Featured in this issue:    PETER FINCH    GRAHAM FOUST    JESSICA HORNIK    JOHN KINSELLA    LEWIS LaCOOK    TIMOTHY LIU    RUPERT LOYDELL    ANDY MORGAN    SHEILA E. MURPHY    WILLIAM OXLEY    MARK ROBINSON    MATTHEW ZAPRUDER

• back to top PETER FINCH is head of the Welsh Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency. His webpage is located here, and his poetry appeared in Slope #1. He lives in Cardiff, Wales. PORM A poem is an unscrewed roof-rack and untranslatable. It moulders unworn in the backs of heads, it farms the hills, it has erection failures. It is never pretty to use as an introduction. A poem is a placarded fly-blown Christian mask worn to remain sober. It genuflects like a townie at breakfast. It is the sense of speed swimming, coal mining, razzle gazing. It is always political to use as time filler. A poem is a football pollarded chrysanthemum so obvious as to become magical. It parses as a refrigerator in America. It is a daffodil collector, a trap of difficulty, a thing of the elderly. It is usually prick-like to use as a money-maker. A poem is a stitched forest of negative charm which has been legally enunciated. It reiterates as a slide-rule in absentia. It has a sense of heaven language, a touch of illness, the mumbles of the free papers. It is often proverbial to use as payment for petrol. A poem wherefore oft stricken antipathy which flows o'r hill and hummock. It ruminates as a shut-up in mixed company, a sense of righteous in speech patterns, an unwillingness to smile ever, it is a culturally miserable drunken doddle. It is often mistaken for use as money. A pom is really cash pasted stuck to the throat back which has been over lucid. It works as an derangement in publishing. A sticky ghost of shattered shards, a seagull patina thickened with rage, a thing with broken rhythm celebrated in the media. Bookworm wins prize poem best out of five thousand soon to be made laureate of Florida framed certificate. It is often half-rhymed for use in the valleys. A porm, make it new. Art money you bastard you are culture and I reach for my gun. It works as a magnet. God and R.S. help me. A bilingual darkness, a wobble, a shoe horn and a out-pipe overspill. I am squeezing it into all the cracks there are with my emergency tyre reflator. We'll fix the world, we will, we will make it smooth all over. STATS height down 10 mm weight increase 2.1 kilo in 60 months waist 32 to 34 maybe pulse resting at 72 up 8 stretch reduction sit & reach 27 cm vision 2.25/3.25 lung capacity 4.21 litres normal grip strength 44 kgf can sit w no movement 1 hr 30 flat mile averaged 7.1 seconds unhindered erection angle 82º no windchill 40 x lifts in sets average belief drop 15.5% alc. unit level 17 mean 1991 records show 32 29 41 82 (unattributed) [compare 2015366 Finch (my father) 134 lbs in 1940 his only extant stat] this data how I move from A to B archaeology without suffering the body elsewhere this is the dust • back to top GRAHAM FOUST is a Ph.D. candidate at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo, and co-edits Lagniappe with Benjamin Friedlander. His poems have recently appeared in Volt, Talisman and Painted Bride Quarterly. deluge: pretending into the general desire if waves were places if things were more worth storing (that is if things only fit into the store - the rain I'm in is not the rain of cities - nothing is as clean as need forcing house here's the quick wish behind each kicked door - manage to hang from my panic or love leave and leave everything open song beginning "baby i know"           after Aretha Franklin enough not to sever the voice from the body from the hand the rest the rest is emphatic scratched out mall parking lot           after Inka Essenhigh's painting the skull or the knuckle honey or shit the blare of jaws or the rattle of remains or this long distance or drinking broken knitting - what one wants to want is just bearable desert what one wants to know is that shelter is over • back to top JESSICA HORNIK's poems are forthcoming, or have appeared, in Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and The Southern Review. NOW I SEE IT The world spread wide outside my window is a dictionary, for every time I look up I learn something. This morning the subject was mist. I studied its forms: the thick tongue of its noun, fresh from the mountain; its tentative lips, murmuring