry me in your lungs (that grayblack box of witness) and regularly exhale my name, Geneva Joy—a name split and yet reconciled. Ma gave each of her girls a trait to which to aspire: Lynella Faith, Madelon Grace, Geneva Joy: joy, the most perishable of the trio, was hid long ago on the Minnesota farm of my grandparents, Anna and William—in the ice house all summer (finally out of hibernation), wrapped in flax straw. The dead can gather at a funeral picnic in pitch dark. Serve up the dessert: the freshly-plucked watermelons (fattened on milk for a blue-ribbon), ice-house chilled. Crack them open with spades and picks. Only then recite the names of those we love, one by one: relish, dear, this accident of grace, faith and (naturally) joy. Sticky loveliness—incant, incant. In gratitude, your beloved Geneva.
Moylenanav
Ciara Patricia Langan
Cool waters flow along the clawed and cleaved and wizened hills. In mind and hand, the heart in sodden soil. Search your eyes across the scars that mark that memory, Ragged edge and ranks catching beams of ancient moonlight. They cry still weeping amber tears upon the land. The elementals swayed that Hungry grass and walked slow upon the moor. With hands stained the colours of each dawn. Set rigid and placed firm. The quaking bog, The changeling shifts. To dry ethereal form And sundew forests wither and will be no more. Rising forth to fill the air emblazoned and betide. The Jagged rock. The unknowable place. For Only stag and hind.
The House
Anna - Marie Young
When I think of it now, I remember it from the height of a child. A forehead’s height over the edge of a mahogany table. Tiptoeing to wash my hands in the painted porcelain sinks, just how close the carpet was, a living, interesting organism of its own. Even then, when it was lived in, the house felt overwhelming. Looming with eyes set back under heavy brows, ivy and Virginia creeper that covered its face. It was so all powerful you couldn’t open a door quietly, you had to kick the base board to force it to let you in or out, waking everything in the walls as you did. The pipes screamed. The plaster and paint ran with tears and the pitch beams were riddled with life, little electric eyes that watched from each pinprick hole. The house wasn’t subtle. Even when she was still alive and using its corners to store brooms and umbrellas, easels and paintbrushes, the house would clutch at them. In spiderweb fingers and lime plaster grip. Sometimes its voice was sharp and painful like shoes on slate and sometimes it was soft and sickly, over perfumed whispers on the carpeted landing. As a child, I stayed there once or twice, sleeping in the beds my dad and his brothers had slept in. The room absorbed me slowly, by old woollen bedclothes which rasped at my skin and thick musty air that crept out of the walls and down into my lungs. At home there was a window by our head that was so close to the ground we could climb out on a summer’s evening and escape to play in the garden a while, but here the window was high, small and painted shut, and from the outside the vines were suckered to the panes. Working their way at the glass to reach us.
the horses, I could hear its loamy yelling when we cut hay in the valley above. I guess my grandfather’s deafness meant he could ignore the sound in the walls, or perhaps the house had consumed him so much by then that its voice became his. The quieter and smaller his life became, the wilder and louder the house was. When it finally broke its roof and the electrics sparked and died, and the fire couldn’t stop the cold from roaring around the room anymore, he came and lived with us. I thought maybe, with time, the house would weaken its grip on life, on the people it recognised as its own, but it was still terrifying even in its dormancy. In its waking moments I could see it running gritty fingers over the photographs of my family that still stood on mantelpieces, coveting our inky faces. I saw it counting all the books on all the shelves with wet, mildewy licks of each page. I saw it sending tendrils of vine in through widening cracks in the walls to push china from the shelves. Jealous of the lives it could hear going on elsewhere, echoing from the road and across the water. It was left like that for a long time. Lonely. Wailing. The house is at the bottom of the valley, and so overgrown and full of damp from the river that runs alongside it that even the light seems underwater. Greenish. Water growing luminous on old stones, seeping through plaster and lime render. Water in the beams, water beneath the tiles, mildew growing across the antiques in the front room. And it smells like turning earth and autumn. Even in the weak heat of the sun. Where there was once a home here there are just buildings now. Crammed with rotting objects full of never–found purpose. There are trees growing into the main house. The roof is missing tiles. The barns are spilling their guts out on the yard in slimy wood and broken glass and lobster buoys and plastic all distorted with the sunlight. A pottery, the drying barn, an art studio, stables, a mechanics workshop and the loft barn
private space. Even though he was gone. How could they understand the things they ripped open? If I could I would have spent a lifetime uncovering them quietly with a paint brush and polish, gluing the handles back on to cups.
