Issue 12: June 2006

Julia Bird | Jane Holland | Gregory Leadbetter | Andrew O'Donnell | Adam O'Riordan | Camellia Stafford

JANE HOLLAND

Cyber Infidelity

Beautiful lover, still beautiful
because unseen, as far apart

as two incalculable griefs
on either side of a war, cast

the broken parts of yourself
over the bridge that separates us —

no less incomprehensible
than history — back into the void

where a limp, or squint, halitosis,
puckered rolls of flesh, a voice

abrupt as a bedspring, can be shed
for this dazzling dive naked

into a fast-as-light vernacular,
cunnilingus of the internet,

fellatio of different parts
of speech — delete, delete, amend —

while the caches of the fluttering ghosts
of our other halves, asleep in bed,

send silent cookies to the heart:
bedtime now, put out the light.

Walks With My Father

My father used to park at Cronk Ny Arrey Laa
and make us tramp
the one and a half thousand feet up there
in thick clinging mist,
falling back with our trousers soaked
and my mother incensed, stuck
home with the Sunday roast. Once
through a fog-drenched cleft in the hills
he led us down to a pebble beach
hundreds of metres below,
twin toddlers and a twelve year old, lost
on the sheer hang of a cliff.
I like to think it was his sense of humour
made him do it. But it was
that sort of place, the Isle of Man,
back in the late seventies.
There were wet slate chasms in the earth
and sheeps' skulls, whitened
by wind, and the grey stone tholtans
of abandoned farms
where a coarse grass shivered over lintels
fallen onto disused paths.
You could lie on your back there
and see the grey sky
through an absence of roof, listen to the wind
finger those broken windows
like hole stops on a flute.
There are few places left like that now,
ranging wild and free,
and no mother to complain. Once
I came home with a frog
in my boot.

 

Warwickshire

Shakespeare's country, they call this;
furthest from the coast

I've ever lived, where dawn mist
is the closest we come to seascape.

I stand at the kitchen window,
try to imagine water

instead of trees, salt waves
instead of sheep, England

my beleaguered sunken island —
no sign of a peak, only

that thin steely line
they must have seen from the ark

in those languorous days
before the dove came back,

a green twig in her beak.

 

Jane Holland is originally from London and grew up on the Isle of Man. Her first poetry collection The Brief History of A Disreputable Woman was published by Bloodaxe. She has also published a novel and runs Poets On Fire, a resource for live poetry.