Category: Poetry

Three poems by Sarah Barr

A LITTLE PERSONAL ETERNITY

The house dreams of white doves on its roof,

remembers a time of coal fires in hearths,

old people in cotton hats under apple trees,

a girl who yanks open sash windows,

shouts, and acts funny plays on the terrace.

The house, too, longs to be an actor.

At night, it sinks deeper into itself –

shifting to clay, trees, slate, and water.

The girl dreams of flying from a bridge

over a ruined house she once saw

as she walked her dog across the moors.

A few atoms in her cells remember

a time before houses, birds, and even earth

as she spins dreaming into space, the universe.

PRAWN COCKTAIL

She’d heard enough of the argument and how

whether frozen, fresh or shelled, it was

impossible to find a succulent prawn.

Now they were tangled in chopped lettuce.

She couldn’t resist dipping her finger in

to suck the sweet Marie-Rose sauce.

Like a jilted girlfriend or abandoned baby,

an extra prawn hung over the rim

of each glass bowl on its skinny stem.

Her mother said the dinner would be a disaster,

Chicken Kiev with its whiff of ‘The Spy Who

Came in From the Cold’ gave the wrong message

and the Gateau Mont Blanc reminded her

of the time he went away on business.

‘Business?’ her mother screamed along the landing.

There was a ring-ring at the door,

and she wondered if they’d stop shouting upstairs.

She took each prawn from its perch and swallowed –

they were salty, plump and a little crunchy –

just as her mother appeared smiling, and wearing

stiletto heels and a green satin dress.

CHRISTMAS, 2020

The leaning apple tree

is still as high

as the upstairs window.

Saved from the builders,

now it repays

with sharp, unnamed fruit

we pick with claw and net

on a long pole.

A woodpecker delves

into the crumbling trunk.

Unless we remember to tie

round the green band

moth caterpillars crawl up

to gorge themselves.

On summer nights

apples thud an erratic beat

on grass and stone.

A dark shadow keeps growing

and sucking the branches.

We were going to pull down

the clump but there seemed

little point in mistletoe

in the hall this Christmas.

If the tree falls

we’ll chop its wood

to warm us in the cold.

How to feel a sense of relief and/or joy when you are stuck in a small flat and unable to go anywhere, see anyone or doing anything interesting

By George Parker

Let a house plant with little leaves dehydrate then water it very gently. Stand close and breathe out slowly through your mouth. Watch how it trembles.

Call someone you don’t want to talk to but should. At a time that you hope they won’t answer. Count seven rings and then hang up. Quickly.

Find a recording of wood pigeons on the internet. Curl up comfortably with a view of roof and sky and listen to them coo. Make the shape with your lips.

Take a pillow and blanket and place them on your kitchen floor. Lie down, wrap yourself in them and look up at how big and spacious the room seems.

Use a felt tip pen to draw a picture of people on the wall with your eyes closed. Place a little red sticker next to your artwork to show that it has been bought.

Pick up a tangle of something that seems impossible to untie. Do not put it down until every knot is undone. As you pull apart the last one, mutter, “That’s the way to do it”.

Strain to read a good book as the light fades. Wait until it is nearly dark, and the page is brown, letters blurred. Turn on a small lamp near your shoulder.

The Green Devil

                        three carbon-neutral poems by Noah Birksted-Breen

Listen: Running commentary 

(performance poetry)

I run around Hackney Marshes

on 19th October 2020

reading Arne Naess’ “Life and Reason in a Deeper World”

No comment

I always like to do what I cannot do.

Trees do not talk.

Rivers do not talk.

Stones do not talk.

I always like to do what I cannot Tree.

Do do not talk.

Rivers do not do.

Stones do do talk.

I always like to do what Rivers cannot Tree.

Do do I talk.

I do not do.

Stones do do I.

Stones always like to do what Rivers cannot Tree.

The Green Devil

     We need a walkable human,

     walkable settlements.

     From Space,

     Mineral aquamarines and ochres.

     Tailings ponds,

     “Maybe a small nuclear reactor would be best?”

     “Roses will bloom.”

