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This edition published in Great Britain by Flaxbooks, Storey Institute, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TH. Tel 01524 62166. www.litfest.org

Flaxbooks is the publishing imprint of Litfest Lancaster and District Festival Ltd trading as Litfest. Registered in England Company Number: 1494221 Charity Number: 510670 Editor: Sarah Hymas Design and layout: Martin Chester at Litfest Photography: Jonathan Bean

Acknowledgements

Elizabeth Burns’ Vessel and Horse previously published in ‘Island’; Shakespeare Does the Cross-Bay Walk in ‘The Interpreter’s House’.

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David Borrott’s Love-Rush previously published in ‘How Do I Love Thee?’

Welcome. Whoever we might be – whatever our tastes, our proclivities – it’s good to encounter new creative work. I’m glad people are doing the work, and I’m glad people are enabling us to encounter it, online or otherwise. You will read poems here, written by five writers – three women and two men. David Borrott’s poems concern themselves with instability. From the figure of St Francis to the emotional and perceptual upheavals that a newborn brings, the subjects of these poems coalesce around the idea that: We imagine a sort of security though most of the house is not our home.

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Foreword

Water fills and runs through Elizabeth Burns’ poems; contained and container, canal and estuary, fresh- and salt-water, this element stands for what good is engaged in: making – as we on earth have always done – from what is broken, separate something whole.

In the darkness of Pauline Keith’s poems ‘the ghosts of heavy horses/ sometimes shift’. These poems, about hidden things brought painfully to light, are pungent and moving: in them, water sluices the cobbles of the knacker’s yard and runs on to join ‘the river.../welling, silent, from the underworld’.

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Mark Griffiths writes about ‘The Golden Life’, whose goldenness his poems celebrate through the accumulation of everyday detail. That we can hold hands ‘still greasy from the chips’ and ‘jump the ditch, landing absolutely on our feet’ are the modest delights his poems set about weighing, and finding priceless.

Jacob Polley

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So here’s to work from a particular somewhere whose music might continue to fill the wires that connect us all.

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And finally, a series of boxes are cleverly evoked in Cath Nichols’ poems. Featuring lifts and their bellhops, magician’s assistants in their cabinets, and vanishing acts, these poems shift vertiginously, disclosing and enclosing as their music ‘fills the wires’.

Foreword by Jacob Polley 1

David Borrott

8

Elizabeth Burns

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Contents

19 Mark Griffiths 24 Pauline Keith

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32 Cath Nichols

2 St Francis and the Birds 3 Brooding 4 Divisions 5 Wolf Fell 6 Ultrasound

Click here to hear David read St Francis and the Birds Click here for David’s profile

1

David Borrott

7 Love-Rush

St Francis and the Birds This is a dawn of doves, of pigeons drawing their loosening spirals across the sky’s canvas. The farmyard crackles and ignites with noise, cock and hen, a grey pool of geese. Still the pigs are asleep in their pens, the cows punctuate the hill’s sweep, Purposeful sparrows divert to the wagon’s rut.

of enthusiasm that they want to fall into. They pursue him, spreading like a peacock’s tail. He is almost winged himself, they thicken about him in the lane. Starlings quaver on the barred gate, a heron comes cometary from the river, crows wait for him like parishioners, he advances with his bridal-gown of geese.

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2

David Borrott

Cassocked and besotted with joy Francesco opens himself to the morning, flinging himself like a twig into the inferno of new light, the birds scatter then gather again. Hens chase his footfalls, doves coo from the roof tiles, geese come dripping. He treasures and ignores them, a magnet, a swell

Brooding It’s the annunciation that puzzles me. I’m fairly sure Europa didn’t need telling, and Leda had the precise feathered touch, not an emissary elaborating to let her know. Potency needs no delegation, except, as the sun says it, loud and all day long, while we simplify glory to the chance for a suntan

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3

David Borrott

or a barbecue, where the chicken wings drip fat onto the coals, and some distant aunt, an uninvited guest, takes us aside to whisper why we’re bleeding or not bleeding.

