Other Lives

To help cope with the post-NPD comedown, I'm delighted to be able to post two poems by Claire Trevien. Love from, On my wall I pinned the postcards you sent me from Malta, Ibiza, Gomera, Greece . . . My fingers jumped from pools of fluorescent water to cats haunting crusty archways. I used to pine at your absence — an idea — as I fingered those battered papers haunting my wall. Each picture was your face watered down by time, even the stamps smiling from their contained box. My fingers would trace the images from the cards until they unpinned. Once, you gave me Madrid, a water fountain, but your words failed. My haunt would always be wrong: you’d pinpoint a boulevard rather than the street it was (or water it down to a lane) and your signature varied from “your father” to “Joel”. I sent its crumbs to haunt the wind, but eventually my fingers chased those scattered scraps pinned inside bins, imprinted, or sailing watery grass. I rescued my wronged address from the pond and the litte...

Sauna Lie still. This is the cusp of comfortable. One thin towel can’t muffle the hot slats and a mist is pressing on you like cement. You’ve become the confluence of two rivers, one of liquid salt and one of steam, which pour over your bones and work them edgeless – and the tiered box is so crisp and angular, it carves up even light like church windows. You lie perfectly still. You are what flows. Dough A silent accordion she cools her hands to play in the kitchen corner. I try and it seems to writhe against my grip. In her firm press it doesn’t struggle, it flows through the shapes she offers it: she leads but makes the dough an equal partner. Hard stem of the palm is what she works with. Sometimes you can see a medic working to restore a heartbeat: bread needs breath, unspooling yeast needs air. I need that strength of touch, that medium which yields as it strains to rise. So I kiss her hands. John Clegg was born in 1986 and is studying for a PhD at Durham University on the Eastern ...

Just want to share some of John Clegg's excellent work up at Silkworms Ink . Rumour has it Salt will be putting out a debut collection in the next year or two... Look forward to it!