Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 (95) i Oxford Poetry

In my last editorial I talked about closure, and in the one before that I talked about paper. But perhaps I shouldn’t have. Because just before we sent our previous issue to press, the mill that supplies our paper closed. Like, forever. Which is why, as you may have noticed, the cover suddenly turned a darker shade of blue, and the dustjacket became a little thicker and smoother. Eleventh-hour substitutions that, actually, I think came together pretty well. If I were clever, then, this editorial would be about inheriting bucketloads of cash from an estranged aunt. But actually it’s going to be about coincidence. Or maybe luck. Which reminds me of an old notebook I found recently in a drawer, from when I was probably about twenty. It’s filled with…

Because the soul is only language worked into a body, thus Adam, thus me. Because we laid down bare, flesh by flesh, in thick darkness & felt almost holy. Because this story, already a blade, cuts me every time my mouth moves. That I scribbled poems & thought it a way towards healing. Help me believe. That grace coincides with mercy. That my aunt did not lose her son but laid him to sleep. That the silver-black crows circling the town are nothing but angels disguised as birds disguised as nothing. That a stray bullet lodged in the forehead marks the end of a body’s sentence. That the blood coursing this map has led me here. That this priest, mid-air, between thumb & forefinger, lifts the Eucharist like Van Gogh…

You see she would only pay a guy to take some stuff to a place. It could have been nothing but mostly it was diamonds and furs, whatever she could get her hands on. One time it was endless yards of tent material and what could you even do with that? Pay some other guy with a sewing machine to make them into pants and jackets. Look up the spelling for Adidas, make it look the way it looked that other time your maybe cousin brought one from Poland. There was of course the one time she did the carrying herself and that was when she got caught. Because she wasn’t a smuggler, just a teenage girl with two kilos of black caviar. You might ask yourself what a smuggler…

At the top of the stairs in fox-print pyjamas I ran past myself From summer to winter missing a beat or two there was no celebration more revelation I was ghosting myself by the old definition I could not turn my head fast enough the medication you see the new prescription The spring in my ghost’s step formed downstairs a place I could no longer descend to without craft or mother niece out late mother asleep gran on another island It dawned on me this must be autumn I am now standing in bursting to pee…

So you have my word. Our back lock clicks when in the morning your hair arrives stunned from evening showers. Slinking in, as if escorted by guards: all his heroic desires, nuclear arousals. How could I have known you were so antiworld… In your wake, all my shame tempers like a gel that could atomise language if applied once daily. Postprotest. Your gaze drags itself out before spontaneous decay. When I laid my hands on the body of your loosening futuretense. From the get-go, I worried our history would keep repeating with a defeated texture like highly fissile shale. I dreamt I ran around, headless, desperate, trying to rescue the molecular bonds in a roof tile from the storm. Your body crumpled on all the beds I have slept and…

Tonight I’ll roast potatoes and eat their names in French, so I can keep you, earth, this close. We are so breathy today!, with moss and hawks, a din of extra syllables, like yours in German, Erde: a twig of air, wide as an earthworm’s hole. When I was young, I walked with my father through a stand of dead pines, and just to be, in his own words, stupid, he shook one hard, and a limb large enough to shake you, earth, fell not five feet from me. So many ways I could have changed my number and never told you, as Ed I think has done to me – your Ed, my guide into miles, campfires, and when there was nothing between you and us but a glossy…

there are very few ways to take respite from yourself I do it quietly, economically asphyxiation of my nervous system memory in a chokehold one pain management technique suggests pretending it isn’t happening gaslighting your nerves to oblivion & hyper-fixating on numbness till it swallows you whole it’ll work for a while in my bouts of disassociation I imagine leaving my body behind I tell my friends in good humour I’ve not gone far, just down here I avoid saying the obvious Ifindmybodyuninhabitable IthinkIamdyingwithinmyself when I lose a quarter pint of blood in diarrhoea a nurse asks, does this happen every time? my body’s a touchy subject an open-ended wound I deliberate over pressing the button imagining a digital notice board above the bed watch me ugly cry for a paracetamol I…

