2016 | FIVE OAKS PRESS
The Last Pub on Earth
The story of the afterlife and times of the unfortunate Garry Morgan, an alias the author adopted when living as an undocumented person in Wales.
“That’s the dark, startling beauty of this collection: Garry Morgan never arrives anywhere he doesn’t expect to arrive. His course is certain. He may not know his place in the world anymore, but he knows drinking in the way that Peter E. Murphy knows how to turn syllables into slipknots. Murphy sketches the Welsh countryside in stark, jagged lines, as his alias ‘roams the Cardiff arcades,’ perpetually heartsick and hungover.” ~Paul Fuhr, The Literary Review
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Excerpt
Garry’s Mother
It is Mothering Sunday in Cardiff,
the fourth Sunday of Lent
as Garry Morgan strolls through Bute Park
to see the latest crop of families
each with a mother attached.
Some wear hats growing flowers.
Some push prams with babies.
Some push prams with their own mothers.
It’s a beautiful yield of mums, he thinks
and squeezes one to see if she is ripe.
Let go! she screams.
Keep your hands to yourself, Garry.
These women are not fruits.
What a fool I am! mutters Garry,
What makes me think I can touch
one as if she were my own?
Garry stops in a scrumpy bar
to sample the mash and winds up
going home with a bag of onions.
Are you my mother? he asks.
You must be high, the bag of onions replies.
Mum, how could you? wails Garry.
I am not high. I am happy,
You just never saw me this way.