Divisions Spiders in the attic but not just there, their pale trails filter out of ceilings, tenuously silver tentacles to catch dust. Mice haunt the moist linoleum; birds drown in the dark chimney. We imagine a sort of security though most of the house is not our home.

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David Borrott

Inside the head, the piloting brain flies at eye level towards the sunset, observing a singularity and not alone, not alone, not alone.

Wolf Fell You stand on the edge with your wife, your balding head a wholesome colour in the November sunshine. You are taking a picture of Wolf Fell, air-fuddled in the distance.

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Click here to hear Cath read from Thinking in Slices Click here for Cath’s profile

David Borrott

Here is the order in which these things shall be lost: your remaining hair, the photograph, you, your wife, this prominence, Wolf Fell, the air, the sunshine.

Ultrasound With four point five megahertz of clarity, through jelly on your lifting bulge, we see into our future: a prophecy that flutters against your gut; a resonance vaguely like ourselves. For you, it is already here; for me, it is as intangible as tomorrow, as if far away, submersed amid oceanic depths, a greening on the scope, looming, rising on anticipation’s winch.

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Click here to hear Cath read from Thinking in Slices Click here for Cath’s profile

David Borrott

Tonight I may place my hand on the projection of your belly and feel only a warmth, as one feels casually on the bonnet of a car that has been somewhere, has somewhere to go.

love-rush I wake to your colours; the old mornings – newspaper grey – are torn into a shower of butterflies. Tangerines have grown and spices raggle the lawn of my tame yesterday. Into the well of myself, echoing in monotone, you flung your rope ladder, raised me to this wild exploration of sky, high as the wind hugging its bundle of clouds.

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7

Click here to hear Cath read from Thinking in Slices Click here for Cath’s profile

David Borrott

I never knew life was such a treasure chest, till you came jangling along, like a pocket full of keys.

9 held 10 horse 11 an eighteenth century experiment 12 creature



13 vessel 14 shakespeare does the cross-bay walk 15 the miller

Click here to hear Elizabeth read Held Click here for Elizabeth’s profile

8

El������������� izabeth Burns

17 First Day in Amsterdam

h�eld One-year-old, and he’s discovering the river, dropping stones in at the edge, retrieving them. He loves containers, says his mother, then wonders, is a river a container? The riverbed is: it curves its way from Roeburndale down through these woods of wild garlic and bluebells, letting the winding stony vessel of itself be filled with springwater, meltwater, rainwater, water which also contains things – you can plop a stone into it, take it out again, and here are glints of fish and floating twigs, silt, insects, airbubbles, ducklings –

says the basketmaker, the earth contains us, we contain bones, blood, air, our hearts. We are baskets and makers of baskets, and fresh from the hold of the womb

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the boy-child’s discovering how things are held by other things: milk in a cup, food in a bowl, a ball in his hands, a stone in water, water in a nest of stones.

Elizabeth Burns

and if the river’s a container, so’s a song, holding words and tune; everything is like a basket

h�orse A horse takes shape on a hillside. It is three thousand years ago. They are drawing the lines of its body, digging and lifting the skin of turf, exposing the white flesh of earth which buries its secrets deep, has in its keeping bones, flints, vessels beads for spindle-whorls hearth-stones the grave-place of a child;

and piece together fragments of a story, making − as we on earth have always done – from what is broken, separate

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something whole: mud and fire that make the pot chalk and grass the horse, still galloping over the hill.

Elizabeth Burns

until time comes to carefully shift the soil, begin to sift

A�n eighteenth century experiment If you were to scoop a cup of water up, here where the river mingles with the sea, freshwater, saltwater twisting over rocks could you tell if the droplets were those which had travelled down the valley from the hills, knowing only silty, pebbly river bed, bearing only twigs, fish, leaves, perhaps the carcass of a sheep? Would you know if this were water from the ocean brought here by the rush of estuary as it shoves itself inland, a high tide deep enough to bring a slave ship right up to the quayside?

Could you tell which were the drops that formed the waves that held the bloated body of one thrown overboard? Or is this simply water from the hills, clear and cold as a spring?

