HLR
Seabright
Nadjarian
Albedo
Kiew
Hullo there,
I can feel PERVERSE’s end rising to meet us, but it’s not here quite yet. First, we have these five explosions of energy: freshly squeezed anxieties, a shipping forecast of threat levels, vipers, a dying lotus, and all your life.
Enjoy, and see you next week for the final part of this issue.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS Some of these poems have long lines, and some are shown as images. They may be best viewed on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or projected onto a wall at Wood Green Station.
HLR
Self Portrait at 30: IX. Mind the gap
Nikomu nie jest dobrze o czwartej nad ranem.
No one feels good at four in the morning.
Godzina dla trzydziestoletnich.
The hour for thirty-year-olds.
— lines from ‘Czwarta nad ranem’ (‘Four in the morning’)
by Wisława Szymborska, translated by HLR
I worry that I am destined to become nothing
more than a cautionary tale. I mistrust everyone
who spells ‘init’ with two ns. I heard you whisper,
‘She’s getting bad again,’ so now I’m going to behave
straitlaced-angelic just to spite you. I regret to inform you
that the people you loathe the most are busy knocking
down the house you were born in to build a Lidl. Tragic, innit?
In Catholic iconography, Saint HLR is always portrayed in marbled disarray,
a blur of smeared bruises & fading lipstick, barefoot, fur coat, no knickers —
the hairs are so realistic, how do sculptors do it? Please mind the gap
between 03:59 & 5 a.m. My brain is made of burnt meringue
& grief is an endless emetic pirouette. All my hopes of recovery
have been hastily shredded, like evidence of embezzlement.
Gentle advice to my thirty-one-year-old self: ‘Don’t leave
your I’ll do it later too late, darling girl.’ Wednesdays are weighted
blankets designed to crush the dread out of me but nothing on
Earth is heavy enough to suffocate my anxiety. Apologies,
we are out of freshly squeezed worries. Please mind the gap
between submission & rejection. 4 a.m. is wrapped
in yesterday’s newspaper, doused in vinegar. I sleep
coiled inside paradox & am surprised when I wake up
feeling cleaved in two. I think a lot about how
the majority of us grew up unnecessarily
fearing quicksand. At 4 a.m., language feels
uncatchable, like trying to photograph a video —
I fail to nail your aura down in metaphor
& pokrzyżowany is an understatement. My still
is never still because my particles won’t stop fucking
dancing. When you left me, you left behind tools
with which to end myself — razor, neckties, meds.
& socks (I’m creative, baby, I’d have found a way).
I left my adoration for you between the blades
of your Gillette for you treated me as replaceable, taught me
I was binnable; I cannot unlearn this lesson. I whisk my shame
into pancake batter; I flip pathetically, become a wrinkled embarrassment
on the floor again. No thank you, Jolly Man Outside Wood Green Station,
I do not want to hear The Good News; I’m too busy panicking about
whether my heartbreak is biodegradable or if it will kill turtles.
‘Better’ looks so good on the Instagram girlies. ‘Better’ don’t suit me.
Please mind the gap between submission & acceptance. I will
ask the depressed Saturday girl at Claire’s Accessories
if they do lobotomies... My antibodies are sick
of working long hours for free. At 4 a.m. I feel very anti-body,
anti-organ, anti-flesh, anti-pulse, anti-breath. Please
mind the gap between acceptance & publication.
Is the priest duty-bound to inform the police
if I confess a desire to murder my mind?
Please mind the gap between 5 a.m. & 03:59.
I hold your smile up to the moonlight
& it shatters all over me.
JP Seabright
Threat; Occasional, Rising Quickly
Lumbered o’er Thames; East to Southeast, four-
play. Occasionally sex; Later, showers.
Moderate or good, occasionally poor.
Pressure Rising; Lashed cyclonic.
Politics, moderate; Falling, mild.
Local squall; Becoming, hedonic.
Moving rapidly; Avoid heavy front.
Backing across path of depression.
Dogger; forceful thunder. Count-
try outlook; limited; Forties, Bight.
Seaman forecast; Rising Quickly.
Threat imminent; Predominantly Wight.
Weather, or not; Resolute to Rockall.
Plain sailing, Chill factor; Absolute Fuckall.
Nora Nadjarian
He plays with his vipers he writes
After a line from Paul Celan
Sucking a mint that is a mothball. It is not a lie. Fiction can be based upon the truth. I pawn my most prized possession to afford the truth and to ask the question ‘what if?’ Somebody will read my words and think hmm or mmm.
*
The most interesting part of my life is desire. I also love the name Shulamith. Every morning I wait for something and chew my nails tenderly.
*
Somebody makes a toast or a proposal and the raised glasses wink with the wine in them, and the mystery.
*
Get this right and it will be a poem. ‘A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes.’ Get this wrong and it will be a bad joke. Whatever you keep in your closet is a viper and, for example, you are too old to play.
