Editorial

 Brink magazine does have certain aims and desires.
In this first issue of Brink there is an inevitable inbalance towards British (even Plymothian!) poets, purely because of the fact that this is a first issue. The end aim is to have approximately equal numbers of U.K. and U.S.A. writers. So please send in your stuff, snail or email, we want it.

Alexis Kirke


(Incidentally, please note that Brink is published as a single file. Try to stick to using Connects/Anchors for flicking through it; and only use the scroll-bar and arrows if you want to browse around a particular poem - otherwise you may get lost in biogs and whitespace!)
[Editor's Top Ten E-zines]  [Editor's U.K. Lists]  [Editor's Contribution]
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The Brink Top Ten E-zines
  1. Descriptions of an Imaginary Univercity
  2. Passages
  3. RIF/T
  4. Inter/face
  5. RealPoetik
  6. Experioddicist
  7. We
  8. Taproot
  9. Spout
  10. The Morpo Review

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SEVEN

By Alexis Kirke

     The rush of water into cold steel was the signal for time to go down. Bar felt her voice slow as the treacling air gripped her throat. Her feet move a bit slower - birds perch with a bit more care - now. Somewhere far below, the sound of an exploding radiator fed her imagination of deeper rooms' contents.
     Bar thought of the rush of water around her body, her mind, her lily-pad brain cells craving for stillness. Grey matter melted like wax by the debris of ruptured heating, neurons a victim of radiator explosion. But just a bit slower now. The water took just that bit longer to grip its way across the stepping stones of air. She wished she could remember the flow of time a minute ago, just to check the change. And the water landed onto the hair of a buzzing scalp. The pain thinking of the pain, far below.
     Bar pushed her bare feet onto the warming steel. Heat passes undetected along her body to her head. She thought of the tall, wide, white building by the Pacific Highway. The flag in its centre - always flying. It was not domestic, but it was white, and she couldn't remember the white cloth flaccid.
     It was only on the way to somewhere. Halfway between an important city, and an important beach that was a city. It was a symbol in her head that coincided with an experience from her past.
     Her image of the highway was long and without end. The sea was maybe blue. The sky definitely. The house, which she was sure now is not a house, was surrounded by...perhaps wasteland? Large areas on the coast dotted with pumping black heads; the android horses, necks in eternal spasm. She was warned about the smell of methane on the beaches.
     The odour of hot radiators and clean clothes is real and only in the near past. The basements are alive with a lava whose constituents are excited people. The crust of carpeted floor smells of warm clothes, from the abdomen, and I am beside the radiator, toes look dislocated, joy of warm feet.
     The house looks like it was designed to look like a mansion, but it was surely a place of work. I only saw it like a Hollywood set - one dimensional. Beneath the seat of the car we drove in - that she drove, I should say - the patterns formed like San Fransisco seen from space. A strip of darkness in the back seat - but not on the actual Pacific Coast Highway. No way. Only sun and oil on the Highway. A grand concrete structure, as beautiful to me as sand shifting in the pumping grounds inside her head.

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On the car floor,

 among the empty coke cans and wrappers, appeared the angel Swedenbourg. Just up to my knee, but he opened a door in the strip of black and asked to be shown around. I put my hand through and was bodily dragged into the realm of rooms. Swedenbourg reappeared on the other side. I explained to him the nature of the rooms - How we could watch whatever happened on the video screens, but that when we were in the rooms themselves, they were empty. I explained to Swedenbourg that what he saw on the screens was really happening, but that he could never directly observe it. He wanted to catalogue events, index happenings, so I taught him about possibilities. I showed him how to guess his possible perception of events, even though he could never be there but by camera. I explained: that as soon as we enter a room, we become part of that room, and disturb its events irrevocably. But the law of the realm is that there are many rooms in this house, and each room is for one and only one occupant. On the camera I showed him a room next to ours. It was full of water, and swimming with fish. I threw open the appropriate door. Swedenbourg flinched, expecting to be soaked. But the room behind the door was bare and empty. The angel looked at the screen again - it showed a room of water, with its entrance out of camera. He looked back at the door beside him. Swedenbourg scribbled some notes, then began to smirk. He ran through the open door and told me to look at the camera and tell him what I saw. Bad move Swedenbourg. I close the door on his room and watch a smile spread over my face on the screen.
[seven]















































