Tag: Atrium Poetry

Absurdism – Megan Pattie

~ Claire Walker ~ 1 Comment

Absurdism

The more we arrange the strange things people give,
the more I’m Alice falling down the rabbit hole,
big-eyed with bafflement while objects continue
to rise up and move around me. I’m overseeing
clothing-rails that sway and burst apart, cascading
tops and jeans and skirts and coats and jackets,
shoes that walk away from one another, scarves
and bags that vanish, mannequins that grab hold
of my name-badge, a giant squid-like monster made
of tangled jewellery, more books than shelves, films
that will take you to the end of time to watch, music
no one will ever listen to, a bright orange novelty
nut-grinder in the shape of a squirrel, hundreds
of spoons, a mug with its handle on the inside,
and one kitchen utensil nobody knows the use for
but we’re selling for 50p and answers, mess, a table
of toys that looks like a torn-up technicolour cubist
painting, cameras, frames, Chinese charms, old coins,
furniture we’re running out of, and when all of the
wonderful things are gone, we’re left with plastic
tubs, wooden spoons, cut glass trinkets, hideous
ornaments, plates, everything nobody wanted, and—
“That’s a new donation on the counter. What’s in it?”
“It’s just a telephone wrapped in a pair of trousers.”

 

Megan Pattie was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2009, and her work has appeared in several online and print publications since; including Eibonvale Press’s Humanagerie anthology and Ink, Sweat and Tears. You can find her on Twitter @pattiepoetry.

Symptoms of a worn ball bearing – Julian Dobson

~ Claire Walker ~ 1 Comment

Symptoms of a worn ball bearing

Noise is a classic sign. Here are some indicators
of worn bearings or other wheel-end damage:

Snapping, clicking, popping. Grinding while in motion.
Knocking, clunking. Humming, rumbling, growling.
Uneven wear. Abnormal side pull. Shudder.

That jolt. It’s when we’re broken, dried,
you pay attention. How we lump into your life,
become a constant source of irritation.

You forget smooth-rolling years. Forget our steel.
How we carried you for miles.

 

Julian Dobson lives in Sheffield. His poems have appeared in publications including Magma, Under the Radar, and Acumen, and on a bus in Guernsey.

Mindstrap – Hannah Linden

~ Claire Walker ~ 1 Comment

Mindstrap

Don’t be mard, she’d say.
You’d reckon she meant mardy:
spoilt or irritable

but she meant soft
inadequate, a weaklin.

She ated children
blatherin, cringin.
Physical pain were
a deformity
and we were marred by it
by default.

She were clever like that –
she could take summat ugly
an ide it in Lancastrian
like Everyone felt the same
round ere – like all o words
conspired against us
a mindstrap for
frangin, maitherin kids.

It’s not fair – it’s leather
a menacing wink, a chuckle.
Don’t be mard: future’s hard
always one step’s too loose –
spare the rod and th’as sprung the noose.

Either way we were marred by it
by default. She were clever like that.

 

[ed. ‘fair’ in Lancs pronounced ‘fur’]

Hannah Linden is published widely, most recently with Magma, Lighthouse, The Interpreter’s House, Domestic Cherry and the Humanagerie Anthology, as well as on several online webzines. She is working towards her first collection. Twitter: @hannahl1n

Speed trials Hogganfield Loch – Finola Scott

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Speed trials Hogganfield Loch

Hooking the wind, they rush
whoosh, claim the space, name it.
Joggers glare, miss beats, consider
evasive action.

Speed isn’t all. Style counts.
The grace of velocity, the angle of curve,
strategy of deceleration. Celebration
of corners.

Swans, Granny!

True to their name the birds whoop
as they swoop the loch.
In a linen-sheeted glide,
they’re down, feet flapping water.

My grandchildren brace, stabiliser balanced.
Pink helmets cradle
baby-bird bones. No steadying
hand at their backs.

 

Finola Scott’s poems are in many places – Gutter, Ofi Press, Firth . A competition winner, her poems are in The Blue Pen’s Chapbook  December ’18. Finola enjoys reading in unusual places including Rosslyn Chapel, Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Scottish Parliament.

Potato Harvest – Ali Jones

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Potato Harvest

Once, we hid moons in earth,
reaching down to sable loam.

Now, tines shy, lifting gently,
we begin to gather them in.

