I go to sleep and wake to a steady drip and wonder if it’s radioactive or pure and clear, like the streams I once knew. Above ground, no fresh water remains: no trace of rain or cloud or sky. There is just the twilight of this cave, the weak rays that find their way through […]
Tag: Out of Standard
Bridges
They explored the bridges of Madison County and each other, body and soul, to a soundtrack of crickets, rustling wheat fields, tyres on dusty roads, and jazz. Days were filled with sunlight, longing and an evening of candlelight. Heaven’s persuasion in a bullying downpour drew her eyes to the truck, cross swinging from the rear-view […]
Selma the Cryptic Cryptid
A cryptic cryptid, Selma’s obscured in the icy depths of Lake Seljord through the long, dark Norwegian winters. She surfaces during hot, quiet summers, playing hide and seek in the fjords, searching for love with an elusive mate, another ferocious monster of the lake. Kim M. Russell, 17th January 2019 My response to Imaginary Garden […]
Back from the Deep
A word wrestles between twisted lips, eyes are sunken like two wrecked ships and her nose erupts from a festering face. Dragging behind her a fisherman’s net, hauntingly humming the Flower Duet, she staggers along the pitch-black shore. Studded with limpets and barnacles, lashed with seaweed and pinned with corals, she’s draped in a lacy […]
Tree-house Terror
I search all round the garden; she wasn’t in her bedroom or the den, not lurking in the ghostly shadows of the infinite corridor. I cross the lawn, enter the copse behind the hedge covered with yesterday’s washing: sheets, pillowcases pinned to twigs instead of using washing pegs. Branches rustle, I hear giggling from the […]
Tree Magic
Along banks and edges of paths and fields, trees watch; their branches lances sharp enough to pierce, their leaves shields. What we think are hollow trunks, devoid of sap and bark, that rise from ponds still as looking glass, are ragged shadows of wet birch and ash, wizard wands that trick us into thinking reeds […]
In the canteen…
the women from the shop floor compare notes – the new fore- man’s cute. They speculate whether he’s available and watch together as he approaches the counter. The girl behind the steaming urn eyes him up as he waits his turn, smiles and flutters lashes like spiders’ legs, gives him an extra helping of scrambled […]
Painting by Numbers
Painting from early morning, with the gusto of a New Yorker a Glaswegian a Marseillais eating a haggis a hot dog a bouillabaisse, the artist tried to beat the August heat before his still life wilted. Applying chrome yellow with textured impasto, he was determined to paint them all in one go. Now the tournesols […]
Beauty and the Beast
Roads flanked with buildings merge into paths flanked with tombs, a city within a city, where the living and the dead repose in separate rooms. Among manholes and rotting flowers, the eyes of cameras find infinite traces of beauty and sometimes a beast. Kim M. Russell, 2017 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads […]
The Future and the Fourth Dimension
I shall be setting my watch and all the clocks to space time, the fourth dimension and time dilation, so I will be able to stretch it out into infinity and beyond: lightyears of exploration, sitting in my tin can with Poe, Wells and Major Tom. They say the future is just around the corner: I […]
