DIGITALBEHEMOTHSTUDY TEXT #2

Let's Get Freakin' Sci-Fi

Winter 2011/2012

Contents

2 poems – Eoghan Walls2 poems – Malene Engelund2 poems – John Redmond2 poems – Sarah Hesketh

Haiku Revue Infamous Last Words – Kit Fryatt

2 Poems – Matthew Gregory3 poems – Maria Takolander

Solicitorial – Robert Herbert McCleanBiogs

RAQ & Textual Disclaimer

EOGHAN WALLS

Sun,SkullsandCoconuts

There are more meteorites pulled from the sea out herethan drowned men or coconuts, despite the smellof whin-flowers. Sweat bristles like an atmosphere

on my scalp, as sunlight bloats the cavities of my skull.Eyes once rolled in my pits and teeth cobbled my gumsbefore I opened my head to let the white flesh swell

and ripen. The world is fading with a rattle of palms,as photons boil within the mucus of my spheres,drowning me with a Buck's fizz of fusing helium.

VenusLandingHead you on to Tiles and Grouting. Leave me in Pots and Plantsblowing smoke across the venus flytraps, and watch them jerkilyclosing on the spiders of my ashes. Of course I mean the planet

and Venera VII’s parachutes unreefing themselves on entry,booming fathoms through clouds of sulphur a few miles highabove the hot rocks, where the coldness of space is a memory.

Of course I am talking of sex. Of course I’ll go down tonightinto the sour heat with eyes as blank as ejected solar panels.I close my fringed lids like flytraps, their bellies swollen tight.

MALENE ENGELUND

Jan-og-Jan

So they gave a twin to his namefor the doubled skullthey had heard ran beneath the skinof his swollen head.

His missing palate, they said,made him mute, and some whisperedthat he still slept by his mother,coiled into her like an unborn,

thumb searching his derelict mouthfor what had been lost. That last FebruaryI’m told they found him down by the fieldsbarefooted in the snow

testing the freshnessof cow dung against his weight,his body already half gone,his laugh breaking the orange light

as he felt the crust give inand sank into the ground below.

OwlsThey have the eyes of the drowned.

That yellow, skull-locked stare of those

who went further, who dived for the grey

of stones and the hell of it.

Beneath their feathers they keep

the DNA of flight; think downs, plumes

bristles, and you might catch the frequency

of air, that silent leap for mice.

Theirs is your doorway; slip though

the cracks in the red pine’s bark

to find the pellets of your sleepless hours,

your wasted nights.

Listen. And you will hear their necks

unlocking, their bones shift and turn.

JOHN REDMOND

The BigFreeze

Quirky howyou want to hear my horse-laugh.Distantly, we download a space-photographof Britannia frozen to her broomstick.At either end of it we’re stuck.

The level of falling is set to continue. “When did Scooby Doo enter our relationship?”Beneath the dopeheads’ windowtheir spits refreshthe Toxteth slush. “Was it after Sebadoh?”

“You got them on in the background?” “We’re slackers (cough) ... I suppose.” “No. We’re slobs.”Spotified lo-fifizzles down the aromatic stairwell.“Chicken, do you want me to become a Catholic?”Into my slovenly Nokia I neigh.

Avatar

“What must be strange?”Under the dragon-wingsand raptor-beaks of Her Majesty’s still-surviving fleet −“To talk about yourself in the plural” − we bob and sway with all the kids, the couples.“The third person, even.”

England’s only island-city.From the other side of the universean armoured vest waves down at usand the many anchors outweigh ‘our’ vegetarian cafe.Enough red meat, it is“almost time for the matinee.”Beneath the dragon-wings

of Apocalypse Now, the raptor-beaks of Blade Runner, the cinema is swarming with Buddy Hollys wearing glasses over glasses.During the slow bits of Avatar, a kiss is a species of shield-playand I shut one eye as you do —as a god uses the royal ‘we’.

SARAH HESKETH

The Wow! Signal

Whatever it was

an alien coughthe sudden, drunken elisions of a star

what matters is that sometimes matter can be not

that those stern and perfect canons of the universe

for once forgave the difference between the lightand dark

affording us a flawless

maybe.

The Elephant in the MapThey walk for days -

different maps arriving in their sleep, each nightthey construct new names for the horizon.

No one can remember who sees him first,whose dry tongue finds its memory and shouts

whose fingers move quickly to a whistle. One man thinks to shoot and lifts his gun

but his fellows wrestle him out of ituntil they all stand and squint into the sun

at a small tail that's throwing cupfuls of dirtand a thick hide and their fingerprints.

And nothing has ever seemed more composedthan the swaying bulk of his behind

and no one considers that an error has been made.Later, there are those who will say it was wrong

or that they all dreamed after a shared excessof something that couldn't have been. Much better, others muttered, to have wondered at this, than to claim they saw nothing at all.

HAIKU REVUE

Journey to the West, Wu Cheng'en – Various Publishers

Ugh oh oh ee ah!Monkey reflects the red sun,baring his anus.

EOGHAN WALLS

Eccentric Spaces, Robert Harbison – MIT Press

Eccentric Spaces:Not by – it is in and onRobert Harbison.

