HEAT Series 3

As a man writes this down, he calls to mind those many instances in which he wished he was at home, reading. He would say to himself, I wish I were at home now, and then picture himself huddled up with a book of no particular title, but nevertheless certain that the pleasure and comfort he found in that imagined tableau would exceed anything before his eyes.

Nobody in Rome cares / that I have begun / to devour you. / In the hostel this morning / and again tonight. / Even on the basilica stairs / while the nuns pray inside.

The medium is a woman in her sixties, with long, thin, blonde hair stretched back into a ponytail. She rises from her chair and moves to the centre of the stage. Energy in the room shifts immediately. Everyone goes still and silent and sits up slightly taller in their white plastic chairs.

The vastness of fiction’s playground (and the seeming abundance of slides and ladders) makes it possible for the reader of ludic literature to flee the corner inhabited by the kids who don’t play and crash into the hall of King Arthur for all the wonder of Camelot on New Year’s Day.

Of all the things I took to the front for Ukrainian soldiers, the most important was a kilogram of freshly roasted coffee from a hipster coffee house in the centre of Uzhhorod.

There was a kind of shuffling about. People looked uneasy, as though a crime were about to be committed. Somebody coughed as sirens sounded in the distance, then an old woman who looked as though she had been asleep, her head back and her mouth open, took up the skein of talk like a trout after a fly.

It was my turn to hold her. I wrapped her in the special stuff. Then he wrapped us both in the special stuff, leaving a corner untucked to fold himself into.

All night my father hangs upside down / in the hospital basement / trapped under the huge pulsing bell / of a crystal jellyfish…

I’ve said it several times, both in public and in private: I do not lead an interesting life. Though many would say that my field of action, as the Detective called it, is fiction, I’ve always secretly believed that my field, my action, belongs to poetry.

Dear editor, The problem isn’t that the young desire to do wrong but, often, their inability to separate right from wrong. This ability arrives only with a sense of consequences, which is linked to an idea of time. The young cannot imagine a time outside their time.

I arrive at the doctor’s office early in the morning. I have forgotten my mask and ask for one at the front desk. Then I take a seat in the waiting room, which looks like a professionally managed Airbnb. Exposed light bulbs and plastic ivy hang from the roof. There is a pink neon sign on the wall that says, in cursive, ‘better together’. 

Keats wrote that ‘Twang dillo dee’ – which means ‘amen to nonsense’ – should be written across the backs of politicians and ‘at the end of most modern Poems’ and on all American books…

There are many ways to break a tongue, and there are many ways to recall its power, not only as an instrument of speech that shapes sound within its home of the mouth and palate, but as an organ involved in knowledge acquisition, sense making, flights and figment.

Phil and I have a make-believe housemate – we call him Allen. Allen is a real jerk. Allen never cleans the bathroom, leaves the fan on when no one’s home, and only half-empties the dishwasher. Allen lets the laundry stay out on the line for so long that all our jeans are sun-faded, and he alone is responsible for the murder of our beloved houseplant, Fernie Sanders.

Even as I uncover materials that suggest Renate’s appearance – a portrait of her sister on an East Berlin balcony in 1961, prisoner records from age sixteen till liberation, a Hollerith card that catalogues her physical features – she remains stubbornly abstract, a dream that can’t be retrieved.