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49 ½
At this age, I’m watching for signs, omens that foretell the end. A rusty car becomes scrap metal. I get hangry sooner after breakfast, need to pee more often in the night, have to nap minutes after eating. I try to remember the summers past, not count the ones that remain. Put the warning lights out on the dash. Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, on the North Somerset coast. His three collections…
My Son's Hands
I studied them seconds after his birth, marvelled at the rightness of them, how they knew to form like so. Now, they are ten years old, nails bitten to the quick while we watch Star Wars from I to IX. Somehow he contrives lines, pencil-maps his imagination, words tumble into stories. They catch the icy dew which clings to a rugby ball on Sunday mornings. With movements I barely see he builds…
Waiting Room
Here we sit, limp old mags on our laps, read the same notice over and over, a local dementia support group. Time doesn’t quite stand still, it reverses a little, rocks, creeps forward until we notice the sky’s turned navy blue. Some of us wait for a procedure, others for the patient we brought. The percentage on my Kindle clicks faster than my watch. Conversations among strangers begin, ailments…
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Photographing Bristol
crowds on crutches near the hospital white bandages and new casts under the giant Broadmead sail hi-viz bus drivers nudge and josh an old man in his wheelchair dozes off with a fag in his mouth two young children hinder their mother cling to their brother’s pushchair junk shops in Colston Street I like the owners better than their wares cat in a big white post-op collar rubs against my calves on…
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Taxidermist
I collect them from roadsides, flick my hazards on, coax flattened bodies into old shopping bags.
I see it as a challenge, wash and brush matted fur to breathe life back into cold forms.
After they’re stuffed and sewn I fix the glass bead stares, stroke the head once, twice, give them a loving home.
Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, near Bristol. He’s the author of a pamphlet, Communing(Indigo…
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Snow Day
You just want to go to the shops, fill your car boot with milk, bread and beans. But the snow has shipwrecked you here, encircled you in dazzling white drifts. There are no decent snowballs or snowmen; this fall, the first for years, is too powdery. You manage some epic snow angels, though, gaze up at a bruised sky as the flakes insinuate themselves under your collar. The motorway’s rumble is…
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Experiment
You, across the playing field ready to clap your hands at my signal, with heady sweet grass and cracked soil sandwiched in my memory like pressed wild flowers. I know we are a hundred metres apart. I wave but you’ve glanced away at a girl’s shrill yelp. I calculate the speed of your disappointment. Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, on the Severn Estuary. He’s the author of a pamphlet, Communing…
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She's Not There
She’s Not There
That wasn’t her, the last time. No, she was long gone by then. A semicircle in front of the TV Power Rangers flashing her face. While we helped her somewhere quieter she said Don’t let me fall over and over. There was a half-smile which I mistook for recognition. Am I glad I went? After she died, they found missing things in her room: brooches, false teeth, wedding rings. Ben Banyard lives in…
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