Excerpt from Ada Kaleh by Freddie Mason with illustrations by Alice-Andrea Ewing released in February 2016 via Little Island Press:

and in the bare cream implied by gardens
she lay implied by shadows and denture
The night in gladness a world of dog and
incubation wanted to be useful

day in secreted expanses passes over her and
pity like metallic squeezes of juddering nothing
flowed into the garden like myristyl myristate
made of rivers made closer because never
pissing alone makes my agelessness
indigenous in awkward fundament
lazy in the moonlight whipping
till thickened matter settles

and how are the ways
in hype this mathematical and held in guzzling
pastoral tumescence sinking into the careful

impressive on TV in horror and golf the men at Avondale
fell from a seven storey window heaving with
protein and themselves the syndicalism in wanting
to be heard out loud in La Cana before the ground
hits you harder than you can hit it back

inducing deepest thought stop
like an oath to a silent land
we compose ourselves imperfectly
for this serene in-coming in
hi-definition and repeated
as many times as you need
through varying syncopations

Feel the road surface break
under the softened thumbs smooth
as they press and injure themselves
but succeed in breaking the road surface up

Pick up our January issue for Leah Grant's interview with Andrew Latimer the Managing Editor of Little Island Press, a new Stroud based independent publisher of poetry, non-fiction and international literature in translation.
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