Pistachio Vignette (WINNER)

A blind man is standing on the corner. An empty dog-lead is hanging around his neck. He fingers it like a rosary. The dog is nowhere to be seen.

I look around for it and am met by your smile brimming over like a hazelnut-half- shell. It is unexpected against your paleness. I was not ready for it. You kiss my nose and your finger traces circles on my palm. I want to make our bodies read like all the shapes of the alphabet.

What do you think he can see, you ask, eyes closed.

I didn’t know that you had noticed him. He is calm and prophet-like, an island in sunlight. I wonder if his dog will come back. We sit on the wall in front of the church and watch him.I haven’t forgotten what you said earlier. I am trying to pretend that I’m not thinking about it.

I don’t know, I say. Maybe nothing. Maybe the bit at the end of a film. Maybe dark space.

You sigh, I knew you’d say that.

You knew I’d say dark space?

You hesitate, Well you would, wouldn’t you. You’d assume there was nothingness. Your jawline is tense. You fix your eyes on the blind man.

I wish you hadn’t said that. I won’t be able to forget.

You pull up your sleeve to show me the new freckle you told me about on the phone last night. The freckle looks hopeful.

What’s that supposed to mean? I can’t help it, I ask – That I’m pessimistic? That I wouldn’t see past my eyelids? That’s right isn’t it. Because I can never see anything from anyone else’s perspective.

You walk away from me, past the blind man, around the corner. I am so sick of your tilting-back-in-chair assumption that you know all of my possibilities, like I’m a pattern you can learn. Like if a piano fell out of the sky, you know which way I would step. You come back with an ice cream towered high like the first Christmas tree I was allowed to decorate myself. You hold it up to my lips. I can’t help it. It is pistachio.

Maybe what he sees is like the bottom of the ocean, you say. Maybe everything is a bit blurred and drowned and has grown pinkish gills around the edges (you see my expression, and try harder). Maybe it’s all a oneness, you say. Maybe everything is orange-marinaded and his world tastes like a tangerine. Or maybe it’s like being trapped in a white-walled nightmare, like spending hours staring at your ceiling, numb-struck. Maybe he has to grit his teeth to leave his house because he is caged behind glass that one stone could shatter. Maybe it’s like when you stare straight at the sun and everything is purple splotched. Maybe he wanted to be a mime artist. Maybe he thinks that orchids are like pom-pom-dahlias (you know I like this word). Maybe there isn’t a dog, he is applying for a job, and thought the lead was his tie. Maybe his eyes and ears have fused, maybe the morning is a sob-wracked summer night when he hears a nocturne, and when his neighbours make love with wall-thudding moans (you moan), he blushes, and,

I raise the ice cream to your lips, and you just can’t help it. It is pistachio.

Amber Medland

 

Pyrrha (Runner-Up) 

 

what tender boy
       drenched in perfume
       strewn on roses
                 holds you to him
                                              in sea rent hollow

 

who watches
                                  you tie up waves
                                  of burntgold hair

 

so simply

 

             he

 

who will weep
            at you              trickling               fidelity
will gaze green eyed
             at his changing
                                                   star     & sea
                        turned;

                                  still now

 

soft boy enjoys you smooth
       boy knows you            will always
                                                     always be
                             still
                                                unknows breezes
                                                     treachery

 

              —wretches—
                                                                see
                                                you shimmer not
                                                  you rocks, you
                                                          wreck–

 

                    me

 

I laywrung dry                my clotheson sand on land                     dedicated to gods       below

Simon Haines

 

Whilst You're Gone

My body is the land from here to Euston.
Fields without meaning lie fallow
in the shade of cranes, shot through with
tunnels that eat deep and gape at the skin.
The hills have grown grey and hard with frost,
the trees sag under the weight of the sky.
The sky is sick with the smell of biscuit
factories, scrapheaps where carcassed
cars entwine the thicket. Clandestine
congregations meet, of post lorries and
broken buses at the arse end of houses.
Dragged out of half-hearted hamlets,
a boredom of carparks and shopping centres,
warehouses brutish and anonymous, half-full
with parts of parts of parts.
Strung along a cable, the threadbare birds
have lost the will to sing, and the music here
is the tidal roar of bypass and highway,
and tired trains on tired tracks through
concrete valleys spraypaint-scarred and dank
with moss. I exist for this line, this longest,
longest grind into the station, into
the heart, that feels like a lifetime,
a lifetime of waiting,
waiting to arrive again, for glass
and stone that sing in the sun, to taste
my soul at the back of my tongue, to feel
it in the roots of my hair, to hear
it in the surge of my lungs.

Maria Hannah Bass

 

Funeral

Of my grandmother’s funeral
The deepest memory is
The coffin, the feel of the thing,
Its hard sharp polished edge digging
Biting my fourteen year old shoulder.
Its weight, its sheer heft, the six men
Who carried it heaving, gasping,
Young and strong still, or wavering like dead wood
Labouring under the drag of her death.
In life so frail, so light.
The rattled blessings of sprinkled earth.
A sunflower on the lacquered wood.
Six men bent under six foot of oak,
The way she knelt to prune roses.

Brendan Gillott

 

Song for Ulysses

Ulysses heard the gull at the metro station,
on the street, in his flat, at coitus, at work,
on his rustling bed, at the white saluting sun
in the seconds only his heart recorded.
come home, come home, come home, long-hearted one
we have missed you in the loud chit-chat of the sea
we have missed the brittle force of an Odyssey
you are a spine to hang from, an immanence of plot
One such as he, an arrow-headed man
arced from himself, tawny, triumphant
into the broad recesses of the sea,
a god in bloom among the algae.

