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...

Prints by Penny Ayers

A child’s mark before letters— sticky red palms, ten tiny petals, two flowers patted on white. Already they’re telling her story— the whorls of the thumbs, the dips and stretches of lines of life, of the heart. She’ll leave them everywhere— on the skin of lovers, knives in the kitchen, the riffled pages of library books, on window glass, wiping raindrops. Will she reach out to touch things no longer there, make her mark for others to find like her sisters whose hands were caught in crushed ochre on cave walls, among running horses, the haunches of bison, 35,000 years ago?* *It’s now believed that many cave paintings were made by women, judging by the size of the handprints. --- Penny Ayers lives in Cheltenham. She has been published online and in various magazines, most recently in ‘Ink, Sweat & Tears’, ‘Snakeskin’ and the summer edition of ‘Spelt’. She helps run the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network.

Smoking and Swearing by Ian Manson

He’s stood outside, he’s on his break. He’s unsure whether to be smoking or swearing. He decides on both. Inhale. Fuuuck! Inhale. Fuuuck! A person, a visitor, or a patient. Heading to the hospital, sees his scrubs and scowls. “ It’s not very professional for a nurse to be smoking and swearing. ” But he doesn’t care. He’s already done his good deed for the morning and by midnight he’ll have done a dozen more. Yesterday was a paltry four. Tomorrow’s shift will be five or two or maybe eight, and another night of finishing late. Inhale. Fuuuck! He breathes a cloud of smoke. Watches it swirling, ascending, a spirit en-route to heaven. The person’s saintly sanctimony means nothing to him. Because he’s on his break. And he’s smoking, and he’s swearing. --- Originally from Scotland, Ian has lived and worked in Worcestershire for the last 11 years. He can normally be found performing his poetry and prose at events on the Worcester spoken word scene...

Dear Reader

Search This Blog