SPAM004
SPAM004
Mantra Mukim - raipur ambient
Lucy Rose Cunningham - Interval: House, Lover, Slippages (selections)
Rebecca Kane - Meat Cute
Fintan Calpin - August 20
- August 24
- September 22
Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir - Automatic Speech Recognition
- *
Louis Fabrice Tshimanga - Senza nome 1
River Ellen MacAskill - Crawling out of the hellmouth
Lou Collins - Clockwork Orange
- BREAKFAST CLUB
Peter Manson - the merry wido
- an englishman's tongue is his kazoo
Zohra Iqbal - incised
alex cruse - from SOLO FOR WORLD SYSTEM
Poppy Cockburn - Stella McCartney Bra
- liquid crystal lovesick demon
- I am snaky
nicky melville - make gates grate again
- [un]thought experiment
Jac Common - gastrology of fucked-up wetland
- wellbeing check-in
F.M. Faccion - LinkedIn is the Anti-Christ
- 4am Reddit quarantine
Sabeen Chaudhry - Sket Life
- (No) Life
- make her rob a motherfucking bank
- cull
- my heart’s not true
Oliver Southall - Vernal Equinox
- Free From
Cam Scott - from SNOWMARE
Dom Hale - Instead of Sleep
- For Mau
Joey Frances - another friendship poem
Sophie Taylor - and I waah
Kaisa Saarinen - Seedbird
- Mud
Alex Glynne - @pstoral3
Anne Lesley Selcer - Did Someone Say Sin or Sorrow?
- Morning Poem'
BREAKFAST CLUB
Ciara Maguire
in the morning the air / is different / a pink antiseptic quality / everything raw edges / swelling / like a grapefruit / violence happens so much / as to be dreary / trauma repeated / like a bruise / gone soft
i hear women screaming / roll my eyes / wish they’d just / be quiet about it / everything that hurt me /
made me worse / at night the sky softens / hollows out / just enough / to hold their lungs / i dream of
24-hour darkness / polar night / your breasts / rising like bodies / under ice
i think it’s lovely / how your idols / reply to you on twitter / how you always / heart react / heart react/ i want to hold your plait / in my teeth / like a leash / want to condition / the hair on your legs /
tomorrow my heart / will crack quietly / like a yolk / orange & / unseemly / bursting glossy / ovum
into your / mouth
HAND TO MOUTH
they say the body keeps the score
& mine is losing
badly
a game of fives i did not sign up for
this work is difficult & hard to do well
get day drunk & dance in lidl frozen aisle
the prawns are indifferent
i am no-one anybody wants to be
an endless loop of flesh & weather
later i flirt with you through tracked changes
tell your poems you have a great sense of humour
i have nowhere to be;
just this day & this word
doc sprawling rough & compelling like
alligator skin
you text me i want to be somewhere pretty
i text back me too
but tomorrow i will be at nisa again
same loaf same milk same lonely exchange
of coins and i will go home shuffle
cards & pray
i will
live this down
the merry wido
Peter Manson
there was a salt fish that absorbed the wolf clyde water
pre-empting glasgow which would have empted anyway
the wind blows mary a contrary identity
her mother was a professional hog-dandler
and preferred to be known as the enemy of lies
ah will you lay me down and love me for no reason
through my uncoordinated irritable hole
or androgynous peripheral attach system
or all of the above and not for want of trying
poetry will be mad eyeball at the doxx and fuck
be sure to dig it out while it still looks like vomit
troll cats looked like balls of yarn in autotelic play
or the testicles in an old sparrow in april
an englishman’s tongue is his kazoo
complex simon met a foreman sunning his despair
i told them when i think i can’t go on i go on
supercritical space-filling self-avoiding walks
against the encroachment of old aberdeen sub-wobs
upon the turf of my new and selected poems
good occasionally poor later rolling homeward
to become the father-in-death of my own parents
i had cut off like a weaver my examined life
of imaginary shit with real sweetcorn in it
and had no memory of my life as a jockey
my cyanotic dog licking this off a pizzle
the harmlessness of the laurel and hardy theme tune
or the jimmy shand monument in auchtermuchty
Zohra Iqbal
incised
I was incised into a lambent sunbeam
engraved wholeheartedly into that imperceptible stream of light
open green glass, water bowl
that she dips her hands in.
soft rain falls from them. drip. see the mountain sitting in front of you. she takes us up its
side like ants on that long traverse of
marble. i dropped ice cream once onto the cream/ egg
white of the house in cyprus.
within moments ants had swarmed onto it.
ducks in a pond.
ducks swimming round
circles into the water. old woman speaking to ducks;
me a child on a swing,
everything smelling of heat. words elude me. i elide.
incised
lay me onto the soft table
lay me to rest, let ferns and wild grasses
circle my legs
let me be a cygnet crowned with morning sun:
engrave me.
i see myself as one of those old stones/ rune stones
carved into with a wolf's tooth blade,
lupine, neck stretched up to gulp
down the sky.
fish swim inside me i am all flakes of silvery moon, the
buoyant rice paper lantern
risen:
aubade in the early hours, such is the life of a rice paper lantern. bending
reeds, i fashion
a rice paper lantern.
circle the reed like a coronation
of blood, feel pulpy
clotted glue and paper mix into your
fingers. it is globby. it brings itself into your mouth
like a pudding, trailing
effervescent threads,
tentacles, reaching extensions of you,
your tangled root network,
extracting.
