Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i Popshot Magazine

ISSUE 22 — NOSTALGIA WINTER 2018 Absence makes the heart grow fonder, yet so does distance. The further we are from important life events, both physically and chronologically, the more they can crystallise into something meaningful and significant. Our first steps, our first words, our first loves, our first homes; the songs, books and adventures that first opened our minds and our hearts. They stay with us, rest somewhere deep within, and become the building blocks with which we define ourselves; the stories that we share with other people in order to prove that we existed before now. Nostalgia then is a potent force. And we’re talking proper nostalgia here – those internal reveries of the past in which we can briefly escape real life, not some forced regurgitation of…

Mussels cling clammy to the groynesAnd the same pale faces frequent theHouse for Discriminating Customerseach Friday night at 9 o’clock sharp. All the bus routes seem to wind their wayback around to the esplanade at some pointAll unexploded ordnance should be reportedto the nearest available off-duty coastguard. Kids here take their cans to the sandpart-time jobs, still with parents, rent-free.Parties and munitions pockmark the mudflats:All this is the property of the MOD. They keep coin-pushing and teddy-pickingBut the change never seems to drop.A Time Crisis in the House of the Dead.The infinite wafer. Washed-out arcadia. There’s nothing left to find here, friendThat’s why you’re so bereftLife’s a beach, perhaps, but haven’t youever heard about longshore drift? At some point, the promenade absorbsthe destinations, everything ends therewhere the estuary joins the…

Bus stop at the Elephant and it’s pissing it down.Goldfinger’s office blocks bulldozed and a hole where Heygate Flatsruined the many. I still dream faces at windows; fossils caught in amber.A vanishing act: Pizzeria Castello missing from the concrete arcade – bygone sceneof every family slap-up – an Itsu in its place. No nostalgia: I’m a London-born defector.The stranger next to me coos into her phone, ‘Take care’; leaps the river-gutter to the 53.I’m just trying to get back to the West Country, home.Can’t miss the Wassail. Old apple tree, we wassail theeHere’s hoping thou wilt bearHats full,Caps full,Three-bushel bags full,And little heaps under the stair! Train west from Paddingtonand the screen in my palm questions:Can the modern coexist with the rural? Is the city always the centreand the rural…

Tell me your past and I’ll tell you mine.We can treat it like lovemaking:I offer this, you offer that. It will be our way of opening veins. We can treat itlike wine-tasting: observe eachtale’s clarity, its bouquet, roll it along our tongues and swallow carefully.We don’t want to belittle anything. Slowly, we’ll reinforce sill platesand shear walls, make sure windowscan’t shatter, slinging daggers of glass toward us, huddled in the doorwayof our life together. We’ll invent the backstory to the romancea more resilient frame. This time,we’ll take nothing for granted.…

Now we go up, man and wife,after the news-where-you-areis done. We want to floss our teethat exactly the same moment, eachwithout telling the other off:for getting in first, for needlesslylocking the door (that otherwiseswings open), for whatever it isthat could possibly take so long,for pushing in to rinse our handswhile the other one swills ‘n’ spitsat the tap, for muddling pillsnot sorted into their compartments.When our bathroom’s so smalland I’m half broken with fatigue,why can’t you just check your email?Why don’t we just diveunwashed into bed these days?…

She built a village centred arounda Norman church, gravestoneswith names etched too small to read.She kept them behind glass in a cabinetthat came ready-assembled.She wasn’t proscriptive like some philanthropists,the villagers were welcome to drink, quarrel and hangtheir washing out whichever day they pleased. The village was all up hill and down dale;shelves of jutting landscape that lentthe uppermost cottages a Top Withens air.Every house was detached with a threadingbeck out back, their gardens linkedby ginnels of varnished wood. Though it was a sleepy placethe village shop was always open,sherbet and biscuit stocks never depleted. Their celestials were wire-hungpainted plates. To any villagers looking upthere really was an old man in the moonand a cushioned kitten in the sun.I liked to be the last one to bed,to switch off the lights…

