SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Thirteen
OZ HARDWICK
The Midnight Visitor
Icarus is at the door with his sodden wings and peeling skin, his head full of flames and his hands twitching with fine adjustments. He's formal as a vampire, so I invite him in and offer salve and temazepam, a soft sofa to coddle his bruised ambitions, and a revised edition of The Boys' Own Book of Flight. Over steaming tea, I tell him about the Montgolfiers and the Wrights, and I'm pretty sure I mispronounce Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain, though Icarus – polite as the wartime BBC and fluent in all the languages of myth – doesn't correct me. He's spent two thousand years swimming to the Mediterranean surface and is understandably tired, but when we turn at last to Eugene Newman Parker, his eyes spark with an apparent magnitude of –26.74. For all his centuries and accumulated stories, he reminds me of myself when I was younger, hurling my dizzy head at the sky and burning as I fell. I'd show him my own scars but it's way too late, so I make up the spare bed, though we both know neither of us will sleep.
Liminal
The hospital atrium keeps its own counsel. It keeps its house in order and it keeps its orders simple and to the point. It keeps its points of reference uncluttered and clearly signed: defibrillators and waiting trolleys carry the indentations of lives cradled and passed back to the love of sweet cities, and yellow lines demarcate safety should the whole world burn down. On the verge of sleep, the atrium is an aviary, with stained glass birds lifting from modernist angles, rebalancing inside and outside, enticing hope in all its feathered glory. On the verge of waking, it's an airport arrivals lounge, with everyone's names writ large on cards held at chest height by restless relatives, cab drivers, and business associates eager to clinch carbon-neutral deals. The only sounds are a baby uttering its first word and a machine that reassures us all is well, life goes on, and there's a place for everyone beneath the huge glass sky.
Towards a Checklist of Abandoned Bedsits
Calm takes the next seat, places its cool hand on mine, and assures me there's no cause for alarm. It recommends taking stock and, before you can say My word! we're in a lop-sided room at the top of a town house, stacked with toppling boxes and lit by a bare bulb that resembles a sad cow's eye. There's an inventory printed on human skin, with a rusty-nibbed pen and a well of tears, and when I open the first box it winces audibly. Inside is a sheaf of phone calls, each packed tight with foolish words, clear as broken windows, edges sharp as the nights they were spoken. There is, inevitably, a ticking clock, so I start to count the minutes spent fumbling coins into call boxes and each occasion upon which I stumbled home to find the furniture rearranged and the carcass of a sad cow slung across the bed, its eyeless head accusing me of unforgivable transgressions. And I realise that, between my stuttering heartbeat and the sputtering engine of language, I misheard the all-important introduction. Harm pulls up a crate and sits to face me, placing its cold hand across my eyes. My word, it says, is law.
Oz Hardwick is a York-based poet, editor and academic, whose most recent collection is A Census of Preconceptions (SurVision Books, 2022). He is co-editor, with Anne Caldwell, of The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. His website is www.ozhardwick.co.uk
