Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
“Foyle really broadened my horizons. It has been a tremendous experience that only spurs me on to write more.” Jack Sagar, Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2015
The Wolves of Normality: Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015 The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX www.poetrysociety.org.uk ISBN: 978-1-900771-94-8. Cover: James Brown, jamesbrown.info © The Poetry Society & authors, 2016
The Wolves of Normality Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Acknowledgements The Poetry Society is deeply grateful to the Foyle Foundation for their generous funding and also to Arts Council England for its ongoing support. We would also like to thank Bloodaxe, Carcanet Press, Divine Chocolate, Faber and Faber, Forward Arts Foundation, Frances Lincoln, Inpress Books, Pan Macmillan, Picador, PN Review, Poems on the Underground, tall-lighthouse and Walker Books for continuing to provide prizes for the Award. We are delighted to welcome as a new supporter, Snopake Ltd. Our gratitude goes out to our judges Liz Berry and Michael Symmons Roberts for their passion and enthusiasm in helping to make the 2015 competition such a success. We are delighted to welcome Malika Booker and W.N. Herbert as judges for the 2016 competition. We thank Arvon for hosting the Foyle Young Poets’ residency with commitment and expertise and Southbank Centre, London, for hosting the prize-giving ceremony. Our thanks go out to Marcus Stanton Communications for their hard work in raising awareness of the competition, and our network of educators and poets across the UK for helping us to inspire so many young writers to engage with poetry. We thank commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year 2015 Aisha Mango Borja for the title of this anthology, from her poem ‘Resolution’, which you will find at the beginning of this anthology. Finally, we applaud the enthusiasm and dedication of the young people and teachers who make the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award the great success it is today. foyleyoungpoets.org
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Contents Introduction Aisha Mango Borja Will Adams Eva Brand Whitehead Margaret Zhang Tom Gonzalez-Carvajal Leila Dickinson Chelsy Jiayi Wu Mia Nelson Zinath Oloko Catherine Yarrow Gazelle Mba Alannah Lewis Hal Henderson Jenny Burville-Riley Mikaela Carmichael Jacob Mason-White Andrew Telford Alex Greenberg Emily Wilder Autumn Carson Pratiksha Saha Alice West Inara Lalani Charis Taplin Jim Woods
6 Resolution It Went Up mama and papa Sanctum Steve Pigs Circe letting the good times roll The Migrant’s Daughter Mr. Boo Radley The Woman return to sea Above St. Andrews June Afternoon 1.59 am Second Coming 6 Ways to Look at The Very Hungry Caterpillar Spring SÊance First Fire of the Year (A Letter from a Hunter) The Waters The Path to a Rebellion Goose Folding Gently into the Galaxy Tree Climbing The Weight of the Day
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 16 18 19 22 23 24 26 27 28 29 30 32 33 36 38 39 40 42
Yasmin Inkersole Tilly Wainwright Ruby Kelman Imogen Wade Satta Kamara Kavae Loseby Reem Sultan Amelia Kendall Gianni Fortes Lucy Wainger Hannah Link Jasmine Burgess Sala Fadelallah Molly Groarke Daniel Blokh Abby Meyer Chloe Smith Patrick Hughes Alice Long Maria Woodford Molly Watkins Damayanti Chatterjee Marina McCready Priya Bryant Caroline Tsai Miles McInerney Rebecca Alifimoff Amy Wolstenholme Finn Scarr de Haas van Dorsser
The Seeds of my Sunflower Grandmother 10:47 pm After Life Neighbours The Vine That Grew You, me, the Arctic The Sovereign of the Street God save the honeybees La Capone Support Group Prelude My Face is against Alien Window The magician Starlings to make a poem Sheltered Paper People The Haven Prenodus tollens Things I Later Put in Boxes Autumn 11:49 pm texts to: London Detroit 1972 33.1533째N 116.2357째W After the Storm Aeroplane God Fallout
43 44 46 48 49 50 52 54 55 58 59 60 62 64 65 66 68 70 71 72 74 76 77 78 80 82 83 84 86
Georgie Brooke Audrey Spensley Finty Hunter Lauren Maltas Isla Anderson Annalise Lozier Shakthi Shrima Freya Carter Lisa Zou Colette Spaul Catherine Dent Amber Thornton Natasha Blinder Alex Zhang Kathryn Hargett Katherine Hampshire Katharina Hรถgler Michelle Chen Lorcan Greene Ben Vince Rawan Yousif
An observation of Nigel in his absence. 87 Diagram of a Scar 88 I am a cave to them. 90 Misplaced 92 Portrait of Zipporah at the Wake 94 Pseudoscience 96 Metairie 97 Life Models 98 Camouflage 100 This room died while you were away 101 Materfamilias 102 my father knows this 104 Phillip Augustus 105 Watermelon After Dusk 106 Mazurka, Op.81, No.1 108 Lucid Dreaming You 110 Why immortality hurts sometimes 111 Coterie 112 Aibreann On the Frontier Withers 114 Nemo: a series of short poems 115 Rules for a little black girl, AKA me 118
List of commendations Foyle Foundation, The Poetry Society Opportunities for young writers Enter the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2016
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2016 entry form
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Introduction “The poems were a delight to read. They were lively, ambitious and engaged with the world. I was so impressed. How exciting the poets of the future are going to be!� Liz Berry, 2015 judge Welcome to the anthology of the commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2015. Founded by The Poetry Society in 1998, the competition has been supported by the Foyle Foundation since 2001 and is now firmly established as the key award for young poets aged between eleven and seventeen years. Every year we find and celebrate the very best young writers from across the world, choosing 100 winners (15 top winners and 85 commended) from the thousands of poets who enter. For the first time, we are delighted to publish this anthology of poems by the commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year. The 2015 competition attracted a remarkable 12,288 poems from 5,846 young poets across sixty-nine countries. Poems came in from as far afield as Trinidad and Tobago, South Korea, Iraq and Malawi. The poems in this anthology tackle a huge range of themes, forms and styles, demonstrating the ambition and talent of these young poets. From portraits of grandmothers and explorations of belonging, to the nature of identity and language, these poems are full of tenderness, anger, surprise and sensation.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
With such fierce global competition, to be selected by judges Liz Berry and Michael Symmons Roberts as one of the top 100 is a truly impressive achievement. The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award has kick-started the careers of some of today’s most exciting new voices. This year alone Sarah Howe was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize, Andrew Wynn Owen was awarded an Eric Gregory Award, Luke Samuel Yates won the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, and Jasmine Simms was named as one of the New North Poets. The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is a career-defining moment for many of its winners and The Poetry Society continues to support winners via publication, performance and internship opportunities. All of our winners receive one year’s youth membership of The Poetry Society, a range of book prizes and goodies from our partner publishers and companies, and ongoing support and encouragement from The Poetry Society. The top 15 poets are invited to attend a week’s residential creative writing course at Arvon’s Shropshire centre, The Hurst, or receive a poet residency in their school followed by distance mentoring. The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award also incorporates a year-round programme of activity aimed at encouraging creativity and literacy in schools. We produce inspiring teaching resources and identify Teacher Trailblazers who share their passion and expertise for teaching poetry. We also offer free poet-led workshops to a number of Applauded Schools to reward their continuing commitment to the Award. We hope you enjoy the poems in this anthology and that they inspire many more poets to enter in 2016. Happy reading!
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Aisha Mango Borja Resolution I will take off my dyslexic coat And run away in my poetry dress. I will run a full seven furlongs With my four magic tigers. I will forge a sword Out of my unsettled words. I will live in a tree until The wolves of normality run away. I will let the lark of imagination Out of its iron cage. I will tame the wildest poems And lure them into my trap And strike them into my page.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Will Adams It Went Up Who knew that a grand piano could burn so easily. A little straw, a few twigs piled around the hammers – a match. Its death was music. Each string-snap a wonderful note in a melody of ash and fire.
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Eva Brand Whitehead mama and papa I imagine you cursing chipped glass the day the window gave way. I imagine you, together, curtain wrapped around you, hippies in your old flat. I imagine you in a marble palace eating marble cake fresh from the marble oven. I imagine you puffing, honeymooning, cycling over tall hills, bike wheels in weeds. I imagine you walking sepia paths, staring at delicate nettles and timid cow parsley, not understanding each other, not knowing what to say because you talk different tongues. I imagine you waiting for me.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Margaret Zhang Sanctum last night my brother Nathan biked / said he was borrowing / at the library I knew he wasn’t I had seen / him at school a boy’s lips brushing his earlobe I / wonder how it sounded I went biking too to escape his skin scent the bible in my parents’ / bedroom tomorrow was Sunday my brother Nathan out to see / a boy why didn’t he tell me Nathan / I tattle but not about that I biked to school it felt like a monument of ease climbed on the swing pulled up my feet to elude tanbark / swinging forward sounded like Nathan / hyperventilating into a paper bag swinging backward sounded like my church / pastor leafing through pages for a morning / prayer elude I wanted to elude Nathan / biked home Nathan was not there my mom sipping chamomile at the kitchen table where have you been where is Nathan I have been / to the library Nathan still / borrowing a book Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Tom Gonzalez-Carvajal Steve As I started peddling a two-wheeler For the first time He muttered about suspension And hydraulics In his patterned jumper And a cowboy hat Whilst cleaning his lotus Grey scale 11:03 pm His lamp would turn on In the kitchen When he poured himself a glass Of Jack or Malibu My brother and I would sit On our window pane And watch through the double-glazing As he would prepare his rifle To shoot some rabbit A magpie in a cage, baiting On his front lawn Inviting me to look That’s why they call me Snoops
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Leila Dickinson Pigs They don’t know what’s coming. Snouts pondering their whereabouts, oblivious to the greedy world that is hungry for their happiness, a world where when you are young with ears that overpower your face and a tail that isn’t yet curly, we think of you as innocent and worthy of protection. When you are pocket-size, we empathise. But when you have grown, despite the fact your personality is still great, and you are still the same soul that could melt any heart with a glance, we put you on our salty plate.
