Articles Available Online

‘Sometimes I go to the tavern and get drunk          What of it?’                                 Nesimi 1 Bars tend us in our brighter afternoons toward the gentler tenses: conditionality, subjunctivity, would reign within their glasses’ stains, so that it might be possible to claim, if there could be a bar where Lorne Greene drank, post-Battlestar, a whole Bonanza shot – if these could somehow have been filmed within these Borders, in this North East – then it would be here where the piano is forever paused, the Cylons placed on charge, beneath this rippling cream ceiling motif not so unlike the way his hair was combed   2 In fact no keyboard need be present, just the suspension of its mammoth tooth-tonk will suffice, any further note defeats both memory and prediction of our tune In fact succession can find no hook here, like the gecko’s rubber foot, baffled by some non-surface, some lack of wall, the brim of things must suffice for now   3 The soft stabilities of brass and glass in late Saturday sunlight, unsure if it’s still summer, gloss on green leather, wrought-iron table legs tucked under sight, polite as beetles, suds amounting to a glaucoma lens of foam, and the muted flame, haemetite immersed in the alien finger- length depth of the pint’s remains Lorne must rejoin us, his stunted doubles, here, and pay off all his gunless hands with ale: all princes among men are here disinherited of their kinricks; in fact are here defined by abdication of any claim upon the future   4 Lorne! Lorne of the sausage they do not serve here at six o’clock alongside the pork pies and many fatty nibbles; Lorne of the flattened sausages of Scotland as though the issue of a union between minced meat