BUT:

PLEASE KEEP SENDING IN ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Issue 2 is now out and on sale. You can buy it for £2. Either buy it online, or send £2 and your name & address by UMS or post to Pascal Porcheron.

Pascal is at Churchill College (Storey’s Way, Cambridge CB3 0DS). If you are outside the University of Cambridge, then please include a stamped addressed envelope for the A6-sized magazine.

“She has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her”

One day you’ll meet her, like a memory half-buried. Her voice is nothing more than a distant echo and surer than that you remember the surety of her hands on your skin when she drew you up into the bright, white heat of the sun, drew you up and took your heart in fair trade for your breath. You recall her tremulous smile and the strength of her long fingers, her hair like a cloud of ink around the delicate bones of her pale face, her huge hollow eyes blown pupil-dark. When you meet her again, you will learn the architecture of her spine and the elegant, eloquent curve of her throat. Under your fingers her heart will sing its hummingbird beat and your mouth will discover the salt taste of her skin. But you will find that that the long line of her torso is the same grey as the rocks she rests upon and that she is serpentine, swift and sly. Her teeth are pointed and sharp as needles and the  sinking sun flashes bright from the hundred thousand tiny scales which begin just below the sweet curve of her belly. One day you’ll meet her, and this time she will draw you down, down, deeper down, until the sun is distant and half-remembered and all around you is the ceaseless motion of the dark sea.

by Rachel Monte

His eyes were always bright. Yet they were always slightly too wide, too open, too alert. That was what gave him away. That, and the way he would tap his left foot to an inaudible beat. Then, as if self-consciously, he would roll his shoulders back, grin widely and delve his hands into the musty jacket he always wore.

You couldn’t call him nervous. He was sure of what he was doing although perhaps not why he was doing it. Criticise him though, and he’d pause, and stare at you. Narrow his blue green-flecked eyes. And stare. It was enough to unsettle the most confident. He did it to me once when I questioned him if he ever kept in touch with anyone at all. You can’t live like this forever, I told him. It was the most still I’d ever seen him. Until they found his body on the edge of the Thames.

Living on the edge. It’s such a bloody cliché. I can’t help it if that’s what described him perfectly. It just seemed like he deserved something more. He was someone so vibrant that it was as if his body couldn’t quite contain his life. I half-expected it to jump right out, vibrate off lamp-posts and bounce its way down the streets, blacking-out the whole city. He sapped my energy – I couldn’t breathe trying to keep pace with his walk; my head ached trying to keep pace with his conversation; and my nose bled when we spent another night cutting coke with the edge of a razor. He’d be at triple-speed then of course, and my nervous twittering would go up an octave, especially when I peered at the spattered mess I didn’t want to call my face.

He turned up at my flat the day before he disappeared. I could practically taste the trouble in that manic smile. I begged him to tell me what was going on, too afraid even to cringe inwardly at my own hysteria. Please, Michael. Please. Please. His eyes were wider than ever as he gabbled through his placatory script; I’d heard his talking-by-numbers approach before. Then he threw me his jacket, told me he’d see me soon and left. I want to say that it was a grand exit and that he strode forth as if into battle. But it wasn’t.

When I got the news a week later, I repeated his last words to me. See you soon, I murmured. I spent a few days staring into space but it is only so long before space can stare back at you. And there he was, as vibrant as ever. Startled to see me, he yelped my name and launched a fantastical tale, hoping I’d snap at the bait. After a while, he noticed I was silent. We looked at each other for a long time. You won’t see me soon, I said.

The next day I chucked his jacket into a skip, went to work and thanked the gloomy sky for being completely unremarkable.

