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Octavius Magazine

Stephen O'Shea

27/6/2015

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Over Coffee

What struck him most was the vividness of detail: flakes of chocolate perspired beads of condensation onto foam while raw sugar granules fell as boulders of bronze crystal into a frothy surf. The sugar built in the center of his cup, piling upon itself into a small island of crystalline sand, and — fascinated by the scintillating grains — Sean began moving the packet of spilling sugar, sprinkling the tiny stones across the surface of his latte to watch it absorb into a milky crust of foam.

Sean’s former boss, a middle-aged woman by the name of Dr. Kerry Decker, sat before him explaining things. She was a tenured professor at the university, with a partner on the city council and an only child just finishing secondary school. She sat aplomb at the edge of her creased booth while Sean ignored her with his idle sprinkling. “It was Mary McKnight applying for the residency that did it,” she was saying. “But there’s a program in Paisley, I think. And maybe others in the city, though application periods...” Her words filled the space between them, reaching Sean through the clutter of his thoughts, ricocheting off the implications of her recent revelation.

Kerry continued to speak with a tone that had at some point transitioned from that of a former employer to that of a companion, with the tenderness of a consolatory guardian. She’d become Sean’s former employer when, two-minutes before — as Sean reached over her to grab their tray of coffees at the Tinderbox counter — she’d blurted out that he’d been cut. “You didn’t get it,” were the words she’d chosen — perhaps carefully, perhaps on impulse — spilling forth in such a blunder of syllables that Sean had to respond with an apology.

“The post. The residency,” she said again. “You didn’t get it.”

Sean had frozen in place, obstructing a crowd of caffeine-deprived patrons from the bar with his tray of coffees hovering inches above the countertop. Kerry had watched him with her faded gaze, eyes turned grey by long hours of staring into computer screens. Even now he could feel her inspecting him, measuring the weight of his response against the demand of her expectations. She followed his eyes as her lips moved. “If not for Mary McNight,” she was saying.

Sean rolled the name across his tongue. Mary McNight. He cursed how fluid it felt, how naturally it fell from Kerry’s lips. He pictured the name printed on her novel, the novel that won Saltire’s “First Book of the Year” award. Call of the Grouse, it was called. Or was it, Flight of the Grouse? Not that it mattered — Sean felt that both titles blew — for, regardless of her writing quality, he failed to see how Mary McNight’s prestige would replace the projects that he’d imbedded himself in over the years of his employment: the writing workshops, the magazine, the courses designed and facilitated. It was, of course, a temporary position — he’d been made aware of that from the start — but there had been hints at continuity, unspoken agreements, gestures that he realized now were as fruitless and fictional as his future within academia.

“You’ll have our commendations wherever you go,” Kerry said. “It really was just a matter of funding…”

Sean blinked, holding his eyes shut and allowing the blackness to block out her face, her words. He turned back to his coffee. There was something hypnotic in the swirl of foam and deposits of sugar. He took his spoon and pushed the island of grains to the bottom of his latte. An espresso bronze spilled around his spoon, wetting the foam and releasing a puff of steam. The color reminded him of the River Clyde after a heavy rain: murky and muddled. He lifted his mug and pulled a sip of the drink through his lips and teeth. He held it on his tongue, swallowed, and then felt the caffeine spark in his frontal lobe. It was a gratifying sensation, accentuated by the intense flavor of the drink, and immediately Sean found himself remembering an old feeling of restlessness. It was the urge to stand. To get up and move. He imagined himself moving — down rivers, roads, airport terminals — to distant places (it didn’t matter where): New Delhi, Costa Rica, Hong Kong.

It was a feeling of weightlessness, and it replaced the anticipation that had suffocated the past three months of his life. The state of limbo that had hid his future behind a froth of applications and deadlines and waiting, all to be brushed aside by Kerry’s abrupt revelation before what was meant to be a routine quarterly review. Now, instead of commending the direction of Sean’s many projects, Kerry was rambling about alternatives to teaching within academia.

Sean took another slurp of foam. From his first sip, the latte had struck him as unusually flavorful. It was as though the coffee were richer, the ratio of milk to espresso — fluid to foam — was calculated to perfection, measured diligently to a level of optimal piquancy so that Sean could feel its flavor around him, outside of him, shielding him from the implications of his unemployment with its startling sharpness. He began obsessing over it. His lips twitched to a quizzical smile wet with nectar, his shoulders loosening with each sip until even Kerry had noticed the shift in his demeanor. She halted mid-sentence, rigid in the silence before Sean opened his mouth and spoke.

“Is it just me?” he began, and then stopped. “It’s like every grain of sugar is exploding inside of my mouth!”

