I. The Other Side of Things. from the sequence Sky Gladiatorials Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop aerial crossing of the Atlantic, Newfoundland to Ireland, 1919.Previous to that, they both flew for Britain in World War I. Alcock ‘was the first man to bomb Istanbul’; then, with plane trouble, […]
REDRESS After Junichiro Tanizaki. Give us this day your problems. Allow us to torment ourselves about shadow and beauty and good taste and we’ll swap all that we’ve got for one hour in the life of a tortured artiste who wants to sit in a fancy lav and listen to a mosquito. We’d leave the […]
English Breakfast Love Song I am longing to pour out my soul to you in words which show my creativity and let off my head of steam but my soul is not so liquid it comes out in funny lumps uneven like old-fashioned sugar ready to make sure your tea is always too sweet […]
Siegfried’s Homecoming You come home from the war at least a third emptier than you were, Like all the words were scooped from your head with the butt of a rifle that you constructed with your own hands and demolished too, leaving so much of yourself in the barrel. The teeth in your gums white […]
Game On In Syria the shooters choose themes for target practice, a living video game of entertainment for the week. On Saturday it’s chins – anything below the nose, above the neck, and rifle sights explore a quivered lip as points deduct for errors – cheeks and ears are left for Sunday’s sport. On Monday, […]
