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poetry

The tree has fallen in the middle of the yard,   cracked to quarters during last night’s storm   which played its elegy then left in a rush   The angry lover flips land on its back,   leaves the earth a stripped and stained mattress   Rain has reduced a crab nestled by broken bark   to a small shell rotting in the midday heat   Children gawp at its glistening armour,   imagine its claws break men like molluscs,   then piece its home together, splint by splint   A gardener finally announces its condition   to stop them photographing the battered form   anyone could have mistaken to be sleeping
Playing Dead

Prize Entry

November 2019

Dahmicca Wright

It would’ve been easier if she hadn’t been known For the chickens But she was famous for these white, Undappled hens, which she’d bring to Perquín to sell On weekends The mayor’s chickens, they were called, As if her husband would ever want them (regal though They were), elegant as the egrets that are still Left to wander the presidential palace in Panama City By the time it happened, the buildings had gathered up The evening to form a landscape, and the streets grown Rancid, like oblong containers from the kind of potluck, In a dank small town, that people will choose to attend Out of boredom, and call a world  Her son was staying In San Salvador to study, and so she was alone                                                  They came for her, and her Box of hens, in three military vehicles, the passengers Disguised as radicals It would be different if they hadn’t Been so quiet They arrested her She was accused of Standing with guerrillas, Vesta at her hearth, in her slacks And a dead son’s blazer, like a queen expatriate In tenuous provinces And her crime was simple, she was The Mother of Intellectuals, the ideal accomplice It’s noted among us that this was recorded in mediocre Spelling, in a functionary’s awkward Palmer hand, As mader de intelectos [sic], a piece of wood, then, Made of the intellect To make her an idea Of accomplishment — it would’ve be different if they Hadn’t been so quiet Soon, some women Who stood outside the barracks — the ones who Ordinarily might jump to buy white chickens — turned When they heard her singing and heard her ringing Her keys against the walls, as if her room were full Of open doors, as if her greatest urgency should be That the room should leave to meet the evening Slowly they turned her body into a torso Then it was A floor Rarely do rooms like these have hands

Prize Entry

November 2019

Vesta

Yvette Siegert

Prize Entry

November 2019

It would’ve been easier if she hadn’t been known For the chickens. But she was famous for these white,...

(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name)       This is a site for production This is a site for presentation  What is to be produced? What is to be presented?  This is a site for the production and presentation of a particular kind of subject  A subject marked by its pursuit of liberty, by individualism and collectivity, competition and cooperation By the sophistication of its speech    This is what we do with our comfort  This is what we do with our plenty    You are watching me, and I begin to watch Rather than using the gift, I reflect upon it Cobwebs2 Among the cobwebs, there, gathering in the corner of the doorway, a form persists, a tool, a silence, towards cleaving, carving, separating us from one another politically, aesthetically, socially, so that we may create a demand for these things we make, that appear here, that we do not yet have a name for     Minds are bending to the shape of this walking stick    This is a violence that can be overcome      What stick or stone is at hand to jam this twentyfourhour self-improvement, self-understanding, self-actualisation and total education? 3       Imagined public space  imagined public law  and in the air  experience and habit float…  experience, he says, is the way through danger4   I wait for Him to come  And I am nothing outside of this  While waiting, I swim,  stalk the interior  One way to move through the world among many  I surround you in my way of moving, my becoming –  monotone address, edge and end  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes    2  Two words –  equality and equivalence  these are frequencies in the expression  of chronic fragmentation and chronic totality      I didn’t want to individuate  and now I am nothing  but a self-interrupting whole,5 a memory full of holes  haunted by the unpolitical    Someone said that this is where our obsession with voice capital V comes from And that listening instead, is grounded in our experience of the sacred It is our

Prize Entry

November 2019

Phrase1

Beth Dynowski

Prize Entry

November 2019

(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name.)       This is a...

shed coral scales & sunrise In England, the inside   is ashen She touches tangerine flowers, when a woman   exiting her home in Camberwell cries, go back to where you come from, as if   she carries still the scent of dragon-fruit I swallow   cherry stones I flower your abandoned garden   in my belly, to carry in me the whispers of all your lost colours I dream   in shades of lilac Sometimes my tummy hurts
My Mother's Hands

Prize Entry

November 2019

Maia Elsner

poetry

October 2019

Three Poems

Jenna Clake

poetry

October 2019

SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE OPENING OF A WINDOW ON A HOT MORNING   Three men carry a large snake home....

Poetry

Issue No. 26

DRAKE EQUATION

GBOYEGA ODUBANJO

Poetry

Issue No. 26

i’m running out of data on the train everyone is feeling particularly lonely it isn’t enough everyone & me...

Two Poems

Poetry

Issue No. 25

Charlotte Geater

Poetry

Issue No. 25

THREE DAYS   so it’s like, we shouldn’t press our cheeks together like we think / we know because say i saw pen on...

 

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