Issue 1: July 2003

Karen Annesen | Simon Barraclough | Helen Clare | Simon Rees-Roberts | John Stammers | Roisin Tierney

SIMON BARRACLOUGH

Tuning Out

All-night-radio again,
  England sound asleep, but
     New England battening down

as a hurricane musters
   her final fling, dressed to kill,
     whipping the coast with her hem

of whalebone and electric stitching.
  Stamping her flamenco
     from the Azores to the Grand Banks.

An English voice interviews families
  in cellars crammed with
     soup cans and prayers,

candles and cookies and
  first aid kits, until the link-up
     is lost and I take my cue

to light out of there
  by turning the dial to starboard
     and steering my bed Eastwards.

My little green line of longitude
  glows with St. Elmo's Fire
     as it trembles left to right

across the blank map of static,
  divining a jazz of foreign chatter,
     whale-song, and witchy harmonics,

through the eye-wall of the storm
  where lost voices huddle
     and out to the calmer channels

where bandwidths unbend
  and effects find their causes,
     Maydays their deliverers.

Carried along the Gulf Stream,
  my thin line of wakefulness
     bushes like a cat's tail

as it slots into the groove
  of Greenwich and passes over
    Bromley-by-Bow towards the Baltic.

For Sale (after Lowell)

A draughty shoebox up on blocks,
Yorkshire Tea and terrier prints,
lived in just a year —
my Dad's caravan at Sand le Mer
was on the market the month he died.
Leaky, salt-lashed, anonymous,
Beatles and brass band LPs
warping in the yearlong must,
a copy of Emmanuelle
and framed royalties from Radio Three.
His second divorce beached him here
and he couldn't support his own weight,
and his dog gnawed the fur
off its paws for a year
and had to be given away.

Simon is originally from Yorkshire but now lives and works in London as a freelance writer. He won the poetry section of the London Writers Competition in 2000 and has published in various magazines, including Magma and The Manhattan Review.