WRITE
RS’
BLOC AL
JOURN
MEMORY
Editor’s Note Dear Reader, Happy New Year! Welcome to the first journal of 2021, and our second journal for this academic year. Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the passing of Birmingham poet Leon Priestnall, who was an encouragement and friend to so many of us at Grizzly and in the wider Birmingham poetry scene. May our memories of him stay strong. In honour of Leon, this term’s journal involved a collaboration with our spoken word night, Grizzly Pear, with a shared theme- ‘Memory’. I’d like to thank our members for joining us at the event, and submitting to this journal. It was a pleasure to see you perform and to read your work! As always, our society continues to produce so many innovative pieces and fresh voices and I’ve enjoyed being your editor more than I can describe. Hope you enjoy reading! Mehar
Contents
West Wittering by Will Moran Three Poems by Majo Sanguino 64 Dale by Vato Klemera Worm Death by Jasmine Barradell Two Poems by Cara Scott Come Rain or Sun by Clara Morate Two Poems by Ellie de Satge Thursday’s Women by Elena Vaid trapped on the wrong side of the wardrobe by Neeve Robinson Three Poems by Felix Chadwick-Histed Wolf of Walsall by Clara Morate Five Poems by Hannah Valente Deja Vu by Ameek Two Poems by Laurie Spafford
who are we to remember it all? by Yerkezhan Berkembayeva Anecdotes (Three Haiku) by Isabelle Porter (Very) Short Story by Laurie Spafford
West Wittering Will Moran I am thinking of the – I am thinking of you, before we met, how memory is present-tense – long white sand and warm inside your coat, as if I were a stone kept and saved for child who did not know joy, for you to keep. I am thinking of us never thinking to look – diving too shallow, you were the water lifting me, holding me, feet dash against rocks – kiss me. Do I say that now, think of that beach, of sand and feel, I never knew myself ? I am thinking of how – never speak again.
Three Poems Majo Sanguino Secrets I’ve never told that to anyone. the words escape my mouth, shocking both of us. its dark in the room but I hear you move in ruffled sheets I don’t know you that well at this point but I know exactly how your face looks, a mix of disbelief with softness. It’s hard to describe but after all this time you and I know which face I mean. we’ve spent many a night similar to that one. we share every thought now, though that night we thought there was a line on what we could and couldn’t share. We both saw it so clearly in the middle of the bed, till one rogue toe decided to drag it like a rag, mopping up the spillage of our words. The moments following my confession were tense, you held my hand in a way that might as well have been a hug. I could feel your eyes on me. As if you couldn’t believe my small frame could hold such a weight. I hope you like hugs ‘cause you’re getting one right now. we both giggle and cross the line for good, and you whispered into my hair: Thank you for telling me, couldn’t have been easy. It wasn’t, but you made it feel like I was safe. We spent the rest of the night trading confidential information, we were children playing at being spies. Our mission: being best friends by bedtime.
On staying strong I wish the words would just come out. I have spent the better half of 3 months rewriting them. Trying every combination to express that while I wish I was in our cottage by la quebrada, I’m thankful I am not. I want to tell you that I wish I was drinking my coffee on the bench that faces the mountains on your balcony. That the last 3 months have been the hardest, being alone is a skill I have neglected and I’m finally practicing. I don’t tell you these things, because I promised. Waking up has been difficult recently, but I do it. I make half-hearted meals though I know I don’t want them. I think to call you when I have nightmares, then I don’t. Everything feels heavy and hard recently. I’m not writing to worry you, I do so because I’m okay now. They opened the restaurants yesterday, and my friends are back in town. I have gone through the worst of it. I have spent every daydreaming of our cottage by la quebrada and while I ached every second of it, I’m thankful I stayed put.
Yet Another Covid Poem I’m choosing to let go of the things that time has stolen from us. This time last year I was laying in patches of grass with my friends, weaving flowers into crowns. The kind of moment that hurts just as much as embraces you, the kind that aches before it is fully gone. The light escapes the blinds in your room letting the blue-sky seep in. I lay on your bed with a sad smile on my face, the memory of that unusually warm week floods me and you tell me that you’ll miss me when the next wave hits. I have only just gained you and yet I must let go all too soon, as we reach your door you hug me so tightly it almost hurts. A final kiss so soft that I can’t help but smile into it, only to feel my chest grow heavy when it’s done. The world has taken mornings in bed and nights on the couch, it stole dancing in the rain and laying on the sand But I let go of my clutching hand. The flowers will grow whether you stare at them or not so, Don’t worry baby, they’ll still be waiting a few months from now.
