IOTA POETRY COMPETITION

WINNERS OF THE FIRST IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2003)

WINNERS OF THE SECOND IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2004)

WINNERS OF THE THIRD IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2005)

WINNERS OF THE FOURTH IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2006)

WINNERS OF THE FIFTH IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2007)

WINNERS OF THE SIXTH IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2008)

First prize: £200
Second prize: £50
Two prizes of £25

WINNERS OF THE FIRST IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2003):

Two first prizes of £50

Joint 1st

SIRIOL TROUP

Bridge

Who's to say, after the fall?

Blame love, that piss-head low-life?
Or was she simply watching the water?
(the raven wing, the ruffled feathers,
always so much to say, even at midnight
- geese, boats, lamplight from the bridge,
spangled truths twisting below like eels.)

Her normal self, nothing
out of the ordinary, toothbrush
still damp in the mug, nothing
to make you think of loss.
(Though waiting, maybe, for something
to burst, and not the type
for buckets in the hall
to catch the drips.)

Look at the black water racing,
the river full as a barrel
for drowning cats.
It will be like falling asleep.
armfuls of wet hair rippling,
the slippered seduction of dreams.

All those words used up -
spring, self, blackbird, happiness.
How she wrapped them in bombazine,
lugged them to the river's edge,
tipped them in like stones.
The ponderous hush
and splash of gravity!
Such a sparkle on the water,
so many broken circles
rolling into the night.

If she has to give reasons,
then this:
the burden of sunrise.

Joint 1st

PATRICIA LEWIS

Post Motherhood

When i am done
                     with being a flyingfish
to be prised from
                                    depths
in the tight-eyed night
                                and dragged
by hook and line that winds me up
                    to spl-spl-splutter
on the gush of every rising tide
lands me
                    lung    ing
        gasp    ing
for my life

I will sprawl out all my days.
I will loll in tall grass amongst rabbit holes
                        reading books with no pictures.
I will sit listening to water idling
                        silent in the ditch.
I will lie watching the hum and drum of a bee
                        dawdling through a euphorbia.
I will play Monopoly and never pass Go.
I will watch the sun creeping round the earth in a huge
O.

WINNERS OF THE SECOND IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2004):

First prize £100, 2nd £50, Joint 3rd £25

1st

PAT WINSLOW

Cutting up shirts for rags

2nd

MARIANNE BURTON

Taking Klee's Line for a Walk

Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk - Paul Klee

After an unfortunate incident with a cattle grid
he preferred town walks, so we took him round Camden
on a lead. The leash was for his own protection,

Joint 3rd

ANN DAY

Escape

We have saved what we can.

Joint 3rd

CAROL COIFFAIT

Bloodshot

WINNERS OF THE THIRD IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2005)

JOHN TERRY 

Stitching Mountains Together

When they invited her for bridge, she went – exhausted
by the coast’s appalling heat, and bored with emptying cases
of gin into a more appreciative container.

Two cases were all that mules could pack on the rough path
that snaked up the mountains (the rest were left stacked in the Jeep).
She stumbled behind, hanging on ropes, or harness, or tails,

unable to stand without support; almost (she thought soberly)
like being pissed – a lot of trouble for a card game.
Which it wasn’t, of course. A bridge lay broken at the foot

of its ravine; and she was (was she not?) the builder’s widow.
(There’d been no sex; just lectures, with diagrams to show
how cleverly his bridges were built.) She’d have gone mad

without booze – now she needed gin to remember. The mules
must descend (At once, please!) to fetch the cases from the Jeep.
That done, she began, (glass in hand) to organise a grand

resurrection of their dead bridge. They slaved at her command
and wreckage rose to span again, stronger than before.
She quickly learned (after the gin was gone) to drink the stuff

they made themselves; agreed to stay. The mules still brought
an occasional case of gin; and eager young men fought
to obey her every wish (could this be happiness at last?)

