Jo Bratten
In the fractured dark we’re all doomscrolling
before dawn, lit up like Caravaggios:
arms stretched across burning beds,
brows trenched like Judith surveying the head
of Holofernes caught against her bright blade,
baffling our morning brains with fresh dread.
In the pale light of refrigerator dawn
we stroke our kettles, wake our computers,
watch the same horrors play on bigger screens.
Tag yourself: Salome looking away,
the dispassionate crone, the white-shouldered
executioner with pity in his lips,
the head of the prophet on the platter
lit like pearl, all played out, prophecies stopped.
Charlotte Baldwin
and neither of us were wearing shoes and the empties
leaked onto our toes while the sun hung red faced
from a tree and the dregs of the harvest stood waiting
for rains which never came and two hours earlier
I staked my last field in a poker hand I should have won
and no one but my father had ever spoken of John Barleycorn
but there he sat on the fallen tree with his tankard
so I tried to explain how we could find his song on YouTube
sing along to the tale of his triumphant drunken return
from oblivion with each harvest growing like a miracle
from his tomfoolery tales I sang with my father who sang them
with his father but he shook his head and swigged
and the summer smelled sweet as an open wound
and John Barleycorn puffed oak smoke from his pipe
and traced the path of the old ways with a calloused finger
and I felt a fight climb from the bottom of the bottle
to join the line of things that were all my fault
and John Barleycorn saw its little balled fists
and chewed the yellow husks of his fingernails
so I punched him because he should have hated me
and all of us for what we had done to him
and I punched him because my dream of country life
lay in the yard with its throat cut and the earth’s dry mouths
filling with its blood and I punched him because his world
lay buried beneath the rusting barley beside my father’s
and John Barleycorn’s crooked nose dripped blood
slowly into their invisible graves black as oil
and he asked me why no one knew the words of his song
anymore if we all carried it round in our pockets
JP Seabright
They swarmed round. In the course. I could see. They were young.
They attacked cunningly. They knocked him. They took advantage.
Others followed suit. Absolutely no chance. Shower of stones.
I saw something. Blood trickled down. Clutched his chest.
This hairless skull. He lay still. It was murder. Not my affair.
The police were. Society’s dregs, they. Watched them chase.
In uncontrollable fury. There were shots. Blood was everywhere.
Suddenly someone shouted. I stopped, waited. He pulled out.
Little jeering fellow. I was disgusted. Turning, I confronted.
One of them. A mistake: he. Remembered the revolver.
Its owner was. Furious, he strode. Who are you? Must have cringed.
Not much past. No more chance. What are you? I knelt down.
There was a. A textbook fall. He fended them. Had been flattened.
Acute pain in. In a moment. Stone was thrown. Did not move.
He lay on. Almost torn off. The heart was. I wiped it.
I wanted to. Was a stranger. Was an outrage. How they treated.
They took no. It was disgusting. There was just. I was still.
Why did you? I regretted not. It’s not allowed.
Text taken from the first phrase of each sentence from pages 111-113 of Anna Kavan’s ICE.
First published in One Hand Clapping, June 2022
Mary Ford Neal
again, as you said it would.
I’ve kept the windows shuttered as you told me to, but
hot fingers always find ways through.
The sun is saying it might turn me golden if I step outside.
But ‘might’ was never good enough for you
and won’t be good enough for me
and I’m remembering everything you’ve said
about how ballerina skin like mine
is slipper-soft, and cannot be exposed.
I think the sun might be a liar, Mother.
You tell me that I mustn’t melt –
that I’m a fool to think I could be golden.
I move the slats a little
see some slow, sun-softened people
and I cannot help but notice that not one of them is burnt.
What should I do? Tell me again
and quickly, Mother. My hand is on the handle
and it’s nearly noon, when shade is hard to find.
in the round mirror face edges hair granular stare into white of the eye see nights dreaming your death your face looking back in the round mirror aches angular mouth holds back scream this transaction between me & mirror image of me is a Hollywood movie you can do this corporate single woman in her thirties straightening jacket crisp shirt floss look down at toothpaste stains ripping pyjama stitch stay afloat in bath same again day in the round mirror gums eat face rub Pret all over newly acquired head-buds finally feel something dunk myself in iced lattes — revert — in the round mirror smiling what else is there is smiling is laughing is cackling
is crying
Arabic lessons
I think I remember this:
my teacher and I discussed free will
on plastic chairs in the scent of citrus leaves,
as thorn tree shadows faded into dark.
God has no plan for you – I think he said –
but what He has, is a map of all your lives.
Which path you take is yours to choose. And then,
which path to take again. And again:
an endless web that only He could weave,
where every join and thread, once left behind, dissolves –
a picture sketched with a twig in the dirt at our feet,
explained with no more words than a child would know.
And yet, Mahmoud, you picked a course you knew
He’d marked in bold for you, and chose to be
a follower of given word for given word.
While most of what I learned from you’s dissolved.
These towering canyon walls whose sandstone layers
were majesty, creation –
evidence that we, however small, belong –
have now become just weight that looms above, and walls.
The river is merely a trickle, and cold:
the sunshine barely reaches here an hour a day.
Hard to recall – imagine even – now,
the paths I chose; or those from which I turned away.
Free will embracing fate, and fate, free will:
it was all so clear, till I forgot the words.
All I can do today is greet a memory of you:
salaam aleikum, keif al hal? Shukran.
Weeks, strong sun has seared the soil:
incongruent, luring us out
as though it were natural
for summer to crown in April.
The valley swelters, febrile
under lockdown: hearts leaping
at each new symptom,
temperatures checked like the time.
I want lightening cracking over the heath,
thunder clapping like Thursdays’ hands,
a high wind, loosed like relief.
Who took for granted the gift
of effortless breaths; reassurance
an arm through an arm can give;
lips on lips, hair brushing a cheek?
I did, I did.
