by MW Bewick
Hattie also remembered that when my father was a child he had described the river as a yawning snake, which to me seems precocious. To him, snakes meant danger, and the space below the bridges was filled with slithering horror. They found things in rivers too. It said so on the news. Whatever people secreted in the unfathomable water eventually washed up. [read more…]
Iain And Will Have A Cup Of Tea
by Matt Haynes
Iain stared glumly at the stained formica. “It’s like I said, when I told you how Hackney’s pre-Games decontamination and realignment into a fugitive cartography of designer lock-ups and guerrilla sofa bars had created a hallucinatory Ballardian nexus of dystopian interzones – some of the ley lines they dug up to build the Basketball Arena had been there since the days of King Lud.” [read more…]
For The Greater Good by Matt Haynes
Mother, by the time you read this I will be in Tegucigalpa.
Don’t worry, I’ll be fine; I just wanted to let you know
That I have buried the body of Nigel Farage
At the back of Uncle Terry’s garage
In Bow.
[read more…]
Leyton Lights by Matt Haynes
Once, on a night flight to Los Angeles, our pilot told us over the intercom that if we looked out the right-hand window we’d see Las Vegas. So I pressed my face to the Plexiglas and saw a strip of pure light blazing out from the Nevada desert like someone had just skimmed sodium pebbles across a vast black lake. [read more…]
A Thousand Black Fishes by Jude Rogers
The sky like a kingfisher’s flash.
The new Eastway overlooking the old, solid river.
[read more…]
A Short Journey Downriver by Mark Sadler
Twice a day, when the tide is high, the Thames floods the broad, low-ceilinged underground channel from which the Granville emerges. During the autumn and winter, as the temperature drops, these back surges create localised fogs that linger along Upper and Lower Thames Street. The river that London buried alive rises like a ghost through the porous layers of paving to reassert its claim upon its former overground course. [read more…]
“I’ve heard there’s a new park here, where is it?” demanded the man in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park information centre in the middle of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
by Matt Haynes
Hedonism, of course, was the name of the game, and pretty much anything went. One night, Boy George nearly brought Duran Duran’s career to a premature end when, clutching a garish mojito, he hurtled down the slope using Simon le Bon as a toboggan; luckily for the course of popular music, the chubby Brummie took it in his pantalooned stride. [read more…]
by Howard Colyer
Goalkeeper’s fumble,
Bywater can’t hold the ball,
then the rest follows.
by David Riddell
What’s this? I’m… I’m falling. That’s what I’m doing. Must be. Wasn’t expecting this. Totally outside my experience. Don’t think I did anything to precipitate it, not that I can think of. Well now. I’ve done some daft stuff, but – nothing like this. I wonder what’s going on? [read more…]