Louder! | Issue 14

She Left her Mark

Sadek Mohammed

It’s Friday.
The quiet cups of silence/ the silence of the cups,
the dirty anguished table/ the table of dirty anguish,
the brimming ash/ the ash on the brim,
the empty packs of cigarettes/ the cigarettes in packs of emptiness,
The leaning shelves/ the shelves of the leaning,
the open mouth of the window/ the window of the open mouth,
the long journeys of the mind/ the mind of the long journeys,
the river of impending dying/ the impending death of the river,
the death of the city/ the city of death,
the loss of a woman, the woman of loss.

It seems she has left her mark.
I told you that.

“Be honest!”

The noun is a ladder. The adjective is a well.

That ladder invokes a well.
The well invokes a ladder.
The ladder. The well.
The invocation…

You know you have to be honest.
You are not real, you know that.
When you stumbled upon the bed, she carried the baby.
Most women carry babies.
The man carries his stick. Most men carry their sticks.
When the Imam says, “Be honest!”
He does not mean Hamlet killed his woman.
He simply means it’s Friday.

1

McCoy’s, Ribena and a Twirl, Barney, Series 5 Episode 2

Héloïse de Satgé

so I might as well let
myself think about
dancing
on the dlr

dodging the sweat
spilled on the
floor and ignoring
the only other woman
in this carriage
resisting the sweat and pull of

her body her grip loosening
around the vending machine
coin slot in the middle
of the carriage,
all her small changed spent,

maybe you’re not a true londoner until you
shake the coin purse of your ass all
over the train floor,
play the same song on repeat
like a reoccurring twirl,
thudding against the glass

2

Tuned Wrong Again

Carrie Farrar

The satellite spoke in
tongues again,
a glottal click between
the wrist and where
you forgot to wear your watch.

Your body kept time anyway:
knees dialed to static,
throat tuned to the wrong kind
of Morse,
the one they use
for birds
trapped inside airport terminals.

Somewhere between
the microwave ping
and your mother’s unanswered call,
you picked up a hum
beneath the tile grout,
a kind of
pre-language,
like a radio station broadcasting
the weather in
octopus.

You’ve been trying to decode
that ache in your jaw
as a message.
All those fillings you got in childhood
conducting signals
from planets
that no longer exist.

At the corner,
the pedestrian light
blinks in semaphore.
You miss your cue again,
feet stuck in buffering.

Every time you reach for someone,
you check first for
cell service
in their clavicle.

Just in case.
Just in case the right frequency
is buried under skin,
waiting to say:
come in,
we’ve been trying to reach you.

3

Missed Connections from Quantum Craigslist

Nicole Shepherd

The rift in the time-space continuum
gave me a highlight reel of my multiverse twin.
You (me) had all the dishes done,
clothes folded and put away.

Besotted plus-one on your arm—
learning salsa?
You were selling your book
and habanero jam at the farmers market.

That REM cycle didn’t even need
magnesium, 65 degrees, or a sleep story.
And your eyes glimmered
ancient forest-god brown,
rather than overtilled-earth
tinged with climate change.

Do I haunt you too?
Is my couch sprawl and dry shampoo mastery
making your mouth water?

Send me the Pinterest life recipe,
I’m all habanero and laundry.
Salsa through,
I’ll let you lead—
I’m already mid dip.

4

Commandment 11: Oops

Irk Irkwell

And lo, the Lord debugged the firmament,
saw it was Good(ish),
then hit Save As → New_Universe_FINALfinal.
But the Cloud was full.
Let there be Light, He said—
only to discover the license had expired.
A patch was promised at Pentecost.
Meanwhile, darkness reigned in Safe Mode.

Divine Misfires (v2.0)
He meant to flood the logs,
accidentally drowned the planet.
Meant to part the Red Sea,
but Moses received error code 403: Forbidden.
Meant to whisper to Elijah—
firewall flagged him as spam.

Free will was a beta test.
Eden, a sandbox environment.
The Fall: an unintended rollback.
Snake: unlisted variable.

Omniscience conflicted with auto-delete.
Hell was cached.
Heaven lagged.
Meaning: a feature request.
Hope: a recurring glitch.

Patch Notes from the Apocalypse
Fixed bug where prayers loop infinitely without receipt.
Adjusted balance: more doubt, fewer prophets.
Silenced burning bush due to audio feedback.
Resurrected the dead (again).

The Kingdom of God is now read-only.
The backup corrupted centuries ago.
All temples archived.

Commandment 11:
Thou Shalt Not Assume I Meant It.

Final Line
And the Word became flesh.txt
but no one remembered the password.

5

Hedge Porn

Kevin Denwood

When I was ten
we played on the disused railway line
behind the old bakery
that shut before I was born.
Sometimes,
we’d find dirty magazines
buried in the hedges.
We called them Noddy books.
The older lads said “hedge porn.”
We never went looking —
they were just… discovered.
Like finding a pound coin
or hearing your name
read out on the local radio.
One moment we’d be fencing
with bamboo sticks
or carving our names
into the old sleepers
with penknives.
If you had a Swiss Army Knife,
you were someone.
Then, suddenly,
a neatly rolled magazine
would appear,
strategically placed,
not thrown,
not discarded —
placed.
I’d pull it from the hedge
and raise it high,
Excalibur in newsprint.
“Look what I’ve found!”
We’d gather round,
high-pitched giggles,
grubby fingers tracing glossy breasts —
each nipple like forbidden fruit.
Then someone would snatch it.
Then another.
Until it tore —
shredded like confetti
on railway dust.
Sometimes,
we’d see a man,
alone,
sifting through the hedges
with frantic hands.
We never knew what he’d lost.
Or what he hoped to find.

