I do like a pleasure every now and again

Sometimes I eat that ‘plastic’ ham or cheese singles.
I’ve also read some really (so-called) trashy books.
I have a fondness for Harry Styles and quite like Cheryl Cole.

I must be pretty thick and uneducated,
or so it would seem, despite the fact that
I often eat in ‘high-end’ restaurants,
read (so-called) literary fiction
and regularly go to the theatre.

I don’t want to read 50 Shades,
but don’t give a monkey’s poop who else reads it.
Read what you like I say, just accept that maybe
I don’t want to read it. I have no interest
in reading Austen, Trollope, Eliot or Dickens either –
so my disinterest crosses many boundaries!

As yet, I have not watched Gogglebox,
but I expect that if I do, I may be hooked.

My cranberry sauce usually comes from B&M.
I have cider in the salad drawer,
and I also like my red wine cold – yes, cold –
and usually the bottle has a screw top!

There are loads of books that I don’t want to read,
things that I don’t want to watch
and places that I don’t want to eat in.
However, lots of people do – and surely that’s fine?

I like my life, my food and my books to be diverse.

Text from a friend’s facebook status, and from her responses to other people’s comments on it. Submitted by Angi Holden.

Four Trees Quartet

Eastern Hemlock

The leaves fall upon drying.
A poor Christmas tree.
Poor quality of wood.

Stonelike hardness of the knots
will chip steel blades.
Lumber taken for pulp.

Useful for railroad ties.
Holds spikes exceptionally well.
Bark rich in tannin.

A tea was once made from leaves
and twigs by woodsmen and Indians.
As fuel, the wood throws sparks.

Japanese Honeysuckle

Fruits eaten
by birds and mammals

and the dense cover
is much used,

but generally speaking
it is a weed.

Smooth Blackhaw

Fruits eaten
by foxes,

bobwhites,
and several

songbirds.
Some people

also like them

Bullbrier Greenbrier

Some twigs
may be

without
prickles.

Taken from George A. Petrides, A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs (Houghton Mifflin Marcourt, 1973). Submitted by J. R. Solonche.

What We Should Be Doing

We ought to be reading
poetry too
of course
and nonfiction

We should read
instruction manuals
legal documents
restaurant reviews and corporate newsletters

We should follow weird people
on Twitter
and go to lots of parties
and have lots of intense
and ridiculous
conversations with drunk people

We should go
home for the holidays
and argue with our families
and we ought to
listen
to lots of music
and we ought to watch
plenty of television

We should eavesdrop
and we should gossip

We should probably be in therapy

We should probably drink
more coffee.

From “Most contemporary literary fiction is terrible”, a discussion about how literary fiction writers should improve their craft. Submitted by Wesley Brown.

Across & Down

Police officer, at times,
bane of the farmer’s wife.
Safest option:
Shirley’s partner.

Outside
snatch Rosemary—
thine
from the Vienna Woods,
winning for the moment
expectant, perhaps
bound together—
perturbed
auriculate
bottomless.

Troublesome,
change the packaging.

Bridge support
where Tanumafili is king.
Type of master
problems for Job.
He didn’t finish his sentence:
the man of a thousand faces.

Utterly beat,
Cosmonaut Gagarin
comes ashore.
Three steps and a shuffle.

Clues from the New York Times crossword, 18th July 1993. Submitted by Joan Siegel.

Deserters

We were getting new recruits
sixteen and seventeen years of age
when we had to do this attack

The two youngsters were crying
It was such a shock
We moved up to the attack
They had cleared off
three or four miles from the action

They were brought back and charged
The verdict of the court was read out
The two young men had deserted
They were going to be shot at dawn

The two young men
were brought out
to a yard
blindfolded

Fire at the head
At the heart

The chances were
they would be killed instantly
As of course they were

The four men who had to shoot them
were sick with it all
There was sympathy for the boys
but more for their parents

We lived with it all
for days
weeks

I can see it all now

(Private William Holmes in Forgotten Voices of the Great War. Submitted by Lisa Oliver)

Crustacean Odyssey

Ever since we were an item,
for years, we had an affinity
for crayfish.

They didn’t stay for long
in the garden.

They didn’t like the pond then
– was it running water?

It was very quick. It didn’t have time
to be un-running.

Did they all go together?
How could they know where to go?

They’ve got eyes and feelers,

Yes, but for underwater, not on land.
And how could they do that, across fields and roads?

I don’t think “road” is in their vocabulary.

I wonder if they went in a line…

What we don’t know is how
they got out of the garden. The fence
it comes right down to the ground.

Maybe a cat killed and ate them –
Oh no, then you’d see the shells.

A cat wouldn’t do that!

Yes it would, if they were moving around.
A cat will eat anything that moves.

Well, they just disappeared.

A conversation between an older man and a younger woman, overhead at breakfast in a Shrewsbury B&B, 2009. Submitted by MsJinnifer.

Glance sideways

Glance sideways into the wings,
and you see the tacky preparations
for the triumphant public event.

You see your beautiful suit deconstructed,
the tailor’s chalk lines, the unsecured seams.
You see that your life is a charade,
that the scenery is cardboard,
that the paint is peeling,
the red carpet fraying

and if you linger you will notice the oily devotion
fade from the faces of your subjects,
and you will see their retreating backs
as they turn up their collars
and button their coats

and walk away into real life.

(From Royal Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Submitted by Angi Holden)

This is our island

We have water all around us, and in these lochs,
and we have the boat –
and there were porpoises – we
have to cross the causeway… These
great big rocks.

This is Raasay, this is Skye; there is nothing
as far as the North Pole.
The sea was like a millpond, the sky was
a great… American blue.

We could never imagine ourselves alone,
with the sheep… and the gulls were laughing
like people.

There are yachts that just arrive
in the North Inlet,
and people arrive in bad weather
and we bring them in.

Here is the croft, with the white walls;
the tide is low here.
This photograph,
this is our island.

My friend’s Mum, in her kitchen, talking about photographs of their holidays on an island off the west coast of Scotland. Just as it was. Submitted by Kerry Featherstone.

Before the end came

Death is so intimate –
more intimate than first love.

I could hold his hand,  
gaze into his eyes,  
stare  
unhindered  
at his tender face,  
stroke  
his frosty hair.

He was very thin,
skin the colour  
of a dried corn husk.  

His mouth  
a dark tunnel.  
The jagged mountain ranges  
of his ruined teeth.  
The petrified forests
of his hair.

The failing locomotive of his breath.
The sadness of the black bobbled socks on his calves.

Yet he was
irreducibly
who he had always been.  

Taken from Tim Lott’s Guardian article, My father’s final moments, 23 February 2013. Submitted by Ailsa Holland.

Dead pianos

The Knabe baby grand
did a cartwheel and landed
on its back,
legs poking into the air.

A Lester upright
thudded onto its side
with a final groan of strings,
a death-rattling chord.

After ten pianos were dumped,
a small yellow loader
with a claw in front scuttled
in like a vicious beetle,

crushing keyboards,
soundboards
and cases

into a pile.

(From For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump. Submitted by J.R. Solonche)