When Constance Dawson died, no-one really noticed nor even batted an eyelid, for she had been ill a long time and also, a bitter old bitch.
When she came back a few days later, re-materialising on a Saturday morning in the middle of the town’s farmers market, the overall response had been a bit more energetic, some gasping, some downright fainting but most whipping phones from back pockets in the hope to catch the eerie sight.
Ages ago she danced among
The joyous grey blue ocean waves
Not ever knowing she was wrong
to dance where danger lay
They watched her with eyes lit like dark flames
“It’s so wonderful you’re helping me, Michael,” Mrs. Brewster said, offering the boy a smile he had no intentions of returning. “I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”
Like I had a choice, you old bitch.
Michael’s mother had forced him to come, so he could help their elderly neighbor dispose of her recently-departed husband’s belongings. It was penance, she said, for receiving yet another suspension at Jefferson Middle School. “It’s either that or your phone,” she’d threatened. He knew she probably wouldn’t take that away—as far back as he could remember, his phone had offered her innumerable respites from her son’s sour behavior—but he also knew everyone had a breaking point. It was best not to push his luck and just pay the piper now when the bill wasn’t too stiff.
Four days after I moved with my family from Mumbai, India, to Cleveland, Ohio, I picked up the phone to order pizza. I had eaten pizza twice before in Mumbai–at a small eatery that served a spicy-sweet sauce and cheese on a six-inch pizza base. (This happened over twenty years ago. In 2021 pizza is widely available in India.) But now in Cleveland, I couldn’t wait to try the exotic version I’d seen in American TV shows and comic books.
I dialed a number from a flyer that had come in the mail. “Hello, I would like to order pizza.”
“Sure,” said a young male voice at the other end. “You have Q-pins?”
“you are standing in a terracotta city. A mermaid appears and hands you an essay”
I am not washed up but dried out,
on this baked dry plain.
The earth cracked beneath my feet,
my feet cracked beneath my limbs,
my limbs cracked beneath a body craving water.
Reviewed by Shura Price, Andy Fraser, Steve Welsh, Theresa Sowerby & Zoe Collins from Todmorden Wednesday Writers
Writer: Gordon Lish
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Release date: 13th April 2021
Price: £17.92
1
Age seven or eight, I receive my first public library card of
hard, green plastic with black letters emblazoned across it and
I look at no other words apart from these precious two:
Book Token.
I wobble up and down the streets between my house
and the mobile library, perched like a mirage
between roaring cars and the curly slide I stand atop for hours,
unsure if I am brave enough to hurl myself down.
I fall in love with haunted neighbourhoods
with empty houses
devoid of living but evanescent photographs
stand witness to a time when
the bed wasn’t so empty
with roads that have no cars fluttering by
I have started to research clouds and how they might taste in different cities. Grandad tells me the clouds are bostin’ around here though: “Full of flavour, wench.” He tells me how he’d scrage his knees terrible to reach the top of the Wrekin, racing his mates to taste the sulphur on the peak. The whisp of the factories they’d come to work in. But Nan says: “He’s yampy, bab.