BRINK #1

• Editorial
  

Contents

• Cranefly - Helen Foster
  
• The Mediator - Dee Marshall
  
• The Thingieth Psalm - Forrest Richey
  
• Swindon Switches On - Tim Allen
  
• The Master of the Revels - Helen Foster
  

By Helen Foster

By Dee Marshall

     Angels

     Orders 9 - Animate:

     Intermediaries

     Things in more than one space

     at more than one time -

                     cloud of suits.

     Trickster

     Multi-faceted

     Child -

     eager-eyed

     wild

     emmanation.

     You come near, I divine.

      This Time needs a prayer

      An invocation -

      I recall

       The Tower Falls

       Suits of cards flicker light

       a babel of sounds, a confusion

       a profusion of tongues -

       roots ripped - mandrake screaming

       Bloody



       Angel / Intercept / Being Speak Curious

       in WIld & Sage Tongue.....................

Tim Allen

So the wound had not been sewn. The mini-skirt was all that remained and the love of the journey was not abated even when such clear chances were missed - an opening goal remained someone's cold thighs, the goalkeeper caught in his own net with fishnet tights to keep warm when he wasn't missed. Swindon swore with joy; he could cross worlds, cross swords, challenge the porch light that said to him "It is night and humans live here with their tornadoes." He piled his corners together to make a sort of teetering barbican and waited for Pressure to come off the air. Soon the birds would ripen and fruit would fly. Buffalo would once more barge their way across the plains and lion-cubs would play with the brownies; unless the botch clot ed and blotted again. Even if Swindon mused the blotching inky blue to block the milk in its thin stem - the pain sharp, like losing a baby but gaining a staring roll any fairy would smoth er his own mother for, (flashing chalk limelight patched or dangling on the warp and weft of gardens parched and nature flooded with the mess of a dead glacier - sloppy rocks stained yell ow by mustard splinters under the silent terror of the naked sun - the scree sews a sort of surface victory out of the spring - a mortal thing desperate for love-music and a good dentist - witch hazel - sluggish - moments of blame when his [Swindon's] flesh felt like rotten wood that even the flame of remembered marriages could not ignite) it could not amuse Conrad.

For wasn't Swindon's past long and sharp? Wasn't it mused before the muses could beck their own demos? He had been born in the age of Clay, the land of grunge only recently de-magnet ised. The baby Swindon had been party to the control of nothingness that had eventually lead to such tired understanding - even in those so young. He had been schooled in the age of Glass and learnt his antique fictions with all the other naughty (having fun with nothing) fledglings. Humble bees danced about horizontal islands glazed by the naughty sun while the sea tranced a brusque throat between levels of navarho feelings. Earthquakes - hunks of royal cake tremb ling and crumbling in knowledge not yet inoculated with environmental innuendo. Geysers and women with cameras whose backs wound up as a whiplash scroll while individual method ology could only crystallise - cast a gesture - implead instruments of torture thrown open to the failure of rigged scepticism - heresy the most basic seance pressured by steamy under-age monism. Tapering spirits his adolescence had been, in the age of Chipboard, his intelligence clipped for clipping's sake trapping him like a dragonfly in the wrong chronicle. Years of clench ed fist followed his face into the age of Water Towers that in the early morning wind crawled across the luxury of bleat bleat history unushered. Beneath the rage of his tiny stack of voices it was then that Swindon's mussels first propertied his fellow creatures and tossed the lovebeads from heaven and coughed up liquid breath - his own chest deceived by his own safetypin heart. Now, in the age of Envisage he moved around like sand in a box, dependant on the strangest human he could find all because she reminded him of spicy afternoon. Survival was his criminal scheme. Sedan-chair law was his big boss - Swindon small-bottle, shaken down and packing slowly. For death for a fairy was analogous to an exceptionally long day at the races that is cancelled at eleven that same morning.

Pressure had learnt to clean herself like a cat. Her image shone. Swindon played her well with a string of Billie Holidays bought at off-season bargain prices.

By Helen Foster