Spotlight Poet #67 is the excellent Leia Butler. Leia (she/her) loves experimental poetry and sound pieces and enjoys work that is bold. She has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is a winner of the Streetcake Experimental Poetry prize (2019), and her work also appears in Re-side, Beir Bua, Permeable Barrier, and on The Babel Tower Notice Board. Her first poetry collection ‘Tear and Share’ is available at Broken Sleep Books. She is Head Editor of Full House Literary. You can view more of her work on her website: https://leiabutler.com/
Hometown: Ilford
Collections/pamphlets titles: Tear and Share - Broken Sleep
Who are you currently reading? On my reading list, I have lots of poets with debut collections. Pamphlets/collections I'm really enjoying currently would be from writers such as Kali Richmond, JP Seabright, Stuart McPherson, Elizabeth M. Castillo, and Louise Mather.
Spotlight Poet #66 is the talented Kitty Donnelly. Kitty's background is Northern Irish. She currently lives in West Yorkshire. Her first collection, 'The Impact of Limited Time', was published by Indigo Dreams. She is working on a second collection and writing a novel. She works as a psychiatric nurse and rescues unwanted animals. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University.
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.
Spotlight Poet #65 is the excellent Elizabeth M. Castillo. Elizabeth is a British-Mauritian poet, writer, indie-press promoter, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Paris with her family and two cats, where she writes a variety of different things, in a variety of different languages, and under a variety of pen names. In her writing Elizabeth explores the different countries and cultures she grew up with, as well as themes of race & ethnicity, motherhood, womanhood, language, love, loss and grief, and a touch of magical realism. Her writing has been featured in publications and anthologies in the UK, US, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East. Her bilingual, debut collection “Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras” is for sale on Amazon. You can connect with her on Twitter and IG as @EMCWritesPoetry.
Hometown: Paris/London/Mauritius
Collections/pamphlets titles: Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras
Who are you currently reading? Gabriela Mistral, Ada Limon, Mary Oliver, Laura Besley, Roque Dalton, Ave Barrera, Daniel Sluman, Jen Campbell...
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?
Spotlight Poet #64 is the excellent Georgia Hilton.Georgia is an Irish poet and fiction writer living in Winchester, England. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, such as The Rialto, Prole Magazine,192 Magazine, and Perhappened. Georgia has a pamphlet, I went up the lane quite cheerful (2018) and a collection, Swing (2020), both published by Dempsey and Windle. Her poem, Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize (2018) and her short poem The Lost Art of Staring into Fires was a runner-up in the Briefly Write Poetry Prize (2021). Georgia lives with her husband and three children. She tweets sometimes at @GGeorgiahilton.
Who are you currently reading? Kim Moore, Naush Sabah, Ankh Spice.
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
Nothing to be done
but watch my
breath and maples catching
fireful;
nervous twitch
at scold of jays
with buttered croak:
a gas-blue eyeful.
Wonder, do I
smoulder slow like
ginkgo-gloam
or orange rust; do I
corrode, or grow
on you, or
switch, like
swift-soft footfall;
stick, like branches,
bare-armed after
leaves?
Spotlight Poet #61 is Attracta Fahy. Attracta lives in Co.Galway, works as a Psychotherapist, and has three children. She completed her MA in Writing NUIG ‘17. She was October winner in Irish Times; New Irish Writing 2019, Pushcart, and Best of Web nominee, shortlisted for Over The Edge New Writer 2018, Allingham Poetry competition both in 2019 &’20. She has been published in several journals at home and abroad. Attracta was a featured reader at Over The Edge Reading in Galway City Library, Cultivating Voices, and read with poet Paul Muldoon and Adrian Rice at The Poetry Salon with the Irish American Society of New Mexico. Fly on the Wall Poetry published her debut chapbook collection Dinner in the Fields, in March’20. She was recently one of ten emerging poets chosen for the first-ever Dedalus Press Mentoring Programme.
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.
Wedlock
‘’both succeed at last in drowning’’
from ‘He is Ava Gardner’, Frank Bidart
They try to assist each other for hours,
day after day. He puts his weight
on her head to keep it submerged,
the parietal bone a resistant football.
He floats on the surface, faces the sky
as her head nudges his back. He becomes
afraid, so rolls away in the water, a man-seal.
