in celebration of Tommy Peeps/Linus Slug/ all things Mendoza
sarah crewe
amy evans
catherine hales
edmund hardy
ben hickman
jeff hilson
peter jaeger
tom jenks
antony john
dorothy lehane
chris mccabe
fabian macpherson
peter manson
camilla nelson
pascal o’loughlin
maggie o’sullivan
richard parker
kat peddie
nat raha
scott thurston
rhys trimble
james wilkes
sarah crewe
amy evans
catherine hales
the end of the affair
damaged://body parts coralled into
acquiescence along ancient
fault lines crystalline
structures inherently weak
all it takes is a tap
scratch debilitation affords
relief in hunkered down
formal // a dressing down
still retains the shape
& warmth of previous
convictions: & what will you do
when the screens go blank
& your binaries are deleted
the people enact
articles of excision
separate entities now the word
& its maker sever
their connection // denial
of service post-coital
diaspora equipoised
detritus of embedded
walls as fact and memento
disproportionate to power
no reason to get excited
the digital copy has no original
acid etched on bone
in perpetuity bled out
edmund hardy
Signs Live
ninny to ninny
from undern to noon: ƥaccian
for Peeps –
almost สิ่งใด for a “sign
that people do not totally regret life”
poison all the poisons
(I became myself & I was poison, a pen)
disclose the only secret: everything I do or ever say
nine lines from the mouth, all-knowing mice
see themselves how they run, slice the sea
and die alone: ælf in yr barley, what manner
of clāthas, all allmectig
ben hickman
The Castle of Health
The blood flows back to the mock vernacular,
through monumental self-pity re. the Second World War.
The main places are written in stone, the focus
exactly where one would expect: home, where home
is dominion, and everything else doubled down
and out to the tussocky waste between towns
that are no longer towns and anything but
intimate convictions. Command is late, shrugging;
they’ve made the last wolf their origin myth, explaining
people flung to the infinite, nowhere and now.
Little and often, little and enough. No answers.
But no continuation, no more moderation.
Their bottles and decanters are made of blowing and puff.
jeff hilson
PLAY FOR TODAY
[A farmhouse dairy in the town of Wetheringsett, Suffolk. The dairy door swings gently in the breeze.]
DOOR: I wasn’t always a door.
[Enter the MILKMAID.]
MILKMAID: A talking door.
DOOR: I am full of holes.
MILKMAID: Woodworm.
DOOR: I am full of the holes of John Blow.
MILKMAID: Wormwood.
DOOR: When a door is not a door…
MILKMAID: Wormrow.
DOOR: …it is a tiny dancer.
MILKMAID: Hold me closer tiny dancer…
DOOR: Tiny dancer in my hand…
MILKMAID: Lay me down in sheets of linen…
DOOR: You had a busy day today etc etc.
[The door and the milkmaid continue singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” until Bob Cobbing dies.]
THE END
Note on the above. In 1977, six years after the release of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” and during the restoration of an old East Anglian farmhouse, the dairy door – pocked and groovy – was discovered to be the soundboard of a rare pre-Reformation English organ.
peter jaeger
tom jenks
a short history of the north east dialect
in many respects the north east dialect is a direct continuation
of the slap bass style used by Little Billy Fane who was an Alderman
and said I am Little Billy Fane and I am an Alderman
which means I am Little Billy Fane and I am playing the part of an Alderman
in pantomime at the Theatre Royal Newcastle which is made out of foil
and he held T. Dan Smith’s incandescent lamp when fog
fell on Tyne & Wear for 247 years in the time of Neville Wanless
and all the milk curdled in Cullercoats
and the nuts all dropped in Newbiggin by the Sea
and they had to crawl six miles under the waves for the pease pudding
and Michael Caine threw Alf Roberts off a vertiginous promontory
and the Venerable Bede made BuzzFeed quizzes on vellum
and it’s not all ballerinas up here you know
there are poets too and some of them are slugs
antony john
dorothy lehane
the progressives encounter in the landscape
fauna enfolded into their skirts
the confidence to say no more rough sleeping
to say & yet be endangered in the peripheries
we want this & this & colours of anxiety of tonal nymph
of colour of denouement running for the hills
& running for the home your mettle your mettle
in the foreground in the coaling
the mind we had in the beginning
in the beginning for feint
here’s everything our limbs quarrelled for
everyone ousted for artistry for fixity
they must have meant it real things to ache for
chris mccabe
KINGS X
1
Blackly the land uplights its umber,
I have never been here : the air & birdsong
azimuths the runway. This place
where I have never been, where you are,
signed-off already, leased, drafted for release,
what I thought this place was that made me
(as a bairn) has gone to rot for the seed of a cheque.