i am all extracted now,
uncarved,
filled in like subtle dentistry under
the moonlight. feather slope
under the moonlight,
i am all dissolution
plush jumper, coloured baby/child pastel blue.
incised
she wakes me up in the early morning with
the sound of her fajr and her duas.
the sound of her prayers: washing me
in the blue waters of her childhood sky,
rocking the z buried under soft cream bedcovers. glow-in-the-dark tasbeeh and i open
up like the long stem of a vase.
u and i clutching our fluorescent
pearls in the dark of the bed, the cold side of the pillow
made warm
by our hands enclosing small moons. chand.
years later i call people my moons,
my line of sight pointed upwards,
seeking moonlight.
split open the goat and rummage around its squelching carcass.
pull out
the beaming light,
return it to her mouth.
spoken onto me are words of protection. my world is decorated with talismans which
dangle
from my fingers. flick of the counter against the carrom board
and all moments are victories. past present and future string themselves
along the tasbeeh of my mind,
i sit swirling below
light
on clear water.
alex cruse
from SOLO FOR WORLD SYSTEM
sometime in autumn 2046
tepals mismanaged room tone
turned ears to a finer instrument
the imaginative supplanted by
associative consciousness
elegiac motes suckling atmosphere
robed in paradigmatic blush
wainscot punch-in unstamps
the parole, tied up in care line and
bursting enriched white,
unveiled phosphate lyrical fringe and scratchers piled
torques the mortal hijink
the ladles brimmed with grist,
executables, blasted another crest
of ash, its languid zodiac unmoved, heat-sought
architecture's too-full pleat latches
‘oft spot, slavic plaiting
slowly onto reproductive core
in classic cold war arrivant style, sloughed in arcs,
doxa's creamed unshakeable
core my scythe edge of ilex indelibly decked,
stock chart just a red gesture, rimmed circle whose center
you want to touch, just to see
which side of the mirror matters less, infoliated
as true experts disagree
on how best to verify the limbic stain
as one hikes down
the last lap of our life
my blood in the centrifuge
swish swish swish
Stella McCartney Bra
Poppy Cockburn
Iris smiling
Anna whispering
Fleur humming
Sylvia laughing
Juliet basking
Josie painting
Caroline reading
Gertrude gyrating
Suzy smirking
Rachel rolling
Cindy seething
Rhiannon ironing
Amelia moaning
Agnes crawling
Gloria writhing
Emily smoking
Rose revelling
Ella gargling
Sophie spluttering
Jemima joking
Rita menstruating
Celia choking
Kate puking
Shannon shrieking
Olivia bucking
Celeste grinding
Gina gagging
Jasmine watching
Theresa floating
Janey sucking
Alison giggling
Sinead retching
Mia glaring
Rosie scheming
Lila spitting
Ruth retreating
Kim sinking
Sandy changing
Eilish blaspheming
Ophelia drowning
Sarah screaming
Cressida hissing
liquid crystal lovesick demon
I slip on a filter
radiate remote pheromones
& you slide in, follow the protocol
wyd male order
I watch the haze-haloed moon
through the misted window
through the hearts in my eyes
your knock on the door
sounds implausibly loud
your thereness so actual
I unpause the music
ambient harp, lamplight
& we’re safe again, pretending
you kiss my synthetic skin
my plumped-up lips
caress the budding horns
protruding from my forehead
apply a finger to my static nosebleed
I wake once in the night
horns retracted, head resting
on your patterned torso
in the morning, I feign sleep
let you stealth away, keep a picture
of me demonic, cheeks flushed
unnatural rose
I am snaky
I taste my
own tail
game over
start over
squat & blithe
each bite of
space food
a morsel
for the dowry
of stored love
extending my
tale / optimism
towards
winning
a new game
boy [oops
I have eaten
myself again]
make gates grate again
nicky melville
if a scandal developed
involving ingress
through
around
beside
adjacent to
or near
a gate
would it be named
Gategate
by the media?
if said scandal
involved a gate
whose ingress
led to a gate
in the archaic
sense of gate
meaning way
or path
would the scandal
be known as
Gategategate?
should the scandal
involve a gate
that is actually
called Gate
would the scandal
be referred to as
Gategategategate?
further
if the scandal
involved someone
whose surname was Gate
would it then be called
GateGategategategate?
similarly
and in parallel
if the scandal
involved someone
whose surname was Gates
would it then be called
GatesGategategategate?
if the scandal
involving a person
with the surname Gates or Gate
pertained to Gates’ or Gate’s gait
would the media name the scandal
GategaitGategategategate
or
GatesgaitGategategategate?
if Gate’s or Gates’ gait also involved
a door
valve
or other device
for controlling the passage
especially of a fluid
would the scandal be named
GategaitgateGategategategate
(or its equivalent with Gates)?
if the gate
or door
valve
or other device
for controlling the passage
especially of a fluid
pertained to a molecule
or part of a molecule
that acts
as by a change in conformation
in response to a stimulus
to permit or block passage
as of ions
through a cell membrane
would the scandal be named
GategaitgategateGategategategate
or
GatesgaitgategateGategategategate?
and finally
if some of the above events
involved a number
of paying spectators
as at a sports event
or indeed
observers
paying to watch
the medical procedures
heretofore mentioned
in an operating theatre environment
beside or near the original gate
and the total admission receipts
of all spectators
were a key factor in the scandal
would it be named
GategaitgategateGategategategategate?