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Elizabeth Burns

Could you tell if this were water which had floated one of those well-built vessels, its hold full of sugar, cotton, chocolate and mahogany, or glass beads and whisky, or human beings?

C�reature New-made, skin thin as lantern-glass that lets the light pour through, you’re still balanced between elements, each one rich in you, and equal, pulling like magnets. Your compass whirls. The earth is where you live, it takes your shape like a hare’s, rolls you giddily down hills, draws you to itself with mushroom smells and orange leaves. You clamber over limestone, stretch for blackberries, purple-fingered.

The sun’s your best friend, calls for you, off out to play together. Staying up late on summer evenings, your hoop turns to gold. Night, and a tiny candleflame shines back from the iris of your eye. Fireworks crackle.

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Sea-water’s inside you: taste your salt tears. Dip a toe in a rock pool, tumble into spray. Fall asleep to the sound of the waves. Cross the river on stepping stones, set sail your boat into the world.

Elizabeth Burns

Wind takes you: you skitter like a kite, touch clouds, full of bluster, skim the ground like old blossom. Winter mornings, cold douses your lungs. Breath hangs in the silvery mist.

v�essel Here is where they laid her − bones, flesh, stopped heart − in a bed of stone carved to her body’s size taking her form like grass where a hare has lain. There was a covering once, some kind of lid, long gone and the space her body filled is outline, absence holding only air − sea winds, heat of the sun –

There may have been earth here in the grave shape – grass growing, harebells − or fire, an offering to a god made over flames of driftwood

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kindled in the cold stone that holds a memory of warmth of hands held round a bowl and humans supping food together.

Elizabeth Burns

or water − spume from a high tide, rainfall, melted ice.

s�hakespeare does the cross-bay walk

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and then he’s deep in, up to his knees, he sees himself drawn down, sinking, mouthfuls of sand: all the words he’s yet to speak and write stopped in his throat. And why? Because he wanted to defy his earthbound life, to walk across the sea, become amphibian, a man turned seal or otter – and he cannot. He yanks his feet up, grabs his neighing horse’s belly like a raft, pulls himself onto the creature’s back. It sways, drags up soaked fetlocks, staggers to a sand bar. They falter on, man and horse; they’ll cross the bay by nightfall, feel flat unmoving land under them again. The horse, rubbed down, will eat its oats and sleep. And he, he will relish being human, not webbed or gilled, but here, splayed feet on solid ground, the tongue inside his mouth not bound by sand.

Elizabeth Burns

Why? Because he could, because the sands were there, a pale flat sheet pulled out between the strong arms of the bay, like a washerwoman’s laundry; and what was seabed is uncovered, laid bare and fresh, untouched. Its huge wingspan. His bare feet squelch in sand. He feels the pull of it around his ankles; plods on; one foot heaved out and then the other. Then a flowing current, clear water washing caked mud off his skin. He sees the ghost of hoofprints fading in wet sand, the hollows made by his companions’ boots filling now with seawater: these little pools, these new-formed landscapes that we make as our footsteps take us over earth. The land ahead, the woven shining cloth that leads to it –

T�he miller Then the wolf went to the miller and said, ‘Miller, sprinkle my paws with fine white flour.’ The miller didn’t want to do it. ‘If you don’t,’ said the wolf, ‘I’ll eat you.’ So the miller was afraid, and did it. ‘The Wolf and the Seven Goslings’, Tales from Grimm It’s the wolf who’s meant to scare you in this tale, the wolf who makes the children jolt and gasp and quiver on your lap, who makes them clutch your clothes in terrified excitement as he sniffs out each gosling, and ‘swallowed them whole in his horrid haste’. But the miller is the one who scares you more, the human one, the one who ‘was afraid, and did it’

who whitened the wolf ’s paws who dyed the cloth to make the stars who welded the metal to make the signs who laid the tracks that took the trains who closed the door of her shop to them who barred the children from his school

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and in your own dark heart with its nugget of evil you know you might have been the one who dusted the paws of the wolf who disguised and covered him even as someone else’s children were being swallowed up −

Elizabeth Burns

the miller who colluded, who was only doing his job, with the tools of his trade

‘And when at last the goslings were freed they cried out, The wolf is dead, the wolf is dead and danced round the pond in delight.’

