Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i Popshot Magazine

As she lay dying, my mum told me the truth about the day I was born. “When you were born,” she said. “You cried like you knew what sort of world you’d been born into. At first you sounded panicky. Then you sounded resigned, like you’d given up and were only really crying to be heard, not because you expected anything or anyone to come along that could make you feel better. Then you stopped crying, and they handed you to me, and you just stared at me with this sad expression on your face, and it was so crushing to me that I started crying because I did know what sort of world we’d brought you into. I told the nurses they were happy tears.” She started crying again,…

I don't know how the sunconvinces the moon to go to sleepso that she can scale the horizonand chase the shadows away each dawnBut I do understand that when someoneruns their fingers slowly through your hairit's worth more than the diamondswe sometimes put onAnd I'm not exactly surehow it is that the sand and the waternever get tired of greeting each otherin the same crashing rhythmic danceon every beachBut I do know that the feelingof someone slipping their hand inside of yoursas you're walking side by sidefor no other reason than they love youbrings you peaceSo I'll probably never figure outwhy father winter allowshis frozen solid grey strongholdto be cracked and ultimately shatteredevery year by such a faint warm lightYet I completely grasp why hearts continueto dust themselves off and…

Loss joins us for dinner at 10.43pm. Well after the main course and just before dessert. Our lips are greasy with olive oil and our cutlery lies spent. We are all red from the sun. It must make you feel at home, I suggest to Seb’s parents as I open the French doors. The room fills with hot-wet tarmac, heady grass, sweet-pea scent. It’s never like this there, they tell me. There, they know how to handle weather. I’m staring at a steady ring of red on the table. It’s seeping into the grain of the wood. I press down hard with my napkin to soak it up, although I don’t know why. The dining room table is covered with stains – every one of them from a meal like…

This festive season I will murder myself or you,either swing from the beams like the surume/Bündnerfleisch/culatello of my native Japan/Switzerland/Italy or hide beneath your bedthen hurt you. You kill me by which I meanI like your jokes. In my country we openour stomachs with a tanto/drink a glassof pentobarbital/wade into the Adriatic.I love you so much/it hurts/so much I love you.You make me perfectly happy. We diemost nights but no relief. Call me Jun/Josef/Guiseppe. I do hope I never see you again.For the love of God, come home: it’s theemperor’s birthday/Christmas/Santa Lucia.…

We are sitting on your lawn. In your sun-bleached, bee-buzzy garden. I’m thinking, maybe I should have gone for a shared house at some stage in my life rather than my very own, all-exclusive, sort-out-all-the-repairs-yourself, great-view-of-the-back-of-the-garages flat. Even if you can only afford all this with a lodger -lodgers. But they seem nice. - it’s lovely having a garden, you say. Sipping the elderflower cordial -it’s good that we kept in touch after I left that job. And living so close now, and working part-time. We can meet up for lunch -like today. A leisurely lunch, and sitting in the sunshine on an afternoon. I haven’t got many friends. It’s funny how it works out –friends I was going to the pub with, the theatre-into town, out for meals. They…

the possibilities of the lives that we can live are endless the people we can meet in a lifetime, uncountable the consequences of every choice we make, unfathomable the dreams that we may dream for ourselves, limitless except, for those who have set their hearts on a single entity: a person, an idea, a purpose, or a dream - there is no other your heart has stubbornly set itself on the idea of marrying him,a love so irreplaceable and unforgettable that you would forgo the excitement of a life full of adventure, a life ought to be reimagined constantly that your happiness lies on one out of a billion that if it fails, you may never get it back this is the most terrifying thought, a danger to one's sanity…

There was once a young couple who owned a very special goose. They bought it at the local market from a mysterious trader who promised it would bring them immense favour if they looked after it well. They took it home and built a nest for it in the warmest part of their kitchen. When they woke up the next day, they found a golden egg in the goose’s nest. They were delighted by their discovery and soon learnt that the goose laid a golden egg every day. With every passing day, the couple’s wealth grew. Soon they grew dissatisfied with receiving a single egg per day; they wanted more. The couple desired as many eggs as they wished whenever they wanted. “Just think,” said the wife to her husband.…

Backyard cracked knuckleswith unattended weals,devoid of moisture andstarved of cream, began.Courtesans of men of rank, living their identities out,buckling their knees,pulling back possibilitiesin fluent solidarity andfine, unrequited dreams. There’s still hope in therubble of emulsion andskirting boards, framesand acrylic, synthetic orreal glass ceilings in this sometime state-of-the-artpartly demolished blockof flats, where no-one triedtoo hard to have a heart; itcame naturally like a spark or a pigment reflecting lightoff lintels, live wires andcut copper cables. On therooftop, holding on tightlyto solitary experiences, there’s a chance of settlingdown completely at dusk ina thrilling stillness tonight.The quality of air aboveThe flyover is astounding.…

