Checking In
In the anteroom, the muzak’s too close for comfort. I mean, I can tolerate its sick-sweet breath at the rim of my ear, but I don’t want it in my head. Synthesised drums and a voice that could never identify all images containing traffic lights. A lyric tossed off by a minimum wage chatbot on a Friday afternoon. And why, after all, am I here, surrounded by fish tanks, and waist deep in picture papers from the early twentieth century? There was, I recall, a black-bordered invitation, an urgent but ambiguous phone call, and a tip-off from a carnival card reader who saw tall dark strangers and profound transformations. It was, perhaps, written in the stars at the bottom of my primary school homework. It’s all, of course, immaterial to the point of phantasm, as the muzak sticks on a low-pitched drone, and a small door opens with a sound like a breaking bone. In the darkness beyond, a dog’s eyes flash both welcome and warning.
The Sunrise Arc
The garden shifts when we turn away, with daffodils becoming dahlias, roses becoming rhododendrons, and other seemingly chance transformations governed by nothing but the laws of alliteration. The lawn becomes a lake, the paths become planets orbiting a star that, last time we looked, had been nothing but a snowdrop. And the glasshouse is a gas nebula some 700 light years from where we stand, fleeting nodes of awareness in the exhalation of spacetime. A black hole becomes a bee, humming its way from singularity to sunlight on purple petals. It is precisely fourteen steps to the gate and, 28 billion light years beyond that, Earendel shines a million times brighter than our humble Sun.
The La La Log
Having lately retired to a small village in the hills, I am struck by the shifts in what passes for real. Houses are painted like bathing huts and are larger on the inside than out, with each room opening onto fields and distant mountains, and staircases winding into clouds. Cobbled streets breathe like the spine of the serpent that circles the world, and car wheels spin in clear air so as not to wake it. Everyone exhibits aspects of the spectral, walking through walls and through each other, and speaking in dead languages which, though weighted with bulk and portent, approximate the harmony of angels. Signposts gesture to a glistening Yes, and time, as it said in the guidebooks I once dismissed as mere fantasy, runs backwards.
24/7
The chemist opens her heart to let the children in. Grazed knees and ears that ring like cracked church bells. Throats raw as condemned buildings. She doles out lint and lozenges, with gloved hands and loving eyes that say: Yes, I have sat alone, watching moths circle the antiseptic flame. Many burn, but those which survive are transformed for the remainder of their brief and beautiful lives. We are all sisters and brothers of the powdery wing; all flirtatious with the rush of extinction. The children all love her, kissing the hem of her white coat before erupting back into the sun. They will remember her when they have children of their own. They will remember her when their wings turn to dust.
Oz Hardwick is a European poet who stumbled into academia through not paying attention. He has published “a dozen or so” collections, most recently the chapbook Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). He has won many prizes, mostly for an extensive knowledge of 70s music trivia, but some for poetry. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.