contents

editorial

visual art
Christos Sakellaridis - Gnarled
Colin Barns - Untitled
Tara Zed - Communist Museum I, Prague, 2009
Tara Zed - Near Meet Factory, Prague, 2009
Tara Zed - Communist Museum II, Prague, 2009
Tom Moore - Aesop
Inga Vesper - Inside German Aerospace Centre's 1380 research plane. Beware face-sucking cables!

comic strip
Bluster 0.1

poetry & prose
Christian Ward - Filming The Beheading of Daniel Pearl
Jacqui Saphra - The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions
Christopher Barnes - Joanna Lumley
G.B. Clarkson - Macroglossia, or: The Tongue Which Took Over
Kevin Simmonds - Hysteria
Tony Williams - Clicks
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé - Gertrude Stein’s Agnosia
Russell J. Turner - on cherche grothendieck
Dan Simpson - A Rube Goldberg Poem
Kristine Ong Muslim - Steady Glide
Joe Dunthorne - A Robin Eats a Worm
Claire Trevien - Sing Bird
Joe Dresner - Shortcut
Louise Warren - Home
Carl Griffin - Deflation
N. God Savage - Methodological Implications Of Behaviourism In The Study Of Planets And Other Creatures
Jake Stringer - Early Adopter

micro-essay
Cliff Hammett - Contraption

this issue's specials: device squad
Introduction
Nicholas Liu - Glider
Chrissy Williams - The Zamboni Clears the Ice
Sophia Blackwell - Barometer
Niall O'Sullivan - A dicta-phone tape found within an old hotel bed frame

contributors

Editorial

EUREKA, bold contemporaries! We present the magnificent CONTRAPTION!

Pistons a-go-go, lights a-flashing, this issue chuffs proudly into view, pulling behind it a train of scribbled, snapped and sung goodies!

From macabre tales of technological overload and dogs to kitchens full of wonder, via mysterious artifacts, automated celebrities and the agnosia of Gertrude Stein, it's an oscillating, steam-piping set-up of hitherto unwitnessed proportions!

Having tested your credulity on that, we urge you to explore the bonus booklet for this issue, which sees a cluster of top writers exploring the art in machines, creating poems from the very mechanics of everyday devices.

Nurture your curiosity, Fusefriends!

visual art

comic strip

poetry & prose

Christian Ward
Filming The Beheading of Daniel Pearl

Week twelve. The special effects

guy has quit, citing ‘insensitive

subject matter’. Asshole. $300k

down. Maryland is no Pakistan

but between the minaret-necked

cormorants and hillbilly locals

I can’t tell the difference. Week

eighteen. The walk-on playing

Pearl’s Taliban executioner can’t

hold the replica scimitar steady,

doesn’t believe it won’t cut. I press

the edge against my right arm, point

to the dent, shallow as a GI’s crew-cut,

that it leaves. $500k down. The man

is still shaking. Dick. Week twenty-four.

Some pathetic loser has left a fake head

drooling ketchup outside my trailer. $2m

down. My head is already loosening itself

from the neck. I don’t need a gimmick to tell me

this is the worst death I’ve experienced yet.

Jacqui Saphra
The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions

There was once a man who claimed he’d been assaulted

by a woman’s underwear. Invited back for coffee,

he’d walked into the kitchen where ranks of brassieres

and panties hung from a ceiling trap in readiness

for ambush. Stockings brushed his cheeks, hooks

and buttons snagged on his hair, straps and ribbons

tied him to a place he’d longed for always without knowing.

As a fine layer of lace wrapped itself around his eyes,

he was breathless, helpless at the pink coal-face

of femininity, and fell into a beautiful swoon.

When he woke, he was captive. His life became

a sweet, slow undoing and re-doing of those fastenings,

and – or so the story goes – the coffee never came.

Christopher Barnes
Joanna Lumley

As runoff to a Srinagar photosphere

the plush larynx grasps high nosed

at Lucy Clayton’s Finishing School.

Scissors in the running stitch of years

back-tacking Jean Muir’s trim –

leggy, lissome, blonde, Bond.

Satanic Rites Of Dracula, Coronation Street,

no morphotic priming besides

how to sky-kick balletically.

Last night I dreamt of Trumped-up hair

on a Nimble unbuttered pillow.

G.B. Clarkson
Macroglossia, or: The Tongue Which Took Over

was fleshed out, fluted and studded

with buds, thrushed-up and furry - and

belonged to a ten-year-old boy. Though

medical journals cite it in reference to many

conditions, there had never before been

a manifestation which was quite so clinical

– the boy scooped daddy-long-legs, wasps,

and house-flies from the wall’s four corners,

funnelled tea by the gallon; nor one so, er,

linguistic – he knew the words for pesky

house-fly in twenty-seven languages;

nor so stretchistic – he could flannel

a face at ten paces, mop a floor with

that flap of muscle and coolly slap

off the sweat, from his own or

anyone else’s brow; nor,

most interestingly,

so social: he was a

bloody brilliant

gossip

Kevin Simmonds
Hysteria

Gorged & vexed

marooned

artesian

Doctors midwives

hand over fist

unbearable thing

1878

the year

of our Lord:

Dr Vigouroux

his machine

Key to

latch to

lifted door

Hum &

hum &

hum

Tony Williams
Clicks

Collard gave us a load of trundlewheels and took us out on the field to measure distances. I went over the fence at the back and kept trundling.

There’s no discreet way to steal a trundlewheel. You just push it along in front of you. If anybody asked, you’d say it was a project. But they wouldn’t ask.

I reached the Spar at the corner and turned into the estate. Counting. Every time the wheel goes round it clicks, and that’s a metre. Wrapped round the edge of the wheel. Collard showed us. I counted three hundred and twenty-six metres to the Spar from the school fence. Fifteen from there to the post box. Post box to Wood’s house: thirty-seven metres. But you don’t say metres. You say clicks.

That’s what they say in Full Metal Jacket. I watched it with Wood’s cousin at Christmas. ‘Contact with Charlie. Forty clicks.’ And so on.

Lampposts every twenty-five clicks. Eight clicks up the garden path and eight clicks down again when no one answered the door. Six hundred and twenty-seven clicks between my house and the hospital. Four hundred and eight clicks from the hospital to the police station. Nobody stopped me

Ninety-two clicks is how far I ran from Biggsy when my sister slapped him. I reckon the trail of blood was forty-five clicks but the rain washed it away so I had to estimate.

Nineteen clicks past the last house the tarmac ends. Seventy clicks of dusty track. It was hard to keep the wheel steady through the tussocks, but something like thirty-nine clicks to the bottom of the field.

I climbed up on the fence and wanged the trundlewheel into the river. No more clicks then, just the trickly sound of the water. And that’s just right – the river moves but it stays where it is – the trundlewheel goes downriver surrounded by the same patch of water.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Gertrude Stein’s Agnosia

A complex number doesn’t have to be truer than binomial theory, right?

Continental philosophy doesn’t have to be truer than an inward turn, right?

The sound of a bass clarinet doesn’t have to be truer than the sound of a sitar, right?

In The Little Shop of Antiquities, she wrote about relics and artifacts, touching them, letting their glow go to the riverbank and send back their sparkles. How the material object moves the spirit. The incomprehensible magic, the shapeless wonder, the familiar history in a middle to high passage.

Their irresolute beauty like an oiled and torched mirror. Slowly crumbling, then shattering.

Was it a wink or a squint as he scraped the bacon bits off the top of the bun?

Was it a duck or the snow or buttons of bark flaking themselves off?

Was it a shout to hurl itself over to the other side of the asphalt?

And who returned the question like an echo into the wind and orange dust?

Russell J. Turner
on cherche grothendieck

deep in the valleys of the pyrenees

he constructs his tesseract

inverted cubic cross

collapsed into the mundane

four arms to the four winds

driving back the devil

from some perfect world

this is the house that alexander built

this is the category of the incognito

this is the metamorphosis of the sane

this is the geometry of the vietcong

this is where travellers stare into the sun

and write their quest across the sky

and write

their quest

across the sky

Dan Simpson
A Rube Goldberg Poem

Copper elements conduct an electric symphony:

dark undertones swell to a chromatic cadence

a shock of auburn strings and burnished strands

textured chords flowing over obscured ears.

The arrangement of your autumn locks

refracts late-summer sunlight

an amber glow frames your face:

Your hair looks nice today.

Kristine Ong Muslim
Steady Glide

This senseless steering has led you to believe that all skies are created equal, that this vagabond Sunday will last you a lifetime. Whenever you touch down with that daredevil contraption of nylon flapping in the wind behind you, you pretend as if nothing happened, as if there are no broken bones. The half-light you cup in your palm is in the peculiar shade of a stubborn watermark. And just like that bakery boy guzzling sugar when our backs are turned, you make sure that nobody sees you hunched like that, that nobody sees you in pain.

