Issue Three is themed on the subject of travel. Knut Mork Skagen’s sparsely beautiful poem, ‘Whiteout’, appears first in Norwegian, and then in English on the other side of the page. It’s a fine introduction to the rest of the contents. American writer, Adam Keker gives us a page apparently torn from a travel guide to ‘St Ersi’. There’s a reference to Mark Twain, and a description of some artefacts from his visit to the city. One of the things that’s so wonderful about this magazine is the mysterious nature of a single leaf. The reader automatically wonders about what lies beyond that glimpse of text, and this applies as much to an apparent travel text as to any excerpt of fiction. Some writers have written specifically for the magazine’s single leaf format, while others have taken an excerpt from a book or longer work they have written. With poetry, it’s usually the complete poem which appears. In a previous issue of the magazine, a poem was printed on the back of a tissue of translucent paper, so the words appeared through the skin of paper. Juliette Shapiro’s ‘Simulacrum’ is one of my favourites in this issue. The reader is absorbed into the text from the very first line. This piece reads as fiction, as the account of a girl travelling with her aunt. They arrive in Prague, and the aunt tells her about the golem, and they visit the synagogue. The aunt is a collector of jars, scents, and other objects from around the world. As the text progresses, there are mysterious references that indicate there is more to this aunt who wishes to be known to her niece as Leone. Of course, the reader is left to wonder about what comes next, and whether this is part of a longer work that might be published elsewhere.

Vanessa Gebbie’s ‘Sandstorm’ is a more sensual piece. A man tells the narrator about an encounter he had with a naked young woman in the Sahara. But the narrator imagines the storyteller with a naked young man instead.

Abi Hirschmann’s ‘Walk 13’ appears at first to be a map and details of a walk, but it soon transpires that this scenic trek takes in an incinerator, a sealed landfill site still emitting toxins, a mobile phone mast disguised as a tree, a school full of kids with asthma and other allergies, fields sprayed by a crop duster, and other modern delights.

Peter Rolls’ ‘XYZ Rail’ is a customer newsletter for rail passengers which has a similar tongue-in-cheek take on modern life. The fictional XYZ train timetable offers new VariTime Schedules, where arrival times have to be calculated by passengers according to a series of variables: D (delay), L (load factor - weight of passengers), F (leaves, ice on the tracks etc), T (Thermal malfunction - effect on track and points), V (fog, etc), W (wind, open or closed windows), etc. Though the mathematical equations for calculating journeys may seem amusing and somewhat bizarre, anyone who has travelled on UK railways will be all too familiar with these variables and their effects on train schedules.

Rab Fulton’s ‘Postcairds Fae Agia Napa’ consists of two poems. The first, ‘Postcaird Fae Cyprus’ starts: “uranus gote eez baws choppt aff / n saw them flung intae thi sea”. Aphrodite is born and she looks for land, finds Cyprus, only to discover she’s over dressed and ‘ur hairstyle jyst plain wrang.” She turns to drink and men and karaoke. The second poem, ‘Life is Brevity’ is more philosophical, but still told in Scots. Fulton uses the language vividly, poetically, and in the case of the first poem, humorously.

’It’s Not as Crowded as the Subway’ by C. Allen Rearick is a beautifully written poem set on a train, and one of the best in the magazine: “I can see the lines float / like the trace / of god’s hand / against ink-stained skies…” Ryan Bird’s poem, “Monkey Bars” is also well-written. It’s impossible to deal with every piece in The Orphan Leaf and keep this review within a reasonable word count. But Martin Brick’s ‘Lost and Found: Hotel Castellar’ is another gem. Ostensibly a series of entries in a hotel lost and found log, interweaving stories are revealed, concerning a champagne flute, and a camera found in a room and a later series of compromising photos. Other lost items include virginity: “Angry-sounding patron reports losing virginity in 716 on Oct 11th 1986... insists we make a note of such loss in our log. If it turns up, she wants it back.” The log is printed in handwritten text, with different handwriting styles.

There are a number of other pieces I’d liked to have picked out - especially ‘Flight to Tel-Aviv’ by Nora Nadjarian and ‘Trains Travel East and West’ by Louisa Howerow. Even something as apparently simple as James Paul Wallis’s ‘Index’ makes for interesting reading, if only to try and suss out if there is some story or theme running through it.

There’s lots more good writing in issue three. Because each writer has only one leaf, this gives each individual work a greater intensity. When a story ends in the middle of a sentence, the reader is left to wonder what happened next, and the absent spaces between pieces are as important as the printed words themselves. The Orphan Leaf Review is a magazine that comes highly recommended.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.