B. ANNE ADRIAENS currently lives and writes in Somerset, Britain. Her work often reflects her interest in alienation and all things weird and dark, as well as her concerns about pollution and the environment in general. She’s written several dystopian short (and not so short) pieces and is putting together a poetry collection exploring the many places where she’s lived. She attended the Poetry Summer School at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, in June 2017 and the following July, she was awarded the title of Frome Festival Poet Laureate. Her work has previously appeared in Helios Quarterly, B.A.D. (The Bees Are Dead) and Harpur Palate, as well as on several online literary platforms.

DAVID CAMERON was born in Glasgow in 1966 and now lives near Belfast. All three of his books – The Bright Tethers: Poems 1988-2016, the story collection Rousseau Moon and the novella The Ghost of Alice Fields – have been among the Books of the Year in the Scottish press. His study, Samuel Beckett: The Middle and Later Years, is due to be published by Greenwich Exchange. In 2014, David received the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry.

Logical Conclusion

You leave behind the fatherland
but hang on to the mother tongue.
A farmhouse recedes like
a piece of Lego dropped on a rug,
among half a dozen brush strokes
passing off as poplars.

You cross a thread of ink on a map
having foraged for boxes and random
stuff scattered in and around the city,
reluctant to retrace childhood steps,
and piled them into a van he’s hired
to help you cover the distance.

One last coffee at your local brasserie,
then your sister and others wave
from the pavement. That’s when –
she confesses years later, digging
for emotion – she realises she has a sister.
Had a sister all this time.

Orchards – 8 … 16

Tone of voice polished to a make-believe:
everything’s all right (except nothing is).

Grab the stem and pull.
Ignore resistance as roots fracture
and leave the fragile ones to the soil.

Pack your boxes and go.

Allow one more look through the glass:
chaotic dance of hazel branches,
green and yellow slapped around by September rain,
gales forcing the drop of unripe nuts.

Then look inside:

bits of dead skin and hair morphed into dust,
grey specs caught in carpets and between floorboards
are the microscopic footprints you left by mistake.

Crumbs you borrowed from other people’s lives,
grit and gems collected into background accretions:
their faded imprints touch you
when you don’t expect anything. Grateful,
you intone a mantra, until you believe it again:

no attachments.
Your gaze will soon find another hazel to rest on.

                                                                          B. Anne Adriaens

The Seventies

You never thought your flares and cheesecloth
Would look as dated as they do,
The album covers you pored over
Be outsized junk of card and glue.

What did you think? Only your old dear’s
Music and clothes were sure to fade?
Or time would stop to let you off?
It’s not in this or that decade

But now that life is fresh. So, talk
About the early Doctors Who
And Baader-Meinhof, Chopper bikes,
And what the Eighties did to you.

                                                    David Cameron

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