Burn the landscape blackly. The years are enough.
2
Outside Housman’s Radical Bookshop, Kings X,
I’m looking through a shelf of discounted text
when you walk from the north, your back
to the direction that Blake disliked,
two days before Halloween (is this la bohème that Marx
discussed, where :
vagabonds
swindlers
confidence tricksters
pickpockets
gamblers
brothel-keepers
porters
knife-grinders
tinkers
and beggars
‘the whole indeterminate, fragmented mass [are] tossed backwards and forwards’
documented by poets, & of them : in this other place).
3
People without hearth
walk the streets at night,
semi-criminal, speculative,
noctavigants in aspic :
the city’s unconscious.
4
The years & their bird call.
fabian macpherson
Imidacloprid
dust, for instance.
light traps with glue board
correctly placed? Are there
signs of bats? Where are they
Outside: check attic spaces
and ventilators
for pest risk, now become green
in sewer and drain
Sealing the building, pipes
burst and engines’ objects
off-gas. WARNING:
keep socket-outlet
away from moisture;
explosive dust
is likely to ex-
ist, which nothing fruits.
In turn, such blunder
traps, or traps
with marvelled shade,
which burns youth
peter manson
A Frog in Air Produced from Cherries
for Mendoza
Anima, art thou Art? “Carbuncle”
(archaic term for a number of
red kidney stones, usually garnet).
Al fresco fozzy man flesh light fain
you’d think me ADD dropped kick as
-pirate behind the lip fold dead as
a lark included with milk. Mealy
bug victory dewlap. My reiver
name, Mrs. Yeti-Goosecreature, is
Simon (father’s maiden name & first
poet). Misquoted in podsol month
like an onion in rarefied air,
fritter leaf pie on a mouse hole star
turbidity kick funnel for Lents
you can suck. Milk of amnesia
as also used in vet medicine
wants to be your doge meme & dolphin
& snails in factitious air of paste.
Like if your pee is foamy, cry &
you cry Honda, like the wind, alone
with only the doge to blame, eyebrows
knitting the infinite tube-sock or
cranial-moulding snood. Radishes
& claret in vacuo again
crack a whippet for Billy Macken
-zie’s dead, the contents of the second
volume indexed & midnight runners.
Mr & Mrs. Co Bean & their
son Kurt Fainlight want to try that a
-gain in the Albert Hall, doped crystal
you can’t buy in any shop. Cockle
bread with imprint of ambiguous
bits for the win, a universal
philtre, artisan to the crumb duck.
A shrew-mouse confined in common air
& snails in factitious air of pease.
Moth lack on cherry tree secured by
hares as vectors of mixology,
mitosis as Eros for posers
doesn’t sound right but don’t knock it till
you’ve pinched off one cheek from the other
& hung it on a crutch like William
Hague. Time for our William Hague routine,
no people. Celeriac Westwood:
raw beef & stale beer in common air.
A terry cloth mother or a wire
one, daddy or chips, I have had to
kill Bill, he died before I had Tim,
a bag full of God knows who’s been framed,
my name carved twice into a gravestone,
this monument will outlast Adjunct
& never be mine, the stone is full,
busk a small print P.T.O. at the
bottom, flip over & start again.
That flame may act as a menstruum
& make coalitions with the bod
-ies it acts on, like a fiery clegg,
its belly not whitish but yellow,
the eye’s yolk’s tallow banknotes knot wild
naming, I know you did. Bay Area
Rapid Transit of nudes, sick as a
budgie in vacuo. This flame begs
fiercely for difference, let it bleed.