64 Dale Vato Klemera I’m taken out of my skin and into the screen: Snapchat Memories holds in my hand the before; It tells me two years ago your smile centred my Attention; uncertainly now the names I knew Refill the old house’s every corner, and I remember The absinth on the shelf, which had so impressed On me at the time. Maybe one day I will smile in The centre of the room again with you.
Worm Death Jasmine Barradell I put the worms in a plastic tub constructed a home of weeds and mud they formed into one and then a family ‘full of germs those worms’ my friend said stood at the edge of her drive by the wood we call the Spinney where we played hide and seek manhunt or poddy 1-2-several times a week ‘they like water’ my friend’s sister said so I bathed them over night until they were – earthworms can’t drown I googled it just now but I’m certain that I accidentally murdered my little wiggly family a fact cemented in sentimentality of childhood laughter and mistakes imagined lands and knee-scraping-escapes the great tragedy of our early life won’t be erased so easily without a fight the internet won’t tell me I’m wrong a fact our friendship rested on I know it in my grieving guilty vegan heart it can’t all be a lie I did cause my worms to die.
Two Poems Cara Scott Memories to Forget These memories play inside my head, a sea of regrets swim inside; I can’t forget. Now the past is haunting me day and night, the ghosts come at any time now, I can’t forget. My dreams just remind me of all that I’ve lost and all that I wish still existed. I want to forget.
Wishful thinking I want you to just waltz through the door As if nothing’s really changed And you’ll ask for a cuppa If one is being made
Come Rain or Sun Clara Morate Your absence let the sun scorch blisters in my eyes and singe my lips till cracks and craters could not stop the tears cascading, burning down my face, my crackled mouth and wrung out neck coiled above a broken ghost, a shell, a shape, or void. Should I let your arms of thunder wrap themselves around the ball of fire in the sky like a mighty python chokes the warmth from a corpse? So that relentless heat will fade away like a distant clap pf thunder rather than a terror booming across my very eyes. So that my eyes will cool and fill my sockets instead of their whites melting spreading abstract all over my vision, clouding me like you cloud the infernal heat that slowly boils me day by day. So that my hair can wash and love and feel wind and matt itself into knots, each one a trophy of adventure, quest, and passion. So that my lips can stretch across my face like the four winds stretch from Abydos to the Caucacus, from Parnassus to Amathus, boundless and unharnessed, a wondering wind. So that my neck can stretch and turn to marvel at your unparalleled beauty, Apollo himself would shoot you down where he not so he enamoured. The spirits of the earth kiss the ground you pound, naiads bathe in the droplets you shake from the sky, the Pleiades themselves fizzle when you are near. So that I can gaze up at the crackle in the air around you rather than cower under the daily burden of Apollo from the gates of Eos to Nyx. Do I drown with dignity in the desert or do I drown in you but with you?
Two Poems Ellie de Satge Back Garden This is where big balloons are blown up for photo shoots, Ready to go to Brighton the next day. This is where Chloe hangs streamers on branches, Ready to bring in the new year. Mads has put lights up in the tree for evenings spent with Keendra, secretly sipping beers, my garden becoming a lockdown sanctuary.
Vegetables Seasoning your skin before you go in, I have learnt to roast you. Leaves cradle you in Our big wooden bowl, which is used For popcorn too when we watch whatever’s on. Mum likes it when we all eat together. This is why I’ve cooked you.
Thursday’s Women Elena Vaid Time brought her to me one Thursday lunchtime, her figure cut out of the shadowed café wall and growing thicker as she morphed into a glowing girl. She found me picking the splintered wood off a table, where there sat an Americano scalding the air with its burnt roast. The eggs sat as company, cold in contrast. and untouched on a cheap diner plate. She frightened me so much that I forgot myself and uncrossed my legs under the doily tablecloth when she came to sit down. Her curious gaze said I had changed, and I had, at least in appearance. “Shouldn’t you be at school?” I asked, confused where I tried to be nonchalant. I hadn’t seen her in seven years, and back then she had been a reflection, distorted in thick glass. The girl before me condensed and sublimed in the air, ghostly and fickle, as though she could be blown away with a single breath. She was in her school uniform- a grey pleated skirt and blazer- and had dry auburn hair that hung past her shoulders in layered tangles. “I have a free period- that gives us thirty-five minutes,” she announced, her voice coming out like static. “I remember.” She started picking at the cold eggs with a fork. I watched her as she breathed in the food as though it were nectar, food of the Gods.
“You haven’t eaten today,” I stated with narrowed eyes, and passed her a bread roll. Her figure dissolved a little in the light as she ate, like rainbows forming from afternoon dew. “I didn’t have time,” she looked at me guiltily. Ofcourse I knew she was lying. Her form shimmered in her shame. “There wasn’t time for breakfast, and then…” “…you started to feel sick because you hadn’t eaten, and therefore were even more reluctant to do so,” I affirmed. That’s how hunger took you- it swelled and bloated your belly and made your throat thick so that the lines between starving and sickness were blurred. I used to clutch my stomach like a pregnant girl when I was deciding which side of the line I fell on. “I’m not here to steal your food, though,” she laughed. “I need to know how you are.” “So you can return to class?” I wanted her gone; her presence unnerved me, and I felt as though I would slip-up and say the wrong thing, have her pull the words out of me as though she had them attached to a rope. “So I can carry on with my life.” She dropped the fork onto the plate and it landed with a sharp crack against the ceramic. “I want to reach a place where guilt and emotional manipulation won’t touch me anymore. Does it touch you? What do I become?” How does her story continue? Her chapters run through changes as they do disappointments; I now wore my hair bleached and had
a fringe to hide my brown eyes. I had these big cardigans and short skirts that men would put their corporate hands up and force me to comply to their company policy. My fingers were bitten around the acrylics. I would tap them next to my keyboard when I had to catch my breath on a thought before I hammered it into a document. I slept next to a cold man whose hands were rough. He held my head and tilted it up so they could kiss me good morning. I loved what he should have been. But I was free and had purpose, despite all of these setbacks. I was finding a sense of fulfilment in these London streets, one that I had never felt growing-up, swaddled in insecurity and books. When I was fifteen, they held a hand full of honeyed words to my mouth so that I couldn’t speak. They told me not to call out the correct answers because the boys who got the answers wrong felt intimidated. But now, I could see my future, feel it in my gut, cut out cleanly and lying like a map in my organs on the floor. Maybe I wasn’t happy, but hopeful- like I had the chance to be. “Okay- first question.” She had these all prepared and they fell off her tongue like an exhalation. “Did you fall in love? You got a boyfriend?” I laughed out loud, sharp and clear. “Those are two- fairly bigquestions. I was sort of thinking you would ask if I had passed my exams. If you will. Something more tangible.” “Of course I pass my exams- you and I both know that,” she said, as though that were a stupid thing to ask. I smiled at myself. I was just playing with her- of course she knew she would pass. “I need to know about this instead.”
“Okay, I’ll take them both. Love isn’t as complex as you think it is, and I found this out with my current partner. You’ll make sense of it one day.” “When?” “Nineteen.” She was silent for what felt like pulsing minutes. “That’s…late.” I shrunk into myself. “It couldn’t have been any sooner. The anxiety decreased at eighteen. Walls don’t dissolve like sugar- you can’t just hope for them to not be there so that you can let people in. You have to wait for the bricks to erode with the rain, and watch as people enter the brickwork with smiles and questions. Answer their questions, and conversations can turn into happy relationships if you let them.” “Can you tell me what he looks like?” I paused. I wasn’t sure if this would shatter the line of Time that sat between us, the rules that kept us having this conversation as pale, shivering ghosts. “No.” “You look better than I do. If you went back, maybe you could find Jack again. He might take you.” She wanted a childhood sweetheart, a nice story to tell her children. I imagined myself taking out my contacts, making my eyes the dark, drowning blue of her own. I would re-dye my hair
that dark brown, the one with the auburn ends. I would put on a low-cut top and stand like a statue and wait for Jack to love me. I paused before saying, definitively, “I’m not going back.” She looked shocked, her form gaining a vivid white glow around her skin. “Why?” I whispered and looked around the café, leaning in. But everyone had disappeared, and only the faint aroma of chamomile tea leaves remained, drawing whisps of steam in the air. “You’re asking too much of me- you’re going to break Time.” She drummed her fingers on the table, her nails bitten to raw skin. The white glow began to fade as her fidgeting stopped, and she passed the fork between her hands as though in contemplation. “I saw an older us,” she said smugly. I stopped dead in my tracks. My mouth went dry. “When? I mean…what age?” “Fifty.” “Fifty,” I gasped. “Why couldn’t she tell you all these things?” “She said she could barely remember being twenty-two, and even if she did, it wouldn’t be her place. That you had a more- what’s the word she used?- emotional perspective on your life. I wanted to know how I would feel in my twenties. You can tell me that more clearly.”
