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The White Review No. 30 features longform interviews with the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola (who also provides the issue’s cover), novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye and...

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The White Review Short Story Prize 2021
SUPPORTED BY RCW   The White Review Short Story Prize is an annual short story competition for emerging writers. The prize awards £2,500 to the best piece of short...

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poetry

THREE POEMS

Poetry

February 2021

Sarah Gridley

Poetry

February 2021

  ADDRESSEE   I mind less that you go far away in time. Once I had to harden myself to the idea. Now I...
                  a      bout                                of    ave    a                           seer                      flict                        of                          by          assembly              ave          by                                                                          by extremity                                         chance                                                                           as                         ice   ¹ unerased from Act of the Commonwealth of Virginia: October 1669, Act 1, 2:270: An act about the casuall killing of slaves

Poetry

February 2021

#10¹

Nat Ogle

Poetry

February 2021

                  a      bout                                of    ave    a                      ...

minutes were different in ward-time continuous difluoromethane and stale skin and sterilising fluid from the ventilation units replaced sundials the electric pulmonary system laughed at dressing-gown- outpatients waiting for cups of blood and honey and metastasised papyrus from a heart ventricle dazed and limp 400 feet above the aerials on the hospital roof they washed and talked to the body before draining and re-filling with formaldehyde and other solvents and then ushered into a hermetically sealed coffin or ziploc sandwich bag I climbed past the 17th hospital floor with my mother the day after a woman in a brocaded suit got down on two knees and whispered about our seven great matriarchs from a Romani family a knock on the door of each sister when another one died we both listened to the flux of compressed air up the lift shaft and the breath caught best by the radiation suite on floor 20 and level LG before the morgue the stairs changed from linoleum to concrete and I tripped over stacked wheelchairs and filing trolleys head pressed against the mirror in the lift for an overdue inheritance of glass divination or splayed-hand- palmistry I was born in the Jessop Wing and watched it being demolished while I passed on the school bus ten years later they struggled to take blood and smiled at never making it to heroin with that circulatory system while my grandmother’s cyanotype roots hummed with warfarin sometimes I used the toilet by the hospital chapel after leaving school and walked corridor to corridor not another doctor for miles between here and 1979 time dilated between IV lines and ventilator drops and bedside alarms and wind pulled through structural cavities we did not know what the family name had been before the air on the roof became anti-septic

Poetry

February 2021

Hospital

Maria Giles-Holland

Poetry

February 2021

minutes were different in ward-time. continuous difluoromethane and stale skin and sterilising fluid from the ventilation units replaced sundials....

  when walt whitman spokea multitudes he meant     did he not     that within each ovus an obsequious beer soaked indie boy broods about steppin in front of a fuckin bus         t burrow down intae the freckled id     where coffee torns t treacle on the hotplate and borst fegs are embedded in the carpet     what i really mean is that ad hate to be that kyid again          rollin along crash barriers at some gig in the union while the country is sold by the furlong     drinkin what i made at my forst communion on a nightly basis     then starvin maself of breakfast & lunch & good mental health

Poetry

February 2021

Abstract

James Conor Patterson

Poetry

February 2021

  when walt whitman spokea multitudes he meant     did he not     that within each ovus...

  Board trustees tapped heirloom spoons against the graduates’ wet green skulls to get at the yolk Academics, in chorus, drilled and blew until we were bright       and airy,       ready for democracy       Cheeks inflated like bubonic plague, foreheads stretched like      drumskin, rainbowed like wounds, skin  whining, funny helium voices I watched the best essayists of my generation float over the Amazon       rainforest and burning       California to drink the sun from the sky,    bite and chew and beat its yellow, so they came back to us     rigged, rainless sierras Each time we fell to the ground like flies under an educative glass, never realising: some skies have a limit, and this is ours

Poetry

February 2021

Prism

Kandace Siobhan Walker

Poetry

February 2021

  Board trustees tapped heirloom spoons against the graduates’ wet green skulls to get at the yolk. Academics, in...