[un]thought experiment
too tier
to tear
health service, employment, citizenship etc.
gastrology of fucked-up wetland
Jac Common
poem could be compost to nourish windowboxes
gulping fumes of main road grind & clank
poem could be compost to gather up discarded coffee ground
offerings on padlocked bins for twilight collection & later fed to
weird rugose spans of rhubarbs & gunnera
poem could be bogland
acidic past
keeps dead chilly & warm, energy derived from steady dissolutions
poem could be fenland
alkaline future
considered mainly poisonous but potentially accommodating if fungal symbionts
are included in committee
poem could be alder carr, willow carr, tangled deep-wet successional
colder mangroves, brine-pool rooting, reedbeds rotting down
mush making occasionally nutritious toothchewed toenail lectureships
poem could be genitals, a flesh folded fractal
developmental programme of soft enclosures
disruptive leakings to make biological appear as unfixable fluid
seeping into cable network thick green tar
poem could be biologic, scratching at doors with a rough barbed tongue
barking in moonlit ditches
inverting a starfish’s stomach during open mic that spills steaming gut stuff
metabolises external spiny surfaces undo hostile architectures
corrodes out space between pigeon spikes to form a bowl of amnion
crackling power gridded where opensource gps could build a nest
poem could be a roomba escaping a travelodge in swansea
hoovering feral shed bolts of old mineworks & big bridge
poem could be you a digital water body remembering cellular sea
or remade wood fibres justabout pulling apart pleasurably
genderhackathon injection colluding with waiting microbiomes
ears open to crystallised pickled ginger of pronounciation
moisturised scars on chest speak through their puss-mouths
a garbled thank you to communal toilet paper & squat shower head
blending javascript into nail polish
lungful surface gases taken in through invertebrate ceremony
complete digesta / excreta of our failing dry swimming pool labours
revolting into scuffed graffiti
sensational nervous presence of every possible membrane
poem could be extruded midnight russets of ichor jellying
from overripe oranges shoved like bombs into exhausts of posh cars
poem could be bog-standard
smashing
wellbeing check-in
on the oily prepackaged salad
polluted brights of false spring
we hope these unremarkable toppings
find you
well
beef tomatoes are regular-sized
modified off-red drips artificial lodicules
plastichouse flavour, la ley de extranjeria
too-watery bloody sump of the mediterranean
at this time the cucumber supply chain
has coagulated in the black sea
fingers pressed in fluorescence
deep putridity is self-scanned
but grapes on pizza is an experience
each round bole a sun-berry bloats
heat melts vertical brickwork
contactless irregularity
red shift patterns on defrosting tarmac
come to the dropout session!
yesterday i saw the VC in the blockchain
consuming the crust of a continental plate
LinkedIn is the Anti-Christ
F.M. Faccion
Barely fledgling
Standing catechumens on the precipice of almost
Out-stretching
something ant-like
Trying to articulate anything
Men are funny when they provoke each other
They stuff their mouths with time-signatures and anecdotes
They addict themselves to absolutes
It’s Morning
The LinkedIn feed is smug and lacks God
In His dearth an article about the right way
to breathe for happiness
LinkedIn is not only the anti-Christ
But an absence of virtue
Clouding over beer-froth and vacant
bodily encounters
I’m preening in the mirror and applying liquid make-up for who
Tech-bros hurt my eyes
This year everyone is to move their hands in circular motions when they speak
and inflect the end of sentences
Outside the bar that ghosts frequent
The frenzied ex-Maoist babbles about ontology and mandates
Between guzzling the tap and re-calling The Bible
That’s my mother gesticulating towards the sky of my hometown
Remembering Aquinas
I think
Through the orifice of smashed stained-glass
His coffin’s incandescent glow devours words
In that hymn is silenced by seraphic light
I comforted the Final Rites when tears closed on baroque doors
of hoarded Funeral programmes
I’m reminded of them when sifting for inanities
A contact lens prescription
Or NHS number
Paperwork collateral nestled between the life of someone else’s Father
and a scratch-card
The insipid markings of me
4am Reddit quarantine
oversharing on a subreddit forum
limbs often go like this (limp)
in lieu of my hands’ ashen cradle
I tap into minefields of craniums encased
in U.S. war crimes and content
re-calling the first courtship via MSN
with a boy I wed on the playground in my cap of flowers
(*) awaiting marlowe’s madrigals (*)
only to discover blowjob briefing through the lyrical croon
of some crass BlackBerry notification
torso torn amidst nascent exploration
and antipathy
he took you to public places
expecting porn-acts between sharing beheading videos on Facebook
{{sad if not utterly absurd}}
oh to have curbed the screen strewn with the soft dough
of uncertain bodies
the breaking of bread
an Omegle prerequisite despite the intermittent ////////// sweet-talking serenade
common interests: 420, harambe, making friends
leveraging the transactional nature of relations in tony blair’s britain
I become everyone’s gf on runescape pimped out for rare items & GP
money squandered on Stardoll memberships
but Tamagotchi alive to defy the odds
standing there phallic to fuck time
earl of rochester style
<3 10 years of immeasurable impact <3
on my lunchbreak I watch rats die in heaps
digesting baudrillard through cracked tempered glass
my god! look here, above the abandoned 85” TV
there are mothers throwing nappies from derelict windows
for foxes to pull apart like sacrificial lambs
bound to altars in the baked half-light.