Soon she was building bridges across every bloody ravine
she could find. All were poems, airily floating above
a frightful fall; an empty gin bottle in each foundation.

MARGARET WILMOT 

Painting From Life

1
                                                           Your studios

You left the crying baby, small apartment,
walked down the hill to the train across the Bay;

then, alert to angles, vistas, movements of
a city on the water, cut across

to the old Monkey-block, gone now, even
the name, and that studio gone. No war,

no slum – places like memories just get blotted out.
Then Walnut Street complete with walnut-tree, 

pot-belly stove – demolished too – and the studio
on La Vereda, which translated as ‘path’,

or – in another idiom – ‘the sidewalk’.
All the New York spaces, huge and freezing 

Fourteenth Street – and when you returned later on
to pay back rent (yes, then you were punctilious),

the landlord brothers, who wore beards and long shawls,
reached down sweet wine and poured you all a toast.

There was that tiny place you called the bedbug-farm,
the one on 23^rd St where you painted moons,

the loft with plants the borough then tore down…
So many studios – turned homes, till the word home

itself was lost beneath strata of paint
and longing, the wedge and scrape of palette-knives,

beneath the colours which wooed and pleaded,
terre verte, alizarin, cadmium orange…

2
                                                            1940s

Eyelids flicker. Pain is bred in the bone.
We want to love – all we want is to love.

You want to cry, look down. Renée doesn’t
understand, is afraid to understand, 

she who grew up in a fairy-tale where
her folks loved each other and their little

princess and they all lived happily in
a little shingle house up from the Bay.

She doesn’t hear, blindly insists, I don’t know
what’s wrong with you. Forget him. Anger isn’t Nice.

And the innocuous word gathers weight –
moral overtone. Eyelids flicker, flicker.

Both of you refusing to see – And pain
bred in the bone, mother’s milk…You slam off, 

seize charcoal and sketch a forest of black
curves, strokes, jabs, a woman – beginning to see,

yes, of course – who becomes a pot-belly stove.
Painting now…if the strawman tilts just so –

3
                                                              1920s 

You are five years old, having breakfast with Dad.
You like getting up early, the two of you,

having breakfast together before he leaves.
Today is special, April Fools, and you’ve put

salt in the sugar-bowl…Your eyes sparkle
as he sprinkles salt across his Corn Flakes,

stirs two spoonfuls in his coffee. His rage
knows no bounds; he spits, and screams at you, and screams.

Eyelids flicker. By seventeen it is you
who are screaming, hurling chairs through windows.

He wants you to play football, work in his shop,
not hang around with those fairies – he rattles

his paper when your sister’s practising.
Who needs Chopin? It’s dance music they want.

4
                                                            In the museum 

The sun’s a white eye –it cuts through night,
hacks like tin. This is war, the war you longed to fight.

So clear the huge wrong, so clean the right –
you were ardent with dreams of fighting black with white.

A horse shrieks, bull stares; torch casts tin light;
blades break. This is the war you wanted to go fight.

The women lunging with rage and pain…
You stare. This is the war you longed to fight in Spain . 

You thought you could leave your own civil war,
own rage and pain – not take it to Spain. Eyes stare. 

5
                                                            1960s

You light another cigarette, stand back,
survey the nude on the easel, full frontal,

twisting forward, as if on a pink chair…
something about the articulation

in the legs…But you glance at your watch, late
for class, again. You grab a clean turtle-neck,

sweep a handful of change off the bureau-top,
dash food into the cat-bowl, and lock up,

not forgetting (security New York-style)
to leave the radio on and call back,

It’ll be at least ten. But it’s later,
much later, before you roll in happy-drunk

from a party at your landlord’s. You wadge up
an old envelope for the cat to chase

across the studio floor. Ah – those legs,
it’s that shadow-pink…You reach for a brush. 

