Landscapes of Abdication
in an empty bar of a pub, I sit at a table, a half-empty pint of Stella before me, an open paperback novel, the cover showing the pages of a book cut into with a sharp blade to reveal more pages underneath, cut into again in ever-decreasing rectangles as if the cover of the book has been designed to hide ever larger guns, but not because the special-effect of depth is made so by perspective and shading, but because the book holds nothing more than words and numbers.
An extract from Steve Finbow‘s new collection of shorts.
Five poems
The lord of cellar labyrinths, the one-eared cat Jespar,
fetches
newly hunted young birds to his lair. Men proudly
point him out to their children.
Is he the one that ensures balance in the natural world?,
asks Janni.
Yes, he’s the one that will save us from poetry,
explains her father,
an ardent opponent of social democrats.
By Grzegorz Wróblewski.