Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: kindle; poetry; anthology
Publisher: Transworld
Rights: All rights reserved.

An anthology by
Ella Risbridger

SET ME ON FIRE

A Poem for Every Feeling

Contents

Cover
Title Page
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication

Please Skip This Introduction And Go Right To The Poems

Poems, In Order

Blk Girl Art – Jamila Woods, (Happy)

Announcement and Next Steps – Amy Key, (Happy)

The Great Lover – Rupert Brooke, (Happy)
Wedding-Wind – Philip Larkin, (Happy)
The Orange – Wendy Cope, (Happy / Hungry)

So Much Happiness – Naomi Shihab Nye, (Happy / Hungry)

A Bowl of Spaghetti – Kimiko Hahn, (Happy / Hungry / Mothers)

Butter – Elizabeth Alexander, (Happy / Hungry / Mothers)

Towards Autumn – Marilyn Hacker, (Hungry)

They Would Have All That – Mary Jean Chan, (Hungry)

Lattimo – Vahni Capildeo, (Hungry)

Lines for painting on grains of rice – Craig Arnold, (Hungry)

Bad New Government – Emily Berry, (Hungry)
Wish (2) – Bhanu Kapil, (Hungry)
In the Kitchen – Chen Jun, (Hungry)
Eating Fried Chicken – Linh Dinh, (Hungry)

To Whom It May Concern – Andrew Motion, (Hungry / Wanting)

Peanut Butter – Eileen Myles, (Hungry / Wanting)

Oh God, Fuck Me – Ruth L. Schwartz, (Coffee / Wanting)

Coffee in Heaven – John Agard, (Coffee / Wanting)

Our Love Could Spoil Dinner – Emily Berry, (Coffee / Wanting)

Want – Joan Larkin, (Wanting)

For You I’ve Started Sleeping – Kaveh Akbar, (Wanting / Hoping)

Overheard on a Salt Marsh – Harold Monro, (Wanting / Waiting / Hoping)

Westron Wind – Anonymous, (Waiting / Wanting / Having)

from Prothalamion – Edmund Spenser, (Waiting / Wanting / Having)

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers – Reginald Dwayne Betts, (Wanting / Waiting / Hoping / Having)

The Stags – Kathleen Jamie, (Having / Talking)

The Hinds – Kathleen Jamie, (Having / Talking)

Millions of Strawberries – Genevieve Taggard, (Having / Talking)

best – Laura Webb, (Talking)

Solitude – Franny Choi, (Talking)

Personal Statement – Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, (Talking / It’s Complicated)

Marblehead – Rebecca Lindenberg, (It’s Complicated)

Monopoly (After Ashbery) – Sarah Howe, (It’s Complicated)

the not quite love – Yrsa Daley-Ward, (It’s Complicated)

Studio Apartment: Sunday – Eileen Pun, (It’s Complicated)

Monica – Hera Lindsay Bird, (It’s Complicated / Other People’s Lives)

About Ana – Victoria Adukwei Bulley, (It’s Complicated / Other People’s Lives)

Victoria – Ruth Stacey, (Other People’s Lives)

Mr Darcy – Victoria Chang, (Other People’s Lives)

Josephine Baker Finds Herself – Patience Agbabi, (Other People’s Lives)

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears – Mohja Kahf, (Other People’s Lives)

1979 – Roddy Lumsden, (Other People’s Lives)

Origin Story – Eve L. Ewing, (Other People’s Lives)

Apples – Rachel Long, (Other People’s Lives)

Delicate and Jumpy – Morgan Parker, (Other People’s Lives / On Being Done)

Let’s Send Our Lovers into Orbit – Liz Venn, (On Being Done)

The Pomegranate – Eavan Boland, (On Being Done / Mothers)

Picking Raspberries with Mowgli – Mimi Khalvati, (Mothers)

Archive for a Daughter – Sandeep Parmar, (Mothers)

My Daughter Brings Home Bones – Jennifer Richter, (Mothers)

Medical History – Nicole Sealey, (Mothers / You Might As Well Live)

Résumé – Dorothy Parker, (You Might As Well Live)

Musée des Beaux Arts – W. H. Auden, (You Might As Well Live)

Bagpipe Music – Louis MacNeice, (You Might As Well Live)

What Every Woman Should Carry – Maura Dooley, (You Might As Well Live / Rage and Trauma)

‘Perhaps this verse would please you better–Sue–(2)’ – Colette Labouff Atkinson, (You Might As Well Live / Rage and Trauma)

Did This Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot? – Alice Walker, (Rage and Trauma)

The House – Warsan Shire, (Rage and Trauma)

Some Toxin – Natalie Shapero, (Rage and Trauma)

Translations – Adrienne Rich, (Rage and Trauma)

Eating Kit Kats During the Last Hurricane, We Decide to Split Up – Christina Olson, (Rage and Trauma / This Is Probably Over, Huh)

[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up – Bernadette Mayer, (Rage and Trauma / This Is Probably Over, Huh)

The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part – Heather Christle, (Rage and Trauma)

One Art – Elizabeth Bishop, (This Is Probably Over, Huh / Overthinking)

Song: Go and catch a falling star – John Donne, (This Is Probably Over, Huh / Overthinking)

Pensive Reflection – Nisha Ramayya, (Overthinking)

Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly – Kayo Chinigonyi, (Overthinking)

Question – May Swenson, (Overthinking / Close of Day)

#53 – E. E. Cummings, (Close of Day)

Do not go gentle into that good night – Dylan Thomas, (Close of Day)

Sin Visits Me – Malika Booker, (Close of Day)

from Clearances – Seamus Heaney, (Close of Day)

Lucozade – Jackie Kay, (Close of Day)

On My First Son – Ben Jonson, (Close of Day / Life After Death)

Suicide’s Note: An Annual – Mary Karr, (Close of Day / Life After Death)

Morning Song – Sylvia Plath, (Life After Death)

Life After Death – Ted Hughes, (Life After Death)

For Michelle – Kiri Piahana-Wong, (Life After Death)

How It Is – Maxine Kumin, (Life After Death)

The Blue Dress – Saeed Jones, (Life After Death / Fathers)

Father’s Old Blue Cardigan – Anne Carson, (Life After Death / Fathers)

Long Distance II – Tony Harrison, (Fathers)

Those Winter Sundays – Robert Hayden, (Fathers)

Other Clouds – Rebecca Perry, (Fathers)

Home – Kazim Ali, (Fathers)

coping skills lost in the flood – CAConrad, (The End of the World)

The Very Nervous Family – Sabrina Orah Mark, (The End of the World)

The Second Coming – W. B. Yeats, (The End of the World)

My Imminent Demise Makes the Headlines the Same Day I Notice How Even Your Front Teeth Are – Momtaza Mehri, (The End of the World)

Post-factual Love Poem – Paul Guest, (The End of the World)

We Have Everything We Need – Selina Nwulu, (The End of the World)

Anthropocene Pastoral – Catherine Pierce, (The End of the World)

Microbial Museum – Maya Chowdhry, (After the End)

be careful – Ed Roberson, (And Last Words)

VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God – Mary Karr, (And Last Words)

This Started Off As A Book For People Who Hate Poetry

1. Reason One (Feelings)

2. Reason Two (Facts)

How I Made This Book, For Poetry Nerds And Other Interested Parties

Index Of Spare Feelings
Index Of First Lines
Index Of Poets And Translators
Acknowledgements
Credits
Copyright
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1. Cover
2. Frontmatter
3. Table of Contents
4. Begin Reading

About the Author

Ella Risbridger is a writer and poet. She has written for the Guardian, Prospect, Grazia and Stylist, among others and wrote a column in The Pool called ‘My Life in Poems’. Set Me On Fire is her first poetry anthology.

Also by Ella Risbridger

Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

for Caroline, who hated poetry first

Please Skip This Introduction And Go Right To The Poems

Writing about music, as somebody once said, is a bit like dancing about architecture.

I feel exactly like this about writing on poetry. It’s like explaining a joke. It’s like wrapping a sculpture in bubble wrap. It’s like covering a painting with printed cards to explain what the painting was meant to be.

And so I’d urge you, really, to skip these pages and open the book at random, and keep opening until you get to something you like: a poem that speaks to you more clearly and vividly than anything I could possibly say.

That said, it’s true that I have written some things in this book: little annotations where I couldn’t shut up, where I wanted you to see what I’d seen in a poem, or where I’d discovered something interesting and wanted you to know it too. Feel free to ignore these notes completely. I won’t mind.

This book is organized by feelings. If I’ve done my job right, you should be able to read any handful of poems pulled from any point in the book and they should make sense together. There are vague categories (indicated in the margins) but please, refer to them as little as possible. They’ll point you in the right direction.

The happy poems tend to cluster towards the beginning of the book; those about the end of the world are (logically) at the end. Poems about mothers are hung together like grapes on a vine, in a section I’d originally thought of as hungry poems. The hungry poems shaded, inevitably, to ones about sex. And then the sex poems got everywhere.

It turns out that categorizing poems is a fool’s game, and so I’ve done it as little as possible. Treat the vague sections as loose, shaky, maybe-these-go-together suggestions. Treat everything I’ve written as pencil scribbles in the margins of a second-hand book. Interesting, maybe. But not important. Not canonical. Not the point.

The poems are the point. Which is why I’m skipping writing an introduction to this book – these pages apart – and saying please please please just read the poems, I was never here at all, you never saw me, right?

Even so, I know that there are some people – and I am one of them – who like to read introductions. There are some people who really want to know the person who chose the poems; who really want to understand how this whole business of ‘making an anthology’ came about and how it works; and some people who (like me) really want to read about other people who love poetry. For those people, I have written a truly appalling number of words at the back of the book: an afterword, just like Kaye Webb used to do in the old Puffin books. There you can read about why I felt compelled to make this book, and who I made it for, and how I chose the poems. (Also, there is an exceptionally tortured metaphor about jam.)

For everyone else, however, the book starts here.

Actually, I suppose it starts wherever you want it to start. Open it up. Start reading. Find something that speaks to you – you, right now, reading this. Just as you are. Find a poem that you don’t hate and go from there.

Ella Risbridger, 2019

Poems, In Order

Blk Girl Art – Jamila Woods, (Happy)

Announcement and Next Steps – Amy Key, (Happy)

The Great Lover – Rupert Brooke, (Happy)

Wedding-Wind – Philip Larkin, (Happy)

The Orange – Wendy Cope, (Happy / Hungry)

So Much Happiness – Naomi Shihab Nye, (Happy / Hungry)

A Bowl of Spaghetti – Kimiko Hahn, (Happy / Hungry / Mothers)

Butter – Elizabeth Alexander, (Happy / Hungry / Mothers)

Towards Autumn – Marilyn Hacker, (Hungry)

They Would Have All That – Mary Jean Chan, (Hungry)

Lattimo – Vahni Capildeo, (Hungry)

Lines for painting on grains of rice – Craig Arnold, (Hungry)

Bad New Government – Emily Berry, (Hungry)

Wish (2) – Bhanu Kapil, (Hungry)

In the Kitchen – Chen Jun, (Hungry)

Eating Fried Chicken – Linh Dinh, (Hungry)

To Whom It May Concern – Andrew Motion, (Hungry / Wanting)

Peanut Butter – Eileen Myles, (Hungry / Wanting)

Oh God, Fuck Me – Ruth L. Schwartz, (Coffee / Wanting)

Coffee in Heaven – John Agard, (Coffee / Wanting)

Our Love Could Spoil Dinner – Emily Berry, (Coffee / Wanting)

Want – Joan Larkin, (Wanting)

For You I’ve Started Sleeping – Kaveh Akbar, (Wanting / Hoping)

Overheard on a Salt Marsh – Harold Monro, (Wanting / Waiting / Hoping)

Westron Wind – Anonymous, (Waiting / Wanting / Having)

from Prothalamion – Edmund Spenser, (Waiting / Wanting / Having)

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers – Reginald Dwayne Betts, (Wanting / Waiting / Hoping / Having)

The Stags – Kathleen Jamie, (Having / Talking)

The Hinds – Kathleen Jamie, (Having / Talking)

Millions of Strawberries – Genevieve Taggard, (Having / Talking)

best – Laura Webb, (Talking)

Solitude – Franny Choi, (Talking)

Personal Statement – Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, (Talking / It’s Complicated)

Marblehead – Rebecca Lindenberg, (It’s Complicated)

Monopoly (After Ashbery) – Sarah Howe, (It’s Complicated)

the not quite love – Yrsa Daley-Ward, (It’s Complicated)

Studio Apartment: Sunday – Eileen Pun, (It’s Complicated)

Monica – Hera Lindsay Bird, (It’s Complicated / Other People’s Lives)

About Ana – Victoria Adukwei Bulley, (It’s Complicated / Other People’s Lives)

Victoria – Ruth Stacey, (Other People’s Lives)

Mr Darcy – Victoria Chang, (Other People’s Lives)

Josephine Baker Finds Herself – Patience Agbabi, (Other People’s Lives)

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears – Mohja Kahf, (Other People’s Lives)

1979 – Roddy Lumsden, (Other People’s Lives)

Origin Story – Eve L. Ewing, (Other People’s Lives)

Apples – Rachel Long, (Other People’s Lives)

Delicate and Jumpy – Morgan Parker, (Other People’s Lives / On Being Done)

Let’s Send Our Lovers into Orbit – Liz Venn, (On Being Done)

The Pomegranate – Eavan Boland, (On Being Done / Mothers)

Picking Raspberries with Mowgli – Mimi Khalvati, (Mothers)

Archive for a Daughter – Sandeep Parmar, (Mothers)

My Daughter Brings Home Bones – Jennifer Richter, (Mothers)

Medical History – Nicole Sealey, (Mothers / You Might As Well Live)

Résumé – Dorothy Parker, (You Might As Well Live)

Musée des Beaux Arts – W. H. Auden, (You Might As Well Live)

Bagpipe Music – Louis MacNeice, (You Might As Well Live)

What Every Woman Should Carry – Maura Dooley, (You Might As Well Live / Rage and Trauma)

‘Perhaps this verse would please you better–Sue–(2)’ – Colette Labouff Atkinson, (You Might As Well Live / Rage and Trauma)

Did This Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot? – Alice Walker, (Rage and Trauma)

The House – Warsan Shire, (Rage and Trauma)

Some Toxin – Natalie Shapero, (Rage and Trauma)

Translations – Adrienne Rich, (Rage and Trauma)

Eating Kit Kats During the Last Hurricane, We Decide to Split Up – Christina Olson, (Rage and Trauma / This Is Probably Over, Huh)

[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up – Bernadette Mayer, (Rage and Trauma / This Is Probably Over, Huh)

The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part – Heather Christle, (Rage and Trauma)

One Art – Elizabeth Bishop, (This Is Probably Over, Huh / Overthinking)

Song: Go and catch a falling star – John Donne, (This Is Probably Over, Huh / Overthinking)

Pensive Reflection – Nisha Ramayya, (Overthinking)

Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly – Kayo Chinigonyi, (Overthinking)

Question – May Swenson, (Overthinking / Close of Day)

#53 – E. E. Cummings, (Close of Day)

Do not go gentle into that good night – Dylan Thomas, (Close of Day)

Sin Visits Me – Malika Booker, (Close of Day)

from Clearances – Seamus Heaney, (Close of Day)

Lucozade – Jackie Kay, (Close of Day)

On My First Son – Ben Jonson, (Close of Day / Life After Death)

Suicide’s Note: An Annual – Mary Karr, (Close of Day / Life After Death)

Morning Song – Sylvia Plath, (Life After Death)

Life After Death – Ted Hughes, (Life After Death)

For Michelle – Kiri Piahana-Wong, (Life After Death)

How It Is – Maxine Kumin, (Life After Death)

The Blue Dress – Saeed Jones, (Life After Death / Fathers)

Father’s Old Blue Cardigan – Anne Carson, (Life After Death / Fathers)

Long Distance II – Tony Harrison, (Fathers)

Those Winter Sundays – Robert Hayden, (Fathers)

Other Clouds – Rebecca Perry, (Fathers)

Home – Kazim Ali, (Fathers)

coping skills lost in the flood – CAConrad, (The End of the World)

The Very Nervous Family – Sabrina Orah Mark, (The End of the World)

The Second Coming – W. B. Yeats, (The End of the World)

My Imminent Demise Makes the Headlines the Same Day I Notice How Even Your Front Teeth Are – Momtaza Mehri, (The End of the World)

Post-factual Love Poem – Paul Guest, (The End of the World)

We Have Everything We Need – Selina Nwulu, (The End of the World)

Anthropocene Pastoral – Catherine Pierce, (The End of the World)

Microbial Museum – Maya Chowdhry, (After the End)

be careful – Ed Roberson, (and Last Words)

VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God – Mary Karr, (and Last Words)

Happy

Blk Girl Art

JAMILA WOODS
after Amiri Baraka

Poems are bullshit unless they are eyeglasses, honey
tea with lemon, hot water bottles on tummies. I want
poems my grandma wants to tell the ladies at church
about. I want orange potato words soaking in the pot
til their skins fall off, words you burn your tongue on,
words on sale two for one, words that keep my feet dry.

I want to hold a poem in my fist in the alley just in case.

I want a poem for dude at the bus stop. Oh you can’t talk
ma? Words to make the body inside my body less invisible.

Words to teach my sister how to brew remedies in her mouth.

Words that grow mama’s hair back. Words to detangle the kitchen.

I won’t write poems unless they are an instruction manual, a bus
card, warm shea butter on elbows, water, a finger massage to the scalp,
a broomstick sometimes used for cleaning and sometimes
to soar.

You see, a poem should work for you. A poem that doesn’t work for you is not a poem that you need. It’s not your failing. It’s not you at all; it’s them. It’s fine. Scrap it. Ignore it. Turn the page.

Happy

Announcement and Next Steps

AMY KEY

In the absence of anything as definitive as blood type
or maths, I am delighted to declare

I found the back to the earring, also
the mildew is banished, albeit temporarily.

I want to share this news with you,
a check against the inventory of living.

Personalized necklaces point to living.

Customizable anything suggests it’s all worth it.

Sometimes it’s ‘oh this iced finger bun’

others it’s ‘put something in the diary to look forward to’.

This is an elaborate mural in an ill-frequented part of the city.

My diary is full and the bakery is out of buns.

Indoors there needs to be a swap from idle teasels
to cacti. (Some sort of permanence that works in the way I work—
water, light, a finger touch confirming my edges.)

I only have cats to verify I’m there.

•

I am building up evidence. Some bodily. Some constructed.

On balance, perhaps I am more a person who racks up
indicators of taste as proof of living. There are condiments,
playlists, preferred linens. I first got drunk
on Cinzano. There was no one taking notes. I used to dream
of sex in a fully upholstered room with no windows or doors.

This idea of rabbit fur rugs and buttoned velvet cushions,
immaculately conceived. Always snagged on the detail
of things—how even did I come to be inside,
nevermind out. The sex wasn’t the point. What I seek
is magic like an intact lipstick mirror in an antique handbag,
my own nifty (crackerjack?) endurance. Or to discover
a gulping heart within a privet hedge. Or the druzy quartz
of someone’s eyes long gone and to say it!

•

I am dying to be written about in your diary
and my self-involvement extends to endless
photographs of my eye makeup, which might be described
as ‘signature’. FYI I prefer a fine brush to a pen.

What can be said about slush, about the corners cut when cleaning
the fridge. What can be said about what is considered
to be ordinary. Crucially, love is a desire
to be a witness and be witnessed, how you might skate
past the provisional. If the house were burning down

I would rescue all the photographs they’ll tell you
or select that option in the quiz. Now the photographs
are in the air and my increments of living, too. We can still
hold hands, eat noodles with the lights off, have deliberate sex.

There is an obscure audience, always. My personal schmaltz,
strumpet wardrobe, the lacquered soles of dancing shoes.

The e-mail I sent has the subject line (no subject).

I thought for a long time that poems had to be about big things, like love and death, but I was completely wrong: the big things are the little things, and love is eyeliner and diaries and noodles, and death is cats and iced finger buns and necklaces with your name on. It’s all the same, and to write about the little things is the only way any of us can really understand the big things. Amy Key understands the big things, I think. (So does Rupert Brooke.)

Happy

The Great Lover

RUPERT BROOKE

I have been so great a lover: filled my days

So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,

The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,

For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear

Our hearts at random down the dark of life.

Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife

Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,

My night shall be remembered for a star
That outshone all the suns of all men’s days.
Shall I not crown them with immortal praise

Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me

High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see

The inenarrable godhead of delight?

Love is a flame:—we have beaconed the world’s night.

A city:—and we have built it, these and I.

An emperor:—we have taught the world to die.

So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence,

And the high cause of Love’s magnificence,

And to keep loyalties young, I’ll write those names

Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames,
And set them as a banner, that men may know,
To dare the generations, burn, and blow

Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming ….fn1

These I have loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;

Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust

Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,

Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;

Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon

Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss

Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is

Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen

Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;

The benison of hot water; furs to touch;

The good smell of old clothes; and other such,

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers

About dead leaves and last year’s ferns ….

Dear names,

And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames;

Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring;

Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;

Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain,

Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;

Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam

That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;fn2

And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold

Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;

Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;

And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;

And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;

All these have been my loves. And these shall pass,

Whatever passes not, in the great hour,

Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power

To hold them with me through the gate of Death.

They’ll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath,

Break the high bond we made, and sell Love’s trust

And sacramented covenant to the dust.

——Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,

And give what’s left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers ….
But the best I’ve known,

Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown

About the winds of the world, and fades from brains

Of living men, and dies.

Nothing remains.

O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,

Praise you, ‘All these were lovely’; say, ‘He loved.’

There are not enough love songs to stuff in the world, which is why I have put so many of them in this book. So many love poems get sort of metaphysical about it. Which is lovely. But it’s also lovely to exist in the real world – the physical, practical, tangible world. Isn’t stuff nice? Isn’t it nice to have a body that can feel stuff? Isn’t it nice to exist?

Happy

Wedding-Wind

PHILIP LARKIN

The wind blew all my wedding-day,

And my wedding-night was the night of the high wind;

And a stable door was banging, again and again,

That he must go and shut it, leaving me
Stupid in candlelight, hearing rain,
Seeing my face in the twisted candlestick,
Yet seeing nothing. When he came back

He said the horses were restless, and I was sad

That any man or beast that night should lack

The happiness I had.

Now in the day

All’s ravelled under the sun by the wind’s blowing.

He has gone to look at the floods, and I
Carry a chipped pail to the chicken-run,
Set it down, and stare. All is the wind
Hunting through clouds and forests, thrashing
My apron and the hanging cloths on the line.
Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind
Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread
Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep
Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?
Can even death dry up
These new delighted lakes, conclude

Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?

Happy / Hungry

The Orange

WENDY COPE

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange –

The size of it made us all laugh.

I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave –

They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do

Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.

This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.

I did all the jobs on my list

And enjoyed them and had some time over.

I love you. I’m glad I exist.fn3

Happy / Hungry

So Much Happiness

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
for Michael

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.

It doesn’t need you to hold it down.

It doesn’t need anything.

Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.

You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records …
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.

You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Is there a better definition of happiness than the possibility of coffee cake and ripe peaches? I don’t think so, but if there is, it’s being known.

Happy / Hungry / Mothers

A Bowl of Spaghetti

KIMIKO HAHN

‘To find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person,’

researchers experimented with the neurons of a worm

then upgraded to mouse hoping

‘to unravel the millions of miles of wire in the [human] brain’

that they liken to ‘untangling a bowl of spaghetti’

of which I have an old photo: Rei in her high chair delicately
picking out each strand to mash in her mouth.

Was she two? Was that sailor dress from Mother?

Did I cook from scratch? If so, there was a carrot in the sauce

as Mother instructed and I’ll never forget
since some strand determines infatuation as a daughter’s fate.fn4

Happy / Hungry / Mothers

Butter

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.

I thought these three poems (the next one, ‘Towards Autumn’, and the two before: ‘A Bowl of Spaghetti’ and ‘Butter’) were just about eating, but they are actually about having a mother. A psychoanalyst once told me that people find soup comforting because it evokes a deep-down memory in all of us of mother’s milk. Is it true? I don’t know, but it feels like it should be.

Hungry

Towards Autumn

MARILYN HACKER

Mid-September, and I miss my daughter.
I sit out on the terrace with my friend,
talking, with morning tea, coffee, and bread,
about another woman, and her mother,
who survived heroism; her lover
who will have to. I surprise myself

with language; lacking it, don’t like myself
much. I owe a letter to my daughter.

Thinking of her’s like thinking of a lover

I hope will someday grow to be a friend.

I missed the words to make friends with my mother.

I pull the long knife through the mound of bread,

spoon my slice with cherry preserves, the bread
chewy as meat beneath, remind myself
I’ve errands for our ancient patron, mother
of dramas, hard mother to a daughter
twenty years my senior, who is my friend,
who lives in exile with a woman lover

also my friend, three miles from here. A lover
of good bread, my (present) friend leaves this bread
and marmalades biscottes. To have a friend
a generation older than myself
is sometimes like a letter for my daughter
to read, when she can read: What your mother

left undone, women who are not your mother
may do. Women who are not your lover
love you. (That’s to myself, and my daughter.)fn5

We take coffee—and teapot, mugs, jam jars, bread
inside, wash up. I’ve work, hours by myself.

Beyond the kitchen, in her room, my friend

writes, overlooking the same hills. Befriend
yourself: I couldn’t have known to tell my mother
that, unless I’d learned it for myself.

Until I do. Friendship is earned. A lover
leaps into faith. Earthbound women share bread;
make; do. Cherry compote would please my daughter.

My daughter was born hero to her mother;
found, like a lover, flawed; found, like a friend,
faithful as bread I’d learn to make myself.

Hungry

They Would Have All That

MARY JEAN CHAN

To sing the evening home, the lover prepares
a pot of lentil stew – her phonefn6 lighting up to
the news of love’s imminent arrival, imagining

her lover’s footsteps across the swollen field,
damp with longing, her lover’s steady hand
gripping her smartphone to navigate towards

some notion of home, their flat an unfamiliar
place of worship, their bodies growing close
and moving apart with the regularity of heart-

beat, blood-breath. There the lover is, running to
catch a bus she knows will take her somewhere
so she can feel once again the sensation of lack –

wondering at her lover’s motions throughout the flat,
how her feet must press insistently on the floor with
each step, how the orchid must have stretched itself

a few millimetres overnight, how the stew must be
whispering on the stove and the table set for dinner.

The lovers are gentler with each other now because

they have memorized each other’s fears like daily
prayer: how too much salt brings back the years of
loneliness, how a warm bath may be more necessary

than a rough kiss after a day’s absence of tenderness.

The lovers are gentler because they have grown too
knowledgeable to love any other way. When one asks

the other to fling her onto the bed, the lover might say:

Do you actually want me to? And the lover might reply:

No, I don’t. Such asking becomes routine, almost like

walking down the aisle of a supermarket at evening,
but it is what they do best as lovers. Beyond desire
and its petty dramas, the two women will have their

tapestry of days and nights, their hands tempered by
love, clasped bodies holding their wounds at bay.

There’s a Philip Larkin poem, which isn’t in this book, called ‘Born Yesterday’. (This is a very good joke, because the poem is to a newborn baby.) I can’t quote from it, because I can’t afford the permission fee. But you should look it up, because that’s what this poem is for me. An ordinary catching of happiness. It isn’t perfect. But it’s the best thing there is.

Hungry

Lattimo

VAHNI CAPILDEO

Lattimo: milk twist, mist hint.
Venetians pearled minerals –
lead, lime, tin lime – thicked
clear glass to quasi-Chinese
porcelain for simple painting,
birds & flowers. Fingers twirl
composite stems whose colour
twist rock-candies, snake-ladders
precious yellow, less-rare green,
birdclaw red, while blue, longed-for,
yearns like a certainty
expressed by convolution
but inwardly a wynd of truth.
Contemplate, for a moment
(l’attimo), how just as when
incalmo joins bubbles blown
separately – two, while hot,
made one – each listed item
here desires liquid, lips;
lights prunted below looped eyes.

Do I completely understand this extremely sexy poem? No. Do I completely adore it? Yes. I put it here because something about the list of beautiful things seemed like it would be happiest between lovers and cataloguing, but I can’t justify this placement for any other reason. That’s just how it is with poems.

Hungry

Wish (2)

BHANU KAPIL

1 But I was thinking today about our conversation earlier in the summer. Exhausted, you lay your head on the kitchen table and said: ‘But what’s the difference between a monster and a cyborg? I need something to eat. Do you have any chocolate?’ Opening the fridge, I said quietly and perhaps too seriously, trying to impress you: ‘The monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances.’ Her fate. Her body. Great Britain. You said: ‘So, is Laloo English or British?’ I said: ‘She’s from London.’ But the more I said London, the more it sounded like a joke. LondonLondonLondon.

2 I was thinking today about what happens when you keep going in a car. This is something you can only do here. Wish for something. Did you ever do it? Wish you weren’t there? I want that go on, gofn7 even though it is unclear to me what happens when you get to the Panama Canal or Idaho. Hitchhiking in Idaho as a veritable child, I was taken in by a farming couple, Fatty and Daddy, a hundred miles or so outside of Boise. Fatty was rail thin, about seventy-five, and Daddy was a big man who had a reclining chair in each room and looked younger than his wife. They picked me up in their truck—I was sitting by the side of the road brushing the knots out of my hair with my fingers—and I stayed with them for five days. They said it was not the right thing for me to be in the open like that, and they took me to eat every day at a restaurant called Country Buffet. In my innocence, I had been walking on a road that led to the country compound of a KKK leader/operative, Charles Reynold. What is an operative? It is someone who is always planning a way in, like the hen-house fox with his beautifully red, bushy tail. Daddy, Fatty, and I hunkered down until Daddy’s nephew, Robert, stopped by on his way through nowhere and gave me a ride to Boise proper, where there was a bus station. I waited until Robert had gone and then I walked out to the main drag to get a cup of coffee and interview murderers. ‘I can take you as far as the state line.’ ‘That would be lovely.’ Obsessed, far from home with its gooseberry patches and grim professions based upon openings at Heathrow Airport or Nestle, the main employers in the dingy part of northwest London that constituted my origins, I said yes. Soft yes to the color green, which is going.

3 That is a tree (going) but also an ocean: a way of being saturated with color that only happens here in your country for me; for you it might happen in another place. Mine. Like Laloo, I lived for many years on an island with congested traffic flows. Thus, a juniper tree flying by the window, intensely blue, or the Atlantic Ocean, to the left, if the car has a destination to the south, such as to The Keys, is magical to me. Improbable in light of my origins. Hers. The girl in the car. I don’t know. I am writing to you, in your special writing dress made from scraps of lace as if it (the dress, the morning of writing ahead of you) is a café; as if, writing, you are hypnotizing not only the biologies of strangers and friends but also yourself. For this reason, when I think of you reading, I think of you as writing blindly. You read but you are also writing. As if my own eyes were closed, I see your white books floating in the sky above my painting of the red girl. These books are separate from my own work, here in the salt-water notebook, but they communicate with it in a nonlocal sense. Like birds.

4 This is pre but the notebook is after. Soaked already at the edge and foamy. Past future. Writing on the warp when dry. Pages. Entries by hand. That is the morning I woke up and walked to the Pacific Ocean, after a night in a motel in Florence, Oregon, complete with a dodgy door and the reality of pillows. The woman at the front desk was wearing a very pretty apron with purple and yellow flowers on it. An expatriate, she said exaggeratedly, oblivious to our common origin: ‘About four miles. You’re not going to walk, are you? Do you have an umbrella? You can’t go out like that, ducky.’

5 I walked towards the sound of something roaring in a day, the kind of day that is like darkness but lit up, on its forested, proximal verge by gorse, which is a bright yellow flower. Citron-yellow and a kind of tin or silver roofing with holes in it. The day. Like walking in a dreamed landscape drenched with the wrong rain. Monsoon. What kind of rain is this? I recognized the immensity but not the temperature. This was monstrous: the inability to assimilate, on the level of the senses, an ordinary experience of weather. Here is the tongue, for example, constantly darting out to feel the air: what is it? Is it summer? Is it a different season? It’s a different day. That’s okay. Damaged from her travels, in some sense unsettled, enormously anxious, a girl does it anyway: gets up and goes. It’s as if the day has a memory of her and not the other way around.

Because this poem is sort-of prose, it feels like a good moment to stress that you do not have to understand any or all of these poems in one go. You don’t even have to read them all in one go. You could just read the colours in this one. You could just read the dreams. The memories. The wishes. ‘For you it might happen in another place’, etc.

Hungry

In the Kitchen

CHEN JUN

Translated by Ming Di

Early in the morning a dough rises from the bowl
curling upward.

He clenches his fists of bean paste, his mouth
dripping a black cocoa stream …

Hey, I say, have you just smuggled
nine knife mountains and nine oil pans from hell?

Deep-fried ghostsfn8 are the sweetest the crispiest the most intelligent
even in burned rims, and taste even better with soybean drinks.

He droops his sad expressions
like Oedipus’s crutch.

Collapsed in the steamer, he squeaks out a sweet smell
of duck soup from his soul—quack, quack.

The next two poems always feel like they need to go together: one by Linh Dinh, and one by Andrew Motion. They are poems about, basically, whether it’s possible to write a poem that’s just about food: it isn’t. You can’t ever write just about food – about hunger, about eating – because food is always something more than itself. It’s about what nourishes us, claims us, drives us. It’s love, sometimes, or it’s sex, or it’s a memory. It’s Proust’s madeleines. It’s the ghost of a piece of toast in the dampness on a plate in Craig Arnold’s poem (see p.40); it’s Emily Berry’s toast burnt in protest (see p.43); it’s butter or spaghetti, or lentil soup to welcome a lover home. It’s a carrot in the sauce as Mother instructed. It’s new peanut butter that’s no damn good; it’s what peanut butter used to be when you were young and in love for the first time and now you’re tasting it again and it’s still the same, for Eileen Myles. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s different. Maybe you can’t even buy a strawberry split or a Mivvi any more, Andrew Motion. Maybe the past is gone and you’re looking at a photograph of your daughter eating spaghetti so long ago you’re not even sure how old she is in the picture, but you remember what was in the sauce …

Food is everything. Food is energy, which is life; and so poems about being hungry are poems, always, about being alive. ‘I am always hungry / & wanting to have / sex,’ begins Eileen Myles’s poem ‘Peanut Butter’ (see p.52): the two most simple of all the animal urges.

Hungry

Eating Fried Chicken

LINH DINH

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times

When I’m eating fried chicken

When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,

When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,

The various blood debts you owe me,

My past humiliations and my future crimes—

Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.

But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times

When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything

That’s not generally available to mankind.

(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)

And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots,

And meat brings humiliation,

And each gasp of air

Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke.

Hungry / Wanting

To Whom It May Concern

ANDREW MOTION

This poem about ice cream
has nothing to do with government,
with riot, with any political scheme.

It is a poem about ice cream. You see?
About how you might stroll into a shop
and ask: One Strawberry Split. One Mivvi.fn9

What did I tell you? No one will die.

No licking tongues will melt like candle wax.

This is a poem about ice cream. Do not cry.

Hungry / Wanting

Peanut Butter

EILEEN MYLES

I am always hungry
& wanting to have
sex. This is a fact.
If you get right
down to it the new
unprocessed peanut
butter is no damn
good & you should
buy it in a jar as
always in the
largest supermarket
you know. And
I am an enemy
of change, as
you know. All
the things I
embrace as new
are in
fact old things,
re-released: swimming,
the sensation of
being dirty in
body and mind
summer as a
time to do
nothing and make
no money. Prayer
as a last re-
sort. Pleasure
as a means,
and then a
means again
with no ends
in sight. I am
absolutely in opposition
to all kinds of
goals.fn10 I have
no desire to know
where this, anything
is getting me.
When the water
boils I get
a cup of tea.
Accidentally I
read all the
works of Proust.
It was summer
I was there
so was he. I
write because
I would like
to be used for
years after
my death. Not
only my body
will be compost
but the thoughts
I left during
my life. During
my life I was
a woman with
hazel eyes. Out
the window
is a crooked
silo. Parts
of your
body I think
of as stripes
which I have
learned to
love along. We
swim naked
in ponds &
I write be-
hind your
back. My thoughts
about you are
not exactly
forbidden, but
exalted because
they are useless,
not intended
to get you
because I have
you & you love
me. It’s more
like a playground
where I play
with my reflection
of you until
you come back
and into the
real you I
get to sink
my teeth. With
you I know how
to relax. &
so I work
behind your
back. Which
is lovely.
Nature
is out of control
you tell me &
that’s what’s so
good about
it. I’m immoderatelyfn11
in love with you,
knocked out by
all your new
white hair

why shouldn’t
something
I have always
known be the
very best there
is. I love
you from my
childhood,
starting back
there when
one day was
just like the
rest, random
growth and
breezes, constant
love, a sand-
wich in the
middle of
day,
a tiny step
in the vastly
conventional
path of
the Sun. I
squint. I
wink. I
take the
ride.

Coffee / Wanting

Oh God, Fuck Me

RUTH L. SCHWARTZ

Fuck me, oh God, with ordinary things
the things you love best in the world –

like trees in spring, exposing themselves,
flashing leaf buds so firm and swollen

I want to take them in my mouth.

Speaking of trees, fuck me with birds

say, an enormous raucous crow,
proud as a man with his hands down his pants,

and then a sparrow, intimately brown,
discreet and cautious as a concubine.

Fuck me with my kitchen faucet, dripping
like a nymphomaniac,

all night slowly filling and filling,
then overflowing the bowls in the sink –

and with the downstairs neighbor’s vacuum,
that great sucking noisy dragon

making the dirty come clean.

Fuck me with breakfast, with English muffins

the spirit of the dough aroused
by browning, thrilled by buttering.fn12

Fuck me with orange juice,
its concentrated sweetness,

which makes the mouth as happy as summer,
leaves sweet flecks of foam like spit

along the inside of the glass.

Fuck me with coffee, strong and hot,

and then with cream poured into coffee,
blossoming like mushroom clouds,

opening like parachutes.

Fuck me with the ticking

clock, which is the ticking
bomb, which is the ticking heart –

the heart we heard in the first months,
in the original nakedness,

before we were squalling and born.

Fuck me with the unwashed spoon

proud with its coffee stainfn13 –
the faint swirl of a useful life

pooled into its center, round as a world.

Coffee / Wanting

Coffee in Heaven

JOHN AGARD

You’ll be greeted
by a nice cup of coffee
when you get to heaven
and strains of angelic harmony.

But wouldn’t you be devastated
if they only serve decaffeinated
while from the percolators of hell

your soul was assaulted
by Satan’s fresh espresso smell?

Coffee / Wanting

Our Love Could Spoil Dinner

EMILY BERRY

We always breakfast with the biographer.
On day one I showed him my grapefruit spoon;
it has a serrated edge. My father gave him
a Mont Blanc fountain pen as a welcome gift,
but I think he was more impressed by the spoon.

‘It’s almost like a knife!’ he said. The biographer
is a coffee nut and I use this fact to bond with him.

‘Oh, Robusta,’ I say dramatically when I know
he’s listening. ‘You inferior bean.’ When we pass
in the hall I fling my arm back and say things like:

‘Am I strung out or what!’ and ‘Time for another
caffeine fix, methinks!’ I am not allowed coffee
because of my nerves, but the biographer doesn’t
know this. Sometimes we sit up in bed comparing
moans. Mine are always loudest. The biographer’s
are hampered by his boarding-school education
and the British flair for embarrassment. Sometimes
the publishers call. When he gets on the phone,
he sweats; afterwards the right side of his face is damp.

I like to monitor these subtle changes. Last night
my father found us touching legs. ‘Go to your room!’

he shouted. ‘You shabby daughter.’ ‘You worthless
excuse for a story,’ the biographer added. They played
cards to settle a debt. That day my mouth felt wetter
than usual. I asked the biographer to check. He used
his tongue. ‘This may affect the results,’ he said.

All good poems are stories. This one is more story than most, or it is for me. It has everything I want in a story: forbidden love, foreboding fathers, boarding schools, breakfast tables and big grand houses. This isn’t all in the poem, of course: when I read it again I see I’ve imagined the big grand house completely. I’ve imagined the chequerboard marble flagstones, the dark wood balustrades, the sweeping stairs; all longing looks and panelling and too-heavy silver. I’ve made it up, the way you do when a story is really good. You fill in the gaps. You imagine everything else. You remember it as if you were there, and I remember this poem as if I was there. And I, too, am not allowed coffee because of my nerves.

Wanting

Want

JOAN LARKIN

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts
of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless
apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,
three cords of ash, an axe; I want
a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:
oats, coriander, thick green oil;
I want nothing to store. She wants pomanders,
linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley
reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s
reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;
she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,
steam rising from rice. She wants goats,
chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want
wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.

She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.

I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s
tenderness. Touch ancient as the river.

I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.

She’s in her city, meeting
her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late
with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking
of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.

We’ve kissed all weekend; we want
to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

Wanting / Waiting / Hoping

Overheard on a Saltmarsh

HAROLD MONRO

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.

No.

Give them me. Give them me.

No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,

Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

They are better than stars or water,

Better than voices of winds that sing,

Better than any man’s fair daughter,

Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

Hush, I stole them out of the moon.

Give me your beads, I want them.

No.

I will howl in the deep lagoon For your green glass beads, I love them so. Give them me. Give them me.

No.

Waiting / Wanting / Having

Westron Wind

ANONYMOUS

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

How can a poem that is so old – hundreds and hundreds of years old! – be so absolutely true still? It’s like all longing-poems boiled down to their essence.

Waiting / Wanting / Having
from Prothalamion

EDMUND SPENSER

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air

Sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play,

A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay

Hot Titan’s beams, which then did glister fair;

When I whose sullen care,
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
In prince’s court, and expectation vain
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away
Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,
Walked forth to ease my pain
Along the shore of silver streaming Thames,
Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
Was painted all with variable flowers,
And all the meads adorned with dainty gems,
Fit to deck maidens’ bowers,
And crown their paramours,
Against the bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

Wanting / Waiting / Hoping / Having

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowersfn14

REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers,
green roses, chrysanthemums, lilies: retrophilia,
philocaly, philomath, sarcophilous—all this love,
of the past, of beauty, of knowledge, of flesh; this is
catalogue & counter: philalethist, negrophile, neophile.

A negro man walks down the street, taps Newport
out against a brick wall & stares at you. Love
that: lygophilia, lithophilous. Be amongst stones,
amongst darkness. We are glass house. Philopornist,
philotechnical. Why not worship the demimonde?

Love that—a corner room, whatever is not there,
all the clutter you keep secret. Palaeophile,
ornithophilous: you, antiquarian, pollinated by birds.

All this a way to dream green rose petals on the bed you love;
petrophilous, stigmatophilia: live near rocks, tattoo hurt;
for you topophilia: what place do you love? All these words
for love (for you), all these ways to say believe
in symphily, to say let us live near each other.fn15

Having / Talking

The Stags

KATHLEEN JAMIE

This is the multitude, the beasts
you wanted to show me, drawing me
upstream, all morning up through wind-
scoured heather to the hillcrest.
Below us, in the next glen, is the grave
calm brotherhood, descended
out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling
like the signatories of a covenant;
their weighty, antique-polished antlers
rising above the vegetation
like masts in a harbor, or city spires.
We lie close together, and though the wind
whips away our man-and-woman smell, every
stag-face seems to look toward us, toward,
but not to us: we’re held, and hold them,
in civil regard. I suspect you’d
hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight
our shared country, lead me deeper
into what you know, but loath
to cause fear you’re already moving
quietly away, sure I’ll go with you,
as I would now, almost anywhere.

I tried, when choosing poems to put in this book, not to put in two by the same poet if I could help it. But this poem and the next refused to be parted. ‘The Stags’ and ‘The Hinds’, both by Kathleen Jamie, had to go together or not at all. They are both about love; maybe all poems are. I hesitate to say they are about different kinds of love – it feels like a bit of a definite thing to say about something I didn’t write – but I think that’s why I wanted them both here. I wanted the man-and-woman smell of ‘The Stags’ – the love, the sex, the hunger – and I wanted the other, too: ‘the bonniest companie’ feeling of nineteen hinds grazing together. Of women, I suppose; of friendship.

You need both. You have to have both.

Having / Talking

The Hinds

KATHLEEN JAMIE

Walking in a waking dream
I watched nineteen deer
pour from ridge to glen-floor,
then each in turn leap,
leap the new-raised
peat-dark burn. This
was the distaff side;
hinds at their ease, alive
to lands held on long lease
in their animal minds,
and filing through a breach
in a never-mended dyke,
the herd flowed up over
heather-slopes to scree
where they stopped, and turned to stare,
the foremost with a queenly air
as though to say: Aren’t we
the bonniest companie?
Come to me,
you’ll be happy, but never go home.

Having / Talking

Millions of Strawberries

GENEVIEVE TAGGARD

Marcia and I went over the curve,
Eating our way down
Jewels of strawberries we didn’t deserve,
Eating our way down,

Till our hands were sticky, and our lips painted.

And over us the hot day fainted,
And we saw snakes,
And got scratched,
And a lust overcame us for the red unmatched
Small buds of berries,
Till we lay down–
Eating our way down–

And rolled in the berries like two little dogs,

Rolled
In the late gold.
And gnats hummed,
And it was cold,
And home we went, home without a berry,
Painted red and brown,
Eating our way down.

You could fill a whole anthology with poems about berries. Sylvia Plath wrote one, and so did Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost; Kathleen Jamie wrote a great one about a horse – but this one is my favourite because it isn’t secretly also about how everything hurts. Something about berries brings out the mortality in people. Which is fine, but not all poems have to be tragic, and sometimes you get nice things you don’t deserve. You and Marcia both.

Talking
best

LAURA WEBB

my best friend lost her housekeys and wallet
buying waterchestnuts in the chinese supermarket.

my best friend has a mole on her ankle

I hijacked for the eye of an elaborate biro parrot.

my best friend has been to all of the greek islands
she has been to france twice not including guernsey.

your best friend is retraining in accountancy/
has moved to leeds or was it glasgow/
has a cat you are quietly, fastidiously, allergic to.

your best friend goes to great lengths laddering
her tights before parties/ plays grade two trumpet/
is scrubbing last night’s red wine off the kitchen lino.

your best friend is not having a photo taken but
is not looking my best friend is stoically fluent
in latin your best friend did two tango lessons,
intermediate dressmaking my best friend is cooking
one of hugh fearnley’s recipes is substituting
table vinegar for wine even as we speak

My best friend and I sit on the sofa, mostly in silence, passing this poem between us like sweeties from a paper bag, being completely delighted by the way that Laura Webb really, truly gets what it’s like to have a best friend. My best friend’s name, by the way, is Caroline. This book is for her.

Talking

Solitude

FRANNY CHOI

I hope no one comes to my party, I said out loud,
and meant it. In the email, I tried to sound too busy to care

like, I’m having too much sex to waste time
on proper punctuation, pretending it’s not
the other way around.

Laura convinced me to jump
in the Narragansett Bay on my birthday—
February. There’s no good word
for the opposite of fire,
the ice’s sear & split, how it beckons the blood
toward what means to end it.

Oh god, I gasped over and over
as we stumbled through the snow back to the car,
me and my burning legs.

Now that’s my kind of intimacy—
faceless, salty.
no wondering how my jokes are going over,

just running straight toward warmth
as my skin bursts open in shock.

Talking / It’s Complicated

Personal Statement

JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA

I don’t believe I was born, maybe emerged
from a soupy formation of gays

and other beautiful things instead. I’ve gone
on and on telling you all about how I

created myself, took a photograph of what

I was given, tore it up, set it on fire, inhaled

its smoke and grew twenty times my size.

All of this has been said. Today I want to make

this space my own and project my light through
every surface. I think by now I’ve earned this—

what with the breathing exercises just to leave
the house, and the hyper-awareness of every blade

of grass’s movement, and the drinking, and the
getting high each night to stave off the nightmares.

You know, just girly things. So here’s what you need
to know—any time I’m doing something I’m doing

something I’m afraid of. This makes each experience
seem new and old at the same time.fn16 I’m always like

I don’t give a fuck when in reality I am literally
going to die from how much of a fuck I give. Also

I’m a witch and I get all my powers from the wind.

Wow. Aren’t I special? Don’t you want to love me

with all of your heart for the next ten seconds?

Don’t you want to rescue me
from all the things that make you feel safe?

It’s Complicated

Marblehead

REBECCA LINDENBERG

not to be in love with you I can’t remember what it was like
it must’ve been lousy

James Schuyler

You take off your black
motorcycle jacket, hang it
on the back of a chair. It’s cold
from our walk along the sea wall.
Your pockets jingle with shells.
While we were gone, you left
the stove on low—some things
you do make me so nervous.
You graze the surface of sauce
simmering in a pan, shiny fingertip
held out for me to lick, you say
‘What does it need?’ Maybe nothing,
maybe honey to unbitter the lime.
Later that night you’ll bury your face
in my belly and sob. ‘I’m sorry,’
though I don’t think you are
always talking to me, my love.
But now lobster steam billows
up the window, you gulp
purple wine, your pinky sticking out,
and the round olives are the green
all green things aspire to be.

It’s Complicated

Monopoly (After Ashbery)

SARAH HOWE

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed.

I am the glint in your bank manager’s eye.

I never eat cake in case of global meltdown.

I am my own consolation.

I have a troubled relationship with material things:

I drop my coppers smugly in the river.

(I do everything with an unbearable smugness.)

I propose a vote of thanks.

I make small errors in your favour.fn17 Sometimes

I pretend nothing is wrong.

I won second prize in a beauty contest.

I am yellowing at the edges.

I was last seen drawing the short straw.

I hang about tragically on street corners, where

I hand out cards that read: if you see

I am struggling to lift this card, please, do not help me.

It’s Complicated
the not quite love

YRSA DALEY-WARD

I haven’t been home in nearly two
weeks.
My new lover has a fridge full of beer
and can almost make jollof rice
also the sex is good
and we are falling into something we
will soon mistake for love

anyway,
‘home’ is a problem. There are the
bills and there
are the mice
plus
there is that feeling you get
when you catch up with yourself.

You know how if you’re playing hide-and-seek with a small child, they put their hands over their face and assume you can’t see them either? That’s me. That’s me the time I got muddled about my council tax when I moved house and decided that it would be better to keep paying both bills because I was too afraid to call them. The time I caught my hand in a blender and tried to insist I didn’t need to go to hospital, and with every single deadline. I like to run away from my problems. I like to stay at someone else’s house instead of putting down a mouse trap in my own. I like to hide in not-quite love because it’s easier than admitting … that it’s not quite. You know? You know.

It’s Complicated

Studio Apartment: Sunday

EILEEN PUN

Sunset honeys the bijou palace. Its dweller wishes
to turn the soft, grey page of a newspaper until his leisure
becomes unbearable. He senses nothing of merit can ever
happen in here. Neither a succession of great decisions,
nor great love.fn18

It seems the studio and its dweller will fill and

empty like any good organ. Gold flecks on the glass
of wine that he is drinking from, the mandolin lies aslant
on the rented sofa (although, only an hour ago, it was seeking
so much playfulness).

He begins peeling a clementine. Now, this is very much
like the introductory part of an evening spent kissing – citrusy.

The bijou flares of gold bead oil miasma, while its dweller
derives and derives – thumbing the natural breaks
of what will come off, next.

Right. OK. Deep breath, friends, because on the next page is probably the longest poem in the book. This is a lot of poem! It is OK to be moderately daunted by 8 pages of poem, but this one is worth it and also not like any other poems that exist. Ideally, you would now go somewhere quiet and read it out, aloud, in this tone like you’re getting increasingly mad about people’s weird affection for Monica Geller, like you literally cannot understand why people like Monica, like you literally cannot understand how anything can be this way, like you literally cannot understand why you are falling in love when love is so fucking dreadful oh no oh my God it’s the Statue of Liberty it was Earth all along. It’s a poem about being in love, just like all the other fucking poems, and it’s so accurate it makes me want to stand in a Ukrainian parking lot and scream Hera Lindsay Bird’s name at a bunch of dead crows.

It’s Complicated / Other People’s Lives

Monica

HERA LINDSAY BIRD

Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica

Monica Geller off popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Is one of the worst characters in the history of television

She makes me want to wash my hands with hand sanitizer

She makes me want to stand in an abandoned Ukrainian parking lot

And scream her name at a bunch of dead crows

Nobody liked her, except for Chandler

He married her, and that brings me to my second point

What kind of a name for a show was F.R.I.E.N.D.S

When two of them were related

And the rest of them just fucked for ten seasons?

Maybe their fucking was secondary to their friendship

Or they all had enough emotional equilibrium

To be able to maintain a constant state of mutual-respect

Despite the fucking
Or conspicuous nonfucking
That was occurring in their lives
But I have to say
It just doesn’t seem emotionally realistic
Especially considering that
They were not the most self-aware of people
And to be able to maintain a friendship

Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy

Is enormously difficult
Especially when you take into consideration
What cunts they all were

I fell in love with a friend once

And we liked to congratulate each other what good friends we were

And how it was great that we could be such good friends, and still fuck

Until we stopped fucking

And then we weren’t such good friends anymore

I had a dream the other night
About this friend, and how we were walking
Through sunlight, many years ago
Dragged up from the vaults, like
Old military propaganda

You know the kind; young women leaving a factory

Arm in arm, while their fiancées

Are being handsomely shot to death in Prague

And even though this friend doesn’t love me anymore

And I don’t love them

At least, not in a romantic sense

The memory of what it had been like not to want

To strap concrete blocks to my head

And drown myself in a public fountain rather than spend another day

With them not talking to me
Came back, and I remembered the world
For a moment, as it had been

When we had just met, and love seemed possible

And neither of us resented the other one
And it made me sad
Not just because things ended badly
But more broadly

Because my sadness had less to do with the emotional specifics of that situation

And more to do with the transitory nature of romantic love

Which is becoming relevant to me once again
Because I just met someone new
And this dream reminded me

That, although I believe that there are ways that love can endure

It’s just that statistically, or

Based on personal experience

It’s unlikely that things are going to go well for long

There is such a narrow window
For happiness in this life
And if the past is anything to go by

Everything is about to go slowly but inevitably wrong

In a non-confrontational, but ultimately disappointing way

Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica

Monica Geller from popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Was the favourite character of the Uber driver

Who drove me home the other day
And is the main reason for this poem
Because I remember thinking Monica???
Maybe he doesn’t remember who she is
Because when I asked him specifically

Which character he liked best off F.R.I.E.N.D.S

He said ‘the woman’
And when I listed their names for him
Phoebe, Rachel and Monica
He said Monica

But he said it with a kind of question mark at the end

Like … Monica?
Which led me to believe
Either, he was ashamed of liking her
Or he didn’t know who he was talking about

And had got her confused with one of the other

Less objectively terrible characters.
I think the driver meant to say Phoebe
Because Phoebe is everyone’s favourite
She once stabbed a police officer
She once gave birth to her brother’s triplets

She doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks about her

Monica gives a shit what everyone thinks about her

Monica’s parents didn’t treat her very well

And that’s probably where a lot of her underlying insecurities come from

That have since manifested themselves in controlling

And manipulative behaviour

It’s not that I think Monica is unredeemable

I can recognize that her personality has been shaped

By a desire to succeed

And that even when she did succeed, it was never enough

Particularly for her mother, who made her feel like her dreams were stupid

And a waste of time

And that kind of constant belittlement can do fucked up things to a person

So maybe, getting really upset when people don’t use coasters

Is an understandable, or at least comparatively sane response

To the psychic baggage
Of your parents never having believed in you
Often I look at the world

And I am dumbfounded that anyone can function at allfn19

Given the kind of violence that
So many people have inherited from the past
But that’s still no excuse to throw

A dinner plate at your friends, during a quiet game of Pictionary

And even if that was an isolated incident

And she was able to move on from it

It still doesn’t make me want to watch her on TV

I am falling in love and I don’t know what to do about it

Throw me in a haunted wheelbarrow and set me on fire

And don’t even get me started on Ross

I really want to copy this poem out completely in lieu of any annotations because each line is … so good? But that would be a waste of paper. So, if you love it too, just call me up and we can talk at length about just how very good it is.

‘Throw me in a haunted wheelbarrow and set me on fire’ is the line from which we stole the title of this book. That’s how much I feel things about this poem. I called my book after it. Hera Lindsay Bird’s book, by the way, is called Hera Lindsay Bird, and there is a whole poem at the start of that book about why it’s called that. And you should buy the book to read it because of the aforementioned copyright nightmare that would ensue from me printing it all here.

It’s Complicated / Other People’s Lives

About Ana

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY

The truth is, nobody
knows how Ana Mendieta
met her death. It would appear
she was pushed. Some distance below,
the doorman said he heard
a woman shout No, and then
the sound as her body
hit the top of the diner
so hard her face left a mark
like a postal stamp. In this photo
she is naked and feathered. She looks
like the first woman
like she doesn’t know
what a camera is, that somewhere
in the world it is believed
that these things can steal a soul.
Her arms are out, as if saying
you move them like this, to fly—
like this, sí? Her feet are
apart, you can see the
sphere of her hips, the delta
between her legs.
I look at her, sated, and think
here is the true work of the body:
to adorn itself and be
comfortable, unaware. I myself
am bored of fig leaves,
of shames I did not choose.

So! This feels like a poem which would benefit from some context. Ana Mendieta was an artist. She made strange works about bodies: about blood, about pain, about how people think about blood and pain and bodies. She poured pig’s blood on the pavement to see what people would do, and mostly they did nothing. She recreated a rape scene in her apartment, with herself as the victim, and invited people to come look (and they did). She took pictures of herself – often nude – with feathers, with flowers, with the world. She made art about violence, and particularly violence against women.

She married another artist – a man named Carl Andre. Eight months later, she died: she fell out of a thirty-fourth-storey window while arguing with him. He was accused, and acquitted, of her murder. He remains famous. She remains dead. ‘The truth is, nobody / knows how Ana Mendieta / met her death …’

Other People’s Lives

Victoria

RUTH STACEY

I am Queen and I shall do my utmost to fulfil
my duty towards my country.

Duty is a slapped mouth, sewn shut with cat-gut.

To my dear, loyal subjects who are assembled to show
their good humour and excessive loyalty.

Apes, hyenas, jackdaws: how they screech and caw.

How proud I felt to be the Queen of such a Nation,
the Crown being placed on my head, so gently.

But such a weight! Monstrous as a beached whale.

It was, I remember, a most beautiful, impressive moment.

My robes draped on the chair beautifully.

White body full of blood, bruises that bleed.

Nothing was done without his loving advice and help,
darling Albert was the other part of me.

Filled with life after life after life after life after life.

The only ray of comfort I get for a moment is in the firm
conviction and certainty.

I remember the chloroform. So blissfully empty of voices.

of his nearness, his undying love and of our eternal reunion.

Impatiently I wait and I do my damn duty.

Other People’s Lives

Mr Darcy

VICTORIA CHANG

In the end she just wanted the house
and a horse not much more what
if he didn’t own the house or worse
not even a horse how do we

separate the things from a man the man from
the things is a man still the same
without his reins here it rains every fifteen
minutes it would be foolish to

marry a man without an umbrella did
Cinderella really love the prince or
just the prints on the curtains in the
ballroom once I went window-

shopping but I didn’t want a window when
do you know it’s time to get a new
man one who can win more things at the
fair I already have four stuffed

pandas from the fair I won fair and square
is it time to be less square to wear
something more revealing in North and
South she does the dealing gives him

the money in the end but she falls in love
with him when he has the money when
he is still running away if the water is
running in the other room is it wrong

for me to not want to chase it because it owns
nothing else when I wave to a man I
love what happens when another man with
a lot more bags waves back

You will get a lot more out of this poem if you read it aloud, at which point it becomes even better: incredibly funny and smart (exactly as happens, weirdly, with Pride and Prejudice itself).

Other People’s Lives

Josephine Baker Finds Herself

PATIENCE AGBABI

She picked me up
like a slow-burning fuse. I was down
that girls’ club used to run in Brixton,
on acid for fuel. Lipstick lesbians,
techno so hardcore it’s spewing out Audis.
She samples my heartbeat and mixes it with
vodka on the rocks. I’m her light-skinned, negative,
twenty-something, short black wavy-bobbed diva.

She purrs La Garçonne, fancy a drink?fn20 I say

Yes. She’s crossing the Star Bar like it’s a catwalk. So sleek!

A string of pearls, her flapper dress
studded with low-cut diamonds
through my skin, straight to my heart.
Twenties chic! She works
me up and down. I worship
the way she looks.

The way she looks
me up and down. I worship
twenties chic. She works
through my skin, straight to my heart
studded with low-cut diamonds.
A string of pearls her flapper dress.

Yes! She’s crossing the Star Bar like it’s a catwalk so sleek
she purrs, la garçonne! Fancy a drink? I say.

Twenty-something, short, Black, wavy-bobbed diva:

Vodka on the rocks, I’m her light-skinned negative.

She samples my heartbeat and mixes it with
techno so hardcore it’s spewing out Audis
on acid for fuel. Lipstick Lesbians,
that girls’ club used to run in Brixton
like a slow-burning fuse. I was down.
She picked me up.fn21

A person can get tired of only reading narratives about tragic lesbians. This one is the opposite of tragic, and I think it’s perfect.

Other People’s Lives

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

MOHJA KAHF

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares

Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown
as they notice what my grandmother is doing,
an affront to American porcelain,
a contamination of American Standards
by something foreign and unhygienic
requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray

They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see
a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom

My grandmother, though she speaks no English,
catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,

I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul
with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems

I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus
over painted bowls imported from China
among the best families of Aleppofn22
And if you Americans knew anything
about civilization and cleanliness,
you’d make wider washbins, anyway

My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,

as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,
my grandmother might as well have been squatting
in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,

Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which,
when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.

‘You can’t do that,’ one of the women protests,
turning to me, ‘Tell her she can’t do that.’

‘We wash our feet five times a day,’

my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.

‘My feet are cleaner than their sink.

Worried about their sink, are they? I
should worry about my feet!’

My grandmother nudges me, ‘Go on, tell them.’

Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see
at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,
all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent
in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum

Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,
is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse

For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps
that match her purse, I think in case someone
from one of the best families of Aleppo
should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display

I smile at the midwestern women
as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about them
and shrug at my grandmother as if they
had just apologized through me
No one is fooled, but I

hold the door open for everyone
and we all emerge on the sales floor
and lose ourselves in the great common ground
of housewares on markdown.

I always think of the next two poems together with a poem by Sharon Olds (which was too expensive for me to put in this book, but that you should look up – it’s called ‘I Go Back to May 1937’). I think they are sort of about the people who made us. Reading ‘1979’ again, there’s nothing to suggest it’s about the poet’s parents – but that’s how I have always read it, how I’ve always thought of it. It might be, I suppose. It always will be to me. It’s interesting trying to work out why you think of poems together: interesting and frustrating, like trying to work out why you think two people might be friends, or trying to explain how you know that one blue paint swatch is going to look better than another on a sitting-room wall.

I guess these three – the Roddy Lumsden, the Eve L. Ewing and the missing Sharon Olds – flow together because they are love affairs in the past, and because they sit at this kind of intersection (I guess?) of other people’s lives and our own: about what’s ours to write about and what isn’t; about which stories belong to us.

‘Every carpet has its weave and underlay, seen / only by the maker, the deliverer and the layer,’ says Roddy Lumsden, which makes me think of Eve L. Ewing’s picture of her parents’ love as if it were a comic book that might have been protected in a plastic jacket or might have been loved to death. I don’t know why those two images seem to me to hang together, but they do. Maybe because we all have our weave, our underlay, our comic-book back story. Maybe these poems are the back stories and they weave together: our lives, their lives, echoing and shadowing, ‘ris[ing] and fall[ing] in the plot’.

Other People’s Lives

1979

RODDY LUMSDEN

They arrived at the desk of the Hotel Duncan
and Smithed in, twitchy as flea-drummed squirrels.

Her coat was squared and cream, his patent shoes
were little boats you wouldn’t put to sea in.

People, not meaning to, write themselves in
to the soap that your life is, rise or fall in the plot.

Seems that they were fleeing from the 1980s
much as a hummingbird flies from a flower’s bell.

These were the times when wine was still a treat
and not yet considered a common bodily fluid.

You will have heard that the mind works much
as an oval of soap turned between two hands.

She went round the room seeking lights
that could be off without desire becoming love.

He spread his arms behind his head, a gesture
of libido she misread as test of temperature.

Every carpet has its weave and underlay, seen
only by the maker, the deliverer and the layer.

The year was a dog but the day was as good as
a song that ends with a wedding, meat on the rib.

Evening was folding over the grid, slick walkers
with armfuls of books splendored in dusk’s ask.

The song of the pipes was eerie as a face pressed
to glass, as a basketball with a mouth and teeth.

They lay in the glow of the times and talked of
how people form a queue to exact or escape love.

Each sigh has a sequel, she thought, then he did,
then the whole hotel pulsed through that thought.

Scandal has an inroad, but you must tunnel out;
she rose and stood up counting, all hair and beauty.

Though we do not hear them, beneath our own,
our shadows’ footsteps clatter, they match our dread.

Other People’s Lives

Origin Story

EVE L. EWING

This is true:
my mother and my father
met at the Greyhound bus station
in the mid-eighties in Chicago.
my mother, all thick glass and afro puff,
came west on the train when she was nineteen,
lived in a friend’s house and cared for her children,
played tambourine in a Chaka Khan cover band.
my father, all sleeveless and soft eye,
ran away from home when he was seventeen,
mimeographed communist newspapers
and drew comic books
like this one, for sale. one dollar.
my mother bought one.

love is like a comic book. it’s fragile
and the best we can do is protect it
in whatever clumsy ways we can:
plastic and cardboard, dark rooms
and boxes. in this way, something
never meant to last
might find its way to another decade,
another home, an attic, a basement, intact.
love is paper.
and if my parents’ love was a comic book,
it never saw polyvinyl, never felt a backing.

it was curled into a back pocket for a day at the park,
lent to a friend, read under covers,
reread hanging upside-down over the back of the couch,
memorized, mishandled, worn thin, staples rusted.

a love like that doesn’t last
but it has a good ending.

Other People’s Lives

Apples

RACHEL LONG

Last night, I missed my train by seconds. So close
that one part of me did catch it; waved from the window
to the other half still panting on the platform, tits play-
doughing out of a shit bra. I couldn’t sleep
for an hour & a quarter – the exact time between
the two slices of me reaching home in separate taxis,
each driven by a brother who co-owned the firm.

Today, I’m assuming the recovery position
in my favourite outfit – a jumper with
no knickers, the perfect hot/cold combo
like a bowl of baked crumble & ice cream.

I am magazine educated, so have known for a while now
that my body is an apple. Supporting theory: I bruise
so easy I worry it’s skin cancer. No, the doctor says, again,
it’s just your dark skin. She recommends scar serum.

When I was bored after service, Mum still counting
the collection then insisting on sweeping from alter to street,

I’d sit in front of a pillar, playing with my brain-Barbie.

She was brown with tattoos and I made her have sex
with a grown man in a toilet cubicle. I don’t remember
her face, or her body. Nor what I named her.

Something beginning with N …

When the mum of my then-best friend said
her daughter wasn’t allowed to play with me because

I was another N-word – meaning

Mum went round in her dressing-gown to slap her silly
with her tongue, then returned to scatter the kitchen

& shred Dad’s Guardian for not sticking up for us, for never
saying anything –

After that I had a sleep-dream, in which I grew a bright green face,
granny-smith hued, high polished & even though I was green,

I was The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. I had the best hair

& even did humanitarian work. I was interviewed
about both things, each night, for TV.

Other People’s Lives / On Being Done

Delicate and Jumpy

MORGAN PARKER

Turns out I feel my body
more than I should. My eyes dart

like a small animal. I’m a museum
of necklines and cloudscapes, a heaven

diving into the wrong hard mountain.

Soon a beer-colored sky will sneak

up behind the fence. I toss my hair
to the street without permission.

A couple in matching peacoats smokes
electronic cigarettes across the platform.

I am a tiny robot like them
but there is no one to love my robo-heart.

On the last day of the year I enter
a scalding tub and think you away.

It is too cold and too quiet for me
to sign language the sky.

Right now six people are in outer space,
and you are growing smaller in my mind.

I just want to have a heart for this, to be
a shaved dog, begging at your heels.

On Being Done

Let’s Send Our Lovers into Orbit

LIZ VENN

Let’s send our lovers where cups are sealed
and breath is measured in grams,

where things return to them in circles:

continents, their own recycled air.

Let’s send our lovers outside blue,
where pockets empty themselves to the roof

and the air’s a juggler. They’ll love us for it.

It’s why they train themselves to wear gloves

and can’t resist sitting on top of things
that are made for sitting under. Let’s give them

only this: the whole of space and time,
where gravity tidies up after itself and stars

make gold from their pockets. We’ll hold them
a little tighter than we hold the moon,

which tends to drift away, and when they pass
in constellations, we’ll love them telescopically,

a blanket round our shoulders, accustomed
to orbits repeating themselves, their gradual decay.

There is something to be said for loving people so much you want to send them into space; something to be said for loving people so much more in their absence, so much more in the past and in the future than in the present. There is something to be said about the ways we love people differently in their presence, and all the ways it is harder to love someone right in front of you; about all the ways we live most fully in all the places where we aren’t; but I don’t know how to say it, which is why (I suppose) I’ve put these poems together in this order.

On Being Done

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cheesefn23

JOSEPHINE FRAMPTON

Candidly: she was the kind of girl who you’d invite to dinner,
and she’d bring a cheeseboard, and eat it all before the starter. A
rude kind of hors d’oeuvre; some down and dirty amuse-bouche; appalling,
obviously, but here’s the thing: you couldn’t hold it against her. She shared.

Long manchego. Proper cheddar, sweet chèvre. Camembert just the wrong side of ripe.

I liked mozzarella because it was bland, like eating blank paper, which was why she did
not: she wanted the kind of cheese with a fuck-off history, something that smacked you
enthusiastically and darkly upside the head and called out, I’m here! That first time
on hard chairs at my kitchen table we were strangers, and we ate a whole Stilton,
daring each other on, and talked about our mothers, who would have hated it,
or us for eating it, because those are the kind of stories that women always have in common.

Not all women? The women I know get together and talk about their mothers.

Oh God, my mother, let me tell you about my mother: all the women I know
get together and talk about other women, and when we’re eating cheese before dinner,
hands up in gesture, we’re always talking about women, and the men, though welcome, are
unnecessary and surplus to the whole business of women eating, and talking about
eating, and talking about women talking about eating, and talking about women.

On Being Done / Mothers

The Pomegranate

EAVAN BOLAND

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.

The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.

The suburb has cars and cable television.

The veiled stars are above ground.

It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

The legend will be hers as well as mine.

She will enter it. As I have.

She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.

And to her lips. I will say nothing.

Mothers

Picking Raspberries with Mowgli

MIMI KHALVATI

It was when he leant close to me, his little naked torso,
brown and thin, reaching an arm into the row of raspberries,

that I snatched a kiss. The raspberries smelled of rosemary
and among them, like a cuckoo’s egg, grew the odd sweetpea.

Do you know why they’re called sweetpeas? Mowgli asked.

No, why? Because look, he said, fingering a sick pale pod,

this is the fruit and this is the flower and inside the pod are peas.

Mowgli looked inside things.fn24 Inside the sieve, a spiderling

trailing a thread his finger trailed up, over, under the pile
of fruit he prodded. Don’t pick the ones with the white bits,

Mowgli ordered, they taste horrid. Sun tangled in the canes,
cobwebs blurred the berries. Mowgli progressed to the apples –

small bitter windfalls. I’m going to test them, he said, for smashes.

Mowgli, throwing apples high against the wall – and missing;

Mowgli squinting, testing the poor things now for bruises; Mowgli
balancing on a rake, first thing in the morning, grinning shyly.

Mothers

Archive for a Daughter

SANDEEP PARMAR

November 1972, Derby
A dance card embalmed in sweat.
Her ruthless curve of palm
mowing the carpet into sheaves before a gas fire.

Liquidescent virgin in a purple dress.

Oil paint, shaded avocado, umbrella sun-wings.

Box 2, folder 20 ‘Early Married Life’

a single page:
recto
a fashionable centre-parting
verso
consonants: midnight affair nuclear affair bleach affair
watermark indecipherable

[But here we are jumping ahead]

The archivist notes that no exact birth date is known.

An already Western dressed 6-year-old reads the headlines
of English newspapers for party tricks.

Her black eyes are blunt and unequivocal like the prophecies of pharaohs.

In a Punjabi village, she and her impeccable mother, gemstoned, oracular,
princess a vernal causeway.

Box 1, folder 2 ‘Emigration’

The BOAC stewardesses Max Factor crinkled baskets
of sweets to soothe the girl’s swinging, impatient feet.

Aviation—a risky endeavour in 1963—levels a curse at her progeny.

Aerophobia—her own daughter’s—
fear of the air between home and exile collapsing.

Box 1, folder 7 ‘Education’

Homelands Grammar School For Girls

Miss Moore leans across an oak sea and parquets a line of future mothers.

Her bovine sympathies, neatly pressed, tentacle
towards the only Indian in the class.

The Georgian battlecross marking her forehead,
kindly and thoughtfully, segregates.

The girl bounds wildly through the Public Library—

Huxley to her 11-year-old mind suggests individuality—
but the Savage’s feet recommend no one specific exit.

folders 8-17

Unbound Notebook, mostly unreadable:

I thought I could become a doctor and asking found I could not think to ask to become anything

The archivist notes that these pages are not continuous.

Refer to Box 2, folder 10 ‘Correspondence’.

A photograph of a prospective husband and several handwritten credentials.

Box 3, folder 1 ‘Notes on Motherhood’

Nursery—pram—groceries—pram—doctor’s visit—
cucumbers in half-lengths—

—over each shoulder some conspicuous intellect—

Husband-academic, wife-typist.

She door-to-doors Hoovers, Avon, thick rosaries of factory lace,
while her children pop tic-tacs for invented ailments in plastic houses.

Nottingham hurls snowballs at her black turbaned gentleman.

Soaked typescript, fair copy of a life—

When she asked her parents for a spare suitcase for an exodus,
they replied my child, nothing is ever spare

Box 4, folder 1 ‘Exile’

1985, Vancouver—ablaze with cherry blossoms from here to the kindergarten.

We arrived with one steel pot, a bag of lentils and an onion.

folder 2

1987, North Hollywood—submarine fences root Thanksgiving potatoes, one a piece. My daughter reads Laura Ingalls Wilder to her menagerie of dolls.

Raft sails calmly on.

folder 3

1989, Oxnard—Gifted children are purse strings.

We mind their collegiate years with interest.

El Rio wizens to a stockpile of citrus and rental agreements.

folder 4

1995, Ventura—Bibled to real estate, gold blazers
cinch round a wade of blonde, leathered adulterers.

The neighbours tend their god-plots of lawn and hedge.

Box 5, folder 1 ‘Drs Parmar’

She saunas with the ladies of the Gold Coast—
one Japanese ex-comfort woman, one savvy señora
goldbuckled and multifranchised.

Stanford, Northwestern, Harvard, London, Cambridge—
and when my husband’s sisters wept
because I had no sons I said I have two doctors

(one of body, the other of mind)
and sent my uterus via Federal Express
to the village, with my compliments!

On the verso, written in ink, is a page from Box 1, folder 8 [misplaced]

I remember clearly when I knew that I would one day die.

I was on the toilet and I was 11.

The bathroom was white and oblivious.

I was, for a long time, the keeper of the family museum – if you can call it that. I mean I kept everything everyone else threw out. I wanted it all. I pressed flowers, tucked notes into the back of books, rescued everything from the bin. I wanted to keep everything, just in case. I wanted to build, I suppose, an archive: to explain who we were, and how we were. Four countries, two continents and a decade later, I do it less. But still, this poem is like that. It makes me wish that things had not been lost. It makes me want to write about all the things I remember, before I forget.

Mothers

My Daughter Brings Home Bonesfn25

JENNIFER RICHTER

and piles them on the driveway: femur, rib, jawbone with a few
flat teeth attached, dozens of thin arced parts. This one for me—40
today. My birthday sent her to the woods and back. Chloe leans
in on her knees, arranges the bones along a concrete seam that
leads out to the street. In this next decade, she’ll go: head off like
today, take into her arms all she’s curious about. Her line of bones
makes an arrow; sun lights them like a sign. She’ll go: undeniable
as these bones, baffling as what animal they’d make. She’s on all
fours. The way I labored: some wild thing. She lays out arms and
legs; the bones in line make a spine. My height. On the driveway
lies my body—when it held her—inside out. The way she came:

like bones. Gleaming, after living in my dark. Gleaming. So I can
always find her.

Mothers / You Might As Well Live

Medical History

NICOLE SEALEY

I’ve been pregnant. I’ve had sex with a man
who’s had sex with men. I can’t sleep.

My mother has, my mother’s mother had,
asthma. My father had a stroke. My father’s
mother has high blood pressure.

Both grandfathers died from diabetes.

I drink. I don’t smoke. Xanax for flying.

Propranolol for anxiety. My eyes are bad.

I’m spooked by wind. Cousin Lilly died
from an aneurysm. Aunt Hilda, a heart attack.

Uncle Ken, wise as he was, was hit
by a car as if to disprove whatever theory
toward which I write. And, I understand,
the stars in the sky are already dead.

You Might As Well Live

Résumé

DOROTHY PARKER

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

You Might As Well Live

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. AUDEN

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

‘How it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along … the dogs go on with their doggy life’! For Auden, it was not an important failure! What can I tell you about this poem, except that when you are suffering and aghast at other people’s inability to realize how vivid and extraordinary your suffering is, it’s useful to think about this. It’s useful to remember that this is always how it has been: their perceived callousness is as your own perceived callousness to the tragedies of others, and this is simply how it is. It isn’t personal. It’s just how the world works. (Writing this now, I’m not sure it’s comforting, but it felt – and feels – so at the time.)

You Might As Well Live

Bagpipe Music

LOUIS MACNEICE

It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,

All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.

Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,

Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,

Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,

Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,

Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,

All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,

Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.

It’s no go your maidenheads, it’s no go your culture,

All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o’Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,

Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.

Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,

Said to the midwife ‘Take it away; I’m through with
over-production’.

It’s no go the gossip column, it’s no go the ceilidh,

All we want is a mother’s help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn’t count the damage,

Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.

His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,

Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

It’s no go the Herring Board, it’s no go the Bible,

All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

It’s no go the picture palace, it’s no go the stadium,

It’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,

It’s no go the Government grants, it’s no go the elections,

Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;

Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,

But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

This is the jauntiest poem I know about terrible things. I’m never sure what to make of MacNeice in this poem – or the narrator, or whoever it is. I’m never sure if he’s horrible or truthful or smug, or just plain sad. And then I get to the end and realize it’s all those things: ‘if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.’

You Might As Well Live / Rage and Trauma

What Every Woman Should Carry

MAURA DOOLEY

My mother gave me the prayer to Saint Theresa.

I added a used tube ticket, kleenex,
several Polo mints (furry), a tampon, pesetas,
a florin. Not wishing to be presumptuous,
not trusting you either, a pack of 3.

I have a pen. There is space for my guardian
angel, she has to fold her wings. Passport.

A key. Anguish, at what I said/didn’t say
when once you needed/didn’t need me. Anadin.

A credit card. His face the last time,
my impatience, my useless youth.

That empty sack, my heart. A box of matches.fn26

You Might As Well Live / Rage and Trauma

‘Perhaps this verse would please you better–Sue–(2)’

COLETTE LABOUFF ATKINSON

Before boys, Susan drove me to work, for teriyaki takeout on Manchester past Lincoln Boulevard. Inseparable, we planned winter and Easter vacations. In the stairwell, I tried to talk. She cut me off. Her echo was loud when she said you can’t see yourself. We went to see Purple Rain. That fall, I had dinner with a boy. Susan was angry and told me I was wrong. I felt it was true. Was it that boy? That he had once dated someone Susan knew? We stopped talking. We were eighteen. A decade later, I turned a corner coming out of a bookstore and heard Susan laugh. I know that, I thought, remembering how she’d saved me from saying who I was. I circled back. She answered as she had before we fell out. She answered with shame. Do you remember how things ended, she asked, because of boys?

