…and now on to the February edition of our minizine, with as much lipstick on our handkerchiefs as Mario’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
In this issue, Sue Clennell checks the ripeness, Zenobia Frost dreams of death and love, Mark William Jackson answers at the end and Kirk A.C. Marshall takes a breather.
Look homeward, angels!
Jeremy
The Black Rider
by Sue Clennell
She is pepper on steak, rich gold capsicum. I can’t help it, offer her gifts because of her youth and brown eyes. The eyes of a doe, no, darker, dark chocolate so good for the heart. Would like to show her Venezia because of the smoothness of her neck, for her to hear a man playing an accordion in a gondola, see the rainbow coloured houses of Burano across the lagoon, buy jewellery from an island where residents slashed traitors’ hearts with glass stilettos, visit during Carnevale and revel in anonymity.
She wants me to wear my golden Pharaoh mask to the Gay Parade. There is a Madonna video where she sings Like a Virgin on the waterways of Venice and a man wears a lion mask and scoops her in his arms. Playing with a lion on the Rialto bridge, no, not the Rialto, one of the four hundred and thirty three bridges in Venice anyway. Oh yes, she’d like that. She also likes Leela the Amazon warrior with the tight skin dresses in Doctor Who, does not like the kissy new doctor.
She gorges seven loquats for breakfast, downing them with yoghurt, there they go sliding down that palm oil throat. Don’t eat the peary loquats too soon my love lest they be tart.
Says she has the passion of a thousand sea horses, salt on my lips. She has it, that thing, I have seen straight women preen in her presence. Likes girls not of her persuasion, feels they are more of a challenge. An aggressive pick-up artist, a show pony, says sometimes it pays to be naughty. I am her horse whisperer, images connect our minds. Trust me, me in my golden Pharaoh mask, you can forgive anything of someone who makes you laugh.
Likes my curios, collectibles, does not realise she is the most treasured ornament of my collection, my Meryt (beloved), Neferusobek, Nefertiti/Nofretete, Nefertari.
May you not be like Nitocris, the beautiful avenger who drowned her brother’s enemies, for I will be your mandrake root. For you I will don the false beard of Hatshepsut. Remember how we lay on the banks of the river and listened to a hot guitar? Like the ancients I am not afraid to express my love through tales of gods, poetry and dreams. I will devour you like a grape tomato, seeds between my teeth. Like rose and lemon flavoured Turkish delight, the sweet and the bitter all in one.
She says older women can last the distance, have more stamina. We will walk the Nile together, the old and the new, in a land of stranger historic trysts, that of brother and sister. In a land where Egyptians were building pyramids when mammoths still roamed Siberia.
I will take her to the Spanish steps in Rome where the Azaleas preen pinkly beside. To the house where autumnal Keats breathed his last ode. I would show her where that poet wrote his name on Shakespeare’s ceiling in Stratford-on-Avon, but they have whitewashed him out of that moment of existence. Byron’s scratchings on the sanctuary of Poseidon and Athena, however, still stay to gaze upon, I am thinking now of the Greeks who have always known and loved us.
For she is the sunflower in a sea of lavender, the rainbow in a trout’s eye Newton’s white light, the welcome presence of rain in the air. She is a John Waterhouse painting, rock star Cher strutting around in just a black ribbon and stockings, a Cretan snake goddess wearing those reptiles like bracelets, though her bite be gentle. She is electric magnetic doesn’t look at me when in a crowd but knows my presence.
I have heard it said her breasts are two roses, so small so fragile.
Come with me to see Galileo’s digit preserved, the tower from which he leaned to drop a feather, or would you sooner hie to England where Charlotte and Emily wooed their rugged hero? I see you as a slim Shakespearean boy playing the girl in the old Globe. Like Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, we will say, What are men to rocks and mountains? … And when we do return, it shall not be like other travelers … No, we will not be like other travelers, trust me, me in my golden Pharaoh mask.
For I am older than you, a ripe loquat waiting to be consumed. I am the full moon to your star ...Muse put honey on my tongue… If you accept I will show you immortality.
For she is raw energy raw sugar in the cane. Dreams of Paris, says lack of sex gives her constipation, needs to be assured each new day that she is beautiful, tells lies with the biggest buttery eyes, knows when you‘re trying on mind games, Narcissus loving her own thin body. I will tempt her appetite with cherry earrings asparagus spears mango juice and strawberries, take her and her bike to Tuscan poppy fields.