JOHN REDMOND

Ariel, Sylvia Plath - Faber

Emptied of vengeanceshe realised Daddy was deadand she was alone.

MARIA TAKOLANDER

Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion – Farrar Straus &Giroux

Blood in the plumbing,she drives straight into the sun.Nothing applies now.

SARAH HESKETH

The Drowned, Carsten Jensen – Houghton MifflinHarcourt

They will all return.Like the drowned they will lift, thenresurface in time.

MALENE ENGELUND

Walk the Blue Fields, Claire Keegan – Faber

Okay I admit it, when I read thesestories I cried.

ROBERT HERBERT McCLEAN

No book, No author – No Publisher

-“I can't write haiku, though. Can I be excused from that section?” -“Yes.”

MATTHEW GREGORY & ROBERT HERBERT McCLEAN

Lunch Poems, Frank O Hara - City Lights.

my papaya heartis in my inside pocketit is lunch poems, #frank

KIT FRYATT

INFAMOUS LAST WORDS

This column is written from poetry’s steady state,which is to be perpetually on the point of anni-hilation. You can learn to love it. God knows,you’ve no choice.

A poem makes up its own form as it goes along. Agood poem is one that gets away with making it upas it goes along. Or; A poem makes a noise. Agood poem makes its own noise.

Poems need subject matter as well. The kind ofpoetry often called ‘conceptual’ might better becalled notional: in précis innutritious, easilyconsumable fun, but the texts themselves are a pi-tiful slog for no reward. Then there are the po-ets who can’t shut up about constraints; someoneshow them how to Google ‘BDSM’, willya? At thesame time, you long not to see the same bag of ma-nipulative emotional tricks—the litanies, theepiphanies, the confidences—in every other poemyou read.

The pleasure poems give us serves to show how numbwe are most of the time. We are scoured, seared,eviscerated by pleasure, and then a couple ofminutes later we’re just ‘fine’, numb again. Thepolitical analogue to this emotional sequencedoesn’t reflect too well on poetry. Then again, Ican’t bear it when poets courageously admit themoral and ethical compromises entailed by the art;it sounds to me like they are signalling to theirminions to hand them knuckledusters and castoroil.

Everything was modern once. Some poets make afetish of the past, and are justly rebuked for it,sentimentality over the contemporary is yet morecommon.

Populists are narcissists, seeing themselves re-flected in ‘the ordinary reader’, and patronisingones, assuming that reader knows as little asthey.

Language is not a thing, goddammit. I mean, iflanguage is indeed anterior to humanity, peeringout through the eyeholes in our faces, it is themore important to refrain from writing oblique an-ti-vocational non-lyrics congratulating yourselfon having realized this. Humanism isn’t much useeither, to be fair.

(Can I get to the end of this page without men-tioning a poem?)

Miss Havisham says Play!

(I think novels are poems still; someone I onlyreally know on Facebook, I met him once, on April1st 2009, he plays ukelele, thinks they stoppedbeing so with Dickens.)

in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries Sleep!

(Guess not.)

(don’t get me started on frank o hara now)

Issuing bulls and edicts like this puts you on thewrong side of everything ever.

KIT FRYATT

MATTHEW GREGORY

The GiantIt must have careeredupwards toreach this point,the mothpreening on hisshoulder. Oldernow theeminent authortried to look atit as the firstmoth he'd everseen. So herewere it's powderwings, the thin tongue a taperlit on nectarAnd heimagined himself remadethrough thethousand prospects of itseyes. Guestshad left him in the arbourunder the spellof fuchsiaand his prose.Drunk andliable at hisowncelebration. Hisfourteenthnovel wasindelicate, yescertainly, but he

meant it to landthat way.Remotely, hewas happy ------his careerreachedbackwards andsome distanceinto the futurelike a ghostpointing to the man who made it. He could feelthe moth'sslight being onhis arm. It waswhite. It hadfallen like ashfrom the night and if he touched it itmight turn toash.

fromDisappointmentsof the WorldCup

Pogerola, Italia

I. Del Cuore

Giulio, in his screw chair, looking at his feet.A rat has nipped his best tomato from its vine,rolled it out of the sun and off of his veranda.There is little to do here but watch the ratedge its orange incisors around the stemand pull the fruit away into the dry boscaglia. Annamaria is gone. And was always going as those women are who move through men like a sweet saying, barely understoodas it passes through them. The rat is rollingthe tomato away, and Giulio is watchingthe tiny, scaled feet vanish from the world.He has to admire, if only from a distance, a kind of momentum in the whole process.

MARIA TAKOLANDER

ConvictsOnly a couple of hundred years ago, grown men and womenwere child-small. Around England, everyone mattered less. When people were hungry, they grabbed at bread made by bakerswith stubby fingers. When people died, planks were nailed together.At all times, earth was easy to come by. After rain, bogs sucked at the bald cart wheels of men and women trying to get somewhere. In the cities, the cobblestones were grimy with children, drunks and sluts. For money, some women hung out piss-warm washing. On the ocean, ships had low ceilings. For sailors, the toneless creaking of wood and flapping of canvas sounded like direction. Beneath the barrels of tack, the convicts listened to the magnitudeof the ocean and the wind, fixed to the clammy timber like snails.

