Painted, spoken

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Poems 3

Kris Hicks

Poem


I climb inside the page. Pure white.

Something thicker than mist but less ominous


          heavier than snow but just as malleable. 

There’s an abundance of the word dark.


I wade through the letters. 

sometimes with ease.       other times with peril.


Stumbling on the italicisation of depression

I lean my weight against it. It creaks like an ancient tree.


Tipped off the edge of a sentence 


poverty cushions the blow, 


                                                       bounces me into hunger.


Some question

is swirling

in a cesspool 

of notes, 

desperate 

to be freed. 


Is it a surprise that the page makes harsh words kind?


Crashing on the sofa of a room with peeling walls 

stench of cigarette smoke baggies and cut straws litter the floor 

nowhere else to go so easily erased. 

  

I stay anyway    headtorch bright among the white and dark

stalking some Delphian creature    until I startle upon it    blade in my hand

rabid with readiness to fashion a fur coat    sink teeth into its meat.


To be a hunter must there always be something to hunt?


Does a mirror still work in the dark?

Caroline Maldonado

One to one to one to one


they can accrete inside you                 griefs

after months          years

lying dormant


prompted by the latest loss

the first wakes up 

another recognises the call 


huddled together they 

shift about 

scratch themselves 


and raise the others from their slumbers


they swarm and scurry

between breastbone 

and spine


uncatchable 

unnameable 

each bearing their own 


sac of pain their own               accusation 

then they bind together

and the accretion begins

 


James McGonigal

Living Through It

 

From skull to gut to calves

it takes its course the way ditchwater

runs after the bend of its road.

 

An avant-garde composer

is conducting your dreams – night music

for ten-pin bowling quartet.

 

How long will it last?

Ditchwater sunk two inches deeper into silt,

that’s one sign.

 

When you wake at five

and walk out in the garden to discover a frog

lounging against the cool lip

 

of the garage floor,

and looking exactly like a spray-tanned scrotum

although you’ve never seen one,

 

that’s another sign.

But only that you’re still not altogether

through the worst.


About these poets

Kris Hicks is from Cardiff, writing mostly about queer identity and mental health.  James McGonigal is a poet, editor and biographer based in Glasgow.   Caroline Maldonado’s three translations are published by Smokestack Books. One, Isabella, includes her own poems. 

All these poems appear in Painted, spoken 34 (2021).

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