Mel

ALT Coloured Tears Yesterday, against soft rain, perhaps the year’s final wasp, hiding amongst the flock of drops alone, in the middle of our sheer window pane; went out with a dab of jam as a sticky blood transfusion: a single strawberry suddenly found growing upon this northern-facing Eiger. Returning, she was gone, the tiny crimson ambulance too, just a thumbnail’s worth of translucent smear, remaining; flying off, she might have thought: I have tasted the coming sweetness of my season’s grave. Julian Cason

ALT First Examined A storm can dredge up memory, guess El Niño events are the churning worst, but sometimes sedimented-thoughts surface without any obvious cause. Long ago, asked a girl for use of a pencil sharpener, my name immediately criminalised by a teacher thinking wrongly, I was stealing her math’s answer. This minuscule public opprobrium returned last night as burning slick, like once sunken barrels of spent then dumped radioactivity, grown tired of their historic seals; heat buried deep at a depth of half a century but still suddenly capable of viciously searing skin. Julian Cason

ALT Last Night, 2:10am, In Sleepy Suburbia A motorbike unzipped the night, an unwelcome streak of flapping-cockerel; mature enough to throttle-back my own persistent tut-tut-tut… Julian Cason

ALT Sailing (off Gull Rock)   a grey comma unsews the blue off Nare Head black-eyed hush then under— my own eye, gone tidal

ALT IN CONVERSATION WITH A STRANGER by Helen Laycock The artist does not speak; words have flown through his skylight like thin, white paper birds. His tongue sleeps dark below an explosion of figments: pigment murals his skull wall in colourswirl, and, like a spinneret of spidersilk, a rapid swipe of lines slice the backdrop of his mind, until it bleeds emotion. His dirty hands conduct the paint as it finds language, until its story breathes, and without a single utterance, he stands back and makes you cry.