6

social mobility

Aisling Towl

all year you’ve said this was the life you worked for
the lanyard the water cooler
the buildings named for eugenicists and war criminals
sex arranged in the last desperate hour of a conference
highball glass cracking in your hand
a man in the lobby speaks into his phone in baby voice
you change your shoes in the bathroom
a friend ghost-writes your profile
says you need a break
you are too used to it
this middle-distance from precarity

you have forgotten the taste of struggle meals and drunk-tonguing friends
fear you will soon become a person who
speaks mid Spanish to waiters

you remember what nostalgia costs
drop in on an old flame just to hear your name in a South London accent
just to stop yours fading any more than it has
you know too much to enjoy it
leave gifts for his next girl in the bathroom
you please everyone
pay it forward take the compliment
businessmen the world over kiss each other on both cheeks.

7

Better

Lázaro Gutiérrez

We drive down the black highway. Bellies full of vegan Chinese food. Hot and sour soup, pickled seitan, sesame tofu, fried wontons, sautéed green beans with veggie beef, and white rice. I said “my depression is gone,” as we ate. All I needed was seventy dollars worth of vegan Chinese food—not goddam Depakote. The owner has known us forever, she invites us to her temple for a Chinese New Year celebration. I agree eagerly and leave our phone numbers with our tip. I have always wanted to belong to something. She says “you are already vegan, you are halfway there.” Good point. On the drive back we discuss this, the way Buddhism makes sense and other religions never truly have. We listen to Regina Spektor, and we mockingly pronounce the word “better” the way she does “beh-uh” “beh-uh” “beh-uh. I run my fingers through your hair as we laugh and sing simultaneously. You’ve said it’s better than foreplay. I wonder if I could bottle up these moments with you for a sip when I get sad again. You read your smut for a moment. Then you break the peaceful silence, there you go again being all inquisitive, and you ask me if I am taking my medicine. I sigh, don’t ruin this moment sweetheart, you know of my pharmacophobia—or perhaps it’s my perfectionist mind rejecting the fact that I am mentally ill. Let me believe I am fine without it. Let me think through the natural solutions, ashwagandha, l-theanine and lion’s mane. Let me believe that God made my mind to be this way to write beautiful words about the tragic condition of the brain I inhabit—after all it is not me. And what do I matter here anyway? If I am a lost cause, the you must take me as I am. But that is too much to ask from everyone. I can barely stand myself most days. I can barely stand the way my thoughts flow—without a direction—without a place to go. Another moment of silence, a scratch of my throat, then the answer blurred by the silence, “No.” I confess. “To be honest, I don’t want to lose the feeling in my dick.” We laugh, but you are concerned, I know. When we get home I stare at the pink bottle. It’s pretty, the capsules are pretty too. They are meant to organize my thoughts, to make me feel better, to make me flow like a normal human being. Tomorrow I’ll tell my doctor a lie when we meet. I’ll tell her the treatment has been great and I am doing better than I have ever been. I’ll tell her my moods have stabilized. And no side-effects, no headaches, no dizziness, no rare rashes. I am simply a happy camper. But truly, I envy the people who live their lives with meager thoughts and not a care at all for anything else. I want to be selfish too. By the end of the night we have fucked the calories away. You know I’ll detest the world again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll swallow them then, or I’ll tell Dr. G another lie and find another band aid for the obscurity I never seem to escape and keep driving aimlessly in the shadows of the night.

8

One of Hammershøi’s Rooms

Benedict Hangiriza

The first time I moved the chair
was by accident. I was vacuuming.
There was a crescent of dust
where your feet used to swing.

I left it crooked for a week.
Then I nudged it back, gently—
as if the air still remembered
your elbows, your breath.

In the third week,
I placed a book there:
the one you started and didn’t finish,
face-down, like a paused animal.
Its spine eventually softened
just enough to keep your place.

The sunlight comes in
at an angle I don’t adjust.
I tell people it warms the room
better than anything artificial.
It’s a lie,
but only a little.

Last night I imagined
you walked back in,
wrinkled your nose
at the candle I lit:
jasmine and old ash,
not your favorite.

And still—
you’d have said something
about the new cushions.
How I never chose yellow
when you were here.
How suddenly
every room
is a quiet
you left ajar.

9

For Birdboy

Emma Lagno

In the purple television slant, the baby cries big
hungry orbits, strikingly human whale songs

that shimmer the apartment walls into fine silk
muslin, then vapor, then sonar. His sound-talons

travel through the wall sockets’ dumbstruck mouths,
along the sky wires, up the legs of perched

birds, into their cherry-sized hearts, out
as whistles and trills. Through echo, he plumbs

the depth of the world. His calls are half-swallowed,
relayed in bright mutation. A train horn, his mother’s

sigh, the crowd at a baseball game. In open
space, he detects the imprints of extinct sounds.

A woolly mammoth’s trumpet. The folding of a folding
map. A dial-up tone. He is learning the shape

of empty, not yet distinct from the shape of his own
organs, curved and impassable as cul-de-sacs, or his ribs,

funneled out like flying. Dumbly, we point. Here
is music. This is a song.

10