After she died, I didn’t go into the house more than a handful of times over fifteen years. And each time the house would spit at me. Hang cobwebs to catch me in the face, hide broken glass or collapsing piles of sharp tins where I stepped, trying to feed the cats. I could hear its long, low groaning when I bypassed its garden to go and see
Half renovated and then abandoned. Filled with everything that made a life, many lives. But they can’t go with him to that other place. I can’t pour into the coffin the treasures of his life, chipped ceramics and old bottles of vinegary wine. I can’t seal the cracks of it with flaking paint from the walls, whisper the blurring words of each book in the kitchen. I can’t stack the tomb with jewels as if he was a Pharoah because I can’t tell the difference between the cut glass or the emeralds she used to set into jewellery. Besides, the drawer is jammed shut with age. All that was good here, has turned rancid and faded away. Half of it all was hers. My grandmother. But she went to that other place a long time ago, taking half of her with him. Twenty–two years. I think that is why the house sometimes aches. We have a photo of her where she sits with her infant sons, legs out in the sun. she is so similar to me that when I look at it I can feel the grass between the heavy weight of her thighs, because they are mine. At first, when my parents and sisters went to dismantle the house, I stayed away. I wasn’t sure if it meant too much or too little but I couldn’t muster the energy to protect myself from feeling it all too close, to be able to go in with my own sense of self and disappear into the gray of the plaster instead. But I listened to them when they came back up the road to our house for cups of tea, joined them at our big wooden table and waited for the stories.The shock in my mother’s voice, the exaggeration in my sisters’. My father nodding mumbles of assent and then a burst of his own in exasperation and despair and that heavy, cloying guilt. And quietly I would cringe as their voices cut, because I knew as my father did that those patterns of a life, that cocoon they were unravelling of his father’s, could possibly run in his blood. I felt it twitch in my own too. Saving and building and coveting for years. For a while I wondered if they’d ruined everything by opening the door and going in to his
intricate glazes but well used, they are from his days in London or Brighton when he taught ceramics, perhaps even when he was earning his degree at the Royal College. If they are darker, more utilitarian, but still finely glazed they are later, when the children were young or just becoming. If they are figurines or cups they are what he made with his boys, perhaps even made by the boys on their own. There’s a set of unglazed terracotta animals on the shelves, wide plates in stacks, bowls with curling lips, jugs, squat mugs. They are kind of modern in their shape, pot–bellied earthenware with interesting glazes. So old they’ve come round in fashion again.
They told stories of the little rat runs he used to navigate rooms dense with things. The walkways between damp newspaper stacked waist high, leaving just enough room to glimpse the fire. The small surface left uncluttered to eat from, the single gas ring left free of an oil filled pan, the one door in, one door out. He had flattened a highway over twenty years’ worth of clothes on the bedroom floor. The groove in the bed where the material between the springs had worn away, and the empty impressionless space next to him. His side, her side. Hung from the rafter’s spider’s webs so heavy with a sticky breathing dust that the black globules had stuck to each strand weighing them lower and lower in the path of any visitor. And with each sip of tea they took I could feel the elastic snapping, the scent of that dead house cracking off them and holding less power in the warm, living heart of our own. Dad is working outside, cutting the trees that are threatening the house. He hasn’t yet decided what to do with the one that is growing directly from the end wall, its roots forcing themselves deeper into the foundations. The chainsaw hacks. The sound dying quickly in the closed old garden. The last time he came down here he left the windows and the door ajar to move the air, but as I enter I can still feel it, stagnant and thick. I haven’t been upstairs in the house for decades. They’ve been working so hard already the bathroom is nearly all ripped out, opposite it the wall to the boy’s bedroom has come down too. Like one of the children’s books where you peel away a picture to reveal the animal underneath, here, with the wall peeled away it looks strangely like a set, something un–living. Where the carpet has been pulled up the old boards are deeply inset with grooves picked away by small animals and time, and in places there are holes right through the wood.
