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A new poem from Kate Behrens ~ Your Sisterʼs Tapestry Cushion

Your Sisterʼs Tapestry Cushion
i.m of my grandmother, ʽCullerʼ and her sister, Den, daughters of a painter-mother.

In this view
weft-faced yews (Ucello darks)
strew the escarpmentʼs
grey-green, mint, plaster, white.

Her mind was stitched
into yours, yours into mine
(those colours spoke like a mother tongue).

From a distance, itʼs leaping wildness,
the in/out of things
sewn up. Shadow and lightness.

Weʼd sit on your sofa in drifts
of Silk Cut smoke, Ma Griffe.
Tonal shifts made patterns

to lean on, with the thick curtains
drawn on blue cedars.

~

Kate Behrens’ most recent collection is Penumbra, published by Two Rivers Press in January 2019. It follows on from her first collection, The Beholder (2012), and Man with Bombe Alaska (2016). Other poems have appeared in Mslexia, Blackbox Manifold, Stand, The High Window, Reading Universityʼs Creative Arts Anthologies, Poetry Salzburg Review, Wild Court, Noon, The Arts of Peace (Two Rivers Press) and as Oxford Brookesʼ Poem of the Week.

Read more about Kate’s poetry here.

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Mint tea is no cure ~ a poem by Kate Noakes

MINT TEA IS NO CURE

The art trail enlivens proceedings by inviting
poets to read in artists’ garden, where bees
work for pollen on lavender and valerian.
I choose a few poems that may chime
with the work of potters, painters,
printmakers and jewellers, but
this year I’ve not shaken off winter’s grip

and my chest is a squeezebox with loosed ties,
tumbling to the floor from careless hands.
Discordant and groaning I’ve wheezed my way
through weeks of heat, so find some quiet shade
away from the studio and watch bees
working for pollen on lavender and valerian,
but it’s hopeless, I can barely give breath
to one whole line let alone the next.

A friend offers to read every alternate stanza
for me to catch my breath, or try,
and we manage like this, but every muscle
of my ribs pulls. My lungs are more folded back
than when I began, and the fresh-picked
mint tea offered by the host is no cure –
I can barely stop straining long enough to drink it
as bees work for pollen on lavender and valerian.

~

Kate Noakes’ Two Rivers Press collection from 2009 is The Wall-Menders. Her most recent is The Filthy Quiet (Parthian, 2019). She lives in London, where she acts as a trustee to writer development organisation, Spread the Word.

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Le Serpent Qui Danse – a translation by Ian Brinton

The following poem is a translation of Baudelaire’s early ‘Le Serpent Qui Danse’.

~

A Serpent’s Dance

How I love, dear indolence, to gaze
……….Upon your body of delight,
That flickering of material
……….A shimmering of skin!

Upon the dark depths of your hair
……….A tangle of pungent odour,
A wild scented ocean
……….Of surging blues and brown,

As a vessel setting sail
……….Upon an early morning breeze,
My erring soul embarks
……….For far-distant skies.

Your eyes let nothing show
……….Of the sweet or of the sour
But like two frigid jewels
……….Gold is merged with steel.

Gazing at your moves
……….Of rhythmic carelessness,
One might say you were a snake
……….Responding to the charmer’s stick.

Burdened with idleness
……….Your child-like head
Wags with the sluggish motion
……….Of a baby elephant,

And your body stretches out in leaning forward
……….Like a trim vessel
That sways from side to side before dipping
……….A yard-arm in the sea.

Like a flood-tide swollen by the deep groan
……….Of a melting glacier,
When the saliva in your mouth surges up
……….To the tooth’s tip,

I seem to quaff Bohemian wine,
……….Powerful and bitter,
A sky of moisture strewing
……….Stars in my heart!

~

See also:

The Cracked Bell – a new translation by Ian Brinton

Crowds – a new translation of a Baudelaire prose poem from 1861

Baudelaire’s ‘Chant d’Automne’ translated by Ian Brinton

~

Ian Brinton’s recent publications include Islands of Voices, an edition of the selected poems of Douglas Oliver (Shearsman Books) and a translation of the selected poems of Mallarmé introduced by J.H. Prynne (Muscaliet Press). Forthcoming publications include a translation of the selected poems of Valéry introduced by Michael Heller (Muscaliet Press) and a sequence of poems by Philippe Jaccottet (Equipage). His Paris Scenes by Baudelaire will appear from Two Rivers Press in July 2021.

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A new poem by John Froy

An Egret Moves North

Wren, robin, dunnock, rat
Mandarin ducks in a raft of eight
great-crested grebe, cormorant
Canada and Egyptian geese
on a winter’s afternoon around the lake –
this strangely vacant campus
the traffic now distant, peripheral.
Listen!
Shrill coot’s tewk, moorhen curruc
laughing kwarr of black-headed gulls
perched on the underwater bench
and now a pair of dabbling gadwall
the monogamous shovelers
and squawking
the usurper rose-ringed parakeet.
Then,
true litmus of the change
a little egret, out of the water
showing the world its yellow feet.

~

John Froy is retired and now writes full time. He has published two poetry collections with Two Rivers Press, Eggshell: A Decorator’s Notes (2007) and Sandpaper & Seahorses (2018), and a memoir The Art School Dance (2013).

Poet of the Week – 14: John Froy

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Two poems by Ava Patel

Smokers

When I smoke,

I feel it in my thighs.
When it rains, my fingertips shrivel,
and when I walk along a beach’s shoreline,
my shoulders burn
to turn themselves inside out;
shoulder blades
wriggle ………….through flesh,
ripe for fresh air.

…….My fingers are cold goldfish
nobody won at a summer fair.

They feel heavier …….than a sledgehammer,

………………….almightier

than a deity— ………….and you—
when you smoke,
my appendix knocks against my abdomen,
keen to finish his joke.

—

A Heat

He thinks I’m a slice of toast.
He brings butter, he brings honey
to the bedroom, looks up at me
through his eyelashes,
the shape of his left iris asking a question.

He wants to coat me, smother me,
does this honey know me?

I swelter in its shroud and stand,
naked and pink, in the middle of the room.

My skin—taut, unyielding—wants
to be stripped away like lurid satsuma peel.

The threads of my hair stick
to the nape of my neck, form rings
around my throat. They smell
overwhelmingly sour, are dark as molasses.

My universe is viscous. It sticks to my teeth
like a piece of toast buttered with tar.

~

Ava Patel studied at the University of Reading and was awarded a first-class MA in Writing from the University of Warwick. She has published poems in webzines (Runcible Spoon, London Grip, Ink, Sweat and Tears) and magazines (South Bank Poetry, Orbis, South, Dream Catcher). Her debut pamphlet Dusk in Bloom has recently been published by Prolebooks and she runs an Instagram poetry page: @ava_poetics.