Neon Literary Magazine #38 Read online

Issue #38

  www.neonmagazine.co.uk

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  This compilation copyright © Neon Literary Magazine (2014).

  Do not copy or redistribute without permission.

   

  All content copyright © respective authors (2014).

   

  Authors may be contacted through the publisher.

   

  Cover image copyright © Farkas Diána Fruzsina (Diana Wolf).

   

  ISSN 1758-1419 [Print]

  ISSN 1758-1427 [Online]

   

  Edited by Krishan Coupland.

   

  Published summer 2014.

   

  Subscriptions and back issues available from the website.

   

  Contents

   

  Steve Subrizi

  Disintegrate In Ambergris | By The Tide, With Mayonnaise | Diving Day

   

  Peter Branson

  Death Of The Naturalist | Family Snap | The Time The Light Went Out

   

  Ian Mullins

  Under Surveillance | Stray Dog | The Devil's Whisper

   

  Holly Day

  Brontomancy | Passacaglia | Percale | Lection

   

  Claire Joanne Huxham

  Under The Apple Tree | Star Gazing | Correspondence

   

  Jonathan Greenhause

  Nowhere People | Not A Holocaust Poem | Lesser Wars

   

  Mark Vanner

  At Low Tide | Survival | Why The Sound Of Your Heart Hurts My Head | The Flood

   

  Karen Heuler

  Glorious Plague

   

  Alina Rios

  Déflorer | Crow's Feast | Calling | Totems

   

  Sam Preminger

  Poem In Which You Unfriend The Dead Girl | Hesitation Wound | Ilan Who Works In The Bagel Shop | Remembrance Of Flings Past

   

  Huang Kaishan

  The Death Of The Motherless Kitten

   

  Postscript

  Contributors | Supporters

   

  Steve Subrizi

   

  Image by Hector Landaeta

   

  Disintegrate In Ambergris

  After Cassandra de Alba

   

  In this future, each and every human has been swallowed by a whale, or that’s what you can tell yourself while you pace your new cathedral’s tongue. The entire rest of your family got their own whale, and they are spending the sequestered time finally hashing out their issues over forkfuls of burnt kelp. Your coworkers from that awful bar got swallowed together too, and when they run out of booze, they are bound to map out who all has been fucking whom, and the baleen will stain henna red from busted ears. You are alone in your whale. And maybe, let’s just say, sure, your secret and corrosive loves are alone in theirs too. She kissed you into dawn one fifth of July, and now soon enough she too will notice how some clumps of algae look like fireworks. He tided orphaned undergarments into your knotted sheets, and now his own cruddy boxer-briefs will disintegrate in ambergris, and his lesser lovers’ homes must gnash their teeth. Meanwhile, you are still naked and inside a whale. Eventually, you should give the whale a name. Name your whale after a famous crooner, some great lugubrious diva. It will never know you apart from fish. It will always shake your puny body when it sings.

   

  *

   

  By The Tide, With Mayonnaise

   

  The metal detector costs a merciful fifteen dollars at a yard sale in Marblehead. You can always find much more abandoned food on the beach than anything that glitters, but in detecting at least there is something like dignity. In the long hours it takes to earn a keep, the act becomes many things: golfing in reverse; pacing an evil king’s maze; a dizzy parade through the wrong state. On a boon day, you can spare enough to buy a steak wrap and a bottle of lemonade, and you can sit on the rock wall by the tide, your mouth rich with mayonnaise, and stare at the seagulls, who stare wildly at nothing and then fly out to nowhere.

   

  *

   

  Diving Day

   

  The rules for the diving competition were never made clear. Whether diving off of a twenty-story building should be worth more points than diving off of a ten-story building with greater speed or grace. Whether a running start across two rooftops should be encouraged or penalized. Whether one’s landing, so inevitable the outcome, should be evaluated at all. Who should keep score in the first place. But dive we all did, through the even handicap rain, down whatever ledges we could access, after whatever running starts we had room to make, with all the speed and grace of whatever bodies we had as of yet. And here was all those bodies meant. Here, like that, in the sky.

   

  Peter Branson

   

  Image by “pabbster”

   

  Death Of The Naturalist

  “Now bless thyself: thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born.”

  (The Winter’s Tale, Act 111, Scene 111, lines 112 – 113)

   

  For Sharon Brennan

   

  You’re sitting on your own, the stalking horse. 

  “Jim’s mate from Trinity,” we’re told, “the poet.”

  I’m curious these days – North sealed your fame –

  so sneak a closer look; stacked hair, barn chest,

  a slow deliberate way of seeing things.

  John’s farming dad was perfect fit, before

  Death of a Naturalist, fence posts for arms,

  bear paws, this private hope and public grief.