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Chelsy Jiayi Wu Circe love for circe was like burning boats & bridges: an island swallowed by shipwrecks & salt, by the mythology of distance, of fear. she did not know how to make men stay without turning them into monsters; love was a feast she held for the heat – for the swines & wolves always faithful in gluttony. this is power, she reminds herself, as she weaves in her image a sea-foam dream – a dress the colour of a thicker magic, waiting to be worn. at night, she empties a lullaby into snoring men: gospels of red-blooded bodies (stretched wide, occupying)
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hymns of devour – thinking, there must be more to this than hunger. but slowly, she forgets how to feed, turns animal herself: wet-mouthed, vacant-eyed, body ruthlessly mortal. what slaughter – what circus – to swim across this distance of longing. & as she sits inside the menagerie of men, she wonders whether to break the spell, half-wanting to watch them drown in sea, screaming her name.
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Mia Nelson letting the good times roll my grandmother grew up on the edge of a bottle – bartender parents and the strained amber light of a dark wood matchbox open 11 to midnight homework was done on that counter in the hazy smog of cigars now she can’t concentrate without ice clinking glass cups without the rasp, like a dog coughing up a bone, of a drunk southern drawl calling her mother “sweetie”. the stories she heard after the third or fourth drink had men who’d lost their wives or homes or minds or all three at the same time – but the customers that scared her the most were the ones with nothing to toast to nursing six or seven drinks like the pre-emptive cure to an ailment they had yet to find she blames her sobriety on those men who would sit on the red plastic stools every night to the same old songs like they were stuck in a scratched record
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their breath the sour note that lingered in the side paneling of that room men with matchstick fingers who tried to grab at her skirt men who could have just as easily drank at home but sat shoulder to shoulder – because alcoholics drink alone and the rest is just guys letting the good times roll.
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Zinath Oloko The Migrant’s Daughter The day I realised you were gone I chased your silence around the house only to be embraced by your absence. I called your name like a siren, an alarm, a baby bird fallen out of its nest. Mother, you packed what you couldn’t live without and left without me. You migrated like a family of birds and put oceans between us. Aunty said you left to build me a better life in London but my young crying couldn’t understand. It felt like rejection feasting on my heart. My sadness turned and looped like the ceaseless sound of a baby crying until the year you came back with bags and new memories. You hugged me and I clung to you with a thousand questions and then lay on the couch relaxed, like nothing happened, like you hadn’t disappeared or made a foreign land home.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Catherine Yarrow Mr. Boo Radley The Radley house, with the tin roof all slanted, wherein a bitter seed was planted. The roots curled across floorboards and window ledges, covering the house in their suffocating embrace. If you walk carefully into the very heart of the house, picking your way through the rubble, you will see a waterfall of vines, clustered around a small mass. If you walk closer still, you will see him. His hands bound behind him and his hair wild. The only thing untouched by these vines, are his eyes. They are the eyes of a ghost haunted by itself. If you look into them, you may see a semblance of a person hiding in them, a flicker of something,
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a moment of escape from his reality, or maybe it is just your imagination. There are remains of branches lying in ripples around him from when he tried to cut them from himself, but they just grew back stronger. As the last of the daylight trickles lazily through the cracks in the walls, the vines seem to soften and fall clumsily around him. It is then that he briefly escapes, sleepwalking through the dead neighbourhood. He takes the same route every night, gazing at the perfect houses with their perfect sleeping families. A father with a handsome smile who comes and goes at strange hours in the night. A mother in a pastel sundress with a tremor in her right hand. Beautiful children with futures mapped out like a path already well worn.
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He pauses for a moment on his porch, his face dreamy, his body light, his eyes almost human, before he is returned to his hiding place. Almost as if his beauty was too much to bear in the dust-cracked road of his old village.
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Gazelle Mba The Woman I love myself when I am laughing And then again when I am looking Mean and impressive When I flash my scaly tongue Crowned with teeth, rectangular pearls Hands conducting unseen orchestras Sequined and sewn in When I am lit by the electric blue of my brother’s eyes The robes of the virgin in renaissance paintings and Alice’s dress When I am a bronze Nefertiti, a laughing woman Whose voice is an opera of shrieks I love myself. Then again a waning moon A female Raskolnikov, Robin Hood Dressed in a sharp black suit When I am a woman in a hijab Or whose job it is to rescue the drowning man Even veined vaguely monstrous, a colossus. Beauty is the rigid line created for us The rulebook we have not thrown away.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Alannah Lewis return to sea we walk to the sea taste with forgetful foot and salted hide the crimson algae and frond our distance from home in grass and tide. we mark the moon reconcile granite chin the imitation wrought in boulder and salt, set in citrine, while the rabid rinse of sanded scum beards the milkwood and oiled weeds (the churning drum of tidesong, like felled timber) and we, who are of this cape, the june rain like ether sweet to lonely throat. we learn early on, resent, in jealous prayer and covetous breath the wave (its agile birth and death). we walk to the sea the flood has made this blue cornered alter where we were cast in sinew and water. Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Hal Henderson Above St. Andrews He could see the sea in its full form And map its steady advance Into the hedgehog of Scotland’s coast The wind rushing past him Punching a cartoon hole in a cloud He descends now on St. Andrews The gold green of the golf course And grey-on-grey of Weathered sea on concrete cliffs And stretching away from the advancing storm Red sloping roofs Falling even further A train screams by A glorious army’s trumpet And in a small semi-detached house A low messy kitchen and a frustrated woman Who can’t remember my name Or her dog’s age Or where she left the spoons Or how to lock the door Or who she’s seeing when
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And she’s crying in her armchair With Pointless on the telly Wishing she knew why She’d forgotten us
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Jenny Burville-Riley June Afternoon Sophie’s pen exploded in the park as we flopped in a henge of bags and backpacks watching cherry faced mothers in billowy dresses settle on the grass like big iced cakes feeding sandwiches to fun sized toddlers and as it was the last day of school we found symbolism in a broken pen, an ocean of spent ink. At the lake a man with a face of lost paths told us water was the mirror to a past we longed for and a future we feared. Looking to melting mothers and their buttercup children already we knew what was stolen, what was yet to be taken.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Mikaela Carmichael 1.59 am Orange light pooled around our ankles, Teaching us the bleary eyed tango. As we twisted in and out of shadows, We re-carved memories into paving slabs, Midnight escapades and streetlights etched into Rucksacks and library passes. Adrenalin and secrets Engraved into spelling tests and playground kingdoms. There were four of us, Historical in our stone infinity. You, me, the wind and the fox. You danced with me, Painting me varying shades of dusk. I danced with the wind, My gasps flowing between the gaps in the breeze. And the fox danced to the wails of a passing ambulance, Perfectly oblivious.
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Jacob Mason-White Second Coming Four rusty nails and a crucifix wash up on Weston-super-Mare in the rain. A child on a donkey drops his ice-cream as his mule cuts his heel on a ferrous metal and the detritus is disposed of by the local fire brigade.
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Andrew Telford 6 Ways to Look at The Very Hungry Caterpillar 1. An educational story about the natural process of a maturing caterpillar. 2. A tragic tale of a teenage caterpillar with a love for food, who becomes obsessed about her appearance, overeats when trying to lose weight, goes into depression and dies but ascends to heaven. 3. The insect world’s version of Man vs Food. 4. A thriller about a caterpillar and his race against time to become a butterfly within one week, breaking the previous world record. 5. A children’s story that I think about far too much for a seventeen year old. 6. A comedy about a grumpy, jealous little man who finds himself through his love for food and blossoms in later life.
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Alex Greenberg Spring Séance I’ve been resting on my back in this patch of grass for so long. The flowers have started growing through me. They prick in from the spine a few inches past the board of my sternum. Unfurling smugly like the empty hand in a magic trick. My blood trickles into the leaf ’s veins on its way through mine. Growing faint under the sunlight, my pulse becomes its own nervous finger, nipping at the temple, beseeching the red from the radish batch. A bee sinks into
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the flower bud and the meadow flourishes, ensconcing my body, reaching over my feet and stomach until all that’s left are a few pieces of hair sticking out from the soil like blades of summer grass.
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Emily Wilder First Fire of the Year (A Letter from a Hunter) Small things pop and burn You and I, we have aged You don’t cast your quick red rot anymore You nibble Then I remember how you lay waste to landscapes and reduce wolves to strings between my teeth You are not a loyal beast I know that with one misstep You would squeeze me till my eyes melted like evening suns Treacle abseiling through a ventricular valve Puddling A honeycomb crust under my nails You cough and embers curl away Chain smoker, I stifle you with snow The sky is having an ultrasound And your pyre defiles her maternal opalescence
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Autumn Carson The Waters My great grandmother’s grandmother pebbled these waters like skulls. Carried oceans on their back until her bones rippled. I’ve heard they were captured from the Cayman Islands from Mali or Chad but we still don’t know. Mama is a southern root picked from cotton colored skies. She is sun dipped. But I took after Daddy’s dark skin. So I shower my insecurities. Stretch them over like a swim suit. Watch sunscreen sink into skin. When I turned six Mama made sure I would know how to swim. Be the first black girl in my lessons to inherit buoyancy, so I wouldn’t seep into muddy waters like she did. She never learned so she threw me in the deep end. Water shackles me like a midnight pit. Waves cradle me like caskets. Curls kink like whips lashing flesh. I am on the coast of Kenya
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and all I imagine is stoned sand clutching ankles until I am flat as sea banks. Until lungs brim tides and all that is left is soaked skin. I can never imagine that forced trip to America. I walk through a cave where coaled wrists had been chained to rocked walls. Where captives would croak freedom just to feel the crack of leather wading down their spines. My ebony lies beneath oceans. This was a vacation. I return home and these waters still taunt me. It’s not Africa, but Lake Michigan where the back of a black boy’s head swallowed stones. Killed because he oiled spilled on white sand. Caught swimming in the wrong side of a whites-only beach. He drowned in the laughter of a white boy, the screams of his mama. I am floating in his blood puddles. This is why Grandma doesn’t like the beach. Says that every ocean has cradled bent bodies.
