Featured in
- Published 20231107
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-89-4
- Extent: 207pp
- Paperback, ePub, PDF, Kindle compatible
Lady, in this heavy light
you show tender: waving your insides
outside, buffeted by the sea’s
old heave ho. Nobody calls out medusa –
but there’s a distinct resemblance
about the tentacles. The currents drag
in silver mercies. Your face flares
and ripples. Look, it was
never meant to be easy: day after day
fronting the ocean. We’ve all been
fettered and must learn: this grasping.
That letting go.
Share article
More from author
A Little Box
PoetryAnd didn’t I grant you six identical faces, each perfectly plain as the other and a sturdy mouth to clasp shut?
More from this edition
The animal in the walls
Non-fictionScrambling the scientific assumptions of the time, fungi and fungi-like organisms also gained new cultural and symbolic meanings. They began to sprout in the claustrophobic houses of gothic fiction and the swamps of horror; in the centre of the Earth and on the distant moons of science fiction; in utopian tracts, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary literature; and in the parasitic infections of the post-apocalyptic. Fungi were metaphors that fruited in many genres, mirroring human preoccupations with communal life and our tangled place in ecologies and economies. Creeping, co-operating, intertwining, fungi continue to feed our cultural dreaming and political unconscious.
The tiger and the unicorn
Non-fictionTigers are as concrete a metaphor as any man could wish: ferocious, territorial loners requiring vast landscape and huge quantities of prey. Henry had named his firm in the spirit of the money making he set out to do: an apex hedge fund, stalking longs and pouncing on shorts, untethered to the groupthink of a pack.
Object permanence
Non-fictionTigger arrived with one eye and a tender but wary disposition, and at first it seemed like the missing eye would be the locus of his mystery. But within a few months of his living in my small apartment, he began presenting strange troubles – back legs listing when he turned a corner, spasms in his resting spine – that were quickly diagnosed as arthritis and diabetes. We so often use the phrase ‘the stiffening of joints’ that we forget it’s a courtly term for the elision of matter, without which the bones rub together, scrape and grate. While I acclimated to managing the diabetes – an injection every twelve hours, which Tigger didn’t mind, quickly learning to associate it with freeze-dried chicken snacks – he also started hesitating before jumping on and off surfaces, before finally doing so despite the promise of pain.
