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Enjoy a selection of features, poetry and playwriting.
Long-form content
Organizing change with Marshall Ganz
When I was hired into IE’s marketing department, I was earning minimum wage as a barista on the wrong side of town. It was, well, tiresome work, and my fingers were covered in burns and callouses, and I loved it. I loved speaking with the regulars, drawing swans in the cream, opening for business in the dark early morning. I even secretly quite liked the meager paycheck.
But life as a starving artist wore me down. Through limited success as a playwright and a dwindling bank balance, I opted for a stable job in the nice part of town.
Poetry
Pipa
Published in The Primer: Vol 2
You do not eat the shell,
he says,
Así.
He holds the seed between his fingers
crystalline with salt, a high noon gem.
Así es.
He holds the seed between his teeth
he turns the lock
discards the husk.
Así es pipa.
Beside the museum of beautiful art
he lies, leather skinned, leather sack of gristle and marrow,
swollen bellied and full of sleep.
Splayed limbs ooze beneath the tree,
its trunk of coiled ropes, branches taughtened like
the outstretched hand of God.
He snores in slow, accordion heaves
and cradles all the broken husks
like pooled water.
Así es pipa.
At the centre of the table
the pile grows. Zebra skinned kindling.
She breaks the casing and removes the chaff.
The sun is like
The sun is too hot,
she says.
The sun is like an egg that’s left to cook in too much oil.
No te metas toa pa dentro,
she says.
Así,
between the fingertips.
Así es pipa.
And on the lawn before the farmhouse
Little Nati sees the men uproot the new palmera,
lay sticks across the bonfire
and roll the tractor over sweet, exploding oranges.
And old Dolores stirs the rice
and Carmen paws her swollen womb
while cigarette ash topples like thousand-year dust.
Little Nati has the bit between the teeth.
Her mother’s fingers round the point.
Así.
Así es pipa.
September March
The procession approached while September
cooled, though still heady and warm. The great muse
poised in plaster, raised aloft. ‘Ven,’ Kike
gestures from the terrace. ‘Ven aqui.’ Drums
and horns sound sombre as a wartime march
while Kike lights a smoke and hangs a cloth
About his shoulder. Blue and black cloth
veil her head. Priests in white robes. September
footfall halted by the impromptu march.
A herd of boys shuffle beneath the muse
and all her decorated weight, while drums
mark her slow advance forward. Old Kike
Stand hand to hip and watches, for Kike
marched for a faction of a different cloth
when he himself was a young man. The drums
halt. The horns pause. The lull of September
falls on San Jacinto. The virginal muse
looks plaintive and bored of this layman’s march,
For that is all it is. A rehearsal march
for the Springtime processions. Now Kike
turns and winks and tells me the virgin
is his ‘niña’, and boys in linen cloth
shift restlessly in falling September
sunshine. A start. The gunfire breaks. The drums
Pull resting eyes awake, and soon those drums
and horns have moved that sweet and sombre march
down la Pureza. Heady September
settles over Triana and Kike
wipes down the terrace tables with his rag cloth
to look busy. I, by the Boca, muse
On what she does, where she might be. I muse
on Winter months to come while the distant drums
sound as scattered raindrops. I watch the damp rag-cloth
tossed aside, and a fat man takes a slow march
before his nap. He hisses at Kike
through billows of cigar smoke. September
Falls, and I muse lonely that September
in cotton cloth to the song that Kike
drums with his fingers. Eyes close,
to dream of March.
The Inheritance
Published in Moonflake Press
It was near Christmas when we first
worked the field. There were cotton
buds. There were many lemon trees
in the dell. In the soft distance
the swelling mountains were pale blue
and the pallid air washed our throats
like fresh water. Manolo walked
slowly through the orchard, thoughtful,
his two hands clasped behind his back,
his brow hunched up like a Buddha
and his nose burnt red. A chapped neck
for winter but the summer months
came in smooth as yarn. Swallows,
he said, pointing to the muro.
Swallows in the road. Like he’d
caught a fist of pure white moon.
The Football Phone-In
Published in the Lamda Verse & Prose Anthology Vol. 19
The second time that my Dad lost his hair
we’d speak about football over the phone,
my hand on the arm of the fake leather chair
where I’d sit through the nights in my bedroom alone.
I’d ring every Sunday and spin him some lies
like ‘dinner was fine’ and he’d tell me some too,
then we’d talk about Gerrard and feign our surprise
at his plans for LA when the season was through.
See football was safe. We both knew the score.
We could talk about losses for hours at length
But no matter the outcome— a win or a draw—
we could gather some hope and turn it to strength.
You could trust that. Sometimes I think the world
would have to end for football to die.
A nuclear bomb tears through banners unfurled
on the Kop end and plumes like a flare through the sky.
But were that to happen, I’d still have it here.
Being pulled up the stand, held tight in his arm
through the noise and me grinning from ear to ear.
My Dad and his pride. The warmth in his palm.
So to sit on those Sundays and speak through a phone,
it never seemed hard to pretend that my heart wasn’t breaking.
Though I never said it, I’m sure it was known;
he could call me whenever, and he’d never walk alone.
Short fiction
Halitosis
Shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2023
I met Maria Giulia in this pokey alley off the high street. It was evening and it had been raining. People’s feet were steaming. Maria Giulia sat on the table next to mine with a bottle of beer and I told her I was bored out of my mind. She smiled with her mouth shut.