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Afraid she will sink when sand suffocates feet. This is how freedom feels. It is worse than drowning. I put a conch to my ear. They say you can hear the ocean sway and hum over the lash of screams and strange tongues. All I can hear is my bloodline.
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Pratiksha Saha The Path to a Rebellion She sits there, tense digits poised over the keys, The keys that tap in to the web woven by civilisation, The crystal display coats the path to hell, And the mouse worms its way into the centre of her mind. The tracker records your history, Every button you hover over, Every code that links you to the shackles surrounding you, Don’t press escape. She enters the web, Which wraps its claws around her, And a certain post beguiles her, She clicks, and lets him in. “Join us,” it coaxes “Join the sisterhood Restore the caliphate Become a righteous wife.” “It was foreseen by his almighty Allah, For you to serve our cause, Armed with a worthy, blessed husband And shrewd, well-bred kin.” The trigger looms before her, One tap and she would be theirs. Trained to become as strong as a soldier Or as weak as a martyr. 36
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Her innocent palm rests on the belly of the mouse, Fretful fingers convulsing over the button, Each word bewitches her, And the claws converge in. Fate establishes its path, A path into the depths of incarceration, And the gateway widens Ready to swallow her soul. She shudders, suddenly solitary, Befriended by the dilemma writhing in her mind, Torturously guiding her limbs To the choice that lies before her. But then the screen emits a memory, A memory of what has been and what could be, Of a cherished family, Right beside her. She must choose, Between servitude and satisfaction, Between foes and families, Between battlefields and bliss. The decision is yours, Two buttons, two paths, two lives, Life or Death, Pick the right one, For your sake.
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Alice West Goose I gathered ingredients, implements, fingers, Lay down knives on the cold marble surface, Gave heat to the cooker, light to My fire, To prepare for the roasting, Hand’s purpose. I dislocated the neck, tore fat flaps from behind, Seasoned body and blood, pierced the belly, I coaxed to a rack to the cooker, the Goose, For two hours to rest until ready. I melted butter for onions, softened till weak, Left to sweat for many long minutes, Peeled the flesh from the lemon, chopped lush from My herbs, Mixed with splinters of bread’s drying grimace. I beat eggs to coat stuffing, to hold with slime, Passed the mix to a tin with foil closure, Smothered with oil, then lulled to sleep, My Body and senses fell colder. Then returned once more to that poor sweating Beast, Probed for cavity, twisting, a capture, I gripped sharp-ended tongs, held far at arm’s-length, Turned the She to more decent a posture. I removed the Specimen with protected Hands, For I had tested the roasting complete; Next tumbled crisped stuffing to lie by Her side, The dish – the Bird’s pillowed deathbed. 38
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Inara Lalani Folding Gently into the Galaxy Yesterday the doctors opened you up. They said that all the stars found themselves caught in a milky way, burning inside of you. And in-between these stars, they found something self-destructible. You stuck a comet in there, along with your beating heart, and your beautiful lungs. It had a diameter of about the size of your kidney. You said that it wouldn’t do you any harm, trapped in there, tangled by all your veins. What about when the galaxy inside of you moves, when the atmosphere you label as yourself takes a step forward? What about when you’re doing the laundry, and you decide to heft a heavy basket that would happen to make your muscles contract and expand uncontrollably? What happens then? Boom. The stars would melt atop your bones, breaking them in every angle. The veins you once predicted to hold would shrivel up. Your heart would stop, your lungs would deflate. Your galaxy would consume you, and leave me with nothing but a dissipated atmosphere. Why wasn’t star-gazing ever enough for you?
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Charis Taplin Tree Climbing You were of the air, plotted constellations of footholds, co-ordinated cumulus of sinuous hands bulging, to hold your heel, support your back, easing you up up up up into the fragmented light, light as a cricket suspended in amber, oxygen inhaled you, veins quenched with August sky. My silly seagull feet rooted in the mud. Branches which cradled you scratched and ignored me. I craned my neck from far down below, among the adults and the clay and the wounded crab-apples and the tin cans and train timetables. The years distorted us,
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our limbs swollen and elongated. One February morning we woke up in new skins, we wore them down the street, bumped our heads in doorways, walked into lamp posts. The branches break under us now. We look like winter coats draped on a hat stand. When did the sky get so low and the ground so close?
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Jim Woods The Weight of the Day As a young boy steps through the door, he drops his bag on the floor, and opens it. It falls over and everything spills out, his book, his pencilcase, his lunchbox. All of the words of the people he has heard, all of the footsteps, and the cool, hard floor they were treading on. The dampness of the grass spills out, and the sound of an aeroplane overhead. The ink of all the pens he had seen, the whirring of the computers in the music room. All of his thoughts he had thought, all of the calculations, all of the numbers, spilling out. The stench of the sports hall and the darkness of the caretaker’s cupboard. A Midsummer Night’s Dream spills out, each of the characters escaping. And finally, the weight of the day pours out, the thoughts, the objects, the senses and the words, all fading away.
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Yasmin Inkersole The Seeds of my Sunflower Grandmother My grandma’s nails finish on her skin. Grey, crumpled paper skin. Skin with blisters, Blisters of old, Old like the trees in her garden, like Her. She is of the soil she has grown to love, She is a sunflower in a bed of daffodils. She is the hand on the door handle that Stops you from leaving. She is the one to offer Seven spices chicken soup and homemade Poppy-seed rolls. She has eyes as wide as her pacemaker heart, She has grooves in her cheeks from Polaroid-frozen photo smiles. Her lungs are paper bags that rustle when She breathes. I wonder If those dull, milky cataract eyes mean anything To the upturned corners of her witty, pink mouth. She used to give me advice on the brown side-swept hair And blue eyes I thought I loved, she said: “Love is only a facet of life. There is so much more to it Than kisses on a park bench.” Years on, when her knees were as swollen with arthritis as Her mind was with loveliness, she amended herself. She was older now, she told me, Wiser. She’d been wrong before – (She rubbed her dirty silver wedding ring) “Love,” she said “is everything.” Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Tilly Wainwright 10:47 pm There’s nothing comforting about this storm; I’ve learnt not to care much for these warped raindrop kind of nights when spring breeze competes with itself to the point of crescendo. The howling wind is a faulty lullaby now, all creaking gates and no rhythm. Sunken bones succumb to the cement of a mattress – I shift slightly, cover my ears as if I was an infant with eyes like cracked windows, ajar doors, screeching car alarms. They will leave nothing about me a ‘secret’. It’s 10:47 pm and by no means late. There are times when I feel like the chest of a barren chapel, a hollow auditorium; I can never seem to shake this feeling that something is missing. Too often I am still awake when 3:00 am pervades across my room
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like familiar perfume, stitching itself to my skin. I wear it like an oversized jumper – it wasn’t meant for me but I guess somewhere between the first few moments in darkness and midnight thunderstorms, I’ve convinced myself that it’s the only thing that fits. I do not remember when ‘tired’ became anything more than a lack of sleep.
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Ruby Kelman After Life The sky is bruised Mauve and turquoise Impaled on a grey church spire Beneath it No ghosts wander between the tombstones in the Twilight twisted shadows, yet The spine shivers I am often alone. I avoid Sundays When the church glistens with faith and piety My sordid thoughts smell rotten And I hide when teenagers Duck under the lych gate to smoke Cradling their lit joints in their cupped hands Mothers protecting infants from a storm Sometimes, I am a filthy imposter Masquerading as a mourner though I have never suffered loss Otherwise, I am alone with the daisies. Cadaver-fed and thriving and Much too alive
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
White and unassuming, having Not yet learned to mourn The sky is ancient, bruised and weeping and We are but just born.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Imogen Wade Neighbours A shimmering vision: silk over flesh; tossed hair; parted lips Captured like an out-of-focus photograph in retrospective. I play half-certain, muffled music in his dreams And I hover like a glow worm on the edges of all things. He loves his flowers. All wistful men do. I love him, But matters of the heart are rarely certain. I take great pleasure In our exchange of smiles as he prunes the roses by the gate. On sunny days, you’ll find me reclining in a panama hat Watching sweat pool on the back of his checked shirt; The paint chart of his neck darkening to a ruddy red. It is midnight. The curtains are open. I’m gazing out from across the alley, through the darkness, To his bald head aglow in the illuminated pane. Tomorrow I will tell him. Tomorrow I will reveal the battlefield of my skin And he will tremble. For now the alley’s width spans continents As he glimmers like a camel in a heat haze On a cold English night In his still orbit of a room.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Satta Kamara The Vine That Grew My English accent was a vine that slowly grew around my tongue. I never used to sound like this. I used to have a weird Dutch accent that made me a bone out of place. The other children sledgehammered my confidence down with questions like, “Why do you talk like that?� My fears tornadoed and my chest tightened with loneliness. I was a thorn no one wanted to touch. And so at night I used to dream that my body was a cello in a concert hall and when I spoke my voice would crescendo into a masterpiece and waves of people would bellow with applause. But then, always, the real world would thicken and I would wake up with a voice like a dissonant chord.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Kavae Loseby You, me, the Arctic The Arctic is calm tonight, For her white flag holds parley with the sky And they whisper as their souls take flight Escaping from her too-slender frame, For not the legs, bum or tum of Mother Nature Nor Earth’s heart, lungs, soul does she personify But eyes that burn with black-iced fire, to nurture A saviour, a humble regal of balconied fame, The head of every coin in every purse Beating tails eternally when our world rotates Whose silvery smile reflects Peary’s and Cook’s Upon seeing this living noun: qanik, Snövit, If only red smiles alone could rehydrate This living Verb: Drip, Drip, Drip. Let us not be parasites, But sacrifice our breath in saving hers And tread softly on her cloth light and half-light And quench not the golden fire in her eyes And keep her white atlas space from oil-black blurs, So that her white flag holding parley with the sky Should surrender not her place at the finial, For would we chisel at the White Cliffs of Dover So why at this living Noun: snowflake, Snow White, If only to unearth our slumbering ancestors For they live on as our life water cycles over, But then corpses keep us warm. So instead
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Save the Arctic from rolling into the sea of faith, with The living Verb: Save, Save, Save. For but a dream the polar bear without the polar, But for the reality in children’s cries, don’t drill Down for you might hurt St Nick. So let us save The Arctic from rolling into the sea of memory, with Our living Verb...
