Oz Hardwick
Anthem Space is at a premium in the City of Slow Children, so they’re turning cemeteries into skateboard parks to keep up with the trend. Kids and skeletons grind and flip, then mooch in the shade of the halfpipe, sharing gum and stories about being alive. Someone’s brought a boombox and they’re playing that song you hear everywhere, though you’ve never listened to the words. It’s something about defiance, about speed and the pallor of girls’ brows, and it rattles like a stuttering rifle or a truck spitting asphalt. Come the next fad, the planners will tear it all down, leaving nothing but the smell of weed. But for now, they’re all wrapping their bones in baggy hoodies, eyeing up the dusk, tagging space with ashes. ** Shedding Young lasts longer than it used to, slipping years into its pockets when nobody’s watching and turning up the music when the neighbours are trying to sleep. It has no sense of rhythm, but it loves to dance on the lawn. It has a voice like a key scraping slate, but it sings the chorus with the wrong words. On Sundays it arrives in an open-topped car, rucking the verge and rattling disreputable cans, blasting retro air-horns and laughing like a drain. Gran totters out on needle-thin heels, glowing with slap-on tan, as Granddad flips a finger to the rows of uptight lawns. Middle Age is bound in the boot, its mouth taped shut. And Old? Old was on its way, but its flight was cancelled, its phone’s dead, and its skin is becoming smoother by the hour. ** A Farewell to Empire Yes, we need to talk about our past: our fingertips, our statues, our birds and animals. We need to consider the canaries wrapped in purple tissue and the lanterns we’ve always strung across our lawns. There have always been friends and allies with glowing eyes, and there have always been worlds within worlds in which liberties have been taken like photographs and tacked above desks for inspiration. In the middle of the forest, we have always been something like giants or – let’s not mince words – ogres. At the edge of the ocean, we have never been anything but stones bearing the imprint of angels. Yes, we can’t deny there’s a lot on our plate: tornados, babies, and dialects which, in the current circumstances – sandcastles crumbling and doors nailed shut – we are uncomfortable about passing from mouth to mouth. Walk this way. No, this way. ** The Metaphysics of Civic Amenities The tap runs hot and cold. I don’t mean the water, because there is no water and, although some swear otherwise, I don’t recall there ever being water. There are old men who say they remember washing their hands, old women who say they remember drinking, but I was born in the same year as the old people, and I know there’s been nothing but fluctuations in dry temperature since, as the saying goes, time immemorial. The tap, while functionally redundant, is a memorial of sorts, a reminder of times when we could feel just a little bit in control. It is, of course, a false memory, a wishful myth passed down by loving liars who had nothing to offer us but empty hope, but it’s no less reassuring for that. I can’t decide if I’m more or less superstitious than most, but when all the city’s asleep, I’ll sometimes kneel beneath its reassuring spout, shiver as the icy absence blasts my scalp, then slowly turn the handle until it feels like I’m on fire. Once upon a time, there was water. Once upon a time, it stopped. ** The X Factory Some nights my fear still clocks in for the late shift, taking its place between angry machines. It strips to the waist and binds its hands in duct tape, then ties an oily blindfold across its weeping eyes Noise spills from tottering hoppers and pain-edged metal cuts endless hours into swelling seconds. My fear is stiff with the weight on joints and flexors as it performs its pattern of pressure and release, its ingrained ritual semaphore which spells out need in a language no one understands. Outside, abandoned cars rust on arterial roads, houses sigh and concertina into their own dust, and sixty or more years of space junk falls burning to Earth. My fear is bruised and bleeding as as it breaks a thing, makes a thing, slings a thing onto the pile of things it hopes it will never wake to see, until, when the shift ends, no time has passed, the clock is a bomb, and the night is just beginning. ** Rewilding There are eagles where yesterday were chimneys and TV aerials, tigers where there were discarded newspapers. It’s a school day in another new world and today’s lessons are rocks and fire. Sweat writes primal memory in all my body’s hollows and I’m learning the language of bruise and fear, the mathematics of chaos and control. 1+1=a couple of million years of building streets in which to fight. There are broken eggshells where yesterday were asphalt and gravel, a serpent biting its tail where there was a map with a circle saying YOU ARE HERE. It’s the first day of a life without rest and there are eager shoots piercing the soles of my feet. The school is a cave full of stinging smoke and today’s test is the limit of mutation. There are yesterdays where there should be todays, coarse fur and bright feathers where there should be soft skin. ** The Last Book in the Misremembered Library This is not the story with the swallowing forest, with flitting things close behind but vanishing at every turn. In the same way, it’s not the simple tale of the vague ache that stops me, and thousands, maybe millions – maybe you, too? – getting up, getting out, getting going, getting things done. These stories were stubbed out before cock-crow. Instead, it’s the one about the dark cellar/cave, with sounds dubbed in from stitched-together Elstree shadows and disconcerting fluctuations in temperature. Somewhere, there’s a cord to switch on the light/pull down a ladder/open a hatch that leads into a 50s kitchen smelling of fresh coffee and blueberry muffins, but in this story I/you/the unnamed protagonist won’t find it. There is no beginning/middle/end, and we have to find these satisfactions elsewhere; perhaps in the forest, after all, though there’s pain in my ankles and behind my/our eyes, and when I glance out of the window, traffic’s streaming backwards. Beneath the floorboards, there’s sawing or sighing and, at least in this story, the cock crows three times, oblivious to the fox. ** Oz Hardwick is a European poet, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “about a dozen” full collections and chapbooks, most recently A Census of Preconceptions (SurVision, 2022) and My Life as a Time Traveller (Hedgehog, 2023). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.” Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. |