PERVERSE 5F
Kerr
Hildyard
Shirley
Lightman
Peterkin
Hullo there,
Welcome to a bit of sauce. It wouldn’t be PERVERSE without some sauce in it somewhere. I’ve amused myself by realising I put it all in the “F” section, too.
There’s lots of fun stuff here — solemn fetishists, polymer headboards, “blwjbs”, touching, Lorraine Kelly — enjoy!
And don’t worry, new readers, PERVERSE isn’t all orgasms and depravity. The “perversity” called for in submissions is generally more about form than subject. Then again, if that’s what you signed up for, I must apologise. PERVERSE isn’t all orgasms and depravity, and for that I am sorry.
With warmest wishes,
Chrissy
PERVERSE Editor
(FYI if you are reading this on a mobile phone, it may be best to turn the phone sideways. Some of the poems are displayed as images, so make sure you’ve clicked “show images” at the top of this mail. Vik Shirley’s poem below has been broken into two images due to its length, which has unfortunately caused an overly-large gap between stanzas 5 & 6, apologies. If you’d rather read these poems in a more formally typset PDF you can do so here, along with an archive of previous issues.)
Chris Kerr
O
Heartache liberated Francis Bacon.
O: a fine, amenable, glam gal Sir pimps for a clandestine, arcane network. Cardiovascular activity. Secret, solemn fetishists wax orgiastic. O’s vanilla: cuffed, nerves abuzz, no gag. Easy sex brokered in back rooms. Urbanites disrobe. Why Fitzrovia? Unbeaten moneyed nightclubbing, druggy and overhyped. Slip dress snags ecdysiast in snafu. Husbands dominate dominatrixes. Pecs unbared. Lace aprons undone. Upmarket BDSM. Euphoric amygdalas, heartbeats dysrhythmic and hornier postmenopausal sybarites. Unblushing, unfaithful, unrepentant & unwrapped, René, O & Sir Stephen slept. Audrey’s flashgun startles Hepburn. Bigwigs, politicians & Attorneys General frig rapaciously. They pay. Unpopular American McMansions: subkinkdoms of frolicful spies. Mischief-making: filmdom normalizes devilry. Serfs & deadbeats disgraced by subhuman monarchs & vicomtes. A fiends’ orgy. Chicness inherited. Fleshpot filmcards shelve putsches with pornography.
Rosanna Hildyard
Every bed you ever slept in was the same
Vik Shirley
Operation Blwjb
From I am a Phenomenon Quite out of the Ordinary: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms
Ira Lightman
LO’AVE’S (LO HAVE US)
I’s w’order o’f the’se
is worder of these
I as we order
o of the use
boo’king ou’t o’r see’king ou’t
booking out or seeking out
boo eking our at
o or see eking our at
yo’n yea’rn fr’o t’ouched
yon yearn fro touched
yo in yea urn
fr’ oo to ouched
Louise Peterkin
Baptism
“To note upon the haly table,
A murders’s banes in gibbet-airns;
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns;”
— Tam o’ Shanter, Robert Burns
“There are pros and cons to each different pose
But we don’t see any need to get to those
’cause we’re feeling great, a heightened state, the missionary position”
— Sparks
Would it be so awful? For once to let you lie
back and shuffle THE NOVEL in your head,
one arm on the pillow, the other patting his back
in a consolatory way, like you would for someone
puking in the toilet at a party. There you’d be,
blanding the frozen blizzard of the Artex ceiling
into a smooth landscape as your eyes unfocused,
floating segments of prose presenting themselves
like snacks in a vending machine. He could opt
out too, select for himself a different lover,
imagine you were Anita Ekberg
or Lorraine Kelly. Maybe it’s harder for him –
trawling through the draggy wetlands of the cunt
like a man in natty tropical cassock holding a bible
above the tall reeds, one palm splayed for balance
patting the invisible dog of the hot thick air. You’re ignorant
to the in and outs of religion although he always said
that needn’t matter to a Scot and at that juncture
would slip into his favourite pantomime, contorting
your soft Edinburgh burr into Scrooge McDuck by way
of a Universal monster movie minion, cringing
at each lightning crash of The Pleasure! Och no! Not
The Pleasure! and you’d laugh, tell him
to piss off but secretly wonder if it wasn’t recompense
for your refusal to attend yet another fuggy party
like the one where he crashed through the patio door
and stood, unscathed, looking down
at his pretty, twinkling destruction with baby-stunned pride.