*
A coincidence is an incident outside a restaurant. You recognise the man’s face when he turns and it is okay that he looks a little sinister and that you know him. That you even slept with him or that he forced you. There’s something dreadful in his face, perhaps Time. I do not want to see. Let there be fog.
*
Fiction can be based upon the truth. I write a story about the man as conflict. Aristotle is credited with first defining sources of conflict as man vs. man, man vs. nature and man vs. himself. There is no woman in conflict.
*
My notebooks are full of anxiety. Anxiety is full of something I can’t describe, like crucifixion or rot. In my notes, the words are exploited. I ask them ‘Are you from around here?’ and they ask me ‘We are not, are you?’
*
We are tremendously complicated, ‘we’ meaning ‘people’.
*
Pushing and pulling.
*
I just want to be left alone. I wonder if it’s possible to tell the entire truth to another human being or if truth can be entirely true. The most beautiful pebble is true. The sea is true. Amen.
Vasiliki Albedo
Anyone can hide like this.
He breaststrokes into the lake,
head shrinking like a dying lotus.
I remember the waitress
catching his eye, the string of lights,
seagulls, stars flying low. He went on
flirting like that. I watched the night go
into the fire. Back home, double doors
open to a red sink overrunning- a horror
film trope. I cut my bangs too short,
tears in the bathtub, baby.
Do I sink my teeth in too much?
A sundog eats the distant sky, I whisper
resentments into the fog. Descend
the basement steps alone.
Contributor Notes & Bios
HLR
https://hlrwriter.substack.com; https://linktr.ee/HLRwriter
HLR is a prize-winning working-class poet from North London. She is the author of History of Present Complaint (First Cut) and EX-CETERA (Nine Pens). Recent work has been published by The Poetry Society, The London Magazine and Poetry Wales.
Note on ‘Self Portrait at 30: IX. Mind the gap’:
“This is one of twelve poems I wrote before turning 31, after Berman’s ‘Self-Portrait at 28’. My psychotic episodes are always preceded by insomnia, my grip on reality slackening with each sleep-deprived minute. I think a similar (although less terrifying) loosening happens for anyone awake in the liminal hour of 4 a.m., where the brain takes you to strange places, so I wanted to capture this specific psychological falling: falling-anywhere-other-than-asleep.”
JP Seabright
JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published and four collaborations, encompassing poetry, prose and experimental work. Their first collection White Cloud Over Purple was published in 2024.
Note on ‘Threat; Occasional, Rising Quickly’:
“I became mildly obsessed with the Shipping Forecast for a short, but intense, period of time, and thought it would be interesting to use its structure and format in a poem. The first lines were inspired by an example of this: “Humber, Thames. Southeast veering southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later.” The poem turned into a narrative about crossing London, confronted by a group of lads out on the lash, looking for trouble. The punctuation follows the Forecast formula and somewhere along the way it turned into a sonnet, of sorts.”
Nora Nadjarian
Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. Her work was included in Mslexia, Poetry International, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, Dust and Under the Radar. Her poetry collection Iktsuarpok was released by Broken Sleep Books in 2024.
Note on ‘He plays with his vipers he writes’:
“I read and re-read Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ following the Poetry Society’s 2023 annual lecture by Ilya Kaminsky. Celan’s use of fragmentation and repetition to depict the horrors of the Holocaust, and the image of a commandant playing with vipers while victims dig graves haunted me for a long time. My poem touches on mental health issues and there is repeated interplay between truth/lies and perpetrator/victim of sexual abuse.”
Vasiliki Albedo
https://www.instagram.com/vasilikialbedo/
Vasiliki Albedo is a poet living in Greece. She was shortlisted for a 2024 Forward Prize, Best Single Poem (written). Her tiny chapbook is forthcoming with Poetry International.
Note on ‘Anyone can hide like this.’:
“I wrote the first draft of this poem while watching episode one of Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story. I noted down images, feelings, thoughts and had a first, long, messy draft. Over time I edited thinking about the psych-horror genre in terms of relationships and specifically my experiences of feeling overwhelmed and wanting to disappear. Things don’t have to be gory to be horrible.”
L Kiew
A chinese-malaysian in London, L Kiew works as a charity leader and accountant. Her pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books (2019). L Kiew’s first collection More than Weeds was published by Nine Arches Press (2023).
Note on ‘Solastalgia’:
“I am interested in the effects repetition, variation and unexpected constraints have on language. Then I came across the philosopher Glenn Albrecht and the concept he described as “the homesickness you have when you are still at home”. The socio-political context and the natural environment continues changing in increasingly distressing ways. The loss of certainty feels like what is certain; loss feels like it might be what we’ll have left.”
See you for next week’s issue (the final part of issue 8), with poems by Alex Macdonald, Meryl Pugh, Warren Czapa, Julian Bishop and Alyson Kissner.
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