Midnight in Accra and the crepuscular chills seem sweeter than we believe a breeze should be, like the moment horseradish ferments into honey. In the afternoon, I saw Q again by a crate of drinks and her collarbone spread like jam on bread. She and I had once stayed up late on the couch, drinking wine, talking like old friends, as we waited for Kwame to finish cooking. In Kwame’s recipe, rice must be soaked in honey. I can imagine the bits of rice turning brown, the way honey is, how it catches and binds the rice together then marks it with a tart scent. Kwame’s rice. I sat before the food, before friends, stared, listened, touched her fingers, his hand. No one said much. No one left the couch.…

1. After ah gong died in my uncle’s house, they kept him in the guest bedroom for years. I knew he was dead from the way my mother channelled his spirit. She did not believe in that kind of stuff. Still, she interpreted every ghostly sound he emitted, told us to picture someone faraway, shouting endlessly through the world’s tiniest window. 2. God said this, God said that. God said many conflicting things according to her. God had a booming voice that was unmistakable. Don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger, my mother would say. She was not so certain when she communed with my grandfather. She chased after his soft, meandering voice, sounds that trickled out in every direction: I… I owned a beansprout empire that grew and grew…

At the online conference, a man spoke from a cabin in the Appalachian coalfields, forest in the window behind him. I don’t remember his talk, only the trees springing to the left of his head, a jug on a ledge, a feeling of river. That night I caught a salmon in my arms by a failed weir. I wanted to seed the Red River with its roe, but gutted it – the knife had its own life. The salmon’s eyes whitened as though steamed, but it would not die and surged from my hold, its skin furred with fungus as it gasped in the shallows. Don’t let it escape, I shouted to the spoil heaps. Hooking my fingers through its…

The editors would like to congratulate the winners of the 2022 Oxford Poetry Prize, judged by Emily Berry. Dominic Leonard received first prize for his poem ‘My Grandfather Goes to the Bathroom’, which you can read on page 32. Second prize went to Linda Ravenswood for ‘Elementary School’ (page 50). And third prize went to Caleb Leow for his poem ‘Tongues’ (page 48). There were also special commendations for Kizziah Burton (‘The World She Crossed the World to Find’, page 52), Jay Gao (‘Split Ends’, page 29), and Brian Gyamfi (‘Horseradish’, page 45). Reflecting on the process of reading this year’s submissions and selecting the winners, Emily writes: ‘Dominic Leonard’s winning poem caught my attention early in the process for its unexpected title, which turns out to be gently humorous…

I. We have been warned not to walk our dogs. The water here is carcass. Do not drink from the neck of the animal that died an animal. II. Heat around a wound may imply: – cause of death (infection) – signs of life (infestation) III. Creation myth: lemons, almonds, the dissipating heat of a doe. IV. The red fish in the trough boil over each other to escape. To what? V. To love is to dance in the shadow of grief ’s pergola, of night jasmine, honeysuckle, whatever flower this is. VI. Language is what comes after, when the mouth waters or is dry and aches to water again – that is when language comes like burying an empty coffin or throwing a baby from a burning building into…

I encounter the self that briefly stopped moving. How to recover, among letters, the craft? This language of the arrangement of characters: tones, pitches, counterpoints, the magnetism of each word, each precisely varied potential to be a noun, verb, adjective, other? Things overflow again as I peel off the skin that was also holding the form. What is left of the poem or prose you call philosophy/ religion / li terature, depending on which discipline the course is affiliated with this semester? Transition from the language of extant dreams to the dream of extant language. Translating like holding the fluid that used to be the limbs of emotional ice sculptures. I pour the fluid cold into English. My feelings in a field of u-shaped strokes, like those in Van Gogh’s…

I remember my mother crying I remember my mother crying I remember my mother crying My father never cried I have tried to misremember but my memory misses no tricks I kicked the old dog with a bride’s shoe she cried without howling I did not cry when kicking her I growled then took the shoe off Now my sister has us working the carnival circuit Sister, dog and bridal shoe show The applause from the front row where her new children (ticketless) sit is unnerving and thrilling for both me and the old dog I can’t speak for the bridal shoe it is not that sort of carnival…