On the windowsill beneath boxes rotting full of nails and screws and tacks, there’s a cake stand in aquamarine with a heavy rim and beautiful paintwork marked in iron oxide, abstract
ingrained with the wild that just clearing and cleaning it won’t do, it has to be tamed somehow Moving the mildew in everything releases a smell like dead animals, like when they burnt the carcasses from foot and mouth and the scent was trapped in the clothes of the farmers. The house smells like that. Like something dead and trapped. But at least with the windows gone the birdsong from outdoors has finally made its way in, and it threads its way through the stale air like reams of gold. I leave the bedroom to Mum like a coward. It is too like disturbing a shroud, moving cotton and corduroy. I was frightened I would feel too much or nothing at all. Didn’t want to reduce this place of love and birth and grief and death by wearing plastic gloves and a facemask. I am too similar to the woman who lived there all those years ago to not get lost in it, find it familiar, comforting even. In the kitchen the lights are long gone. Decay growing a fast pace across the few glass panes that are left, and anyway the green leaves of vines and ivy are pressed up against the windows so there is only a half light. In the midday dusk of this dark house I fill binbag upon binbag. Tools and pans, trays, jars of spices labelled in French. It is twenty-five years since they had last been in France. There are paintbrushes everywhere, the tools of his trade, and as I move more and more, I find watercolour trays, the patchwork blocks of paint dried into different shades of the same ochre. On the shelves his bowls, thrown at one of the wheels in the shed. His pots and cups and plates. I can roughly date them by style. If they are beautifully finished,
It isn’t until we push the rotting window frames from the first floor and watch them splinter and crash on to what was the patio, that the air moves inside at all. The cobwebs balloon slowly as if to take a deep breath and then they tear with the change, fall against the walls and stick there. Even the voice of the house is quiet. Waiting in the walls. Wondering just how far we’ll go, daring us to try. The house is so deeply
The metal is blackened and bent. But it fits my fingers like it was made for me. I try it on three of them, and then the other hand and it’s the same. I wonder if she made them for herself. When dad comes in, I show him the treasures, they are worth almost nothing. But to us, to him and me they mean something. I had never really known she had made jewellery till then. However many times I have listened to stories of her, of both of their lives, they hadn’t really sunk in beyond vague images. But this, this is something made by a person, not a memory. That evening I take them home with me, clean them and leave them on my bedside table, but I can’t escape the smell of the house. All night it fills my nostrils with a thick, mildewy rot.
Ann Bedsole, art collector, philanthropist, senator Gouache on handmade paper 15 x 19 inches
like leaves. It is so lovely and full of life, of movement, of turning one thing into something else just with skill and time that my stomach aches for the people who used it. These things, treasures if they weren’t so numerous, I pack in to boxes. We can’t leave them here but we can’t get rid of them either. These things are not our possessions or our memories and so we handle them like museum pieces. I haven’t found her yet, but I’m aware that the door behind me that goes through to the living room is where I last remember my grandmother, a half–formed memory that is mostly her smell and the texture of her wool coats and jumpers against my face. She was tall to me then, scraped back grey hair, thick round glasses, dark eyes. Smiling and busy and not to be crossed. I don’t know if I’m filling in the gaps from pictures. But I have only this, so I will keep it.I put my hand up onto the tallest shelf and touch something. A coin, three rings. One with a carved piece of what looks like jade, like a scarab beetle sitting on a thick mottled band of silver, a plain band and one which is made of silver wire. Where it holds the stone it is looped so it looks like the handles of a pair of scissors on each side. Held in–between is a large blue topaz, layered in grime.