Tim Waters

 

Philoctetes

Leave me on the island, please just let the wound
Drive you, its gaping mouth
Marooned. "I served you once, I served you well"
Our human temples feed
Such eager sacrifice.
And earless trees don’t hear me tell
Tall tales, they only bleed their leaves.
And the conch is no companion, but a shell.

Catherine Lough

 

To Fingernails

Oh shell-like beauties! Milky splendour flows
Across your ridges, moon to glowing moon.
I gaze, full-wondrous: fingertips and toes
Are capped by Nature’s steely-silver boon.
Then why – oh why – abusèd tortured things
Complain’st thou not when bored or tired I chew?
Your glory stunted, trickling rim half-gone,
You struggle on, my sad blunt friends: do you
Not see that struggle is in vain? Your rings
Will never last: but when dies she who sings
Far underground your battle will be won.

Julia Nicholson

 

Definition

Mindle, noun: the part of a tree likely to snap in a storm, or else be turned to shoddy weaving frames; the place where the length of a needle becomes the point; the stick kept for fireplace stories.  

Or, to Mindle, verb, the stagger used to fight the rain at 3am; half-hearted rummaging through loved ones’ things; the thinking of thoughts two seconds before sleep.

Paul Merchant

 

Like It Is

"Just keep it real," she advised, the acrylic point of her index finger distractedly tracing the contours of her ash-blonde plait. We huddled closer around the screen. Of course, we’d already watched the videos of Last Year’s Winner and grown intoxicated by the promise they seemed to make. That could be you, meeting the press in white fringed cowboy boots. You too could be interviewed on daytime TV, in between a chat with Björn from Abba and a special report on sex crimes in the South East.

I’d cut out the advert with a vague sense of living on the edge. So unlike me! I thought, as I collected my number. 4371. I positioned it on my stomach and joined the others for the video introduction.

The auditions were lengthy. Group exercises, followed by individual screen tests and tea from plastic cups. We lined up along a wall and waited to be summoned one by one. The girl next to me was called Jodie. She was kind and had purple dreadlocks. "I tell it like it is," Jodie explained. I wondered what I would say when it was my turn. "I tailor my words to what the other person wants to hear"?; "If someone upsets me I suppress it and watch re-runs of The Avengers until I’ve lost all feeling"?

We spent the morning falling into each other’s arms – it was a trust exercise. My partner was a contortionist from Bristol. He got me tea and offered to show me how to put my leg behind my head. "You’re a wonderful girl, babe," he said when we parted. It was sweet, but I’m not so sure. I try to be myself but it’s hard when the real you likes to spend her day eating tinned peaches and imagining what kind of husband Malcolm Tucker would be.

We went round the circle showing off our party pieces. Disappearing coins, impersonations of celebrity chefs. The contortionist dislocated the wrong shoulder and had to be examined by a St John’s Ambulance volunteer.

That kind of show is so outdated, my sister had said. You’d be better off on Deal or No Deal.

Jodie had been called. Keep it real. Didn’t she know I was trying? I glanced helplessly at the pile of magazines on the table before me. Toughen up a tea dress with gladiator sandals, one suggested.

"4371? It’s you."

 

Joker

"How did you see? No, really – how?"

"I just did."

"You ruined my punchline."

Two-and-a-bit years of togetherness spawns a familiarity that ruins jokes at dinner parties. He begins telling one, but at the twitching of the left side of his upper lip she knows what is happening. That one sign released, her shoulders shake and she laughs. This stops the process too soon – not stretching their disbelief far enough, he is robbed of his moment of shine.

He cries later at this flop, feeling unappreciated. She loves him, so tries to unlearn her attentiveness. She stops watching so closely. Consequently, three-and-a-bit years produces a more distant care, which slowly drifts from her and wraps him up. Now, they’re a stunning young pair possessing dazzling social success, due to the long-suspended fantasies he unveils with skill over coffee and tea.

Two routes remain from this height – the first, more distance and increasing social success, or (the second) an elastic ping back to what they used to have. Sadly, the forceful comedian loves his storytelling so much that the first path is what comes to pass. At fourteen-and-a-bit years her concern for him is so dissipated that it happens upon cats; she begins to collect them furiously. Her husband comes home for lunch and often sits on a cat brazenly occupying his chair – this makes her giggle. By twenty-two-and-a-bit years they buy rocking chairs, and enjoy fulfilling the cliché which began with her kitten obsession. They bob back and forth, avoiding the tails of the ever-breeding cats, while he tells jokes.

Meanwhile, during daily rocking, she grows pensive, wishing that they’d had option two. In the real world, she plays along and laughs at his jokes as they rock prematurely back and forth. But she is angry at having been pushed away – for her, punchlines were less important than being given leave to count the bristles in his beard and grow ever-closer. And one day, after a particularly intense bout of joke-telling, she grabs the nearest pussy and tenderly winds its furry tail around his neck like a scarf – twist, flick, tug, and the old joker turns blue. Happily she snuggles down and pets the deadly feline, body still entwined around the head of a husband of twenty-nine-and-a-bit, by the end, and strokes and laughs and rocks herself to sleep.

Stephanie Davin