Sabeen Chaudhry
Sket Life
She is getting up on the wrong side / as irradiated coral dust / falling she / (vapourised islands now) / dots the i penumbral / becomes the mo(u)rning breeze and then weightless / skips the rope communal / moving sketlike / leaking the noose. Suspension is her moth-fisted alibi / buoyant labour that clangs the colour / of shadows on the sea. Anticipating gravity’s agenda this time / stretches the legs of her spirit of shade / side-eye with friends they cackle and stride / through storms / floods / atoll craters / eyeshadow fallout / a toxified drop on the end of a leaf. Together they say: ‘fake snow’ / ‘don’t smile’ / ‘every other spiral’ / ‘detonation’ they turn / to one another and mouth ‘miss u when can i see u?’
(No) Life
She is evading / passé so dense it rips the universe a new one / choking on the afterlives through every dusk / desolation / dinnertime / she plays metastable footsie with him under the table / does not let anyone order for her / runs a finger round the rim of- / no, checks her lipstick in the holographic duality of- / no, metallic duplicity of / a spoon. Leaning down, she pats clay on the combed backs of broth kittens / touching her nose to their derelict / wet noses which have been in the milk wine soil / 284 baby hearts full / of metastasis without permission. Beating now she / spills the bisque romantic / sashays the world a turn in good faith saying ‘no’ / (no) (no) (no) (no) / no to their soup / sticks a fork in his arm like she is a law / passing / doesn’t blink / leaves the table.
make her rob a motherfucking bank
abysmal fawn pyroclastic I
pretty cry through The Revolution
looking like a victimless crime
all trending excruciations petty thefts
hot swimming the halocline
small_fire_soak
abyssal in my salinity
anoxic for perfect lines
between perfect crimes
cull
in the ached furl of our girlhood
the hot-cold of motherly subsidence
diachronous as silt&slide
ride_or_die
every suburban street: an opportunity
for precocity, a sed(im)entary smirk
basking post-megafauna
in colonial overkill, resting
on their laurels milk it
milk it till it’s blind
my heart’s not true
infra_swirling
in new inflations of wet microburst
taxonomic soil technics sifting fatal
I want to be perma_
frost_footed and free
released from strategy
and caring too much
unextracted, a wince
from an icy heel on a hot thigh
Notes
‘irradiated coral dust’ is from Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018, p. 45. Here, she also writes of islands being vapourised by the U.S. nuclear tests.
‘afterlives’: I borrow from Saidiya Hartman who refers to the ‘afterlife of slavery,’ i.e. its continuities, transmutations and iterative sway, in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, 2007. I am applying the term more broadly with reference to afterlives of racialisation.
‘milk wine soil’ which is originally ‘milk, wine, soil’; ‘284 baby hearts’ and ‘without permission’ are all from Justin McBrien’s chapter, ‘Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene’ in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Ed. Jason Moore, 2016.
‘make her rob a motherfucking bank’ is André 3000’s penultimate line in Frank Ocean’s song ‘Pink Matter’.
‘my heart’s not true’ is from a Blood Orange song, ‘On the Line’.
Vernal Equinox
Oliver Southall
A famous pleasure, watching peas begin to boil.
The way they rise and fall. The rightness of their form as matched to a collective motion.
This simmering marimba headfeel. A quickened line just jagging to outrun itself.
Today a chaffinch does the same song over and over
and collared doves are calling as though they’ve been here always.
There is a feeling which means something
like butterflies
are made of nitrogen and jade. Like something is coming
and some things never return.
The birthday sky takes on a lilac haze that looks like warmth
like impacts softened and dispersed by water.
Floating logos in imaginary light. Like something true and useless whistled from the trees.
At the piano, Monk. The voice of Robert Ashley and a muted drone.
Free From
A muscular pause, conducive to the presence of a sound.
A gloss on the somatic aspect.
In this case a smooth jazz soundtrack and a goat descending from the boot of a car.
There needn’t be a theory here, or any message buried in events.
There’s only the most spacious and amazing shed.
There’s only an old fountain somewhere, soft and plashy.
And several sounds like fridges, humming.
The essence was a single, simple difference.
And items have a focal rhythm in the hand.
That’s happened.
And now this.
A meaning flying past like déjà vu.