Kevin Brown
Deva
An angel, Grandmother would say, saved her life during a four-story suicide jump the year China went Red.Me on her lap, she told how she toed the ledge, stared out at the network of alleyways smothered in smoke and screams and men tearing through men and manmade.How she leaned forward and the landscape fell up, toward and past her.How Kuan Shih Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, appeared and placed a palm beneath her. Whispered, “The Earth shall keep spinning.Spin with it,” and eased her to the ground.“I broke a leg and both arms,” she said, raising two gnarled fingers, “But it was magical.” I’d cry when she told me about Grandfather, whom she hadn’t seen since the day he was taken away. He’d been a politician in the Nationalist Government, and so imprisoned for life. “They took my possessions,” she said, “Then my husband. Forced me to bow and confess against him to avoid his immediate execution.” She’d stare ahead. “Last time I heard his voice, he was screaming mine and your mother’s names as they drug him away.” She’d blink several times and I could see the image dissipating, melting into the now. “We were helpless in a country that needed help,” she said. “Unable to save those who needed saving.”
Years later, we returned to the location of her old house, but it was gone, replaced by an office building. Grandmother only smiled and said, “Prettier than it used to be.” She died shortly after.As she was lowered into the ground, I asked Mother if she believed a Deva really saved her. “I don’t not believe it,” Mother said. I was married later that year, and each time I looked at my husband, I’d think of Grandmother’s story. How hard it must’ve been to have everything one second and be bowing as it is dragged away the next. How easy it’d be to jump. How hard to climb down. So I mentally recorded my husband’s voice, his smells. Behind my eyes, I imprinted his shape and face. Then, on June 4th, 1989, he was killed in Tiananmen Square, when a tank rolled between us and has never moved since. A week later, I stood on my own four-story ledge with a bottle of prescription pills. Toed the edge and looked out at my mental vision of the world, a network of alleyways that all led to the same dead end. At everyone helpless in a country that needed help. I missed my husband. Wanted to see Grandmother arm-in-arm with Grandfather, the memories of forced bows and screams erased forever. So I jumped by swallowing every pill. Felt the landscape fall up, toward and past me, until my angel, my Goddess of Mercy, my grandmother appeared, and placed a withered palm beneath me. Whispered: “The world shall keep spinning. Spin with it,” and eased me to the ground, where I vomited and it was magical.
Diana Raab
Dad knew of his death long before mother phoned to say he wasn’t doing well. Husband, three kids and I dashed to New York, two hours later tiptoed into his private hospital room, as he gasped for air from oxygen prongs jammed up his nose: this loving father of mine who has witnessed war and death way too many times. We quietly moved towards his bed, slung our arms over its side rails. His eyes slowly opened and a smile flickered from his chapped lips as he tried lifting himself to hug me. He asked about our trip. My kids nudged closer and a tear seeped onto his unshaven cheek.I love you guys, he said with a barely audible whisper, robbing him of all his remaining energy.
Dad leaves
Dad from the series These Days
Katherine Potter
I’m not well, he said, rolling his head back and forth on the foamless pillow, begging me to help him one way or anther. Do you want a rabbi, I asked. He nodded no, your mother wants to put me in a psychiatric ward with the crazies. She says I am depressed. What should I do?
With my nursing hat still positioned on my head, I turned to the coldest part of the room and told her she belonged in that unit as I looked deep into father’s eyes— the same ones which always reminded me of my wonder.
I imagined how I would feel if I were leaving behind a wife who resented me, a daughter who adored me and three grandchildren who could not let go. I swallowed my grief.