Can I bind these words together with the finest filament of my hair? Can I set
the spine with the viscosity of my affection? Can I wrap
this humble offering in egg-shell, and earth, so that on their way to you, new things, green things, might sprout up in between each whispered word? Can I etch
the destination across my rib cage, right there, where the wound you gave me almost
bled out? Can I slice
it open, press you inside, sew it back up with gorse and spidersilk? Hold my breath so
you can’t escape?
Can I tear myself down to only skin, steal into the forest under cover of night? Launch
myself from the tallest canopy? Can I hang,
suspended on the wind, clamber into the undercarriage, nestle myself between blades of
the whirring motors? Fall asleep, head resting against the lull of this strong, steady
machine? Feel the hundred tonnes of thrust cradled beneath me? Can I throw
my entire self into the welcome embrace of the ocean? Can I cleave
my way, breathless, across the seas? Can I scale
the mountains erected defiantly between us? Fight, bare-knuckled, the beasts that live at
altitude? Can I crush
their venomous, bottom-dwelling brothers beneath my heel? Can I harness
the finest desert stallion? Ride him, bare-backed and broken, into the city, against the
wind?
Can I climb the trellis of your castle, slip in, silently through the window of your room?
Can I curl myself around your sleeping body, weave my limbs and yours into a divine
tangle, rest my head in your neck’s crook? Can I bury
myself beneath you, absorb myself into your sweat and skin? Can I burrow
deep into your teeth’s enamel, stretch myself along the slant of your nose? Can I wrap
your thinning hair around me, shrink into the hollow of your clavicles? Navigate the
tunnels of your bloodline from heart to wrist? Can I find
my home in the juncture of the veins that gather there? Dissolve myself into the
lifeblood, disappear into that glorious red?
Or can I just send you some of my poems instead?
When I went up in flames
it wasn’t quick, or clean.
Even now I can hear myself
scream. In still moments
it comes back to me –
the howling, the disbelief,
the smell of burnt fat,
singed feathers, scorch marks
on the ceiling. The mess I left
behind when I immolated
was itself an atrocity.
I grew back a worm
from a pile of ashes, ugly
pale thing without feeling.
Here I am in red and gold,
indestructible, a flame-bird –
rage and sheen are what
the fire left me. You say
my tale is hopeful – yes –
I was reborn but I still died first,
my plumage mimicking
the thing that killed me.
And I did it to myself, that’s
what hurts the most
I’d thought that having lost it all would spare me this
the way you never hear of snow falling far out
on a calm sea but anchored somewhere between
my thirty first and thirty second year static
settled at my temple flecks of granite
in the stubble first but then the flesh itself
appeared to lighten as though the skin were thinner
and the skull were pushing through and now the right side
of my head is the colour of clouds after
heavy rain and I’ve come to think that this is just
what living is something’s lost and the body
pushes on regardless it has its script
it has its cues you have your lines
What if Eros
was also a tender leaf
falling in autumn,
or a marigold,
striking light,
decomposing in soil?
The wind gathers, travels
into every crevice,
as the months move.
I sit in sunset,
watch swans float
on Lough Corrib,
how they arrive
at the brink,
and observe.
Seagulls speak to me
from other worlds.
When the stars dance
they arrive at night
in a sheet of sparkling
pleasure, into our hearts.
My heart also moves,
raw and bright.
until there’s no coming back.
You have never been so relieved
to breathe in pollution, to find your feet
standing on concrete at the bottom of Highgate Hill.
You got out. You lied your way out of the padded room,
and now you stand, outside, alive, a sobbing Sisyphus
with holes in your socks and shakes in your veins.
You feel fizzy
[when you were 18, you burnt your fingertips off]
Your body is fizzing under its skin
[in all of your dreams, he is in trouble]
You spilled everything and you’re still not empty
[on your 21st birthday, you set your hair on fire]
Psht <<< that’s the sound of a can opening
[you wore black to his wedding, red to his funeral]
North London has never looked so ______________.
You are not okay but you are not inside
You feel fizzy inside but you are outside
You are outside so you are free
You are free and you are
you are
you
are
you
are
you[1]
[1] are not a liar
There was a breath of white fog
that smothered the vast mouth
of water like a wet hand; there
was a boy on a canoe pedalling
furiously into the half-smoke;
there was a vase of lilies in the
hallway, drooping into oblivion.
I sat whale-quiet in the doorway,
mind fixed on a peculiar dream:
a sliver of foil silver as mercury,
a straw long and thin, blue smoke
thick as New Delhi smog. Two
teenaged cherubs danced in
my vision, laughing as I inhaled.
The smoke plumed from my
nose like cold breath, and my
cold breath plumed from my
mouth, like smoke. The fog
kept on sighing, and a thousand
other girls like me breathed air
clouded as fresh Italian lemonade.
These greys are not alien imports,
just reds grown accustomed to dreich,
survival of the flattest,
such are pigeons, town doves,
waiting for a referendum
to cross the graphite sun.
Even the robin, poor thing,
will wear a leaden breastplate
while a stoat in dark coat
scopes a granite sky
for signs of snow.
We cling to a ridge
where the ben’s leaky pen
smudges the mist
and run the scree slope
to an ashen-ersed lochan
which hings aff the edge
of the long walk out.
And you, my braw bairn,
redhaired Rowan,
pink in your perfection,
you too will go grey
at the end of the day
and I will be smoke in smoke
hugging the heart of the haar
where even the midgies don’t bite.
First published in “Things to do with love”, Dreich, 2021
With cancer she is a child again,
the drive to the hospital lit
by her pale face tilting at trees,
her voice proclaiming
everything clean and bright.
Her handbag lies open on her lap,
Turkish Delight spilling out,
whitening the seats.
The darling she gives to her daughter’s name,
glistens like a wedding band, its yellow
piercing her final night like a star.
Her hands lie youthful against the sheets,
a fan scatters summer across her brow,
and the silence of the heart monitor
is a good husband’s promise of sleep.