We went to a bar by the two towers. The drinks were cheap and the staff were south-Asian. They were all in love with her. She was very good-looking and had dark curly hair and ghoulish eyes. Her lips were grey. She came from a farm in Napoli and was four years older than me and while she wouldn’t explain why she was in Bologna, she insisted on paying for everything. The drinks came with bowls of peanuts. Maria Giulia ate them quickly and put her own bag of sweets on the table. There were marshmallows and coke bottles and other things in there, and she sucked on them while she smoked. She smoked a lot, and when she wasn’t smoking, she chewed on the cigarettes like toothpicks. And whenever she laughed, she covered her mouth.
Later on we walked back through the flaky labyrinth of the old town and picked up a litre of beer from the late-night grocery store and took it up to the big empty room I’d rented for the month. It was a big sad tunnel, Japanese-themed, my suitcase still unpacked by the bed. But there was a balcony, so we opened the windows and drank there. You could see across the suburbs and the hills. We sat and looked out at it all. Then we took each other’s clothes off, our legs still sticking out on the balcony.
‘Not here,’ she said, squeezing my face.
‘OK.’
‘I have the period.’
‘OK.’
Here meant the balcony, so we had sex in the toilet which was also a wet room.
We left the balcony open that night. It was warm. We lay there naked, wrapped around each other, and Maria Giulia told me things. How she hated going home. How the boys she lived with were pigs. How she came to Bologna with her boyfriend but now he was gone. She said she felt empty. She said she had a big emptiness inside her. Then she went down on me. She did it without any warning. I had to stop her because it hurt too much. It was the teeth. I told her I was sleepy, but it was the teeth. After that I was awake for hours. I was thinking about the condom, because we’d taken it off. And I was thinking about her boyfriend, too. I was wondering why she’d told me all that stuff about him.
The next day I sat on a bollard on the high street while she was working. She worked in a phone-case shop which looked like the inside of a fridge. It depressed me a bit. But Maria Giulia was pleased. Pleased to have someone outside, waiting for her, witnessing her. And that day there were lots of customers, too, which meant she was late getting out. By the time she did, the restaurants were all shut, so we got a few beers and sat in the big piazza instead. There’d been an open-air cinema there the week before. I’d gone every night. Now it was all empty and open. There were people sitting in circles. Street vendors sending toys into the air. They flashed green and purple and whizzed up and down. Delivery boys congregated on cathedral steps, their cooler bags hung over their handlebars. And Maria Giulia pointed it all out and said it was beautiful. Every bit. She pointed at the clay-red buildings and the pillars and the restaurant lights. ‘So beautiful,’ she said.
Then we kissed. She kissed me hard and put her hand between my legs and squeezed my crotch. It was nice, but all I could think about was how much her breath smelt. It was the cigarettes. I’d noticed it the night before. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Or the condom. Later, when we were walking through town, she said her back hurt. I went straight home and googled symptoms for undiagnosed STDs and there it was – back pain. What are the odds?
I didn’t see her again.
Flash forward thirty miles down the coast and two weeks later and I realised I’d caught the wrong train out of Ravenna and there were no more going back. I was leaving Italy on an early flight the next day.
‘Find a hotel until the morning,’ the conductor said.
I cradled my face with my hand. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
It had been a long month.
‘Get off in Rimini,’ he said. ‘Find a hotel.’
I did get off and I did find one. It was a cream-coloured concrete box on the rise of an underpass. The lobby was air-conditioned, and a glass display of watches revolved by the door.
‘Hello?’
I rang the reception bell and a girl came out. She was tall and had a blazer on. I told her I needed to stay over and she checked the system.
‘Forty euros. Drink and breakfast included.’
‘Drink?’
‘A drink. One.’
‘Ah.’
‘This, then?’
‘Yes please.’
I started to cry.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘It’s been a long month.’
‘That’s OK. Do you want your drink?’
‘Yes please.’
I asked for a gin and tonic. She didn’t have any tonic, but she gave me the gin. Then we went onto the terrace. There were seats, and you could see the underpass and its orange wall lamps. There was a grey house across the road, too. There was a child’s swing on the front lawn.
‘You’re not the first person crying in here,’ the girl said.
I said thanks. Then I explained how I’d gone to see a girl in Ravenna. How she’d picked me up in Florence and invited me to visit her. How it hadn’t worked out. And I explained how I felt useless. How I was a useless person. And the girl with the blazer nodded, and listened, and said something about how some days you’re beautiful and some days you’re not and you never really know which is which or who’s going to show it to you. But to be honest, I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy thinking about something else. I wish I had listened, though.
Soon it was too cold to stay out. The girl’s shift had finished, too. So we gathered our things and said goodbye. ‘Would you like to come up with me?’ I asked. She laughed. I wasn’t joking, but she laughed anyway.
Lying in the hotel room that night, still fully clothed, I stared up at the ceiling. I was thinking still. I was thinking about Maria Giulia. I was thinking about the size of loneliness. About how difficult it is to find one of equal proportions to your own. And when you start thinking like that, you start wishing you weren’t such a useless bastard all the time. You start wishing you were, at the very least, a nice guy.
I turned on my side and worked out the hours I had to catch the train, and the hours I had to get sober. It was the first time I’d had to plan anything all month. And after doing it long enough, I decided I’d get up early to eat breakfast. And I focused on the sausages, and the beans. And that was the best thought I’d had for a long time.