He needs her weight too.
She struggles in the air, recovers in rushed
commotion, reminded of separation.
Cold and colder. Oxygen infuses her blood.
It is his turn to drown.
She puts her pale hands on his skull –
an un-birthing; his head scattered
with tiny pits of slime and pain.
His wide, scarred limbs float away.
They cannot solve it –
how to help each other drown.
Perhaps they should swim out
until their legs refuse to move
so that they lose direction –
release each other’s hands
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
Spotlight Poet #58 is the talented Naoise Gale. Naoise is an autistic poet from West Yorkshire. Her debut pamphlet After the Flood Comes the Apologies is forthcoming with Nine Pens. She writes about mental health, neurodivergence and addiction. Her work has been published in various magazines such as Opia Lit, Versification and Nightingale and Sparrow. She was shortlisted for the Creative Future Writer’s Award 2021 and longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize 2021.
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.
Spotlight Poet #57 is the brilliant David Bleiman. David writes out of Edinburgh in English, Scots, Spanish, Yiddish and a largely imagined dialect of Scots-Yiddish which won him the Sangschaw prize in 2020 for The Trebbler’s Tale. He has been shortlisted for the Wigtown Poetry & Pamphlet prizes 2020. He is a winner of the Poetry Society members’ competition on the theme of surreal cities, Poetry News, September 2021.
Name: David Bleiman
Hometown: Edinburgh
Pamphlet title: This Kilt of Many Colours
What are you currently working on?
I have several projects bubbling away. My next pamphlet may be on various forms of love,including family, romantic and love of place (as in my slightly ironic love poem to myadoptive home nation of Scotland, included here). Or maybe I will assemble my poems about my home barrio of Cramond, a strangely liminal suburb of Edinburgh, which sits on a muddy border between city and countryside and even has its own island. A third project would be a collaboration with my novelist sister and compile her short stories and my poems on a family heritage theme, alongside photos and documentary records. Finally, I am working up my capacity to write poems for children, so as to have something to offer my two year old granddaughter, who is already enjoying rhyme and is nearly ready for unreason.
What poem by another poet would you have liked to have written?
I’ll plump for John Donne’s famous sermon on the theme that “no man is an island”. It is
extraordinarily resonant and enduring. Hemingway used the phrase “for whom the bell tolls” as the title of a novel. I found that during and after the Brexit referendum Donne’s words kept repeating in my brain, especially the concept that we are all part of the continent and if a clod of earth be washed away, Europe would be the less. I wrote a number of angry rants about Brexit and eventually some more reflective poems and, time and again, found myself channelling Donne. Oddly, what Donne developed as a metaphor, now works in a much more literal way.
An interesting fact about yourself.
In 1976 I smuggled the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into East Berlin in my Y-
fronts. It was in one of those wee yellow German Reclam paperbacks. So it tucked in nicely. I have since tried to tuck this anecdote into a poem, with less success.
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
Spotlight Poet #56 is the awesome Nikki Dudley. Nikki is managing editor of streetcake magazine and also runs the streetcake writing prize and MumWrite. She has a chapbook and collection with KFS. Her pamphlet 'I'd better let you go' is out with Beir Bua Press. She is the winner of the Virginia Prize 2020 and her second novel, Volta was published in May 2021. Her website is: nikkidudleywriter.com Twitter: @nikkidudley20
Spotlight Poet #55 is the brilliant Helen Allison. Helen is from Forres in Morayshire, North East Scotland. Her poetry is rooted in the dark and light of the natural world and relationships, and her work has appeared in journals and online. The poems in her first collection ‘Tree standing small’ (Clochoderick Press, 2018) explore her family tree, grief and longing, tangled with the beauty and brutality of the natural world. Frequent swearer, tea drinker, walker, swimmer, art trier and important of all mum to two teens, she is working on a new sequence of poems.
Pamphlets and Collections: Tree standing small, Clochoderick Press, - available directly from Helen: email helen.k.allison@outlook.com
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.
Spotlight Poet #53 is the brilliant Maia Elsner. Maia was born in London to Mexican and Polish Jewish parents, with three refugee grandparents. Much of her work thinks about exile in relation to the dislocation of objects and languages, as well as people. She is interested in silences and fragmentation in relation to memory, as a form of alternate history in contexts where so much has been destroyed, and how we resist established narratives, forms and structures. Overall, her subject is the search for intimacy, hope and survive in a violent world. She hopes one day to write about joy.