It’s a long way now – the house has outgrown him. Everything about the journey has assumed a new heft. This week is not so bad; the terrible suns turning under his skin are not pain itself, but assurance of pain. The landing is narrow and gloom, like a place put briefly back inside time; outside, in the night, the rain insists its low, first-rain quietness. Cold riddles up his neat backbone, the cold the wind has borne and left inside the thin-walled house, where hurt grips onto the sides of the bath. His mind not gone to pieces - a miracle and mercy – it’s the body that’s going. He knows what is happening: any charm against this attrition has failed. In the bathroom he adjusts the sacks…

if among all this, the sunshine pours like grease to smear each day and undo us with the sepia hiss of a slow puncture. Oh – we blather on – such a gift in these times a rare treat – a summer like ’76 showing us what we could’ve won while the national gaze melts into puddles forming two-way mirrors: reminders that we are always looking in different directions – distracted by notions of abundance by the shape of Europe by fading rainbows and blokey-hokey-cokeys by vast palaces and second birthdays or just birthdays – alone – in apartments by the way the blackbirds wing it ribbing us with versions of daybreak and dusk by sweating drivers in cardboard cars firing Amazon’s arrows by the cerise mouse heart our cat brings…

When they say it, I lift up my skirts to show off a host of giggling bunnies. You let me take your breasts from the fridge before they have set and eat them straight from the jelly moulds. When they say it, we peg our underwear out on the line and watch the wind turn it into balloon animals. Point out: elephant, poodle, snake. We say fishmeal, fluke. We open Google Earth and trace the red thread marking the border the Russian military is imposing on receding Arctic ice. When they say it, we beat your mother’s Persian rug over the balcony. When they handed us the requisite administrative forms and it was printed on the top in Times New Roman, we dutifully filled in our names – chou fleur,…

He was my air-punching Alpha Centaurian, my bama and shaka, my basic wage answer book, my bish-bash-bosh, my bodhi tree, my bovver, my bro-hug. He was my centredness, my chargrill, my deffo flauta, my glamping jackalope, my go ba, my hackable sensi, my human bean, my krump lamellophone, my left justification, my right justification. He was my likembe, my likeliest parmp, my listicle, my long-running maitake, my play-to-play mofongo, my refleet, my Scooby Snack, my self- selected right-footer, my sleepsuit, my snus. He was my softscape, my splendiferous sense, my starter marriage, my startfulmood tink, my stratum corneum, my test drive, my top gun, my vlog, my yogalate.…

there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree she said. you have to forgive men I immediately wanted to say for how long but I knew she’d say it’s a process and a cycle that we have to thank them for wheels and the trips to CVS and the houses that it’s a balancing act for everything everywhere that marriage is about – in the end – coming to an agreement that you both need each other especially as you get on in life. (three husbands, four husbands, lots of sons.) the song of the night bird she said. they say it’s something men are like it’s what boys do something comes over them maybe it’s a little bit biology maybe it’s a little bit dark anatomy…

It’s just a sick, uneasy head in a foil crown, making it watch us talk about how it’s gonna love us and then making us watch it fail. It asks for love in worlds it’s shitting on like a big old gentrifier, begging to share bad food. There is, unsaid, much touch longed for. There is, unsaid, a hand in the fog trembling like a moth in the face of a floodlight, trembling for contact, trembling for a way back, like napkins on the wind after a jumbo jet crash. Habit can’t leave. There are fairy lights flagging food as public and private up and down the changing street; there are different shades of red. There is always something left. There are slugs of ice charging up the pipes of…

ROWLAND BAGNALL is a poet and writer based in Oxford. His poems, reviews, and essays have recently appeared in Pain, Prototype, and PN Review. His debut collection, A Few Interiors, was published by Carcanet in 2019. rowlandbagnall.com. LILY BLACKSELL is a poet living in London. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Boston Review, Bath Magg, The Scores, and elsewhere. Her pamphlets are There’s No Such Thing (ignitionpress, 2018) and Stressed, Tested (Rough Trade, 2022). KIZZIAH BURTON placed third in the 2022 Mslexia Poetry Competition and second in the 2020 Ledbury Poetry Competition. Her poems were commended in the 2022/23 Magma Poetry Competition and the 2021 National Poetry Competition, and were shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport Prize. Recent work is published in the 2023 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Anthology.…

