Issue 12: June 2006

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

ANDREW O'DONNELL

Written on Air in a Rain Storm

What do you look at? Who? Where do we go? Not go?
And since it is this, and always will be — what wrench
of a word, what leaf... could drop in the mess of all these
beige buildings, charcoal hills?... for an answer, the exchange

of several stricken teeth, axed in a stone of drunk weather.
What rain could stoop to picking up the laughter and
the screaming in these cloud-gilded walls? If we could
we would and do, and so will, so will... But it is

all rounded out first, no one's bearing out to anything —
the last laugh is the first look you give, broken records of
What do you look at? Who? Where do we go? Not go?
And the sky coughs up a branch of the sea; sun that won't

be watered — hung above the flush of mouth — an umbilical,
needed vision in which your eyes, constantly reviving
and revising, placeless to meet the rain — curse the day
we were born, the day we will die — idiotically

thankful, dissolving, hammers, mercies, rain, hammers.

 

Three Views of a Used Condom

The rickshawed middle,
knotted; a brass serviette
  holder — the burnt grill
of a car without headlights,
vast space of the long table.

*

Wrinkled top-high ridge,
muddling snow of final push —
  altitudinal.
Sherpa light juniper leaves —
the mountain their goddess.

*

Airport of an inn —
condensation-spiked windows.
  Planes drifting to gates,
drops of zlurring bay hangars,
pilots summoned from hotels.

 

Toby Davis Reads Rimbaud at Parliament Square

/ We're all totally fucked, I'm assuming s'you know —
locked in't Chandos with this pithy firebrand of time
which I thought'd must've forgotten me, O age-beaked crow
of cities clawcawing along their carriageways' primer;
some horrible night in a cafe, the drinks not decided on
an' suchansuch news of Toby's friend, cut down at a train
window on't way back from where he'd efficiently come from —
but several years, war — much of it much the same...

/ Why always the lust o' t brush o' the blur o' the scene
as you b-blather through it? I always have a palette lurched —
o' different greens, lurched, rung dry in my logged brain
when, glory, gl- Davis reading poems after some march
or other, in the original French, teetering his piper's feet
along't usurped curb, vast sounding, whatever the meaning.

 

Andrew O'Donnell was born in 1977 and currently lives in Korea. He studied English and Philosophy at Staffordshire University.