In 2011, IS&T publisher Kate Birch established the The Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry Writing Scholarship (MA) at the University of East Anglia (UEA); Freya Bantiff is its twelfth recipient. Kana is the fourth student to be awarded The Birch Family Scholarship set up to support mainly UK-based poetry MA students from the Black, Asian, Latinx and other global majority communities.
“Our Little Brown Rat”
The Bramble Cay melomys was the first mammal to be declared extinct as a result of the climate crisis/rising sea levels. Title quote comes from Tim Beshara, The Wilderness Society.
We return for you like a storm
surge or visiting birds –
a disturbance, but we try to land
lightly. It is late in the year.
You are here: citation needed.
The string of your tail should have
had a knot so we couldn’t forget.
Prehensile and mosaic-patterned:
you see the value of broken
pieces – arrived on driftwood
or a vanished land bridge
so you must know connections
can’t be trusted. No one said it,
but you were too ugly
for publicity. Matted and coarse,
last time, we found the fallen
chestnut of you, soaked, as though
before roasting. Even your whiskers
shivered, as if there was a breeze
we couldn’t feel. The chill
comes in a blink as we scour
the cay for nest sites, scat,
crackle of you in vegetation,
scuffle of you in sand – appoint
cameras like lifeguards,
set hair-trigger traps only
to watch them fill with salt.
You are the first of the everyday
lost, exquisite
in it. We toast with flasks
to your name as the tide
inches up towards our feet.
Is a Harp a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
I question after my first lesson, thinking of how she
may teach me some inner truth. And of my desire to be
naked against her, like a cat licking a comelier reflection –
to imbibe her, to imbue her perfection by pressing
my dry winter skin, its stretch marks, its scars to her
glossy maple whorls. When folk talk of maple they imply
syrup and she is sticky-sweet in a way that knows nothing
of bodily fluids and everything of a love song – sung to her,
through her, time and again. Curves exist only
where needed. Elsewhere, she’s so slim that no discernible
inner life can squeeze inside. As if the hands of men and boys
with bitten nails have caressed her into shape from neck
to shoulders to feet, moulding her to size. Under my fingertips,
she is all pampered freshly plucked smoothness. And although
she tolerates the tedious repetition of scales, how expert she is
in tension and wanting. She never hits an off note, sounding
a little like rain on a drop-top convertible, the thrill
of a silk bra unhooking, you only live once and carpe diem.
On occasion, she reverberates through me with a pang
of sickness when I imagine how others would touch me, if I
were a harp – how every note I made would be pleasing.
Since being awarded the Ink Sweat & Tears Scholarship, Freya Bantiff has been a 2023 winner of the New Poets Prize, third place prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition 2022, highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2022 and joint winner of the 2022 Bridport Poetry Prize (18-25s). Prior to this, she was winner of the Canterbury Poet of the Year Competition 2021, longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2022, second prize-winner in the Bedford Poetry Competition 2021. She will be Apprentice Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival in October 2023.
‘“Our Little Brown Rat”’ will be published in Freya’s upcoming New Poets Prize pamphlet.
‘Is a Harp a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?’ was previously included in the Dear Life anthology, showcasing poems from Hive South Yorkshire.
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cathedral
I look at a photo taken of myself and think about how I am shaped. I look at the framework
I fit into and how I use my body when I am asked to move in a way. I check with the photo to
make sure it is myself that fills up the frame of the body.
I look in the mirror but with her I can only see parts of me,
eyes they communicate with words, they shape into a spell.
Pupils they can speak to me if they are mine.
you do not really have a body. what moves is just tricks being played but you must also take
care of the body. you must carry it around without dragging it on the ground or else
something will leave the frame of you. not the body. you.
And then I will be empty. Empty is not the right word, but still, empty.
Hollow. Like carved out clay. Like a room. A shell, like an eggshell, empty,
will continue with its words.
i am here in that space of the hollow. i occupy you by remaining hollow.
The voices are ringing in a cathedral. It is only an imagination.
I was told or not told, but guided, that my voice was not to be heard
in a space like that.
I hear my imaginary voice skipping in the hollow cathedral. In my hollow head.
I used everything that trickled out of the follicles and from the tip of my fingernails to stop
the voice.
Slipping out of my nostrils, my mouth, and my hollow head.
If only I could speak to her, the one in the photo.
I cast a spell on myself. I feed it something nice. I coax it to sleep. I hug it kindly.
It is only imagined, the sound reflecting in the hollow,
but somehow it has now become true.
In the photo there is no empty space. It is flat, and it can be rolled up or crumpled.
I look at my photo and think quite often,
how lovely
she looks.
monoglot
I pick up words that have fallen from people’s tongues, and I pat it off and put it in my
pocket. At an outdoor wedding, I crouch down on the ground feeling with my hands the
shards of grass flimping through my fingers until I find the words that have fallen, probably
no longer an intention in the air that is going to pick it up. Some have been smeared with
green extract of the grass, but I put them in my pocket anyway. Swishing their flute glasses around, no one is watching me, like no one cares for a child in these settings, unless they are doing something unruly. Unless they are walking down the aisle throwing petals.
I grasp my pocket in fear.
I take myself into a well-hidden corner in this overly spacious venue and I choose a word
from my pocket and try putting it in my mouth. I chew on it, but it is impossible to swallow. Green that overflows from the creases of my lips stain my outfit. I spit the word out and rub
my sole on it like burning out a cigarette. I wash my mouth with champagne. Disappointed, I
return to the crowd and stand in between people discreetly inhaling and exhaling their words.
I am impatient.
Kana Hozoji is a poet and a student studying Japanese contemporary literature at Waseda University and Creative Writing Poetry at the University of East Anglia as the Birch Family Scholar. She writes in both Japanese and English and often bilingually. Her poems have appeared in Tokyo Poetry Journal and Sink Review.