Tag: Atrium Poetry

Self Guidance – Robin Lindsay Wilson

~ Claire Walker ~ Leave a comment

Self Guidance

fold your arms
on the desk
rest your head
and go to sleep

dream yourself clever
dream yourself good

dream yourself grown up
remembering this day
of shocks and tears
and bright red cheeks
this friendless day

when you waited it out
then looked at the sun

because it was forbidden
because it was impossible
because it was an idea
smiling and obvious

smiles will blind you
but ideas can heal

 

Robin is a lecturer in Acting and Performance at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. He has had work published in many UK literary journals and poetry magazines, including – Magma, Iota, The Rialto, South, Other Poetry, Dream Catcher, The Interpreter’s House, Brittle Star, The Edinburgh Review, Chapman and Envoi. He has had three collections of poetry published by Cinnamon Press, Wales. The titles are – ‘Ready Made Bouquets’ (2007), ‘Myself and Other Strangers’ (2015) and ‘Backstage in Paradise’ (2019).

Cohabitat – Hilary Watson

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Cohabitat

The flat below is rented out to angels
who pass us in the hallway, quickstep
down the stairs to fetch up wine crates
overfilled with books: The Cuckoo’s Egg,
Critical Path, The Unseen Hand. They shift
furniture at night, slap each other’s flesh,
whistling the kettle, guffaw like riled chimps
at Friends. Their incense haunts the corridor
with feathers lost from duvets until the call
to move again. We’ll force the lock to check
for char or shrine or scrap or monument.

 

Hilary Watson lives in S Wales. She has recently been published in The Interpreter’s House, Butcher’s Dog, Impossible Archetype and The Emma Press Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse. She loves dogs & beautiful bookshops @poetryhilary http://www.hilarywatson.co.uk

 

 

Featured Publication – apple, fallen by Olga Dermott-Bond

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Our featured publication for May is apple, fallen by Olga Dermott-Bond, published by Against the Grain Poetry Press.

‘Olga Dermott- Bond’s superb poems make their way towards searing emotion via craft,
detailed observation and a kind of glittering acceptance that the world we have is the world we must write about and the job of the poet is to make art from the flawed things around us. These poems reward rereading and hang around in your mind, delivering phrases and lines back at you at unexpected times that turn out to be the times you need them most.’ Ian McMillan
‘Vivid and Powerful‘ Ana Sampson McLaughlin
olga5

 

apple, fallen

Her smile is waxed water, curved perfect and full.
Sleeping in grass-hush, she fits herself perfectly,
a wise moon dressed only in pearled skin and sugar.
She is open as a lake, offering a steady reflection to
gospelled branches above that sway love-heavy,
growing with all of her hope-laden daughters –

her smashed skull is a restless shattered crawling
of ferment, made only of wasps that cling to shrinking
edges. she is a cave of black static, her crabbed body
hollowed beyond blood. a boat silenced with dry land,
she has sunk her own tongue, devoured her eyes, cheeks,
swallowed the blameless sun. there is only this place –

………………………….turn me over before you ask how I am.

 

Toaster

Each Sunday morning
the bread would often get stuck
or launch itself high

across the kitchen
where dad would catch it, juggling
each flapping bird with

blackened wings. His dance
made us laugh. Tea, marmalade,
homemade jam, honey –

again and again
we would wait for its metalled
cough, to watch salmon

leaping through currents
of sun. I ate six slices
one weekend, enthralled

with how happiness
was the colour of butter,
best eaten hot. Toast.

I believed I could
save each tiny crumb of you,
thinking aged just four

that every Sunday
would stay like this, love landing
soft, the right way up.

Previously published in Ten Poems about Breakfast (Candlestick Press)

 

……………..Fionn courts Oonagh

……………..Harebell

The first time he came to see her after work
it had rained a misery of tales all day,
her mother’s kitchen shrunk, shrivelled at the thought
……………………………………………………………………..……of a visitor

his shoulders sleeping boats anchored deep beneath
an old raincoat, scarcely covering shyness
that she wanted to undress, mind skittering
………………………………………………..…like a leveret –

her book-learning left far from this equation,
cleverness something she was used to hiding,
conjugating verbs a witch’s trick she could
………………………………………perform in her sleep.