Spotlight Poet #52 is the incomparable Aaron Kent. Aaron is a working-class publisher and poet from Cornwall, now living in Wales. He has been awarded the Awen medal and won the Michael Marks Publishing award 2020. Aaron has had several pamphlets released, and his debut collection, Angels the size of Houses, is released at the end of July by shearsman. Gillian Clarke has called his poetry 'word-music', JH Prynne has called it 'unicorn flavoured'.
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
Spotlight Poet #51 is the talented Kali Richmond. Kali is a lapsed video artist living in the north of England. Her poetry has featured in various publications, including Gutter, The Babel Tower, Green Ink Poetry, Coven, Jaden Magazine, Osmosis and Porridge. In 2020 she won both the Reflex Press and Lucent Dreaming flash fiction competitions.
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.
Spotlight Poet #49 is the excellent Rick Dove.Rick is a progressive poet, storyteller and activist whose work extends across page and stage, blending styles, both old and new, to examine societal and personal change and these forces interact as we grow. A regular performer on the London poetry scene since late 2015, Rick has been published in numerous poetry zines, the national press, was highly commended at the BBC Edinburgh Poetry Slam in 2018, The Hammer & Tongue London Slam Champion in 2019, and the UK Slam Silver Medallist in 2019.
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)
Spotlight Poet #48 is the fabulous Olga Dermott-Bond. Olga is originally from Northern Ireland. She studied English at the University of St Andrews and is an assistant head teacher at a secondary school in Warwickshire. She has always loved reading and writing poetry, and over the past five years has been dedicating more time to her writing. She has two daughters, and motherhood has shaped and influenced many aspects of her work. Memory, social and political history and female identity spark her interest as a writer and are prevalent themes in her work.
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)
Spotlight Poet #46 is the excellent Bryony Littlefair. Bryony is a poet, community worker and workshop facilitator living in London. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, most recently Poetry Ireland, Magma and Poetry Wales. Her pamphlet Giraffe won the Mslexia prize in 2017. She was shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation prize in 2018 and 2020 and in 2019 received the Moth Retreat Bursary Award. Her first collection Escape Room will be released with Seren in 2022 and is funded by Arts Council England. bryonylittlefair.wordpress.com
‘the sky darkening from light to heavy grey
And why shouldn’t I be happy, and why shouldn’t we argue –‘
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.
Spotlight Poet #45 is the fabulous Michael Conley. Michael is a writer and teacher from Manchester. His poetry has appeared in Rialto, Magma, Interpreters House, Butcher’s Dog, Strix, among other magazines. His first pamphlet, ‘Aquarium’ was published by Flarestack. He also writes short stories and flash fiction, and his prose collection, ‘Flare And Falter’, was published by Splice and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.
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.
Spotlight Poet #44 is the excellent Jake Wild Hall. Jake is one half of Bad Betty Press, the host of Boomerang Club and winner of the PBH 2016 Spirit Of The Free Fringe Award. He has performed on BBC Radio and at festivals and literary events across the UK, including touring his debut pamphlet Solomon’s World—longlisted for Best Pamphlet in the 2018 Saboteur Awards. He co-edited anthologies The Dizziness of Freedom and Alter Egos (Bad Betty Press, 2018 and 2019). He is a multiple slam champion and his work has been published in magazines and anthologies including Hit Points (Broken Sleep Books). His second pamphlet Blank is out with Bad Betty now.
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
Spotlight Poet #43 is the brilliant Gill McEvoy. Gill won Keele University’s Inaugural Poetry Prize, 2007, and Havant Literature Festival 2009. Best of all was winning the 2015 Michael Marks Award for “The First Telling” (Happenstance Press) It gave her a 2 week residency in Greece at the Harvard Centre for Hellenic Studies, Nafplion, just wonderful!! Hawthornden Fellow (2012).
Pamphlet title: from Happenstance Press: Uncertain Days, 2006; A Sampler, 2008; The First Telling, 2014. Collections. From Cinnamon Press: The Plucking Shed, 2010; Rise. 2013. Hedgehog press: Are You Listening? 2020. Also one of 6 featured poets in Caboodle, Prole books, 2015.
