PERVERSE issue 4B
PERVERSE issue 4B
Campbell
Payne Ware
Draper
Baker
Murrain
Hullo there,
Here is the next instalment of PERVERSE poems. I’ll keep it brief today, and let these brilliant poems speak for themselves. I hope you enjoy them.
With warmest wishes,
Chrissy
PERVERSE Editor
(FYI if you are reading this on a mobile phone, it may be best to turn the phone sideways. Some of the poems are displayed as images, so make sure you’ve clicked “show images” at the top of this mail. If you'd rather read these poems in a PDF you can do so here, along with previous instalments of this issue.)
Susie Campbell
Mouse God
Make an orderly queue for meat and frozen, or a small pack of mince, any ok. One bag of frozen fillets, two of fish fingers, and a small bag frozen of broken fingernails. Secrets stir in the ice-drawer. This block of ice cream is not a revolver, we don’t know anything if mum’s the word. Smothered in ground coffee, our common ground is anything bloodstream might rhyme with. Mice droppings in the bakery aisle might ail us. Spare us, Apollo Smintheus, or squeak to us, an idiot dribble of sediment in the idiom. This is a contamination and a medication and our preference for plastic, a packet of mixed thin or chicken grills, any flavour of moccasin and a final, poisoned pigeon on the polished table.
Kat Payne Ware
BUTCHERING
Cai Draper
History
As in in. As in spire. As in going through the roof
at god. That’s just made up. Knowing nothing would be better
if certain people weren’t begging to die for capitalism.
When a ring changes finger the finger feels a hunger akin
to shadowless noon. Finger. As in fing. As in er.
As in engrossed with yourself in the pluck of disgust.
I used to work with a kid who’d attack then scream I hate myself.
His class teacher was a Spaniard with a pointy beard and bandy legs
who made the most delicious tortilla. Spaniard.
As in span. As in yard. As in rove the lengths of your garden
like an empire. Christopher Columbus had a strawberry mark
in the shape of America on the inside of his eyelid.
This is what made him sleep red.
Mania. As in main. As in ear. As in the bellicose framing of audio.
I tell my niece what is amazing about writing is it’s yours to do
what you will with and wonder how white that is.
Everybody understands better than white people that white people
need to understand themselves better. At the wedding in Marrakech
when Noor said to us Of course the white people are early
we regarded each other curiously
and almost as if we’d been practising our whole lives we said in unison
I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.
Tom Baker
Lunch
Jess Murrain
Shoot in four pieces
(1) The performance art piece: two white men experiment with a gun
The bullet wrenched through the flesh like a tractor-trailer on a freeway. Bruce was well chuffed. He relished the invitation to fire in the name of art especially since Chris was a friend he very much wanted to touch. The gallery ideal was 15ft away. A nip eliciting one drop of scratch, pining down the cuff of the limb, an unlaced ant on an ice-cream cone. It didn’t turn out that way. A very American aesthetic though because Chris had an arm muscle & a studio called the F Space down on fifth. Chris had been felt up by an expansion found lurking in the very early universe. It would become his most famous piece of wound. I too am shot some years later, at close range & tenderly waiting for my mother.
(2) The film version is a Western
I’m holstered riding air with Artex. My Smith & Wesson rubs close to our speed as we drop off our trail towards Dodge. Artex is tied to a dust post as I enter my butch kid kind of self. Settle with a whiskey inside & one eye is with the woman I love. We’ve been fucking in secret & so to greet openly would run the risk of discovery like being shot by a family member. Bulldagger tendencies & a quiet disposition means the director likes my work ethic. She will not let me drink real liquor in this scene.
(3) The day I’m shot
From a passing car window, it bites into my name. Married recently to rain the concrete hums of sugar-grit & oak. The hyacinths frame the outside of the Asda where I will fall on a street known for helium balloons shaped in the manner of thirty. The sky my hot iron rod, bright & white & laying me off like every bed sheet I will never again sleep under. My afro is stiffer than its usual cushion & an elderly woman called Maureen is running towards me. She forgets her arthritis, her swollen life, the urine down her thighs is no daytime priority since she must sway us by our Caribbean heads, hold us through the bars like the elephant does to Dumbo. I cry a bit & tell her the bullet that has landed in me was searching for my younger brother Jackson. His white neighbours are hunting him down. Except for VE Day when they shared fags. Drank lemonade.
