Family. Food. Heritage. Continuity. Love
A comment that says it all and, after a closely fought contest, was almost certainly the reason that Lalah-Simone Springer pipped her rivals at the post with her poem ‘Dasheen’ becoming the Pick of the Month for July 2022.
Voters also loved the beauty of the poem, how it appealed to the sense; they could ‘taste’ ‘feel’ and ‘smell’ the food, the poem itself. It was comforting, heart-warming, intimate.
Lalah-Simone Springer is a poet and speculative fiction writer from Dagenham, Essex. Their debut poetry collection, ‘An Aviary of Common Birds’, will be released by Broken Sleep Books in August 2023. They also long-listed for the Merky New Writers Prize in 2021 and were part of the first Rewrite Academy cohort in 2020 – a developmental programme designed to support Black Women and Women of Colour writers who are keen to finish their works-in-progress.
Lalah has been published in Ink Sweat & Tears, She magazine, Onyx Magazine, GOAT magazine, Marble Poetry Magazine and on the ANTHEMS podcast. Previous collaborations as a performance artist have been staged at The Barbican and Whitechapel Gallery.
She has asked that her £20 ‘prize’ be donated to Imkaan, which is a is a UK-based, black feminist organisation dedicated to addressing violence against women and girls. https://www.imkaan.org.uk/
Dasheen
Tuesday: a mountain of rice, one roast potato, two pieces of fried fish with bones and skin softened through oil, draped in sour rings of pepper and onion, home made coleslaw, tea.
The plate is piled high and hot before you even take off your shoes:
you may not wash up plates,
you may not serve them first.
This is how my grandparents show their love.
Nanny’s lips purse while she spoons mounds of rice-and-peas onto the plate
Her studied silence except to ask: ‘Is this enough?’
I never want as much as she tries to give me.
I make myself small in the face of their love,
I do not know how to ask for more.
All these things are true at once.
Thursday: chalky boiled yam, dasheen, potato. Wilted lettuce and fresh sliced white onion, tinned tuna with hot pepper sauce, salad cream, white pepper, salt. And tea.
“How much you want Sam?”
They stand over his plate together,
Her metal spoon sings as it scrapes mash from the cast-iron pot.
Her soft black woolly hat meets his thinning salt and pepper pate as they look down.
After 50 years together, they do not always need to say thank you.
Sometimes their outlines blur together.
Sunday: Roast chicken, roast potatoes, rice-and-peas, macaroni cheese, salad, home made coleslaw, mixed vegetables, hard food.
We crowd around the brightly covered table on Boxing Day, we 30.
We jostle, slipping plantain into aunties plate, stealing chicken skin and slopping gravy,
but we fill up the young ones first.
Their plates are piled high and hot – may they never need to ask.
Voters comments included:
such rich, real painting-with-language
I felt the smell, while reading it, and then cried a bit.
It gave me warm nostalgic feeling. Writing with simplicity which gave space for one to feel the environment the piece was written in.
It brings back my memories of Jamaican family dinners, especially my aunties. Plate full of food, good times.
It’s visceral representation of the precious ordinary, so easily overlooked.
So heartfelt! Love the imagery too
Food being a symbol of love, in a family that doesn’t always say it, really resonates with me
I could smell, taste and feel the poem ALL at the same time. It was the most heart-warming read for me and left me with a big smile. What a beauty it is to end a poem with a prayer.
Lalah’s methodology of writing for me is reality. Love it.
Resonates so closely with me. Recently lost a Grandparent and they taught me that food is love
Their poem is visceral and makes me hungry!
The Caribbean notes. Very nostalgic.
Cinematic, evocative and poignant af.
Simply evokes memories sounds of my background. And resonates so vividly the grandparents.
Beautiful, evocative work from a very talented poet.
Beautiful meditations on culture and familial love
It’s Da-bomb
I was transported by the poem , it’s as if I was there. I could almost taste the food. Caribbean life .”Wonderful “
“I make myself small in the face of their love” – this line!! Felt it in my soul, beautiful work
Love the imagery and rhythms. Resonates after reading.
Is very rare a poem uses a well known Caribbean food within its title and original
It’s evocative of body and soul being nourished by food and the warmth of family
The imagery is comforting.
Beautiful description and very relatable to me and a Caribbean audience
I enjoyed the descriptions of the universal connection between love and food
Beauty. Truth.
The story touches on the unspoken intimacy of family and food.
I could taste this poem!
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THE REST OF THE JULY 2022 SHORTLIST
For the boy playing with silk scarves at 2:25am by Troy Cabida
here’s something to wear
to cover over the head and the ears
for those who come up to you
with questions that sound like threats
here’s something to wear
if you’ve ever needed
to hide the throbbing
of your temples after the surge
of the homophobe who’s not hating
just playing devil’s advocate
here’s something to wear
around the neck or under a shirt collar
a queer alternative to a tie
if you want to look like anarchy
while downing whiskey with a group of boys
flexing silver chains the size of biceps
Troy Cabida (he/him) is a Filipino poet from south-west London. His debut pamphlet, War Dove, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2020. He currently works as a Library Assistant for the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre.