Hauling up, bundles of small satellites,
Dark drops. Another moon floats up

between branches of cherry.
Small moons bring night home,

geosmin, thick and dense, a full tide coming in,
held in canvas beneath polished granite.

They wait to ghost up again, to rise
through fire and water, in cauldron dark pans.

 

Ali Jones’ work has appeared in The Interpreter’s House, Proletarian Poetry, Ink Sweat and Tears, Snakeskin Poetry, Atrium, Café Writers, Laldy, Green Parent magazine and The Guardian. Her pamphlets Heartwood and Omega are forthcoming with Indigo Dreams Press.

Depressed Penguins Make Recovery – Ian Stuart

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Depressed Penguins Make Recovery

We’re fine now. Thanks for asking.
White chests and black tail coats,
we look like waiters in some posh hotel.
Three times a day we go through our routine –
the comedy walk-on in perfect sync –
then dive in, one by one, and swim
to the ice floe
made out of cement
which never melts or grows.

They throw us chunks of frozen herring –
always the same but quite nutritious –
and laugh to see our antics.
Sometimes they clap their flippers in delight.
It is nice to be appreciated.

They’re very needful of our welfare.
Even the herring
has a special tang to it these days.

Yet even now, some nights,
huddled with others on a concrete floor
I still hear great bergs crash together
see distant sky shimmer,
feel the ice
sharp under my claws.

No, honestly. We’re fine.

 

Ian Stuart is a writer/performer in York. He has had work accepted by Dreamcatcher, Obsessed with Pipework, Selcouth Station and other poetry outlets.
Last October he had  “Quantum Theory for Cats” published by Valley Press in Scarborough – see link below.

Saturna – Katerina Neocleous

~ Claire Walker ~ 1 Comment

Saturna

Under a bare bulb
in a windy metal shed
we’d sort and pack
our back breaking harvest,
dug out of the loam.

Once, a pair of rabbit kits
– amorphous as potatoes
or clay clods – slid past us
on the conveyor’s rollers,
shuddering untouched

until the end of the line.
Nobody knew what to do
with them, it felt unlucky;
as though we had taken
too much from the earth.

 

Katerina Neocleous has been published in various poetry journals, most recently in Obsessed With Pipework, and Algebra Of Owls. For more of her work, please visit visionsfromhell.wordpress.com

Winter Light – Bethany Garry

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Winter Light

The clear winter light down Oxford Street
is the frost I will wish North,
that my mother’s country may remember me,
in the quality of the daybreak,
of the shape of free-falling snow.

Mum is always looking out the kitchen window,
in the back of the house,
where it is darkest first,
because she knows the vicious winters,
— every light is a false one.

 

Bethany is a Scottish writer currently living in London. Her poetry has been published in Octavius, Raum Poetry and Vast Sky. She tweets @brgbethany.

Self-Portrait With Sylvie – Kitty Coles

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Self-Portrait With Sylvie

Your yellow eyes grow
and shrink with the tides of the moon,
expand like onions, bulbous globes of light.
You press your spine
against my thigh so closely
our bodies seem to fuse, blur
at the edges, and your fierce heat
infects my worm-white flesh.
You hold my hand
in your arms, against your belly,
and you are supple like the lushest velvet.

I can’t get up today.
The pain is spreading
behind my eyes like mould,
malignant bloom.
My clothes are fumy with sweat,
the odours of cooking onions
and rank cumin.
My face melts in the mirror,
drips like tallow,
streams down my bones, greyly, unstoppably.
Only your palms, like petals, keep me whole.

 

Kitty Coles lives in Surrey. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. She was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, was published in 2017. www.kittyrcoles.com

Featured Publication – How to Wear Grunge by Ruth Stacey

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Our featured publication for January is How to Wear Grunge by Ruth Stacey, published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

“Ruth Stacey’s How to Wear Grunge eschews nostalgia and the self-fulfilling mythology of rock’s nearly-famous excesses for a fierce, feminist holler back into the feedback of another place and time, in all its bleached and sticky-carpeted illusions and almost-glory. Between truth or dare narratives that toy with the tension of hard facts – “Too gloomy, tell me about the prettiness again. / No. Tell me the worst thing” – these poems are wild and wise, and faultlessly written. There is a beating rock’ n’ roll heart of riot-grrl rebellion in every line. Stacey is a fearless and utterly compelling writer, whose candid, courageous poetry takes on the prevailing narrative and places women at the very epicentre.” Jane Commane

