Turcotte
Gore
Skinner
Barnes
Fowler
Hullo there,
I’m writing this from a new city, having recently moved back west (well, actually, I’m just about to embark on a five-hour car journey back to that city, having spent a wonderful weekend away at Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival, talking to people about poetry comics and various things). Still…
The view from my desk has changed, but the desk itself, and the work, remains the same. Here are more poems for you to enjoy: clouds, and hot air balloons; Spielberg, monsters, and bite marks.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS Some of the poems might display in a different font, depending on where you read them. This is to preserve their spacing.
PPS Some poems have long lines. These might be best viewed on a larger-than-phone sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or projected onto a Hollywood billboard at midnight.
Paula Turcotte
The only difference between prophecy and delusion is luck
The psychic tells me it is my destiny to become a hot air balloon. I spend eight years thinking about weightlessness. Then I buy a battered board-book copy of Goodnight Moon at a thrift store and sit in my yard past sunset, where Fievel the mouse brings me a tiny divining rod and says you gotta know when to fold ’em. Before I can ask what he means I’m four thousand feet up, a blimp with a slow leak piloted by a carousel of people I’ve failed to text back. With my dirigible thumbs I pull up the psychic’s website, formerly pink and glittery. The error 404 reads If you are reading this message we are experiencing figments of levitation. Try again later. I become one with the air and float.
Sylee Gore
Clouds?
Before film, we watched the sky.
“The Portrait of a Cloud.”
I lie in wait.
Sound changes when it’s cloudy.
Rain’s shadowy bouquet.
The advent of abstraction.
A portrait of surrender.
The only possible collection.
Richard Skinner
Interview with a Vampire
I Am an American Soldier
I Am Big Bird
I Am Cuba
I Am David
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
I Am a Hero
I Am the Law
I Am Legend
I Am Love
I Am Not What You Want
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
I Am Sartana, Your Angel of Death
I Am Still Here
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
I Am Vengeance
I Belonged to You
I Can’t Go Home
I Can’t Sleep
I Carry You with Me
I Come in Peace
I Confess
I Cover the Waterfront
I Died a Thousand Times
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
I Do Not Want to Know Who You Are
I Dream Too Much
I Drink Your Blood
I Eat Your Skin
I Feel Pretty
I Got Life
I Know What You Did Last Summer
I Know Where I’m Going
I Know Who Killed Me
I Live in Fear
I Live My Life
I Lost My Body
I Married an Angel
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
I Married a Strange Person
I Married a Witch
I Saw the Devil
I Sell the Dead
I Served the King of England
I Shot Andy Warhol
I Spit on Your Grave
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
I Trapped the Devil
I Wake Up Screaming
I Walked with a Zombie
I Want to Live
I Was a Simple Man
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
I Was a Teenage Zombie
I Will Survive
I, Frankenstein
I, Madman
I, Monster
I, Robot
I, Zombie: A Chronicle of Pain
I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer
I’ll Never Lose You
I’ll See You in My Dreams
I’ll Be Seeing You
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK
I’m No Angel
I’m Not Scared
I’m Not There
I’m Still Here
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing
I’ve Loved You So Long
Barbara Barnes
I’m in conversation with Michelle Williams So much to talk about!It was a shock.
Spielberg on zoom?Yes I didn’t know what was–
happening no.Was I hearing this? Me to play his mom? I’ve worked my whole life–
I can imagine to be ready.Right and I do carry the well you carry as a person every person who lives in your body. She was a woman searching–
for a liberated life.That’s right how to honour her one wild and precious.
To map that journey from broken to broken open.I’m thinking of all these enormous mothers who love–
so fiercely.What haunted her how do I hold this carefully enough so many choices–
uh-huh bold ones.To be in the pain of a thing but take care of your own mental how to manage?
How do you manage figure out how you’re going to hold hands and–
walk through it together let your unconscious guide you in an unforeseen way.
Perilous, yes.Yes this precise thing I’ve always wanted to do it’s only joy childhood done correctly.
Evergreen.It’s summers in Montana when I was young the freedom between action and cut–
kidhood.That memory of bareback on a horse I want–
me too I want that feeling again.That’s it yes yes.
Watching you on the screen.SJ Fowler
an extract from Pits
you drink other people’s tea
because it smells different
half drunk
I mean, you go to tables in cafes
and eat leftover food
half eaten
you imagine their saliva in the croissant
and sniff the bite marks
Contributor Notes & Bios
Paula Turcotte
https://instagram.com/p.turc; https://paulaturcotte.weebly.com
Paula Turcotte is the author of the chapbook Permutations (Baseline Press, 2024). Her work appears in Full House, Canthius, PRISM international, and elsewhere. Paula has studied poetry at Oxford and the University of Virginia, and she serves as a poetry editor at MAYDAY.
Note on ‘The only difference between prophecy and delusion is luck’:
“I love prose poems for the jumps that they allow. After I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, I wrote a lot of these; I like the way they let you peek inside your own psyche a bit. The title for this one conveniently arrived to me right as I typed the final line.”
Sylee Gore
Sylee Gore is a poet and artist.
Note on ‘Clouds?’:
“Why clouds? Need clouds ‘matter’? I work as a German-to-English translator for galleries and artists, and I particularly love translating interviews, because they’re so refreshingly direct yet mysterious.
During a recent project, I discovered Caspar David Friedrich’s indignant response after Goethe asked him to illustrate cloud types. Friedrich refused point blank ‘to force the free and airy clouds into a rigid order and classification’.”
Richard Skinner
https://richardskinner.weebly.com/lsquoflickersrsquo.html
Richard has recently had work published in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry London, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Scotland & Poetry Wales.
Note on ‘Interview with a Vampire’:
“‘Interview with a Vampire’ is part of a forthcoming collection of poems, entitled Flickers, each of which is inspired by a film. In the case of ‘Vampire’, I collected all film titles starting with ‘I’ and then edited them down. To me, these sentences are a sad plea for sympathy by a vampire, who is ‘unliving’, yet never dead. A ghoul speaks and I find his words curiously moving.”
Barbara Barnes
https://www.instagram.com/ryanopoet/
Barbara’s poems have appeared in The Interpreter’s House, Poetry London, Under the Radar, Butcher’s Dog, Brixton Review of Books, Ambit, Arc Poetry, The Alchemy Spoon, Black Iris, and in Perverse. Her collection Hound Mouth was published by Live Canon in 2022.
Note on ‘I’m in conversation with Michelle Williams’:
“The great theatre practitioner Stanislavski wrote that, ‘the actor must clear the jump at full gallop […] to surrender […] instantly and utterly into the power of intuition and inspiration’. This is what we all aspire to do, whatever we’re attempting creatively. Michelle Williams reminds me how it’s done.”
SJ Fowler
SJ Fowler is a poet, writer and performer. His latest collection is The Parts of The Body That Stink (2024) from Hesterglock Press.
Note on ‘An extract from Pits’:
“How uncanny the smell of living is to modern humans! Reminding them of waste and sex and death. Our own retched stench is quite funny when you think about how clean everyone wants to be. Everybody has parts of their body which periodically stink, no matter what they think about themselves. This chunk is from a book about that.”
See you for next week’s issue, with poems by Robert Hodkinson, Philip Gross, Rishi Dastidar, Suzanna Fitzpatrick and Sam Phipps.
Find us on socials
X / the hell platform formerly known as Twitter