“I see.” I took a sip of my coffee. “So why did you see her before you saw me then?” She choked on a laugh. “Leverage.” Tables-turning, frustration, and other related matters. I sighed, thinking if I should take the bait. She smirked at me. “A question for a question.” “You’ve already had two.” “Alright, well, my free-period’s almost up anyway. I could go now, but I would be dissatisfied, drawing meaningless circles around my essays until my words fell to the floor,” she tutted. “You- you would be here, and you could forget all about me. Live the life you’re living, not think about the dreams you had when you were younger. When you were me. But I think we would both live our lives unfulfilled. How long will you look at cold eggs, wanting to leave the man you’re sleeping next to? Pine after your co-worker, wandering if she’ll ever leave this town with you to make a home in New York?” My heart stuttered. “So I do get out of here? I leave with her? She’s the one,” I whispered. She bit her lip, frustrated that she had spilled before she had the chance to bargain. She went too far in telling me what she had, and the rules of Time became fractured. But then she nodded slightly to herself, as though this weren’t the worst turn of events, and a small smile danced on her lips.
“Yes,” she said, quiet as the words dissipated like smoke. Then the world went black and my eyes were itchy. I went to rub them but the irritation grew until all I could seeI closed my eyes to was a small girl of fifteen at the back of my mind, doing her homework and picking at the skin on her fingers in a world behind a red filter. When tears started streaming down my face from the rawness of my eyes, I could finally see, and she was gone.
trapped on the wrong side of the wardrobe Neeve Robinson eyes closed shapes swim like psychedelic patterns behind the lids silhouettes of lions and polar bears roam freely across this fleshy landscape fingers reach the mind seeks for something far more than the back of a wardrobe to get lost in a thicket of coats wading through them until the scent of fur fades and clouds of sweet pine cascade with the needles poking my sides and snow settling on skin lightly as fallen eyelashes needing the breath to explode from my mouth like an icy genie brandishing its fists and for the cold to flutter against my face like butterfly wings desperate to feel the air palpitate pushing me towards that
glow of the lamp-post. But the only things I feel are the heavy coats and empty oak. Hear only the absence echoing in my ears.
Three Poems Felix Chadwick-Histed NYC dreams Come here to me, The sunlight criminal. Out there is a world of plastic chairs and dusty corridors, uncaring in the smoke and rain. Here, wrapped in bone breaking skins of red brick, The fingers of window panes Stretch out into the sun, Flicking mud into the shadows Of the wrought iron bed frame And the Brooklyn Bridge staggers away into the creaking dark, rust drenched smog hung over it like a Sunday afternoon sunset on a village hall.
It was so real Meet me in the back room, Leave the lights on. Let the streetlights gather like a cloud of fireflies, A hush mixing with the rain in the sea of windscreens As steps tumble down the concrete scales That line the sleeping thighs of endless streets. Juggernauts pace the held breath of the clouds, The trams fumbling for their names in the choke of the night. The underpass will lose itself in the shivers of the city, A car battery bleeding out with the full beams on Like the breaking back of December on a summer’s day.
From the twentieth floor Keepsakes of the endless sprawl Beat down my door, Heartbreaks to the tones of a crescent moon, It’s like learning a forgotten language. The desolate empty hands of the street lamps Speak to me in the dark They are scared but the glint is whispering Like a house key tumbling down an open drain.
Wolf of Walsall Clara Morate You fill the room with an earthly tremble, A strong back and a grace so humble that the mountains move for you Though there is still a silence to you A silence to match the still between the stars and at the depths of the sea A quietness in your soul like that before first breath or after last breath You play the role of the room well A chameleon Yet you leave a litter of questions A breadcrumb of wonder You flitter from one stage to another The scripts of many men in you Life is your stage and you enjoy it wisely But not like that of a fraud or a jester, Like a poet on an Augustan stage Or a tree that grows with the changing sun and shifting winds, the waxing and waning of the moon You blow and flow like an age old wind To deaf or unwanted ears you sing soundlessly Your cacophony although foreign when observed with patience
Rings in the heart and head like a pulse Few really stop to pause and breathe you in to translate the great gaps and sounds you create And, like the wind, we only see what you want us to see The ripple of a flag, a kite in the sky, the billow of a dress, leaves twisting on the earth When you trickle into a gust of wind we only feel you and look for your footprints, listen intent ever more curious Its only in silence that your lyrics ring from the tree tops, the great gorges that scratch the surface of the earth, the scabs of land called mountains and the rolling oceans that spread on and on over earth Maybe one day I will stand still enough to feel and hear you all over me
Five Poems Hannah Valente Strange she tells me to imagine giving birth in a morgue, under a hospital, during the blitz. her mother clutching a hand, saying she’s too busy to give a damn about Hitler right now, Charles, or something. I can’t remember the line, only the laughter that followed. she tells me about her students, how they walk across continents, or lie crammed in car boots. some of them have never been out of Bournemouth before, can’t get the English analysis GCSEs they need to become plumbers, mechanics, equivalent qualifications I can’t remember the name for. she lets me sip her strawberry flavoured sparkling water, more concerned about my dehydration than I am, makes me take the bottle when the train stops. she’s going to a cabin by a loch to read the Silmarillion and remember her dead childhood friends. (I’m struck by the memory of a story I heard, about a hairdresser who lies to each new person she meets. I do that too, to people on trains.) I hope she wasn’t lying. it sounds nice.
