Kirsti Whalen: Brave Like

an excerpt



Gaffer toe inside lake water. Not cold in there. Is not. Like. Imagined. Run, he say. Little eel snap snapping at your toes. Water like mud and thick too. Shallow but. Out. Out, Love Little. Out for it. Little run, Little One. Little One, his name for me.



But we are West. Rules snap snapping. This the other side. East of home and West of an older one. Western Springs. Springs

Barb why don�t you get an Italian greyhound?

I love the way they lean against you
with total love and adoration.

And I love those daft dogs
that kind of bounce with floppy ears.

And little dogs that sit in your arms
and tremble a lot.

I love love love those.
But then again � tigers.



Taken from Seven Silly Questions ... for Barb Jungr, 11th May 2011. Submitted by Andrew Bailey

Se�n Lysaght: A Jay Feather

A Jay Feather

�for Lynda

I know of a wood that hangs
like a heavy drape
flung over a hill in the midlands.

You can hear jays deep in its folds
tearing like engines
at the fabric of a winter�s day.

Way down in the leaf litter,
beyond where it is normal
or decent for a walker to go,

there must be a fragment of that blue,
that eye through which you dive on a thread,

Echoes of Silence

Killed the family and went to the movies.
And nobody knows who he is.
Meat tenderizer and saliva
remove bloodstains.
Fornication changes its skin
Goodbye to the story,
memories they told me,
trees in autumn (three colors: white).
Join us at another place,
a polemical mile-high skyscraper.
Free wheelchairs available.



A selection of texts from the MoMA Member Catalogue, May/June 2014. Submitted by Howie Good.

Jean Sprackland: At Night in the House

At night in the house
a river runs through her

carrying its burdens
the golden barges the dead griefs and the quick fishes

She lies alone
wet at the mouth
and between the legs

and it runs not always placid
sometimes angry

A row over the cook

After the stabbing, the
�120,000 a year actuary
ripped some pages out of
a Game of Thrones book
and shot himself with a speargun.

The actuary slept with
the fluffy duck every night
because it still bore the scent
of his ex-partner's perfume.

But the actuary suffered
panic attacks and sat around
the flat all day eating food
from a saucepan,
snorting coke
and watching daytime TV.



Court reports tweeted by @CourtNewsUK on 1st May, 2014. Submitted by Marika.

The burn

Boredom makes us do it, that and the chase.
The sun whitens the grass until it's ripe
to burn and then we light it, watch and wait.

The flames take the land, they come and we run.
Us in our shorts, them in their gear, too
clumsy to run but fast because they're men.

We're laughing and falling, stumbling and rolling
safe if not caught, too young to worry
about the dead birds and black landscape.



From Gawain Barnard's photography exhibition, as previewed on A Fine Beginning: Made in Wales, BBC News In Pictures, 14 March 2014. Words omitted: 'and then' (line 4), 'and' (7), 'from the burn' (8), 'broken land' (9). Submitted by Gabriel Smy.