Back to Issue 3

By Salobrena's Walls by Dave Migman

The old women amble along
Calle de Clara Maria
back and forth, bags clasped in offering.
Above them the mast of the old radio station
shrieks

            a meeting point for troubled ghosts and the four cast
furtive glances skyward.

No doubt their minds are bloody
with images of Christ,   slipping like a eel against the block,
while Maria weeps waxen bolts of relief.
(There is a gluttony in this fear,
the peoples' lust
for death and tragedy)

I lean over the wall, eye's stretching out to lap the   last
golden patch out there upon the surf, big old clouds
rolling in from Cadiz, Tarifa
between the dividing straits.

Once the war now waged was fought here
this brown frontier, sucked dry cross cut star
and after all their battles, out rages, inquisitions
the only credible victor was superstition.
The women crowd together. They see me up there
hunched over the baked clay wall
silhouetted against a back drop of fire and blood.

I scatter promises to the ruins
inhale the flowered scent of the little town
trace my fingertips over the crevices of a thousand years
hungry to taste each rosy bud of dew.

The Detour by Dave Migman

There's a longing, sweet and deadly
to ditch and run,
but there's a fear
that grabs me by the scruff
and I choke
on thoughts of freedom.

Still, the best times
were burning alone;
the room,
books, sweet music and the night,

alone and godlike in the wound
singing along with humming pipes
or sharing cracked slab wisdom
with chortling fridges
and the like.
But relationships make a mess out of me,
love fills my mouth with sweet air
and candy kisses savoured
for a rounded shoulder.

Once there was the Self, itself.
now the wound fits two.
this messy nest
love snuck upon me.

I want desert dust on tongue,
a bag, a book,
a one way ticket
to the end.