When the museum closes down its school,
a vital scaffolding drops away. You

slowly free-fall down, down into that nightmare
pain bred in the bone and the whole world hurting,

become your Dad; it threatens, talks money, money.
Your colours rage brazen, brushes jab.

Why aren’t things better organised? Organised
for artists? You venture out chiefly for scotch 

and Saltines, kick out the dealer invited
to see your work, pour another glass, stare at

the canvas, where born of the glance of light
on wave…Yes, this was your use of memory,

not for liberation but civil war.
Painting dreams in cobalt, viridian,

ochre, terre verte, painting love and desire,
and too, on giant bicycles, their huge

thighs pumping over a next hill, women
shrieking or singing or swearing, women

bearing your pain away over a hill…
While you drank and raged, why does he want rent? 

He’s a millionaire. On the floor above
your landlord built a handball-court. Thud. Thud. 

6
                                                            Hospital

Hospital’s safe. So wondrously safe. Eyes
close as you sink back into a velvet 

darkness. In my beginning is my end.
Unless eyes clap their hands and sing, unless ears –

You swim up through your tubes, hearing a step
by the bed, open your eyes on legs, long legs, 

how pretty this young nurse stepping off
the too-white canvas…You sink back into 

the comfortable black underworld where no
bird sings money, money and there’s nothing 

for a poor artist to pay…And the care,
it’s warmer than scotch, like having sympathy 

on tap. You lap it up, push far away
the unpleasantly nagging awareness

that this is the underworld: it is your task
to come out the other side. You don’t like 

tasks, they smack of your Dad. You call the nurse,
inquire fretfully about a sleeping-pill.

7
                                                            San Francisco  

It’s hot, and your studio on a top floor
off Market Street is hotter. A Balcony  

Woman gazes out over a cool sea,
but no breeze fans the Calligraphic City

on the opposite wall. It takes an act
of God to get you out, but then you can’t 

stop looking. Green, you murmur in the park,
I think I became an artist to paint green.

Sun riffles the gingko leaves. What about
that trip down the coast? You up to it yet?

I wonder. Mother’s eager to come too
and there’s an open invitation to lunch.  

The wide white beach has hardly changed -
your eyes drink in bent cypresses, kelp festoons,

the shining sweep where dunlins peck between
the suck and fling of breakers. Remember when

the soles of your feet got sunburned? Mother smiles.
You want to find the rocks south of the point

where you’d set your easel up among tide-pools
alive with white crabs, starfish, anemones.

This was the sea I was always painting,
you tell friends over lunch, eyes drinking the view,

forgetting Long Island, and the rocks off Maine –
or maybe there only is a first sea.

8
                                                            1998-1999 

You are sitting in the patio, this
brick patio you laid forty years ago;

sometimes you visit now, when you can get
a lift across the Bay. You love the light

on La Vereda, falling through pepper-trees –
it makes a kind of shadow-beaded curtain, 

dancing, not still…You enjoy a sandwich…
Today you and Renée discussed at length 

whether to have egg salad with scallions,
or avocado and bacon on rye,

and then a long time later she came out
with lettuce, cheese and tomato on whole wheat,

sliced diagonally on a blue plate.
She always did make food look beautiful.

You smiled. Tastes delicious! Her black cat appeared,
and you began remembering aloud

Black Venus in New York, how she fetched,
you’d throw a paper-wad, she'd bring it back – 

Renée’s face is so young when she’s laughing…
All we want is to love. When she brought that 

cappuccino milkshake to the hospital,
you agreed to put the past behind you.

You admire the peonies together,
talk of her class in botanical drawing.

Even your parents are fading…They were
children, benighted children, afraid…You 

go back to The Lemons, and the angle
of light has changed, the shadow’s easier now, 

won’t need that alizarin you don’t have.
You reach out for Cadmium Yellow Light.

