by Oz Hardwick
Dropping the One
We’re dancing like there’s no tomorrow, and all the signs suggest that we may be right. Wars are elbowing across contested borders, and new strains of old diseases are mutating like mad in schoolrooms and railway carriages. Diplomats draft treaties, and doctors dish out antibiotics, but it’s all placebo and prestidigitation, slipping false hope out of expensively tailored sleeves and holding it up for the masses like a parcel of unknown provenance. It could be aid, or it could be an IED, but when we open it up, there’s nothing but cancelled promises and a banging countdown at 120 BPM. We’re dancing in the schoolrooms and railway carriages. We’re dancing on the borders. There’s surely no tomorrow. There’s barely even today.
Squaring Up to the Antediluvian
Autofocus clicks to a clay-daubed face, white-eyed in smears of red. It’s a statue of a state of mind you’d prefer to avoid if it were at all possible but, regrettably, it’s not. Look closer: it’s your thumbprints edging the cheeks and picking out that awkward jaw, and it strikes you like a flung schoolbook that if you looked down at your hands, you would still see muck from the red riverbed compacted beneath your nails. But your focus is fixed on ochre lips, opened to a slit, an obscene black crack that threatens whispers the moment your back is turned. Then // focus shifts to a million identical moppets, patient as xenon-124, each face a non-negotiable demand for explanations and recompense in the light of every past transgression. Where are you going to find words like that? How are you even going to move your hands?
Not My Ithaca
Done with smoke, done with shatter, the shamed lead the shameful to the shore, with its boats of bones, ships of shadows, blind seers, and dead crews bending to oars. Here, a figure adrift from myth, arms feathering in fearful transformation. Here, a marked man stumbling from a ballad’s lost stanzas, the horizon closing at his shoulder. Women sell winds by the stinking sack, and wise children draft maps in dried blood and fish scales. This is where truth washes ashore, wrapped in scraps of stories, its ink still wet and its heart still beating. Bring sharp knives and silence. We’ll burn it for a beacon at the dark of the Moon, then smear ourselves with ashes to hide our shame.
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