You think you know your past
but then you find some things
have hidden meaning,
not just the older pictures
or your granny's watch,
the table linen
Wrapped
and kept for best in a drawer
but not because
it waited for
a queen or star
to come for tea
Because it was the way
the women
stitched a beauty
from existence,
it made a room
more than a function,
the smallest stain
would be a sacrilege.
This was how the ones
who blur between
the photos
blessed the next
with social standing
because
although
they may not own a table
they'd have the cloth.
This outlasts the repo man,
divorces, wars
and emigration,
this the thread
that passes
from the linen
through each hand.
What even is the first law of Nightmares?
What even is the square root of sleep cycles?
It is easier to use your fingers to count time
spent at the edge of REM
than it is to wrap yourself up in duct tape
and fake your own kidnapping.
I guess what I'm saying is:
I'm still writing about sleep,
still inches from my tomb,
still a walking cut-out of hypnotherapy.
(It didn't work).
Soon, I will have nobody left to bargain with
beside the nocturnal cuckoo
that howls dubstep
and renders the silence
into a form of energy
betrothed to my kinetic restlessness
Inspiring a nice bump of dopamine
a woman rescues a bee from a paddling pool
with a trowel from which, when no longer sodden,
the bee crawls into the grass
seeking shelter
from predators who would likely not miss
it on that reflective platter,
and huddles close by gathering strength.
So she is unaware when, an hour or so later
presuming the bee long since flown off,
her shoe finds its sanctuary;
presses thorax and mandibles into earth.
The bee does not die quickly as the woman would
if a creature of unfathomable size
stepped on her as it hung out its washing,
but slow, unable to free itself, and anyhow
even if its legs were able to heft it up and out of the shit,
its wings have been shredded by the grind of pivoting heel,
the woman taking a moment
to admire the buddleia
swathed in painted ladies.
Not entomology, nor some god-aping
yen for a menagerie to bend to my will
but for the blood, the lifeblood sir! It flows
through the strata of the littlest things.
I was precious
at first, reticent. So when a bee marred
itself in a clumsy descent from the window
I let it curl for days like a dried flower
before I sampled. I smiled:
it tasted liverish, autumnal.
I dusted the sill with sugar for a fly.
I blackened the sill with flies for a spider.
The spider would tempt down a bird.
But I was impatient; I indulged.
I rattled a flea to my ear
then popped it in my mouth like a pill.
My fingers took on the tang of a bell,
faint arcs of gore under each nail
as if I had been playing a black pudding piano.
Small viscera
hung from my gums like a piñata.
I needed self-control if I wanted the sparrows!
I began once again to propagate.
Until the day the doctor entered my cell
to find the air and my hair full of birds.
And what he conveyed, not so much in words
but a sharpening glint in his eyes was a sort of…
respect. I wouldn’t say awe. No, not just yet.
capitalism is
putting out a fire with a bucket
with a trickle of a hole at the base of it
and having to carry said bucket
from the lake edge to the seat of it
(the fire that is)
and what is your strategy in this
is it in a steady stream of half buckets
anxiously and hurriedly
backwards and forwards forwards and backwards
more than enough
to make sure of enough
or is it more conservatively
in believing you have time
to plug the hole before you go
and committing early to that belief
that efficiency and lack of waste
especially of your own energy
is the key
capitalism is
filling the bucket with poured possessions
to a raging fire made of need
capitalism is
the bucket makers’ greed
selling straw as kindling with black market weed
there’s a hole in my bucket dear Liza dear Liza
you used to sing to me
that one bucket was enough for Maslow’s hierarchy
you used to sing to me
there’s a hole in my bucket dear Liza
that all abundance is about anxiety
around security
about the fear of fire that our news reels bleed
there’s a hole in my bucket
you used to sing to me
my bucket a hole
capitalism is
black market buckets
reselling buckets to stockpile
to price fix
reading bucket diplomas at bucket universities
studying an amendment to the very definition of freedom
all about buckets and straw
and a straw man’s deeds
capitalism is
a media obsessed with fires
even the ones with deniers
the ones we started abroad
and still sell straw to feed
capitalism is
the very idea of buckets
with buckets as seeds
and bucket peer reviewed
year-on-year growth in perpetuity
and bucket salesman arsonists
suggesting the blood of refugees
is as good as water
and better for the buckets’ longevity
it is only thicker
when you’re family you see
capitalism is
an endless game of buckets
bucketing down with rain
and when into every life some rain must fall
the bucket is panacea
catch all
capitalism is
our willing acceptance
and yet total denial
of all this
until we kick it
(the bucket that is)
Human body parts 'pile up' in NHS waste backlog
BBC News
This is a love poem. These body parts
don’t know they were meant to be burnt long
ago; don’t know an oozing of black hearts
that swim out of plastic bags is so wrong.
Don’t know the kiss between elbows and scooped-
out intestines - once punctured tyres - now round
with bacteria, bright as jewels hooped
through dismembered Havisham hands, sounds
grotesque when the radio tells us.
A mourning of ankles, appendices, hurt,
waltzing in darkness of this second chance;
a putrid opera, a wake in reverse.
Tendrils of skin float, tiny fish in the depths,
lips brush against cheekbones, longing to be kept.
I was ten when I learned I could hold
my breath, long enough to make the adults
come running. At the traffic lights, after school,
I tensed ‘til my face screeched with blood
stars. I shattered two teeth on the concrete,
was made a fuss of. It wasn’t enough to ask for love.
I needed panic. It was the language, the formula
I understood: harm yourself love will follow.
My tiny face, found suspended in the coat rack, looking
for attention, cord from dad’s dressing gown
in a double-knot ‘round my neck
their little balloon.
(published in Rattle 2020)
How am I meant to bear this, I thought, along
with everyone - the year a typo in a hyperlink -
wearing a fur coat to the funeral
like I had to become an animal to endure it.