Or parsley on a human tongue.
from SNOWMARE
Cam Scott
SNOWMARE. Flash forward to another notebook. Moments are a sheaf of paper, shuffled as the seasons in an age of heavy weather. Met Hayden at the ambient café, born New Year’s Day, and everybody thinks that twenty-twenty is fortuitous. I have an inkling but am less susceptible to symmetry. “The law is my baby.” Many people here have been awake for days. A cluster of beige orbs clutter the ceiling; a lone helium balloon breaks rank with the décor. The continental breakfast has been decimated by the time we move to fill our boots. Amber says congratulations on your union, takes us to her rooftop to admire the unattended feeders. It’s not yet migration season, she explains, when Central Park is a green beacon on the flyway. New year new fare. Over breakfast, Annie visiting from Arizona asks if we believe that anything could really change. Three days without the internet, she prophesies, and people would revolt. Sniff shoes at Dolce, slump to work. We’ll take a cup of kindness yet. What time is it? We’re still at cold feet, hungry dogs, smudged clouds. Day breaks, a bluish bulletin. Skipping stones down an abandoned lane. Pleasure of contemplation in an orange chair, a pianism shimmering like fish. Close listening costs us in metaphor. (Patricia Brennan Quartet, 1/18/20) Pick any element—dried flowers, intermittent kick, a sobbing trumpet, rain-damp beanie, barren guestbook, bathroom tile—and drive a pin through memory’s least feeling tissue, holding the moment in place. The rest will hang there as a garland, or a sentence. And I do mean judgement. Plastic bags went out of style months before they were banned. Everybody’s resolution was to love more, carry less. I guess I am depressed that friends of lovers might dislike me; even in the slight conspiracy of two against society one flirts elliptically, woos by approval. The melody in Morse code spells a key. Red skirt, crimson curtains, a genital pleat. Fat fiddlehead atop the stalk, a crowning curlicue of chordal implication. Leather rustle of uncrossing legs, patient as alligators in an elevator pool. Flu travels by reputation, as onomatopoeia. An instrumental knack starts as a hollows in the arms, an orphic basin brimming. Rhyme without pitch lacks an axis of physical meaning. Missing steve dalachinsky hurts like missing an incredible gig, but every night, at every gig. Ginger candy, ginseng, cat naps. Maybe this is for another project. Diving into history, are objects better? Are we all holes above the ground? Head rush on the whispering snare. Pet sitter to the stars, step ladder to the ceiling. See you in a week, I promised weakly. Safety is returning to the city. Poets are discovering punk rock. A vegan shark fin only looks endangered. But the problem with declared transparency is that it matters which aesthetic one stands limpidly before. Direction and simplicity have changed sides. Tiny paintings, each the size of a matchbox, punctuate the room. This poetry won’t rest until we’re all made politicians, of a sort. The smell of brass, nostalgic sipping from the spit valve. Doing front crawl, gasping for air underarm. It’s hard to say what that would look like—American democracy a make-work project for so many listless statisticians. Society must be defunded. Put your slippers on, we’re going to the store.
Dom Hale
Instead of Sleep
where I am no lack
life overtook me, leap strafe
it’s the ginnel of night stars flute near my shoulder
in whip of a timesheet
I give what I have to the poems that they’ll move prey mess
maybe for some listening friends
or others over arc way I don’t know
green knife lap
pissed to velvet thistle
here I love how the sky darkens & changes, sound
leading me from irrelevant speech
in slur range
freed up past spite I address you
with tattered weeds, whorl pitch
I love how the language slaps me
too much of our writing
clocked or collateral,
self-laceration
mimics algorithm culture
the work society not what we could throat on
to turn from this that’s slowly consuming you
I take an arrow from each
winter breaches
and go outside of myself not lost
glamour of the undertow
frost is sword light
For Mau
listen to the falconet haar-fold
in an overgrown garden
hemmed snow grey by blocks
to pulling my shirt off the cord
the skull’s a cavity
that proves something
among sharks & legal skyline
so that the world nearly forgets us
and polar suicide
cracks open shell of a walnut
is gone
what defence does a poet have?
redwing slingshot
pings from thought branches
I’ve stood in rooms been flanked
by slat numb sunlight
useless drunk
it’s that things fall away from me
ambitions for songs
until I know less
than a blowtorch confidence
of milling about
saughton walls
and there are hardly any words to carry us
how I reach out of the whirlpool
that abyss. with one last job for prometheus
what jetty will art have?
if suffering bluff-sways, and the administrator
types out a chain
but they won’t buy us no they won’t.
gold gale
flash fire
offices go up
my name is not my name
another friendship poem
Joey Frances
for sam
sappho sixteen:
some people love their horses
some people love a good boat
others say the most beautiful thing
in this whole world
is a man in uniform
(o fascist beauty)
but me, i love my baby
every thing's about
the same thing
words for things
don't exist in character
same or otherwise
the only thing i knew
to burn down
was my own life
gotta start
where you are
what i miss is that
i mean all of you
saying it over
one long boring
project of opening
til we dissipate
if we did that
we could all live
in a great big house
a fucking huge one
you lose in owning
what you gain
in decorative rights
we're hanging out
straight goofin
there's a baby here
pretty weird right
she ent my baby
but we're into it
cos all of yous are fuckin family
don't want nobody to be my baby
& that's not different
that's the same thing
the poem itself
is the sociality
it asks for
when we read it
at the memorial
& cry in voices
& elsewhere all
my oldest friends
the love for whom
i'm abuzz with
aren't so fussed
about poetry except
& occasionally on
my behalf it's
just the ways
we relate, yes
& they love me
& our plausibly compatible needs
i'm constantly realising
a co constituting helix
here we are
back on the inward curve
& everyone's finally doing great
actually, haha
and I waah
Sophie Taylor
All Videos
Seedbird
Kaisa Saarinen
Recklessly cross-exchanging keys with neither shame nor secrecy
The metal freezes on my palm like a sparrow I cannot feed
Far from the cold marsh. Grief twice-removed lingers in exhalations
Only on Tuesday morning I was torn apart strip by strip
The skyward-pointed scissors devoured my outlines
I shed petals of plastic and black duct tape
In the video of myself coming undone I was laughing like a child
I was a child watching myself laughing
In that small room overcast by concrete forests
I cut my ribcage open and seeds spill out, but
No winter garden to plant them in. I fill my screens
With timelapses of ugly apples blooming from snowflowers
Mud
Once I saw the path laid out
In the bend of a spine
Now I don’t know up from down
My hand burns the hollow
Charred cartographies
Toward the blank spaces of the everyday where
Suddenly something is there, a quiet
Gravity uncalled - take the earthquake into you
Bury it deep in the heart-land epicentre
Hold the handle of a worn-out leash
Stitched with crimson thread of life
Watch everything move but you
A centrifugal slow dance
My stage knife spills thick ink
Carving murders out of thin air
Shadows move slowly
Bracketed by iron bars
The point of the needle knows where to flesh itself out
Seeking skin with a higher purpose, a language
Of wounds opened into secrets
By the perfect silence of pain
The fade and throb of memory
Is it good to leave no trace on this world
as i tread on its infinite wounds
Is it wicked to plant seeds in a lake of blood
even if the water lilies bloom
gggirl!
