Speaks directly and painfully, sharp images
‘Insomnia’ by Julie Stevens spoke to many voters, whether it was an anguish experienced only occasionally or bound up and endemic to a chronic condition; and, for this reason, this ‘compelling’, ‘visceral’ poem is the Pick of the Month for October 2021. Voters also remarked on the craft of the poem, its ‘deftly handled conversational tone’ and how it said so much with ‘precision and poise’.
Julie writes poems that sometimes reflect the impact MS has on her life. Her chapbook, Quicksand, was published by Dreich (Sept 2020) and her Stickleback pamphlet Balancing Act was recently published by Hedgehog Poetry Press (June 2021). Website: www.jumpingjulespoetry.com. Twitter @julesjumping
Insomnia
Night shakes hurt the most.
Firm hands strangle the life
out of sedate songs.
You’re awake
breathing the curse of noise,
as dark sniggers.
The hours clang,
trees thump the ground,
damp air sharpens knives.
Prickly reminders have lodged in bones,
ill words wrestle sore blood.
A bead of mourning rolls under skin.
You lie on this rack,
hear every rotten dream;
words swoop like snatching gulls.
Other voters’ comments included:
It describes Insomnia in such a powerful way
The poem’s imagery is convincing, haunting, and brave; it is so hard to capture/express physical illness/insomnia in language, make them palpable; and this poem makes the reader think about/ponder both, and more.
It is a compelling and evocative insight into her experience with insomnia which made me empathise with her situation – I was moved by her honesty
It’s just so evocative of the frustration of not being able to sleep. The imagery is so sharp and clearly defined.
Incredible poem that truly captures the anguish and torment of those small hours when you can’t sleep with such inventive, imaginative and vivid words. Julie plunges us deep into the experience. Wow.
Very powerful, resonated with me.
Julie is a natural, lifelong poet. She always sums up how I feel about my MS.
Very emotional
A visceral sense of discomfort vividly expressed.
Gives hope and help to sufferers and understanding to those lucky people who are fit and healthy.
Beautiful, powerful imagery that conveys so much in a short form. Haunting.
Simple words with strong meaning
Every word counts in this poem.
This piece was incredibly moving, relatable and the imagery perfectly fitting.
Powerful and personal
We may all suffer from it sometime.
Effect of pain expressed with such eloquence
Unbelievable bravery of honesty
Night shake hurts the most. As the poetry is very relatable and beautifully penned!
Julie Stevens poem Insomnia is beautiful and really is so descriptive and well written! She is inspirational.
It’s a poem that puts you right there; you feel just what it’s like to be struggling when you should be asleep
It stands out as well-crafted and restrained.
The insight and honesty!
Her poem is unique and it’s deep
She has been my inspiration and motivation for a long time. Her works had always lifted me up! So does this.
All the poems make their points but ‘Insomnia’ expresses some of the feelings we all have at various time whilst lying awake at night reflecting on our lives.
Because I know how this feels
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THE REST OF THE OCTOBER 2021 SHORTLIST.
Street-preacher by Zelda Cahill-Patten
She looks at me with that
fearsome oil-sheen in her
eyes, the weighty conviction
of milk-heavy gaze and breasts,
telling me (the spittle-flecked words
like Words made flesh) of her
Father, how he is unseen, felt
unstirring in the Godless air.
She is seized with her preaching
like a fist about the neck,
the knocks and blows of the world,
wonderfully inflated with FATHER.
I wish to tell her of my own faith,
of my own father who, like hers,
is a lack, a hole, an unfleshed thing,
something I must believe in, remember.
But there is a Rule — we do not talk
to street-preaching loon-women, dear.
We do not look in their
shockingly flammable eyes, their eyes
like cheap synthetic cloth that’s ripe for burning.
Zelda Cahill-Patten is a twenty-year-old university student from London. She is studying English Literature and has recently been awarded the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize for her sonnet ‘Pelias’.
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“GOTHS AREN’T BLACK” by Kat Holmes
BUT YOU’D STARE ANYWAY,
AND I CAN SMOKE TREE
BOP ON THE CORNER TO BLACK METAL
OR BASHMENT,
IN PLATFORM BOOTS OR NIKE BLAZERS
BECAUSE I AM STILL THE ONLY SPECTACLE
IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.
IT IS BRAIDS KNOTTED INTO NOOSES,
RINGS CAUGHT IN MY AFRO,
POISON FROM A PAPER-CUT MOUTH.
YOU SHOULD KNOW
I WANT TO ZACK FOX-UP YOUR DAY
SMACK THE TEETH OUT YOUR HEAD LIKE AIRPODS.
YOU EVER WONDER WHY BLACK GIRLS
NOD TO EACHOTHER IN PUBLIC?
BARE TEETH AND TOUCH ARMS?
IT’S BECAUSE WE KNOW SIS HAD
A HARD FUCKING DAY.
CRAMMED WITH PALE FACES
PINK FINGERS STARK BLANCHED WORDS.
SHE HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO BEAR YOU,
RAISE YOU BUT NOT HER VOICE, NOT HER FIST
THESE DAYS I WEAR ALL MY DARK ON THE OUTSIDE
LET HER KNOW THAT SHE DOESN’T HAVE TO
“SET HER FACE GOOD.”
