PERVERSE 9I
"drying on the radiator"
Sands
Harvey
Whittle
Penn
Doegar
Hullo there,
Next week will be the last week of this issue of PERVERSE — how exciting. I have sadly failed to secure any kind of reading, because it turns out that trying to book London in December is prohibitively expensive. Who knew, eh? (Everyone.) However I’m trying to plan something fun for January. Watch this space.
In the meantime, please enjoy these lovely poems, from Jean Valjean to Lush glitter, via a shadow formerly known as leaf mulch.
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 an angry box. If any of the fonts are shifting between poems, it’s because Substack’s “poetry” setting plays by its own rules.
Dawn Sands
I Blame Myself for Herbert Kretzmer’s Death
‘To love another person is to see the face of God.’
— Herbert Kretzmer, translation of the musical Les Misérables
is hyperbole but not unreasonable. As unreasonable
as voodoo, as praying a name in whiteboard pen the day
he died, as enshrining him in literature for months
till he could take no more. I blame Herbert Kretzmer’s death
on the fact that he was ninety-five but also on the fact I was
thirteen. If it is self-centred to say I
defined his life perhaps say he defined mine, blurred reality
and language into love like a swell. He died an atheist
according to Wikipedia, so perhaps I can blame myself
at least for this. In a life in which I do not kill Kretzmer
at the age of thirteen I brush past his skeleton-self
and tell him it was true, what he wrote about
God. He would not take it from anybody else.
When Jean Valjean died, he gave Cosette a confession
about love that perhaps he could only give as a dying man.
Perhaps all a thirteen year old can give to a dying man is his
name, indelible on a classroom whiteboard,
an obituary that seeps inside him, compels him to die.
Sam Harvey Crying into the Onions Cold open on your eczema gloves playing the radiator grooves while the novelty wears off the RoboVac. Scratch that. The rain is raining. They are drying on the radiator pointed at by lasers We are cat sitting and the cat is catching the cold. Open invitation to unstick the rolling brush and un- -fortunately I’m otherwise crying into the onions and tonight, ‘L’ is for the way you hey, Alexa, how do I make it through the sofa of it all?
Charlotte Whittle Lush Today I met a woman at work. The first thing she said was Hi my son’s autistic and I said, as though she also had a teardrop birthmark under her belly button, my brother’s autistic! Our knowingness is not in a smile but the way her eyes nod to me. She said he won’t wear deodorant he’s twelve but he won’t and he needs to. I said is it the spray? Yes, oh the spray but he hates the roll too. We fly over jelly thrown by mucky-mouthed boys I show her the powder and she looks happier than I have in months. I tap some onto her hand and onto mine we sniff and she says oh no no he won’t like the smell too toothpaste. We look through all the powders I rummage for ways to keep her here distract her with seaweed, organic bubbles, ask if she wants to watch me cut the soap. Somewhere along the way she frees my colleague from her apron and ties it around her waist then we add sticks, spit, fairy wings into some potion. She tells me he’s got OCD as well so does mine, I say and we discuss all the ways they worry about their skin. I give her so many samples she keeps dropping the tiny pots I wait for her to tell me he’s diabetic like mine. She says she’ll come back soon, she’ll let me know and as she walks out the door, I stir my disappointment into glitter, take one of the magic pills staff use to become a child again and transport myself back beside the bath, combing his curls, back portioning out chips and fried eggs for his dinner, back birthing insulin bruises into his thighs back looking at him through my nine blown out candles atop a cake Mum will weigh and worry over. Him, with the fat drained from everywhere but his knuckles. Him, knowing he’ll never get it back.
Michelle Penn
Edward Doegar Mothered phrase. Leaf mulch scraped to the side of the paving, its shadow, there, uncleansed, the damp then of it still new. But now — Schneeglöckchen, Krokus, Narzisse are gained discreetly; nouns that I intend to clumsily father.
Contributor Notes & Bios
Dawn Sands
Dawn Sands is an undergraduate English student at Warwick University. She has been published by The Poetry Society, Young Poets Network, Tower Poetry, Poems on the Underground, Ink Sweat & Tears, and elsewhere.
Note on ‘I Blame Myself for Herbert Kretzmer’s Death’:
“This poem has a peculiar backstory. When I was 13 and had listened to nothing but the Les Miserables soundtrack for 4 months, slowly falling in love with Herbert Kretzmer’s beautiful English lyrics, I wrote his name on a school whiteboard. This was met with a justifiable level of derision from my friends, which prompted me to Google him later on — upon which I discovered he had died that morning...”
Sam Harvey
www.instagram.com/officialsamharvey
Sam Harvey is a poet, visual artist, and musician. He has been shortlisted for the London Magazine Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the MONO and Bridport prizes. He was most recently published in The London Magazine, Scarlet Tiger, and Streetcake.
Note on ‘Crying into the Onions’:
“This poem came out of a seminar with George Szirtes on “productive limits”, and how constraints in poetry can be liberating. I’m one of those people who feel liberated by the constraint of an excuse to stay home and be unproductive. I’d like to think this poem is a kind of sitcom-ification of that inertia. George wasn’t impressed, and felt I was just being lazy. Who knows. Ask the sofa.”
Charlotte Whittle
www.instagram.com/charlottewhittle_
https://substack.com/@charlottewhittle
Freshly graduated from her MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, this is Charlotte Whittle’s first publication. Both a poet and prose writer, she investigates grief of childhood and the glory of girlhood.
Note on ‘Lush’:
“This poem is based on a real interaction I had with a customer while working at Lush. I wrote it as a sort of ode to connection, to those unravelling conversations and quickly flourishing intimacy that often results in desperation. A desperation to hold onto this intimacy but also to push it, expand it, as if that may absolve one’s loneliness entirely.”
Michelle Penn
Michelle Penn’s new collection, Retablo for a door, is forthcoming from Shearsman Books. Michelle is also 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).
Note on ‘Box’:
“When I wrote this poem, I was stewing about the ways people assume things about each other based on appearance, accent, social media posts — anything, really. Being labelled is like being shoved into a box, becoming a box. That’s what you are and you can’t be anything else. Each pair of eyes sees the box in its own way — but what does the box think?”
Edward Doegar
Edward Doegar is a poet and editor based in London. His works include For Now (clinic; 2017), Adaptation (Kelder Press; 2022), a collaboration with the artist Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, and sonnets (Broken Sleep Press; 2024).
Note:
“I would prefer not to have a note.”
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