Popshot Magazine Issue 37

I’ll willingly admit to being a bit of a scaredy-cat. Walking home alone at night, or in an empty house, I experience sharp prickles of fear. In these moments, I am five years old again and convinced the stories my sister told me of ghoulish dogs and murderous grannies are real. I still love the frisson provoked by a good ghost story, but as soon as the lights are out my brain whirs whatever it was into being all too vividly. Trust me, I couldn’t sleep for a week after reading Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger; and at university Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw left me with a terror of Gothic novellas. So, it was with some trepidation that I opened the inbox to see what had been…

and the kids are dressed uplike it’s the end of daysThey’re busy plundering lollipops from the sweet bowlleft out by a neighbour we hardly knowand I’m wondering what the world will be like in their haunted futureI’m not afraid of a bang or a whimper to end it allNot afraid of witnessing the fallinevitable as it has becomeI’m just so very scaredof what those few extra degrees will meanfor this pack of excited school childrenwho are so full of sorcerywith their witches gowns, broomsticks and wandsbecause there just might not be enough magicin these desperate days to comestrong enough to undo our past…

He’d been having a rough few weeks. The band he was in weren’t going to make it, it looked like. He’d realised the songs he was writing with his bandmate – the keyboardist – were bad. Terrible, really. Really terrible. If they were narrative, they were forced; if they were abstract, they were pretentious. He’d tried his hand at shifting the rhyme a word earlier (instead of It’s you I miss, You I long to kiss he had I miss you, Long to kiss you). It hadn’t worked or not worked. He had the same words and a headache. The headache persisted. Morning came and the fogginess hung around. That sunrise, that new day (as referenced in many life-affirming songs), was not to be his. The beach, though, acted as…

Julie Findler was excited. If there was ever a night to dress herself up and get her hair looking all nice, this was it. She was fifteen years old, on the brink of adulthood, and she had woken up that Tuesday morning in the bed she’d always slept in, in the house she’d always lived in, knowing tonight was going to be the best night of her life. Tonight, on the twenty-second of March 2011 at roughly seven o’clock, Julie Findler was going to get her best friend back. Julie and Michelle had bought the tickets six months ago. They’d used Michelle’s dad’s computer. He had one of those new Apple Macs and an unstable enough relationship with his daughter to let her use it whenever she pleased. Julie and…

if you called me pretty right nowit would haunt every poem I will ever writeor have ever writtenthus is my limited understanding of the fluid nature of timebased largely on Doctor Who reruns and the ringing in my ears after the rock showmouthing into the reverb like breathingI want you I want youto call me pretty whilst I puke Dark Fruits into a patch of nettles in a sad layby&if you asked me right nowheyare you okay?I don’t think I’d ever need to eat or write anythingeverever again…

For four days every monthI prepare for the bats. Inside the organ, thousandsof throbbing eyes peer religiouslyin the direction of the mouthof the cave. They arrive at dusk, a coal cloudbreathing like a crude blacklung, loose and sticky and mattedplasma panic flapping throughpits, trapped for days, lack of airturning them dark, destructive. When they appear pumping, flutteringit is a ceremony. Fruits, laidat the altar, are shelled and setfor sucking, palm branches fan outfor the bats to recover, absorb into the diminterior, scratches, clicks faintly echoing. For nine months I need the bats to migrate southfor winter, where there are richer soils, sweeterfruits. Or hibernate – sleep so deeply nature transitionsinto every season, dizzy and peaceful from what is requiredto stay alive. I need the bats to leave me so I…