Ellis
Sprackland
Bratten
ojikutu-harnett
Bridgwood
Hullo again,
No waffle from me this time, other than to remind folks that there’s a launch event happening tonight, Monday 7th October, in central London! 7pm (for 7.30), upstairs at The Devereaux — 20 Devereux Ct, Temple, London WC2R 3JJ, with ten readers, each reading one poem and talking about their process in writing it: Jo Bratten, AV Bridgwood, Tim Tim Cheng, Eve Ellis, Holly Hopkins, Alex MacDonald, mulika ojikutu-harnett, George Ttoouli, Olivia Tuck and Mark Waldron. It’s free, and everyone is welcome!
Please enjoy this week’s poems. They range from raccoons to toddlers, from tostadas to Kierkegaard to Babybel.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS The first poem is in a different font to the others, because that’s the only way I could get Substack to preserves its indentations, apologies.
PPS As some poems have long lines, it may be best to view them on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or projected onto a mature blue whale.
Eve Ellis
Night Theory
after Louise GlückAt birth I swallowed the universe, like a spore. I’ve been breathing it out ever since. This is why the cat lurked by my cot: she sensed my planetary music and wanted it. No one thought I was very wise. This is why my mother cried over me: I was absorbent as tissue, as paper-light; with each tear that sank in, switches in my DNA turned on, like lightbulb filaments. Plink, plink. I am not sure how I acquired language: possibly it was the space between my mother’s eyes— that tundra I wanted to touch. The right sound, I thought, could brush it so when I got control of my jaw I sang my first few notes: this is how I woke the word snow, this is how I summoned ice and rain, also how I conjured a brother, so I wouldn’t have to carry the words alone. We lay in our little beds passing the language between us. Meanwhile my mother slept on. Outside, the raccoons were listening—I have inherited their nightly chorus, their yellow eyes, their claws.
Martha Sprackland
Agnus Dei
Cloud, cloud, cloud, the emptiness of God!
And he climbs onto a dancing-stage
of rage, of rage, of rage!
The stage it has an Oubliette
in the floor, floor, floor
and the door leads to the labour queue
in blue and red and blue
and His blueness bleeds to darkness
His hunting grounds are sightless
Loud, loud, loud, the trumpet-cry of God!
And in the brake the trembling Lamb
I am, I am, I am!
Jo Bratten
Crunchwrap Supreme
All is cold, cold. All is void, void, void. All is terrible, terrible—
The Seagull
On our second date I take Anton Chekhov to Taco Bell.
The counter is sticky, the girl behind the counter bored, haloed
by the 24-hour menu. I ask her for two soft tacos, beef.
It’s what I always have, I tell Chekhov. But look, he says,
at all the choice. Why not try something new? What are you
afraid of? He asks the bored girl about the Crunchwrap Supreme.
She explains how it’s a tostada wrapped up in a soft
tortilla which is grilled into a neat hexagonal shape,
that inside the meat and cheese sauce is divided
from the lettuce and tomatoes by the crunchy barrier
of the tostada. Chekhov thinks this sounds tremendous.
What a time to be alive. We sit in a booth. I am most afraid,
I tell him, mashing three packets of Diablo into the pablum meat,
of disappointment. And you, what are you most afraid of?
I climbed Vesuvius once, he says, opening a packet of Fire
with his teeth. I stood at the crater’s lip and was gripped
by a desire to leap straight into the devil’s mouth.
What is the word for that, he asks, that feeling when you stand
too close to the edge of a cliff, or deep chasm, and you worry
an urge will take over and fling you over the side?
I push my phone across the glittering Formica.
I’ve taught you how Google works, I say. Look it up.
There’s a phrase from the French, he says. L’appel du vide.
The void. Chekhov savours the balance between crunch
and softness, the sharpness of tomato and the warmth of meat,
the sweet heat of the cheese sauce. The call of the void,
he says, sauce dabbing his beard, the 24-hour menu blinking,
spinning, the bored girl tapping her phone, LIVE MÁS
in neon on the wall, the booth shuddering as trucks blast past.
Chekhov holds my hand. Don’t be afraid, he says. I am here.
mulika ojikutu-harnett
ALONG WITH YOUR HEAVY OVERFED BODY
You throw all the green out. All the living
things you pickle. You jar all the fruit.
Hand them out to neighbours. Collect
boxes emptied of use from the largest
supermarkets. Break down
the bookshelves. List what cannot
be carried. All the white men
you have loaned, returned.
