It was the day after my second miscarriage. We stood in a queue for fish and chips. I didn’t feel like cooking. I didn’t feel like doing anything.
Two women ahead of us were deep in conversation: ‘She’s getting a cot from my sister, clothes from Jane’, ‘What a chubby little boy…’ his weight, his date, his toes. How friends rally to a birth.
I thought, how easy for some to drop a sprog, of all our preparations, discussions of names, trips to Mothercare. All that excitement turned into silence and I-don’t-know-what-to-say looks.
Outside we walked between parked cars loathing the Baby on Board bumper-stickers.
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Sue Spiers lives in Hampshire and works with Winchester Poetry Festival and the Open University Poetry Society. Her poems have been published in 14, Acumen, Fenland Poetry Journal and Stand, and on-line at Ink, Sweat & Tears. Sue tweets @spiropoetry.
It’s Tuesday. The big match The Whirlpool engineer glazes over For dinner, something pre-made, easy to heat through rips in the centre of the soup plate
You really gotta try the raspberry volcanic from the nonlinear past where food is presented on the laziest Susan Shirt tail/syntax/unbreakable chain
The Vegas quadrant in Morecambe Bay an opulent public space Back in the nineties, this whole area was a theme park with a theme of an unsightly Red-eyed Hamburglar or a Funny Fry friend from a frieze
Rides have astral/fairyland names like Vespertine and Nebula You remember how Olaf had a star named for him once
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You know who else was here? Elsie. Elsie was here in a brick red shade of lipstick the ghost of her kiss blotted on tissue
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Zoë Ranson is a writer and performer from Hackney, via Walton-on-the-Naze. She makes work from micro to epic, sometimes for the stage. @zooeyr @tentative_line
and I recognise that today is a bruised sky blue and purple day: everything readying itself, steadying itself, tasting the turn in the air. Squirrels attack me on my lunchbreak: scale my legs and dive head first into my Pret paper bag and I cannot even pretend to be annoyed: they are so unapologetically sure that I am here to sustain them, so gleefully confident they won’t be harmed. I recognise the date and I want to say that the weather, the sky, the wildlife; that they were all exactly like this – except of course I don’t remember the weather. I don’t even remember the time of day. All I know is that they told me it had happened and that for hours and hours I pretended that it hadn’t: assumed there must have been some ludicrous, laughable mistake. My brain is so good at saying oh, no thank you, not today: it makes everything slippery and lilting and diluted. Even now I can stand in bubbling light and mud and rose green amber splendour, five, no six, no seven years on, covered in fearless squirrels, a nudging ocean of pigeons at my feet, and wonder what you might be up to this weekend: decide I should check in, give you a call, tell you about these squirrels.
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Becki Hawkes lives in London, loves being outside and butterflies, and has poems published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Shore, Rust + Moth, Brittle Star and Perhappened, among others. Her first pamphlet is published next year by Survision Books. Her Twitter is @BeckiH_678.
Our featured publication for January and February is Erased by James McDermott, published by Polari Press.
“Erased deploys found and erasure poetry to answer back to decades of censorship and homophobia. Removing ‘not’ from Section 28 legislation makes it a riot of celebration; the pluralised UK national anthem, an invocation to ‘save the queens’. Through selecting and reversioning these texts, we see that ultimately, in the witty words of Pride placards, “love is/power/love wins” Caleb Parkin
“McDermott’s new pamphlet quivers with political tension and confirms him as a vital voice of queer British poetry. McDermott changes the narrative of homophobic documents, revisits their language and moulds it into a glittery powersong of wonder and unashamedly queer joy. ‘God save our gracious queens’ indeed” Serge ♆ Neptune
“Erased is a crystallised gem of a collection. Emotive, evocative, and ingenious. Using central conceit that keeps on delivering, James McDermott has uncovered something truly special, an iridescent revision of the canon and our received wisdoms” Rick Dove
“Erased is an act of reclamation and fabulous impudence. The whole pamphlet empowers and validates” Simon Maddrell
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NOTICE
after Al Parker Productions Gay Porn Video Intro Guidance
the following is being presented as a visual fantasy as a viable alternative to actual sexual contact
some of the precautions taken by the producers in the preparation of this fantasy have been visually omitted for editorial considerations
this is intended for viewing by a special and limited audience namely adults who request and desire material for their information education and entertainment
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GENESIS 9: 12-13 after God
and god said this is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you a covenant for all generations to come I have set my rainbow in the clouds and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth
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LGBTQ PROTEST SLOGANS after Pride protest slogans
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James McDermott’s spoken word collection ‘Manatomy’, published by Burning Eye, was longlisted for Polari’s First Book Prize 2021. James’s pamphlet ‘Erased’ is published by Polari Press. Their poems have been widely published in magazines including Poetry Wales, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Cardiff Review, York Literary Review, Popshot Quarterly & Atrium. James was shortlisted for Outspoken’s Poetry Prize 2020 in the Performance Category and has been Commended in the Verve Poetry Competition, Winchester Poetry Prize & York Poetry Prize. As a playwright, their plays published by Samuel French include ‘Rubber Ring’ (Pleasance Islington) and ‘Time & Tide’ (Park Theatre). James is also a writer on EastEnders. Follow James on Twitter at jamesliammcd and on Instagram at jamesmcdermott1993. Visit their web site to read more about them and their work here: https://jamesmcdermottwriter.weebly.com
Signed copies of Erased are available to purchase from James McDermott’s website.