Her hair wafts coconut milk, I am thinking now of Fletcher Christian and Gauguin with the dusky musky women of the South seas.
Say you are not spurning me for another. Quince in my mouth, shouting in my sleep. I am thinking now of all the ships that will founder on the strength of your sweet breath. How the air chokes with the dust of Africa, and temples are just crumbling stones after all. You think that I can wait till the Nile freezes over? Trust me, me in my golden Pharaoh mask, such things have indeed come to pass.
by Zenobia Frost
I dreamt that you were dead
and I was told off in class for grieving,
even though I’d made it on time for once.
Your funeral was touching,
although I probably said something
offhand about touching you.
I dreamt that you were dead,
and I talked to you like you
were an answering machine.
Long monologues beginning, “It’s me,”
and ending, “I don’t know what I’m trying to say.
You know where to find me.”
I dreamt that you were dead
and you knew where to find me.
It wasn’t such a shock.
You were right when you said
no one else would have believed
you were a ghost.
I dreamt that you were dead
and it was grand. We did all the things
we used to do before you developed
that abstract sense of duty.
I dreamt that you were dead,
and you kissed me in public. We slept in
on rainy days. You seemed solid
for once, and for once
you stuck around.
I dreamt that you were dead
and you said that you loved me,
because there was nothing left
to stop you now.
by Mark William Jackson
I searched in the tattered pages of time
through jungles of wine
and clouds too light
to hold water
in wet dreams of anger
I crashed through the door
to find an empty room
with no windows
the light socket shocked my tongue
should have checked the power
if, at the end I’m asked
I’ve learned nothing other than
do not try to kiss
electricity
By Kirk A.C. Marshall
Salvatore King Spinoza – cobalt eyes gleaming to adjust – hulked with the shuffling lethargy of all night-annihilated shift-workers, up the internal flock of stairs within the meat locker of Spiro Bonanza’s Red Light Diner, and burst into the winter dusk.
He exhaled the city, in its polychromatic tangles of moonlight smoke, into one spectacular breath-bouquet through his fingers. His gaze hunted the madness of the dark, teeming with movement, rancour, shadows and human sound. A sonic empire, the sleeping-but-sleepless city.
He stood in a white chef smock bruised with blood, a human atlas of slaughter, scarlet continents separating and expanding against his cold flesh. These were the butchers’ bloodflowers, plasmic blooms too surly to poison, no matter how much detergent or soda and soap or barbershop chemical bleach Salvatore might hope to immerse himself in.
Each night he would confront the graveyard-shift duties of the job, brazen in a uniform of immaculate whiteness, and each night he would depart before 5:00am, while the sun was still recovering from its astrological haze, adrift in clothes saturated with carnage. He liked to pretend to his sleep-consumptive, ache-slandered self that it was the regalia of a timberland wolf, his death-soaked smock, because didn’t they so often sport manes of lustrous black caked with the battle and blood of the slain? Who was he fooling; he looked like an uncoordinated obstetrician, not a beast of pinewood snows.
What he needed best now was a cigarette: there they were, squelched and flattened into the ass-pocket of his blue jeans, a cosmos in collision, a match-face on the underside of his heel, a sudden lurch of soft sound, a sudden burst and a trembling light: a flame eroding the tip of a smoke like a taper.
Ah... Salvatore breathed in nicotine and relaxed.
There was something spectral and sublime about this well-manipulated routine, something of a subdued and lazy beauty about standing in the snow, with a smoke, after work. He could still hear the clamour of the other chefs trading tomcat hollers and diffuse perversions over the fabled hush of the downward-spiralling frost, could still apprehend the noisy vicissitudes of his boss’ final-minute requests, but that world down there, of labour and sweat and bourbon-tempered wit, was already swiftly subsiding, its rinse of life now dimming to accommodate the buzz of the traffic above, the cobblestone scramble of glass bottles and the friendless thunder of a car door slamming a gradient of streets away.
Salvatore King Spinoza huddled beneath the constellation of descending flakes, and warmed himself with a frivolous smile at his toes. Pay was coming in this morning.
