Cheng
Collison
Larkin
Dorroh
Penn
Hullo there,
I hope October is treating you well. There are ghosts in the first poem but I promise the halloween tie-in is entirely inadvertent. There are also blood-staunching flowers, priests, talking babies and fire-breathing dragons. All. Totally. Normal. Fare.
Enjoy!
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS The last two poems may display in a different font. This is because Substack is a blunt tool for typesetting and there’s no better way to preserve their spacing, 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 the wide wall of a dark ominous cave.
Tim Tim Cheng
Girl Ghosts
say Surabaya. Sound like eight again. Girl ghosts pick and choose their countries. Yes to father’s nose, mother’s eyes. No to her wiggling pair of lí zi, her widowed, high-pitched lǎo lǐ, lǎo lǐ. Girl ghosts beat each other into meat floss. Shout luun daak, the only Hokkien girl ghosts pass on. Be it Surabaya or Putien, girl ghosts are rich, beautiful, in denial. Love being loved by landlord fathers. Steam thin rice cakes when the rice runs out. Charge neighbours for watching their TV. Girl ghosts are crying. Girl ghosts are not crying. Girl ghosts are learning èrhú in Fuzhou. Hands, frost-bitten, out of tune. The èrhú cries out for girl ghosts with long faces, low registers. Girl ghosts don’t think xìqǔ schools like them. Girl ghosts drop singing. Raise girl ghosts in Hong Kong. Girl ghosts meet in a tea restaurant with a beauty pageant play set. Porcelain clatters among girl ghost chatters. Girl ghosts want to be the champion. An uncle tells girl ghosts Champion? More like pork chops! Girl ghosts tell girl ghosts Study hard. Compensate for having your father’s small eyes! Girl ghosts take group photos. Swipe other girl ghosts out of the screen. Girl ghosts enlarge themselves in part: Face. Hair. Belly. Girl ghosts suck the eyes out of fish heads with fermented soy beans. The heads of girl ghosts fly out of stuffed winter melons.
Claire Collison
Statice (Limonium sinuatum)
Commonly known as Dead on arrival
Mid 18th century from modern Latin
based on Greek, feminine of statikos, causing to stand still
used to staunch blood—
very loyal and committed in attitude
steady bunker flower
suffragette flower
commonly known as boring
short-lived perennial
cousin of baby’s breath
native to the whole Mediterranean Basin
aka notch leaf
aka wavy-leaf, sea lavender, marsh rosemary, sea pink
the leaves are pinnate, lobed, lance-shaped
all parts are downy
the winged flower stems appear
in short papery clusters
the flowers are used
in dried arrangements
in colours ranging from invasive to where the hell am I?
commonly known as Park in the street
commonly known as I’m on holiday
commonly known as Yeah I’m a bitch but not yours
Fiona Larkin
I stress-test my yes
yes, I said to the violet
I will water you
yes, I stroked the velvet shirt
I’ll wash you by hand
to my child I said yes
he really exists
& bowed my head to the priest
yes, I shall do penance
I promised the bottle
you’re safe till the weekend
said yes, to my love
I will never look back
yes, to my mother
I will stay till the end
yes, I said to myself
yes, I said to myself
& heard a string snap
John Dorroh
Some Advanced Baby Poetry Ba ba da da
da da ba baDa da da
ba ba baBa da ba da da da ba ba Da ba da ba ba ba ba da
Michelle Penn
your distraction wears a paper dress you wrap dragons round your ankles they breathe their usual fire & you pretend they’re rockets launching you toward more acquiescent galaxies you don’t you don’t decorate your body with wishes you’ve never believed in the edge of the earth or how easy it is to fall off
you are a giant black cube on a night street after the city goes home
no you’d never promenade the cages of your mind people see you and think
fountain think firework your hardness permanent as a cloudyou dance at the end of a marionette thread each flick of an invisible wrist shapes you and the space you take but no you tear through each moment chin-first you long to be a bullet a torpedo anything that allows no argument
Contributor Notes & Bios
Tim Tim Cheng
Tim Tim Cheng is the author of Tapping At Glass (VERVE, 2023), which was a Poetry Society Book of the Year. Her collection The Tattoo Collector (Nine Arches Press, 2024) is forthcoming. She lives between Glasgow and London.
Note on ‘Girl Ghosts’:
“My poem ‘Girl Ghosts’ is a bad imitation of Sawako Nakayasu’s Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From. Bad as in: I selfishly keep images that might not help the poem move. Those images come from stories my grandmother and mother told me during the pandemic. There is so much more that I don’t and won’t know… and we could be pretty unreliable recounting our lives.”
Claire Collison
https://www.clairecollison.com/
Claire Collison won the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, 2018. Her debut pamphlet, Placebo is published by Blueprint. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet.
Note on ‘Statice (Limonium sinuatum)’:
“This poem comes from a project about the Palomares Incident, a nuclear accident that occurred at the height of the Cold War in 1966 in Southern Spain. Statice grows on the beach close to where four H-bombs fell. I have always thought it a horrible flower. The poem includes found language recorded on a recent site visit.”
Fiona Larkin
https://fionalarkinpoetry.wordpress.com/; https://www.instagram.com/fiona.larkin/
Fiona Larkin’s debut collection, Rope of Sand, was published by Pindrop Press in 2023. Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, her pamphlets are Vital Capacity (Broken Sleep, 2022) and A Dovetail of Breath (Rack Press, 2020). She manages innovative projects with Corrupted Poetry.
Note on ‘I stress-test my yes’:
“What promises do we make to those people and items surrounding us? Are they spoken, or implied, essential or self-imposed? What pressures are exerted by these duties of care? Is it selfish to say no? What happens if you do? These thoughts have occupied a part of my mind for many years, largely unconsciously. When I put ‘stress-test’ together with ‘yes’ the rhyme brought a kind of clarification.”
John Dorroh
https://bsky.app/profile/ashevillebiowriter.bsky.social
Six of John Dorroh’s poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Hundreds of others have appeared in over 100 journals, including Feral, Kissing Dynamite, and River Heron. He makes his home in Southwest Illinois.
Note on ‘Some Advanced Baby Poetry’:
“I find it funny that baby language can often be interpreted by parents, seeming to know exactly what their child is trying to say. But perhaps some babies are just born poets, right? That’s what this poem is about: a smart baby poet who is trying to tell us something.”
Michelle Penn
https://michellepennwriter.com/
Michelle Penn is the author of the book-length poem, Paper Crusade (Arachne Press, 2022), and the pamphlet, Self-portrait as a diviner, failing (Paper Swans Press, 2018). Recent work has appeared in PBLJ, Poetry Wales, Shooter and The Pomegranate.
Note on ‘your distraction wears a paper dress’:
“I wrote this at a time I was pulled toward just about anything other than what I was working on. I was interested in the idea of arguing selves, and all of these images spilled onto the page in a rush. The poem turned into a rather amusing yet daunting distraction in itself.”
See you for next week’s issue, with poems by Georgie Brooke, Liz Kendall, Mary Mulholland, Ernesto Sarezale and Anthony Wilson.
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