I see them as they really are bright pink and slick-clean when, in the start-light, they come to me, choose their veneers for the shine-time. I display their selections in my silver-side; she decides herself, always so well finished, but he needs both our help.
I tend to them faithfully, always ready, not like that upstart, bed, lying around, neither providing nor holding a thing, until they give-up, in the dark-time, go pale and shivering to that lay-about; though sometimes I hear them gasp and moan like they never do with me their treasured veneers tossed to the floor.
But I know they love me, they spray sweet-scent, massage my sides until I gleam. It is me they trust with memories kept in a box at my top, though the lid stays closed.
Sometimes children visit and play inside me; they know me better than I do, find whole worlds in the back of me, their laughter echoing in my chest.
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David Thompson is a poet from Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire. His work has featured or is upcoming in Magma, Orbis, The Cannon’s Mouth, The Seventh Quarry and New Contexts: 1 (Coverstory Books, 2021).
Step warily my dear, on slippery earth-paths that thread uphill past ivied trunks away from a world of dull-crack gunshot and quadbike roar. Lift your head instead to light that catches silver on hazel bark.
If, my dear, you find yourself wire-barred – backtrack down, bottom-slide, clutch each handhold branch offered by soft-eyed strangers.
Learn, my friend, to avoid the glisten of sticky opinion. If its mire sucks you in, wave your wing tips and let the pull of air-tides uplift you all the way to the hillfort crown.
Rest there, my love, on an old horse-trough. Gaze at dainty deer track by your feet, scrutinise badger sgraffito. Listen to rook chatter and feel your body fizz. Now you are human-imal, mudful of mind.
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Rachael Clyne’s collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams), concerns our relationship with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (www.4word.org) explores her migrant heritage and sense of otherness. She is currently expanding this work into a collection.
It’s Christmas morning and his face is a stale balloon. His brined eyes seek something beyond this house. And her, in Care Bear pyjamas clutching the Sindy horse and carriage in its pink and white box, her eyes wide as mushrooms. She leans to him the way children make lions of the fathers they have. Let me reach in and shift his weight to the wall. Let me fold her like paper into the dolls’ house and tell its scaly feet to run deep deep into the Baba Yaga’s forest.
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Abigail Flint is a heritage researcher from Sheffield. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in a range of magazines including Under the Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears, Reliquiae, Popshot Quarterly, About Larkin, 192 magazine, and research project anthologies. Twitter: @constantunusual
Vincent is Captain America only the zip on his back is missing revealing a five-year-old’s spine and not our superhero. He does not care one little bit as he flies constantly waiting for me to growl, frighten him, but not too much. I pull an evil face (easy for me), he dives away. I shout louder, his head almost spins off its axis. When it is time for me to go, he follows on his scooter – we both agree it’s really a time machine.
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Tom Kelly is a north-east of England writer. He has had eleven books of poetry, short stories and a play published in as many years. His new collection THIS SMALL PATCH has recently re-printed by Red Squirrel Press. https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/product-page/this-small-patch-tom-kelly
Mouse-eared into tight corners, smalled into holes lined with abandoned wishbones, it took time to learn the skreels were my own. He did not seem to hear them, or realise that behind skirting boards, there were tunnels gnawed into being when the house was asleep. He still walks through the rooms he opened to the public, but the real work is behind the scenes, deep in the foundations or under layers of old wallpaper that is no longer replaceable. I have chewed it all, made nests for impossible futures, conceived them when he was unaware how my wildness still lived under floorboards, in cavities in the walls.
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Hannah Linden is published widely including or upcoming in Atrium, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Prole, Proletarian Poetry, Stand, The Interpreters’ House, Under the Radar and the 84 Anthology etc. She is working towards her first collection. Twitter: @hannahl1n
Somewhere beneath that listening ridge the winds are gossiping again, in tongues beyond the most vague and coarse translation.
A breezy sonic-catalogue of air let loose, wheezes up behind walkers staggering up the slopes, outroaring the M5 at every step
Until the top with banks now bare again, fit for prehistoric sentries to cast their eyes across the stretching flats, Land Yeo wriggling
Off towards the estuary’s greyed-out islands, Wales industrious over fast brown waves, not quite yet the sea, still almost as strange.
It is a chafing edge of sorts, rabbits racing over grass towards the woods, not waiting to witness other beings cloud over the horizon.
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Matt Gilbert is a freelance copywriter and blogger at richlyevocative.net. Originally from Bristol, he currently gets his fill of urban hills in south east London. He’s had poems published by Anthropocene, Black Bough and Green Ink, amongst others. Twitter @richlyevocative
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