Select 6 - Sam Smith's Poetry Page

Saturday's rains

your dirty tongue stuck into a song/ there's a lipstick on the glass
your red skirt drowned in wine/ and a trace of a face that isn't mine
your perfume hunting the silence in the air/ there's a shadow on the table
your cigarette like a flower between your fingers/ attached to a body that isn't yours
your hair upon my lips/ open up the window
your voice/ the sky is thirsty, wants to drink another light
your gentle lift up of the hips/ such a fine night whispers on the terrace
your glorious orgasm/ i can't remember where i left the day
your pillow and your breath/ like always, i can't forget.

by Jurak Ot Petrof

Children's Voices Rise In protest Against the Pro-Afterlife

Scalpels wait patiently to leave their signatures
On pro-afterlife registers.
These are the signatures that will seal
The fates of millions of Xs.

In this world burdened with rust and with fear
Children's tongues swell with the clear
Eyed proverbs of elders, and kindergarten notebooks
Choke on the wisdom of the death-bed.

Dear scalpel, cursed are you. Abortion-shack, you too.
And cursed is every hand that makes a living between
Your walls. Into its amnesiac loo
The earth expels the little ones, in this world burdened

With rust and with fear.
And every child's tongue shall become an angry ray
Of light, which, in the wombs of soul-less prisms
Shall break forth into joyous and rainbowed music.

by Tolu Ogunlesi

Out of Gilded Menus

African tourists all, sitting
At The Quay, filling our mouths
With words as we await
The white-man's food, stiff and flattened
Between the pepper-less pages of a carte du jour.

"I'll be darned if Antwerp's bland sauces
Haven't wriggled their way
Into the dishes of Ilfracombe."

"The first culinary commandment of Europe,
For a first time African visitor is this:
Nothing ever tastes as it looks!"

"Every helping of white food tastes
Like it was shaven clean. A distant world
From the spiced afro of African cuisine."

We shall find no rest here -
Not in food that sits glumly
On monogrammed plates.

We will eat the food,
But it is the memories that will silence
Our rumbling stomachs -

Of Lagos, our Lagos, where Isi-Ewu* nightly sails
On raging streams of fresh beer, tongue-paddled,

Headed for the deep oceans,
From whose depths proverbs and Tales by Moonlight
Rise like the mirthful spirits of distant ancestors.

Throughout the days we have left
On this English soil, our backs shall be turned
To all Palaces of Prandial Pleasures. Our plates
Will have no appetites for food out of gilded menus.

We will content ourselves with the smoke that rises
From Lagos' open-air kitchens,
Smoke that doesn't require a visa to visit us here,
Laden with news of Home and Happenings;

Smoke that simultaneously darkens
The visions of sleepy African gods, and
The insomniac tempers
Of Europe's environmental activists.

*Isi-Ewu: Goat-head pepper-soup (A Nigerian delicacy)

by Tolu Ogunlesi

Seeing Yellow

The bywater
of a surfing imagination
scalds his face.
This painting's about love.
He is embarrassed.

A mess of organdie
ruffles his arm
with the impetuousness
of gases.

He bends to the canvas
cataract-close
a storming of unglued nerves
prickling the creepers
of his stubble.

With a hiss
his years
collapse into cuneiform
monumentalizing
into a gallery chair.

An invisible whispering
beneath the paint
announces the arrival
of shade.

by Christopher Barnes

Last night's fire has licked the air
a final time and they dance on

in charcoal ash. Eyes turned down low,
their meeting was a brief affair.

In her taut back a fizz of passion;
her breast welded to his chest by the heat

of her heart. He is not the focus,
merely the projection; the only strength

left in his shoulders is his casual certainty.
Rumour of brutal betrayal spreads in dead chatter

in empty glasses. Not far from a waterfall
of black hair is the cold punch of goodbye.

by Gordon PD Mason

hands

his hands flutter
like leaves
the doctors said
it's a type of autism

now they are a plane
swooping through clouds
defying gravity

now a firework
a clenched fist
exploding as fingers
hang in the air

now a parachutist
now a hang-glider

he puts his hands together
birds bats and butterflies
populate his world

by Jim Bennett

OUT NOW

from the field book by Carol Thistlethwaite

How do you get 'the jizz' on birds? The language of guidebooks is only a start; the language of poetry takes us further and especially when it's as crafted and innovative as the poetry of Carol Thistlethwaite. This is a collection that invites you into a particular world and does so with great success; a world of keen observation where language is achingly precise and lucid, pushed to the boundaries of observation. Here sound and shape combine to allow the reader 'that wordless leap', the moment of epiphany 'to recognition/jizz'. Jan Fortune-Wood Cinnamon Press/Envoi editor

'from the field book' will be released in paperback (ISBN 978-1-905202-76-8) and ebook (ISBN 978-1-905202-77-5) formats.

Excerpt

Purchase: Paperback | eBook

"Nana's poetry is perceptive of human nature, the land she has come to love, its shores and its wildlife. Her poems say 'take a closer look, adopt a sharper angle' - an angle that gives her work strength and insight." Ron Wiseman

"A collection of gentle, reflective poems that explore aspects of the poet's life, work and everyday environment. They reveal an eye for detail, as well as great sensitivity to the subject. Her use of imagery delights." Helen Gould

"The poems here take us a step farther. They continually beat back the void. Engage them and let them engage you." Uche Nduka, author of 'If Only The Night'

"Renée Sigel's poetry has an erotic thrill and a daring rarely seen in contemporary English language poetry. She is a poet entirely in love with both language and the world, but at the same time absolutely unsentimental about either. Her best work reads like that of a 1920s French surrealist reincarnated in the body of a 21st Century woman." Kevin Higgins