Trick
Inside this disused tool-shed in Hammer Woodslatted walls morse daylight on an earth floor.Here two local boys find a knife, its bladefreckled in rust. The older boy picks it up,with its egg whiff of wet metal, and pointsto his friend to back against the wall for a trick.Then the younger boy's T-shirt is hustledover his head and rolled into a blindfold.In its blackness, he imagines the moment heldlike a knife above his friend's head. His friendwho whispers. Don't. Move. And thenthere's a kiss. Lips quickly snipping against his.Silence. He's aware of his chest, the negativeof his T-shirt. He pulls his blindfold. Looksthe older boy full in his up-close face. And seesthat he's bleeding, everywhere, under his skin.
Feature Date
- October 25, 2022
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“Trick” from Slide by Mark Pajak published by Vintage.
Copyright © Mark Pajak 2022.
Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Mark Pajak has written for the BBC, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Poetry London, The North, The Rialto and Magma. His work has been three times included in the National Poetry Competition’s winners list, awarded first place in The Bridport Prize and has also received a Northern Writers’ Award, an Eric Gregory Award and an UNESCO international writing residency. His first collection, Slide, is published with Cape.
This assured and arresting first collection moves deftly and with purpose into private, hidden places - a locked shed, the dark of a battery farm, a murky riverbed, a late-night bar - to show, unflinchingly and in cinematic detail, what we might otherwise choose not to see. Sight is both a gift and curse, of course: given or taken away in poems of windows and curtains, torches and blindfolds, and yet here - following in the tradition of Oswald and Heaney - each image is freshly minted through a cool, objective eye.
"Fresh, urgent, alive... genius."
—Patience Agbabi
"Mark Pajak's debut does not read like a debut: there is no fumbling beginner's luck, no rough moments or threadbare patches - it's polished craftsmanship throughout is striking... [Slide] deserves to be a blazing success."
—Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month*
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