This title is an Emily Dickinson quote. It’s from a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, who was her sister-in-law, and her best friend, and to whom she wrote in terms that would absolutely be seen (if one of them were a man) as evidence of their being in love. You can see this last bit as evidence that perhaps we read romantic love into everything between men and women; or that we deliberately whitewash lesbian love out of history; or that things between people are complicated. And all of those things are worth thinking about when you read this poem.

Rage and Trauma

Did This Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?

ALICE WALKER

I love a man who is not worth
my love.

Did this happen to your mother?

Did your grandmother wake up
for no good reason
in the middle of the night?

I thought love could be controlled.

It cannot.

Only behavior can be controlled.

By biting your tongue purple
rather than speak.

Mauling your lips.

Obliterating his number
too thoroughly
to be able to phone.

Love has made me sick.

Did your sister throw up a lot?
Did your cousin complain
of a painful knot
in her back?
Did your aunt always
seem to have something else
troubling her mind?

I thought love would adapt itself
to my needs.

But needs grow too fast;
they come up like weeds.

Through cracks in the conversation.

Through silences in the dark.

Through everything you thought was concrete.

Such needful love has to be chopped out
or forced to wilt back,
poisoned by disapproval
from its own soil.

This is bad news, for the conservationist.

My hand shakes before this killing.

My stomach sits jumpy in my chest.

My chest is the Grand Canyon
sprawled empty
over the world.

Who ever he is, he is not worth all this.

And I will never
unclench my teeth long enough
to tell him so.

Rage and Trauma

The House

WARSAN SHIRE

i

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen of lust,
bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.

Sometimes the men – they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men – they come with hammers.

ii

Nin soo joog laga waayo, soo jiifso aa laga helaa,

I said Stop, I said No and he did not listen.

iii

Perhaps she has a plan, perhaps she takes him back to hers
only for him to wake up hours later in a bathtub full of ice,
with a dry mouth, looking down at his new, neat procedure.

iv

I point to my body and say Oh this old thing? No, I just slipped it on.

v

Are you going to eat that? I say to my mother, pointing to my father who is lying on the dining room table, his mouth stuffed with a red apple.

vi

The bigger my body is, the more locked rooms there are, the more men come with keys. Anwar didn’t push it all the way in, I still think about what he could have opened up inside of me. Basil came and hesitated at the door for three years. Johnny with the blue eyes came with a bag of tools he had used on other women: one hairpin, a bottle of bleach, a switchblade and a jar of Vaseline. Yusuf called out God’s name through the keyhole and no one answered. Some begged, some climbed the side of my body looking for a window, some said they were on their way and did not come.

vii

Show us on the doll where you were touched, they said.

I said I don’t look like a doll, I look like a house.

They said Show us on the house.

Like this: two fingers in the jam jar
Like this: an elbow in the bathwater
Like this: a hand in the drawer.

viii

I should tell you about my first love who found a trapdoor under my left breast nine years ago, fell in and hasn’t been seen since. Every
now and then I feel something crawling up my thigh. He should make himself known, I’d probably let him out. I hope he hasn’t
bumped in to the others, the missing boys from small towns, with pleasant mothers, who did bad things and got lost in the maze of
my hair. I treat them well enough, a slice of bread, if they’re lucky a piece of fruit. Except for Johnny with the blue eyes, who picked my locks and crawled in. Silly boy, chained to the basement of my fears, I play music to drown him out.

ix

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

No one.

x

At parties I point to my body and say This is where love comes to die. Welcome, come in, make yourself at home. Everyone laughs, they think I’m joking.

Rage and Trauma

Some Toxin

NATALIE SHAPERO

You’re supposed to thank the fumes. To be grateful
for the toxic patch on the rail track.
For the craquelure
in the asphalt, seeping green—
it reroutes you, proffers with each commute a forced
adventure. Who’s to say what you’ll find
in your course of avoidance?

Ideally a willing stranger.

Maybe a glimpse of the most
expensive painting per square inch.

When you can no longer meet your needs
by working, you should feel joyous. No more daily
wear and tear on the blazer.

Now you can keep it pristine. Superlatively
inky. It’ll look smart at funerals.

Of course they’ll invite you to make some brief
remarks, and when you move to retrieve
from your pocket the paper,
out will come a whole sheath of solemn statements—
you’ve lost this year
how many? You’ll shuffle
through the pile. Where is the life
that lived in the body before you? Where is the right
one gone?

Rage and Trauma

Translations

ADRIENNE RICH

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political

Rage and Trauma / This Is Probably Over, Huh

Eating Kit Kats During the Last Hurricane, We Decide to Split Up

CHRISTINA OLSON

We ignored the best reports,
didn’t flood the bathtub
with clean water. And when
the storm did shatter overhead,
we had only tiny candy bars,
pulled from the plastic head
of the pumpkin the treaters
never called for, our porch dark
and uninviting. We sat cross-legged
on the rug. The rain drowned
the frogs that used to keep us
awake. We were glad, then,
we had no children. We ached
for fiber, some green
and bright vegetable. But we
had only the candy. I said,
This is probably over, huh,
and you said, Please don’t turn
this into some fucking movie.fn27
I had meant only the storm.
Whoever calls rain cleansing
is a liar. Outside, something
cracked. It sounded like bone.

Rage and Trauma / This Is Probably Over, Huh

[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up

BERNADETTE MAYER

You jerk you didn’t call me up
I haven’t seen you in so long
You probably have a fucking tan
& besides that instead of making love tonight
You’re drinking your parents to the airport
I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
By a soporific color cable t.v. set
Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander

To make love, turn to page 121.

To die, turn to page 172.

Rage and Trauma

The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part

HEATHER CHRISTLE

you have to live where the house lands on you
what else can you do  your bones are all broken
and somebody loves you  who is it  tell me who
loves you  not as much as I do  I mean  I even
built you a house  and found you  why won’t
you live in it

The whole thing is the hard part! I more or less had a rule that only one poem per poet could go in this book (ten points to anyone who spots where I broke it), and I was very torn between this piece and another poem by Heather Christle called ‘More of Form Is More of Content’. If you like this one here, you should look up the other. I probably read ‘More of Form Is More of Content’ more often, but this one felt more … universal.

This Is Probably Over, Huh / Overthinking

One Art

ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

This poem, with its tricky little rhyme scheme, is a villanelle, and if you would like to see how much work goes into making something this complicated appear this effortless, you can read a lot of Elizabeth Bishop’s early drafts of the piece (seventeen!) online. Most of them are nothing like the poem printed here. Lots of them don’t even rhyme. There’s a lesson there – about work and struggle and mastering an art – just as there is here, but one art is poetry and the other is loss. (If you’re into complicated forms, Marilyn Hacker’s ‘Towards Autumn’ on p. 34 is another example.)

This Is Probably Over, Huh / Overthinking

Song: Go and catch a falling star

JOHN DONNE

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find’st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

This is such a Mean Boy of a poem. It’s a Mean Boy smiling at you across the pub table, saying things you know you could and should argue with, but he’s so damn charming. And he’s being genuinely, absolutely offensive and you’re just going, ‘But— But, John, hang on, you can’t say that. What—’ And he’s laughing at you, and somehow everyone is now also laughing at you, but he is being funny so you smile reluctantly, because you can’t help it, and somehow your smiling is tacit approval of the terrible things he’s been saying. And then he buys you a drink without even asking what you want, but it’s obviously what you want and you’re still a bit like, ‘But I—’ But absolutely nobody cares any more, the conversation has moved on, and did anyone even care about it anyway, did he ever care about it, or was he just saying it to wind you up? And later you find yourself going home with him again. That. That’s John Donne.

Overthinking

Pensive Reflection

NISHA RAMAYYA

Imagine a time in which you feel happy. In your happiness, you imagine another time in which you feel unhappy. You are in bed, your love is in your arms; the room is cold and it belongs to you.

This is the tower of the past. The battlements are formed of anthills, the anthills the curves of the goddess, the curves snakes agreeing sealing themselves away. Lookouts lie face down, mouths open to the earth, swallowing the matter of their warnings. Lookouts are snakes.

In your unhappiness, you imagine another time in which you feel happy. You are standing, you catch sight of your love across the room. One or both of you is wearing a uniform. The room is warm; it does not belong to you.

The tower is oversaturated and impossible to date. Lookouts’ mouths fill with earth, earth itching, itching converting warning to retch. Lookouts reduce the noise of their retching; snakes containing the warnings in the smoothed lines of their swallows.

This is how to conjugate the old future tense.

Overthinking

Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly

KAYO CHINIGONYI

The silence between songs can’t be modulated by anything other than held breath. You have to sit and wait, time the release of the pause button to the last tenth of a second so that the gap between each track is a smooth purr, a TDK or Memorex your masterwork. Don’t talk to me about your MP3 player, how, given the limitless choice, you hardly ever listen to one song for more than two minutes at a time. Do you know about stealing double As from the TV remote so you can listen to last night’s clandestine effort on the walk to school? You say you love music. Have you suffered the loss of a cassette so gnarled by a tape deck’s teeth it refuses to play the beat you’ve come to recognise by sound and not name? Have you carried that theme in your head these years in the faint hope you might know it when it finds you, in a far-flung café, as you stand to pay, frozen, and the barista has to ask if you’re okay?

I took this poem from Chinigonyi’s unbelievable collection Kumukanda, which is a kind of coming-of-age novel if that coming-of-age novel were nothing like any coming-of-age novel you’ve ever read before and was also poems. There’s a kind of exacting specificity to his writing – small, identified, precise moments and objects and things – which, as with good comedy, is the key to the whole thing.

Overthinking / Close of Day

Question

MAY SWENSON

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

When I was thinking about categorizing these poems (or, rather, how to organize them at all, because trying to put a poem into a single ‘category’ is the kind of thing that would put anyone off), I put the poems in this part of the book under the heading of ‘loss’. It strikes me now that actually, what mostly unites these poems is questions. ‘Ask if you’re okay?’ on the previous page. ‘How anyone so gay / possibly could / die’, on the following. ‘Where’s the big brandy?’ (p.160); ‘Why / will man lament the state he should envy?’ (p.162); ‘What wind / Serves to advance an honest mind’ (p.150); ‘What can I tell you that you do not know / Of the life after death?’ (p.166); and here, ‘What will I do / when you are fallen.’

A similar thing happened with the poems about eating on pp.31–3: I thought they were about food, but really they were about having a mother and being a mother. This sort of thing is, I suppose, the point of anthologies: the point of reading poems together with other poems is to make connections you might not have otherwise made.

If you look at it like that, you could say that loss is a series of questions without answers: a definition as good as any other.

Close of Day

#53

E. E. CUMMINGS

of all things under our
blonder than blondest star

the most mysterious

(eliena,fn28 my dear) is this:

—how anyone so gay
possibly could diefn29

There are a lot of E. E. Cummings poems much more famous than this one, lots of which I love, but this is the one I come back to over and over again.

Close of Day

Do not go gentle into that good night

DYLAN THOMAS

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Close of Day

Sin Visits Me

MALIKA BOOKER

They say a dead woman can’t run from her coffin.

How moonshine can orchestrate nuff wild thoughts!

It’s an hour past midnight and the road outside is quiet;
my thoughts are a twisting screwdriver; licks
of a dozen switches scorch my skin. Pomegranate flowers
line the road, each spread out from the other,
and their crumpled petals are the shocking red of death.

I am in the centre of this wreath. You chew chillies raw,
laugh, and spit the seeds, then tell me of the joys
of sitting on a big stone under Concord waterfall,
watching near naked boys leap off the moss-green cliffs above.

Your voice is smooth liquor. Your whirring hands speak
another language. I hold a white china cup in my hand;
funny how the cracks don’t seem to show.

You in your saucy lace that binds your body like mace
covers nutmeg seeds; I am shocked by your vulgarity.

I tell you, crapaud don’t have no right in salt water.

You tell me you have a right to be everywhere.

If this poem is a ghost story, it’s about the kind of ghosts I can get to grips with: the kind where dreams and stories and memories ‘have a right to be everywhere …’

Close of Day
from Clearances

SEAMUS HEANEY

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984

3

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Close of Day

Lucozade

JACKIE KAY

My mum is on a high bed next to sad chrysanthemums.

‘Don’t bring flowers, they only wilt and die.’

I am scared my mum is going to die
on the bed next to the sad chrysanthemums.

She nods off and her eyes go back in her head.

Next to her bed is a bottle of Lucozade.

‘Orange nostalgia, that’s what that is,’ she says.

‘Don’t bring Lucozade either,’ then fades.

‘The whole day was a blur, a swarm of eyes.

Those doctors with their white lies.

Did you think you could cheer me up with a Woman’s Own?

Don’t bring magazines, too much about size.’

My mum wakes up, groggy and low.

‘What I want to know,’ she says, ‘is this:

where’s the big brandy, the generous gin, the Bloody Mary,
the biscuit tin, the chocolate gingers, the dirty big meringue?’

I am sixteen; I’ve never tasted a Bloody Mary.

‘Tell your father to bring a luxury,’ says she.

‘Grapes have no imagination, they’re just green.

Tell him: stop the neighbours coming.’

I clear her cupboard in Ward 10B, Stobhill Hospital.

I leave, bags full, Lucozade, grapes, oranges,
sad chrysanthemums under my arms,
weighted down. I turn round, wave with her flowers.

My mother, on her high hospital bed, waves back.

Her face is light and radiant, dandelion hours.

Her sheets billow and whirl. She is beautiful.

Next to her the empty table is divine.

I carry the orange nostalgia home singing an old song.

Close of Day / Life After Death

On My First Son

BEN JONSON

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,

Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father, now. For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon ’scaped world’s, and flesh’s rage,

And, if no other misery, yet age!

Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

Fun fact: this was the only poem we studied in school I ever loved; the only time I felt someone real and alive reaching out across hundreds of years to tell me this is how it is; the only time I felt the poet of the past put his hand out and into my heart to make his hurt my hurt, his fear my fear, his grief my grief. I still love it.

Life After Death

Morning Song

SYLVIA PLATH

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Life After Death

Life After Death

TED HUGHES

What can I tell you that you do not know

Of the life after death?

Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.

Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing

His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.

But his mouth betrayed you – it accepted

The spoon in my disembodied hand

That reached through from the life that had survived you.

Day by day his sister grew

Paler with the wound

She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it

Each day with her blue Breton jacket.

By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder

Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots –

I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.
Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.

We were comforted by wolves.

Under that February moon and the moon of March

The Zoo had come close.

And in spite of the city

Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night

For minutes on end

They sang. They had found where we lay.

And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves –

All lifted their voices together

With the grey Northern pack.

The wolves lifted us in their long voices.

They wound us and enmeshed us

In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,

They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,

In the fallen snow, under falling snow,

As my body sank into the folk-take

Where the wolves are singing in the forest

For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,

Into orphans

Beside the corpse of their mother.

There are things about the three poems you’ve just read (if you’re reading them in order) that I feel I have to mention. All, for me, are about what it’s like to live and to die and to want to die and to love someone who wants to die and to love someone who dies. Mary Karr loved the author David Foster Wallace, who died by suicide. Ted Hughes loved Sylvia Plath, who died by suicide. These relationships have nothing and somehow everything to do with each other. Does this feel confusing? Perhaps it should – life is, and death is, and love is most of all.

I didn’t want to name names, because people aren’t poems and everything is more complicated than it appears on the page. These three poems aren’t autobiography, neither are they biography or memoir. But I can’t help but notice, when I read them together, how the same images come up in these strangely parallel stories: how the mouth of one is the breath of another is the air in a balloon is a moon is a face is a mouth is a betrayal.

‘You emptied our oxygen into that jug,’ Hughes tells Plath (different poem; same book,fn30 and I think of the ‘parcels of oxygen you / inherited’ in Mary Karr’s poem. The small son whose ‘mouth betrays you’ in Hughes’s ‘Life After Death’ feels like the mouth in Karr’s poem, breathing into those ‘rosy implanted wings’ which ‘rise like rain’, which feels like the ‘clear vowels’ in Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ that ‘rise like balloons’, mouth ‘clean as a cat’s’, ‘flat pink roses’ (and then there are Karr’s ‘pink balloons’).

And on. But it’s bigger than that.

Like: you can follow Ted Hughes’s ‘blue Breton jacket’ into all the blue clothes of grief, into Anne Carson’s ‘Father’s Old Blue Cardigan’ (see p.175), and into the titular blue dress in Saeed Jones’s poem (see p.174). That dress is goodbye is the mother is the moon, which is like ‘such queer moons we live with’ in another of Plath’s poems, ‘Balloons’, and the ‘February moon and the moon of March’ in ‘Life After Death’, which starts ‘What can I tell you that you do not know / Of the life after death?’ in just the same way Maxine Kumin’s poem ‘How It Is’ (see p.172) begins, ‘Shall I say how it is in your clothes?’ as she buttons herself into the ‘dumb blue blazer of your death’. And on and on and on.

There are other paths you can follow, if you want: you can follow stars, say, or trains, or questions through these poems and into all those that follow and back again. In some ways, this following is all I’ve really tried to do with this anthology: picking poems apart and threading them back together.

There’s a kind of family tree of feeling here: a framework for everything that’s ever been or ever will be. The more you read, the more you have. The more you have, the easier it is to understand where you fit in: ‘announcing your place’, as Mary Oliver puts it in ‘Wild Geese’, ‘in the family of things’.

Life After Death

For Michelle

KIRI PIAHANA-WONG

You have receded against the far

horizon. It’s been three months

since you left, I can barely make

out the shape of the vessel you

sailed away on. I lie in my garden

and I grieve. Nothing seems to

thrive, not the flowers, not the

vegetable plants. Sometimes I

go to the shore and look out.

I think I can see you, surely

you are just there, surely

you haven’t left yet, it’s too

early, did no-one tell you?

I know now that’s what

happened. You forgot to

read the timetable, you didn’t

realise, Oh yes, the time to

catch this ship is years from now,

I have all the time in the world.

Life After Death

How It Is

MAXINE KUMIN

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?

A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.

The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.

In the left pocket, a hole.

In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.

In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.

My skin presses your old outline.

It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Life After Death / Fathers

The Blue Dress

SAEED JONES

Her blue dress is a silk train is a river
is water seeps into the cobblestone streets of my sleep, is still raining
is monsoon brocade, is winter stars stitched into puddles
is good-bye in a flooded, antique room, is good-bye in a room of crystal bowls
and crystal cups, is the ring-ting-ring of water dripping from the mouths
of crystal bowls and crystal cups, is the Mississippi River is a hallway, is leaks
like tears from windowsills of a drowned house, is windows open to waterfalls
is a bed is a small boat is a ship, is a current come to carry me in its arms
through the streets, is me floating in her dress through the streets
is only the moon sees me floating through the streets, is me in a blue dress
out to sea, is my mother is a moon out to sea.

Life After Death / Fathers

Father’s Old Blue Cardigan

ANNE CARSON

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.

He would not have done this.

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.

But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.

He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.

Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face —
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

Fathers

Long Distance II

TONY HARRISON

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.

He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.

You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

Fathers

Those Winter Sundays

ROBERT HAYDEN

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Fathers

Home

KAZIM ALI

My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our hair.

After a bath the cold metal soothing against my scalp, his hand cupping
my chin.

My mother had a red pullover with a little yellow duck embroidered
on it and a pendant made from a gold Victoria coronation coin.

Which later, when we first moved to Buffalo, would be stolen from
the house.

The Sunn’i Muslims have a story in which the angels cast a dark mark
out of Prophet Mohammad’s heart, thus making him pure, though the

Shi’a reject this story, believing in his absolute innocence from birth.

Telling the famous Story of the Blanket in which the Prophet covers
himself with a Yemeni blanket for his afternoon rest. Joined under
the blanket first by his son-in-law Ali, then each of his grandchildren

Hassan and Hussain and finally by his daughter Bibi Fatima.

In Heaven Gabriel asks God about the five under the blanket and

God says, those are the five people whom I loved the most out of all
creation, and I made everything in the heavens and the earth for
their sake.

Gabriel, speaker on God’s behalf, whisperer to Prophets, asks God, can

I go down and be the sixth among them.