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Reem Sultan The Sovereign of the Street I Majestic pigeon! Sovereign of the street, how swiftly you swim through the gum studded ways of this town. II The edge of your wing winks at Apollo and tells him how through worthless rock he has found the dancing light of emeralds and veronica at your neck. III A quill of silver smoke, you escape the choked grasp of a wandering child IV I throw my bread to you I throw a banquet, A feast, Onto your mighty trays of cobble
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
V Your beak is the hand of Midas Your wing, Hermes’ sandal VI May you lace telephone lines till your Day is through, and leave gifts Of white and brown upon the shoulders of Those who do not recognise your nobility!
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Amelia Kendall God save the honeybees She sits square, her feet spreading like batter on a hot pan, the underside leather and spotted. In summer she pickles onions in jam jars and stores them next to the apocalypse cans. She chases the wild dogs out the front paddock, eats a pork leg by herself. In short she slots right under the unforgiving sky, lives and dies by sense. She spies a bug on the table, grabs a placemat, “I kill them all like this HA!” A wheezy laugh. A sip of tea. “But not the honeybees. I pray for the honeybees.”
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Gianni Fortes La Capone He was the king...pin but I was his goddess. He used bullets on the streets blanks in the bedroom but I ran both empires. I was the Desert Eagle pistol clutched in his trembling hand who could kill anyone with one look. One glance. I cleaned pockets faster at the Sapphire Dollar than a walk down a downtown alleyway. I was Chicago’s secret ruby robed in blue that left the green scent that made men’s eyes go yellow their wallets remain brown and the night anything but black. He was seated at the bar when we first met he’d asked for a sherry but settled for a Bloody Mary when we kissed in the dressing room I demanded a gorilla but received a yapping terrier – looks can be deceiving.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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But I liked his bark and so I kept him and taught him how to bite. Cappy would read Sylvia’s works to me in the dwindling dusk down by the East Chicago harbour where my Chicago sky ate his Chicago Sea. My toes teetering on the edge of the dock my eyes hiding somewhere in the moon as I reignited my affair with the evening wind and listened as Capone committed his first murder with nothing more than his thick Sicilian accent and a phobia of metaphors. A few nights later, he took me to Ol’ Monty’s fairground beside the bay. A dichromatic dream of dancing teacups, flightless unicorns and weeping clowns. We stayed there till morning as he held my neck like a promise suspended on a string of gold and with his musty breath whispered in my ear that he would buy me a dinghy and sail me to the moon. I wept. My songs were shorter as my nights with him became longer. Soon he was the guy around town
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
the fat idiot with heaven’s lucky number on his lottery ticket. On our birthdays he bought me a bouquet of roses and I his first Tommy gun. We vowed to teach each other how to use them for better or worse. Eventually we were nothing more than fallen petals and fired bullets. And phone calls from girls in the dead of night. I’m sure he remained faithful. He was my Cappy after all with a bullet cocked between each tooth and a metal moon clutched in metal hands. My moon nonetheless.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Lucy Wainger Support Group For you, I would fold into myself and emerge as a brain parasite, burrow into your skull through the soft spot behind your ear, and nest among the pill-shaped thoughts. For you, I would tag along to a symbiotic support group, my mouth full of neurons I found quivering on the ground post-stampede. I would gnaw gently while they asked your name and you gave your heart yet to be infested.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Hannah Link Prelude Of these memories I am often told: the boy’s face scrubbed raw, and bleeding rivers, from the phosphorescent poison of the hospital lights; and his voice cracking like delicate lightning that splits trees in two to reveal their still beating hearts (that’s what all the lovers don’t tell you: that trees and their green hearts go on living still, against their wishes, for years after the fatal blow is struck; they don’t tell you, those lovers, because they don’t want you to imagine the pain of life within death). I am told, also, of the girl whose brittle chest began to cave to feed the monster she found there; her mind started tearing itself to bits in a centrifuge that never stopped picking up ravenous speed – she grins and her teeth rattle, bone against pure bone. The boy (become man) and the girl (become woman) meet one another, against the odds and the deep stings of razorblades; how can they know, as young as they are? In both of them lies half the child who they will love with their open green hearts.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Jasmine Burgess My Face is against Alien Window Arteries swelling and falling red, Pumping, beating this regular music, As if I’m alive. I remember the English essay, A guy rating me two out of ten, Repeating the same conversations to break The gnawing silence And forget it again. This is what it means to eat the roaring wind for supper, I could run about bare-footed like a mountain goat, I could lie in damp grass and fall asleep. If everything tastes of tears here, With the sea air, why can I not think of crying Or even laughing here and now? Arms outstretched as if I might fly away. & now, my face is against an alien window, A holiday camp window, cold against my skin, Sweet as ice cream in the air of evaporated sweat, Beauty is fleeting but that doesn’t make it less.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
I fear failing, fear looking at life and being unremarkable, I want to dance with the moon, and become An author. Or watch videos until my eyes Jade with blue light. My heart continues to beat. Lightning spills over the sky, The night is a blanket with points stabbed through it At 2am, but fizzing slowly out Into the deep black.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Sala Fadelallah The magician She is his spyware. Daily, he cracked his codes for vulgar profit. A master of cybernetics. Through the screen light she could see his shoestring smile. His bound laugh lacked love as loud as it was dark. The vivid fervid heat, scorched her oak heartbeat. Livid light blinded her. He drew lovers on her polished skin, she supported the artist within. A microfiche moment. Gone. In a puff of electric smoke. He splintered her wooden heart. Now he sat beneath her. A subordinate. An e-pirate. Wearing his crooked black hat.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
A mad, maladjusted magician. Riding the cyber waves. She sank While he sailed away.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Molly Groarke Starlings Faceless soldiers against the stark sky, The starlings sit in the stillness Atop the turrets of man’s castle; Fumeless chimney tops Long since ceased to cough And when the cars they come trundling, Lilting over sleeping policemen, Cells sliding through the veins of the city, The starlings leave – a feather caught by breaths of Curdling air To join the army, where each becomes a figureless blot Twisting nameless wings. A space against colourless clouds, A space for the blackness to pour through.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Daniel Blokh to make a poem i craft the bird’s form from the night, carve it from the corners of the dark and weave its wings from cloud. amidst its starry ribs, i stitch the moon in for a heart, so it should know the sky. holding it, i feel the holy inertia that the cosmos must when cradling the earth; my hands, the creature’s nest, a home for this tiny vessel of wings and breath and life. and then, i put my message in; quietly slide it in its beak as it yawns and wakes, the words hid in its melody. its wings unfurl, catching the spark of song. i unlock my hands and lift it to the sky, so it may fly to you.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Abby Meyer Sheltered I love this dining room; its great glass cloche closes over me, as moss. This is all we wanted; a slow drip of light filtering in; phone screens gently ticking over with news. We never wanted the glare of the news flashes lighting up our skies; so intense, we have to shield our eyes. At night you can hear the rain beat against the windows like trapped insects. That’s the house rule: in a storm, check all the windows are closed; you don’t want it pooling on the floor, soaking into the carpet like mud. When someone brings in dirty footprints, we get the supplies out right away;
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the soap bubbles shatter like crystals into suds. Today the orchid-clouds are weeping sap like a weather warning; ready to release their tumbling blooms. I am prepared; I know how to count the seconds between the roar of the thunder and lightning strike; let’s hope the morning finds some seesaw-splintered tree – limbs twisted as fulgurite – many miles away in someone else’s back garden.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Chloe Smith Paper People When I crafted them, my minuscule, innocent hands creating life, I was focused. With each cut, there was not a loss, but a pump, of blood – as I breathed life into them. Each delicate boy and girl. My hands were blackened by the mere act, worn with a thick smog of words that had no meaning at the time. My heart, however, ballooned – as I saw what I had done – could do. After which, I smiled, my teeth as white as the bodies of the people, alive because of me. I let them dance, blending and swaying around and around and around for hours, or minutes, or days. More than those words, and shapes.