by Phoebe Amoroso

Big Issue! Would anybody like an issue today?
Music, theatre, sport, news and many other features too.
Would anyone like a Big Issue? Don’t be shy, come buy folks.
Something different, to read later on maybe?
Would anyone like a
Big Issues in society today, where we can go home and say
that it’s okay for someone to be on the street in the cold,
hoping you’ll stop and pay for a magazine he can’t even read,
because he’s “working not begging” even though he’s grey and old,
Did you ever stop and count the issues he sold?
Not half as many as the rubbish we’re sold by the press,
by men in suits trading souls for gold.
Would anyone like a big issue in their life?
Would anyone like to think about their wife
working on the street in his situation,
sleeping on a bench in an underground station.
Where the only thing done about her plight,
was to write about it, to write about
Something different, to read later on maybe?
Hard to see amongst the music, theatre, sport, news and
many other facial features staring gauntly out of the grey pages,
speckled black with meaningless words
promising hope and a future, and the first year’s credit absolutely free,
and the answers to your prayers with cosmetic surgery that will make you look fine,
So you can use your pile of gold that you got after remortgaging your soul on a falling market
to buy some time to lie down
before the bell chimes, telling you “your time is up number 32,
Please come in now, this is the end of your trip, have a nice day,
don’t forget to visit our gift shop on your way out,
don’t forget to pay,
don’t be shy, come buy folks,
Don’t be shy, come buy failure written down,
turned around and sold by someone who missed you whilst you were away,
wrote a big issue about you,
cried into a shirt-sleeve about you,
about the time you ran away,
about the time you didn’t say why my time had come,
about the time I stood in the rain,
About time to go- just leave,
amd in the long caresses of the night-time weave a web of dreams
for all the people in the world to walk upon,
still soft, though relics of a time long gone,
Tread oft the halls of solitude but fear not the dark,
as you wear nothing but sway stark naked into the distance,
He shall be your ark and watch over you,
and spread flowers beneath your feet,
and wash your hair with spring water,
whilst his daughters waft perfumed sweetness into the air,
and the heady scent strokes your mind to rest,
with a pillow of silk and a bed of tissue.
Dream on, and dream not of your big issues.

by Tristan Withers

Low Shoulders

Glowing like fake pearls
In her skin my eyes
Aren’t enough. She is awake
As silver rustles. But
Cautious in the cold I
Have been always clumsy.
I rip chintz and mugs
Split. I will not crack her.
We will both sigh, but she
Will be whole and open
For pilgrims who have tidy hair.

By MAFC

Futures

The trick of the light
Shrinking into form;
Billowing out to women
Picking their apples,
Now ingrowing, finding
The reserve of the summit.
My bedsheets dance when
I am out the room
Reading books,
Always aware the reverse
Is true.
I lost my courage from hunting -
A spear replaced my spine;
The irony in being found.

Perpetual Motion

Why do I rotate and spin,
Whirling whipping up
the cavernous concrete sky.
I would
Maybe like to come down
but I’m afraid I will burn out
Dissipate into the ether,
Sand in a whirlwind,
Consuming as I am
consumed
Without boundaries
As I flounder.
Why do I not cling on
To some tangible
Border
Some steadfast rock
Like a human
Instead of paddling in
the deep end,
staring at the shore
wading like a bird.

Dry

One straight line weaving down
like a subway folding at the end
as an envelope does.
There is no construction that tries to change
its function,
the created stays unmalleable,
my face remains the same.
Yet in my crippled vision
of how the axes try to
circumnavigate the
men
with only one virtue,
I find I am a battered scrap
of uncultivated soil, covered in clay
Like stone
like steel
like you can’t break the windows here.
Bring about this distancing,
my self propelled aspirations.
I want the line to wander
on
And kill this sole transmission.
No use has come
from being clay -
I’m dried out
and no one knocks
like when my knees
Become water for fools.
The sight of the pretence
touches down cleanly on the rough land.
I am all solace and
grudges
that burn when
I breathe.

Aspirations

My one line of vision,
Carved like none
of the land,
is fighting
soil on soil
for a chance to be
unsettled.
If I were just
a bluebird’s perch
sturdy and covered
with scratches like a smile
like a heart that scorches
the arms of my clothes,
then I would be a
beauty queen
and all my teeth would tear.

Sorcery

We built extravagance
With agile hands
And straight laced affinity
For practising eligibility
To dismantle witches
And their vile bleeding
Over our necks where
The dust should settle
And the cream curdles firmly
Because we choose
To wreck eyes
naïve eyes
Jagged eyes
That can’t sleep.

by Sophie Peacock

The Michaelmas Exhibition [click link for more information]

Award winning poet Mario Petrucci on Science and Poetry: