a few poems to read....
Winning poem in the 2017 Myslexia unpublished poets prize
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Ann’s shed
bags of cement, rusty poles, a rook of hoes, spades and shears. ivy
growing through a crack in the door, Grow-Bags, rolled up carpet strips,
a Helping-Hand pick-up stick, plastic sheets and bamboo canes;
used each season that comes around, stuck in a punctured yellow bucket.
a worn-out cushion, tangled wire, a Spear & Jackson tool (I can’t describe)
3 coloured and leaky watering cans. the first summer flies; all novice,
all weak, tough shadows grown long in the day, and here - a coat
I should recognize. sweet peas straggling the roof, defying a rickety trellis,
the neighbour's cooking drifting in, another roast, another day fro rest, a jar
of shells from an unremembered beach, a barking dog, a cobweb rocking
between window and frame; its threads spanning more pots than her garden would need,
and the gardener herself; bedded down in her purple room with palliative bed,
a catheter, a morphine supply, a disease. the window always ajar (to breathe,
to breathe, to take in the last of all she would leave) listening only to birds
to voices now, and the wind playing each individual leaf. and Ann,
still asking how everyone is, whilst softly growing her own death.
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A short-listed poem ( York festival 2018, judged by Andy Macmillan )
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couple. [in a box]
a lasso in the corner steadies our heads. a blind-folding lid
flat-packs four limbs into dark. you left grease rings under my eyes,
and at the top of my ribs. can’t see you any more. there’s no tick tick tick
to measure hearts by. (don’t know if i ) there’s nothing to count
with. my arm has ants. we are pulling short slitted breaths out
from under a door we have imagined over there. how many small hours
left? or squashed? you press on me the way rain-drenched cardboard
sticks to the streets. are we are not finished yet? your legs
kill. minutes hang like washing that never quite dries
in the cold. nothing will burst into light. they say it was us
who emptied the box took its cube of oxygen to our lungs
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