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... I wipe my eyes. The sky is dark and so it is time to see them again. Each of them similar but somehow different – smudges of former sentences, stories and reports all that is left. Other than their shells. I lay them out. A small army, protecting my younger days. It has been years – but they are still here, stronger than the words that made them, filled them – all this time, existing, defying the soft, thin paper, and my shaking, greying hands. If I could focus. I could probably see their chests rise and fall while they are momentarily within my grasp, again. No. Don’t be a child – it was just a breath of wind.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Patrick Hughes The Haven The green diamond stretches away below me. Great chalk cliffs surround the island, the field of endless trees. Thatched houses peer up like blond children. Going closer, I see the endless stream of cars along the Cliffside Road, and the fishing boats coming in and out of the Haven, laden with the day’s catch. Even lower, suddenly, out of the trees, Dunnos House, and the Luccombe triangle. Bill and Jane’s jeep, just the right size For seven dogs and two cats. And then the three houses: Candlewick Cottage, Journey’s End, and Number Three. I lower myself down and through the window see that the bed has been freshly made.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Alice Long Pre‘Fried Eggs on the Plate without the Plate’ (Dali, 1932) Infinitesimal mouths kiss the organ awake. Salt-white spores, crusting into sequins, gleam And drop. Smile, my little drupelet, Planula, milk-jelly; digesting creamy amoebas And washing like plankton in the plum-flesh universe. Lungs of waterweed, sprouting Redly. Outside is too blue for you! Sunlight slides in the air, Melting gelatinous eyes, hearts, into sweet jams. An icy blackness glitters like death. The umbilical cord strings out pinkly towards it.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Maria Woodford nodus tollens my mouth is a garden of beautiful mistakes i cough up summers in strangers’ faces and call it modern art. i write out letters and never send them the box under my bed is a graveyard of poems entitled with the colour of his hair. i’m forever trapping feelings between lines on paper snatch splinters of romance from pages of novels and wonder how it feels to be a protagonist. my mind is a mutter of midnight musings think pianists could use my heart as a metronome. i think about being a pretty girl an essay on house party etiquette and the dangers of drinking full fat milk. i google goddesses with flat chests and cold hands and pretend to be shocked when the search comes up empty. i call myself a study in blue confide my secrets in flower patterned notebooks and boys who grow roses at the backs of their throats. i read about beauty and how to define it with cloud ridden skies and intertwined fingers.
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i feed my words to starving artists we talk about oceans and fairweather friends. my internet history is femme fatales and guides on how to make diamonds from dust.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Molly Watkins Things I Later Put in Boxes the smiling rips of pilfered ancient boxers, the elastic removed for a garland. wrapped twice around tiny, nut-like skull. only their skeletal seams, too tough for safety scissors, stay curled like mouse tails in her palm. those framed spaces revealed – when spread – shapes of butterfly wings and hearts. useless held in her fleshy spreading hand. felt leaves and threaded eyelashes blurred by a sunny outline. time stacks like plastic fruit in the corner, cumulative and tasteless. the remnants of hoarded tights she found in her mother’s waste basket. rolled – intestinal – up her arm until crotch meets armpit and hands may spread, webbed. she is a prehistoric, prehensile thing. most lies limp, clinging like ticks beneath a lifted pinafore. as still and distant as the time before – the afternoons before; the carpet rough and stained and warm, with pink fingers learning to join and hold and make.
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... later, she will bleed as the moon splits open like a robin’s egg. she will inhale understanding like second hand smoke. learn to identify the aorta, patella, pancreas. she will not know how cold the water will have grown, pausing half naked beside the bath. crouching on her heels, barely balanced. a melting candle. she will distend into a heavy thing. recognise herself in the liquid of medieval windows. she will grow to find a great many things misplaced, too dirty to carry like a kitten in her mouth. her face will fold like a napkin, caught in the wind, cartwheeling through a birthday party. as she crosses – en pointe – into the waiting room.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Damayanti Chatterjee Autumn The morning is silent. Only embers in the east and the sigh of footsteps through hushed palaces of leaves. And through the day the constant fall of rain so soft its icy kisses are mist on exposed skin. Night falls like an apology while it is still afternoon. People scurry like mice to golden doorways singing out into the dusk.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Marina McCready 11:49 pm i could count your freckles and find the constellations (orion on your shoulder hercules across your thighs) you are a map of the galaxies you are a fragile thing but you are bold in your very existence because there are stars in you in your eyes, in your hair, in your smile every bruise on your wrist is a nebula and every tear a meteor shower you are beyond me, so far beyond me that all i can do is gaze but i know the secret of your stars: they are so distant the light we see may already be dead.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
77
Priya Bryant texts to: London 10.24 pm it is 6:24 am where you are. I always think Meridian Time must be Real Time – add zero, the logical concentration of the map and the cement centre of my spinning chaotic galaxy. 10.46 pm god, I miss you so much. I miss your smokey-eye edges and the husky growl of your voice, split into channels of bus, tube, rolling never-ending crowds. I miss every ornate detail of your misshapen body, your eau-de-grittedexhaust and the writhing watery grin that courses through the middle of you. 10.55 pm are you there? Are the bodies unfurling themselves from their rolled-up poster bindings yet, is the air clear and snarling with hurry, is the breakfast radio being prodded on in two million cars and are you irritably watching toes being stood on on the district line? 11.03 pm I long for the way your breath curls around my body – cat-fur warm but then snakeskin cold and distant. How you whisper creeping traffic tones into the shell
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
of my ear. I know you’ve done this before, my dear – collecting souls with ghoulish concentration – but I fall for it every time. The sparks don’t let up. 11.11 pm you know what they say; you know what my wish is. the stars are not the same without you. 02.34 am it is 21 days until I am with you again. 21 days, 3 hours, 14 minutes. 02.35 am wait for me?
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
79
Caroline Tsai Detroit 1972 The boy, 43 years old, learns how to buy toothpaste. In aisles lit fluorescent he stands before labels in hieroglyphs, chooses one with a name he cannot yet pronounce. A tongue bitter from sour words. A rotten language of worms. Back home, the night market glows alive under swell of an August moon as round and yellow as egg yolk in damp heat of late summer, air thick with soy sauce eggs and fried turnip cakes, the clinking of metal chopsticks, the thudding of knives against the cutting boards. The silence in produce deafening. Everything green is in a plastic bag except this. He holds it, can still see the textbook cartoons. Ap-ple. An apple is an apple is an apple across oceans. He holds it. Waxy skin the color of Taipei sunset. And he can see it,
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the house with the grey shutters, the doorknobs that took so long to replace. And he can see her, white apron faded from too many laundry cycles, pleated, cheeks like this rosy fruit, and he is holding this. He is holding all of this. When the cashier asks paper or plastic he almost says xie-xie but stops his lips says thank you teaches himself to think in dollars and cents. At home, the breaking skin. White meat against lips. Incisors against flesh. He buries the core a grave, but does not expect a tree tomorrow, knowing how long it takes seeds to trust soil.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
81
Miles McInerney 33.1533째N 116.2357째W The great bowl of the desert On the edge of the Mojave Ocotillo scratching the sky Aiming overland to Ghost Mountain Walking, slowly Badlands, all lands, lands with no one Chuckwalla basking in the inferno Smoke tree, cat claw, velvet mesquite Fountain grass, brittle bush, barrel cactus scratching the sky Salton sink Walking, slowly Badlands, all lands, lands with no one Desert wash, dry bed, great bowl of the desert Big horn sheep scratching the sky The vanishing game of Ghost Mountain Anza Borrego
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Rebecca Alifimoff After the Storm Oz, Kansas, 2004 A month of sun dearth – rain heavy on our backs. The dark sky of July. Blows and brawls in the blazes of mud bisecting our town. Main Street, Jefferson, Broadway – Washington. The signs washed away in the third week of rain. We soon forgot where they led. Our maps too sodden to read. Our hands ran red. Our hands hacking and ran red again. We don’t dare wash the rain from our hair, the soil from under our nails. Only blasphemers are clean. Teach me the sun. Teach me something more than this leaden sky, these roiling clouds. Teach me the summer of our songs: cobalt skies and apples and amber oceans of wheat. Forget the dirges. These purple clouds, this violet lightning.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
83
Amy Wolstenholme Aeroplane God First the roar, the man-made roar, I defy you sky etcetera, watch the sun wink on my Scratched plastic windows and stained wings. The unfolding of my country, Open like a book with flickering field pages, And the eye is drawn down through the hedgerows Like a needle through thread. This is mine, you think. I’ll sketch it out in the fumes. Who cares about the planet choking? This is art. The towns like spun mosaics, drawn by a blind eye anticlockwise, Unseen from the ground the ugly beauty. I see the whiplash mistakes. This spew of factories. I see the jut of England’s hipbones. Hills like breasts, small, eagerly thrust upwards. The teenage girl waiting to be a woman under my inspection. Cars, beads of sweat trickling north to south. A thousand suns wink from a thousand windows – SOS Seen as a glittering multitude of meaningless – I live here. Notice me. Please. I notice with my eye of God. But you are so small. So interchangeable. So many. And you’re gone. The coastline snakes, kissing the sea amorously, Interrupts the eye. A line of where your duty ends. An edge no thicker than an inch. I will peel it from the sea like a sticker from a bottle And throw this land away with my hand. Start afresh. Here comes God with his clouds, this pure white blanket,
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
But it’s greying, fraying with my passage. Shifting, like a rug unfolding to snap, layer over layer. Dizzying. Was that a river? Or just an image? A mirage of a cloud within a cloud and an imagined land. A new country emerges with the same shoddy patchwork. But your fields were greener, you think. Your cities stretched further to the sun, you think. Down there, they’re saying “pass the salt” in the wrong language. You would not bleed for this land. Even though the same clouds cover it And the same shades of blue stretch up into space. 37,000 feet and we’re cruising over the Alps. Small synclines and anticlines run up and down, Dusted with snow. I could pinch it to a new shape. Darkness falls and the edges light up with shaky glow-worms. I can cover them by lifting a finger. The light barely scratches the darkness. It is a blemish in the black, pimples. Nothing more. This dot-to-dot coastline. I will sew you together in sky thread.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
85
Finn Scarr de Haas van Dorsser Fallout Knocking punctuates the birdcalls from the beach. He sees the men from the window, red vests, soft eyes. The pulse quickens and then freezes, strange for a tropical beach in glistening summer. The man draws his curtains and retreats. Deeper. He had never heard these strange birds. Now he wants to know, wants to see, wants to hear. His binoculars comb the sands for the birds. Only litter: towels and sunblock, mixing, marinating, mingling in the ruts. Until now he missed it. The focus wheel glides. The tourist colony swarms around. Motionless forms hunkered down in the ruts, some calling. Some. The charred and hopeless ones tip back, heads open for a nourishing trickle to flow down their crusty throats, fledged and yet nested. The man snaps on the lens caps. Foggy lenses. These weren’t birds.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
Georgie Brooke An observation of Nigel in his absence. on occasion a discordant rare twang of jagged, mismatched notes erupts from Nigel’s black room, but he must be dressed in all nylon to protect himself from the itching stabs of fibres in a world made petrifying by others’ expressions. failing to understand why they don’t have a manuscript like you failing to feel like the films say one should failing to compare his black box to their wondering minds “he’s quirky,” my mother says. he is not illuminated like dust drifting in a slit of light in a black box like the flecks of nothing are illuminated but he has found new means of expression in the dark that we could never find, and in his black box of expression he is a small, silvery, glittering rocket amongst inky stars, more free in the dark than we are, illuminated.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
87
Audrey Spensley Diagram of a Scar Summer is sycamore season, every hill leaf blazing like the moon littered matchsticks on the valley. My mother said if I sucked sassafras veins I would be clean again. She presses poppy petals to my teeth, my skin, the crooks of my elbows bruised tender and pink like uncooked meat. How to be clean again – how to be good. In summer I am smooth as a vowel, eleven months spent digesting September. The footprints have been softened by rain like tension kneaded out of muscles. There are subtler infections than these clawed knees, these cherry-colored dog bites, these scabbing sunburns. The bruises that pulse like colorless jellyfish under the skin, between the skin, inside the skin. Eleven months and I still taste dirt in my throat. They said I was better pinned like a butterfly on corkboard, wingless. Musical like a girl kicking through water. In the morning my mother presses my palms, knowing there is a way to love what is damaged. To eat without swallowing.
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Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
They found me splayed in September. The valley, an inverted goosebump. Now my mother shuffles and reshuffles questions like cards on the bedspread – what will you remember in the morning, how many mousetraps have you ever set, and do you think it hurts, the snapping of bone, when it’s so clean and so quick?
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
89
Finty Hunter I am a cave to them. Craftsmen mine their way through me, pickaxing my lungs and swinging spades at my bones; taking each part of me in. They seal my fractured nerves in countless jars for eternal examination – they want to become experts in my composition. I feel the intrigued chatter of scientists worm through me as they marvel up at my make-up. Miners ladder up my skeleton, finding footholds and handholds in the spaces between my ribs, checking for anything worth their exploitative exploration. Each jolt of their axe sends tremors through my nervous system. Engineers shine torches on my joints, on the cascading cracks, winding roads of bones, finding places for their drilling machines to delve further into me. Soon there will be nothing left that I can really call my own.
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The foremen are shouting screamed orders; cracked teeth reveal themselves in cackling victories that echo around my cavernous skull, around my skeleton: reverberate off my vertebrae. They find the stalactite sadness: my very own parasite made of cold brittle stuff that hides no gold, no silver lining. Workers examine it with a magnifying glass held tightly in their hands like a pistol they shoot me with their staring eyes and their piercing questions – dynamite is planted, and in apprehension I will wait for near-certain explosion.
Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
91
Lauren Maltas Misplaced You can hide the buttons in matchboxes The cogs and shards and debris In sardine cans With string she found Collected hair and rings And paint the covers in enamel colour Like arrowhead charms Decorate and guard You can hide her frames in matchboxes With her shoelaces The pin they found Her brooches They are missing something aren’t they Her touch on them The glass that filled the frame You can hide the heel from her courts In matchboxes Conceal it with her lipsticks They were blood red and still are Like she is You can hide her pendants In old medicine jars And her tonics can be flushed down the sink You can lock her life in the bureau Unpick her straw hats Make chair cushions A fly swat if you wish
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You can scatter her things all around your house Like a salvage yard of bits You can replicate and reconstruct Maybe you can be convinced They are just the same As the day they were found With her coat to the east Her soul to the north Her body still near the centre As she furnished the ground Like she wanted to Made the friction tracks pretty again Gave up her pearls to the wreckage You can hide her bracelets In matchboxes In your Fox’s biscuit tin She had fastened her clasps but the knot came undone Her scarf is still blowing in the wind
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Isla Anderson Portrait of Zipporah at the Wake Gloss-mouth, undone. Show me something. Freud and paint and patchwork skin. This is a shadow. This, a hive. Chin a globe of spiders’ eggs; that swell of clicking limbs. The mirror holds no face to be excised. Speaks in tongues. Threatens swarms of locusts where it cysts; a bed of blood. I’ll kill your sons if they make me. They make me. Open seas on them and let them close; fall asleep with a cemetery of bees between my legs. Salted wings. When they beg for aisles, say you could have flown. Come shrill. Come bottle-blue and stinging
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at the crest. When mothers ask me where they can pay homage to their boys, I lift my shirt and show this honey-swollen chest.
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Annalise Lozier Pseudoscience Pretty picture, Velcro Face. Cut your silhouette in canvas & watch the light pour through like water, facetious as the eye of a pin. Queens of every suit put out the sun, but the world only quivers in the dark. Snap your fingers & watch it all fly outward – planets & ribbons with clots of burning stars tied on the ends. Follow the waves of ancient sound & there you are at the beginning, your heel pressing into the seed of the universe. Press a little harder & you never happened at all.
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Shakthi Shrima Metairie Every August, Mama swaps her stomach for broken-lipped gutters where she once saw a boy stolen like the moon. She dreams that the kites are orphaned again. All that littered light. The streets shuffled and unshuffled like a deck of cards. The boy couldn’t swim. Mama won’t fill the sink anymore. When she is not careful, he surfaces in her throat, a riptide. He sews smoke into her lower register, bleeds headlights into the storm she keeps under her tongue. He hides with her in church and teaches her how to pray. Every August, Mama kneels. This is the month we wear the sea like a skirt. The sky is the color of her mouth after half a bottle of Cognac, of splinters turning their faces inward. When I am not careful, I mistake this color for honey. When I am not careful, the sink yawns with rust. She steeples my hand in hers, teaches me words for drowning – ahogar. El diluvio. I want to tug the lines around her mouth until they snap open like the night into stars, like puddles slipping into the streets shrieking, hold me, hold me.
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Freya Carter Life Models Art is ambling along the aisles; paint is inhaling/exhaling – through dried out lungs and flaking throats. The escalator is cluttered with compositions. First in line for the check-out appears old age, sketched in charcoal, dust particles gathering in the furrow of his brow. Years of practice have etched monochromic views, deep as a grudge, through every ligamentous line. It is only his memories that are smudging, shifting, smearing around the edges – fading too quickly, like pages left bared to the sun. Heavily shaded are the sockets of the cashier’s eyes, as if already empty: scratched crudely with crow’s feet and complaints. A pencil groove marks her mouth, like a fissure in a cliff, which under stress longs to split in a scream. These details are overlooked by the viewers. Few admire a traced uniform, a flattened figure, a study in disappointment’s muted greys. From a cradle of arms, a Crayola baby cries – scribbled fists clenched tight on a felt-tip blanket. His tired mother seeps at the edges, weeping nostalgia, in gentle watercolour hues. She blends into the background,
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a pale wash of weariness, content that her child is so vivid, bawling with life – the unapologetic splash of colour in the crowds. Framed in the doorway hangs the modern art movement – formed from abstract/pop art/romanticism: the clashing contradictions of youth. There are no subtleties to their thick acrylic. Textured and rough. The brush strokes remain visible: imperfectly powerful. Colour gradients are forgotten. These portraits are raw. Unmixed emotion and undiluted defiance. Today on display: the grander picture, our kinetic canvas in a stirring exhibit. As the day closes, this gallery falls still, yet elsewhere the art continues to walk.
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Lisa Zou Camouflage Imagine a wasteland so barren it must never have sipped water. Burn the recognizable unfamiliarity into your memory while tasting dust so bitter your lips turn themselves inside out. Picture the tumbleweed. I want you to be her lover, to navigate twelve asphalt roads, to untangle the knots in her forehead. Between elephant trees, you need to decipher the secrets of the haze. You slipped into the desert before death, yet every corner is overflowing with life. The breathing of saguaros. The mute sirens still ringing to be heard. I ask you to grasp the intangible, to kiss the heat before it smothers you.
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Colette Spaul This room died while you were away I’ve been away over a week. It’s strange to think that on holiday one can feel more at home than when in the house one grew up in. Where the first word and first step and bloody work was conceived and endured. I recognise after the fact, that I feel more comfortable with the abrupt halt of shore and the grey sea. The day I left, that same water looked like an oil painting. Ah, but I concede nothing. Not to this empty room with its silent judgement. I love the long coastline, the dawn chorus of gulls. There is no reason for me to be limited to this stagnant place. I was made for those same storms, that have ravaged the beaches I walk on since they were formed. For sand, not tarmac; for cliff paths, not cycle lanes. Still in this room, guilt lingers.
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Catherine Dent Materfamilias whenever i pass a farm from the passenger’s side, i stutter always to create the rich arable pasture of your ancestral home. all our summers were spent there. my sister and i would sit, weighted by the old staircase, feeling ourselves to be strange and unripened fruit to view the world as you had done before our imaginings. in the mornings the walls bellied in with the orange and untrapped light and i would run to your room to tell you of the sun’s new transit. once you told me that, in my clean white nightdress, i reminded you of Artemis, using a language i could not yet understand. you used to take us to open fields, thumb our eyes to your green and yielding distances of morning, thinking you could fend off my suburban glaucoma. everything had such a neolithic delicacy in your large and cicatrice-traced palms; i remember being teased from my huffs by your imitations and that the next day’s school lunch would be brightened by the hasty pink crayon hearts you slipped beneath my sandwich box. the totem of measurements to track my proud new heights along the back door frame and watch my past grow tall in its shadow is still preserved. moon’s horns turn. and tonight you are the stained-glass saint
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of the kitchen casement, watching adolescent males dismantle my swing-set in the tubular halfdarkness. as i pack my things into my childhood suitcase, star-spangled and blue, don’t think, mum, that i don’t know you’re wringing your hands in the dishwater, a small cry the heated prayer unvoiced in the back of your throat.
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Amber Thornton my father knows this And tumbling, like heavy drapes, white miasma, Your marble, your suffering, your cold and distant thirst. The Church in Tinos, also white, also heavy. With Christ, with red water from a body so rich They drink in the sight of You, eyes two cups of drunk lust, Still holy this time, though baked from the sea salt wall Esoteric purchase, trade from death to pocket, This pilgrimage: these sooted Grecian feet so tired Of Pilgrims: who seek courtship in this sacrifice, These natives worn like he was, raped and skinned like He, Paraded for three millennia on the wall. The blood rained down like coins in the fountain. The wall is white, the child sees it and paints pictures, You shift with your body cracking and wait for her. They tumble down, the paintings, into the ocean And you smile, black eyes, with red eagled wings, Swoop and pluck the paper from the water, shake feathers, Unlock grey talons, see the red paint run – And feast.
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Natasha Blinder Phillip Augustus Three lions passant guardant Or, it haunts you in the space beneath your fingernails, like dirt or blood, and when you close your eyes the lion smiles, his blue tongue lolls, he rumbles with the cavalry. Though you were younger you had seen a greater portion of the years; he dripped down, honey through your hands, he stuck sweetly to your teeth. Now the whisper of it lingers in the hollow of your ear, and in the silence it crawls in. He is gone. He is gone. Too long it is since you both knelt and took the cross. He was the Holy Lance, and you were there to bear it as he gleamed and rose above the throng to drip with gore and chant songs with your troubadours. Now three lions passant guardant Or curl round your feet, and you take Mass.
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Alex Zhang Watermelon After Dusk Waxed seeds shaped lunar like waning moons, or perhaps black flames. The blade sweeps through the husk, gliding gracefully as if through butter, or even air. Pink juice spills from the fissure – running, flowing, it oozes ripeness, succulence, sweetness. We feast with spoons, digging holes shaped like moon craters. I expect roots when we tug the flesh out. Mother spits out seeds like bullets from a gun. Father picks his teeth for the stragglers. I catapult sticky pieces with my fingers, they berate me for wasting those last tender chunks for only
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carcass remains now; green swollen veins, jagged neon flesh. We throw out what’s left, let the body hit the ground, splattering. The grass greedily gleans the rest.
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Kathryn Hargett Mazurka, Op.81, No.1 Summer is a whimpering dog for our adolescent anarchy. Today, blood-brother swears for Birmingham or Augusta: to find a freight train or some to mourn like a midnight radio broadcast & to smash gunsmoke moonshine against the tracks. We want it to pass through us like kaddish: symphonia like a naked woman & the sky humming with Lazarine blessings. We want the wind to rush through our ribcages like a dust storm, like maternal wisdom, for Sherman neckties to adorn the pineal gland – bring a pizzicato harmonic to rush us into a boxcar. Teeth suckerpunched out of the gums, alone on the tracks, we are too high on June to disbelieve, not to expect summer’s hungering belly breaking the skyline. To not say: Jehovah, show us Canaan. We want cigarettes & hookah bars & a dilated green-eyed alien abduction in our lungs, we are ready to remove ourselves from the broken joints of Appalachia. Poised, bottle-in-hand, we are waiting for a train to expose its head at the mouth of the forest, to shout out of grief:
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all night, projecting ourselves on the road snaking its way towards the moon, & onto the train we know must be coming for us like a balding deity. Say: God, show me my salvation; but it doesn’t come. But nothing ever comes except sunlight: overture broken by morning, memory lost in fits of smoke.
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Katherine Hampshire Lucid Dreaming You You are the Freudian slip on the tip of my tongue. And I cannot swallow you in black coffees and tea, nor purge you through bile’s control (that unilateral whip). I can’t leave your kiss on anonymous lips: the ghost of your taste has always soaked through the blockade my brain had tried to accrue ’gainst your hands, in the bed, on my hips. And oh, you lied so softly as I was drowning like a sick child in fevered sleep – just past the heavy point where I could weep dreamt prose into my created cavern. I alone feed this stripped out dream, because I broke us into lucid reality.
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Katharina Högler Why immortality hurts sometimes Believe me, when you’ve seen the world a thousand times, And heard one million church bell chimes, And been on journeys far and wide; Well, something deep inside me died Sometimes As I ventured alone through the treacherous seas of Time and age and era. After discovering prodigious treasures in Berlin, Cairo and Peru, And done all I’d ever wished to do; From New York to Sydney I pray do not bid me To linger here longer Than it takes me to ponder why people die Sometimes. Trust me when I say That brief joyous moments will fade away, Old memories lost in the fabrics of time, left to decay In his perpetual cloak, Insubstantial and flimsy as smoke. But I remember Sometimes. Where is the beauty in a billion sunsets of glory, When, deep down, you know it will be the same old story. I cannot enjoy it because I know That I have another one billion to go.
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Michelle Chen Coterie I have never known a person who has died & I’ve been trying to do better. Egypt’s finest hiccoughs made me a swooning dilettante of the museum’s darling coffins, sobbing over dropped haw flakes. Forgive me, I’ve been busy. I’ve been dreaming in chemistry class & somehow an umbrella has found its way against this blasted landscape & the rain is trickling down the flaps of this flying squirrel & my long dark hair begins to dry – Buckyball…molecule …write it down…fullerene. Full? I am not full, lunchtime is next period. My head droops and jerks, eyes widening tiredly. I am as poised as death. I hear my sentences filling up with fear. The loveknot at the orphanage wasn’t half bad. The only tongue I had was a stub, and that made me glad. The pond drowned me when I stepped on a lily pad. The eyes glitter like stage spotlights & traffic at night The tiles undress flesh from bone, feather from dove (sugar stuck to my heel)
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I limp casteless past. Now I said I’ve been busy lately clicking ahead in Youtube videos skipping flash-frames for the ignition of human voices & bawl-worthy lyric yesterday my only friend told me her great-grandmother watched her grandma die & I didn’t understand but tried. Darling, I planted your voice for you. I spread all your dead things into the compost & stepped back & Buckyball is the most common naturally occurring fullerene & you are so so quiet I have never known a person who has died & I’ve been trying to do better. I’m sketching clear deserts in the dark.
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Lorcan Greene Aibreann On the Frontier Withers Aibreann in her verdant shawl, as cerement To bear her moonkissed shoulders for the boys, A Lemon Cichlid shimmer in her hair. Aibreann lilting through the world as goldfinch: With dainty feet she consecrates the ground; With flaxen voice she beatifies the air. Aibreann with engilded hair now rizzared Faded to a dusty ashen blonde, Aibreann with light linen skin now crinkled, Crumbing as a dying Cycad frond. Aibreann with the lysèd lips once holy Dried out by a harsh harmattan squall; There in casket garter-bound goes Aibreann, Wrapped up in her cerements, as shawl.
Aibreann (pronounced Ab-rawn) is the Irish Gaelic word for April.
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Ben Vince Nemo: a series of short poems On reupholstering the sofa How it’s taken me going on 3 years to decide that this orange fabric isn’t worth us escapes me. With the amount of shit I’ve found stuffed down the sides, I’m half expecting to find the original maker’s arm, reaching up from the cushion, trying to pull me under. On finding dust hanging onto their urn How ironic. On you, this morning, sun-kissed, dappled by weariness It’s like you’re a mirage – half there, simultaneously alive, physical, and virtual, hollow like air. I’m only half deserving of you, partially in your dimension.
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On hearing things I shouldn’t Breathing down the nape of my neck when I’m lucidly waking up alone. The windows, ripping when I open them. The windows, ripping when I close them. Birdsong. A cage door, opening in a basement (I have no basement). Birdsong. The flutter of fabric against air as an arrow rips through a target, like a window. Birdsong. On a bird, flying into the car windscreen It dipped like an air current: invisible, until it hits you in its entirety. Like grief. Just like a ghost.
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On a bird, flying into a plane engine I do not really fit in anywhere. Does the blood and viscera collect in the rotors? Does it get propelled from the craft? I imagine the plane dipping like an air current – constant, tumbling, unpredictably elusive – like birdsong.
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Rawan Yousif Rules for a little black girl, AKA me When I was a little girl, a boy half my age, with the bluest eyes and the blondest hair, came to me with a question I had wondered my whole life, and he asked me: “why are you brown?” Bewildered I told him “my mother drank too much coffee when she was pregnant with me” and that was the end of that, the little boy walked away and I was left with a question no adult has ever bothered to answer. Now, as I got older and my skin stretched to make way for an ever growing skeleton, I realised that there are rules unspoken, unwritten and silent in nature, so, in an attempt to rewrite history I have compiled them into a list and will proceed to dub this: “rules for a little black girl, AKA me”.