yes this little body is
gravity centre
black! hole!!
SO SMALL
desire minus fire
only have eyes for me
pick me, I’m tight
call me pretty and i’ll cry
blood on cue, just for you
dream of slaughtering
myth of lovely tears
kiss daddy good morning
violate me. elevate me
i take it so well, flying high
chem pearl on my tongue
read me hagiography
breed me violent sleep
you don’t have to victimise me daddy
i can do it myself. i’ve got the manual
three hundred pages of crucifixion tips
knuckleduster bulimia acid bath hysteria
my favourite thing in the world is fucking
a raging misogynist
schizoid soft femicidal
pillow talk
butcher me harder
i’m less pink inside
glitter-guts
reform tomorrow
@pstoral3
Alex Glynne
Natas Kaupas pioneered the hydrant spin;
see him gracing the cover of Thrasher
in rose embroidered jeans
as a cumulous is interviewed by Vice magazine
from the green and dewy fields
a depop notification pings...
Fashion vloggers gather in twos and threes
and at the Rivers’ edge, as Badiou begins to speak, discoursing on the irruptive nature of the event,
each begins to list...before succumbing, reluctantly, to sleep
/in crisp 1080p, the cherry blossom sheds its leaves
Then the whole scene becomes completely stilled.
For what could be hours, even years,
a lone Deutsche Bank ads’ flickering
seems the sole indication that here
life was ever, like,
a thing
(Last autumn’s double edition Frieze
with its easy apophatics and le gout de neant
springs to mind, don’t you think?
this reticulated concrete bit the lone elliptical machine that tweet
)
.... until,
at last, our longed for _ does finally arrive: a single, restorative Click
...
...
‘Amongst the myriad forms, now I see
the silhouette of Margueritte Pourette
drawn in cloud-stuff miles above the lawn...’
Vice correspondent Isobel Young
chimes in, her gaze
directed up toward her interviewee
— Who, also revived, but still no less inscrutable, roils violently on
‘...All motives remain unclear;
but, then again, here, motives
barely seem to test the reality of misty fields’
She blinks.
‘...and perhaps if anything can be taken from this scene
it’s that.’
And perhaps it is
The cumulous begins to weep
turning again
the turbines sing
but, for now at least,
we have the wood spurges’ incremental creep
The 3 minute pop songs’ bittersweet gift
And the knowledge that
outlasting any seasons’ trend
this little brook will continue to leap on
to burble and to wend
and
further down
in some deeper recess of the dream
Natas will always wear those jeans
and continue
improbably
to spin
Did Someone Say Sin or Sorrow?
Anne Lesley Selcer
There are so many men in gay porn
I love it
then I tire of dick
think of the ineffability
of the female fantasy
the impossibility of woman
the incredulity of gender
I watch a couple
cross the rainy street
dressed to the nines
to see Fred Halsted films
my heart literally ached for you
when the three guys
pounced on the blonde sailor
his face so round
body so built
the flame of a man’s nipple.
I sneak into the internet
late at night
looking to be finished by violence
find a photo of Karla Homolka
and her girlfriend in jail
a twin hand upon each criminal hip
Klossowski writes of
the desire to deindividuate
to pseudo eternity
your room plastered in flyers
angel wings in the hallway
salt and water in a vase
the ecstatic gazes in all directions
drops the body of beauty
the work of love
is perilous, expensive
how has the moon not refused?
Throw the bones of your mother behind your back
I will cut the ribbons
at my wrists
I will pull the knife
return it to the sun.
Morning Poem
I am starry and cold
a crown of ice is melting
down my face
this solitude I requested
has been granted
I pay so much rent.
In the sky tonight
a change
it has nothing to do with the stars
as time has nothing to do with space
it's still cold
it's spring
he texted me again
I lay here composing a response
breathing water.
When I spread my arms out
toward the environment
like men do
in pictures
on dating apps
I am in the universe
it is supposed to feel epic
or sublime
but the word
is for grade schoolers
or mystics,
“That’s interesting you felt violently disconnected
can you say more?” he texted.