PAT BORTHWICK 

At The Observatory

Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
when a new planet swims into his ken.  John Keats

I’m waiting for my turn to climb the spiral
staircase to the reflecting 10" Newtonian
trained within a fraction of an eyelash

on the rim of a planet a billion miles away.
I’m eager to reach the polished eyepiece,
to adjust the knurled brass focus wheel. 

A man is talking chemistry and numbers
with necklaces of noughts. He’s talking
dust and snowball rings, shepherd-moons. 

But it’s all above my head until suddenly
I’m looking through the scope and
Saturn’s mine, tilted like that cup and saucer 

spinning from your hand the day I said
it’d take more than milky statues or a saint’s
scrawny toe to have me still believe in God. 

You’ve worn out rosaries for me since,
lit candles everywhere. But how can I
when, a few gates down the road, 

Orion strides across our hollow barn?
When, with each turn of my spade, soil bleats?
Smoke bleeds from every blade of grass.

The Saturn man tunes the lens to Titan. It’s
lambing time. The family should be playing
astral dot-to-dot with one eye on the ewes. 

Beyond the pock-marked moon’s ecliptic path
the night fold is the same dark only deeper.
Stone huts flicker in the fields, as we do, 

as the white stars do in theirs, before
being rounded up then spindled one by one
into an impenetrable and far unknown.

Joint 3rd

SUE BUTLER 

Something Slight

We drink tea and nothing happens
until something slight
puts down its mug, opens
the door with hardly a click.
It lights a cigarette
wanders down the gravel path
pulling leaves off the laurel.
On the lawn by the pond
it watches the goldfish
then raises its open palms to the sky.
Now I see but cannot hear
it sink on its haunches
and roar.

                          A roar to jam the dials
of scientists in desert locations
listening with giant ears. A roar
to make life in other galaxies
shiver at earth’s primitiveness.
Something inside you tightens.
A forlorn bone or twist of sinew
is strained to the limit. A pulse
throbs in your neck. The roaring
creature comes back in, wipes its feet
and sits down. A void opens
that you try to fill
with artificial light and lemon cake.

WINNERS OF THE FOURTH IOTA POETRY COMPETITION
(2006)

ANGELA FRANCE

Victor Knows the Danger of Words

Victor writes in blue notebooks with red pen, his script tiny
from practice. When they are stiff with ink, filled from edge
to edge, he tapes them shut and piles them, in order,
on the very top shelf of his wardrobe.
He knows that they strain and struggle to open.

He sticks cardboard over his window to blind the city,
afraid the neon letters would burn him
with sigils and squiggles while he sleeps.
Outside he wears earplugs, keeps his eyes downcast
to fend off the hoardings and adverts
that chatter at him wherever he goes.

Victor hears the malicious whisper from his books,
sees the curl of his fingers as they become commas;
bleak against the bright page. He feels his heart jump
into a verb, waits for it to straight line. He chants
his name, rams his fingers in his ears;
still feels himself being written by the dark.

Victor unplugs the radio, muffles it
with bubble wrap and gaffa tape:
he knows the radio display will blink
Live. Write. Die.

ADRIAN BUCKNER

The Course Not Viable
WEA Evening Class, Nottingham 2005

I’m informed at Reception that a third gentleman
has enquired. I will wait for another eight
to take this road through February sleet.

David is the second of two:
I could be seven people, I like
seven types of poetry. Does that help?

Lovely idea says our Branch official –
specs, corduroys and shyly brightening
with the slow smile of a lifetime’s gentle behaviour.

No calling for execution, his instinct’s
to console. He stays to make a four
for what the office calls ‘a taster’.

I joke feebly about sixty years poetry in an hour,
decide against Douglas ’s How To Kill
and give out James Wright’s The Blessing instead. 

- Later on the bus, I remember
I had Larkin in reserve.
Who will be the last, the very last? –

Gradually we find ways of talking
about things other than poetry. At the close
we shake hands in the foyer.

David says in morale boosting style
that he specialises in finding oases
and then moving on to the next desert.

