The Northmen are coming, their longboats with striped sails silhouetted on the horizon. We discuss the implications over coffee and croissants in the mall café. The old gods will stir in their cave behind the ice rink, so too the fallen kings, piecing themselves together from splintered bones strewn deep in the hedgerow. It will be a prosperous period for furriers and silversmiths. Marnie has commissioned a raven brooch with a single onyx eye and retrieved her great aunt’s mink stole from the loft. Vintage fur is already in circulation and wearing it prevents waste. No new harm is being done.
goulash
Sometimes, she says, I am a bird with wooden wings, looking down on squares of turf, on inland lakes and stony islands with ruins and living, breathing cats of all kinds. Others, I am my own ghost, adrift in winter fog, spooked in parkland, on some eerie errand. Standing in the porch, staring at the inscription. Rain on the skylight, dust on the bulbs, moths, candles, tricks of the evening. The quiet lane where the old man bumped his head. She sits at the table wearing her coat. We light the stove with extra-long matches. We put out the bowls with the painted rims. We serve fried tinned potatoes with gravy and paprika, with heavy bread to soak up the sauce. It is goulash, we say, in the books they call it goulash.
Tom Jenks’ [photo credit: Sonya Smith] latest publication is Chimneys (above/ground press, 2025), a collection of prose poems. Other books include The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions, 2024) and A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions (if p then q, 2018). His work appears in The Surreal-Absurd: An Anthology of Contemporary Surrealist and Absurdist Poetry (Mercurius Press, 2025) and The Penguin Book of Oulipo (Penguin Books, 2019). He also makes text art and edits zimzalla, a small press specialising in literary objects. More at tomjenks.uk.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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