February 2012
3 posts
1 tag
“The Train - Moscow to Yekaterinburg 27/04/11”
– By Euan Ramsay
Another rush to the train and sweat is pouring down my back as I enter the hot, cramped carriage. Carriage three, they really do make you feel like third class right from the off; before you even get on you have to walk another fifteen carriages down the platform to reach your...
1 tag
“‘You’re just not a proper lesbian couple if you don’t have a supper club and...”
– By Elizabeth Wewiora
The final allotment visit of the year took me to Belfast – a very early rise to travel across the water, and a visit that would turn out to be the most rewarding in terms of diverse allotment sites, and indeed allotment folk.
Armed with wellingtons and uncountable layers of...
1 tag
“Misspent Years”
– by Max Raskin
To know one’s life
Has been misspent
Before it can begin
To house one’s love
Where sadness lives
And so too, all one’s sins
To think of nought
Is thought misplaced
Spellbound and paralysed
To wish that lust
Unthinkable
Could simply be reprised
To hold your gaze
Once...
January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
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“Kaleidoscope Hop-Scotch”
– By Anne McColgan
Personal identification wakes in the morning
Dresses up in self- reflected shape-ography
Images fast-forward through mirrors
Somewhere, un-turned by time.
Outside the bedroom, swirl idealised concepts
Energy cuts through rubbed-out memories
Welcoming over arched exposure...
December 2011
8 posts
1 tag
“Whistle blower your table shine is mine”
– By Richard Taylor
In my mind’s eye I saw from below the coffee table again, its underside constructed for ultimate-fold and transportability. Atop this table, opposite from where I hid, stood a woman wrapped in a scarf and covered from breast to toe in a black jump suit. She whistled a tune...
1 tag
“Four feathers and an open window”
– By Richard Taylor
Of late I have been collecting the feathers that float through the window at the eastern end of my open plan living space. The feathers seem to be from pigeons that habituate their movements in flight by dipping under the bridge across from my window frame and landing reversely...
1 tag
“Saint Petersburg 18/04/11”
– By Euan Ramsay
The riverfront of St. Petersburg has a wind straight from a Siberian winter. The wide River Neva flows like a great choppy sea under grand bridges, past the Winter Palace and Russia’s imperial past. My ears burn from the cold. Wandering around, I realise where my awkward sense...
1 tag
“Different Wine”
– By Lee Devonish
She had to go outside. Indoors she felt the entire day roll up behind her like a scroll and ahead there lay only more of the same, only in the dark. The hangover was hard earned, the headache well deserved. Punishment was what she needed. Whatever was left of the sunlight was going...
1 tag
“Bread is the land, the land is bread”
– By Maja Pegan
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shall return.
-Bible (Old Testament)
Genesis 3:19.
There is something basic, earthy about bread, don’t you think? It is vital for our...
1 tag
“Black Dust, White Mountain”
– By Sera Marshall
There is not much in it: between a pulverised mountain and a pulverised heart. From the outset, they are both formidable. Immovable, unsurpassable, unassailable. Daunting. Although most do not realise the magnitude they are up against. In the effort to conquer another’s heart;...
1 tag
“The Land of the Moomins 17/04/11”
– By Euan Ramsay
The sun shines down on the land of the Moomins. Light blue skies and distant cotton wool clouds. Red wooden houses with white windows and mossy roofs sit amongst forests and flat green plains. The naked Silver Birch stands straight and tall beside the pine, which glows with life...
1 tag
“For Happiness”
– By Lee Devonish
Every day
Wake up and say
“He simply did not love me enough.
The bastard.”
Stir.
Repeat.
November 2011
9 posts
1 tag
“Access Denied”
– By Elizabeth Wewiora
As it turns out, trying to access some allotments sites are considerably harder than others. Whether casually passing by or formally contacting the local allotment officer or site secretary, sometimes the answer will just be no.
Why? Well with growing cases of left and...
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“Glasgow to Helsinki 16/04/11”
– By Euan Ramsay
The sun comes up on the first day, it’s been a long time coming since I watched it go down last night. It is 6am and I am surrounded by retired Canadian women, forty-two in total I’m told, all on a tour here in Scotland. I have been up all night; dinner, wine, beer and a...
1 tag
“31st October”
– By David Flood
Batman wipin’ shite aff his shoe.
Batman staggering after his pal, aw upset, ‘Where ye gawin?’
Wonder Woman crying, alone in a bus stop.
The Muppets n a banana are all Rangers fans.
They know the words to all the songs.
Neil Lennon and a priest are knocked...
