Evocative, timely and poignant
Jenny Pagdin’s ‘Before the market town with the Pepper Pot building’ resonated with so many of you. You loved that you knew the place but understood, too, the different feelings that it could provoke, felt the sense of not quite belonging. All this in a poem that was simply beautiful.
Jenny’s pamphlet Caldbeck was published by Eyewear in 2017, shortlisted for the Mslexia pamphlet competition and listed by the Poetry Book Society. Longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation prize 2018, and second prize winner in the Café Writers 2021 competition, she has work published with Smoke, Wild Court, Magma, The Stand, Finished Creatures, Ambit and an Emma Press anthology. Her first collection manuscript is being considered by publishers – like the pamphlet it tells the story of her postnatal psychosis. She is a graduate of Oxford University and holds a Creative Writing MA from the University of East Anglia. You can find more of Jenny at her website jennypagdin.co.uk or on Twitter, @PagdinJenny
Before the market town with the Pepper Pot building
and the concrete bus station and its standing water,
we were Hampshire, Beirut and Freetown
with neat shelves of Vimto, ivory, Milupa,
of Milton, tie-dyes, pink almonds and sugarcane.
I picture my poor legs straddling the continents
and note that I come missing certain accessories:
my birthright languages, my dowry earrings,
my baptismal faith, etiquette,
history and certainty of acceptance.
I was born into do well, say grace, press your clothes,
into an English market town hawking
wolf fleeces and salwar kameez
where the girls drink spritzers and the men, pints
and I’ve tried, I’ve tried to leave.
Voters’ comments included:
I really like the way it evokes a feeling of not belonging, of being between cultures, but how what it evokes is also so universal – it could refer to class or regionalism too.
A strong depiction of restlessness, of shifting sands and a search for a place to make one’s own.
I love all the recognisable details
Unique and captivating!
I read it over and over, and loved it
Reminiscent of a place called home.
So evocative of different places and a sense of multiplicity
Beautiful writing, important subject matter
Because it really resonated with me and moved me.
Thought provoking and beautiful
I enjoyed them all but this seemed to resonate with me the most.
A strong depiction of restlessness, of shifting sands and a search for a place to make one’s own.
It evokes feelings of how one’s background and physical location can affect one’s sense of identity in society.
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THE REST OF THE SEPTEMBER 2022 SHORTLIST
Revivifying Bees in the PRU* by Graham Clifford
(*Pupil Referral Unit)
A tennis racquet leaves a waffle imprint on the forehead of the boys that get too close. The Jackson 5 at full blast at 08:45 bounces off the Georgian townhouses that surround the PRU. This Island Earth from the 50s was on at teatime last night; benign alien super intelligences ultimately couldn’t think their way out of spectacular galactic doom.
Marcus sees everything. He is alive like sparrows, their pinhead hearts beating too quick to count, every leaf twitching is threat. He makes an origami knife with so much masking tape it is nearly hard enough. He bites his forearm and wants to be Iron Man. How does he know so much about guns?
He climbs the unclimbable three-metre-high perimeter fence and pisses on the sports coach.
Instead of lunch, we extract a still bee from a dusty web. Its surprisingly moist proboscis uncurls into a spoonful of sugar water and in the end it takes off but it’s a drone and there are more spiders in this square mile than all the humans in the world.
Graham Clifford is published by Seren, Against the Grain and his recent fifth collection by the Black Light Engine Room. He is a Head in Tower Hamlets, London. You can find him at his website here.
*
Imagining Green by David Gilbert
The leaf is the paradigmatic form of openness: life capable of being traversed by the world without being destroyed by it
(The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Emanuele Coccia.)
I was imagining green
light like two rivers
one from each shoulder blade,
diagonal streams
that met then crossed
at the solar plexus
continuing through my
thighs and calves – ribbons
of billowing crosscurrents
fallen towards one lake
and there the relief
of twin divergent sorrows
and I thought of a leaf,
that whilst love moves within
me I move within it and
I could hardly stand
or hear my name being called,
staggering back to the car.
David Gilbert‘s first full collection was The Rare Bird Recovery Protocol (Cinnamon). He’s also had three pamphlets published and poems in Rialto, Magma, Smiths Knoll, Brittle Star, South Bank Magazine and Interpreter’s House. He is a former mental health service user. www.davidgilbertpoetry.com
*
Microfiction by Louella Lester
Marking Your Territory
It was a pack I’d never seen in my neighbourhood before. A panting bulldog and a big-eyed mutt, with a handsome guy in tow. We were all waiting to cross the street, them on one corner, me on the other, when the guy, standing sway-back with his left hand hooked on his pocket, looked over at me and sniffed. It was only polite to sniff back. The light changed and we all crossed, then went our separate ways. But I knew I’d be out that night, leaving my scent up and down the street, howling into the dark.