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Rule number one: Speak every word with the same pride that your father taught you to say your name, arabic notation and a thick sudanese accent, scream it scream your own birthright until the word loses all of its meanings. Scream your heritage with all the strength your mother gave you, worn and loving hands around your heart remember what her smile looked like remember that if you could heal her in all the places that she hurts you could die in the most peaceful sleep ever known to man. Rule number two: There are those who think you are violent in nature, nurture, that your DNA has generation after generation coded for ruffians and thugs that is all you have ever been good for that you brought it with you from that blasted country you came from Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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but how can you have brought it with you? when the only memory you have of a country you have never been comfortable with calling your own is the way your grandmother smiles, the way your baby cousin, just shy of three months old, laughs like it is the breath of life itself like it’s the only thing sustaining her and how your uncle’s weddings lasted four, five, six days because they couldn’t stand to think that they were only allowed one window of opportunity to scream their love for newlywed wives. Rule number three: Never stand in between other people’s stories again little girl, today write your own construct it with the english you crafted from birth pour your mixed blood over pages, let it bleed through bind it in skin too thick for bullets and choke holds.
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Rule number four: Always remember that his name was Mike Brown and that you’re black. Always remember that his name was Trayvon Martin and that you’re black. Eric Garner, Antonio Martin, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey That they died in the street. That for the rest of your life the words “I can’t breathe” are embossed in your mind and carved into your skin; because “Don’t shoot” meant let trigger happy fingers slide because mothers mourned their dead children on Christmas Eve without a soul to console them. Because arms up in surrender meant break this boy’s life with both hands.
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But do not let them deceive you little girl, do not let them tell you you deserved to lose a war you were never drafted for. The next time you hear someone scream “I can’t breathe” lend them your lungs. The next time someone holds their hands up in surrender, lower them, remind them that they have nothing to be sorry for. My skin is not an apology I refuse to let my prologue consist of “sorry”, I won’t ever apologise for the honour my parents gave me.
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Rule number five: Never forget that they will see black skin before a beautiful mind, brown eyes before a graceful soul, and a girl whose name they can’t push properly between their teeth or wrap around their tongues before they see a human with mixed parts that make her whole. And I can’t promise that all these rules will keep your bones safely locked in your body, and I can’t promise that we’ve made good men’s dreams come true and I can’t promise that the battlefield feels any more like home.
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And I won’t lie to you and tell you that I’m the jack of all trades when the fighting starts and I won’t lie when someone asks if I’m tired because my muscles are weak, and my melanin strained. No one is coming to save you little girl, there will be no classroom presentations telling you how to sleep at night with the knowledge that there are those out there not far from your home who wish you were dead there will be no leaflets or handouts, telling you how to tell your best friend that saying the n-word is racist that when people touch your hair without your permission, they’re racist that when the teacher looks at your name the first day
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of school and says “I’m not even going to try to pronounce that” they’re racist. But I can tell you that I remember why the war began I remember what I fight for and who stands with me because when the gunshots start, I can look to my left and then my right and I am proud of how many stand by my side. I have a dream that one day our children will be judged not on the colour of their skin but on the content of their character.
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Congratulations to the Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015 Commended poets: Will Adams, Rebecca Alifimoff, Isla Anderson, Natasha Blinder, Daniel Blokh, Aisha Mango Borja, Fóla J. Brady, Eva Brand Whitehead, Georgie Brooke, Priya Bryant, Jasmine Burgess, Jenny Burville-Riley, Mikaela Carmichael, Autumn Carson, Freya Carter, Damayanti Chatterjee, Michelle Chen, Misbah Choudhry, Shamma Dalal, Catherine Dent, Leila Dickinson, Sala Fadelallah, Annie Fan, Gianni Fortes, Ava Goga, Tom GonzalezCarvajal, Alex Greenberg, Lorcan Greene, Molly Groarke, Katherine Hampshire, Kathryn Hargett, Hal Henderson, Katherina Högler, Eli Hong, Patrick Hughes, Finty Hunter, Yasmin Inkersole, Satta Kamara, Ruby Kelman, Amelia Kendall, Inara Lalani, Alannah Lewis, Hannah Link, Alice Long, Kavae Loseby, Annalise Lozier, Lauren Maltas, Hermione Marshall, Jacob Mason-White, Gazelle Mba, Marina McCready, Miles McInerney, Abby Meyer, Ruby Morvan, Mia Nelson, Zinath Oloko, Pratiksha Saha, Claire Seymour, Shakthi Shrima, Chloe Smith, Colette Spaul, Audrey Spensley, Reem Sultan, Charis Taplin, Andrew Telford, Abigail Thomson, Amber Thornton, Caroline Tsai, Finn Scarr de Haas van Dorsser, Ben Vince, Imogen Wade, Lucy Wainger, Tilly Wainwright, Molly Watkins, Alice West, Emily Wilder, Amy Wolstenholme, Maria Woodford, Jim Woods, Chelsy Wu, Catherine Yarrow, Rawan Yousif, Alex Zhang, Margaret Zhang, Lisa Zou. Top 15 poets: Apollo, Sophia Carney, Magnus Dixon, Gaia-Rose Harper, Ian Macartney, Kajol Marathe, Riona Millar, Maud Mullan, Eira Murphy, Ben Read, Jack Sagar, Allie Spensley, Ella Standage, Jonathan Stone, Sophia Tait. The winners’ anthology is available from The Poetry Society website poetrysociety.org.uk/foyle 126
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Foyle Foundation The Foyle Foundation is an independent grantmaking trust supporting UK charities which, since its formation in 2001, has become a major funder of the arts and learning. The Foyle Foundation has invested in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award since 2001, one of its longest partnerships. During this time it has trebled its support and enabled the competition to develop and grow to become one of the premier literary awards in the country. www.foylefoundation.org.uk
The Poetry Society The Poetry Society is Britain’s leading voice for poets and poetry. Founded in 1909 to promote “a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry”, the Society is now one of the country’s most dynamic arts organisations, with nearly 4,000 members around the world. It is the publisher of the leading poetry magazine, The Poetry Review. With innovative education and commissioning programmes, and a packed calendar of readings, performances and competitions, The Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. www.poetrysociety.org.uk
Help young writers thrive The Poetry Society’s work with young people and schools across the UK has changed the lives of countless emerging readers, writers and performers of poetry, developing confidence and literacy skills, encouraging self-expression and opening up new life opportunities. Support us by donating at poetrysociety.org.uk/donate
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Opportunities for young writers from The Poetry Society Young Poets Network is The Poetry Society’s online platform for young poets up to the age of 25. It’s for everyone interested in poets and poetry – whether you’ve just started out, or you’re a seasoned poetry reader and writer. You’ll find features, challenges and competitions to inspire your own writing, as well as new writing from young poets, and advice and guidance from the rising and established stars of the poetry scene. We partner with amazing organisations, from English National Ballet and the British Library, to Oxfam, sparking ideas that travel far beyond the page. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @youngpoetsnet youngpoetsnetwork.org.uk SLAMbassadors is the national youth slam championship, open to young people aged 12-18. Prizes include a masterclass weekend with slam champion Joelle Taylor and the chance to perform at a prestigious London venue alongside a headline spoken word act. Recent judges and headliners include Kate Tempest, Hollie McNish and Scroobius Pip. SLAMbassadors workshops are also available for schools and youth groups. slam.poetrysociety.org.uk Poetry Society Youth Membership is for aspiring writers and poetry enthusiasts aged 11-18. Members receive poetry goodies, opportunities for feedback and Poetry News, The Poetry Society’s newsletter, packed with features, interviews and practical tips. poetrysociety.org.uk/membership
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Enter the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2016 Judges: Malika Booker & W.N. Herbert Enter your poems – change your life! The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2016 is open to any writer aged 11 to 17 (inclusive) on the closing date of 31 July 2016. The competition is completely free to enter and poems can be on any theme or subject. Individuals can enter more than one poem, but please concentrate on drafting and redrafting your poems – quality is more important than quantity! Entries cannot be returned under any circumstances so please keep copies. Prizes include mentoring, places on a week-long residential writing course at an Arvon Centre, publication in a prestigious anthology, and much more. Winners also benefit from ongoing support and encouragement from The Poetry Society via publication, performance and internship opportunities. How to enter: before entering, please read the rules, published in full on our website. Enter online or photocopy the entry form and send it, with your poems, to: FYP 2016, The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX. School entries: want to submit your whole class’s poems? You can enter a set of poems by post or online using our simple submission form. Every school that enters 25 students or more will receive a £50 discount on our Poets in Schools service! Want a FREE set of anthologies, resources and posters for your class? Email your name, address and request to fyp@poetrysociety.org.uk For full rules and instructions on how to enter visit our website: foyleyoungpoets.org Poems by the Commended Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2015
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Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2016 Entry Form Individuals: complete and post this form or enter online at foyleyoungpoets.org Teachers: to submit multiple entries, use our online form for teachers or download a class entry form from foyleyoungpoets.org Name ______________________________________________ Address _____________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Postcode ________________ Country
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Your school __________________________________________ Your tel MOBILE PREFERRED ________________________________ Your email
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Date of birth __________ No. of poems submitted ________ Gender
MALE
Ethnic group
FEMALE
OTHER
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I confirm I have read and agree to the competition rules (online at: poetrysociety.org.uk/fyprules) To enter by post, write the entrant’s name and postcode on the reverse of each poem submitted and include a completed entry form. Send to: FYP 2016, The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX or enter online at www.foyleyoungpoets.org The Poetry Society has created a FREE online community, Young Poets Network, to keep you updated with opportunities for young writers. If you do NOT wish to join the mailing list, tick here
www.foyleyoungpoets.org