Noah is an environmental researcher. In 2019, he co-founded the Oxford Flyingless Group @oxford_policy, while also working on research about reducing academic flying at the School of Geography and the Environment (University of Oxford). He is now helping to organise the Carbon Neutrality Summit in Oxford, Milan and Berlin, 8-10 September 2021. Noah is currently completing the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. In 2019, he was the Hackney Winner of Spread the Word’s City of Stories competition. His creative non-fiction piece, Beef, was published by therealstory.org in 2020. He is Artistic Director of @sputniktheatre
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.
Val Whitlock is a writer, counsellor and musician. She has an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from the University of Birmingham, where she is currently a PhD candidate with a university doctoral scholarship. Her research involves writing a hybrid book which blurs boundaries between poetry, prose, fragments, and other forms. She is also the co-author of five internationally bestselling children’s books on singing, published by Boosey & Hawkes. She gets excited about guitars, books, Stephen Sondheim, and books. She can often be spotted loitering with her greyhound Casper.
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.
Born in 1993, Lewis Buxton is a poet, performer and arts producer. In 2020 he won the Winchester Poetry Prize. His first collection Boy in Various Poses will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2021. He lives in Norfolk.
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.
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
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.
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