There were times now

 when he saw her as massive, a first love imprinted on his subconscious. Dressed in purple and scarlet, spanning the sea, she hangs with gold, pearls around her thick neck. Her knuckles gripped a gold goblet filled with the bad side of his head. Tattooed on her head was her secret name: "California the great, the mother of whores and of every obscenity on earth" and her secret number: seven. Swedenbourg the Super-Ego would whisper her secrets in his ear and show surprise at his surprise: "Why are you so surprised? I will tell you the secret of the woman and of the beast she rides."
[Seven]















































On day on cold sand,

 my abdomen was empty of worry. The bike bolted on the railing, the beach small enough to be empty. Exquisite pump heads appearing over the closest horizon. The invisible topology of the sea, soaking another. Quadrupeds that should have bestrode the sea as an apocalyptic vision were just frames against a low sky. I didn't know why I'd ridden there, or where I was going to go next. The sun was invisible in its omnipresence, so the sand seemed cold. The calm of the sea found it easier to enter through such a small inlet.
[Seven]















































In the shower she likes

 to stand under the water and hold out her hands palm down: The water collected on her hands and fell from her fingers in 10 long streams of twisiting liquid. She watched tubular rivers form and vanish on her arms. The sound of pumping energised the bathroom. She moved her body back and forth. A feather blade of platinum sliced through the steamed air. A bass that morphed to the ear like a wildly gesticulating mouth, raised and lowered the palate to the melody of breath. A drum that was the heart of the speaker that sent it out, rhythms of air. Water poured from the bowl of the shower head, strips of monochromatic rainbow, screamed through the rapidly compressing atmosphere. A rising song that would open the doors in her head; and after the shower, she would wrap herself in large white towels and sit in front of a fire, reading poetry, slowly massaging the seals of her flood doors.
[Seven]















































In one room lies

 a sleeping form. His vast apocalyptic visions are calmed by his nascent Lithium desires - those visions that are nothing more than images of his own inevitable end. His sleep is the coma of the Lithium host. It is the prophet's curse to be destroyed by his own sight. A Seventh Lithium prophecy - vampiric - one individual form, in the empires of sleep.
[Seven]















































Like planets the rooms

 orbited each other. In this twisting galaxy, I was contained by one room, the universe by another, her by yet another. Outside was the unbounded room. It contained everything but itself, and its walls were      .
















































SEVEN

By Alexis Kirke

     The rush of water into cold steel was the signal for time to go down. Bar felt her voice slow as the treacling air gripped her throat. Her feet move a bit slower - birds perch with a bit more care - now. Somewhere far below, the sound of an exploding radiator fed her imagination of deeper rooms' contents.
     Bar thought of the rush of water around her body, her mind, her lily-pad brain cells craving for stillness. Grey matter melted like wax by the debris of ruptured heating, neurons a victim of radiator explosion. But just a bit slower now. The water took just that bit longer to grip its way across the stepping stones of air. She wished she could remember the flow of time a minute ago, just to check the change. And the water landed onto the hair of a buzzing scalp. The pain thinking of the pain, far below.
     Bar pushed her bare feet onto the warming steel. Heat passes undetected along her body to her head. She thought of the tall, wide, white building by the Pacific Highway. The flag in its centre - always flying. It was not domestic, but it was white, and she couldn't remember the white cloth flaccid.
     It was only on the way to somewhere. Halfway between an important city, and an important beach that was a city. It was a symbol in her head that coincided with an experience from her past.
     Her image of the highway was long and without end. The sea was maybe blue. The sky definitely. The house, which she was sure now is not a house, was surrounded by...perhaps wasteland? Large areas on the coast dotted with pumping black heads; the android horses, necks in eternal spasm. She was warned about the smell of methane on the beaches.
     The odour of hot radiators and clean clothes is real and only in the near past. The basements are alive with a lava whose constituents are excited people. The crust of carpeted floor smells of warm clothes, a wrapped towel. Lighting just right, brain open to the strange telepathy of memory; messages that seemed to be from another planet, a better place, subreal joy at indistincts, smooth voices.
     The radiators whine twice, like the faint twist of a choir through a twice slammed door in my head. Rain perfectly accompanies choirs, but not now. The gurgle of heat is angry trapped clouds and I am needing help to get through - the push is from the abdomen, and I am beside the radiator, toes look dislocated, joy of warm feet.
     The house looks like it was designed to look like a mansion, but it was surely a place of work. I only saw it like a Hollywood set - one dimensional. Beneath the seat of the car we drove in - that she drove, I should say - the patterns formed like San Fransisco seen from space. A strip of darkness in the back seat - but not on the actual Pacific Coast Highway. No way. Only sun and oil on the Highway. A grand concrete structure, as beautiful to me as sand shifting in the pumping grounds inside her head.
















