adjectives in the grass; the verb of its vanishing. And then the soft declensions of the whistling swans, looked up under V. A is for apple tree empty of apples, whose falling occasioned the round red Absolute's ascent into air. And in the meadow-fleeting as a definition a thousand times consulted and as many times forgot (O Robin-Hood mind who thieves to give, itself forever rich and forever poor) - the deer, bounding soundlessly into the speckled edge of woods. AN OLD ARGUMENT The Sun I ply you with evening light as helium fills a balloon. Believe what you see. Horizontal like a lover, my rays lift the skirts of the opening oak and take you in. The Sun's Reflection A thumb's width of brilliant water, I am a yardstick whose markings have rubbed away. Only with me, substance of the insubstantial, will you rise from the limb of yourself. Exceed your height. Consider what you cannot touch or measure your equal. The Body And why is that your constant aim, to transcend me? I shall go on indenting you in the day's paragraphs. I shall introduce you to walls. You shall not eat of the yolk of the soul, whose nourishment is indistinguishable from suffering. The place for you is bed, just after waking, when the soul fits neatly into me like a pillow in its case. The Soul Evening is something other than a time, and this bench, weathered as a ruin, not only the place you came to at the end of the day. To hear me is to hear through me. The wind is stronger than the doorframe where your height is marked in inches. Stay by the river until you see the colors of sunset breaking up like guests at the end of a party. • back to top JOHN KINSELLA is editor of Salt and Folio Publishing, co-editor of Stand, and is international editor for The Kenyon Review. He is fellow and writer-in-residence at Churchill College, Cambridge, U.K., and is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships including the Western Australian Premier's Award for Poetry, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry, and the John Bray Poetry Award from the Adelaide Festival. RENUNICATION I don't take photographs but cling to the few I have when we can afford a digital camera I will take photographs again regular film contains gelatine and the preservation of memory at the expense of an animal's life is appalling : the fragment of a life, of living and the moment or scene or vista, the gravel roadside sloping down from the bitumen, run-offs storm water rushing, and salt marsh below the hazy sky, the brittle yellow warmth of where I am always, and now each day passes : we might mention we have seen something unusual in terms of our points of reference : a troop of fly agaric mushrooms under birch trees near Ambleside, the pike rising high enough and the mist clinging to a lake, the compass collapsed into prayers I don't understand, though I might say I do within reason, working my tongue around the dialect, the miracle working best on the disbeliever; style is something you construct around repetitious acts : the illusion of the one-off that is mimicked, the originating event posing as style, every second post in the fence rotted through, hanging on stretches of rust, barbs tetanus-rich, salinity, a passport with too much to say about place and race and heritage and statistics : it's time we weren't here, the budget flight is on the point of leaving, the airport is new and pure class, vegans eat plain chips and drink orange juice, the only paper left is the Wall Street Journal; a road intones orange over the rise, the scrub and survey markers wandering into the blank room : cold and cluttered with books and blank; write that we held off for as long as possible, under-siege, transferring knowledge to our child, filling our heads with pictures and anaesthetic : the fear of getting back what we've left decipher location in the biorhythms : today I can't take it, you take it for me and vice-versa, we almost kneel at the same altars but never at once, though we move comfortably as one through dead abbeys RECORDS OF INDETERMINATE ORIGIN: A BOXED SET Mosh pit exchange of the hyperactive : Stage dive, trance-struck collectibles ending Words, legal doctrinal bootleg, high jump Continent deep phobia portable Recorders hissing and crackling product Foreclosed trope is what happens in units Back technology poised in damned light, dragged Or sucked dry may