HEAT Series 3 Number 24

YOU WILL BE SO SENSATE

YOU WILL BE SOUP

So warns Hollen Singleton in their poem about the alluring promise of change held out by the deep, salty darkness of a pay-per-use float tank. HEAT 24 is an issue of transformations, remakings and reversals of fortune.

In ‘The Cleaver’, Patrick Hunn recounts the trials and terrors of the Levy family, whose loving mother has been inexplicably replaced by Villana, a medieval Italian woman hell bent on dragging them into abject madness. In John Morrissey’s gothic story ‘The Judge Advocate’, a colonial investigation into suspected cannibalism wreaks havoc on the careers and lives of a judge and a once-heroic captain. And Nell Pierce’s story ‘Live Action Role Play’ follows a new mother as she finds solace in watching the free-hearted LARPing of a group of men who meet on a football field every second Thursday.

Playing with substitutions and alternates in three poems translated from Spanish by Rachel Galvin, Alejandro Albarrán Polanco asks, ‘Do you mind if I swap you for an actor or a waiter? Or whoever comes by first.’

Anna MacDonald’s essay ‘Breaking Patterns’ tracks the growth of a slim crack in her coffee cup, over years of reading, thinking, forming and reforming the habits that measure her life. And Holly Isemonger’s poemessay ‘The Way of Clay’ places us as a woman in the ancient Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, where ‘there is clay dust in your food, your lungs, hair, on your skin, up your nose and in your shit’, reminding us that from clay we are made and to clay we return.

Contents

Holly Isemonger  The Way of Clay  prose
John Morrissey  The Judge Advocate  prose
Alejandro Albarrán Polanco (trans. Rachel Galvin)  Three Poems  poetry
Anna MacDonald  Breaking Patterns  prose
Nell Pierce  Live Action Role Play  prose
Hollen Singleton  Sensory Deprivation Isn’t Really What It Is  prose
Patrick Hunn  The Cleaver  prose

Frontispiece by Elisabeth Cummings