It is summer and we are still married Law dictates that we can pitch a tent wherever we want Easier said than done Light is early morning, all bone The straps of a heavy bag leave erotic marks on your shoulders Sand dunes grow up sideways, like the protogay child We laugh and discuss the non- arrival of our protégée child instead Laughing feels good so we laugh louder Babies are pointless who needs them Around us the midges form a constellation I admire their loveless manoeuvres LOOK THESE STARS HAVE WINGS you shout through the turbulence A couple fly into your mouth and crawl up your tongue You swallow with difficulty Sex for pleasure is very human but then again so are choke points Harnessed chaos is your thing and we don’t talk about it A midge bites behind my ear and injects saliva into my skin What each female needs is an abdomen full of blood I know Eggs are laid no matter what Her mouth parts work as two saws, perforating my skin I say THIS REMINDS ME OF YOU and clap the midge dead Wind hurls her tiny corpse elsewhere You touch your throat and point out the sound of the ocean Wave after wave Things are a little awkward now I want to dig a trench in the sand and lie inside, together A bodily grammar should, like the body, be full of holes

Poetry

February 2021

Swarm

K Patrick

Poetry

February 2021

It is summer and we are still married. Law dictates that we can pitch a tent wherever we want....

  Mall parking lot becomes dodgeball court, 2 vs 20 Opposition’s fitted sheet fingers cover king-size stones Boys’ backs clamp against the storefront window Their propeller limbs swatting, foreheads pouring blood and sweat like broken soda dispensers Spectators flaunt their yellow-corn teeth, as they sing Boom Bye Bye; supporters whispering invocations and protective medleys Not once did the boys cry out for God Police wait for the whiff of oak coffins before they whisk the boys away in their Jeep; and the names of all the girls I crush on at school clank like crockery, 11-year-old-me vows to avoid bursting lips and wailing skin
The Purge

Poetry

February 2021

Courtney Conrad

   I know you can see through my body, its soft little bones its heart-shrill rhythm I forget how astral everything is,   that my suffering is equivocal to my orchard, the number of orange fruits that exist   I love the way your beak is pierced with a thousand holes like a flute Each opening has a different sound, each sound is a secret   Phoenix, I tried to rip the skin off a snake instead of letting it moult I tried to block sunlight with my body save a fly from a swimming pool   I’ve tried to live my life in one breath Tried rebirth, reared myself to live quietly beside a shoal of wild demons   I trust I am a butterfly dreaming as a woman, the fact there are realized beings   Don’t tell Oaba, Baba joon about my drinking rainwater through dirt   About my opening the door to death like a boathouse That I am only water mixed with dust That we are just something rather than nothing That the world might persuade you of otherwise

Poetry

February 2021

Solo to bird phoenix

Eve Esfandiari Denney

Poetry

February 2021

   I know you can see through my body, its soft little bones its heart-shrill rhythm. I forget how...

                                                we pass through a series of moral systems –                             the accumulations of good acts, the weighing of bad, we note cicatrices of consequence   for as many as twenty generations after,                             we count the number of words spoken and                                             how many were wrong The function of moral                                               systems differ according to era: historical                             relativism rewrites the language of accounting Some ghosts may choose to visit facsimiles   of dead ancestors and punish them eternally,                             leaving them raped and blood-bound, but                                             we must remember this is an unmoderated                                               activity: there are over five billion cases                             pending appeal; accounting might have the raw data but they lack the resources   to form conclusions I have been                             counted, meted; upside down I do not                                           move the water, the water moves me

Poetry

February 2021

From: Acheron

Freya Jackson

Poetry

February 2021

                                     ...
THREE POEMS

Poetry

January 2021

Luke Allan

Poetry

January 2021

  First winter in Iceland     Some mornings we’re woken by the sound of our neighbour sneezing. I raise the blinds and drink...

 

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