Issue #38
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This compilation copyright © Neon Literary Magazine (2014).
Do not copy or redistribute without permission.
All content copyright © respective authors (2014).
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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
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
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.