day iron lady churchill Archives report for alternative use Of space magnesium special common Wealth collections proverbs vegetable Values as detached comes the main nest struck Out and down through cavities, the dust, Spray and thatcher writing lunar "pollen Smelling" artemis and procris renewed Every fifteen or twenty years out near The test-sites for gm crops, for bio- Ethical piss-ups, jugbands, verse dramas, Removal of body parts, I WILL sign Away the rotten tissue of my bowel, Surveyed in the year of, in exorcism As there's nothing there : just a never-re Leased single or broadcast from a pirate Radio station off the stormy coast Of Cumbria or the Sun, first session blank Mastertape like a grim fairytale : we Take, ignoring time and all wildflowers And thomas moore, or the Main Man who said The devil take him black-dogged and made dead, Though sales were good, the cohorts and lackeys And henchmen out there smiting his sharp-tongued Enemies (with their strange syntax and bright Language and left-of-centre politics), Barrels of dynamite and enclosure : That old tree stump down by the creek a real Bugger, utopian prize, great act of Revenge with a national flavour, all preamble And self-certainty, they'd take our licence Though we might feel sorry for him, ourselves And them : all one 33 rpm Circle, we WERE there : mystery hunt key As just it is, that anaesthetic death Absolute decrepitude along Paul Eluard's walled orchestras, outmoded Vinyl analogues, power gendered groove- Tone take note, dialectic dumping word Order on its nether up-ended, it's how It's taken down: typeface magnetic fluid That's narrative, the parish births and deaths Register the fastest mile or shortest Sailing time between voice and prize and blanc Caches of skulls that form the secret wealth Of the grave robbers, software companies Crying foul "you're ripping our artists off," Repeating nothing as each recording Is its own and can't be replicated: YOU could own this magnificent box-set, Litotes: not bad, all liner notes, artwork, Screed and death-throes, plaints and dark marketing: Scratch, mix, retro : isotonic swamp rock. • back to top LEWIS LaCOOK's poetry has appeared in Lost & Found Times, Whiskey Island and the Potepoet e-series. He edits the online journal Idiolect. FUSE, BLUE The outer scope's allotment sounds where blue balloons abreast a voluptuous. Whole kernels of frightening moon full you into sleeping through functions and harmfuls of supplements won't wake (take a draught of ether to calm castled dirt pants) by cognition's fringes, or what's territorial in your suffering's certain to upload smoothly. Arrays mean evil branches crack avoidance until what's due is usurped by brief exchanges with the converted; I had half a mind to slow the other half blind, latte neighborliness with bronzed young women moistening pillows with wools of shocked you tactile from experiencing minor earthquake problems, how sits any sixth of this simplicity that duties long code from starward wanings, wrath. A messed-up mathematics. You hiss escaping word coffins, finish crosswords with your bits of (your) skin, poems the sound of blue a fuse with its LCD dark; display cases sacrosanct and delicious such spheral honeys from the moon stitched lavender through long dead launch of cupping you cooked in my arms for eating with, that width of grammar finally depth in who steps out. My eyes felt like they saw it. My teeth felt slick with it, sickness. Shroud a corner of jaw mouth wound wind blooming, pricking foliage for bulge until lights brigand every village and gentleness, I find a loose patch of and in your pants. If healing matches dissonance of learning your body through thorough listening, civilize embrouchre to these tempos less cured than wax saws sway danger's porous orbital whimper, else levitate, relax, reference. The sleeping we gleam with is only wet stars. LANGSTON HUGHS Light-splashed leaves. Important. Collage-trees almost perfectly Seed. Jigsaw junction: Step back from the pores It makes A face Step back from A face it Makes a Colony, All the Running It Takes To Make grace from Weird weave of hiphuggers Slung Little Brown Belly tightened to pull Children from glaze of grinning Earth. It's kindness on our last visit Was "More Than We Could Ask." For Another's marks took his spring of toy To the edge of her bewildering And Howl Could be