Tag: Poetry

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.

 

Anna Kirwin is a writer and artist, living in London, but dreaming of the Arctic. Her last published piece explored the strange glow of European cities by night, but more generally, her recent work deals with language, thought and time. She sees light in the darkness.

 

Yusti Herrera reading ‘Borrowed Home’

Three poems by Michelle Penn

 

Pastoral

after Dorothea Tanning

 

 

birds haunt the train tracks

 

                        and the doors beyond doors

 

urban birds, a necklace worn by trees that haven’t yet been slashed back,

while the ones that have stand sheepishly, apologising

for all that sky exposed

 

                           spray-painted on a wall in red: FRESH

 

                           spray-painted on a wall in green: EAT DA RICH

 

the twitter-birds and big storks know how to tease

 

a door opens to a book, you wear a paper dress, stare into a mirror

               that’s a sunflower

                                       a frenzy

                                                   a frame of rage 

 

                           something thin pushes into morning

 

faith creeping from its field, leaking its words in scraps

 

 

newsreader \ sibyl

 

hands \ hands \ my hands \ slashing

air to symbol \ shuddering invisible words \

the gods \ riding my lips \ as river \

 

how do you dress \ a vessel \ i wear

no scent \ carry \ the stink \ of prophecy \

wrap myself \ in stolen cloth \ the stammers \

of a savage \

 

people \ dip their eyes \ pass in fear \

in awe \ as though this messenger \ makes

her message \ as though flowers \ don’t

revolt me \ with decay \

 

someday \ every memory \ will be drowned \

this place \ will be my sole name \ i will sleep \

while priests \ read my riddles \ the gods \

work up \ new and more terrible \ thirsts

 

 

 

the gift

 

the ladder-god hands me a cherry

says it’s an apple

assures me it’s been an apple

all along

 

all signs

point cherry

the swollen bulb of it

dark heart

planet in my palm

 

the ladder-god says, apple

 

rungs hover in air

 

I bite through the cherry

to prove I’m right

my chin drips with juice

 

the ladder-god says, apple

 

the garden turns to pulp

 

---

Michelle Penn’s debut pamphlet, Self-portrait as a diviner, failing (2018), won the Paper Swans Prize. Recent poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Nimrod, B O D Y, 192 and Poetry Birmingham. New work is forthcoming in Perverse, Stand and the visual poetry anthology, The Mouth of a Lion. Michelle plans innovative poetry/art/music events in London as part of Corrupted Poetry. She’s also a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. michellepennwriter.com

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

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

Megan Pattie reading ‘Mi O Vuku’

 

---

Lucy Cundill is a poet and prose fiction writer from Chesterfield, now living in Norwich, where she studies English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has been published in The Writers’ Café Magazine, Full House Literary Magazine, Concrete, the Life Lines zine, and the UEA Undergraduate Creative Writing Anthology. Her work can be found @ futile.devicez on Instagram.

clare e. potter reading ‘Losing My Grip’

Robert Sheppard reading ‘Flight Risk’

but there are fossils in language too

 

when we talk about

ourselves post breakup

why do we preserve our

exceptionalism? why

do we crave pity to fill us

like the blue in the wings of

the jewel beetle at messel pit?

 

at messel pit

lost animals remain.

we see history

and say ‘wow

look’ ‘what do

you know’ ‘I wish I’d

discovered that’

 

at messel pit there is fur on some of the fossils

a snapshot of a lost world.

nostalgia is blue but also rose-

tinted memories of the best times

‘oh why oh why do

things have to die’ change,

die again. skin shadows on fossil.

 

on the surface, the mud is neutral.

clean clay. spade.

how do we know where to dig?

under the surface, mud is truth.

 

Kayleigh Cassidy is a dyslexic writer, comedian and visual artist who studied Creative Writing at Birkbeck. She was long listed for the MIR Folktale competition and is a writer and performer in How to survive Your Life podcast. Her writing and collages have been published by TOKEN, Rollick and 3:am magazine as well as Ertoplasty and Visual Verse. Kayleigh likes walking and during lockdown has really got into jigsaw puzzles.