Oz Hardwick
Summer 2025 | Poetry
A Sense of Community
When the lions left the circus, they moved into shops and offices, learning new skills to bolster the local workforce. Paws made for tearing adjusted to tills and typewriters, and mouths made for roaring adapted to service and polite enquiry. It’s amazing to think how quickly they just slotted in, and how soon we got used to 500 pounds of apex predator looming over the counter at the newsagent or the council helpdesk. At first, they’d run alongside buses during rush hour, but soon they joined us, cramming on for the daily commute: and where once they’d go home to caves in the wilderness, before long they moved into bijou apartments in the up-and-coming suburbs. They bought smart clothes, joined the gym, and kissed their cubs off to school with packed lunches and dreams of a wonderful future. We forgot they were lions, then they forgot they were lions. So, when I open the door to seven feet of golden shadow blocking out the day, neither one of us so much as blinks.
Oz Hardwick is a UK-based poet, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “maybe fifteen?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). With Anne Caldwell, he edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022); and with Cassandra Atherton he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (MadHat, 2024). In 2022, Oz was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry”. www.ozhardwick.co.uk