I don’t believe in signs and portents but can’t deny that the dragons in the eastern sky cause some perturbation. My calendar app’s not working, but it looks a lot like June 793, and I can smell sweat and smoke where just a minute ago there had been nothing but sea air from here to an undiscovered shore. The dragons look more bored than hungry, moping around the amusement arcades with pockets full of coins which aren’t accepted anywhere but museums. I’d like to ask if they understand the concept of museums, but I suspect that, appearances aside, they’re just waiting for an excuse to get tasty, so I keep my stupid questions to myself.

a carpet of ink 

birds and beasts in bright margins 
chasing each other’s tails 

loose threads run 
from hand to eye 
from memory to supposition 

Somewhere, it’s already tomorrow, dogs are waking and sniffing the day, and the Sun’s stroking another thin layer from the future. Here, though, it’s still the past, and amongst the to and fro of Vikings and Victorians, I am lying in the back of an ambulance trapped in traffic. A twisted figure presses pinched fingers into my chest. They could be a medic or they could be a demon, and they could be starting my heart, or stealing it, or simply struggling to still it as it pulses into a volcano that threatens to tear the whole world in two. There’s a sleeping dog at my feet, like a thirteenth-century alabaster, and a tonsured priest at my shoulder, chanting nonsense in schoolboy Latin. Time, I know, is running out, and I feel a prick in my left forearm as the figure on my chest tells me that there will be no Sun. The ambulance stalls, and news comes on the radio that, even on the other side of the world, it’s still only today.

beached boats 

words wash ashore 
stories ebb and flow 

my grandmother stands 
Queen of superstitions 
Governing unlikely futures 

Though I’m an old dog, I’ve never been averse to new tricks and I accept that maybe it’s time for a crash course in prognostications and their attendant superstitions. My grandmother, bless her, always carried a rabbit’s foot in the voluminous pocket of her floral pinny, and she lived to join the immortals in a Christianised Valhalla, with tea instead of mead and considerably more knitting than is mentioned in the sagas. Being a vegetarian, I find this problematic, so I decide to carry a live rabbit in my bag-for-life. It should bring four times the luck, though the dragons are looking hungry and, out of the gathering clouds, a horn keens a mournful lament.

—Second Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4

Oz Hardwick

is a European poet, photographer, and wannabe musician, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “maybe 15?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). He has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in disreputable bars. In 2022, he was awarded the Arc Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose 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).

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

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Adventures in Experiential Limnology, cheribun by Oz Hardwick in Issue 29 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2025); First Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

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

⚡ 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”