Kerry’s jaw fell with the reaffirmation for her decision to back Mary McKnight for their residency, but Sean hardly noticed. He was absorbed in the aroma of his latte, raptured by the intensity of its flavor, the crunching of sugar between teeth and the surge of dopamine against neural receptors. It was, quite simply, the best coffee he’d had in months.



Find out more about Stephen on his website, and like his Facebook page here.
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Ross Sayers

20/6/2015

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Moon

I want to live in a world
where the moon is as brilliant
and round as it is in cartoons.
I want its white and blue
light to pour over a loch
while I'm sitting on the bank.
The air will be warm
and I might be drinking
beer, kept cool and wet in the water.
This special, fantastic light
will be bright enough to walk by,
through wide-open streets, and home.


You can tweet at Ross here.
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Rhuar Dean

20/6/2015

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Kennington Dawn
 
Today at dawn
an Attenborough moment
unfolds in half light.

Three pigeons feast
on a spilt kebab
strewn on the corner
below an Astra's hood.

As they feast
(food is food
to these beasts)
a tom stalks low
across the tarmac.

Perhaps his skills are weakened
or perhaps he is down wind 
and knows something I don't
but from my vantage
his hunt appears
pure folly.

And sure enough it is
with no Savannah to gild his prowl
and, being white, 
having not had the sense 
to follow the line
at the road's apex.

The pigeons wait just long enough
to tease this domestic
into dreaming a kill.

He feigns to run
as they rise to perch on a TV aerial, 
then he pretends that it was the kebab 
he came for after all.


Rhuar Dean is a poet, writer and occasional journalist based in Washington DC. His work has appeared both in print and online. More information is available at www.rhuardean.com
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Jamie Norman

20/6/2015

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Alfie

That summer I spent every day guddling about in the wee burn behind our house. Up to my ankles in the trickle, the cracks between my toes collected silt so that my walking was grainy and my feet crunched wherever I stepped. I’d hunt for rocks in the burn to show to Alfie, our local skimming champion. Once I found a smooth brown rock that was shinier than the rest and took it to him. I'd see him whenever we were out playing football and he'd always smile and wave to us. He would work his garden endlessly, growing carrots and potatoes and thin green stalks of celery which I hated - the only thing that wasn't worked on was a chipped white bench. I showed him my ‘prize’ and he invited me in for tea, to sit on one of his three chairs amongst the pictures of his son. I couldn’t sit in the chair next to the TV though because that was his wife’s chair and nobody sat there anymore. I sat in his son’s and slurped at the tea while he watched the news about the war. In those days that was all the grown-ups watched; I hated it and took to playing football in the streets with the kids, the sun dimming over our heads.

He took the stone off of me and said he was going to make me a present – at the time I was so happy because I didn’t usually get presents unless it was my birthday or dad was home. I left it with him and went to tell mum, but she was watching the news too, and it was bad luck to disturb that. A week later Alfie gave me the stone back, except it was polished so that my face gleamed out of it and there was a crown painted on. It had words I didn’t know running round the rim: Dulce Bellum Inexpertis, written in gold. He gave me his son’s cap as well which was dark green and had a silver pin in it. I told him we'd use the hat as a goalpost, and Alfie’s smile almost reached his eyes. He went back to digging in his garden and I took to gathering my team.

Two days later a man in green and brown went to Alfie’s and gave him a present: clothes like he wore, a shiny medal in a glass box and a hat– it had a gold pin through it. Alfie took him inside and ten minutes later the man left, he waved to me and took another present across to number four. I knocked on Alfie's door but there was no sound from within. The TV was off and I could see him in the living room, staring at the black screen. Since then I've not heard from Alfie, his garden’s grown full of weeds around where the old white bench swallowed him. The other kids played football in the street and I put the rock on my windowsill, so it could see the burn.


Jamie Norman is currently studying towards a Masters degree in Creative Writing at The University of Aberdeen. He writes short fiction and poetry, and has been featured in the Eildon Tree magazine and the University Creative Writing Anthology.
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Reza Ghahremanzadeh

20/6/2015

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Drown Me

The watery grave of that beautiful boy still shimmers.
I forgive you, Narcissus.
The strands of your DNA turned into bars,
They imprisoned you.
I couldn’t offer you freedom,
Because even in those spaces that exist between the bars,
You only saw yourself.
Now I’ve returned to the scene of the crime.
The location is the same,
But the situation is different.
I want the water to quench me,
To cool me,
To cleanse me,
To restore me,
And if it can’t do that,
I want it to drown me.