We meet. But only almost. A street.We fail to greet, these short years on.Instead your eyes flare panic. DisarmedAlarmed, sensing some vague harmThis passing stranger brings, you striveTo place the ghost that spectres someNagging ache you thought you'd shedFrom some discomfiting past. Connection missedRelieved you choose the pavement’s vacant gazeFor comfort, embrace the welcome solaceOf the nameless passer by, a passing momentPassed; the past survived. And that could be the end of it. But let me help you. Picture this. Anew. Review.All pin-striped blue, we thought we knewEach other then. In barren meeting roomsWe shared the bare bland space betweenThe PowerPoints, and points of powerSharpened like stilettos, points of orderPointed with accusing zeal yetNothing more than blank encountersSterile as that receptionist’s sullen smile. Jackets off, not pugilists, as one,Ties loosened,…

As far as any of us can remember, it all started with Alice Bennett. She hadn’t been to school in weeks – one day just stopped coming, vanished – and none of us seemed to know a thing. She was an empty desk, a blank space previously occupied. We wondered where she was, what had happened. We were concerned and we were curious and we needed to know. Those of us sat in first period English that Monday in early October heard the story first. We heard it from Hannah Sharp, her closest friend. She’d been reluctant to tell us anything, but on that morning she gave in and we listened eagerly. She told us that the reason Alice had stopped coming was because of the phone calls. For weeks…

What are the chancesof getting some sleep tonightand waking up in a Russian novelwhere the light’s always late summer eveningand there is only this.It’s hard for a motherto love an existentialist.Sometimes we have to take the bins out,not sit around probing at the essence of selflike a rash around the navel. His headis a skull-shaped hovelfull of sour breath and drinkskeep coming, lucky or not. Unsurehow romantic it’ll be to die poor.He arrives latein yesterday’s shirt.She’s an expertin pretending not to notice.…

Glen got up one day and died. Her head rolled clean off her shoulders and down the stairs, past the cat and out the front door. As she rolled away she had one last look at the rows of terraced houses, at the rubbish that blew out of the bins, at all the dead birds you could ever want. Glen tried to grab a bird in her mouth as she rolled downhill, but she was going too fast. She slowed down as she approached the funeral parlour to shout through the open door, Hey! Clemson! Bury my body!’ ‘Sure thing, dollface. Have a good ride!’ he shouted back. Clemson knew Glen from all the cats and birds she’d buried with his help. The coffins he imported were made of fine…

When I was ten, an employee at a Milwaukee brewery dumped fourteen packages of rat poison into an aging barrel in order to get back at the drunk driver who ran over his six-year-old daughter. He had carried it in in a backpack and put his plan into action during lunch when the other employees were out of the room. It’d been his goal the entire time he had worked there – in fact, it’d been the whole reason he’d gotten the job. What the employee didn’t know is that after being acquitted, the man who killed his daughter had reformed, gone to rehab, and had been sober for three years. After the poisoned beer was bottled, packaged, shipped out, and purchased thirty-eight people died. The guilty employee was quickly…

Temping again. Christmas cover for some lucky sod spending three weeks in Jamaica. Lucy was eighteen and going nowhere for Christmas. Going nowhere, full stop, it seemed. But at that time of year, anonymous offices had their own unique thrill. Left alone while bosses went to boozy lunches, came back chubby-cheeked from cheeseboards. Mince pies everywhere, crumpled Quality Street wrappers rainbowing over desks. And Daz from sales loitering at reception every day, flirting for a week before they kissed in the kitchen with the windows snowflaked and steamy. Big hands around her waist when she wouldn’t tell him his Secret Santa, pressing her against the counter with its tins of coffee and tea. And then the first of the nightmares came. Lucy was awkward when he sauntered in next morning.…

This morning’s clinic is egg collection. We wait in our cubicles, like a brood of hens on a battery farm, wondering who will be called next. We are blind to each other us hens, paper curtains drawn tightly around each bay. The nurses’ station provides the background hum: cupboards being open and shut, the soft thunk of self-closing doors, the squeak of Crocs against the shiny floor. The nurses’ intermittent chatter reminds me that this is merely someone else’s working day. Every so often, the quiet is breached by a flurry of activity: the sudden sound of the double doors of the theatre opening, and the squeaky castors of a hospital bed making its way to a recovery bay. The room is windowless; every corner brightly lit, it could be…

It was not the best planto convalesce on the cheap coach home,the hole in her side weepinglymphatic blood-marble,podge, liquefied for the weddingand her millionaire dress. Paramedics have taped and revived herstemmed the flow of love handlesyruping on the seat.An hour on the hard shoulderand pity has worn thin for the fatof our flushing bride, there are whispersof “compensation” and “lost connections.” Led down the aisle to a blue lit recessionalby grooms in morning suits of green,no fond smiles here from under millinery;they see the soaked side of her sacrifice,the limp bag of her body,the wings of bingofolded over the flowers of her dress.…