Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (2)

This is where King Alfred beached the Danes,
cut channels in the Lea, created the marsh,
and, post-battle, post-hot-scorched summer,
post heady festival of loafmass, gave them over
kindly to the serfs as common land, to graze
their cattle and tackle the unshodden horses.
Land too thick for crops, too wet for housing,
land wept cunningly from warfare, strategy,
pre-planned hard labour of soldiers, slaves,
serfs, was handed over, piecemeal, between
August and March, as feeding space, lambing
land, recreation ground, where people came
from the parishes of Homerton and Hackney
to break the bread, to celebrate the harvest.

Michael McKimm - The Lammas Lands (1)

Six Poems for Hackney Marsh

What I shall miss is the smell at the end
of the street, the sound of water gushing
under Hackney - marsh-water, Lea Valley
tribulations, all that's dank and dead in
hidden liquid: history mainly, flooded
plains scuttling Viking warships, sewer-tales
and monies made from bodies, layers of clay
and chalk and once-crisp water, drinkable
by seamen down at Limehouse. If you think
of water as the thing that builds a town
you can't imagine living where the river
doesn't run, even if that river is a stream
that swells with rainfall, coming up from drains
and forever whispering beneath your feet.

=====

Gists and Piths will be publishing 'The Lammas Lands' in six consecutive installments. Tune in tomorrow for section two. . .

Peter Larkin - Stone Forest, 4

Fossil Forest at Lulworth Cove by Marilyn Lowe

Algae cushions sit that button-hole, as if blind puncture were put to the punches of how flushed-out trees point an undiffraction: pulled limbs are now paws in stone, clawlessly rasping at nest. Bone beds due vertical root-fealty pulverize hollows of shaft in accretive rock. Given such shallow knolls free of primordial root-jam, this contusion of absence is for priming sedimentary verticals and launching forward the stopped burrows of secondary support.



Forest itself a string
lacking interval, final
incursion of the stone
of belonging





Banked in mound, absence has no runway except in scarcity of scoured relief, an incubation pillow refers presence: how loss scooped at a cumulus of instrumentally yoked abandonments. Spongy dependence went rigid at this incorporate latter bowl, whose parafidelity won’t quit defeat-treads retrapping the sieves of site.



Mounds of record
like a nascent super-
structure ramp the
desiderables of scarce
counter-sift





Free salt swimmings sapped trunk and then baste in wrap mouths of ruinables cast onto enduring particulars of the non-negotiation. Sustain a stripping from site, deep structure calls for no strapping in the empty bowl. So forest, once fossilized, was never a gallery of conversion but a witness traversing preventions with all retention intact but disappeared.



Towers of spongiform
bone spin what vacates
in socket along the
zero held association





Tufa formation mounding unique to tree-crown like some modern jacket of the groin: this collar repeats from stock the hollow callus where a tree loses its own branch. The re-pleat snakes the leaves off forest cover with trans-offerable precision, or same ground blames for its badges of lesion. Not cemented to base but folded for inland edge of breach, the primal trunk insertion: hollow sump encombs a ground filling with horizon.



A petrifying spring
of forest absorption,
in saline paces go
integral inscriptors:
occupy strata out of
posts vertical with
reguiding the absence





Algae by the colonial unit courted by trunks soon to be grounded in brine. As secondary mould the rampart is outclan. Defeat primaries took for their reproof any arisen subsidence sounding a razed rod-zone, what phantom spires sitefully elate. How the hollow sockets, sensing open bowl, conjugate the travelling root-sendings of perforate surround.



Algal in mat will
wind tree-fatings
through the suck
of wild tunnels

of attachment:
never hollow enough
socket if it lack
swirl of a place’s
choppy festoons
of prehension

though root is barrier-
pierced tufa goes carrier-
hipped: lifts with
empty fore-cages
to an horizon
its overwhelming

======


Peter Larkin is Philosophy & Literature Librarian at Warwick University, with research interests in ecocriticism and in postmodern theology. His recent collections include Leaves of Field (Shearsman, 2006) and Terrain Seed Scarcity (Salt, 2001).

"You're a Monster!" - Three Poems by Charlotte Geater

Swollen Lip

I think, fights, steady in my seat
lining up the contents of my pencil case:
HB pencil, 2B, H, 3B, 6B (no lead), red,
a fountain without a cartridge, dry,
pencil sharpenings, blue, three small highlighters,
rubber, sharpener, yellow biro, blue biro,
black biro, a red pen that I stole
I’m thinking of punching someone in the eye.

I write a note to myself in red –
no, yellow, yellow’s better, harder
to read. I write

            and you’ve got to stay
       peaceful, remember
       to always be a pacifist

I think that’s what always did it.
I’d remember the and, but not what came before
I’d have a handful of change to give
a customer in the pasty shop

        and I’d want to smack her
       with the money, the metal.
       No, I never fought with anyone.

