ITS HARD TO IMAGINE IT ALL GOING TO SHIT
THE PINK FLOWERING DOGWOOD
After Jon Woodward’s ‘Rain’
by Chloe Elliott
The wins and the stink; I’ll take the funnel and the shovel
though it’s hard to be a person when all the flowers are dead.
Is it worth finding a nice spot amongst the cornelian cherries?
Those pink fists gripping. What is dogging anyway?
I’ll wink and you’ll be next to me in a field of white bunches,
stirring through little pickles that spell out combs of bog.
Daze
by Terence Dooley
What are box-sets for? They are where we live.
They drop, they use up all the time we have.
They make the seasons one perpetual summer.
Their square-jawed heroes have intriguing flaws,
clean hair, desirable apartments and fast cars,
they quench their thirst with blood, and they mutate,
they zoom through space: their lives are unlike ours,
the ones we had before. They are more real
and twice-life-size in HD on our walls.
Their lovers love them back. Bad guys they kill
revive in the next frame. Good guys play dead.
No mystery’s unravelled till the sequel.
Where can we live but in box-sets? Ah, asking
that question sends aftershocks through Netflix.
Girlish Duties
by Samir Sirk Morató
Shamim isn’t certain that Pratyusha’s plan will work until Pratyusha emerges from the general store, badges gleaming on her breast, boxed candles and a cake in her arms. Shamim gapes at it.
“It’s perfect!”
The cake is the size of cousin Abhineet’s head. It’s piped in swirling draperies of buttercream and studded with sprinkles and plastic balloons. Its whiteness is obscene. Shamim, delighted, wants to retch.
Pratyusha scoffs. “I told you I could get it. Everyone loves a scout.”
Shamim nods. Bloody relief tacks her gums.
Pratyusha’s parents are at the temple in Louisville,so they bike to her house, braids flying, unphased by twitching roadkill or Abhineet’s bridge-bound memorial cross or screaming neighbors. Soon, they trot into the living room. While Shamim hefts the cistern lid onto the linoleum, Pratyusha retrieves the rope.
Shamim leans over the shaft. “We’re home!”
The cistern buzzes.
Pratyusha hooks their knotted rope to a pipe. She tosses it into the cistern. It slaps the water below. Shamim, bagged goods tied to her skort, wiggles into the cistern’s maw.
“Don’t drop the cake!” Pratyusha says.
Hand over hand, Shamim lurches downward. When her sneakers touch stone, coolness splashes her socks. Pratyusha’s flashlight beam illuminates the cistern from on high. Shamim smiles at their work.
Abhineet’s new body—a maggoty mâché of deli slices, popsicle sticks, mannequin parts, and trinkets—smiles with tea light eyes and rubber-banded deer jaws. His entourage of paper boats and rubber duckies bobs around Shamim’s ankles. She kneels at his humanish side. He reeks of molding strawberries.
“Happy birthday, Abhi.” Shamim brushes a wig curl from Abniheet’s brow, then scoops cake into Abhineet’s mouth. It clogs his slinky throat.
“They don’t have merit badges for what we’re doing.” Pratyusha’s echo laughs. “We need to find jumper cables next.”
Shamim curls Abhineet’s sticky wooden fingers around his “6” candle, distracted by dreams of nectarines cut for three and griefless school night dinners. Abhineet still lacks fingernails. Perturbed, Shamim vows to give him her kitty-patterned press-ons. Without pink, pulsing nail beds, something important is missing.
Fortunately, their hands are the same size.
Chloe Elliott is a poet based in the North. She is a winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize as well as the 2020 Creative Future Writers’ Award. Her writing features in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, bath magg, Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, and The North, amongst others.
Terence Dooley has his 8th and 9th translations of Spanish poetry out this autumn with Shearsman Books: Mercedes Cebrian’s Affordable Angst and Daniel Samoilovich’s The Enchanted Isles. His own poems Tocoloro are coming out next year with Los Papeles de Brighton.
Samir Sirk Morató is a scientist, artist, and heap of flesh. Some of their work can be found in Catapult, The Dark Sire, and The Hellebore. They are on Twitter and Instagram @spicycloaca.