sleeveless eras, that gray bumpy ride I'm gleeful when I stand next to her Talking on top of histories, giving them eyes. We want to use a plaintive, almost "childlike" tone Here, to Tug Her Beneath the Waves where The tocking of amorous squids weep Gas Puffs Amazement, a lean-to through often seen eating alone Though became A Prime Subject. "Oh? What kinds of Things do you Write about?" I keep misplacing my grammars, instead of Dips in Meaning See holes lurching lucid, "Pipes through which to Feed." She was Training me to abstract Responsibility from Love, Like I was langston ZHughs or something. SHE'S ALWAYS MAKING OBJECTS OF UTILITY The words I use For your body sprawled And watchful with (Red eyes) from her own Subconcious was found At the scene. Next to you The word I use For cat washes the Master plan from his Sister geneaology as The washing machine makes Exercise for the drain. The brain reacts To the police, if there was No way she could have been Accidentally poisoned. There Was little to link it to The file I have of you Twirling your lip-ring through Its hole, a dilation Of distances the close And private eating of more Could be hungry. Learn To do tricks. Honey, you're Complicating our relationship With me. • back to top TIMOTHY LIU's poetry appeared in Slope #1. He edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, which was recently released by Talisman House. He lives in New Jersey. LIKE BOYS NEXT DOOR channel surfing from baseball scores to late night news for images of ourselves in vain no faggots here in uniform only shirts that say repent or perish as closets open wide their flaming doors just try on the face of a christ that took a lifetime of our suffering to achieve last-pick sissies striking out foreheads marked with ash as tongues begin to slide like eels in public parks tempting boys who'd flock to sport some jockstraps stuffed down throats where teeth had been knocked-out a pack of trading-cards some drag from base to base JUST SOME BOYS tossing frisbees in the eucalyptus scented air equidistant to the site of old catastrophes waterlogged under a bridge our bodies pulled to the center where it sags with years of connubial bliss and hardly an hour's peace on unpaved roads that lead to a drive-thru window where shrooms were tucked in a happy meal why not spy on boys who spread their legs under leaves so green you'd think it was a set heaving in the heat forget that homeless voice that kept on shouting how many easter eggs you want up your ass the two of us pushing ROMAN FEVER gripped by a cell-phone panic day-trading shares a load more fun than getting drunk on Jersey sky awash in amaretto light as I vespa through the Palisades dependent more on Wall St. than the voice of Pasolini now walling out all canyon echo clandestine rest-stop action darting through the shrubs in search of Armani-suited cock pack-muled through crevices at dusk patrol-car love winking past that dogstar all aglitter over Ostia falling into the hands of rough trade che gelida mania thread-bare boxers pulled down to our heels • back to top RUPERT LOYDELL's poetry appeared in Slope #1. He is managing editor of Stride Publications. from THE MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF PARADISE My summer was disastrous. I became aware that gravity had shifted, and had to work at staying seated. Long and winding lines led up to a woman whose sole qualifications are her skills at oral and phone sex. Jesus the Hot Air Balloon is an extension of my own self-absorption; I will topple out if I am not careful. Well, you know I am a savage, frightened and dazed. The mind is a monkey and, honey, so am I. *** He took us to another world, writing the same book several times to make sure we understood. Each book the same journey through an imaginary city he had created from reality. He did not plan to travel anywhere; was a thousand miles away from his room, looking further into impossibility. He told me of a perimeter fence with a set of instructions for simulating the distance between, a technology of disorganization conjured up whilst lying in hospital listening to a beeping monitor. He was not interested in relying on science, wans't accustomed to his environment; truly felt his strangeness in the world. His final departure, this forced narrative, seems to have finalised the future. He was not the one who chose his words. He lived and worked hard, so they say, journeying around Britain reshaping the novel, painting in obsessive bursts until a picture was finished. Maintaining the always implausible distance between the creator and his creation, he appears only once in his own work. *** I paid him a visit once and his attitude was not one of distress but, rather, of recognition. 'You know,' he said, 'there is no silence.' He was delighted at being able to project all those sounds into the hall at once. If you've ever seen a man singing songs while trapped under a chaise-longue you'll know exactly what I mean. By arousing indignation or sympathy, he reminds us how fragile music really is; how finely attuned to the zeitgeist. *** He did all his painting looking through a telescope, seeing only a small bit at a time. Again and again he was marooned in no-man's land, a utopian idea of refuge. The wonders of his art are now being recognised. He very much desired to give something back to the viewer who had a compassionate side, wanted them to be silent and overpowered. For forty years his followers have been wandering through blasted landscapes and living on a more abstract plane. People always think there is something to understand, worry over the ghostliness and shadowlike quality of existence. There can be, there must be, and are several events which unfold at once, suggesting not only a confidence trick but also a feeling of vertigo. Do you know the posthumous work? Slow, impressionistic mood pieces. A landscape can reflect our lives: we are at the mercy of nature and the mechanics of lightning. • back to top ANDY MORGAN has worked as editorial assistant of Verse. He lives in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. from JAWS WITH WHEELS i: P & Q I heat the world as it whispers beneath my nape, emancipating a sluttish falsification: agnostic seashells and lackluster charm (smoldering). Moonlight serenades congested lock-ness - a plisky tantalization plowing forth the roots of a plesiosaur remembrance. To quaff - stomach cramps and urination-qualmed. Reddhaw branches scribble satisfaction; ribaldly leaping from frog to stone I quadratically compensate a caffeinated slur. Hysterical - a Chacerian tantalization-buffoonery: medicated indifference spooning with the tide. 2: Remelted ASAP's A tubercular promenade jousting retention: my mirror-glaze rhododendron is lost; serape the tricot is a hounds tooth of refraction. Candelabra foolishness milking, suckling, fornicating pheonic madness: platelet stasis evading a triatomic rigor mortis, scalene pathways yule-tiding sloppy-second depression. Is tabernacle smothering me? Does the moonlight bridge oceanic diversions? Rhetorics - evangelical and pedestrian biased - leak, soothe and seep retribution. iii: Moose Hunting        I. Epoch eyebrows arc'd and poised, pre-arthritic fingers crossed, mouth cannabis-dry-gummy-stuck awaiting the slush of Cranial Photography: "Daddy, may I manipulate that weapon to cease biological activity in another orgasminism?"        II. A jubilee of rancidness drools from the cracks of half-moon lips as weeds sprout amongst discarded truths - post-Cranial Education: "Don't spot ya eldah's lepahd's fore noon." iv: Ballroom Inadequacy A fulcrum sanction silhouettes adoration, extinguished fumes belch forth moonlight, a checkered floor's marked for chess and forgotten: all weep in pre-uterine deliberation. A cavalcade of ovenware takes coats at the door while Junior experiments with chemistry in the attic: calculations (+) combinations (=) a suicidal-waltz on the piano. The guests tap toes and begin: one to the other undressing calm, fingering marigold faces with polystyrene nails. Chapstick and lipstick intertwined, redefined: shimmering platens for the anvil of necessity. 