But yesterday I woke, cheeks dry for the first time
- we’d slept for eleven hours or more -
and I said, half-dreaming,
I’ve always
thought lesser-spotted meant an animal
has fewer spots and I realised just now
it means less often seen.
Maybe sometimes a strangeness arrives
and lets us free, like loving your partner afresh
when both of you are on separate walks,
and you bump into each other on the high street.
Or a thought occurring to you years after
someone’s death: they didn’t do that to be mean,
they did it because they loved me -
sounding out like a windchime across
an overgrown garden.
It’s like the door
being on the latch when the whole time
you thought it was locked. Someone thinks
I can’t bear it, and then dies. Typo.
Someone thinks I can’t bear it, and then does.
To your surprise, your fist
connects. A cushioned implosion; the rush
of a gas stove igniting.
It hits the pavement like a book of raffle tickets.
It scrabbles itself upright in the gutter
and tumbleweeds across the road,
newly aware of gravity.
At the pedestrian crossing, you push the button
and make eye contact
with the man accosting people
for Save The Children. He stares, open-mouthed.
You are the first to look away.
and of course you could have died
i knew that but what use was i
being the dead weight of my worry
two tiny whirlwinds in the front room
me trying to put the room back together
so that when you finally came down you’d say
this is how you kept it for me?
i’d reply i love you this tidy
instead we cried in the kitchen
over a lukewarm dinner
in a brand new bowl taken from
a brand new cupboard in a brand new kitchen
a week ago we where the people
in the pictures we look at and sigh
and wasn’t it perfect
One airport much like another,
the same eternal corridors,
the same departure lounges.
We taxi to the runway.
Below I see white clover in the grass,
a bee, a clump of yellow bedstraw,
a small brown butterfly.
At once the airport turns into
a place where species are defined
by difference. I want to be out there,
on my hands and knees,
naming things.
(from “A Sampler” (Happenstance Press, 2008)
Exte
For my partner’s first visit to his village, my father brings us to
the highest peak of the Pyrenees. My partner asks why
the word etxe appears everywhere, from road signs
to restaurants, town halls to hotels. My father explains it
means ‘house’, and that the house is very important
for the Basques.
My father doesn't mention a Basque would rather immolate
himself and his family than lose his house. Gabriel Aresti had
his people in mind when he wrote “My Father’s House.”
My father doesn’t admit losing his house would be a
mutilation.
My father tells us the etxe is so important here his neighbours
know him by the name of his house. My father forgets to add
he regularly threatens to disinherit me of his every time I stand
up to him.
My father explains that the eldest child used to inherit
the family house so the other siblings had to emigrate to
Argentina to earn a living. What he doesn't say is many of them
refused to buy land in America because it would have meant
bidding farewell to their Basque house.
Many Basque surnames have etxe as their root, like Etxegaray.
My father deciphers our own: Iri = the city, garay = above,
and at last I understand this is all about place – my surname,
this visit, my angst and anger at never feeling at home in any
country –
My father concludes: it is very Basque, to leave and return.
2 Swings
And they will not hold hands,
Instead they will let little fingers
Hang, intertwined. In this bond
they will keep the time he said
I dunno man, you’re special
and the time she said, yeah
maybe not all boys, just most.
Between this finger link
And his black air max 95s
Brushing along the side
Of her white Air Force ones
They will hold a phenomenon
That breaks every rule of this
Place. They will wrap it warmly
In black tracksuits, dip it in honey,
Coat it with Demerara sugar
and rock it, back and forward
On these swings, under midnight sky.
Serpent tongues
swaddle girls like me,
hissing venomous gibberish for
rebuffing the thought of belly becoming coop.
Barbells sculpting shoulders that carry fields
worth of cotton; catapult arms launching stonewall
rage, lasering eyes sifting crowds for violin waists,
tossing breasts into blender garments,
forging husky morning tones over phone lines,
landscaping hair and fingernails to midget form,
pistoling fingers making pussies rise like sky lanterns.
Who wants a ragdoll, sprawling out on both sides of the road?
They see me as tittyless carcass
getting in the way of traffic.
Survival conjuring reinvention of self.
I unearth
the potential of diaper-wearing men;
wrapping self in skirts and dresses tight
like clenching assholes.
Allowing rifle to shoot load
into stainless pussy.
I prepare my stomach,
for cramming,
after the crippling.
Radipole - Out Of It (Deluxe)
(originally published in ‘Café Kaput!’ from Broken Sleep Books)
Omnishambolic… The gruelly spermbursts
From our kicked bollocks;
The native Dorset daughters shy away.
Aortal anthems of ad hoc four letter words
Slurred into a timeless rectitude;
Pisshead, jackboot, thugggery, yes!
Yet, as a pastiche potage of a ‘crew’,
Assumed, assuredly, a bit o’ruff deluxe;
This loose, shape-shifty, bitumen brew,
This assemblage of chummy loners and losers, true!
We speak in oddments and oddities of the Anthropocene age.
Casements of spent vials of home brew, knock-off shots,
Mad Dog 20/20 translucent with our flotsam slobber;
Our platitudes of jabs and right hooks,
Applied with affection betwixt we skittling punchdrunk
Who laugh at contusions and the serenity of knockout.
Now the curfew is ladling down like a vomitous broth
And our matedoms clutch in the crannies
Of the distil points of derelict quarters
With whatever dregs aswill in our filched tinnies
Supped as we smutch for scant warmth
And chirrup in fractal glitch; out of it.
Thirty year train wreck later, this be redolence deluxe
As I flob into Radipole lake.
Guttered delinquents, mastic seep;
Inelegantly, inexpertly spatchcocked.
Tenderised in the bootstomp,
Scabs crisping in the coiling night;
Darkly mottling bruisings,
Black as the potholed tarmac surrounds.
Eternal trimesters of trial.
Our forged crunk credentials;
misfiring misspells in faltering scrawl.
