ian seed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
FLAWLESS AVENUE I couldn't rename
something longer, those times kneeling down. The hand has left a stain,
the city without a hangman. I came here to capture the freshness
of the moment. And they despised them of another brethren. It's
only a piece of abandoned scaffolding, blood and hair stuck to
one side. You removed the sentence because it had no relevance, but the
sentence hung around for a lifetime, tingling in the palms of
your hands. No one believed you, stroking grey hair. The photo
was taken on the eve of war, eyes calm and confident. The blow
arrived unseen. One side of the face was visible through the dark
pane. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman close enough to
touch.
ALMOST Only one island among others. Beyond the
thin stream, where footprints vanished, nobody noticed you waiting, particularly
at night. The string of notes was bent to your desire, dancing just below the
surface, marking your progress, although at that time invisible. I leaned over your lips. It
seemed an odd miracle that my feet were moving, taking me from one side of the road to
the other.
NIGHT SHIFT From a distance the trees look joined
together. The hills exist as an etching, not yet awake. He seems
to have been standing there all night. It's the first time you've
smiled at him, though you?ve seen him before. Crushed leaves by
the track, the moment of freedom when you board the train. A door
slides open, shuts again. A man sits opposite you. You dare not look up into
his face. Empty rooms of abandoned houses, a curtain fluttering in a smashed window.
You?ll need to get milk and bread. He gets up from his seat when you do.
CHARITY You pick up where the thread left off,
enter a landscape the people around you are too busy to see. Time to reclaim, if it
is a question of reclaiming at all. What does 'fond of' mean in this context,
where you are dazzled by sunlight? They appear from nowhere, pieces of a puzzle that won?t
fit, but beautiful as fragments. It would be a mistake to wait at this point. You
have to go on, try to reach 100, a destiny that would weigh on your conscience if
you hadn?t slipped around the corner into the next street.
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ian seed
edits Shadow Train. He
writes
poetry, fiction and reviews, as translator. His last collection
was Rescue (2002). Work has recently appeared in Dream Catcher,
Great Works, Green Integer Review, Litter, PN Review, Poetry
Nottingham, and Stride Magazine. Future plans for publication
include a book of prose poems and a tranlsation of Pierre Reverdy's Le Voleur de Talan. |
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