  Just as that text arrives, like Lazarus,

  CF, the sponge rung dry, your death spills from

  the radio. “Good match, as far as they

  can tell” – an accidental sacrifice –

  “It’s go!”  Someone has passed, unheralded,

  so not like you. Your footprint’s fixed and deep.

   

  Seamus Heaney, poet, 13th April, 1939 – 30th August, 2013

   

  *

   

  Family Snap

   

  A photograph, rewinding, re-invents.

  Through shadow, highlight, myths develop, fix,

  with memory, the willing host, enthralled,

  reality revised, enhanced, suborned.

  We’re west face, high as angels, slings and flaws,

  what’s human, cast, bird shit removed, black dog

  snuffed out, by flash-eyed genie, jack-in-box,

  erased as readily as fake tattoos.

  It’s me at nine, immortalised, before

  some chance aside wipes off that smile for good.

  This man’s the grandfather I never meet,

  straight-edge, misunderstood, cute as a bear.

  That one’s my wedding mum-to-be, blue home-

  made frock and borrowed shoes, b-movie stare.|

   

  *

   

  The Time The Light Went Out

   

  How did the Dark Age come?

                                                          The power wound down.

  There’d been some temporary rationings

  but this time they’d been warned it was for good.

  Cookers lay barren, central heating stalled

  and kettles lacked the will to mash the tea;
/>   no candles left to burn, light chased the sun.

  Lids flipped, big-time; weird portents, false sunsets.

  The web and mobile culled, churches swelled up –

  "All day confessionals." They soon got used

  to life without TV; had radio,

  just BBC and certain hours per day:

  "Don’t panic. It will do more harm than good."

   

  Then what?

                         Home freezers stank. Cards idle, cash

  points blunt – rioting: "All looters will be shot!"

  Shops glass-eyed blanks and supermarket shelves

  exposed, how people change... They hid what food

  they’d got. Pet cats and dogs soon disappeared.

  Gunfire was circumspect, mostly at night:

  can’t live on love. Tap water was unsound;

  rubbish and sewage stacked. With pharmacies

  racked dry, they dropped like pins: Death rock ‘n’ rolled.

  The mood turned desperate: a boy was birched

  for stealing cabbage leaves; black marketeers

  and deviants were scourged and strung from trees.

   

  Who lived and died?

                                          Folk tried to flee the towns

  and cities. All known exits batten-downed

  and booby-trapped, a few got out on foot

  before the walls of razor wire went up.

  From then escape well nigh impossible,

  Badlands we shun today, rank with hindsight,

  became death camps. Nine out of ten expired:

  many gave up the ghost. But where we are,

  farm stuff long commandeered, some held their breath:

  with notice of old ways you kept alive.

  Gamekeeper, poacher, new age traveller

  survived The Cleansings; gypsies dined like kings.

   

  Ian Mullins

   

  Image by Naomi Austin

   

  Under Surveillance

   

  Left on London Road

  the camera turns with you,

  inhaling a snapshot of your scent

  from the dirty eye over

  the all-night chemist,

  then passes you like a baton in a relay

  to the twitchy lens over the adult store.

  You cross at the lights

  but the eyes that never blink

  are watching you again:

   

  not the lens of a hand-held camera

  ticking you off the celebrity face-list,

  more the mechanical slab

  of a mortuary mug-shot, the picture

  they paste on your security pass

  or paper-clip to Personnel;

  not to name you somebody

  but to file you a nobody,

  fit for footnotes or an e-mail cc

   

  So you sniff out camera-dry corners

  to re-brand yourself one,

  alone, not a face in the line-up

  lined up to be erased. Until a cop

  taps your shoulder and

  there are cameras in his eyes.

   

  *

   

  Stray Dog

   

  The bravest man I never knew

  lived alone in a small house

  where the curtains were always closed

  and the chimney pumped smoke

  day and night.

   

  When he walked the street

  he carried his head as though

  it was a vase

  brought with much dignity

  into the auction room

  to be sold with a dozen more

  of its kind.

   

  What silenced him

  I’ll never know:

  but after leaving school

  he stopped setting stray dogs on fire

  and took work by the docks. Sometimes

  I’d see his shadow

  moving along the street;

  as thin as the sun lighting up

  an empty bottle. He grew older

  and strangely smaller, a dead dog

  slowly vacating his skin until only

  scraps remained. So it appeared

  quite natural to me

  that he never left a note,

  was simply found hanging

  in a lit room with the curtain un-drawn

  and the streetlamp stealing in.

   

  Imagine caring so little for life

  that you might end it so casually,

  with such gentle contempt, as though

  failing to close the curtain

  said all that needed to be said.

   

  Nothing greater than the need

  to put yourself down like a dog

  grown weary of walking four legs

  when his master gets by on two.