Daisies in a dream I have facial hair. like daisies, bristling, tangling, a stuttering of blooms across my jaw, save the patch where they won’t grow, heart shaped, on my cheek, like a ruggedly handsome Marilyn Monroe.
Phone Notes (3:15 am) it’s weird that your worldview is always edged in by your eyelashes. you’re standing in your own way. obscuring. you can’t keep your perspective form – see? blink and you’ll miss it. hi mum, it’s been a while. crumpets, nyx eyeliner, frozen peas, the bee movie musical (there isn’t one yet, but god what a thought). re-shaping the plot of a dream upon telling it, the real one sliding away like a whole pan full of noodles disappearing beneath the soap suds.
Notebook Fragments: Lockdown I stop writing my diary and start recording the few unbearably pretentious thoughts I manage each day:
1. I forgot that morning had a smell. The sound of planes overhead has become strange.
2. Someone calls this a ‘wuthering.’ (I don’t call it anything when I can help it.)
3. Heya! I’ve noticed that you aren’t posting much, I just wanted to check in and see if you were surviving quarantine? I am leaning into my screen like I’m waiting for a kiss.
4. It’s pretty here. the sunset, the empty street a rush hour, the untouched wheelie bins baking in the heat-wave. I’ve never heard bird-song in Selly Oak like this.
Thoughts Composed on [Brighton Beach, 1st Jan 2020] Rusting metal fences / new beach huts / wind / buffered / swept the sea, pale and milky / the sky / a dark slit in the harbour, caught / brimming / like fog if fog could / tangle frozen in my hair or / the green energy plant, smell of [unclear] / pools before me, if pooling fog was made of / an [My Bedroom Floor, 31st Dec 2020] attempt at living in the moment / before the moment / when the world gutters. This is a / blink/ which has passed in a year’s / indoors / nothing has changed / or, it is Decebuary / again / and I am used to what is now / 2021 / a prediction which is hollow when knocked on.
déjà vu Ameek a ripple’s shriek air’s scent in blanket flicked aside that surprising streak somewhere a finger cut the colour we couldn’t find treacle black coffee sips of memory slips of fondant’s nothingness bitter’s glacé that tongue poking plucking freckled snow cold gulps of revision of passion mechanised only for a filled bottle I play in lovers’ eyes lighting fragrant candles a lost slipping thumb the same lips absent time
Two Poems Laurie Spafford the day (4th June 2019) Eyes open Come downstairs we need to talk I learn slowest walk upstairs and back to bed again. The cold river runs down my back and a cloud gathers on my left shoulder blade. Dreaming And awake And what vile form the day takes, an unknown house now, a vessel for memories and green and pregnant silence. The day flattened.
Sharp (or How to Swallow a Memory) Holding a thought in my mouth, regurgitated, a memory of mistake forgotten and brushed over, Bulging a hole in my throat, I feel it all day ((a decision to coat it with sugar again – to go down easy (but only to surface soon, dug up, collected in mud)) ------------------The biting of memory, sharp, has been smoothed over That used to visit me each day, Distant now; clouded and lost, like spring
who are we to remember it all? Yerkezhan Berkembayeva now time has passed and i have left met different people and held hands with different friends. we haven’t talked in so long, do you even remember what my favourite colour is or why i double tie my shoelaces before i leave? now it feels like it’s been forever since you and i laughed ‘till we couldn’t breathe and now when we talk the silence grows louder with every minute it seems. do you still like the colour green? and why haven’t you said anything about my new fringe? and all the friends i said i’d marry if i wound up alone by 50 are now far away and we haven’t even said happy birthday to each other in years growing apart is truly harder than it appears the people you thought you knew all have changed. and i don’t blame them, we all grew up became our own people, and i guess part of that was to let it slip away from our memory.
Three Haiku Isabelle Porter june ‘86 second from the left i don’t remember their names think i still have that HANDLE WITH CARE plastic past, a light cracked. ‘should we throw it away?’ ‘i know it’s broken.’ after all these years everything ever i see in your face sometimes wish i could unknow
(Very) Short Story Laurie Spafford “Where’s the future that I remember gone?”