(4) She rode a horse called Honey
On pavement we splay out. Maureen & I sidled beside little coffins of once spat-out chewing gum marks. An ice-lolly stick is fading in my rearview life. How very Margate of that stick to date beside my body I wish my mum was here I regret berating her for wearing her pyjamas whilst dropping me at the school gates don’t worry about it babe all parents hold their guilt by the scruff of the morning is what Mum said to me then lay the thought to rest & it’s natural to be embarrassed by the sight of your own blood your mother she’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes Maureen I say Maureen! my mum’s blonde freckles & sometimes dry hands she’ll be here soon baby don’ wurry she’ll be ridin’ she’ll be wearing pink pyjamas
Contributor Notes
Susie Campbell
https://susiecampbellwrites.wordpress.com
Susie Campbell is currently undertaking a research project on Gertrude Stein, spatial form and prose poetry at Oxford Brookes University. Her most recent publications are I return to you (Sampson Low, 2019) and Tenter (Guillemot Press, 2020).
Note on ‘Mouse God’:
“The starting point for this poem was shopping in the supermarket during the pandemic, and becoming aware of a heightening in the anxiety about contamination which surfaces periodically in and around our food industry. Inspired by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen, the poem draws on an actual shopping list given to me by my neighbours. Apollo Smintheus or Mouse Apollo is the aspect of the god associated with diseases and epidemics.”
Kat Payne Ware
https://twitter.com/katpayneware
Kat Payne Ware is a poet from Bristol, UEA Creative Writing MA graduate, and founder and editor of SPOONFEED, an online literary food magazine. Her debut pamphlet, THE LIVE ALBUM, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in July 2021.
Note on ‘BUTCHERING’:
“This poem is part of a pair of sequences investigating pig slaughter. It comes from Side B, ‘PRODUCTION’, which reverses the slaughterhouse process, denaturing the pork product back to what one agricultural economist calls the ‘meat raw material’ — i.e., the live pig. ‘BUTCHERING’ superimposes the capitalist jargon of slaughterhouse machinery catalogues onto the fragmented body, with the aim of illuminating the influence of economics on ‘natural’ human appetites.”
Cai Draper
Cai Draper is a poet from South London, living in Norwich. His work has been published in various magazines, journals and anthologies. He organises free poetry workshops at the Book Hive and online readings with Arts at the Assembly House.
Note on ‘History’:
“This poem came about through an email correspondence with great people-poets Mira Mattar and Ellen Dillon. Sheepishly we committed ourselves to sending each other a poem a day. Working from home meant I could only take snatches of time for writing, so I’d write a line or two, “work”, then return to add more throughout the day.”
Tom Baker
Tom Baker is a musician, writer, and advertising producer based in London. He has previously published poems in Belleville Park Pages, Eyot Magazine, and Salmon Poetry’s Cold Weather Anthology.
Note on ‘Lunch’:
“When you have a full-time job it’s not always possible to spend nine hours staring at a panther but you can still glance at things in your lunch break. The thing in the poem is a chair outside M&S on Southwark street. I wanted to play with disrupting the connection between narrative and image; some images demand attention that shouldn’t, some get lost, some aren’t there at all.”
Jess Murrain
https://twitter.com/JessMurrain
Jess Murrain is an inter-disciplinary creative whose poetry appears in Tentacular and is upcoming in Under the Radar and Field Notes on Survival: a Bad Betty anthology. Her wider practice includes artist moving image and film poetry. She is co-founder of Theatre with Legs, an experimental devised theatre company who are currently dreaming up an album of poetry and music to eventually stage. She lives in London.
Note on ‘Shoot in four pieces’:
“I wanted there to be space in this poem for a reader to orbit around some kind of disparate experience. Guns and the shooting of them is obviously the vehicle*. But what I felt evolved when writing this was that the narrative began to speak about love, family, harm and intimacy. How do we retain intimacy in a world where harm and fear is played out between us? Can the imagination lead us to a space where we can transform the harm we feel, remember and perpetuate?”
*(1) was based on Chris Burden’s 1971 performance piece ‘Shoot’.