And God says, go down there and ask them. If they consent you may go
under the blanket and be the sixth among them.

Creation for the sake of Gabriel is retroactively granted when the group
under the blanket admits him to their company.

Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside.

Asking the 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered.

In Hyderabad I prayed every part of the day, climbed a thousand steps
to the site of Maula Ali’s pilgrimage.

I wanted to be those stairs, the hunger I felt, the river inside.

I learned to pronounce my daily prayers from transliterated English
in a book called ‘Know Your Islam,’ dark blue with gold calligraphed
writing that made the English appear as if it were Arabic complete with
marks above and below the letters.

I didn’t learn the Arabic script until years later and never learned the
language itself.

God’s true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.

As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.

I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence
of stars.

When Abraham took Isaac up into the thicket his son did not know
where he was being led.

When his father bound him and took up the knife he was shocked.

And said, ‘Father, where is the ram?’

Though from Abraham’s perspective he was asked by God to sacrifice
his son and proved his love by taking up the knife.

Thinking to himself perhaps, Oh Ismail, Ismail, do I cut or do I burn.

I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.

Fourth son of a fourth son, my father was afflicted as a child and
as was the custom in those days a new name was selected for him to
protect his health.

Still the feeling of his rough hand, gently cupping my cheek, dipping the
steel comb in water to comb my hair flat.

My hair was kept so short, combed flat when wet. I never knew my hair
was wavy until I was nearly twenty-two and never went outside with wet
and uncombed hair until I was twenty-eight.

At which point I realized my hair was curly.

My father’s hands have fortune-lines in them cut deeply and dramatic.

The day I left his house for the last time I asked him if I could hold his
hand before I left.

There are two different ways of going about this.

If you have known this for years why didn’t you ask for help, he
asked me.

Each time I left home, including the last time, my mother would hold a

Quran up for me to walk under. Once under, one would turn and kiss
the book.

There is no place in the Quran which requires acts of homosexuality to
be punishable by lashings and death.

Hadith or scripture. Scripture or rupture.

Should I travel out from under the blanket.

Comfort from a verse which also recurs: ‘Surely there are signs in this
for those of you who would reflect.’

Or the one hundred and four books of God. Of which only four are
known—Qur’an, Injeel, Tavrat, Zubuur.

There are a hundred others—Bhagavad-Gita, Lotus Sutra, Song of

Myself, the Gospel of Magdalene, Popul Vuh, the book of Black Buffalo

Woman—somewhere unrevealed as such.

Dear mother in the sky you could unbuckle the book and erase all the
annotations.

What I always remember about my childhood is my mother whispering
to me, telling me secrets, ideas, suggestions.

She named me when I moved in her while she was reading a calligraphy
of the Imam’s names. My name: translated my whole life for me as

Patience.

In India we climbed the steps of the Maula Ali mountain to the top,
thirsting for what.

My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage.

She had told me the reason why.

Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages.

I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she
would give a new son.

I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sister’s first
son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my
telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs.

It is the one betrayal of her—perhaps meaningless—that I have never
forgiven myself.

There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.

You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God
will still welcome you.

My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.

Every time one of those big army helicopters flies over my house, which happens surprisingly often, I think, ‘bombers / arriving / early here / they are.’ I would love to explain this poem to you, to be sure I understand it well enough to explain it to you, but I don’t and I can’t. I can only say that I feel it like a lump in my throat, a knot in my chest, like butterflies in my stomach, like ‘make you aching upwards’ or ‘underwater / libraries’ or ‘hello love us for / the century of progress’.

The End of the World

The Very Nervous Family

SABRINA ORAH MARK

Mr. Horowitz clutches a bag of dried apricots to his chest. Although the sun is shining, there will probably be a storm. Electricity will be lost. Possibly forever. When this happens the very nervous family will be the last to starve. Because of the apricots. ‘Unless,’ says Mrs. Horowitz, ‘the authorities confiscate the apricots.’ Mr. Horowitz clutches the bag of dried apricots tighter. He should’ve bought two bags. One for the authorities and one for his very nervous family. Mrs. Horowitz would dead bolt the front door to keep the authorities out, but it is already bolted. Already dead. She doesn’t like that phrase. Dead bolt. It reminds her of getting shot before you even have a chance to run. ‘Everyone should have at least a chance to run,’ says Mrs. Horowitz. ‘Don’t you agree, Mr. Horowitz?’ Mrs. Horowitz always refers to her husband as Mr. Horowitz should they ever one day become strangers to each other. Mr. Horowitz agrees. When the authorities come they should give the Horowitzs a chance to run before they shoot them for the apricots. Eli Horowitz, their very nervous son, rushes in with his knitting. ‘Do not rush,’ says Mr. Horowitz, ‘you will fall and you will die.’ Eli wanted ice skates for his birthday. ‘We are not a family who ice skates!’ shouts Mrs. Horowitz. She is not angry. She is a mother who simply does not wish to outlive her only son. Mrs. Horowitz gathers her very nervous son up in her arms, and gently explains that families who ice skate become the ice they slip on. The cracks they fall through. The frost that bites them. ‘We have survived this long to become our own demise?’ asks Mrs. Horowitz. ‘No,’ whispers Eli, ‘we have not.’ Mr. Horowitz removes one dried apricot from the bag and nervously begins to pet it when Mrs. Horowitz suddenly gasps. She thinks she may have forgotten to buy milk. Without milk they will choke on the apricots. Eli rushes to the freezer with his knitting. There is milk. The whole freezer is stuffed with milk. Eli removes a frozen half pint and glides it across the kitchen table. It is like the milk is skating. He wishes he were milk. Brave milk. He throws the half pint on the floor and stomps on it. Now the milk is crushed. Now the milk is dead. Now the Horowitzs are that much closer to choking. Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz are dumbfounded. Their very nervous son might be a maniac. He is eight. God is punishing them for being survivors. God has given them a maniac for a son. All they ask is that they not starve, and now their only son is killing milk. Who will marry their maniac? No one. Who will mother their grandchildren? There will be no grandchildren. All they ask is that there is something left of them when they are shot for the apricots, but now their only son is a maniac who will give them no grandchildren. Mr. Horowitz considers leaving Eli behind when he and Mrs. Horowitz run for their lives.

Oh, this poem! It’s a joke until it isn’t.

The End of the World

The Second Coming

W. B. YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This is a very satisfying poem to learn by heart, if you feel inclined to learn something by heart.

The End of the World

My Imminent Demise Makes the Headlines the Same Day I Notice How Even Your Front Teeth Are

MOMTAZA MEHRI

At the internment camp, promise me you’ll take the top bunk.

I want to see you every time I look up.

National anthems are still more violent than most hip hop lyrics.

Sugar-coat me this. I know.

Got a sense of humour blacker than my granddaddy’s knuckles.

You are the sinkhole into which I pour my desperations.

My sixth pillar. Validate me, if only with the soft explosions
of your breath. Its daily, naked persistence.

Who cares if they burn our houses?

Our bones?

Yes. We might lose our reflections.

We might lose our names.

We might lose feeling in both hands.

Our blood will still dry solid. Still keep its colour. A kind of Abrahamic love
to outlast the mist of rain,
the depth of waters,
the permanence of chicken grease on fingers.

Find me a world as eternal as the birthmark between your shoulders.

Find me a sign as prophetic as a boy born with a target on his back.

Haven’t you heard?

Every time my thighs rub together,

God answers a prayer.

This heart is not a footrest.

For you,

I can make an exception.

We can make a life out of such exceptions.

The End of the World

Post-factual Love Poem

PAUL GUEST

I’m thinking of the boiling sea
and the dream in which
all the fish were singing.
I want to wake up with my heart
not aching like death,
but I am always falling
in to terror. I’m a good person.
I grieve to appropriate degrees.
I mourn this season. This moment.
I mourn for the polar bear
drifting out of history
on a wedge of melting ice.
For the doughnut shop
which reached an end
yesterday, after decades and decades.
I’m thinking of the light
at dawn. Of the woman
in Alabama who ordered
six songbirds from a catalog because
she was lonely. Or
heartbroken. I’m thinking
of the four that came
dead in the box, mangled.
Of the two that are
missing. I want to tell you
that they were spotted
in the humid air
winging above a mall.
I want to tell you a story
about the time leaves fell from
the trees all at once. I am
thinking of cataclysm.
More than anything, I want to tell you
this. I want to disappear
in the night. I want
the night to vanish from memory.
I want to tell you
how this happened.

There’s a famous Bertolt Brecht line that goes like this: ‘In the dark times, will there still be singing? Yes, there will still be singing. About the dark times.’ That’s how I feel about the poems around this page.

I suppose every generation feels the world it has inherited is a bleak one: every civilization in history has had some reason to think it’s going to be the last. That’s why we’ve inherited so many poems (the Book of Revelation, for example) about the end of the world as we know it.

I like to think about this tradition of making art while the world is falling apart to make myself feel better about making art while the world is falling apart. Because the urge to make and consume art is pretty universal: making art about the end of the world is how we know we’re still human. After all, what kind of world would there be to save without art? Why bother with a world without art?

The End of the World

We Have Everything We Need

SELINA NWULU

We have each become a small world,
spinning from one collision to another.

We scrub cities off our skins
and watch its roads leave tracks in the bath.

Damp rises, rent rises, high-rises.

Look how the cities silhouettes grow new forests for us.

What new constellation of stars guides us home?fn31

We are tower block light flickers come evening
crammed into shoe boxes, basements,
living room-come-bedrooms.

Stretch out our feet to turn the TV on.

Reach out for our phones,
our faces made radiant by its birdsong.

Mining happening somewhere, but we can’t be sure.

We are compassion in 140 characters.

We are lying lonely next to each other
between paper thin walls.

We know our neighbour’s shouts and moans.

She sounds like a redhead, I think.

Rent rises, heat rises, sea rises.

Put the kettle on, scald dinner in microwaves.

Droughts happening somewhere, but we can’t be sure.

Tesco Metro fluorescence lives on.

I wonder what will this all look like in 50 years’ time.

How will our cities exhale then?

How will we wear our loss?

How will we sleep when we cannot turn our alarm clocks off?

We have each become a small world,
spinning from one collision to another.

The End of the World

Anthropocene Pastoral

CATHERINE PIERCE

In the beginning, the ending was beautiful.
Early spring everywhere,fn32 the trees furred
pink and white, lawns the sharp green
that meant new. The sky so blue it looked
manufactured. Robins. We’d heard
the cherry blossoms wouldn’t blossom
this year, but what was one epic blooming
when even the desert was an explosion
of verbena? When bobcats slinked through
primroses. When coyotes slept deep in orange
poppies. One New Year’s Day we woke
to daffodils, wisteria, onion grass wafting
through the open windows. Near the end,
we were eyeletted. We were cottoned.
We were sundressed and barefoot. At least
it’s starting gentle, we said. An absurd comfort,
we knew, a placebo. But we were built like that.

Built to say at least.fn33 Built to reach for the heat
of skin on skin even when we were already hot,
built to love the purpling desert in the twilight,
built to marvel over the pink bursting dogwoods,
to hold tight to every pleasure even as we
rocked together toward the graying, even as
we held each other, warmth to warmth,
and said sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry while petals
sifted softly to the ground all around us.

After the End

Microbial Museum

MAYA CHOWDHRY

April ship sets sail, sea freezes ripples, leaves Rothera
behind. One hundred and fifty thousand years of snowfall in

cylindrical samples, bubble-wrapped, boxed in styrofoam,
cores wrenched from ice caverns to Immingham.

Drill incises annulus ice cuttings spiral surface.fn34 Statistics
held in water vapour measure up to eons of weather.

Blueprints of other lives, the oldest ice sequesters
reservoirs of extinct creatures resurrected.

Suspending cable sonars frozen microbial cells
immortal bugs from bacteriasicles emerge, grow, divide.

Prehistoric pestilence thaws, allows ancient genes to mix with
modern ones. Skiing genotype slaloms through DNA markers,

mutating the ocean, creeping into the unsuspecting cells
of species climbing the ladder to life.

The future is thawed, dispatched into a white out.

There are things that will survive us. I mean this in the big sense and the little sense: I mean that there is life after death, as Ted Hughes puts it. I mean that whatever happens to me, and whatever happens to you, and whatever happens to the world – for we live in interesting times – something will go on after us. In this poem (based, I think, on Martin Redfern’s polar diary: a 2008 account of drilling for CO_2 samples in Antarctica) it’s bacteria; and that’s probably true. Tiny things that knew us that go on without us; and things frozen long before we were even thought of. We are as nothing to the ice; nothing to the world, really, in the long run. The Earth doesn’t mind if we exist or not. So, I suppose, what’s left? What do we have that’s ours? Only ourselves, and only each other, and only for now. This is supposed to be comforting, but if it isn’t comforting, it is – at least – a reminder to be careful.

and Last Words
be careful

ED ROBERSON

i must be careful about such things as these.

the thin-grained oak. the quiet grizzlies scared
into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
in behind them closer in the snow. the snared
rigidity of the winter lake. deer after deer
crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare
with their eyes pressed to the ice. in a sleep. hearing
the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear
in the high quiet. i must be careful not to shake
anything in too wild an elation. not to jar
the fragile mountains against the paper far-
ness. nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.

of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious
words. like rocks. without one snowcapped mistake.

and Last Words

VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God

MARY KARR

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but we want magic, to win
the lottery we never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.

It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
i.e. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.

I have this poem printed out and folded in my purse. I recommend this course of action to you, too. ‘Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.’

This Started Off As A Book For People Who Hate Poetry

Hello. Hi.

If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’re one of my people: the people who want to read the long, dull bit that doesn’t technically belong in the book at all. It’s a lonely crowd to belong to. Especially when you’re already part of a lonely crowd: people who really, really love poetry.

Most people, you know, hate poetry. This is a terrible thing to admit, if you’re a person who loves poetry. Most people hate poetry, and if they don’t hate it they’d rather not admit to liking it, and if they don’t mind admitting it they’d rather not talk about it too much. I think, in some ways, there’s something a bit embarrassing about poetry; perhaps because a poem is evidence of having tried to make something beautiful. And nobody (except God) loves a trier.

(Me, I do, I love a trier. But I also love poetry, and talking about it, so it’s probably too late for me.)

But for whatever reason, people hate poetry and talking about it. And it’s hard to love something when the people you love don’t love it too. And that, I suppose, is how I got here.

I started collecting poems for this book a long time ago now, as a Christmas present for my best friend. Her name is Caroline, and this book is for her. My best friend hates poetry, or at least she used to. This makes me sound like the world’s worst gift-giver: Hey, remember that thing you hate? Here’s ninety-eight of them! Hope you like them! But it wasn’t like that. Or at least, not exactly like that.

I started making this book for my best friend because I couldn’t understand how we could agree on absolutely everything except poetry. We agreed on the best place to get cardamom buns, the best amount of money to have in your purse (£6.50: enough to buy lunch but not enough to save) and the best kind of books (sisters, a big house, a mystery). We agreed about writing and we agreed about work and we agreed about reading – so how could we disagree over something so fundamental? Poetry was my whole life. And she hated it. All of it. She hated poetry for the same reasons you hate poetry (if you hate poetry): it’s boring, cryptic, stupid.

‘It’s just songs without music,’ she said to me once, and I replied, ‘Yes!’ thinking we finally agreed on something. And then we looked at each other blankly, because that one small sentence meant something so different to each of us that we might as well have been speaking different languages. She meant something was missing, and I meant something that could stand alone: the music was in the words, and nothing else was needed.

I started working on this book at Christmas five years ago to try to show her what I saw in poetry; to try to show her this thing I loved more than anything else – more than any other kind of art or any other kind of writing. I wanted to show her what it was about poetry that could be so good.

I wrote this book (or curated it, or made it, or edited it, or whatever) because somebody had to. I am a very lazy person. I would much, much have preferred to have bought it from a shop; to have been able to hand it to my best friend and say, Look, now you see what I mean! Look how much fun this is!

But it wasn’t there. Not really. I have bought and been bought, conservatively, half a million anthologies in my life. Almost all of them have something to recommend them, but none of them were quite right.

There were two main reasons for this. One was to do with feelings. The other was to do with facts.

Reason One (Feelings)

The first reason was this: I didn’t believe that any of the mainstream anthologies felt like I did about poetry. Part of this, of course, is because that’s just the way it is when you love something: you think you’re the only one who’s ever felt this way.

But I also felt that many of those anthologies treated poetry as something beautiful and strange and distant. And yet when I talked about poetry in real life, to other people who loved it, I didn’t feel like that at all. It was as if they saw what I did: that poetry was just about people.

T. S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land was first titled He Do the Police in Different Voices. (It’s a better title, right?!) And I think about this a lot when I think about poetry. Poetry is all voices: it’s listening to people; it’s little glimpses into other lives, like licensed eavesdropping; it’s being able to read a stranger’s mind.

The world opens up to you and you never have to have had a feeling first. The thing about poetry is that it’s almost impossible to believe you’re the only person who has ever felt this way before – which is pretty much always true. You’re a person among people, doing the things that people do, feeling the things that people feel – and someone, some poet, somewhere, at some time, will have written about it. You don’t have to think of the words yourself because someone else has already thought of the words for what you’re feeling and you can use those words to understand better the world we’re all living in, and the way we’re living, and the way we are.

People hate poetry, often, because it has this reputation for being difficult. It doesn’t have to be. It can be a road map or simply someone yelling out to let you know I was here too! I understand!

I wanted an anthology, I suppose, that did that.

A number of fairly bad things have happened to me in my life. I imagine some fairly bad things have happened to you, too. I don’t propose to dwell on my own particular bad things, because that would be boring for you and horrible for me, but look: they happened.

And they are part of the reason, I suppose, that I am so violently dedicated to trying to explain why poetry matters: because without poetry I wouldn’t have the words to explain my own life. Without other people’s words, I’d still be floundering. I’d be lost. I am going to tell you a small story to illustrate this point.

When I was seventeen years old, I met a boy. This happens to a lot of people. I fell madly in love, and so did he. (This also happens to a lot of people.) After a bit, we started going out, and after a bit (three dates) we moved in together and we were very happy.

I called him the Tall Man, because he was tall, and because of a book of poetry called Love, an Index. The book was by Rebecca Lindenberg and it was (I thought) about being in love with a man called Tall Man. The Tall Man gave me a copy of this book for our first anniversary; we wrote all over it, underlining bits, spilling wine on the pages. Her Tall Man was not mine; her relationship was not mine; the fictional-not-fictional version of her relationship was not exactly like the fictional-not-fictional versions of mine that I wrote about in my diary and in my journalism and in my own poems. But it was similar enough that it felt as if it had been written for me.

I loved this book, and I quoted it a lot (you can read one of those poems on p. 80: it’s a perfect poem, I think).

When I was twenty-four years old, the Tall Man suffered a traumatic brain injury. It took away his ability to write, to speak, to walk. It changed our lives, and eventually he died. In the year after his death, some vicious instinct led me to pick up Love, an Index again. I wanted to hurt: I wanted to look at the life I had once had. I wanted to look at Rebecca Lindenberg’s poems about being in love at a time when being in love seemed if not pointless, then useless. I wanted to press my fingers into the bruise.

And when I opened it, to my absolute shock, here’s what I saw.

I saw that Love, an Index isn’t a book about being in love with a man called Tall Man. At least, not exclusively. It’s a book about losing a man called Tall Man.

A poem, you see, is a kind of collaboration. It is partly what the writer wrote and partly what the reader reads. You bring your own life with you when you read. How I read a poem might not be how you read a poem, and how I read a poem now might not be how I read it next year. Poems change: the same words on the same page can be different because you are different.

I had known, I think, when I read it before, that half the book was about the fact that Rebecca Lindenberg’s partner had disappeared while hiking a volcano. But I had skimmed those parts, or never bothered with them, or just … not read them properly. However, after losing my Tall Man too, I read them. I read them properly.

Hers disappeared hiking a volcano. Mine had cancer, and then caught an infection and died. They aren’t the same situation. But they were similar enough that I felt it had been written just for me. I felt, for the first time, that I was not alone.

And this is the reason poetry matters.

I wanted, when I read an anthology, to find a field guide to my feelings in the way that Love, an Index had been. I wanted to find a poet who spoke my language. I wanted to find people who felt like me.

