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
Reading the Storm Glass
During the storm times, I built ships in bottles. It was a skill my dad passed on from his deathbed when, although his mind was wandering barefoot amongst abandoned hotels on the Kiritimati shore, his hands were steady as irrevocable orders. The trick, he told me, is less in the planks and rigging than in selecting the ideal crew, as career high-flyers will soon feel trapped, while one arsey bilge rat can split the voyage into splinters. By this time he was only drinking diet cola, and I'd ease him upright, his tiny body heavy as war, and tip a can to his sun-baked lips, before rowing back through the shattering sea to a home that was already nodding beneath the waves. I drained bottles and manipulated matchsticks into hulls and castles, wove webs of cotton as fine as my mother's hair, and mustered staunch hearts from dive bars and Jobcentres with pledges of adventure and cash in hand. I offered Dad command, but his ship had already sailed, its flags fluttering messages distorted in the glass.