Anzan and the Visitors by Anton Krueger

Forbidden Steps by Gary Cummiskey

Eva Jackson: 0050

Lines for explaining yourself to audiences

“I will just pretend that I am walking into a new office where I have just gotten to know everyone very well.”

“I have no sensation in my fingers, so if I clutch my papers in a kind of crumpling frenzy it is not because I am scared of you.”

“Those with no sensation in their fingers are still good at sex.”

“I do have sensation in my fingers.”

“Imagining you all as naked or as clothed in some kind of period dress would just result in a weird delay in my reactions and then you would get stony-faced, so let’s just dispense with that shall we?”

“This has gotten weird. I’m going now. Thanks. Bye.”

cherry bomb: 0016

Victoria Williams: 0207

The disadvantage of drunken letters: no sent folder. I have no context as to why you’re replying to me with such anger, and ending with the flourish shut up you suicide!

Internet Sentences: 0023

Give to your girlfriend enjoyment

Source: Junk Mail

tuesday by Anton Krueger

The Right Start by Gary Cummiskey

Eva Jackson: 0049

cherry bomb: 0015

Victoria Williams: 0206

Something with that many nerve endings into hot water...

F

New from Dye Hard Press: Left Over by Kobus Moolman

ISBN: 978-0-9869982-2-5

The poems in Moolman’s latest collection tease the boundaries between fact and fiction, between memory and invention. The poems push into territories as yet unexplored in Moolman’s work: the obsessions and hallucinations of the body ‒ all permeated with a wry humour, the kind that laughs at its own terrible seriousness.

Kobus Moolman was born in 1964 in Pietermaritzburg. He has been awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize, the PANSA award for best drama, the DALRO poetry prize and the South African Literary award for poetry. He teaches creative writing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

His previous poetry collections include Light and After, Separating the Seas, Feet of the Sky and Time like Stone. His play Full Circle has also been published, as has Blind Voices, a collection of radio plays. He edited the anthology Tilling the Hard Soil: Poetry, Prose and Art by South African Writers with Disabilities.

Eva Jackson: 0048

Song to a cockroach

For when you visit the plughole
THERE WILL BE NOTHING THERE
And when you walk along the dresser
NOT A CRUMB
And when you sample the gap between the stove and the counter
THERE WILL BE FUCK ALL
BECAUSE IT IS CLEAN.

cherry bomb: 0014

Victoria Williams: 0205

In a conversation about jokes: I can’t even tell the last one since the punch-line is to get your cock out.

K

The Return by Gary Cummiskey

Eva Jackson: 0047

Opinion

When you said ‘all opinions are shit’
Did you mean that the radical contingency of beliefs positions and attitudes
Confounds us and confounds you,
Even as you, like me, hold to your shrill indignation?
Or did you just mean all opinions are shit?
When you said you were very interested in hunter gatherers
And that you would therefore like to know more about the Zulu,
Did you cavil at my cackle? It was very funny. You were so confident
In your lack of knowledge; I recognised a fellow bullshitter.
When we rode on a bike between beaches
And saw tiny huge elephants trained to walk in a line
And your shirt became my whole world
And you eventually on one street corner put your forearm calmly on my leg
And a little while later held my hand for a moment
And then jokingly said, in perfect time, that you were just doing that to clean your hand,
Did you know your pronouncements were clever and foolish and disarming?
Back in town after the holiday
I looked up clothed in black
To find you walking towards me and you saw my sadness.
Just for the record, when my mother met my father
He said ‘life is a shit sandwich’
And after that, like most people, she couldn’t forget him.
Did you know he was joking, did you know he was quite, quite
Serious?

cherry bomb: 0013

Victoria Williams: 0204

MAPS: The Royal Exchange Theatre. I saw Jeannette Winterson reading from her new book. It sounded good, although I didn’t hang around afterwards to buy a copy. I was impressed by some of the questions from the audience members, including one girl who said she’d been born to parents who’d really wanted boys. Her way of dealing with this had been to get a bus to Manchester. My solution had been to cut all my hair off, start wearing three-piece suits and twirling a pocket-watch on a chain, but it turned out that that was not the sort of boy my father really wanted. So here I am in Manchester too.

V:2