Tag: British Literature

Hilary Otto: “Show don’t tell”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

 

Show don’t tell

Don’t say people get off on power
Say he licked his knife blade clean

Don’t say a tie is a symbol of status
Say he pulled his tie taut between white-knuckled fists

Don’t say he was privileged and benefited from good connections
Say his swimming medals clinked together like coins

Don’t say he is depraved
Say he smirked several times during a 5 minute police interview

Don’t say he will get off.

 

 

About the Author: Hilary Otto is an English poet, teacher and translator based in Barcelona. She reads regularly in Barcelona in both English and Spanish, most recently as part of the Berlin International Poetry Festival. Her work has been published in Popshot Quarterly, Black Bough Poetry and Fixpoetry, as well as in anthologies.

 

More By Hilary Otto:

Underworld

 

Image Credit: “Portrait of a Man” Unknown Artist (about 1850) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Z.D. Dicks “Altered State”

Posted on by Chase Dimock

 

 

 

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About the Author: Z. D. Dicks is the author of Malcontent (Black Eye Publishing) described as ‘Uncompromising, sometimes controversial, but always entertaining’ by Clive Oseman and ‘Evocative, atmospheric, breathing new life into the everyday’ by Nicola Harrison. Z. Dicks is the CEO of Gloucestershire Poetry Society and Gloucester Poetry Festival. His work has been accepted by Ink, Sweat and Tears, Three Drops from a Cauldron and Fresh Air Poetry. He frequently reads at poetry events throughout the UK.

 

More By Z.D. Dicks:

Downpour

Sleepless

 

Image Credit: Giorgio de Chirico “The Song of Love” (1914) Public Domain

 

Anna Saunders” “Golden Chain”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

 

 

GOLDEN CHAIN

At 13 you lay with him on the grass
looking up at the trees’ cascade of saffron fire

as he tells you it is called Golden Chain
he turns and touches your blonde hair, smiling.

The flowers are sheeney
yellow mouths with extended tongues,
something else you cannot name yet.

How could you resist reaching
for the flaxen stalactites
pendant from the tree.

Afterwards sickness,
your body writhing in the night

learning what love is – reaching to the sky,
ripping flowers from the bough
eating, hungrily.

Then the sleeplessness, the aching heart.

 

All parts of the common laburnum are poisonous – the bark, roots, leaves and especially the seed pods. They contain the alkaloid toxin cytisine. Consumption of this can cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, frothing at the mouth, convulsions and even death through paralysis

 

 

About the Author: Anna Saunders is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams) and Ghosting for Beginners (Indigo Dreams, Spring 2018). Anna has had poems published in journals and anthologies, which include Ambit, The North, New Walk Magazine, Amaryllis, Iota, Caduceus, Envoi, The Wenlock Anthology, Eyeflash, and The Museum of Light. Anna is the CEO and founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North and ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts’ by Bernard O’Donoghue.

 

More by Anna Saunders:

The Delusion of Glass

In The Drowned Woods

 

Image Credit: Sämmtliche Giftgewächse Deutschlands Leipzig :F. Voight,1854. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Anna Saunders: “Thirteenth week of Lockdown- woke wondering if I were a ghost”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

 

Thirteenth week of Lockdown- woke wondering if I were a ghost.

I am too diffuse, fill the air like smoke
glide around empty rooms, feeling immaterial .

You would think it would be easier existing as ghost, 
airborn, iridescent as summer rain, 
but I am weightless only in mass -my psyche is ballast. 

To be a ghost means to live with the self undiluted.
Imagine who you are, but magnified.

I am too much at times, 
the condensed quick of myself,  
like a perfume oil or a 100 percent rum.  

Nothing touches me, and no-one.
And if they did, I am so tissue skinned 
their fingers would go right through me. 

At best I am inspiration, contain light,
but adrift and nebulous, like mist
all abstract antipathy and desire, 

and  invisible 
(who sees the ghost but the haunted?) 

I pull desperately at my own arm with this poem 
and claim 
I am here, I am here.

 

About the Author: Anna Saunders is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams) and Ghosting for Beginners (Indigo Dreams, Spring 2018). Anna has had poems published in journals and anthologies, which include Ambit, The North, New Walk Magazine, Amaryllis, Iota, Caduceus, Envoi, The Wenlock Anthology, Eyeflash, and The Museum of Light. Anna is the CEO and founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North and ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts’ by Bernard O’Donoghue.

 

More by Anna Saunders:

The Delusion of Glass

In The Drowned Woods

 

Image Credit: Julia Margaret Cameron “Julia Jackson” (1867) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Matt Duggan: “The Remains”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

 

The Remains

Come walk with us down lanes of dirty hemlock
where the hands of car wrecks reach out from the earth
like metal statues with glass made cheeks

Follow the midnight light in short hours of the lost
listen to the movements of mechanical ghosts –
along lime and sand pathways of verge;

They have not yet mastered the darkness levels at night
as we spend our daytime mostly dazed
our eyes stretched out like fragile rocks
clinging to the foundations of white cliffs;

Kingdoms will always believe that they can wear
a battledress with pride – though the rest of the world can see
that the seams have long ago been cut and unthreaded;
placed inside an old sewing box labelled dangerous and obsolete.

 

About the Author: Matt Duggan was born in 1971 and lives in Bristol in the U.K. with his partner Kelly and their dog Alfie, his poems have appeared in many journals across the world such as Osiris Poetry Journal, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, The Blue Nib, Into the Void, The Journal, The Dawntreader, Midnight Lane Boutique, Anti—Heroin Chic Journal, The High Window, A Restricted View from Under the Hedge, Ghost City Review, Laldy Literary Journal, L’ Ephemere Review, Carillion, Lakeview International Literary Journal, Levure Litteraire, erbacce journal, The Stray Branch, Prole, Black Light Engine Room, Militant Thistles, Matt won the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2015 with his first full collection of poems Dystopia 38.10 and became one of five core members at Erbacce-Press, where Matt interviews poets for the erbacce-journal, organises events and reads with the other members for the annual erbacce prize.

 In 2017 Matt won the Into the Void Poetry Prize with his poem Elegy for Magdalene, and read his work across the east – coast of the U.S.A. with readings at the prestigious Cambridge Public Library Poetry Series in Boston, a guest poet appearance at The Parkside Lounge and Sip This in New York, Matt read at his first U.S. book launch in Philadelphia and has two new chapbooks available One Million Tiny Cuts (Clare Song Birds Publishing House) and A Season in Another World (Thirty West Publishing House) plus a small limited edition booklet The Feeding ( Rum Do Press) Venice and London. He has read his work across the world including The Poetry on the Lake Festival in Orta, Italy, the Poetry Café in London, and in Paxos in Greece and at various venues across the U.K.

 

Image Credit: “Auto Accident” (1922) The Library of Congress