Issue 6: January 2004

Paul Batchelor | Zoë Brigley | Olivia Cole | Sasha Dugdale | Anna Woodford

PAUL BATCHELOR

The Vampire

   Tom Collier hath sold his coals,
      And made his market today,
   And now he danceth with the Devil,
      For like will to like alway.

                              Ulpian Fulwell, 1568

The nights close in fast
& cold up there in the north.
Hesitation mists the glass before your face.
Few locals venture out from their homes.

Our mam, however, sticks a tape in for Coronation Street
& ushers us out.
Clucking & fussing like nervous chickens,
my brother & I pile into the car

and the road unwinds like an old cine-film
pitted with pot-holes & cat's-eyes that wink.
There are many occasions when it does not snow.
Many times thunder & lightning fail to show,

but I won't remember those times.
With barely a farmhouse for miles around,
we bounce along the road's broken spine
& sing Cushie Butterfield, or Dance To Your Daddy,

or demand that mam tell us over again
how the road is sinking because it was built
on the mines where granddad was buried alive
(countless times, earning him his nickname 'Lucky').

The road ends with another mine.
Mam kills the engine, & darkness settles over us
like a suffocating picnic blanket.
Anticipation licks its fangs.

Above us in the purple sky
a full moon poaches itself in the clouds.
My brother & I press our faces to the glass,
squeak crosses in the misted-up bits, and wait.

A wire fence & a floodlit watchtower
mark the only gate to the mining site.
In the front, mam gets over to the other side,
adjusts the mirror, winds the seat with a sheet ...

... The car rocks about like a boat in a storm
when he climbs in, all shoulders & hands.
The kiss he smacks on mam's cheek leaves a bruise,
& his clothes are heavy with the odour of the mine:

old earth newly turned: a smell that sticks
with you like a lesson you wish you'd never learned.
Donkey-jacket dancing with coal-dust, he bellows:
NOO THEN, LADS ... ARE YE' AHL-RIGHT?

My brother & I nod our pumpkin heads
& grin our pumpkin grins. When this pleases him
he reaches behind his seat
& grabs at our knees, his hand swinging like a shovel.

The Bridesmaid

sits naked by the window, last light of a summer evening,
pinning and tacking, turning the fabric,
tailor-tacks guiding the darts into place.

Clipping the curves of the hips to ensure
the seam hangs true by the hidden cog-teeth. Cutting.
Dragging out a false stitch, turning the fabric.

The whispers: Why such a hasty wedding?
No doubt she'll have to keep an eye on him!
The lining sliding inside-out, held flush

against the waxed-silk, warm as flesh.
The looks exchanged when she walked by.
The quick precision of each scissor-snip.

Close-by, a yellow candle in a jar
and a heart-shaped box of shuttles & pins.
She pauses. Lights the candle. Her reply:

It's no concern of yours. A give-away.
The flame sobs & steadies, her back bunches,
and her fingers work with spider-efficiency

over the delicate circuitry of the dress.

Keening

    i.m. Barry MacSweeney

The quality of keening is not narrow.
It ranges freely, back roads & low roads:
a violin heard from a window at night
(a silken rubbing, a tune you cannot place),
a fellside lapwing signalling in slate grey rain:
all this betokens keening. It travels incognito
as lyric, or as perfume from a dress,
passes customs unfazed; is taken as currency
everywhere, ache bearing witness to ache.
Keening puts words in hungry mouths,
gives tongue without language, longing without hope.
With keening no man's hand is strong,
no heart true. It mars the wild
& we who were not wild enough are marred
equally. Truly your riches are worthless;
your poverty yet shall be rendered more bitter
with keening, who has no tears. Let blood be drawn
& let the dogs be driven far from the hearth
before keening shares tears: beholden to no one,
it suffers all woes, & none may evade it.

'The Vampire' was first published in Reactions (Pen & Inc, 2000)
'The Bridesmaid' was first published in Fighting in the Captain's Tower (Hawthorn Press, 2002)
'Keening' was first published in Poetry Wales.

Paul Batchelor was born in Northumberland. His poems and reviews have appeared in the Reactions anthologies, Poetry Wales and Poetry Review. A chapbook, Fighting in the Captain's Tower (written with J.P. Nosbaum) was published by Hawthorn Press. He is soon to begin a PhD on the poetry of Barry MacSweeney.