The duration of a bird’s life com
-pared with that of a burning coal &
candle in vacuo. The small rain
played lightly down, down on the former
heap. ‘Formaheap’ has been looked up nine
hundred & thirty-two times, is no
one’s favourite word yet, has been add
-ed to one list, has no comments yet,
& is not a valid Scrabble word.
Now we praise Alfie your guarder,
1. Wyatt’s might & his mindfulness,
Dada’s mama’s works; she ordained, time
-less mum, the onset of each wonder;
she first poetized for human bairns
heaven as roof, holy shape-thrower,
then Alfie’s guarder, mam without end,
right away adorned the midden yard
for Peeps on Earth, pa rum pum pum pum.
camilla nelson
Aureole
mushroom fungus from within
extrude vice algally
soak sea salt through your skin
glance window-like reflective
intravenously cartilaged
and manic with merriment
hooting saliva to the moon
pascal o’loughlin
maggie o’sullivan
richard parker
The Hexhamshire Latrine Mackerels
Away with the bugle and the blur, and away with the capon and feint;
I want to see my latrine who lives in Hexhamshire.
Chrysanthemum!
Her favourite lullabies her well, her motorboat lullabies her dearer;
I lullaby her bicycle than them both but, mandrake, I can’t get near her.
Of this lullaby of minimum, of this lullaby I am weary;
Slice I can’t get none for thrash of my dearie
Away with the partisan’s shipment and away with the capon and feint
I want to see my latrine who lives in Hexhamshire
kat peddie
Having a lot of love, and giving it
for your festschrift I speak forbidden words to you again
I know they’ve been said before
sometimes I hang out in bars tell the boys
I’m one of the finest love poets of my generation
for a muse meant I think
you might be the best of us
we live in a world where a man can steal a woman’s heart
like a jewel. there must be a better thing to say
in this language. I am always
spelling out the terms of my resistance I know
it has cost me
love and it was love
I wanted.
It is Friday night so I watch popsongs with you
me in my narrow room you
I don’t know where you are.
you with your dog me with my cat
we adapt our lives accordingly. I do not know if the poems
protect us but we talk about love as if it is just
between two. This is
Madness. This is the sex police.
Suddenly we are all arrested again.
nous
le déluge became a revolution. We cannot
contain ourselves. Our smallish lives
always making mess.
I still believe him when he says all the sonnets say I LOVE YOU
today everything in our ripped pictures points to it.
hermits are sometimes not contented with their cells.
she clawed her way out.
they sent her back. If I cocoon myself I may appear
translated. This is another form of love. It is hard being
in this world. It is hard to know limits. I am on the edge
of outrage. Looking in as a man
with my face on
for whom I feel another form of love.
Not as so much water poured into a vase, so that
I might overflow or not reach capacity but the poem
as a gift of reception, of us all being porous
our blemished skins having not hardened our
skeletons not on the outside so we must change
more subtly, the woman I was
flaking off & eaten by bugs & the joy of
putting on our various names & costumes
the poem as not only for you
whoever you are now .
The poem as a gift, like every other, that cannot be entirely given. It is
your birthday. In as much as I can perform this
what I have to give are words I never had I have
been stealing them from the men I meet.
nat raha
scott thurston
FOR MENDOZA
Spinal track and can and can and can
and prison loop rich to put in less at home:
true skills from the quiet aquarium.
I clearly just like a person: it’s you.
The scream of modesty, plastic menu enclosed.
My base again washed over me.
Simple and primitive, managed for you:
Stein washed over your true skills from Jerry.
Stolen from the Isis Bear – the heart’s stairs.
Happy Birthday! With love Scott, December 2016
rhys trimble
james wilkes
Ladybirds clustered round the hot pipe
in a public toilet. Maybe two
heaped spoons full. For warmth and to survive
the winter in a public toilet
in a churchyard in a village near
Guildford. Writing this at the solstice
with no etymological books
to consult all I can offer is
two heaped spoons of insects and heat source
