Concrete’s creative team would like to proudly introduce you to this summer’s creative anthology, Heat Waves.
The day is open
by Una Wilde
In the early morning
Orange sky
Forgetting
Her grief
As she opens eyes
Wide to the new day
Blinks and blushes
At all this startling colour
The day is open
As worms in the dark earth
Uncurling slowly
As they move away from
Heavy human feet
Open as
The unfurling of roses to the sun
As a mouth tasting
Fresh apricots
As the sounds which come from
Insects, birds and sheep alike
Each alive to their own outpourings
Each open to the orange sky
Who stretches out
Elongating her limbs
Until sunlight infiltrates
Every space we occupy
Open your palms and
All we touch will be
Illuminated
Image credit: Una Wilde
Scared to sweat
by Ruby Robbins
–
Without the tang of:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Everything around her:
The water
You off this skin
becomes prunish
Like this haze.
It flips people inside out, Hooked round the mouth
Like that fish
That you didn’t mean to kill.
Dragon flies kiss Calm like the boys in the clouds, Frantic like the woman holding on to the sky
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Ducks feed their scruffy babes
The hidden ribbon from the womb
Cannot stomach
The lack of
Obese rain,
We blister and faint
Bulging with contraception
Clots like slugs,
Anaemic blue.
Irreversible
Heat.
–
old fabric,
–
–
–
–
–
–
Yours.
ripples maternally.
Image credit: Ruby Robbins
Is it a Club? Is it Inferno?
by Sophie Cullen
I’ve never really understood clubbing, so on nights out I’m too sober and have beasts to outrun I allow myself to be guided. I hold hands with my Virgil, abandon all hope, and enter. We fall into the fireplace and descend through the pyramid of flickering bodies, spiral past concentric circles of duo-chrome limbs, watch heads bob up and down like puppets as their knuckles are caught then tugged to the ceiling. Pleading, pleading, pleading.
Eyes like Ivan’s smooth the damp in the roof, the cracks in the walls, the syrupy floor – diluting to discs and waning to pins in each frame of the strobe. Every socket joins the swam, together hunting for Helen in a mini skirt, Cleopatra unrolled and bare, Venus come out of her shell.
Tongues over teeth over lips. Smiling hollows crash and fuse, forming, for a moment, a chamber in which to intwine and feed on each other – a grotto with salt and lime and smoke.
Appetites glint off silver chains and ears dipped in gold – metallic freckles twist through the remixes like fireflies and weave a gilded constellation across the dance floor.
Atop the sludgy vinyl, sharpened elbows burrowed into ribs. Snarls smudged in lipstick. Stinking roars choked by cologne. The active and passive float and sink. The bog bubbles to the beat.
Kings and cardinals become entombed between sweating, fiery walls. They preach water and air and earth as the cure, declare the soul as just as sick as the body. Pleading, pleading, pleading.
Heads turn a boiling vermillion as an avalanche of streaming paper strikes and scorches the floor. Burying, smothering, swaddling. At the perimeter, wooden corpses loom and groan in the smoke. Pecked at and bleeding, they hang on thorns dripping viscous scarlet, forced to silently watch the blaze and await rescue.
It forms a sweltering amphitheatre. At the centre, each figure twists and contorts – behind the face becoming reptilian, scorpion-like, winged, bestial. A flock of wyverns submersed now in sticky pitch with claws and grappling hooks.
With a gesture from the stage, they crouch. Knees cracking, spines shifting, burning soles.
Cowering from the sky. They are frozen, bound to each other but never breaking skin.
And then at once, with a great swing of bulbs, electric buzzing cries out for them.
Splayed hands rise and cluster and form a glistening canopy. Acrylics
puncturing collars are dragged skyward. Calloused digits are tugged
up with wilting vertebrae, pulled into soft, fine hair, and finally
heaved above aching ears to twitch as one in the howling
inferno.
Image credit: Sophie Cullen
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