Bio
Oz Hardwick is a poet, photographer, academic, and inveterate dabbler, based in York (UK). He has published nine solo collections and chapbooks, most recently the prose poetry sequence Wolf Planet (Hedgehog, 2020), and has been published in many international journals and anthologies. He has performed and held residencies in the UK, USA, Europe and Australia, and once sang in a small town in the American Midwest, though fortunately hardly anybody noticed. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University but would like to be bass guitarist in a Belgian space rock band when he grows up.
Oz Hardwick
Storm Grammar
Relative to the wind, we are doors, swinging, with no idea of out or in; we are lightning rods waiting for the groundward charge. There are bigger skies than this, but we each claim our own, bag it and tag it for the reckoning we suspect is imminent, as the pendulum swings in the gothic cellar, shading between black and white. Fruit, bright as lightbulbs, swings in the storm, adopts the condition of gravity, feeling for the earth with questing skin: we bag it and tag it, store it with love, as expressed in archived greetings cards from close relatives. Then it comes: a witch of a wind wailing at the windows, dashing doors open or closed, shrinking the sky into a gothic cellar, rank with rotten fruit. In the dark, someone uses the word relatable incorrectly, but it's a relatively trivial error. Sooner or later someone will have to bag and tag the bodies, and neither grammar nor lexis can help us now.