     Indium, neodymium, lithium,

     Steel, silver, copper.

     Oily coined term: “climate change,

     solution, solution, solution, solution,

     growth.”

     Rare-earth, a

     “high-capacity” dying empire,

     black hole, no light,

     “planet-spanning stuff”,

     Decade Zero.

     Death villages will fruit cancer.

     Superstition was insisting upon

     a “radical Revolution”.

     In pursuit of a lifeless, weatherless sky,

     “Lop off one head of the hydra”.

     Face another.

(Found text from Jasper Berne’s ‘Between the Devil and the Green New Deal’ https://communemag.com/between-the-devil-and-the-green-new-deal/)

Val Whitlock reading Fissure

Fissure         

by Val Whitlock            

If you could slit the black, sucked-in skin,

you’d find her there, alone in a chasmic closet.

On such a winter’s day it’s full of all the leaves.

They are red and yellow and green and brown

and titian and bronze and ochre and peach

and amber and olive and ecru and fawn

and copper and gold and chocolate and beige

and sorrel and henna and hazel and rust

and auburn and ginger and russet and tan

and tawny and nut and umber and orange

and desolate blue

< 

She’s a Matryoshka Prune-Shaped Tardis doll.

Who would risk it?

Turning the tops, pulling them off

one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by

The fear of finding never-ending

Pain

too hard to bear

Yours or mine?

< 

It’s a fat-suit, Klomp-hard, and she’s crammed inside.                     

No give. No flex. No blooming space.

‘Let me out’, she screams in the bleak

‘Can’t you see me in here?’

But after all these years, she’s virtually invisible.

<

Matryoshka. ‘Little matron’. Mater. Mother.

A fertility doll.

And all the dolls are her children. Holding hands across kin and clans.

Keep holding tight, my love.

<

All those Matryoshka tops

Peeling peeling peeling peeling

But even so, who can ever really

know?

< 

When she steps outside the Prune-Shaped Tardis she’s like a colander.

And sticking a finger in a hole in a dyke won’t stop it caving in.  

Try to fill the titanic void. Plug up unpluggable holes.

<

When

Why don’t you get this?

feels like

why don’t you get this?

< 

A prune is what’s left.

A handy thing to call upon. For the odd occasion when you need that quick remedy.

Though never a sugar plum fairy.

No comfit.

For her. The dried out. The withered.

The absence of flourish.

<

Prune. Never sugar coats it. Speaks its mind.

The yearn to expunge. And to cleanse.

<

But you can’t put new wine in old wineskins

And the ache to shed a skin. To step outside of it all and start over

< 

and inside the Prune-Shaped Tardis, she wonders if she really exists

< 

Slice the shrivelled Prune-Shaped Tardis skin

interior            spherical          photo-backdrop white

lightless    weightless    erstwhile      

and centre-slapped

a slopped scribble

a mooning human doodle

she’s not really this screwed up

she’s just drawn that way

< 

Oval Matryoshka

Ova-less Prune-shaped Tardis

<

Where are you all, you figurine family?

<

There they all are. Lined up in a row.

And here we go again. Pulling off tops.

Nothing inside

Nothing inside

Nothing inside

Nothing inside

Nothing inside

Two pills

Do you do it?

Or pin your hope on that last, tiny doll.

Unopenable.

Which?                                           

< 

Lucky seven

or seven ages

end to end

this tender night

give me a child  

until she is seven

tiny and exquisitely chiselled

and each one that follows

is fashioned around it precisely

the same apart from its greater

size and outward embellishment

as if with the finest

of brush strokes

Sunday’s Child

on Wednesday

<

Woodentop

she is lumber, shelved

she gazes out from paint-glazed eyes  

gathers herself for the cursory feather dusting.                                 

‘I am all hollow,’

her dark insides yowl.

‘Knock would you                  

knock on my temple block

random rhythmic blurts  

make me reel                                                                                     

drill will you

drill fine deep holes

in my ocarina head

blow blow you winter gale

fill me, balloon me, smithereen me

make me feel

very very

breathe me some euphony                                                                           

from these cinders’

<

she puts on her uniform

ornate and vividly patterned,

glossy, jaunty,

people meet her in the crowd

jovial, smiling

and have no clue

<

Once it was so vast inside it was stacked with possibilities.

