Tuesday poem #556 : Constance Hansen : Motherless at Thirteen

 

 

My body begins to curve
into a question mark.

 

 

 

 

Constance Hansen is Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in: RHINO, Harvard Review Online, Southern Humanities Review, Cimarron Review, Four Way Review, Northwest Review, Vallum, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she lives in Paris. You may learn more at www.constancehansen.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #555 : Lydia Unsworth : Featherlight

 

One by one, the houses are run down. Link-style maisonettes with their bellies sliced out. While I remain the same, dated as interior design, open to visitors, like a fine example, shackled in glass, of a postwar estate. I was meant to live like this, small, nurtured. Hanging gardens, oval Bonsai dishes, we were two and the same. Can anyone else see these streets, their buried gods, the blood from our shins like shadows in gravel, these graves? Private housing associations bleach our village greens as I photograph this new undoing.

 

 

 

 

 

Lydia Unsworth’s latest collections are Arthropod (Death of Workers) and Mortar (Osmosis). Pamphlets include Residue (above/ground), cement, terraces (Red Ceilings), and YIELD (KFS). Poems in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, PERVERSE, and Shearsman. This poem is from These Steady Bulbs, forthcoming in January with above/ground press.

Photo credit: Liza Stokport

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #554 : Yoyo Comay : Sumpharvest (IX)

 

 

 

just another shining of the sheet

the heat shimmering around

 

grey sparrows

wink into dust

 

sound hums with going

 

snows terror down

 

choppers blaspheme

the biosphere

 

the heavywet

mood of the air

sweating with labour

with fervid birthing

 

you ain’t heard

nothing yet

 

o wait till you

hear it

playing pattycake

on your eardrum

 

pounding out its panting rhythm

upon your idiot flesh

 

the skin barking

and taut

as you embark

the frozen wave of noon

 

vision like a twitching wing

caught betwixt

the wicked thumbs

of the age

 

the neck strained

 to breaking

afore it

to eke

a closer peer

 

the water stiffens

to wax

& the lone wick of sky

smoulders ajar

turning all

adjacent to it

 

but you split off

to care for the burial grounds

 

angles dance the air

 

the leaflight

a passingthrough

 

but chained I’m sat

in this rock of agues

a pane ashspattered

muttering machinespeak

 

success’s bright hook

stigmata of the inner cheek

drags it gasping

stringed ass to lip

upon succession’s

cawl of spit

 

madness is choosing

& not chewing over

this papered lung stuff

 

cracking the code

unwrites itself,

a defence mechanism,

underwrites its losses

 

lostlight of lamplost

sloshes limpid at the shore

 

punchdrunk & stumbling

see the mind at its madness

 

frantic homesteader

its web upon the water spun

lost in the chase

of a fraying mayhem

 

ahem

 

amen

 

 

Yoyo Comay is a poet and musician from Toronto. He released his first EP of original music Crushed under the name Sufferin Mall in 2022, and his debut poetry collection, States of Emergency, was published with Vehicule Press in 2023. His work has appeared in The Peripheral Review, Commo Mag, Touch the Donkey, Metatron Press, and Small Walker Press. He is also a co-founder of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan