Maggie Shearon’s ‘Our Columbian Boyfriends’ is the first offering in this issue. A woman is telling the story of the time she spent in Mexico some years before. It is a rather laboured effort, self consciously conjuring atmosphere: of Mexico, of innocence, of two girls (free spirits of course) having a good time. Era is established by cultural references to such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Beatles; innocence is captured in images of bright feathers and dancing with umbrellas; exoticism presented as food and drink (lovingly described at every opportunity), and a bit of flamenco dancing. It all gets a little wearing. There is a story going on (the Columbian boyfriends), but Shearer sacrifices them to ‘atmosphere’ and so we never find out why one of the girls spends time in jail, or exactly what happened to Laura. But whatever it was, it hasn’t dulled our narrator’s enthusiasm for returning to Mexico.

Five poems by Liesl Jobson follow. The best of these is ‘Strange Dreams Doctored’, an original and moving approach to describing unhappiness in a grandmother’s house, which leaves behind it a terrible pathos.

Ashley Stokes' ‘Post – Leading Man’ concerns the broken dreams of an actor who never quite made it. His ambition is to play stud-hunk, ‘Sly’, in a programme called ‘Gentleman’s Relish’. He fails to get the part and his girlfriend feels it is time to give up acting. He goes for a walk and in the course of it, has some encounters which prove to be both funny and moving. The first is with a beggar girl. He knows what Sly would have done, but his own innate kindness prevents him from a macho seduction, and he merely gives her his coat and his money. Even when she begs for his company, he still leaves her. Later he meets up with a gang of thugs. Here he does act like Sly – and floors one of them. But they come after him and he ends up in the river. When he emerges it is to squelching misery and discomfort. The life of Sly isn’t so wonderful really… Somehow he sheds something of himself in the river and approaches an epiphany.

Randall Brown has four poems printed here. ‘Incorrect’ is wonderful – a counterpunch to a lecturer who rebukes Sylvia Plath for appropriating Holocaust tropes for herself. Brown has a lot of fun with the wisdom of literary critics and Freud’s Oedipus complex. ‘On My End’ is quite different, a painful account of a father’s debility.

‘The Austin Project’ by Derek Gour is the strange tale of Austin, a customer service call centre employee who is obsessed by numbers. He will not answer his phone if he is at a page in his book which is a multiple of three or a power of seven. He is urged constantly to answer more calls but his number compulsion retards his progress. Finally, he hears of a project to replace human customer service with robotic service …and somehow he becomes convinced that he is in fact the trial robot….with shocking results. This is an enjoyable story with much understated black humour.

‘The Ride’ by Joseph Faria is also understated until the horrifying finale. The story tells of Carl and Fred, on their way in a car to abandon a sick dog. Their conversation is coarse and quarrelsome, and they pay no regard to the little boy Tim in the back seat, whose dog it is. The car journey is tense and full of cruelty to the dog, full of the quarrels and machismo of the men. It is possible to forget all about young Tim in the back seat…until the finale when all the misery and love of the child is made hideously manifest.

One of the highlights of this issue is Richard Hollins’s ‘Two Good Feet.’ The boy is missing a hand and has been in six different schools in his five years schooling. He is a hangdog little creature, accepting of the bullying and horrid curiosity of other children, an experience he has to relive time and time again whenever he changes school. But he has a talent, one that impresses other little boys, and manages to find himself a place with them. Till he moves again. It’s a simple story, but remarkable for the intensity of feeling in its spare prose.

Five poems by Ann Walters follow. She draws heavily on her experience as an archaeologist to inform her work. I liked best ‘Or At Least A Peaceful Sleep’ which is about some open graves ‘where the past coughs and groans.’ In a few scant lines she realises fully a sense of the past and of death and of the possible anger of the disturbed dead.

Bernard Connell’s ‘3 Metrophilia’ comprises three sections, one set in Luxembourg, one in Paris, and one in Mexico City. In Luxembourg, a woman has sex with a toad, in Paris, a fetishist licks muck off a woman’s shoes, and in Mexico City a man has sex with his perfect woman, a robot, who has ‘breast like strawberries floating in bowls of milk’, possibly the most revolting visual image of many in the story. What are these three portraits for? The author explains in a paragraph at the end – ‘these portraits are of humans superimposed on their suburban environment.’ Right.

Wry, dry, and amusing is Joel Willans ‘The Crossword ‘. Dylan is a crossword fanatic – the Times is a bit above him, but he feels the Guardian is intelligent but achievable although hitherto he has never quite managed it. He avoids human contact on the train in favour of his crossword. He works steadily, ignoring the beautiful girl beside him. Trying to ignore a persistent beggar woman. Barely noticing a passionate couple, the lady half of which pokes out her tongue at him. After a while, he realises that what is going on around him is predicted by his puzzle answers – ‘destitute’ precedes the beggar, ‘passionfruit’ follows the couple, and then his clue leads him to complete the puzzle with the word ‘death’. And you’re quite wrong about what follows after that. Willans is a much more satirical writer than that. His ending is a classic.

Completely different in style and tone is Erin Pringle’s ‘Moxie’, the tale of a wannabe bank robber, a homeless woman who has dreams for the future if she only had money. This is an edgy piece stained with hopelessness – you know nothing is going to work out, just as it never has. The whole piece is written in staccato bursts of sentences as the woman gives herself instructions about what to do and how to get away with it. Very tense and very involving.

André Naffis has five poems in the magazine, every one a little gem. Somehow he imbues a letter, a waiting room in casualty, a summer’s day with pain and a delicate sorrow. One to watch for.

Another highlight is Gary Cadwallader’s ‘Angel of The Compost’. A farmer has an accident on his land and is fatally injured. His wife comes to his assistance and what follows is an unsentimental exploration of real love and tenderness and courage. Such ordinary people, such an extraordinary depth of feeling.

Last up is an extract from Jenn Ashworth’s ‘Annie’s House’. In this extract, Annie is discovered beside the body of a dead or dying man by the postman. Her thoughts as the postman tries to help reveal the sad life of a fat plain woman who has suffered much rejection in her life. How she comes to be in her present situation is not clear yet – one of the drawbacks of novel extracts – but the woman and the proposition are certainly interesting.

Taken all in all, the magazine delivers what it promises – variety in genre and style. It is a little patchy in quality here and there, but there is more than enough really good stuff to justify having a look at it.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.