Which meant hot mulled wine and knuckle-shots of gin and vermouth; a hoot lounging over the bleachers at a downtown slugfest with money on the prizefighter; an immodest breakfast of butterscotch and cherry mascarpone pancakes; a jug of black coffee; a hotdog with caramelised onions and yellow peppers; a steambath in some all-night pimp-gallery dive; and maybe a trip to the zoo tomorrow if he was awake enough to manage it, before work claimed his hands, eyes, focus and perspiration for another six hours.
There was good in the world tonight, he thought. There was possibility and ambition; another morning to brave the almost-atomic fallout of a twilight territory of powder and luminous doorways bristling with music, the monasterial whipcrack of billiard ball on billiard ball, the whisper-flash of some taut-breasted dragonfly of an alley stripper, as she lunged and winked like a blade in the darkness. There were no further reflections forthcoming of what it was he was doing down in that chopshop, no strategic and surprised fevered-memory of a cleaver rending marrow from bone in the refrigerated meat locker of Spiro Bonanza’s Red Light Diner.
He’d weathered that shank-rankling, marrow-winnowed, steel-toed furnace of frozen meats – The Kitchen – long enough to develop certain intractable skills and precocities when it came to creating a distance between his world above ground and the occasional mutilation he was obliged to perform beneath its sidewalks.
Salvatore had – to summon one of his many uncommon qualifications to hand – swiftly emerged within the hospitality industry of wholesale livestock butchery to become a triumphalist with the blade: there wasn’t another squint-sullied soul as economical with a knife, nor as generous with his cuts.
You wouldn’t survive in this realm of blue-collar bloodletting if you were inflexible of moral or feeble of constitution. Nossir: You had to be a strategist with the steel, and blood was only a vocational hazard of its mastery, something to accommodate and encourage (in the same vein as a leak of oil is for a mechanic). You had to expect spills and thrills, for a little liberated blood never hurt anyone, really, and a shirt laundered in the spoils of slaughter only demonstrated that your method was succeeding.
There was no suffering involved from Salvatore’s keen and salient perspective; the animals were engineered to be dismantled for convenient consumption, and his cleaver was just cunning enough to locate the perforation lines. This wasn’t a political philosophy, unless folding a paper plane constituted a loaded and subversive act. What actually concerned Salvatore was not this professional tolerance of the intricacies necessary to affect a successful bargain-bulk kill, but the madness that could not be disassembled and cured so easily in the street-level functions of the world beyond the meat locker.
He didn’t really understand what was expected of him up here, an identity he’d long neglected so as to advance up the furrows and levels of complexity in the blade trade. It was an indictment on the night’s invitation that now that he stood free, beyond the conventions of that mutton-froze kitchen, he was bereft of purpose, of immediate strategy.
He decided to think his plan over, here, while kindling the alley with his cigarette exhalations – and that’s when he saw it, hovering on forelock and hoof in the snowtorched darkness, like a subdued and placid-faced nightmare. Like a stark piebald-pelted planet of helium cowering at the end of this backstreet city intersection.
The snow still wheeling and tumbling like ash, Salvatore watched the cow pace the chill-slick cul-de-sac with sad eyes of stroboscopic trust, flat and prismic and overwhelmed.
A heart-shaped peninsula of bovine landscape, this red devil of the dusk was all devon, of no tusk nor talon. Salvatore blinked, and some fleece from the sky’s drove of bestial cloudform, from overhead, whistled through his lashes.
He stamped out his cigarette, sheathing his fists beneath his pits, and ventured to broker a momentary alliance with the apparition by scuffing forward in the powder. The cow did not move: it simply raised its head. Salvatore King Spinoza frowned. There was something of visceral physics going on here. He could not explain away the animal’s appearance, for this was not the countryside, but the byzantine limits of a city of glass and furious light. And still, not twenty metres distance, there stood, amongst arabesques of heat-sweetened breath, a cow trembling in the snow.
Salvatore grimaced. He felt, of a sudden, the threat of the wind and ice on his face. He grit his teeth. If they, if anyone of discerning eye, caught him out here, on the shingle-flamed street opposite his workplace, with a live full-grown buttercup cow, a breathing and bellowing cow, what would they say? What would the world demand he do? He rested his neck against the corrugated iron of a water-pipe for a minute, his head raging in the dark. Eventually, reverently, he unclenched his hands and shuffled forward once more.
‘C’mon now, it’s okay now,’ he whispered, and as he said it, exchanging the cow’s gaze for his, he felt the ache of his knife-crippled fingers subside and he knew he could trust these words. ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you.’