Poetry & prose by Alex Hickman
Today, right at the beginning I hung the heavy bag. I bought a good jute rope and slung it over a high branch of the yew, my boys helped me out. I found the bag loaded with pain and a generosity all of its own, a guarantee of what life may give up if you’re […]
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Lying in bed listening to my liver sing to my kidneys songs of destruction and of joy. Listening to the shallow breathing of the girl in my bed, the baby girl, our Christmas girl who I did not drop last night nor did I offend her after most of a bottle of champagne burgundy, three […]
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Blindfolded by your mother you do not see the high moon, whole villages behind pickets of wasted trees, their captive churches. The white road slow between the darkness and the Christmas lights. Without God or fear we carry you, and each mile brings us closer to a motorway junction, the black hospital approaches swept and […]
Read More…Training done with and the pool deserted I took a deep breath and exhaling cornered myself in the deadly quiet of water. Its emptiness, the bright blue distance like nothing you might imagine. I sat still, a sluggish thinker the oxygen curdling in my adult lungs. All the time I was down there I thought […]
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Long questing days the anchor raised we longed to ground in territory we could not find. The anxiety about money which frayed and rowed, the hateful to and fro. We kept going. II The steel-shod boots of men their paint-fouled radio filled our new house with other music. Where now our bed is assembled was […]
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Fieldfares flutter its fine netting maddened by the scented air, their hard eyes looking for holes into this open-air larder where currants and berries sit bright as jewels under the green leaves.
Read More…At Piraeus’s deepwater port ends Europe where Themistocles built his navy sheds and high walls against the Persians, walls to protect the precious Athenian way of life. Now Europe ends in concrete and quayside cranes made elsewhere, raised over the sea to process containers sat waiting in the sunshine. An international ship approaches slows and […]
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