By Oz Hardwick.
Day after day, submarines grow rudimentary limbs and waddle along the shore. They taught us about evolution at school, but back then it was something that took a long time and most things knew their place, yet already the submarines are experimenting with their new limbs, dancing, putting together five-a-side squads for friendly kickabouts, and kneeling at scrimshaw shrines to the USS Tang and the Proteus. Faith and fiction are common bedfellows and there’s no point telling them that the Proteus wasn’t even real. Of course, they need fingers for the finer details, and no sooner are they pressing their palms together in prayer than they are building chapels decorated with shells to remind themselves of their miraculous birth, vaulted to the perfect pitch of the cosmic sonar ping. Then, before you know it, they’re building windmills simply for the beauty of air and slapping complex rhythms on hand percussion. Naturally, some miss the simplicity of the dive and silence, but others are already identifying as human, building boats and inflating water wings, frying in the sun on bright beach towels, and perfecting rock/paper/scissors into an Olympic sport.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oz Hardwick is a poet and academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “about a dozen” full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently A Census of Preconceptions (Dublin & Reggio di Calabria: SurVision Books, 2022). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.