Joe Dunthorne
A Robin Eats a Worm

A jack-in-the-neck, a flick-book

blackout starts the tug o’ war

with the under-robin, the auto-robin,

the high-clutched grubber, battling

on a mirror, both gripping the tail.

To win is to fail; to fail, win. They throw

their heads back, one in glee, one

in mourning, sharing a gore-soaked bib.

The worm-tongue, swallowed alive.

Dear Robin, what tidings you bring this day,

what faceless creatures inside you.

Claire Trévien
Sing Bird

(editor's note: this poem best viewed in landscape!)

Vile   Birds fried to the wires - electric funambulism

Violins   played by the jaded weaves of a rainstorm

Violins steal  sautéed voices trapped by melted claws

Violin-stealth   – the surprising street-corner orchestra

Violins steal the vows  of a shackled bandstand of brothers

Violins steal the voices   that have lost the page and wing-it

Violins steal the voices-off   with some gin-soaked inspiration

Violins steal the voices of whim   but I’ve seen how their jaws open

Violins steal the voices of women    under stress

‘Violins steal the voices of we men too’   mechanically

Violins steal the voices of women to put in there as if they had fried in their

Violins steal the voices of women to put in their   cage of shoulders and hips

Joe Dresner
Shortcut

The artifact had a cool clean grain, like the stuff

which embellished my sister’s wedding dress

on that night of our mutual disgrace,

on the very cusp of winter – although,

strange to say, everyone wore cool summer clothes,

mother a pink hat, father a pink suit.

‘One shouldn’t be the first penguin off the ice’,

they advised. ‘The last plate is always emptiest’,

others countered. ‘The saddled horse need not worry’

I said to myself quietly – and no sooner said than

my mother saw that, ‘with one sordid gesture’

all her fine expectations had dissolved

like the last leaves of autumn. My solace?

amid the chaos and the inevitable insurrections,

I reach down and thumb the thingy

in my pocket with the cool clean grain.

Louise Warren
Home

He makes his house out of an old door

stumps down the nettles to make a floor

sits there with a pecked-out snail for company

sits there till he’s called in for his tea

and the sun is a tin lid dangling

with the moon on the other side rusting

Carl Griffin
Deflation

Mines, dozens,

in this field

and the next.

Local craftsmen

expect jobs

to be forthcoming

while their children

pick fruit

along the lanes.

N. God Savage
Methodological Implications Of Behaviourism In The Study Of Planets And Other Creatures

The Movements Of Whales

I have kept my promises in spite of myself. They are mostly simple pledges, relating to the position of my limbs and the angle of my neck. Like a sculpted explosion I am transfixed in frozen motion, my fingers splayed at the tips of outstretched arms, my legs contorted, the skin quivering like elastic stretched over a frame constructed from chicken bones. I shimmer for her: a translucent pink that barely conceals my inner mechanics.

These inner mechanisms, refined since birth, now constitute nothing more than a selection of high-frequency sound detection equipment, fifteen feet of connecting wires, my bone-frame and a withered piece of parchment upon which my maker has scribbled a map of my happiness. I do not understand the map, and as such I am filled with a numbing lethargy. I listen for gloomy echoes from deeper waters that might guide me nonetheless, but so far: silence.

The Complexity Of Rivers

She does not shimmer back at me. My sun faces off against her moon: I squint in the reflected light of myself and see nothing. She is encased in dense spandex, rocketing curves of sheer black that conceal an uncharted interior. Like a curious probe I circle her, scanning her monotone surface for clues, for eyes, for cracks through which my salvation might leak.

I do not know how thick her crust is, but I am almost certain there is a liquid core beneath. She is in constant motion, forever flowing. I try to divert her will by building feeble dams of twigs and leaves, but she always overwhelms me, trickles through the gaps between my fingers, washes over the sandcastles of my memories.

Panic In Bats And Other Mammals

The magnitude of her gravitational pull suggests a violent interior, inflicted with massive reactions and incredible heat. The inert sweep of her surface belies the magnetic rage of her insides. Too close, and my delicate structure – a kite of gossamer skin pulled taut over rickety bones – begins to quiver and disintegrate in her influence. I have been close enough to smell her perfume in the past, but the psychosomatic terror that wells up at such proximity could be sustained for no more than a few minutes.

One day I might touch her, and tremble myself into oblivion as I do.

Depression In Babies

Some years ago, we acquired a son – a depressed baby. We drove to an orphanage specialising in depressed babies and selected him from a litter of runts. My jealousy has known no limits since he was admitted into our family. The sophistication of his sound detection is astonishing. He has discovered more about her in three years than I have in a lifetime. We named him Copernicus, since nothing has been the same since his arrival.