Gide, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Lacan
The rest are burnt.
A fire that resembles June.
Circles, song as offering,
elder gathered from hedgerows.
Top-heavy thing — expellant
— transported to the quiet of a bottle.
You accept a bid. The bed marked
as gone. On the final morning
of the final day, you listen —
the former stray considering in sounds
the closed flap of its entry.
Just as there are hours in the day
in which you forego eating,
there must be hours
in which not everything is open
to the world outside.
AV Bridgwood
greedy
hell yes i am, foraging in the kitchen after the threesome, ransacking the cupboards while they’re sleeping. she’s meal-prepped his office lunches, in every tupperware a love letter and a babybel. i’ve always loved looking in other people’s fridges. i go through them reading the notes — you are my one and only — and eating the babybels, scrunching up the idyllic landscape on the packaging, splitting the red circle with my fingernails, crumbling it onto my tongue. i eat the whole week’s — I’m yours, I want to share my life with you — playing pac-man on the counter with a red shell open like a mouth and wax balls that i shape by warming them with my lips. who are these people, lids clicked over portioned grapes, unslammable drawers, boiling water straight from the tap. how much does it cost, something like that? full now, i am peeling them just to peel them. i want red stuck beneath my nails. i want the feel of the warm skin yielding, the warm center revealing itself, the warm mouth opening. i want to have my life and eat it too.
Contributor Bios and Poem Notes
Eve Ellis
https://instagram.com/eve_ellis14
Eve Ellis is an American poet who lives and teaches in London. Shortlisted for the Women Poets Prize in 2020, her poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Her debut pamphlet is forthcoming from ignitionpress this winter.
Note on ‘Night Theory’:
“I wrote ‘Night Theory’ after a brilliant poet showed me a Louise Glück poem and encouraged me to tell outrageous lies about my early life.”
Martha Sprackland
http://www.marthasprackland.co.uk/
Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Citadel (Pavilion, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. She is currently translating the poems of St John of the Cross for Penguin Classics.
Note on ‘Agnus Dei’:
“This strange thing emerged from an episode of Stress Test, the radio show I co-present for Rough Trade Books on Soho Radio with Joe Dunthorne, John Osborne and Ella Frears, in which poets write under timed conditions. Ali Lewis, our guest, chose the title ‘Agnus Dei’. I had one of my toddler’s books echoing (Verde, verde, verde, el cocodrilo que muerde!) and the rhythm made its way into the poem…”
Jo Bratten
Jo writes poems and teaches English in London. Her debut pamphlet, Climacteric, was published by Fly on the Wall in 2022. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, The Rialto, And Other Poems, berlin lit and Poetry London.
Note on ‘Crunchwrap Supreme’:
“This poem is part of a sequence in which I go on dates with Anton Chekhov to chain restaurants, starting in Pizza Express and ending in a Wetherspoons, by way of, naturally, Taco Bell. I was reading Chekhov’s Collected Letters before bed and got a bit obsessed. The story about Vesuvius is true and the poem’s final line is taken from Act 2 of Uncle Vanya.”
mulika ojikutu-harnett
https://www.instagram.com/__mulika
mulika ojikutu-harnett is a Lagos-born Nigerian-Brit poet, producer and integrative practitioner. An MA candidate at the Poetry School, with an MA in Performance from Central (RCSSD). PERVERSE is their first publication.
Note on ‘ALONG WITH YOUR HEAVY OVERFED BODY’:
“The poem started with thoughts around received orthodoxies which end up absorbing personhood. In that sense, I think the poem could be said to be about going from caught to uncaught, purging, opting out, and withdrawal of tacit permission.”
AV Bridgwood
AV Bridgwood is a writer from Manchester. They are a former Foyle Young Poet and recent graduate of UEA’s MA Poetry. AV was commended in the National Poetry Competition 2023 and won second prize in The Rialto’s Nature and Place Poetry Competition 2024. Their work is published in journals such as Magma, The Interpreter’s House, and Anthropocene.
Note on ‘greedy’:
“This poem is part of a project exploring bi-erasure — and bi joy! It may or may not be based on a true story, but definitely on a love of Babybels. Given that the prose poem is a hybrid form that itself queers a binary (prose versus poetry), I’m really interested in its potential for expressing queer sexualities and identities...”
See you for next week’s issue, with poems by Alison Winch, Ruby Lawrence, Olivia Tuck, Sarah Wedderburn and Holly Hopkins.
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