The week of the wildfire T tells me he is going through something and he says it just like that, in italics. The air is thick with smoke, foaming into a new word, haze, until it does what only haze can do, hangs. See? Everything can be untangled into figures of speech. The cloud talks itself back into its own prosopopoeia. At least going recalls motion and motion a journey. You can’t hang through something, only hang onto or off of, which can only be worse. And something is only a noun, like a kettle or a body, although it can’t be as certain as illness, not something you can get over, no fence to clear in one clean leap. Unnamable, yes, but unnamable. Think of the fire, 30 miles from here,…

Ones you stumble across, right there looking stony. Humble stones, standing alone. Take stones in Umbria where summer intones without umbrellas. Stonking stones drunk on sun, in their oneness stunned, a stone stoned. Stones like nests for pebbles that revel in the stonic quality of their cold. Your toes reading out sentences of stones, hitting low notes of stones, soles flat and stoical on a senate of stones, palms stocking up for windowsills, paperweights. Nasty stones. Oiks of grey and unrounded. Stones of undone. Onus on stones. On tonnes. On tonnes to stones. Stonnets.…

When I got my first period, I wept into mama – she showed me the infantile stain in my underwear as though someone had taken a butter knife to it and scraped burnt blood orange across the crotch. I did not kiss the child farewell, square on the forehead – the way an underarm aches from shoots of hair. This was the year when everything died: my grandmother, who we found asleep at her desk – she did not wake when we banged on the glass. She did not tell us about the cancer inside her – the years of bellflowers tolling in the night. I think of the block of butter preserved in her icebox, whose outer layer became coated in salt – each granule extracted from the inside.…

Once inside the taxi I notice the lipstick printed inside my mask like a lone flamingo. Maybe it’s another relationship Rorschach test where I jot down whatever I see in the blots. A lyre, two dolphins, a vulva, Laurel and Hardy. Madagascar and the puckered coast of love. At least I’m spared the legion of psycho bats flapping back to my personal guano cave. The driver asks me to kindly cover my face. Outside the city looks freshly peeled, younger than it ever was, without the snarl or shufflers. Workers take the zebra crossing like gazelles. Flame trees blaze and drains steam with coffee. Every rucksack is jetpacked with hope. Surveillance cameras droop with tired eyes. Someone has even found some grass to cut. Today I must live at any…

Well the sun is seeping and so am I, in two lines like tarmac markings / parking restrictions, the light that is, I’m just bleeding from the side of my misplaced mooncup, addressing this by rootling around with all the rigour of a teenage boy at a birthday party who’s put his beer down especially. Standing behind a hazel tree saying excuse me, I’m sorry and I’m doing this for you after all, environment, wiping my fingers on the grass and hoisting up my boyfriend’s jeans which I’ve borrowed with a nod to androgyny that has ultimately fooled no one. The buzzard above is perfectly capable of seeing the blood / smelling it throb from me. There’s no point drinking Red Stripe, I once thought, unless others can clearly see the red…

This intensity is my own. I feel all the things. I take my inside-outness and put it on the bus. I drag it on and off the bus. I pull it along the pavement, carry its laptop, say come on, get rough. What I want is everything on top of me and always. A body crushed. There is no doubt when my hands are held, when my mouth is stuffed. My daughter sat on my lap in the summer and put her legs exactly on my legs. And it comes close, it comes close, it’s something, but it is not enough.…

1 The day she calls, I come running. Drive as fast as I can to the crossroads she has given me. I park carefully at the corner exactly as she stresses on the phone. 2 I kill the engine. Drop the windows and wait. It’s hot. The weird light is desolate and lonely. I watch for signs on the street. 3 The desert blows in fine red sand dusting the windshield like pollen. I squirt water on the dust-slicked glass. The wipers drag back / forth. 4 I wait some more in the red wet mist. I drink some water. I turn on the car, the air conditioning, and roll up the windows. 5 Over a slight opening between buildings, in the distance, she emerges. An uncoiling mercurial form. A…

Everywhere I look the trees are full of grief. There is a doorway I cannot walk through. Last night, from a phone call I overheard, I learn my grandfather’s body is tired of itself. When he writes his name the characters get smaller and smaller. It seems the world ends every day. I wonder if there is softness to this. In a way I still want a reason for everything. The garden on their balcony that no longer exists calls to me from my memory. It says I am not remembering it right. My grandmother is always angry now. Maybe, like me, she is afraid to be lonely. I watch both their hands tremble as she trims his fingernails. Something about it is unbearable. This morning I stood in the…