By: Alex Aldred
i have a habit
of finding projectiles
round the side of the house –
splinters of glass where no bottle
ever smashed; plastic scraps
spotting my allotment like a rash;
and, once, a golf ball
from the range across the way,
buried in unmown grass.
i worry that i’m the target
of some far-off assassin’s
mistimed blasts;
or that, perhaps, like a cassette
winding back, these pieces
will someday run together
towards an explosion
in my past, every home
i’ve known at the heart of it
Alex Aldred lives and works in Lancaster, England. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, and has previously been published by Coffin Bell Journal, The Molotov Cocktail, and Daily Science Fiction. At night, his stories climb out of his laptop and play tricks on him.
"I used this poem as the opening piece for my final project portfolio during my Creative Writing MA. The project was intended to explore ideas of home and physical space - the ways in which we are comfortable or uncomfortable in familiar environments, and how our memories and/or preconceptions of places change the way we experience them. With this piece, I tried to play around with linearity; the narrator's fear of an event which has yet to happen, but which is also grounded in the past, felt like a decent first shot at tackling those themes of memory and familiarity I wanted to play with in the portfolio."