Your consciousness is homeless and itinerant for quite some time in a significant physical journey. And you must build it its home, or its redoubt. That redoubt is specific to the journey. And like a tortoise’s shell the redoubt accompanies you on the journey even as it grows. Its construction is excruciatingly frustrating and failure-ridden. Accept this. Construction of the redoubt is the journey.
Arrival takes place much later cognitively.
Accept this.
Continue reading “Redoubt by John Trefry”
February 29th 1933
The saddest thing for the English to bear, is not what they have lost, but instead
what they know has not yet been found, but is nevertheless enduring in the shadows.
– Derrick Adderage
The house has slid here
to this wide street-middle; it floats
like a dark ship on smooth wet tarmac; it splits
the road that seems to flow slowly
either side of it.
The houses lining the street shrink
as this one house inflates
with where it came from.
Fragment I
The story of a screech: it rose as the last bus of the evening crossed the borders of the city to the motorway. All seventeen of us on the top deck turned our heads. Oh yes, it was perfunctory (because on a double-decker you cannot really see what’s going on behind you on the road, even less so in the dark), but the gesture had already captivated me – the meaning, the intention. By the time all heads were turned, it was clear that we had all misjudged the nature of the screech (pitch dropping, frequency decreasing as it unwrapped). This could never come from a human throat, but rather from the strained brakes of a vehicle. Continue reading “Three Fragments On The Portative Organ* by Eva Ferry”
“I seek a place that can never be destroyed, one that is pure, and that fadeth not away, and is laid up in heaven, and safe there, to be given, at the time appointed, to them that seek it with all their heart.”
– John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Our pilgrimage almost came to an end under the wheels of a 10-ton truck on the D650 from Istanbul to Eskişehir, on a summer night made darker by no highway illumination and no towns for miles around. The four-lane highway was flanked on one side by dry, empty country and on the other by two-hundred-feet-tall black crags, out of which the silhouettes of pine trees leered, high up. Continue reading “Phrygians In The Rigging by Caroline Stockford”
Jo Tinsley is the founder and editor of Ernest Journal – “an independent magazine for the curious and adventurous”. She is also the co-author of two books, The Odditorium: The tricksters, eccentrics, deviants and inventors whose obsessions changed the world and The Mysterium: Unexplained and extraordinary stories for a post-Nessie generation, and editor of Waterfront, a magazine celebrating a connection with water for the Canal & River Trust. Somehow, she also finds time to work as a freelance writer and curator. Continue reading “Jo Tinsley: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”
I want to be promised
everything.
My hand I am
so wet
the simultaneous breaths
are soaking
everything Continue reading “Everything by Line Toftsø”
If I were an office worker in Japan, I would take a holiday with my Japanese boyfriend to the Hachiman Shrine in Kamakura. We would ride the train together, holding hands. We would always be holding hands. I would know the feel of his grip better than anything. Continue reading “This Would Be The Perfect Day by Cathy Ulrich”
For the end of the plague, for victory the erection of a scutulously ornate votive column in the isolation of the multiaxial crossroads of the citycenter, for here is the palimpsest of vehicular crossroads, for the completion of the navmesh, for the nativity of Salty, for nothing more than the ecstasy of sculpture, for successful dolphin harvesting, here upon this plinth is the destruction of the Parliament Hall, here upon this plinth is the meatjam Continue reading “Smithsonian Destruction Vigil by John Trefry”
It was a bad day:
By the end of it
He had become convinced
That the landscape of the city
Had been usurped Continue reading “In Anticipation Of The Singularity by Mark Beechill”
For months before going to Alaska, I thought about how six hours of daylight would feel. In California, I’d lay in bed and imagine the darkness as a hand closing around my throat. Continue reading “A Believing Place by Nina Foushee”
Fying from New York to Athens,
I am seated next to a man named Frank.
35,000 feet in the air,
high above sea level,
far from swelling waves – Continue reading “Meeting Frank by Loretta Oleck”
Fushimi Inari
We walked into the dark-
-er and darker red gates and long long steps
a key between my teeth
shiny shiny boots plastic
cup of warm white wine Continue reading “Two Poems by John Boursnell”
Crying on the threshold, waiting to step into light, waiting to step into a history of pain. I am at the doorway now. The process of healing hollows me out, a tree preparing to become a waka. Sailing back in time into an ocean of grief and love, back to where I began, back to where we first landed. Continue reading “whatitoka (doorway) by Kathleen McLeod”
This city, this big sprawling dream of a city, mighty and misunderstood Los Angeles, is often defined in terms of tired cliches and sweeping generalizations. Soul-less and a-historical L.A., they say. A city where nobody walks, they lie. A far-reaching enigma going on for miles and miles, they all nod and agree, baffled. Continue reading “L.A. Lust by Yanina Spizzirri”
Journeys, physical, spiritual and psychological, are at the centre of each of my works. The idea of leaving and arriving – or transcending – inspires me to create. Continue reading “Journeys, art by Jodie Day”
We wandered the streets
Pointing out our childhood
Every detail that remains
A teenaged memory Continue reading “This Place is Ours by Hazel Warren”
And once we’ve reached the bridge, we stop.
I have seen the native fellaheen* cross on bikes and motorbikes,
phones in their back pockets,
blasting music that hits like sudden hail in the country stillness,
bites,
and echoes away. Continue reading “Walking Westward, Toward Jerusalem, Across The Jordan Valley by Aiya Sakr”
Douglas, Arizona, is a border town.
I pull up outside the Gadsden Hotel around 10.15am after driving down State Highway 191 from an overnight stay in Willcox. The road follows the line of the Dragoon Mountains, where, in the 1860s, the Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise took refuge with two hundred of his people and for ten years waged a guerrilla war against the US army Continue reading “Who’d Pick A Fight With Lee Marvin? by David Dragon”
In Casablanca you will expect buildings to be white, based solely on the city’s name, which translates to ‘white house’. But there will hardly be a truly white building in sight. How odd is it to call a city a house? Once you spend a little time in Casablanca, it will make perfect sense. Continue reading “In Casablanca by Ganzeer”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 