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Issue 3 (Spring 2011)

In This Issue:

Okla Elliot / Jürgen Becker:
     (Poetry, Translation)

Peter Barlow:
     (Prose)

Stephen Middleton:
     (Poetry)

Carys Bray:
     (Prose)

Kenneth Gurney:
     (Poetry)

Danita Berg:
     (Prose)

Hazel Mutch:
     (Book Review)

Ernest Williamson:
     (Art)



Archive

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Issue #2

     


The Great Divides

Stephen Middleton

 

And creep, eyes wide,
Through loosestrife and high reed
Trumpet vine…

The great divides …abiding
Prickly pear and scorpion's sting
Strip-searched at the border

Beneath the frieze
Bones, casually strewn
And other ruins

The canvas is buckling
At the airport the hand dryers
Blow air so powerful
That the skin shifts like wheat
Beneath a descending helicopter
Like crop circles forming

Elsewhere a stillness
Learnt in the hospital
A passivity paid for
Heroic or stoic
We call it
Falling for it
Strip-searched (or worse) at the border.


 

 

Stephen C. Middleton
is a writer working in London, England. He has had five books published, including A Brave Light (Stride) and Worlds of Pain / Shades of Grace (Poetry Salzburg). He has been in a number of anthologies, including Paging Doctor Jazz (Shoestring), Troubles Swapped For Something Fresh (Salt, 2009) & From Hepworth's Garden Out (Shearsman, 2010). For several years he was editor of Ostinato, a magazine of jazz and jazz related poetry, and The Tenormen Press, producing limited edition art books of illustrated poetry about music. He has been in many magazines, mostly in the U.K, but also in the U.S.A, Australia, and Europe. His live work includes poetry readings, performance pieces with musicians, stand up comedy, and storytelling. He is currently working on a number of projects (prose and poetry) relating to jazz, blues, politics, outsider (folk) art, mountain environments, and long-term illness.

 







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