By Sian Evans
Location: Armentieres Square, Stalybridge
I
Stagnant water
becomes
ice islands
becomes
frozen
afternoon stroll.
II
Green grass
where the sun shines
white grass
where the moon shines.
III
Beer can
coke can
soup can
refuse –
an exhibition of
IV
a mop,
a shopping basket,
three balls,
and a red scooter.
Is this art?
V
Abandoned pallet
a life raft for
strands of yellow grass.
Refuge.
VII
The ducks?
The geese?
Not even a robin.
First look,
frozen February.
Sian Evans relocated to the rainy north from the sunny south five years ago. It rains and it pours and it floods. She thought it was a myth! This, however, leaves plenty of time to spend indoors writing. Sian is studying English Literature and Creative Writing at Salford University.
By Gill James
Location: Chapeltown Road, Radcliffe
‘I saw some geese today,’ says Joe. ‘Flying across over the hills there. Beautiful they were. They fly in a V, you know.’
It’s worked then, giving Joe the big room with the en suite and making his armchair face the window. From his chair he can see the Pennines in the distance, with the wind turbines, and a vast expanse of sky. And if he stands up – he can stand for a short while – he can see the comings and goings on the street.
We’ve been here just over six weeks. Joe can get around the house quite well now. The first two weeks were great. He must have been tired out from the respite week in the care home while we moved. Perhaps his nights were disturbed there. The journey up here from Southampton took it out of him a bit as well. So, he went to bed just before eight and slept through until just after eight the next morning. It was like having a baby in the house all over again.
Recent weeks have been a bit more fraught. I’m a light sleeper and his en suite backs on to our bedroom. Plus he’s been taking something to counteract the constipation the iron tablets he’s on cause. It always seems to work in the middle of the night. Fortunately, I don’t hear the details, but I do hear the clop shuffle of a man who walks with a stick (stroke three years ago) and I can’t settle again until I hear the toilet flush and evidence that he has safely returned to bed.
Then one evening something really peculiar happens. Mark and I are just getting ready for bed. We’re just about to put our lights off and we hear Joe make his way down the stairs. Clop shuffle. Clop shuffle. Click, click as the lights go on one by one.
‘You’d better go and see what he’s up to,’ I whisper to Mark. I don’t know why I whisper. Joe can’t hear a thing. We have to write everything down for him.
Joe makes his way through our Tudor-style house – one room leads to another. He goes down the stairs, across the hall, into the lounge, through the dining area and then the kitchen and finally into the utility room. He rattles the back door. Then he shakes his head.
He turns, and shuffle clops his way back – through the kitchen, the dining area, the lounge, the hallway and up the stairs. The landing light snaps off.
By anyonita green
Location: Deansgate, near Croma
it is not that i am homesick
for the house of cards, mr simic.
i yearn for the proverbial flop
of the flimsy, two-toned structure,
replica of the place where origin
begins and comfort constructs walls.
* * *
last night we circled deansgate
with our hands tucked into the palms
of each other’s, those suits
in the high-class restaurant stared
through the window as he, his
breath warm against my cheek, slowly
lifted my skirt in the cold to reveal
unstockinged legs.
one woman blushed – yet could not
her eyes from us remove.
* * *
By David Gaffney
Location: Manchester Art Gallery
Art galleries are perfect for picking up women, a fact surprising to Warren whose entire working life had been in art galleries, and he’d had no idea. He’d met his wife Georgina in a gallery – that’s where they had both worked – but the notion of chatting up a strange woman in a gallery struck him as disrespectful.
The fact that men and women used Warren’s carefully curated spaces to feed explosive, untiring sex lives appalled him. His efforts to excite and delight the public, to waken the soul with the tender strokes of art, had been wasted. Years of registering, ticketing, cataloguing, placing, interpreting, caring, protecting meant nothing. The public didn’t want his art. They wanted secret nooks for fleshy encounters. Soft chairs, heavy curtains, peepholes – tissues even. His art gallery was a pick-up joint and Warren, a pimp.
But Georgina had run away. With a wedding photographer. And although he’d tried the bachelor life for a few weeks, without her, without Georgina, without a woman, his life was dingy and meaningless. He had decided to do something about it. Georgina’s last email spurred him to action. Your vacuous chimp-scrawl makes my eyes vomit, she had pounded out in fat capitals, You can mop the jam from between Satan’s toes for all I care.
Where had she learned this language? It can’t have come from Vernon, the quiet wedding photographer, who specialised in novelty poses for his couples (his New Avengers, Pulp Fiction, and Bonnie and Clyde set-ups were all very popular). Warren had no bad feelings towards Vernon. He’d never met him, but he’d walked past the man’s studio a few times and once glimpsed him arranging a family portrait and using a puppet to make the children laugh.
Warren wanted to stop doing furtive, obsessive things like watching Vernon using puppets to make children laugh. Warren wanted forward movement, and a new woman would give him this. And if Warren couldn’t pick up a woman in a gallery then who could? Manchester Art Gallery’s revival of the Art Treasures of the UK exhibition from 1857 seemed an appropriate popularist choice; many single, available women would be wandering unsupervised. All he needed was the nerve and the blood.
By Michelle Green
Location: On the A676 (Wigan Road) leading into Bolton
six thirty pm
and the remains of the most expensive cheese sandwich I’ve
ever eaten
cling to the crevasses
of my slowly dissolving
back teeth
the baby at the rear of the bus
fusses
and frets
over her drink box
as her father’s tattooed hand follows his soft voice
smoothing her into a seated position
You can sit next to me and drink your drink
the sun keeps its winter eye trained on the horizon
we move forward
a blur of last week’s magazines
and mobile phone threats from the man
with no van
and no plan
I’ll have ye fer dinner ye cunt!
and in perfect unison we all move
particles of water
away
from the spit of hot oil in the fourth row from the back
he bellows into his phone
I’ll have yeeee
and the sweet sour smell of afternoon sick
and drinking
clings to the edges of the chairs and pulls itself
slowly up the aisle
