Issue 30: Joseph Minden
from PADDOCK CALLS: THE DAYBOOK
w/c 3 Jan 2022
It is Epiphany, when
we reflect on how things are
revealed to us. With masks
back, their eyes come
forward harder from
around the room, but widen
with what they can’t say.
They are subdued, deprived
of the impulsive
preliminaries to expression:
how the mouth moves
often so immediately after
where the eyes go.
On their own, the eyes are legless.
Year 8 and I are thinking together.
Where do tears start? Inside
these eyes. And where do they end
up? Below them. So that, by
definition, they lower
you, those characters,
into the world.
w/c 7 Mar 2022
Peter and James fell into
the bottom of a lift shaft
I vaguely saw them crunched there
in this glass bore
Slowly
the firemen came as paramedics
There was a brief
muffled investigation
Peter is dead they said
coming back up to the rest of us
The smallest hesitation that
Peter is truly but not indefinitely dead
Hello spine
ladder to turn out
The same place in that is what
stairs are up to the top suite
w/c 6 June 2022
It’s Monday morning, 1am.
I’ll not sleep.
The day is a church,
its windows the last few days,
the door, my desk.
Everyone respects a door.
Then I was on my feet,
my head against the food.
w/c Sep 12 2022
Having observed the lesson,
the inspector presumed to pass
judgment on Danielle:
you’re a bright girl
but you’re being led.
Our eyes met
in the conspiracy of children
which says
who the fuck is that
and smiles off, distracted
like a slide
into the afternoon.
When I make my new
friend, now
as this eleven-year-old
I discover –
suddenly –
his mouth doesn’t
stop but leads
on and on,
his relentless approach
immortalised
by the loop of time.
Get it away!
Saying
you’re dead to me
(I discover as the inspector)
is an important type of
murder. I, too, retain
the infinity
of starting out as a human
but it is mine. I cannot bear
to know better.
Or you
of the asking,
the asking again.
w/c 21 Nov 2022
for S, for Aug
At the counter, Kat
grates lemon zest into
a frying pan with halved
tomatoes, although bleedy,
sparklered by rain, the new
Krieg interface, given by
our hand in the meadow that is
the same gait as first circled
such stuff as dreams that we were
full of war and would tend more
that way, ghosting a final meeting
in newborn shadow, sleeping
in the creeping wakefulness
of weeks, the steeples of trees
walking with no different
pace across the neurotoxic
hull of Salisbury, a neutron
star in the chapter house,
I am a free. Fortunate son,
at the counter your back is just
your back. But yours is the body
who carries our minds
into the blast radius.
Joseph Minden is a poet and secondary school teacher. His books Paddock calls: The Nightbook (slub press) and Poppy (Carcanet) came out in 2022. Another, Backlogues, is coming out in 2023 with Broken Sleep Books.
Copyright © 2023 by Joseph Minden, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author