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Elizabeth Burns

But the miller’s heart was heavy and sank like a stone.

Fi���� rst Day in Amsterdam She is learning that the starry coins are Euros, that breakfast can be cheese and ryebread, that she herself is ‘zeven jaar’. She is learning that a city can be laced through with canals, that bicycles can get you anywhere, that a house can have six flights of stairs and that people hid in attic rooms like this; that a family could survive for years, that friends will bring you food and enemies betray you. She only knows that soldiers came, and took them, she does not know yet where the girl

the tiny writing, the tartan cover – was taken. Or that we can do such things to one another. She is learning that writing can be secret, potent, though it may not save your life. That not all children will survive a war.

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Here in the city of frozen canals and straight lines and hard graft she is learning that an artist may be mocked if people think the way you paint is queer; that all your life you may be poor and your paintings never sell until you’re dead.

Elizabeth Burns

– the girl not much older than she is herself, the girl who wrote a diary, look, here it is, you can see it with you own eyes,

But she is learning too the lovely blues of irises, the way that blossom on a peach tree sings against a fresh spring sky and those colours in the painting of a river which, months later, she’ll be reminded of by the blur of greens and yellows in her dress. A secret diary. A canvas turned against the wall. Things that seem invisible may one day dazzle with their glare. A child marked with a yellow star. A man stoned out of town.

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Elizabeth Burns

An attic room. Thickness of paint. Canals under ice. Crocuses in flower. The world is cruel. The world is kind.

20 The Golden life 21 outgrowing my sex-object status 22 fernando smith

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19



M����� ark Griffiths ��������

23 the state of things

t�he Golden Life We sat in the car in the centre of town safe from the hatching November rain eating fish and chips steaming up the windows with our salty breath my son and I having a laugh the radio going on about something or other.

Later, we tramped through the woods skimmed stones across the Gelt made a den in a fallen tree played army with sticks for guns held hands, still greasy from the chips, watched a squirrel hopscotch the branches jumped the ditch, landing absolutely on our feet.

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Mark Griffiths

We talked about gravy and the hardest lads in the school and music he liked and which fish was hotter and his mum’s bloke and big sister’s bloke and dinosaurs and other stuff.

outgrowing my sex-object status You emptied your soul for me that I could live in your imagination without distraction The broad street led to the sea we found the purse In my memory I kissed you there In my lust I unwrapped you behind the bushes

We were naked then young even our faces lost as sleeping children happy to remain at the foot of the mountain waiting for the football scores

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Mark Griffiths

Our breath curdled with cinnamon and chocolate

F�ernando smith Oh, Suzanne he never knew your eyes but once heard the boys singing your name in Calle Triana. He found a note tagged to the cactus ordering him not to follow you. Spy him there fervent by the harbour gates anticipating the boat that will penetrate his horizon.

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Mark Griffiths

Remember him by the fountain tossing in the same coin over and over to lighten the fever he carried in his spine.

The State of things The little bird stood transfixed by the sun St Francis bent over scooping the creature in his kind palms The wind was high urging the poplars to curve like reaching feathers

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Mark Griffiths

Ten minutes later the bird, perched in a cage, cursed the sun in a fishbone voice mistaken for delight

25 the knackers yard 26 Childcare in the slaughteryard 27 In the dark stable 29 flaying-knife



30 lip balm for my mother

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Pauline Keith

31 failing

the knacker s yard Council-licensed, it lies low in the valley bottom like a guilt. It’s hidden behind the high church and beneath the singing saw-mill; under drifting smoke from engines shunting back and forth across the viaduct; where the river takes on colour downstream from the dye-works.

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Pauline Keith

Those who risk the cinder track, short-cutting past the Yard, know to pinch their nostrils tight, don’t peer through knot-holed boards for sights kept sheltered there. Only the wind slips in by chance, moves among the beams and pulleys, sets up a moaning as it sees.