Some Remarks On Auditory Stimulation

With the window open, I can register the click of her heels from the other end of the street. A frequency that thrills me, sends me into a habitual terror and joy all at once. The sharp rasp of metal on concrete, the steady stab of her liquid pins – these things must constitute the essence of her. So long as my radar is consumed by her interior, the reflections of her surface are all I have to go on.

I gather that Copernicus has made progress in his investigations of her soul, but this only makes me hate him more. I am confined to her outsides: her shape, her noises, her movements. She is, to me at least, nothing more than the sum of these stolen images. I collect them pedantically, construct endlessly complex similarity-circles based upon minute qualitative alignments. I hold this leg up against that arm, that sigh against this yawn. I make and remake her in these terms, from these materials – a mannequin hewn from the plastic of noise.

The Melting Point Of Aluminium

The silence of her insides remains. Here, I am confined to conjecture. I have no hard evidence from beneath the skin. I continue to circle her, making vague conjectures about rivers of heat, about bones made of water, about pitying affection that has melted over the years into dull hatred.

Her gravity sucks me in. Slowly, dumbly, blindly, I encircle her, spiralling down to a final impact on the smooth planes of her thighs. I will not reach them, though. I will disintegrate and burn up in the heat of her breath long before touchdown. My skin will liquify; my pores will spread and merge into one great pool of empty air. I will vapourise over her like a desert mist.

Jake Stringer
Early Adopter

It now seems inevitable that when the mass production of the empathy machine brought it to every high street shop, it would be purchased primarily for the purposes of enhancing sexual pleasure. However, when it was first announced to the world that neuroscientists had created a small hand-held device that, held to the temple of another person, would transfer precisely what you were feeling into the other’s head, it was hailed as a great breakthrough in human communication. It would heal relationships, it was claimed. It would reform those hardened to the suffering of others, bridge cultural divides, enable men and women to finally understand each other. It would almost certainly, many opined, end war and its accompanying brutality.

These latter reasons were not why Sean bought the HumanTouch model for his girlfriend for her birthday and wrapped it in holographic wrapping paper, which he thought had an appropriately futuristic aura. These reasons were not why Myrtle was pleased upon opening her present, though nor, it should be pointed out, was she pleased at the thought of future sexual pleasure. Myrtle was pleased because the last few presents Sean had bought her had been presents for himself, and he hadn’t even bothered to wrap them. The iPod speaker stand, she had been forced to point out, was useless to someone who listened to all her music on the radio. The folding bike had been more appropriate to a commuter – Sean, for example – than to someone whose office was five minutes down the road. As for the gas-powered barbecue, she had never been allowed to touch it.

To Myrtle’s surprise and Sean’s joy, the sexual ecstasy attained with the help of the HumanTouch was every bit as intense as the advertising had promised. For several weeks they barely stirred from their bed at the weekend, and the small white machine, not unlike a glossy television remote, was constantly in their hands. Their relationship felt revived, almost reborn. They told all their friends about the empathy machine, both in real life and online, mostly to show they were ahead of the curve with new technolog,y but also because they wanted other people to experience the new level of pleasure they had discovered.

Sean was home alone one night while Myrtle caught up with a female friend at the pub (she had been falling behind with her friends since the arrival of the machine) when he was struck by the idea of holding the HumanTouch to the head of his dog Walter. If Sean had consulted the instruction manual, he would have noticed the paragraph warning against using the device on animals, but he had not read beyond the first page of the manual since buying the machine, so he called Walter to the sofa and touched the machine to his dog’s head.

Sean had always vaguely imagined animals to be morally superior to selfish, grasping humans. Far from his dog’s mind being a tranquil place made warm by the constant presence of food and loving human owners, it was instead a swirl of mild hatreds, strong jealousies and strange paranoias - the causes of which Sean could not begin to guess, since the machine did not reveal that level of knowledge about a mind, only the feelings. Sean felt a rush of disappointment, anger even, that Walter had been deceiving him these past three years. His dog was no better than a human.

Sean stared at Walter with a mounting loathing for some minutes, and then he tried another experiment. He put the dog’s paw on the HumanTouch controller, and he touched the machine to his own forehead, so that Walter would know what he felt.

Walter dropped dead.