Three years later
I receive his text
in a gossamer gown
standing upon a globe
lit from below
barefoot
herbs and flowers
snaking through my hair
I make a gesture
a very long blink
it sorts the whole visible world
I touch Venus to the left
Jupiter to the right
quietly ruffle
the surface of this logic
to find holes,
I am not alone
I have a baby
I am a mother here
if I spread out my arms
to the universe
as men do
in their pictures
on dating apps
my baby would be gone.
My child is at their father’s
we arrange our lives
underneath the stars
though Our Family Wizard.
It’s seven AM
I text “I miss you
have a good day at school,”
it shows delivered,
but not yet read.
raipur ambient
Mantra Mukim
twisting the washed
cloth of sky over the stilts
egrets return
having picked locusts
from the backs of buffaloes
all morning an amber gap dries out
the washed cloth of sky echoes from a
single note tricks of skin see the repetition
of water as rain the escarpment in chitrakut
is one thick fold on the earth’s fabric he tells me built
to hold a tune breath tickling the washed cloth
of sky when i say ambient i mean tamarind
ripening in record time ambient
hand stroking last night’s dough under cheap fridge light
wind deep in the belly of the factory roaring iron ore
into landscapes with weak passwords a lazy eyed man
deep in kondagaon firms up bronze
armies with muzzles poking the washed cloth of sky
hand is full wading searching
the edge of summer is there a rose
beyond the rice fields a birthmark
hovers above the neighbourhood etched
in bauxite dust boys behind take-aways
reworking playlists the braindance rising
but my hand is full of words
like grass popping through an old lattice
leave your eggs here in the helix of my ear
safe in the ‘world-class banking scheme’
raipur is where the earth’s warmth is hatched
this hand is full of other hands colours
cracking the dense world distorting the
clearing when i say clearing i mean maoists
at the bus stop i mean saying no to the hill-myna
clearing the thick august morning pulling out
old samples and hits as the ‘export-quality’
teak wood around it shivers tired &
often leaving but at least my hand is full
Interval: House, Lover, Slippages (selections)
Lucy Rose Cunningham
***
I read phone notes.
Collages
memory as collective
cutting things away,
offcuts
beveled edges,
function,
stage-sets
we are stood on set
together, a shifting movie
without direction or end.
***
Frühjahrsmüdigkeit*
early year,
hoarse throats and sore lung.
Spring fever comes and your mother says
it’s the new season. The book I’m reading proposes it’s fatigue, and the calendar nods, it’s been a whole year.
*Früh (early) jahrs (year) müdig (tired) keit (ness).
***
I walk the roads licked with sunset reds to our compost collection point, the smells of earth and damp wood filling each nostril. Listening to the woozy bass of drums and shrill violins in a black midi song, I walk through a swarm of midges. Senses overwhelmed, very pandemonium. Pandemic. Epidemic. Epidermis. The top layer of skin is singing. I feel tingly when I talk to unfamiliar people now and I thank post-punk-maybe-art-pop bands for their conveyance of my whirring synapses.
Entering public spheres again, this/is/is/this/normal.
Meat Cute
Rebecca Kane
I’ll set the scene. The lovers next to me whisper about the lion’s language, his vowels and such, while the crop top bagel babes go about their day, I pray, undisturbed. I am right sitting, thinking of our romantic meats all folded into spirals like a big, salami staircase. If I were to bring you here, I’d say you would first notice the soggy, salty smell. A smell that brings you back to holidays under a shared sun. Holidays congealed in the mind due to our loving, quiet mouthings to each other. Holidays of smudging delicatessen fridges with fingers as we carved hearts into the meaty smog <3
August 20
Fintan Calpin
When I write
the perfect poem
I will drop
my immediate sandwich
tan-lines of old postcards
on my cork board
househunting spreadsheet.
Sitting in the garden
with the bluebottles
I guess I am work shy
deadline’s Sunday.
Three second rule.
What’s the opposite of labour?
Life / leisure / art / experience / sleep?
A question has no obverse.
August 24
Proposal for poets:
length of string
drop it
shape it lands in
describes the lyric
line of flight
language
turning in / out.
Repayments begin
épater le bourgeois
I reflect on my loneliness
with Charles Bernstein
coldness is a type of security
picture frame not so wonky
a horseman riding by might notice.
The rain this afternoon
long vertical stripes
smells floral almost
overripe.
September 22
where poetry
is intelligible
crops fail, objects relate
to this preponderous
rhetoric in the pejorative sense
desire is sometimes about
what you don’t care about
I need near things
every time I sing god kills a
bluebirdbluebirdbluebird
pick a poesy from the garden pick a poesy
Automatic Speech Recognition
Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir
When you can hear the robins through the chimney
from the neighbour's garden, silence crawls from
under the glass, it lives, there, between stone
grey couches stretches its arms, its legs, jumps
to grandmother's lap and curls up on the beige corduroy,
happens suddenly, not a certain time of day
silence is one, increasingly challenging, shouting
silence and flat and cold and damp, it is definitely damp,
not to give in, grandmother rises, silence falls
on the parquet, grandmother walks to the small black box
by the radio and whispers Alexa, Alexa, play classical guitar.
The black box starts with a Spanish ballad and
it becomes invisible, silence, grandmother takes off
her slippers and stuffs them in the chimney, just ballads
not robins, has not been barefoot in ages, has not
been alone before, has thousands and thousands of ballads
in the little black box Alexa, Alexa, how is the weather in London?