*
The Act by Anna Chorlton
Summer began with a bike,
its frame painted red,
one thin wheel.
The focus was balance,
hours of clinging to walls and doors;
fences and fingertips, pigtails and ears.
It became about a clown;
greasepaint mouth sadways
striped dungarees, floppy bowtie,
hair a woollen orange.
I rose an act
balancing on my one-wheeler.
rolled across the stage,
arms outstretched; head strained forward
a hunting buzzard, eyes ringed with white.
I listened to a rippling about the marquee,
the sound of a Circus crowd,
laughing at the unicycling clown
laughing at me.
Anna Chorlton‘s poems have been published in Atlanta Review (spring,2020) Wild Court (winter, 2021) The Dawntreader (winter and spring, 2021). She is author of Cornish Folk Tales of Place, The History Press, (2019). www.annachorlton.com@anna_chorlton
*
Into the Orkney Sky by Adam Horovitz
That spring, I learned how to fly.
Willed my small arms hollow,
thrust them into a long coat
and made wings as the wind rose
from plaintive selkie cry to fury’s register.
I spread myself gull-like
into the sea’s salt-feathered breath,
swallowed the scent of seaweed,
rotted rope, oil and fresh-caught fish.
Oh, it was so easy, flying.
I laughed as I rose.
My high voice, overcome,
was carried beyond islands
out into the great grey void.
Feet became strangers, unfixed.
No longer craved soil or stone.
I flailed in an ecstasy of drowning
a few inches above the world.
In a moment of skyward freedom
unhooked from fear or falling
I forgot my friend Phil. Abandoned
all thought of the goat kid snug in his arms.
My step-father vanished rapidly.
Even the face of my mother faded
as I rose toward the point where sun
tore feebly at a caul of cloud, birthing
choppy stains of greenish blue below
until beneath me I saw pasture
bound in by shrinking fence;
heard the clamour of grass
pressed unwilling into prayer.
Its song, like gravity, lured me home.
I landed three yards down the lane,
blood astonished by contact, pressure.
Spread my ragged wings once more.
Dared the weather not to change.
Adam Horovitz is a Gloucestershire-based poet, performer and editor. His first full collection,Turning (Headland, 2011), was followed by Little Metropolis (a CD of poetry and music commissioned by the Stroud Fringe Festival in 2015) and The Soil Never Sleeps in 2018. He is one of Ledbury Poetry Festival’s Versopolis poets, and was poet in residence for Herefordshire and the Pasture-fed Livestock Association. He is one of 10 poets to appear on Cerys Matthews and The Hidden Orchestra’s album We Come From the Sun (2021). Love and Other Fairy Tales was recently published by Indigo Dreams Publications.
*
Wild Years by Alex Vellis
And so give me wild summers.
Give me long, soft nights
and give me streets that snake, and steal, and grow dark.
And so give me campfire lungs.
Give me hot skin
and give me well-read books that belch, and spit, and grow light.
And so give me gentle kisses.
Give me tight jam-jar lids
and give me hand-drawn maps that leaf, and lose, and find nothing.
And so give me bloody knees.
Give me reading glasses
and give me late dinners that cool, and feed, and find bellies.
And so give me home
and give me here
and give me fruit, and forests, and fields.
And give me hope.
And give me hands
and give me you, and youth, and years.
Alex Vellis is a Greek-British poet, producer, and playwright from Canterbury, Kent. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Kent and has published five books through Whisky & Beards Publishing.
*
Yearnings by Julia Webb
StJohns won’t let the crowlight in, only sparrowbeams and antdark. StJohns is over-alive with noise – day and night, it never stops. Owlish stuffs her ears with balled-up toilet paper, buries her head under the sofa cushions. Dadward’s music is boom, booming in the speaker corners of every room except the kitchen, where Ma is crashing pots around to the scratchy voices of Radio 1. Tawny is engrossed in some kind of war, lining up infantry on the living room carpet, while LongEars clunks through the TV channels – hoping some interesting programme will magically appear.
StJohns, StJohns,
the shouting, thumping thrill of it,
the smoke and damp and fug of it,
the bread and meat and cake of it,
the higgledy-piggledy shelves of it.
NO crowlight here – though Owlish yearns for it the way she yearns for the shush-shush quiet places, the places she runs to after school – the friends’ houses stuffed full of delicious silences, the needle-soft whisper of the pinewoods, but not the big-forest-dark beyond the factories, no, that quiet is too-too sinister, too slow – though she knows in her heart that it might be a better place to find the lights and darks of her crow.
Julia Webb‘s third collection The Telling was published by Nine Arches Press in 2022. She is a poetry mentor and editor for Lighthouse. She is currently working on a series of collages called ‘Flower Heads’.