My greatest achievement in life is that, because I have always loved wild-flowers and trees I was passionate about learning their names as a child, and I’m pleased to say I can still name most of them even when they’re not in flower. I learned to Look, really look, and I treasure that. I’m not sure if that counts as an ‘interesting fact’ but as I haven’t gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel it will have to do!
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.
Spotlight Poet #38 is the excellent Amara Amaryah. Amara is a poet and travel writer of Jamaican descent, born in London. Her writing is interested in generational traditions, voice, spirit and black womanhood. She has been longlisted for the Women Poets’ Prize (2020) and her poetry can be found published in Under the Radar magazine, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, the Hippodrome Young Poet’s anthology and translated in the Colombian publication Arcadia. Amara has performed her poetry both nationally and internationally. The Opposite of an Exodus is her debut pamphlet.
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.
Spotlight Poet #37 is the brilliant Stuart McPherson. Stuart is a poet from Leicester in the United Kingdom. His work has appeared in online journals and anthologies, including Beir Bua Journal, After the Pause and Selcouth Station. His debut pamphlet ‘Water Bearer’ will be published in December 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. His work tends to explore the impact of family dysfunction and trauma upon ‘norms’ of masculinity and encourages a more open dialogue and openness around this challenging subject. He has also been known to write the odd cat poem from time to time.
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
Spotlight Poet #36 is the irrepressible Anna Saunders. Anna has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North, ‘a modern myth maker’ by Paul Stephenson, and Tears in the Fence said of her ‘Anna Saunders’ poetry is reminiscent of Plath – with all its alpha achievement and radiance’. The author of six collections, Anna’s new book is Feverfew. (Indigo Dreams 2021). The collection has been described as ‘rich with obsession, sensuousness and potency’ by Ben Ray, and ‘a beautiful and necessary collection’ by Penny Shuttle. She is also the Executive Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival and works as a creative writing tutor and mentor, communications specialist, journalist, broadcaster and copywriter/editor.
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.
Spotlight Poet #32 is the brilliant Sue Finch. Sue was born in Kent and now lives with her wife in North Wales. She likes all kinds of coasts, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. Her first collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in Autumn 2020 with Black Eyes Publishing UK. Georgi Gill describes Sue’s work as having “the ability to beguile and shock”. Helen Ivory says Sue’s poems are “tender and straight talking yet can catch you off-guard with their slanted pathways” and Anna Saunders comments on Sue’s “fiercely original vision of the world”.
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)
Collections/pamphlets titles: A Poultry Lover’s Guide to Poetry (Indigo Dreams 2015)
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.
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.
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.
Spotlight Poet #27 is the enigmatic Simon Maddrell.Simon Maddrell was born in the Isle of Man in 1965, brought up in Bolton, lived in London for twenty years and then moved to Brighton & Hove in Feb. 2020.Simon writes through the lens of a queer Manx man, thriving with HIV.In 2020, Simon was first runner-up in the Frogmore Poetry Prize. His debut chapbook, Throatbone (UnCollected Press) was longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards. Simon also appeared in The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2019 (Black Mountain Press).Queerfella was Joint Winner in The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition, 2020 and will be published in December.
Collections/pamphlets titles: Throatbone (UnCollected Press, July 2020); Queerfella (The Rialto, Dec. 2020)
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
Spotlight Poet #25 is the excellent Julie Stevens. Julie has Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and used to be a teacher and successful athlete. Her poems tend to reflect the impact MS has on her life, as well as other topics close to her heart. She writes for both adults and children. Her poems have been published in various magazines, most recently The Honest Ulsterman, Dodging the Rain and Dreich. Her debut chapbook, Quicksand, came second in the Dreich Chapbook Competition 2020 and was subsequetly published. Her poem 'If I Can’t' was a winning poem in Bespoke Verse’s poetry competition in association with National Poetry Day 2019. www.jumpingjulespoetry.com
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.
Hometown: Kingston upon Thames
Pamphlet: A Dovetail of Breath
What are you currently working on? I’m developing a couple of new pamphlets, which
might come together as a collection or might stand alone - it’s all quite fluid at the moment.
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.]
