The Poets Puglia are six women from the UK who met up in an online workshop and, as one of them explains, “Just over a year ago I responded to a message on a forum in which Louise said she was traveling out to her trull in Italy and did anyone fancy making the trip a poetry retreat? Six of us went – articulate, self-motivated women of a certain age’ who hadn’t previously met… what could possibly go wrong?! We had an amazing and productive time. We’ve since met up again for a writing weekend at Susan’s oast house.”
Angi Holden
Laura Larchbourne
Mandy Macdonald
Maggie Mackay
Finola Scott
Susan Castillo Street
Angi Holden
THAT SUMMER
Exams over, papers closed, we sauntered
through lemonade afternoons, read
dog-eared copies of The Mersey Beats,
fingers sticky with fresh-squeezed oranges.
We listened to Ummagumma and Dark Side
on his father’s Bang & Olufsen, abandoned
our virginity between polycotton sheets,
mouths stained with raspberries.
Waited for results.
KNEADING
Forehead pressed against the knot-holed door,
the boy strains on tiptoe, watches the heave and turn of dough.
She reaches forward, muscles tense; sweat dribbles
down her neck, across her chest, into her cleavage.
She wipes a floury hand across her brow, resumes her kneading;
tonight in the leavened bread he’ll taste her salt.
OFFICE BOOK CLUB
Caught between the pages of the book
you loaned me, a lover’s note,
the paper flecked with hasty ink.
Now when you gather up your Radley bag,
close your door and head for home –
your pin-striped suit uncreased,
you blouse still crisp and white –
I see the tangle of your legs in his,
the tumble of your loosened hair,
I hear your sudden cry, muffled
in the seasalt sweat around his neck.
TO THE GUY I MIGHT HAVE MARRIED
Thank you for the note slipped under my door.
I found it in the morning; my fingers trembled
as I unfolded it. Even now I can see your writing,
that familiar rolling script in royal blue ink.
I called by, but heard a guy’s voice
so didn’t knock. Sorry to have missed you.
I’m sorry too; sorry that you had to come back.
I hope the resits went well. Your approach
to physiology was always more practical
than academic. You would have made
a good teacher back then, before Ofsted.
I wonder how you coped when schemes of work
became more important than physical prowess
and looking the part on the cricket pitch.
You will always be the most beautiful guy
I ever slept with. Know that, at least.
I hope he is kind to you – a better lover
than I was. I hope you are happy.
He was, on both counts. Still is,
all these years later. And yes, I am.
Happier than if you’d knocked that night
and found me alone. Wasn’t I the accepter
of apologies and excuses, the dispenser
of second chances? Always the faithful type.
I hope you found the girl you thought
you’d found in me: the homemaker, the mother,
the teacher’s wife. I hope you are happy.
Know this too: I feel no malice. For all the pain,
I feel only gratitude. On that cold October night
you heard a guy’s voice and turned away.
AFTER THE DINNER PARTY*
A triangular table, seating thirty nine.
The scientific, the artistic,
the intellectual, all women gathered
together to break bread, share ideas.
Boudica and Elizabeth, strong queens both
in a man’s world.
Sappho and Dickinson, poets linked
by words, separated by centuries.
The astronomer, the medic,
the abolitionist.
And from the shadows, neither
on the guest list, two sisters.
Mary, hungry for this feast
of wisdom, perches on the table’s lip,
leans in to hear Woolf discuss
the influence of Modernism with O’Keefe.
While lingering at the margins, knowing
she’ll be left with the washing-up,
Martha worries about the gravy already
drying in the plates’ labial folds.
* The Dinner Party by feminist artist Judy Chicago
MATRIX
(after Firmament by Antony Gormley)
Hold fast
get a grip
each hollow cell grasps each
fears the gaps, the confined
spaces
that can’t be bridged, clutch
at top
soil
Metal filaments shine
Fragments take strength
from neighbours
All angles, different faces,
find their core
deep
Distance defines
breast to mouth to mouth
kneeling to suck
earth
connected and separate
The sum greater
MATRIX was previously published at Jupiter Artland.
Angi Holden is a mature post-grad student and teacher of creative writing. Environmental and family landscapes are key to her work, much of which explores relationships and identity. Her poetry and fiction has been published in a range of online and print anthologies for both children and adults and in 2015 she co-edited the National Flash Fiction Day anthology.