Prospects. Options.

Rocket Boots.

Lewis Buxton reading Boy in Various Poses

A Boy Runs 

                 out of his lungs like they are a coat held by a parent at a school gate. The world around him is closing, the shops pulling down shutters as he turns into a cemetery where his heels push the dead further into their graves. He feels his weight on the ankle that crumpled beneath him months ago. He didn’t listen to the physio or do the exercises she gave him. He hoped he would heal himself, that in deepening the wound he would make it more heroic, grow back into the bruised ligaments till his breathing is a spooked horse again. Spittle rattles from his cheeks, the bit between his teeth worn away by worrying, the whip of a hundred fathers keeping him going, going, going.

Boy in Various Poses

The boy is an orange, an apple, a banana, a portrait by one of the Dutch masters, his armpit, a water lily, his dick, the sunflowers. He tries not to move so his twitch won’t break someone’s line. His back is arched so he won’t look so fat, so the light won’t catch his acne scars. They asked him to keep his shoes on, black leather boots beneath a body scuffed by living. He can’t see the sketches but feels the paint slipping down the stretch-marked canvas like beads of sweat from his temple. He feels himself up on the easel, cross legged & naked, his spit turned to acrylic, his peach soft skin, arsehole pink & dark as the pip.

A Boy Does a Magic Trick

            appears in a black suit & striped collared shirt, a new tie & shows the crowd his empty palms. There are doves in his pockets and aces up his sleeves. A rabbit quivers inside the hat of his heart. Boys know sleight of hand so people are always looking somewhere else as their houses of cards fall apart: pick a card, any card this boy says, vanishing into his own head, folding his fingers together like iron rings failing to escape the box he has locked himself in, and being dumped into the Thames. He is gasping but is so magic that no one comes to help him.

A week in a day

by Anna Kirwin

Promise explodes from her gossamer wings as she crosses the threshold. Under the gaze of none but the cockroaches, clicking and clacking across the torn lino, she releases a commonplace flutter of ordinary plans for a future unconsidered. In this unsullied opportunity for such a hollow vessel, unblemished by thinking and weighty with confidence, she knows to stay light. Beyond our demands for beauty, little is asked and less performed. Her wings flutter unhindered, still transparent, still unreachable, and we gaze, transfixed by symmetrical hypnosis.

She is not the sum of two halves, but a half repeated. In this demi-world of possibility, she thrives, twice of the half that she is. But a controlled half is far from a dangerous thing, they think, and let her fly free. Young for the old guard, she is welcomed by the admirals and with their desire, not to mould her in the vision of themselves, but to follow and nod and follow and nod, so she flies just like a child: unrestricted, unrestrained, unreliable. She feigns experience and expertise, keen to prove a point about herself.  Unaware of the pitfalls of the pack, the turbulence of the ripples of air which push randomly across her path trouble her.  She only thinks she has the sense of age. Her wings heave.

Up, she ascends, surrounded by the troupe, at heights too lofty for her to breathe. Birds circle, but the threat comes to nothing. Beauty encourages confidence over competence. She copies the frogs. She mimics the spiders. But repetition doesn’t build empires.

The flutter can’t flutter together forever. Pandemonium reigns in the chaos of nature. First one, then another disappears. It’s easy to be beautiful when you’re the only one left.

Change has come to her now too. As she transforms, her wings recede, just tiny little secrets, tucked in, hidden. Her features collapse into discs which collapse into caterpillar soup. Retracting her skin, reducing her food, she tips over on her twig and, shedding the leaves upon which she had feasted to plump herself strong, she rolls herself back into her silky cocoon, folds back into the egg and shrinks into a larva.

Yusti Herrera reading ‘Borrowed Home’

Three poems by Michelle Penn

‘Flight of the dandelion’ a poetry film by Meng Qiu

Samuel Coe reading ‘Is There Such a Thing as a Native Bird?’