WOTblog

by Jane Monson © The audience are in winter; it is visible in their backs, in the hills they make that lower into the wind and wait for snow. They are stopped from the cold and the hunger bred by silence. They are tightly mooded, curled up in a half listen, the eyes turned inwards and the face down, the floor of the room cast back at them, dimming the skin with shadows. The author stands before them, opens his book, removes his hand from the blanketing of the pages, leans his head towards the print, peers over the view and opens his mouth. His story leaves him, with the apologetic gait of a new boy at school. The small crowd remain unmoved; the breath reserved, a small bare mist that comes and goes. The author moves towards the centre of the page. Men seen from the road play chess outside their doors; the game is balanced on a tilting table that follows the slant of the street; a light shout ensues from the slow slide of a chess piece. Over the page crickets set off their songs like l...

by Jane Monson © The roof quotes Gothic, then Romanesque. The floor understands neither, its aisle stone tongue cracked and splintered, each flag its own fit. The ground looks starved. Rugs are cast like bones; the dips and folds make flesh or skeleton of the faces that pattern the cloth. Each look is of a tight or a loose order according to the flow of the weave. Smoke contorts above the fabric, then cuts out and sinks into the design. Incense fills the unstitched gaps. Stutters from the organ mark the air. The minister opens his mouth as if to yawn, falls away from the lectern; static returns in his voice. A marble falls from the pocket of a boy and tells us where the rug ends and the stone begins; he lifts another to his smile and swallows it, tugs at his mother’s sleeve. Tugs again. Prose Poem from Speaking Without Tongues (Cinnamon Press: Oct 2010)