1 tag
“Dog on Bike”
– By Andrew Taylor
‘Travel’ they say! Still there is too much shit talk. The cause of it all I wonder while rich businessmen conceive impossible and infeasible methods of controlling the whole ordeal. It’s a business plan; you move the whole of gravity a few million feet through space. Political...
1 tag
“Broken”
– By Lee Devonish
Sleepless night
After night
Flight and fight
Empty pockets
Empty cupboards
Empty hands
Empty chest
Hole in the ceiling, hole in the wall, hole in me.
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“Existentialist
Glaswegian
Poems”
– By Damian Reilly
The Absurdity Of Life
fuckinjokesoitiz
The Inherent Emptiness Of The Universe
fuckawtayseeheermate
The Immutable Law Of Impermanence
ifitznowanhingitzanother
The Inevitability of Death
haubigmanyerteazoot
October 2011
6 posts
1 tag
“Bore Bore”
– By Sean Cumming
Bore a whole in me
Boredom bores
A deep French sigh
In black and white
Cover your eyes
Now speak
Inevitability shakes like
A dancer high on mdma
And that new drug you told
Me about
Bore oh bore
Bore the slick street
Bore the twisted ankle
Bore the fallen angle
Bore the...
1 tag
“Day 10 at the Allotment
‘The best Advice from Mr R is not to take advice from...”
– By Elizabeth Wewiora
I met with one gentleman. Mr R, and his neighbouring plot owner, Mrs M today – who both seemed to find the allotment site as a constant source for conversation, opinion and amusement. Mr R has had his plot for over 50 years, and over this time has seen many other plot owners...
1 tag
“Waiting Game”
– By Mary Paterson
I picked up an old magazine in the
waiting room and mindlessly turned its pages
and let my gaze slide over its shiny
faces as familiar and strange as a
beast at the zoo, angular models and
fresh skinned socialites and furniture sourced
from exotic places, an...
1 tag
“Going to the cinema with a colleague”
– By Mary Paterson
This would all
be so much
better if
we didn’t
have to make
small talk on
the way home
1 tag
“WHAR DAE YI STAE NOO?”
– By JV
Look this is very important
And as I’ve said many times
Economical with the truth?
I’ve got driving fines?
Ah ken, that’s whaye am askin yi
Yir lies stick tae yi lik glue
The patsies hiv aa bin cote
So whar dae yi stae noo?
Wiz it you that claimed tae get yir moat cleaned?
And yir...
1 tag
“BEHOLD”
–
by Gary Reid
Inspired by ‘Diana & Callisto”
National Gallery of Scotland
‘Be careful child.
For that is what you are still.
A child with child
I was young,
I was beautiful and, yes,
I was human.
Then I crossed Diana
And behold me now.
Does anyone even notice my...
September 2011
6 posts
1 tag
“the right time”
– By Kim Simpson
it’s only been 15 seconds
i tried to make it more
but i couldn’t hold onto it any longer
the timing was all wrong
it should have been less dramatic
but it wasn’t
it’s only been there 15 minutes
it should not have taken as long
as that
now i don’t even have time for a song
...
1 tag
“Untitled”
– by Matthew Holmes
say I take a 1000 Mg Xanax and 30 minutes later;
I dive into an aquarium.
for every pebble at the bottom, i’ll count.
‘1, 2, 3, 4, etc’
then what?
jump out and find a towel.
‘5, 6, 7,’
i’ll eat another and try to find home.
honestly diving into the fishbowl,
...
1 tag
“Dark Shadows Prevail, Dark Anger Surrounds”
– by Kenneth W Allan
Fearless characters of hieroglyphic illuminations perform a frenzied orchestra of rage and anger. Thundering screams and beckoning cries crescendo in an arena of diffused light. Powerful blackening threats redeem themselves as heroic Trojan warriors, slaying each tormentor into...
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“Bounce and haul-ass”
–
——
Sitting on the bright orange plush sofa in my open plan loft apartment I relax, having just listened to a rendition of some other song or other on Jazz FM. I turn my head to the corner of the room looking passed the spiral staircase in front of me. There, in this corner, I see my desk. I stand...
8 tags
Very Small Kitchen. →
paulantonycarr:
VerySmallKitchen Residency: Nathaniel’s Perpetual Motion (2)
I am currently doing a three month residency on VerySmallKitchen. Image-text pairings from a new narrative thread of my Excerpts series – entitled Nathaniel’s Perpetual Motion – will be debuting over on VerySmallKitchen between now and October.
In the second installment of image-text pairings, Nathaniel conceptualizes...
August 2011
10 posts
“Imagining Worlds #2”
– By Anne McColgan & Jane Hartshorn
Butterfly Navigation
I heard on Radio 4 quite recently
That butterflies are cleverer
Than you might think.