Alexa how is the weather in Skåne? Alexa, Alexa, whatever
happened to Monica Lewinsky and how many grams in a cup, please,
classical guitar please, always polite to Alexa, in case of silence
is a teenager now, increasingly challenging, shouting
silence and flat and cold and moist, it is definitely moist,
not to give in, grandmother stops wearing slippers, hears
the skin on wood, claps! Alexa, Alexa play Johnny Cash!
and candles that smell nice and silence is so heavy it crawls
up the chest presses the soft pale skin, varicose veins, liver-
spots, printed onto silence’s neck Alexa how many people live
in the Congo all maps seem to have tripled in size as silence glues
them to the glass table, see all that sea, silence points to
grandmother puts the slippers on, sherry, Alexa, Alexa
how much does a whale weigh there is no measurement
for silence but humpbacks are thirty thousand kilograms
and it only takes five hundred grams to make rye, flour,
the house – Alexa what is the history of bread – gets smaller, just in case
of silence is all grown, increasing at night, spreading
silence and round and cold and soaking wet, it is definitely soaking
her feet in the washtub grandmother, slippers off again, not to give in, moves
the crooked toe, small circle, writes cursive ‘buy marzipan’ grandmother remembers
this is everyone’s washtub, warm and mint green, Alexa, Alexa
play classical guitar and tell me the story of the thieves in the night
and the child and the tree and please whatever happened again to Monica Lewinsky
*
We have discovered a black hole
on our doorstep.
It is starving and that’s what makes it so dark
apparently
we don’t know what black holes like
to eat other than stars and interstellar gas
and we are currently on a budget; tuna in cans your step mothers’
lentil soup my bag of dried fish since I last went home. 2kg popcorn for 3.99.
It is much easier with dogs and humans
everyone likes buttered toast and pasta with nothing on it.
You read How to care for a place where gravity pulls too hard?
How to keep your matter (that is squeezed into a tiny place) happy and healthy?
and I arrange shells around its edges like one does
to mark the flowerbed from the weeds.
We measure thousand light years
in fly lives and convert that to human
lives through macaroni diagrams to try understand
and see how long we have
to learn how to feed enormous or supermassive
unexpected voids
in space.
Louis Fabrice Tshimanga
Senza nome 1
Prey and predator epicyclic eye movement, swirling and crossing,
I lost a lover.
Those complex combinations of simple circles
that turn smoothly
and approximate sharp edges, adjustable to any close orbit, cut by Occam
rather than Kepler and Copernicus, a choir of faes,
gods in carillons,
shifting away from pyramids pins
Pick a form and make it a wave, by repetitions,
edges, tongue, tooth
there you have a project, onto the fundamental axis
that silently guides the array
and its companions,
Fourier discovered this machine.
I lost a lover due to the shift in tides, mismatch of our spectra,
to the high frequencies of her heat, the bulimic eating of my patience
A woodpecker and a beaver going through my log
And whats cold crystal looks still, dead ordered, coral,
vestigial organ at best
Even the moon shifts away and three-body problems are unsolvable
In close form
But I’m a tooth, mineral painfully alive,
art of the clouds, art of the clocks, pond by pond
projected to the astral plane, recovering, growing new tales,
salamander of the passions, Newt of the sexes,
stepped out of my own skin, shed by the stress incarnation of psoriasis
I completely lost my predisposition to meditation
the tension is feeble
Platelets and tiles collect in my foggy head, ferns swallow the pupil
and the rays of CGI dreams scan the eye fundus down to the pelvic floor.
A wet snake
pushing me in and out scrolling frenzies, swiping crazes
to cry saliva, or to [redacted], this is the problem solving skill I need.
Brain frog, was it?, long covid effect
Rolling in the reflected clouds, pond by pond,
beside the highways, with no license
per aspera ad lichens
I spin with my little pin
Eye spill with my little [redacted]
Take omega 3 6 9 feel the oily energy of a bank of herrings shooting out of
your [redacted]
hollering around your brain convolutions,
a head that is a globe, a warning for unprecedented storms
disentanglement and distortion of taste,
this widespread private mess
Crawling out of the hellmouth
River Ellen MacAskill
trans crossing over
trans one foot on the other side
one foot on fire on each side
burning trans coming out of nowhere
a meteor on blank skies
trans through the atmosphere
humming, a flying object circling
late at night trans falls into
morning sun trans claws on your thighs
trans exploding between tectonic plates
and ectoplasm just everywhere, lava
it’s hot trans continental shift
to a moorless volcanic rock trans
predating on everything good and pure in the underworld
trans crawling out from the cracks
in your floorboards, pissing on your bedsheets
fucking on your bedsheets trans
forever trans for housing trans for
shadows in the closet where the mould grows
trans gnawing their way to the source and
eating it alive trans heating up, that’s hot–
this ‘‘‘trans’’’ thing’s come out of nowhere hasn’t it?
trans cumming all over your never ending borescape
Clockwork Orange
after Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Callie Gardner
Lou Collins
and it was too hot a day to be sad
which only really means
it was ten or twenty degrees
which is warm not hot but
what is the difference I
do not know I was waiting
for the metro I think or
for something else to happen
doesn’t have to be much
and it wasn’t it never happened
so I smiled and said hello