To this day no one knows why this happens, whether animals are unable to bear the intensity of human emotions, or whether there is some more fundamental incompatibility between human and animal minds. Whatever the reason, when Walter dropped dead, Sean felt no regret. The dog was as bad as people. What purpose would there have been in feeding and watering and walking him every day after that?

Later that afternoon, when Myrtle came home from meeting her friend, slightly tipsy, she found herself walking past pet corpses scattered along the street. She became increasingly puzzled and upset at the massacre, then reached her house, feeling somewhat lost, and found at her front door a furious crowd, with Sean at its centre, fending off neighbours with the empathy machine.

"You have no idea what I’m feeling!" he screamed at them. "Come on if you dare!"

The crowd drew back a little, then surged forward again as more spectators arrived. Her way to Sean blocked, Myrtle stood at the back of the crowd, neither attempting to shove her way through nor walking away, wide eyes fixed on the raging man on the doorstep.

micro-essay

Cliff Hammett
Contraption

The world is replete with ridiculous contraptions, and they can be thought of as such in part because of their implausible ends. Here, it isn’t just that such machines attempt the impossible, such as trying to fly through replicating a bird’s motions, it’s also those machines that perform tasks which seem entirely redundant. Take, for instance, Professor Faber’s Euphonis, a talking machine made in 1830 that could speak all five vowels. The fascination is not that such things are possible, but that a machine can perform them. Likewise, I remember my brother and I being held in thrall by a computer game on the Commodore 64 system that could say a crude approximation of the word – ‘Robocop’ – and this in spite of it being transmitted to me through a television, and the game itself having been loaded from a tape cassette.

But a contraption also appears as ridiculous by throwing together incongruous parts and using convoluted methods. One only needs think of those featured in Wallace and Gromit – a leather-booted ball-kicking machine with a ball carriage resembling an anti-aircraft array, or a rabbit-catcher with the aesthetics of a plumbing system and a fairground tombola. They’re jokes, and indeed Sigmund Freud starts his exploration of the technique of jokes by examining jokes that work by such ‘condensation.’ For instance, De Quincy once remarked how old people were prone to their ‘anecdotage.’ If we were prone to whimsy, we could imagine the contraption originating in a similar joke:

CONTRACTION = CONTRAPTION
TRAP

In the word ‘contraction’ we have the first signs that a new life is ready to emerge, and the means by which it is going to do so. A trap, on the other hand, is associated with death, or at least capture. It also evokes a particular kind of machine, a one shot deal which then has to be re-set. And of course contraction is another word we could apply to this form of joke. All this is after all a joke in itself, not a remotely plausible etymology and certainly no guide to its meaning, which can only come from examining the actual use of word. Quite like the way a joke can open out the associations and connections in languages, the contraption opens up the potential forms and uses of machines. Both have their uses – the first points to new ideas, ways of thinking and patterns of reasoning; the second, more often than not, points to new modes of production.

As a history of automata by Mary Hillier reveals, by the eighteenth century complicated and intricate mechanisms were often the preserve of showmen and magicians as well as clockmakers. Using the tools of the clockmaker, Jacques de Vaucanson drew crowds with his mechanical grocer, flute-player and, most famously, a duck automaton which could flap its wings and eat grain. Later, Vaucauson created innovative improvements to weaving methods, including automating patterns through punchcards, an innovation that lead Jacquard to create his famous industrial loom. Likewise in Japan, Takeda Omi I started as a sand clock maker before establishing a mechanical theatre of dolls driven by clockwork, sand, water, levers or pulleys. The techniques of Japanese automata were later borrowed to improve manufacturing processes for sugar and medicine. Here, we can only acknowledge the age that these engineers were entering - that of the standardisation of time across geographical difference, the shift from paying workers for their produce to paying them for their labour time, and the new regimes of industrial production. But it suffices to note here that the relation between the showman and the clockmaker was not one where the former appropriated the tools and techniques of the latter. In many ways the clock is the origin of automata, as well as its horizon. For instance, the fabulous water clock sent by the King of Persia in the ninth century would open a door and drop a ball bearing at each hour – then at the twelfth a mechanical horseman would whirl round and shut them, returning the clock to equilibrium. Before the invention of the pendulum clock in the seventeenth century, clocks were brilliant contraptions but lousy timekeepers.