And the anthologies I read didn’t give me that.

So that was one reason.

Reason Two (Facts)

The other reason was this: in none of the mainstream anthologies – the big ones, the ones that you can buy in big chain bookshops – did I find anything that even came close to providing a balance of gender or race.

I thought at first I was imagining it. So I checked some books out of the library and I started counting.

I’m not going to name names here – because there are many brilliant poetry anthologies – but …

In one of them, I had to turn over – this is true – thirty-one pages before I found a poem written by a woman. It was Emily Dickinson, obviously. Then sixteen more pages for another one (a Brontë) and then twenty-two more pages until I reached Edna St Vincent Millay. And that was when I gave up.

I like Emily Dickinson, I do. And I love Edna St Vincent Millay. I have mixed feelings about the Brontës, admittedly, but that’s not the point. I had turned something like seventy pages and found three pieces of work by women.

Then I went back to the beginning of the anthology and started counting again, checking online where I wasn’t sure: there was one poem, in those same seventy pages, by someone who wasn’t white. Can you believe that? You probably can if you’re a woman or a person of colour. You definitely can if you’re a woman or a person of colour working in poetry.

This was an anthology published after, say, Friends went off the air. This isn’t historical; this can’t be explained away by an easy ‘it was different in the past’. I hope things are changing. I do. In the time it’s taken to make this book, I have seen so many signs that the poetry world is changing. But we’re not there yet. And we won’t get there unless we try: unless everyone tries.

What trying looks like, it turns out, is numbers. Straight-up maths. At least to start with. The issue of diversity quotas is more complicated than anyone really wants to read about in a poetry anthology. It’s a lot more complicated than I really want to write about. But it felt important to have enough women and people of colour in this book that you could open it at random and wouldn’t always find yet another dead white man.

I made this book because I was tired of hearing people – mostly Caroline, but admittedly others too – say they hated poetry. I was tired of people thinking they hated poetry, and I was tired of picking up anthologies and hating nearly all of the poems in them. I was tired of having to apologize for poetry.

I was tired of people treating poetry like the elderly great-aunt of the arts: difficult; a nuisance; cryptic, in the way only the very ancient can be; quintessentially feminine (weak, silly and indulgent); faded, dated and mostly irrelevant; tolerated only at weddings and funerals.

I was tired of hearing people say that poetry was (to borrow the playground insults of my childhood) ‘lame’ and ‘gay’ and ‘girly’, and meaning that these things – to be disabled or queer or female – are somehow something shameful, something humiliating and that poetry by association is also shameful or humiliating or ridiculous. We don’t talk about this. We think, Maybe it will go away. It won’t. It hasn’t. I don’t know exactly what we do about this. I don’t think this book is going to solve anything, and I’ll admit that as a queer woman writing this, I’m not exactly bucking the stereotype that poetry is for girls and gays.

And yet … if it’s for girls and gays, why are so many famous poets dead white men? Why are so many of the dead-white-man poems about looking at women in a way that is dehumanizing and unsatisfying and gross? I was tired of this, just like I was tired of realizing that the GCSE syllabus gave us individual white poets to study while all the ‘multicultural poets’ got lumped together in one booklet. I was tired of the only poems people knew by heart being by Tennyson (fine) or Kipling (eesh).

Your Tennysons and your Kiplings – much like jam – are perfectly reasonable in the proper place.fn1 But, like jam, you’re going to go off it pretty quickly if it’s the only food available.

‘Jam is food,’ someone told you when you were too young to know better. ‘Jam is the only real food. Eat jam. Do you like jam?’

And the jam was sticky and too sweet and it got in your hair. But where in another universe you might have found some crisps or chocolate or toast, there was only jam. It bubbled through the wires of the toaster. You ate it wrapped in newspaper by the sea. Sometimes you opted for a nice, refreshing tall glass of jam. And this didn’t seem strange, because it was all you’d ever known.

‘Don’t you like jam?’ a helpful person would say. ‘If you eat enough of it, you can really taste all the different sugars. It’s very complex.’

‘There are actually different flavours of jam,’ someone else would offer. ‘Maybe you just don’t like strawberry. Maybe you like raspberry. Or blackberry.’

All the jams look the same to you. They taste the same, too. The jam jars stretch on for ever, and your hair is sticky with sugar, and the helpful person is still trying to explain to you that you just don’t understand jam. You’re holding up your jammy hands and wondering whether anyone, ever, can really have enjoyed eating it at all.

The reason I am editing a collection of poems rather than writing a collection of poems is because I have a tendency to really stretch a metaphor.

But you get it. You get my point.

We’ve all been raised on jam. And there are so many other things to eat.

And it’s easy, I suppose, to understand why people hate poetry if they think it is one thing. But poetry is a million things. Poetry, even in this book, is ninety-eight things. Some of the poems you’ll like. Some of them you won’t. But there’s no need to swear off reading poetry altogether.

How I Made This Book, For Poetry Nerds And Other Interested Parties

I had two reasons to make this book – and two guiding principles. I wanted it to feel like these poets were speaking directly to the reader. And I wanted to make sure that those poets were not limited to one kind of poet, one kind of poem.

There are dead white men in this book but fewer, I think, than in most anthologies. This hasn’t happened by accident. It can’t happen by accident: the weight of the ‘approved’ canon makes accidentally creating a diverse anthology completely impossible.

When you start thinking about collating poems for an anthology, you start thinking about the poems you love. You make a list of poems you’ve loved: poems from other collections, poems you studied at school or at university that somehow broke through the tedium of essays; poems that feel real and vivid and alive. You read 80 million blog posts about other people’s favourite poems. You read 80 million anthologies. You read 80 million lists of the public’s ‘top 100 poems’. You pick your favourites. You make your list.

And without ever having a single bad intention – no malice aforethought – you’ve replicated the exact same mistakes made in every anthology. It’s white. It’s male. It’s dead. And having that one eat-your-own-life Derek Walcott poem in there doesn’t make it any better.

This happens even if you love poetry and read a lot of it, even if you think you’re thinking about these kinds of things already, even if you think you’re better than that. You’re probably not. That’s how internalized misogyny works; how internalized racism works; how the whole structure of the Western canon works. Not only does it give you a list of actual, concrete poems to value – it gives you a sense of What A Poem Is Supposed To Be.

The idea of What A Poem Is Supposed To Be is the most constricting idea of all and it’s almost impossible to shake off. What A Poem Is Supposed To Be In Order To Be In An Anthology acts as a kind of confirmation bias: poems rhyme, they have a set pattern, they are written in an olde-worlde English that employs elaborate metaphors and codes. They are written by white men. Those men are probably dead. If a poem doesn’t fit those criteria, is it a poem? Does it belong in an anthology? It screws with all your instincts; it messes with your natural taste, your ideas about what you like and what you want to read. It shapes the lists you make. Unless, that is, you make a sustained and concrete attempt to counter it.

This isn’t ‘tokenization’, and to say so is insulting. This is simply correcting an academic and cultural bias that has historically favoured the poems of white men.

So. You have to work out what the actual numbers look like.

I started with a simplified demographic map of the UK. I looked at gender, sexuality, race, disability, and I took these as my starting points. If this anthology were to be truly representative, there should be at least this corresponding percentage of women; at least this percentage of people of colour; at least this percentage of disabled people; at least this percentage of LGBT+ poets.

These, obviously, are not discrete categories: if all the women poets are white or if all the people of colour are straight or if all the queer poets are men, there’s an obvious error. It isn’t a spreadsheet; it’s a Venn diagram.

Unhappily, however, the only way to do this practically is to use a spreadsheet. Poetry and spreadsheets are no more natural bedfellows than I am a natural at spreadsheets. I hated employing this method. I hated everything about this. But it was the only way to make sure this was fair. I made my initial list as above: the poems I already loved, new poems I found. I logged those poems into a spreadsheet, and then I logged data about those poems. Subject matter was easy to fill in. Gender was pretty easy too. Race was a bit trickier; sexuality and disability statistics almost impossible. There’s something unsettlingly sinister about trying to work out the sexuality of strangers to log it into a database. Still, I couldn’t think of a better way to do it. (I’ll keep trying.)

It turns out that I have a bias towards American lesbians, almost all white, almost all mid-century and middle class. I did not expect this. I also did not expect to have quite so many dead white men on my list. When women talk exactly half the time, people think they’re dominating the conversation. And when men talk exactly half the time, people think they’re barely speaking. It was that.

The numbers and demographics weren’t targets as much as they were salutary reminders: a benchmark against which I could measure my own biases and blind spots.

So then I started reading. I knew where my own blind spots were and where I was missing out. Because make no mistake: it was me who was missing out.

I primarily went for poets writing in English. I love many translated poems, but there’s often a kind of stilted feeling to them that – for me – makes it hard to fall into them wholeheartedly. There are a million more things to say about translations – about how that stiltedness can add to the experience; about how it can show you the gaps between languages and cultures in a way that makes the world feel very tiny and vast all at once – but we didn’t have nearly enough space (and I don’t have, really, the necessary skills) to explore that as it deserves to be explored here.

I also went primarily for poets who intend their poems to be read, rather than heard. This was a hard call to make. Was I just replicating my own ideas of What A Poem Should Be? But in the end, I wanted the poems in this anthology to be a complete experience on their own. I wanted you to be able to open this book at any page and have that instant connection between writer and reader: not to feel there was something inevitably missing, which sometimes happens when performance poetry is written down.

But within those two parameters? I read so, so many poems. I asked other poets, spoke to other anthologizers; read individual collections and themed anthologies and indie anthologies and mainstream anthologies. I read blogs. I read Tumblr. I read thousands of poems, and when I read one I liked I logged it into my spreadsheet. Then I whittled down my list only and exclusively to poems I loved.

Not one of the poems in this book is here because of some characteristic of their author. Rather, they are all here because I could hear the author’s voice in there – because they spoke to me, person to person. They are here because they formed part of my road map – because, like the Rebecca Lindenberg poems, they felt like someone reaching out a hand to say that they understood.

Then, when I had a list of poems I loved, I worked out how many poets in various demographic groups I’d need to make sure you’d never, ever have to turn seventy pages to read the work of a poet of colour; or thirty-one pages to find a woman.

And then I narrowed down that list of poems to fit those numbers.

It isn’t perfect. Of course it isn’t perfect. This is partly because I am not perfect, obviously, and partly because this could only ever be a start. This could only ever be a nod in the direction of a fairer future for poetry, and poetry anthologies; of a better way of doing things. I am one person, with all my own privileges and biases and blind spots, and I can’t change a whole broken system by myself. But I have tried to do something.

The permissions process – where you work out how much you can pay to reproduce each poem – was complex both financially and morally: were some poets worth more than others? Were some poems? Should we pay by line? (Not without prioritizing the epic over the haiku.) Could we pay everybody the same? (Not without being millionaires or losing all the big names.) Could we lose the big names and just make this a book of newer writing?

We thought about this last question a lot. Some of the big-name poets were unbelievably expensive, and it was hard not to wonder what kind of dynamic we were setting up by paying a lot for very famous poets, and less for emerging poets.

Some emerging poets – and their agents – also asked this question. So we had a lot of meetings. We wrote a lot of emails. I spent a lot of time panicking, and wondered just how much personal debt it was advisable to get into for The Sake Of My Art (anthologizing, apparently?).

But this book had always been conceived as a collection of old and new. We wanted the newer writers to shine new light on the older writers; but we wanted the older writers to open doors for the newer writers. It’s hard to get people to read new poetry, and we hoped – and hope – that we could use the older, more famous poets to sort of trick people into falling in love with newer poets they might not otherwise have tried. I wanted to use, say, Plath to legitimize other young female poets your average poetry buyer might not have heard of; I wanted to use Heaney to grandfather in a new generation for schools and libraries and other traditional poetry places.

Too often poetry writing seems to me to be unhappily divided between these two camps: the traditional poetry people, who look down on the Instagram poets; the Instagram poetry people (many of whom aren’t on Instagram, actually) who can be dismissive of what came before as boring and staid. This is a mad simplification, obviously, but it’s based (I think) in my experience of talking about poetry, and reading about poetry, and writing about poetry. I hoped that with this book we could keep traditional poetry fans on board, and Instagram poetry fans on board, and that both kinds of poetry fan could learn something from the other – a compromise, I suppose.

And so I had to compromise, in ways that in an ideal world I would have avoided compromising: I cut a vast number of big-name traditional poets (all of whom I miss) who wanted staggering sums of money. I kept the bare minimum I thought we could get away with: the bare minimum that would allow the traditional poetry reader to know what kind of book this was before they bought it; the bare minimum, if you like, that stamped the more emerging poets with the same mark of quality as the established poets.

I also had to lose a number of emerging poets who wanted more than I could afford, even with my stripped-back big-name budget, and each of those cuts really broke my heart. (Which sounds dramatic, I know, but I am.)

So this book is not perfect. But we have tried. And I hope that you go away and make something better, because here we are, and I hope you like it.

(And if you have read this all the way to the end, I admire and applaud your dedication. Text me. We’ll be friends, even if nobody else will have us. But please, go back to the poems now. You’ll have much more fun. I swear.)

An Index Of Spare Feelings

This isn’t by any means an exhaustive index.

(Actually, I think most people who care about indexes would dispute whether it can be called an index at all.)

What it is, I suppose, is a series of short lists of poems I wanted to put next to each other but couldn’t: poems that seemed to me to speak to each other in ways that could be helpful or fun or interesting. Poems that had a commonality. Poems that you could think of together. Poems that might come to mind in the same circumstances.

In some ways, of course, that’s what this whole book has been about. But feelings are complicated, and so are poems. And books have to start at the beginning and run on until the end. Short of attaching strings to various poems and running them through the book (an idea that, in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you was both mooted and vetoed in pre-publication discussions) it’s impossible to connect up all the poems that might speak to each other and to you.

There are, for instance, twelve poems in this book which contain the word ‘leave’. There are seven with the word ‘joy’. You could tie together each of those poems in a perfectly coherent argument. There are multiple poems, for example, that speak to me about waiting, far beyond the poems I collected around the loose theme of ‘waiting’. There are four poems I think about together every time I drink coffee.fn1 ‘About Ana’ by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, say, is about so many extraordinary things besides the death of an artist, just as Sandeep Parmar’s ‘Archive for a Daughter’ is about so much more than a daughter, or even a family; and every poem in this book is about so many things.

The anthologizer has to fail in her attempt to categorize these poems, or the poems themselves would be failures.

This page is an attempt to explain this failure. It’s a page that mostly is here to say, clearly and loudly, that this book isn’t a definitive order of poems; that you can read this book in all kinds of ways; that I could have arranged this book completely differently, and might have done, if my own feelings had been different; that however you want to pull these poems together, you’re probably right.

These, then, are a few more feelings. Not all of them. Not all the poems that might or might not be included. Nothing is definitive. And I am often wrong about things, as far as anyone can be wrong about poems. But here, a handful of other ideas, to put my money where my mouth is; to demonstrate a few more ways that this book might have gone; to illustrate just how fluid anthology-making and poetry-thinking must necessarily be.

The page references in this index correspond to the print edition from which this ebook was created, and clicking on them will take you to the the location in the ebook where the equivalent print page would begin. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

Activities, Leisure: 76, 81, 132, 146, 153

Admin: 20, 78, 128, 129, 142

Age, Coming Of: 62, 78, 118, 122, 127, 135, 147, 153

Anxiety, General (Disordered & Otherwise): 78, 80, 147, 154, 204

Anxiety (State Of The World Today): 43, 50, 51, 96, 190

Baby, Having A: 31, 127, 165, 166

Body, Having A: 77, 78, 94, 128, 138, 154, 205

Coffee: 34, 40, 44, 58, 61, 62

Condiments: 32, 34, 52, 58

Denial: 85, 170, 177, 188, 196

Dreaming: 20, 44, 70, 85, 196

Domesticity: 19, 20, 23, 28, 29, 177

Duty: 96, 134, 204

Else, What […] Can You Do: 50, 98, 130, 147

Emergencies (Fire, Flood, Act of God): 27, 44, 144, 174, 188, 190

Fairy Tales, Things That Feel Like: 67, 73, 74, 118, 147

Fruit: 28, 29, 40, 74, 83, 118, 120

Glory: 23, 58, 160

Grandparents: 19, 31, 102, 128

Hope, Probably Misplaced But Nonetheless Present: 82, 132, 160, 181

Instructions: 34, 51, 67, 129

Kitchens: 19, 32, 36, 40, 48, 58, 65, 80

Listening: 62, 64, 67, 153, 165

Listened To, Not Being: 138

List-full: 23, 43, 64, 81, 122, 128, 134

Listless: 52, 112, 128, 141

Making Things: 19, 20, 148, 153, 196

Moments, Perfect (Possibly Unexpected?): 28, 118, 179, 194

Nights Out: 76, 100, 122, 132

Nostalgia (To A Point, Ish): 23, 31, 44, 68, 152, 160

Pettiness, Pleasant: 76, 77

Relationships, Probably Romantic, In Some Senses Settled: 36, 40, 43, 71, 76, 80

Relatives, Pleasant Feelings Towards: 31, 32, 34, 102, 160

Relatives, Mixed Yet Somehow Tender Feelings Towards: 108, 122, 128, 134

Resignation: 82

Science: 31, 128, 202

Sea: 23, 77, 80, 196

Sex, Ish: 20, 36, 38, 58

Sleeping, Not: 43, 65, 128, 166, 188

Things, Reading Into (Signs, Signifiers, Omens): 127, 144, 181, 190, 194, 196, 205

Trauma, Non-Soothing Poems About: 138, 141, 144, 163, 188, 190, 202

Trauma, Kind Of Soothing Poems About: 129, 205

Watching (Telly, Deer, Love, Boys, Each Other): 73, 85, 142, 146, 158, 198

Weather, Fair: 27

Weather, Foul: 27

Weddings, Poems You Could Read At: 27, 36, 70, 71, 81

Index Of First Lines

About suffering they were never wrong, 130
and piles them on the driveway: femur, rib, jawbone with a few, 127

April ship sets sail, sea freezes ripples, leaves Rothera, 202

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange, 28

At the internment camp, promise me you’ll take the top bunk, 194

Before boys, Susan drove me to work, for teriyaki takeout on, 135

Body my house, 154

But I was thinking today about our conversation earlier, 44

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air, 69

Do not go gentle into that good night, 157
driving with my father he said, 179

Early in the morning a dough rises from the bowl, 48

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy, 162

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers, 70
for you I’ve started sleeping, 65

Fuck me, oh God, with ordinary things, 58

Go and catch a falling star, 150

Her blue dress is a silk train is a river, 174

I am always hungry, 52

I am Queen and I shall do my utmost to fulfil, 96

I don’t believe I was born, maybe emerged, 78

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times, 50

I have been so great a lover: filled my days, 23

I haven’t been home in nearly two, 82

I hope no one comes to my party, I said out loud, 77

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus, 163

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed, 81

I love a man who is not worth, 136
i must be careful about such things as these, 204

I’m thinking of the boiling sea, 196

I’ve been pregnant. I’ve had sex with a man, 128

Imagine a time in which you feel happy. In your happiness, you, 152

In the absence of anything as definitive as blood type, 20

In the beginning, the ending was beautiful, 200

In the end she just wanted the house, 98

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness, 29

It was when he leant close to me, his little naked torso, 120

It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw, 132

Last night, I missed my train by seconds. So close, 110

Lattimo: milk twist, mist hint, 38

Let’s send our lovers where cups are sealed, 114

Love, I woke in an empty flat to a bad new government, 43

Love set you going like a fat gold watch, 165
make you aching upwards of a, 188

Marcia and I went over the curve, 74

Mid-September, and I miss my daughter, 34

Monica, 85

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen, 138

Mr. Horowitz clutches a bag of dried apricots to his chest, 190
my best friend lost her housekeys and wallet, 76

My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our, 181

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink, 102

My mother gave me the prayer to Saint Theresa, 134

My mother loves butter more than I do, 32

My mum is on a high bed next to sad chrysanthemums., 160

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you, 205

November 1972, Derby, 122

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair, 175

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?, 67

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow, 68
of all things under our blonder than blondest star, 156