List of Poets
Louise Larchbourne
GOING
Making your eyes spears, you bring me down.
Hand over hand hot soft we climb the ladder of we,
the ladder disappears we are fire eating each other with everything and grace
such detailed grace, the signatures of flame.
Eyes raising eyes, mouth mouth, belly belly long ago your warm wet cock became my engine
air air, two voices drawing signs in it a long way off;
In the fire I have become a new,
intelligence
unknown before,
different than youandme, but is
becoming only light.
And then.
We go back clean,
our bodies boats at anchor
all but still.
Louise Larchbourne is also an actor, an editor, and a sometime lexicographer. First published a long time ago in the West Midlands, as a ‘local poet’ in Birmingham she explored the distinctions between poetry for reading and poetry for performance. She was one of the poets invited to contribute to the new anthology For Jeremy Corbyn. One of her poems is included in the collection The Very Best of 52 and another in the newly published Oxford Backroom Poets’ anthology, Infinite Riches. She is on the editorial team of The Fat Damsel, and runs ‘Ekphrasis Poetry at the Museum’, a series of themed readings in situ of selected work inspired by exhibits at the Ashmolean in Oxford. She has a trullo in Puglia.
Back to the Ladies
Mandy Macdonald
IN A DREAM OF FALLING
endlessly repeated
i slip
helpless down the scooped col, smooth
as though you had been shaped by glaciation, curving
just there
between throat-hollow and shoulder
delicate and immense, nothing to break my
fall
if you would let me stop, i might
curl up there and sleep
like wildcat or foxcub in your hollows, or set out
(tiny, brave in the distance)
a cataloguer of mirages and treacherous slopes
across your skin’s trackless dunes
but there is no stopping
no journey, no shelter, no exquisite
calligraphy of footprints
just the fall for ever
HOLIDAY ROMANCE
it’s like this
quite simple really
i fancied you
i thought i did
at any rate i couldn’t forget the movement
of your hands on my back, my
cunt & your simultaneous
mouth travelling my whole landscape
the way you came up over my
body like the sun
but then i knew i didn’t fancy you
just the way you made love
or possibly the finegrained
hardness of you, like the
white & rose & russet marble stratified
above the beach we swam at
maybe i did fancy you
but i don’t like you
i’m sure about that, just
as i’m sure
you don’t like me
even though we did fuck
3 times in the tent on the wasteground on the dunes
in the hearing of the sea
hard & passionate
& long
scratching the fresh sunburn
nice you having a dress on
(what were you thinking of?)
& your hands under it
& my spine lifting to meet
you as though suspended
from the ridgepole
away in the sunstruck distance
the wild dogs
keening
UNREPENTANT
You were in the house with her
that night
still my husband, still my house;
I, an exile,
drawn back home after closing time, alone,
and there was a red light, for god’s sake,
a red light in the front bedroom
(how was I to know
it was the children’s nightlight?)
That rusty bike seat was in the garden,
among the weeds, bound for the tip.
I saw the red light.
I saw red.
I threw the thing. The window shattered.
The noise was tremendous.
I fled round the corner, triumphant,
raging, laughing,
crowing, howling.
The next day you phoned:
‘The weirdest thing happened last night: someone
chucked that old bike seat through the front window.’
‘Really? That’s terrible! Did they break in?’
Didn’t miss a beat.
AN INVITATION
To what shall I invite you, sweetest friend?
To dine? Ah, I remember, long ago,
banquets at one another’s houses, when
we’d make a feast of anything at all.
Beneath the kitchen light-bulb’s goat-eyed glare
we sliced and stirred and tasted, side by side;
your wrists, escaping from unbuttoned cuffs,
were pale as pearl, and nearly broke my heart.
Well, this is not the love I wanted then,
bedazzled by your beauty and your youth.
Now patient time has taught my passion sense,
has schooled me to distinguish love from love.
Let’s drink, then, to the serene love of friends,
Which weathers pain and tears, and never ends.
Mandy Macdonald is proud to belong to the honourable company of those the English journalist Oliver Thring has memorably called ‘deranged poetesses’ (#derangedpoetess). She is Australian and lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, trying to make sense of the 21st century. Music, poetry, good wine and gardening keep her sane. Her poems appear in print and online, for instance in Outlook Variable (Grey Hen Press, 2015), Poetry Scotland, The Fat Damsel, Snakeskin, Triadae, the Maligned Species Project, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted in the 2015 Wells Poetry Festival. The rest of the time, she sings.
