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POEMS FOR A LIMINAL AGE
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Poems for a Liminal Age
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| Sample poems from Poems for a Liminal Age edited by Mandy Pannett John McCullough SLEEPING HERMAPHRODITE Asleep? I’m watching you
through my lids. This isn’t easy, tracking your nebulous shape while you assess my neck’s turn, slide down to smooth cleavage, tummy, waist then encounter what’s stashed below my thigh. Here I am, unveiled as arguable, a mishmash of harbour and ship – the stay in thought when all ideas are possible. I’m everything yet deeply ill-equipped for solitude. What I
need to know is whether you ache to prise free the ankle I’ve left loosely wrapped in a sheet. Singlespeak
is boring. Let’s talk
toes and honey. Come on,
nosey boy. Surprise me. Jim Bennett THE FLAT EARTH today I
could see why people thought the
world was flat it looks flat feels flat as far
as I can see it’s flat but it isn’t I can
see its shadow across a daytime moon the
gentle curve of land through Arctic Africa
Antarctica folding into night sometimes there is a line between knowing
and believing something a train
station gap that can trip you when you
least expect it even when evidence is clear
you don’t want to see it even
things she said are hard to believe until I
remind myself about what I know and that
the world is round and the sound on the
beach is the moon and dying ice and land
folds into mountains how it
came to be how it moves how the
movement of time changes everything Siham Karami LETTER TO ASMA AL-ASSAD As you
were shopping for designer clothes, My
child was tortured by your husband’s thugs, The
price to keep his job to buy you shoes. Because
we stood and chanted, “We refuse This
tyranny!” the bodies piled like jugs While
you were shopping for designer clothes. He
fights with tanks that no one can oppose. From
neighbors’ rooftops snipers sink their slugs. That’s
the price he pays to buy you shoes That
walk in the machinery of a ruse To hide
the human rubble as he shrugs, So you
can keep on shopping for the clothes That
lighten up his heart before he mows Down
men like grass, lets hospitals pull plugs — The
price to keep his job to buy you shoes Whose
path is getting rougher as it goes Down
darker where you can’t tell men from bugs And
guts are dropping on designer clothes And God
knows where you’re stepping with those shoes. Wendy Klein THE WORD FOR LOST IN SWAHILI Find your phone found
you this morning on a road not far from the so minute on my screen, I zoomed
and zoomed to see it before it moved off again
in the direction of Kyabamba, where there are
volcanoes (live?) and not far off, in both English and French, but the
nearby Ugali River Game Reserve will offer
its own temptations – lions, elephants,
rhinos, long-lashed giraffes – do not be seduced, so
many beasts, dangerous, endangered. But I see
you’re moving again: Musama, Kigoma, Tabora,
where the search widens, hones in on of massacres, and across the map, Where are you going my heart? Ivy
is rampaging everywhere; it’s choking the wild
cherries and blossoms are falling from your
plum tree, though your apple is still in
flower. If you’re lost will your phone find
you? Do you know the word for lost in Swahili? My bed is unruffled; I am sleeping too well without you. Aprilia Zank MAN-MADE she walks into the garden stumbles across wall wreckage searches for the remains of some flowers to hang above the family photograph so many missing now not much left among the ashes a few beheaded stalks petals and stamina scattered all over the place she stoops down digs with bare hands under the ruins for seeds to plant in the spring in the distance growl and flashes of man-made thunder approach relentlessly Michaela Ridgway UP past jammed-together houses doors all shut, faces lit by TV screens, past a boy racing down the street — a woman’s voice falling faster still behind him the trick is to keep a steady pace past lampposts a clutch of honeysuckle buds the pub with no name a rope-swing slung from the dying elm and past mum, with daisies in her hair and dad, cross-legged on a mountain-top past the scent of mangoes as they ripen in the dark, and up past the time when my heart almost stopped. Don’t dilly-dally. Lengthen your stride note the flock of geese as they rise from the lake and fly up past a choir of trees with branches raised their leaves falling, upwards and up, to the line that marks the top of the hill the sudden sheer sky
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