You slagged us for loitering in Arndale arcades,
Those arcades now padlocked empty!
We could’ve been crests of swans glissing ‘cross the Radipole lake,
But got slated and slaked into the quicklime slime
Of your aloofly, boggle-oggle, judgmental stares
Quagmired Dorset lads for whom quarries, trawlers, farmsteads
And grockle laden summer seasons were no longer there.
Not we, beshillinged, cart-bound chancers
A-chance to reel merrily down Ridgeway
Nor the clobber and pat to seduce a Lizbie Brown
Just shat, pissed keks and hunkery hovels
In what of Budmouth Regis be left
We sleep beneath fresnels of rot fronds in watery basements.
On sponge damp mattresses,
We, attired in gaffa’ed cast off carrier bags to stay dry,
Marinaded in the stupor stews of drunken weedheadedness,
Out of it.
Roots and genesis
A golden shovel after Sonia Sanchez
Somewhere between where I am and who I was, I decide to be both loved and
Lover even though this is not how it is done where I am from. In
This way, I have become more of my mother than my
Mother has. She has let ripeness split the skin, it weeps down the back of her head.
When old roots reggae slips from beneath the kitchen door, I
Imagine her story afresh. On a verandah at sunset, I see
My mother, dressed in all white with a garland in her hair, whispering low and my
Guess is that she is happy. Somewhere near I am Good Island Daughter, etching my history
Into hymn-song and forbidden drum and my love, who wears red, always, sees me standing In
the morning's darkness until it slits itself open and it says something like
I dare you forget again. Maybe this dreaming is all the work left for us raised by a
Body of girls who recognise the love they want only by song; too shy
Or tired to name it. The only way we unearth a soft place to teach a child.
Aperture
It’s your lens that I’m pushed through
A white flatness manta-raying in liquid
Held atop by tongs, shaken loose drops
More than latent under red light
If you’d have framed me by the lilacs
Not the ledge of your ragged outcrop
I wouldn’t now be flooded,
like a bright ghost from the edges of film
You need to get the dead out of your poems
you told me but here I am writing of how
a month before you left this earth
we stood together in the gallery and I saw you reflected
in the fictive space of a painting
your form, gleaming white and translucent
as thin frost, or a sleek gauze
floating on the black glass as if airborne
a premature, amorphous haunting
your ghost getting here ahead of you.
You, see-through, overlay an oil sky
taking up almost all the canvas
a deep hued emptiness which consumes the artist's vision.
In that huge starless heaven,
a white dwelling is as diminished
as a tooth in a cavernous mouth,
a moth flying in space.
Your steps are so light
as you walk nearer to me.
How brave to paint so much darkness, you say.
From Fever Few. Indigo Dreams.
I had started packing up places and folding them
into pockets of dried time when I saw her burning.
I was to the north of her centre at the time, upwind
of the flames that were already ashes as they reached
my tongue. I took communion there once, years earlier,
taking the wafer onto that tongue that had yet to know
the taste of cinders. People cried their novenas below
while the flames ignited the stars above and the river
ran black as if already in mourning. C’est comme quelqu’un
était mort, someone said while I pulled the tape over
another packed box the river would carry downstream
until it forgot its way back. They all stood there,
on that street by the Seine, where les bouquinistes
sold those fading books that smelt of death, while
the ashes fell upon their heads, their eyes, their lips
and their tongues.
And so there we were- the grieving and the leaving,
open-mouthed, all of us desperate for one last taste
of what we had believed to be eternal.
The sun is setting and the house’s eyes are burning gold.
Red hot pokers, ebullient and upright,
line the stone steps like torches. Just outside the door,
someone’s cigarette smokes itself on the ground.
With the blind pulled down, the air in the room
is the colour of rye – like fucking in a basket.
She thinks of the bath she’ll run later, a different kind
of nakedness. She thinks of steam – a natural soft focus.
There’s a place down the road that sells cakes impossibly
heavy with cream. There’s a palm tree nearby so enthusiastic
the sky has had to make extra room.
She shuts her eyes so they can see her better, and becomes
aware of her own mouth. Meanwhile,
a river splits in two, stretches its lovely long legs towards the sea.
THE FARMER THAT LIVES IN A KNUCKLED HOUSE
The chin he found in a stonewall holds sunlight
for his working hours.
He grubs up another work day, pushes the tractor wheels
out of a gate.
Rooks, fetch back the blackness he hides in his head,
as they stagger across the ploughed sky,
bend the rawky air with their caw.
There’s signs of orange peel in his fingernails,
but he never eats on the whim of a hedgerow.
He catches his face in a rose petal when the morning rises
from the nest of night.
The mention of oak branches, shape his arms,
allow him to stand against the coughing wind.
Sometimes he shears sheep in a pen.
Grabbing them by the throat, he yells into their faces,
as his wife slips as a draft under the bed.
He seems to think we’re all part of his flock
as a frown escapes his whittled fringe, as you pass
him walking the dog.
The shaved wool whitens his beard fills the hair he lost
when his youth died.
He skittles the sheep with his stare, then whistles
the tractor homeward.
Unmutes the silence with sentences of a bluebottle fly.
Invitation
She says I will be able to see
Perseids tonight in her armpits,
just as I am worrying
that I cannot read binary.
I assure myself I can Google it later
hoping that the instructions
will be simple.
I plan to have a notebook
and pen ready.
I know that joke about
there being 10 kinds of people in the world:
those who understand binary
and those who don’t.
I tell her it would be great
to see the meteors up close,
nuzzled right in.
They don’t make your neck ache
this way, she says,
and you will be able to hear
the crackles of ancient fires
it is all deep in there.
I wonder if we will ever be
sociable again after this.