New research suggests they have
A natural capacity to navigate
Themselves towards light in
A straight line.
I used to think they were...
1 tag
“Contact
- On the Psychopathology of Self, Between The Two Deaths ”
– U.H DEMATAGODA
//~~~//
____________
‘Life has become the ideology of its own absence.’ - Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951) Robert Lamont awoke from a dreamless sleep with a sudden start. Various plastic tubes were hanging from his limbs and appendages, but at this stage he is...
1 tag
“Funeral Masks”
– By Sean Cumming
The leopard
Picked off his spots
Like clotted blood
Laid them purposefully
On the table
A game of checkers
With the snake
Tasting a change
In the flavour of the weather
Peeled off his skin
Awkwardly
Like pulling a bribe
From a hidden pocket
The leopard
Not to be...
1 tag
“Allotment Diaries – day 6
‘She is the brains, I am merely the Brawn’”
– By Elizabeth Wewiora
Plot owner T considered himself the ‘worst combination of the two types of allotmenteers’ on this site. He described himself as a man of the older generation who likes to see things done in a certain way, but also considered himself very much more like one of the younger...
1 tag
“Keep stepping stay hydrated”
– By Richard Taylor
Repeat these two phrases: “keep stepping” “stay hydrated”, practice saying them one after the other again and again until they’re meaning is lost. Repeat them so much so that you no longer have a clear idea of which phrase did indeed come first. Now,...
2 tags
“Imagining Worlds”
– By Anne McColgan & Jane Hartshorn
Shadow Girl
She sleeps in the honey dew forest
Childhood sweet-pea stopped in stone
Her pearly young body a dusky statue
Of something that once was
So innocently alive and free
What happened to her, you wonder…
Writer’s block / mind...
1 tag
“Etoile a cinq points”
– By J.D.A. Winslow
Mocks a kind of antelope, mild and gracious, gassed like reptiles including large crocodiles in Asia and Oceania.
Long and fine.
Freeze, kind of love birds.
Species of leopard (has rosettes) South America.
Horizontal, vertical, oblique, radius vector.
Star has five...
1 tag
“Jake Jarvis’ Juice Experiment”
– By Alex Allan
Prologue
Being one for writing his thoughts down rather than speaking them, he once wrote in his journal; “The inadequate support of cheap imitation shoes is slowly crippling a whole generation of young wannabe fashionistas. Trying desperately to follow the trends of today and...
1 tag
“Red Dust”
– By Miriam Vaswani
The bus rattles to a stop in a dusty square, spilling bags of rice, sari fabric, two crates of furious chickens and one conspicuous backpack into the dirt.
The rickshaw drivers are queued near the road. I walk toward a young man with quiet eyes, and...
1 tag
“A Famous Man”
– By Mary Paterson
A famous man died recently. His obituary was in all the papers, and his death was mentioned on the television news. He was famous for something that happened before you were born and until you’d read the notices, you didn’t know who he was.
But you saw his name on the day of...
July 2011
11 posts
1 tag
“The adventures of Kim-bob [part 1]”
– By Richard Taylor
I slide open my phone to access saved contacts; under favourites I find Kimbal’s number and press dial. The phone nears on connection and then fails – I lift the phone away from my ear and press re-dial, this time it connects, but alas to a foreign dial-tone: he is on his travels...
1 tag
“Monsieur L’Artiste”
– By Gary Reid
“Right, how are you with flowers?” He came storming into the studio in his usual presumptive manner.
“Well, they’re pretty and colourful and….” I stammered in reply. He was always like this when work was scarce. Perhaps I’m being too charitable with that last...
3 tags
“Exquisite Corpse; a writing exercise.”
– By Sean Cumming, David Flood & Jane Hartshorn
The Pot Hole
It was anomalous for the Head of Glasgow City Council to receive a postcard at his office. Letters were rare, petitions unusual, emails and post its from his secretary, everyday. The grinning yellow full stop emblazed on the thin...
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“from MOBSTER FRACTIONS”
– By David Berridge
I left the farm for rumours of the coffee shops of Brick Lane. Amidst a hedgerow, a loyalty card two drinks away from one free. On my way from Somerset to London I visited the Three Gorges Damn, proof that the world is more interconnected daily. It had been presumed I was...
1 tag
“A Murder of Crows”
– By Wendy McCredie
The first time I saw her as an adult she was walking down the Old Town road. In her wake a dozen crows wheeled through the air or gathered on the arms of the streetlights. It was the crows I noticed first, they were silent, creating none of the usual cacophony that accompanies a...