Payne Ware
Nield
Williamson
Grady
Colley
Hullo there,
Here is the penultimate set of poems for issue 7 of PERVERSE - I hope you enjoy reading them.
They connect in various ways. I had thought one of those ways was through the colour yellow, but that’s not actually the case. Somehow I still feel yellow about the two that don’t mention it though. Context, I suppose; the way poems gathered together can infect or influence the others around them. I hope the unintended palette works for you. Apologies if not.
I’m looking forward to our event next Monday 11th December - please join us if you can. It’s from 7pm @The Wheatsheaf (London, W1T 1JB) with Barbara Barnes, Charlie Baylis, Erica Hesketh, Jake Reynolds, Livia Francini, Lydia Unsworth, Michał Kamil Piotrowski, Miruna Fulgeanu, Nora Blascsok & Ryan Ormonde.
Till next week, the final week.
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. One of them is shown as a jpeg.
Kat Payne Ware
LONDON, ENGLAND.
yellowness as virtue / signalled
in volume & & & the stacks
fanning back like tiling / sunlit
roofs & the grain of the wood
a firm sweep / diametric
to the buttered shingles / as if
to signal a foundational reserve
every slice / so much its own
& the colour of a slap / of a man
who died in the middle
of the day / sunlight splashed
across his bedsheets / as if to say
C.P. Nield
STARGATE
Everything happens in this room.
Nothing happens in this room. I sit and
smile and try to contact the mothership
from this room. But the mothership
doesn’t seem to be picking up my
frequency. I’m bored of mindfulness –
open awareness of breath and brick
wall. I want, I demand, sparklier
dimensions. There must be a stargate in
this room. Is it in the hand gel? The
fruit bowl? The face mask? The council
tax? Should I twist the glass Italian boot
of limoncello? Text me. I see a book
called Omega and After. I see a mirror. I
see twelve stamps of owls. I see a deck
of Atlantis cards and pick the High
Priestess who sits on a throne with a
white peacock. I see The Plague by
Camus. I see an ordinary, cluttered
room. The chair. The table. The chair.
The table. The ceiling. The rack. The
door. But the stargate is never the door.
Heidi Williamson
Becca Grady
Knowledge
for Georgia O’Keefe
The desert blows hot on the back of my neck.
The house was built on a snake den. Georgia climbed a ladder to the roof to sleep,
wrapped up, eyelids aflutter under Orion, Andromeda.
The wrangler waves a weathered arm past chain links, surveillance signs,
the picture windows cut in the adobe walls letting in all that light, too hot to sleep.
All that light, I say, it has moved, shining into my eyes, a temporary blindness.
You can’t show fear, the wrangler tells me. A horse knows.
A horse knows early to run, away from the surge, taking over dry earth,
the tornado in the arroyo, planting trees inside houses,
crumbling foundations, washing everything downstream.
Washed downstream I was too late, without the confidence
to run or see, the ground slipping, disappearing. Until you
your ghost, everywhere, in the woods, in a gale force flash.
Jo Colley
Giallo
drawn to the between states
of night and day of day and night
the ochres of the shuttered room
the scent of dust the jaunes
opulent fin de siècle brocade
in panelled drawing rooms
the primrose paths to nowhere
lemonade light filtered through trees
the citrus sharp daybreak stinging you
awake in the curtainless room
his yellow skin mustard eyes against
the white pillow in the hospital bed
Contributor Notes
Kat Payne Ware
https://twitter.com/katpayneware
Kat Payne Ware (she/her) is a queer poet and essayist, and the founding editor of SPOONFEED, an online literary food magazine. Her debut pamphlet of poetry, THE LIVE ALBUM, was published with Broken Sleep Books in 2021.
Note on ‘LONDON, ENGLAND.’:
“‘LONDON, ENGLAND.’ is from a series translating Martin Parr’s food photography into poetry. The image this poem draws from shows a tea tray displaying buttered, sliced white bread, spread out in three adjacent columns like a street magician’s hand. The angle is low, the slices suggestive of sunlit roof tiles, cascading back and upward toward the top of the frame. You can find the photograph in Parr’s photobook Real Food.”
C.P. Nield
C.P. Nield’s poetry has appeared in New Poetries IV (Carcanet) and journals such as PN Review, The North, The Rialto and Magma. He was shortlisted for The London Magazine poetry prize in 2014 and 2023 and longlisted for the 2022 National Poetry Competition.
Note on ‘STARGATE’:
“‘Stargate’ was scribbled at high speed during the height of lockdown. The squished-in paragraph evokes the panicky claustrophobia of being confined within the four walls of our home, as well as the lack of breath associated with Covid-19. The stargate is the door, of course.”
Heidi Williamson
https://heidiwilliamsonpoet.com/
Heidi Williamson is a Lector for the Royal Literary Fund and teaches for the Poetry School, Poetry Society and others. She has three collections with Bloodaxe. Her latest, Return by Minor Road, came out in 2020.
Note on ‘Lies I tell’:
“I’m writing a fantastical sequence about a lion tamer’s wife, her courtship, marriage, and family. Different voices come forward to speak – the wife, a narrator, the daughter, the lion, the circus. Who is who is not as clear-cut as it might seem. As cascading versions accumulate, they intertwine, overwrite, and contradict one another. The sequence explores what we make of the narratives our families tell us, and what they make of us.”
Becca Grady
https://www.beccagrady.com
Becca Grady (she/they) is queer writer, photographer, and artist currently living in New Mexico, at the southern end of the Rocky Mountains. Her writing was recently chosen in the Open Mountain Competition at the Kendal Mountain Literary Festival.
Note on ‘Knowledge’:
“I have been working on a longer piece of nonfiction about how and when we know things about ourselves (and others) and after reading about flash flooding near Georgia O’Keefe’s former home in Abiquiú, I decided to write around this project in a different way, using poetry and references gleaned from the desert storms that sweep through so quickly in the Southwestern US.”
Jo Colley
https://twitter.com/jocolley
Jo Colley is a writer, poet and film maker who lives in Darlington. Her latest poetry collection, Sleeper, was published by Smokestack in 2020. She has won prizes for poetry films, short stories and flash fiction and runs Blueprint Poetry press.
Note on ‘Giallo’:
“I had been watching and reading about Dario Argento and the term giallo as used for a particular genre of Italian horror film, in which colour is really important (although the term comes from the yellow pulp fiction covers he derived his plots from). I wanted to write a poem which, whilst based around a colour, had something more mysterious going on, the creation of a yellow-toned world.”
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