How many people in the world
are hankering to see
night skies in the armpits of lovers?
dystopia
in memory of sean bonney
the eagle with gold bars melting in her mind
lava over the opal mines
ashes in a bucket of ice-cream
the silk worm eating herself tail to mouth
at the centre of a roundabout is hope
philosophers gridlocked in philadelphia
eagles dropping bars of gold over opal mines
between you and me sean bonney
i’ve had enough of this shit
nothing everyone and nobody
the city is killing me
the city hates my poetry
the city is a fucking nightmare
sean bonney do not fear
we will bury the dystopia
in unreadable film scripts under the pyramids
empty space expanding into empty space
your heart beating at the centre of the earth
bluebells growing bluer in the belly of blue-whales
black banners in riots for peace
re capitalism: fuck you
golden snow dropping gently over the opal mines
the sun is one of seven stars
rays of light polish our nightmares
write to me when the war is over
write to me when we have won
(‘dystopia’ first appeared in The London Magazine)
Swing of a page to a new year.
Door yawns to first footers
bringing shortbread and sloe gin.
She must open more doors; no shut them.
Draughts prick her calves; light shafts
stab past the hinge’s stiff applause.
A chain smiles across an open slit.
She jokes with her kids to ask callers
to put a hoof through the letterbox
as proof, to beware the wolf who flours
his claws. The door’s side is pierced
with keys and bolts to keep out bad things.
Flashback : midnight in a moon-milk kitchen,
A backdoor handle turns. He is outside,
a low, spitting growl. Door plays dead.
reads the sign around the neck of the enormous Playmobil figure.
I know the feeling. I blame Red Bull and I blame the news.
In tests 70% of humans can be persuaded to give an electric shock
to strangers. I’d rather give them shortbread, or perhaps a little wave,
but those too could have blue consequences. I scan the crowd
and wonder who might push the button. This student in brogues,
wielding lilies? The yummy mummy with a fearsome ponytail?
I’m not answering further questions till my solicitor is present
or I have proof they are irrevocably bad, like at that fancy dress party
when I saw a Cyberman smoke a cigarette. Meanwhile, I’m petrified
of the thump in my chest that is four valves closing, that conjures up
a backwards Advent calendar, a door shut with every year.
I tremble, pick at falafel wraps and store each terror
like those bald eagles who save every twig they find
till their overburdened nests plummet to the ground.
I drop my leftover wrap in a bin and consider death by falling
or electrocution. Death by milk float, steered by the nemesis
I didn’t know I had. I am vastly misjudged as a foe,
I want to tell him. He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with,
how much I’m not here, startled as I am by what turns out to be
moss tumbling from gutters, by the voice shrieking and howling
in my pocket that is Kate Bush, by a horde of breakable creatures not licking or hitting each other, just treading their way
softly along the back of morning, tiny hearts jolting.
First, let go of all the plans
you once had: the casual ways
we assume the right to live.
Create a box for all your future tense.
Catch yesterdays in your upturned hands,
unfurl memories, learn to read code.
Before long, these too will be dust.
Abandon sleep. Forget the clock
and roll like a wave
on dawns and dusks that drip
like morphine into days
that feel as if they could go
on and on and on, but never
look away, in case you miss
the moment that it ends.
Learn to live between the punctuated hours,
your ears attuned like the city fox
to spot an altered breath,
your eyes alert to the pallor of skin.
Juggle everything, and fail,
and tell yourself this is your best
and know this best will never be enough.
Accept you cannot change any of this,
and break, and get back up again.
Try not to let them die before they die,
try to let them stay in this world
even as this world gets smaller
every day, even if some days
you wish an end to this and when it comes
try to remember
to stop, to sit
and listen
to the silence
after
the dying is done;
watch the morning come.
Try all over again
to let go,
and live.
Bobbing in a rowing boat
in Port St Mary bay,
father recited the whole Rime
of the Ancient Mariner to me.
Some things I remember now
and some I remember then.
Me a glitter
in his half-closed eyes,
an albatross
I did not want to be.
I did not want to be
weighed by the neck.
There was a shearwater
whose wings I wanted to see
skim & break the silence.
I recall those licks
about the stern,
those slaps up on the bow,
and that smell, half-rotten,
half-new. One day
it may never return.
From port-side appeared
Gobbag vooar swimming at us
abeam, wide open
like Ahab’s foe, and all alone
I saw my life inside a mouth.
Its bulbous nose dived
and all in one breath breached
the starboard swell,
its tail fin dripping triumph.
My father smiled.
I loved the man who loved
the boy who loved men, even
though he shot me with his bow.
Struck by the starkness of the walls;
colourless and cracked like eggshells,
I notice the only decoration, a thick wooden crucifix
looming above the blackboard—
X marks the spot, my older brother once told me,
showing me his knuckles, skinned
and wet like red inkwells,
courtesy of the metre stick.
I pick a desk as far away as possible,
beside the window,
and within sight, the playing field.
Already I’m longing for the clatter of the lunch bell
when I’ll be free to run to the wet grass;
perfect for lunging tackles, diving headers
or a knee-slide when I score.
Pay attention lad, he snaps,
before finger and thumb tightly grips
the hair behind my ear,
raising me from chair to toes.
My feet scrape the floor
as I’m hauled towards the blackboard,
recalling again my brother’s warning
that the Headmaster has no favourites.
In this room, he is not our uncle.
Published in North West Words
If I can’t walk that fast,
then I’ll start a new race.
If I can’t keep my balance,
then I’ll sing as I sway.
If I can’t use my hand,
then I’ll learn a new trick.
If I get so very tired,
then I’ll run in my sleep.
If the heat is too much,
then I’ll wave at the sun.
If I forget the answer,
then I’ll find a new question.
If I can’t sleep at night,
then I’ll say good morning to the stars.
Form it from mica, a runnel of crystal. From shell, from sand. Form it from loosestrife, form
it remorselessly. From salt. Gather whatever is floating, plastic or rotten, belly-up crab.
Form it in thunder, dash it to pieces in winter derangement.