55: Suggested Maximum Velocity The bit is raw, freezing, emanating moonlight: shards of liquid-refabricate spur on constipated togetherness, preempting diagnostics' pixelating idiosyncrasies. Traversion's blocked by demilitarized crosshairs - yellow timed phone lines stampede monotony, snapping the pavement of relation (with) de accuracy dove, a cackling of rotten-stick-to-knee cracking. Ineptitudal despondency mackling magnetism, coupling east to west with a clevis of vibration until the rusted culverts of memory burst, vomit forth the anchors of a nitrified cabriolet. vi: Cardboard Burns Quicker The clergy ignites the demigoddess Tide, burning cleanliness and inhaling bleach. Sulfur tints eyelids with garbure halos, darkening with moonwave henna the crescents of ephemeral disdain: a finial dint upon the pupil of lust. Arm and Hammer deception's hidden, shielded and cuckold behind dial-tone decibels, fatiguing the sockets of epidermal and wool; soda sparks bake awe into grotesque: the fippled music of sand-bar demonism rippling eddies along blazing eighth-note piers. vii: The Sink (& Its Contents) The canary drowns in soapy fogo - a lunar cadaver floating amongst toothpick-discard, compromising loneliness with humor; fratricide briskly settles archaic debts. Icterus sponges mold disuse, cray-papered and psylocibicly pleading to massage linoleum. Bubbles fuck-elope toward drainage; faucet handles (free) associate, remembering the fingerprinted swiveling of yesteryear. *: Mudbogs & Cigarette Distribution Grunge, established within lunatic sludge, rhyizomicly absorbs laces (loafers and all): parading phobias leap-frogging sickly requests for nicotine satiation. But was it more than that? Narcotic metaphors perhaps?; glucose and tobacco square-dancing unrequited tranquility bulbs?; a taste tester's delight of porridge and lima? Backing away, adjusting my hairstyled beanie, dragging-mouth-to-lung-to-mouth, browning, malignanting, brimstone branded. Breath, a custard cuss, waxes prehistoric bedlam and cuttinizes the balded with a scalpel: an eyelash of dimorphic gratitude shielded by elytronic composure: the humor of zippers echoing disdain. ix: Abstract Tissue Failure The timber of speech beseeches calamity as urinals ignite sophomoric fibers - gangplanks (screech) connecting sanity and hygiene. Ignition modules sparking metaphysical darby, trading red for retina for sand (and park), milk seed duds grey-white-confabbed in tri-coat. Banshee whiskers whisper silken confetti burn; a cracked crab turns a yeti's creed-bite tote fancy. Demerol sienna-bloodshots - skin-pops strata-moon-cheesing iris dilation, capsizing a mile(ph) sneezes (balance) fata morgana. v+v: The Assignment (aka: xx-x: A Hietal Eclipse) It was sor  did: like a ban   an          ares embles an ass(w)hole- :::for so(sum)e _(?)(_+_)(?)_reason crutches bench -pressed my arm pits (force-feed) propelling a fast and quick          upo nus            : a numb(ing) of limbs asphyxiates vi(o)si(o)n: I see all I care not to be with a knee- prayer-a de/  a  /th of chatt (                 )              er. iiiixv: Glass An anti-despondent shove barnacles greeting with thorns of forgetfulness, dying in the Shakespearean sense upon charcoal battlefields of festering namelessness. Prismoidal speech catapults clitoral stampedes, bungee jumping spaniel ethics, cocker sprockets revisiting ball joint dismay - a musth radiating orbital plankton. The transparency of heated sand breast-feeds sight with dogmatic frugality, puckering pleasure from trimesteric curves, pungently wrenching lip from breast as un-nibbled earlobes simmer with the moon-plop of silence. 1 (Six-packs) : (Bookshelves) 2 (& Salt) A sheetrock cosmopolitan fragment relinquished to pumice - gouged by naked tragedy: depth angels, nipple hardening tears, tongueless screams echoing, threading, piercing the needle atwixt scutch and void: a mumble-soothing cortisol: orchards-reaped: baskets-stuffed: oranges leaking teratoidal ichor: the nectar of belligerence synovially cementing salvation to sukkah to simony. Almost a Saturated Octagon Nesting Necromancy        (Ettu Tarantula) Manilla grips the tumbleweeds & poison ivy seed pods served in anti-climactic fashion. A toadstool wistfully withers, contemplating bathing; a mylar vortex soothes boils with light, a plastic-play; a steed of unfathonable vision fraud prances hoof to atom to ion; pastel smudges split heirs upon cardboarded suit; the blisters of an Armani hex anon a pusing anti-hill height. • back to top SHEILA E. MURPHY's books of poetry include Falling in Love Falling in Love With You Syntax: Selected and New Poems (Potes & Poets Press). Last year she appeared in the annual Brisbane Writers Festival in Queensland, Australia. (PURPLE FAINTS INTO OUR LAP ONCE) Purple faints into our lap once We recoil from what is Naturally normed fish blue In the equation I would father Sentences of light, And I would extrapolate from altar An intrinsic drawing on