Lisanne de Witt
Peter Clark
Soft tread waits bonny lad, Plunged in to the North Sea water. Reveries of studded boots first time done up, Did I ever remember to thank you for that? A father among billions of fathers who all feel the same rain, Bathe in flux, tear, and flow of paternal love. Oil film on brine water, fumes of the diesel engine, The rope that he held, turned palm into marine leather. Gales and roars among the Gallowgate, Even in years of absence, I remember the colour of the grass. Admit, regret, neglect, accept, All pass with the years like falling foundation bricks. ’You could heat homes, or burn them down you know son’ His words, your words, matters none. I’m still the boy with the metal fragment through my skin, As I hear his voice ‘’hush child, hush child, hush’’ Hand in tiny hand set in frozen soil and white touchline paint, Our blood runs through the same 37 degrees Celsius river.
te jagen (hunting)
A Son's Thoughts
"Trouble" (Michael, St. Roch Resident) Gouache on handmade paper 12 x 15 inches
In childhood memory dark room, black and white negative and fixer. I remember the ragworm and the reel click, I remember the spray of the never ending seawater, I remember the pier as it gripped into the sand and rock, I remember the goodness in his heart, that danced and delighted as I kicked a plastic ball, Up against the window frames, in the grass, and off the concrete walls, I remember a son’s true happiness.
Points of Departure
Laura Johanna Braverman
I come from wanderers, outsiders and seekers. From those who know hunger and bomb shelters. I come from wanderers, dust-covered travelers. My women are healers. My women sew jewelry in dresses, lose children on journeys. My men are shy soldiers, doctors, postmasters— musicians, wood-workers. I come from wanderers, outsiders and menders. My women are sailors and searchers. My women bend in the deep black dirt and wear black ribbons, save bread rolls in stiff black bags. My men trust in language even when they are broken. My women are teachers, shopkeepers, jam-makers. I come from wanderers, outsiders and workers. My people stand witness to partings in doorways. My people climb mountains, know tree names, plant uses— carry what food they gather. I come from wanderers, outsiders and strivers. From those who choose the sea passage. From those who meet absence with eyes open.
The theme of issue 4 will be 'Wildlife' and that can be interpreted however you wish, we're looking for shapeshifters and shamen, foxes and familiars,panthers and pets.Are you in touch with your wild self? what do animals and nature mean to you? how do you feel about climate change and the Anthropocene? Submissions open December 1st '22 check the website: www.theamphibianlit.com and instagram @miss_merrykat The Amphibian Literary Journal
Issue 4 * Wildlife
Jessica Bundschuh teaches at the University of Stuttgart in English Literatures and Cultures and holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review and The Los Angeles Review. Current work appears in The Moth and Long Poem Magazine and The Honest Ulsterman.
Kevin Brown has published two short story collections,Death Roll and Ink On Wood, and has had Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry published in over 200 Literary Journals, Magazines and Anthologies. He won numerous writing competitions, fellowships, and grants, and was nominated for multiple prizes and awards, including three Pushcart Prizes.
Poets and Writers
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is author of Archipiélagos; Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking; and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. He is editor of the international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review; and co-editor of the Native dance/movement/performance issue of Movement Research Performance Journal. Co-founder of the world’s first transgender film festival, he organized the first transgender people of color panel at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference & Bookfair; and organized the world’s first transgender Arab roundtable dialogue for Sinister Wisdom. He has received scholarships/fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, Radius of Arab American Writers, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Lambda Literary. In Europe, his work has appeared in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Wales.
Laura Johanna Braverman is a writer and artist. Salt Water, her first collection of poetry was published by Cosmographia Books. Her poems have appeared in Reliquiae, Verse of April, North of Oxford, Plume, Levure Litteraire, and New Plains Review, among other journals and in the anthology Awake in the World, Volume II. She earned her MA in poetry and will soon begin PhD studies, both at Lancaster University. Austro-American by birth and upbringing, she lives in Lebanon with her family.