Form it again. From molluscs, in ankle-deep drifts. From bladderwrack, itching with
sandflies, memento mori of cuttlefish bone. Scratch it from cliff edge. From what is
exposed twice a day, the hood of crustacean, the foil of the eel. From rain.
Form it from barnacles, intact on the rock: from what is resisting attrition. Shape it from
stasis. Form it from creatures in soupy lagoons, quarry for egrets at the turn of the tide.
From sea-glass, herald, assurance. Form it as votary, down on your knees.
[Commended, Winchester Poetry Prize 2019 and published in the competition anthology.]
grandiose with colour confetti
blue whimsical
banners
Kelewele cake
and presents galore
with an open-casket service
my Caput Mortuum
in a coffin
waiting for sundown
to build myself back
in my own way
luminous like Saturn’s face
wiser than yesterday
my phoenixian renaissance
incinerates the weak me
that is why
so much depends upon.
centre yourself in
height or weight
of her gravity
10 days empty
outline shedding
never at speed
the trickle is
contagious red
pith or water
directed toward
a pink-cap vial
focus consciousness
car park remains
visible this room
with a view
I am the lucky
one curtain between
bodies draining
other bodies
snow white drags
your limbs under
the water hello
h ello hhh h el hello hello
hello o oh hel hello hhell
hel lo hhh ello l l l l hello
cn y ou he a me
hel lo h e llo h h ello
hell o hello hello hello
hello hello hello hello
can you hear me?
open eyes remember
to breathe
Winter’s roar on a frosty night
would find me sitting on the sill,
in an old cotton dressing gown,
lights off.
I would throw open the bedroom window
and listen to the sounds of the sea,
with the path of moonlight
paving the way a dream might take.
Go to sleep.
The door shifted and
I’d jump between winceyette sheets
as mother’s arm eased the window closed.
She warned me of sirens
who make men weak
and mermaids who drown
the meek and good
unless you say your prayers.
Through the glass, the physics of
a wave’s increasing asymmetry
transferred energy as sound.
How shifting gravity as the moon
waxes and wanes creates tides.
Scatter my ashes in the ocean,
let my atoms drift across the
wide, life-giving sea and maybe
I will feel fingers ripple through
amniotic fluid.
Hear new waves.
first published in Dream Catcher 37
If when we die, the soul attaches itself to something half-alive,
mine will settle for forest rot,
drip its thousand spines to a pale spill.
Woodland does not pause at loss,
it lives through its buried —
another hounded fox, the wrong red.
Somewhere, a horse chestnut’s falling pulse
and in the damp, stars yawn into autumn.
Everything and nothing in this wood.
When I become impossibly light, appear as wax,
let foragers steal my ghost-meat home,
prepare a meal of it, slow as winter.
We thought the pond just needed cleaning
to make sure the fish would thrive
but you said overstocking
was the problem and not the years of silt.
We deferred to your authority
idly standing by as you labelled
so many sick, diseased and weak:
threats to the well-being of the rest.
You judged them by their colour,
despatching the unchosen
to the pile beside your booted feet
impervious to their mouthed appeals.
Afterwards we cleared up the carnage
yet the memory still lingers,
like the stink upon our fingers,
that no amount of water will wash away
published in ‘What the Moon was Told’, edited by Janice Dempsey, Dempsey and Windle, 2000.
Kingdom
Hammered gold of glass.
Golden wood. Through this door,
the sky’s blue door. The birches,
rays of light, up from earth.
Hammered gold in a high sky.
The here-ness of there.
Vantaa, Finland
I return to the house,
stare through the grime-smudged windows
at chairs on their sides,
at the table covered with districts of muck.
The backyard’s slabs are mottled with litter,
weeds advance through gaps in brick.
A cold fetor clouds all from the corner,
from refuse sacks that holds water in clefts.
I sit on a brick pile near the fence,
head full of the last time we met.
The silence as our shoulders touched with the last hug,
your large eyes stupefied of their sheen.
Our laughter echoes from the bedroom window.
This is what I have of you
I see colours project on the curtains
if I stare hard enough.
I leave to the street, walk under the lamplights
and wonder where you are, in some living room
the silence between the two of you
deafened by the television.
I imagine the could-haves,
they ebb from the house,
flow out of the road, to you
they break brick from cement, skid cars on roofs,
knock your fingers from lampposts
that you grab in the current.
(from ‘Working Animals’)
A kestrel hovers above the roadside,
a wary shadow against the sky.
You are stuck handbraked staring
into the arse-end of backlogged traffic.
The sun is a yellow stress ball
out of reach. Up ahead,
a motorcyclist has come apart:
not in the way we all do, but in two
discrete parts – there’s the part that’s their head
and the part that’s not.
You need to piss and you bark
at a drive time radio DJ who isn’t listening.
The Icelanders have a word that means just that.
A murky day that you know is better
enjoyed from the comfort of a window-seat;
soft mizzle cleansing leaves shiny and bright.
When webs become crystal dreamcatchers,
or perfect drops form on the telephone lines
and slide slowly down like the oil
on the wire of the indoor rain lamp,
with Venus in pink marble,
her flowing robe revealing perfect curves
against the plastic plants.
Outside the blackbird puffs himself,
feathers rippling. He dances on the lawn.
Drizzle doesn’t bring the worms up
but his fancy seven-step has the desired effect
and he pecks and pecks and pecks;
like the drinking woodpecker did, long ago,
on the dentist’s counter, see-sawing,
a globe of red liquid dancing, as I looked
past it and through the window,
longing to be outside in the rain.
Odd protrusions on her body.
The darkening blood on her egg white school panties.
Was this feminine disease contagious?
Pining for her premenstrual form.
Hair tight in sequined scrunchies.
Sucking the irony blood off her fingers that she inserted up herself.
She was curious for a sniff, her new smell was different.
It was disgustingly womanly she thought.
Ignoring the wet slush gush from crimson coated nether regions.
Hand prints slaps embellished from her turbaned papa.
He was not a man of god, only a man of excuse.