I tell people how I feel, sometimes.

The Hairdresser's Boy

“You’re a monster!” he said, because I cut off his hair without asking for permission.

“You’re a monster,” I said, “look at your hair, it’s all over the place.”His hair had cascaded down his neck and throat and sat in clumps on his collar.

“You’ll want to wash,” I said, but I took him to the zoo where we fed elephants and giraffes with unripe fruit because we just wanted to make them hurt.

“I hate the baby animals,” he said, “Don’t they make you want to vomit?”

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked then brushed his hair from his eyes.

The hairdresser’s boy made me take him home and his Dad called me a savage, said

“Do not ever handle scissors again, do not ever touch them ever again,” but I? I wouldn’t listen.

Cautionary Tales

“Condoms are like barbed wire fences for sperm,” you said, “they’re effective when they haven’t been around for too long.”

“Things are different now,” I answered, “sex is boring, one of many dreary things that the media is attempting to sell us. Advertisements make me hate contraception. I want to confound expectations.”

“Do you remember,” you asked, “kissing me through the school fence? My lips bled as I walked home and I didn’t speak to you for the rest of the year.”

“No,” I said, “you have confused me with someone else.”

Charlotte Geater was a winner in the Foyle Young Poets competition in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and a runner up in the Christopher Tower in 2006 & 2008. She is on the editorial staff for Pomegranate magazine.

Nine Arches Press presents Shindig! @ Kozi Bar, Warwick

On Tuesday August 19th 2008, Nine Arches Press presents:

Shindig!

Doors open 7.30pm

Kozi Bar, Market Place, Warwick.

Come celebrate the launch of our first issue of Under the Radar with poets, wine and song.

Special guest poets:

Jane Holland - Warwick's very own poet laureate

Simon Turner - Leamington based new modernist poet

Matt Nunn - Birmingham's finest poetic export

Join us for the first ever Shindig! event in Warwickshire - a new kind of poetry event, a veritable feast of music and the spoken word. Gists and Piths hopes to see you all there.

http://ninearchespress.com/events.html

'SCHMIG' - Two Poems by Chris McCabe

Tabs


Genuinely peculiar or just trying to be?

Dial 3 for genuine

______________________________________________________


lardon : pig erection

______________________________________________________


so what’s the closest thing
to the sea, to happen,
between any of us?

______________________________________________________


Put the stones in the empty rose bottle to do the Bez-maracas shake. This is what happens when you hit 30 you said : just throw it away. Look : the dry stones stick in the still-wet neck. Recycles Box – just place it there – to take it where the glass breaks back. Can the stones be made again? The wine inside & the air in my hair felt nice. Just freaky-dance I said, to the woman of 26. Don’t be such a miserable cow

______________________________________________________


REMINDER

memory loss
(or do you prefer
the one
about Memory Loss?)

______________________________________________________


correct use of language is about context : you would never call a man who had murdered a woman a ‘ladykiller’. yet the definition is accurate & in some way deferential to the victim –

police said they were looking for a ladykiller aged between 35 & 40

______________________________________________________


They tried to market the other side of the river as ‘northbank’ but that’s how people already knew it, due to the absence of what makes the south appealing. And you can’t market absence

______________________________________________________


Poseuring for photos inflates the sense of self until you don’t recognise your own image. Then you eat porridge.

______________________________________________________


(work okay today
quite quiet)
[ CONTENT ]
(get stuff done)

______________________________________________________


Shovel-loads of horseshit across the film set. Who would want to act across that? Just loads of it. Shitloads.

______________________________________________________


The quartz fly landed on the ESCAPE key. Made my teeth CAPS grit. Knee joints LOCK. Made me sick. Viscerals SHIFT.

______________________________________________________


so what’s the closest thing
under one roof, to the sea,
to these two
who love like this




Free Gift



Before bed she said : Have you seen the slug?
I answered : I’ve already flossed. If I had not
misheard I would have offered to remove it.

The morning brought a red teapot of hope in the post.
Its aroused spout stuck out of the bubblewrap.
If a teapot could be sexual, if a teapot could be socialist.

We thought a baby was either hungry or happy
but inbetween he made a noise called SCHMIG
like a jester preparing a gig for the King of Tourettes.

We had to teach him that moral dilemmas
dreg the spontaneous & here was a case exercise:
I’d lost a nail in the cornflakes trying to scoop the free gift –

I’ve found the plastic prize, but should we tell anyone?










Chris McCabe published his first book, The Hutton Inquiry (Salt) in 2005. A book called Zeppelins (Salt) is out now in hardback and a pamphlet of ludic elegies called The Borrowed Notebook (Landfill) will be published later this year.