Peter Clark I was born in a council house in Hackney, London. However I've spent most of my life in the North-East, and that's where my dad's family line all originate from. Poetry wasn't really part of day to day life growing up if I'm honest, and my upbringing was extremely difficult to say the least. I was a very normal lad in many respects, loved football and running round raising merry hell - shite at school. For some reason I was drawn to writing poetry in my early 20s, I think because for me it provides the purest form of self expression.
Contributors to issue 3 in their own words
Christine Grant grew up between two cultures in the Highland community in Glasgow. After working internationally, she now lives in the Scottish Highlands with her family. She has had short stories published in a number of places, including Flash Fiction Magazine and Northwords Now. You can find out more at https://christinegrantwriter.wordpress.com/blog/
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. His work has recently appeared inTar River,Whistling Shade,Neologism, Consilience Journal, PoeticaMagazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal,Amethyst Review, The Deronda Review, Jewish Literary Journal,The Decadent Review and others.
Affly Johnson is a London-based poet, graduate of the UEA Creative Writing MA, workshop facilitator and co-founder of the Say It Back collective. Her debut collection (seeking representation) Pulling Milk Teeth, chronicles the evolution of a young woman of mixed-race heritage journeying through loss,belonging and becoming. Notable publications include gal-dem a Lighthouse Literary Journal (upcoming).
Rebecca Green is a writer and illustrator based in West Yorkshire, UK. She is Ilkley Literature Festival's Apprentice Poet in Residence for 2022 and a shortlisted poet for Griot's Well; a poetry development programme for Black and ethnically diverse poets over 25. Her poetry explores the self, motherhood and heritage and Rebecca is currently working on writing and illustrating her first pamphlet.
Victoria Gartner I was born in Ukraine, but my mother decided to move when I was five. I grew up in Switzerland and moved to the UK because of a love of theatre and Shakespeare. I have family in both Russia and Ukraine. My grandmother taught me to embroider as a child, and I took it up again in lockdown. Since the war started, I have been embroidering Ukrainian flower crownsand selling them for Ukraine aid relief. I have also started a local embroidery group with Ukrainians, their sponsors, and locals here in Folkestone, Kent.
Sarra Culleno is widely published, writing fiction and poetry for publication, performance, print, audiodramas, podcasts and radio. She was longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Prize, for Nightingale and Sparrow’s Full Collections 2020, and nominated for Best of the Net 2020 by iambapoet. Sarra is a frequent contributor to Fevers of the Mind, and to Alternative Stories and Fake Realities. She co-hosts Write Out Loud at Waterside Arts and performs as both guest and featured poet at numerous literary festivals.
Born in London and now living in Kingston-upon-Thames, I have worked for the past fifteen years as a private tutor, teaching mainly English and Maths to pupils of all ages and abilities. I have been writing poetry for about the same length of time, and find the constant interaction with people struggling to learn a stimulus to reflection and poetry.
Andrew Kaye Kauffmann His work has been featured in Polari Press, Queerlings, Litro Online, Huffington Post, Mechanics Institute Review and Untitled: Writing. He is a winner of the 2021 Spread the Word and Scribe UK competition for works of narrative non-fiction and in 2020 he was a winner of The Literary Consultancy’s LGBT+ Free Reads competition. A genealogy geek, he coaches individuals processing their past so they can understand, own and take pride in their family story, and is writing a book on his experience of donating a kidney to his father. https://linktr.ee/andrewkkauffmann www.andrewkauffmann.co.uk
Rosalind Moran I am an Australian writer currently living in the UK. My poetry has been shortlisted for the Cambridge Poetry & Prose Prize and the June Shenfield Poetry Award. I am also an established freelance writer.
lives in Manchester, UK. She writes short fiction and essays and is perpetually two-thirds of a way through her first novel. Poor Peg is part of a collection of short stories she is working on to re-write and re-centre women and their experiences within Northern folklore.
