Against my better judgment, I slide into the car. It’s clean and red and it has a mind of its own. The radio plays a song from seventy years ago, all Baby this and Baby that, from the days when repetition and a mannered delivery were the markers against which we all calibrated sincerity. The windows are tinted tobacco. Behind is a city by the sea, the silhouettes of cranes like clumsy stitches hemming water, earth, and air. To the left, a column of folding tables snakes into the flat distance, at each of which is a woman in a crisp, white blouse, with a face drawn from an ad for disinfectant. To the right, I’m still waiting at the side of the road, sunburnt and ragged, a black tent flapping at my shoulder. The radio plays silence as the DJ carefully flips the only record they own: Am I? Are you? Am I? Will you? Baby Baby Baby. Ahead, the road imagines itself into dust and glass.

In a dead tree’s branches 

the sum of all sunsets 
perches like a bird. 

If it was a nightingale, it would sing. 
If it was a lyrebird, it would say 
nothing. 

When I see the Moon by the side of the road, a sack of superstition slung over her shoulder and her thumb stuck out like a fishhook, how can I do anything but stop? She smiles and slips in beside me, and I’m struck by the way she’s smaller than she ever looked in the night sky, but bigger than I imagined when I was a child flipping through the pages of Look and Learn in a dentist’s quiet waiting room.

Between one song and its identical twin 

the voice of a dead man recites 
litanies of explosions. 

Trinity, Little Boy, Fat Man, George, 
Hurricane, Ivy Mike, Ivy King, Castle Bravo, 
Orange Herald, Tsar Bomba, Canopus, Smiling Buddha. 

I was terrified of the dentist, not for fear of pain, but for the agony of proximity and the feeling that masked men should not have their hands inside anyone’s head. It was, I guess, a hangover from the time I was abducted by aliens, though the details of that were always blurred: just a light and a voice and then, sometime later, a piece of tech—unremarkable by today’s standards but mind-blowing back then—fell out of my ear in the school playground. Friends gathered round but a teacher confiscated it and swore me to secrecy with the usual threats of public humiliation. And I realise I’m telling the Moon all this, but she’s just smiling and nodding as if I’m an old song on the radio—a song about roads and fishing and Baby Baby Baby—and she asks me if it’s ok if she smokes. I say it’s fine and she smiles a little wider but doesn’t light up.

I have seen the movies and read the books 

lurid covers burning my eyes 
as words lost shape beneath weeping streetlamps. 

Nightmares spin like songs on the radio—
Baby Baby Baby. Won’t you? Can’t we? 
Last year’s hits, endlessly replayed. 

The last door in the world is a car door, or maybe not a door at all. Perhaps it’s a window, webbed in cracks, the fractured blackness of one of my turns, the smoke from blazing hillsides, or just that service station mirror from back along the A-whatever. I step through anyway and there’s a dog at my heels. I don’t know its name but it knows all of mine, and when I lean down it licks the years from my lifeline and the miles from my crooked hitch-hiking thumb. When it lifts its eyes, they are every shade of blue imaginable, and it is not a dog but a girl in a long white dress, smiling like a ghost in a school play. She mimes opening a car door and slips away. A dog barks and the sky burns so bright that it’s invisible.

Once upon a sleeping road 

a traveller wrapped in his own shadow 
his head a rusted birdcage 

one hand on a lurid red button 
the other cupping a rescued bird 
singing Baby Baby Baby as the world pulls away. 

—First Place Winner in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #2

Oz Hardwick

is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “a dozen or so” full collections and chapbooks, including most recently with Hedgehog Poetry Press: Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (2024) and My Life as a Time Traveller: A Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (2023). His manuscript Orion Highway won the 2024 Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize and will be published by Dalya Press in 2025. His book Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry.

With Anne Caldwell, Oz edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022); and with Cassandra Atherton, he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press, 2024).

By day, Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK). In his spare time, he is a respected music journalist. He has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the Arc Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.”

Author’s website: www.ozhardwick.co.uk

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A New Home Beneath the Stars, a prose poem in Flash Glass (1 May 2024)

⚡ Oz Hardwick, seven prose poems in The Mackinaw (Issue 1, January 2024)

⚡ Five Stunning Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick in Lothlorian Poetry Journal (23 April 2021)

⚡ Dislocations: Five Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick in Inverse Journal (6 February 2019)