Spotlight Poet #22 is the fantastic Arun Jeetoo. Arun is a poet and educator from Enfield, North London. He is a wanderer and a compassionate soul, known for his dirty realism style, provocative imagery, and dark humour. His work appears in The London Reader and LUMIN Journal amongst numerous print and online magazines across the world. His poetry received second place in the John Hopkins Prize (2016) and was shortlisted for the Erbacce Prize (2020). His debut pamphlet I Want to Be the One You Think About at Night published from Waterloo Press is on sale right now. He tweets @G2poetry and Instagrams @g2poetry.
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.
Name: Briony Hughes
Hometown: Ipplepen, Devon
Collections/pamphlets titles: Dorothy (Broken Sleep Books), Microsporidial (Sampson Low)
What are you currently working on?
I am currently developing a series of object poems which address the 1940s and 50s testing of nuclear weaponry at the Bikini Atoll, alongside the design of the bikini swimsuit, and the 2015 development of a ‘pollution absorbing’ bikini. Within the poem, found language linkingto each of these moments is in freefall, suspended in water and subject to chance encounters, collisions, disruptions, and reverberations.
Who would you say has had the biggest influence on your work and why?
It would be criminal to not mention Redell Olsen in response to this question. Dell led the lectures in the ‘Introduction to Poetry’ course during the first year of my BA. Fast-forward four years and Dell led my MA in Poetic Practice and is now my current doctoral supervisor. She has been such a wonderful and generous mentor, teacher, and friend, and has helped me to develop my writing and creative practice in so many unexpected ways. Check out some of her collections! Film Poems (Les Figues), Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel (Sub Press).
If you could take one collection with you to a desert island, what would it be?
Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow)
What advice would you give to your young poetself?
Ignore the rules. Tear the rules down, open yourself up to different possibilities and don’t be afraid to experiment (in every sense of the word). Find the small presses. Find the indie presses. Engage with presses which champion all voices. Write and find a community and write some more. Throw rhyme out of the window and do something different. Language is fun.
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
Spotlight Poet #20 is the excellent Clint Wastling. Clint’s poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies like Blue Nib, Dream Catcher, Orbis and Dreich. His novel, The Geology of Desire, is an LGBTQ thriller set around Whitby in the 1980’s and Hull during World War II. He also has a sci-fi novel: Tyrants Rex set 3000 years in the future, both are published by Stairwell Books. Clint has worked with composers as part of Leeds Lieder Festival and toured his one man show, The Poet as a Geologist.
What are you currently working on? I’m working on a series of poems charting the River Hull from its source to meeting the Humber at the city of Hull. My family farmed in the area for many generations, so it’s not just about landscape. There’s also the edits on the next draft of my novel Stalin’s Bear to do and a publisher to find!
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
Spotlight Poet #16 is the fabulous Richy Campbell. Richy is a writer based in Manchester. With language, he wishes to capture noticeable detail, dream-like apparitions and the idiosyncrasies of human beings. He has performed his work at the Poetry Cafe in London, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, and Huddersfield Literature Festival. In January 2020, his first collection of poetry, Lovely Peripheries, was published by Live Canon. In addition to his own literary pursuits, he co-edits Sideways poetry magazine. He exists digitally on Twitter (@richyacampbell) and Instagram (@lovelyperipheries).
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.
Spotlight Poet #15 is the brillant Liam Bates. Liam is a poet originally from the Black Country, currently living in Birmingham. He’s been published in some places and not published in most places.
(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.
Collection/ pamphlet’s title: Circling the Sun (2018), Memory Forest (2019)
What are you currently working on? Promoting my debut full collection, Venus in Pink Marble, due for release from the Hedgehog Poetry Press 8th September 2020. As I have a 9 to 5 job, I have limited time and I can’t always find the time to write. I would love to say I was working on my next collection, but alas…
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.