Annie Peter is a Dublin-based writer. She studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature in Berlin, and Creative Writing in Dublin. Currently, she is working on a poetry collection. Her work was published in Dodging the Rain, The Outpost Éire, The Headlight Review and is forthcoming in Dreich Magazine. Twitter handle: @Annie_Peter_
Ciara Patricia Langan Having been born into a creative rural family environment. Ciara has a passion for nature and a strong advocate for a healthy biodiverse environment. Having mastered many mediums over a 20-year career in the Arts. With aspie sensitivity, her artistic practice spans many disciplines. It is always thought provoking, timely and always reflect a deeper narrative. At times dealing with the contradictions we live.
Olivia Payne is a librarian working in London. She is an alumni of the Faber Academy and proud member of the Write Like a Grrrl community. She has been previously published in Litro Magazine and STORGY, and is currently working on her first novel.
Suzi Mezei (she/her) is a Sri Lankan born Australian writer living on unceded Kulin land. Her cultural experience influences her writing. Suzi's work appears in several journals and anthologies including Hecate Journal, Cordite, Burrow and Aniko Press. Anthologies include The Sky Falls Down and Not Keeping Mum which was a finalist in the Indie Book Awards. Suzi is working on several projects including a novella and enjoys baking for her dogs and selected others.
Lani O'Hanlon From a theatrical family, Lani O' Hanlon is a writer, poet, creative writing facilitator/mentor and somatic movement therapist. She facilitates and designs literature programmes with the Waterford Healing Arts Trust, South East Libraries, Waterford City and County Arts Office and The Molly Keane Writers Retreats. Lani has an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, her writing is published internationally and is regularly broadcast on RTE’s Sunday Miscellany. She is the author of Dancing the Rainbow, Holistic Well-Being through Movement, (Mercier Press) and The Little Theatre (Poetry). Awards and commendations include; Hennessy New Irish Writing, The Bridport Prize and Poetry on the Lake. laniohanlon.com
Abby Ledger-Lomas
Nora Studholme I was born and raised in the countryside of Virginia, where I grew my roots wandering forests and finding animal friends, always with a book in hand. My greatest delight comes from being a writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. Mostly, I think of myself as a treasure hunter, traveling through life seeking those glimmers of story that hide everywhere. have short fictions published in Aayo Magazine,andClub Plum, andThe Dillydoun Review,and forthcoming at The Woolf Literary Review. I am deeply honored that my works have been finalists for several literary awards, including theGrindstone Novel Prize,The Alpine Fellowship, and Fractured Literature's Micro Award.
Lee Clark Zumpe is an entertainment columnist with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his bachelor’s in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Publication credits includeTiferet, Zillah, The Ugly Tree, Modern Drunkard Magazine, Red Owl, Jones Av., Main Street Rag, Space & Time, Mythic DeliriumandWeird Tales. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter. Visit www.leeclarkzumpe.com.
Claudia is a Miami native who currently resides in Western New York. She is the author of the forthcoming novels To Be Maya and Catch Me if I Fall. Find out more at www.recinosseldeen.com.
Desirée Seebaran is a Trinidadian poet, writer & editor. Her work has been published in Cordite Poetry Review 81, by Anomalous Press, Moko Magazine and Interviewing the Caribbean journal. Desirée won the poetry section of the 2019 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writers Prize and was the 2021 winner of the Johnson & Amoy Achong Caribbean Writer’s Prize.
Diana Raab, PhD Is an award-winning memoirist, poet, blogger, speaker, and author of 10 books and is a contributor to numerous journals and anthologies. Her two latest books are, "Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life," and "Writing for Bliss: A Companion Journal."Her poetry chapbook, "An Imaginary Affair," was released in July 2022 with Finishing Line Press.She blogs for Psychology Today, Thrive Global, Sixty and Me, Good Men Project, and The Wisdom Daily and is a frequent guest blogger for various other sites.
