PERVERSE 7D
PERVERSE 7D
Unsworth
Jeetoo
Lloyd
Wade
Tongue
Hullo there,
I think nothing unites these poems. By which I mean the something that is nothing – something missing or absent or broken, that we can’t turn away from. Even nothing is something.
Enjoy the poems.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS It may be best to view these poems on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or else a phone turned sideways.
Lydia Unsworth
Something *shocking* is happening on Betelgeuse
The lump is gone. You do believe me. Today I bought you a portal. You asked if mine was in the box. What do I do, Lyd? You want to be like me too, a bit. I put five fingers through your heart and twist. Like this? You say, I’m yours, I’ll talk about anything. I will give you a croissant in Paris. A salt lake in Alicante. I will give you a SEGA Mega Drive game in Osaka, the kind where no one wins. I will walk through your dreams with you because in your dreams, you tell me, you are trying to explain things. In my dreams I’m a fish. The eyes are so big. The face hits the curve of the bowl. The eyes. So desperately big. They don’t turn away from whatever they are looking at. They are in the bowl. Whatever it is, they can’t ever turn away from it.
Arun Jeetoo
I Cracked my Second Molar
crunching on a brunch bar
chipped my first on a bhaja
the day before. i really liked
that one. we could’ve gone far.
in art, i’d snap the pencil lead
just by writing the first letter
of my name. i’d make a habit
of fracturing my ankle during
rugby fixtures; i’d limp like
my cat when i stepped on his paw
before the bhaja incident.
this’ll make kissing you stranger.
for breakfast i ate love hearts
which said “be mine” “be mine”
one also said, “break yourself
open that’s how the light gets in”.
i cracked my first molar.
your tongue was a carwash
wiping suds off the windscreen,
was wrigley’s chewing gum.
listen, mate, my mouth’s celestial
ever since—
Christopher Lloyd
skin
the first time ariel sees eric she pans up from his gay boots
& her body gasps his blue eyes & black hair & open
white shirt liquify her tail her body lolls
to the boat the film came out
when I was two so I can’t have fallen in love
with him then can I? did I watch those fickle waves
as a toddler and know I was destined to simp
over straight guys with wavy hair & silent lovers?
the nurse that injected me today looked
exactly like eric but with glasses line drawn
more muscular & uninterested in my turquoise scales
when the needle went in I felt hot my denim shirt
undone this jab was intradermal & itchy
eric got under my skin and never left
Imogen Wade
Nothing Porn
My mum’s friend came back from a holiday
with a rare Greek illness. Maybe you’ve got
a rare Greek illness too, she said. I was home
for the summer and couldn’t lift my arms up
above my head, could barely leave the bed.
It was the summer I wrote a porn script and
emailed it to Serbia. They sent me headshots
of women and asked me to pick one to star;
the same summer that I found God in a glass,
cancelled the show, blamed porn on Greece.
It was the summer I was a stuttering corpse;
the summer I flew to Kraków and watched
fake buildings collapse like a deck of cards.
It was the summer she took me to the GP
and it was the first summer I begged a man
please help me, in a doctor’s office in a town
that wasn’t my hometown or my real town
but my mother’s town, where a rare Greek
illness was on the loose. She picked me up
from the local surgery and said, anything?
But nothing, it was the summer of nothing.
Samuel Tongue
Use the calculator to see which days are most likely to be your fertile window
Morning is the best time. I am a milk bottle filling and emptying at the early door.
Even the feral pigeons are surprised by the royal glint of purple in their feathers,
tiny princes balanced on balcony edges. I read ‘the dream of the unified field’ as
‘the dream of the untried field’ and, as a great, tired poet once said, nothing is
not giving messages. Alignment; balance; the mathematics of days and temperature.
We watch comedy repeats on YouTube because god laughs when you show her
your plans. Somehow it’s even funnier when you know what’s coming next.
Some chart the narrow way between rock and reef, sandbank and sunken wreck –
we make a beautiful mess of it, throw open all the windows in the house
and sink into each other again and again and again
Contributor Notes
Lydia Unsworth
https://twitter.com/lydiowanie; https://lydiaunsworth.wordpress.com/
Lydia Unsworth’s latest collection is Mortar (Osmosis). Pamphlets include Residue (above/ground), cement, terraces (Red Ceilings), and YIELD (KFS). Poems in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, Shearsman, SPAM, and Tentacular. Her forthcoming collection, Arthropod, will be published by Death of Workers in 2023.
Note on ‘Something *shocking* is happening on Betelgeuse’:
“The lump is a finger infection. The portal is a concrete model of Birmingham New Street Signal Box. The croissant was near Les Etoiles d’Ivry. The salt lake was researched working freelance for Booking.com. When you play an equivalent 2p arcade game in Japan there is no hole for the coins to come out. Sometimes something is bad for you but it might be good in the future. Sometimes it might already be good now, but you might not know how to make the most of things.”
Arun Jeetoo
https://waterloopress.co.uk/books/i-want-to-be-the-one-you-think-about-at-night-2020/
Arun Jeetoo is an English teacher from London. His debut pamphlet I Want to Be the One You Think About at Night was published by Waterloo Press (2020). @g2poetry.
Note on ‘I Cracked my Second Molar’:
“I wrote this poem to celebrate my second broken Molar. When things break, it is usually an upsetting or negative thing. However, for me, a part of my brokenness allows light in. I like being transparent.”
Christopher Lloyd
https://twitter.com/clloyd9; https://christopherianlloyd.wordpress.com
Christopher Lloyd (he/him) is a writer and academic. His first pamphlet comes out in 2024 with fourteen poems, and he has had essays, poems and short stories published in Lighthouse, &Change, Roi Fainéant, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere.
Note on ‘skin’:
“The poem began with me trying to make sense of being vaccinated by a nurse who really looked like Eric from The Little Mermaid, my first love. Only a sonnet could hold my rapture for both the film and the man. (I am drawn endlessly to popular culture so it made sense to write).”
Imogen Wade
https://www.instagram.com/imogen_wade_poetry/
Imogen’s poetry has received praise in the 2023 New Poets Prize, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and the Winchester Poetry Festival Prize. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review and Bi+ Lines, a new anthology.
Note on ‘Nothing Porn’:
“It’s hard to comment on a poem that is about nothing. The characters dance around the edge of something that is never named; they try to rename it, they try to fix it and they try to outrun it, but they cannot speak it. The poem is written in past tense as reassurance that one always wakes up.”
Samuel Tongue
https://samueltongue.com/; https://twitter.com/SamuelTongue
Samuel Tongue’s collections include Sacrifice Zones (Red Squirrel, 2020) and three pamphlets: The Nakedness of the Fathers (Broken Sleep, 2022), Stitch (Tapsalteerie, 2018), Hauling-Out (Eyewear, 2016). He has a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust, and poems have appeared in many different places.
Note on ‘Use the calculator to see...’:
“Fertility and conception are a bit of a bewilderness; I became a little obsessed with all the apps and bio-management tools that circulate around them and try to map a way through when there are so many factors in play: fatigue, poetry, YouTube, pigeons. This was my response.”
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