Waiting at the Coffee and Suds
He tumbles onto the chair next to her. Thighs suspended in grey-as-his-hair sweatpants wrinkled down to the elastic cinching his chicken ankles. Sniff. She pokes her nose into her cup. He blows his nose into a cloth hanky. Jams it into his pocket. Snort. She regrets wearing her hearing aid. He spills out his arms. Spreads his hand alongside her cup. Shuffle. She doesn’t look up. He speaks in gurgles. “You have no ring, honey. Widowed or divorced?” He puffs up his basket chest. Spin. She turns and leaves. He crumples into a pile on the floor.
Louella Lester is a Winnipeg (Canada) writer/photographer. She’s been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Her CNF book, Glass Bricks (At Bay Press, April 2021), written in flash/micro, is a quirky look at her work life. You can find her on her website and her book here. She is also on Instagram @louellalester.
*
Everyone Welcome by Stephen Lightbown
I sit at the back of class, behind rows of people in padmasana.
Legs crossed on their mats. I stay in my chair. I’m not everyone.
I haven’t taught anyone in a chair before, says the teacher.
I assume you know what you’re doing.
Through yoga I’m trying to accept who I am, to learn more
about my body, one that does not move in a conventional way.
It has led me to appreciate the breath that flows through
my whole limbs. Sometimes it leads me to classes
where there is a look of judgement, even fear on the face
of someone who only wants to teach a body like theirs.
I become my own teacher.
I ask myself what I need to feel happy, balanced.
The answer is not at the front of the room but in the space
I create by lifting in my chair, forming room beneath my buttocks.
I use my hands to guide my legs. Through that connection
I recognise I am whole. At the end the teacher says,
You can do a lot from your wheelchair.
I have taught myself how to listen to my skin.
Stephen Lightbown is a poet who writes extensively but not exclusively about life as a wheelchair user. Stephen is the author of two poetry collections Only Air and The Last Custodian (both from Burning Eye Books). He lives in Bristol in the UK.
*
Friendly by Phoebe Thomson
Shriek of bats, in the barn’s rafters. Wild. Sweet and sour smell, our sweat, our blankets, our hay. Pebbles whickering, the clatter of her week-old foal, its brittle legs. Tired. Not-long back to sleep.
More light. Later. Rain on stables. Waiting. Droppings. Snorts, and our breath, and day-whinnies.
Restless feeling. Hack-hack of my feet against floor.
Rumble of people awake and parking cars, and skreek of tyres on gravel. Pat-pat of boots. Water cantering into buckets, in the yard.
They come in and they feed us, then. They work their way along the stables. Pebbles, and the baby, first. ‘Oh, aren’t you lovely?’
I stand, and wait, and know that I am last. I want to thrash. To run. Instead I listen. Hear the others: soft of their noses into buckets, haylage, oats. I lick salt and wait, stamp the cold out.
They come at last, the tall woman and her colt – her almost-grown boy. He pats me as I eat. ‘Hey, Friendly.’
He leaves and I eat and I wait and I listen. Larger wheels now, the sound of van. High voices, unloading, little ones whickering. Trample of boots, puddle slosh.
‘She’s good with little ones,’ the boy’s voice, ‘Would you like to meet her?’
It is always me they choose, for this. I am peaceable, comfortable for them. My teeth are bluntest, and I do not bite. And I oblige.
‘Good girl, good girl,’ the boy says to my neck, unbolting me, walking me outside. The children are agawp out there, and pointing. I piss at last, relief, and daylight, and the children giggling. And I whinny. I shimmy my head. Not too much movement, or I’ll scare the little ones. But just enough to show them I’m alive. I am.
I walk towards the steps, the boy beside me. We both know how this goes. How each child treads upwards and onto me, one at a time. Lands themselves on my back. And I walk each child in a gentle loop. The boy walks with me.
Some children cling on to me, afraid, and I go very slowly. Others are rough, kick, tug, and I flinch. But I forgive them.
A child, a girl, gives me an apple. I nibble, soft lipped, at the food on her tense, flat, hand. I want to bite. Want to gnash. I hold back. Then the children are grabbing grass, fists of it, holding it up to me. I accept. I oblige. I hold back.
The children are taken away to eat, and then they are running through the mizzling rain. The sweet of it. The boy eats, too, and feeds the other horses.
Sound of barn doors, and feet again, and grooming brushes, and I’m walked forward, and brushed by little hands. One lifts my tail up, touches me roughly with her blunt, wet hands. But she is only little, and I am forgiving. I hold my legs in tight. Don’t kick, don’t kick. Hold back.
Afterwards, he takes me back to my stable, the boy. He’s cleaned it, and he pats my neck. ‘Good girl.’
Some days there is sun. Sun for days in a row and the grass in the paddock. And we kick and hurtle, roll. All of us. Us horses. And grass and sky and hills and flies and rain and clover and cantering. And evening, and dusk, and bats, and going back inside. Holding on. And blankets on our backs. It’s a life I can stand. I can get what I need.
Phoebe Thomson (she/her) is from South London. Her stories and reviews have appeared in Best Small Fictions 2021, Litro Online, IFLA!, Brixton Review of Books, Lunate, Short Fiction and 3:AM Magazine. In 2020 she completed the Goldsmiths MA in Creative & Life Writing through the Isaac Arthur Green Scholarship.