The light behind the space Of couples to be spooned into Conglomerance Until the drive time Glistens with a rolodex of know Sprained weatherful Again as might Transcends to ought transcends to . . . (IN THE OTHER ROOM SHE SLEEPS) In the other room she sleeps This afternoon she sleeps After the football precipice she sleeps The score is up, the score down, sleeps How many thought-sides Lie upon the land How many free zones How many aberrations I am here To watch Her breathing in This house However many cubic inches blue The patterned space And kismet Of the park, how many stones (I USED TO BE IN LOVE WITH NOT YET) I used to be in love with not yet Functional abundance, used to Speak to strangers on the bus, I used to mutter from my books Look into matte Patina making way Into the forenoon of careen-with-me- Along-the-muscles-of-the-shoulders Where a little group decides Who will earn quality of notice We are live from where they are A drinking glass against the wrong side of their room Still early in our history That no one owns, where claims are placed, Where sprinkler touches during summer When the harvest starts to show • back to top WILLIAM OXLEY's poems have been published in journals including The Formalist, The Scotsman, New Statesman, Agenda, Stand, The Independent, The Spectator, and The Observer. Co-editor of the Long Poem Group Newsletter, he divides his time between London and South Devon, U.K. TELLING THE SOUND (I) Somewhere in the holy distance begins that buzz in the ear Nadia Mandelshtam spoke of, the dip of sun into far-off snows setting off an extra rhythm of being. I hear it. It is why I have to sing. Not just the noise of sound but its meaning. Where joy and sorrow meet to make lament. And as I hold quite still, secure in the storm's eye, or amid the buzz of a thousand bees, cark of disgusting crows celebrating acres on acres of the disquieting real, I listen in blue silence to the meaning of noise. In the madness of sound begins the poem before it subsides onto dead paper of a page. DIFFERENT KINDS OF SUNLIGHT The eskimoes have many words for snow we have one for sun, so if I cannot make some more, I can say there are different kinds of sun- light. There's palladian sunlight that is cut up into golden strips as it slips through elegant shadows cast by stucco'd walls in big, green-marbled parks. Then there is wild sunlight thrown into trees, nature's halls, by the late red ball of neurotic winter furious at clouds or dawning above pullulating estuaries where sea slithers like grey grease. But nothing quite matches an old-fashioned sun, a wheatfield sun, or one where you make hay while ... the shine of it talks peace and lark-speak gives joy and sky is kids' blue with one big yellow lion-splodge in the middle. Last, though, is the sun of dreams. It can be baroque as a gilded rose or a curious white-heat at the edge of vision. You cannot see it straight but it's pure light that bathes even the meanest thought. It is the inside-out sunlight of a sun often clouded by error-horror - seen best behind closed doors of sleep, through windows of prayer, or clinging like now to words, a dry rain on invisible leaves. That is poetic sunlight, and it pleases me best because it is always there. LINES ON PARADISE It's a miracle - then suddenly it's all gone back to a stone rolling on a beach, a seagull strutting on the sand. Impossible this paradise for the flesh-governed who cannot concentrate for long on plain stone or subtle flowers - see every shape, be it stone, gull or hand that clutches stony rubbish - each also wears perfection like tears or light. • back to top MARK ROBINSON's books of poetry include The Horse Burning Park (Stride), Gaps Between Hills (Scratch) and Half A Mind (Flambard). He lives in Teesside, U.K. HACKING THE JOURNAL OF ALBION MOONLIGHT War endured because lookout offers us a spectacle, a clock candy bigger midnight of fireworks. Mechanical scares most lines out of us, bleeding net its leather, its fascination, sunk because everybody wants to sting alternative porridge. Everybody pardon secretly proud of mechanical. War endured because mechanical offers us a spectacle, an authority opens bigger proceedings of fireworks. Flash scares daylight satisfaction out of us, so communicate philosophers with reddish loaves, lethergy, because everybody wants to sweat what pulse is telling. Everybody secret union of sunrise desolation. War endured because intention offers us a spectacle, a bust beam bigger lunch of fireworks. Deference scares district barbarian out of us, bleeding blotch pile fortitude, its unreality antique, regular, because everybody wants to system what natural's really rabbit. Everybody process secretly respond of natural. War endured because level offers us a spectacle, a coverlet crave bigger nobody of fireworks. Natural scares thick mend out of us, turns us notepaper out, menial incline, whistle, because everybody wants to snare what liberty notices. Everybody passion secretly green of ill. War endured because crash offers us a spectacle, a sun collapse bigger will of fireworks. Few scares captain or grumble out of us, beauty after beauty candy china tip up, aurora, because everybody wants to steer what transfusion's really lurks. Everybody connection secretly jealous of war. Based on computerised mutations of lines about war from The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. WHEN AID IS NO HELP That is not a solution, that is a sausage on a stick. The quizmaster misunderstands paraphrased seduction. The lights go out. You have won the booby prize, the darkened room awaits, needle clicks in the eternal present. Life and death are a spondee split by our stuttering. Neither Anish Kapoor nor IKEA can save you now. 'I was born in a wheatfield snapping my fingers' Tomaz Salamun I was born in the back bedroom of a council house, breech and purple from bruising, not picked up for three days except when absolutely necessary. I was born in a room that looked out over the playing fields of my primary school. I imagine my mum and dad, and my nan, gripping the window ledge as eager boys below played football while I cried and cried and cried. I was born weeping and bursting my lungs, as unanswered calls swept through rooms and through houses, until the whole terrace was holding its breath, until the Beatle-cut fathers had to walk down the gardens in the rain to smoke fag after slow musty fag in the dusk. • back to top MATTHEW ZAPRUDER's translations of the Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu, from his book Secret Weapon, have appeared in Verse, Meanjin and International Poetry Review, and will be appearing in subsequent issues of Salt Hill, Fence and Slope. ARCADIA The meadow is not too flat, with a scarecrow in a wedding dress, a ruined barn, and a stream that catches light mechanically. A woman bends over it, turning her limbs, always looking down to see how beautiful she is as a linden. Hidden in her branches a magpie stares, as if summer had suddenly ended, listening to a shadow approaching from the south, while bees who had been sleeping curled in twos and threes inside the cups of snowdrops grow frantic, trying to burst out of their prisons. Slowly the Floating Amusement Park interposes itself between meadow and sun, while the linden grows flushed, turning her leaves towards the whirling lights and claxons, and the stream twists in an agony of bliss. Phrases begin to rain down. Who was it again who said it is always the same question? Even a grassblade thinks. Did I truly get what I deserve? More and more, so many it's like static in the hall of angels before the meeting is called to order. Before we can ask how long, it is suddenly gone. Not far off a little bell is ringing around the neck of a cow. If you lay a hand between his ears, he will raise his head to meet it, still grazing, and you will know he used to be a soldier. BLACK WINDOWS Oh well it's morning again and I'm out trolling my sinister feet along the edges of the park where languid mechanical young mothers wander balancing precarious carriages It's much too early for such vintage of light as strays over the hillocks to be held like a mouthful of butterflies And the mothers shiver and smile when towards them I drag my breath made famous for danger by a radio that cannot stop chattering about how it has eaten the final chrysanthemum Somewhere inside me I've hidden the switch I am guilty of countless secret wishes to stroke the black constellations that make the black hair of the moon I carry around in my pocket like half a pair of spectacles abandoned Only the library of my hands with its black windows remembers how birds search for automatic writing in a sky where every morning is grown by bluedelicate wings