When the moment presents, I do not suggest
the pub or point in the listings to dates
for open mic poetry and creative writing courses – 

we did not come to pluck from that sexy
fruiting tree ‘The City’s Cultural Offer’;
we did not come to be vibrant, seek new opportunities; 

we came to do this once a week,
saw there were not enough of us, spoke a blessing,
brushed up on wistful irony and left.

HELEN LAWRENSON

Following Emily

By Elm Hill and Willow Lane
whose trees were timber long ago,
threading between the crowds that drift
where beasts once plodded, up Cow Hill;
by Lower Goat Lane, hurrying to
Pottergate, where shadowy craftsmen lift
their heads from visionary clay
and glance from windows at the slow
ghosts of fine herds lumbering through
the muddy street…On through the rain
we tag behind, circle and skip
round shoppers in the narrow way,
with Emily bright and dancing still
ahead. We catch up as she waits
in snow-becoming rain; and while
we come to rest, she celebrates
our safe arrival with a smile. 

We had almost let her slip
out of our sight, as we fetched up
in Maddermarket, redolent
of woodruff, cleavers, damson dye –
of rambling rosemary and mint,
and shops where every bowl and cup
is stained with rose and peony:
a place where stores of pigment are –
boxes of scarlet grain and lake,
reddle and carmine, cinnabar –
to colour dreams that weavers make
deep in the puzzle of their looms,
determined in long-windowed rooms.

Joint 3rd

JULIE MELLOR

The Day She Fell Apart

It wasn’t painful, or difficult.
Piece by piece she landed at her own feet:
two full stops, an exclamation mark,
her hyphenated mouth.
The ground bore an expression
she recognised, vaguely, as her own.
The full stops rolled into the gutter
like marbles. Through them she saw herself
alone in a crowd of shoppers.
She kicked the exclamation mark aside,
afraid someone would notice. It clattered
down the grate. Her mouth lay on the edge
of a block-paved area of the precinct
distinct from the chewing gum and tab ends.
Saturday. Busy with feet and voices.
Her mouth called for help while she sat,
helpless, on a slatted bench, head down
between her knees, feeling faint.
Kids on skateboards scrawled past.
The sound of their wheels roared in her ears.
Thank God for that, she thought. 

Then two neatly shaped question marks fell at her feet.

WINNERS OF THE FIFTH IOTA POETRY COMPETITION
(2007)

D. H. W. GRUBB

At Smollensky’s

At Smollensky’s we drink words and smoke
and raid the orchards of imagination until small
faces peep out from our fantasies and even the
storyteller is unsure about who it was who fell
off a roof or bathed naked at Lamorna and why
it was we never asked the names of the three girls
on the clifftop whose beauty boxed our eyes.

At Smollensky’s we roar from skipping songs
to dead birds to solitary gifts to the silence of
late night bus stations and didn’t we all meet
the same dentists and teachers and preachers,
and didn’t they all look and talk and walk the
same way as if they knew what was coming,
as if they had all experienced most of it already?

At Smollensky’s we stand on the table tops and
hurl abuse at the clock and settle down for a final
round of red ghosts and blue lies, and name all the
beasts and bullies who must have settled down or
died in tidy houses or seaside hotels, jockstrap gags
and bladder blazing giggles and when did the girls
on the clifftop marry captains of incest or industry?

At Smollensky’s the jig is up, carriages weave and
crash, the boy of a waiter grows a ginger beard, the
sun slips up over the cider factory and we will do this
again. We will do this before we die or after we have
died. We will do this with old friends and enemies
and clifftop women. We will do this standing in the
bright air balloons of our death beds with our dogs.

This is the way we cope with the deaths of children,
deaf piano tuners, blind mechanics, sea bathers in Winter;
this is the way we survive the songs that remember us,
the miracle workers, the roads that were not even there;
this is the way we do not weep because of letters never sent and
the knowledge of toys stuffed into attics and the backend of dreams;
the knowledge of snow at Lamorna and the haul of words on the cliffs.

