Oz Hardwick

​Odysseus and the Early Commute
 
In the damp silence before dawn, the mermaids swim to work. Before the first bus, before the trams and underground trains, they shimmer and glide between tidy gardens, singing their songs of morning. They sweep in shoals up desolate streets, undulating like light itself, the sleeping shop windows glittering back their kaleidoscopic scales. Then, as the first alarm clocks call to the city, they ease themselves into elegant limbs and smooth down their fashionable frocks. The first bus coughs into life, and stations open their eyes to gold light in the East. Shop shutters rise, offices jolt awake, and down the broad parade, dazed sailors with long coats and rolled umbrellas stagger with the weight of half-remembered songs.
 
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Urban Redevelopment and the Moral Imperative
 
To dodge the consequences of my indiscretions, I pulled the house down around me, just another wreck in a street still trembling from war. Kids would come by, picking through the rubble for souvenirs – brass trinkets and cracked plastic dolls – and I’d hold my breath so they didn’t know I was there. Grass grew from all my cracks, then scrubby flowers and the occasional wild strawberry that the kids would be excited to find, though a little disappointed with its bitter taste. A tree grew, stiff and uneven, and birds gathered at its lopsided crown, shouting at the sky for more sun, more rain. And in all this time, I forgot what I’d done that had once been so terrible. More trees grew, and the kids became adults who, for all I know, became birds. I sometimes dream about a house, but I can never picture myself within its walls. 
 
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The Last Midsummer
 
Words slip on their dancing shoes and sneak out down the ivy. A parched field. A rainbow marquee with boards laid out for the summer night tap-and-shuffle. A string band strikes up with a tune my mother would hum while she hand-washed my first school uniform and the words bow in lines on the point of making sense. A red-haired girl in pale blue lace spins barefoot in between, her hands high with fruit and sharp pencils, her head a hive of buzzing ideas, her heart a home of heroes-in-waiting. She inclines her face, just so. And now the words are tapping their toes, lacing their fingers into a processional arch for the swaying line that reaches back to the first capital and disappears towards the shimmer of the full stop at the end of the universe. I know this story of births and deaths; I know this song and its chorus of love lost and found, and I kick off my threadbare slippers. Once upon a time there was a red-haired girl. 1,2,3 – 1,2,3. I want to tell you a story. 
 
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Redirecting the Male Gaze
 
Cross your arms, says the photographer, and she does without question, as she does everything without question. It’s like that time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, one million years BC, making primitive promises. Cross your heart and hope to die, said the hunter-gatherer, and she did, even though her sense of anatomy was fairly rudimentary, her conception of an afterlife or eternal nothingness was more fear than faith, and, besides, she could not be completely certain of anything in a language based on little but grunts and the angle of crudely knapped flint. It’s just like in the movies, she thinks, though she knows there’s no comparison, and deep down she understands that it is just a movie, storyboarded by cynical committee, then cut and shaped to the focus group’s passing whim. Why so cross? smirks the photographer, tangled in her tight brow, and he reaches to touch. 125th of a second. Flash. She leaves him beside a bloodstained club. Perhaps there will be consequences, perhaps not. It may take a million years. Jesus, she scrawls on a makeshift intertitle, haughty as Jacqueline Logan. It’s a cross we all must bear. 
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The Willow Initiative
 
It being a time for wings, I step behind the screen to shed my skin. I’m a moth, taking my bearings from anything that resembles the Moon; I’m a crane, asking whistling policemen the quickest way South; I’m a cheaply animated superhero going through the same motions, week after week; and I’m a 1:48 scale biplane with adhesive not supplied. The screen resembles Japanese lacquer, but is Victorian pastiche, a varnished découpage of problematic cultural stereotypes and extinct lepidopterae: British large copper, Danish clouded Apollo, Polydamas swallowtail, Dutch Alcon blue. And there are secret lovers on the delicate bridge between yesterday and tomorrow, their warm hands clasped, their soft skin feathering beneath long winter coats.
 
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Soul Cakes
 
Coffee fills the gaps in everyone’s story. A girl reads recipes like choose-your-own-adventure books, skipping implicit hyperlinks through weight and process, folding herself into the stiffening mix as she thumbs thumbs thumbs steep crimps into everything raw. It’s 4am, and her bed bakes in summer’s mouth, gaping like the stove she saw carved in a Belgian church, the day they loaded coffins through the open top of a 2 CV with Boschian birds pecking at the windscreen. On balance, she knows it’s a blend of coffee and cookery, the kick and the heat, the sentence and solace, that fills her with weight or wings; so, she chooses her fresh ingredients carefully, lays them out like evidence. Presently, timers will sift and tick, sift and tick, as soul cakes rise, awaiting taste, and she will slip away into Java steam that fingers her throat and runs its tongue down her spine.
 
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Oz Hardwick is an award-winning prose poet, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “a dozen or so” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). 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 (UK).