The clock can still be a spectacle today. Joao Wilbert’s Exquisite Clock (www.exquisiteclock.org) is a networked artwork, a collaboratively created timepiece where users submit their own images of numbers to create a digital clock face. But in the exposed wires and circuitry of its various installations, it might also remind us of that time where engineers starting out would use the same tools and mechanisms as clocks to become showmen, and thus start make a living from their trade. In this exposure, Wilbert’s work can be aligned with the eighteenth century Japanese tradition in which viewers would be taken behind the scenes to see how the mechanisms worked, rather than in Europe where the mechanisms were kept veiled so as not to ‘spoil’ the magic. More than this – the exposure makes the work that much more a contraption, as does the difficulty we have in reading the clock through its mash of images. What it primarily puts on display, however, is capitalism’s latest stage of evolution – the ‘prosumed’ networked artefact – and attention to how people interact with this work can only add to understanding of this development.

The historian of technology Otto Mayr identifies the clock as a symbol of an authoritarian world. He relays how, from the seventeenth century, the clockwork metaphor was extended to the body, the state and the world, and, as such, entailed a radical denial of the freedom of its subjects. Its imagery dies off with the absolute despots. Perhaps Exquisite Clock could be such a symbol for our age – we all get to contribute, to participate, but nonetheless perfect time is kept, control is somehow maintained. It's not simply that we can determine content but not form – we can of course hack it, as an open source program we’re actually invited to. But the most this could be is a gesture, akin to those in the 1848 revolution who began shooting at the public clock faces. The clocks keep running, the system picks itself back up even after a crash.

Few functioning timepieces today can properly be thought of as contraptions. The idea of the contraption comes to the fore when there is something anomalous, some quirk or instability, some surprise or contrivance. We become aware of the machinic element, but in a chaotic way, and at times it's almost as though there’s a claw at life, but never an attempt to become life. Do such machines raise a smirk because they remind us of our own ability – not just as individuals, but as societies – to be mechanical, rigid, inflexible? Or is it something else – as the machine whirls and strains, regular but not quite invariable, when it seems as though it might collapse at any moment but never quite does – do we have a moment of actual recognition, do we see a spark of agency flying out between the cogs?

this issue's specials: device squad

Introduction

IS a poem, as Don Paterson has asserted on a number of occasions, a machine for remembering itself? Or can a poem be a machine of another kind? Can it break down, overheat, go haywire? And what if a machine-poem took on a life of its own, like HAL or GLaDOS? This issue's special feature sees four poets attempting to mimic, in language, the effects and character of various mechanisms or devices. Nicholas Liu tackles Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton, while Chrissy Williams, Sophia Blackwood and Niall O'Sullivan take on the Zamboni (a brand of ice resurfacer), the barometer and the dictaphone respectively. The results, as ever, are multimfarious and surprising. Try it yourself at home, but don't forget to take basic safety precautions!

Nicholas Liu
Glider

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Chrissy Williams
The Zamboni Clears the Ice

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

.  .  .  .  .  .  .

.  .  .  .  .  .

.  .  .  .  .

.  .  .  .

.  .  .

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.

Now make new lines.

Sophia Blackwell
Barometer

Falling

In vain.

I contain

magnitudes,

smell rain.

I am where

your prayers

end, in

the beat

of air.

Heavy

weather

squeezed

between

damp hands,

tightening

pressure

bands

crush my

accordion

sides like

a coffee can.

Sighing,

the vacuum

greets mercury

like a vial

takes blood,

incapable

of resistance,

incapable

of lying.

Inverted in a bath of mercurial bliss, sticky-fingered weather dips a slick kiss in the meniscus,

pushing the column low. I am all response, results, all molecules flirting with surfaces,

nosing the airtight glass. I am a vacuum, puckered, sucking the sinking air, nowhere to go.

I am the sum of damp beds, wind, cloud-sweat, shrouds of smog on fog-blind mornings.

Here is a fragile thing. This is your reading when the sky sheds layers like uneasy Spring.

You and your dumb numbers. You should be grateful. Here are millimetres. Here is data.

Batten down the hatches. Tug at the air. Readings drop, sky draining, skin cold.

Hang up a torch-round eye cinched in old gold. Look at that instead. By the way, it’s raining.

Niall O'Sullivan
A dicta-phone tape found within an old hotel bed frame

contributors

Christopher Barnes lives in Newcastle. In May 2006 he had a solo art/poetry exhibition at The People's Theatre, which can be viewed at http://ptag.org.uk/whats_on/gallery/recent_exhbitions.htm. The South Bank Centre in London recorded his poem, 'The Holiday I Never Had', which can be heard  on www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=18456

Colin Barns studied at UEA, Norwich, and is now based in London.