Childcare in the Slaughteryard Knacker Brown, her grandfather, fed her on sights and smells and little presents of boiled meat hauled clean from the seething broth.

She grew up close-acquainted with blood’s many lovely reds and the sequence of its thickening: an opalescent stripiness that seeped in rivulets and slowed to form flat pads of solid-seeming matter: rubbery, perhaps possible to peel and lift? She prodded with her toe; never touched with fingertips.

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Her hands stroked and stroked smooth quiet necks, so slack, deep knife-slits almost sealed. The bleeding done.

Pauline Keith

In winter, when the carcasses lay cold on the sloping flags, the boiler house breathed warmth; the fierce walls of the vats, thick with their years-old grease, rose into wreaths of steam. Drawn by their dangerous heat she edged carefully between them, hearing the comfortable bubbling she feared to see when lifted tall.

In the Dark stable

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She scoops live maggots into old tobacco tins; heaped, they wriggle flat before they’re capped ready for the fishermen who come from the canal. If one falls free, she lets it go, sees how it loops along, in cracks between the flagstones. It doesn’t stand much chance: one way open air and birds, the other back inside the yard where it hatched on a fly-blown haunch. It risks bucketfuls of scalding water

Pauline Keith

the ghosts of heavy horses sometimes shift (Black Tommy, Bay Tommy and the mare without a name); they shake the harness hanging still from hooks high on the wall above her head. The child works near the doorway in low light filtered from the slaughteryard where real dead animals lie stretched. She’s helping with small jobs she’s fit for: ladles dog-grease into jars, smoothes them flat-full.

dashed down to sluice the flags of blood and treacherous bits that make clog-irons slip. Not as cruel as a hook.

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Pauline Keith

Yet she reaches for another tin: her uncle and her grandfather don’t care, screw down fast, so half-maggots fall, twist on the floor. Mine don’t die like that. She gently scoops more maggots, tips them in and waits, lid poised.

flaying-knife Worn thin against the grindstone; between times, slicked along a steel to keep its edge; sharp-pointed to slit a throat for bleeding, incise round a hoof, open up a seam down the inner thigh of a draught-horse or a cow.

Now, post-mortem, that knife’s mine but lacks its proper purpose. It rests in my kitchen block with carvers, saw-edged bread and salad cutters. You’d know it by its narrow blade and the old string round its handle, brown and greasy with cold sweat.

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Pauline Keith

My uncle’s fingers, flying against time, could make mistakes – ruin the silk of a racehorse hide; his father sliced his wage to match the cost. Neither let a girl-child learn the skill. It’s still an unfulfilled desire to strip a carcass of its perfect skin.

lip balm for my mother I could do with some, she said, if you’ll call in Boots. A strange extra to her shopping list: she’s housebound – no harsh wind dries her lips.

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But four years before that shift, he’d slicked his lighted cigarette along her lower lip. My god! Why? To punish me. What had you done? I can’t remember. She borrows my lip balm, rubs gingerly, to soothe a hurt long hidden. Write Boots on your list, love, so you won’t forget.

Pauline Keith

It pricks here, where he burned me. She’s almost eighty-nine years old and this the first I’ve heard of it – a new tale of that man who yanked dogs close before he kicked them, cowed his wife and every child, except for this one, his first daughter. At eighteen, she declared she’d kill him if he beat her once again. He laughed, then listened to her new low voice: When you are asleep. From then, his blows were words and they had weight enough.

Failing The low ebb of the night – my father, thin and pale, sits sideways on his bed, shins disappearing into gloom. Does he sense which river runs below the shaded lamplight, welling, silent, from the underworld? It flows deep between the beds. I sit on my mother’s, waiting: he’s too weak to walk, but There’s something I must do myself, under my own steam. My mother’s raised and propped him, eased his white feet into slippers far too new – now she stands away.

We line up, watch his loneliness from the safe side of the Styx.

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Pauline Keith

He makes no move and suddenly she sits by me, not him.