2nd

KATE NOAKES

The Boat painter

He strips the gloss from canvasses
flattens surface and shape. 

His hulks are life-size, accurate, the way
clinkers are, all overlapping timber. 

He says it’s the form of the skiff
that matters, contrasting bow-bottomed 

brigs to ridge-boned whales,
the more endangered the better. 

Knee-deep in mud, he records
the history of oyster smacks and crabbers,

lobster boat geography and the English
of the coast, the east English coast

with its tattooed estuaries, shingle
beaches and light, its chalky light.

Joint 3rd

PAT BORTHWICK

The Old Observatory

You may or may not recall
how half its brick staircase had collapsed
so we had to improvise with ropes
to reach the viewing floor. 

The scope pillar was still there
and we could see the raw edge
where they’d used oxy-acetylene
to cut the precision mount free. 

You pushed the dome round with one hand
then found the brass chase and ratchet
to open its narrow slit, setting free
a stellar flash of butterflies. 

Then, from nowhere, hailstones clattered down
the size of planets, or so you said,
as you unhooked me and we became
as breathless as those first astronomers here 

who also must have thought
they’d brought the Universe into focus.
Passing overhead in tonight’s bright dark
the space station burns a hungry hole 

and the stars that once were ours
(because that evening we named each one)
are blurred. You could be anywhere. How long
can you remain while never having stayed?

Joint 3rd

HUW WATKINS

Ghost-writer

You think you’ve written
all you know about them now,
they’ve been dead so long –
but no, they keep coming back;
nothing startling, like a thump
on the shoulder someone gives you
suddenly in recognition…but like
an itch somewhere, often low down
that you reach to scratch without
thinking at first, until it reddens,
and you realise you have to pay
attention to it. And something
emerges that you never thought
was there – an indication, a drawing
of attention, a realisation. Then
you have to begin on the matter
of a narrative, until, gradually,
the picture builds and the person’s
there, right under your nose;
reaching out, almost, as if to touch
you; bringing up propositions;
and the tale is set. So, however
long they’ve been dead and buried,
in whatever places, you bring them back
to that one place you grew up with them. 

Like my father’s rose bushes, they keep
flowering; and even when the petals fall,
the stamens follow and the bush, reduced
to a spindle now, the scent never goes
away. And that’s it. That’s the secret
of it all, more potent than any of the old
photographs – the great-grandmother ones
in their sepia shawls, the suited marriage
ones, the christenings, the rolled scrolls
of certification; the ones who never
came back from two wars. It’s not
the definitive, but the lurking part
that matters; hugging the shadows.
So that you have to tease it all out,
like burrs embedded in rough wool. 

Some day, you think, it must all end;
but so far, not. The haunting still
goes on; the ghostly pencil picks
itself up and writes. You watch it
as it goes, knowing none of them
will ever read it for themselves.

WINNERS OF THE SIXTH IOTA POETRY COMPETITION (2008)

First prize £200, 2nd £50, Joint 3rd £25

1st

DAVID KING

Our Lady of the Doorway

Our Lady of the Doorway
She’s arrived in pieces, a jig-sawed cat,
smile sweet as a death row prisoner’s final ice-cream,
breath cold as Reykjavik cathedral,
skin smooth as sunlight falling on a railway platform

Hello, she says, I’m your next incarnation.

I say, what?

She says, it’s simple. Next time round you’ll be me.

I say, but I used to own a lion’s tongue and a fierce moustache.

She says, no matter, you’ll be me. You’re lost like a message in a battle,
or a nail hammered in the Captain’s trunk,
lost like a picture of dead twins in sailor suits that once hung
in a half-lit corridor of the long demolished house we call the past.

I say, but I’ve seen flying orchids and unsettled sparrows. Besides,
I’m just taking the dog for a snooze.

