Simon Carnell

I’d want this piece about our father to have something of the texture

of Schwitters’ Workman’s Picture – some glued-on gauze, a piece of copper pipe,

drips of solder, torn glass paper. And to somehow speak of the fact

that when he ‘lost’ a leg, and then his bladder, it occurred to him to connect

the tube from his bag to a small tap soldered to a...

Jesuits have left their cliffs of gilded wood; Franciscans stone fronts of rock candy.

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Pet ferret with velvet collar in Coyoacán. An iguana on a shoulder in Querétaro.

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A man is walking draped in a carcass. Raw midday delivery from a flatbed.

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The Colt 45; the Remington; the actual desk at which the death sentence was signed …

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… the short and narrow painted coffin of...

The town that ‘doesn’t need another silly love song’, and gets ‘You Look Like I Need a Drink’.

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Next to the deleted cigarette on the barroom door: the red crossed circle deleting a handgun.

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‘Hear a sound like a train coming’ (tornado season) ‘get in the tub and hold pillows over your heads’.

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In Music City, even the waiters and...

A downtown storefront window containing only a single giant plastic ear.

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In a San Ángel garden: the four-inch-long orange potato bug called face of a child.

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Ancient evil in a 400-year-old wall? Its nest of black widows.

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Still standing in a busy street: a ’quake-damaged high-rise abandoned in eighty-five.

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Woven from lake-grown reeds at Tzintzuntzan: grasshoppers, bulls,...

Brickfield workmen turned up a quern and bones in clay –    gigantic, not Christian, a prodigious thigh and forearmaroused their curiosity ... Eighteen fifty two, Armley,    and a bewhiskered Mr Denny, having stimulated the men

to increased care and search, with the generous promise    of small rewards of cash, amassed a big...