Sophia Blackwell describes herself as "an eclectic word-flinger", and has performed poetry in a wide variety of settings across London, as well as at Glastonbury. Her debut collection, Into Temptation, was published in 2009 by Tollington Press.

www.myspace.com/sophiablackwell

G B Clarkson lives, works, eats, and sleeps in the middle of the Midlands.

M P Dean lives and works in London. Elsewhere he would be a phoniatrician, logopède or orthophoniste. Here it is the more prosaic speech therapist. He is not aware of this having any bearing on his poetry.

Joe Dresner graduated from Lancaster University in 2009, where he studied English, Philosophy and how to avoid being expelled. He was born, and currently lives, in Sunderland. He is also published in Cadaverine, Pomegranate and Erbacce.

Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea. His debut novel, Submarine, was published by Hamish Hamilton and the film adaptation was released this year. His debut poetry pamphlet was released in 2010 as part of Faber's New Poets series and he co-runs regular poetry cabaret Homework.

http://joedunthorne.com

Louis Gilbert is a Fine Art graduate from Sheffield Hallam University, a member of the band The Dufflefolks, and also runs the record label Spilt Milk Records.

Carl Griffin is from South Wales and is in his mid-twenties. His work has been published in Magma and Pomegranate. His favourite poets are Stephen Dobyns and Roddy Lumsden.

Nicholas Liu recently graduated from the National University of Singapore and his first collection, Versions from the English will be out later this year from firstfruits publications.

http://nicholasliu.wordpress.com/

Simon Messenger is reading for an MA in Library and Information Studies at University College London, having worked in libraries, bookshops, and a cinema. He is a member of The Dufflefolks.

Tom Moore (19 October 1903-12 May 1971) was a professional wrestler and actor. He is perhaps best remembered for his roles in a number of B features, including police inspector turned zombie Louis Burke in Death Warrant and the part of a recurring lab assistant, often named Saint Lobo.

www.tommoore.eu

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of A Roomful of Machines (Searle Publishing, 2010). Her publication credits and acceptances include more than 400 publications, including Boston Review, Envoi, Narrative Magazine, Other Poetry, Southword, and The Pedestal Magazine. She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize.

Niall O'Sullivan's work has appeared in a number of publications, including Wolf, London Magazine, South Bank Poetry and Rising. His first collection, You’re Not Singing Anymore, was published in 2004 and his second, Ventriloquism for Monkeys, in 2007, both with Waterways. He runs regular events The Cellar and Poetry Unplugged in central London.

http://niallosullivan.co.uk

Christos Sakellaridis writes poetry and sometimes takes photographs that could accompany poems. Some of his poems have appeared in The Delinquent and Stimulus Respond. He is currently working on his first collection, Xenon/Ξενον. He likes/extols the virtues of lots of stuff, such as animals, Epicurean philosophy and ice cream. He dislikes/detests the word ‘quintessentially’, financial capitalism and aubergines.

Jacqui Saphra's work has appeared in Acumen, Staple, Orbis and The Interpreter's House, among other magazines. She is on the editorial board for Magma and co-organises regular poetry event The Shuffle at the Poetry Cafe. Her pamphlet, Rock 'n' Roll Momma, is available from Flarestack, and a full collection was published in 2011 by Salt Publishing.

http://www.jacqueline.saphra.net

N. God Savage lives in Belfast. His writing has appeared in print and online on sites like Word Riot and Mud Luscious. He is currently completing a PhD in philosophy. Find him at www.ngodsavage.com.

Kevin Simmonds is a writer and musician originally from New Orleans. He's contributed to Chroma, jubilat and Poetry and his musical work Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country opened the 2006 Poetry International at Royal Festival Hall. He lives in San Francisco.

Dan Simpson is a spoken word poet and writer. He performs his poetry wherever he can: on beaches, at festivals, in bars (often) and at the National Theatre (once). He can be found online or, less virtually, in London.

Jake Stringer is a habitual writer whose habit is out of control. He lurks in the bowels of London avoiding paid work, brewing medieval concoctions and filling up his hard drive with short stories, long stories and non-fiction.

Claire Trévien is a PhD student living in Paris this year and taking an active part in its spoken word scene. She has recently been published in the anthology Dove Release: New Flights and Voices by Worple Press. Her writing has been been published, or is forthcoming, in anthologies published by Leaf Books, Cinnamon Press and Heaventree Press, as well as in publications such as The Battered Suitcase, Nth Position, Pomegranate, Danse Macabre and Fingerdance Festival.