Perhaps payback for the time you vetoed the latest contortion
he showed you online, rendered in millipede-thick,
corporate looking pictorials, the kind that instruct on
the proper way to deliver the Heimlich manoeuvre
or how to use the office defibrillator. Well, you’re paying
your dues now, lying naked in the empty tub
waiting for the stream to trickle onto your breasts,
the warm jet which doesn’t seem to be forthcoming
though he’s downed two pints of the fancy rhubarb
and nettle cordial you bought at the Farmers’ Market
and you are thinking you must have taken
some wrong turns in life to have sex
that so resembles water torture
and his face has acquired a concentration,
so pink and gastric you feel that you should
start coaxing him with some ASMR whispers
about cool forest becks or perhaps nudge out
some drips from the tap with your big toe
but it comes
then
with an ejaculate gasp from him
and surprising warmth and pressure
and the faintest of odours like the taint a ladybird
would leave on your finger: hoppy, redolent of bell
pepper and you feel like you have received the first
blast of Hell after waiting for it the longest time,
and it’s bad, sure it’s bad, just about as bad as everyone
said it would be but you feel better in that moment,
and slaked, for the knowing of it.
Contributor Notes
Chris Kerr
https://www.chriskerrpoet.com/
Chris Kerr lives in Brighton. His work has appeared in Ambit, Anthropocene, Adjacent Pineapple, Blackbox Manifold, code::art, Haverthorn, Oxford Poetry, Poem Atlas, Tentacular, and The Babel Tower Noticeboard. He is the co-author of ./code --poetry with Daniel Holden.
Note on ‘O’:
“I wrote ‘O’ under a constraint I call Atomic Numbers: all the element symbols in the periodic table appear in order in the text. For example, the symbols for osmium (Os) and iridium (Ir) masquerade as ‘O & Sir’. Seeing ‘Os Ir’ in the table made me think of Story of O by Pauline Réage, with its characters O and Sir Stephen. Writing ‘O’ was an act of chemical bondage.”
Rosanna Hildyard
https://twitter.com/RosannaHildyard
Rosanna Hildyard is an editor and writer from Yorkshire. Her poetry has recently been published by Banshee, Modern Poetry in Translation and the Crested Tit Collective. Her short story pamphlet, Slaughter, was published by Broken Sleep Books in March 2021.
Note on ‘Every bed you ever slept in was the same’:
“This is self-explanatory: everyone has the same cheap IKEA bed. I have fond memories of summers spent working at the Edinburgh Festival. There’s nothing more disconcerting than recognising your ex’s furniture in your aunt’s house. Poetry doesn’t come naturally to me. I find it hard to think in metaphors, and often find myself stuck trying to create something mysterious and difficult. This one, however, was fun to write.”
Vik Shirley
Vik Shirley has published Corpses (Sublunary Editions), The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN Press) and Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock Press). She is currently studying for a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal at the University of Birmingham.
Note on ‘Operation Blwjb’:
“Reading the diaries of the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms, knowing the difficult times he lived in, I expected them to be harrowing, but instead, for the most part, found them hilarious. Kharms was running around Leningrad like a madman, completely obsessed with sex, oral sex, in particular. Blowjobs, or blwjbs, as they often appeared, popped up frequently. So I set about compiling a list of passages in which they were mentioned and the results were this poem.”
Ira Lightman
https://twitter.com/iralightman
Ira Lightman is a conceptual poet and plagiarism sleuth. He copyedits academic papers for a living. He often appears on The Verb on Radio 3.
Note on ‘LO’AVE’S (LO HAVE US)’:
“I wrote the poem as an exploration of the apostrophe: as it stands for a missing vowel, I thought I’d explore swapping all vowels for apostrophes throughout. And also explore deadpan assuming the “wrong” apostrophe for famous contractions. Putting too many in and taking too many out. And kept in mind my usual themes of the non-divisible sometimes sexy monads that cross the supposed non-divisibility of the ‘individual’ in any of us. Or the eros of not necessarily carnal love.”
Louise Peterkin
https://www.saltpublishing.com
Louise Peterkin is a poet and editor from Edinburgh. She is an assistant poetry editor for The Interpreter’s House. Her first poetry collection The Night Jar was published by Salt in 2020.
Note on ‘Baptism’:
“This poem belongs to a longer sequence centring around an author recovering from a breakdown. She takes up a residency in a haunted house in an off-season resort on the Suffolk coast and her only (mortal) visitor during her stay is her callow boyfriend. The poem attempts to explore the dysfunction of their relationship and the depressive state of the protagonist through her dissociation during a sexual act.”