PERVERSE 7A
Caspari
McDonnell
Mack
Lyster
Fulgeanu
Hullo there,
Welcome back to PERVERSE! It’s been an age...
Here are the first five poems of issue 7! Bam! More next week, and the next, and so on until slightly before Christmas.
It was so enjoyable to read through all the weird poems that were sent in for this issue. ‘Weird and wonderful’ is such a haggard cliche, but in this case usefully true. I really feel like people save up their most interesting poems for me, and it’s a great pleasure and privilege to be able to read through them.
So here are the first five – starfish, a naked bike ride, a shark, tinnitus and a tortoise. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. If you have thoughts on the punchline of the tortoise joke, please let me know. (I think the whole point not knowing, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in a bit of chat...)
I was hoping to have some details for you for an end-of-issue party in December in London, but I haven’t quite got it together yet. Does it sound like fun though? What do you think?
Enjoy these poems.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS It may be best to view these poems on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or the perfect poem-sized device of your own devising.
Maya Caspari
A Short Talk on Starfish
(Found poem) after Anne Carson
Starfish are also known as asteroids. They regrow limbs when they are lost in time.
They have five arms, tube feet, hydraulic holes and hedgehog skin – all very sensitive to touch.
Each arm will hunt alone, leaving others trailing on the sand. We do not fully understand this process yet;
the starfish moves bilaterally and cannot plan its actions.
Fokkina McDonnell
After the bike ride
Emil had been doubtful about doing the naked bike ride, signed up late. There were penny-farthings left, but he didn’t want to stand out. He’d gone through his checklist: sun lotion for the exposed parts, sunhat, saddlebags. He had found himself on a tandem with an unknown woman. It was joyous. She had been solid support, laughing behind him, tickling him when they flew past the TV cameras. They’d collected their certificates and now they were sitting awkwardly on a black plastic mat with huge red rhododendrons. His eyes were drawn back to her pink necklace, the exact colour of her large nipples.
Katy Mack
And so, I started to dress up as a shark
I enjoy my newfound height –
how people hold doors open as I approach them,
and strangers stop me in the street for selfies
asking if they may rest their heads
upon my white, pillowy underbelly.
I wear the suit so often that friends and loved ones
have begun to forget I’m in there
and address their comments to the arrow-shaped head
looming just above my own,
making jokes about custard
while jabbing their pink elbows into my side.
I sleep often now – deep, thick dreams
in which I’m lying in a field of grass, blades turning
in the breeze, stripes of sunlight over my arms and legs,
while in the undergrowth,
shadows flash, start to circle in.
When I Google sharks, I learn
that they lack the capacity to dream and so
I decide to empty my head of all its difficult thoughts,
drip by drip. But I keep coming back
to that house party a few weeks ago,
where a girl cut her hand on some glass
the blood trickling down her arm,
and how in the slim moments before the panic,
frenzy tingled up my spine.
How my mouth went dry,
my skin tightened like leather
and in the mirror, for a second,
I caught myself –
a jaw gaping open with a pair of eyes
looking back from between
row upon row of jagged teeth.
Rowan Lyster
Tinnitus: A poem
Miruna Fulgeanu
The Tortoise
I was still a child when I first heard the joke
about the tortoise, and decided to save it for a future,
wiser me, the joke in which these two men are walking,
I see them as having walked a long time on this path
so that it’s become flatter and more path-like, when they come
across a tortoise. What is this? says the first man,
pointing at the tortoise. Now the animals that pursue me are many –
the tortoise only one of them – gritting and clawing,
much-changéd, at the hour
when I need & am not needed. So
after a moment of contemplation, the second man says
Well, this is either something or it’s going somewhere.
You know, I have had so many days
to perfect the perfect day, but the things I want
are memorised from so long ago, they don’t mean much,
and my body has become so porous that when I slowly lick
my hands, I could almost believe
they’re meringue.
Contributor Notes
Maya Caspari
Maya Caspari is a writer and academic based between York and London. Her work has previously appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, Ambit and Butcher's Dog. She was highly commended in the 2022 Forward Prizes.
Note on ‘A Short Talk on Starfish’:
“Loosely inspired by Anne Carson’s Short Talks, I created this found poem from a Wikipedia article about starfish. I enjoyed, and wanted to accentuate, the article’s seemingly unintentional eccentricity.”
Fokkina McDonnell
https://twitter.com/FokkinaM; https://acaciapublications.co.uk
Fokkina McDonnell’s poems have been widely published and anthologised. She has three collections and a pamphlet. Fokkina received a Northern Writers’ Award in 2020 for Remembering / Disease, published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. She lives in The Netherlands.
Note on ‘After the bike ride’
“The prose poem was written on a workshop, a couple of years ago and, probably, on Zoom. I don’t have a copy of the image that inspired the poem (Young Man and Woman, painting by Erich Heckel). Decades ago, I gave my parents a miniature penny farthing as a wedding anniversary present. The studied ease with which naked bikers ride past…”
Katy Mack
https://twitter.com/MackKatymack123
Katy Mack’s work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Ambit, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poem International, and SPOONFEED X New Writing. Her pamphlet, First, I turn off the light, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books next year.
Note on ‘And so, I started to dress up as a shark’:
“This poem was written as part of a broader series which focused on my experience of having OCD. I was keen to look at this issue from a sideways lens and I wanted to use the image of the shark suit as a playful way of concealing some of the poem’s other, slightly darker, preoccupations — including anxiety, self-doubt, and violence.”
Rowan Lyster
https://twitter.com/rowanlyster; https://linktr.ee/rowanlyster
Rowan Lyster is a poet and physiotherapist-in-training based in Bristol. Her poems have appeared in places including Anthropocene, Bath Magg, Magma, Poetry Wales, The London Magazine and The Rialto. She is part of the Southbank Centre New Poets’ Collective 2022-23.
Note on ‘Tinnitus: A poem’:
“I’ve been living with Long Covid for the last 18 months (do not recommend). When I got reinfected last year I developed a fun new symptom of tinnitus, which fades in like a warning alarm whenever I’ve pushed myself too hard. Of all my symptoms it’s the least-worst, so I thought I’d commit it to paper and share it with you.”
Miruna Fulgeanu
https://twitter.com/libglib; https://www.instagram.com/hmmiruna/
Miruna is a Romanian-born poet and translator based in SE London. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, The Rialto, Propel and the PROTOTYPE anthology among others. She’s currently preparing a workshop series on metamorphosis, illness and resistance.
Note on ‘The Tortoise’:
“I must’ve, in fact, been about five when I heard the joke about the tortoise, which goes exactly like in the poem (except in Romanian). The punchline was ‘It’s either something or it’s going somewhere.’ The adults around the table all laughed, so I made a point of committing the joke to memory, saving it for when my adult self could make some sense of it.”
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