Checkpoint
* Best of the Issue - July 2009 winner! *

Perhaps if you had flashed
a bit of thigh at the guard
whilst I slipped him the wad
of notes parcelled like meat,
we might have had a chance.

Instead, you danced a polka
with his ideology until it
collapsed, remarked how
his skin was coarse like the taste
of Stolichnaya.

And now we are being chased
through the tundra by soldiers,
who are in turn, being chased
by other soldiers. An endless
series of waves waiting for one

of us to surrender so the cycle
of life and death can reset.
Such is nature. Listen: A clock
ticks in the distance. Can you hear it?



Holden Caulfield Considers His Life, Aged 60


Spring. The fields have exploded
in a cancer of white and yellow stars.


Now I am getting old, love and sex
are slipping through my fingers
like runny eggs.

Months until summer and the flowers'
retreat into the migraine coloured earth.
Perhaps if I press my head against it,
I will feel their constant throbbing,

like the fizz of lightbulbs with too much voltage.
And my heart doing the opposite, waning
like a moon; eager to retreat into the comfort
of a familiar darkness.


Christian Ward is the author of Bone Transmissions (Maverick Duck Press, 2009). His work currently appears in Grasslimb, Crannog and is forthcoming in Envoi, Decanto and The Emerson Review.