BETTER TALK TO ME NICE OR DON’T TALK AT ALL
BECAUSE HELLO KITTY MIGHT SAY ACAB
BUT YOUR BOYFRIEND SAYS THE N-WORD.
MY MOTHER WAS THE ACE OF SPADES
AND PUNK WAS BORN BLACK,
DON’T GET STOMPED OUT
Kat Holmes is 23 and as per has no idea what’s going on. Follow her writing @katswritingabook.
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Origins by Tristan Moss
She would not have the mini bag
of Haribo, even though she loves them,
because they had been handed out
in her classroom for the birthday
of a boy she did not like.
She’s going to hold grudges
which eventually will hurt her,
or hold the origin of all things
above her wish to have them:
the type of person we will need
if the world is to be saved.
Tristan Moss lives in York with his partner and two youngish children. He has recently had poems published in London Grip, Snakeskin and Poems in the Waiting Room.
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Man-Made by Tré Ventour
For the victims and survivors of male violence and the system that enables it.
CW: rape, sexual violence, police brutality, genocide, racism.
Raised by West Indian matriarchs
I was taught by Black women about whiteness and patriarchy
where women throughout history had resisted, some non-violently
aside from Martin and Malcolm, there’s Claudette Colvin,
Fanny Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Rosa Parks
also my mother, grandmothers, and aunties
what school didn’t teach me
was that before Rosa boycotted the buses
by sitting down, she had already stood up as part of the NAACP
in the 1940s she was a rape investigator
specifically cases where white men had raped Black women
her biggest case and one of the biggest of that era
>was the 1944 Rape of Recy Taylor
an afterthought of chattel enslavement where rape was industrialised
so to properly discuss colonial histories, we must analyse
how this history is also gendered, as the lives of Black women, Indigenous women
still find themselves the butt of epistemic violence and misremembered
but cultures of gender discrimination
started way before colonisation (and prior)
with Jack the Ripper, the Stewart kings,
and the Tudors, like Henry VIII who had Anne Boleyn
and Catherine Howard killed
because they could not give him boys
razor blades patriarchy planted
in their hearts forcing women to ‘deal with it’
as teaching children that Henry was a sexist
does not sound so profound as ‘King of England’
or as honest as serial misogynist
where a woman’s worth is still written inside
school history textbooks that stigmatise
ladies of the court, where even queens
were raped as children, as teens
when monarchs sold their daughters to kings overseas
for every Henry VIII
there is a court of male advisors and friends
urging little lords to carry on these trends
food scientists will tell you that “one bad apple”
has the capability of spoiling the bunch,
with no accountability of the tree that bears strange fruit
Wayne Couzens abducted and kidnapped
Sarah Everard under the precarity of the Coronavirus laws
handcuffed her in broad daylight on a busy street
this is how police can operate without accountability
if they police the public, who polices them…
where male violence is endemic to society
the murders of Banaz Mahmood, Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa,
and other women and gender-diverse victims of male violence
is backed by centuries of patriarchy and misogyny
from violent policymaking to physical abuse,
gendered colonialism, and queens hanged in the noose
why do we say Witch Trials rather than femicide
asking for the 3.9 billion
and when I listen to half the Earth weep
patriarchy bleeds bouquets of winter roses
because as children, we are taught to fear witches
but not the male executioners that sourced wood and oil
nor the man-hands writing history, building pyres, setting fires
where women were brutalised at a vigil
and most women killed by men are at home
so it’s their partners or relatives
repeating history like a scratched record
where those that write the past also disappear
wrongdoings of the future, holding the hilt of the bloody axe
COVID lockdowns put men on curfew
but women have been curfewed for centuries
like state-sanctioned genocides of indigenous women
and as those who are Black and minoritised continue to be disrespected
by the police, by their partners, by social harm
it was the brutality at the Sarah Everard vigil that changed perspectives
I wonder if there’s a difference between
Black men marching for George Floyd,
whilst also watching other Black men perpetuate misogynoir
I wonder if there’s a difference between police that kill,
and the heroic officers watching their friends deploy justice
where women and gender-diverse victims
are buried like seeds, spirits left to sing in the dry earth
the saying goes “not all men”
the saying goes “just a few bad apples”
the saying goes “text me … if you get home.”
A proud Northamptonian: Tré Ventour is a freelance artist-educator, and thinker. His education work through lectures and workshops allows him to visit all types of institutions, including schools and universities in the subjects of Black history, anti-Black racisms, and whiteness. https://linktr.ee/treventoured
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Decision Made by Stephen Walrond
How to confuse your Daemons:
List your choices against numeric encodes.
Cut the paper to pieces and make a mosaic,
Slowly chew on each part, sip soda
To wash them down. Let them slosh on an ocean
Between continents of turmoil and insecurities, they’ll come
Upon the shores of your inner diocese,
Those who survive. Those who survived the noise
Of the seas will stand tall like comedians
Make you grin. It’s not choice by dice
But choice by your own demons.
If asked Stephen Walrond (@mertle8 on Instagram) would tell you he’s only been writing for a few years, performing far fewer. He’d say he does it for the love of form, and is inspired by the talented performers he sees baring their souls through this art.