   

  *

   

  The Devil's Whisper

   

  The first shot, I understand:

  the man needed killing

  so someone fired a bullet

  like a fist between the eyes,

  and it was almost an afterthought

  for the man who pulled the trigger;

  nothing but blood and brain

  splattered like vomit on the street.

   

  But the mob who poured bullets

  into the dead man’s mouth

  like beer down a drunk’s throat,

  what was their aim? Were they

  desperate for an atrocity of their own,

  frightened of being the only ones

  who didn’t burn a kiss

  on his cheek? Scared that they were

  one of the little men

  who gather outside the courthouse

  to pound on the prisoner’s van,

  who scream across the courtroom

  to ram poison down his ears?

   

  Needing to say Yes, I was there,

  I breathed breath on the accused man’s face,

  was bold enough to pump one shot

  in the devil’s head

   

  then live out my days in memory, sitting quietly

  in the corner of the cell

  where only the best men – the dreamers,

  the murderers, the poets and paedophiles –

   

  find the devil’s whisper

  still needful in the hovels of their hearts.

   

  Holly Day

   

  Image by “fcl1971”

   

  Brontomancy

   

  I tell them that this is not the time for a barbecue, that the rain

  is going to ruin everything, but they tell me that the noises I keep hearing

  are just jets moving through the clouds. They laugh when I tell them that they’d better

  call their brokers as soon as possible because those noisy jets are telling me

  that they’d better hold their money close for a while.

   

  I go home and wait for the storm, count the cans of food I’ve stored in my cupboards

  prepare for the worst, because I know, I know

  it’s coming. The rumble of passing clouds tells me

  that the schools in my district are going to be closed

  tomorrow, that I need  to check the brakes on my car,

  that this isn’t a good year for Geminis. The television screen flickers briefly

  as the rain starts up heavy outside, and I know, I know everything

  the thunder tells me is true.

   

  *

   

  Passacaglia

   

&n
bsp; I trudge from the bedroom to the kitchen every morning, hands ready

  to make food, fix clothing, brush hair. There is no questioning

  my role in this dance, which steps I must take – the required pirouettes

  are worn into the carpet as visibly as if someone had outlined my feet in chalk.

   

  The school bus leaves and I turn once, twice, fetch the newspaper from the stoop,

  go inside, make coffee. The birds outside the kitchen window watch me move

  imitate my pathetic shuffle on the lip of the bird feeder, mock me

  with their fluttering wings, their tiny, sure feet, their perfectly coiffed feathers.

   

  I long to find the recordings that dictate my moves

  the slow-paced funereal march that decides my day.

  I don’t know what I’d do with them

  except make them stop.

   

  *

   

  Percale

   

  I can almost see you through the fabric between us, can almost

  feel your warm skin through the cloth. I can feel the wet spot where your mouth

  is trying to reach my lips, I can taste your saliva mingling with

  with the residue of scented detergent and bleach.

   

  You thrust and I come and it’s almost too quick, I grab your hands

  wrap fingers in rough cotton, wrap hands around your body, strain against you

  in brief claustrophobia, then I’m done. You’re still moving, and I wonder

  if it’s because I can’t see you, can’t really touch you

   

  that I want you so much, if I want you so much because

  the only place we can reach each other is through

  a single hole in a sheet, this one place we can always connect.

   

  *

   

  Lection

   

  Beyond the curve at the edge of the world, there is a monster that knows

  who you are, an awful thing with claws and teeth and too many

  eyes to miss all the bad things you do. It is watching you now.

  It has an eye dedicated entirely to watching you.

   

  There is a book that your parents are writing and it’s

  all about you, a list of all the terrible things you’ve done

  since you were born, a laundry list of evils. When you are old enough

  they will present this book to the monster, and it will decide

  if you’re worthy of passing on to adulthood. Your parents

  may intervene on your behalf, but they probably won’t. They know

  that the monster only takes bad children, and they

  can always have another one, they can try

  for a good, well-behaved child next time.

   

  Just a few children, bad children, never get to grow up, disappear into the night

  from their bedrooms, dragged out the window and presumably, all the way

  to the very edge of the world, where the monster lives. Who knows

  what the monster does with all the children it drags back to its lair? That’s not really the question

  here. That is the wrong question. This, this

  is what you must take back with you today: Try to be good.

  Sit still and don’t fidget. Pay attention when I’m talking.

  Don’t lie.

   

  Claire Joanne Huxham

   

  Image by Lillian Nelson

   

  Under The Apple Tree

   

  Every night she walks up to the woods behind her house to gather all the things she needs.  She takes her tights off and leaves them balled up in the toe of one shoe.  She likes the feel of damp earth under her feet.