Eternal Pride

I fight with every
nail and tooth,
go ahead
and call me “poof”!
I really do not
give a damn!
I’ve accepted
who I am!
Self-love flows
through all my veins,
I reject your nasty names.
My victory
is in the bag,
go ahead
and call me “fag”!
Your anger
will instil no fear,
go ahead
and call me “queer”!
My true colours
you can’t hide!
I have got eternal pride.


Reza Ghahremanzadeh is a Queen's University graduate living in Northern Ireland.
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Joe Cushnan

13/6/2015

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This Is This

A hospital patient dies from an injection of the wrong drug.
We will learn from this tragic mistake, say officials who pledge that
This will never happen again, until it happens again and again.
A bomb devastates a market killing hundreds and a man with a machete
Runs amok because something in the sky told him it was okay to kill.
Police hunt paint-spraying artists for crimes against bricks
And councillors debate savage spending cuts inside fine buildings.
Below par schools crawl along, dragging more new rules in a wheelbarrow.
League tables boost morale and demoralise and a league table of the best

And worst league tables becomes the focus for 24-hour news for 24 hours.
New jobs are announced here, with redundancies there, to maintain balance.
A teenager is jailed for stealing birthday presents from his sister
And a hate preacher is out on bail, back to the streets to preach hate.
Ramblers head off for a ten-mile hike in sensible boots and socks
Discussing the pros and cons of cons and pros in the fresh air.
People die and if they are on “our side” they are immediate heroes,
But if they are “against us” we cheer good riddance and hope they rot in hell.
We see real people in silhouette, voiced by actors, talking about tragic lives
And posing, boo-hoo celebrities inventing bad childhoods to sell books.
We watch judging panel shows on TV and learn how to sneer and be catty.
We assume we are judge, jury, executioner, comedian and guru on Twitter,
Thinking we can speak freely and honestly because “it’s only a bit of fun”.
We know about the prying eyes and recording ears, the “Snooper’s Charter”,
And we laugh it off! LOL. FFS.
Out beyond us all, a comet as big as London can be seen with its golden light and blue tail for us to worship, a marvel to provoke context, to promote universal awe,

A lump of iced matter to knock the edges of our arrogance.
But, moments of miracle and marvel are short-lived, stopped in their tracks
By another bomb, another murder spree, another beheading ... Out there

We may find answers but we are not out there. We are here and this is this.


Joe Cushnan has written for Ireland's Big Issue, The Guardian, and the BBC, amongst many others. You can find out more about him on his blog.
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John Keogh

6/6/2015

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The Ceiling

Every night as I peel back the covers
It’s there waiting for me
Waiting for my thoughts to sail upwards
As I twist and turn
Sometimes a tear on my cheek
It sits and listens
Gleams things I’m afraid of
Hopes and fears, dreams and desires
For fear of looking like a failure
In the eyes of those who care
A silent judge
Looming over my prone frame
Lapping up the stories
Never written, never spoken
Waiting for the next instalment
Another anecdote to lock away
Maybe someday for someone to read
To peek at the secrets inside

The Loner

Alarm rings six am
Sun is just rising
Milk over breakfast
Cool water of the shower
Brush back and forth
Plant that smile
Dashing down the street
Just before it departs
Stare blankly
Other commuters on the journey
Reach the office
Set your eyes forward
Screen waits
Faint hum of life
Keys rattling
Phones ringing
Rumble of voices
Heels clicking past
Lunch on the fly
Small corner of hope
Eyes on the clock
Slow moving hands
Buzz of conversation
Turns cloud overhead
Cool drink of water
Eyes averted
Five pm
The bell rings
Freedom reigns
The train waits
Eyes fixed
The world drifts by
Sit down
Evening meal
Placed on the couch
Grave well bedded
Eyes fixed
The night mirror
Time set
Lights out
All over again
Tomorrow is your future


You can tell John if you liked his poetry by getting in touch here.
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Andrew Blair

6/6/2015

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How To Save a Life

They are dead
Is meat so sacrosanct
We came for money honest from the start
To sit and eat and dwell
I need the rent I need
what is owed to me
That I need
your death is a minor issue
What were you doing that was so great anyway
Corpses have no problems
Only the living are afflicted
So really our crime is
keeping people from death
We are facilitators
These sawbones must learn
Justice
in halves
In death and deed we gift this city nothing
but progress
Deceased equine beatings
Commercial
Immortal
Mugs for mugs
Fleshpits footsteps fleshpits footsteps fleshpits footsteps there is a lesson
here
You've learned
there's money in meat
(digital prising opportunity) and
there's money in monsters'
digital prising opportunities
We have not brought this city down
we have maintained its standing
We are its resurrection
men


Andrew Blair can be found on Twitter @freelance_liar and has further fiction/poetry available here.
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