Issue 1: July 2003

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

HELEN CLARE

The Small Hours

Midnight — by the window eating Aero,
humming Lord and Father of mankind —
a vixen scrikes into a dark so soft
it holds her cry between the particles of air.

Undisturbed, the kink-tailed tube mice
pick at crumbs beneath the tracks, a rat
chews herself a nest from cardboard boxes.
Sometime on a night like this I'll join them,

be noisy, naked underneath the moon
until someone, maybe anyone,
makes a hammock of their limbs,
and holds my bones as they were held

that airy night, when three of us
were carried car to kitchen, feigning sleep
in moth-light, and I, the heaviest
with dangling legs, my father's cargo.