The Demon of Shape is Rehabilitated by Tim Kiely

having lived in other people like

a monk inside their cell – where the walls

are made of hands – having spent lifetimes

practising the taste of curses

– whispers – stones – bread –

endeavouring to do them justice –

having walked the geography of foreign

fingertips – having made sore

those feet desiring to walk unshod

up the slopes of all of them on the way

to holiness – and at the end

having travelled back through their bewildered

eyes and stories to what was imagined

as a self – only to find that there was

a luminous nothing – was itself

as thrilling and eviscerating

as redemption was always reputed to be

– in the best stories – having been stripped

of all illusions – beneath that cloud

when the downpour broke – when skin slid

away and creation lay unclaimed –

stretching away to the very

extremities of all perception –

having drunk the wind in all

its coldness – having been shown

that all was lost and recovered – all

was unselved and instant – having known

---

Tim Kiely is a criminal barrister and poet based in London. He has been published by 'Dreich', 'South Bank Poetry', 'Under the Radar' and 'Magma'. His poetry pamphlet 'Hymn to the Smoke' was a winner of the 2020 Indigo Dreams First Pamphlet Competition

Comments

Home by Jessa Forest

Home scratches at her shingles with tree branch fingers, pulls the air conditioning unit close to her grimy aluminum siding, and keens an empty song of mourning. We found her wandering the tornado snarled wild three months ago, starved and lonely. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself, you see? We fed her shards of dining room tables, kindling for the fireplace, and cast iron bathtubs clawed feet first. She was slow to recover so we gutted her plumbing, ripped out her nerves, and rewired the electricity. She let the water in every time it rained so we put a new roof on her and let her out for regular walks around the wolf pen. Let her mingle with the vultures, I said, let her feel useful and clean up the dead but no one wanted to listen. We found rot an mold in her corners, infused her insulation with antibiotics, and quarantined her for two weeks while she belched ladderback chairs, sofa cushions, wind chimes, and broken bookcases. She still has her bad days. After feeding time

“Are You So Tired Then, Stranger?” by Ace Boggess

—Dick Allen, “B&B” Wind exhausts with its icy fists. Knives of rain wear me down, & leaves in their helicopter swirls like leaflets dropped from a plane. October depletes me, & November. They’ve too much busyness. They send me spinning, dancing, lonely with the rake, the broom. I surrender, collapsing like an old barn, debris of me piling in a chair with clear view of the television. News is on. It spends me. Talk of politics, also. I’d like to shut up the voices that fatigue. They hum like a B-flat in the pipes. They bicker & scold, condemn. They expend me like carrying groceries up a flight of stairs until I’m too drained to care which side they’re on. --- Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So , and The Prisoners . His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-c

Why Men's Judgements of New Clothes Shouldn't Be Trusted by Simon Williams

I join four men outside the fitting room, while women try on size 14 with 16 in reserve. We’re trying to look in place and failing. It’s important not to let your eyes settle on any racked garment for over 30 seconds or any racked customer for over five. This is especially true if the fitting room in anywhere near lingerie. Nobody is interested in our slight discomfort; five expressionless faces keen to compress time, urgent to breathe less material air. People want to read Big Thoughts on how we were misused as boys, how we were louts on bikes. But it has come to this; such a longing for a brief appearance from the cubicle, a show-off of prospective wear that all clothes look wonderful on you. --- Simon Williams has eight published collections, his latest being a co-authored pamphlet with Susan Taylor, The Weather House , published in 2017 by Indigo Dreams. Simon was elected The Bard of Exeter in 2013, founded the large-format magazine, The Broadsheet a

Dear Reader

Search This Blog