That evening we made supper from our gleanings,

joking about sows ears and silk purses,

but were muted as the huge pan bubbled

under the harsh kitchen light.

I held up the crooked husk;

a weird, long, dishwater thing,

knuckled like a finger; new born; senescent. Afterwards

as we lay in bed, I thought of the beans

rolling round our plates, their alien autopsy colour.

It was then I was jolted by an oscillation inside me,

a throb like a smothered orchestra. You stirred

on your side and I placed my splayed palm

across your belly – a middle aged man’s paunch,

stretched from years of home brew.

But the swelling felt different:

tighter, somehow significant. And I felt it in you:

that same strange movement, undulation. I timed

our two throbbings till they rhythmed in tandem

then dropped off to a deep sleep, comforted

by our peas-in-a-podness, dreaming of surfeit.

Louise Peterkin

My Father’s Sci-Fi

Hard backed, jam-packed in condiment colours: cocktail sauce, Colman’s Mustard. A sepia tang rose from inside, pages the colour of old men’s fingers. Time travel of deflated prices: 80p for a novel, more in US/ Canadian dollars. Kneeling at the shelf behind the sofa I fought the tedium of long afternoons slack as space; the drowsy clock; sear of sad, squandered sun on my back. My father lay dozing. Sometimes, his snoring would stop and I counted the s e c o n d s a sick fear he was dead making my toes tingle. Only his Norse blasts resuming released my own breathing, the task of the antiquarian. Philip K. Dick. Dunes sprawling dynasty. Asimov’s mysteries – taut and lovely – a box of gems held up with tweezers in a stark white light, the jeweller a squinting cyclops. I liked Bradbury, collections compiled from 50’s magazines. The best story hurled me

like a pod from a spaceship into a vacuum of infinite dark folded onto itself like velvet with absolutely no

stars. A man on a long haul space flight. He was convinced his sole companion, Wilbur, was an android, assigned to save his mind from the crumble of solitary confinement. Wilbur was detached, aloof, impersonal. Our narrator: charismatic, inquisitive, jovial.

Then they switched him off. They. Switched. Him. Off. The narrator was the robot all along.

That was a kick in the guts.

That was when I realised there were stairs in my head and I had to stare straight ahead not to tumble down them, get smashed at the bottom.

The covers were frightening: A prickly jewel stared out from one, a sort of pincushion with eyes hanging in a sea of yellow. The worst was a man with a bald head cracked at the top like a boiled egg, out of which rose a moth. The moth rising out of the man’s head had a man’s head. And it was bald as an egg, cracked at the top with a moth rising out. The moth had the face of a man’s bald egg head, cracked...

Louise Peterkin

Spring offensive

Spring is here all blasé and the sun storms

the city with its solar weaponry

armed with melanoma in broad daylight.

Are our laptops the gravesites

of long lost flower beds

we could be attending to?

Flowers are pustules, infectious and leaking.

The colours are so violent.

Why do all the beautiful things have cancer?

We tend plastic morning glories,

eat sweeteners and bathe under UV light.

The horizon is the colour of a lit fuse.

We purchase an AI robot as a nanny.

On a busy day, she sighs,

threatens to destroy all of humanity.

Children buy gas masks to see

who can hold their breath longest

before having to strap theirs back on.

We repeat the word equinox