PERVERSE 9F
"I’ll sleep in bowls of moss..."
Gray
Cockburn
Birksted-Breen
Best
Leask Arizpe
Hullo there,
This week’s selection is brought to you from sunny Harrogate, where I’ve just attended Thought Bubble festival — an annual celebration of all things comics, with a special focus on indie creators. I highly recommend it. Plus there’s a lovely Turkish Baths. No wonder Agatha Christie absconded there.
This week’s five poems are linked by language (well, duh) and, if I can say this without sounding too Sesame Street, by the colour yellow. Even the leaf feels yellow, though perhaps that’s just me looking out of the window.
Please enjoy. More next week.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS Some of these poems may be best viewed on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or projected onto a painting of a fried egg.
Poppy Cockburn
POSTCARD
Ragged daffodil sun
trembles on the edge
of a wave.
One day, I’ll live with
run-silent drapes,
I’ll sleep in bowls of moss.
I’ll be taken to a marsh
to watch wingless birds
attempt flight.
Having a wonderful time.
Noah Birksted-Breen
Turning over a new leaf
There. Is. No. New. Leaf.
Crispin Best
Now Let’s Do A Silly One
I bring your messages with me across the famous
bridge. The latest says that a painting of a fried egg
made you think of me. Why wouldn’t it? Every day
we go ahead and wear our clothes. When your
moon moves, mine moves too. Beard shavings
fall through morning shafts of light, not on purpose
but I take credit for it all the same.
Every day there are so few things to think. I can spend
an entire afternoon just repeating the word “woods”
while I am in one. And above the woods, a stripe
of sky, pale from the end of itself, and the knowledge
that we all have that one friend who looks down at us
from a hot air balloon and says, “I’d love to stay.
But I’d like to leave even more.”
Flora Leask Arizpe
About egg yolks and flames
Yema – egg yolk | Llama – flame
How can I explain this,
that it’s primordial, this
sense that the ‘y’ in yema
is a world away from
the ‘ll’ in llama:
the difference simple as
the pure yellow yolk
standing out from white plate.
A difference difficult
as the dense collage
in layers of flame;
it leaps from hiding
in the ever-changing-yellow
of that fire!
Contributor Notes & Bios
Em Gray
https://bsky.app/profile/em-words.bsky.social
Em Gray is a neurodivergent poet living in Brighton, UK. She has been highly commended by the Forward Prize, shortlisted for the Creative Future Writers’ Award and has won second prize in the Mslexia Poetry Competition.
Note on ‘The leaflet with the lightbulb says do not swallow’:
“I was drawn to the ‘remarkable in the unremarkable’ potential of this real leaflet, and wanted to use it to explore themes of desire and non-obedience. I ate multiple small objects as a child. I like to reframe this as a form of ambition.”
Poppy Cockburn
https://poppycockburn.com/poetry/
Poppy Cockburn is a Margate-based writer working in the arts. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, with her first book-length collection Naked Oyster published by If a Leaf Falls in 2025.
Note on ‘POSTCARD’:
“I love postcards – the way there’s only limited space so you have to pick out one or two things to say, and the sense of whimsy attached to them. This one is sent from the aftermath of a Twin Peaks watching spree – a red-curtained psychic domain.”
Noah Birksted-Breen
Noah Birksted-Breen is a translator and academic. In 2021, he completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck in 2021. He has poems in the lickety~split and Mechanics Institute Review.
Note on ‘Turning over a new leaf’:
“Sometimes I write longer poems and feel pleased with myself. Weeks later, I start cutting phrases here, there and everywhere. On brutal days, I’m left with a single line. I remember thinking about the phrase “turning over a new leaf”. How alluring and naively reassuring for our present era. I wanted to rip it apart. There was nothing else for me to do or say; the poem had crash-landed.”
Crispin Best
Crispin Best lives in London. His book Hello is published by Partus.
Note on ‘Now Let’s Do A Silly One’:
“I always wanted to end a poem like this. Everything else in there is just a list of things that have happened.”
Flora Leask Arizpe
https://attackofthepaperwizards.wordpress.com/
Flora is a writer from Scotland. She can be found in publications such as Gutter, Interpret Magazine, Propel Magazine, and also Dublin, where she now lives. She is a current New Writers Awardee for poetry with the Scottish Book Trust.
Note on ‘About egg yolks and flames’:
“Attempting to write poetry in a second language is both frustrating and illuminating in the way it makes you examine the words you use and why. Growing up in a bilingual household, I ended up with a lot of feelings about the rightness words — which I try to express in this poem.”
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