Daylight chased from the doorway he ducked under
she stood as sudden moonlight, wondering if
he would sweep all the plates of the table, lift
………………………………………….it clean with one hand –

instead he took harebells from his pocket,
purple-slight flowers, brimming with wet-hedge smell,
held them outstretched, their modest heads trembling wild,
………………………………………………………………..…..a beautiful storm.

previously featured in the Bedtime Stories For The End Of The World podcast

 

Hagoshii

The Navajo people have a word for bringing a conversation to a close. Hagoshii. It was the women, the gatherers, who first made pots; mothers who believed they had already passed through three worlds, trusting the wet clay of this glittering one with their wet fingers, feeling the weight of something hollow and useful taking new form. I wish we had shared this word, wish that I hadn’t interpreted your silence, delays and polite replies as a vessel to drink from. I wish I had known you had buried me like a thirsty fragment, because I was still carrying you sacred as air and fire and light, making sculptures of what I thought we could be with my clumsy hands. I handle our last meeting like a fired relic, searching for symbols. I wish I had learnt the shape of acceptance, of what cannot change through time. Hagoshii. It is finished.

 

Olga is originally from Northern Ireland. A former Warwick Poet Laureate, she has had poetry and flash fiction published in a range of magazines including Rattle Magazine, Dodging the Rain, Magma, Strix, Cordite Review, Under the Radar, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House and Paper Swans. She was the winner of the 2019 BBC Proms poetry competition, is a commissioned artist for Coventry City of Culture 2021 and last year was selected as one of the emerging poets for the podcast Bedtime Stories for the End of the World. She is an assistant headteacher in a secondary school and has two daughters. apple, fallen is her debut poetry pamphlet.

apple, fallen is available to purchase from the Against the Grain Poetry Press website.

morning person – Tanner

~ Claire Walker ~ Leave a comment

morning person

I get up before the alarm
to have the first piss
but the moment I open the bedroom door
our cat wails long and high like a train whistle,
blocking my way until I feed her
and as I’m kneeling over her bowl in my boxers,
squeezing meat jelly out of the packet,
my wife skirts around us,
beating me to the bathroom

every morning they trick me, these two
and as I sit on the cold kitchen floor
filled with piss
listening to my wife piss
watching the cat lick jelly
I AM FILLED WITH ENOUGH PISS AND LOVE
TO DROWN AND BURN YOU ALL

but then I have to go out and meet you all
and I chicken out:
I want to live to see another morning
of these two and their tricks.

 

Tanner is from Liverpool. His latest collection, ‘Shop Talk: Poems For Shop Workers’ is published by Penniless Press

An Inspection – Karen Little (kazvina)

~ Claire Walker ~ 3 Comments

An Inspection

The landlord turns up early, doesn’t appreciate my attempts with
vinegar and baking powder. Hangover life is relatively rosy,
though sometimes it must be erased, or smudged at least.

I fake strength I don’t possess so enemies can’t bump me off—
a thousand pins suspend me between completion and destruction—
my aspirations are abandoned buildings. Stripped, I feel like

a potential champ knocked out by illness— a crawling
heart letting the rain pour in. We all give way sometimes,
ache at times—fail to ripen. With everything uncertain, I tip

back and forth between faith and doubt, a visual hug, a vexed
form. In the end, the landlord decides he’ll leave me to it.

 

Karen Little (kazvina) has exhibited her art internationally, and is widely published as a writer in the UK and further afield. Her latest publication is the illustrated pamphlet, Dissecting an Artist (2019) with The Black Light Engine Room Press.

We Lose the South – Lynn Valentine

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We Lose the South

in a gaggle of road-weary cyclists,
posing for photos at the top of the land.

Ahead lie rumbling currents, dark feathers
of wind gathering foot passengers in.

The crossing is short, fulmars follow the roll
of the boat, the grey keening of sea.

Set down, we see butter-rich fields, countless
stout cows the colour of darkest cream.

We stroll on beaches as tides suck at gaps
in conversation, shells are picked like strawberries.

Midnight stumbles in with hardly a change
in the air. We sit, punch-drunk on light.

 

Lynn Valentine writes between dog walks on the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands. She is widely published, both in print and online. She has won and been placed in competitions. Lynn won a place on the Cinnamon Press mentoring scheme and in 2020 will be mentored by them, working towards her first poetry collection.

Fox – Kitty Coles

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Fox

The town’s dark and those within are dark
and I move through it in a fox’s form,
a being of the dark, the under-earth,
my nails click-clicking lightly on the tarmac,
the breath of trees still purling through my fur.

I press my way through shadows,
scrunched cans, torn paper, nose to the ground,
ears shivering to the shifts of sleepers
who twist in their dreams like netted fish.
My eyes reflect the light, its faltering gleams.

 

Kitty Coles’ debut pamphlet, Seal Wife (2017), was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize. Her first collection, Visiting Hours, will be published in 2020 by The High Window. www.kittyrcoles.com

The Interviews – Matt Pitt

~ Claire Walker ~ 1 Comment

The Interviews

The radio was playing Lovesick Blues
so I poured myself another cup. Then
I got up and went to the interviews.

I opened my book, I flourished my pen . . .
I sat in sumptuously appointed rooms
with slick-heeled women and serious men.

