Addressing Sylvia Plath’s Fan Club
You will need four hundred items in the stew of her:
cumin, lemon, colocynth, bitter apple, lime, broccoli
to get the aftertaste she would want in your memory.
Mix half the ingredients, the dry, dyed ingredients,
cochineal, dates, grasshoppers, bleached flour,
into a cream clay bowl. Wind and wind a spoon
until you cannot tell one ingredient from another
except the black pinpricks of poppy seeds glaring
darkly from the depths of the cream clay bowl.
Take her wet ingredients – rain, brine, absinthe,
sour milk, red wine, all the juices of a basted pig.
Find a few strange ingredients no one else uses.
Let them smoke like Rauchkäse, jerky or kippers
while their flavour gets stronger, play her games
with the construction of heavy batter as a side-dish.
Use your mouth and tongue, your teeth and throat.
Chew and swallow. Don’t choke on consonants.
Eat her piece by acid piece. Do not spit her out.
Sue Spiers works with the Winchester Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The North, South and Under The Radar. Sue was longlisted in the 2023/4 National Poetry Competition. Sue Tweets @spiropoetry.
Grandad
He stuck his head inside the oven,
others removed it later
It took years to piece events
together; hushed voices, evasions,
or little glances
I should acknowledge it, really
should, otherwise it gets hidden,
pain unbidden gets shunted down
the line; that’s not fine
‘Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!’ Gas
War never left him; shellshock,
I was told
Mike Huett is a UK writer now living in Penacova, Portugal. He turned to poetry only recently when hospitalised with dengue, after spending a year living in Vietnam. He suspects fear of his own demise made his unconscious get a bit bossy, or if Muses exist his likes to turn up at the most inconvenient times. Mike’s poems sometimes address his rather challenging childhood, along with issues such as intergenerational trauma and stigma. Often they surprise him, and occasionally they can even make him laugh. He is happy to try and answer any queries via e mail; at mikehuett@hotmail.com