Loneliness

The donkey sat at the plastic table and looked atthe sunset, the orange skyline quickening her likedrunkenness or lust. She shook her head to shedthe flies that clung to her weeping eyes and,before they settled again, saw the ibises in theswamp with heads like axe picks. She turned to herhusband. He was sitting beside her with a frayed,rolled-up newspaper. He swatted his shoulders andlegs, his tail twitching like an echo. ‘Warmnight,’ she offered. She heard the sound of theflies around her ears and, more subtle, thestirring mosquitoes. The light was fading. ‘Quitelovely,’ she said. Her husband smacked the greentable. Three flies were dead. There was somethingwrong with her, she thought. Some undiagnoseddisease. It became insistent. Even as she knew shewas being unreasonable, she turned on him. ‘Do Ieven know you?’ She regretted that her voice wasso high-pitched. Her husband sat, stooped, grey-haired, still. The sky was bruised, and the flieswere dwindling. She found that she could notimagine, did not want to imagine, the underworldto which those insects were returning for thenight. In the remaining light, the donkey lookedat the sparse hair on her belly and watched as amosquito landed, injected her with anaesthetic andfilled up on her blood.

Why nuns are holy

Nuns are virgins.Their wombs, robbed of the worship of pagans,make us absent-mindedlike corridors.

Nuns do not practice adornment.They do not beguile with ochre and emeralds,the omens that makebodies frightening.

Nuns are not garrulous.They take their language,surgeon-like, from a steel tray andare truly grateful.

Nuns are respectful.In stone convents, they hone themselves into ideas among the sussurationsof long-dead men.

Nuns are holy. So do not speak of it.Or of how, month after month, they bleed like the unchristian.

SOLICITORIAL

The first issue seemed to be a relative success,many readers and many positive comments about theendeavour. I hope you enjoyed studying the secondissue too. When contacting poets to write somepoems for this issue, I read a news article aboutthe large hadron collider. It was not an articleabout the for and against of such science, but wasinstead a sweet yarn, that brightened the enddaze. It told of a man found hoking in the bins atCERN, claiming he was from the future, and that hehad come back in time to warn humanity of thedisaster that would occur, if the experimentscontinued and succeeded. I have quite a potentsuspension of disbelief, and was wholeheartedlyconvincing myself of this story until theprotagonist then claimed that he was searching forempty cans of Mountain Dew to refuel his timemachine, which was an unplugged blender. Thischoice of futuristic fuel struck me asjuxtaposional, in that it was the same soft drinkthat the great songwriter Daniel Johnston becamefixated with during his time spent in a mentalinstitution. Another story of wowness that cameto my attention was one of a man who'd noticed aleak on his kitchen floor. It was then, uponopening the cupboard beneath the sink, andcrawling in for a better look at the plumbing, heunwittingly entered a wormhole. Exploring furtherthrough a white light, he meets himself clearly asan older man, of around seventy. Realizing thathe would not necessarily be believed, he luckilyhad his mobile phone in his pocket, and so usinghis out of date technological initiative, hefilmed himself having a lark with his seventy yearold self, illustrating to the camera, how both menhave the same tattoo. Apparently they hung outfor what felt like two hours, but the manremembers only the inept phone footage, but theyprobably had some organic beer, with a hops tobarley ratio of 8:5, played some Xbox3.141592653589793, and ate a nitroglycerine BBQchicken. I heard a story too about a quantumphysicist who quit his professorship to study law,because his beloved physics was getting toophilosophical. Lucky for poetry. Robert McClean

BIOGS

Eoghan Walls debut collection is finallyout, on Seren. Everyone should seriouslybuy it. He was my confidant after I wasnot very seriously attacked by a two leggedcat, after a conference about lonely pages.

Malene Engelund once came to me seeking acontact for herbs. She is the only Danishpoet I know. We shared classes at college.

John Redmond is my PhD supervisor. Helucked out. His second collection, MUDe, isthe first quintessential collection of Irishpoetry for like the twenty first century.It reads like a Japanese car manual.Allegedly.

Sarah Hesketh stood out in Stop SharpeningYour Knives 3. Everyone should seriouslybuy it too. She fights the good fight forPEN. Her book is out. Buy it.

Kit Fryatt is orchestrating a post avantgarde lo-fi language revolt in Dublin. Sheis always winning. See Wurm im Apfel. Buy.

Matthew Gregory and I met at a poetryreading in a Norwich pub named after anumber of bells. He was shaved, live onstage. Call him Gregorian, he won a Gregory.

Maria Takolander teaches creative writingdynamism at Deakin University, She isAustralian. Buy her books too. No Joke. Robert McClean is Robert Herbert (McClean)

RAQ

Are you seriously going to wait forthirteen issues before going to print?I don't... No, It'll probably be annuals.Coincidentally in time for every Christmas?

DIGITAL BEHEMOTH

TEXTUAL DISCLAIMER

Any enlightenment caused by wordscontained in this e-zine remains the

responsibility of the poets whoconjured them.