Mark Bercier Born in 1950 in Crowley, Louisiana, Mark Bercier currently lives in New Orleans. In a faux-naïve style, Bercier conveys images of childlike innocence through his paintings and portraiture. Using intense color and sheer exuberance in his portrait series, Bercier captures with breathtaking perception the joy and tragedy of life. Mark Bercier received a BA from the Texas Academy of Art, Houston, TX, and has studied independently in Austria and Belgium. For the past 30 years, his work has been included in over 80 exhibitions across the US. His work is also in the collections of the The New Orleans Museum of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Hillard Museum of Art in Lafayette, LA, The Hudson Museum at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, and the University of Iowa Museum.
Natalia Garbu is a visual artist living in The Republic of Moldova. For more of her work and the#Vadikfightsback project see @NataliaGarbu and her website: www.nataliagarbu.com
Artists
Olga Kovtun
Was born in 1983. She lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. A passion for fine-art brought her to The State Art High School also known as Shevchenko Art School. She spent five years working hard and entered The National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kyiv in 2002. During her university years Olga joined the studio of painting and cathedral culture of M. Storozhenko, became the member of youth organization of the Ukrainian Union of Artists and received The Scholarship of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (the parliament of Ukraine). In 2008 she received her Master of Arts degree and started internship in Storozhenko’s studio. Since 2010 Olga Kovtun has been a member of Ukrainian Union of Artists. In 2012 she won a grant of the President of Ukraine “as a young person involved in the fine-arts”. 2015 - the winner of the Kyiv Art Award in the field of fine arts. Serhiy Shishka. 2020- Merited Artist of Ukraine, Awarded for Outstanding contribution to development of art. Artist’s main areas of interest are monumental and easel painting, sacral and icon painting. There is a large number of Ukrainian and international exhibitions Olga participated in. Her artworks can be found in private collections in Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Russia, Germany, France, USA, Iceland and Spain.
Katherine Potter Is a writer and photographer living in Kent, England. She has had an international career as a photographer and has written two novels Pigeon Feet and The Absolutes Pigeon Feet will be filmed in 2023.
Lisanne de Witt Lisanne de Witt finds the inspiration for her large-scale paintings from old photographs she finds in archives. The depicted characters are seen from the back and unrecognizable. They seem important to be portrayed on such large canvases, but their identity is hidden. Her work is characterized by a certain fortitude in the images. Making mistakes in a painting are important and give space to impulsive hunches.After the image is painted, De Witt often decides to apply a radical decision in the image. She tackles the painting again to transform its original subject. These decisions are being made out of frustration with the still image. Why create a static picture, when it might as well have been a photograph? Her painterly answer to this is to perform an impulsive adjustment, spray-painting over the original image or wiping away certain parts.
In the studio, Phillips begins each piece with a simple under-painting in acrylic paint on canvas or muslin, to which she adds appliquéd fabric and thread on top. Using a long arm sewing machine, she explores line drawing using colorful thread in her layered compositions. Often, her life-scale fabric forms are cut out of the picture plane and installed on the wall using pins. An ever-changing narrative is created when her pieces are displayed in a new location, and also depending on how the figures are juxtaposed with one another. Phillips earned a BFA in painting from the University of Kentucky in 1994. She continued her studies of painting in graduate school at Tulane University, where she recived an MFA in 1997. In 2013 she was recognized by The Legacy Award, presented by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, which also presented a solo exhibition of her work that same year. Her art has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums across the country including the Ballroom Marfa, TX; Ringling Museum of Art at Florida State University, Sarasota, FL; Asheville Art Museum, NC; Mobile Museum of Art, AL; and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; Her work is also part of private and public collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; 21c Museum, Louisville, KY; and Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Gina Phillips's work courtesy of the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery.
Gina Phillips is a mixed media, installation and narrative artist who grew up in Kentucky and has lived in New Orleans since 1995. The imagery, stories and characters of both regions influence her work. She started her career as a painter, but over the years, she has increasingly incorporated fabric and thread into her practice. The textiles used in Phillips’s portraits are sourced from neighbors, friends, and family in her local community.
Literary Journal for the Culturally Amphibious