“In How to Wear Grunge, Ruth Stacey has achieved a bittersweet examination of brutal youth and violent love, with expert attention to the timing of acceptance, obsession and revelation. There’s almost a contact-high to these poems, an intoxication that has been carefully crafted to provide relief from the horrors of the past and of each other, creating a deceptively fragile romance of a sub-culture that encouraged the dirt and distortion of the fragmented self. However, once we have questioned the lives of the damaged, haunted souls in this cool as hell collection, what burns through is strength and survival, wounds that gush with the language of dark joy, the sweet stink of dope and incense, a promise (to past, present and future selves) tightly rolled into a joint so full of flavour it will leave your mouth watering. How to Wear Grunge is ultimately a kaleidoscopic questionnaire. There are no right or wrong answers. In the end, we all dance to something. We make noise, we hurt each other and, sometimes, we forgive.” Bobby Parker

grungecover

 

Her Name

She left a quickly scrawled business card, listing her attributes:
bright, witty, sexy, tenacious, generous,
irresistible, reckless, wild, petite biche

Name: Carey Hunter

Age: 20

Address: Somewhere familiar, cold snap in the air, city buzzing,
guitar music playing, lyrics aim and circle: theme gloom/not gloom.

Voice: Growl, low, high, light, whispered, bellowed, impossible
to describe. Butterfly made of paper, caught in the draft.

Eyes: Fox coloured. I’m certain, fox-russet, copper.

Smell: You can’t smell her through the internet. Come on.

 

Wasted

Drinking in the park, drinking on a false id
Drinking cider, thunderbirds, 20/20, taboo
Drinking to get courage, drinking to dance
Drinking, drinking, drinking until you
Fall over & say all the wrong things
Shout, cry, get lost, kiss the wrong man
Kiss the right girl, feel nothing, drink!

Drink too much for your small frame
Drink like all the boys you hang with
Drink so much at your work drinks
You have to take some ecstasy to sober up
Drink so you have to apologise: sorry, sorry!
Drink like you are in the longhouse,
Drink because sobriety is painful, drink!

 

people would drift in

at different times, everyone would wait
play pool, drink cheap beer
upstairs, at The Crown
go & score from the bloke
who had the scar across his cheek
Tony someone? forgotten now

the Seattle singer was dead but his voice
his voice and other pine-tinged voices
played on repeat in a small town
landlocked, far from America
far from the chill Pacific North West:
this was the Shire, rolling hills
and Porcelain factory jobs

this was strange, why
we all loved punk and grunge
listening to bands in the art deco
theatre, hanging off the steps
female singer howling still
but I think
it was the dirty drugs honesty

 

The Real Truth

this phrase annoys me: what is real
what is true,
everything is filtered through bias
memories that re-arrange like landscapes

it’s familiar……………… but something dark has grown
shading the whole left side of it all
or the unkempt, tangled bushes have been strimmed
back to grass and everything is simplified
………………………………….she was in love
with a rock star who died, she died too

 

Ruth Stacey’s poetry collection Queen, Jewel, Mistress was published by Eyewear Publishing 2015. Alison Weir wrote that, ‘Ruth Stacey’s poems are exceptional. They evoke voices long silenced, and the very essence of these past lives and the ages in which they were lived.’
Her recent pamphlet, Inheritance, was published by Mother’s Milk Books 2017. A duet with another poet, Katy Wareham Morris, it explored the 19th-century experience of motherhood, contrasted with a 21st-century mother’s voice. Inheritance won Best Collaborative Work at the 2018 Saboteur Awards.
Her latest poetry collection, How to Wear Grunge, was published November 2018 and is available from Knives, Forks & Spoons press. Jane Commane wrote that, “Stacey is a fearless and utterly compelling writer, whose candid, courageous poetry takes on the prevailing narrative and places women at the very epicentre”
Ruth Stacey works as a lecturer in Creative Writing at Worcester University and designs the poetry book covers for V.Press. Stacey is currently writing the imagined memoir, in poetry, of the artist Pamela Colman Smith for her PhD.

 

How to Wear Grunge is available to purchase from the Knives Forks and Spoons Press website.