SEVEN

By Alexis Kirke

     The rush of water into cold steel was the signal for time to go down. Bar felt her voice slow as the treacling air gripped her throat. Her feet move a bit slower - birds perch with a bit more care - now. Somewhere far below, the sound of an exploding radiator fed her imagination of deeper rooms' contents.
     Bar thought of the rush of water around her body, her mind, her lily-pad brain cells craving for stillness. Grey matter melted like wax by the debris of ruptured heating, neurons a victim of radiator explosion. But just a bit slower now. The water took just that bit longer to grip its way across the stepping stones of air. She wished she could remember the flow of time a minute ago, just to check the change. And the water landed onto the hair of a buzzing scalp. The pain thinking of the pain, far below.
     Bar pushed her bare feet onto the warming steel. Heat passes undetected along her body to her head. She thought of the tall, wide, white building by the Pacific Highway. The flag in its centre - always flying. It was not domestic, but it was white, and she couldn't remember the white cloth flaccid.
     It was only on the way to somewhere. Halfway between an important city, and an important beach that was a city. It was a symbol in her head that coincided with an experience from her past.
     Her image of the highway was long and without end. The sea was maybe blue. The sky definitely. The house, which she was sure now is not a house, was surrounded by...perhaps wasteland? Large areas on the coast dotted with pumping black heads; the android horses, necks in eternal spasm. She was warned about the smell of methane on the beaches.
     The odour of hot radiators and clean clothes is real and only in the near past. The basements are alive with a lava whose constituents are excited people. The crust of carpeted floor smells of warm clothes, a wrapped towel. Lighting just right, brain open to the strange telepathy of memory; messages that seemed to be from another planet, a better place, subreal joy at indistincts, smooth voices.
     The radiators whine twice, like the faint twist of a choir through a twice slammed door in my head. Rain perfectly accompanies choirs, but not now. The gurgle of heat is angry trapped clouds and I am needing help to get through - the push is from the abdomen, and I am beside the radiator, toes look dislocated, joy of warm feet.
     The house looks like it was designed to look like a mansion, but it was surely a place of work. I only saw it like a Hollywood set - one dimensional. Beneath the seat of the car we drove in - that she drove, I should say - the patterns formed like San Fransisco seen from space. A strip of darkness in the back seat - but not on the actual Pacific Coast Highway. No way. Only sun and oil on the Highway. A grand concrete structure, as beautiful to me as sand shifting in the pumping grounds inside her head.
















































SEVEN

By Alexis Kirke

A wrapped towel
on the car floor.
Deeper rooms' contents.

There were times: now
She
in one room lies.

In the shower, she likes
darkness in the backseat,
from the abdomen.

One day on cold sand.
like planets, the rooms.

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Alexis Kirke is editor of Brink.
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Brink List of British Poetry Magazines

(Those highlighted are recommended)


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Brink In-Between List


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Brink Experimental List


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Editor's Contribution

For those of you who get annoyed by editor's putting their poetry in their own magazines, I have put my stuff away in a seperate section to the rest so that it is easy to avoid.


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