33 fear of falling 34 The tallest buildng in the world 35 the assistant 36 music in the wires



37 where sixpence works wonders

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32

Ca���� th Nichols ������

38 here i am:

Fear of Falling (new york, 1913) A raw egg was placed gently in the carriage. Cables were cut and the lift fell fifty-five floors. Journalists and potential tenants gathered at ground level, waiting.

The egg was unbroken.

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Cath Nichols

The lift arrived. As Frank had stated: their safety mechanisms were second to none.

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Not a hard interview, no, I was chosen because I’m five foot four, shorter than him that owns this place. We’re all blonde too, and wear white gloves, a smart uniform. Mr Woolworth likes to see me close the doors, press the buttons. I like to sew at home; I have small hands and a neat way with my fingers (I come from a family of weavers). The lifts, they say, have triple safety features, and stop to within an eighteenth of an inch on every floor. I’m the spider plumbing depths between a girdered web. Here, there’s such precision. I think of a shuttle, zooming back and forth, crossing the weft of each floor, filling in the picture of an empire built on dimes and cents. It’s a fairy-tale palace for the 20th century, with electric lights on every floor! They say it’s like the parliament in England. They call it the new gothic. This is a sky scraper. My Dad says that’s what they used to call a ship’s tallest mast. So, in my lift I am a sailor in the rigging, criss-crossing... up and down.

Cath Nichols

The Tallest Building in the World

Th�� e Assistant Whilst we wait for The Man let me tell you about my lipsticked mouth (my teeth) my beautiful ring (my nails) my sparkling shoes (my toes)...

I have red shoes with sequins, and though I’m not from Kansas I don’t think that matters. It’s about how much you want it. But I can’t click my heels. My left foot is poking out of this hole and I can’t move my right foot towards it without losing my balance, and that would be dangerous because this cabinet is only just wide enough and tall enough and deep enough to hold me. If I bring my feet together I will fall.

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And besides I have no time: the audience is waiting

Cath Nichols

I want to go home. I want to click my heels together and go home.

M�usic in the wires

There’s a harmonic interval – the sound of whole numbers – whole vessels filled with water, a mathematical equation a resonance that seems just right. Music fills the wires. Sometimes I’m a rocketman; and when the music in the wires exceeds the speed of – we take off, punch through the roof and fly. Else we lift the building too; drag Woolworth’s towering store through clouds and layers of blue – bricks crumbling from our tail – to arrive in steady blackness. From the flight deck I listen to the music of the spheres, glide past the moon, the Milky Way, finally disappear.

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Cath Nichols

There’s a rhythm in the lift, in the cogs and wheels of it, the wires and cables, tensions and a minor third. If you blow through wheat you also get a hum.

Where sixpence works wonders The VP Twin camera is sold in three parts: the camera body, backplate and a choice of camera case. Each part costing sixpence. We build an empire, you build a camera. A way to buy exactly what you need, bit by bit. Ideal for today’s careful housewife or pocket-moneyed child. Nothing more than sixpence, a pricing guarantee. Tin soldiers, tiny tubes of Snowfire lipstick, two razor blades, instead of packs of five. We build an empire, you build a camera.

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But when playing cards are taxed at thruppence our margins are squeezed. We think you think: It’s good to know where my money’s going, so we keep our pricing guarantee by charging for tax separately. Ciggie lighters, too, are more expensive: sixpence to the store; sixpence to the Treasury. We build an empire, you build a camera.

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We think you think: Every part has its value. VP Twin camera, sold in three parts, thruppence, sixpence, dimes and cents.

Cath Nichols

Saucepans sold without their lids (or buy the lid for sixpence too), and socks and shoes come singly (for the thrifty, one-legged man). Nothing more than sixpence, a pricing guarantee.

H�ere I am: a mouth a hand some toes about to disappear. I am dismembered, and my slices stay stacked because I am held upright by this box. The wounds heal. But I get scared when I lie down. I was in bed this afternoon, with the curtains drawn. I thought: if I lie still, the mattress might catch the loosened parts as they fall away from me; the duvet might stop them as they roll away from me; slide off the bed, and run away from me.

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Cath Nichols

I thought: if I shut my eyes I might not be here anymore.

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Colophon