MacDonald
Pugh
Czapa
Bishop
Kissner
Hullo there,
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu — it’s time to say goodbye to issue 8 of PERVERSE as it bows and pirouettes off up the stairs of some idyllic lakeside mansion, Sound of Music style.
This has been the biggest issue of PERVERSE so far — with so many brilliant poems. Kate Wakeling’s outstanding ‘In Praise of Vaginal Flora’, which opened part A, seems ever so far away now. It has been a pleasure to bring so many strange and interesting poems to your attention.
I will open submissions again sometime next year, probably in the summer. I’m hoping we can also do some more readings in the new year, both IRL and online. As ever, you’ll hear it about it here first.
Thank you for reading PERVERSE. Please enjoy this last wonderful batch of poems, and the images they leave behind.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS If you have enjoyed the issue, and feel so inclined, you can buy me a coffee here. Zero pressure though.
PPS Some of these poems have long lines, some are shown as images, and some are shown in a different font (because Substack is an absolute tool — I have been obliged to make an artform of inconsistent typesetting). These poems may be best viewed on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or projected brightly onto the concept of time.
Alex MacDonald
Lozenge
We think of a world without us: volcanoes
spill harmlessly, windfall tans to mulch,
deer tongue joysticks in a seafront arcade.
It wouldn’t be so bad to become a grandfather
clock buried in the mountains, chiming as an
avalanche founds a new resort. After all,
conveyance confused our content: our heart
echoed in our head, one word hid another,
the mouths lacked courage and constancy,
our lozenge, once emblem, became a balm.
We could listen to cellos from open windows
all afternoon, rearrange the table endlessly.
Now, the sconce goes unadmired, fridges creep
open as rooting onions shove, fungus plugs up
the bath. Our calendars did a number on us all.
Meryl Pugh
a sharp hurt calendar
penury
to the orange night: flowers to the pavement: spent rockets to the fence post: rain
fibs
a disc through cloud, pale eyes of snow yucca at forty-five degrees to the lawn
marred
thick falling diagonals onto mud
to the pollard: budding to the stethoscope: a placard to the High Street: a cardboard pallet
apeshit
the underpass accordionist plies his same three chords the wren sings half its changed song
maybe
horse chestnut leaves in curled lemon and chocolate
gin
to the burnt-out delivery scooter: flash flood in Croydon to mud on the stairs: riot gear to signals failing, tracks underwater: lightning strike
jowls
lime blossom thickens the air, cascade of tiny spiders the house that smells of wee is empty, where did they go? carder bees, sloes, a heel cutting that doesn’t take
auguries
to the artist intervention: a peacock butterfly to the field of buzzing grasses: a beagle on an extending lead to the open van with cement bags: a portaloo
cow parsley down to its spokes – in Paris everyone leaves
septic
the chemist says, this year again in Cyprus, not enough rain a wrapped Kit Kat, tin foil bitten, turned over in squirrel paws
crowbar
blackberry’s second flowering, dusty stamens, cup and gift festival of gold coinage spent over car roof and pavement payment overdue form, much crumpled
no
to the broken supermoon: fox twice crossing to the oak processionary: copter drone to parakeet roost: dieback
dismember
half a sink dumped by the hornbeams, prison riots something small, crying out there at night-time
Alyson Kissner
Colour Scheme from a Temperate Landscape
Sweetening deer-headed orchids /
Blue-eyed grass with their yellow eyes cast down /
The sun melted /
Small warrens and white pines heavy with frost /
My one body in the darkening forests /
Downriver, the night doubles like smoke /
There’s nothing here to hold me down /
My mind, too, is coniferous /
A coyote’s tail in punctuation /
Lavender drowning with bees /
Every season looks ochre underwater /
Tracks glistening like pyrite in Autumn /
This shadow is the colour of an open flame /
The rain, the rain, the rain, the rain /
Contributor Notes & Bios
Alex MacDonald
https://linktr.ee/Selected_Poems
Alex MacDonald lives and works in London. He has had three poetry pamphlets published and received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.
Note on ‘Lozenge’:
“I wrote this poem after seeing the film Pastoral: To Die in the Country by Shūji Terayama, which reflected on death with surreal images. I tried to do something in honour of that, imagining a world without human intervention.”
Meryl Pugh
https://furtive11.wordpress.com/
Meryl Pugh’s most recent publication is Feral Borough (2022, Penned in the Margins). Her first collection was a PBS Guest Choice and long-listed for the Laurel Prize. She is a Core Tutor on the Poetry School’s MA in Writing Poetry.
Note on ‘a sharp hurt calendar’:
“‘a sharp hurt calendar’ was pieced together during the Boris Johnson years. Counterpointing page space against text, garbled naming/almost-naming, fragmented in media res notes; these strategies seemed necessary for my warped, mutated shepherd’s calendar, which tries to capture the increasing sense of horror and unreality as climate change gave London its annual heatwaves and heavy rain and the shenanigans in Parliament bore less and less relation to real life.”
Warren Czapa
https://www.instagram.com/warren_czapa/
Warren Czapa lives and works in London. His poems have been published in various journals and anthologies including Magma, Ambit, Perverse, Anthropocene, Verve, Burning House, Black Bough, Poetry Bus and Babel Tower Notice Board.
Note on ‘Hourly Event’:
“I started writing this poem while waiting in the pub for friends to arrive. An old sepia photograph hung on the wall of the booth where I was sitting and, when I got stuck after writing a few lines, I started studying the photo, which was of Ethel Matthews, a Victorian comedic actress. Ethel, details of her life, and the passage of time, ended up becoming integral to the poem.”
Julian Bishop
https://www.julianbishoppoet.com/
Julian Bishop’s first collection of eco poems called We Saw It All Happen was published earlier this year by Fly On The Wall Press. A former environment reporter for the BBC, he’s currently working on a follow-up collection looking at how we might be able to reconnect with a damaged natural world.
Note on ‘Pollution Blackout Poem’:
“As a journalist, I get a pile of unrequested press releases daily and a couple of years ago I received a boasty one from Southern Water about their Pollution Incident Reduction Plan. The 19 pages were light on regret but heavy on corporate guff and flow charts (haha...) which made me so furious I wrote a poem about it. Of course the form had to be a blackout.”
Alyson Kissner
Alyson Kissner is a Canadian-born poet based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is a winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and placed second in the 2023 Bridport Poetry Prize.
Note on ‘Colour Scheme from a Temperate Landscape’:
“I was interested in highlighting the role of a line or a stanza as a singular image, and the way these lines/images build into their greater whole. With ‘Colour Scheme from a Temperate Landscape’, I was looking at elements of the Pacific Northwest like a colour palette – where the lines act almost like paint chips. I love thinking about ways we represent nature as text, landscape as memory.”
Find us on socials
X / the hellscape formerly known as Twitter
Click the “subscribe” button below to stay in touch, and find out when the next submissions period opens. Thanks for reading.