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in the rest for yourselves! Tired at last, we lay sleeping.
        May my siestas often turn out that way!
    Trans. Peter Green

The Wasp Station
Paul Johnston
    He was sixteen, she in her forties – the classic older woman
    scenario, though her hair was shorter than Anne Bancroft’s
    and he wasn’t such a dork as Dustin Hoffman.
    They didn’t do it in a hotel but in a garden shed, rusty
    sickles, shovels and old model railway bits all around.
    A wasp was hitting the buffers on the web-wrought window.
    His lack of experience hung off him like a fireman’s uniform
    as he stammered, bruised lips when he kissed her and grabbed
    for her breasts when she ground their groins together.
    She opened her blouse and let him lap the c-cup cornucopia,
    her nipples rigid as funnels. It was obvious that squeezing his rod
    would bring him juddering to the terminus faster than the Flying Scot.
    ‘Now we take our time,’ she said, reginal. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ his look
    bolder despite the stickiness in his boxers. He stripped them off
    and wiped himself, then tapped his rapidly rising tool
    against her whiter-than-the-driven-steam knickers.
    She pulled aside the gusset and let him in. All aboard!
    They rode the Orient Express to Paris, Venice, Istanbul,
    cities on fire with carnal pleasure. She shrieked as they entered
    the tunnel, pistons thundering and steam cocks fully open.
    She arrived first, bucking, nails digging into his coal tender.
    He squealed and spurted, head back like a plume of wind-whipped smoke,
    then panted in her ear, ‘I love you, Aunt Alice.’ She looked away;
    the wasp was tangled in the silken threads, its movements lacking vim,
    its screech the desperate braking of a soon-to-be-derailed express.
    ‘Silly boy,’ she said, reversing. ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow, same time.’
    Having deposited, she thought, my underwear in a left luggage locker.
    He grinned, wondering where his uncle and cousins were; and would be
    the next day. Roger at his office near St Pancras, Lily
    and Jez blowing out clouds of skunk in the park?
    The wasp manages to jab the spider’s belly with its stinger
    and in a single tug is free, a sentient yellow-and-black
    bullet racketing past them to the station exit.

And Looking Back
A. F. Harrold
    Sometimes a hand in or of or from the past can make us come
    alive again without our realising what it is that’s being done.
    And sometimes bodies find their ways from where they each began,
    a surprise curving into the present, into the light, under the hand,
    and without warning or comment everything on hold has suddenly begun
    and now, it seems, this is not as bad as it could possibly have become
    and for a while there’s only time and flesh to pass before the rising sun.
    And it happens that tonight is a night picked from a hundred and one
    other possible nights, each spinning lost between the stars in the silence from
    the closing mouths of kisses and answers and the lover’s tongue
    to the morning that in the end is well known to always come.
    And looking back what is there that has not yet been remarked upon,
    the resistance of memory to education of any form,
    or the ritual days of living that nights like this can pluck us from?

Explode
John Etchingham
    It’s the way that you say ‘I don’t usually do this’
    And seeing your pain all the time mixed with such bliss,
    Initial resistance both mental and physical,
    Tightness that gives way to depths almost mystical;
    Slowly at first, just until you get used to me –
    Pushing, I feel you relax so deliciously,
    Urging me on I try not to let go, but who
    Could keep control? I just have to explode in you.

The Man in the Print Room
Sarah Salway
    Now if he’s slow and she gets upset
    he’ll move towards her, tease the hair
    from her face, lick her tears away.
    She lets him tie the straps on her new ankle boots,
    teaches him to pull her corset just tight enough,
    has sewn fifty pearl buttons on a black sheath dress
    he presses into her