Poems are bullshit unless they are eyeglasses, honey, 19

Razors pain you;, 129

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?, 172

She picked me up, 100

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts, 64

Sundays too my father got up early, 178

Sunset honeys the bijou palace. Its dweller wishes, 83

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;, 148

The only legend I have ever loved is, 118

The silence between songs can’t be modulated by anything, 153

The truth is, nobody, 94

The wind blew all my wedding-day, 27

They arrived at the desk of the Hotel Duncan, 106

They say a dead woman can’t run from her coffin., 158

This is the multitude, the beasts, 71

This is true:, 108

This poem about ice cream, 51

Though my mother was already two years dead, 177

‘To find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person,’, 31

To sing the evening home, the lover prepares, 36

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, 192

Turns out I feel my body, 112

Walking in a waking dream, 73

We always breakfast with the biographer., 62

We have each become a small world, 198

We ignored the best reports, 144

What can I tell you that you do not know, 166

When all the others were away at Mass, 159

You are the kind of person who buys exotic fruits, 40

You have receded against the far, 170
you have to live where the house lands on you, 147

You jerk you didn’t call me up, 146

You show me the poems of some woman, 142

You take off your black, 80

You’ll be greeted, 61

You’re supposed to thank the fumes. To be grateful, 141

Index Of Poets And Translators

Adukwei Bulley, Victoria, 94

Agard, John, 61

Agbabi, Patience, 100

Akbar, Kaveh, 65

Alexander, Elizabeth, 32

Ali, Kazim, 181

Anonymous, 68

Arnold, Craig, 40

Auden, W. H., 130

Berry, Emily, 43, 62

Bishop, Elizabeth, 148

Boland, Eavan, 118

Booker, Malika, 158

Brooke, Rupert, 23

CAConrad, 188

Capildeo, Vahni, 38

Carson, Anne, 175

Chan, Mary Jean, 36

Chang, Victoria, 98

Chinigonyi, Kayo, 153

Choi, Franny, 77

Chowdhry, Maya, 202

Christle, Heather, 147

Cope, Wendy, 28

Cummings, E. E., 156

Daley-Ward, Yrsa, 82

Di, Ming, 48

Dinh, Linh, 50

Donne, John, 150

Dooley, Maura, 134

Dwayne Betts, Reginald, 70

Espinoza, Joshua Jennifer, 78

Ewing, Eve L., 108

Guest, Paul, 196

Hacker, Marilyn, 34

Hahn, Kimiko, 31

Harrison, Tony, 177

Hayden, Robert, 178

Heaney, Seamus, 159

Howe, Sarah, 81

Hughes, Ted, 166

Jamie, Kathleen, 71, 73

Jones, Saeed, 174

Jonson, Ben, 162

Jun, Chen, 48

Kahf, Mohja, 102

Kapil, Bhanu, 44

Karr, Mary, 163

Kay, Jackie, 160

Key, Amy, 20

Khalvati, Mimi, 120

Kumin, Maxine, 172

Labouff Atkinson, Colette, 135

Larkin, Joan, 64

Larkin, Philip, 27

Lindenberg, Rebecca, 80

Lindsay Bird, Hera, 85

Long, Rachel, 110

Lumsden, Roddy, 106

MacNeice, Louis, 132

Mayer, Bernadette, 146

Mehri, Momtaza, 194

Monro, Harold, 67

Motion, Andrew, 51

Myles, Eileen, 52

Nwulu, Selina, 198

Olson, Christina, 144

Orah Mark, Sabrina, 190

Parker, Dorothy, 129

Parker, Morgan, 112

Parmar, Sandeep, 122

Perry, Rebecca, 179

Piahana-Wong, Kiri, 170

Pierce, Catherine, 200

Plath, Sylvia, 165

Pun, Eileen, 83

Ramayya, Nisha, 152

Rich, Adrienne, 142

Richter, Jennifer, 127

Roberson, Ed, 204

Schwartz, Ruth L., 58

Sealey, Nicole, 128

Shapero, Natalie, 141

Shihab Nye, Naomi, 29

Shire, Warsan, 138

Spenser, Edmund, 69

Stacey, Ruth, 96

Swenson, May, 154

Taggard, Genevieve, 74

Thomas, Dylan, 157

Venn, Liz, 114

Walker, Alice, 136

Webb, Laura, 76

Woods, Jamila, 19

Yeats, W. B., 192

Acknowledgements

This book has been the world’s biggest pain to put together and I am grateful to too many people to list. Besides, I’ve talked too much already. So I’ll be as quick as I can.

Thank you everyone who taught me about poetry. Thank you everyone who continues to teach me about poetry. Thank you everyone who lets me write about poetry. Thank you, all the poets. Thank you, all the poets’ agents. Thank you, all the poets’ publishers.

Thank you to my publishers at Doubleday, for taking on this unbelievably complicated project in the first place, particularly to my editor Lizzy Goudsmit and to Sharika Teelwah for stepping in when I became overwhelmed by permissions.

Thank you to Janina Matthewson, who wrangled all my spreadsheets into a semblance of order and talked soothing sense for many hours over tea and sometimes wine. She is an angel of order. Buy her book, listen to her podcast, etc.

Thank you to my best beloved and long-suffering agent, Daisy Parente, for being the greatest sounding-board, voice of reason, and stoic friend that a person could wish for. I am very lucky.

Thank you to Tash Hodgson, who really deserves to sometimes get home from a long day and not immediately have to listen to a long list of everything wrong with my book. She keeps coming home anyway, which I think shows great strength of character and purity of heart. Thank you, prec. (Can we go home now?)

Thank you to Sarah Perry and Kate Young, for particular well-timed support in the last weeks of making this book. Thank you to Lettie ‘Debo’ Graham and Alice, ditto. Thank you to Harry, Gav and Sylv. Thank you, as always, to John.

But mostly, thank you to Caro. I think you’re supposed to grow out of smugly saying ‘my best friend’ around the age of eight, but why would you if you had a best friend like mine? She has been to France twice, not including Guernsey, etc. Once a stranger in the park asked us if we were married and Caroline said ‘Yep’ without even thinking about it, and that’s really all there is to it.

So to Caroline O’Donoghue, my best friend, my most trusted colleague and confidante, my chaste wife: thank you for Wonderful Small, and for South-East London, and for so many other things. Thank you for a million stupid games; a million stupid voices; and for walking literally hundreds of miles at my side. Thank you for pho and Hallmark movies and always getting it. Thank you for learning to like poems for me. Thank you for letting me read everything; and thank you for reading this book before anyone else. This isn’t even the half of it, of course. I am grateful to you for so many things, and so this book is for you, of course. Who else? Happy Christmas 2014. Sorry it took me so long.

(See you same time tomorrow?)

Ella Risbridger, 2019

Credits

The compiler and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:

Victoria Adukwei Bulley, ‘About Ana’ first published in Tongue Journal © Victoria Adukwei Bulley 2017, reprinted by permission of The Good Literary Agency; John Agard, ‘Coffee in Heaven’ from Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems with Live DVD (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), reproduced by permission of Bloodaxe Books; Patience Agbabi, ‘Josephine Baker Finds Herself’ from Bloodshot Monochrome (Canongate Books, 2008) © Patience Agbabi 2008, reprinted by permission of Canongate Books Ltd; Kaveh Akbar, ‘For You I’ve Started Sleeping’ from Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Penguin Books, 2018) © Kaveh Akbar 2017, reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House; Elizabeth Alexander, ‘Butter’ from Body of Life (Tia Chucha Press, 1996) reprinted in Crave Radiance (Graywolf Press, 2010) © Elizabeth Alexander 1996, reproduced by permission of the Author; Kazim Ali, ‘Home’ from Bright Felon (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) © Kazim Ali 2009, reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press; Craig Arnold, ‘lines for painting on grains of rice’ first published in Poetry Magazine (October 2013) © the literary estate of Craig Arnold 2013; W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ from Collected Auden (Faber & Faber, 2004) © W. H. Auden; Emily Berry, ‘Bad New Government’ and ‘Our Love Could Spoil Dinner’ from Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) © Emily Berry 2013; Reginald Dwayne Betts, ‘For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers’ first published in Poetry Magazine (September 2011) © Reginald Dwayne Betts 2011; Hera Lindsay Bird, ‘Monica’ from Hera Lindsay Bird (Penguin Books, 2017) © Hera Lindsay Bird 2016; Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’ from Complete Poems (Chatto & Windus, 2004), reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited; Eavan Boland, ‘The Pomegranate’ from In a Time of Violence (Carcanet Press, 1994) © Eavan Boland 1994; Malika Booker, ‘Sin Visits Me’ from Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) © Peepal Tree Press 2013; Vahni Capildeo, ‘Lattimo’ an extract from Through and Through from Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press, 2018) © Vahni Capildeo 2018; Anne Carson, ‘Father’s Old Blue Cardigan’ from Men In the Off Hours (Jonathan Cape, 2000) © Anne Carson 2000; Mary Jean Chan, ‘They Would Have All That’ first printed in The London Magazine (December 2016) © Mary Jean Chan 2016; Victoria Chang, ‘Mr Darcy’ first published in Poetry Magazine (June 2015) © Victoria Chang 2015, reprinted by permission of the author; Kayo Chingonyi, ‘Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly’ from Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017) © Kayo Chingonyi 2017, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited; Franny Choi, ‘Solitude’ from Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) © Franny Choi 2017, reprinted by permission of the author; Maya Chowdhry, ‘Microbial Museum’ from Fossil (Peepal Tree Press, 2016) © Peepal Tree Press 2016; Heather Christle, ‘The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part’ from The Trees The Trees, published in Great Britain by Corsair, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, © Heather Christle 2019, reprinted by permission of the rights holder; CAConrad, ‘coping skills lost in the flood’ first published in Poetry Magazine (October 2013) © CAConrad 2013, reprinted by permission of the author; Wendy Cope, ‘The Orange’ from Serious Concerns (Faber & Faber, 2002) © Wendy Cope 2002; E. E. Cummings, ‘of all things under our’ from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, © the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust 1963, 1991, used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation; Yrsa Daley-Ward, ‘The not quite love’ from bone (Penguin Books, 2017) © Yrsa Daley-Ward 2014, reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House; Linh Dinh, ‘Eating Fried Chicken’ from American Tatts (Chax Press, 2005) © Linh Dinh 2005, reprinted by permission of the author; Maura Dooley, ‘What Every Woman Should Carry’ from Sounds Barrier: Poems 1982–2002 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002) © Maura Dooley 2002, reproduced by permission of Bloodaxe Books; Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, ‘Personal Statement’ first published by BOAAT Press, © Joshua Jennifer Espinoza 2017, reprinted by permission of the author; Eve L. Ewing, ‘Origin Story’ from Electric Arches (Haymarket Books, 2017) © Eve L. Ewing 2017 via Haymarket Books; Paul Guest, ‘Post-Factual Love Poem’ first published in Poem-A-Day (30 June 2017) © Paul Guest 2017, reprinted by permission of the author; Marilyn Hacker, ‘Towards Autumn’ from New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2006) © Marilyn Hacker 2006; Kimiko Hahn, ‘A Bowl of Spaghetti’ from Brain Fever (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014) © Kimiko Hahn 2014, used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc; Tony Harrison, ‘Long Distance II’ from The Collected Poems of Tony Harrison (Viking, 2007) © Tony Harrison 2007, reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House; Robert Hayden, ‘Those Winter Sundays’ from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher, © Robert Hayden 1966, used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation; Seamus Heaney, ‘Clearances’ from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (Faber & Faber, 2002) © Seamus Heaney 1990; Sarah Howe, ‘Monopoly’ from Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015) © Sarah Howe 2015, reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; Ted Hughes, ‘Life After Death’ from Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber, 1998) © Ted Hughes 1998; Kathleen Jamie, ‘The Stags’ from Selected Poems (Picador, 2018) © Kathleen Jamie 2018, ‘The Hinds’ from The Bonniest Companie (Picador, 2015) © Kathleen Jamie 2015, reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan; Saeed Jones, ‘The Blue Dress’ from Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, 2014) © Saeed Jones 2014, reprinted by permission of the author; Chen Jun, ‘In the Kitchen’, translated by Ming Di, first published in Poetry Magazine (October 2017) © Chen Jun 2017; Mohja Kahf, ‘My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears’ from E-mails from Scheherazad (University Press of Florida, 2003), reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida; Bhanu Kapil, ‘Notes on Monsters: Section 2 (Wish)’ from Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Kelsey Street Press, 2006) © Bhanu Kapil 2006, reprinted by permission of Kelsey Street Press; Mary Karr, ‘Suicide’s Note: An Annual’ first published in Poetry Magazine (September 2012) © Mary Karr 2012, ‘VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God’ part of ‘The Less Holy Bible’ from Tropic of Squalor (HarperCollins, 2018) © Mary Karr 2018, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins; Jackie Kay, ‘Lucozade’ from Darling: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) reproduced by permission of Bloodaxe Books; Amy Key, ‘Announcement and Next Steps’ first published in Poetry Magazine (October 2014), reproduced by permission of Bloodaxe Books; Mimi Khalvati, ‘Picking Raspberries with Mowgli’ from The Weather Wheel (Carcanet Press, 2014) © Mimi Khalvati 2014; Maxine Kumin, ‘How It Is’ from Selected Poems 1960–1990 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998) © Maxine Kumin 1978, used by permission of W. W. 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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Doubleday
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Poems, in Order

1I must have read this poem 84,000 times and I don’t think I have ever paid proper attention to this first stanza. Sorry, Rupert. I just always want to get to the list of stuff. Which is, I suppose, an important lesson in How To Read Poetry: take what you can from it, take what you need from it, and move on. There is always time to come back to a poem. There is always time to take something new from a poem. You are under no obligation to like it all, to understand it all, or even to read it all. There are poems I adore that I really only care about one line of, and that’s fine. There are poems where I used to like just one line, and now I like it all; and poems where I used to like it all and now cling only to one line, like a plank of wood floating after a shipwreck. Both ways of reading a poem are fine.

2It took me fourteen years of reading this poem almost every day to realize that the wave is ‘going home’ because it’s returning to the sea, where it came from. Poems! Always something new!

3And what else is there?

4I think about this every time I grate a carrot into a pasta sauce: ‘I’ll never forget / since some strand determines infatuation as a daughter’s fate.’

5‘What your mother / left undone, women who are not your mother / may do. Women who are not your lover / love you. (That’s to myself, and my daughter.)’ I wanted to write out that bit again because it’s so important and good, and maybe you needed to hear it twice? I always need to hear it at least twice.

6Not enough phones in poems. Like the email in Amy Key’s ‘Announcement and Next Steps’, I’m always glad when a poem lives in the same world as I do.

7Maybe these poems are actually about going; not about being hungry at all. But then, what’s going anywhere but being hungry for something you don’t have?

8Who among us doesn’t yearn to deep-fry a ghost?

9Can’t buy a Mivvi any more, Andrew, I told you.

10So there’s this tarot card: the Fool. The Fool is all going to places without purpose – going away, onwards, out. Going forward. I think a lot about the Fool when I read a line like this: ‘I am / absolutely in opposition / to all kinds of / goals.’ And why not? What goal am I supposed to have, apart from love and peanut butter?

11Immoderately! Who wants to be in love any other way but immoderately?

12If you can read this poem and not immediately go and look for breakfast, you’re a stronger person than I am. Look at how nice it is to be alive! Who could be broken when there are muffins?

13A very famous poet once wrote a very famous line about lives, and measures, and coffee spoons, but I think he was less happy about it than Ruth L. Schwartz and me. A life measured out in small things sounds about right. Actually, when you get right down to it, I think small things might be all we ever really have.

14‘“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?” “So easy that … I am seldom perfectly sober.”’ I think about this bit from Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night whenever I think about this poem.

15‘Let us live near each other’! Something about this breaks my heart into pieces every time.

16There’s a Hera Lindsay Bird poem called ‘Planet of the Apes’, which I am pretty sure I can’t quote here for copyright reasons, but if this line speaks to you in any way you should look it up; it’s online. I feel sick just thinking about it. In a good way.

17Is this the most succinct description ever written of how hopeless it is being in love? It might be.

18Here is the thing: things can be not ‘great decisions’ and not ‘great love’, and still be sort of beautiful, and that is what I like about this poem. Not everything has to be great. Some things just are: a rented sofa, a glass of wine, a clementine. And that’s OK too.

19‘I am dumbfounded that anyone can function at all’!!!!!!

20‘La garçonne’ means ‘flapper’, basically. I once saw it translated as ‘sexually liberated woman’, which: fine, but it makes me tired just thinking about it. Where’s the fun in that kind of over-the-bifocals academic-speak? Technically, and stripped right back, it’s the feminine noun for ‘boy’ in French, which is exactly the kind of gender playground I love best.

21If you think this palindrome of a poem is kind of nifty, you might also like ‘Ode to Mennel Ibtissam Singing Hallelujah on the Voice France, Translated in Arabic’ by George Abraham, in which the words to ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen are written down both sides of the poem. You also read it from right to left (because Arabic) and the whole thing is exceptionally well done.

22I think about this poem often when I watch the news, and when the news is all bad – all dust and blood – I think about the Iznik tile, the painted bowls, the best families.

23This poem is, in the trade, known as an ‘Easter egg’: an intentional inside joke, hidden message or secret feature of a work. Much like this book, both it – and its presence here – are for Caroline O’Donoghue. (It is also all true.)

24Poetry is all looking inside things.

25My sister used to do this: a shoebox full of tiny, shining, white vertebrae; a rabbit’s skull gently wrapped in tissue; her own baby teeth.

26Like Emily Berry (see p.43): ‘my heart, that junkie …’

27The tendency to turn ‘this’ – everything – into ‘some fucking movie’ is in a lot of poets, I think. Maybe all artists. Everything, as Nora Ephron’s mother is supposed to have famously said, is copy. It makes you a strange person to be around, when everything is copy: it makes you the kind of person who watches, the kind of person who notices. Or perhaps the kind of people who notice are the kind of people who become artists – because all good art is, really, is a thing that makes you notice the world in a way you never noticed it before.

28This footnote was originally full of biographical information about ‘eliena’. It took me a long time to research and a long time to write, and then I deleted it because honestly? It’s not important. It doesn’t matter. This fact took me even longer to learn: poems aren’t autobiographies, and the people in them aren’t puzzles, and it makes no difference. For the purposes of this poem, you’re eliena, I’m eliena, and everyone is eliena in the end because everyone is going to die.

29No question mark, you know? Just … an absence; a flat, hanging nothing. How could this happen. How could any of this happen.

30The poem is ‘A Dream’ from Birthday Letters, an extremely magnificent book that you should read alongside Ariel by Sylvia Plath, so long as you are prepared to have extremely complicated feelings about someone else’s tumultuous marriage. (I, myself, have a great deal of feelings about Plath and Hughes’s tumultuous marriage, but I am only prepared to discuss these feelings in person after a large glass of wine. I feel very protective towards them both.)

31There’s a skyscraper in London near the station from which I take my train home. If I’m out in the city, I find myself scanning the horizon for it, as if it were some kind of new North Star. If I can see the Shard, I can see my way back; if I can see its weird, bright-white angular jut against the clouds, I can set a fair course. The same is true, I think, of the precise silhouettes of high-rise office blocks and towers. I could draw you the horizon-line of those buildings as seen from the hill by my house, lit up in lights at night, but there are only a handful of stars now and all of them are faint.

32I am writing this on the first day of a too-early spring. It is just like this, and I am frightened, but it is very beautiful.

33‘Built to say at least’ is such a vivid and beautiful and terrible description of people, isn’t it?

34The hissing sibilance of this sentence is so exactly like a drill going down through ice, and I think that is extremely nifty.

This Started Off As A Book for People Who Hate Poetry

1This is me deliberately misquoting from the start of an Edwardian children’s book called The Wouldbegoods by E. Nesbit. It is what the Indian uncle says about children (‘[They’re] like jam: all very well in the proper place, but you can’t stand them all over the shop – eh, what?’) and it makes me laugh every time.

An Index of Spare Feelings

1‘Our Love Could Spoil Dinner’ by Emily Berry, ‘Lines for painting on grains of rice’ by Craig Arnold, ‘Oh God, Fuck Me’ by Ruth L. Schwartz and ‘Coffee in Heaven’ by John Agard.