Russell J. Turner is an actor, poet, promoter, mathematician and recovering alcoholic. Norwich is his playground. His first poetry chapbook, The Machinery of the Moment, has recently been published by headCRASH. Visit http://themachineryofthemoment.blogspot.com/ to read more.

Originally from London, Robin Vaughan-Williams moved to Sheffield in 1999, where he ran Spoken Word Antics for five years, presented the Antics radio show on Sheffield Live, and produced a series of site-specific sound and poetry collage-performances.In recent years he has explored Skype poetry and improvisation, collaborated with musicians from the Ella Luk project and written a script for Surveillance Suite, an auto-generative CCTV project by James Coupe. His pamphlet, The Manager, was published by Happenstance Press in March 2010.

http://www.zeroquality.net

Inga Vesper was not born in the UK in 1984, but in Germany, a small hiccup in her biography which she rectified by moving to London in 2003. Inga then attended City University regularly enough to gain a degree in Journalism. She has tried her hands at various professions since, including pint puller, orphanage matron, pigeon scarer and Middle Eastern diplomat, before finding her true calling as a journalist for Research Europe. In this profession Inga has has many close encounters with contraptions of various kinds, but thinks that the people who think them up and then don't try to dominate the world with them are even more interesting.

Christian Ward is a 29 year old poet who is currently finishing an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. He reviews poetry occasionally and translates it from time to time. His work can be currently seen in Ezra and has appeared in Iota, Poetry Wales and The Warwick Review. He loathes movers and stray cats, both of which have been encountered in the last three weeks.

Louise Warren is a poet and playwright living in London. Her poems have appeared in Agenda, New Writer, Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis, Poetry Wales, Stand and Seam, and in several poetry anthologies. Her most recent plays have been at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre and for Immediate Theatre.

Chrissy Williams lives in London, has had poems in S/S/Y/K/4, Horizon Review, Orphan Leaf Review, Rising and Southbank Poetry, and was recently included in The Rialto's Young Poets feature. She works on the Poetry Library's digital poetry magazine archive, co-edits edible poetry journal Poetry Digest and wishes she had a dog.

http://chrissywilliams.blogspot.com

Tony Williams lives and works in Sheffield. The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, a collection of poetry, was published by Salt in 2009. He blogs irregularly at http://aye-lass.blogspot.com/

Chris Woolfrey writes, reads and records. Then he combines these things. He graduated from the UEA Creative Writing department in 2008 and reads an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College. GSOH, WLM similar. Find more at http://www.chriswoolfrey.co.uk

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé is a city hermit who’s shy but loves hot sex. He has edited more than 10 books and co-produced three audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organisations. Also working in clay, Desmond loves throwing on the wheel. He’s presently sculpting a three-piece set based on Lacan’s ideas on the moebius strip.

Table of Contents

contents

Editorial

visual art

comic strip

poetry & prose

Christian Ward - The Beheading of Daniel Pearl

Jacqui Saphra The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions

Christopher Barnes - Joanna Lumley

G.B. Clarkson - Macroglossia, or: The Tongue Which Took Over

Kevin Simmonds - Hysteria

Tony Williams - Clicks

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé - Gertrude Stein’s Agnosia

Russell J. Turner - on cherche grothendieck

Dan Simpson - A Rube Goldberg Poem

Kristine Ong Muslim - Steady Glide

Joe Dunthorne - A Robin Eats A Worm

Claire Trévien - Sing Bird

Joe Dresner - Shortcut

Louise Warren - Home

Carl Griffin - Deflation

N. God Savage - Methodological Implications Of Behaviourism In The Study Of Planets And Other Creatures

Jake Stringer - Early Adopter

micro-essay

Cliff Hammett - Contraption

this issue's specials: device squad

Introduction

Is a poem, as Don Paterson has asserted on a number of occasions, a machine for remembering itself? Or can a poem be a machine of another kind? Can it break down, overheat, go haywire? And what if a machine-poem took on a life of its own, like HALor GLaDOS? This issue's special feature sees four poets attempting to mimic, in language, the effects and character of various mechanisms or devices. Nicholas Liu tackles Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton, while Chrissy Williams, Sophia Blackwood and Niall O'Sullivan take on the Zamboni (a brand of ice resurfacer), the barometer and the dictaphone respectively. The results, as ever, are multimfarious and surprising. Try it yourself at home, but don't forget to take basic safety precautions!

Nicholas Liu Glider

Chrissy Williams - The Zamboni Clears the Ice

Sophia Blackwell - Barometer

Niall O'Sullivan - A dicta-phone tape found within an old hotel bed frame

contributors