unsung - daniel brocklehurst

Bend and scrape, with nipping nails
Portland, tram lines, pricking pyramids
with headlines, holding cobbled hordes,
head-aching hour bells, claustrophobia:
‘Everybody’s watching you
when you follow the line.’

‘With a flat, incessant forward climb
She drinks a round of bottled wine,
A static shadow moves, behind
Nearly morning, ‘nearly mine’.’

Bench-like, sat on a woman outside
(grinding writhes inside),
but then I thought I maybe shouldn’t.
Dying tree-like drooping down
over her corpulent face,
slick white hair, opulent rare,
couldn’t help listening, her groaning urine skirt for cats,
stranded, ripped and wrenched, outside a red-brick flat.

‘Fat, fluorescent concubine,
Drink the sound and hear the wine,
Fat, fluorescent concubine,
Smell the taste, sounds divine.’

It hailstones for a couple hundred seconds:
startling as she left the corner,
ending as I get through the door, swipe card turned around,
standing with her tongue on the glass licking a cross shape on the window
while wine trickles out of the crevice of her mouth.
Black eyes, and yellow cracks,
hair was falling like snow on the fag packets
of intelligent Neolithic man’s waste:

‘I know what you don’t want to know.
I don’t believe in limitless roads.
I don’t believe in howling ghosts.
I don’t believe in seconds, I do believe in hours, but not days.
I don’t believe in stealthy forms, but movements in alleyways where their
stealth is worn.
I don’t believe in rising day, but falling hourly, fright falls away,
I don’t believe. I don’t believe in suffocating fumes
But breathe, resonate, impulse, cry out, far and finger-wide, cry out!’

news!!

ok, so you're friendly team at unsung have been in a coursework/exam induced coma for the last month or so, hence the lack of updates...however, we've still been working very hard on the magazine and have got some news...

firstly we have just set up a blog at www.unsungmanchester.blogs

pot.com we intend to use this blog to publish our magazine's content online ,aswell as those that we aren't able to publish in each issue...so follow the link and follow us for regular updates.

not only that but we're also tweeting...so if you also like the concise textual spewings of twitter come and follow us on www.twitter.com/unsungmagazine

finally, the news you've all been waiting for...we've got our next issue in mid-production AND we've got our next launch night organised at the thirsty scholar on 31st May!!! WOW! make sure you keep the date free and we will garnish you with some more details nearer the time...

we're still accepting submissions for the next issue, so if you'd like us to publish your poetry, prose etc then email your work to unsung.manchester@gmail.com

the sweet smell of resentment - justin dooley

gothic images plague sick mind,
bloodshot eyes devoid of shine.
fairytales left far behind,
truth and myth become entwined.

pussy sores, stained fingertips,
skeletal frame, blistered lips.
vulgar states can't be suppressed,
self destruction, self detest.

sombre thoughts of piety
in moments of sobriety.
drown in drink, in drugs immersed,
shelter from this universe.

the curtain falls, the final scene
nothing left but tales and dreams,
a wasted youth, debauched, obscene.
say farewell to the libertine.

manchester prayer - matt byrne

On holiday in Mexico,
In the jungles of Yucatan
Where the tree grows from rock
That knew Mayan feet
And nothing else.

I think of Manchester
And the alleys of Rusholme
Where the wheezing vents cough
Overhead, knowing me
And nothing else.