Just as the river will run where it will, your thoughts will run you ragged, racing sticks and leaves down runnels they’ve cut through logic and all strata of persistence. Here’s a bonfire on a storm-stripped spit, with the world’s tallest man—8' 6" in his stocking feet—striking a match like a broken bone, bending his face to fire. Here’s the Frog Prince, trapped in transformation, webbed in ermine, bug-eyed and crowned in white gold; an unfinished tale in an amber droplet, plump on a cindery breast. Here’s a bridge across a gorge of caverns and bright lights, a reflection of that jump to hyperspace embroidered in the corner of a dropped handkerchief. There’s a skeleton sitting with a raised cup and crooked pinkie, his skin scorched off by tourists’ flashbulbs, his rib cage rippling with cold music. There’s a tree with a tunnel cut right through it, and if you pass through its sappy portal on the longest day of the millennium, you will exit in a desert with an empty cigarette machine swaddled in webs. There’s no river here but your thoughts cut deeper, scraping the nerve of that 4 a.m. baptism of paper, rock, and scissors.

beyond the gate 

days pass by 
looking the other way 

a yellowed note 
script like a river 
flutters 

Sunday knocks, with its rain and buttoned-up collars, its reluctantly held hands and nodding lilies. It lurks on the threshold, shifty as a forged pardon, an ill bird rotting across its shoulders and indigo smudging in its clammy pits. When it smiles, its teeth are grey marble, each carved with the name of someone I think I may have met at a friend’s wedding or a therapy session. In one hand it holds confession, in another contrition, in a third restitution, in a fourth compassion, in a fifth a Methodist Hymnal—yes, we’ll gather at the river—in a sixth a pack of cards, and in a seventh a pack of cigarettes. I lose count of hands, but each one reminds me of Noah’s dove returning from the drowned world with a sprig of olive and an eye dazzled in rainbows. The only things missing are the right words, be they blessings, banishments, or just a simple acknowledgment that time’s passing and we all make mistakes. In a tree across the road, two ravens clack their ink-black beaks like slapsticks scattering punchlines, and Sunday turns away, wrapping its hands in the folds of forgetting, wheezing like a cracked harmonium in an empty chapel.

dust in summer air 

children’s tales remember 
dreaming in dark forests 

drifting downriver 
a princess sighs 
her breath a feather 

On high days and holidays the swans arrive, all neck and flapping feet, strutting and tutting into town as if the King himself was in their train, hooting and tooting and shooing the riffraff. It’s a rare sight for sore heads, and it makes me think of all the bridges I’ve burned, all the oil and breadcrumbs I’ve spread upon waters across my sixty or more winters. Cafés bulge with whoopers and trumpeters snapping snacks off silver platters, and the chatter of the hoi polloi is nothing but the glamour of beaks and bead-black disdain. Paparazzi clamour for the perfect shot, and there are vox pops of shoppers and curious passers-by, who have dropped into the picture without knowing how or why. I am amongst the latter, gathering my scattered thoughts like feathers and pasting them to my bony arms in imitation of wings. After all these seasons, I know it’s the done thing, and I take my place in the queue for cake with the rest of the wannabe waders as the swans sway by; but I know that, however hard I kick, I’ll be here long after they’ve passed, mute as a black candle, wishing I’d left just one bridge standing.

petals scatter 

the same old path 
always different 

words drop from stories 
bright boats sailing 
memory’s winding river 

Trees wag their fingers like old men in children’s books of a bygone age, and time slips again. We are walking through leaves by a river or a lake and everything’s the colour of burnt sugar. It’s a Sunday afternoon, the clouds are so still we can see the Earth turning beneath them, and if we closed our eyes we could drift off into space. In my pocket is something you lent me by Gide, all creases and sadness, and in my hand is a flower, which I’ll press between pages without ever learning its name. I talk of us as if you were here, but the trees wag their fingers, admonishing me to shake such nonsense out of my old, old head. And I am walking through water where once was a path, waist deep in mistakes and misremembering. In my pocket is a flower that never learnt its own name, because it never needed to, and in my hand is a book I’ll never finish. It could be one I borrowed or it could be one I’m writing.

beyond the summer 

the same old path 
passes like days 

breath like a river 
words drift 
flutter 

We reach the point of not going on; that leg-tired heartache point, at which all systems freeze and truth diffuses into pixels until even the ghost images are gone. Nothing resembles its photograph anymore and the road denies it ever led anywhere at all. We’d take each other’s hands for comfort if we still believed in hands, and we’d step into the raging river if we still believed in water. Horizons hang their heads and turn away, turn to empty. All that’s left is breath     edge     stop     and     We reach the point of not going on, of no point at all; and then you point at something only you can see, and I see it, too.

—First Place Winner in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

Oz Hardwick

is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “maybe 15?” full collections and chapbooks, including most recently with Hedgehog Poetry Press: Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (2024) and My Life as a Time Traveller: A Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (2023).

His manuscript Orion Highway won the 2024 Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize and will be published by Dalya Press in 2025. His poem “Witness Statement” was awarded the 2024 Charles Simic Prize for Poetry. In 2022, Oz was awarded the Arc Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.” His book Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry.

With Anne Caldwell, Oz edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022); and with Cassandra Atherton, he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press, 2024).

By day, Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK). In his spare time, he is a respected music journalist. He has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops.

Author’s website: https://ozhardwick.co.uk

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Irresistible Rise of Prose Poetry: Northern Soul Talks to Poet Oz Hardwick, interview by Mark Connors in Northern Soul (9 December 2024)

⚡ Last Ride in the Dead Zone, cheribun by Oz Hardwick in Issue 24 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2024); First Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #2

⚡ A New Home Beneath the Stars, prose poem in Flash Glass (1 May 2024)

⚡ Oz Hardwick, seven prose poems in The Mackinaw (Issue 1, January 2024)

⚡ Three Poems by Oz Hardwick in Anthropocene (3 August 2022): “Jobs for All”; “The Seaside Line”; and “Absolute Zero”

⚡ Five Stunning Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick in Lothlorian Poetry Journal (23 April 2021): “The Glasnost Legacy”; “Diluvial”; “The Evolutionary Urge”; “Yolo”; and “Heredity”