Congratulations to Bindweed contributor, Catherine Arra, on the publication of her recent poetry collections: Deer Love; Her Landscape and (Women in Parentheses).
Catherine has contributed fiction to Bindweed and has been published in Issue 11. You can read her story, Baby Car, which was published in November.
We wish you all the best with your new book, Catherine!
Byzantium
To a distant friend killed in a car crash
At an unpredictable point in time
the brain
bowing under the weight of facts,
pulsed in protest
and spat the blood through your busy head
like the yoke of a badly boiled egg
The great jawline of that vaulted dome
slammed shut
– a vain attempt to prevent a meltdown –
broke in an instant
and lay like shards in a glass case,
the scant fragments of a mind too full
No longer you in that skidding car
stopped short,
crumpled by the random truck –
identity swept away –
and the empty shell of your curious skull
cracked and shattered by some cosmic trowel
They no longer mummify or pickle in jars
or stuff
what is worthy of preservation:
carved quaint prose
is what remains, recalled in the smoke
glimpsed by your Aeneas on the road to Rome.
Fan Club
back then
just a look or a word
or a touch
from those guys
could make us immortal
but the founder of Genesis
was busy on his phone
and Anderson (the guy with the flute)
danced behind a counter
selling fish
yeah man but I was in the same room
saw them both back then
and I seem to recall
Phillips (simply years ahead)
smiling shyly and someone from Tull
shouting peace man yeah
I’m sure he was talking to me
I was this close to Stacia in 72
Hawkwind far out yeah and Curved Air
that Sonja’s 72 today
and still gorgeous
still got the T shirts they signed
and did you know Lemmy yeah
he was born in Burslem
yeah man in the same effing street
Glastonbury yeah that was me too
yeah third row back
sitting on some guy’s shoulders
totally pissed
a-gain
yeah mate I mean Fripp and Eno
I mean they’re like gods
retired now
or gone
the old familiar faces
just like the seventies
all in our seventies
posting ripping yarns
from our new conservatories
the Peter Pans of YouTube
never such innocence,
never such innocence again
still
bloke in the pub quiz team
he was in a band
once you know
got to number 85
in the Billboard 100
with a song about gnomes.
Jane Hill’s Wife
As I search online for another glimpse of the immortals,
my way is barred by curious diversions, such as
“Breakfast Show guest swears live and walks off set” and
“Weather presenter reveals amazing new beard” and
“Take a close up look at Jane Hill’s Wife – so weird!”
Recalling that newsreader with the faint maternal smile,
I click the link idly and resist the fierce challenge of
“Important message for all you baby boomers” and
“Savvy pensioners cannot afford to miss this plan”; or
“Invest now. Protect your family while you can.”
I am not distracted: Jane’s Wife is my holy grail
as I bravely withstand straplines with their siren songs, such as
“Whatever became of the other Herman’s Hermit…?” and
“You won’t believe how much Snow White has grown old…” or
“This horror-child is now a gorgeous centrefold.”
But I am wise to these distractions that would entice us
And I resist the lure of more sinister temptations:
“Can COVID really increase your memory skills?” and
“The ten greatest movies of Johnny Depp revealed” and
“Name all the teams who have won the Charity Shield.”
And now she is there again, this unseen Eurydice
awaiting my gaze as the flight of an arrow leads to
“Ten TV celebrities in same-sex relationships” and
“Ten stars called Jane who made it big, it’s said” and
“Ten famous people called Hill who are now all dead.”
And always the advertising fed intravenously,
half-truths and oxymoron turning brain to stone:
“These baked beans buff you up better than Botox” and
“Love Island cutie reveals beauty secrets of tar” and
“New tanned body for less than the price of a car.”
I reach Olympus. And here at last to greet me
Is Jane, the face that launched a thousand headlines:
“Boris Johnson says Brexit is a done deal” and
“Scientists say climate change is caused by cows” and
“Jane Hill caught on camera adjusting her blouse.”
Blinded by her fame, I cannot avert my gaze:
I am one step from my objective. I click again:
“A personal message to you from Jane Hill’s Wife”. Yes?
“The Internet gods are cruel. They take no prisoners.
“So respect my privacy. And mind your own bloody business.”
And, armed with clutch purse and tiara, Jane’s hologram stands
Next to a cut out silhouette: the wife. And Jane says:
“Behold. A false trail leads only to a dead end” and
“Go home. Turn off your computer. Get a life.”
And thus ends my epic quest for Jane Hill’s Wife.
Yet now, in old age, I still desire to dwell with the gods
by Googling the divine along well trodden paths, such as
“The quick and easy way to write your will” and
“The new dementia craze that is sweeping the nation”,
“Blind faith”, “assisted death” and “cut price cremation.”
Jeff Gallagher is a poet and playwright living in West Sussex. He has had numerous plays for young people published and performed nationwide. His poetry has appeared in The Journal, One Hand Clapping, Makarelle, Spellbinder and Runcible Spoon.
Trade-in
Kliban imagined Our Lady
appearing to a Volkswagen
parked at a one-hour meter
in Denver. One assumes she had her reasons:
a message too urgent
to take venue and audience sufficiently into
account. Any secular intellectual
might sympathize.
There are cases still more extreme.
Universal consciousness
suddenly befalls one
of those attenuated stickmen made
to writhe by hot air at used-car lots.
He understands everything.
He knows where the others are.
The answers are so terrible
he becomes at last one with his dance,
but even more alienated
from his eager open painted eyes
and smile. Preaching also to windshields.