She says, no matter, you’ll be me. Look, here’s the entrance,
here’s water in the shape of snails’ shells that overlaps itself
like feathers on a kestrel’s neck.

I say, but I’ve seen a ballerina’s armpit resting on a broken chair.

And she turns to me with eyes like butcher’s marble,
lips red and raw as cut fingers or ripped leather on a toecap.

She says, no matter, you’ll be me and remember,
never play footsie with stilettos.

And I sink into the shadows cast by tongues.
I have just one more card to play and say,
but I’ve seen children’s breath at daybreak, watched a bullock drink its own
reflection, picked ragged flowers with leaves green as distant unripe wheat,
licked thick honey from a wooden spoon with my own thick tongue.

She says, no matter, you’ll be me.

Her words hang like a bunch of keys.
And only then and at last I realise,
death is so patient and so precise.
She waits, a leopard in the last tree,
hovers like a black veined white butterfly,
and when she’s ready, makes her choice,
with all the permanence of frozen smoke.

2nd

ANDREW FROLISH

Arthur’s Self Portrait

Arthur has a desk in the corner
where he will be less troublesome
and he will not see those things
that sometimes trouble him.
Like the clouds. And how they move.
And what does that really mean?

When the sun begins to dip
to the west of here
and blazes through the blinds,
black bars of shadow
step across Arthur’s desk.
Watch how his lazy fingers
trace the driftwood lines from end to end,
to give them shape and make them real.
To define them.

He shouts. Like that. Bursts of volume.
One or two shift in their seats
but they do not turn and look.
They are trained in the art of survival
in the modern classroom.
They are prepared for the unexpected
eruptions each day brings.
We are proud of how well
they have learned not to notice him.

Notice now, how he rarely looks
at the mirror by his side.
The image he creates is a memory
or a wish; a representation; a symbol.
Observe the outline of his sketched self
and the use of thick, black lines.
He’ll tell you if you ask him.
Those lines are where he ends
and everything else begins.

Joint 3rd

PATRICIA TYRRELL

Translating Russian

By Daddy aches the head.
His headache seems to be
world under water, full of wavering curves,
strange oysters, flickering starfish.
In that barnacle-language world
everything’s obvious except what’s said.

Nobody not is here.
Sort this
and count the no-ones. Life’s a swift game of ghosts
especially in that land. Nobody not
opens the door, walks in.
Nobody not is always near.

Some words have facets like a gem:
to drive or behave – which did he mean?
Handcart or mole, preparations or toll,
as if a clown paints and distorts the intention
yelling, Cheap and angry! (a good bargain).
While behind, almost opposed to him,

moves the agile dispossessed
form of the real creator. Translation’s a plaguey itch;
vistas open and fold, air breathes like an insect
sucking but nervous. Sometimes I catch
the wind’s probe of disaster or passion;
mostly a word speaks just beyond earshot, calm, scorched, bright, obsessed.

Joint 3rd

DAVID GRUBB

The Blue Dogs Of Albania

Blue dogs don’t ask you things;
they come out from corners in a slow motion jog,
packs of them dodging in and out of shades and shadows
and things that have been, seeking the unexpected and hidden
and used, a ghost here and a buried thing there and things we
do not see that may have to do with small surrenders and loss.

They keep away from the boys who sometimes fly their kites
and the cruising cars near the cafes and the wrecked factories
and in the evening go down to the beach where wind keeps
turning over the pages of newspapers and the ocean drags
trash and sometimes there will be a well dressed couple who
are startled and start to run although the dogs ignore them.

Blue dogs sometimes sleep outside the library or beneath
blue trees, they have had their fill of cemeteries and car parks
and people don’t leave things in the parks anymore. They keep
their heads down and get skinnier and remember the days of
big rats and open sewers and following an old drunk all the
way home in a street where the only light came from mimosa.