Bruise shaped-malevolently coloured.
Everything her was dying.
Her legs were blood.. scarlet limbs.
Her father was jealous of her female secrets that her dainty body told her only.
Shards of the feminine.
Underwear sodden and warm.
Murdering the whiteness of her school shirt.
She has to hand wash everything.
A washing machine was a luxury that was unavailable.
The lies that bind the womanly shame together.
Garnet soaked clothing in cold water and scrubbed with a cheap plastic washer
brush before her Punjabi Papa found her.
Curdled brain, belly flop, churning body, clouded corneas.
She was an embalmed butterfly.
His anterior fury, her half former thirteen year old thoughts.
Her staccato stuttering, her bloody words, dribbling from vagina lips.
Retreating inside her head, the fractures of her feminine chronology
Adorned in a wealthy costume of humiliation by these menstrual mothers that greet her monthly.
She is thinly with a painted face at obligatory family functions and weddings.
The pitiful cosmetics daubed on, her body somehow seemed wrong
Sexual assault is erectly waiting
Her finest salwar kameez is soaking-raw silk blanched in vermillion gore.
He can sniff at her period stench.
Was she impulsive and her father compulsive in his slaps at mortification at her womanhood.
Once reveling in the palpable joy of sniffing a bloody cunt.
Her eyes blooming in fear.
Inanimate to his anger, ungracefully running with ruby prints on her thighs.
i
sea wrapped in itself like a dead bug
voyaged on sunk within its liquorish water
that once drunk burns the mouth elongated
bone-structure of the sea its drench bark
zappy whirlpool skin cosy exoskeleton even
the greatest of men here flounder
ii
how long to be lost at sea months years
hormones spiral mind hallucinates how the absence of touch dictates what one sees in a distance of waves ~~ one defines lust as a
sea cucumber wriggling inside the ear & into
the brain ~~
what factors contribute to the brain splitting
into chunks of desire a ship that wobbles this loneliness of salt that tastes like pork well
past its due date & the other sea mammals
~~ gaily swimming by
iii
brine-lustrous species head & trunk of man
ending in a tail of fish or cetacean these
beguilers test the thirst of men lips wet with prophecy which have had centuries to
practice teasing scaly Cassandras nobody
ever listens to for fear of drowning & what
is it to love a man if not to drag him
underwater to steal his last breath
every sea-faring culture reporting the cheek
of it
iv
the sun like a spell of sweat which blurs the
sight the motions of shoulders pulling ropes
vigour of firm hands make a man forget
himself how a secret peek can cause the
strongest lungs to bruise
when tempest arrives it’s a quarrel of
spinster clouds fighting over the most
handsome sailors waves become hands that
clutch & crush & when wood turns to
splinters men look for each other ~~ not
even the virile want to die alone or unloved
when you drown you can feel the brain of
the sea at work hear its synapses cling to one another like a fishnet of laughter & song ~~
v
everything so blue wish I could eat the blue
whole like a pretty blue hamburger have you
ever chewed on your own guilt how a song
pulls and twists the mind of a man so that he
wants to die to forget his home & family our
voices’ frills baroque jukebox our lips know
~~ the wants of flesh
but what survives of us once men forget
little brothers we flick our fins in spite
dissolve sperm-white glowing spume on
choppy waves first wink of dawn
Cara L. Mckee
The Island
I lived on an island once
which was sometimes surrounded by sea.
Sometimes though the island’s god
would decide the island was enough
and wrap us up in a soft grey-white cloak
of frost and feathers, take us far away.
That’s the thing that no-one tells you:
that islands can just go away.
I don’t know where they go. It’s not
something I’ve read in the physics books,
I don’t care, except it’s hard sometimes
putting up with the other islanders.
At least we can laugh together at
mainlanders who say that sometimes
they can hardly make us out
for all the fog.
Matthew M.C. Smith
After gods
He wanders, drifting, after death of gods
and kneels on rock at earth’s still pool,
where water ripples to finger’s touch.
He rises, raising eyes to starry vault,
his spirit soars through endless night,
with ancient heavens myriad on show.
He leans again at water’s blackened edge;
the graven image, stream of light of stars,
imprisoned, still, a liquid mirror.
El Duende
From Haggards
Grief lives in my house
like dry rot infesting the timbers.
It has taken up residence
in the cellar, where I do not go.
I pretend there is no such space.
But he sits there, smoking coltsfoot tobacco,
and brewing a bitter tisane of rue
and wormwood, hyssop and dill.
Too much indulgence, he says, in sweet things
like joy and kindness, all the fruit
of sunlight and fresh rain, have done me harm.
It is time to take my medicine,
time for a purge, a cleansing.
Hell mend ye, he says. And hope.
Confessional
Thank you for the lovely meal. I noticed that your name was Jennifer. Please accept this poem in lieu of payment. Forgive me, I am but a struggling artist with a taste for fine dining. I also took the cutlery, glasses and crockery.
I am so sorry. I must take opportunities as I find them. For instance, the other day I found a whole poem that had become caught in the drain at the swimming pool where I work. I was cleaning hair out of the filter and there it was. Jennifer (may I call you Jenny?), I was
astounded. Ever since, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Perhaps it became tangled in someone’s hair at a poetry reading, then they rinsed it out when they came for their regular swim. It’s either that or they are a poet themselves and keep their drafts in their hair. I have known a few who do. I have launched an investigation. I have decided to open an office in the city. It will need to be a little dingy, and perhaps the glass in the door will be cracked. I am still wrestling with the specifics. Anyway, Jenny, I leave you this poem. I have tucked it under the tiny saucer you brought with the bill. It is not the poem that was tangled in hair. Nor is it the poem I found in a supermarket trolley. I have submitted both of those to literary magazines. No. This is just an occasional poem about a meal I ate alone with a price my humble means could not meet. This is really just to say sorry.
August Rain
Mirror
Incident
from Her Lost Language