It survived, hurray, we all rejoice,that clackety old structure of speed,slight by today’s standards, but stillchain lift, compact twister, wooden,G-force 3.75 (is that bad?)stood up to the hurricane blowingright through the old switchback’s upsand downs that have churned many a gut,brought a stream of smiles and tearsto the public – I mean us. We are they,the ones that ride, the ones that watchits little train hug the rail. It has nearlybeen a goner before, out of date,out of luck, kids moved on to other dares,but saved by the people of New Yorkwho know a good thing when theysee it. I only wish I could say I’d ridden it.…

Over the Thames on Gabriel’s Pier, a man thinks about love. It’s too hot to think about love; it’s too hot to think. It’s as hot as the summer which drove him mad – but that was another him and that was another river. A river abroad, clear as a mirror and fish that went straight for his toes. Love was there because love had walked with him. Love fed him fruit in a garden and love laid him down in the grass. Love pinched his arms first pink, then sunspot-brown, the undersides white as if bleached. ‘Napolitaine!’ Love laughed. Surprised to find his eyes are shut, he opens them and sees the Thames. It’s the colour of muddied milk. Over the Thames on Gabriel’s Pier, a man thinks about…

Here, I say, is my story:on a plate or in a bowlsoups of fire, budding mountains,red rings of oily kisses,stir-fries of grey morningsunder a concrete highway–the wok song, the flame dance.My eyes follow the brown hands– splash, flick, flip, swirl–a hit of garlic in my nosea puddle in my mouth.Of my brand-new leather school shoesa fist in my belly, a golden sweatrolling down my spine.Of the car exhaust in the airsweet and smoky. Of the heatyellow and thick, collecting on my skin.Of my mother’s cleaver, rappingon the bird’s eye chilliesthe green-grass cruncha splash of coolness. Here, I am telling youof breakfasts gone by: my fathercutting, scooping, arranginghis plate, his methodology.Of my heartache: how it squeezesand I can’t breathe.Of a hollowness, a deep clanking in my chest.Of moments I wish I’d…

Out on the Clifton Road, a scooter swervestuba-heavy around a bus. A man sings,a woman’s name rings in the air. A head,curled and pearled, leans out of the top deckand laughs. On a campsite somewhere in Northern Francecirca ’83, a cross-channel couple plan to meetfor Bastille Day fireworks. There, under sparks,they say they love each other for the first timeand kiss. These are the tales I am told, that this is howlove manifests in the wild. Sometimes, Iwonder whether I will add how you cycledacross town just to see if I mightneed you. Then again: I never got fireworks, or bus-sideserenades. Our only confessions came late at nightand with the proviso that you might forget. Youalmost always did; I almost always meant it.Did you? It’s early days. It’s too close…

PAN INI have to admit I shake a little in my coffin despite myself.Those witticisms are so carefully observed. ANGLE ONNow, my idiosyncratic friend, a plangent word or two from him.The sad guilt pins me, useless to the wooden base of my coffin. But REVERSE ONmourners kick back, pews slacken to my favourite1960s song:Up Beat Boy. MONTAGEWe’d stay this way, if it wasn’t for the tearing,tumultuous montage.Oh, that montage,the terrible life it drivesinto my already dead heart.…

We used to feed the gulls together. Bags of scraps; bacon rind, bread crusts, cold roast potatoes, pasta shells that clung to the plastic and made our fingers sticky. Marjorie called the gulls her angels. Claimed their eyes shone with prayers and wishes. She could never understand why people called them pests but said it meant more angels for us. Marjorie didn’t care that we had to masquerade as sisters; that our love was considered unclean, and our only friends were feathered. We had each other – and Marjorie’s illness, of course. I never minded its lingering presence. She was worth it. Toileting, bathing, dressing, sluicing hard skin off her toes; it was all part of loving her. Every day, I carried Marjorie across the sand and from her favourite…

Take your coat off at the door, let it falllike the memories you can’t recallbut which bubble up and harden into glass. Brittle conversation will pass your lips–training for a Himalayan hike, the stateof football. Drinks come and go, the difficulty of staring sober-eyed at the pain.Outside, the sky has sunk so lowit wears the last of summer on its sleeve. You escape to the smoking areaintent on your phone but look insteadat daytime’s broadcast fading over chimney pots and squawking seagulls.Your blood’s reached fever pitch.There are shots to down, trays of drinks to knock over in an effortto remember the oppositeof what drove you here first – to hide.…