I nodded, smiled, crossed and uncrossed my arms.
I straightened my tie. I steepled my hands.
I made the same rehearsed joke seven times

and laughed at one I didn’t understand.
I said the word “synergy”. Tried phrases
like “bulge bracket”, “Big Four”, and “meta-brand”.

I ate a pink biscuit. Drank four glasses
of lemon tea. Sucked a Polo. Said no
to sandwiches, rolls, raspberry slices

and a rich, beguiling Chateau Margaux.
On Lombard Street, I sneaked a cigarette
and slugged two-thirds of a latte to-go.

Twice I was early. Three times I was late.
Once, I told a long, elaborately
sustained lie about my employment dates.

I argued, parried, challenged politely,
conceded, agreed with, said that perhaps
it was not but then again it might be.

I rode lifts. Climbed stairs. Clung to the straps
of buses and trains. I studied connections,
calculated journey times, scrolled through maps

upside down and memorised directions.
I signed registers. Smiled for a mug-shot.
Waited for hours in neon receptions.

I started out at Bank. Then came Earl’s Court.
I dog-legged to Dalston, swung a wide left
to Latimer Road (where briefly I got

lost) and rattled on to Queensway West.
I visited Frith Street, Fleet Street, London Wall,
Chinatown, Greek Town, Little Bucharest . . .

And over and again, throughout it all,
the rail, the road and the interviews,
I heard the sound, the soft, insistent call

of a radio playing Lovesick Blues.

 

Matt Pitt is a poet and screenwriter from Brighton. He has previously published in Ambit, Acumen, London Magazine and Prole. His debut feature film, Greyhawk, was shortlisted for the Michael Powell Award at the 2014 Edinburgh International Film Festival.

the female etcetera – Pippa Little

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the female etcetera

the woman in the wire dress
the fruit gum shoes
climbs the gallery stairs
emigrant in her life
surrounded by absent children, husbands
and versions of herself
no cloud of glory
just an unceasing buzzing of white noise
emotional tinnitus

I am nearly used to it she tells herself

the gallery is cold and pale
the uniformed men seem bored
she walks a centimetre or two above the ground
not enough for anyone to notice
she is 70 % water 30% rage
the art has suffered cracks in the emulsion
rather as her children’s paintings curl and crack
rolled up in kitchen drawers

she lists in defence two-sided things
the back of a cinema, secretive and dirty
how dust accrues behind the sideboard
the hungry mirror, the hanged man
how the opposite is always true

I woke myself up she says
from the labours of twilight sleep

when the lost return, how shall they look?

 

Pippa Little is a poet, mentor and workshop facilitator. Overwintering (Carcanet) came
out in 2012 , Twist (Arc) in 2018: a third collection is forthcoming. She works for The Royal Literary Fund at Newcastle University and lives in Northumberland.

Herd mentality – Sharon Larkin

~ Claire Walker ~ 1 Comment

Herd mentality

What panicked the sheep was invisible.
One second, ewes were grazing in green pastures,
the next, a report from some silent starting pistol
sent them sprinting, faster than ovines
should ever have reason to travel.

Nothing pursued them –
no hound or horse or bird of prey.
No farmer had come to tempt his girls
with trailer-loads of beets or hay
but some were leaping lamb-like,
all hooves aloft, then turning, as one,
to charge again from whence they came,
stampeding forth and back beside the wall
which some began to clamber on,
to disappear beyond – where a year before,
we found a sheep’s corpse, bones picked clean.

We knew a steep slope fell away
a few feet further on, into the quarry below,
feared a lemming-like scene there,
wondered what weed or bane, opioid or hemp,
could drive beasts to madness such as this.

Back home, we’re alarmed by news
of stock market crashes, supermarket dashes,
clashes in aisles as folk go overboard
for toilet rolls.

We can’t make sense of theories
about herd immunity
or appeals for distance and isolation
as sixty thousand flock for four days on the trot
to the races, and others jump
aboard their last flight home.

We try to fathom stats and graphs.
that attempt to flatten the curve,
choke when asked to swallow the pill
that our loved ones will be lost.
It spooks the flock out of us.

 

Sharon Larkin’s ‘Interned at the Food Factory’ was published by Indigo Dreams in 2019. Her poems have been anthologized by Cinnamon, Eyewear and more, and regularly appear in magazines eg Prole and Obsessed with Pipework, and on-line eg Ink Sweat & Tears and Atrium. She has a poem forthcoming in Magma. Sharon organizes Poetry Café Refreshed, is Gloucestershire’s Stanza Representative and runs Eithon Bridge Publications and the Good Dadhood e-zine. Sharon has a Creative Writing MA and is passionate about Wales, photography and the natural world.