Congratulations to IS&T contributor SJ Fowler on the publication of this intriguing collection from Knives Forks and Spoons Press.
{the Seven deathly Sins / Gula}
An allegorical figure of a woman in sixteenth-century dress and a fifteenth-century head-dress sits on top of her attribute, a pig, guzzling from a pitcher; around her at the table several demons and nude women eat and drink to excess; behind them to the left a man vomits over a bridge into a river; on far left a giant man imprisoned in a building from which only his head emerges at top; in right background a windmill in the shape of a man's head being force-fed; various monsters eating and drinking throughout. The floor is the whitest stone interlaced with the most intricate borders of flowers of every colour. It is a horticulturalists garden, this feast, begun with the best intentions, truly, with Caladiums swelling about his ankles, the Pig, already, eats his mater and is not stopped. He is only held back by the profusion of Albane, but eats it, green spew spilling beyond his chickpea teeth and soon he is eating Alocasia, Anthuriu, Amorphophallus, Nidularium, Tillandsia, Cyrpiledium, all entwined, telling us their names as they are eaten alive, blotting each other out in a concoction of swollen mercurial lard, mating, dragging each other to stop the grand heart shaped bulbs of the Pigg, gorged further on Caladium, starving all else and others, who wait, across the borders, scared of trees, and careful not to impede his progress. The orchids, the artichokes the size of his hands, the Micanias, the Zamias, like skin pineapples, the Droseras, the Begonias and Crotons, the Cattleyas and syphillitic flytraps, insides like old iron boxes, fill his busting gut, ready to spring. In fact they lose their colour when he looks upon them, before they are and stem, and pooled by vine, they begin to seem like they are winding down to the stone, becoming win upon the sickening twist of a salival Catherine wheel. We try to save just one flower. We cannot maintain focus, diabetes and chest pains wrack our salted sight. Our running is erratic. The pig needs only to roll, it is unable to synch its lungs and its brain, though its belly is not yet full of food. We hear the bark of a single door, aneurism in cotton and the loading of shotgun barrels.