When I look at a clear blue sky in August, all I can taste is monkey blood. My nose aches with a sneeze that’s coming, coming, but not. There’s the tinkle of an ice cream van, and just by the sound of it I can tell which street it’s on. I run there, shouting for Josie on the way. I’ve got enough for two, I guess, counting out the twenty pence pieces in my hot palm as I sprint. She can pay me back. I get there and there’s no queue. He’s out of the blue Ice Pops, he tells me, and I’m glad because I’m here for 99s, with as much strawberry sauce as I’m allowed. I meet Josie on the way back and we cut through to the…

Without car boot sales she’d be going around naked, no use to anyone. Her wages hardly stretch to a pair of tights, the sort that ladder in the rain, or rip on a rough nail. Lately, she’s made some good finds – a seersucker blouse and an emerald skirt. Her granddaughter, as thin as crepe paper, needs a dress for a party. Poor little mite. She never makes it onto party lists, but a week today she’ll be off to Burger King. Oh, but she must get on. A gurgling mind will get her nowhere. The bargains will all be gone. She ought to focus, but now she’s thinking about her grandmother, smoking her old clay pipe. She has some vivid memories, some terrifying ones. But so few of her…

8 – Julie-Ann Rowell is a Bristol-based poetry teacher and mentor. Her first poetry pamphlet, Convergence, won a Poetry Book Society Award. Her latest collection, Voices in the Garden, was published by Lapwing Publications. 10 – Jessica Kashdan-Brown currently divides her time between the University of Warwick’s writing programme and working on the installation of a poetry route along the Kennet and Avon canal. 12 – Anna Nazarova-Evans is a published flash fiction writer. Her flash fairytale came second in the Federation of Writers (Scotland)’s Vernal Equinox competition. 14 – Charlotte Newman is a South London-based writer working on a debut novel inspired by art, loss and an accidental trip to a taxidermist 15 – Geoff Lavender often sets stories in his native London. London Plane was prompted by feelings…

That he worked here, at the ESA? Justo asks andI say yes, because even if I never knew the letters forThose sun-soaked buildings under Spanish skiesI remember the photos of newly-built rocketsAll those strange machines igniting andThe time we gathered around a too-small screenTo watch the parachute land in a desert that was not oursNo Sahara or Egyptian plane, no dunes or sands whose grains we knewBut the jasper mist of Titan – and my father told usHe did that Now Justo leads us round the foyer and shows meThat yes is an answer I should not give without knowingWhat words like Huygens and Cassini meantThat every piece of a rocket is made by someone newThat years of my grandad lay between those groovesWhere he sat at the desk by…

Around four in the afternoon, if the sun is shining, a shadow falls across that part of the square where a woman sits on a park bench, waiting. She brings with her a flask of tea and two enamel mugs which she takes from her bag and places on the bench beside her. It’s late September now and leaves are beginning to fall from the trees that surround the park. When they last met here, in this London square, it was June and he was on leave. They sat on the same bench that she sits on now and drank tea from a flask. She will recall these moments, even years from now, as the best she’s ever known. The happiest of times. He promised that as soon as the…

Unsettling to see him againamong this cacophony of strangers. Decades ago we crossed legsevery Saturday on the floor of his attic bedroom. Cocoonedby its slanted ceiling, we folded into our weekly programs,a maroon radio antenna our sail. We crayoned to Big John and Sparkyand the Lone Ranger, favouring silver and Prussian Blue. In the corner tank,fish mouths opened and closed. We pinky-swore to find each otherafter we’d left home for good. Not like this – unable to speak,just looking at our watches.…

On my way to work, a child’s bicycle abandoned by the swings reminds me of your old one from all those years ago – the same cherry red with white rubber ridged handlebars. We bejewelled yours with shiny bits that I deemed too childish for my more “grown-up” bike; plastic reflectors for the spokes, and hologram stickers for the frame. You needed training wheels for longer than the other kids (balance was a challenge for you). That summer, our mother took one off so you had your own odd little tricycle. Refusing to let go of its one-sided safety, you careened down hills, fringe air-blown back, gap-toothed grin, body tilted to one side. Until that day it came off mid-pedal, and you wobbled dangerously, suddenly at sea. ‘Keep going,’ I…