Back to the Ladies
Maggie Mackay
CHILI PEPPER
Hernán Cortés gasps.
His tongue vibrates in the liquid’s pulse;
fluted red, pepper slices burst over his mouth.
The lobes swell, stuffed with gunpowder fury
–their flames scream flamenco swirl
the swell of her hips
on Spanish nights, long ago,
the heave of jasmine and orange…
He explodes. Heat, heat, so deep.
As she stamps, knuckles hit tables in time,
the rhythm explodes and peaks;
membranes soaked in garlic oil
yield fleshy parts fuelled with rapid-fire
staccato cracks of Palomino whip.
A full circle skirt spins, has him reeling.
Ole! Jaleo! Then pedicured fingers strum, strum,
hum, finish him off in the stomach with a punch
fiercer than the peppers of the Caucasus.
THE HOPPERS, NEW YORK CITY
You pull me up from my painting stool,
maddening woman with your splash of noise.
The music gets to me, so I cave in.
Three times we dance around this tiny space
in silent swirls and turns and contra checks
to the frivolous swish of this Strauss waltz
past piles of cans and coal and the unheated stove,
my hand splayed on your narrow back, and flexed.
You are surprised I’m this light on these feet
and your fine legs, made famous by my art,
let me lead, bird-wife, three tiger hiss,
drive us, fixed in close circular motion,
our fights parked up, this truce unspoken.
Damn.
Maggie Mackay is a bravehearted Scot and a final year MA poetry student at Manchester Metropolitan University with work in various print and online publications including Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Bare Fiction, Obsessed with Pipework, The Fat Damsel and Three Drops from a Cauldron.
Back to the Ladies
Finola Scott
AVALANCHE
I fall loosen
slide in
to you let go
toppling in
to your heat slipping
reckless sinking
my softness meets
solid you melts
helpless I don’t know where
youbegin&iend
cocooned in our cave
I dissolve
drifts of desire engulf
I’m buried blinded
in you
TRADE DESCRIPTION
Bathing alone
I finish the rich gel you bought for a treat.
At first the velvet liquid froths.
For one sweet moment it caresses.
Perky bubbles blink and wink
then plop and burst sagging
sticky wetness on my legs.
The golden shower of oil, once
caring and nurturing like you,
has lost its gentle touch.
It fails to smooth rough patches
or tease shy nipples.
I shiver and let the spray wash the silk away
no longer savouring the pampering.
Too late I realise
The label promises more than we did.
TAPAS
What to choose?
Lush moist bites
Where to start?
Hot spicy morsels
Then what?
Velvety smooth nibbles
What next?
Salty treats
spread for our delight
pleasures for the sharing
Amuse bouche
Sweet nothings
Silky titbits
Amuse toi
Flavours savoured
Amuse moi
Glaswegian Finola Scott’s poems and short stories are widely published in anthologies and magazines including The Ofi Press, Hark, The Lake. She is pleased to be mentored this year on the Clydebuilt Scheme by Liz Lochead, Scotland’s Makar. A performance poet, she is chuffed to be a slam-winning granny.
Back to the Ladies
Susan Castillo Street
TARANTELLA
We walk down to the village
and into a different world,
six ladies of a certain age,
stroll through a rainbow arch of neon light
Crowds swirl. A circle forms.
The men and women grab our hands
and sweep us in. We whirl
in tarantella wheel,
feel the percussion in our bones,
throw caution to the winds,
bare pale white necks to grinning moon,
reach avid for bright bursts of stars.
Susan Castillo Street is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita, King’s College, University of London. She has published three collections of poems, The Candlewoman’s Trade (Diehard Press, 2003), Abiding Chemistry, (Aldrich Press, 2015), and Constellations (Three Drops Press, 2016), as well as several scholarly monographs and edited anthologies. Her work has appeared in Southern Quarterly, Prole, The High Window, Ink Sweat & Tears, Messages in a Bottle, The Missing Slate, Clear Poetry, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Foliate Oak, The Yellow Chair Review, and other journals and anthologies.