The Stowaway
A voice, insinuating, loathsome,
came over the comms: “In ancient times,
small groups in bad situations –
an open lifeboat, cave-ins –
often hallucinated
another member, always calm and helpful.
In many cases they called him Shepherd.
Later they may have viewed him as an angel,
but I make no claim to that. You can call me Shepherd.”
What was so bad about the voice?
It was educated, in an old, elitist way, and
relaxed. The captain, whose job
and joy it was portentously to state
the obvious, announced, “We have a stowaway”
and called for teamwork; he and the others
thinking what the Head Office
would do to them for this, and covertly
selecting whom to blame. They
conferred. They checked readings, logs,
storage units, food and oxygen
consumption. Were issued sidearms,
and headsets that, once activated,
erased fear, superstition, and
concern about career, leaving only
purpose. They found him
in the lounge, beside a viewport, looking down
at the planet. Vegetation there
was purple, much of it now black
from mining. “Freeze!” yelled someone. He
smiled. Was oddly wispy, antique
clothes without a logo,
dyed by the old red dwarf; hardly there
when they upped the lighting. They tased him:
nothing. Zipties passed through him.
Their focused anger fought its bounds. He
smiled. The AI identified
what he said next as propaganda
issued to soldiers in an ancient war: “You should
regard the enemy as someone
who has killed your father, burned your house, dishonored
your mother. On him you may discharge
the load of misery and frustration
you have carried with you all your life.”
Capital
I had arranged a few objects
on the setback bricks
atop the old-fashioned fireplace.
A blue Tunisian plate.
A Baule mask. A small sculpture,
which only when you looked at it
looked shapeless, by a sculptor
who had lived upstairs of my father.
This was after
I had scrubbed with a wire brush
as much grime as I could
from the fireplace, which had burnt
nothing in decades and never would.
Then I realized that something like
a window or a mirror
was there, and that beyond it lay
an almost identical
but clean and working hearth. The plate
was the same, the mask better and not
inherited, the artwork
by some big name and rather dull,
the room a charming nook. Mine was my flat.
I could almost see him.
He could almost see me, and was
amused, not very interested, then gone.
I wondered: were we both evil?
Legacy
Their names remembered like old phone-numbers,
or vanished, though the face remains,
and the last ambiguous laugh, or request for a loan …
Best to regard them as scientists, explorers,
lost somewhere. One discovered
the effect of forty acid trips
in one semester on a mind
that might have rivaled Goethe’s. One
who loathed computers when they appeared
became their master, hidden in that fortress.
One researched for ten years with Scholastic rigor
unrequited love, then boringly,
hermetically, theorized women. And, finding
profession, promotion, family, one found me
a vestigial organ, subject to infection, best
removed. But the cases
that keep me up, trying to remember names,
cafés, disputes, are less clear …
It’s only certain that the fault was mine.
Explorers, certainly, for all of us
“moved.” I imagine them
in towns I never visited, every turn
of every street available on screens
but where the later, all-revealing face
never appears, while
the googled bio seems a fantasy …
Scientists, too; for they learned
new accents, tastes, ways of accommodating
and dying. In any case
the dullest will bequeath ten thousand facts,
I a few mysteries.
Grasp
Immune to its charms, ignorant of its names,
I drive into the countryside.
Odors of vegetables and animals.
Hay-fever, chaperone of intellect.
I bear in a cardboard box the relics
of the deceased, suggesting only innocence:
a past, that is, not canceled promise.
The house is as I expect, expecting little,
in need of paint to hide its other needs.
And, knocking, I must remember whether
son, daughter, or whoever is in the box,
for that can influence my reception.
Which will inevitably be bad,
though at first I’m offered a chair and awful coffee
and gaze at pious slogans, framed or carved,
I privately decode, my look approving.
Try to grasp, I urge, that I didn’t know him
or her. I’m not the police. I come
long after the police, who were and would be kinder;
it’s we around this desperately polished
table who are the cold case now.
She meant to be good, quit drugs, help people,
he to be rich, successful, male –
successful in any case, a star, a patriot!
These toys, that scrap of diary, this key
to a long-emptied safe deposit box
reveal if properly interpreted
their good intentions. The city
was cruel, but with a cruelty you wanted …
At which the beating comes. I’m prepared,
faith in non-violence never questioned;
and when, exhausted, he, they stop,
I see in them through my remaining
eye that agonizing choice of troubles,
whether to dispose of me or learn.
Junior Moment
As I awoke I wasn’t sure
what the times demanded, what diction to use.
Slang flashed and vanished
like quanta. Was a word meant
to be placed in a sentence or replace it?
And with what emphasis, what shrug or rictus?
Worse was the question
of persona and tone. Once there had been
a noncommittal caution,
a mask of belonging. Still earlier
in my genetic background lay
a touching earnestness that coincided
oddly with the “hardboiled” mode.
(At such a distance the term confused me:
surely it meant a way of being eaten?)
Later there came a frantic expressiveness
that may have been honesty, shot through
with saving moments of rage. This yielded
to a sullenness, which deepened.
How should I speak, who should I be,
I wondered, when I entered
the cafeteria, went to my locker
for my blazer, my hoodie?
Swung from bed; was surprised to encounter
my cane, my denture.
Frederick Pollack is author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; to be reissued by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, OffCourse, Bindweed (June 2016) and elsewhere.
Congratulations to Bindweed contributor, Toti O’Brien on her recent poetry collection, In her terms
Toti has contributed poetry and fiction to Bindweed and has been published in 2017, 2018 and 2020. You can read more of her work on Bindweed here.
We wish you all the best with your new book, Toti!
Bindweed Magazine 