Spotlight Poet #13 is the amazing Sunita Thind. Sunita is a British, Punjabi published poet with two published collections of multicultural poetry. She is a performance poet as well as Secondary English, History and Primary school teacher and workshop facilitator. She uses her poetry as a medium to voice important issues that woman have to deal with, such as mental health, equality, cultural and social injustice, racism as well as achievements. She has suffered from depression, PTSD, GAD, anxiety and paranoia throughout my life as well as having Ovarian Cancer twice. She is a BAME, female, Punjabi, Malaysian, British writer, qualified Make Up Artist and model and writer. She is also an advocate for Ovarian Cancer and have fundraised or charities and completed charity fashion shows and she has been covered by BBC East Midlands, BBC Radio Derby, BBC Asian Network, Mirror, The Daily Express, Eastern Eye Magazine, Huffington Post and Macmillian Cancer Support as a media volunteer.
Pamphlet’s title: The Barging Buddhi And Other Poems (Black Pear Press) The Coconut Girl (Wild Pressed Books - Upcoming in November)
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.
Spotlight Poet #12 is the tidal wave of brilliance that is Serge ♆ Neptune.Serge ♆ Neptune has been called ‘the little merman of British poetry’. His first pamphlet is 'These Queer Merboys' published with Broken Sleep. His work has appeared in Lighthouse, Banshee, Brittle Star and elsewhere. He is the creator and host of poetry broadcast 'Neptune's Glitter House for WayWard Poets'.
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.
Spotlight Poet #8 is the brilliant James Roome. James is a poet and English teacher from Manchester, UK. His first pamphlet, Bull, was published in April 2019 by The Red Ceilings Press. Recent work has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Anthropocene and Iamb.
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
Suddenly, six months later in the steam
of scalding water in the bath,
my abdomen contracts
as if with birth
and I let out a cry—more a howl.
You were the wolf
and I would have sold my grandmother.
You ate me,
then cut open your own stomach
and wrenched me out.
There I am,
that bloody dissolved mess on the floor.
There I am, that stain lying
like a dead foetus
and you have sewn shut your stomach,
clamped shut your mouth.
What use is being sated to a wolf,
what use is a full stomach
to one accustomed to tearing flesh with teeth?
I wrote you this poem
in the steam of gushing water.
I bathed you like my own infant,
with these hands I poured
water over you parted
your lips where you lay injured;
of what I made with my own hands,
you ate.
I ball this poem in my fist,
it becomes a brick and shatters
through veiled glass into shards.
The mirror above your hearth now
a glinting mosaic on your living room
floor your daughter dances across
slicing her fleshy feet
trailing blood to daddy.
Such mess and outside air
in the centre of your home.
When you tend her cut soles,
gripping fragments of glass to extract
from her feet & drop into your hand,
bloodied canines lie in your palm
and you tongue your empty roots.
You can find Arji's work over on his website at www.arji.org
Incident
from Her Lost Language
The late spring snow
catches us off-guard,
drifts against the henhouse wall,
blots out the distant fells.
And here, in this borrowed house,
we watch, transfixed,
brave the blizzard
to throw scraps for the birds,
half-wishing it could always be like this.
Just you and I
at the kitchen table—
a dog-eared novel,
the weekend papers,
the last bottle of wine
waiting on the shelf
until the sheep are fed.
Yet we know
the snow will thaw by morning,
and we’ll drive down the lane
for bread and logs,
ice-melt from the trees
pattering on the bonnet.
Then, too soon,
the workday grind will call us back
from this adopted life
to the small house in the town,
where everything is a little less bright
and a little less kind.
As we leave,
the weather will change again,
the brilliant shine of it
making us smile,
and I’ll point out a newborn lamb,
his pink ears backlit by the sun,
as he watches us drive away.
Woman of the failed state
Woman in your failed state
With wrists warm as sepia
Burnt sage between your lips
Woman your thighs speckled
As slender as communion bread
One century from today, you’ll dine
On offal gnocchi, sip on honeyed wine
Fennel seeds will perfume your breath
From your lobes two opals will hang
There is no heaven, no haven
Only retreat from that elm-ringed brook
Where the stream ran warm like bathwater
And for now no thigh to rest your cheek
For now, no sanctuary bar his iris
Friday for our funerals rites—else, a pyre
A day where it rains enough to soak the veil
Where the ground forgives, aids the spade
Somewhere the earthworms have forsaken
And I’ll see twelve girls spread on marble
And you, Woman, read the prayer cast
on the underside of all our eyelids:
Pluck
From my breast the rib You loaned. Pluck from
My breast the rib You loaned. Pluck from my
Breast the rib You loaned. Pluck from my breast
The rib—