Issue 15: James Coghill
from After Aniara
2
lacked meaning as an object of belief
Donkey funeral. Deserves nothing but. Pachomius
did you think
you’d die of disgust? Rome’s quick sag brought out
a thirst for abstention
unparalleled in this charnel desert. / The river irks me too
and yet he was
a good monk for all the showy ascetism
laid out here
in his hunger singed bones / my dear Abba / remember
we were all struck by the spear, head on
3
One jar of uncontaminated soil / is owed by everyone
Check your groundwater. Check your geiger counter. The revolution
is unsinkable. I drink / milky chai
from a pint glass / hope measured by the picogram /
with a fierce sincerity
I miss you / my sorrowfully rare allotrope of affection. My predilection
for sin is honestly under the heel
is infuriating and undeniably / innocent / despite the fuck ups
I am a whore / but this does not mean
a thing. Wilting, I write you a mock epic signed with my heteronym:
The monumental foolishness of living
4
The pilots are more nonchalant
self-confessed double cynics / loving their cold
double edge,
resenting the rich and poor / alike / in futurity, they’re as dead
as each other
sensation / is the truth of it / and trusses their moral co-llusions / thus we
crawl from the age of bipolar
to the age of psychopathy / in my dream / King Ghiadorah and Mothra
brawl for the honour
of bursting imperial hornets underfoot / They’re coming
here fatalists of that most recent stamp
6
atoms that overlay Nineveh’s blocks
churned aside / and the blocks torn up / detonated, chopped
in foul light
whited out: Banitu, Inurta, Alluhappu / The Assyriologists tears
are obscure ones
when we fly over / tell the persecuted to cry out in an intelligible language
speak to me
in pogroms since I have a taste for this kind of catastrophe
and since my complicity
is gorgeous and I cherish its noble, bystander aesthetic
so men sink their teeth into right
James Coghill is an ecopoet currently clinging to the edge of the country by his fingertips. Most recently he has had poems published in Sidekick Books' 'Lives Beyond Us' and 'The Emma Press Anthology of Dance'. He has interests in Swedish language and culture, Christian mysticism, and (of course) ecology He blogs here: https://thesolenette.wordpress.com/
