Four Poems
by Oz Hardwick
The Good Samaritan
The dark takes hostages but treats them better than the lives they had at home. It lets them use their own names and promenade through the city streets without the need for answers or excuses. If they want to dance, it offers its elegant hand to lead the way. If they want to sit and sway like anemones beneath warm waves, it folds itself small to allow them space without judgment. And when, as will inevitably happen from time to time, they wish for the blade that will cut them clean from all their tangled agonies, it will dry their eyes with a star-flecked tissue and lead them to the edgelands, where night-scented stock will wrap them softly in all the reasons that used to matter before everything became so unnecessarily complicated. A telephone rings in a bright red kiosk. The voice down the long, long line breathes patterns onto the reassuringly cold glass and promises that no one will pay the ransom.
The Spice of Life
The show’s the same every night, with the knife thrower, the mime artist, the escapologist, and all the other holdovers from the Golden Age of variety. The only thing that changes is that each performer ages at a different rate. It’s most noticeable with the escapologist, who’s dapper with his peppery moustache as the stooge from the audience checks his chains and seals him in his iron safe, but when he frees himself four minutes later, he’s as grey as a tired goose, slack-skinned and pink-eyed, his knotty hands shaking in his spot-lit moment of apotheosis. The knife thrower, on the other hand, has been a teenager since the theatre opened, flinging blades as his sequinned mother spins on her wooden wheel. As for the mime artist, who knows? As soon as he leans into his imagined hurricane, I feel my own time ticking faster, and I gather my hat and coat to leave. But it’s already tomorrow, the lights are going down, the curtain’s going up, and the pit band is playing a tune no one’s written yet.
A History of Naive Art Since 1974
The Ferris wheel stops but the world keeps turning. Below, a hundred amateur artists paint what they see in their mind’s eyes. For no reason at all, and entirely independently, they each paint something pertaining to the sea. Did you know, calls a voice from a swinging gondola, that an octopus has three hearts? Talk about perspective! 78 of our random sample will never brandish their brushes again, and only one will go on to any sort of success, exhibiting in cool pop-up galleries to critical acclaim, if only occasional sales. They’re known for the skewed perspective of their fairground scenes, which they daub in blood and brine. Reviews riff on the beautiful grotesque of the hallucinogenic hyperreal. The works’ progenitor speaks about turning and falling in love with the arrow that pierced her/his/their octopus heart.
Field Trip
It’s half past everywhere in the Science Museum and temperatures are rising. Each display is labelled Global Warming and there’s nothing to see but steamed-up glass. But press your ear to the tepid slickness, and you can hear the skulls of our ancestors chatting about steam engines and flying shuttles. You can hear the tap-tap-tap of knapped flint and the shuffling of uneasy sheep. The boxed fog pulses with the first splash of accidental fire. It’s quarter to nowhere and, deep in the undercurrent of algae soup and dripping fronds, reactions nod and shudder, time is revealed as a tissue of chance consequences which was never meant to be like this, and blind fish are experimenting with bicycles, convinced that they will save the world.
BIO: Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “maybe fifteen?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). He has won numerous awards, including the 2024 Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize, the 2024 Charles Simic Prize, and an array of stuffed animals from fairgrounds. He would love to be bassist in a Belgian space rock band, but makes do with being Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. www.ozhardwick.co.uk